Debate On Understanding National Identity by David Mccrone and Frank Bechhofer

NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS
NATIONALISM
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FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN
Nations and Nationalism 23 (3), 2017, 441–462.
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12314
Debate on understanding national

identity by David McCrone and Frank
Bechhofer
ATSUKO ICHIJO,* JON E. FOX,**
ARTHUR AUGHEY,*** DAVID MCCRONE**** and
FRANK BECHHOFER****
*Department of Politics, International Relations and Human Rights, Kingston
University, London, UK
**School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies, University of Bristol,
Bristol, UK
***Ulster University, Coleraine, UK
****School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh, UK
Atsuko Ichijo: introduction
Understanding National Identity by David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer is a

product of a particular intellectual environment. For the past few decades, the
Department of Sociology, University of Edinburgh, where both have been
based, has been the hub of research activities into nations, nationalism and
national identity. In addition, the Department runs a successful MSc pro-
gramme, MSc in Nationalism Studies. The Department’s contribution to the
development of the study of nations and nationalism (and national identity,
indeed) is wide ranging. For example, the Department was where what is
known as the Moreno question was born, a scale to measure the relationship
between two overlapping/competing national identities. It was devised by Luis
Moreno who came to Edinburgh to work on his Ph.D. in the early 1980s
(Moreno 2006) and has been introduced to the wider world through the works
produced by Edinburgh scholars including McCrone and Bechhofer. The
Moreno scale is now one of the most widely used scales to discern the
relationship between competing identities across Europe, and McCrone and
Bechhofer have been tweaking it in their research in Scotland to refine what
the scale can do (see their contribution to the section). McCrone and
Bechhofer have played the key role in a number of research projects on
national identity including projects on landed and arts elites in Scotland
© The author(s) 2017. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2017
442 Atsuko Ichijo et al.
and on Berwick-on-Tweed and two Leverhulme Trust-founded research

programmes on national identity. Their publications are numerous, and
anyone with interest in nationalisms and national identities of the British Isles
(and now increasingly the questions of European integration and identities)
simply cannot fail to encounter (and engage with) them. Understanding
National Identity is the culmination of many years of their research into
national identity, a piece of work that is praised as ‘the best book ever written
on national identity’ by John Hall.
The volume sets out with a sharp observation that national identity is a
neglected element in the study of the holy triangle of ‘nationalism, nations
and national identity’, and it tackles the claim head-on by means of in-depth
discussions as to ‘how to get at’ national identity from an unambiguously so-
ciological perspective. McCrone and Bechhofer argue and show that national
identity is knowable and researchable in the volume, and this is the theme Jon
Fox, who has been developing the ‘everyday nationhood’ angle, picks up in his
contribution to the debate. Fox believes that McCrone and Bechhofer have
delivered more than they have promised in exploring how to use two method-
ological approaches to the study of identity: qualitative and quantitative. He
finds in McCrone’s and Bechhofer’s use of surveys something that links to
the breaching technique Garfinkel developed, a technique to expose something
hidden in the mundane everyday life and sees much potential for this technique
in the study of national identity. While McCrone and Bechhofer maintain that
their surveys are not a tick-box exercise (a closed questionnaire) as Fox
described in his contribution, they acknowledge the analytical potential of
the breaching technique in studying something like national identity that could
be latent rather than salient.
There is no doubt methodological deliberations are what McCrone and
Bechhofer are concerned with in Understanding National Identity (and for
which, it has been positively received); there is, however, another, unavoidable
dimension to the volume because of the wider context in which it has been
shaped: their research into national identity started in the 1990s and has con-
tinued into the 2010s when constitutional change is high on the agenda, both
in terms of the idea of the United Kingdom and the UK’s relationship with
the European Union. The introduction of the volume starts with a disclaimer:
the book is not about constitutional change, but about national identity. The
fact that the book on national identity starts with such a disclaimer says a
lot about a widely spread assumption that identity drives political behaviour,
one of the questions this comprehensive study tackles. So what is national
identity and how can we study it? And why do we tend to assume there is a
‘natural’ link between national identity and political behaviour?
Despite the authors’ insistence that the volume is not about constitutional
change, since the debate took place in 2016 after two referenda, the Scottish
independence referendum of 2014 and the EU membership referendum of June
2016, the editorial team of Nations and Nationalism felt it was important to
discuss the volume’s contribution in a context of constitutional change. Arthur
Debate on understanding national identity 443
Aughey has taken up this challenge and furnished us with political philosoph-
ical reflection on the relationship between (national) identity and the idea of
the UK. In contrast to Fox who focused on the immediate issue of the volume,
methodology, Aughey explores the opposition of identity vs. allegiance and
that of solidarity vs. contract as a way into an investigation into the relation-
ship between national identity and constitutional change. McCrone and
Bechhofer respond to Aughey’s invitation to allow themselves to comment
on constitutional change by providing a new set of data on the relationship be-
tween the patterns of national identity and how people voted at the EU refer-
endum. What is more, in a truly intellectually rigorous fashion, they suggest a
further research agenda to look into different significance attached to national
identities and their combination in four constituent nations of the UK that
seems to have exerted differentiated influence on how people voted at the
EU referendum. Indeed, research is a never-ending process; there is always
something interesting to pursue further. In this regard, too, Understanding
National Identity is a tour de force in the study of nations, nationalism and
above all, national identity.
After the debate that took place on 9 November 2016, for me, one question
still lingers: would the volume be possible if McCrone and Bechhofer were lo-
cated outside Scotland? In other words, is it the cases that this research has
been possible because it originates in Scotland where arguably national iden-
tity is more salient and therefore easier to get research started? This is not to
question the general applicability of McCrone’s and Bechhofer’s findings but
to ponder the socio-historical and political contexts in which research as en-
gagement with society takes place. How much are we bound by our own con-
text even in the supposedly abstract realm of research and how far can our
findings be shared? Understanding National Identity invites us to ponder some
epistemological questions as well as the fascinating phenomenon of national
identity.
Jon E Fox: understanding national identity as doing and being
No book in recent memory has provided such a comprehensive overview of the

multiple contents and variable contexts of national identity than David
McCrone and Frank Bechhofer’s Understanding National Identity (2015).
The book’s focus is on Scottish, English and British national identities, but
the diverse methods it employs and the theoretical insights it generates
resonate far beyond these narrower empirical confines. The book is the
culmination of decades of theoretically driven and empirically grounded
collaborative research on national identity. Their commitment to and
investment in national identity research can be felt in the breadth and depth
of the analysis presented here.
Taking their cue from Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday
Life (Goffman 1959), McCrone and Bechhofer posit that national identity
should be understood in performative terms, as something people ‘do … within

