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Social Movements as Nationalisms or, On the Very Idea of a Queer Nation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Brian Walker
Brian Walker*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

Given the immense mobilizing power possessed by the rhetoric of nationalism, as well as the many resources which can be tapped by groups which successfully establish national claims, it is not surprising that we have recently seen such a resurgence in nationalist discourse. One of the things which may surprise us, however, is the growing breadth in the types of groups which now launch such claims. No longer is the discourse of nationalism limited to use by ethnic groups and territorial populations. Recently it has come to be deployed by groups which we would normally tend to look upon as social movements. There has been a growing realization of the way in which constituencies such as Blacks, gays and lesbians, Chicano/as, and so on, make up distinct peoples, with cultures, public institutions, dialects, tastes, and social practices that set them off from the people or peoples around them.

Type
PART IV: Some Consequences of Nationalism
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 22: Rethinnking Nationalism , 1996 , pp. 505 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1996

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References

2 Queer Nation is an activist coalition formed in April1990 as an offshoot of ACTUP. Like the former coalition, Queer Nation aims at publicizing what it sees as the criminal slowness of the American government's response to the AIDS epidemic. But it aims beyond that at a more general attack on the homophobia which had such mortal results in the first years of the AIDS crisis, when the latter was still seen as a gay disease. The early pamphleteers of Queer Nation drew an explicit link between their strategies and those of black nationalists. See Esther Kaplan, ‘A Queer Manifesto,’ quoted in Berlant, Lauren and Freeman, Elizabeth, ‘Queer Nationality,’ in Boundary 2 (Spring 1992) 149-80, esp. 155-6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 I shall argue this point at much greater length below.

4 See Barkan, Elazar, The Retreat of Scientific Racism (New York: Cambridge University Press 1991), 343-5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Taguieff, Pierre-André, ‘Les métamorphoses idéologiques du racisme et la crise de l'antiracisme,’ in Face au Racisme Tome 2: Analyses, hypothèses, perspectives (Paris: La Decouverte 1991), 13–63, esp. 21-25Google Scholar.

6 See Kymlicka, Will, ‘Individual and Community Rights,’ in Baker, Judith, ed., Group Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994)Google Scholar, and Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989); Williams, Melissa, ‘Justice Toward Groups; Political Not Juridical,’ Political Theory 23:1 (February 1995), 67–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Margalit, Avishai and Raz, Joseph, ‘National Self-Determination,’ Journal of Philosophy 87:9 (September 1990) 439-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Margalit, Avishai and Halbertal, Moshe, ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture,’ Social Research 61:3 (Fall 1994) 491–510Google Scholar; Dyke, Vernon Van, ‘Justice as Fairness; For Groups?’ American Political Science Review (1975), 607-14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seymour, Michel, ‘Anti-individualisme, droits collectifs et Etats multinationaux,’ Le defi du pluralisme; Lekton 4:1 (Printemps 1994), 41–80Google Scholar.

7 Touraine, Alain, ‘The Idea of Revolution,’ in Featherstone, Michael, ed., Global Culture (London: Sage Publications 1990), 121-41Google Scholar

8 I shall use the terms ‘trans-statal’ and ‘diasporic’ to refer to the way in which gay culture relates to its territories. I use ‘trans-statal’ rather than the more usual term ‘transnational’ in order to avoid several confusions pointed out by Verdery, Katherine in her article ‘Beyond the Nation in Eastern Europe,’ Social Text 38 1–19Google Scholar. ‘Transnationality’ is generally used to refer to “movements of peoples, commodities, ideas, production processes, capital, images as well as possible political alignments across the boundaries between sovereign states” (Verdery, 1). But, as Verdery points out, ‘transnationalism’ is thus a misnomer, since what is referred to is not processes which bridge ethnic nations but sovereign states. I follow Verdery in using the much clearer ‘trans-statal’ instead.

9 I have been influenced here by Green, Leslie, ‘Internal Minorities and Their Rights,’ in Baker, , ed., Group Rights, 112Google Scholar.

10 Claims to the status of nationhood or peoplehood are above all claims about survivance. They are claims that one's collectivity has the right and perhaps the duty to resist certain forms of metamorphosis, that one's group can not, and will not, be moved from its integral relation with a certain set of patterns.

