National Identity as a Resource for
Global Inclusion: ‘Dislocating’ national
identity from the nation-state
Catherine Frost
Working Paper CSGP 12/6
Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
www.trentu.ca/globalpolitics
Abstract
This paper argues for conceptually dislocating national identity from the nation-state, so that we
can recognise the risks and opportunities for global inclusion that national identity presents.
The paper offers two arguments for this dislocation approach. First the origins of national
identity lie in international mobility and exchange. Second, the contemporary experience with
national identity frequently exceeds and may in fact be re-shaping the nation-state. The paper
then considers two risks of this dislocation. One is that the strategic choices of individuals with
multiple national identities will create unfairness or inequity, the other is that the
interpenetration of national identity into the affairs of other states creates problems for
democracy. Yet these practices can also provide avenues for representing complex patterns of
mobility and attachment, as well as integrating the fates of disparate states, which means they
present resources – as well as risks – for global inclusion. So if national identity does not neatly
map on to the state structure, and is unlikely to ever do so without considerable conflict and
alienation, then we should seek ways to bring out the inclusive potential of such dislocation,
while minimizing its tendency to generate patterns of privilege or influence.
1
After years of focusing on the development of multiculturalism, interculturalism and
cosmopolitanism, the challenges of national identity and nation-building are returning to
the forefront of popular debate. Places as diverse as post-invasion Afghanistan and David
Cameron’s Britain can agree on one thing: If a population doesn’t share a robust sense of
national identity you will have a hard time getting it to share much else. But there has been
a great deal of concern about focusing political energies on national identity in all but the
most extreme cases of political reconstruction. The fear is that building up national identity
means an increase in essentialism, exclusionism and isolationism (Okin 1999; Barry 2000;
Abizadeh 2002). In an increasingly mixed and mobile world, these patterns are to be
avoided at all costs. In essence, national identity, while it may serve the ends of state
stability and even social solidarity within the state project, is generally seen as anathema to
the kind of global inclusion within which the state project should ideally operate.
The difficulty is, as the tide of popular opinion turns against multiculturalist solutions in
many advanced states (Joppke 2004), national identity is becoming the new (old) solution.1
This in turn suggests that global inclusion may be about to suffer a serious setback.
Without minimizing any of the risks involved, however, this paper challenges the view that
national identity and global inclusion is a zero-sum game. The key to this approach lies in
quite literally dis-locating the national identity. Conventional wisdom says national
identity is a phenomenon with a clearly demarked geographical footprint. National identity
is thought of as the exclusive property of nation-states. Or, as Ernest Gellner put it, every
nation “wants a state, and preferably its own” (1983, 51). But there are good reasons to
question this equation and even Gellner did not believe the nation-state formula worked out
as neatly as eager nationalists would suppose (1983, 47). Rather, from the very start the
problem with nationalism has been that nations do not map neatly onto states. The effort to
force this union at all costs has been at the root of the most violent conflicts nationalism has
bred. Is it possible that in the new era what was once a problem could become a solution?
Can the state/nation mismatch provide a conduit along which global inclusion may
develop?
The paper offers two arguments for dislocating national identity from the standard state
structure. First the origins of national identity lie in global and international mobility and
exchange. Second, the contemporary experience of national identity frequently exceeds and
may in fact be re-shaping the nation-state formula. Taking these patterns into consideration
the paper then reflects on the risks a dislocated version of the national identity presents for
global inclusion. What does it mean to have national identity operating outside the
traditional state container?
The paper examines two major risks associated with the dislocation of national identity.
One is that the strategic choices of individuals with multiple national identities will create
1
See, for example recent speeches on the “failure” of multiculturalism by British
Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Cameron
2011; Connolly 2010).
2
unfairness or inequity; the other is that the interpenetration of national identity into the
affairs of other states (either through diaspora representation in the homeland or a national
lobby in the new host state) creates problems for representative democracy. But these
patterns of strategic identity and diaspora advocacy can also be avenues for representing
complex patterns of mobility and attachment, as well as integrating the fates of disparate
states, and these qualities make them resources for global inclusion. So if national identity
does not neatly map on to the state structure, and is unlikely to do so without considerable
conflict and alienation, then the other option is to find ways to bring out the inclusive
potential of this dislocation effect, while minimizing its tendency to generate patterns of
privilege or influence.
ORIGINS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
In order to begin this discussion it’s helpful to consider the origins of national identity and
nationalism as social and political phenomena. Those who trace the roots of these
phenomena ultimately find themselves looking at supra-national dynamics rather than
national ones to identify its origins. This section explores the accounts of three leading
theorists of nationalism. Leah Greenfeld finds the roots of national identity in the scholarly
communities of medieval Europe, and argues its historical development relied on a kind of
demonstration effect between a sequence of polities ripe for change (1992, 17). Benedict
Anderson argues that the aspirations of Empire breeds self-conscious national identity
when the realities of colonial birth hits home for ambitious young elites (1991, 55-7). And
Ernest Gellner argues that “social-entropy-resistant” traits force disadvantaged groups to
turn inward for support when faced with the impressive, but inaccessible, achievements of
more fortunate neighbours (1983, 65).
