[Discussion] The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 09:45:57 -0700

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*lf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort, eds.* /The Postnational Self: Belonging
and Identity//. /Public Worlds Series, vol. 10. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002. 360 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $74.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-8166-3936-1; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8166-3937-X.

Reviewed by *Aysegul Baykan*, Yildiz Teknik Universitesi, Istanbul.
Published by H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/>
(May, 2004)

Since the late 1980s, the literature on globalization has dominated the
interdisciplinary scene of academic writing and issues of identity and
politics of difference have followed suit. Social, political, and
cultural matters pertaining to this interest range from the micro level
affective nature of individual constructions to macro structures of
international, transnational, and postnational orders. The Postnational
Self: Belonging and Identity, edited by Hedetoft and Hjort, is an
addition to this literature. The contributions to this volume are by
prominent scholars who have been participating in the debates on aspects
of these thematic issues for more than a decade. Given below is firstly
a rough outline of the broad problematic of this volume and
consecutively reviews of individual contributions.

The general backgrounds of the information age we currently live in, and
the reorganization of the societies' articulations to this new order,
are being speculated from various angles by most scholars and the public
at large. Especially in the post-Cold War era, the re-configuration of
the forms of governance of the already existing nation-states and new
ones that emerged spurred an interest into various domains of analysis.
On the one hand, matters of agency, subjecthood, and forms of structures
and establishment of civil societies, and, on the other, the balance of
power between different constructs such as civilizations and/or
geo-political articulations that divide the globe into different spheres
of influence have been analyzed from predominantly the perspective of
culture. From an analytical perspective of spatial references, one of
the levels of contestation has been the global domain at large and the
nation-state in its particularity. The literature, in general, agrees
that the relation between these two domains is dialectical. That is, the
particular nature of the nation states are, performatively, responses
and constructions vis a vis global dynamics of power, be it cultural,
political, or economic.

Another spatial-analytical domain is the one that confronts the "new
identities," "differences," minority cultures, and/or diasporic
communities vis a vis a host-culture of nation states. Here, the
problematic of defining the nature and boundaries of identity groups has
resulted in an array of multiple discourses that contest the primordial
and essentialist foundational basis of communal constructions from one
end to the political and cultural emphasis on "rights" to one's own
identity in confrontation to a majority culture and hegemonic power on
the other end. The fact that these debates have become parts and parcels
of the general networks of communications across the world has resulted
in perceiving these claims to identities as global and transnational in
field of operation. The dilemmas on the relationship between contested
identities and the nation-states they are embedded in have led social
theorists and political philosophers to reanalyze the historical and
foundational nature of the nation-state from the premises of individual
liberalism, republicanism, and citizenship. An identity between
citizenry based on pre-political--primordial--ethnicity and a bounded
system of nation-state is disputed on several grounds. On the premises
of this non-identity, the question has become the ways and means of
coexistence, the construction of one or many public spheres, or even of
constitutional patriotism =E0 la Habermas. The possibilities of social,
cultural, and political rights within and without citizenship are viewed
as challenges to redefining the claims to nationhood. The discourse on
the post-national state or the naming of the present stage as
post-national is based on these yet unclear questions.

A third spatial-analytic debate focuses on the identity of constructions
brought about by the union of nation-states, such as the European Union.
Here again, the issue of boundaries, the cultural identity, and the
raison d'etre for supra-national bureaucratic and ideological
unification is contested. More importantly, from the globalization
perspective, against and with whom, the EU stands is contestable.
Finally, the already questionable relationship of the immigrant
populations' rights, compared to the status of the nationals of the
member states, is contestable as, at this time, works for an EU
constitution is under way.

Given this background, Hedetoft and Hjort have sectioned this volume on
the postnational self into three: "Nationalism and Postnationality,"
"Self and Community," and "Images of Home, Belonging, and Exile." In
their introduction, the editors question the concepts of home and
belonging and how they are discursively constructed and imagined as
driving either from ethnicity and culture (a pre-political and
organicist approach), or as political and civic, therefore rational.
Either way, belonging, they argue, is a contested field. During the
national phase, the pre-political and the political levels coincided on
the same community to accrue citizenship to members of a particular
nation-state, whereas the postnational order separates ethnicity and
identity. Belonging becomes a property of a rational kind of politics.
Therefore, liberal and civic nationalism and cosmopolitanism go hand in
hand with subjective demands for individual freedom, communal rights,
and negotiated identities. Belonging belongs to various levels,
national, subnational, and cosmopolitan, at the same time. However,
Hedetoft and Hjort claim globalization itself is not a substitute for
home and belonging, as one does not belong to the globe even as one
supports responsibility for global issues.

