Contemporary Authors

• The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber Allen & Unwin (Boston, MA), 1984
• Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1992
• Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1996
• Ethnicity without Groups Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004
• Grounds for Difference Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2015
• Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2016

1. Trans : gender and race in an age of unsettled identities LCCN 2016936750 Type of material Book Personal name Brubaker, Rogers. Main title Trans : gender and race in an age of unsettled identities / Rogers Brubaker. Published/Produced Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2016. Projected pub date 1609 Description pages cm ISBN 9780691172354 (hardcover : alk. paper) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. Grounds for difference LCCN 2014024298 Type of material Book Personal name Brubaker, Rogers, 1956- Main title Grounds for difference / Rogers Brubaker. Published/Produced Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2015. Description xi, 219 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780674743960 Links Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45973 Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46295 Shelf Location FLM2015 086603 CALL NUMBER HM821 .B78 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. The limits of rationality : an essay on the social and moral thought of Max Weber LCCN 83015152 Type of material Book Personal name Brubaker, Rogers, 1956- Main title The limits of rationality : an essay on the social and moral thought of Max Weber / Rogers Brubaker. Published/Created London ; Boston : Allen & Unwin, 1984. Description viii, 119 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0043011721 004301173X (pbk.) CALL NUMBER HM22.G3 W42367 1984 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 4. Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany LCCN 91042897 Type of material Book Personal name Brubaker, Rogers, 1956- Main title Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany / Rogers Brubaker. Published/Created Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1992. Description 270 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0674131770 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER JN2919 .B78 1992 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER JN2919 .B78 1992 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5. Nationalism reframed : nationhood and the national question in the New Europe LCCN 96010873 Type of material Book Personal name Brubaker, Rogers, 1956- Main title Nationalism reframed : nationhood and the national question in the New Europe / Rogers Brubaker. Published/Created Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1996. Description xi, 202 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 052157224X (hardcover) 0521576490 (pbk.) Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/cam027/96010873.html Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/cam021/96010873.html CALL NUMBER DJK51 .B78 1996 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER DJK51 .B78 1996 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 6. Ethnicity without groups LCCN 2004047343 Type of material Book Personal name Brubaker, Rogers, 1956- Main title Ethnicity without groups / Rogers Brubaker. Published/Created Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2004. Description x, 283 p. ; 25 cm. ISBN 0674015398 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER GN495.6 .B77 2004 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms Shelf Location FLM2015 110676 CALL NUMBER GN495.6 .B77 2004 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2)

• Princeton University Press Web site - http://press.princeton.edu/releases/m10800.html

  QUOTED: "In the summer of 2015 I became fascinated by the intertwined debates about whether Caitlyn Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman and Rachel Dolezal as black. The debates were dominated by efforts to validate or invalidate the identities claimed by Jenner and Dolezal. But at the same time they raised deeper questions about the similarities and differences between gender and race in an age of massively unsettled identities."

  An Interview with Rogers Brubaker, author of Trans.

  This book has taken you into new territory. What drew you to the subject?

  In the summer of 2015 I became fascinated by the intertwined debates about whether Caitlyn Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman and Rachel Dolezal as black. The debates were dominated by efforts to validate or invalidate the identities claimed by Jenner and Dolezal. But at the same time they raised deeper questions about the similarities and differences between gender and race in an age of massively unsettled identities. I had planned to spend the summer months working on a completely different project, but this “trans moment” afforded a unique opportunity to think systematically about sex and gender in relation to race and ethnicity as embodied identities that are increasingly – yet in differing ways and to differing degrees – understood as open to choice and change

  You begin with the pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” in the debates about Jenner and Dolezal. One common trope in the debates was that transracial is “not a thing.” Do you disagree?

  Of course transracial is not a “thing” in the same sense as transgender: there’s no socially recognized and legally regulated procedure for changing one’s race or ethnicity comparable to the procedures that are available for changing sex or gender. But I do think the term “transracial” usefully brings into focus the ways in which people do in fact move from one racial or ethnic category to another or position themselves between or beyond existing categories.

  The second part of your book is called “thinking with trans.” What do you mean by this?

  The idea is that one can use the transgender experience as a lens through which to think about the instability and contestedness of racial identities. I distinguish three forms of the transgender experience, which I call the trans of migration, the trans of between, and the trans of beyond. The trans of migration – the most familiar form – involves moving from one established sex/gender category to another. The trans of between involves defining oneself with reference to both established categories, without belonging entirely or unambiguously to either one. The trans of beyond claims to transcend existing categories or go beyond gender altogether. I argue that each of these can help us think about race and ethnicity in fruitful ways. Racial passing (including “reverse passing” like Dolezal’s) exemplifies the trans of migration, the multiracial movement the trans of between, and indifference or opposition to racial or ethnic categorization the trans of beyond.

  Doesn’t sex have a deeper biological basis than race?

  Exactly, but this presents us with a paradox. Morphological, physiological, and hormonal differences between the sexes, although not as marked in humans as in many other species, are biologically real and socially consequential. Nothing remotely analogous can be said about racial divisions. Yet as the debates about Jenner and Dolezal showed, it is more socially legitimate to change one’s sex (and gender) than to change one’s race.

  How do you explain this?

  The distinction between sex and gender – a distinction that has no analogue in the domain of race and ethnicity – has made it possible to think of gender identity as an inner essence that is independent of the sexed body. Yet according to the widespread “born that way” narrative, this inner essence is understood as natural – as unchosen and unchanging. Changing one’s sex or gender does not mean changing one’s identity; it means changing the way one is recognized and classified by others. This usually involves changing one’s self-presentation and may also involve transforming one’s body to bring it into alignment with one’s identity. We have no cultural tools for thinking about racial identity as an inner essence that is independent of the body and knowable only by the individual. A key part of what is understood as constituting racial identity – notably one’s ancestry – is located outside the self and is open to inspection by others. An individual who identifies with an ethnic or racial category to which she is not entitled by ancestry cannot intelligibly make use of the “born in the wrong body” narrative to justify changing her racial classification.

  The broad sympathy toward Jenner seemed to suggest that transgender, unlike transracial, had achieved a remarkable degree of mainstream public acceptance. Were you surprised by the more recent controversy over transgender access to bathrooms in schools?

  Not really. The shift toward public acceptance of transgender has been astonishingly rapid, but it has been uneven across regions, generations, institutions, and milieux. As transgender claims have moved from insulated settings like liberal arts colleges to mainstream settings like public school systems, and as courts, civil rights agencies, and legislatures have taken action to establish broad transgender rights, it’s unsurprising to see a backlash. Controversy has focused on access to bathrooms and locker rooms, tapping into public anxieties about vulnerable children, sexual predators, and the presence of people with penises in girls’ and women’s spaces. It’s also worth noting that to cultural conservatives, especially religious conservatives, preserving sex and gender boundaries is much more important than maintaining racial and ethnic boundaries. So while Dolezal’s claim to identify as black provoked fiercer opposition than Jenner’s claim to identify as a woman, transgender rights are likely to be far more controversial in the coming years than practices associated with choosing or changing race.

  Rogers Brubaker is professor of sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. His recent books include Ethnicity without Groups, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, and Grounds for Difference.

• Wikipedia -

  Rogers Brubaker
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Rogers Brubaker (born 1956) is an American sociologist, and professor at University of California, Los Angeles.[1] He has written academic works on ethnicity, nationalism, and citizenship. Born in Evanston, Illinois, he attended Harvard University and the University of Sussex before receiving a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1990.[2]
  Works

  The limits of rationality: an essay on the social and moral thought of Max Weber, Taylor & Francis, 1984, ISBN 978-0-04-301173-7
  Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany, Harvard University Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-674-13178-1
  Nationalism reframed: nationhood and the national question in the New Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0-521-57649-9
  Ethnicity without groups, Harvard University Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-674-01539-5
  Nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in a Transylvanian town, Princeton University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-691-12834-4
  Grounds for difference, Harvard University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-674-74396-0

• University of California, Los Angeles Web site - http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/brubaker/

  Mailing Address:
  Department of Sociology
  UCLA
  264 Haines Hall
  375 Portola Plaza
  Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551

  Phone: (310) 825-1129

  E-mail: brubaker@soc.ucla.edu

  Office: 232 Haines Hall

  Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles. Brubaker has written widely on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and ethnicity. His first book explored the idea of rationality in the work of Max Weber, while his essays on Pierre Bourdieu helped introduce Bourdieu to an English-speaking audience. His next two books analyzed European nationalism in historical and comparative perspective. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992) sought to explain the sharply differing ways in which citizenship has been defined vis-à-vis immigrants in France and Germany and helped establish what has since become a flourishing field of citizenship studies; Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (1996) compared contemporary East European nationalisms with those of the interwar period, both emerging after the breakup of multinational states into would-be nation-states. Subsequently, in a series of analytical essays, many of them collected in Ethnicity without Groups (2004), Brubaker has critically engaged prevailing analytical stances in the study of ethnicity, race, and nationalism and sought to develop alternative analytical resources. These informed his collaborative book Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (2006), which examined the everyday workings of ethnicity in a setting of highly charged ethnonational conflict.

  Brubaker’s most recent books have taken him in new directions. Grounds for Difference (2015) emerged from three new lines of work, engaging three increasingly salient contexts for the contemporary politics of difference: the return of inequality, the return of biology, and the return of the sacred. The introduction can be read here. Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities, to be published by Princeton University Press in September 2016, grew out of an article analyzing the controversial pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” in the intertwined debates about Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal in the summer of 2015. Brubaker’s longer-term book project is provisionally entitled Religion, Language, and the Politics of Difference.

  Brubaker has taught at UCLA since 1991. Before coming to UCLA, he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows of Harvard University (1988-1991). He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (1994-99), a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (1994-99), and Fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1995-96), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1999-2000), and the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin (2016-2017). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. Brubaker is a Senior Editor of Theory and Society and a member of the Editorial Board of numerous journals.

  CV: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/brubaker/web/vita.pdf

• Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/trans-brubaker-race-gender/502397/

  QUOTED: "The sex vs. gender distinction allows us to distinguish the inner gender identity from the outward sexed body. There’s no analogous way of separating out the inner from the outer in the domain of race. The inner gender identity can be understood as an essence that only the person concerned can know, and can be independent of the sexed body. We just can’t think about race in that way. It is incomprehensible if I tell you that I simply feel black."
  "Also, when we talk about race, ancestry matters. Ancestry doesn’t matter at all for sex or gender identity. Even though sex is in fact inherited, it is inherited in this way that has nothing to do with history or lineage or family or relationships. This permits us to think about gender as something that only the individual has the authority to determine, whereas others always have a stake in saying what someone’s racial identity is."

  If Americans Can Be Transgender, Can They Be Transracial?

  A new book explores the flexibility of race and gender.
  Caitlyn Jenner
  Chris Pizzello / Reuters

  Emma Green Oct 2, 2016 Politics

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  Maybe it was when they were googling Laverne Cox in Orange Is the New Black. Perhaps they were reading about the death of Leelah Alcorn. Or they could have been watching an intense political fight over bathroom use unfold in North Carolina. In recent years, more and more Americans have had to ask questions about gender identity. For some, these news stories and cultural events may have provided their first exposure to the concept of being trans.

  “Transgender” is a term for people whose gender—feelings of being male or female—doesn’t match up with the biological sex they were assigned at birth. A lot of different people might use the word to describe themselves: Not every transgender person has surgery or makes physiological changes, although some do; and not every transgender person identifies as “male” or “female” at all, sometimes choosing other words to describe themselves.

  Although the term “trans” is almost exclusively used to talk about gender, it also offers a framework for thinking about how other identities can and cannot be thought about separately from people’s physical bodies, argues Rogers Brubaker, a University of California, Los Angeles, professor in his new book, Trans. Specifically, he says, it’s useful to compare race and gender through a “trans” lens—in what ways are the two categories similar and different?
  Related Story

  America’s Profound Gender Anxiety

  It’s an interesting thought experiment, but it’s also a relevant one. Last spring, two news stories collided to create a culture-wide seminar in identity studies: Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic athlete, came out as transgender on the cover of Vanity Fair, and it was revealed that Rachel Dolezal, the former head of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had lied about her African American descent, although she has said she identifies as black. The two women’s stories are neither perfect analogs nor good representations of the experiences of other people who cross gender or racial lines, Brubaker writes. But the convergence of their experiences did offer an opportunity to explore and compare two unsettled forms of identity.

  Many words have already been written about the Dolezal vs. Jenner debate—some thought-provoking essays are here, here, and here. The value in Brubaker’s book is not in readjudicating old internet battles, but in laying out current conflicts of identity in a public, accessible way; academics have been thinking and talking about the fluidity and fixedness of gender and race for a long time, but their thinking hasn’t always been part of mainstream conversations. Especially with the growing number of legislative, judicial, and cultural challenges to the role of gender in American society, sometimes, it can just be useful to lay out the terms of debate.

  Brubaker and I spoke about the complexity of trans identity, largely in the context of gender, but also in the context of race. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

  Emma Green: What sets race and sex or gender apart as forms of identity?

  Rogers Brubaker: They are similarly becoming massively unsettled. And yet, as you suggest, they are indeed very different.

  There are two ways to think about that. The sex vs. gender distinction allows us to distinguish the inner gender identity from the outward sexed body. There’s no analogous way of separating out the inner from the outer in the domain of race. The inner gender identity can be understood as an essence that only the person concerned can know, and can be independent of the sexed body. We just can’t think about race in that way. It is incomprehensible if I tell you that I simply feel black.

