ABSTRACT
There is limited cultural analysis of the tropes and metaphors underlying the discourse of national solidarity. This article revisits three central approaches to bounded solidarity and connects them with distinctive tropes of personal relationships: solidarity-through-sameness encapsulated in the family metaphor; solidarity as an impersonal relationship between strangers; and solidarity as an extension of sociability encapsulated in the friendship metaphor. I examine these tropes in terms of collective perceptions of simultaneous and mythic time and a meta-narrative of salvation. The national imagination can be distinguished from civic and ethnic forms of belonging by its enactment of a dual transformation from strangers to friends and from newfound friends to rediscovered brothers of a timeless and primordial tribe. While much of the nationhood literature assumes a causal pathway from national identity to solidarity, this fraternisation of friendship points to a reverse route from trust between compatriots to feelings of loyalty to the nation.
In a seminal and highly quoted essay on modernity and ambivalence, Bauman (1990, p. 153,155) identified the role of friendship and strangership in the national imagination, noting that nation-states deal with the problem of poorly defined strangers in modern societies by the enforced collectivisation of friendship. Bauman argued that, in contrast to the clear binary of friendship versus enmity in premodern tribal societies, the national state ‘commands to extend the rights ascribed “to the friends only” to all – the familiar as much as the unfamiliar – residents of the ruled territory. … Were the national state able to reach its objective, there would be no strangers left in the life-world of the residents-turned-natives-turned-patriots’. Bauman thus suggests that nations attempt to turn all residents into natives and natives into patriots through the expressive dimension of friendship. However, he did not expand on what this national imagination consists of and what is the key narrative of solidarity that it deploys. Nor does the existing literature on nationhood provide sufficient insights on how these symbolic tropes of relationships between compatriots unfold over time and relate to the modern quest for salvation. Given the limited cultural analysis of the tropes and narratives underlying the discourse of national solidarity, these questions have remained largely unanswered.
My purpose in addressing these issues is fourfold. First, much of the literature on nationhood has focused on the experience of national belonging as a form of collective identity rather than collective solidarity, prioritising questions of group identification over questions of cooperation between members (Kaplan, 2018). Second, this, in turn, demands a deeper exploration of the in-group experience of solidarity rather than the inter-group dimension. Ever since Barth’s (1969) pioneering work on the construction of group identity through boundary-making, scholars of nationhood have been more concerned with the ways in which the national consciousness creates exclusionary boundaries in relation to its collective ‘others’ perceived as enemies (neighbouring countries, immigrants, refugees) (e.g. Friese, 2005; Yuval-Davis, 2004) than with the ways in which it perceives members of the national community internally as strangers, friends, or extended kin. Whereas collective identification can be studied in terms of both the external and internal viewpoints held by members of the group (‘us-hood’ and ‘we-hood’ respectively) (Eriksen, 1993, p. 670), scholarly discussions of national solidarity have centred mainly on the former, focusing more on the structure of ‘us versus them’ than the structure of ‘we’. The question I raise is which relationship trope – strangers, friends or family – can best capture a sense of groupness among non-affiliated individuals that come to imagine themselves as a national ‘we’.
Third, in order to deal with ‘we-hood’, it is important to explore national belonging not only as a social bond but as a bond that unfolds over time and is understood as a promise of salvation. Despite growing interest in national consciousness and collective time (following Anderson, 1991), little attention has been devoted to connecting questions of collective temporality back to solidarity and tropes of personal relationships. Finally, a focus on relationship tropes associated with solidarity can help us to reexamine the oft-disputed distinction between national, civic, and ethnic conceptions of belonging. It allows us to ask which relationship trope best captures each form of belonging and, at the same time, how nationhood may encompass more than one of these tropes.
In an attempt to address these challenges, I have taken a cultural-sociological approach to the study of nationhood. As concisely reviewed by Woods (2016), a focus on the cultural dimensions of nationhood deals with the nation as a moral community and examines, among others, how visions of the nation’s history and destiny emerged as a collective response to encounters with modernity. The strong programme in cultural sociology is particularly useful in approaching these questions as it centers on the internal structure of meaning. It asks how cultural forms (as expressed in practices, narratives, or symbols) are constructed and transformed in the modern era and how they become meaningful as the result of their perceived proximity to the sacred (Alexander, 2003). Thus, cultural-sociological studies of nationalism explore how national movements strive not only for state independence or institutional power but also for cultural salvation (Alexander, 2013; Woods & Debs, 2013).
To explore the national imagination through narratives of solidarity and notions of collective time this article revisits various theoretical formulations of bounded solidarity and examines them in light of key personal relationships invoked in national rhetoric. First, I briefly describe two distinct conceptions of national temporality: one grounded in a perception of simultaneous time and the other in mythic time. I then present three central approaches to understanding bounded solidarity and explain how each can be associated with a particular metaphor of personal relationships: solidarity as a byproduct of the shared identity and sameness encapsulated in the family metaphor; solidarity as an abstract, impersonal relationship encapsulated in the relationships between strangers; and solidarity as an extension of the sociability encapsulated in the friendship metaphor. Applying these metaphors to national solidarity also carries gender implications, particularly at the intersection of friendship and fraternity, which derives etymologically from brotherhood. This is addressed in the penultimate section, which discusses how the three relationship tropes may combine into a meta-narrative of national salvation: strangers-turned-friends-turned-brothers. This entails a symbolic transformation of mundane interactions between citizens into sacred ties of friendship and a celebration of these newly formed relationships as an ethnic, timeless brotherhood. Table 1 summarises the key approaches to bounded solidarity and the corresponding relationship tropes and temporal dimensions discussed in the article.
Models of bounded solidarity, relationship tropes and temporal dimensions of nationhood.
