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We “imagine” our national identities in public and private settings, and encounter them in everyday popular culture (Billig, 1995; Wodak et al., 1998). Political speeches, news reporting, sports, television fiction, film, and even weather forecasts: They all imagine the nation and locate us within it.
Some discursive practices come to formulate state action and legislative frameworks. The state and its institutions play a key role in the construction of national unity (Gellner, 1983). We encounter state concepts of national identity in our school books and in state funded media cultures; we experience it when applying for citizenship (Brubaker, 1992; Herb, 2004; Michels, 2004). The collective effort of these “storytellers” represents, and also reinforces, the values and beliefs of our social and cultural environments. Discourses of national identity inform the way in which we make sense of the world around us and give basis to the formation of our identities (Wodak et al., 1998, p. 70). Concepts of national identity that are enshrined in law are, of course, cast in more rigid forms than, for example, identities expressed in everyday conversation. Once established as dominant, however, discourses are not fixed or “sealed off” (Wodak et al.). Several versions of an imagined nation may circulate and struggle against each other. This means that discourses within the popular, for example, are not necessarily in tune with institutional discourse. Such clashes of competing images of what defines a nation clearly expose the artificial nature of the nation. If we are to understand the nation, it is crucial to approach it as an artifice. Nation and national identity are constructs, built from a selective choice of defining elements. This choice may vary, depending on who tells the story of the nation.
A poster in the Munich underground (see Figure 1), advertising Germany’s new citizenship law in 1999, illustrates the dialectic nature of national identity and the complexity of its construction.