Imagining national solidarity: Strangers-turned-friends-turned-brothers

There is limited cultural analysis of the tropes and metaphors underlying the discourse of national solidarity. This article revisits three central approaches to bounded solidarity and connects them with distinctive tropes of personal relationships: solidarity-through-sameness encapsulated in the family metaphor; solidarity as an impersonal relationship between strangers; and solidarity as an extension of sociability encapsulated in the friendship metaphor. I examine these tropes in terms of collective perceptions of simultaneous and mythic time and a meta-narrative of salvation. The national imagination can be distinguished from civic and ethnic forms of belonging by its enactment of a dual transformation from strangers to friends and from newfound friends to rediscovered brothers of a timeless and primordial tribe. While much of the nationhood literature assumes a causal pathway from national identity to solidarity, this fraternisation of friendship points to a reverse route from trust between compatriots to feelings of loyalty to the nation.