Introduction
Emotions are only occasionally the primary focus of research on nationalism, even though nationalism is widely recognized as an emotion-laden phenomenon. This assumption is often implicit and, at times, explicitly acknowledged, even within the dominant research on everyday “banal” nationalism. Scholars frequently note that national membership can lead to significant emotional experiences, which can sometimes be beneficial for individuals and groups — particularly when motivating civic engagement and solidarity across identity group boundaries (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2004, 121) — but can have devastating consequences at other times — the most extreme outcome for people is sacrificing their lives in national wars or being killed by others’ national fervor. Anderson (Reference Anderson1991) captured this darker side of national belonging in his classic formulation:
Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: What makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? (p.7)
Anderson later expressed the puzzle even more succinctly: “Why people are ready to die for these inventions?” (p. 141)
The fundamental question, long posed by nationalism scholars but perhaps most elegantly posed by Anderson (Reference Anderson1991, 4) as “why [nations] command such profound emotional legitimacy,” serves as a common thread in three parallel lines of research on national emotions reviewed in this article. The first of these research streams revisits nation-building through the lens of the history of emotions; the second recalibrates the study of banal nationalism by advancing an “affective nationalism” framework; and the third examines periods of intense national emotions.
Notably, while discussions in all three research lines highlight emotional commitment to the nation — “How the homology between the nation and the individual becomes internalized and is assimilated by the individual, entering his or her ‘inside’” (Verdery Reference Verdery1993, 40) — they also broaden the scope to explore a wide range of nation-centered emotions, particularly by examining the emotions associated with experiences of marginalization, oppression, and alienation from dominant national narratives. Rather than reinforcing national cohesion and reproducing a particular version of collective national identity, these emotions can fuel struggles that reshape national boundaries, cultural and emotional repertoires, political landscapes, and policies.
Before reviewing key developments in three prominent areas of nationalism research, a conceptual disclaimer is in order: the nature of emotion remains a subject of debate across a wide range of academic disciplines, from philosophy to neuroscience. I will leave it to others to engage in the battle of titans over the relationship between visceral sensation and interpretation. I readily acknowledge that I lack both the expertise and the inclination to examine this issue with sufficient precision. Instead, like most authors referenced in this review, I will assume that visceral impulses and appraisals are intertwined, co-producing emotions.
Nation-building
Scholars in the ethnosymbolism school (Armstrong Reference Armstrong1982; Smith Reference Smith1986) should be credited with initiating the effort to link nation-building to emotions. Beginning roughly half a century ago, they supplemented the focus of modernist historians on the structural conditions for nation-building and the vested interests of nationalist entrepreneurs by examining how nationalist movements and state institutions employed and reshaped ethnic symbols, myths, and narratives — embedded with “chosen traumas” and “chosen glories” (Volkan Reference Volkan1997) — in constructing a “deep image” of the nation (Banti Reference Banti and Cole2007), fostering both emotional attachment to putative nations and territories and a sense of resentment toward domestic and foreign others. While the ethnosymbolism school and the scholars it inspired have provided invaluable insights into how nationalist movements, leaders, and state institutions selectively adopted and adapted elements of ethnic cultural traditions to forge national bonds and attachments to territorial homelands, their conclusions often make an unwarranted leap from analyzing representations of the nation to asserting the existence of widespread national fervor without fully explaining how and why ordinary people adopt and internalize nationalist messages and symbolism (Riall Reference Riall2009; Stynen, Van Ginderachter, and Seixas Reference Stynen, Van Ginderachter and Seixas2020, 2).
Nation-building through emotion regulation
A prominent contemporary research line on nation-building draws on the “history of emotions” research framework (see a review in Stearns Reference Stearns2008) to explain how nations develop not merely as cognitive (“imagined”) constructs but as communities bound by shared feelings (Rozin Reference Rozin2024; Penslar Reference Penslar2023; Stynen, Van Ginderachter, and Seixas Reference Stynen, Van Ginderachter and Seixas2020; Gienow-Hecht Reference Gienow-Hecht2010). These scholars often criticize past research for neglecting or superficially addressing the emotional dimension of nation-building despite widespread recognition of the deep emotional attachment that inspires national loyalty and sacrifice. However, as Demertzis (Reference Demertzis2020, 179–180) argues, this critique of a cognitivist bias in past research is somewhat overstated. Instead, it is more constructive to highlight the reliance of studies on vague terms such as “national sentiment” or “national bond” and focus on distinguishing between specific emotions and analyzing their origins, hierarchies, and interconnections in the context of nation-building. From this perspective, recent scholarship represents less of an abrupt “emotional turn” than a gradual evolution, moving beyond cursory acknowledgments to a systematic examination of emotions as integral not only to initial phases of nation-building but also to significant transformations in national histories.
The history of emotions framework has adopted two central principles common to much of the social sciences and humanities research on emotions. First, emotions are socially constructed, meaning that any emotional experience consists of both a visceral sensation and meaning-making based on culturally specific codes (Gienow-Hecht Reference Gienow-Hecht2010, 2). Second, comparisons across societies, social categories, and historical periods reveal significant differences not only in the vocabulary used to interpret and express emotions but also in the unwritten feeling rules (Hochschild Reference Hochschild1979) that dictate which emotions are acceptable, in what circumstances, and for whom. By focusing on feeling rules, historians have analyzed the development of national communities of feeling through the emergence of standardized emotional norms within the imagined boundaries of nations. These studies emphasize that a central goal of nationalist movements and nation-states has been to cultivate national emotional regimes — or, as Stearns and Stearns (Reference Stearns and Stearns1985) termed it in their seminal article, emotionology — often viewing nation-building as a primarily top-down process. However, some studies have also examined the emotional experiences of ordinary people, analyzing diaries and testimonies and, in the case of more recent nation-building efforts, interviews to explore how emotions were shaped and regulated in the formation of national communities. For example, Rozin’s (Reference Rozin2024) study of Israel in the two decades following independence offers a compelling case of nation-building through emotion regulation. The book examines efforts to suppress fear and other undesirable emotions during prolonged periods of insecurity while fostering emotions aligned with national ideals of resilience and sacrifice. Emotion regulation was particularly crucial because rival political-ideological camps operated with different feeling rules — for instance, they disagreed on whether to suppress public anger following violent attacks by national enemies or to encourage its expression as a call for revenge. Standardizing emotions thus became a key aspect of nation-building, closely linked to the broader effort to replace sectarian institutions with national ones.
