Over the years, China’s nationality policy tended to imitate the Soviet Union while also retaining its uniqueness. Existing scholarship has described three deviations the CCP made vis-à-vis the Soviet model: denying national self-determination, rejecting the supra-national union of nation-states, and undertaking constructivist classification of ethnicity. These features took shape around 1949. In this article, I survey China’s observations on Soviet nationality affairs from 1949 to 1991 and provide a perspective for understanding how these deviations from the Soviet nationality model both crystallized and varied. My findings show that after 1949, Soviet studies in China lacked a coherent agenda for studying the nationality question. The experts gathered rich materials but subordinated nationality questions to themes such as revolution, a centrally planned economy, border disputes, geopolitics, and ideological indoctrination. They also tended to reduce ethnopolitics to class struggle and economic modernization. Such systematic evasion of nationality questions persisted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The USSR’s disintegration caused China to recognize the resilience of ethnicity and nationality, while before 1991, Soviet studies in China had lacked any systematic reflection on the Soviet nationality model.
{"title":"Chinese Observations of Soviet Nationality Affairs in the Mao and post-Mao Eras","authors":"Luyang Zhou","doi":"10.1017/nps.2023.92","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.92","url":null,"abstract":"Over the years, China’s nationality policy tended to imitate the Soviet Union while also retaining its uniqueness. Existing scholarship has described three deviations the CCP made vis-à-vis the Soviet model: denying national self-determination, rejecting the supra-national union of nation-states, and undertaking constructivist classification of ethnicity. These features took shape around 1949. In this article, I survey China’s observations on Soviet nationality affairs from 1949 to 1991 and provide a perspective for understanding how these deviations from the Soviet nationality model both crystallized and varied. My findings show that after 1949, Soviet studies in China lacked a coherent agenda for studying the nationality question. The experts gathered rich materials but subordinated nationality questions to themes such as revolution, a centrally planned economy, border disputes, geopolitics, and ideological indoctrination. They also tended to reduce ethnopolitics to class struggle and economic modernization. Such systematic evasion of nationality questions persisted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The USSR’s disintegration caused China to recognize the resilience of ethnicity and nationality, while before 1991, Soviet studies in China had lacked any systematic reflection on the Soviet nationality model.","PeriodicalId":508038,"journal":{"name":"Nationalities Papers","volume":"76 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139178769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines how the Turkish political elites have responded to the uneven geographical distribution of physicians. This has been a chronic problem in health care provision, with physicians concentrated in the urban areas of western Anatolia at the cost of rural areas and the east, especially the Kurdish southeast. Successive Turkish governments have employed compulsory service laws as major policy tools to tackle this distribution problem. Legislative discussions about these laws have revolved around the idea of a unitary Turkey, the Turkish nation, and how to close the gap between the idealized imaginary of these and the defective reality. Drawing on Kojin Karatani’s mode-of-exchange framework, this study examines the legislative process on the distribution problem through the history of the post-Ottoman republic to the present. It identifies Turkish nationalism centered on state and on commodity exchange as two variants giving shape to the response to the problem. This analysis also contributes to our understanding of the weakness of social citizenship in Turkey. It is argued that Turkish nationalism—specifically, its state-centered version—operates by interpellating Turkish citizens as indebted to the nation-state, thereby hindering the development of the notion of the rights-bearing citizen.
