Search Results

Because Hitler claimed to be a Raumpolitiker or a ‘geopolitician’ concerned with vast spatial goals, he scorned Grenzpolitiker or politicians who took interest in minor border revision. Despite this, Nazi foreign policy accounted for both perspectives because the acquisition of a number of European countries displayed ethnonationalist irredentism. Since Hitler viewed the Dutch as Aryans who were to become members of the master race, the Netherlands was placed under a civilian government instead of exposing them to military settings. Although some of the geopolitical goals of the German expansion resembled that of the First World War, the attitude of Nazi racism towards those who were not included in the Aryan race was more intensified than that experienced during the military rule of the First World War. Hitler aimed to establish a new order of ethnographic conditions to promote the development of better boundaries.

This chapter pursues three aims: it provides a literature synopsis on the study of Russian nationalism in Western scholarship; offers a brief historical overview over the development of Russian nationalism; and outlines in broad terms the trajectory of Russian nationalism from statist to ethno-centrist positions. In the first decade after the Soviet collapse, nationalist sentiment in Russia continued to be dominated more by empire-nostalgia than by ethnonationalism. The new turn towards ethnonationalism came only after the turn of the millennium, spurred by two issues in particular: concern for Russian co-ethnics abroad, ‘stranded’ in the other former Soviet republics; and the influx of non-Russian migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia into Russian cities. The chapter concludes that the ethnification of Russian nationalism seems to stem from below, driven by opposition activists rather than by the regime, but that it also to some extent reverberates in official Russian rhetoric.

This book examines the factors that drove people with ethnic identities to support nationalism in some cases but not in others. Drawing on variation in mass nationalist mobilization and regional secessionism across sixteen ethnic republics of the Russian Federation, it shows why ordinary people respond to the appeals of nationalist leaders calling for a radical change in the status quo. It explores how popular support for nationalism develops as part of political mobilization, a process that transforms the meaning of ethnic identity, and suggests that people throw their support behind nationalist movements after developing a group grievance. Group grievances arise from the interaction between people's experiences in local labor markets and issues concerning ethnic economic inequality that were articulated by ethnic entrepreneurs. It is these grievances that inspire support for nationalist transformation and account for the rise of ethnonationalism.

Ethiopian ruler Mengistu Haile Mariam demonized his Eritrean opponents as foreign agents or mercenaries and accused Tigrayan dissidents of being unpatriotic. He argued that the historical interregional, interfeudal, interdynastic, interclass struggles for power and for control of the peasantry's labor and meager surplus were all anti-Ethiopianism. Mengistu made these claims despite Gabre Hiwet Baykedagn's affirmation of Tigrayan patriotism and pronouncement that no other people cared more for Ethiopia's welfare and safety than the Tigrayans. Tigray had been an economic backwater in the empire-state since 1890, when Eritrea was colonized by Italy, to the outbreak of the Ethiopian Revolution in 1974. This chapter examines the emergence of Tigrayan ethnonationalism and insurgency as well as the rise of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front.

This chapter examines what was described as the worst “ethnic rioting” in Malaysia in decades. In 2001, Malays and Indians clashed in an area known as Kampung Medan. Many analysts, academics, and politicians were quick to ascribe blame, drawing on the ethnic “myths” or stereotypes. Others invoked the purported and inevitable frustrations caused by anomie and squalor in squatter areas. The recounting of the violent events by witnesses and victims demonstrates that the respective figures of the Indian and Malay increasingly silence complex exchanges and intimacies between the two groups. These figures, in turn, are also produced out of a particular developmentalism driven by ethnonationalist impulses. The chapter also studies the symptoms of cultural and ethnic uncertainty generated by the bureaucratization of ethnic privilege.

This chapter discusses changes in spiritual and religious practices after the 1960s through stories of Mariophanies in post-1970s Egypt. It studies ethnic strife in the framework of modern scripturalist concepts of religion and a modernist concept of truth. Such changes have affected nation, religion, concepts of religious truth, and authenticity. They have also fostered ethnonationalism, violence, and exclusion at the expense of egalitarianism and civil rights.

