The Concept of "Homeland"

From Barrington, Herron, and Silver: The Motherland is Calling: Views of Homeland among Russians in the Near Abroad:

"While national identity may or may not be based on ethnicity, it always contains a territorial component. An ethnic group becomes 'national' when it recognizes a particular territory as one that has a right to control politically. The development of a sense of homeland an an emotional attachment to that homeland coincides with the development of national self-consciousness. Scholars have asserted that 'for a nation to exist, it must have some place that it can claim its own' and 'nations cannot be conceived without a specific territory or homeland.' Thus, to understand a particular group's idea of homeland one must understand its political and social conduct and its relations with a national 'other.'

"An individual or group can have several possible homelands. The first is an external homeland, in which case a minority does not consider any part of its state of residence to be its homeland but instead views some region or state outside its country of residence as the group's true homeland... Such a situation would not ordinarily fuel secessionist claims, though it could lead the government of the external homeland to intervene on behalf of the minority group. If there is a legitimate basis for claims of discrimination, the external homeland may put diplomatic, economic, or military pressure on the minority's state of residence to protect the minority from discrimination.

"The second possible homeland is internal - a part of the state of residence. This perception of homeland is generally associated with a state that contains a sizable and concentrated ethnic minority. The minority considers a region to be its national homeland and desires political control over that territory. Such situations fuel secessionist drives and are at the heart of many ethnic conflicts around the world because what is seen as a homeland by the minority is often the perceived homeland of the majority group. This situation of overlapping homelands is common in the former Soviet Union, especially where regions within the existing successor states are named for a particular ethnic minority (for example, Chechnya within Russia and Abkhazia within Georgia).

"The third type of homeland is best called the mixed (internal-external) homeland. In this situation, members of a minority in one state see the homeland as comprising both a part of the state of residence and an external region or state. Such views of homeland can result in irredentism, in which members of an ethnic minority support the secession of a region of their state of residence and its joining with a neighboring state. An oft-mentioned example is Kazakhstan, where Russians consider both the northern part of the country and Russia as their homeland. In such situations, nationalist claims take the form of a desire to break part of the state of residence away and to join with the rest of the homeland group.

"The fourth homeland option is also internal but with different implication from those of the internal variant discussed above. Members of an ethnic minority may see their entire state of residence as their homeland. This possibility is rarely discussed in works on the intersection of minorities, identity, and territory. Since it is assumed that to be a nation requires a homeland different from that which another nation can claim, it follows that by definition 'national minorities' would not consider their state of current residence to be their homeland. Whereas national minorities (as the term is understood by scholars of nationalism) may not accept their state of residence as their homeland, ethnic minorities may."

Barrington, Lowell W., Erik S. Herron, and Brian D. Silver. "The Motherland is Calling: Views of Homeland among Russians in the Near Abroad." World Politics 55 (January 2003), 290-313.

Marc Morje Howard on Civil Society in Post-Communist Countries

"What should we expect to find ten years from now? Will levels of membership and participation gradually increase, at least in some countries, and if so, how?"

"The first and most obvious potential mechanism is generational change, as younger post communist citizens less influenced by the experience of life in a communist system come of age. A group of people roughly the same age can be shaped not only by their common age or geography but by 'significant social events' such as war or economic depression. Piotr Sztompka argues that 'as long as the majority of the population consists of the people whose young, formative years, and therefore crucial socializing experiences fall under the rule of the communist regime-- one can expect the continuing vitality of the bloc culture.' He adds, however that this will change over time, as 'new demographic cohorts replace the older generations at the central positions in a society.' The expectation therefore is that those people who dislike and avoid voluntary organizations will eventually die off, replaced by younger generations that might be more sympathetic to such activities.