{"title":"Turkish Nationalism, Egalitarianism, and Social Policy: The Compulsory Public Service of Physicians","authors":"İlker Cörüt","doi":"10.1017/nps.2023.81","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.81","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how the Turkish political elites have responded to the uneven geographical distribution of physicians. This has been a chronic problem in health care provision, with physicians concentrated in the urban areas of western Anatolia at the cost of rural areas and the east, especially the Kurdish southeast. Successive Turkish governments have employed compulsory service laws as major policy tools to tackle this distribution problem. Legislative discussions about these laws have revolved around the idea of a unitary Turkey, the Turkish nation, and how to close the gap between the idealized imaginary of these and the defective reality. Drawing on Kojin Karatani’s mode-of-exchange framework, this study examines the legislative process on the distribution problem through the history of the post-Ottoman republic to the present. It identifies Turkish nationalism centered on state and on commodity exchange as two variants giving shape to the response to the problem. This analysis also contributes to our understanding of the weakness of social citizenship in Turkey. It is argued that Turkish nationalism—specifically, its state-centered version—operates by interpellating Turkish citizens as indebted to the nation-state, thereby hindering the development of the notion of the rights-bearing citizen.","PeriodicalId":508038,"journal":{"name":"Nationalities Papers","volume":"69 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139177432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The minority question has long been a hot topic in Central and Eastern Europe. Whereas most CEE countries guarantee the privileged position of the dominant nation, they also recognize the existence of national minorities and provide special rights for them. Hence there is an apparent contradiction between the values of the nation-states: unity and diversity. This article proposes that to resolve this contradiction, it is necessary to define the concept, scope and limitations of group-specific minority rights, as well as their relationship with other human rights and the nation-state. Constitutional courts are appropriate candidates for this task. However, based on our analysis of the relevant constitutional jurisprudence of five CEE countries – Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia – it seems that constitutional courts in the region have failed to properly conceptualize minority rights. Instead of developing appropriate tests for assessing the constitutionality of legal regulations, they have only superficially touched upon the conceptual issues of minority rights, using incidental, case-by-case arguments to justify the (un)constitutionality of the legal provisions. Therefore, this article also attempts to outline a constitutionality test that may be suitable for constitutional courts to consistently evaluate submissions that challenge the constitutionality of laws on minority rights.
{"title":"The Achilles Heel of Constitutional Jurisprudence: Conceptualization of Minority Rights by Constitutional Courts in Central and Eastern Europe","authors":"Tamás Korhecz, Noémi Nagy","doi":"10.1017/nps.2023.94","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.94","url":null,"abstract":"The minority question has long been a hot topic in Central and Eastern Europe. Whereas most CEE countries guarantee the privileged position of the dominant nation, they also recognize the existence of national minorities and provide special rights for them. Hence there is an apparent contradiction between the values of the nation-states: unity and diversity. This article proposes that to resolve this contradiction, it is necessary to define the concept, scope and limitations of group-specific minority rights, as well as their relationship with other human rights and the nation-state. Constitutional courts are appropriate candidates for this task. However, based on our analysis of the relevant constitutional jurisprudence of five CEE countries – Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia – it seems that constitutional courts in the region have failed to properly conceptualize minority rights. Instead of developing appropriate tests for assessing the constitutionality of legal regulations, they have only superficially touched upon the conceptual issues of minority rights, using incidental, case-by-case arguments to justify the (un)constitutionality of the legal provisions. Therefore, this article also attempts to outline a constitutionality test that may be suitable for constitutional courts to consistently evaluate submissions that challenge the constitutionality of laws on minority rights.","PeriodicalId":508038,"journal":{"name":"Nationalities Papers","volume":"254 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139178883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the subjective experience of nationality and (trans)national belonging based on biographical interviews with two groups of Jewish participants born in Bulgaria before the Second World War, and residing in Bulgaria and in Israel, respectively. I focus on their retrospective accounts of the mass exodus to Israel in 1948–1949 and the maintenance of transnational family and kinship ties thereafter, during the Cold War. The comparison brings into relief the challenges of their integration into the respective national contexts, and the ways in which the memory cultures in the two countries have molded biographical reminiscences. I argue that despite these differences, a unique case of a transnational generation is at hand, formed by their past experiences as well as by the re-negotiation of these experiences, which was made possible from the 1990s on.
{"title":"Negotiating Transnational Belonging: Post-WWII Migration as Life Experience and Collective Memory","authors":"Daniela Koleva","doi":"10.1017/nps.2023.87","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.87","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the subjective experience of nationality and (trans)national belonging based on biographical interviews with two groups of Jewish participants born in Bulgaria before the Second World War, and residing in Bulgaria and in Israel, respectively. I focus on their retrospective accounts of the mass exodus to Israel in 1948–1949 and the maintenance of transnational family and kinship ties thereafter, during the Cold War. The comparison brings into relief the challenges of their integration into the respective national contexts, and the ways in which the memory cultures in the two countries have molded biographical reminiscences. I argue that despite these differences, a unique case of a transnational generation is at hand, formed by their past experiences as well as by the re-negotiation of these experiences, which was made possible from the 1990s on.","PeriodicalId":508038,"journal":{"name":"Nationalities Papers","volume":"178 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139179873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article asks how, in early post-World War II Canada, Syrian, Armenian, and Lebanese communities claimed whiteness in the context of Canada’s racially restrictive immigration regulations that defined them as “Asiatics,” and hence inadmissible. But, it also examines how Canadian politicians and immigration bureaucrats responded to those claims. Using so-far untapped archival records, this article shows that immigration authorities were unwilling to redefine the racial status of these groups out of fear that doing so would provide a wedge for other groups of “Asiatics” to press for the ability to migrate to Canada. In this case, Syrians, Armenians, and Lebanese could be regarded as experiencing collateral damage in the politics of whiteness. While Canadian immigration authorities seemed to privately accept the white/European identity claims of these groups, they were nonetheless unwilling to publicly grant them one of the privileges of whiteness – namely the ability to migrate to Canada on a basis equal to that of other white immigrants. Instead, the government used “merit-based” orders-in-council as an under the radar administrative mechanism to admit members of these groups. This allowed the government and the immigration department to avoid a larger public debate about racial discrimination against “Asiatic” immigrants.