This chapter examines the religious attitudes of Russian ethnonationalist circles whose ideology and political practice centre on the promotion of political self-determination for ethnic Russians. It points out the in/compatibility of the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church with nationalism and shows that the ‘Russian world’ concept as advocated by the Church is far from promoting ethnic Russian nationalism. As ethnic nationalism contradicts the teaching and the policy of the Church, it is argued that Orthodox nationalism as promulgated in the early 1990s has now become obsolete. As for the neopagans, these have long been a closed sub-culture in Russia, and support for them now seems to have reached its limits. Instead, it is secularism that has become the fastest expanding stratum within contemporary Russian ethnonationalism. Unlike Orthodox nationalists, they experience none of the ideological challenges or practical difficulties of having to satisfy the regulations of the Church.

This chapter illustrates how one's cultural identity is defined just as much by geographic location, gender, class, and political ideology than by perceived race or ethnic self-identification. It studies two texts by Puerto Rican authors to show how individuals challenge rigid notions of ethnonationalism: Judith Ortiz Cofer's The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women (1993) and Ernesto Quiñonez's Bodega Dreams (2000). Set in the proximate urban Northeastern cities—Paterson, New Jersey, and New York City, respectively—with large populations of Puerto Ricans, other kinds of Latinas/os, and other underrepresented ethnic populations, the books challenge persistent definitions of puertorriqueñidad—the essence of one's Puerto Rican identity. Ortiz Cofer portrays the confinement women experience due to patriarchal Puerto Rican family values while Quiñonez portrays the confinement Puerto Rican men experience due to their ethnonational loyalties.

This chapter explains the impact of Ronald Reagan's administration on the crisis of Southwest Asia. The crisis ranges between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution. The chapter notes ethnonationalist autonomy movements disrupting state-focused politics and politicizing Islam as the key consequences of Reagan's focus on state sovereignty and survival. For example, the Pashtun ethnonationalism in the Afghan–Pakistan borderlands had been a major hurdle in US relations with both Afghanistan and Pakistan throughout the twentieth century. The chapter notes that Southwest Asia represents an enduring paradox in US foreign policy. The Reagan administration's policies highlight the postcolonial importance of states and international states system in international politics.

The chapter examines the transformation of an armed secessionist movement into a peaceful one. The Basque armed group ETA was founded in 1959 and formally disbanded in 2018. During those six decades, this clandestine group evolved to become the central node in a complex network of organizations that shared the strategic goal of political independence from Spain. The chapter argues that the pressures of the armed path, innovative counterterrorism policies, and an internal process of debate triggered a factional transformation of the ETA. The chapter accounts for the transition from armed to unarmed activism with a multi-level approach that combines individual, organisational and contextual data. Ultimately, the transformation of ETA can be accounted for by analysing the meso- and the macro-level variables of leadership, internal and external interactions with the “other,” inducements and failures of the armed path. The continuous factional transformation of ETA – from the 1970s to 2017 – has shown the critical importance of meso-level factors (especially charismatic leadership), even when macro-level changes occur (such as democratic transition in Spain and the EU’s consistent support for transformations to unarmed politics).

This chapter focuses on the first major test of Catholic “revolution” in the postwar world: the cause of world peace. This cause created a political space for Catholic-Marxist collaboration, first in Poland, then across the emerging Iron Curtain. In August 1948, the movement that eventually became known as the Partisans of Peace held its first meeting in Wrocław, the largest city of postwar Poland’s formerly German “Recovered Territories.” For four days, Poland welcomed a cast of global cultural and intellectual icons, from Aimé Césaire to Pablo Picasso. At that congress, Catholic socialism found its political footing. This peace activism was not only anti-nuclear, but also anti-colonial, anti-American, and anti-German. It went beyond French Catholic activist André Mandouze’s politics of “progressive Christianity,” cultivating fear of a revanchist Germany. Ethnonational hatred brought together a coalition of intellectuals who guaranteed integralism a postwar career, all while providing political cover for the Soviet Bloc’s transition to Stalinism.

This chapter examines “Americanism” as an ethnonationalist exceptionalism spurred by growing Catholic religious strength and polyglot immigration. Noting the irony of Catholic confusion over the concept, the chapter shows how the predominant usage after the Civil War became a racial and ethnic rather than a religious one. While Americanism came to express an exceptionalist identity founded on the white race, Americanism remained a contested term with civic nationalism as a more liberal alternative later swamped by the xenophobia of World War I and post-war agitation against socialism and foreign immigrants. Wartime anxiety produced the American Creed as a patriotic point of national identification. As a result of the 1917 Russian Revolution’s global impact, Americanism became identified with the (political) nation-state and with capitalism in competition with communism. Next, the chapter considers how the term exceptionalism was employed to describe US failures to conform with Marxist calls for international socialist revolution. The chapter concludes by examining how this Marxist materialist formulation underpinned modern social science exceptionalism. Here, the career of Seymour Martin Lipset was prominent.