particular contexts’ (2015: 14–18, 25–26). ‘[I]t would be helpful’ they advise,
‘to get away from “identity” (as a noun), implying that it is a badge which af-
fixes to people, describing who they are, as it were, and treat it more as a verb,
“to identify with”, which implies a more active process of doing, which varies
according to context’ (2015: 17). Their focus is on identity-as-doing; they are
critical of identity-as-being for not infrequently relegating identity as unknow-
able or inaccessible, hidden from the gaze of prying researchers ‘in the deeper
recesses of the mind’ (2015: 13, quoting Miller 1995: 18, see also Billig 1995).
The 200 pages of data and analysis in this book confirm that national identity
is not only eminently observable, but knowable as well. For McCrone and
Bechhofer, national identity is not ‘below consciousness’, off the radar or inac-
cessible to empirical investigation, but rather located in the context-specific
and explicit practices of ordinary people.
But is this really an either/or proposition? Are being and doing mutually
exclusive modalities of identity? McCrone and Bechhofer’s scepticism towards
identity-as-being is fuelled partly by pragmatic concerns (because they want
to access and know identity), but also partly by conceptual considerations
(because they believe identities are made explicit through their everyday
invocations and performances). But if there are contexts, as McCrone and
Bechhofer suggest, where people do identity, then definitionally there must
also be other contexts where people do not do identity. What happens to iden-
tity in those in-between contexts? Does it disappear altogether, before sponta-
neously popping up in the next context? Surely it is possible to conceive of a
latent identity, one (temporarily) hidden in the crevices of the unconsciousness,
silently and stealthily guiding thought and action without being the explicit
focus of that thought and action (Billig 1995; Edensor 2002). In other contexts,
that same identity can come to the fore in explicit articulations and perfor-
mances, where identity is self-consciously and purposefully manipulated for
specific purposes (McCrone and Bechhofer 2015, see also Fox and Miller-
Idriss 2008). McCrone and Bechhofer are correct, following Miller (1995), that
identity-as-being is often inaccessible from view. But this pragmatic problem
with locating identity should not translate a priori into a conceptual problem
with how we understand identity. Rather, this is merely a methodological chal-
lenge to develop research strategies to tease out otherwise inaccessible identi-
ties. If anyone is positioned to come up with innovative techniques to reveal
this otherwise inaccessible national identity, then that would have to be David
McCrone and Frank Bechhofer.
Without acknowledging it, I think this is what they have actually done in
their book. They show us identity being performed, but they also show us iden-
tity simply being. To be sure, their emphasis is squarely on the former. The
data they present, both qualitative and quantitative, consist of ordinary people
doing things with their national identities (generally talking and ticking boxes).
But while on one level it is clear that their respondents are freely invoking their
identities, on another level the same data might be reinterpreted to tap into
that more elusive and typically unnoticed version of national identity that
others have claimed is inaccessible (see Fox 2017).
On the one hand, McCrone and Bechhofer are doing exactly what it says on
the tin: they are generating and analysing evidence of national identity as a
claim (McCrone and Bechhofer 2015: 25, 17–18, see also Calhoun 1997: 5),
as something that is ‘performative and presentational’ (2015: 25, see also
Edensor 2002: 90) and sometimes as something ‘tactical’ (2015: 25, see also
Wodak et al. 1999: 31–35). This version of identity does not operate below
consciousness, but is self-consciously manipulated in certain contexts for
specific purposes. McCrone and Bechhofer situate their analysis of identity
in different overlapping and intersecting macro-structural and micro-interac-
tional contexts. In chapter 4, the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, located on
the border of Scotland and England, supplies the territorial, political and geo-
graphical contexts for local residents’ accounts of their identities. Embedded
within these larger spatial and structural contexts are multiple mundane con-
texts that also prompt their own bespoke versions of national identity. There
are the interactional contexts of work, family and marriage; the conversational
contexts of joking, accented speech and bickering; the organisational contexts
of local building codes, having babies, sport and shopping. These varied con-
texts do not produce a one-size-fits-all version of national identity, but multiple
complementary and sometimes contradictory versions of identity.
Other chapters tackle other contexts. Chapters 6 and 8 consider (in different
ways) the political (and politicised) contexts of national identities. Chapter 7, in
contrast, explores the situational contexts of identity, and specifically how the
national ‘self’ can become (more) apparent when confronted with the national
‘other’ (see also Triandafyllidou 1998 on this point). What national identity
means in these different contexts depends on where and when it is invoked.
Individually and collectively, what we see in these various examples is people
doing their national identities in different ways and in varied contexts. This is
what McCrone and Bechhofer promised to deliver in their book, and they did.
But they did more: they also offered us a glimpse into this mostly unex-
plored realm of the unselfconscious. This is national identity not as a claim
or performance, not strategically deployed, nor creatively manipulated; this
is national identity as an unselfconscious set of nationally specific norms,
values and understandings that underlies and informs social life without
(usually) being talked about in a self-conscious manner. These are the reflexive
habits (and habitus; see Edensor 2002: 88–98) of identity, the doxic experience
(or non-experience) of a nationally inflected world (see Karner 2005: 223–36).
In McCrone and Bechhofer’s choice of vocabulary, this might be the rules and
grammar of national identity (2015: 30–31) that allow, without question,
people to simply be national (Eley and Suny 1996). As one of their Scottish
interviewees put it, national identity was ‘like breathing, you do it’ (2015:
52–53). This is national identity as an involuntary reflex. This is not identity’s
frontstage of ‘impression management’ but its backstage, ‘more concerned
with the reproductive functions of everyday life’ (Edensor 2002: 89).
This backstage version of national identity, while not entirely inaccessible,

does pose certain methodological challenges. But that does not mean we
should write it off as inaccessible, or worse, non-existent. It is there, just
beneath the surface, and it can be examined empirically, though with a
different methodological toolkit. Experimental psychologists have developed
laboratory techniques to show how national identity operates subliminally
(Carter et al. 2011; Hassin et al. 2009); ethnomethodologists have explored
how identities inform talk-in-interaction without becoming the explicit conver-
sational focus of those interactions (Hester and Housley 2002); and many
other social scientists have occasionally happened upon more taken-for-
granted variations of national identity through the identity breaches that
sometimes occur in their data (see, e.g., Skey 2011).
McCrone and Bechhofer also uncover evidence of this backstage version of
identity in at least two ways. First, they get a glimpse backstage when
identities are challenged in some way. National identities that normally do
not need to be articulated are articulated when they are threatened. In
ethnomethodological terms, this is a breach (Garfinkel 1967). For Garfinkel,
breaches make visible the ‘background expectancies’ of social interaction
(Garfinkel 1967: 36, 41–42); for McCrone and Bechhofer, it is the ‘rules and
grammar’ of national identity that are generally ‘glimpsed only in their trans-
gression, where … claims are made which are judged illegitimate. In this way
they resemble many social norms on how to behave … where only transgres-
sion makes the “rule” explicit’ (2015: 98, see also 120). The otherwise implicit
racialised rules of Scottish identity come out in an interview with a Scottish
man who describes one such breach. For him, Scottish identity was ‘… not
something that you notice until you are faced with someone who isn’t white.’
Then he described a meeting with an ethnically Chinese man who claimed a
Scottish identity.
Meeting someone who is ethnically Chinese with a Scottish accent was like a revelation,
because he didn’t look like he sounded. And I found it quite hard, he called himself
Scottish and he wore kilts and he did Scottish things and he looked Chinese. And it took
a bit to adjust to it. Whereas if he’d said I0 m British I would have said, ‘yeah, fine’. But he
said ‘I’m Scottish’ and I thought ‘oh no you’re not’ (McCrone and Bechhofer 2015: 105).
The ethnically Chinese appearance of this man claiming (or performing) a

