2018/2019 Centenary Edition

ISSN 2051-6932

2018/2019 ISSUE 1

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Managing Editor’s Comment Year 2019 marks the centenary celebrations of the establishment of the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. On this occasion, the new issue of Interstate frames in various ways our specific understanding of the theme ‘heritage’, reflected in the articles submitted by our contributors. The approches vary from the discussions about national identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, the challange of

nationalism in Poland, which celebrated in November 2018 its 100 years of independence, to the Female Suffrage Movement in

THE INTERSTATE TEAM

Wales and the women’s struggle for the right to vote. In order to challenge some of the mainstream approches to International Relations (IR) and Western exceptionalism that dominates the discipline, two of the papers analyse ’heritage’ from a non-western

Managing Editor & Design Agata Kusiak

perspective. One of them looks into the technological 'heritage' of inherited nuclear infrastructure in post-apartheid South Africa and

Translation

the ways in which it reverberates through contemporary South

Llŷr ab Einion

African public life, whilst the other paper focuses on the Westphalian heritage and the liberal world order in relation to how

Senior Editors

we tend to look at the Middle East and Islamic culture. As for a

Siân Howell

Managing Editor, my goal was to look for ideas that could reach

Elizabeth Bowater

beyond the mainstream IR concepts and to see how people construct their perception of 'heritage' when interpretation vastly depends on their own catalysis of knowledge and inherited cultural beliefs.

Agata Kusiak Managing Editor

The Interstate Committee, the Department of International Politics, and Aberystwyth University cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this journal. Any opinions expressed in Interstate are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily represent those of the Committee, the Department, or the University.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/interstatejournal Website:intestate1965.wordpress.com

Interstate Department of International Politics Aberystwyth University Aberystwyth Ceredigion SY23 3FE United Kingdom

Acknowledgments We would like to thank all contributors to this issue for their interest and expressing different approaches to the theme ‘heritage’ which shaped the Centenary Edition.

Credit for the final design of the issue belongs to Agata Kusiak.

Copyrights of the cover page cartoon belong to Chris Madden.

The translation of the Centenary Edition to Welsh has been provided by Llŷr ab Einion.

The editing of this issue has been a collective effort of Agata Kusiak and Siân Howell.

Thank you,

Agata Kusiak, Llŷr ab Einion, Siân Howell and Liz Bowater Board of Editors for Intestate 2018/2019 Aberystwyth University 2019

INDEX Politicising myth: heritage, museum and national identity in the Atlantic Archipelago by Siân Howell..................................................5

Continuity and change in nuclear South Africa: technopolitical interactions with the global nuclear order by Tom Vaughan .........13

The Middle East is not so particular: on Westphalian heritage, Islamic exceptionalism and the liberal world order by Agata Kusiak .......................................................................................29

Votes for women: the Female Suffrage Movement in Wales by Elizabeth Bowater ...............................................................................39

The challenge of nationalism: how has the national identity rhetoric evolved through the last century (1918-2018)?

Case study of Poland by Katarzyna Pogorzelska .............................47

Politicising Myth: Heritage, Museum and National Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago

by Sian Howell BA Student, History and Welsh History Department, Aberystwyth University Email: sian.a.howell@gmail.com

National identity is traditionally important to every nation, and generally tied to its heritage, although this is particularly noticeable within the Atlantic Archipelago. This may, almost undeniably, be due to the way in which each nation was invaded, colonized and brought under English control, as a result it is rather inappropriate to refer to the five nations that make up this region as something so Anglocentric as the ‘British Isles’ or the ‘United Kingdom’. In fact, J. G. A. Pocock suggests that these regions were: ‘the Atlantic Archipelago – since the term “British Isles” is one which Irishmen reject and Englishmen decline to take quite seriously. This is a large – dare I say sub-subcontinental? – island group lying off the north western coasts of geographic Europe, partly within and without the oceanic limits of the Roman Empire and of what is usually called “Europe”’1 The inclusive nature of this term accommodates the convoluted histories of each nation, as well as overlaps between them. It also allows for analysis of heritage sites and the affects of the industry upon national identity, in England the links between the government and English Heritage, particularly in the Thatcher era, suggests that the construction of a national identity within the

1

J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History vol. 47, no 4. (1975), pp. 606-607

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heritage industry is highly political. However, in each nation the heritage industry has its own unique relationship with national identity as no two nations within the Atlantic Archipelago experience identity in the same way. The historical context within which each nation formed its identity affects the way in which heritage and museums are used, in Scotland, for example, Fiona Maclean and Steven Cooke, argue that the use of museums and heritage is a tool to reassert national identity.2 This seems a direct contrast to approaches to heritage and identity in Wales and Ireland, as these areas appear to have fairly neutral heritage sites. This shows that each area has a different relationship with heritage and national identity.

There is an argument that while these sites are deemed to have a value that they are used to create identity rather than reinforce it. Liz Zampano argues that, not only is national identity constructed and pliable, but that Margaret Thatcher believed that ‘the arts could contribute to the making of a new national identity’ and that she politicised England’s history in order to reinforce the national identity.3 It might be suggested that Thatcher’s approach to heritage was to use stories and mythology to draw people closer to their national identity, as well as a distraction from increased industrialization.4 Zampano also argues that ‘heritage is a reflection of a particular era’; this is particularly noticeable within English Heritage as proposals from the Department of Media, Culture and Sport in 2014 appeared to apply stereotypical Tory measures as respondents to these believed that English Heritage was too business focused and that government investment was too low.5 This therefore suggests that, certainly within England, heritage is used to shape culture and national identity.

2

Fiona Maclean & Steven Cooke, ‘Communicating Identity: Perceptions of the Museum in Scotland’ in J. M. Fladmark ed. Heritage and Museums: Shaping National Identity, (Aberdeen, 2000), p. 148 3 Liz Zampano, ‘Heritage and the Making of a National Identity: A Study of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain’, MA, University of British Columbia, (2008), pp. 17 & 2 4 Zampano, ‘Heritage and the Making of a National Identity’, p. 2 5 Zampano, ‘Heritage and the Making of a National Identity’, p. 4 & Department of Culture, Media and Sport, ‘English Heritage New Model Consultation: Response’, (2014),

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It might also be suggested that the English relationship between heritage and national identity has affected the whole of the Atlantic Archipelago, largely through political interactions; any affect England has on the heritage and identity of the Atlantic Archipelago is through previous political influence. It could be implied that English Heritage is an attempt to form a national identity and sense of unity in the face of decreasing international influence.6 However, this model does not necessarily apply to the rest of the Atlantic Archipelago, it could be argued that the wider Atlantic Archipelago approached national identity differently, perhaps as a result of English policies. As a result of English policies towards, and dominance within, Wales, Welsh national identity became highly anglicised; it could be argued that this dominance resulted in a dependence on the culture and traditions that were believed to have existed prior to the English invasion, which is visible at heritage sites such as Celtica, Powys, thus providing the Welsh with a separate national identity to invest in.7 Wales appears to differ from the rest of the Atlantic Archipelago in that there appears to be a need to completely invent a national identity rather than to simply play upon separate aspects of the Welsh identity, perhaps as a result of the highly anglicised past Wales experienced, but perhaps also because it is more interesting for heritage sites, such as Celtica, to portray an invented identity rather than try to emphasise parts of a traditional identity. This implies that heritage sites such as Celtica play an important role in creating a national identity, but not necessarily in creating an accurate national identity.

Heritage sites in Scotland appear to have a similar role and approach to those in Wales as there is an argument that Scotland also needed to create a culture to go alongside its identity, such as tartan, which while a dominate part of

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/363588/Englis h_Heritage_New_Model_Consultation_Response.pdf 6 Zampano, ‘Heritage and the Making of a National Identity’, pp. 17-18 7 Pyrs Gruffudd, David T. Herbert, & Angela Piccini, ‘“Good to Think”: Social Constructions of Celtic Heritage in Wales’, Environment and Planning D. Society and Space, Vol 7, (1999), p. 706

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‘Scottishness’ now, was only invented during the eighteenth century. 8 Developing elements of culture such as tartan could perhaps be seen as an attempt to differentiate Scottish heritage from English heritage, David McCrone et al argue in Scotland – The Brand: The Making of Scottish Heritage that heritage carries the idea of self more effectively than history does.9 This might suggest that when two nations have such an intertwined history, in the way that Scotland and England do, it may be deemed necessary for the, traditionally, less dominant partner to assert their own heritage in some way. However, the fact that both Scotland and Wales appeared to need to invent aspects of both culture and identity in order to reinforce a separate national identity suggests that England’s influence was so extensive that there were not separate identities for the nations of the Atlantic Archipelago but one archipelagic identity. This could be used to explain why traditional terms used to describe the archipelago are so Anglocentric, as it generally seems to have appeared that the archipelagic identity was the English identity. McCrone et al also suggest that the Scottish heritage industry wanted to find a true Scottish culture which was unadulterated, implying that English dominance led to a national need for a separate identity, and that perhaps if England had not been dominant across the archipelago there could have been a more unified archipelagic identity rather than several national identities.10 While this may be the dream of the heritage industry the reality of the Atlantic Archipelago means that no one nation has been left untainted by another, therefore the search for a pure national identity, one must be invented.

