UNQUESTIONABLY, of all the presentational patriotisms employed, NWAC propaganda most extensively used adversarial patriotism. Harold Lasswell's claim that there ‘must be no ambiguity about whom the public is to hate’ is amply demonstrated in NWAC propaganda, though its adversarial patriotism was more refined than simply ensuring that that ‘all the guilt [was] on the other side of the frontier’. Britain's military enemies, especially Germany, received considerable opprobrium, but so did Bolshevik Russia, for betraying the allied cause, the so-called ‘peaceat- any-price’ movement at home and, less extensively, anyone at home who, by striking for work conditions to match the realities of wartime Britain, or simply through war-weariness, undermined the progress of Britain's war effort. By presenting the public with a range of adversaries varying both in their proximity and their degree of threat to Britain, the NWAC could produce a more complex adversarial patriotism than with a sole, over-arching adversary.

Adversarial patriotism is one of several interactive and mutually dependent presentational sub-patriotisms which together construct an image of patriotic identity. Marjorie Morgan is undoubtedly correct to suggest that middle-class Victorian travellers ‘exhibited a flexible repertoire of national identities rather than a single one’, but her study nonetheless assumes, like Linda Colley, that this flexible identity depended upon the recognition of difference, ‘the proximity, real or imagined, of the Other’. Unlike an ‘otherness’ approach, the concept of adversarial patriotism does not suggest that ‘we usually decide who we … are by reference to who and what we are not’. While such an approach was certainly sometimes taken to demonstrate identity (both by NWAC propagandists and historically), the use of adversarial patriotism as an explanatory category assumes that identity is substantially formed by an evocation of the values and virtues possessed by a community, and not by the ‘mapping of difference’. Edward Said argues that the ‘construction of identity … involves establishing opposites and “others” whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from “us”’. A major purpose of the concept of adversarial patriotism is to avoid such presumptions of the universality of difference as the basis for identity. If such universality is not accepted, an alternative conceptualisation of the role of difference in identity construction is more appropriate than simply misapplying an existing paradigm.