Nationhood as Cultural Repertoire: Collective Identities and Political Attitudes in France and Germany

For decades, nationalism research had been dominated by historical approaches that viewed the nation state as the product of economic and political forces channelled by elite actors. Once institutionalized, nationalism was seen as a fait accompli, except in unstable states, where fringe radicals and separatists occasionally disrupted the national equilibrium. This scholarly consensus was challenged by the publication of Michael Billig’s (1995) seminal book on banal nationalism, which persuasively argued that the reproduction of the nation’s hegemony is a continuous accomplishment, even in established nation states. Alongside emerging Bourdieusian approaches to nationalism (e.g. Brubaker 1992), Billig’s thesis helped shift the focus of research from elite-driven politics to bottom-up identification processes, thereby motivating scholars to ask when and why people think, talk and act with the nation in their everyday lives. Nationhood as Cultural Repertoire: Collective Identities and Political Attitudes in France and Germany