Nana 12420 PDF

NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS
NATIONALISM
bs_bs_banner
FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN
Nations and Nationalism 24 (3), 2018, 579–593.
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12420
How to gauge banal nationalism and

national indifference in the past:
proletarian tweets in Belgium’s belle
époque
MAARTEN VAN GINDERACHTER
Department of History, Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium
ABSTRACT. Michael Billig’s theory of banal nationalism involves the assumption

that the absence of an explicit discourse on the nation should be interpreted as the un-
mindful presence of nationalism and that the mass media faithfully represent or reflect
the discourses of ‘ordinary people’. Recent historical research of ‘national indifference’
in imperial Austria has inverted the correlation between the ubiquity of nationalist dis-
courses and their impact in society. This article assesses these conflicting frameworks
and refutes AD Smith’s critique of everyday nationalism research as necessarily ahistor-
ical and presentist. This case study of the rank-and-file of the social-democratic Belgian
Workers' Party at the close of the nineteenth century uses a unique source of working-
class voices: the so-called ‘propaganda pence’ or ‘proletarian tweets’ from the Flemish-
speaking city of Ghent. Hot, explicit nationalism was absent from these sources, which
begs the question: is this proof of banal nationalism or national indifference? A histor-
ically contextualized analysis of the absences shows that workers expressed national
indifference towards Belgian, but not towards Flemish ethnicity. In Rogers Brubaker’s
terms: Flemish ethnicity was a relevant social category, but only in a very restricted
number of social contexts could it become a basis for ‘groupness’ or political
mobilisation in daily life.
KEYWORDS: banal nationalism, Belgium, everyday nationalism, Ghent, national

indifference, socialism
Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism refers to the unmindful process

by which people internalise a sense of national belonging as the ‘normal’, un-
seen state of affairs (Billig, 1995: 6). Undergirding Billig’s analysis is a method-
ology of inference on the basis of implicit media discourses and the unnoticed
presence of national symbols in the public sphere. Historians can easily repro-
duce Billig’s method. The discursive mechanisms used to ‘normalise’/
‘banalisze’ nationalism (the unreflective use of deictic words in the mass media
and banal displays of identity on monuments, money, and the like) can be ob-
served in historic sources from the late eighteenth century onwards (e.g.
© The author(s) 2018. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2018
580 Maarten Van Ginderachter
Baycroft, 2004: 85, Storm, 2017, Thomas and Virchow, 2005). As such, banal
nationalism is not confined to the post-WWII era or even to established na-
tion-states (Crameri, 2000).
Billig’s theory involves the (unspoken) assumption that the absence of an
explicit discourse on the nation should be interpreted as the unmindful pres-
ence of nationalism and that the mass media faithfully represent or reflect
the discourses of ‘ordinary people’ – defined as those who ‘are usually not
actively or consciously engaged in concerted, organized nation-building strat-
egies’ (Beyen and Van Ginderachter, 2012: 10). To my mind, this presupposi-
tion is problematic and needs to be corroborated by more direct evidence of
the ordinary people that are on the receiving end of banal discourses. In this
respect, historians are at a clear disadvantage vis-à-vis social scientists and
other scholars who study the present: they cannot conduct interviews and have
to rely on historical sources that were not created with a view to assessing the
presence of banal nationalism.
This heuristic-methodological issue is especially relevant as recent historical
research on the topic of ‘national indifference’ is in direct contradiction to
Billig’s assumptions. The concept national indifference has been coined by his-
torians working on late nineteenth and early twentieth century East Central
Europe (mainly the Austrian part of the Habsburg monarchy) (see Bjork,
2008, Judson, 2006, King, 2002, Zahra, 2008). Their main thrust is that the na-
tionalist struggle in East Central Europe prior to WWI was not driven by mass
fervour for the nation, but rather its opposite: ordinary people exhibited resis-
tance, indifference, ambivalence and opportunism when dealing with issues of
nationhood and nationalist claims (Zahra, 2008: x). This reaction can often be
interpreted as an unreflective challenge to nationalist assumptions, the oppo-
site of Billig’s unmindful acceptance of nationalism. Moreover, scholars of
national indifference have inverted the correlation between the ubiquity of
nationalist discourses and their impact in society. The pervasive propaganda
of German and Czech nationalists in imperial Austria was more a form of
ritual chest-pounding hiding the limited appeal they had among ‘the people’
than a reflection of their actual success.
This contribution seeks to address these conflicting frameworks through a
case study of the rank-and-file of the social-democratic Belgian Workers' Party
at the close of the nineteenth century. The aim is to see if we can find evidence
of banal nationalism, national indifference or both, and to refute Smith’s
(2008: 565–566) critique that everyday nationalism research is necessarily
imbued with an ‘ahistorical blocking presentism’. To this end, I use a unique
historical source of working-class voices, the so-called ‘propaganda pence’,
published in the party paper of the city of Ghent. These short written messages
can be best described as proletarian ‘tweets’: workers used them to speak
their mind, reflect on daily life and to stay in touch with each other. Originating
in a milieu outside of organised nationalism, the ‘tweets’ offer a view on
potential, unsuspecting or implicit manifestations of nationalism or national
indifference.
How to gauge banal nationalism and national indifference in the past 581
Banal nationalism and national indifference
Historians of nationalism have examined processes of national identification