Key approach to solidarity: . | Solidarity through Sameness . | Solidarity as Impersonal Relationship . | Solidarity as Extension of Sociability . | Combined Model: Meta-narrative of Salvation . |
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Organising trope of personal relationship: | Family | Strangership | Friendship | Brotherhood, Fraternisation of Friendship |
Type of connection between compatriots: | Connected through primordial familiarity. Does not require mutual interactions | Interest-based, calculative commitments Instrumental cooperation | Horizontal ties of equal status Expressive cooperation | Trust transformed into loyalty |
Temporal dimension: | Mythic time, sense of common ancestry | Simultaneous time only | Simultaneous time, anticipation for shared destiny | Interplay between simultaneous and mythic timeframes |
Causal relation between identity and solidarity: | Identity leads to solidarity | Identity not implicated | Identity not implicated | Solidarity leads to identity |
Corresponding form of belonging: | Ethnicity | Citizenship | Nationhood | Nationhood |
Relational dynamic: | Family-remains-family | Strangers-remain-strangers | Strangers-turned-friends | Strangers-turned-friends-turned-brothers |
Key approach to solidarity: . | Solidarity through Sameness . | Solidarity as Impersonal Relationship . | Solidarity as Extension of Sociability . | Combined Model: Meta-narrative of Salvation . |
---|---|---|---|---|
Organising trope of personal relationship: | Family | Strangership | Friendship | Brotherhood, Fraternisation of Friendship |
Type of connection between compatriots: | Connected through primordial familiarity. Does not require mutual interactions | Interest-based, calculative commitments Instrumental cooperation | Horizontal ties of equal status Expressive cooperation | Trust transformed into loyalty |
Temporal dimension: | Mythic time, sense of common ancestry | Simultaneous time only | Simultaneous time, anticipation for shared destiny | Interplay between simultaneous and mythic timeframes |
Causal relation between identity and solidarity: | Identity leads to solidarity | Identity not implicated | Identity not implicated | Solidarity leads to identity |
Corresponding form of belonging: | Ethnicity | Citizenship | Nationhood | Nationhood |
Relational dynamic: | Family-remains-family | Strangers-remain-strangers | Strangers-turned-friends | Strangers-turned-friends-turned-brothers |
Miller (2017, pp. 63–64) provided a useful, relatively broad definition of solidarity as a sense of mutual concern and reciprocity among a group of people who form a community of fate, assume collective responsibility for individual members, and pose certain limits on inequalities within the group. Because my goal is to focus on relationship tropes, I confine my analysis to the bonding dimension and the focus on a community of fate and do not deal with other well-studied dimensions of solidarity such as redistribution or welfare policies. In addition, I concentrate on bounded, societal-level solidarity rather than on alliances with or among subordinate groups.
National temporalities
National belonging is a paradigmatic case of a modern ‘social imaginary’, that is, intellectual doctrines that gradually spread to wider populations and became first-person subjectivities that offered new moral conceptions of the modern social order (Gaonkar, 2002; Taylor, 1993). Dominant social imaginaries – such as the nation, the public sphere, or the self-governing people – have become self-evident, implicit understandings about people’s collective lives: how they got where they are, how they fit together, and what they may expect from each other in carrying out collective practices that are constitutive of their way of life (Gaonkar, 2002). Malešević (2011, p. 283) nicely summed up how nationalism as an implicit ideology infused human actors ‘with the transcendent grand vistas of a specific imagined social order that invokes advanced ethical claims, collective interests and emotions’.
Social imaginaries such as nationhood are carried in a variety of cultural myths, tropes, metaphors, images, and symbols that give meaning and coherence to everyday life experiences and collective practices (Šarić & Stanojević, 2019; Taylor, 2004). Metaphors and tropes are particularly useful discursive tools in this regard in that they go beyond a binary system of cultural codes and rest on a surplus of meanings that expand the expressive repertoire of language (Binder, 2019). Discourses of solidarity often focus either on membership in a bounded group or on voluntary relationships forming between social actors. Thus, some metaphors of solidarity presuppose a bounded social whole without direct relationships between its members whereas other metaphors represent solidarity as a consequence of social interactions (Honohan, 2008).
A major function of social imaginaries is the organisation and control of collective time (Baczko, 1984). Theories of national temporality present two different accounts of collective understandings of time. Some have argued that the national community is grounded in perceptions of simultaneous time; others have pointed to the significance of mythic time. Anderson’s (1991) cultural-phenomenological approach pioneered the former, asserting that a precondition of modern nationalism was the emergence of novel perceptions of parallelism and simultaneity in time. Thanks to changes in technology and mass communication, people were increasingly able to experience unisonance and a sense of synchronicity with millions of others they had never met. Anderson’s (1991, p. 35) renowned example of the newspaper-reading ritual is a case in point. Since the seventeenth century the mass circulation of print newspapers occasioned daily encounters between fellow citizens. Although the newspaper is read individually and in silence each reader could acknowledge the presence of like-minded readers in public spaces.
The growing capacity to perceive important events in the community as occurring concomitantly and shared by fellow nationals facilitated collective collaboration. Through this experience of simultaneous time compatriots were able to conceive the abstract community as a living social body moving uniformly through historical time and building a common future. Indeed, the idea of common destiny played an important role in the rise of national consciousness among activists of national liberation movements across Europe (Wohl, 1979). As further noted by Bauer (2001), the construction of destiny is central to narratives of national solidarity; destiny can be seen not only as a ‘natural’ outcome of a shared origin but also as a result of a newly emerging civic ideology or other kinds of unifying ideologies (Antonsich, Mavroudi, & Mihelj, 2017).
