Space and Identity Constructions of National Identities in An Age of Globalisation PDF

National Identities
ISSN: 1460-8944 (Print) 1469-9907 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnid20
Space and identity: constructions of national

identities in an age of globalisation
Elfie Rembold & Peter Carrier
To cite this article: Elfie Rembold & Peter Carrier (2011) Space and identity: constructions
of national identities in an age of globalisation, National Identities, 13:4, 361-377, DOI:
10.1080/14608944.2011.629425
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Published online: 21 Nov 2011.
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National Identities
Vol. 13, No. 4, December 2011, 361377
Space and identity: constructions of national identities in an age of

globalisation
Elfie Rembold and Peter Carrier
Braunschweig, Berlin
Downloaded by [Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory] at 16:25 04 November 2017
This article enquires how notions of national identities are still topical in recent
scholarship at a time when processes of globalisation appear to be undermining
the nation-state and its territorial power. The so-called spatial turn within the
social sciences and humanities has exposed transnational, postcolonial and global
aspects of identity constructions beyond the narrow borders of the nation and all
things national. Stimulating historical and geographical research into nations and
identities, this journal is informed by the same epistemology, tentatively located in
postmodern thinking. Despite the prophecies of doom of postmodern enthusiasts,
this study testifies to the continued relevance of borders and national attach-
ments, albeit in terms of self-reflexivity.
Keywords: spatial turn; identity relations; de-/reterritorialisation; globalisation;
borders; hybridity
Introduction
Looking back at the studies of national identities published in this journal over the last
10 years, the time has come to review the achievements of the journal and enquire
whether national identities are still pertinent in a period of accelerated globalisation.
We pose the question of whether notions of nation and nationhood are still useful
analytical terms with which group identities can be examined, especially when
considering their spatial dimensions, hence employing transnational, postcolonial
and global approaches. Already in the mid-1990s, that is, a few years after the collapse
of communism in 1989, some writers diagnosed the end of the nation-state (Guehénno,
1995; Ohmae, 1995). Clearly, nations and nationalism relate to state and territory and
strengthen each other (Hobsbawm, 1990, pp. 910; Alter, 1994, pp. 115). If the
political stronghold of the state loosens, territorial reorganisations and social
differentiation take place with changing scales of reference for identity constructions.
When out of the manifold identities of an individual the nation as a reference point
diminishes, others more situationally defined identities (Campbell & Rew, 1999, p. 10)
take on greater significance.1 The themes that inform this article, therefore, revolve
around the questions of how do the features of globalisation, like migration, the
transnational organisation of the economy and the borderless flow of goods and
communication influence people’s experiences mainly in metropolitan areas, where
people of from all over the world meet, and what impact do these experiences have on
identity constructions? By addressing these questions, this article takes into account
*Corresponding authors. Email: dr.rembold@mayl.de and carrier@gei.de

ISSN 1460-8944 print/ISSN 1469-9907 online
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362 E. Rembold and P. Carrier
current epistemological knowledge applied in both geographical and historical

research.
When, in the early 1990s, geographers rediscovered the relational character
between space and society, historians likewise questioned the ‘great metanarratives of
Marxism and structuralism’ (Conrad & Kessel, 1994, p. 10). They challenged
quantitative methods and turned instead to linguistic ones, adopting theories of
meanings and relational approaches which allowed for investigations into the actions
of individuals and social groups. This article enquires into the question of how these
epistemological developments in the increasingly interdependent fields of geography
and history influenced the study of national identities.
This article contains two sections. The first reviews theories of and conceptual
approaches to national identities, discussing modernist assumptions and theoretical
implications of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences. By approaching
processes of globalisation in terms of de- and reterritorialisation, we discuss recent
approaches to national identities, from those which consider them to be irrelevant to
those which conceive of them as spatially and temporally bounded. The second
section of this article then puts these findings to the test by drawing on empirical
studies published in this journal.
A. Conceptional approaches in the studies of national identities

