This chapter canvasses coalitions for and against pluralism that emerged with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. It shows that while the early nation-builders pursued a unitary, ethno-nationalist project, Kemalism also entailed an “embedded liberalism” inherited from late Ottoman modernization, including resources for eventual democratization. Throughout the twentieth century, political actors sought to mobilize these resources toward pluralizing the political system across a series of critical junctures (e.g., the 1920s’ cultural revolution; the 1950 transition to multiparty democracy; successive coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980; and a 1997 “postmodern coup.”) Across these junctures, the chapter argues, there were only two pronounced periods of secularist/Islamist cleavages. More often, conflict was driven by significant, cross-camp cooperation and intra-camp rivalry. Tracing when and why pluralizing and anti-pluralist alignments succeeded or failed, the chapter captures a key dynamic: the installation of an ethno(-religious nationalist project – the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS) – as national project, even as ideas and actors invested in pluralization continued to mobilize.

This chapter traces Ottoman responses to the challenge of Europe’s rise and global hegemony – responses that engendered two emergent properties: religious disenchantment and growing resentment at the loss of Muslim primacy. These properties informed new political programs in the buildup to and during critical junctures. Milestones included the Tanzimat (1839) and subsequent, Young Ottoman reforms led by bureaucrats and intellectuals. The result was a framework for multicultural citizenship – an Islamo-liberal project. It bore fruit in the first Ottoman constitution (1878), but was soon suspended by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1908/9) who instead developed (pan-)Islamism as a political program. His authoritarian rule, in turn, spurred a coalition of liberal and proto-nationalist Young Turks to revolt (1908), launching the “second constitutional period.” The revolution was then captured by an illiberal Triumvirate espousing a more unitary, proto-nationalist project. No linear or teleological process, the chapter reveals that contests were driven by the complex interplay of ideas, actors, and contextual pressures. These forces informed a new menu of programs for managing religion and diversity that would outlive the empire itself: Islamo-liberalism, liberalism, Islamism, and Turkism.

This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.

In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

This chapter introduces an original and timely theoretical toolkit. The purpose: to challenge misleading readings of (Turkey’s) politics as driven by binary contests between “Islamists” vs. “secularists” or “Kurds vs. Turks.” Instead, it introduces an alternative “key”[1] to politics in and beyond Turkey that reads contestation as driven by shifting coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists. This timely contribution to conversations in political science (e.g., comparative politics; political theory) is supplemented by an original analytical-descriptive framework inspired by complex systems thinking in the natural and management sciences. The approach offers a novel methodological framework for capturing causal complexity, in Turkey and other Muslim-majority settings, but also in any political system that is roiled by contending religious and secular nationalisms as well as actors who seek greater pluralism.

This chapter traces how the concept of ethnicity emerged as a depoliticised alternative to nationality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of nationalism as the hegemonic source of state legitimacy had resulted in the politicisation of the nation concept. This conceptual linkage of ‘nation’ with ‘state’ opened up a terminological vacuum: If nationhood implied statehood, what label should be given to those stateless nations and national minorities that had neither a state of their own nor the political capacity to acquire one? Against this backdrop, the chapter traces how an embryonic concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the terminological void. The chapter’s empirical focus is on the early twentieth-century academic literature on nationalism and the establishment of the world’s first international minority rights regime after the First World War. The argument also has significant implications for debates surrounding the conceptual distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism.

This chapter explores a hardy perennial – the meaning of the American Civil War – from the standpoints of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It evaluates historian David Potter’s 1968 assertion that, from an international perspective, the defeat of the American South’s bid for independent nationhood and the emancipation of enslaved Blacks, the American Civil War resulted in an unprecedented marriage of liberalism and nationalism, a union unique in the formation of nineteenth-century nation-states. This marriage not only gave liberalism a strength it might otherwise have lacked but also lent nationalism a democratic legitimacy that it may not otherwise have deserved. It also explores how the end of the Cold War and the emergence of multiple decentralizing technologies (cell phones, social media, the internet, etc.) and other polarizing forces which have raised serious questions about whether a more than 150-year-old marriage can survive the centrifugal temptations of the new century.

Indian Economics’ global development plan in the long run was universal industrialisation and free trade. The widely accepted plan for development in the nineteenth century was broadly based on David Ricardo’s comparative advantage model, which prescribed industrialisation for western Europe and condemned the rest of the world to producing raw materials. This international division of labour, argued Mahadev Govind Ranade, would not, like the model theorised, bring Indians the highest level of progress. Indian Economics envisaged a positive-sum game of global development where an industrialised Asia would not outcompete the already industrialised western Europe. Industrialisation in India would bring higher standards of living and increase global aggregate demand, leading people to buy more goods from Britain and other industrialised countries. Universal industrialisation would, argued the Indian economists, be win–win for the world economy.

The title of this chapter points to the frequent use of the word ‘we’ in Brexit discourse before and after the referendum. The pronoun ‘we’ in Brexitspeak almost always serves the exclusion of other nations or those in the domestic arena perceived as enemies of ‘the people’. Three different cases of the uses of ‘we’ are examined, each of which in their different ways shows how ‘we’ expressed an exclusionary notion of national identity. One of these cases shows how Brexitspeak persisted in the years after the referendum, and included the long-standing idea, at all levels of society, that ‘we’ speak only English. The second case is the 2013 speech by the then prime minister David Cameron, who favoured remaining in the EU. That speech, which announced the referendum, was apparently intended to placate the Eurosceptics and neutralise UKIP’s attractiveness. The speech repeatedly used ‘we’, embedded in an exceptionalist narrative of British greatness. Cameron’s speech failed in its aims and in fact boosted national-populist discourse. It was in tune with Farage’s own speeches of the same year, which is the third case of Brexiter ‘we’ examined in this chapter.

