• Friday, 29 March 2024
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Atalia Omer to Gulan: Globalization is here but through the system and logic of neoliberalism

Atalia Omer to Gulan: Globalization is here but through the system and logic of neoliberalism

Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her PhD in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (November 2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on religion, violence, and peacebuilding as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. She is a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow working on a book tentatively titled Tweeter Prophets & The Harmony Business: Religion and the Violent Legacy of Peace. In a written interview she answered our questions like the following:

Gulan: How do you define Nationalism, and what are its fundamental features?

Professor Dr. Atalia Omer: Nationalism is a modern phenomenon closely linked in terms of its origins and consolidation to the expansion of western Christian colonial powers since the 15th century. I understand nationalism to be a political legitimizing narrative focused on a control of a state infrastructure which then functions to socialize and reproduce itself through a variety of mechanisms.

Gulan: Obviously, there is a resurgence of nationalism worldwide; this rise is primarily driven by what?

Professor Dr. Atalia Omer: It is not that nationalism went away it is that what is manifesting in the foreground are illiberal and exclusionary forms of nationalism (this is with a recognition that all forms of nationalism involves certain thresholds of exclusion and inclusion in citizenship, including linguistic boundaries). What contributed to the manifestation of right wing exclusionary forms of nationalism globally are profound global inequalities due to neoliberal policies, refugee and migrant flows, and growing non-Christian communities in Euro-America as well as the mechanisms of social media, misinformation, and the ease of transmission of conspiracy theories.

Gulan: Some scholars characterize this nationalism as populism or authoritarian nationalism, what do you make about that?

Professor Dr. Atalia Omer: While populism is not necessarily authoritarian or chauvinistic what we see consolidating in recent years is anti-democratic, fascistic and autocratic chauvinistic forms of nationalism that manufacture imagined conceptions of a "golden age" to justify racist tendencies and exclusionary practices (and narratives about threat to the good old days, when "America was great," for example). This also comes with a supposed suspicion of the establishment for its self-destructive inclinations. We can observe this pattern in various places with ethnoreligious nationalists exchanging notes with one another identifying and targeting enemies within and without. A targeting of a domestic other indeed has been part and parcel of modern nationalism from its inception. The Inquisition in Spain for example was nation-making instrument.

Gulan: Has globalization run its course? Has this trend reversed? And the return to nationalism has become inevitable as the result of dissatisfaction or disappointment of globalism?

Professor Dr. Atalia Omer: Globalization is here but through the system and logic of neoliberalism. There are also global currents of social justice that connect the dots and expose global matrixes of power, domination, and exploitation.

Gulan: Those who have expressed concerns about the revival of nationalism, point to the fact that, historically nationalism wreaked havoc and led to the eruption of devastating war, persecution of minorities, and undermining democracy, do you believe that these are substantiated claims or are misplaced and erroneous assumption?

Professor Dr. Atalia Omer: These are big claims that can be problematized. The nation-state framework is not one thing and is also the site of deepening of human rights (potentially). I always like to return to the words of Hannah Arendt, the great German Jewish philosopher who was a stateless refugee during WWII, there is something about the right to have rights that within the modern context is fulfilled within the nation-state. I think that the meaning of citizenship and belonging can be negotiated. It does not need to be exclusionary and violent and people who were marginalized from the discourse of nationalism need to be centralized and their historical injustices redressed.

Gulan: Some talk about closed nationalism, how do you define this form of nationalism? And do you agree that it has led some states to pursue a more isolationist foreign policy?

Professor Dr. Atalia Omer: I suppose what you mean by that is the coexistence of exclusionary naitonalist rhetoric on the one hand and neoliberal policies benefiting economic elites on the other. This is the situation we have today with the new wave of so called strong men from Modi to Trump and their benefiting from global neoliberal policies. Many of the people who vote for them on the basis of their rhetorical racism and targeting of "others" within their communities (Muslims in particular) are absolutely disadvantaged by the global economic regimes.

Gulan: You are a co-author of “religious nationalism”; we cannot help but to ask you about the definition of religious nationalism and the interplay of religion and nationalism? Can they reinforce each other, or they are mutually exclusive?

Professor Dr. Atalia Omer: Yes they are very linked to one another as per my above example of the proto nationalism created by way of the Inquisition. Nationalism as the political project of modernity emerged in conjunction with displacing the supposed centrality of religion in shaping every aspect of social and political life in Europe. And yet the "secular" is not emptied of religion but rather is constituted by it selectively. Religion becomes a "heritage" an "ethnicity" a "race" (all modern categories) that constitute thresholds for belonging and non-belonging to the modern political community. What each of these categories would mean can change over time with explicitly "religious" forms of nationalism making those connections synonymous.

Gulan: It is evident that the issue of religion is deeply enmeshed and entangled in the Israel- Palestine conflict, what do you make about that? And don’t you believe that it further exacerbated the conflict?

Professor Dr. Atalia Omer: The short answer is yes. Even the secular interpretations of Isralei nationalism depends on a particular biblical grammar and a selective interpretation of Jewish history. Over the years and with the entrenchment of the occupation, the arguments to justify this ongoing violence against Palestinains became more and more Judaize. Now, prestegious human rights organizaitons render the entire space as "apartheid" based on Jewish supremacy.

This does not mean that everything is done through explicitly appeals to Judaism but rather that everything is underpinned by a system that privileges Jews over non-Jews(once again exposing the complex relations between Judaism as ethnicity, politics, religious traditions, etc). There are other explicit religious interventions that have shaped the course. these include the role of Christian Zionists. In any case, religion is absolutely relevant to the analysis of the political dynamics, the realities of colonization, the occupation as well as how all these processes have been authorized all these decades. There is also the issue of antisemitism that reuslted in a genocide against the Jews during WWII which consolidated the political project of Israel on the acks of Palestinains. One cannot understand modern antisemitism without analyzing how it is rooted in classical Christian violence against Jews.

Gulan: What is your opinion about of what it is called “Christian nationalism” in USA, as some say that it will distort Christian faith and undermine American Democracy?

Professor Dr. Atalia Omer: Yes many of the points I made above about right wing populism apply here. The democratic institutions are eroding and democratic spaces are shrinking.

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