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Scholars of nationalism and national attachment have focused on questions of collective identity far more than on questions of collective solidarity. Their attention has been given to the ways in which individuals establish, maintain, or modify their sense of commonality as they identify with the abstract entity known as the nation rather than to the ways in which they interact with compatriots and socialize according to shared patterns of sociability. 1

Prominent modernist scholars of nationalism, such as Ernest Gellner (1983), Anderson (1991), and Eric Hobsbawm (1991), charted long-term political, economic, and cultural preconditions for the emergence of national attachment, typically addressing one of three different, though often related, processes (Wimmer and Feinstein 2010): nationalism as a political movement, a shift in institutional state structures, and a gradual spread of national consciousness among a local population. Others rejected this kind of macro-level developmentalist approach in favor of a micro-level lens. Roger Brubaker (1996) called for an “eventful” perspective that considers epistemological shifts in the meaning of nationness to be determined by “contingent, conjuncturally fluctuating” yet potentially “transformative” events (19). 2 Philip Gorski (2000) opted for a postmodern genealogical perspective that focuses on surface characteristics, localized narratives, and a specific set of categories around which the coherence of a particular nationalist discourse is determined. Both the macro- and micro-historical approaches concentrate primarily on the “what,” namely on transformations in conceptual meanings associated with national consciousness. However, as noted by Anthony Smith (2009, 42–43), they leave lingering questions about the emotional experience of nationalism unanswered. In particular, they have not addressed the “how,” namely how national consciousness conveys a sense of a close-knit community.

Anderson (1991) famously noted that conceiving the nation as a “deep, horizontal comradeship” (7) is what has ultimately led millions of people to willingly sacrifice themselves for the sake of fellow nationals. And yet, precisely on this point, the limited discussions that explicitly address national attachments in terms of solidarity have described it as a form of disinterested, impersonal relationship between strangers (e.g., Anderson 1991; Calhoun 1991; Gellner 1983). They thus presuppose a dichotomous distinction between personal friendship and collective solidarity and fall short of answering how the community of strangers is experienced as a deep comradeship.

The focus in current scholarship on questions of commonality privileges actors (whether individuals or groups) as the primary unit of analysis and overlooks the role of interactions between actors as an equally important category of analysis. While national attachments crucially depend on cognitive perceptions of group commonality that shape the boundaries of the national community, these perceptions cannot account for how compatriots develop mutual feelings of trust and solidarity .

I purposefully employ the term national “attachment” as an umbrella term encompassing issues of both identity and solidarity . Although seldom used in the literature beyond studies in political psychology, Dan Lainer-Vos (2012) clarified how the term “attachment” circumvents the theoretical and analytic closure that emerges from the current scholarly focus on identity discourse and identity work. That is, it does not presuppose that the formation of national groupings rests wholly on the emergence of collective representations which generate perceived commonalities between members; rather, it invites researchers to identify both agents and processes involved in the formation of groups and directs attention to an entire range of practices (including cultural activities and social events) used to generate national associations based on concrete contact between national actors. Among other things, attachment brings to mind the imagery of a “network” and directs researchers to examine the practical challenge of incorporating groups in national networks within which members can engage in productive cooperation .

As an overarching concept, national attachment is also more effective than other umbrella terms, such as “national belonging,” in clearly evoking the emotional component crucial to both national identity and solidarity. At the same time, precisely because of its all-encompassing scope, it does not specifically assume interactions or ties between actors and does not replace the analytic importance of addressing and underlining the question of solidarity and social ties per se as a distinct aspect of national attachment .

Studies Going Beyond Identity Have Not Gone Far Enough

In recent years , a growing body of literature has questioned the uncritical acceptance and reification of national attachments as a fixed collective identity and drawn attention to the processes of institutionalization involved in producing and transforming popular imaginations of national identity. However, despite its promise, this literature has not expanded the prism of analysis to the institutional process involved in imagining other aspects of the national beyond identity, such as social relations between co-nationals. I delineate several arguments in this critical reappraisal of national identity discourse and related discussions of national solidarity and explain what I view as missed opportunities in this line of research.

