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This article explores the discussions concerning history textbooks that occurred within the Swedish State Approval Scheme for Textbooks (Statens läroboksnämnd) from 1945 to 1983. By focusing on the negotiation of nationhood and the process of textbook approval as an arena for the renegotiation of ways in which history was taught in schools, the article reveals that nationalistic sentiment associated with the historical discipline was challenged by intercultural and materialist discourses during the period under examination. However, much of the debate within the State Approval Scheme for Textbooks indicates that an ethnic nationalist discourse and competing discourses introduced in new syllabi for history education after 1945 tended to converge.

In recent years it has been asked whether it is time to move ‘beyond the national museum’. This article takes issue with this assertion on the grounds that it misunderstands not only museums as cultural phenomenon but also the ways in which globalization, nationalism, and localism are always enmeshed and co-constitutive. The article begins by considering theories of globalization, postnationalism, and cosmopolitanism and their relevance for national museums in the European context. Specific theories of cosmopolitanism are subsequently further explored in relation to two museum examples drawn from the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin. In different ways both examples demonstrate the potential for museums to engage visitors with ideas of cosmopolitanism, globalization, and postnationalism by revisiting, reframing, and reinterpreting existing national collections and displays. In the process the article makes the case for the merits of a nationally situated approach to cosmopolitanism in European museums. At the same time it acknowledges some of the potential limits to such endeavors. The article concludes by imagining what a ‘cosmopolitan museology’ would offer in terms of practice, politics, and ethics.

This article analyzes the historical semantics of the concept of unnati in the nationalist discourse in Hindi between 1870 and 1900. The article first outlines the basic features of the Enlightenment concept of progress using Koselleck's analysis. It then goes on to discuss the place of the concept of progress in the colonial ideology of a “civilizing mission,“ and concludes by taking up the analysis of the usage of the term unnati in the nationalist discourse in North India.

Keywords: Flanders; autochthony; nationalism; neo-liberalism; integrism This contribution traces three interconnected evolutions that characterise the transformation of Flemish nationalism into autochthony as Flemings obtained more cultural autonomy, the cultural influence of the Flemish Movement declined and Flemish nationalists started radicalising their political demands; as Flemings obtained more political autonomy, demands for greater economic autonomy started extending beyond the Flemish-nationalist fringe; and as Flanders became more autonomous in relation to the federal state, Flemings started identifying increasingly with a new Flemish culture. In the process, both allochtons and Francophone Belgians came to be construed as Flanders' ultimate others .

This article discusses the relationship between race and physical anthropology in Hungary and Romania between 1900 and 1940. It begins by looking at institutional developments in both countries and how these influenced the most important Hungarian and Romanian anthropologists' professional and research agendas. Drawing from a wide range of primary sources, the article reveals the significant role the concept of race played in articulating anthropological and ethnic narratives of national belonging. It is necessary to understand the appeal of the idea of race in this context. With idealized images of national communities and racial hierarchies creeping back into Eastern European popular culture and politics, one needs to understand the latent and often unrecognized legacies of race in shaping not only scientific disciplines like anthropology, but also the emergence and entrancement of modern Hungarian and Romanian nationalism.

This article deals with the theory of the "strong nucleus of the Greek race" elaborated by the Greek physical anthropologist Ioannis Koumaris (1879-1970), who headed all academic anthropological institutions in Greece between 1915 and 1970. According to this theory human groups were in a state of "fluid constancy," meaning that the "proper" nucleus of the predominant race always persisted in a stable form despite miscegenation, and was hence capable of resurfacing. This theory footed, first, on racial theories challenging the existence of "pure races" in favor of evidencing "racial varieties" and "racial types" and, second, an early Greek national idea according to which Hellenism possessed the ability to acculturate and absorb foreign peoples or nations without losing its innate qualities. The Greek notion fili (meaning both nation and race), and its shifting semantics from religious to national and racial, is similarly instrumental to this analysis. By means of this theory racial purity was not so much rejected as it was relativized, essentially being replaced by the constancy of a race over time. With the shift from purity to constancy, the imperative of the homogeneity of an entity is not violated but, in contrast, supported by race anthropological arguments. Race hygienic theories, in turn, advanced the shift from racial consistency to purification.

The West Berlin anti-authoritarians around Rudi Dutschke employed a notion of subaltern nationalism inspired by independence struggles in the global South and particularly by post 1959 Cuba to legitimate their loosely understood plans to recreate West Berlin as a revolutionary island. Responding to Che Guevara's call for many Vietnams, they imagined this Northern metropolis as a Focus spreading socialism of the third way throughout Europe, a conception that united their local and global aims. In focusing on their interpretation of societal changes and structures in Cuba, the anti-authoritarians deemphasized these plans' potential for violence. As a study of West German leftists in transnational context, this article suggests the limitations of confining analyses of their projects within national or Northern paradigms. As a study of the influence of the global South on the North in a non-(post)colonial situation, it suggests that such influence is greater than has heretofore been understood.

