Secularism has long been employed by states to signal their emancipation from “religion,” itself often positioned as unmodern and undemocratic. In this paper, we examine the ways in which secularism is understood in contemporary debates in Quebec. While secularism is typically employed to regulate religion, often with a focus on Islam, we show that with An Act Respecting the Laicity of the State (2019) its usage is mobilised to articulate the distinctiveness of the “Quebec nation.” Based on our discourse analysis of the 35 public briefs in favour of the Act, submitted to the Quebec legislature prior to its enactment, we show how most of these submissions define laïcité as a necessary tool to emancipate the Quebec nation from the rest of Canada. Laïcité is thus conceptualized as central to Quebec’s identity and constructed in opposition to a Canadian liberal-multicultural-Anglophone Other.

L'existence et la persistance de mouvements nationalistes peuvent avoir plusieurs explications, dont l'une est liée aux générations – à la façon dont elles ont été socialisées à la politique dans des contextes sociétaux distincts, et comment les générations plus âgées sont remplacées par les plus jeunes à travers le temps. Pour mieux comprendre l’évolution du nationalisme au Québec, cette étude s'appuie sur les six dernières Études électorales québécoises (2007–2022) et utilise un modèle âge-période-cohorte pour examiner la relation entre les groupes générationnels et divers indicateurs du nationalisme. Les résultats révèlent effectivement une histoire générationnelle. Les baby-boomers se distinguent particulièrement des autres générations par leur attachement au Québec, leur soutien au projet d'indépendance et leur appui au Parti québécois, tandis que les millénariaux soutiennent davantage Québec solidaire et les membres de la génération X appuient davantage la Coalition avenir Québec. Ainsi, il cohabite actuellement différentes « générations nationalistes » au Québec.

This presidential address on Canada and the study of territorial politics makes four main arguments. The first is that territory is a central component of politics, especially of Canadian politics, and that it should remain a focal point of specialists of Canadian and comparative politics. The second is that territory matters in contemporary politics because it serves as grounding for political communities, their claims, and their politics. The third is that not “identifying” parts of Canadian politics as “territorial politics” risks overlooking the importance of territory in the theorizing of federalism, nationalism and regionalism. The fourth is that, through the case of Canada, political scientists have made significant contributions to the study of comparative territorial politics.

Cet article porte sur le débat idéologique que suscite l'interculturalisme dans le champ intellectuel québécois depuis les années 2000. S'il a longtemps servi de point de convergence entre intellectuel.le.s néonationalistes, cherchant à allier pluralisme et nationalisme, l'interculturalisme n'a toutefois pas empêché la recrudescence des appels en faveur du resserrement du contrôle sur les personnes migrantes et les pratiques culturelles minoritaires. Notre thèse est que cette tendance confirme l’éclipse de la tentative de concilier nationalisme et pluralisme au sein de l'interculturalisme québécois. Pour soutenir cette thèse, notre article documente la faiblesse de l'interculturalisme québécois devant les blocs idéologiques formés par le multiculturalisme fédéral, le nationalisme conservateur et la montée des critiques antiracistes et décoloniales au Québec. Face à ces positions rivales, les contradictions de l'interculturalisme quant au privilège de la majorité sur les minorités ont été mises au jour au fil de controverses que l'article examine sur une période de vingt ans.

Alors que le clivage portant sur l'indépendance du Québec est en déclin, on aurait tort de croire que ce phénomène s'accompagne aussi d'un déclin du nationalisme québécois. Dans les faits, le nationalisme québécois structure toujours le débat politique. Pour une majorité de répondants, l’État québécois a toujours un rôle important à jouer en matière d'identité. Le nationalisme demeure pertinent et nécessaire. À ce jour, il est également toujours associé au caractère francophone du Québec. Ce nationalisme a cependant pris une nouvelle forme. À l'aide de données de sondages originales, ce texte permet de mieux comprendre l’évolution du nationalisme québécois contemporain porté par la Coalition avenir Québec et sa dynamique autonomiste. Enfin, ces données illustrent aussi certaines lignes de fractures sur le plan linguistique et partisan. Celles-ci peuvent contribuer à expliquer les difficultés posées au Parti libéral du Québec pour renouer avec l’électorat francophone, sans pour autant décevoir sa base électorale anglophone.

Previous research has shown that the public tends to see some groups as less deserving of social rights. Our focus in this article is whether they are also seen as less entitled to engage in political claims-making. Recent theorists of inclusive nationalism argue that whether minorities are seen as having the right to codetermine the future may depend on whether the majority believes minorities are morally committed to the nation. Drawing on a unique survey experiment, we test this intuition by analyzing how majority perceptions of a minority's commitment to the larger society influence support for claims-making by immigrants and national minorities. We show that immigrants, French-speaking Quebeckers, and Indigenous peoples are judged more harshly about their right to make claims and that this is in part explained by the majority's views that these groups are not, in fact, committed members of the larger political community.

