Billig, Michael (2017). Banal Nationalism and Imagining of Politics. In Michael Skey & Marco
Antonsich (eds) Everyday Nationhood: Theorising Culture, Identity and Belonging after Banal
Nationalism. London: Palgrave. 307–321
Banal nationalism and the imagining of politics
Michael Billig
It would be absurd to pretend that all the arguments of Banal Nationalism have
been confirmed by the events that have occurred globally since the book was first
published over twenty years ago. As I will suggest in this chapter, some of the
book’s weaknesses and its over-simplifications have, in fact, become clearer over
time. Nonetheless, one central theme has been reinforced and this is shown in all
the chapters of the present volume. The authors take for granted that the issue of
nationalism remains important. It was different when Banal Nationalism first
appeared. The fashion then was for social scientists to claim that the world was
moving inexorably towards a global, post-national age. Foremost among the
theorists of globalization was the sociologist Ulrich Beck. He criticised Banal
Nationalism because it concentrated on nationalism and ignored ‘banal
cosmopolitanism’, thereby being, in his words, ‘selective to the point of distortion’.
At the start of the twenty-first century any signs of banal nationalism were,
according to Beck, ‘only islands in an overwhelming river of banal
cosmopolitanism’ (Beck and Willms, 2003, p. 37).
Nationalism and the world of nation-states has not withered away. In the past
twenty years there have been massive shifts in populations across national borders,
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but this has not meant that those borders have been trampled down. Quite the
contrary, within the countries to which the migrants have been fleeing, there has
been pressure to strengthen borders. Generally boundaries continue to be policed,
as well as to be contested both politically and militarily. The boundaries within the
European Union might have been relaxed but those around the Union have been
strengthened to exclude migrants. According to a recent book, the number of
border walls in the world has increased. In 1989, there were fifteen border walls but
by 2016 there were seventy. The number of deaths at borders has been rising,
reaching record figures in 2015 (Jones, 2016). The new president of the United
States campaigned for a wall to be built along his nation’s border with Mexico. All
this building of border walls and the heightened concern for boundaries is
happening at a time when global trade and international travel are increasing.
Beck and others were mistaken when they assumed that global forces were
antithetical to the particularity of nations and that as the former increased so
inevitably the latter would decline. None of the contributors to this book have
found it difficult to identify the existence of nationalism in the modern world. Their
examples are to hand; they have not had to search for increasingly rare islets that
have not yet been submerged by the rising waters of cosmopolitanism. Nor have
they needed to start their chapters by justifying that they are taking the topic of
nationalism seriously. As was suggested in Banal Nationalism, the world of nationstates
has historically been an international world, for internationalism rests upon
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nationalism and vice versa. In this spirit, Craig Calhoun writes that ‘forgetting the
international character of nationalism is conducive to illusory notions of how
globalization will affect nationalism’. He is rightly baffled by ‘how many people
have imagined that globalization will simply replace nationalism with a universal,
cosmopolitan consciousness’.
A number of the chapters highlight the links between nationalism and
internationalism. Atsuko Ichijo provides an excellent empirical example when he
examines how UNESCO included cooking as a protected cultural heritage. Ijiko
notes the contradiction between UNESCO’s position as an organization promoting
universal values and its desire to promote the value of particular cultures. UNESCO
operates within a national context: it encouraged official bids from the nation-states
of Japan and France that parts of their respective culinary cultures be granted the
status of protected cultural heritage. The contradictory position of UNESCO is
hardly surprising. Its parent organization, the United Nations, is an international
organization devoted to universal aims, while being comprised of individual nationstates.
In consequence, the UN’s internationalism is inextricably connected with the
nationalism of established, recognized nation-states.