This chapter introduces how the study of the Merovingian kingdoms has developed since the sixteenth century. Merovingian history is not easily or self-evidently presented in the source material; it has had to be recovered and reconstructed. The historiographical survey is therefore important to understanding how writers and scholars have put that history together. It highlights some of the key political, confessional, theoretical, and methodological issues that have shaped how the period is interpreted, from the Magdeburg Centuriators of the Reformation to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica’s self-consciously ‘scientific’ approach to editing sources.

This chapter explores how identities were forged and developed under the Merovingians, from the creative fiction of ‘Frankishness’ to more personal identities defined by gender and social status. It examines how identities can appear different through stories, laws, dress, and language, highlighting the importance of how people defined and presented themselves according to need and circumstance. It takes seriously the contention that identity formation fed into discourses of power because they structured hierarchies and issues of inclusion and exclusion.

This chapter explains how the artificial creation of the Nigerian state – spurred principally by colonialism – drove colonial and eventually Indigenous officials to promote a system of regionalism to accommodate the creation of a federal system of government. In doing so, the concept of ethnicity was arbitrarily and crudely introduced to the complex and diverse patchwork of peoples inhabiting what would become Nigeria. Regionalism fostered self-interested political groups, whereby the individual interests of Nigeria’s three principal regions (North, West, and East), each dominated by one of three major ethnic groups (Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo), competed amongst one another for power, leading to extraregional conflicts. Complicating this system was the presence of many hundreds of other, much smaller, minority ethnic groups. The promotion of regionalism would ultimately give rise to ethnonationalism, in which Nigeria’s three largest ethnic groups were given precedence over minority groups, leading to intra-regional conflict. The concepts of regionalism and ethnicity would become inseparably intertwined and would significantly hamper decolonization and efforts at building a consolidated and equitable state.

As represented by the title, this chapter unpacks how the British colonial administration left indelible legacies on the Nigerian state and how those legacies killed the sociopolitical fabric of the region before the institution of colonial rule. Through the concept of regionalism, which the chapter understands as “the systemic division of governmental control where a central or federal government holds clearly defined authority and power,” the colonial administration hamstrung Nigeria’s political and economic growth by creating ethnic mistrust and conflict, the marginalization of minorities and agitation among ethnicities after the development of ethnic nationalism. Self-serving interests of colonialists aimed to partition the country along arbitrary lines, disregarding the complex web of pre-existing linguistic and ethnic communities for ease of administration. The effects of these colonialist policies fueled the ethnopolitical and social conflict (and other marginalization of minority groups only possible after the creation of a state) within Nigeria, thus stymieing the development of Nigeria’s internal and independent sociopolitical structures.

This chapter follows the creation, adoption, and impact of the numerous constitutions implemented in colonial Nigeria, ultimately pushing the region toward adopting a more federal system of government. This chapter will contain overviews of the five important constitutions created in the colonial period, while also exploring the factors which drove the colonial government to push the region toward federalism and the greater inclusion of native Nigerians. It will identify two primary periods of constitution-making, one before World War II and one after, pushed more vigorously by nationalist groups. Federalism, codified by Nigeria’s consecutive implementation of different constitutions, promoted regionalism, causing the growth of ethnic nationalism. Consequently, ruling groups benefiting from previous, more unitary systems, like Northern Nigeria’s emirs, and small minority ethnic groups fearing the influence of larger groups, opposed the growth of federalism. As Nigeria transitioned into an independent nation, it walked a fine line between an oppressive unitary system and a chaotic federal one. This balancing act defined its constitutions and political landscapes during Nigeria’s colonial period, and continues to do so today.

This chapter focuses on Haiti’s twentieth-century periodicals, and more specifically on the literary magazine. By bringing to light the complex stories of literary revue culture during key historical moments I show how these specific forms of publications, which played a major role in Caribbean countries, have influenced Haiti’s sociopolitical and intellectual life. At its core, this chapter addresses the tension between the aesthetics and politics of several literary revues by highlighting, first, literary and/or socially engaged magazines predominantly concerned with the development of Haiti’s literature and culture, and, second, those with a clear political agenda, some of which were infused with an explicit objective: the forging of a Haitian national voice.

Beginning in 1840, the acceptance of emancipation among liberals became more general, no doubt, but still remained deeply ambivalent. The chapter uses the example of Baden to show this fact and moves from there to the early stages of the 1848 Revolution, during which pogroms against Jews, first in the French provinces along the border with Germany and then within Germany itself, gradually spread across the country. Once again, the fate of the Jews represented the duality of the overall German situation. Meanwhile, efforts to formulate a new constitution at the Paulskirche did indeed grant full emancipation to the Jews, but soon suffered the fate of the rest of the liberal constitution, with the collapse of the revolution. The Prussian king refused to cooperate with the revolutionaries, but even more important for their final collapse was their own weakness vis-à-vis the forces of reaction and the inner split among them due to their inability to reconcile liberalism, democracy, and nationalism.