Jonathan Hearn
Michael Lind’s new book The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite (2020, Atlantic Books) is a compact argument aimed at a general readership. In it Lind makes the case for a revival of ‘democratic pluralism’, his term for the post-WWII left-right consensus politics of the US and Europe, exemplified by FDR’s ‘New Deal’, and sometimes referred to as the ‘Keynesian consensus’.
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Jonathan Hearn
As I begin to write this on 19 October, Michael Gove is speaking for the government in Parliament against the Letwin Amendment, which requires that implementing legislation be passed before the Prime Minister’s ‘Brexit Deal’ is approved by Parliament. Once again, he gives the refrain that respect for democracy requires that Parliament support a deal, because that’s what the people voted for (by 52%).
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The 30th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) will take place on 22-23 April 2020. This year’s theme will be Nationalism and Multiculturalism. The Annual Conference will take place in Edinburgh and is organised in cooperation with ASEN Edinburgh. The Anthony D. Smith Lecture will take place on 21 April 2020. Please, submit your abstract by 15 November 2019.
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Michael Amoah
Nationalism in Africa has moved beyond the romanticised independent anti-colonial nationalisms of the late 1950s and early 1960s led by champions or nationalist leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Contrary to mainstream theorising that the course of nationalism is usually led by leadership, with the masses just tagging along, there is currently a new wave of ‘people power’ uprisings or protest movements, one of which unseated the head-of-state right away (Burkina Faso in 2014), and subsequent others which have yielded significant changes to the status quo (Sudan and Algeria in 2019) albeit ongoing.
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Jonathan Hearn
In Jan-Werner Müller’s recent short study What is Populism? (2017, Penguin) he defines it as a form of politics characterised by anti-elitism, the imagined oneness of ‘the people’ and their representatives (regardless of the mechanisms of representation), and the categorisation of political opponents as ‘enemies’ outside the body of ‘the people’. Müller calls populism ‘the permanent shadow of representative politics’, in which the necessary pluralism and compromise of modern democratic politics is rejected. It offers a dream of untainted ‘rule by the people’, attempting to bypass the frustrating process of real democracy.
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David McCrone
Many years ago, Ernest Gellner spoke of the ‘dark gods theory of nationalism’. By this he meant that the dominant view was that, like some pestilential plague, ‘nationalism’ had been contained since 1945 but always threatened to escape from its Pandora’s box such that the bacterium then infected those with least resistance to it. Continue reading
Jonathan Hearn
Some might argue that the wave of scholarship on nationalism stimulated by decolonisation and subsequently the collapse of the USSR has run its course. Many leading scholars of this era have departed this world—Gellner, Smith, Hobsbawm, Anderson, and Connor. On the other hand, it is easy to point to current developments—Trump, Brexit, Windrush, Syria, North Korea, China—and argue that nationalism is implicated and still highly relevant, perhaps even resurgent. Continue reading