This chapter looks at the persistence of anti-Roma hate speech in the Romanian media well beyond the country's EU accession in 2007. It seeks to demonstrate the production of “scandalous ethnicity” and articulates its role in contemporary Romanian ethnonationalism. It argues that prejudiced representations of Roma in the mainstream Romanian media is facilitated by a discursive inversion of the actual power relation between Romanians and Roma: while Roma are the disadvantaged group from both a socioeconomic and a cultural point of view, ethnic Romanians construct themselves as victims of allegedly “vicious” Tigani. This discourse of ethnonational victimization enables Romanians to cast extreme hate speech against the Roma as a legitimate act of self-defense and, therefore, as morally justified.

Chapter 6 investigates the circulation of foreign-produced recordings in Vietnam to understand how popular music is generating a heightened awareness of Hmong transnationalism. Vietnamese minorities are compensating for shortcomings in the national media by accessing transnational networks through alternative technological means. VCDs, cell phones, and the Internet are permitting an unprecedented intensification of cross-border exchanges, some of which promote the concept of an independent Hmong nation. Vietnam-based Hmong now regularly listen to, watch, and comment on recordings and music videos produced in other countries. This chapter examines the means of access to these global networks and argues that the limitations on access outweigh the potential for unification as an independent Hmong nation. The research traces the emergence of a Hmong music industry to provide a means of understanding Vietnamese Hmong power, or lack thereof, in this reimagined ethnonationalist community.

The conclusion summarizes the findings of the book and outlines a new paradigm for research on the cultural practices of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities. It opens with a description of two contrasting approaches to this research. Certain strategies for presenting results in public fora are shown to promote unhelpful stereotypes on these people. The author attempts to bridge the gap between contrasting methodologies and ideologies by promoting constructive dialogue between these groups of scholars within the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and musicology This dialogue is stimulated by identifying and working towards a shared goal: the sustainability of intangible cultural heritage in a rapidly urbanizing society.

This chapter examines the role played by territorially based, ethnonationalist forces in Ethiopia’s remarkable political transformation. It shows how the collapse of the socialist dictatorship and the victory of a coalition of ethnonationalist insurgent forces resulted in constitutional transition, culminating in a federal system designed to empower ethnonationalist groups at regional state level. This institutional design allowed such groups to exercise some self-rule at a regional level and ensure representation at the federal level, while also promoting relative peace and political stability across the country. The chapter first considers the context that led to the emergence and transformation of territorial cleavages in Ethiopia before discussing the period of constitutional engagement (1991–94) and its outcomes. It also considers the lessons that can be drawn from Ethiopia’s adoption of a federal system of government that places strong emphasis on ethnonationalism, along with challenges arising from decentralization, “ethnic federalism,” and political pluralism.

The introduction lays out four clusters of themes which the book covers: clash of institutions within the state, patterns of ethnonationalism, Islamization of law as a divine source of legitimacy, and the subaltern's situation of non-conflict expressed through the bondage which is territorially localized and transactionally personalized in the context of patronage politics. Conflict is both destructive in the context of loss of peace, prosperity, and security and constitutive of a new social order such as divination of the political landscape in Pakistan. The introduction brings out the sources of conflict in Pakistan as rooted in the slippage from design to practice. It discusses postcolonialism as the second wave of intellectual decolonization couched in the "orientalist" framework of Islam versus the West. Nationalism has the overtones of pre-destinationism. The introduction argues in favour of systematicity of conflict beyond a mere breakdown of the political system.

This chapter provides the narrative framework within which the nationalist discourses in the three states are analysed. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section deals with a review of literature on nationalisms that have prevailed in India after Independence, and which are relevant to positioning the Bangladeshi migrants present in the three states. The second section points to some key concepts from the non-Indian literature that invites attention. The last section states the two axiomatic assumptions that underlie the narrative structure and which give the study a unity. The first assumption is that the discourse of nationalism starts with colonialism, the second assumption is that partitions have had defining impact on nationalist thought in India.