Abstract
Both cultural nationalism and democratic theory seek to legitimate political power by rendering it compatible with the freedom of those over whom it is exercised, i.e., by appeal to a notion of collective self-rule. Both doctrines thus advance a self-referential theory of political legitimacy: their principle of legitimation refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is to be exercised. Since self-referential theories base legitimation in a collective self, they must necessarily combine the question of legitimation with the question of boundaries. The problem is that it is impossible to solve both problems together once it is assumed that the collectivity in question is in principle bounded. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it authentically expresses the nation's pre-political culture, but it cannot fix the nation's cultural boundaries pre-politically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. The democratic theory of bounded popular sovereignty claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the people's will, but cannot itself legitimate the pre-political boundaries of the people it presupposes. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only a theory of unbounded popular sovereignty avoids this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos, but such a theory departs radically from traditional theory. It abandons the notion of a pre-politically constituted "will of the people," supports the formation of global democratic forums, and challenges the legitimacy of unilaterally controlled political boundaries.

Arash Abizadeh is associate professor in the Department of Political Science and associate member of the Department of Philosophy, McGill University, and specializes in contemporary political theory and the history of political philosophy. His research focuses on democratic theory and questions of identity, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism; immigration and border control; and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hobbes and Rousseau. He is currently finishing a book titled The Oscillations of Thomas Hobbes: Between Insight and the Will.

The recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East represent one of the most dramatic global political developments since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  What factors and forces led to the sudden collapse of well-entrenched regimes and the emergence of democratic reform movements across a region long accustomed to hereditary succession and autocratic rule?  Does the current upheaval reflect unique circumstances in the Arab World?  Or should it be viewed in the wider context of governance issues and challenges that have arisen in Asian and other settings beyond North Africa and the Middle East?  As a governance specialist whose international career has spanned Arab and Asian societies, David Arnold will share his insights regarding these questions.  

David D. Arnold became the president of The Asia Foundation on January 1, 2011, after serving as the president of the American University in Cairo (AUC) for seven years. At AUC he superintended the construction of a new, state-of-the-art $400 million campus, including the region's largest English-language library; spearheaded a $125 million fundraising campaign, the largest in the University's history; and oversaw academic innovations including AUC’s first-ever PhD program and master’s programs in education, biotechnology, gender studies, digital journalism, and refugee studies.  Under his leadership, AUC also expanded its continuing education and community outreach activities and created new scholarship opportunities for its students.  Mr. Arnold’s earlier career included six years as executive vice president of the Institute of International Education and more than ten years of service in the Ford Foundation including stints in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.  He earned his Master’s in Public Administration at Michigan State University following a BA from the University of Michigan.

Europe dominated the 19th century. The 20th century saw the rise of the United States. Will the 21st century be "the Chinese Century"? Using a series of Harvard Business School Cases, this lecture will explore production, consumption, and education for China's new middle class, and think about China's future, in the light of its past.

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He serves as Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Chairman of the Harvard China Fund.

A historian of modern China, Professor Kirby's work examines China's business, economic, and political development in an international context. He has written on the evolution of modern Chinese business (state-owned and private); Chinese corporate law and company structure; the history of freedom in China; the international socialist economy of the 1950s; relations across the Taiwan Strait; and China's relations with Europe and America. His current projects include case studies of contemporary Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China, Europe, and the United States.

This talk is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS).

Daniel Posner is Total Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  His research focuses on ethnic politics, research design, distributive politics and the political economy of development in Africa. His work investigates, among other topics, the sources of ethnic identification and the political, social and economic outcomes that ethnicity affects-coalition-building, voting, collective action, public goods provision, and economic growth-with special attention to the mechanisms through which it has its impact. His methodological approach is to find creative ways to maximize leverage for making strong descriptive and causal claims, through the use of experiments (in the lab, in the field, and occurring "naturally"), new data sources (including the re-appropriation of data collected for other purposes), and the adoption of techniques from other disciplines such as satellite geography, public health, and behavioral economics.

His most recent co-authored book, Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage, 2009) employs experimental games to probe the sources of poor public goods provision in ethnically diverse communities. His first book, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (Cambridge, 2005), explains why and when politics revolves around one dimension of ethnic cleavage rather than another. He has received several awards for his work, including the Luebbert Award for best book in Comparative Politics (2006 and 2010), the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article in the American Political Science Review (2008), the Michael Wallerstein Award for the best article in Political Economy (2008), the best book award from the African Politics Conference Group (2006), and the Sage Award for the best paper in Comparative Politics presented at the APSA annual meeting (2004). He has been a Harvard Academy Scholar (1995-98), a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2001-02), a Carnegie Scholar (2003-05) and, this year, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2010-11). He currently serves on the editorial boards of World Politics, PS, and the Annual Review of Political Science. He is the co-founder of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE). He received his BA from Dartmouth College and his PhD from Harvard University. Before moving to MIT, he taught for twelve years at UCLA.