At the moment I am attending to a course of Greek History at the Univ. Of Trento. I've never imagined I was going to find it so interesting. We are now focusing on the efficiency of federalist arrangements in Ancient Greek to moderate conflict in interstate relations. Of course we needed to check and redefine the concepts of federalism, state, political conflict to fit the context of Ancient Greek and even if it might have seemed awkward at the beginning, it turned to be very stimulating.
In 2005 I specialized on Federalism at the Institute of Federalism in Fribourg in Swizerland and Federalism was being considered an instrument to handle Ethnic Conflict. It had worked in managing the end of the war in the Balcans and it was being applied in Irak after the war in 2003. At that moment it was impossible to imagine that the mix of federalism and ethnicity was going to arrive to Ancient Greek Studies.
Now, I have just received a very appealing book titled “Federalism in Greek Antiquity” Edited by Hans Beck and Peter Funke (2015 Cambridge University Press) that contains an article by J.Hall titled “Federalism and ethnicity”. I haven't read it yet and it probably includes an interesting perspective to understand the Greek world, but somehow it suggested me that ethnicity became an overexploited category and we are not able to move forward the Nation-State concept.
So, in this course I'll try to explore the following three hypothesis:
1- I have the feeling that after the end of the Cold War there is the tendency to define most conflicts as “ethnic” and Federalism as “THE” instrument to handle ethnic conflict.
2- Ethnicity and Federalism became extremely abstract and flexible concepts that include a wide range of cases. The Cold-War had been the main problem on international arena for many decades and in some sense had burdened any other conflict. The end of this main conflict has two consequences: the first is that the security concerns moved from the world wide dimension to the local dimension; and he second is that there is not any ideology alternative to democracy in nation-state units. So ethnicity and federalism seem the only categories we can use.
Now, I have just received a very appealing book titled “Federalism in Greek Antiquity” Edited by Hans Beck and Peter Funke (2015 Cambridge University Press) that contains an article by J.Hall titled “Federalism and ethnicity”. I haven't read it yet and it probably includes an interesting perspective to understand the Greek world, but somehow it suggested me that ethnicity became an overexploited category and we are not able to move forward the Nation-State concept.
So, in this course I'll try to explore the following three hypothesis:
1- I have the feeling that after the end of the Cold War there is the tendency to define most conflicts as “ethnic” and Federalism as “THE” instrument to handle ethnic conflict.
2- Ethnicity and Federalism became extremely abstract and flexible concepts that include a wide range of cases. The Cold-War had been the main problem on international arena for many decades and in some sense had burdened any other conflict. The end of this main conflict has two consequences: the first is that the security concerns moved from the world wide dimension to the local dimension; and he second is that there is not any ideology alternative to democracy in nation-state units. So ethnicity and federalism seem the only categories we can use.
3- Somehow we are trapped in a Nation-State logic in which:
a- we assume that every state needs to correspond to a nation, imagined nation or nation of destiny;
b- every nation (or “ethnic group” which is defined in a similar way but insted of focussing into the future, it focus on the past) is legitimated to expect to have its own state;
BUT
c- political units don't happily accept that parts of the territory separates from their state. If this is true, conflict is a logical consequences of the political logic of Nation-State in democracy.
I am open to new concepts and ideas, let's see how it follows.
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