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TAMIL NATION LIBRARY: Nations & Nationalism
- * Notions of
Nationalism
Edited by Sukumar Periwal
published by Central European University Press
Budapest, London, New York
* link to Amazon.com
online bookshop
also ** link to Amazon.co.uk
on line bookshop
Contributors:
Hans van Amersfoort is Professor at the Institute for Social Geography, University of
Amsterdam.
John Armstrong is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
Ernest Gellner is Professor Emeritus, University of Cambridge, and Director of the Centre
for the Study of Nationalism at the Central European University.
John Hall is Professor of Sociology at McGill University, Canada.
Chris Hann is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent.
Miroslav Hroch is Professor of History at Charles University, Prague.
John Keane is Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of
Westminster.
Michael Mann is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Hudson Meadwell is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University, Canada.
Sukumar Periwal is Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Nationalism, Central
European University.
Elzbieta Skotnicka-Illasiewicz cooperates with the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology,
Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.
Nicholas Stargardt is Lecturer in Twentieth-century European History at the University of
London.
Wlodzimierz Wesolowski is Professor of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. |
from the conclusion:
"...'Yet another volume on nationalism?' a tired reader sighs, browsing through a
bookshop or library. 'Why?'
In recent years 'nationalism' has become an eponymous word, a word one cannot escape, a
word like 'modern' or 'politics' or 'identity', a word one encounters so many times every
day, whether in the morning newspaper or in the evening news on television, a word which
has become so much part of our daily vocabulary that it passes submerged into the diffused
mental structures that allow us to comprehend the world in which we live. Everyone has
some intuition about what 'nationalism' is...
This book seeks to clarify the meaning of the word 'nationalism' as it is used in daily
discourse. The authors who have contributed to this volume are
important participants in a debate which is central to contemporary social science...
....all the contributors to this book share the basic premises that 'nationalism' is
not a self-evident phenomenon or notion, and that the attempt to understand nationalism is
important because nationalism is a crucial and inescapable component of politics and
identity in the modern world.
'Politics', 'identity', 'modernity': these words point to two aspects of the debate on
nationalism. First, far from being a unitary concept with sharp, clearly defined
boundaries, the very notion 'nationalism' is inextricably intertwined in an intricate web
with other complex concepts. (Furthermore, as several of the essays in this book remind
us, 'nationalism' itself is analytically divisible into other concepts: secession,
irredentism, self-determination, to name just three.) Secondly, the use of the words
'politics', 'identity' and 'modernity' in this context points to ... an understanding that
nationalism is all about the construction and contestation of concepts of identity in the
social conditions specific to modernity; that it is, in this sense, essentially political.
This understanding contrasts sharply with the common intuition that nationalism is somehow
'natural'. Insofar as most people think about nationalism at all, they seem to assume
rather vaguely that since people live in groups, speak different languages, cook in
diverse ways, and above all else, look different, then such divisions of the world must
always have been the case, 'nations' must always have existed, and states are synonymous
with 'nations'.
We have the United Nations, relations between states are called international
relations, international peacekeepers try to defuse tensions in various
trouble-spots around the world, elections are monitored by international
observers . . . Such a list could go on indefinitely, but the point, of course, is that
the prevalent worldview assumes the equation of 'state' and 'nation', an assumption which
is itself essentially nationalist...
This assumption that the state and the nation are synonymous entities is so deeply
entrenched in the late-twentieth-century worldview precisely because of the success of
nationalist ideology. Furthermore, the assumption that 'state' and 'nation' are synonymous
causes us to feel uneasy when the political unit and the national unit are not congruent.
They should be. Nothing provokes greater outrage than 'imperialism', when groups who claim
the privileged status of 'nation' are denied the 'right' to 'self-determination', whether
in the form of enforced belonging to an 'alien' state or in the form of a more powerful
state bullying a weaker one.... We might not think of ourselves as nationalists, indeed,
we might well think of ourselves as being positively internationalists, but the point is
that nationalism and internationalism are two sides of the same coin and that the very
ubiquity of the words debases the value of the conceptual currency..."
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