Mclean and Crooke argue within ‘Communicating Identity: Perceptions of the Museum of Scotland’ that identities are produced and consumed within discursive sites, such as the Museum of Scotland and Celtica.11 This supports the

8

David McCrone, Angela Morris, & Richard Kiely, Scotland – The Brand: The Making of Scottish Heritage, (Edinburgh, 1995), p. 51 9 McCrone, Morris, & Kiely, Scotland – The Brand, p. 58 10 McCrone, Morris, & Kiely, Scotland – The Brand, p. 70 11 Mclean & Crooke, ‘Communicating Identity’, p. 149

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idea put forward by Pyrs Gruffudd et al in ‘“Good to Think”: Social Constructions of Celtic Heritage in Wales’ that ‘representations of Welsh heritage are fundamental to the ways in which visitors reproduce their own identities in relation to the images they construct of Welshness’ – throughout much of the Atlantic Archipelago, presenting an image of the desired identity appears to help create it, perhaps through the collective nature of national identity.12 The public, or political, need for a collective national identity is not easy to manifest in all areas of the archipelago, in almost direct contrast to Scotland, where a growth in the number of museums demonstrates a ‘reassertion of nation identity’, Northern Irish museums aim to be neutral territories where all ‘can explore their common heritage’, without inciting nationalist feeling.13 Gemma Reid claims that heritage defines aspects of national identity and can contribute to a unified national identity, however, she also argues that this can lead to negative discrimination and xenophobia, suggesting that it is difficult to balance a unifying identity with one that becomes exclusionary.14 It could also be suggested that this prevents Northern Ireland from achieving a ‘positive national identity’, although to say this is to say that Northern Ireland is the only nation which experiences these difficulties throughout the archipelago, which is simply not the case.15 It might be suggested that this comes as a result of a delayed establishment of heritage organisations, for example that there could be a correlation between nations which established a heritage organisation more recently and those which have a more precarious national identity. This theory does not actually work in practice, however, as the Heritage Trust Network in Northern Ireland was established in 1978, prior to the establishment of English

12

Gruffudd, Herbert & Piccini, ‘“Good to Think”’, p. 716 & Mclean & Crooke ‘Communicating Identity’, p.

148 13 Mclean & Crooke ‘Communicating Identity’, p. 148 & Gemma Reid, ‘Redefining Nation, Identity and Tradition: The Challenge for Ireland’s National Museums’ in Mark McCarthy ed. Ireland’s Heritages: Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity, (Aldershot, 2005), p.215 14 Reid, ‘Redefining Nation, Identity and Tradition’, p. 206 15 Reid, ‘Redefining Nation, Identity and Tradition’, p. 207

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Heritage in 1983, meaning that the precarity of national identity within the heritage industry in Northern Ireland cannot be so simply explained.

It could be suggested that domestic policies have a particular influence on the heritage industry and consequently on national identity. This is particularly supported by the influence the English government holds over English Heritage as the organisation is organised and funded by the government, therefore the forms of identity it puts forward may be heavily politicised. Political nationalism may also be seen as a reason for the lack of a national museum within England, as a result of the other nations of the archipelago reasserting their national identity, there was a need for England to reduce the nationalistic appearance of its heritage.16 While this may be the case within England, it could be suggested that throughout the rest of the Atlantic Archipelago a desire for political and national independence drives the heritage industry. Within the Republic of Ireland, a desire for tourism and to challenge the stereotype of Irishness’ suggests there was a need to present Irish national identity as Irish nationals saw themselves, rather than as how they were viewed in the wider Atlantic Archipelago.17 Eric G. E. Zuelow appears to argue that Irish heritage organisations wanted to demonstrate a unified Irish identity which was not affiliated to any one particular party, ideology, or religious belief, however there are elements of confusion within his argument which demonstrate that tracing identity through heritage can be difficult, especially when heritage organisations attempt to portray identity responsibly.18 This therefore suggests that it is not always possible to directly trace the effects of the heritage industry on national identity, as despite there being collective elements, it is a sensitive and individual notion.

16

Reid, ‘Redefining Nation, Identity and Tradition’, p. 206 Eric G. E. Zuelow, ‘The Tourism Nexus: National Identity and the Meanings of Tourism Since the Irish Civil War’, in McCarthy ed. Ireland’s Heritages, p. 197 18 Zuelow, ‘The Tourism Nexus’, p. 198 17

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By writing from an archipelagic perspective, it is possible to demonstrate that each nation has its own approach to national identity, in order to separate itself from a wider archipelagic identity, which is strongly tied to its national heritage. In Scotland and Wales national identity had to be created within a political vacuum as a result of English political involvement, suggesting that without these created elements, Wales and Scotland would simply participate in an archipelagic identity formed as a result of colonization and Anglicised culture.

Within England, decreasing international influence resulted in a national identity based upon historic greatness, a nation highly dependent on past glories to distract from contemporary issues. This therefore implies that nations which have little independent history, whether it be through colonizing or being colonized, are reliant on what distinctive history they do have to create a national identity which unifies and bolsters their citizens. Historic conflicts within Ireland explain why Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland contrast this, as there is no need to create a national identity, in fact one could go so far as to say that national identity within Ireland needed to be reduced. This may well explain why the Irish and Northern Irish heritage industries attempt to provide a neutral and unifying national identity, to produce a cultural identity and reduce political divisions. This therefore suggests that the extent to which heritage organisations, and the sites they manage, influence and demonstrate national identity depends upon the national and historical context within each nation. There is no one single approach for the heritage of the Atlantic Archipelago, despite the appearance of an archipelagic identity, resulting in five distinct national identities, created under different circumstances for different purposes.

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Bibliography:

Department of Culture, Media and Sport, ‘English Heritage New Model Consultation: Response’, (2014), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/att achment_data/file/363588/English_Heritage_New_Model_Consultation_Respo nse.pdf Gruffudd, Pyrs, Herbert, David T. & Piccini, Angela, ‘“Good to Think”: Social Constructions of Celtic Heritage in Wales’, Environment and Planning D. Society and Space, Vol 7, (1999) pp. 705-721 Maclean, Fiona & Cooke, Steven, ‘Communicating Identity: Perceptions of the Museum in Scotland’ in Fladmark, J. M. ed. Heritage and Museums: Shaping National Identity, (Aberdeen, 2000) pp. 147-165 McCarthy, Mark, ed. Ireland’s Heritages: Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity, (Aldershot, 2005) McCrone, David, Morris, Angela & Kiely, Richard, Scotland – The Brand: The Making of Scottish Heritage, (Edinburgh, 1995) Pocock, J. G. A. ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History vol. 47, no 4. (1975), pp. 601-621 Zampano, Liz ‘Heritage and the Making of a National Identity: A Study of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain’, MA, University of British Columbia, (2008)

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Continuity and change in nuclear South Africa: technopolitical interactions with the global nuclear order

by Tom Vaughan PhD Student, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University Email: tov1@aber.ac.uk Abstract Amid a welcome uptick in critical perspectives on nuclear order and governance, many valuable accounts of ‘the social life of the bomb’ have proliferated in recent years, and we are increasingly invited to pay attention to the geographies of nuclear locales and their attendant processes of political contestation. However, most International Relations (IR) scholarship has been slow to systematically integrate the important insights provided by those outside of its disciplinary borders, and subsequently to understand the global implications of this work. Using a conceptual framework which can account for the ‘global’ and ‘local’, material and ideational, I aim to challenge what I interpret as an unhelpful scholarly divide between accounts of ‘international’ nuclear politics on one hand, and ‘social’ or domestic accounts on the other.

My PhD research focuses on the South African nuclear experience, preand post-apartheid. South Africa, with its turbulent history of colonization, apartheid, and liberation as well as its unique experience of voluntary nuclear disarmament, is a crucible for myriad interactions between the global nuclear order and domestic politics and society. This paper showcases part of my research agenda, which will be supported by fieldwork in South Africa and Europe during 2019. Specifically, it explores the links between the global nuclear order, the African National Congress (ANC) government’s retention of apartheid-era nuclear technology, and the infinitely-deferred process of post-

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apartheid ‘transition’, considering the possibility that the normative terrain of the international nuclear order has discouraged South Africa from confronting the ‘debris’ of its nuclear and apartheid past.

Introduction The 2017 signing of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (hereafter the Ban Treaty) has triggered a vibrant scholarly debate. Against the sceptics, proponents such as Kjølv Egeland have argued that by reframing the use and possession of nuclear weapons as a violation of established humanitarian norms – and therefore incompatible with ‘civilized’ international behaviour, as defined by the Western ‘great powers’ – those states formerly deemed ‘uncivilized’ are ‘turning the norms of humanitarian law against its creators’ (2018, p.16). It also represents the genesis of a parallel legal framework which does not – unlike the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) – afford a powerful minority of states the rather outrageous special permission to hold nuclear weapons. Even Ban Treaty sceptics (among which number I count myself) should concede that its establishment within the United Nations framework is a significant achievement, given that the campaign in favour was spearheaded by Global South states and activist NGOs. The Ban Treaty is a clear and conclusive statement on the legitimacy of nuclear weapons. However, I follow Columba Peoples in his call for a ‘more expansive form of nuclear critique’ (2016, p.233), able to apprehend other forms of nuclear power and technology. My research focuses on the South African nuclear experience, spanning the apartheid era to the present day. Despite a number of investigations into the extraordinary episode of the apartheid bomb and South African disarmament, very few if any analysts have examined the

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significance of South Africa’s broader encounter with nuclear technology, and its potential implications for our understandings of global nuclear order.

In this exploratory article, I argue that these implications are significant.

South Africa has been instrumental in marshalling the political will behind the Ban Treaty and in the overall project of delegitimizing nuclear weapons.

