Word: nationhood
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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History is no guide. Nations are not some natural, organic phenomenon but complex accumulations of strength, alliances and enmities. And the passion for nationhood has swung between eras of consolidation and fragmentation: the single-state world of the Roman Empire; the 500-odd nations of the 1500s Renaissance. In the post-cold war age, people impatient with the map they've inherited appear to be caught in between. A globalized economy is melting down the relevance of nationhood at the same time that the dispossessed's unrealized yearnings to be a state are gaining legitimacy...
...question of regionalism once and for all. To me, as to many westerners, a course on challenges to American national identity would naturally include some discussion of place-based or regional challenges, but this is clearly not what brings most students to the course. Racial and ethnic strains on nationhood are well understood, but the idea that a region like the Rocky Mountain West might begin to question the prevailing nationalist assumptions seems outlandish--or, in another word, provincial. But such an attitude no longer becomes a world-class center of learning...
...relationship between American Jews and Israel in terms of ominous overtones of divorce, as Horowitz does in the New York piece, is raising a false prospect: even if the two groups wanted to split with each other, they cannot. In this chapter of our history defined by proud nationhood, all Jews must do our best to support the state of Israel. In turn, Israel should return the favor of making itself truly a state for all the world's Jews to live or to visit...
Australians have been much given to pondering the question of national identity. Was Australia "born" in 1901 when the colonies federated? Or in 1915 when Australian "diggers" (soldiers) landed at Gallipoli? Or was a sense of nationhood forged during the Second World War when a Japanese invasion seemed possible? Or does the onset of a multicultural society mean that nationhood and citizenship in any case need to be redefined...
...small political and economic" groups. "You cannot call them tribes," he says. Yet even if tribalism is an inadequate term, it does speak to an emerging and explosive phenomenon in other parts of the world. Fragmentation, Balkanization, the dissolution of states: at a time of blurry borders and contested nationhood, ethnicity may become the most common--and easiest--organizing principle for nation builders. In the next century, conflagrations of apparent tribalism will not be set off by old ethnic rivalries as much as by contemporary political struggles--struggles that power-hungry leaders will use to inflame tensions among groups. Says...