BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

partisan differences within nations which can become transformed into stereotyped differences
between nations.
Recent Historiography on National Identity
Perspectives on national identity have shifted considerably since the 1940s. Raymond
Grew, surveying the long historiography of national identity in 1986, specifically praised studies
of nationalism by Carlton Hayes, Hans Kohn and their followers as analytical departures from
national character questionnaires and the self-mythologizing national histories of preceding
generations. He also credited later comparative studies for conceiving the formation of national
identity as part of a universal historical process that necessarily depends upon a territorial state,
or the longing for one, and that requires an evaluation of national identity in terms of
international relations as well as internal politics. 35 The comparative approach, in Grew’s view,
entailed consideration of both self-consciously propagandistic identity constructions and less
conscious, event-driven formulations of national identity. By the mid-1980s historians of the
modernist school and their critics had established, according to Grew, the following key points:
the dual impetus driving national identity in the merger of individual motivations to reap the
political and economic rewards of citizenship with the top-down interests of the state in
problems with multiculturalism, such as the ban on Islamic face veils.
35 In addition to Kohn, some of the many milestone works mentioned by Grew include:
Carlton J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1926; idem, The Historical
Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1948); Sir Earnest Barker, National
Character and the Factors in its Formation (London: Harper, 1927); Perry Anderson, Lineages
of the Absolute State (London: NLB, 1974); Charles Tilly, ed. The Formation of National States
in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). See Grew, “The Construction
of National Identity,” in Peter Boerner, Concepts of National Identity: An Interdisciplinary
Dialogue, Interdisziplinäre Betrachtungen Zur Frage Der Nationalen Identität 1 (Baden-Baden:
Nomos, 1986), 31-43.
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