National and Postnational Theories

Many social theorists have suggested that we are currently living in a period in which the identities of the past are becoming increasingly irrelevant and in which new identities, and new identity formations, are being created. The major identity colossus forged in the nineteenth century, and subsequently spread over much of the globe - nation-state identity - has been the subject of particular debate; and theorists have attempted to identify alternative, post-national (in the sense of post-nation-statist) identity constructions. The proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was undoubtedly closely bound up with the formation and solidification of nation-states in, and subsequently beyond, Western Europe. A crucial question for museums today concerns their role in a world in which nation- statist identities are being challenged. Are they too inextricably entangled in ‘old’ forms of identity to be able to express ‘new’ ones?
How and why museums are able to act as manifestations of identity or sites for the contestation of identities requires a ‘denaturalizing’ of the concept of ‘identity’. That is, we need to be able to see our notions of particular identities, including ‘national identity’, not as universal but as historically and culturally specific. What is entailed in even ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ ‘the nation’ or ‘the public’? And what role have museums played in such ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’? What is it about museums that makes them suitable - and sometimes not so suitable - for certain identity ‘work’?
The article proceeds as follows. I begin with a brief outline of the identity work of the nineteenth-century museum and with a focus on the articulation of ‘the nation-state’ and ‘the public’. My concern here is with the relationship between the museum as a cultural form with particular technologies of representation, and with the kinds of identities that this form helped not only to express but also to constitute. The second part of the article turns to arguments by social theorists that many former identities are in the process of radical transformation, of fragmentation and disembedding and considers their implications for museums. If the nation-state and the kind of ‘public’ with which it was associated are on the brink of obsolescence, then what future is there for museums? Are museums perhaps too intimately linked up with material- and place- rooted, homogeneous and bounded, conceptions of identity to be able to address some of the emerging identity dilemmas of the ‘second modern age’ or ‘late modernity’? Of course, this account of identity transformation may be wrong or exaggerated, and there are social theorists who would argue thus. Rather than address this problem directly, however, what I suggest here is that museums - because of their longstanding and central roles in the articulation of identity - are significant sites in which to examine such claims. In the third part of the article I discuss one example of an attempt to articulate a post- national, trans-cultural identity complex. The final part of the article draws upon this to reconsider the potential of museums for articulating new, postnational and transcultural identities in late modernity or the second modern age.

This essay is an expanded, Spanish language version of my earlier article on Bartra. "La jaula de la condición postmexicana" discusses the concepts of postnationalism and the “post Mexican condition” in Roger Bartra’s deconstruction of homogeneity in Mexican identity and nationalism. Bartra is a well known Mexican sociologist and anthropologist who bases his analyses of Mexican society on postmodern theory. His criticism of Mexican intellectuals and their invention of Mexican identity has made him an important figure in cultural studies. In his discussions of ethnicity, Bartra is critical of attempts to assimilate indigenous communities into a national culture, and is also skeptical of the segregation of indigenous communities based on an equivocal notion of multiculturalism following U.S. models. He cites the Zapatista uprising as an example of the decline of nationalist politics and identity. This article also examines Bartra’s position regarding Mexico’s transition to democracy, in particular his
notion of civil society’s role in political legitimation and his opposition to any populist or nationalist movements. His belief that Mexican society has entered a postnational condition, his postmodern disenchantment, and his distrust of nationalist and populist traditions in Mexico, have shaped his view of the ongoing crises of legitimation.
This article compares Bartra’s views to two other prominent intellectuals in Mexico: Néstor García Canclini and Carlos Monsiváis. This paper concludes that Bartra’s postmodernist standpoint has limited his ability to recognize the negative impacts of globalization and the transnationalization of culture, as well as the rise of the neoliberal
state, on Mexico’s democratic transition. In this extended version I also examine Bartra's role in the 2006 elections in Mexico and his views on populism and nationalism. In particular I criticize his reading of Ernesto Laclau's book On Populist Reason.

The Special Jurisdiction for Peace was the judicial mechanism chosen by the negotiating parties in Havana to overcome the Colombian armed conflict that lasted for more than five decades and split this country into violence. The universalist nature of this peace accord, and the open structure of the Colombian constitution, compel the judges and the prosecutors of this special jurisdiction to apply international law on a regular base. This Transitional Jurisdiction relates to international law in the same way that most hybrid criminal tribunals do, and binds the domestic application of the law to the universal values of human rights. The unique legal nature of the SJP forces us to rethink the rigidity of the traditional system of law to favor a more dynamic and pluralist understanding of justice, often framed as postnational. This research highlights the necessity to understand the hermeneutics of transitional justice beyond the context of State sovereignty, and from the broader vision of the progressive internationalization of constitutional law.

This book is a study into how immigration is transforming the EU and its member-states. Kostas Maronitis contends that immigration creates utopian and dystopian visions of the European project. These visions can be found in the immigration detention centers and the fences between member-states, the dead bodies on Europe’s shores, the electoral success of far-Right parties, and in the way migrants and refugees view Europe as a land of rights and equality. Maronitis locates the transformative power of immigration at the intersection of sentiments regarding national and ethnic hierarchies with a policy framework constructed around the presence of migrants and refugees in Europe. By examining the utopian and dystopian transformation of the EU and of Greece as its borderland, the author challenges established notions of integration, citizenship and nationality on new intellectual and political terms. The book will be of use to students and scholars specializing in migration, EU policy and Greece, and will have a wider appeal for those interested in the ongoing debate surrounding the EU and immigration.