In line with modernist theories of the rise and spread of nationalism, now deemed classical (for example, Tilly Reference Tilly1994; Mann Reference Mann and Periwal1995; Greenfeld Reference Greenfeld1992), some studies of emotions in nation-building have highlighted geopolitical competition and conflicts as primary causes for the emergence of national communities. For example, an edited volume on nation-building in the Baltic Sea region (Bohlin, Kinnunen, and Grönstrand Reference Bohlin, Kinnunen and Grönstrand2021) explores the feelings associated with the experiences of loss—of territory, culture, collective virtue, or greatness—that is the defining theme of romantic nationalism in this region during the long nineteenth century. The chapters show how loss was propagated through various media, including political rhetoric and the arts, and fueled emotions such as grief, longing, and resentment. Similarly, Demertzis (Reference Demertzis2020: chap.8) argues that ressentiment is pivotal to modern Greek nationalism, rooted in Greece’s historical marginalization and perceived inferiority within the Western world, exacerbated by its technological and economic lag (p. 193). Building on Greenfeld’s (Reference Greenfeld1992) framework, which identifies ressentiment as central to nationalist movements in France, Russia, and Germany, Demertzis extends this analysis to Greece. He demonstrates how ressentiment has shaped the construction of Greek national identity and is closely intertwined with “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld2005)," a bond characterized by contradictions between classical and Byzantine-Orthodox legacies, pride and grief over historical triumphs and losses, and an ambivalent mix of admiration and resentment toward the West.
While analyses of ressentiment emphasize how humiliation and perceived inferiority — often compounded by economic weakness — can shape national identity, Suny (Reference Suny2015) shows how such emotions can be radicalized into a program of violent exclusion. His history of the Armenian Genocide demonstrates that the Young Turks were not initially motivated by a coherent nationalist ideology but, under the pressures of imperial collapse and wartime insecurity, came to interpret Armenians as both political collaborators with foreign enemies and economic competitors who possessed disproportionate resources. These fears and resentments resonated among many ordinary Muslims, whose own sense of humiliation and hopes of material gain were mobilized in the process of dispossession and violence. Here, national emotions of fear, humiliation, and envy not only shaped identity but also bound a new political community together through the destruction of another.
Whereas Suny demonstrates how fears and resentments could be mobilized to forge destructive solidarity through violent exclusion, Gross highlights how national identity could also be reshaped through complicity and shame. Situating his analysis in World War II and its aftermath, Gross traces how emotions such as shame and guilt became embedded in Polish collective memory. His works link these emotions to key historical events: the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939–41 (Gross Reference Gross2002), the participation of Polish communities in atrocities against Jews under German occupation (Gross Reference Gross2022), the expropriation of Jewish property during and after the war (Gross and Gross Reference Gross and Gross2016), and the hostility and violence directed at Jewish survivors returning after the Holocaust (Gross Reference Gross2007). By showing how these experiences were absorbed into national narratives, Gross demonstrates that Poland’s emotional and moral landscape encompassed not only pride and sacrifice but also shame, complicity, and moral ambivalence.
Paying closer attention to national frontiers
An essential development in reexamining nation-building through the lens of history of emotions has been paying particular attention to national frontiers, in contrast to past writings on nation-building that often highlight the actions of leaders located in geographic, political, and economic centers without examining the reactions of people and communities in the peripheries. For example, Rozin’s book mentioned earlier pays particular attention to the emotional experiences of Israelis who lived along the borders and were the most likely to experience security threats and suffer loss of lives and, therefore, were a primary target for the national leadership’s effort to regulate emotions. However, an even more important reason for focusing on national frontiers is the need to examine how efforts to develop an affective-discursive canon — shared, socially scripted ways of feeling and interpreting events and relationships (Wetherell et al. Reference Wetherell, McCreanor, McConville, Barnes and le Grice2015) — can overcome the differences between local communities of feeling due to their particular collective experiences, memories, myths, and narratives. For this purpose, it is essential to extend the investigation beyond the “emotional regime” concept (Reddy Reference Reddy2001), which assumes a relatively centralized and politicized effort — led by states and political elites — to enforce standardized, nation-encompassing feeling rules. Instead, or rather in addition, the concept of “emotional community” (Rosenwein Reference Rosenwein2010) provides a valuable perspective by locating emotional tendencies and feeling rules within smaller, more intimate communities. These communities may nurture emotional norms in less centralized and pedagogic ways than national emotional regimes.
Faraldo’s (Reference Faraldo, Stynen, Van Ginderachter and Núñez Seixas2020) research on settlers in Poland’s recovered territories after World War II is an excellent example. These settlers formed emotional communities around shared fears and a sense of otherness. Over time, however, they developed national pride through narratives that connected their local histories to the broader national story, thereby integrating local emotional attachments into broader processes of Polish nation-building. This case points to the importance of analyzing nation-building at the frontiers for understanding how a national emotional community emerged. This process is not solely the product of imposing a narrative that suppresses local memories and sentiments. Instead, it involves standardizing emotions within a putative nation by integrating the tragic and triumphant memories of local communities into a grand national narrative.
