Chapter 3 examines the formation of the Ethiopian state and the revolution of the 1970s. This analysis makes two contributions to understanding the EPRDF and its project of state-led development. The first is to show that long-run state formation and the revolution forged many features of the state that subsequently enabled the EPRDF’s development project, even if these state structures were not initially utilised for developmental purposes under the Derg. More problematically, however, state formation also resulted in a linguistically and culturally diverse population, which was increasingly politicised along ethnic lines. Second, the chapter emphasises the EPRDF’s revolutionary origins. The Emperor’s overthrow in 1974 resulted in competition between multiple revolutionary movements, including one that was overtaken by the military in urban areas and rural-based ethno-nationalist insurgencies that sought to fight their way to the centre. These revolutionary origins shaped the EPRDF’s strategy for gaining and maintaining power, and the structure of the party itself, as it transitioned from an ethno-nationalist movement to a national government.

British neoliberalism was taken up by democratic parties in an open society, so this chapter explores what, if any, lessons about its political consequences can be drawn from the political evolution of the Soviet Union. Political parties in Western Europe by the 1970s were struggling to keep pace with the changing social needs and preferences of their electorates when neoliberalism emerged. This social dis-embedding of parties would only worsen in the UK, however, when neoclassical economic diagnoses became the bipartisan methodology, and electoral choices around economic strategies were duly narrowed. The chapter traces how, as the tide of neoliberal developmental failures has risen, the Conservative Party embraced the same political strategies as late Soviet regimes. The ‘combat task’ rhetoric of economic change was replaced with the charismatic politics of nationalism, and governments increasingly resorted to demonstrable lies and invented realities to deflect from the real effects of policy and after 2016, its most utopian expression: Brexit. The chapter also reviews the rise of political corruption under neoliberalism, another Soviet affinity, as ideology morphs into alibi.

This chapter applies Pragmatic Constructivism to interpret and assess two communities of practice: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which frames the problem of global warming, and the Conference of Parties (COP), which meets annually to discuss international society’s response within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Applying the book’s two normative tests – inclusive reflexivity and deliberative practical judgment – the chapter demonstrates how the IPCC maintains epistemic authority by appropriately managing the boundary that separates expert knowledge from non-expert opinion. The analysis of COP operates at a micro level (e.g. how physical space at the Conference is organized) and the macro level (e.g. whether it would be better to organize deliberations on a ‘minilateral’ basis). The chapter notes how this debate has been bypassed by the Paris Agreement and the decision to commit to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for emissions reduction. It assesses the consequences of that collective judgement in light of the progress made at the 2021 Glasgow COP. The chapter concludes that the problem should now be framed in terms of states delivering on the commitments they have made, and it considers the usefulness of nationalist dispositions and citizens assemblies in that process.

This chapter considers how Puccini was represented visually, predominantly through the still fairly new medium of photojournalism. The author discusses the marketing strategies devised by the Ricordi publishing house in order to promote Puccini to the readers of its various illustrated magazines as the successor to Verdi. Initially portrayed as a rather Bohemian young student, Puccini soon came to be depicted as the epitome of stylish Italian manliness. Visual representations of the composer – not only photographs but also paintings and sketches – exploited his connections to the Tuscan landscape of his native region, as Puccini was increasingly co-opted into the project of forging a national identity for the recently unified country. Care was taken to represent Puccini as an emblem of modernity and dynamism, and this was an image of the composer that was presented not only at home in Italy but all around the world.

This chapter focuses on ancient Sparta as a representative case for the general reception of classical antiquity in heavy metal music. The Spartans are the basis of songs and albums by dozens of bands across the globe: their last stand at Thermopylae is the most popular ancient battle in metal music, and their king Leonidas is one of the most popular ancient figures. Their appropriation by metal bands is a product of their rise in popularity in popular culture since the premiere of the 2006 film 300, and as in pop-culture, their appeal resonates with political and nationalistic agendas, especially of Greek bands. Sparta’s wide appeal harmonises with metal’s core ethos of hypermasculinity, the liberation of animal instincts and the disruption of systems of conformity and control. As with other topics from the classical world, heavy metal music takes the Spartans from both ancient sources and modern media and remakes them in the image of its own counterculture, that of the few standing defiant against the many.

Dubbed ‘the noisiest picture in English art’ by Martin Meisel, William Hogarth’s The Enraged Musician (1741) has enjoyed a long and prominent afterlife. Long before it became a canonical image in sound studies, it was adapted for the London stage as a musical afterpiece, Ut Pictura Poesis, at the Haymarket Theatre (1789). Though the performance took its plot, very loosely, from Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, its central conceit was not just the embodied reenactment of an image, but its conversion into a linear sequence of music. In this chapter, Oskar Cox Jensen interrogates this adaptation through a combination of close reading (of playtext, score, and imagined performance) and contextualisation, considering the key roles played by both the theatrical space itself and the members of the company – particularly the scene painter Michael Angelo Rooker (1746–1801). The resulting blend of sound, sight, and movement, Cox Jensen contends, reveals much about wider issues of the era, from the construction of national identities to the interplay between stage, street, and social class.

Chapter 1 identifies and analyzes the discourses that went into the “Indian Mona Lisa” trope. It qualifies the painting’s formal label, Portrait of Radha–Kishangarh (referring to the goddess, Krishna’s favorite), and informal one “Bani Thani” (referring to the purported model of the portrait, a concubine of the crown prince). It does so first by situating the painting among contemporaneous Mughal and Rajput Women Portraits. Further, it traces art-critical discourses surrounding the discovery of the Kishangarh School of Art during colonial times and the nationalist appropriation of the painting as an emblem for Rajput spiritual art, apotheosized in the issuing of a stamp. It describes the search for a model behind the painting, the protestations of this theory, and the painting’s current role in a popular cyber-orientalist love story.

