It seems reasonable to assume that anyone who picks up this book does so because they are interested in understanding national identity. After all, that is the title of the book, and our purpose in writing it is to explain our approach to national identity and present the empirical evidence which has led us to understand it in the way we do. We must make it clear right from the outset that the book is not centrally, or even largely, concerned with constitutional change. We are well aware that to some people it seems self-evident that the two must be inextricably entwined. The way political events in the United Kingdom have been reported since devolution in 1999 and the tendency in the media to assume a strong association between national identity and matters of governance has served to encourage that belief. The book will appear relatively soon after the referendum on Scottish independence held in September 2014, which is why we wish right at the outset to say that it is not about the referendum, and after this Introduction that momentous event will largely disappear from view in these pages. There are two reasons for this. Our intellectual focus over twenty years has been on various aspects of national identity. We do, of course, have our views, both personal and intellectual, about constitutional change, but that is not what our empirical research has been about, and this book is concerned with that research. Second, the connection between national identity and people's political and constitutional preferences is considerably looser than one might expect. We do not want to mislead the reader, so it is necessary to emphasise that the title of the book accurately describes its contents, which is at it should be.

How did we first become interested in national identity? Truth to tell, it is impossible to say. One of us has lived in Scotland for all of his life and the other for most of it. If you do that, national identity is pervasive and yet implicit. We are fond of a comment by the novelist Willie McIlvanney that ‘having a national identity is a bit like having an old insurance policy.

Identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty. (Mercer, 1990: 43)

It would seem self-evident to say that national identity is ‘political’. After all, in Scotland in particular the last two decades have been intensely ‘political’, and arguably the decade or two before that. Since the 1970s, agitation about ‘home rule’ has sought to mobilise national identity. The politics of national identity were brought to the fore by the rise of the Scottish National Party in the mid-1970s on the back of the discovery of North Sea oil; Labour's attempt to create a Scottish Assembly in the second half of the 1970s culminating in the first referendum in 1979; its failure in constitutional terms, and the election of the Thatcher government. The creation of, and elections to, the Scottish Parliament since 1999, especially the electoral successes of the SNP in 2007 and 2011, would seem to confirm an intimate relationship between politics and national identity. And England was not immune to the effects of these constitutional changes. Creating a Parliament in Scotland (and an Assembly in Wales) highlighted the so-called West Lothian Question (WLQ), the apparent contradiction of non-English politicians being able to ‘interfere’ in ‘England-only’ matters at Westminster while English MPs could not vote on those same issues decided at Holyrood. The topic has begun to attract the attention of political scientists such as Michael Kenny who argues that English nationhood ‘remains a subject which is usually skirted rather than directly engaged, and is mainly confined to the margins of political analysis. There are still only a few academic books devoted to this question, and English national identity has been studied much less extensively than its Scottish and Welsh counterparts’ (Kenny, 2014: 1).

Running through many of the chapters, but not discussed in detail, has been a key question: have the British ceased to be British? In particular, have the Scots ceased to be British, and are there signs that the English are following the same path away from state identity?

Much of the debate about ‘being British’ has been driven by the politics surrounding the constitutional future of the United Kingdom and the possibility of Scottish independence. This has led, ineluctably, to assertions about the declining impact of Britishness, and how, in the interests of the Union, it might be revived. Being British has largely been viewed through a political prism, as if this is its essence, and that it follows that anyone claiming British identity must be in some sense a ‘unionist’, and not a ‘nationalist’. This, we believe, is too simple a view, or, rather, it ought to be seen as a question for research rather than being taken for granted.

It would be highly unusual, possibly unique, if a large and established West European state in the twenty-first century lost significant territory through secession. If Scotland did leave the Union following the referendum vote in September 2014, or in the following few years, there would still remain a large state of around 55 million people. Such loss of territory would be especially unusual if secession were to be driven by shifts in national identity, although we shall argue later that this intuitively attractive hypothesis is improbable.