However, compatriots also adhere to mythic time, experienced as sacred, cyclic, and recurring (Freeman, 1998; Zerubavel, 1981). This perception of time assigns national meaning to past events, playing on epic narratives to recreate a shared sacred heritage (Singer, 1996). Epic events and heroic figures situated centuries apart become linked in the national imagination through common mnemonic devices of remembrance that condense the distinction between present and past. A case in point is the commemoration rituals for the sacrificial dead – those who died a violent death in the service of the nation (Marvin & Ingle, 1999). The recognition that they died so that the nation could live places the dead and the living in a single community of fate, experienced not through historical time but through mythic time (Kaplan, 2008). The deceased are torn from their position as equal members of the community and become mythic ‘ancestors’ whose resurrected presence is meaningful for the collective life of the community (Handelman, 2004, p. 145; Kaufman & Morgan, 2005).
How can we reconcile these contrasting views of collective time in the national consciousness? As I elaborate below, the duality of simultaneous and mythic time can be examined in light of distinct relationship tropes of solidarity and located in a meta-narrative of salvation.
Kinship: Solidarity through sameness
In the following sections I present three distinct approaches to understanding mass solidarity, each of which can be associated with a particular trope of personal relationships (see Table 1). A dominant approach in the literature considers feelings of national solidarity as a consequence of people’s shared identity and a byproduct of perceived similarities between members of the group (Miller, 2017). The idea is that people are disposed to trust and take responsibility for those they perceive to be similar to themselves in significant ways. According to this view, merely knowing that others share our collective identity is sufficient to trigger an emotional bond with them, even without interacting with them directly (Miller, 2017).
Ringmar (1998, p. 545) outlined how an ethos of nationhood-as-sameness has transformed the sources of political identification and cooperation. The rise of national consciousness in modern democratic societies, he claimed, led to an expectation that rulers shared a similar background and identity as their constituency and not only similar interests, motivations, and opinions. People demanded that the public sphere be populated by individuals like themselves ‘with whom they could speak on free and intimate terms – hence nationalism’.
Examining solidarity through the lens of identity and sameness reduces the national imagination to the logic of us versus them. Stone’s (1998, p. 204) discussion of nationalist consciousness typifies this approach, emphasizing that nationalist solidarity establishes its distinctiveness by virtue of an external group whose presence is constantly felt by the members of the national community such that ‘without ‘them’, so to speak, ‘us’ would not exist’. Wodak, de Cillia, Liebhart, and Reisigl (2009) analyzed in detail how employing the us-versus-them distinction enables social actors to discursively make national boundaries such that the ways of ‘us’ promote national uniqueness, sameness, and homogeneity and erase internal differences and dissenting voices.
A discursive rhetoric that figures prominently in the nationhood-as-sameness approach is the trope of kinship and, specifically, the family metaphor, both of which signify common ancestry (Smith, 1991, p. 78). The rise of modern nationalism is closely related to the partial decline of kinship ties as a central organising principle of the social order. Perhaps because of the need to override tribal loyalties, national rhetoric has actually bolstered the imagery of family, even as the political institution of the family has historically weakened (McClintock, 1993).
How does the family metaphor play out in national rhetoric? I briefly highlight four widely used applications. First, the family is a powerful metaphor for a solidarity grounded in sameness and built along the us-versus-them distinction. The image of a family bound together by blood reinforces notions of purity and homogeneity and can be used to justify domination or the exclusion of national others (Šarić & Stanojević, 2019, p. 16). Second, the image of kin relationships invokes feelings of closeness, warmth, and support between group members (Smith, 1991, p. 78). Third, the vertical structure of the family resonates with the hierarchical relationship between government and citizens. Different conceptions of parent – child relations embellish alternative moral systems and political ideologies (e.g. ‘strict father’ versus ‘nurturing parent’) (Lakoff, 2010, p. 126). Finally, the family imagery summons up a sense of common ethnic past. It treats the national community as an ethnic group envisioned as an enlarged family sharing a common myth of origins and descent (Smith, 1991). This shared familial past also conveys the stability of an intergenerational structure of solidarity (Handelman, 2004, p. 125). Through the experience of mythic temporality, tribal ancestors are resurrected as a meaningful presence for contemporary members of the community.
The family trope thus captures the idea of solidarity as a byproduct of shared identity. It suggests that people trust and take responsibility for those who seem the most ‘familiar’ to them. This familial resemblance is applied to strangers to form a community of extended kinship. Feelings of closeness between strangers emerge only as a result of this imagined community. The corresponding political culture takes the form of hierarchical relations and, at the same time, appeals to an intergenerational solidarity between the living and the dead situated in mythic temporality. Because the kinship trope, unlike the strangership and friendship tropes, assumes that people feel connected by virtue of sharing primordial similarities, it does not depend on any type of interaction between members.
Strangership: Solidarity as impersonal relationship
Another widely discussed approach considers bounded solidarity in terms of impersonal relations between distant others (Calhoun, 1991; Young, 1990). A good illustration of this approach in the context of nation-building is Gellner’s (1983) account of how the nation-state was able to train the masses to the demands of industrialisation by uprooting them from local communities and mobilising them through state-run institutions, such as schools and the military, where they were subject to generic, homogenising training programmes. The goal of this ‘exo-socialization’ (Gellner, 1983, p. 36) was to facilitate efficient interactions between strangers by advancing standardised and precise communication that does not depend on preexisting social ties and webs of common understandings.