  Also, when we talk about race, ancestry matters. Ancestry doesn’t matter at all for sex or gender identity. Even though sex is in fact inherited, it is inherited in this way that has nothing to do with history or lineage or family or relationships. This permits us to think about gender as something that only the individual has the authority to determine, whereas others always have a stake in saying what someone’s racial identity is.

  “We are chronically and continuously remaking who we are.”

  Green: This also seems to be a matter of a fundamental difference in worldview: the idea that individuals determine their identities, versus the belief that our identities are determined by nature, or a Creator, as some Christians might believe.

  How do these worldviews collide over modern conceptions of gender and gender transition?

  Brubaker: There is a distinctly American strand of individualism—the notion of the self-made man, or the self-made person. It’s the idea that we are chronically and continuously remaking who we are and that we must, in fact, do so in order to keep up with the times. This is not just true in the domain of sexuality and gender; more generally, it’s essential to neoliberal understandings of how people need to be entrepreneurial about themselves by retraining, remaking, and reshaping their bodies, their minds, and their capacities. That’s part of what it means to be a good citizen.

  Although certain forms of Christianity embrace that language of individualism, other forms offer a very powerful critique of that way of thinking about what the self ultimately is.

  Green: You write that the brain could have a role in shaping our perceived gender identity. This stuck me as a bit of a black-box claim. What do we actually know about how brains relate to gender identity? Why is the brain important in sorting through these concepts?

  Brubaker: It’s interesting that people invest so much hope in the idea that brain might determine gender. On the one hand, you have this notion of the ultimate subjectivity of gender identity: Only you can say who you really are. And yet, at the same time, you have the sense that who I really am is, after all, not arbitrary. Only I can know who I am, and yet who I am, in this way of thinking, is grounded in some aspect of my brain, my body, my organic being.

  Of course, not everyone feels that way. Some transgender people reject that ‘born that way’ argument and the idea that their gender identity is something grounded in their brains or other aspect about their bodies.

  “I don’t think there are any categories more central to the experience of being a human in society than sex and gender.”

  Green: Let’s bring race back into the conversation for a moment. Throughout American history, “science” has been used to establish “truths” about identity—for example, to argue that African Americans are inferior to whites.

  Given the hazards of using science to establish “truth” about categories as elusive as race or gender identity, why do you think people gravitate toward medicalized or scientific language to understand gender identity, race, and sexuality?

  Brubaker: I there are two reasons. One is more strategic. If you have the scientific justification for something, that gives it greater authority. For example, if you can enlist scientific authority to ground your claim of having a gender identity at odds with your body, you can also persuade medical authorities to allow you access to treatment.

  There’s also a deep cultural authority and prestige in biomedical science, and increasingly in genetics. I don’t think you can understand the yearning for this discovery for the natural grounding of identity without taking into account the broader cultural authority of biomedicine.

  Green: A lot of Americans seem befuddled by the idea that people could have a gender other than the one that matches their biological sex. Why do you think, at a basic level, this confusion exists, and do you have any empathy for it?

  Brubaker: Very much so, yes. I don’t think there are any categories more central to the experience of being a human in society than sex and gender. When, suddenly, these utterly foundational categories start dissolving, it’s extremely unsettling.

  Ultimately, I think sex and gender are more fundamental categories for most people than race and ethnicity. Certainly, the latter are not as important for religious conservatives—nothing is more central to the created order than sex and gender.

  Green: But that hasn’t always been the case. Two hundred years ago, you might have encountered people in various traditions—the Southern Baptists, for example—who would have said the Bible justifies slavery, or later, the Bible justifies a racial hierarchy that gives lesser rights to African Americans.

  What changed?

  Brubaker: Attitudes have shifted tremendously. If you look at, for example, data about the public’s attitude toward interracial marriage over 50 or 60 years, it was described as one of the largest changes in the history of Gallup polling. It went from being something that almost everybody disapproved of, to something that almost everybody approves of.

  I don’t think you see anything like that in the domain of sex and gender. Attitudes about what women can or should be doing have changed, but there’s not evidence that an equally dramatic change has taken place.

  “There’s the fear ... that an aggressive transgender-rights agenda will be much more far-reaching than the recognition of gay marriage.”

  Green: Perhaps there’s evidence of that in the transgender backlash. In the 2015 campaign against a Houston ordinance which would have outlawed discrimination against transgender people in public bathrooms and other spaces, opponents spoke of not wanting “men in women’s bathrooms,” but they didn’t seem to care about “women in men’s bathrooms.” Why do you think this fear, and that double standard, exist?

  Brubaker: This is not only the case for women—it’s the case in the domain of race. There’s more concern about claiming a black identity than there is today about claiming a white identity. And of course, the reverse was true historically. So why is it that access to the subordinate category is more closely policed today than that access to the superordinate category? It’s kind of a puzzle.

  In the case of race, you could say it’s connected to concerns about cultural appropriation and access to spaces that were supposed to be reserved for blacks. This has a certain parallel to concerns about access to spaces, like at women’s colleges, that are supposed to be reserved for women.

  Green: You write that “opposition to strong versions of transgender rights may be deeper than opposition to gay marriage.” Why do you say that?

  Brubaker: The gay-marriage debate involved complicated questions of public recognition. But it also involves what people do in private. It doesn’t affect other people in the same way that legislation requiring identity-based bathroom access does. Ultimately, they’re both matters of recognition. But I do think there’s the fear, grounded or not, that we see in the Houston campaign and the North Carolina debate, which is that an aggressive transgender-rights agenda will be much more far-reaching than the recognition of gay marriage is.

  Green: What would it look like to have a gender order that’s deeply destabilized in a much more widespread way than we’ve ever had to contend with before, as you’re describing?

  Brubaker: I think this is what makes the subject so fascinating. This is such a foundational social category—gender, sex—that we can’t really imagine what lies in the future. I think certainly major cultural, political, and legal struggles lie in the immediate future. But what lies beyond that is really hard to say.

• Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Web site - http://www.mmg.mpg.de/diversity-interviews/brubaker/

  Interview with Rogers Brubaker (University of California, Los Angeles), conducted by Franziska Meissner

  Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles.

  For further information click here.

  M: What does ‘diversity’ mean to you by way of your work and field of expertise?

  B: In a sense ‘diversity’ is just a more recent term for concepts that have been central to sociology from the very beginning – the idea of differentiation, for example, or the notion of heterogeneity. ‘Modern’ societies have been defined precisely by their heterogeneity, by being ‘differentiated’ societies. Clearly, ‘diversity’ is doing more work than simply referring to this extremely general notion of differentiation or heterogeneity. But there are limits to what one can do by talking about diversity in general. Different forms of diversity work in different ways, in everyday interaction and in political life. This afternoon, for example, I’ll be talking about the differences between religious diversity and linguistic diversity.

  M: That leads on to the second question. Is 'diversity' really just a zeitgeist term, i.e. a post-multiculturalism policy catch phrase such as in notions like ‘integration and diversity’ or is it a corporate tool – we're talking about ‘diversity management’ all of the time – or can it as a concept help structure and advance social scientific analysis?

  B: It’s not only a zeitgeist term, a policy catchphrase, or a corporate tool, though it is indeed all of these. It’s important to distinguish between categories of analysis – the categories that social scientists use -- and categories of practice that are used in everyday social and political life. And ‘diversity’ is clearly both a category of analysis and a category of practice. As a category of practice, it’s used in the corporate world, in universities, in advertising, in public policy discourse, and so on. So if we are going to use the term in social science, we have to give the term a specific analytical meaning, otherwise we risk simply conflating the analytic category with the practical category.

  M: For the third question, we're trying to develop research and theory spanning contemporary immigration societies and longstanding multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies. How do you see the concept of ‘diversity’ shaping this agenda?

  B: This is a valuable agenda. It’s consistent with a broader trend in the literature towards the development of an integrated comparative field of study. But I think it's important to note that there is not a sharp distinction between immigration societies and societies with longstanding forms of ethnic and religious pluralism. In Europe we have migration-generated linguistic and religious diversity, but also longstanding forms of linguistic and religious pluralism. And in Africa or South Asia – yes, these are countries with longstanding forms ethnic and religious diversity, but those patterns of diversity are changing as a result of contemporary migration flows. So it’s important to try to specify the connections between longstanding forms of diversity and newer forms of diversity resulting from migration. In the Netherlands, for example, there is a connection between the longstanding pattern of religious pluralism and ways of accommodating contemporary migration-generated ethnic and religious heterogeneity. Even though the Dutch system of ‘pillarization’ was already disintegrating in the 1960s, this model helped shape ways of thinking about organizing newer forms of heterogeneity. Or take the German case. The historically established German system of church-state-relations, built on the distinctive status of a ‘corporation of public law,’ shapes contemporary debates about the legal integration of Muslim migrants and their descendants.

  Another point is that the connections between long-established patterns of diversity and newer forms of migration-generated diversity themselves differ depending on what kind of diversity we're talking about. This is a theme I'll develop in my talk this afternoon. The connection between historically established ways of accommodating diversity and contemporary modes of accommodating diversity arising from migration are much stronger in the domain of religion than in the domain of language. Several historically multilingual societies in Europe, for example, have institutionalized strong forms of linguistic pluralism. But these strong forms of pluralism are nowhere extended to include languages spoken by immigrants and their children. On the other hand, historically established systems of religious pluralism have been extended to included religions practiced by immigrants and their children – though not, of course, without prolonged and ongoing struggles. To take again the example of the Netherlands, the system of state support for religious schools that was established in the early 20th century for Catholic and Calvinist schools has been expanded to include Islamic schools.

  M: From your perspective – and here you can reflect on your expertise, discipline, country, or intellectual tradition – what are a few of the key empirical, theoretical and methodological challenges that we are currently facing in ‘diversity’-related research?

  B: I've already mentioned a couple of these. One is the challenge of distinguishing analytical categories from categories of practice and making sure that we as analysts do not simply re-deploy journalistic or administrative categories. I’ve also mentioned the challenge of distinguishing different kinds of diversity. Beyond these, there is the challenge of avoiding what I've called ‘groupism’ or ‘substantialism.’ There’s a temptation to think about diversity or pluralism as a juxtaposition of internally homogeneous, externally bounded groups or blocs. Pluralism can sometimes exist in such bloc-like forms as a kind of Nebeineinander of bounded groups. But pluralism or diversity can also take more individualized forms, resulting in the erosion of group boundaries. I think our representations of contemporary forms of diversity are often excessively group-focused.

  One last challenge is to be sensitive to different ways of representing diversity and framing political claims. In any particular context, some ways of representing diversity and framing claims are going to be more legitimate than others. This creates incentives to talk about diversity in particular ways. So in the last century and a half, for example, where nationhood has carried with it a presumption of self-government, there have been strong incentives for political entrepreneurs seeking independence or autonomy to represent the diverse populations of large polyglot and multi-confessional states in specifically national terms, as multi-national. There are similar incentives today to use the language of indigeneity. And in liberal democratic polities today, where religious rights and liberties and strongly protected, there are strong incentives to represent diversity in religious terms. The general point is that how diverse populations are characterized depends on what claims are recognized as legitimate and effective in particular discursive and policy environments – and these change over time and vary across contexts.

  M: Thank you very much.

Trans
Sujaya Dhanvantari
129.50 (Dec. 19, 2016): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Rogers Publishing Ltd.
http://www2.macleans.ca/

TRANS

Rogers Brubaker

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In Western culture, gender and race were traditionally thought to be unchangeable and fixed for life. Black or white, male or female: These were forever separated by the binary logic of absolute difference. But even as the old colonial theories of racial determinism have long been discredited, the notion of changing race is still ethically troubling. Not so for changing gender, which is now socially accepted in unprecedented ways. That is why celebrity trans woman Caitlyn Jenner and transracial civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal, born white but now identifying as black, are not the same kind of "trans." Inspired by those two news stories, UCLA sociologist Rogers Brubaker explores the unstable categories of gender and race in his new book.

Brubaker is the author of Grounds for Difference (2015), a study of how racial and gender differences entrench structural inequalities. In Trans, he analyzes the newly recognized kind of person constituted by transgender stories of migrating from one gender to the other, existing between them or refusing any form of gender classification. His attempt to include a trans moment for transracial, multiracial and post-racial identities ventures into new terrain.

The glitch is that gender is now seen as purely individual, while race is still inherited, making it harder to change race without asking how difficult it might be to leave behind intergenerational communities, or even if that would be possible in situations of oppression. It would also mean asking if Dolezal's transition from white to black raises questions about privilege.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

While the first part of Trans compares Dolezal and Jenner, the second leverages the concept of transgender to examine transracial differences. Ultimately, Brubaker would like us to recognize transracial identities in the same way we accept transgender ones. In his analysis, transracial identities generate uneasy resonances with not only the dark histories of racial passing, but also the contemporary realities of racial oppression. Still, he prods us to reflect on the new kinds of racial identities being created through interracial relations multiracial movements and generational change. While the mainstream recognizes transgender, it remains wary of transracial. The controversy over trans identities is far from settled.

Caption: 'The Revenge of Analog': Niche markets for products like film, vinyl and watches provide jobs in a manufacturing climate devastated by digitization
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dhanvantari, Sujaya. "Trans." Maclean's, 19 Dec. 2016, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474126074&it=r&asid=de37c1d54d7dce2a4e424a5cb82f063b. Accessed 8 May 2017.

