Negotiating National Identities

Between Globalization, the Past and 'the Other'

Christian Karner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754676386
• eBook ISBN: 9781317089377
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Negotiating National Identities presents an empirically detailed and theoretically wide-ranging analysis of the complex political and cultural struggles taking place in contemporary Europe. Taking contemporary Austria and her controversial identity politics as its central case study in a discussion of developments across a variety of national and pan-European contexts, this book demonstrates that neo-nationalism has been one among several competing reactions to the processes and challenges of globalization, whilst inclusive notions of identity and belonging are shown to have emerged from the realms of civil society and cultural production. Shifting the study of national identities from the party-political to the social, cultural and economic realms, this book raises important questions of human rights, social exclusion and ideological struggle in a globalizing era, drawing attention to the contested nature of European politics and civil societies, in which existing configurations of power and exclusion are both reproduced and challenged. As such, it will be of interest to anyone working in the fields of race and ethnicity, national identity and media and cultural studies.

Chapter 1
Paradigms of Identity

Introduction

This chapter draws a crucial distinction: between national identities and nationalism. Nationalism, it will be shown, does not exhaust – or exercise an ideological monopoly over – national identities. Put differently, national identities are the larger, more complex and diverse phenomenon of the two. National identities are subject to processes of (re)construction, (re)interpretation, and (re)appropriation. They are in continuous flux, comprising an ideological force-field contested by competing notions of inclusion and exclusion, rights and entitlements. National identities are, in short, subject to ongoing negotiations involving competing visions of social order, alternative interpretations of history and delineations of a national self that differ in their relative inclusiveness or exclusivity vis-à-vis ‘the other’.

The notion of a ‘positive nationalism’ may indeed be a paradox (Aftenberger 2007, 215), at least from the vantage point of a universal ethics of human rights and if independence struggles inspired by more positively connoted nationalisms are bracketed out. Negative judgments of nationalisms are due to their rigid separation of ‘self’ and ‘other’ (Aftenberger 2007, 99), shaping visions and demands for an unequal allocation of resources, rights and entitlements according to perceived membership in – or exclusion from – the ‘imagined’ (Anderson 1983) national community. However, one cannot project such rigidity from nationalism to the more heterogeneous and complex domains of national identities and their negotiability. Whilst nationalist ideologies are prominent parts of such domains, the latter also include discourses that propose more inclusive definitions of ‘the national community’ or even question the differentiation of the in-group from certain outsiders. There is no shortage of discourses that regard the nation-state as the most consequential political unit and as a significant source of identification, whilst also opposing nationalism and criticizing existing exclusions. There is, in other words, much between the two opposing ends of an ideological spectrum that stretches from rigidly exclusive, externally hostile nationalisms to utopian discourses of post-national global belonging. With regard to the former in particular, and however objectionable nationalist discourses may appear to observers, sociological analysis must strive – in the first instance – for contextualization: rather than condemning nationalism a priori, its conditions of possibility, appeal and plausibility to many need examining and analyzing. Only from a position of informed understanding can differences between nationalism and other identity discourses be gauged and, if appropriate, a convincing ethical response be formulated.

The concept of national identities implicates social processes, institutions and historical change. Stuart Hall (1996) conceptualizes identities as routes or ongoing projects of becoming rather than as static roots. Such routes are shaped by institutions and discursive practices, which speak to and make demands of social actors, constraining their possible courses of action and life chances. Identities are thus in part the subject-positions structures of power provide us with or impose on us. However, they also involve individuals interpellated or ‘hailed into place’, recognizing or accepting – in a given context – a place in the world with its constraints and opportunities. Such an understanding of identities involves power and its manifestations in institutions and language. It also recognizes individuals’ (constrained) agency in responding to or contesting their interpellations, in recognizing or potentially transcending some imposed subject-positions. Whilst emphasizing the highly variable impact of power and inequality on differently positioned individuals and groups, Hall’s framework also allows for psychologically complex individuals whose negotiations may effect ideological resistance and structural change. Translated into our terms, national identity negotiations occur within the institutional parameters provided by nation-states, their histories and legislation related to – for example – citizenship and immigration. Moreover, such identity negotiations occur in the context of representations of boundaries defining and separating ‘self’ and ‘other’, as well as through social practices and civil society activities that variously help reproduce or challenge existing power structures. Nationalism, then, is one amongst several competing discursive regimes that aim to speak to and interpellate groups and individuals, who in turn variously accept or contest their claims and constructions.

