The Universality of Banal Nationalism, Or Can the flag hang unobtrusively outside a serbian post office?

Abstract

Ivana Spasić in her chapter examines the concept of banal nationalism from a perspective embedded in the contemporary Serbian society as an instance of global semi-periphery. Such a vantage point helps detect three different, and sometimes divergent, meanings of the “banality” of banal nationalism: the geographical, the substantive, and the cognitive. It is argued that Billig's failure to deal in a more systematic manner with this ambiguity, as well as with other dimensions of banal nationalism that are bound to vary across national contexts, detracts from the concept's ability to travel beyond its original location of the advanced, democratic West.