Conference Draft – For Distribution at Nationalism and National Identities Today: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, CRONEM, University of Surrey, June 13th 2007Not to be reproduced or cited without author permission. Comments to author welcome at robin.mann@ageing.ox.ac.uk

The Personal Contexts of Nationalism: Class, Indifference and Resentment

Robin MannOxford University

(With Steve Fenton, Bristol University)

Abstract

There is an important strand of scholarship which argues that we need to explain “ethnicity” within the social and personal contexts in which ethnic identities and sentiments are created and enacted. But there has been little attempt to consider whether, and if so how, attitudes to the nation may be informed by experiences and events at the personal level. Adopting a case study approach, this paper focuses upon the lives of four “white English” individuals. Treating each respondent’s accounts of their social milieu as the analytical starting point, the paper investigates how wider self-understandings and personal experiences inform a particular orientation towards nation, place and the country. In further exploration of this it tentatively argues that the salience of “resentful nationalism” is intensified when articulated through a sense of personal or social decline and failure. This is then demonstrated through reference to those with both “resentful” and “indifferent” orientations.

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Introduction

Within scholarship on nations and nationalism, there has, in recent years, been an increasing effort to document the subjective sense of national identity and belonging as constituted within everyday life. And while nationalism scholarship overall remains broadly committed to examining nations and nation-states as macrocosms of historical social change, there is now widespread acknowledgement that explaining personal, everyday and local attachments to the national community are of equal sociological import (Anderson 1983, Brubaker et al 2006, Fox 2004, Hobsbawm 1992). It is perhaps Anderson’s (1983) Imagined Communities that initially stated the need to explore people’s attachments to the nation (see also Phillips 2002). We can also recall Anthony Cohen’s (1996: 803) argument regarding the “anonymizaton of the human subject” in explanations of nationalism. As he argues:

…to see identity as being derivable from membership of a nation or group – be it an ethnic, kinship or descent group, a sect, class, gender, initiation cohort or whatever – is implicitly to deny that individuals construe their membership and their sense of themselves in very different terms. In a sense it renders these individuals as merely members of these collectivities (1996: 803).

Indeed, in the UK, there is now an established body of work aimed at both quantifying (Heath et al 1999, Heath et al 2006, McCrone et al 1998) and qualifying (Condor & Abell 2006, Jacobson 1997, Fenton 2007, McCrone et al 1998) the nature and extent of subjective national attitudes and imaginations. Despite the growing focus upon this, there has been little attempt to consider how national identification relates to experiences and events over the course of an individual’s life. National identities are commonly treated as free-standing social facts.

The value of quantitative approaches is in establishing the socially structured character of different national identifications. Equally however they are limited by a “one-dimensional” approach which treats the nation as one of a range social identities that neither overlap nor interact (Phillips 2002:598-9). Qualitative approaches are more adept at capturing the life contexts and active construction of national identity. Discourse analytical approaches for instance account for the self-management and presentation of national and ethnic identity talk (Condor 2000, De Cillia et al 1999,Verkuyten et al. 1995). The person is indeed present in these accounts, but only as isolated individuals detached from their social milieu. While we are notified of the nationality of these individuals, along with some other objective social characteristics (e.g. age, occupation, gender), we know little of the personal events and experiences that inform a particular articulation of national identity. Anthropology and cultural studies on the other hand have focused specifically upon thick descriptions of the everyday contexts and cultural icons (Edensor 2002) but often reduce individual biographies to fragments of talk (although see Baumann 1996). Rarely do studies retain a sense of the individual’s broader social experience that lies behind the extracted passage of talk. In effect they tell us how national identities are presented in conversation and social interaction, but tell us less about the social and personal location of nation-relevant statements. By failing to situate

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national identity as part of a wider account of a person life, we are unable to consider some key questions: To what extent does national identity form a central, or conversely marginal, aspect of their broader self understanding? How are particular orientations towards the nation informed by personal circumstances? When, and in which social contexts, does national belonging become meaningful?

While the qualitative literature documents the diversity in everyday discourses of the nation, there is no convincing argument as to what distinguishes the often contradictory representations – such as those who articulate strong, emotion-laden and highly personalised accounts of the nation from the ordinarily weak (Fenton 2007), or banal, expressions (Condor 2000). Billig (1995) and Smith (1991) provide explanations for the pervasiveness of national identity in terms of socialisation and exposure to national symbols and rituals, particularly in education, sport and media. But forms of cultural and social reproduction need not amount to anything more than an ethnic or national framing – a certain taken for granted-ness. This can be evident even among those who are indifferent to national identity, who are antithetical to nation-ness, but who nevertheless grant nationhood a certain facticity. In other words they point to its reproduction and taken for granted-ness in everyday life but not to an account of how and why it matters ordinarily to certain individual actors. Rather, in order to explain ethnic and national sentiments one needs to go beyond ethnicity (Fenton 2004) and refer to the context of “that which is not ethnic” (Eriksen 1993). Here we argue that in explaining the “national” we need to go beyond the nation.

