Rogers Brubaker

The 'diaspora' diaspora

As the use of ‘diaspora’ has proliferated in the last decade, its meaning has been stretched in various directions. This article traces the dispersion of the term in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space; analyses three core elements that continue to be understood as constitutive of diaspora; assesses claims made by theorists of diaspora about a radical shift in perspective and a fundamental change in the social world; and proposes to treat diaspora not as a bounded entity but as an idiom, stance and claim.

The return of assimilation? Changing perspectives on immigration and its sequels in France, Germany, and the United States

“The point about the melting pot,” wrote Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the preface to their influential Beyond the Melting Pot, “is that it did not happen.” This “failure to melt” thesis was iconoclastic when the book was published in 1963. But it had become widely accepted already by the end of the decade — well before the post-1965 revival of mass immigration began to transform the American urban landscape. By the 1980s, when the effects of the “new ‘new immigration’” had become unmistakable, earlier conceptions of assimilation seemed to many to have lost all relevance. When Glazer published We Are All Multiculturalists Now in 1997, he was writing as eminence grise, not as iconoclastic intellectual.1 Pluralistic understandings of persisting diversity, once a challenge to the conventional wisdom, had become the conventional wisdom, not only in the US and other classic countries of immigration such as Canada and Australia, but also in much of northern and western Europe.

Ethnicity as cognition

This article identifies an incipient and largely implicit cognitive turn in the study of ethnicity, and argues that it can be consolidated and extended by drawing on cognitive research in social psychology and anthropology. Cognitive perspectives provide resources for conceptualizing ethnicity, race, and nation as perspectives on the world rather than entities in the world, for treating ethnicity, race, and nationalism together rather than as separate subfields, and for re-specifying the old debate between primordialist and circumstantialist approaches.

The limits of rationality : an essay on the social and moral thought of Max Weber

Introduction 1. The Specific and Peculiar Rationalism of Modern Western Civilization 2. The Nature and Limits of Rational Action 3. The Ethical Irrationality of the World 4. Webers moral Vision

“Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutionalist Account

ConclusionThe Soviet nationality regime, with its distinctive and pervasive manner of institutionalizing nationhood and nationality, has transmitted to the successor states a set of deeply structured, and powerfully conflicting,expectations of belonging. Successor state elites, with their deeply institutionalized sense of political ownership and entitlement, see the polities that bear the names of their nation — above all the territory and institutions, but also, with some ambivalence, the population as well — as “their own,” as belonging, in a fundamental sense, to them. National minorities, above all Russians, with their institutionally supported, basically ethnocultural understanding of nationhood, see themselves as belonging, in a deep if not exclusive sense, to an “external” nation; this cannot help but color and qualify, even if it does not exclude, their belonging to the would-be nation-state in which they live, and of which they (or most of them) hold citizenship. Russian state elites, finally, whose national self-understanding was not in the Soviet period embedded in, and is now only very imperfectly contained by, the institutional and territorial frame of the Russian Federation, see the Russian minorities in the non-Russian successor states as belonging, in an ill-defined yet potent sense, to the emerging Russian state. These deeply rooted and powerfully conflicting expectations of belonging — interacting, of course, with conflicts of interest engendered by state-building, regime change, and economic restructuring — will make the dynamic interplay between non-Russian successor states, Russian minorities, and the Russian state a locus of refractory, and potentially explosive, ethnonational conflict in coming years.