Confino’s (Reference Confino1993, Reference Confino1997) foregrounding of the “local” level of national experience offers a valuable complement here. His argument that the nation becomes meaningful through localized metaphors and memories aligns with Faraldo’s attention to frontiers and peripheral communities. Just as Faraldo demonstrates how Polish settlers in the recovered territories formed emotional communities centered on their localized fears and hopes, Confino reminds us that such local experiences are not secondary to national projects but rather constitutive of them. In his work on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Imperial Germany, particularly in the Kingdom of Württemberg (1871–1918), Confino shows that national emotional regimes succeed only to the extent that they translate abstract narratives into the idioms and emotional repertoires of everyday local life. His comparison between the failure of Sedan Day commemorations and the success of Heimat culture captures this dynamic: whereas Sedan Day, imposed from above, failed to evoke strong popular emotions, Heimat traditions flourished precisely because they resonated with people’s everyday attachments to place and community. This insight underscores why the study of nation-building must extend beyond state-centered narratives to the varied local contexts where national feeling is negotiated and reproduced.
Shifting the focus to historical transitions
Another critical extension of linking nation-building to emotion regulation involves challenging the assumption that national histories progress steadily toward harmony and instead examining historical transitions, including those that disrupted unity and the harmonization of emotions. An example of a study that examines a critical historical juncture through the lens of emotion regulation is Nagler’s (Reference Nagler and Gienow-Hecht2010), which analyzed the reactions in US society to World War I — characterized by intense hatred toward European enemies and their co-ethnic citizens in the USA, as well as fervent national ardor. Propagated by the government, these emotions contributed to the widespread embrace of world leadership as a defining element of many Americans’ national identity for decades. Fortier’s (Reference Fortier2005) discussion of the “politics of shame and pride” in the UK in the late 1990s and early 2000s presents a more recent example, emphasizing struggles between competing nation-building efforts. While some public actors sought to advance a superethnic Britishness by evoking shame and guilt over the racist history of an English-centric Britain, others aimed to evoke pride in Britain’s grand history (and, for some, in their English identity).
Still, while exposing the efforts to evoke and channel emotions to shape the boundaries and meaning of the nation — in itself an important contribution — Fortier’s argument shares the top-down focus of most research on historical nation-building. Specifically, it does not examine what makes opposing emotional appeals successful and with whom in a diverse population. Furtheremore, it does not address what determines the outcomes of these struggles, particularly shifts in the content, popularity, and salience of national beliefs. A more comprehensive framework for analyzing historical transformations should move beyond such a top-down model and instead consider the dynamic interactions between communities of feeling — whether geographically rooted or abstract (such as ideological or political “camps”) — and the affective-discursive canon promoted by official national pedagogy, both in relatively stable periods and especially during crises. This perspective should provide a deeper understanding of the twists and turns in national histories, challenging the notion that nation-building is a linear process inevitably leading to cohesive nations with uniform emotional tendencies. Integrating this approach aligns with and advances cultural sociology’s understanding of nations as sites of struggle over collective boundaries, narratives, and meaning (Bonikowski Reference Bonikowski2016), whose outcomes are not predetermined and whose members do not always share strong affection or tight bonds (Hochschild Reference Hochschild2018; Feinstein Reference Feinstein2024; Bonikowski, Feinstein, and Bock Reference Bonikowski, Feinstein and Bock2021). Contemporary conflicts over competing visions of nationhood continue to spark intense emotions, even in long-established nation-states such as Germany, the UK, France, the USA, and the Netherlands. These ongoing struggles reaffirm the importance of an emotion-centered approach to studying nation-building and reshaping — one that incorporates insights from the groundbreaking studies reviewed in this section.
Nationhood reproduction
For years, Thomas Scheff has been the most persistent theorist of national attachment (Scheff Reference Scheff1988, Reference Scheff and Calhoun1994, Reference Scheff2007), arguing that pride and shame serve as “master emotions” that signal the strength of national bonds. However, most scholars have avoided integrating Scheff’s ideas into their arguments. One reason may be discomfort with his psychoanalytic framework (Heaney Reference Heaney2013). However, a more significant factor is his focus on pathological nationalism — such as fascism and nationalistic wars driven by heightened hatred and rage (Heaney Reference Heaney2013, 250) — which contrasts with the dominant trend of studying everyday muted manifestations of nationalism. In this section, I discuss a notable emotional turn in research on “banal nationalism.”
The so-called “affective nationalism” research line, initiated by political geographers, challenges an alleged cognitivist bias in the literature on the everyday reproduction of nationhood. Since the publication of Billig’s (Reference Billig1995) seminal Banal Nationalism, numerous studies have examined how physical objects — flags, monuments, street names, coins and banknotes, and even cars’ license plates — and public discourse sustain mental images of nations and nation-states (for example, Fox and Miller-Idriss Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008; Skey Reference Skey2017; Leib Reference Leib2011; Hammett Reference Hammett2021). However, the affective nationalism literature has expanded this focus to explore how everyday encounters foster emotional attachments to the nation, its institutions, and its territory (Jones and Merriman Reference Jones and Merriman2009; Antonsich et al. Reference Antonsich, Skey, Sumartojo, Merriman, Stephens, Tolia-Kelly, Wilson and Anderson2020; Militz and Schurr Reference Militz and Schurr2016). A key principle in this line of research is that the objects Billig identified as “forgotten reminders” of the nation not only reinforce it as a cognitive construct — the aspect emphasized in the “banal nationalism” literature — but also, following Sara Ahmed’s (Reference Ahmed2013) argument that emotions “stick” to certain objects and spaces facilitates the transmission of affect, binding individuals emotionally to the nation and the nation-state. Feminist critiques of nationalism studies have inspired the shift towards focusing on everyday emotional experiences, challenging the field’s traditional emphasis on masculine geopolitical spectacles, particularly wars. By redirecting attention to the micro-level mechanisms through which national imagination and attachment are formed, these critiques highlight how nationhood is not only constructed through major events but is also continuously experienced, negotiated, and reinforced in daily life (for reviews, see Militz and Schurr Reference Militz and Schurr2016; Faria Reference Faria2014).
