Central Asia in international relations: the legacies of Halford Mackinder

political power and the intellectual weakness of the abstraction” of the nation (p. 22). The concept of “banal nationalism” makes evident how these paradoxes are resolved: following Billig, the technologies of banal nationalism – national anthems included – are what enable the paradoxes to “go unnoticed” (p. 22). This brief introduction to theories of nationalism and routine creates the basis for Kelen’s empirical work, which has lyrics and language at its centre. Kelen is particularly interested in comparing and typologizing themes, but also in recognizing ironies and exceptions, not to mention deliberate parodies which reveal fundamentals of the anthem convention (like the Marx Brothers’ “Hail, Hail, Freedonia”, heard in Duck soup) or outright failures of the form (such as the regrettable incident in 2012 when hosts of a Kazakh shooting team played not the genuine Kazakh anthem “Meniñ Qazaqstanım” but the boastful parody from Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Borat). The overall impression is nevertheless how interchangeable, taken out of context, large parts of many nation’s anthems are and how far they draw on common representational conventions. Within these conventions, the symbols of belonging to this nation rather than that stand out all the more: its history (however the anthem narrates it); its language (or in certain cases, such as South Africa, its languages) and its territory, the source of much of the material content with which a national lyricist must work. Generally switching between many countries’ anthems at once rather than (as in Kelen’s articles) developing a sustained focus on one at a time, Anthem quality is a poetic compendium of anthems and anthem-like lyrics; indeed, the cumulative effect of the extracts Kelen provides might suggest that the time has come for a comprehensive anthology of anthems and songs of similar standing. Its focus on shared linguistic imagery helps to open further questions for future research. How, for instance, did the idea of religious devotional song be attached to the idea of the nation? Historicizing the spread of the national anthem as an institution could productively become a reason to ask in more depth about the precedents set for nationalism as a “civic religion”, in the festivals of the French Revolution, or about the uses of religious music in European colonial rule. Yet perhaps the most important question raised by Kelen is implicit: if the force of “asserting ourselves to be national subjects” through official and de-facto anthems comes through “the act of singing together”, can the power of the affective and experiential aspects of identification – one might think for instance here of the work of Angharad Closs Stephens on what she calls nationalism’s “affective atmospheres” – fully be illustrated through concentrating on lyrics and language? And, if not, how else could it be approached? Anthem quality may not answer all these questions, but nevertheless places the anthem back on the agenda of nationalism studies.