International Identity in Theory and Practice: The Case of the Modern American Presidency

Abstract

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the concept of national identity. In a globalizing world, however, identity is increasingly shaped not only by one's own nation but also by foreign nations. With this in mind, this study theorizes international identity as a communicative process. We propose four features of international identity—that it is distinct, relational, contextual, and stratified—and examine these features in one crucial context: the modern American presidency. Our content analysis of every mention of a foreign entity in 74 years worth of presidential discourse—2480 mentions in all—supports our conception of international identity and begins to identify the parameters of this construct in American political communication.

Keywords:

• National Identity
• International Identity
• Social Identity
• Presidential Discourse

Notes

1. Texts of presidential speeches, from which all quotations and analyses are drawn, were retrieved from the National Archives’ Public Papers of the Presidents, the definitive record of presidential communications (available online at: www.americanpresidency.org).

2. Specifically, presidents devoted 33.2% of their words to foreign policy. To determine this, we randomly selected two speeches from each president included in our analysis (n=24, representing more than one third of our total sample of speeches). We then counted words in the sections of the speeches that were devoted to foreign policy, and divided that number by the total number of words in the speech.

3. Those instances where presidents delivered a written rather than spoken State of the Union—Truman 1946 and 1953, Eisenhower 1961, Nixon 1973, and Carter 1981—were excluded from the analysis because these speeches were unlikely to be encountered by many people. For the same reason, in the two cases where the speech was written but then a summarized version was delivered to the people (Roosevelt in 1945 and Eisenhower in 1956), the latter was used. Additionally, at the time of this writing Barack Obama had not yet delivered a State of the Union address; he was therefore excluded from the analysis.

4. Specifically, we tracked any mention presidents made, phrased in any fashion, of the nation (e.g., America, United States, our country, this nation of ours) or its people (e.g., Americans, our citizens, our people). This approach is consistent with other studies that have sought to track presidential mentions of national identity (e.g., Domke & Coe, 2008).

5. Presidents often did not clearly distinguish between the northern and southern parts of these countries, so we merged all mentions into one category.

6. Translation by the second author, who is a native speaker. Text of the 1997 Berliner Rede was retrieved from the archives of the Press and Information Office of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany (available online at: www.bundespraesident.de).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Coe

Kevin Coe (PhD, University of Illinois) is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Arizona

Rico Neumann

Rico Neumann (MA, University of Arizona) works in international development at the UN-mandated University for Peace, Costa Rica