In their influential work, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000) argued that the salience of identity as a category of practice in national discourse does not require its use as a category of analysis. The uncritical use of identity when theorizing about nationalism may reify conceptions of the nation as an unchanged, fixed entity and replicate nationalist preconceptions of nations as “real communities” (5). As further elaborated by Siniša Malešević (2011), national identity has become a sweeping conceptual chimera used to describe assumed social reality or to offer a shortcut explanation for particular forms of collective behavior. Malešević noted how despite conceptual differences between modernist approaches (e.g., Gellner 1983) and ethno-symbolist approaches (e.g., Smith 1986) to nationalism, both consider collective identity as a key epistemological category, whether it is studied as an offshoot of premodern ethnic and religious attachments or as a product of structural transformations in modern societies.

Instead, Brubaker (1996) proposed an understanding of the nation as an institutionalized category of practice and directed attention to contingent historical events that helped shape these very processes of reification. In other words, analysts should seek to explain the processes through which the concept of the nation “crystallize[d], at certain moments, as a powerful, compelling reality” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 5). This “cognitive” perspective shifted attention from group identities such as race, ethnicity, and nationality to group-making activities of classification, categorization, and identification: “Groupings are not things in the world, but perspectives on the world—not ontological but epistemological realities” (Brubaker et al. 2004, 45). This approach emphasized the productive and transformative power of institutional processes as they engineer cognitive frames that engender nationality. A telling example is the Soviet classification system that, despite a repression of national ideology, institutionalized territorial and ethnic nationality as enduring social categories and as a legacy that later shaped post-Soviet nationalist politics (Brubaker 1996). 3 Malešević (2011) likewise suggested shifting attention to the historical and ideological processes that generate and reproduce such a widespread belief in national identity.

Similar attempts to problematize and destabilize essentialist conceptions of national identity have been made by several scholars within the ethnographic tradition who focused on processes of collective identification in everyday life. Richard Handler (1994) provided a pointed critique against studies of culture which employ the concept of identity in ways that underpin nationalist ideology. He argued that collective groupings should be taken as symbolic and communicative processes rather than bounded objects, for even “to talk about identity is to change or construct it” (30). Following Fredrik Barth ’s (1969) pioneering work on how ethnic identity is constituted through boundary-making interactions, Thomas Hylland Eriksen (1993) called for a more elaborated understanding of identities as situated and relational, distinguishing between “us-hood” and “we-hood” as distinct external and internal viewpoints in national identification (67).

In addition, building on Michael Billig ’s (1995) influential paradigm of “banal nationalism,” researchers have considered the role of “ordinary people” as social agents actively producing representations of the nation during mundane, everyday activities and in the consumption of popular culture (Edensor 2002; Foster 2002). In particular, Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss (2008) explored how collective practices and cultural artifacts acquire national significance not because of their intrinsic properties but because of the ways meaning is attached to them by everyday users as a result of institutionally mediated choices.

However, the call to reject essentialist accounts of national identity and to avoid reification of nations does not in and of itself replace the subject matter of analysis and fails to provide the crucial shift away from the scholarly focus on identity. Brubaker (1996) recast national identity as a contingent form of classification that is a product of institutionalized collective action rather than its stable underlying cause (20). In replacing the notion of national identity as cause with national identity as product, this suggestion neither abandons group identity as the subject of study nor expands the prism of analysis to altogether different institutionalized aspects of imagining the national beyond identity.

Taken together, these various anti-essentialist and cognitive approaches to nationalism significantly advance our understanding of collective systems of identification and classification, foregrounding ethnographic perspectives and analytical tools that are highly valuable for studying how social actors attribute meaning to nationalism or ethnicity, such as boundary maintenance, transformative events, institutional practices, or us-hood versus we-hood. Yet, in the end, by proposing alternative terms to identity that nonetheless do “the theoretical work ‘identity’ is supposed to do” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 14), this critique remains within the bounds of national identity discourse.

The problem with the focus on identity in studies of nationalism is not only the reification of identity. It is, in addition, the privileging of actors (whether individuals or groups) as the primary unit of analysis and the overlooking or rejection of the role of the ties between actors as an equally important epistemological category. Brubaker and Cooper (2000) argued explicitly that for large-scale collectivities such as nations, “a strongly bounded sense of groupness…is likely to depend not on relational connectedness, but rather on a powerfully imagined and strongly felt commonality” (19–21). In this regard, privileging actors over interactions between actors is just as pervasive in constructionist approaches to nationalism as in traditional scholarship. Eriksen (2004) affirmed that interpersonal networks are rarely considered by sociologists writing about nationalism and noted in passing that solidarity grows out not only of shared commonalities but also out of trust and commitment that can only emerge through “enduring interaction” and acts of reciprocity (56). Ultimately, rejecting connectedness in favor of commonality brings us right back to the study of identity .

