Grounding nationalism: Randall Collins and the sociology of nationhood

Introduction

Since its inception nationalism has regularly been dismissed as a transient phenomenon that is bound to decline and disappear. Most intellectuals were dismissive of this ideology and social practice, misdiagnosing it as a relic of the sectarian past. It is only from the 1980s onwards that social scientists took the study of nations and nationalism seriously and produced several influential theories of its origins, historical trajectories and social influence. However, mainstream sociology largely remained indifferent to these analytical developments. Randall Collins was one of the few contemporary sociologists who recognised the significance of nationalism in social life and who also theorised its social dynamics. In his early works he develops an approach to nationalism that is influenced by the macro Weberian analysis of social status, legitimacy and geopolitical change. His recent contributions expand this analysis to account for the micro Durkhemian and Goffmanian influences leading to a novel explanatory model centred on the currents of interaction ritual chains. In this paper I analyse the key tenets of Randall Collins’s sociology of nationalism. The first part briefly looks at the legacy of classical sociological theory upon which Collins builds his approach to the study of nationhood. In the second part I analyse the key analytical ingredients of Collins’s theory while the final part offers a sympathetic critique of Collins’s project. More specifically, I aim to extend Collins’s analysis by developing an approach centred on exploring the coercive-organisational, ideological and micro-interactional grounding of nationalisms.

Nationalism and classical sociological theory

The classics of sociology have often been accused of neglecting the study of nationalism. For example, both Özkirimli (2017: 5) and Smith (1998: 11) emphasise that this topic has only been ‘a peripheral concern’ of classical social thought. In some respects, this is understandable as the classics were written at the time when nationalism was still a novel sociological experience. In other words, in the late 19th and early 20th century nationalism was largely an ideology associated with the upper and middle social strata, whereas the majority of European populations remained attached to the religious, local and kinship-based networks of solidarity (Malešević, 2013, 2019; Mann, 1993). However, Marx, Durkheim, Weber and other classics of sociology all reflected on this topic and offered perceptive insights that still resonate today.

For Marx ‘national one-sidedness’ was a bourgeois phenomenon, a reactionary and temporary by-product of class struggle. Although he welcomed the rise of nation-states as vehicles for the destruction of the feudal and imperial world, he perceived nationalism as being ultimately harmful to the development of global class solidarity. As emphasised in the Communist Manifesto:

The working men have no country…The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them [national antagonisms] to vanish…as the antagonism between the classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end. (Marx and Engels, 2005 [1848]: 67)

Weber devoted more attention to nationalism than Marx and Durkheim. In Economy and Society he even articulates a proto-constructivist understanding of the key concepts and questions the sociological value of popular terms such as ‘ethnic group’ and ‘nation’ (Weber, 1978: 389, 394–5). Although he never produced a book on this topic, which was in his plans, one can still discern how Weber’s views on nationalism developed over time. Initially he was a staunch German nationalist who supported expansionist geopolitics and perceived the Polish minority in eastern Germany as an economic and geopolitical threat. In this context his early writings conceptualise nations as political and economic organisations competing viciously in a Malthusian global market arena. In several of his early writings he invokes the importance of economic nationalism as a form of rent-seeking where nations are perceived as ‘broad rent-creating and rent-seeking interest groups’ (Norkus, 2004: 402). In this early period Weber believed that the German worker would soon find himself in a precarious situation where he

will be restricted to that vital space (Ernahrungsspielraum) which the capital and power of his homeland is capable of creating. We do not know when this will occur, but it is true that this process is taking place. It is also true that the fierce struggle for power replaces the alleged peaceful progress. And in this fierce struggle the strongest will be victorious. (Weber, 1897; Norkus, 2004: 399)

