Abstract
It is gratifying that Michael Skey engages seriously and critically with Banal Nationalism. I welcome his suggestions for studying more systematically some of the phenomena that I only sketched in outline. Although I broadly agree with many of his points, nevertheless I feel at times he over-simplifies the argument of Banal Nationalism, particularly when he claims that I hold a top-down model which views ordinary people as passively receiving media messages.
Certainly, Banal Nationalism concentrates on top-down phenomena, such as statements from politicians, symbols on coins, national flags. Skey's complaint is not that I examine such phenomena, but that I use an unsatisfactory ‘model’ to do so: ‘This model basically assumes that a national media addresses and constitutes a coherent national public’ (p. 335). Skey wishes to challenge ‘the very notion of a uniform, homogenous national audience’ (p. 335, italics in original). Regarding the issue of British nationality, Skey states that ‘it might be legitimately assumed…that Billig believes nationalism is banal for everyone who happens to live in Britain at the current time’. He suggests that, given the diversity of Britain and its four ‘national’ groups, ‘we might contend that making such an assumption closes down our analysis where it should begin’ (p. 337).
I certainly did not intend my descriptions of banal nationalism in the media to ‘close down’ further analysis. In any case, I do not hold the view of a homogeneous audience that Skey ascribes to me. Banal Nationalism did not assume that the public of any nation – including the four ‘nations’ of the United Kingdom – have homogeneous views. I specifically suggested that arguments about the nature of the nation are the norm. I wrote that ‘different factions, whether classes, religions, regions, genders or ethnicities, always struggle for the power to speak for the nation, and to present their particular voice as the voice of the national whole’ (Billig, 1995: 71, emphasis added).
The ‘model’, which Skey ascribes to me, is obviously unsatisfactory but it is not the psychological model, on which Banal Nationalism was based. Skey does not relate Banal Nationalism to my psychological writings. I welcome the opportunity to do so here. My psychological perspective stresses the link between arguing and thinking (Billig, 1987 and 1991). Human thinking is not based on information-processing, as many cognitive scientists have implied, but it is intrinsically rhetorical: to think is to be engaged in debate. As such, thinking is primarily a public activity. Of course, the rhetorical skills of argumentation can be internalized enabling individual thinking to be a form of silent, inner argument. This means that humans as thinkers are not simple passive receivers of media messages (Billig, 1997).
To say that human thinking is based on argumentation does not mean that individuals will necessarily argue about anything and everything. There are ideological and cultural constraints. People do not choose the means and the topics of argumentation in a vacuum; they use the rhetorical tools of ‘common sense’. In some cultures, at some times, certain topics will be matters of controversy and others taken for granted. As my colleagues and I have argued, ideology is ‘dilemmatic’, for it presents ideological dilemmas, rather than clear-cut positions (Billig et al., 1988). People have much to debate, as they bring the topics of ‘common sense’ into rhetorical opposition. This can be seen in my study of views about the British Royal Family (Billig, 1992). Royalists were not uncritical ‘believers’, who repeated a common line unthinkingly. The more that people were committed to the Royal Family, the more they would criticize the behaviour of particular royals and the more they would argue about the dilemmas of royalty in the modern age. In short, the ‘ideological subject’ by no means passively receives a single ideological message.
This has direct implications for understanding banal nationalism. The media do not transmit a single, coherent message about the nation: there are continual controversies, debates, dilemmas. Each individual is likely to have contrary things to say, as they seek to balance the conflicting themes of common sense. Condor, one of the co-authors of Ideological Dilemmas, has found this in her studies of the ways that British people talk about nationality. She has specifically used the concept of ‘ideological dilemma’ to make sense of some of her data (Condor, 2006; Condor and Gibson, 2007). Consequently, there is nothing in the theoretical background of Banal Nationalism to deny that ordinary people will engage in sense-making.