Why Study Solidarity?

Although the distinction between mechanisms of cooperation and processes of identification is not clear-cut, such a distinction is analytically useful in bringing attention to the full range of practices involved in nation-building and in maintaining national consciousness (Lainer-Vos 2012, 75). In most circumstances, we can expect feelings of solidarity among compatriots to converge with a deep sense of national identity. The engagement in exclusive cooperation and development of familiarity and mutual loyalty make it easier for participants to believe that they belong to the same nation. At the same time, acknowledgment of group commonalities is what defines the boundaries of this cooperation in the first place.

But the two processes may also diverge. For example, individuals who find it hard to identify with certain attributes of their ascribed national identity may still feel deeply connected to their fellow nationals by virtue of the multiple (nonsectarian) social institutions that they are embedded in and the shared sociability that they have experienced. In contrast, other individuals may find pride in their national identity despite having limited opportunities to engage in shared social institutions, minimal experiences of shared sociability, and weak feelings of connectedness to their fellow nationals. Thus, assuming the proposed distinction between identification and solidarity is indeed viable, if we were to make a comparison between individuals within a given country, we could expect that: (a) Those who have participated significantly in (nonsectarian) social institutions in the course of their lives will report higher levels of connectedness and feelings of national solidarity than individuals with limited participation in shared social clubs; and (b) while predictive of national solidarity, such high participation in social institutions may be somewhat less predictive of reported levels of national identification.

We could also make a related comparison across countries. According to the theoretical model presented here, citizens are likely to report higher levels of national solidarity in countries with greater access to and participation in nonsectarian social institutions than in countries with limited opportunities to participate in institutional life. Thus, in a cross-country comparison the extent of participation in social institutions is likely to be more predictive of national solidarity than of national identification. While an empirical examination of these predictions is beyond the present scope, such an inquiry could enrich our understanding of nationness beyond the prism of identity.

Shifting the focus of study to solidarity and framing solidarity in terms of sociability could also prove beneficial in the continuing debate on the historical periodization of the nation-state. A growing body of work challenges the empirical and conceptual validity of the modernist approach, which considers nationalism a distinctly modern phenomenon. Gorski (2000) reviewed historical evidence for the existence of various national movements and ideologies in medieval and early modern European polities and contended that contrary to the modernists’ search for universal, essentialist accounts of nationalism and its causality, periodization, and scope, what is needed “is not a deep definition, but a superficial one…one might define nationalism as any set of discourses or practices that invoke ‘the nation’ or equivalent categories” (1461). Although I agree that we should forego deep definitions of national ideology given the diversity and heterogeneity of nationalist discourses and practices, we should not abandon the quest to understand the deep meanings underlying people’s general sense of national attachment.

And while I also concur with Gorski (2000, 1461) that the modernist attempt to provide universal answers to key wh-questions such as “what is nationalism?,” “when did it happen?,” and “why does it happen?”—and, one could add, “who does it include?”—is bound to fail, I suggest instead that we raise a fifth question that can be framed in universal terms. In keeping with the age-old Durkhemian query “how do societies cohere?,” this question asks, “how do national communities cohere?” and, more specifically, “how do compatriots bond with one another?” Once the national question is construed in terms of mechanisms that are relatively context-free rather than in terms of historical effects and once these general mechanisms are then explored in specific institutional and cultural contexts, it might be easier to place and relocate the answers within an historical framework.

