Making imagined communities

The nation, along with the people or the majority, belongs to a commonplace but functionally powerful vocabulary of legitimising political power, ownership, and social justice. From Hobsbawn’s thesis about the invention of ancient tradition, Gellner’s juxtaposition of agrarian and industrial societies,

examine nations as a modern phenomenon. These approaches are generally more interested in social constructivist processes of ensuring uniformity in a state than in nationalists themselves (Hirschi 2011, 22). Among the historical reasons for constructing nations, scholars have posited the ontological need of belonging in secularising societies (Anderson 2007, 60–61; Kinnvall 2004), granting egalitarian social mobility for the needs of an industrial society (Gellner 1983), and the need of states to mobilise people for mass armies under exclusive state membership (Triadafilopoulos 2007).

Benedict Anderson’s theses on how space, territory, and place relate to nationalism have established Imagined Communities as a classic among a range of scholars reviewing geographical thought (Hague 2011). According to Anderson (1983, 2007), a nation is a solidary, sovereign, and limited community that is imagined in the sense that its past, present, and future members cannot actually meet each other at once, and they therefore need to be imagined. Community implies a sense of transgenerational solidarity and brotherhood, enabling its members to make personal sacrifices for its sake. Additionally, the nation is variably limited, as not all the earth’s population can be included in any nation. Finally, the nation is sovereign in the sense that it is entitled to rule itself (ibid. 37–41). Nationalism is often seen as a fundamentally territorialising ideology (e.g. Paasi 2011, 14). For example, Russian nationalism has been categorised in accordance with Russia’s idealised borders (Laurelle 2019, 7). Through spatial socialisation nationalism promotes stable, homogenous, and strong identification and the prioritisation of a human collective as a sovereign nation with their own sovereign state within the “world of nations”.

Particularly since the end of the Cold War many have seen the role of states and therefore nations decreasing in several spheres of their lives, from mobility, (military) security, and economies to the media (see Paasi 1996;

2011; Triadafilopoulos 2007; Laurelle 2019, 1–17). However, the perception that nations and states were or are gone reflects the perception that they are stationary entities. The discourses of nation-ness have countered the increasing flows of globalisation, neoliberalism, information abundance, and relativism, which are increasingly enabled by technological advances.

While this is celebrated as the progressive emancipation of individuality

and diversity by some, for others it problematises the foundational beliefs of their worldview and stirs existential anxiety. Consequently, populist and conservative movements worldwide have promoted the exclusion of national identity from the ordinary deliberated political agenda and protected it as a specific subject of existential security (Moffitt 2016; Kinnvall 2018; see Section 2.2.1.).

The modernist paradigm founded studies of nationalism that focus mostly on states and the production of nationalism by elites (Hirschi 2011; Laruelle 2019). Michael Billig (1995) famously separated the study of “hot nationalism”

in struggles to gain a sovereign nation state from banal nationalism, which is embedded (or “flagged”) in less prominent daily contexts and practices, in which the national idea gains and manifests its meaning. Besides providing a more holistic perspective on nationalism, Goode and Stroup (2015) suggest that studying banal nationalism can remedy the previous blind spot of studying the dynamics and practices of dominant groups outside formal institutions.

Further, Fox and Miller-Iddriss (2008) encourage the study of nationalism in the everyday landscape of nationhood not only by scrutinising the contexts in which everyday nationhood is manifested but by acknowledging the non-verbal content of the national idea. The counterforces of everyday nationalism, particularly ethnoscapes, transnationalism, and everyday cosmopolitanism, emerge similarly in people’s daily lives, but undermine the national order of things (Appadurai 1996; Beck 2002, Madianou 2005; Vertovec 2009).

The imagined communities definition of nation-ness has been criticised for its vague inclusiveness that can apply even to several premodern communities (Hirschi 2011, 25). In similar vein, Marlene Laurelle (2019, 9) criticises scholars for equating nationhood processes with nationalist policies, because to do so makes virtually every country nationalist. Indeed, if nation building is examined as a process that aims to bind the state and its inhabitants (Paasi 1996, 42), there seems to be little significant discursive difference between nationalism, (everyday) nationhood processes, and nation building. However, Laurelle’s criticism appears to target efforts to define “nationalist” instead of its processes.

While several different kinds of nation are imagined, their boundary building

nations as their starting point (Neumann 1999, 5–6). Among others, Neumann (ibid.) and Jouhki (2015) have applied the idea of imagined community to a more abstract community than a sovereign nation, such as Nordic, Baltic and Western identities. On Russian TV “offshoring elites”, “the West”, and

“Muslim migrant” have taken turns as civic national others for the idea of the Russian self (Hutchings 2004; Hudson 2012, 195; Tolz 2017). Regional units can be imagined and produced with an inside-out approach that focuses on cultural integration, or an outside-in approach that focuses on geopolitics or both (Paasi 1996; Yarovoy 2007). Indeed, in identity-political othering the other does not need to be a peer nation or polity. While several scholars have categorised boundary making along the lines of civic-ethnic (Kohn [1994]

2005³) , ethno-civilisational (Pain 2009; Laruelle 2016), or ethno-imperialistic (Laurelle 2019, 7) nationalisms and nation building, these dichotomies are widely criticised for their inability to explain complex and ambiguous understandings of (political) identities (e.g. Butler 1990; Bakardjieva 2009;

Goode & Stroup 2015; Kolstø & Blakkisrud, 2016; Laine, 2016).

Overall, a fundamental problem in citizenship and belonging is that (nation) state borders do not manage to overlap with understandings of a nation (Levitt

& Schiller 2004; Yuval-Davis 2006, 207). The mobility of people and borders, along with significant social and historical developments, have problematised the “genuine links” criteria for nationally unitary citizenship (Faist 2007;

Bauböck 2018). Underlining the embodiment of multiple social and economic bonds, networks, activities, living patterns, and ideologies across formal and symbolic national boundaries has been at the heart of the conceptualisation of transnationalism. Transnationalism entails manifestations of cross-border globalisation networks of non-state actors – for example, descendants of immigrants with active ties to their ancestral states (Basch, Schiller & Blank 1993, 4; Vertovec 2009, 15). To a degree social contacts that bond people across territorial boundaries are an older phenomenon than nations (ibid.,

3 Accordingly, territorially anchored “Asian” civic identity is more tolerable and hence less conflict-prone for pluralist groups (Kohn 2005). Hence, some apologists in the Russian Empire and in the Russian Federation have claimed that Russia is more capable of taking care of otherness than Europe (Neumann 1999, 19; Laine 2020, 10*).

2–3). For this conflict between national discourse and transnational practices, residence-based citizenship as a post-national membership is suggested as a possible remedy to support liberal democratic and human rights (Faist 2007, 2). However, an unwillingness to engage with recognisable and time-traversing “as-if” stories of national selves in political practice can undermine their engagement due to the dominance of the national discourse (see Neumann 1999, 215).