Nationality claims which are successfully established thus rule out as illegitimate the trade-offs which might otherwise be demanded of a group within the terms of pluralist politics, where many groups struggle together for scarce resources. Prior to the successful assumption of the mantle of nationhood one's collective might be seen as just one more interest group among the many which make claims on common resources. In pluralistic democracies these claims are mediated by central authorities who force strategic trade-offs in the name of the large number of groups fighting for scarce goods. When claims to the status of nationhood are successfully established they lift one's group out of this game of bargaining and strategic trade-offs, and they justify the refusal of certain compromises which might otherwise have seemed reasonable.

11 It might be suggested that the right of democratic self-determination serves as a fourth justification for national self-determination claims, and this is to some extent the case. The right of groups to determine their own future has served, since the French Revolution, as a sort of macro-justification to which all nationalisms have appealed. This aspect of republicanism serves as the lingua franca ofmodem self-determination movements. But arguments for democratic self-governance have seldom been a sufficient justification for national selfdetermination, and that for the following reason.

It is widely accepted that peoples have a right to govern themselves, as long as they accept certain well-known side constraints (that they can achieve autonomy without thereby causing unnecessary harm to other peoples, for example). But there is almost always a great division of opinion on the question of who makes up ‘the people’ for the purposes of self-governance. For example, if Canadians make up one people a mare usque ad mare then the borders of the unit of self-determination are set at the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The various groups living between- those claiming aboriginal heritage and the French-Canadians-are therefore subject to the decisions of the majority, and are held to the everyday give-and-take of the federal order with their needs being discounted accordingly. However, if Canadians make up one people, and francophone Quebeckers make up another, then the appropriate border of self-government is not that of the country Canada but that of the borders of the territory populated exclusively by francophone Quebeckers, namely the areas outside aboriginal lands and outside the island of Montreal (which has always been a polycultural city). Or, if all citizens of the current province of Quebec (aboriginal peoples, anglophones, Montreal immigrants, francophones and so on) make up one people then the relevant political unit would be the current border of the province of Quebec. An argument for democratic self-government cannot address the question of the appropriate border of the ‘people.’ This is why theories of nationalism tend to situate a republican core within a more elaborated justificatory matrix which gives the basic democratic argument a particular valence. It is these latter justificatory systems that I am concentrating upon here.

12 Herder, , ‘Yet Another Philosophy of History,’ translated, edited and introduced by Barnard, F.M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1969), 181–223, esp. 183-5Google Scholar

13 See Barton, Michael, Race Relations (London: Tavistock 1967), 8Google Scholar.

14 See Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism.

15 Taguieff, ‘Les métamorphoses ideologiques du racisme'

16 Within analytical legal and political theory we can distinguish two distinct forms of culturalism. The first is based on a transcendental-type argument about the necessary conditions for the attainment of full personhood and moral autonomy. Will Kymlicka is the best-known proponent of this version of culturalism. This school of thought is in many ways the most analytically sophisticated, carefully justifying cultural promotion by reference to egalitarian considerations which are already widely accepted, and, in the end, making cultural rights derivative of liberal rights and freedoms.

The other version of culturalism centres on a right to culture, a right which is itself fundamental and non-derivative of individual rights. In this position cultures are portrayed as possessing rights akin to the rights of persons. Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal argue for this position in ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture.’ This latter position attempts to solve a central difficulty with the derivative rights position. If cultural institutions are justified only as a means to develop a particular set of capacities then there is no way to protect particular cultures if other ones offer an equally wide range of means-to-capacities. For example, one homogeneous world-culture with a single language but many highly differentiated institutions might well supply access to full socialization and a very supple and pluralistic set of lifeways. Under the derivative view of cultural rights there is thus little reason to protect particular cultures. Under it people should be allowed to assimilate since by doing so they merely exchange one set of capacities for another. In conditions where this is done over generations with relatively little fuss (the case is quite different if colonialism or other cultural imposition is at work) then this form of assimilation should be seen as noninvidious.

The position which suggests that there are non-derivative cultural rights - were there any good arguments given for us to accept such a position - might be a much more satisfactory source of reasons why we should fight assimilation.

17 See Kymlicka, , Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 165-6Google Scholar.

18 For these examples see, respectively, Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, Seymour, ‘Anti-individualisme,’ and Margalit and Halbertal, ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture.'