The first section, "Nationalism and Postnationality," contains articles
by Mark Jurgensmeyer, Ray Taras, Philip Schlesinger, John Hall, and
Richard Jenkins. In summary, Jurgensmeyer's contention is that
globalization has undermined the secular nationalism of Western models
and replaced it with ethno-religious nationalisms where identity and
power are threatened. People of particular nations have feared and
reacted to transnational and secular modernity and hence targeted the
United States which, according to Jurgenmeyer, defends secular
governments and stability of regimes. We have to make note that
Jurgensmeyer would not have foreseen the war on Iraq but his model goes
against the grain of the historical consequences of United States-led
actions against secular nationalisms. As examples, we can count its role
in the coup against the legitimate government of Mossadeq, which was
trying to nationalize the oil industry in Iran in the early 1950s, in
favor of the autocratic regime of the Shah, and the aid to Islamists in
Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Contrary to this first article,
Ray Taras argues for taking into consideration the multifaceted nature
of the instability in the international order, from mass poverty to
internal political conflicts and fragmentation of central authorities,
rather than explaining it solely as consequence of ethno-religious
nationalisms. His point is, U.S. intervention into international order
is arbitrary, disfavoring nationalisms in certain cases and rejecting
others. In one sentence, according to Taras, while in the bipolar world
before the collapse of the Soviet Union the national conflicts were
internationalized, "in the post-bipolar world, a 'nationalizing'
international system emerged" (p. 18).

Schlesinger in his article reflects on how the politico-communicative
space in Europe has changed. On the lines of Habermas and Castells, he
emphasizes the communicative networks in the construction of social
cohesiveness and the informal processes leading to a political identity
and a political culture for the EU. To the earlier space of the practice
of democratic politics and citizenship identifiable on the basis of
individual nation-states, supranational formations in the European Union
look for communicative relations between the individual public spaces of
nation-states. In other words, the European public sphere must be
thought of as interrelated spheres of European publics. However, this
does not result just on the principles of economic and political
unification but through an idea of citizenship that transcends the level
of member nation-states. Although, together with a small group of media
and communication networks, groups of bureaucratic and business elites
have emerged Schlesinger does not believe the EU has transcended the
national spaces to become an identity above those nation-states yet.

The essence of the next two articles, by Hall and Jenkins, is a critique
of a broad globalization view. According to Hall, images of belonging
are imaginary not primordial and on that basis, strong transatlantic
images of belonging are unfounded. Immigrants do long for their origins
yet this is not the same as feelings of belonging. As in Canada and
United States, the prevalence of multiculturalism does not support the
thesis that the national culture in these countries is not homogenized
around the idea of belonging. Jenkins as well, similarly, questions the
adjective "global" in explaining the formerly multinational now
transnational corporations. In the corporate business environment, which
in larger volumes take place among the core nations, and in certain
institutional forms, a transnational culture emerges in "meaningful
international social networks." However, Jenkins notes, percentage-wise
this is a very limited population when the globe is our reference.

