Cahan 2019 Nations and Nationalism

Nations and Nationalism 25 (2), 2019, 478–498.
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12423
National identity and the limits of

constructivism in international relations
theory: a case study of the Suez Canal
JEAN AXELRAD CAHAN
Department of Philosophy, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA
ABSTRACT. Constructivism in most of its variants emphasises the creation of cir-

cumstances and the social construction of reality. In international relations theory (IR),
it also emphasises the establishment of international regimes. The Suez Canal and its
governing regime, established at a high point of European nationalism and imperialism
in the nineteenth century, are explored as a test case. I argue that, while the early history
of the Canal is illuminated by a constructivist approach, maintenance of the regime to
govern it involved military intervention and debt restructuring. Military force, balance
of power considerations and economic interests all have to be invoked to explain the
later history of the Canal, that is, factors usually stressed by the realist school. A combi-
nation of realist and constructivist approaches is recommended. The paper is also critical
of certain constructivist concepts of national identity.
KEYWORDS: constructivism, Middle East, national identity and foreign policy, real-
ism, theories of nationalism
There are premeditated and unpremeditated cities.

(Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground)
Introduction
Perhaps because of the continuing fascination of such thinkers as Nietzsche,

Kant and Foucault, or because of postwar successes in promoting international
institutions, dialogues between cultures and a more Kantian ‘culture of anar-
chy’,1 research approaches based on the premise that national (as well as indi-
vidual) identities are products of human construction and intention, and not
of natural or even historical evolution, continue to flourish. This has taken place
in a multiplicity of fields, ranging from philosophical ethics to security studies to
international relations and the study of nations and nationalism. In this paper, I
shall be concerned with constructivism as an approach in international rela-
tions, but with special attention to the question of national identity. More than
© The author(s) 2018. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2018
National identity and the limits of constructivist
theory in international relations theory 479
one leading constructivist scholar has characterised national identity as the

‘central puzzle’ of constructivism (Lebow 2004; Zehfuss 2001).
The constructivist view with regard to national identity holds, principally,
that nations and nationalism, which emerged as such in the second half of
the nineteenth century, were and continue to be largely the result of conscious
construction, and sometimes fabrication, by governing classes, especially in
Europe. On this view, further, treaties and policies in the aftermath of World
War I contributed to the establishment of states in Africa and the Middle East
which were highly artificial and were often clients of or dependent upon
European states. What would be preferable, it is implied and sometimes de-
clared explicitly, is a world society, or at least as few borders as possible,
and the construction of a more cosmopolitan and hybrid conception of per-
sonal and societal identity.2 Yet the resurgence of nationalism in Europe shows
that, even or especially in the face of cosmopolitan choices, national identity
remains a topic of enormous concern to many people. As Miller (1995) and
Connor (1994) have argued, there are good reasons for this. Referring to a
range of theories that minimise or ignore ethnic and kinship bases of national
identity, Connor (1994: 74) writes: ‘[All of these approaches] can be faulted
chiefly for their failure to reflect the emotional depth of ethnonational identity
and the mass sacrifices that have been made in its name’.
It therefore seems timely to revisit the promise of constructivism. In this pa-
per, I explore constructivism as a two-fold claim: about the feasibility of inter-
national institutions and cosmopolitan ideals, and as a claim about the
intentional construction of identities and interests.3
Belief in the constructed nature of national identity received a large impetus
in recent decades through its articulation by the ‘invention of tradition’ school
of history and social anthropology.4 This school, characterised by the preemi-
nent scholar of nations and nationalism, Anthony D. Smith, as ‘modernist’, in-
cludes Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, John Breuilly and
numerous others. It has been both enlarged and paralleled in international re-
lations theory (IR) by a somewhat different group of scholars who designate
themselves as consructivists. The IR constructivists are often inspired by the
modernists but also have some different concerns. Drawing from sociology,
social and cultural anthropology, and social psychology, and freely appro-
priating fragments of philosophy of language, mind and history, constructiv-
ists in IR have put forward many ideas and theses. Although there are
several types of constructivist theory,5 just as Smith’s modernists in social
science vary on certain issues, it is fair to say that most authors who see
themselves as part of this school include an insistence on the primacy of ide-
ational rather than material aspects of identity; emphasis on the efficacy of
international regimes and on shared understandings between states and
societies; a preference for narrative explanations; and, perhaps most funda-
mentally, a belief in the creation of circumstances rather than submission
to them, and an appeal to the power of political intentionality broadly
conceived.6
480 Jean Axelrad Cahan
Using the example of the major material transformation represented by the

construction of the Suez Canal (for reasons given below), I argue that national
identity is not only the result of intentional choice and construction (or manip-
ulation), but equally the result of unintended and even irrational-seeming his-
torical events and processes. It is interesting to note that Smith (2004), too,
viewed Egypt as a particularly useful test case for theorising about national
identity. The Canal began in 1859 as a cosmopolitan idea, though an imperial-
ist one, with the acquiescence of the Egyptian state. Its functioning was later
interrupted by unanticipated, violent insurrections which drastically altered
both Egyptian perception of the imperialist powers and, to a lesser extent,
the latter’s perception of Egypt. Thus, during this process (or processes), the
Self and Other – terms much favoured by constructivists – were on the one
hand, Egyptians versus Europeans and a purported international order, but
on the other hand, different ethnic and social groups and classes within
Egypt. After another seventy years of international conflict over the canal dur-
ing the two World Wars, and revolutionary, internal changes within Egypt, the
canal became a symbol of an altered Egyptian and Arab national self-con-
sciousness, and in 1956, it was nationalised by the Egyptian state. Along the
way, norms and institutions governing the neutrality of the canal fell underwa-
ter, and were revived again, on numerous occasions. Thus while overall the his-
tory of the Suez Canal tends to support the constructivist conviction that
ideational factors, and especially the concept of identity, ought to be given
greater weight in analysing the relations between states than realists have been
wont to do, this history also supports the realist reflex of concentrating on ma-
terial factors – military and economic power and balance of threats – and re-
garding international institutions as quite flimsy. The constructivist claim
that international institutions survive because the nation-states involved have
taken on new identities and beliefs, such that they come to see themselves as
‘partners in some common enterprise’ (Hopf 1998: 191), and that these new
and improved identities reproduce themselves, may hold in some cases, espe-
cially post-World War II. But in other cases, including that of the Suez Canal,
international institutions or agreements survived, ultimately, because one
nation or other used military force to uphold the principles which those
institutions or regimes embodied.7
Criticism of constructivism within IR has tended to focus on questions of
international security or the general relationship between cultural and ideolog-
ical factors as against material ones. The work of Mearsheimer (1994),
Keohane (1988) and Barkin (2010) figures here. With regard to national iden-
tity, criticism has come less from IR scholars and more from theorists of na-
tions and nationalism. Perhaps the most prominent critic has been Anthony
D. Smith, though others, such as Motyl (1999) and Miller (1995), have also
provided extended critiques (Ozkirimli 2005). In numerous books and essays,
Smith (1991, 2004) argued that what he called the ‘modernist’ perspective fails
to recognise that ‘a vivid sense of common ethnicity’ and a non-aggressive ‘na-
tional sentiment’ are necessary precursors to fuller nationhood, which includes
civic, legal and political dimensions. An extension of the objection to modern-

