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This paper is centred on exploring how young people from Sikh and Hindu backgrounds, who are British born and living in the London area understand Britishness. By utilising transcripted interviews from eighty respondents, this research uncovers and presents the core perceptions and understandings that these young people have about British national identity and the ways in which it is accommodated (or not) alongside other important sources of belonging in their lives. This paper presents the diverse ways in which these young people understand Britishness. In particular, ‘thick' and ‘thin’ conceptualisations of Britishness and the role of family structures in shaping belonging are examined. It is suggested that any discussion of how ethnic minorities relate to national identity requires a better understanding of the diverse ways in which this form of identity is understood and accommodated. This, in turn, will encourage a more inclusive and productive debate on the role of national identity in multi-cultural Britain. This is particularly salient in a post-Brexit Britain where the themes of nationality and belonging have been brought into the socio-political fore once more, and newer immigrants are facing the challenges of feeling included and becoming British.

This paper focuses on the impact of current nationalism studies on national narratives disseminated through secondary education. The paper draws on interviews and focus group discussions with 31 teachers in Slovakia as a case study and asks to what extent these teachers’ understandings of national identity reflect primordialism, constructivism or ethno-symbolism. It also explores the teachers’ awareness of these mainstream paradigms. The findings defy the straightforward categorisation of the teachers’ views into these paradigms and suggest that nationalism studies have a limited impact, as the teachers’ understandings remain unchallenged. The paper concludes with the implications for educational research and practice.

The economic crisis signifies a turning point for Greek national self-image. The present paper explores the ideological function of interpretative repertoires in relation to the reproduction and contestation of national identity. We focus on two basic repertoires: a victimizing and a self-blaming one. Even though connotations of victimhood are not homogenous, its association with an external enemy is very popular. This paper demonstrates that discourses of victimization are not unambiguous and solidified; they interact with self-blaming discursive patterns, thus leading to hybrid perceptions of the national self-image that are adjusted to particular political actors’ strategies.

This paper engages a close analytical reading of the lyrics of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ in order to understand what the functional survival of this song tells us about the rhetorical/affective investments of national devotion in the British sense. This study asks also how the lyrics of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ figure in the general definition of anthem and in the generic classification of anthems worldwide? Because of the song's international spread, and status as ‘Ur-anthem’, much may be gleaned from it as to both the nature of the speech act entailed in the prayer-type of anthem and the nature of ‘anthem quality’ more generally. ‘Anthem quality’, for the purposes of this paper, is defined as that soul stirring effect which certain combinations of music and lyrics achieve, most typically in the service of national affiliation. Theories of nation and nationalism are drawn on to frame affective relations between nation, state and citizenry as implied by, fostered by and utilized in anthems. Parodies and ...

This paper scrutinizes history narratives as a practice of a specific kind of nation-building and analyzes the role of history teachers in this process. Based on 60 semi-structural interviews with history teachers in Ukraine, this paper analyzes three major national narratives used by history teachers to produce specific meaning of social identity among school pupils. This paper shows how history teachers reproduce national identity in their classrooms by altering the teaching program and textbook narratives and by promoting their vision of a nation, rights of specific groups to participate in nation-building process and defining enemies and allies.

The renewed demand for Biafra by Igbo people is a rejection of their post-war socio-political and economic condition in Nigeria. Through the processing of primary data, the paper examines this reinvention of Igbo nationalism. It looks at its linkage with the 1999 democratic transition in Nigeria, its implications and management by the government. The paper concludes that the renewed demand for Biafra is caused by perception of inequities and injustice in the distribution of power and resources among the Igbo. Hence a deliberate effort to correct these social problems can assuage ethnic tensions and presumption of political violence in Nigeria.

This paper seeks to demonstrate that since their arrival in France in 1962, the Harkis – the Algerians who fought with rather than for the French side against the Algerian independence movement (1954–1962) – have been the victims of symbolic violence. They have been assigned by the French state to the periphery of French towns, French history and French identity. As, since 25 September 2001 (the first national Harki remembrance day) and 5 December 2002 (when President Chirac inaugurated the Algerian war memorial in Paris), the Harkis ceased to epitomise ‘the archetype of official non memory’ (Rosello, 1998, p. 170), this paper ultimately asks whether the end of a certain form of symbolic violence may not result in the ‘delegitimisation’ of the Harkis’ main (historical) claims and, consequently, in the weakening of the Harki identity.

