Nationalist Discourses

This article explores the ways in which feminist and women’s agency is articulated in the Cypriot context through the paradigms of nationalism, peace, and conflict. It does so to broaden our understanding of gendered and peace agency in troubled and divided societies, in which complex and conflicting discourses meet. Analyzing data from interviews with feminist and women’s groups’ representatives, it examines how nationalism and women’s approaches to gender, politics, peace, and conflict enable or restrict feminist and women’s agency. It finds that a strategic essentialist approach has initiated a reconfiguration of gender(ed) power relations, women’s agency, and peacebuilding processes. It argues that when this approach is combined with feminist theory and praxis and the employment of transnational peace paradigms, the possibilities for feminist and women’s agency increase, as long as feminist scholarship and grassroots activism inform each other through dialogue. Therefore, it highlights the nuanced and complex dialectic between essentialist and anti-essentialist feminist gender discourses. Moreover, it challenges theories that posit a rigidly hierarchical relation between local and transnational gendered and peace agency paradigms, by demonstrating their malleability and reciprocity. Thus, it contributes to the debate about the modalities and possibilities of feminist sociopolitical intervention in nationalism- and conflict-ridden contexts.

KEYWORDS: Cyprus; feminism; gender; nationalism and peace; women’s agency

Parliamentary debates on the definition of the nation-state and national identities are a very revealing discursive domain of tracing the cues of the social construction of this category. Integrating social-psychological and discourse analyses, this article studies how Spanish nationalism interacts with the most influential regional (Catalonian and Basque) nationalisms in the Spanish Parliament in Madrid, and in the regional Parliaments of Catalonia and the Basque Country.

The study is based on a two-dimensional framework, which characterises nationalist cultures in terms of their Institutional Status (“established” vs. “rising” nationalism), and in terms of the Basic Assumptions (“civic” vs. “ethnic” aspects in the social representation of the nation — Smith, 19986, 1991). According to the conceptual framework, each of these nationalisms represents a different combination of “established” (Spanish) or “rising” (Basque and Catalonian) Institutional Status as well as of “civic” (in Catalonia) or “ethnic” (Spanish and the Basque) Basic Assumptions (Grad, 1999). The study shows that, in these parliamentary contexts, the Institutional Status and the Basic Assumptions not only configure different nationalist positions, but also configure distinct “discursive formations” — reflected in interactional dynamics (of inclusion vs. exclusion, compatibility vs. incompatibility, and consensus vs. conflict relations) — between the different national projects and identities. These discourses belong to an “enunciative system” including systematic subject (the dominant national identity), system of references (or referential) terms to denote national categories or supra-regional — Spain, Spanish State, Basque Country, Catalonia — that serve to distinguish between national in-group and out-group, and clearly differ in extent and connotations in established and rising national codes), as well as associated fields (more ascriptive membership criteria, rigid group boundaries, requirement of internal homogeneity, restrictive referent and extension of the “us” in the ethnic than in civic codes), and materiality (strategies of discursive polarisation, especially salient in the Basque Country parliamentary discourse, which both indicate less compatibility between identities and aim to delegitimise dissent with regard to national referents and goals). Finally, in parliaments where ethnic codes are confronted (Spanish and Basque) politeness is impaired, there is a higher degree of controversy, and the strategies of delegitimisation constitute strong face-threatening acts which endanger the “tacit contract” of the parliamentary interactions. In this regard, ethnic centralist and independentist political positions make harder the compatibility between national identities than civic regional-nationalist and federal proposals. Recent confrontations between Spanish and Basque national positions seem to confirm the patterns found in this analysis.

