Arizona State University Nationalism in Settled Times Essay

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Nationalism in Settled Times
Bart Bonikowski
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2016.42:427-449. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
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Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138;
email: [email protected]
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2016. 42:427?49
Keywords
First published online as a Review in Advance on
June 1, 2016
nationalism, collective identity, political culture, practice theory, culture
and cognition
The Annual Review of Sociology is online at
soc.annualreviews.org
This article?s doi:
10.1146/annurev-soc-081715-074412
c 2016 by Annual Reviews.
Copyright
All rights reserved
Abstract
Due to a preoccupation with periods of large-scale social change, nationalism research had long neglected everyday nationhood in contemporary
democracies. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to shift the focus of
this scholarly field toward the study of nationalism not only as a political
project but also as a cognitive, affective, and discursive category deployed
in daily practice. Integrating insights from work on banal and everyday nationalism, collective rituals, national identity, and commemorative struggles
with survey-based findings from political psychology, I demonstrate that
meanings attached to the nation vary within and across populations as well
as over time, with important implications for microinteraction and for political beliefs and behavior, including support for exclusionary policies and
authoritarian politics. I conclude by suggesting how new developments in
methods of data collection and analysis can inform future research on this
topic.
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INTRODUCTION
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The mid 2010s have witnessed a resurgence of nationalist discourse in the United States, mirroring
longer-term trends in the European public sphere. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have
articulated visions of their nations under siege?by immigrants, refugees, domestic minority populations, and these groups? ostensible accomplices among the political and cultural elites. Evoking
nostalgia for the nation?s bygone glory days, these diagnoses have been coupled with sundry policy proposals aimed at making the country great again, to paraphrase Donald Trump?s campaign
slogan: from the tightening of national borders, increased surveillance of national populations,
and scaling back of supranational integration to an ill-fitting mix of foreign policy isolationism
and hawkish calls for unilateral projection of military power abroad. Narratives of the nation?s
putative failings have resonated with beliefs deeply held by large segments of the voting public,
laying bare cultural cleavages that are likely to shape election outcomes, policy decisions, and
social movement mobilization.
Although by no means novel (Berezin 2009, Gerstle 2001, Smith 1997), these developments
make clear that nationalism?understood as a pervasive cognitive and affective orientation rather
than a coherent ideology?continues to animate everyday politics in contemporary democracies.
Yet, until recently, sociologists of nationalism have had surprisingly little to say about lay understandings of the nation. Instead, most nationalism research had long been preoccupied with
exceptional moments of social transformation, such as the rise of the modern nation-state and
more recent efforts by nationalist movements to realign existing state boundaries. The contributions of this work have been notable, but its emphasis on elite-driven historical change has largely
neglected nationalism in established nation-states (Calhoun 1997, p. 2).
Building on past programmatic statements by leading theorists in the field (Billig 1995;
Brubaker 1996, 2004a; Calhoun 1997), I propose to redirect scholarly attention toward nationalism in contemporary democracies, among everyday people rather than elites, and in settled times
rather than in periods of fundamental social upheaval. To do so, I draw on five research traditions
that have considered the nation as a politically relevant cultural construct: (a) studies that examine
how and when the nation is employed in routine interaction; (b) work on the role of public rituals in heightening and reinvigorating national attachments; (c) analyses of national identity that
seek to identify the dominant representations of the nation in political culture; (d ) scholarship
on collective memory that explores symbolic struggles over the nation?s contested meaning; and
(e) survey research that makes distributional claims about respondents? attitudes toward the nation. Whereas each approach has considerable limitations, their synthesis presents opportunities
for innovative research on this important topic.
What might a research program built on such a foundation look like? First, it should consider
nationalism from the bottom up, as a set of intersubjective meanings and affective orientations
that give people a sense of self and guide their social interactions and political choices. Such a shift
would imply not only a focus on popular beliefs and attitudes, but also the understanding that
nationhood is only one source of identity, whose salience depends on a variety of contextual factors.
