Universals and Particulars: the Case of Liberal Cultural Nationalism

Recent work in liberal political theory has rejected cosmopolitanism to incorporate the empirical agenda of nationalism and multiculturalism. In this article three issues facing cultural national liberalism are first extracted from Rawls's Political Liberalism : the range of reasonable cultural identities under liberalism; the substantive ethical bases of the state; and the possibility of principles of cultural self-respect. I then examine three works which address these problems, Will Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship , David Miller's On Nationality , and Charles Taylor's 'The Politics of Recognition'. Kymlicka provides principles of cultural self-respect but is caught between conceptualising culture in universalist and particularist terms. Miller's liberal national state rests on shared meanings, but this serves to complicate the introduction of universal moral ideas. Taylor presents authenticity as an alternative self-understanding to liberal autonomy, but I argue against the notion of cultural authenticity.     

Cultural difference in the national state: from trouser-selling Jews to unbridled multiculturalism

ABSTRACT

Stoetzler explores a series of newspaper and journal articles published in Germany in 1879–81 that are part of what later came to be called the ‘Berlin Antisemitism Dispute’. In these articles, anti-Jewish remarks by the historian and right-wing liberal politician Heinrich von Treitschke were responded to by leading political and academic figures, including Theodor Mommsen, Moritz Lazarus and Ludwig Bamberger. Treitschke's texts have been seen as crucial to the development of modern antisemitism in Germany, but the debate that they provoked also points to some of the conceptual weaknesses of the liberal critique of antisemitism. Stoetzler suggests that both Treitschke's support for antisemitism and the ambivalence evident in the views of his opponents are rooted in the contradiction between inclusionary and exclusionary tendencies inherent in the nation-state. To the extent that liberal society constitutes itself in the form of a national state, it cannot but strive to guarantee, or produce, some degree of homogeneity or conformity in the form of a national culture that, in turn, cannot be separated from issues of morality and religion. Stoetzler argues that a discussion of the Berlin Antisemitism Dispute in its specific context of German nineteenth-century liberalism, if interpreted in the more general framework of modern liberal society, can contribute to current debates on nationalism, patriotism, ethnic minorities, immigration and ‘multicultural society’.     

Minority rights and the dialectics of the nation: Otto Bauer’s theory of the nation and its contributions to multicultural theory and globalization

Conclusion This article analyzed Otto’s Bauer idea of the nation and assessed its meaning and significance qua liberal nationalism and the expansion of national minority rights in Europe. It argued that Bauer's formulation of the same rights for all minorities exposed certain limitations of multicultural theory, namely the failure of liberal multicultural theorists to adequately address the consequences of special minority rights and the potentially transformative role of labor in liberal societies that necessarily seek to be inclusive. Further, Bauer's idea of cultural autonomy raised important and relevant implications for advancing national minority rights in Europe. In particular, his initiative exposed possible ways to promote the social of cultural rights of EU Charter on Fundamental Rights. Given this and the EU's commitment to labor rights, it is curious that Bauer’s theory has not received the attention it deserves. Indeed, even if Bauer's ideas prove somewhat non-conventional by liberal standards, it is still important that we see his ideas as serving some elemental purpose in linking the advancement of national values and sentiment with the EU goal of integration.     

Applying the Environment Shaping Methodology: Conceptual and Practical Challenges

Abstract

Repatriation has long been the international community's preferred solution to refugee crises. This article argues that repatriation must be understood not in terms of physical return but as a process of political rapprochement between citizen, community and state. In particular, this work takes account of the need to accommodate community-based political identities. Repatriation should be conceived of as the deliberate remaking of a social compact between not only refugee-citizen and state but also refugee-nation and state. This offers a means for resolving the inherent contradiction between the notion of universal human rights and contemporary political organization which determines meaningful access to these rights on the basis of group or national identities. This is particularly important given the role of group-based conflict in causing mass refugee flight.     

