Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 22

1999 were not civil wars.13 War is now more often the
breaker of states than the maker of states. More generally,
the erosion of the national security function reduced the
authority of states and the reason for people to identify
with their state, and instead promoted identification with
subnational and transnational groups.
The relative significance of national identity has varied
among cultures. In the Muslim world, the distribution
of identities has tended to be U-shaped: the strongest
identities and commitments have been to family, clan,
and tribe, at one extreme, and to Islam and the ummah or
Islamic community, at the other. With a few exceptions,
loyalties to nations and nation-states have been weak. In
the Western world for over two centuries, in contrast, the
identity curve has been more an upside-down U, with
the nation at the apex commanding deeper loyalty and
commitment than narrower or broader sources of identity. Now, however, that may be changing, with transnational and subnational identities gaining salience and the
European and American patterns flattening and coming
more to resemble the Muslim one. The notions of nation,
national identity, and national interest may be losing
relevance and usefulness. If this is the case, the question
becomes: What, if anything, will replace them and what
does that mean for the United States? If this is not the
case and national identity is still relevant, the question
then becomes: What are the implications for America of
changes in the content of its national identity?

Prospects for American Identity
The relative importance of the components of national identity and the salience of national identity compared to the other identities have varied over the years.
In the last half of the eighteenth century the peoples of
the colonies and states developed a common American
identity that coexisted with other, primarily state and
local, identities. The struggles first with Britain, then
France, and then again Britain strengthened this sense
of Americans as a single people. After 1815 the threats
to the nation’s security disappeared, and the salience
of national identity declined. Sectional and economic
identities emerged and increasingly divided the country,
leading to the Civil War. That war solidified America as
a nation by the end of the nineteenth century. American
nationalism became preeminent as the United States
emerged on the world scene and in the following century
fought two world wars and a cold war.
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The ethnic component of American identity gradually
weakened as a result of the assimilation of the Irish and
Germans who came in the mid-nineteenth century and
the southern and eastern Europeans who came between
1880 and 1914. The racial component was first marginally weakened by the outcome of the Civil War and then
drastically eroded by the civil rights movement in the
1950s and 1960s. In the following decades, America’s core
Anglo-Protestant culture and its political Creed of liberty
and democracy faced four challenges.
First, the dissolution of the Soviet Union eliminated
one major and obvious threat to American security and
hence reduced the salience of national identity compared
to subnational, transnational, binational, and other-national identities. Historical experience and sociological analysis
show that the absence of an external “other” is likely to
undermine unity and breed divisions within a society. It
is problematic whether intermittent terrorist attacks and
conflicts with Iraq or other “rogue states” will generate the
national coherence that twentieth-century wars did.
Second, the ideologies of multiculturalism and
diversity eroded the legitimacy of the remaining central
elements of American identity, the cultural core and
the American Creed. President Clinton explicitly set
forth this challenge when he said that America needed
a third “gr eat revolution” (in addition to the American
Revolution and the civil rights revolution) to “prove that
we literally can live without having a dominant European
culture.”14 Attacks on that culture undermined the Creed
that it produced, and were reflected in the various movements promoting group rights against individual rights.
Third, America’s third major wave of immigration
that began in the 1960s brought to America people
primarily from Latin America and Asia rather than
Europe as the previous waves did. The culture and values
of their countries of origin often differ substantially
from those prevalent in America. It is much easier for
these immigrants to retain contact with and to remain
culturally part of their country of origin. Earlier waves
of immigrants were subjected to intense programs of
Americanization to assimilate them into American
society. Nothing comparable occurred after 1965. In
the past, assimilation was greatly facilitated because
both waves substantially tapered off due to the Civil
War, World War I, and laws limiting immigration.
The current wave continues unabated. The erosion of
other national loyalties and the assimilation of recent
November-December 2016  MILITARY REVIEW