Nationalism for babies: Investigating the early transmission of national habitus to children in the family

Delmotte, Florence;Duchesne, Sophie
(2022) 19th INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON CIVILIZING PROCESSES Racisms and the expansion of the civilizing process — Location: Salvador, Bahia, Brasil (27.November.2022)

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Our paper aims at discussing how Norbert Elias’s sociology may be used in order to investigate young children’s socialisation to ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995). Despite the obsolescence of nations as ‘survival units’, young children seem accustomed to the normality of a world divided into nations and convinced that they have one of their own, that they love or that they ought to love and respect (Throssell 2010). In order to understand why and how, we decided to work on the transmission of national belonging within the family in the frame of a pluri-disciplinary project carried out in France in the region of Bordeaux (2020-2022), which is to be extended in French-speaking Belgium. Our aim is to understand how the family transmission of landmarks (cognitive, emotional, relational) operates, before and beside school. Many studies exist on school curricula –especially on the teaching of history (Ferry 2019) but it is less common to work on families. Yet investigating the family sphere seems unavoidable when dealing with primary political socialisation, even if it proves methodologically more difficult. Elias and the psychologist Michael Billig have both noted the naturalization and inadequacy of the division of the world into nations, the latter being primarily concerned by asserting their superiority. Both point to the largely unconscious nature of this vision and its reproduction in the minds of most people. However, Billig considers that banal nationalism is an international ideology that is all the more hegemonic because it is imposed through mechanisms like flagging. Elias is more interested in the deeply rooted yet changing character of the national habitus and its affective component. Nevertheless, Elias’s approach can contribute to deepening questions that Billig explored little, namely, how banal nationalism ‘works its magic’ (Fox 2017; Duchesne 2019). Our research draws on rather late and political texts within Elias's bibliography: Studies on the Germans (2014 [1989]), central on nationalism and national habitus, 'Changes in the 'We-I' Balance' [1987], dealing with the difficulties of the transition to the 'post-national' (Delmotte 2012), but also Involvement and Detachment (2007), marked by the Cold War. These texts address nationalism in a critical and comprehensive way, never suggesting that patriotism, good or ‘cold’ nationalism, on the one hand, and bad, ‘hot’ or extreme nationalism, on the other, could be opposed. Instead, Elias suggests that the latter presents the former in a blinding, distorted form, and that both are two sides of the same coin. The same position can be found in Billig, who argues that banal nationalism constitutes the breeding ground for extreme nationalism. In terms of working on children, we mobilise a corpus including the essays on the ‘civilising of parents’ (Elias 2008) and on emotions (2009), as well as texts considered to be more central, like On the Process of Civilisation (2012a [1939]), The Society of Individuals (2010a [1939]) and What is Sociology? (2012b). In the first one, Elias brings to the forefront the concept of ‘love and learning relationships’ through which children learn to situate and gradually designate themselves as an ‘I’ by situating and designating many others (Gabriel 2017). At the same time, national habitus and banal nationalism transmission contribute to ‘freeze’ one or more ‘they’ facing ‘us’. Based on 90 interviews carried out in 30 families with children aged 5 to 6, the study is invested here as an opportunity to reflect on the tensions that arise from two authors' perspectives, and aims at developing and testing their propositions in order to better understand the significance of the national fact, myth and belief as it is learned and reproduced from early childhood.
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Delmotte, F., & Duchesne, S. (2022). Nationalism for babies: Investigating the early transmission of national habitus to children in the family. 19th INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON CIVILIZING PROCESSES Racisms and the expansion of the civilizing process, Salvador, Bahia, Brasil. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/165359