Divisive Nostalgia: How do Dialogues of National Nostalgia Impact on Civil Society’s Relationship with Populism?

This paper explores how local civil society organisations respond to populist politics’ use of national nostalgia and the extent to which they replicate or resist its exclusionary discourses. Setting out our theoretical framework by drawing on the literature on the relationship between populism and nostalgic nationalism as well as previous studies on how civil society encounters populism, this study introduces a typology of how civil society organisations respond to populist rhetoric, and distinguishes between victims, vehicles, replicators, and resistors. A media analysis of 564 news articles was undertaken to examine instances of local polarisation in the UK which arose from national discourses of division around national identity, ‘race’, religion, and immigration. This was supplemented with semi-structured interviews with key representatives from civil society groups identified as pivotal case studies. To illustrate the findings, four case studies are presented in two pairs. The first pair represents heritage organisations that sought to engage in dialogue around the complexity of Britain’s past but found themselves in contention with nostalgic populist ideas. The second pair represents organisations that sought to advance inclusion by incorporating discourses of diversity and equality into existing dialogues of Britishness. This study demonstrates that the different ways of interacting with nostalgia around nationalism can cause civil society organisations to become victims, vehicles, replicators, or resistors of polarisation but that these categories are not mutually exclusive, with many civil society organisations finding themselves in multiple roles as their own dialogues respond to populist discourse which may incur backlash. Care and critical engagement are needed, though these do not inoculate civil society from being targeted, and yet there is hope for a path of resistance.