One can distinguish between a general common-sense value, or ‘topos’, and its rhetorical uses in particular contexts. Within a given nation-state, there invariably will be competing conceptions, histories, stereotypes etc; there may even be competing nationalisms disputing the nationhood of particular pieces of land. However, such disputes are likely to assume those general themes of nationalism that take for granted the naturalness of a world of nations. In order to investigate this, it was necessary to move methodologically from the conscious sense-making, which I studied in Talking of the Royal Family and which Condor and her colleagues have been examining so fruitfully (eg, Condor, 2000; Condor and Abell, 2006). Basically, my topic was the unconscious aspects of nationalism, rather than those which are consciously noticed. This does not make nationalism a deeply psychoanalytic phenomenon, for this is not the repressed, Freudian unconscious (Billig, 1999 and 2006). The unconscious can also include what is so familiar and habitual that it passes unnoticed. Banal Nationalism attempted to look beyond the dialogues of conscious sense-making towards a psychology of the unnoticed. The flags hanging in the street, or attached to the lapels of politicians, carry no propositional message for the ordinary citizen to receive passively or consciously argue against. Yet, such symbols help to maintain the everyday world as belonging to the world of nation-states.
The assumptions of nationalism, which take for granted the naturalness of a world of nations, have become virtually universal. In Banal Nationalism, I wrote about ‘a universal code of particularity’ (pp. 72–3). The universal and particular aspects of nationalism present continual dilemmas for controversy and debate (p. 87ff). Such debates are not conducted between nationalists and universalists, as if these were opposing groups of people, each holding pure, consistent ideologies. These are debates within nationalism, or rather debates that take for granted the universal frameworks of nationalism. The implication, which I stressed in Banal Nationalism, is that nationalism and internationalism are not opposites. The ideology of nationalism could only triumph in an international world, for the ideology of nationalism assumes that particular nations take their place within an international world of nation-states. Accordingly, I agree with Skey that nationalism and globalism are not contrary forces locked in a zero-sum battle. It is slightly strange that Skey, in presenting his views, does not mention that this was a central theme of Banal Nationalism.
If nationalism is global, then one can expect to find features of banal nationalism across the world. Skey, however, claims that I firmly locate ‘banal nationalism in the “established, democratic nations” of the West’. I think there has been a misunderstanding. First, it is not only in the West that one can find democratic nation-states. Second, it is not difficult to find the banal reproduction of national symbols in non-Western nations (see, for instance, Fuller, 2008). I think that Skey may have been misled by the emphasis of Banal Nationalism, which for political and theoretical reasons deliberately focussed on banal nationalism within Western democracies.
I wanted to stress the nationalism of ‘our’ mundane practices. Most analysts have ignored the nationalism of established, Western nation-states. By ‘established’, I do not mean secure or unchanging, but simply nation-states that have been conventionally accepted in the world of nations – belonging to the United Nations, issuing internationally accepted passports, possessing their own military and so on. My argument was that analysts have defined ‘nationalism’ too narrowly, thereby excluding the mundane practices of established Western democracies. The context, in which the quote about the banal nationalism of ‘established, democratic nations’ appears, makes this clear. It was certainly not my intention to suggest that non-Western and non-democratic nation-states lack similar mundane practices by which they reproduce themselves as nation-states.
In my eagerness to show ‘our’ nationalism, I oversimplified the complexity of nationalism in the United Kingdom. As Skey and other critics (eg Rosie et al., 2004; MacInnes et al., 2007) have pointed out, my day survey ignored Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and it exaggerated the extent to which English-based newspapers constitute a national press. Partly these deficiencies arose from my wish to illustrate the presence of nationalism where it was not expected (and where I live). To reveal that there is nationalism in Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland would be no revelation. For theoretical reasons, it seemed better to concentrate on a ‘hard’ case, in order to show the relentless nationalist messages in apparently non-nationalist England.