This focus on everyday affective experiences resonates with Confino’s (Reference Confino1993, Reference Confino1997) earlier conceptualization of the nation as a “local metaphor,” according to which people come to feel the nation through familiar routines, cultural references, and practices that make the abstract nation tangible in daily life. Most of the affective nationalism literature focuses on nation-reproducing objects and spaces. Kaplan (Reference Kaplan2018) highlights, in contrast, how intimacy between strangers fosters a sense of national “we-feeling.” This intimacy can arise through both direct participation and passive observation in various contexts, such as social clubs, reality TV viewership, and social media interactions.
From harmony to power relations
Whether focusing on encounters with physical objects, spaces, or other people, studies in the affective nationalism literature emphasize that relationality is pivotal to people’s national identification. As Heaney (Reference Heaney2013) explains, nationhood functions as an action-oriented habitus, a process “by which the relational and historical matrix within which an individual is enmeshed becomes part of the individual’s becoming and thereby structures the individual’s actions (nationhood is something one feels and does)” (p. 257). However, from this recognition of the relationality of nationhood that evolves through encounters with bodies, objects, and spaces follows that affective experiences in encounters likely nurture diverse feelings about nations, states, and institutions. Therefore, examining affective experiences through the lens of power relations expands the scope of analysis beyond the emotions tied to inclusion and recognition — such as national pride, security, and content — to those associated with exclusion, marginalization, or subordination, including fear, resentment, alienation, humiliation, and despair. Ethnic, racial, and religious minorities are particularly susceptible to those negative emotions in their daily lives, as they frequently navigate asymmetrical interactions with institutions such as law enforcement, judicial systems, and welfare agencies, which differentially recognize or misrecognize their membership in the nation and social worth (Tolia-Kelly Reference Tolia-Kelly2020, 590). Furthermore, power and emotions are closely intertwined: dominant national frameworks shape how minority groups engage with spaces, symbols, and narratives, often eliciting negative affective responses, and, in turn, these unsettling encounters feed back into and reinforce the marginalization of minority groups or their positioning as outsiders (Antonsich and Skey Reference Antonsich and Skey2020, 582; Tolia-Kelly Reference Tolia-Kelly2020; Militz Reference Militz2017; Flam and Beauzamy Reference Flam, Beauzamy, Delanty, Wodak and Jones2008).
Considering power relations also leads to revisiting Billig’s banal/hot nationalism dichotomy because attributing banality to particular objects or spaces itself may be the outcome of dominant nationalism. As Closs Stephens (Reference Closs Stephens2020, 589) observed, it is difficult to resist affective-discursive canons because power and domination are experienced as inherently ordinary and everywhere. Therefore, whether people’s encounters with objects and spaces that symbolize a nation produce relatively weak or more intense emotions often depends on the power relations and conflicts present. Jones and Merriman’s (Reference Jones and Merriman2009) study of Welsh nationalists’ campaign in the 1960s and 1970s to replace English-only road signs with bilingual ones, along with Zubrzycki’s (Reference Zubrzycki2006) analysis of the late-1990s struggles in Poland over the placement of Christian crosses near the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial provides compelling examples of how seemingly “banal” representations of nations can evoke intense emotions in the context of struggles for recognition and dominance. In the Welsh case, bilingual road signs became emotionally charged as potent symbols of resistance to English dominance in public space and as claims for the public standing of Welsh after a long history of marginalization. In Poland, the struggle involved competing narratives of national memory: one framing the crosses as expressions of Polish Catholic identity and national suffering under Nazi occupation, and another rejecting them as a politicization that obscured difficult questions about Polish complicity while undermining Auschwitz’s status as a universal site of Holocaust remembrance.
Beyond the banal reproduction of nationhood
Due to its explicit efforts to refine Billig’s argument by emphasizing the role of emotions in the everyday reproduction of nationhood, the affective nationalism literature has largely adopted Billig’s notion that nationhood is reproduced through “banal” everyday encounters and, in turn, expressed in episodes of “hot” nationalism. A critical development has been the shifting away from the dichotomy through attention to what Closs Stephens (Reference Closs Stephens2016) terms “national atmospheres.” This approach extends research on nationhood reproduction beyond the daily encounters with “unwaved flags” (Billig Reference Billig1995), which do not elicit strong emotions and often happen to individuals without any experience of a group dynamic, to include moments of “happy flag waving” (Closs Stephens Reference Closs Stephens2016, 182), where large crowds of people collectively experience an infectious festive mood. People may have such experiences while sharing a physical space with others or through a virtual “campfire,” such as watching a national sports team compete on personal television screens.
Merriman and Jones (Reference Merriman and Jones2017) have proposed the most succinct description of how nationhood reproduction occurs through affective experiences that emerge relationally, with intensity levels that vary between individuals and over time:
National feelings, expressions, sentiments, affects, and spaces, then, take hold through the emergence of relational configurations that resemble the flickering of fire, affecting some bodies but not others, appearing in certain configurations while absent in others, and manifesting as ‘hot’ and contentious for some while burning invisibly for others. (p.605)
Merriman and Jones further emphasize that some people develop heightened national affective tendencies through repeated experiences:
the more-or-less consistent rhythmic refrains associated with particular national feelings, moods and atmospheres frequently affect and relate bodies with a degree of repetition and predictability, as some bodies develop a capacity or indeed a tendency to become affected more than others (ibid.).
