McCrone’s account of Scottish identity is particularly useful in examining how national identity works. He points out that many considerations of national identity tend to focus on the ‘national’ rather than on ‘identity’, with the weight of the question ‘conventionally placed on the existence or otherwise of the ‘nation’ rather than on the mechanisms where actors themselves do the defining and constructing’.8 This is not to suggest that ‘nation’ is an unimportant consideration in understanding national identity, but rather that what constitutes ‘nation’ is a complex of historically and culturally shaped meanings and representations.9
In the case of Scotland, for example, different levels of meaning are attached to it - as country, as society, as nation. Each of these conceptions carries considerable political and cultural weight and continues to play out
in constructions of Scottish identity. McCrone also points to the different ways in which ‘nation’ can refer to ethnic (place of origin) identifications or civic (social and cultural) identifications, or a mixture of both. His recent Scottish population studies reveal that being Scottish is defined through a mix of different weightings given to class, gender, political orientation, as well as birth, ancestry and residence. Being Scottish has also become stronger as well as more culturally diverse in recent decades. In this, Scotland is not alone, as this increasing diversity and complexity in the ways that people formulate their national identity is reflected in modern societies generally.
McCrone, like Anthony Cohen, suggests that the idea of ‘nation’, that plays out in people’s sense of national identity, ‘does not reside in geographical or even social territory so much as in people’s minds’.10 It is essentially symbolically constructed. Following Benedict Anderson’s conception of nation as ‘imagined community’, McCrone’s view is that nations are imagined, ‘interpreted as ideas, made and remade, rather than simply as actual ‘places’ ’.11 The idea of ‘nation’ is made possible through real, imagined or remembered connections, however distant in time and space. In this sense, ‘nation’ is a place of the mind, and a set of meanings that attach to it.
Those meanings - ideas and images of a place, its people, its characteristics and values - are culturally constructed, are often contested, and are not sets of fixed, naturally occurring characteristics of a people or place. They form part of the stocks of cultural knowledge that are selectively brought into play in formulations of national identity, whether that be in the context of national ideological struggles or in family get- togethers. What it is to be, for example, Scottish, or Australian, or German, or Canadian means different things in different situations and at different points in history, and may depend in large measure on who is making the claim and under what circumstances. The point being made here is that national identity operates at different levels of meaning in different contexts and settings, and that there is no ‘one size fits all’ national identity. The question to ask, according to McCrone, is not ‘how best do cultural forms reflect an essential identity, but how do cultural forms actually help to construct and shape identity, or rather, identities’. Moreover, as he adds, ‘these identities themselves, in turn,
cannot be defined or understood without reference to the cultural forms which give them shape and meaning’.12
Harris Berger and Giovanna Del Negro also emphasise that various, and often competing ideas about national identity emerge and are played out across all domains of social activity, large and small, in different settings and for different purposes.13 For example, national identities are regulated and codified in law and government policy; promulgated by community leaders, activists and politicians; framed through social and cultural institutions such as schools, the church, galleries and museums; turned to material advantage by publishers, tourism bodies, and the music industry; expressed in literature, art and song; disseminated in folklore, popular culture, and supermarket products; fought over at football games, and in ideological debates and wars; celebrated in public performances and in family reunions; and studied and explained by researchers. Through social processes such as these, ideas about national identity are expressed, interpreted, affirmed or resisted, reformulated, passed on and disseminated.
Ideas and interpretations of national identity can also exert considerable social force. They are brought into play to rally support for social or political action, and enhance social position; to regulate, dictate or control behaviour and assign rights and privileges; to attribute certain qualities to groups of people and to explain the behaviour of individuals or groups; to foreground special skills or attributes; to assert group attachment or difference; to invoke authenticity and authority to speak or act on behalf of others. As Berger and Del Negro note, ‘reconfirming, nuancing, adumbrating, resisting or overturning previous visions, the interpretation of identity is one of the prime battle grounds upon which ideological struggles are played out’.14 In the context of identity politics and nationalism, for example, ‘the sense of being a nation is a powerful political force’, as McCrone notes.15 Here, national categories are adopted and
mobilised as a means of appealing to the population at large. McCrone explains that ‘nationalism does not derive from a distinctive culture. Rather, it seeks to manufacture and make distinctive such a culture for political ends’.16 And, as McCrone reminds us, if
national identity is above all a set of meanings, then much depends on whose meaning wins out.
Some meanings ‘win out’, or at least become pervasive, attain wider currency and valency through being sustained in social discourse, disseminated through popular culture, and embedded in institutional arrangements. McCrone, Berger and Del Negro, Storey, and Michael Billig draw attention to the ways in which cultural meanings and ideas that are articulated and circulated through these types of mechanisms can take on a common sense, taken for granted quality. Billig’s ‘banal nationalism’ underscores how the idea of nation is ‘flagged’ in daily life, and is implicitly and symbolically reinforced.17 One of the important ways that ideas about national identity become routinised and ‘naturalised’ is, as McCrone observes, through the ‘civil institutional apparatus’ - the education system, the legal system, the press, the church, the financial system and so on - that ‘provides a social template’ that sustains ideas about nation and national identity.18 This ‘social template’ can take more or less explicit form, and be more or less regulated. As Berger and Del Negro’s account of identity highlights, in some institutional arrangements, highly regulated representations of identity, such as identity cards, visas, work permits or legal privileges, are explicit and restrictive; whereas ideas about national identity may be framed in more implicit ways in social institutions such as schools and the church.19 Cultural institutions too, such as, museums and galleries can act as cultural gatekeepers even where aspects of culture and identity are explicitly framed as arenas for debate and re-interpretation. While highly institutionalised and regulated representations of identity are more obvious examples of the social order, Berger and Del Negro stress that power relations play a key role in all interpretations of identity, including those that would seem to be neutral or more open for consideration. All representations of identity are informed by implicit or explicit interpretations of the social world, and ‘gain their valences and meanings through their relationship with a larger social history and social context’:
“Pre-existing social structures and stocks of cultural knowledge (native social theories, images and icons and narratives) are the ideological raw material and
informing context in which even the newest and most idiosyncratic interpretations are made. … And while actors may produce interpretations that resist dominant ideas, none may do so independently of the larger social field.” (Berger and Del Negro, 2004, p 142)
Storey addresses how that larger social world produces dominant discourses that generate powerful cultural meanings that can assume a certain authority or status of ‘truth’. His focus is on how dominant discourses play out in popular culture. His analysis recognises that ‘the culture industries are a major site of ideological production, constructing powerful images, descriptions, definitions, frames of reference for understanding the world’.20 But he also rejects the view that people are passive consumers of culture. Storey’s work serves to highlight the ways that cultural narratives about nation and identity are produced and made available in culture, but also that the process is neither homogenous, nor all one way.
Ideas about national identity that emerge and circulate in culture are both shared and conflicting networks of meanings. According to Storey, ‘cultures are arenas in which different ways of articulating the world come into conflict and alliance’.21 While public processes of representation and cultural dissemination act as repositories and sources of ideas about national identity, they are also sites for the negotiation the re-interpretation of those ideas. It is through mechanisms such as these that ideas about national identity are reinterpreted, challenged, and reformulated. But these more widespread and public processes are by no means the only ways in which ideas about national identity are constructed, nor do they operate in isolation from other scales of social interaction. As Storey notes, ‘culture is not something ready-made which we ‘consume’ ’.22 People appropriate, make meaningful, and use cultural ideas and forms, in the lived practices of everyday life.