The national nature of globalization and the global nature of nationalism: Historically and methodologically entangled

Abstract

It is often assumed that psychological globalization produces tolerant, cosmopolitan outlooks, which deglobalization is now replacing with intolerance and narrow nationalism. This article argues that nationalism and cosmopolitanism, rather than being simple opposites, are entangled historically and methodologically, and that the national nature of globalization and the global nature of nationalism need to be recognized. Historically, the period of globalization coincided with the formation of the world of nation-states. Methodologically, economic calculations of globalization assume a world of nation-states. Nationalism is not only global in its reach but national consciousness is entangled with international consciousness. This entanglement may not be apparent if nationalism is equated with its extreme forms, for nationalism has everyday forms in established states. This article shows how studies of cosmopolitanism can themselves take for granted the world of nation-states within their methodologies. There are some brief suggestions about how to study banal nationalism.

An increasing number of social scientists are suggesting that the era of globalization, which marked the 20th century, has given way to the era of deglobalization. Globalization saw the world becoming metaphorically smaller, as interconnections spread. Psychologically, outlooks became more cosmopolitan, even as social inequality increased. Now, it is being said that “the great recoil” has begun, as the trends towards globalization and cosmopolitanism are reversed (Gerbaudo, 2021). Social scientists, including social psychologists, are gathering evidence that outlooks across the world are becoming more anti-immigrant and nationalist (e.g., Bar On, 2019; Engström & Paradis, 2015; Goodman, 2017, 2021; Knoblock, 2017; Kornprobst & Paul, 2021; Pascale, 2019; Wodak, 2021; see also, Gao, 2023, for a discussion of the double “unbelonging” experienced by Chinese migrants today). In this light, the presidency of Donald Trump and the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union are being seen as harbingers of a new, narrower age.

However, we need to be cautious about claims of a new age of deglobalization. Part of the problem is that the new age is said to have started comparatively recently, with some economists pointing to the financial crisis of 2008 as the moment when globalization gave way to deglobalization (Komolov, 2021; Schaeffer, 2021). Others concede that there has been evidence of economic deglobalization since 2008, but point out that there have been previous periods of deglobalization within the era of globalization (Irwin, 2020; H. James, 2018; Martin, 2018; Ortiz-Ospina & Beltekian, 2018). One economist writes that “globalization and deglobalization are recurring features of our economic system” (van Bergeijk, 2019, p. 3). He and others argue that it is far too soon to tell whether economic globalization will pick up or whether it reached its peak in 2008. Both sides of this debate are doing more than noting past and present economic trends: they are predicting future trends.

The purpose here is not to resolve this debate but to discuss whether globalization and deglobalization are indeed opposing social processes that produce opposing psychological states of mind. Globalization is often associated with the modern cosmopolitan outlook, while deglobalization is being associated with increasingly nationalist outlooks. As is often the case, it is necessary to step outside of psychology in order to better understand key psychological concepts (Teo, 2017). In the present case, this means not seeing cosmopolitan and nationalist outlooks purely in terms of psychology. Disciplinary boundaries must be crossed to discuss matters that some psychologists might consider to be economic, historical, sociological, and political, rather than psychological.

There is nothing peculiar about this. C. L. R. James, the radical Trinidadian thinker and cricket writer, artfully adapted a maxim from the imperially minded Rudyard Kipling. In his great book on cricket, C. L. R. James (1964), asked “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?” (p. 11). He was suggesting that, without understanding the inequalities of empire, history, and race, cricket would always remain incomprehensible (see Docherty, 2019, pp. 124 ff.). The wisdom of C. L. R. James’s maxim is not confined to these specific topics. On a much lower level, the maxim can be adapted to warn against narrow, academic specialism: those who only know of psychology, know not psychology (Billig, 2018).

The warning is particularly appropriate because the concepts and methodical practices of mainstream academic psychologists are not suited for exploring how major, seemingly opposite processes can become deeply entangled. The problem is that research psychologists are frequently trained to feel that they should seek to disentangle variables, especially by using artificially created experimental situations. Thomas Teo (2018) has argued that mainstream academic psychology can be characterized theoretically and methodologically by the status it accords to “variables” (see also O’Doherty & Winston, 2014). However, theoretical and methodological moves to disentangle what is entangled in practice may lead to a distorted view.