Michael Skey has played a key role in challenging Billig’s banal/hot dichotomy, particularly through his work on ecstatic nationalism, which examines how collective rituals and ceremonies evoke intense emotions that shape national belonging (Skey Reference Skey2006, Reference Skey2011). Drawing on Lukes (Reference Lukes1975), he argues that in these ritualistic moments, the nation takes on a tangible form, becoming “a concrete community that can be seen, heard, and idealized” (Skey Reference Skey2006, 148). It is essential to recognize that not only joyful but also sorrowful ceremonies and rituals contribute to reproducing the emotional commitment of people to their home nation (Militz and Schurr Reference Militz and Schurr2016). More than merely making the nation perceptible, ecstatic nationalism inscribes it as a deeply embodied aspect of identity. As Jusdanis (Reference Jusdanis2001, 31) notes, “[n]ationalism works through people’s hearts, nerves, and gut. It is an expression of culture through the body.” Building on feminist scholarship on embodiment, studies have emphasized how bodily interactions generate national sentiment, highlighting the synchronization of movement — marching, chanting, clapping, singing, or praying — particularly in public spaces like stadiums, streets, and bars, but also in private settings such as homes during national celebrations (Closs Stephens Reference Closs Stephens2016). These experiences of intense feelings of unity and solidarity during rituals and ceremonial events leave lasting marks on participants (Berezin Reference Berezin2018, 250).
However, national ceremonies and rituals intended to promote unity may evoke different emotions depending on one’s position within structures of representation and power. These events may inspire admiration or awe in an outsider, such as a tourist. By contrast, individuals with strong national ties — whether residents or diaspora members — may feel pride, but also a sense of longing or exclusion. While dominant groups often experience excitement and confidence without questioning underlying power dynamics, national minorities may feel alienation or resentment. In Israel, for example, national memorial events reinforce pride among the Jewish majority while evoking discomfort among Arab-Palestinian citizens, whose exclusion from the national collective is compounded by traumatic loss, subordination, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Feinstein and Shehade Switat Reference Feinstein and Switat2019).
While research on ecstatic nationalism emphasizes predictable, ritualized expressions of collective feeling, Bergholz’s (Reference Bergholz2018) concept of “sudden nationhood” shows how intense, spontaneous emotions in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina could escalate local disputes into broader conflicts, reinforcing national divisions and collective identification outside formal ceremonies. Local, emotionally charged incidents — often stemming from personal altercations — could quickly acquire communal significance, turning private disputes into intergroup confrontations. These incidents reactivated traumatic memories of violence and atrocities committed by other ethnic-religious groups during World War II, shaping how those involved interpreted the incidents and challenging the official narrative of unity promoted by the Yugoslav communist regime. Notably, these emotional dynamics are far from “banal.” By attending to the affective experiences of ordinary people, Bergholz demonstrates that not only organized rituals but also ordinary but intense emotions play a decisive role in sustaining national divisions and reinforcing collective identification, thereby reproducing nationhood.
Tying emotions to meaning
As discussed in the sections on nation-building, one of the critical developments in research on national emotions has been drawing the connection between emotional regimes and collective narratives. Within the framework of affective nationalism, some scholars assume that national identity, like any social identity, is grounded in “unreflexive feelings” that sustain the group as a taken-for-granted social entity (Edensor Reference Edensor2002, 28–29). However, national socialization plays a critical role in linking national emotions to cognitive constructs, such as the nation’s symbolic boundaries and the geography of its homeland. For example, at educational institutions, tying an emotional recipe to narrative occurs through formal teaching and other activities such as games, day trips, and sing-alongs (Millei Reference Millei2021).
National rituals and ceremonies — those structured within the national calendar and those enacted in response to unexpected events such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or wars — play a critical role in this lifelong process, not only evoking feelings of unity and solidarity but also cultivating emotional norms that dictate how people should feel and which emotions they ought to express, while the discourse surrounding these rituals connects these norms to collective memories and narratives. For example, through memorial rituals, people learn that they are expected to experience emotions toward fallen national soldiers they have never personally known and that the appropriate response includes both grief and pride. Therefore, Wetherell and coauthors (Reference Wetherell, McCreanor, McConville, Barnes and le Grice2015) emphasize the need to examine not only the imposition of an emotional regime but also what they call an “affective-discursive canon.” Through repetition, national rituals embed emotions within cultural narratives and linguistic codes, collectively sustaining the nation’s emotional legitimacy and reinforcing a shared sense of identity and belonging. For example, in Memorial Day rituals, pride is linked through myth-making and symbolism to bravery and sacrifice — a link pivotal to the discursive canons of many nations. However, this characterization of affective-discursive canons does not imply that these canons are static. A comparison by Ismer (Reference Ismer2011) of Germans’ reactions to victories in two Football World Cup tournaments — their happy but publicly reserved response in 1974 was replaced by an open collective excitement and public displays of national rituals in 2006 — illustrates how affective-discursive repertoires can change, in Germany’s case, moving away from the post-World War II canon.
