National Identities

National identities have played a leading role on the world stage ever since the end of Europe's Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants, which resulted in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This is the treaty that granted local political leaders sovereignty over their own territories and is often marked as the beginning of the concept of the nation-state. Early forms of collective identification within the monarchical states of Europe emerged soon after, but it was the 20th century that witnessed the global triumph of the nationstate principle, culminating with the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the end of the 20th century, national identities had become a universal feature of politics; therefore, anyone seeking to understand global society cannot ignore their ongoing influence on global affairs.

There have been two general approaches to understanding how national identity construction works. Primordialist approaches assume that each nation (composed of a “people”) has a unique essence, rooted in material history and that each nation, or people, must work to realize its unique personality. Such an approach identifies national identity with objective ethnic, cultural, or material factors, such as skin color, religious views, and local history; however, primordialists often fail to fully address the important role of language in the ongoing negotiation of national identity. Conversely, constructivist approaches assume that national identities shift as historical conditions shift, and national identities are seen as being politically consequential ways of imagining one's relationship with “one's own people” as well as with other peoples. Constructivist approaches tend to associate [Page 1209]national identity with language in use and how language in use impacts ethnic, cultural, legal, economic, and political frameworks.

National identities are best understood as a combination of both primordialist and constructivist approaches, for they are incessantly constructed out of available historical and symbolic-cultural resources for competing instrumental purposes under ever-emerging circumstances. Although it is true that national identities are incessantly constructed out of local languages, cultures, economic policies, ethnicities, and legal-constitutional structures, they are also imagined forms of community, or politically consequential fictions, which evolve with unfolding historical conditions. Most important, however, is the obvious fact that different ways of imagining (and believing in) the nation have a direct impact on transformations in global affairs and international relations.

National identities should not be confused with state structures, as the former are (re)constructed and (re)imagined through the use of language, whereas the latter manifest themselves institutionally (e.g., through police forces, armies, judicial systems, and other forms of “legitimate” violence within a bounded territory). That said, it is obvious that the imagined nation and the institutional state mutually influence one another. Ways of imagining the nation have a direct impact on state structures, and state structures (e.g., constitutional law, religious policy, and military policy) have a direct impact on the character of a given political community. One should always be careful, nevertheless, to not think of “the nation” as a stable entity but as an ever-changing way individuals imagine “their people” and how that imaginary contributes to concrete political action (e.g., wars for national independence, ethnic wars between groups living within the same state, wars against enemies of the people).

...