The Concepts Of Nationhood In Philanthropic Activities
In this paper we are going to uncover how concepts of nationhood unfold in the context of philanthropy: how ideas of nationhood and national belonging may offer sets of categorisations that enable the pursuit of philanthropic activities; and how such ideas of nationhood are recreated and constituted through philanthropic practices, that is through donating and volunteering.
National identifications and categorisations at the heart of philanthropic giving are documented by social scientists in various settings: philanthropy and volunteering in 19th century Germany, in diaspora philanthropy directed towards Israel during the 1940s, or volunteering for the Red Cross in several 19th century European states have all been explored as core terrains for constituting and forming national categorisations and identities. Despite numerous conjunctions of philanthropy and nationhood, neither mainstream research on philanthropy and volunteering, nor nationalism studies have yet devoted thorough attention to these entanglements. In the research of nationalism social constructionist approaches have made the notion of national solidarity, that is benevolence towards co-nationals, a core assumption. They however conceptualised solidarity as an outcome: as an aspect of identity, emotions and attitudes, saying little about national solidarity turned into actual practices and actions. What are these benevolent actions, how they are produced, towards whom, among what circumstances, and how these solidarities are reproduced or transformed in these actions have received less attention. In this paper my aim is to investigate further in this direction.
The interlacing relationship between concepts of nationhood and philanthropy will be analysed from from two vantage points. First, the former will be regarded as pre-existing imageries that orient and influence how helping, and specifically philanthropy, donating and volunteering is initiated, maintained and practiced. Second, and more importantly, such benevolent practices, actions and interactions will be regarded as institutional terrains that enable – through interpretative processes - the construction and reconstruction of the social imagery, including national categorisations and identities. By analysing the role of nationhood in the context of helping actions follows recent calls to analyse nationalism not only as top-down elite-driven structural processes of nation building but as quotidian activities, interactions and practices of everyday actors as embedded into discourses, institutions and organisations. Circumscribing goals and activities of helping in national terms allows volunteers and philanthropists to engage in “doing the nation”, that is to perform national roles, effectuate national choices, or talk using national categories.
The current article will provide empirical insights into possible interconnections between philanthropy and nationhood on two terrains. Both philanthropic actions, although in contrasting ways, have unfolded in social environments having nationhood, national categorisation and national ideologies as their core ideological building blocks. Philanthropic actions organized in postsocialist Hungary, framed by nationalist ideologies and targeted towards helping co-ethnic Hungarian minority communities in Ukraine and Romania will be considered and contrasted with humanitarian volunteer initiatives organized in Hungary aiming to support refugees during the “refugee crisis” of summer 2015. In the first case, legitimacy for and commitment to help are prescribed primarily by an essentializing communitarian ideology built around the shared ethno-national belonging of the helpers and addressees of help. In the second case, central ideological frames organizing legitimacy of helping rely upon a larger set of universalist ideologies, referring to concepts of shared humanity, which however has close linkages with social imaginations of nationhood and national belonging. We show that in both cases philanthropic action and practices will be coupled with ‘breaching’ that is breaking the spoken or unspoken expectations of the actors concerned, which will incite intense articulation on their part of categories and identities related to nationhood and national belonging. Our empirical investigation reveals that among such circumstances of mobilised national categorisations philanthropy will be more than just another terrain for multiplying already existing concepts of nationhood, produced by national cultural or political institutions, or the media.
The institutional and practical context of philanthropy will leave its own mark on the ideas, cognitive schemas, or dispositions related to the nation: the latter will mirror categorizations and boundary-making inherent in philanthropic giving and volunteering. Divisions between the helper and the helped, between the deserving and non-deserving needy, and between those who take part in helping as opposed to those who do not, articulated by philanthropic actors will be reflected in the ways concepts of the nation, national categories and identifications are shaped by these activities. Volunteering and philanthropy research embedded into modernisation and individualisation theories already discovered the capacity of these activities in maintaining, reshaping, reproducing ideologies, values and identities. According to these authors, philanthropy and volunteering contradict to everyday norms of the pursuit of self-interest, thus incite continuous and intense demands for explanatory legitimising interpretations; or, among social conditions of late modernity, they help reassamble consistent biographies when uncertainties, unforeseen conditions and the absence of traditional group-identities would otherwise tear them apart. These theories however, focus on the maintenance of individual identities and on the maintenance of universalistic ideologies and values, and hastily dismiss the reproduction of national categorisations and identifications operating with boundary making. This paper reveals that giving in the context of volunteering and philanthropy may also firmly contribute to reproducing national categorisations, ideologies and identities. In this way, this attempt follows calls to re-examine volunteering and philanthropy beyond abstracted universalist ideologies, and by reassessing complex interrelations between universalism and particularism, re-embed such giving practices into their socio-historical context. (
Understanding the coupling of concepts, roles, categorisations inherent in philanthropy and those in the national domain, these findings contribute to understanding the importance of imagined internal divisions and fractures in the imagined community of the nation, and in its everyday construction. While analyses related to the spheres of public culture (e. g. education, or media) in institutionalized nation states, as well as studies focusing on rituals generally dissect social processes of constructing ideas around national unity and homogeneity, as opposed and distinct from other nations, we complement these perspectives by revealing how the nation may also be reproduced through imageries of its internal differences. Either through helper-recipient distinctions projected upon the nation, or through distinctions between morally superior, responsible helpers as opposed to those rejecting help and responsibility, nationhood in the context of philanthropy becomes reimagined based on its internal differences.
