The Contemplation Toward a Theory of National Consciousness (original) (raw)
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THE CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY – ON PRIMORDIALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM
The author argues that the content of the concept of "national identity" is determined by the way how we construe "nation". She submits two ways of construing the nation as basic ideal types: primordial versus instrumental. In primordial terminology the nation is primarily the "ethno-nation", i.e. a community which unites individuals through "the same blood and common fate". The instrumental way of construing the nation stresses the pragmatic and situational aspects of large communities. Thus it approaches the political understanding of the nation. The beliefs about the character of the nation prevailing within a particular community, determine the identification of the member of this community with the nation. Terminological chaos governs this area of life as well as research on it. The concept of "nationalism" can serve as an example: it denotes loyalty to the state as an instrumental political formation. Simultaneously, however, within the ideology of nationalism, the state is introduced as a primordial community. The aim of this paper is: 1. the analysis of the ways of construing the "nation" as a form of social reality by individuals; 2. the use of the construing about the nation in public, cultural, and political discourses; 3. consequences of the ways of construing the nation for the national identity of individuals.
Interrogating Naturalness of National Identity
Fudan Journal of the Humanities and social sciences , 2020
Nation-state has been considered both an intellectual brainchild and a practical offshoot of the European Enlightenment. The liberal philosophy as an intellectual representative of the Enlightenment tradition and the modernists who emphasize modernization as the practical derivative of it not only deliberated on the simultaneousness and coexistence of the two happenings-the rise of national consciousness on the one hand and appreciation for modern values such as equality, liberty and justice on the other, many theorists argued that these modern values could be realized within a nation-state model (a modern institution). Hence, they contributed to naturalization and de-politicization of the nation-state model. Naturalization/secularization of the nation-state idea without deliberating on the possibilities of politicization and construction of national identities legitimize exclusion of people from national space, drives toward homogenization and nation-building process producing refugees and stateless people. Further, nation-states do not feel the urgency in meeting the normative demands of the international order that strive to defend human rights and address the problem of statelessness. In this context, the article seeks to interrogate the naturalness of national identity of individuals by examining the factors that tend to secularize and naturalize it and by unraveling the real socioeconomic forces that engender and shape national identity and help it look the way it does.
LIMES: Cultural Regionalistics, 2008
The author affirms that the phenomena of history are always interpreted in the perspective of our future objectives. So, it is stated that the interpretation of nation's history is the recollection of our future. Projection of the future grants us both creative dynamism (picturesqueness), and possibility of death (existential departure). According to another thesis, creating and existence form two planes of human reality, which create a living environment interacting between each other. The author affirms that this environment is the background of becoming of both individual and the nation, and it changes together with the phenomena emerging in it. According to the third thesis, existential participant's space and time of existential participant ‐ individual or nation ‐ interact as his spiritual environment's components of his becoming. The author follows individual's and nation's analogy, which means rather interaction when creating a living environment than sim...
A STUDY ON NATION AND NATIONALISM IN THE CONTEXT OF NATIONALISM THEORIES
The French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution that faced with the end of the era of empires formed a new and centralized state organization. This organization which provides for the formation and development of social and political life is called nation-state. The heterogeneous population existing in the empires is an undesirable phenomenon. The heterogeneous population that exists in the empires is an undesirable phenomenon because the concept of nation forms the basis of its legitimacy and sovereignty power. In other words, the source of the legitimacy and sovereignty of states is the people. To ensure a homogeneous population and to keep this population together, nationalist discourses and nationalist ideologies are used. There is no mention of a single national identity or a theory of nationalism because these discourses and ideologies are shaped by different societies, political regimes, time, or events. Therefore, the concepts of nation or nationalism are complex, and they have different types. Within the framework of this study, the definition, origins, and development of the nation are examined with three different nationalist approaches: primordialism, modernity, and ethno-symbolism.