Much of the discussion of solidarity in mass society builds on similar ideas of impersonal exchange, albeit focusing less on nationhood and more on civic belonging. Brunkhorst (2005) maintained that modern societies characterised by fragmentation and functional differentiation can develop a form of democratic solidarity among strangers based on individual autonomy and universal, egalitarian political inclusion. A central model for such impersonal solidarity is the normative ideal of civic life in the modern metropolis. Young (1990, pp. 237–238) argued that city dwellers cooperate and develop a common sense of belonging through shared interaction in urban spaces and institutions without those interactions dissolving into unity or a bounded community. City dwellers are connected by common problems and interests, but ‘they do not create a community of shared final ends, of mutual identification and reciprocity’. Another prototypical model for cooperation in mass society is the public sphere. Following Habermas (1991), Calhoun (1991, p. 223) emphasized how in the public sphere participants have to ‘establish rather than take for granted where they agree and disagree’; in such settings, in contrast to personal interactions, it is the merits of the arguments and not the identities of the arguers that are crucial.
The trope of the stranger is central to this approach. It was first highlighted in Simmel’s (1950) classic work on the role of the stranger in modern society, namely, a person who is a member of the social system but not strongly attached to it. Strangers are not only foreigners and outsiders along the lines of the us-versus-them distinction but may also play a constructive role in unifying society from within as unknown insiders by either linking the separate elements of the group or taking on a special task (Karakayali, 2006). Ultimately, as Simmel (1971) discussed in another essay on life in the metropolis, the modern individual displays most of the characteristics attributed to the stranger and treats everybody else as strangers, such that strangership becomes a universal otherhood.
Building on these insights, sociologists and political theorists have begun to employ the trope of ‘strangership’ to describe impersonal interactions between fellow citizens that are politically productive and contribute to feelings of solidarity. How does the strangership trope accomplish this? First, it forms a space of non-hostile recognition based on mutual indifference (Horgan, 2012). The theme of indifference can be traced back to the classic theorists of liberalism, who envisioned modern civil society as based on cooperation between sympathetic but disinterested strangers described as ‘authentically indifferent co-citizens’, thus replacing the dichotomy of ‘friend’ versus ‘enemy’ found in premodern tribal politics (Silver, 1990, p. 1482). Indifference means treating everybody exactly the same, and it can therefore form the basis of modern morality and societal integration (Sznaider, 2002).
Second, strangership rejects the notion of close-knit social bonds between members. Levy (2017, p. 107) contended that in democratic political cultures strangers can develop norms of negotiation and learn to manage disagreements without resorting to some deeper pre-established understandings. Accordingly, members of a political community are united only by shared circumstances; they are ‘more like strangers who find themselves locked in a very large room together than they are like an extended family or a voluntary association united in pursuit of a common purpose’.
Third, strangership thus depends on simultaneous temporality: it constitutes a contingent situation of copresence between individuals caught up in the same place at the same time and recognising each other as strangers (Horgan, 2012). Their experience of copresence in simultaneous time teaches distant others how to relate to each other in a sympathetic but impersonal manner and how to develop generalised trust which can facilitate cooperation and collective action.
Fourth, the strangership trope is more effective in drawing out the civic aspect of belonging in line with liberal accounts of civil society than appealing to national belonging. The liberal account of citizenship presupposes a community of strangers whose members share equal status, civic rights, and duties and negotiate common interests, obligations, and expectations. But they also ‘accept that in principle and in fact they are and will remain strangers to each other’ (Roche, 1994, p. 90). The implication is that, over time, members’ mutual commitments remain relatively instrumental and provisional. This can be illustrated in Habermas (1994) related formulation of ‘constitutional patriotism’, referring to an abstract, legally mediated solidarity between strangers that does not rely on enduring feelings of loyalty to the nation but on shared allegiance to the political principles and values embodied in the constitution. Thus, constitutional patriotism does not require a belief in already sharing something with compatriots, but only an aspiration to continue co-existing under the same political principles, an aspiration that rests on a voluntarist identification with what they ‘share and do together’ (Gustavsson, 2019, p. 700). This civic orientation reinforces a focus on simultaneous temporality and rejects a mythic sense of common destiny.
In short, the strangership trope encompasses the idea of solidarity as a productive relationship between distant others who take responsibility for those with whom they can interact on the basis of interest-based rational and calculative commitments. This solidarity is situated in simultaneous temporality and invites civic engagement. It forms the basis for generalised trust, which secures a sense of political commitment but does not imply unconditional belief in a common destiny.
Friendship: Solidarity as an extension of sociability
In his overview of the sources of solidarity, Miller (2017, p. 69) provided another model for bounded solidarity centreing on the notion of an ‘expanding circle’, according to which solidarity extends progressively outward from the small group to wider social circles until it culminates in the nation. Individuals learn the rudiments of solidarity by interacting and socialising with others in their immediate circles of affiliation and the evolving ties of affection train them to feel wider attachments. This model is implied in some theories of civic engagement, such as associationalism (Putnam, 2000), which considers how meso-level civic organisations and voluntary groups foster modes of cooperation and norms of reciprocity that might be beneficial for wider societal cohesion. Irrespective of the content of the association or its ideological purpose, the idea is that mutual (and preferably face-to-face) interactions can enhance democracy and solidarity. As noted by Miller (2017), the starting point of associationalism is the belief that people are likely to trust one another when they associate together on a regular basis, particularly if there is some common project that animates their association. A related idea appears in some of the symbolic interactionist research on solidarity, which studies how different dimensions of small group interaction offer a model for civic participation and create affiliation with society (Fine & Harrington, 2004). In the course of their everyday interactions in personal networks people experience concrete instances of mutual trust, which give credibility to the symbolic values of national solidarity. Personal networks can thus be studied as a ‘meaningful interface of belonging’ to the imagined national community (De Federico de la Rúa, 2007, p. 691).
