Edith W. Clowes, Russia on the Edge. Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity. Ithaca and...

Book Reviews

Adrian Guelke, Politics in Deeply Divided Societies, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.3184pp. £15.19 (pbk).

Adrian Guelke’s latest work provides a lucid and insightful view of the internal andexternal politics of deeply divided societies. It is both an even-handed critique ofintegrationist and accommodationist models of conflict regulation, and a comparativeanalysis of the twentieth century’s most prominent ‘hard cases’: Northern Ireland,South Africa and Israel-Palestine. The accessibility and clarity of Politics in DeeplyDivided Societies makes this a must read for students and scholars of comparativepolitics, conflict studies and international relations, and for policy-makers consideringexternal intervention in divided societies such as Lebanon and Syria, or disengagementfrom others such as Afghanistan or Iraq.

Like many academics in this field, Guelke situates the politics of deeply dividedsocieties in the state-building failures of empire; violent conflicts over nationalism,ethnicity and religion are most prominent in pluri-national places where the state hasyet to be consolidated, where its legitimacy is challenged by one group or more, andwhere threats of secession and partition loom large on the horizon. His hypo-thesis is straightforward and rigorously tested throughout this comparative work:‘Vertically divided societies tend to be more susceptible to “tit for tat” violence than arehorizontally divided societies. In the case of horizontally divided societies, the controlexercised by the dominant community can often sustain long periods of tranquillity.But, by the same token, the crisis that follows the breakdown of control in suchsocieties is likely to be intense and protracted’. Guelke finds that ethnic cleavages areespecially prone to lead to violent political conflict when a society is divided into‘settlers’ and ‘natives’, which is invariably a horizontal division with the settler com-munity forming the dominant group, wherein the conflict can almost always be cat-egorised in racial or ethnic terms.

Guelke’s study advances our understanding of deeply divided societies in a numberof important ways and provides researchers and policy-makers with a sound theoreticalframework for conducting comparative analysis using other case studies. It contains atypology of divided societies and their different characteristics, focusing on the wedgeissues of policing, justice and politically motivated violence that are so often central toconflicts between dominant and subordinate groups, and where the most odious modesof conflict regulation such as genocide and ethnic cleansing become policies that areacceptable to one or more groups, as was the case during the collapse of Yugoslavia inthe early 1990s. Even-handed external mediation to prevent or reduce these tendencies,Guelke argues, only works well when it is accepted by all parties to the conflict.

In his comparative analysis of Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel-Palestine,Guelke focuses on the siege mentality of the dominant communities. This restrictedpolitical leaders from engaging in the sort compromises or reforms that might havemanaged conflict or even prevented it from erupting, but, in the same way, doing somight have undermined their hegemony within society and their control over their

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ENASJ OURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION

FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITYAND NATIONALISM

NATIONS ANDNATIONALISM

Nations and Nationalism 19 (2), 2013, 395–408.DOI: 10.1111/nana.12026

© The author(s) 2013. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2013

respective communities. In constitutional terms, the polities under examination herewere constructed, and the distribution of political authority within them tightly con-fined in such a way as to ensure the durability of the regime by means of the siegementality that it exacerbated.

Although Guelke is as pessimistic as most scholars concerning the prospect of asuccessful peace process leading to a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian con-flict, given the array of unhelpful exogenous regional and international factors thatremain central to the politics of the two deeply divided territories in question, he israther more sanguine about the future of Northern Ireland and South Africa. Hesuggests, however, that the South African model may be superior to Northern Ireland’sconsociational framework in that the former has largely resolved the conflict byadvancing a progressive integrationist democratic post-apartheid settlement, whereasthe latter has constitutionalised the ethno-national parameters of the unionist-nationalist divide. However, this ignores the fact that those framing Northern Ireland’sconsociational institutions were cognisant of the fact that the 1998 Belfast Agreementwas an instrument of conflict regulation rather than a settlement that resolved theconflicting claims to self-determination in Ireland that led to partition through theGovernment of Ireland Act 1920. Comparatively speaking, Guelke’s critique of power-sharing as a means of regulating Northern Ireland’s conflict is far more objective thanmainstream academic writing on this topic and, as such, it will serve students new tothis protracted debate well. This is important, for Guelke frames his analyses from theperspective that power-sharing and more organic integrationist methods of alleviatingtension in deeply divided societies are not at all mutually exclusive, and of course he isquite right in this contention. The academic debate on this topic has long been skewedand distorted by those who are wedded to the use of polemics against the proponentsof consociational democracy and Guelke’s work is all the more refreshing and intel-lectually stimulating for remaining aloof from this rather narrow discourse.