However, in a wider sense, its interactions with the global nuclear order are much more ambivalent. There is an ongoing process of interpenetration between spheres of nuclear activity that are too often fenced off from each other as ostensible ‘local’ and ‘global’ arenas (cf. Onuf 1995). The norms of international nuclear society create a perverse imperative for South Africa to hold on to its inherited nuclear assets. South Africa performs its twin roles of ‘advanced’ steward of nuclear technology and protector of non-NWS interests by appropriating the muscular and anti-democratic technopolitics of apartheid nuclearity, using weapons-grade uranium to assert sovereignty and independence from the global nuclear order. Meanwhile, Pretoria’s diplomats are able battle ‘nuclear apartheid’ internationally, distracting from a continually deferred goal of political ‘transition’ on their own doorstep.

South Africa’s contemporary nuclear diplomacy Most analysts of nuclear politics are familiar with post-apartheid South Africa’s efforts to install itself at the forefront of efforts to reform the global nuclear order. South Africa can claim immense moral credibility from having overcome authoritarian white minority rule and replacing it with liberal democracy, as well as having dismantled a putatively ‘indigenous’ nuclear weapons capacity—although, as is often glanced over in triumphalist narratives, disarmament was instituted by the same apartheid regime which had built the weapons in the first place. South Africa quickly assumed pivotal importance in various mainstream non-proliferation organs, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG), International Atomic Energy 15

Agency (IAEA), and the Missile Control Technology Regime (MCTR). In 1996 it signed the Pelindaba Treaty (named for the former nuclear weapons research centre), creating the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone. South Africa’s newfound influence within the Non-Aligned Movement was vital to the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995, when Pretoria’s delegates successfully convinced enough sceptical members to support the extension’s passage. Crucially, the extension did not impose any significant disarmament obligations on the nuclearweapons states (NWS), attracting criticism from several other Non-Aligned, nonnuclear, and post-colonial states in particular.

At the same time, however, South Africa often explicitly challenges some of the norms of the global nuclear order. It has robustly challenged what many perceive to be a condition of ‘nuclear apartheid’ (Singh 1998) underpinning the NPT, whose Article VI ‘bargain’ has failed to deliver substantive progress towards disarmament by the nuclear-weapons states. It has previously refused to condemn Iran’s nascent nuclear programme because the Western-led opposition ‘lacked the moral quality of parallelism and lateralism’ (Grovogui 2011, p.182) guiding relations between Non-Aligned states. It has also played key roles in the development and execution of the New Agenda Coalition, the Humanitarian Initiative, and the resulting Ban Treaty, demonstrating a well-developed and principled divergence from mainstream positions on non-proliferation and disarmament. Indeed, such dissent has occasionally come at a cost for South Africa’s standing in world nuclear politics. In 2009, for example, the diplomat and veteran activist Abdul Samad Minty failed in his bid to be elected as DirectorGeneral of the IAEA, drawing support from mainly from Southern and nonaligned states but having alienated Western nations – the US in particular – due to a perceived ‘soft’ stance towards Iran and other potential ‘proliferators’.

South Africa’s international nuclear diplomacy after 1994 is riddled with such apparent contradictions. However, South African elites retain significant 16

political interests in both maintaining nuclear ‘business-as-usual’ and protecting the moral authority conferred upon them by disarmament. Simultaneous gestures of support for sweeping (if superficial) reforms like the Ban Treaty and deep involvement in mainstream nuclear governance institutions both serve this end well. It should be noted in passing here that I suspect that the Ban Treaty, despite being an impressive achievement in campaigning terms, does not pose a credible threat to the prevailing nuclear order or the arsenals of the nuclear weapons states.

I follow both Campbell Craig & Jan Ruzicka (2013) and Laura Considine (2017) in conceiving of the Treaty as a conceptually limited and ultimately insufficient response to the problem of nuclear weapons. Perhaps it will destabilize the NPT, delegitimizing its central bargain and thus encouraging non-nuclear weapons states to renege on their obligations. On the other hand, perhaps it might serve to strengthen Craig and Ruzicka’s ‘nonproliferation complex’ by acting as a lightning rod for criticism of the global nuclear order, while still remaining firmly within the normative framework of that same order. In any case, even if the Ban Treaty does represent a significant challenge to the weapons stockpiles and systems of the nuclear states, it still leaves untouched the legacies and powereffects of nuclear power that are still present in South Africa more than 25 years after the disarmament process was completed, and which are freely permitted under the auspices of the global nuclear order.

I consider here that the global nuclear order, or more specifically the normative terrain of ‘international nuclear society’ (Stroikos 2015), encourages anti-democratic exercises of nuclear power in South Africa in the following ways: it requires South Africa to retain its nuclear infrastructure and expertise to retain its authority in international nuclear politics, encourages the expansion of unpopular nuclear activity, and preserves the technopolitical legacies of the apartheid government. However, the gravitas conferred upon and claimed by South Africa as a locale of technological ‘advancement’ within the global nuclear 17

complex subsequently allows it to perform authority and moral leadership on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, while at home the incomplete process of ‘transition’ from apartheid remains stalled.

Nuclear technopolitics and malignant legacies Gabrielle Hecht has famously argued that nuclearity, defined as ‘the degree to which a nation, a program, a policy, a technology, or even a material counted as “nuclear”’, is always a point on a continuum rather than a binary condition, and always subject to political contestation (2006, p.26; 2012). Nuclear status, or more precisely the degree of nuclearity that a state can credibly claim, is arguably one of the most important determinants of authority in international nuclear politics. Hecht has chronicled the efforts of apartheid South Africa to tightly delineate the boundaries of nuclearity drawn by the IAEA Statute of 1956, ensuring that the criteria of nuclear ‘advancement’ corresponded to South Africa’s technical capabilities. This would ensure that Pretoria secured the mantle of the ‘most advanced’ African nation and therefore would represent the whole of Africa on the IAEA’s Board of Governors (2006, pp.39–40). Faced with political pressure over apartheid, South Africa’s Board seat would eventually be usurped by Egypt, but the newly democratic Republic resumed its representative status in 1994. The Statute continues to enshrine the importance of nuclear advancement ‘in the production of atomic energy including source materials’ (IAEA 2014) and thanks to the efforts of the apartheid government, South Africa is ‘advanced’ indeed. Although it only operates one nuclear power station, South Africa boasts advanced nuclear research facilities and specialisms in, inter alia, modular reactor technology and medical isotope production. Until recently, the ANC government had also planned a massive 9.6 gigawatt expansion in nuclear energy generating capacity.

If we take the IAEA’s internal ordering principle of ‘advanced nuclearity’ as emblematic of the hierarchies at work within the wider global nuclear order, it 18

becomes clear that retaining a certain level of technical nuclear capability is crucial for South Africa to preserve its international political standing. The immediate challenge to this proposition is that ‘non-nuclear’ nations are increasingly influential in building international opposition to nuclear weapons; Austria in particular has been extremely important in the Humanitarian Initiative and Ban Treaty efforts, and has crafted a unique form of authority vis-à-vis nuclear technology by forswearing it altogether (Felt 2015). However, with regard to influence within mainstream organs of non-proliferation, regulation, and nuclear governance, nuclear experience and expertise appears to carry significant political weight. Not only does it allow South Africa to keep its representative seat on the IAEA Board, but also contributes to its ‘exceptional moral authority and credibility’ among Non-Aligned states on nuclear matters (Potter and Mukhatzanova 2012, p.30). Overcoming apartheid and forswearing nuclear weapons are significant components of this credibility, but so are South Africa’s direct historical experience of successful ‘proliferation’ (in the vernacular of international nuclear society), and its present-day ability to engage in nuclear co-operation with developing states. Recognition from both the NonAligned/‘non-nuclear’ community and by the NWS for its high degree of nuclearity has allowed South Africa to cultivate admiration for its unique brand of what Jo-Ansie van Wyk (2012) has called ‘niche’ nuclear diplomacy, playing the role of a respected ‘middle power’ (Schoeman 2000; Taylor 2006) while throwing its considerable weight behind efforts to reform the nuclear order.

Clearly, nuclear technology and expertise are of great political value to Pretoria.

However, South Africa’s reliance on ‘nuclear things’ (Hecht 2012) to stake a political position extends beyond simple advantages in research and technology.

The geopolitical struggle over Pretoria’s highly enriched uranium stockpile is perhaps representative of the ambivalent relationship between South African political cultures and nuclear technology. Most of the HEU was removed from 19

South Africa’s nuclear warheads and a small portion was ‘blended down’ for use as reactor fuel. However, between 610 and 760kg remain under IAEA-supervised storage at the Pelindaba facility (NTI 2017), theoretically enough to build 6 to 8 nuclear warheads. Despite (or perhaps because of) its apartheid origins, observers have remarked that the stockpile is ‘more precious to the African National Congress government than all the gold bullion in the Reserve Bank’ (Fabricius 2015). No serious observer would ever suggest that South Africa might attempt to reinstitute a nuclear weapons capacity, notwithstanding a cataclysmic change in the global security environment. However, imbued by the previous regime with huge technopolitical value and enhanced nuclearity by the physical process of enrichment, South Africa’s HEU remains a signal of the ‘sovereignty, power, and integrity’ and the ‘technical ability to construct an atomic weapon’ (Fabricius 2015) which its apartheid creators intended to convey. It has also taken on a contradictory post-apartheid significance, showcasing Pretoria’s ‘firm moral determination’ never to build another nuclear weapon (ibid) and serving as a ‘stick [with which to] beat up on the US for not dismantling its own nuclear weapons’ (Stott, quoted in Fabricius 2015). The Obama administration, apparently unnerved by a 2007 break-in at the Pelindaba facility, offered President Jacob Zuma’s government low-enriched reactor fuel worth millions of dollars in compensation for giving up the HEU, in service of the US’s flagship ‘nuclear security’ agenda. Of course, Zuma declined.

