Don’t be deceived: referenda seldom tell us much about national identity

Referenda on belonging are not a new phenomenon in modern European history. Neither is suspense about their outcomes. In a series of frontier plebiscites held in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, for example, voter sentiment often fluctuated dramatically. Jim Bjork writes that negative campaigning played a strikingly prominent role, raising the prospect that many voters were not affirming a positive national identity but rather voting against incorporation into states that they distrusted, due to past personal experience or fears of future developments. He argues that today too fluctuations and ambiguities in indicators of national, as well as European, identities, show that these provide neither clear nor stable signposts for predicting referenda results.