What is often still missing from such accounts of solidarity as an expansion of small groups and social circles is a more explicit discussion of the constitutive role of sociability. The modern era is characterised by growing differentiation and fragmentations of social spheres and institutions. Simmel (1950) conceptualised modern society as a network of sociations whereby individuals are involved in multiple circles of affiliation and establish numerous and partly overlapping social ties. This means that people face growing demands to both communicate and socialise with non-familiar others. Thus, to go back to Gellner’s (1983) idea of exo-socialization, participation in shared social institutions has served to enhance societal solidarity not just because it facilitates cooperation through standardised communication of explicit content and ideas but also because such participation engenders forms of expressive sociability premised on sharing something that is more implicit, namely, the actual bond between participants. As famously articulated by Simmel (1950), expressive sociability and small talk create a momentary social space in between the more serious talk of instrumental interactions and the more intimate involvement in purely personal conversations. It is a form of communication that is free from binding external roles and establishes ‘the liveliness, harmony, and common consciousness of the ‘party’’ (Simmel, 1950, p. 53).
This idea is captured by the framework of ‘social club sociability’ (Kaplan, 2018). Building on associationalism and interactionist analysis, this framework centers on the expressive function of meso-level social institutions in creating collective solidarity. It examines how, since early modernity, social clubs, broadly defined, have created an arena of sociability in which unaffiliated strangers become friends. Whether in clearly bounded organisations (military units, schools, voluntary associations, etc.) or more loosely structured associational forms (festivals, media practices, etc.), members engage in informal interactions which facilitate the establishment of expressive personal ties, staged and performed in front of others. By passing through diverse social clubs, people learn how to generalise patterns of sociability from one institution to the next, acquire a sense of competence in making friends, and gain confidence in the ability of like-minded ‘clubbers’ – but not others – to do the same. Because social institutions in the modern era have, for the most part, been bounded by and confined to national settings, the networks and norms of sociability that participants develop are likely to impinge on national-level solidarity (Kaplan, 2018).
Friendship is the central organising logic of the solidarity-through-sociability approach. In recent years, scholars have increasingly turned to the friendship trope as an analytical, descriptive, and normative model for political relations (Mallory, 2017; Honohan, 2008; Nordin & Smith, 2018). The political significance of friendship has been systematically addressed more often in connection to citizenship or democracy than in connection to nationhood (e.g. Schwarzenbach, 2015; Kaplan, 2010). That said, whereas the family trope invokes mainly ethnic belonging and strangership relates to citizenship, I suggest that the friendship trope is better suited to capture the idea of nationhood, which partly coalesces with these other forms of belonging.
Several studies of national cultures noted how friendship – and specifically male friendship – serves as a central trope for mobilising solidarity (e.g. Kaplan, 2006; Lake, 1992; Nelson, 1998). This imagery of friendship appears almost always in tandem with a rhetoric of fraternity, as for example in epics of male bonding that accompany rituals of commemoration for fallen soldiers. I will address the interrelations between friendship and fraternity in the next section that deals with the brotherhood trope and restrict the present discussion to analytic and gender-neutral aspects of friendship per se and how it bears on national solidarity.
First, unlike the family imagery, friendship is used in national rhetoric to depict non-authoritative, voluntary, and horizontal ties and to emphasize mutual cooperation based on equal status between the parties. In this, friendship ties resonate with the central rationale of nationalism, namely, to legitimize cooperation between citizens (Kaplan, 2007). But, unlike the solidarity-through-strangership approach, under the rhetoric of friendship this cooperation is not limited to an instrumental and impersonal exchange and carries expressive function.
Second, friendship ties coincide with the notion of expanding circles. Unlike the family unit whose members are fixed, friendship is a more open-ended, fluid, and extendable connection (Kaplan, 2007; Nordin & Smith, 2018). And while the strangership approach disassociates solidarity from close-knit ties, it is precisely this analogy that motivates the solidarity-through-sociability approach, building on the Aristotelian tradition of political or civic friendship (Mallory, 2017). The bonds of friendship are also particularistic and preferential. People can choose their friends, but once chosen these friends take precedence over others. The exclusivist and exclusionary qualities of friendship correspond to those of national solidarity. The assumption is that feelings of exclusivity, familiarity, and loyalty typically directed toward personal friends can be extended to more distant circles such as members of a social club and, ultimately, fellow nationals.
A third aspect of the friendship trope is that friends connect in terms of not just their similarities but also their differences (Nordin & Smith, 2018). Whereas solidarity derived from shared identity requires the recognition of sameness, as in the logic of kinship, the focus in friendship is on the relationship and its dynamics rather than on the individual members. Shared similarities may change over time; it is the contrasts between them that may actually hold the friends together, pointing to the idea that ‘change is intrinsic to friendship’ (Nordin & Smith, 2018, p. 625).
A fourth advantage of friendship is that, while being rooted in the experience of simultaneous temporality, it goes beyond it to elevate the provisional condition of simultaneous copresence into a semi-mythic sense of common destiny. When individuals become aware of each other in a variety of situations and spaces of copresence – from interactions in social clubs and encounters in city streets to shared media events – they do not always remain strangers accidentally caught up together but may gradually develop a sense of a common pursuit emerging from the growing reassurance of their social connection. This common pursuit is the hallmark of friendship. Unlike passing interactions between strangers, a friendship is forward-looking and entails an ‘expectation of future events’ (Hinde, 1997, p. 38). In this regard, mediated public assemblies that foster simultaneous temporality, such as Anderson’s (1991) aforementioned example of daily newspaper reading, are emblematic of the national imagination because they reflect not simply a ‘community in anonymity’ but rather a shift from anonymity to familiarity. As readers learn about distant others cast as heroes and antiheroes and become intimately acquainted with their social lives, these public characters become in their minds closer to the category of friends (and enemies) with whom they share a common fate than of strangers. National solidarity carries a similar belief that in the course of future events compatriots will treat each other in ways that differ from relations between strangers and that in times of trial they will act as loyal friends.
