Nationalism and National Identities Today: Multidisciplinary Perspectives Re-Conceptualizing the Construction of Nations with Bourdieu‘s Help Marc Helbling University of Surrey, June 13, 2007

June 13, 2007 / 2 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Aim of this paper  Explore what Pierre Bourdieu’s political sociology can contribute to the study of nations and offer a more coherent conceptualization of nations.  Explore how his concepts allow us to overcome analytical shortcomings in the study of nations and nationalism.

June 13, 2007 / 3 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Theoretical under-determination  Smith (1998: 223) „[t]he field is so riven by basic disagreements and so divided by rival approaches, each of which addresses only one or other aspect of this vast field, that a unified approach must seem quite unrealistic and any theory merely utopian.“  Malesevic (2004): Durkheim, Marx and Weber did hardly deal with these social phenomena.

June 13, 2007 / 4 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Definitional proliferation  There are almost as many definitions of nationalism as scholars in this field (Smith 1998; Spillman and Faeges 2005)  But none of these theories explains them entirely or provides a coherent analytical framework.

June 13, 2007 / 5 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help What is a nation?  Debates between essentialists and constructivists.  Almost everybody agrees that nations are socially constructed.  But what does this mean?  Brubaker (2004): “By virtue of its very success, the constructivist idiom has grown weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.”

June 13, 2007 / 6 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help What is social constructivism? Instrumentalism? Methodological Idealism? Post-modernism?  Too much emphasis of subjectivist aspects!  We need an analytical framework that combines objectivist and subjectivist approaches!

June 13, 2007 / 7 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Classification Struggles I  Going beyond the objectivist/subjectivist divide.  Classes are not objectively defined and do not automatically gain consciousness.  They are the results of ongoing political struggles over how to define them.  Contentious nature of group formation.

June 13, 2007 / 8 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Classification Struggles II  Struggles happen in a field of (changing) power relations.  Struggles between different visions of the division of the social world.  Account for both the individuals (their ideas and their power) AND the social space.

June 13, 2007 / 9 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help How are nations constructed?  The claim that a nation is socially constructed invokes a specific process by which a national self-understanding is produced and reproduced in interaction processes (cf. Fearon and Latin 2000).  A nation is such a field in which people confront, in a socially constituted space, their opinions on what constitutes the cultural boundaries (cf. Spillman and Faeges 2005).

June 13, 2007 / 10 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Culture and Power  These definitions do not predefine which categories lie at the basis of a nation; it even leaves open which actors participate in the processes of labeling the nation and which arguments are mobilized.  It merely expounds that people incessantly struggle in political processes over the question of who they are and whom they exclude.  Accounting for symbolic and material aspects of interactions and thereby going beyond discourse analysis.

June 13, 2007 / 11 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help The actors‘ perceptions  Barth (1969): “[With regard to nations] the features that are taken into account are not the sum of ‘objective’ differences, but only those which actors themselves regard as significant […].”  Brubaker (2004): “Nations are not things in the world, but perspectives on the world.”

June 13, 2007 / 12 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Where do ideas come from? Socialization, education, legitimate symbolic force of the state etc.  Danger of social determinism!  To apprehend the dynamics of nations consider human beings as both actors and agents.  Definitions and ideas might be imposed but they might also be challenged!

June 13, 2007 / 13 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Habitus  A general perception or action-scheme that structures an individual’s reactions to new situations.  A toolkit of habits, skills and styles, which are applied in everyday thinking and activities.

June 13, 2007 / 14 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Processes  Nation-states ≠Nationalizing states ≠ Nationalizing nation-states  Transformation and fluidity≠developmentalist perspective  Account for interactions, power structures and relations between actors.

June 13, 2007 / 15 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Fields  A field of forces and struggles  Positions of actors (political capital)  Account for the distribution of cultural idioms and discursive frameworks, on the one hand, and power relations, on the other hand.

June 13, 2007 / 16 Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help Bourdieu‘s contribution to the study of nations  Combine macro- and micro sociological approaches.  Going beyond the assertion that nations are constructed by providing instruments to analyze how they are constructed.