Modernist conceptions of nation formation
The journal National Identities was set up to ‘explore the formation and expression of
identities’ in a multidisciplinary perspective. The combination of historical and
geographical approaches to the temporal and spatial dimensions of national identities
provides a challenging framework with which to harness the interests of anthropology,
cultural and media studies, sociology, political science, geography and other related
disciplines. In the early 1980s Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) published an illuminating
volume on the Invention of Tradition in which they questioned the ideological
groundings of nations in ancient pasts and thus set in motion reflections about the
construction and management of national identities. In the same year the path-
breaking work of Benedict Anderson (1991) appeared which turned attention to the
constructivist part in history arguing that nations are imagined communities generated
by the evolution of print capitalism (Anderson, 2006; revised ed., pp. 4445). This
argument inspired scholars from across the disciplines analysing nation formations
from the perspective of the historical actors rather than the societal and economic
structures.
Questions of national identity are incomprehensively addressed when viewed
merely from a subjective, that is, constructivist point of view. Narratives of nations,
nationhood and identities are not simply products of the imagination, they also
require a natural or ‘organic’ rootedness. It was Benedict Anderson who asserted
that there exist ‘natural ties’ to a community despite the culturally constructed idea
of nationalism. He complemented his influential study on the constructedness of
communities (Anderson, 2006) with his observation that the political love of one’s
country is often described in a patriotic language which uses ‘either . . . the
vocabulary of kinship [motherland, Vaterland, patria] or that of home [heimat or
tanah air]’. He goes on to claim that ‘(b)oth idioms denote something to which one
National Identities 363
is naturally tied’, and that ‘in everything ‘‘natural’’ there is always something
unchosen’. In the conclusion of his book he gives us a faint hint to objective
ingredients of nation-ness or nationality when he claims that ‘(i)n this way, nation-
ness is assimilated to skin-colour, gender, parentage and birth-era all those things
one can not help’ (Anderson, 1991, p. 144). Natural ties may therefore be
understood to be either something essential, depicting a preoccupation with ethnic
decent, history, culture and/or geography, or it may be used as an additional
explanation of nationality because, as Oliver Zimmer convincingly argues, ‘a purely
constructed nationality would be hopelessly underdetermined’ (Zimmer, 2003,
p. 180). Both ways of formulating national identities may be employed side by
side and the choice of metaphors derives from the socio-political context of the
historical actors. For historical research it is pertinent to disclose the procedure of
how the nation is described rather than what it is supposed to be.2
Research on nations and nationalism is carried out predominantly along two
main strands of methodology. On the one hand there is the modernist approach with
which nations and nationalisms are conceived as specifically modern, taken as a
result of economic and political development mainly of European history. On the
other hand there are primordialists who draw a naturalised and universal image of
nations. While modernists such as Gellner, Anderson and Hobsbawm imagine the
nation as socially constructed,3 primordialists like, for example, Anthony Smith,
understand the nation as made up by an ethnic group that existed prior to the era of
nationalism or nation-states. Modernists, moreover, claim not only that the nation is
a product of nationalism but that it has been spatially bounded by a clearly defined
territory since the eighteenth century (Herb & Kaplan, 1999, pp. 10, 11). In any case
nationalism functions as an attractive discourse for social actors because of its
capacity to develop a discrimination in constituting political power. Depending on
how nationalists construct national identity, the inclusion of members will be based
on cultural, linguistic, historic or even racial elements. Generally speaking,
conceiving human relationships in nationalist terms means to define boundaries
and determine the ‘other’ outside of an allegedly homogenised cultural or ethnic
group (Echternkamp & Müller, p. 8; Eley & Suny, 1996, p. 107).
This special relationship between modernity and territory was scrutinised by
human geographers who rediscovered place, space and landscape as crucial factor
in the production of social life (Gregory & Urry, 1985, p. 3). Human geographers
notably questioned the assumptions that territorial space is commensurate with
national space, and that space and place are static containers in which cultural
traditions evolve. Similar to the primordialists in the studies of nationalism
theorists of international relations believed that the territorial state existed prior to
society and therefore constituted a container in which the latter developed. This
container conception of the nation-state spawned a territorially trapped scientific
and scholarly approach that conceived politics in antagonistic terms of inside and
outside (Agnew, 1994; Bachmann-Medick, 2006, pp. 295297). The impact of this
approach among geographers, as well as in the humanities and social sciences,
which came to be known as the ‘spatial turn’, meant that geographical scale
became a major factor in analyses of national identities (Herb & Kaplan, 1999, pp.
3149).
The ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences and the humanities

The spatial turn is closely related to theorists studying the contemporary social,
economic, cultural conditions as well as international relations against the
contemporary processes of globalisation. Globalisation is a multifaceted term and
it encompasses a process by which an increasing volume of goods, information and
symbols circulates at an ever greater speed, in an ever shrinking space. Viewed from a
perspective of political culture, it can be argued that, particularly after the fall of the
Berlin Wall and concomitantly the ending of the political block system accompanied
by the spread of information technology, it was the new transport systems and
international divisions of labour that have profoundly changed spatial practices
(Beynon & Dunkerley, 2000, pp. 37; Agnew, 1994, p. 72, Soja, 1989).
It is in response to these changing practices that the geographer Karl Schlögel
(2003) has lamented modern scientists’ loss of any sense of space in which history
takes place. In order to draw an adequate picture of the world, Schlögel claims that
we ought to conceive of space, time and action not separately but in tandem (p. 24).
He describes the spatial turn as the inclusion of geographical dimensions into history
while he tracks its origin down to the coincidence of two crises that of Marxist and
critical theory in the northern hemisphere in the mature late modern and late
capitalist societies, and that of industrial societies, especially in metropolitan areas.
This in spatial terms reformulated historical materialism encountered critical
thinking in various disciplines, like in urban studies or in a general diagnosis of an
ever enlarging consciousness of living in a ‘risk society’.4 Moreover, according to
Schlögel, the spatial turn gained currency within the context of changing political
and spatial structures after the end of World War II, the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989
and the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 (2003, p. 63).
New spatial practices had previously been acknowledged by theorists of political
economy inspired by the writings in the French Marxist tradition, represented in
particular by the philosopher Henri Lefèbvre and his book The production of space
(1974) first translated into English in 1991. By establishing the direct connection
between spatiality, social reproduction, politics, power and the state, Lefèbvre
underscores the spatial dimension of the development of productive forces (Löw,
2007, pp. 5253). The most prominent theorist among the Marxist geographers has
been David Harvey, who explains the dialectical process of spatial structuring and
restructuring in relation to crises in the accumulation of capital. In The condition of
postmodernity (1990), he draws on Lefèbvre by arguing that the most important
cultural change in the transformation of the economic system from Fordism to more
flexible accumulation in economy and thus from modernity to postmodernity
was the change in the human experience of space and time:
The intensity of time-space compression in Western capitalism since the 1960s, with all
of its congruent features of excessive ephemerality and fragmentation in the political
and private as well as in the social realm, does seem to indicate an experiential context
that makes the condition of postmodernity somewhat special. But by putting this
condition into its historical context, as part of a history of successive waves of time-
space compression generated out of the pressures of capital accumulation with its
perpetual search to annihilate space through time and reduce turnover time, we can at
least pull the condition of postmodernity into the range of a condition accessible to
historical materialist analysis and interpretation. (pp. 306307)
Harvey therefore calls for an entirely new conception of space, which he derives from
German phenomenology rather than from the historical materialism of Marx. He
draws, for example, on Heidegger’s notions of place and being,5 which are conceived
on the basis of their situatedness, but ultimately disapproves of them because they are
often used to legitimate reactionary and exclusionary politics.
Deterritorialisation and identity relations