In the Name of the Nation: Reflections on Nationalism and Patriotism 1

Treating nationhood as a political claim rather than an ethnocultural fact, this paper asks how “nation” works as a category of practice, a political idiom, a claim. What does it mean to speak “in the name of the nation”? And how should one assess the practice of doing so? Taking issue with the widely held view that “nation” is an anachronistic and indefensible or at least deeply suspect category, the paper sketches a qualified defence of inclusive forms of nationalism and patriotism in the contemporary American context, arguing that they can help develop more robust forms of citizenship, provide support for redistributive social policies, foster the integration of immigrants, and even serve as a check on the development of an aggressively unilateralist foreign policy.Treating nationhood as a political claim rather than an ethnocultural fact, this paper asks how “nation” works as a category of practice, a political idiom, a claim. What does it mean to speak “in the name of the nation”? And how should one assess the practice of doing so? Taking issue with the widely held view that “nation” is an anachronistic and indefensible or at least deeply suspect category, the paper sketches a qualified defence of inclusive forms of nationalism and patriotism in the contemporary American context, arguing that they can help develop more robust forms of citizenship, provide support for redistributive social policies, foster the integration of immigrants, and even serve as a check on the development of an aggressively unilateralist foreign policy.

National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe

Twice in this century, Central and Eastern Europe have undergone a massive and concentrated reconfiguration of political space along national lines. In the first phase of this reconfiguration (which actually began in the nineteenth century), the crumbling of the great “traditional” multinational land empires – the prolonged decay of the Ottoman Empire and the sudden collapse, in the First World War, of the Habsburg and Romanov empires – left in its wake a broad north-south belt of new states in East Central Europe, stretching from the Baltic littoral to the Balkan peninsula. In the second phase, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia and the emergence of some twenty new states in their stead have resulted in the nationalization of political space on a much vaster scale, extending from Central and Eastern Europe eastward across the entire breadth of Eurasia. Like the nationalizing settlement that followed the First World War, the most recent reconfiguration of political space along ostensibly national lines has conspicuously failed to “solve” the regions longrefractory national question. Yet while nationalist tensions have not been resolved, they have been restructured. This chapter addresses this new phase and form of the national question, focusing on the triadic nexus linking national minorities, nationalizing states, and external national “homelands,” and illustrating its dynamically interactive quality with a discussion of the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Categories of analysis and categories of practice: a note on the study of Muslims in European countries of immigration

Abstract This article reflects critically on the study of Muslims in European countries of immigration. ‘Muslim’ is both a category of analysis and an increasingly salient – and contested – category of social, political and religious practice. The traffic between categories of analysis and categories of practice makes it important for scholars to adopt a critical and self-reflexive stance towards the categories we use. The article sketches some ways in which the use of ‘Muslim’ as a category of practice – a category of self- and other-identification – has changed in recent decades, and it concludes with some cautionary remarks about the use of ‘Muslim’ as a category of analysis.

Migration, Membership, and the Modern Nation-State: Internal and External Dimensions of the Politics of Belonging

The politics of belongingpolitical struggles about the membership status of populations both within and outside the geographical confines of particular nation-statesderive from four conditions: (1) the migration of borders over people, (2) the deep and enduring inequalities between mainstream and minority populations, (3) the persisting legacies of empire, and (4) the migration of people over borders. New forms of external membership represent an extension and adaptation of the nation-state model, not its transcendence.

Nationalizing States Revisited: Projects and Processes of Nationalization in Post-Soviet States

Abstract This paper analyses Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan as nationalizing states, focusing on four domains: ethnopolitical demography, language repertoires and practices, the polity and the economy. Nationalizing discourse has figured centrally in these and other ‘post-multinational’ contexts. But nationalizing projects and processes have differed substantially across cases. Where ethnonational boundaries have been strong, quasi-racial and intergenerationally persistent, as in Kazakhstan, nationalization (notwithstanding inclusive official rhetoric) has served primarily to strengthen and empower the core nation. Where ethnonational and linguistic boundaries have been blurred and permeable, as in Ukraine, nationalization has worked primarily to reshape cultural practices, loyalties and identities, thereby in effect redefining and enlarging the core nation. Where boundaries have been strong, yet show signs of being intergenerationally permeable, as in Estonia and Latvia, nationalization was initially oriented towards protecting, strengthening, and empowering the core nation as a sharply bounded collectivity, but has subsequently become more assimilationist and culturalist.