I begin with an outline of theoretical debates underpinning my subsequent analysis of relevant empirical materials. My central claim that nationalisms and national identities are conceptually and empirically separate – albeit often interrelated – entities draws on Anthony D. Smith’s (2008) ‘historical sociology of nations and nationalism’. This is followed by a discussion of the politics of social classification as manifest in the institutional and discursive delineation and reproduction of group boundaries. This is followed by a mention of seminal conceptualizations of ‘hybrid’ experiences – those of inhabiting and speaking from within the spaces between categories – that occupy a more central role in later chapters. Its theoretical apparatus in place, the present chapter then turns to its main focus: an analysis of different discourses of national identity that have shaped Austrian history since the late nineteenth century. The purpose of this analysis is, first, to provide a historical overview crucial for an understanding of Austria in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and, second, to present empirical evidence of the politicization and negotiability of Austrian national identities in and across different contexts. My main empirical finding and conceptual point in this chapter thus concerns the discursive diversity and contestability of national identities. The chapter then traces similar complexities through existing research on three other European contexts: Ireland, Sweden and the UK.

Theoretical context

Modernism, a major paradigm in the study of nations and nationalisms, insists on the relatively recent origins of nationalism as an ideology of legitimation for (modern) nation-states. That said, the dating and decisive symptoms of modernity postulated by different theorists vary. Most famously, Benedict Anderson (1983) traces nationalism to the dual forces of the invention of the printing press and capitalism – or ‘print-capitalism’, which through novel cultural products such as novels and newspapers published in a newly dominant vernacular language facilitated the ‘imagining’ of a comradeship transcending intra-group divisions and the lack of social interaction amongst the vast majority of co-nationals. Ernest Gellner (1983), meanwhile, saw the origins of nationalism in industrializing society’s demand for a culturally homogenized workforce consisting of ‘mutually substitutable’ workers, who possessed a minimum of numerical and literacy skills in order to service the rapidly modernizing and urbanizing social formations of the nineteenth century. This in turn required a standardizing educational system that achieved cultural homogeneity by transmitting the ‘high culture’ of emerging national elites.

Anderson’s and Gellner’s are by no means the only modernist analyses of nations and nationalisms, but they illustrate the main thrust of the modernist project: they level a powerful challenge against some academic work (e.g. van den Berghe 1995, 2005) and much commonsensical ‘knowledge’ and political rhetoric about the taken-for-granted – but rarely if ever empirically demonstrated – ancient or ‘primordial’ origins of nations. Nations, such widely held beliefs assume, are perennial units of social and political organization and nationalism, such discourses continue, is the ‘natural’ feeling of belonging to such seemingly inevitably entities. Clearly, the gulf between such primordial accounts and modernist scholarship is wide, though not necessarily insurmountable. An alternative approach referred to as ‘ethno-symbolism’, and widely associated with the work of Anthony D. Smith, successfully bridges the gulf between the two (Özkirimli 2000) by offering a synthesis: it echoes the modernist insistence on the relatively recent social transformations underpinning the genesis of an international order based on the institutions and ideologies that define nation-states, whilst emphasizing that national identities and nationalisms have had to, in order to be generally recognized and appealing, tap into and utilize pre-existing traditions, symbols, myths and practices.