One of the main themes of Banal Nationalism was that signs of nationalism
can be too familiar to be noticed. Whereas ordinary citizens may fail to observe the
national symbols on the stamps that they are affixing to their letters or on the
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banknotes that they are spending in shops, it is less forgivable that social theorists
should routinely be so unobservant. Social scientists have concealed the
nationalism of Western nations by labelling it positively as ‘patriotism’, which they
contrast favourably, but unjustifiably, with the ‘nationalism’ of others. As Calhoun
comments, Banal Nationalism argued that ordinary people and social theorists have
shared common blind-spots and that the book drew attention to signs of nationalism
that often pass unrecognized. However, if such signs are ‘often’ unnoticed that does
not mean that they are always so. Shanti Sumartojo makes the very reasonable
point that from time to time individuals can notice the signs that they generally
overlook – becoming, for instance, suddenly aware of the nationalist meaning of a
road name on a well-travelled, familiar route. She notes that Banal Nationalism did
not attempt to say how such episodes of sudden, individual recognition might
occur. The book, of course, had its own blind-spots.
Before proceeding to discuss some of Banal Nationalism’s other
simplifications, it might be helpful to discuss what I believe to be a
misunderstanding. This comes in the chapter by Ivana Spasić. She writes about the
Serbia and she claims that the concept of ‘banal nationalism’ is, at the very
minimum, inappropriate for understanding the Serbian situation. This is because
the notion of ‘banal nationalism’, at least as outlined in my book, contains
ethnocentric presuppositions, which express a Western bias against the non-
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Western world and against countries such as Serbia. This is an important charge
that deserves to be examined.
Spasić claims that in Banal Nationalism I was arguing that there were two
distinct types of nationalism – banal nationalism and hot nationalism. According to
Spasić, I equated banal nationalism with the nations of the West and hot
nationalism with the non-Western world or with nations like Serbia that are situated
on the ‘semi-periphery’. She suggests that Banal Nationalism unequivocally
condemned Serbian nationalism as non-banal nationalism and thereby sharply
distinguished it from the banal nationalism of established nations. The result was
that book expressed pro-Western assumptions that are tantamount to ‘orientalism’.
Spasić suggests that my preface to the Serbian edition of Banal Nationalism
represents a change of thinking, for there I contemplated the possibility of Serbian
banal nationalism.
I do not wish to dispute Spasić’s observations about Serbian politics about
which she knows far more than I do. However I would wish to dispute her
interpretation of Banal Nationalism. I was arguing that the established nations of
the West are deeply nationalist although their citizenry and sociological theorists
often overlook this nationalism. Unfortunately, Spasić, in offering quotations to
suggest that I was biased in favour of Western nations, sometimes quotes from the
views that I was criticising in Banal Nationalism rather than those that I was
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upholding. Certainly I was not suggesting that the nations of the West were only
nationalist in a banal sort of way. When I was writing Banal Nationalism, the
British government was engaged militarily in Northern Ireland with Irish
nationalists, who wanted the province to secede from the United Kingdom. In the
book I criticised the ideological and theoretical bias which led only to the
secessionists being labelled as ‘nationalist’. The British government typically was
not called ‘nationalist’, although it used force ‘in the interest of maintaining, rather
than challenging, present national boundaries’ (Billig, 1995, p. 48). I was seeking
to expose the ideological blindness which routinely calls politics aimed at altering
nationalist boundaries ‘nationalist’, but which equally routinely withholds the same
label from politics aimed at maintaining those same boundaries.
Banal Nationalism aimed to apply the word ‘nationalism’ to the processes,
often unnoticed, by which established nation-states are re-produced day-by-day.
Spasić is correct to suggest that the processes of re-producing a nation-state differ
from those involved in producing or creating the nation-state in the first place. The
book assumes that the original formation of most nation-states, which have become
established over time, was violent and backed by imaginative and highly conscious
declarations about the nature of the state, its people and its claimed territory. This is
certainly true of the United States of America, France, Italy, the United Kingdom
and so on. When Banal Nationalism was originally written, Serbia was in the
process of being produced, rather than being re-produced. If there is a difference
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between the first edition Banal Nationalism and the preface for the Serbian edition,
it is that Serbian history has moved on. From being a nation, which was in the
violent process of being produced, Serbia by 2009 was becoming a nation-state
which will be banally re-produced.
