Country ownership is a recurring topic in political debates. Statements such as ‘we were here first!’ or ‘we built this country!’ are advanced by politicians when claiming ownership of the country for their own ethnic group. In Western European countries, right-wing parties use successfully the rhetoric of the dominant group’s ownership of the country to generate opposition to immigrants. In settler societies, founded by white colonizers who deprived indigenous inhabitants of their lands, debates about compensation and land restitution are still present. Furthermore, territorial ownership claims seem to resonate even more in countries that are home to two long established groups that both have historical reasons to demand ownership of the land. Examples are Serbs and Albanians who view Kosovo as primarily their own group’s ancestral homeland, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is predominantly fought around the issue of historical territory. While the opinions of politicians are publicly voiced, we do not know how widespread ownership claims are among the general population, where these claims originate from, and how damaging they are for intergroup relations.
Previous research has studied psychological ownership – feelings of possessiveness towards a target – from the perspective of individuals (‘mine’) and shown that people can feel that objects, places and ideas belong to them even in the absence of legal recognition. However, ownership can also be experienced on a group level. People are not only concerned about their individual property, but they also see themselves as group members. By extension, what we think we own as a group becomes relevant to us. Almost nothing is known about these experiences of collective psychological ownership (CPO): a shared sense that something is ‘ours’. Yet, CPO seems to be particularly relevant with respect to territories and in the context of ethnic relations.
The aim of OWNERS is to develop a first instrument to measure collective psychological ownership and find out (1) to what extent people perceive their group as owning the country more than the relevant ethnic outgroup, (2) what psychological needs motivate people to claim ownership of the country for their group and which categories of people are more likely to do so, and (3) what consequences ownership claims have for attitudes towards other relevant ethnic groups. We focus on multi-ethnic countries where collective ownership claims are prominent in the political discourse. Moreover, implications of ownership claims on a national scale could be far-reaching and unnerving, endangering social cohesion at large.
Intergroup relations are complex and location specific, and have been studied not only by social psychology but also by historians, anthropologists, legal scholars, and political scientists. OWNERS project' s contribution is to examine in a range of multi-ethnic national contexts the prevalence, underlying motives, and group consequences of CPO. We will study three types of settings: (1) Western European immigration countries that have a clear dominant ethnic majority (the Netherlands, UK/England, Finland), (2) settler societies that also have a dominant ethnic majority, but one that has colonized the indigenous groups (Australia, New Zealand, USA), and (3) countries with ongoing territorial disputes between two established ethnic groups (Kosovo, Cyprus, Israel). If we find out that in these diverse contexts CPO is a mechanism that contributes to ethnic tensions, and that the underlying reasons why people claim CPO are comparable, this will open up new possibilities for improving ethnic attitudes. Interventions can be implemented to promote historical narratives that give people a sense of ownership that is not exclusively reserved for their own group.