Skey draws an important implication from his critique of my day survey. He claims that it should ‘encourage us to move beyond “official” or state-run institutions to focus on the different levels – national, sub-national, supra-national or indeed non-national – that may operate in any given locale or context’ (pp. 335–6). That is obviously correct: any analysis of a given form of nationalism should take into account as many contextual factors as possible. However, in present circumstances, the net effect might be to draw attention away from the more unnoticed forms of nationalism.
Certainly, there has been an enormous amount of work in the social sciences examining both the sub-national and the supra-national. This can be seen in the reactions to Banal Nationalism. The book has provoked more sub-national studies of the press in Scotland and Wales than of the national press in the United Kingdom or other established nation-states (eg, Higgins, 2004; Law, 2001). On the other hand, many social scientists prefer to look beyond the nation. Ulrich Beck suggests that Banal Nationalism ignored ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ and that, in concentrating on nationalism, I was being ‘selective to the point of distortion’. According to Beck, the signs of banal nationalism are ‘really only islands in an overwhelming river of banal cosmopolitanism’ (Beck and Willms, 2003: 37; see also Urry, 1999 and 2000, on ‘banal globalization’).
Interestingly, Beck (2008) has recently written about the failures of global capitalism to solve problems of climate change and financial insecurity. Strong states, he suggests, may be necessary to deal with these problems in the twenty-first century. Beck might have added that strong states do not come without an accompanying ideological nationalism that reproduces the nation-state as a strong nation-state. If Beck is right about the resurgence of strong states, then the processes of banal nationalism are unlikely to remain islets about to be flooded by the onrushing floods of globalism.
Social scientists have faced theoretical temptations to avert their gaze from the nationalism of Western nation-states. The temptations are understandable, but the effects are unfortunate. There has been the temptation to examine the exciting, apparently global new world. At the same time, there has been a resurgence of interest in the local – or sub-national. It is easy to sympathise with nationalist movements battling against more powerful majorities – to see Basques, Catalans, Kurds, Scots etc as progressively rectifying historic injustices and challenging existing bases of power.
These two theoretical attractions – for the global and the local/national – have pushed established nationalism beyond the attention of many social scientists. ‘Our’ nationality is unimportant – after all, ‘we’ are global citizens and ‘we’ feel for the small nations struggling in their birth pains. However, these two theoretical trends have helped create an omission of ideological proportions. Having written Banal Nationalism, I hoped that others would then analyze in detail the banality of the world's most powerful nationalism – that of the United States. Instead, it has been the less powerful nationalisms that have attracted attention. In setting out his agenda for analyzing nationalism, Skey does not specifically discuss the nationalism of the United States. He mentions it only in passing when outlining my argument, proportionally giving more attention to nationalism in Belgium and Quebec.
It is somewhat bizarre that US nationalism has received such relatively little social scientific attention, even from specialists in nationalism. Nation-states typically claim for themselves the monopoly of the right to violence within their borders – and, in the case of the USA, beyond their borders. The USA, as the world's current super-power, is supported by the greatest stock of armaments ever assembled in history. The military expenditure of the USA accounts for forty-six percent of the whole world's military expenditure. America's military budget continues to rise, dwarfing that of the next greatest national spender, the United Kingdom (Stålenheim, Perdomo and Sköns, 2007). With respect to military might, there is no sign that the nation-state is withering away.
Such military power must have its sociological and psychological bases. By looking upwards towards the global or downwards towards secessionist movements, analysts have avoided looking directly at one of the most important social phenomena of the age. They have left an enormous hole right at the centre of the study of contemporary nationalism. Today, virtually no academic analysts have used the concept of banal nationalism to explore this most powerful form nationalism (but see Caldwell, 2006, for a non-academic example). If the most powerful nationalism passes unrecognized and unstudied as ‘nationalism’, then there is what Zerubavel (2006) might call an elephant in the sociological room. The academic avoidance of this metaphorical elephant certainly merits critical engagement.