Nation-State and Nationalism

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Nation-State and Nationalism ´ SINIŠA MALEŠEVIC University College Dublin, Ireland

´ TROŠT TAMARA PAVASOVIC University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

A nation-state is a form of polity which derives its political legitimacy from the claims that it represents a particular nation. This social organization is characterized by clearly demarcated territory, centralized political authority, and the propensity to legitimately monopolize the use of violence, taxation, education, and legislation over the territory it controls (Maleševi´c, 2013). A nation-state is the dominant form of polity in the modern era and is also popularly regarded as the only legitimate form of territorial political organization. Nevertheless, this contemporary dominance of the nation-state model is historically speaking a very recent development.

The Rise of Nation-States Whereas human beings have lived in different forms of state for over 10,000 years, it is only in the last three centuries that the nation-state has gradually been established as the principal mode of human sedentary existence. For much of history, empires and city-states were the prevailing mode of state organization, and their organizational and ideological structure differs profoundly from the ideal type of the nation-state. For example, in contrast to nation-states that have stable and internationally recognized borders, the classical imperial orders had frontiers where territorial claims were constantly shifting, were regularly contested, and often poorly defined. This organizational difference was deeply rooted in the ideological disparity between empires and nation-states: While the imperial orders were universalist in a sense that they were perceived to be the epicenter

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of the whole (known) world, the nation-states are mostly oriented toward their own citizens. In other words, since traditional empires, such as the ancient Chinese or Roman Empire, were bent on conquering the entire world, they tended to legitimize their existence in global terms by invoking universalist doctrines such as religious canons, philosophical principles, or civilizing missions (e.g., Roman humanitas, Chinese Confucianism, or later French oeuvre civilisatrice). In contrast, nation-states are founded on the particularist principles (i.e., nationalism) that generally center on the unique and special characteristics of one’s nation. Furthermore, nation-states differ from empires in terms of hierarchal order: Whereas empires presuppose the existence of inherent status-based rights and obligations where one’s lineage determines one’s position for life, the nation-state model is built on the idea that there are no innate privileges and that all citizens are of equal moral worth. This does not necessarily mean that nation-states have no social hierarchies, but only that, unlike traditional empires, they are nominally committed to the principles of moral equality of their citizens. Another important feature of a nation-state model, which differentiates it further from the imperial orders, is the emphasis on the cultural cohesion of its populace. Although no nationstate in the world is culturally homogeneous, all such polities are established around the principles that foster national unity and glorify standardized, hence relatively uniform, models of nationhood. Even though some nation-states might be more open than others toward multicultural and other pluralist forms of rule, the ideological and organizational structure of the nation-state model as such tends to push it toward cultural homogeneity. The main reason for this is the fact that, unlike empires where society-wide cultural practices generally do not have political meaning, the nation-state emerged as, and continues to be defined by, politicization of cultural difference. Simply put, unlike empires where culture was used to reinforce social hierarchies between the aristocracy and the commoners, in modern polities culture operates as the social glue

The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Edited by George Ritzer and Chris Rojek. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosn003.pub2

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that binds the citizens of individual nation-states together (Gellner, 1983). Finally, nation-states also differ from empires and other premodern forms of polity in their reliance on secular modes of organization. The principle sources of political legitimacy in the modern era have largely shifted from the religious and other supernatural authorities toward the citizens (i.e., “the people”) as the primary raison d’être of modern states. This is not to say that religion has disappeared from the public sphere or the constitutions of modern states. It is quite obvious that some contemporary states, including Iran, Sudan, and Mauritania strongly invoke theocratic principles as a part of their polity’s legitimacy. However, even in such cases, the state’s organizational structure is heavily dependent on the existence of secular institutions and secular principles (e.g. parliaments, presidents, economic systems, the moral equality of the citizens, etc.) This organizational secularism of modern nation-states differs substantially from the nonsecular sources of legitimacy in the premodern world where one would justify the right to rule invoking the doctrine of divine origins of monarchs, religious privilege, or kinship-based mythologies (Brubaker, 2015). In this sense, a nation-state is the only model of polity organization the existence of which is legitimized through secular concepts. Although nation-states differ profoundly from empires, city-states, and other models of polity, they do not emerge ex nihilo. Conventional historical narratives emphasize the centrality of political revolutions for the formation of nation-states. Hence the French and American revolutions, together with the Latin American wars of independence, were often identified as the pivotal moments in the development and worldwide proliferation of the nation-state model (Anderson, 1983; Breuilly, 1993). There is no doubt that all these three major violent historical episodes have contributed substantially toward the transformation of the world. The American Revolution (1765–1783) inaugurated the idea of a self-governing republic breaking up from the tutelage of the larger (British) imperial order. This early experiment in state-building and nation-formation drew on the Greek and Roman traditions of republicanism as well as on the Enlightenment ideals that prioritized individual

