A key challenge for the party since 1949 has been to forge a new Chinese nation within the boundaries of a vast, ethnically heterogeneous former empire. The party has experimented with a variety of policies and mechanisms for securing the loyalty and obedience of non-Han groups, shifting between accommodative and assimilative approaches depending on the broader political climate at any given time. Frustrated by continued ethnic unrest, which the party sees as a threat to social stability and its political legitimacy, the party has, in recent years, sought to fortify the unity of the nationalities via increasingly coercive administrative and technological measures. This chapter examines the coercive measures implemented by the CPC to guide and control China’s minority nationalities. These include controls over religion, language, traditional practices, minority nationality regions, and minority nationalities who ventured to other parts of China. The controls are designed to prevent ethnic protest and to forge a common Chinese ethnic identity that subsumes all other ethnic identities and which is united by loyalty to the party-state.

The sixth chapter of Invisible Fatherland builds on the analysis of Rathenau’s assassination by examining the wide range of eulogies and obituaries published in its aftermath. These texts served as memory sites, in Pierre Nora’s sense, where Rathenau’s life and death were appraised alongside broader questions about the state and nation. While the many expressions of solidarity revealed gaps and contradictions in the republican imaginary, they also demonstrate that Rathenau’s death gave new momentum to the republican cause. Four weeks after the murder, the federal parliament passed the “Law for the Protection of the Republic” with the required two-third majority. Shortly after, President Friedrich Ebert declared Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Deutschlandlied the German national anthem, reclaiming a liberal democratic tradition that had been monopolized by German nationalists. The proclamation coincided with the republic’s Constitution Day on August 11, which is the focus of the following chapter.

Chapter 2 develops the core theoretical arguments of the book. First, citizenship is a foundation for democratic stability. It binds together deep differences inherent to plural societies to establish a baseline of shared liberal democratic goals and, with those goals in mind, conveys legitimacy to a regime to govern. Second, the division of this national unity is a source of instability as citizens respond to democratic threat not as citizens but as partisans, interpreting good citizenship norms by what benefits their “side.” A citizen-centered approach focuses on how individuals use partisanship as an informational heuristic in hard times, relying on party cues to determine whether responding to threat is “in their interest.” These interests are determined by positional incentives of their side, that is, whether their party is in or out of power and institutional design features, which either encourage costly, zero-(majoritarian) or positive-(consensus) sum responses.

Chapter two examines how postcolonial states respond to ethno-nationalism in general and minorities in particular. I argue that nationalist ruling elites conceive of the postcolonial state itself as an ‘ideology’, claiming that the unified national state, its liberal constitutional structure, and the developmental agenda will end the troublesome ethnic parochialism and, therefore, solve the problem of minorities. The ideological making of the postcolonial state not only obscures and glosses over the real reasons for the problem, but also shift attention to issues that help maintain asymmetric power relations. To substantiate this argument, I first explain John Thompson’s notion of ‘ideology’ as a set of ways in which ideas and meanings help create and sustain relations of domination. I then develop my argument that the ideology of the postcolonial state functions in three different forms: the postcolonial ‘national’, ‘liberal’, and ‘developmental’ state. Working through these three ideologies, the postcolonial state demands the submission of the minority cause to the greater ‘national’, ‘liberal’, and ‘developmental’ interests of the state, thereby legitimising the oppression of minorities. I demonstrate these ideological functions of the postcolonial state with historical examples: the discourse used in Indian Constituency Assembly debates to discuss minority rights.

Post-Oslo Nakba anniversarial mediation became a means of expressing the communities’ concerns in coherence with the readerships’ cadres sociaux, forming the inverse of Israeli-dictated mediation in the wake of the 1948 War and Six-Day War in 1967. Accordingly, this chapter posits that Kul al-Arab has presented the Nakba as an interpretative framework for contemporary grievances resulting from Palestinians’ status as an involuntary minority in Israel. Inside the West Bank, application of the Nakba as an interpretative framework and, simultaneously, an analogical tool testifies to the mediated expression of what Dennis McQuail defined as “national problems” and “national goals.” Through repeated usage of previously censored symbolic terminology, the readership of the semi-independent Al-Quds and the PA’s mouthpiece, Al-Hayat al-Jadida, is admonished to adhere to these national objectives, which call for an end to “the permanent Nakba.” Invocation of the so-called fixed national principles is equally meant to challenge the main actor deemed responsible for their suspension: Israel. The chapter’s identified mediated convergence of the Holocaust and the Nakba testifies to the actualization of the previously-discussed defensive victimhood theory; the fallacious negation of the former’s historical veracity is symptomatic of its deemed discursive incompatibility with the Palestinian narrative. Incongruously, the Holocaust has also been conjured within Nakba media output as a means of highlighting the depths of Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israelis. Forming a powerful realm of collective social mobilization against “the Zionist entity,” Nakba mediated output thus, at times, makes use of the most tendentious charge to debunk the Israeli aggressor and the perceived “Zionist colonial project”: the execution of a Palestinian Holocaust.