Suchergebnisse

AbstractUsing Slavic examples, the article looks at the nationalism/security nexus present today between the birth of ethnicities (early middle ages) and the birth of nationalism (eighteenth century). I discuss how Slavic ethnicity emerged in Greek and Roman security thinking. Others were classified in terms ofethnoiand were then interpellated into this self‐understanding. If ethnicity is an identity for the Other, then nationalism is an identity for the Self. It becomes a security concern not to order the Other polity's identity, as did the Byzantines, but to see to it that groups that may threaten your own nationalism – minorities, imperial subjects – cannot embrace nationalism. The policy of denying nationhood to minorities must be understood amongst other things as security policy. The organic understanding of the nation as young and vital demonstrates a third interstice between security and nationalism. If the young and vital nation is to grow and expand at the expense of the old and tired, then the polity that represents itself as a young and vital nation is by dint of that representation alone a security threat against those that they represent as old and tired. Finally, I discuss how this theme is played out in today's Russia

Since the reign of Peter the Great, Russia has identified itself in opposition to Europe. In the late 1980s, Michael Gorbachev and associates forged a liberal representation of Europe and initiated a Western-oriented foreign policy. Against this westernizing or liberal representation of Europe stood what was at first a makeshift group of old Communists and right-wing nationalists, who put forward an alternative representation that began to congeal around the idea that the quintessentially Russian trait was to have a strong state. This article traces how this latter position consolidated into a full-fledged xenophobic nationalist representation of Europe, which marginalized first other forms of nationalism and then, particularly since 2013, liberal representations of Europe. The official Russian stance is now that Russia itself is True Europe, a conservative great power that guards Europe's true Christian heritage against the False Europe of decadence and depravity to its west.

Russia defines itself as a Great Power in relation to Europe and the West. The first part of the article traces how, since 1991, a story about greatness centred on being part of contemporary European civilization has given way to a story of how Russia is great by being superior to a Europe that is now seen as rotten and decadent. The former story spelled cooperation with Europe and the West, where the latter spells confrontation. The second part argues that Russia's superiority complex is unsustainable. It is hard to see how, in the face of the formative structural pressure of the state system, Russia will be able to sustain its superiority complex. A state that does not order itself in such a way that it may either gain recognition as a Great Power by forcing its way and/or by being emulated by others, is unlikely to maintain that status. The costs of maintaining Great-Power status without radical political and economic change seem to be increasing rapidly. If Russia wants to maintain its status, an about-turn is needed. Such a turn may in itself be no solution, though, for if Russia does not do anything about the root causes of its perceived inferiority to Europe, then the Russian cyclical shifting from a Westernizing to a xenophobic stance will not be broken. (International Affairs (Oxford) / SWP)

- ; Taking its clue from Finnish experiences with identity politics, this lecture introduces the concept of collective identity. Collective identity is about forging an acting 'we'. It constitutes the polis, and is therefore basic to any politics. Constituting the polis is a relational act: the group in question constitutes itself by drawing up and maintaining boundaries towards other groups. Drawing on these insights, the bulk of the lecture discusses European identity in term of Europe's relations to some of its constituting others. Pointing to the importance of not sealing itself off from its Muslim citizens and neighbours, the lecture ends with a plea for Turkish EU membership.

Contra Jackson, I am sceptical of splitting the category of phronesis into aesthetic and normative knowledge, for it invites a Kantian understanding of aesthetics as an exercise in detachment. I see scientific disciplines as genres held together by mutual disciplining, which means that they share a certain style. It is hard for me to see how systematic knowledge may emerge without there being some kind of generalisable intent in play. The scholarly ethos focuses on exactly this element of knowledge production. Sociology and ethics conspire to maintain science's monopoly on systematic knowledge production.

In this written version of his inaugural lecture for the Montague Burton chair in IR at the LSE, Iver Neumann takes stock of International Relations understood as a social science. Having paid homage to predecessors, in the first part of the lecture, he detects and regrets a certain unwillingness within the discipline to address the full universe of pertinent cases. Inspecting the toolbox of the discipline, he finds things to be satisfactory where data collection, theory and meta-theory are concerned, but traces a glaring lack of attention to data collection method among qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) scholars. In the lecture's second part, Neumann draws on Marcel Mauss's idea that human agency draws on a constellation of social, psychological and physiological sources and on Emile Durkheim's insistence that a social science has to privilege social sources of agency, without neglecting sources of other kinds. A nutshell review of relevant trends within psychology and evolutionary biology highlights work that competes with the discipline's own. While insisting, with Durkheim, on the need to privilege social causes, Neumann calls for more work that explores the possible compatibility of new findings within these non-social disciplines and International Relations.