The second part, "Self and Community," in this writer's opinion, is the
strength of this volume. The articles by Seyla Benhabib, Riva
Kastoryano, Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, and James Tully are on how to
construe citizenship. While they contribute an analytical approach to
claims of identity and citizenship membership, they provide insights
towards new directions in social analysis. The minority groups in
Europe, the immigrants and the diasporas, in the environment of host
cultures of Europe's nation-states underline authors' concerns, but
their theoretical frame is well detailed in terms of applicability to
other settings as well. Even in Europe, today, their arguments are
cogent in the face of strict laws prohibiting religious scarves and
other religiously symbolic items in public schools in France and with
the decision to expel more than twenty thousand foreign residents from
Holland. Benhabib aims to find an intermediate alternative to
open-borders and universal human rights claims on one side and the civic
republicanism with "thick conceptions of citizenship" on the other.
Given the ambiguous situation of the non-national inhabitants of Europe,
the liberal democracy position of the European Union and the varying
citizenship laws among the member nation-states open the space for
further controversy. When citizenship is not a communitarian normative
principle and is broken down into components of collective identity,
political membership, and social rights and benefits, the situation of
foreigners becomes a differential of many factors. Do these groups act
as communities, or subject to rules as individuals? To which level do
social rights belong? Are rights separate from identities they choose in
terms of loyalties to country of origin? Do these loyalties exclude them
from political participation and claims to membership? Benhabib seeks
answers to these and similar questions. Kastoryanis also breaks the link
between national sentiments and political identity and civic
republicanism by positioning national identity separately from the
rights to political participation. She argues that the supranational
construction of the idea of European citizenship as a transnational
identity, independently from membership to nation-states, is
paradoxically exclusionary against the immigrant populations. This shows
how the nation-states are still the basis of transnational experiences.
Following on these lines, Soysal argues that membership to national
community has become decoupled from rights, the latter becoming more
abstract and transnational. As a consequence, citizenship is also
decoupled from the national level, becoming a matter of practice at
local and supranational levels as well. The practicing of civic rights
of immigrants becomes focused on the rights to identity--existence as
universal human rights principles--and occupies public space on those
grounds.

Theoretically, Tully analyzes the important value of identity politics
as a process of democratic engagement for citizenship rights, rather
than seeing it as a source of social fragmentation. He presents a
coherent yet detailed argumentation for explaining the meaning of
subjective identity and its construction vis a vis other identities.
Belonging, he says, is not a matter of a discrete end-product but the
practice of recognition of each claim to identity even as they may be
antagonistic. Furthermore, identities are not bounded but overlapping.
Democratic principles have to be inclusive of all claims and have the
sphere to reason its position, rather than building a homogenizing space
against fragmentation.

Mich=E8le Lamont and Michael Herzfeld offer not so much abstract
principles of citizenship but more sociological findings on how
particular nationals react to issues of identities. In her essay, Lamont
cites the differences in attitudes between individual community members
of United States and France, based on her study of sample populations.
The processes of exclusion and inclusion work differently in these two
societies. According to Lamont's findings, the United States has weaker
external boundaries and strong moral boundaries in denying social
membership to blacks and the poor, constructed around the moral value of
the work ethic. However, France has strong external boundaries and holds
negative values against Muslims on the moral claim of universal values
of the collective republican French identity. Herzfeld's discussion is
on the resurgence of neo-Orthodox religious identity in Greece. Here, in
the process of modern nation-state making, classicism was presented as
the source for the new identity, with disregard to religious elements of
culture prevalent in the society, in order to put Greece more on the
European direction, and to offer a more rationalized and "Protestant"
role for an official view on religion. Herzfeld suggests that there is a
reversal in Greece in the direction towards neo-Orthodoxy in the last
two decades.

The last section of the volume, "Images of Home, Belonging, and Exile,"
offers articles by Ulf Hannerz, Benjamin Lee, Orvar L=F6fgren, and Jeffre=
y
Herf. Hannerz takes on the meaning of home, mainly in terms of the
nature of defining home in contrast to what is away, and he presents the
ways in which home is constructed away from home, in biterritorialized
or multiterritorialized contexts. Hannerz also discusses how
cosmopolitanism may be both aesthetic and experiential and political in
terms of supporting political programs with respect to the cosmopolis at
large. He, in addition, offers support to another perspective to
cosmopolitanism, following thinkers like Martha Nussbaum and Kwame
Anthony Appiah, as a general understanding and acceptance of differences
and living with them while being "at home." Benjamin Lee's piece, "The
Subjects of Circulation," is a metatheoretical argument on the social
imaginaries of flows of financial and technological systems, of people,
images, and ideas. When in circulation, these imaginaries have a
performative nature, with tropes to acquire semiotic values, which in
fact enter into circulation. From images of nation states to
citizenship, to capital, social imaginaries become objectified within
circulation. In new semiotic spaces, in circulation, they attribute
values to identities and new processes of globalization. In contrast to
Lee's article, L=F6fgren's narrative on the anxiety of border crossing
directly faces one's own memories and experiences of similar contexts,
whereby home and abroad is designated value. With the emergence of
practices of issuing passports and visas, countries have contributed to
nationalizing spaces across borders and attributing values to border
crossers as nationals, foreigners, or even undesirables. Technologies of
border crossings and symbolic signs also contribute to the
territorialization of culture, history, and identities. In the final
essay, Jeffrey Herf discusses the reasons behind the ways West Germany
came to terms with the memory of the Holocaust, going back to the 1950s,
whereas there was a deliberate avoidance in the East, in the German
Democratic Republic. The reasons lie, according to Herf, in how in the
Federal Republic of Germany, under the guidance of conservative
Christian Democrat Konrad Adanauer, a supranational, pro-liberal,
individual rights discourse attempted to override the nationalist
premises--whereas, in the GDR, the evil of fascism became a generalized
concept and its victims were also constructed in the same manner, with
emphasis on patriotism and antifascism.