Cet article a pour point de départ la querelle épistémologique survenue entre Anthony D. Smith et Jon E. Fox et Cynthia Miller-Idriss concernant les différentes approches du champ d’études du nationalisme. Alors que Fox et Miller-Idriss rejettent la pertinence d'une approche sociohistorique dans l’étude ethnographique du nationalisme, Smith considère l'ethnographie comme une pratique descriptiviste dénuée d'intérêt scientifique qui, de surcroit, fait abstraction des recherches sur la nation conduite au cours des dernières décennies. Afin de dénouer cette impasse, nous proposons une démarche méthodologique visant à concilier ces deux approches par l'entremise du concept de lieu de mémoire. À partir d'une étude de cas, la bataille des Éperons d'or et sa résonance dans les pratiques discursives, nous illustrons comment l'historicité du fait national peut s'avérer essentielle pour comprendre le fonctionnement de la nation au quotidien et nous éclairer sur la manière dont les Flamands se construisent en tant que sujets nationaux.

Opposition to sexual minority rights in Poland is among the highest in the EU. Populist political actors in the country repeatedly scapegoat gays and lesbians, presenting them as a threat to the Polish nation and its shared norms and values, particularly those derived from religion. Building upon previous research which shows how discourse constructing homosexuality as a threat to the nation has been used by social and political actors to legitimize homophobic rhetoric and behaviour, our paper shows whether nationalism—understood here as national collective narcissism—predicts prejudice towards gays and lesbians at the level of individual beliefs.

The article examines the controversy triggered by the “Victory Tour” of Russia’s high-profile biker organization, the Night Wolves, to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. The tour provoked important questions about the relationship between European borders and the politics of World War II commemoration. The article argues that the international public discourse around the Night Wolves illuminates how state borders are being transformed both as hard, territorialized borders and as “soft,” symbolic boundaries. The analysis compares how print and online media in Russia, Poland, and Germany framed the Night Wolves’ tour across Europe. It emphasizes the construction of borders as a narrative project and maps the symbolic boundary-drawing strategies mobilized by various actors. It shows how cross-border commemorative tours can serve as a tool of transnational memory politics that shapes the very meaning and salience of state borders and regional divisions.

This paper argues that conceptualizing Western state citizenship from the vantage point of advancing liberalism is insufficient. Instead, recently restrictive trends may be summarized under the umbrella of earned citizenship. Conceived of as privilege not right, this is a citizenship that is simultaneously more difficult to get and easier to lose, and it inheres elements of neoliberalism and of nationalism in tandem. One could even call it an instance of neoliberal nationalism, which is neither ethnic nor civic but including on the basis of merit and desert. The rise of earned citizenship is a convergent trend across Western Europe and the classic immigrant nations of North America and Australia.

Scholars have generally taken a “diffusionist” view of the rise of national standard languages—the state pushes for the wider adoption of such languages, and other forces (principally economic modernization) facilitate its diffusion. But such a view is too mechanistic and Eurocentric, and an examination of other, less-familiar cases lends itself to a revised interpretation. Amid Western imperialism and the rise of nationalism in East Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a massive shift in language practices took place between about 1870 and 1950, as regional hegemony shifted from China to Japan. Bound for two millennia by their common use of Classical Chinese, elite literati in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam all moved away from that abstruse lingua franca and turned to the creation of new national vernaculars. I argue for a more “integrationist” perspective: language nationalization was a state-led and top-down process directed at remaking society.

Sociologists have noted that the ideological inclusiveness of nationalism varies. By comparing the Bolshevik and Chinese communist revolutionary elites, this article explains that such variation depends on the social strength of nationalism. A strong nationalism is (a) undergirded by a widely diffused national culture that can socialize most radical elites into the nation; (b) kept institutionally open to broad social strata so that lower classes can form a nationalist identity through participation; and (c) universally believed to be a geopolitically feasible anti-colonial revolution so that radical elites can think of engagement as worthwhile and necessary. Using a comparative biographical method probing both nationalists and communists, this article demonstrates that nationalism in Tsarist Russia was far weaker than in post-imperial China. In the former, the nationalist movement excluded communists while, in the latter, communists were incorporated. Therefore, the two communist parties had different understandings of Marxism.

Nationalism in the modern world began in European metropoles but spread throughout the world system in the form of anticolonial nationalism. While many studies have explored the former, this essay systematically examines the latter. Based upon an original database of 124 cases, we test multiple theories that might account for the origins and spread of anticolonial nationalism. We adjudicate between cultural-cognitive approaches emphasizing the discursive bases for national imaginings on the one hand and, on the other, theories that emphasize political-economic dynamics and elite conflict. Our time-series regression analysis suggests that while cultural-cognitive approaches best account for the initial wave of anticolonial nationalism, from 1700 to 1878, theories stressing political-economic dynamics and elite conflict explain anticolonial nationalism in the later wave, from 1879 to 1990. The analysis suggests that theories of nationalism need to be attentive to the historical specificity of their claims.

