Assertive Nationalism Research Articles

Making Sense of Nepal’s Nationalism: Implications for the India–Nepal Relationship

The assertion of (territorial) nationalism by Nepal has serious implications for its bilateral relationship with India. Once dominant, the singular narrative of the upper-caste Hindu Parbatiya nationalism is increasingly encountering competing narratives emerging from the marginalised Janajatis and the Madhesis of Nepal. Accordingly, several nationality sentiments that were sidelined earlier have now become salient. While the India factor in these competing perspectives of nationalist discourses in Nepal appears to be subtle (but important), the growing territorial dimensions to it invariably locates India in a prominent position. This article investigates the implications of the changing dynamics of Nepal’s nationalism on its bilateral relationship with India. Looking at the internal dynamics of nationalism discourses in Nepal, the article offers a critical analysis of the territorial disputes between India and Nepal, and its implications on nationalism in Nepal and on the bilateral relationships between India and Nepal.

The rise and fall of China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’: Implications for US-China geopolitical competition in the Indo-Pacific

Strategic competition and rivalry between the United States and China has become a paradigm of international relations in the past decade. Central to this growing strategic distrust between Washington and Beijing is the tug of war between the US-led Indo-Pacific strategy and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). However, the role of China’s ‘peaceful rise/ peaceful development’ strategy and assertive nationalism characteristic of Chinese foreign policymaking in creating an atmosphere of tension and misunderstanding between Beijing and Washington have been largely overlooked. This paper, therefore, seeks to understand the relationship between the rise and fall of China’s ‘peaceful rise/peaceful development’ concept, the emerging prominence of assertive nationalism in China’s foreign policy making and a deteriorating US-China relations with deepening strategic mistrust between the two major powers through a comparative-historical analysis of China’s BRI and the US-led Indo-Pacific strategy. Rather than demonstrating China’s commitment to its ‘peaceful rise/ peaceful development’ to the world, this paper argues that Beijing’s offensive to defend China’s national interests in a confrontational manner is an indication that an increasingly confident Chinese leadership no longer feels the need for reassuring the world that China's ‘rise’ is peaceful and non-threatening in nature. This could embolden Beijing to defy (if not explicitly challenge) the ‘rules-based international order’ upheld/ defended by Washington, thereby spelling the end of China’s ‘peaceful rise/peaceful development’ strategy.

A Reconceptualization of Nationalism: Communal and Assertive Nationalism in Ethnic Majority and Minority Groups

A Reconceptualization of Nationalism: Communal and Assertive Nationalism in Ethnic Majority and Minority Groups

Maniu and Popoviciu. Different Views on National Self-Identity of Romanians from Transylvania

The activity of two great personalities representing the interest and the rights of Romanians ethnics from Transylvania during the dualist period from 1867 to 1918 are analyzed here. Iuliu Maniu and Aurel Constantin Popoviciu were members of the Romanian National Party from Transylvania and Hungary with a different vision on the national assertion of rights and freedom related to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and another ethnic group of Dualist State.

Ignorando o Soft Power – o momento Mea-Culpa das Nações Tentando Alcançar Influência Nos Bens Comuns Globais: a Perspectiva Indiana

With the advent of emerging economies such as China and India, which have a highly productive and influential human capital spread globally and are also fast emerging as economic giants, the concept of soft power is ideally applicable for both national assertion and its effective relevance in the international arena. The paper aims to establish this concept as a better suited strategic outreach for an emerging nation with specific relevance to India and while doing so dwells on a wide spectrum of instruments including foreign affairs, political science, sociology apart from the nations geography which India may factor to influence the global influence, in exercise of its National Power, to derive favourable impact in the global commons.

BJP’s Ideological Hegemony: Combining Religious Conservatism and Nationalism

This article explores popular support for two key dimensions of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s recent ideological dominance in Indian politics. We examine public opinion on assertive nationalism and religious conservatism. The article analyses data from an individual-level survey conducted among voters across 12 states across the country in 2018. We find that public opinion is largely sympathetic towards the ideological positions held by the right on these dimensions. Moreover, ideological resonance transcends various socio-economic cleavages, and there is high support even among non-core segments of the BJP’s social coalition. We also find suggestive evidence for the role of nationalism in expanding the BJP’s support base.

