Search results for ""Author Alain Dieckhoff""

Published in English for the first time, this book defends the idea that nationhood remains a central aspect of modernity. After the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the following decade confirmed this hypothesis with the rise of independence movements in Europe (in Scotland and Flanders) and the persistence of claims to nationhood the world over (for example, in Kurdistan and Tibet). A dual perspective informs Dieckhoff's analysis: to understand the hidden social and cultural underpinnings of post-Cold War identity dynamics, from Kosovo to Catalonia and from Flanders to Corsica, and to examine how societies can meet the challenge of national pluralism. Finding liberalism, republicanism and multiculturalism unequal to this task, he argues that only by building 'multi-nation' democratic states can the issues be properly addressed and secessions prevented. Contemporary liberal discourse often treats nationalism as an archaic aberration -- as a primitive form of tribalism astray in the modern world.Dieckhoff's sensitive and clear-headed analysis shows why nationalism is in fact a fundamental facet of modernity, which must be dealt with as such by states vulnerable to breakup.

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The vulnerability which is the lot of any nation without a state was experienced in a particularly extreme way by the Jews. With the destitution and persecution of many Jewish communities in the 19th century, especially in Eastern Europe, Jews demanded a solution to their uprootedness. This required a state. Alain Dieckhoff recounts the tortuous ordeal through which the Jews reacted to the challenge of modernity. While some contributed to the development of capitalism and put their talents at the service of the Western European states, others threw themselves into revolutionary movements. Yet others imagined ways of "re-nationalising" Jews by transforming them into a nation. Thus the Jews were formidable experimenters who participated in causes with contradictory agendas: assimilation (bourgeois or socialist) or nationalism. The text focuses on Zionism, whose ultimate objective was the creation of a sovereign state for the Jews in Palestine. This required the invention of the Jewish nation. Such an objective meant several things: building a national language, defining a secularized and territorialized Jewish identity, and using military power. This was a difficult enterprise, as the national project was faced with the persistence of communitarianism. But the enterprise was at least partly successful: this process of politicization makes Israel a paradigmatic example of the invention of a nation-state, the main focus of this work.

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Interest in the study of national identity as a collective phenomenon is a growing concern among the social and political sciences. This book addresses the scholarly interest in examining the origins of ideologies and social practices that give historical meaning, cohesion and uniqueness to modern national communities. It focuses on the various routes taken towards the construction of cultural authenticity as an inspirational purpose of nation-building and reveals the diversity of the themes, practices and symbols used to encourage self-identification and communality. Among the techniques explored are the dramatization of suffering and tragedy, the exaltation of heroes and deeds, the evocation of landscape, nature and the arts and the delimitation of collective values to be pursued during reconstruction in post-war periods.

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