This is the explanatory logic that guides the present work. While most of this book is devoted to theorizing general mechanisms of public intimacy and to elaborating how they engender feelings of solidarity in specific case studies of social club sociability, I also offer tentative suggestions as to why, on the whole, the historic spread of national consciousness (but not the rise of specific national movements and discourses) can be linked to the modern era. Specifically, in Chapter 3, I connect the rise of national consciousness with growing participation in (nonsectarian) social clubs and, consequently, with the ever-growing demands to turn strangers into friends; demands which can be situated in the historical processes of modernization and institutional differentiation . Without diminishing the importance of studying specific discourses and cognitive processes of categorization that lead to the crystallization of national identity at certain historical moments (Brubaker 1996; Gorski 2000), a study of social ties between compatriots that centers on the meso-level of social institutions and applies historically informed ethnographic research can provide a complementary avenue for exploring national attachments . 4

National Solidarity as an Abstract Tie Between Strangers

Despite widespread recognition among theorists of nationalism that compatriots experience strong ties of “comradeship” or “fraternity,” there is little systematic exploration of how such ties between distant others are imagined as a close-knit bond. As underscored by Malešević (2011), neither modernist nor ethno-symbolist perspectives have sufficiently addressed the processes that mobilized people to extend their loyalties from the small, kinship-based groupings toward large-scale collectivities. Indeed, this question seems too often to be overlooked, taken for granted, or explicitly rejected as a valid direction of analysis. For example, Anderson ’s (1991) ground-breaking phenomenological approach highlighted how gradual changes in technology and communication enabled people to perceive the abstract idea of the nation as directly relevant to their daily lives and as lending meaning to the arbitrariness of death. But even as he noted that this new consciousness is imagined as a horizontal comradeship, Anderson stopped short of examining precisely that, namely, the mechanisms that render national solidarity a transparent, close-knit social bond. In a similar fashion, as noted by Malešević (2004), Anthony Smith ’s (1986) ethno-symbolist approach follows a Durkheimian distinction between traditional solidarity premised on resemblance of kin and modern national solidarity premised on functional interdependence. While noting that national societies are conceived as a collectivity of autonomous yet quasi-egalitarian individuals linked by “impersonal but fraternal ” ties (1986, 170), Smith offered little analysis of this tension between the impersonal and the fraternal.

Several scholars of nationalism have explicitly rejected the comparison between collective solidarity and close-knit bonds of friendship, instead bringing up the notion of strangership (Brunkhorst 2005; Calhoun 1991). Following Simmel’s (1950) writing on the role of strangers in modern society (1950, 402–408, 409–424), sociologists and cultural theorists began to employ the term strangership to denote a form of impersonal yet socially and politically significant form of interaction between individuals in modern society (Karakayali 2006; Mallory 2012). Strangers were taken to be social actors embodied in mutual acts of recognition (Ahmed 2000) who could, therefore, also engage in a productive form of solidarity, such as in a civil society of strangers (e.g., Vernon 2014). As discussed by Mervyn Horgan (2012), building on Erving Goffman ’s (1963, 84) notion of “civil inattention ,” relations between strangers require physical co-presence and mutual agreement about forming a space of non-hostile recognition and indifference. Since encounters between strangers often increase as a result of social mobility, strangership may act as an equalizing force (Horgan 2012), as, for example, in eighteenth-century European coffee houses where people of different social classes engaged in shared practices of sociability (Davetian 2009).

A similar claim about the equalizing force of strangership and its productive role in society has been made in connection with non-present mass audiences. John Hartley (1999) discussed how television brings together individuals who “may otherwise display few connections among themselves and positions them as its audience ‘indifferently,’ according to all viewers the same ‘rights’ and promoting among them a sense of common identity as television audiences” (158). In a discussion of audience “witnessing” during media events , Paul Frosh (2006) further maintained that, similar to civil inattention, contemporary mediated relations between strangers habituate individuals to the otherness of others and create a productive and morally enabling form of indifferent civil equivalence among strangers. Such relations sustain “the thin threads by which the most distant and different can be bound together” and share similar (albeit the most general) features “only because they connect a great many people’’ (280, and quoting Simmel 1950, 406).

Following Paddy Scannell (2000), Frosh noted how television addresses its audiences by intertwining the impersonal and the personal: It is directed to anyone who happens to be watching (or listening) and not tailor-made for a particular individual, yet it nonetheless addresses the individual viewer directly, quite often informally and with apparent intimacy. This “for-anyone-as-someone” structure of contemporary broadcasting (Scannell 2000, 5) can be linked to the care structure of modern society, for it enables us to care about the lives of others without knowing them personally. While avoiding the exclusiveness of intimacy, Frosh (2006) argued that these depersonalized relations enable viewers to feel sufficiently similar to other viewers to be able to imagine what it might be like to be in their shoes and to empathize with them. As he concluded, media witnessing reveals how “the care structure of modern society is that to be someone you must first be anyone. Its unrealized ideal is that anyone can be someone” (281).

