Claire Sutherland

Reconciling Nation and Region: Vietnamese Nation Building and Asean Regionalism

The article sets out to gauge the usefulness of the concepts of legitimacy, sovereignty and nation in theorising a specific, South-East Asian case of nation building. It looks at the interplay between nation building and regionalist ideology in Vietnam, within the context of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). As one of the worlds last communist states, the way in which Vietnam has reconciled hard-won sovereignty with regionalisation is all the more intriguing. The article distinguishes the state-led ideology of regionalism from the macro-level process of regionalisation in charting how sovereignty, legitimacy and nation are constructed in the Vietnamese case, with a view to drawing parallels with experiences in other regions. The first section looks at the concepts of legitimacy, sovereignty and nation and how they underpin the state construct, before relating these to Vietnams ongoing nation-building project in the second section. The final section evaluates the evolution of these concepts within a regional framework, with specific reference to Vietnams experience as a member of ASEAN. It concludes that official nation building in Vietnam continues to be based on the premises of state sovereignty and legitimacy, an approach eminently compatible with ‘the ASEAN way’. The Vietnamese Communist party seeks to reconcile regionalism with its ongoing nation-building project in a bid to bolster both domestic legitimacy and external sovereignty.

Diaspora and Citizenship: Introduction

The majority of current citizenship debates focus on the ways in which diasporic and migrant communities affect the citizenship regime in their country of settlement. In contrast, the articles in this special issue focus on the relationship between the sending state and its diasporic communities abroad. In so doing, the contributions seek to delink understandings of citizenship from state territoriality. The articles assembled here stress that both sending, or kin-states, and diasporic people actively engage in the process of revising the meaning of citizenship. They demonstrate important ways in which diasporas affect the delineation of citizenship regimes and the politics of national identity in their homeland. They also trace the salience of ethnic and cultural markers in diaspora politics and their implications for the articulations and practices of citizenship. Every nationalist variant, whether terrorist, democratic or “banal,”1 pursues the political goal of embodying its interpretation of the nation through territory, institutions, and, in some cases, the national diaspora. Furthermore, and as the name “nation-state” suggests, a sense of national belonging represents one of the key sources of legitimacy and loyalty for states. Indeed, the nation has been described as “the ultimate object of competition for loyalty.”2 Whereas the state is legally able to command this loyalty to some extent,3 substate nationalists and the like must mobilize loyal support in their quest to undermine the legitimacy of the existing link between nation and state. Many of the debates surrounding diasporas and their politics also turn on the

Soldered states : nation-building in Germany and Vietnam

Note on sources List of maps List of figures List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Spatialising states 2. Nation and region 3. Iconic cities 4. Museum myths 5. Textbook heroes Conclusion References Index

Reimagining the nation: Togetherness, belonging and mobility

This book develops new ways of thinking beyond the nation as a form of political community by seeking to transcend ethnonational categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Drawing on scholarship and cases spanning Pacific Asia and Europe, it steps outside assumptions linking nation to state. Accessible yet theoretically rich, it explores how to think about nationhood beyond narrow binaries and even broader cosmopolitan ideals. Using cutting-edge critical research, it fundamentally challenges the positive connotations of British patriotism and UK politics’ increasingly shrill anti-immigrant discourse, pointing to how these continue to reproduce vocabularies of belonging that are dependent on ethnonational and racialised categorisations. With a cross-continental focus, this book offers alternative ways of thinking about togetherness and belonging that are premised on mobility rather than rootedness, thereby providing a constructive agenda for critical nationalism studies.

Inviting essential outsiders in: imagining a cosmopolitan nation

Abstract The article uses the archetype of a cosmopolitan, diasporic Jewish community to reassess the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. It takes as its starting point the notion of ‘Essential Outsiders’ mooted by Anthony Reid and Daniel Chirot in their so-titled, comparative study of Jewish and Chinese entrepreneurs in Europe and South-East Asia respectively. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s methodological writings, the article discusses the possibility and desirability of such cross-cultural and continental comparisons. It uses work by Pheng Cheah, Heonik Kwon and Angharad Closs Stephens to examine the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, questioning whether this is indeed as antagonistic as it might first appear. Building on this analysis, the article explores alternatives to the bounded ‘imagined community’, of which ‘Essential Outsiders’ form a constituent part. The article considers new ways of thinking the nation using the guiding metaphor of ghosts and haunting. It asks: can the idea of Jews as ‘Essential Outsiders’ prompt the development of new models of national belonging for the twenty-first century?

