Week 3
Nationalism

SOCI 229

Sakeef M. Karim
Amherst College


FAR RIGHT POPULISTS, TRUMPISM, AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF EXCLUSIONARY POLITICS

Lecture I: September 16th

A Quick Reminder


Response Memo Deadline

Your first response memo—which has to be between 250-400 words and posted on our Moodle Discussion Board—is due by 8:00 PM today.

The Final Roster

Look around the room. These are your colleagues for the semester.

The Final Roster

Time for some introductions.

You’re All Invited

Nationalism Reframed —
by Rogers Brubaker

Rethinking Nationhood

Nationhood as Institutionalized Form

Nationhood as Practical Category

Nationhood as Contingent Event

Question
Can anyone offer some definitions?

Rethinking Nationhood


[A]n understanding of nations as real entities continues to inform the study of nationhood and nationalism. This realist, substantialist understanding of nations is shared by those who hold otherwise widely diverging views of nationhood and nationalism.

(Brubaker 1996, 14, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Question
Does Brubaker agree with this “realist, substantialist” treatment of nations?

At One Pole


At one pole, it informs the view of nationalism held by nationalists themselves and by nationally minded scholars. On this view, nationalism presupposes the existence of nations, and expresses their strivings for autonomy and independence. Nations are conceived as collective individuals, capable of coherent, purposeful collective action. Nationalism is a drama in which nations are the key actors.

(Brubaker 1996, 14, EMPHASIS ADDED)

At the Other Pole

[T]he realist ontology of nations informs more sober and less celebratory scholarship as well. Consider just one indicator of this …

What is a nation?

This question is not as theoretically innocent as it seems.

(Brubaker 1996, 14, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Problem With the Realist Approach?


The problem with this substantialist treatment of nations as real entities is that it adopts categories of practice as categories of analysis. It takes a conception inherent in the practice of nationalism and in the workings of the modern state and state-system - namely the realist, reifying conception of nations as real communities - and it makes this conception central to the theory of nationalism.

(Brubaker 1996, 15, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Problem With the Realist Approach?


To argue against the realist and substantialist way of thinking about nations is not to dispute the reality of nationhood … [i]t is to decouple the study of nationhood and nationness from the study of nations as substantial entities, collectivities, or communities. It is to focus on nationness as a conceptual variable … not on nations as real collectivities.

(Brubaker 1996, 16, EMPHASIS ADDED)

The Path Forward


We should not ask “what is a nation” but rather: how is nationhood as a political and cultural form institutionalized within and among states? How does nation work as practical category, as classificatory scheme, as cognitive frame? What makes the use of that category by or against states more or less resonant or effective? What makes the nation-evoking, nation-invoking efforts of political entrepreneurs more or less likely to succeed?

(Brubaker 1996, 16, EMPHASIS ADDED)

The Path Forward

Nationhood as Institutionalized Form

Nationhood as Practical Category

Nationhood as Contingent Event

The Path Forward

Nationhood as Institutionalized Form

Ours is not, as is often asserted, even by as sophisticated a thinker as Anthony Smith, “a world of nations.” It is a world in which nationhood is pervasively institutionalized in the practice of states and the workings of the state system.

(Brubaker 1996, 21, EMPHASIS ADDED)

For a relevant paper, see Brubaker (1994).

The Path Forward

Nationality as a Practical Category

Ours is not, as is often asserted, even by as sophisticated a thinker as Anthony Smith, “a world of nations” … [i]t is a world in which nation is widely, if unevenly, available and resonant as a category of social vision and division.

(Brubaker 1996, 21, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Race, ethnicity, and nationality … are not things in the world, but perspectives on the world - not ontological but epistemological realities.

(Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004, 45, EMPHASIS ADDED)

The Path Forward

Nationness as a Contingent Event

Ours is not, as is often asserted, even by as sophisticated a thinker as Anthony Smith, “a world of nations” … [i]t is a world in which nationness may suddenly, and powerfully, “happen.”

(Brubaker 1996, 21, EMPHASIS ADDED)

As Craig Calhoun has recently argued … identity should be understood as a “changeable product of collective action,” not as its stable underlying cause. Much the same thing could be said about nationness.

(Brubaker 1996, 20, EMPHASIS ADDED)

An Example


For a relevant paper, see Kuran (1998).

Group Discussion I

Summarizing Brubaker’s Thoughts

In groups of 2-3, discuss how you would summarize Brubaker’s ideas about nations and nationalism.

Nationalism in Settled Times —
by Bart Bonikowski

A Nationalist Zeitgeist?


Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have articulated visions of their nations under siege—by immigrants, refugees, domestic minority populations, and these groups’ ostensible accomplices among the political and cultural elites. Evoking nostalgia for the nation’s bygone glory days, these diagnoses have been coupled with sundry policy proposals aimed at making the country great again, to paraphrase Donald Trump’s campaign slogan.

