Banal Nationalism, 30 years on - a review

<p dir="ltr">In this review piece, we would like to offer a number of reflections on Banal Nationalism and, in particular, responses to it, three decades on. First, we would like to provide some context for the development of the Banal Nationalism thesis and then outline some of its key arguments. Here, in particular, we address a central argument of the book that has been perhaps over-looked. That is, how nationalism operates as a wider ideology at the global level, providing powerful justifications for how individual societies, as well as relations between them, should be ordered. The relative lack of attention given to this view stands in contrast to much of the empirical work inspired by banal nationalism, which tends to focus on particular features or social relations in a given (usually national) setting (see Duchesne 2018, 2019 for a critique).</p><p dir="ltr">Subsequently, we address the various approaches that sought to critically engage with Billig's work. These studies emphasised variability within national settings and argued for a more dynamic model to emphasise the transition from banal to hotter forms of nationalism, and vice versa. Then we turn to Jones and Merriman's (2009) paper on hot, banal and every-day nationalism as a way of opening up, and then critiquing, what seems to have subsequently become the established way of thinking about banal versus everyday nationalism. This is the argument that the former is only about top- down, institutional forms of taken-for-granted nationalism, while the latter is about agency and ordinary people's everyday activities or utterances. Having sought to outline the weaknesses of such a dichotomy, in the final section we offer a number of concluding remarks.</p>