This consideration is directly related to issues concerning the psychological effects of globalization and deglobalization. Cosmopolitanism and nationalism might appear to be contrasting outlooks, which need to be separated into distinctly different variables. As will be seen, however, attempts to separate them theoretically and methodologically are only accomplished by unrealistically narrowing the concepts of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. By contrast, it is necessary to acknowledge the national nature of globalism and the global nature of nationalism.

Opposition in theory between globalization and nationalism

Stepping outside psychology, or being interdisciplinary, is insufficient on its own for demonstrating the entanglement of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, because it is not difficult to find social scientific approaches that see the two as incompatible, opposing processes. According to Daniel Chernilo (2020), in the late 20th century, many social theorists found it almost impossible to see beyond the opposition between global cosmopolitanism and narrow nationalism. They viewed globalization and its attendant cosmopolitan outlook as forces for good, unlike nationalism, whose diminished role in the modern globalized world social theorists tended to celebrate. This moral approval of global cosmopolitanism has persisted into the 21st century. One social psychological study of globalization has claimed that the cosmopolitan values of the global culture are neither dogmatic nor exclusionary: these cosmopolitan values “do not condone suppression of people or groups who have a point of view or a way of life that is different from that of the majority” (Arnett, 2002, p. 779; see also Keeting, 2016; Marcelić e al., 2021).

Ulrich Beck fits Chernilo’s (2020) description of the late-20th century social theorist. His book Risk Society (Beck, 1992) has been described as “one of the most influential European works of social analysis in the late twentieth century” (Lash & Wynne, 1992, p. 1). In it, Beck (1992) argued that a new form of society—a risk society—was emerging. Modernization, he suggested, contains “an inherent tendency towards globalization” (p. 36) and the new risk society possesses an internal dynamic that “destroys boundaries,” and “undermines the borders of nation-states” (p. 47). Beck argued that this new form of society could only be understood by a new sociology. The old sociology, going back to Weber, had fashioned its image of society on the nation-state, and was limited by what Beck and others have called “methodological nationalism” (Beck, 2016; Beck & Willms, 2003; Wimmer & Schiller, 2002, 2003). For Beck, it was imperative to break free from “the presumption that society is something ‘contained’ in nation-states” (Beck & Willms, 2003, p. 30). Cosmopolitanism was, in his view, already replacing nationalism as the dominant outlook in the modern world. Beck criticized a study of banal nationalism on the grounds that the signs of banal nationalism were “only islands in the overwhelming river of banal cosmopolitanism” (Beck & Willms, 2003, p. 308).

In essence, Beck was presenting a sequential account: first comes nationalism and then globalized cosmopolitanism. In this way, he was separating nationalist and cosmopolitan states of mind. His sympathies lay clearly with the latter and he advocated that social scientists should adopt a cosmopolitan vision, which would replace methodological nationalism with methodological cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2016). In the 1990s, Beck was formulating a seductively optimistic message, assuring his cosmopolitan readers that the future belonged to them. Today, Beck’s theorizing feels somewhat dated. Our future seems to be promising greater numbers of authoritarian, nationalist strongmen (Applebaum, 2020; Ben-Ghiat, 2020), rather than the unstoppable triumph of global cosmopolitanism (see also Gao, 2023, for a discussion of similar processes in a Chinese context).

Chernilo (2020) carefully qualified his statement about late 20th century social scientists by writing that they found it almost impossible to see beyond the opposition between globalization and nationalism. Roland Robertson’s book, Globalization (1992) did much to introduce the concept of globalization into social theorizing, but he did not find it impossible not to view globalization and nationalism as opposites. Robertson (1992) argued that globalization involved the development of a consciousness of the world as “a single place” (p. 193); and the various different theories of globalization accepted “the relatively simple observation that the world was increasingly becoming a ‘single place’” (Robertson & White, 2007, p. 56). Nevertheless, beyond the apparently simple observation, there was deep disagreement about the nature of globalization, so much so that Robertson and White (2007) describe globalization as “an essentially contested concept” (p. 54). As Teo (2023) shows, deglobalizers and antiglobalizers hold very different conceptions of globalization.

Regarding the relations between globalization and the future of the nation-state, Robertson took a different position from Beck. At the start of Globalization, Robertson (1992) asserted that globalization has involved processes of deglobalization (p. 10) and he claimed that the “nationally constituted society” would continue in the global world (p. 5). However, Robertson did not outline how the seeming opposites would not only coexist but would, to use his words, “interpenetrate” each other (p. 100). Robertson’s attention, together with that of his readers in the 1990s, was directed towards globalization, rather than deglobalization, and towards the world as a single place, rather than the world as divided into nation-states. Globalization seemed to be attracting exciting new theorizing.

