In 2024 two unrelated events received a great deal of public attention in Ireland. In May the Cork native non-binary performer Bambie Thug won sixth place at the Eurovision song contest in Malmö, which mass media have described as ‘Ireland’s most successful achievement since 2000’ (O’Rourke Reference O’Rourke2024:1). The Eurovision contestant was considered to be highly unusual. Their performance combined unorthodox and syncretic musical styles including heavy metal and hyper-punk avant electro-pop (i.e., ouija-pop) with the stark staging visuals invoking images of witchcraft, occult, and neopaganism. Bambie Thug regularly accentuates the rebellious nature of their music: ‘Historically, heavy metal, punk and rock has always been for the outcasts, the misfits and for the people who needed to rebel. Right now, our community is completely under attack’ (Shutler Reference Shutler2023:1).

Nevertheless, despite this rebelliousness and the nominal commitment to nonconformity, Bambie Thug constantly emphasises their strong sense of nationhood. In many photographs published after their Eurovision success Bambie Thug was dressed in the fully fledged Irish tricolour with the sign ‘crown the witch’. In their post-performance press conferences Bambie Thug would regularly emphasise how central is their sense of Irishness to this success: ‘I’m beyond proud and beyond grateful for the love.… We’re a tiny country and I don’t think anyone screams louder than the Irish.… I am so proud to be Irish and to be representing this country and to have that war chant behind me.… I love you so much, we’ve just put Ireland on the map globally guys’ (O’Rourke Reference O’Rourke2024:1).

Although the other event, taking place in September 2024, received less mass media coverage than the Eurovision contest, it too attracted a great deal of public attention – the winning of the Homeless World Cup by the Irish women’s soccer team. This victory of the Irish national team, consisting of fifteen unhoused women, was hailed as ‘heroic’, ‘amazing’, and ‘inspirational’. Although none of these women had any proper accommodation or fixed address in Ireland, the headlines in the major TV and newspaper outlets emphasised the centrality of their Irishness for this unprecedented success: ‘The Girls in Green beat USA 5-2 in their Trophy Stage Final to cap off a fantastic tournament in style’, ‘Ireland ladies Homeless World Cup team are doing the country proud’, and ‘The victorious Irish women’s homeless football team has returned from South Korea to a rapturous welcome at Dublin Airport’ (FAI 2024; O’Donnell Reference O’Donnell2024). The mass media have zoomed in on the public elation and the even more emotional responses from the players: ‘The team were joined by the men’s squad and were greeted with cheers of “Ole, Ole, Ole” by family and well-wishers who gathered at Terminal One to welcome them home’ (O’Donnell Reference O’Donnell2024:1). The commentators emphasised the homeless players’ difficult road to the success by making links to their nationhood: ‘They have experienced so many hardships in their lives yet here they are representing their country on the world stage and doing themselves, their families & friends and the nation proud’ (FAI 2024:1). One report singled out a player who lost her father just before the tournament: ‘My father boasted to so many people that his daughter was playing in the world cup so I felt like it was right to go, and I couldn’t have asked for a better group to be there with. I’d say he would be bursting with pride and that’s all I wanted to do is go out and make myself proud and make everyone else proud and I’m happy with that’ (O’Donnell Reference O’Donnell2024:1).

What these two unrelated events have in common is that they are both firmly framed in the nation-centric terms. Not only do mass and social media articulate these two events through the prism of nationhood, but the participants of these events define their achievements within the identical, nation-centric, framework. Their individual success stories are automatically and unambiguously narrated as victories for and of the Irish nation. They express a sense of enormous pride of being members of their nation, and their accomplishments are simply assumed to be also the achievements of millions of other individuals whom they do not know and will never meet – the Irish nation.

The international successes in sports and entertainment regularly invoke a sense of collective effervescence where the citizens of nation-states routinely engage in the acts of national self-worship. However, on the first glance these two cases would not fit easily into these predictable patterns of national self-adulation. With their provocative appearance and the controversial performance, Bambie Thug challenges the conventional parameters of what is appropriate behaviour at international song contests. Their performance was deemed to be scandalous by many conservative groups throughout Europe, who objected to their ‘sick and satanic routine’, their ‘demonic rituals’, and ‘disgusting witchcraft’ (Williams Reference Williams2024). Bambie Thug is very conscious that their performances attract such controversy, and they thrive on being rebellious, unconventional, and provocative: ‘tell me I can’t do it, I’ll do it anyway.… [T]here’s space for weirdness and diversity.… We are the rebels you need to hear’ (Shutler Reference Shutler2023:1).

