This article examines the Turkish Language Olympiads as a political-performative strategy that the Muslim nationalists used to communicate their ideology. I argue that to understand the rise of Muslim nationalism, we also need to understand how emotional appeal is created through spectacles like the Turkish Olympiads. The spectacle was effective in boosting people’s sense of national pride and self-confidence by resolving two important tensions of Kemalist nationalism. First, it addressed the tension between Westernization and nationalization. Depicting an image of Turkish national culture that is appreciated and imitated by foreigners, it contested the imitative, Westernist character of Kemalist nationalism. Second, recasting the outside world as friendly to Turks, even Turkophile, it challenged Kemalist nationalism’s emphasis on external threats. Turkish-speaking and -acting foreigners communicated a message of nationalist self-empowerment and confidence, calling into question people’s sense of fear and distrust of the outside world. How Muslim nationalism was promoted, particularly the performative-symbolic strategies that were used, are important to understand because of their emotional resonance and potential for mass mobilization.

This study in comparative global history sheds light on a largely ignored forum for the politics of transition from monarchical empire to nation-state in the Middle East and Central Europe—religious festivals at sacred shrines. It compares the role of key pilgrimage festivals at politically important sacred shrines: (1) the Islamic Nabi Musa (Prophet Moses) pilgrimage to the Haram esh-Sharif and Nabi Musa Tomb near the Dead Sea in Mandatory Palestine and (2) various Catholic pilgrimages to Jasna Góra in Częstochowa in interwar Poland. The author demonstrates how these events served as sacred forums for secular politics, where various political factions contested their partisan ideas of the nation, which included the elite nationalism of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husseini and the Catholic-Endecja nationalism of Polish clerical leaders. Moreover, I examine the role of these pilgrimage festivals in some of the major conflicts afflicting their respective areas, such as Arab–Jewish violence and hostility in Palestine and wars for borders as well as anti-minority sentiment, especially anti-Semitism, in Poland.

Scholars from various disciplines argue that the 1970s formed a historical watershed. Several arguments rely on the notion of a significant change in the modes of production, labour and consumption – a change usually coined as de-industrialization, which had severe economic, social and cultural repercussions on numerous cities. These repercussions are frequently phrased in semantics of crisis. The article will present an exemplary case that sits uneasily with this master narrative. Wilhelmshaven, a medium-sized city in north-west Germany, witnessed significant changes in the 1970s, too – but not away from, but towards industrialization, and throughout the industrializing phase, diagnoses of crisis played a major role in stabilizing the process. Analysing Wilhelmshaven's industrialization, which took place between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, will shed light on two aspects: first, the effects industrialization had on the city's socio-economic structure; secondly, the effects different crises and their diagnosis had on the process. In doing so, the article will link perspectives from urban history with theoretical concepts of crisis and, thus, attempt to provoke a closer look at cities of the 1970s.

This article provides a normative analysis of the rationale behind the creation of the Chinese unitary multinational state. Far from being irrelevant in the face of the well-known aversion of scientific socialism for normative thinking, such analysis illuminates the Chinese Communist Party’s long-standing commitment to the unitary multinational state as the best response to the national question. It shows that the Party’s leadership, in a conscious effort to adapt Stalin’s theory of nationality to Chinese revolutionary praxis, substantially revised the standard conception of national self-determination. Relying on its own materialist logic, it made participation in the struggle against alienation the normative basis to justify granting ethnic minorities special rights of regional autonomy under a common state. The creation of the Chinese unitary multinational state appears in this light as a normatively coherent attempt to guarantee that all ethnic groups that contributed to national liberation benefit equally from their imprescriptible right to collective self-determination.

In a recent paper in Nature1 entitled The Moral Machine Experiment, Edmond Awad, et al. make a number of breathtakingly reckless assumptions, both about the decisionmaking capacities of current so-called “autonomous vehicles” and about the nature of morality and the law. Accepting their bizarre premise that the holy grail is to find out how to obtain cognizance of public morality and then program driverless vehicles accordingly, the following are the four steps to the Moral Machinists argument:

1. 1) Find out what “public morality” will prefer to see happen.

