Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

Illusions of European integration 41
organisations to mobilise the masses and incorporate them into a unitary society that
controls economic, military, cultural and political frontiers. However, as we noted
above, nation-states and states in general have been shaken periodically by
unexpected military, economic and ideological challenges during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
Nineteenth-century Britain remained a world power, in part because of its skill
in mustering coalitions of states against the dominant great power on the European
sub-continent. Periods of ‘splendid isolation’ when Britain would enjoy a relative
autonomy as a global power have alternated with a pooling of sovereignty in the
two World Wars. In the economic sphere states have employed different strategies
to compete in a transnational economic market, depending on their relative
strengths and the degree of ‘openness’ of the world market itself. As the pioneering
industrial society, Britain saw it in its national interest to promote free trade, though
it had to shift to protectionism after the First World War destroyed the a ‘golden
age’ of liberal internationalism. By contrast ‘late-comer’ Germany pursued more
protectionist policies.
Not only strategies have evolved in response to contingent challenges. There
have been oscillations between national and imperial, class, regional, and religious
identities throughout the modern period (Connor 1990). The threat of workingclass
insurrection has haunted middle-class nations in Western Europe at various
intervals from the early nineteenth century until 1968. Regional identities too have
fluctuated. Eugene Weber’s analysis (1976) of the strength of regionalism in the
1870s implies a decline in the pervasiveness of French nationalism since the period
of the revolutionary wars.
The notion of a golden age of sovereign nation-states is a myth. If the autonomy
of even Britain and France was limited, this was even more true for small countries.
European nation-states, as William Wallace (1997) has noted, have varied
enormously in how they have articulated state–society, state–economy, and
state–interstate relations. Nations and nation-states vary considerably in the social
niches they wish to regulate by explicit reference to national norms. This says
nothing about the potency of national identities per se. Following Banton (1994),
one might argue that a switch from avowedly national to international class loyalties
(for example industrial action against a co-national employer in support of foreign
workers) may not indicate changes in the values attributed to national affiliations,
but rather a changing conception of what relationships should be governed
by national norms. An adherence to the nation may not fluctuate much despite
apparent changes in behaviour.
Nonetheless, it is obvious that oscillations in nationalist vis-à-vis class, religious
and regional loyalties have occurred in two centuries, marked by periods of liberal
and communist revolution, Islamic resurgences, and huge mass emigrations.
Clearly there are two issues that must not be conflated: why national groups make
strategic choices over the range of roles they wish to regulate, and why there are
fluctuations in the salience of national loyalties. The former are in effect rational
decisions about how to achieve national goals, through, for example, pooling of
sovereignty; decisions that are in effect conditional, and in principle reversible. The