Of course some, like A.D. Smith, believe that national identity has its roots in a primordial
and pre-existing ethnic core. But even Smith acknowledges that this ‘core’ needs to be
mobilized before it takes the shape we recognize as modern national identity (1998). The
advantage that accounts like Greenfeld, Anderson, and Gellner’s offer is that they explain
where the energy and motivation comes from for such mobilization. The point is that this
energy arises in some kind of encounter with those who prove foreign. It’s this encounter
that sets off the original process forming the national identity, regardless of how much
primordial material was already available. The availability of a primordial core (and of
course, homogeneity among this ethnic core) makes the nation-building process smoother
and more effective. But as Smith points out this raw material has been around for a long
time without going through the kind of transformation modern national identity requires.
So if we are looking for the developments that triggered this transformation we must look
beyond the ethnic core, since the generative energies of national identity do not lie within
nations themselves.
Liah Greenfeld began her study of early nationalism with a conceptual genealogy of the
word “nation,” and she finds that the origins of national identity lie in the experience of
denizens and outsiders rather than that of the citizen/insider. “Natio” is Latin for
“something born” and was originally applied to foreign-born individuals who constituted a
social stratus beneath Roman citizens (1992, 4). This outsider meaning continues to attach
3
to the idea of “nation” throughout early Christianity, when it served to group students into
roughly identifiable language groups while studying abroad at university. The term
gradually shifts in meaning from something “derogatory” to become an indicator of
scholarship and common schools of thought. As Greenfeld explains, nation “referred now
to the community of opinion and purpose” (1992, 4). But crucially, this community was
also embedded within a system of encounters as the nations also represented “sides in
scholastic disputations” (1992, 4). Greenfeld also notes that nation takes on a new quality
by the time of the Council of Lyon in 1274, when it indicates “representatives of cultural
and political authority” especially an elite (1992, 5). But yet again it is embedded in an
encounter, one that has what we would call today international qualities.
Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries the idea of the nation came home, in the
sense of applying to people in their place of origin rather than outside of it. But this was a
decidedly secondary development, and even then it indicated the political elite of a country
and not its general population. The eventual transformation into a form of nationhood that
included all “the people” emerged first in early sixteenth century England, Greenfeld
claims (1992, 16). As the political history of England unfolded, this example of political
sovereignty had a kind viral effect on neighbouring countries. The effect was such that
“the emergence of new national identities was no longer a result of original creation, but
rather of the importation [emphasis added] of an originally existing idea” (1992, 14).
Indeed she suggests the importation and imitation involved tended to breed a kind of
reactionary “ressentiment” towards the original source (1992, 15, see also Kedourie 1993).
This reaction gives national identity its oppositional and “othering” energy, but it lies over
a more fundamental pattern of engagement and interaction. In other words as ideas of
popular sovereignty spread from one state to another under the flag of nationalism, national
identity served to soften the psychological costs of this imitative practice (Greenfeld
1992,17).
Greenfeld’s focus is primarily on the dynamic between nationalism and democracy (or
popular sovereignty) and her interests are in the social and psychological processing of
modernity’s political challenges. But her account makes clear that national identity is just
as much an international phenomena as a national one. Based on this account, locating the
national identity within the parameters of the nation-state would lead us to miss critical
aspects of its functioning.
Although he approaches nationalism differently, Benedict Anderson shares Greenfeld’s
analyses when it comes to the roots of nationalism in supra-national encounters. Anderson
focuses on large-scale shifts in collective consciousness and argues that changes in
dominant communication practices (like the use of vernaculars in administration and the
spread of newspapers and novels) forge a new “imagined community” where previously
the sacred consciousness and imperial order had ruled supreme.
Like Greenfeld, Anderson believes that nationalism arose in response to a psycho-social
need. As with all forms of collective consciousness, he argues, nationalism caught on
because it helped people make sense of where they found themselves in life. Crucially, it
leant meaning to aspects of our lives whose utter randomness might otherwise leave us
4
facing deep meaninglessness. Anderson believes we create imaginative ways to cope with
the “overwhelming burden of human suffering” which faces us with questions like “Why
was I born blind? Why is my best friend paralysed? Why is my daughter retarded?” While
religions attempt to explain such suffering, Anderson explains that the “great weakness of
all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marxism, is that such
questions are answered with impatient silence.” The crucial value of nationality, he feels,
is that it can assume the role once held by religion in terms of “transforming fatality into
continuity” (1983, 10-11). When being born in a particular place or into one language
group or another can determine one’s life prospects, the world becomes an unbearably
arbitrary place. National identity allows us imagine that such arbitrary experiences have
some inherent meaning.
