Lived Nation: Histories of Experience and Emotion in Understanding Nationalism

Abstract

The chapter introduces the concept of “lived nation” as a new perspective on studying nations and nationalism. By employing theories and methodologies from the histories of experience and emotions, the authors suggest a framework for analyzing how nations form and renew contexts for experiencing and feeling, and how the nations themselves are constructed in this process. Experiences and emotions are seen as mediators between different personal, social, cultural, and political spheres. Linked to discussions on everyday nationalism, personal nationalism, and national indifference, the chapter points toward future steps to be taken in nationalism studies, steps which will pay growing attention to historically varying bodily, material, and spatial contexts of experiencing.

Today’s Nationalisms and Their Challenge to Historians

Our book explores the nation as lived-through experiences and emotions: as objects, producers, and contextual frameworks of feelings, experiences, memories, and meanings. Our aim is to analyze the nation as an entanglement of the personal, social, and collective, transcending one-way causalities or top-down hierarchies. As an event or happening between people and social groups, the lived nation¹ is inevitably a more multifaceted and “messier” phenomenon than nationalism treated only as an ideology or discourse. By taking the history of Finland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as our empirical case, we want to develop ideas and methodologies to examine nations through the histories of experiences and emotions, burgeoning fields in current historiography.²

Our focus on experiences and emotions in the study of nations is accentuated by present-day politics around the globe. At the time of this writing, nationalism continues to persist and flourish in many different forms. It may appear in a statist form, sponsored by institutions and representatives of the state, but it is also eagerly consumed and produced at the grassroots of people’s personal lives. In resurgent nationalist “revolts,” discourses that were only recently considered to be on the fringe have gone mainstream. Populist right-wing movements have been sparked from below through horizontal social networks not related to the state but opposing it. Their anti-immigration and anti-establishment rhetoric is more focused on national pride and cultural identities than on any clear political ideology. Although there are certainly important financers and nodes of power contributing to mobilizing the new populist revolutions, their function can hardly be explained by top-down, state-centered models of nationalism.³

Adding to the uncertainties of the time, it is rare for an introduction to a history book to be written in the midst of such historical events. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has influenced the editing of our anthology very concretely—but, more importantly, it is yet to be seen how the pandemic will influence trends in globalization and nationalism, for example, the future development of nation-states vis-á-vis multinational entities such as the European Union. It is already evident that many responses to the transnational pandemic have been “national” or “nationalist” in essence—both in public policies and in informal rhetoric and practices.⁴

In short, it is clear that nationalism today cannot be considered a relic of the past; in its various versions, it is setting the agenda for the future. To borrow sociologist Jon E. Fox’s terms, in the new “hot” populist nationalisms we are seeing “nationalism on steroids” and “fireworks nationalism.”⁵ At the same time, the “cooler” and more latent versions of nationalism are doing equally well. Social psychologist Michael Billig famously employed the term “banal nationalism” to describe national feelings and identities routinely reproduced in people’s daily encounters with various national-symbolic artifacts. By living their lives inside the established nation-state structures and the nationally framed cultures, people are consuming nationalism on an everyday basis: for example, in buying food, watching sports, following weather forecasts, driving on a highway, and reading textbooks at school.⁶ It is important to remember that Billig’s idea is not to juxtapose banal nationalism with hot, more explicit nationalism—just the reverse. The embeddedness of nationalism in everyday lives can serve as a key to explaining the sudden outbursts of heated nationalism and, in the extreme, to understanding people’s apparent willingness to kill and die for their country. It is thus probable that the powerful emergence of hot nationalism today is linked to the continuities of banal, everyday nationalism in its implicit forms.⁷

For a historian of nationalism, present-day politics together with various social and cultural phenomena connected with national identity provoke a number of questions. First of all, to what extent is nationalism an -ism in any ideologically coherent meaning of the word? Starting with the philosophical works of Hegel and Herder, the study of nationalism as an ideology has represented one of the main veins in intellectual history; but this does not mean that people have had a great national philosophy in mind when feeling strongly about their nation or identifying with it. Therefore, it is worth looking at earlier forms of nationalism and nationhood, like those of today, without an interpretative overemphasis on the role of nationalism as an educated ideology. It also warrants asking how nationalisms may have worked differently in the past compared to today.

If, and when, nationalism as an ideology-based political identity forms too narrow a perspective to explain nationhood, then it is important to search for locations and manifestations for the nation other than political programs and ideological tenets. National feelings, identities, and ways of thinking have also maintained their strength in those countries (e.g., in Scandinavia) where public nationalist rhetoric, for a long time, was relatively temperate until the surge of right-wing populism in the 2000s. Nationalism has been embedded in welfare-state structures, and it has hibernated in informal spheres of culture and society other than the explicitly political one. Following the call for the study of everyday nationalism (see below), it seems useful to situate the lived nation in routine practices, experiences, human relations, and emotions—and to focus, for instance, on children and adolescents in order to understand transmission of and continuities in the forms of national belonging. Young people are targets for the renewal of the nation, but they also identify with the nation on their own terms, re-interpreting and occasionally challenging the designations imposed on them.⁸

The vigorous emergence and form of today’s nationalism are not easily aligned with the modernist narrative regarding the birth of nations and their development into nation-states. Instead of representing an evolutionary period in a linear historical timeline—“an Age of Nations”—it now seems plausible to see nationalism as a more episodic, wave-like phenomenon that may appear in different forms at different times—and then retreat into the background.⁹ Although the nation-states and their power structures have certainly provided nationalism with institutional coherence, nationalism seems to be a more complex phenomenon than top-down models would suggest. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann has proposed the use of complexity theory to understand these horizontal dynamics of “crowdsourced,” “viral” nationalism. According to Kaufmann, modernist theories of nationalism are too statist and elite-centered; instead, “national identity is like a forest, emerging from peer-to-peer flows and feedbacks more than via state direction, especially in our post-industrial, democratic age.”¹⁰ It may prove useful to test such perspectives on earlier nationalisms as well as on their distribution.