Russophone or Anglophone? The Politics of Identity in Contemporary Russian Indie Music

This article reveals the connections between Russian nationalism and Russian indie music. It argues that indie trendsetters’ views on music converge, perhaps unconsciously, with the state’s promotion of an assertive nationalism and its cultural implications, following the same politically inspired defensive mechanisms. In support of this argument, the article analyses the reaction by some music intermediaries in public discourse in the 2010s to the popularity of Russian Anglophone bands in local settings. The article thus reconceptualises the relationship between indi and politics in Russia since the Pussy Riot affair in 2012.

No Pope in Politics? Britain, the Vatican, and the "Irish Lacordaire" at the Creation of Edward Cardinal McCabe, 1882

No Pope in Politics?Britain, the Vatican, and the "Irish Lacordaire" at the Creation of Edward Cardinal McCabe, 1882 Mary McCain (bio) On May 28, 1882, Ireland's most famous Catholic preacher ascended the pulpit in the procathedral in Dublin, hoping to redirect the minds and hearts of his auditors toward Rome. Before a large congregation gathered for the first time with their newly elevated cardinal, Edward McCabe, the famous Dominican priest Thomas N. Burke delivered an address full of his characteristic eloquence, but also carrying two very pointed messages: first, that Pope Leo XIII had elevated McCabe to the College of Cardinals without any secular motive or hope for political gain; and second, that the future happiness of the Irish people depended on their continuing practice of the kind of Catholicism they had been encouraged in and directed to adopt by McCabe's predecessor, Paul Cardinal Cullen.1 That either of these points needed to be asserted, let alone roundly defended, on such an occasion suggests that the four years since Cullen's death in 1878 had wrought significant change in his Church. The change came not in terms of Catholic religious practice but in the sphere of secular politics, as increasing numbers of the laity became much more directly engaged in insisting that the British provide and implement a satisfactory answer to the land question. As this article will demonstrate, Burke was not fully in sympathy with this new approach of activism and agitation, and the analysis of why this was so will illustrate that, though Cullen's reforms in Irish religious practice would long outlast his death, the de facto settlement he had achieved in terms of the secular, political questions of the nineteenth century would be altered. This analysis will support the argument that after Cullen, the institutional Church recognized and responded to a need, in Emmet Larkin's apt phrase, to "change its focus."2 Two sermons that [End Page 122] Burke composed for McCabe's elevation, the one he delivered and the one he prepared but chose not to make public, will shed light on the discussion.3 Burke, a member of the Dominican order of priests, had been one of the most important heralds of the devotional revolution for more than two decades and was often Cullen's choice for key ecclesiastical celebrations. It should quickly be added, however, that the relationship flourished because the two men were largely in sympathy on both religious and secular matters; Cullen did not direct or supervise either Burke's calendar or the content of his sermons. Called "the Irish Lacordaire" earlier in his career, after the famous French Dominican of the previous generation known throughout the Catholic world for his eloquence, Burke likely watched the Land War unfold with increasing unease. Like Cullen, Burke had witnessed the effects of highly assertive nationalism while living in Italy. And, like Cullen, Burke feared the results of any similar movement taking hold in Ireland. When the time came to welcome the new Cardinal McCabe home, a strange coincidence of timing served to exacerbate Burke's fears. Because the cardinal archbishop had stayed in Rome for several weeks after his March elevation, the celebration of his new office was complicated by, and temporarily paired—in Burke's mind, if not also in the public's—with the Phoenix Park murders on May 6, 1882. The assassinations of Lord Frederick Cavendish on the day he arrived to take up his duties as chief secretary and of the longtime civil servant Thomas H. Burke were shocking, totally unexpected, highly unusual in the Irish context, and repellent to all quarters of public opinion.4 The coincidence forced Burke to confront the immediate problem of gross political violence alongside his increasing concern that his fellow Catholics' adherence to Rome was weakening. Burke himself was deeply shaken by the murders from the moment they were reported. The sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Burke (who was not a direct relation of the murder victim or of the preacher) had coincidentally returned to Dublin from convent school in England on the day of the assassinations. The next day, a Sunday, the teenager, who would soon marry the Earl...

