Suchergebnisse

Ethnicity; political aspects; Turkey

Why African Americans do not rebel? Why is there no armed insurrection of African Americans across the USA, especially in cities and states where they make up almost half of the population? In many parts of the world, ethnic, racial, and religious groups that are much smaller in size, much less disadvantaged socioeconomically and politically, and with relatively fewer historical grievances than African Americans, launched armed insurrections that lasted for decades. The quiescence of African Americans is a momentous puzzle if one subscribes to grievance-based theories of violent ethnic insurgencies (e.g., Gurr 1970). There are more than 40 million African Americans in the USA, which makes them a more populous ethnic group or a potential nation than any Eastern European nation in the European Union. Yet, approximately 40 million African Americans, despite their high level of collective consciousness and multifaceted grievances, did not produce as much armed insurgency as less than three million Basques in Spain have, to expand a comparison Manuel Vogt (4) briefly alludes to. What accounts for this dramatic difference?

How compatible is Turkey's grand strategy with the grand strategies of global great powers? This article briefly summarizes principles of Turkish grand strategy, both from a descriptive and normative point of view, and then proceeds to outline and compare the grand strategies of five great powers that are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). While there are some observable conflicts between Turkey and the French, Russian, and American proxies in Syria, Libya, and the Caucasus, there are no outstanding militarized conflicts between Turkey and the British proxies. China is also positioned against Turkey in several international conflicts including Syria, and the intense persecution of Turkic Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang adds another dimension of latent Chinese-Turkish conflicts. The article provisionally concludes that the Turkish grand strategy seems to be most compatible, or least incompatible, with the British grand strategy, followed by the U.S. grand strategy, among the five permanent members of the UNSC, whereas Turkish and French and especially Russian grand strategies seem particularly incompatible.

AbstractDoes religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the "Chosen People" as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious observance on national identification; and religiously based "civilizations" transcending nationalisms. Western Christian experience with nationalism is not generalizable due to the institutional autonomy and supranational organization of the Catholic Church. Western European nationalisms were premised on religious sectarian homogeneity, and the homogenous "confessional state" served as the template of European nation-states. Furthermore, I argue that the late medieval eradication of Muslims and Jews across Western Europe prefigured sectarian and ethnonational purges of the following centuries. Finally, I argue that different configurations of religion and nationalism depend on two critical conditions: the degree to which the dominant religious tradition is doctrinally supraethnic and institutionally transnational, and the religious identity of the main adversary in the constitutive conflict that culminated in national statehood. The crises of Marxism and liberalism provide the context for the resurgence of religion and nationalism at present.

Based on a critical reading of three recent books, I argue that the exclusion of Jews and Muslims, the two major non-Christian religious groups in Europe and the Americas, has continued on the basis of ethnic, racial, ideological, and quasi-rational justifications, instead of or in addition to religious justifications, since the Reformation. Furthermore, I argue that the institutionally orchestrated collective stigmatization and persecution of Jews and Muslims predated the Reformation, going back to the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III in 1215. The notion of Corpus Christianum and Observant movements in the late Middle Ages, the elective affinity of liberalism and racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the divergence in religious norms at present are critically evaluated as potential causes of ethnoreligious exclusion.