Framing the nation: three rival versions of contemporary nationalist ideology

Abstract

The author proposes an analysis of the common and differentiating elements of contemporary nationalist ideologies based on the starting assumption that the character of nationalist discourses in the building of nations is not merely exogenous and expressive, but rather endogenous and productive. The study, which is centred on the internal structure of the concept of nation and the political nature and the relationships between its principal elements, employs a frame analysis approach. Three main types of framing strategies present in contemporary nationalist ideologies are highlighted: 1) an organicistic strategy, which is articulated around a concept of nation as an homogenous ethnic group shaped by the presence of thickly ethnic objective elements (race, spirit, mission, physical space, etc.); 2) the culturalist strategy, which is the result of a purging of the determinism found in the organicistic model and which is based on other objective but thinly ethnic elements (culture, language, tradition); and 3) a strategy based on the emergent model of pluralistic nationalism, which competes with the two previous models by considering the nation as an always-in-the-making political-cultural community, integrated by majorities and minorities, and as an open environment for democratic deliberation and accommodation. The analysis demonstrates how, as a last resort, only the third model, which significantly moves away from the classical formulation of nationalist ideologies, turns out to be compatible with the normative demands of contemporary democratic theory, but at the cost of losing the mobilizing efficiency of the two traditional models (organic and cultural) and the heuristic efficiency of the binary opposites: we/they, insider/outsider, friend/enemy.

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