In nationalism studies social constructionist approaches have focussed on the relationship between concepts of the nation and benevolent intentions towards others, however such solidary intentions in the institutional context of philanthropy and volunteering have not yet been extensively covered. Classical research on the historical formation of modern nations emphasizes the importance of states and its institutions in the formation of ideas of nationhood. Voluntary organisations and civil society having been imagined as separate from and antagonistic to the state received little or no attention in these models of nationalism. Moreover, models of nationalism in general emphasize nationhood as built upon the idea of sameness, similarity and equality of its members. Philanthropy and volunteering that heavily relies upon divisions and hierarchies – between helpers and the helped, or between the morally superior helpers and the morally inferior bystanders – have not been convenient terrains of describing such egalitarian models of national belonging. These models while usually presupposing national solidarity as an aspect of identity and attitudes reproduced by state institutions and elite-driven processes, usually oversee the links between solidarity and actual helping practices and lack the analysis thereof. There are however several scholarly works devoting attention to the coupling of national categorisation and philanthropic giving and volunteering.
Firstly, a more evident form of national solidarity is found in communitarian philanthropy and volunteering explicitly emphasizing solidarity among co-nationals. These models directly link national categories with giving and receiving to the nationally same others. Secondly, inclusionary helping ideologies, denying collective categorisations of race, religion, ethnicity or nationhood in directing solidary intentions and practices, however, may also become building blocks in the creation of ideas about the nation. The explicit refusal of constraining helping to co-nationals, and emphasizing instead the inclusion of groups and categories outside the national body become major tools of performing liberal values of tolerance, inclusion and cosmopolitism, which, however, on a transnational or global terrain may become interpreted in national frames, as valuable characteristics associated with the national affiliation of the performers of helping.
Philanthropy built upon solidarity within a nation, among co-nationals in general, or between specific subcategories of the nation (e. g. between the population of nation states and the diaspora, or national minorities outside territories of the national kin-state) are analysed by several authors from various disciplines. Philanthropy originating from the kin state towards the diaspora is described in Cramer’s historical accounts of ideological transformations in the mission of Gustav Adolf Association in interwar Germany. In line with ideological currents of 19th century nation building, by the means of donations and other forms of philanthropic engagement it aimed to preserve “German spaces” in East and Central Europe; and aimed to help these minority German speaking communities preserve their ethnic German identities among political and economic conditions perceived as hostile and threatening towards these communities.
Another historical account on the intimate connections between philanthropy and nation building in 19th century German society is provided by Quataert (2001). She underlines that philanthropic poverty relief and care for the sick and the wounded were institutional terrains that were built upon specific ideas of nationhood (conservative, dynastic, gendered) and contributed to the reconstruction and distribution of such national ideologies. Another socio-historical analysis, Dan Lainer Vos’s research addresses 20th century Jewish diaspora philanthropy directed towards Izrael. Relying on the Maussian description of giftgiving in philanthropy, Vos emphasises the capacities of giving and receiving in the creation of what he calls ‘national attachments’ between different subcategories within the Jewish nation.
There are several analyses that reveal more recent interconnections of philanthropy and nationalism. In his analysis, Carter (2007) shows how during the Yugoslav Wars in the 90s the American Croatian diaspora constructed their duty to support the national homeland through humanitarian aid and philanthropy. In his analysis he drew attention to the importance of analysing philanthropy together with ideologies and boundary making. Shachar’s analyses on present day discourse of volunteering in Israel as promoted by specific NGOs also discuss intimate interconnections between the working of national categorisation and volunteering. He highlights the production of a legitimising ideology of Israeli national unity through specific ideas of volunteering, that is pursuing the good of all Israelis, imagined as the “will of the nation”, acting against ubiquitous ethnic divisions within the Jewish state. An important historical example on the second form of solidarity built upon the coupling of national concepts and the refusal of an exclusionary national solidarity is that of Dromi (2016).
In his thorough historical sociological analysis on the birth of humanitarianism, and specifically the Red Cross Movement, Dromi provides a vivid description how the denial of restricting helping along national boundaries created a universalist humanitarian morality closely relying upon concepts of nationhood. Regarding more contemporary social processes, Goodman (2009) reveals how nationalist and universalist humanitarian ideologies may interact, may be embedded into each other, in creating intentions and actions of solidarity. By analysing refugee solidarity movements in Australia, he showed how meanings, identities and categorisations attached to nationhood are built upon universalist helping interpreted as collective – national – characteristics of solidarity activists. Harald, in a similar line of thought, also in relationship to the acceptance of refugees, along values of tolerance and multiculturalism, emphasizes the discourse of volunteerism in Canadian self-identification. Another example of coupling national ideologies and the refusal of restricting solidarity along national lines is offered by Haklai (2008). He describes how American Jewish philanthropy might be linked with supporting Palestinian NGOs and social movements in Izrael, in order to contribute to the creation of a civic ideal of tolerant, liberal and inclusive Jewish nation. These analyses have all regarded philanthropy and volunteering as basic sites of reproducing national concepts and ideologies.
