Suchergebnisse

Power and weakness of civic nationalism in Switzerland, 1848-2014 / Regula Argast -- Squaring the South Slavic circle: ethnicity, nationhood, and citizenship in Yugoslavia / Andrew Wachtel and Igor Štiks-- Civic constitutional nationalism in Egypt: revisiting Egypt's liberal experiment, 1907-1952 / Israel Gershoni -- Building the Swahili nation: civic nationalism in Tanzania / Gregory H. Maddox -- Ethno-nationalism travels incognito in Singapore / Michael D. Barr -- National ties entwined: civic and ethnic elements in New Zealand identity / David Pearson -- Unusual, often implicit, yet surprisingly effective: civic nationalism in Brazil / Roderick J. Barman -- Homogenizing and demarcating America: civic nationalism in the United States, 1774-1861 / Jasper M. Trautsch.

The Genesis of America investigates the ways in which US foreign policy contributed to the formation of an American national consciousness. Interpreting American nationalism as a process of external demarcation, Jasper M. Trautsch argues that, for a sense of national self to emerge, the US needed to be disentangled from its most important European reference points: Great Britain and France. As he shows, foreign-policy makers could therefore promote American nationalism by provoking foreign crises and wars with these countries, hereby creating external threats that would bind the fragile union together. By reconstructing how foreign policy was thus used as a nation-building instrument, Trautsch provides an answer to the puzzling question of how Americans - lacking a shared history and culture of their own and justifying their claim for independent nationhood by appeals to universal rights - could develop a sense of particularity after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War

In view of the fact that national maps were circulated in the 19th and early 20th century to strengthen people's national consciousness, this article inquires whether the six EC founding states have in turn been using maps of Europe or the territory encompassed by the EC members since the 1950s in order to promote a sense of supranational community among the citizenry. Postage stamps, mass-produced by the national postal administrations, serve as the source material for this investigation. The analysis, however, reveals that the four largest countries initially made little use of cartographic representations of Europe. Only in the course of the eastward enlargement of the EU did European maps begin to appear frequently on stamps. One explanation for this surprising finding is the fact that the European unification process aimed at territorial expansion right from the start, but that maps have the contrary effect of implying that borders are fixed. It was therefore only when the European division was overcome that European maps were increasingly used to represent the continent as a closed space.

Die in diesem Artikel vorgestellten Überlegungen sind das Ergebnis breitflächiger empirischer Untersuchungen von Zeitungen und Zeitschriften aus den USA, Kanada, Großbritannien und Frankreich. Sie rekonstruieren also die Verwendungen des Begriffs in denjenigen Ländern, die sich seit Entstehen des Begriffs als 'westlich' verstanden haben und deren Zugehörigkeit zum 'Westen' kaum je in Frage gestellt worden ist. Es wird also die Binnenperspektive 'des Westens' dargelegt. Da das Anliegen dieses Artikels konzeptionell ist, wird darauf verzichtet, Quellenmaterial zu zitieren, stattdessen nur auf weiterführende Literatur verwiesen, die die Sachverhalte, auf die in der Analyse des Begriffs des Westens Bezug genommen wird, näher erläutern.