Publication of National Days book
The Institute of Governance is pleased to announce, on St Andrew’s Day 2009, the publication of a new book ‘National Days: constructing and mobilizing national identity’, edited by David McCrone, and Gayle McPherson (Glasgow Caledonian University).
Like national identity, national days involve a process of ‘othering’, saying who you are, as much as who you are not. We examine why Scotland and Ireland have stronger national days than England, and why the English seem belatedly to have discovered St George. If some countries celebrate it far more strongly than their neighbours, why is that?Why should near-neighbours, Sweden, Norway and Finland, have such different traditions of national remembering? What if a national day and its associations are so tied into a previous political regime that they have become an embarrassment? Germany, Italy and South Africa have undergone radical political changes in the last 50 years, and with these, complex processes of forgetting and remembering and indeed the self torment of “lest not we forget”.This is a vital aspect to reconstructing national identities. If national days have considerable political significance, whether positive or negative, they are also of major economic worth.Just as ‘heritage’ is not simply, some might say not even, a matter of history, but of markets, so ‘national days’ have the potential to be major icons of national tourism. The book has chapters on England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy and Valencia in Spain, as well as chapters analysing the significance of national days as a cultural, political and social phenomenon.
For further details, and the introductory chapter, see
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/0230236618/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-page
This page was published on 30 November 2009