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This chapter examines the EU’s policy towards Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). It argues that the EU’s collective identity includes the notion of a ‘special responsibility’ towards CEECs. It involves purely self-interested behaviour by policymakers acting on behalf of the EU, and prescribes a degree of accommodation for CEECs’ preferences in EU policy. This component of collective identity limits the range of available policy options by precluding certain options as inappropriate, and reinforcing the legitimacy of others.

In the concluding chapter of the volume, Ian Lustick summarizes evidence in support of his theory of boundary institutionalization. Drawing on the volume contributors’ studies of the former Soviet Union, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Jordan, Congo/Zaïre, and Iraq, the author seeks to expand options for aligning collective identities and states without encouraging premature deconstruction of state boundaries. Instead of violent destabilization of borders, the author encourages the use of the volume's conclusions for preventing violent conflict or forcible collapse of a state territory.

Chapter 7 looks at peasants who lost their land to urban expansion in the last three decades. It seeks a territorial explanation for the gap between the magnitude of peasants' grievances and the low frequency of protests on the one hand, and peasant's mobilizational capacity on the other. It argues that the mobilizational capacity of peasants is undermined by the snowballing effect of forced relocation. Forced relocation often leads to the deterioration of villagers' household financial status, disintegration of village organization, and rupture of collective identity, all of which contribute to village deterritorialization. More specifically, relocation produces deterritorialization through nebulous compensation negotiations that undermine mutual trust within villages, phased demolition and relocation that gradually destroy the physical environment and village solidarity, and switching peasants' status from members of village collectives to urban residents, thereby splitting villagers' interests. These moves weaken villagers' potential for successful collective action.

In many European countries, religion today seems to function as guardian of the collective identity and memory, even as those same societies are becoming more multi-religious. Focusing the analysis on European Catholicism and, particularly, on the new role played by the Catholic Church in the public sphere in two historically Catholic countries — Italy and Spain — the chapter develops the hypothesis that Catholic leaders are accepting the idea that religious power must work more and more as communication. They can longer impose norms, but they can reconstruct a romantic sense of being a society, a collective identity rooted in the Christian pattern of values, projecting unity where there is social, religious, and ideological difference.

Taylor and Leitz trace processes of collective identity construction and politicization among women suffering from postpartum psychiatric illness who have been convicted of infanticide. Joining a growing body of research suggesting that self‐help and consumer health movements can be a significant force for change in both the cultural and political arenas, Taylor and Lietz examine one such movement, a pen‐pal network of women incarcerated for committing infanticide. Taylor and Leitz show how a sense of collective identity fostered by the pen‐pal network triggered a profound emotional transformation in participants, allowing them to convert shame and loneliness into pride and solidarity, and encouraging their participation in efforts to change how the medical and legal system treat postpartum psychiatric illness.

This chapter examines the relation between cultural trauma and collective identity. It explains that cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks on their group consciousness, and that the scientific concept of cultural trauma illuminates an emerging domain of social responsibility and political action. It discusses a middle-range theory of the complex causes propelling the trauma process in developed and less-developed societies. It argues that the theory of cultural trauma applies, without prejudice, to any and all instances when societies have, or have not, constructed and experienced cultural traumatic events, and to their efforts to draw, or not to draw, the moral lessons that can be said to emanate from them.

This chapter discusses the hybrid political/therapeutic approach of feminist self‐help groups of the very early 1980s, which developed an analysis of internalized oppression that linked the political and the personal. Like their immediate feminist predecessors, these women constructed influential experiential knowledge about child sexual abuse, expanding on the politics and techniques of self‐help. They drew on and contributed to identity politics, constructing a collective identity as survivors. They also sought to influence how professional psychotherapy addressed child sexual abuse. They have been analyzed as part of a therapeutic turn in feminism; this chapter argues that the therapeutic turn remained fundamentally oriented toward social change.

This chapter focuses on the importance of ethnic identity change for conflict transformation. The author asserts that collective identity is malleable, constructed in interaction with other social actors, and subject to incremental change. Those who sponsor the display of group symbols and rituals are situated to introduce new ideas and shift group boundaries. However, such change is limited by structural circumstances, strategic imperatives, and the social psychological needs of group members. Fortunately, the shift in Northern Ireland’s conflict toward nonviolent political persuasion provides opportunities for unionists and loyalists to reflect on their priorities, articulate their goals and identities, and thereby develop a sense of empowerment that is conducive to the development of a multicultural society.