In addressing the thorny question of how long a form of conflict regulation will last,be it consociational or integrationist, Guelke asks: ‘will the [African National Con-gress] ANC be willing to abide by the results of an election in which it is voted out ofoffice?’ The same question could certainly be asked of Sinn Féin and the DemocraticUnionist Party in Northern Ireland, both are traditionally anti-establishment parties ofprotest, the former against the British state in Ireland and the latter against its authorityto impose power-sharing as a form of government in Northern Ireland. We will have towait and see just how democratic they are. But one significant difference between thesetwo cases becomes apparent from Guelke’s analysis; unionists, regardless of whetherthey voted for the Belfast Agreement or not, view the outcome of this peace process asa settlement, whereas Irish republicans do not; they acquiesced in it because it containsinstitutional mechanisms for the future unification of Ireland by the principle ofconsent and it provided them with equal access to all of the levers of power in NorthernIreland. Yet much like their South African counterparts, both Northern Ireland partieshave invested all their political capital in the peace process and the power-sharingarrangements that form an integral part of it. And in his ruminations on this topic,Guelke reflects on Arend Lijpart’s conclusion that political will is perhaps the mostcrucial ingredient to the success of consociational government in regulating conflict andpolitics in deeply divided societies.

MICHAEL KERRKing’s College London

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Atsuko Ichijo (ed.), Europe, Nations and Modernity. London: Palgrave MacMillan,2011, 232 pp. £55 (hbk).

This book brings together a number of scholars – often paired as established professorand younger academic – involved in a European Commission study, ‘Identities andModernities in Europe’, 2009–2012. The editor and presumably research coordinator,Atsuko Ichijo, provides the central question of the project in a brief introduction: ‘whatis it to European now?’ Thankfully this does not involve a rehash of whether some sortof pan-European identity is replacing individual national identities, a facile question ifever there was one. Nor does the editor make the now familiar point that nationalidentities are plural for a particular case, and therefore no single orientation vis-à-visEurope exists within any given country. Rather, the book seeks to address the interre-lationship between Europe, nations and modernity. Ichijo stresses that this last termshould be treated as multiple, not in a historical sense as in ‘late’, ‘post’, etc., butthrough a recognition that there are various routes to modernity. The reference here isto the late Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt. His work emphasised not differentdevelopment paths within Europe, but that European modernity is only one amongothers in a critique of what came to be known as Eurocentricism after the SecondWorld War. Ichijo’s use of the term in fact highlights the centrality of human agency tomodernity. Nationalism is considered to be distinctly modern, so taking the three termstogether, the editor claims that the book provides an ‘effective’ understanding as‘European identities can now be investigated in the wider context of modernity, nolonger confined to an “either/or relationship” with national identities or in a normativeframework’ (p. 4).

The book is subsequently split into three sections that purport to give ‘proto-types’of European modernities (Turkey, France and Germany) and ‘varied manifestations ofthe “proto-types”’ (Bulgaria, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Finland and Britain). Inevi-tably, the chapters vary in quality. For instance, the contribution on Germany by Boltand on France by Bozec and Duchesne are lucid. By contrast, I found the Croat casestudy by Topic very difficult to read. Different approaches of the writers were alsolikely, but one senses that greater co-ordination might have made for greater coherence.Some of the chapters consist of potted histories of a given nationalism with a couple ofafterthoughts about modernity, usually, but not always, with mention of Eisenstadt.Others stick more closely to a discursive method in trying to tease out how Europe hasbeen configured within different strands of a nationalism. Something that emerges outof this is how modern European nationalisms – among others, German, Greek, Finishand Hungarian – have stressed their special role guarding the frontier of Europe,referred to recently as ‘bulwarkism’ by Neal Ascherson. The chapter on Greece byGropas and Triandafyllidou is not so much about discourses on Europe and moder-nity, but a sketch of Greek national character consisting of a binary opposition betweenan ‘underdog’ trope – pre-modern, pre-democratic, etc., given to nepotism, corruption,etc. – and the modern – secular, pro-capitalism, etc. Although the writers do not quitespell it out, the given opposition is obviously a product of Greece’s history and geog-raphy. Like all uses of national character, the depiction contains undeniable aspects oftruth, but also caricature. Even if one accepts the ambivalence the picture is inevitablymore complex. For instance, there is no mention of within an uncritical discussion ofEuropean integration, how aspects of the ‘pre-modern’ were institutionalised.

This book will be of interest to the many postgraduate students doing courses onEurope and scholars interested in understandings of Europe, nations and nationalism

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wider than European Union policy analysis. Anderson’s (2009) magisterial The NewOld World is indicative of this contemporary approach. And an advantage ofbringing different writers together is that a range of issues and reflections areaired. However, there are several criticisms to be made of Europe, Nations andModernity.

At some point, there should have been discussion of quite what Europe is, even if itwas just to say that a binding definition is impossible. As it is, there is no mentionwhether it should be seen as a geographical area, a legacy of culture, civilisation anddestruction or a deepening zone of political and economic integration. It is all of thesethings perhaps, hence the advantage of the multiple modernities aspect, but with‘modernity’ it is not clear, given the breadth of the remit, what purpose the conceptserves. As with definitional problems with the first and third key terms, so with thesecond: nationalism is loosely defined as modern, but what emerges in several of thechapters is that the Europe an question(s) is much influenced by pre-modern histories– something that confounds a ‘modernist’ understanding of nationalism. Finally, it isworth mentioning that the book was compiled during a far from resolved crisis in theEuro zone that has clearly both weakened and strengthened integration. Extendedcoverage of this issue would have been another project for another day. However, withthe exception of a few remarks in the Greek chapter, there is no mention of the likelyimpact of the crisis on nationalisms and Europe.