This paper scrutinizes the ways in which two films from the showcase of contemporary Turkish popular cinema (Mrs. Salkim's Diamonds and Commissar Shakespeare) function in disordering the monolithic and homogenising discourse of Kemalist nationalism. The paper is an attempt to unravel how the official nationalism in Turkey has suppressed and imprisoned the diverse and plural identities in the margins of its society. Throughout the piece the author underlines the importance of the post-1980s political and social climate of Turkey in preparing the ground for subversive criticisms towards the Kemalist regime and in allocating a space for the emergence of multiple identities with ethnic, religious, local and global references. Finally, the paper explores how this climate has been reflected in cinema, through the analysis of the above-mentioned two films.

Heightened integration with the US coupled with the rise of an indigenous movement have challenged and strained long-held images regarding the US and the indigenous within Mexico. As a result, Mexico finds itself facing the difficult task of re-evaluating and reconstructing its national identity. This paper explores the traditional images of the US and the Indian shaping national identity in Mexico and the challenges posed today by neo-liberalism and neo-indigenismo. It sets out a range of current issues, explores the linkages and contradictions, and examines the state of national reform. Fundamentally, the paper strives to raise important theoretical questions and hence set the stage for further research into these issues.

This paper argues the perceptions of relations between two nations involve not only the institutionalized national-boundary but also the perspectives of multiple symbolic boundaries. Based ...

A central issue in the academic discussion related to immigrant groups and their integration in ‘their new home’ is national identity. This paper focuses on the methodological choices during a case...

The contentious nature of national identity has been welldocumented, and the difficulties and challenges associated with self-understanding, particularly in a ‘stateless nation’ context, have undergone profound scholarly exploration. As part of this exploration, the idea of ‘multiple identities’ is prominent; one nation member can simultaneously hold a number of ideas, for example, Welsh and British. This had also led scholars to suggest that the same nominal identity, for example Welsh, may in itself have multiple meanings. Yet this accepted multiplicity of the same nominal identity often masks the hard truths: it is plausible that certain nation members may rank each other on a continuum, or sliding scale, of national identity, wherein some are considered more or less worthy of claiming that identity than others. This paper explores this concept in relation to Wales and the Basque Country. It begins by situating this phenomenon within the relevant theoretical context, subsequently exploring its ...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the challenges and difficulties faced in using a peasant model to create a national matrix for Belarus. The sense of belonging to a nation generated by the ‘...

This paper analyses the construction of an Alevi political identity in terms of cultural, social and religious values at a time when the role of religion is increasing in the political life of Turkey. It indicates the emergence of a new form of conflict and hegemonic articulation between Sunnism and Alevism that offers an alternative means of conflict resolution by the Alevi political agents within a radical pluralism and agonistic democracy. It also argues that the social construction of Alevi political identity is both a political project and an ontological question as this identity focuses on religious discourses in establishing a counter-hegemonic culture through mobilizing political ‘collective passion’.

Political cartoons enable the public to understand and interpret otherwise very complex problems. However, while all cartoons agree that the European Union has been suffering from a major crisis, agreement on what kind of crisis is far less uniform. By executing a comparative analysis of 400 political cartoons across 12 countries, this paper examines how cartoons frame the eurocrisis and argues that its definition, causal interpretation and moral evaluation, is constructed along national or cultural lines. In northern Europe, the eurocrisis is primarily associated with a crisis of responsibility. In southern Europe, a crisis of solidarity is the dominant frame.

The question of what Australian identity means has re-emerged, as globalisation and a concerted political effort to reconstruct an ‘Anglo’ identity have caused uncertainty about ‘who we are’. To explore how Australians conceptualise identity, this paper examines empirical research since Phillips’ [1998. Popular views about Australian identity: Research and analysis. Journal of Sociology, 34(3), 281–302. doi:10.1177/144078339803400305] seminal work synthesising research on Australian identity. Nearly two decades on, a civic/ethno-nationalist distinction and traditional socio-political correlates remain; but less dichotomous constructions are also being explored and more progressive values included. Key differences are found in the increased range of meanings of Australianness, as well as an apparent shift, for some, towards a cosmopolitan identity.

In the Euro debt crisis, it is hardly surprising that reciprocal stereotyping is carrying the day in the national media reviving old images of the respective ‘other’. The study asks how covers of German news magazines are shaped by the use of national stereotypes and images when reporting about this crisis. The paper seeks to build a bridge between the seemingly distanced disciplines arts and political science by offering a lean framework for analysis. It uses some cover images taken from two German weeklies and modifies Panofsky's semiotic model revealing traditional stereotypes and images of Greece.