In order to demonstrate how personal events and experiences over the course of ones life can inform ones wider sense of national belonging, a certain level of intimacy in presentation is required. In seeking to address this question, and to provide sufficient depth within the frame of an article, this article will focus on the lives of four individuals. Through this empirical exploration, we are looking to form an account of how different national orientations, indifferent, resentful and proud being key examples, are informed by personal events and experiences over the course of ones life. These micro-experiences then act as the “filling” for the otherwise empty ethnic or national category (Ruane & Todd 2004). The filling may be an ‘emotional charge’ where for example socially generated anger and resentment inform national sentiment; or the filling may be ‘meaningful’ where social and personal experiences provide layers of meaning for national orientations.

Nationalism, National Identity and Social Context

In support of the analytical approach undertaken here, a wider sociological inventory can be drawn upon. Bourdieu’s theory of practice provides a conceptual repertoire for refocusing our attention towards the individual actor, as well as providing a supporting account for the limiting of our analysis to only four individual case studies. The actor-level, yet non-subjective, perspective is most evidently captured within The Weight of the World (1999) – in which the reader is presented with around fifty accounts, or “short stories”, of male and female lives. As Bourdieu (1999) and his collaborators argue, one cannot understand ones position in the macro social order without reference to the

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directly experienced effects of social interaction within different social microcosms. Only through this “perspectivism” is it possible to capture the range of “ordinary suffering” generated within the contemporary social order. Following this, expressions of national belonging, particularly emotional or resentful expressions, need to be understood not simply in terms of objective social differences but with reference to a more nuanced social milieu. By emphasising the personal dimensions however, we do not mean to arrive at an individual, and potentially unsociological, explanation for nationalist sentiments. On the contrary, narratives of personal suffering will be influenced by a socially embedded “habitus” of expectations, self-understandings and values which are themselves shaped by social milieu and class position. Consequently, personal unease and resentment emerging from unfulfilled expectations and status frustrations can be found amongst both middle class and working class segments of the population.

The critical contribution of the idea of the social milieu, is that through it we can bring to life the living contexts with which class, place, and gender are experienced. As Sayer (2005:36) argues, emotional responses (so often associated with nationalist ideologies) are commonly influenced by previous experiences and often emerge around issues considered to be of social importance. It is not simply any discourse, such as a discourse of the nation, that produces an emotional response, “but discourses that refer to the kinds of things whose implications for ones well being and that of others make them matters of emotional concern” (Sayer 2005:38). With specific reference to ethnic conflict, Ruane and Todd persuasively demonstrate how intense ethnic sentiments are produced through a combination of individual and collective experiences. As such, in order to explain strongly-felt ethnic sentiments one needs to go beyond the category of ethnicity, and to consider its dependence upon “dense nested sets of linkages which themselves produce a multiplicity of ‘sub-communities’ at neighbourhood, local, town and regional levels” (2004:225). Under certain conditions, these linkages align and combine with each other to produce articulated ethnic oppositions and dualities. Following Ruane and Todd, it is entirely possible that the appeal of the discourse of the ‘nation’ is not simply connected to the ‘nation’ per se, but that the nation serves as a container through which a multiplicity of experiences can be linked together. The directly and indirectly experienced social changes, refracted through the life of an individual, are thus discursively ‘nationalised’.

A brief illustration of this can be provided with the case of Wales. In this context, the strength of boundaries between Welshness and Englishness in rural Wales surrounds the everyday experience of local changes (Bowie 1993, Thompson 1999). For example, the closing of the village primary school, changes of language use in the local shop or outside the school gates, changes in housing ownership, or changes in the nature of work such as a shift from an agriculture to tourism based economy - these are changes which, at least as far as local actors themselves are concerned, are considered to be of personal importance and can even engender a sense of personal loss (Mann 2007:218-9). Moreover, the personal and local salience of Welshness is precisely to do with its multidimensionality – that is its close interrelation with both social experiences connected to class, language, place and religion as well as particular material contexts such as housing, schooling, employment.. We find that respondents in our Leverhulme

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study also referred ‘country’ and ‘nation’ to tangible local contexts rather than abstract debates or symbols (such as the crown).

