Foundations of National Identity

Foundations of National Identity
Author: Josep R. Llobera
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781845450427

Since it emergence in the 19th century in response to feudalism, nationalism has been a mixed blessing. Originally seen as a positive force, often enough it has resulted in warfare and persecution of minorities, so much so that, over time, it has been considered a social evil whose apparent decline has been greeted as a positive development. The author disputes this or rather, he maintains that the picture that emerges is more complex: nationalism is not disappearing but has taken on a different form. What we are experiencing is an increasing autonomy of ethnonations, i.e. nations without a state, in the wake of a weakening of the multinational states and the transfer of their sovereignty upwards, in the case of Europe to the federation of the European Union, and downwards to the "ethnonations." Catalonia is the major case study in this book but it is embedded in a comprehensive theoretical framework as well as the historical and contemporary reality of Europe, opening up a new perspective. The author, one of the foremost scholars in this field, brilliantly succeeds in developing an original, clear and comprehensive vision of nationalism that is accessible to a wide readership.

Identity

Identity
Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2018-09-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0374717486

The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy. Identity is an urgent and necessary book—a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity

Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity
Author: Nancy Foner
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-10-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610448537

Fifty years of large-scale immigration has brought significant ethnic, racial, and religious diversity to North America and Western Europe, but has also prompted hostile backlashes. In Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity, a distinguished multidisciplinary group of scholars examine whether and how immigrants and their offspring have been included in the prevailing national identity in the societies where they now live and to what extent they remain perpetual foreigners in the eyes of the long-established native-born. What specific social forces in each country account for the barriers immigrants and their children face, and how do anxieties about immigrant integration and national identity differ on the two sides of the Atlantic? Western European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have witnessed a significant increase in Muslim immigrants, which has given rise to nativist groups that question their belonging. Contributors Thomas Faist and Christian Ulbricht discuss how German politicians have implicitly compared the purported “backward” values of Muslim immigrants with the German idea of Leitkultur, or a society that values civil liberties and human rights, reinforcing the symbolic exclusion of Muslim immigrants. Similarly, Marieke Slootman and Jan Willem Duyvendak find that in the Netherlands, the conception of citizenship has shifted to focus less on political rights and duties and more on cultural norms and values. In this context, Turkish and Moroccan Muslim immigrants face increasing pressure to adopt “Dutch” culture, yet are simultaneously portrayed as having regressive views on gender and sexuality that make them unable to assimilate. Religion is less of a barrier to immigrants’ inclusion in the United States, where instead undocumented status drives much of the political and social marginalization of immigrants. As Mary C. Waters and Philip Kasinitz note, undocumented immigrants in the United States. are ineligible for the services and freedoms that citizens take for granted and often live in fear of detention and deportation. Yet, as Irene Bloemraad points out, Americans’ conception of national identity expanded to be more inclusive of immigrants and their children with political mobilization and changes in law, institutions, and culture in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Canadians’ views also dramatically expanded in recent decades, with multiculturalism now an important part of their national identity, in contrast to Europeans’ fear that diversity undermines national solidarity. With immigration to North America and Western Europe a continuing reality, each region will have to confront anti-immigrant sentiments that create barriers for and threaten the inclusion of newcomers. Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity investigates the multifaceted connections among immigration, belonging, and citizenship, and provides new ways of thinking about national identity.

The Plot to Change America

The Plot to Change America
Author: Mike Gonzalez
Publisher: Encounter Books
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2022-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1641772522

The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics. The first myth that this book exposes is that identity politics is a grassroots movement, when from the beginning it has been, and continues to be, an elite project. For too long, we have lived with the fairy tale that America has organically grown into a nation gripped by victimhood and identitarian division; that it is all the result of legitimate demands by minorities for recognition or restitutions for past wrongs. The second myth is that identity politics is a response to the demographic change this country has undergone since immigration laws were radically changed in 1965. Another myth we are told is that to fight these changes is as depraved as it is futile, since by 2040, America will be a minority-majority country, anyway. This book helps to explain that none of these things are necessarily true.

Who are We?

Who are We?
Author: Samuel P. Huntington
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2005
Genre: Americanization
ISBN: 9780684866697

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations

The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations
Author: Andrew D. Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 967
Release: 2020-01-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0192561944

Conceived as the meanings that individuals attach to their selves, a substantial stockpile of theory related to identities accumulated across the arts, social sciences, and humanities over many decades continues to nourish contemporary research on self-identities in organizations. In times which are more reflexive, narcissistic, and fluid, the identities of participants in organizations are increasingly less fixed and less certain, making identity issues both more salient and more interesting. Particular attention has been given to processes of identity construction, often styled 'identity work'. Research has focused on how, why, and when such processes occur, and their implications for organizing and individual, group, and organizational outcomes. This has resulted in a burgeoning stream of research from discursive, dramaturgical, symbolic, socio-cognitive, and psychodynamic perspectives that most often casts individuals' efforts to fabricate identities as intentional, relational, and consequential. Seemingly intractable debates centred on the nature of identities - their relative stability or fluidity, whether they are best regarded as coherent or fractured, positive (or not), and how they are fabricated within relations of power - combined with other conceptual issues continue to invigorate the field. However, these debates have also led to some scepticism regarding the future potential of identities research. Yet as the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate, there are considerable grounds for optimism that identity, as root metaphor, nexus concept, and means to bridge levels of analysis has significant potential to generate multiple compelling streams of theorizing in organization and management studies.

Beyond National Identity

Beyond National Identity
Author: Michele Greet
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2009
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780271034706

Traces changes in Andean artists' vision of indigenous peoples as well as shifts in the critical discourse surrounding their work between 1920 and 1960.

Who Counts as an American?

Who Counts as an American?
Author: Elizabeth Theiss-Morse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2009-07-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139488910

Why is national identity such a potent force in people's lives? And is the force positive or negative? In this thoughtful and provocative book, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse develops a social theory of national identity and uses a national survey, focus groups, and experiments to answer these important questions in the American context. Her results show that the combination of group commitment and the setting of exclusive boundaries on the national group affects how people behave toward their fellow Americans. Strong identifiers care a great deal about their national group. They want to help and to be loyal to their fellow Americans. By limiting who counts as an American, though, these strong identifiers place serious limits on who benefits from their pro-group behavior. Help and loyalty are offered only to 'true Americans,' not Americans who do not count and who are pushed to the periphery of the national group.

Constitutive Visions

Constitutive Visions
Author: Christa J. Olson
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0271063637

In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.

The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness

The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness
Author: Michael J. Mazarr
Publisher: Rand Corporation
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2022-06-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1977409407

Nations rise and fall, succeed or fail in rivalries, and enjoy stability or descend into chaos because of a complex web of factors. One critical component is a nation’s essential social characteristics. This report examines the characteristics of highly competitive societies, explores the relationship of a nation’s social condition to its global standing, and then applies these lessons to the United States today.