mainly through the lens of elites and institutions (and through the more readily
available sources they have produced), while neglecting the perspective of the
recipients of nationalist propaganda. Ordinary men and women have
remained elusive to historians for two reasons. Obviously, they have left fewer
sources than middle-class or elite people, but, more crucially, they have been
the victim of a conceptual bias. The classic constructivist paradigm as devel-
oped by the likes of Ernest Gellner, Eugen Weber and Benedict Anderson
views nation-building as the logical outcome of an unescapable modernisation
process from above (Anderson, 1994 [1983], Gellner, 1993 [1983], Weber,
1977). Assisted by structural developments in the economic and technological
realm (in labour markets, communication and transport networks etc.), state
institutions, elites and civil society organizations shaped peasants into French-
men, as Weber’s classic phrase goes. There is no need to look at nationalism
from below as everything is determined from above. Billig’s banal nationalism
is based on a similar assumption, viz. that a widespread unreflective public
discourse is a good proxy for the unmindful and private internalization of
identities, or put differently, that the mass media are a mirror of ordinary
people’s attitudes. Several critics have pointed out this issue as one of the
major weaknesses in Billig’s analysis (e.g. Wertsch, 1997: 469).
Billig makes a distinction between the unmindful reproduction of banal
nationalism and the self-conscious reproduction of ‘hot’ nationalism (Billig,
1995: 43 ff.). His equation of the omnipresence/pervasiveness of a banal dis-
course to its invisibility/‘unmindfullness’ raises an important methodological
question: does the absence of an explicit and self-conscious nationalist rhetoric
indicate a surplus or a deficit of nationalism? If there is no ‘hot’ nationalism in
the sources, does this mean that it has gone underground and has become
banal or that it is simply not there at all? Or in slightly different terms: if
ordinary people remain silent about nationhood, are they exhibiting banal
nationalism, national indifference or both?
The most elaborate attempt to conceptualise national indifference was
Zahra’s 2010 article ‘Imagined non-communities: national indifference as a
category of analysis’. Starting from the realization that in East Central
Europe, several groups have ‘seemed on the surface to resist the momentum
of modern nation-building projects’ (Zahra, 2010: 96), she describes national
indifference as ‘a new label for phenomena that have long attracted the
attention of historians and political activists. What we might call indifference
has gone by many other names (often derogatory) in the past: regionalism,
cosmopolitanism, Catholicism, socialism, localism, bilingualism, inter-
marriage, opportunism, immorality, backwardness, stubbornness, and false
consciousness, to name a few’ (Zahra, 2010: 98).
It should be noted that national indifference does not entail explicit political
disagreement with the nationalist programme. In practice, Zahra uses the term
to denote three types of behaviour: 1) ‘national agnosticism’ or ‘complete ab-

sence of national loyalties as many individuals identified more strongly with re-
ligious, class, local, regional, professional, or familial communities’ (Zahra,
2008: 4); 2) fluidity and flexibility among ‘nationally ambivalent populations’
(Zahra, 2010: 98). These groups practiced opportunistic side-switching be-
tween different nations depending on the rewards they hoped to gain by explic-
itly adhering to one or the other. These rewards included better education,
school food, clothes, social welfare protection etc.; 3) the survival of bilingual-
ism and the practice of inter-marriage across ethnic lines.
Zahra emphatically conceptualizes national indifference as an expression of
modernity and as a response to modern mass politics, particularly to the norms
nationalists project onto ordinary people. She rejects the notion that it is a pre-
modern relic of local, regional, dynastic or religious loyalties. (Zahra, 2008: 5)
This is a clear departure from the modernist paradigm, which, following the
likes of Eugen Weber and Ernest Gellner, sees national indifference as a
premodern relic.
The methodological implications of the national indifference research are
considerable. According to Zahra and Judson, nationalists' attempts to influ-
ence ordinary people’s behaviour with their public, often unreflective dis-
course, in which people, language and culture were inextricably linked, were
counter-productive. Commoners reacted with national indifference and re-
fused to accept the hard boundaries nationalists drew between ‘us’ and ‘them’
(Billig’s deictic words). In other words, a widespread unselfconscious national-
ist discourse need not necessarily reflect a successful internalization by ordi-
nary people. Indeed, it may point to the opposite. This of course contradicts
Billig, who assumes that pervasive but unmindful nationalist discourses reflect
a widely distributed sense of national belonging. Just like Billig, the national
indifference scholars have been taken to task for not supplying enough evi-
dence for their conclusions. Laurence Cole, for instance, has written: ‘Put
bluntly, [Judson’s] claims about the “failure” of nationalists to “convert” the
population to a “nationalist identity” are based primarily on conjecture rather
than close investigation’ (Cole, 2008).
Zahra has stressed that national indifference is not only an analytical instru-
ment of historians, but it was also a practical, contemporary category central
to the actions of nationalists who used it to rationalise their lack of success
in reaching lower class people. The other historical source of national indiffer-
ence, the Marxist interpretation of the nationalities' conflict, is mentioned only
obliquely by Zahra. While nationalists complained about their target audi-
ence’s national indifference, social-democrats did the exact opposite: they la-
mented the success of the nation’s call.
Well into the 1960s, scholars interpreted the pre-WWI relationship of so-
cial-democracy and nationalism as antithetical, taking their cue from the
Marxist adage ‘national identity is a false form of consciousness’. This view
was informed by a one-sided reading of the founding fathers. On the one hand,
Marx and Engels did indeed denounce nationalism as a bourgeois contrivance
aimed at dividing emancipatory movements. As self-professed anti-

