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A recent article has found nationalism to be negatively associated with government respect for several human rights. In this article, I replicate the original study’s findings, I demonstrate that these findings are robust to an alternate model specification, and I then extend the analysis to additional human rights not examined by the original author. Ultimately, I find that in comparison to when the chief executive is not nationalist, when the chief executive is highly nationalist, that state is less likely to be associated with high government respect for six ‘empowerment’ rights (i.e. the freedoms of assembly and association, electoral self-determination, speech, foreign movement, religion, and worker’s rights), and more likely to be associated with low government respect for these six empowerment rights. This study suggests that nationalism’s influence on human rights is greater than previous thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the claim, largely accepted within the sociological community for over thirty years now, that classical sociologists had no clear concept of the nation-state and thus were unable to conceptualize its rise, main features and further development in modernity. In contradistinction to this standard view, which in current debates receives the name of methodological nationalism, I advance a re-interpretation of classical sociology's conceptualization of the nation-state that points towards what can be called the opacity of its position in modernity. Marx understood the historical elusiveness of the nation-state as he believed that it had already passed its heyday as political struggles were fought between Empires and the Commune. Weber captured the sociological equivocations that arose from the historical disjuncture between the nation and the state. And Durkheim, finally, tried to come to terms with the nation-state's normative ambiguity via the immanent tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The conclusion is that, even if not thoroughly unproblematic, classical sociologists were able to avoid the reification of the nation-state's position in modernity precisely because they were not obsessed with conceptualizing modernity as such from the viewpoint of the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National identity is a symbolically complex configuration, with shifts of emphasis and reprioritisations of content negotiated in contexts of power. This paper shows how they occur in one post-conflict situation – Northern Ireland – among some of the most extreme of national actors – evangelical Protestants. In-depth interviews reveal quite radical shifts in the content of their British identity and in their understanding of and relation to the Irish state, with implications for their future politics. The implications for understanding ethno-religious nationalism, nationality shifts and the future of Northern Ireland are drawn out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This thematic section of Nations and Nationalism starts from a question of substantive political importance: How does institutional change – in particular reforms towards ethno-national equality and the opening of borders – affect national identification in divided regions? It takes the case of Northern Ireland where a radical process of institutional change is under way. It uses new approaches to national identity to map different aspects of change and continuity – in categories of identity and in their interrelations and contents, in elite and in everyday popular identifications (for useful overviews, see Abdelal et al. 2003; Ashmore et al. 2004 ). It examines the trajectory of the Protestant minority in the Irish state to show possible repertoires of change. The authors look respectively at self-reported categories of identity, official discourses of identity, and popular understandings of nationality. The introduction outlines the relevance of this research to current comparative and theoretical debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Castells' analysis of the rise of a global network society and information age is underpinned, paradoxically, by a nationalist vision with organic links in a Gramscian sense to Catalan nationalism. This leads to various weaknesses in his theory, especially an over-emphasis on language and nation at the expense of class. Exploring the specifically Catalan origins of his work, and testing its adequacy there, helps us to understand Castells' broader approach. Discussion of Castells has perhaps overlooked his commitment to nationalism because the sociology of identity sometimes unwittingly adopts what Billig has called a banal nationalist perspective. A stricter distinction between the different meanings of the term identity would help sociology to avoid arguments, such as that of Castells, that risk becoming determinist, teleological or both. The article concludes by asking whether the 'sociological imagination' has been alert enough to its banal nationalist form, facilitated by its intimate relationship with the state, its concern for policy relevance and methods of data gathering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although scholars often treat "ethnicity" as one of the most important phenomena in politics, nothing close to a consensus has emerged about not only what its effects are but also what it is. Theorists typically divide this debate into two camps, usually dubbed "primordialism" and "constructivism," but these categories are unhelpful and actually obscure some of the most important questions. This study recasts the debate by providing a micro-level explanation for why and how people tend to think and act in terms of macro-level identity categories in the first place. Drawing heavily on recent psychological research, this approach reveals why ethnicity is special and why it is ascribed importance by researchers in fields as diverse as sociology, anthropology, and political science. As it turns out, neither constructivism nor primordialism is fully accurate, and theorists are advised to think in terms that are more consistent with psychological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language rights