Linking feeling rules to collective narratives has contributed to a shift in nationalism research from focusing on the making and reproduction of supposed unified nationhood to examining internal struggles over the definition of nationhood as a complex composition of beliefs (Bonikowski and DiMaggio Reference Bonikowski and DiMaggio2016). While dominant groups and state institutions often have the upper hand in shaping affective-discursive scripts, it is equally important to consider how counter-hegemonic narratives emerge and whether they can drive social change. This perspective introduces a crucial element of human agency (Antonsich and Skey Reference Antonsich and Skey2017, 844), often overlooked in the literature’s focus on hegemonic reproduction. While reinforcing symbolic boundaries and hierarchies between the nation and Others, some national rituals and ceremonies serve as contested spaces where ideological factions within the nation vie to assert their preferred narratives of national history and visions for the future, shaping participants’ emotional engagement. Research on memory activism underscores the significance of this dynamic, highlighting how collective remembrance becomes a battleground for competing narratives and affective recipes (Gutman Reference Gutman2017; Ferrándiz Reference Ferrándiz2022; Goldberger Reference Goldberger2022; Rule and Rice Reference Rule and Rice2015). However, it is essential to explicitly connect memory struggles to emotions, both theoretically and empirically. Two fascinating case studies provide valuable illustrations. McCreanor and coauthors (Reference McCreanor, Muriwai, Wetherell, Barnes, Barnes, Skey and Antonsich2017) illustrate how Māori activism disrupts the state’s efforts to use New Zealand’s memorial days to promote national unity and evoke happiness and pride, instead foregrounding Māori painful defeat, oppression, and ongoing marginalization. Similarly, Zembylas (Reference Zembylas2013) examines how, in Greek-Cypriot school ceremonies, a counter-hegemonic commemoration challenges the dominant narrative of Greek-Cypriot victimhood and heroism in wars with Turkey by highlighting the shared suffering of Greeks and Turkish Cypriots and prescribing reconciliation through shared grief.
Intense national emotions, mobilization, and change
Most theoretical ambitions and empirical research on national emotions in the past several decades have focused on the historical and contemporary production and reproduction of nations as communities bound by shared narratives and emotional repertoires, including people’s everyday banal encounters, experiences of ecstatic nationalism during ceremonies and rituals, and the emotional experiences of groups excluded or marginalized by national affective-discursive canons (as reviewed in the previous sections). Far less emphasis has been placed on how the emotional dispositions cultivated through pedagogy, everyday encounters, and ritualistic practices of nationhood can give rise to intense emotions that drive political mobilization (Calhoun Reference Calhoun, Skey and Antonsich2017, 19). However, several crises — including extreme ethnic violence and civil wars in several parts of the world, reactions to the September 11 attacks in the USA, the legitimacy crisis in the European Union and the success of the Brexit movement in the UK, the increasing polarization and the rise of populist authoritarian leaders in democratic countries, and, most recently, the wars in Ukraine and Israel and Gaza — have served as powerful reminders that beneath its veneer of banality, nationalism often hides a deep sensitivity that can turn fervent and resentful (Spasić Reference Spasić, Skey and Antonsich2017, 41).
The September 11 attacks, in particular, significantly boosted research on national emotions, as scholars sought to explain why the majority of US citizens rallied behind President George W. Bush and the declared “war on terror.” Investigations of this phenomenon have been approached through four theoretical frameworks. The first two attribute emotions to the confrontation with external enemies. Studies grounded in social and political psychology have directly linked public fear and rage to the security crisis, framing these as national emotions grounded in a shared sense of vulnerability that fueled militancy and strengthened support for national leadership (Huddy, Feldman, and Cassese Reference Huddy, Feldman, Cassese, Neuman, Marcus, Crigler and MacKuen2007; Schildkraut Reference Schildkraut2002; Halperin and Sharvit Reference Halperin and Sharvit2015, 82; Bar-Tal, Halperin, and De Rivera Reference Bar-Tal, Halperin and De Rivera2007). In contrast, building on his sociological theory of emotions, Theodore Kemper (Reference Kemper and Barbalet2002) attributed the intense emotions in the USA following the September 11 attacks primarily to the symbolic assault on the collective worth of the American nation — its honor and international prestige. When official rhetoric and popular discourse reframed the crisis as an opportunity for the nation to demonstrate its resilience through military action abroad and displays of unity and solidarity at home, emotions such as pride, confidence, and hope intensified, leading most Americans to rally behind military response and the president (Feinstein Reference Feinstein2022).
The two remaining frameworks for discussing intense national emotions in the post-September 11 era have shifted the focus from intergroup conflict to intragroup dynamics. Building on Émile Durkheim’s (Reference Durkheim2001[1912]) concept of “collective effervescence,” Collins (Reference Collins2004) has attributed the surge in national unity in the USA after the attacks to people’s participation in “rituals of solidarity” (rallies and candlelight vigils). These rituals, he argued, created a unique intersubjectivity among participants as they focused on one another and synchronized their movements, chanting, and flag-waving. Collins later coined the term “time bubbles of nationalism” to describe periods of heightened national unity and emotional intensity that emerge through frequent ritualistic activities (Collins Reference Collins2012). In contrast to Collins’ emphasis on ritualistic behavior, several authors linked intense emotions to national meaning-making, particularly by attributing the widespread emergence of such emotions to the use of elements from the national cultural toolbox to interpret the terrorist attacks on the United States and justify the decision to pursue a military response. For example, Ross (Reference Ross2013, 68–73) highlighted how the news media invoked the collective trauma of the Pearl Harbor attack and memories of the subsequent heroic US intervention in World War II, transforming Americans’ initial anxiety into a mix of rage, pride, and confidence. These arguments echo earlier studies on the 1990s Balkan Wars, which have shown how leaders and media leveraged collective trauma to evoke emotions and drive war mobilization (Denich Reference Denich1994; Oberschall Reference Oberschall2000).
Unlike the two major research trajectories discussed in the previous sections (the study of nation-building through the history of emotions and research on the reproduction of nationhood through affective nationalism), no epistemic community has yet emerged to systematically theorize the causes and effects of intense antagonistic national emotions. This lacuna is also evident in scholarly writing on the rise of nationalistic authoritarian leaders and increasing political polarization in many countries worldwide, which often highlights the efforts of populist politicians to provoke nationalistic emotions. Many authors have highlighted the propagation of a “cultural survivalism” sentiment (Richards Reference Richards and Demertzis2013, 12) among groups that feel threatened by economic insecurity and the demographic and cultural changes in their countries. Nationalistic leaders exacerbate these fears and concerns through a rhetoric that invokes shame about the nation’s present, nostalgia for a lost glorious past, and fear and hostility toward those blamed for the nation’s decline and humiliation — immigrants, minorities, and the progressive left accused of eroding the nation’s moral values and distorting its history (Richards Reference Richards and Demertzis2013; Kinnvall Reference Kinnvall and Demertzis2013; Wettergren and Jansson Reference Wettergren and Jansson2013; Mattingly and Yao Reference Mattingly and Yao2022; Tokdoğan Reference Tokdoğan2020; Skey and Antonsich Reference Skey and Antonsich2017, 323).
