Nationalism and cultures of democracy

Public Culture

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 151-173

  Calhoun, Craig ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34249862451     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2006-028     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. Nationalism is a "discursive formation" in Foucault's sense. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge,
2. trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1969) and Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1977). Nationalism is a way of talking that inescapably exceeds the bounds of any single usage, that endlessly generates more talk, and that embodies tensions and contradictions. It is not simply a settled position but a cluster of rhetoric and reference that enables people to articulate positions which are not settled and to take stands in opposition to each other on basic issues in society and culture. Nationalist rhetoric provides the modern era with a constitutive framework for the identification of collective subjects, both the protagonists of historical struggles and those who experience history and by whose experience it can be judged good or bad, progress or regress or stagnation. In this, nationalism most resembles another great discursive formation, also constitutive for modernity - individualism.
3. See Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
4. The status of this hyphen is subject to considerable controversy. It is common to speak of nations without distinguishing the state from the ostensibly integrated population associated with it. This is in fact hard to avoid without pedantry, and while I shall at certain points make clear that I mean one or the other, like most writers I shall not consistently make clear that the relationship between national identity or integration and state authority or structure is not stable or consistent. As a discursive formation, nationalism continually reproduces the idea that there should be a link between nation and state as well as various forms and dimensions of national identity, integration, distinction, and conflict.
5. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 41.
6. Of course it is worth recalling that the 1648 Peace of Westphalia did not transform the world overnight into one of strongly institutionalized nation-states and international relations. It is more a myth or symbol for the project of remaking the world in these terms than a token of such achievement. See Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London, New York: Verso, 2003).
7. Buchanan, "Rawls's Law of Peoples: Rules for a Vanished Westphalian World," Ethics 110 (2000): 697-721.
8. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971);
9. and Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
10. See also Charles R. Beitz, "Rawls's Law of Peoples," Ethics 110 (2000): 669-96;
11. and Rex Martin and David Reidy, eds., Rawls's Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
12. By encompassing I mean to echo Louis Dumont's argument about the ways in which culture may bring together dimensions that cannot be logically integrated. National cultures often encompass different subcultures without integrating them, or encompass logically contradictory values, creating nonetheless a sense in which they belong as parts of the larger whole.
13. See Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, trans. Mark Sainsbury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
14. The best and most careful of such cosmopolitan theoretical visions come from Jürgen Habermas and David Held. See, for example, Habermas, Inclusion of the Other, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo DeGreiff (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998);
15. and Held, Democracy and the Global Order (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).
16. See also essays in Daniele Archibugi and Held, Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1995);
17. Archibugi, Held, and Martin Köhler, Re-Imagining Political Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998);
18. Archibugi, Debating Cosmopolitcs (London: Verso, 2003);
19. and Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
20. These cosmopolitan visions are clearly Kantian; for elaboration of that heritage, see James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). My reference here is mainly to these more political theories of cosmopolitanism, not to the accounts of vernacular cosmopolitanism in which some anthropologists and historians have urged us to look at the more concrete and often local transactions and cultural productions in which people actually forge relations with each other across lines of difference. See Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Cosmopolitanisms," Public Culture 12 (2000): 577-89. In a sense, I pursue in this essay a meeting point between these two perspectives, one that I think is impossible to discern if one focuses only on transcending the nation, imagining the world mainly globally at large and relating this to the local and immediate rather than emphasizing the importance of the mediating institutions of which nations and states are among the most important.
21. See Craig Calhoun, Cosmopolitanism and Belonging (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
22. Nationalism figures prominently as an example of categorical identities in which each individual figures as an equivalent token of the larger type, But this does not exhaust the ways in which national culture matters to the production of solidarity. Common language and frameworks of meaning, for example, may integrate people without suggesting that they are equivalent. Common projects create alliances among otherwise dissimilar people. Communities understand their solidarity to be embeddedness in webs of relationships as well as categorical distinctions from other communities. Of course, culture may also figure as ideology underwriting (for better or worse), functional integration among national institutions or nationally organized markets, and direct exercise of power. See Calhoun, Cosmopolitanism and Belonging.
23. Martha Nussbaum can serve as an exemplar of such "extreme cosmopolitans" reasoning from the ethical equivalence of individuals. See her For Love of Country (Boston: Beacon, 1996). See also Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
24. and Craig Calhoun, "Belonging in the Cosmopolitan Imaginary," Ethnicities 3 (2003): 531-53.
25. See Richard Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), chap. 2.
26. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, writing in The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), are thus right about invention but wrong about its implications.
27. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963);
28. Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1968).
29. This side of nationalism is emphasized by institutionalist theories such as the world polity theory of John Meyer and a range of colleagues; for an early statement that helped launch the perspective and informed discussion of institutional isomorphism, see Meyer and Brian Rowan, "Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony," American Journal of Sociology 83 (1977): 340-63.
30. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), on horizons of moral judgment and the idea of self-transcendence.
31. This is increasingly contested, both by the writing of global history and by efforts to internationalize national histories. For an example of the latter, see Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006),
32. and the reflections on internationalizing American history in his edited collection, Rethinking America in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
33. Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 34.
34. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, "Difference and Disjuncture in the Global Cultural Economy," Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 1-24;
35. and the journal's special issue on alternative modernities (Dilip Gaonkar, ed.), Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999).
36. Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.
37. I have elaborated on this theme and on the language of category and network at more length in Calhoun, Nationalism, esp. chap. 3. My usage is indebted to the anthropological distinction of clan and lineage, and to the specific formulation of S. F. Nadel, The Theory of Social Structure (London: Cohen and West, 1965).
38. The popularity of mixed-race self-identifications in the U.S. Census of 2000 is an example, but of course the categories to which people feel they belong are not all ethnic; they may be based on a variety of membership criteria from class and religion to sexual orientation or occupation.
39. The Discovery of India not only integrates the Vedas, the Gitas, the Mughals, and the Congress Party into a single national story, it does this both in a style influenced by Western narrative history and in English, the language of British colonialism that India made also one of her own.
40. See Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949).
41. Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1998).
42. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951).
43. The useful concept of illth - the negative counterparts to wealth, such as environmental degradation - was introduced in 1860 by John Ruskin; see the title essay in Unto This Last and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1986). It remains inadequately integrated into economic thought. Negative externalities addresses related problems but more narrowly from the perspective of the individual economic actor.