The Postnational Self is a volume that deals with the uncertainties of
the contemporary world where issues of nationalism and globalization are
debated on more specific forms of postnationalisms and
supranationalisms. The controversy regarding globalization is salient,
but nevertheless contested as well in certain articles. The theoretical
and conceptual framework around the problematic of citizenship is
especially strong. Unfortunately, this book does not offer a
satisfactory approach to interpret the nature of social and political
events that have taken place since its date of publication. Namely, what
happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ongoing fight between the
Palestinians and Israel are of significant importance to understand the
reordering of the globe among sources of power and transnational
alliances, as they aim towards making new selves of belonging and
identity. The enlargement of the European Union and hence the increasing
complexity and variation among the members have also led to new
questions regarding the feasibility of constructing supranational
identities in such a union.

Having read this volume, one wishes to read more, but this time with an
approach that would focus more on the particular yet similar problems
that face societies of the South, as much as those of the North. This is
not to claim that they are different, but there are more particularly
significant dilemmas that the societies of the South face in matters
concerning the making of the subjects of nations and societies, and
theory might be able to write itself there first based on given
histories and social structures. Overall, this volume offers a good
addition to the subject as it offers insights to start debating similar
problematics.

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lf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort, eds. The
Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity. Public Worlds Series, vol. 10. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002. 360 pp.
Notes, bibliography, index.
$74.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8166-3936-1; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8166-3937-X.

Reviewed by Aysegul Baykan, Yildiz Teknik
Universitesi, Istanbul. 
Published by <a href="http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/">
H-Gender-MidEast</a> (May, 2004)

