ABSTRACT
Although the idea of “national character” has been attacked often, it lives on in the minds of human beings who conduct international relations. The daily newspapers are full of quotes about “ancient Slavic enmity,” “we Japanese,” or “the American way of life.” These generalizations often are drawn along lines of racial identity, national culture, or degree of modernity. Considerable recent scholarship on the formation of these powerful concepts has enriched our understanding of how people both imagine their own national community and contrast it with others. Yet much of this same literature has focused on the way that contemporary individuals often lose sight of that complexity and instead accept narratives of unified unbroken tradition—even patently false tradition. 1 As yet, however, this compiex literature has had little impact on diplomatic history and analyses of contemporary international relations.
