ABSTRACT
With Banal Nationalism (1995), Michael Billig did social sciences a great service: he gave nationalism, arguably the most successful political ideology of modernity, a thoroughly social-psychological frame of reference. Billig’s book gave a perspective for theorizing and researching the instantiation and reproduction of national ideology in everyday life. Moreover, by attending to nationalism as a pervasive ideology, Billig advanced a political as well as a social theoretical argument. In his argumentative sights was the recurrent, at the time, habit within Western media and academic circles of focussing on the “hot” nationalism of the West’s Others and, in so doing, to ignore the nationalism of the West itself. For Billig, while “normal life” in Western nation-States allegedly manifests a zero-degree of nationalism, it rests upon intricate indexicalisations of national imagery and of the core ideological assumption regarding the naturalness of the division of the world in nation-states.
