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This comprehensive book focuses on the challenges facing Ukraine as a newly emerged state after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like all countries with no recent history of independence, Ukraine had to invent or recreate effective political institutions, reintroduce a market economy, and reorient its foreign policy. These tasks were impossible to accomplish without resolving the question of national identity. In this balanced and clear-eyed assessment, a team of U.S. and Ukrainian specialists explores the external and internal dimensions of national identity and statehood, providing a wealth of information previously unavailable to Western scholars. Arguing that the search for national identity is a multidimensional process, the authors show that it reflects the realities of the dawning twenty-first century. Paradoxically, this quest must cope with the both the weakening of state boundaries caused by globalization and the strengthening of the national model as new countries emerge from the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. After providing the historical context of Ukraine's international debut, the book analyzes the complexities of constructing a national identity. The authors explore questions of ethnic relations and regionalism, the development of political values and attitudes, mass-elite relations, the cultural background of economic strategies, gender issues, and the threat of organized crime to emergent civil society.
How to define a Chinese national identity remains as hotly contested a question among today's Chinese citizens as it has been among foreign observers. This volume brings together ten new essays by an interdisciplinary group of leading sinologists and offers a comprehensive framework for understanding the nature of Chinese national identity in past and contemporary settings.
The author follows the debates beyond the unexpected unification of the country in 1989/90 and analyses the most recent trends in German historiography, hoping that it doesn't return to the stifling homogeneity that characterized it before the 1960s.
Why is English national identity so enigmatic and so elusive? Why, unlike the Scots, Welsh, Irish and most of continental Europe, do the English find it so difficult to say who they are? The Making of English National Identity, first published in 2003, is a fascinating exploration of Englishness and what it means to be English. Drawing on historical, sociological and literary theory, Krishan Kumar examines the rise of English nationalism and issues of race and ethnicity from earliest times to the present day. He argues that the long history of the English as an imperial people has, as with other imperial people like the Russians and the Austrians, developed a sense of missionary nationalism which in the interests of unity and empire has necessitated the repression of ordinary expressions of nationalism. Professor Kumar's lively and provocative approach challenges readers to reconsider their pre-conceptions about national identity and who the English really are.
Drawing on Freud, Mead, Erikson, Parsons and Habermas, William Bloom relates mass psychological processes to international relations.
Debates over the remote and beguiling Southern Kuril Islands have revealed a kaleidoscope of divergent and contradictory ideas, convictions, and beliefs on what constitutes the “national” identity of post-Soviet Russia. Forming part of an archipelago stretching from Kamchatka to Hokkaido, administered by Russia but claimed by Japan, these disputed islands offer new perspectives on the ways in which territorial visions of the nation are refracted, inverted, and remade in a myriad of different ways. At the Edge of the Nation provides a unique account of how the Southern Kurils have shaped the parameters of the Russian state and framed debates on the politics of identity in the post-Soviet era. By shifting the debate beyond a proliferation of Eurocentric and Moscow-focused writings, Paul B. Richardson reveals broad alternatives and possibilities for Russian identity in Asia. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Russia was suffering the fragmentation of empire and a sudden decline in its international standing, these disputed islands became symbolic of a much larger debate on self-image, nationalism, national space, and Russia’s place in world politics. When viewed through the prism of the Southern Kurils, ideas associated with the “border,” “state,” and “nation” become destabilized, uncovering new insights into state-society relations in modern Russia. At the Edge of the Nation explores how disparate groups of political elites have attempted to use these islands to negotiate enduring tensions within Russia’s identity, and traces how the destiny of these isolated yet evocative islands became irrecoverably bound to the destiny of Russia itself.
America was founded by settlers who brought with them a distinct culture including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of later immigrants came gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of immigrants, bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the "denationalization" of American élites. September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism, but already there are signs that this is fading. This book shows the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans.--From publisher description.
A volume in Cross National Research National identity has been the subject of much controversy and debate. Some have even suggested dropping the concept entirely. One group, Essentialists, argue that national identity is fixed, cultural, based on birth and ancestry. Another viewpoint is posited by Postmodernists who argue that national identity is malleable, invented or imagined. As alternatives, some have suggested that national identity is a hybrid of both Essentialist and Postmodernist views. And still others bypass this argument and suggest that national identity should be based on civic factors, such as shared values and norms about citizenship. While controversy and debate are healthy exercises in any science, at some point order must be established if science is to proceed. The present volume is based on the idea that national identity is an ideal-type concept; it does not completely capture reality, but is used for analytic purposes. In addition, rather than focusing on these theoretical debates, we pursue research with the idea that results from research will contribute to the field of national identity. Three areas of national identity are discussed: theoretical, national, and individual. Two chapters focus on the major theories about national identity, provide critiques, and make suggestions about the topic. In section two, six chapters provide case studies of national identity on Scotland, Ireland, Russia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Germany, and France. In section three, two case studies focus on immigrants and the challenges they face in forming their identities, especially identifying with their host countries-Belgium, and the United Kingdom. Several important conclusions may be gleaned from the contributions of the present volume. To begin with, while national identity is a slippery concept, if the field wishes to move beyond debate about fundamentals, it would be well advised to view the concept as an ideal-type as suggested by the great German scholar, Max Weber. Secondly, the case studies included in the present volume indicate that national identity is not only based on ethnicity and culture, but on such external factors as governance regimes and their changes, economic crises, wars and other forms of aggressive activity, and social demographic changes in a population. These factors affect a population at the national level. For immigrants at the individual level, developing national identity is greatly affected by four interrelated factors: 1) the degree to which they are accepted by members of the host society; 2) immigrants' language skills and physical appearances; 3) how well they are able to balance their host national identity, their ethnic identity, and acceptance of their native country; 4) and their generational status. Generally, at the national and individual levels, context and circumstances matter in developing national identity.
Guadeloupe (as well as Martinique, Guyane, and Réunion) is one of the former colonies of France that chose to remain tied to the mother country rather than seek independence following World War II. Through the 1946 law of political assimilation, these territories became départements d'outre-mer. Departmentalization, however, failed to bring about full social and economic equality. As political integration increased economic and commercial dependency on the metropole, the pressure of homogenization to the French model precipitated the loss of cultural autonomy. In the 1960s, an anticolonialist movement pushing for a change in political status appeared in Guadeoupe. The nationalist movement was rejuvenated in the 1970s by the selection of the Creole language as a symbol of political and cultural resistance to assimilation, conduit and container of an alternate ideology, and emblem of Guadeloupean identity and island specificity. With this resurgence of interest in kréyòl, a proliferation of associations, groups, and individuals became actively engaged in research and efforts to standardize and develop the language and to popularize its use in new public domains. This case study of the mouvement créole in Guadeloupe analyzes three key sites of conflict - the school, the media, and the political process - in relation to the local, regional, and national levels that structure these arenas. While the monograph is important in illuminating a new concept of identity for the region, the work singles out key differences between the Creole movement in Guadeloupe and its counterpoint, créolité, in Martinique. Both succeeded the earlier formulations of difference in the French Antilles - négritude and antillanité. The study is especially relevant in light of the current and very polemical debate concerning the introduction of an exam for Creole (the CAPES créole) in 2001 for secondary school teachers in France and in the four overseas departments. This educational directive was a response to the demand that Creole receive equal status with the other regional languages (e.g. Occitan, Breton, Basque) in France.