I believe that Spasić over-simplifies Banal Nationalism when she presents it
as suggesting that the processes of banal nationalism are typically confined to the
West and that the nationalism of the rest of the world is non-banal. It was a major
theme of Banal Nationalism that the ideology of nationalism is international indeed,
global. In this respect, ‘ideology’ denotes the sorts of beliefs which seem so
obvious – so natural - to those who live in a particular age that they require, to use
Melissa Aronczyk’s phrase, few narratives of justification. For the last hundred
years, it has been taken for granted, or treated as common-sense, that ‘nations’ exist
and that a world divided into independent nation-states is ‘natural’. We imagine
that the world was always like this, although historically nation-states belong to the
modern era. Particular nations, especially those that have not established their
separate independence, might produce their own particular narratives of
justification to support their claims for statehood, but nationhood per se today does
not require justification. Moreover, as argued in Banal Nationalism, the belief in
the ‘naturalness’ of nations and in the world of nations is itself global: it is not
confined to specific continents.
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That being so, banal nationalism, as one of the means by which established
nations are re-produced, will not be confined to the nation-states of the west. It is
likely to be found in any established or establishing state wherever it might be
situated. Subsequent researchers have been able to find instances of banal
nationalism across different continents. Crawford Young (2004) writes of the
dozens of banal ways in which the new nations of Africa subliminally
communicate nationhood through their flags, currency, postage stamps, identity
cards and so on (see also Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2011, and Fuller, 2008, for further
African examples). Banal nationalism has been observed in Iran (Elhan, 2016),
Syria and Jordan (Phillips, 2011) and Argentina (Benwell and Dodds, 2011;
Benwell, 2014). If Serbia is part of the ‘semi-periphery’, then Turkey, straddling
Europe and Asia, might be thought to be semi-semi-peripheral. Nevertheless,
researchers have found in the Turkish press analogous forms of banal nationalism
as can be seen in the British press (Yumul and Özkırımlı, 2000; Kös and Yılmaz,
2012).
Of course, it might be argued in defence of Spasić that such investigations
have expanded the concept of ‘banal nationalism’ beyond what I had intended in
Banal Nationalism. Significantly, the researchers, who have found African, Asian
and South American forms of banal nationalism, do not present their findings as if
they are contradicting what had been argued in that book. Phillips claims to show
that ‘the everyday reproduction of nationalism which Billig identified in the West
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can be successfully adapted and transposed onto Syria and Jordan’ (2011, p. 3).
According to Phillips, Banal Nationalism argued that ‘the reproduction of nations
in the West takes two forms: the conscious, overt flag-waving, such as 4th July
parades in the USA, and the banal, un-waved flags that hang unnoticed on public
buildings and outside houses’ (p. 11). This I believe takes us to the centre of
Spasić’s dissatisfaction with, and possible misunderstanding of my 1995 book.
According to Spasić, I suggested in Banal Nationalism not only that banal
nationalism is principally confined to the nations of the West, but also that this is
the principal form of nationalism to be found in the West and that very different
forms of nationalism exist outside of the West. She writes that in my book ‘the
dichotomy banal/non-banal is basically framed as Us/Them’ and that ‘some people
have one, others have the other; “We” have this one, “They” (and some stray
members of “Us”) have the other’. However, as Phillips’ quotation suggests, Banal
Nationalism did not assert that the Western nations have a single form of
nationalism, but that nationalism in established states, whether of the West or
elsewhere, takes two forms – the banal and the non-banal. Indeed, the book argued
that banal nationalism is the backdrop for more overtly nationalist episodes in the
West.
That is why Banal Nationalism connected unwaved US flags with the highly
nationalist passions of the first Gulf War; and British banal nationalism with the
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speedy mobilization of the British public in support of the Falklands/Malvinas war.
As such, banal nationalism, far from being innocently peaceful, is the precondition
for nationalist violence committed by established nations. Since 1995, the world
has seen the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention interventions
by the USA and Russia in Syria. All these campaigns have been accompanied by
outpourings of nationalism within the established nations that are doing the
intervening and the invading. The argument of Banal Nationalism was that the
populations of such countries could not be mobilized so quickly and so successfully
for sudden military campaigns without the steady existence of banal nationalism in
between the episodes of hot nationalism.