As Brubaker et al have recently argued, to study ethnicity in isolation from other social experiences that constitute everyday life is “to risk adopting an over-ethnicised view of social experience” (Brubaker et al 2006:15). To focus one-dimensionally on national identity therefore – that is national identity as prior and in isolation to other social identities – is to misconstrue the set of meshed, unspecified experiences from which it manifests itself. To understand why nation matters it is not sufficient to refer simply to its pervasiveness and social availability as a discourse, rather it needs also to be in a sense anchored through reference to personal experience.

Methodology

The interview data presented here is based on a research project forming part of the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship1. In total, 100 in-depth interviews and 10 focus group discussions were conducted between July 2004 and August 2005 across 2 research sites – Westown, a small rural town and Southdown, a multiethnic, inner city area of Bristol. In all cases, respondents were asked to take part in a study examining attitudes to social changes in Britain. The interviews were carried out using a topic guide based on four key themes – a sense of local place; work and getting on in life; national identity and attitudes to multiculturalism. The first two themes – place and work – therefore, provide the personal and social contexts to the subsequent themes of nationhood and ethnicity. In structuring the topic guide in this way, we were able to examine how the nation was indirectly articulated by respondents as part of their experiences of local place and getting on, before they had been prompted to talk about the nation directly. The aim of this analysis then is to demonstrate how different orientations to the nation relate to respective experiences, and interpretations of these experiences, over the course of individual lives. In deciding which sections of text to select, we focus upon three inter-related dimensions:

i. a sense of local and familial belonging;ii. a sense of getting on/or having got on in life;and finally;iii. a particular orientation to nationhood and a view of social decline.

The central concern of the analysis is not only to uncover orientations to nation, but to see these as both expressed within and related to social and personal life.

Reported Lives and the Nation

In what follows, the article will provide an in-depth analysis of four case study individuals – Mary, Mark, Karen and Brian. While the choosing of four individuals could be considered arbitrary, having been drawn from a much larger set of interviews, the cases have been purposively selected in order to contrast two examples of ‘resentful

1 Held jointly by University of Bristol and University College London.

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nationalism’ with two examples of ‘indifferent cosmopolitanism’ – each mediated through different place- and work-based contexts. Indeed, this contradiction between indifferent and nationalist expression was not only evident through our corpus as a whole, but did not at first appear to relate to standard concepts of class division. As such, they do not represent the ‘only’ cases to exemplify the argument. Rather, having analysed all interviews, these cases offer the opportunity of looking closely at personal life contexts whilst exemplifying key themes in our interpretation. In presenting each of the four cases, we have tried to retain a sense of the entirety of particular passages of talk. After this, we then provide some interpretations of our respondents’ stories.

Our first ‘personal context’ comes from ‘Mary’ who is new to Westown and is much influenced by her period living abroad.

1. MaryMary is in her mid-40s and has lived in Westown for one year. She is married with two children and is a full time mother. She was born and brought up in Nottingham where she also went to University. Like her husband, she qualified as a Pathologist and had worked in the Midlands area for a number of years before moving to the south of France some 13 years ago. She describes Westown and the decision to move back to Britain from France in the following way:

i. We came back for my husband’s work. We finished the job in France and couldn’t find another comparable job there…so we came back because there was an opening here…that was the only reason we came back at all. We didn’t want to come back…I mean who would? But we came to Westown because of the school…this area had the best state school. And we didn’t want to put them into private education…plus we like the aspects, because of the local community…still got a post office just…I would say that Weston is perhaps a little behind the rest of England I wouldn’t expect to go into some of the bigger towns and see that same sort of community.

And would you say that you belong here?

Not particular no…I don’t feel very Westownian…no we were here for two specific reasons as I say we wouldn’t be in the country if it weren’t for this…I don’t particular like some aspects of British life, which aren’t anything to do with Westown.

ii. I think I’ve had a great opportunity by leaving the country and going to live and work and bring children up in a different society…I was working in a hospital in France it was sort of part time work and office work and when I went out there I didn’t speak any French and it was difficult and I had two babies so I umm and I didn’t need to work so it was it was a really nice change actually…Yes, I think that’s I think is a great plus when I left not many people were doing that. Not many people were leaving…I know lots of people are now but it felt good to see how the rest of the world lives.