With the exception of works stemming mainly from Anthony D. Smith’s thinking,¹¹ all the classical theories in the history of nationalism are linked to the modernist paradigm. With various emphases and explanations, Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Miroslav Hroch have all seen the birth of nationalism occurring within the frameworks of nineteenth-century modernization.¹² As several chapters in our book illustrate, we by no means consider this body of scholarship irrelevant; yet, in line with the remarks above, it is worth asking whether our recent encounters with nationalism require having a fresh look at past nationalisms as well—and whether modernist theories of nationalism need revision. The re-evaluation of this history also feeds into current debates on present-day nationalisms.

New Perspectives in Nationalism Studies

Our suggestion for the historical analysis of nations, nationalisms, and national belonging in the past is to study “lived nations” as entangled histories of experiences and emotions. In order to overcome the dichotomy of top-down and bottom-up perspectives, we want to see “the nation” and “the national” as things that actually happen in people’s individual and social lives.¹³ We see experiences and emotions as a mediating sphere where the different impulses (personal, social, cultural, and political) mold into meanings, concepts, actions, and practices. This sphere is also dynamic and contested, marked by conflicting interests and the exercise of power. But before coming to this, we will introduce those initiatives in nationalism studies that have been seminal and thought-provoking for our approach. These initiatives are centered around concepts of everyday nationalism, personal nationalism, and national indifference. Much of this new work has been done in disciplines other than history, although we are, of course, not the first historians to utilize these perspectives.¹⁴

Noting that research on national identifications has tended to focus on institutions and elites, historian Eric Hobsbawm once regretted that we know little about how ordinary people of the past experienced nationhood in their everyday lives.¹⁵ Three decades later, this regret has not become outdated, even though some historians, such as Maarten Van Ginderachter, have grasped the challenge. In his work on the everyday nationalism of workers in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Belgium, Van Ginderachter sets the aim of tracing how ordinary people engaged with, enacted, ignored, and deflected the nation and nationalism in their everyday relations. He adopts a “sustained focus on sources from, and not merely about, ordinary people” and focuses on, for example, the accidental encounters of rank-and-file workers with national tokens. This approach shares some key characteristics of our idea of studying the lived nation as it seeks to bring together nationalism studies and social history while connecting macro-level explanation to micro-level analysis and discourses to daily practices.¹⁶

In social sciences and human geography there already exists a solid tradition of exploring everyday nationalism. While Michael Billig’s work on banal nationalism remains an important contribution to the scholarship—and can be integrated into the idea of the lived nation—here we draw especially from more recent studies on everyday nationalism. These studies place the making of the nation within social interactions, practices, and mundane everyday encounters between people, spaces, and materialities, and look into the ways in which people, in a more interactive manner than through simply absorbing the nationalist content, take part in reproducing the nation.¹⁷

Moreover, in these recent studies, there is a more focused emphasis on the affective nature of nationalism. As cultural geographers Rhys Jones and Peter Merriman have recently pointed out, national forces and affects are relational and mobile, “for while they may be partially located, grounded or sited – taking hold of particular bodies, in particular places, at particular times – these forces and affects circulate between and are only partially apprehended by bodies inhabiting and moving through particular spaces and sites.”¹⁸ What can be drawn from this scholarship for the concept of a lived nation is that the area of everyday nationalism is dynamic and process-like, and that there are many and varied ways in which to be affected, or not, by national forces. Instead of clear-cut categories and straightforward explanations, this is a juncture of multidirectional encounters.

Studies on everyday nationalism have most often focused on the production and location of national “banalities,” that is on the nationalist framings of the everyday. As sociologist Jon E. Fox has noted, it is important to think about “how banal nationalism gets ‘in here’, in our unspoken, unreflexive understandings of the (national) order of things?”¹⁹ Approaching the same question of nationalism in everyday experiences from a different angle, social anthropologist Anthony P. Cohen has coined the term “personal nationalism” to aid in understanding the ways people use nationalism and nationhood to formulate their sense of self. Cohen’s idea has been to see members of a nation as active participants in personalizing nationalism, in attributing their own meanings to it:

the arguments for nationalism must be cogent within the experience and circumstances of the individuals who interpret it as being appropriate to themselves. Nationalism becomes at once a compelling means of both locating and depicting their selves. Through their ownership of their selves, they “own” the nation, or the manner of its representation, just as they “own” culture.²⁰

Developing Cohen’s concept further, historian Raúl Moreno-Almendral has called for a study of “microhistorical acts of nation-making.” By reading people’s personal accounts, it is possible to see how they experience, memorize, and customize nationhood and how they use the nation as “a meaningful way of framing and making sense of specific life experiences.” Nationalism serves the purpose of codifying personal experiences and memories in collective terms. A personal approach to nationhood does not necessarily mean the same as a biographical one; instead of scrutinizing a particular human life, the idea is to study how the nation shapes people’s mindsets and conceptual frameworks.²¹

