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This article aims to explicate the mechanisms underlying Poland’s support for Ukraine amid the Russian invasion by unravelling the puzzle of the swiftness, strength, and scope of Poland’s efforts, thereby challenging the latter’s potential explanations on the grounds of political realism. The authors achieve that by tapping into Ontological Security Theory (OST) and investigating how the ontological security needs of Poland, first, underpinned and directed the strategy and conduct of its security and foreign policy towards Ukraine during the first year of the war, which constituted a critical period for Poland’s national and identity security; and, second, how those needs fuel Poland’s diplomatic resolve and efforts to persuade the West to support Ukraine. This process is unpacked through an outline of the historical-cultural roots of Ukraine’s significance for Polish national identity, a review of Polish national security and foreign policy strategy documents, and an analysis of Polish political discourse regarding Poland’s national identity and Ukraine’s relevance to it. While drawing their conclusions, the authors focus on their applicability beyond the case of Poland.
In discussions on Japanese whaling, a common question is why Japan appears indifferent to international pressure (gaiatsu) on the issue, that is, why it continues to flout the international anti-whaling “norm” despite widespread criticism and condemnation. The key to answering this question is to examine why the anti-whaling “norm” resonates so poorly in the domestic sphere. This paper argues that the impotence of international pressure to curb Japanese whaling can only be understood by examining how whaling has come to be reactively defined in the domestic debate not as an issue of conservation and environmental protection but as a symbol of national identity and pride. The paper concludes that because whaling is framed as a key marker of “Japanese-ness”, international pressure is counter-productive as it merely serves to stoke the fires of nationalism, creating an atmosphere in which anti-whaling opinion is seen as “anti-Japanese”.
Through an examination of Olympic-related art and the gendered, labored bodies that produce the Olympic spectacle, “Olympic Dissent: Art, Politics, and the Tokyo Games” reveals continuities in the political and artistic stakes of the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964 and 2020.
This article explores Japanese responses to the Syrian refugee crisis since 2011. In particular, it examines the rationales of the Japanese government and others who expressed opinions on the crisis. Since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in March 2011, a large number of civilians have been forced to flee their country of origin. Japan has been reluctant to accept refugees although it has pledged a large amount of financial assistance to international organizations. This article explores the rationales of Japanese responses as expressed in media texts and proceedings of the Diet and its committees, with a particular focus on issues of national identity and state identity.
This paper provides a contextualized reading of the South Korean 2016 hit drama ‘Descendants of the Sun’, the most prominent pop cultural manifestation of the Republic of Korea’s rising status as a global middle power. Through linking the fictional peacekeeping mission to a confidently nationalist conception of South Korean identity, the drama normalizes troop deployments by circumventing traditional narratives for legitimation. This argument rests on observations concerning the omission of any historical and UN context for the deployment, the Othering of the United States as main antagonist, and the unchallenged sense of righteousness and morality displayed by the main protagonists in an otherwise passive local setting.
This article describes the research on the nationalization of peasantry in Poland by the Polish sociologist Józef Chałasiński (1904–1979). He realized that the ethnicity and nation in Poland were formed with the exclusion of peasants marginalized by privileged classes. The idea of a nation was used to ensure class domination over peasants; their inclusion in the nation was tantamount to the abandonment of the peasant culture and rural lifestyle. Chałasiński described the emergence of a modern Polish nation through the popularization of the elite culture, which led to the gradual disappearance of the peasant class in Poland.
Qatar University (QU) in Doha, Qatar, was founded as a public institution whose purpose was to provide higher education to the academically talented students from the country. After several decades, the institution sought to pursue international standards of excellence, hiring international faculty and offering courses in English. However, a course correction led the institution back towards its original purpose and a desire to strengthen national identity and values.