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iii. I’m English yeah can’t get away from it. I’m not terribly proud to be English but I am English…I think people have, people have lost a sense of pride in the country. They’ve had responsibility taken away from them by legislation and the government…and I just don’t think people give a shit anymore about the reputation of the country, and you know, they treat themselves as individuals. I don’t think people have a sense of Britishness anymore the younger age groups they don’t give a monkey about anybody or anything…the media likes to group us all together and make sweeping statements about Britain and Britons behaviour abroad...put umm England in a bad light…because we were on down the south of France and we were getting a huge influx of British in the summer…there were a lot more English families coming down to work that weren’t integrating terribly well, which didn’t go down to well in the local community…people didn’t have a very high opinion of the British population.

The town’s filthy…its something we’re not used to in France even though our people chew gum and smoke just as much in France but I mean its filthy…I mean its shocking you know…its most striking its just little things like that…and the way people dress…It doesn’t make you feel very proud when you see, you know, British holiday makers coming down.

Mary’s nationalism (partly articulated by her anger at not being able to feel proud)is based on the sense that Britain has declined just as (or in the same moment that) values of respectability, interpersonal good treatment and respect have receded, leaving a sense of social decline, along with disdain towards “scruffy Brits”. Sensibilities of class and status provide a frame within which views of ‘our country’ are expressed. Although Westown is a good place to live compared to the rest of the country, she would not have returned to Britain if given the choice. Alongside this, her sense of having got on is focused on the opportunities provided by living and bringing up a family in a different country. Mary could have positioned herself as part of a wider community of English expatriates living in France. Her class sensibilities, based on values of respectable behaviour, meant that the “other English in France” were viewed with disdain. Moreover, they symbolised the overall process of decline in values that has occurred around Britishness (and thereby Englishness). In this case therefore social class cuts across nationhood, leading to conflicting nationalisms. It is different from a football-centred English nationalism which she considers to be “pointless”. Her personal nationalism (Cohen 1996) emerges from, rather than in spite of, these social class distinctions in relation to a sense of decline and disorder in the country. Moreover, the decline of Britishness is also evident “back home” in the form of dirt and litter in Westown. The ‘resentful talk’ in her account is directed towards changing Britain, maybe her own reluctance to return to England, and her disdain for others who don’t care about anything.

2. MarkMark is a company manager in his early 40s. He was born and brought up in Westown but has spent a considerable amount of time living and working in Europe, largely as a result of his Swiss mother. As we can see below, whilst considering himself as English,

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he also considers himself to be Swiss and European. However, alongside this mixed national background, is a very rooted sense of Westown as home:

i. For me it’s home I suppose, the biggest thing is that my father’s family has been in Westown for as far back as you can trace…Westown is a place I have got roots, you know… my grandfather was born in this street, my father was born in the next street up, I was born just up there and my father was one of six children: one went to Canada and the rest live in the town… there are quite a lot of people in Westown who I suppose haven’t seen anything else, who have been here and that is it…I have got the luxury I suppose of being here because I want to be here, because of what it can give me, not just being here just because I was born here and I haven’t bothered to go anywhere else…I made a very conscious decision to be here, you know… there aren’t many people you can talk to these days, there aren’t many people to whom you can say ‘I come from there’ you know and they can say you know, their family is there for 400 years and the people say ‘I was brought up there’ and that gives I think security, that belongingness.

ii. I have probably done better than I would have expected…but equally I could have done better if I had carried on from the career side… so the decision to come back here was also really requiring me to give up the career and really get a job instead of a career because when I was with them, I, you know…the next move would probably have been up to Newcastle or it could have been Manchester or it could have been abroad…and yes you could say ‘no’ at times but you can’t keep on doing it…I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want my kids to grow up just anywhere and I can remember at the time a lot of people at the company said ‘you are so brave doing that!...but I didn’t think I was because it just seemed the right thing to do…they wanted me to move over to Germany to work at the European HQ a few years ago and become the IT manager there and I said no…so, ye, that had a cost on my career…there is a balance…but equally it does mean that I get home on time.

iii. I’m a bit mixed up. No I do consider myself to be English. I am probably English before British although nothing against the rest of the United Kingdom …especially coming from somewhere like Switzerland, everybody thinks you are English and you almost have to tell them: ‘yes I am English’ but actually it is Britain, you know there are other people there as well. …but yes I do feel myself to be English, I feel myself to be British and as I say I do feel myself to be Swiss as well…I think that that’s coming back to this thing about the Empire which the English aren’t very good at doing, it’s kind of ‘here we are take us or leave us but this is the way we do things’…one thing that does frustrate me is the whole big Europe issue, it’s feeling that we are not part of Europe…we actually have more in common with the French than the Germans have and we have got more in common with the Germans than the French have…and yet they get on…we don’t realize that we are kind of a melting pot of Europe…we kind of ignore that…and that frustrates me because you know I consider myself also obviously to be European.