Scottish identity upset the interviewee’s theretofore taken-for-granted assump-
tion that being Scottish meant being white. The implicit thus became explicit:
‘If I see a white person who says that they are Scottish I don’t think about it at
all I just accept it. If I see someone with a different colour who says that they
are Scottish I do think about it’ (McCrone and Bechhofer 2015: 105).
There are other examples as well, though perhaps less dramatic. The
othering described in chapter 7, for instance, might be understood as a kind
of breaching experiment, writ large. National identities that lay dormant much
of the time come to the fore when confronted (or challenged) by the national
other. People are called to account for their own identity in national terms
once the national cards are on the table. McCrone and Bechhofer arrive at
these and other examples not by design but by chance. But while their
intention was not to breach national identity, some of the topics they discussed
with their research subjects functioned as breaches. These are breaches that are
uncovered (or can be uncovered) in the data we analyse (Skey 2011).
The second way McCrone and Bechhofer generate evidence of an
unselfconscious national identity is through their survey research. McCrone
and Bechhofer put surveys to good use to assess how people rank identities,
how they understand their multiple identities, and the quality and intensity
of those different identities. Surveys provide detailed snapshots of the scope,
content and strength of national identities. Surveys are however less useful
for assessing how people ‘do’ their identities. The aggregate identities culled
from survey research do not reveal identities-in-action, but rather identities
momentarily frozen in time and space, detached from the everyday contexts
they sometimes serve. They measure not what people do, but who people are.
McCrone and Bechhofer took a critical view of this latter, more static, ver-
sion of identity. But I would like to suggest that one beneficial unintended con-
sequence of their survey research is that it can also be interpreted as capturing
some of these more otherwise ‘inaccessible’ and ‘unknowable’ versions of iden-
tity. There are three ways this occurs.
First, surveys generate not thoughtful, elaborate responses, but quick, snap
judgements (often from a finite universe of fixed choices). As such, they
provide a comprehensive but condensed overview of the many different
dimensions of national identity. The questions that confront survey respon-
dents bear little resemblance to the way identity questions arise in their every-
day lives. But the answers they give are nevertheless meaningful. The boxes
they tick do not provide space for nuance or texture, but rather require quick,
quasi-automatic, reflex-like responses (see, e.g., Li 2013: 120–24, Bonikowski
2016: 438, Fox 2017: 42). And because the answers are not premeditated, they
give us a glimpse into the netherworld of national identity as who we are.
Second, and relatedly, the data generated through surveys are
decontextualised. Surveys are not part of everyday interaction; indeed, they
momentarily suspend those unspoken rules and replace them with a new gram-
mar of interaction. We do not normally rank people according to nationality,
meditate on our multiple identities, or otherwise narrate the national self in the
course of our everyday comings and goings. But surveys ask us to do just these
things in a contrived research environment. They thus detach the content of
national identity from its context: they show us what people think about their
national identities without telling us when or where they think about their na-
tional identities. People’s capacity for answering these questions shows us that
national identity has meaning for them, even when they are not ‘doing’ those
identities in context-specific ways.
Third, survey data are also depersonalised. While the detail of interviews
comes from the in-depth exploration of single questions, the detail of surveys
is gleaned from all the questions posed to the entire sample. Survey results
matter in the aggregate, detaching the data from the individual and placing it
‘out there’, in the ether, a sort of disembodied national identity available to all.
It may not have been their intention, but McCrone and Bechhofer are on to
something here. The survey data and analysis they presented provide us with a
window into some of those dimensions of identity that Miller (1995: 18, quoted
in McCrone and Bechhofer 2015: 15) claimed are either inaccessible or
unknowable. McCrone and Bechhofer dismissed this claim on both pragmatic
and conceptual grounds. They then showed us identity is both accessible and
knowable when it is performed. But they also showed us that identity is acces-
sible and knowable when it is not performed, when it simply is. They delivered
more than they promised.
Arthur Aughey: understanding national identity: a political reading
Michael Oakeshott thought that a ‘tradition of behaviour’ was a ‘tricky’ thing

to get to know. National identity can be understood as a tradition of behaviour
and is an equally tricky thing to get to know. It is useful to have assured guid-
ance in trickiness and that is what Understanding National Identity delivers.
The book begins with reference to William McIlvanny’s remark: national iden-
tity is like ‘an old insurance policy. You know you’ve got one somewhere, but
you’re not entirely sure where it is’. And you’re ‘pretty vague about what the
small print means’ (McCrone and Bechhofer 2015: 1–2). When read this I
was reminded of George Santayana’s (1922: 4) comment on nationality: ‘too
radically intertwined with our moral essence to be changed honourably, and
too accidental to the free mind to be worth changing’. It is who we are but it
is not all that we are and – unless our sense of nationhood is seriously threat-
ened – probably not the most important thing about us. Like Edmund Burke’s
observation on rights, national identity occupies a sort of middle, ‘incapable of
definition, but not impossible to be discerned’. McCrone and Bechhofer dis-
cern it brilliantly, and they challenge one of its most ‘obvious’ explanations.
They detect no intimate connection between politics and national identity or,
more precisely (p. 1), ‘the connection between national identity and people’s
political and constitutional preferences is considerably looser than one might
expect’. And they ask (p. 9): ‘what exactly is meant by national identity if it
is not simply – or even – being a citizen of a state and bearing its passport?’
McCrone and Bechhofer admit that their research does not engage with
Northern Ireland and an ‘Aha! Got you’ critic might claim that here is the
example that disproves that rule. In the colloquial of that part of the world:
‘sure, the dogs in the street know’ that politics and identity are the same thing.
More often than not those dogs are barking up the wrong tree and even canine
wisdom can be incorrect.
That is because people are not very historically minded. Perhaps we all
suffer from the Maurice Chevalier syndrome in the musical Gigi: remembering
things so well that we get them wrong. For example, there was some interest
recently in increasing self-identification as ‘Northern Irish’ which, some