The Union Flag is a recognised global icon, flown and worn on a variety of occasions. And yet, like the owl of Minerva, it may fly only at dusk, presaging the end of being British. Given that ‘Great Britain’, in one form or another, has existed since the Union of the English and Scottish Parliaments in 1707, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that it was not until 1975 that a historian, J. G. A. Pocock, a New Zealander to boot, made ‘a plea for a new subject’ – British history (Pocock, 1975).

Pay a visit to the tourist office in the small town of Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Scottish–English border, and you encounter some curious identity tales. Berwick ‘is at war with Russia’ it has its own language: gadgie (a man); manashee (woman); jougal (dog); it changed hands between Scotland and England some fourteen times; there is also the ditty about Scotland, England and Berwick, and many more. Many small towns have developed their distinctive curiosities to bring in the tourists, so why should Berwick be any different? And why in sociological terms is this interesting? More to the point, what does it tell us about national identities?

Berwick, a town of 11,500 people, sits in the borough of Berwick-upon-Tweed, the most northerly in England, with a population of 26,000. Berwick is further away from London than anywhere else on the mainland, even further from London than Penzance in Cornwall by some fifty miles. In jurisdictional terms Berwick's regional affiliations are to Northumberland, the most northerly county in England, and it lies some 50 miles from Newcastle, Northumberland's largest city which has a population of around 190,000. Berwick is at the far north-easterly end of the Scottish–English border which, far from running from west to east, slopes up roughly north-east from its south-west end, and is further north in terms of latitude than much of southern Scotland.

The current borough of Berwick-upon-Tweed, its English nomenclature, straddles the river Tweed. ‘Berwick’ is the oldest part of Berwick-upon-Tweed and lies within the Elizabethan town walls north of the river. South of the Tweed lie Tweedmouth and Spittal. These latter two parts of the town were originally separate villages but joined with ‘Berwick’ to make up Berwick-upon-Tweed in the nineteenth century.

If, as we argued in the previous chapter, national identity matters, that it is important to social actors, as well as being a useful concept for explaining their attitudes, actions and behaviours, how do we study it – in other words, how do we ‘get at’ national identity? This is not simply a matter of adopting the best research method, assuming such a thing ever exists, or a variety of methods, but closely connected with how we conceptualise national identity in the first place. In this chapter, we will give an account of our understanding of national identity, how we went about studying it, the methods we employed and the research designs we adopted. We will discuss our findings in the chapters which follow.

There are two influential views in this regard. Firstly, there is the commonsense view, shared as we have seen by some theorists, that national identity is a fixed badge, something we all have been given, derived from our ‘nationality’, and there is little more to be said. Once we have it, a bit like an identity card, we are what it says on the tin. From this perspective, we can use it or ignore it, but there is nothing much we can do to change it, short of emigrating and taking another citizenship, or perhaps forging another identity. That, though, is wrongly to equate national identity with ‘nationality’, or citizenship. Nor is it simply a matter of where you were born. National identity is much more subtle and variable than that. It will probably be clear to the reader that living and working in Scotland has been a major influence on our thinking. ‘Nationality’, British citizenship, is not at all the same as ‘national identity’, being Scottish or indeed English. Our understanding of national identity, then, comes literally with the territory.

This book is the product of a thoroughly collegiate form of working in which the data, the analysis and successive drafts, as well as the many papers on which it is broadly based, have been discussed and amended by both authors throughout, and they are equally responsible for it. David McCrone took responsibility for writing the first draft. We are both deeply committed to collegiate research but it is inevitable that one can only do this for twenty years or so by also being firm friends. Given our differing personalities and intellectual interests and strengths, our colleagues may well regard our enduring intellectual partnership as something of a miracle but we have greatly enjoyed the experience and that is what has enabled us to produce this body of work. The usual stricture applies. We and we alone are responsible for the research we have done together and what we have written; the faults are ours alone.

