Personality and national identity: How the Big Five relate to civic and ethnic conceptions of nationhood

In recent years, the concept of national identity has recaptured the imagination of public opinion research and with it individuals' conceptions of what it takes to be a “true” member of their nation. This investigation aims to add to the explanation of varying conceptions of nationhood by scrutinising their personality-based foundations. It provides the first systematic analysis of a yet unstudied link between the Big Five personality traits and two ideal-typical conceptions of nationhood: civic and ethnic national identity. Using 18 samples from six European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and the United Kingdom), each containing around 1000 individuals, we uncover psychological underpinnings of attitudes towards national membership, revealing several consistent trait patterns. We find a negative relationship between openness to experience and an ethnic national identity, while conscientiousness associates positively with the civic ideal type of national identity content. The findings presented extend current understandings of how people conceptualise national belonging and provide evidence that distinct conceptions of nationhood are related to different dispositional foundations.     

And if they don't dance,they are no friends of mine: Exploring boundaries of national identity

National identity is widely used to explain anti-immigrant attitudes and thus the appeal for right-wing (populist) parties. Yet, consensus on how to capture national identity is lacking. This article identifies ideal-typical patterns of national boundary making across 42 countries and more than 25 years beyond the ethnic–civic dichotomy and addresses the multidimensionality of national identity. Using latent class analysis and cluster analysis, four ideal-typical conceptions of nationhood are identified and shown to be differently related to national attachment, national pride, and national chauvinism. Overall, the results close the methodological–empirical gap between classical approaches and recent inductive approaches to national identity and demonstrate that national identity is a cross-cultural phenomenon with distinct types.     

Trusting diversity: nationalist and multiculturalist orientations affect generalised trust through ethnic in‐group and out‐group trust

One premise of popular nationalism is that ascribing to a shared culture that enjoys a privileged political status enables us to construct the foundation that is vital to generating and supporting trust among members of the ethnic majority. Multiculturalism presumes that the accommodation of new minority cultures is conducive to trust. Utilising structural equation modelling, this paper distinguishes between ethnic in‐group trust (in the Danish context, trusting fellow Danes) and ethnic out‐group trust (trusting refugees and immigrants), in addition to a more generalised social trust towards unknown others. Previous studies in this field have not distinguished between these different dimensions of social trust. Results show that, vis‐à‐vis generalised trust, at the individual level, nationalism cannot compensate for lower trust towards immigrants with higher trust towards other Danes. There is some support for the ‘national identity’ argument, whereby nationalism, perceived shared values and in‐group trust are positively correlated. However, the net effect of nationalism upon generalised trust remains negative. By contrast, multiculturalism is associated with higher levels of in‐group trust and out‐group trust and ultimately of generalised trust.     

The chimera of national identity

ABSTRACT. In both popular discourse and many academic works, the existence of national identity is largely taken as given. Although researchers disagree on whether national identities are modern or perennial, and how best to gauge the intensity of identification with a particular nation, there is near unanimity on the view that national identities are real and perceptible entities. In contrast to this view I argue not only that there was no national identity before modernity but also that there is little empirical evidence for the existence of national identities in the modern age either. While it is obvious that many individuals show great affinity for their nations and often express sincere devotion to the ‘national cause’, none of these are reliable indicators of the existence of a durable, continuous, stable and monolithic entity called ‘national identity’. To fully understand the character of popular mobilisation in modernity it is paramount to refocus our attention from the slippery and non‐analytical idiom of ‘identity’ towards well‐established sociological concepts such as ‘ideology’ and ‘solidarity’. In particular, the central object of this research becomes the processes through which large‐scale social organisations successfully transform earnest micro‐solidarity into an all‐encompassing nationalist ideology.     

Imagining Britain: reconstructing history and writing national identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles

ABSTRACT

The idea that in the Tudor era the English people became proudly conscious of their national language and history, has been challenged by critical interventions that suggest how England as a nation had to be “written”: the act of writing can construct imagined boundaries, both to appropriate and exclude. In Englands Heroicall Epistles, Drayton replaces Ovid’s mythological figures in the Heroides with specific well-known English historical personas who provide, through their letters, different perspectives on English history. I will contend that Drayton’s assertion of national identity and patriotism is done verbally and semantically, while his allegiance to oppositionist politics is rendered generically and subversively by a remarkable manipulation of the genre of historical poetry in the Heroicall Epistles: this in turn reflects his deep engagement with ideas of history and the construction of national consciousness in early modern England.     