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autonomy, reason, and rationality, and the moral equality of human beings over the traditional monarchist models of rule embedded in the established and inherited status hierarchies. In this sense, the declaration of independence issued by the representatives of the 13 American colonies became a symbol of a successful anti-imperial struggle that inspired many nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist movements. In a similar vein, the French Revolution (1789–1799) represented a break with the ancien régime as it too was deeply influenced by Enlightenment principles. This is clearly evident in the guiding motto of the Revolution – liberté, égalité, and fraternité – as well as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), which emphasized that the state’s sovereignty does not reside in the monarch but in the nation, and that the nation consists of free individuals equally protected by the law. Some of these ideals were just as present in the early and mid-nineteenth-century Latin American wars of independence, where successful rebellions and wars forced Spanish and Portuguese imperial orders to recognize the independence of Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and other Latin American states (Anderson, 1983). Nevertheless, these three historical episodes, as important as they are, have not obliterated the imperial and other traditional models of political organization. Instead empires remained the dominant form of rule well into the twentieth century. In some instances they maintained their traditional models of organization, as was the case with the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, or the Russian Empire under the Romanovs, while other states combined national and imperial features. For example, France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium were all involved in nationalizing projects at home while also pursuing imperial expansion abroad. The new American republic also fits into this pattern as its rulers were soon involved in imperial-style territorial expansion throughout the North American continent: continuous conflicts with the native population, the war of 1812, the Mexican–American war, the Spanish–American war, and so on. Although the American and French revolutions introduced and to some extent institutionalized the ideas and practices of nationhood, this process of transition from an imperial to the national world was rather slow and uneven. Not only

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N AT I O N- S TAT E were rulers often stretched between imperial and national ambitions, but the majority of the population were still far off from seeing themselves as full-fledged members of their nation. As Eugen Weber (1976) demonstrated convincingly, even at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, most citizens of France identified themselves in local, religious, or kinship-based terms rather than as members of the French nation. The process of turning peasants into Frenchmen and women was very slow and patchy. Similarly, Walker Connor’s (1990) work indicates that the overwhelming majority of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European immigrants to the United States had little or no sense what nation they belonged to, as they would regularly describe themselves not in national but only in local, regional, religious, or kinship-based terms. The key issue here is that the shift from empire to nation-state entails complex and protracted social transformations including the substantially increased organizational capacity of states and their ability to penetrate deeply into their respective societies. In other words, the society-wide spread of nationalist ideas and practices is dependent on a variety of organizational and ideological factors: the existence of transport and communication networks that successfully integrate social order, the presence of centralized and effective political authority that can shape that social order, the expanded coercive capacity of governments that can tax their citizens at source and also recruit them in times of war, the development of societywide and state-controlled educational systems that help mould new generations of loyal citizenry, the existence of mass media networks that stimulate the emergence of a shared public sphere, and so on. It is only when these organizational processes were fully in place that nationalism could gradually become the dominant ideological discourse (Mann, 1995; Maleševi´c, 2013).