ism was Smith’s critique of the ‘activist’ conception of nation formation, which
places too much emphasis on political, especially state, action and not enough
on cultural and other non-political factors. A basis of shared ethnicity, or
culture, which is the prerequisite for nation formation, Smith (2004) believed,
requires historical memory, myths of shared origins, language and religion,
and other ‘components’, all of which emerge initially beyond the precincts of
the political sphere or state. Moreover – and here lies a similarity to my own
critique of constructivism – the development of a shared culture requires long
periods of time: ‘… to grasp the nature and forms of ethnicity and nationalism,
we need to extent our analysis over long time-spans … [M]odernists [read Con-
structivists] foreshorten the necessary time-span …’(Smith 2004: 20). Rather
than utilising notions of invention and imagination, Smith (2004: 24) argued,
we should think in terms of reinterpretation and reconstruction of nations.
This is certainly true in the case of Egyptian nationhood. It took 100 years
for Egyptian national identity to shift from that of a society and state which
was relatively accommodating to European and Ottoman imperial powers,
to one which was and saw itself as self-determining and playing a leadership
role in the pan-Arab movement. During this time, at least two major violent
uprisings occurred (1882 and 1919), in large part driven by socio-economic
dissatisfactions. These uprisings helped shift both popular and elite attitudes
toward greater desire for national independence, but even then various leaders
and sub-groups held ideological positons characterised by continued toleraton
of British protectorate status. In the terminology of Brubaker (1996), Egypt
around 1919 would count as a ‘nationalizing state’. With the rise and fall of
Gamel Nasser, roughly between 1950 and 1970, Egypt’s identity shifted again,
and the Arab Spring of 2011 has brought further changes, though the outcome
of these is very unclear.
Before entering into the empirical case study of the Suez Canal, I would like
to make a few additional comments on some theoretical issues relating to
national identity as discussed by some leading constructivists. For each
theoretical point, I will relate my comment to the particular case of the Suez
Canal explored in this paper.
Some theoretical questions about national identity
(i) An ontological concern
In general, the relations among (national) identities, ideas and national inter-
ests, as understood by constructivists, are quite unclear. There is a pervasive ten-
dency to use inflationary language. The term ‘identity’, which in my view should
refer to a property of an integral whole, or to an entity, such as a conscious
person or self-conscious national group, striving for integrity, is often used to
refer to what are merely partial policies or attitudes. Consider these examples:
In discussing balance of threat explanations used by realists, Ted Hopf ar-