Romantic Healers in Old and in New Worlds

The revision of Romanticism in the last two or three decades went deeper than any other revolution in the canonization of western literature. Tom Wein (British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms and the Gothic Novel.1764-1824), Gary Kelly (English Fiction of the Romantic Period), Virgil Nemoianu (Taming Romanticism), or Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre (Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity) demystified the uncritical association of this literary trend with the revolutionary political ethos in 1789 France, casting light on the conservative, pastoriented yearnings of the major representatives. Such considerations, however, do not apply to the American scene, where politics and poetics, unaffected, or at least not directly affected by the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic wars remained faithful to the ideas of the French Revolution. Whereas Europe turned conservative, with the Great Powers forming suprastatal networks of influence (The Holy Alliance at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 bonding the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian and Russian empires, joined a few years later by France and the United Kingdom), America built a political system grounded in the rights of the individual and pursued ” dreams” of personal and national assertiveness (the ”city on the hill,” “from rags to riches”) in opposition to the European ”concert of nations” model. Our paper is pointing to a necessary dissociation of meliorist plots and narratives of healing in the romantic canon on either part of the Atlantic instead of subsuming them under a common poetics/politics heading.

Taiwan, Hong Kong & Macau in China’s infrastructure-diplomacy and the China Dream: Will the dominions fall?

ABSTRACTThe “China Dream” is a native imagination of a great renewal of the Chinese nation. Mao Zedong had a dream to save the nation and promised the Chinese people utopian socialism tomorrow at the cost of sacrifices that needed to be borne today. Deng Xiaoping brought in economic reforms so that the Chinese people could dream of becoming rich. Xi Jinping’s China Dream has focussed upon China’s sphere of influence extending beyond its regional space. While Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” revolves around connectivity and infrastructure, using shades of affirmative, assertive and aggressive nationalism, as necessary, his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is likely to affect over 68 countries, 65% of the world’s population, and 40% of global GDP. At the regional level, China’s 55-km-long Zhuhai-Macau-Hong Kong Bridge is geared to transform the political geography of the South China Sea sub-region. This paper attempts to contextualise the notion of the contemporary “China Dream” and deconstruct the implications of Xi Jinping’s aggressive “infrastructure diplomacy” upon Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.

Heidegger’s Metapolitics

Heidegger’s Metapolitics Jeff Love (bio) and Michael Meng (bio) National Socialism is a barbaric principle. That is its essence and its potential greatness. The danger is not National Socialism itself, but that it becomes disarmed in a preaching of the true, the good, and the beautiful (just as at a training seminar). And that those who want to form its philosophy do nothing more than repeat the accepted “logic” of commonplace thinking and exact science instead of realizing that precisely now “logic” comes anew into distress and needs and must arise anew.1 HEIDEGGER Martin Heidegger is a philosopher of the city. He is not devoted to an otherworldly city. He creates no city in speech, no city of God. Heidegger devotes his thought to the city as the site (Stätte) of a history that forecloses and grants certain fundamental creative possibilities. One of those possibilities came to the fore in 1933, and Heidegger chose to seize the moment, to pursue with the utmost energy a thorough and radical program of renewal. Heidegger’s choice was not an aberration, not the blundering of a naive scholar into the rough-and-tumble precincts of political life. To the contrary, this choice made good on a promise that he had not kept hitherto, the revolutionary promise of his own thought as it had developed in the 1920s. For what can one say of a thinking that claims to pose a question—indeed, the question—having lain dormant for more than two millennia while making no corresponding intervention in the life of the city? What kind of attitude to thought might this be, if not one of sardonic derision and dismissal? As we know from his own insistent pronouncements, Heidegger did not see philosophy as so trivial, but rather as sovereign, [End Page 97] ruling (Basic Questions of Philosophy). To be sure, he did reject the direct connection of philosophy with action, but he never tired of proclaiming a far more important indirect connection, a grounding one, whereby philosophy opens up the very horizon that proscribes at any given time the possibilities for action or any series of actions: in short, a history or metapolitics in Heidegger’s own words (Überlegungen II–IV, GA 94, 115). We might then ask why it was that Heidegger chose to intervene in the life of the city under the banner of National Socialism. If Heidegger was not naive nor a mere opportunist, it follows that he must have found some kinship to his own thought in National Socialism. This seemingly simple conclusion has created exceptional controversy for eighty years now. Why, after all, would a thinker of Heidegger’s stature side with National Socialism? The question is a cloying one because it implies that no thinker of stature could have endorsed a movement so fixated on the primitive assertion of inequality, violence, and nationalism. To think against the consensus, stemming from the Enlightenment, about equality, peace, and universality, might seem to be mere folly, an affront to the cherished end of history, that promised land of peace and prosperity whose achievement hangs over us as an unshakable imperative. But it is precisely Heidegger who challenges this consensus as well as its accompanying imperative. He allies himself with the only stream in modern political thought that affirms this challenge: fascism. Heidegger does in fact much more than that. For Heidegger not only allies himself with fascism, he creates his own brand of fascist political thought. We are not speaking here of the ever exculpatory claims of Heidegger’s “private” National Socialism, or private this or that. We have no interest in the private Heidegger. In this respect, we follow Heidegger’s famous advice to ignore the private life of a thinker. And it is easy to do so, since Heidegger’s thought is and was eminently public, published in books and journals, proclaimed in speeches and in the classrooms of one of Germany’s more notable universities. To avoid unnecessary misunderstandings, we do not seek to show that Heidegger is a National Socialist or that he introduces Nazism into philosophy as Emanuel Faye and his supporters are wont to claim. We find that Faye’s...