Nationalism Nationalism is an ideology built around ideas and practices that recognize the nation as the central building block of group solidarity and the only legitimate unit for the sovereign territorial organization of political rule. In nationalist

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understanding, nations are perceived to be culturally unique expressions of collective being, and are, as such, regarded as the natural and optimal units of social organization. For the proponents of nationalist ideology, nationhood stands above other group allegiances, and not expressing loyalty to one’s nation is regularly understood to be a type of moral alienation. Most nationalist discourses conceive of fully developed nations as entities that are sovereign in their decision-making, culturally autonomous, economically independent, and politically free (Anderson, 1983; Maleševi´c, 2013). The central conceptual pillars of nationalist ideology, such as autonomy, political sovereignty, unique cultural features, shared destiny, and collective freedom, have all developed in the wake of profound ideational conflicts between the philosophies of Enlightenment and romanticism. Traditional accounts often associate the Enlightenment with the promotion of individual rights, reason and rationality over superstition, personal liberty, and tolerance, while romanticism is conventionally linked to the collective emotional self-awareness, cultural distinctiveness, spontaneity, mysticism, naturalism, and the affirmation of the collective heritage and shared past. In this context, the Enlightenment tradition is generally perceived to have influenced the emergence and development of civic or political models of nationalism, whereas the heritage of romanticism has been connected to the rise of ethnic or cultural nationalisms. The civic model of nationalist ideology is often attributed to the polities where states have developed before nations, or where the states and nations emerged together, such was the case in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, the United States, or Britain. In this civic version of nationalism, nationhood is conceptualized around the political and territorial markers of membership: The nation is perceived to be a voluntary association of individuals. In the famous pamphlet of Ernest Renan (2018 [1882]), nation is no more than a “daily plebiscite” where individuals have to reaffirm their commitment to each other on a daily basis. In contrast, the ethnic model of nationhood has traditionally been linked to polities where nations develop before the states and where the nationalist movements aspire to establish sovereign and independent polities for the members of one nation. To achieve

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this, ethnic nationalists appeal to shared cultural heritage including language, ethnic descent, common customs, shared religion, or collective myths and memories. German philosopher Johann Fichte’s Address to the German Nation (2013 [1808]: 147) is often identified as the quintessential example of the ethnic nationalist rhetoric. For example, Fichte emphasizes the significance of commemorating one’s ancestors: “It is they whom we must thank – we, the immediate heirs of their soil, their language, and their way of thinking – for being Germans still, for being still borne along on the stream of original and independent life.” Nevertheless, this well-established dichotomy between ethnic and civic nationalisms has been questioned on several grounds. For one thing, this typology is often deployed to delegitimize or discredit minority nationalist movements by the dominant state nationalist discourses. Thus separatist and postcolonial nationalist movements are regularly associated with the lack of civility and rationality that the label “ethnic nationalist” implies, whereas hegemonic state nationalisms are rarely questioned, presuming wrongly that they are based exclusively on voluntary principles (Brubaker, 2004). For another, as much of recent empirical research demonstrates, civic nationalisms are not immune to intolerant and violent social action (Hall, 2002). Finally, the civic versus ethnic dichotomy is neither historically fixed nor predetermined: Nationalist movements and ideologies change and no specific state or social organization can be permanently identified with either of these two types of nationalism. Hence, rather than simply assuming that one of these types of nationalist doctrine is inherently violence prone or predetermined, it is much more productive to treat nationalism as a dynamic and scalar concept that can oscillate and move between these two, and many other, ideal types (Maleševi´c, 2006, 2013). Another important feature of nationalist ideology is its conceptual and organizational flexibility. Unlike other political ideologies, from conservatism, liberalism, and socialism to religious fundamentalism, nationalism is often perceived to be a free-floating discourse which can successfully coexist with the variety of political positions. Hence one can find rightwing, leftwing, and centrist nationalist movements, and nationalism is utilized equally by democratic and authoritarian

