National identities blur

National Development Generates National Identities

The purpose of the article is to test the relationship between national identities and modernisation. We test the hypotheses that not all forms of identity are equally compatible with modernisation as measured by Human Development Index. The less developed societies are characterised by strong ascribed national identities based on birth, territory and religion, but also by strong voluntarist id...

Malung and Marketing National Identities

ow everybody loves Puerto Rican culture,” observed a Puerto Rican schoolteacher and festival organizer, “but that’s exactly the problem. Now you have people that don’t know culture but are putting together events because it’s fashionable. That’s why we need the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, so people don’t devalue our culture.” Culture is certainly fashionable in Puerto Rico. In addition t...

Identities : Connecting National and Global Perspectives

Modelling the Dynamics of Securizitating National Identities

Using the example of conflict escalation in former Yugoslavia, a common framework of the mechanisms leading to conflict escalation is developed in this paper. Escalation of ethno-nationalist violence is described as an endogenous feature of the nation. The principle of the nation may succeed in being an organising principle for integrating large-scale social groups. However, it may also generat...

Editorial – educational networks , educational identities : connecting national and global perspectives *

The brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, active in the last years of the eighteenth century and first part of the nineteenth, are excellent examples of the cosmopolitan scholar and Universalgelehrter (polymath). Wilhelm, a Prussian diplomat and government administrator, is chiefly remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of the world’s languages, as we...