In response to the Heideggerian’s concept of place frequently used by postmodernist
theorists, the geographer Doreen Massey defines a positive relationship between
place and identity in terms of a ‘progressive sense of place’ (Massey, 1993). She
argues that the specificity of a place is a construction out of social relations and an
articulation of them at a particular locus. Here people communicate and interact,
drawing on experiences acquired in a broader context in different places in the world.
Rather than understanding place as a physical container, Massey follows the current
trend in the social sciences by emphasising its social dimension and constructedness
(see also Löw, 2007, p. 54ff; Schroer, 2008, p. 135ff). A ‘progressive sense of place’
does not rely on drawing boundaries and opposing one place against another. ‘It is,’
as Massey points outs out, ‘possible to envisage an alternative interpretation of place.
In this interpretation, what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalised
history but the fact that it is constructed out of particular constellation of relations,
articulated together at a particular locus’ (Massey, 1993, p. 66). If place is
constitutive for personal identity (Agnew, 2001, p. 16), a ‘progressive sense of place’
links a particular place to places beyond and thus transgresses a national sense of
place without becoming a source of threat. Moreover, Massey highlights the fact that
identities are multiple, constructed in relation to multiple locations (1993, p. 65) at a
time when people move from place to place, and live in different social, economic and
cultural contexts.
It has to be considered whether local identities take precedence and eventually
replace identities constructed in relation to the nation-state if social relations become
increasingly connected on a global scale. Assuming that globalisation involves the
deterritorialisation of states, images and ideas, and consequently the displacement of
people, an entirely new approach to place and identity and thus to national identity
emerges. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, for example, holds soil and place to
be no longer central to identity construction. Instead, he defends a notion of
‘locality’ (Appadurai, 2005, p. 61), understood to be neither spatial nor scalar, but
relational and contextual. Locality, he claims, is ‘a lived experience in a globalized,
deterritorialized world’, ‘emergent from the practices of local subjects in specific
neighbourhoods’ (p. 198). If we translate Appadurai’s postmodern theory with the
terminology of modernisation theory, ‘locality’ corresponds approximately to
‘nationality’. Both are phenomenological qualities of social interaction and therefore
culturally produced. They differ, however, insofar as nationality may only be
achieved if there is political intervention which delineates territories with hard
boundaries. While locality is realised in neighbourhoods which come into being in
relation and in contrast to non-human or barbarian forces (p. 183), nationalities are
constructed discursively in relation to other nationalities, in contradistinction to the
presumed ‘existence of a variety of unassimilated (or unassimilable) ‘‘others’’’ (Eley
& Suny, 1996, p. 25). In general, modern identity constructions are based on group
membership defined by negation in relation to other ethnic groups, while

postmodern notions of identity are inter-relational, reflexive and bound by place.
In contrast to the characteristics of national cultures and the nation-state,
Appadurai develops his neologism of ethnoscapes because, as he states, ‘group
identities [do not] necessarily imply that cultures need to be seen as spatially bounded,
historically unselfconscious, or ethnically homogenous forms’ (2005, p. 183). Within
the conceptual framework of modernisation theory, national identities are based on
national narratives, intentionally constructed by social groups, which are largely
conceived in opposition to an ‘other’ and related to specific territories. In a more
unstable postmodern setting, Appadurai claims that localities are historically
produced, but that ‘the histories through which localities emerge are eventually
subject to the dynamics of the global’ (p. 18). According to Appadurai’s definitions of
‘locality’ and of the ‘dynamics of the global’ or globalisation, the historical dimension
or facets of power are conspicuously absent. His main assumption, that ‘deterritor-
ialisation is one of the central forces of the modern world’ (p. 37), provides the
foundation for his argument that ethnoscapes, that is, the landscapes of group
identities, are floating rather than ‘tightly territorialised’ or ‘spatially bounded’ (p. 48).
These ethnoscapes do not emerge within an identifiable geographical space, but are
relational and mediated via globally available information and images, in which people
do not succumb to the homogenising influence of the nation-state. Ultimately, claims
Appadurai, this emerging system of changing ethnoscapes should supersede the
system (modernity) in which the nation-state made sense (p. 19). In short, ‘Modernity
at large’ as he conceives of the contemporary social conditions has compounded the
process of de-territorialisation in which national identities are no longer of
importance. This idea does not go unchallenged as Agnew & Brusa (1999) and
Crameri (2000) for example show in this journal.
Reterritorialisation: Scales and the nation-state

