Nations in black: charting the national thanatopolitics of mourning across European countries

Abstract

Periods of national mourning have been on the rise in the last decades in European societies as part of a wider process of democratization, whereby ordinary citizens have been increasingly granted the honors of state condolences. However, despite their growing incidence, periods of national mourning have not received the due attention in social science scholarship. This study examines the patterns and politics of national mourning observed in European countries between 1989 and 2018, based on an exhaustive dataset compiled for this analytical purpose (N = 415). Periods of national mourning are understood here as instituting states of social exception during which state authorities enact ritual actions consisting in a sequence of choreographically staged performative acts meant to create a national community of grief in the face of what is framed as a socially meaningful loss. Against these considerations, the paper argues that there are two main political cultures of public mourning in Europe. Data analysis reveals that the continent is split diagonally between a sober, Northwestern and Protestant political culture of public mourning and a lavish, Southeastern one informed by the traditions of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.