Search Results

This concluding chapter reviews the overall predicaments of the European dilemma as the EU faces the dual challenge of national-ethnic diversity and social crisis. It focuses on the issues of European moral-political identity and the future of a multinational-multi-ethnic democracy. It asks which moral-political values and institutional strategies may actually guide the future integration of one of the world’s most powerful economic and political blocs. The discussion reconnects with the overall issue of the dual crisis of the welfare state and the nation, contending that the dual crisis needs to be restated as also encompassing a crisis for the EU-European supra-nation. With the character of currently dominant EU policies and the emergent ‘post-national workfare regime’ of the Union in mind, the authors elaborate on the potential capacity of the European supra-nation to offer a viable and democratic alternative. They question today’s strong tendency to seek solutions to an apparent crisis of neo-liberal strategies in stringent immigration and asylum measures, and retrograde policies of ethno-cultural entrenchment. This serves to highlight the crucial question as to which moral-political ‘creed’ will actually prevail in the 21st century.

Draws an analogy between the threats posed by social heterogeneity in the USA and the threats posed by differing national allegiances in the EU. The author reminds USA that core political identities can vary over time and that early conceptions of citizenship in the USA focussed almost exclusively on state, not federal, citizenship; in his view, within unitary states communities of identity are fine so long as individuals do not conflate these with their core political identity. In a federal system, the problem or challenge is exactly that of belonging to several political communities. Lacorne argues that pure constitutional patriotism will not suffice, since individuals require a substantial citizenship; what is needed instead are ‘common and concrete political experiences’ that would give rise to ‘a new European ethics of responsibility’. The two sections of the chapter are: The Irrelevance of the American Model of Federal Citizenship; and The Relevance of the American Multicultural Model.

Researchers have suggested that family discourse can work toward socializing children into the political beliefs of their parents, thereby “reproducing” political values and behaviors across generations of the same family. This chapter shows that a family's political identity can be a fundamental component of family identity. It considers how members of one family construct a family identity based on their support of Democratic Party presidential candidate Al Gore. The chapter illustrates how family members use language during conversations to create a group, rather than individual, identity and how political socialization is multidirectional in the family context, where all family members play a role in constructing the family identity. It also contributes to research in political socialization, wherein researchers have previously claimed that the family is of great importance in this process but have relied on interviews and surveys.

This chapter explores Hamlet's meaning in today's Arabic political vocabulary. Hamlet has been invoked in reference to nearly every major and minor political crisis touching the Arab world in the past decade. Analyzing his function in recent polemical writings such as newspaper columns, speeches, and sermons, this chapter shows how Arab writers read “to be or not to be” not as a meditation on the individual's place in the world but as an argument about collective political identity. Other themes from Hamlet—words/deeds, sleep/waking, madness/wholeness—help reinforce the urgency of the crisis. However, these cries of outrage and alarm are not the only approach to the issue of historical agency. As a counterpoint the chapter offers an instance of Hamlet rewriting by the important Palestinian–Iraqi writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.

This chapter traces the development of specific features of the political identity, culture, and participation in Hong Kong. It highlights the conflicting readings on these areas offered by scholars notably for the period before the 1990s. The dominant view that in Hong Kong a culture of political apathy prevailed was not seriously challenged until the late 1990s, when scholars re-examined the definition of political participation and the related evidence. After the 1997 handover, the different interpretations of the political culture and participation in Hong Kong among scholars have gradually been reconciled. Political activism has surged and political participation has also been on the rise. People have continued to seek to influence the government through various means including innovative non-institutional means.

Decolonization of the European empires in the twentieth century was spurred by the colonized based on two purposes: the desire for independence, and the desire to build a sovereign political identity. The most obvious feature of the first intention was the formation of anti-imperialist movements, organised under the banner ‘they must leave’. The latter was characterized by the establishment of constitutional government, which highlighted the identity of a novice country in a political and unified form and which featured a central source of power. These two purposes share a complex relationship. For power to be sovereign, independence must be gained first. Power cannot be obligated to the wishes of another power or constrained by the laws of another regime. The struggle for independence of European empires did not readily create the conditions for the exercise of a sovereign power. It was elusive at the moment of independence. This chapter discusses some of the implications of these two purposes, with emphasis on the second purpose and the Indian experience. It addresses questions such as: what is the meaning of collective identity to those newly independent countries in the context of politics; what were the pressures on the claims to political identity and unity; how did these pressures encourage a revolutionary mindset in the conceptualization of constitutional provisions and political power; and how does the struggle for political identity relate to the history of nation and its struggle for independence?

In March 1923, Philip Snowden rose in the Commons to propose a motion whose terms demonstrated that, in the complex political arguments and alignments of the 1920s in Britain, socialism and the supercession of capitalism was a major theme. Snowden was supported by other senior figures within the Parliamentary Labour Party: Ramsay MacDonald, J. C. Clynes, and Arthur Henderson. Their presentations offered a significant statement of Labour's political identity as perceived by its most authoritative figures. Snowden's lengthy and characteristically lucid indictment of capitalism was in terms of efficiency and morality. The cumulative consequence was an unintended shift from pure capitalism towards socialism. The belief in evolutionary change was complemented by a confidence in the moral superiority of socialist politics. Those who became socialists were not just perceptive; they had made an ethical choice. Commendations of ethical and evolutionary socialism were supported frequently by claims of British exceptionalism.