Historical and methodological entanglement

First, there is the matter of historical periods, in which nationalism and globalization are entangled; then, there is the matter of a methodological entanglement. Most economic analysts recognize that the era of globalization covers much of the 20th century, not just the years following the Second World War. One economist claims that since 1870, there have been five periods of globalization, as measured by the increasing proportion of gross domestic products that are exported (Irwin, 2020). Accordingly, the post-2008 dip is not unique: previously there have been four other economically identifiable dips.

We cannot know whether the present dip will follow the course of previous ones or whether it will prove to be more permanent, but what we do know is that the era of globalization, together with the rise of neoliberal capitalism, coincides more or less with the global spread of nation-states. In 1900, only 40% of the world’s habitable land mass comprised independent nation-states: much of the rest was composed of territories ruled by national empires. By 2000, independent nation-states constituted virtually 100% of the world’s land (Wimmer, 2012). Thus, the growth of globalization has accompanied the growth of independent nation-states and that cannot be pure coincidence.

The creation of the nation-state system involves the legal creation of foreign outsiders who do not belong to “our” nation, whatever and wherever that nation might be (Wimmer & Schiller, 2003). The popular media, especially in wealthier nation-states, make much of migration. Typically, stories in newspapers and speeches from right-wing politicians greatly inflate the numbers, especially by using what have been called round, semimagical numbers (Billig, 2021); claims are made that thousands upon thousands of migrants are pouring into “our” country (see, for instance, Goodman & Kirkwood, 2019; van Dijk, 1993, 2019). This sort of discourse certainly predates the supposed start of current deglobalization (Ben-Ghiat, 2020).

Although politicians and the media regularly reinforce the impression that “our” national boundaries, wherever they might be, are collapsing in a fluid world constantly on the move, the facts are somewhat different. According to Wimmer (2018), only 3% of the world’s population live outside their country of birth. From such figures, Wimmer concludes that “the post-national age has yet to arrive” (p. 5), for globally this is still a world of separate nation-states.

The historically concurrent processes of nation-state building and globalization could perhaps be disentangled in theory, but the result would be too clean and too removed from the complex ways in which people actually speak and behave. Any disentanglement is made harder by the standard economic methodology for measuring globalization and deglobalization. These methods constitute a type of methodological nationalism but not the one that is based on the Weberian image of a society.

As has already been mentioned, economic globalization/deglobalization is measured by calculating the percentage of the world’s total GDPs that are imported or exported. The World Trade Organization (WTO) publishes an annual statistical review of world trade. The 2021 edition, like previous editions, summarizes its methodology. It defines “general trade” as “all types of inward and outward movement of goods through a country or territory.” It states that “goods” include all merchandise adding to, or subtracting from, “the stock of material resources of a country or territory by entering (imports) or leaving (exports) the country’s economic territory” (WTO, 2021, Chapter IV, p. 42).

These definitions, on which the calculation of globalization and deglobalization is based, take for granted a world composed of bounded nation-states and/or territories. Gross domestic products are impossible without countries or territories for which the gross product is domestic. “General trade” also assumes national boundaries, for it refers to goods that either leave or enter “the country’s economic territory” (WTO, 2021, Chapter IV, p. 42). Trade within a nation does not add to this figure, which would exclude the movement of goods from one end of China to another, but would include the much shorter movement of goods across the borders of two adjacent small nation-states.

The WTO’s definition of general trade does not refer to “nation,” “nation-state,” and certainly not to “nationalism.” It keeps its semantic distance from “nation” by using terms like “country,” “territory,” or “country’s territory.” When the report provides information about individual “countries,” it sometimes calls them “traders” (WTO, 2021, p. 18) or refers to them merely as “economies” (p. 17). The WTO is employing universal concepts to describe what is historically particular. Throughout recorded history, there have been “countries,” “traders,” and “territories,” at least in one form or another. By contrast, nation-states, with their tight boundaries and quantifiable economies, have only dominated the world’s land mass in historically recent times. Thus, nation-states can be linked to historical periods of globalization and deglobalization, and methodologically to the calculation of those periods.

