Self and Nation

Stephen Reicher, Nick Hopkins

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781446236253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A `RARE BOOK? FROM LOCAL AUTHORS

`Here is a rare book, a truly helpful piece of work on the psychology of nationalism. Stephen Reicher and Nick Hopkins, of St Andrews and Dundee Universitie s, focus much of their study of recent Scottish experience, drawing on inter-views with political activists. The cast light on why our `Unionists? and nationalists feel so sure their side represents our national identity and the other lot doesn?t. For once it is a compliment to say a book raises more questions than it answers. Stephen Reicher and Nick Hopkin s open up large questions closer inspection? - Glasgow Herald

`In this impressive book S tephen Reicher and Nick Hopkins draw from a wealth of research to address issues of nationality, national identity and nationalism that lie at the heart of core topics in social psychology and its cognate disciplines. They have produced a powerful and scholarly text that interweaves an abundance of rich empirical data with a broad-reaching and timely theoretical statement. Moreover, the content is not confined to matters of national identity but also extends to treatments of stereotyping, prejudice, intergroup conflict, leadership, collective action, and the self.... For all these reasons, the book should serve essential and compelling reading for a very broad audience? - S Alexander Haslam, Australian National University

`Stephen Reiche r and Nick Hopkins write with elegance and clarity, drawing the reader into their argument, without losing any of its complexity and nuance. This book deserves to make a major impact in studies of nationalism. It ought to become a classic…. I?m quite bowled over - it?s really brilliant? - David McCrone, Edinburgh University

1 The National Question

Psychology in a world of nations

We have said it before, but let us say it again: the aim of this book is to use social psychology to answer some questions about national phenomena and to use national phenomena to pose some questions about social psychology. This might seem an obvious task, and one might reasonably suppose that it had been undertaken with such frequency that any new attempt would be jostling for room in a very crowded space. Yet, on closer inspection of that space, one finds a remarkable absence – or rather, a remarkable pair of absences.

For all the huge and burgeoning literature on nations and nationalism, there is virtually no explicit consideration of the psychological mechanisms which mediate between structural, cultural and ideological considerations on the one hand and action on the other. Even more notably, psychology is frequently excluded from the family of disciplines that are invited to discuss the nature of national phenomena. For instance, in his review of explanations of nationalism, John Coakley (1992) provides a taxonomy based on the definition of the phenomena to be explained, the disciplinary approach to be adopted and the ideological approach that is taken. Under ‘disciplinary approach’ he lists:

political science; philosophy; sociology; anthropology; geography; sociolinguistics (history has been omitted on the assumption that the contribution of many historians who have addressed this subject on a theoretical level will fall under the heading of one of the above disciplinary perspectives, all of which, in any case, tend to adopt an historical approach to the topic). (pp. 2–3)

Just as the study of nations is booming, so social psychology is a growth area covering an increasing number of topics as reflected in a diversifying array of journals. What is more, after prolonged neglect (cf. Steiner, 1974), group and collective processes are receiving renewed attention. Between 1974 and 1989, 5.9 per cent of articles in top mainstream social psychology journals were concerned with some aspect of group processes or intergroup relations. Between 1990 and 1995 the average grew to 10.6 per cent, with the figure for 1995 alone standing at 14.9 per cent (Hogg & Moreland, 1995; Moreland, Hogg & Hains, 1994). Further, two new journals have started in the last couple of years alone: Group Dynamics and Group Processes and Intergroup Relations. As these titles would suggest, their remit is limited exclusively to collective phenomena. Yet, for all this interest, nations and nationalism have received scant attention.

In the first two volumes of Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, not a single article has been devoted to such phenomena. Looking at an admittedly non-random sample of social psychology textbooks on our bookshelves (Baron, Byrne & Johnson, 1998; Brewer & Crano, 1994; Brown, 1965, 1986; Forsyth, 1987; Hewstone, Stroebe & Stephenson, 1996; Hogg & Vaughan, 1998; Levin & Levin, 1988; Moscovici, 1972; Pennington, Gillen & Hill, 1999; Sabini, 1992, 1995; Wrightsman & Deaux, 1981) only two contain any mention at all of anything to do with nations and both of these are limited to passing reflections covering no more than a single page: one on whether we have clear stereotypes of different nations (Brewer & Crano, 1994); the other as to whether different nations have different values (Wrightsman & Deaux, 1981). This isn’t because textbooks are somehow atypical. A computer search of psychology journal articles over the period 1987–1994 reveals eight articles on nationalism and 11 on national identity. This compares with 485 articles on a specific personality characteristic (neuroticism) and 3174 on rats!

