Liberal And Illiberal Nationalisms

How people construct their idea of home influences the types of nationalisms that emerge in various parts of the world. These nationalisms can be inclusive or exclusionary, tolerant or intolerant, peaceful or violent. In this important new book, Ray Taras provides a comprehensive analysis of the history and study of nationalism. He describes what happens when home is defined as empire (Russia and India), secessionist state (KwaZulu and Quebec), uninational Volkstaat (Germany and Israel), or transnational community (Islam and anti-Americanism). Finally, he explores the idea that the mantra of multiculturalism has fuelled conflicts over what home is and generates divisions within and between communities.

Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy highlights the use of religious identity to fuel the rise of illiberal, nationalist, and populist democracy. In Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy, David Elcott, C. Colt Anderson, Tobias Cremer, and Volker Haarmann present a pragmatic and modernist exploration of how religion engages in the public square. Elcott and his co-authors are concerned about the ways religious identity is being used to foster the exclusion of individuals and communities from citizenship, political representation, and a role in determining public policy. They examine the ways religious identity is weaponized to fuel populist revolts against a political, social, and economic order that values democracy in a global and strikingly diverse world. Included is a history and political analysis of religion, politics, and policies in Europe and the United States that foster this illiberal rebellion. The authors explore what constitutes a constructive religious voice in the political arena, even in nurturing patriotism and democracy, and what undermines and threatens liberal democracies. To lay the groundwork for a religious response, the book offers chapters showing how Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism can nourish liberal democracy. The authors encourage people of faith to promote foundational support for the institutions and values of the democratic enterprise from within their own religious traditions and to stand against the hostility and cruelty that historically have resulted when religious zealotry and state power combine. Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy is intended for readers who value democracy and are concerned about growing threats to it, and especially for people of faith and religious leaders, as well as for scholars of political science, religion, and democracy.

This edited volume addresses the set of politically challenging issues that the advent of populist movements raised for individual nation states and the whole Europe. Based on critical engagements with the extant scholarship in comparative politics, political philosophy, international relations, regional studies and critical geopolitics, this collection of chapters offers the interpretation of the contemporary populism as illiberal nationalism, and underscores its deeply political challenge to the post-political core of the EU project. The contributors discuss the deep transformations within the fabric of contemporary European societies that makes scholars rethink the post-Cold War hegemonic understanding of liberal democracy as the dominant paradigm destined to expand from its traditional hotbed in the West to other regions. This edited volume intends to stretch analysis beyond the conventional accounts of populism as an anti-elite and extra-institutional appeal to the general public for the sake of its mobilization against incumbent power holders, and look for more nuanced meanings inherent to this term. The chapters in this book were originally published in European Politics and Society and the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

First published in 1998, this volume emerged in the light of the resurgence of militant nationalism and racism since liberalism’s alleged triumph in 1989. We have to ask whether liberalism represents a bulwark against these deformations, or whether it is in fact their harbinger. Central themes explored in this interdisciplinary collection are: ¢ the position of the Romani, especially in central and eastern Europe ¢ the nature and scope of multiculturalism and its relation to conceptions of recognition ¢ the relations of liberalism to nationalism and racism ¢ the philosophical relation of ’the individual’ to national and other identities ¢ the debate between liberal and communitarian conceptions of personhood The book will thus be of particular interest to social and political scientists, philosophers and educationalists, as well as to anyone more generally concerned with contemporary issues of nationalism and racism.

From the acclaimed historian and New Yorker writer comes this urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century. At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths. With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history—and the history of the idea of the nation itself—while calling for a “new Americanism”: a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America’s past. Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how liberalism, the nation-state, and liberal nationalism, developed together. Illiberal nationalism, however, emerged in the United States after the Civil War—resulting in the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the restriction of immigration. Much of American history, Lepore argues, has been a battle between these two forms of nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the nation’s latest, bitter struggles over immigration. Defending liberalism, as This America demonstrates, requires making the case for the nation. But American historians largely abandoned that defense in the 1960s when they stopped writing national history. By the 1980s they’d stopped studying the nation-state altogether and embraced globalism instead. “When serious historians abandon the study of the nation,” Lepore tellingly writes, “nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.” But liberalism is still in there, Lepore affirms, and This America is an attempt to pull it out. “In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws.” A manifesto for a better nation, and a call for a “new Americanism,” This America reclaims the nation’s future by reclaiming its past.

In current political debate, liberalism and nationalism are often portrayed as one another's enemies. In contrast liberal nationalists believe that the tolerance and relative openness of liberal societies depends on the unifying force of a shared national identity. This multidisciplinary book explores the different forms that national identities can take, as well as their political consequences, drawing not only on philosophy but also on political science andpsychology. It argues that a liberal national identity must be cultural, rather than ethnic or merely civic, and examines the challenges involved in integrating immigrants, dual nationals, and otherminorities into the national community.