It is precisely on this latter note that discussions of strangership as a form of solidarity appear to miss a crucial point. By noting in passing that the “unrealized ideal” of modern society is that “anyone can be someone,” Frosh (2006) inadvertently invoked—not the structural constraints of mass society, which he charted compellingly throughout his analysis—but the fundamental cultural structure of a national community; to put it in relational terms, it is the ideal that strangers can be friends. In contrast to Frosh, I would therefore argue that from a phenomenological and cultural sociological perspective the ideal of being someone—or, rather, of being someone’s friend—is, in fact, part and parcel of the care structure of society; it is proclaimed and partly realized on a daily basis in social institutions and expresses itself in the paradox at the heart of this book, namely that compatriots constantly imagine the nation as a community of friends, even as they know that in reality it is an abstract collectivity of strangers.

The widespread understanding of contemporary mass solidarity as a relationship between strangers can be traced back to classic liberal thought and is couched in the modern distinction between friendship as a strictly personal bond and solidarity as a political bond (Kaplan 2006; Mallory 2012). Allan Silver (1990) explained that liberal Enlightenment theorists envisioned modern civil society as based on cooperation between sympathetic but disinterested strangers described as “authentically indifferent co-citizens” (1482). Replacing the dichotomy of “friend” versus “enemy” in premodern tribal politics, this emotionally regulated civil solidarity allowed for a new kind of intimate and interpersonal friendship that was to inhabit a distinctive domain of private life, detached from impersonal public interactions (Silver 1990).

It is possibly this prevailing distinction between personal friendship and collective solidarity as well as the novel conceptualization of strangership as a productive form of co-present or mediated interaction that predisposed some contemporary theorists to look upon national solidarity as an abstract relationship and to dissociate it from interpersonal ties. Craig Calhoun (1991, 1997) presented the most articulate argument in this vein. First, he drew an analytic distinction between the “relational” and “categorical” modes of identification (foreshadowing Brubaker and Cooper’s (2000) aforementioned reappraisal of national identity discourse). He argued that in large-scale collectivities individuals are linked through their membership in a set of abstract categorical attributes rather than through their participation in webs of concrete interpersonal relationships (Calhoun 1997, 46).

Second, Calhoun (1991) made a related claim with regard to solidarity, rejecting the use of equivalent terms to “refer simultaneously to face-to-face networks and whole nations” because “on a larger scale, community in the sense of dense, multiplex networks of interpersonal relationships becomes impossible” (222). Instead, he posited, large-scale solidarity reflects impersonal relationships between strangers. The prototypical stranger relationships take place in public settings or “publics,” understood as “arenas in which people speak to each other at least in part as strangers” (223). In such settings, as opposed to personal interactions, it is the merits of the arguments and not the identities of the arguers that are crucial. People in publics, he claimed, are not bound by dense webs of common understandings or shared social ties and have to “establish rather than take for granted where they agree and disagree” (223).

Informed by conceptions of the modern public sphere as an abstract, depersonalized arena for communicating a rational-critical discourse (Habermas 1991), Michael Warner (2002) made a similar association between publics and nations, arguing that an environment of strangerhood and norms of disinterested subjects have become the hallmark of modern life: “The modern social imaginary does not make sense without strangers. A nation, market, or public in which everyone could be known personally would be no nation, market, or public at all” (57).

An understanding of collective solidarity as a form of disinterested sympathy between strangers bound by a commitment to abstract principles is consistent with the internal logic of classic liberal ideology (Silver 1990). But it underestimates the degree of connectedness between fellow citizens in modern states where people live in relatively enduring, multiple interdependent relationships (Honohan 2001). And while there is, by definition, no nation in which everyone could be known personally, the point is that if we want to understand the phenomenology of national attachment, this imagined continuum between personal familiarity and collective solidarity is worthy of study in its own right .

