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Joint Princeton-Columbia Graduate Student Workshop
September 29 - October 1, 2000

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National Identity and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective

Supported by:

Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission
Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (Columbia University)
Center for International Studies (Princeton University)
Council on Regional Studies (Princeton University)
East Asian Studies Program (Princeton University)
Japan Foundation
Committee for European Studies (Princeton University)
East Central European Center (Columbia University)
Richard W. Weatherhead Fund, East Asian Institute (Columbia University)
Graduate School (Princeton University)
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Columbia University)
A virtual consensus on the constructed nature of modern states has emerged across the social sciences. Recently, attention has concentrated on two separate, but interacting processes: (1) the construction of identities underpinning the state, and (2) the impact of national identity on policy formation. We are organizing a graduate student workshop to bring together research on these interacting processes. This workshop both will foster an exchange of empirical findings and theoretical ideas on this relationship, and offer an opportunity for younger scholars to meet other researchers and to build a network of academic contacts. Research on national identity is being conducted in the social sciences, regional studies, and modern history, but there are few opportunities for graduate students in these fields to meet across disciplinary boundaries.

This workshop will offer such an opportunity by welcoming proposals from a range of disciplines. While the comparative nature of this topic will be stressed by including a maximal number of cross-national research projects, single-country projects will not be excluded a priori, except for research focused solely on the United States.

Current research on the relationship between postwar ethnic, national, and supranational identities and public policy concentrates on a number of themes. For example, much of the discussion concerning the influence of identity on policy is centered on security policy. The transformation of Eastern and Central Europe has provided a focus for debates about the importance of the institutional conditions for economic reforms and, thus, for the connections between identity and civil society. In addition, the resurrection of national identities long thought moribund has led to conflict around identity issues in numerous regions of the former Soviet Union and in the Balkans. For Western Europe, researchers have become interested in the effects of an increasing European integration on national and supranational identities. These are some of the specific substantive areas that seem most vibrant at the moment, and we expect the majority of proposals to address these kinds of issues. The format we have developed for this workshop will help to advance fellow graduate students' thinking on the relationship between identity and policy formation in general and on their specific research in particular.

March 2000