Nation-state Paradigm Research Articles

The politics of statelessness, refugeehood, and humanitarianism of the Rohingyas

Undoubtedly, the Rohingya crisis has been one among the most discussed issue in the last few years. The political exclusion and persecution revolve around the fault lines of modern nation-states built along the ethno-religious lines, making them the most persecuted minority in the world. Especially, post-global denunciation of the military crackdown in August 2017 and the United Nations accusing the country of “ethnic cleansing and genocide” led to the massive exodus of people to the neighboring countries and beyond. Yet, the existing political and protection space for stateless Rohingya refugees is extremely volatile due to the absence of legal mechanisms, un-documentedness, and rising security concerns globally often criminalizing them as illegal migrants/immigrants or threats to national security. Forcing them to live under continuous threat of detention, deportation, and forced relocation further tarnishes their identity between the man and the citizen, dumping them into a socio-legal limbo. Based on the ethnographic inquiry conducted among stateless Rohingya refugees living in semi-urban ghettoes of India- Delhi, Mewat, Hyderabad and Jammu, the article looks into the historical and political trajectory of exclusion, resistance, and counter-resilience of stateless Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar along exploring their refracted and displaced realities and complexities of “life” in asylum and protracted refugees in India. And, the responses made by national and international agencies to the crisis. In doing so, it provides a grim insight into the inadequate, inconsistent and highly uncoordinated national and international response to care and protection and aid politics that have contributed to the collective failure in addressing the crisis. Thereby, the study attempts to bring forth the wider debate upon issues of state and statehood, rights and humanitarianism within the nation-state paradigm.

Review: Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World, by Malcolm Campbell

Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World is a superb piece of transnational history. For the last two decades, Malcolm Campbell’s work has stood at the vanguard of a historiographical movement to expand the focus of Irish diasporic history beyond the dominant case of the United States to consider other locations around the globe. Ireland’s Farthest Shores marks a fitting culmination to this research project.In his previous work, especially Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States, 1815–1992 (2008), Professor Campbell questioned a prevailing framework among Americanists that traced the social problems of Irish people abroad to their pre-migration culture, in particular a deeply rooted predisposition to see departure from Ireland as exile rather than opportunity. Irish immigrants struggled economically and encountered considerable animosity in the American Northeast, to be sure, yet Professor Campbell found little evidence that they did so in Australia, or for that matter in the American Midwest and West. Using tightly focused trans-regional comparative analysis, he emphasized networks of chain migration, the timing of Irish immigrants’ arrival in settler-colonial societies, the fluid and dynamic character of these societies, patterns of rural settlement, and racism against Chinese immigrants as the dominant themes in Irish American history beyond the Northeast. Exchanges of people and information between California, Australia, and New Zealand, Professor Campbell concluded, took place in the context of a Pacific Irish culture that could be analyzed through cross-regional comparisons as well as transnational interactions. This insight led to Ireland’s Farthest Shores, his broadest and most ambitious work to date.In Ireland’s Farthest Shores, Professor Campbell sets out to explain how Irish migrants shaped the Pacific World and how that world shaped them. Historians have been asking similar questions about the Atlantic World for many decades, but Professor Campbell’s geographical focus is new. He is careful and sensitive in avoiding Eurocentric myopia and bias in defining the Pacific World. Whose world was it, who defined it, and how? He is equally careful in establishing his chronological boundaries so that they do not coincide simply with the age of European incursions, even if Irish migrants were both products and agents of that process. Breaking, like his earlier work, from the nation-state paradigm that shapes many studies of immigration and ethnicity, Ireland’s Farthest Shores places its subject within the dual context of expanding empires and specific regions in the Pacific World, especially in the American West and present-day Australia and New Zealand. The first half of the book examines the process of migration, arrival, and settlement from the early sixteenth century through the late nineteenth century. The second half analyzes how Irish migrants and their descendants engaged with the host societies—principally in Anglo-Pacific regions, as that is where most of them settled—with a focus on religion, radicalism, ethnic nationalism, dispossession of Indigenous populations, and eventual integration into the host societies, in forms notably different from the dominant pattern in Irish America.Thoughtful, deeply researched, and elegantly written, Ireland’s Farthest Shores is not only a powerful and original study of an important and neglected topic, it will be recognized as a landmark work in Irish diaspora history and in transnational migration history more generally.