QUOTED: "As a whole, the work leaves much room for further reflection and analysis."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A474126074
Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities
263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p81.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities

Rogers Brubaker. Princeton Univ., $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-69117-235-4

Sociologist Brubaker (Grounds for Difference), a sociology professor at UCLA, seeks insight into the contemporary politics of belonging through his analysis of two high-profile cases of individual identity, both of which made headlines in 2015. Expanding on an article published in the academic journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, Brubaker examines the media narratives about Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, and Rachel Dolezal, who claimed to be black, and suggests (not entirely successfully) that together these cases of publicly contested gender and ethnoracial identities are an "intellectual opportunity." The author argues that the concept of transness has particular salience today, and that the way people think about transgender experiences could be fruitfully used to think about race as well. The book is organized into two sections: part one describes public perceptions of race and gender identity in reaction to the Jenner and Dolezal narratives, and part two argues for the usefulness of "thinking with trans" with regard to race. Such interdisciplinary efforts are welcome, but the execution in this case is hasty. Brubaker is reasonably well versed on the history and politics of transgender identity, but he nevertheless accepts Time magazine's declaration of a "transgender tipping point" or a "trans moment" narrative of mainstream acceptance. Meanwhile, shifting notions of ethnoracial identity remain disappointingly underexplored. As a whole, the work leaves much room for further reflection and analysis. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 81+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462236489&it=r&asid=898d7908fe1bcdd065a94564b8c668a4. Accessed 8 May 2017.

QUOTED: "important and conceptually innovative book."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A462236489
Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics - Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town
Robert Levgold
86.2 (March-April 2007): p176.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org

Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town By Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, and Liana Grancea: Princeton University Press, 2006, 502, $35.00

No topics receive more attention these days than nationalism and ethnic politics, but the reigning abstractions by which they are comprehended, say these authors, miss the way ethnicity actually resonates in the lives of people. By drilling deep into the mundane conversations, cares, and relationships among citizens of Cluj-Napoca, a city of mixed Hungarian-Romanian heritage at the heart of Transylvania, they set out to examine precisely how ethnicity matters -- for, indeed, it does -- far from the flourishes of the political entrepreneurs operating over people's heads. They are not trying to undo the day's ascendant macrotheories, seen not so much as wrong as incomplete, but rather attempting to connect the overarching with the underpinning. In this important and conceptually innovative book, Brubaker's name is in larger lights, because he did most of the writing, but it is a genuinely collaborative effort in which the others added anthropology and sociolinguistics to his sociology.

Levgold, Robert
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Levgold, Robert. "Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics - Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town." Foreign Affairs, Mar.-Apr. 2007, p. 176. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA164843448&it=r&asid=3b9c187bde14ab9e57e2ef7d0af4b97f. Accessed 8 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A164843448
Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World
Elizabeth Vlossak
23.3 (Sept. 2012): p747.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World. Edited by ROLAND HSU. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010. 272 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper and e-book).

This lively, informative, and thought-provoking interdisciplinary collection of nine essays explores the effects that globalization and immigration have had on ethnic identities in Europe. In the first of three parts, sociologists Saskia Sassen, Rogers Brubaker, and Salvador Cardus offer creative new models for approaching the "ethnic question" in contemporary Europe and understanding how the concept of ethnicity continues to define who does and who does not belong within the European community. Sassen reveals that within an expanding and globalizing Europe, new immigrants have the opportunity to develop multilayered identities and a sense of belonging based on "concentric membership" to local, national, and global communities. Thus the concept of ethnicity itself needs to be redefined. Brubaker proposes that in order to properly understand ethnic identity one needs to differentiate between the social and political. While the collection as a whole attempts to move away from an overly simplistic East versus West binary, here Brubaker nonetheless demonstrates major differences with regard to ethnicity, which he defines as "a perspective on the world, not a thing in the world" (p. 49). Most notably, his research shows that the increased power of the European Union over nation-states has provided the institutional framework for ethnic minorities in Western European nations to make demands for self-determination, while in the East the European Union now acts as a modern-day Austro-Hungarian Empire by diffusing ethnic tensions. Cardus, for his part, argues that it is the mobility of individuals, rather than the role of institutions or communities, that is reshaping ethnicity and transforming societies.

Ethnicity nonetheless continues to exclude groups and individuals from full membership to nations and the wider European community, and these "divided lines" are explored in the collection's second part. Alec Hargreaves uncovers the paradox of French discourses of ethnicity and its consequences. On the one hand, according to the principles of French republicanism, ethnicity has no place in public discourse since all Frenchmen, by definition, are French. Yet the growing popularity of the racist, anti-immigrant, right-wing party, the Front National, as well as the continued economic, social, and political marginalization of ethnic minorities, in particular France's significant Muslim population, tells a very different story. Moreover, as Hargreaves clearly demonstrates, the reluctance to acknowledge ethnicity and the lack of ethnic data gathering have arguably had a detrimental effect on the very groups who would most benefit from improved services designed to address the very real challenges caused by ethnicity and to help them integrate into the French community. While immigrants to France, as well as much of Western Europe, generally come from beyond Europe's borders, ethnic tensions in Eastern Europe, and in particular in the Balkans, are generally the result of internal migration. Pavle Levi, through his interview with and comments from the filmmaker Zelimir Zilnik, offers a unique perspective on questions of identity, interethnic relations, and exclusion within the border regions of the former Yugoslavia. Since the 1960s, Zilnik has documented these "internal exiles," and Levi highlights the role that art and film can play in challenging long-held prejudices and forging greater ethnic integration and understanding.

The third part of the collection brings us back to the questions originally addressed in part 1, by exploring the "promising ties" that could lead to greater ethnic unity within Europe. Bassam Tibi voices his frustration with his fellow Muslim immigrants who have embraced Islamist fundamentalism as a means of forging a sense of identity and belonging in their adopted nations. While recognizing that the systemic discrimation of Muslims by European states and their non-Muslim citizens needs to be eradicated, Tibi sees the integration of Muslims as a two-way street: Muslims themselves need to embrace European civic values to create a new form of European Islam. The question of Turkey's eventual inclusion in Europe, and whether Turks will ever be considered "European," is explored in two articles. Kader Konuk's fascinating study of German Jewish immigration to Turkey in the 1930s reveals the inability of these immigrants to be fully accepted into Turkish society, despite the fact that Turkey was attempting to Europeanize at this time. The fate of these Germans is similar to that shared by Turkish immigrants to postwar Germany, a theme further developed by Leslie Adelson, who explores the works of German artist Alexander Kluge and the Turkish poets Berkan Karpat and Zafer Senocak. Here again we see how art and literature provide an alternative means through which to bridge ethnic divisions and create a more united European identity. In the collection's final chapter, historian Caroline Fink assesses the fate of Jews in contemporary Europe. Over the past twenty years, a "Jewish space" has emerged and expanded in various parts of Europe, notably Poland, Germany, and Spain. The social, cultural, artistic, and at times political elements of this space include not only restored synagogues and Jewish cemeteries but also the Jewish studies departments at many European universities, the hugely popular klezmer music, the "Jewish tourism" industry, and recently built museums and memorials. European Jewry remains nonetheless divided along generational, ethnic, religious, and political lines. Moreover, just as a Jewish space has been expanding in Europe, so has anti-Semitism. Despite these challenges, Fink concludes that Jewish communities can play an integral role in strengthening interethnic cohesion within Europe, as well as acting as a bridge linking the continent to communities beyond its borders.

Interdisciplinary collections can be both exciting and frustrating. On the one hand, readers familiar with one particular field or academic discipline are directly exposed to a wide range of approaches, methodologies, and research objectives that they would not regularly encounter or necessarily consider. By having sociologists, literary theorists, political scientists, historians, and art historians study the question of ethnicity from their respective vantage point, this collection proves to be an innovative alternative to discipline-specific texts. Humanists and social scientists are equally represented, and each author reveals another facet of a rich and very complex subject. On the other hand, such interdisciplinarity is at times jarring and confusing for the reader. Hsu must be commended for his creative selection of essays and his ability to integrate them into a coherent whole. Each author has also made some effort to write for a generalist audience. Nonetheless, some readers may wish for more representation of their particular discipline; historians, for example, may feel a bit shortchanged. While this collection does not aim to be a definitive study of ethnicity in contemporary Europe, certain key themes are not addressed. The most conspicuous omission here is gender. Considering that the image on the book's cover is of a Muslim woman wearing a burqa, it is very surprising and indeed disappointing that none of the authors or the editor felt that the relationship between ethnicity and gender was worth exploring.

Despite these shortcomings, this is an important collection, and certainly timely. However, as Hsu recognizes in his introductory chapter, Europe is changing rapidly. In fact, since the book's publication, the European Union has found itself struggling to deal with a growing list of financial, political, military, and social challenges, both domestic and international, the consequences of which have had a direct impact on immigration policies, attitudes toward ethnicity and race, and the notion of a shared European identity. Published on the eve of the Arab Spring and the Eurozone meltdown, this book nonetheless remains relevant because it provides historical context, theoretical and methodological frameworks, and numerous examples of individual and communal responses to the "ethnic question" that will allow readers to make sense of current developments and possible future outcomes. While an updated edition will eventually be necessary, this collection remains a powerful document, and will be of great interest and use to students and scholars of world history, as well as those specializing in European studies, international relations, immigration and globalization, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

ELIZABETH VLOSSAK

Brock University

Vlossak, Elizabeth
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vlossak, Elizabeth. "Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World." Journal of World History, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, p. 747+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA306970969&it=r&asid=d54c2bb933c7393e966b3f137a9aa8fb. Accessed 8 May 2017.

QUOTED: "Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity remains an excellent case study that masterfully combines conceptual innovation, analytical precision and rich empirical description, making for a very enjoyable read."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A306970969
Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town
Matthias vom Hau
87.3 (Mar. 2009): p1703.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Oxford University Press

Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town

By Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox and Liana Grancea

Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2006. $35 cloth, $27.95 paper.

The carefully researched case study Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity explores the workings of nationalism and ethnicity in the Transylvanian city of Cluj. Drawing on Brubaker's previous theoretical critique of groupism (Brubaker 2002), the authors spare no effort to avoid treating nations and ethnicities as reified groups. Nationalism and ethnicity are conceptualized as cognitive frames for experiencing and understanding the social world, as patterns of discourse about identity and community, and as political claims evoking the "nation" or ethnic solidarity, which is again likely to sound familiar to readers of Brubaker's earlier work (Brubaker 1996; Brubaker et al. 2004). The key contribution of the book is thus to illustrate this theoretical perspective empirically. Brubaker et al. analyze ethnicity and nationalism as being articulated in nationalist rhetoric, objectified in symbols, grounded in organizational routines, expressed in commonsense knowledge, and enacted in private conversations. At the same time, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity moves beyond mere illustration. The study also addresses one of the major voids in the literature, the relationship between nationalism "from above" and nationalism "from below."

Its methodology is organized accordingly. Chapters 1 through 4 on nationalist politics combine historical narrative and focused comparisons, and draw primarily on relevant secondary literature. Chapters 5 through 12 on everyday ethnicity take an ethnographic approach, its data being based on individual interviews, group discussions, and participant observation. The authors avoided introducing their research theme directly, and instead focused on when and in which circumstances participants employed ethnicized ways of understanding and experiencing the social world.

The first part of the book traces the "national question" in East Central Europe since the late 18th century. The authors explore its dynamics in the contested borderland of Transylvania, to finally focus on Cluj and its trajectory from a Hungarian town 100 years ago into a predominantly Romanian city today. The historical narrative is organized around episodes of nationalist contention; its main actors are educated political elites involved in making nationalist claims and counterclaims.

According to the authors, during the late 18th century, nationalism provided a new cultural and political language that had came to infuse the resistance against the modernizing Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov empires. Provincial elites such as the Hungarian nobility began to extend their struggles against the Habsburg rulers into the domain of culture, complementing demands for political autonomy with the defense their "national" language and heritage. Those elite claims were buttressed by policies such as making schools teach in Hungarian and subsidizing Hungarian cultural associations. Because East Central Europe was marked by substantial religious and linguistic heterogeneity, and--compared to, for example, late 19th century France--a relatively weak state infrastructure, these official nationalizing projects resulted in intense counter mobilization. In late 19th century Transylvania, an emerging Romanian intelligentsia, supported by state elites in Bucharest, met the Hungarian demands with their own nationalizing claims and policies. This dynamic of state-sponsored nationalization and minority contestation continued to shape elite-level conflicts after Transylvania became part of the Romanian nation-state after World War I. (After a brief Hungarian interlude during World War II the region became again Romanian).

In Cluj, municipal authorities pursued the "Romanianization" of the city, to the dismay of the city's Hungarian cultural and intellectual elite. Conflicts crystallized around Hungarian schools, the historiography of Cluj's origins, and the symbolic structure of public space. Yet, Brubaker et al. argue that the impact of these nationalizing policies remained limited. The gradual transformation of Cluj into a Romanian city was largely the result of economic policy and demographic change. The twin-processes of industrialization and urbanization accelerated the influx of largely Romanian immigrants from the countryside since the 1950s, changing class relations, language patterns, life styles, and the city's associational landscape.

According to the authors, Cluj's demographic transformation did not alter the basic fault lines of ethno-political conflict. Shortly after the fall of the Ceausescu regime in 1989, Hungarian political and cultural elites began to mobilize around demands for collective rights, territorial autonomy, and the protection of their status as national minority. The most important representative vehicle of Transylvanian Hungarians, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians of Romania, established its headquarters in Cluj. Moreover, Hungarian mobilization was facilitated by school- and church-based ethnic networks and the support from the post-communist Hungarian government in Budapest. The reemergence of Hungarian mobilization was met by Romanian counterclaims. In Cluj, an ultranationalist mayor advanced an outspoken anti-Hungarian discourse in defense of national unity. His actions were less radical than his rhetoric, yet during his twelve-year tenure he systematically reconfigured the symbolic order of the city center. This included renaming streets, rewriting the plaques of statues and memorials, and redecorating the city center in the national colors of Romania. In turn, these initiatives were met by a steady stream of criticism by DAHR and Hungarian newspapers, and at least initially provoked a number of Hungarian demonstrations. Thus, a perspective "from above" reveals persistent and intense nationalist conflict in post-communist Cluj.

