‘The Germans are Hydrophobes’: Germany and the Germans in the Shaping of French Identity

Abstract

Historians of national identity in Europe have frequently distinguished between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ patterns of belonging. In the ‘western’ form, the nation is defined politically, that is as a matter of explicit or implicit political choice by its individual citizens whose continued existence together as a nation, as Ernest Renan famously declared in 1882, was a tacit ‘daily plebiscite’.1 This makes one’s nationality, at least theoretically, a matter of political choice, defined by one’s determination to share the political and civil rights of citizenship with other citizens in the same state. It may take years or even a generation before some individuals or groups, such as foreigners and immigrant communities, are allowed to enjoy the full rights of citizenship, but their ethnicity, racial origins or religion are not an obstacle to that process. Indeed, in some cases, their new nationality is meant to transcend, if not efface altogether, such identities.