Since the 1980s, Barcelona's local institutions have been pioneers in creating a close relationship between culture, urban regeneration, and the social and economic development of the city, and subsequently in implementing a new paradigm in cultural policy for entrepreneurial, cultural, and creative cities. As a consequence, the city has also become a model for place branding and cultural tourism. In this context, Born, an archaeological site of the early eighteenth century which offers detailed testimony to both the cultural and economic lifestyle of the city at that time and the defeat of the Catalans during the War of the Spanish Succession, has been preserved and opened to the public in line with the city's varying cultural policies and attitudes to national identity over the last two decades. This article discusses Born from 2000 to 2017 and the political and cultural management context in relation to the Barcelona model that has defined its current form as a cultural centre. In this context, this article also discusses the role of archaeology in Barcelona's cultural governance, as a case study through which to consider the role of urban archaeological heritage management today.

The Athens 2004 Olympic Games presented an opportunity for Greece to celebrate its ancient traditions and modern organizational skills. The organizers used archaeology as theory, iconography, idealism and so on. They particularly focused on Classical antiquity, when the Games were at their height before their modern revival. This article, however, will examine the use of Minoan archaeology. I argue that, although there is no archaeological evidence to connect Minoan archaeology to the original Olympic Games, the modern Greek national narrative adapted it to the current national image of the Olympic Games. I analyse this phenomenon by deconstructing some of its processes, taking Crete as a case study. I also highlight broader issues, concerning the instrumentality of the public domain in the shaping of cultural heritage.

Despite recent emphasis on the impact of nationalism on archaeology, the discussion has centered more on the ideological framework of the culture-historical school of archaeology, particularly on the concept of archaeological culture. Comparatively little attention has been paid to how archaeologists contributed to the construction of the national past. This article examines Slavic archaeology, a discipline crisscrossing national divisions of archaeological schools, within the broader context of the ‘politics of culture’ which characterizes all nation-states, as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991). Indeed, the current academic discourse about the early Slavs in Ukraine, Russia, and Romania appears as strikingly tied to political, rather than intellectual, considerations. In eastern Europe, the concept of archaeological culture is still defined in monothetic terms on the basis of the presence or absence of a list of traits or types derived from typical sites or intuitively considered to be representative cultural attributes. Archaeologists thus regarded archaeological cultures as actors on the historical stage, playing the role individuals or groups have in documentary history. Archaeological cultures became ethnic groups, and were used to legitimize claims of modern nation-states to territory and influence.

This article bridges the literatures on nationalist projects and everyday nationhood by elucidating a repertoire of actions shared by both. Analysis of such “nation-work” contributes to the cognitive turn in ethnicity and nationalism research by showing how ethnonational categorization operates. Examining variation in this domain shows that though nationalism may project an image of a homogeneous “we”, internal heterogeneity is crucial for refining the experience and performance of membership in the nation.

Since the beginning of the 19th century the Balkans has been a synonym for aggressive nationalism and unbridled violence; the two phenomena traditionally understood to be the key obstacles for its social development. This paper contests such views by arguing that it was the absence of protracted warfare and coherent nationalist doctrines that distinguishes the history of South Eastern Europe from the rest of the continent. Drawing critically on bellicose historical sociology and modernist theories of nationalism - with a spotlight on the work of Charles Tilly and Ernest Gellner. Drawing critically on bellicose historical sociology and modernists theories of nationalism the paper makes a case that it was not the abundance of nationalism and organised violence but rather their historical scarcity that proved decisive for the slow pace of social development in the Balkans.

This paper examines changing German and Korean policies towards transborder coethnics (Germans in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and Koreans in Japan and China) during the high Cold War and post-Cold War eras. The paper contributes to the emerging literature on transborder forms of membership and belonging by highlighting and explaining the selective, variable, contingent, contested, and revocable nature of states’ embrace of transborder coethnics. The explanation highlights the relationship of transborder populations to predecessor polities; changing geopolitical contexts and domestic political conjunctures; the constitutive, group-making – and group-unmaking – power of state categorization practices; and the enduring institutional legacies and unintended consequences of such practices.

Surveying three generations of comparative sociologists, separated by abrupt discontinuities, the study reaches the conclusion that the original promise of comparative sociology set in motion a century ago remains largely unfulfilled. It will then be argued that the work of the third generation of comparative sociologists on civilizational analysis and multiple modernities can redeem the promise of comparative sociology by rectifying the neglect of developmental patterns in other civilizations and recovering the fundamental relevance of the periphery. The third generation is thus seeking to undo the erasure of the historical experience of a very sizeable portion of humankind from the foundation of social theory. This argument is illustrated by selective reference to the concept of the nation-state, and comparisons of civilizational processes and developmental patterns that stem from different religions and traditions and generate varieties of nationalism, alternative modernities and patterns of secularization.