thought, heralded the emergence a new post-Troubles identity. Yet, forty five
years ago, Richard Rose in his ground-breaking study Governing Without Con-
sensus (1971: 215) found that people in Northern Ireland had a well-developed
sense of ‘their Province’s distinctiveness’ and that national identity was more
complex than the simplistic division British or Irish. This was especially so
amongst Protestants – thirty-nine per cent described themselves as Ulster,
thirty-two per cent British and twenty per cent Irish. It was the IRA campaign
that made ‘British’ (as the most un-Irish option) the overwhelming choice for
Ulster Protestants. Far from being novel, current identity shading is a case
of back to the future. Equally, the passport question has become interesting
as well after the result of the EU referendum on 23 June 2016. Many Unionist
voters have decided to register for an Irish passport in order to avoid the
possible inconveniencies of travelling in the European Union with their British
passport. This is instrumental, of course, does not affect ‘constitutional
preferences’ and demonstrates the truth of McCrone and Bechhofer that ‘what
exactly is meant by national identity’ is not answered very well by examining
the passport one bears. But it does indicate a certain trickiness at work.
Understanding National Identity demonstrates how ‘getting at national
identity’ involves recognising very complex personal and collective narratives
and illustrating how they work. In the case of the UK, how can we explain
those connections that do exist between national identity and constitutional
preferences? McCrone and Bechhofer explore this in illuminating and
persuasive detail. If one abstracts politically from their work, I suggest one
can differentiate two sets of concept – identity and allegiance/solidarity and
contract – which may be brought together as a paradoxical ‘elective affinity’.
I think this procedure helps to frame – if not fully explain – the puzzle of
national identity/ies and politics in Britain.
First, what is the relationship between allegiance and identity? Allegiance
may be to the Crown, to political institutions, to values, or it may be to
all of these things. It can change over time, though older allegiances do linger
(I always think of Joseph Roth’s lament for the old Habsburg monarchy in The
Bust of the Emperor where people who had previously been ‘Austrian’ came to
be part of the Polish, the Czech, the Ukrainian, the German, the Romanian,
the Slovenian and the Croatian nations. Perhaps it is a tale for today). If
identity is concerned mainly with self-understanding – what one feels oneself
to be individually and communally – allegiance involves authoritative political
obligation. This distinction is appropriate because it has become fashionable to
consider British as either invented or forged. This confuses the artifice of the
statehood with artificiality, implying inauthentic – and contrasts it with
‘Scottishness’ or ‘Englishness’ as authentic identities. That is a highly question-
able procedure. Understanding National Identity shows that not only do Scots
understand the functioning distinction but so too do the English (p. 125 and
p. 129). Distinguishing allegiance and identity, however, provides for their
(possible) accommodation. Seventy-five years ago, Sir Ernest Barker
(1942: 15) called being British a distinctive ‘mixture of unity and diversity’, one
in which individual nations maintain their identity but each nation gets more
‘by being included in the wider scope of the United Kingdom’ than by being
separate. In Scotland, during the independence referendum, Barker’s descrip-
tion was re-invented as the slogan: Better Together. The consequence of inde-
pendence, it was argued (with echoes of Roth), would diminish all parts of
the UK, individually and collectively. Nationalists, by contrast, believe that
identity – for example, being Scottish or English – should be intimately and log-
ically aligned with allegiance – to Scottish or English institutions exclusively.
Or to adapt the terms of McCrone and Bechhofer, culture and politics should
become one.
Second, what is the relationship between contract and solidarity? Contract
implies a relationship in which one has no obligations other than those freely
entered into either by arrangement or by treaty. It is an arrangement of conve-
nience. Solidarity supposes a common belonging and the sharing a larger
good. In contemporary political discourse, nationalists stress the contractual
character of the UK because it implies a right of dissolution. Take two exam-
ples, one Scottish and one English. Alec Salmond put it succinctly when he
said that independence would transform the Scots from being surly lodgers
into good neighbours. The writer and activist Paul Kingsnorth (2008) stated
that ‘England is a nation, Britain is a convenience’ (implying that it had now
become inconvenient). Unionists, on the other hand, stress solidarity because
it identifies the value of the whole. Here, the UK becomes what Hegel once
thought of marriage: a contract that transcends contract, involving (to use that
resonant, if ambiguous Scottish phrase) a partnership for good. And it was
also interesting to note that the word ‘solidarity’ was heard frequently during
the Scottish referendum campaign. In politics, of course, both principles are
at work. There are utilitarian calculations of self-interest by the UK’s
component territories, but those calculations also assume obligations of British
solidarity. This is explored with subtlety in chapter 6 of Understanding
National Identity.
Devolution has altered the framework for determining who gets what,
where, when and how. Formerly, those decisions had been taken within the
bureaucratic arrangements of government. Now, to adapt a term of Peter
Hennessy’s, the hidden wiring of the constitution had become (more) visible.
The promise of devolution was to accommodate popular sovereign claims by
the containment of separatist tendencies, especially in Scotland. In short, con-
stitutional change was designed to guarantee – by democratic, institutional rec-
ognition – the rights of the nations within the Union. As we now know, even
Tony Blair (2010: 251) was uncertain about its wisdom, acknowledging devo-
lution to be a dangerous game. He accepted that there was no guarantee that
national identity might not become nationalist politics. His judgement was
simply that it was ‘inevitable’. The bargaining between devolved institutions
and Westminster often appears to place contract above solidarity, grievance
over mutuality, like some zero-sum game. Devolution is to some extent an
identity test because it raises the subversively instrumental question challeng-

ing allegiance and solidarity, one which the Scottish referendum tested almost
to destruction: what is the UK for? That political leaders struggled to provide a
convincing answer to that question, was partly the reason for Project Fear
(Pike 2016). Those leaders would do well in the future to read Understanding
National Identity, especially chapter 8: ‘A manner of speaking: the end of being
British?’
However, political research (Jeffery, Lodge and Schmuecker 2010) also
identifies a devolution paradox. It is this: while citizens in Scotland, Wales
and – with qualifications – Northern Ireland appreciate the ability of devolved
institutions to deliver policy diversity, there is also a wish for common British
standards. This is not so much a Boris Johnson ‘cake and eat it’ thing as a
broad – if not universal – feeling that difference should not mean either discon-
nection or disadvantage. This was captured well in the consultation document
(2008: 2–3) that preceded the Commission on Scottish Devolution (Calman)
Report of 2009. Two truths of devolution were set out. On the one hand, devo-
lution admits difference, allowing ‘in principle’ for different welfare provisions
especially in relation to health and education. On the other hand, welfare is
based on a principle of ‘sharing risks and pooling resources’ and driven by
ideas of equity and parity. ‘It does not matter whether an individual is ill in
Caithness or Cornwall: he or she has access to free health care when and where
it is needed, supported by taxes paid across the UK’. If Project Fear
emphasised the risks, the key ideal was ‘sharing’. McCrone and Bechhofer
use the phrase ‘complementary, not competing’.
Third, what do I mean by elective affinity? That term will be familiar to stu-
dents of Max Weber but I do not use it in his precise (or imprecise) way. I take
elective to suggest agency and deliberate choice; affinity to imply that individ-
uals and nations are related by something other than choice. In short, compo-
nent national identities elect to remain in relationship with one another but
that the relationship exhibits affinities that give meaning to the term ‘British’.
In another enigmatic phrase of Michael Oakeshott’s, it assumes a flow of sym-
pathy between identities, past, present and future. Elective affinity seems to
capture the intersection of self-understanding and self-interest. It involves real
and active democratic choice – Vernon Bogdanor, as McCrone and Bechhofer
note (pp. 169–70), makes representation at Westminster the key to being
British – but also sentimental or emotional identification – feeling sympathy
with most, if not all, things British – Gordon Brown often stressed family
connections throughout the UK. Choice, then, becomes paradoxically natural.
Interestingly, though rejecting the elective side of being British, Scottish
nationalists wish to remain affined. Hence the objective of keeping a ‘social
union’ defined by common cultural and historical links. Here is a good
example of what McCrone and Bechhofer call the inadequacy of a strict
unionist/nationalist divide. If what Colin Kidd (2008: 300) called ‘banal
unionism’, a ‘form of casual and unquestioning silence on the topic’ of British
identity is no longer possible, his historian’s perspective also confirmed the
judgement of McCrone and Bechhofer. He thought that the centre of gravity