Lastly, among the few scholars to call attention to the centrality of national solidarity, the position taken by Malešević (2011) is most telling. On the one hand, he affirmed the importance of solidarity in lieu of identity as an object of study in order to examine how it is possible “to make a person feel so attached to an abstract entity that he or she allegedly expresses willingness to treat and cherish this entity in the same way one cherishes his or her close family?” (282). On the other hand, instead of taking this question at face value, Malešević seemed to reject the very idea that this imagined continuum between personal and collective attachments should be thus explored. Rather, he suggested that it is epistemologically important to analyze them separately as two different phenomena, arguing that the organizationally produced interactions that characterize large-scale entities such as nations are not a “real” form of solidarity. In particular, Malešević contended contra Durkheim that “genuine, deep-felt emotional solidarity is only possible on the micro, face-to-face level of interactions where individuals are familiar and physically interact with other individuals” (284). By presupposing that some social ties are more genuine and real than others, Malešević did not pay sufficient heed to the phenomenology of solidarity as a social tie and stopped short of providing a substantial alternative to the study of identity .

Bringing Friendship Back In

The rise of modern nationalism is closely related to the partial decline in the role of kinship ties as a central organizing principle of the social order and the rise of friendship as an alternative principle. The increasing importance of friendship, however, has gone largely unacknowledged, mostly due to the aforementioned modern divide between personal ties of friendship and collective ties of solidarity; the former are regarded in liberal thought as detached from the social order, while the latter are seen as central but remain profoundly undertheorized .

A diverse body of literature has challenged the dichotomy of interpersonal friendship and collective solidarity. This can be roughly divided into three main lines of research. The first, mainly anthropological, contests the Eurocentric and modern-centric link between friendship and heightened individualism and explores how practices of friendship are embedded in the wider societal context and carry collective significance (Bell and Coleman 1999; Desai and Killick 2010). Male homosocial enclaves, in particular, have received rich ethnographic attention (Gutmann 1997) with studies that have addressed practices of friendship as varied as joking relations among fraternity students (Lyman 1987), café sociability among working-class men (Vale de Almeida 1996), and reciprocal acts of animal theft among villagers (Herzfeld 1985).

In his seminal study of preadolescent boys participating in Little League baseball, Gary Alan Fine (1987) called attention to the localized “idioculture”—the system of shared beliefs, behaviors, and customs—that emerges in small groups and depends on both individual and collective ties of friendship (“chum” and “gang,” respectively) (8–9). Fine pointed out that friendship is not simply an affective bond charged with positive feelings. It is “also a staging area for interaction, a cultural institution for the transmission of knowledge and performance techniques,” and one which “has implications for interaction within and outside of the friendship bond” (Fine 1988, 225). Fine’s later theory of “tiny publics” (Fine 2012a; Fine and Harrington 2004), while less focused on friendship per se, laid out a research agenda for exploring how collective solidarity emerges from interactions in the small group. By providing a structure for affiliation and cohesion, groups offer a model for participation in larger social settings. Some ethnographic work on identity formation in social movements likewise noted the various ways that friendship ties served as a vehicle for communal solidarity (e.g., Polletta 2002; Tavory and Goodman 2009).

A second line of research which has explicitly contested the public–private divide in studies of friendship can be found in historical and gender scholarship that has examined male fraternal friendship as a key cultural trope for mobilizing national identification (Kaplan 2006; Lake 1992; Mosse 1982; Nelson 1998). While these studies highlighted rhetorical and performative practices—such as popular literature and rituals of commemoration—through which hegemonic representations of male homosociality figure in specific national cultures, they did not provide a broader conceptual understanding of how the bonds of friendship are linked to the political sphere.

The third and most extensive discussions of friendship as a collective sentiment can be found in the work of political theorists who investigated friendship as a normative model for civic or national attachments (Allen 2004; Devere and Smith 2010; Honohan 2001; Mallory 2012; Schwarzenbach 1996; Yack 2012). I briefly elaborate on some of this literature, much of which is based on Aristotle’s views on civic friendship as discussed in Nicomachean Ethics. As delineated by Sibyl Schwarzenbach (1996, 2015), Aristotle’s conceptualization of genuine and virtuous friendship entails a reciprocal awareness of the other as a moral equal, goodwill toward the other for the sake of the other and not for oneself, and practical doing for the other. These qualities can extend from personal friendship to the political sphere as the binding force of the community, allowing citizens to experience a form of friendship with each other and do things for their fellow citizens both individually and as a citizen body on the basis of shared values, goals, and a sense of justice. Moreover, in such a just society the values of friendship ideally become indirectly embodied in the basic structure of society, its laws, and its institutions (Schwarzenbach 2015). Within this framework, the fundamental quality of good citizenship is friendship. Individuals who conduct themselves openly as friends to one another will make better citizens, have a capacity for (critical) loyalty, and act as equal agents in the community (Frazer 2008).