This dynamic is illustrated, Anderson believed, in the career trajectory of bright young men
born in the colonial hinterlands. They aspire to recognition and status in the Empire, but
after climbing the career ladder in the colonies, find the way forward blocked by their
colonial origins: they are too foreign to make it in the metropole itself. In this encounter,
this failed ‘functionary journey’ turns into a “cramped pilgrimage,” through which they
discover their Creole identity (1991, 55-57). The “shared fatality of trans-Atlantic birth”
proves to be the crucial deciding factor in their prospects (1991, 57). The frustrations of
this encounter drive the Creole back towards the colonies and gives rise to the first
nationalist projects, which Anderson believes originated outside of and in counter to the
European project. Nationalism and national identity, as Anderson puts it, became
“modular” (1991, 4). It was discovered, adopted and adapted based on prior models
pioneered by other peoples. While Anderson’s account places the origins of nationalism in
a very different locale than Greenfeld, both involve an encounter oriented towards what lay
beyond the national boundaries; in both cases the encounter drives the parties to invest
more significance in national identity; and in both cases nationalism spreads through a
demonstration effect.
Ernest Gellner had an explanation for the boomerang-like effect in the birth of nations,
where an external encounter sets off internal re-imaginings. He explained that we
generally have a problem seeing the real roots of nationalism because we often start by
looking at the nation or nation-state as the source of the development. But we’ve got it
backwards. The nation-state is the effect and not the cause of nationalism. As he put it:
“it’s nationalism which engenders nations and not the other way around” (1983, 55).
Gellner attributes the rise of nationalism to the imperatives of a new social order organized
around industrial production and its requirements for an educated and socially mobile
workforce. As this “inescapable imperative” gained momentum populations were either
swept up or swept aside (1983, 39). For individuals with “social-entropy-resistant” traits
that barred them from identifying with an emerging national project, the choice was stark:
either forge your own or remain a permanent underclass in someone else’s (1983, 65).
At every turn in this account, though, national identity again appears as the expression of a
supra-national encounter. The energy of this encounter drives nationalist aspirations to
create a national identity that is designed to map on to the socio-economic apparatus of the
state. Whether or not Gellner’s functionalist and economics-driven account captures all the
5
complexities involved in the phenomenon, it shares with Greenfeld and Anderson this
central theme: the drive to national identity has roots in, and draws energy from,
externalities and encounters outside the national or proto-national grouping. Indeed these
works illustrate that in most cases the nation cannot fit neatly within state boundaries,
although there is a constant effort to make it so.
This dynamic, while important to recognize, does not bode well for global inclusion, since
the nationalist drive they describe tends towards political closure. It is focused on an
increasingly futile matching process “striving to make culture and polity congruent” by
means of the state (Gellner 1983, 43). This impulse is still evident today in the speeches of
European leaders like David Cameron and Angela Merkel who fear for their country’s
national identity in a culturally complex age. But national identity is not born in isolation,
or out of cultural simplicity, so it’s not automatically clear why its development or renewal
should require these conditions. Or to put it another way, the phenomenon of national
identity cannot strictly be located within a single nation-state project because the
experience of supra-national encounters is critical to its origins and development. This
may do little to diminish the energies of Cameron or Merkel’s neo-nationalist projects, but
it should help keep the real dynamics of national identity in perspective.
DIASPORAS: NATIONAL IDENTITY BEYOND THE NATION-STATE
The tension between the apparent logic of nationalism and its real world dynamic is not
limited to its historical roots. Today’s experience with national identity among diaspora
populations reinforces a message about its disjuncture with the nation-state. National
identity, understood within the confines of a nation-state project, risks missing critical
patterns in how this identity operates and more importantly how its operation is changing
the nation-state itself. Because, paradoxically the resilience and persistence of national
identity in diasporas appears to be one of the transnational forces re-shaping the role of the
state in a global context. Peculiar as this finding is, it’s crucial to understand that diaspora
activism can create transnational effects without losing its national potency.
Theorists of early nationalism describe it as a drive to make the political and socio-cultural
orders coincide under the influence of international encounters. This imagery – of
identifiable and internally coherent national units – also informs the basic structures of the
international order, even though today the idea that nations and states will eventually settle
down into neat pairings seems unforgivably naive. Scholars are therefore actively
questioning the value of the nation-state ideal as an analytical model (Walby, 2003, 530;
Shain and Sherman 1998, 339; Adamson and Demetriou 2007, 513). Yet any rush to
dismiss the power of nationality is equally unwise because national identity remains a force
to be reckoned with in state-based and global politics (Antonsich 2009, 292-3; Tonnenson
2004, 186, 193). One explanation for the continuing salience of national identity alongside
the increasingly discredited nation-state model is that national identity easily exceeds the
parameters of the state project. Indeed its tendency to do so may be at the root of much of
its political potency.