There is tension between manipulation of national identity construction and agency in the literature on ingroup identification, especially in authoritarian contexts. In China, the past is very relevant with regards to legitimacy of the Communist Party. Yet, we cannot just assume that what the state propagates is what can also be found at the bottom-up level. This article analyses social representations of history in China combining the top-down perspective of state education policies and curated historical narratives to the bottom-up perspective formed through analyzing two student surveys, collected first in 2007 and again in 2011-2012, and 11 interviews. Earlier research indicates that in most countries representations of history concentrate on negative issues and their time span is short. Chinese representations of history are divided into narratives of glory and humiliation, and respondents have a much longer perspective to national history than typical participants in international surveys. Finally, although problematic periods such as the Cultural Revolution get less coverage in political speeches and school textbooks, they are not forgotten among students. Furthermore, the view that people should have their own ideas about history and China rather than having to adopt the government promoted narrative was visible in multiple student interviews.
This chapter analyses constitutional intolerance on the basis of the Hungarian Church Law of 2011, which deregistered hundreds of religious organisations, attached special conditions to re-registration, and privileged a number of politically favoured religious organisations in return for their political legitimation and support. These micro-legal actions are analysed within the context of the notion of the “System of National Cooperation” and “constitutional identity”. Constitutional intolerance in Hungary appears to stem from a traditionalist commitment to protect traditional values: on the one hand, by strengthening the position of the main Hungarian churches, and on the other hand, by championing anti-liberal policies on gender and sexuality, including the prohibition from exposing minors to “gay propaganda”. But the varnish of Christianity is relatively thin: Hungarian society is thoroughly secularised with low numbers of church attendance, with language and ethnicity taking precedence over religion in their importance to national identity.
Anthony D. Smith, in one of his earlier, less debated, works – Nationalism in the 20th Century (1979) – examines phases of nationalism in the modern era, suggesting that nationalism has taken various forms before and during the 20th century. He argues that nationalism’s adaptability is at the core of its persistence, adapting to changing situations such as fascism and communism. As a result of this adaptability, nationalism still flourishes today. This article applies Smith’s theory to explore the interplay between cultural and material factors in the evolution of nationalism in Ireland. It identifies five ideological phases – revolutionary nationalist, protectionist, liberalising, neoliberal, and ecological – to which nationalism has adapted, and within which nationalism has influenced various aspects of Irish society. These phases are situated within a broader ideological and material context, analysing obliquely the Irish language (a core element of Irish nationalism), and related to changing processes of individualization.
This chapter elaborates on the relationship between space and coexistence, and ways in which hegemony is reproduced in public space. Constitutionalism plays an ambivalent role in the reproduction of this hegemony, not least through the reproduction of a thick sense of publicness. This thick sense of publicness can be asserted against a range of “others”, such as religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities, whose identities may be subject to privatisation and retreat from public spaces. At the same time, constitutionalism offered a tangible alternative for the old order of toleration, recognising that religious divisions would be permanent, and that legal and social frameworks of accountability might support peace and order. Given that religious intolerance and the foundation of political order were entwined in early modernity, the establishment of the freedom of religion and the more general protection of religious minorities were vital to the project of the modern state.
Chapter 2 provides the theoretical and methodological foundations for understanding East Asian international relations and demonstrates how facts and theories are constructed. Building on that foundation, the chapter then provides a preliminary review of the merits and demerits of the prevailing theories: realism, liberal institutionalism, constructivism, Marxism, and neo-traditionalism, depending on the research questions we are interested in. The chapter also offers an initial connection between the existing IR theories and theory of evolution. It emphasizes that the theory of evolution does not necessarily replace any existing IR theory but offers instead a different insight and scientific framework, which may be left in the background or be explicitly applied.
This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.
This concluding chapter considers the dynamics of music and place, issues of diversity, and the impact of Indigenous artists on building bridges to a whole history of music in this place. Reflecting on the four interlinked themes guiding this Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia: Continuities, Encounters, Diversities, and Institutions, it takes up musical threads not covered elsewhere in the volume, discussing pub rock and hip hop to consider dynamics of exclusion, inclusion, and identity. In advocating for a move away from anthropocentrism toward ecocentrism in considering the relationships between music and the place now known as Australia, it simultaneously foregrounds unresolved tensions associated with Indigeneity, settler-colonialism, and prejudice in music that are ultimately intertwined with concepts of place and belonging.