The centrality of nationalist ideology in the domain of politics did not translate into everyday life. Both ordinary Hungarians and Romanians in Cluj were largely indifferent to the nationalist rhetoric of their mayor and the discourse entertained by the Hungarian political and cultural elite. Yet, ethnicity and nationalism retained a powerful, if uneven, influence in shaping lived experience. Of particular importance were their workings in and through social categories and language. In post-communist Cluj, "Hungarian" generally referred to ethnicity, whereas "Romanian" was employed to describe either a citizen of the Romanian nation-state or an ethno-cultural nationality. Most Hungarians were bilingual, most Romanians were not. As such, spoken Hungarian constituted the key criterion for the identification of that ethnicity, whereas Romanian was the taken for granted language. Thus, nationhood and ethnicity were experienced in different ways among Clujeni. The profound asymmetries in demographic composition, social categorization and sociolinguistic practices result in a more "ethnicized" experience for the Hungarian minority.

The authors argue that the comparative salience of Hungarian everyday ethnicity is not a conscious choice of individuals, but institutionally grounded. The fascinating Chapter 9 shows how formal institutions and organizations such as schools, churches, workplaces and associations--and the informal networks growing from them--shaped the Hungarian "world" in Cluj. For example, the DAHR successfully mobilized for the restoration of separate schools and more control over the curriculum in Cluj, demands which the Romanian nationalist mayor denounced as a manifestation of Hungarian "separatism." The authors suggest, however, that it was the provision of a particular social environment, and not the ideological content of education, through which Hungarian-language schools helped to sustain ethnicity. Schools formed a setting where everybody spoke Hungarian, and it was "natural" to establish one's friendships and acquaintances with other Hungarians. As a matter of fact, institutions such as schools set the stage for the reproduction of Hungarian ethnicity, even when ordinary Hungarians often took a very critical stance towards DAHR's nationalist discourse. Thus, institutions constituted a critical node through which nationalist politics shaped everyday ethnicity, yet not in the ways envisioned and struggled over by elites.

Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity thus urges scholars to take a "dual perspective" on nationalism. Post-communist Cluj illustrates that elite-level nationalist discourse and symbolic politics were distinct from the everyday workings of ethnicity and nationhood. Even in a context of intense and protracted nationalist contention, elite claims only elicited a muted response among ordinary people. Analogously, the ways in which ethnicity and nationhood were experienced in everyday life were only of limited relevance for the reproduction of official discourse. The book is particularly strong when it moves beyond demonstrating that there was a disjuncture between elite-level nationalism and everyday ethnicity into showing how the two shaped each other, as in the analysis of Hungarian institutions in Cluj. The theoretical upshot would have even been more impressive, had the authors pushed further in explaining why there was such a disjuncture between nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in Cluj. Such a move from description to explanation would have offered an opportunity to identify new questions and generate more general hypotheses about the relationship between elite-level nationalism and everyday lived experience. For example, when--contrary to the case of Cluj--does elite-level conflict resonate at the level of everyday ethnicity? Likewise, under what conditions does everyday lived experience translate into elite-level nationalist contention? Sprinkled throughout the book, the authors provide some implicit answers linked to demographics, international politics and collective memory, but those explanatory arguments are never pursued in any systematic fashion. This said, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity remains an excellent case study that masterfully combines conceptual innovation, analytical precision and rich empirical description, making for a very enjoyable read.

Reviewer: Matthias vom Hau, Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester

vom Hau, Matthias
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
vom Hau, Matthias. "Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town." Social Forces, vol. 87, no. 3, 2009, p. 1703+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA198804592&it=r&asid=fb3f7783ccc69efa23eada892a907bcc. Accessed 8 May 2017.

QUOTED: "Ethnicity Without Groups, a set of essays on various themes in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, contains all the virtues of Brubaker's early work: theoretically informed analysis, a sure grasp of comparative European history, and a willingness to explore new fields of enquiry. The book contains much that is interesting and novel."
"Brubaker is to be commended for producing a stimulating mix of history, politics, and sociology, but he falls short of providing a comprehensive account of how nationalism provides a basis for political mobilization."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A198804592
Ethnicity Without Groups
Bill Kissane
19.1 (Apr. 2005): p126.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs
http://www.cceia.org/index.html

Ethnicity Without Groups, Rogers Brubaker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 283 pp., $45 cloth.

Ethnicity Without Groups, a set of essays on various themes in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, contains all the virtues of Brubaker's early work: theoretically informed analysis, a sure grasp of comparative European history, and a willingness to explore new fields of enquiry. The book contains much that is interesting and novel: an illuminating exploration of how research in cognitive psychology can inform our understanding of ethno-national identity; an essay on the return of a soft version of assimilation as a desideratum for immigrants in the West; a trenchant critique of the use of the ethnic/civic distinction in nationalist studies; a rich analysis of how the 1848 revolutions were commemorated in 1998 in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia; and a sensible review of the literature on nationalist and ethnic violence. The analysis is lucid and well written throughout and makes for a worthwhile collection.

The essays in the book have all been published before and are united in this volume (admittedly loosely) by the strong theoretical claims advanced in the first two chapters, which represent a radical example of the constructivist turn in social science over the last decades. As Brubaker makes clear, there is much to be said for this approach in the field of ethnic and nationalist studies. First, when ethnic groups claim rights on the basis of a distinct past, it is not so much the historical facts that matter but the perception of those facts that is important. In the final chapter, Brubaker shows that Hungarians in present-day Hungary and those in Transylvania remembered the events of 1848 in very different ways. The analysis is a good treatment of the ideological options available to nationalist elites on the European periphery. Second, there is usually an element of arbitrariness in the selection of the cultural features groups choose in order to highlight their distinctiveness, and, in this sense, the interests of the selectors are as important as what is being selected. Third, as other researchers have shown, it is not so much the cultural essence of a group's traditions that sustains its members' identity but rather their relation to an "other." Finally, as Brubaker's Nationalism Reframed (1996) demonstrated, institutions can frame the mental horizons of populations--a fact that the history of the former Soviet Union by and large shows.

Taken together, the chief merit of all these standpoints is that they allow the scholarly analysis to distance itself from the practice of nationalists by casting doubt on the claim that nationalist movements always represent an actually existing and long-standing nation. According to Brubaker, national, ethnic, and racial identity should be considered a category of practice, not of analysis. Moreover, ethnic identity may well be the result of ethnic conflict, not a precondition for it, and Brubaker warns against seeing "ethnically framed conflict" as conflict between ethnic groups. Ethnic organizations, such as the Basque separatist group ETA, may not represent objectively existing groups, though they do act in their names. There is a case for trying to identify factors other than "groupness" that lie behind the phenomenon of ethnic violence, such as material resources, class, gender, or region.

All these recommendations seem sensible as a guide for analysis. However, before accepting the strong ontological claim that groups (including races) do not exist independently of our ideas about them, one has to consider its practical consequences. It would mean, for example, that the British-based Minority Rights Group could not publish a report on the treatment of the Muslim minority in Bulgaria. If we accept that ethnic groups do not exist, we would undermine the fundamental premise of the international system, which is that some if not all groups have rights. For example, if the self is always illusory, the international community would not be able to grant a right to self-determination to a group. Similarly, it would follow that there must be no relationship between the success of a nationalist movement and the characteristics of the group it represents (even though Brubaker admits that 1848 could not be hijacked for commemoration by the Slovaks because there was not enough material suitable for "mythmaking"). Indeed, if we follow the logic of Brubaker's argument, a whole set of ideas must disappear from the scholarly lexicon: the concept of "ethno-national potential" which some populations, say the Irish, may have had before the French Revolution; the idea that a national state, say Spain, may be based on an original "ethnic core"; and the argument that some populations, say the Finns with regard to language, possessed "ethnic markers" that distinguished them from the Russians and the Swedes. From a constructivist perspective, the "development" of a nation (as analyzed by the Czech political theorist Miroslav Hroch, for example) is logically absurd, since there is no qualitative difference in consciousness of group identity at various stages of the nation-building process.

We need to find a middle ground between the realist/evolutionist tradition and the constructivist approach. The comparative politics literature on the political mobilization of social cleavages comes closer to such a marriage. Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair (in Identity, Competition, and Electoral Availability [1990]), for example, have shown that three elements must be present before a cleavage may be considered an ethnic one: it must exist independently of actors (the sociological approach); it must give rise to organizations (the organizational approach); and it must have political saliency for people (the subjective approach). In contrast, in the debate on nationalism scholars are too attached to the poles of the debate. It is not clear to me that we can really dispense with the idea that groups exist, or that a constructivist approach cannot be combined with a realist one. How else can we understand Brubaker's passage, "In Transylvania, where Romanian peasants were subordinated to Hungarian landowners, social and ethno-national issues were intimately intertwined. In Wallachia, where both landlords and peasants were predominantly Romanian, social conflicts were not coded or framed in ethnic or national terms" (p. 191)? Brubaker is to be commended for producing a stimulating mix of history, politics, and sociology, but he falls short of providing a comprehensive account of how nationalism provides a basis for political mobilization.

BILL KISSANE

London School of Economics and Political Science

Kissane, Bill
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kissane, Bill. "Ethnicity Without Groups." Ethics & International Affairs, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, p. 126+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA139107185&it=r&asid=a1cb83f17c1306c272ba098231823239. Accessed 8 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A139107185
Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe
William Safran
93.2 (June 1999): p476.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Cambridge University Press
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=PSR

By Rogers Brubaker. Cambridge: University Press, 1996. 202p. $54.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.

William Safran, University of Colorado at Boulder

There seems to be no end to theorizing about nationalism. This is understandable in view of the continuing formation of nation-states, the revival of national consciousness since the end of the Cold War, and the protracted ethnic conflicts around the globe. Ernst Haas's book, the first installment of a projected two-volume study, is an erudite, complex, and ambitious analysis of "liberal" nationalism, which is contrasted with nonliberal varieties. Nationalist ideologies are divided into two basic types: revolutionary and syncretic; these are subdivided into seven subtypes: Jacobin, Whig, Leninist, racist, reformist, traditional, and restorative. Only the first two are truly liberal; they stress individual rights, democracy, and the perfectibility of human beings, and their creed is inclusive and not bounded by a given state.

In his search for the kind of nationalism that is "compatible with both international and national happiness" (p. 18), Haas deals extensively with the nationalisms of five countries: France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States. All have arrived at "liberal" forms of nationalism, although by different routes and at different speeds. Haas rejects the "primordialist" approach to collective identity in favor of an "instrumentalist" one. A nation, he argues, is "a socially mobilized body of individuals who believe themselves united by some set of characteristics that differentiate them from outsiders and who strive to maintain and create their own state" (p. 23). Nationalisms are social constructions that lead to integration and state-building, but only liberal nationalism is a vehicle for modernization and progress. Haas's instrumentalism leads him to adopt a "voluntarist" definition of the nation-state: "a political entity whose inhabitants consider themselves a single nation and wish to remain one" (p. 23). He doubts whether the "cultural building blocks" of national identity - language, religion, and race - are sufficient to define a nation. He points to India, where diverse linguistic and/or religious identities are subordinated to a common Indian nationalism, and to the various linguistic communities in Switzerland, all of whom "define themselves as Swiss above all else" (p. 40).

Haas distinguishes between successful and "disintegrating" nation-states. The former are marked by the orderly transfer of power, consensus about constitutional forms, "core" religious values, representative government, the public use of language(s), the autonomy and participation of interest groups in decision making, and a distributive public policy. The United States appears to be the ideal type (followed by Britain). States lacking these elements are disintegrating. This raises the question of why France developed a successful democratic nation-state while retaining the Le Chapelier law for nearly a century, and one wonders whether the increasing gap between rich and poor and the growing social Darwinism in the United States are harbingers of national disintegration.

Haas presents an interesting discussion of different historical paths to the building of nation-states, the differences depending on the nature and role of the elite, the uniformity and diffusion of culture, the initial strength or weakness of the state, and the dynamics of social mobilization. He clearly prefers the liberal path, although he admits that "liberalism is not the only ideology that served as the basis for rationalizing polities. . . [and] that nonliberal ideologies enjoy tremendous popularity" (p. 35).

Haas is an optimist and idealist. His belief in progress leads him to prefer a liberal nation-state because it is in such a state that rational behavior, scientific problem solving, and "the progressive transnational sharing of meaning" (p. 19) are best developed; but if so, liberal polities, like all territorial entities, would ultimately prove inadequate and are therefore the most likely to outgrow the nation-state, which would be replaced by "more cosmopolitan and multilateral forms of action" (p. 59). The most likely candidates for that development are Western Europe, North America, and Japan.

The bulk of the book is devoted to the five country studies, each of which is replete with details concerning the role of centralizing elites in national mobilization and in the growth of secular political culture. Haas supports his arguments with statistics on population, literacy, industrialization, urbanization, and enfranchisement. One of the merits of his discussion is that he does not neglect the international aspects of the growth of nationalism. Thus, he argues that English and, later, British nationalism was influenced by the rebellion against Rome, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the shock of the American Revolution, and it was constructed "instrumentally" by elites in order to promote their economic interests and to protect themselves against foreign elements.