While South African diplomats sought to downplay the political significance of the dispute, the episode had huge political significance. For the US, the legitimacy of the non-proliferation agenda—founded, as several commentators have pointed out, upon several controversial assumptions regarding the political rationalities required for the responsible stewardship of nuclear materials (for instance Gusterson 2004; Biswas 2014)—was clearly under threat from an HEU stockpile in the hands of a Southern state with a track record 20

of criticizing the global nuclear order. South Africa employed its uranium as a technopolitical tool: a lurid reminder to the world that the US exploited a concern with non-proliferation to distract from its own unwillingness to fulfil its side of the NPT bargain, and as an excuse to withhold uranium enrichment rights from developing corabuntries. This use of the uranium also reminded the US that it had failed to robustly oppose apartheid. The presence of weapons-grade uranium in South Africa was presented as a direct consequence of the moral turpitude displayed by successive US administrations in turning a blind eye to what they knew to be an apartheid nuclear weapons programme (see Rabinowitz 2014).

Here, we see the norms of the global nuclear order creating another, more perverse imperative for South Africa to hold on to its inherited nuclear assets.

South Africa performs its twin roles of ‘advanced’ steward of nuclear technology and protector of non-NWS interests by appropriating the muscular technopolitics of apartheid nuclearity, using weapons-grade uranium to assert sovereignty and independence from the global nuclear order.

Conclusion: political implications The fact that South Africa’s nuclear base is entirely inherited from the apartheid regime is routinely ignored by most commentators. Perhaps this is because it complicates the easy association between South African democratization and nuclear relinquishment, or perhaps it is not analytically important: in the hands of a liberal democratic, black majority regime, the nuclear power and research infrastructure serves an entirely different and comparatively benign state project. However, empirical investigations by Hecht (1998), Breckenridge (2005), and von Schnitzler (2016) all suggest that the political projects embedded in apartheid-era technological choices continue to generate domestic socio-political fallout. Apartheid-era nuclear activities, unlike the chemical and biological weapons programme, were never investigated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and successive ANC governments have 21

been reluctant to release the remaining documentary records of the programme, partly for fear of implicating current officials in past nuclear excesses (Gould 2009). Apartheid-era secrecy laws and confidentiality agreements are used to justify these silences, demonstrating how South Africa’s determination to hold onto its nuclear assets militate against reckoning with apartheid’s legacy and instituting a transparent public sphere. A similar lack of public accountability has recently been starkly demonstrated by the so-called ‘state capture’ scandal, during which Zuma and his associates misdirected huge amounts of public funds to their own private business interests, including the acquisition of uranium mining companies before the aforementioned 9.6 gigawatt expansion of nuclear power generation was publicly announced. The contracting arrangements surrounding the expansion also contributed to Zuma’s eventual downfall: the ANC had agreed with Russia that Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear utility, would deliver most of the build, and remarkable allegations later emerged that Vladimir Putin had personally intervened in Zuma’s cabinet selection, hand-picking ministers who were sympathetic to the extremely unpopular project (Winkler 2018).

Meanwhile, South African anti-nuclear activists find that their historic alliance with the ANC has disintegrated (Cock 2004). For grassroots campaigners, the struggle against nuclear power in their backyards is part of a much wider push for ‘environmental justice’, which connects ecological degradation and environmental risk with the other pervasive inequalities which still cleave South African society along racial lines. Their campaigns explicitly draw upon the anti-apartheid struggle, positing a vision of democratic ‘transition’ whose completion is contingent upon, among other things, the complete disavowal of nuclear power and infrastructure—as well as weaponry.

This analysis reveals that South Africa and international nuclear society are locked in continuous interaction with one another, generating deeply political effects. In order to retain its leading voice in global nuclear affairs, South Africa 22

is encouraged to maintain the sophisticated nuclear technology, expertise, and research infrastructure inherited from the apartheid regime. These enable South Africa to claim the kind of ‘enhanced nuclearity’ which is so highly valued by international nuclear society. This, in turn, requires a continued reliance on apartheid-era nuclear infrastructure, unavoidably and physically entangled with apartheid’s technopolitical goals and attitudes, which manifests in strange episodes like the battle over the HEU stockpile and the denial of public accountability in domestic nuclear affairs. South Africa can then leverage its considerable authority in world nuclear politics, using initiatives like the Ban Treaty to claim the legacy of the liberation struggle in an international battle against ‘nuclear apartheid’, potentially depriving domestic critics of their most powerful ideological resource in the ongoing struggle against nuclear power at home. In pursuit of institutional reform, Pretoria’s diplomats appropriate the radical rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s, in which anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid campaigns joined together in exposing the nexus between nuclear technology and Afrikaner state power (Edwards and Hecht 2010); after democratization, the conviction that nuclear technology and apartheid were inextricable ‘links in the same chain’ (Intondi 2013) of colonialism and white supremacy continued to find voice in South Africa’s nuclear diplomacy, but not in its domestic policies. By locating a continuing anti-apartheid struggle in the arena of international nuclear politics, this political manoeuvre also papers over the cracks of the stalled project of democratic transition within South Africa, which continues to grapple with deep-rooted social divisions, neopatrimonialism, and everyday violence, and remains one of the most unequal countries in the world.

The processes sketched out in this article are, at this stage, hypothetical: an upcoming extended period of archival and interview fieldwork in and outside of South Africa will shed more empirical light on what, exactly, is going on in Pretoria’s nuclear policy and diplomacy. The vignette presented above will form 23

part of a much broader research project which attempts to demonstrate the interlinkages between the global nuclear order and putatively ‘national’ or ‘internal’ political dynamics. Critically-inclined scholars of global nuclear order should remain attentive to issues beyond the systemic questions of disarmament and big-ticket initiatives like the Ban Treaty, understanding that when the strictures of international nuclear society interact with civil technology and contested national histories, the boundary between ‘global’ and ‘local’ politics may dissolve entirely.

This article is an adaptation of a paper presented at the Annual Conference of BISA Global Nuclear Order Working Group, ‘Global Nuclear Order: Past Present and Future’, King’s College London, 4th December 2018.

24

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The Middle East is not so particular: On Westphalian Heritage, Islamic Exceptionalism and the Liberal World Order

by Agata Kusiak BA Student, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University Email: agk1@aber.ac.uk Varying degrees of a complex hegemony that the West has produced historically and maintained to this day, are deeply embedded in the representation of knowledge and common perception of how we tend to look at the regions culturally distinct, albeit historically dominated by the West, such as the one of the Middle East. The first part of this paper aims to discuss the historical roots of secularism in order to examine further the relationship between religion and politics through the lens of modernization, Islamic identity and the role of the West. Thereafter, it will focus on the issue of Islamic democracy. It will be concluded that values such as justice, equality, freedom, democracy or inclusion are neither unique to the Western, liberal world order nor exclusively immanent to the secular framework. Consequently, more post-secular engagement and debates are still needed within the study of International Relations, in which secularity continuously remains a defining feature of the discipline.19 As pointed out by Edward Said, the relationship between the Occident and the Orient has evolved as a relationship of power and domination.20 Nevertheless, whilst Orientalist representations largely depend on traditions, conventions, institutions and socially accepted codes of understanding for their effects, Western political imperialism is not so unique for the amorphous and heterogenous Middle East. The experience of colonialism, incidence of

19

Mavelli, L., Petito, F. ‘The Postsecular in International Relations: An Overview’, Review of International Studies Association, 38 (2012), p. 931.

20 Said, E. Orientalism (London, Penguin, 2003), p. 5.

29

dictatorships, exploitation of natural resources or foreign interference in domestic politics of a developing country along with liberalization attempts of its society and often failures in doing so, also occur in other parts of the world. In this regard, approaches to analyse the Middle East from a perspective of particularism or uniqueness, have been significantly overrated within the field of IR and remain insufficient for understanding the dynamics driving those societies and challenges that they face.21 Hence, it is doubtful whether hypostatized Islam from the Western perspective could provide a full explanation about the extraordinary diversity of the Middle East as well as it is doubtful that we could understand the region and its politics without acknowledging the role that religion always played in shaping societies and how greatly it has been neglected by IR. Religious roots of secularism date back to the Protestant Reformation which ended up a series of sectarian wars between Catholics and Lutherans, within the Holy Roman Empire. The principle cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion) that emerged as a product of the 1555 Augsburg Settlement, slowly became the historical pathway leading to the formulation of the Protestant political interests, concluded in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.22 Hence, not only has it marked a founding moment for the contemporary international system based on the JudeoChristian concept of sovereignty that officially separated religion from state’s politics, but more importantly, Westphalian treaties initiated a trend of universalizing claims in theory and practice to represent neutrality, equality and social justice, which consequences resonate and persist to this day.

Therefore, Westphalia should be also seen as a highly politicized decision that in fact demarcated the category of religion from politics and has neglected its positive role in the mainstream academic theory and political decision-making ever since.23 Following a similar line of analysis, Elizabeth Hurd distinguishes 21

Halliday, F. Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (London, I.B. Tauris, 2003), p. 215.

Philpott, D. ‘The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations’, World Politics, 52 (2000), p. 207.

23 Hurd, E. ‘The Political Authority of Secularism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 10 (2004), p. 240.