Second, such research should explicitly consider the heterogeneity of vernacular conceptions
of the nation within any given polity. The nation is not a static cultural object with a single shared
meaning, but a site of active political contestation between cultural communities with strikingly
different belief systems. Such conflicts are at the heart of contemporary political debates in the
United States and Europe.
Finally, as is explicit in the title of this article, research on nationalism should examine the
phenomenon during settled times and not just moments of fundamental institutional crisis?that
is, in stable, modern democracies rather than in newly formed states, regions with separatist
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proclivities, or unstable political regimes. Although nationalism may crystallize, and thus become
more readily observable, in the aftermath of exogenous shocks to the nation or during protracted
conflicts in the public sphere, such periods of heightened national self-awareness bring to the
surface latent tensions that preexist and succeed them. Thus, for the purposes of this article,
?settled times? should be understood in relative terms, as periods when disruptions of varying
magnitude do arise but are absorbed by existing institutions instead of generating widespread
social and political transformations.
All three objectives require scholars? engagement with meanings held by individuals embedded
in concrete social environments. If the nation is not just a political entity but also a cognitive
frame through which people apprehend social reality and construct routinized strategies of action,
research on nationalism must incorporate insights from cultural sociology and social psychology
about how meanings structured by institutions shape social interaction and group relations. This
suggests a research strategy that views dispositions toward the nation as relational, intersubjective,
morally and affectively laden, and largely taken for granted. The resulting empirical investigations
are likely to require an adaptation of existing research methods and the exploitation of new sources
of data. Fortunately, the constitutive elements of this research agenda already exist; what is needed
is their integration across disciplinary and methodological boundaries.
Before surveying the relevant scholarship, it is important to clarify how nationalism should be
conceptualized in the context of this review. In particular, I hope to unsettle the identification of
nationalism with specific ideologies and instead advocate for its understanding as a heterogeneous
cultural domain consisting of tacit cognitive and affective dispositions, routinized forms of talk,
and ritualized symbolic practices.
BEYOND NATIONALISM AS IDEOLOGY
Dominant scholarly approaches to nationalism can be classified along two dimensions, illustrated
in Table 1: political versus quotidian (i.e., focusing on elite political projects or on the beliefs
of everyday people) and ideology versus practice (i.e., treating nationalism as a coherent set of
principles or as a heterogeneous domain of social and political life). Research on nationalism
as an elite ideology (top-left cell of Table 1) has focused on modern nation-state formation
(Anderson 1983), the subsequent diffusion of the nation-state form (Wimmer & Feinstein 2010),
and separatist movements that seek to reconfigure the boundaries of existing states (Hechter
2000). This scholarship typically defines nationalism as ?a political principle, which holds that
the political and the national unit should be congruent? (Gellner 1983, p. 1). Central debates
in this field concern the causes of the emergence of nation-states (e.g., print capitalism, colonial
governance, industrialization) and the historical status of nations as either modern creations of
centralizing states or successors to preexisting ethnic groups (Calhoun 1997). From this vantage
point, nationalism has largely fulfilled its promise and is thus primarily a matter for historical
research?except in cases where existing institutional configurations are actively contested.
Nationalist ideology, however, is not solely the domain of political elites seeking to legitimize
their rule over a territorially bounded people. For political psychologists, nationalism is a set of
dispositions that cohere at the level of individual actors (top-right cell of Table 1). Thus, for
instance, Kosterman & Feshbach (1989, p. 271) define nationalism as ?a perception of national
superiority and an orientation toward national dominance??that is, chauvinism. Here, the congruence of the nation and the state is not in question; the nation-state is not only legitimate but
is exalted above all others. Analytically, nationalism is understood by this tradition as a set of
attitudes that shape the perceptions and behaviors of ordinary people as they come into contact
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Table 1
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Conceptions of nationalism
Political
Quotidian
(focus on elites? political projects and
discursive practices)
(focus on lived culture, ideas, and
sentiments of non-elites)
Gellner (1983, p. 1): ?a political principle,
which holds that the political and the national
unit should be congruent?
