Majority,State Nationalism,and New Research Pathways

Abstract

In this contribution, Alain-G Gagnon reflects on existing scholarship on majority and state nationalism, arguing that minority and majority nationalism are broadly similar in their intent. Both seek to promote a set of values, myths and meaning systems within a given political community which exists on a specific territory, shares a common language and a history. As a result, there are several promising avenues for research on state and majority nationalism, outlined in this piece.     

State and Majority Nationalism in Plurinational States: Responding to Challenges from Below

Abstract

While calls for self-determination and independence make headlines worldwide, an often more subtle state nationalism remains an endemic condition of the modern world. In the introductory article for this Special Issue, we define state and majority nationalism we identify three challenges in the study of these phenomena, we suggest that a focus on plurinational states helps to overcome them, and we set out the conceptual, ideational and strategic dimensions of the Special Issue. We hope that this edited collection as a whole contributes to refine our understanding of state and majority nationalism and encourages scholars to engage more actively in their study.     

The role of actors and institutions: The difficulties of democratic survival in Mali and Niger

Mali and Niger, two neighbouring countries in Francophone West Africa, offer a good opportunity for identifying key factors favouring the survival of a young democracy. While democracy has so far survived, just about, in Mali, it ended in Niger with a coup d'état in January 1996. Given comparable levels of poor economic development and similar troubled modern political histories, economic and societal preconditions do not provide clues to the different experiences of the two countries. Instead, the answer must be sought in the institutional choices made and in the interaction between key players during the democratic transition. An electoral system with proportional representation resulted in political instability in Niger, while a majoritarian system ensured a stable political majority in Mali. Political crisis in Niamey provided an opportunity for the army to retake power. While the military had been alienated from the Nigerien national conference, it had participated actively in and supervised the Malian conference. Mali and Niger provide tentative lessons for other ‘late democratizers’.     

Does ethnofederalism explain the success of Indian federalism?

ABSTRACT

Ethnofederalism has been contested as a solution for diverse societies as seen recently in Nepal (where federalism has been accepted, but the design and number of units remains heavily contested) and Myanmar (where ethnic minority demands for increasing federalization have had to take a back seat to the demands for increasing democracy). It remains a heavily contested subject in Sri Lanka. Concerns are expressed that ethnofederalism will increase pressures for secession and/or lead to increased violence through increasing a sense of separateness of the people living within that territory, providing resources for political entrepreneurs to mobilize groups against the center and will lead to the persecution of minorities within the ethnofederal units. India is an example of a federation that appears to demonstrate that ethnofederalism decreases rather than increases conflict through its successful reorganization of states along linguistic lines. However, a group-level analysis reveals a more diverse picture. India has simultaneously been both a success and a failure at conflict management.     

Making Hong Kong Chinese: State Nationalism and its Blowbacks in a Recalcitrant City

Abstract

Drawing from the literatures on strategic identity shift and on signaling, this article examines the strategies used by Beijing to impose its monist brand of state nationalism on Hong Kong. Given the nominally high degree of autonomy granted to Hong Kong, Beijing has been unable to impose its nationalism directly from above. Instead, it has made use of cooptation strategies so as to cultivate increasingly vocal and influential loyalist circles among local elites, who have promoted state nationalism from within. This logic, this article argues, has led many among Hong Kong’s political elite to compete in expressing an increasingly overt Chinese nationalistic posture as a way to signal loyalty to Beijing. These strategies have however backfired, raising doubts as to the actual extent of Hong Kong’s autonomy and triggering an existential crisis that led to the emergence of a reactive form of popular Hong Kong sub-state nationalism. In this context, state and popular sub-state nationalisms have fed on each other and grown increasingly irreconcilable, echoing the intensifying radicalization and polarization between the authoritarian establishment and the democratic opposition.     

Asymmetric Federalism and the Question of Democratic Justice in Northeast India

This article intends to fill a glaring void in the existing academic literature on the issues and challenges which stem not only from crafting, but also making asymmetric federalism work in northeast India. It examines the extent and limits to which asymmetric federalism—specifically under Article 371A of India’s Constitution—not only negotiates Nagas’ sovereignty claims over their land and resources and caters to the demands of democratic justice, but also the extent to which it consolidates India’s state-nation and democracy building in its northeastern periphery. Contending that the extant asymmetric federal arrangement in India’s polity stems from a centralist federal framework, the article makes a case for a more robust asymmetric federalism, which goes beyond this framework.     

Paradiplomacy of India’s chief ministers

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-1990s, state governments within India’s federal system have taken a greater interest in foreign relations. They have sought indirect influence by lobbying the central government to take account of their preferences and direct influence by seeking investment and making links with international organizations and other national and subnational governments. This article considers how chief ministers engage in parallel diplomacy noting how they draw on regional cultural resources and make connections with a regionally defined diaspora. The article finds that some chief ministers have embraced the role of “chief diplomat,” while others take a more discreet approach to international activity. Comparing the cases of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu reveals the political logic for expanding, de-emphasizing, or avoiding international engagement.     

