Nationalism is dead, long live nationalism! In pursuit of pluralistic nationalism: A critical overview

Rather than vilifying or rejecting it, an increasing number of scholars from two seemingly anti-nationalist cohorts, namely liberal political theory and multiculturalism, have come to argue that nationalism is not intrinsically illiberal or undesirable, but some forms of it (e.g. liberal, multicultural, pluralistic) can be a positive force to meet the demands for nation-building, national identity and national culture, on the one hand, and demands for recognition, respect and accommodation of diversity, on the other. This paper critically examines recent scholarly literature on liberal nationalism and multicultural nationalism. It argues that both projects have developed necessary responses to (1) growing diversity and (2) ethnonational and populist-majoritarian forms of nationalism and hence, are welcome. However, two substantial shortcomings need to be addressed. The first is the nation-building–education nexus and the limits of multicultural education (e.g. the teaching of history), and the second is the nationalism–transnationalism nexus or the normative desirability of dual nationalities. The paper concludes that a morally acceptable form of nationalism (e.g. pluralistic, inclusive or moderate) operating within multi-national and multicultural liberal democracies is theoretically possible, yet its viability is related to the extent to which it addresses the two issues raised, amongst others.

Promotion of Nationalism through Caste: A Study of Rabindra Nath Tagore’s Gora

The original idea of caste system was engineering the society on the basis of labor division by providing every sector of society a distinct and important role to make the Hindu society an integrated whole making every group in the society depending on every other or the society was engineered to be completely inter-dependent, but the problem is that it has been misused as a means of social exploitation, oppression that has led the society towards mutual hatred and disintegration. The main objective of this research article is to find out how Gora, the protagonist of Rabindra Nath Tagore’s novel Gora, has used the idea of caste division as a means to promote nationalism among the people. Theoretical insights of liberal nationalism are used to analyze the primary text with the help of theoretical insights of Edward Soja’s ‘Thirdspace’. The article examines and analyzes how one can help strengthen social integration by respecting the others and offering the people justice even though difference is inevitable among the people living in a society. The article concludes that caste system can be exercised as a means of cultural nationalism by celebrating the difference among the people and respecting the jobs done by others.

Dramatizing Chinese Intellectuals of the Republican Era in Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek: Encoding Nostalgia in a Comedy of Ideas

Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek, one of the most influential Chinese plays to have garnered attention in recent years, serves as a reminder of the importance of campus theatre in the formation and development of modern Chinese spoken drama from the early twentieth century onwards. As an old-fashioned high comedy that features witty dialogues and conveys philosophical and political ideas, it stands in opposition to such other forms of theatre in China today as the extravagant, propagandistic ‘main melody’ plays, as well as the experimental theatre of images. This article argues that the play’s focus on Chinese intellectuals of the Republican era and their ideas encodes nostalgia both in its dramatic content and theatrical form: the former encodes nostalgia for the Republican era through a nuanced representation of Chinese intellectuals of that period, while the latter encodes nostalgia for orthodox spoken drama (huaju) in the form of a comedy of ideas. Yuan Li (first author) is Professor of English in the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She has published extensively on contemporary Chinese and Anglo-Irish drama, theatre, and cinema. Tim Beaumont (corresponding author) is Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Shenzhen University. His research is primarily philosophical, and it is currently focused on the relationship between nineteenth-century liberal nationalism and contemporary multiculturalism.

How Legacies of Geopolitical Trauma Shape Popular Nationalism Today

Geopolitical competition and conflict play a central role in canonical accounts of the emergence of nation-states and national identities. Yet work in this tradition has paid little attention to variation in everyday, popular understandings of nationhood. We propose a macro-historical argument to explain cross-national variation in the types of popular nationalism expressed at the individual level. Our analysis builds on recent advances on the measurement of popular nationalism and a recently introduced geopolitical threat scale (Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017). With the use of latent class analysis and a series of regression models, we show that a turbulent geopolitical past decreases the prevalence of liberal nationalism (pride in institutions, inclusive boundaries) while increasing the prevalence of restrictive nationalism (less pride in institutions, exclusive boundaries) across 43 countries around the world. Additional analyses suggest the long-term development of institutions is a key mediating variable: states with a less traumatic geopolitical history tend to have more established liberal democratic institutions, which in turn foster liberal forms of popular nationalism.

Part I International Refugee Law— Reflections on the Scholarly Field, Ch.6 The Ethics of International Refugee Protection

The ethics of international refugee protection reflect the dual normative principles of state sovereignty and recognition of refugees’ international human rights which characterize the contemporary refugee regime since the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. This contribution identifies three major positions, each of which acknowledges these dual foundations while seeking to balance, synthesize, or transcend them. These positions are: liberal nationalism, which prioritizes state sovereignty and the rights of bounded political communities to protect their own culture and territory; liberal internationalism, which recognizes that state sovereignty is embedded in a system of international duties and prerogatives; and, cosmopolitanism, which seeks to transcend ‘ontology of containment’ characterizing both positions by acknowledging the radical interdependence of peoples and the fluidity of their movement across boundaries. The cosmopolitan position is further divided into agency-centric views, power-centric views, and the post-colonial perspective. The article concludes by defending jurisgenerativity and democratic iterations as political processes through which law’s normative promise and its imbrication in systems of power and domination can be brought to light and resignified to reflect the dignity and subjectivity of refugees and not merely their protection.

Wisconsin Marianism and Upper Midwestern Catholic Culture, 1858–2010

In the late nineteenth century, a cultus that included a shrine and devoted followers developed around the claims of Adèle Brise, a Belgian immigrant, asserting that “Our Lady of Good Help” had appeared to her in Robinsonville in northeastern Wisconsin in the late 1850s. In December 2010, the bishop of Green Bay, David Ricken, pronounced the apparitions to Brise valid, making these the only American apparitions to be officially recognized by the Catholic Church. By contrast, in 1955 the bishop of La Crosse, John P. Treacy, found Mary Ann Van Hoof’s claim of receiving apparitions from “the Queen of the Holy Rosary, Mediatrix of Peace” in Necedah, central Wisconsin, to be inauthentic, and he prohibited Catholics from worshipping with Van Hoof and her followers. Van Hoof’s claims briefly attracted thousands of Midwestern Catholics seeking mystical experiences of Mary in an American nationalist idiom during the Cold War. The Robinsonville and Necedah apparitions were Upper Midwestern manifestations of a transnational Marian Revival originating in continental Europe after the French Revolution as European Catholics and their diasporas responded to aspects of liberal nationalism and its advocacy of an expansive modern state that undercut clerical authority and parochial communalism.