Cohen is aware that there are great differences between nations in how much freedom they allow their members in interpreting nationalism for their personal use and to what extent the nation itself can be constructed through such personal narratives.²² In contrast to totalitarian and strictly hierarchical nation-states, Cohen’s concept was originally developed to help understand the attraction of cultural nationalism in liberal, modern-day Scotland. This is important to keep in mind, although there are arguably also some spaces for personal nationalism in other, more restrictive nations and nationalisms. Similarly, historians should stress as well that the idea and norms of the self vary in time and in culture. Consequently, there are historical and cultural differences to be considered in exploring people’s uses of the nation for expressing and formulating their selfhood. With these caveats, personal nationalism becomes a relevant approach to be developed when studying the experiential and emotional aspects of nationhood. So far, historians have not applied it widely.²³

Situating the national in grassroots practices, everyday experiences and personal feelings may result in seeing the nation everywhere. Nevertheless, not everything is national, and it is therefore important to consider the stumbles and limits of the nation. A shift of focus from the triumphs of popular nationalism to the moments when the nation loses its salience has given rise to studies that draw on the notion of national indifference. Many of these studies have examined national indifference in the context of the Habsburg Monarchy, but scholars working on other historical contexts have also increasingly adopted the term.²⁴ According to historian Alexei Miller, national indifference has often been associated with a situation where a nationalist movement struggles to mobilize the masses or where two groups of nationalists are competing, while “ordinary people” are trying to stand apart from this confrontation. However, indifference can be a part of practically any situation involving national mobilization.²⁵ It can also take many forms, including “national agnosticism,” or absence of national loyalties, nationally ambivalent or opportunistic side-switching, or approval of bilingualism and cross-ethnic marriages.²⁶

The notion of national indifference has its limits. First of all, if the sources used by a historian do not include explicit nationalist rhetoric, this does not necessarily imply national indifference but can also hint at “a banal nationalism that has retreated into the background.”²⁷ Second, all divergent grassroots reactions to the nationalist message do not necessarily imply disregard, rejection, or opportunistic appropriation of the nation. Some of these reactions can also be interpreted, for instance, within the framework of what historian Alf Lüdtke calls Eigensinn, that is, spontaneous self-will or willfulness. From this perspective, a certain reaction to trickle-down nationalism does not in itself explain national belonging or non-belonging but tells about subversive reappropriation or inversion of imposed values.²⁸ Nevertheless, considering the questions of national indifference is fruitful for a study of lived nations. When and why, for instance, is the national framework relevant or irrelevant to people’s identities, thinking, and behavior? How do different experiences and emotions relate to national indifference, as in contrast to nationalbelonging?

The Nation and the History of Experiences and Emotions

At this point it is necessary to specify what we mean by the concept of a lived nation. We are drawing here mainly from two traditions in historical scholarship—the history of experiences and the history of emotions—and aim to bring these two parallel research fields into a fruitful conversation in order to explain how nations are constructed through experiences and emotions, and vice versa.

As a starting point for the discussion it is useful to look at historian Joan W. Scott’s classic article “The Evidence of Experience” (1991), where she offers a poignant critique of the essentialist, unproblematized uses of experience in earlier historiography. According to Scott, historians should not use “authentic” experiences as evidence; instead, they should analyze how discourse and ideology produce knowledge of experience, in the first place, and thus also the subjective identity and reality of the person who experiences. “Experience is, in this approach, not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain,” Scott wrote.²⁹ As one of the pioneers in introducing poststructuralist theory to history, Scott’s emphasis was solely on language; there was no space here for bodily and non-discursive experiences—or the material world—which would nowadays be recognized as important historical phenomena to study.³⁰ Yet Scott’s main point that experiences are not simply experienced, but that they are socially and culturally constructed, serves as a basic point of departure for our understanding of the history of experiences.

Until recently, the “history of experiences” has not really acquired a stable of its own in English-written historiography.³¹ In German scholarship, however, Erfahrungsgeschichte boomed at the turn of the millennium, especially in studies on war and society. In this case, the concept of experience has been seen as a possible answer to the challenge of a linguistic or cultural turn. German Erfahrungsgeschichte can be called moderately constructivist in its stance toward language and discourse. Using Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge, it has focused on those semantic systems of meaning that formulate people’s perceptions and pre-discursive experiences (Erlebnisse) into socially shared experiences (Erfahrungen). In longitudinal diachronic processes, experiences pile up to form stocks of knowledge, which are transmitted between individuals, social groups, institutions, and even generations.³² Furthermore, instead of being considered somehow authentic or free from socio-cultural influences, experiences are seen as “predisposed” (vorgeprägt) by the person’s language community; religious and ideological standpoints; generation, class, and gender; political community and national belonging; as well as by several other background factors.³³ According to historian Reinhart Koselleck’s famous postulation, “experience is present past, whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered.”³⁴

In this German research tradition, experience is not understood simply as a subjective consciousness of objective reality, but as a process in which events and perceptions are shaped into socially shareable meanings. Experiences are not only individual reflections: they form layers of collective and institutionalized knowledge. These layers act as structures that further predispose historical subjects to certain interpretations of their social reality. Still, experiencing is not only an act of reproducing earlier knowledge. Although the experiencing subject is a historically conditioned product of certain kinds of knowing, he or she is also a conscious producer of knowledge, in varying degrees capable of creative reorganization and recombination of cultural meanings in order to express experiences. In this form, a history of experiences should avoid the dangers of essentialism warned about above by Scott; yet it should also avoid reducing historical subjects to mere carriers of discursive meanings, as important as these cultural predispositions may well be for socially meaningful experiencing.³⁵

We are not proposing to apply the German history of experiences as such to our own work, but to take from it three crucial notions. First of all, instead of locating experiences within individual minds, we see them as a strongly cultural, social, and societal phenomenon, bound to power relations, institutions, and systems of meaning. Second, instead of direct perceptions and fixed entities, experiences are synchronically and diachronically constructed processes which blend into memories—and which are shaped by the person’s or social group’s earlier experiences and memories. Third, the study of experience is a study of a blurred mediating category, where cultural meanings, subjective identities, social relations, and societal structures shape individual perceptions into experiences proper. Analyzing this messy category is thus a matter for social and cultural history.