6
National identity can exceed state boundaries in two ways. First when some existing
population outside the state identifies with it in irredentist ways. But this tends to be a
feature of newly formed or re-founding states. More commonly the national identity
travels with its bearers as they join global population flows seeking economic opportunity
or political refuge. While it was never true that nations and states neatly aligned, these
migration flows and the subsequent disasporic communities introduce a new factor into the
national equation. Because their continued identification with the national project, while
developing a life outside the national territory, suggests that national identity can sustain
itself outside the state. To see this in operation we must “disaggregate the concept ‘nationstate’ into nations and states, which may overlap but are not co-terminous” (Walby 2003,
541).
It is important to note that this disaggregation does not imply a weakening in national
identity. Studies in Europe show that between 1982 and 2005 national identity among
fifteen European nationalities did not decline but increase (Antonsich 2009, 285) and that’s
in a setting where there was a revolution in political and economic mobility and a concerted
public effort to forge a transnational identity. Instead it appears that the increasingly
mobile variant of national identity may have its own special qualities. As one author
observes, mobility “reinforces the national uniqueness of the Self. Globalisation does not
water down the sentiment of national belonging, but fortifies it” (Antonsich 2009, 292-3).
In a diaspora setting the experience of affirming the national identity takes on a new “selfreflexive” quality. Once outside of the nation-state project “national identity becomes the
product of agency rather than structure” (Antonsich 2009, 292). This explains not only the
strong appeal of national identity among diasporas, but also why diaspora takes on its own
political potency becoming a “prescriptive term” that allows “identities and forms of
coalition-building and action… across national borders” amounting to a “new form of
nation-building” (Adamson and Demetriou 2007, 498, 501).
With national identity operating on this global scale, it’s important to re-evaluate its
association with the nation-state without merely blending the national identity of diasporas
into global or transnational processes. Because while Castells “space of flows” (Castells
2010, 408) has made it possible for diasporas to be “both here and there at the same time”
(Aikins 2009, 16), it has dispersed rather than submerged the national identity. Global
connectivity and mobility has “led not to the erosion but rather the spatial reconfiguration
of national identity” (Adamson and Demetriou 2007, 508) And it’s not just self-reflexive
diasporas driving this development. The nation-state takes a hand in the “embedding of
national identities within new transnational spaces and diasporic practices” (Adamson and
Demetriou 2007, 508).
Good evidence for the ever-increasing scope of national identity comes from the nationstates themselves. More and more are actively engaging their diaspora communities as the
self-defined boundaries of the national project become increasingly blurry. It’s not
uncommon for states to develop a ‘diaspora strategy’ aimed at tapping the potential of
expatriates while, in return, advocating for their interests at home and abroad. As
geographers Robert Kitchen and Mark Boyle explained in an editorial in The Irish Times, a
diaspora is a “precious resource to be tended, valued and re-energised” (2009, 14) This
7
sentiment is shared by Ireland’s President, Mary MacAleese, who made diaspora relations
a special priority of her presidency.2 But engaging the diaspora in this way calls for a
change in how the national project is conceived. Since many Irish live outside the state,
maintaining “Irish-mindedness” should be a goal of state policies towards them, say
Kitchen and Boyd (2009, 14). This might look like a self-serving ploy by the state, but
these Irish geographers say it involves a genuine shift in thinking about the political
community the state serves. They explain: “To think of Ireland as a globally connected
nation of seventy million people, rather than a small country on the periphery of Europe, is
a more powerful way to think and proceed” (2009, 14).
This same thinking also seems to be behind a proposal attributed to the Armenian President
to create a bicameral legislature whose upper chamber would contain representatives of the
diaspora (“Senate for Diaspora?” 2011). While its still unclear how far the initiative is
endorsed, that it is being seriously discussed reflects how far this small country of around
three million has come to see its fate integrated with that of its seven million strong
diaspora. Indeed Armenia already has a ‘Diaspora Ministry’ with responsibility for
managing the state-based affairs of nationals who do not reside in and may never return to
the national territory, and who also outnumber state-based nationals more than two-to-one.
Thinking about national identity as a nation-state phenomenon leaves us powerless when it
comes to grasping these kinds of developments.
The Irish and Armenian examples also illustrate that states are consciously cultivating
national identity outside their national borders (Adamson and Demetriou 2007, 489) further
complicating the supposed fit with the nation-state. Yet this ‘new nation-building’ or what
Benedict Anderson called “long-distance nationalism” (2001, 42) still seems to need some
anchor in the state structure, which must learn to juggle this new mandate alongside the
need for state-based social cohesion. So the persistence of national identity outside the
national territory becomes one of the forces re-shaping the nation-state. But the impact is
not simply to break down national identity in favour of transnationalism. Instead we see
new efforts to tap national attachments driven by forces inside and outside the state.
Looking at this from the point of view of global inclusion it means that national identity
plays a crucial but complex role in people’s movements through a globalizing world. It
may be, as one scholar suggested, that “global inclusion is more easily accomplished when
citizens are not forced to globalise continuously” but instead have some increasingly
mobile national identity to fall back on (Tonnesson 2004, 192). While for some observers
diasporas represent “a constant menace of instability and fragmentation” they are also
“endemic to a world order of nation-states, where national identity will always exceed its
state container (Shain and Sherman 1998, 340).