gues that if these were fully persuasive, then the post-World War II era would
have seen more effort directed at balancing against the United States than the
Soviet Union. In fact, Hopf argues, France, Britain, Germany and the United
States itself perceived the Soviet Union as the principal threat to the world sys-
tem and peace in Europe. This happened, not because of the objectively ob-
servable behaviour of the Soviet Union, as realists might argue, but because
of the (state) identities of each of the parties; the identity of each state was
‘rooted in domestic sociocultural milieus [that] produced understandings of
one another based on differences in identity and practice’ (Hopf 1998: 187).
Each state constructed or interpreted the Soviet threat in its own way, depend-
ing on its internal sociocultural environment. For example, the United States
(presumably because it was a paradigm of a capitalist nation) constructed
the Soviet threat predominantly as a communist one ‘because of the latter’s
communist identity’, and therefore other possible Soviet identities ‘such as
Asian, Stalinist, Russian or authoritarian threat, were not operative’ (Hopf
1998: 187). Hopf further suggests that because the US constructed Soviet iden-
tity strictly as communist, it further constructed threats in the Third World
along these lines. On the other hand, because France did not understand Soviet
identity as primarily a communist one, but rather as a Russian one (with a
strong Russia all too close to Western Europe), it was not prepared to venture
against the Soviet Union for anti-communist reasons. Moreover, France and
other European states tended to view Third World identities in economic or
colonial terms rather than ideological ones. Hopf (1998: 193) concludes: ‘Un-
derstanding another state as one identity, rather than another, has conse-
quences for the possible actions of both’. But one may ask: are the differing
interpretations of the Soviet Union presented by Hopf really equivalent to dif-
ferent Soviet identities, or do they refer simply to various facets of one and the
same identity, which did not substantially change over many decades?
In a similar way, Barnett (1993) has argued that varying constructions and
interpretations of Arab countries’ roles led, during the first Gulf War in 1991,
to the calculations and miscalculations that were made. By roles Barnett seems
to mean identities; it is in any case unclear how he thinks they might differ. Ac-
cording to Barnett, Saddam Hussein believed that Saudi Arabia’s pan-Arab
role/identity would prevent it from permitting the United States to base troops
on its soil. Saudi Arabia’s own conception of its role/identity as a sovereign
state, however, led it to decide otherwise.8
In each of these cases, rather than saying that identity was interpreted in a
certain way, shouldn’t we say more accurately that a threat or power position
came to be construed in different ways by different countries? Surely Soviet
identity, even as understood by the government of the United States, extended
far beyond communist ideology and included the complexities of Russian in-
terrelationships with other nationalities within the Soviet Union, together with
their many centuries of interwoven histories, and with other major communist
states. Similarly, Saudi Arabia in 1991 did not have multiple identities, or even
roles, as Barnett holds, but held within itself competing beliefs, interests and
preferences, as does any living individual or community continuously
confronted with the need for decision and action. A new identity does not
necessarily arise every time a new threat is perceived.
This is not merely a matter of choice of words that makes no difference. It is
precisely a matter of semantics in that words indicate an underlying ontology –
they are intended to refer to the entities that one believes make up the world,
and eventually the nature of those entities. Constructivists frequently point
with pride to their concern with ontology and epistemology, in contrast to
other IR approaches.9 I would like to reserve the term ‘national identity’ for
a deeper, more complex and more slow-moving phenomenon than the con-
structivist authors mentioned above suggest. Identities, whether national or in-
dividual, do not shift within a short span of time. Such shifts emerge from
drawn-out processes, both internal and external. To say: ‘The same state is,
in effect, many different actors in world politics, and different states behave
differently toward other states, based on the identities of each …’ (Hopf
1998: 193), does not illuminate a state’s intentions or explain its actions. On
the contrary, it foreshortens what should be a lengthy historical, socio-political
and cultural narrative or puts it in capsule form. For the state is made up,
apart from its government and leaders, by innumerable classes, subgroups
and coalitions of various kinds, each with its own attitudes and beliefs, each
of which may have developed over long periods of time. To assume a unitary
identity of the nation-state, and to conflate certain policies, perspectives or
plans with the category of identity, can be seriously misleading, both intellectu-
ally (in understanding what happened and to whom) and as a preparation for
political action.
(ii) Where is national identity located?
Assuming, as constructivists do, that identities are the source of and consti-
tuted by ideas and interests, it may be asked: who holds the ideas and perceives
the interests that constitute a national, intersubjective conception of identity?
Adler (1997: 337) argues that a national, intersubjective conception is arrived
at through competition of ideas and interests in the ‘political process’. He
states that ‘national interests are intersubjective understandings about what it
takes to advance power, influence and worth, that survive the political process,
given the distribution of power and knowledge in a society’. He then argues
that constructivism is well-suited to the ‘empirical study of the conditions that
make one particular intersubjective conception of interest [and identity] prevail
over others’. In other words, constructivism can explain ‘which interpretations
and whose interpretations become social reality’ (Adler 1997: 337). Presum-
ably in each society, the political process will be different, but this left unclar-
ified. More importantly, it remains unclear how this explanation differs from
one that uses coalition-building, exchanging concrete favours in the form of
legislative logrolling and so on, that realists might use.10 Moreover, it is
doubtful whether the questions of who holds the predominant ideas about na-
tional identity and interests, and how they came to predominate, are ones
which can be answered purely empirically by studying ‘the political process’.
They are at least in part philosophical or conceptual questions about collec-
tive, social epistemology: what counts as a group that has knowledge of certain
ideas and interests, and commitment to them, and how do the members of the
group relate to one another? (Bird 2014).
No doubt the decision by the Egyptian khedive to make land and other con-
cessions to the French government for construction of the Suez Canal can be
read as resting on his interpretation of his role and authority as khedive, espe-
cially in relation to the Ottoman Empire. In this rather limited way, it
amounted to an intersubjective understanding between himself and his subject
population, as well as between himself and his Ottoman overlord. But as the
urban uprisings of 1882 show, the authority of the khedive, the unity of the
Egyptian state, and Egyptian national identity, were not viewed in the same
way by all the inhabitants of Egypt. They were not only more fragile than they
seemed, they may have been illusory.
(iii) Material and ideational aspects of identity
Unlike Emanuel Adler, another major proponent of constructivism, Wendt

(1999), does extensively address epistemological and ontological questions re-
lating to national identity. His main concern is to demonstrate the dependence
of collective identity and perceptions of national identity on external sources of
ideas, in other words ‘the constitutive effects of culture on identities and inter-
ests’ (Wendt 1999: 177). A state or individual cannot have a property, or an
identity, without others attributing that property or identity to them. For ex-
ample, a state which sees itself as a regional hegemon may start interfering
in the internal affairs of another state in the region. But if this other state does
not recognise the first state as the legitimate hegemon, its actions will be
interpreted merely as aggression, and not as the intervention of an actual heg-
emon with certain responsibilities. ‘The truth conditions for identity claims are
communal rather than individual’ (Wendt 1999: 177).
The key element here is that of recognition. While Wendt mentions Hegel’s
famous master–slave dialectic, the locus classicus of recognition theory, on sev-
eral occasions, his main source seems to be George Herbert Mead’s theories of
symbolic interactionism and discussions of Self and Other. In any case, he
maintains that both internal cognitive and motivational states and external,
shared or cultural knowledge are required to produce human action and the
explanation of action. ‘This willingness to define the Self by reference to how
Others see it is a key link in the chain by which culture constitutes agents, since
unless agents appropriate culture as their own it cannot get into their heads
and move them …’ (Wendt 1999: 180). This is relevant for IR in that ‘culture
is deeply embedded in how both statesmen and scholars understand the nature
of politics’, though there will be differences of opinion as to ‘how significant
this cultural superstructure is in governing state behavior, relative to the rump

