General comment: The short questions are supposed to test whether the students read the syllabus and followed the lectures. Long answers are not expected, everything between a paragraph and a page should suffice, as long as the core points are made. The essays are designed to favour students who have read, understand, and are able to use theory in empirical analyses. In case of an unclear grade, the performance in the longer essay is decisive.
I. Short questions.
What does Anderson mean when he calls the nation an ‘imagined community’? How does he explain the emergence of the nation?
The first question demands an answer that provides Anderson’s definition of an imagined community, emphasizing that ‘imagined’ does not mean ‘imaginary’. An answer that does not make this point is not full. It should list all the characteristics that this author includes: Imagined political community – inherently limited & sovereign. A good answer should also explain what these notions mean in Anderson’s view.
The second question should show that the candidate is familiar with the chapter from ‘Imagined Communities’ where Anderson explains the emergence of a conjuncture of historical, cultural and technological factors that together allowed the modern nation to emerge, e.g. concepts such as a common idiom emerging from vernaculars, contemporaneity, a growing public space, the role of printed books etc.
What is a nation, and what, if anything, sets it apart from the ethnic group?
There are different ways to go about answering this question, but the take-home message is that there is no clear answer.
One possibility is to distinguish between a political, a socio-cultural and a subjective nation concept, and then look at how the different generic conceptions of nation relate to ethnicity. A common distinction is between ethnic category, ethnic group and nation, with degree of subjective identification as an important differentiating element. A second differentiating element is political aspirations. (This is covered in lectures).
A second possibility is to compare and contrast A.D. Smith’s working definitions of nation and ethnie, and to focus on what sets the nation apart from the ethnie.
A third possibility is to look at how different scholars’ conceptions of the nation relate to ethnicity.
What do Brubaker and Cooper mean by ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ conceptions of identity? How does that relate to A.D. Smith’s conception of national identity, and how can we conceptualize individual and collective affiliation with nations if not as ‘identities’, according to these authors?
The first part should indicate that the candidate has read the article or the lecture notes, and needs to contain a general distinction between two ideal typical ‘extremes’ in identity research. Hard: Identity is something all people/groups have or ought to have; you can have identity without being aware of it; Implying strong group boundedness and homogeneity. Soft: Identities are multiple, unstable, in flux, contingent, fragmented, constructed, negotiated etc. A good reply should already signal the problems with both, e.g. that a ‘soft’ identity concept might be too weak for theoretical and empirical work.
The second question should depart from the concepts of reification and essentialism, juxtaposing Brubaker’s and Cooper’s reflexive approach to the more essentialist approach that Smith illustrates.
Finally, the last part of the question should ideally list the strategies that Brubaker and Cooper propose, and discuss them: Identification and categorization; Self-understanding: Commonality, connectedness, groupness.
Describe briefly a) the main tenets of populism as an ideology as presented in the literature and b) the core ideology of populist radical right parties.
According to Mudde (2010), populism is a thin centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale” or general will of the people.
The core ideology of populist radical right parties is a combination of what Mudde calls nativism [an ideology which holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogenous nation-state], authoritarianism [the belief in a strictly ordered society in which infringements of authority are to be punished severely] and populism [see above], including anti-establishment sentiments.
IMPORTANT: Parties can be populist without being radical right: to fit into this party family, all three elements have to be present at the same time.
Rydgren (2007) likewise writes that populist radical right parties share an emphasis on ethno-nationalism rooted in myths about the distant past and anti-establishment populism embedded in a general sociocultural authoritarianism.
Populist radical right parties are thus radical rather than extreme: they accept popular sovereignty and majority rule and work within the system, but are anti-pluralist and do not support constitutional limitations to popular sovereignty (oppose liberal democracy). They also tend to prefer strong executives. They are rightist in socio-cultural terms, relating to issues like national identity, law and order, immigration, abortion, same-sex marriage etc., but not necessarily in socio-economic terms. Finally, they are populist: they divide society into the (pure) people and the (corrupt) elite, and claim to side with the people. Empirical examples are welcome, but not necessary.
Syllabus: Mudde (2010), Rydgren (2007).