From Gastarbeiter to “Ausländische Mitbürger”: Postnational Citizenship and In-Between Identities in Berlin

The recent condition of complexity within nation-states, triggered by the visibility of transnational communities and by the political demands of cultural identities, indicates that the traditional tools of national narratives with respect to articulations of identity and membership are exhausted. The debate on postnationalism suggests that unbounding citizenship from its national narrative would create the conditions in which the contentious issues of cultural recognition and representation could be resolved without resorting to the narrow confines of national narratives. This paper argues that that even though the postnationalism debate makes an important contribution in terms of indicating alternative forms of citizenship that are not tied to national discourse, it seriously underestimates the deep political connection between citizenship regimes and national narratives. By separating citizenship from national discourse, the postnationalism debate overlooks the ways in which transnational, ethnic, religious, sexual and other cultural identities interact with national narratives to negotiate their citizenship rights. More importantly, this assumed separation of citizenship rights from national discourse fails to acknowledge that the particular forms of citizenship rights, such as political representation and cultural recognition, and how they are exercised, are intertwined with the cultural hegemony of national narratives. Finally, the tension between citizenship regimes and national narratives provides the political space within which formerly marginalized groups and identities can invoke otherness to negotiate the cultural boundaries of nation-states. In other words, the politics of citizenship invoked by marginalized groups and identities is not simply about legal claims but also includes political attempts to reconfigure national narratives.     

Kurdish migrant mothers in London enacting citizenship

The article explores the mothering work of a group of Kurdish women in London as enactments of citizenship. Rather than focusing on their integration, it foregrounds the migrant mothers' ability to disrupt hegemonic citizenship narratives and bring into being new political subjects. They co-construct diasporic citizenship, through their mothering work, producing their children's cultural identifications as both British and Kurdish. These identifications are contingent, involving intra-ethnic contestations of legitimate Kurdish culture. Kurdish migrant mothers' cultural work is not simply about making nation state citizens. By giving meaning to cultural continuity and change, the mothers reference multiple levels of belonging (local, national and diasporic) which challenge state boundaries. The article shows that although mothers play a key role in constructing their children's cultural identities and their articulation in ethnic and national terms, they also contest the meaning of ethnic minority cultural practices and group boundaries, potentially disrupting hegemonic narratives of good citizenship as ethno-national.     

Nationalism,the Nation and Migration: Searching for Purity and Diversity

This paper adds to debates on the double-edged and contested nature of nationalism and its relationships with migration and diaspora. It does this by focusing on the notion of purity and highlights the ways in which national identities can be based on homogenising constructions of the nation. In an age where the nation-state system and migration are both important and in which there are recurring politicised uses of nationalism in potentially extreme ways, the paper discusses how nationalism can be problematic. It calls for contextualised and grounded research on the everyday meanings of nationalism in order to emphasise the messy and often ambivalent nature of national identities. In this way, it argues that there is potential for ‘rescuing nationalism’ as a more inclusive, diverse notion.     

The Measure of a Nation

In his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, and in several speeches in subsequent years, Enoch Powell claimed that immigration was an ‘issue of numbers’. Britain could not, he believed, accommodate a significant number of non‐white people without threatening the existence of the nation. I argue that Powell's opposition to immigration, and his numerical framing of it, rested upon his racialised conception of British, or English, nationhood. As he was shunned by political elites, Powell articulated an increasingly populist nationalism. Drawing repeated references to Britain's wartime experiences, Powell claimed that the British, or more often the English, were being attacked by an immigrant enemy without, and betrayed by an establishment enemy within. I conclude with some reflections on the similarities between Powellite nationalism and contemporary discourses about national identity during and since the European Union referendum.     

