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This chapter reviews the definitions or types of nationalism, including the distinction between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ nationalism, and the less common and apparently self-contradictory concept of ‘multicultural nationalism’. It argues that identities are not only chosen, multiple, and fluid, but also used for purposes, for integration, as well as for differentiation. This chapter also describes two key Scottish minorities: ethnic Pakistani Muslims and English immigrants, reviews the historical and political setting, and describes the plan of the book.

What should political actors and state institutions be permitted, encouraged, required, or forbidden to do in the attempt to shape people’s national identities? This is the central question in the ethics of nation-building, and has been vastly understudied in recent normative political theories of nationalism. This chapter answers this question by discussing more than a dozen components of an individual’s national identity. It considers the many legitimate and illegitimate ways in which political actors and the state can shape or alter these components, and the content of the identity itself. It also considers the soundness and relevance of the seemly age-old distinction between so-called ethnic and civic national identities.

The empirical variation between the political trajectories of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, on the one hand, and Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, on the other, is striking in the early 1990s. The presence or absence of an opposition to communism strong enough to take and hold power in 1989 put the first group of states on the road to liberal democracy, and the second group on the road to illiberal democracy. This chapter compares the two groups of states in three areas: the nature of the opposition to communism and of the regime change in 1989; the political, economic, and national policies of the first post-communist governments; and the quality of the left alternative available to voters after1989.

This chapter explores how immigrants' identity and nationalism developed out of the conflict between Japanese and Filipinos in the San Joaquin River delta during the 1930s. Focusing on the local expression of immigrant nationalism, it is argued that their “Japanese consciousness” was primarily a product of American social relations, which shaped their interests and directly affected their daily livelihoods. The Issei's ethnic nationalism resulted as much from an image of a collective enemy and a sense of shared interests in the delta, as from events in Asia or anger against racist society.

The role of the Serbian Orthodox Church during the years of the communist federation of Yugoslavia is discussed in the context of Tito's suppression of Serbian secular nationalism, which in the end led to an upsurge of clerical nationalism that would during the last two decades of Yugoslavia's life successfully appropriate and virtually monopolize ethnic nationalist causes. Among the events covered in the chapter are the rise of Serbian ethnic nationalism, the rise of Albanian ethnic nationalism in Kosovo, the seeking of independence from the Serbian Orthodox Church by the Macedonian and Montenegrin branches of that Church, and the schism in the North American branch of the Serbian Church. Surveys of religiosity in the Catholic, Muslim, and Orthodox communities in the 1960s are also reported and relations between the Russian and Serbian Orthodox Churches discussed.

The first part of the chapter gives a brief account of the bloody fratricidal war fought in Croatia and Bosnia‐Herzegovina in 1991–5, which resulted from ethnic nationalistic revolutions aimed at destroying the multiethnic federation of Yugoslavia founded by the communists, and establishing independent homogeneous states. Further wars would continue in 1998 (between the Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo) and in 2001 (between Albanians and Macedonians in Macedonia). The main part of the chapter discusses religion and nationalism in these successor states – Islam and Muslim nationalism in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Catholicism (the Madonna of Medjugorje) and Croatian nationalism in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Croatia, and the Orthodox Church in Serbia (and Kosovo), Macedonia, and Montenegro. The remaining two sections of the chapter discuss saint making in Croatia in the late 1990s, and the role of religious organizations in the international peace process.

After Tito's death, ethnic nationalism was simmering in all parts of Yugoslavia from Slovenia in the northwest to Kosovo in the southeast. The secular politics of the regime's establishment involved factional quarrels, and the activities of secular intellectual elites have been analyzed at length elsewhere. The religious scene, where important things occurred, has remained obscure, yet visible religious symbols and movements were no less telling harbingers of what was to happen in the 1990s; these are the subject of this chapter. The different sections cover: the clerical offensive and the communist regime's last stand (1979–87); the promise of peaceful transition (moderate religious policies and the belated democratization of the regime, 1988–90); ethnoreligious realignment and multiparty elections; worsening relations between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and the schisms between nation‐states in the Serbian Orthodox Church; the Churches and the official history of the genocide of Serbs by Croats in World War II; the establishment of a site of Serb martyrdom at Jasenovac in Croatia (completed in 1983) to commemorate the genocide of 1941, and the myths surrounding this; disputes over holy places; the collapse of interfaith dialog; untimely Serbian commemorations of World War II sufferings in 1990–1; and calls for partition and revenge by the Serbs.

