Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Separatism and Integration: A Study in Analytical History (Publication of the American Association of School Administrators)

Relying on a comparative perspective, this book fills the gaps among political, sociological, and historical analysis of separatism. Instead of starting, as is traditional, from a preconceived conception of nationalism, Roehner's approach reverses the perspective. He shows how the forms taken by liberation struggles provide a "fingerprint" of the kind of nationalism at work. For instance, bloody and desperate uprisings taking place mainly in rural areas are typical of a nation that has been deprived of its land, as seen in eighteenth-century Ireland or nineteenth-century New Zealand. On the other hand, protestation meetings taking place in cities reveal a revolt of the ruling class against political subordination as seen in Hungary in the nineteenth century, in Egypt or Morocco in the first half of the twentieth century, or in Kosovo in the late 1990s. Moreover the sociohistorical perspective adopted in this study reveals that religion and language are but two different facets of a nation's identity. In seventeenth-century Europe, religion was the principal social cement, but during the nineteenth century, languages progressively took over the role formerly assumed by religions. Through its broad perspective, this book allows new insight into the various ways separatism is likely to manifest itself in the world of the twenty-first century, and it provides a framework for understanding the diverse components of nationalism. Review A scholarly, well-defined inquiry that combines sociology and history. Recommended.-- "Choice" About the Author Bertrand M. Roehner was born in 1946 in Strasbourg (France), and is currently a professor at University Paris 7. He is the author of several books and nearly fifty papers that have appeared in various scientific journals in sociology, economics, and econophysics. He has been a guest at various leading economic institutions such as the Institute of Economics in Copenhagen and at Harvard's Department of Economics. Leonard J. Rahilly holds a Ph.D. in romance languages and linguistics from Princeton University. He taught languages briefly at the secondary level, and was a member of the faculty of the Department of Romance and Classical Languages at Michigan State University until his retirement in 1996. He is the author of several papers on medieval French manuscripts, as well as a number of others devoted to the pedagogy of language study. Several of the courses he has taught addressed the problems of translation.