Migrant Responses to Popular Uses of the Australian Flag

By Catherine Austin and Farida Fozdar

Volume 15, Issue 2, pages 315-333

Abstract

Australian nationalism, once seen as laconic and understated, has become increasingly shrill over the last fifteen years. One evidence is the growing popular use of Australian flags, particularly their display on cars to celebrate the national day. Popular use of the flag has been encouraged by relevant government bodies, such as the National Australia Day Council. This article explores migrants’ responses to the flag display. Qualitative interviews and focus group discussions identified a continuum of reactions ranging from inclusion to exclusion. Contrary to expectations, many migrants see it as simply a demonstration of festivity and pride, in which they feel included. While recognizing that the flag display could represent exclusionary nationalism, migrants carefully attribute this usage to a limited number of individuals, rather than seeing it as emblematic of a more generally held sentiment. Additionally, migrants tend to read the flag through civic, transnational, and multicultural lenses, in order to see themselves as included in the identity that it is seen to portray.

Read the full article here.

State of Mind, State of Order: Reactions to Ethnic Unrest in the Islamic Republic of Iran

By Rasmus Christian Elling

Volume 8, Issue 3, pages 481-501

Abstract

By analysing the symbols and language employed in official statements on two cases of ethnic minority unrest in Iran in 2005–6, the article shows how the Islamic Republic’s ideologues and leaders are responding to threats against national security and to alternative definitions of identity. In this emerging discourse, religious and secular notions of patriotism and loyalty are interwoven and an Islamist/nationalist conceptualisation of Iranian nationhood is defended. This interesting process of paradoxical dynamics is an important part of the ongoing struggle to define the identity of Iran in a region boiling with political and cultural conflicts.

Read the full article here.

A Sacred Bastion? A Nation in Itself? An Economic Partner of Rising China? Three Waves of Nation-Building in Taiwan after 1949

By Hsin-Yi Yeh

Volume 14, Issue 1, pages 207-228

Abstract

Agreeing with the constructivist approach to nationalism, this article argues that the prevailing ambiguous attitude towards nationality among people in Taiwan is a reflection of different waves of nation-building − each led people to imagine a distinct nation − and the mixture of these waves during past decades. Whereas all nations are artificially imagined, ‘the style in which they are imagined’ should be examined. This article aims to distinguish three waves of nation-building in Taiwan after 1949 and address the issue of superimposition of contradictory elements in producing nation-ness to highlight that nation-building is a path-dependent process. Three suppositions can be derived from the investigation of Taiwan’s case. First, people are not empty vessels and the new national imagination has to compete and coexist with vestiges and crystallizations of former imaginations. Second, the content of a single nation-building programme may be reinvented according to the external and/or internal environment. Third, depending on the social atmosphere, official nationalism may adopt a different method to instil the national imagination.

Read the full article here.