National identity
National identity refers to a set of common beliefs , behaviors and often emotional implications, individuals or groups as a nation connect. After Benedict Anderson is on nations to "imagined communities" (imagined communities) because its members do not know personally because of the spatial separation, but the idea of in their minds Community create. The conceptions of the nation function as connecting elements within the community and as reference points for collective identification . In this respect, national identity can generally be described as an awareness or a feeling of belonging within a community that is under the sign of the nation.
As a special case of collective identity, national identity can not only have a binding effect, but also distinguish it from other groups or nations if the similarities claimed in the community are based on a difference to outsiders. In this respect, national identity is exclusive and can thus produce effects similar to those of a football team or a political ideology. However, several national identities can also combine to form transnational or transcultural forms of identity, for example if there is a French and Algerian or a German and American affiliation. Are the special features of a nation, in contrast to other groups emphasized and makes instrumentalized political purposes, the identification can with the nation in nationalism lead. In contrast to national identity, nationalism is characterized by political objectives, such as the establishment of a state , and in many cases is accompanied by strong forms of demarcation from other groups, for example to legitimize a war or a rigid policy on foreigners . The transitions between national identity and the political-ideological phenomenon of nationalism are often fluid.
Concept and function
In terms of content, national identity depends on what is understood by nation. Ernest Renan pursued the question “What is a nation?” As early as 1882 in a speech at the Sorbonne that is still significant today . Renan rejects all essentialist definitions of the nation, which according to race , language , denomination or territorial boundaries are to be regarded as the sole criteria, because they cannot be generalized for all nations. According to Renan, a nation is nothing material, but arises from the common memory of a collective and the agreement to live together, both of which have to be updated again and again in the form of a “daily plebiscite ”. Renan's aspect of memory and Anderson's concept of the presented community are considered to be the essential components for understanding the concept of national identity and are pointedly brought together by Jan Assmann: “Societies imagine self-images and continue an identity across the generations by developing a culture of memory ; and they do it - this point is crucial for us - in very different ways ”.
As a collective imagination or self-image made up of memories, national identity is a cultural and not a state construction. As Aleida Assmann has shown for cultural memory , collective memories change depending on the respective historical context and the associated demands on the community or on the goals pursued by the constructors of identities. Because collective memories are selected and interpreted according to current perspectives, they follow a historical dynamic of change that also determines the form and content of the resulting national identity.
Stories and Media
Similar to a personal identity, a national identity is constructed narrative . While the narration of oneself creates a person's identity, communities create their national identity through narratives in which memories with a national reference are passed on. Patrick Colm Hogan emphasizes the role of narratives as the basis of national identity: “Nationhood, everyone now seems to agree, is inseparable from storytelling.” For through such narratives it is conveyed which historical events are relevant as constitutive features of the nation and how and for what purpose the history is to be interpreted. In the past, national events or topics were passed on orally ; but they are also associated with places and structures such. B. monuments , and reach a mass audience through literary texts and especially films. In Germany, national identity has been increasingly negotiated in television films about National Socialism and the GDR for several years . In Hollywood films , on the other hand, topics such as the constitution , the founding fathers , presidents or wars have established themselves as having national significance.
Genesis and topicality of the phenomenon
Because national identity arises primarily from shared memories, it is a cultural and not a political phenomenon. A number of nations have strong identities but none like the Basques , the Roma, or the Francophone and indigenous people of Canada . Nations and national identities exist independently of states, but they are often the basis on which nationalist movements arise. Accordingly, the nationalisms and the founding of nation states in the 18th and 19th centuries were based on existing national identities that were either functionalized or first constructed for political purposes. Likewise, the collapse of Yugoslavia accelerated after the fall of the Tito regime in the 1990s, when different national identities resulted in nationalisms, which resulted in both ethnic cleansing and the establishment of new states . A similar development took place after the dissolution of the Soviet Union from 1989 in the former USSR and in Eastern Europe . There, too, people with different national identities were forcibly integrated into the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc and after its collapse founded their own sovereign states .
The importance of national identities for individual individuals and groups has not been diminished by the individualization spurts of the 20th century, globalization processes or the formation of supranational structures such as the European Union . In particular, the euro crisis that began in 2008 has shown that there are still strong national identities and equally strong prejudices against other nations. As a result of economic problems and dissatisfaction with political decisions, there was an increase in prejudices and demarcations from other countries with the aim of political and economic autonomy. Forms of nationalism emerged from national identities, which individual political parties tried to use or created for their own purposes. National identities are not invented by any particular political-ideological trend. Historically, neither left nor right parties have so far been able to avoid recourse to the nation when formulating their claim to power and to make clear to the voters that they are committed to the interests of the nation. The National Socialist ideology or Stalin's Patriotic War are extreme examples , but also almost any current election program . With regard to the constitution of a national identity, it makes a difference whether a director like John Ford in his films argues about the question of what it means to be an American against the background of American history, or whether someone with certain interests in the national The identity of a community appeals and thus connects certain inclusive, exclusive or political implications.
literature
- Benedict Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. To the career of a momentous concept. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-593-37729-2 (Original title: Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism . Verso, London 1991, ISBN 0-86091-329-5 ).
- Aleida Assmann: Spaces of Memory: Forms and Changes in Cultural Memory. Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-50961-4 .
- Aleida Assmann, Heidrun Friese (ed.): Identities (= memory, history, identity , volume 3). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-29004-5 .
- Jan Assmann: The cultural memory. Scripture, Memory and Political Identity in Early High Cultures . Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-406-42107-5 .
- Wolfgang Bergem: Identity Formations in Germany. VS, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-531-14646-7 .
- Patrick Colm Hogan: Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science and Identity . Ohio State UP, Columbus 2009, ISBN 0-8142-1107-0 .
- Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning: Media of the collective memory. Historicity - constructiveness - cultural specificity. De Gruyter, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-311018-008-4 .
- Holger Ihle: National and regional identity of television programs: an analysis of the program content of ZDF, ORF 2, BR and MDR. Lower Saxony State and University Library, Göttingen 2012, DNB 1043515739 (PhD thesis Georg-August University Göttingen 2011, reviewers: Jörg Aufermann, Wilfried Scharf, Helmut Volpers; full text online PDF, free of charge; 339 pages; 4.6 MB).
- Joseph Jurt: Language, Literature and National Identity. The debates on the universal and the particular in France and Germany . De Gruyter, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-034036-5 .
- Pierre Nora: Between History and Memory: The Places of Memory (= Small Library of Cultural Studies, Volume 16). Berlin 1990, ISBN 978-3-80315-116-2 , pp. 11-33.
- Michael Metzeltin: Paths to European Identity. Individual, nation-state and supranational identity constructs. Frank & Timme, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86596-297-3 .
- Hartmut Wagner: Reference points of European identity. Territory, history, language, values, symbols, public sphere - what can the European feeling of "we" relate to? Lit, Münster 2006, ISBN 3-8258-9680-3 .
- Ernest Renan: What is a Nation? Speech on March 11, 1882 at the Sorbonne. With an essay by Walter Euchner. European Publishing House, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-434-50120-7 .
- Andreas Wirsching: The price of freedom. History of Europe in our time . Beck, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-406-63252-5 , p. 308 f.
- Dieter Borchmeyer : What is German? - A nation's search for itself. Rowohlt, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-87134-070-3 .
Web links
- Bernhard Giesen , Robert Seyfert: Collective Identity. In: Federal Center for Political Education (Ed.): From Politics and Contemporary History (APuZ) 13/14 (2013).