 
Since the late 1980s, the literature on globalization has dominated the
interdisciplinary scene of academic writing and issues of identity and
politics of difference have followed suit. Social, political, and
cultural matters pertaining to this interest range from the micro level
affective nature of individual constructions to macro structures of
international, transnational, and postnational orders. <cite>The
Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity</cite>,
edited by Hedetoft and Hjort, is an addition to this literature. The
contributions to this volume are by prominent scholars who have been
participating in the debates on aspects of these thematic issues for
more than a decade. Given below is firstly a rough outline of the broad
problematic of this volume and consecutively reviews of individual
contributions. 
 The general backgrounds
of the information age we currently live in, and the reorganization of
the societies' articulations to this new order, are being speculated
from various angles by most scholars and the public at large.
Especially in the post-Cold War era, the re-configuration of the forms
of governance of the already existing nation-states and new ones that
emerged spurred an interest into various domains of analysis. On the
one hand, matters of agency, subjecthood, and forms of structures and
establishment of civil societies, and, on the other, the balance of
power between different constructs such as civilizations and/or
geo-political articulations that divide the globe into different
spheres of influence have been analyzed from predominantly the
perspective of culture. From an analytical perspective of spatial
references, one of the levels of contestation has been the global
domain at large and the nation-state in its particularity. The
literature, in general, agrees that the relation between these two
domains is dialectical. That is, the particular nature of the nation
states are, performatively, responses and constructions vis a vis
global dynamics of power, be it cultural, political, or economic. 
Another spatial-analytical domain is the one that
confronts the "new
identities," "differences," minority cultures, and/or diasporic
communities vis a vis a host-culture of nation states. Here, the
problematic of defining the nature and boundaries of identity groups
has resulted in an array of multiple discourses that contest the
primordial and essentialist foundational basis of communal
constructions from one end to the political and cultural emphasis on
"rights" to one's own identity in confrontation to a majority culture
and hegemonic power on the other end. The fact that these debates have
become parts and parcels of the general networks of communications
across the world has resulted in perceiving these claims to identities
as global and transnational in field of operation. The dilemmas on the
relationship between contested identities and the nation-states they
are embedded in have led social theorists and political philosophers to
reanalyze the historical and foundational nature of the nation-state
from the premises of individual liberalism, republicanism, and
citizenship. An identity between citizenry based on
pre-political--primordial--ethnicity and a bounded system of
nation-state is disputed on several grounds. On the premises of this
non-identity, the question has become the ways and means of
coexistence, the construction of one or many public spheres, or even of
constitutional patriotism &agrave; la Habermas. The possibilities of social,
cultural, and political rights within and without citizenship are
viewed as challenges to redefining the claims to nationhood. The
discourse on the post-national state or the naming of the present stage
as post-national is based on these yet unclear questions. 
A third spatial-analytic debate focuses on the
identity of
constructions brought about by the union of nation-states, such as the
European Union. Here again, the issue of boundaries, the cultural
identity, and the raison d&#8217;etre for supra-national bureaucratic and
ideological unification is contested. More importantly, from the
globalization perspective, against and with whom, the EU stands is
contestable. Finally, the already questionable relationship of the
immigrant populations' rights, compared to the status of the nationals
of the member states, is contestable as, at this time, works for an EU
constitution is under way. 
 Given this
background, Hedetoft and Hjort have sectioned this volume on the
postnational self into three: "Nationalism and Postnationality," "Self
and Community," and "Images of Home, Belonging, and Exile." In their
introduction, the editors question the concepts of home and belonging
and how they are discursively constructed and imagined as driving
either from ethnicity and culture (a pre-political and organicist
approach), or as political and civic, therefore rational. Either way,
belonging, they argue, is a contested field. During the national phase,
the pre-political and the political levels coincided on the same
community to accrue citizenship to members of a particular
nation-state, whereas the postnational order separates ethnicity and
identity. Belonging becomes a property of a rational kind of politics.
Therefore, liberal and civic nationalism and cosmopolitanism go hand in
hand with subjective demands for individual freedom, communal rights,
and negotiated identities. Belonging belongs to various levels,
national, subnational, and cosmopolitan, at the same time. However,
Hedetoft and Hjort claim globalization itself is not a substitute for
home and belonging, as one does not belong to the globe even as one
supports responsibility for global issues. 
The first section, "Nationalism and
Postnationality," contains articles
by Mark Jurgensmeyer, Ray Taras, Philip Schlesinger, John Hall, and
Richard Jenkins. In summary, Jurgensmeyer's contention is that
globalization has undermined the secular nationalism of Western models
and replaced it with ethno-religious nationalisms where identity and
power are threatened. People of particular nations have feared and
reacted to transnational and secular modernity and hence targeted the
United States which, according to Jurgenmeyer, defends secular
governments and stability of regimes. We have to make note that