The broad concept of nationalism

To take this further, it is necessary to acknowledge that nationalism, like cosmopolitanism, is an essentially contested concept. There are, for example, those who see nationalism as an age-old phenomenon, as opposed to modernists, such as Benedict Anderson (1983) and Ernest Gellner (1983) who link nationalism to the era of the nation-state. According to the modernists, nationalism is the ideology that enabled first the creation and then the maintenance of the modern nation-state. Of course, calling nationalism (and cosmopolitanism) an ideology would seem to throw the problem further back, for “ideology” is almost the paradigmatic example of an essentially contested complex. In this matter, we will follow the lead of Terry Eagleton (1991), who asserted that the concept of ideology has a whole range of meanings and that it would be unhelpful to compress this wealth of meaning into a single comprehensive definition. Also, we will follow the modernists, at least, to the extent of claiming that the modern nation-state could not have been created, nor the present world of nation-states be reproduced day after day, without the ideology of nationalism (Billig, 1995).

Describing nationalism as an ideology in this sense means taking a broad view of nationalism. We are not seeing it simply as based on a single phenomenon—such as an irrational group identification, a deep emotion, or an extreme form of politics. Instead, nationalism is seen also as a globalized, almost unnoticed view of the world. To adopt one of Eagleton’s (1991) important senses of ideology, nationalism, in its broad sense, is the set of routines, assumptions, outlooks, and so forth, that enables the world of nation-states to be experienced as if it were a natural, unchangeable reality.

The narrow concept of nationalism, by equating nationalism with an extreme form of politics, supposes that nationalism declined during globalization, but is growing during a time of deglobalization. Leaders such as Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Erdogan fit the pattern of authoritarian nationalists (Ben-Ghiat, 2020). They advocate tight national borders to keep out migrants; they treat their political opponents as national traitors, and they express contempt for liberal cosmopolitanism (Applebaum, 2020; Roberts-Miller, 2017; Wodak, 2021). We might assume that Trump’s slogan “Make America great again” and his policy of putting America first are overtly nationalist. Some observers go further and call Trump “a white nationalist,” linking his politics with fascism (Collins, 2020; Giroux, 2017; Morris, 2018; for discussions of the similarities and possible differences between fascism and populist nationalism, see Mørck e al., 2023; Teo, 2023).

Equating nationalism with authoritarian populism is potentially misleading because there are also less extreme forms of nationalism that are overlooked when the term “nationalism” is reserved for the extreme forms. Indeed, there would seem to be no word to denote these more ordinary forms of nationalism and without such a word they can appear as natural. Martha Nussbaum (2019) has written in philosophical praise of cosmopolitanism but, unlike Beck, she sees the nation as the natural home of cosmopolitan politics. Yet, she divorces this ideal nation from nationalism, declaring that national cosmopolitanism does not imply “a type of me-first tub-thumping nationalism that is all too familiar in our time” (p. 11). Having equated nationalism with its extreme form, she does not say what ideology would reproduce the cosmopolitan nation as a nation. Something seems to be missing.

Certainly, there are political differences between Trump and the presidents who immediately preceded and followed him; and certainly analysts should explore such differences in detail. Yet, at the same time, there are underlying similarities that neither the supporters nor the opponents of Trump would want to acknowledge. If it is “nationalist” to declare that America should be made great again, then is it also nationalist to declare that America is currently a great nation? American presidents, whatever their specific policies or party, commonly speak of America’s greatness. In his State of the Union message delivered in January 2012, Barack Obama used the trope a number of times, declaring “This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team” (p. 13). When Joe Biden announced his governing team shortly after defeating Trump in the presidential election of 2020, he announced: “America is back. Ready to lead the world” (Smith, 2020, para. 3). Such messages are not generally taken as exemplars of nationalism, but declaring America ready to lead the world or to be currently great are not, at least rhetorically, distinct from declaring that America should be great again. They share the presumption of America’s greatness, whether past, present, or future, and, consequently, liberal cosmopolitans, like Obama and Biden, can be heard to be voicing nationalist tropes.

This is unsurprising because, in a world of nation-states, nationalism is international. Nationalism is often seen as the ideology that combines passion and imagination to create new nation-states (Anderson, 1983). Today, movements that seek to form new nations or to extend old ones, will generally be called, and call themselves, “nationalist.” There are, for example, Scottish, Armenian, Palestinian, Kurdish, Basque nationalists, and many more besides. Again, it would be too narrow to equate nationalism with such movements. Secessionist movements are typically opposed by the existing nation-states that they wish to secede from. The existing state might mobilize its resources, including armed forces, to combat secessionists. The leaders of the existing states are not generally called nationalist because they wish to defend existing boundaries. It is as if nationalism is a movement of change or an extremist movement; the defence of the nation-state status quo appears so obvious, so natural, that it does not require a specific label (Billig, 1995; Centre Émile Durkheim, 2020).