States as laboratories: The politics of social welfare policies in India

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of India’s states in shaping the implementation and framing of social policy within India’s federal system. Since the 2000s, the central government has overseen a substantial expansion of social welfare policies partly through a new push toward rights-based social provision. Yet, it is India’s states that are both responsible for an increasing proportion of total public expenditure on social welfare provision as well as determining the nature and effectiveness of that provision across space. Drawing on a comparative research program across pairs of Indian states, three critical factors explaining how state-level political environments shape social policy are identified: the role of policy legacies in shaping policy frames; the role of social coalitions underpinning political party competition; and the role of political leaders in strengthening state capacity to achieve program goals.     

Why Stay Together? State Nationalism and Justifications for State Unity in Spain and the UK

Abstract

This paper examines the way party elites in the UK and Spain discursively construct the nation and justify state integrity in the face of resurgent Catalan and Scottish demands for self-determination and independence. While in each case there is a plurality of conceptions of the state, in Spain the demos is predominantly defined as a single, indivisible nation of equal citizens while in the UK the focus is typically on a plurinational Union. This, we contend, shapes the arguments made in favor of state unity. The dominant case for state integrity in Spain is more negative, focused primarily on the unconstitutionality of independence and delegitimizing the independence agenda. In the UK, the predominant appeal to the Union is more positive and instrumental: as the country is perceived as a partnership entered into willingly, a case must be made for its continuation. This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of state nationalism and political dynamics in plurinational states by shedding light on the ways in which party elites understand and legitimize the state at moments of profound internal challenge.     

The “Civic” Road to Secession: Political Ideology as an Ethnic Boundary Marker in Contemporary Scotland

Abstract

Civic nationalism is a weak vessel for secession. Nonetheless, contemporary Scottish nationalism has proven unusually successful, using the characteristically civic marker of political ideology as its signature boundary mechanism. Because a civic form of nationalism funnels toward civic markers of national identity, nationalist elites define Scotland as social democratic and England as neoliberal. This symbolic cultivation of a Scottish social democratic essence is deeply ethnic, however, through a mythological fusion of ideology with genealogy characteristic of ethnic myths of descent. Scotland’s “civic” nationalism points up the confused nature of the ethnic-civic dichotomy itself.     

Federal Calculations in State Level Coalition Governments

When political parties organize, compete and maintain interests at different levels, they bring interconnections both between as well as horizontally across levels. This study suggests that the autonomy of state politics formulation may have to pay greater attention to the federal framework and give more consideration to the role of polity-wide parties. This study uses the autonomy thesis as a heuristic tool and expands the discussion beyond state politics as considered by Yogendra Yadav-Suhas Palshikar. It examines the interface between the rise of the state as the primary unit and the functioning of political parties, especially in a multi-party competitive scenario where parties are forced to enter into coalitions. By situating India and its coalition experiences within a broader literature of comparative politics, the study tries to enrich our understanding about the relationship between federalism, political parties and coalition politics.     

Battleground: candidate selection and violence in Africa’s dominant political parties

ABSTRACT

This article develops a theory – rooted in the experience of the African National Congress in South Africa – to explain how, and why, a dominant political party is less likely to conduct orderly elections to select its political leadership. First, I demonstrate that canny party leaders – operating in the space between a divided society and a weak state – make an ideological turn to a “congress-like” political party, which is clever (in the short term) because it provides party leaders with an in-built electoral majority. It is, however, also a dangerous manoeuvre because it essentially endogenizes social competition for state resources inside the dominant party. This displacement of social competition away from the public sphere towards the partisan organization increases the likelihood of disorderly competition for party candidacies. Second, I demonstrate how this competition need not necessarily become the basis of violent competition inside the dominant party. The party leadership can use intra-party elections to stabilize competition, but only if the party invests in an organization that applies impartially the rules that govern the election.     

Women and wars: Some trajectories towards a feminist peace

This paper seeks to explode a number of myths about women's absence from wars and conflict; it considers some problems about their vulnerabilities in these circumstances; and offers some feminist perspectives for addressing these problems. The paper considers the conflicting demands made on women in periods of war and revolution, and argues that differing historical processes result in different post-conflict policies towards women. There is, however, a commonality of experiences that universally marginalise women in the post-conflict and reconstruction phases. Even when women have participated actively in wars and revolutions, they are heavily pressured to go back to the home and reconstruct the private domain to assert the return of peace and 'normality'. This paper contends that the insistence on locating women within the domestic sphere in the post-war era may be counter-productive and located in the historical construction of nationhood and nationalism as masculine in terms of its character and demands. With the dawn of the twenty-first century and the long history of women's participation in wars, revolutions, and policy making, it may now be possible to use the symbolic importance given to them in times of conflict to articulate a different perception of nationhood and belonging, and to create a more cooperative and less competitive and hierarchical approach to politics and the reconstruction of nations and their sense of belonging.     