22

30

and interprets two varieties of secularism; laicism, seen as an attempt to expel religion from politics and Judeo-Christian secularism, which ties the potential for secularization to racial identity, geographic location and cultural background.24 Both interpretations remain vastly relevant in a non-Western context, including the Middle East. As Hurd argues, “in the Middle East in particular, secularism has served as a legitimizing principle for the suppression of local political authorities and practices. It has contributed to the attempt to ‘take possession’ of the Middle East in the name of a modern Western ideal.”25 Hence, what has evolved as the collective civilizational consciousness, also affected the way in which modernization became associated by the West with its secular values of the Judeo-Christian heritage. Nevertheless, Westernization and modernity are not identical, even if they constitute the main reference point for a historically dominant culture and religion.26 If we follow this logic, not only does it make no surprise that the Shah regime in Iran, openly supported by the Western secular powers failed in delivering social change for the people, but more importantly, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 serves as a relevant case study of how the role of religion has been neglected and marginalized in the study of IR and policy-making process. It can be also argued that the Shah regime failed, as it represented Orientalist values and simultaneously became a reflection of the Orient itself. Scott Thomas points out: “The saliency of religion in social and political life was supposed to decline with economic progress and modernization, and so the Iranian Revolution was from the beginning interpreted as a reactionary and fundamentalist response to modernization and Westernization.”27 Whilst this is not the role of this article to

24

Hurd, E. ‘The Political Authority of Secularism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 10 (2004), p. 241.

25 Hurd, E. ‘The Political Authority of Secularism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 10 (2004), p. 238.

26 Eisenstadt, S.N. ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 129 (2000), p. 3.

27 Thomas, S. The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations. The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), p. 2.

31

study in detail the causes and consequences of the Islamic Revolution, the example is made to picture the consolidating role of religion within Iranian society that led to the overthrow of the ancient régime.

The similar uniting role of religion can be seen in the context of the Polish people’s movement “Solidarity” as a response to the communist dictatorship that created the geo-political isolation, maintained for decades by the Soviet Union.28 In this context, Catholicism served as a consolidating force that helped to deliver social and political change, concluded in 1989 by the fall of communism and the iron curtain. Therefore, religion came in as a cornerstone against the alienating of the individual and the totalizing of society that contributed to the preservation of Polish cultural identity, deeply rooted in its Judeo-Christian traditions - as much as Islam did in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, against Westernization attempts.

It can be argued that both case studies, despite their distant geo-political locations, different historical experiences, which have shaped their political systems and diverse civilizational heritage, come along on the ground of the moral and cultural foundations of religion that delivered revolutionary civilizational roots, can have a crucial impact on the type of political action that takes place. 29 From this perspective, Islam is not so unique either.

For as much as the role of religion has been neglected by international relations, whether it was the rise and success of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 or the 9/11 terrorist attacks, international dimension remains a pivotal element to consider while trying to analyse the Middle East. Thus, it is impossible to fully understand the region only by focusing on Islam and domestic aspects, since it tells us very little about a weak democratic impulse or the legacy of authoritarianism across the Arab world. For the Middle East, the experience of

28

Thomas, S. The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations. The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), p. 5.

29 Thomas, S. The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations. The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), p. 7.

32

Euro-centric colonialism along with challenges of globalization and American involvement in the region, constitute together as much significant range of factors to consider as domestic aspects. From this perspective, extraction of oil and gas are crucial to understand the political economy driving the Middle East and inequalities that is has produced. As estimated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting countries (OPEC), proven oil reserves stand there for more than 65% of the world total.30 Therefore, politics of oil make natural resource-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq or Egypt largely rentier and therefore fragile states with tendencies for autocratic governments. When combined with international funding, most notably by the US and United Kingdom, for the local regimes and their military such as in Egypt or the royal family in Saudi Arabia, vulnerability towards authoritarian rules increases, making democratic revivals of the people fail in their attempts to overthrow the ancient régime. However, exploitation of natural resources and politics of oil are not unique to the Middle East either. The largest oil reserves in the world are currently located in Venezuela and they constitute 85% of the region’s crude materials and occur in other Latin American countries, too.31 As in the Arab world, extractive industries remain there a chronic source of domestic conflicts between local populations and authoritarian regimes. Moreover, politics come here again hand in hand with religion. El-Fatih argues: “Secularism has been an inevitable product of colonialism. It has been used to legalize authoritarianism and absolutism.”32 In this context, Westernization and its secular values provide a false sense of modernity and should not be considered by a vast majority of IR specialists as an imperative towards successful transition of democracy in Muslim societies.

Otherwise, it will fail for one obvious reason. Western model of democracy is

30

Milton-Edwards, B. Contemporary Politics in the Middle East (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2018), p. 88.

Ortiz, G. ‘Latin America Holds One Fifth of World's Oil’, Al-Jazeera, 16 July 2011 [Article]. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/07/201171613719358164.html [Accessed 5 December 2018].

32 El-Fatih, A.S. ‘Islam, Secularism and Democracy: The Predicament of Contemporary Muslim Polities’, Intellectual Discourse, 12 (2004), p. 216.

31

33

based on the Eurocentric model of liberalism where the interpretation of its core principles largely depends on the Judeo-Christian roots and universalizing assumptions. Haynes and Ben-Porat point out: “(…) societies can become more secular or display secular trends, while state institutions remain bound to religious norms (like in Morocco) or become more religious while states remain, or attempt to remain, secular in various ways (like in Turkey)”.33 Thus, what remains universal, are human aspirations for justice and freedom. From this perspective, Islam remains compatible with Western standards of democracy. What differs them, is the approach in which those values are interpreted. The West has created a persisting bias about its own exceptionalism – a conviction supported by scholars like Samuel Huntington who separates the promotion of Western political values (human rights and democracy) from the rest of the world as something unique to the achievements of the Western civilization. He also describes others (notably Islamic civilization) as “the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order”.34 It can be argued that if more IR theorists paid significant attention to the ontological roots of the concepts analysed in the Orientalist works they produce, such as Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations (…)”, the common perception of the world order would be finally questioned at its roots and therefore, universal human values like justice and freedom, not perceived as an exclusive product of history to the West. Said accurately points out: “(…) without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.”35 Islamic

33

Haynes, J., Ben-Porat, G. ‘Globalisation, Religion and Secularisation – Different States, Same Trajectories?’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 11 (2010), p. 129.

34 Huntington, S. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London, Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 321.

35 Said, E. Orientalism (London, Penguin, 2003), p. 3.

34

ideal of the state holds the notion of ‘justice’ as its principle value and consequently - moral order becomes the foundation of Islamic democracy.

Concepts of shura (leadership consultation), ijtihad (intend of the law meaning independent reasoning) and ijma (consensus) derive from the Quran as much as the principles of Western liberal democracy ontologically evolve from the Bible, despite secular pretensions initiated by the Westphalian world order. Mavelli and Petito analyse: “Islam does not contradict democracy, rather shares with it several common features that constitute a firm foundation for a common ground where benefits are exchanged, mutual interests are realized, and a formula for coexistence is achieved.”36 The Middle East is not so particular, once we refuse to analyse it through the range of labels, commonly associated with it by the West and deeply embedded in the Orientalist discourses. Instead, it is a highly diverse region, with its own Islamic culture and heterogenous identities, varying from the Shi’a majority population in Iran, Wahhabi royal family in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kurdish minorities in Iraq, Turkey and Syria, with its Alawi-led government of Al-Assad family, to the Sunni majority population in Egypt and beyond. As acknowledged by Erin Wilson, religion has always been present in politics and the public realm, but its influence has manifested and been interpreted in different ways.37 Inevitably, these imaginings of the Middle East and Islam as a homogenous entity have serious political and social consequences. However, religious backlash resonates not only in relation to Islam. Defining role of religion in the public realm has been neglected by IR theory and policy-makers around the globe, contributing to the rise of populist governments in Europe, since it links religion to the very identity of human existence. It can be concluded that mutual historical misinterpretations between the dominant West and Islam, which 36

El-Fatih, A.S. ‘Islam, Secularism and Democracy: The Predicament of Contemporary Muslim Polities’, Intellectual Discourse, 12 (2004), p. 211.

37 Wilson, E. After Secularism: Rethinking Religion in Global Politics (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), p. 20.

35

eventually led to the reproduction of stereotypes resulting in reciprocal political hostility, need ontological reconfiguration and the discipline of IR should become a starting point. Historically, secularism as a concept remains an Orientalist discourse and its secular modernity has been already exhausted, lacking organizational efficacy. As Jürgen Habermas points out, the challenge now is “how one can assimilate the semantic legacy of religious traditions without effacing the boundary between the universes of faith and knowledge.”38

38

Mavelli, L., Petito, F. ‘The Postsecular in International Relations: An Overview’, Review of International Studies Association, 38 (2012), p. 936.

36

Bibliography:

El-Fatih, A.S. ‘Islam, Secularism and Democracy: The Predicament of Contemporary Muslim Polities’, Intellectual Discourse, 12 (2004), pp. 205-217.

Eisenstadt, S.N. ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 129 (2000), pp. 1-29.

Halliday, F. Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (London, I.B. Tauris, 2003).

Haynes, J., Ben-Porat, G. ‘Globalisation, Religion and Secularisation – Different States, Same Trajectories?’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 11 (2010), pp. 125-132.

Huntington, S. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London, Simon & Schuster, 2002).

Hurd, E. ‘The Political Authority of Secularism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 10 (2004), pp. 235-262.

Mavelli, L., Petito, F. ‘The Postsecular in International Relations: An Overview’, Review of International Studies Association, 38 (2012), pp. 931942.

Milton-Edwards, B. Contemporary Politics in the Middle East (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2018).

Ortiz, G. ‘Latin America Holds One Fifth of World's Oil’, Al-Jazeera, 16 July 2011 [Article]. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/07/201171613719358164.htm l [Accessed 5 December 2018].

Philpott, D. ‘The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations’, World Politics, 52 (2000), pp. 206-245.

37

Said, E. Orientalism (London, Penguin, 2003).

Thomas, S. The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations. The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).