Although Appadurai affords innovative insights into the role of space in identity
formation beyond the nation-state, it is also necessary to take into account power
relations in which identities emerge. Authors in the fields of political science and
history agree that the ‘new economy’ is characterised by flows of money and
information which are not readily contained within state boundaries. Political
scientists and historians are also increasingly wary of dividing the world into a
system of exclusive nation-states (Agnew & Corbridge 1989, p. 15) bounded by
frontiers which generate a dichotomous spatial division that leads to what Agnew
calls the ‘territorial trap’ (1994, pp. 59, 61). What becomes increasingly relevant in a
globalising world is the reconfiguration and re-scaling of relatively fixed forms of
territorial organisation, rather than their simple dissolution. In other words,
deterritorialisation is followed by reterritorialisation. According to the sociologist
Neil Brenner (1999), globalisation revitalises the national scale as much as it
intensifies sub- and supranational forms of territorial organisations (p. 52), that is,
regions, cities or, for example, the European Union (EU). In these processes of flows
and movements, the nation-state plays an ambivalent role. By making its boundaries
permeable, introducing deregulation in order to encourage flows of money,
information and people, it fosters the acceleration of globalisation while simulta-
neously reorganising territorial power according to a different scale. This ‘rescaling’
of territory and power consequently influences identity constructions. If we conceive

of ‘identities of state and nation as spatial identities’ (Kaplan & Herb, 1999, p. 17),
and acknowledge that ‘state territoriality currently operates [. . .] as a polymorphic
[disparate] institutional mosaic composed of multiple, partially overlapping levels’
(Brenner, 1999, p. 53), we may imagine national identities as scalar and spatially
hybrid. Such an approach lends itself to the examination of identity constructions on
a transnational, intra- and supranational level in connection with place and territory.
In the following section, we will raise some of the issues dealt with on the pages of
this journal in a number of articles which explore empirically the function of space,
place, territory and scale in identity formation, as well as hybridity and blended
identities.
B. Recent research about spatially bounded national identities

Territory and spatialities
Among the articles published in National Identities, some poignantly cut across
disciplinary boundaries and develop concepts that overlap the formerly distinct fields
of contemporary geography and history. Inspired by Hardt and Negri’s work,
Empire, Phillip Leonard (2003), for example, scrutinises the writings of the French
poststructuralist philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, extracting concepts that ‘reveal
the diminishing role of the nation-state and national identity’ (p. 194). He points out
that one of their most well-known notions of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisa-
tion arises directly out of a concern for national and geopolitical issues. This
dichotomy also reflects the provocative character of their work insofar as ‘it pays
attention to the deconstitution of national identity by lines of flight that take place
within, as well as beyond, the borders of the nation-state’ (p. 196). These ‘lines of
flight’ can more explicitly be described as both the delocalising forces of capital and
the nomadic movements of ‘bands, margins, minorities’ which resist ‘full incorpora-
tion into the social body’ (p. 196). Even though capitalism may, Leonard concludes,
establish a uniform global empire, it will neither produce worldwide homogeneity nor
become a single uniform organisation (p. 195) for the simple fact that deterritor-
ialisation processes are always overseen by the state as an agent of capitalism and as
a creator of new territories, that is, of reterritorialisation.
This argument is empirically supported by Agnew and Brusa’s (1999) research on
the Northern League in Italy, which stands for a territorially not clearly defined new
state of ‘Padania’ (p. 117). For this ‘unit of choice’ the Northern League claims
cultural and political differences deriving of a ‘long-distant past rather than as
constituted over time and potentially invented in the present’ (p. 121). The Northern
League invents this territorially defined region of Padania and adds to it a particular
national identity just like the regional movement of Catalonia as shown by Crameri
(2000). These regional movements can be conceived as the outcome of globalisation
or, more precisely, of Europeanisation and thus provide evidence of the persistence of
national identities albeit on different geographical scales. These examples of regional
nationalism demonstrate the ‘malleability of political identities’, as Agnew and Brusa
succinctly put it, ‘after a period in which these had seemed to take on a permanent
cast, particularly in terms of the priority of the established national identities over
those associated with other geographical scales (. . .)’ (1999, p. 118). According to
Agnew and Brusa, the process of deterritorialisation or regionalisation, in which

national identities dissolve and are recomposed on a different geographical scale,
proves the persistence of national identities.
In their analysis of the relationship of space and identities Agnew and Brusa
emphasise the malleability of political identities. Similarly, and from a topological
perspective on the process of nation building, Jouni Häkli (2008) underlines the
malleability of the (Finnish) nation state. If we want to avoid the ‘territorial trap’ we
need concepts of ‘other spatialities pertinent to nation-building and national
identities, such as topological networks’ (p. 6) in which to conceive the development
of the nation-state. By adopting the poststructuralist credo of heterogeneity and
multiplicity, he distinguishes between three spatialities regions, networks and fluids

none of which can be reduced to the other. Despite the difficulty to grasp the ‘fluid
space’, he points at the ‘flexibility of human identification that characterises ‘the
nature of fluid objects in the context of the Finnish nation-state’ (p. 8). In the fluid
space ‘an object may transform without breaking or losing its identity’ (p. 8). Taking
this into account, the notion of ‘fluid space’ can be taken as commensurable to the
pivotal role ascribed by new cultural historians to language as a sign system. For
identity constructions can be conceived in spatial terms of ‘homeomorphically
changing process(es) of fluid space’ (p. 16) and, in the language of the new cultural
history, as discursively negotiated narrations of a nation’s past. As demonstrated in
the case of Finland, the nation-state is spatially complex since it ‘exists through
different spatialities simultaneously, none of which can be thought of as under-
pinning the others’ (p. 17). These theoretical deliberations make it clear that studies
of linguistic, visual and architectural representations of the nation-state with regard
to its identifications require spatial contextualisation.
Borders and boundaries

