| dc.description.abstract | Nationalism in nations without statehood is common throughout history, although what nationalism leads to differs. In the cases of the United Kingdom and Spain, these effects ranged in various forms from extremism to cultural movements. In this paper, I will examine the effects of extremists within the nationalism movement and their overall effects on societies and the imagined communities within the respective states. I will also compare the actions of extremist factions, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Basque Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), and the Scottish National Liberation Army (SNLA), and examine what strategies worked for the various nationalist movements at what points, as well as how the movements connected their motives and actions to historical memory. Many of the groups appealed to a wider "imagined community" based on constructing a shared history of nationhood. For example, violence was most effective when it directly targeted oppressors, but it did not work when civilians were harmed. Additionally, organizations that tied rhetoric and acts back to actual histories of oppression or of autonomy tended to garner more widespread support than others. Through these comparisons, I will show how extremist nationalist tactics can vary across a wide spectrum of more and less violent activity but that one common thread is to locate extremist activity in the larger context of historical memory. | |