There is no doubt that Weber, Durkheim and Marx made valuable and insightful comments about nationalism. Although their focus was on other topics, they still offered a useful analytical springboard from which a comprehensive sociology of nationalism could emerge. It is no surprise that the classics of sociology devoted more attention to other topics. It is more astounding that the contemporary sociological thought still has little to say about nationalism. Although nationalism has attracted a great deal of attention since the 1980s, it was mostly historians, anthropologists and political theorists that developed systematic theories. The multidisciplinary field of nationalism studies that developed over the past 40 years has somehow bypassed sociological theorists, and the key names associated with this field of research, such as Ernest Gellner, Ben Anderson, Anthony D. Smith, Elie Kedurie, Hans Kohn, John Breuilly, Liah Greenfeld, Eric Hobsbawm, Miroslav Hroch, Karl Deutsch, Partha Chatterjee, Nira Yuval-Davis and Tom Nairn, were not sociologists by training. While some sociologists, such as Michael Mann, Charles Tilly, Anthony Giddens, and Michael Hechter, contributed to these classical debates there has not been much attempt to theorise nationalism through the prism of classical and contemporary sociological thought. In other words, the few sociologists who took the study of nationalism seriously tended to focus on the historical and comparative analyses of European experiences of nationalism rather than attempting to develop general sociological theories of this phenomenon. For example, Giddens (1986: 116) dismisses nationalism as a ‘psychological phenomenon’ involving ‘the affiliation of individuals to a set of symbols and beliefs emphasising communality among the members of a political order’. He understands it largely as an extraneous product of state formation that requires little analysis as it is no more than ‘a prop for the nation-state’ (Smith, 1998: 75). Although Mann (1986, 1993, 1995) and Tilly (1992, 1996) devote much more attention to nationalism, they too downplay the role of ideology while emphasising state formation and state competition as the key historical processes. While Tilly (1992) is explicit in his minimising of the role ideological power plays in social life with his focus on the economic and political power of the state, Mann acknowledges the significance of ideological power, including nationalism. However, he too overemphasises the role of the state in this process and argues that ideological power has experienced continuous decline since the 19th century. In this context he sees political, economic and military power as more significant historical forces since the French Revolution onwards (Mann, 1986: 371). ¹ Such overly materialist and state-centric accounts, as Brubaker (2010: 380) rightly points out, only address ‘the political form of nationalist claim-making while ignoring the cultural content of nationalist sense-making’. The same problem is visible in Hechter’s work (1999 , 2001), where the focal point is the instrumental rationality of individual actors and where there is little or no room for value rationality, emotional action or wider structural contexts (Malešević, 2004: 101–9). However, the most significant problem with these sociological interventions is that they shy away from engaging comprehensively with the classical and contemporary social thought and show no ambition to develop a general sociological theory of nationalism.

It is only recently that some scholars have attempted to utilise the conceptual tools of classical and contemporary social thought in order to articulate a fully-fledged sociological theory of nations and nationalism. For example, Roger Brubaker (2004, 2015) draws on Weber, Bourdieu, neo-institutionalism, and Schegloff’s conversation analysis to develop a cognitive constructivist approach to the study of ethnicity and nationhood. Andreas Wimmer (2012, 2018) combines Weber’s insights with those of Deutsch, Bendix, Barth, Tilly and social exchange theory to formulate a novel theory of nation-building. However, I would argue that it is Randall Collins (1986, 1999, 2004, 2013, 2014) who has achieved most in building on classical and contemporary social thought to devise a novel sociological theory of nationalism.

Building on the classics: Collins, sociology and nationalism

Randall Collins is a versatile sociological theorist whose work has influenced a variety of research fields – from social conflict and violence to gender, stratification, education, intellectuals, capitalism and beyond. Although nationalism is a not a topic that features extensively in his opus, Collins has gradually developed an original theory that draws on Weber, Durkheim and Goffman and attempts to explain the workings of nationalism on both macro and micro levels. More specifically, Collins historically situates the rise of nationalism in the changing geopolitical context of European warfare where he zooms in on the historical dynamics of status change. This wider structural context is then related to the micro-social world where nationalism is analysed through the interactional ritual chains that sustain much of human social relations. While other scholars of nationalism have also engaged with, and borrowed from, the sociological classics, Collins has done much more in directly building on the classical ideas to formulate an original, yet comprehensively theorised, model of nations and nationalism. For example, Smith (2003) and Hutchinson (2005) draw indirectly on Durkheim to advance a culturalist theory of nationalism. They see nations as moral communities that persist through shared myths, memories, symbols and rituals. For Smith (2003) nationalism is political religion through which the ‘sacred communion of citizens’ engages in periodic self-worship and in this way reproduces the idea and practice of nationhood. Nationalism is a secular equivalent of religious belief as it offers the promise of immortality by binding the past, present and future generations in the idea of the everlasting national community.