In international scholarship, the tradition of Erfahrungsgeschichte is less known—and in Germany, too, it has given way to new approaches over the past ten years. Nevertheless, many similar questions posed by the German history of experiences can be recognized in the booming field of contemporary history of emotions, albeit approached from a different angle and adding to it. Most works in the field, starting from the concept of “emotionology” developed by Peter and Carol Stearns (1985),³⁶ have treated emotions as social and cultural phenomena and pointed to historically and culturally specific forms of emotional expression. Many of these studies have focused on the constitutive role of language. Anthropologist William Reddy drew attention to “emotives,” which are emotion words seen as speech acts or performative utterances that produce or change the emotion or feeling they describe. The importance of language was also key to historian Barbara Rosenwein’s influential notion of emotional communities, which she understands as social groups adhering to the same valuations of emotions and emotional expression.³⁷ Emotional communities, or “communities of experience” for that matter, are useful categories in striving to understand collective experiences, especially if, as is pointed out by historian Margrit Pernau, emotional communities are not grounded in fixed social communities. One should rather pay attention to “the performative power of emotions and their potential ability to contribute to, or even trigger, the creation of communities in the long run, but also for communities which only exist for a short period of time.”³⁸

With the communities of experience, we refer to people who have experienced the same things or events, who have communicated and negotiated these experiences with each other, and who have thus given similar (although not necessarily identical) meanings to their experiences. It is important that the people themselves understand these experiences as formative for their sense of identity and belonging. A nation is not, per se, a community of experience, as not all its members have ever experienced the same things and, even less, given them similar meanings. But nations have the capacity to “nationalize” personal and social experiences that are important to people’s identity, that is, to give these experiences nationally framed interpretations. For example, in times of war or some other major crisis or upheaval, people are inclined to experience through their parent large groups—and in such cases nations can be powerful instances of collective meaning-making. Thus, momentarily at least, nations can act alike a community of experience, although not all the citizens share the same experience and its interpretation.³⁹ Yet, normally, any nation is composed of a multitude of competing and overlapping communities of experience; some of them more closely related to the national community than others. It would be an important empirical question to study which communities of experience are given special status in shaping and defining the nation under different circumstances—for instance, war veterans come to mind—and which communities of experience may be excluded, unrecognized, or pushed to the margins.

In recent years, researchers on the history of emotions have paid more attention to the relationship between emotions and the body, and to emotions, spaces, and matter. Historian Monique Scheer, drawing on practice theory, has highlighted the importance of the bodily practices of “doing emotions.”⁴⁰ To a similar end, historian Benno Gammerl uses the concept of “emotional spaces”: different spaces are linked to diverging emotional styles and practices, which depend on historically specific economic, cultural, and political conditions. Where emotions take place, significantly influences how they are generated and expressed.⁴¹ Certain material and spatial realities enhance particular relationships of bodies to each other and how they are entangled with particular emotions. In the framework of the study of the history of childhood and emotions, historians Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen have introduced the concept of an “emotional frontier” in order to address the multi-dimensional, and often competing, sites available to children in negotiating their emotional identity.⁴² In which spaces and how “patriotism” and other “national feelings” are produced, encountered, and renewed are important questions within the history of nationalism. Just as people do emotions and experiences, they do the nation in embodied practices. Like emotional communities, emotional spaces should not be considered in overly fixed terms: “a prescriptive space can become a refuge if and when nobody is looking.”⁴³ Emotions, including those directed toward the nation, always emerge through people’s dynamic uses of space.⁴⁴

The histories of experience and emotion represent two different, although in several aspects parallel, research traditions in historywriting. It is noticeable how easily “experience” and “emotion” could be used interchangeably in most of the previous introduction. It is possible to see experience as a wider category than emotions, so that the former incorporates the latter but is not limited to it. Yet it can also be argued that any relevant experience entails an emotional component of some degree. Furthermore, not all emotions are necessarily experiences in the socially shared and discursively processed sense of the German Erfahrung. Time will tell whether the differences between these two scholarly branches merit a clearer demarcation; for now, in the chapters of the current book, we see the history of experiences and the history of emotions as fruitfully supplementing and contributing to each other, as well as to the concept of the lived nation.

We return now to defining remarks on the notion of the lived nation. Since the nineteenth century, nations and nation-states have been major contexts for collective and subjective experiences and emotions. We perceive a lived nation as a series of encounters and negotiations between individuals, social groups, institutions, and explicitly nationalist advocates, as well as between bodies, spaces, and objects. This entanglement does not have clear boundaries, and it is not unambiguously a top-down or a bottom-up process. The lived nation is equally about how nations form and renew contexts for experiencing and how they are constructed through experiences. Similarly, nations have been both objects and producers of emotions. In these processes, lived nations have been constructed as political bodies—and one can see nation-states as institutionalized and layered experiences. These political bodies, in turn, create new experiences and emotions. Together with the emerging framework of the nation-states, the messiness of the above-mentioned encounters is shaped by other structures of experience (or emotion): economical frameworks, power structures, and material circumstances. Structures of experience are also cultural and ideological. As the Great Story of the Nation has been constructed as the master narrative of modern national history, people have been invited to integrate their own experiences and emotions into this collective script. In other words, nations have become important systems of meaning when consigning significance to one’s experiences and feelings.

