Paper Topic:

Nationalism

IS NATIONALISM ALWAYS BAD FOR THE STABILITY OF A COUNTRY

Nations are integrated communities of compact territory and history which have political aspirations . Anthony Smith has argued that five factors are necessary for the formation of a nation : the construction of a collective name , a common myth of descent , shared history and culture a bounded territory , and sense of solidarity . These are political units which have a monopoly on the use of force within a well-demarcated territory (Kaufmann and Conversi . Nation-building is the dialectical process through which the modern world-system structurally

differentiates ethnicities . The nation is constructed as a fictive ethnicity ' grounded in a historical system of complementary exclusions and dominations which are mutually interconnected . For that reason , nationalism has been closely intertwined with the practices of racism , ethnocide , religious intolerance , and culturicide . Without those mechanisms , the state could neither control population movements within its geographical space nor coalesce a people ' around a common identity , civilizational project , and official history (Dunaway . The persisting feature in the formation and continuity of national identities are myths , memories , values , traditions and symbols . Myths of ethnic descent , particularly myths of 'ethnic choseness , lie at its core . Of all these myths , the myth of a `golden age ' of past splendour is perhaps the most important

Theories of Nationalism

The foundations of modern nations are earlier ethnic communities , or ethnies . The first nations were formed around ethnic cores . One of original debates within theories of nationalism is that of Instrumentalism vs . Primordialism . On the one hand...

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