However, as I have argued before, this neo-Durkhemian theory of nationalism suffers from several pronounced explanatory weaknesses, including its evolutionary historicism, collectivist essentialism and epistemological idealism (Malešević, 2006: 127–34). Tilly (1992) and Mann (1993, 1995) draw on the Weberian legacy to articulate politically-centred theories of nation-state formation where nationalism is conceptualised as a by-product of state development. Although these neo-Weberian approaches are empirically and conceptually much more sound, they too lack a wide-ranging theoretical apparatus capable of connecting classical and contemporary sociological ideas (Poggi, 2006). More importantly, both traditions of research, the neo-Durkhemians and neo-Weberians, tend to overemphasise the macro-structural variables while mostly neglecting the micro-sociology of nationalism.

In direct contrast, Collins develops a theory that successfully integrates the macro and micro dimensions of nationhood. Initially his approach to nationalism was more influenced by macro Weberian political materialism, but over the years this has been supplemented by the subtle Durkhemian and Goffmanian micro-sociology of everyday interactions. The starting point of Collins’s theory is that nations and nationalisms are modern political phenomena that emerge in the context of changed geopolitical environments. Drawing on Weber he sees nations as entities ‘constructed through the political experience of people with their state. Nationalism is not primordial; it waxes and wanes’ (Collins, 1999: 80). One of the key organisational ingredients in the development of nationalism as a mass phenomenon is the state’s penetration into the society. While pre-modern, patrimonial, social orders were incapable and unwilling to permeate the mostly peasant societies under their control, modern states are defined by their capacity to bring all their citizens under the state’s watch and reach. In other words, whereas the patrimonial states had no interest or capacity to impose the standardised system of obligations on their ruling subjects, modern bureaucratic states were able to successfully expand the state’s capacity to extract money (routinised systems of tax collection), people (compulsory military conscription) and resources. The expansion of the modern state apparatus was reflected not only in the rise of the civil service but also in the development of transport and communication systems, the centralised systems of education, and vibrant economies. However, these organisational developments also impacted on the rise of social movements that challenged the state authority. As Collins (2014: 53) points out:

in parcellized medieval society, protests could only be local and mostly ephemeral; but state penetration created both the means of large scale political mobilisation and target to aim at…by penetrating the walls of patrimonial households to inscribe persons on the rolls of the state, not as group members but as individuals, such regimes opened up new possibilities for identity formation.

In addition to these internal structural changes that opened the space for its rise and proliferation, nationalism was also spurred by geopolitical competition. Following in Weberian footsteps Collins argues that nationalism is often tied to the prestige of the nation-state. Rather than being a simple reflection of shared cultural markers (i.e. language, religion, territory) or the mythical narratives of common ethnic descent, nationalism is a political phenomenon associated with the shared political ideals and common history of struggle and hardship. In this context nationalism is a powerful legitimising force in all modern states regardless whether they are democratic or authoritarian. For Collins the strength of nationalism is regularly determined by the political successes of the state:

A victorious state experiences the greatest nationalism; an embattled one experiences nationalism to the extent that it can draw upon memories of past victories that can probably be repeated. A long string of defeats saps national loyalty, and eventually…national loyalty disappears. (Collins, 1986: 155)

This macro-structural frame is related to the micro-sociology of nationalism. In this context Collins (2014: 54) understands nationalism as ‘an intensely felt bond of solidarity’. However, unlike the cultural neo-Durkheimians who simply assume that shared symbols and myths indicate a strength of emotional attachment among co-nationals, Collins (2014: 54) argues that ‘symbols are alive only to the extent they are the focus of shared emotional attention; and thus symbols can be living, dead and lukewarm’. In other words, strong national ties entail concentrated emotional activity where individuals are connected in interactional ritual chains. This concept, influenced equally by Goffman and Durkheim, stands for the situation where group members engage in rituals that create and reinforce symbols of their membership. For example, when people focus their attention on specific objects, individuals or symbols such as the rock concert, religious sermon, sporting event, political rally, street demonstration or a pub brawl, they share a ritual experience which amplifies their emotional state. Collins (2004) shows that when such rituals are successful, they reinforce group boundaries and increase the emotional energy of the individuals involved. Such individuals experience exhilaration, enthusiasm and very intense emotional reactions. This situation resembles the Durkheimian state of collective effervescence where individuals are involved in ‘rhythmic entertainment’ of bodies that undergo the same emotional experience. In such situations group members are usually filled with a sense of morality and are often willing to carry out acts of sacrifice or heroism.