Kosterman & Feshbach (1989, p. 271): ?a
perception of national superiority and an
orientation toward national dominance?
Practice
(?nationalism? refers to a domain
of meaningful social practice)
Brubaker (2004b, p. 116): ?a claim on people?s
loyalty, on their attention, on their solidarity
[. . .] used [. . .] to change the way people see
themselves, to mobilize loyalties, kindle
energies, and articulate demands?
Brubaker (1996, p. 10): ?a heterogeneous set
of ?nation?-oriented idioms, practices, and
possibilities that are continuously available
or ?endemic? in modern cultural and
political life?
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Ideology
(?nationalism? refers to narrow
set of ideas)
with political institutions (e.g., by voting) and engage in social interaction (e.g., with immigrants
or ethnic minorities).
Political psychologists tend to view nationalism (i.e., chauvinism) as a normative problem,
owing to its associations with anti-immigrant attitudes and bellicose foreign policy preferences.
Potentially invidious dispositions toward the nation, however, are not limited to chauvinism; they
also include exclusionary conceptions of national membership, excessive forms of national pride,
and strong identification with the nation above all other communities. Furthermore, the standard
distinction in this literature between nationalism and its ostensibly benign counterpart, patriotism,
is fraught with analytical difficulty. It is unclear if the difference between ?a deeply felt attachment
to the nation,? as Conover & Feldman (1987) define patriotism, and a ?perception of national
superiority? (Kosterman & Feshbach 1989) is one of degree or kind. The slippage between these
terms is not lost on scholars of patriotism, who are forced to come up with further distinctions when
their central concept turns out not to be as value-neutral as assumed (Schatz et al. 1999). These
problems illustrate the limitations of identifying nationalism with a single ideology; nationalism is
multidimensional and its conceptualization should be guided by analytical clarity, not normative
convictions. As Calhoun has argued (1997, p. 3), ?[b]oth positive and negative manifestations of
national identity and loyalty are shaped by the common discourse of nationalism.?
The two ideologically oriented research traditions subscribe to the view that nationalism defines the ends of action: For elite actors espousing nationalism as a political ideology, the goal
is to achieve political sovereignty on behalf of (or over) a national community; for people who
experience strong feelings of national superiority, the preferred outcomes are domination over
other nations and the policing of the nation?s symbolic boundaries (Lamont & Molnar 2002)
against undesirable others. An alternative way of thinking about nationalism, however, is to treat
it as the means rather than the ends of action (Swidler 1986). Nationalism is not only a conscious
ideology, it is also a discursive and cognitive frame through which people understand the world,
navigate social interactions, engage in coordinated action, and make political claims. The latter
orientation is exemplified by the two research approaches in the bottom cells of Table 1, which
view nationalism as a domain of meaningful social practice.
If the operative mode of nationalism-as-ideology is to effect political change in the interest of
national sovereignty, nationalism-as-practice involves people thinking, talking, and acting through
and with the nation (Brubaker 2004a, Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008, Goode & Stroup 2015). The latter
research approach does not begin with a priori assumptions about the content of nationalist ideas,
but rather treats nationalism as a domain of social life (and of scholarly inquiry) that is defined by
a taken-for-granted belief in the natural status of the nation-state as an object of identification and
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a mode of social and political organization. The goal then is to investigate the range of meanings
with which people imbue the nation, examine the relationship between national and other forms
of identification, uncover the mechanisms that reproduce the unquestioned cultural and political
dominance of the nation-state, and observe the manner in which the nation is evoked in everyday
practice. The central units of analysis in this tradition are not ideologies but collective narratives,
political claims, symbolic representations, and cultural schemas.
Research on nationalism as a domain takes two forms. The first (bottom-left cell of Table 1)
treats nationalism as a mode of political discourse articulated in the public sphere (Brubaker 2004b).
