MİLLİYETÇİLİK VE İDEOLOJİ
Alan Finlayson:
Tartışılacak Önermeler
Alan Finlayson (1998) Ideology, discourse and nationalism, Journal of Political Ideologies, 3:1, 99-118,
«No two nationalisms can be the same. This is a point perhaps too obvious to be noticed and often obscured by the search for generalizable truths. By their very nature nationalism in France and England, for example, must be different since one is concerned with some notion of Frenchness, the other with Englishness. If these nationalisms did not specify something which made their respective nations unique, different from others, they would not be nationalisms. The difference between French and English
nationalism is contained within the differing 'concrete contents' they
ascribe to 'Frenchness' and 'Englishness'. We might say that they differ on the basis of the nonequivalence of the signifiers 'French' and 'English‘»
Finlayson: Tartışılacak Önermeler
Thus nationalism can be understood only when it is recognized as always part of the discursive articulation of particular social formations. Theories of nationalism that ascribe its genesis and functioning to something
external to such articulations—the logic of modernization, atavism,
deformation of class interests and so forth—miss the point. In looking for overarching structural or psychologistic explanations, such theories, while possibly helpful and accurate in important respects, may not be able to perceive the nature of nationalism as it operates in political discourse
because they are trying to look beyond the specificity of which nationalism is composed.13 We cannot simply revert to the usage of Weberian 'ideal types' in the hope of attributing certain common denominators to nations and nationalism while holding space open for the subsidiary recognition of the specificity of individual instances.
Finlayson: Tartışılacak Önermeler
• If nationalism is defined and understood in terms of its own particular mode of discourse rather than by an a priori academic discourse, such as 'modernization', then important methodological questions emerge. This is not to suggest that we accept definitions of nation as provided by
nations and nationalists themselves, but that we understand nations as setting up the discursive terms and conditions under which they are
defined. This is to say that the term 'nation' can only make sense within a specific discursive regime (and in such a regime it will make sense). We then come to investigate what sort of 'sense' it is making and producing, and within what sorts of discursive regime it is making such sense. Taking nationhood seriously in this way can actually prove much more effective in grasping its form and function than trying to place oneself 'outside' of the phenomenon and assessing it from there
Finlayson: Tartışılacak Önermeler
Nationalism must be understood as a form of ideological discourse where that form derives from a 'specific articulating principle'.27 In this case the articulating principle is the signifier of nation. Nationalism will take on varying ideological forms depending on the elements with which it is
articulated and it is precisely this which must be the object of analysis. Laclau considers the class character of nationalism, arguing that while it has no
intrinsic class connotation, such a connotation can nevertheless be found in specific instances. Nationalism may be linked by a feudal class to the support of a traditional 'hierarchical-authoritarian' system (Bismarck's Germany) or by a bourgeois class to the development of a modern, centralized, nation state that transcends feudalism making national unity the supreme object of attainment
Finlayson: Tartışılacak Önermeler
It necessarily follows that nationalism is a dynamic process of continual articulation and re-articulation. The circumstances, conjunctures, change and the discourse of nationalism will also change, may even be part of that change. For 'the national' is not
merely one part of political contestation, it can form a discursive field within which contestation occurs. Where a nation-state is reasonably stable, political dispute can take on the form of a dispute over what the nation is really like and who is the authentic representative of its traditions. This is not a dispute over some empirically verifiable fact but consists of rival attempts to define the nation in accordance with some particular set of social values. Political parties rarely claim to be doing anything which is not in accord with the wishes and character of the people
Finlayson: Tartışılacak Önermeler
• But nationalism also provides particularity to the social, a particularity produced through differentiation. Nations are produced through the construction of boundaries, both territorial and symbolic, and this forges a founding contradiction within modern nation states—that between particular and universal. The nation and its connotations must apply universally, within the nation, but this
particular universal is only guaranteed by the declaration of some outside, some other to the nation. To be itself the nation must always produce that antagonistic other which prevents it from being itself
Finlayson: Tartışılacak Önermeler
– We do not, then, search for a root cause or
foundational moment of nationalism, to find what is or is not the nation, but rather ask how is it that the concept of nation has been produced and
deployed. In what ways is the positing of an origin to nation and claims to its causal effects used as a form of ideological power? Nation is not a cause but an effect of power and institutions of power.
In turn it occasions its own effects. What are these, how do they work and in what ways?
