Nation-building Process Research Articles

“CHIESA E STATO” FRATTURA DI COSA, FRATTURE PER COSA

Una caratteristica cruciale della storia italiana è il poliedrico rapporto tra Stato e papato, un rapporto a volte conflittuale, a volte amichevole ma sempre presente nelle diverse fasi del processo di costruzione della nazione. Da un lato, la Questione Romana e le vicende dell'Unità del XIX secolo si basano su diverse fratture e ne evidenziano l'antagonismo. Dall'altro, una riconciliazione si può vedere dopo il Movimento di Resistenza, quando la Chiesa è diventata protagonista del sistema democratico repubblicano e durante il periodo della stesura della Costituzione, basata sugli sforzi reciproci e sull'utopia di un dialogo fecondo. Nel complesso, e questo è vero fin dalla Cattura di Roma (1870), lo Stato italiano ha sempre dovuto misurarsi con la presenza duratura del papato.

The conformation and negotiation of nationalism in China’s political animations—a case study of Year Hare Affair

ABSTRACT Nationalism is a prominent theme in China’s cultural productions. While many studies research nationalistic representations of wars, revolutions and nation-building processes in Chinese socialist cinema and dramas, this article focuses on a marginal media form: political animations. It examines the patriotic discourses in popular Chinese animated series Year Hare Affair and presents three main findings. First, that the series characters represent personified/animalized nation states, reflecting the animator’s perceptions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ (and ‘friends’ or ‘enemies’), which are highly consistent with the Chinese authority’s stance and policy in foreign affairs. Second, that the animation’s key theme of ‘dreams of being a powerful nation’ explicitly demonstrates nationalist and developmental connotations, showing confirmation and resonation of Xi’s China Dream initiative. Third, that the animation also moderately deviates from the mainstream representations and offers re-interpretations of the official patriotic narratives with regard to China’s performance in international affairs. The analyses conclude a negotiation dynamic between the (half-) independent political animation and the state’s hegemony in China’s transformative political communication space.

Power and Culture: The Cultural Foundations of Brazilian Sociology

In this article, I analyse how Brazilian sociology articulates the relationship between culture and power, which is one of the central problems of cultural sociology. I analyse two theoretical traditions, culturalism and institutionalism, which traverse different areas of Brazilian sociology. Broadly speaking, the approach of culturalism takes culture as a dimension that structures power relations (culture over power), while institutionalism considers that the structure lies in the institutionalised power relations that produce the cultural codes of political culture (power over culture). I conceive of political culture as an expression of an Ethos, and show how it is considered either as a cause or an effect of the historical nation building process. In Brazilian sociology, the notions of culture and power pose a permanent interpretational challenge for both classical and contemporary scholars. This makes the discussion about the relationship between culture and power a key element in understanding past and present historical processes in Brazil. I seek to understand the variations of meaning regarding these notions and their implications for Brazilian sociology. In this sense, this article is a cultural sociology of cultural sociology in Brazil, or, in other words, an analysis of the cultural foundations of Brazilian sociology.

Contract for Peace: Peace Agreements and its Security Implication

Negotiated settlements have been increasingly accepted as the preferred way of ending civil wars. Studies show that only 50 percent of negotiated settlements last beyond five years, while in others, negotiated settlements have been shown to keep the peace for only three and half years. Contrary to this, the peace agreements/understandings were universally considered as the pivotal blue print for conflict transformation and peace buildings. In our case, the management of arms and armies, reintegration of few former rebels in the national army, promulgation of the constitution from the constituent assembly etc. are the crucial tasks of the peace process. In this context, this paper highlights the major peace agreements (2005-2010) reached between the then Communist Party of Nepal (CPN)-Maoist and the seven parliamentary party alliance’s government and simultaneously tries to analyze these agreements’ influence on security. The 12-point understanding of 2005 concluded in New Delhi is the guiding framework of the Nepalese peace process and has its geostrategic implication as well. Likewise, the Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) of 2006 is a milestone in bringing about an end to the decade of old civil war and beginning an inclusive, secular, peaceful and democratic nation-building process. Despite everything, delaying the transitional justice process and staling the social reconciliation can be the potential reason for a reprisal of conflict