The discussion of France is rich in detail, in particular with respect to the evolving constitutional legitimacy and the growth of sociopolitical pluralism and decentralization. There is a minor error (p. 209): The title "commissioner of the Republic," introduced in 1982, is no longer in use; it was replaced a few years later by the traditional one of "prefect." More important, there is little discussion of how in France the idea of the autonomy of "civil society" has affected national sentiment. This is somewhat disconcerting, especially when one is dealing with a country with a reputedly strong state.

Haas's treatment of the evolution of German nationalism from a volkisch and racist to a "liberal" one is thoroughly informed. The economic success of the Federal Republic has had a great deal to do with the growth of "constitutional patriotism." Whether this evolution is permanent is still moot; in view of the persistent xenophobia and popular antisemitism in Germany, Haas is perhaps too optimistic about the transformation of political culture and the acceptance of liberal nationalism there. The tendency of German elites immediately after World War II to identify not as Germans but as Catholics, Bavarians, and later as Europeans - to engage in a kind of Selbstentdeutschung - was replaced by Kohl's efforts to make being German respectable again, and one hopes that the result will be an inclusive and tolerant nationalism. Indications are that the post-Kohl government will move from an ethnic nationalism to a civic one, as the traditional jus sanguinis is replaced by jus soli for determining membership in the national community.

There is also some doubt about the diffusion of liberal nationalism in Japan, for a variety of reasons pointed out by Haas: the persistence of protectionism, the strong involvement of the state in the market, continuing xenophobia, and the inability of people not of Japanese descent to acquire citizenship.

All five countries examined by Haas share a commitment to progressive learning and rationalized approaches to reality, especially in the economic sphere. Such approaches are fostered, inter alia, by multinational corporations, which a relatively weak state is not easily able to control. Hence, old nationalisms are replaced by liberal forms, a process that will gradually lead to a deconstruction of the traditional nation-state, which was often based on ethnic criteria. A portent of that development is the fact that "ethnic conflict in Western countries is not an everyday event" (p. 338).

Haas also discusses challenges to liberal nationalism: in Britain and France, the revival of ethnoregional consciousness; in the United States, the irruption of "multiculturalism." In this connection, it would have been useful to discuss the challenges posed in France by the National Front; in the United States by Christian fundamentalists and other elements of the Republican Right; and in various western countries by the Greens and other "postmaterialists."

There are occasional problems with the use of concepts by Haas. Thus, liberalism is not clearly defined and is used in contradictory senses, especially in discussions of American and French nationalisms. In some instances, liberalism refers to market capitalism; in others, to political values and institutions of democracy (pp. 144, 173, 179). A conceptual purist might raise questions about the fact that American (Jeffersonian and liberal) nationalist ideology is put under the rubric of Jacobinism (pp. 47, 132, 143); and not everyone would accept the argument that "the effort of active religious believers [in the United States] to penetrate the still-secular state smacks of. . . communitarian liberalism" (p. 159). But these minor details do not affect the overall depth and sophistication of the analysis. This review can hardly do justice to the book, which is a tour de force, and which feeds the intellectual appetite of all who are interested in the phenomenon of nationalism. We look forward eagerly to the sequel.

Brubaker's work must be viewed in juxtaposition to Haas's thesis. The various chapters, most of them revised versions of essays published earlier, focus on the continuing reality of the nation-state and the revival of traditional ethnonationalisms. Whereas Haas concentrates on Western (or Westernized) industrial democracies, Brubaker deals largely with the postcommunist states of east-central Europe. In these states, the "integralist" and exclusivist kinds of collective national consciousness of the post-World War I successor states have reappeared, along with the old irredentisms. Brubaker speaks of a "triadic nexus" that now prevails, specifically, a complex set of interrelations among mutually antagonistic nationalisms: the "nationalizing nationalisms" of newly independent or "newly reconfigured" states in which the "core nation" - "the legitimate 'owner' of the state" (pp. 5, 108-12) - attempts to assimilate its ethnic minorities; the "transborder nationalities" that wish to maintain certain relationships with their ethnic "homeland"; and the nationalism of the homelands themselves. This theme is fully explored in chapter 3, which deals with the relationships among Croatia, Serbia, and the Serbs in Croatia.

Given his cases, it is not surprising that Brubaker adopts a primordialist approach. He lays the groundwork by criticizing the "substantialist" treatment of nations (p. 15). Much of his criticism is aimed at those who conceive of ethnonationalist consciousness as a false one. He reminds readers that much of the theorizing about nation-building Was informed by a "teleological" model of development (p. 80ff), whereby the state becomes modern as it creates a "nation" that is supra-ethnic and is defined in purely transactional terms. Yet, while beating this dead horse, Brubaker revives it 'in part by focusing on "nationalizing states." Instead of elites leading "polity-seeking nationalist movements" (e.g., in the former successor states of Europe and in the postcolonial states of sub-Saharan Africa), we have "unrealized nation-states," that is, existing states that elites make more "national" and therefore more "complete," presumably by forcibly assimilating or eliminating ethnic minorities. As Brubaker points out (chap. 4), this process was already occurring in interwar Poland, where the deep-seated antisemitism of the "nationalizing" elite prevented the Jews from being assimilated. Even in the Soviet Union, the elites were torn between the assimilating impulses of a transethnic state, the retention of the ascribed status of (most) ethnic minorities, and the pre-Soviet Russification policies.

The one new essay (chap. 5) in Brubaker's book compares Weimar Germany and "Weimar Russia." Just as the former was increasingly concerned with the promotion of the "homeland nationalism" of ethnic Germans living in Eastern Europe and Russia, so the latter is concerned with the protection of (the language and culture of) Russians who now find themselves as minorities in areas previously part of the Soviet Union.

The book by Ishiyama and Breuning adds a useful empirical dimension to the debate on post-Cold War nationalism. Focusing on ethnic political parties in Western and Eastern Europe, they suggest that the reality of primordialist ethnicity should not be discounted; it is often exploited by elites and may serve as the basis of political mobilization. Whether this is expressed in political parties and whether these parties advocate political conflict and national disintegration or impede them depend on the sense of economic, cultural, or political grievance; the overall context of national politics; and the extent to which the majority is willing to provide institutions and public policies that cater to ethnic minorities.

The case studies in Ethnopolitics show a rather diverse situation. In Bulgaria, the state and the ethnic parties are accommodationist; in Slovakia, this is much less true, owing both to the acute nationalism of the Slovak elite and to the disunity of the Magyar parties. In the Baltic countries, the situation is mixed and fluid; in Belgium, the disintegrative tendencies and the ultranationalism of the Vlaams Blok have been moderated by consociationalism and constitutional change and by the improved economic status of the Flemish community. In Britain, the Scottish National Party and the Plaid Cymru have tended to accept the "multiethnic" state to the extent that the ethnic elites have been coopted by that state, and the institutional arrangements and public policies are seen as satisfying the representational and economic demands of the ethnic rank-and-file. It is too early to predict to what degree the ethnic identities of the minorities in Britain will be affected by the recent decentralization policies and the continuing supranational integration of the European Union.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Safran, William. "Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe." American Political Science Review, vol. 93, no. 2, 1999, p. 476+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA54896445&it=r&asid=0693cfbd170dbc1d514d2dfdbc6126fd. Accessed 8 May 2017.

QUOTED: "Nationalism Refrained is likely to become a well-respected contribution to the literature on nationalism. And, to its credit, one does indeed come away from this book with an enhanced appreciation of the rich and tragic history of twentieth century nationalisms in Europe."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A54896445
Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe
Martin Orr
76.3 (Mar. 1998): p1138.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 Oxford University Press

Reviewer: MARTIN ORR, Boise State University

Nationalism Reframed - an examination of the causes, characteristics, and effects of twentieth century nationalisms in Europe and Eurasia - is timely, historically rich, and often insightful. A collection of essays, the unifying theme of the book is an argument against the reification of the concept "nation." Brubaker suggests that whereas many scholars reproduce in theory nationalism's strategic reification of "the nation" as its constituency, "we should focus on nation as a category of practice, nationhood as an institutionalized cultural and political form, and nationness as a contingent event or happening, and refrain from using the analytically dubious notion of 'nations' as substantial, enduring collectivities."

Specifically, Brubaker's thesis is that the redrawing of state boundaries as part of the political settlements of the twentieth century has generated a "triadic nexus" of competing nationalisms. "Nationalizing nationalisms" refer to the claims and compensatory policies of formerly marginalized ethnic groups that now find themselves in possession of the state (e.g., the Estonian disfranchisement of its Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian inhabitants). "Transborder" or "homeland nationalisms" emerge as challenges to nationalizing nationalisms, and purport to defend the interests of "ethnonational kin" abroad. "Minority nationalisms" are invoked in opposition to nationalizing nationalisms by those directly affected by such policies, and may be at odds with the homeland nationalisms advanced in their name.

Although Nationalism Refrained is lucid and edifying, it does have its limitations. Most troubling is that the reification of "the nation" is never really avoided. When "nationness" and "ethnicity" are synonymous, ethnic groups are frequently taken as homogeneous entities - attitudes are, sometimes without qualification, attributed to "Germans" or "Poles" or "Russians." When "the nation" becomes the equivalent of "the state," it is often reified and sometimes even personified (e.g., "many highly polyethnic states . . . claim to be, or aspire to become, nation-states"). To the extent that people are acknowledged to produce governmental policies, policy is the product of national elites whose decisions are constrained only by the actions of other national elites. Thus, the history of the twentieth century is largely reduced to struggle between nation-states and ethnic groups within states. Revolution and reaction have no explicit and systematic relationship to the "triadic nexus." Occasional references to "the Right" and "the Left" hang in the air - rarely mentioned are specific political parties, their policies, or constituencies ("class" having been dismissed in a single paragraph early in the book).

Granted, one book cannot do everything. Still, one is left with the impression that Nazism was primarily the culmination of a quest to bring ethnic Germans under its protection. The anti-Communism of the Hilter regime (and that of the quasi-fascist government of inter-war Poland) receives no systematic treatment, and even the discussions of anti-Semitism seem somewhat truncated. Apparently, neither Western policies nor intra-ethnic dissent had much to do with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The putative "democratization" and "market reform" of the East are not critically examined - few thoughts are offered on the role of Yeltsin's autocracy or the human costs of "shock treatment" in fostering the resurgence of nationalism. In sum, the heuristic principle of the "triadic nexus" often obscures more than it illuminates; while it does draw attention to interesting and important conflicts in Europe, it systematically diverts attention from contemporaneous struggles that, at minimum, have shaped and been shaped by ethno-national struggles.

Despite all this, Nationalism Refrained is likely to become a well-respected contribution to the literature on nationalism. And, to its credit, one does indeed come away from this book with an enhanced appreciation of the rich and tragic history of twentieth century nationalisms in Europe.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Orr, Martin. "Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe." Social Forces, vol. 76, no. 3, 1998, p. 1138+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20565312&it=r&asid=159dd6574f4ec4636e8c92064de81a3e. Accessed 8 May 2017.

QUOTED: "This book is essential reading for those involved in the current debate over the future of the nation-state. Whereas others pay attention to the changing characteristics of the international order, Brubaker focuses on deep-rooted traditions."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A20565312
Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
Cristina Escobar
72.4 (June 1994): p1264.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Oxford University Press

This book is a fundamental contribution to the study of migration and citizenship in France and Germany as well as to the analysis of the modern state and citizenship in general. It is also as an excellent example of comparative historical methodology. As such, this book appeals to a variety of academic audiences.

Initially, Brubaker helps us see the international arena not just as a "territorial organization" of states, but also as a set of "bounded and mutually exclusive citizenries." This second dimension, he says, is commonly obscured by a territorial bias in the definition of the modern state. Then he discusses modern citizenship, focusing on the formal dimension of citizenship, which in political sociology has been, more often than not, the taken- for-granted institutional framework. Brubaker's significant contribution is to have brought the modern state in its dual dimensions -- as a territorial organization and as a political organization -- into the analysis of modern citizenship. Correspondingly, he proposes two ways of understanding citizenship. One is a formal and abstract approach that considers citizenship to be a "general membership status" defining the common rights and obligations of the permanent resident population of a state. The other is a concrete and substantive approach that defines citizenship as "special membership status" where the citizenry is a privileged subgroup of the population of the state.

Brubaker unravels the different dimensions of citizenship in France and in Germany by means of a historical comparative methodology. The distinction between national and state membership might seem artificial in France, where citizenship as a general status (developed by the absolutist territorial rulers) and citizenship as a privileged status (derived from the classical, medieval, and early modern city-state) were joined in the French Revolution and developed together. However, this distinction is crucial for understanding the immigration problems that France faces today. The French "assimilationist and "expansive" tradition of citizenship has created the problem of second- and third-generation immigrants who have received citizenship but who have not genuinely been assimilated into the French nation. In contrast to France, German nationhood, the privileged status, developed previous to and independently from the state as a result of the particular historical features of the political geography of the region. The German "differentialist" and "ethnic-centered" tradition of citizenship policy possesses the paradox of second- and third- generation immigrants unable and mostly unwilling to achieve German citizenship.

This book is also particularly appealing in its effort to show the significance of the cultural dimension of the politics involved in the definition of citizenship. Even if legislation has been contested, and in some cases modified, Brubaker demonstrates that there are clear continuities, or traditions, in the French and German definitions of citizenship. He argues that these continuities reflect the deep-rooted nature of "national self- understanding." He also emphasizes that the traditions are embedded within nonneutral "cultural idioms" that reinforce and recreate them, producing particular policy outcomes.

Since the author emphasizes that France and Germany are both the exception in Europe, the reader would have benefited from a discussion of the main characteristics of the general context from which they diverge. Nevertheless, Brubaker's contribution to the historical analysis of citizenship in Europe is outstanding.