nationalists, militant social-democrats often claimed to be nation-less interna-
tionalists, grumbling about workers who were in thrall to nationalism and who
acted against their supposedly self-evident class interests. On the other hand,
Marx also distinguished between ‘a justified nationalism in progressive “histor-
ical” nations such as Britain and a counter-revolutionary nationalism in back-
ward nations’ (Berger, 1999: 41). Both he and Engels were influenced by great
state nationalism, believing that only large, homogeneous nation-states had a
role to fulfil in (socialist) history. Minorities, the so-called ‘historyless’ anti-
revolutionary peoples, were doomed to disappear.
In actuality, social-democratic attitudes ‘oscillated in a multi-layered patch-
work between alienation from, critical reception of and commitment to’ the
nation (Berger, 1999: 34). The social-democratic example shows that people
who explicitly called themselves nationally indifferent and who even had a
(Marxist) theory to underpin that position were in practice not immune to na-
tionalism. This raises the question of how far we should trust contemporary
testimonies about the perceived lack or abundance of national fervour among
ordinary people. If nationalists complained about indifference towards the na-
tion and socialists about the opposite, whom should we believe?
This brings us to the central issue of this themed section: how can we find
evidence of ordinary people’s unprompted, everyday ideas about the nation
in the past? The first step is not to rely solely on widely distributed media dis-
courses as a proxy for ordinary people’s experience or on public and official
testimonies about the masses. John Breuilly recommends to ‘look for sources
which will provide the direct evidence needed to probe popular attitudes and
motives’ (Breuilly, 2012: 24). In the case at hand, the proletarian ‘tweets’ offer
this type of more direct proof. The second step is to adjudicate in these sources
between manifestations of banal nationalism and national indifference. The
recognition of both phenomena hinges on the analysis of a deficit rather than
a surplus of data. Banal nationalism implies the retreat of hot nationalism in
lieu of a self-evident, implicitly recognized sense of nationhood, while national
indifference involves an unreflective non-involvement in the nationalist pro-
ject. In other words, the absence, and not the presence, of certain data (in this
case overt nationalism) constitutes evidence of banal nationalism or national
indifference. The key to deciding which is which is a historically contextualized
analysis of the absences. In this case study on ordinary workers from belle
époque Ghent, there are several contextual levels to take into account. I will
specifically look into 1) the historical and source-critical context of the prole-
tarian ‘tweets’; 2) the identification context: an analysis of the different social
categories available to Ghent workers in their everyday life will allow us to sit-
uate nationhood and ethnicity in an identification network. Thus, we can over-
come one of the classic difficulties in analysing identity discourses, namely,
assessing the relative importance of social categories vis-à-vis each other; and
3) the local setting: a focus on Ghent will enable us to draw out the significance
of concrete context in ‘activating’ social categories. Particular attention will go
to the role language played in workers' identifications in a bilingual city. The

aim of my analysis is to get closer to the everyday discourses of non-elite peo-
ple and to make informed judgments about whether a lack of hot nationalism
in the sources is indicative of banal nationalism, national indifference or both.
Proletarian ‘tweets’
The proletarian ‘tweets’, or ‘propaganda pence’ as they were properly called,
were basically a subscription list. Workers could donate money to the party
while providing a short written message in colloquial language, usually no lon-
ger than a few short lines. The name is probably derived from the Saint Peter’s
pence, a Catholic donation system to the Holy See in the context of the late
nineteenth century culture wars (Clark, 2003: 21–22). The Belgian Workers'
Party collected the messages and published them in the dedicated section of
the party papers. For the whole belle époque, hundreds of thousands of these
statements have been preserved. In this article, I use a sample of 27,529 ‘tweets’
published in the Ghent party paper Vooruit between February 1886 and
December 1900, from at least 1,000 different working-class individuals.1
A complete tweet had the following form: ‘My brother has made his first
Communion, P., 0.10’.2 The statement was followed by the initials or the full
name of the author and ended with the amount of the gift: 0.10 Belgian francs
or 10 centimes. Very often, the author remained anonymous. We can generally
distinguish between three types of ‘tweets’. Forty per cent of all messages
merely mentioned the name of the donor (‘Bruno, 0.05’.3), the organization
or group behind the gift (‘From the vendors of the journal Vooruit, 1.90’4) or
the circumstances of the collection (‘Collected at Frans Herri’s wedding in
Vooruit, 1.67’).5 Thirty per cent were ideologically inspired reflections such
as: ‘Capitalism resembles an animal, whose open mouth is constantly ready
to devour other people’s goods, 0.10’.6 The remaining third were personal state-
ments. Some workers struck up conversations and replied to each other’s mes-
sages in the next edition. For instance, someone from the town of Mechelen
would ask: ‘Nephews Alp. Sch. and Fr. Pr., how is your health, your nephew
Fr. L., 0.10’.7 A week later the answer would come from Ghent: ‘Nephew Fr. L.
all is well, Alp. Sch., 0.10; Nephew Fr. L., it couldn’t be better, Fr. Pr., 0.10’.8
Upper party echelons were sometimes annoyed by the ‘deplorable’ quality
of the messages. The editors tried to streamline the pence by, for instance,
insisting on the statements being short and edifying. There was occasional cen-
sorship, indicated by the phrase ‘personal statement not published’.9 In our to-
tal sample of 27,529, these editorial interventions amounted to just 150, or
barely 0.5 per cent of all published ‘tweets’. Moreover, the (very attentive)
readers of the pence were quick to denounce censorship (and Vooruit’s editors
let them): ‘I protest against the shortening or suppressing of statements,
0.10’.10 For a more thorough elaboration of this unique source, I refer to a pre-
vious publication (De Sutter and Van Ginderachter, 2010). Suffice it to say
here that the ‘tweets’ represented a working-class discourse from below.
Identification networks
Seventy per cent of the propaganda pence messages in my sample contained a

