Re-Conceptualizing the Construction of Nations with Bourdieu's Help

1. 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

2. 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. Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

3. 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. Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

4. 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. Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

5. 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.” Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

6. 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! Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

7. 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. Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

8. 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. Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

9. 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). Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

10. 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. Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

11. 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.” Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

12. 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! Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

13. 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. Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

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

15. 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. Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help

16. 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. Marc Helbling - Re-conceptualizing the construction of nations with Bourdieu‘s help