Identity at Home and Abroad: (Kin)state Nation-Building Projects and Identity-Making in Diaspora - The Case of Slovakia and Slovak Diaspora

Present challenges stemming from migration, globalism, and the highly interconnected world, underline the importance of identities not only for individuals but for social and political life too. For the past few decades, identity has become a significant concept in social sciences and important political issue in many contemporary societies. Today (collective) identities seem to form a central concept in both theoretical and empirical studies of social movements, political mobilisation and democratic legitimacy. Many scholars use this concept to explain different aspects of mobilization and the role of cultural meanings in the movements and nation-building projects. Recent literature predominately considers identities as fluid, multidimensional, and personalized social constructions that reflect socio-historical contexts. In addition, scholars have acknowledged that “collective identity is a banner” under which people can be mobilized for different types of action such as political, military or other action (Jasper-McGarry, 2015). This paper investigates identity-making, identity formation and identity performance in multilevel contexts. Paper examines (kin)state national building projects in Slovakia and identity-making and identity performance in Slovak diaspora living in Serbia. The main focus is on the different state policies and strategies of national identity formation in Slovakia and on the intensity of different collective identifications, the relationships between identifications with different collectives, and reference objects as the content and meaning of identity in Slovak diaspora living in Serbia. This study indicates that Slovak state deployed different nation-building projects and strategies in different point of times in order to create a common Slovak national identity. Secondly, study shows that members of Slovak diaspora living in the contemporary Serbia perform multiple identities, which coexists in non-conflictual way and vary in their importance for respondents. However, study reveals that Slovak national identity and other collective identities together with Slovak-ness are perceived in different ways on state level and among ordinary people. Further, different collective identities such as national, ethnic, language and religious have divergent emotional intensity for respondents. Nation-building projects and identity-making and performing processes are here investigated from the perspective of political science. This study applies mixed research design, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. Qualitative methods included interviews and quantitative methods included web-based survey and traditional survey. First contribution of this study is that defines the main terms and concepts in a coherent way and secondly, that these definitions are deployed in empirical study in methodologically appropriate manner. Studying nation-building processes and identifications of diasporas/minorities can contribute to our understanding of identity-making, identity formation and identification processes, and enhance our knowledge in nationalism studies and identity politics, especially in mapping so called popular nationalisms of ordinary people in opposition to the state, formal nationalism. This study suggests further examines on collective identities between minorities and majorities at the same time in order to gain better and new understandings of crossing and shifting boundaries, intersections of different statuses and 'imagined communities' and existence of different nationalisms on the ground.