Description
- Abstract:
- Abstract of “Empire, Democracy, State, and Nation: Sociological Occlusions of the German and Russian Empires” by Juho Korhonen, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2019 Contrary to most narratives of the twentieth century, the transformation of imperial into national states in the aftermath of World War One was neither a break with the past nor a condition of democracy’s development. Instead, nation-state politics were a means of another kind of imperial rule limiting democracy’s extensions; their sociological reflections subsequently make invisible democratization’s possibilities within imperial formations. Empirically, I analyze democratization efforts of politically oppressed actors in a non-sovereign periphery of the Russian Empire and in the sovereign metropole of the German Empire to highlight democracy’s actual expressions in this period, on the one hand, and on the other, to address subsequent occlusions in theoretical accounting for empire’s alternatives. Political and historical sociology have failed to theorize the dynamics of empire and nation-state in this transformation. The discipline itself, formed in step with these political transformations, developed a perspective resonating with the political needs of Western metropolitan nation-states and their national historiographies. There is an alternative, most clearly evident in the rethinking of democracy’s conditions. I take democratization as my proxy and proceed from a comparison of two democracies under non-Western imperial states to theorize democratization separate from the politics of nation-states. Exploring the relations that informed and defined democracy in this context, I analyze the transformation of imperial states into nation-states. Concluding with a comparison of the sociology of democratization to democracy’s articulation and mobilization by dominated actors under non-Western imperial relations in the Russian and German Empires, I highlight several blind spots in the narrative and analytical lens organizing the sociology of democracy, nation, state and empire that speak to the co-constitutive development of sociology and western imperial metropoles, and reveal the continuities of empire in the transformation into nation-states, highlighting sociology’s imperial entanglements along the way.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019
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Citation
Korhonen, Juho,
"Empire, Democracy, State, and Nation: Sociological Occlusions of the German and Russian Empires"
(2019).
Sociology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/bsh4-bx05
