This essay examines nationalist party views on abortion. The abortion policies of the Sweden Democrats, the United Kingdom Independence Party, and Sinn Féin are studied through descriptive actor-centred idea analysis. Utilising theories on nationalism and abortion policy, the party policies on abortion are scrutinised in terms of which conception of abortion they subscribe to, and how actors and objects in relation to abortion are perceived. Subsequently these views are compared, showing a great overlap in terms of how abortion as a public issue is conceived, and how the objects and actors involved are perceived. All parties in the study subscribe to a moral conception of abortion to some extent, and the aborting woman and the foetus become the main focal points. In other regards party policies on abortion vary greatly.

This thesis examines the ways in which the ideology of Irish nationalism has influenced and shaped the works of five Irish poets from a Protestant background: Louis MacNeice, John Hewitt, Richard Murphy, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. These poets began their careers during a time period in which the cultural framework for comprehending authentic Irish identity, place and history was largely yielded to the authority of the principles of nationalism. This made a considerable impact on the poets and the ways that they would be made to engage such themes in their poetry. Their works are often noted for expressing ambiguity, ambivalence and complexity with regard to the poets' relationship with their Protestant background. This thesis maintains that much of the conflict found within the poetry can be attributed to an internalisation of a number of precepts from the politicised cultural construct established by nationalism. The nationalist authority over the Irish identity-discourse has not been sufficiently explored or explicated in critical studies of these poets' works. This thesis is dedicated to examining the nuanced ways in which nationalism influenced the poets' understanding of the concepts of Irish identity, place and history. With respect to their individual biographies, contexts and backgrounds, detailed analyses will reveal the significant affect that the tenets of nationalism had on each writer's poetic output and career. The research will make clear the extent to which these five poets exemplify a particular paradigm of the Irish Protestant poetic psyche of the eras under review. The analyses will contribute a fresh perspective to critical understanding of the intricate, oftentimes complicated, relationship that these poets maintained with their community, culture and country of origin.

The purpose of this work is to examine the origins and development of Croat nationalism in the light of the Croat-Magyar relations from the period of Enlightened Absolutism to the eve of the revolutionary year of 1848. Since the development of Croat nationalism was strongly influenced by the Magyar national movement of that period, the bulk of this discussion is devoted to an analysis of the Croat-Magyar controversy caused by the Magyars' desire to magyarize the Croat nation. The main struggle between the two opposing forces took place in the Common Diet composed of the delegates from both nations. However, the Croat national movement itself originated among the young native intellectuals who, as a rule, did not have any direct influence on the proceedings of the Croat legislative house, the Sabor. Under the influence of the Czech, Slovak and Polish nationalists, these intellectuals rendered an invaluable service to the Croat nation. Their work resulted in Croatia's cultural renaissance which subsequently served as the basis for the struggle against Hungary. The author presupposes that the reader possesses adequate knowledge of Croat history in general and of the period discussed in particular. Therefore no attempt has been made to describe or explain some fundamental aspects of Croatia's political and cultural history. Any such endeavour would inevitably remove us from the topic and would be inconsistent with the task of this work. Chapters I and II deal with the background of the problem. Chapter I offers a brief explanation of Croatia's political status within the Habsburg Monarchy. Chapter II describes the origins and background of the Croat national movement which developed, following the year 1832, as the Illyrian Movement. It enables the reader to acquaint himself with the fundamentals and character of the Croat-Magyar controversy and with the political and cultural situation prevailing among the various Croat regions. Chapter III concentrates on the Illyrian Movement itself. It describes extensively the cultural renaissance of the Croats and points out the role and effects of the Illyrian Movement on the Croat-Magyar relations. Here again the author concentrates on the political effects of the cultural renaissance. The literary works of the Illyrians are mentioned and described in so far as they had a direct bearing upon the political situation in Croatia. In Chapter IV, the political nature of the struggle between the two nations reaches its peak. Following the formation of the first political parties and the crisis in the Croat national movement caused by the defeat of the Illyrians at the hands of the Magyarons in the election of 1845, the Croat national idea was finally emancipated. The Croat language finally became the official language for Croatia. Thus the main aim of the Illyrians was accomplished. In the last moment, Croatia emerged fully prepared to face the revolutionary year of 1848. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