(Bonikowski 2016, 428, EMPHASIS ADDED)

A Nationalist Zeitgeist?


[T]hese developments make clear that nationalism—understood as a pervasive cognitive and affective orientation rather than a coherent ideology—continues to animate everyday politics in contemporary democracies. Yet, until recently, sociologists of nationalism have had surprisingly little to say about lay understandings of the nation.

(Bonikowski 2016, 428, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Disparate Conceptual Treatments of Nationalism

Scholarly Conceptions of Nationalism

Adapted from Table 1 in Bonikowski (2016)
  Political
(focus on elites’ political projects and discursive practices)		 Quotidian
(focus on lived culture, ideas, and sentiments of non-elites)
Ideology
(“nationalism” refers to narrow set of ideas)		 Gellner (1983, 1): “a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent” Kosterman & Feshbach (1989, 271): “a perception of national superiority and an orientation toward national dominance”
Practice
(“nationalism” refers to a domain of meaningful social practice)		 Brubaker (2004, 116): “a claim on people’s loyalty, on their attention, on their solidarity [. . .] used [. . .] to change the way people see themselves, to mobilize loyalties, kindle energies, and articulate demands” Brubaker (1996, 10): “a heterogeneous set of ‘nation’-oriented idioms, practices, and possibilities that are continuously available or ‘endemic’ in modern cultural and political life”

Nationalism as Political Project

John Gast’s American Progress

Nationalism as Political Project

Combat et prise de la Crête-à-Pierrot by Auguste Raffet
(engraving by Ernst Hébert)

Quotidian Forms of Nationalism

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant book, see Billig (1995).

Quotidian Forms of Nationalism

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant book, see Billig (1995).

The Nationalism of Individuals

As Ideology


Nationalist ideology … is not solely the domain of political elites seeking to legitimize their rule over a territorially bounded people. For political psychologists, nationalism is a set of dispositions that cohere at the level of individual actors.

(Bonikowski 2016, 429, EMPHASIS ADDED)

The Nationalism of Individuals

As Ideology

Political psychologists tend to view nationalism (i.e., chauvinism) as a normative problem … but [p]otentially invidious dispositions toward the nation … are not limited to chauvinism; they also include exclusionary conceptions of national membership, excessive forms of national pride, and strong identification with the nation above all other communities. Furthermore, the standard distinction in this literature between nationalism and its ostensibly benign counterpart, patriotism, is fraught with analytical difficulty.

(Bonikowski 2016, 430, EMPHASIS ADDED)

The Nationalism of Individuals

As Practice


Nationalism is not only a conscious ideology, it is also a discursive and cognitive frame through which people understand the world, navigate social interactions, engage in coordinated action, and make political claims.

(Bonikowski 2016, 430, EMPHASIS ADDED)

The Nationalism of Individuals

As Practice


If the operative mode of nationalism-as-ideology is to effect political change in the interest of national sovereignty, nationalism-as-practice involves people thinking, talking, and acting through and with the nation.

(Bonikowski 2016, 430, EMPHASIS ADDED)

The Nationalism of Individuals

As Practice

Research on nationalism in everyday life … examines how the nation is understood and deployed in routine interactions (Brubaker 1996). This may manifest itself through explicit references to the nation, but just as often,nationalism’s influence is more tacit, expressed in habituated modes of thought, speech, and behavior that take for granted the nation’s cultural and political primacy.

(Bonikowski 2016, 431, EMPHASIS ADDED)

The Nationalism of Individuals

Bonikowski’s Primary Goal

To integrate “sociological research on nationalism as a meaningful category of practice and political psychology scholarship on nationalist attitudes.”
(Bonikowski 2016, 431)

Schemas of the Nation

A Site of Symbolic Struggle


The nation is not a static cultural object with a single shared meaning, but a site of active political contestation between cultural communities with strikingly different belief systems. Such conflicts are at the heart of contemporary political debates in the United States and Europe.

(Bonikowski 2016, 428, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Disparate Understandings of the Nation

[I]f we are to understand how people perceive the nation, we ought to capture the wide range of beliefs and symbolic representations that constitute people’s nation schemas. These are likely to include tropes about the nation’s character, salient national symbols and traditions, perceptions of the nation’s appropriate symbolic boundaries, feelings of pride in the nation’s heritage and its institutions, and views about the nation’s relationship to the rest of the world.

(Bonikowski 2016, 437, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Disparate Understandings of the Nation


More simply, popular nationalism taps into the following questions:

  1. Who Is a Legitimate Member of the Nation?

  2. What Are the Nation’s Virtues?

  3. What Is the Nation’s Place in the World?

Crucially, different “thought communities” nested in the general population will have substantively different answers to these questions.

Disparate Understandings of the Nation

Disparate Understandings of the Nation

Disparate Understandings of the Nation

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant paper, see Smith (1993).

Disparate Understandings of the Nation

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant paper, see Smith (1993).

Lecture II: September 18th

Temperature Check

How are things going?

