scholarly journals THE PLEBISCITI CONCEPT OF A NATION BY ERNEST RENAN

Author(s):  
Roman Korshuk

The article analyses the concept of the nation of the French thinker Ernest Renan. The role of objective factors in nation-building processes is considered, the inadmissibility of absolutisation of the role of these factors in the formation of the nation is indicated. The reasons for E. Renan's criticism of the identification of nation and race are investigated. In particular, the anti-scientific and anti-democratic nature of such identification is pointed out. The concept of the nation as a daily plebiscite and its connection with the common history and destiny is analysed. The importance of the national idea in the process of nation formation is pointed out. In particular, the role of national myths, the myths of the "victim nation" and the "hero nation", and historical oblivion in the processes of nation-building is analysed. The results of the study were obtained by applying the following methods: structural and functional - to analyse the role of objective and subjective factors influencing the processes of nation-building, their relationship; comparative - to compare the importance of territory, dynasty, statehood, common interests, race, language, religion and national identity in the process of nation-building; institutional method - for the analysis of the daily plebiscite as a process of mental and socio-political institutionalisation of the collective will, which is the basis for the continuous reproduction of the national community; causal analysis - to reveal the specific historical circumstances of the formation of the plebiscite concept of the nation of E. Renan, in particular the influence on the formation of his views on the consequences of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Ernest Renan entered the history of the development of socio-political thought as the author of the concept of the nation, which is a combination of psychological, historical and democratic elements. Renan's concept organically combines national identity as the basis of the nation with the democratic nature of national choice (daily plebiscite). This combination forms nationally conscious citizens who together make up the nation and embody its collective will. The existence of nations as the collective wills of nationally conscious individuals is the key to the law in domestic politics and international relations.

Author(s):  
Tim Dunne

For much of the history of academic International Relations, foreign policy has understated the role of ethics in the theory and practice of statecraft. As discussed in the first part of the chapter, it was not until the critical and normative turn of the 1980s and 1990s that ethics assumed a significant role in the study of foreign policy. Ethics also rose to prominence in the language and commitments of a number of modernizing centre-left governments claiming to be agents of the common good. The second part of the chapter treats humanitarianism as a case study because it illustrates how ethics and foreign policy are configured in practice. While it is true that human rights significantly contributed to the end of the Cold War, it is also the case that erosion of the liberal international order poses stark questions for the resilience of humanitarianism in a deeply divided world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-3) ◽  
pp. 70-81
Author(s):  
David Ramiro Troitino ◽  
Tanel Kerikmae ◽  
Olga Shumilo

This article highlights the role of Charles de Gaulle in the history of united post-war Europe, his approaches to the internal and foreign French policies, also vetoing the membership of the United Kingdom in the European Community. The authors describe the emergence of De Gaulle as a politician, his uneasy relationship with Roosevelt and Churchill during World War II, also the roots of developing a “nationalistic” approach to regional policy after the end of the war. The article also considers the emergence of the Common Agricultural Policy (hereinafter - CAP), one of Charles de Gaulle’s biggest achievements in foreign policy, and the reasons for the Fouchet Plan defeat.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Hugo Canihac

This article contributes to the debate about the history of the political economy of the European Economic Community (EEC). It retraces the efforts during the early years of the EEC to implement a form of ‘European economic programming’, that is, a more ‘dirigiste’ type of economic governance than is usually associated with European integration. Based on a variety of archives, it offers a new account of the making and failure of this project. It argues that, at the time, the idea of economic programming found many supporters, but its implementation largely failed for political as well as practical reasons. In so doing, it also brings to light the role of economists during the early years of European integration.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C Hendrickson

This essay offers a constitutional perspective on the American encounter with the problem of international order. Its point of departure is the American Founding, a subject often invisible in both the history of international thought and contemporary International Relations theory. Although usually considered as an incident within the domestic politics of the United States, the Founding displays many key ideas that have subsequently played a vital role in both international political thought and IR theory. The purpose of this essay is to explore these ideas and to take account of their passage through time, up to and including the present day. Those ideas shine a light not only on how we organize our scholarly enterprises but also on the contemporary direction of US foreign policy and the larger question of world order.