So there are at least two good reasons for dislocating the national identity from the nationstate. First because its origins lie in supra-national encounters and second because it
otherwise proves inadequate to the scope needed to understand diaspora phenomena and
2
For example the international aspects of the Irish national identity was the focus of a
lecture series hosted by the President at her official residence and broadcast on the
national network, RTE. See www.rte.ie/radio1/podcast/podcast_presidential.xml
8
their influence on the originating state. Subsuming diaspora identity under a
transnationalist banner is similarly unhelpful because it isn’t an identity at some higher
level of abstraction; it’s the same identity in a different location under different
circumstances. In short, it is what it seems to be: a national identity dislocated from the
nation-state.
RISKS AND RESOURCES
If the idea of a neat match between national identity and the nation-state proves
problematic from the very start, and becomes more so in an era of global mobility, the
wonder is why it retains such a strong influence. One explanation could be that it’s the
desirability and not the reality of national identity being expressed in this idea. Theorists
like David Miller and Margaret Moore, for instance, offer strong arguments for the
advantages of a fit between state and national identity. A cohesive sense of nationality
within a state, Miller explains, makes possible the kind of redistribution needed for social
justice in the modern era (1995, chapter 3). The same sense of solidarity also underpins the
spirit of compromise necessary for thorough-going democracy, explains Moore (2001,
chapter. 4). But in both cases what is needed is that individuals share a national identity.
Does this also imply they can (or should) only have one, and that any extras undermine the
social and democratic project? This question, and the concerns it raises, is behind much of
the recent criticism of multiculturalism on the grounds that it legitimates the persistence of
diaspora attachments in new states.
There is a great deal at stake, therefore, in the question of whether national identity is or
should be located exclusively within nation-states. On the first score – that of its
descriptive accuracy – the nation-state/national identity alignment falls short. There is little
evidence that national identity originated in or has unfolded exclusively within state
projects. If it had, or was even trending in that direction, there would be less need to
confront the second question: Should national identity map on to the nation-state?
Rather than approach this question in terms of costs and benefits to the state project, this
paper aims to switch focus and ask what the dislocation of national identity from the
nation-state means in terms of global inclusion issues. The ideal of inclusion is taken very
broadly here, to suggest the avoidance of unnecessary barriers to political and social
participation.
When looked at from this perspective the dislocation process presents at least two major
areas of risk. First people may tend to identify strategically and opportunistically in selfserving ways. Second, uncontained national identity may warp the politics of both the
originating homeland state, and in different ways, the new host-land state. These risks
present a serious concern and if the story ended here would constitute a good argument for
either containing national identity within the state project or eliminating it altogether. But
that solution would itself come at a high cost in terms of political conflict and personal
alienation. Therefore it is worth considering these risks more closely to see whether they
represent such an unmanageable departure from ‘normal’ politics.
9
i) The strategic use of identity
First, the dislocation of national identity means that some people can lay claim to more
than one national attachment – their diaspora identity plus a new host-land identity. As
these identities proliferate so does the opportunity to mobilize and or switch between
identities strategically. Examples of this strategic behavior abound. Many of the
individuals recently evacuated at considerable risk and expense from Tunisia, Egypt and
Libya have opted to exercise their claim on a European or North American national identity
for understandable reasons. Many may do so with every intent of returning as soon as the
immediate crisis passes. Yet this kind of strategic identity-shopping tends to generate a
negative reaction among holders of the alternative national identity (the one footing the bill
for any emergency airlifts) especially when that identity is only temporarily activated in a
crisis situation and then set aside again.3 It should be noted that in these extreme cases
documented citizenship is generally required to make a national identity claim stick. The
increasing liability this extra-territorial identity claim represents in terms of protecting conations abroad has led states to seek ways to limit the transmission of citizenships outside
of the national territory (Nyers 2010, 56).
The evacuation phenomenon illustrates how national identity is used strategically to
mobilize a claim on the resources of the originating or new host state. But is this a problem
rooted in the dislocation of national identity? And could relocating it within state
boundaries solve it? There are reasons to think not. For one thing the strategic use of
identity is not a perversion on the identity experience. All identities are used strategically
at some level, to help us navigate our social and political worlds (Hedetoft 1999). Indeed
one could say that identity is a kind of social strategy - one that emphasizes certain bonds
in certain circumstances. If this is so, then separating strategic behavior from identity is not
a realistic goal. Its not clear, for example, why strategic identity claims linked to
evacuations should offend us more than strategic identity claims linked to health care,
education, or social assistance. The only difference is where the strategy unfolds.
Therefore the strategic use of identity is not the offending act. Yet to invest location with
the moral significance to render an act acceptable or repugnant seems specious. We have
to wonder: is territory anything more than a method to conceal our moral arbitrariness from
ourselves? If so, the strategic use of identity falls short as a moral objection.
