Words: 2885
Assignment 3 Readings. On the uses and Implications of Constructionism. By: Yeros P. 1999 In the development of the study of ethnicity and nationalism, the concepts of ethnicity and nationhood are often considered to be distinct. Conventionally, ethnicity has been conceptualized within a continuum between primodialism and instrumentalism. Meanwhile, nationalhood and nationalism have been understood as the process that either owned their existence to various dimension of modernity.
The enlightenment, industrialization, capitalist social relations, print capitalism or state or to the determine resilience of ethnicity in conjunction with modern social-political circumstances. One concept applied is” imagined community” developed by Benedict Anderson. It demonstrates the emergency of nationhood at the historical conjunction of capitalism and print technology. Imagined community referred to as the departure for constructionism in the study of ethnicity and nationalism. The basic understanding of ethnicity and nationhood as the process that is socially constructed that is as products of human thought and action.
The emphasis of social construction is, above all, an ecological one, and that stands opposed to primodialist imagining of the world. By this, it becomes immediately apparent that those who label themselves as constructionist, and hold true to the constructivist ontology, go on to draw diverse conceptualizations of society and politics in spelling out what construction actually consist in. thus constructivists disagree on what should be properly considered constructivist, and what should be its political significance.
Constructivism today resembles a national in formation, busily invoking traditions and preoccupying itself with its origins, purpose and identity. THE END Globalisation, Modernity and National Identity. BY Guibernau M. 1996 The major features of current era are the strengthening of globalizing processes. There is a global character of nation-state system in so far as the political arena that is based upon a division into sovereign unities that rule within clearly demarcated territories and have the capacity of acting at supranational levels.
Globalization adds a significant new dimension to the life of individuals in so far as it widens their horizon and opens up new perspectives to the consequences of their actions. Intrinsic to gloabalisation is the dialectic of the local and the global, process by which local events are transformed and shaped under the influence of the extension of social connections stretching across tine and space. The extension of global cultural interrelatedness leads to persistence cultural homogeneity and cultural disorder.
Globalsiation when applied to culture is unprecedented possibilities for expansion and reproduction of particular cultures that the development of new technologies has favoued. Nationalism relies heavily upon tradition in so far as it has common memories as one of its central features. Nationalism entails cultural resistance, and challenges modern societies by vindicating what is called identity politics. Modern societies produce some kind of the uncertainty and fragmentation that lie at their core. Ontological insecurity generates anxiety and jeopardizes the indivdiual’s capacity to relate to others.
As result of globalization, Islamic fundamentalism denies relativism, and at the same time refuses to establishes a distinction between religious and political arena. The existence of a common enemy plays a key role in the construction of a group’s identity Islamic fundamental rejects the West and turns to its own doctrine and tradition in search of an alternative to secular nationalism, socialism and capitalism. The cultural and religious values defended by Islamic fundamentalism firmly regulate the dealt life of its followers. This allows the restoration of a sense of I identity and dignity that springs from within their own culture.
Globalsiation and modernity mediate the ways in which nationalist discourses are produced and circulated, leaders portrayed and events presented. The persistence reactivation of nationalism and also the revitalization some regular show the manifest need of individuals to feel part of the group and find a set of ideas work fighting for and able to give meaning to their lives. Nationalism operated as a legitimizing ideology in the foundation of nation-state. THE END Nationalism and Modernity. By Charles Taylor 19997 How nationalism arises into modern societies and modern state?
A modern economy is one undergoing growth and change. It requires a population that is mobile, both occupationally and geographically. Societies needs a sense of homogenous culture, one into which people have to be inducted to be able to do business with each other across all the particularities of context and background. A homogeneous language and culture is fostered and diffused and hence also to some degree defined bt the state. Modern societies have official languages almost official cultures. This has been seen as functional imperative.
Comparing this to earlier societies, which tended to be divided between a high culture, and appendage of restricted class, and of partly overlapping “folk” culture putting a larger and larger proportion of its population through tertiary education, inculcating into many, as high culture pervades the whole of society. All states focus so much on national sentiment and national identity. Modern nation-states are imagined communities. There are two features of imagine communities, first, there is a shift from hierarchal, mediated- access societies to horizontal, direct-access societies.
Second, feature of the modern social imaginary, is that it no longer sees the greater translocal entities as ground in something other, something higher, than common action in secular time. The importance in premodern revolution, up to and including the English civil war, of the background look, of establishing an original law, comes from this sense that the political entity is in this sense action-transcendent. Here the basic idea is that people defined antecedently by unity of culture, language, or religion should be allowed to give themselves their own political forms.