What has so far been insufficiently integrated into the historiography of nationalism is the role that experiences and emotions play in people’s reproduction of the nation in their daily lives. People do not simply encounter and digest national representations; they have experiential and emotional agency in these encounters, which can be highly varied and is always situational. Clearly, not everyone had experienced and felt a sense of belonging to the nation in similar ways, or not everyone experienced and felt a sense of belonging to the nation at all. In addition, different groups within society had different experiences and emotions in similar national (material or imagined) spaces.⁴⁵ People brought to their encounters with the nation their gender, social class, age, and their situated life histories. While we are interested in people’s varying positions in relation to the production and consumption of the nation, it is obvious that one should not lose sight of the question of power, and the resulting limits of people’s own agency. The collective scripts of the nation have also been narratives of exclusion and marginalization in relation to people’s experiences.

What is crucial for both the history of experiences and the history of emotions is to underline that experiences and emotions always happen in a historically specific time, place, space, and materiality. Even though they are formulated through culture and society at large, experiences and emotions are situated and contextual—and they are thus hardly ever quite the same from one person or social group to another. Consequently, it is important to highlight how there exist several influential and affective national/nationalist discourses and practices within particular places at specific times.⁴⁶ We will now proceed to frame our specific case of a lived nation: the study of Finland as the history of experiences and emotions.

The Case of Finland: Context and Timeline

Finland, in its wider transnational relations, serves as an excellent laboratory for scrutinizing the concept of the lived nation. As a case, Finland is as “exceptional” as any nation, but it is also a fruitful example within the European timeline of political mobilizations and crises due to its multifaceted complexity as revealed through “eastern,” “western,” and “northern” versions of nationalism and nation-state histories. And as the present anthology demonstrates, Finnish history can offer useful cases via which to study the connections between gender and class in relation to the nation: how was the nation felt and experienced differently and how did the issues of gender and class shape the experience of the nation? Finland is also useful for the analysis of, e.g., the development of a civic society hand-in-hand with a national “awakening,” war experiences and the nation, and the emergence of “welfare state nationalism.” From a practical standpoint, Finnish archives contain many exceptional and even unique materials for the study of experiences and emotions, for instance, in the fields of the history of childhood and youth, history from below, the history of everyday life, or memory studies. All of these approaches are utilized in our book.

To help to contextualize Finland as a case, it is necessary to give a brief chronological overview of the “national” history of Finland from roughly 1800 to 2000. After being part of Sweden for centuries, Finland was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1809 as a result of the Napoleonic Wars and was afforded wide autonomy. In this new imperial framework, the national movement that strove for a national entity, united in language and culture, gained ground in Finland in the mid-nineteenth century. As elsewhere, the development of nationalism into a mass phenomenon was based on civic associations, but crucially also on the rise of modern mass media, the role of which has been somewhat overlooked in Finnish histories of nation-building, despite being underlined in classic works on nationalism.⁴⁷ The Finnish national movement known as Fennomania strove for strengthening the status of the Finnish language vis-à-vis Swedish and for elementary education for the masses. At the same time, the rise of the global market economy increasingly affected Finland, especially its industries, forestry, and agriculture. These processes led to restructuring in the economy, population, and social divisions, including strengthening the position of landowning farmers as the backbone of the nation in the nationalistic societal imagination.⁴⁸

The preservation and production of cultural heritage became a key part of the nation-building process occurring around Europe during the nineteenth century.⁴⁹ In Finland, the ideas of romantic nationalism inspired the work of the Finnish Literature Society, which, ever since its establishment in 1831, had specialized in the collection of folklore and oral history. Based on similar premises, the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland became active at the end of the century in preserving the Finland-Swedish and Scandinavian heritage, thus carrying on a nationalistic tradition of its own.⁵⁰ The activity of these two institutions has continued until the present day as part of the changing objectives of national heritage work. The archives of the Finnish Literature Society contain vast multitudes of reminiscences, diaries, and other materials. These documents, while addressing various aspects of people’s daily life, may also be understood as “national work” that people themselves do: that is writing, in very concrete terms, one’s own story into the national narrative. Therefore, the archives of the Society provide an extraordinary repository of the “lived nation,” that has been utilized in several chapters of this book.

The Finnish nationalist movement developed in an imperial context like the nationalist movements in many other European regions.⁵¹ For a long time, Finnish nationalists avoided confrontation with the imperial power and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century when the Russian government’s integration policies caused a radicalization of Finnish nationalism. Around the same time, the socialist labor movement emerged as a mass phenomenon, developing after the Russian Revolution of 1905 into a formidable political force in Finland. The changing balance between the two civic religions, nationalism and socialism, or a redefinition of their mutual relation, characterized the Finnish case in the twentieth century. The success of socialists owed a great deal to their ability to introduce a new idea of the nation that underlined the extension of civil rights.⁵²

Finland seceded from Russia to become an independent state in December 1917, as a consequence of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. However, the struggle as to who was to govern the emerging state led to a bloody Finnish Civil War between the bourgeois Whites and the socialistReds in 1918. The war left the country deeply divided, as the White winners and the defeated Reds held on to their own public spheres and cultural institutions.⁵³ The early years of independence also witnessed a tense relationship between Finland and Soviet Russia, and Russophobia featured as a key element of nationalist discourses. In short, Finland is a good example of the challenges faced by the new nation-states that were formed as multiethnic empires collapsed during and after World War I.

