Michael Billig mounts a critic to orthodox theories in sociology, politics and social psychology by arguing that although nationalism continues to be a major ideological force in contemporary world, its everyday version that remains embedded in the day to day of contemporary consciousness has been disregarded and overlooked to the point where its presence goes unnoticed. It is such forms of nationalism, their routine symbols and their embedded habits which are easily identifiable in mass media communications, political discourse and public rituals, that permeate deeply into a myriad of elements from our daily routines, which need to be paid attention and recognized for their relevance and bias towards the ways our vision of the world is constructed today.
In Chapter 2, “Nations and Languages” attention is drawn to the constructed nature of modern states and the underlying ideology which justifies their existence and claims, which is normally overlooked. While nationalism is often overlooked as an extraneous, often radical ideology, we fail to recognize how most of its premises are taken for granted in our sense of the world today and how ready we are to accept them in order to neither question nor recognize our own internalized version of nationalism, which permeates our day to day thinking. The markers of nationhood, such as flags, anthems, boundaries, cultural tracts and linguistic differences are brought to light for analysis. Taking the (extreme) case of language (the others being easier to remark), and it’s natural geographical continuity in pre-modern times, absent of political enforcement of the standardized versions which we know today, epitomizes the case of how much we take nationhood symbols as authentic and how little we question the political nature of these markers as artificially constructed.
Chapter 3 “Banal Nationalism” brings the attention of how much this embedded version of nationalism, where the flag is waived regularly in many of our daily interactions (as a metaphor for the many markers of nationhood that are routinely flagged to the public) , is repressed and unrecognized while we tend to project the idea of nationalism over the “hotter” more radical versions of it that tend to populate the fringes of modern western democratic political and geographical arena (but increasingly less peripheral as recent events gradually emphasize). This uncivilized version of nationalism is used to hide or repress our own recognition of how much nationalism ideology permeates the contemporary western world and its mainstream thinking and communication.
Chapter 4 “National identity in a world of nations” makes the case of how much this “milder” nationalism permeates our current vision of the world and the international political context as nationhood is not opposed to a plural world but assumed the root and right by which it is constructed. This world of multiple nations is then endowed with a right and recognized as the natural form in which global political interaction is to be framed. For banal nationalism, hegemony becomes justified by replacing the interest of the world by that of the nation, through a careful game of syntax that modifies political discourse to make the latter camouflage as the former.
Chapter 5 “Flagging the Homeland daily” focuses on giving examples of how that syntax of banal nationalism permeates our daily routines, with examples on political discourse, where democracy is represented as the nation, patriotism is emphasized (and taken for granted) and Deixis of the homeland and the people permeate the rhetoric of politics, and then moves into the mainstream media to show how the news, weather or sports are used to reinforce the image of the nation in the public.
Chapter 6 “Postmodernity and Identity” challenges the way in which post-modern analysis has quickly discounted the end of the nation in favor of global fluid identities and how much this analysis has disregarded the fact that modern expressions of the global audience are deeply permeated by the discourse of nationhood and the attempt of US media to impose the American way as the hegemonic discourse of globalization.
Finally Chapter 7 “Philosophy as a flag for the Pax Americana” makes the case that the philosophy of Richard Rorty can be seen as the embedding of the ideology of Banal nationalism into philosophical discourse and how much Rorty’s ideas stand for the rationalization of American hegemony as a moral right.
Overall, the book is very well written, its analysis deep and the case of banal nationalism is fairly strong and well thought out. The book somehow seems to lack in exhaustiveness and the examples provided barely cover a few of the multiple faces in which this phenomenon can be brought to bear in modern contemporary life. In that sense the author leaves the reader to put together the rest of the pieces or emplaces academia to fully chart the territory while a more detailed map would surely have been appreciated. This tends to detract some weight from the arguments made (unfairly to this reader as the underlying case for banal nationalism is solid) which could have been underpinned by a more thorough display of examples. ( )