Comment est né l’Etat moderne que d’aucuns disent en crise ? Quel rôle a-t-il joué dans la relative pacification des sociétés occidentales au cours des cinq derniers siècles ? Une théorie de la civilisation peut-elle comprendre et expliquer Auschwitz ? L’œuvre de Norbert Elias (1897-1990) s’est confrontée sans faux-semblants aux principaux défis légués par le XXe siècle aux sciences humaines. Atypique et longtemps méconnue, cette sociologie historique assume la tentative de penser ensemble, et dans la longue durée, l’évolution des structures psychiques des individus et celle des structures sociales des entités qu’ils forment. Aujourd’hui, les conséquences de la mondialisation et les questions soulevées par l’intégration européenne lui offrent une actualité nouvelle. Les transformations affectant l’organisation politique des hommes n’ont certes aucune raison de s’arrêter aux frontières des Etats-nations, peut-être appelés à disparaître sous l’effet d’interdépendances devenues planétaires.

Mais quand l’appartenance à l'humanité peine à créer du sens, peut-on éviter que la communauté ne se fonde sur un sentiment, par définition toujours exclusif d’un « autre » ? La tâche du sociologue se voit alors redéfinie : mettre les problèmes en histoire afin de les mettre à distance. De même que sa mission : rapprocher les individus en leur faisant connaître et reconnaître les liens qui les unissent.

C’est à la lumière de cette double ambition que se laisse décrypter la réflexion d’Elias. Une réflexion sur le devenir de la civilisation et de l’Etat aussi originale que contestée, et dont les enjeux politiques et épistémologiques ne sauraient être dissociés.

This article charts the movement towards what might be called, following from Richard Kearney’s 1995 book, a post-nationalist approach to representing gaelic games in film, particularly since the late 1960s through an examination of two films, Rocky Road to Dublin (1968) and Clash of the Ash (1987). However much gaelic games were part of the construction of Irish identity before and immediately after independence, the depiction of these games in films such as Rocky Road and Clash of the Ash, films which reflected the emergence of a critically engaged indigenous cinema in Ireland since the late 1960s, would also be part of the deconstruction of such an identity and critique of the failures of the state. Significantly, both these films use gaelic games as a means to interrogate and critically engage with certain mythologised and narrow-minded understandings of Irishness associated with the promotion of these games, including the issues of nationalism and masculinity.

The Special Jurisdiction for Peace was the judicial mechanism chosen by the negotiating parties in Havana to overcome the Colombian armed conflict that lasted for more than five decades and split this country into violence. The universalist nature of this peace accord, and the open structure of the Colombian Constitution, compel the judges and the prosecutors of this special jurisdiction to apply international law on a regular base. This Transitional Jurisdiction relates to international law in the same way that most hybrid criminal tribunals do, and binds the domestic application of the law to the universal values of human rights. The unique legal nature of the SJP forces us to rethink the rigidity of the traditional system of law to favor a more dynamic and pluralist understanding of justice, often framed as postnational. This research highlights the necessity to understand the hermeneutics of transitional justice beyond the context of State sovereignty, and from the broader vision of the progressive internationalization of constitutional law.

Former MEP, Bernat Joan, the author of this paper, intends to reflect on something that is still under construction (and probably still at an early stage): European citizenship. He focuses on his own experiences and intuitions and to reflect on them, as if thinking aloud.

His deliberations are based on his own perception of what the latest political developments in Europe, what is still Today going on and what could happen should the process of European construction be allowed to come to fruition. A personal approach to the issue at stake. He wishes to be about sharing ideas, sensations, feelings and concerns with the readers. yet when writing he had no intention to finalise his arguments, nor to offer a concrete model for Europe and its political structure when it is finally better established.

With this paper he offers a reflection, to be shared with whoever is interested, on this idea of a Nation of Europeans. This concept goes beyond citizenship, it represents a space in which to discuss the nature of all nations in the continent. To endure in the goal of resolving national conflicts and providing solutions to problems arising from the legitimate national aspirations of several peoples whose ambitions have not yet been met.

A significant number of individuals are living in the Russian territory, as well as in the neighboring countries that have strong links with the Russian identity. Whether they are called Russky, Rossiyanin or neither, they tend to be referred to as Russophiles or Russophones. This raises several questions, including, in the realm of identity politics, how can one evaluate the recent actions of the Russian Federation regarding of the Georgian and Crimean crises? Is their aim securing pre-existing bonds or some other end, such as provoking a national reaction, or a strategically driven post-national move? The analysis supports the latter hypothesis, i.e., driven by the assumption that the Russian policy is being dominated by geopolitical interests, rather than by ethnic concerns. The recent Russian foreign policy is evaluated through a post-national lens within a wider community of ethnographic diversity, drawing evidence from the Compatriot policy of the Russian Federation with a focus on the
Compatriots in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Crimea.

This article takes as its main focus Marcelo Gomes’s 2005 Cinema, Aspirins and
Vultures and examines the extent to which, through Gomes’ work, we can identify
the emergence of a new, ‘post-national’ cinema in Brazil. Such post-national
film-making represents a move beyond concerns for the need to represent in an
authentic fashion the nation on screen and discussions of national identity, more
broadly speaking, that have marked Brazilian cinema for decades, and particularly
in relation to the representation of the sertão or Brazilian backlands as a site of
‘cultural purity’. Instead, it opens up the possibility of reading Brazilian films in a
much wider framework such as that of World Cinema.