The Seven Rules of Nationalism

by Kosmopolit in Academia & Society

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Some food for thought (and some more lazy blogging). Via Ariel Zellman’s blog I came across this little gem which can be found in Stuart Kaufman’s Modern Hatred: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War A Beginner’s Guide to Ethnic Politics 1. If an area was ours for 500 years and yours for 50 years, it should [...]

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History has always been (mis-) used in political debates. Basically, every social group constructs a set of historical ‘facts’ which then are used to justify any kind of ‘political action’. The constant repetition of these ‘facts’ create history. Usually different “versions” of history exist and most of the times these versions seem incompatible even though [...]

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Tower of Babel

by Kosmopolit in EU politics

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Every now and then a little language war breaks out in the EU institutions. Spain lobbies for Spanish to become one of the official working languages (at the moment: English, French and German) because it is one of most spoken languages worldwide. Germany (sometimes together with Austria) claims that German became more popular after the [...]

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Orson Welles in Belgium

by Kosmopolit in EU politics

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It is still working! 68 years after the original radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles. Listen to the original here: RTBF, a Belgian public television station repeated the exercise. This time without aliens invading planet earth but with the political destruction of Belgium. In the version of (french-speaking) RTBF, Flanders, the [...]

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