{"title":"Syrian, Armenian, and Lebanese Claims to Whiteness in Post-War Canadian Immigration Policy","authors":"Vic Satzewich, Leili Yousefi","doi":"10.1017/nps.2023.82","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.82","url":null,"abstract":"This article asks how, in early post-World War II Canada, Syrian, Armenian, and Lebanese communities claimed whiteness in the context of Canada’s racially restrictive immigration regulations that defined them as “Asiatics,” and hence inadmissible. But, it also examines how Canadian politicians and immigration bureaucrats responded to those claims. Using so-far untapped archival records, this article shows that immigration authorities were unwilling to redefine the racial status of these groups out of fear that doing so would provide a wedge for other groups of “Asiatics” to press for the ability to migrate to Canada. In this case, Syrians, Armenians, and Lebanese could be regarded as experiencing collateral damage in the politics of whiteness. While Canadian immigration authorities seemed to privately accept the white/European identity claims of these groups, they were nonetheless unwilling to publicly grant them one of the privileges of whiteness – namely the ability to migrate to Canada on a basis equal to that of other white immigrants. Instead, the government used “merit-based” orders-in-council as an under the radar administrative mechanism to admit members of these groups. This allowed the government and the immigration department to avoid a larger public debate about racial discrimination against “Asiatic” immigrants.","PeriodicalId":508038,"journal":{"name":"Nationalities Papers","volume":"69 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139180264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When we study the Jewish-national historiography of the last quarter of the 19th century, there is a tendency to pass directly from Smolenskin’s doctrine to the Zionist-cultural approach of Ahad Ha’am and his students, omitting the works written in between. However, even before the emergence of Ahad Ha’am as a cultural icon in the Jewish national movement, some Hibbat Zion activists engaged in Hebrew cultural activities directed at shaping national Jewish consciousness. The main figures in this trend were Saul Pinchas Rabinowitz and Avraham Shalom Friedberg. Their world view was based on education that advocated proto-nationalism: Jewish solidarity, love of the Hebrew language, promoting Hebrew newspapers, and preserving Jewish tradition. To this they added settlement in Eretz Israel as a solution for the harsh conditions of the Jews in Russia. They edited literary and scientific collections in Hebrew and Jewish historiography and wrote historical monographs and biographies. In this way, they sought to introduce national historical protagonists instead of the Hasskala’s pantheon of historical characters to vividly illuminate periods of historical “golden ages” suited to the national ideology and teach the lesson of historical history—that Hibbat Zion is the solution to the plight of Jews and Judaism.