Nevertheless, this radical challenge to the existing norms and the intrinsic rebelliousness of this performer stop at the borders of nationhood. While they fiercely contest the conventional understandings of music, religion, sexuality, and even international politics (with their critique of Israel), they remain deeply conformist in reproducing nation-centric language and practice. While one can question and rebel against nearly every aspect of conventional life, nationhood remains outside that critique. By superimposing the rebellious sign ‘crown the witch’ on a garment made of the Irish flag, Bambie Thug’s rebellion defines its ceiling – the deconstruction of nationhood remains off-limits. Moreover, the sense of being a member of one’s nation remains the central nodal point of all activity. As Bambie Thug emphasises, ‘I am so proud to be Irish’, ‘We’re a tiny country and I don’t think anyone screams louder than the Irish’, and ‘we’ve just put Ireland on the map globally’ (O’Rourke Reference O’Rourke2024:1).

However, there is nothing unique in embracing nationhood by the rebellious artists. This pattern has been present with many other radical performers – from the deeply anti-conformist hippie singers to the punk and heavy metal bands to the recent politically defiant rappers and hip-hop artists. Although many of them challenge social inequalities, political corruption, gender disparities, conventional sexual mores, and racial injustice, they generally do not question the ideas and practices of nationhood. For example, when the punk band the Sex Pistols recorded their version of ‘God Save the Queen’, they were attacking nearly all aspects of the existing social, political, and economic order, including the institution of the monarchy, but not British nationhood as such. Paradoxically, this rebellious song eventually became another cultural product that glorified the British nation-state by emphasising its unprecedented liberties, where you can even poke fun of the national anthem. Hence, even the most radical performers remain within the confines of nation-states and their own nationalisms.

The same pattern of nation-centricity permeates the second public event – the Homeless World Cup victory by the Irish women’s soccer team. In some respects, this is not unusual as sporting victories in the international arena have become an important instrument of national prestige. Hence, any international success, and especially winning a global trophy, is bound to be hailed as a major accomplishment that glorifies a particular nation-state and provides an opportunity for an act of collective self-adulation. Nevertheless, what is atypical in this case is that the winning team consists of individuals who have no home of their own. Although all the players are Irish citizens, none of them had a fixed address or place to call a home in Ireland. Although the sense of nationhood is often derived from the idea of home, a place where one feels safe, loved, and where one belongs, these players do not have actual homes. Instead, an abstract notion of a homeland replaces the real homes as the main nodal point of belonging. In this context nationhood is almost literally an imagined community, solely based on one’s mental image of intra-group affinity and belonging. In Anderson’s (Reference Anderson1983:9) words these mental images of shared communion are ‘saturated with ghostly national imaginings’. So, the individual players can embrace their abstract homeland but cannot return to their actual homes as they remain unhoused. This paradoxical situation is never referred to or even mentioned by the mass media reports where one’s attachment to their respective nation-state is simply and automatically assumed to trump all other forms of belonging, including the attachment to one’s locality and place of residence. The players themselves have also internalised this view and understand nationhood as something more significant than one’s own home. In this context nationhood is not a substitute for the actual home but it replaces it completely as a source of identification, group solidarity, and collective prestige.

Both of these paradoxical examples indicate just how central nationhood is in the contemporary world. We live in the world where nation-state is the fundamental form of territorial political order and where nationalism is the hegemonic ideological discourse that justifies the existence of such an order. Nationhood is normalised, naturalised, and nearly universally perceived to be the principal form of organised collective belonging. While most other aspects of social life receive extensive scrutiny and generate intense polemics, the ideas and practices of nationhood largely remain taken for granted. For example, key social divisions such as the class, status, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and ‘race’ are comprehensively analysed, problematised, and remain the central topics of intense debates across the globe. In contrast, the ideas and practices of nationhood receive much less analytical attention among sociologists and almost no critical scrutiny in public debates. Instead, nation-states are presumed to be the standard, logical, optimal, and only rightful form of social organisation, while nationhood is perceived to be an intrinsic and normal mode of collective existence. It is recognised that one can be a member of more than one nation-state (and possess several passports) and can have mixed loyalties or multiple identities. However, being voluntarily a-national or nation-less is largely not considered to be a serious political or social position. Losing one’s membership in a nation-state or feeling alienated from one’s nation would generally be perceived as a terrible misfortune.