In this year of 1948 we see for the first time the economic and political union of several nations of Western Europe. Doubtless they have united in the face of a common danger: communism; but many men of good will hope that this union inspired by fear will survive that fear and become the germ of a true world society. One of these nations, France, has already contributed freely to this idea, the idea of a united Europe. Many of her most eminent contemporary writers have dedicated a considerable portion of the work, a great deal of their thought, to this problem. These French intellectuals of the 1920's and 1930's proposed a variety of ways of accomplishing this vital synthesis, all of their discussions reflecting the new and keen awareness that European civilization has suddenly become extremely mortal. A surprising number of French writers not only realized, well before Munich, that the League of Nations was a house of cards, but sought the catalyst that would permit the nations of Europe, at once the glory and the curse of the world, to fuse otherwise than in the furnace of war. It is the purpose of this thesis to note the views of this subject of several brilliant minds, especially those of Valery, Benda, Larbaud, Durtain and Giraudoux. The examination will be necessarily superficial, but, it is hoped, complete enough to indicate the diversity of opinion and, more important, the unanimity of a very lively concern. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

This thesis project explores the ways that we/us/our, they/them, you/your and other grammars/pronouns position readers in relation to a nationalizing we. Building on the work of Michael Billig and his articulation of a theory of banal nationalism, I argue that curricular materials, authorized grade eight Ontario textbooks specifically, reflect and represent a national we that gets racialized—essentialized, arbitrarily defined and divided and continually reproduced—through the use of a grammar that permeates the representations of geography, language arts, science and mathematics discussions in curricular textbooks. Using a theory of racialized deictic nationalism, one that points to the representation of a racialized us that reproduces and reflects seemingly natural nationalized populations, I argue that the texts both actively operate to contain the imagined spaces of the nation and describe it as our space exclusive of a them through the subtlety of grammar. As a means of contesting the ease with which a racialized deictic nationalizing grammar is used, I analyze a Wikipedia article as an exploration of a potential space for re/writing notions of the racialized deictic national we. While the analysis of the Wikipedia article and the “behind the scenes” discussion highlights the difficulties of escaping the trappings of a racialized deictic national us, the analysis serves to show that individuals do hold differential conceptions about who we are and how seemingly static notions of us don’t accurately reflect us. I conclude with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of this project.

This project traces the wide and varied uses of patriotic (and, at times, jingoistic and xenophobic) humor within the Victorian novel. a culture’s humor, perhaps more than any other cultural markers (food, dress, etc.), provides invaluable insight into that nation’s values and perceptions—not only how they view others, but also how they view themselves. in fact, humor provides such a unique cultural thumbprint as to make most jokes notoriously untranslatable. Victorian humor is certainly not a new topic of critical discussion; neither is English ethno-cultural identity during this era lacking scholarly attention. However, the intersection of these concerns has been seemingly ignored; thus, my research investigates the enmeshed relationship between these two areas of study. Not only do patriotic sentiment and humor frequently overlap, they often form a causational relationship wherein a writer’s rhetorical invocation of shared cultural experiences creates humorous self-awareness while “inside” jokes which reference unique Anglo-specific behaviors or collective memories promote a positive identity with the culture in question. Drawing on and extending the work of James Kincaid’s Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Harold Nicolson’s “The English Sense of Humor,” and Bergson’s and Freud’s theories of humor as a social construct, I question how this reciprocated relationship of English ethnic identity and humor functions within Victorian novels by examining the various ways in which nineteenth-century authors used humor to encourage affirmative patriotic sentiment within their readers.

