2.

Conceptualizing Nationalism

Nationalism is best understood as a malleable and narrow ideology, which

values membership in a nation greater than other groups (i.e. based on gender,
parties, or socio-economic group), seeks distinction from other nations, and
strives to preserve the nation and give preference to political representation by
the nation for the nation. I distinguish between latent nationalism that is
ubiquitous and can serve to include migrants or exclude minorities, but is
constant and steady, described by Michael Billig as ‘banal nationalism’, an
endemic condition that shapes society (1995). From the flags flown, the stamps
and advertisement, the world around most citizens normalizes the nation. These
markers remind us that it is better to buy French, American, German than from
other nations, that the weather is constrained to the national maps of weather
forecasts, that the heroes we commemorate are national and that we pledge
allegiance, stand or fly a flag. The organization of the world into states that are
called nations, hence ‘United Nations’ rather than the more appropriate ‘United
States’, has created the endemic sense that the world should and is first and
foremost divided into nations that also happen to be states—both are largely
fictions.

In contrast, the worry of nationalism as a ‘wave’ alludes to its revolutionary side.

The virulent nationalism that rejects the status quo and seeks to reassert the will
of an imagined community over a political or cultural space is different from, but
draws on, endemic nationalism.

Nationalism is, of course, not a force of its own, it is man-made. While the
scholars up to the 1990s have focused on the larger processes that shaped
nationalism, literacy, communication, the emergence of the modern state and
standardized languages, research in recent decades has shifted our attention to
the actors, the ‘ethnic entrepreneurs.’ Nationalism does not exist by itself, but has
to be promoted and its members have to be convinced to belong to this group
(Brubaker, 2004). This requires media, political, social and cultural elites.

2. Conceptualizing Nationalism

Nationalism is best understood as a malleable and narrow ideology, which

values membership in a nation greater than other groups (i.e. based on gender,
parties, or socio-economic group), seeks distinction from other nations, and
strives to preserve the nation and give preference to political representation by
the nation for the nation. I distinguish between latent nationalism that is
ubiquitous and can serve to include migrants or exclude minorities, but is
constant and steady, described by Michael Billig as ‘banal nationalism’, an
endemic condition that shapes society (1995). From the flags flown, the stamps
and advertisement, the world around most citizens normalizes the nation. These
markers remind us that it is better to buy French, American, German than from
other nations, that the weather is constrained to the national maps of weather
forecasts, that the heroes we commemorate are national and that we pledge
allegiance, stand or fly a flag. The organization of the world into states that are
called nations, hence ‘United Nations’ rather than the more appropriate ‘United
States’, has created the endemic sense that the world should and is first and
foremost divided into nations that also happen to be states—both are largely
fictions.

In contrast, the worry of nationalism as a ‘wave’ alludes to its revolutionary side.

The virulent nationalism that rejects the status quo and seeks to reassert the will
of an imagined community over a political or cultural space is different from, but
draws on, endemic nationalism.

Nationalism is, of course, not a force of its own, it is man-made. While the
scholars up to the 1990s have focused on the larger processes that shaped
nationalism, literacy, communication, the emergence of the modern state and
standardized languages, research in recent decades has shifted our attention to
the actors, the ‘ethnic entrepreneurs.’ Nationalism does not exist by itself, but has
to be promoted and its members have to be convinced to belong to this group
(Brubaker, 2004). This requires media, political, social and cultural elites.