National museums, national myths: constructing socialist Yugoslavism for Croatia and Croats

This article concerns two national museums in Croatia during the socialist period, the Museum of the Revolution of the Peoples of Croatia and the Historical Museum of Croatia. Both state-developed institutions were intimately tied to the process of nationalization as they helped articulate the place of the Croatian nation within the ideology of supranational Yugoslavism founded on the ideas of socialist patriotism, brotherhood and unity, self-management, national assertion, and South Slavic culture and community. This paper therefore traces the development and collapse of Yugoslavism in Croatia's national narrative by analyzing how these museums adapted the mythology of socialist Yugoslavism for a particularly Croatian context. Specifically, this paper investigates the ways in which these museums operated in an often ambiguous national-supranational discourse in order to reinforce the historical precedents of Croatia as part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. I argue that these museums were envisioned by party elites and museum curators alike as essential to the project of building socialist Yugoslavism by adapting and altering Croatia's previous national pantheon of heroes, places, objects, and events to fit into a larger and distinctly supranational Yugoslav framework.

Macron and the world

Newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron, while inexperienced in international affairs, is inclined to return France to a de Gaulle/Mitterand tradition of national assertiveness. At the same time, his native prudence, as well as the geostrategic realities of the early twenty-first century, suggest more continuity than change.

Negative Ecodomy in Romanian Politics and Religion: Anti-Muslim Attitudes in the Bucharest Mosque Scandal during the Summer of 2015

This paper focuses on a chronology of events presented by the Romanian media, especially newspapers with national coverage and impact like Gândul and Adevărul, between the first week of June to the first week of September 2015, when the issue of having a mosque erected in Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, was intensely debated by intellectuals, politicians, and religious professionals. The debates were intensely heated from the onset of these events and most of them revealed that most of the participants were driven by anti-Muslim attitudes, xenophobia, and assertive nationalism, a complex of feelings that I called “negative ecodomy”. The concept of “negative ecodomy” presupposes an attempt to built a safe environment, in this case for Romanians in their own country, but the adjective “negative” was added to the the positive idea of “ecodomy” because these efforts to offer a safe context for Romanians were accompanied by the negativity of anti-Muslim, xenophobic, and nationalistic activities. This array of negative ecodomic attitudes were displayed by Romanians not only in online media but also in the street through protests and other similar actions in a country which has been a member of the European Union for almost a decade and was supposed to adhere to the European Union’s basic principles of multiculturalism and the free circulation of persons. The totality of these events show that Romanians are still rather far from accepting the European Union’s fundamental philosophy or perhaps these principles themselves should be reconsidered and reinterpreted in the context of the massive Middle Eastern and African immigration and the constant, if not increasing threat of Islamic terrorism.

Os Estados Unidos entre o nacional e o transnacional: o saber produzido pela circum-navegação científica da U. S. Exploring Expedidion (1838-1842).

Trata-se de analisar alguns aspectos do conhecimento moderno expresso no relato de viagem da primeira circum-navegação científica, U. S. Exploring Expediton, entre 1838-1842. Os conjuntos de saberes constituído pela expedição estiveram entre a afirmação nacional e os aspectos transnacionais próprios da época. Revela-se o propósito norte-americano no que diz respeito à inserção de quadros do país na rede de conhecimento liderada pelos europeus, discutindo com os seus pares do velho continente, mas também concorrendo com eles.