This certainly picks out a class of movement’s sentiments political ideas forces in the contemporary world. THE END Imagined Communities by: Anderson Benedict Anderson argues that the very possibility of imaging the nation only arouse historically when and where, three fundamental cultural conceptions. All of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grips on men minds, he said that the first of these was the idea that a particular script- language offered privileges access to ontology truth, precisely because it was an inseparable part of that truth.
It was this idea that called into being the great transcontinental sodalities of Christendom, the Ummah Islam, and the rest. Second, was the belief that societies were naturally organised around and under high centre- monarchs who were persons apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological dispensation. Human loyalties were necessarily hierarchical and centripetal because the ruler, like the sacred script which was a node of access to being inherent in it. The last conception was the temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men essential identical.
When combining these ideas rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of things, giving certain meaning to everyday (life) fatalities of existence above all death, loss and servitude and offering, in various ways, redemption from them. The slow and declined of these interlinked certainties, first in Western Europe and later elsewhere, under the impact of economic changes, discoveries and the development of increasingly rapid communications, drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history. There is no surprise then that the research is on so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together.
Nothing perhaps more precipated this search nor made it more fruitful, then print-capitalism which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people who think about themselves and relate themselves to others in profoundly new ways. THE END Nationalism and Modernity by: Rustow D. A 1967 Nation and modernity are the most potent ideals of the twentieth century. Scientific discovery, new technology and technical skills and industrial production are among the tools of modernity. Nationalism has lay social foundation for division of labours.
In modern science and industry the desire for modernity bring national loyalties. Nations have been suggested as human communities that have ventured jointly upon the major tasks of modernization. Both nationalism and modernity have form an arena of tacit assumptions in which vocal battle between political ideologies such as democracy and communism has been fought. Modernization begins in Europe in the renaissance and spread overseas in the wake of European expansion. National and modernizing motifs blend in the rhetoric of post colonial leaders in Asia and Africa and of revolutionaries and reformers in Latin America.
Americans, Russians and Chinese are trying to ferment in the southerly regions of the world. Democracy and communism themselves today appear as the major alternatives of modern government and whereas democracy reveals it nationists affinities in the days of Jefferson and Robespierre, communism came to terms with nationalism with nationality in the days of Lenin and Stalin. THE END The Myth of Civil Nation by: Bernard Yack. The kind of community the modern people make focus on political and legitimacy and loyalty of its members. This happened in two ways in which modern individuals imagine political community.
On the other hand, the development of strong connection between cultural and political identities. On one hand, there is new imagining community that has developed to parallel the new organization of political power by modern states. By breaking these down and integrating local communities and overlapping jurisdictions, state sovereignty has in effect “nationalized” political community. The new connections between cultural and political community have received the most attention under the heading of ethnonationalism, the nationalization of political community or nation building.
Hence, d the ethnic idea of nation celebrates inherited cultural identity and is exemplified by Germany, Japan, and most eastern European countries. The civic idea of the nation, in contrast, is capture freely chosen and purely political identity of participants in such modern states. The distinction of ethnic and civil understandings the term national community that reflects the two ways in which origin and characterizes the political communities that correspond to modern states. The distinction builds along series of conceptual dichotomies such as Eastern versus Western nationalism, Ethnos versus Demos political states.
The contrast between ethnic and civic nationalism services both descriptive and normative goals. It serves both to classify the different forms of nationalism that exist in modern world and distinguish more valuable forms of nationalism from more counterparts focusing exclusively on one or other component of national identity inspires the contrasting myths that exaggerate, on the one our ability to change, build on, and improve on communal ties we have inherited and, on the other, our capacity to recreate ourselves in the image of our liberal theories. THE END
Hobbies and the Modern State : By: Gray. J. 1993 Liberalism was the political theory of modernity. As entering the closing phase of the modern age, we confront the spectre of renascent atavistic barbarianism, which threaten to ruin the modern inheritance of civil society. The task of post-moderns no longer sustained by the modernist fictions of progress, rights and universal civilization or classical conceptions of natural law as embodied in Greco- Roman and Christians traditions is to preserve the practice of liberty that is transmitted to us by the inherited institutions of civil society.