Hence for Collins structural conditions and geopolitical environment cannot generate nationalist action by themselves. Instead nationalism entails the presence of micro-interactional action that forges and sustains bonds of group solidarity. Nevertheless, since successful interactional ritual chains involve intense emotional experiences, they cannot be created and maintained through routine activities. Instead they are temporary events that quickly escalate, strongly hold attention of their participants for a while and then quickly dissipate. For Collins nationalism is a highly dynamic phenomenon that operates through ‘time-bubbles’. Simply put, nationalism resembles a balloon in a sense that it is ‘inflated quickly, stays high for a while, then gradually floats down; its beginning is more sudden and dramatic than its ending’ (Collins, 2014: 54). This point is well illustrated with the examples of American nationalism in the wake of 9/11 and the, mostly failed, Arab spring revolutions. In both cases the nationalist effervescence, characterised by intense flag waving, communal gatherings and the public celebration of national heroism, was intense but temporary, lasting up to three months and then declining and returning to everyday normality. This dynamic quality of nationalism also leads Collins to conclude that although nationalism remains a potent force of state legitimacy, it has limited power in mobilising people to fight wars or in making soldiers more efficient killers:

Troops motivated chiefly by nationalism and unsupported by workable techniques of combat performance tend to lose their nationalist fervour fairly soon…and to become cynical and alienated. (Collins, 2013: 42)

Grounded nationalisms

Since its foundation as an interdisciplinary field of scholarship in the 1980s nationalism studies have been preoccupied with the question of how old nations and nationalism are. The famous 1995 Warwick debate between Ernest Gellner and Anthony D. Smith expressed the entrenched positions that still underpin this research field: the modernists, such as Gellner (1983), see nations and nationalism as profoundly modern phenomena that could not exist before the French Revolution and its aftermath, and the ethno-symbolists, led by Smith (1998), who argue that the contemporary nations developed gradually out of the pre-existing ethnic cores. While this particular debate is important, it unduly overshadowed the key sociological questions about nationalism such as: How and why did nationalism become a dominant form of collective subjectivity in the modern world? Why, when and how did nationalist ideologies experience periodic rises and declines? Why is nationalism such a malleable and impervious ideological force? How is nationalism related to class, status, gender, family or sexuality and why is this ideology often capable of overpowering all other forms of group attachment?

These are just some of the questions that have not been theorised properly and deserve attention from the sociologists of nationalism. It is only very recently that some sociologists have attempted to address some of these questions, mostly in the context of the sociology of everyday life. Hence Jon Fox (2017, with Cynthia Miller-Idriss, 2008), Hearn (2007, 2017) and Michael Skey (2009, 2011) have analysed how nationalist categories and practices permeate and are reproduced in everyday interactions. Drawing on Michael Billig’s (1995) concept of banal nationalism, the ethnomethodological and the symbolic interactionist traditions, these scholars have demonstrated successfully that nationalism is discursively constructed through a variety of ordinary practices including everyday talk, nation-centric patterns of consumption, the habitual rituals of nationhood, and the banal, nation-centred, advertising campaigns, among many others. This scholarship has been highly effective in dissecting the mostly invisible dominance of nationalist narratives and practices that underpin everyday life in the world of nation-states. However, this research tradition has very little to say about the periodic transformations of nationalism and has no interest in linking the wider historical and structural contexts with the habitual everyday practices. Hence the study of everyday nationalisms cannot adequately explain how banality is transmuted into virulence and vice versa.

This is where Collins’s work is truly helpful. His time dynamic theory which explores nationalism through ‘time-bubbles’ and focuses on periodic ‘surges in time’ helps us understand the shifts in nationalist intensity. Moreover, Collins also explains the sociological processes that generate fervent nationalist experiences. Hence whereas Fox, Miller-Idriss, Hearn and Skey tell us a great deal about the cold, banal and routine forms of nationalism, Collins offers perceptive analysis of the hot, concentrated and passionate modes of nationalist practices. Nevertheless, these two approaches remain disconnected from each other and from the wider structural and historical contexts. The scholars of everyday nationalism largely ignore the historical dynamics of nation-formation and tend to take the organisations that reproduce the nation-centric habitus for granted. In other words, rather than analysing how the banal practices such as sporting competitions, tourism, cuisine, song contests and beauty pageants remain parasitic on the already existing organisational scaffolds of nation-states, they tend to see these practices as products of spontaneous action from the grassroots. ² Collins certainly offers more as he situates his micro-sociological analysis within the macro-sociology of geopolitical change and the nation-state’s struggle over prestige. However, it is not completely clear where the habitual forms of nationalism come from and how they operate in his analytical framework. Furthermore, since he argues that the macro-sociological processes have micro-foundations, it is difficult to ascertain how this works in the context of nation formation.

