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Everyday Nationalism in Unsettled Times: in Search of Normality During Pandemic

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Everyday Nationalism in Unsettled Times: in Search of Normality During Pandemic Nationalities Papers (2020), 1–25 doi:10.1017/nps.2020.40 SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE Everyday Nationalism in Unsettled Times: In Search of Normality during Pandemic J. Paul Goode,1* David R. Stroup2 and Elizaveta Gaufman3 1University of Bath, Bath, UK, 2University of Manchester, Manchester, UK and 3University of Groningen, Groningen, NL *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] Abstract Pandemics and other crisis situations result in unsettled times, or ontologically insecure moments when social and political institutions are in flux. During such crises, the ordinary and unnoticed routines that structure everyday life are thrust into the spotlight as people struggle to maintain or recreate a sense of normalcy. Drawing on a range of cases including China, Russia, the UK, and USA, we examine three categories of everyday practice during the COVID-19 pandemic that respond to disruptions in daily routines and seek a return to national normality: performing national solidarities and exclusions by wearing face masks; consuming the nation in the form of panic buying and conspiracy theories; and enforcing foreign policies through social media and embodiment. This analysis thus breaks with existing works on everyday nationalism and banal nationalism that typically focus on pervasively unnoticed forms of nationalism during settled times, and it challenges approaches to contentious politics that predict protest mobilization for change rather than restoration of the status quo ante. In highlighting the ways that unsettled times disrupt domestic and international structures, this work also presents a first attempt to link everyday nationalism with growing work on international practices. Keywords: everyday nationalism; practice; performance; consumption; everyday foreign policy; COVID-19 Introduction During the long pandemic season of 2020, the most common question has been, “When will things get back to normal?” Arguably, the next most common question has been, “How do things get back to normal?” followed closely by, “Will things ever get back to normal?” and, finally, “Do we really want to go back to normal?” Answering any of these questions is not just a function of epidemiology, as they involve an implicit suggestion that there is an agreed-upon sense of what constitutes normality. People frequently express their sense of a lost normality in terms of the everyday practices and routines associated with daily national existence, such as working, shopping, voting, studying, or socializing. The reality of a life constrained by lockdowns, quarantine, and self- isolation leaves people trapped in worlds which are familiar yet just different enough that they cling to the select few routines they consider essential to their identities—not unlike the ways that migrants cling to the routines they associate with their national identities. The pandemic thus transforms the background practices and routines of everyday life, suddenly conferring new significance on doing normal things as a way of performing one’s nationhood and calibrating national solidarities. The spatially and socially confining response to the COVID-19 pandemic is qualitatively different from other kinds of disruptive events or disasters that induce protest by disrupting © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for the Study of Nationalities. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 2 J. Paul Goode et al. people’s everyday routines (Snow et al. 1998). For some time, scholars working on banal nation- alism and everyday nationalism have argued that there is a continuous relationship between everyday nationalism and mobilized nationalism—that is, between the ways that nationalism is activated as a mobilizational frame during contentious political cycles and, vice versa, when nationalism is demobilized and fades into a background as a form of legitimation for new regimes (Goode 2020a; Jones and Merriman 2009; Skey 2009).1 Owing to the imposition of lockdowns and quarantines around the world, however, the process of framing nationalist responses to the pandemic are frozen at the point that people start acting consciously in the name of the nation but stop short of mass mobilization. The COVID-19 pandemic is thus a uniquely disruptive kind of event that brings everyday nationalism to the fore. This article first examines the nature of everyday nationalism as a form of social practice that is commonly observed during settled times and considers how it transforms (and is transformative) during unsettled times like the ongoing pandemic. We next consider specific categories of practice, looking at ways that performance and consumption aim to recover normality. Finally, we build bridges with the international relations literature on international practices by looking at the intersection of everyday nationalism with foreign policy. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the implications for understanding the relationship between everyday nationalism and social movements for future global challenges to normality, like climate change, and for the development of everyday nationalism as a scholarly approach. Everyday Practices, Unsettled Times, and the Pursuit of Normality Everyday nationalism is an approach to observing how ethnicity and nationhood are manipulated as categories of social practice and reproduced “by ordinary people doing ordinary things” (Fox and Ginderachter 2018, 547). It follows in the vein of constructivist works that disaggregate (rather than operationalizing and reifying) social identities, taking up Rogers Brubakers’ (2004) recommenda- tion that scholars focus on groupness rather than groups. The crucial methodological move made by this approach is “to replace individuals or groups with ethnic or nationalist practices as units of analysis” (Goode and Stroup 2015, 8). A social practice is “a routinized type of behavior which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz 2002, 249). Practices relate to specific forms of knowledge that render them recognizable, demarcating communities by their performance and enabling judgments of agents’ competence to perform them. Much of the literature on everyday nationalism focuses on exposing the ways that people infuse everyday routines with ethnic or nationalist content. The nation is not something that objectively exists but rather functions as a “cognitive frame through which people apprehend social reality and construct routinized strategies of action” (Bonikowski 2016, 429). As Adler and Pouliot observe, “The performance of practices in socially recognizable ways is the source of ontological stability in social life. At the same time, however, it is also from practices that social change originates” (2011, 18). While Jennifer Mitzen (2006) and other proponents of ontological security as a concept (Kinnvall 2004; Rumelili 2015; Subotić 2016) advocate moving from an individual to a state level of analysis, we argue that ontological security in unsettled times offers explanatory power at the level of individual practices, where it originates. Ontological security is inextricably linked to routine practices (Skey 2010; Subotić 2016), whether domestic or international. As Mitzen and Larson (2017) note, most people are ontologically secure and reify their identities passively through daily routines. However, unsettled times bring out the need to reestablish structural relations that have dislocated practices. There is a clear temporal dimension to practice insofar as it engages with the material world and contributes to social structuring. If this temporal dimension is mostly unnoticed in ordinary times, it is thrown into sharp relief when the structures that contextualize everyday practices come Nationalities Papers 3 Table 1. Perceptions of Threat and Change as a Consequence of the Coronavirus. (“COVID-19 – Srez potrebitel’skikh nastroenii No. 1: Rossiiskie potrebiteli – novaia real’nost’,” ROMIR, April 2020. http://romir.ru/download/BCG_Romir_ Covid.pdf.) Russia China India Brazil Philippines Malaysia USA Italy The world is in grave danger because 76% 88% 83% 86% 86% 86% 79% 86% of the coronavirus My daily life has changed because of 75% 81% 85% 93% 85% 85% 84% 91% the coronavirus unglued. The temporal dimension of practice explains the disruptive nature of unsettled times. In his review article on nationalism in settled times, Bonikowski describes settled times as “periods when disruptions of varying magnitude […] are absorbed by existing institutions instead of generating widespread social and political transformations” (2016, 427). This perspective is helpful in suggesting that settled times are structured by resilient social and political institutions, though it also assumes that we already know whether institutions will survive. In contrast to settled times, unsettled times are ontologically insecure moments when everything appears to be in flux. They are defined by the experience or perception of uncertainty regarding the future of social and political structures within which routine social practice takes place and derives
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