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Mark is particularly aware, and to some extent critical, of his privileged, “middle class”, sensibilities. Also, like Mary, Mark has considerable experience of living in Europe. For both, Westown represents quality of life and a good place to send children to school. Unlike Mary however, his orientation to nationhood is relatively indifferent and cosmopolitan. Indeed, it is noticeable that he talks about security and belonging without ever mentioning the nation. While retaining a sense of Swiss heritage, he does define himself primarily as English but also considers himself as European. Again, it is the personal contexts of place and getting on that provide further elucidation. In particular, his orientation is informed by a position of being part of ‘an established family’ within the town – well respected and known in the wider locale. This engenders a particular “stake” in Mark’s case to combine his European cosmopolitan identity with an evidently secure sense of local belonging. This is evidenced by his – somewhat hesitant – recounting of choosing against geographical mobility in pursuit of career. While Mary is not living in Westown out of choice, Mark clearly wishes to emphasise his decision to live there as a “lifestyle choice”. In this sense, it is through his cosmopolitan worldliness that he maintains distinction from other “locals” who merely continue to live in Westown because they do not think much about anything else or have made a positive choice not to move. Arguably, therefore, his cosmopolitanism is no less informed by his middle class sensibilities around lifestyle choice, autonomy and education. Perhaps crucially, Mary expresses a certain anger about social decline, an emotional ‘charge’ that appears to be more or less absent from Mark’s story. Mark presents himself as ‘mixed up’ but this is evidently a benign array of different sentiments and not a source of anxiety.

3. BrianBrian is in his late 50s and has worked for the council as a caretaker for the past 18 years. Prior to this he has had various jobs including a dock worker in Avonmouth for 20 years. He and his wife have always lived in Bristol, in different parts, but in the same house in Southdown for about 24 years. Prior to the extract below, Brian was asked an opening question regarding whether he felt the neighbourhood had changed in his time living there:

i. Definitely yeah, got more recognition…well it’s more multi-racial, in fact it’s gone the other way now I should say, where I work which is down Greenville, there I would say is nearly all ethnic minority down there. You know we’re in the minority the white faces now…It’s getting this way up here as well yeah…Everybody around there who got a house there, who’ve lived there years and they want to move out, they’d have a hard job, they’d be pushed to sell their house because of that shelter down there…it does lower the tone of the area, you see them come out of there…they’re half cut or they’re on drugs or they’re on something or other you know…but sometimes it seems to me the council seem to go out of their way to make people’s lives a misery…okay you’ve got a nice area, let’s go along and spoil it for them. I worked for the council so I know what I’m talking about.

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ii. Yeah we’d all like a bit more like …..We got quite a good life…well it’s all according to what you need, obviously some they like ….it’s all according what sort of commitment you put in…obviously some people don’t want it do they, they seem quite content to sort of doss around and do nothing….. No matter how educated they are, well I know people that are educated that you know, they gone to university, I know them, and they don’t work, I know they spends all their time in a boozer, and I know for a fact there’s two to my knowledge very educated but, just didn’t want to bother with

iii. I think we’re losing the plot over here…on my job I see so much of it with all these asylum seekers and I see them on day to day basis…they’re being offered all sorts of accommodation…if you’re white down there living, you feel threatened, and I feel like I’m threatened in me own country you know and I think, it’s like you got to be ashamed to be British, that’s how I feel about our country, I feel like that I’m sort of British and proud of it, well why shouldn’t you feel proud of it but they think it’s like a dirty word, everybody else they can all be, oh they’re a Sikh, they’re this you know…but you can’t do it, well I mean we seem to be the only ones and it seems like our own government are encouraging it, and that’s, I don’t like that.