Hedberg and Kepsu (2008) examine the case of the Finland-Swedes in a similarly
multidimensional way. Concepts of scale (Kaplan & Herb, 1999), multiplicity
(Massey, 1999) and border inform their analysis, which draws on the assumption
that both space and identity can be defined in relational terms. (p. 99). Hence the
authors paint a differentiated picture of a minority group in Finland that migrates to
and from Sweden. In defiance of all postmodern criticism of notions of state borders
and imagined boundaries, the authors demonstrate that group identities are
embedded in spatial and historical contexts and therefore require boundaries:
A collective identity is spatially defined through the construction of borders, both from
within and from the outside, as’territory expresses internal cohesion and external
differentiation’. Within a particular region, group identity is formed as an historical
image of belonging, in reciprocal interaction with the contemporary political and
economic context. (Hedberg & Kepsu, 2008, p. 99)
Accordingly, Hedberg and Kepsu conclude that the identities of the minorities living
in border regions ‘were linked to various scales in space and thus formed a spatial
hierarchy of affinities’ (p. 114). Consequently, members of this migrating border
group are susceptible to a dual national identity, depending on the local and ethnic
context in which they find themselves.
A rather different case of border studies is presented by Mansvelt Beck (2008)

in his examination of the Basque borderland on the FrancoSpanish border.
Unlike the Finland-Swedes, the Basque cultural minority resides on both sides of
the border. While in an earlier special issue of National Identities (2002) authors
examine the ‘peripheral identities in the Iberian context’ and thus adopted the
modernist centre-periphery approach, Mansvelt Beck employs a postmodernist
method, focusing instead on ‘cross-border ethnonationalism’ in order to analyse
‘the discursive role of the border in nationalist rhetoric’ (p. 374). His approach is
an excellent example of the cross-fertilisation of history and geography in border
studies. Applying the postmodern geographical conceptual framework of deterri-
torialisation and reterritorialisation, he enquires whether a new kind of discursive