This chapter presents a spectrum of poetic responses to American Orientalism by Asian American poets in the early years of the ethnic nationalist movement. Largely forgotten poets like David Hsin‐Fu Wand played native informant to both Pound and Snyder, but the Orient was a prisonhouse for activist poet Lawson Fusao Inada, who turned instead to African American and Chicano artistic influences. In reading the differing transpacific and American alliances imagined by Asian American artists, this chapter argues that a literary legacy of Orientalism exerted significant pressure on the formation of Asian American poetry.

The problem of identity within a multiethnic empire is highlighted in this chapter on the brothers Nikolai and Emilii Medtner. As Russian citizens of Baltic German descent, both brothers struggled to reconcile their mixed Russian-German identity within an empire that increasingly sought to define citizens by ethnic origin. Philosopher and critic Emilii Medtner saw it as his brother’s Orphic mission to unite German and Russian national identities through the continuation of the “eternal laws” governing music, thereby overcoming the destructive influence of contemporary life. Both brothers sought to define their place as imperial Russian citizens (rossiiskii) in contrast to an ethnically based understanding of Russian identity (russkii). However, Nikolai Medtner’s non-Russian ethnic background proved increasingly difficult for many of Nietzsche’s orphans to accept, demonstrating a growing uneasiness over ethnic identity within Russian educated society.

Russian societal nationalism comes in various guises, both ethnic and imperialist. Also Putin’s rhetoric is marked by the tensions between ethnic and state-focused, imperialist thinking. Noting the complex interplay of state nationalism and societal nationalism, this introductory chapter examines the mental framework within which Russian politicians were acting prior to the decision to annex Crimea. The chapter develops a typology of Russian nationalisms, surveys recent developments, and presents the three-part structure of this book: official nationalism, radical and other societal nationalisms, and identities/otherings. It concludes that after the annexation of Crimea, when the state took over the agenda of both ethnic and imperialist nationalists in Russia, societal nationalism finds itself at low ebb.

This chapter considers the “logic” of the exclusionary politics of ethnic nationalism in the region and the social and political implications of women's forced migration. It evaluates the changes in the roles and social relations of refugee women caused by the gendered violence of war, flight, and exile. The negotiation between women's role as mothers, their love and care for their sons, and their socially constructed role as “Mothers of the Nation” is a recurring theme in the interviews. The data suggest that women of higher socioeconomic status and of ethnically mixed background commonly have a better chance of choosing between their love for their children and their patriotism. It shows that radical changes in gender roles and responsibilities, in conjunction with a constant fear for family members who remain in war zones, contribute to women's difficulties in developing appropriate and successful survival strategies.

This chapter, which examines the significance of Chinese discourse on human origins as a whole, including but not limited to issues of ethnic nationalism, asks: Is ethnic nationalism a sufficient explanation of Chinese preferences for theories that place human evolution on a Chinese stage? The answer is no. First, nationalism alone does not account for the ongoing debates in China and elsewhere. Second, where nationalism does play a role, it is not only or even primarily an issue of race or ethnicity. Third, while the Chinese state does frequently mine theories of human origins to construct a concept of the Chinese nation rooted in a biological concept of race, this construction is simultaneously destabilized by other meanings produced by scientists, laypeople, and the state itself. There is also the question of how people on the receiving end of science dissemination view fossils. The chapter suggests that many people have embraced Peking Man, Yuánmóu Man, and other human fossils not simply as early representatives of their nation or race, but in much more personal ways.

This chapter conceptualizes the nation and nationalism, placing them in context with issues of wealth and income inequality, immigration, xenophobia, and diversity. The term “nation” may be defined in several ways, but generally a nation refers to a distinct, usually geographically or regionally bound people. Likewise, depending on academic discipline, nationalism has varied definitions, though the concept generally refers to the emotions wrapped up in a shared national identity. There are two dichotomous types of nationalism: civic and ethnic. Civic nationalism was found in Western societies, where individuals are seen as belonging to a political community consisting of people with equal rights and duties. People in these societies unite around political precepts, values, and respect for institutions. Conversely, in countries where ethnic nationalism is the norm, citizens belong to an ethnic community based on blood ties. Although this dichotomous view has its share of critics, the notion that civic meanings of nationhood correlate with a positive attitude toward immigrants while ethnic-based ideas of the nation promote xenophobia still holds currency. Meanwhile, although there is little empirical research concerning factors that influence nationalist thinking, one study found poor citizens’ national pride rises as income inequality increases, especially in countries where there are many migrants in the lower class.