Our son’s married to a cop and he’s having to live in rented accommodation because um no way will he get council, he’s been on the council list for five years and he gets annoyed because there’s no chance but the Somalians are getting a flat like that…It seems like I’m coming over as like you know racist or that sort of thing, well see we’ve had Indians, Pakistanis, and they come over from the Commonwealth or whatever, they had all the rights in the world to be over here…we welcomed them with open arms, and I think a hell of a lot of them have done very good, you know, they got lovely you know, pretty high up you know the jobs they got. Well it seems like now any sort of sponger, they think well these people are not being persecuted…and I see that day in and day out where they demanding, I want this and I want that, and they’re running around breaking their necks to give it to them. I’m there I got to walk away from them I get so frustrated…I think if you had a politician who stood up and actually told the truth, I’d say forget about calling me a racist I’m just stating some facts you know, I think people would cheer him…I’m not talking about rivers of blood or like Enoch Powell, I’m not talking that sort of thing you know, or the you know these other crazy mob er, neo-fascists, I’m just talking about stating facts, I’m amazed many more people would come in to a little island like this, for swamped.

The overall impression of Brian during the interview was of a secure individual, but with an undertow of resentments against discursive outsiders. Indeed, of the four cases, it is Brian’s nationalism which is more focused upon “people coming in”. His talk is often framed as “what they are doing” by implication “to us”. He has a strong sense of “English-British” identity with evident frustrations around the failures of politicians, both local and national, to speak the truth about asylum and immigration issues. Yet it is also an account of a wider form of resentment based upon personal and local experience. His

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job puts him in regular contact with asylum seekers being housed by the council. But he was also scathing about a nearby homeless hostel and the types of people it brought to the area; a “gypsy problem” up the road, as well as people who don’t work. These “otherings”, along with his reference to work shy graduates, suggest that he is not entirely nationalist-racist in his orientation. Furthermore, Brian was on occasions very positive about living in a multicultural area and claimed to have very good relations with his black and Asian neighbours. Given this, is such resentful talk to be characterized as evidence of a pervasive nationalist racism? His talk could be certainly be represented as an example of commonplace anti-immigrant sentiment and racism. At the same time it may be construed in two importantly related ways: first as a discourse of resentment towards a range of “local outsiders” (both ethnic and non-ethnic), albeit one which, in this case, is significantly ethnicised or racialized (Fenton & Mann 2006 for a further discussion of this point); and second as a discourse of anger about work-shy people which is directed at both gypsies and graduates.

4. KarenKaren is in her late 30s and currently works as a legal conveyancer. She has always lived in Bristol but in different parts. She has lived in Southdown with her husband and two children for the past four years. She describes her reasons for living in Southdown in the following way:

i. Well price, obviously property prices were affordable when we sort of moved to Southdown and we like the area…we don’t like new estates because of not only the prices but the sort of people that tend to gravitate to those type of areas and the parks, we like them, we’ve got a dog so yeh…we’ve got kids here and the house is obviously quite large so it may outgrow us. The house might be too big but we don’t want to move away from this area. I don’t think we’ll be here forever but for the next decade or so…I mean there’s some bits to every area aren’t there that you don’t like, I mean there are, just round the corner you’ve got some problems with working girls now and again and things like that…but it’s not a problem I mean I don’t think, as long as they don’t sort of encroach on our life, it’s not a problem but then a lot of people look negatively at the area, you say where you come from and they sort of look down a bit, but no we like it so.

ii. We’re trying to achieve…I think we’re trying to sort of work up from where we began. We’re comfortable with where we are, we’ve got no massive aspirations I don’t think…I mean I wouldn’t aspire as long as we’re sort of comfortable and we’re happy and yes we’re ok. No massive aspirations…I mean I studied not maybe for financial reasons but because I felt I had more in me than what I achieved when I was at school, so that’s why I went back to study, it wasn’t to build up a massive wealth or whatever, it’s not important, still isn’t important…that was just for me because I didn’t feel as though I achieved what I should but yeh now we’re comfortable, we’re happy…it’s not been easy, I don’t think it’s been a easy ride for me, it’s a struggle, it’s been a struggle sort of…I’m certain you’re working but if you’re prepared to work there are opportunities there aren’t there, but it’s not easy for people at the lower end of the spectrum, but there are

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opportunities to be taken…some people are born sort of lucky I suppose. Some people fall into sort of really good professions or jobs or whatever that are really you know really lucrative some people are gifted, so you know. Sometimes perhaps, sometimes not.

iii. I’ve not really sort of made, you know I’ve not really got any firm views on it, although I don’t know what English is. I mean, black, blacks, Asians everybody’s English, everybody’s, everybody’s yeh so I consider it’s English yeh I suppose. If oh I don’t know, England sounds too confining doesn’t it so. They’re all of the same type of people as us, If we’re English, then they’re English and if we’re not then they’re not if that makes sense…It’s difficult as um, everything becomes more global to sort of categorise and I think an English attribute is, is that, are we talking about a white attribute again or you know, you can’t, the national dish now is a curry which, you know, people wouldn’t necessarily see as English would they so I don’t know, a very, very difficult and deep question which I’m unable to answer really, are you? [laughter]