reference to at least one collective social category. After labelling every state-
ment, I was able to draw up an identification hierarchy. The most prominent
themes were in decreasing order of occurrence – and for brevity’s sake, I only
provide one example for each category:
• organizational pride (what German historians have called

Organisationspatriotismus; Groh, 1973) was mentioned in 43.58 per cent
of all the ‘tweets’ that contained an identity marker
‘Never have I witnessed so many people at our meeting, 0.10’11
• class and socialism (26.93 per cent)
‘You can persecute us, imprison us or shoot at us, but we socialists fire back
with reason, 0.08’12
• profession (20.90 per cent)
‘Collected by some flax workers, 1.65’13
• neighbourhood (13.89 per cent)
‘A worker from the Brugschepoort [neighborhood in Ghent] 0,10’.14 This
statement clearly shows that ‘tweets’ regularly contained more than one
reference to a social category.
• Anti-Catholic solidarity (11.41 per cent)
‘All socialists should work towards the fall of the black vermin [i.e. priests
and supporters of the Catholic workers' movement] because they are up to
nothing but lies, deceit and oppression, Fr. De P., 0.30’15
• gender (7.99 per cent)
Interestingly, the propaganda pence are one of the few socialist sources in
which women figured more prominently: ‘Are we, women, less able than
men, 0.20 – We who manage the entire education of the future generation,
0.20’.16
• home town (7.16 per cent)
‘A Brussels worker encourages his companions to contribute to the propa-
ganda pence, 0,10’17
• anti-establishment solidarity, directed against the government, the bour-
geoisie, the officialdom, the police, the courts and employers (6.75 per cent)
‘Bourgeoisie, don’t you fear the popular wrath, L.S., 0,10’.18
Language, ethnicity and nation (1.75 per cent) were only marginally present
in the propaganda pence, as were some of the supposed basic social categories
of social-democracy like internationalism (2.41 per cent), anti-militarism (1.61
per cent), republicanism (0.71 per cent) and anti-nationalism (0.05 per cent).
The high representation in our sample of positive categories like the work-
ing class and organizational pride and of negative ones like Catholicism and
the establishment probably indicates that these categories played an important
role in workers' daily life and that they were the core of the rank-and-file’s self-
identification. These loyalties were continuously activated and made explicit

by quotidian conflicts with hierarchical superiors on the work floor, and with
priests and the Catholic, anti-socialist workers' movement in daily life. In this
sense, they are examples of Brubaker’s thesis that identities are a ‘practical cat-
egory’, they are about doing not being (Brubaker, 1996: 7). In terms of fre-
quency, however, this classification also raises the question whether a low
occurrence correlates with a negligible impact of a particular loyalty or, con-
versely, whether that category was too self-evident to be made explicit. More
crucially for the purpose of this article: given the relative absence of language,
ethnicity and nation, are we dealing with national indifference, a banal form of
nationalism that has retreated into the background or with both? To answer
this question, the issue of local context is all-important.
The local context of the city of Ghent
Before the First World War, the most important site of Belgian socialism be-
sides Brussels was Ghent. The city had the country’s highest ratio of factory
workers to the total population. Its work force and local labour movement
were mainly proletarian and non-artisan. Because of the slow growth of its tex-
tile industry, Ghent had a low immigration rate and its neighbourhoods were
relatively stable. The result was a tight neighbourhood sociability that was
the basis of a strong sense of organizational patriotism around Moeder Vooruit
[Mother Forward] – the affectionate name by which the whole Ghent socialist
movement came to be known after its consumer cooperative and paper
Vooruit. In response to the massive support for socialism, a Catholic, self-
styled ‘anti-socialist’ workers' movement arose in Ghent, which would provide
the basis for Belgium’s strong Christian-Democratic movement.
In the Ghent party paper Vooruit, the ‘tweets’ were published in separate
lists according to the town where the propaganda pence were collected. The
majority came from Belgium’s two western-most Flemish-speaking provinces,
the Brussels area and the border region between France and Belgium, up to
Lille that had a considerable Belgian working-class population. Most ‘tweets’
obviously hailed from Ghent (18,738 on a total of 27,529).
The provenance of the propaganda pence is relevant because there are re-
markable differences between the ‘tweets’ from Ghent and elsewhere, differ-
ences that hint at the importance of context. ‘Tweets’ from Ghent hardly
ever referred to the city itself, while they did often mention street or borough
(in 18.90 per cent of all Ghent ‘tweets’ as opposed to 13.89 per cent in the total
sample). This most probably reflects a banal city loyalty. As the average tweet
came from Ghent, the hometown aspect was rather self-evident and less impor-
tant than the neighbourhood where people lived. By contrast, ‘tweets’ from
outside Ghent did frequently stress the hometown (and hardly ever the
neighbourhood).
We can make similar informed judgements about other absences. Interna-

tionalism, for instance, was relatively lacking in the propaganda pence
(occuring in only 470 cases or 2.41 per cent). Among the internationalist
‘tweets’, radical cosmopolitanism, which rejected the division of the world in
separate nations, was the exception (fifty-seven cases). The majority of interna-
tionalist statements did not question the notion of national identity. Even ap-
parently, cosmopolitan ‘tweets’ could carry a subtext of banal nationalism, like
the following one from Ghent:
My farewell to the party members in general and my friends in [the] Bijlokevest

