Conclusion

National indifferences during everyday nationalism: Experiencing the nation in Finland in the aftermath of the Second World War

“…The history of nationalism has not involved a straightforward, determinist development but has rather been composed of ‘contingent events.’ On a similar note, national indifference should not only be seen as a 19th century pre‐stage to widespread nationalism. It ‘persisted well into the interwar period’ (Fox et al, 2019: 249–251; Zahra, 2010: 98–99), and, as our article suggests, it could well emerge in the post‐war period, too. The case of Finland in the aftermath of the Second World War demonstrates that just as nationalism changed its shape over time, becoming more and more subtly embedded in mundane expressions and encounters, so did national indifference.…”

“…The national indifference that it includes can be manifested both through active doing and in passive inaction (cf. Fox et al, 2019: 252–253). In the Finnish case, the former could be manifested, for instance, through joining the communists, defying the authorities or even in dancing, if this was indeed a conscious protest against wartime nationalism.…”

“…Depending on the context, national indifference has been associated, for example, with borderland populations possessing a marked local identity but with little linkage to nationalist projects, people shaping hybrid forms of regional and national identities or inhabitants in ethnically mixed regions pendulating between different national identifications (Miller, 2019; Van Ginderachter & Fox, 2019; Zahra, 2010). According to Fox et al (2019), the usefulness of the umbrella concept of national indifference relies on its ability to direct attention away from the ‘purveyors of nationalism’ to the agency of ordinary people and to probe the limits of their nationalisation. While agreeing with this, our emphasis on the history of experience directs our attention to interactions and negotiations and encounters between people and the state (and other) institutions.…”

National Indifference in Post-Ottoman Spaces: A Case from Northwest Bulgaria

“…In my contribution I will thus first attempt to show the possibilities of the applicability of the concept of national indifference in the post-Ottoman area. This continues to be the area which – despite the recent publication of a collection of studies seeking “to extend geographical remit of the discussion” of the concept to other parts of Europe (Van Ginderachter and Fox 2019a, 248) – remains rather out of the reach of authors working with the concept. In other words, I will try to demonstrate that it is possible to apply the concept of national indifference to materials from this area and period, and that this application will allow us to view the situation from a new perspective in which we will be able to answer questions and solve problems that otherwise would appear anomalous and difficult to understand.…”

Varieties of nationalism in the political discourses of Habsburg Austria

“…What illustrates the difficulty of studying nationalism as a historical and present ideology is the divergence between first, historical writing in post‐Habsburg nation‐states, which aims to legitimise these states through constructing their own national histories; second, American and western European historical writing that ‘tended to view nationalist politics in Habsburg central Europe, in contrast to western European experience, as an intolerant and ultimately antidemocratic force that helped doom hopes for parliamentary democracy both under the monarchy and in the post‐1918 successor states’ (Cohen, 2007, p. 241); and third, the more recent ‘national indifference’ (NI) literature (Judson, 2006; Zahra, 2008) that seeks to avoid ‘ethnicism’ (King, 2001), that is, to treat national identifications as grounded in ethnic entities, as well as the developmentalist fallacy of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002), which interprets the past through the lens of the nation‐state (Fox et al, 2019, p. 249). A shift in attention to ‘everyday’ and ‘from below’ perspectives aimed at avoiding the reductionist top‐down perspective of elite‐centred discourse analysis.…”