Jack Citrin Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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In the next phase of your research career you turned to this question of what is the American identity and what are the threats to it. Talk a little about that, and the time in which you were directed to this research.
I began that research in the late eighties, but it grew out of an earlier interest. A graduate student class I took with Ernie Haas -- you may have taken it yourself: "Nationalism and Imperialism" -- if you remember, he talked about different models of nationalism, civic versus ethnic, and various [other] things, and then the future of the nation state. A lot of people are hostile to nationalism and the nation, but I think I had, because of my background, a more positive outlook, certainly on the American nation state, because it was the nation that allowed me to, in some sense, become a citizen. It was not unique, I could have done this in Canada, too, but I didn't, I did it here.
What happened was that in the late eighties there began to be a political concern over immigration, the impact of Asian and Hispanic immigration to the United States, and whether this would, in some sense, change the conception of American nationhood. I became very intrigued by this and wanted to study it empirically. And so, starting in 1990, I've had more than a decade of research and publications focusing, first of all, on the historical constructions of American identity and the competing visions of America, and then the impact of waves of immigration, and then finally, what is the meaning of the current wave of immigration and the occasional backlash against it. Is American remaining, and can it retain what may be a somewhat idealized image of itself as a country where people can come as strangers and then over a couple of generations become citizens and identifiers, and Americans in some psychological and cultural sense?
And what was that construction of American identity that emerged as you put these pieces together?
There are essentially two competing conceptions, and historians debate the relative strength of these two images. One is a liberal cosmopolitan, inclusive, individualistic conception, and the other is an ethnocentric conception in which kind of certain groups, initially Anglo-Protestants, then later European, and then [others] became the paragons of Americanism and American identity.
I think there's a legitimate discussion of the gap between rhetoric and reality, ideals and practice, but I believe that the end of World War II and the Civil Rights Movement, and the change in the immigration law in 1965, represented the triumph of the liberal conception of American identity in law and in official ideology. Ironically, it became challenged by multiculturalism. My new book, also written with David Sears, which we hope to publish next year, is called American Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism. It looks at a different challenge to this liberal individualist conception of American identity, that anyone can belong provided you accept a certain set of values and cultural practices.
In some of this work, which I've looked at, you focus as a political scientist on what you call self-categorization effect and normative content. Tell us how you look at the process of making America work, and what the evidence is showing.
The evidence shows that for minority groups and for immigrant groups, the self-categorization changes generationally, and there's a movement from a self-categorization in which your ethnic origins and your country of origin classification is psychological very important to one in which it loses that significance and has only a nostalgic symbolic significance. So, the emphasis on Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans -- people may talk that way today, but given intermarriage and social mobility, all of that white ethnic self-designation has eroded and is not significant.
Over generations.
Over generations. If you look even at data about Hispanic Americans, you see there, too, a big difference in terms of this preferred self-categorization from new immigrants, second-generation immigrants, and people whose immigrant origins are far more distant.
The other thing we find is linguistic assimilation. One of the things in terms of the popular content of what it means to be an American, speaking English is way at the top of most people's lists. Actually, speaking the country's language is the top of most of the lists cross-nationally, as well -- I've been looking at some European data. But what you find is despite fears and concerns expressed by some writers on the topic, by the third generation most immigrants, wherever they come from, are monolingual in English, have trouble talking to their grandparents in their native language. It was my own experience. My grandparents spoke only Russian, really; my parents were bilingual; I have a smattering of Russian, my child has no Russian.
In this process I know that you think upward mobility is important, and so the role of the university becomes very important in the adoption of policies that help further the assimilation that's crucial to American national identity. Talk a little about that, and where you think the university gets it wrong and gets it right.
Well, two things have changed between, say, the 1920s, that wave of immigration, and the contemporary period. In that era Americanization policies existed and assimilation was not a dirty word. Today in most university circles, assimilation is, at best, viewed ambiguously, and maintaining one's ethnic heritage is of value, it's proclaimed in various ideologies of multiculturalism. So, the notion of one nation and a prior commitment to the nation rather than sustaining one's ethnic traditions, culture -- I think the word "culture" is thrown around very, very loosely -- is in certain segments of the university the dominant ideology. As Troy Duster pointed out years ago in his study of diversity at Berkeley, rather than the university encouraging people to think in terms of an overarching identity, whether it's a national identity or even an intellectual identity, the official ideology (with which I have openly disagreed, so this is not news to anyone who knows me) is the opposite: is to sustain difference and to value difference. Having grown up in a world of differences I certainly can appreciate differences, but my experience was that people from all these different backgrounds and experience thought of themselves as members of a common enterprise.
I think that's the challenge in any country where there are religious, linguistic or ethnic differences, and I think it's something that doesn't happen automatically. There's a lot of research in psychology that shows we prefer to be with people like ourselves, that we tend to favor people like ourselves. So, how do you define the self, and how do you categorize people like you? The nation should not be the only unit of solidarity, but if you want people to feel that there's an obligation to share, there's an obligation to provide for people who have less than you, who are different from you, etc., then if that's not grounded in some sense of common membership, I think it's very difficult to sustain, particularly in the face of everything else in the society that says "look out for number one."
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See the interview with Ernst Haas on "Science and Progress in International Relations" (2000)