The task is a daunting one, but it is one which our circumstances and prospects impose upon us, if we retain any sense of the worth of our inheritance, and any perception of the nature of the alternatives to it. In the past there may have been viable alternatives, in which civilization and civil society did not go together. In the contemporary Western world, a self-denigrating guilt inhibits the discourse of civilisation and barbarism that informed the Scottish enlightenment, yet it is the lesson of our century that, if the claims of commissars or Mullahs or clerical is fascists are concede, civilisation may e lost along with civil societies they seek to subjugate and barbarianism supervenes. We will serve what remains alive in liberalism, if we come to see liberal civil society as a particularistic form of life, spreading throughout the world, but everywhere threaten by modernist fundamentalisms and atavistic ideologies. A commitment to the preservation of civil society is, for us a commitment to the maintenance of civilisation.
For though, it may be only one of the diverse forms of flourish our species has achieved, a liberal civil society is form of society in which we have made our contribution to the human good; and in defending it , we defend the best in our cultural inheritance, and the best that the species can presently reasonably hope for. THE END Self-Determination versus pre-Determination Of Ethnic Minorities in Power-Sharing Systems:Lijpahrt. A 1995 How to provide peace and democracy in plural societies?
This has been seen to be difficult task in that, successful democracy is assumed to require a minimum of homogeneity and consensus and hence cannot be established in plural societies. The answer to is that, first, it must be stated in term’s of probability that democracy is less likely to be successful in plural than homogenous societies instead of in absolute and apodictic possible terms. Social scientists are not the only people who can understand the logic of this proposition. Politician in plural societies can grasp it and may want to try to take a special measure to strengthen the probability of successful democracy.
This means that the proposition can be turned into self-denying prediction. Second, is democracy in divided societies is possible provided that there is majoring that is firmly in control for instance, in the Northern Ireland (1921-1972). Third, is that peace and democracy are indeed possible in even the most deeply divided societies, provided that instead of majority rule, consciational democracy is used. A grant coalition is an executive in which the political leaders of all significant segments participate.
On the issue of power-sharing in one country If there is disagreement, the only way forward is to do an elections. The system of consociational system on the basis of self-determined segments. All of the consociational principles can now be instituted on the basis of self-determination. Segmental autonomy can be organised along similar lines. Any cultural group that wishes to have internal autonomy can be given the right to establish a cultural council, publicly recognized body equivalent to a state in federation.. n the case of South Africa territorial federalism makes a great deal of sense because many of the ethnic segments have clear geographical strongholds and also because of the great diversity of the country in other respects. There are good numbers of self-determination over pre-determination 1. It avoids the problem of invidious comparisons and discriminatory choices. 2. The problem of potential discrimination is especially serious in countries where there are two or more large segments, which will obviously be recognized as participants. 3.
Per-determination entails not only potential discrimination against groups, but as rule, also the assignment of individuals to specific groups. 4. Self determination gives equal chances not only to all ethnic or other segments, large or small, in plural society but also to groups and individuals who explicitly reject the idea that society should be organised on a segmental basis. 5. In pre-determination, there is a strong temptation to fix the relative shares of representation and other privileges for the segment on permanent or semi-permanent basis. . Even when ethnic groups are geographically concentrated, the boundaries between different ethnic groups never perfectly divide these groups from each other. THE END Multiculturalism and Liberal State: By: Habermas. J. 1995 Liberal and communitarian side interpret differently principles of equal respect for and equal protection of everybody. Liberalism is supposed to advocate a state which is blind to skin color and other differences. It grants everybody equal rights for free pursuit of their own life project.
It grants equal chances for everybody for the development of personal identities, independently of the kinds of persons and their relationship to collective identities. Turning to the political themes, the idea of a struggle for recognition stems from Hegel’s phenomenology. From this perspective, we discover similarities among different but related phenomena. Feminism, nationalism, conflict of cultures, besides the particular issue of multiculturalism.
All these phenomena have common the political struggle for recognition of suppressed collective identities. This good is different is from that good. But those struggles for recognition, fought in various forms of identity politics, are different in many other aspects. One such as aspect is law. Since of these groups only women and ethnic minorities have been recognized as objects of constitutional protection, only feminist and multiculturalists’ claims can be, at least in principle, settle within the frame of the constitutional state.
Lastly, immigrants should be obliged to assent to the principle of the constitution as interpreted within the scope of the political culture that is, the ethical-political self-understanding of the citizenry of the receiving country. Therefore, once they become citizens themselves, they are in turn get a voice in public debates, which may then shift the established interpretation of the constitutional principles. The obligation to the way of life of the majority culture. A legally required political socialisation may have an impact on other aspects of the collective identity of the immigrant’s culture of origin. THE END Bibliographies