material conditions …’ (Wendt 1992: 190). Nonetheless, interactions between
Self and Other are determinative of international relations: ‘Managing this
process is the basic problem of foreign policy’ (Wendt 1999: 21). Elsewhere
he states that ‘the daily life of international politics is an ongoing process of
states taking identities in relation to others, casting them into corresponding
counter-identities, and playing out the result …’ (Wendt 1999: 21). Under-
standing identity is primarily a matter of understanding the ideas behind them,
and Wendt (1999: 24) shares the philosophical idealists’ view that ‘material
forces are secondary, significant insofar as they are constituted with particular
meanings for actors’. For political realists and neo-liberals, identities are rela-
tively fixed and unchanging, and therefore when states act selfishly, ‘nothing
more is going on than the attempt to realize selfish ends’ (Wendt 1999: 36).
For constructivists, on the other hand, ‘actions continually produce and
reproduce conceptions of Self and Other, and as such identities and interests
are always in process …’ (Wendt 1999: 36).
One problem here – also suggested above in Section (i) – is that changing an
idea is not equivalent to changing an identity. On Wendt’s view, identities must
be changing so rapidly and frequently that a political actor would have a great
deal of difficulty determining what the current condition of anyone’s – state,
leader or civil society – identity is. Yet identities cannot be so much in flux that
a master and a slave, for example, cannot be reliably identified as such.
Wendt criticises Marxist theory and other socio-economic approaches for
failing to see that socio-economic structures and relations are permeated by
ideas and cultural ‘factors’. Whether or not this is true, it is evident in the history
of the Suez Canal that class relations in some basic socio-economic sense had a
definite structure during the ten-year period of construction. It was a structure
which initially recapitulated earlier stages of Egyptian history and the Egyptian
practice of canal construction. In the course of the construction process, how-
ever, the machines and technology available changed dramatically, as did the
character of the workforce and the workers’ interrelations. To characterise
the totality of the Canal construction process as a material or economic one,
even though it relied significantly on scientific and technological ideas; had a
certain social and political structure; and involved workers from a great variety
of cultures; is not obviously wrong. If Wendt’s aim is to ‘clarify the value-added
of a constructivist relative to a rationalist approach’, it is not evident what that
value added is, since the historical materialist, like the IR realist, can to a great
extent recognise the effectiveness of ideas, culture and social relations, without
conceding the primacy of economic or material activity.
Creating circumstances: construction and history of the Suez Canal
As long ago as 1988, in his much-cited article ‘International Institutions: Two

Approaches’, Keohane (1988: 392) pointed to the need to add to the small
universe of cases that could display benefits of a constructivist approach: ‘Until

the reflective scholars or others sympathetic to their arguments have … shown
in particular studies that it can illuminate important issues in world politics,
they will remain on the margins of the field, largely invisible to the preponder-
ance of empirical researchers’. I turn now to such a case study in the hope of
adding to the set of empirical examples.
The establishment of international regimes for various bodies of water, and
integrated water management regimes for transboundary river basins, would
seem to be a promising area of study for constructivists. The Suez regime be-
came the model for the later Panama Canal Treaty and contributed to the wider
development of laws of maritime neutrality. Lying at the intersection of the con-
tinents of Africa and Asia, and Arabic and European societies and cultures, the
Suez Canal, in its early decades at least, symbolised a spark of cosmopolitan
imagination during the high point of European nationalism and imperialism.
Reill (2012) has made a similar argument about the Adriatic Sea. But while
the Adriatic was a more natural body of water, even if it was susceptible of be-
ing ‘framed’ in different ways, the Suez Canal was almost entirely artifically and
humanly constructed. (I say ‘almost’ because the water which eventually filled it
was naturally occurring seawater.) It was a political, economic and social
construction project par excellence. Yet while a constructivist approach can
provide a deeper understanding of Egyptian and European motivations at var-
ious points – drawing on shared understandings, principles, norms, ideas – it
cannot by itself explain the survival of the international neutrality regime
governing the Canal through the two World Wars and the takeover by Egypt
in 1956. Realist concepts of balance of state and military power; vast economic
interests; and the sway of national sovereignty also have to be invoked.
The decade of the 1850s was one in which the cooperation embodied in the
Concert of Europe had largely dissipated. It was also one of increasing
industrialisation and international trade led by Western European nations,
ruled by governments with varying degrees of stability and popular legitimacy.
Britain’s industrialisation began earliest (Bayly 2003: 173–4). Through its ter-
ritorial and commercial holdings in India, other parts of Asia, and South
America, and protected by fleets of battleships and armed steamboats, Britain
was able to transport raw materials, mail and other essentials efficiently
around the cape of southern Africa and to hold together a far-flung empire.
The French emperor Louis Napoleon also sought to advance industrialisation
and imperial expansion. Raw silk was imported from Asia and the Middle
East for the French silk textile industry. Across the Mediterranean lay the
Eurasian empire of the Ottomans, containing Greeks, Slavs, Arabs and Turks
among many other ethnic, religious and linguistic groups. Gradually the belief
developed among many of these groups that independence from the Ottomans
would bring greater property, political and cultural rights. One such group or
nation was Egypt, with its ancient origins, distinctive form of Arabic, and rich
riverine agriculture. Nonetheless European, especially French and British, res-
idents tended to dominate this society.
Both British and French rulers carried on a discourse promoting the benefits
to all of free international trade and industrialisation, suggesting that this
would lead to world peace. Louis Napoleon proclaimed: ‘The empire means
peace … [W]e have immense tracts of uncultivated lands to clear, roads to
open, ports to create, rivers to make new, canals to finish, our railway network
to complete. These are conquests I am contemplating and all of you … are my
soldiers’ (Bayly 2003: 176). Indeed, an internationalist vision of doing away
with natural borders and providing great commercial benefits for everyone
led to proposals for canal projects around the world: a Corinth canal; a White
Sea–Baltic Sea canal; Black Sea–Caspian Sea; a Congo–Zambesi canal;
Biscay–Mediterranean canal and so on (Farnie 1969: 92, 255). Schemes for a
canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, through the isthmus of
Suez, had been discussed since the time of the Persian occupation of Egypt un-
der Darius II (550–486 BCE). The idea recurred intermittently until Napoleon
conquered the territory in 1798. Napoleon, seeking to disadvantage Britain’s
trade with India, and the trade between other European nations and Asia, as
much as possible, investigated the possibility fairly closely. But he was given
faulty scientific information regarding its feasibility and decided against it.
After a less than brilliant diplomatic career, another Frenchman, Ferdinand
de Lesseps (1805–94), became obsessed with the vision of a waterway through
the isthmus and set about making it a reality.
Initial planning and construction phase
Lesseps’ actions are certainly an instance of individual agency prevailing over