Even if the label “nationalist” were extended to describe an established state’s armed opposition to secessionist movements, the concept would still not have been extended far enough. Existing nation-states are reproduced every day. How this occurs tends to be overlooked, but it includes familiar routines, symbols, beliefs, and ideological assumptions that are often taught in schools (Tröhler, 2022). This form of nationalism has been called “banal” or “everyday” nationalism (Billig, 1995; Centre Émile Durkheim, 2020; Duchesne, 2018; Fox, 2017; Martigny, 2010; Skey & Antonsich, 2017).

This nationalism, expressed in Obama’s and Biden’s tropes about American greatness, and in the flags they wear on the lapels of their jackets, is so banal that its routines, symbols, and rhetoric are frequently unrecognized as being nationalist, except by a few academics. Daily, pedestrians pass flags hanging on official buildings without a second glance, le alone a nationalist glow in their hearts (Billig, 1995). In established nations, this banal nationalism hides in plain sight. It is there when national leaders, as part of their political blah-blah-blah, declare their nations to be great nations. We’ve all heard it, but rarely do we listen. Yet, this everyday form of nationalism prepares the ground for those hot moments of nationalist passion, sacrifice, and violence.

Nationalism as an international ideology

If nation-states are created and then reproduced through the wider ideology of nationalism, then, because nation-states exist globally, the ideology of nationalism must also be global, despite the temptation to assume the opposite. Moreover, nationalist ideology is not only a psychological identification with, and a felt attachment to, a specific nation, but it must also involve ideological assumptions about the nature and naturalness of nation-states. An Argentinian’s feelings for Argentina, or a Rwandan’s feelings for Rwanda might involve similar feelings for very different nations, but both will share ideological assumptions about the place of nation-states in the modern world, as well as assumptions that Argentina and Rwanda merit their status as nation-states. Any psychological feelings of identification will exist within the ideological context from which they take their specific meaning and their social force.

The influential social identity theory, proposed by Tajfel and Turner (1986), assumes that common psychological principles, such as the search for a positive identity, lie behind all forms of social identity. In its search for general principles, the theory treats national identities like any other social identity, whether based on religion, profession, hobby, sexuality, and so forth (Billig, 1995, 2019, Chapter 7; Condor, 2003). However, nationalism is more than a feeling that may or may not fulfil personal needs: it possesses ideological content, historical significance, and social substance that make it a uniquely powerful, global force in the modern world. The same can also be said of cosmopolitanism, which can also be treated as primarily a social identity (Reese e al., 2019). Thus, Gao (2023) insists that belonging and unbelonging cannot be properly understood in terms of the individual; instead, identity, including national and cosmopolitan identity, must be set in its sociopolitical context.

In a world of nation-states, nationalism has become, to use the apt phrase of Daniel Tröhler (2022), globally universalized. The Argentinian and the Rwandan, or the American and the Russian, in identifying with their particular nation, will conceive of their nation as a nation belonging to the international order of nations. Each unique nation will resemble the world’s other unique nations. The sense of national uniqueness, and feelings of attachment, rest on a substratum of shared ideological presumptions.

There is an analogy with globalization. Roland Robertson (1992) claimed globalization was “the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (p. 8). Similarly, nationalism can be said to involve a parallel but opposite consciousness: the consciousness that the global world is a world divided into separate, unique nation-states. From the world’s largest nation-state, China, with its population of almost 1.5 billion inhabitants, to tiny Tuvalu, with less than 12,000 inhabitants, each nation shares the special property of being a unique nation. According to Chernilo (2020), all nations invest heavily in the “production and reproduction of their own exceptionalism” and this constitutes the “key paradox” of nationalism (p. 1073). In common talk and in the daily media, this special property of nationhood is undefined, even undefinable, but it is accepted as if it were a “natural” fact.

Even those who feel betrayed by current national boundaries and who support a movement to establish a new nation-state—their nation-state—accept that there is this special, but shared, property, distinguishing social groups that merit a state from those who do not. This is because the nationalist supporters of a new state are not creating the nation-state system, but seeking to join what is already established. Their people, whether Scottish, Kurdish, or Palestinian, are said to possess the characteristics that qualify them as nations. They will show this with their own versions of the universal iconography of uniqueness: they will wave their own unique flag that fits the accepted patterns and shape of national flags; and they will sing their own unique national anthem which, even if recently composed, will sound stirringly out of date.