[neighbourhood] in particular; chased from Germany to Belgium and from Belgium
to Paris we can only hope to meet friends everywhere, a socialist has no fatherland,
the German, 0.50.19
This man (we can infer his gender from the original Dutch grammar) had fled
his country of origin, Germany, and now had to leave Ghent as well. His
experiences had shown him the importance of international cross-border soli-
darity. He hoped to meet friends everywhere like he had in the Bijlokevest.
Thus, abstract internationalism was linked to concrete neighbourhood solidar-
ity. He ended with a radical cosmopolitan motto, but at the same time, he kept
– almost instinctively and unreflectively – identifying himself as a German, a
national identification made more relevant by his transplantation in a
non-German context.
In sum, the low frequency of internationalist ‘tweets’ does not reflect a
banalization of radical cosmopolitanism, but rather of an ‘inter-nationalism’
(Callahan, 2000) based on the existence of separate nations as a prerequisite
for world peace, which was centred on very practical solidarity with the imme-
diate German, Dutch or French neighbours.
In 305 ‘tweets’ from the sample (1.57 per cent of cases), reference was made
to nation, language or ethnicity. In more than a third of these cases (127
‘tweets’), the reference was to Flemish ethnicity, like the following tweet from
Bruges: ‘Papists, if you’ve got any Flemish blood in your veins, you will not
reject the discussion [about universal suffrage], otherwise you are cowards and
frauds, 0.10’.20 In 10 per cent of all cases (thirty ‘tweets’), there was an identifica-
tion with Belgium, as in this tweet from the western border town of Menen/
Menin: ‘With general suffrage all Belgians will awake, 0.10’.21 Walloon
identifications were as frequent (thirty-one ‘tweets’), for instance, in this French
tweet from Brussels: ‘A Walloon, friend of the Flemings, Rasse, 0.25’.22
All in all, however, the propaganda pence contain few references to Flemish
ethnicity and Belgian nationhood. These low frequencies, however, signal dif-
ferent underlying patterns. The positive allusions to Belgium occurred within
two contexts. First of all, there were the internationalist campaigns that were
often conceived in terms of contacts between nation-states. Hence, when in
1884 (outside of my sample), the Ghent socialists opened a subscription list
to support the German SPD in the national elections, someone wrote:
‘Germany ahead, Belgium follows, 1.00’.23 Second, there was the struggle for
civil rights. At the occasion of the national suffrage demonstration in Brussels
on 15 August 1886, the following appeal from Ghent appeared: ‘Belgians, the
time has come to march, 0.16’.24 Yet, in this civil rights context, Flemings and
Walloons could also become relevant categories, as the following example
from the same summer shows: ‘Long live the Walloons and the Flemings.
Long Live General suffrage, 0.86’.25
The civic idea of Belgium as the stage where political rights had to be con-
quered and the principle of Flemish-Walloon fraternization played a (minor)
role at the grassroots level, but Belgium did not appear in its ethnic sense.
The propaganda pence do not contain references to nationalist topoi like the
national revolution of 1830, the call of the Belgian blood, the perennial Belgian
battle for freedom against foreign oppression or the appropriation of ‘our poor
Belgium’. The image of the Walloon and Flemish brethren was not used in the
ethnic sense of Belgium as an extended family, as children of the same country,
but rather in the sense of an international solidarity that was also due to the
Germans and the French. The symbols of Belgian nationhood were even
derided or rejected. The nationalist cult of the Constitution was thus repudiated:
‘To me the Constitution is a filthy piece of paper, 0.10’.26 This negative discourse
makes it highly unlikely that the low frequency of ‘tweets’ referring to Belgium
was a sign of a banal Belgian nationalism. It can be more productively
interpreted as a sign of national indifference towards Belgian nationhood.
While the few allusions to the symbols of Belgium were mostly negative,
those to Flanders and the Flemish vernacular were positive. For instance, a
worker from Ghent referenced the heroic Middle Ages of the County of
Flanders by mentioning two legendary artisans' leaders from the fourteenth
century: ‘We have our De Coninck, who will be our Breydel, 0.10’.27 Flemish
ethnicity was a positive social category the Ghent rank-and-file could appro-
priate, but given its low frequency in the ‘tweets’, it ranked low in their identi-
fication hierarchy.
If we relate these observations about Belgium and Flanders to other prole-
tarian sources, in particular, to the dozens of popular socialist songs from
Ghent, a clear motif emerges. In the 100 most popular songs, as compiled in
a 1908 pop poll by the newspaper Vooruit,28 Belgium occasionally appeared,
but mostly in a negative context, for instance, in the revealingly (and xenopho-
bically) entitled song: Belgium is worse than Turkey.29 Yet, the three undis-
puted classics of the Ghent songbook – Canaille, The Working man’s song
(Werkmanslied) and Where would you be without the working people? (Wat
zoudt gij zonder ‘t werkvolk zijn?) – had a subtext of Flemish ethnicity. Again,
nationhood and ethnicity were not as marked as class, anti-Catholic feelings or
organizational patriotism, but if they were present the songs spoke to ‘the
Flemish people’, not Belgium.30 In conclusion, the minimal references to Flan-
ders in the propaganda pence reflect a mundane Flemish nationalism, an emo-
tional, unpoliticized sense of Flemishness, while the relative absence of
Belgium hints at its limited appeal as a positive category of identification.
Ghent’s linguistic segregation
In the nationalist framework, unilingualism is the norm and language forms