19 See Kymlicka, Will, ‘Liberalism and the Politicization of Ethnicity,’ in Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 4:2 (July 1991) 239-55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 I make this point at greater length in Walker, Brian, ‘Plural Contexts, Contested Territories: A Critique of Kymlicka’ in Canadian Journal of Political Science 30:2 (June 1997), 211-34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 I am referring, for example, to the way in which the gay movement in North America has its own flag, the multicoloured stripes of which fly over numerous parades and rallies which are themselves strongly reminiscent of the mass gatherings in which other nations were forged. I am referring as well to phenomena like the gay Olympics (which for trademark reasons is referred to as the Gay Games), which occurs every two years and which gathers together gay athletes from around the world, and to the increasingly frequent talk of a gay sub-economy, what is sometimes referred to as the economy of ‘lavender dollars’ and to which, it is argued, gays and lesbians should give preferential treatment. But I am thinking, above all, of the way in which a network of gay institutions (community centres, bars, magazines with their readerships, activist coalitions, NGO's and so on) joins together to make up an alternative gay public sphere, one in which gay culture has been formulated and spread and which has allowed, over time, the creation of a sense of a distinct gay peoplehood.

22 I am influenced in this skeleton history of nationalism by the (very different) accounts given by Anderson, Benedict in his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, New York: Verso 1983)Google Scholar and by Gellner, Ernest in his Nations and Nationalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1983)Google Scholar.

23 See Smith, Anthony D., ‘National Identity and Myths of Ethnic Descent,’ in Kriesberg, Louis, ed., Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change, 7 (1984), 95–130Google Scholar.

24 See Duggan, Lisa, ‘Queering the State,’ in Social Text 39 (Summer 1994), 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 For a brief overview see ‘Witch-Hunt: The United States Government versus Homosexuals,’ a collection of news stories from 1950s’ editions of the New York Times and Post gathered by Katz, Jonathan in his ‘Documentary,’ Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell 1972)Google Scholar.

26 d'Emilio, John, ‘Gay Politics, Gay Community,’ in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics and the University (London: Routledge 1992), 74–95Google Scholar

27 I am indebted here to an unpublished thesis by Vecchio, Gina Anne Del, ‘Homosexual; Homophile; Gay; Lesbian; Queer: The Construction of Gay Political Power in San Francisco,’ 21–25Google Scholar.

28 Anderson, , Imagined Communities, 48–53Google Scholar

29 Webber, Jeremy, ‘Language, Culture and Political Community,’ in Reimagining Canada: Language, Culture, Community, and the Canadian Constitution (Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press 1994), 194-7Google Scholar

30 D'Emilio, John, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983), 146-8Google Scholar

31 See, for example, the various writings gathered in Jay, Karla and Young, Allen, eds., Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, twentieth-anniversary edition (New York: New York University Press 1992)Google Scholar, particularly ‘Out of the Closets, Into the Streets,’ by Allen Young, 6-31. For a synoptic overview of the relations between the gay liberation movement and radicalism more generally see also the Foreword to that volume by John D'Emilio, esp. pp. xi-xxix.

32 Alan Conter, ‘Pride and Plague; Stonewall Traces,’ radio documentary broadcast on CBC Ideas, 28 November 1994. But to say that people leave the closet because the heat has turned up there does not necessarily mean that they will go back in if the heat goes down. We know, from the history of other nationalisms, that nationalist movements have their own momentum. This is why gay culture has to be seen as something more than just a stepping stone to a non-homophobic society. Most of the functions of gay culture, it might be suggested, are essentially aimed at combating the homophobia in society at large. Once this is done away with, gay nationalism will have no further reason to exist. It is thus not like Québécois nationalism, for example, which is basically about guaranteeing the survival of a certain form of cultural difference over time. Gay culture, some might argue, aims at making a certain form of difference acceptable within the mainstream, at which point it will no longer be needed and can disappear.

There is, no doubt, a part of the gay and lesbian population that wishes to be seen as exactly like all other North Americans, and longs for the day when being homosexual will be seen as no more serious or meaningful than being lefthanded. But there are also many for whom homosexuality or’ queerness’ is seen as defining an ethos and a way of life. For these people sexual preference is just one feature of a much broader way of life based on a radical questioning of everyday institutions, gender roles, and so on. For these people queerness is not a transitional way of life for those on their way into the mainstream but a radically different ethos that needs to be preserved. (See Blasius, Mark, ‘An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence,’ in Political Theory 20:4 [November 1992] 642-71.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar And the disappearance of homophobia is in any case a highly unlikely event, particularly if the sort of strong pluralism that culturalists advocate is successfully instantiated in North America. Many traditional cultures have deeply homophobic patterns and at least some culturalist writers advocate giving groups powers which would allow them to preserve these homophobic attitudes (see my discussion of Margalit and Halbertal, below). If we move beyond a regime of individual rights and give communities the right to protect their culturallifeways, cultural rights for gays may end up being even more important than they are now.

