Hot, banal and everyday nationalism: Bilingual road signs in Wales

The paper focuses on Billig's (Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage) notion of banal nationalism. While Billig's work is to be commended for demonstrating the way in which nationalism is an endemic political ideology in all states – and not merely an extreme or hot political ideology that is based upon “blood and belonging” (Ignatieff, M. (1993). Blood and belonging: Journeys into the new nationalism. London: BBC Books) – we suggest that his work tends, perhaps unwittingly, to reinforce an unwarranted separation of the banal and hot processes that reproduce nationalism. Some empirical work has implicitly and explicitly begun to question the distinction between banal and hotter forms of nationalism. We argue that one way in which such an agenda can be furthered is through a promotion of the idea of everyday nationalism, which combines banal and hot elements in more complex and contingent ways. We elaborate on the benefits of adopting such an approach through an empirical discussion of the campaign in favour of bilingual road signs in Wales between 1967 and 1975. We focus, first, on how monolingual English road signs were constructed by Welsh nationalists as part of an everyday landscape of oppression and, second, on the everyday politics of road signs within the spaces of government. We conclude the paper by reaffirming the need to move beyond notions of banal and hot nationalism and to focus on the everyday contexts within which nationalism is reproduced.     

The ‘everyday’ of banal nationalism – Ordinary people’s views on Italy and Italian

In 1995, Banal Nationalism set a new way to study nationhood. Away from the traditional concern with its historical origins (‘when’) and its substantialist features (‘what’), Banal Nationalism offered a systematic analysis of its reproduction (‘how’). Informed by social and discursive psychology, Billig pointed to the role played by familiar, unremarkable ‘little words’ (deixis) to explain the persistence and pervasiveness of the idea of a world divided into nations. The present article aims to expand Billig’s seminal study on the reproduction of nationalism, by incorporating an ‘everyday nationhood’ perspective, which attends more closely to human agency and contextual interaction. To give empirical substance to this move, the article relies on photo-elicitation group discussions and written essays collected in a vocational school in Milan, Italy, among an ethno-culturally diverse sample. By bringing the voices of people in as active producers of national meanings, the article offers a more complex picture of a world banally divided into nations. Both a national ‘we’ and a national ‘here’ emerge in fact as socio-spatially differentiated, fragmented and articulated at a plurality of scales, thus defying the logical linearity of banal nationalism, which unwittingly reproduces nations as singular, internally homogenous discursive entities. The article concludes by arguing for the need to complement the banal with the everyday in order to more fully capture processes of national reproduction in contexts of increasing ethno-cultural diversity.     

Securing disunion: Young people's nationalism,identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literature from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children's emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009, Shaw et al., 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign.     

Dancing on the graves: Independence,hot/banal nationalism and the mobilization of memory

Nationalism is frequently considered as an extreme, ‘hot’ phenomenon related to often violent nation/state-building processes. Billig’s Banal Nationalism turned the attention to how nationalism is also ‘flagged’ and routinely reproduced in existing states. This article studies the mobilization of these forms of nationalism and suggests that independence is a useful notion in bridging the hot/banal divide and for tracing the ‘hot in the banal’. Whereas for separatist movements independence is primarily a goal aspired to, in existing states independence/sovereignty is used to bring together hot and banal forms of nationalism which are mobilized in reproducing the discourses/practices related to the purported national identity. This paper first outlines a heuristic framework for conceptualizing independence and its key dimensions in relation to hot and banal nationalism as well as state-territory building. Secondly, the paper will study empirically the merit of the notion of independence regarding nationalism research via four themes: (1) the role of independence in Finland’s state/nation-building process, spatial socialization and in mixing hot and banal nationalism; (2) the use of the ‘independence card’ by (nationalist) parties; (3) the mobilization of nationalist practices/discourses in the performativity of Finnish Independence Day; and (4) the resistance that the independence celebrations have incited. This study shows that the idea of independence in this context is inward-looking, draws on Othering, and is flagged in media and spatial socialization (e.g. education) using particular iconographies, landscapes, events, and memories related above all to wars. Rather than expressing hot or banal nationalism these discourses/practices effectively merge the two, challenging any simple dichotomy between them. The performativity of Independence Day in particular displays this blending.     

Nationalism,patriotism, or national reference? A response to Jacopo Custodi

Jacop Custodi elaborated recently a response to our article “A nationalist party with non-nationalistic voters? Discussing the limits of nationalism in party categorisation” published in the journal Nations & Nationalism. We consider the work of Custodi is an important and original contribution to the study of left politics and nationalism. This being said, we reflect on the negative consequences of overstretching the category nationalism, both referring to parties and to political discourse. The aim of this reply is unpacking and explaining these negative consequences and offering an alternative as well as responding to some specific points raised by Custodi in his reply.     

Argentine territorial nationalism revisited: The Malvinas/Falklands dispute and geographies of everyday nationalism

This paper is concerned with expressions of Argentine territorial nationalism with a specific focus on the Malvinas/Falklands dispute. Billig’s (1995) notion of banal nationalism has been widely applied as a means to understanding the ways in which national identities are learnt and reproduced by the populace, through a multitude of ‘mundane’ representations. More recently Billig’s (1995) thesis has been critiqued (Jones & Merriman, 2009) for its rigidity and inability to take account of the different ways these nationalisms are produced and received (Müller, 2008) within and outside of the nation-state. We build on these interventions by arguing that research into territorial nationalism should not ignore the wider temporal, spatial, political and everyday contexts in which such discourses emerge and are consumed. To illustrate this diversity we contend that territorial nationalism and, more specifically, the attention placed on the Malvinas dispute by the Argentine government has varied in its intensity, depending on wider political events and agendas in the South West Atlantic and Latin American regions. Secondly, through the use of interview extracts from a pilot study conducted with 20 young people in Buenos Aires, we suggest that Argentine territorial nationalism is not received uniformly across the nation-state and, rather, should be explored in its everyday contexts. These contexts take into consideration things like respondent’s geographical location, personal/familial relationships and generation, amongst other variables, in order to more sensitively appreciate Argentine territorial nationalism’s multifarious reception.     

U-series dating of soda straw stalactites from excavated deposits: method development and application to Blanche Cave, Naracoorte, South Australia

This study aimed to further test the method, reported by St Pierre et al. (2009), to develop robust chronologies of deposits in limestone caves through U/Th (Uranium/Thorium or U-Series) dating of soda straw stalactites. The chronology of fossil bearing deposits at Blanche Cave was further constrained with thermal ionisation mass spectrometry (TIMS) U/Th dating of 17 additional soda straw stalactite samples, and results were compared to recalibrated ¹⁴C ages of charcoal. The results support the assertion that soda straw stalactites can provide ages close to the time of sediment deposition and may be used as reliable chronological markers, particularly for periods reaching or beyond the radiocarbon dating limit. The application of an enhanced cleaning technique facilitated the reduction of detrital Th in samples, significantly increasing age accuracy and precision. Additionally U/Th age accuracy and precision was increased through the application of site-specific measured U/Th ratios to correct for the detrital ²³⁰Th component in samples.