References

Anderson, P. (2009) The New Old World. London: Verso.

SAM PRYKEEdge Hill University

Lotte Jensen, Joep Leerssen & Marita Mathijsen (eds.), Free Access to the Past:Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010, 342pp.£83.60 (hbk).

How did monuments, texts and vestiges of the past become part of an enlarged publicsphere by the nineteenth century? Setting out to answer this question, the collection ofessays under review discusses the connections between cultural nationalism and thepublic sphere from the perspective of how narratives, propaganda, literary circles,public commemorations, historical genres, art reproductions, museums, opera, thecreation of the literary canon and the teaching of history during the late eighteenth andthe nineteenth centuries, and, more recently, public history and debates over national-identity in the postcolonial context have provided/or provide free (read public) accessto the past. The common theme of the volume is centred on how the past was publiclyimagined, appropriated, preserved, taught and re-enacted in a variety of contextsstretching from those of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars to the moremundane world of writers, artists, literary scholars, musicians and museum curators inthe past and the present. While doing this, the authors also cover numerous nationalcontexts including those of France, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Hungary, the

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German states before their 1870 unification, and to a lesser extent, the world ofnineteenth-century imperialism, twentieth-century post-colonialism (especially in rela-tion to the interaction between the Dutch colonisers and today’s Indonesia) as well asthat of contemporary USA. Addressing a specialist audience, this is a collection that isrich in its thematic and geographic coverage and successful in bringing various researchagendas in line with the central focus of the volume.

The reason for the chronological focus of most of the chapters on the late eighteenthand the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century is that it was then, according to themajority of contributors, that cultural nationalism – in a reaction against the emphasison accelerated change unleashed by the French revolution – set for itself the goal ofpreserving and sharing the past. With its emphasis on the rise of historicism during thisperiod the volume wants to cover ground that was less tread on by classic studies ofcultural modernisation and the rise of the public sphere. By becoming increasinglypublic and open for consumption, the past inserted itself in the narrative of modernityin the guise of multiple competing memories. As the French Revolution disruptedpeople’s sense of time, the new historical awareness caused by the disjunction betweenthe present and the past was filled – as Peter Fritzsche argues in his essay – bydisenchantment and melancholy ‘rooted in the recognition of loss’ (p. 10). At the sametime, however, the dislocations caused by the French revolution can be seen – as MaritaMathijsen does in her discussion of French revolutionaries’ Janus-faced discarding andvaluation of the past – in terms of both rupture and continuity.

The manifold relationship between the present and the past is richly illustrated in allthe other chapters of the volume. Be it in the guise of the ancient Gauls who haveprogressively advanced during the Ancien Regime and republican times to become theancestors of present-day Frenchmen (Anne-Marie Thiesse), or the politicians andsoldiers taking centre stage during the Napoleonic wars in public funeral ceremoniesthat before were the preserves of crowned heads (Evelyne G. Bouwers), the past wasincorporated in modernity as part of an enlarged public sphere that was able toindiscriminately accommodate narratives of continuity and dislocation.

Other contributors provide interesting insights into the existence of uneven nationaland chronological processes in the appropriation of the past. It is remarkable, forinstance, that while during the first half of the nineteenth century the elevation inSweden of seventeenth-century authors into the national canon by editors of their workwho rejected the former focus by Swedish literati on international classical authors(examined by Paula Henrikson), and the rise of the historical novel as a dominant genrein the Netherlands (explored by Lotte Jensen), confirm the increasing importance ofhistoricism in dealing with the past, the way aesthetic concerns prevailed and historywas relegated to a minor role in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum (as pointed out in hercontribution by Ellinoor Bergvelt), challenge, at the same time, the view of historicismas being ubiquitous in shaping citizens’ public access to the past.

Examining the impact of Napoleonic wars on a group of German intellectualsbelonging to the Bökendorf circle, Joep Leerssen points to the paradox that while theyresented on nationalistic grounds the process of institutional modernisation thatFrench occupation brought to Central Europe, the same process provided careeropportunities, which enabled them to popularise the past as a panacea for the ills ofmodernity. Other chapters by R.M. Verhoogt, Krisztina Lajosi, Matthias Meirlaen andSharon Ann Holt offer well-researched perspectives into the role played by art repro-ductions, opera, history textbooks and history preservation projects in translating thepast into the present. The volume also includes an exploration of how the meaning of

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nineteenth-century historicism could be reassessed from the perspective of the interac-tion between national and imperial identities. Contributors’ opinions, however, aresplit on this matter. Peter Rietbergen’s findings that imperial themes played a minorrole in opera libretti that were written Europe-wide at the time when opera turned intoa tool of nation-building and European imperialism came to dominate the globe are atodds with Susan Legêne’s argument that contemporary Dutch identity was shaped byand is incomplete without incorporating the transnational framework and legacy of theNetherlands’ colonial past. Instead of being weakened by, however, it is through suchopposite findings and arguments that this edited collection makes a valuable contribu-tion to the history of cultural nationalism in the western world.

