War, Shame, and Time: Pastoral Governance and National Identity in England and America

Abstract

This essay examines the emergence of national identity in international society through the curious example of “National Humiliation Day,” a special holiday proclaimed by the head of state in wartime and celebrated in local churches throughout the nation. It argues that the observation of humiliation days produces the nation as the sacred political community because it figures both problems and solutions in a “national” time that is radically different from the dynastic and ecclesiastical times that defined medieval Europe. Unlike those who suggest that the Peace of Westphalia instituted a dramatic shift to an international system of secular states, the essay argues that national humiliation days demonstrate an enduring overlap between the transcendental world order of religion and the temporal world order of territorial states. National humiliation days share not just an invocation of God in politics, but the continual invocation of the nation as the sacred political community. Thus, rather than being the result of a secularizing process, the nation is continually constructed through pastoral governance. The essay's second argument is more theoretical. It is common in constructivism and critical international relations theory to argue that nations are constructed through the production of foreign enemies in a clear division of a virtuous inside from a vicious outside. National humiliation day texts help us question this understanding of identity politics because they concentrate their critique on the national self rather than a foreign Other; the self here “Others” itself in a productive and contingent identity politics that allows more space for criticism and resistance. Yet the resistance generated in these humiliation holiday texts is not to nationalism as a category of identity per se, but to specific oppressive forms of the nation. Thus the essay concludes that the nation is generated not just through pastoral governance, but also through resistance to pastoral governance.