construction of politico-cultural borderscapes is emerging. Mansvelt Beck focuses
in particular on the ‘territorial myth-making’ of the nationalist narrative and of
cross-border political networks and cultural experience, although neither of these
analytical levels yields proof of the emergence of a new borderland region in spite
of the increased permeability of the borders ‘for economic flows and policy
activities of multilevel government due to European integration’ (p. 386). His study
leads to the conclusion that a specifically postmodern theory of state territory and
state borders is invalid, and that no rescaling of territory takes place. Rather the
opposite is true, for state borders endure as devices which frame ‘the political and
cultural organization of space’ and the separation of political identifications
(p. 386). In short, state borders do matter.
Scale
For many geographers, the spatial impact of intense capital and human movements
on state territory and national identifications should be conceived in terms of scale.
Building on the theoretical deliberations of Neil Smith and his notion of socially and
politically produced geographical scale (1993), Christopher Merrett argues that ‘the
identity of any group is scale-dependent’ (2001, p. 71). His concern is with the
implications of globalisation processes for people’s relation to the geographical units
in which they live, such as regions, locations and neighbourhoods. In contrast to
some observers, who predict the eclipse of ‘the fixed statics of space’ as a result of the
‘new fluid dynamics of pace’ (Luke & Ó’Tuathail, 1998), Merrett defends a
continuous ‘sense of place’ (p. 73). Reviewing two books6 which ‘set up a binary
framework pitting global processes against reactionary local responses’ (p. 83), he
advocates ‘a better understanding of discursive formations and the social theory of
scale’. There is, he claims, no simple causal relationship between local responses and
globalisation. ‘Just as free markets do not necessarily beget democracy, local
communities do not necessarily beget fundamentalism’ (p. 83). Besides any political
implications of local responses to globalisation processes, it becomes clear that
identity constructions relate to geographical scales and, most importantly, to their
mutual contingency as also Agnew and Brusa (1999) insightfully elucidate on the
case of the Northern League in Italy. Similarly, Confino and Skaria (2002) confirm
these findings from a historical point of view in that they point out that the local
does not exist ‘outside the national, but beyond and alongside it’ (p. 7).
While these authors highlight the scale dependency of identity constructions,
Merrett’s exploration of scale more particularly echoes Harvey’s ‘rediscovery of
place’ (1993, p. 27) and especially Massey’s idea of a ‘progressive sense of place’. As
mentioned above, Harvey argues that with ‘place’ and the emotional attachment to it
goes a reactionary attitude, whereas Massey derives place from global flows
articulated on a particular spatial scale. In light of these contrasting approaches to
place, authors have attempted to elucidate the relation between national identities
and a sense of place, rather than assume that political demarcations of a nation-state
incorporate the identities of an entire people living within such a delineated space.
Sense of place
The two articles discussed below built on the spatial concepts of Harvey and Massey.
By reviewing literary and poetic approaches to land and landscapes the authors
illustrate how people who are involved in their environment acquire a sense of place.
Steven Schroeder, for example, examines the metaphors applied by several nine-
teenth-century authors writing about an area which later became known as the
Panhandle of Texas (2004). Following the mapping of the Long expedition in 1820,
the census of 1870 formally declared that this region was ‘empty’, that is, void of US
citizens. This unilateral declaration of ‘emptiness’ contradicted statements made in
students’ MA theses of the 1940s and 1950s, which applied the metaphor of
‘infestation’ in order to claim that civilisation could begin only after the’Indian
problem’ had been ‘solved’.
The drawing of boundaries defining and placing the Panhandle served various
political purposes. One aimed to ‘place’ this region within the territory of the
Confederacy, another was to ‘place’ it outside the territory controlled by the United
States Army and, eventually, with respect to the Plains Indians, to ‘place’ them, that
is, to isolate those who refused to be confined to reservations (Schroeder, 2004, p. 56).
Economic and military activities of the newcomers paved the way for the
‘incorporation’ of the Panhandle into the territory of the United States. Schroeder
understands ‘incorporation’ as an ‘appropriate[ly] biological metaphor for processes
by which places like the Panhandle are created and people who occupied them are
placed’. This shows that, unlike the claims of the census of 1870, the Panhandle was
‘no empty space to occupy’, but rather a ‘structured space, occupied and named in a
series of stories by people who passed through and people who stayed’ (Schroeder,
2004, p. 56). Linguistically, the occupation of land can be seen as a way of using ‘old
models [. . .] to structure fresh experience’. This active placement of oneself in an area
differs from a ‘sense of place’, which results from hearing and reading the landscape
which is ultimately manifested in place names. With reference to Heidegger and the
French philosopher Merleau-Ponty, Schroeder regards place names as a means to
transform space into place, because dwelling and sensitivity interweave objects into
the body. A ‘sense of place’ is therefore action rather than thinking, ‘something one
undergoes a passion’ (Schroeder, 2004, p. 57). Hence identity is bound to places
that either recur in national mythologies or are incorporated into national heritage.
William Taylor (2007) also reflects on ‘a sense of place’, by exploring
architectural and landscape projects along the Swan river, which he depicts as an
integral part of Perth’s landscape. According to Taylor, investigations into a riverine
system also ‘prompt’ ‘reflections on the theme of rivers and regional and national
identities’. Having assumed the existence of a ‘migrant aesthetic’, he suggests that
identities are ‘misplaced’. And, like Schroeder’s account of the white settlers’
encounter with Indian tribes and their imposition of values on the landscape (2004,
pp. 4648, 50), Taylor argues that ‘European settlers approached the land by
imposing codes of reference and meaning on wilderness understood as infinitely
malleable’ (p. 144). It is with reference to the multiple meanings of symbols that
Taylor pleads for an aesthetic understanding of identity achieved via the ‘negotiation
of multiple codes and meanings’ rather ‘than simply [by] juggling the symbols
forming a linguistic one’ (2007, p. 158). Having repudiated the idea of an ‘integrated
selfhood’ or, in geographical terms, the possibility of obtaining ‘a map with all gaps
filled in’, he calls for the use of context analysis in order to situate aesthetic
contemplations in their socio-historical context. Consequently, he avoids statements
about Australian identity which embrace the multifarious population of the different
states and regions of this continent, and investigates instead the social history of
regional and national ‘monuments’. By means of this methodology, Taylor conceives
of a ‘sense of place’ with which he relates the specific environment and its manifest
human interventions to the perceptions of its inhabitants, for ‘a sense of place arises
from such settings [the Federation Walkway, Swan Bell Tower] and from patterns of
sensibility and habitation at work’ (2007, p. 157).
Of equal symbolic power are the urban landscapes as ‘heuristic framework[s] for
thinking’ studied by Peter Scriver (2006), p. 207) in his exploration of colonial-
modern architecture in India, also through the lens of literature. By means of three
novels published over time he analyses ‘the architectural legacies of the colonial
expansion of Europe into the geographical and cultural spaces of the non-West over
the past five centuries’ (p. 209). In one example, John Masters’ novel, Bhowani
Junction (1954) he singles out railway constructions as a typical embodiment of the
physical borderline between the indigenous urban population and the European
suburban population. In his examination of this novel, Scriver demonstrates the way
in which racial thinking determines architectural planning and how this in turn
mirrors the mentality of Anglo-Indians when the heroine expresses ‘the belief that
members of the group have no control to define and shape their own aspirations; to
embrace change and be different in an intentional and creative manner. It is this
belief that is seemingly embodied in their ossified patterns of building and dwelling’
(p. 216). By contrast, Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s last sigh (1996),
architecture operates as a ‘mnemonic device’, albeit not only as a ‘store’ of
knowledge of the past, but one which enables successive generations to experience
for themselves ‘cross-cultural contact and social development in India since
antiquity’ (Scriver, 2006, p. 220). Scriver concludes that references to architecture
in everyday speech play a significant role in constructing cultural and national
identities. In short, the railway colony, which evolved in the vicinity of the railway
station, was thoroughly hybrid, characterised by mixed customs and race, an
ambivalent sense of belonging, and a language based on a blend of local languages
and English (Scriver, 2006, p. 210).
Hybridity as layered subjectivities