Jurgensmeyer would not have foreseen the war on Iraq but his model goes
against the grain of the historical consequences of United States-led
actions against secular nationalisms. As examples, we can count its
role in the coup against the legitimate government of Mossadeq, which
was trying to nationalize the oil industry in Iran in the early 1950s,
in favor of the autocratic regime of the Shah, and the aid to Islamists
in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Contrary to this first
article, Ray Taras argues for taking into consideration the
multifaceted nature of the instability in the international order, from
mass poverty to internal political conflicts and fragmentation of
central authorities, rather than explaining it solely as consequence of
ethno-religious nationalisms. His point is, U.S. intervention into
international order is arbitrary, disfavoring nationalisms in certain
cases and rejecting others. In one sentence, according to Taras, while
in the bipolar world before the collapse of the Soviet Union the
national conflicts were internationalized, "in the post-bipolar world,
a 'nationalizing' international system emerged" (p. 18). 
Schlesinger in his article reflects on how the
politico-communicative
space in Europe has changed. On the lines of Habermas and Castells, he
emphasizes the communicative networks in the construction of social
cohesiveness and the informal processes leading to a political identity
and a political culture for the EU. To the earlier space of the
practice of democratic politics and citizenship identifiable on the
basis of individual nation-states, supranational formations in the
European Union look for communicative relations between the individual
public spaces of nation-states. In other words, the European public
sphere must be thought of as interrelated spheres of European publics.
However, this does not result just on the principles of economic and
political unification but through an idea of citizenship that
transcends the level of member nation-states. Although, together with a
small group of media and communication networks, groups of bureaucratic
and business elites have emerged Schlesinger does not believe the EU
has transcended the national spaces to become an identity above those
nation-states yet. 
 The essence of the
next two articles, by Hall and Jenkins, is a critique of a broad
globalization view. According to Hall, images of belonging are
imaginary not primordial and on that basis, strong transatlantic images
of belonging are unfounded. Immigrants do long for their origins yet
this is not the same as feelings of belonging. As in Canada and United
States, the prevalence of multiculturalism does not support the thesis
that the national culture in these countries is not homogenized around
the idea of belonging. Jenkins as well, similarly, questions the
adjective "global" in explaining the formerly multinational now
transnational corporations. In the corporate business environment,
which in larger volumes take place among the core nations, and in
certain institutional forms, a transnational culture emerges in
"meaningful international social networks." However, Jenkins notes,
percentage-wise this is a very limited population when the globe is our
reference. 
 The second part, "Self and
Community," in this writer's opinion, is the strength of this volume.
The articles by Seyla Benhabib, Riva Kastoryano, Yasemin Nuhoglu
Soysal, and James Tully are on how to construe citizenship. While they
contribute an analytical approach to claims of identity and citizenship
membership, they provide insights towards new directions in social
analysis. The minority groups in Europe, the immigrants and the
diasporas, in the environment of host cultures of Europe's
nation-states underline authors' concerns, but their theoretical frame
is well detailed in terms of applicability to other settings as well.
Even in Europe, today, their arguments are cogent in the face of strict
laws prohibiting religious scarves and other religiously symbolic items
in public schools in France and with the decision to expel more than
twenty thousand foreign residents from Holland. Benhabib aims to find
an intermediate alternative to open-borders and universal human rights
claims on one side and the civic republicanism with "thick conceptions
of citizenship" on the other. Given the ambiguous situation of the
non-national inhabitants of Europe, the liberal democracy position of
the European Union and the varying citizenship laws among the member
nation-states open the space for further controversy. When citizenship
is not a communitarian normative principle and is broken down into
components of collective identity, political membership, and social
rights and benefits, the situation of foreigners becomes a differential
of many factors. Do these groups act as communities, or subject to
rules as individuals? To which level do social rights belong? Are
rights separate from identities they choose in terms of loyalties to
country of origin? Do these loyalties exclude them from political
participation and claims to membership? Benhabib seeks answers to these
and similar questions. Kastoryanis also breaks the link between
national sentiments and political identity and civic republicanism by
positioning national identity separately from the rights to political
participation. She argues that the supranational construction of the
idea of European citizenship as a transnational identity, independently
from membership to nation-states, is paradoxically exclusionary against
the immigrant populations. This shows how the nation-states are still
the basis of transnational experiences. Following on these lines,
Soysal argues that membership to national community has become
decoupled from rights, the latter becoming more abstract and
transnational. As a consequence, citizenship is also decoupled from the
national level, becoming a matter of practice at local and
supranational levels as well. The practicing of civic rights of
immigrants becomes focused on the rights to identity--existence as
universal human rights principles--and occupies public space on those
grounds. 
 Theoretically, Tully analyzes
the important value of identity politics as a process of democratic
engagement for citizenship rights, rather than seeing it as a source of