{"title":"Between Peretz Smolenskin and Ahad Ha’am: The Forgotten Historiography of the Jewish National Movement Hibbat Zion","authors":"Asaf Yedidya","doi":"10.1017/nps.2023.86","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.86","url":null,"abstract":"When we study the Jewish-national historiography of the last quarter of the 19th century, there is a tendency to pass directly from Smolenskin’s doctrine to the Zionist-cultural approach of Ahad Ha’am and his students, omitting the works written in between. However, even before the emergence of Ahad Ha’am as a cultural icon in the Jewish national movement, some Hibbat Zion activists engaged in Hebrew cultural activities directed at shaping national Jewish consciousness. The main figures in this trend were Saul Pinchas Rabinowitz and Avraham Shalom Friedberg. Their world view was based on education that advocated proto-nationalism: Jewish solidarity, love of the Hebrew language, promoting Hebrew newspapers, and preserving Jewish tradition. To this they added settlement in Eretz Israel as a solution for the harsh conditions of the Jews in Russia. They edited literary and scientific collections in Hebrew and Jewish historiography and wrote historical monographs and biographies. In this way, they sought to introduce national historical protagonists instead of the Hasskala’s pantheon of historical characters to vividly illuminate periods of historical “golden ages” suited to the national ideology and teach the lesson of historical history—that Hibbat Zion is the solution to the plight of Jews and Judaism.","PeriodicalId":508038,"journal":{"name":"Nationalities Papers","volume":"81 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139179512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Under the Banner of Islam: Turks, Kurds, and the Limits of Religious Unity, by Gülay Türkmen, New York, Oxford University Press, 2021, 204 pp., $82 (hardcover), ISBN 9780197511817.","authors":"Ş. Aktürk","doi":"10.1017/nps.2023.90","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.90","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":508038,"journal":{"name":"Nationalities Papers","volume":"100 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139179728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Catalan nationalism had always supported Ireland in its struggle for autonomy or independence against the British Empire. The outbreak of the Irish Civil War, nevertheless, surprised Catalanism. This article discusses the difficulties of the main Catalanist political parties in that period—the Lliga Regionalista, Acció Catalana, and Estat Català—to explain the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the Catalanist milieu as well as the difficulties of differentiating dominion and federation and adopting a coherent position according to their own ideology and to Catalan internal political dynamics. Focusing on this study case, the objective of the article is to show the difficulties of stateless national movements to explain their own politics and objectives from external models. And, likewise, how the look toward an external nationalism can stop being useful or even raise unexpected questions within the movement that tries to explain itself by simplifying the contexts of others.
{"title":"Griffith or de Valera? The Split of Catalan Nationalism in the Face of the Irish Civil War","authors":"J. Esculies","doi":"10.1017/nps.2023.83","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.83","url":null,"abstract":"Catalan nationalism had always supported Ireland in its struggle for autonomy or independence against the British Empire. The outbreak of the Irish Civil War, nevertheless, surprised Catalanism. This article discusses the difficulties of the main Catalanist political parties in that period—the Lliga Regionalista, Acció Catalana, and Estat Català—to explain the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the Catalanist milieu as well as the difficulties of differentiating dominion and federation and adopting a coherent position according to their own ideology and to Catalan internal political dynamics. Focusing on this study case, the objective of the article is to show the difficulties of stateless national movements to explain their own politics and objectives from external models. And, likewise, how the look toward an external nationalism can stop being useful or even raise unexpected questions within the movement that tries to explain itself by simplifying the contexts of others.","PeriodicalId":508038,"journal":{"name":"Nationalities Papers","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139245674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article concerns the endurance of political traditions brought to Palestine at the turn of the 20th century from the revolutionary milieu in Imperial Russia. The Russian Empire and its neighbors, which form most of today’s Eastern Europe and large swaths of Central Europe, was the homeland of most early Zionist settlers. They had acquired experience in a range of clandestine political organizations in the Russian Empire. It is this revolutionary experience that constitutes the bedrock of Russian Zionists’ influence on the political culture of the pre-state Palestine and Israel. Later, those who found themselves in Poland after Versailles became familiar with parliamentary rituals, even though the Polish state did not enjoy democracy for long. We suggest that this seemingly distant history continues to manifest itself in the political culture of contemporary Israel. We consider epistemology, tradition, ideology, and political action while looking at Israeli politics through the lens of its Russian roots.
{"title":"On Political Tradition and Ideology: Russian Dimensions of Practical Zionism and Israeli Politics","authors":"Y. Rabkin, Yaacov Yadgar","doi":"10.1017/nps.2023.84","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2023.84","url":null,"abstract":"This article concerns the endurance of political traditions brought to Palestine at the turn of the 20th century from the revolutionary milieu in Imperial Russia. The Russian Empire and its neighbors, which form most of today’s Eastern Europe and large swaths of Central Europe, was the homeland of most early Zionist settlers. They had acquired experience in a range of clandestine political organizations in the Russian Empire. It is this revolutionary experience that constitutes the bedrock of Russian Zionists’ influence on the political culture of the pre-state Palestine and Israel. Later, those who found themselves in Poland after Versailles became familiar with parliamentary rituals, even though the Polish state did not enjoy democracy for long. We suggest that this seemingly distant history continues to manifest itself in the political culture of contemporary Israel. We consider epistemology, tradition, ideology, and political action while looking at Israeli politics through the lens of its Russian roots.","PeriodicalId":508038,"journal":{"name":"Nationalities Papers","volume":"202 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139243304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}