In the early 2000s, Iceland enjoyed an extensive boom period that ended abruptly with an economic crash in 2008. This paper focuses on how Iceland's past as a Danish dependency was revisited in the economic boom period. The Danes were widely seen as the former colonial rulers who were ‘jealous’ of Icelanders’ success, in turn, giving the Icelandic national identity a stronger coherence. The concept ‘colonialism without colonies’ is applied to the Icelandic situation in terms of its potential and limitations, emphasising that a nuanced look at colonialism has to involve the consideration of contradictory desires and subject positions.

The article shows how powerful colonial discourses are in Switzerland, especially with regard to popular narratives on national identity. It starts with the Swiss Dhaulagiri expedition of 1960, which led to the first ascent of this Himalayan mountain, and how it is remembered 50 years later. The paper examines how in the discourse surrounding this expedition, the colonial trajectory of mountain climbing is linked to the use of technology (in this case aviation) and the emergence of white masculinity. It is argued that up to the present day, this ‘techno-colonialism’ is crucial for the self-conception of Switzerland.

This paper examines the violence in the Tajik Civil War (1992–1997). The actions of both sides mimicked ethnic cleansing as civilian settlements were targeted. The fragmented ethno-regional identities of the republic had historically lived together peacefully, so this style of violence was unanticipated. However, its patterns resemble similar events in the past 40 years that have been examined by other scholars. By conceptualizing it as a modern phenomenon that can be compared to, I develop a better understanding of this form of violence in the Tajik Civil War and place it within scholarly work on ethnic cleansing.

The Imperial (subsequently the Commonwealth) War Graves Commission (IWGC) was established in 1917 comprising member countries of the former British Empire. The organisation was charged with providing appropriate memorials to commemorate the Empire’s war dead, individually and equally, without regard for military rank, class or nationality. This was no easy task given the numbers of dead from multiple theatres of war, the variety and oftentimes competing demands of imperial and national war offices, and the uncertain aesthetics arising from individually attuned and publically oriented commemorative intentions. Equally caught up in the mix of agencies and design practices were hordes of war trophies, captured artillery and military relics retrieved from battlefields across Europe, items carefully catalogued and preserved by the British War Office (BWO) and offspring agencies to provide artefacts for building memorials in Commonwealth states. This paper describes the work of the IWGC during and immediately f...

The colonial Northwest of Western Australia was a harsh frontier, where demands for Aboriginal land, labour and knowledge led to dispossession, loss of rights, massacre and generations encumbered with the colonial legacy. In the Pilbara, there are some rare attempts to engage with this difficult colonial history, mainly in the form of heritage site interpretation and heritage trails. Overall, the difficult colonial history of the Northwest is poorly represented. Colonialism and its legacy are not effectively commemorated, nor are distinct local cultural and civic attributes highlighted as ‘lessons from the past’. In this paper, we explore the memorialization and commemoration of the Northwest's traumatic colonial history and consider a history of how heritage has been represented across the landscape. We suggest that the affective heritage of the Northwest especially cross-cultural or multi-cultural sites and histories can provide a basis for commemorating difficult colonial history or violent events that...

By focusing on the ultra-nationalism of the recently defunct Welsh Defence League (WDL), which in turn had a direct influence on the formation of its more infamous relation the English Defence League, this paper re-examines the long-entrenched discourses of competing nationalisms in Wales. By doing so, it highlights a tendency to emphasise only left-leaning cultural and linguistic nationalist types in that country's historiography, as opposed to the more violent, albeit minority, racist/new racist varieties to be found amongst recent extreme right groupings. Such extreme right antipathy in Wales is not Anglophobic but is directed rather at the ‘substantial numbers of immigrants and minorities … [who] have arrived as a result of empire and its postcolonial aftermath’, particularly those who are Islamic. By taking this new perspective on a heretofore generally ignored, but by no means insignificant Welsh subaltern group, this work further underlines the theoretical difficulties in understanding nationalism(...