There are, nevertheless, a number of over-simplifications in Banal
Nationalism which later researchers, including those in the present volume, have
commented upon. As can often happen, social scientists, who aim to draw attention
to phenomena that have previously been overlooked, can emphasise their case
rhetorically by presenting clear exemplars. In consequence, they can end up with
illustrations that resemble ‘ideal types’, rather than examining the complexities of
actual cases as they messily unfold in real life. Banal Nationalism was a
comparatively short book of less than two hundred pages. So, simplifications can
be expected, although that does not excuse them. It is the task of subsequent
investigators to fill in the complex details. I now think that the one chapter, which
aimed to provide an empirical investigation to support the theoretical ideas of the
3010
book, considerably over-simplified matters. As critics have noted, the one-day
study of newspapers failed to emphasise sufficiently the English dimension of the
papers that were analysed. It did not distinguish adequately between the banal reproduction
of England as compared with that of Britain, let alone the United
Kingdom. In addition, I ignored the newspapers of Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland, failing to discuss how such newspapers might portray, both banally and
non-banally, the complex national contexts in which they were published. Such
points have been made by subsequent critics, whose observations contribute to
understanding the complex forms that banal nationalism can take in nations within
nations (for example, Law, 2001; Rosie et al, 2004; MacInnes, 2007 et al; Skey,
2009).
Today, I would concede that the day-study of newspapers contain obvious
gaps and also that the analysis itself often failed to probe the rhetorical
complexities of the phenomenon that it aimed to demonstrate. The book argues that
there is a contrast between hot nationalism and banal nationalism – metaphorically
illustrated as the contrast between the waved and the unwaved flag. But this
contrast, which may have made the basic theme more understandable, is too stark.
It implies that at one moment there are no waved flags and at the next all is a blur
of waving flags. As Skey (2009) has noted, there are gradations between hot and
cold nationalism and that the gradations of temperature are better represented by
talking about heating and cooling nationalist temperatures. Generally the social
3011
sciences benefit by using verb phrases (‘heating and cooling nationalist
temperatures’) rather than noun phrases (‘hot and cold nationalism’) to describe
processes brought about by human actions (Billig, 2013). Using the phrases of
heating and cooling nationalist temperatures emphasises the gradations in between
the extremes. Hopefully such phrases will encourage investigators to point to the
ways that actors might be heating up or cooling down moments of nationalism.
The inadequacy of just using the concepts of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ nationalism
does not stop there. It is a mistake – and a mistake to be found in Banal
Nationalism – to suppose that each moment in the history of nationalism can be
summarised by a single temperature. The heating and cooling of nationalism can
occur at the same time in the same place. If I had looked more carefully at my
single day survey of the English press, I would have found this. I presented the
survey as representing a moment of banal nationalism. The day’s papers also
described the successes and failures of the nation’s sportsmen and women. The
items were encouraging little cheers or feelings of minor disappointment. The
nationalist temperature was warming on some pages of the press as it was cooling
on others: indeed, it might be moving in both directions on the same page and even
within the same paragraph.
In this volume, Lukasz Szulc takes this idea further. He notes how lesbians
and gays using LGBTQ websites in Poland and Turkey employ the language of
3012
banal nationalism in order to ‘domesticate’ such sites. In illustrating this, Szulc
connects the complexity of nationalism’s temperature with the emphasis in Banal
Nationalism on top-down signs of nationhood. By contrast, Szulc looks at the way
that ordinary people can challenge and reinterpret official signs and then use their
reinterpretations banally. It should be added that since the publication of Banal
Nationalism there has been of growth of research examining episodes of such
bottom-up nationalism. This volume contains a number of such studies besides
Szulc’s. Those who study nationalism in this way sometimes wish to distinguish
what they call ‘everyday nationalism’ from ‘banal nationalism’. In my view,
analysts of nationalism do not need to choose between taking the one approach or
the other, as if there is a theoretical zero-sum game at work. As Szulc’s chapter
illustrates, it is possible to combine creatively the study of everyday actions that reproduce
and re-imagine the nation, with an awareness of how that re-imagined
nation can also be re-produced banally. Investigators, therefore, should try to avoid
assuming that the reality of ‘banal nationalism’ must reflect the sorts of
simplifications to be found in the book of the same name and that anything more
complex should be taken as evidence for the non-existence of banal nationalism. As
Szulc comments there is still work to be done on banal nationalism. In particular, as
he comments, there remains amazingly little interest in researching the banal
nationalism of the United States.