2. 2) On the basis of this discovery, claim both popular acceptance of the preferences and persuade would-be owners and manufacturers that the vehicles are programmed with the best solutions to any survival dilemmas they might face.

3. 3) Citizen agreement thus characterized is then presumed to deliver moral license for the chosen preferences.

4. 4) This yields “permission” to program vehicles to spare or condemn those outside the vehicles when their deaths will preserve vehicle and occupants.

This paper argues that the Moral Machine Experiment fails dramatically on all four counts.

Current historiography endorses a narrative that the political elite of pre-industrial gateway cities became more ‘open’ in the wake of efflorescence and that their city councils became populated with merchants. Yet, according to the existing literature, Antwerp challenges this narrative, as the influx of merchants was very limited during late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when Antwerp transformed from a medium-sized Brabantine city into the leading economic centre in western Europe. Moreover, scholars disagree on whether the economic expansion had any impact at all on the composition and profile of Antwerp's political elite. By analysing the social composition of the city council and how this evolved from the beginning of Antwerp's commercial expansion around 1400 until its apogee around 1550, I revisit the question whether Antwerp constitutes an exception to the established pattern of elite formation in gateway cities and, if so, why.

In his autobiographical writings, the Russian-Jewish author and the founder of Zionist Revisionism Vladimir Jabotinsky constructed a retrospective self-image, according to which ever since becoming a Zionist early in the 20th century he exclusively clung to a Jewish national identity. This one-dimensional image was adopted by the early historiography of the Revisionist movement in Zionism. Contrary to this trend, much of the recent historiography on Jabotinsky has taken a different direction, describing him, particularly as a young man during the period of his early Zionism in Tsarist Russia, as a Russian-European cosmopolitan intellectual. Both these polarized positions are somewhat unbalanced and simplistic, whereas the figure of Jabotinsky and his worldview that emerge from reading his rich publicist writing in late Tsarist Russia present a far more complex picture of interplay between his deep ethnic-national primordial Jewish affinity, on the one hand, and an array of his different attachments to his non-Jewish surroundings including local, cultural, and civil identities, on the other. Focusing on Jabotinsky’s unexplored journalist writings that address the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, the article discovers a previously unknown identity pattern of the young Jabotinsky—his Russian state patriotism—and traces its relationship to his Jewish nationalism.

In this article, I focus on the context in which levees were constructed on the Lower Danube, along the Bulgarian–Romanian border. I argue that after World War II, while the two states shared the management of the river in this region, Romania pursued a techno-nationalist hydraulic policy, which led to the complete damming of the left bank of the Danube with levees. Bulgaria also succeeded in building levees on its side of the Danube, that is the right bank of the common border; however, Bulgaria used different technologies and its building works proceeded at a different pace. Techno-nationalism as delineated in this article considers nation-states as basic units in the analysis of technologies. Technological development is not a flowing process, as it becomes entangled with the interests of nation-states seeking legitimation. Hydraulic technology may strengthen nation-states, and in some circumstances leads to the emergence of nationalistic ideologies.

In 1938, doctors Eric Guttmann and Walter Maclay, two psychiatrists based at the Maudsley Hospital in London, administered the hallucinogenic drug mescaline to a group of artists, asking the participants to record their experiences visually. These artists included the painter Julian Trevelyan, who was associated with the British surrealist movement at this time. Published as ‘Mescaline hallucinations in artists’, the research took place at a crucial time for psychiatry, as the discipline was beginning to edge its way into the scientific arena. Newly established, the Maudsley Hospital received Jewish émigrés from Germany to join its ranks. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, this group of psychiatrists brought with them an enthusiasm for psychoactive drugs and visual media in the scientific study of psychopathological states. In this case, Guttmann and Maclay enlisted the help of surrealist artists, who were harnessing hallucinogens for their own revolutionary aims. Looking behind the images, particularly how they were produced and their legacy today, tells a story of how these groups cooperated, and how their overlapping ecologies of knowledge and experience coincided in these remarkable inscriptions.