The mythic quality of this expectation can be partly illustrated in personal experiences of friendship. In my own work on men’s friendship and nationalism in Israeli culture (Kaplan, 2006) I delineated several cultural constructs employed by my interviewees to account for how their personal friendships formed and developed over time. One cultural construct was the image of chemistry, referring to a semi-magical encounter between two men characterised by immediate emotional connection, flowing communication and feelings of revelation. Where many accounts of friendship focused on the men’s ‘shared past’ invoking a familial relationship, this framing stresses anticipation for a ‘shared destiny’ between men who were initially strangers and establishes a romantic rhetoric of friendship.
Finally, and most pertinent to the present argument, the interlocking of simultaneous copresence with a passionate longing for shared destiny underscores how intrinsic to a national solidarity based on friendship is a taken-for-granted cultural belief in the ability to tackle the problem of strangership in modern societies. In contrast to a static predetermined relationship associated with kinship and the emotional indifference associated with strangership, the friendship trope presumes that compatriots create new and meaningful ties (and sunder others) on a daily basis. Renan (2002, p. 58) famously defined this daily ‘plebiscite’ of reaffirming national solidarity as ‘actual consent’, which he described as the ‘desire to live together, the will to continue to value the heritage that has been received in common’. Although this account of consent does not specifically address friendship ties it touches on expressive aspect of solidarity. In addition, as opposed to the logic of the family trope that presupposes automatic maintenance of already existing expressive relationships, consent rests on a logic of turning strangers into friends, on which I elaborate in the next section.
To conclude, the friendship trope highlights horizontal ties of equal status that foster mutual cooperation. Friendship is an extendable relation based on similarities as well as differences that can change over time. This highlights the dynamic and emotional process of friend-making, which develops in mundane situations of simultaneous copresence but transcends into a sense of common pursuit. While the liberal account of solidarity assumes that individuals expect to remain strangers to each other (Roche, 1994, p. 90), the solidarity-through-sociability approach comes closer to describing the national imagination in that compatriots not only cooperate in their common interests but also share their lives, passions, and destiny.
Meta-narrative of strangers-turned-friends-turned-brothers
Having discussed each of the relationship tropes of solidarity separately, I now offer an integrative view which merges all three tropes in a combined meta-narrative and a particular temporal trajectory of national solidarity, strangers-turned-friends-turned-brothers. Before I spell out this proposal, I should note that this course of evolution should be taken as only one possibility; there may be other transitions between tropes that could account for the social imaginaries of national belonging. The trajectory that I present attempts to tackle the quest for collective salvation, an issue that is widely acknowledged but not sufficiently theorised in the nationhood literature.
Alexander (2003, p. 8) noted that people in modern societies invest social life with metaphysical meaning no less than in premodern religious communities: ‘practical meanings continue to be structured by the search for salvation’, that is, by the ongoing existential concern with ‘how to be saved, how to jump to the present from the past and into the future’. Along these lines, Anderson (1991, pp. 11–12) reflected on the promise of modern salvation offered by nationalism: ‘What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning … If nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical’, the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future’. Renan (2002, pp. 57–58) described the nation as a ‘soul’ and ‘a spiritual principle’ characterised by a similar interplay between a shared legacy of memories and a consent to a common fate. In Renan’s understanding national salvation is connected mainly to sacrifice: ‘A nation is therefore the expression of a great solidarity, constituted by a feeling for the common sacrifices that have been made and for those one is prepared to make’.
There has been little attempt to spell out how these reflections on national temporalities and collective salvation relate to symbolic relationships between compatriots and how these relationships unfold in time. A focus on social ties in and of itself, as in the solidarity-through-sociability approach, does not fully explain why friendship ties growing out of mundane interactions in social clubs should be perceived as collectively binding and lasting. In order for social connections to acquire collective meanings, we need to consider how they tap into underlying cultural structures. As discussed by Alexander and Smith (1993), cultural structures operating through symbolic codes and narratives form a relatively autonomous realm independent of social practice and can, therefore, shape social life in powerful ways.
Building on this cultural-sociological approach, people’s confidence in their social connections can be conceptualised as relying on an overarching narrative of strangers-turned-friends, which endows mundane interactions in social institutions with collective meaning. This narrative enacts a Durkheimian distinction between the profane and the sacred and coincides with a unidirectional movement within national discourse from the ordinary and the morally inferior to the extraordinary and morally superior (Handelman, 2004). Along these lines, the move from strangership to friendship can be thought of as encoding a transition from anonymity to familiarity, inclusivity to exclusivity, indifference to loyalty, interest to passion, and abstractness to concreteness.
To understand this transition more fully in connection to national solidarity, we need to introduce another relational metaphor, that of the brother. ‘Brotherhood’ and ‘fraternity’ are common relational terms in national rhetoric, as evident, for example, in their extensive use in national anthems (Lauenstein, Murer, Boos, & Reicher, 2015). The use of brotherhood in national discourse resonates with the tradition of civic friendship, relating to a bounded, particularist form of solidarity and should not be confused with the universalist, egalitarian religious tradition of brotherly love that expanded the biblical love-of-neighbor to include love of strangers and enemies (Brunkhorst, 2005, p. 23; Kattago, 2017).
