The New Nationalism: A Modern Phenomenon?

As Hans Magnus Enzensberger suggests, it may be fruitless to rail against national stereotypes: they are absurd, unfair, pernicious, and nonetheless so persistent that they probably serve a purpose. When asking where they are most likely to thrive, one realizes that it is not politics. Set ideas about the national character or cultural stereotyping are especially vivid within popular culture and the media. Often, they are diagnosed as potentially dangerous invitations to racism, or conversely, as accurate, if regrettable “reflections” of widely held views. But one could also argue that racist incidents in sports or tourism signify the opposite of the new European racism: a mimicking, a “staging” and an impersonation of prejudice, which tries to exorcise the feelings of fear of the other, by ritualizing aggression towards the kinds of “otherness” that have become familiar from life in ethnically mixed metropolitan communities and is thus different from traditional forms of nationalism. By shifting the sites of social representation away from the rhetoric of enemy nations and territorial conquest – trading jingoism, in other words, for stereotyping and puns – does popular culture fuel the old politics of resentment that were mobilized to fight the wars of the first part of the 20th century, or are television, tabloid journalism and advertising merely mining a sign-economy of difference, ready-made via a long history of images and now circulating through the many topographies of consumption? The transformation of the geographic and historical spaces of nationhood and national stereotypes into sign-economies has, however, in no way diluted the political value and “emotional legitimacy” of the idea of national identity. Rather, precisely because no external threat is involved, nationalism has become a major phenomenon of contemporary politics and a focal point in cultural debate. The divisions are no longer only or even primarily across the borders, but have opened up boundaries, zones and demarcations within the nation-states, dividing groups formerly held together by class-interest, economic necessity and religious faith or were forced together by political ideologies, such as fascism or communism.