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governments. Its intrinsic litheness has led many analysts to see nationalism as being a less than a full-fledged ideology. For example, Freeden (1996: 751) insists that nationalism lacks a set of unique conceptual attributes that would distinguish it clearly from other mainstream ideologies. For Freeden, nationalism is a thin-centered ideology that does not offer its own distinct answers to the key societal questions such as “social justice, distribution of resources and conflict management which mainstream ideologies address.” However, these political theory perspectives focus too much on the intellectual constructs that underpin specific ideological messages and pay insufficient attention to the sociological features of nationalist ideologies. While nationalist ideologies might conceptually be less elaborate and even less sophisticated, they are far from being thin ideological discourses. The unprecedented success of nationalism in the modern era stems in part from its ability to permeate everyday life – from public institutions such as schools, hospitals, post offices, mass media, cemeteries, to the private sphere including family life, friendships, and neighborhoods where nationhood can tap into the microlevel modes of solidarity. In this way nationalism is a fully embedded and society-wide phenomenon precisely because it is an ideology that is central to how subjectivity is formed and enacted in the modern world (Gellner, 1983; Maleševi´c, 2018; 2013). Thus, rather than seeing nationalism as thin ideological discourse, it is more fruitful to analyze it as the dominant metaideology of contemporary times. In this context one can distinguish between the two layers of ideological discourses that underpin all modern social orders: the normative and the operative layers of social reality. The normative layer stands for the official doctrines of the particular nationstate and can range from the liberal, socialist, or theocratic, to the conservative and many other ideologies. In contrast, on the operative layer all contemporary nation-states inevitably espouse strong nationcentric understandings of social reality. For example, on the normative level Denmark, Iran, and North Korea all subscribe to very different and in many ways mutually incompatible normative ideological principles: liberalism, Twelver Ja’fari Shia Islam, and the Juche variant of Marxism-Leninism respectively. Nevertheless, on the operative level – that is the

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N AT I O N- S TAT E way ideology works in everyday discourses, from school textbooks to popular novels and advertising – in all these three societies nationalism functions as the dominant ideology (Maleševi´c, 2006, 2013). It is the operative realm that is crucial for the continuous reproduction of nationalism as well as for the legitimacy of any particular modern political order. The strength of nationalism often resides in its public invisibility: Being well embedded in the institutions of modern states and being constantly reproduced in the everyday practices of modern societies makes nationalism a potent social glue that keeps the contemporary nation-states and their inhabitants together.

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the other hand, find nations to be formed on the basis of attachments to the “cultural givens” of social existence, and are seen by those who share them to have an “overpowering, coerciveness in and of themselves” (Geertz, 1973: 109). The actual intrinsic nature of ethnic attachments, and the naturalness and longevity of nations, however, is less relevant than the fact that individuals experience them as givens and consequently attribute power to them. While praised for accounting for emotions and the intensity of the affect of ethnic appeals, primordial theories are criticized for taking the “cultural givens” as too fixed and essentialist, rendering them unable to account for their variance across people within the same cultural group, nor for transformations over time.

Theories of Nationalism Though many different typologies of the theories of nationalism have been proposed, the main paradigms can be grouped in four main camps: primordialism/perennialism, modernism, ethnosymbolism, and new approaches.

Primordialism Primordialism, based on the conviction that nationality is a natural part of human beings, is typically used in explaining primordial attachments to ethnic identity. Sociobiological approaches emphasize the biological bases of affinity, finding ethnic identity to be rooted in biological circumstances and nature, while nations, ethnic groups, and races are derived from genetic reproductive drives with the goal of increasing genetic longevity. Ethnicity and nationalism are perceived to have deep roots in human nature, while culture and kinship are understood to play a defining role in human evolution from time immemorial (Gat, 2013). Human sociality is seen as focused around principles of kin selection (altruistic), reciprocity (cooperation for mutual benefit), and coercion (use of force for one-sided benefit); while humans do not necessarily have a gene for nepotism, societies practicing nepotism and ethnocentrism have a selection advantage because kin selection is a basic blueprint of animal sociality. Myths of ethnic groupness, thus, actually have roots in biology, explaining the tendency of individuals to treat strangers of the same ethnicity as kin. Cultural approaches, on

Perennialism Perennialism holds that nations are immemorial, and stresses the historical antiquity of the nation, wherein claims of the historical basis of the nation are empirically supported by historiography and archaeology. Perennialist approaches have three main variants: continuous and recurrent perennialism and neoperennialist approaches. Continuous perennialism posits that some nations have continuous histories, and have indeed existed, in continuity, since antiquity, allowing us to differentiate between old (continuous) and new, deliberately created nations. Recurrent perennialism, while also holding that the nation is perennial and ubiquitous throughout history, and nationhood a universal, disembedded phenomenon, allows for changes in nations over time; recurrence is evident in the maintenance of the collective identity of the nation (Smith, 2010: 54–55). Neoperennialists point to the “national” characteristics of premodern nations, including a written history, an authoritative center, a conception of a bounded territory, and cultural uniformity sustained by religion and legal codes. These theorists point to the convergence between ethnicity and statehood in premodern states, seeing nationalism as a “particular form of a broader phenomenon, that of political ethnicity” (Gat, 2013: 3), and point to its existence “in various forms, among diverse societies, throughout much of history of the literate civilization” (Roschwald, 2006: 10). Nonetheless, while all these approaches stress the historical nature of nations, they do

