Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on November 6, 2008
Public Opinion Quarterly 2008 72(4):677-705; doi:10.1093/poq/nfn042
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Foreign Occupation and National Pride
The Case of Iraq
Address correspondence to Mansoor Moaddel; e-mail: mmoaddel{at}umich.edu.
Investigators from such disparate fields as public opinion research and comparative history agree that foreign occupation tends to provoke nationalist awareness. Engaging this growing body of literature, we focus on the affective side of nationalism—the feeling of national pride—and argue that foreign domination by itself does not necessarily incite this feeling among all members of the population under occupation. Rather, (a) the perception of the occupation held by the public is related to national pride and (b) this perception is anchored in communal attributes. A survey of Iraqis (n = 2,700) in 2004 found that the only common factor that is linked to national pride for the Sunnis, Shi’is, and Kurds is attitude against foreign Muslim militants. In addition, for the Sunnis, it was linked to attitudes against foreign presence and in favor of the Baath party. For the Shi’is, national pride was inversely related to their attitudes toward American moral values. For the Kurds, national pride is linked to attitudes toward the political issues over which the Sunnis and Shi’is have consensus—attitudes against foreign presence and disbanding the former Iraqi army, and a rejection of American moral values. Implications for the study of national pride are discussed.
MANSOOR MOADDEL is with the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, and with Population Studies Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248, USA. MARK TESSLER and RONALD INGLEHART are also with the University of Michigan. Comments by Kristine Ajrouch, Julie de Jong, Stuart Karabenick, and Robert Robinson, and the editor and anonymous reviewers for Public Opinion Quarterly are gratefully appreciated. This study has been supported by two grants from the National Science Foundation (SES-0433773 and SES-0522174). The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and the NSF assumes no responsibility for these opinions, findings, and conclusions.