Smith’s most recent contribution to these debates, entitled The Cultural Foundations of Nations (2008) continues along similar lines. It offers a ‘historical sociology’ of ‘cultural traditions’ rooted in antiquity – those being ideas about hierarchy, covenant and the civic republic – that subsequently influenced the genesis of nations and nationalisms. Smith insists (2008, 184) that the categories of ‘nations’ (and national identities) and ‘nationalisms’ have to be kept separate. He defines nationalism (2008, 15–17) as ‘an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity, and identity on behalf of a population, some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential “nation”’. Smith identifies a number of core nationalist beliefs: the notion that ‘the world is divided’ into historically distinctive nations; that ‘the nation is the sole source of political power’ and ‘must possess maximum autonomy’; that ‘a just and peaceful world must be based on a plurality of nations’; and ‘to be free, every individual must … give primary loyalty to the nation’. Smith also provides a more fine-tuned definition of ‘the “ethnic” variant of nationalism’ as emphasizing ‘genealogical ties’, ‘vernacular culture … indigenous to the land’, ‘nativist history – a belief in the virtues of indigenous history’ and popular mobilization. Conversely, he offers the following ideal-typical definition of nations and national identities:

[T]he ‘nation’ [is] a named and self-defined human community whose members cultivate shared myths, memories, symbols, values, and traditions, reside in and identify with a historic homeland, create and disseminate a distinctive public culture, and observe shared customs and common laws … ‘[N]ational identity’ [refers to] the continuous reproduction and reinterpretation of the pattern of values, symbols, memories, myths, and traditions that compose the distinctive heritage of nations, and the identification of individuals with that pattern and heritage … [There is a] centrality of social process and symbolic resources in the formation and persistence of nations, giving them their distinctive but flexible character. (Smith 2008, 19, italics in the original)

Two dimensions of this are crucial. First, Smith’s analysis of vast historical stretches and geographical terrains enable him to demonstrate (2008, 15–16) that ‘the assumption that only nationalists create nations is questionable’ and that, on the contrary, ‘some conceptions of the nation, which may well differ from modern conceptions of the nation, antedate by several centuries the appearance of nationalism’; the nation can therefore not be simply ‘derived from the ideology of nationalism’. Second, Smith’s insistence on the ‘flexible character’ of nations, the ‘centrality of social process’, and ongoing symbolic ‘reproduction and reinterpretation’ as defining features of national identities is echoed in the following analyses.

In a quantitative and comparative study, Kunovich (2009, 574) defines ‘national identity as a socially constructed sameness resulting from nationalism’. This is problematic and contradicted by the argument made here: Smith’s historical sociology shows that national identities and sentiments often predate nationalism. In chronological terms, then, national identities cannot ‘result from’ nationalism; instead, Smith reveals that modern nationalisms and many ‘present-day nations’ developed out of, built on but also significantly transformed older traditions and solidarities best understood as national sentiments (Smith 2008, 184–185). Moreover, and this is an argument crucial to this book and will be developed over successive chapters, there is evidence of vastly different discourses of national identity, some of which do not insist on ‘sameness’. Instead, they define ‘the nation’ as inherently pluralistic. At the same time, this does not mean that such inclusive discourses do not also draw external boundaries or regard the nation as the crucial unit of political organization. Put differently, there are pluralistic, multicultural conceptions of national identity that are not automatically tantamount to an ideology of postnational utopia.

This discussion is also about the politics of social classification, about the power to draw and institutionalize boundaries, as well as about the everyday experience of negotiating boundaries. This is, in short, also a discussion about the state, the construction and reproduction of groups, social inclusion and exclusion, and about individuals’ agency and their sometimes hard-to-classify lived realities. Two theoretical strands that resurface in later chapters are worth mentioning here, for they jointly provide a conceptual framework for thinking about processes and experiences of social classification. The first strand is derived from Zygmunt Bauman’s analyses (1990; 1993) of the modern nation-state’s promotion of cultural homogeneity. Bauman describes how ‘the stranger’, defined by Georg Simmel as ‘a person who comes today and stays tomorrow’, is perceived as an embodiment of difference and a political challenge by nation-states, which respond to such heterogeneity with a combination of ‘methods’ first differentiated by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: anthropoemic strategies of segregation and anthropophagic strategies of enforced assimilation. Whilst these strategies respond to difference with contrasting methods of permanent exclusion and coercive ‘ingestion’, they are both distrustful of – and opposed to – diversity or classificatory ambivalence (see Karner 2010a).