The place of the brother in national imagery is fourfold. First, it is where the gendered aspects of national solidarity become most explicit and apparent. A growing body of work in the fields of cultural history, gender studies, and political theory has examined the role of fraternal male friendship as a key cultural trope for mobilising national identification (Kaplan, 2006; Nagel, 1998) and stressed the political implications of using the androcentric term fraternity for sustaining and reproducing a masculinist and patriarchal social order (Nelson, 1998; Pateman, 1989). Second, the figure of the brother mediates between the imagery of friendship and kinship, although technically belongs to the latter. It signifies the equal status and mutuality of friendship ties as well as the warmth and sameness of family ties. By reconciling the opposing frameworks of friendship and kinship, the brotherhood trope combines feelings of solidarity, typically conceived in horizontal terms, with notions of collective identity, which invite a more vertical, genealogical sense of belonging.
Third, in mediating between friendship and kinship, the brotherhood trope prescribes a distinct temporal pattern, which entails a complex interplay between the simultaneous and mythic timeframes. This brings us to what is perhaps the key aspect of the national meta-narrative of solidarity, namely, the ‘fraternization of friendship’. For the gist of the national imaginary lies not simply in transforming strangers into friends but in considering these newfound friends as rediscovered brothers (and, only obliquely, sisters) of the same primordial tribe. Although we do not personally know the mythic figures in our tribal past, we do not consider them as ever having been strangers. Their starting point is as our ancestral heroes, ingrained in our familial heritage from time immemorial.
I illustrate this cultural dynamic on two levels. At the level of personal relationships, referring again to my study of friendship in Israeli culture, it is noteworthy that many of the interviewees emphasized the significance of long-lasting friendships by describing their friend as being part of the family (Kaplan, 2006). Employing the Hebrew term ben-bayit (household member, literally, son of the house), they recounted how the friend would regularly spend time with their family up to the point that the parents would treat him like their son. In this respect, and in contrast to the romantic framing of chemistry between friends noted previously, a ben-bayit is not considered as ever having been a stranger but as an integral member of the family, another brother, as described by one of the interviewees: ‘He would come to my house and have dinner, for years and years … it’s simply family … it’s this calm, safe, taken for granted thing you’re supposed to have with your brother. You were born together; you’ll also die together. I’ll never be cut off from him. Why? Because! Because we’re together from kindergarten.’ (Kaplan, 2006, p. 40). The term ben-bayit encapsulates a subtle interplay between everyday practices of friendship taking place in simultaneous temporality and an allusion to a mythical bond that was always there, virtually from birth.
At the collective level, this fraternisation of friendship and mythologisation of a present relationship can be illustrated in commemoration rituals for fallen soldiers which are often accompanied by tributes of fraternal friendship. The commemorative performance transforms personal instances of friendship into a collective bond of brotherhood. The soldiers – known during their lifetime to only a limited circle of personal friends and acquaintances – attain upon their heroic death public recognition by distant others who experience familiarity with individuals they never met (Kaplan, 2008). In this process, rituals of commemoration also reflect a shift from an experience of simultaneity among the living to mythic relations with the deceased.
Anderson (1991, pp. 201–202) famously singled out a fascinating cultural moment where this metamorphoses from strangers into kin, and specifically brothers, goes even one step further. He referred to revolutionary junctures in national history when violent conflicts between groups who had little in common were recast as fraternal unions undergoing instances of ‘fratricide’. Two examples are the American and Spanish ‘civil’ wars – the former effectively a war between two sovereign states and the latter a confrontation between European cosmopolites and local Fascists – which both became enshrined in national memory as a war between brothers. Indeed, the symbolic association between fratricide and the founding of a new political community can be traced back to the Greek and Roman traditions, as in the myth of the twin brothers Eteocles and Polynices who killed each other in battle for control over Thebes and the myth of Romulus who murdered his twin brother Remus and founded Rome (Kattago, 2017).
Whether the mythic fraternisation of friendship goes back to kindergarten, to heroic death in battle, to violent intergroup conflict or to the very founding narrative of the nation what these symbolic moments share in common is a transformation of contingent and mundane social interactions between individuals into passionate (and often deadly) bonds of friendship and ultimately a refashioning of this solidarity as a primordial identity. What these junctures also share is a cultural structure of male supremacy, for by framing the collective ‘we’ as a brotherhood they symbolically exclude women from the body politic of the nation, even as women are fully incorporated as citizens.
Finally, and this is the fourth point, the move from simultaneous solidarity with living friends to a mythic identification with timeless brothers can be compared to the distinction between trust and loyalty. Barbalet (1996) saw trust as the emotional basis of cooperation and argued that it reflects the confidence that other people’s actions will correspond to our expectations of them. Loyalty, on the other hand, is forward-looking; it is the confidence that trust can be maintained in the long term. Individuals can feel loyalty to a person, relationship, or institution even in the absence of individual trust in those they rely on. By connecting these observations to the relationship tropes, one can distinguish between generalised trust between strangers and acquaintances, which rests on normative and moral considerations of people’s actions, and feelings of loyalty to close friends and family, which rest on obligation and partiality. In other words, I am responsible for the well-being of my friends before they reciprocate and regardless of their reciprocation (Bauman, 1990); I am faithful to my friends and, even more so my family, even if I sometimes disagree with their moral behaviour, indeed, even if I lose trust. Loyalty is directed toward perpetual ties, ties that persist beyond their inadvertent circumstances and become essentialized primordial identities frozen in time. Put differently, we can say that loyalty, like brotherhood, is strongest when directed toward the dead. According to this reading, the move from strangers to friends to brotherhood captures a linear pathway from solidarity to identity, from bonds of trust between compatriots to feelings of loyalty to the nation.
