220037 Nationalism in a Globalizing World: Theories, Approaches, and History from the 19th Century to the Present (S) (SoSe 2015)

Imagined as the trans-historical aim of politics, as the primordial, legitimizing framework of sovereignty, the state, social order, belonging and collective identity, the nation is a modern idea. The capacity to merge with diverse political ideas and social categories (region, language, religion, class, gender, ethnicity), and the concurrence of emancipatory promise and violent exclusion make nationalism a multi-faceted and ambivalent phenomenon. Besides its temporal paradoxes, nationalism also offers a spatial one: the idea of the nation as a closed, homogenous space and its diffusion correspond with relations and interactions that transgress boundaries and become entangled globally in the 19th century. This course will focus on classic and recent theories of nationalism, nation building and national identities. We will critically examine main trends in historical research, ranging from social history, inspired by modernization theory, and approaches to the cultural construction of national identities to transnational perspectives that move beyond intrinsic explanations and point to the problems of methodological nationalism.

The course will start on Thursday 9 April 2015. Six sessions will be taught jointly with Professor John Deak (University of Notre Dame, Indiana): two sessions will take place on Thursday (11 June, 18 June) and four sessions will take place on Saturday (13 June, 20 June, 27 June, 10 a.m. – noon, plus 1-3 p.m. on 27 June).

Bibliography

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1985, 2006); John Breuilly (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, "Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation" in Becoming National. A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) 3-37; Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation?" in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds.), Becoming National. A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 42-55.