In this chapter, I build on my ethnographic fieldwork to examine how Serbian nationalist NGOs and movements used religious
nationalist discourse in their struggle against LGBT Pride Parade. In the first part of the chapter, I offer a brief account of their history, organizational practices, and external relationships. I show how these organizations and their supporters, including the Serbian Orthodox Church, fought against an alliance of the state, LGBT NGOs and a broader liberal civil society over which issues and norms had a legitimate presence in the public sphere. I illustrate this further with the example of the anti-Pride “Family Walks” in the second section. In the third part, I focus on the historical roots, social ideology, and current uses of religious nationalist discourse. Finally, I highlight the nationalists’ populist presentation of their anti-Pride campaign as a defense of the collective rights of the Serbian nation, and consider the audience and achievements of this strategy.

La Volksunie a vécu. Depuis novembre 2001, deux formations en sont issues : la Nieuwe Vlaams Alliantie (NVA), guidée par Geert Bourgeois et Spirit, emmené par Anne-Marie Van de Casteele. Comment cette formation, qui a incarné le nationalisme flamand démocratique pendant près de cinquante ans a-t-elle pu en arriver là ? Dans un premier temps, nous présenterons les principales étapes de la Volksunie avant de présenter ses difficultés dans les années quatre-vingt et la spirale de son implosion en 2001.

This paper explores, briefly, the circulation in the River Plate (and Chile) of the discourses and concepts elaborated by Giuseppe Mazzini in the context of his Giovine Italia movement, with an emphasis on the concept of "nation", and its reconfiguration by publicists of the Romantic generations of the Argentinian Confederation, Uruguay and Chile. Emphasized are the prisms -conceptual, discursive and contextual- through which notions encountered in Mazzini (and his followers) were given new inflections -original nuances- by his South American readers. The period covered is 1830 to the middle of the 1860s. This was published in a beautiful British Academy edition, but it is highly expensive and by now somewhat rare. The editors of the volume were C.A. Bayly and Eugenio Biagini.

In the sociopolitical space of divided Cyprus the political problem dominates, leaving little space for discussions about the exclusions it produces. The accentuation of existing patriarchal structures and essentialist gender role binarisms by masculinist and heteronormative nationalist discourses is a prevalent phenomenon in Cyprus, as it in other locales that face analogous ethnonational problems. However, a preliminary glance at filmic spaces suggests that in Cypriot films women assume diverse and significant roles, which both intensify and emasculate predominant discourses.

This chapter evaluates gender issues in Cypriot films from the 1960s to the 2010s and examines the possible significance of filmic spaces as areas where alternative constructions of female subjectivity and agency could be negotiated. It examines films based on three categories of female subjectivities and women’s agency – or lack thereof: a) women-as-victims of predominant discourses, b) women as (co) perpetrators of predominant discourses and c) women as agents.

Tagore's women are distinguished for their radical worldview and actions, successfully heralding the 'new Indian women' of modern India. The women's question that proves crucial not only for the colonial justification of a foreign rule over people who apparently 'brutally' treat their women but also for the nationalist discourse regarding the sacredness of space that women in India inhabit, gets a new dimension through portrayal of extraordinary women in Tagore's fictions. His fictional writings foreground images of outstanding women as harbingers of the 'new era'. Tagore's strong belief in the potential of woman as the driving principle for meaningful change in the fossilized immobility of a rigid patriarchal society is evident in most of his remarkable female characters such as Chandara, Binodini, Mrinal, Kalyani, Damini, Bimala, Anila, Nandini, Kumudini, and Ela. These characters, projected as the catalyst for social transformation in terms of the woman question, are fervent advocates of women's rights and caustic critique of social injustices that dehumanize and objectify women in society. This article attempts to explore how such women characters organically contribute, like the blocks of a jigsaw puzzle, to complete Tagore's imagination of the 'modern Indian woman' and critique the nationalist discourse on the women's question in the nineteenth century Bengal.

9780691125992, £13.95 (pbk) Stefan Breuer, Nationalismus und Faschismus: Frankreich, Italien und Deutschland im Vergleich, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: Darmstadt, 2005; 202 pp.; 3534179943, E44.90 (hbk) A. James Gregor, The Search for Neofascism: The Use and Abuse of Social Science. Cambridge University Press: New York, 2006; xii + 306 pp.; 9780521676397, £14.99 (pbk)