Map-Making and Nation-Building

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-97
Author(s):  
Christine Leuenberger ◽  
Izhak Schnell

Jewish organizations and Israeli institutions, before and after the establishment of Israel in 1948, produced various maps that fostered an “imagined community” and helped build the state. The Jewish National Fund, in particular, become a powerful socializing agent into notions of territory. Its widely disseminated Blue Box helped brand the territory and territorialize Jewish identity. Moreover, after 1948, the newly appointed Governmental Names Committee established a Hebrew toponomy of the land. Yet top-down naming practices often encountered bottom-up resistance by local municipalities, as ideological directives would mix with local politics. At the same time, the Israeli atlas became a powerful representation of Israeli’s national story, reconstructing its history, its achievements, and its modern prowess. Last, at that time, various political parties also used maps to put forth different visions for a new society, a new human being, and a new state commanding a yet to be defined territory.

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 522-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christofer Berglund

After the Rose Revolution, President Saakashvili tried to move away from the exclusionary nationalism of the past, which had poisoned relations between Georgians and their Armenian and Azerbaijani compatriots. His government instead sought to foster an inclusionary nationalism, wherein belonging was contingent upon speaking the state language and all Georgian speakers, irrespective of origin, were to be equals. This article examines this nation-building project from a top-down and bottom-up lens. I first argue that state officials took rigorous steps to signal that Georgian-speaking minorities were part of the national fabric, but failed to abolish religious and historical barriers to their inclusion. I next utilize a large-scale, matched-guise experiment (n= 792) to explore if adolescent Georgians ostracize Georgian-speaking minorities or embrace them as their peers. I find that the upcoming generation of Georgians harbor attitudes in line with Saakashvili's language-centered nationalism, and that current Georgian nationalism therefore is more inclusionary than previous research, or Georgia's tumultuous past, would lead us to believe.


2001 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Corrales

AbstractThe literature on the origins of democratic institutions is split between bottom-up and top-down approaches. The former emphasize societal factors that press for democracy; the latter, rules and institutions that shape elites' incentives. Can these approaches be reconciled? This article proposes competitive political parties, more so than degrees of modernization and associationalism, as the link between the two. Competitive political parties enhance society's bargaining power with the state and show dominant elites that liberalization is in their best interest; the parties are thus effective conduits of democracy. In the context of party deficit, the prospects for democratization or redemocratization are slim. This is illustrated by comparing Cuba and Venezuela in the 1950s and 1990s.


1977 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 474-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Story

AS LONG AS FRANCO LIVED, ALL MILITARY, LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE powers centred on his person. Regional autonomies were suppressed, unions outlawed and political parties banned on the metaphorically medical grounds that ‘Spain’ was historically addictive to the ‘demoliberal system of inorganic democracy’. But Admiral Carrero Blanco, Franco’s éminence grise, was assassinated on 20 December 1973. His death marked the burial of Franco’s plans to perpetuate the regime beyond his grave. Juan Carlos, son of Don Juan - the heir to Alfonso XIII’s throne - pledged at his inauguration in November 1975 to create ‘a real consensus of national concord’. Spain was to become a full member of Europe, ‘with all that this implies’. Neither pledge was attainable without at least a major reform, or at most a dismantling of the regime’s characteristic institutions: the National Movement and the state syndicates. Both were eventually accomplished by a de facto alliance between the monarch and all political forces in the country opposed to a maintenance of the status quo.


2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 834-851 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Mikuš

This article analyses from an anthropological perspective the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, the first state-supported Parade in Serbia, as a part of the building of a democratic and European Serbian nation. In their discursive framing of the Parade and making claims on the state to take it under its auspices, the organising NGOs bound the event to the EU integration process of Serbia. This policy link helped them forge a political alliance with the state, but was also instrumentalised by the government to avoid an ideological conflict with the opponents of the Parade. Owing to the perception of the alliance as “elitist” and to the militarised and depoliticised nature of the state’s involvement, the event materially actualised and reified rather than transcended the enduring conflict of liberal and collectivist citizenship visions in Serbia. The article argues that the overall discourse of the government on Europeanisation is informed by the same top-down and instrumental logic. However, members of civil society develop political subjectivities which demand active citizen participation and critically engage with the discourse to restore its democratising potential. Similarly, the emerging “populist” politics of LGBT rights, illustrated by the pop singer Jelena Karleuša’s participation in the domestic debate, are better placed to face the legacies of socialist and ethnonationalist nation-building than the human rights and Europeanisation approaches.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 817-835 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liudmila Voronova

The Ukrainian Euromaidan protests in 2013, alongside the Brexit vote and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, have strongly changed the imaginary of Europe. Apart from ideological shifts and geopolitical changes, the situation in Ukraine has led to a geographic relocation and displacement of media producers and audiences alike. Yet, in the Ukrainian context and beyond, little is known about dislocated journalists in conflict situations. This article addresses the specific experiences of immigrant and internally displaced journalists, their imagined audiences and the overarching construction of post-revolutionary Ukraine as an imagined community. The argument draws empirically from the dislocatory experiences and relocatory trajectories of two groups: immigrant journalists, who moved to Ukraine from Russia, and journalists who migrated internally – to Kyiv and other government-controlled Ukrainian regions from Crimea and non-government-controlled areas of Donbas. For immigrant and internally displaced journalists, the search for new identities and positions is strongly related to their imagination of the audiences. The journalists notice a simultaneous fragmentation and unification of the audiences driven by both top-down and down-up intentions of post-revolutionary nation building. They hope to contribute to turning the fragmented communities into a media nation that will perceive them as ‘us’.


1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. E. Sackett

Virtually all studies of the rise of nationalism in modern Germany relate their subject in some way to the history of the state. There was, for example, a profusion of national feeling in German society in the later nineteenth century, and it has been seen as an outgrowth of the aggrandizement of state power in Prussia. German nationalism in the Age of Napoleon has been viewed as the nation's response to her subjugation by France, which in turn the Revolution made possible by enlarging the social base of French rule. So-called high politics—these central relations of power in or among particular states—indeed produced stimuli for the growth of German national sentiment. However, due in part to modernization theory, the connection between nationalism and the state now appears in another light. Interest in the state has come to include the administration, a less exalted form of politics but no less crucial to the process of nation-building.


1935 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-67
Author(s):  
Ellen Deborah Ellis

It is curious that the question with which, of all others, every participant in local politics finds himself most persistently confronted—and it is a truism that by far the greatest part of our political lives are concerned with local affairs—should be given so little. attention in treatises on American government. I refer to the problem of the relation between national political parties and state and local politics.The problem presents itself under two aspects, in one sense separate, though in reality closely interwoven with each other. There is first the anomaly that local issues seem so far removed from the platforms of the organizations, the national parties, through which the often perplexed and embarrassed voter must express himself in the performance of his ordinary electoral duties in the state or the locality; and there is, secondly, the question faced by every would-be reformer of local government, as to whether the desired reforms can best be brought about through the national party organizations or through separate locally organized groups.


2003 ◽  
Vol 123 (0) ◽  
pp. 51-55
Author(s):  
Munenori Hayakawa ◽  
Tadao Nishimura ◽  
Kenji Suzuki ◽  
Natsuki Morishima ◽  
Nobuhiro Shibata ◽  
...  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document