Online/Offline National Identities in Quebec and Scotland: A Comparative Contextual Analysis

The past and current literature within nationalist studies has almost exclusively looked at how national identities are promoted, or reproduced, in the offline/real world. As such, it has not touched much on how the internet and the web 2.0 revolution (expansion of social media into our societies) have affected the promotion of national identities given the prevalence of the online in our everyday lives, both at the individual and communal levels. Though a recent phenomenon (the internet continuously expanding in the past two and a half decades), the digital world has pervaded all aspects of the socio-political arena, including the mechanics of nationalism, as most clearly seen recently in the 2014 Independence Referendum in Scotland.

In my paper I look specifically at how national identities are promoted online and offline in Quebec and Scotland, through the perspective of Michael Billig’s banal nationalism theory. Methodologically, I use contextual analysis to compare the online packaging of identities to the accepted views and ways on how Scottish and Quebecois identities are promoted both within and outside their respective borders. My overall arguments lie in the blurring of the distinction between the online and offline (digital and real) which is only reinforced by the promotion of national identities on the internet and outside of it, given the borderless outreach that the online world provides. As such I will show ample evidence that banal nationalism is transposed and adapted online, through a (softer) diplomatic language of legitimacy, via cultural diplomacy.