This paper suggests that the study of the modernisation of European political cultures in the eighteenth century would greatly benefit from a comparative conceptual historical approach. is approach would effect the reconstruction of a variety of meanings attached to chosen political concepts in different national contexts through the side-by-side analysis of primary sources originating from each case according to the methodology of both historical semantics and pragmatics. A promising research topic is the continuity and change in the conceptualisation of national community, national identity, popular sovereignty and democracy in various European political cultures. e conceptual analyses of late eighteenth-century political sermons from five northwestern European countries, conducted by the author, for example, reveal that conceptual changes related to the rise of nationalism took place even within public religion, allowing it to adapt itself to the age of nationalism. Further analysis of the secular debates taking place in representative bodies and public discourse in late eighteenth-century Britain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden elucidates the gradual development of the notion that all political power is ultimately derived from the people and that such a system constituted a "democracy" in a positive sense within different parliamentary traditions and perhaps even before the French Revolution.

Language and solitude. Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg dilemma . By Ernest Gellner. Edited by David Gellner. Foreword by Steven Lukes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Hb.: £35. ISBN 0521 630029. Pb.: £12.95. ISBN 0521 639972. Nietzsche (1994: no. 25) described ‘a knowledge of the conditions of culture’ as ‘the enormous task of the great minds of the next century’. It was necessary to ‘surpass all previous knowledge’ in this way in order for humankind to ‘carry onward the banner of the Enlightenment’ and establish a form of government ‘embracing the whole earth’. If humankind was to avoid destroying itself, then it had to set itself the ‘ecumenical goal’ of a world morality which was based on ‘a scientific standard’. Although he would not have liked me for saying so, Gellner is relatively dismissive of Nietzsche as a peddler of ideas concerning ‘the pathogenic origins or consequences of universalism and aggression-denying conscience’ which paved the way towards extreme and racist nationalism (1998: 25). it has been Ernest Gellner who has recently and most vigorously taken up the Nietzschean challenge in anthropology, combining knowledge of culture, government, morality and science. Gellner has endeavoured to come to terms with culture while appreciating science as a universal form of knowledge and also the need for equally universal forms of polity and morality.

This article studies the transformation of the debate about national culture in twentieth-century Mexico by looking at the complex relationship between discourses of authenticity and mestizaje. The article firstly demonstrates how in the first half of the twentieth century, Mexican national identity was constructed out of a state-led program of mestizaje, thereby supposedly giving rise to a new and authentic identity, the mestizo (nation). Secondly, it is argued that the authentication project around mestizaje is riddled with paradoxes that require explanation. Thirdly, the article studies the political dimension of the authenticity discourse and demonstrates how the homogenizing and unifying forces that spring from the process of authentication played an important role in buttressing an authoritarian regime. Fourthly, the article looks at two recent developments: indigenous cultural politics and transnationalism. Here it is shown how discourses of difference, pluralism, and transnationalism are challenging the central tenets of Mexican post-revolutionary national culture and the boundaries of the national Self.

This article focuses on controversial plans by the government to rebuild Aisha Bibi, a small, crumbling mausoleum in southeastern Kazakhstan, and thereby hitch its symbolic potency to the nationalist drive. There has never been one commonly accepted account of the building in terms of when and by whom it was created. Nonetheless, it has long been a site of pilgrimage for many different groups and, since the Soviet period, a source of scientific interest. Plans to construct a replica building have brought the multitude of previously co-existing narratives into sharp relief as the new version threatens to oust the others, effectively making one narrative claim exclude others. Further, as is the nature of all representations, the replica will halt and contain the unboundedness and perishability of the mausoleum which, for many local narratives, is an essential part of Aisha Bibi.

This article describes why the Polish government has pushed for an invocation to Christian traditions in the European Union Constitution. It is argued that this is a rather 'unfortunate' outcome of the political alliance between the Catholic Church and the Polish left, especially between President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). This alliance allowed the SLD to legitimize their rule in the post-socialist Poland, and it was a result of a political competition between them and the post-Solidarność elites. As a result, John Paul II became the central integrative metaphor for the Polish society at large, which brought back in the marginalized as well as allowed the transition establishment to win the EU accession referendum in 2003. The article (which was written when Leszek Miller was still Prime Minister) demonstrates how this alliance crystallized and presents various elements of the cult of the Pope in Poland that followed. Finally, it argues that the worship of the Pope is not an example of nationalism, but of populism, understood not as a peripheral but as a central political force, and advocates for more research on the 'politics of emotions' at work in the centers and not in peripheries.