Reconfiguring the French nation: Public debates on the Left and national identity

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalisation has shaped the fate of local and national cultural productions, from movies to music, from entertainment to food. How did French intellectual and political elites respond to this unprecedented challenge? What were the implications for the politics of nationalism and national identity? Two books respond to these questions, although in very different ways – the first directly and the second indirectly. Vincent Martigny's Dire la France explains how a new way of narrating French national identity emerged in the 1980s within an internationally oriented French Left, attentive of the coming challenges of cultural pluralism. Patrick Boucheron's (ed.) Histoire mondiale de la France advances into a more challenging direction by skilfully unsettling the ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ clichéd narrative. French history is thus redefined by moving away from the Frankish/Gallic myth of descent, thereby reconfiguring national identity along new lines. This article identifies how crucial debates on the cultural nation and cultural identity emerged in the wake of the May 1968 uprising, asking how much they contributed to the current shape and meaning of French national identity. It thus reviews what can be described as a new historiographical turn in French history.     

Contesting the nation: negotiating national narratives and the Jewish settlements

Why and how does national identity reopen for contestation? Existing theories argue that institutional design, social ties or elite manipulation alter the saliency and nature of national identity. These theories view the ethno‐nation as homogenous and shaped vis‐à‐vis other groups. However, I argue that we should examine the re‐emergence of nationalism as an intra‐national struggle between groups with different saliency and understandings of national identity: new issues can raise the importance of national identity for some members of the group but not others. Moreover, members develop diverging understandings of fundamentals of national identity such as citizenship, borders and the role of religion. To support the theory, the paper utilises original not yet studied archival materials to show that struggle over Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories led to contestation of the saliency and meaning of Jewish Israeli national identity. Specifically, I analyse letters individuals sent to leading government officials in the early days of the settlements and show that settlement supporters tied the issue to Zionist ethos, injecting new content into Zionist identity. Meanwhile, national identity did not rise in importance or alter in meaning for settlement opposition. The method reveals individual understandings of national identity and points at broader societal divisions.     

Zionist identity and the British Mandate: Palestine's internment camps and the making of the Western native

This paper examines the relationship between British police officers, Jewish guards, and German internees in Palestine's internment camps during World War II. Using the reports of the Jewish guards, the paper investigates the role of Western‐identified actors in the Zionist identity‐making project. The reports evince a surprising rapport between the British and their German prisoners and the mistreatment of the Jewish guards by their British superiors. The paper analyses these Jewish accounts in the context of identity‐ and ethnic boundary‐making and argues that they illustrate Zionism's intent to construct itself as a Western but noncolonial movement and Zionists in Palestine as natives but not “Orientals.” The reports also reveal a breach between the formal hierarchy—British officers, Jewish guards, German internees—and the ethnic order, which situated British and Germans at the apex and the Jews at the bottom. The paper highlights the utility of researching group‐making interactions in different contexts to develop a more nuanced understanding of identity‐making processes.     

Possibilities and pitfalls of the concept of national indifference

This introduction to the themed section ‘The history of national indifference. A critical appraisal’ explores the challenges and possibilities of the concept of national indifference. It starts from the premise that national indifference remains a very useful concept to avoid falling into teleological narratives of nationalism. The central argument is that national indifference needs to be theorized as a non-binary, relative concept that is not the complete opposite of national identification. Indeed, the contributions show that national indifference has gradations and can coexist with explicit, banal or everyday forms of nationalism, both among elites and ordinary people, both in and outside of East Central Europe, both before and after the Two World Wars. This central argument results from an engagement with three areas of debate surrounding the national indifference literature, which all relate to its (inadvertent) reproduction of binary understandings of nationalism: the dichotomous conceptualization of east versus west, nationalisation versus non-nationalisation and elites versus masses.     

Articulating national identity in Turkmenistan: inventing tradition through myth,cult and language

A study of myth, cult, and language as tools of state power, this paper analyzes ways national identity was constructed and articulated in one state. When Türkmenistan became independent in 1991 its first president, Saparmyrat Nyýazow, promoted himself as the ‘savior’ of the nation by reconceptualising what it meant to be Türkmen. Myth, public texts and language policy were used to construct this identity. While they were the targets of the state's cultural products, Türkmen citizens contributed to the processes of cultural production. Nyýazow legitimised his authoritarian leadership, first by co‐opting Türkmen citizens to support his regime, and then by coercing them as participants in his personality cult. The paper concludes that Nyýazow used the production of culture, ‘invented tradition’ in Hobsbawm's sense, to bolster his agenda and further his own power. It also argues that the exaggerated cult of personality Nyýazow cultivated limited his achievements, rather than solidifying them.     

Exchange on the quantitative measurement of ethnic and national identity*

In recent decades, there has been a noticeable increase in the use of quantitative techniques in the study of ethnicity and nationalism, without, however, a sufficient amount of reflection on how these techniques have contributed to our understanding of ethnic and national identities. As such, in this exchange three sets of authors answer questions about the degree to which it is possible to use quantitative data to measure ethnic and national identities, which types of methods are most suitable in measuring these identities and what the major research findings of this quantitative research are that were not possible using qualitative approaches.     

