Présentation d’Arash Abizadeh intitulée « Ethnicity, Nationalim, and the Problem of Boundaries ».

21 janvier 2020, 16h.

C-8132 Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, 3150 Jean-Brillant, Montréal.

Résumé

I advance two main theses. First, even the most open forms of cultural nationalism have an inherent disposition to collapse into ethnic-nationalist variant. Second, this disposition is rooted in the impossibility of specifying the boundaries of the nation prepolitically. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar a it expresses the nation’ prepolitical culture, but it cannot fix cultural – national boundaries prepolitically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. The remedy is to conceive of politics without positing a prepolitical collective entity from whom the state derives its legitimate authority.