The basic work on identity from social psychology is Henri Tajfel, "Social Identity and Intergroup Behavior," Social Science Information/sur les sciences socials, 13 (1974), 65-93. See also John Turner and Henri Tajfel, "Social Comparison and Group Interest in Ingroup Favoritism," European Journal of Social Psychology, 9 (1979), 187-204, and Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology (London: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Tajfel's basic point is that groups form under even minimal provocation and that people quickly come to see the in-group as more competent, deserving, and moral than the out-group. People also tend to exaggerate the differences between the in-group and the out-group and to police the boundaries between them. For summaries of the research on identity, cohesion, and in-group bias, see Rose McDermott, "Psychological Approaches to Social Identity: Experimentation and Application," in Rawi Abdelal, Yoshiko Herrera, Alastair Iain Johnston, and Rose McDermott (eds.), Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Scientists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Leonie Huddy, "Group Relations and Political Cohesion," in David Sears, Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 511-58. The topic is so important that there now is a journal Self and Identity devoted to it. The best application to international politics is Jonathan Mercer, "Anarchy and Identity," International Organization, 49 (1995), 229-52. The importance of interaction for identity is stressed in Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), who argues that identities are central to international politics both in the foreign policies of specific states and in the characteristic nature of international politics prevailing in particular eras. David Campbell, Writing Security (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), examines the role of identities in the Cold War.
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1955), makes a crucial argument that American political culture is distinctive because its social structure is unique: the country was formed by what he calls a "social fragment" as the founding population that wielded political and social power was essentially middle-class. Unlike Europe, the United States then never experienced feudalism (except for the South, which had a form of it), and therefore never experienced a bourgeois revolution or, concomitantly, working-class radicalism. This also gave the United States a distorted view of other countries, who experienced revolutions in the normal course of their history. Hartz extended his views by comparing the United States to other settler countries in The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964). Hartz's views have been subject to prolonged debate: for a recent summary and defense, see Philip Abbott "StiU Louis Hartz after AU These Years,” Perspectives on Politics, 3 (2005), 93-109, and the comments by Richard Iton and Sean Wilentz, ibid., 117-20. See also The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1963) and American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996) by Seymour Martin Lipset, and Byron E. Shafer (ed.), Is America Different?: A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1991). For analyses of American identity based on survey data, see Donald Devine, The Political Culture of the United States (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1972), and Herbert McClosky and John Zaller, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes toward Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
The literature on the sources of American identity is large and contested. The role of the period before the American Revolution is stressed by Bernard Bailyn in his The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971) and The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968), and by Richard Merritt, Symbols of American Community, 1733-1773 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966). David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), shows that although the American colonies were indeed settled dominantly by people from Britain, there were four distinct waves of British immigration that brought with them different cultures and ideas. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), sees events a century before the revolution as crucial. Samuel Huntington among others, Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), sees national identity forming only after the Civil War.
Ted Hopf, The Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, 1933 and 1999 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), provides a theoretically informed and empirically well-grounded study of changing Soviet and Russian identities, highlighting 1955 and 1999. He is particularly acute on the changes wrought by Khrushchev and the interconnections among domestic politics, conceptions of collective self, and foreign policies toward the Third World and the West. Hopf shows how the acceptance of a wider range of regimes abroad and a willingness to relax tensions with the West were linked to domestic reforms and how both were reciprocally linked to a broader sense ofthe Soviet self, a broadened definition of the social classes that supported the Soviet state, and a more relaxed view of class conflict.
Jussi Hanhimaki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), is a thorough, comprehensive, and evenhanded analysis of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, of which detente was the centerpiece. Like everyone else, he draws on Raymond Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations From Nixon to Reagan, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994). Deeply scholarly, but informed by his knowledge as a former government official, Garthoff argues that the version of detente presented in the two volumes of Henry Kissinger's memoirs available when he wrote are extremely misleading, disguising as they do the degree to which at every turn the United States sought to thwart the Soviet Union's quest for equality, thereby undermining detente. Ironically, the third volume of Kissinger's memoirs, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), written after the fall of the Soviet Union, endorses Garthoff s analysis, although without mentioning it. Mike Bowker and Phil Williams, Superpower Detente: A Reappraisal (London: Royal Institute ofIntemational Affairs, 1988), is briefer, critical of the United States, and (correctly) stresses the incompatible aspirations and self-images involved. The role of the Third World in the Cold War is most fully developed in Odd Arne Wested, The Global Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), which shows both the extent to which the conflict was waged in these areas and the ideological character of the struggle.
World History