2002 ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Z.V. Shved

Over the last decade, interest in the heritage of such national thinkers who have worked in the space of sociocultural and religious studies has become relevant. That is why, in our opinion, the appeal to Vyacheslav Lipynsky's creative work is justified. Today, his legacy can be used not only to understand the history of society and the state, but also to understand some aspects of our present. Therefore, you should listen more carefully to the thoughts of this thinker.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 101-111
Author(s):  
A. A. Mikhaylova

Serbian fi gured gingerbreads owned by the Russian Museum of Ethnography are described, the history of the collection is provided, and its cultural meaning is evaluated. Ethnographic parallels are analyzed, and archaic examples are cited. The custom of baking gingerbread results from the commercialization of the agricultural tradition of baking ritual bread. In terms of cultural anthropology, the question may be raised whether the replacement of destroyed originals by plaster replicas preserves the information potential and ethnographic value of the collection. Its interpretation is relevant to national identity in new Balkan nations such as Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia. Another problem is if and how a craft shared by several peoples can be an ethnic marker. In terms of ethnographic museology in the globalizing world, the prospects of acquiring recent collections are discussed. The role of such collections in constructing new national identities may be considerable.


Author(s):  
John Watkins

This book examines the role of marriage in the formation, maintenance, and disintegration of a premodern European diplomatic society. The argument develops in dialogue with the so-called English school of international relations theory, with its emphasis on the contemporary international system as a society of states sharing certain values, norms, and common interests rather than as an anarchy driven solely by power struggles. In studying the place of marriage diplomacy in questions of monarchical and national sovereignty, the book draws on interdisciplinary methodologies that have long characterized academic studies of queenship and, more recently, European diplomatic culture. It begins with Virgil, whose epic tells the story of Aeneas's marriage to Lavinia—the paradigmatic interdynastic marriage. It also considers the inseparability of marriage diplomacy from literary production. Finally, it discusses the factors that precipitated the disintegration of marriage diplomacy, including new technologies of print and the large public theaters for promoting diplomatic literacy.


This chapter extends the book’s insights about nature, technology, and nation to the larger history of the modern period. While the modern nation loses its grip as a locus of identity and analysis, attempts to understand the operation, disruption, and collapse of continental and global infrastructures continue to mix the natural and the machinic in ways that define them both. Those vulnerabilities emphasize large-scale catastrophe; historiographically, they mask the crucial role of small-scale failures in the experience and culture of late modernity, including its definition of nature. Historical actors turned the uneven geographical distribution of small-scale failures into a marker of distinctive local natures and an element of regional and national identity. Attending to those failures helps not only situate cold-war technologies in the larger modern history of natural and machinic orders; it helps provincialize the superpowers by casting problematic “other” natures as central and primary.


Author(s):  
Jeanette McVicker

A young Virginia Stephen describes the rustic beauty of Salisbury plain and its surroundings (including Stonehenge) in an early voicing of Englishness in the 1903 journal. Three years later, Virginia visits Greece and Turkey, where she begins to contrast that developing sense of Englishness with other nationalisms (German, Greek and Turkish), both resisting and appropriating the language of the tourist. In addition to helping her formulate a sense of national identity, as a woman and a writer, these trips share another aspect: they are suffused by personal experiences of loss (Leslie Stephen’s declining health and death, and Thoby’s sudden death from typhoid). A similar weaving of personal loss with issues of national identity can be detected in her diary during her second journey to Greece in the company of Leonard, Roger and Margery Fry in 1932, prompted by the deaths of Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, and her return to the English countryside. This paper explores the relation that these specific journeys, 30 years apart, have to Woolf’s developing sense of tradition, history, and western civilization, and her own place as a writer. The interweaving of the rustic – peasants, common people, villages and natural places – with the history of ideas allows Woolf to reimagine the legacy of heritage for her dramatically changing times. That heritage, intimately bound up with death – whether neutralized as an ancestral past or bearing the sting of the lived present – shapes the way Woolf engages with memory, beauty, and the contemporary role of the English writer.


Author(s):  
Tutaleni I. Asino ◽  
Hilary Wilder ◽  
Sharmila Pixy Ferris

Namibia was under colonizing and apartheid rule for more than a century. In 1990, the country declared its independence, and since that time, great strides have been made in linking its rural communities into a national communications Grid that was previously inaccessible to them, often leapfrogging traditional landline telephone technologies with universal cellphone service. In addition, one newspaper, The Namibian, has been innovatively using newer communications technologies to maintain its historic role of nation-building. This study explores the use of SMS via cellphone and a traditional national newspaper in creating a sense of national identity that transcends geographic distances and a legacy of economic/political barriers.. The cell phone messages made it possible for the rural communities who have been left out of discussion relating to issues of development to be included. Like the old slogan, “information is power,” this chapter illustrates that the lives of some rural area dwellers have improved a result of a technological gadget, the mobile phone.


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