This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.
Migration destabilized family life, gender, and sexuality. Whereas most Turkish guest workers traveled alone during the formal recruitment period (1961–1973), West Germany’s subsequent policy of family reunification sparked the increased migration of spouses and children. This chapter shows that, although migrants developed strategies to maintain connections to home, separation anxieties and fears of abandonment loomed. The departure of able-bodied young workers strained local economies, upended gender roles, and separated loved ones, sparking tensions at home: were guest workers sending enough money home, communicating enough, and remaining faithful to spouses? In Germany, reports about sex between male guest workers and German women fueled Orientalist tropes about “foreigners,” perpetuated stereotypes about Turkish men’s propensity toward violence, and stoked fears about the transgression of national and racial borders. Women left behind worried that their husbands would commit adultery while abroad. Guest workers’ children were viewed simultaneously as victims and threats: some stayed behind in Turkey, others were brought to Germany, and thousands of “suitcase children” (Kofferkinder) repeatedly moved back and forth between the two countries with their bags perpetually packed. As physical estrangement evolved into emotional estrangement, the perceived abandonment of the family came to represent the abandonment of the nation.
The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.
This epilogue reexamines select themes – return migration and transnational lives, estrangement from “home,” racism, and the inclusion of Turks in European society – applying the arguments put forth in the previous chapters to more recent developments. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, there was an explosion of racist violence that recalled the racism of the 1980s and reverberated throughout Germany and Turkey. The 1983 remigration law had its own echoes in a 1990 GDR law that incentivized the departure of unemployed foreign contract workers. In the new millennium, paying unwanted foreigners to leave became standard practice for dealing with asylum seekers – in Germany and a united Europe. Over time, Germans transposed the call “Turks out!” onto a new Muslim enemy: Syrian asylum seekers. For its part, Turkey’s turn to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strained Turkey’s relations with Germany and the diaspora. These developments come with profound implications – regarding citizenship, political participation, and national identity – for the approximately 3 million Turks who live in Germany today, and for the hundreds of thousands who have returned.
Historians have tended to view postwar labor migration, including the Turkish-German case, as a one-directional story whose consequences manifested within host country borders. This chapter complicates this narrative by arguing that Turkish migrants were mobile border crossers who traveled as tourists throughout Western Europe and took annual vacations to their homeland. These seasonal remigrations entailed a three-day car ride across Central Europe and the Balkans at the height of the Cold War. The drive traversed an international highway (Europastraße 5) extending from West Germany to Turkey through Austria, socialist Yugoslavia, and communist Bulgaria. Migrants’ unsavory travel experiences along the way underscored East/West divides, and they transmuted their disdain for the “East” onto their impoverished home villages. Moreover, the cars and “Western” consumer goods they transported reshaped their identities. Those in the homeland came to view the Almancı as superfluous spenders who were spending their money selfishly rather than for the good of their communities. Overall, the idea that a migrant could become German shows that those in the homeland could intervene from afar in debates about German identity amid rising racism: although many derided Turks as unable to integrate, they had integrated enough to face difficulties reintegrating into Turkey.
The United States has long represented one of Canada's primary international allies. This partnership has remained strong despite turbulent times in the relationship, such as the one brought forth by the Trump presidency. Our article seeks to understand the sources of such continuity through the lens of continentalism. While historical accounts of continentalism have portrayed it as a passive force stemming from Canada's material self-interest, scholars have recently identified the emergence of an evolved form of continentalism that represents a dominant idea and a coherent analytical framework in Canadian foreign policy. Has this new form of continentalism indeed gained widespread acceptance among Canadians? We answer this question by considering continentalism in the ideational realm. Using novel public opinion data, our analysis investigates whether continentalist attitudes have become embedded in Canadians’ national identity and foster closer alignment preferences vis-à-vis the United States. We find significant and robust evidence of such effects.