This is not to deny that there are many papers in which national identity is employed as a dependent or independent variable, but these are cases where the nation is not of interest in itself, nor are the particularities of national categories a focus of study. Indeed these are glossed over since the nation is only employed as a convenient domain in which to study more general phenomena – stereotyping, intergroup comparison or whatever (cf. Billig, 1995; Condor, 1997, in press). There are, of course, some exceptions to this sorry picture and there are incipient signs that psychologists are beginning to treat the nation more seriously. We shall be dealing with these exceptions in the next chapter. Nonetheless, in broad terms, there is little doubt that students of the nation have ignored psychology and that students of psychology have ignored the nation. If this double absence is remarkable enough in itself, it becomes even more remarkable when one considers the extent to which the issues and the concepts used by each are so inhabited by the other. It is as if, on each side, a central member of the family had been banished to the nether regions and, while never spoken of by name, still haunted each and every conversation.

This is, perhaps, most obvious in studies of nations and nationalism. If the revival of peripheral nationalisms in Western Europe sparked the new wave of study and if the emergence of nationalisms following the break up of the Soviet Union only added to the impetus, the most acute concerns accompanied the periodic upsurges of violence, most notably around the break up of Yugoslavia. To quote from the back-cover blurb for Michael Ignatieff’s account of his journeys into the new nationalism: ‘modern nationalism is a language of the blood: a call to arms that can end in the horror of ethnic cleansing’ (1994). Such concerns lead to a frequent definition of nationalism as a psychological category (Giddens, 1985) and, more particularly, an equation of nationalism with the psychological categories of passion and of sentiment (Hooghe, 1992). The combined taint of extremity and irrationalism also leads to a widespread suspicion concerning all manifestations of nationhood. In Kitching’s delightful phrase, ‘son, when they raise your flag, raise your eyebrow’ (1985: 116).

However, there is a danger in reducing nationalism to its most intense manifestations. As Gellner (1994) observes, nationalism may be an important and pervasive force, but it rarely leads to violent disruption. If we limit our concern with the phenomena to those moments when people are preparing to die, or else to kill, in the nation’s name, we would conclude that, however spectacular, nationalism is generally of little relevance to the way in which we live our everyday lives. Gellner’s own description of nationalism is revealing in this respect. He likens it to gravity – a force that exerts its pull upon us in both spectacular and mundane ways. Sometimes it may cause things to crash to the ground, or apples to drop on our heads. But it also shapes the way we act in less obtrusive ways. To borrow Billig’s term, it is banal nationalism – the way we presuppose a national frame for everything from what counts as ‘the news’ to what we understand as ‘the weather’ – that may ultimately have the greatest impact upon us (1995). By focusing on the periodic explosions of nationalist fervour we miss the fact that nationalism is the ideology through which people act to reproduce nation-states as nations (Billig, 1996).

But even in these banal forms, where national identity is not overtly asserted but rather taken for granted and where a national frame of reference does not lead one to kill but shapes the way one scans and understands a newspaper, one is still invoking a psychological category. One is dealing with the ways in which people understand who they are, the nature of the world they live in, how they relate to others and what counts as important for them.

It is not only nationalism and national identity that invoke psychological constructs. Increasingly, the very concept of nation has come to incorporate a psychological dimension. Perhaps the two most famous quotations in this regard are from Rupert Emerson and Benedict Anderson. Emerson states that: ‘the simplest statement that can be made about a nation is that it is a body of people who feel that they are a nation; and it may be that when all the fine-spun analysis is concluded this will be the ultimate statement as well’ (1960: 102). Anderson defines the nation by saying that: ‘it is an imagined political community’ (1983: 15). However, these two are not alone. Walker Connor states that: ‘many of the problems associated with defining a group are attributable precisely to the fact that it is a self-defining group. That is why scholars such as Ernest Baker, Rupert Emerson, Carleton Hayes, and Hans Kohn have consistently used terms such as self-awareness and self-consciousness when analysing and describing the nation’ (1994: 104).

To introduce a psychological dimension to the definition of nations does not mean ignoring other dimensions. In Anderson’s case, quite the opposite is true. His analysis centres on the material conditions of national subjectivity and may best be seen as contributing to a materialist theory of consciousness (Kitching, 1985). We will consider these conditions in more detail later in this chapter. For now we simply want to stress that, even if psychology must not be allowed to supplant other social scientific analyses, an understanding of nations and nationalism requires it to be re-admitted to the debating table.

