Orthodoxy and nation-building: Nichifor Crainic and religious nationalism in 1920s Romania

This article uses the early career of Nichifor Crainic (1889–1972) to show why Orthodox Christianity became a central element of Romanian ultra-nationalism during the 1920s. Most Romanian nationalists were atheists prior to the First World War, but state-sponsored nation-building efforts catalyzed by territorial expansion and the incorporation of ethnic and religious minorities allowed individuals such as Crainic to introduce religious nationalism into the public sphere. Examining Crainic's work during the 1920s shows how his nationalism was shaped by mainstream political and ideological currents, including state institutions such as the Royal Foundations of Prince Carol and the Ministry of Cults and of Art. Despite championing “tradition,” Crainic was committed to changing Romanian society so long as that change followed autochthonous Romanian models. State sponsorship allowed Crainic to promote religious nationalism through his periodical Gândirea. Crainic's literary achievements earned him a chair in theology, from which he pioneered new ways of thinking about mysticism as an expression of Romanian culture and as crucial to understanding the Romanian nation.     

Playing for and against the nation: football in interwar Romania

The article explores the development of football in interwar Romania, stressing its role in the dissemination and grounding of Romanian nationalism. I show how, due to its modular form, the game of football was deeply involved in the efforts of centralizing, territorializing and naturalizing the Romanian nation-state of the interwar period. The founding of the leading Romanian sports club at the University of Cluj and the selection of the national representative for the Paris Olympics of 1924, in conjunction with the institutional infrastructure developed to nationally regulate and control the game, are used to present the acute tensions between local/regional and national aspirations and projects, with a strong ethnic component, that have shaped the history of the game in Romania. I argue that the increasing calls for the full Romanianization of football in the 1930s have their immediate roots in these tensions and frictions.     

Secularizing Religion: Hindu Extremism as a Modernist Discourse

In this article, I suggest that Hindu nationalism, like many other religious extremist ideologies, is a modern discourse rooted in modern categories such as a homogenous national identity, objective science and history, hyper-masculinity, and secularism. To demonstrate the above claims, I undertake a close analysis of the writings of V.D. Savarkar, a key founder of "Hindutva" or Hindu nationalism. I show how he retools Hinduism by removing all aspects of religiosity/piety while replacing it with a primarily political-secular identity that places an exclusive Hindu nation at the center.     

‘Conflict Over Property’: Lodging in Times of Displacement,Poland 1944–1946, the Case of Zielona Góra

This article examines housing conflicts during times of displacement in World War II and its aftermath. It looks specifically at the property experiences of eastern Poles in the western Polish town of Zielona Góra after forced displacement from the Soviet Union. It explores the intricate relationship between property and population displacement. By examining a micro-historical process at a time when property relations were in flux, we can investigate how displaced people negotiated spaces for themselves within a complicated set of realities. The article also adds to work done on state–society relationships in immediate post-World War II Poland.     

Violence from Below: Explaining Crimes against Civilians across Soviet Space, 1943–1947

The end of World War II brought little relief to the lands it ravaged most. Mass wartime violence continued in the Soviet space beyond the ‘false peace’ of 1945. Historians have sought to explain this violence in terms of the ‘wartime brutalisation’ of state and citizens alike, though this approach is limited in explaining how and why violence continued after 1945. This article shifts focus from psychology to social history to argue that the disintegration of Soviet state control is central to explaining the enduring violence after 1945 and understanding its emergence as much ‘from below’ as ‘from above’.     

An undisclosed story of roses: church,state, and nation in contemporary Georgia

Since the Rose Revolution (2003), Georgia has encountered an unprecedented scale of institutional reforms concomitant with the rise of American and European involvement in the “democratization” process. Various scholars have suggested that Georgian nationalism developed from an ethno-cultural basis to a more civic/liberal orientation after the Rose Revolution. This paper analyzes Georgian nationalism under President Mikheil Saakashvili to demonstrate the significant divergence between political rhetoric on national identity, the selection of symbols, and state policy toward the Georgian Orthodox Church versus state policy toward ethnic minorities. The aim of this article is to examine the at times conflicting conceptions of national identity as reflected in the public policies of Saakashvili’s government since the Rose Revolution. It attempts to problematize the typologies of nationalism when applied to the Georgian context and suggests conceptualizing the state-driven nationalism of the post-Rose Revolution government as “hybrid nationalism” as opposed to civic or ethno-cultural.     