Social Media, Politics, and Law: The Role of Data in the Brazilian Constitutional Democracy

ABSTRACT Contemporary manifestations of power that exceed the traditional nation-state paradigm undermine Western constitutional democracies’ foundational principles. The Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrates how non-state actors can exercise control and bypass individual political autonomy by exploring personal data and through manipulative practices. In Brazil, similar electoral practices occurred during the 2018 election period, in which political propaganda transcended traditional media outlets through social media platforms, such as WhatsApp and Facebook. This arose as one of the consequences of the political reform established in through Legislative Act no. 13.488/2017. This article proposes an investigation into the intersection between knowledge and power in the mechanism of manipulation of political subjects, considering Michel Foucault’s critique of sovereignty, and conflating this under-standing with Bernard Harcourt’s consideration of “digital power.” The aim is to evaluate the intricacies between digital media, politics, and law, addressing the complexity of power structures in the material and cybernetic space.

The ‘state’ of degrowth: Economic growth and the making of state hegemony in Turkey

Critical perspectives on economic growth have laid bare the fragility of the assumed link between material growth and socio-ecological wellbeing. The appeal of economic growth, however, goes beyond the economic sphere. As a societal goal, growth is often mobilized to pre-empt and/or co-opt opposition around issues of social justice and redistribution. Not only does the constitution of growth as a collective goal serve to unite the internally fragmented sphere of the social and brush aside (class-based) distributional conflicts, but it also enables the distribution of material concessions to subordinate classes for eliciting their consent. The degrowth proposal should thus more broadly tackle the material and discoursive ways in which growth enables the reproduction of contemporary political-economic systems. This paper argues that the notion of growth functions as a powerful ideal that shapes state–society relationships and social-collective imaginations. It demonstrates this by discussing the making of state in Turkey through a Gramscian perspective, where the notion of economic growth is deeply imprinted in the broader practices of the state to legitimize its existence and dominates the social imaginary in a way that cannot be easily dismissed. Against this backdrop, the possibility of not only effectuating, but also imagining and desiring degrowth would call for a radical reconfiguration of state–society relationships. Within this context, the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s project of Democratic Economy emerges as an alternative, both to the nation-state paradigm and to the imperative of economic growth.

Italian Colonialism in Africa as a Connected System: Institutions, Men and Colonial Troops

ABSTRACTIn the last two decades studies on Italian colonialism have shown remarkable vitality and many positive results. But in spite of this undoubted progress there still remain some limitations of approach that prevent any real outstripping of the interpretive schemes hitherto used. The research being conducted largely follows the nation state paradigm: the Italian colonies are viewed and studied as essentially independent entities, devoid of relations with the surrounding territories and, above all, between each of these and the others.This article offers an interpretive scheme that stresses the intimate relationship among the Italian colonial possessions in Africa, their status as a system, by moving away from a representation that has always favoured a rigorously individualised treatment of Italy’s colonies. It emphasises three main levels of interconnection: administrative structures, officials and colonial troops. While the first two were also common to other colonial entities, the extreme recourse to the mobility of colonial troops was a distinctive feature of the Italian version and the main factor of interconnection among Italy’s territories.Our analysis also enables us to better understand the place violence held in Italian colonialism. Along with analyzing the deportations, massacres and use of gas, we must consider the uninterrupted cycle of campaigns that from 1911 to 1941 Italy inflicted on its colonies. For the most part, wars were delegated to colonial troops who for thirty years, moving from one colony to another, made war and violence a fundamental aspect of the Italian colonial experience.