the natural basis for authentic self-representation and identification. Bilingual-
ism or multilingualism thus becomes the result of ‘foreign’ machinations, of
Germanization or Czechification attempts by the ‘other side’ in the Bohemian
case. In the national indifference framework, multilingualism is a strategy used
by ordinary people to resist the nationalist norm of ‘one people, one language’.
One of Judson’s central claims is that ordinary Austrians in linguistically
mixed areas were nationally indifferent in their pragmatic shifts between differ-
ent languages (Judson, 2006: 3). Did Ghent workers exhibit this type of na-
tional indifference?
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Ghent, as all major cities in Flanders,
had a significant French-speaking community. About 8 per cent of its popula-
tion used French mostly or exclusively according to the official census of
1910. Hence, scholars have generally assumed that workers were exposed to a
daily routine of bilingualism (Zolberg, 1974: 221). Surprisingly though, the pro-
paganda pence show that Ghent workers lived in a linguistically segregated
world. On a total sample of 18,738 statements from Ghent, barely fifty-seven
were in French, of which fifteen came from French or Walloon workers
visiting Ghent. Indeed, for local workers, the only structural opportunity for
linguistic exchange were the visits to or from French-speaking comrades from
Brussels, Wallonia or France. At these occasions, even ordinary slogans such
as ‘Vivent les mineurs!’, ‘Vivent nos frères wallons!’, ‘Bienvenue!’ had to be
learned by heart.31 The poor second-language knowledge of the Ghent prole-
tariat was due to the shortcomings of the elementary schooling system and
the nearly complete lack of opportunity to practice French in daily life. We
can qualify this situation as a form of linguistic segregation. In popular
neighbourhoods and on the work floor, there were hardly any French-speaking
workers or foremen. The reason was Ghent’s very low labour immigration rate.
Because Ghent workers lived their lives in a practically monolingual envi-
ronment, there were few potential language tensions. This meant that their lin-
guistic identity was weakly politicized and did not provide a platform for
cooperation with the Flemish movement, which had been advocating
Flemish language, culture and ethnicity since the 1840s. At the same time,
however, the absence of linguistic troubles made Flemish unilingualism seem
self-evident, which formed the basis for a banal, non-politicized acceptance
of vernacular rights. This is reflected in the naming of at least two popular so-
cialist pubs: ‘The mother tongue’32 and ‘Flemish in Flanders’33 (the latter
named after the Flemish movement’s rallying cry) – a typical example of
the banal unnoticed and uncontested presence of nationhood in everyday life.
Workers' sense of linguistic solidarity could be activated when they were put
into linguistically mixed environments, most specifically in the two Ghent fac-
tories that boasted a high number of French-speakers. One was the railroad ar-
senal, a state enterprise in the suburb of Gentbrugge, where the pairing of
unilingual French-speakers to Flemish-speakers, led to complaints like

‘Flemish workers from the Arsenal want Flemish bosses, 0,35’34 – ‘Because a
Walloon foreman from the Arsenal has to behave himself better towards the
Flemings, 0,10’.35 Here, we clearly see how a sense of linguistic discrimination
fed antagonistic group identifications in terms of Walloons and Flemings.
To sum up, in contrast to Belgianness (both in its ethnic and civic sense),
Flemish ethnicity and linguistic solidarity were positive social categories to
Ghent workers, although they were only relevant in a limited number of con-
texts. Precisely because their everyday life occurred within a basically monolin-
gual environment, there were few opportunities for the politicization of language
and ethnicity. These categories could, however, be activated when the circum-
stances changed, specifically when confronted with French-speakers on the work
floor. In this sense, there was a banal Flemish nationalism present among Ghent
workers, which was coupled to an indifference towards Belgianness.
Conclusion
Hot nationalism is easily recognisable in contemporary and historical sources.