lay at a more interesting location in Scotland, on ‘the vast yet variegated ter-
rain which constitutes the middle ground between the extremes of anglicising
unionism and Anglophobic nationalism’. That location marks the spot not
only in Scotland but also in Wales, though it is always capable of shifting.
The Scottish referendum revealed British political identity to mean some-
thing very civil: no nation can be compelled to stay in the Union but there is
no good reason for any to leave (actually, John Major had announced this in
1992). Nationalists, equally civilly, beg to differ on the second point. Consent
is now the acknowledged rule – even in Northern Ireland. As J. C. D. Clark
(2000: 275–6) felicitously put it, the notion of political Britishness meant
seldom ‘demanding of its members a deeper acknowledgement of kinship with
their neighbours than they were willing, informally, to give’. Or, as McCrone
and Bechhofer observe (p. 178), Britain ‘remains a salient and meaningful
frame of reference, even though more and more people in England and
Scotland do not define their own identity primarily as British’.
The delicacy of multinational relationships is noted in one interesting
passage in the book. McCrone and Bechhofer (p. 165) refer to J. G. A.
Pocock’s (1975) landmark essay ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’
which, it can be argued, represented an attempt to put historical flesh on the
bones of choice and affinity in what Irish cultural theorists in the 1990s began
to call ‘these islands’, precisely in order to avoid the word ‘British’. There is an
academic reference in Pocock that is relevant to the question of identity. As
A. J. P. Taylor (1965: v) had stated provocatively in his Preface to English
History: 1914–1945 that though the use of the word English, except for a
geographical expression, brought the usual protests, he intended to use it any-
way as an all-embracing explanatory term for things British. As Pocock ob-
served (1975: 602–3) in his essay – especially Taylor’s habit of using ‘Scotch’
for ‘Scots’ in a coat-trailing manner – there are parts of the world in which
men are killed for less. Taylor (1975: 622–3) was given an opportunity to com-
ment on Pocock’s article, and he responded by arguing that it did not make
sense to claim ‘something called British history that is different from English
history’. The difference between English and British in this context, according
to Taylor, was trivial and of interest only if people wanted to ‘have a row’. Pro-
vocative indeed, if not worthy of a death sentence, and yet there is a perfectly
non-chauvinist defence of his argument from a consistently British position:
that it is indeed only those who are intent on having ‘a row’ (nationalists of
whatever hue) and who want to differentiate absolutely between what belongs
to England and what belongs to everyone else. Taylor’s view illustrates not
only the problem of doing justice to what is English and what is British but
it also intimates what once was the pragmatic solution. If there was intellectual
and political muddle about England/Britain, then the thing to avoid was
having a dangerous row about it – ‘nationalist cranks’ Taylor had called those
intent on making an issue of identity. And the operative assumption of British
politics has been hitherto that the UK is a sufficiently robust polity such that
these questions of national identity are, or should be, confined to the trivial
and not serious category – which, ironically, is a very English way of
looking at things. That very English disposition now seems rather quaint
(McCrone and Bechhofer p. 119).
How does the vote on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union affect the
politics of national identity in the UK? It is very difficult to make any
considered assessment at the moment – except to note that the result seems
rather different looking out from England and Wales than it does when
looking in from Scotland – never mind from Northern Ireland. It challenges
those neat concepts that I have been making, straining not reconciling them
– in short, making relations look less natural, less consensual and more forced.
Yes, the referendum was UK-wide; yes, the people have spoken. But who are
the people? The ‘identity’ of the people can appear rather different depending
on where one lives. Brexit makes consent – as Rose (1982: 208) noted three
decades ago – look much more contingent than it did before. Understanding
National Identity concludes: ‘To ask who ‘we’ are, and for what purposes,
remains one of the key questions of our times’. I cannot put it any better for
that. Anyone wanting answers to this question should read McCrone and
Bechhofer.
David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer: response to Aughey and Fox
We greatly appreciate the thoughtful and generous comments by Arthur

Aughey and Jon Fox on Understanding National Identity. They raise a number
of interesting points, and we shall only be able to address some of them.
We wrote the book on the basis that ‘national identity’ is the puny child of
muscular parents, namely, ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’. When issues of national
identity are raised, rather than examining them directly, the discussion usually
ends up debating what constitutes a nation, and how nationalism as an ideol-
ogy arises. Our aim was to show how national identity matters per se, rather
than simply being subservient to these ‘muscular parents’. Neither do we ac-
cept the view that national identity is unknowable (Miller 1995), still less that
it is a ‘chimera’ (Malesevic 2011).
After more than twenty-five years’ work, using a variety of research
methods, and informed by working with other social scientists, we are con-
vinced that there is something real and knowable that can be studied, and,
furthermore, that one can ‘get at’ national identity using imaginative research
designs. Furthermore, national identity is not imposed from on high, as
Anthony Smith believed, in order to ‘to provide a strong “community of
history and destiny” to save people from personal oblivion and restore
collective faith’ (Smith 1991). Rather, we found that people largely make it
up for themselves, using the raw materials available to them. We are sympa-
thetic to the notions of ‘everyday nationhood’ (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008),
and ‘personal nationalism’ (Kapferer 1988); that social actors develop
‘interpretive manoeuvres’ to formulate ‘the nation in terms of their selves for