(Re)considering sovereignty in the European integration process

The World War II (WWII) as a great shock significantly weakened the European nation-state paradigm and gave the European elites a chance to achieve a ‘paradigm shift’ from ‘the nation-state paradigm’ to a ‘federalist paradigm’. However, the nation-state’s strong institutionalization did not allow a paradigm shift and the WWII actually created a ‘paradigm duplication’ in the European integration process. In this two-layered atmosphere, ‘democracy’ was conceptualized under the influence of ‘federalist intellectual paradigm’ but its implementation had to be achieved in the nation-state paradigm. Therefore, this anomaly has played a significant role in the recent stalemate the European integration process has faced. For example, the literature clearly shows the relationship between the sensitivity of European nations towards their national sovereignty and the rise of Euroscepticism in the European integration process. Moreover, the institutional and legitimate strength of the nation-state gives the nation-state paradigm a gravitational power, which gradually weakens the feasibility of the ideas originating from the federalist paradigm. As a result, this article argues that a more symbiotic institutionalization of democracy and sovereignty is necessary to make the European integration more attractive again.

Reformulating Strategies to Develop Democratization through Civic Education in Aceh


 
 This paper aims to pursue appropriate strategies to shape students’ characters and sense of nationalism through formal education in Aceh. Grounded in the structured interviews, focused group discussions, and observations, this qualitative case study reveals that Aceh, as one province in Indonesia, which was trapped in prolonged army conflict, needs character education that focuses on the nation-state paradigm. The contemporary Acehnese society is also facing new cultural, ethnic, inter-religious conflicts, as well as internal conflicts among Muslims. The seed of these conflicts becomes increasingly worse when infiltrated by the contemporary political interests in the province. During the era of military conflict, Pendidikan Moral Pancasila (Pancasila Moral Education) was deemed “a dangerous” subject to be taught in Aceh schools due to its contradictory nature against the ideology of Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh Movement). Despite downgrading the students’ spirit of nationalism, such situation has gradually been changed since a peace agreement between the two parties, Indonesian government and Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, was achieved in August 2005. Nevertheless, this demonstrates the need to overhaul curriculum and instructional strategies in the pursuit of the democratization in the province.

Colonial imprints: settler-colonialism as a fundamental feature of Israeli constitutional law

AbstractMany constitutional questions in Israel are dealt with through the lens of the nation-state paradigm where the state is constitutionally associated with an ethnically and religiously defined majority group. Thus, many of the challenges that face Israeli society and the legal system are often presented as a result of an exceptionally antagonistic majority–minority relationship in a nation-state. This paper offers a novel way of analysing the Israeli constitutional regime using the framework of settler-colonialism. It argues that adding the settler-colonial lens will help better understand many features of Israeli constitutional law. Drawing on theoretical frameworks developed by theorists of colonialism, the paper explores a number of foundational aspects of Israeli constitutional law and demonstrates how they were shaped, and continue to be shaped, by settler-colonialism. The paper argues that settler-colonialism is one of the central features that animate Israeli constitutional law.

Intertextuality as a Comparatist’s Tool

Comparative Literature as a ‘nation-state paradigm’ is under conceptual pressure in the present day context of Transnationalism. If it should survive as a discipline, there is an imperative need to broaden its conceptual framework and retool the discipline. This paper argues and also demonstrates that Intertextuality, specifically, ‘Accidental Intertextuality,’ can be a good tool for a comparatist.

Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing ed. by Adele Parker, Stephanie Young

Reviewed by: Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing ed. by Adele Parker, Stephanie Young Polina Kroik Parker, Adele, AND Stephanie Young, eds. Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 301 pp. $84 (paperback). Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing is a wide-ranging, theoretically informed collection of essays that explore the interrelations between the concepts and categories of the title. The volume appears to be carefully curated, representing writing by women from many parts of the [End Page 320] globe. While some of the texts that the authors analyze are widely read, many are not well known. One of the volume’s strengths is in bringing critical attention to marginalized authors and texts. The volume’s authors and editors also raise important questions about the politics of identity and representation in an era of greater geographic mobility and increased transnational cultural production. Though the authors and editors offer some answers to these questions, the tension between the variety of perspectives represented in the volume seems more productive, opening up avenues for future inquiry. In their introduction, Adele Parker and Stephanie Young situate the volume within the field of transnational studies, distinguishing this perspective from a “global” approach, represented here by David Damrosch’s concept of “World Literature.” Citing Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih’s argument that the transnational perspective is “less scripted and more scattered” than the “global” and noting that it may be more attentive to cultural specificity, the editors conclude by leaving the political value of transnationalism open: “One of the debates currently in circulation is whether transnationalism is a move beyond the traditional nation-state paradigm, or is just another name for an institution that reinforces the nation state” (3). While few of the authors engage with transnationalism on a metatheoretical level, most regard the transnationalism in women’s writing as a positive “deterritorializing” force. For example, in Liama Durán Almarza’s essay about Josefina Báez’s performance Dominicanish, Almarza focuses on the liberatory character of the hybrid or “nomadic” identity that Báez seems to embrace in her work. Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s influential The Location of Culture, Almarza writes that Báez creates “a Janus-faced ‘third space’ where traditional linguistic, ethnic, and generic boundaries are transgressed and transcended” (47). The author goes on to claim that “the transcultural body of the narrator is enacted in all her multiple embodied subjectivities” only at the “interstices” of the contacts between Dominican and US experience. Adele Parker’s essay on the Slovenian French-language author Brina Svit somewhat similarly (though less emphatically) suggests that transnationalism offers insights and reveals aspects of identity that cannot be accessed in a monolingual, national culture. Though these and a number of other contributors succeed in demonstrating that transnational encounters are symbolically rich and potentially liberating for individual subjects, the celebration of cultural hybridity does little to advance scholarly understanding of transnational literary production. Theorists like Homi K. Bhabha and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari—whose work underpins many of the arguments in this volume—made important interventions in the 1980s and 1990s when transnational experience and literature were still regarded with suspicion in hegemonic high and popular culture. Concepts such as hybridity, deterritorialization, and a “minor literature” allowed authors and critics to claim and study identities and cultural objects that were either devalued or excluded. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, many kinds of hybrid identities, as well as the capacity [End Page 321] for cultural and geographic mobility, have become highly valued in the dominant culture. Though this valorization is problematic and excludes other kinds of transnational identities, the theoretical apparatus needs to account for these historical changes. On the other hand, in this volume, essays that valorize hybrid transnational identities are placed in a productive tension with ones that portray transnational subjectivity as fraught, painful, or traumatic. Stephanie Young’s essay explores the work of Yugoslav author Dubravka Ugrešić, focusing especially on her experimental novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Young develops an interesting reading of Dubravka’s work in...

BRICS health and tuberculosis control collaborations during an era of global health

In this think piece, I examine the difference introduced by BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) health collaborations in an era of global health. Using tuberculosis control as a grounding example, I show that BRICS collaborations prioritize: state-led solutions, particularly through policies aimed at expanding universal health coverage; scientific and programmatic innovation; experience and technology sharing; clear benchmarks for progress, based on current best practices of control; and flexibility. Unlike international health, BRICS health collaborations are not primarily concerned with preventing the importation of infectious disease across national borders. Nor are they based on global health’s concerns about global biosecurity or humanitarian biomedicine. Rather, BRICS collaborative health efforts fall within the nation-state paradigm, while also aspiring towards the global. They remain flexible in their operation, gesturing towards a neoliberal ethic. This flexibility allows BRICS to work within existing structures, while also establishing their own institutions from which to change traditional assistance relationships.

