BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

nationhood. 66 Of course, instinct alone could never explain the incorporation of national
traditions, images and symbols into a concept of self, nor could it explain the personal choice to
either to abet or resist a totalitarian regime. Self-justification, or preservation of “self” in the
abstract, better describes the psychology driving both national identity and nationalism. More
relevant to the question of motivation, Anderson outlined an essential human propensity for
constructing collective identities beyond the immediate influence of family and locality. This
human constant underpinned the shift from identification with pre-modern universal religions,
sacred languages and consecrated monarchies toward identification with “territorialized” faiths,
vernacular cultures and nationally legitimated governments. 67 Cultural relativism and national
identity, according to Anderson’s thesis, merely represented a newer phase of imagined
community developed within the modern paradigm of competing nation-states.
The combination of non-rational impulse and rational adaptation that seem to mark
collective identification on a panoramic scale corresponds with social categorization on an
individual level. Jan E. Stets and Peter J. Burke have stressed the twofold process of group
identification and individual role within a group, and they hypothesize a combination of
subconscious self-categorization (what one is) with conscious self-verification (what one does)
formulated “in terms of meanings imparted by a structured society.” 68 This same interface
between “instinct” and rationality in social identity theory has found confirmation in
66 Imagined Communities, 9-12.
67 Ibid., 16-22.
68 “Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory,” Social Psychology Quarterly 63, no. 3
(September, 2000): 226.
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