ALEXANDER VARIMarywood University

Christopher Heath Wellman and Phillip Cole, Debating the Ethics of Immigration: IsThere a Right to Exclude? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 352pp. £15.19 (pbk).

Every election year, political discourse reinvigorates debates surrounding immigration.Often, however, their points of contention are limited to the impact that immigrantshave on various cultural, economic and national security issues. Nowhere is this moreapparent than along the US/Mexican border depicted on the cover Debating the Ethicsof Immigration. While immigration policy might determine just how open or howclosed legal immigration into a country aims to be, the more basic and often ignoredaspect of this issue is its philosophical and ethical dimension. It is this within thisdimension that Wellman and Cole’s book is framed. Rather than asking whether a statecan morally justify restricting immigration, they seek to answer the underlying questionof what gives the state the right to restrict immigration in the first place.

Wellman and Cole divide their book into two parts. The first, Wellman’s defence ofa state’s right to exclude immigrants grounded on the idea of freedom of association;the second, Cole’s claim that freedom of association is a fundamental human right thatoverrides any state’s claim that they have a right to exclude. Because Wellman andCole’s focus is the larger ethical and philosophical picture, they are not focused onactual or historical immigration policy, nor are their examples meant to be limited to aparticular geographic region of historical context. Together these two views coversignificant ground in the literature, e.g. they discuss egalitarian arguments regardingimmigration as well as libertarian, democratic, utilitarian and consequentialist viewsamong others.

Wellman’s defence of the right to exclude is based on three premises. The first, thatmorally legitimate states are entitled to political self-determination. Second, freedom ofassociation is an essential aspect of self-determination. He sets forth his argument byworking his way through various analogies and hypothetical examples in order todemonstrate why freedom of association can be extended to states. And finally,freedom of association contains the corollary that one can choose not to associate withothers, in this case, the right to exclude potential immigrants.

In the second part of this book Philip Cole argues against the moral legitimacy ofimmigration controls in two ways. He first tries to demonstrate that restricting immi-gration is morally inconsistent with liberal theory’s own principles. In particular, he

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argues that states are so different from any other type of association we have encoun-tered, e.g. a club or family, that we cannot assume that freedom of association is anintegral component of self-determination. Second, Cole offers a strong defence of theidea that the human right to freedom of movement is such an essential right that itoverrides virtually any state’s claim to a right of exclusion. Cole does not go on todefend the position that borders should be entirely open; instead, his argument leadshim to emphasise the need for strengthening international regulations. Immigration isfar too important and complex to be left up to the states themselves. Wellman’s largergoal is to argue for a different kind of immigration regime where state sovereignty is notabsolute, but rather subject to international law and global governance.

The jargon-free language used and the examples given help make this work easilyaccessible to students of ethics, political theory and public policy, as well as individualreaders who wish a more philosophical analysis of the immigration debate. They relyheavily on analogies to present positions and clarify arguments as well as to discuss anylimitations or weaknesses in various lines of thinking. Both Wellman and Cole are alsoquick to recognise the limitations of these analogies and how they might be misleading.As a result of their charitable interpretation of critiques their views encounter, thearguments in this book are presented as objective, plausible and fairly complete.

While Cole and Wellman’s moral claims seem plausible, the desire for a consistencybetween political theory and practice seems quite distant from what actually drivespolitical policy making. In many countries, especially the USA, public perception ofhow well immigration policy is working, whether or accurate or not, coupled withpolitical pressure from interest groups, are the driving forces behind a state’s immigra-tion policy. Desire for consistency in their largely ideology is nowhere in sight. Yetmaintaining the debate on a primarily philosophical level, while it might not allow usto move forward with any practical policy creation, it does provide an ideal that we canstrive for if striving to create a well thought out immigration policy.

IRENE ARIÑO DE LA RUBIAUniversity of South Florida

Philip A. D’Agati, Nationalism on the World Stage: Cultural Performance at theOlympic Games. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2011, 205pp. £19.15(pbk).

Arriving less than a year before the London Olympics, Philip A. D’Agati’s book onnationalism and performance at the Olympic Games is timely. D’Agati, as a politicalscientist, seeks to show how the national organisers of Winter and Summer Gamescreate and redefine national identities through performance, concentrating on thecontemporary Olympic set piece of the opening ceremony. The richness of these cer-emonies as a source of data on the construction of national identity, and the potentialto theorise them with reference to sociological and anthropological understandings ofevents and festivals, will be apparent to any nationalism scholar who has spent morethan a few minutes watching what D’Agati, following the work of David Guss onVenezuela, rightly interprets as ‘cultural performance’ (p. 1). D’Agati’s research ques-tions thus have the potential to add to our understandings of this significant biennialevent.