This book is essential reading for those involved in the current debate over the future of the nation-state. Whereas others pay attention to the changing characteristics of the international order, Brubaker focuses on deep-rooted traditions. His work makes plain that any reconsideration of the nature and future of the nation-state requires a look at the "politics of identity" that has played such an important role in the physiognomy of modern Europe.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Escobar, Cristina. "Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany." Social Forces, vol. 72, no. 4, 1994, p. 1264+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA15658189&it=r&asid=9329f777c0f85e280539e9ab3ff66d4f. Accessed 8 May 2017.

QUOTED: "This is an important book and provides a striking corrective to an exclusively rights-based account of citizenship. But Brubaker's historical perspective on the development of nation-states introduces its own narrowness."
"If we move away from the definition of citizenship as membership in a nation-state and toward one of membership of a community of legal rights and obligations, we arrive at a picture both more complex and richer than the one Brubaker leaves us with."

Gale Document Number: GALE|A15658189
Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
J.M. Barbalet
87.2 (June 1993): p509.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 Cambridge University Press
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=PSR

During the 1980s, political science and sociology discovered citizenship. Yet the seminal work to which much of the current literature refers first appeared over 40 years ago, with Marshall's Citizenship and Social Class (1950); and other notable contributions, influenced by Marshall, such as Bendix's, Nation-Building and Citizenship (1964) and Parson's "Full Citizenship for the Negro American" (Daedalus, |1965~) are not recent. Indeed, citizenship and writing about it goes back to Greek antiquity.

During the 1980s, the very reference points of political and social action could no longer be taken for granted. In these circumstances, the question "Where am I?" readily transforms into "Who am I?" Because it refers to membership in political community, the concept of citizenship is particularly efficacious in making sense of political identity. Thus, uncertainty about the latter raises questions of citizenship.

Membership is not a simple notion, a fact reflected in the quite different approaches to citizenship in the books under review. Membership implies nonmembership. The salient political community in the modern world is the nation-state. Rules of access to citizenship status separate citizens from noncitizens. The legal possibilities of such rules include jus sanguinis (citizenship by descent) and jus soli (citizenship by birthplace). The question of access to citizenship status becomes crucial when the internationalization of economic activity and the transformation of political units move significant populations across national boundaries. Brubaker and Goulbourne focus on this aspect of citizenship.

In addition to access, there is a second axis of citizenship, which relates to what it is that membership, once attained, provides. This is its quality, what rights and duties attach to citizenship. Marshall distinguished between the civil, political, and social components of citizenship as sets of rights derived from judicial, legislative, and social services institutions, respectively. These institutions have independent histories; and the quality of citizenship will therefore vary between nation-states and within the same nation-state at different times, depending on local circumstances. Most of the contributions to the book edited by Vogel and Moran deal with questions of the quality of citizenship.

Feminist critiques of modern citizenship have succeeded in bringing together the different issues of access and quality. In The Frontiers of Citizenship, coeditor Ursula Vogel asks, "Is citizenship gender-specific?" Within a nation-state, access to citizenship status is potentially problematic for outsiders, foreigners, and politically marginal groups (separated from the majority by religion, language, or pigmentation). Yet Vogel shows that a central institution of Western society, marriage, has historically excluded exactly half of those subject to it from modern citizenship.

Vogel shows not only that when they crossed the threshold of marriage, women ceased to be members of the state in their own right but that this subordination was an integral part of men's citizenship. This situation is well documented in the chapter; but in focusing almost exclusively on the sexual dialectic, the possibility of an explanation in a larger framework is lost. Vogel does make the point, however, that before the end of the eighteenth century, marriage was not "a sentimental bond concluded for the sake of individual happiness" but a means "to guarantee the order of civil society by producing legitimate heirs for the transmission of property". An obvious question is, What happens to female citizenship when marriage does become merely a sentimental bond and the property question is not at issue? Vogel does not pose this question; but her likely answer might be inferred from her remark that today "a women's rights of social citizenship are, in many respects, still defined by her relation to others".

Social rights have a general salience because the welfare component is a distinctive feature of late modern states. Desmond King's chapter in the edited volume, "Citizenship as Obligation in the United States" shows how the New Right critique of welfarism (especially the programs of the 1960s) contributed to the Reagan administration's Family Support Act of 1988. King indicates that the earlier 1935 Social Security Act, while establishing clear social rights for the individual, empowered the states to enact their own welfare measures and administrative arrangements. This resulted in significant differences between states. A further divergence between social right and welfare policy was introduced in the 1988 act through the mandatory work or training requirement for those in receipt of welfare. Thus, federalism and punitive obligations have tended to make a serious inroad on American social rights.

Yet Michael Moran argues that economic decline has not led to a significant decline in health care entitlements. In his contribution, "The Frontiers of Social Citizenship," Moran demonstrates that health care citizenship expanded, rather than contracted, in all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, including the United States, after the onset of the world recession in 1973. His explanation is that health care entitlements "command the intense support of popular majorities" and the "burden of 'cost containment' fell on providers". While this might be good for the present, it does not forebode a promising future. Moran mentions that (1) demographic developments suggest that in the future health care entitlements will be an object of intergenerational political struggle and (2) it will be increasingly difficult to contain costs at the expense of providers.

These studies show that because social rights depend on budgetary considerations, they are the most vulnerable and therefore precarious of citizenship rights. But it is not only the quality of citizenship that is subject to politically determined change. The settlement of large migrant populations in European nation-states raises highly contentious issues of citizenship in many of them.

In the contemporary world, France and Germany bear close comparison. Their migrant populations, in particular, grew extensively from the 1960s and today form the basis in each country of a second generation of foreign settlers. While France and Germany have been subject to similar migration processes, have comparable immigrant populations, and converging immigration policies, naturalization rates in France are much higher than in Germany. In Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Brubaker explains such differences in the civic incorporation of immigrants in terms of the quite different conceptions of citizenship that have emerged in France and Germany. Indeed, his achievement is to trace the development of citizenship as the basis of membership in the French and German nation-states. In doing so Brubaker illuminates the processes of nation-state formation, as well as accounting for the different practices and politics of immigrant incorporation in those societies.

Brubaker's stated intention is to move away from the treatment of the state as a territorial organization and focus on the neglected view of it as a membership organization, as an association of citizens. Citizenship as a body of rights is, therefore, less important to Brubaker than citizenship as an ascriptive form of closure. This is an interesting perspective. It leads Brubaker to hold that as a formally defined and externally bounded membership status, citizenship was the product not of the internal development of the modern state but of interstate relations within a loosely integrated state system. In its bold form, this perspective cannot be sustained, as Brubaker's own narrative indicates a number of times. This cannot be an alternative to the conventional viewpoint, but it does complement it in significant ways.

The old saw that France is home to civilization (rational, universal, inclusive, and expansive), Germany, to culture (spiritual, particular, exclusive, and local) is shown by Brubaker truly to reflect the different traditions of nationhood in each country. The French nation-state was the product of centuries of state building. National consciousness developed gradually within a territorial state and its socializing institutions of schoolroom and barracks. The German nation-state, on the other hand, came from more mixed traditions, which included a national consciousness formed outside and against the territorial and institutional frame of the pre-Bismarckian German states. It is in these formations of the nation-state that quite different types of citizenship emerged. French citizenship is attributed to a child born in France if at least one parent was also born in France (including French colonies and territories prior to independence). German citizenship, on the other hand, is based on ethnocultural descent; and birth in its territory has no bearing on the matter, even for second and third-generation settlers.

Brubaker develops this position in a historical, institutional, and cultural argument that takes us up to the present day politics of citizenship. This is an important book and provides a striking corrective to an exclusively rights-based account of citizenship. But Brubaker's historical perspective on the development of nation-states introduces its own narrowness--which finds its correction in Zig Layton-Henry's "Citizenship and Migrant Workers in Western Europe" and Elizabeth Meehan's "European Citizenship and Social Policies" in the edited volume. The simple truth is that the structure of citizenship is changing. If we move away from the definition of citizenship as membership in a nation-state and toward one of membership of a community of legal rights and obligations, we arrive at a picture both more complex and richer than the one Brubaker leaves us with. Layton-Henry shows that in Western Europe today there are different levels of citizenship participation insofar as nonnational residents may have civil and social rights and even certain political rights by virtue of the laws of their host counties. Meehan shows that the transnational European Court of Justice guarantees social rights to workers and their families within the European Community irrespective of their immigrant status.

Whereas French and German citizenship has remained more or less unchanged in recent times, British citizenship has been significantly modified since the loss of Britain's colonies from the late 1940s. This is the subject of Paul Rich's "Patriotism and the Idea of Citizenship in Postwar British Politics" in the edited volume and also Harry Goulbourne's Ethnicity and Nationalism in Post-Imperial Britain. Rich provides a succinct and highly readable account of the politics around and between the 1948 Nationality Act, which appeared to provide free rights of entry to colonial immigrants, and the 1981 Nationality Act, which offered no such illusions. Goulbourne covers the same ground and more. Part of his argument is that immigrant decisions to take up British nationality or not are partly shaped by the politics of the nation-states they leave (a point also developed by Brubaker). He therefore includes two chapters on diasporic politics, in addition to discussing the changes and prospects of citizenship and nationality in a postimperial and multiracial Britain. The discussion is not only scholarly but at times programmatic and is always informative.

Each of these books indicates the liveliness of citizenship in current politics and scholarship. As Vogel and Moran note in their introduction, citizenship has arguably overtaken class, market, and even democracy as the "strategic concept of political science". Each of the books under review gives some clear indication of why this is so.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Barbalet, J.M. "Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany." American Political Science Review, vol. 87, no. 2, 1993, p. 509+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA14108916&it=r&asid=91e65649a5b0f7ae867fae5d9411f7c0. Accessed 8 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A14108916

Dhanvantari, Sujaya. "Trans." Maclean's, 19 Dec. 2016, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA474126074&asid=de37c1d54d7dce2a4e424a5cb82f063b. Accessed 8 May 2017. "Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities." Publishers Weekly, 29 Aug. 2016, p. 81+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA462236489&asid=898d7908fe1bcdd065a94564b8c668a4. Accessed 8 May 2017. Levgold, Robert. "Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics - Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town." Foreign Affairs, Mar.-Apr. 2007, p. 176. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA164843448&asid=3b9c187bde14ab9e57e2ef7d0af4b97f. Accessed 8 May 2017. Vlossak, Elizabeth. "Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World." Journal of World History, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, p. 747+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA306970969&asid=d54c2bb933c7393e966b3f137a9aa8fb. Accessed 8 May 2017. vom Hau, Matthias. "Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town." Social Forces, vol. 87, no. 3, 2009, p. 1703+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA198804592&asid=fb3f7783ccc69efa23eada892a907bcc. Accessed 8 May 2017. Kissane, Bill. "Ethnicity Without Groups." Ethics & International Affairs, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, p. 126+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA139107185&asid=a1cb83f17c1306c272ba098231823239. Accessed 8 May 2017. Safran, William. "Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe." American Political Science Review, vol. 93, no. 2, 1999, p. 476+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA54896445&asid=0693cfbd170dbc1d514d2dfdbc6126fd. Accessed 8 May 2017. Orr, Martin. "Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe." Social Forces, vol. 76, no. 3, 1998, p. 1138+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA20565312&asid=159dd6574f4ec4636e8c92064de81a3e. Accessed 8 May 2017. Escobar, Cristina. "Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany." Social Forces, vol. 72, no. 4, 1994, p. 1264+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA15658189&asid=9329f777c0f85e280539e9ab3ff66d4f. Accessed 8 May 2017. Barbalet, J.M. "Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany." American Political Science Review, vol. 87, no. 2, 1993, p. 509+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA14108916&asid=91e65649a5b0f7ae867fae5d9411f7c0. Accessed 8 May 2017.

• Yale Review of International Studies
  http://yris.yira.org/bookreviews/154
  Word count: 2017

  Review: Nationalism Reframed by Rogers Brubaker
  By George E. Bogden · April 2011

  In Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Rogers Brubaker studies the causes, characteristics, and effects of twentieth century nationalism in Europe and Central Asia. Drawing on geographies with frequently remodeled boundaries, the author examines aspects of the national question in states previously subsumed by multinational empires and influenced by the major political reconfigurations of the last century. Through careful discussion of complex ethnolinguistic and political boundaries, Brubaker describes the factors sustaining conflicting national stances. The collection of essays which compose the book together support an argument against the concept of nation as an immutable or ever-present embodiment of a given constituency.

  Brubaker’s overarching conclusion is one regarding the framework and vocabulary for analyzing nationalism. Instead of reverting to the persistent paradigm of “nation,” he asserts that analysts should adopt the concept of nation as a “category of practice,”[1] and nationhood as the product of cultural and political institutionalization.[2] From these assertions, Brubaker urges that scholars “refrain from using the analytically dubious notion of ‘nations’ as substantial, enduring collectivities.”[3] The result is an analytical framework fashioned for precise theoretical and comparative purposes. This system is primarily developed in Part I of the text. Part II brings the framework to life with rich historical detail that accentuates important aspects of the national question in the “New Europe.”

  Summary of the Text

  Brubaker’s central assertion is that repeated revising of state boundaries has created a “triadic nexus” of interdependent and rival varieties of nationalism in the regions he examines. This core of relational factors provides three categories or perspectives from which to approach nationalism. These are “nationalizing nationalism;” “homeland-” or “transborder nationalism;” and “minority nationalism.” Brubaker extends this framework further in his introduction, asserting that these elements of his theory are more than fixed entities. He ultimately describes them as “fields of differentiated and competing positions, arenas of struggle among competing stances.”[4]

  The author describes “nationalizing nationalism” as motivated by the claims of formerly marginalized ethnic groups which have since established states. Such groups often define themselves in ethnocultural terms, claiming that they together compose a “core nation” or nationality. These groups likewise claim that this professed status entitles them to control over the state. In addition to these central claims, those promulgating nationalizing nationalism often couple their demand for legitimate “ownership” of the state with assertions about a region’s legacies of discrimination directed against them.[5] Estonian disenfranchisement of Russia, Ukrainian, and Belarusian citizens of Estonia serves as Brubaker’s chief introductory examples of nationalizing nationalism.[6] However, he does draw on significant additional examples throughout the text to illuminate this variety of nationalism in his “triadic nexus.”