This special issue of National Identities explores the social and cultural practises of nationhood and the articulation of nations and states in sport contexts. The dominant models of nations and nationalism studies centre on a received paradigm that has an implicit but seldom critically articulated association with states – that is, the nation-state equation appears as axiomatic in many cases of nationalism studies where the received version of politics holds that a nation without a state is incomplete or in some way not a real nation. This issue unpicks these issues through a set of discussions that will explore one of the most pervasive, banal, and comprehensive areas of this taken-for-granted association of culture, nations and states, i.e., sport. \ud \ud There is a set of sports and other cultural practices that disrupt this axiomatic association of nations/states and identities: we see these in, for instance, indigenous sports (such as the question of the Iroquois Nationals' travel documents, visas and attendance at the World Lacrosse Championships), events such as the VIVA World Cup for football teams representing nations without states, in various post-national and post-colonial understandings of sport-as-cultural practice such as the place of cricket in South Asian and West Indies diaspora communities, and in transnational/transcultural sports events such as the Francophone Games that seem to be premised on a cultural nation beyond the state. \ud \ud Papers in the issue analyse rugby, wine and regional identies in France (Occitania), Cornish sporting identities, the potential for normative rules of international sports representation, Circassian sporting identities in the context of Russian nationialism associated with the winter Olympics in Sochi, national and indigenous associations of skiing in northern Norway (Sami) and claims to nationhood in the context of the 2010 VIVA Football World Cup. Our opening essay considers the question of the palce of the state in claims to sporting nationalism.

Sport, and, in particular, football, has become an important lens for examining processes of globalisation and, increasingly, cosmopolitanism. In this paper, I explore the ways in which competing national and cosmopolitan discourses are articulated by and through the media's reporting of football. Analysing coverage of the appointment of three recent managers of the English national team, two foreign, one English, I show how ideas about (national) self, other and place are being scrutinised and negotiated in the contemporary era. However, rather than rendering national modes of thinking obsolete, these debates point to the periodic emergence of conditional forms of cosmopolitanism.

The question of eligibility for international sporting representation (ISR) has become increasingly contentious. In this paper we argue that the current ISR regulations are outdated and problematic. Sporting governing bodies ought to ignore citizenship as a criterion for ISR, and instead ISR should be based on a normative account of national belonging which would operate primarily on grounds of early socialisation and long-term residency. This approach would avoid many of the pragmatic and moral pathologies of ISR, and would utilise sports potential in promoting a liberal and progressive understanding of national ties.

Ecuadorian migration has emerged as a good case study on the pro-active orientations of sending countries toward expatriates, as an attempt to retain their allegiance, connectedness, and investments. Drawing on the discourses and policies of the Correa government in Ecuador, this paper aims to explore the effects of emigration on the national ‘self-understandings’ of sending countries and on their nation-building projects. Three theoretical questions are addressed: how do symbolic issues interact with more instrumental reasons in accounting for the political agendas of emigration countries? How do emigrant-addressed appeals affect the shifting boundaries of their national belonging? How do migrants react, if at all, to state-led representations and policies which build on their (supposedly) persistent loyalty to the homeland? While revisiting the Ecuadorian case, this article argues for domestic factors, nation-building agendas, and ‘banal nationalism’ to be factored into the literature on diasporas and e...

This special issue raised some points of interpretation that need developing. Everyone writes with a (more or less overt) set of assumptions, which is particularly true where the subject matter is as politically contentious as nationalism and that nationalism is still contested, as with Ireland. This was particularly true of this issue. This response aims to tease out some hidden assumptions and interpretations in those papers to further our understanding of the role of religion not just within the general framework of nationalism but also within our own assumptions of religious and ideological norms and values when studying nationalism.

This introductory essay places the articles of the special issue within the context of current scholarship on Europeanness and European identities as well as on transatlantic and inner-European migration. It probes the relationship between various migration experiences and identifications with Europe and the possible emergence of a European self-understanding among migrants. This exploratory collection of papers puts the two bodies of scholarship in dialogue and several case studies offer a wide variety of vantage points on the themes of Europe, identity, and migration. Much can be learned, they suggest, by careful historical and sociological investigations of the connections between migration experiences and Europeanization.

Since the discovery of oil, increasing wealth and international exposure have challenged Bahraini society and her notions of peoplehood. The earlier celebration of the “death landscapes”, comprised of the world's largest conglomeration of burial mounds, the pearl monuments and Dilmun pottery works have since been seen as inadequate to define Bahraini identity. This paper examines the emerging architectural landscapes of Bahrain that construct its national identity as a liberal modern state. It investigates how national space is defined by competing idealisms of the reconstruction of landscapes that celebrate grand historical narratives, and contemporary post-modernistic urban settlements and monuments crafted in parallel infused with meanings to produce a coherent social construct of the nation.