the purposes of personal identity’ (Cohen 2000: 166).
We have a number of people to thank. The Leverhulme Trust gave us two
major research grants, one to collaborate with other social scientists –
sociologists, social psychologists, political scientists, social anthropologists –
from whom we learned a lot. No discipline has a monopoly of wisdom, even
though, in the words of C. Wright Mills, every cobbler thinks leather is the
only thing, and, for better or worse, we are sociologists. Much of this collabo-
rative work was published in our edited book, National Identity, Nationalism
and Constitutional Change (2009). The present book, Understanding National
Identity (2015) includes subsequent work, but above all, our own attempts to
make sense, in a way that is accessible to a wide range of readers, of our work
on national identity as a whole. Taking the two books together gives a better
sense of where we are coming from, and, indeed, who we have travelled with.
Neither a single discipline, nor a single research method, has a monopoly of
wisdom. We used intensive interviews (long periods on people’s sofas), ethnog-
raphy and social surveys (not to be confused with opinion polls). We believe in
‘triangulation’, that several observations of a datum are much better than one,
and, furthermore, that there are benefits of cross-fertilisation. Talking to
people in a semi-structured way allowed us to distil out of such conversations
ways of getting at national identity through survey questions, which we
modified and refined in successive surveys.
Triangulation of ‘methods’ is important, but even more crucial is research
design: how to choose, access and compare research locales to ‘get at’ matters
of national identity. To take an example, if, for most people, national identities
are implicit, latent, for others, national identity claims are problematic, for
instance migrants – born in one country, living in another, or people living in
‘debatable lands’ (such as Berwick-upon-Tweed) between two countries.
We start with what may seem a minor matter of methodology, Jon Fox’s
comments about survey research with which we disagree to some extent.
He says (see above)
The data they present, both qualitative and quantitative, consist of ordinary people
doing things with their national identities (generally talking and ticking boxes).
And further (see above),
The second way McCrone and Bechhofer generate evidence of an unselfconscious

national identity is through their survey research. McCrone and Bechhofer put surveys
to good use to assess how people rank identities, how they understand their multiple
identities, and the quality and intensity of those different identities. Surveys thus pro-
vide detailed snapshots of the scope, content and strength of national identities. Surveys
are however less useful for assessing how people ‘do’ their identities. The aggregate
identities culled from survey research do not reveal identities-in-action, but rather iden-
tities momentarily frozen in time and space, detached from the everyday contexts they
sometimes serve. They measure not what people do, but who people are.
We would not claim that surveys are the only valid form of data gathering still
less that they are intrinsically ‘better’ than other methods. However, no boxes
were ticked by the respondents in our surveys. We were not doing opinion
polling, but survey research. Our questions about national identity and related
issues were embedded in lengthy, face to face interviews conducted like ‘con-
versations’ with respondents in their own homes, undertaken by highly skilled
and experienced interviewers employed by the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey
and the British Social Attitudes Survey. Respondents were allowed time to
think, and the responses are accordingly not ‘quick, snap judgements’.
We attempted to contextualise the questions although there is admittedly a
fundamental difference between answering questions with regard to a putative
context described by an interviewer and actually ‘being in a particular situa-
tion’. We do partly reject the idea that surveys, ours anyway, ‘detach the con-
tent of national identity from its context: they show us what people think about
their national identities without telling us when or where they think about their
national identities’ (see above). The situations in which people were asked to
accept or reject what we have conceptualised as ‘claims’ are described to them
although we would not claim that this can substitute for being present when
people ‘do’ identity.
Accordingly, Jon Fox is right about it being a contrived research environ-
ment but underplays the crucial interaction between the qualitative and quan-
titative in our work. We re-interviewed many respondents in intensive, more
open-ended interviews and responses told similar coherent stories and were
consistent with the survey responses over time. Our colleagues Susan Condor
and Jackie Abell (social psychologists then at Lancaster) carried out a similar
and connected programme of qualitative interviews in England with many
parallels.
We agree that experimental techniques can yield fascinating insights and
have worked closely with Steve Reicher at St Andrews and Nick Hopkins at
Dundee. These experiments are, however, no more embedded in ‘natural
contexts’ than surveys. One such experiment involved partitioning a group of
young Scots into two: one reading a passage suggesting that to be Scottish is
to be born in Scotland of Scottish parents (an ethnic definition); and the other
group, a passage with a ‘civic’ definition (to be Scottish is an act of choice and
of commitment). On leaving, both groups see a young woman of Chinese ori-
gin wearing a Scotland football top, who stumbles and drops some pens. Those
who have been exposed to the ‘ethnic’ definition pick up few pens, while those
who have been exposed to the ‘civic’ definition pick up relatively more. The
experiment suggests that whether we see someone as one of us or not affects
how we behave towards them and whether they benefit from those various acts
of civility that so shape our everyday experience.
Underlying these questions of method is Jon Fox’s discussion of the uncon-
scious and the inaccessible. It is kind of him to argue that our work offers ‘a
glimpse into this mostly unexplored realm of the unselfconscious’ (see above).
We think that we do offer a glimpse and that it is mostly unexplored, but that
we only touch on this issue and further research would be well worthwhile.
Where we differ is in thinking that the unselfconscious is not necessarily
unconscious. There are obvious problems with the idea of sociologists studying
the unconscious. Some psychiatrists would doubtless be happy with the idea,
though national identity would probably be an unappealing topic.
Thinking of social identities tout court, these do indeed seem to be ‘latent’
much of the time rather than manifest. Our age, gender, social class and so
on belong to our senses of self, though we usually pay attention to them only
in particular contexts (we find the metaphor of ‘playing the appropriate cards’
appealing).
We agree that we ‘showed [that] identity is both accessible and knowable
when it is performed’ (see above) and that was our aim. Jon Fox also credits
us with delivering more than we promised by showing ‘that identity is
accessible and knowable when it’s not performed, when it simply is’ (see
above). Here we are in two minds. We did not set out to achieve this feat.
But did we actually do it? The survey material is fairly sharply focused on
performative identity, on accepting or rejecting claims by specified persons in
specified circumstances. But, in retrospect, we can see that some of the
qualitative material is possibly related to the non-performed and that is
something worthy of further thought. We are adamant that neither can relate
to the unconscious but the qualitative may well relate more to the
unselfconscious than the survey does.
While much of our work in the later years of our research relied on survey
data, it is important to reiterate that ‘getting at’ national identity can and
should involve a wide range of methods. We have mentioned social scientific
experiments. A different kind of approach involves doing textual analysis for
instance on the cultural content in newspapers, to get at the ‘deixis’ of the na-
tional ‘we’, which requires contextual information in order to be understood
(see Rosie and Petersoo 2009). The point is to define, usually implicitly, who
is ‘one of us’, and who is not. During the 2016 Brexit campaign, protagonists
of ‘Leave’ took to referring to ‘the British people’, the national ‘we’, especially
as ‘the people have spoken’, and so claimed that the result could not be
challenged or changed. In a Scottish context, however, the ‘national’ deixis is
ambiguous, and arguably the Scottish ‘we’ has greater salience for Scots. In
the post-Brexit battle for legitimacy, this clash of ‘national we’s’ suggests that
it would be revealing to analyse cultural content, the written and spoken word,
and attendant photographs.
Although often ignored, theoretical and conceptual issues underlie all
methodological questions, and Jon Fox’s contribution makes that clear.
Coming to conclusions about the meaning in the context of national identity
of the unselfconscious and the unconscious is a pre-requisite to choosing
appropriate methods or deciding they do not exist.
This is a good point to segue into Arthur Aughey’s more theoretical com-
ments, although we should reiterate our view that ‘methods’ and ‘theory’ are
inextricably linked. Our book has stimulated him to write an essay on, to quote
the title, ‘A Political Reading’ of our book in which he ‘abstracts politically

