Globalisation, fragmentation and the emergence of identity politics challenge the myth of the homogeneous nation-state. They also lend increasing importance to processes of national boundary construction. This article argues that the dichotomy of ethnic and civic nations which traditionally informs much of social science discourse on nations and nationalism is inadequate to analyse how nations distribute membership. The same is true of the Meineckean distinction between cultural and political nations. Both typologies fail to account for some actually existing types of national boundary construction and they suggest that, in any instance, the process of boundary construction is homogeneous, universal and generic. As a consequence of these shortcomings, the ethnic/civic dichotomy needs to be revised, by disentangling different organising principles at work in defining the boundaries of ethnic and civic nations: ancestry, race, culture and territory.

The article examines a recent normative argument for ‘liberal nationalism’ that can be found in the work of a range of influential contemporary writers. That argument seeks to defend the view that the state has a responsibility to preserve and promote national cultures. It does so by arguing that the liberal ideal of an autonomous individual chooser presupposes a rich and healthy national culture which provides, and gives meaning to, the options which an individual faces. The claim of the present article is that the liberal nationalist argument is much less successful than these writers would like to think. Although the argument may be valid in certain restricted contexts, the article shows that it runs into severe difficulties for a wide range of central cases that nationalists have traditionally been concerned with.

The existing body of theory explaining how religion contributes to conflict is inadequate. This is because no existing theory is both sufficiently comprehensive, in that it describes most of the ways in which religion can become involved in conflict, and sufficiently dynamic, in that it takes into account the interrelationships between the various components of the theory. Also, few attempts are made to integrate such a theory into the general literature on conflict, and few such theories are tested, or even testable, in a large-n format (the use of statistical methodology to analyse a large number of cases in order to test theories and look for general trends). A more comprehensive and dynamic theory of religion and conflict is developed here based on the argument that religion has four basic functions in politics, society and conflict: to provide a value-laden belief system; to supply standards and criteria of behaviour based on that belief system; to organise adherents through its institutions; and to legitimate actors, actions and institutions. This theory is then integrated into Gurr's theory of ethnic conflict in a dynamic format that is testable in a large-n format.

We have great pleasure in presenting a special issue on ‘Chosen Peoples’. This is a subject that has received growing attention amongst scholars of ethnicity and nationalism. It combines studies of religion, politics, history and society, to focus on the inner sources of ethnic survival and national renewal. Few societies have been without some myth of chosenness which has sustained their sense of identity and community in the vicissitudes of daily existence and natural and human tribulation. The need to strengthen social cohesion and morale and to explain the meaning of communal destiny finds repeated expression in many periods and across the continents in mythologies of ethnic election and national mission.

There is virtually no treatment of republican political cleavages or political culture in the literature on European political development. This article fills part of this gap by examining the consequences of republican political culture for the history of nations and nationalism. I argue that the republican question was a central political cleavage in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but that it has been largely overlooked, or reduced to the politics of class or to the politics of nation. The article critically assesses some of the central elements of standard political histories of nationalism, in light of the importance of republican politics. This exercise includes a sketch of the republican challenge to dynastic states, and a more detailed discussion of two individuals who figure prominently in every history of nationalism: Renan and Mazzini. It also includes a discussion of the relationship of nationalism and marxism, in light of the analysis of republican patriotism in the first part of the article.

The collapse of the Soviet empire and subsequent rise and spread of ethnic and national conflict in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have sparked a wave of research on ethnicity and nationalism among scholars and policy makers alike (Brubaker 1996; Diamond and Plattner 1994; Greenfeld 1992; Horowitz 1985; Smith 1991). This recent surge of interest in ethnicity and nationalism particularly concerns the potential danger that ethnic nationalism poses to social stability and political developments such as democratisation. There is a strong tradition in the scholarship on nationalism, from Hans Kohn (1945) to Donald Horowitz (1985) which views political nationalism as civic, integrative and constructive while ethnic nationalism is dangerous, divisive and destructive. Ethnic cleavages are considered more fundamental and permanent than other forms of cleavage, and conflicts arising from them are therefore said to be the most difficult to deal with.

