National consciousness is a feeling of belonging together with other people to a mutual ethnic, linguistic, historical, and cultural background. The way each individual feels inside the nation is essential for the country’s socio-economic development, the feeling of mutual respect, patriotism, safety, and the conduct toward other nations. Historically, the convergence of capitalism and print technologies together with an increasing variety of human languages formed each nation as a unique separated community. Print languages became a significant and useful means of communication and formed the languages-of-power in certain areas (Anderson, 2016). The creation of the country’s symbols, development of culture, preferences, blood connections, and cuisine participated in the national consciousness of people of different nationalities. For instance, the traditional cuisine of Scandinavian countries was predominantly based on fish as Vikings lives along the shore, and the soil in the north was not very fruitful (Opsahl, 2017). Several centuries later, people in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway still have a variety of national fish dishes.
Nationalism should be separated in sense from national consciousness, as nationalism represents the ideology that promotes the interests of a particular nation in sense of reaching its sovereignty and absence of active foreign interference. For instance, in the United States, the topic of national consciousness and nationalism has become central to the cultural identity and everyday life of its residents. Some events brought the country a strong feeling of unity and separation from other nations. One of the central events was, with no doubt, American Revolution between 1765 and 1791. The war had not only political but also a strong ideological subtext as all the parts of British America united against one enemy, the British Empire (Shaffer, 2017). The feeling of mutual goal and the threat to national safety and independence gathered the Americans to fight for their interests. The Revolution has formed the future of the country, nationalism, and national consciousness of every American citizen.
References
Anderson, B. (2016). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso Books.
Opsahl, E. (2017). Norwegian identity in the late Middle Ages, regnal or national?Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 51(1), 449-460.
Shaffer, A. H. (2017). The politics of history: Writing the history of the American Revolution, 1783–1815. Routledge.