from our work’ (As above). This is interesting and stimulating, and we com-
mend it but takes us well out of our comfort zone. We read his comments
partly as examining the relationship between ‘national’ and ‘state’ identities;
whether, and in what contexts, one can be Scottish, English, Welsh, Northern
Irish and British. We have been criticised elsewhere for our use of these terms,
especially the last (Modood 2016,). Modood hangs his criticism chiefly on the
observation that our distinction between ‘national’ and ‘state’ identities does
not stand up conceptually because British may mean something different to
the Scots than the English. Quite unlike Aughey and Fox, Modood miscon-
strues our argument and we welcome an opportunity for clarification.
Recall our comment about research design. These islands are good places to
study ‘national identity’ because there is no simple relationship between formal
citizenship (‘British’ for these purposes) and ‘nation-ness’ (Scottish, English
etc.). We use ‘nation-ness’ here to avoid terms like ‘nationality’ (often used
as a synonym for ‘citizenship’) or even ‘national identity’ because if they so
wish people can think that being British is their national identity. Social
anthropologists have a useful distinction, borrowed from linguistics, between
the ‘etic’ – the analyst’s concept – and the ‘emic’ – the participant’s ones. We
see British analytically as a ‘state’ identity (the ‘etic’ position); people can view
British as their national identity (their ‘emic’ position) and that is up to them.
Our task as social scientists is then to make sense of that, to see how consistent
it is (over time), and how it is seen differently in certain contexts; for instance in
England as opposed to Scotland. This veers close to ‘politics’, but, as Arthur
Aughey says, it is not derived from politics. In other words, people are not
necessarily making a statement of political preference if they choose one
national identity over the other.
Since we wrote our book, events seem to have conspired to make life more
difficult for us. We do not want to say much about Brexit and other recent
political events because they were not the focus for our work, and further,
we are empirical animals and there is as yet very limited data available. There
are some passing comments in our book that bear repetition. We wrote, before
the ‘political’ events of 2014–16:
A run of key political events and elections are likely to determine the long-term shape of
the UK: the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence; the 2015 UK election; and the
2016 Scottish Parliament election; and if the Conservative Party is re-elected, a promise
of an in–out referendum on UK membership of the European Union. Those will need
to be followed, documented and analysed. As much as anything, the sequence of events
will matter, the one influencing the other in ways we cannot predict. (197)
It turned out that we got things pretty well right, and we were correct to say
that we could not predict outcomes and effects. Regarding recent events, one
could not even make it up. We were not surprised by the results of the Indepen-
dence referendum, but thereafter with the 2015 UK election, the success of the
SNP, the result of the European referendum and the travails of the Labour
Party, things have become more extraordinary. As ‘Brexit means Brexit’ has
become an ever more meaningless mantra, as the courts have become
embroiled in the political shambles, and as party consensus has become more
fragile, we are inclined to view developments through the frame of national
identity. Much of what Arthur Aughey has presented relates to this. We read
his distinctions between identity and allegiance, and solidarity and contract,
as his way of getting at ‘belonging’ vis-à-vis formal citizenship without
implying that one rules out the other. Recent political changes make these
distinctions more salient. We think it fruitful to explore in more detail the
relationship between ‘politics’ and national identity.
Some of the available data confirm expected relationships. National identity
was closely associated with voting ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in the Scottish Independence
Referendum (sixty-nine per cent of people describing themselves as ‘mainly
Scottish’ voting Yes; and eighty-seven per cent of ‘mainly British’ voting No).
At the 2015 British General Election, that relationship was tighter than ever if
one takes support for Independence as proxy for actually voting for it. Over
time, the relationship between ‘politics’ and national identity seems to have
tightened up, arguably though we cannot be sure, because of this highly political
sequence of events. For example, in 1999, forty-six per cent of people who
described themselves as ‘Scottish not British’ were in favour of Independence.
By 2015, the figure was seventy-two per cent. Will the relationship loosen again
if in three or five years politics is no longer so salient, whether because Brexit is a
thing of the past or Scotland is independent or quasi-independent? It is probably
an error to think that heightened political awareness necessarily persists through
time, although the protracted nature of Brexit may set these islands on a
lengthy period of heightened political–constitutional debate.
The figures for the European Referendum show the relevance of national
identity and the differences between the nations as follows:
% by
England Scotland Wales
column
More More More More More More
English British Scottish British Welsh British
Leave 71 39 34 45 53 58
Remain 29 61 66 55 47 42
base 3040 2360 564 190 194 202
Source: Ashcroft poll: 21–23 June 2016.

The gradient is steepest for England; thus, the gap between the ‘more English’
(English not British, or more English and British) and ‘more British’ (British
not English, or more British than English) is thirty-two percentage points.
The analogue for Scotland is only eleven percentage points, with a majority
of all national identity groups backing ‘Remain’. In Wales, there is no signifi-
cant variation by national identity, with all national identity groups backing
Leave, and a percentage point difference of only five. In Northern Ireland,
the ‘mainland’ identity categories do not apply, but those describing them-
selves as ‘British’ voted fifty-eight per cent to Leave, while those describing
themselves as ‘Irish’ voted sixty-two per cent to Remain.
To note that there is a close or even tightening relationship between national
identity and politics, however, is not to say that national identity is primarily
about politics, a point we made and stand by in Understanding National
Identity. Our insistence that labels such as Scottish, English and British cannot
be taken at face value is crucial. What counts is what people read into the labels
in different contexts, recognising that the meanings of the labels may differ.
Claimed national identity does not cause the vote. To borrow Arthur Aughey’s
Weberian analogy, there was an elective affinity between one’s national
identity and Brexit vote, notably south of the border. Why it is that in England
the more ‘English’ people said they are, the more likely they were to vote for
Brexit (in contrast to ‘Scots’ in Scotland) is a matter for further research. There
is now a research agenda that sees the ‘English question’ with new eyes.
Doing research on national identity and nationalism for twenty-five years
led us to comment in the book:
Future-gazing is always a risky business, but it is possible that in ten years’ time the
important issues of ‘national identity’ in these islands will be construed as largely being
‘about’ England, rather than Scotland (or Wales and Northern Ireland, for that
matter), whereas at present they are deemed to be about the so-called Celtic Fringe.
We may well have moved on from the view that national identity is not about England,
to one in which it is all about England. (204–5)
Michael Kenny has argued that Englishness is an ‘empty signifier’ which is

