National Identities and International Relations

National Identities and International Relations
Author: Richard Ned Lebow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2016-10-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1107166306

A comparative study of how and why people identify with their countries and the implications for foreign policy.

National Identities and International Relations

National Identities and International Relations
Author: Richard Ned Lebow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2016-10-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316721078

Identity is the master variable for many constructivist scholars of international politics. In this comparative study, Richard Ned Lebow shows that states do not have identities any more than people do. Leaders, peoples, and foreign actors seek to impose national identifications consistent with their political projects and psychological needs. These identifications are multiple, fluid and rise in importance as a function of priming and context. Leaders are at least as likely to invoke national identifications as rationalizations for policies pursued for other reasons as they are to be influenced by them. National identifications are nevertheless important because they invariably stress the alleged uniqueness of a people and its country, and are a principal means of seeking status and building self-esteem. Lebow tracks the relative appeal of these principles, the ways in which they are constructed, how they influence national identifications, and how they in turn affect regional and international practices.

National Identity and Foreign Policy

National Identity and Foreign Policy
Author: Ilya Prizel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 1998-08-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521576970

This book is based on the premise that the foreign policy of any country is heavily influenced by a society's evolving notions of itself. Applying his analysis to Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, the author argues that national identity is an ever-changing concept, influenced by internal and external events, and by the manipulation of a polity's collective memory. The interaction of the narrative of a society and its foreign policy is therefore paramount. This is especially the case in East-Central Europe, where political institutions are weak, and social coherence remains subject to the vagaries of the concept of nationhood. Ilya Prizel's study will be of interest to students of nationalism, as well as of foreign policy and politics in East-Central Europe.

The Creation of National Identities

The Creation of National Identities
Author: Anne-Marie Thiesse
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004498834

From the barbarian epics to the ethnographic museums, from the national languages to emblematic landscapes or typical costumes, this book retraces the cultural fabrication of the European nations. National identities are not facts of nature, but constructions.

National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America

National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America
Author: Antonio Gomez-Moriana
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135667667

This study frames the social dynamics of Latin American in terms of two types of cultural momentum: foundational momentum and the momentum of global order in contemporary Latin America.

Identity Politics Inside Out

Identity Politics Inside Out
Author: Lisel Hintz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2018-08-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190655992

The trajectory of Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule offers an ideal empirical window into puzzling shifts in Turkey's domestic politics and foreign policy. The policy transformations under its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan do not align with existing explanations based on security, economics, institutions, or identity. In Identity Politics Inside Out, Lisel Hintz teases out the complex link between identity politics and foreign policy using an in-depth study of Turkey. Rather than treating national identity as cause or consequence of a state's foreign policy, she repositions foreign policy as an arena in which contestation among competing proposals for national identity takes place. Drawing from a broad array of sources in popular culture, social media, interviews, surveys, and archives, she identifies competing visions of Turkish identity and theorizes when and how internal identity politics becomes externalized. Hintz examines the establishment of Republican Nationalism in the wake of imperial collapse and examines failed attempts made by those challenging its Western-oriented, anti-ethnic, secularist values with alternative understandings of Turkishness. She further demonstrates how the Ottoman Islamist AKP used the European Union accession process to weaken Republican Nationalist obstacles in Turkey, thereby opening up space for Islam in the domestic sphere and a foreign policy targeted at achieving leadership in the Middle East. By showing how the "inside out" spillover of national identity debates can reshape foreign policy, Identity Politics Inside Out fills a major gap in existing scholarship by closing the identity-foreign policy circle.

Making Identity Count

Making Identity Count
Author: Ted Hopf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2016-04-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190255498

Constructivism, despite being one of the three main streams of IR theory, along with realism and liberalism, is rarely, if ever, tested in large-n quantitative work. Constructivists almost unanimously eschew quantitative approaches, assuming that variables of interest to constructivists, defy quantification. Quantitative scholars mostly ignore constructivist variables as too fuzzy and vague. And the rare instances in which quantitative scholars have operationalized identity as a variable, they have unfortunately realized all the constructivists' worst fears about reducing national identity to a single measure, such as language, religion, or ethnicity, thereby violating one of the foundational assumptions of constructivism: intersubjectivity. Making Identity Count presents a new method for the recovery of national identity, applies the method in 9 country cases, and draws conclusions from the empirical evidence for hegemonic transitions and a variety of quantitative theories of identity. Ted Hopf and Bentley B. Allan make the constructivist variable of national identity a valid measure that can be used by large-n International Relations scholars in a variety of ways. They lay out what is wrong with how identity has been conceptualized, operationalized and measured in quantitative IR so far and specify a methodological approach that allows scholars to recover the predominant national identities of states in a more valid and systematic fashion. The book includes "national identity reports" on China, the US, UK, Germany, France, Brazil, Japan, and India to both test the authors' method and demonstrate the promise of the approach. Hopf and Allan use these data to test a constructivist hypothesis about the future of Western neoliberal democratic hegemony. Finally, the book concludes with an assessment of the method, including areas of possible improvement, as well as a description of what an intersubjective national identity data base of great powers from 1810-2010 could mean for IR scholarship.

The Politics and Ethics of Identity

The Politics and Ethics of Identity
Author: Richard Ned Lebow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2012-08-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107027659

Challenges the notion of consistent unitary identities, arguing that we are multiple, changing selves, shaped by social contexts and processes.

National Identities & Bilateral Relations

National Identities & Bilateral Relations
Author: Gilbert Rozman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780804784764

The second of Gilbert Rozman's contributed volumes on East Asian national identity traces how efforts to draw a sharp divide between one country's identity and that of another shape relations in the post-Cold War era. It examines the two-way relations of Japan, South Korea, and China, introducing the concept of a national identity gap to estimate the degree to which the identities of two countries target each other as negative contrasts. This concept is then applied to China's reinterpretation from 2009-11 of the gap between its identity and that of the United States. Each pairing represents a key relationship through which an Asian country has historically shaped its identity, and is striving to reshape it. The volume begins with experts' analyses of how Japan, South Korea and China have changed their diplomatic environment in Asia in order to transform identity. In the second half of the book, Rozman reflects on the discomfort all three East Asian countries have from excessive dependence on the United States. He concentrates on Chinese discourse in particular, as analyzed through the ideological, temporal, sectoral, vertical, and horizontal dimensions of national identity. Even if foreign policy turns more cautionary for a time, Rozman argues that China's inflammatory identity discourse, which remains at an intensity unmatched in the other countries, will continue to have a chilling effect on prospects for pragmatic diplomacy with the U.S.