Karen likes Southdown and considers it a nice place to live. She acknowledges the local presence of “working girls” and “drugs” but adopts a more or less “blasé outlook” towards these particular problems. Other people would probably view it as a “rough” area but she likes the mixture. Her story also comes across as one of upward social mobility. She is unambiguous in defining herself as working class and began her working life doing various secretarial work. Since this however, at the same time as raising her family, she got herself a degree and is now hoping to qualify as a solicitor. Of the four cases in hand, her orientation to nationhood appears most progressive. She has no fixed ideas about what it means to be English. On one hand she considers everyone to be English, not just whites, while on the other feels English to have a narrow feel to it, failing to truly reflect its diversity. Her views and attitudes come close to those described by Fenton (2007) in his discussion of a pattern of indifference towards national identity. She is inclined to reject “national categories” and sees herself as part of “a bigger picture”.

In considering the four cases together, Mark and Karen point in one direction – towards a sense of “happy” national belonging, thinned out by ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘multiethnic’ experience; yet Mary and Brian point in a distinctively different direction – towards a more “unhappy” mode based on a sense of decline. Equally, however, their social contexts cut across their senses of national belonging. Mark and Mary both espouse middle class sensibilities, they both live in the same street in the same ‘white’ small rural town and both have considerable experience of living abroad – and yet their sense of national belonging point in opposite directions. While Karen and Brian, despite their contrasting ethno-national sentiments - both define themselves as working class, and both live within the same multiethnic neighbourhood in Bristol. This is summarised in the table below:

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FIGURE 1: THE PERSONAL CONTEXTS OF NATIONALISM

RESENTFUL NATIONALIST COSMOPOLITANISTW

ESTO

WN

: WH

ITE

RU

RA

L TO

WN

Mary:Not living where she wants to live, moved because of husband’s work; Qualified Pathologist but has largely sacrificed her work to raise family. Ashamed to be English, no one cares about Britishness anymore.

Mark:Originally from Westown but “chooses” to live there due to quality of life; has managed to balance successful career as a company manager with spending a lot of time with family. Being European is more important than being English.

SOU

THD

OW

N:

MU

LTIE

THN

IC

NEI

GH

BO

UR

HO

OD Brian:

Has always lived in Bristol, Southdown for 24 years. Has worked as a caretaker for the council and comes into daily contact with “asylum seekers”. The country’s gone to pot and the whites are now the minority.

Karen:Has always lived in Bristol, in different parts, views where she lives as one of the nicer parts. Has achieved considerably upward mobility in work while also raising family. Not bothered about being English, and approves of multiculturalism.

In exploration of this, what appears to be crucial in respect of these differences is the sense of autonomy and control over key personal decisions and over ones social situation, against a sense of having been affected. Furthermore, far from free-floating, these “differences” can be attributed to the class and status characteristics of the four cases: Mary is defined by her and her husbands professional middle class occupations which have drawn them into a Europe wide labour market; the disappointments of this (having to return to England) and maybe the sacrifice of her own career, are a source of tension and some anger. She couples this with a disdainful status attitude to low status English people whose behaviour is not acceptable by her standards. Mark is similarly defined by his middle class opportunities, a successful career and a sense of having achieved what he has sought after, and an ability to control his own destiny. Brian is working class in origin but frustrated by a non-mobile unrewarding working class occupation. He combines this with resentful attitudes towards incomers. Finally, Karen is working class in origin and in ‘status’ terms, that is, she is proud of her background. Equally she is upwardly mobile working class, achieving mobility within the horizons of many working class people, and satisfied with her gains. Like Mark, she has a sense of control and a democratic sense of accepting others.

The experiences of our four people are shaped by their class of origin and class of destination, and their attitudes are shaped by their view of their lives in relation to class based expectations. These experiences and modes of “digesting” their experience are

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converted into views of “the country”. This, in turn, engenders a particular interpretation around welcomed, or unwanted, social changes.

