Conclusion: The Politics of Identity

Abstract

In this concluding chapter, we shall place national identity in its wider context and discuss its impact, especially its wider political impact on society. The thread running through the chapter can be summarised as, ‘does national identity matter?’ We start with a brief summary of some of the salient findings discussed in this book, and also describe and discuss our approach to studying and understanding national identity. We hope that this section will help the reader to understand the intellectual background to the research reported in this book and how it is carried out, and thus judge its credibility. We then move on to examine in more general terms what we have called the politics of difference. Drawing upon examples from home and abroad, we argue that seemingly fixed categories of difference are rarely that; much depends on how these are construed and mobilised for political and social purposes. In the penultimate section, we summarise how the peoples of the four countries of the United Kingdom do national identity, and how it might be changing, with implications for the future of the British state itself and the potential for further constitutional change in Britain. Finally, we return to our key question: does national identity matter?