Claiming national identity

Abstract

Using data from the British and Scottish Social Attitudes surveys 2006, this article examines the willingness of people living and born in England and Scotland to accept or reject claims to national identity made by those living in but not born in the appropriate territory. It compares the way claims employing key markers, notably birthplace, accent, parentage and ‘race’ are received in the two countries. It is a significant finding that the results for the two countries do not differ greatly. National identity, thinking of oneself as ‘exclusively national’, is the critical criterion explaining the extent to which respondents reject claims, while there is a modest educational effect if the respondent does not have a university degree. National identity is not to be equated with citizenship but involves cultural markers of birth, ancestry and accent as well as residence. Understanding how people identify and use markers of national identity is not as straightforward as politicians in particular believe and imply.

Keywords:

• National identity claims
• identity markers
• English
• Scottish
• British
• race

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to The Leverhulme Trust for supporting research on national identity since 1999, and in particular for their most recent grant enabling them to commission the National and the Scottish Centre for Social Research to ask the questions in the 2006 surveys. We are also grateful to Lindsay Paterson for his helpful comments on an earlier draft, and to the anonymous referees for theirs. David McCrone produced the first draft of the article, but it is the product of a collegiate form of working in which the data, the analysis and the drafts have been discussed by both authors throughout, and they are equally responsible for it.

Notes

1. We use this phrase intentionally to emphasize the performative aspect.

2. This is a deliberate allusion to the work of early Chicago social interactionists and to Erving Goffman 1959) in particular, with their focus on the capacity of social actors to negotiate and mobilize identities when interacting with others in various social contexts. We find his work insightful in a general sense, without implying that we are following a specifically ‘Goffmanesque’ research strategy.

3. One of the journal's referees suggested that some of the findings below should be related to the theoretical literature on this topic.

4. ‘Race’ divides not simply into white and non-white, with different degrees of willingness to accept people within each of those broad racial groups, but our aim was to see whether ‘race’ made a difference at the broad aggregate level.

5. We are grateful to one of the journal's referees for suggesting we should address these important issues in this paper.

6. The surveys are carried out on residents in Britain and Scotland, but data on respondents’ place of birth makes the analysis possible.

7. Named after the sociologist Luis Moreno, who developed it from Juan Linz (Moreno 1988). He later explained (Moreno 2006) how ‘the question’ came about. As used in British Social Attitudes 2006 and Scottish Social Attitudes 2006 surveys, it read as follows:

Which, if any, of the following best describes how you see yourself?

[English/Scottish/Welsh] not British;

More [English/Scottish/Welsh] than British;

Equally [English/Scottish/Welsh] and British;

More British than [English/Scottish/Welsh];

British not [English/Scottish/Welsh];

Other description (WRITE IN);

(None of these).

8. Condor and Abell observe that the interview talk about national issues which they analysed tended to be volatile, subject to rapid topic shading and drift. They comment (p. 66): ‘[t]he category of nation itself tended to be very fragile. Rather than being construed as a “deep horizontal comradeship”, accounts of nation were liable to fragment as the speaker attended to class, ethnic or regional diversity’.

9. Throughout our survey work from 2003 to 2006, we did not ask people whether they would accept someone who claimed to be, say, English if they had been born in England and lived there permanently – the default position. We cannot be sure that everyone would do so. For some, simply being born in a country may not be enough; they may demand the appropriate ancestry going back generations. In the 2008 and 2009 surveys, we are asking this ‘default’ question to give us an accurate benchmark.

10. This is a complex area and interpretation is beset with pitfalls. We have chosen to settle on the terms prejudice and discrimination because they embody the important distinction between attitudes and behaviour, both of which may be involved in ‘racism’.

11. In the British Election Study of 1997, 24 per cent of people in England described themselves as ‘mainly English’, 46 per cent as ‘equally English and British’, and 24 per cent as ‘mainly British’. The comparable figures for ethnic minorities in England were 8 per cent, 20 per cent and 44 per cent respectively (calculated from British Election Survery 1997 data set obtainable from UK Data Archieve: http://www.data-archive.ac.uk).

12. We have modelled the data for Scottish and English natives, for claims by whites and non-whites, and for each of three ‘levels’ of marker of identity (residence; residence plus accent; residence plus accent plus parentage). There are twelve sets of models, each containing models first for the effect of national identity, national identity plus sex, and national identity plus sex plus age; and then for national identity plus class; national identity plus education, and national identity plus class plus education. Space precludes presenting all the models in this paper.

13. The order in which these variables are entered into the model makes little difference to the results, and statistical models cannot in general determine causality. However, it seems to us more plausible that national identity is the primary variable affecting acceptance of claims and it generally reduces the effect of education much more than education affects the impact of national identity.

14. The political theorist Amy Gutmann (1987, p. 173) commented: ‘Learning how to think carefully and critically about political problems, to articulate one's views and defend them before people with whom one disagrees is a form of moral education to which young adults are more receptive [than school children] and for which universities are well suited.’

15. A fine example comes from the very early days of empirical sociological research. See Lazarsfeld (1949, p. 380). We have used his insight in a very recent paper on national identity to make precisely this point (Bechhofer and McCrone 2009).

16. Crick (1989, p. 29) observed:

For the English to have developed a strident literature of English nationalism, such as arose, often under official patronage, everywhere else in Europe, and in Ireland and Scotland, eventually in Wales, would have been divisive. From political necessity English politicians tried to develop a United Kingdom nationalism and, at least, explicitly and officially, to identify themselves with it, wholeheartedly.

17. See http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2007/11/13092240/9.