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Chapter 5 Minorities, Homelands and Methods LOUISA SCHEIN The relationship between nationalism and transnationalism As Zha Daojiong points out, there are different kinds of nationalism. We can talk about state or official or economic nationalism, which is primarily associated with government organs, official statements, official media, and policies. Or we can talk about popular or ethnic nationalism, which I want to deal with here. Nationalism shouldn’t only be associated with states and central governments; it can also be produced and disseminated by groups not associated with states and their boundaries. This is what I will call “deterritorialized nationalism.” Zha on different kinds of nationalism The term “nationalism” is often prefixed with various modifications in order to differentiate the scope of inquiry in one particular study from reference to a broad, and indeed global, phenomenon as the term tries to capture. Such prefixes can be references to a research object, one component of a country’s foreign policy, sponsors of projects to foster national consciousness, or seemingly apolitical projects that can be understood as part of a nationalistic agenda. Examples include “American nationalism,” “economic nationalism ” of many countries, “state nationalism” and/or “popular nationalism,” and connections between sports and nationalism (Fousek 2000, Bairner 2001). At one level, as is true in studies of “security,” arguably the most enduring concern in IR, adding more prefixes does not necessarily lead to conceptual clarity. At another level, there are perhaps few other choices than going with more prefixes, both as a result of the context for research and in response to the demand for precision in elaboration. When the prefix to “nationalism” is reference to a state or a civilization, subjectivity easily sets in. This is true of not just the conceptual gaps in the debates over the so-called “clash of civilizations” thesis (i.e., a purportedly Western civilization versus a Confucian civilization, which is understood to be in collaboration with an anti-West Islamic civilization). Research rhetoric about nationalism within the same geographic area—Europe—also makes a distinction between “good” and “bad” nationalisms. More importantly, such tendencies are not restricted to discussions about Cold War politics; they take on a far more historical dimension. The situation is similar to studies of “security,” another key concept in IR (see Miller 2001). Chine össze 3 2005.05.31 11:42 Page 99 The issue of scales is also important in describing different types of nationalism: In addition to official nationalism, we can identify the subnational and the supranational . The subnational includes minorities and other kinds of organizations that are below the level, or scale, of a certain state. Supranational refers to transnational identifications and movements. The nation and the state American literature on nationalism sometimes refers to the problem of the hyphen between “nation” and “state.” Conferences and workshops in the US are devoted to “interrogating the hyphen.” This phrase is a shorthand way of suggesting that there may not be a one-to-one correspondence between states or countries and practices and productions of nationalism. So to start with, let’s look at the issue of the hyphen. One article concerned with the exploration of this hyphen is Arjun Appadurai’s (1993, reproduced in 1996) “Patriotism and its Futures.” It has both had tremendous influence and been very heavily critiqued. Appadurai’s concept of transnationalism: loyalties that transcend or replace the nation-state If the territorial state has fixed political boundaries and a clear sense of the territory that belongs to it, questions arise about whether national loyalties are always associated with and directed at the territorial state. What other kinds of territories or nonterritories might be relevant in considering national loyalties? The first sentence of Appadurai ’s article—a very famous sentence—reads, “We need to think ourselves beyond the nation.” By this, he indicates a “postnational” research agenda that will allow scholars to address other forms of nonstate collective identity. He wants to consider which of these should also be considered nationalism. He wants to retain the idea of a national form, but he wants it to be divorced from the territorial state. I think that Appadurai should have written, “We need to think ourselves beyond the state” (Appadurai 1996: 158), because this article talks about types of loyalty that are no longer attached to the political unit of the state. He says, “while nations might continue to exist, the steady erosion of the capabilities of the nation-state to monopolize loyalty will encourage the spread of national forms...

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