The writing on political polarization and the rise of nationalistic authoritarian leaders has focused on the “supply” side — analyzing leaders’ messages — while the “demand” side — why certain societal groups at particular historical moments and across different periods are more receptive to neo-nationalism — remains underexplored.Footnote 1 Two notable exceptions are Hochschild’s (Reference Hochschild2018) study of Tea Party supporters in a US town (Lake Charles, Louisiana) in the year leading up to Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency in 2016, and Illouz’s (Reference Illouz2023) study of the emotional basis of support for right-wing populism in Israel. While Hochschild’s argument centers on the grievances of white working-class conservatives in rural communities, nationalism has a significant role in her argument because the emotions stemming from these grievances (which Trump helped propagate) were woven into a “deep story” that included a nationalist framework. Feeling “left behind” was tied to the American Dream national ethos, and channeling resentment and rage toward ethnic minorities and immigrants (and their alleged liberal allies) reflected a reframing of the class-ethnic/racial interests and grievances into an ethno-national boundary work. Illouz delves even deeper into the emotional structure that serves as fertile soil for nationalistic populist rhetoric. She singles out four emotions: fear, rooted in collective traumas and their articulation in national narratives; disgust toward national “others,” nurtured through decades of occupation and segregation practices; resentment toward ethnic groups within the nation, stemming from experiences of economic deprivation and cultural marginalization; and the transformation of these emotions into intense (chauvinistic) love of the nation. In light of these two important studies, the sources and triggers of emotions that drive people to rally behind authoritarian leaders, feel strong antagonism toward political rivals and state institutions, and, for some, even result in violence (the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol is a notable example), should become a focal topic in nationalism research, which should cover a broad range of political phenomena.
In a recent article (Feinstein Reference Feinstein2024), I have developed a theory of the sources and triggers of intense national emotions, as well as the circumstances under which intense emotions increase national unity or polarization. Similar to the increasing attention to the links between emotions and national narratives in the two research areas discussed in the previous sections, my theory centers on the depth of national cultural repositories filled with emotion-laden memories, myths, narratives, and symbols and on internal struggles to define an authentic (or “true”) national core. The theory proposes that (a) the combination of two factors — the emotional commitment of individuals to their nation, which helps them cope with existential anxieties, and the precariousness of the nation as a constructed belief reliant on contested historical narratives — makes national identification a source of intense potential energy; (b) national narratives, along with the idioms and symbols that represent them, form a cultural toolbox that people rarely reflect upon in stable times but which become more articulated and explicit during crises, particularly when (through leaders’ rhetoric and the public discourse) events become “nation-disrupting events” that challenge core, taken-for-granted national beliefs; and (c) intense national emotions can increase unity (this is most likely during conflicts with enemies if leaders pledge to defend national honor and prevent humiliation) or fuel internal divisions if political leaders frame political competition as battles over the definition of collective identity.
This cultural sociological approach to intense national emotions offers several advantages for nationalism research. First, it does not equate intense national emotions with other types of group experiences, as some approaches (reviewed earlier in this section) do by attributing emotions primarily to intergroup dynamics. Instead, it emphasizes nations’ cultural “thickness” and internal contestation, aligning with hermeneutic research that explores how national historical narratives and symbols are created, maintained, contested, and transformed (Bodnar Reference Bodnar1992; Olick and Levy Reference Olick and Levy1997; Rousso Reference Rousso and Goldhammer1991; Zubrzycki Reference Zubrzycki2006; Griffin Reference Griffin2004), often focusing on traumatic or nostalgic collective memories (Boym Reference Boym2008; Hodgkin and Radstone Reference Hodgkin and Radstone2003; Vinitzky-Seroussi Reference Vinitzky-Seroussi2002; Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson2017; Malešević Reference Malešević2022). Second, adopting this framework aligns with shifts in research on nation-building and research on the everyday reproduction of nationhood toward focusing on the links between emotions and national meaning-making (as discussed in the previous sections). Third, this framework does not downplay the effects of intergroup rivalry but attributes intense emotions not directly to engagement with national others but rather to how these encounters shape perceptions of the home nation — specifically, how people interpret the situation and collective reaction vis-à-vis their idealized image of the nation. Fourth, this approach also does not downplay the significance of ceremonies and rituals but repositions them within the causal scheme leading to mass mobilization. Rather than serving as the primary source of intense emotions, ceremonies and rituals are moments where participants’ preexisting emotions — which influenced their choice to attend — are amplified, synchronized, and directed. Ultimately, this approach underscores that intense national emotions are not fleeting outbursts, but rather integral to deeper processes through which nations reinterpret their pasts, reshape their collective self-concept, and transform their cultural and political landscapes. By situating intense national emotions within the rhythms of contestation, crisis, and mobilization, it contributes to a theory of historical change that clarifies how nations actively remake their historical trajectories. Methodologically, this highlights the importance of tracing not only the content of national narratives but also the emotional dynamics that underlie their transformation, offering a framework for understanding how nations’ histories are continually rewritten and their futures reimagined.