America expanded trade and cultural relations as it faced foreign competition from the entrenched powers in Iran, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company maintained its strong economic control over Iran. Despite these limitations, the Pahlavi state centralized and engaged in nation-building. However, it imposed political restrictions and censorship that privately concerned American diplomats. Iran embarked on an immense project to build a national railway system, which it inaugurated just before another global war. The repression of political dissent, particularly religious or socialist viewpoints, raised concerns about Reza Shah’s style of leadership. Some Iranian intellectuals gravitated toward intolerant ideologies that clashed with the country’s legacy of religious and ethnic accommodation.

Contra readings of Harlequin’s Invasion that characterize the play as a patriotic call to arms during the Seven Years’ War, this essay argues that David Garrick constructs a different myth for Shakespeare than the myths of bellicose nationalism, celebrating a Harlequin Shakespeare over a nationalist one. The play suggests that comedic variety is more crucial to Shakespeare, to his ability to draw a plethora of characters who all seem true to life, than any nationalist zeal rooted in an unruly masculinity. Just as the play calls attention to the fluidity of citizenship, it calls attention to other fluidities that valorize nature and Harlequin as polymorphous. Garrick’s myth is predicated on a celebration of difference that is united in the same way that natural fecundity is harmonious. While nationalist myths yearn for unity as a totality that regulates, suppresses, and subsumes difference via antagonism, Harlequin’s Invasion valorizes nature’s spontaneity, its transformations and improvisations, more so than glory or self-sacrifice. The play uses Harlequin and his marvellous transformations to restore theatrical play and the daily enjoyments of theatre as a force for national unity that can accommodate the many differences that exist in a nation.

This essay tracks the conflicts that have taken place in Ireland over a period of several centuries, examining the ways in which Shakespeare has, himself, engaged with these conflicts, and the ways in which his work has been recruited by those participating in the conflicts – on both sides. The importance of Shakespeare to the identity formation of the colonial community in Ireland is noted, and the increasing appropriation of Shakespeare by nationalists from the end of the eighteenth century onwards is registered. A particular point of focus here is the nineteenth-century nationalist militant and land-rights activist Michael Davitt. Davitt’s possession of several photographic images relating to Shakespeare is noted, as is his general acquaintance with the playwright’s work. The essay also discusses the importance of Shakespeare to later nationalists, such as Patrick Pearse, executed for leading the 1916 uprising against British rule in Ireland. That one contemporary unionist commentator unexpectedly offered a cautious celebration of Pearse’s self-sacrifice by drawing a comparison between the militant and Julius Caesar’s Brutus is a telling sign of the extent to which Shakespeare served as a kind of common cultural reference point over the course of Ireland’s fraught, conflictual history.

The concept of nation in the United Kingdom is famously ambiguous. It has no juridical value but is a central element in constitutional debates. It can refer to either the whole state or to one of its component parts, England, Scotland, Wales and a part of Ireland. The name of the state, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, lacks a corresponding adjective; as Richard Rose remarks, ‘No one speaks of the “Ukes” as a nation’.1

The UK is an ‘evolved’ state1 that has become a devolved state. It was created by a series of bilateral arrangements to become a ‘state of unions’.2 The centre is key to how any state develops, extending its authority over a wider geography, whether by enforcing uniformity or permitting diversity. The rationale for each union has changed over time, reflecting the changing views on how the UK should stay together as a multi-national state.

The constitutional union between England and Scotland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and is central to our understanding of the nature of the British state today. It was a union long in the making, unveiling itself in two significant moments one century apart: the union of crowns in 1603 and of parliaments in 1707. These moments of union, which were indeed constitutional rather than merely political in nature, both signalled and helped to maintain over the following centuries, albeit in subtle ways, plural patterns of nationhood beneath the veneer of unitary statehood. The United Kingdom, which also includes Northern Ireland, that troubled relic of the Acts of Union with Ireland of 1801, has in recent times been called plurinational;1 but this is no more than a recognition of the plural national fact that has characterised the social nature of the state from its inception, albeit that the political salience of its multinational character has only in recent times come to the fore.

Irish poets wrote as much about love and beauty, memory, God and grief as their French, or English, or Dutch counterparts, but viewed in the round Irish literature, in Irish and English, is indelibly stamped by the cultural and political experience of colonisation. From the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bards’ and chroniclers’ literary record of a distressed Gaelic civilisation and of the depredations of foreign heretics, to the nineteenth-century novelists wrestling with the concept of ‘national character’ as destiny in the age of union, Ireland’s British Question could not, it seems, be avoided.

Explanations for Germany’s aggressive and bellicose foreign policy during the Wilhelmine period often point to efforts by entrenched elites to distract from the country’s stunted democratic development by generating international threats to unify the country. These accounts fail to come to terms with the moral revolution occurring in Germany at the time – the rise of nationalism. The identification of the group as the nation, and the understanding that the nation’s welfare is the leader’s primary concern, required a revolution in the basis of authority, one which implied that the emperor owed loyalty to the people. The nationalist right began to question the indecisive policy of the Wilhelmine regime in a way that was previously ethically sanctioned, condemning the emperor in particular for a lack of will and resolve during the second Moroccan crisis. In a dangerous world, this amounted to moral castigation. I supplement this chapter with a survey experiment conducted on the American public. For those who hold dangerous world beliefs, four virtues generally thought to indicate “competence” – disciplined and hardworking, strong-willed and determined, tough and strong, and persistent and resolute – are actually used as moral benchmarks, particularly for leaders.