Wilson, E. After Secularism: Rethinking Religion in Global Politics (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012)

38

Votes for Women: The Female Suffrage Movement in Wales

by Elizabeth Bowater BA Student, History and Welsh History Department, Aberystwyth University Email: elb42@aber.ac.uk

2018 marks the 100th anniversary of women being able to vote, and the 19th anniversary of universal suffrage.39 While less has been written about the Welsh, Scottish and Irish supporters of the suffrage movement, it has been argued that the National Union for Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), among other groups, sought to promote female suffrage as a viewpoint held in all four nations, many authors have said that ‘British’ and ‘English’ Women’s Suffrage movements are fundamentally the same thing because most groups advocating female suffrage, up until 1922, were led by English women.40 My objective in this article is to explain what the contribution of Welsh members of the suffrage movement, explain how they are different to but equally worthy of as much merit as their English counterparts. Many historians have simply focussed on the contributions of the Pankhursts, Millicent Fawcett and perhaps even Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.41 For the purposes of this article, I am focussing on the suffrage movement from c.1890-1928.

Christine Bolt has argued that in some respects, the suffrage movement was “alien” to Welsh women. Not as many women were in paid employment, which meant that the arguments made by the suffrage movement’s argument 39

Krista Cowman, Women’s Suffrage Campaigns in Britain, Women’s History Review, ix (2002), p.819 & Harold L Smith, The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign 1866-1928, (Harlow, 1998), pp.105-6 40 Kirsti Bohata, ‘’For Wales, See England?’ Suffrage and the New Woman in Wales’, Women’s History Review, xi (2002), p.643 & Angela V. John, Turning the Tide: The Life of Lady Rhondda, (Cardigan, 2013), p.371 41 Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex & Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914, (London, 1987), p.200

39

about working conditions not applicable to their lives.42 To add to this, June Hannam argues that the ideas of the suffrage movement were most popular among middle-class English women who had moved to Wales in coastal areas and industrialised areas in South-Eastern Wales.43 This is not exclusively true, Amy Dillwyn and Elizabeth Andrews were both prominent Welsh-born suffragists, who both grow up in industrial areas, Dillwyn who owned her family spelter works honestly thought that the vote would help her female workforce and improve their conditions and give them a voice of their own. 44 Dillwyn was probably right, because the suffrage movement continued to grow throughout South Wales and the Cardiff and District Women’s Suffrage Society (CDWSS) had the biggest membership outside London, totalling 1,200 by 1913.45 The difference between the Welsh movement and the other movements was just that suffragism was slow to take off in Wales, Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association (CUWFA) in Wales, because they did not have such an entrenched tradition or figurehead of female suffrage in the early days of female suffragism, c.1867, in the same way that Scotland did in the form of Lady Balfouror England had in the form of Millicent Fawcett, and as a result it took longer for it to take root. 46 But many of the petitions were the same once it had got started among those who lived in industrial areas.

The Welsh suffrage movement was different to the English suffrage movement immediately before the First World War. The Welsh reformers were more inclined to be suffragists than suffragettes. Suffragists were more inclined to use legal means to ensure that women got the vote, regardless of how long it 42

Christine Bolt, ‘The ideas of British suffragism’ in Votes for Women, eds. June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton, (London, 2000), p.48 43 June Hannam, ‘’I had not been to London’ Women’s Suffrage – a view from the regions’, in Votes for Women, eds. Purvis and Holton, p.232 44 Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey, (Abingdon, 2006), p.221 45 Derek Draisey, Welsh Women in History, (Swansea, 2004), p.143 46 Mitzi Auchterlonie, Conservative Suffragists: The Women’s Vote and the Tory Party, (London, 2007), p.9 & Janet Howarth, Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies, (4th October 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33096 accessed 7/12/18

40

took to get or how many times they were thwarted by male MPs. Their methods including lobbying MPs, and peaceful processions and making speeches to persuade.47 Suffragettes were more belligerent; they used more radical and violent methods to get the vote, sometimes using illegal methods such as disrupting methods of communication, throwing themselves into horses and hunger strikes in order to publicise the cause in order to win support in the hope that they could persuade people to change their minds would allow women to get the vote.48 Suffragettes thought that using constitutional methods was becoming increasingly futile because they kept getting defeated using those means. The suffragists were popular in England too, but more popular in Wales because they used the constitutional means. The Welsh were known for their support for the liberal party, and David Lloyd-George, the Welsh-born Chancellor of the Exchequer in the liberal government who were elected in 1906 was somewhat a Welsh National hero.49 The WSPU’s negative view of Lloyd-George set it on a course for not picking up as much support in wales as in England.50 Christabel Pankhurst was sceptical of Lloyd-George and thought he was a bit of a hypocrite.

Outwardly he seemed to be supportive of female suffrage, but she thought this was a façade whilst trying to prevent women from having the vote behind the scenes and called members of the WSPU “lunatics” in a letter to his brother, William and was complicit in H. H. Asquith’s decision not to go ahead with Asquith’s decision not to allow a second reading of the Conciliation Bill of 1910.51 This difference of political opinion put the English and Welsh suffrage movements immediately at odds. They each had different strategies of how to

47

Draisey, Welsh Women, p.143 Deirdre Beddoe, Margaret Haig Thomas, suo jure Viscountess Rhondda, Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies, (28th May 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36479 accessed 7/12/18, Vera Di Campli San Vito, Emily Wilding Davison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies, (3rd January 2008), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37346 accessed 7/12/18, Kent, Sex & Suffrage in Britain, p.199 & Liz McQuistion, Suffragettes to She-Devils: Women’s Liberation and Beyond, (London, 1997), p.25 49 Auchterlonie, Conservative Suffragists, p.105 & Emyr Price, David Lloyd-George, (Cardiff, 2006), p.195 50 Bolt, ‘The ideas of British suffragism’, p.48 51 J. Graham Jones, David Lloyd-George and Welsh Liberalism, (Aberystwyth, 2010), pp.146-7 & Kent, Sex & Suffrage in Britain, pp.199-200 48

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achieve the vote, and which individuals to put faith in. The suffragists in Wales were more inclined to put their faith in Lloyd-George because of the Party he belonged to. The Welsh Union of Women’s Liberal Association (WUWLA), whose membership had peaked at 9,000 in 1895 had promised to consult women on Suffrage as well as Home Rule, whereas the more radical Pankhursts were a little more sceptical. 52 They had been let down by politicians a few too many times before, pretty much every time since John Stuart Mill tried to enfranchise women on the same terms as men on the second reform bill by changing the language in it from ‘men’ to ‘persons’ and were being kept out of the decisionmaking arena. They were reluctant to trust another politician who seemed to be doing the opposite of what he was saying. Therefore, there was a difference here between the national movements because of the way these movements chose to go about getting the vote and who they put their trust in.

To add to this, it could be argued that the suffrage movement in Wales was in fact more radical after the First World War than the suffrage movement in England. The Viscountess Rhondda, who had been the most notable Welsh member of the WSPU, and had been imprisoned for setting fire to letterboxes, had become the most prominent member of the suffrage movement since Fawcett had resigned her leadership of the NUWSS because of her old age, and Emmeline Pankhurst was also taking on increasingly less responsibility for a similar reason.53 In 1922, she founded and chaired the Six Point Group to work for feminist reforms, working to ensure that mothers had rights to see their children and working towards equal franchise, and set up the Equal Political Rights Campaign Committee (EPRCC) in 1926 to ensure this, this was achieved in

52

Draisey, Welsh Women, p.141

53

Smith, British Women’s Suffrage, p.108, Janet Howarth, Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies, (4th October 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33096 accessed 7/12/18 & June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst, Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies, (6th January 2011), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33096 accessed 7/12/18

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1928.54 In addition to the increase in the radical nature of the Welsh suffrage movement because of the decline in the radical suffrage movement in England, there was also the fact that the Liberals, including Lloyd-George, had let women down by not giving the vote to women on equal terms with men in 1918. 55 This dissatisfaction encouraged people to turn to the Labour Party, who had been campaigning for female suffrage on equal terms and home rule since Keir Hardie was leader of the Labour Party before the start of the First World War, Hardie had also been helped to campaign by the Pankhursts before he was elected in Merthyr Tydfil in 1906.56 This caused UK wide resentment because Hardie was a local MP in South Wales, close to Viscount Rhondda’s sphere of influence. As Rhondda was inspired by the Pankhursts, she saw it as her mission to finish what they had started. 57 This shows a rise in the Welsh radicalisation with regard to the suffrage movement compared to the English, in order to make sure that women in the whole of the United Kingdom were able to vote on equal terms as men; there is an implication that the English suffragettes and suffragists had not quite finished the job.