Vietnamese diasporic citizenship

This chapter explores diaspora citizenship through the case of Vietnam. There, as elsewhere, nationality ? in the strict sense of national belonging ? is so closely bound up with citizenship and naturalization that citizenship can be considered the legal expression of national belonging (Sutherland 2012a ). In the Southeast Asian context, the practical and spiritual connotations of nationality and citizenship are very wide-ranging, as is evidenced in the anthropological work of Aihwa Ong ( 1999 ) and Kate Jellema ( 2007 ) among others. Jellema ( 2007 , 70) has used the term ?kinetic nationalism? to describe the Vietnamese state?s readiness to countenance the long-distance belonging and periodic return of its diaspora as part of its nation-building project, one which is increasingly premised on the shared practice of ancestor worship as a source of national solidarity. This marks a new departure in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam?s (SRV) positioning of citizenship to appeal to its diaspora, and a greater readiness among some members of that diaspora to engage with an ideological foe. Vietnamese citizenship is thus clearly a site of struggle over its ideological, religious, and ethnic parameters. The following chapter uses the concepts of territory, ideology, and solidarity to illuminate different facets of citizenship in the Vietnamese case.

Berlin, Alexanderplatz: Transforming Place in a Unified Germany

Gisa Weszkalnys’ monograph Berlin, Alexanderplatz takes Alfred Döblin’s novel of the same name (but different punctuation) as the starting point for an anthropological reflection on the fate of this vast square since German reunification. Her analysis seeks to illuminate the Alexanderplatz from different perspectives, including those of urban planners, citizen activists and youth workers. At the same time, it also pays attention to the importance of the time dimension in constructing the Platz, understood here in its dual sense of ‘place’ and ‘square’. Alexanderplatz is immensely evocative of ideologies past and present as the symbolic centre of East Berlin and a cipher for Berlin’s post-Wende evolution, but it is also constitutive of local community and belonging within the city’s Mitte district, thereby reflecting people’s sense of self and their place in contemporary German society. These aspects are richly illustrated in the book through accounts of exchanges with the square’s planners and users, vignettes of artistic performances and examples drawn from several types of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in and around Alexanderplatz. The result is a thoughtprovoking analysis of the square’s multifaceted meanings within a theoretical framework drawing on citizenship, Heimat and other concepts of interest to political scientists and anthropologists alike. The book’s introductory chapter characterises Alexanderplatz as a place of arrival and becoming, couching evocative descriptions of the square and its activities in a discussion of the relevant anthropological literature (in English). Although this literature review is rather too brief to be particularly illuminating for a reader not versed in these debates, it does serve to situate the author’s methodological approach as an attempt ‘to move beyond simplifying juxtapositions of different types of plan and reality, lived and planned space and, correspondingly, between the planner, as a strangely disembodied imagineer [sic], and the citizen, as the embodied practitioner of the city’ (p.22). The second chapter, in turn, focuses on Berlin’s rapid transformation since reunification and the extent to which public participation served to shape its new face. Weszkalnys discusses the initiatives used to elicit public opinion on plans for Potsdamer Platz, the Brandenburg gate and Alexanderplatz itself in order to explore the concepts of ‘debate’, ‘citizen’ and ‘expert’. She notes the demotion of former GDR ‘experts’ and the proliferation of citizens’ initiatives (Bürgerinitiativen) as signs of how ‘notions of entitlement’ (p.39) are very much bound up with individuals’ influence over the making of place. Naturally, this has strong implications for Germany’s self-understanding as a democratic nation-state, and is closely linked to ongoing debates over which of the city’s historical relics to preserve and which to erase