detailed consideration. SOUTH ASIA 221 First, the overwhelming concern of analysts of democratization in South Asia regarding political consolidation suggests a profound disquiet about the teleology of democratization. In a region in which democracy preceded nation and state-building the challenges have been correspondingly difficult. The experience of South Asian states – of India in particular, it is asserted – offers a revisionist interpretation of accounts in which state and nationhood are seen as seen the sine qua non of effective democratization. According to
established nations or something exotic that exists on the periphery. Instead, it is ‘the endemic condition’.11 His central question is, ‘why do people not forget their nationality?’ He attempted to answer this question by insisting that ‘[I]n established nations there is a continual “flagging”/“reminding” of nationhood. Nationhood provides a continual background for political discourse, for cultural products and even the structuring of newspapers’.12 Moreover, Billig identified the ways in which political discourse assumes the existence of a ‘national’ audience. Billig
membership of the euro for two parliaments. But as Philip Lynch notes in Chapter 8, the pragmatism of this new position and the ‘In Europe, not run by Europe’ platform masked a significant move towards Euro-scepticism. This reflected the increase in Euro-sceptic sentiment in the parliamentary party, though pro-Europeans (like Ian Taylor) were persistent and vocal critics. Europe was one of the few areas where the Conservatives were closer to public opinion than Labour, but Hague’s ‘Keep the Pound’ campaign brought little electoral reward. The ‘politics of nationhood’ are
in certain more recent writings, as a source of invention. Writers investigate metaphor, symbol, dream and fetish as signifiers of a national reality or as constituents of a sense of national being, rather than the nation as literal truth. Under a range of pressures – political dislocations and violence, economic trauma, geographical and cultural displacements, other forms of national schizophrenia – the made up nature of nationhood has emerged into greater prominence. And so, as the split between nationalist fantasy and nation-state reality has been teased open
. Most important, a common Arabic language – the critical ingredient of nationhood – existed. The ‘awakening’ of Arab identity was a product of the spread of mass education and literacy, especially in the 1950s and often by the Egyptian teachers recruited across the Arab world who helped form the educated middle class. The spread of a standardised Arabic in newspapers and radio made the language more homogeneous, stunting the evolution of national dialects as the linguistic basis of separate nations. The recent advent of Arab satellite TV has sharply reinforced cross
, allowing a remodelled Labour Party to win votes on traditional Tory issues such as taxation and law and order. Europe and the single currency brought together a potent cocktail of strategic dilemmas concerning political economy and nationhood that re-opened a serious intra-party fault line. Unity was once (albeit erroneously) said to be the Tories’ secret weapon, but now the party was bitterly divided. Finally, as Andrew Gamble has noted, the pillars of Conservative hegemony – the defence of property, the constitution, Union, and Empire then Europe – were ‘hollowed out
the people that paradoxically thrive on both at once a strict oppositional segregation of the sexes and an adamant disavowal of their intrinsic heterogeneity, or self-andotherness. In the modernist era of the early twentieth century this fundamental deconstructive disunity at the heart of nationalist discourse – albeit ‘repressed and disguised by the veneer of national unity’ (Plain 1996: 20) and thus prone to strengthen the alleged bond of complementarity between the nation’s men and women – gives rise to the genderspecifically disparate experience of nationhood
by France. As he puts it, “political legitimacy in a democratic polity is not derived from nationhood or voluntary association but from popular self-government, that is, citizens’ participation and representation in democratic institutions that track their collective will and common good” (p. 41). I shall return later to Bauböck's rejection of nationhood as a basis for jurisdiction, but first I want to try to unpack these
, and perhaps how other policies in turn get changed, or get influenced to be changed, by interest groups whose behaviour we hope to have modelled sufficiently accurately. Of course, encapsulated in the above are the divisions that dog economic analysis of development policy, even when all sides agree on the objective of development policy (for example, reducing infant mortality rates, rather than building a sense of and a pride in nationhood). Depending on assumptions of how markets behave, or how the political economy behaves, very different conclusions can be
Schöpflin, however, does not dismiss nationhood, or more specifically ‘ethnicity’, as unimportant to democracy. Indeed he argues that ‘democratic nationhood is composed of three key, interdependent elements: civil society, the state and ethnicity’. The central thrust of his argument is that ‘ethnicity, far from being an exaggerated or pathological condition is essential to certain aspects of nationhood and thus to