Multiculturalism,recognition and the “Kurdish question” in Turkey: the outline of a normative framework

Despite the ever-growing literature on various aspects of the Kurdish question in Turkey, there are practically no normative discussions of Kurdish demands for the public recognition of their identities. This is all the more startling given the ascendancy of philosophical accounts in the literature on minority rights. This article will try to redress the balance by proposing a normative framework that could be used to justify Kurdish demands for recognition, drawing on the broader debates that revolve around Charles Taylor's seminal conceptualization of “the politics of recognition”. In this context, I will identify nationalism, a strategy used both by the state to suppress demands for recognition and by the minorities to put forward these demands, as the most serious hurdle in the way of the democratic resolution of the “Kurdish question” in Turkey and promote a form of recognition-based multiculturalism that (a) respects the basic rights of all citizens, not only those in whose name the said claims are made, but also those of the members of the majority against which the claims are voiced; (b) leaves room for alternative values or conceptions of the good life.     

Back to the future: How Serbia is heading the way of post‐versailles Germany

This analogy written before Milosevic's ouster theorizes that Serbia in the aftermath of Kosovo mirrors Germany after 1919 as a nation forced to accept an imposed peace. From the evidence a resurgence of Serb nationalism and territorial ambition is still inevitable. Various parallels support this conclusion including the use of post‐war sanctions, demands to hand over a wanted war criminal and owe up to guilt, geographical fragmentation, political uncertainty, economic depression, and military association with Russia. The salient point remains one of oversight by the victors to acknowledge an ignominious settlement is the source of all grievances and patterns of instability.     

India's secularism in comparative perspective

This review assesses whether Gary Jeffrey Jacobson's The Wheel of Law resolves the two major dilemmas besetting Indian secularism: first, how to reconcile the paradox of transforming formal equality into substantive equality for groups and individuals while also allowing religious freedom; and, no less importantly, with whom lies final authority for transforming religious practices. This review essay argues that the crisis of secularism, linked intimately with democracy and manifested in the rise of religious majoritarian (Hindu) nationalism, can be resolved only by confronting the question of power – in this case, the authority to alter religious practices.     

Agenda-setting from behind: India and the framework convention on climate change

ABSTRACT

India’s approach and policies at climate change negotiations have garnered considerable interest and attention. Over the last three decades, India’s positions have gained more importance as its carbon emissions rise. In this article, I explain India’s ratification of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) using the New Interdependence approach, a framework that explains state behavior by analyzing how global rules affects the domestic politics and policymaking around a particular issue. Specifically, I map how the conflicts around which countries should address global warming influenced the domestic politics of climate change in India, particularly the rise of MEA in leading India’s policymaking on climate change, including FCCC negotiations. MEA’s political understanding of climate change, sharpened by two domestic environmental groups – TERI and CSE, decisively shaped India’s approach at FCCC negotiations. Indian negotiators focused on hammering the differences between developed and developing countries helping shape a Framework Convention that differentiated climate responsibilities based on development constraints.     

印度教与印度民族主义

本文探讨了印度教对印度民族主义的负面影响 ,以及印度民族独立运动的领袖如何利用印度教来促成印度民族主义的形成、教派民族主义者如何利用印度教来为教派民族主义服务 ,并指出以印度教为基础的民族主义对印度社会的的双重作用。     

The Failure of the Indian Federation's Process of Civic Nation Formation

The States Reorganization Act of 1956, which reformed India's state boundaries primarily along linguistic lines, derailed civic nation creation in postindependence India. Thereafter, regional politicians were given a linguistic community with occasional ethnic congruence as their vote bank. This post-1956 political reality incentivized regional identity formation for regional politicians consolidating political power and eroded the influence of the independence era English-educated secular elite. In addition, the 1956 act made it a strategic rational choice for regional political elites not given their own states, to fight for the formation of new states. The hypothesis demonstrated in this article follows: The States Reorganization Act of 1956 made it the rational choice for regional political and intellectual elites to consolidate power based upon linguistic regional identities, making the central independence era goal of an overarching civic nationalism for the Indian federation impossible.     

Empire and modernity: dynastic centralization and official nationalism in late imperial Ethiopia

Conventional accounts of modern state-formation either underplay its contradictory and variegated character or neglect its international dimensions. Against these approaches, alternative theories of state-formation have emerged centred on the constitutive significance of intersocietal relations and differential temporalities. This article develops the latter approaches in relation to the Ethiopian state. Contrary to widespread assumptions of Ethiopia's political insularity, it suggests that at three crucial turning points geopolitical exigencies provided the critical impetus for the political and cultural reconstitution of the state. Late nineteenth century European colonial encroachment triggered a reaction in the form of an Ethiopian imperial expansion to rival them. And the political shock of Italian occupation 40 years later provoked a concurrent project of dynastic centralization and official nationalism in the post-restoration period. But precisely because divine monarchy and nationalism are antithetical orders by virtue of their opposed principles of sovereignty, the attempt to conjoin them generated deep social and cultural contradictions that erupted in two successive revolutions that were internationally overdetermined and resulted in a profound reconstitution of the Ethiopian state.