Moreover there is no reason to conclude that the strategic use of identity cannot be a
progressive and inclusive force. Scholars looking at national identity in Australia found
that ordinary Australians drew on a combination of national and cosmopolitan identities as
resources to help come to terms with rising diversity (Brett and Moran 2011). Studies in
Scotland found that among visible minorities the sense of inclusion in a national identity
required conscious “agency” (Bond 2006). While my own work among minorities in the
Republic of Ireland found that minority advocates adopted an active strategy of appealing
to elements in Irish national identity that supported inclusion (Frost 2010).
3
For example, in 2006 Canada organized the evacuation of 15,000 citizens from the
shelling in Lebanon, there was a subsequent backlash against those evacuees who
were not Canadian residents, but who activated their Canadian citizenship out of
necessity or convenience (see Nyers 2010).
10
So being able to navigate identity options strategically is not inherently problematic. Yet
there is a looming problem nonetheless. The problem is not that some people use national
identity strategically and others do not. The problem is that some people have more and
better national identity options than others. In other words the problem is inequality of
access to this process, not the process itself. As Ayelet Shachar has argued, national
citizenship is one of the most valuable things we can inherit in life (2009). If national
identity is the key to citizenship because it represents the primordial belonging A.D. Smith
says lies at the heart of the modern nation-state then it’s understandable that rivalry and
resentment follows its uneven distribution.
We may not be able to take the strategic element of out identity – indeed we may not want
to when we see it used in resourceful ways – but we should be conscious of the increasing
inequalities this system makes possible. Otherwise we may unwittingly enable a deepening
system of privilege for the globally mobile. The dislocation of national identity from the
nation-state should not translate into an opportunity for a privileged few to accumulate an
extensive range of cultural and political opportunities while other, less mobile, populations
make do with fewer options. Herein lies one of the real risks of dislocating national
identity from the nation-state.
How can we limit this effect? Should we be trying to ensure people have access to only
one nation-state through their national identity? This would certainly rationalize the drive
toward a national identity/nation-state alignment, which has the virtue of limiting us
(ideally) to the national identity that aligns with the territory we occupy. The problem is
that people do not unproblematically settle in one political space. Artificially forcing an
identity choice based on geography, for the sake of equalizing strategic identity
opportunities, achieves superficial equality at the cost of real injustices to denizens,
resident aliens, and other mobile populations. Global inclusion is therefore undermined by
this model since it penalizes most heavily those for whom global mobility is a fact of life.
We cannot take the strategic element out of identity. But if we authorize some identity
strategies while rejecting others based on the brute fact of location then we are using
arbitrary factors to create administrative simplicity rather than using moral factors to create
justice. There is a genuine risk of inequality involved in the proliferation of national
identities, but it is better to consciously confront the risk and develop resources for its
management than to conceal it under the banner of territory. Moreover, by shifting focus
towards equality in identity resources we are also led to consider that not all national
identities are created equal and some have more strategic value than others. The one-stateone-identity formula lends itself to a misled sense of equality and turns our attention away
from another pressing issue for global inclusion: it’s not that people need some national
identity, it matters for equality which national identities they can mobilise.
ii) ‘Outside’ influence in domestic politics
The Armenian proposal to integrate diaspora representation into the state’s governing
institutions hints at a second risk of the dislocation process. The risk is that the new scope
of national identity may eventually warp the domestic politics of nation-states, and this
11
concern applies both to the politics of the homeland state and the new host-state. Hannah
Arendt said that the boundaries of the polis were critical because they were a way to
contain the boundless unpredictability of human action; they serve to corral the otherwise
unruly consequences of our existence within an accountable and intelligible context (1989,
198). But a dislocated national identity does precisely the opposite; it represents human
action spilling over the boundaries of what we generally think of as the modern polis. So
the risks are considerable that in acknowledging this process we sacrifice a crucial resource
in managing politics itself.
In some ways the Armenian Senate proposal is an innovative solution to the complex
history and identity of a small internationally-oriented state. The risk is, however, that it
violates a key tenet of democratic government. In The Politics Aristotle outlines the core
principle of citizenship as “ruling and being ruled in turn” (Book III, sec iv, 1277a25). In
other words one must eventually live under the rules you help to make, and this reciprocity
ensures equality and civic friendship. But diasporas pose a problem for this relationship
because many individuals may not return to the home land to be ‘ruled in turn.’ This opens
a window not only to unrepresentative politics be also to government-by-nostalgia where
expatriate population have a stake in forestalling adjustment and development that may
change the culture or society of the homeland.
This nostalgia effect, for instance, was behind the lagging development in Irish national
identity, because the focus on expatriate tourism in the mid twentieth century kept the
country oriented towards a nostalgic traditionalism (Zuelow 2007). This traditionalist drive
lasted until an economic boom created enough independence to renew the national identity,
by injecting new elements based on the relationship with Europe and technological
innovation.