To address this explanatory lacuna, it is necessary to conceptualise nationalism as an organisationally, ideologically, and micro-interactionally grounded phenomenon (Malešević, 2019: 8–16). Collins is absolutely right that the strength of nationalism is often determined by the wider geopolitical contexts and that nationalisms of powerful nation-states are enhanced by their military victories, political dominance or economic successes. However, this argument cannot account for the strength of nationalism within the small nation-states that have no history of significant military victories or substantial political and economic accomplishments. For example, as surveys indicate, the populations of Ireland, Norway or Iceland regularly score very high on scales of ‘national pride’ (Antonsich, 2009), yet these countries have little experience of major military and political triumphs and have only recently become economic success stories.

The point is that nationalism involves more than the geopolitical achievements. To extend Collins’s football metaphor further, one could argue that it is true that the winning teams tend to increase the number of their fans. Barcelona, Manchester United and Bayern have supporters from all over the world. However, the genuine football fans never give up on their teams, even if they have never won anything. Even big football teams such as Schalke in Germany or Tottenham in England have not won their premier leagues since 1961 and 1958 respectively, yet both teams still boast millions of dedicated supporters. This is even more the case with the nation-states where only a handful of countries have won major tournaments, yet billions of individuals express a strong sense of attachment to their national sporting teams.

To understand where this persistent sense of attachment comes from it is crucial to explore the organisational underpinnings of nation-states. As I have argued, nationalism developed and proliferated through the historical expansion of its organisational capacity – from the clubs and salons of intellectuals, the secret revolutionary societies, social movements, cultural and sporting associations, to political parties and civil society networks (Malešević, 2013, 2019). Nevertheless, the main entity responsible for the rise and social penetration of nationalism is the state. The last two centuries witnessed a dramatic and systematic expansion of the infrastructure, administration, military, police, courts and revenue agencies that enabled the state authorities to attain unprecedented capacities to monitor, police, tax, conscript, educate, and mobilise their citizens. With the rise of civil service, transport, communications, border controls, statistical offices, educational systems and recruiting services, the nation-states acquired enormous coercive powers which were systematically utilised to organisationally homogenise their populations.

Although Collins recognises the crucial role the state authorities have played in this process, he does not focus enough on its coercive side. ³ However, the relatively swift and intense transformation of ‘peasants into Frenchmen’ was far from being a painless process. On the contrary, in most instances the states moulded their populations through direct or indirect violence. In the French case liberté, égalité, fraternité were achieved on the back of the mass slaughter of the disloyal peasants and monarchists in Brittany and Vendee and the obliteration of linguistic and cultural differences throughout the new republic. It is no accident that one of the prominent leaders of the revolution, Abbé Grégoire, drafted a report on ‘the necessity and means to annihilate the patois [minority languages] and to universalise the use of the French language’ (Hawkey, 2018: 20). In the American case popular sovereignty and individual freedom were built on top of the genocides of the Native Americans, institutionalised slavery of African Americans and the continuous wars of territorial expansion.

In addition to these organised and systematic forms of direct violent behaviour the new nationalising polities, and many others that later imitated this path of nation-state formation, also embarked on more implicit violent techniques. Thus, the rulers of new nation-states standardised their vernaculars and coercively imposed uniform scripts and linguistic policies. They also introduced compulsory education systems with regulated and state-approved curricula centred on the nation-centric teaching of history, geography, native language and other subjects. Civil servants embarked on the often obligatory literacy campaigns which, together with the mass military conscription, contributed toward the further ‘nationalisation of the masses’ (Mosse, 1991 [1975]). In other words, the coercive grounding of states and other social entities created organisational conditions for the emergence and expansion of grounded nationalisms which are now firmly embedded in the everyday lives of modern citizenry. Not only were these organisational scaffolds created and implemented through violence, they also remain wedded to the coercive apparatuses of the modern nation-states. Hence both the virulence and banality of nationalism stem from the same coercive organisational sources, and their periodic transformation is often determined by their ideological and micro-interactional grounding.