In their study of the transformation of central Asian nations from traditional via
modern to late modern eras, Andrew Phillips and Paul James strive to define
experiences of ‘subjectivities’ associated with national identities. However, their
notion of subjectivity is not determined by a sense of place, but by types of social
relations or ‘ways of being-in-the-world’ (Phillips & James, 2001, p. 25). Moreover,

they describe identities as ‘multiple, contextual and relational’ and indicate reflexivity
as just one means of identification alongside tradition and universalising religion (p.
32). Such ‘layers’ of subjectivity coexist within any individual. Somewhat like
geological strata, they do not substitute previous layers, but involve compounded
means of social integration, first via face-to-face communities (tribal or traditional
integration), then via institutional association (modern integration in empires or
nation-states), and at last via disembodied integration (late or postmodern
association with strangers via means of mass communication) (p. 25). The key to
their argument is that traditional and modern forms of integration are not seen as
alternatives and did not occur in succession, no more than nations emerging after the
collapse of the Soviet Union may be defined as an atavistic ‘return’ or ‘awakening’ of
traditional nationalisms (p. 24). They therefore contradict what they call ‘the one-
dimensional modernist approach of theorists such as Ernest Gellner’, who maintains
a societal development in which modernity supersedes more traditional forms of
living. Phillips and James thereby squarely reject the dichotomous conception of
primordial and modern nations, as popularised by the exchange between Ernest
Gellner and Anthony Smith in the 1990s. Instead, they claim that tradition and
modernity coexist, as exemplified by the evolution of central Asian states. Unlike
European states, where modernisation occurred gradually, in central Asian states
(like those of the Middle East in the wake of the withdrawal of colonial powers)
‘modernity collided with tradition more dramatically and across all classes’ (p. 30).
This, claim these authors, is the essence of hybridity, that is, not ethnic mixing but the
coexistence of traditional, modern and late modern subjectivities on the basis of face
to face, institutional and disembodied forms of integration which, in turn, underpin
different modes of group loyalty and, ultimately, a ‘bifurcated consciousness’
(Phillips & James, 2001, p. 30).
What role does space play in this theory of hybridity as a collection of layered
subjectivities? Phillips and James’s conception of space is not geographical but
social and experiential, and acquires significance only insofar as it impinges on the
quality of social formations. The putative ethnic distinction between Uzbek and
Turkmen tribes of the eighteenth century, for example, is in fact determined by
their use of space. The Uzbeks were sedentary, bound by a weak form of loyalty,
and developed an institutionalised Islamic religion. Turkmen, by contrast, were
nomadic, bound by strong loyalties and a non-institutional ritualistic Islamic
religion (Phillips & James, 2001, p. 26). Similarly, the artificial national boundaries
imposed by Stalin’s nationalities policy from the 1920s onwards, coupled with
nationalisation policies such as the introduction of literacy programmes, were
precisely what led to the accelerated (and often traumatising) discrepancies between
traditional and modern subjectivities (pp. 2930). It is therefore coherent with
Phillips and James’s social and experiential notion of space and place that the mass
migrations by those people who were unwilling to become subjects of constructed
states in central Asia (such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgystan) of the
1930s ‘involved large numbers of people translocating themselves physically over
large distances in order that they might remain psychologically in the same place’
(2001, p. 30).
Hybridity as the coexistence of narrative modes

In their contribution on the Polish Tatars, Anna Cieslik and Maykel Verkuyten
emphasise that it ‘has been argued that analyses of hybridity tend to ignore questions
of power and inequality, that the term is meaningful only as a critique of
essentialism, that hybridity depends on a notion of purity, and that it is an elitist
posture promoted by privileged postcolonial and diasporic intellectuals located in
the West’ (2006, p. 78). In response, they published a complex but empirically
founded study of contemporary representations of Polish Tatars which strives to
redefine the very concept of hybridity in terms of parallel narrative modes
underpinning spatial belonging. They propose an alternative analysis, not of
definitions of hybrid identities, but of ‘discursive strategies’ used to ‘manage’

