Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
The rise of nationalism: the politics of perturbation
Before delving into a detailed analysis of the narrative material and the
discursive strategies that have socially and culturally sustained antagonism
and war, it was important to identify a theoretical framework. This framework
should highlight the relevance of these social and cultural discourses
in relation to both the social implications of psychological intervention
and the psychological implications of social intervention. In analysing the
fragmentation of contemporary Serbian society, it is very important to
refer to an ongoing historical process of confrontation between two coexisting
cognitive frameworks, corresponding to and re-producing two
different moral and social worlds:
• Ahomogeneous world, sustained by a regressive, narcissistic fantasy of
unity and homogeneity, which produces ontological security through the
denial of difference;
• A heterogeneous world, where a social environment is constructed by
accepting difference and acknowledging it as a non-threatening and
inseparable part of everyday life.
According to Artan Fuga, there is an intrinsic relationship between a cognitive
order and a specific conception of political power, as a type of social
and political justice is tied reciprocally to a certain conception of truth
(Fuga, 1998). If homogeneous thinking can be defined as a cognitive
approach based on the principle of homogenization, or the appropriation
of all of the conceptual space by one of the categorical poles involved in
the process of intellectual confrontation, heterogeneous thinking can be
defined as a cognitive approach based on acknowledgement of the value
of difference and on the attempt to synthesize the arguments produced by
all of the categorical poles around which the debate is structured. All
philosophical logic operating within homogeneous categories thus legitimates
authoritarian power, while democracy has been conceived, throughout
the history of philosophy, by heterogeneous conceptual structures. (Fuga,
1988: 28).
For the purposes of this project, the emergence and permanence of discourses
related to these two different cognitive, psychological and social
worlds can best be traced and analysed, in their full social and psychological
relevance, from a historical perspective. In order to do this, one
should bear in mind, as a common thread linking current events and the
discourses evoked to produce and interpret these events, a process: the
formation of modern nation-states following the dissolution of non-ethnic
sovereignties such as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Since
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