On March 8, 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy created a political uproar during the French presidential campaign when in a televised interview he proposed creating a “ministry for immigration and national identity.” His political rivals immediately denounced his plans as an attack against the French republican tradition and accused him of flirting with the xenophobic ideas of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front. Shortly afterward, though, the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, asked her supporters to “reconquer the symbols of the nation” instead of “abandoning the national anthem to the extreme right.” She said that if elected she would “ensure that the French know the words to La Marseillaise, and that every family owns a national flag” to “fly from their window on national holidays.” So intense was the row over French identity that it sidelined the more traditional materialist concerns that tend to define Left-Right competition. As the New York Times put it at the time, “the battle over French identity has overtaken discussion of more practical issues like reducing unemployment and making France more competitive.”

Although partisan appeals to national identity are not always as explicit as in the French elections, they are a much broader phenomenon in Western Europe. In September 2007, for example, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stirred controversy when he stated at the Labour Party's annual convention that he wanted to create “British jobs for British workers.”