As I said in the introduction, historians have been criticised for overemphasising the English contribution to the British suffrage movement. 58 The suffrage movement took root in England and Scotland before it did in Wales, but although it was late taking hold in Wales, they still wanted to have their own version of suffragism, which included holding liberal, suffragist beliefs longer than England because they held Lloyd-George in high esteem for longer, before becoming more radical. 59 But neither nation was particularly nationalistic about the suffrage movement, all strands of the suffrage movement wanted to get women the vote on equal terms for everyone in the United Kingdom and Ireland; 54

John, Turning the Tide, pp.371-9 & Smith, British Women’s Suffrage, p.106 Smith, British Women’s Suffrage, p.106 56 Ryland Wallace, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales 1866-1928, (Cardiff, 2009), p.54 57 Viscountess Rhondda, This Was My World, (London, 1933), p.121 58 Bolt, ‘The ideas of British suffragism’, p.46 59 Bolt, ‘The ideas of British suffragism’, p.47 55

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they just had different beliefs at different times because of the amount of industry they had in each country and the age their leaders were at the time of the start of women getting the vote in 1918 and to what extent they believed the Liberal party could bring about change.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources Viscountess Rhondda. This Was My World, (London, 1933), p.121 Secondary Sources Auchterlonie, Mitzi. Conservative Suffragists: The Women’s Vote and the Tory Party. London, 2007 Crawford, Elizabeth. The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey. Abingdon, 2006 Draisey, Derek. Welsh Women in History. Swansea, 2004 John, Angela V. Turning the Tide: The Life of Lady Rhondda. Cardigan, 2013 Jones, J. Graham. David Lloyd-George and Welsh Liberalism. Aberystwyth, 2010 Kingsley Kent, Susan. Sex & Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914, London, 1987 McQuistion, Liz. Suffragettes to She-Devils: Women’s Liberation and Beyond, London, 1997 Price, Emyr. David Lloyd-George, Cardiff, 2006 Smith, Harold L. The British Women’s Suffrage Campaign 1866-1928, Harlow, 1998 Wallace, Ryland. The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales 1866-1928, Cardiff, 2009

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Articles in Edited Collections Bolt, Christine. ‘The ideas if British suffragism’. In eds. Purvis, June. and Stanley Holton, Sandra. Votes for Women, London, 2000. Pp.34-56 Hannam, June. ‘’I had not been to London’ Women’s Suffrage – a view from the regions’. In eds. Purvis, June. And Stanley Holton, Sandra. Votes for Women, London, 2000. Pp.226-245 Articles in Academic Journals Bohata, Kirsti. ‘’For Wales, See England?’ Suffrage and the New Woman in Wales’, Women’s History Review, xi (2002): 643-656 Cowman, Krista. ‘Women’s Suffrage Campaigns in Britain’, Women’s History Review, ix (2002): 815-823 Websites Emily Wilding Davison’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37346 accessed 7/12/18

Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33096 accessed 7/12/18 Emmeline Pankhurst’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33096 accessed 7/12/18 The Viscountess Rhondda’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36479 accessed 7/12/18

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The Challenge of Nationalism: How Has the National Identity Rhetoric Evolved Through the Last Century (1918-2018)?

Case Study of Poland

by Katarzyna Pogorzelska MA in International Politics, Aberystwyth University Email: kipogorzelska@gmail.com

Introduction Conflicts and global challenges do not appear out of thin air. They are always complex issues that cannot be reduced to a single cause or a single spark.

However, they are most often deeply rooted in history and societal perspectives.

What societies regard as ‘their own’ can sometimes become contested and that aspect of holding possession over something, such as for example a place, a tradition or a whole idea of cultural identity, becomes a spark that creates a challenge that is often not only local but global. Nationalism is no doubt not a new phenomenon. In addition, it is not a challenge that is a given constant. It changes, and it evolves. Just like global conflicts, nationalism does not exist in a void, rather as an ideology it is built upon culture and tradition alongside a belief in their supremacy. The question of heritage can easily be interwoven into this rhetoric as it relates to a society’s collective memory and the value they ascribe to ‘their own’. Therefore, although the focus of this paper is to be on the challenge of nationalism, heritage must remain an important aspect of this debate.

This essay will analyse the evolution of nationalism, as a challenge in international affairs throughout the last century, in an attempt to uncover the underlying trends and shed some light on how these changes have affected global issues. Poland has been chosen as a valuable case study with regards to 47

nationalism as a threat to the European Union integrity as it provides insight into the Central/ Eastern European region and the recent concerns about rising populism along the EU’s eastern border, as well as concerns that other nations will follow in the steps of Brexit. In addition, 2018 marks a century of Poland’s independence, allowing for a thorough study of the time period.

Firstly, the essay will explore the concept of nationalism and how it links to the concept of heritage, before moving on to explore the challenges that nationalism poses in relation to international affairs and the EU. Secondly, the essay will attempt to identify how nationalistic sentiments have changed in Poland since the inter-war period, through the Second World War, moving on to explore the Communist period and after its fall, with increasing democratization marked by Poland’s entry into the EU and finally, accounting for the current situation. To conclude, this paper will reflect upon the link between heritage and nationalism.

The notion of ‘nationalism’, ‘heritage’ and the question of a global challenge While one can find many definitions of nationalism, it is considered that Ernest Gellner’s interpretation has had a significant scholarly influence over the debate. According to Gellner, ‘Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ (2006:1).

Thus, we can see that the emphasis in Gellner’s definition is placed on the political aspect of nationalism, implying that this sentiment is closely related to the notion of a modern nation-state, which can be identified as the congruence or the meeting point of the political and national. The violation of this principle creates a sentiment of animosity and satisfaction can be acquired through the principle’s realisation (Gellner, 2006:1). In other words, nationalist principles can be best fulfilled when state boundaries encompass the whole nation, unmixed with foreigners.

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According to Pocket Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, heritage is ‘valued things such as historic buildings, passed down from previous generations’ while stating out synonyms such as, for example, ‘tradition’, ‘culture’ or ‘ancestry’ (Hawker, 2008:341). Thus, the link between heritage and nationalism is not overtly clear at the first sight. However, if one looks at this definition from another perspective and asks the question ‘valued by who?’, it is inferred that there is a group of people who are a source of this value. One can draw a conclusion that this group can be a nation. In a discussion on nationalism, Eriksen identifies nations as ‘ideological constructions seeking to forge a link between (self-defined) cultural group and state, and that they create abstract communities of a different order from those dynastic states or kinship-based communities which pre-dated them’ (2010:120). Thus, we can identify this group as a nation as it is defined as a cultural group, whereas heritage is defined as synonymous to culture. Heritage can, therefore, become a factor in fulfilling or violating the nationalist principle, for example when a valued historic sight is outside state boundaries.

It is the violations of nationalist principles and the strive towards fulfilling them that can become a question of global challenge. As a sentiment of animosity, it can become a driving factor for conflict of various proportions, from a mere squabble to a war. According to Harry Anastasiou, ‘nationalism furnished an unprecedented basis for the collective legitimization of aggression and violence as necessary instruments of national policy’ (2007:35). One does not need to look far to find multiple examples of where nationalistic sentiments have led to bloody conflicts that in no small manner posed a challenged to international affairs. It is believed that conflicts sparked by nationalism have been a hallmark of nineteenth and twentieth century European history, with the Second World War marking the most devastating example (Arts and Halman, 2005/2006:70). While it would be erroneous to assign nationalism as the sole cause of the Second World War, it 49

was no doubt an important contributing and enabling factor. As we read in Anastasiou, ‘The absolutist and self-centered approaches of ethno-centric nationalism, prevalent in nearly all European states, lagged behind the international and inter-societal interdependencies (…)’, which when faced with economic depression lead to war (2007:34). Therefore, we can see that nationalism has in the past posed a challenge to international affairs as it acted as an enabler for conflicts to emerge.

This can bring us to the question whether nationalism remains a challenge to global affairs, given also the premise of this paper is that nationalism may evolve over time. Let us, therefore, consider the case of the European Union. As a supranational construct it encompasses multiple states and nations and operates on a premise that there are shared values within this community that allow for a close socio-economic union of its members. However, various surveys have been conducted and the predominant finding is that EU inhabitants mostly identify with their national identity and typically identify as European secondarily (Political Capital Policy Research and Consulting Institute, 2013:3-5). Thus, we can observe that there remains a major sense of primacy of one’s nation over European sentiments and while Euroscepticism is not a new phenomenon it is already bearing its fruit of unsettling EU integrity, thus posing a challenge to modern-day global affairs. Of particular concern have been the Central and Eastern European members of the union, with populism and nationalism increasing in popularity in countries such as Hungry and Poland.

A century of Poland and a century of nationalism: The evolution throughout the decades On the 11th of November Poland has celebrated a hundred years of its independence. In the light of accusations that the current government has endorsed Polish nationalists during the celebrations by marching in the same procession albeit in different columns with those who burnt flares, carried fascist 50

flags and burnt the EU flag (TVN24, 2018), it becomes additionally warranted to research the evolution of nationalism in Poland. With the end of the First World War in 1918 Poland re-appeared on the map of Europe after 123 years. As we read in Wandycz, ‘The partitioning powers deliberately cultivated an image of Polish history as indicative of Poland's inability to exist as an independent state’ (1992:1011). Thus, it can be concluded that under the partitions, nationalistic sentiments allowed for preservation of Polish identity that would have otherwise been Germanified or Russified. That nationalistic self-preservation lead to Poland’s independence and the creation of the Second Republic, thus it is ‘No wonder that the defense of the national heritage became an almost obsessive Polish concern’ (Wandycz,1992:1011).

Forced assimilation into foreign cultures and questions of national identity, however, had a significant effect on the shape of the re-emerged Poland. The end of the First World War saw a number of plebiscites in areas such as Upper Silesia, Kashubia or Masuria. Significant portions of disputed territory were assigned to Germany due to cases such as the Masuria plebiscite, an incident which was considered ‘an embarrassment for the Polish national movement, with over 97 percent of the vote in this largely Polish-speaking region being cast in favor of Germany’ (Cordell,2009:6). Thus, once again, the question of national survival hinged on sentiments of national identity. It is therefore hardly surprising that the experience of foreign oppression evolved into hostility towards minorities. This view is shared by Eichenberg who exemplifies it with nationalist antisemitic pogroms in Lwów and Kielce in 1918, emphasizing that violence against minorities was not only characteristic of the military but was also supported by the domestic population (2010:236).

Furthermore, what was linked to the animosity towards foreigners was that they represented different religions than the largely Roman Catholic Poles.

