Common Culture

Introduction

Human beings have always lived in groups. The nature of these groups has, however, varied considerably. They range from families and small bands through clans and other larger kin organizations to villages, kingdoms, and empires; they include religions and cultures, occupational groups and castes, nations, and more recently, even global society to the extent that it knits all humanity into a single group.

In most of these cases, the self-understanding of members is crucial to the existence of the group—a kingdom, a religion, or a caste is both an “objective” collection of people and pattern of social organization and a “subjective” way in which people understand how they belong together and should interact. This is clearly true of the idea of nation. Without the subjective component of self-understanding, nations could not exist. Moreover, once the idea of nation exists, it can be used to organize not just self-understanding but categorizations of others.

The most basic meaning of common culture is the use of this way of categorizing human populations, both as a way of looking at the world as a whole and as a way of establishing group identity from within. In addition, common culture usually refers not just to using the category of nation to conceptualize social groups but also to holding that national identities and groups are of basic importance (and often that loyalty to one's own nation should be a commanding value). Common culture is thus simultaneously a way of constructing groups and a normative claim. The two sides come together in ideas about who properly belongs together in a society and in arguments that members have moral obligations to the nation as a whole—perhaps even to kill on its behalf or die for it in a war.

Discussion

Common culture, then, is the use of the category “nation” to organize perceptions of basic human identities, grouping people together with fellow nationals and distinguishing them from members of other nations. It is influential as a way of helping to produce solidarity within national categories, as a way of determining how specific groups should be treated (for example, in terms of voting rights or visas and passports), and as a way of seeing the world as a whole. We see this representation in the different-colored territories on globes and maps, and in the organization of the United Nations. At the same time, clearly the boundaries of nations are both less fixed and more permeable than nationalists commonly recognize.

Central to nationalist discourse is the idea that there should be a match between a nation and a sovereign state; indeed, the nation (usually understood as prepolitical and always already there in historical terms) constitutes the ground of the legitimacy of the state. Kedourie (1993) has argued, for example, that common culture was invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In his view, it “pretends to supply a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power ...