existing political structures and creating a new material and social reality. It
took extraordinary energy to pull together the acquiescence of the Egyptian
governor, international investors, engineers and the thousands of workers re-
quired for the project. It was a project which seemed to most informed people
to be completely impossible physically, and of dubious benefit economically or
politically. Nonetheless, Lesseps managed to persuade the Egyptian viceroy
Said to allow him to form a company ‘composed of capitalists of all nations’
and to begin construction without waiting for final approval from the Sublime
Porte in Constantinople (Pudney 1968: 44). Said seems to have accepted Les-
seps’ argument that the canal would benefit Egypt economically but probably
also moved ahead in part to assert his independence over against the Ottoman
Empire.
While both the Viceroy Said and Lesseps gave expression to the notion that
the canal should have a ‘universal’ character, the initial political and financial
support remained limited.
Along the financial dimension, Lesseps planned a system of shareholding in
a canal zone company that would be fifty per cent French-held and the other
fifty per cent reserved for shareholders from the Ottoman Empire, Spain,
Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Prussia, Austria, the United States and other
nations or principalities. However, most of the reserved shares were not taken
up: nothing was purchased by Britain, the United States, Austria or Russia
(though the Austrian Emperor purchased shares privately). The company
was domiciled in Paris and was subject to French law as a foreign entity; le-
gally speaking, it was not an international company. In 1866, in an agreement
between the company and the Egyptian government, it came under Egyptian
jurisdiction (Pudney 1968: 76–7).
Politically, too, international support for the canal project was weak. While
the Emperor and Empress of France, especially the latter, were eager to back it,
the British immediately opposed it strongly. The Prime Minister of Great
Britain, Lord Palmerston, dealing with the aftermath of the Crimean War
(1853–56), feared that the Ottoman Empire would be weakened along with Tur-
key’s influence over Egypt and that it would no longer be able to serve as a bul-
wark against Russian expansion. He also wanted to block the growth of French
influence in the Red Sea zone, the Levant and ultimately the Indian Ocean
(Farnie 1969: 29–30; Gallagher and Robinson 1953: 11; Pudney 1968: 59 ff.).
The engineering details of this formidable project need not be entered into
here. Briefly, a plan with multiple stages and careful progress from north to
south was prepared in April 1859, in what is now the city of Port Said. This spit
of land, with a few hut-like buildings, became the operational base. It was
planned to dig the canal from the Mediterranean shore (west of the Bay of
Pelusium) through the western reaches of the Sinai Desert, past lakes Ballah
and Timsah to the Bitter Lakes, past the Gisr and Serapeum Ridges, down to
the Gulf of Suez. Apart from the main canal, there would have to be a smaller
canal running eastward from the Nile to supply freshwater for the workers, en-
gineers and so on. Overall, the canal would have sixty miles of water and would
require cutting through fourty miles of land of varying composition. The labour
force to carry this out would be one of forced labour, as had always been the
case in Egypt’s long practice of canal construction. Forced labourers received
some minimal wages or goods but were not technically free. During the ten-year
construction period, however, more and more of the labour was taken over by
machines: huge, state-of-the-art dredgers of various kinds and other tools. The
human labour was also increasingly done by a ‘global’ workforce, including
Europeans from Greece, Dalmatia and Croatia. These labourers received travel
and housing expense money but were minimally paid for their work.
In light of later events, it is important to say a few words about the ‘city’ of
Port Said. At the outset of construction, it was nothing more than a sandbar
separating the Mediterranean from the Bay of Pelusium, with a few shacks
on it. As the project progressed, it became the reception point for all construc-
tion materials, supplies for the workforce, and fresh water. Later, a pier
reaching into the Mediterranean was built to enable large ocean-going vessels,
which could not approach the shore more closely, to unload supplies. In
addition to the initial huts, the spit of land now obtained a lighthouse, a wa-
ter-distillation plant, stores and houses. About 500 Europeans and Arabs
now lived there together. Over time, however, as in other Egyptian urban cen-
tres, ethnic, religious and economic tensions emerged among the population.
Opening and early functioning phase
The Suez Canal opened successfully in November 1869, with the French Em-
press Eugenie’s yacht leading an international procession of vessels carrying
European and Egyptian dignitaries, and merchant ships with many ordinary
passengers, down the length of the canal. Tens of thousands of visitors from
all over Asia and Europe came to participate. An interfaith ‘ceremony of bene-
diction’ began the proceedings. It was held in specially built pavilions with
both a Christian altar and Muslim pulpit; the pavilions were emblazoned
either with gilt crescents and verses from the Quran or with a shield with the
cross of Jerusalem (Pudney 1968: 52).
The sceptical British were forced to admit that the canal was the ‘grandest
enterprise which has been achieved in Egypt since the days of the pharaohs’,
and the lack of British involvement an enormous mistake. ‘The Queen of
England has opened the Holborn Viaduct, and the Empress of the French is
going to open the Suez Canal’ (Farnie 1969: 88).
However, by 1879, the successive Egyptian khedives and their governments
were practically bankrupt, holding enormous debts to European banks. Their
Ottoman overlords, mired in their own political and economic difficulties,
were not in a position to bail them out. The first major change to the structure
of ownership of the canal came in 1876, when Britain purchased a substantial
portion of the Canal Company shares, thereby alleviating the Egyptian debt
and preventing extension of French control. By this time, the benefits to British
trade and relations with India, and other parts of the Empire, had become
unmistakeable. But continuing economic instability in Egypt fanned growing
demands for political reform, especially constitutional reform. Egyptians in-
creasingly viewed the French, French-speaking Turkish–Albanian aristocrats
in their midst, and the English and their bankers, with hostility.
The 1882 uprisings
Subsequent events are difficult to recount neutrally, as they have become a

‘prooftext’ for differing theories of imperialism. Baldly stated, violence broke
out in Alexandria and other cities, including Port Said, in 1882, and several
Europeans were killed. Nervous about the continued functioning and owner-
ship of the flourishing canal, the British, with the agreement of the Egyptian
khedive, decided to land a military force. The French resorted to diplomatic
protests, but nothing further. The British occupied the Canal Zone, and traffic
through the canal, which had been blocked by certain segments of the Egyp-
tian uprising, resumed. Lesseps, infuriated by French inaction as well as what
he saw as British overreach, declared that the British occupation was ‘an act of
war which constitutes a flagrant violation of the neutrality of the Canal’.
Realists in international relations would be inclined to view the 1882 events
– regarding mainly the actions of the imperial powers – as a standard example
of states acting to protect substantial economic and political interests. Thus,
they would be likely to accept the famous theory of imperialism of John

Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, which distinguishes between formal and in-
formal domination. Informal rule allowed protection of trade routes while
avoiding the administrative and political costs of direct rule. But, as in Egypt
1882, it was sometimes necessary to use military force and/or impose direct
rule. British policy should be understood as ‘trade with informal control if pos-
sible; trade with rule if necessary’ (Gallagher and Robinson 1953: 13). Or IR
realists might adopt the historian Andrew Porter’s view of imperialism. This
is more multi-causal than the Gallagher and Robinson interpretation but also
foregrounds economic and technological needs. Porter’s view is that technol-
ogy greatly facilitated European expansion in the last third of the nineteenth
century; this meant that global trade routes relying on coaling stations for
ships, telegraph cables, modern port facilities, dry docks, connecting railways
and other means of transportation all had to be protected. Thus, the Egyptian
crisis of 1882 was not merely a local one; it had ramifications for both British
and French imperial interests including trade, investment and military security
in several parts of the world (Porter 1994).
But other interpretations, including a constructivist one, are possible.
Coming from a perspective that seeks to combine historical materialism with
cultural factors and also take into account organizational resources, Juan Cole
has argued that too many accounts of the uprisings have focused on elites,
Egyptian and European. The uprisings emerged, on Cole’s reading, out of
changing urban and agrarian structures and the interactions of numerous so-
cial strata. For example, in Port Said, among many other cities, increasing
numbers of European workers – Greeks, Italians, Maltese and others – became
involved in conflicts with local Egyptians. Part of the motivation was eco-
nomic: European workers received higher wages and often managed to pay
lower taxes (Cole 1992: 193). But, and here a constructivist approach could
be helpful, part of the motivation for increasing conflict may have been cul-
tural or religious, that is, based on differences in belief and custom between
Christians and Muslims. Cole (1992: 194) himself suggests that a larger back-
ground of ‘Euro-Muslim conflict’ in Syria, India and elsewhere may have had
some influence. He also provides substantial evidence that the khedive was
temporarily ‘effectively deposed’ and that the uprising was ‘protonationalist’
in character (Cole 1992: 236–7):
… most members of the loose reformist coalition were ethnic Egyptians or Arabized
Circassians who identified with them rather than with the Turcophone nobility.
Urabi [the key leader of the revolutionary movement] widely appealed to these
Egyptians as a hero, and he had in fact articulated his nativist ideas fairly clearly.
(Cole 1992: 249)
Disputes over the political culture of the new Egypt were resolved in favor of Arabic as
the language of discourse, and a dual ideological basis of regional patriotism and Is-
lamic nativism. (Cole 1992: 249)
In Port Said, Egyptian coal heavers carried out a strike against their British
employers (Cole 1992: 250). In this context of Egyptian social disturbance
and the perceived imminence of Ottoman collapse, the aim of the British was
not really or certainly not only to protect the Suez Canal (which Cole does
not believe was seriously threatened) but to block the formation of a viable
and independent Egyptian state (Cole 1992: 17).
The 1888 Convention on free navigation
However one views the meaning of the uprisings and the causes of British in-
tervention, it became clearer to European states that the conception of the ca-
nal as an international entity had to be spelled out in much greater legal and
political detail. It was now not only a question of share ownership and legal
jurisdiction, but of fair use under rules of maritime neutrality, and what this
would entail in case of domestic conflict within Egypt or international conflict
between states and empires. A complex set of negotiations was begun in order
to construct such a new or revised conception of the canal and to provide some
legal documentation. The result was the ‘Convention Respecting the Free
Navigation of the Suez Maritime Canal’, signed in October 1888 at Constan-
tinople. The signatories were Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary,
Turkey, Russia, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.11
The Convention required that use of the Suez Canal, and its branches,
remain completely free in both peace and war. Enemies were to refrain from
impeding one another’s transit; there was to be no right of blockade. The asso-
ciated port facilities were not be hindered from operating in any way. Article V
stipulated that troops and armaments were not to be delivered or stored at any
of the ports; if for some reason passage through the canal was temporarily
blocked or slowed, troops could disembark only in detachments of 1,000 or
fewer. It was also agreed that the Convention would remain in force even after
the original Egyptian Act of Concession to the Universal Suez Canal
Company expired.12
It is not difficult to discern, alongside the practical provisions, the seeds of
future problems. Article X stated that the government of Egypt, ‘within the
limits of powers resulting from the [Ottoman] Firmans [writs of permission]’,
would be responsible for implementing the Convention. However, the Turkish
Sultan, and the Egyptian Khedive in consultation with the Sultan, retained the
right ‘for securing by their own forces the defense of Egypt and the mainte-
nance of public order’. The phrase ‘defense of Egypt’ was to provide the basis
for later challenges to the ownership and functioning of the canal.
Overall, then, the Convention set up new international norms, going be-
yond the initial terms set up by Egypt and the Canal Company, which tended
toward international coordination if not cooperation. But as the events of 1882
had shown, and as would become evident again during the two World Wars,
unstable and conflictual power relations, within the Mediterranean zone and
beyond, worked to undermine the maintenance of the regime.
World Wars and the changing face of Egyptian national identity
In the earliest stages of both World Wars, Germany aimed, either directly or
indirectly, to conquer Egypt and acquire control of the Suez Canal. The pur-
pose was to cut off critical military supplies and commercial goods flowing
to Britain and her allies. A further goal was to intercept Britain’s communica-
tion with, and therefore governance of, her vast overseas empire. Although in
both wars, Britain (occupying Egypt) and the Canal Company initially sought
to adhere to the principles laid down in the 1888 Convention and suspended
transit through the canal only for short periods, it was impossible to overlook
German intentions to invade Egypt. Shipping through the canal had to be
inspected, and extensive defences prepared to prevent a German takeover from
either the West or the East. During World War II, the fighting in North Africa
and Syria-Palestine was largely about this (Weinberg 1994).
Meanwhile, although there had been economic benefits to Egypt from the
canal since its inception, there was growing frustration within the country over
lack of control over this major asset on Egyptian territory. There was also in-
creasing political and intellectual activity – especially during the 1930s and
1940s – seeking to redefine Egyptian identity and Egypt’s place in the wider
Arab and Muslim world.13 Whereas prior to 1914 emerging Egyptian nation-
alism may have been of the type which emphasised a national right to self-de-
termination and the formation of nation-state comparable to Western nation-
states, in later decades, it became more widely accepted that ‘the adoption of
Islamic, Arab and Eastern symbols, myths and values’ should be the basis of
Egyptian identity. ‘These manifestly non-Western components were perceived
as possessing vital attributes missing in the Pharaonic and Nile Valley imagery
associated with [mere] territorialism’ (Gershoni and Jankowski 1995: 215).
Thus, the rise to leadership in 1954 of the virulently nationalistic and
pan-Arabist general Gamel Abdel Nasser had been some time in the making.
Nasser ended the arrangements contained in the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of
1936, which had purported to give Egyptians greater control over their own af-
fairs. He continued the policy, in place since August 1949, of blockading all
shipping, both commercial and military, to the new nation-state of Israel. Nas-
ser nationalised the Suez Canal in July 1956 and demonstrated – contrary to
foreign expectations – that it could be run efficiently by Egyptians. The Suez
Crisis ensued in fall 1956. Briefly, this crisis was in part an effort by the
United States, Britain, France and Israel to restore, by military means, the
conditions of use of the canal which had been established by the 1888 Conven-
tion. But it was also the result of Great Power dynamics, fears of a new wave of
fascism with Nasser as the vehicle, and the decline of empires. In any case,
political opposition in the countries concerned was so intense that the military
forces were withdrawn and territorial gains relinquished.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 thus marked a turning point in international rela-
tions, providing evidence for the constructivist thesis that nation-states have
the capacity to change their beliefs about the desirability of using force to solve
international problems. Whether this also marked a change in identity on the