Discussion
This article described how relationship tropes of kinship, strangership, and friendship shape our common understanding of national solidarity and explored how these tropes can be linked to national temporalities and the desire for collective salvation. There are two basic ways to approach the national imagination. The first assumes that people’s sense of collective identity leads to mutual feelings of solidarity. This view, which dominates the nationhood literature, corresponds to the solidarity-through-sameness approach encapsulated in the family metaphor. It invites a perception of mythic temporality that resurrects tribal ancestors as a meaningful presence for fellow nationals. There is no transition from anonymity to familiarity but a static narrative of family-remains-family. The bonds of solidarity are predetermined. They presuppose membership in a bounded social whole (Honohan, 2008) and do not depend on any kind of interaction between fellow nationals.
Alternatively, the national imagination can be understood to present the opposite pathway: from feelings of solidarity to collective identity. According to this view, bounded solidarity results from mutual interactions between actors. The solidarity-through-strangership and solidarity-through-sociability approaches share this position but differ in how they interpret mutual interactions. The former considers strangership as the rule and describes ties between compatriots as interest-based, rational and calculative allegiances located in simultaneous temporality. The latter approach highlights a dynamic process of friend-making and elevates everyday encounters between strangers to the level of long-lasting bonds of fate.
I began this article with a quote from Bauman (1990) on how nations aim to transform strangers into friends. But Bauman (1990, p. 155) went on to describe how this national project has failed: ‘Melting pots were either myths or failed projects. The strangers refused to split neatly into ‘us’ and ‘them’, friends and foes. Stubbornly, they remained hauntingly indeterminate. Their number and nuisance power seem to grow with the intensity of dichotomising efforts’. I take issue with Bauman’s view, which, as in premodern politics of survival, reduces the national imagination to the dichotomising efforts aimed to distinguish friends from enemies (Silver, 1990). The category of enemy is undeniably central to national discourse (e.g. Nagel, 1998; Yuval-Davis, 2004) and the us-versus-them distinction has been researched extensively in the field (e.g. Eriksen, 1993; Wodak et al., 2009). This is corroborated by studies of national trauma and commemoration where cultural salvation is connected to restoration of purity by giving moral, sublime meaning to collective sacrifice and triumphs over polluted perpetrators (Alexander, 2013); however, there is more to say about the ways in which strangers fit in this national imagination – not simply as its failed outcome and polluted enemies but as part of its narrative of success.
As I have suggested above, a cultural belief in the ability to deal with strangers in modern societies is inherent to national discourse, and specifically within the solidarity-through-sociability approach. In other words, the ideal of strangers-turned-friends is, in and of itself, part of the national imagination and not external to it. The idea is not only to turn strangers into friends so as to keep them from becoming enemies; nor is it simply to keep out unwanted strangers by turning them into enemies and commemorating their demise through a politics of salvation from trauma. Rather, the rationale of strangers-turned-friends is also to overcome the fear of social atomisation and estrangement in modern life, in other words, to provide salvation from alienation.
And yet, in dealing with alienation, the modern national imaginary takes a different form than the universalist stance of democratic solidarity (Brunkhorst, 2005) and other cosmopolitan visions intended to solve the problem of strangers in mass society through ‘universal hospitality’ (Kant, 1971, p. 105); Between the Kantian framework of host and guest and the republican framework of civic friendship (Kattago, 2017), modern nationalism offers salvation from alienation through the promise of friendship, and, even more specifically, the fraternisation of friendship.
Thus, the gist of my argument is that the national imagination invokes a symbolic meta-narrative that turns strangers into friends, but only if it can imagine these newfound friends as timeless tribal brothers. Through this process, accumulated bonds of trust established between strangers cease to be a conscious, individual choice and become embedded in a collective bond that acquires the taken-for-granted character of familiarity, exclusivity, and loyalty. This meta-narrative is set in both simultaneous and mythological time yet reveals a distinct temporal and relational structure: while we may think of our collective past as preceding our common destiny, it is the experience of simultaneous copresence and anticipated shared future with newfound friends that forms the precondition for the myth of a shared tribal past.
The focus on the fraternisation of friendship can help us distinguish national solidarity from other, partly overlapping forms of belonging, particularly ethnicity and citizenship. Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov (2004) demonstrated analytically why national identity cannot be readily separated from ethnic identity. From a perspective of collective identity formation both categories can be treated as one domain of study which examines how group members conceptualise their commonalities. By the same token, it is difficult to distinguish national solidarity from civic solidarity, for in terms of bottom-up practices and social interactions the two have much in common (Kaplan, 2018). However, as I have attempted to show, it is in the symbolic realm that national belonging can be distinguished from both ethnicity and citizenship. Simply put, while ethnicity invokes the notion of extended kinship and citizenship relates to a community of strangers, nationhood is the only category of belonging that encompasses and merges both tropes through the lens of friendship and, more particularly, by codifying a unidirectional moral transformation from strangers to friends to brothers. In this respect, if we consider nationalism as a vehicle of cultural salvation, it could be read as salvation from the anxiety of future alienation re-experienced as salvation from past mythological trauma and sacrifice.
Given the exploratory nature of this inquiry, I could only provide a schematic outline of this proposal. Future studies conducted in specific national contexts could examine how this temporal-relational structure plays out in a given national culture and whether it may work for some cases better than others. These limitations notwithstanding, I suggest that this merging of the three relationship tropes of solidarity within a distinct temporal structure, weaving together primordial ethnic identity and civic redemption, may help explain the continuing appeal of national belonging as a dominant social force in contemporary societies.
Acknowledgements
Parts of this paper were presented at the research workshop “It's about Time” held at the Open University of Israel, Raanana, on September 2019. I thank Miri Rozmarin, Hizky Shoham and the workshop participants for their valuable discussion and comments. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology and the editor Veikko Eranti for their contribution and insightful comments on the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).