Nation and Neighbourhood: Nationalist Mobilisation and Local Solidarities in the North of Ireland

Abstract

A central ambition and achievement of modern nationalism is to extend collective identifications beyond the local spaces of everyday life. Nationalists assert the primacy of the national as a scale of solidarity and identification which subsumes and transcends solidarity and identity at regional and local level. Nationalism achieves this despite the fact that the national scale usually extends far beyond the more intimate and densely connected spaces of everyday life. As Agnew puts it, ‘the spatial practices of everyday life have always maintained a local place specificity that defies sweeping up into national territorial containers.’1 Crucial to this achievement is the embedding of the national scale in the spaces of everyday life.