Политические режимы разделённых обществ в условиях глобализации

In the course of the project, the authors have studied ample new latest Russian and international scientific literature on split societies; today’s status of studies of post-conflict settlement of split societies, ways of political control of split societies in the context of authoritarianism and democracy, territorial organization of split societies (federalization, regionalization). The research explores the empirical experience of solving the problems of split societies in a comparative historical perspective, reviews institutional methods for resolving and preventing inter-segment conflicts. It compares processes of state and nation-building in the split conflict and post-conflict societies, examines separatist ethnic conflicts and cases of declaration of independence, secession and the emergence of de facto statehood, as well as the impact of these processes on the stability of political regimes and post-conflict institutiona­lization. The authors also focus on the challenges of globalization (migration, ethnic and religious terrorism) and the emergence of new foreign-cultural segments caused by migration in the old democracies (France, Spain and Germany).

Power and influence in post-secession South Sudan: A leadership perspective on nation-building

ABSTRACT Following South Sudan's secession in 2011, the country faced significant political, social and economic challenges. The country emerged from a long andarduous nation-building journey, including almost 50 years of violent conflict, that would continue after declaring independence. This nation-building process would suffer a significant set-back in December 2013 when the most recent civil war broke out. This article provides a new perspective on South Sudan's nation-building trajectory that tends towards violence and complicates peace-building. It does so by utilising the leadership process approach from the Leadership Studies literature. While popular literature and commentary tends to fault the South Sudanese elite for the current crisis, there has not been a systematic effort to understand the leadership challenge and its role in conflict, peace and nation-building in South Sudan. In this article, South Sudan's nation-building process and its three primary components of (a) identity construction, (b) statehood and (c) collective will and responsibility, are analysed from a leadership perspective, focusing on issues of power and influence. The conclusion is reached that South Sudan's nation-building has been and will likely continue to trend towards a violent process due to a leadership process that lacks mutuality and is founded on insufficient sources of power.

Confronting the Silences of History: Licínio Azevedo’s Virgem Margarida and Comboio de Sal e Açúcar

Through fictional portrayals of events that, though based on historical fact, have either been forgotten or marginalised by Frelimo’s process of nation building in the aftermath of the Civil War, Licínio Azevedo’s films Virgem Margarida (2012) and Comboio de Sal e Açúcar (2016) engage with political tensions that are rooted in the past yet continue to affect contemporary Mozambican society. Both films examine the ways in which authority figures, whether explicitly representing the government or not, attempt to control the thoughts and actions of those whom they consider subordinate to them. Specifically, Azevedo casts a critical eye on the ideological training of both citizenry and soldiers that Frelimo considered fundamental to the creation of a new Mozambican society. This study contends that, through these films, Azevedo is engaging in the politics of memory by contesting the official historical version of events. In some cases, this involves presenting a vision of the past that contradicts official history, while, in others, this involves focusing on aspects of the past that official history has chosen to forget. In doing so, Azevedo engages with a discourse concerning the manipulation of official history by those in power.

Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea by Christina Yi

Reviewed by: Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea by Christina Yi Travis Workman (bio) Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea. By Christina Yi. Columbia University Press, New York, 2018. xiv, 211 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. A number of scholarly publications on the Japanese empire have come out in the last two decades, expanding our understanding of the history, culture, and politics of Japan's imperialist expansion in the early twentieth century. They have explored the colonial histories and literatures of Taiwan, China, Manchuria, and Korea from multiple vantage points and theoretical orientations. This is a welcome development, considering the various ways that cold war political ideologies—including, most prominently, ethnonationalism—had previously led to myopic and present-oriented narratives of the period. Works concerning "the colonial period" in Korea have brought to light the complexity of issues of national identity, gender, language, and cultural erasure under Japanese colonial rule. Contemporaneously, a number of scholars have drawn from developments in the study of the Japanese empire to expand the context for reading and interpreting the literary works of ethnic Koreans in postwar Japan (zainichi). Considering the literal meaning of the term zainichi, this is a necessary recognition of changing views of the Japanese empire, which produced the conditions of possibility for Koreans "remaining" in postwar Japan. One of the virtues of Christina Yi's Colonizing Language: Cultural Production and Language Politics in Modern Japan and Korea is that it bridges these two areas of research to present an illuminating account of "Japanese language literature" (Nihongo bungaku) in the mid-twentieth century. As the title of the book suggests, Yi's primary concern is "language ideology"—how concepts and practices of national language were employed for colonial rule and how colonial and minority subjects responded to and worked within regimes of national language. In this regard, the "colonizing" of the title has a double meaning, referring both to the way that concepts of language were integral to subject formation, and therefore colonized the bodies and consciousnesses of modern national and imperial [End Page 183] subjects, as well as to the ways that local, regional, and individual languages were objects of colonization during the processes of nation building and empire building. One important intervention of Yi's work is that she reads this subject-object duality of language and colonization not simply as an erasure of the Korean national language by Japanese national-imperial language. She rather emphasizes the power of modern language ideology to establish the parameters of the universal and the particular, the cosmopolitan and the local, and the national and the regional, categories that then structure how literary and cinematic texts engage with and attempt to overcome the problem of their linguistic medium in a colonial situation. Therefore, she not only analyzes and clarifies the colonial effects of the policies and practices of the Japanese national language (kokugo) in colonial Korea, but also shows how the idea of kokugo came to affect Korean intellectuals' imagination of the Korean national language (kug'ŏ) after liberation. She also explains how speaking and writing in a national language as a colonial or minority subject are not simply matters of subordinating one's original national identity out of self-interest. She shows the ambivalence of the desire to be a proper speaking and writing subject of national language: national language at once empowers and subordinates; it provides access and includes, while discriminating and excluding. Although she does not refer directly to Naoki Sakai's discussions of national language as a "regulative idea" (in the Kantian sense), Yi shows, through close readings and a detailed literary-historical account, how "Japanese-language literature" grapples with the normative function of "national language," and how colonial and minority subjects engage with language ideology in ways irreducible to a political calculation. Therefore, by focusing on language ideology and reorienting our attention to the tropes and practices through which Koreans imagined themselves as imperial subjects, Yi disrupts powerful cold war–era ideas about collaboration and resistance during the colonial period. At the same time, she also provides a conceptual framework through which to judge the...

Where is my home, my nation?: Cinematic Memory of the Women who were Abducted During the Partition of India in 1947

This paper is an intense engagement of the partition saga and the experience of women in the process of the remaking of ‘Nations’. It aims to narrate the memories of survival and aftermath lives of abducted women who faced horrendous acts of violence in wake of evolution of ‘partition’ times. The tales of horror inflicted the arrival of nationalistic rhetoric on the bodies of women presents the gendered notions of nationalism and its horrendous expressions. Interspersed with readings from literature on the subject of partition with an analysis of discourses mostly from eleven selected films from Hindi cinema, this paper highlights the textual understanding of the films in the context of the idea of nation and sufferings of women in the nation building process. It revisits the patriarchal inflictions on the body of a woman in the larger context of the dark desires of macho-nationalism through the intersectional analysis of texts and subtexts of the selected Hindi films.

Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy by Enrico Dal Lago

Reviewed by: Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy by Enrico Dal Lago Edoardo M. Barsotti Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy. Enrico Dal Lago. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-1070-3842-4. 465 pp., cloth, $50.28. Nineteenth-century United States and Italy pique the interest of historians for their curious similarities and coincidences. Both countries underwent the consolidation of their nation-states in the 1860s, Italy by accomplishing its unification process and the United States through a civil war that reasserted the preeminence of the federal government over the centrifugal forces of the slaveholding states. Moreover, both countries were confronted with their own southern questions and the social and political factors underlying them. Specifically, in the same years (1861–65), the United States defeated the Confederacy, while the newborn Kingdom of Italy secured its annexation of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies by crushing the “Great Brigandage,” namely those insurgencies targeting the new nation-state and its supporters. These similarities are the driving force of Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy, in which Enrico Dal Lago analyzes why some nation-building processes, like the Italian unification, succeeded, while others, like the construction of the Confederate States of America, did not. He also investigates how these new polities coped with the internal dissent represented respectively by the Southern unionists and African American slaves on the one hand, and by the “brigands,” consisting of Bourbon legitimists and insurgent peasants, on the other (6–7). By adopting a comparative approach, Dal Lago argues that two inner civil wars opposing the respective agrarian elites—slaveholding planters and the liberal landowners—and their agrarian subaltern classes took place, albeit with opposite outcomes. In America, the secessionist planters fatally underestimated the resistance of the unionist yeomen and slaves, while in the Italian South, the galantuomini (the liberal landowners) secured their hegemony by siding with the new state and repressing the peasants’ rebellion (28–29, 397–99). [End Page 206] These conflicts originated, as the author remarks, from the restructuring of the world economy following the industrial revolution, which strained the relationship of these agrarian elites with their respective rural workers but, also, with their governments—the Union and the Bourbon Kingdom—to the point of an actual rebellion (28–29). Dal Lago does not hesitate to define both the planters’ secession and the support of the galantuomini for the unification as “preemptive counterrevolutions,” aiming at securing their socioeconomic status threatened by radical political transformations (23, 28–29). The first part of the book focuses on how the South Carolinian planters and the Sicilian landowners ignited the new processes of nation-building; then it broadens to investigate how the new nation-states claimed and maintained their legitimacy in the face of a growing dissent (61). Through the two case studies of Eastern Tennessee and the Terra di Lavoro, the author examines the emergence of the unionist and legitimist guerrillas and how the governmental repression engendered, although with opposite results, similar strategies of resistance (223). Dal Lago identifies, however, the core of the anti-Confederate and anti-Italian resistance in the exploited agrarian masses constituted respectively by the slaves and the landless peasants. The two case studies of the slaves’ and freedmen’s resistance in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the brigand bands of the Upper Basilicata examined in the second part of the book reveal how these agrarian rebellions proved problematic to quell because of their nature of social conflicts over the ownership and use of lands. In Mississippi, the slaves accelerated the demise of slavery and claimed their rights to own and cultivate the land of their former masters. In Basilicata, the insurgent peasants targeted the landed estates, and it took the martial law and an increased cooperation between army and landowners to definitively crush the brigands. In both cases, the winners defended the property owners at the expense of the rural workers, and in the case of the former slaves, their crucial contribution in defeating the Confederacy. In short, as Dal Lago concludes, the common condition of landless peasantry shared by Southern Italian and...

AZERBAYCAN'DA KAPİTALİST GELİŞİM SÜRECİNİN POLİTİK EKONOMİSİ (19. YÜZYILIN ORTALARI-20. YÜZYILIN BAŞLARI)

Azerbaijan is a country that went through a number of different phases under the control of many countries for long permanent and short temporary terms. It can be said that states founded by Azerbaijan Turks were active in the states existed in middle ages and modern times and empires that controlled the region during their hegemony periods. The most important breaking point of the political history of Azerbaijan Turkish people corresponds to the beginnings of the nineteenth century. Russian empire, that was rising in this period and started expand to south, interfered to the long term Ottoman-Iran struggle in this period. Russian empire achieved significant gains from the competition that included three great powers. In 1813 Gülistan and 1828 Türkmençay agreements Azerbaijan’s territories north of Aras River were annexed by Russia. Russia developed different formulas in regards of the regional governance after its occupation. But these formulas that are known as administration reform were changed frequently as they were bereft of permanent and problem solving qualifications.The important changes in the socially traditional and economic structures were made possible by the 1861 reform that abolished the serfdom system that existed in the Czardom Russia. These reforms’ results, which started in the Caucasus ten years later, explicitly revealed itself in the development of the petroleum industry in Baku. The capitalist development in Baku simultaneously caused developments in education, press and cultural fields. On the one hand the development of petroleum industry changed Baku’s economic and political features and on the other hand caused serious demographical transformations. Within the scope of this process social and political transformations gained momentum concurrently with economic transformations, Azerbaijan Turkish People’s nation building process broken new grounds.Azerbaijan society, which built on Islamic identity and lived in colonial system, made progressions in enlightenment and nation consciousness, ummah and nation concepts started find distinct meanings in the start of twentieth century. As in the history of other nations, economic and social transformations show up as mutually triggering and concurrent processes in Azerbaijan history. In this regard, examination of economy politic of the colonial system and nation building process is important for demonstrating the social economic side of nationalization process that Azerbaijan Turks went through

Kentucky's Joseph C. S. Blackburn: Soldier, Statesman, and a Friend of All by Elizabeth Rouse Fielder