We have a lot of people and organisations to thank. By far the major funder was The Leverhulme Trust without which most of the research would simply not have happened. Successive directors Barry Supple, Richard Brook and Gordon Marshall were always supportive and understanding, and above all, wonderfully non-bureaucratic. We commend the Trust as an ideal funding body with which to work. We are also indebted to the Economic and Social Research Council which funded the arts and landed elites study and helped with funding Scottish and British Social Attitudes Surveys at crucial moments. The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) which carries out the British Social Attitudes Surveys, and the Scottish Centre for Social Research (ScotCen) which is responsible for the Scottish Social Attitudes Surveys, have been especially helpful and encouraging. We particularly wish to thank Simon Anderson, Rachel Ormston, John Curtice and Susan Reid at ScotCen for their robust and incisive help with the social surveys, and their willingness to let us try out innovative ideas even if they were initially sceptical.

All forms of social identity involve ‘othering’ the positing of a notional other against whom one compares the nature and strength of one's own identity. Often this involves ruling out who you are not. Of course people do not go about their daily interactions continually doing this explicitly but, as we shall see, where national identity is concerned they are aware of the process. As Reicher and Hopkins observe: ‘For Scottish identity, as indeed for any social identity, who we are depends upon who we compare ourselves to’ (2001: 30). It is a question of the vis-à-vis, a term which has no simple equivalent in the English language – ‘against’ is both far too strong and implies opposition or hostility. Most of the time, the ‘other’ is taken for granted and the comparisons are implicit rather than explicit, especially where there are imbalances of power or size. Thus, men are less likely than women to define themselves vis-à-vis the other sex; middle-class people vis-à-vis the working class, and so on. In terms of national identity, it would seem likely that the Scots, and the Welsh, and possibly the Irish, are intuitively presumed to define themselves vis-à-vis the English, and it similarly seems reasonable to imagine that the latter might define themselves vis-à-vis the French or Germans on the grounds that the ‘Celtic’ minnows are too small to be the salient and prime ‘other’. Only in the last few years have researchers rigorously investigated the processes of national identification in these islands rather than simply relying on such assumptions. One of the later tasks in this chapter will be to discuss the questions in the 2008/2009 British and Scottish Social Attitudes Surveys which we asked in order to address these issues.

What is it that is so interesting about national identity that it has intrigued us and dominated our research for some twenty years? Given what has already been published about nations, nationalism and national identity, why inflict yet another volume on readers? One reason is that a lot has been written about nationalism, a fair bit about ‘nations’, but far less about national identity. Consider this statement by the political philosopher Margaret Moore (2006: 98), in a hand-book on nations and nationalism:

It would not be devastatingly dislocational, in a cultural sense, to leave Canada and live in the United States, or to leave Scotland to live in England, and would not involve the traditional costs involved in learning a new language or new symbolic repertoires. But it may be profoundly difficult for the Scot to think of herself as an Englishwoman, or the Canadian to think of himself as an American.

It seems reasonable to accept Moore's premise that it would be fairly straightforward to adjust to the new way of life, but is it more debatable that it would be ‘profoundly difficult’ to acquire a new ‘identity’? One might of course believe that what people choose to call themselves is neither here nor there, that national identity does not really matter. We think that it does matter, and that Moore is right in her surmise. It may well be that in the two examples she gives the migrant's behaviour does not actually change very much, because so much of the new life and its meanings are familiar. How people identify themselves in national terms is another matter entirely. We know, for example, from interviews with Scots who migrate to England, and English-born people who come to live in Scotland, that their country of origin, where they were born and brought up, confers on them a powerful sense of who they are.