It is ‘there’, in your face, instantly identifiable. Banal nationalism, however, is
a nationalism that does not speak its name. It is present in the background, un-
noticed and unreflectively reproduced. Its social impact can only be indirectly
inferred from implicit media discourses and the ubiquity of national imagery
(on money, in weather forecasts etc.). Underlying Billig’s analysis is the as-
sumption that the absence of an explicitly nationalist rhetoric constitutes proof
of a surplus, not a lack of nationalism and that the mass media reliably echo
ordinary people’s attitudes. This assumption is challenged by recent historical
research on the topic of national indifference in East Central Europe.
Historians such as Pieter Judson and Tara Zara have argued that the propa-
ganda of Czech and German nationalists in Imperial Austria – a propaganda
that ‘normalised’ / ‘banalised’ ethnicity as a central concern of ordinary people
– did not reflect the latter’s experience. Rather, these people unreflectively
reacted by exhibiting national indifference. As such, the presence of a perva-
sive self-evident discourse of ethnicity in the press did not reflect its
internalisation by ordinary people.
Historians usually study the impact of nation-building through the nation-
alist gaze. By that I mean that they tend to rely on the discourse of the active
brokers of nationalism in government and civil society. The sources these bro-
kers have left are an indirect way at best to gauge how their messages were con-
sumed, appropriated or resisted across society. Ordinary people were
confronted with a multitude of public discourses. It is very hard to infer the ex-
tent to which they internalized banal forms of identity from widely available
media discourses. One way to get a closer look is to use sources produced by
ordinary people. These materials do not offer an unmediated or ‘authentic’
view of reality, but they allow historians to go beyond the heuristic limitations
of more traditional sources.
This contribution has sought to assess the conflicting frameworks of banal
nationalism and national indifference through a unique working-class source:
some 27,000 proletarian ‘tweets’ from social-democratic workers in the Bel-
gian city of Ghent at the end of the nineteenth century. Hot, explicit national-
ism was conspicuously absent from these sources, which begs the question: is
this proof of the presence of banal nationalism or of national indifference? A
historically contextualised analysis of the absences – shedding light on the gen-
esis of the sources, reconstructing the network of social categories available to
workers, and laying out the local context in the city of Ghent – provides the
basis for an informed answer.
Unsurprisingly, class and organisational pride were the most relevant cate-
gories in workers' daily lives, but other socialist core values like international-
ism and republicanism were poorly represented, as were nationhood, language
and ethnicity. Clearly, these categories were hardly politicized at the grassroots
level. The relative absence of Belgian nationhood and Flemish ethnicity, how-
ever, are not similar. Navigating between induction from the ‘tweets’ and infer-
ence from the context, I have argued that Ghent workers expressed national
indifference towards Belgian, but not towards Flemish ethnicity. There was a
certain banal acceptance among the rank-and-file of the self-evidence of Flem-
ish nationhood and language. In Brubaker’s terms: Flemish ethnicity was a rel-
evant social category to socialist workers, but only in a very restricted number
of social contexts could it become the basis for ‘groupness’ or political
mobilisation in their daily lives. (Brubaker et al., 2006: 11) There was simply
too little contact with French-speakers in daily life for language or ethnicity
to become more salient in most instances. These conclusions hint at the situa-
tional character of both banal nationalism and national indifference. In that
respect, the question whether workers expressed one or the other is misleading.
In everyday life, both co-existed. Depending on the exact context one or the
other was foregrounded.
Acknowledgements
The writing of this article has been facilitated by a grant from the FWO-Flem-
ish Research Foundation’s program for international Scientific Research
Communities, grant W0.017.14N.
Endnotes
1 In the academic year 2005–2006, I supervised a random sample by thirty undergraduate