… corralled in the service of a surprisingly wide range of arguments and ideas’
(Kenny 2014: 6). On the other hand, Susan Condor has argued that the
reticence of the English to talk about national identity does not mean that they
do not understand what the concept means (Condor and Abell 2006: 52).
The process whereby national identity labels, calling oneself say English or
British, trigger particular responses in different contexts is not well understood.
This may be because the necessary task of finding an appropriate research
design would be challenging.
National identity labels are relational, ‘being Scottish’ (or English or
whatever) is a matter of the vis-à-vis – with whom you compare yourself, and
who you say you are not. If people in England are shifting towards saying they
are English (rather than British), what at a deeper level is going on here? It
could be that the substance of ‘who they are’ remains the same but they are
simply using a different label for it. If, on the other hand, we are seeing the
emergence of a new proto-English nationalism, amongst whom is this
occurring, and for what purposes? And on the other side of the equation, what
does ‘British’ then mean in this context?
In 2006, we carried out research that could provide a base line against which
to examine this latter question and the techniques could be applied to both. We
found, using factor analysis, that ‘English Brits’ (that is, people born and
currently living in England who thought of themselves as British) could be

divided into three clusters ‘empire loyalists’ (proud of monarchy, empire and
tradition, celebrating British achievements); ‘liberals’ who valued multicultural
and multinational diversity; and, more specifically, ‘devolutionists’ who saw
the UK as a multinational state. For ‘English Brits’ in this context, ‘British’
had no singular meaning. In the present context of Brexit, such a study would
be fascinating, relating as it does to the cries of ‘Give us our country back’! In
Scotland, ‘Scottish Brits’ were much more focused on the concept of union as
partnership, with a more ‘affective’ association with Britishness. This
contrasted with a more ‘instrumental’ association between being English and
being British in England.
We would like to see one other piece of work carried out in England, and
expanded further in Scotland. Quite far on in our research (2011, and again in
2012), we experimented with different kinds of national identity scales, other
than the usual ‘Moreno’ scale. We were interested in two questions. First,
would using a seven-point quasi-Moreno scale, rather than the five-point scale,
produce more finely grained and different but still reliable results. Broadly, the
answer is ‘no’. However, we also tried using separate seven-point scales, one
asking how strongly Scottish respondents were and one how strongly British.
This allowed someone to be both strongly British and Scottish. As far as we
know, the separate scales have not been tried in England but it is likely that
it would be even more revealing than in Scotland. In Scotland, because such
a large proportion claim a strong Scottish identity, meaningful variation
occurs mainly in the British scale. About four in ten people in Scotland are
‘dualists’, saying they are strongly Scottish and strongly British, and about
three in ten are ‘nationalists’, saying they are strongly Scottish and weakly
British. In England, we would expect a wider spread on both the English and
the British scale.
A related issue, relevant to Arthur Aughey’s comments, is the whole ques-
tion of the relationship between national identity and citizenship. In 2013, we
quoted Vernon Bogdanor’s comment that ‘those choosing the separatist option
in the 2014 referendum would be proclaiming that the two identities [Scottish
and British] are incompatible, just as, when Ireland became independent in
1921, it signified that the identity of being Irish was incompatible with a British
identity.’ (The Guardian, 8 April 2013). This argument restricts ‘being British’
to a matter of law; one is British de jure or not at all. But ‘British’ is not simply
a matter of citizenship. People say they are British because they inhabit the
same archipelago; there is a common history; and there is the question of what
‘independence’ means. The majority of people on the other island do not say
they are British, which is too politically and historically fraught, but there
are common links, traditions and dimensions that make it not unthinkable.
We find Arthur Aughey’s comment that ‘there is also a wish for common
British standards’ throughout the UK somewhat problematic as it is not
clear how we know this, and whether such standards are of outcomes or of
means. Alternatively, they might be common values, but defining these in a
meaningful way is fraught, and prone to political hijacking. Indeed as we

write, (20th December 2016) a government minister is flying a kite suggesting
immigrants should have to take an oath to show their allegiance to British
values.
What would be the case in an independent Scotland is anyone’s guess. Hope-
fully it would come to pass without violence and it would lack a religious
element, albeit the European dimension would be important, so residues of
‘Britishness’ would probably exist but take a quite different form.
Brexit does have material consequences for the peoples of these islands, and,
to employ another Weberian concept, the unintended consequence of human
action, no-one can predict the outcomes. Parallels are attractive as well as
misleading, but the demise of Czechoslovakia did not happen as a result of
Czechs and Slovaks becoming more Czech and more Slovak. That was an
outcome, not a cause, of political change. To say that national identity does
not determine political outcomes is not to deny its importance. It operates as
a prism through which people view change, and interpret this accordingly.
Finally, we are grateful to ASEN for acknowledging our book that has been
long in the making. If we have done something to reinstate the study of
national identity into the research agenda, it will have been worthwhile. In
the light of recent events, the final sentence of our book has added import:
to ask who ‘we’ are, and for what purposes, remains one of the key questions
of our times.
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Debate On Understanding National Identity by David Mccrone and Frank Bechhofer

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NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS

FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

Debate on understanding national

Atsuko Ichijo: introduction

Understanding National Identity by David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer is a

and on Berwick-on-Tweed and two Leverhulme Trust-founded research

Jon E Fox: understanding national identity as doing and being

No book in recent memory has provided such a comprehensive overview of the

should be understood in performative terms, as something people ‘do … within

This backstage version of national identity, while not entirely inaccessible,

The ethnically Chinese appearance of this man claiming (or performing) a

Arthur Aughey: understanding national identity: a political reading

Michael Oakeshott thought that a ‘tradition of behaviour’ was a ‘tricky’ thing

recently in increasing self-identiﬁcation as ‘Northern Irish’ which, some

identity test because it raises the subversively instrumental question challeng-

judgement of McCrone and Bechhofer. He thought that the centre of gravity

David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer: response to Aughey and Fox

We greatly appreciate the thoughtful and generous comments by Arthur

‘interpretive manoeuvres’ to formulate ‘the nation in terms of their selves for

And further (see above),

The second way McCrone and Bechhofer generate evidence of an unselfconscious

the title, ‘A Political Reading’ of our book in which he ‘abstracts politically

Source: Ashcroft poll: 21–23 June 2016.

Michael Kenny has argued that Englishness is an ‘empty signiﬁer’ which is

currently living in England who thought of themselves as British) could be

meaningful way is fraught, and prone to political hijacking. Indeed as we

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