Group Discussion II

Summarizing Bonikowski’s Thoughts

In groups of 2-3, discuss how you would summarize Bonikowski’s ideas about studying everyday nationalism.

Capturing Nationalist Beliefs

How can we capture or measure
disparate understandings of the nation?

A Survey-Based Approach

Figure 2 from Bonikowski and DiMaggio (2016)

A Survey-Based Approach

Figure 3 from Keskintürk and Kuyucu (2024)

A Survey-Based Approach

Karim’s Popular Nationalism, Intergroup Attitudes and the Moderating Role of Immigrant Origins

Role of Democracy


Figure 5 from Soehl and Karim (2021)

Partisan Sorting of “America” —
by Bart Bonikowski, Yuval Feinstein & Sean Bock

“Cultural” Sources of Radical-Right Support


Explanations of popular support for radical-right parties tend to fall into two categories: those stressing economic factors … and those emphasizing “cultural” factors … The latter perspective rests on the claim that economic anxiety is neither a necessary nor sufficient cause of voters’ favorability toward candidates who capitalize on out-group antipathies.

(Bonikowski, Feinstein, and Bock 2021, 497, EMPHASIS ADDED)

“Cultural” Sources of Radical-Right Support


We view the economy-versus-culture dichotomy as misplaced … but we also take issue with the vague concept of “cultural” explanations on which it is predicated. This category comprises a wide range of attitudes, including xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia, and anticosmopolitanism, without specifying the cultural mechanisms that connect them.

(Bonikowski, Feinstein, and Bock 2021, 498, EMPHASIS ADDED)

“Cultural” Sources of Radical-Right Support


One way in which scholars have sought to bridge these distinct phenomena is to subsume them under the category of nativism … This is a more promising analytical category than “culture” writ large … Nativism, however, is overly narrow: it customarily emphasizes foreign birth over other bases of nationalist exclusion … and it misses other aspects of nationalism apart from membership criteria.

(Bonikowski, Feinstein, and Bock 2021, 497, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Question
Can you name other “aspects” of popular nationalism not captured by nativism alone?

Nationalism and Institutional Politics

America in 2016

Figure 3 from Bonikowski and colleagues (2021)

Nationalism and Institutional Politics

America in 2016

Figure 5 from Bonikowski and colleagues (2021)

Group Discussion III

Populism and Nationalism

We’ve now covered populism and nationalism.
In groups of 2-3, discuss how these two concepts are related to one another and how they differ.

Then, discuss how both phenomena are implicated in, or give rise to, the politics of exclusion.

References

Note: Scroll to access entire bibliography.

Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: SAGE.
Bonikowski, Bart. 2016. “Nationalism in Settled Times.” Annual Review of Sociology 42 (Volume 42, 2016): 427–49. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-081715-074412.
Bonikowski, Bart, and Paul DiMaggio. 2016. “Varieties of American Popular Nationalism.” American Sociological Review 81 (5): 949–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122416663683.
Bonikowski, Bart, Yuval Feinstein, and Sean Bock. 2021. “The Partisan Sorting of ‘America’: How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” American Journal of Sociology 127 (2): 492–561. https://doi.org/10.1086/717103.
Brubaker, Rogers. 1994. “Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutionalist Account.” Theory and Society 23 (1): 47–78. https://www.jstor.org/stable/657812.
———. 1996. “Rethinking Nationhood: Nation as Institutionalized Form, Practical Category, Contingent Event.” In Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, 13–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511558764.002.
———. 2004. “In the Name of the Nation: Reflections on Nationalism and Patriotism.” Citizenship Studies 8 (2): 115–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362102042000214705.
Brubaker, Rogers, Mara Loveman, and Peter Stamatov. 2004. “Ethnicity as Cognition.” Theory and Society 33 (1): 31–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4144890.
Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hiers, Wesley, Thomas Soehl, and Andreas Wimmer. 2017. “National Trauma and the Fear of Foreigners: How Past Geopolitical Threat Heightens Anti-Immigration Sentiment Today.” Social Forces 96 (1): 361–88. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sox045.
Keskintürk, Turgut, and Tuna Kuyucu. 2024. “Sentiments of Solidarity: Varying Conceptions of Nationhood in Turkey.” Nations and Nationalism. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.13008.
Kosterman, Rick, and Seymour Feshbach. 1989. “Toward a Measure of Patriotic and Nationalistic Attitudes.” Political Psychology 10 (2): 257–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/3791647.
Kuran, Timur. 1998. “Ethnic Norms and Their Transformation Through Reputational Cascades.” The Journal of Legal Studies 27 (S2): 623–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/468038.
Smith, Rogers M. 1993. “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America.” American Political Science Review 87 (3): 549–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/2938735.
Soehl, Thomas, and Sakeef M. Karim. 2021. “How Legacies of Geopolitical Trauma Shape Popular Nationalism Today.” American Sociological Review 86 (3): 406–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224211011981.