Floating nationality: its paradoxes in theory and practice.

Authors

Johannes Kögel

Published in

Frontiers in sociology. Volume 11. Pages 1830290. Epub Jul 02, 2026.

Abstract

Nationality can be understood not simply as legal membership in a political community but as a complex and unstable means of signifying collective identity. References to nationality do not carry a fixed meaning; instead, they function as signifiers that attempt to create coherence and continuity in how groups understand themselves. Nationality operates at the intersection of identity (what a group believes it is) and membership (who belongs), yet emphasizing one dimension inevitably obscures the other. As a result, nationality often appears stable while remaining internally ambiguous and context-dependent. It acts as a "floating signifier" whose meaning shifts across political, cultural, and social settings. Nationality, in its ambiguous two-dimensionality as membership and identity, or form and content, produces paradoxical experiences in lived reality, even more so in postcolonial contexts. While the notion of nationality contains inherent paradoxes, the postcolonial context-through its engagement with colonial structures and legacies, and its efforts to negotiate identity and belonging-reveals these ambivalences, contradictions, and discrepancies in particularly pronounced ways.

PMID:
42460442
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 16 Jul 2026.

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