Managing the difficult past: Ukrainian collective memory and public debates on history

This article analyzes the status of difficult historic events in Ukrainian collective memory. Difficult elements of collective memory are defined as those which divide society on basic matters, such as identity and national cohesion, and events which are being actively forgotten because of the role of Ukrainians as perpetrators. Three such issues were analyzed: World War II and the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Holocaust, and the ethnic purge of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1945. Utilizing data from quantitative and qualitative studies, the author showcases the significance of these issues for contemporary Ukrainian identity and Ukraine’s relations with its neighbors. In particular, the evaluation of World War II and the role of the UPA in Ukrainian history polarizes Ukrainian society to a great degree. At the same time, this element of national history is used to construct a common, anti-Russian identity. The difficulty of relating to the memory of the Holocaust and the ethnic purge in Volhynia is of a different character. These events are problematic for Ukrainian collective memory because they demand a painful settling of accounts with the past. At present, only Ukrainian elites are willing to work on these subjects, and only to a limited degree, while the common consciousness either denies or ignores them altogether.     

‘No one is Forgotten,Nothing is Forgotten’: Duty,Patriotism, and the Russian Search Movement

This article discusses duty in relation to the past, focusing on Russia’s nationwide Search Movement (Poiskovoe dvizhenie). This civil movement of volunteers searches for the remains of fallen soldiers left on the battlefields of World War II all over Russia and has young people as its main target group. Despite in many ways being critical of the state, the Search Movement explicitly wants to make a contribution to the patriotic upbringing of Russian youth. In its work, the movement relates to the official government plans for patriotic education. Several obligations are central to the notion of patriotism: for the Search Movement, an obligation to the past, to remember, is the most important. In this article I will examine how the malleable concept of duty allows the Search Movement to carry out work implicitly critical of state failings in the name of patriotism.     

East China Sea or South China Sea,they are all China's Seas: comparing nationalism among China's maritime irredentist claims

Much has been made over the past few years of China'vs ambitions of regaining control of its irredentist claims in the East and South China Seas. While some of this speculation focuses on the massive amounts of money the People's Republic of China (PRC) has funneled into its naval modernization program, other analysts are more interested in the drivers behind the increasingly popular sentiment that the country must “reclaim” its lost territories. The Chinese Communist Party can ill afford to ignore the voice of an already disenchanted population if it hopes to stay in power, particularly in regard to matters of national pride. As a result, in dealing with China's irredentist claims, nationalism in particular can be a powerful ideological factor in shaping the nation's foreign policies. This is especially apparent in the case of irredentism, where nationalism can often override diplomatic and strategic imperatives. This paper addresses the question of how does the nationalist discourse vary between two territorial disputes, the East and South China Seas. It uses discourse analysis to examine developing trends among online social media and news sites. This in turn allows for the construction of a framework of how nationalism develops among both elite and grassroots audiences.     

Bar Kochba’s Homelands: Prague Zionists on National Soil and Rootedness

In late-Habsburg Prague, in the years before the Great War, the members of the Zionist Student Association Bar Kochba were remarkably ambivalent regarding the “objective” constituents of “genuine” nationalism claimed by the national movements of that place and time: territoriality, “blood,” distinctive cultures, national languages, etc. As Zionists, they desired such “objective” national attributes for themselves, even as they remained fully aware that these were ultimately inapplicable to their Jewish reality. The article illustrates this complexity by examining how these Prague Zionists theorized the concepts of national lands, national homelands, and national rootedness. Their deep-seated ambivalence toward the territoriality of nations, then, has been in response to Jews’ particular condition in the Diaspora. It does, however, expose a broader tension manifested in some shape or form in other national movements: many of the concepts of what nationhood is are adopted from alien cultures and often from the very culture from which the national movement seeks to dissociate.     

