From Parents to Children - Un Air De Famille: The Early Transmission of Nationalism through Family and National Habitus

This paper will present some of the findings of a qualitative study of 30 families in the Bordeaux region of France, which seeks to understand how nationalism is reproduced through its early transmission within the family, before children learn to read at school. The project is based on the critical theses of psychologist and social scientist Michael Billig on ‘banal nationalism’ (1995). According to Billig, nationalism is a universal ideology that reproduces itself through mechanisms such as ‘flagging’, which make nations as omnipresent as they are unnoticed in everyday life. Our paper aims to show how the ‘naturalisation’ of nations operates in the parents of young children, a question that Billig has not explored. Using projective methods with families that were as sociologically diverse as possible, the interviews asked the parents about their own trajectory and belongings and the way in which they received, modify and transmit them through family life and habitus, precisely conceived as a social, ‘second nature’. The analysis of the interviews draws on an in-depth knowledge of Elias's writings on national habitus, nationalism and the ‘civilisation of parents’ to explore the various dimensions of the naturalisation of nation(s) that underpins banal nationalism which, according to Billig, feeds all types of nationalism, including its most extreme forms. We emphasise that naturalisation - the fact of taking nations for granted and inescapable while in no way considering oneself nationalist - refers (1) firstly to the naturalisation of the division of the world into nations, (2) secondly to the naturalisation of national feeling and (3) thirdly to the naturalisation of national preference. We show how these three dimensions are modulated differently from one family to another, and that they nonetheless reveal common features that partly relate to the supposed particularities of the ‘French’ national habitus.