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elections All states restrict the right to vote to certain categories of people. In older times, restrictions commonly included property ownership, male gender, and literacy. Though such exclusions have largely fallen into disuse, there is nevertheless variation in the extent to which the suffrage is in practice ‘universal’ in the modern world; exclusions are generally based on two principles: political community membership and political competence. The concept of ‘universal suffrage’ implies that the franchise is granted to all members of the political community, with
moment. The UK’s Brexit governments, both before and after the general election of 2017, sought to take back control, not just from the EU, but also from the idea of England as a political community that the Brexit issue mobilised. The Brexit referendum may well have been about ‘independence’ and ‘taking back control’, but as the UK Government negotiated to leave the EU, it was unclear what sort of control or independence was being won or taken back from whom. Obscured by the neologism ‘Brexit’ was a complex interplay of elite projects and popular
Anderson notes in a brief bibliography on the concept of the state in the Arab world, this approach of ungluing sovereignty from statehood is potentially disconcerting on normative grounds as sovereign power may be ‘reattached’ to monarchs, princely families or even firms.15 I do not go quite so far in my analysis. Instead, I argue that such an approach is necessary to understand the claims to power made by regimes and from this, the way in which political life is contested. Ultimately, focusing on sovereignty allows for exploration of political communities and their
Walter Benjamin after, was acutely aware of the role of violence in constituting and sustaining forms of political community. On this view, there is an uneasy continuum between the polite deliberation and disagreement within forums, senates and parliaments, and the fighting and killing that bring these into being and sustain them internally against opposition and against rival communities and
meaningless if it is considered in isolation from the state, because the modern state shaped the nationalist agenda and provided it with an overarching objective – the possession of statehood.30 The closest Breuilly came to outlining an account of the emergence of a national ‘order of things’ was a brief discussion of the transfer of political power from monarchs to an enlarged political community. He suggested that the driving force behind this transfer was the need to defend the monarch’s territory against the rise of similar states, though this tautology is unconvincing
”, “nation”, “state”, and “political community” interchangeably’. 6 In a discussion of state authority which is pertinent for considerations of community, Joseph Raz says ‘Throughout the discussion I refer interchangeably to the state, which is the political organization of a society, its government, the agent through which it acts, and the law, the vehicle through which much of its power is exercised’. 7 But
the police, political parties and the district administration; in short, the encapsulating structures. Situational analysis as demonstrated in Bailey’s ethnographies of politics abstracts specific situations from reality to understand the contingency of rules and practices within political communities. 6 This can be understood through the ways in which two political
disaffection of Israeli Palestinians with the Israeli regime ( Amara, 2000 ). 20 So the Palestinian minority within Israel could become alienated from both political communities. Ethnic and religious tolerance National security does not require ethnic and religious homogeneity or cohesiveness. What it does require is that differentiated ethnic and religious groups avoid internecine
behaviour and competition (Butler and Stokes 1969; Roberts 2000; Caramani 2004). However, recent approaches to territorial politics have questioned these state-centred accounts. The ‘nationalisation’ or ‘standardisation’ of politics has run into problems, namely, the existence of distinctive territorial identities based on history, language, or institutional traditions (Keating 1988). Substate territorial units have provided an alternative setting for defining the political community, or the ‘small world’ nested within the state (Elkins and Simeon 1980). As individual
states’ (Haas 1958 : 16), then clearly it is difficult to conceive of CFSP as a process of integration. In CFSP, no central institutions have emerged which possess jurisdiction over member states’ foreign policies, nor has CFSP led to the emergence of a political community defined as ‘a condition in which specific groups and individuals show more loyalty to their central political institutions than to any other political