Embodying the nation: football,emotions and the construction of collective identity

1 In this article the term “football” is used for the sport that US readers know as soccer. View all notesThe article intends to combine contemporary debates about nations and nationalism with a sociological perspective on collective emotions in its attempt to gain a better understanding of the process of constructing national identity. It will further present interdisciplinary evidence that collective emotions evoked in rituals instigate a number of group-related sociocognitive processes that reinforce enduring feelings of belonging and an emotional priming of collective representations. I will suggest that states of “collective effervescence” (Durkheim) do not only tie individuals to a community, but also provide a strong frame for the creation of symbols and the embodiment of shared meanings defining a community. The second part of the article analyzes examples taken from the football media coverage of the FIFA World Cups 2006 and 1974 (both were held in Germany) in order to provide a comparative case study exemplifying the proposed theoretical approach. The sample illuminates some interesting changes that invite further hypotheses about corresponding changes of national identity in a larger context.     

The difficult relationship between nationalism and built heritage: the case of late nineteenth-century Krakow

This paper examines the debates that surrounded the renovation of the royal castle in Krakow during the last decade before World War I. When the Galician crownland took over the castle in 1905, it bore little resemblance to a royal seat, having been used as military barracks since 1846. The debate that followed focused on what should be preserved, what demolished, and what recreated. In this discourse the “meaning” of a historical monument was examined and different interpretations within the circles of architects, preservationists, and artists were propagated. The debate conducted during the meeting of the Central Commission for Research and Conservation of Historic Buildings revealed that the division was not along national lines, but rather among different philosophies of preservation of built heritage. The point made by the paper is that the discourse conducted 100 years ago allows us today to draw conclusions about the role of historical buildings in a national(istic) worldview and examine its inherent contradictions. That is because, I argue, the past as such matters little in the national(istic) understanding, despite its ostentatious interest in history. What matters is the usefulness of historic symbols in the present.     

Spectres of the Third World: global modernity and the end of the three worlds

The three worlds configuration was a product of Eurocentric mappings of the world to deal with the postcolonial situation that emerged after World War II. Mortgaging Third World futures to either capitalism or socialism, which was a premise of this mapping, also pointed to a future dominated by alternatives of European origin. The situation I describe as ‘global modernity’ refers to a post-Eurocentric modernity that has scrambled notions of space and time inherited from modernity. It is a product of modernity, and of the struggles that the idea of three worlds sought to capture, but those struggles have led to unanticipated reconfigurations globally, including the reconfiguration of capitalism that has globalised following the fall of the Second World (the world of socialisms). This article discusses some of the problems attendant upon this situation.     

The Algerian Works of Hélène Cixous: at the Triple Intersection of European,North African and Religious Nationalisms

The theme ‘Jewish conditions and theories of nationalism’, relating particularly to the twentieth century, can be connected to Hélène Cixous the thinker, through her childhood experiences in Algeria during the Second World War. Thereafter, she would spend 10 years in a country on the verge of what some have termed a ‘civil war’ between ‘European’ inhabitants, settled multiple generations previously, and an increasingly angry, marginalised, and dispossessed (Muslim) indigenous population. Importantly, Cixous has also called on her experiences in Algeria after Algerian independence, which is extremely rare given that the vast majority of non-Muslim departures took place up until 1962. In this way, her early life history and her intellectual trajectory, positioned as a writer of gendered and then ethnic difference (from Paris), and the relationships she garnered with Algerian women in the 1990s during the dark years of violence in Algeria, as well as her subsequent process of return to Algeria against a backdrop of a narrowly defined French national identity, are at a triple intersection with the evolutions of Algerian, French and Jewish nationalisms. This paper engages with the ambiguities and tensions of Hélène Cixous’ experience of and writing about Algeria combining close analysis of her literary production with our meetings in her Parisian home.     

How post-imperial democracies die: A comparison of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia

While socioeconomic crisis – like in Germany after World War I and in Russia after the Cold War – is a necessary precondition for democratic erosion resulting in a breakdown of democracy, it is not a sufficient condition. We identify, in the cases of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, a post-imperial syndrome that includes nationalist irredentism and an ambition to return to the status quo ante of a “great power” as a main reason why democratization faces specific and enormous challenges for former “great powers.” A slide back to authoritarianism in post-imperial democracies takes a high toll. It is facilitated by international political conflicts, including annexation and wars, with new neighbouring states that harbor territories perceived as external national homelands like the Sudetenland or Crimea.     

