Conflicting images of the Zuider Zee around 1900: nation-building and the struggle against water

In 1918, the Dutch government decided to enclose and reclaim the Zuider Zee (later called the IJsselmeer). The preceding decades had been marked by broad public debate about the utility and urgency of the project. Around 1900, its proponents constructed images of the region and of the Dutch nation in which the Zuider Zee was no longer a crossroads. They emphasized the backwardness of the area and depicted the sea as a domestic enemy, its violent storms posing a threat to the nation. Cornelis Lely’s Zuider Zee proposal (1891) promised a bright future for both the region and the Netherlands as a whole. The struggle against the water would revitalize the nation (by stimulating nation-building) and modernize its international image (perceived as a picturesque but archaic country). Opponents of the project feared the high costs and developed a counter-image: the Zuider Zee region as heartland of ‘authentic’ Dutch culture, a heritage that would be jeopardized by the project. The article concludes by highlighting the synchronicity of the non-synchronous: the Zuider Zee region was envisioned as a region living in the past, thereby constituting an ‘internal Other’ in a country undergoing rapid modernization around 1900.     

Explaining stability and change of territorial identities

A significant body of work examines the presence and strength of territorial political identities (either subnational, national or supranational). A common assumption of this literature is that the presence and strength of these political identities are invariant over time. Given the importance of political identity, it is surprising that this assumption has not been empirically tested. We address this omission by testing this assumption through considering the question of who is most likely to exhibit variation in the reporting of territorial identities and why. We posit that one source of instability in territorially based political identity is rooted in cognitive dissonance which emerges through the interaction of partisanship and electoral outcomes. We explore these questions using panel data from the British Election Study (1997–2001), the Canadian Election Study (2004–2008). Results reveal that the territorial identities of Labour and Liberal partisans, in Britain and Canada respectively, are compatible with expectations.