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National Cultures

National cultures are the designs for living that people identified by nation are perceived to share, including attributes such as language, dress, style, diet, religion, sports, leisure, and consumption patterns. Numerous works on particular national cultures have been published, often within a narrative frame of redemption or decline, but attempts to verify generalizations and assumptions about national cultures and cultural differences in behavior, sentiments, beliefs, practices, and attitudes have had limited success. Despite these difficulties nation-states, with perceived national cultures, have become widely accepted as the normal political arrangement, although the connection between nation and state is ambiguous. It is on this socially constructed reality that this discussion focuses first with a consideration of the genesis of the nation-state followed by consideration of national cultures from the points of view of national character, belonging and community, patriotism and nationalism, and citizenship and consumption.

Genesis of the Nation-State

The relationship between nation and state is disputed. For modernists, such as Ernest Gellner, Tom Nairn, Eric Hobsbawm, and Elie Kedourie, nations are essentially new forms of political community that came to prominence in Europe in the nineteenth century—and later exported to the rest of the world—in a unique social transition to modernity, stimulated by industrialism, mass production, and war, an increasingly professionalized state, urban populations, and the development of mass means of communications. By this argument, states tend to precede nations, although some historians acknowledge an earlier “ethnic core,” where strategic regions first cohere with elements of a common culture and by conquest or allegiance incorporate peripheries. Examples cited include France, Japan, England, and China where origins have been sought, for example, in fourteenth-century Europe where both the Ile de France and an emergent English realm defined the other through warfare.

In effect, the debate about the age of national cultures depends on definition. If it is accepted that an essential attribute of nations is the sovereignty of the people, then nations are modern constructions first popularly asserted in France with the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (“The source of all sovereignty resides in the Nation”) before being applied as a model in the nineteenth century with the demand for the inclusion of more categories of the population, such as the lower orders and women, under the umbrella of citizenship. If, on the other hand, it is sufficient that strategic political orders of preindustrial societies have at times forged institutions to express notions of geographical belonging and identity to mobilize populations, then incipient national cultures can be sought worldwide through long periods of history including those of ancient Egypt, Persia at the time of the Achaemenids (550–330 BCE), China during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), and Japan of the Heian period (794–1185).

National Character

The concepts of national character and national culture derive from the eighteenth century in England, France, and Germany (Smith 1991). Favored ideas are those of the collective unity or the indivisibility of the people using metaphors drawn from family relationships, the extension of individual self-determination to the imagined collective self, the uniqueness and value of the genius of each nation, and the awakening of the collective self. Hugely influential here was the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who makes the early conceptual distinction between the nation as a living sociological whole expressed though language, customs, religion, and the territorial home in contrast to nationalism as the narrow self-interested conflict between nations. By the nineteenth century, these ideas tend to be organized in a historicist time frame around the key idea of progress and narratives describing the growth, advancement, and decline of nations.

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