The economy turned upside down: Bourdieu and Australian bohemia

This article engages Bourdieu's work on the cultural field to ask how the bohemian identity helped an aspiring artist make sense of the opportunities and problems encountered in the Australian cultural market, and how competition between established and new cultural players over several generations constituted a bohemian tradition in denial. Bourdieu's concept of ‘the economy turned upside down’ does not merely critique the romantic claims of autonomy from the market explicit in the bohemian identity, but reveals how the performance of autonomy through transgression made cultural producers as diverse as Tom Roberts, Henry Lawson, the Angry Penguins modernists or the Oz satirists attractive to the bourgeois consumer. There are, nevertheless, significant ways that the Australian bohemian tradition differs from the Western European experience theorized by Bourdieu, namely in the areas of politics, popular culture and post-colonial national assertion.

China's Competing and Co‐opting Nationalisms: Implications to Sino–Japanese Relations

This paper contends that nationalism has always been a constant feature of Chinese politics. Indeed in order to understand the implications of China's nationalism vis‐à‐vis its emergence of China in global and regional politics, one has to examine the delicate equilibrium between state nationalism and ethnic nationalism. We put forward two hypotheses: first, if ethnic nationalism is more likely to be mobilized vis‐à‐vis state nationalism then an aggressive and assertive nationalism may emerge which is likely to lead to more confrontational foreign relations; second, when ethnic nationalist interests are suppressed, a more affirmative (or pragmatic) brand of nationalism tends to prevail. We argue that it is in the balancing act conducted by Chinese political elites that we can understand how nationalism has affected domestic politics. We then translate this understanding to regional politics, in particular China's relations with Japan and Taiwan.

China's New Foreign Policy Team

The new foreign policy team is more professional and with an Asian focus than its older counterpart. Although still fragmented, it may have stronger leadership and better coordination. This is critically important because China is at a defining moment as to its international role. Xi Jinping's closer ties with the military and his hands-on style may encourage assertive nationalism and more active role of the military in foreign affairs.

Situating Citizen Khan: Shifting representations of Asians onscreen and the outrage industry in the social media age

This article looks at the way that British Asians have been portrayed in UK postwar popular culture historically concentrating on onscreen representations and considers these alongside academic analyses coming up to date with the much remarked on BBC1 television situation comedy Citizen Khan of Autumn 2012. It is argued that whilst we have witnessed a shift from popular cultural examples that construct Asians by substituting them within pre-existing broadcasting formats to what could be termed self-depictions by Asian writers themselves, the word “Asian” has itself unravelled under the weight of heightened religious and national assertiveness. More profound still has been the growth in scale and extent of new media allowing a new cultural politics of representation which now empowers the (mis)represented to respond to their portrayal in mainstream media in a way that the consumers and producers of earlier cultural products could not have imagined was possible.

Legitimising discourses in the framework of European integration: The politics of Euro adoption in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

ABSTRACT Despite their common history, the countries of the former Czechoslovakia appear to have adopted markedly different policies towards Eurozone accession. Whereas Slovakia joined the common currency in January 2009 the Czech Republic has adopted a more sceptical attitude with the question of Euro adoption postponed indefinitely. Given the relative similarities of the two states' institutional apparatuses and economic structures it is unsurprising that standard accounts of monetary policymaking struggle to explain the divergence in attitudes towards the EMU. This article presents a constructivist understanding of the politics of Eurozone accession strategies by focusing on the role of ‘legitimising discourses’ in the political process. These are conceptualised as the historically-informed sum total of inter-subjectively held beliefs held by elites and masses within a particular political system. By focusing on the ideational aspects of Euro adoption we are able to understand how each country's early experience with EU accession fed into differing perceptions of national purpose and the relative importance of European integration. Whereas the Czech Republic increasingly favoured greater national assertion and policy independence, Slovakia came to understand Eurozone membership as an important tool in reversing the feelings of isolationism experienced during the Mečiar period. A focus on these competing discourses helps us to understand the divergence in Euro-adoption strategies and in turn serves to enrich the debate on EU economic and monetary integration by highlighting the limitations of rationalist analyses.