part of the states involved is too large a question to be pursued further here.
But it remains true that, up till this point, maintenance of the 1888 regime
was not thought to be achievable by arriving at a ‘shared understanding’
among Western powers. Especially during the World Wars, and in order to
end the blockade of Israel, the ultimate decisor was either military force or
the threat of military force.
Concluding analysis: what does constructivism explain in regard to the Suez

Canal project?
There are several ways in which construction of the Suez Canal and the rules
governing it might be said to have constructed a new social reality. There is
no doubt that throughout its history, economic, political and military interests
were deeply imbricated with ideational considerations such as national prestige
and cultural identity. Indeed, ultimately, Egypt’s sense of national identity
prevailed over Great Power considerations. But the intervening history also
shows that the international regime governing the Canal Zone had repeatedly
to be militarily enforced.
The canal certainly re-shaped the material reality of the area between the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea. In addition to the canal itself, which now
linked the global North and South, a small city, Port Said, with a variegated
population and complex social and political structure, was also constructed.
The social meaning of the isthmus of Suez therefore changed. From being a
comparative wasteland, i.e. having virtually no social meaning, it became, with
the canal, an important instrument of socio-economic growth for several
countries, including Egypt. It took on a socio-economic as well as political
and military significance – international and national – that was not there orig-
inally. It also became the object of romantic cultural imagination. Gustave
Flaubert, one of nineteenth-century France’s preeminent writers, for example,
spoke of a long-standing dream to write ‘a great book’ about the isthmus.14
The canal facilitated processes of globalisation that were already underway.
In addition to Mediterranean zone trade in raw materials needed for the con-
struction, the process of construction and the opening ceremonies brought to-
gether manual labourers, supervisors, engineers and other workers of varying
nationalities in ways that had perhaps not often occurred before. Trade be-
tween Asia and Europe greatly increased, further enhancing relations between
different nations, cultures and identities, or what constructivists call Self and
Other. But we have also seen that an incipient form of Egyptian nationalism
arose in response to these increasing international cultural encounters as well
as to British occupation. The revolutionary uprising of 1919 was, likewise,
characterised by nationalist responses, though they varied as to whether and
how much independence to seek from the British (Mansfield 1972: 160).
Other societies responded in a different way to the globalising impact of the

canal. For example, the port city of Trieste, which for hundreds of years had
independent status and been a major gateway to the Mediterranean and the
East for the Hapsburg Empire, now benefited from the canal and increased
its importations from China and India into Europe. The 1870s saw the emer-
gence of movements to separate its Italian, Germanic, Slavic and other ethnic
components and have them join larger state entities of similar ethnicity. But, it
has been argued, these nationalist movements failed in an interesting way: they
could not overcome the ‘pluralist-nationalist’ tendencies of ‘regional national-
ism’. The regional nationalists did not seek mono-ethnic states but argued for a
regional identity which preserved and developed the historical, multiethnic and
inter-ethnic relations around the Adriatic Sea (Reill 2012).
Although the canal became an important alternative to the route around the
cape of southern Africa for European ships; the values of its shares generally
rose considerably; and it had long-term consequences for trade in commodi-
ties, especially oil, it is not obvious that the canal was the product of strictly
economic or political motives on the part of either France or Egypt. Indeed
it could be, and was, argued that a canal was not in Egypt’s economic interest
at all, since it already had unimpeded access to both the Red Sea and the Med-
iterranean, and had a firm grip on the lucrative overland trade routes through
its territory. As for the French Empire, it was conceivably about to lose a for-
tune in a hole in the sand, as the British foreign minister put it. As much or
more than economic benefit, both parties to the construction project were
concerned with national cultural prestige, and perhaps a new internationalism.
The regime governing the canal after 1888 contributed to the development
of norms of maritime neutrality and international law. The Convention speci-
fied rights and duties of belligerents with respect to the waters and ports of
the canal; it was designed to ensure that during both peace and war, essential
goods – foodstuffs, medicines, oil – could reach populations in Europe, Asia
and Africa. It provided one model of neutralisation of a critical international
asset and area.
But it remains true that huge nationalist, military and economic interests
‘interrupted’ the canal’s neutrality during two global wars and during the late
1940s. Despite Lesseps’ dream of international cooperation and prosperity, the
canal’s neutrality was visible mainly in peacetime; war almost destroyed those
ideals and the canal’s neutrality every time.
Nevertheless, the constructivist emphasis on ideational, non-material factors
is illuminating. While a narrowly rationalist or realist analysis would suggest
that it would have been more beneficial for Egypt to have acted differently, by
insisting on more shares initially, and perhaps not nationalising later, such an
analysis would not display the subtle interplay between the British, French and
Ottoman Empires and their respective representatives in Egypt on the one hand,
and the variegated population of Egypt on the other. Much more was at stake
than economic or commercial benefit, though these were of course far from neg-
ligible. As indicated above, the canal was a substantial factor in the development
of Egyptian identity over the century that followed, and it is not difficult to
see how the attempt to ‘undo’ the nationalisation of 1956 would be perceived
by Egyptians as an attempt to restore or perpetuate the imperialist past.
The Suez Canal project was an essay in the construction of international
cooperation. Despite enormous countervailing forces, it is functioning success-
fully in altered form – indeed, it has recently been widened and modernised. I
would say that there are three main conclusions to be drawn from this complex
history. First, no single type of causal analysis or interpretive method –
whether constructivist or realist, material or cultural – is adequate by itself in
the study of international relations. While there is much scope for constructiv-
ist approaches, we should not be surprised to find the factors that realists usu-
ally point to. Smith’s (2004) conception of ethno-symbolism seeks to be a
comprehensive approach along these lines, taking into account both cultural
and material factors. More directly in IR, Barkin (2010) has advocated a com-
bined constructivist–realist approach. In security studies as well, a case can be
made that ‘neither approach [constructivist or realist] is in any case superior,
but that both may be indispensable to any fully satisfactory understanding of
security affairs’ (Duffield et al. 1999). Second, construction of international in-
stitutions is far more difficult than constructivist or ‘activist’ theorists seem to
allow; attachments to nationhood continually, if only slowly, undermine more
cosmopolitan plans. Egyptian nationalism, which developed relatively late in
response to French, British and Turkish imperialism, nonetheless came to pre-
vail over Suez, the canal as well as the region, in the mid-twentieth century.
And finally, any intention to construct either an international institution or a
certain type of national identity must contend not only with different visions
of it (for the future) but a host of circumstances, processes and individual ac-
tions that cannot be completely foreseen or controlled. In Anthony Smith’s
terms, the activism of modernists, or the intentionality of constructivists that
I have discussed, is overly optimistic and likely to require enormous amounts
not only of persuasion but also of coercion.
Acknowledgements
I would like to convey sincerest appreciation to my colleagues Patrice C.