In Nations and Nationalism Gellner spoke for the capacity of institutions to substitute for weakened or withering nations, and it is in this sense that the Bauhaus (1919–1933), a German institute of architectural education, is theorised here as an abbreviated state of renewed collaboration. The paper posits the view that the contribution of architecture to discussions of nationalism, based on its capacity to elucidate latent aspects of the lifeworld, is its account of the spatial and material state of the nation. Institutions are viewed as middle-ground operations that rehearse the national spirit within an abbreviated setting for redemptive praxis.

Explaining Islamic architecture was a challenge for early modern Spanish historians. Although many of the buildings were highly valued, they nonetheless represented a defeat and 700 years of Muslim presence in the Peninsula. Consequently, the Islamic legacy was sometimes viewed with a wide range of aesthetic, moral and religious prejudices. This paper aims to analyse the role of these unfavourable narratives of Islamic architecture in the negotiation of the memory of the so-called ‘loss of the Iberian Peninsula’.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 gave an opportunity to remake not just political institutions but ethno-religious distinction in Northern Ireland. This paper looks at the how individuals reconstruct their way of being Protestant in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the context of social and political change. It shows individuals renegotiating their ways of being Protestant, attempting sometimes successfully to change its socio-cultural salience, blurring ethnic boundaries, distinguishing religious and ethno-national narratives, drawing universalistic political norms from their particular religious tradition. It argues that these renegotiations are highly sensitive to the macro-political context. Changes in this context affect individuals through their changing cognitive understandings and strategic interests which, at least in this case, are as important to identification as are social solidarities. Not applicable Embargo until 01/09/10. Link to publisher version - http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a908734400. DG 15/07/2010 ke SB. 29/7/10 MD done -OR

The articles in this special issue of National Identities are based on papers presented at a panel for the 120th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association on the theme ‘Nations, Nationa...

This paper explores the process of Irish national identity construction during the Land War of 1879-1882. I take a social constructivist approach to nationalism and a narrative approach to national identity construction, and focus on the discursive struggle between the various, and often conflicting, groups that constituted the land movement. After decades of self-defeating struggle between conflicting nationalist factions, the Land War provided the 'political field' on which a unified national identity emerged from public discourse over landlordism and British domination, and collective action based on new symbolic understandings. At the core of both Land War ideology and the emergent national identity was a discourse of retribution, configured through the collective sharing of narratives, embodying central themes of the injustice of British and landlord domination, and the rights of the Irish to the land and the country.

During the past half-century Australian immigration policy has moved from the assimilationist doctrine of Anglo-conformity, whereby non-British settlers were expected to adopt the Australian way-of-life, to a policy of multiculturalism that accepts and respects the cultures and traditions of newcomers, governed only by an overriding commitment to the basic institutions of Australian society. Newcomers are encouraged to take out Australian citizenship, which is available to immigrants after two years' residence, provided that they meet some other requirements, for example, the ability to speak and understand basic English. Notwithstanding changes in official policy, the population at large has a more diverse range of understandings of what it means to be 'truly Australian'. In this paper, I validate an earlier typology of such understandings and explore the social and attitudinal correlates of beliefs about Australian identity among four broad groupings of Australians: dogmatic nativists; literal nativists...

At first sight there can be no more telling example of the distorted and parochial priorities of the Northern Ireland government at the outbreak of the Second World War than its preoccupation with the safety of a statue of Lord Carson. The statue fronts the Stormont parliamentary buildings and a committee had been established to consider how it could be protected from bomb damage at a time when the population of Belfast lacked adequate air-raid protection.1 The government’s action, however, is more comprehensible if seen in the context of Anglo—Irish politics since 1921 rather than the beginning of a conflict whose dimensions and horrors had yet to unfold; and in particular, if it is seen in the context of attempts to create an identity for Northern Ireland so as to enhance its security in a period when its existence was vigorously contested. This paper, focusing on government-related publications, state emblems and, especially, the Stormont parliament building, will attempt to assess the relativ...

National identities are often seen as the polar opposite of identities associated with other geographical scales of political identity, such as the local or the regional. Under contemporary circumstances, however, including the globalisation of economies and the questioning of the efficacy of existing states, national identity may no longer be best thought of as ‘opposed’ to political identities at other geographical scales. Using the case of the Northern League in Italy, this paper identifies three new ‘rules’ of political-identity formation, the self-conscious invention of political units, the malleability of identities and the multiplicity of identities, that suggest the mutual contingency of different geographical scales in the crafting of political, including national, identities.