Aristotle, however, favored a selective and elitist citizenship regime, much less egalitarian than the democratic vision of modern civil societies (Brunkhorst 2005). Schwarzenbach (2015) thus underscored how Aristotle’s vision presupposed an “equal fraternal” model of friendship based a priori on sameness and equal standing (a relation between two self-sufficient, virtuous, and similarly situated male friends) and precluded a model of friendship based on difference and diversity (in terms of age, gender, class, religion, race, or culture) (8) .

Danielle Allen (2004) connected this Aristotelian framework to the problem of solidarity among strangers. She described how strangers can negotiate norms of democratic citizenship through practices of political friendship considered a set of hard-won habits used to bridge individual, social, and racial differences. Despite having different lives, friends share common events, environments, and social structures. Political friendship begins from this recognition of a shared horizon of experience and moves to a second recognition “that a core citizenly responsibility is to prove oneself trustworthy to fellow citizens” (Allen 2004, xxii). In order to win this trust, one must interact self-confidently with strangers. Only by engaging in reciprocal interactions and conversations can strangers turn into political friends, drawing each other into networks of mutual responsibility and developing a political bond sustained by equitable rather than rivalrous self-interest.

Lastly, Iseult Honohan (2001) offered some qualifications to Aristotle’s notion of civic friendship. While adopting the basic assumption that personal ties can serve as a normative model for collective ties, she argued that relations between citizens are comparable only to a specific kind of personal relations, namely to ties between colleagues and not to personal friendships, familial bonds, or interactions between strangers . People’s civic responsibilities are grounded in irregularly extending and overlapping networks. This interdependence entails special obligations without being as radically exclusive and sharply bounded as national attachment but also without being too thin to generate commitment as in the case of cosmopolitan identification. In order to address the particular obligations of citizenship, Honohan opted for a social tie that is less intimate, committed, emotional, and voluntary than friendship and came up with collegial relationships. Unlike personal friends and similar to colleagues, “citizenship does not lose its meaning when ‘diluted,’ even if direct contact with many fellow-citizens remains latent rather than being realized” (63–64) .

I have found this comparison between colleagues, friends, and civic and national ties to be instructive on various levels. Above all, it informs my own formulation of the ties between co-nationals as analogous to membership in social clubs. Relations between social club members can be situated exactly in between relations with colleagues and close friendships. Social club interactions are emotionally more expressive and less instrumental than collegial relationships and, in this respect, are better suited to account for national than for civic attachment. At the same time, such membership does not preclude civic aspects of solidarity, an issue which I address in Chapter 6.

Taken together, these various analytic discussions have provided important justifications for bringing friendship back into the study of public and political life. But the argument they make has remained largely at the discursive level. In line with Fine ’s (1988, 225) aforementioned depiction of friendship as a “staging area,” a social performance that has wider collective significance, what is called for is a more grounded and empirical approach in order to address the question of a continuum between interpersonal ties and macro-level solidarity and to explore how the social bonds of friendship stimulate national attachment .

Notes

  1. 1.

    A simple search in Google Scholar can illustrate this disparity. A search for article titles with the phrase “national identity” and “national identities” conducted on September 24, 2017, resulted in 23,600 hits. The phrase “national solidarity,” on the other hand, yielded only 282 references. After combining additional terms related to solidarity, “national integration” (2090 entries), “national unity” (1700 entries), and “national cohesion” (149 entries), these article titles are still outnumbered by titles with the term “national identity” by a ratio of almost 1:6. The search was conducted with option “all in title.”

  2. 2.

    More recently, Robin Wagner-Pacifici (2010) laid down a programmatic framework for studying such epistemological shifts in social meaning by proposing a comprehensive eventful approach that attends to the performative, demonstrative-orientational, and mimetic-representational features underlying historical transformations.

  3. 3.

    In this, Brubaker (1996, 24) adopted a new institutionalist perspective that emphasizes the constitutive rather than merely constraining role of institutions. I adopt a similar approach in considering the crucial role of social clubs in constituting sociability and solidarity.

  4. 4.

    See Fine (2012b) for a general argument on the role of meso-level group interactions in establishing social order and contributing to civil society.