Nationalism and National Identities Today: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

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Nationalism and National Identities Today
Multidisciplinary Perspectives

• Re-Conceptualizing the Construction of Nations
  with Bourdieus Help
• Marc Helbling
• University of Surrey, June 13, 2007

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Aim of this paper

• Explore what Pierre Bourdieus political
  sociology can contribute to the study of nations
  and offer a more coherent conceptualization of
  nations.
• Explore how his concepts allow us to overcome
  analytical shortcomings in the study of nations
  and nationalism.

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Theoretical under-determination

• Smith (1998 223) the field is so riven by
  basic disagreements and so divided by rival
  approaches, each of which addresses only one or
  other aspect of this vast field, that a unified
  approach must seem quite unrealistic and any
  theory merely utopian.
• Malesevic (2004) Durkheim, Marx and Weber did
  hardly deal with these social phenomena.

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Definitional proliferation

• There are almost as many definitions of
  nationalism as scholars in this field (Smith
  1998 Spillman and Faeges 2005)
• But none of these theories explains them entirely
  or provides a coherent analytical framework.

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What is a nation?

• Debates between essentialists and
  constructivists.
• Almost everybody agrees that nations are socially
  constructed.
• But what does this mean?
• Brubaker (2004) By virtue of its very success,
  the constructivist idiom has grown weary, stale,
  flat and unprofitable.

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What is social constructivism?

• Instrumentalism?
• Methodological Idealism?
• Post-modernism?
• ? Too much emphasis of subjectivist aspects!
• ? We need an analytical framework that combines
  objectivist and subjectivist approaches!

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Classification Struggles I

• Going beyond the objectivist/subjectivist divide.
• Classes are not objectively defined and do not
  automatically gain consciousness.
• They are the results of ongoing political
  struggles over how to define them.
• ? Contentious nature of group formation.

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Classification Struggles II

• Struggles happen in a field of (changing) power
  relations.
• Struggles between different visions of the
  division of the social world.
• ? Account for both the individuals (their ideas
  and their power) AND the social space.

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How are nations constructed?

• The claim that a nation is socially constructed
  invokes a specific process by which a national
  self-understanding is produced and reproduced in
  interaction processes (cf. Fearon and Latin
  2000).
• A nation is such a field in which people
  confront, in a socially constituted space, their
  opinions on what constitutes the cultural
  boundaries (cf. Spillman and Faeges 2005).

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Culture and Power

• These definitions do not predefine which
  categories lie at the basis of a nation it even
  leaves open which actors participate in the
  processes of labeling the nation and which
  arguments are mobilized.
• It merely expounds that people incessantly
  struggle in political processes over the question
  of who they are and whom they exclude.
• Accounting for symbolic and material aspects of
  interactions and thereby going beyond discourse
  analysis.

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The actors perceptions

• Barth (1969) With regard to nations the
  features that are taken into account are not the
  sum of objective differences, but only those
  which actors themselves regard as significant
  .
• Brubaker (2004) Nations are not things in the
  world, but perspectives on the world.

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Where do ideas come from?

• Socialization, education, legitimate symbolic
  force of the state etc.
• ? Danger of social determinism!
• To apprehend the dynamics of nations consider
  human beings as both actors and agents.
• Definitions and ideas might be imposed but they
  might also be challenged!

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Habitus

• A general perception or action-scheme that
  structures an individuals reactions to new
  situations.
• A toolkit of habits, skills and styles, which are
  applied in everyday thinking and activities.

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Processes

• Nation-states ?Nationalizing states ?
  Nationalizing nation-states
• Transformation and fluidity?developmentalist
  perspective
• ? Account for interactions, power structures and
  relations between actors.

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Fields

• A field of forces and struggles
• Positions of actors (political capital)
• Account for the distribution of cultural idioms
  and discursive frameworks, on the one hand, and
  power relations, on the other hand.

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Bourdieus contribution to the study of nations

• Combine macro- and micro sociological approaches.
• Going beyond the assertion that nations are
  constructed by providing instruments to analyze
  how they are constructed.