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Nationalism on the World Stage aims to prove that Olympics and other events areappropriate locations for identity performance and definition and that organisers,acting as rational ‘goal-seeking individuals’ (p. 64), intentionally select strategies foraccomplishing this. The aim is refined into a focus on opening ceremonies and onorganisers’ decisions both to present nationalist imagery at all and to decide whichnationalist imagery to present, bearing in mind the twin audiences (domestic andglobal) of any Olympics. A number of fascinating case studies are presented, such as theconstruction of a Mediterranean rather than Iberian narrative for the foundation ofBarcelona in 1992, the efforts of Norway to inscribe itself alongside Greece as anoriginator of Olympic traditions, and the tension between pan-Yugoslav andrepublican/national identities in the pageantry of Sarajevo 1984.

This slim volume chooses its disagreements carefully. D’Agati explicitly has not setout to write a critique of the Olympics or of the nationalist uses of Olympic perform-ances: ‘[w]hat has typically been looked down upon, as an inappropriate and damaginguse of the Games [the use of opening ceremonies for political purposes], can be quitehealthy for a society’ (p. 7). His standpoint is thus implicitly Durkheimian: theseperformances can help to build the nation, bring cohesion into social life, and evenenable ‘a society to symbolically heal by reintegrating once-peripheralized elements’ (p.42). The author spends some time taking issue with the possibility of a structuralistapproach to the study of opening ceremonies, but does not discuss other, more criticalparadigms through which it would have been equally possible to analyse theseperformances: the spectacle in the work of Guy Debord, the simulacrum of JeanBaudrillard, or Judith Butler’s feminist understanding of performativity. Studentswould have benefited from a mention of these approaches even if only to refute them.The absence of critical secondary literature is most keenly felt in the final chapters onrepresentations of national cores and peripheries, where D’Agati discusses how theCalgary 1988, Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 ceremonies attempted to complicate theidentities of what had traditionally been imagined as white settler nations. For 2000, forinstance, he states that ‘[t]he Australian government was in a process of deconstructingwhat had been a racist past that separated Australian society into a core western societyand a peripheral aboriginal counterpart’, yet the account does not refer to argumentsthat – despite official efforts at performative reconciliation – Australia continues tohave a racist present. In the discussion of Atlanta, similarly, racial inequality andviolence appears completely displaced into the past. The lead times of academic pub-lishing mean that this book may have been in press before critiques of the appropriationof First Nations imagery by the organisers of the Vancouver Games emerged,1 butsimilar criticisms were made during the Calgary Games, when the Lubicon Lake Creeboycotted a Shell-sponsored Games-related exhibition of First Nations artefacts.2 Evenif the author considers these perspectives unfounded, the account would be stronger ifthe reader heard about them.

A further problem is the author’s handling of nationalism itself. It is unfortunatethat other authors in sports politics are criticised for paying little attention to nation-alism when the book’s own approach to nationalism is itself limited. There are verygood grounds for applying ‘invention of tradition’ and ‘imagined communities’ theo-ries to Olympic opening ceremonies, as the author has done. It is not clear, however,what the author imagines the nation is: his definitions and their theoretical underpin-nings (Fredrik Barth and Thomas Hylland Eriksen) could relate equally to ethnicity,while concepts of state and power take a back seat. Despite depoliticised references toGramscian hegemony, theoretical linkages between identity definition and political

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power are not made clear, and curiously there is no reference to Michael Billig’s theoryof banal nationalism, which contains highly relevant observations about internationalsports competition.3 The value of this book is thus for policy-makers and practitioners,for whom the documentation of organisers’ solutions to particular national problemsmay be useful. Scholars of nationalism will require more.

CATHERINE BAKERUniversity of Hull

Edith W. Clowes, Russia on the Edge. Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity.Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011, ix-173pp. £ 15.50 (pbk).

Clowes’ Russia on the Edge is a detailed and well-researched study of post-SovietRussian identity formation and the continuous search of Russia’s place in the world –at the centre or periphery. Through the study of major literary (mostly contemporaryRussian works although with some comparisons from Russian Soviet literature),Clowes demonstrates how these works contributed to the construction of the Russianpost-Soviet national identity. The variety of literary forms and breadth of selectedissues along with short yet helpful descriptions of these units of analysis enrich thiswork. It engages readers in further investigations of both identity formation processesas well as developing an interest in contemporary Russian literature.

While arguing that Russian post-Soviet projects of national identity shifted from thedemonstrations of Soviet historical progress towards what she calls ‘imagined geogra-phies’ – ‘geographical images endowed with complex post-Soviet attitudes toward selfand other, tradition and change, ethnicity and multiculturalism, the state and nature ofcitizenship’ (p. 2), she gives vivid examples from selected literary works. These notableworks that become focus of her detailed and sophisticated analysis represent differentparadigms of ‘geographical imagination’ – from the perspectives of Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism to different variations of the ‘imagined’ South of Liudmila Ulitskaia andthe Caucasus of Anna Politkovskaia and Makanin.

Through the interdisciplinary approach (when analysed both literary and academicworks, essays, monuments and images) and later detailed study of films (e.g. Prisonerof the mountains), Clowes shows how the Self (centre) and the Other (periphery) areconstructed in contemporary Russia. Moreover, she reveals different views andapproaches of defining the periphery and the centre from ultranationalist to construc-tive forms of ‘Russianness’ to mixture of Slavophonic, neo-Nazi, postmodern Eura-sianism to more multicultural ideas. Clowes argues that the debate about theidentification of the nation in Russia went further beyond the traditional borders oftheoretical understanding of the nation based on language, culture, history or ethnicityto the territory and its symbolic meaning.