This latter phenomenon, the experience of inhabiting and speaking from within the ambivalent spaces between categories, relates to the second theoretical strand: analyses of ‘syncretism’, ‘liminality’ and ‘hybridity’. Though not identical, these terms overlap in capturing social realities that are ‘messy’, hard-to-classify unambiguously, positioned in the interface or at the threshold between categories, and defined by an inherent pluralism. Homi Bhabha, a key theorist of hybridity, argues that ‘ambivalence’ and an ‘impossible unity’ are intrinsic to ‘the idea of the nation’:

The ‘locality’ of national culture is neither unified nor unitary … nor must it be seen simply as ‘other’ in relation to what is outside or beyond it. The boundary is Janus-faced and the problem of outside/inside must always itself be a process of hybridity, incorporating new ‘people’ in relation to the body politic, generating other sites of meaning … What emerges … is a turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated. It is from such narrative positions between cultures and nations … that Nation and Narration seeks to … extend Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary credo: ‘National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension’. (Bhabha 1990a, 4)

Classification, boundaries and hybridity are key conceptual themes explored in this book. Bhabha also adds weight to the argument developed in the present chapter: that nationalism and national identities (or ‘national consciousness’) are not necessarily the same thing. I now turn to an overview of different, to some extent co-existing yet also often competing discourses of national identity that have shaped different eras in Austria’s recent history. Not only have dominant understandings of ‘the nation’ changed, but their criteria of inclusion also differ significantly. The conceptual point I develop through the following historical analysis is simple but crucial: even within a given national context, national identities are not ideologically monolithic but are defined by heterogeneity, disagreement and discursive struggle.

Competing discourses of Austrian identity

In Language and Solitude, Ernest Gellner (1998) terms two diametrically opposed discourses that circulated on the territories of the decaying Habsburg Empire the ‘universalistic-atomic’ and the ‘romantic-organic’ vision respectively. The former was associated with an individualistic world-view based on the Enlightenment notion of Universal Man and a ‘bloodless[ly] cosmopolitan’ laissez-faire liberalism (Lukes 1998, xiii). Its discursive rival conceived the individual to be intrinsically part of a linguistic-cultural collective. Such ‘holistic’ romanticism provided the ‘rationale’ underlying the ethnic nationalisms that contributed to the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. The same ideological configuration informed the negotiations at Saint Germain after World War I, resulting in the redrawing of the borders in Central Europe and several newly legitimated nation-states. Austria – according to Karl Renner, its Socialist representative at Saint Germain and first Chancellor – was ‘what was left’ of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Reduced by two-thirds in territory and three quarters in population, the First Austrian Republic was – from its creation until its infamous Anschluss to Hitler Germany in 1938 – unsure of its cultural identity and political destiny (e.g. Brook-Shepherd 1997). Following World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, post-war reconstruction, decades of political neutrality and consensual democracy on the Western side of the Iron Curtain, the revolutions of 1989 and Austria’s EU membership in 1995, national identity is being negotiated, to a profoundly different historical and ideological backdrop, in contemporary Austria. The earlier-mentioned temporary ‘sanctions’ by Austria’s then 14 EU-partners in 2000 following the formation of a coalition government between the centre-right ÖVP and the controversial FPÖ also testified to this.

In this section, I analyze competing constructions of national identity articulated in Austria throughout the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Taking Gellner’s arch...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Paradigms of Identity
• 2 National Symbols and Histories in Crisis
• 3 The Past, The Present, Nation-states and Europe
• 4 Markets and Nations: Of Flows and Solidarities
• 5 Counter-Hegemony: Universal Human Rights Versus Exclusive Citizen Entitlements
• 6 Everyday Politics: Self–Other Relationships and Lived Ambivalences
• 7 ‘The Other’: Representations Of and By
• Conclusion
• References
• Index