The introduction to the collection offers a theoretical overview of the relationships among race, nation, and religion as categories of collective identity formation. It argues, in brief, that these categories are always already inextricably linked and cannot be studied in isolation from each other—that they are, in fact, co-constituted categories, wholly dependent on each other for their social existence and symbolic meanings. It then explores some of the implications of this argument for our understanding of racial, national, and religious identities in the Americas and elsewhere. It focuses, above all, on a critique of the presumed secularity of racial and national identities and thus casts doubt on the popular equation of modernity and secularization.

The European Union has produced a remarkable set of agreements to guide the political interactions of countries across Europe in the past forty-five years. These agreements have produced collective rules governing market transactions of all varieties, created a single currency, established a rule of law that includes a European court, and promoted increased interactions for people who live within the boundaries of Europe. Trade has increased dramatically; European corporations have greatly expanded their investments, production, sales, and employment; markets that were formerly fragmented across national lines have become regional, the largest corporations have redeployed their activities to profit from market opening projects. This has created a kind of vicious circle whereby more and more markets across Europe have become reorganised on a European basis. The missing piece of this puzzle is how these changes have affected the lives of people who live in Europe beyond the mere fact that more goods and services are available.

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to answer the question of how a small group of anti-Muslim organizations commandeered the collective identity of Islam across so much of the American public sphere. It examines how collective actors compete to shape shared understandings of Islam within the American media, the policy process, and everyday life. In so doing, the book provides a new theory of how collective actors create cultural change after major historical ruptures such as the September 11 attacks. The chapter then discusses the study of cultural change with Big Data, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter traces the development of a repoliticized self‐help movement focused on visibility politics in the wake of the countermovement. It discusses the construction of a repoliticized collective identity among survivor activists, their understanding of self‐help as political, and their emphasis on identity disclosure, or coming out, as a political tactic. The chapter discusses the notion of visibility politics as including activist art, speak‐outs, and identity disclosures in daily life. It analyzes the tactical implications of identity disclosure and emotional transformation within social movements, and discusses the role of visibility politics in social movements more generally.

Before turning to the general intellectual roots of the negative theology related to the concept of original sin, this chapter outlines the German history of coping with the Holocaust. The case of Germany differs strongly from that of the United States. Germany was unquestionably the prime nation of perpetrators and, at first glance at least, people should expect a strong reluctance to accept the tragic narrative of the Holocaust as a core element of German national identity. Rarely do nations agree on a negative representation of their collective identity. Should the German postwar history, however, fit into Jeffrey Alexander's conception of a tragic narrative, this would provide strong evidence for his assumption that the Holocaust takes the position of a transnational narrative of collective identity.

Typically the modern state has collective referents, the common good of which its officers claim to serve. These referents, depending on periods and countries, are variously called the citizenry, the nation, and/or the people, and they are often invoked in rituals, discourses, and educational policies that aim to create a collective identity linked to the state. In turn, each of those terms has various and complex meanings, creating a terminological Babel that this chapter tries to at least partially clarify. This is necessary for setting the discussion of the complex relationship of citizenship as defined in a democratic regime and citizenship as entailed by membership in a nation or equivalent terms. The chapter also includes an overview of the processes of construction of such a collective referent in the Northwest, once again providing some references to the similarities and contrasts to other parts of the world.

Authenticity has always been associated with freedom. If we are free to express our true selves and feelings, then we are also initiating an act of emancipation. The corporatized version of authenticity renders it into a very individualist expression of identity. It is what makes us different and unique compared to the mass of other workers in the firm that defines our authenticity. This chapter rethinks the notion of authenticity. It argues that there are many ways in which freedom and authentic selfhood might be interconnected, some of which are based around solidarity and collective understandings of work. The chapter explores three versions of freedom and the authentic expressions of self that accompany them: freedom through work, freedom around work, and freedom from work. The first two approaches are the most popular in organizations today, but are also open to appropriation by the ‘just be yourself’ management approach. The third position, freedom from work, is perhaps the only way a full version of authenticity might be achieved without it being a slave to the corporation. The implications of this analysis are explored in relation to workplace politics in the contemporary organization.

This chapter analyses the nature of collective identity implicit in the notion of a political community. Taking the debate between Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt on the competing claims to priority of the legal-normative and the political as exemplary of influential and opposing positions in constitutional theory, it argues (against both) that collective identity is reflexive identity, that self-constitution is constitution both by (political) and of (legal-normative) a collective self, and that the paradoxical relation of constituent power and constitutional form — of democracy and legality — is in a certain sense specious. The chapter sets a frame for addressing the arguments of the papers that follow.