This debate among local scholars and writers themselves becomes another focus ofthe book. How Dugin’s ideas of neo-Eurasianism parodied in Pelevin’s ‘Chapaev andthe Void’, how different perspectives and stereotypes about Chechen South representedin the contemporary Russian discourse? All of these subtopics form an interestingmultifaceted analysis of intellectual debates about national identity in Russia. Anotherinteresting point of the book is the analysis of early post-Soviet deconstructions of theSoviet and imperial past in Russia, and of course different approaches to the studies ofvarious peripheries in Russia – from the West to the North.

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This original work represents a fresh look at the Russian and post-Soviet nation-building from a local point of view as the author acknowledges that Russian case doesnot fit into classical theoretical concept of nation-state. Differentiated perspectives onnational identity developments and closer consideration of local authors are crucial forfurther research development in the region. Clowes opens up the space for theseconsiderations by providing this introduction to the literary field.

Another important and strong point of the book is its sole consideration of the roleof intellectuals in this debate and their role in the construction of national identity incontemporary Russia. Ranging from nationalists to postmodernists authors and pro-viding different views on Russia and its place in the world from within Russia andoutside it (both in terms of Soviet and post-Soviet space, South and abroad), it providesdifferent sides and opinions about Russian development.

With its accessible language, this book is ideal for students of nationalism, literaryanalysis, those interested in ideological studies and scholars who work or are interestedin the study of contemporary Russian nation-building. However, this analysis also canbe used as a grounding point for those scholars working in the same field of national-identity construction in other post-Soviet countries.

DIANA T. KUDAIBERGENOVAUniversity of Cambridge

Shlomo Sand, The Words and the Land: Israeli Intellectuals and the Nationalist Myth.Cambridge, MA: Semiotexte, 2011, 264pp. £12.95 (pbk).

The ‘new historians’ in Israel present an alternative approach to the tradi-tional Zionist histories and myths that dominated the field until the late 1980’s.In his latest book, Shlomo Sand, a reluctant post-Zionist historian (p. 15), con-tinues his deconstruction of the Zionist narrative and the myth of an ethnic Jewishnation; a deconstruction which he started in ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’and ‘On the Nation and the Jewish People’ (Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People,2009; Sand, On the Nation and the Jewish People, 2010). In his latest book, Sandfocuses on the role of intellectuals in the creation of Zionist myth, having beeninspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu (p. 20) as well as adding to the work ofErnest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, who Sand believes were novel in theirfocus on culture, but argues that their theories lacked, as they ‘did not concentrateon the contributions of the agents of culture directly involved in these developments’(p. 31).

The book begins with a historical account of how the first Jewish intellectuals beganto think of themselves as a distinct ‘ethnic’ nation, as they adopted the ‘scientific’ modelthat originated in Germany. This model was seen in high-profile debates such as the onebetween Treitschke and Mommsen on the German nation’s ethnic character. Jewishintellectuals such as Moses Hess and Heinrich Graetz adapted the erroneous ‘scientific’history of the German Volk and adopted the reverse image, that of a people-racestretching back two thousand years who acted as an example of moral superiority. Sandclaims, ‘The oppressed took on the reverse image of the oppressors judgment’ (p. 39).Sand continues by mapping the role of Zionist intellectuals, starting with early politicalZionists in the nineteenth century, their reactions to modernisation, and their begin-nings as an intellectual minority movement without support of the masses. He then

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describes their evolution within mandate Palestine, as originally serving the politicalobjectives of the hegemonic Zionist Left, but ultimately developing independently, dueto factors such as the rise of the Zionist Right, neo-liberalism and success in the 1967war.

A chapter is dedicated to analysing the way in which language has been used in thebuilding of national consciousness, meticulously deconstructing loaded terms such as:‘Galut’ (exile), Ha’Aliyah (The ‘Ascent’ – referring to Jewish immigration) and thenaming of a Jewish State as ‘Eretz Israel’ (the Land of Israel). His final chapters providea more detailed analysis, first of the ways in which intellectuals used the analogies of theHolocaust and Hitler when describing Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and achapter describing the rise of post-Zionists intellectuals who challenge the hegemonicZionist narrative.

The book provides a good starting point in analysing Zionist intellectual historyand the deconstruction of Zionist myth. However, sections would benefit from abroader survey of intellectuals, including the influence of intellectuals of the Right,which is almost entirely excluded, as well as the role of religious intellectuals andtheir relationship with political Zionism, as discussed by Ehud Luz (Luz, ParallelsMeet, 1988). This lack of breadth causes his argument as to why Russian intelligent-sia joined the Israeli Right to lack context, and thus fails to convince (p. 82). Addi-tionally, his analysis of Yitzchak Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, greatly missesmention of religious context, focusing only on the effects of his time at Bar IlanUniversity (p. 80).