Twenty-first century cyborgs: cosmetic surgery and aesthetic nationalism in Colombia

Abstract

In this article, I explore the institutional and symbolic construction of aesthetic nationalism in Colombia around a fetishization of women’s surgically exaggerated breasts and buttocks. While political scientists have focused almost exclusively on the internet and social media, other technological advancements have altered the relationships between state and society, public and private, and bodies and national inclusion. Combined with the transnational flow of ideas, goods, and people and a political economy that embraces cosmetic surgeries as a development model, this intersectional analysis suggests that aesthetic nationalism in Colombia has recentered the female body in the practice of nationalism, communicating political information, belonging, and power. Based on archival research, direct observation, and elite interviews, I argue that cosmetic interventions play a key role in conferring citizenship rights and defining the borders of the political community. This study contributes to our understanding of how intersectionality can help explain the ways in which technology shapes national body politics, disrupts conventional modes of political communication and representation, and positions the body at the center of contemporary citizenship practices.     

Accommodating toleration: on Balint’s classical liberal response to the multiculturalism challenge

ABSTRACT

Peter Balint identifies three challenges to toleration, one of which is the multiculturalism challenge. This is the charge that liberal toleration fails to accommodate minorities adequately, which requires positive recognition rather than negative toleration. I discuss his response to the multiculturalism challenge and its connection to a classical liberal view of toleration. This involves Balint’s claim that liberal neutrality should be understood as reflective and ‘difference-sensitive’, which should be realised by the state being ‘hands-off’ in the sense of withdrawing support for privileged ways of life. I argue that Balint’s classical liberal view that the state needs to be ‘hands-off’ is in need of specification and that it does not fit well with his claim that neutrality needs to be reflective and difference-sensitive.     

Testing the liberal subject: (in)security,responsibility and ‘self-improvement’ in the UK citizenship test

The recent debate over the changes to the ‘Life in the UK’ citizenship test offers another opportunity to reflect on the testing of would-be citizens in liberal democracies. The citizenship test has often been understood as part of the ‘strengthening’ of national borders: set within a discourse of fears over high levels of migration and the risk to cultural homogeneity. Furthermore, it has been viewed as an illustration of the death of multiculturalism and presented as an illiberal strategy of cultural assimilation. I propose that whilst the notion of ‘testing’ is built out of fears regarding ‘threatening’ difference and ‘community cohesion’, what the UK testing process presents is an explicitly liberal strategy of governing. Drawing on the history of the test, I suggest that it is not purely a mechanism of restriction but that it also relies on strategies of responsibility, empowerment and ‘self-improvement’. The citizenship test, alongside other recent border strategies, may be better understood as representing a fascinating nexus between advanced liberal ideas of governing and concerns regarding (in)security. I argue that studying the test in this way offers up vital questions about how community and political membership continues to be shaped in late modernity.     

The evolution of Swedish fascism: self-identification and ideology in interwar Sweden

ABSTRACT

Historians and social scientists generally understand nationalism to be the defining feature of fascism. Kunkeler's study challenges that assumption with his examination of Swedish fascist movements through the notion of self-identification. Using fascist periodicals, he traces the development of Swedish fascists' identification with the movement—in relation to matters of race, nation and the signifiers of ‘fascism’ and ‘National Socialism’—from the early 1920s, when an overt attachment to Mussolini's project was evident, through a National Socialist phase showing cautious commitment to Nazi Germany, and ending with a final phase of strategic anonymity. In the face of criticism that fascism was an alien import, Swedish fascists adapted their public profile to accommodate such national sensitivities, developing a racialist ideology that was not confined by national borders and was believed to be more in tune with Swedish political culture at the time. When public opinion turned decisively against ‘international fascism’ in the mid-1930s, they were forced to discard the name and image of ‘fascism’ altogether and enter a final phase of public anonymity that, in any case, involved no significant ideological metamorphosis.     

Sleeping Dogs, Prowling Cats and Soaring Doves: Three Paradoxes in the Political Theory of Nationhood

This article examines three paradoxes concerning nationhood and nationalism in which political theorists have become entangled. Until recently most mainstream political theorists ignored nationhood. In constructing their own theories, however, they tacitly relied upon it to supply the polity with boundaries, solidarity and collective power. More recent attempts to defend national self-determination on liberal grounds have proved self-defeating, containing perverse incentives to illiberal actions and appearing to authorize neo-imperial tutelage. But cosmopolitan anti-nationalists also find themselves in a paradoxical position, since nation-states provide the indispensable launching-pad for attempts to transcend nationalism.     