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According to Eichenberg, ‘In Poland, antisemitism increased in the war years because the Jewish population was suspected of supporting the Habsburg authorities in suppressing Polish nationalism’ and a similar logic was applied to Orthodox Ukrainians (2010:245). Thus, religious affiliations became intertwined with nationalistic sentiments. This was further encouraged by political forces such as National Democracy, a right-wing movement led by Roman Dmowski, which attempted ‘to combine nationalism with Catholicism and so enhance its impact on the masses of believers among workers and peasants (…)’ as part of national strive for survival (Holzer,1977:397-398).

The Second World War once again threatened to take away the independence and integrity of the Polish state. Once again, nationalism became means for self-preservation and national survival. This can be seen through the Polish resistance effort and the establishment of the underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) as well as the establishment of the Polish government inexile located in London. Resistance operations, especially Operation Burza (Tempest) can be seen as an attempt at national survival, described by General Bór-Komorowski as ‘our will to manifest our struggle against the Germans’, as well as ‘our will to manifest to the Soviets the presence of elements representing the sovereignty of the Republic’ (Gluckstein, 2012:63).

In this context, nationalism became a struggle against repeated foreign oppression and thus seen as reasonably justifiable in this manner. According to Bromke, ‘With their state dismembered, the Poles' last line of defense became nationalism, the sine qua non of their survival as a people. It inspired them in their repeated efforts to cast off foreign bondage and to restore a viable Polish state’ (1962:636). Communist rule was seen as another ‘foreign bondage’ and despite the endorsement of Polish nationalistic sentiments by Polish Communists, the Soviet military’s assistance was required to facilitate the onset of the new 52

regime and as stated by Bromke, ‘the bitter resistance to the imposition of a Communist regime in Poland was essentially nationalistic and not social in character’ (1962:637).

The end of the Second World War saw another shift in Polish borders as eastern territories were lost to the Soviet Union but new territories gained from Germany. Polish communist rule adopted the vision of ‘Poland as one modern mass nation among others’ and associated ‘modernity with Polishness’ (Snyder, 2003:220-224), ignoring any significanct remaining minorities could present.

Achieving national homogeneity through population transfers can be seen as both a result of nationalist tendencies and ethnic policies as well as a reinforcing agent.

For example, Ukrainian-Polish transfers ‘created profound social difficulties for the displaced population and contributed to continued disagreement between Poland and Ukraine’ (Stadnik, 2009:181). Indeed, Communist authorities sought to gain legitimacy by using ‘patriotic rhetoric’ and portraying ethnic minorities as enemies. Thus, policies of resettlement were coupled with Polonising attempts along the new western borders, to remove signs of ‘Germanness’. This included ‘pressuring Germans to change their names to Polish ones and purging their bookshops, libraries, schools and institutions of German language literature and poetry’ (Zielinski, 2009:195). Thus, nationalism could no longer make a case for survival of Polish identity. However, it was better understood in terms of Soviet control over the Polish state and lack of self-determinism for the Polish nation.

According to Davies ‘Ironically, if the Second Republic possessed political sovereignty but not a nationally uniform population, the People’s Republic possessed a truly national society, but lacked full sovereignty’ (2001:222).

With the fall of Communism and the establishment of the Third Republic, notions of nationalism and religious nationalism were incorporated into the statebuilding of post-Communist Poland. Some consider the Polish Constitution, 53

established in 1997 and currently in-use, as an expression of, on the one hand, a step towards democratization and liberalization, while on the other hand, an inscription of nationalistic sentiments into the legislative principles governing the country. According to Kirkham, the fact that the preamble of the Constitution first addresses the Polish Nation and only secondly citizens of Poland, as well as emphasizing the protection of Polish heritage, reflects ‘historical sensitivities’ and is ‘a strong statement of historical identity’ (2004:48). Thus, it can be seen that highlighting these notions in the preamble shows the amount of regard placed by the Polish state and can be interpreted as finally achieving a national society and sovereignty as part of the fulfilment of nationalistic principles. This can be further linked to religious nationalism. As we read in Kirkham, ‘Poland is a strongly Roman Catholic country, and the preamble makes clear that the nation’s Christian heritage is not to be ignored in public debate’ (2004:48). Nevertheless, despite the clear emphasis on the nationalistic sentiments expressed through historical and religious identity and heritage, the constitution also established Poland as a liberal democracy, governed by rule of law and ensuring the protection of the rights of all citizens, not only Polish nationals.

This newly acquired freedom of speech however affected the sentiments expressed by citizens of the new Polish state. According to E. Hauser, ‘traditional nationalistic signifiers’ were observed to gradually lose their meaning and be ridiculed as the Catholic Church and conservatives attempted to ‘formulate a new Polish patriotism, reclaiming the heritage of the dominant traditions’ (1995:93).

It can be argued that nationalism was also becoming meaningless due to the achievement of nationalistic principles, as the Polish nation was no longer ruled by a foreign power and its existence was no longer a case of a fight for survival.

The political move towards the West gradually brought Poland closer to the EU. However, the ambition of the pro-European social-democrats to modernize Poland politically, socially and economically by entering the EU, was hampered 54

by voices of discontent of the conservative and Catholic nationals. In their view, entering the EU would pose a threat to the regained sovereignty and to the Polish national identity (Wagner, 2003:200). These nationalist sentiments, however, proved to be a minority view. In a 2003 referendum to decide Poland’s accession, 77.45% of voters proclaimed to be for and only 22.55% to be against (Obwieszczenie Państwowej Komisji Wyborczej z dnia 9 czerwca, 2003). Thus, Poland entered the EU and with it many claimed that the supra-national institutions and the multinationalism would work to eradicate nationalism in its member-states, replacing national identity with a European one.

There is no doubt that in general the next decade in Poland saw processes of further liberal democratization and a decrease in xenophobic sentiments. In 2011 Poland was still a majorly homogenic country, with 94 per cent identifying as Polish nationals only (Central Statistical Office, 2013:180). Nevertheless, one could observe a growth of tolerance towards non-Poles. In 2014, 91% of Polish interviewees expressed that they would not mind having a foreign neighbour.

However, Fox and Vermeersch claimed that ‘contrary to both the spirit and letter of the EU, accession opened a backdoor for Eastern Europe's unreconstructed nationalists pursue their nationalist ambitions’ (2010:325-326). Poland’s general willingness to adapt to European standards and to pursue European integration resulted in rekindling of nationalist sentiments that echoed the pre-joining voices in their Euroscepticism. Some radical groups outside mainstream political parties portrayed Europeans ‘as the allies of the enemy within: non-Catholics, sexual minorities and ethnic minority populations, in particular Jews, gays, and Roma’ (Fox and Vermeersch, 2010:351). Therefore, we can see that in this manner nationalists once more began to call upon the rhetoric of there being a danger to the survival of the Polish nation.

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Such sentiments have since gained more momentum. As we read in White, despite being open to receiving refugees in the past, since 2015 this idea has been met with general hostility which ‘should be seen not as a direct impact of the Syrian refugee crisis but as an artefact of right-wing politicians and movements’ (2018:225). Some claim that attitudes are changing, and that Poland is becoming more accepting of foreigners and of diversity (White, 2018:160). However, there is significant cause for concern. The current right-wing government of Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (PiS, Law and Justice Party,) has come to be associated with growth of nationalistic sentiments which has already been exemplified this year’s Independence Day march. Perhaps a clear view of these sentiments can be seen in the words of President Andrzej Duda at a meeting with electorate where he claimed that the EU is an ‘imaginary community’ that has provided little for Poland and should leave Poland alone for now (Dziennik, 2018). PiS remains a populist party with widespread support and it is uncertain what will happen in next year’s parliamentary elections, despite the opposition’s attempt to counter the nationalist sentiments and policies which many view as undemocratic. One can argue that it has become a struggle for survival for Polish Euro-enthusiasts who fear that these actions and views may cause Poland’s exit from the EU, intentionally or not. This concern has been voiced by Donald Tusk, President of the European Council and former Prime Minister of Poland, who claimed that there are political forces in Poland who try to undermine the foundations of its independence by speaking against the EU (TVN24, 2018b).

Conclusion Nationalism is as much of a challenge today as it has ever been. The case of Poland has shown that throughout the last century nationalistic sentiments have been present amongst the population. Heritage has been quite closely linked to the notion of nationalism, in as much as it can be a principle that can fulfil the 56

sentiment. Poles have frequently called upon the protection of their heritage as part of ensuring the nation’s survival, such as after the First World War, or as part of upholding tradition for future generations, such as with the mention of heritage in Poland’s constitution. However, where nationalism may become an extreme form of xenophobia and be seen as morally wrong and unjustifiable, heritage holds no moral charge other than the value people choose to assign to it.

It seems however warranted to claim that there were moments in history when nationalism enabled the survival of the Polish nation, such as for example before Poland regained independence, during the Second World War or during the Communist regime. Simultaneously, one can observe that Polish nationalist sentiments have evolved throughout the century, from trying to fulfil the principle of a homogenous nation state to trying to fulfil the principle of independence and self-governance. The most recent evolution, however, appears as formulation of nationalistic sentiments against perceived threats of immigrants and foreign involvement. Hence the occurrences of hostility towards receiving refugees or the EU. Thus, this nationalistic struggle for survival against questionable threats can be seen as a challenge to global affairs. With Brexit looming on the horizon and the increasing worry that the UK might set a precedent, that in turn will set in motion a domino effect and a build-up of nationalistic sentiments, adds a particularly volatile ingredient to this brew. If these sentiments grow and people become increasingly hostile towards the EU, seeing it as impending on their sovereignty which is a vital nationalistic principle, more countries may choose to opt-out. ‘Polexit’ has already been mentioned in the media. Therefore, it is not a far-fetched claim to see nationalism as a potential cause of EU break-up. And the challenges that this scenario could pose to the international affairs is a topic for a whole separate research paper.

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