Sand’s argument sometimes slips into a functionalist polemic, including claims thatin mandate Palestine, the political centre gave the cultural agents the ‘task’ to ‘supervisethe production of elements of collective identity and memory’ (p. 53) and that intellec-tuals were given the ‘responsibility’ to ‘control the revolutionary cultural melting pot’(p. 62).

The detailed chapter on language is an insightful example into the study of seman-tics, especially in the instrumentalisation of traditional religious vocabulary withinModern Hebrew. However, Sand’s chapter on post-Zionism is conveyed from theperspective of the author, a hesitant post-Zionist historian (p. 15), and as such, lacksthe impartiality needed for a study of this sort, but does prove useful as an insight intopost-Zionist thought. To a certain extent, this chapter reflects Sand’s wider analysis,which is littered with political judgments, Sand possibly being trapped by the phenom-enon to which he identifies when quoting Pascal: ‘When we are too far or too close wecannot see properly’ (p. 180).

Nevertheless, the book will appeal to those with an interest in intellectual history, aswell as those looking for a history of Zionism from the perspective a post-Zionisthistorian, and is well written even in its translated form.

STEPHEN (YAIR) LEHRERLondon School of Economics

Ugur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in EasternAnatolia, 1913–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 334 pp. £23.74 (pbk).

If one of the prerequisites of a modern nation-state is a certain degree ofethnic homogenisation that includes processes of inclusion and exclusion of certain

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populations simultaneously, The Making of Modern Turkey ‘argues that from 1913 to1950, the Young Turk regime subjected East Anatolia, an ethnically heterogeneousspace, to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homog-enizing region’ (p. vii). Beginning the story with the import of nationalism into theOttoman political sphere from Europe in the early nineteenth century, Üngör arguesthat the means of homogenising multi-ethnic and multi-religious Ottoman terrainsincluded physical destruction, deportation, forced assimilation and the politics ofmemory. Population policies and social engineering are the central concepts of hisanalysis in which the genocide of Christians, deportations of Kurds, cultural andeducational policies in the Eastern provinces and the politics of memory form the mainchapters of the book. Rather than reflecting the traumatic experiences of a specificethnic group in the late Ottoman and the early Republican years, Üngör tells us a storyof an Eastern province: Diyarbekir; an ethno-religiously heterogeneous Ottoman prov-ince and its demographic transformation through the social engineering of the YoungTurk intelligentsia.

In Chapter 1, Üngör begins the story by discussing Greece as the first country todeclare its independence from the Ottoman state in 1829, which later extended to thecatastrophic ethno-religious partition through the Balkan Wars in 1912–13. Amidstsuch traumatic experiences, he identifies the ideological transformation of the Ottomanmodernisers from an anti-ethnic and anti-religious civic Ottomanism (1860–89) toMuslim nationalist activism (1889–1913) and from Muslim nationalism to Turkishnationalism (1913–50). In this cycle of ‘victimization, violence, and vengeance’ due tothe Balkan Wars, ‘the continuing losses of territory and ensuing shifts of populationimposed upon the Ottoman Empire, defined and redefined Ottoman identity by thesetwo shifts: first, the exclusion of Ottoman Christians and inclusion of Muslims, and,later, the exclusion of Ottoman Muslims and inclusion of Turks’ (p. 52). While Chapter2 covers the change of ethno-religious relations, in East Anatolia in general and inDiyarbekir province in particular, the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and the Ottomaninvolvement in First World War, ‘the genocide of the Christians’ is analysed as theinitial means of social engineering in the region.

In Chapter 3, the deportations of the Kurdish communities of Diyarbekir provinceas a reflection of population politics after the break of the Muslim solidarity betweenTurks and Kurds are examined. Chapter 4 deals with the phase of Turkification inwhich the Young Turk regime utilised cultural policies and education in eastern prov-inces as tools for indoctrination and the spread of regime’s propaganda in whichreshaping and homogenising the society through assimilation was an essential goal.Analysing the politics of memory in Chapter 5, Üngör states that while the memory ofviolence and massacres of the late Ottoman and early Republican years was aimed tobe deleted, a new memory to fill the mental blankness of the new nation was con-structed through such as the production of narratives and history, the change oftoponymical names into Turkish, and the censorship on publications of Kurdish andArmenian memoirs.

As an historical study with an eclectic disciplinary approach from sociology, anthro-pology and political science, this book includes a fascinating bundle of primary andsecondary sources from official and unofficial archives in Istanbul, Amsterdam, Wash-ington, London and Berlin to oral histories and semi-structured interviews. Besides,Üngör’s insightful analysis deconstructs the official history of modern Turkey throughhis excellent demonstration of how Diyarbekir province was demographically trans-formed by the Young Turk intelligentsia from 1913 to 1950.

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Yet, the book needs serious conceptual clarifications such as for genocide, totali-tarianism and dictatorship. For instance, he seems to be using physical destruction,mass killings, massacres, genocide and genocidal acts interchangeably. I find thisapproach problematic because he assumes the reader to accept his choice of keyconcepts as taken for granted rather than explaining what he means by the technicalterminology he prefers.

