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M1634 - HAYWARD TEXT.qxp:ANDY Q7 27/1/09 13:23 Page 18 2 Nation-state and European Union The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate in detail the theoretical basis for the application of the triform model – identity, borders and governance – to the nation-state and the European Union. Theories of nationalism and European integration are examined in three sections. The first section sets out a constructivist/modernist conception of official nationalism and nation-statehood, which traditionally frames a political system in a triform model of ‘nation
M1218 - THOMPSON TXT.qxp:GRAHAM Q7.3 10/3/08 13:10 Page 18 1 The modern democratic nation-state For Machiavelli and his heirs, reason of state was prudent politics for princes and republics in competition for territory and power at home and abroad using violence. By the time the first aspects of what were to become modern democratic nation-states were emerging during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the domestic and external conditions in which the authority and power of any state had to be realised were very different. That change began with
4 The nation-state’s wobbly hyphen: the backlash against multiculturalism We are sleep-walking our way into segregation. (Trevor Phillips, Chairman, Commission for Racial Equality, 2005) The assertion, re-imagining and negotiation of difference is central to group formation and evolution and thus to multiculturalism. (Modood, 2007) The nation-state holds within it a deep schizophrenia. Tensions between the private space of the national, which is deeply ideological, and the public space of the state, which is impartial, can result in tensions that are hard to
M1634 - HAYWARD TEXT.qxp:ANDY Q7 27/1/09 13:23 Page 92 5 Building the Irish nation-state, 1922–72 The initial focus of official nationalism in the Irish Free State was on the activity of nation-building. ‘Nation-building’ refers here to the process by which the governmental elite seek to construct a sense of popular affinity and collective identification with the state as the representation of the identity of the historical and cultural nation. The core purpose of this process was to unite the nation behind the new state. This necessarily involved the
8 Orissa and the making of the Nehruvian nation state, 1946–52 Scholarly studies related to post-1947 India are yet to make their presence felt in a serious way, excepting a few ‘grand narratives’.1 Although useful up to a point, these prove to be hopeless in terms of unravelling the diversities associated with the different regions of a country as vast as India. This chapter focuses on Orissa, exploring the way that this region interacted with the visions of the Nehruvian state in the context of several complexities that developed after India’s emergence as an
Although composed before 9/11, Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Thomas Ligotti‘s The Shadow at the Bottom of the World are both prescient in their critique of the impulse of American communities following 9/11 to monumentalise and concretise the nation-state and in particular the remains at Ground Zero. In this essay I discuss Ground Zero as a suggestive trope for the illusiveness of the nation as an imagined community. These complementary Gothic short stories operate as allegory and offer a way of reading how patriotic communities cohered around what remained at Ground Zero and (re)produced it as a site of patriotic performance. A new Gothic trait in our age of terror(ism) is the anxiety over the absence of a stable centre that anchors national continuity. This article places these short stories in conversation with Benedict Anderson,,Étienne Balibar and other theorists who engage critiques of nation-building in order to draw out what is Gothic about the nation-state and to further substantiate how 9/11 revealed the nation-state as a principally Gothic phenomenon.
The article examines the phenomenon of terrorism presented in Sam Mendes‘s film Skyfall (2012), with relation to Julia Kristeva‘s concept of the abject, developed further by Robert Miles in the context of nationalism and identity. While exploring the extraterritorial nature of terrorism, which in Skyfall breaches the borders of the symbolic order, threatening the integrity of the British nation-state represented by M, Bond, and MI6, the article also focuses on the relationship between the major characters, whose psychological tensions represent the country‘s haunting by the ghosts of colonialism, as Britain is forced to revisit its imperial past(s) and geographies at the fragile moment of post-devolutionary changes.
and other individuals with whom they share the experience of being displaced. She borrows Appadurai’s (1996) label of ‘cultural citizens’ to describe these two groups, given that both rely on information technology to engage in producing locality that transcends the artificial boundaries defined by the nation-state. Interestingly, while both netizens and asylum seekers share this trait, Leung identifies a key difference: netizens, she claims, receive the nation-state’s endorsement as long as
, then, is that since the end of the Cold War, something comparable has occurred in the inter-state system. ‘Babel syndrome’ has determined the course of international relations for almost three decades, and the story has now reached its climax. Let us explain further. The basic unit of power in the world system in which we live at the beginning of the twenty-first century is still the nation state, with its frontiers clearly delimited and its sovereignty recognised by other members of the system. This inter-state system was formed in Europe
migration and trade policies, Europeans have increasingly opted for a closing-inwards of the nation state, calling into question the viability of the European project itself. The Brexit referendum, in June 2016, provided a clear example of this. Politics on the periphery has taken a similarly illiberal turn, with more violent consequences. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte boasts of carrying out extrajudicial killings and threatens to kill corrupt state officials, and he has launched a bloody war on drugs, for which he has been