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Identifying Scotland and Wales: types of Scottish and Welsh national identities
Author(s) -
Haesly Richard
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
nations and nationalism
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.655
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1469-8129
pISSN - 1354-5078
DOI - 10.1111/j.1354-5078.2005.00202.x
Subject(s) - welsh , national identities , nationalism , ethnic group , national identity , identity (music) , sociology , gender studies , nationality , linkage (software) , genealogy , media studies , history , anthropology , law , political science , politics , aesthetics , archaeology , immigration , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
. How are national identities and the ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991) upon which they are based linked? This article demonstrates that Q‐methodology, which allows each participant to express his or her own ‘personal nationalism’ (Cohen 1996) while simultaneously highlighting how these individual assessments aggregate into coherent, shared types of national identity, provides a means of empirically assessing the linkage between the micro‐ and macro‐components of national identity. When applied to the cases of Scotland and Wales, the six types of national identity – three each in Scotland and Wales – highlight distinctions that reflect, as well as challenge, the ubiquitous academic division between civic and ethnic national identities. They also illuminate the differing natures of contemporary Scotland and Wales, with particular emphasis on the observation that the Welsh imagined community appears to be fundamentally more contested than the more easily forged Scottish imagined community.