The interwar period witnessed a high tide of “hot nationalism” and far-right movements in Finland. Recent scholarship has shed new light on the threat posed by these movements to democratic government.⁵⁴ However, Finnish historiography has also long underlined so-called national unification as a characteristic of this period.⁵⁵ This notion of unification has tended to neglect the exclusion of some segments of the population, such as communists, from the nation by the dominant political groups. In the grand story of a homogenous nation there has also been little space for the Sámi and Roma people of Finland. While these ethnic minorities were of some interest to folklore collectors, their histories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were often marked by stigmatization and maltreatment, including the assimilation of Sámichildren by means of separating them from their parents and preventing them from using their native tongue at school.⁵⁶

As in other European regions, the nation-building process and national identity in Finland were shaped by transnational flows and movements of people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Russia, and especially St Petersburg, drew tens of thousands of people from the Grand Duchy of Finland to work as factory workers, craftsmen, and civil servants in the nineteenth century.⁵⁷ The Finns were also a part of the great European wave of emigration to America, for over 350,000 Finns migrated to North America between 1870 and the early 1920s.⁵⁸ After World War II, Sweden featured as a main destination for Finnish emigration. The Finnish emigrant communities formed their own associations, cultural institutions, and media, through which they also maintained connections to the home country and shaped the character of Finnish nationalism. This “long-distance nationalism,” as coined by Benedict Anderson, is one of the spatial aspects that has recently received growing attention in the history of nationalism.⁵⁹ Equally important are the experiences of uprootedness or assimilation among immigrants at various moments. Finland was affected, for example, by a wave of migrants from the former regions of the Russian empire after the Bolshevik Revolution, and a similar wave took place after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. In the interwar years, these migrants encountered hot versions of nationalism, which shaped their experiences of the Finnish society.

The tense relationship between Finland and the Soviet Union escalated into a war in 1939, as a consequence of which Finland lost part of the Finnish Karelian region to the Soviet Union. In hopes of regaining these territories, Finland joined Germany in the onslaught against the Soviet Union of June 1941 and then withdrew from the war under a separate peace agreement in the fall of 1944. Finland eventually remained one of the few nations not occupied during World War II, but the wartime sacrifices, the severe peace terms, and the need to resettle hundreds of thousands of Finnish Karelian refugees after the war had ended became major markers of the national experience.⁶⁰ The postwar period also witnessed a political shift, as the communist movement that had been illegal since 1930 re-entered open political life. Moreover, until the 1980s, the influence of the Soviet Union on Finnish politics was significant, even if Finland did not follow the path of central and eastern European people’s democracies.

All in all, the years following World War II saw a cooling of the aggressive vigor and pathos of Finland’s prewar nationalism. At the same time—and partly also reflecting the “shared” war experience—earlier lines of demarcation and exclusion between the “core” nation and its political non-communities were crossed and even erased. This made space for national integration—and also for the pacified, moderated, relatively inclusive versions of Nordic social-state nationalism. One of the main characteristics of this development has been an emphasis on gender equality, education, and citizenship.⁶¹ After the mid-twentieth century, the development of the welfare state was a defining feature in Finland, and the Nordic welfare model became a master narrative of national history. Yet this story has had its outsiders and victims as well, just as the welfare policies have had their own shortcomings.

The welfare-state development in Finland was enabled by postwar economic growth, which, in turn, was boosted by bilateral trade with the Soviet Union. When the Soviet bloc collapsed at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Finland witnessed a deep economic recession, a new rise of nationalist currents and a “neo-patriotic” re-evaluation of the past wartime history of 1939–45. From the early-2000s onwards, right-wing nationalist populism has also been a growing phenomenon in Finnish politics. At the same time, the national identity and rhetoric have been shaped by Finland’s integration into the European Union and a new phase in economic globalization.⁶² Finnish politicians and experts, like their counterparts in many other countries, have typically treated global competitiveness as a national challenge and modified the existing welfare-state institutions to fit the needs of a “competition state.”⁶³

With regard to nationalism and nationhood, the case of Finland has been (and continues to be) explained through strong modernist and state-centered paradigms in historiography. There are features that make Finland a compelling case for the classic explanations of nationalism: the close connection between the emerging state institutions and the civic society in the development of Finnish nationalism; the educated elites’ role in the top-down dissemination of national consciousness; and the process of rapid industrialization that went hand in hand with the creation of the public sphere and national mobilization. But Finland is an equally compelling case for the study of the lived nation. What our approach adds to the research discussion is the production and reproduction of the nation in experiences and emotions, which in turn are culturally, socially, spatially, and thus also nationally constructed. Consequently, instead of a clearly top-down or bottom-up perspective, we aim to focus on that reciprocal, two-directional dynamic of production between the nation and experiences. Finland is our case study in this enterprise, yet our approach and results are in no way limited to one Nordic country.

Current Volume

Our book starts with a historical self-reflection. Historians have played an important role in different nation-building processes, from the early nationalism that constructed a shared past for the new nation to the recent forms of national identity work. Pertti Haapala examines Finnish historiography from the latter part of the nineteenth century till the turn of the millennium. Haapala focuses on history as a script that is used to give meaning to individual and collective experiences, to frame them with regard to the nation and to integrate present experiences into a national-historical timeline. It is also evident that in the vein of new social and cultural histories from the 1960s onwards, Finnish historians have worked to incorporate new experiences and social groups into the national narrative, thus redefining the nation. From this perspective, history-writing is not simply an academic matter but a crucial medium between experiences and the nation. Haapala’s chapter can also be read as an introduction to the key issues and turning points in the Finnish national narrative of the past 200 years—and it thus helps to contextualize other chapters in the book.