Because the individual nation-state is part of an international order, the age of nationalism has also been an international age (Billig, 1995). Independent nations need international organizations like the WTO to facilitate and monitor trade, just as they require passports, embassies, and international treaties, not to mention an international organization like the United Nations to deal with the inevitable international crises, conflicts, and wars. The consciousness of national uniqueness historically has gone hand in hand with an international consciousness.

The simultaneous conjunction of national and international consciousness can be observed in megasporting events, such as the Olympic Games and association football’s World Cup. Most major sports and many minor ones have their international competitions and world championships, which provide a stage for outward displays of nationalism and internationalism. Nothing illustrates this more than the Olympic Games, the largest globally watched sporting event in the modern world. The games stage nationalist displays with marching, flags, and national uniforms, while the International Olympic Committee jealously protects its profitable, internationally recognized, Olympic brand (Boykoff, 2016; Goldblatt, 2016; Teo, 2023). The IOC shifts the loss-making costs of building the stadia and facilities onto the host nations who, in their turn, shift the losses onto their tax-paying populations (Boykoff, 2016).

To compete in the Olympic Games, athletes must represent their nations while staying in the “Olympic village.” If athletes representing a newly established state find Olympic success, they will instantly become national heroes. They will also know how to behave in their supreme moment of athletic triumph. They will drape a national flag around their victorious shoulders. Then, as their anthem is played and their flag is hoisted, they will adopt the conventional pose for displaying deep nationalist emotion, aware that they are standing before a truly global audience. These unique moments of national triumph have become standard, international displays.

Cosmopolitan methodology and methodological nationalism

The entanglement of globalization and nationalism is not only reflected in sporting megaevents or the global conduct of politics, but it can also be detected within the minor details of social scientific methodology. This section will examine some examples of academic social scientists who study the psychological effects of globalization on cosmopolitanism. As will be seen, those who study the psychology of cosmopolitanism sometimes appear to avoid looking directly at nationalism by considering what is national to be cultural, thereby transforming the historically specific nation-state into something as universal as culture. Although the researchers might not be directly studying nationalism, nations and national consciousness have a habit of sneaking into their studies. This is similar to “methodological nationalism,” which has been described as “the naturalization of the nation-state by the social sciences” (Wimmer & Schiller, 2003, p. 576). However, the nation-state is not the only thing made to appear natural—so is the international world of nation-states.

One point should be emphasized: the studies, to be discussed in this section, are in no way methodologically slipshod or second-rate. Far from it: They are all high-quality studies. This makes their methodological treatment (or, rather, nontreatment) of national identity all the more significant.

Quantitative psychological methods tend to be designed to look for differences between variables, and researchers often divide their participants into different categories. Arnett’s work on the psychological effects of globalization is an example (Arnett, 2002; Jensen e al., 2011). Arnett (2002) argues that globalization has affected identity, claiming that “globalization is influencing every part of the world, but cultures differ greatly in how much they have been affected by it” (p. 775). He distinguishes between globalized persons with cosmopolitan identities and those who identify with traditional cultures. According to Arnett (2002), “most people in the world now develop a bicultural identity”: part of their identity is rooted “in their local culture,” which is presumed to be premodern, while another part is tied to “the global culture,” which is a culture with modern values (p. 777). Arnett gives examples of these identities from around the world: China, Japan, India, Russia, Latin America, and so forth.

Arnett’s (2002) psychological perspective is itself refreshingly global, but there is a gap. He and his colleagues focus on the variable of cultural identities (whether local or global) and the values that they contain. The nation only appears as a means for identifying the locus of cultures, such as, “Inuit in Canada” or the cultural values of China and Japan, and so on. The problem is that most people in the modern globalized world have an identity which, according to Arnett’s theoretical perspective, would seem to lie between global and local identities: namely, their national identity. The Inuit in Canada are more than a people in Canada: they are Canadians, citizens of a nation-state in the global world of nation-states.

A similar pattern emerges in a series of studies conducted by social psychologists Nina Bahl, Hilde Nafstad, and Rolv Blakar, investigating people’s “psychological sense of community.” Some of these studies have concentrated on respondents living within Norway (e.g., Bahl e al., 2017). In an interesting recent study, the researchers examine the effects of globalization on the psychological sense of community of young and old living in two very different “cultures” (Bahl e al., 2021). The authors identify the two “cultures” as India and Norway.