However, as nation-states and nationalisms develop very late in human history, it is not completely clear how have they become so hegemonic in the contemporary word. Since its inception nearly 300 years ago nationalism has gradually expanded through a variety of social practices. This expansion was possible because nationalism is much more than a form of politics. It is a set of discourses and practices that strongly shape the economic, social, legal, and cultural life of billions of people all over the globe. The nationalist principles impact public policy, welfare provisions, migration laws, border control, economic planning, education systems, mass media discourses, military and policing practices, artistic trends, cultural policy, and consumption practices, among many others (Storm Reference Storm2024; Fox Reference Fox2025). Nationalism is not a marginal ideology to be associated with the militant movements, extremist groups, and populist politicians. It is the dominant operative ideology of modernity and as such it underpins the structural foundations of the world we inhabit today – the world of nation-states. Whether we like it or not, nationalism has become the dominant way of life.

Nationalism developed quite late as a sociological phenomenon, but once it took hold of state power its growth was largely continuous. The nationalist doctrine has managed to replace the competing ideological discourses of state legitimacy, including the divine origins of monarchy, imperial creeds, and the notion of civilising mission, among many others. From the end of World War II nationalism has gradually attained many hegemonic features and has become the dominant form of political legitimacy in the contemporary world. In addition to acquiring state power and enveloping official institutions and non-state organisations, this ideology and social practice has also penetrated civil society and the inter-personal networks of everyday life. Over the last 200 years one could witness an incessant proliferation of nationalism across the globe and within different social strata of individual societies. As I have argued before, and as elaborated more extensively in Chapter 1, the historical trajectory of nationalism has been shaped by the nearly continuous organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional grounding across time and space (Malešević Reference Malešević, Höhne and Meireis2020, Reference Malešević2019, Reference Malešević2013). Nationalism has protean features and, like a chameleon, can easily adapt to its surroundings. Scholars have traditionally invoked the image of the Roman god Janus to pinpoint the two contradictory faces of nationalism: as a force of collective solidarity but also as a mechanism of group aggression against those that do not belong to the nation (Nairn Reference Nairn2011, Reference Nairn1998). However, nationalism has many faces – it is a multifaceted political ideology, a habitual form of everyday practice, and a very plastic type of modern subjectivity.

Nationalism is a flexible discourse and social practice that can coalesce with far-right and the far-left ideologies, but it can also accommodate moderate positions across the political spectrum. Nationalist ideas are the cornerstone of such ideologically diverse movements as the far right Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden and far-left groups such as the Tigray People’s Liberation Front or the Communist Party of Cuba. Similarly nationalist principles feature prominently in centre right parties such as Les Républicains in France, GERB in Bulgaria, or Fine Gael in Ireland, and in centre left parties such as SMER in Slovakia, the Republican People’s Party in Turkey, or the Plaid Cymru in Wales.

Even more importantly nationalism is not just a political ideology; it is also a social practice that is integral to many activities and processes present in a variety of social organisations and outlets of everyday life. For example, nationalist practices are often promoted by religious organizations (e.g., the Greek Orthodox Church, evangelical Christian movements in the United States, or the Bajrang Dal in India). Nationalist ideas can also underpin civil society activities (e.g., ethnic minority NGOs, cultural heritage associations, and national sport societies such as GAA in Ireland or Basque pelota clubs), private corporations (from selling distinct national products such as BMW or Guinness beer to promoting national tourist destinations such as the Eiffel tower, Taj Mahal, or Hagia Sophia), and different social institutions (such as Masonic lodges, war veterans’ associations, or Boy Scouts).

Nation-centric practices are also integral to everyday life and habitual interactions between friends, family members, neighbours, peers, clans, and kinship-based groups. For example, wedding celebrations in the Balkans are often accompanied by the patriotic songs and the waving of national flags, while in Denmark birthday cakes regularly feature Danish national symbols such as the Dannebrog. The intimacy of friendship is also often interwoven with the shared experience of fervent cheering for one’s national teams in various sporting competitions. In this sense nationalism has become a meta-ideological doctrine and social practice that infuses many aspects of everyday life in the contemporary world. Hence to better understand this complex phenomenon it is necessary to explore these many faces of nationalism to understand how and why nationalism has become the prevalent way of life in the early twenty-first century.

This book aims to explore the rise and transformation of nationalist subjectivities in the modern world. By zooming in on very different aspects of social change I intend to show how nationalism has gradually penetrated nearly every aspect of social relations and has largely become an incontestable and naturalised mode of living. More specifically, this book analyses a variety of historical and contemporary milieus, including religious-secular dynamics, imperial and post-imperial contexts, the formation of nationalist movements, the role of golden age myths in nationalist narratives, the impact of warfare on nation formation, the motivations of soldiers on the battlefields, the role of geopolitics in nation-building, civil-military relations, and the impact of conspiracy theories, to reveal the social and historical dynamics of nationalism as a way of life.

