IN the NWAC's patriotic narrative, the values celebrated by proprietorial patriotism supplied the foundations of British national identity. Supranational patriotism provided a validation of this value-based identity and a means of demonstrating that more could be done. Adversarial patriotism reminded Britons of threats to their identity to revitalise their commitment to the war effort. Quantitatively, these sub-patriotisms represented a substantial proportion of NWAC propaganda, often the majority of a speech or article. However, purposively they merely contextualised the NWAC's core message, that the British people not only had a particular national identity, but were duty-bound to maintain it. Sometimes this message amounted to a minuscule proportion of the overall piece – the ‘moral of the story’. Over-explication of Britons’ duties without such contextualisation might be counter-productive, potentially discouraging citizens by making stark demands for public exertion without a reasonable purpose.

Propagandists’ recognition of the danger of antagonising war-weary civilians with unreasonable demands was manifested in their discussions of duty. Together with a rhetoric of sacrifice, NWAC propaganda espoused a complementary view of duty stressing obligations but emphasising the praiseworthy meeting of these by most individuals and communities, with ‘consent and coercion [becoming] reciprocal functions of each other’. In this dual approach, civic patriotism extended the contextual subpatriotisms, especially proprietorial patriotism. Since, so NWAC rhetoric assumed, Britons lived in a privileged nation with institutions and laws to protect key civilisational values, citizens should work unstintingly to maintain the British way of life. Because they were Britons, however, they amply understood the relationship between responsibilities, rights and privileges, and had responded to the crisis in such a way that they grew closer together within several concrescent communities; occupational, local, regional and national (also imperial or international, when blended with supranational patriotism). By highlighting communal ties, NWAC propaganda sought to override sectional distinctions such as class or political affiliation.

In this (probably coincidentally) NWAC propagandists echoed the views of the Idealist sociologist R.M. MacIver, whose 1917 study, Community, stressed that ‘rank and wealth and religion are properly accidental in respect of the right of citizenship, and where they determine citizenship the community is incomplete’. Nationality, MacIver argued, was merely ‘the colour of community … a way of being human, a communal individuality’.