The focus here is on the manner in which elites formulate political claims by evoking meanings of
the nation that resonate with salient public narratives (Snow & Benford 1988, Tilly 2002). Research
on nationalism in everyday life (bottom-right cell of Table 1), on the other hand, examines how
the nation is understood and deployed in routine interactions (Brubaker 1996, 2004a). This may
manifest itself through explicit references to the nation, but just as often, nationalism?s influence is
more tacit, expressed in habituated modes of thought, speech, and behavior that take for granted
the nation?s cultural and political primacy.
The fourfold classification of the conceptual approaches to nationalism research suggests some
common themes. If we understand nationalism to consist of cognitive and discursive practices that
enact and perpetuate a common-sense understanding of the nation-state as a natural cultural and
political entity, then we can ask how such practices came to be taken for granted in the first place
(as do scholars of nation-building) and how and when they are evoked in political claims-making
and to what ends (as do scholars of political discourse). We can also seek to understand under what
circumstances tacit understandings of the nation crystallize into self-conscious ideologies, and how
those ideologies in turn shape the cultural practices of the members of national communities (as
well as those who are excluded from legitimate national membership). To answer these questions,
one would need to take into account the contextual factors that reproduce and sometimes transform
nationalism, from organizational and institutional practices to symbolic rituals and structured
microinteractions (Skey 2011).
In this article, I review sociological research on nationalism as a meaningful category of practice
and political psychology scholarship on nationalist attitudes (the two cells in the second column
of Table 1); among their other consequences, such practices and beliefs are likely to shape the
conditions of possibility for political mobilization through nationalist discourse (the bottom-left
cell). Thus far, these literatures have proceeded largely independently of one another, despite
sharing a common object of analysis. Greater synthesis of their respective contributions is necessary
for the development of a more complete understanding of nationalism?s role in everyday life. To
that end, the reader is encouraged to treat nationalism as a general social, cultural, and political
domain, which can include the invidious beliefs studied by political psychologists but is not limited
to them. Such an approach leaves analytical room for a range of research approaches, regardless
of how they define their object of study.
THE NATION IN EVERYDAY PRACTICE
The first step in furthering a research agenda on contemporary nationalism is to establish the
salience of the nation in everyday life. That people routinely perceive the world through a national
lens is a necessary prerequisite for any claims about the impact of competing visions of the nation
on social interaction and politics.
National identification is most tractable when the meaning of the nation becomes an object of
symbolic struggle (as in research on commemoration), when national membership is reinscribed
through collective ritual (as in research on festivals and holidays), and when nationhood-as-usual
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is punctuated by unexpected events (as in studies of terrorist attacks or natural disasters) (Brubaker
1996). While such moments of relative unsettlement represent deviations from routine practice,
they are analytically useful, much like breaching experiments in ethnomethodology, for bringing into relief otherwise latent cultural processes (Swidler 1986). Even outside of such episodes,
however, scholars have been able to examine people?s national dispositions by analyzing routine
symbolic practices, by observing the use of national frames in interaction, and by directly eliciting
responses in interviews, focus groups, and surveys.
This research has demonstrated that routine evocations of the nation in settled times are
essential for the continual reproduction of the national community. Indeed, as Renan [1882 (1996),
p. 42)] has stressed, if the nation is fundamentally based on ?consent, the clearly expressed desire
to continue a common life,? then the nation?s continued existence is ?a daily plebiscite, just as an
individual?s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.? This plebiscite is tacit and its outcome
for the most part predetermined, but this is so precisely because of the myriad ways in which the
nation is actively institutionalized in daily practice.
It is this process of institutionalization that is the focus of work on banal nationalism (as opposed
to more incendiary or ?hot? nationalism), a term coined and theorized by Michael Billig. Billig
(1995, p. 6) argues that ?daily, the nation is indicated, or ?flagged,? in the lives of its citizenry?
through exposure to implicit cues. These subtle reminders reinforce prior socialization into the
nation through mass education and collective rituals associated with national holidays and crises
(Collins 2012, Skey 2006). Thus, ?nationalism, far from being an intermittent mood in established
nations, is the endemic condition? (Billig 1995, p. 6), based on the naturalized beliefs that ?the
world is (and should be) divided into identifiable nations, that each person should belong to a
nation, that an individual?s nationality has some influence on how they think and behave and also
leads to certain responsibilities and entitlements? (Skey 2011, p. 5).
