Cultural intimacy in International Relations

Abstract

In anthropology, the concept of cultural intimacy expresses those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of international criticism for the state, but are nevertheless used to provide insiders with a sense of national comfort, understanding, and self-reflexive, ontological security. Cultural intimacy helps illuminate how states present themselves internationally and how they understand themselves domestically. It can also explain the seeming discrepancies and contradictions between a state’s domestic and international identities. Cultural intimacy, in other words, explains the mutual reproduction of different levels of identity. Using the concept of cultural intimacy as a departure point, this article develops a framework for understanding incongruities in the domestic and international facades of state identity. We argue that there is a structural component to the level of discomfort caused by negative international appraisals of a given state. Structural position determines whether the domestic sources of cultural intimacy will cause shame, embarrassment, or guilt, and therefore also indicate how that negative international image will be handled by the state. The theoretical argument is illustrated with reference to the cases of Serbia, Croatia, and the Netherlands, and their distinctive responses to the Balkan conflict of the 1990s.