students as part of the second year bachelor course of ‘Historical Practice’ at Ghent University.
Each student was assigned half a year of the (then not yet digitized) newspaper Vooruit in the pe-
riod February 1886–December 1900. For each month, the students had to enter in the database the
full propaganda pence section published on the 15th of that month or the next day. All ‘tweets’
were brought together in one large database by Bart De Sutter (2008), who wrote a master’s disser-
tation on the subject under my supervision. Subsequently, I went through the entire database,
checking every single tweet individually, correcting them where necessary and assigning labels to
them. I also added 1,744 ‘tweets’ that had been ‘forgotten’ by the students, although they belonged
in the sample. For more information, see my upcoming book Workers into Belgians and Flemings.
Everyday Nationalism and Social-Democracy in belle époque Belgium.
2 Vooruit, 24 March 1885, p. 4.
3 Vooruit, 15 February 1886, p. 4.
4 Vooruit, 26 August 1898.
5 Vooruit, 26 August 1898.
6 Vooruit, 20 June 1890, p. 4.
7 Vooruit, 7 December 1887, p. 4.
8 Vooruit, 14 December 1887, p. 4.
9 Vooruit, 14 December 1888, p. 4
10 Vooruit, 20 June 1890, p. 4.
11 Vooruit, 15 April 1886, p. 4
12 Vooruit, 15 and 16 May 1886, p. 4.
13 Vooruit, 19 and 20 June 1886, p. 3.
14 Vooruit, 3 October 1886, p. 4
15 Vooruit, 3 July 1899, p. 4.
16 Vooruit, 21 November 1890, p. 4
17 Vooruit, 15 and 16 May 1886, p. 4
18 Vooruit, 17 July 1886, p. 4
19 Vooruit, 1 July 1892, p. 4 (my emphasis).
20 Vooruit, 14 June 1892, p. 4.
21 Vooruit, 12 January 1892, p. 4.
22 Vooruit, 1 February 1889, p. 4
23 Vooruit, 6 November 1884, p. 4.
24 Vooruit, 11 June 1886, p. 4.
25 Vooruit, 23 August 1886, p. 4.
26 Vooruit, 16 October 1886, p. 4.
27 Vooruit, 26 October 1886, p. 4.
28 100 zangen voor het volk, Gent, Het Licht, [1908].
29 X., België is slechter als Turkije, in: Id., p. 33.
30 Moyson, Emile, Werkmanslied, in: ibid., p. 5; Hendrik Van Offel, Het Kanalje, in: ibid., pp. 3–4.
31 De Borains te Gent, in: Vooruit, 15 May 1894, p. 3.
32 Vooruit, 19–20 June 1886, p. 3; see also: Vooruit, 13 and 20, 27 August, 1 October 1887, p. 4,
16 November 1888, p. 4.
33 Vooruit, 14 May 1894, p. 3.
34 Vooruit, 22 November 1889, p. 3.
35 Vooruit, 28 April 1899, p. 3.
Reference
Anderson, B. 1994 [1983]. Imagined communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of national-
ism. London: Verso.
Baycroft, T. 2004. Culture, identity and nationalism: French Flanders in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. London: Royal Historical Society.
Berger, S. 1999. ‘British and German socialists between class and national solidarity’, in Berger, S.
& Smith, A. (eds.) Nationalism, labour and ethnicity 1870–1939. Manchester/New York,
Manchester University Press.
Beyen, M. and Van Ginderachter, M. 2012. ‘General introduction. Writing the mass into a mass
phenomenon’ in M. Van Ginderachter, M. Beyen (eds.), Nationhood from below: Europe in
the long nineteenth century. Palgrave-Macmillan: Basingstoke.
Billig, M. 1995. Banal nationalism. London: Sage.
Bjork, J. E. 2008. Neither German nor Pole. Catholicism and national indifference in a Central
European borderland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Breuilly, J. 2012. ‘What does it mean to say that nationalism is ‘popular’’ in M. Van Ginderachter,
M. Beyen (eds.), Nationhood from below: Europe in the long nineteenth century. Basingstoke:
Palgrave-Macmillan.
Brubaker, R. 1996. Nationalism reframed: nationhood and the national question in the New Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brubaker, R. et al. 2006. Nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in a Transylvanian town.
Princeton University Press: Princeton.
Callahan, K. 2000. ‘Performing inter-nationalism' in Stuttgart in 1907: French and German social-
ist nationalism and the political culture of an International Socialist Congress’, International
Review of Social History 45: 51–87.
Clark, C. M. 2003. ‘The new Catholicism and the European culture wars’, in Clark, C. M. &
Kaiser, W. (eds.) Culture wars: Secular-Catholic conflict in nineteenth-century Europe.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Cole, L. 2008. ‘A proposito di “guardians of the nation: activists on the language frontiers of
imperial Austria” di Pieter M. Judson: Laurence Cole, Alla ricerca della frontiera
linguistica: nazionalismo e identità nazionale nell’Austria imperiale’, Quaderni Storici 43,
2: 501–512.
Crameri, K. 2000. ‘Banal Catalanism’, National Identities 2: 145–158.
De Sutter, B. 2008. About dunces, snitches and papists. Construction of identity through humour.
Case: the Ghent socialist propaganda pence in Vooruit (1886-1900), unpublished master thesis in
history, Ghent University.
De Sutter, B. and van Ginderachter, M. 2010. ‘Working class voices from the late nineteenth
century. Propaganda pence in a socialist paper in Ghent’, History Workshop Journal 69, 1:
133–145.
Gellner, E. 1993 [1983]. Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Groh, D. 1973. Negative integration und revolutionärer Attentismus: die deutsche Sozialdemokratie
am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges. Ullstein: Frankfurt a. M.
Judson, P. M. 2006. Guardians of the nation: activists on the language frontiers of imperial Austria,
Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press.
King, J. 2002. ‘Budweisers into Czechs and Germans’ in A local history of Bohemian politics,
1848–1948. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Smith, A. 2008. ‘The limits of everyday nationhood’, Ethnicities 8, 4: 563–573.
Storm, E. 2017. ‘The nationalisation of the domestic sphere’, Nations and Nationalism 23, 1:
173–193.
Thomas, T. and Virchow, F. (eds.) 2005. Banal militarism. Zur Veralltäglichung des Militärischen
im Zivilen. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Weber, E. 1977. Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France, 1870–1914. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Wertsch, J. V. 1997. ‘Consuming nationalism’, Culture and psychology 3, 4: 461–471.
Zahra, T. 2008. Kidnapped souls, National indifference and the battle for children in the Bohemian
Lands, 1900–1948. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Zahra, T. 2010. ‘Imagined non-communities: national indifference as a category of analysis’, Slavic
Review 69: 93–119.
Zolberg, A. 1974. ‘The making of Flemings and Walloons: Belgium 1830–1914’, The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 5, 2: 179–235.

Nana 12420 PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Nana 12420 PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS

FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

How to gauge banal nationalism and

ABSTRACT. Michael Billig’s theory of banal nationalism involves the assumption

KEYWORDS: banal nationalism, Belgium, everyday nationalism, Ghent, national

Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism refers to the unmindful process

Banal nationalism and national indifference

Historians of nationalism have examined processes of national identiﬁcation

to denote three types of behaviour: 1) ‘national agnosticism’ or ‘complete ab-

aimed at dividing emancipatory movements. As self-professed anti-

to the role language played in workers' identiﬁcations in a bilingual city. The

Seventy per cent of the propaganda pence messages in my sample contained a

• organizational pride (what German historians have called

identiﬁcation. These loyalties were continuously activated and made explicit

The local context of the city of Ghent

We can make similar informed judgements about other absences. Interna-

My farewell to the party members in general and my friends in [the] Bijlokevest

Ghent’s linguistic segregation

In the nationalist framework, unilingualism is the norm and language forms

unilingual French-speakers to Flemish-speakers, led to complaints like

Hot nationalism is easily recognisable in contemporary and historical sources.

1 In the academic year 2005–2006, I supervised a random sample by thirty undergraduate

You might also like