Category Archives: Weekly Features

Featured weekly article: Ethnoregionalism, Multicultural Nationalism and the Idea of the European Third Way

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Ethnoregionalism, Multicultural Nationalism and the Idea of the European Third Way

By Alberto Spektorowski

Volume 7, Issue 3, pages 45-63

Abstract

While the idea of a Europe of its peoples, or a post‐nation‐state ‘regionalist Europe’ is largely applauded by liberal, radical democratic, and post‐colonial theorists, who welcome this development as an antidote to narrow nationalism, ideologues of the New Right had adopted this idea to their exclusionist political design. Based on what can be defined as ‘multiculturalism of the Right’, the New Right proposes a new European nationalist resurrection based upon the idea of the reemergence of multiple European organic identities that would set a cultural barrier against immigrant communities. In order to elaborate this plan the New Right makes use of the intellectual contribution of old anti‐liberal integralist sources at the fringes of fascism. The latter set the path for a European ‘third way’ in the 1930s and the New Right attempts to reestablish this trend in a post‐modern Europe. This article does not claim that Europe of the peoples is an anti‐liberal project, but asks to heed ‘unexpected’ political uses of the idea.

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Featured weekly article: Sovereign Dignity, Nationalism and the Health of a Nation: A Study of China’s Response in Combat of Epidemics

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Sovereign Dignity, Nationalism and the Health of a Nation: A Study of China’s Response in Combat of Epidemics

By Sung-Won Yoon

Volume 8, Issue 1, pages 80-100

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the role of nationalism in China’s policy towards the combat of emerging infectious diseases. By locating nationalism as a factor which facilitates or impedes global governance and international collaboration, this paper explores how nationalism influences China’s political decision‐making. Given her historical experience, China has in its national psyche an impulse never to become ‘the sick man of the East’ again. Today, China’s willingness to co‐operate with international bodies emanates out of reputational concerns rather than technical‐medical considerations. This was clearly manifested in her handling of two epidemics in recent years: the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and HIV/AIDS episodes. This paper concludes that China’s nationalism plays an inhibiting role in China’s attempts to further incorporate herself into the architecture of global health governance in the long run.

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Featured weekly article: Narrating Taiwan out of the Chinese Empire: Rewriting Taiwan’s History from a Taiwanese Perspective in the 1970s

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Narrating Taiwan out of the Chinese Empire: Rewriting Taiwan’s History from a Taiwanese Perspective in the 1970s

By A-chin Hsiau

Volume 18, Issue 2, pages 93-126

Abstract

The political control, cultural ideology, and exilic mentality that prevailed in postwar Taiwan under the authoritarian Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was informed by a historical narrative based on a ‘Great China’ outlook embodied in the official historiography of Chinese imperial dynasties. In the 1970s, anti‐KMT young intellectuals of local Taiwanese background began to challenge this narrative by revisiting the history of Taiwanese anti‐colonialism of the 1920s and creating an alternative understanding of Taiwan’s past that was supposedly a ‘return to reality’ and a ‘return to native soil’. This article examines the alternative historical accounts narrated by dissidents of the younger generation in the period of political change, when the dissident cultural politics began to shift, moving from antagonism towards the KMT and its exilic politics to an increasingly anti‐Sinocentric ‘de‐colonial’ view which motivated the challenge of Taiwanese nationalism to KMT dominance and stimulated the evolution of democratization in the 1980s and beyond.

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Featured weekly article: Shi’i Ideology, Iranian Secular Nationalism and the Iran‐Iraq War (1980–1988)

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Shi’i Ideology, Iranian Secular Nationalism and the Iran‐Iraq War (1980–1988)

By Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh

Volume 7, Issue 1, pages 86-103

Abstract

In the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the ensuing Iraqi invasion of the southern province of Khuzestan, one of the most important initiations of Islamic institutions of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the creation of the Sepâh‐e Pâsdârân‐e Enqelâb‐e Eslâmî (The Islamic Revolutionary Guard) or SPEE (Rafiqdust 1382/2004:173‐4). This revolutionary organisation was Khomeini’s answer to the regular standing Iranian army, trained and disciplined under the tight control of the deposed monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to thwart any effort to destroy the much fought for Revolution and a possible coup d’état (Menashri 1999:218–219; Katzman 1993). The Ayatollah ordered its creation in the first week of his victory in February 1979 (Rafuqdust 1383/2004:174). ‘Whoever is armed,’ stated the call, ‘can join the Sepâh’ (Rafiqdust 1383/2004:184). The call was put out to start recruiting those who had taken up arms against the Pahlavi regime during the Revolution. Basîj‐e Enqelâb‐e Eslamî (Islamic Revolution’s Mobilisation Force) or Basîj was the organisation born out of SPEE, which was filled with devout, motivated, and faithful Shi’i militants (Globalsecurity.org 2004)). By default, the Iran‐Iraq War (1980–1988) solidified the Islamic Revolution, and Basîj, as a key military body of the new regime, played a major role in this process. This study discusses how the Islamic government of Iran successfully promoted long‐learned religious traditions, in this case, the Karbala paradigm and the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in 680 AD to rally support and receive unconditional loyalty of the Basîji (a Basîj member) during the Iran‐Iraq War. It examines the following two points: first, the idea of self‐sacrifice as part of a religious belief, powerfully energised by the use of Shi’i ideology and history; second, the discussion of the amalgamation of secular and religious nationalism, which Ernest Gellner describes as ‘a principle which holds the political and national unit’ together (Gellner 1983:1). Secular or modern nationalism was imbued with religious symbols, playing a key role in the fight against Iraq.

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Featured weekly article: Delicious Food in a Beautiful Country: Nationhood and Nationalism in Discourses on Food in Contemporary Japan

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Delicious Food in a Beautiful Country: Nationhood and Nationalism in Discourses on Food in Contemporary Japan

By Takeda Hiroko

Volume 8, Issue 1, pages 5-30

Abstract

The article discusses the recent development of banal forms of nationalism in contemporary Japan by examining a multitude of discourses on food produced by the national government as well as civil organisations working for food safety. Despite the intrinsically hybrid nature marked by the historical trajectory of Japanese food culture, these discourses tend to emphasise and propagate the Japanese element and, in so doing, firmly locate Japanese food as the core of ‘Japaneseness’. In this sense, contemporary food discourse in Japan functions as a powerful biopolitical device by propagating the notion of ‘delicious food in a beautiful country’ on which Japanese people are expected to organise their everyday lives.

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