Toward a Research Program for Studying National Solidarity

Abstract

The concluding chapter sums up the theoretical argument and spells out the main structural issues to be considered in the empirical investigation of social clubs. The case studies presented in this book enact the meta-narrative of strangers-turned-friends through different patterns of sociability, different configurations in the relative position of participants and spectators, and different cultures of participation in civic and national life. But all employ the figure of the brother and the symbolism of fraternity in ways that link the social and cultural structures of national solidarity with male ascendancy. By studying from bottom-up institutional processes of public and collective intimacy, we can gain a better understanding of how national solidarity works at the micro-level and how it has remained the world’s dominant social glue from early to late modernity. The logic of clubbiness goes hand in hand with the practice of civic nationalism, contributing to both the spread of participatory democracy and its implementation as an exclusionary national attachment.