Education,epistemic virtues,and the power of toleration

ABSTRACT

Toleration is usually regarded as a pivotal democratic virtue that should be cultivated in the educational systems of liberal democracies. The concept of toleration, however, is marked by deep ambivalence. Power-theoretical criticisms of toleration as a political and educational ideal have emphasized that discourses of toleration are entangled with societal power struggles, and tend to naturalize social hierarchies and reify individual and collective identities. Given this criticism, toleration refers not just to justificatory problems concerning the limits of political or pedagogical authority, or to the peaceful negotiation of conflicts that pervade pluralistic societies. On the contrary, toleration itself seems to create and perpetuate precisely those political conflicts that it is meant to contain. This contribution develops a defence of toleration as a coherent and sound aim of public education and as a democratic virtue against the power-theoretical critique.     

Liberalism,Multiculturalism and the Problem of Essentialism1

This article focuses on key themes in the liberal philosophical debate over multiculturalism, as well as the responses of Canadian social and political actors to the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Since September 11, there has been a renewed popularity of arguments positing a 'clash of civilizations' between Muslim and Christian societies, and a new legitimacy advanced for 'ethnic profiling' in the name of security. The rapidity with which this has happened in Canada is particularly striking because of the country's liberal-democratic and multicultural tradition. The introduction of a national policy of multiculturalism in 1971 provided a new understanding of Canadian citizenship that was more inclusionary of immigrants and ethnic and racial minorities. Multiculturalism has also become a hotly debated ideal among Canadian, American and European political philosophers concerned with addressing the possibilities and limits of liberalism given ethnic diversity, and the limits of ethnic diversity given liberalism. Multiculturalism is typically presented as a 'problem' for liberal politics and ethics. Building on how multiculturalism policy in Canada has provided a more inclusionary discourse around citizenship, a defence of multiculturalism is advanced which rejects the essentialist treatment of 'culture' and 'cultural' groups. It is suggested that the unfolding discussions in Canada since September 11 demonstrate the ongoing tension between cultural essentialism and liberal individual rights. The Canadian experience points to the value of an anti-essentialist multiculturalism in challenging discrimination given that neither liberalism, nor liberal democratic states, are neutral in their allocation of resources and legitimacy among more and less powerful ethnic groups. It is argued that rather than multiculturalism, it is essentialist thinking, imagery and ideas which present the greatest 'problem' to the ethics of liberalism and the politics of liberal democracies like Canada.     

Integration and Identity in an International Context: Problems and Ambiguities in the New Politics of Multiculturalism

Debates about multiculturalism, minority rights, and identity dominated Anglo-American political theory during the majority of the 1990s, and continue to raise important questions concerning the nature of citizenship, community, and the responsibilities of liberal states. They were popular, too, among policy makers, politicians, and journalists: many academics and practitioners were, for a time, united in their support for multiculturalism. Just as the philosophical literature at that time became more 'multiculturalist', so many European states increasingly adopted multiculturalist policies as a way of including historically marginalised groups into mainstream liberal culture or, in some cases, as a way of protecting minority groups from unfair pressures from the majority culture. However, as time has gone on, the multiculturalist turn in liberal political theory, and among many European governments, has waned. In the wake of terrorist atrocities around the world, growing concerns about the erosion of civic and national identity, and fears that cultural recognition can permit illiberal practices, many academics and practitioners have sought to distance themselves from the idea that it is a role of the state to afford special treatment to cultural minorities, and have sought once again to emphasise those common bonds which unite citizens of liberal democratic states, rather than those cultural identities which may serve to divide them. This article evaluates some of the recent philosophical literature on multiculturalism against the changing political landscape in Britain and Europe and suggests that the multiculturalist position remains weakened by a number of crucial ambiguities.     

