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Rethinking Banal Nationalism: Banal Americanism, Europeanism, and the Missing Link between Media Representations and Identities

2014; USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism; Volume: 8; Linguagem: Inglês

1932-8036

Vera Slavtcheva‐Petkova,

European Cultural and National Identity

This article questions some tacit assumptions underpinning Michael Billig’s banal nationalism concept but also confirms the ongoing relevance of aspects of his central argument. It demonstrates that the taken-for-granted link between banal flaggings of nationalism in the media and national identities is highly problematic. Drawing on a content analysis of seven TV news and current affairs programs and an audience study with 174 children in Bulgaria and the United Kingdom as well as Eurobarometer survey data on adults, this article explores two “derivatives” of banal nationalism: banal Europeanism and banal Americanism. It demonstrates that banal nationalism does not entirely work as Billig anticipated in contexts outside the respective country’s national borders, especially regarding examples of deixis in the media coverage or embedded identities. “Having written Banal Nationalism, I hoped that others would then analyze in detail the banality of the world’s most powerful nationalism―that of the United States. Instead, it has been the less powerful nationalisms that have attracted attention” (Billig, 2009, p. 351). Michael Billig’s banal nationalism concept has been widely used in nationalism and media studies. At the core of his thesis lies the argument that politicians and the mass media “flag” nationhood daily in the eyes of the citizens of established Western democracies. This study contributes to this growing body of research by following the advice Billig (2009) gave when reviewing the concept, namely, to investigate the banality of the world’s most powerful nationalism. Originally, my research was oriented toward banal Europeanism (Cram, 2001, 2009) in two European countries: the United Kingdom (UK) and Bulgaria. In 2009, when Billig was reviewing his concept, Cram (2009) was again claiming that there was a EU-focused banal Europeanism, though her argument and empirical evidence seemed different from those in her first work. In 2001, Cram had built fairly closely on Billig’s argument, and hence concentrated on the media’s role, but in 2009 the media escaped mention; instead, the focus was on “the concept of European Union identity” (p. 109). Inspired by both Billig’s and Cram’s claims, I started looking for trends of banal Europeanism in two very different national contexts: the Eastern European EU newcomer Bulgaria and the UK, an old but notoriously Euroskeptical EU member state in Western Europe. Instead of finding banal Europeanism in the UK,