Being ideologically grounded means that nationalism is not only imposed through coercion but is also dependent on popular appeal. Nationalist messages are accepted and believed because they resonate with the dominant worldviews of the individuals they address. It is no coincidence that most nationalist discourses deploy very similar ideas that invoke a sense of justice, equality, fraternity and liberty. Nationalist ideas entice ordinary individuals precisely because they are rooted in the language of morality and righteousness – to liberate the oppressed people, to defeat the aggressive and conquest-prone intruders, to honour the sacrifices of our predecessors, to alter historical injustices, to safeguard our way of life and so on. These ethical imperatives invoke some universalist principles, but their collective centred framing also indicates their modernity. While in the pre-modern world of inherent hierarchies, collective morality was largely confined to one’s social stratum or a shared religious affiliation, in the post-traditional universe all human beings are nominally considered to be of equal moral worth. In this context one’s local and eschatological attachments tend to be either fused with, or replaced by, the nation-centric attachments.

This ideological transformation stems in part from the dominance of the nation-state model as the principal and only legitimate form of territorial organisation in modernity and in part from the internalised beliefs of many modern individuals who now conceptualise and perceive the world through national categories. Hence ideological groundedness is firmly linked with the organisational groundedness as one’s beliefs and practices are shaped by the nation-centric world into which we are all now born. Unlike the aristocrats and peasants of medieval Europe, who inhabited different physical and moral universes and whose sense of loyalty and attachment were deeply hierarchical in organisational and ideological terms, modern-day citizens populate the same ideological and organisational spaces of their respective nation-states. In this world nationalism provides an ideological glue that fuses diverse individuals together. It also offers a political and cultural legitimacy for the rulers and state institutions: whereas empires justified their existence through the universalist creeds of religious doctrines, civilising missions and supernatural leaders, the nation-states can only be governed in the name of specific sovereign people (i.e. we the French, the Germans, the Ghanaians, the Vietnamese, etc.). The rulers who are judged to have worked against the interests of their own nation-states and their ‘own people’ are unlikely to stay in power for long.

In this context nationalism as a legitimising state doctrine regularly trumps other ideological discourses. A politician can be a conservative, liberal, socialist, republican, monarchist, feminist or environmentalist, but she is unlikely to ever be elected if deemed not to be a loyal to her nation-state. Simply put, nationalism can absorb a variety of ideological positions without losing its dominance as the principle operative ideology of modernity (Malešević, 2006, 2019). In addition to its legitimising power, the strength of ideological grounding of nationalism can also be gauged through its capacity to mobilise the people. While the organisational grounding provides the structural means for the proliferation of nationalism, the ideological grounding offers the grand vistas that can mobilise mass support. Hence in times of serious or manufactured crises individuals are summoned to protect or defend their nations. Sometimes these appeals invoke shared economic and political interests, the sense of national prestige or international obligations, but in most instances the emphasis is on emotional calls – the safeguarding of our close ones, e.g. family members, friends, partners and other personal relations. Ideological mobilisation is most effective when it is couched in the language of intimacy, that is, when it is grounded in the world of micro-solidarity.