3013
There is a simplification of emotions in Banal Nationalism, relating to the
contrast between banal and hot nationalism. Calhoun, in his chapter, rightly claims
that there is a certain ‘flatness’ in my characterisation of banal nationalism. Partly
this comes from concentrating on the unnoticed, banal aspects of nationalism – the
weather maps, the nationally deictic use of the definite article (le président, the
prime minister, el país, ha-aretz and so on), and all the other barely noticed but
ever present signs of nationhood. These are not matters to stir the heart but that is
precisely the point. However, nationalism, as Calhoun points out, cannot rest solely
upon such pallid factors. It requires, to use Calhoun’s phrase, ‘an imaginary’, so
that each nation imagines itself to be unique. And in imagining itself to be unique,
the particular nation is just like all other nations, imagining themselves to be
unique.
Nor is hot nationalism circumscribed by the waving of the flag – as if there is
only absence of emotion or feelings of intense enthusiasm with no points inbetween.
There are other uses of the flag beyond being waved or not waved. I
regret that I did not comment upon the common, international trope of the flag
draped over the coffin. Here the emotions can be complex: sadness, respect,
solemnity and so on. In the context in which the image of the coffin-draped flag is
often displayed, the image can also be interpreted as expressing ‘necessary’
sacrifice and the ‘just’ desire for revenge. The familiarity of the visual trope means
that its emotional semantics do not need to be specified each time the image is
3014
presented. Distant observers within the nation, seeing the image by means of
television, internet or newspapers, can respond with appropriate emotion - not that
all will do so.
Banal Nationalism did not discuss in detail how the banally reproduced signs
might be received – who will fail to notice them, who will register approval and
who will react with disapproval (even outrage). The work did not aim to detail
individual differences, or even communal differences. If the book expressed a
tendency to suppose that officially produced images, phrases and signs will always
be accepted unthinkingly then this is regrettable. The present volume contains two
studies which dramatically show how an official governmental policy on
citizenship – the official imagining of the nation – can be rejected by many
members of the nation. Manolis Pratsinakis and Gesine Wallem discuss how
citizens can dissent in their everyday actions from the official definitions of
nationhood. These citizens are not ‘nationalists’ in the traditional sense of the term
because they do not wish to secede from their nation, or to re-draw its boundaries
or to base politics around the idea of the nation. Instead, they wish to exclude from
the nation some who officially qualify for their nation’s citizenship.
Pratsinakis and Wallem present evidence from two populations, living in
different countries but sharing similar reactions. Pratsinakis looks at the reactions
of native Greeks to incomers from the former Soviet Union whom the Greek
3015
government has declared to be ethnically Greek. Wallem examines a similar
situation in Germany. In both cases, the incomers are not accepted as fellow
citizens by many of the natives who see them primarily as ‘Russians’. They
criticise the incomers for speaking Russian among themselves, for behaving in socalled
typically ‘Russian’ ways, and generally for being ‘really’ Russian, rather
than ‘really’ Greek or German. To use a concept that Aronczyk uses in her chapter,
these native inhabitants see their governments as committing ‘categorical
treachery’ when they accepted these essentially ‘foreign’ incomers as if they were
‘properly’ Greek or German. This nationalist complaint represents what analysts
have termed ‘everyday nationalism’, as compared with the sort of top-down official
symbols of nationhood discussed in Banal Nationalism.