Part I of the book, “Feeling and Conceptualizing the Nation,” focuses on the formative period of Finnish nationalism in the nineteenth century. The section starts with Jani Marjanen’s chapter, which explores the use of the concept “national sentiment” in Finnish- and Swedish-language newspapers during the course of the nineteenth century. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of digitized newspapers, Marjanen shows that the term “national sentiment” was at the intersection of two nineteenth-century developments: the breakthrough of a national perspective in understanding society and a change in the language relating to emotions and feelings. By shedding light on what kind of emotions were really in question when authors talked about national sentiment in the press, the chapter taps into larger questions of how talking about emotions and emotions themselves relate to each other.

The emotional language of nationalism is also under examination in Reetta Eiranen’s chapter, which delves into the romantic correspondence of a Finnish nationalist couple in the mid-nineteenth century. By drawing on the notion of personal nationalism, Eiranen analyzes how nationalism was incorporated into the self-narrations of the letters and identifies emotions and gender as central elements in the construction of the national experience. In the correspondence under examination, nationally interpreted male and female ideals formed a basis for the emotional relationship. Interestingly, these ideals were partly contradictory to the stereotypes: the man cast himself as a selfless but emotional national hero, whereas the woman, used to mediating her personal nationalism through men, had to exercise stronger emotional control in order to adapt to the man’s feelings.

Heikki Kokko’s chapter addresses the construction of the national experience on a personal level by shifting the focus from the protagonists of the national movement to a target of their exhortation. Kokko combines Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities and Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of modern temporality in order to explore the case of the self-educated peasant Johan Hänninen in mid-nineteenth century Finland. Hänninen was one of the hundreds of ordinary people who engaged in the public sphere as writers of readers’ letters to the emergent Finnish-language press and whose writings can be traced with the aid of new digital tools. Analyzing Hänninen’s writings, Kokko demonstrates the appearance of the term “nation” in Hänninen’s vocabulary and its links with a new conception of time, one that was associated with modernization that affected Hänninen’s life in multiple ways. While Kokko does not use the concept of personal nationalism, his notion of the first-hand experience of the nation addresses the same questions about how and why ordinary people adopt and personalize the idea of the nation. Thus, while the chapter shows that the spread of nationalism was partly a trickle-down process, it also indicates the limits of top-down interpretations in elucidating grassroots nationhood.

Part II of the book, “Nation of Encounters and Conflicts,” is marked by the events of 1917–18, when the Russian revolutions and Finnish independence were followed by a traumatic civil war. The optimism and integrative elements of the early Finnish nationalism were crushed when the imagined nation was split by political and class-based divisions. Marko Tikka and Sami Suodenjoki take a novel perspective on this history by studying the Finnish music culture at the end of the 1920s and the practices of producing and distributing music records for a politically divided audience. Finnish “gramophone fever” was a transnational phenomenon, which was linked to the American music business and to the Finnish-American immigrant community. Taking Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities as their inspiration, Tikka and Suodenjoki recognize two communities of experience, a bourgeois and a socialist one, which consumed different kinds of music and occasionally came into conflict over musical pieces. Interestingly, though, the American record industry also helped to construct a shared idea of what “Finnish music” sounded like.

The interwar era in Finland was a period of hot nationalism, which was directed against the Soviet Union and the perceived outsiders among the Finnish people. At the same time, the newly independent state started to implement policies which aimed at reinstituting national unity. Probably the most important of these policies was the introduction of universal compulsory education in 1921. Mervi Kaarninen looks at the post-Civil War Finnish society through the eyes of those “Red” children who had witnessed the bloody Battle of Tampere in the spring of 1918 and whose fathers and sometimes mothers had served in the defeated Red Guards. The children’s experiences were characterized by the presence of violence, loss, scarcity, and humiliation. In contrast to these experiences, the school curriculum emphasized the “White” interpretation of the Civil War and the nationalist-religious values of the new nation-state. Kaarninen uses Karen Vallgårda’s, Kristine Alexander’s, and Stephanie Olsen’s idea of “emotional frontiers” to study how children (and their teachers) navigated between dissonant experiences and expectations in these conflicting circumstances.

In a relatively poor agrarian country, the main “social policy” until the 1950s was to distribute land to the landless. In the post-1918 situation, turning former tenant farmers into smallholders was meant to help de-radicalize the rural poor—but the Social Democrats also decided to support smallholding as their policy of choice. Pirjo Markkola and Ann-Catrin Östman analyze the ideology and norms of Finnish “agrarianism” in the 1920s and 1930s, and how they constructed smallholder citizenship. Instead of focusing solely on normative materials, Markkola and Östman discuss the actual encounters between the farmers and the different promoters of small-scale agriculture. Owning one’s land was a matter of progressive self-development and the practicing of proper Finnishness; it was linked to national family and gender ideals. The nation of smallholders also contained a language issue as the Swedish-speaking minority on the western and southern coasts of Finland developed the idea of “Swedish soil” to support their existence and identity.