Discussion: Indifference and Resentment

At least two themes can be condensed from the interpretations of personal accounts within and without a national frame. One is the theme of resentment and the other the theme of cosmopolitan indifference. The classic formulation is that both dominant and subordinate class politics can be articulated in a mode of resentment deriving from frustrated class ambitions. Greenfeld (1992) and others (Brown 2000) have argued that the early modern nationalisms derived from the unfulfilled social ambitions of new elites articulated as being ‘for the people’, enabling suppressed class aims to be expressed as national ideology. More recently nationalist ideology and racist neo-nationalisms have been interpreted as grounded in the anger and social resentments of petty bourgeois (Wells & Watson 2006) and working class populations who see their livelihoods and once-protected social institutions being threatened. The combination of class frustrations, changed social environments, and anti-immigrant sentiments is the social foundation of neo-nationalist and populist politics in most European states (Svallfors 2004, Taylor-Gooby 2004). The term resentment itself derives some of its theoretical force from the deployment of the French term ressentiment by Max Scheler (1961, see discussion by Meltzer and Musolf 2002). The broader structural analyses are less adept at linking these socially structured frustrations to the personal lives of individuals, whilst qualitative studies frequently uncover these sentiments (Bourdieu et al 1999, Charlesworth 2000), as we have tried to do here. As we suggested here, Bourdieu is one whose work is outstanding in drawing together ‘personal suffering’ and structural constraints.

If these are social and personal sources of wider social frustrations taking on a national frame – a nationalism of resentment, it is in the cosmopolitan frame of mind that we see either a relaxed and “benign” set of national sentiments (“I suppose I like to think of myself as English/British”) or a stepping outside of the national frame altogether. We may speculate that these attitudes are typically linked to a measure of personal success, security and a relatively stable sense of place on the one hand, or a trans-national life-style on the other. Running through the theme of indifference, was an evident ability to narrate a sense of individual choice over where to live and achievement over both work and family life; as well as a sense of ease and happiness about a changing local and national environment. Unlike the theme of indifference, the theme of resentment entailed a failure or inability to narrate their external environments with the same sense of autonomy and distance – thus mirroring the “affective” quality of social resentments and anger (Barbalet 2002:153, Sennett & Cobb 1971). As these accounts illustrate, evaluations of personal success, and thereby personal suffering, do not simply map on to objective class positions, but can be understood as a combination of Bourdieu’s distinction between positional and material forms of suffering. Their lives have discernible class trajectories and their satisfactions and discontents are shaped by frameworks of expectation.

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Along with class frustrations and changing local environments, age and life course factors also appear as significant. It is surely relevant that Brian, as our most “resentful” case individual, is older than the other three individuals. Indeed, his references to “boat people”, “coloureds” and “rivers of blood” locate him in an earlier generation. It is surprising, given its near universal acceptance, that so few efforts have been made to understand why older people report higher levels of racial hostility compared to younger people, particularly given that not all old people do so. While older generations are commonly stereotyped as harbouring nationalistic prejudice based on a sense of decline from the “golden age”, a more sociological explanation could be to do with the distinct personal and family contexts of old people. As Dench et al (2006:186) find with their older respondents, negative attitudes to multiculturalism are far more prominent amongst those who have a wide range of family members living nearby and for whom kin and local community ties intertwine (see also Wallman 1986). Not only is their considerable overlap between old age and dense kinship ties, but those who do not have close family ties are less likely to have a “stake” in, and are more likely to ignore, the changes taking place (Dench et al 2006:187). From our perspective, therefore, it is no surprise that Brian’s anger towards “ethnic others” should have a general focus upon housing, along with a specific reference to his son’s difficulties in finding a house locally.

The intention of this article was to highlight the role of personal context in the production and reproduction of ethno-national identities and sentiments. Considerable miscellany in attitudes towards the nation can be found at the everyday level - much more so than is found within public and political propagations of the nation. A key contradiction, we argue, is whether such everyday attitudes are articulated through a mode of indifference and/or resentment. The social patterning of such modalities however cannot be captured, or indeed explained, solely with reference to objective social divisions of class, gender and age. Through accounts of ‘lives within a milieu’ we see how, for example, class and age structured experiences are personally translated into nation-relevant attitudes. In order to understand what underlies and justifies these different viewpoints, it is necessary to attend to the nuanced social milieu within which different personal circumstances and social experiences intertwine. To provide an illustration of this, our qualitative analysis focused upon a detailed description of four case study individuals. In so doing, we identified how different orientations towards the nation were informed by the respondents’ personal experiences, particularly in relation to social contexts of place and work. While the theme of resentment, commonly articulated through a sense of decline in the country, is associated with experiences of frustration and immobility in these domains, the theme of indifference is characterised by personal security and upward mobility in these domains and an attendant autonomy of the individual from potentially undesirable changes in the local and national context.

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