33 Rhetorical strategies of performance and self-defense which were first developed in the gay enclaves on the east and west coast were broadcast by the new gay magazines and newspapers and made available as resources for those individuals attempting to carve a niche for themselves in more peripheral locales. Adopting strategies developed in the cities allowed more secure identityformation for (the gay aspects in the character of) non-urban gays, and this new self-confidence, in turn, encouraged the formation of new institutions in small towns. Local entrepreneurs saw a profit to be made from this new identitycohort and opened up new spaces for them, spaces which were protected on other levels by the work done by increasingly confident gay people in advancing their case among non-gays. These processes concatenated to gradually ameliorate the living conditions of many gay people in peripheral areas. Or at least, where local struggles were unsuccessful, the movement as a whole created an alternative network into which people could escape from the pressure of small towns.

34 Leznoff, Maurice and Westley, William, ‘The Homosexual Community,’ in Dynes, Wayne and Donaldson, Stephen, eds., Sociology of Homosexuality (New York and London: Garland Publications 1992), 219-25Google Scholar

35 Murray, Stephen O., ‘Components of Gay Community in San Francisco,’ in Herdt, Gilbert, ed., Gay Culture in America: Essays from the Field (Boston: Beacon Press 1992), 107-46Google Scholar, and Levine, Martin P., ‘Gay Ghetto,’ in Dynes, and Donaldson, , eds, Sociology of Homosexuality, 196–204Google Scholar

36 Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man, quoted in Green, Leslie, ‘Internal Minorities and Their Rights,’ in Baker, , ed., Group Rights, 112Google Scholar

37 See Herdt, Gilbert, ‘Coming Out as a Rite of Passage: A Chicago Study,’ in Herdt, , ed., Gay Culture in America, 29–67Google Scholar; also Dank, Barry, ‘Coming out in the Gay World,’ in Dynes, and Donaldson, , eds., Sociology of Homosexuality, 60–195Google Scholar.

38 Harry, Joseph and Lovely, Robert, ‘Gay Marriages and Communities of Orientation,’ in Dynes, and Donaldson, , eds., Sociology of Homosexuality, 135–200Google Scholar.

39 In 1994 a record number of American states faced ballot initiatives attempting to restrict gay rights, encouraged by a similar measure passed by Colorado in 1992. (See Holmes, Stephen, ‘Gay Rights Advocates Brace for Ballot Fights,’ New York Times, 12 January 1994, A12Google Scholar.) Lisa Duggan points out that the combined budgets of the six largest gay organizations total only about $12 million, compared to more than $210 million in the combined budgets of the six largest right-wing religious organizations (Lisa Duggan, ‘Queering the State,’ 1).

40 Remafedi, Gary, Farrow, James A., and Deister, RW., ‘Risk Factors in Attempted Suicide in Gay and Bisexual Youth,’ in Pediatrics 87:6 (June 1991) 869-75Google Scholar; and Gibson, Paul, ‘Gay Male and Lesbian Youth Suicide,’ in Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide 3: Prevention of Youth Suicide (Rockville, MD: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 1989)Google Scholar

41 I am influenced here by a passage in Melucci's, AlbertoNomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1989)Google Scholar, which points out the importance of such highly general and evanescent goods in modem social movements.

42 Mohr, Richard sketches the extent of the problem in a paragraph of his book Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society and Law (New York: Columbia University Press 1988)Google Scholar: “A recent extensive study by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found that over 90 percent of gays and lesbians had been victimized in some form on the basis of their sexual orientation. Greater than one in five gay men and nearly one in ten lesbians had been punched, hit, or kicked; a quarter of all gays had had objects thrown at them; a third had been chased; a third had been sexually harassed and 14 percent had been spit on …. ”, 27-28.