Research related to banal nationalism has taken two forms. The first holds analytically constant
the importance of the nation in everyday life and asks how this common-sense belief system is
reproduced. The second, in contrast, challenges the idea that the nation is relevant to all people
at all times and instead asks under what circumstances national frames of reference are employed
in daily practice.
To answer the first question, scholars have studied the public culture within which contemporary life unfolds in established nation-states. Wodak et al. (1999), for instance, focus on the
importance of political and commemorative speeches and debates in perpetuating national habitus (Bourdieu 1990). These forms of public talk emphasize the internal homogeneity of the nation
and its fundamental distinctiveness from other national communities, thereby bringing people?s
personal identity narratives in line with those of the nation-state. Edensor (2002) highlights the
importance of geographic space in perpetuating national frames of reference, in the sense of both
an administratively bounded territory and a familiar, affectively infused landscape. Others have
examined the role of the concurrent consumption of media content across geographically disparate
regions of a given nation (Anderson 1983, Rahn 2000), the prominence of national figures in streetnaming practices (Centeno 2003), the role of museums in curating national culture (Levitt 2015),
the institutionalization of cultural rituals that index the nation (Surak 2011), the branding of nations through large-scale architectural projects (McNeill & Tewdwr-Jones 2003), and patriotic flag
display practices (Ko?se & Yilmaz 2012), particularly in the wake of national tragedies (Skitka 2005).
Symbolic reminders of the nation?s primacy are also shaped by state institutions that systematically survey, classify, and reconfigure the social and physical world in distinctly national ways
(Scott 1999). By defining national populations through censuses and citizenship laws (Anderson
1983, Brubaker 1992, Herzog 2015), institutionalizing national territory through administrative map making (Winichakul 1997), producing national history through standardized school
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curricula (Moreau 2003), and marketing cultural heritage in national terms (Aronczyk 2013, Bandelj & Wherry 2011, DeSoucey 2010), the state continually reasserts the primacy of the national
community in its citizens? thinking and behavior. No less important is the formal exclusion of
those judged not to hold the appropriate traits or credentials for national membership (Koopmans
et al. 2005, Smith 1997, Wimmer 2002).
Evidence that the nation is a deeply internalized and embodied (Surak 2012) category of practice
suggests that people are likely to make choices and enact routinized scripts of action based on their
sense of national belonging. Yet, the nation is only one of many sources of individual identification,
alongside other collective and role-based identities (Di?ez Medrano & Gutie?rrez 2001, SmithLovin 2007). Thus, in addition to studying how the nation becomes taken for granted, the challenge
is to find out when and where it becomes practically important (Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008).
Some promising leads are offered by Fox & Miller-Idriss (2008), who argue that nationalism-aspractice informs everyday life in four ways: through talk (both about and with the nation), symbolic
rituals, engagement with national institutions, and consumption practices. Of these, nationalist talk
has received the most attention in sociological research. An exemplar of this approach, Brubaker
et al.?s (2007) extensive mixed-methods study of Cluj, a Transylvanian town, sought to identify
the use of ethnic and national affiliations in everyday interactions by members of the Romanian
majority and the Hungarian minority, as a bridge across cultural differences and, occasionally,
a source of differentiation and conflict. The study demonstrated that the nationalist rhetoric of
Romanian and Hungarian elites is rarely reproduced in daily life, where more practical concerns
dominate. Nationhood becomes salient in certain circumstances, to be sure, as when ethnic markers
are acknowledged in microinteractions, when people are called to represent their community, or
when they interact with ethnic and national institutions, but its unconditional importance should
not be taken for granted.
Other studies have sought to elicit national frames of reference through in-depth interviews.
Skey (2011), for instance, demonstrates the ease with which highly ritualized understandings of
Britain are used to achieve a shared definition of a situation in social interaction. Even when they
verge on cliche?s, such narratives help to establish common group membership [cf. Condor (2000)
on ambivalence toward national talk in Britain]. This interactionist approach echoes Deutsch?s
(1953) argument that nationalism is reproduced through frequent interactions with linguistically
and culturally similar individuals, and that such interactions may outweigh more infrequent contact
with culturally distant others.