religious, ethnic and national identities in the public sphere (Cieslik & Verkuyten,
2006, p. 81). Such strategies include emphasis placed in public on ‘religious
similarities rather than difference’, or emphasis of ‘the contribution that Islamic
religion and culture has made to Polish culture’ (p. 88). Yet well-meaning linguistic
gestures alone do not bring about effective reconciliation or the stable management
or accommodation of mixed identities. The authors therefore explain the accom-
modation of inconsistent narrative strains in relation to the case of Polish Tatars in
terms of parallel narrative types, whereby factual and historical narratives are
sustained alongside mythical and symbolic narratives without contradicting them.
‘In general, the Oriental story has a mythical and symbolic form, whereas the Polish
story is historical and factual’ (Cieslik & Verkuyten, 2006, pp. 8586). In practice,
historical accounts referring to Poland are descriptive, contain a precise temporal
and spatial dimension, and refer to precise sources, whereas accounts referring to
Tatars or Islam contain poetic images and metaphors which are void of temporal and
spatial precision. Hence the Tatars’ perceptions of themselves as simultaneously
Tatar, Muslim and Polish are not inconsistent because ‘they are presented at different
levels of reality’ (Cieslik & Verkuyten, 2006, p. 87).
Cieslik and Verkuyten’s findings suggest two types of spatially informed identity
constructions. On the one hand, we can understand these narrative ‘strategies’ as
pragmatic devices to reconcile the Tatars’ sense of being different with their Polish
nationality, that is, a sense of incongruency or foreignness arising from having lived
for an extended period on Polish territory. On the other hand, the historical
representations of the Polish nation, characterised by abundance, familiarity and
historical fact, contrast sharply with the ‘oriental’ images of modesty, mystery and
mythology, creating ‘contrasting characteristics between the ‘‘here’’ and the ‘‘there’’
[. . .] between the reality of Poland and the fairy-tale qualities of the Orient’ (Cieslik
& Verkuyten, 2006, p. 87). In the case of the Tatars, short, hybrid national identities
are structured and sustained not only by a sense of belonging to different
geographical territories but also by spatial and temporal maps of the mind.
C. Conclusion
Conclusion: The tenacity of nationhood
Studies of national identities in a context of globalisation must take into account the
spatial dimensions of identity constructions. The complex terms of space and, from a
political perspective, territory, should no longer be understood as container concepts
but rather as products of social practices. Consequently, from the stance of the social
actors, identity is nothing invariable and always attached to the places of action.
How these particular places are signified depends on the historical experiences of the
actors. Which of these significations eventually become dominant in historical
metanarratives is a matter of power.
Against this theoretical background, we selected studies of national identities
published in this journal which consider that geographical scale is an essential aspect
of identity constructions. Transnational relationships clearly make it necessary to
approach identities not only in terms of their national scope, but also in terms of
hybridity and as multilayered identities. This is particularly evident when studying
the spatial dimensions of identities, for the cultural and political contextualisation of
all things national invariably unfolds in space. Yet in times of territorial reorganisa-
tions and increased personal mobility, national attachments still persist, albeit with
new qualities, for national attachments are no longer considered as ‘a socially
imposed structure’, but as ‘the product of a self-reflexive choice’ (Antonsich, 2009, p.
294; Agnew & Brusa, 1999). Similarly, there is empirical evidence that the impact of
the economic integration of the national system into the global economy, alongside
increased mobility and communication, enhance rather than diminish national
attachments. In short, the more the political stronghold over the nation and, more
particularly, over the definition of all things national diminishes, the more it can
become a discursive term attracting ascriptions from different social groups with
common values and experiences who accept nationhood as just one element of their
complex identity.
Notes
1. Identification processes of migrants or minority groups are a case in point here. People of
Turkish descent in Germany, for example, seek identification with the migrant group of
Turks in Germany rather than with the German or Turkish nation. (Sackmann, Peters,
Schultz & Prümm, 2001
2. For new research and approaches on nationalism in political and cultural perspective see
the introduction of Echternkamp and Müller (2002, pp. 124).
3. We have to distinguish between a radical and a relative constructivism. Radical linguists
would not subscribe to a historical reality beyond language, while relative constructivists
according to Berger and Luckmann (1966) claim historical reality as being socially
constructed.
4. The sociologist Ulrich Beck describes the contemporary social conditions of living in terms
of a risk society. It characterises a break within modernity which dissolves out of the
traditional industrial society and takes on a new shape that of a risk society (1986, p. 13).
5. Heidegger sought for a mythology of modern life different to a universalising machine
rationality. ‘He proposed, instead, a counter-myth of rootedness in place and environmen-
tally-bound traditions as the only secure foundation for political and social action in a
manifestly troubled world (. . .). The aestheticisation of politics through the production of
such all-consuming myths (of which Nazism was but one) was the tragic side as the ‘‘heroic’’
era came crashing to an end in World War II’ (Harvey, 1990, p. 35). Commentators assert
that Harvey well sees the problematic of an aesthecisation of politics when he asserts ‘that
such sentiments easily lend themselves to an interpretation and a politics that is both
exclusionary and parochialist, communitarian if not intensely nationalist (. . .). Indeed,
mediated relationships of this sort are felt as threatening to identity and any true sense of self,
while anything that contributes to or smacks of ruthlessness is rejected outright (. . .).
Experience, furthermore, becomes incommunicable beyond certain bounds precisely
because authentic art and genuine aesthetic sense can spring only out of strong rootedness
in place. This exclusionary view becomes even more emphatic given his views on the power of
language over social life. Place become the sites of incommunicable otherness. There can be
no interlinkage in the world of aesthetics or of communicable meanings of the sort that
modernism often sought, even in a context of strong interlinkage in the material world of
production and exchange’ (Bird, Curtis, Putnam, Robertson & Tickner, 1993, p. 14).
6. Barber (1996) Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World,
and Friedman (1999) The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization.).
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National Identities

ISSN: 1460-8944 (Print) 1469-9907 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnid20

Space and identity: constructions of national

Elfie Rembold & Peter Carrier

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2011.629425

Published online: 21 Nov 2011.

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Space and identity: constructions of national identities in an age of

*Corresponding authors. Email: dr.rembold@mayl.de and carrier@gei.de

current epistemological knowledge applied in both geographical and historical

A. Conceptional approaches in the studies of national identities

The ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences and the humanities

Deterritorialisation and identity relations

membership defined by negation in relation to other ethnic groups, while

Reterritorialisation: Scales and the nation-state

of territory and power consequently influences identity constructions. If we conceive

B. Recent research about spatially bounded national identities

Agnew and Brusa, the process of deterritorialisation or regionalisation, in which

multiplicity, he distinguishes between three spatialities regions, networks and fluids

Borders and boundaries

A rather different case of border studies is presented by Mansvelt Beck (2008)

torialisation and reterritorialisation, he enquires whether a new kind of discursive

Hybridity as layered subjectivities

relations or ‘ways of being-in-the-world’ (Phillips & James, 2001, p. 25). Moreover,

Hybridity as the coexistence of narrative modes

definitions of hybrid identities, but of ‘discursive strategies’ used to ‘manage’

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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