Will Lawther, active in the Durham Miners' Association (DMA) since 1907, was a leading and gaoled member of Red Chopwell's Council of Action during the General Strike. Within the DMA in the 1920s, he was associated with the Left; appropriately and controversially the Chopwell Lodge banner was decorated with images of Keir Hardie, Karl Marx, and Nikolai Lenin. As a Left activist, Lawther had political ambitions, and in 1929 he was elected Labour Member for Barnard Castle. Two years later, he addressed a May Day rally in the Durham coalfield. Oswald Mosley's New Party was two months old; the collapse of the second Labour Government was less than four months away. Lawther's speech remembered the 1926 stoppage selectively and developed a contrast that would become central to the Labour Party's political identity.

The argument of this book turns on the paradox that the political victors of the 18th century have been its literary losers. This chapter begins by questioning the discrepancy between the modern neglect of Whig verse, and the considerable acclaim that it enjoyed in its own time. It uses Joseph Addison's tribute to the author and statesman Charles Montagu to explore some of the characteristics of Whig poetry, drawing attention to the issues of political engagement, patronage, canonicity, and poetic tradition that are central to the argument of this book. The chapter also provides a brief introduction to Whiggism, and a discussion of the relationship between literature and political identity, considering the extent to which Whig poetry constituted a form of propaganda.

This chapter discusses three set of issues related to European identity. It first reviews the existing theoretical and empirical literature on European identity, organizing it around two major perspective, the neofunctionalist and the identitarian one. Second, it discusses the different ways European identity has been measured over time and it traces its evolution, based on different indicators, from the early 1970s up to 2007. The format of the question appears to be the most important element in explaining variation in levels of European identity, followed by the nation and, last, time. Third, the chapter assesses the relative weight the functional and identity models play in explaining variations in levels of European identity cross-nationally and over time. Using a pooled design, the results show that both functional and identity components are important in explaining variation in level of European identity over time and cross-nationally. As to identity, the quality of government index and the percentage of foreign workers are both significantly and negatively related to European identity. While all functional variables point in the right direction, length of duration of EU membership, a controversial and important indicator of the aggregate level of European identification, is found not significantly related with the aggregate level of European identity.

The collapse of postwar political arrangements in Eastern, and to some extent Western, Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, and Asia in the past decade has re-mapped geopolitical space and challenged social science to find new ways to conceptualize cultural and social transformation. The fall of long-established regimes coupled with vast shifts in migration flows have catapulted political identity, with its concomitant issues of nationalism, ethnicity, and citizenship, to the forefront of social scientific research. Macrosociological interest in political identity tends to focus principally upon the legal institution of citizenship, the problem of immigration, and juridical issues of membership and group rights. This chapter recasts citizenship as a cultural as well as legal mode of political incorporation and underscores the symbolic and emotional practices that nation-states marshal to mobilize affection for the polity. Wedding emotion and citizenship expands the concept of membership to include the felt experience of national belonging.

This chapter begins by establishing the historicity of the contentious relationship between language and social and political identities in Germany by taking the debates on language in the first half of the 19th century as an illustration of the coincidence of sociopolitical upheavals and linguistic crises, and as a demonstration of how values attached to the ‘national language’ or ‘mother tongue’ at the time foreshadowed many later developments. It then traces the course of the debates, showing how they track the shifting political climate of east-west relations in post-1945 Germany, and examines the links between political and academic agendas. Finally, the chapter discusses language change and language use. It argues that the ideological force of linguistic practices such as naming outweighs the extent of quantitative differences, that the use of key words to construct contexts is more important than the mere existence of distinct lexical sub-sets.

The introduction situates representational identity theory and my conceptualization of a Black political identity in preparation for theorizing Black women’s political behavior. It proposes that African American women legislators’ views of a Black political identity influence their legislative decision making. The representational identity theory that this chapter builds upon goes beyond taking simply race or gender identities as mere starting points to explain Black women’s legislative behavior.

Chapter 5 examines how Black women state legislators employ forms of Black political identity when representing their constituents, specifically when it comes to groups that are constructed as deserving and undeserving constituents. By exploring Black women’s stances on marriage equality legislation, which, this study contends, is a racialized issue for African Americans, this chapter demonstrates that the elected women have a nuanced view of Black political identity. As in the previous chapter, the chapter incorporates a generational analysis to show that the younger African American women state legislators are more progressive and push back against the tropes of Black culture that construct same-sex marriage as deviant.

This chapter examines the centrality of wandering to the experience of being Greek. From earliest times, the Greeks were in restless movement, propelled from their familiar habitat either by human force or by the exigencies of their environment. Wanderer refers to the tens of thousands of men, women, and children who left their homes without a settled route or fixed destination. A wanderer in this sense was not only apolis (without a city-state), but also aphrêtôr (without a phratry), and anestios (without a hearth). In other words, he or she was stripped not only of civic and political identity, but also, even more fundamentally, of social and familial identity. Without attachment to a phratry, a Greek was denied membership of one of the primary divisions of Greek society, and without attachment to a hearth, he or she was estranged from that most basic unit of Greek life, namely the oikos or oikia (home, household).