Nevertheless, in crucial ways this sort of everyday nationalism rests upon an
unexamined, banal assumption: namely that everyone, or virtually everyone, in the
world of nations belongs ‘properly’ to a particular nation. The incomers, according
to the complainants, have no place here in ‘our’ homeland because they are
properly ‘Russian’. The complainants do not have to spell out their ideological
reasoning from first principles. The deep logic that nations can and should exclude
those who do not belong is part of a common-sense that is accepted from nation to
nation. These Greek and German complainants can make their arguments with
accusatory stereotypes, using the unexpressed, exclusionary assumptions of
nationalism – not just ‘our’ nationalism but nationalism internationally – to justify
3016
their specific complaints about ‘them’. It is these deep assumptions about
belonging and, most importantly, about not-belonging to nations that, in a time of
mass migration, can leave millions in makeshift, exposed camps, unwelcome in the
countries to which they have fled and unable to return to their so-called ‘proper’
countries. The leaders and populations of other nations wring their hands: these
unfortunates do not belong ‘here’ with ‘us’, they say. To demonstrate ‘our’
magnanimity and the goodness of ‘our’ great nation, ‘we’ will accept a few – a
very few - but all the others in their millions must go elsewhere, preferably back to
‘their’ own lands where ‘they’ supposedly belong but where they have suffered so
much.
Calhoun is surely correct in claiming that the imagining of nations can be
performed imaginatively. He writes that ‘the idea of social imaginaries is precisely
a bridge between the objectively recurrent and the subjectively enacted.’ He also
suggests that Banal Nationalism was over-critical of nationalism. Far from being
uniformly pernicious, nationalism can be integral to positive projects. Democracy,
for example, depends upon notions of the nation, or the national people, making its
choice. In this regard, it rests today upon national ‘imaginaries’. But here is the
problem: the assumptions of nationhood and the dominance of the national
‘imaginary’ have not just produce exclusive communities but they have, in effect,
blocked out alternative ways of imagining the political past and present.
3017
Recently I have been examining the annual celebration in the Portuguese
parliament commemorating the 1974 overthrow of dictatorship (Billig and
Marinho, in press). This is not an example of banal nationalism, for metaphorically
the flag is waved on these occasions, as ‘we’ celebrate ‘our’ history and ‘our’ great
triumph. Such a ceremony is what the classical rhetoricians called ‘epideictic’.
Modern rhetorical analysts claim that national epideictic ceremonies affirm a sense
of collective belonging (for example, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1968;
Condit, 1985). In the Portuguese ceremony the national context dominates the
ceremony and both banal and imaginative rhetoric are to be found intermingled.
What Calhoun calls the national ‘imaginary’ overwhelms any other form of
imagining politics – thereby constraining, as well as expanding what can be
politically imagined.
The Portuguese deputies, as they celebrate the historic overthrow of the
Salazarist dictatorship, typically pursue current partisan politics. Sometimes in
these celebrations speakers from the right will dispute with those from the left
about the term ‘the people’ (o povo). Both, however, will accept the nationalist
meaning of the term: in the context of the celebration ‘the people’ refers to the
people of Portugal. In the 2010 ceremony, a speaker from the right was talking
about his party’s view on re-writing the formal constitution of Portugal. The
speaker explicitly criticised the left-wing concept of o povo, which refers to the
unprivileged mass as contrasted with the privileged few. The speaker claimed that
3018
all Portuguese belonged to o povo, rich and poor, the shareholder as well as the
worker. A deputy from the Communist Party then interrupted, calling out: ‘Strike
out the shareholder!’ Left-wing deputies responded with laughter.
We can ask why the left-wing deputies laughed. At its minimum such
laughter indicates that the left was not seriously advocating that the constitution
should be revised to exclude shareholders from citizenship. If this were the actual
policy, then cheers and applause, not laughter, could be expected. The intervention
and the accompanying laughter illustrates the extent to which a former dream of
universal unity (the dream of workers of the world uniting) has become
nationalised in the twenty-first century. Now the thought of removing shareholders
from the nation, like a Freudian fantasy, can only be expressed as a joke, rather
than as a serious desire.
This illustrative example might seem unimportant but it expresses something
that is today so familiar, so banal, as to be hardly worth noticing. The term ‘the
people’ has been co-opted nationally within the world of nations, and has been
correspondingly emptied of its non-national, even anti-national, class-based
meaning. An imagined politics, not based around the imagined nation, is virtually
unimaginable. Thus, the so-called national ‘imaginary’ also represents a restriction
of political imagination. In this respect, nationalism is not a disappearing island
about to be overcome by the tidal flow of internationalism. It remains the dominant
3019
political ideology of today, determining what politics is to be seriously practised
and what can only be non-seriously imagined.
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