Upholding Refugee Rights: Cessation, Transnationalism and Law’s Limitations in the Rwandan Case

The cessation clause epitomises the 1951 Refugee Convention’s internal barriers to the full achievement of refugees’ rights. By examining the controversial application of this provision in the case of Rwandan refugees, this paper demonstrates the resultant infringements on refugees’ human rights, and signals a key obstacle in understanding refugee experiences: institutional insistence on subjugating refugee perspectives and knowledge. This top-heavy ‘knowing what’s best’ for refugees must cede to alternative conceptualisations of refugee rights, especially in the well-worn durable solutions debate. A rights-based approach would see transnational mobility as a solution to challenges endured by camp-based refugees in particular. The Rwandan case study is grounded in theories of today’s membership-based nation-state paradigm, and questions whether re-inscribing refugees as primary agents of their own repatriation (with or without return) can bridge the divide inherent in the exclusionary citizenship-centric logic which ultimately structures the refugee rights system, and can adequately address problems rooted in complex identity politics

Machiavellian Nation-State Ideology as a Democles’ Sword over Culture Policy of the EU

The paper is set out to examine the relationship between working nation-state paradigm in European Union member countries and its effect on the culture policies of EU members. What is aimed here is that the obstacles against a common culture policy in EU ache, is a reminiscent of nation-state reactions which can be explained through the understanding of Machiavellian philosophy of state. The mechanisms of the nation state function in parallel with the Machiavellian “ruthlessness” when it comes to the development of common culture policies since culture is s ‘securitized’ and thought to be bounds of the imagined community that should not be violated in any case. There is a sense of Machiavellian submission of the religion in coherence with the ‘ends’ of the state and the formation of subordinate, god fearing citizens who compose the imagined community in his philosophy. Nation-states have been endeavoring to trash off the diversities to create a new conception of unitary and artificial community whose members are implicitly forced to be subordinates and objects of ‘national culture’ so that just like in Machiavellian vision, they are easy to control. The prominent tool in the mechanism of subordination is the ‘institution of citizenship’, which is directly identified with the notion of having equal rights and the sense of having equal right is directly associated with having the same identity. The deepening process of European Union was expected to create various realms commonalities such as strengthened political union in terms of fiscal and culture policies but it has not been the case so far. The paper tries to put light on the question why member states are still in conflict in culture policy, obstacles against founding a new common culture policy which are crucial since the problematic mechanism still prevents the EU from becoming “People’s Europe”. The Machiavellian philosophy will be utilized to show what kind of parallelisms are working in the complex, multi-faceted problem of legislating a common binding culture policy in the era of “imagined communities” since the philosophy still functions as an “invisible preventive hand” and questions whether it is able to give a viable response to the EU common policy programs. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p1956

Union Citizenship Revisited: Multilateral Democracy as Normative Standard for European Citizenship

Union Citizenship as currently implemented in the European Union introduces a distinct concept of citizenship that necessitates an adequate normative approach. The objective of this paper is to assess EU Citizenship against the theoretical background of multilateral democracy. This approach is specifically suited for this task, as it does not rely on a nation-state paradigm or the presumption of a further transformation into a federation or union. We propose three criteria by which to assess multilevel citizenship: equal individual rights, equal sovereignty of peoples and the balancing of individuals' and peoples' interests. We argue that the current practice of Union Citizenship does not fully meet the proposed standards, regarding equal rights within and equal access to, the political system. Based on our assessment, we propose reform options of access to national and supranational citizenship and argue for supranational participation rights and equal transnational rights to gradually re-establish full membership for individuals.

Controversias jurídicas en Europa.

