National Myths: Constructed Pasts, Contested Presents ed. by Gérard Bouchard (review)

Our political identities and identifications are formed via processes at once communal and deeply psychological, the result of multifaceted historical, sociological, and cultural forces. As Seymour Martin Lipset (1959) wrote many years ago, the stability of nations, particularly nations existing through democratic consent, depends on effectiveness and legitimacy. Effectiveness refers to the performance of the state, primarily its ability to establish conditions for economic development and distribution. Legitimacy is more symbolic in nature, reflecting the support of the population for key institutions of society and how the political process prioritizes and addresses major issues of concern. Lipset underscored that, while effectiveness relies on instrumental assessment, legitimacy is more affective and tied to the maintenance of a common “secular political culture.” As Gérard Bouchard and his fellow contributors explore in this engaging collection of essays, a fruitful framework for understanding this symbolic and emotional connection between individuals and their political system is in terms of national myths, or the beliefs, values, meanings, memories, and ideals that are associated with the project of the state.

This volume consists of sixteen chapters, all but one of them examining the mythic dimensions of national identity in a specific country. The last chapter by Bouchard synthesizes themes from the constituent chapters and highlights topics for researchers going forward. The continents of North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America are all represented in the book, although with certain selection biases. Canada gets two chapters; Japan has its own chapter and is also the focus of a chapter on Chinese attitudes; Australia, an interesting case for this kind of analysis, is omitted. In his brief Introduction, Bouchard explains that authors received free rein in regard to their definition of the concept of national myths as well as their focus on particular questions of mythic origins, functioning, impact, and evolution. While the result serves the editor’s aim of conveying “the richness” of this field of inquiry, it also presents intellectual and methodological inconsistencies bound to limit the collection’s appeal for some audiences.

Bouchard’s own chapter on Quebec, which he portrays as “the small nation with the big dream,” is valuable not only for its detailed discussion of the collective imagination of this Francophone Canadian province, whose national strivings resulted in two referenda on sovereignty in 1980 and 1995, but also for his summary of the sociological approach to analyzing the concept of myth. Bouchard explains that myths are distinctive in four respects: they are complex hybrids of contending elements—fact and fiction, reason and emotion, conscious and unconscious beliefs; they have meaning in terms of both a particular social and historical setting and grander universal symbols and narratives; they possess an almost sacred, self-perpetuating power; and they can function either to promote or to inhibit social change. Bouchard locates all these themes in Quebec’s mythic heritage, although two “master myths” have wielded transcendent power during the last two hundred years—Quebec as “the dominated humiliated nation,” and Quebec as “the fragile threatened cultural minority.” Currently, disparate new myths are emerging in which the forces (and attractions) of globalization appear to be undermining Quebec’s historical preoccupation with nationality, yet without replacing this preoccupation with a coherent, vitalizing alternative for popular consumption.

Allan Smith’s chapter on the nation of Canada offers a telling companion piece to this focus on Quebec. Quebecois resistance to full absorption into the larger Canadian state project has not detracted from the myth making of English Canada so much as it has, in Smith’s words, contributed to the construction of a national “role as custodian and overseer of a power-allocating apparatus” devoted to maintaining the “correct balance” between centralized authority and subnational self-determination. This defining tension, in turn, has placed Canada, practically and psychologically, in the company of other countries—among them Spain, the United Kingdom, and Belgium—that all face predicaments of governance regarding “nations within nations.”

Ian Tyrrell from the University of New South Wales, Australia, writes...