It is often easier to recognize the outlines and relevance of nationalism if one looks at it from the borders. In Part III, “Experiential Edges of the Nation,” the Finnish nation-state and national belonging are observed from three perspectives that are outside the mainstream. Hanna Lindberg explores the role of nationalism and language among a double minority, the Finland-Swedish deaf in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By examining their published letters, Lindberg shows how deaf persons belonging to the Swedish minority created their own “imagined community” in Finland. Although the deaf community in many cases defined itself as standing on the sidelines of national conflicts, nationalism was incorporated in the community’s everyday practices and spaces. Lindberg also indicates the role of sign language in uniting the deaf who belonged to different linguistic groups in Finland.

In the first half of the twentieth century, tuberculosis was the most lethal illness among the Finnish population, a “national disease.” Consequently, the fight against tuberculosis was considered a mission of the highest national importance. The building of a nationwide network of sanatoria was a huge societal effort. Heini Hakosalo studies the reminiscences of those Finns who were treated in these public institutions. Many experiences were ambiguous: patients felt grateful for being taken care of and receiving modern medication, yet there were also shortcomings and failures in treatment. The patients connected their individual experiences to the collective narrative through three nationally framed discourses: the stories of progress, stories of war, and stories of belonging. In so doing, they wove their personal hardship and recovery into the history of the nation, thus gaining a sense of purpose from their difficult experiences.

Seija Jalagin makes an important contribution to our discussion concerning the lived nation from a refugee perspective. The focus of her chapter is on East Karelianrefugees, who first, following an unsuccessful uprising in Russian Karelia against the Bolsheviks in 1921–22, escaped to Finland, and then, after World War II, fled to Sweden, fearing that they would be taken back to the Soviet Union. These East Karelians were refugees twice, in that they were “a minority of a minority,” and their experiencing of the nation involved living in three countries. Jalagin points out that the refugees’ sense of Finnishness can be seen as evidence of flexible nationalism: while over the years the nation-state transformed itself from a controlling to a more ambivalent element in refugees’ lives, it nevertheless maintained its importance. Based on written and oral history narratives, as well as on archival material, the chapter makes a compelling case for the transgenerational nature of experiences.

Part IV of the book, “Nation Embodied and Materialized,” focuses on spatial, material, bodily, and sensory aspects of emotions and experiences when analyzing historical manifestations of everyday nationalism. In addition, the chapters in Part IV show the interconnectedness of individual and collective experiences. By exploring Finnish war-related dreams during and after World War II, Ville Kivimäki’s chapter focuses on one of the most intimate spaces and spheres of the lived nation: people’s bedrooms. Kivimäki illustrates the rich methodological potential of narrated dreams as source material for historical research beyond Freudian theory, providing a way to analyze nations as embodied lived-through experiences, in this case the intertwined experiences of the nation and violence. Kivimäki’s chapter draws inspiration from Anthony P. Cohen’s concept of personal nationalism but ends up arguing the reverse. The Finnish war dreams, and how they were later reminisced about, provides an example of how the nation entered people’s lives as a collective context of war and postwar periods. Rather than being invited and “personalized” by people into their lives, the nation invaded the dreaming subjects’ nightlife by violent force.

Children and childhood have a special place in adults’ national(ist) imagination. Key to national pedagogy has been the education of children—intellectually and emotionally—to become future citizens. But children, even though they still rarely appear as subjects in historical studies focusing on nation-building, also were participants in the negotiation of different ideas, practices, and emotions with respect to the national community. Building on early childhood educationalist Zsuzsa Millei’s concept of a “pedagogy of nation,” which highlights the complexity of the reproduction of the nation in children’s everyday life, Antti Malinen’s and Tanja Vahtikari’s chapter focuses on emotional co-creation, by adults and children, of the nation in everyday (school) practices in the immediate postwar period. This co-creation, explored by Malinen and Vahtikari via both adult- and children-authored sources, is shown to have been an inherently embodied and spatial experience: the nation became felt in postwar children’s lives, among other things, through taking excursions and drawing. Both these practices were understood as means of expanding children’s emotional competences in and for the postwar world, as it aspired to peace and democratic values.

Spaces of national memory and heritage figure prominently within the scholarship dealing with the history of nationalism. Spaces of memory are also central to the debates around uses of urban space in capital cities. Tuomas Tepora contributes to these discussions with the concept of the “emotional figure,” which he defines as “a symbol and a container of contradictory public emotions.” Tepora’s chapter addresses the changing images of C. G. E. Mannerheim (1867–1951), the Marshal of Finland, and, in particular, the debate concerning the construction of the Museum of Contemporary Art next to the statue of Mannerheim in Helsinki. Tepora shows how both sides in the debate used Mannerheim images as emotional figures: for those opposing the building of a new museum—and defending the conservative Mannerheim image—the emotional figure remained static, whereas those in favor of the museum construction recoded the emotional figure to reflect their liberal and cosmopolitan perspectives. The changing Mannerheim images were reflective of the wider social and political changes and experiences in Finnish society being undergone in the early-1990s, related to economic recession, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and joining the European Union.

Our book concludes with Josephine Hoegaerts’s and Stephanie Olsen’s afterword on future prospects for histories of experience and emotions in studying nations. These perspectives are not limited to any single country or context but can be applied widely in analyzing those aspects of nationalism and national belonging that have usually remained invisible in research. Taking the histories of disability and children as their examples, Hoegaerts and Olsen point out new ways to consider experiences and emotions in relation to the nation—and the relevance of finding new kinds of sources and methods to write these histories. As the editors of this volume, we hope that Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800–2000 serves to expand our understanding of how nations are experienced and felt—and how these experiences and emotions are a crucial part of making the nation, in history as well as today.