Anti-Tradition and Democracy in China at the Start of the Twentieth Century: National Culture and the Crisis of the Nation-State

2012 ◽  
pp. 377-457
Author(s):  
Richard S. Wortman

The assassination of Alexander II on 1 March 1881 ended the European myth of Russian monarchy—the narratives and imagery that had elevated Russian rulers since the reign of Peter I as exemplars of Western absolutism—and was followed by the introduction of a new governing myth idealizing seventeenth-century Muscovy. This chapter demonstrates that, by entertaining the illusion of a monarchical early Rus’, Alexander III and Nicholas II not only undermined the supra-national culture of their multi-national empire, but isolated themselves from educated society, both liberal and conservative, that looked towards political participation and the formation of a united nation-state on the model of the West. The catastrophic events of early twentieth-century Russia resulted not from a decrepit monarchy collapsing before insurgent oppositional movements, but from the clash of a monarch seeking to restore divinely inspired authoritarian rule with a Russia awakening politically and demanding to be heard.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius

Muslim presence in Lithuania, though already addressed from many angles, has not hitherto been approached from either the perspective of the social contract theories or of the compliance with Muslim jurisprudence. The author argues that through choice of non-Muslim Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their adopted Motherland, Muslim Tatars effectively entered into a unique (yet, from the point of Hanafi fiqh, arguably Islamically valid) social contract with the non-Muslim state and society. The article follows the development of this social contract since its inception in the fourteenth century all the way into the nation-state of Lithuania that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century and continues until the present. The epitome of the social contract under investigation is the official granting in 1995 to Muslim Tatars of a status of one of the nine traditional faiths in Lithuania with all the ensuing political, legal and social consequences for both the Muslim minority and the state.


2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-360
Author(s):  
Elmer S. Miller

Research reports on Christian missions to foreign lands have tended to focus on the relationship between missionary and native people, giving little attention to the interplay of nation-state agencies. Furthermore, the reports portray a one-way process in which the missionary gives and natives receive, although the intervention actually entails multiple agents influencing one another. This study documents the dynamic interaction among a Mennonite Mission, Argentine national and state indigenous policies, and Toba aborigines throughout the latter twentieth century. It illustrates the active role played by the Toba in reformulating both the missionary message and nation-state policy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61
Author(s):  
Thomas Blom Hansen

Abstract Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not from the heart of Western Europe but from the complex arrangements of “distributed sovereignty” that emerged in the Indian Ocean and other colonized territories from the eighteenth century onward. These arrangements were organized as multiple layers of dependency and provisional domination, captured well by Eric Beverley's term minor sovereignty. Thinking through sovereignty in a minor key allows us to see sovereignty less as a foundation of states and societies and more as a performative category, emerging in a dialectic between promises of order, prosperity, and law, and the realities of violent domination and occupation.


Author(s):  
Mona Hassan

This chapter analyzes the vibrant discussions of the early twentieth century over how to revive a caliphate best suited to the post-war era. While some advocated preservation of a traditional caliphal figurehead, many Muslim intellectuals were greatly persuaded by new models of internationalism embracing the nation-state and proposed international caliphal councils and organizations, similar to the League of Nations, or other purportedly spiritual institutions, similar to the refashioned papacy, to preserve the bonds of a transregional religious community. To varying degrees, all the participants in the debate over reviving a twentieth-century caliphate were influenced by an intriguing confluence of both the historic transregionalism of the Muslim community as well as the modern thrust of the new age of global internationalism.


This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book tells a story of the changing script of warfare in the mid-twentieth century through the Korean War. At stake in this conflict was not simply the usual question of territorial sovereignty and the nation-state. The heart of the struggles revolved around the question of political recognition, the key relational dynamic that formed the foundation for the post-1945 nation-state system. This book argues that in order to understand how the act of recognition became the essential terrain of war, one must step away from the traditional landscape of warfare—the battlefield—and into the interrogation room.


Author(s):  
Yasmine Ramadan

The fourth chapter takes the reader beyond the boundaries of the Egyptian nation, to Europe and the Gulf, to explore the space of political and economic dislocation, and brings together the work of Bahaa Taher and Muhammad al-Bisati. It traces the transformation of the exilic novel from the early decades of the twentieth century: while early Arabic narratives showed a movement beyond the borders of Egypt largely for the purposes of education, Taher’s Al-Hubb fi al-manfa (Love in Exile, 1995) and al-Bisati’s Daqq al-tubul (Drumbeat, 2006) depict Europe as the space of political exile, and the Arab Gulf as the site of economic exploitation. In both cases the novels under examination raise questions about the unity of the Egyptian nation-state in an age where political, social, and economic flows extend beyond the boundaries of the nation. The two works engage not only with issues of national identity and belonging, but also with that of regional affiliation. highlighting how the experience of economic and political dislocation serves to illuminate the failure Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalist dream, and its dissolution under the regimes of Sadat and Mubarak in the following decades.


Author(s):  
STEPHEN BANFIELD

Between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a cultivated relationship with the music of a favoured period in the distant national past was a pervasive aspect of high, and sometimes lower, musical culture in England. This chapter first sketches a general picture of that relationship before presenting some particular case studies. It addresses the following questions: to what extent does Tudorism in music refer to the revival of music itself, to what extent to its stylistic emulation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English compositions? Was it a matter of appealing to the Tudors to set a political agenda for music? Tudorism in English music was many things but also one very definite thing — a conscious modelling of style or atmosphere in musical composition on that of a perceived golden age of national culture. It was in some respects part of the early music movement that Harry Haskell identified as beginning in 1829 with Mendelssohn's revival of J. S. Bach's St Matthew Passion, yet not the same thing insofar as that movement was about reviving discarded old music and Tudorism was about creating new music in an earlier image.


Author(s):  
Flora Xiaofang Shao

Lu Xun, a pre-eminent man of letters in twentieth-century China, is widely regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature. Writing during China’s tumultuous transition from a dynastic empire into modern nation-state, Lu Xun was one of the leading practitioners of the nationalist ‘New Literature’ as well as a driving force behind the iconoclastic New Culture Movement and other intellectual reforms. His works have been celebrated for their trenchant critique of the cultural malaise of Chinese society. His inimitable style of acute self-reflexivity, combined with dark sarcasm, set an example for later writers who were similarly engaged in literature as a form of social critique.


2020 ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Julian Go

This chapter explores how the Bourdieusian field theory can be deployed to make sense of global dynamics. It mentions international relations (IR) scholars that have enlisted Bourdieu in their analyses, applied his work to international issues, and taken certain concepts, such as habitus and practice, from his larger theoretical conceptual apparatus. It also focuses on three transformative processes or macro-historical turning points: the expansion of colonial empires during the phase of 'high imperialism', the two world wars, and the post-war end of formal colonial empires that heralded the rise to dominance of the modern nation state. The chapter maps the points of differentiation between field theory approaches and other approaches. It recognizes other key elements of Bourdieusian field theory, such as fields that consist of objective relations between actors and the subjective and cultural forms of those relations.


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