This research was conducted in 1993–4 in several peripheral kolkhoz villages in the north-west Belarus Grodno province, a religious (Catholic/Orthodox) and linguistic (Belarussian/Russian/Polish/Lithuanian) borderland. The members of the folk communities of this region conceive and categorise social reality differently than it is done by the members of a nationalised and urbanised society, according to religious, and not nation-state, criteria. People are divided by these criteria into natsyas, i.e. religious groups. There are two main natsyas: the Catholics (also called Poles) and the Orthodox (called Rus′ or Belarussians). The distinctive criterion for several natsyas is the language of a prayer: the Catholics pray in Polish and/or Lithuanian, the Orthodox in Old Church Slavonic and Russian. The terms Catholic natsya and Polish natsya (and similarly Orthodox natsya or Rus′ natsya) are synonymous. The language of everyday speech does not differentiate the natsyas; all the villagers speak Belarussian dialect or so called ‘plain language’.

The natsya, a concept specific of traditional folk societies, should not be confused with a ‘nation’, a political term of the modern world. None the less, the kolkhoz peasants of the region under study are confronted with a concept of ‘nation’. It results in a turmoil in their worldview and in confusion about their identity; what we see in the Belarussian villages is a process of change. The borderland where the material was collected seems an excellent field for the study of the process of the emergence of nations.

Central to assertions of national identity in the contemporary world is a sense of collective mission and destiny. This is clearly manifest in the recent spate of religious nationalisms, but it is also present as a component of secular nationalisms. In both cases, it is possible to trace the origins of the sense of collective destiny to much earlier beliefs in ethnic chosenness. In some cases a strict ‘covenantal’ form of the myth of ethnic election, such as was found in the Old Testament, has survived more or less intact into the modern era. In many other instances, a looser sense of ethnic election by the deity has continued to influence the outlook and purposes of secular nations. While there is no strict covariance between the earlier myths and modern national ideals, the ancient beliefs in divine election have given modern nationalisms a powerful impetus and model, particularly among peoples in the monotheistic traditions.

To a large extent, the Lithuanian nationalist movement of the late nineteenth century was founded on language. Although this is typical of many nationalist movements, the Lithuanian case was special because of the amount and type of attention that was focused on the Lithuanian language, and the qualities that were ascribed to that language. This article discusses the influence that scholarly research into the Indo-European language family, in combination with the romantic nationalism typical of the nineteenth century, exerted on Lithuanian nationalists, and considers the symbolic importance of the Lithuanian language for this movement as a whole.

Equatorial Guinea is the only Spanish-speaking state in sub-Saharan Africa. Since independence in 1968 it has been ruled by the tyrant, Macías Nguema and then from 1979 by his nephew, Obiang Nguema. Over time, the fixed inherited colonial borders may have allowed for the emergence of a sense of national identity, constructed like a collage from different materials. The article explores how the ruling elite has summoned a number of discourses to help with the forging of the nation. The Hispanic link is claimed as an important component and an attempt has also been made to unite the various ethnic groups through a myth of common Bantu origins. The despotic rule of Macías may, surprisingly, have contributed to an emergent Equatoguinean identity by forcing people en masse to behave as they would not normally do, by the consequent shared memories of terror, and through the effects of forced population movements and the creation of a large diaspora.

The primary focus of this article differs from the author's earlier argument about why it may be legitimate to apply the category of nationality to ancient Israel. The concern here is three-fold: an examination of the conceptions of Israel as the chosen people (both conditional and unconditional) in the Old Testament; the possible bearing of those conceptions on the historical imagination of the Occident; and what those conceptions might tell us about the constitution of nationality in general.

Filipino women participated actively in the Philippine Revolution (1896–1902), performing a wide range of tasks essential to sustaining the revolutionary challenge against Spanish and American imperialism. Though largely omitted from mainstream histories of the nationalist revolution, women's involvement has been recorded in several marginalised texts. However, these texts have invariably used a limiting format based on presenting biographies of outstanding women. This article suggests an alternative approach, by situating the history of revolutionary Filipino women within a comparative framework. The article outlines key ideas of feminist writers who have analysed women's participation in nationalist struggles from an international perspective. Drawing on these ideas, some new approaches to women in the Philippine Revolution are suggested.

‘Special Peoples’ explores the causes and consequences of believing in a chosen people by considering, first, the Serbian case, as seen especially in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. The mythology, history and genuine Byzantine traditions which have created this East European form of belief in ‘special chosenness’ is then compared with West European developments. While both make use of the Bible, the West (and also Ethiopia), it is suggested, depends more directly on the Old Testament, Israelite model, while the Eastern approach rests rather on the experience of the Christian empire of Constantine. The English, Spanish and French are considered briefly as examples of chosen peoples. The discussion ends with the words of Carl Goerdeler, meditating on the Nazism that was about to kill him, and challenging the whole nationalist notion of an ‘exclusively chosen’ people from Israel on, as inherently prone to genocide.