"The expectation that generational change will bring about a steady increase in organizational membership is certainly plausible (although not particularly encouraging, since even in the best conditions, it will take many decades for the process to run its course), and it reaffirms the importance of communist experience in explaining the low levels of post-communist organizational membership. Yet such a development may be far from assured, and it is difficult to predict whether or not generational change will contribute to an increase in participation in civil society in the long run. After all, socialization comes both from the current institutional setting and from one's parents, teachers, and peers, all of whom can contribute to reproducing the same patterns of attitudes and behavior, even if the original institutional environment is long gone."

Howard, Marc Morje. "The Weakness of Postcommunist Civil Society." Journal of Democracy. Vol 13 (1), January 2002.

Life as Origami

From Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love, p. 171.

A chicken, boat, bird, dart or aeroplane such as schoolboys make out of bits of paper--if you unfold them carefully they bocome a page from a newspaper or a blank sheet of paper again. For a long time I'd been vaguely uneasy, but I was amazed when I realized that my life--I mean the events of my life, spread out flat in front of me--was nothing but a blank sheet of paper which I'd managed to fold into something different. Perhaps I was the only one who could see it in three dimensions, as a mountain, a precipice, a murder or a fatal accident.

international women's day

Happy International Women's Day- it's the only day in Russia and Eastern Europe on which women get any respect at all.

Speaking of Russian women, Russia's female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova turned 70 on Tuesday. Ms. Tereshkova, who blasted into space in 1963, also worked as a politician and diplomat during the Soviet Era. She is a national hero in Russia (according to some, second only to yuri gagarin), and has an astroid and moon crater named after her.

If you build it . . .

The following is from the latest issue of the New York Review of Books (not yet up online, but perhaps I'll add a link once it is). Anyhow, I must say I'm a bit skeptical of Vaclav Havel (anybody who is the subject of the kind of hero worship that Havel is becomes automatically a bit suspect, in my opinion), but I very much agree with his opinion of a "Freedom Tower" as expressed in this piece from his forthcoming book, To the Castle and Back.

Let's set the scene:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced yesterday that he supported going ahead with construction of the Freedom Tower at ground zero, making official his change of mind about a project that he once called a white elephant.
(the New York Times, 21 February 2007)

Havel writes:

19 May 2005

I have to admit to something I don't know whether I can actually say here: I absolutely hated those two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center. They were a typical kind of architecture that has no ideas behind it. Moreover, they disrupted the skyline of the city; they towered absurdly over the beautiful crystalline topography of Manhattan. They were two monuments to the cult of profit at any cost: regardless of what they looked like, they had to have the greatest imaginable number of square meters of office space. I was once on the top floor of one of those buildings for dinner, and I discovered that the entire edifice was constantly swaying slightly. I took it as a sign that something was not right and that something was going on here that was, in a sense, against nature. A boat may sway, but a building should not. The view down was dull; it was no longer the view from a skyscraper and it wasn't yet the view from an aircraft.

And here's what I fear: that for reasons of prestige they will build something even higher on the same spot, something that will spoil New York even more, that will enter into some kind of absurd competition with the terrorists; and who will win in the end, the suicidal fanatics or an even higher Tower of Babel? You have to fight against terrorists with armies, the police, the intelligence services; their sympathizers have to be dealt with by politicians, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists. Buildings, however, should be erected to enrich human settlements, not to make them duller. Why couldn't new buildings be put up on that spot proportional to the buildings already there, and that would simply blend into the existing skyline? Likewise, I don't think that some bombastic monument should be erected at Ground Zero. What happened there must be commemorated, but tastefully, as the fallen from the Vietnam or Korean wars are commemorated in Washington, or simply with a single large space or room that would evoke the catastrophe and its context.

coldness

Yesterday (February 24) was the anniversary of Estonia's first independence. Every year on Freedom Square, Tallinn holds a huge parade, but this year- because of the cold (it went down to -22 degrees F on Friday night)- it was cancelled. Too cold for the musicians to play, according to Eesti Paevaleht.

the airline industry can suck it

i have a new enemy.