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not necessarily regard nations as natural, organic, or primordial (see Smith, 2010: 54). Perennialist approaches have been criticized on both methodological and terminological grounds: a static understanding of national identities and culture, projecting modern concepts onto earlier social formations, focusing too much on elite discourse without unpacking the meanings of “nation” across time and contexts, and selective use of historical evidence (Özkirimli, 2017).

Modernism Modernism emphasizes the recent, invented, and constructed nature of nations and nationalism, what Smith calls “structural modernism”: the inherently national and nationalist nature of modernity (2010: 52–53). Nations are thus the product of specifically modern processes, including capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, secularism, and the modern bureaucratic state, a sociological necessity in the modern era (Özkirimli, 2017: 81). Early modernization theorists such as Karl Deutsch or Daniel Lerner include functionalist accounts of nations and nationalism: They were seen as a “concomitant of the period of transition, a balm that soothes weary souls, alleviating the suffering caused by that process” (42). Nation-building is set in motion by sociodemographic processes like urbanization, mobility, and literacy (42–43), a process in which the ability to communicate is critical, as membership in groups relies on the ability to communicate, both between lower- and middle-class social groups as well as between them and the center. A similar argument can be found in Kedourie’s historically idealist explanation of nationalism, which he viewed as a movement of alienated and dissatisfied youth, a subversive and revolutionary answer to the “breakdown in the transmission of political habits and religious beliefs from one generation to the next” (Kedourie, 1961: 99). Socioeconomic approaches view nations as a product of social and economic factors including capitalism, regional inequality, and class conflict: National sentiments can be heightened in periods of economic deprivation and among newly mobilized masses of the periphery. These include Tom Nairn’s uneven development and Michael Hechter’s internal colonialism theses, both of which emphasize the relative deprivation

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between the core and periphery and the sociohistorical costs of capitalist market forces. Economic and rational choice models have been rejected by many scholars for their lack of explanatory value, the presence of counterexamples, and essentialism – treating some nations as given. Political approaches see nations as created by the modern state’s interaction with society, and as inevitably occurring simultaneously with state sovereignty, emphasizing the role of politics, power, and the state. These approaches include Breuilly’s political theory of nationalism (1993), which posits that nationalism is an instrument for political goals, thus exclusively arising in modern times. Whereas politics in the modern world is based on the control of the state, nationalism is an instrument to seize and retain control because of its ability to offer a platform to elites for the mobilization, coordination, and legitimation of their interests (Smith, 2010: 60; Özkirimli, 2017: 92–94). Other political accounts of nationalism similarly emphasize the role played by regional administrations in the rise of nations and the centralized, professionalized, and territorialized nature of the modern state, which invokes nationalism, generating “the cultural sensibility of sovereignty.” Some political approaches take the shape of instrumentalist arguments, focusing on rationality: inspired by debates in the nature of ethnicity; these theorists view ethnicity as optional and symbolic, and by extension, ethnic or national groups as behaving instrumentally to maximize their resources and power over the masses (Brass, 1991). Based on situationalist models of ethnicity, which argue that members of a society can choose to emphasize certain cultural or national traits, in which boundaries are maintained by underlying socioeconomic interests of group members (Olzak, 1993), these theories explain how stratified systems of social organization that appear in modern capitalist societies allow or encourage certain groups to use ethnic or racial boundaries to assert dominance over others, demonstrating how competition and conflict can strengthen preexisting ethnic or racial boundaries or even create them (Cornell and Hartmann, 1997). The main criticisms of political approaches include their overemphasis on the role of elites while ignoring why or how ethnonationalist appeals work among ordinary people and their inability to explain premodern ethnic ties.