Public and private: national identities in a Scottish Borders community*

Abstract. This paper is an exploration of national identities among sports people in a community in the Scottish Borders. This group experiences a split in their identities. Publicly, they are ascribed an ambiguous national identity by the surrounding national communities. Privately, and among fellow community members, they unambiguously assert national identity. This paper examines the way this split is managed, arguing that the performance of public ambiguity is expected, but is supported by the private performance of nationality. National identity is analysed specifically as a performance, and sport is the context in which this performance takes place.     

Making time for national identity: theoretical concept and empirical glance on the temporal performance of national identity

Despite global, economic, technological and social transformations, nationality has remained an influential identity category. It still forms the basis for collective self‐determination, political sovereignty and sense of belonging. This article puts forward the concept of ‘Chrono‐Work’ to offer a critical approach to national identity. Employing temporal and performative perspectives, the concept addresses the conditions for establishing and constructing national identity. Drawing on Judith Butler's performance theory, it is suggested that performance of national acts loads national identity with meaning through the construction of a chronological narrative. To complete the theoretical picture, a case study of ‘Chrono‐Work’ among the Jewish settlers on the Golan Heights in Israel is offered. It is shown that national identity is constantly performed through temporal strategies that aim at achieving a chronological order. Therefore, it is suggested that national identity is not given, but rather is the result of continuous ‘Chrono‐Work’.     

The nation in the region: flamenco and canzone napoletana as national icons in modern Spain and Italy (1880–1922)

Although the relationship between music and nationalism has been at the centre of recent cross‐disciplinary research, many areas remain unexplored. Among them are forms of ‘national music’ that nest overlapping identities, functioning simultaneously as vehicles of regional, ethnic, urban, global and diasporic belongings. This article focuses on the national dimension of these multilevel identities, concentrating on the swings and transmigrations between the national and the regional. It compares two Mediterranean traditions which, particularly between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have served as multilevel identifiers of national and regional belongings: flamenco and canzone napoletana (Neapolitan song). I argue that, besides geographically bounded identities, both genres were constructed as ‘national’ primarily abroad, rather than in their home countries, thus contributing to a theory of the ‘international’ dimension of ‘national’ music. In the case of flamenco, I focus on the irradiation centre of the time, Paris, although the modern notion of musical Spanishness was first associated with national identity in Russia. The canzone consolidated its international position mostly through the Italian diaspora, achieving a much wider reach than is ordinarily thought, both nationally and globally.     

Remembering the past against the grain: an analysis of the reconstructions of the past in The Sunday News's ‘Lest We Forget’ column

Memories of the nationalist struggle are fervently contested in Zimbabwean public spaces such as the media. This paper examines the emergence of the counter‐hegemonic historical narratives in the state‐controlled media that seek to subvert the dominant nationalist discourses propagated by the ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF). Focusing on the Sunday News's Lest We Forget newspaper column, the paper analyses the representations of the role played by the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) in the liberation struggle, a nationalist movement whose contributions are marginalised and obscured in the official nationalist historiography. Given that in Zimbabwe the state‐owned media are generally viewed as mouthpieces of the ruling party, this paper identifies the tensions in the Sunday News as alternative historical memories are being reproduced and sustained. Drawing upon the critical discourse analysis (CDA) method, this article argues that alternative historical imaginations are rekindled in the state media.     

Charisma,populism, and the formation of national identity: Sheikh Mujib and Bengali nationalism

Identity formation is a complex process and has been discussed by post-structuralist discourse theorist Ernesto Laclau. This paper focuses on Laclau's proposed ideas on the means of identity production and populism and studies the popular independence movement for Bangladesh under that rubric. It locates charismatic leadership as a necessary condition for populism and identifies Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the charismat suturing the various chains of equivalence that rose to become the populist movement that resulted in the nation's struggle for independence in 1971. This paper also looks at the transformational leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and acknowledges it as a necessary condition for the patterns of identity creation in East Bengal in the late 1960s.     

I Quindici Giorni di Scanzano: identity and social protest in the New South

Abstract

This paper examines the dramatic events of ‘I Quindici Giorni di Scanzano’, the vast popular uprising in Basilicata in November 2003 that thwarted a government decree to create a consolidated national nuclear waste dump at Scanzano Jonico. The struggle cut across lines of locality, age, social class and political affiliation, mobilizing the populace with various symbols, including references to brigandage, postwar struggles for land, and the Madonna of Loreto. Solidarity for the protest came from all quarters of the South, especially the neighboring regions of Apulia and Calabria. Although government representatives and some of the media portrayed the Lucanians in recognizably anti-Southern tropes of ‘uncivicness’, this paper argues that this remarkable moment in Basilicata's history created a new sense of public identity and action that in many ways reflected recent intellectual discourses on the South.