  Brubaker argues that “homeland” or “transborder nationalism” counteracts nationalizing nationalism. He asserts that transborder nationalisms rise from the will to defend the place of “ethnonational kin” outside the borders of their supposed “external national homelands.” According to Brubaker, this variety of nationalism obliges states “to monitor the condition, promote the welfare, support the activities and institutions, assert the rights, and protect the interests of ‘their’ ethnonational kin in other states.”[7] This variety of nationalism often arises as a reaction to the perceived threat posed by a nationalizing state to populations living within its borders which are viewed as ethnonational kin. In addition to fomenting a dynamic, if not competing, interaction with nationalizing nationalism, homeland nationalism brings about popular conceptions of nations which transcend boundaries, territories, and citizenships. Such is the power of cultural and political elites when they construe foreign residents as co-nationals, worthy of protection by the same government which recognizes their common nationhood.[8]

  The author also describes “minority nationalism” as tending to oppose nationalizing nationalism. Brubaker argues that his variety of nationalism may also compete with homeland nationalism as applied to the same group. Those directly and adversely affected by the policies of nationalizing nationalism may invoke minority nationalism to advance their cause. Brubaker analogizes self-identification as a “national minority” with claims to “external national homelands” and “nationalizing statehood”: despite the views of their proponents, all three represent political stances rather than ethnographic facts.[9] Yet Brubaker describes minority nationalism as characterized by a population’s demands that their state recognize more than that population’s unique “ethnic” status. A group invoking minority nationalism will often insist that their distinctive “ethnocultural nationality,” and the supposedly implicit nationality-based cultural and political rights be recognized by the state as well.[10] Though minority nationalism may work in the same way that homeland nationalism does, tending to undermine nationalizing states and their varieties of nationalism, Brubaker is careful to point out that minority and homeland nationalisms do not always coincide in complementary or harmonious relationships. Indeed, these nationalisms often clash when homeland nationalism is trumpeted for geopolitical, rather than genuinely nationalistic reasons.[11]

  Critiques

  Despite Brubaker’s clearly stated delineation of an analytically compelling framework and vocabulary for describing nationalism, there remain significant weaknesses in several of his arguments. The author’s de-emphasis of “class” and contemporaneous factors related to the rise of the Nazi regime and the dissolution of the USSR represent significant weaknesses in his theory and the examples he uses to support it.

  Brubaker’s brief and insufficient discussion of socioeconomic class undermines his sweeping assertions regarding the national question in Europe and Central Asia. Though the author avoids the problematical question of a unifying definition for nationalism (itself a disappointing gap in the text), the more fundamental issue with his analysis comes early on, when he describes the idea of “class”:

  the working class—understood as a real entity of substantial community—has largely dissolved as an object of analysis…The study of class as a cultural and political idiom, as a mode of conflict, and as an underlying abstract dimension of economic structure remains vital; but it is no longer encumbered by an understanding of classes as real, enduring entities.[12]

  Other than this brief dismissal of class—apparently it is only relevant as a “cultural and political idiom,” “mode of conflict,” and “underlying abstract dimension of economic structure”—represents the author’s only significant explanation of its role in the text. Class is mentioned elsewhere only three times, and these instances are only tangential references to the concept. Despite Brubaker’s frequent reliance on national “elites”—be they of the “political,” “cultural,” or even more vague “social” varieties—as engineers and initiators of nationalism, the reader is left without an explanation of the role of their socio-economic status in shaping the national question in the states Brubaker provides as examples.

  Perhaps the most troubling example of this deemphasis comes in the author’s reliance on the heavy-handed role of elites in interwar Poland. By discussing Poland in detail in Chapter 4, he fashions the newly established country into an example of nationalizing nationalism within an existing state. He carefully explains the role of “dominant elites” in promoting the language, culture, demographic preponderance, and economic flourishing of interwar Poland. Yet he pays little to no attention to whether the economic strata of the referenced elites put them in a particularly advantageous position. Were their interests not served by advancing the conceptualization of Polish “national” interests, and the broad economic advancement of the Polish people? It is hard to imagine that the displacement of Germans from “key positions in the economy,”[13] and the Polish government’s broad agenda to “nationalize the urban economy” (an initiative which economically disempowered minorities, particularly Jews),[14] served solely the political interests of the elites who engineered these policies. Even if the obvious economic interests involved in these actions were judged insignificant in the grand scheme of Brubaker’s analysis, class serves as a key example of Brubaker’s tendency to push aside potentially influential interests in his reduction of 20th century nationalisms into struggles between nation-states and ethnic groups. This reader found Brubaker’s focus on the “characteristic structure and style of nationalist politics in post-Communist Europe and Eurasia”[15] obscured by his willingness to avoid those mundane factors, like class, which often shape and determine domestic politics.

  In addition to his discounting of class, Brubaker’s discussion of Nazism and the dissolution of the USSR deemphasize major distinguishing factors in both cases. In his focus on Weimar Germany, the author carefully catalogues the sustained rise of homeland nationalism. He points to the many factors which led to the ideology’s “crystallization” and ultimate transformation into an aggressive foreign policy platform.[16] Despite this historically rich explanation of the origins and development of homeland nationalism in the Weimar Republic, his section on the ideology’s “legacy” unconvincingly seeks to explain the Nazi regime and its policies as the logical and theoretically consistent results of the homeland nationalism which developed in Weimar Germany.

  Given the limited scope of homeland nationalism—it entails action which defends ethnonational kin outside the borders of their external national homelands—it is hard to imagine that such an ideology motivated the complex and highly aggressive foreign policy of Nazi Germany, not to mention the state’s persecutory and ultimately genocidal domestic policies. Do these infamous state actions truly amount to an attempt to protect ethnic Germans outside their homeland?

  Even a cursory glance at Hitler’s declared objectives and their outcomes indicates that the leader intended to establish a multiethnic empire. He pursued this ultimate objective through much more than simply homeland nationalism. Even Hitler’s intermediate policy of Nazi commitment to establishing a “grossdeutsches Reich”—the consolidation of the entire area of German settlement—rests uneasily under the heading of homeland nationalism as described elsewhere in the text. For example, there is considerable evidence that Sudeten Germans were inspired, if not heavily encouraged by the Nazi regime to call for the region’s annexation to Germany.[17] Nurturing sentiments aimed at annexation fall at the extreme boundary of the scope of homeland nationalism, yet they were the beginning of Hitler’s expansionist scheming. This is just one example of many that conveys historical factors in the development of Nazi Germany which remain unaccounted for by the “complex web of political stances” making up homeland nationalism in the Weimar Republic.

  The same troubling deemphasis of contemporaneous factors is also present in Brubaker’s discussion of post-communist Europe. The role of western anti-Soviet policies in the dissolution of the USSR is rarely discussed in the chapters describing former Soviet Republics. The protracted efforts of western powers to cultivate nationalist anti-Soviet movements in Soviet states are not addressed in the text as substantial motivating factors. Political historical events like the official visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland, in June 1979, where he inspired the “solidarity” movement of the early 1980s, and the persistent rhetoric of leaders in prominent western countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, which together helped to incite nationalism in Eastern bloc states, are not mentioned as additional motivating factors for the rise of nationalism. These western-oriented political events may not have decided the national questions of the Eastern bloc states in question, but including them could have added context to the decline and dissolution of the USSR, a period in which Brubaker focuses almost exclusively on relations between Moscow and the nominally national governments under the Warsaw Pact.

  Taken together, Brubaker’s discussion of the rise of Nazism and the dissolution of the USSR convey a larger flaw in the text. It is often the case that the author becomes preoccupied with his prescribed theoretical principles, leading to his simultaneous deemphasis of contemporaneous factors which shaped the same historical developments he aims to systematically explain through his heuristic framework of the “triadic nexus.” These cases create the unfortunate outcome of the “triadic nexus” occasionally obscuring more than illuminating the development of nationalism in the nation-states Brubaker examines.

  [1] Rogers Brubacker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7.

• Allegra Laboratory
  http://allegralaboratory.net/review-transrachel-unsetting-analogies-with-rogers-brubaker/
  Word count: 2589

  #REVIEW: TRANSRACHEL. UNSETTING ANALOGIES WITH ROGERS BRUBAKER
  Photo by Chey Rawhoof (flickr, CC BY 2.0)

  In early 2015, I followed the case of Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane woman who attempted to pass as black. She went to considerable length to affirm her blackness – to which she was not born. Once her own parents testified to that effect, she was swiftly denounced and her claims dismissed, with social media playing an important role. Rachel Dolezal became a poster child for something that was ‘not a thing’, as conventional wisdom (i.e.: Twitter) had it: #transracial.

  I read many commentaries on this, especially on the tension between transgender and transracial, with the case of Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn Jenner being big news at the same time, and vaguely hoped to collate and analyze the debate one day: ethnicity, ‘race’, identity, ascription, subjectivity, constructivism, body, genealogy, many classic anthropological items came together in a perfect storm. I even had a title for my draft, a bad pun nobody else seemed to be making. While I was considering these issues, Rogers Brubaker wrote a book.
  Photo by TEDx UIdaho (flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

  Photo by TEDx UIdaho (flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

  trans is not a long book, and it is not a particularly difficult one. The author does not explicitly state this, but writing and organization (with endnotes and references tucked away in the back) seem geared towards non-academic accessibility. Considering the public interest the Dolezal affair occasioned, such a potential audience surely exists. The public reception of the book, and readings by activists and people personally entangled with the politics of race and gender, will be the actual touchstone for Brubaker’s project: looking at ‘gender and race in an age of unsettled identities’ (as the subtitle suggests). He seems comprehensively informed, he is committedly non-committal, and still – he is an old white man (well: 60) analyzing positions and practices that he has no personal claim to – where angels fear to tread.

  He starts with the facile statement that ‘transracial (as opposed to transgender) is not a thing’, a point he returns to throughout the book.

  But why is it not?, asks Brubaker, why is the analogy of transgender and transracial so quickly dismissed?

  How do the categories gender and race work again?

  The first part of the book recapitulates how we got to this point, with a slew of interesting details. Beyond a clear-headed account of the Dolezal affair and the near-simultaneous Jenner transition, we learn that ‘transracial’ used to be solely employed in regards to adoption – specifically, to the problems arising when white Americans adopt children from another ‘race’: how can parents do justice to the children’s ‘heritage’ if they don’t share it? How can they prepare their children to grow up in the world that we have? (Rachel Dolezal’s parents apparently adopted several black children.) To use the term to refer to an individual changing their ‘race’ is a new idea, and, as Brubaker points out, part of the problem with transracialism is that we do not (yet?) have the semantic and conceptual apparatus to express this well.

  k10800Brubaker also provides a brief cultural history of racial ‘passing’ and its ambivalences: black-to-white passing was usually justified as some sort of self-defense against a racist society, while white-to-black passing (which also occurred, if much rarer) had no such legitimation. This raises the specter of the ‘policing’ of identity categories, as when white people who have ‘discovered’ their Native American roots are called out: ‘Indigenous Identity Fraud’ clearly is ‘a thing’.

  Such policing of categories never goes away; many drastic examples of how forays across category boundaries are limited or prohibited follow throughout the book. Quite daunting seems the conflict between trans women and certain ‘radical feminists’. The latter refuse to welcome trans women into the category ‘woman’. For them, being a woman is more than having breasts and a vagina and a subjective claim. Being a woman means having had a socially female biography as well, and having made one’s way through a patriarchal world. From this perspective, trans women’s demands to be accepted as women is yet another male imposition. In turn, these feminists are labeled TERFs – ‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’ – and bitter battles are fought over these seemingly irreconcilable positions. The faint of heart better not follow the links Brubaker provides in this section (e.g., p. 122).

  Through the rich and empirically (or at least anecdotally) informed discussions of these and other topics (e.g., census forms, whitening creams, gender in sports), Brubaker manages to reconstruct some more formal aspects of the two categories race and gender as well as the dynamics of their social negotiation. They are marked today, he argues, by a high tension between chosen-ness and given-ness that also shapes the (allegedly misplaced) analogy between Jenner and Dolezal.

  A neat little four-field matrix (p. 22) in which he plots the question ‘Can one legitimately change one’s gender?’ against ‘Can one legitimately change one’s race?’ demonstrates the political complexities of the struggles over race and gender. A typical position on the left would be the Yes/No quadrant that espouses voluntarism towards gender, but maintains an essentialist position vis-à-vis race. Occasioned by the Jenner/Dolezal brouhaha, some conservatives, seeking to provoke the other side, went full-on ‘if-then’ by demanding equal treatment for both: they claimed that if Jenner had the right to decide her gender, then Dolezal had the right to choose her race as well – an argument likely designed to undermine transgender positions rather than support transracialism, as these conservative voices would surely prefer an essentialist position on both counts, race and gender. By insisting on racial essentialism, so their challenge, the left surrendered its progressive values. Brubaker found few voices genuinely embracing dual voluntarism, the Yes/Yes quadrant, and no commentators at all laid claim to the No/Yes position of gender essentialism and racial voluntarism. Again Brubaker: just why is that so? Why do we have such firm commitments to given-ness and chosen-ness? This firmness is especially intriguing since transgender also has not been ‘a thing’ (i.e., socially and even legally validated) for a very long time either.

