The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion in British Identity

Eleni Andreouli

Imagined Communities (Anderson, 1983)

Nations are imagined/created: As communities As limited (boundaries) As sovereign Nationalism equivalent to religion rather than to any political ideology (sense of continuity and destiny)

National Solidarity National identity provides solidarity to the members of the national community

Based on some shared common ground among members (Wallerstein, 1991):

Ethnicity or race Language Cultural and political values Territory, etc.

National Boundaries Distinctiveness of the nation in relation to other nations (Triandafyllidou, 1998; Hopkins & Murdoch, 1999)

The paradox of national identity:“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 point of reference” (Parekh, 2000, p. 7)

National Boundaries (2)

Us/them is not a straightforward distinction in multicultural societies (Triandaffyllidou, 2000; Deaux, 2000)

The national boundaries are multi-layered

Implications for categorization theories

Criteria of Belonging Formal/legal criteria of belonging and informal or symbolic criteria (Crowley, 1999; Bleich, 1999)

“The concept ‘ethnic group’ is linked in practice to state boundaries, as is the concept ‘nation’, despite the fact that this is never included in the definition. The difference is only that the state needs to have one nation and many ethnic groups” (Wallerstein, 1991)

Passive belonging (feeling at home in a nation) and governmental belonging (having a right to a nation’s management so that it remains one’s home) (Hage, 1998)

The Politics of Belonging

National identity represents a balance between inclusion and exclusion

“The politics of belonging involves not only the maintenance and reproduction of the boundaries of the community of belonging by the hegemonic political powers but also their contestation and challenge by other political agents” (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p.204)

The Strategic Dimension of Identity Construction

The construction of national identity is a political action

We choose and define the categories that suit our purposes (Reicher & Hopkins, 2001)

Every category selection and definition is an argument against alternative categorizations and definitions (Billig, 1985, 1996)