How to gauge banal nationalism and national indifference in the past: proletarian tweets in Belgium's belle époque

Abstract

Michael Billig's theory of banal nationalism involves the assumption that the absence of an explicit discourse on the nation should be interpreted as the unmindful presence of nationalism and that the mass media faithfully represent or reflect the discourses of ‘ordinary people’. Recent historical research of ‘national indifference’ in imperial Austria has inverted the correlation between the ubiquity of nationalist discourses and their impact in society. This article assesses these conflicting frameworks and refutes AD Smith's critique of everyday nationalism research as necessarily ahistorical and presentist. This case study of the rank‐and‐file of the social‐democratic Belgian Workers' Party at the close of the nineteenth century uses a unique source of working‐class voices: the so‐called ‘propaganda pence’ or ‘proletarian tweets’ from the Flemish‐speaking city of Ghent. Hot, explicit nationalism was absent from these sources, which begs the question: is this proof of banal nationalism or national indifference? A historically contextualized analysis of the absences shows that workers expressed national indifference towards Belgian, but not towards Flemish ethnicity. In Rogers Brubaker's terms: Flemish ethnicity was a relevant social category, but only in a very restricted number of social contexts could it become a basis for ‘groupness’ or political mobilisation in daily life.

Slivovitz and Everyday Nationalism: The Analysis of Slovene Newspapers in Interwar Yugoslavia

“…The difficulty with studying the everyday is that it is too obvious, so its comprehension most often remains at the level of theory instead of an analysis of actual practices or processes. This article continues the debates on how unreflective national identity, based on the everyday, becomes at least partially the subject of reflection, and about how things and events that disturb the everyday routine provoke at least a partial awareness that certain things are important, that they are an omnipresent part of our everyday reality and, consequently, of our national identity (Edensor 2002; Skey 2011; Fox 2017; Fox and Ginderachter 2018; Ginderachter 2018; Skey 2018). One of the important aspects of everyday nationalism is the emphasis on human agency and reflexivity, or the idea that people are not only passive consumers of national meanings but are simultaneously their contingent producers.…”

“…Namely, research into the everyday nationalism of the past, which is conditioned by selective and specific historical sources (cf. Ginderachter and Beyen 2012; Ginderachter 2018), can also be tackled, as this article demonstrates, through the analysis of newspapers.…”

“…These unreflective feelings of belonging register when the everyday routines and practices are violated or brought into juxtaposition with alternatives, when the national order of things is shaken, when people are confronted with a relatively novel set of “national circumstances” (cf. Foster 1999, 271; Edensor 2002; Skey 2011; Fox 2017; Fox and Ginderachter 2018; Ginderachter 2018; studies applying Garfinkel’s insight: Blokland 2003; Wise 2010; Skey 2018). This point is nicely illustrated by Marcel Mauss in his “classic” Techniques of the Body (1973 [1934]) where he writes about how French soldiers in the First World War struggled to use British spades when digging trenches (and vice versa).…”

“… 6 Several critics have pointed to the assumption that mass media are a mirror of ordinary people’s attitudes as one of the major problems of Billig’s analysis (Wertsch 1997, 469; Van Ginderrachter 2018, 3). …”

National indifferences during everyday nationalism: Experiencing the nation in Finland in the aftermath of the Second World War

“…Looking at nationalism as a complex and situational phenomenon means that it is misleading to view particular groups of people as either expressing national indifference or engaging in everyday nationalism. Instead, both could simultaneously co‐exist, one being foregrounded to the other in particular situations (Van Ginderachter, 2018: 591). We argue that both everyday nationalism and national indifference have explanatory power when analysing nationalism in post‐war Finland.…”