This paper argues that the two models of collective responsibility David Miller presents in National Responsibility and Global Justice do not apply to nations. I first consider the 'like-minded group' model, paying attention to three scenarios in which Miller employs it. I argue that the feasibility of the model decreases as we expand outwards from the smallest group to the largest, since it increasingly fails to capture all members of the group adequately, and the locus of any like-mindedness becomes too abstract and vague to have the causal force the model requires. I thereafter focus on the 'cooperative practice' model, examining various ways in which the analogy Miller draws between an employee-led business and a nation breaks down. In concluding I address the concern that my arguments have worrying consequences and suggest that, on the contrary, the rejection of the idea of national responsibility is a positive move.

Sri Lanka's civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamil communities has now raged for nearly half a century. The Sri Lankan cum Sinhalese Buddhist state has since independence resisted all significant attempts by the Tamil political leadership at power sharing. Most constitutional lawyers and progressive Sri Lankan opinion (Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher, etc.) hold that short of a separate state, administrative power should be devolved in the form of a federal state, so as to give autonomy to the northeast of Sri Lanka, while the forces of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism have sought to justify the centralized state by recourse to the history of Buddhism and the Sinhalese on the island. Such arguments have drawn on the ontological potential of the cosmic order of Sinhalese Buddhism, which is fundamentally hierarchical in intent. Here I argue that the diffused nature of this cosmic order provides the ontological grounding for a decentralized state structure that can accommodate ethnic difference in a non-hierarchical relation. Thus, the legacy of Sinhalese Buddhism can be rescued from the forces of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism.

Indonesian is the national language of the world's fourth most populous coun try. Although it has 200 million speakers, it is little known beyond its borders and a narrow circle of area specialists. To reduce its obscurity in the global scheme of things, I will show here how it has developed into an unusually national but 'un-native' language. A brief sketch of the language's history high lights commonsense ideas about language, identity, and nationalism that the Indonesian case does not fit, further reinforcing its uncommon aspects.

Is nationalism more noble than racism? Anderson argues that it is: "National ism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal con taminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations" (1991: 149). For Anderson, racism springs from ideologies of class, which are rooted in notions of blood purity. In contrast, he holds that patriotic dreams and nationalist fellowship rest on a fundamentally different criterion—the language encountered on the mother's knee. This dis tinction that Anderson draws is crucial. It leads him to view nations as open and inclusive, since one can be invited into the nation (as is implicit in the term 'naturalization'), whereas the impulse of racism is to exclude. At a time when many scholars view nationalism as a pathology, Anderson reminds us that nations can inspire love—"often profoundly self-sacrificing love" (1991: 141). Do these contending positions, then, evidence different types of nationalisms, the 'good' and 'bad' (see, e.g., Plamenatz 1973)? I suggest oth erwise. Nationalism's power derives from the way it simultaneously conjoins forces that we assume must repel one another—e.g., love and hate, inclusion and exclusion, openness and closure. Accordingly, I argue that if nationalism is an 'invitation', it is an invitation predicated on exclusion—a sublime love that is premised on hatred and dreams of a historical destiny that is cleansed of "loathsome copulations." Such is the paradoxical state of nationalism from which it derives its power. This paradox is heightened in nationalisms of the Americas, where blood (as a synechdoche for race) serves as a key symbol for the nation. While the 'bloody' racist history of the New World attests to the intimate connection among racism, exploitation, and the symbolics of blood, nationalists here have also deployed a particular narrative of the spoils of their history—blood mixture—to forge national redemption for each incipient nation.1 Narrating the nation through blood mixture promises national redemption because mixture Viranjini Munasinghe

There exist in intellectual history periods where, following intense deliberation on a question, something like a consensus emerges. Typically the consensus amounts to a refinement of the competing views on the question rather than some final resolution. These refined views are then presented as the official 'debate', and faithfully reproduced in university courses world-wide. Something of this sort has happened with theories of nationalism, or to be more accurate, with theories of the modernity of the nation. Indeed, the issue of the modernity of the nation looms large in the Smith, Ozkrimili and Guibernau & Hutchinson texts. The modernity of the nation is a question most famously articulated by Ernest Gellner when he asked: 'Do nations have navels?', that is, are they the progeny of pre-modern ethnic parents, or are they new imaginings produced by modern conditions without parents at all? The 'debate' identifies three answers to this question: (1) the primordialist: the nation is an organic and enduring part of human society; (2) the modernist: nationalism, a product of modernity, constructs nations as if they were organic but they have no essence; they are like an onion which can be peeled away to nothing; and (3) the ethno-symbolist: the nation is a modern imagining of a pre-exist