The focus is on tracing the organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional processes that have made nationalism such an influential discourse and practice in the contemporary world. This book builds on my previous studies on nationalism (Malešević Reference Loyal and Malešević2020, Reference Malešević2019, Reference Malešević2013, Reference Malešević2006) but it differs from these publications in the two main ways: (1) it elaborates fully the key tenets of the grounded nationalism perspective and makes clear how this approach differs from other theories of nationalism and (2) it expands the historical and geographical scope of analysis by applying the grounded nationalism approach to a variety of case studies across time and space. In other words, I focus on the specific organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional mechanisms that reproduce nation-centric ideas and practices and make nationalism into a hegemonic way of life in the early twenty-first century. The book explores the key forms of lived experience: (1) how and why has nationalism become the dominant form of modern subjectivity – I explore the practices through which nation-centric idioms become normalised, routinised, and infused with social meanings that underpin how most people today see and experience the world; (2) how nationalism operates as a multifaceted meta-ideology – I aim to show why nationalism is much more than an ordinary political ideology such as liberalism, conservatism, or socialism; and (3) how and why national categories become organisationally embedded in everyday practices – I focus on the micro-context of kinships, friendships, and deep comradeships to demonstrate how dominant social organisations can successfully nationalise the micro-universe of everyday life.

In methodological terms the book is based on the analysis of primary and secondary data from different sources. Chapters 4 and 5 use primary data from archival research conducted in several archives in the Balkans. Chapters 5–10 rely on the qualitative analysis of various primary documentary resources including newspapers, school textbooks, official government records, military reports, websites of different civil society organisations, and artefacts from popular culture from all over the world. Chapter 9 also analyses data collected from in-depth interviews with former soldiers who fought in the 1990s wars of Yugoslav succession. Chapters 1–3 and 11 mostly rely on secondary sources.

The Book’s Structure

In Chapter 1 I briefly engage with contemporary approaches in the study of nations and nationalisms and offer a critique of structuralist and agency-centred explanations. I also articulate the theoretical framework that is then applied to the variety of case studies in the book. I outline the key features of my approach and describe how nationalist grounding operates on the coercive-organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional levels.

Chapter 2 explores the relationship between imperial and national subjectivities. Empires have dominated this planet for thousands of years, but in a relatively short period of time they have been completely delegitimised by nationalist projects. Hence, this chapter aims to explain how and why this has happened. Using historical examples of Japanese and Hungarian nation-formation the chapter traces the transformation of local, kinship-centred, and religiously based subjectivities into the nation-centric subjectivities.

In Chapter 3 I analyse the relationship between religion, state-formation, and nationalism. The focus is on the transformation of collective subjectivities in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds. By zooming in on case studies of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey the chapter analyses what role religious and state institutions play in the development of distinct nationalist projects. Since both religion and nationhood were key sources of political legitimacy, the chapter explores how these two distinct types of collective subjectivities were reconciled in the social and political spheres. The chapter investigates the inherent tensions between the universalist doctrines of Sunni Islam and the unambiguous particularism of the modern nationalist projects in Turkey.

Chapter 4 explores the relationship between nationalism and imperialism. In this chapter I question the role of (nationalist) agency in the collapse of imperial order. Drawing on the primary archival research I focus on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian rule (1878–1918). The chapter contests the view that the imperial state was severely undermined by the presence of strong nationalisms. I also challenge the notion that most of the Bosnian population remained ‘nationally indifferent’ during this period. Instead, I argue that understanding the character of Austro-Hungarian rule is a much better predictor of social change that took place in this period. Rather than stifling supposedly vibrant nationalisms or operating amidst widespread national indifference, the imperial state played a decisive role in forging the nation-centric world through its inadvertent homogenisation of social discontent.

Chapter 5 examines the role of golden age narratives in nationalism. By contrasting the experiences of the late nineteenth- and early twenty-first-century South-East European societies I explain how and why the images of the mythical past are articulated differently in these two historical periods. I argue that in the nineteenth century, golden age rhetoric was mostly a top-down phenomenon centred on transforming Balkan peasantry into the loyal members of their new nation-states. By the early twenty-first century this process has reached its institutional limits, and the golden age narratives have become a bottom-up phenomenon: the key agents of their creation and dissemination are members of civil society, social movements, and ordinary people. I focus on the structural processes that underpin this change to explain the historical dynamics of nationalist subjectivities.

