Undefeated nationalism: extending the banal nationalism thesis through the family

How to account for, understand and explain the exceptional health of nationalism today, around the world and within the ‘Western’ democracies? This paper aims at exploring this issue by discussing the concept of ‘banal nationalism’ developed by the social psychologist Michael Billig in 1995. In the 1990s, however, many read in the latest advances of globalisation and the admittedly difficult deepening of European construction the gradual disappearance of nation states and nationalism seemed on the verge of becoming a subject for historians (Hobsbawm 1992). Nationalism was considered old-fashioned and was to remain the preserve of extreme right-wing parties and of peoples in struggle. Thirty years later, this is far from being the case. Nationalism seems incredibly powerful and the ‘flagging’ analysed by Billig is more than ever omnipresent – and for this very reason nearly invisible and widely accepted – in all democracies to varying degrees. Following Billig, it can be seen as one of the main testimonies and supports of a transnational hegemonic ideology, perpetuating silently a division of the world into nations that is implicitly unsurpassable. Nevertheless, if Billig succeeds in analysing the logic of banal nationalism (an expression derived from Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’), he does not explain how ‘its magic works’ (Fox 2018). Situational factors are often put forward to explain – or legitimise – the ‘refuge’ that the nation would represent for people in our times: economic and financial crises, migratory crises or crises due to COVID, all of which more or less linked to what is known as globalisation, not to mention the threat of terrorism or the spectre of war. But apart from the very paradoxical nature of such attachment of citizens to a ‘survival unit’, nation state, that protects them less and less, these episodes cannot explain the enduring character of national identity. This paper is interested in the driving forces of banal nationalism today: the manifestations, vectors and ‘reasons for unreason’. It aims to investigate various hypotheses that Billig has explored little, for instance those opened up by the historical sociology of Norbert Elias (1981 [1939); 1991). Is nationalism not only an ideology imposed and maintained by the dominant, but also a question of ‘national habitus’, embodied over generations through individual and collective practices and representations, in the wake of the development of the modern states? The persistence of a national habitus would then attest to the delay of the processes of identification. We propose to explore these issues by looking specifically at how the national habitus is forged in childhood. In particular, we will look at how the national flagging is inserted into the family, imported from grocery shop shelves, toys, books, films or children's programmes, and woven into the fabric of family narratives, thereby multiplying its effects.