The poets William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934) were among the builders of their respective Irish and Jewish national cultures. Their lives and careers were in limited ways remarkably alike and throw light on the dynamics of cultural nationalism. Each emerged in an historical watershed, leading to the establishment of an Irish state in 1921 and a Jewish state in 1948. Though their circumstances, styles, receptions and fates differed, each represented a profound moral vision in an age of declining faith, expressed his people's sense of victimisation and exposed their weaknesses as he saw them. Each saw his culture as being humanist and universal, not narrowly nationalistic. Each identified with his nation for reasons that were in part intensely and disturbingly personal. Each found a poetic voice in a rich heritage of ethnic myth, legend and symbol but was conscious of tension between the need for self-expression and national demands. It is argued that the creative powers of both Yeats and Bialik were set free by the national movements of which they were a part, and that the national struggle for self-determination was, in effect, mirrored on the private scale by the poet striving for artistic freedom and originality.

This article, which is presented in two parts, analyses the changing conceptions of the status of the two sovereigns (the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic) whose competing claims to sovereignty over Northern Ireland has been the ultimate cause of conflict. In Part I (presented here) I adapt Ian Lustick's theory of state contraction and expansion to the British-Irish relationship as it affected the negotiation of the Sunningdale Power-sharing Agreement of 1973–1974. I argue that the failure to address the competing claims to sovereignty limited the possibilities of achieving and maintaining the consent of sufficient proportions of each ethno-national community. Part II of the article (forthcoming) will extend the analysis to explain the relative equalisation of sovereignty status between Britain and Ireland and presents a modification of a ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’ explanation of the evolution of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and Belfast Agreement (1998).

Perhaps the most important happening in South African history was the Great Trek, the massive movement of people, goods, wagons, north from the eastern Cape Colony into what became the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. These Voortrekkers migrated between 1834 and the end of the decade. On the way they developed distinctive beliefs concerning their destiny, their relation to God and their relation to the African groups with whom they had serious conflicts. A major battle between better-armed Afrikaner forces and Zulu warriors ended in triumph for the Afrikaners on 16 December 1838. This formed the basis of a national holiday for the Afrikaners, and for the nation of South Africa.

Various Afrikaner organisations conceived of a great celebration surrounding the centennial of this major battle in Natal when a great monument to the Voortrekkers would be constructed near Pretoria. The corner-stone laying was planned for 16 December 1938. In preparation for this celebration, Ox wagon caravans from many parts of the Cape Province made their way north, holding worship services, giving speeches and otherwise building enthusiasm in countless towns along the way. Some of the wagon caravans travelled for four months. The culmination near Pretoria resulted in perhaps as many as 200,000 Afrikaners camping there for the corner-stone laying on the appointed day.

Two major complaints had been voiced continually for decades. First, the Afrikaners wanted total freedom from the British Empire; second, they feared the increasing numbers and influence of African groups for jobs, commodities and land. Scholars and political leaders are convinced that this show of emotion for the Afrikaner cause went a long way to unifying Afrikaner people, resulting in victory for the ‘Purified’ Nationalist Party at the polls in 1948. This study shows how the reiteration of past historical events, in the context of emotional and sometimes tense situations, helped to produce a self-confidence among the disunited Afrikaner factions. From this there resulted a reinforcement of their ideology, or myth, which contributed to their success as a people at the middle of this century. They were confident that their highest nationalist dreams were the result of God's help in their struggles, and resulted also from their loyalty to their cause.

This article advances the argument that national cohesion cannot meaningfully be pursued in multiethnic African states in the absence of democracy. But in order for democracy to facilitate cohesion, it must have the capacity to address issues of unequal power relations among the competing groups and regulate the conflicts which ensue therefrom. The article discusses four dimensions of pluralist democracy which address this capacity: democratisation of the state, strengthening of regulatory and oversight institutions, civil society and promotion of cross-sectional affiliations in party politics. The contrasting experiences of South Africa and Nigeria are then used to illustrate the formidable obstacles to democratic national cohesion in multiethnic African states, and the efforts that have been made to overcome them.