So where individuals will not be being ‘ruled in turn’ they should not be part of the
‘ruling’ elements of the nation-state project, this is a sound principle. The difficulty is we
cannot say with certainty to whom this rule applies. In an age of high mobility we can no
more suppose that a population within a nation-state is a stable governing entity than we
can conclude that those currently outside it won’t one day return. In fact all signs point to
some consistent level of churning of populations as individuals move in and out of the
nation-state as necessity, opportunity and/or inclination dictate. Individuals may also create
hybrid lives, with homes in different states, extended family links abroad, or international
educational or work opportunities, etc., all of which create a genuine, if somewhat
marginal, stake in a nation-state’s affairs. Ranier Baubock believes such connections form
the basis for a principle of “stakeholdership” that grounds rights to membership and
political participation (2009, 21-7). If Baubock is right, and if the goal is an accurate
representation of the stake people hold in the affairs of the states they interact with, then
it’s not a simple matter to rule out all forms of diaspora representation in nation-state
government. For that just creates another risk – this one based on the mis-representation of
people’s complex life trajectories, which can exceed the traditional scope of the nationstate without exceeding the bounds of national identity attachments.
12
This risk of misaligned political representation appears in another form within the new
host-states. Possibly the most controversial risk associated with dislocation of national
identity from the nation-state is the potential for national lobbies to exert sway within new
host-states. The singular focus of a national lobby is seen as problematic because it is
presumed to put the interests of the diaspora homeland ahead of those of the new host state.
In effect, it’s a version of the strategic-identity concern writ large, whereby the host state is
used opportunistically to serve goals not inherently in its own interests. As one prominent
Canadian columnist put it, diaspora politics turn dangerous if they “twist Canada’s foreign
policies to suit ethnic demands” (Simpson A19). Many national diasporas have come
under criticism for just such influence including Irish, Israeli, Armenian, Punjabi and
Tamil, to name a few. If such lobbies genuinely lack a long-term interest in the affairs of
the new host-state it’s reasonable to wonder whether their intervention is productive.
Although realistically we could raise the same question about the intentions of big industry.
Likewise anyone with aspirations to eventually global mobility could pose a similar
democratic risk since their fates and ambitions lie elsewhere. The point here is not that the
influence of national lobbies is unproblematic. The point is that a) assuming we have an
adequate metric for sorting ‘sincere’ political participation from the self-serving kind is a
fallacy, and b) assuming ‘sincere’ political participation means it must be exclusively hoststate-centric in focus, is a mistake. If we are all implicated in an increasingly interdependent world it cannot be automatically illegitimate to advocate within a state for
initiatives outside it.
The risk that extra-territorial national lobbies will influence domestic politics is real. But is
it always a bad thing to have a force that makes states take an interest in affairs outside
their borders? The dislocation of national identity from the nation-state means national
groups can make claims on different nation-states the way individuals can mobilize
different citizenships. Which means a similar problem arises: it matters how these
powerful resources are distributed. Once again it is the potential for exacerbating
inequality and privilege that presents the greatest concern. The focus therefore should be
on monitoring and if necessary ameliorating the inequalities in influence, rather than on
eliminating the use of influence per se since this proves as fundamental to political
participation as strategic behavior is to personal identity.
If national identity never neatly mapped on to the nation-state then what we are really
dealing with in this case is a claim about the desirability of such a fit. A clean alignment
between identity and polity can make social justice and democratic engagement easier to
administer. And there are definite risks to the dislocation of national identity from the state
project. But it is not all risk. There are also opportunities to align institutions with actual
practice. If individuals use identity strategically we should be vigilant to the inequalities
that may result. If diaspora attachments are encouraged within an originating state, this
should not translate into unrepresentative politics. And if national lobbies mobilize new
host states to international action this should not provide a license for the strong to become
stronger. But allowing people choice in their identity, creating institutions to represent
people’s complex life trajectories and engaging states with one another’s fate are not
13
inherently undesirable outcomes. Instead these can help provide the resources needed to
enhance global inclusion.
CONCLUSION
Dislocating the national identity from the nation-state is a risky venture but it carries two
significant rewards. First, it more accurately captures how national identity actually works
in terms of where it develops and operates. Second, it challenges us to recognize people’s
real life patterns, which may involve a genuine stake in the affairs of several countries, an
attachment which cannot be neatly severed for administrative convenience. Moreover by
bringing this dislocation into sharper focus we also reveal ongoing patterns of inequality
and privilege.
None of this diminishes the significance of the nation-state as a central element in the
equation however. And the increase in popular rhetoric stressing the need for cohesion
continues. But this exercise illustrates that it’s not always clear what cohesion is supposed
to be organized around. If there are fractures in the supposedly straightforward nation-state
project the solution is not to delegitimise diasporas or the strategic use of personal identity,
while exalting some traditionalist nationalism. The national identity/nation-state model
was never adequate and likely never will be. Nationalism at best represents the aspiration
towards this fit not its achievement.