in the EU tend to be viewed in terms of the respect of national identity on the one hand and the clear and harmonised application of the internal market on the other. It is argued that an efficient language policy in the EU is one that reconciles respect for diversity with the need for effective communication. The use of specialist jargon in effect consolidates networks and power, of which there are two separate but related dimensions. The first is the external dimension of language, namely the lingua francaof deliberation, be it English, French, German, and so on. The second dimension refers to the use of élite codes, that is, language for ‘insiders’, which operates in spheres of politics, the law, economics, culture, medicine, and so on. It is the latter which the EU language rights régime has neglected. The absence of enabling provisions governing a duty of clear language renders democratic legitimacy intended by the former relatively meaningless. It is argued that the law can protect, facilitate, safeguard, and encourage clarity and transparency as part of good administrative practice. The duty to use language in a clear and comprehensible manner that has arisen in relation to producers in the EC law context of consumer rights is a useful case in point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world polity and cultural system are relatively stateless, but they legitimate strong nation-state identities as the dominant actors. This produces very strong tendencies for the adoption of common models of modernity, despite extraordinary differences in resources and local culture. Local distinctiveness is also legitimated, so long as it is not inconsistent with homogeneity on the main dimensions of stratification and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses three issues facing cultural national liberalism. Range of reasonable cultural identities under liberalism; Substantive ethical bases of the state; Possibility of principles of cultural self-respect.

Religious nationalism represents an institutional project to transform the ontology of the social, to redefine the substance of collective representation, the principle of domination and the criteria for membership. Religious nationalism transforms the territorial nation-state into a vehicle in and by which to extend the materiality of its culturally specific categories, codes, values and narratives. It thereby challenges social theories, like that of Bourdieu, that deculturalize power, as well as those, like Alexander, that culturalize it in an institutionally restrictive manner. Religious nationalism is not a retreat to the premodern, but an effort to bound and energize the elemental modern moments, that of the self and the national-state. Religious nationalism represents the return to text, to the fixity of signs, the renarrativization of the nation in a cosmic context. It returns us to bodies and souls, a zone to be defended against things on the one side and beasts on the other. It offers a way to secure morality against an increasingly post-humanist world. Its discourse of difference seeks to bound the nation. Religious nationalism restores the binaries of inside and outside, us and them, good and evil, man and woman and centers them in sacred space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article tries to develop a better understanding of the role of discursive formations in the establishment of a nationalist claim. Nationalist discourses are defined as a distinctive subset of those discursive practices directed to transform, through the drawing of a boundary, a given audience in a solidary community, characterized by an internal, socially constructed similarity and by an external, socially constructed difference. It is argued that such a cultural approach may also help clarify some controversial issues in the sociology of nationalism, such as the meaning of the frequently made distinctions between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ nationalism. It is argued that, while useful in identifying two crucial rhetorical resources, such distinction is troublesome when applied to nationalist actors. The empirical focus of the article is an analysis of a sample of articles published in the main Italian newspapers about the secessionist campaign of the Northern League in 1996. An analysis of their contents makes it possible to highlight the plurality of discursive strategies employed by social actors in order to advocate or oppose a nationalist claim. It is shown how all the actors involved adopt rhetorical themes belonging both to ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ templates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a distinction between the symbolic and the structural centers of the nation-state. Whereas the structure center connotes state power, the symbolic center is closer to the concept of the nation and is vital to the creation of a sense of nationhood. The symbolic center contains values, symbols, rituals and myths that define nationhood. Since it is fundamental to the delineation of a nation, it is sacred. Although the two centers are analytically separate, being in command of one does not necessarily entail command of the other. However, claiming representation of the symbolic center is tremendously important for the legitimation of the structural center. The 1989 Chinese student movement is used to illustrate that students displaced the Chinese Communist Party to become the center of symbolic power. The crackdown reasserted the party's structural control over society only; it therefore had to introduce various measures to purify itself and cleanse society so as to regain its place as the occupant of the symbolic center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the political upheaval of 1989, a political concept has regained its significance, an idea, it was thought, that belonged to the past: the idea of the nation as the basis of international order and the foundation of political self-determination. The re-emergence of the nation as a model of political order contradicts the vision that post-war European integration would culminate in complete transnational unification of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]