Don’t be deceived: referenda seldom tell us much about national identity

Bjork, Jim (2016) Don’t be deceived: referenda seldom tell us much about national identity. LSE Brexit (02 Feb 2016). Website.

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Abstract

Referenda on belonging are not a new phenomenon in modern European history. Neither is suspense about their outcomes. In a series of frontier plebiscites held in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, for example, voter sentiment often fluctuated dramatically. Jim Bjork writes that negative campaigning played a strikingly prominent role, raising the prospect that many voters were not affirming a positive national identity but rather voting against incorporation into states that they distrusted, due to past personal experience or fears of future developments. He argues that today too fluctuations and ambiguities in indicators of national, as well as European, identities, show that these provide neither clear nor stable signposts for predicting referenda results.

Item Type:	Online resource (Website)
Official URL:	http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/
Additional Information:	© 2016 The Author(s)
Divisions:	LSE
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D501 World War I D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D901 Europe (General) H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) > JN101 Great Britain
Date Deposited:	11 Apr 2017 08:39
Last Modified:	11 Dec 2024 15:13
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/73348

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