Contested National Identity and Political Crisis in Bangladesh: Historical Analysis of the Dynamics of Bangladeshi Society and Politics

This paper develops the theme that the ongoing political polarization and political crisis in Bangladesh since its independence from Pakistan in 1971 reflect the fundamental weaknesses of the pillars of Bangladeshi society and national identity. The paper adopts an historical approach to explain why and how Muslim nationalism, which was the basis for the establishment of Pakistan, has re-emerged in contemporary Bangladeshi society and politics and is competing against Bengali ethnicity, language, culture and secularism (‘Bengali nationalism’) within an emerging ‘two-party’ political system. However, instead of establishing a stable political system following the Hotelling–Downs principle of democracy, the Bangladeshi society/polity has been polarized and divided almost vertically on the question of national identity and political philosophy and created sustained political instability and uncertainty. This has stifled the formation and consolidation of a national identity based on ethnicity/language/culture or religion/territory/political history or that have elements of both. Neither ethnicity/language/culture/secularism-based nationalism (Bengali nationalism) nor predominantly Muslim-territorial nationalism (‘Bangladeshi nationalism’) alone can dominate and flourish in Bangladeshi society and polity; instead, the objective conditions in the country dictate that a competitive democratic system of politics which accommodates aspects of secularism, language, Muslim identity and Islamic ethical–moral codes remains the feasible political discourse for forming and consolidating the country's multi-racial, multi-religious national identity over the long run and its survival as a sovereign state.     

“Orbiting the Core”: Politics and the Meaning of Dialect in Chinese Linguistics, 1927–1957

In 1956, the Chinese Communist state launched its official language policy, which included the promulgation of a standard spoken language, called Putonghua. Their justification for this policy and their methods for implementation were guided by intellectual and ideological frameworks that formed during decades preceding the policy's rollout. In particular, Communist language reform was predicated on the conceptualization of Putonghua as a holistic language meant to serve the national body—and of local dialects, called fangyan in Chinese, as dependent on Putonghua for their very definition. This article interrogates the history of this framework. Focusing on dialect surveys from the 1930s, Chinese interpretations of Marxist linguistic theory in the early years of the Communist state, and methods of Putonghua promulgation in the late 1950s, this article reconstructs the epistemological regimes that gave meaning to the concept of independence and autonomy as they related to language in modern China.     

Export-led Growth,Gateway Cities and Urban Systems Development in Pre-World War II Southeast Asia

Between the 1870s and World War II, falls in world shipping costs and Western industrialisation gave rise to export-led Southeast Asian growth and specialisation in a narrow range of primary commodity exports. A linked development was the emergence of a few dominant Southeast Asian urban centres, typically primate and always ports. Drawing on historical census data, this article uses rank-size distributions and transition matrices to investigate the influence of commodity specialisation and exports on urban systems development in the region. It is argued that different commodities produced different spread effects, resulting in variation in degrees of urban concentration in the region. However, geography, path dependence and infrastructure also shaped urban systems development. The main cities that emerged during this period became the ‘gateways’ that connected frontier Southeast Asia to the global economy. Cities dominant in 1939 retain this status in today's Southeast Asia.     

National identity-building and the “Ustaša-nostalgia” in Croatia: the past that will not pass

Most scholarship on post-Communist Croatia claims that the first Croatian president, Franjo Tu?man, intentionally rehabilitated the legacy of the World War II (WWII) Croatian Usta?a and its Nazi-puppet state. The rehabilitation of the Usta?a has been linked to Tu?man’s national reconciliation politics that tended toward a particular “forgetting of the past.” The national reconciliation was conceptualized as a joint struggle of both the Croatian anti-fascist Partisan and the Croatian WWII fascist Usta?a successors to achieve Croatian independence. However, the existing scholarship does not offer a comprehensive explanation of the nexus between national reconciliation and the rehabilitation of the Usta?a. Hence, this article will present how “Usta?a-nostalgia” does not stem from Tu?man’s intentions, but rather from the morphological gap occurring in Tu?man’s nation-building idea. Namely, Tu?man’s condemnation of the entire idea of Yugoslavism and Yugoslavia eventually brought about the perception that any historical agent advocating the idea of an independent Croatia is better than any form of Croatian Yugoslavism. Finally, the article will present how contemporary Croatian society is still seeped in “Usta?a-nostalgia” due to the hesitation of the post-Tu?man Croatian politics to come to terms with the legacy of his national reconciliation politics.