Asymmetrical international attitudes

In general, attitudes towards nations have a fair amount of reciprocity: nations either like each other, are relatively indifferent to each other, or dislike each other. Sometimes, however, international attitudes are asymmetrical. In this study, we use social identity theory in order to explain asymmetrical attitudes. Parting from social identity theory, asymmetrical attitudes can be predicted to occur most likely between countries that are linguistically either similar or closely related, but differ in size. Europe, more than any other continent, offers a rich variety of nations which represent natural conditions for our study, such as size and degree of linguistic similarity. In order to test hypotheses derived from social identity theory, we asked respondents (N = 405) from (Dutch‐ and French‐speaking) Belgium, France, Germany, and The Netherlands to fill out a questionnaire on three large nations (Germany, Great Britain, France) and three smaller ones (The Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark). Results strongly supported hypotheses and confirm that a social identity approach may help to better understand international attitudes. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.