43 Margalit, and Raz, , ‘National Self-Determination,’ 443-4Google Scholar

44 Margalit, and Raz, , ‘National Self-Determination,’ 445-6Google Scholar

45 See Holmes, ‘Gay Right Advocates Brace for Ballot Fights.’

46 I argue this point at much greater length in Walker, ‘Plural Contexts, Contested Territories.’

47 See Margalit and Halbertal, ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture.’

48 For example, the Ultra-Orthodox Jews whom Margalit and Halbertal concentrate upon require that visitors to their neighbourhood refrain from driving on Sundays or wearing short skirts.

49 I am following here an argument made in Rhéaume, Denise, ‘Individuals, Groups, and Rights to Public Goods,’ in University of Toronto Law Journal 38 (1988) 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Margalit, and Halbertal, , ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture,’ 507Google Scholar

51 Margalit, and Halbertal, , ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture.’ Chandran Kukathas makes a similar argument in ‘Are There Any Cultural Rights?’ Political Theory 20:1 (February 1992) 105-39Google Scholar.

52 It might be thought that a Will Kymlicka's account, which justifies collective rights only for vulnerable minorities, could not be used in this way, since Protestant fundamentalists seem to be part of the mainstream English-speaking, culture. But the notion of dominant culture that Kymlicka uses is too broad to serve the theoretical purpose he wishes. Just because Protestant fundamentalists share a language and ethnicity with the culture around them does not mean that they are not a minority with good reason to see themselves as strongly vulnerable within the liberal mainstream. Indeed, because Protestant fundamentalists share a language and many other cultural referents with the ‘liberal humanists’ whom they see as threatening, they are in many ways more vulnerable than groups protected by a barrier of linguistic and cultural difference; for example, it is doubly difficult for such Christians to protect their children from what they see as the corrupting influences of the mainstream culture, since television shows, music, and so on are all in a language their children understand.

53 See Taguieff, Pierre-André, La force du préjugé: essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: La Découverte 1987), 326-33Google Scholar.

54 Wegierski, Mark, ‘The New Right in Europe,’ in Telos 98-99 (Winter 1993-Spring 1994)55H69,esp.68Google Scholar

55 On the essentially contested idea of deep difference see James Clifford, ‘Identity in Mashpee,’ an account of judicial attempts to deny the difference of aboriginal cultural specificity that in many ways operates like similar attempts to deny gay and lesbian cultural specificity, in Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1988), 277–346CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 On changes in the environmental conditions of modem cultural reproduction see Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, translated by Ritter, Mark (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications 1992)Google Scholar; Hannerz, Ulf, ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,’ in Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990) 237-51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jokinen, Kimmo, ‘Cultural Uniformity, Differentiation, and Small National Cultures,’ in Cultural Studies 8:2 (1994) 208-19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 One of the facts that is little noted in culturalist works is that the same worries that ethnic minorities voice about cultural decay are just as frequently voiced by members of majority cultures, often with just as much reason. The worries of Anglo-Canadian nationalist George Grant about the onslaught of mechanized mass society are almost exactly the same as those voiced by the 1953 Tremblay Report, which was one of the key documents of conservative French-Canadian nationalism (Kwavnik, David, ed., The Tremblay Report: Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1973]Google Scholar). But while French-Canadian nationalists were able to mobilize ethnic solidarity and post-conquest resentment in order to found a nationalist movement which was, for several decades at least, immensely creative as far as the development of new cultural institutions was concerned, the project of English-Canadian nationalist mobilization was much less successful. Minority status brings groups advantages of solidarity and creativity that are frequently unavailable to majority groups, and can thus serve as compensation for the smaller numbers and ostensibly more fragile structures of minority communities. And, as I pointed out above about Protestant fundamentalists, ostensibly being part of mainstream culture may well be a disadvantage for some groups. Anglophone Christians find it difficult to filter ‘immoral’ media out of their homes. English Canadians have more difficulty maintaining their distinctiveness from Americans since they share a language with their American neighbours.

58 I am indebted here to Horowitz, Donald, ‘The Utility of Ethnic Affinity,’ in Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press 1985), 74–83Google Scholar.

59 See Margalit and Raz, ‘National Self-Determination,’ 458.

60 See, for example, the chapter on diasporas in Seton-Watson's, HughNations and States (London: Methuen 1977)Google Scholar.

