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This paper reconsiders liberal nationalism in light of the current autocratic nationalist threat. I argue that liberal nationalism cannot redress the social ailments which acclimatize people to the sorts of no-holds-barred political contestation favoured by autocratic nationalists – excessive polarization. I then argue that liberal nationalists do not recognize the degree to which 'in-group' racial solidarity motivates members of the racial/ethnic majority to preserve their status, and that the liberal nationalist approach to defending minorities' rights therefore risks either emboldening the majority to embrace autocracy or consolidating social hierarchies between the majority and minorities. On these bases, I show that democrats must seek to not only detach race/ethnicity from nationality but also redress those problematic racial/ethnic hierarchies. This suggests the need to develop liberal nationalism into multiculturalist nationalism. Multiculturalist nationalism, however, promises a sort of bounded solidarity that does not include all citizens: it makes use of targeted political antagonism against anti-democrats like White supremacists and Identitarians to help diffuse any social antagonism that might exist among minorities, inclusive members of the majority, and cultural conservatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalism is often singled out as the powerful force that brought about the collapse of the last great land empires of the 19th and early 20th centuries. We offer a different picture: nationalism was weak before 1914, with war being caused by the fears of the great powers rather than pressures from below; crucially war was less an opportunity for pre-existing nationalists to seize than a maelstrom that created new identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the question of why, during the First World War, the Italian government and nationalist public opinion conformed to other European countries’ campaigns against enemy aliens in spite of the problem’s very minor dimension. After analysing the shift from Germanophilia to Germanophobia, it explores the policies targeting civilians of enemy nationality (mainly Austro-Hungarians and Germans), and assesses their implementation. By using statistical data on the presence of aliens in Italy, official documents, and the nationalist press, it shows that Italy waged a twofold campaign against an often imaginary enemy. The first was conducted mainly by nationalists and resulted in press campaigns, rumours, and brief eruptions of violence against alien targets. The second was conducted through decrees, administrative provisions, police activity, and military orders intended to affect personal freedom and property rights. The article inserts the Italian case into a broader European comparative framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the nationalist constructions that have influenced American identity and attempts to discern the resonances that these modes might produce in literary creation. To engage this topic, the inquiry first examines the multilateral influences on the formation of collective identity through attention to governmental and political social engineering; and, second, the article explores the progression of the historiographic imaging and imagining of cultural proprietorship of the America continent as it has been projected through cultural media. The aim is to characterize the structures that place a contrived primordialism in the image of specific population demographics and to explore the attendant literary and cultural expressions of this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the interpretation of nationalists on the blood donation activity in India. It examines how Indians read integrative messages into the practical procedures in which blood were distributed and donated by culture. It highlights how the Nehruvian ideology of national integration possesses a compelling presence in the Indian blood donation milieu. In addition, the difference traversing gift that demonstrates the important roles of enumeration, anonymity and an array of technical and imaginative is also given.

The purpose of this article is to understand how a corporate museum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia works to create proleptic myths of nationhood to under-gird a broader state-centric project of nationalist-capitalist modernization. The article examines how these myths are expressed in the museum's design plans and are manifested in the museum's displays and spatial layout. From this analysis it becomes apparent that, first, the museum's designers intend for Malaysian museum-goers to both learn and embody particular myths of national modernization. Second, the museum's displays are dedicated to establishing a Malay-centric origin narrative for the contemporary nation-state. Third, as one moves through the museum, Malay-centrism gives way to narratives of a 'multi-racial' society that link technological modernization with social progress. Eventually, however, 'race' is trumped by 'class' as the social identity category deemed appropriate for 'information age' citizenship and nationhood in Malaysia in a story that parallels broader cultural and political-economic state-centric aspirations to achieve 'development'. The deployment of 'class' in this context melds strategies of government with selective aspects of neoliberalism that seek to manage the possible cultural and political experiences of nationalist-capitalist accumulation and democratic authoritarianism in contemporary Malaysia. I suggest that while these aspirations expressed through the design of the museum might appear to overcome certain limitations of racial communalisms among different Malaysians, they also dissemble underlying symbolic and material violence that enforces a state-centric stability on the possible meanings of citizenship and national identity in contemporary Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the unmaking of French nationalism after the Dreyfus Affair citing the role of Catholic women. The nationalists' women's group in Rouen, France, the Dames Queteuses decided to devote its efforts and funds to the mounting political fight to save church orders from government-mandated dissolution. The decision caused a serious problem for the Ligue de la Patrie Francaise because Dames had raised significant funds that supported the nationalist committee.

During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, an estimated 50,000 executions took place in the Republican zone. Of these, around 9000 were killed in the Spanish capital. Explanations of Republican violence still tend to assume that it was the work of ‘uncontrollables’ and frequently cite Agapito García Atadell as an example. Atadell led a brigade of 48 men that spread terror in Madrid during the summer of 1936 before he attempted to escape for Cuba that October. However, he was captured in the Nationalist-held Canaries and executed in July 1937. This article considers whether Atadell was really an ‘uncontrollable’. It shows not only that Atadell was a significant figure in Madrid's Socialist movement before the Civil War but also that his brigade was the result of an initiative by the Socialist Party bureaucracy in early August 1936 to reinforce the police with loyal Republicans. This does not imply the existence of a Republican ‘programme of terror‘. It suggests that the brigade operated autonomously in its pursuit of dangerous ‘internal enemies’. It also argues that the brigade was widely perceived to be efficiently defending the Republic against the ‘Fifth Column’ and that Atadell's departure did not harm the career prospects of many of his subordinates in the reorganized Republican police after 1936. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The symbolic role of women in Irish nationalism has to some extent obscured their practical involvements. By studying some of the most prominent female nationalists, this paper shows how women often read representations of women as icons of nationhood very much against the grain of the passive interpretations favoured by later historians. The paper also shows how heavily contested was the ultimate exclusion of women from public and political spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of nature and nation are both rooted in the notion of birth. Thus both can be conceived anew if the underlying vision of natality is conceptualized, following Hannah Arendt, not as a set of inexorable biological processes, but as the fundamental human capacity for political action. This reconceptualization of natality allows proposing an alternative to the prevalent commonsensical ethno-nationalist definitions of nationhood, and also allows a view of the realm of nature itself as inherently political. Arendt's theory finds an interesting referential point in modern developments in biotechnology that threaten to undermine the 'naturalness' of existing notions of ethnically conceived nations. Similarly, nature might be revealed to have a polis working at the very heart of what seemed to be a set of inexorable processes, independent from human beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines the main theoretical positions in research on nations and nationalism. The normative polarization between primordialist and constructivist positions is projected onto the separation between agency-oriented and structural forms of explanation: where theorists wished to discredit evolutionist notions of national emergence, they focused on agency and when the opposite was true, structural explanations of one type or another were used. Only in the 1980s did nationalism become a developed field of enquiry, with journals dedicated to the study of nations and nationalism. The history of research on nations and nationalism has been the history of a gradual problematization of that view, as authors argued that nations are modern and deliberately constructed, and of an evolutionist backlash defending the nation as a natural category. Theorists have recently begun to get beyond this debate, with more adequate approaches to agency/structure and the interplay of identity/interest. Nationalism theory has no consistent theoretical questions, but has worked around four main problematics: the epoch of nations; the content of nationalist discourse; nationalist political mobilization; and the nationalization of the masses.