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This dissertation examines how North Korea’s version of nationalism was constructed by taking a material thing as my point of departure. Vinalon is a kind of synthetic fiber developed by a Korean scientist during the Japanese colonial era. North Korea succeeded in the industrial production of vinalon in 1961. The construction of the Vinalon Factory in Hamhŭng was completed by North Koreans using their own resources and manpower. Unlike nylon, which uses oil as the main raw material, vinalon uses locally-mined anthracite and limestone as the main raw materials. For these reasons, North Korea was proud of the industrialization of vinalon, eventually giving it the title of “Juche [self-reliance] fiber.” Although North Korea emphasizes solely its self-reliant aspect, vinalon has had a global history from the colonial period to the post-war era. I argue that the global network of technological knowledge made the industrial production of vinalon possible and that the industrialization of vinalon was a historically contingent process of experimentation. Uncovering the global history behind the industrialization of vinalon and probing vinalon as a material produced in the dynamics between Juche and the global, my work contributes to the rethinking of U.S.-Soviet-centered Cold War scholarship by investigating Second World-Second World and Second World-Third World relationships. Furthermore, focusing on the agency of the vinalon products in people’s everyday lives, my project explores how vinalon threaded North Korea’s Juche discourse through a variety of products that penetrated into the everyday and the gendering of those products. By analyzing the interaction between the scientific and the socio-political realms on the one hand and by exploring how the Mother Party discourse became embodied in the form of the material vinalon on the other hand, my dissertation goes beyond the politics-centered narrative that has dominated scholarly work on North Korean ideology. In this dissertation, I utilize diverse sets of textual, material, and visual sources, as well as interviews, while combining methods from social and global history, material culture studies, history of science and technology, gender studies, and STS studies. Each chapter of the dissertation explores different aspects of the social life of vinalon in North Korea. Chapter 1 investigates how the industrialization of vinalon allowed North Korea to promote its legitimacy as a postcolonial independent nation-state while contributing to the expansion of the Juche discourse, providing background on the processes through which vinalon was invented and industrialized. This chapter shows that the successful industrialization of vinalon and subsequent fetishization of Juche science facilitated the formulation of Juche ideology in middle to late 1960s North Korea. Chapter 2 uncovers the global history that enabled vinalon to be industrialized, focusing on the global circulation of technological knowledge from the colonial period to the 1960s. This chapter also traces how the vinalon industry developed differently in Japan and China in response to changes in the world chemical industry. Chapter 3 explores the social conditioning processes in which people’s perceptions of vinalon were constructed through their interactions with the state’s promotion of science, particularly in the form of literature. Taking a look at how the popularization of science and vinalon products consumed in the everyday lives of the people were connected to the construction of North Korean national identity, this chapter uses the case study of vinalon to examine the crossroads where science, the masses, and national identity intersect. Chapter 4 deals with how vinalon played the role of a maternal artifact that embodies the leader’s love for the people as well as the discourse of the Mother Party. Here I probe how the affective aspects of the fiber based on its materiality and representation contributed to the process of making the Mother Party discourse stronger and more pervasive. Chapter 5 addresses how the uses of vinalon in the realm of the everyday have changed over time, what role vinalon played in the process by which North Korea reinforced nationalism in response to social crises, and how vinalon has been consumed in the process of constructing an ideological fabric of North Korea today. Clothes, socks, blankets, scarfs, bags, and other products made from vinalon became the objects by which people directly experienced Juche in their daily lives. By looking at vinalon as a thread that played a pivotal role in weaving the Juche discourse into North Korean society, my dissertation shows that vinalon acted as an effective vehicle to project North Korea’s Juche materially and discursively in the people’s everyday lives.

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Thesis advisor: Ali Banuazizi / This thesis takes a historical approach in examining the effects of foreign intervention and interference in the development of Iraqi nationalism. The first portion of the thesis provides a background of Iraq’s history to provide the reader with knowledge of Iraq’s political development. The thesis will demonstrate that direct occupation, transnationalism, and a weak state have prevented Iraq from developing a coherent national identity that can be adopted by all ethnosectarian groups in the state. Tracing the development of Iraq as a state, as well as an analysis of the motivations of foreign actors and transnational entities will shed light on this dynamic. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.