The Spatial Imaginary of National Practices: Dwelling—Domesticating /Being—Exterminating

Abstract

The prevalence of a culture of ‘tolerance’ towards ethnic minorities in the West in the face of the practices of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Eastern Europe and of other more general practices of intolerance and extermination in parts of the Third World has led to a popular as well as a sometimes academic conception of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ nationalisms essentialised into two radically different kinds of nationalism. In this paper I offer a critique of such a differentiation based on an examination of various practices of dealing with otherness in the process of nation building, particularly in Lebanon and Australia. I argue that practices of nation building, ranging from the promotion of ethnic cultures to mass ethnic killings, are guided by national imaginaries which, despite their empirical variety, are basically structured in the same way. This means, first, that such differences are better understood as the historical or contextual privileging of specific nationalist problematics grounded in this common national imaginary. Second, it means that within the nationalist imaginary that guides them there is a space in which, in given circumstances, the practitioners of valorisation and tolerance can turn into practitioners of mass killings and vice versa without them turning into a radically different kind of nationalists. Far from being specific to an ‘Eastern’ nationalism, the logic of extermination is inherent to any form of nation building today.

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