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N AT I O N- S TAT E Finally, cultural and constructionist approaches acknowledge the modernity of nations while emphasizing their cultural components and their socially constructed nature. In cultural approaches, nations are expressions of “high culture” transmitted to masses through two crucial elements contributing to the reproduction of culture: media and education. The “cultural stuff” that nationalism uses might be historically inherited, however, the modern state “uses them very selectively, and it most often transforms them radically” (Gellner, 1983: 55). Hroch also stressed the importance of identification with the cultural aspects of identity: Modern nations become fully existent “only when everyone, or almost everyone, who qualifies as its potential member, identifies with it” (Hroch, 2015: 34). Constructionists posit that nations and nationalism are constructed: Anderson (1983) sees nations as “imagined communities,” which developed upon the amalgamation of national consciousness through the emergence of printed press, filling the void left by decline in religion and monarchies, while Hobsbawm and Ranger’s “invented tradition” approach (1983) views nations as necessarily arising out of modernism: Modern states needed to “invent traditions” in order to provide social cohesion among groups and provide legitimacy to its own institutions. As with other approaches within the modernist paradigm, cultural accounts are also criticized for their inability to explain the passions and affect of national appeals, for being empirically selective, overlooking regional and historical variations, as well as for ignoring the broader geopolitical context (i.e., the external threats).

Ethnosymbolism Ethnosymbolism emerged in response to the debates above, conceding that there are some historical artefacts, like myths, symbols, memories, traditions, and values, which still affect the present, and that these “metaphysical” elements justify collective existence and contribute to the uniqueness of nations, and persistence of nationalism (Smith, 2010). Ethnosymbolists see nations as embedded in particular historical eras, however, they regard ethnic identities as critical in the formation and persistence of nations. Ethnosymbolism thus represents a “middle approach”

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between modernist and perennial accounts of the nation, focusing on the reciprocal relationship between elites and the people: While acknowledging the modern and constructed nature of nations, ethnosymbolism nonetheless recognizes the social and cultural patterns that are deeply embedded and persist in societies, and urges their examination over la longue durée (Smith, 2010: 3–40). Anthony Smith’s historical approach stresses the ethnic origins of nations, additionally emphasizing antiquity – a felt affiliation and cultural affinity with a remote past in which the community was formed – as a source of legitimacy. Similarly, Hutchinson (2017) emphasizes the way in which institutions can preserve premodern cultural repertoires of symbols, myths, and memories. Phenomenological approaches rely more on perennialist understandings of the nation, where ethnic identities are “shifting clusters of perceptions, sentiments, and attitudes,” “myth-symbol complexes” which should be investigated over the long term (Armstrong, 1982). A recent approach, focused on the moral psychology of community (Yack, 2012), has reformulated ethnosymbolism’s main ideas, arguing that nations can only be explained by “social friendship” – relations of mutual concern and loyalty. Groups of individuals – communities – who imagine themselves to share loyalty, are linked to nations by “our affirmation of the shared cultural legacies that we inherit from previous generations” (2012: 66). Özkirimli (2017) outlines the main criticisms of the ethnosymbolism approach: conceptual confusion between the terms “nation,” “ethnicity,” and “ethnic group”; underestimating differences between modern nations and earlier ethnic communities; nonexistence of nations and nationalism in premodern eras, lack of historical detail and analytical rigor, using empirical cases selectively; and, finally, ethnosymbolism’s insistence on the persistence and durability of ethnic ties, leading to a reification of nations.

Contemporary Approaches to Nationalism Contemporary approaches to nationalism have moved away from the question of the origins of nations and nationalism, challenging the fundamental assumptions of mainstream scholarship: In particular, they reject methodological nationalism – the tendency to take nationalism