Reviewed by: Kentucky's Joseph C. S. Blackburn: Soldier, Statesman, and a Friend of All by Elizabeth Rouse Fielder Stefano Tijerina (bio) Kentucky's Joseph C. S. Blackburn: Soldier, Statesman, and a Friend of All. By Elizabeth Rouse Fielder. (Morley: Acclaim Press, 2018. Pp. vii, 384. $29.95 cloth) Having researched the Joseph Clay Stiles Blackburn papers at the Kentucky Historical Society in search of primary sources that would shed light on his work as Civil Governor of the Panama Canal Zone, it is evident that Elizabeth Rouse Fielder's depiction of the life of Blackburn is idyllic. This does not demerit the fact that in Kentucky's Joseph C. S. Blackburn: Soldier, Statesman and a Friend of All, Fielder is able to effectively describe the dynamics of local politics and culture, and its impact on nation-building, as the United States moved past the Civil War and toward the unification of the national market. Fielder's objective was to describe the trajectory of the political career of Joseph Blackburn, while drawing parallels to the economic development of Kentucky and the consolidation of the nation-state, contributing to the historiography of the Reconstruction era from a southern lens. Blackburn's political life, as described by Fielder, reveals that the vision of nation-building and the realization of "Manifest Destiny" was not only the intellectual product of the North but also of the South. Her book is broken down into six parts. The first part describes the emergence of the Blackburn family in Kentucky, emphasizing their generational trajectory in the economic, political, and cultural spheres. This is followed by a section that gives agency to Blackburn's role in the American Civil War and that served as a means to connect him to the Reconstruction era and its impact on Kentucky's post–Civil War economic development. The third part contains the core of the development of Blackburn's political career, his vision as a Democrat, and his numerous battles, on the debate floor, in defense of a balance between state and federal powers, always placing country first (pp. 258–94). Part four of Fielder's work focuses on his years as Governor of the Panama Canal Zone (1907–1909), connecting Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine with nation-building [End Page 323] overseas, as the power of the United States expanded beyond its borders, threatening the interests of other superpowers of the time. This is followed by parts five and six which depict the concluding years of Blackburn's career, emphasizing the life of the Southern Democrat whose political trajectory was driven by the conviction that the United States was destined to a growing and influential role on the international stage (p. 315). Although lacking clarity, the concluding remarks let the reader know that without the conviction and dedication of Southern Democrats like Blackburn, the nation-state project would have been impossible to achieve. Perhaps Fielder's work will inspire scholars to move past the classical historical analysis, unveiling new local historical narratives that may shed light on the political, economic, cultural, social, and business history that shaped the nation during the first era of globalization. Ultimately, as shown by Fielder, Blackburn was face-to-face with the challenges of nation-building, juggling local interests and national interests, as the United States transformed into a regional power. Fielder's work is lacking in-depth historical analysis and only touches the surface in many instances. Nevertheless, it illustrates why it is important to move beyond the status quo of history, encouraging scholars to return to the archives, dust away old collections, and revise the narrative through new stakeholders that impacted the local, federal, and international trajectories of our nation-building process. Many questions remained unanswered: what were the worldviews of pro-federalists like Blackburn? What were his views on American expansionism? What were his views on Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine? What role did he see the state of Kentucky play as the first era of globalization unfolded? Perhaps some of these answers would explain why his political rivals back home would repudiate his "inconsistency" when it came to casting a vote in Washington, according to an op-ed piece...

PROBLEMS OF NATION-BUILDING PROCESSES IN UKRAINE AT THE PRESENT STAGE

The article deals with the problematic aspects of nation-building processes in Ukraine at the present stage. A methodological basis is a comprehensive approach to problem analysis. The categories «nation», «Ukrainian nation», «Ukrainian people» are characterized. The main markers of national identity are identified among which: national consciousness, national interest, national territory, national idea, culture, language, history, common origin, religion. The nation was found to contain both ethnic, cultural and political components. From the dominance of one of these characteristics is formed in essence, an ethnic or political nation. The basic internal and external factors that negatively effecting nation-building processes in Ukraine are investigated. The internal ones include: lack of clear legislative criteria for inclusion in the ethnic community and real indicators of the ethnic composition of the Ukrainian people; loss of title ethnic identity based on linguistic marker; political speculation about the ethno-cultural features of the regions of Ukraine, linguistic and mental differences of the citizens of Ukraine; lack of an effective system of national-patriotic education and formation of national consciousness. External factors include: hybrid war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, aimed at loss of territorial integrity and state sovereignty of Ukraine, aggravation of interethnic relations; intensive globalization processes that require new approaches to public policy on preserving and developing national identity; negative impact of information flows of foreign countries on the formation of information and cultural space of Ukraine; political and cultural expansion of neighboring countries (Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia) into Ukraine, which goes beyond the support of their national minorities and poses a direct threat to Ukraine's national security. Keywords: ethnicity,nation, national identity, nationalization, Ukraine, Ukrainian nation, hybrid war.

