Suchergebnisse

In a departure from the unquestioning liberal consensus that has governed discussions of nationalism for the last quarter of the 20th century, Anthony Marx exposes the hidden underside of Western nationalism. Arguing that the true history of the nation began 200 years earlier, in the early modern era, he shows how state builders set about deliberately constructing a sense of national solidarity to support their burgeoning authority. Key to this process was the transfer of power from local to central rulers; the most suitable vehicle for effecting this transfer was religion. Religious intolerance, specifically the exclusion of religious minorities from the nascent state, provided the glue that bound together the remaining populations. Exposing the West's idealization of its exclusionary past, Marx forcefully undermines the distinction between a Western nationalism that is civic and tolerant by definition and an oriental nationalism founded on ethnicity and intolerance.

Why was official racial domination enforced in South Africa and the United States, while nothing comparable to apartheid or Jim Crow was constructed in Brazil? Slavery and colonialism established the pattern of early discrimination in all three cases, and yet the postabolition racial orders diverged. Miscegenation influenced later outcomes, as did economic competition, but neither was decisive. Interpretations of these historical and economic factors were shaped by later developments. This article argues that postabolition racial orders were significantly shaped by the processes of nation-state building in each context. In South Africa and the United States ethnic or regional "intrawhite" conflict impeding nation-state consolidation was contained by racial domination. Whites were unified by excluding blacks, in an ongoing dynamic that took different forms. Continued competition and tensions between the American North and South or South Africa's English and Afrikaners were repeatedly resolved or diminished through further entrenchment of Jim Crow or apartheid. With no comparable conflict requiring reconciliation in Brazil, no official racial domination was constructed, although discrimination continued. The dynamics of nation-state building are then reviewed to explain variations in black mobilization and the end of apartheid and Jim Crow.

While scholarly discussions of citizenship, social movements and racial identity-formation have generally remained distinct, these social institutions and processes are intimately connected. Official policies of exclusion from citizenship according to race have drawn boundaries solidifying subordinated racial identity, which then forms the basis for collective action in response to shifting state policies. Forms of domination are thus two-edged; exclusion of officially specified groups has the unintended consequence of defining, legitimating and provoking group identity and mobilization, forging struggles for inclusion between state agents and emerging political actors. This dynamic has generally been overlooked by those theorists of social movements, who have focused on relative deprivation, resource mobilization and responses to political opportunities, without explaining the related process of identity formation.