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Lecture 4

Comparative

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Lecture 4

Comparative

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sarahali.gee
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LECTURE 4: Ethnicity, Nationalism, & Identity

MAIN IDEAS:
- Ethnicity: group sharing common attributes
- Nation is ethnicity politicized (spec. community claiming self-governance based on distinct
attributes)
- Nationalism: pursuit of sovereignty/autononmy on behalf of national community
- National identity: collective feeling of belonging to a nation
- How do we define the nation or nationalism?
- Primordial
- Perennial
- Subjective
- Modernist
- Can modern economics/politcs define nationalism?
- Case study of national identity

NOTES:
- PRIMORDAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATION
- Nation is an empirical fact (objective) w/ emotional resonance
- Solid foundations for national identity → primordial ties that bind (language, race, religion, etc)
- Form content of ethnic and national identity (Franjo Tudjman quote)
- “Deep in the past, nations were formed that were locked in”
- PERENNIAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATION
- Nations not as objective, essentialist, timeless
- But as deeply historical:
- Framed around crucial events (i.e., Serbia as a result of Turkish defeat)
- Supported by symbolism
- Cultivated by literate elites
- Continuity between pre-modern and modern nations - “ethnie” as necessary foundation
for the “nation-to-be” (Anthony D. Smith quote)
- Nations identified in the past that frame continuity:
- Aviel Roshwald: ancient Israel and Greece; Adrian Hastings: medieval England
- Views nationalism as a “recurring, universal phenomenon that has existed throughout human
history and across cultures” → conceptions of the nation inherent to human identity
- SUBJECTIVE UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATION
- Ernast Renan: the nation is a daily plebiscite…that builds on past and present
- Collective nation has memory, but also forgetting
- People consent to a nationalist view of nation based on subjective views of the collective
community and their resonated success
- MODERNIST UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATION
- Benedict Anderson: nation is an imagined community
- Imagined as limited and sovereign
- National relations are mediated by signs and symbols
- Historical product of:
- Capitalism
- Print, and subsequently, “The fatality of human linguistic diversity
- Not false, potentially powerful
- “There are there things that differentiate us, but external factors work to distinguish nations’
- Ideas of nationalism are modular - capable of being transplanted elsewhere (think nations
formed from post-colonialism)
- THE NATION AND ECONOMIC MODERNITY
- Nationalism as expression of modern social forces (i.e., rising middle class)
- Nationalism as integrating force in modernizing societies: Ernest Gellner quote
- Community amidst individualization + industrialization
- THE NATION AND POLITICAL MODERNITY
- War drove need for contribution, sacrifice
- State formation:
- Enhanced contact
- Standardized language, culture religion
- Promoted national identity
- Nation-creation served the state using above methods by:
- Cultivating uniformity
- Aligning state and popular aims → easing implementation of laws
- THE FRENCH CASE: OLD REGIME
- Historically: territorial continuity; monarchical regime; recognition of difference (corporate
privileges of diff groups: chuurches, estates, etc); varied linguistic/cultural diversity
- THE FRENCH CASE: REVOLUTION (1789-1799)
- Overthrow of society of privilege first
- Then monarchy - incompatible with revolution
- Revolutionary principles seen as universal → “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”
- Leads to ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and The Citizen’
- Article 3: Popular sovereignty = national sovereignty (consent of the governed), exercise
of sovereignty rests w/ the body politic, NOT a singular person
- Revolutionary state drove political nationalism through:
- Creation of new national institutions w/ rational-legal legitimation
- Civil Constitution of the Clergy (subordination of the Catholic Church), secularism
- War 1792-1815, national conscription (levée en masse)
- Replacing provinces w/ departments
- PEASANTS INTO FRENCHMAN
- Revolution nation narrow, Paris-centred
- France deeply divided over religion, regime, and ideology
- Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: nation formation 1860’s-80’s through spread of nat’l
inst’s.
- The military; The market; etc.
- THE FRENCH CASE: CITIZENSHIP AND THE STATE
- Citizenship: relationship to the state, involving allegiance in exchange for rights/duties
- Brubaker: belonging to a specific nation-state
- German outcome: primordial ethnocultural approach, jus sanguinis, “particularistic,
organic, differentialist, Volk-centred”
- French outcome: subjective political approach, jus soli, “universalist, rationalist,
assimilationist, state-centred”
- Charles-Tilly: ability to effectively claim rights w/ respect to a particular state
- Anderson: citizenship speaks to how the nation is “imagined”
- THE FRENCH CASE: SEQUENCING
- Why the difference in outcomes of citizenship? Brubaker says sequencing
- Nation precedes state = ethnocultural nationalism
- State precedes nation = political nationalism

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