Moving forward
The three topics that structured this review — historical nation-building, the reproduction of nationhood with its internal variations and struggles, and periods of intense emotions that drive political mobilization and may become historical watersheds — will likely remain central to research on national emotions. The developments highlighted throughout this article — linking emotions and emotion regulation to meaning through national narratives, expanding research to national peripheries, and challenging the illusion of harmony by emphasizing power relations and dialectical change — remain incomplete. Therefore, my primary recommendation for future research is to further explore these directions.
Certainly, diversifying the geographic locations and contexts of data collection on emotions would enhance research and theorization of national emotions. However, two scope expansions are particularly essential. First, in light of the increasing immigration from the Global South to relatively wealthy and stable countries, as well as the resistance to assimilation from both immigrants and host societies, research on national emotions should focus more on national diasporas. This investigation should explore both how communities of feeling are co-produced in national diasporas through community-building activities, rituals, and connections with the homeland (Milani, Levon, and Glocer Reference Milani, Levon and Glocer2019; Lainer-Vos Reference Lainer-Vos2013; Wulff Reference Wulff2007) and how diasporic nationhood is reinforced through daily encounters with people, spaces, and objects that serve as affective reminders of otherness (Sumartojo Reference Sumartojo, Skey and Antonsich2017).
Focusing research on national diasporas should also benefit research on intense national emotions. In the past decade and a half, several regional crises have sparked intense emotions that sprang political activism by members of national diasporas far away from their homelands — for example, during the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions (Moss Reference Moss2022) or more recently, in response to the wars in Ukraine and Israel and Gaza. Moss’s book on diaspora mobilization during the Arab Spring serves as a crucial reminder that the study of intense emotions in diasporic communities should focus not only on reactions to international conflicts — often the most apparent catalyst for diaspora mobilization — but also on passionate struggles within nations. One of the most intriguing questions for future research is whether intense emotional responses to events in a distant homeland that lead to widespread activism abroad can generate (or accelerate) structural changes in the diaspora’s country of residence. Such changes may include raising the salience of specific issues in public discourse, provoking adverse reactions toward the diasporic community, or, as a consequence of both, shifting the balance of political power by strengthening some parties while weakening others. If so, this phenomenon could be termed “transnational eventfulness,” capturing how intense emotional responses to homeland events acquire structural consequences in countries of residence.
Second, cyber networks and spaces should be central to studying national emotions, as they provide unique environments where individuals, groups, and digital artifacts interact in emotionally charged ways. Liu’s (Reference Liu2019) pioneering work reminds us that digital platforms are not merely neutral arenas for communication, but rather sites where nation-centered emotions are actively shaped and contested. Future research should examine how such emotions are evoked, transmitted, amplified, and reconfigured across virtual platforms, including through written, visual, and multimodal forms such as posts, memes, emojis, and videos. What is at stake are not only new modes of emotional expression but also the infrastructures that mediate them. Global connectivity fosters transnational affective linkages, while algorithm-driven echo chambers reinforce identity and ideological divisions. This raises pressing questions about how digital platforms reshape the dynamics identified in the three research lines reviewed earlier. Concerning nation-building, digital environments offer opportunities to examine how emotional communities form online, how they negotiate or resist shared emotional rules, and how they sustain, challenge, or reconfigure collective memories and narratives. For the reproduction of nationhood, everyday digital encounters — ranging from shared hashtags to viral jokes — can generate banal attachments or spark contestation over affective-discursive canons. And in moments of crisis, digital “rituals of solidarity” or algorithmically amplified narratives can transform latent attachments into intense emotions that mobilize action across borders. Perhaps most intriguingly, algorithms themselves should be conceptualized as actants (Latour Reference Latour1987), whose ranking, recommendation, and filtering mechanisms actively shape national and transnational communities of feeling.
To address these questions, nationalism research can benefit from adopting methodological tools capable of capturing emotional and discursive dynamics at scale and with precision. Natural language processing can be used to detect and classify emotional and evaluative language across large text corpora, including news, forums, and social media. Computational sentiment analysis enables the assessment of the intensity and polarity of nation-centered expressions, providing a systematic approach to studying a wide range of national emotions such as pride, shame, fear, resentment, and hope. Topic modeling can uncover latent themes and narratives that structure national discourses, shedding light on how emotion-loaded collective memories and myths circulate online. Multimodal content analysis enables the tracking of how images, memes, and videos convey or amplify national emotions alongside text, thereby extending the study of affective symbols beyond traditional artifacts, such as flags and monuments. Network analysis can map how national emotions and narratives — and competing emotions and narratives rooted in alternative social or ideological frameworks — circulate across communities, revealing clusters of belonging, lines of exclusion, and points of amplification. Applied together, these methods should allow researchers to trace how emotion-laden narratives travel across and between national centers and peripheries, how everyday attachments converge into moments of collective effervescence, and how crises generate “time bubbles of nationalism” in both digital and physical spaces, as well as the struggles and transformations that unfold over time. They also open the way for systematic study of the feedback loops between user expression and algorithmic amplification as well as attenuation or suppression — mechanisms largely invisible to archival, survey, or interview-based research. Combined with qualitative and historical approaches, as well as survey-based and experimental studies, these tools can produce a more integrated understanding of how national emotions are produced, reproduced, and transformed, revealing both moments of intensification and decline, and linking micro-level encounters to macro-level conditions and processes of political and cultural change.
Crucially, these tools open new avenues for research on neo-nationalism, populism, political polarization, and authoritarianism — issues that now dominate the study of nationalism and politics. Computational approaches can reveal how populist and authoritarian leaders mobilize nation-centered emotions and how digital platforms foster polarized affective communities where narratives of belonging and exclusion are contested. These computational approaches should help researchers better map the affective logics underlying contemporary political divides and trace how nationalism evolves and operates in the digital age.
Disclosure
I used AI tools exclusively for language editing to improve grammar and style. All substantive research content, arguments, and analysis are entirely my own.
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