Introduction to Political Theory

Immigration and open borders N o country in the world operates an ‘open borders’ policy. All control their borders. But the exte ...

Nations and nationalism In the period from around 1850 to the start of the First World War in 1914 there was a marked rise in po ...

[A nation is] a named human population that shares myths and memories, a mass public culture, a designated homeland, economic un ...

We have talked of ‘nations’ but what then of ‘nationalism’? Again, we have competing understandings of nationalism: It is a theo ...

a ‘civic nation’ may succeed in providing non-racial or non-ethnic criteria for citizenship all nations involve belonging, and b ...

freedom, we need rights that cannot be removed by the majority. The threat from majorities exists whether or not there is strong ...

competing linguistic groups, such that instead of developing fellow feeling differences will become institutionalised. Mill conc ...

the nation develops from its most basic unit of organisation. Herder draws an egalitarian and non-authoritarian conclusion from ...

Nations must have a certain minimum sizeand large and powerful ones were to be encouraged – what Engels called the ‘miserable r ...

(Ignatieff, 1993: 7). The distinction between the two forms of nationalism has been attributed to Hans Kohn, who, in his discuss ...

not bring Kurdistan into existence. In response, it could be argued that Kurds have to believe that Kurdistan exists independent ...

nation, and which many Muslims feel between Islam as a universal community of believers and the nations to which they belong. Th ...

communitarian argument that we are, in part, constituted by our social attachments in this case our nation – and that this give ...

for the production of various things, primarily proteins). Darwin knew nothing about genes so this second element is owed to the ...

function of the state is coercively to police territorial boundaries, and for ethnic nationalists the absence of a territory mak ...

genes. We do not need to have children in order to reproduce our genes; we can do so by helping those who are genetically closel ...

eyes, the preference for which is often seen in racial terms (‘blond hair and blue eyes’). If one blue-eyed person acts favourab ...

(b) Restrictions could be justified on the grounds that the world is best organised into states. This seems to be Mill’s positio ...

international politics and, perhaps more importantly, the concept of nationhood undermines that claim. Even the softest, most ci ...

Kedourie, E. (1993) NationalismOxford: Blackwell. Kellas, J. (1998) The Politics of Nationalism and EthnicityBasingstoke: Macmil ...