Second, while he knowledgably demonstrates how ‘Turkishness’ was constructedthrough the processes of exclusion and inclusion, his tendency towards the essentialistidea that Armenian and Kurdish communities had been ethnically self-conscious acrosstime and space lacks a logical consistency in his analysis. Finally, his theoreticaldiscussion in terms of placing his case within the larger theoretical literature of nationand state-building needs more effort because the brief theoretical analysis lags behindthe fascinating historical data he provides. Still, this book is an excellent source forthose who are interested in late Ottoman and early republican years of modern Turkey,policies of nation and state-building, the dissemination of the Europe-based, nation-state system and nationalism and their territorial and demographic outcomes in non-European contexts.

SERHUN ALUniversity of Utah

Edward Adams, Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Church-ill. Charlottesville, VA, and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011, 336 pp. £34.60(hbk).

Edward Adams’s new historiographical study of liberal historians provides us withan account of the way that the Homeric epic, and its successor Virgil’s Aeneid,became the basis for a historiographical tradition. Adams seeks to show how histo-rians from Gibbon onwards adopted and adapted the epic structure. He begins byshowing us how Homer’s treatment of violence was softened by Alexander Pope.Moving from translator to historian, he describes how Gibbon tried to smooth outancient history, creating a sanitised account that might appeal to the sympatheticmodern. Moving beyond Gibbon, into the romantic era, he shows how a new liberalhero was born out of these accounts, a hero who eschewed the blood and violenceof the ancient epic, in favour of civilisation, romanticism and national self-determination (see Byron). Adams attempts thence to unfold the history of that con-ception – he views the history of an idea as the unfolding of its own inner logic. FromHardy’s equivocal dynasts, to Churchill’s epic of liberalism, Adams brings theaccount to the twentieth century and closes by arguing that liberal epic is alive rightnow. This book covers a vast range of sources across a long expanse of time andProfessor Adams takes the time to apply some interesting close readings of the textshe examines. However, despite its manifest virtues, the study is fundamentally flawedin three ways.

First, it is difficult to understand what Adams means by liberalism. He defines itearly on as liberalism in its individualist and then political dimension – liberalismembodied in Benedetto Croce’s philosophical history and then by his English discipleR.G. Collingwood – that has striven to theorise, achieve and preserve nation-statessubservient to the free will of its citizens and founded on their consent. It is also the

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liberalism of Isaiah Berlin’s negative freedom, according to which the state or society isbound to maximise the space in which individuals realise themselves independent fromany positive idea of the self imposed from above.

Adams privileges national self-determination and economic individualism as thekey constituent parts of liberalism. This is a modern definition of liberalism and willhardly work in the eighteenth or previous centuries: Adams counts Hume, Gibbonand Milton as liberals and yet the first two were not interested in national self-determination and the latter had a republican conception of freedom. Adams’sdescription of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and Glorious Revolution (1688) asliberal moments hardly fits either: the first reinforced the boundaries of ancientempires, the second was an anti-Catholic putsch! But that is not all. Adams assumesall choices made by historians are ideological. For example, Adams believes thatGibbon’s refusal to follow his sources on the siege of Constantinople is an ideologicalcommitment, rather than the result of the historian’s confessed scepticism about hisown sources.

This is an error of scale as much as anything. However, there are significant absencestoo. Adams does not discuss the influence of the Bible on his tradition. With theexceptions of Fenelon and possibly Tolstoy, he writes about liberalism as though itwere solely Anglophone. Equally, Adams does not discuss the professional historianswho emerged in the late nineteenth century: figures as crucial as Gardiner, Maitland,Collingwood and Round are excluded, not to mention Guizot or Ranke. There is nospace for Jowett either. After Pope, Adams does not mention a single translator ofHomer, not even Gladstone! These silences are to be expected in the first work of ayoung scholar but they undermine the ambition of what Adams has written – this studyis not complete.

Lastly, Professor Adams is betrayed by his ambition. He is an epic thinker – hebelieves in History with a capital H. He tells us at one point that Lenin and Hobson’sunderstanding of how imperialism arises from capitalism is ‘self-evident’. The centralpoint of the book is that liberal epic’s development makes clear some ideologicalweaknesses within liberalism itself. Even if we accepted Professor Adams’s ahistoricaldefinition of liberalism – this cannot be true. There are alternative histories of the worldin which liberal epic (as defined by Adams) worked out in different ways: to imply thatour history is the only possible history rather than the only history that existed does twothings. It underrates the value of human choice in history. Furthermore, it turns historyinto what it definitely is not: an iterative process for testing ideas. Professor Adams, justas his subjects, cannot escape his own Hegelian epic.

HENRY MIDGLEYIndependent Scholar

Notes

1 See e.g., Margot Francis, ‘The Imaginary Indian: Unpacking the Romance of Domination’, inPower and Everyday Practices (ed. Deborah Brock, Rebecca Raby and Mark P Thomas): 252–76(Toronto: Nelson Education, 2012).2 See Moira McLoughlin, ‘Of Boundaries and Borders: First Nations’ History in Museums’,Canadian Journal of Communication 18:3 (1993).3 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).

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