In his classic 1961 paper entitled ‘The oversocialized conception of man in modern sociology’, Dennis Wrong began with the account of the writer Gertrude Stein on her deathbed. She is reported to have muttered: ‘What, then, is the answer?’ ‘Pausing, she raised her head, murmured, “But what is the question?”, and died.’ (1961: 183). Wrong uses the story to make the point that answers are meaningless when separated from the questions:

If we forget the questions, even while remembering the answers, our knowledge of them will subtly deteriorate, becoming rigid, formal, and catechistic as the sense of indeterminacy, of rival possibilities, implied by the very put- ting of the question is lost. (Wrong, 1961: 183)

We shall conclude this final chapter with some speculative remarks about the future of research on national identity. The bulk of the chapter will pull together and expand on previous discussion of two key questions which, together, frame our approach to the study of national identity. First, why is national identity sociologically interesting? We argue that the concept helps us to address some classical questions about the nature of social order. The second question is: why have issues of national identity come to the fore in modern times in the British state? What does this tell us about the relationship between citizenship and ‘nation-ness’, notably in England and Scotland, and about the possible future of territorial relations in these islands? Here, then, are two fundamental questions pertaining to the social and political order which studying national identity can help us address.

Recovering the social

The first of these questions takes us back the classic problem of social order: how is society possible, or, in Dennis Wrong's words: ‘How are men capable of uniting to form enduring societies in the first place?’ Leaving aside his use of the male form, a feature of its time and not ours, this remains arguably the central question in sociology.

We have seen in previous chapters that national identity matters to people in England as well as Scotland. It is an important part of the way people in both societies describe themselves, although it operates somewhat differently north and south of the border. As we showed in Chapter 2, Scots, whether they live in England or Scotland, are well able to ‘talk the talk’, whereas, as Susan Condor and her colleagues show, identity talk in England is more muted (Condor, 2006).

Being able to show, however, that national identity matters to people in both countries is only a first step. In Chapter 2 we introduced the idea of identity markers and identity rules, that is, the characteristics which people use in claiming national identity or attributing it to others, and the rules or procedures they employ in the process. We regard these markers and rules as the conventions by which people develop and maintain a sense of their own and others' national identity. Such markers and rules are usually implicit and unproblematic, which is why we sought out contexts where national identities were problematic or ambiguous. Of course these are not ‘typical’, but they have heuristic value in terms of research design as they make more apparent what is normally taken for granted.

In this chapter, we will explore how people deal with claims to national identity; how they present their own claims; how they attribute national identity to others; and how they themselves receive the claims of others, or react to attributed claims by a third party. Studying these processes enables us to address a key question of societal structure: who is ‘one of us’ who do we include as ‘people like us’, and who do we choose to exclude. Most of the time this matters little, but it can become a live political issue.

Taken as a whole, the overall purpose of this chapter is to ask, when it comes down to it, whether people find national identity meaningful, whether it really matters to them. We will discuss and bring empirical data to bear upon a number of common assumptions:

1. • That many people do not care, and possibly do not know, about national identity. There is a particularly ‘British’ (or maybe, as we shall see shortly, ‘English’) form of this argument, namely, that while it matters to the French, the Germans, the Americans and so on, the people of these islands have a much more relaxed and latitudinarian view of these things.

2. • That, if it matters at all, ‘national’ identity is less important to people than other forms of social identity such as their social class, gender or family status.

3. • That, if anything, people in England and Scotland ‘think small’, that is, identifying far more with locality, town or region, than with ‘nation’ or state.

4. • That national identity categories, as used by sociologists and political scientists, are fairly meaningless, accepted by people if they are asked questions by such social scientists, but not part of their own personal world. We explore that assertion by looking at the accounts of national identity which people give in non-survey settings, as well as by examining the reasons they give for their national identity choices.

5. • Finally, we show how national identity comes into play in different contexts, be they cultural or political.

6. Let us start with the fairly widespread claim that the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh manifestly care about national identity, but somehow the English do not. As Krishan Kumar observed: ‘unlike the French, the English have little tradition of reflection on nationalism and national identity’ (2006: 423).