To try and address the conditions of national imagination without considering the nature of human imagination will be a futile exercise. To analyse the cultural battles over the definition of national identity without understanding how people come to assume and inhabit such identities, and how the identity then shapes what they do, may be an interesting exercise in its own right, but it does not get us very far in understanding nationalism. How can nationhood come to be so important to people and have such an impact on their actions? Why and when will national identity lead to violence against members of other nations? How is it that the Serbians of 1999 can be so moved by the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and the slights or triumphs of the distant past can exert such influence on present-day behaviour? Without finding a way of articulating the social and the psychological rather than subsuming one under the other, we will be left, like Paul Valéry, simply wondering at the nation as ‘something unquantifiable, an entity which cannot be coldly defined, that is determined by neither race, language, land, interests nor history: that analysis can deny, but which nonetheless resembles, as by its proven all-powerfulness, passionate love, faith, one of those mysterious possessions which lead man there where he did not know he could go – beyond himself’ (quoted in Privat, 1931: 3; translated by the authors).

Having looked at social psychology in the study of nationhood, let us turn to nationhood in the study of social psychology. The first and most obvious point is that, if this latter study is concerned with the understanding of behaviour in social context (cf. Israel & Tajfel, 1972) then the context in which we act is a world of nations. For Eric Hobsbawm, the twentieth century both began and concluded as an era of nationalism. The national conflicts that tore Europe apart in the 1990s were the old chickens of Versailles once again coming home to roost (Hobsbawm, 1994). We are, to use Balibar’s phrase, homo nationalis from cradle to grave (1991b: 93). Castells (1997) goes yet further and argues that it isn’t just that the nation is the predominant form of collective being in the contemporary world. Rather, nationalism has re-invigorated the very possibility of collective identity in an age of individualism.

The apparent ubiquity of nations has led to claims that there is something eternal and necessary about them. Smith (1986) refers to the widespread assumption that nations were as natural as the human body itself – an assumption that bridges popular, political and academic divides. According to the South African Broederbond intellectual Nico Diedrichs, nations are of divine inspiration: ‘God does not only work through men, but also through nations . . . An effort to obliterate national differences thus means more than collision with God’s natural law. It means an effort to shirk a divinely established duty or task’ (quoted in No Sizwe, 1979: 23). According to Regis Debray, they embody a natural logic: ‘We must locate the nation phenomenon within general laws regulating the survival of the human species’ (1977: 28). However, the most developed expression of this viewpoint is to be found in the work of Friedrich List (cf. Gellner, 1994). List argued for a nationalist ontology: people may not always construe themselves in terms of nationhood, but national divisions are the motor that drives history forward. The political task is to turn the nation ‘in itself’ into the nation ‘for itself’. If this is reminiscent of Hegelian–Marxist language, that is because List was involved in a direct polemic with Marx and Engels over the issue of whether class or nation should be given ontological priority. There are those, such as Gellner, who have declared List the victor: ‘The supposition that [nations] will be dismantled, anticipated by Marxism, is the real chimera – and not ethnically defined protectionism, as Marx thought. In all this, List was superior to Marx, and much more prescient’ (1994: 19; emphasis in the original).

Irrespective of whether Gellner, List, Debray and Diedrichs are correct, the very fact that their views have such currency is evidence in itself of the predominance of national consciousness alongside national forms throughout the world that we live in. So whether spoken of or not, it is often the nation that frames the concerns that guide social psychological research, it is often the nation that social psychologists have in mind when they address collective phenomena and it is often through the contemplation of national phenomena that social psychologists frame their core concepts. It may help to provide a concrete example of each.

Genevieve Paicheler (1988) illustrates how the emergence of social psychology as a distinct discipline in the USA during the 1920s was bound up with the concerns of nation formation. The growth of Fordism and of mass production demanded a mass market in which the new volume of products could be sold. The division of a population into separate groups – German Americans, Italian Americans, Anglo-Americans and so on – with different tastes was an obstacle to the emergence of this market. What was needed was a new and singular national consumer with unified tastes. The task of psychology, as clearly enunciated in the editorials of new social psychology journals, was to help in fitting the individual to the needs of the nation.

