Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations (Cambridge Studies in International Relations, Series Number 9)

Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations is the first psychological study of nation-building, nationalism, mass mobilisation and foreign policy processes. In a bold exposition of identification theory, William Bloom relates mass psychological processes to international relations. He draws on Freud, Mead, Erikson, Parsons and Habermas to provide a rigorously argued answer to the longstanding theoretical problem of how to aggregate from individual attitudes to mass behaviour. With a detailed analysis of the nation-building experience of preindustrial France and England, William Bloom applies the theory to international relations.