Search results
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
(‘sincerity’), the limitative criterion sets up a mobile, subjective norm that cannot be defined objectively. Instead, the manifest process of interpretation involved turns the normative criterion into an interplay of differential normalities as it effects a process of repetitive changes and adaptation. Based on specific politics of reading and interpretation, the various approaches to nationhood invoked
process as based on mutual acceptance in terms of each ‘acknowledging the other’s nationhood’, as Herbert Kelman of Harvard, a mediator in the peace process, has put it ( 1992 : 18–38). In this regard we need to ask whether, and in a commitment to peace, the Islamists acknowledge the place of Israel in the Middle East 18 and the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty over the grounds of
South-Eastern Europe. The conflict over Kosovo demonstrated that the east had not yet completed the tasks of modernity, that is, forming nation states, and defining borders. In the age of globalisation and European integration, it has turned out that pockets of violent modern nationhood still exist. Indeed, the Balkans are often interpreted as the reserve of the archaic, reminding one of Jean Baudrillard
, for academic work documenting the foundational character of Greek (Christian) Orthodoxy in contemporary understandings of nationhood see, George Th. Mavrogordatos ( 2003 ) and Elpida Vogli ( 2007 ). 21 Mihalis Nivolianitis, ‘Landing of Illegal Migrants in the Law School’, Ethnos , 25 January 2011
civilization was judged with reference to religion, technological development, ascribed racial characteristics, economic capacity, political institutions, morality, intellectual competence, and sense of nationhood. 36 Towards the end of the nineteenth century the religious and racial aspects lapsed and emphasis was put on the other ‘minimum standards of civilization’ and in this sense the standard opened the way for the inclusion of Japan and other non-Christian and non