Again, nationality is being translated into culture. The problem is not solved merely by adding in an extra variable such as national identity or a sense of national community. Doing that on its own would not necessarily show up the entanglement of global and national identities. This can be seen in the unspoken methodological assumptions of an interesting study investigating “banal cosmopolitanism” amongst young people in Croatia (Marcelić e al., 2021). Like the other studies already discussed, this is a sophisticated and thoughtful piece of work. It distinguishes cosmopolitans from traditionalists and explores the various dimensions of cosmopolitan thinking by using a number of measures, including the scale of postmaterialist values, devised by Ronald Inglehart (1977; see also Inglehart & Welzel, 2005).

Despite Marcelić’s interest in studying cosmopolitanism, Inglehart’s scale (1977) is rooted in a sense of nationhood, so much so that it has been called a measure of “national priorities” (Lakatos, 2015, p. 292). Respondents are asked to choose between various policies for their “country.” Basically they are asked to choose between materialist and postmaterialist priorities: for example, whether “Making sure that this country has strong defence forces” (a materialist item) is more, or less, important than “Trying to make our cities and countryside more beautiful” (a postmaterialist item; for details of these and other scale items, see Inglehart, 1977).

The scale’s items employ the common phraseology of banal nationalism (Billig, 1995). Small, insignificant words are used to convey the nation without specifically mentioning it. The context, especially the use of “the government,” maximizes the chance that our cities and countryside will be understood as our nation’s cities and countryside, not the world’s or the local community’s cities. “This” country is our country, the nation-state in which the respondent lives. Similarly, some items use the term “society” and again the context makes it clear that this refers to the respondent’s country/nation. The scale (Inglehart, 1977) can be, and has been, used internationally, with our referring to the nation in which the scale is being administered at that moment, and, thus, it can refer potentially to any nation. As the researchers investigate banal cosmopolitanism, so, at the same time, they use the language of banal nationalism, which takes for granted our nation within the world of nations. Even those whom the scale identifies as being cosmopolitan are using a form of banal nationalist language to demonstrate this cosmopolitanism.

Bayram (2019), in a study of the psychology of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, comes close to some of the positions taken here. She does not try to separate cosmopolitans and nationalists into two very different classes of person, but she writes of “nationalist cosmopolitanism.” She uses data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to show that most people are both nationalist and cosmopolitan. In discussing her results, Bayram comments “on the positive relationship between national identity, cosmopolitan identity, and patriotic obligations” (p. 774).

Some of Bayram’s (2019) comments about the importance of national identity in the modern world are in line with the theme that nationalism as an ideology makes the nation-state appear natural to its members. She writes that “national identity has high psychological centrality” and that most people are “born into a system of political organization that is based on the nation-state and nationality”; and in consequence, they “encounter national identity as a social fact, a ‘natural’ social identity” (p. 762). Her analyses of the WVS do not provide direct evidence for the naturalness of national identity, nor how this naturalness might be manifested in everyday life. Nevertheless, Bayram’s chosen methodology itself provides an example. The WVS website includes the instructions that interviewers should tell respondents:

This study will interview samples representing most of the world’s people. Your name has been selected at random as part of a representative sample of the people in __________ (mention country in which interview is conducted). (World Values Survey, 2020)

The phrase “the world’s people” banally indicates the cosmopolitanism of the world as a single place, while the next sentence just as banally draws attention to the participant as a representative of their nation-state. Strangely, this methodological routine, enacted by interviewer and interviewee, bears a passing resemblance to an Olympic ceremony.

This illustrates on a micro-level how globalization and cosmopolitanism might linguistically coexist within the world of nation-states. The language of banal nationalism and that of banal cosmopolitanism are so embedded within contemporary discourse that even highly sophisticated social scientists studying these topics may not notice them entangled within their own methodological practices.

Towards a psychology for understanding cosmopolitanism and nationalism

All this suggests that psychologists may need to go beyond the methodological confines of mainstream psychology if they wish to examine the deep entanglement of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. As Teo (2018) and other critical psychologists have noted, mainstream psychology often fixes people into separate categories and then searches for differences between those categories. The research into cosmopolitanism and nationalism, discussed in the previous section, typically searches for psychological and attitudinal differences between those whom the researchers categorize as cosmopolitan and those they categorize as nationalist. Researchers can even classify respondents as “cosmopolitan” on the basis of an answer to a single question (Taniguchi, 2021). However, as Arnett (2002) and Bayram (2019) point out, most people are both cosmopolitan and nationalist.

