Fate Of The Nation

Are Nation-states obsolete? Are multination states viable? Can we really create powerful supranational institutions? These are the questions that celebrated authors and specialists attempt to answer in this important collection of articles. The work contains theoretical essays and case studies by philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and governmental analysts that provide state of the art analyses of the situation of the nation-state as it is developing all over the world in the new millennium. There are different concepts of nationhood and different forms of national consciousness: ethnic, civic, cultural, socio-political and diasporic. There are also different ways for nations to be present on any given territory; as immigrant groups, as extensions of neighbouring national majorities, as minority nations or as majority nations. There are also different policies adopted toward different groups: bilingualism, multiculturalism, interculturalism, collective rights, etc. Finally, there are different sorts of political arrangements: nation-state, multination state, confederation of sovereign states, multinational federation, federation of nation-states, supranational institutions, etc. The enormous complexity of these issues explain why nations, nationalism and nation-states have been so difficult to understand. The theoretical essays contained in this volume are sensitive to all those issues. The authors examine the foundations of nationalist thinking and the justifications behind the nation-state model. They also reflect upon the nation building policies, politics of recognition and issues related to globalization. The case studies investigate countries or regions such as Ireland, Scotland, Catalonia, the Balkans, Russia, USA, Finland, India, Indonesia, the European Union and Canada.

The fate of a nation hangs in the balance. Israel cannot lose even a single battle. One defeat would mean the destruction of the tiny Jewish state. Not waiting to be attacked by the Arab forces massing on its borders, Israel strikes first. Hundreds of tanks sweep across the borders, punching deep into the enemy defenses, seeking out the enemy tanks. The infantry follows behind, assaulting the fortifications, clearing the way for the advance to continue. A bare six days later, the war was over. A thousand tanks lay strewn across the desert. Tens of thousands of soldiers lay dead and wounded. Israel had survived, but the Arabs vowed that there would be no peace with Israel. Battlefront brings this conflict from the Cold War to life in a game where you command your troops in miniature on a realistic battlefield.

WHAT DOES OUR FUTURE HOLD? In these uncertain times, this is the question on many South Africans' lips. Will we become more prosperous and less divided as a nation or remain hugely unequal and generally poor? Will the ANC split or eventually be forced into an alliance with the EFF after 2019? Could the DA rule the country after the 2024 elections? In Fate of the Nation Jakkie Cilliers develops three scenarios for our immediate future and beyond: Bafana Bafana, Nation Divided and Mandela Magic. Cilliers says the ANC is currently paralysed by the power struggle between what he calls the Traditionalists and the Reformers. It is this power struggle that has led to the inept leadership, policy confusion and poor service delivery that has plagued the country in recent years. Key to which scenario could become our reality is who will be elected to the ANC's top leadership at the party's national conference in December 2017. Whichever group wins there will determine what our future looks like. This is a book for all concerned South Africans.

New interpretations of historic episodes in international relations result from a fresh analysis of national security policies and the demands and constraints imposed upon their development by the international system.

The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more "dispassionate" notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists—and Democratic campaign strategists. The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on "the issues," they lose. That's why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt—and only one Republican has failed in that quest. In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Elections are decided in the marketplace of emotions, a marketplace filled with values, images, analogies, moral sentiments, and moving oratory, in which logic plays only a supporting role. Westen shows, through a whistle-stop journey through the evolution of the passionate brain and a bravura tour through fifty years of American presidential and national elections, why campaigns succeed and fail. The evidence is overwhelming that three things determine how people vote, in this order: their feelings toward the parties and their principles, their feelings toward the candidates, and, if they haven't decided by then, their feelings toward the candidates' policy positions. Westen turns conventional political analyses on their head, suggesting that the question for Democratic politics isn't so much about moving to the right or the left but about moving the electorate. He shows how it can be done through examples of what candidates have said—or could have said—in debates, speeches, and ads. Westen's discoveries could utterly transform electoral arithmetic, showing how a different view of the mind and brain leads to a different way of talking with voters about issues that have tied the tongues of Democrats for much of forty years—such as abortion, guns, taxes, and race. You can't change the structure of the brain. But you can change the way you appeal to it. And here's how…

How partisan politics lead to the Civil War What brought about the Civil War? Leading historian Michael F. Holt convincingly offers a disturbingly contemporary answer: partisan politics. In this brilliant and succinct book, Holt distills a lifetime of scholarship to demonstrate that secession and war did not arise from two irreconcilable economies any more than from moral objections to slavery. Short-sighted politicians were to blame. Rarely looking beyond the next election, the two dominant political parties used the emotionally charged and largely chimerical issue of slavery's extension westward to pursue reelection and settle political scores, all the while inexorably dragging the nation towards disunion. Despite the majority opinion (held in both the North and South) that slavery could never flourish in the areas that sparked the most contention from 1845 to 1861-the Mexican Cession, Oregon, and Kansas-politicians in Washington, especially members of Congress, realized the partisan value of the issue and acted on short-term political calculations with minimal regard for sectional comity. War was the result. Including select speeches by Lincoln and others, The Fate of Their Country openly challenges us to rethink a seminal moment in America's history.

Politics was once regarded as an activity which could give human societies control over their fate. However, there is now a deep pessimism about the ability of human beings to control anything very much, least of all through politics. This new fatalism about the human condition claims that we are living in the iron cages erected by vast impersonal forces arising from globalization and technology: a society that is both anti-political and unpolitical, a society without hope or the means either to imagine or promote an alternative future. It reflects the disillusion of political hopes in liberal and socialist utopias in the twentieth century and a widespread disenchantment with the grand narratives of the Enlightenment about reason and progress, and with modernity itself. The most characteristic expression of this disenchantment is the endless discourses on endism - the end of history, the end of ideology, the end of the nation-state, the end of authority, the end of government, the end of the public realm, the end of politics itself - all have been proclaimed in recent years. Andrew Gamble's new book argues against the fatalism implicit in so many of these discourses, as well as against the fatalism that has always been present in many of the central discourses of modernity. It sets out a defence of politics and the political, explains why we cannot do without politics, and probes the complex relationship between politics and fate, and the continuing and necessary tension between them. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of politics, public affairs and political thought.

"The Fate of America" examines the national character of the United States against the backdrop of its history, popular culture, and media. Michael Gellert suggests that the deterioration of America's "heroic ideal," the heart of its national character, is responsible for the country's deepening social ills and the erosion of its vital institutions. He calls for a spiritual and intellectual renaissance and a renewed sense of national purpose in order to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.