Yeni Bir Disiplin Olarak Nasyonolojinin İmkânı (The Possibility of Nationology as a New Discipline)
Türkiye'de Bilgi Üretimi ve Bilim Politikaları Uluslararası Sempozyumu, 15-17 Kasım 2017, Kırşehir
Nation is a phenomenon widely regarded as peculiar to the modern age and a concept that is of interest to all social sciences, mainly political science and international relations. There are remarkable social sciences like anthropology and sociology on human societies, but there has not been any independent science to study the phenomenon of nation. This paper aims to analyse whether nationology is possible, and if possible, what to study and how to study in nationology. Nation is defined here as a large group of people based on internal assimilation and external differentation. Elements of similarity and dissimilarity can be formed based on ethnicity, language, or religion, etc. This situation rules out the possibility of uncovering law-like generalisations about nations like in physical sciences. Nationology should adopt this impossibility and prioritise the peculiarities rather than commonalities of nations, because there are a great deal of objective and subjective factors explaining the emergence, development and disintegration of nations. The multitude of individuality and idiosyncracy enables a limited categorisation as well. Despite these restrictions, it is possible to lay the ontological, epistemological and methodological foundations of nationology if we determine what and how to study.
The Concept of the Nation and the Question of Nationalism
Citizenship and Rights in Multicultural Societies, 1995
The traditional nation-state is based on an authoritarian ideology in terms of the ethnic, religious and regional status of the individual (the citizen). This ideology corresponds to a centralist power structure and to the regrettable fact that population groups which differ from majority populations (in terms of their ethnic, religious, cultural orientation and so forth) do not enjoy equal rights. (Examples of this denial of basic rights are numerous even in the member states of the European Union.) The often un-reflected equation of nationality and citizenship fails to provide proper legal (constitutional) safeguards for human rights in the sense of peoples' (ethnic) rights. 1 The inhuman result of such an 'ideology of equation' can best be studied by analyzing the present ethnic strife in the territory of former Yugoslavia, where regrettably-with the help and tacit approval of European and United Nations diplomats-nationalist and chauvinist policies are being re-introduced as major factors shaping international relations.
NATION, NATIONALISM AND OTHER INTERVENING CONCEPTS-THE TENSION, CONTENTION IN THEIR MEANINGS.pdf
Analyses of nation and nationalism, which are figuratively about “‘belonging’, “‘bordering’, and ‘commitment’” (Brennan, 1995:128), have come in various ways. While some scholars evaluate it from 1980 upwards (Zuelow, 2006), others concentrate on ideas around it across time (Smith, 1994; Brubaker, 1996; Özkirimlii, 2000). Many others try to group theories of nationalism into typologies, for easier understanding (Smith, 1994; Greenfeld, 1995; Hechter, 2000). There are also various theories on its manner of emergence (Anderson, 1983; Handler, 1988; Gellner, 1983; Hroch, 1996; Renan, 1996). While a grouping of the arguments can be elusive, relationships between the individual and the collective to the state are in the centre of most analyses. Issues are also around ways of considering the relation between the self and the nation. This paper discusses nation and nationalism from the multiple perspectives, and other intervening and related concepts, in the bid to expand the scope of understanding, and concludes that the shades of conceptualisations are still bound to continue.
Towards a Critical Theory of the Nation and Nationalism
2021
Paper Presented at the Historical Materialism 2021 Online, 4-14 November 2021. The relationship of the nation and nationalism to the organization and reproduction of the bourgeois state and capitalist social form, as well as the constitution of the class relation and its political forms of expression, has historically been unreflectively embraced or uncritically disregarded. Despite the course of the world refuting Eric Hobsbawm’s prognosis regarding nationalism’s progressively fading significance, since our historical conjuncture continues to be determined by the proliferation of virulent and aggressive nationalist mass-movements, racial exclusions, militarized borders and migrant detention centres, a theoretical interrogation adequate to the demands of the present vis-à-vis the notions of nation and nationalism has still remained elusive. In an endeavour to contribute to contemporary formulations of the crisis-ridden constitution of capitalist society, this paper aims to present the rudiments of a critical theory of the nation and nationalism. Drawing from the negative-critical impetus and the conceptual orientation of the former, it shall be maintained that the absence of a conceptualization of the category of the nation is indicative of a blind spot within recent accounts of capitalist social domination, and moreover, that a critical theory conceived as an irreconciliatory critique of the miserable state of human affairs from the standpoint of their practical abolition remains lacking, to the extent that it does not also amount to a critique of the nation, grasped as a contradictory and alienated political form of human community corresponding to the perverted character of capitalist society as such. By considering the category of the nation as an objective social mediation structuring, but also structured by those forms of social life that are endemic to capitalist modernity, it shall be argued that the category of the nation, as a form of social organization, constitutes an objective relation of social mediation permeating though, but also shaping the totality of everyday life, carving the internal and external borders of the community through the exclusionary determination of those social groups demarcated as belonging outside of the nation’s ties and bonds.