In a thoughtful analysis, Michael Skey (2012) suggested that people move between being cosmopolitan and exclusionary in modern life. This is not necessarily a movement across time, but in the same moment they may invoke the values of cosmopolitanism and make racist or exclusionary comments. To understand such entanglement of seemingly opposing states of mind, Skey (2012) uses the notion of ideological dilemmas—namely that ideology is dilemmatic because it incorporates values that are easily brought into conflict with each other, thereby creating dilemmas for those living within the ideology (Billig e al., 1981).

It is easy for social psychologists to reify the notion of identity: to see, for instance, cosmopolitan identity as being something different from national identity, with both identities lying at the heart respectively of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. By contrast, “ideology” can be loosely used as a sort of portmanteau concept, gathering different aspects of social and psychological life within itself. Identities, such as national identities or cosmopolitan identities, will have their ideological features. Nationalism will include more than utterances about identity: there will be specific sociopsychological feelings, symbols, heated opinions, casual opinions, routines, contexts of power, and so on.

Because nationalism and cosmopolitanism embrace so many different moments of social life, they cannot be examined by a single methodology. Sometimes the moments are fleeting, even unnoticed by those who are living those moments. Jon Fox (2017) has suggested why conventional social scientific methods might be inappropriate for studying banal nationalism, and, by implication, banal cosmopolitanism. Questionnaires probe conscious beliefs, while banal nationalism can often be on the edge of consciousness. Also, questionnaires include items that attract a range of opinions, and thus are inappropriate for studying presumptions that are generally shared. According to Fox, observational and interpretive methods are required. These would include methods that discursive psychologists use to study the close details of language, especially language in naturally occurring interaction rather than situations, such as interviews, created by researchers (Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Hepburn, 2005; Tileagă & Stokoe, 2016). In addition, the writings of social scientists, including their writings on methodology, can be analysed as instances of naturally occurring, written discourse. The present paper has treated methodological assumptions as objects of analysis rather than as means of analysis.

To study ideological presumptions, it is important to note absences as well as presences—to notice what is not being spoken about because it is accepted as “natural.” Qualitative, discursive methods are vital for understanding the meaning of silences (Billig & Marinho, 2019; Murray & Durrheim, 2019; Scott, 2019). Silences need not be absolute, for what cannot be spoken directly might be turned into a joke if it is to be uttered (Billig, 2005). Such an incident occurred in the Portuguese parliament, when a communist member defined citizenship in terms of class and excluded shareholders from the nation. The speaker could only voice this idea as if he was making a joke (Billig & Marinho, 2017, pp. 170 f.). But “just a joke” is seldom just a joke.

If psychologists recognize the historical and methodological entanglements of nationalism and globalization, then they must do more than increasing the number of methodologies that they use. They must also develop a critical, historical awareness (Teo, 2018). So much psychology is ahistorical, as psychologists seek to construct universal theories that are designed to stand outside history. As Gao (2023) argues, positivist psychology is only interested in producing decontextualized and ahistorical knowledge. Neither nationalism nor globalization, le alone their historical entanglement, can be understood as universal, ahistorical processes.

This almost takes us back to our starting point: to C. L. R. James (1964). Although we cannot know whether globalism and nationalism will become more or less entangled, we do know two things. No structures of power, however solid they appear, last forever; and second, there is constant change. This is why Teo (2023) distinguishes between deglobalizers and antiglobalizers, and looks towards the latter, not the former, for genuine, social change. If, as has been argued here, globalization is entangled with the existence of nation-states and thus with nationalism, then antiglobalizers, who wish to radically change the inequalities of globalization, must also be antinationalists; and they must look beyond the existence of a world of nation-states.

In his cricket book, C. L. R. James (1964) made a profound observation. He wrote that, during his lifetime, he had seen old empires fall and new ones arise, and what matters is movement: “where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there” (pp. 116–117). Those of us who are no longer young have seen the world of nation-states become increasingly globalized in our lifetimes. We have not witnessed nation-states simply withering away. We can note increasing tensions that are unsustainable in the long term; but it is still too early to tell when the great crisis of change will occur, and what its outcome will be.