Discuss. Well, only if you want to. I
ask the question because it is the topic that has taken me away from
this blog for longer than I would have liked, along with getting back
into the swing of things post-Liberia and of course the approach of
Christmas. Back now though.
I am completing an M.S.c. at BirkbeckCollege, University of London, at the moment, and have been studying a
fascinating set of debates around nationalism and ethnic identity.
What makes a nation, and do we all have the same idea of what that means? Where do our ethnic and other identities come from and how do they shape what we do?
Big philosophical debates but the
question I have been researching this month has been the extent to
which nationalism can be understood using different analytical
lenses. Specifically, the lenses adopted by 'ethno-symbolists', such
as Anthony Smith, or 'modernists' such as Birkbeck's own Eric Hobsbawm, who sadly died recently.
I am not about to repeat the depth of
the research here, save to say that ethno-symbolist perspectives view nationalism
as being the latest expression of a set of factors that have roots
going back many centuries, drawing primarily on religious and cultural
developments for each social group. Modernists, on the other hand,
take their starting point as more related to the growth of the modern
nation state emerging out of the period of industrialisation in the
1700 and 1800s.
They both have a valid perspective, of
course. Without nations, or the idea of what that would mean, you
can't by definition have nationalism. But to discount all historic
factors which have moulded societies simply because they occurred
under a different governance system, generally monarchies drawing
their legitimacy from religion, seems to me dangerously close to
trying to fit a complex situation into the straightjacket of a
pre-cooked theory.
Either way, the collection of thoughts
and research on these questions are not simply academic hot air. They
have very real relevance to how we can understand the world we are
in, and nowhere is this more pressing than in regions of armed
conflict, where the narrative on both sides is usually framed in
nationalist or quasi-nationalist terms. Yet what struck me recently
was a comment by the person leading this course, a newly qualified
PhD who clearly has huge enthusiasm for the subject, which was that
until recently these questions had largely been neglected by the
mainstream of academic debate.
I would add to that the mainstream of
policy making, which at best has limited the likelihood of success
for peacebuilding efforts in some of the most intractable conflicts
in the world. At worse it may have resulted in real harm, as projects
have been set up and implemented in ignorance of the subtle nuances
of the situation they were intended to improve.
How do we effectively connect the
reflective academic with the time pressured policy maker and make it
work? Now there's a question.
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