The key purpose of this chapter is to examine the nature and impact of the Derg regime under Mengistu Haile Mariam between the mid-1970s and 1991, and the eruption of a series of revolts and the waging of guerrilla war against it. The exercise of violence by the Mengistu state represented continuity from earlier eras; the emergence of ethnically rooted and nationalist armed ‘liberation’ movements can be seen as resulting from processes of violence and counter-violence with their roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as being the products of cultures of brutality facilitated by more recent regimes. The main movements under examination are the Oromo Liberation Front, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF). Particular emphasis is placed on the difficult relations between the TPLF and the EPLF, and on Eritrea as the epicentre of much of the region's violent instability.

The conclusion recapitulates the book’s five main theoretical arguments. It shows how each chapter highlights the fundamentally political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation-building; examines the bureaucratic underpinning of transborder membership politics; reveals its historical nature; demonstrates the importance of the broader interstate system in determining the efficacy of the state’s transborder claims-making; and offers a deeply agentic portrayal of transborder membership politics by attending not only to the macropolitics but also to the micropolitics of identity. It also demonstrates the values and the limitations of ethnic nationalism as an analytic category by identifying the historical genesis of the bureaucratic and semantic infrastructures of ethnic nationalism, its variable manifestations (or lack thereof) in different policy domains and repertoires of contention, and its persistence as well as metamorphosis over time. A discussion on the future of transborder membership politics in the contemporary phase of globalization follows.

This chapter examines the concept of post-diasporic experience in the works of K. S. Maniam, a Malaysian novelist and a third-generation descendent of South Asian migrants who worked as indentured labourers in the plantation estates of British Malaya. It describes Maniam's articulation of a post-diasporic consciousness against the ethnic nationalism expressed in the New Economic Policy. It suggests that his writings do not foreground a diasporic condition per se but rather a struggle to recover the diasporic condition so as to interrogate the socio-political space of the nation.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to examine how African Americans and Asian Americans adapted the concept of the “internal colony” to explain the sociocultural legacies of American-style colonialism in their communities, and how the “internal colony” informs subsequent academic analyses of “postcolonial” black and Asian subjectivity in America. Taking all of this into account, the book proceeds from an understanding of Power as more than just rhetoric, but as an ideology of revolutionary ethnic nationalism. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

The current rise of nationalism in Europe and elsewhere is often said to pose a threat to liberal values. Liberal nationalists argue in reply that nationalism can take a liberal form, and in doing so provide support for both democracy and social justice. The chapter uses empirical evidence to show that people continue to identify strongly with their countries; such identities can exist alongside local, regional, and continental ones. Nor are those who feel close to their country only those who are less educated or politically conservative. The chapter explores whether national identities can be classed as either ethnic or civic, concluding that the prevalence of cultural factors shows that no such sharp distinction can be drawn. Finally, survey evidence is used to show that having a stronger national identity does not correlate with having more authoritarian (and therefore less liberal) views on matters such as civil rights and religious tolerance.

People define the membership of their national groups in a variety of more or less inclusive ways. This has implications for how immigrants and minority groups are treated. Traditionally, variation national boundaries has been understood as a distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism. However, despite a developed empirical literature, it is difficult to find strong defenders of this distinction or its ability to capture the empirical reality of popular conceptions of nationhood. This chapter explores some of the deficiencies of the ethnic–civic distinction, arguing that these problems arise because when people report the importance of various criteria to national belonging, they are not selecting from philosophically derived ideal types on nationhood but rather are positioning themselves within the particular and local debates about nationality relevant in their time and place. The chapter proposes a situated and bottom-up investigation of how national boundaries are constructed and contested in particular places and how this differs across what this chapter will call ‘argumentative contexts’.