Skey?s (2011) work also suggests that national identification grants people a level of ontological
security (Giddens 1991) and that perceived threats to the nation?s stability, like those represented
by globalization and multiculturalism, can generate aggressive claims to the nation?s cultural?and
ethnic?purity, which are often expressed in everyday conversations. Such threats need not originate outside of the nation, however, as demonstrated by Miller-Idriss?s (2009) study of differences
in national attachment between German vocational school teachers and students. In contrast to
the older generation that rejected nationalism because of its association with the country?s Nazi
past, the younger working-class respondents embrace the nation as a source of identity and solidarity. Because their national identification is explicitly delegitimized by the educational system,
many of the students are drawn toward involvement in radical right-wing politics. The relevance
and political implications of nationhood, therefore, depend not only on situational context and
sociopolitical conditions, but also on the relationship between deeply held beliefs and dominant
narratives embedded in national institutions.
These findings suggest that to understand which segments of a population are most receptive to
nationalist political appeals, scholars would do well to focus on those who are acutely threatened
by rapid cultural and economic changes. Moreover, such effects are likely to be mediated by
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social class and cohort effects. These arguments are consistent with research on popular support
for radical-right politics in Europe and the United States. In Western Europe, the working and
lower-middle classes have benefited the least from European integration and have been the most
susceptible to nativist rhetoric (Swank & Betz 2003). In the United States, the claims of grassroots
conservative movements (McVeigh 2014) and right-wing presidential candidates (Knuckey &
Kim 2015, Oliver & Rahn 2016, cf. Bonikowski & Gidron 2016) have strongly resonated with the
economic insecurity and racial resentment of working-class white men.
Shifts in the salience of the nation are also driven by public rituals that heighten the national
consciousness of large segments of the national population. Such rituals reinvigorate the nation
by amplifying mutualistic norms and feelings of solidarity and by infusing group symbols with
emotional potency and meaning [Collins 2012, Durkheim 1995 (1912)]. They include events that
explicitly sacralize the nation, like civic holidays and anniversaries of founding moments (Skey
2006, Spillman 1997, Waldstreicher 1997), but also events that bring the national community
together around seemingly nonnationalist ends, from sporting contests to democratic elections
(Alexander 2006, Fox 2006, Hobsbawm 1983, Kertzer 1988). The result of these recurring rituals
is the continual renewal of nationalism as a form of civil religion that places the nation above other
collective affiliations (Bellah 1975).
Communities are especially likely to set aside internal differences and rally together during
times of crisis that generate mutual entrainment around the national idea (Collins 2012), as illustrated by Americans? widespread public displays of national symbols after the 9/11 attacks (Skitka
2005). Such ?rituals of solidarity? (Collins 2004) unfold in patterned stages, from a rapid initial
surge, through a stable plateau of heightened emotion, to a gradual dissipation and return to precrisis levels. Given the fleeting nature of collective solidarity, the rituals? potent integrative effects
are frequently preserved in symbolic representations, such as songs, poems, and commemorative
monuments.
Whereas scholars in the Durkheimian tradition have stressed the integrative effects of national
crises, the resulting upwellings of national identification can also engender otherwise unlikely
policy developments. For instance, following the 9/11 attacks, Americans expressed unusually
high levels of unconditional support for state institutions and leaders (Feinstein 2016a), which
generated the conditions of possibility for the PATRIOT Act and the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq (Chanley 2002, Kam & Kinder 2007). More recently, the moral panic in Europe and
the United States concerning Syrian refugees has been exacerbated by nationalist politicians?
exploitation of public fears following the November 2015 Paris attacks (Francis & O?Grady 2015),
leading to the reintroduction of border controls in some Schengen Area countries.
Survey-based research supports these arguments, but it suggests possible mediating factors
for the exclusionary consequences of strong identification with the nat