La creación de la Unión Europea estableció un sistema de derecho europeo que ha generado no pocos enfrentamientos con los sistemas jurídicos nacionales nacidos bajo el paradigma del Estado-nación. El presente artículo pretende realizar un análisis sobre la manera como se están resolviendo ciertos conflictos en los cuales están involucradas normas de derecho interno con normas de derecho comunitario europeo. Se emplea un método cualitativo, con técnicas de revisión documental, observación directa y comparación sobre fuentes primarias y secundarias; se seleccionaron 6 casos relevantes de países en donde se presentan disputas entre el derecho interno y el derecho europeo comunitario (Alemania, Francia, Austria, España e Italia). Las conclusiones señalan que el problema de la jerarquía se resuelve admitiendo al Tribunal de Justicia de la Unión Europea TJUE como un tribunal de similar estatura que los tribunales nacionales; el derecho comunitario es tan vinculante como el derecho interno; las decisiones que emite el TJUE al conocer directamente los negocios son acatadas por los Estados miembros; los tribunales nacionales de la UE pueden emitir sus propias decisiones teniendo en cuenta las interpretaciones que el TJUE realice.

Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era ed. by Christopher P. Hanscom

Reviewed by: Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era ed. by Christopher P. Hanscom Eunhee Park Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society from the Japanese Colonial Era edited by Christopher P. Hanscom , Walter K. Lew , and Youngju Ryu . Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press , 2013 . 230 pp. Imperatives of Culture is a great collection of twelve selected essays by colonial Korean intellectuals of the left and right, such as the “cultural gradualist” Yi Kwangsu (Chapter 1) and the Marxist Sin Paegu (Chapter 2). This book also touches on various themes, such as women’s issues (Chapter 3, on Mun Ilp’yŏng), diaspora in Manchuria (Chapter 7, on Kang Kyŏngae), modernism and “fragmentary notions” in the poetry of Kim Kirim (Chapter 8), and the so-called “literature of self-indictment” (kobal munhak, Chapter 10, on Kim Namch’ŏn). Judging from the great endeavors that the participating scholars made in each translation, the many tribulations this work underwent on the road to publication (as the Foreword implies) have been vindicated by the end result. Each chapter begins with an insightful commentary that effectively unfolds the complex colonial intellectual world in a novel, interdisciplinary way. The commentary section contains each intellectual’s biography, works and contributions. The commentators were responsible for selecting the texts and making the commentaries and translations, which help readers to better comprehend these intellectuals and their selected works. Within the translated texts, relevant commentary is added depending on the situation and at the [End Page 142] commentator’s discretion. For instance, in order to reduce a lengthy text and better convey its meaning, in Chapter 5 Seung-ah Lee omits several parts of the original and replaces them with summaries (pp. 91–97). As the title implies, throughout the book culture plays a crucial role in challenging the nation-state paradigm of colonial Korea, but the authors also attempt to position this culture within the global context (xii). Instead of attempting to define “culture” directly, this book attempts to show colonial Korea through the eyes of the twelve colonial intellectuals and to clarify their ideals about the nation-state, national spirit, people, and history. This book gives a new meaning to the 1930s, suggesting that it laid the foundations for the ideological schisms of the post-liberation era. To do so, language took on multiple, crucial roles in deepening the rifts. By comparing the two post-colonial intellectual essays—regarding the role of national literature (Kim Tongni, Chapter 11) and new nationalism (Son Chint’ae, Chapter 12)—with the essays from the colonial period, readers can get a sense of how colonial intellectuals sketched out a framework for nation-building. To show ideological diversity, this book dedicates a considerable amount of space to the works of Marxist and socialists groups, including the writings of Marxists Sin Paegu (Chapter 2) and Paek Namun (Chapter 6), and the socialists Kang Kyŏngae (Chapter 7), Kim Kirim (Chapter 8) and Kim Namch’ŏn (Chapter 10). To those less familiar with colonial Korean literature, this book provides a good overview of socialist and Marxist intellectuals during the colonial period. I believe it is rare to find books that collect such diverse works by different ideological groups, so this book can serve as a good reference for those interested in colonial literature and history. That colonial Korea was connected to the global context can be seen in the diverse worldviews of the authors. Yi Kwangsu was influenced by mass psychology through the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon (p. 12). Sin advocated the “serious passionate socialist” movement (p. 39) and Paek understood mid-1930s Korea as a “semi-feudal” society riven by the “dual conflicts” of class and national struggle (p. 106–107). Likewise, each intellectual explored the uniqueness in “Korean-ness.” The lack of similarities or agreement among the twelve authors may confuse some readers, but this may be intended, because “culture is a concept that reveals the complexity of both imperial and national identities and the political projects that undergirded them [these collected essays]” (xi). However, the density of this book may act as both a strength...