Концепт «народ» в манифестах А. С. Шишкова в контексте дискурса об Отечественной войне 1812 года

The Patriotic War of 1812 is an event that influenced the formation of the Russian na­tional consciousness. At that time, imperial and class identities coexisted. With the de fac­to ban on discussing the idea of a civil nation, Russian intellectuals focused on the cultural and linguistic components of nationalism. The aim of this study was to identify the content of the concept of ‘people’ in the manifestoes by Shishkov. These texts expressed the official posi­tion of the supreme authority on national unity. The method of discourse analysis employed by the author, made it possible to place Shishkov’s texts in a broader historical context, trac­ing their origins in the discussions on the language of the beginning of the 19th century and determining their impact on the subsequent process of nation-building. Being a supporter of the creation of the Russian literary language on the basis of the folk and Church-Slavonic Russian, Shishkov embodied these views in the texts of manifestoes during the War of 1812. Although there is a certain contradiction between the ideas of class society and national unity, the style and images used made it possible for representatives of all classes to perceive the texts. Later on, “people” as a synonym of “nation” was widely used in the formation of the myth of war as a national affair, forming the foundation for the formation of the Russian na­tional consciousness.

Die koloniale Schweiz? Die postkoloniale Schweiz!

This paper shows Switzerland’s involvement in colonialism. Swiss actors participated in the slave trade or benefited otherwise from the colonial system. This linkage was accompanied by the construction of the «colonial Other», which was also important for the formation of Swiss identity in the course of the nation building process. In the paper, the « othering» is illustrated by three examples: the science, the so called «Völkerschauen», («human zoos») and on the basis of a selected textbook of the 19th century

The Disappearance of “Palestine Airways” from the Historical Narrative

The article deals with the disappearance of the Jewish aviation company Palestine Airways from the historical narrative of the foundation of Jewish and Zionist aviation in Mandatory Palestine. Less than two years later, another company called Aviron (modern Hebrew for airplane) was established by the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Council, and the Histadrut labor union as an aviation company and a flight school. Aviron is considered by the media and aviation historians to have been the pioneer of Jewish aviation in Palestine though it was founded in July 1936 while Palestine Airways had registered as a company in December 1934 and began to operate a few months earlier than Aviron. While the story of Aviron has been commemorated and described in various studies, there has been no comprehensive research on Palestine Airways. I offer two complementary explanations for this phenomenon: first, the assumption made by Zionist historians regarding the importance of private non-socialist ventures verses collective socialist enterprises in relation to the nation building process; second, the opposition of Palestine Airways founder Pinchas Rutenberg and one of its managers, Eliyahu Eliachar to the labor movement because of their self-perceived identities and ethnic spatial perception. These two factors precipitated the labeling of Palestine Airways as a non-national company.

Managing Ethnicity and Constructing the Bangsa Malaysia (A United Malaysian Nation)*