There is no doubt that Collins has done more than any other contemporary sociologist in dissecting the dynamics of the micro-interactional world. His concept of the interactional ritual chains captures well how human beings create symbols of group membership, including the idea of the nation, and then rely on these group symbols to maintain their sense of group attachment and also to enhance their individual emotional energies. Collins is also absolutely right that emotions play a central role in this process and that the intense group attachments usually require face-to-face interaction involving a degree of synchronicity between physical bodies for the interactional ritual chain to succeed. Nevertheless, what is missing in this powerful micro-sociology is the stronger link with the organisational and ideological layers of nationalist phenomena. Nationhood is a powerful group symbol, but it is much more than that. It is also a distinct organisational form and an ideological project that entails continuous collective action. Nationhood is also a dominant form of collective subjectivity in the modern world. Hence to operate successfully on the micro-level nationalism has to successfully connect the micro-world with the macro-world. In other words, nationalist messages will not resonate unless they are couched and institutionalised in the discourse and practices of inter-personal attachments. Since human beings are first and foremost emotional and meaning-oriented creatures, they require a degree of justification for their actions. Thus, nationalism can only succeed at the grassroots level when capable of linking the micro-level intimacies with the macro- and mezzo-level organisational and ideological structures. That is, nationalism depends on the micro-interactional grounding as it entails the presence of individuals and small groups that actively or habitually work on reproducing the nation-centric habitus. Nationalism requires synchronicity of individual bodies, but these bodies have also to be aligned with the specific ideological projects and the coercive organisational structures of the particular nation-state. Since nation-states are bureaucratic, anonymous, abstract and alienating entities, there is no obvious reason why any human being would feel a sense of attachment to such formal organisations. Hence to make these coercive organisations likable it is necessary to endow them with a sense of reverence. This is what ideological grounding does – it makes nations into ‘communities of destiny’ by associating them directly with one’s predecessors, descendants and living family members and close friends. It is no accident that many nationalist ideologues invoke Edmund Burke’s (1998 [1790]: 96) famous statement about the ‘community of memory’ that involves partnership ‘between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are [yet] to be born’. To entice a sense of emotional and moral attachment to a nation, this entity has to be associated with something that truly matters to most individuals – the intimate circle of family and friends. As most human beings attain comfort, fulfilment, emotional stability and security in these small-scale face-to-face groups, social organisations and nation-states in particular can acquire a degree of emotional attachment by emulating these intimate groups. This is why nationalism regularly deploys the language of kinship, comradeship and friendship where millions of individuals that we will never meet in our lifetime became our ‘French brothers and sisters’, ‘our beloved sons of Britain’ or ‘our comely Irish maidens’, while one’s nation-state is referred to as ‘the Mother Russia that bleeds for her children’ or ‘our sacred German fatherland’. Thus, through micro-interactional grounding an ideological project and an organisational structure become transformed into an object of intimacy. Nationalism is most successful when it taps into the microcosm of close friendships and kinships. By enveloping the already established and strong networks of micro-solidarity and by infusing them with this specific organisational logic and ideological narratives, nationalism gradually becomes a second nature for many modern human beings. Nevertheless, this ideological and organisational translation in which cold and distant bureaucratic entities become our brothers, sisters and best friends is a never-ending process. Since deep human bonds entail protracted and continuous emotional interactions and personalised dedication while bureaucracies are largely driven by specific instrumental goals, there is an inherent tension at the heart of every nationalist project: an attempt to reconcile the instrumental demands of coercive state structures with the spontaneity of micro-level emotional bonds.

Conclusion

In several of his publications Collins emphasises the potency of nationalist experience. Nationalist effervescence involves intense emotions of group solidarity that crystallise in interactional rituals. This is most visible in the occasional gatherings of people in the public squares where they proudly wave their national flags and sing national anthems and other patriotic songs. In these moments of group mobilisation ‘sovereignty of the people is not a philosophical abstraction, but a felt experience’ (Collins, 2014: 57). Nevertheless, as Collins recognises, such effervescent moments, full of passion and intensity, cannot last for long. The intense collective emotional experience is bound to reach its peak and then dissipate. With the waning of an interactional ritual nationalist enthusiasm fades away. This leads Collins to conclude that ‘most of the time, nationalism is low-strength: latent, perhaps, but far from the thoughts and feelings of most people’ (Collins, 2014: 54).

Collins is right that nationalist rituals show well how nationalist exuberance can be explosive and then evaporate, indicating its time-specific character. However, there is more to nationalism than the micro-dynamics of inter-personal experiences. In this paper I have tried to demonstrate that these periodic moments of effervescence must be understood as a part of the long-term historical processes that made contemporary individuals receptive to such nationalist messages. If one is to focus only on the interaction ritual chains and geopolitical and status changes then it would be difficult to explain why such Durkheimian moments could not transpire in the pre-modern world. Waving a tricolour and singing a la Marseillaise would not mean anything to 16th-century peasants in Vendée, even if these two key nationalist French symbols had existed at that time. Hence, nationalism is a historical phenomenon that is created, reproduced and maintained through its coercive-organisational and ideological groundedness, and it is these two structural processes that make micro-interactional grounding possible and sociologically relevant. We live in a nation-centric world and our perceptions of social reality remain shaped by the dominance of the nation-state as the only legitimate form of territorial rule in the modern world. In this context nationalism is not a temporary aberration or only a periodic ritualistic event; it is the dominant form of human subjectivity in the modern world. Thus, to understand its episodic effervescence, it is also crucial to study its non-episodic existence. Nationalism endures because it remains grounded in the coercive-organisational, ideological and micro-interactional realities of the contemporary world.