  One development he points to in this context is the rise of the ‘new objectivism’ (p. 64-65), an increasing willingness to draw on essentialist arguments: to the challenge ‘you can’t just choose to be a woman’ the reply is of course ‘we don’t choose to be women; we simply are women’. This reveals competing essentialisms on both sides. This tension between given-ness and chosen-ness as rhetorical arguments exists regarding race as well – ironically, a genetic test could offer somebody a socially validated claim to blackness even if they never ‘felt black’. So this is where we are: Identities are unsettled, old binaries are going the way of the dodo, a lot of policing and adjudication of claims is going on, and the dust is far from settling.

  But here comes the punchline: As trans is different things to different people, and as there are many more than one position on transgender, “trans is not just a social phenomenon to think about; it is also a conceptual tool to think with” (p. 68). The second part of the book explores this “thinking with trans”, to equip us to deal with the analogy of race and gender in a more constructive way than just dismissing it.

  Brubaker offers a tripartite heuristic to think about the different modes of trans: the trans of migration, the trans of between, and the trans of beyond.

  Each is explored in turn, illustrated again with numerous examples from academic studies as well as more ephemeral sources; but each is also a mode of thinking that Brubaker abstracts from actual transgender dynamics and goes on to project on the question of race. The theoretical advantage is clear: ‘transracial’ as an analogy to ‘transgender’ is partly murky and uncertain because ‘transgender’ already lumps rather different things together. Figuring out the modalities of transgender removes at least the murkiness from the analogy.

  The trans of migration is mostly straightforward. It indicates the passage from one established category to another, without subverting or challenging the respective categories. Transitions from man to woman or woman to man fit this model. Thinking about race through the trans of migration reveals that of course there are such transitions, as when people change their legal status or seek to pass as the other, either permanently or intermittently (‘the trans of commuting’). For Brubaker, the main difference to transgender migration seems to be that gender migration is driven by identity, and racial migration by interest, a somewhat tenuous working heuristic. Dolezal and Jenner both fit the trans of migration model, which presents a ‘satisfying narrative form’ (p. 92).
  Photo by Shako Liu (flickr, CC BY 2.0)

  Photo by Shako Liu (flickr, CC BY 2.0)

  The trans of between sets up new categories. This is an entirely different story, one of emergence, of a new ‘position in a space of possibilities’ (p. 93). Some transgender folk move out of their original category, but never quite settle for the other one. This entails a focus on performativity, enactment, and representation, sometimes involving denied legibility through (re-)combination of male and female traits. In terms of race, the attempts to establish ‘multiracial’ as a socially validated and legal category can be counted as an instance of the trans of between. Racial in-betweenness, then, usually hinges on ancestry, as with ‘mixed children’ – but Brubaker is quick to point out that this suggests the existence of unmixed, putatively pure backgrounds, a problematic notion as well. One problem activists demanding recognition for the category ‘multiracial’ eventually ran into was that their position pitted them against black activists who worried that their constituency would shrink if people selected ‘multiracial’ over the ‘black’ identifier (p. 105). The one-drop rule endures in this and other indirect ways.

  Additionally, racial in-betweenness becomes cumbersome over generations, as half-identities become quarter- or sixteenth identities – not a particularly rich and plausible identity claim. The mere performance of in-betweenness, such as ‘voluntary black identity’ by Wiggers (p. 111), is already fraught: it is often seen as appropriation rather than celebration.

  Finally, the trans of beyond seeks to overcome existing categories, which is not as easy as it might sound. It breaks down into three further categories: neo-categorical, anti-categorical, and post-categorical. Here, the examples become increasingly idiosyncratic – Brubaker discusses the case of Christie Elan-Cane who pursues an identification as ‘ungendered’. But there is also ‘genderqueer’, which is a (neo-)category, but so underdetermined that it ends up making a mockery of the original binary. The trans of beyond in particular is a fertile field for utopian visions of a post-gendered world (I personally was reminded of the Ancillary book series by Ann Leckie) that again dovetail with some feminist positions. But of course, going beyond genders is quite the opposite of what people pursue in the model of the trans of migration: ‘… the trans of migration presupposes and reproduces gender difference, while transgender projects that seek to carve out a space between or beyond binary gender categories celebrate the liberation and proliferation of previously unimaginable forms of gender difference; they are not assimilationist but hyper-differentionalist’ (p. 122).

  While some have sought to make light of existing racial categories by means of parody, this has been proven to be dangerous; but going entirely beyond race is an equally utopian project (a ‘direction of change’, p. 127), as it would require disentangling descent and identity. Some developments point in this direction, but Brubaker is careful not to celebrate just yet – there might be a weakening of racial categories, but not everybody will be equipped (by education, capital, geography) to make use of that.

  His conclusion is in principle a summary. The analogy of transgender and transracial should be seen ‘as an intellectual opportunity rather than a political provocation’ (p. 151), an intellectual opportunity that he has very helpfully opened up and made accessible by displaying the complexities and the underlying structures of the field.

  Transracial, then, is largely not ‘a thing’ because it is based on ancestry rather than individuality, and individual choice is (in this neoliberal world of ours) something that receives both attention and validation.

  His subsequent notes section is tremendously rich.

  Photo by gaelx (flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 )

  My draft notes about #transrachel had a subtitle: ‘an addendum to Horace Miner’. This reference to a text that is pointedly as old as Brubaker himself was meant to raise the ethnographic problem of describing taken-for-granted practices and beliefs. This seemed to me particularly relevant in a social field such as this, in which the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of practices is an explicit goal of an identitarian movement, something that anthropologists are usually happy to deconstruct. Who, I might ask, other than the innocent ontologist, sees it as theoretically progressive to accept the objectivity of subjectivity?

  On the other hand, the Nacirema that Horace Miner wrote about live ‘in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles’ (1956: 503), and this by and large is the region discussed by Brubaker as well. Jesting aside, trans clearly is a book about the United States of America, with few diversions and excursions. France is mentioned as a foil a few times, as is Latin America. Brubaker does mention that the acceptance of transgender is unevenly distributed, but still is speaking about the US – or the global West/North, if we are being generous.

  Anthropologically, trans thus ends up still begging a question – the question of culture.

  Numerous trans identity claims are products of very particular conditions: these arguments have emerged in a place, at a time, are couched in an idiom, and have their own historical roots. This is true for both gender and the race discussion. In trans, the latter focuses on Blackness in the USA, which matters but hardly covers the full spectrum. Brubaker suggests that the radical celebration of personal self-realization in North America is an important factor. But we still need to learn how transgender travels the globe, and how these identities find (or do not find) social validation elsewhere, and how race works in other places. That challenge is relevant because of the universalist language of both gender and race claims, a language that obviates its own historical positionality. The Dolezal affair is a case in point. It is imbued with US-specific rules and conditions.

  Hence, the European reader – off the deep end in Nacirema country – comes away with a new appreciation of the ambivalence of constructivism, and a welcome reminder that while often popular culture is fast, convention is slow, and academia is slowest, sometimes a timely response does come from the university. But in the face of the recent US elections, Twitter users now are jesting that for the next four years, they have decided to become ‘a 35-year old white male’ – under the hashtag #transracial. Rachel Dolezal has a memoir coming out in 2017. And so the unsettling of identities continues. Brubaker’s trans seems a good way to get an empirical overview as well as an abstract understanding of these dynamics.

• H-Net Reviews
  https://networks.h-net.org/node/4089/reviews/132483/sotiropoulou-brubaker-grounds-difference
  Word count: 1175

  QUOTED: "For all students and researchers with an interest in citizenship, ethnicity, and nationalism this is a book worth reading."

  Sotiropoulou on Brubaker, 'Grounds for Difference'
  Author:
  Rogers Brubaker
  Reviewer:
  Panagiota Sotiropoulou

  Rogers Brubaker. Grounds for Difference. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. 240 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-74396-0.

  Reviewed by Panagiota Sotiropoulou (Loughborough University)
  Published on H-Citizenship (June, 2016)
  Commissioned by Sean H. Wang

  Rogers Brubaker is one of the leading scholars of citizenship, ethnicity, and nationalism, and Grounds for Difference is his latest contribution to the aforementioned fields. Renowned for his social constructivist approach, Brubaker focused on the everyday aspects of ethnicity and nationalism in his two last books and critiqued the use of ethnicity and the nation as fixed analytical concepts. In Grounds for Difference, however, Brubaker makes a twofold twist, from the micro- to the macrolevel of analysis and from the critique of concepts to a theoretical and empirical analysis of relationships among various markers of difference.

  The first chapter analyzes the relationship between categorical differences of citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and the (re)production of inequality. Among those, citizenship is considered as the strongest source of categorical inequality in the modern world, with the most straightforward and yet undertheorized contribution to inequality’s (re)production. This argument fits well with the vast amount of literature talking about citizenship as a means of “social closure”[1] and the implication that this has on immigrants and their sense of belonging in host societies. After deconstructing Charles Tilly’s theory of categorical inequality,[2] instead of emphasizing exploitation and opportunity hoarding like Tilly did, Brubaker suggests three alternative processes through which categorical differences relate to the (re)production of inequality. These are “the allocation of persons (or their exclusion from) reward-bearing positions; the social production of persons unequally disposed and equipped to pursue desirable positions; and the structuring of positions and their rewards” (p. 42). This theoretical conceptualization provides fertile ground for conducting empirical research in the field of the (re)production of inequalities.

  The second chapter deals with the return of biology in the study of race. After biological understandings of race were debunked in the late twentieth century, a resurgence of biological objectivism about race is currently taking place. Brubaker claims that the work of Neil Risch and his collaborators has significantly contributed to the scientific validation of commonsense understandings of race.[3] The resurgence of biology in racial studies is posited to have influenced and transformed “vernacular and organizational understandings and practices” related to race and ethnicity (p. 55). Brubaker calls on social scientists to challenge this neo-objectivist trend by providing genuine arguments from a social constructivist perspective. In other words, Brubaker encourages social scientists to become critically involved with this new relationship between biology and race instead of disregarding or ignoring it all together. This proposition for a complementary rather than contradictory relationship between sociology and biology might provide a new ground for research in regards to the relationship between social and biological constructivism.

  The relationship between language and religion as forms of cultural difference is the main issue examined in the third chapter. Both similarities and differences are identified between the two domains and their modes of institutionalization. In the last few years and especially after 9/11 and the consequent rise of Islamophobia, the number of studies examining the relationship between nationalism and religion has increased, contrary to what is happening with research examining language and nationalism. Thus, it would be almost impossible for Brubaker not to highlight the importance of religion as a source of cultural difference in the contemporary world. Brubaker’s claim is that religion has overtaken language as the main area of contestation concerning the political accommodation of cultural difference in contemporary societies. His argument for that is that religious pluralism appears to be more intergenerationally persistent compared to the linguistic one, driven by the resurgence of public, organized religion and immigration.

  Religion is further examined in the next chapter, although this time in comparison to nationalism. A lot of claims are made concerning the relationship between these two ambiguous terms. Brubaker posits that they are intertwined but not identical and that the most fruitful discussions can arise by asking not what the connection between them is but rather how these two terms can be examined together. Consequently, he proposes four ways of doing so: (1) as “analogous phenomena,” (2) in a causational context, where religion provides either the cause or the explanation of nationalism, (3) as interrelated phenomena, and (4) treating religious nationalism as an exceptional kind of nationalism. These suggestions have great practical use for future studies as theoretical concepts requiring emperical validation.

  Chapter 5 deals with the informed content of the term “diaspora” brought by the prolific interest in diaspora and diasporic studies after the beginning of 1980s. The discussion focuses around the claim originally made by Henry Goldschmidt that diaspora has itself become “diasporic,” that is, assigned various meanings.[4] Brubaker notes the danger for diaspora essentialism and suggests talking about “stances, projects, claims, idioms, and practice” (p. 130) in diasporic studies rather than strictly bounded groups, as a preventive measure. In other words, he revisits his argumentation, initiated in Ethnicity without Groups, according to which “groupness” should not be imposed where what actually exists is process and fluidity.

  The relationship between migration, membership, and the nation-state is discussed in the sixth chapter. Brubaker argues that, although we are obviously living in a globalized era characterized by transnational mobility, the nation-state has increasing importance as a “locus of belonging” (p. 133). In other words, the nation-state is far from irrelevant as a model for political and sociocultural organization. So, postmodernity did not transcend “the national”; instead of “post-nationalism,” Brubaker talks about “transborder nationalism” (p. 143). The rest of the chapter sheds light on the various ways in which the nation-state continues to be implicated in the politics of belonging, as these are defined both within and between nation-states.

  The final chapter critically engages with the “multiple modernities” perspective. After unpacking it, Brubaker goes on to articulate his own argument, according to which modernity is a single historical phenomenon with multiple “configurations, patterns, and programs,” is “dynamically changing,” and is “subject to chronic contestation” (p. 147).

  Grounds for difference is yet another of Brubaker’s publications calling for readers to constructively and critically engage with concepts that are usually taken for granted, if not ignored. Although this book is comprised of essays that were written separately, they form a coherent sum, easily comprehensible and united by the underlying principle of Brubaker’s social constructivism, understood as examining the various grounds of difference not as “things in the world, but perspectives on the world.”[5] For all students and researchers with an interest in citizenship, ethnicity, and nationalism this is a book worth reading. Full of fruitful ideas, it could form the perfect stimulus for innovative and much-needed research related to these topics as well as the interrelation between them.

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