The Global Crisis and the Crisis of Democracy: A Cosmopolitan Way Forward?

Trapped in the logic of the nation-state paradigm, political imagination and analysis remain largely restricted. Even if capable of recognizing problems, without adequate cognitive frames, the capacity to provide solutions or identify alternatives is lost. When trying to identify the deeper roots and interconnectedness of different sorts of crises (global financial, economic and debt crises, and the ecological crisis), the relationship between globalization and democracy and democratic legitimacy needs more careful analysis at the EU level. The global crisis and transformation might enhance transnational and global consciousness and responsibility-taking as well as networking and participation. An unexpected result may open the way for de facto cosmopolitanism. Given the strong political attempts and interests to re-strengthen the nation-state, the non-linear path will be conflict ridden.

The New Nomos of Europe

According to Carl Schmitt, in his late work The Nomos of the Earth, published in 1950, the long evolution in the relation between humans and the earth has been decisive for the nature of traditional legal order. The historical links to European international jurisprudence (ius publicum Europaeum) have decayed with the old world order that supported them. Territoriality, once the foundation of the nation-state has evolved, causing a parallel change in the nation-state paradigm of sovereignty and the fabric of international law which has its basis in that paradigm. If Schmitt is correct in his prognoses about the end of a global era and the rise of a new yet uncharted world order in the mid-1940s, then the architects of the nascent European Coal and Steel Community face the same conditions, and must carry out their work with the same cultural, social and juridical raw materials, against the backdrop of the same concrete historical experience. This article will attempt to continue the trajectory of Schmitt's historical analysis of the ius publicum Europeaum, suggesting how its central concepts and theses map onto the grand geopolitical and civilisational project of European construction from 1950 to 2004 and beyond. It will explore the applicability of the concept of nomos for the nature of EU evolution, and interpret general elements of the European legal system in terms of the concept of nomos.

Europeisk familjelycka

The re-unification of a family of nations: usages of the family metaphor in the EUThis article analyses usages of the family metaphor in the EU. It starts up with a scrutiny of feminist theories of the nation-as-family metaphor. Introducing the concept of domopolitics, the author infers that the family, on the one hand, connotes to feelings of security and homelyness and, on the other hand, fears of the well-known, of immanent threats to in-group cohesion. The significance of the family metaphor in the EU rhetoric connects to a renewed emphasis on distinct values, principles and norms that balance the otherwise technocratic image of the EU. He further applies the nation-as-family metaphor to contemporary EU rhetoric. In the analysis, he infers that all three dimensions of the metaphor (ethnic, civil and hierarchic) are manifest in the EU political language making its use an enterprise that strives at moving beyond, but not completely away from the nation-state paradigm.

Empire of the Chinese Sign: The Question of Chinese Diasporic Imagination in Transnational Literary Production

This paper begins with an examination of the burgeoning interest in literatures in Chinese. It argues that studies in literatures in Chinese map out a terrain where complex negotiations and interventions for different purposes are carried out. As studies in literatures in Chinese often imply a shift from the nation-state paradigm to the transnational paradigm, which implicitly celebrates diasporic imagination as a counterforce to the power of the nation-state, this paper proposes to examine the intersection of Chinese Malaysian literature and Taiwan literature at two specific moments of transnational literary production—the late 1970s to the mid-1980s and the late 1990s to the present—so as to demonstrate the unstable meanings of the diaspora sign. It highlights the importance of historicization in investigating phenomena of transnational cultural production and the need to reincorporate the notion of “place” into our agenda in conducting cultural critiques. The paper ends with a critique of the global city as a methodological concept and argues for a place paradigm without privileging the global city as a metaphor for transnational space.