Towards a more concrete imagined community: How Welfare State and public policies influence national belonging and its changes in France, Belgium and the UK.

This paper will aim to analyze in detail how public policies – and in particular those related to the Welfare state and its transformation – influence the way citizens feel about their nation. National feelings are considered, at least in Western European States, as basic components of political attitudes: they strongly influence voting behavior (both as determinant of turn-out and political choice) and they participate of what is called “diffuse support”. In the literature, national identities are mainly apprehended with social psychological concepts witch emphasized a personal construction of in and out groups mostly considered in cultural term. Alternatively national identities are analyzed as historical constructs driven by political events and again cultural dynamics. When directly asked about their own feelings, citizens usually produce highly standardized answers that reflect their long term socialization by what Billig rightly called the ’universal ideology of banal nationalism’. However, when asked about other topics, in particular European integration, European citizens account for their attachment to their nations in terms that reveal, for some of them, especially working class people, the influence of public policies in national feelings. This hypothesis will be elaborated thanks to the secondary analysis of a series of 24 focus groups conducted in France, (French speaking Belgium) and the UK in 2006 on attitudes towards European integration (Duchesne, Haegel et alii 2010). In order to stick more closely to the workshop program, I will analyze more particularly the role of welfare policies and welfare reforms on national identification. Using secondary literature that will allow me to contrast the three countries’ welfare states, I’ll provide a detailed comparison of the three national cases, checking if and how these differences are reflected in the different ways citizens of the three countries speak of their nation. Duchesne, S., Haegel, F., Frazer, E., Van Ingelgom, V., Garcia, G. & Frognier, A.P., “Europe between integration and globalization. Social differences and national frames in the analysis of focus groups conducted in France, Francophone Belgium and the UK”, Politique Européenne, n°30, p.67-106.