Antecedentes y fundación

In common with most other types of collective identity, it is important to emphasise that there is nothing ‘natural’ or ‘essential’ about national identities and that, indeed, they are historically a relatively recent concept. Stuart Hall (1996a), for example decouples the

‘natural’ association between the individual and the nation-state he or she is born into by stressing the role of identification; national identities are formed and transformed through a process of identification and this process is shaped by the cultural meanings that serve to create the idea of a nation. The nation itself can only continue to exist if people continue to

participate in the idea of the nation, and perpetuate the cultural processes through which the nation is understood. However, this is not to imply that an individual person can simply

‘opt out’ of the national – the discourses and processes constituting the nation are sufficiently strong that continued participation in them appears ‘natural’.

The respective work of Benedict Anderson (1991) and Michael Billig (1995) has been influential in the social sciences in this regard. Anderson describes how national identities operate as an ‘imagined community’ while Billig puts forward the concept of ‘banal nationalism’, by which he refers to the numerous minor, everyday ways in which national identity is constructed and re-constructed, or ‘flagged’. He argues that these reminders, or flaggings are “such a familiar part of the social environment, that they operate mindlessly, rather than mindfully”(Billig, 1995, p. 38).

While Billig does not discount the role of deliberate, conscious, often state-sponsored commemorations of the nation in shaping national identity, his argument is that for this identity to be seen as natural rather than imposed, it must remain near the surface of contemporary life and be daily perpetuated through language in an unremarkable and unremarked-upon fashion, something he refers to as “flagging the homeland daily” (p.93).

As such, it should not be imagined that the survival of the nation depends on a daily act of collective will, but rather through the continuation of ‘banal national practices’ which take for granted the reality of the nation, but in doing so, affirm its existence. Therefore, Billig asserts that the psychological study of national identity should not attempt to determine supposedly ‘fixed’ national characteristics, but rather should “search for the common-sense assumptions and ways of talking about nationhood”. The focus should not be on asking

“what is a national identity?”, but rather on asking “what does it mean to claim to have a national identity?” (Billig, 1995, p. 61)

On a socio-political level, Billig and other theorists have addressed this question by emphasising the political effectivity of the promotion of the notion of an eternal, unified, homogenous national identity and culture. Stuart Hall has claimed that while national identities continue to be represented as unified, they are in fact “cross-cut by deep internal divisions and differences, and ‘unified’ only through the exercise of different forms of cultural power”(Hall, 1996a). So important is the myth of unity to the construct of a singular national identity that any threat to this unity is perceived as a threat to the nation itself. It has been posited that national identities are being squeezed on both sides by a renewed interest in the local and the spread of globalisation. Also, migration has, in Hall’s (1996a) terms, resulted in a contestation of the settled contours of national identity, and exposed its closures to the pressures of difference, “otherness” and cultural diversity (Hall, 1996a, p. 627). Therefore, national identities may be invoked as something that needs to be protected from outside influences, particularly if those who are represented as ‘outside’ i.e.

not sharing the national identity, are to be found ‘inside’ i.e. sharing the national territory.

As such, national identities, when closely aligned with a narrow view of nationalism, may be inherently exclusionary, and a source of tension within the nation. Bhiku Parekh has described this as the “paradox of national identity” (2000, p. 6):

Every political community needs some shared view of its collective identity; but every such view has an exclusivist, authoritarian, repressive and ideological thrust and a tendency to demean those outsiders who constitute its acknowledged or unacknowledged point of reference. A view of national identity is a force for both unity and division, a condition of the community’s survival and reproduction which can paradoxically also become a cause of its fragmentation and even disintegration (Parekh, 2000, p. 7).

Billig’s analysis, along with those of Hall and Anderson, links discourses of national identity very much with nationalism and the role of the nation-state in promulgating these discourses. The focus of a social psychological analysis lies in the ways these discourses are taken up or rejected by individuals who identify with the nation. One might ask how national identities that do not necessarily correspond with the ‘preferred’ version are articulated and how some national identities, as opposed to others, come to be seen as authentic. As such, national identities are reproduced in individual discursive practice, as set out by Wodak et al:

The national identity of individuals who perceive themselves as belonging to a national collectivity is manifested, inter alia, in their social practices, one of which is discursive practice. The respective national identity is shaped by state, political, institutional, media and everyday social practices, and the material and social conditions which emerge as their results, to which the individual is subjected. The discursive practice as a special form of social practice plays a central part both in the formation and in the expression of national identity (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Liebhart, 1999, pp. 29-30).

Bearing in mind the extent to which national identities are shaped by “state, political, institutional, media and everyday social practices”, it is relevant to re-examine Billig’s above question from the perspective of the individual migrant, or person of recent migrant descent. What does it mean to claim to have a national identity that is distinct from the nation in which one lives, and may be expressed through allegiance to another nation? If national identities are perpetuated by being flagged daily, what effect do such banal reminders have when they serve to remind the individual that he or she is not of the nation, whether by choice or by exclusion? And to what extent can the nationally-oriented identities that such individuals do articulate be termed ‘national identities’, given the lack of a facilitatory discursive context?

As a means of addressing these concerns, as well as counteracting the essentialist tendencies of national identities, diasporic identities have been frequently suggested as an alternative prism that both more accurately represents the range of identifications available to people in an era of late modernity, and also as a more progressive form of identity that is less associated with hegemonic prescriptions of identity, anchored to the nation-state.