Banal Nationalism on the Internet

Fifteen years ago, Michael Billig was struck by the fact that nationalism tends only to be noticed in crisis, in war, in violent ruptures, in extremity.  But, he noted, nations like the U.S. and France continue to exist even when there are not such major crises, and declared that “the world of nations is the everyday world, the familiar terrain of contemporary times.”  How, he wondered, is nationalism reproduced in such nations?  To answer the question, Billig went about “stretching the term “nationalism” to include the “unnamed” and “unnoticed” habits that reproduce established nations, which he called “banal nationalism.”

“Daily,” Bilig wrote, “the nation is indicated, or ‘flagged’, in the lives of its citizenry.”  Focusing less on a waving flag than on “the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building,” Billig insisted, is necessary to really understanding how “the embodied habits of social life” reproduce nations in everyday contexts.

Reading Billig’s book after the explosion of the internet and the later advent of Web 2.0, I got to thinking about its continued relevance in digital environments.

The same year Billig published his book, Roger Chartier’s Forms and Meanings was printed in English.  In it, he used the case of text to articulate one of the fervent hopes of digital utopianism: “The communication of texts over distances annuls the heretofore insoluble distinction between the place of the text and the place of the reader.”  The scope and address of digital technologies has in the fifteen years hence been consistently (if not exclusively) celebrated as universal, as creating the conditions for overcoming national boundaries and connecting the world. 

But that is a fantasy.  And it is a fantasy which is certainly problematic on a few fronts, and it seems to me that the banal, quotidian reproduction of nationalism continues apace on the web.

Language, for example, is one of the main ways nationalism reproduces itself.  Not only the assumption of shared language, but the constant references to “our” nation, to “us” as opposed to them” help create an imagined community (as Benedict Anderson would style it) out of people who feel connected despite not knowing one another.  These habits are certainly reproduced online, where sites regularly address a common national audience, with a common language, despite the possibility--even likelihood--that audiences come from elsewhere.  The fracas that surrounded livejournal.com’s purchase by a Russian company, and the consequent unsettling of the U.S.’s cultural and linguistic claim on it, is just one example.  And the very textual infrastructure of the internet reproduces nationalism in painfully banal ways.  The domain suffixes that make navigating the internet possible for humans proliferate significantly--and nationally. The fact that only last year was an Arabic suffix approved suggests something about how nationalism (and empire) remain relevant online. 

And, of course, the “us” of the internet is not only often nationally bounded but must always refer only to that “us” with access.  Whether the lack of access is material/technological or political, the distribution of access often lines up along national (as well, certainly, as intranational economic) lines. 

And then, of course, there are national security discourses which claim particular areas of the worldwide network of digital technology as “ours,” as I went on about in a previous post. 

Basically, to stop babbling at this point, I wonder if the purportedly universal, fetishistically global connectivity of the web actually hides all of the banal ways that nationalism is still fostered. 

 Surely the internet has changed how nationalism functions, and has led to what Arjun Appadurai calls the “new condition of neighborliness” that emerge when new technologies offer ever more direct informational and affective connections across borders.  But it is certainly far too easy (though quite seductive) to say nationalism has simply been supplanted by a global, digital village.  Indeed, we still have quite a bit of work to do unpacking exactly what this new digital environment means for nationalism.