Nor is the solution to exalt a transnationalist alternative that has never proven powerful
enough to assume the role national identity holds in people’s lives. Instead, recognizing
that people use their national identity as a strategic personal and political resource in a
globalised world creates openings for both inclusive and regressive politics. Unless we
think we can curtail these practices entirely we would be wise to focus on developing
institutions designed to capture the complex reality of people’s political and cultural lives,
while averting the accumulation of privilege that these practices make possible. The first
step towards developing those institutions will be to acknowledge that national identity is
not now, and has never fully been, contained within the structure of the nation-state.
14
REFERENCE LIST
Abizadeh, A. (2002) “Does Liberal Democracy Presuppose a Cultural Nation? Four Arguments,”
American Political Science Review 96(3): 495-509.
Adamson, Fiona B. and Madeleine Demetriou (2007) “Remapping the Boundaries of ‘State’ and
‘National Identity’: Incorporating Diasporas into IR Theorizing,” European Journal of
International Relations 13(4): 489-526.
Aikins, Kingsley (2009) “Tapping into Irish diaspora could make big impact at home,” The Irish
Times, Opinion, 18 September.
Arendt, Hannah (1989) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Aristotle (1984) The Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Anderson, Benedict (2001) “Western nationalism and Eastern nationalism” New Left Review 9
(May-June): 31-42.
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.
Antonsich, Marco (2009) “National identities in the age of globalization: The case of Western
Europe,” National Identities 11(3): 281-99.
Barry, B. (2000) Culture and Equality. Cambridge: Polity.
Baubock, Rainer (2009) “Global Justice, Freedom of Movement and Democratic Citizenship,”
European Journal of Sociology 50: 1-31.
Bond, Ross (2006) “Belonging and Becoming: National Identity and Exclusion,” Sociology 40(4)
609-26.
Brett, Judith and Anthony Moran (2011) “Cosmopolitan nationalism: Ordinary people making
sense of diversity,” Nations and Nationalism 17 (1): 1888-206.
Cameron, David (2011) “PM’s speech at Munich Security Conference” delivered Saturday 5
February. (Available online at: http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/speeches-andtranscripts/2011/02/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference-60293). Accessed
February 10, 2011.
Castells, Manuel (2010) The Rise of the Network Society (The Information Age: Economy, Society
and Culture, Volume 1), Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Connolly, Kate (2010) “Multiculturalism is a failure, says Merkel: German chancellor’s remarks
reflect heated debate and suggest shift in attitude towards immigration,” The Guardian
(London). Final Edition, October 18.
Frost, Catherine (2010) Transformative Multiculturalism: Irish minorities and national identity in
hard times. Paper delivered at the American Political Science Association Annual
Meeting, Washington DC, Sept 2-5, 2010. Available online at:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1643977
Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism. New York: Cornell University Press.
Greenfeld, Liah (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press.
15
Hedetoft, Ulf (1999) “The Nation-state Meets the World: National Identities in the Context of
Transnationality and Cultural Globalization,” European Journal of Social Theory 2(1): 7194.
“Senate for Diaspora?: Bicameral parliament idea sparks debate in Armenia”
http://armenianow.com/news/politics/27425/armenia_bicameral_parliament_diaspora).
Accessed February 14, 2011.
Joppke, C. (2004) “The retreat of multiculturalism in the liberal state: theory and policy,”
The British Journal of Sociology 55(2): 237-57.
Kedourie, Elie (1993) Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Kitchen, Robert and Mark Boyle (2009) “New Strategy can enrich relations with Irish diaspora,”
The Irish Times, Opinion, 27 January.
Miller, David (1995) On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moore, Margaret (2001) The Ethics of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nyers, Peter (2010) “Dueling designs: The politics of rescuing dual citizens,” Citizenship Studies
14 (1): 47-60.
Okin, S.M. (1999) “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?,” in J. Cohen, M. Howard and M.C.
Nussbaum (eds) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Shachar, Ayelet (2009) The Birthright Lottery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shain, Yossi and Martin Sherman (1998) “Dynamics of disintegration: Diaspora, secession and
the paradox of nation-states,” Nations and Nationalism 4 (3): 321-46.
Simpson, Jeffrey (2010) “Don’t let diaspora politics twist Canada’s foreign policy” The Globe and
Mail. April 24. A19.
Smith, A.D. (1998) Nationalism and Modernism. New York: Routledge.
Tonnesson, Stein (2004) “Globalizing national states,” Nations and Nationalism 10 (1/2): 179-94.
Walby, Sylvia (2003) “The Myth of the Nation-State: Theorizing Society and Polities in a Global
Era,” Sociology 37 (3): 529-46.
Zuelow, Eric (2007) “ National identity and tourism in twentieth-century Ireland: the role of
collective re-imagining,” in Mitchell Young, Eric Zuelow and Andreas Sturm (eds.)
Nationalism in a Global Era: The persistence of nations. London: Routledge.
16