The concept of nationalism in discussions on a European society

ABSTRACT

In scholarship, nationalism has been found to be an integral ingredient of any sense of nationhood. In everyday public use, nationalism is used as a term of disapproval. The stubborn discursive border between the two uses of the concept of nationalism evokes questions about the historical preconditions of creating an ism concept based on the roots ‘nation’ or ‘national’. In the period often called ‘the age of nationalism’, from the French Revolution to the First World War, nationhood was essentialized in ways that did not allow nations to be explained as constructions of any ism. ‘Nationalism’ gained popularity from the 1890s onwards as a critical concept directed at ideas and actions that broke against what was seen as the legitimate role of a nation. Defining the role of nations and nationhood took place in a series of political contests utilizing the concept of nationalism. Debates on Europe and ‘European society’ created one of the contexts of these contests. In current scholarly discussion on the idea of a European society, the critique of ‘methodological nationalism’ has been targeted at the nation-state-bound notion of society. However, in much of policy-oriented research and policy planning, the references to nationalism only contain views and actions found to be reactions against globalization and European integration. ‘Nationalism’ does not apply to efforts to improve ‘our’ national and European competitiveness nor ‘our’ joint EU policies of external bordering.     

Can a value-neutral liberal state still be tolerant?

ABSTRACT

Toleration is typically defined as follows: an agent (A), for some reason, objects to certain actions or practices of someone else (B), but has outweighing other reasons to accept these actions or practices nonetheless and, thus, refrains from interfering with or preventing B from acting accordingly, although A has the power to interfere. So understood, (mutual) toleration is taken to allow for peaceful coexistence and ideally even cooperation amongst people who disagree with each other on crucial questions on how to live and what to value, which is why it has traditionally been regarded as an important part of political liberalism. An explicitly value-neutral liberal state then avoids taking sides when it comes to different and competing ways of life. However, following this idea of liberal neutrality, it has been questioned whether a value-neutral liberal state still needs toleration or is even compatible with it, for apparently neutrality leaves no more room for the objection component of toleration to take hold. In this paper, I take up this question and argue that there is, indeed, conceptual and practical room left for a value-neutral liberal state to be tolerant. Drawing on the interplay between four kinds of reasons (pragmatic, ethical, moral, and political), pragmatic and political reasons may still provide the needed evaluative and normative ground upon which the combination of objection and outweighing acceptance can be made sense of. However, the possible scope of toleration for a value-neutral liberal state is considerably limited.     

The Structure of Political Competition: Dimensions of Candidate and Group Evaluation Revisited

In this paper, we take a fresh look at the structure of sociopolitical conflict through confirmatory factor analyses of survey data gathered in Florida during the presidential campaign of 1996. Our analysis shows both stability and change in the electorate. In line with prior research, a single bipolar partisan dimension underlies the mass public's evaluations of political leaders, though national figures fit more comfortably on this continuum than do those at the state level. Citizens' evaluations of key sociopolitical groups reflect orthogonal cultural disputes, class divisions, and conflicts relating to issues of social control. While all three of these dimensions impinge to some degree on voters' conceptions of party and ideology, our findings point to the leading role that cultural issues now play in shaping ideological images and identities.     

The Rise and Decline of Turnout in Congressional Elections: Electoral Institutions,Competition, and Strategic Mobilization

Considerable debate exists over the impact of electoral institutions on turnout in U.S. national elections. To address this debate, I exploit the rich variation in electoral rules present throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using a newly constructed dataset of district‐level turnout results for the U.S. House from 1840 to 1940, I find that electoral institutions and political competition jointly provided incentives, and by the turn‐of‐the‐century disincentives, for political leaders to mobilize the electorate. The results demonstrate that changes in electoral institutions and varying levels of political competition help explain congressional turnout across districts and over time.