Expansionism

About: Expansionism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 979 publications have been published within this topic receiving 11169 citations.

Territory as the Kernel of the Nation: Space, Time and Nationalism in Israel/Palestine

Abstract: The article deals with the relations between time and space in the making of modern nations, focusing on conditions of territorial conflicts in general, and on expansionist 'ethnocratic' societies in particular. Under such conditions, it is argued, territory (the 'where' of the nation) becomes a most vital 'kernel' of national mobilisation, while the history of national origins (the 'when') tends to become mythical and homogenous, used chiefly to boost the territorial struggle. A geographical critique of dominant theories of nationalism is presented, focusing on their 'spatial blindness' and analytical fusion of nation and state. These deficiencies are conspicuous in ethnocratic societies, where the 'national project' does not aspire to merge nation and state, but on the contrary, to essentialise and segregate group identities. While the 'when' and the 'where' of the nation are still intimately intertwined, it is the latter that provides the core of nation-building. The claim is substantiated through a de...

Germany and Republican China

Abstract: IntroductionThe history of China since the mid-nineteenth century has been closely intertwined with global economic, political, and intellectual developments. Despite its best efforts and better judgment, the Ch'ing dynasty was forced to deal with the West on the West's own terms, even as it sought to acquire the most obvious elements of Western strength without jeopardizing its own cultural and institutional uniqueness. For Republican governments that followed the collapse of the Empire in 1911, the fact that China was inescapably caught up in the whirlpool of international currents was at once dangerous and promising.The risk lay in being overwhelmed by the imperialist expansionism of more powerful, qmodernizedq states. The promise lay in China's status as a qlate-comerq to the modern world. If China was hardly a qblank piece of paperq on which new directions could be written, it did have the advantage of studying the experiences of other, relatively qmodernq nations. As China's political and ideological structures collapsed with the Ch'ing, and as the nation's social fabric became increasingly threadbare in the twentieth century, leading Chinese political and intellectual figures had laid before them a plethora of potential foreign models for development from which to pick, choose, and adapt to their own circumstances. If the ultimate goal was a return to Chinese wealth and power, the means by which this was attempted often involved the emulation and appropriation of the experiences of other nations.One way that foreign models came to China was as qisms,q as political or philosophical constructs with universal application. Republicanismncould appeal to a generation of Chinese revolutionaries both as the most modern political form yet developed and as the best means of preventing a restoration of the old order.' Constitutionalism seemed to the reformers of 1898 as a process of invigorating the ties between ruler and ruled, and to politicians of the Peking government after 1916 as a method of establishing an orderly structure for the resolution of differences. Sun Yat-sen and other early Kuomintang leaders studied European socialism during the years 1905-7, not as a cure for the ills of capitalist industrialization but as a preventive. To the youthful founders of Chinese communism, Marxism-Leninism offered a recipe for national renewal that involved both the overturning of existing social relations and the expulsion of imperialist influences from the land. And in the 1930's, fascism appeared to some Kuomintang leaders as a means for both mobilizing and disciplining the populace; it was the leading qismq of the day. n n n n

Gender, Modernity, and Eroticized Internationalism in Japan

Abstract: It is by now a commonplace that, in translocal contexts, modernities must increasingly be theorized in the plural as diverse global phenomena reflecting multiple local agendas. The traditional/modern binary that was once a central mobilizing trope of anthropology, in which modernity is viewed as a "robust and noxious weed whose spread chokes the delicate life" out of "authentic" local and traditional meanings (Pigg 1996:164), has been revealed as inadequate to explain ways that discourses of the modern may be deployed oppositionally, for example, by those who seek access to modernity's language of rights against an oppressive state. At the same time "local" modernities do not proliferate indiscriminately without reference to the originally modern West; they are intimately implicated in questions of Western universalism and its relation to Western nationalism. As Rey Chow writes, modernity must be understood "as a force of cultural expansionism whose foundations are not only emancipatory but also Eurocentric and patriarchal" (1992:101). In this article I will examine the personal accounts of a marginalized population of professionally ambitious Japanese women to show how they deploy discourses of the modern, or "narratives of internationalism," to construct an "emancipatory" turn to the foreign/West in opposition to gender-stratified corporate and family structures in Japan.1 It should be noted at the outset that such internationalized professional women constitute a small minority of Japanese women; as Ogasawara observes in her recent book, the majority of young women in Japan still hold marriage and full-time motherhood as their primary life goal (1998:62-63). For the small number of women who are enabled by their age, marital status, economic resources, and familial flexibility (among other factors) to explore the cosmopolitan possibilities of internationalization, however, this option can lead to opportunities to travel, study, and work abroad and to the discovery of a female niche in the international job market as translators, interpreters, consultants, bilingual secretaries, entrepreneurs, international aid workers, United Nations employees, and so on. Examples of internationalist narratives abound in a genre of Japanese women's writing about the West by authors such as Toshiko Marks (1992),

Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism

Abstract: This title presents literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism.American literary nationalism is traditionally understood as a cohesive literary tradition developed in the newly independent United States that emphasized the unique features of America and consciously differentiated American literature from British literature. Robert Levine challenges this assessment by exploring the conflicted, multi-racial, and contingent dimensions present in the works of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and African American writers. Conflict and uncertainty, not consensus, Levine argues, helped define American literary nationalism during this period.Levine emphasizes the centrality of both inter- and intra-American conflict in his analysis of four illuminating "episodes" of literary responses to questions of U.S. racial nationalism and imperialism. He examines Charles Brockden Brown and the Louisiana Purchase; David Walker and the debates on the Missouri Compromise; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Hannah Crafts and the blood-based literary nationalism and expansionism of the mid-nineteenth century; and, Frederick Douglass and his interest in Haiti. Levine offers critiques of recent developments in whiteness and imperialism studies, arguing that a renewed attention to the place of contingency in American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments.

The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as Imperial Polities

Abstract: trate on the external aspects of empire, investigating the roots of expansionism, for instance, or the military and economic sinews of power.2 Others have looked at the domestic constitutions of empires, analysing, for example, the management of multi-ethnicity.3 One major problem is that 'empire' in the contemporary world is a word with very strong negative connotations. A century ago, European countries and their rulers welcomed the term. It implied not only that a country was powerful but also, probably, that it was in the forefront of progress, one of that very small group of great powers entrusted, in Hegelian terms, with leading mankind towards higher levels of culture, wealth and freedom. Flattering comparisons were made with the great civilizations of the past, almost all of them embodied in political terms in empires. In the late twentieth century, however, empire implies exploitation of weak communities by stronger ones, as well, particularly, as the suppression of the Third World by Western power and culture. Empire is seen, moreover, not merely as wicked but also as anachronistic and doomed to disappear. In the post-1945 global economy, autarchy and physical control of territory are viewed as largely irrelevant: peaceful access to food, raw materials and markets seems assured, and the skills, unity and motivation of a country's workforce are regarded as the keys to prosperity and even power. Countries are unwilling to take upon themselves