In Chapter 6 I analyse the processes of nationalist grounding in ethnic and civic projects of nation-formation. I focus on the Yugoslav case to explore why both historical instances of civic-based nation-building have ultimately failed. This chapter focuses on the development and transformation of Yugoslav nationalism with the spotlight on its two main incarnations – the Yugoslav idea as articulated in the centralised and monarchic state of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (1918–1941) and the development of the Yugoslav project during the state socialist period (1945–1991). I argue that despite the nominal commitment towards building a civic nationhood, the Yugoslav project has paradoxically provided organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional mechanisms for the relatively continuous rise of ethnic nationalisms. The failure of Yugoslav nationalism stems in part from its uneven and misdirected grounding. It is this structural unevenness that also contributed to the relatively continuous proliferation of a much better-grounded ethnic nationalism.

In Chapter 7 I examine the impact war victories and war defeats have on the character of dominant nationalist discourses. Scholars of nationalism have extensively analysed how military defeats have shaped the collective memories of different nations. However, there has not been much comparative analysis of the relationship between nationalisms that transpire in the context of war victories and those that emerge in the environment of war defeats. This chapter looks at both phenomena. It argues that the scale and direction of nationalist narratives is rarely determined by war winning or losing but by the ability of social organisations to institutionalise a particular interpretation of specific wars. Instead of victories or defeats it is the coercive-organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional grounding that shapes the character of nationalism. This key argument is illustrated with a paired analysis of Croatia’s memorialisation of the war victory in the 1991–1995 war of independence and Ghana’s commemoration of the war defeat in the 1900 War of the Golden Stool.

In popular culture nationalism is often associated with battlefields. The combatants are regularly deemed to be inspired by a strong sense of patriotic duty. In Chapter 8 I challenge such views and aim to show that nationalism plays a marginal role in the combat zone. I argue that in most cases the warrior ethos is not linked directly to the nationalist ideas and practices. Instead, most combatants fight from a sense of moral obligation and emotional attachment to their micro-level groups. However, this is not to say that nationalism is irrelevant in the context of violent conflicts. On the contrary, I aim to show how nationalist ideas and practices permeate the organisational and ideological scaffolds of the wider social world. I argue that nationalism is primarily generated and reproduced in civilian institutions and other domains of civilian life.

Chapter 9 follows this line of argument by looking at the social mechanisms that facilitate the transformation of micro-level solidarities into coherent nationalist narratives. The aim is to explain a paradox: while the armed forces are highly nationalist institutions, most ordinary combatants detest nationalist rhetoric on the battlefield. Drawing on interviews with combatants who fought in the 1991–1995 wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina together with the analysis of mass media reports, I examine how deep bonds of micro-solidarity forged in violent experiences are transformed into coherent nationalist discourses. I explore how social ties generated in the protracted face-to-face interactions can be enveloped by specific social organisations and then ‘translated’ into nationalist ideologies that project deep comradeship as ‘national solidarities’. I aim to show that the direct war experience does not automatically generate strong bonds of national solidarity. Instead, nationalism is always a product of protracted coercive-organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional work.

Chapter 10 focuses on the historical relationship between nationalist subjectivities and conspiracy theories in times of profound crises. I argue that premodern conspiratorial narratives were mostly focused on eschatological and theological images, aiming to blame and delegitimise the religious Other. In these imaginary plots, large-scale pandemics were regularly interpreted as attacks on one’s religious subjectivities. With the rise of nation-states and the decline of empires and patrimonial kingdoms, the periodic outbursts of epidemics gradually attained more nationalist interpretations. In these narratives the threatening Other was usually nationalised, and even traditional religious groups became reinterpreted as a threat to one’s national subjectivities. In recent times, new technologies and modes of communication have created space for the emergence of global conspiracy theories. Some scholars have interpreted this as a reliable sign that nation-states and nationalisms have lost their dominance. However, this chapter shows that many global conspiracies in fact reinforce nationalist ideas and practices and, in this process, foster the perpetuation of national subjectivities.

In Chapter 11 I briefly explore how future human societies could exist without the nation-states and their foundational ideology of nationalism. I envisage several scenarios for the post-national world and analyse the long-term consequences of such scenarios. The Conclusion summaries the key arguments of the book.

Nationalism is so embedded in our lives that it is almost impossible for anyone living today to disentangle themselves from its engulfing tentacles. Moreover, as this ideology and social practice has become second nature to billions of people, there is no interest nor meaningful organised attempt to remove these tentacles. Most people enjoy the embrace of these tentacles and identify strongly with them. In many respects nationalism is the quintessential example of Weber’s view that human beings are animals suspended in webs of significance that they themselves have spun (Geertz Reference Geertz1973:5). We have created this omnipotent nationalist web of significance that now shapes nearly every aspect of our lives.