The question of nation-building has always been a central issue in Malaysian politics. Whilst the coun try has been able to sustain stable politics since the 1969 racial tragedy, spawning two decades rapid socio-economic development until the 1997 Asian economic crisis, the project of nation-building remained a basic national agenda yet to be filly resolved. This short paper investigates the delicate process of nation-building in Malaysia in the post 1970s. especially in the context of the vision of constructing the Bangsa Malaysia or united Malaysian nation enshrined in Mahathir's Vision 2020 project which was introduced in 1991. The aim of the paper is firstly to highlight the underlying socio-political parameters that shaped and influenced the politics of nation-building in the country, and secondly to explore the viability of the project of Bangsa Malaysia in the context of the daunting challenges involved in the process of nation- building The paper contends that, based on the Malaysian experience, the potent interplay between the forces of ethnicity and nationalism constitute the crux of the problem in the politics of nation-building in Malaysia. This dialectic it is argued, stems from the prevalence of the varying 'nationalisms' within and across ethnic groups. These phenomena have not only shaped the pattern of ethnic political mobilization in the country, but above all, laid the most complex set of obstacles in the path of the project of nation-building. The paper argues that the project of constructing the Bangsa Malaysia therefore, can be seen as significant attempt by the state to reconcile the competing 'nationalism'. It can also be considered as an attempt to consolidate Malay nationalism and cultural pluralism, thus promoting the development of 'civic nationalism 'or creation of 'a supra-ethnic ' national identity. The 'nation', therefore, is depicted as a 'mosaic of cultures but with a strong fervour of Malay nationalism. However, the viability of the envisaged project is yet to be tested. The concept itself is still vague to many people and the challenges ahead are enormous, involving political, economic, socio-cultural and religious issues. Indeed the project risks becoming the 'latest ' in the series of competing notions of 'nation-of- intent' circulating in Malaysia. The paper contends that whilst, to some extent, the socio-political landscape of Malaysian society has been rapidly changing, especially in the past two decades of Mahathir’s reign, ethnicity still pervades Malaysian political life. The paper probably differs from many previous studies on nation-building in Malaysia, thus, deepening the understanding of Malaysia politics and society.

Das "koloniale Andere" im Nationbuildung der Schweiz - ein Einblick

his paper shows Switzerland’s involvement in colonialism. Swiss actors participated in the slave trade or benefited otherwise from the colonial system. This linkage was accompanied by the construction of the «colonial Other», which was also important for the formation of Swiss identity in the course of the nation building process. In the paper, the «othering» is illustrated by three examples: the «science», the so called «Völkerschauen», («human zoos») and on the basis of a selected textbook of the 19th century.

The Legacy of Literacy: Evidence from Italian Regions

Italy was unified in 1861. As part of the process of nation-building, a free and mandatory national primary school system was established. While the new school system greatly contributed to the modernization of the country, its initial design did not reduce considerably regional disparities in human capital, with Southern regions lagging behind. The paper studies the effect of the heterogeneous territorial diffusion of literacy during the postunification period (1871-1911) on economic and social outcomes of Italian provinces 100 years later. We exploit the exogenous variations in the territorial spread in literacy rates arising from the gradual building and expansion of the railway network across provinces. We find evidence that provinces with a higher territorial diffusion of primary education in the post-unification period have today higher income per capita, less unemployment, and greater educational attainment. The evidence in terms of social capital outcomes is instead mixed, depending on the indicator considered.

DYNAMICS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY FORMATION IN INDEPENDENT UKRAINE

The dynamics of national identity formation in independent Ukraine has been studied. Based on the analysis of the results of sociological research, the state, problems, and prospects of Ukrainian national identity formation have been revealed. At the time of the declaration of independence, Ukraine was characterized by a blurred national identity, where regional identities predominated when the West of Ukraine focused on the European Union, and its East and South parts focused on Russia. The sociological research results revealed positive dynamics in the formation of Ukrainian national identity in the conditions of independent Ukraine, as it is a civic identity that has become a priority for the citizens of Ukraine over other group identities. At the same time, the shortcomings of the liberal approach to the formation of national identity, which emphasizes human rights, ignoring the problems of blurred Ukrainian national identity, incomplete nation-building processes in Ukraine, and the collective rights of Ukrainians as the titular nation, are proved. This led to the deepening of divisions and fragmentation of Ukrainian society, the alienation of property and power by the broad masses of people. Russia took advantage of this by unleashing a "hybrid war" against Ukraine and annexing Crimea and part of the Donbas. However, the modern political elite has not drawn proper conclusions, and as the results of recent sociological studies show, it continues to pursue politics, ignoring the Ukrainian national interests and expectations of its own people. The priority of national integration and ensuring the national unity of Ukraine has been justified while maintaining the priority of European integration concerning other areas of foreign policy orientation and international integration. It is proved that the conceptual basis for consolidating the people of Ukraine can be primarily the Ukrainian national idea. Keywords: national identity, Ukraine, consolidation of society, Ukrainian national ide