61 As, for example, in Bloc Québécois MP Philippe Paré's suggestion that Quebec's political future should be determined, not by a vote which includes anglophone and other minority citizens, but exclusively by ‘old-stock Quebeckers,’ the implication being that the latter alone are the real Quebeckers. ‘Bouchard Chastises Two Bloc MPs,’ Globe and Mail (28 February 1995) A10.

62 Anderson, Imagined Communities

63 Every terrain must be named. But there is an alternative to the exclusions fostered by an ethno-territorial regime. A state which attempts to give fair access to the expressive goods of a terrain would, first of all, recognize and respect the fact that territories always already have a dense history of naming, and avoid homogenizing this, wiping out the traces of a history in which numerous groups have occupied and disputed the land over centuries. When new streets are created, when new boulevards are opened up, or when renaming is necessary, concerns of fairness should lead to a recognition that all groups on the terrain should have a say in the process. New names, for example, might be constructed out of the culture that is always created in between groups struggling together on a territory, in the meta-community formed by their struggle for the same resources.

64 By diasporic nations I am referring to groups like the Armenians, Chinese, Sikhs, Acadians, the Jewish people before the founding of the State of Israel, and to the form of nationality established within modem social movements. Each of these different national groups is organized quite differently and sometimes the differences are important. For example the Acadian diaspora, the Jewish diaspora before the twentieth century, and social movements such as that of gays and lesbians all represent diasporas without homelands. Likewise, the ethnic Chinese in California and South America are part of a diaspora with no real homeland as such; its roots rest in a triumvirate of cities: Hong Kong, Taipei, and Singapore.

Despite their diversity, these nations have enough in common to be referred to under a common term. Diasporic peoples all find themselves in situations where a large part of their populations are forced to share space and political power with other collectivities; a large portion of the population of the nation will be scattered in situations wherein they live as minorities vis-à-vis other groups. Diasporic nations are trans-statal nations, and are, for the most part, organized as networks. Population pockets are joined together by circulation systems which bring personnel and cultural resources from one node to another on the network. In recent times diasporas have been greatly aided by access to forms of technologies which allow goods and people to move about much more quickly than they could in former centuries. New technologies also make possible forms of public space which are not geographically dependent; newspapers, magazines, cable television channels, and a range of telecommunications media allow diasporas to create their own public spaces drawing together people who are widely dispersed in terms of geography. Diasporas create a form of civil society which is no longer specifically rooted in one geographic space. With the profusion of communications technologies, we now live in a world where numerous particularist civil societies can exist simultaneously on the same terrain. This means that modem technologies have raised the possibilities for diasporas to have their own specific cultures which differ from those of their homelands. Thus, for example, the East Indian diaspora has important differences from the culture of India, the Irish in America have different perspectives than the Irish in Ireland, and so on.

65 There is also the problem of homogenization. Although ethno-territorial nationalisms may seen to be introducing a form of cultural distinctiveness visa-à- vis adjacent territories and thus increasing diversity from one perspective, it is often the case that this distinctiveness is gained at the expense of diversity within the nation's borders. The government conceives a vision of what the culture it is protecting should be, and projects this over all the actually existing institutions on its terrain. The anthropologist Richard Handler has, with considerable subtlety, traced this process at work in Quebec in his Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1988). Even a state that tries for a rigorous cultural neutrality is prey to such problems, but a state which has a particular visage culturelle in mind will have a whole set of additional difficulties.

66 See Boyarin, Daniel and Boyarin, Jonathon, ‘Diaspora: Generation and Ground of Jewish Identity,’ in Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993) 693–725, esp. 712-14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 One could, for example, make very similar arguments for the humanistic culture which is carried by the university system. The institutions which bring people into contact with the centuries-old tradition of humanistic learning make possible forms of identity which are deeply different from those modes of selfhood made possible by the state and market system. Academics make up a caste which stands apart in many ways (though, like most other cultural groups, not in all ways) from the rest of the societies in which they live. The mode of life that the academic system makes possible is not that of an encompassing group, but academic affiliation, like many other forms of corporate affiliation, quickly comes to colour the entire life of the people who hold it. This lifeway has been remarkably responsive to and enlightening about the development of modernity. But the widespread campaign to replace the humanistic focus of the university with a more market-oriented approach poses threats to this lifeway which are similar to those felt by ethnic populations which feel themselves threatened by sociological change.

68 This point is well argued by Cohen, Jean and Arato, Andrew in Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992), xvi.Google Scholar