McMahon and John Brunero, who provided detailed, helpful comments.
Thanks also to Dane E. Kennedy and David P. Forsythe for comments on
an earlier version and to the editor and anonymous reviewers for constructive
advice.
Endnotes
1 The notion that the condition of anarchy in the world system of states could have different
structures or cultures was put forward in Wendt (1992).
2 An influential statement of this set of views is to be found in the works of Edward Said, who
nonetheless, as is well known, did all he could to develop a national consciousness on the part of
Palestinian Arabs. See, for example, Said (1993).
3 There is disagreement among IR theorists as to whether constructivism makes or implies any pre-
scriptions. Mearsheimer (1994) has argued that it does, Wendt (1999) that it does not. Yet an essay
such as Habermas’s (1998) ‘Die postnationale Konstellation und die Zukunft der Demokratie’, one
of the finest examples of constructivist writing, leaves no doubt as to the moral and political aims
of the author.
4 Some of the best-known works in this regard are Anderson (1983), Breuilly (1982), Gellner
(1983) and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983).
5 Ted Hopf, among others, has differentiated ‘conventional’ from ‘critical’ constructivism.
Conventional constructivists are ‘analytically neutral’ on the nature of power relations, whereas
critical constructivists are strongly influenced by postmodernism and evaluate all power relations
as involving domination and repression (Hopf 1998: 185). A similar distinction is to be found in
Zehfuss (2002).
6 In addition to Hopf (1998) and Zehfuss (2002), see Adler (1997), Katzenstein, Keohane and
Krasner (1999), Ruggie (1998) and Wendt (1999).
7 I therefore agree only partially with the neo-liberal claim that institutions survive because of
the transactional costs of dismantling them.
8 Hopf (1998: 193–4) cites this argument by Barnett in terms of identities, but Barnett (1993)
himself uses the term ‘roles’.
9 See, for example, Ruggie (1999).
10 For the purpose of the case study which follows, Jack Snyder’s analysis of Lord Palmerston’s
political coalition-building is instructive. Compare with Snyder (1991: chapter 5).
11 The full text of the Convention was published by the American Society for International Law
in The American Journal of International Law 3 (2), 1909, 123–7.
12 The expiration date was stipulated in the Act of Concession (1856) to be ninety-nine years after
completion of the canal. That would have put it in November 1968. But events intervened, as will
become apparent below. A version of the 1866 agreement between Egypt and the Canal Company
may be found in Lauterpacht (1981).
13 Gershoni and Jankowski (1995: chapter 9). The historian Elie Kedourie described the struggle
for power among different Egyptian parties in the early twentieth century, and the use made of the
symbol of the Suez Canal by nationalists, in Kedourie (1970). The Palestinian poet Barghouti
(2000) recalls the importance of the canal in Arab consciousness in his memoir.
14 For more on the idea of Suez in the European imagination, see Huber (2013).
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Nations and Nationalism 25 (2), 2019, 478–498.

National identity and the limits of

ABSTRACT. Constructivism in most of its variants emphasises the creation of cir-

There are premeditated and unpremeditated cities.

Perhaps because of the continuing fascination of such thinkers as Nietzsche,

one leading constructivist scholar has characterised national identity as the

Using the example of the major material transformation represented by the

civic, legal and political dimensions. An extension of the objection to modern-

Some theoretical questions about national identity

(i) An ontological concern

In discussing balance of threat explanations used by realists, Ted Hopf ar-

(ii) Where is national identity located?

(iii) Material and ideational aspects of identity

Unlike Emanuel Adler, another major proponent of constructivism, Wendt

this cultural superstructure is in governing state behavior, relative to the rump

Creating circumstances: construction and history of the Suez Canal

As long ago as 1988, in his much-cited article ‘International Institutions: Two

universe of cases that could display beneﬁts of a constructivist approach: ‘Until

Initial planning and construction phase

Lesseps’ actions are certainly an instance of individual agency prevailing over

Opening and early functioning phase

The 1882 uprisings

Subsequent events are difﬁcult to recount neutrally, as they have become a

they would be likely to accept the famous theory of imperialism of John

The 1888 Convention on free navigation

World Wars and the changing face of Egyptian national identity

international problems. Whether this also marked a change in identity on the

Concluding analysis: what does constructivism explain in regard to the Suez

Other societies responded in a different way to the globalising impact of the

I would like to convey sincerest appreciation to my colleagues Patrice C.

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