Rethinking Nationalism And Ethnicity

While there has been a spate of books concerned with race and ethnicity in Europe more specifically, this timely volume offers a broader perspective and positions issues of identity, ethnicity, multiculturalism, xenophobia, regionalism and ethnonationalism within the wider contexts of trans- and supranationalism. With the weakening of welfare states and the homogenizing influences of globalization, nations within both Eastern and Western Europe are discovering that the battlefield of political action is being redefined, and as a result emotional alliances threaten to bypass the democratic systems of the past. Offering fresh insights that are both empirically and theoretically informed, this book illuminates the processes and consequences of these new developments. In particular, it reviews Marx's, Durkheim's and Simmel's theories on nationalism and national identity, and presents case studies of Belgium, Italy's Northern League, right-wing intellectual production in Russia, and much more.

"A welcome and brilliantly crafted overview of this field. It represents a major advance in our understanding of how ethnicity works in specific social and cultural contexts. The second edition will be an invaluable resource for both students and researchers alike." - John Solomos, City University, London The first edition of Rethinking Ethnicity quickly established itself as a popular text for students of ethnicity and ethnic relations. This fully revised and updated second edition adds new material on globalization and the recent debates about whether ethnicity matters and ethnic groups actually exist. While ethnicity - as a social construct - is imagined, its effects are far from imaginary. Jenkins draws on specific examples to demonstrate the social mechanisms that construct ethnicity and the consequences for people′s experience. Drawing upon rich case study material, the book discusses such issues as: the ′myth′ of the plural society; postmodern notions of difference; the relationship between ethnicity, ′race′ and nationalism; ideology; language; violence and religion; and the everyday construction of national identity.

Globalization and migration are pressuring nations around the world to change their ethnic self-definition and to treasure diversity not homogeneity. This book explores the growing gap between modern nations and their dominant ethnic groups.

Multicultural Riddle is a comprehensive exploration of all the issues that shape our search for a multicultural society. The book examines how we can establish a state of justice and equality between and among three groups: those who believe in a unified national culture, those who trace their culture to their ethnic identity, and those who view their religion as their culture. To solve the multicultural riddle, one must rethink national identity, ethnicity and the role of religion in the modern world.

Nationalism, national identity, and ethnicity are cultural issues in contemporary Western societies. Problems in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Turkey, Poland, Croatia, the Ukraine, Hungary, and Bulgaria illustrate both large-scale internal variations in these phenomena as well as their cross-national relevance for teaching, research, and educational development on such subjects as multiculturalism, ethnic diversity, and socialization.

Bound by Distance takes its place among a growing body of scholarship the goal of which is to challenge the kind of thinking that reproduces the "West" as a stable and homogenous political and discursive entity. The Italian nation, with its peculiar process of formation, the continuous tensions between its own northern and southern regions, and its history of emigration, provides an important case for complicating and reassessing concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance. The author analyzes the interactive space of the history of Italian state formation, Italian subaltern literature, Italian emigrant writing, and the current situation of North African and Asian immigrants to Italy, in order to contest the "feigned homogeneity" of the Italian nation and to complicate and reassess concepts of national, racial, economic, and cultural dominance.

"Despite a quarter-century of constructivist theorizing in the social sciences and humanities, ethnic groups continue to be conceived as entities and cast as actors. Journalists, policymakers, and researchers routinely frame accounts of ethnic, racial, and national conflict as the struggles of internally homogeneous, externally bounded ethnic groups, races, and nations. In doing so, they unwittingly adopt the language of participants in such struggles, and contribute to the reification of ethnic groups. In this timely and provocative volume, Rogers BrubakerÑwell known for his work on immigration, citizenship, and nationalismÑchallenges this pervasive and commonsense Ògroupism.Ó But he does not simply revert to standard constructivist tropes about the fluidity and multiplicity of identity. Once a bracing challenge to conventional wisdom, constructivism has grown complacent, even cliched. That ethnicity is constructed is commonplace; this volume provides new insights into how it is constructed. By shifting the analytical focus from identity to identifications, from groups as entities to group-making projects, from shared culture to categorization, from substance to process, Brubaker shows that ethnicity, race, and nation are not things in the world but perspectives on the world: ways of seeing, interpreting, and representing the social world."