In such a context, hostility between groups of different national backgrounds became a serious issue. The perception of others as different and as negative required urgent attention, and it received such attention in the form of stereotype research. The pioneering study of Katz and Braly in 1933 presented college students with a list of adjectives and asked them to indicate which were typical of ten groups. While the groups included ‘Negroes’ and ‘Jews’ and while the paper was entitled ‘Racial Stereotypes of 100 college students’, it is notable that most of the groups chosen were nationalities and that the paper is generally described as concerning nations. For instance, Brewer and Crano (1994), in one of the two references to nationality that we found in recent text books, present the Katz and Braly results in a three-quarter page box under the heading ‘National Stereotypes in the United States’ and they then ask ‘following are the four characteristics most frequently assigned to ten nationalities by US college students in 1933. How many of these stereotypes do you think would still be held today?’ (p. 463). Katz and Braly’s actual discovery of considerable consensus about the nature of particular groups and the differences between groups led them to express strong fears about the breakdown of community.

It continues to be true that nations are used by psychologists as exemplary instances of stereotypes and stereotyping processes (see Spears, Oakes, Ellemers & Haslam, 1997, for a recent overview of the literature) and indeed of many other group processes besides (Condor, in press). It is also true that the very concept of a group in social psychology has been defined in relation to the nation. Work on groups and group processes in psychology has, over recent years, become increasingly dominated by the social identity tradition (Tajfel, 1978, 1982; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Part of the appeal of the theory is that it seeks to explain the behaviour of large-scale collectivities and not just the small groups of traditional laboratory research. So, when Tajfel seeks to define the social group in such a way as to understand how people who are not co-present and have no personal acquaintance can come to act together, he states that: ‘We shall adopt a concept of “group” identical to the definition of “nation” proposed by the historian Emerson’ (1978: 28) and he then provides the famous quotation reproduced above.

All in all, social psychology is as thoroughly haunted by the nation as the nation is haunted by psychology. In consequence, just as our understanding of national phenomena will gain by addressing the psychological dimension, so our understanding of social psychology will gain by an explicit consideration of national phenomena. To understand how people assume and act in terms of national identity, when national identity leads to international conflict, and how distant pasts can shape present actions, not only demands a psychology but also makes severe demands of psychology. These demands have already been expressed in their most general sense: we need a psychology that articulates with the social world – the world of nations – rather than one that subsumes it. We need to elaborate psychological constructs that act as a pivot between structure, culture and ideology on the one hand and understanding and action on the other. To ask of psychology that it helps us to understand the complex realities of national phenomena and to test it against this ability is to set a very stern test and to risk some painful discoveries for social psychology as a discipline. However, if we, as social psychologists, are demanding a seat at the table of social sciences it is incumbent upon us to prove ourselves.

It is best to acknowledge openly and from the start that this proof is all the more necessary because of a sorry history. If the other social sciences have tended to ignore social psychology as a discipline and have tended either to gloss over psychological concerns or else develop their own psychologies, it is largely because the discipline of social psychology has tended towards intellectual imperialism and to proceed as if all could be explained by psychology without the need for sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists or whoever. That is, the social was indeed subsumed under, if not obliterated by, the psychological. From the very start, on those occasions where psychology did address nations and nationalism it was to explain them as the reflection of an irreducible psychological essence (e.g. Le Bon, 1894). If the disciplinary sleight is bad enough, the politics are even worse. There is a tragic tale, frequently told (e.g. Billig, 1978, 1979; Hopkins, Reicher & Levine, 1997; Kamin, 1977; Richards, 1997; Rose, Kamin & Lewontin, 1984), of how psychology has portrayed the consequences of social inequality as the reflection of set group characteristics and then used these characteristics to justify further oppression. Lest we take comfort in the notion that these are past sins from which a painful lesson has been learnt, it is worth quoting from Anzulovic (1999) who notes how the idea of Croatians as murderous and incurably dangerous was inculcated by the Serbian intelligentsia in order to create the conditions for ethnic cleansing: ‘Psychoanalysts explained why, thanks to the specific character of certain peoples, things had to happen that way. Poets added a few poems about the calvary of their own people, regarded as heavenly, and the atmosphere of hatred – which became a way of life – started from there’ (pp. 140–1).

This is the background against which we will address what sort of psychology is needed to be fit for the nation. If it indicates how far there is to go, it also indicates how important it is to undertake the journey. The first step is to investigate the world of nations in a little more detail, for we can only assess the adequacy of our explanations by grounding them i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The National Question
• 2 Psychology and Nationhood
• 3 Nation and Mobilization
• 4 National Identity and International Relations
• 5 In Quest of National Character
• 6 Lessons in National History
• 7 Representing the National Community
• 8 Changing Categories and Changing Contexts
• 9 Nationalist Psychology and the Psychology of Nationhood
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index