Transborder Membership Politics

BERKELEY SOCIOLOGY COLLOQUIUM SERIES

PLEASE NOTE THE SPECIAL TIME AND PLACE

ROGERS BRUBAKER

UCLA

Transborder Membership Politics 

in Cold War and Post-Cold War 

Germany and Korea

Thursday, 22 April 2010, 4-5:30 p.m.

102 Wurster Hall

This paper addresses transborder membership politics in historical and comparative perspective, examining changing German and Korean policies towards transborder coethnics (German in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and Koreans in Japan and China) during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. "Ethnic Germans" or "overseas Koreans" are often treated as prepolitical, self-subsistent ethnonational entities; and the transborder membership politics of Germany and Korea have been cast as clear exemplars of ethnic nationalism. Yet transborder populations' status as "co-ethnics" or "co-nationals" is not given by the facts of ethnic demography: it is constructed through, contested in, and contingent on representations, claims, and struggles in transborder political fields; and the state is central to these historically specific and variably configured political struggles.

Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.