. - Cultural Boundaries and National Identity - book review

Kultergrenzen und nationale Identitat (Cultural Boundaries and National Identity). Edited by H. L. Cox. Rheinisches Jahrbuch fur Volkskunde 30 (1993-94). Bonn: Ferd. Dummler, 1993. 240 pp. Maps. Pb. DM65.00. ISBN 3 427 88321 3

From 5-7 April 1993, the International European Ethno-Cartographic Working Group held a symposium in Bad Honnef, Germany, devoted to cultural boundaries and national identity, a topic which has not diminished in importance in the years which have passed since that meeting. The volume under review contains the proceedings. The truly international nature, within a European context, of that symposium is reflected by the fact that the authors of the nineteen papers in these Transactions come from twelve different countries, including Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland. The articles are in English, French and German and, contrary to what so often happens at conferences of this kind, mostly keep within the thematic framework suggested by the title of the symposium. In spite of the papers' geographical diversity, they therefore also reflect cohesion within their variation.

As chief organiser of the conference, H. L. Cox sets the scene with an introductory presentation in which he highlights several fundamental aspects of the central theme by emphasising, on the one hand, some of the more or less peaceful changes which occurred in the early 1990s, not only in the break-up of the former Soviet Union and in the reunification of the two Germanys but also in the relationships between Czechs and Slovaks and between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, and on the other the (in 1993) still continuing conflicts in Northern Ireland and in the Basque Country, and the "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia. One cannot help contemplating the additional political and demographic changes which have had an impact on the maps of Europe since 1993, and changes in the concept of nationhood which have paradoxically, through their greater stress on internationality, also created a greater awareness of regionality and of the shaping forces of regional culture, not least on the unofficial, folk-cultural level. In the core of his paper Cox investigates in broader terms the interdependence of culture and national identity.

In the three articles from the British Isles and Ireland, Alexander Fenton (Edinburgh) discusses the conceptual development of a highland/lowland boundary, often called the "Highland Line" in Scotland; and both Alan Gailey (Belfast) and Patricia Lysaght (Dublin) examine the role of language, religion and culture in their relationship to national identity or identities in Ireland. From Gailey's northern perspective, the differing "national" identities of Roman Catholics and Protestants are of ethnic origin, and he interprets their conflicting outlooks in terms of historical background and geographical distribution, while also taking into account the strong influence of emigrant Irish communities, particularly in Britain and the USA. Lysaght naturally relates the history of Ireland, and especially its most recent phases, to the sense of identity within the Republic of Ireland and to the emergence of Ireland as a European state, while also drawing attention to the consequences of the partition of the island in 1920. It is illuminating and helpful to read these two carefully crafted accounts away from the usual political turmoil, shrill animosity and attitudinal rigidity.

The contributions from other European countries (many of them from the former Austro-Hungarian empire) demonstrate: a fascinating variety of approaches to the central theme. With a few exceptions, they view their subjects in contemporary terms rather than in the idealised nineteenth-century notions of aspiring but repressed nationhood. Even more impressive is the frequent emphasis on boundary-crossing multicultural phenomena in preference to divisive single-culture characteristics and frictions.

Such a brief summary cannot possibly do justice to the impressive substance and rich variety of the presentations in the volume under review. While all the basic concepts in its title--culture, boundary, national identity--become to a certain extent questionable as the result of these investigations, they nevertheless do not lose their powerful influence in the many ways in which their complex interrelationship is viewed by those most strongly affected by them. Divisions are thus inevitable, but there is in these papers also much evidence of the bridging of such division and of a clearer understanding of the ever-increasing impact of regional thinking on the building of larger political units, especially in the world of folk-cultural concerns, processes and products. The necessity to clarify the issues involved in, and the realities underlying, these observable outward manifestations for the purposes of atlas-making, both on a German and on a European level, thus felicitously opens new avenues in the ethnological study of geographical distributions and of the related historical stratification of folk-cultural phenomena. In spite of some recent evidence to the contrary, the hope of living together tolerantly, possibly even contentedly, in a multicultural Europe has, it seems, increased rather than decreased.