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and its appeal for granted – and instead attempt to explain conditions under which nations and nationalism have become so pervasive (Özkirimli, 2017: 182). As such, these approaches are necessarily interdisciplinary and include new methods of analysis: critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, rhetorical theory, psychoanalysis, intersectionality, and new epistemological perspectives such as feminism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism (183). The most well-known articulations of these criticisms include Rogers Brubaker’s ethnicity without groups appeal: avoiding ethnic groupism – “the tendency to take ethnic groups, nations and races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed” – which results in the conflation of our object of analysis and our analytical tools. Instead, Brubaker urges us to analyze ethnicity and nation in “relational, processual, dynamic, eventful, and disaggregated terms,” as “practical categories, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas, discursive frames, organizational routines, institutional forms, political projects and contingent events” (2004: 167–168). Michael Billig’s (1995) banal nationalism urges a focus on the unnoticed, banal ideological habits which enable the reproduction of nations and imagined feelings of groupness through the use of flags, symbols on currency, turns of phrase, national songs, and implied togetherness in other national contexts. Using Billig’s and Brubaker’s arguments as a starting point, everyday nationalism approaches give priority to the role of ordinary people’s beliefs and practices: Instead of seeing “ordinary people” and masses as passive consumers of national ideologies served “from the top,” ordinary people are seen as creative and proactive consumers and producers of nationalism (Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008). Four ways of producing the nation in everyday life are proposed: “talking the nation” (the discursive construction of the nation through routine talk), “choosing the nation” (the way in which nationhood frames the choices people make), “performing the nation” (producing national feelings through the ritual enactment of symbols), and “consuming the nation” (the manifestation of identity through everyday consumption habits): These four mechanisms allow us to appreciate the variable meaning and salience of nationalism, which would not be possible through studying only its state-sponsored

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construction, modern industrial context, or elite manipulation (2008: 537–538). In addition to the everyday nationalism approach, several other strands of research have rejected the reification of nations, instead paying attention to discourse: The “various ways in which a diverse range of practices, symbols, texts, objects, and utterances form a wider social discourse that reproduces the world” (Skey, 2011: 50). Craig Calhoun (1997: 3) similarly defined nationalism as a discursive formation, or a “way of speaking that shapes our consciousness,” identifying ten features of the rhetoric of the nation. Andreas Wimmer’s comparative theory on ethnic boundary-making attempts to explain why ethnicity matters “to different degrees and in different forms in different societies, situations and periods” (2013: 3). He proposes three main factors that influence the dynamics of boundary-making: the institutional setup, power hierarchies and the distribution of resources, and preexisting political networks that can determine the limits of the boundary-making process (11–12). Wimmer also identifies five types of strategies that actors can pursue, as well as the means of boundary-making, providing a coherent model of boundary-making. Finally, several additional approaches have examined the understudied aspects of nationalism, such as feminism and the politics of belonging, focused on exploring the gendered and sexualized nature of nationalist projects (Yuval-Davis, 1997), and the peculiarities of nation-building in postcolonial societies (Chatterjee, 1993).

SEE ALSO: Capitalism; Citizenship; Democracy; Empire; Global Politics; Imagined Communities; Modernity; Nation-State; Nationalism; Postnationalism; State References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London. Armstrong, J. (1982) Nations before Nationalism, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC. Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism, SAGE, London. Brass, P. (1991) Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison, SAGE, London. Breuilly, J. (1993) Nationalism and the State, Manchester University Press, Manchester.

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N AT I O N- S TAT E Brubaker, R. (2004) Ethnicity without Groups, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Brubaker, R. (2015) Grounds for Difference, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Calhoun, C. (1997) Nationalism, Open University Press, Buckingham. Chatterjee, P. (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Connor, W. (1990) When is a nation? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 13, 92–103. Cornell, S.E. and Hartmann. D. (1997) Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World. Sage, Newbury Park. Fichte, J.G. (2013 [1808]) Addresses to the German Nation, Hackett, Indianapolis, IN. Fox, J.E. and Miller-Idriss, C. (2008) Everyday nationhood. Ethnicities, 8, 536–563. Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Gat, A. (2013) Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Blackwell, Oxford. Hall, J.A. (2002) A disagreement about difference, in Making Sense of Collectivity: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Globalization (ed. S. Maleševi´c and M. Haugaard), Pluto Press, London, pp. 181–194. Hobsbawm, E.J. and Ranger, T. (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hroch, M. (2015) European Nations: Explaining Their Formation, Verso, London. Hutchinson, J. (2017) Nationalism and War, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Kedourie, E. (1961) Nationalism, 2nd edn, Hutchinson, London.

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