Forging a nation: the Ethiopian millennium celebration and the multiethnic state

Due to a different calendric system, Ethiopia celebrated the turn of the millennium in September 2007. This paper investigates how Ethiopia's coalition government, associated by many Ethiopians with minority rule, set up and mobilised a year‐long millennium project to propose new idioms of nationhood redefining Ethiopia's identity to deal with the challenges of ethnic federalism and to accommodate its multiethnic society. I argue that the millennium celebration sought to find a solution to the divisive effects of the politics of ‘difference’ derived from a policy of ethnic federalism, and to the existing outdated metaphors of nationhood rooted in Semitic culture and Orthodox Christianity. It proposed more suitable idioms of common identity based on the idea of ‘unity in diversity’. This paper contributes to our better understanding of the role of symbolism, commemorative events and appropriation of the ‘sites of memory’ in the complex process of the transition of multiethnic societies into nation states.     

Ambivalence,pride and shame: conceptualisations of German nationhood

ABSTRACT. This article examines complex everyday expressions and understandings of nationhood in Germany, focusing on citizens' articulations of national pride and their relationship with the nation. Through an analysis of ninety semi‐structured interviews with ‘ordinary’ Germans conducted between 2000 and 2002, we argue that the prevailing, elite‐centred approach to studying nationhood has not adequately captured the complex relationships that individuals have to the nation. We examine how individuals actively process and interpret nationhood in ways that reveal ambivalence, confusion and contradictory emotions towards the nation. Such individual variation is not neatly captured by official, elite, public or institutional presentations of the nation. We argue for further research on everyday understandings of nationhood and on ordinary people's views on national pride and national identity.     

Coping with deviance: Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT. This article highlights two processes that shaped Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century. The first concerns the competition between different nation‐states and the nationalist visions these contests engendered. In a Europe dominated by the norm of the culturally and ethnically homogenous nation, the Swiss authorities, public intellectuals and various political representatives were desperate to display an image of national authenticity to the outside world. The result was a nationalism that combined voluntaristic and organic elements. In the second and main part of this article, the focus turns on citizenship; it is conceived not only as a social and legal institution, but also as a cognitive prism through which people defined their membership in the national community. Remarkably, the authority in granting national citizenship to foreign nationals remained firmly in the hands of the cantons and, above all, the Swiss municipalities. In practical terms, this meant that the Gemeinde provided the institutional and cognitive frame through which nationhood was primarily experienced, imagined and defined. While Switzerland represents a particularly strong case of a communalist polity, it should not be treated as unique. Instead, it should alert us to a potentially fertile yet little‐explored area of research: what might be called the communal embededdness of the national(ist) imagination.     

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.     

Dimensions of social trust and national identity: Addressing a multifaceted relationship

Social trust is crucial for the functioning of societies and states as well as for the wellbeing of individuals. In this article, I expand on previous literature and scrutinise the role of definitions of group membership in the form of national belonging as a key predictor of three distinct dimensions of social trust: particularised trust, trust in strangers and identity-based trust. Drawing on recent data from the European Values Study, I find that stronger ethnic conceptions of nationhood are related to higher identity-based trust, whereas the reverse holds for trust in strangers. The latter relationship, however, must be qualified regarding majority conceptions at the respective national level. Results for particularised trust, however, point towards a more complex relationship than outlined in the theoretical expectations. Thus, this article contributes to extant literature by presenting a comprehensive argument linking all three dimensions to conceptions of nationhood challenging simplified notions of generalised trust. Further, I go beyond extant studies by combining conceptions of nationhood at the individual level with several country-level variables to demonstrate the robustness of the results.     

Transformations in contemporary Quebec nationalism, 1960–2020: A shift in the sources of collective animosities

This article is interested in the shift of the object of hostility, which historically fuelled Quebec nationalism. The main targets of discontent have long been the ‘rest of Canada’ and the lower socio-economic status of Francophones. After the 1995 independence referendum, the feeling of dissatisfaction with Canada, and even resentment, gradually faded. This retreating within Quebec's borders has led many French-speaking Quebecers to become concerned about the conditions that make possible the preservation of their cultural and linguistic heritage in North America. This shift has meant that the source of concern is now individuals and groups who do not share this heritage rooted in Western Judeo-Christian values or who are perceived not to adhere to the concerns related to the preservation and development of the French character and the dominant values within the ‘Quebec nation’. The expression of these concerns has manifested itself primarily in debates about the place religion should occupy in public and civic spaces since the mid-2000s.     

The evolution of the civic–ethnic distinction as a partial success story: Lessons for the nationalism–patriotism distinction

This article brings, for the first time, two of the most pivotal distinctions in nationalism studies into extended dialogue: the civic–ethnic distinction (CED) and the nationalism–patriotism distinction (NPD). By reviewing both the evolution of those distinctions over the previous decades and the ways in which they have been used in quantitative empirical research, we argue that the CED's evolution has been a partial success story, whereas discourse around the NPD has not seen substantial development. Despite lingering inconsistencies, researchers drawing on the CED have been successful in addressing different lines of critique and in using the CED as a heuristic for investigating notions of nationhood as expressed in public perceptions. In contrast, there has been only limited dialogue between theoretical and empirical approaches to the NPD. The article illustrates how research drawing on the NPD could profit from the CED's evolution. We close by providing a conceptual roadmap to guide the path towards more terminological clarity and to construct more theoretically robust measures for nationalism and patriotism. We specifically suggest that nationalism and patriotism should be consistently understood as ideal types that citizens can simultaneously hold to varying degrees.     

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.