The 2012 Quebec Student's Movement in the Nationalist Political Thought: When Nation Hijacks Political Subjectivity (original) (raw)

Social movements and the national question in quebec the institutional legacy of a cleavage

2020

By taking a historical perspective on the higher education and the housing sectors in Quebec, we demonstrate how the political cleavage around the national question has had long-term effects on the dynamic of contention in these two sectors. At a general level, the presence of this cleavage has favoured the adoption of institutional arrangements related to funding that have allowed the reproduction of social protest over time. Nevertheless, the institutional arrangements vary from one sector to another: in the case of higher education, Bill 32, adopted in 1983, facilitated the division of the student movement into two branches and, to some extent, its dynamism; in the case of housing, the AccèsLogis program and the contribution au secteur, implemented in 1997, ensured the selection of claims for social housing and favoured the grouping that leads this issue. In both cases, the national question is at the heart of the process that led to the adoption of these policies.

The Exclusive Nature of Quebec's Contemporary Nationalism: The Pitfalls of Civic Nationalism

International Journal of Canadian Studies, 2013

With reason, Quebec contemporary nationalism can be defined as a form of civic nationalism. This type of collective identification can be defined as being inclusive for every citizen notwithstanding their ethno-cultural origins. However, the Quebec case tends to illustrate that the discourse surrounding civic nationalism can be as exclusive as ethnic nationalism. This is largely due to the fact that Quebecers' collective identity is defined around specific political values that are not and cannot by nature be shared by every Quebec citizen. This is what this text will show and it will focus on the reasons that explain such a situation. Résumé IJCS/RIE´C 47, 2013

Sub‐state nationalism and the welfare state: Québec and Canadian federalism

Nations and Nationalism, 2006

This article examines the relationship between sub-state nationalism and the welfare state through the case of Que´bec in Canada. It argues that social policy presents mobilisation and identity-building potential for sub-state nationalism, and that nationalist movements affect the structure of welfare states. Nationalism and the welfare state revolve around the notion of solidarity. Because they often involve transfers of money between citizens, social programmes raise the issue of the specific community whose members should exhibit social and economic solidarity. From this perspective, nationalist movements are likely to seek the congruence between the 'national community' (as conceptualised by their leaders) and the 'social community' (the community where redistributive mechanisms should operate). Moreover, the political discourse of social policy lends itself well to national identity-building because it is typically underpinned by collective values and principles. Finally, pressures stemming from sub-state nationalism tend to reshape the policy agenda at both the state and the substate level while favouring the asymmetrical decentralisation of the welfare state.

2012 Quebec student protests: some observations on motives, strategies and their consequences on the reconfigurations of state and media discourses

Politics, Consultation or Nihilism: Protest and Disorder After the Global Crash. Editors: B. Jeffrey, J. Ibrahim and D. Waddington, 2015

The first part of this article reports the main events of the 2012 student protest in Quebec leading to the government’s adoption of Bill 12. It highlights the major ideological conflict generated through the liberal managerial mutation of the academic institutions as a key to understand more clearly the student’s claims. Rapidly, the standard strike was transformed into a massive mobilization that produced many protests and other forms of resistance. The response given by the government to these unprecedented acts of resistance was Bill 12, to be understood as a symbolic coup d’état with voluntarily disruptive media effects whose aim was to make people forget the massive rejection of a pseudo tentative agreement in relation to Higher Education reform. The bill was also supported through the abusive and twisted use by the government of a series of buzzwords, like “bullying” and “access to education”, which were relayed by the media. The authors also discuss the issues surrounding the traditional conceptions regarding the analysis of discourses, mobilizing Orwell’s concept of doublethink and the notion of self-deception inherited form Sartre.