social fragmentation. He presents a coherent yet detailed argumentation
for explaining the meaning of subjective identity and its construction
vis a vis other identities. Belonging, he says, is not a matter of a
discrete end-product but the practice of recognition of each claim to
identity even as they may be antagonistic. Furthermore, identities are
not bounded but overlapping. Democratic principles have to be inclusive
of all claims and have the sphere to reason its position, rather than
building a homogenizing space against fragmentation. 
Mich&egrave;le Lamont and Michael Herzfeld offer not so
much abstract
principles of citizenship but more sociological findings on how
particular nationals react to issues of identities. In her essay,
Lamont cites the differences in attitudes between individual community
members of United States and France, based on her study of sample
populations. The processes of exclusion and inclusion work differently
in these two societies. According to Lamont&#8217;s findings, the United
States has weaker external boundaries and strong moral boundaries in
denying social membership to blacks and the poor, constructed around
the moral value of the work ethic. However, France has strong external
boundaries and holds negative values against Muslims on the moral claim
of universal values of the collective republican French identity.
Herzfeld's discussion is on the resurgence of neo-Orthodox religious
identity in Greece. Here, in the process of modern nation-state making,
classicism was presented as the source for the new identity, with
disregard to religious elements of culture prevalent in the society, in
order to put Greece more on the European direction, and to offer a more
rationalized and "Protestant" role for an official view on religion.
Herzfeld suggests that there is a reversal in Greece in the direction
towards neo-Orthodoxy in the last two decades. 
The last section of the volume, "Images of Home,
Belonging, and Exile,"
offers articles by Ulf Hannerz, Benjamin Lee, Orvar L&ouml;fgren, and
Jeffrey Herf. Hannerz takes on the meaning of home, mainly in terms of
the nature of defining home in contrast to what is away, and he
presents the ways in which home is constructed away from home, in
biterritorialized or multiterritorialized contexts. Hannerz also
discusses how cosmopolitanism may be both aesthetic and experiential
and political in terms of supporting political programs with respect to
the cosmopolis at large. He, in addition, offers support to another
perspective to cosmopolitanism, following thinkers like Martha Nussbaum
and Kwame Anthony Appiah, as a general understanding and acceptance of
differences and living with them while being "at home." Benjamin Lee's
piece, "The Subjects of Circulation," is a metatheoretical argument on
the social imaginaries of flows of financial and technological systems,
of people, images, and ideas. When in circulation, these imaginaries
have a performative nature, with tropes to acquire semiotic values,
which in fact enter into circulation. From images of nation states to
citizenship, to capital, social imaginaries become objectified within
circulation. In new semiotic spaces, in circulation, they attribute
values to identities and new processes of globalization. In contrast to
Lee's article, L&ouml;fgren's narrative on the anxiety of border crossing
directly faces one's own memories and experiences of similar contexts,
whereby home and abroad is designated value. With the emergence of
practices of issuing passports and visas, countries have contributed to
nationalizing spaces across borders and attributing values to border
crossers as nationals, foreigners, or even undesirables. Technologies
of border crossings and symbolic signs also contribute to the
territorialization of culture, history, and identities. In the final
essay, Jeffrey Herf discusses the reasons behind the ways West Germany
came to terms with the memory of the Holocaust, going back to the
1950s, whereas there was a deliberate avoidance in the East, in the
German Democratic Republic. The reasons lie, according to Herf, in how
in the Federal Republic of Germany, under the guidance of conservative
Christian Democrat Konrad Adanauer, a supranational, pro-liberal,
individual rights discourse attempted to override the nationalist
premises--whereas, in the GDR, the evil of fascism became a generalized
concept and its victims were also constructed in the same manner, with
emphasis on patriotism and antifascism. 
 <cite>The Postnational Self</cite>
is a volume that deals with the uncertainties of the contemporary world
where issues of nationalism and globalization are debated on more
specific forms of postnationalisms and supranationalisms. The
controversy regarding globalization is salient, but nevertheless
contested as well in certain articles. The theoretical and conceptual
framework around the problematic of citizenship is especially strong.
Unfortunately, this book does not offer a satisfactory approach to
interpret the nature of social and political events that have taken
place since its date of publication. Namely, what happened in
Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ongoing fight between the Palestinians
and Israel are of significant importance to understand the reordering
of the globe among sources of power and transnational alliances, as
they aim towards making new selves of belonging and identity. The
enlargement of the European Union and hence the increasing complexity
and variation among the members have also led to new questions
regarding the feasibility of constructing supranational identities in
such a union. 
 Having read this volume,
one wishes to read more, but this time with an approach that would
focus more on the particular yet similar problems that face societies
of the South, as much as those of the North. This is not to claim that
they are different, but there are more particularly significant
dilemmas that the societies of the South face in matters concerning the
making of the subjects of nations and societies, and theory might be
able to write itself there first based on given histories and social
structures. Overall, this volume offers a good addition to the subject
as it offers insights to start debating similar problematics. 
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