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

In the midst of the seven days of mourning observed by the people of Venezuela following president Hugo Chavez’s death in 2013, a scholar interviewed by the BBC ventured the hypothesis of two cultures of mourning. In global terms, ‘a dividing line can be drawn between the “more reserved” northern hemisphere and “more emotional” southern hemisphere’, suggested Jill Scott, a mourning scholar who explored the poetics of forgiveness in the face of loss and wrongdoing (Robb 2013; Scott 2010). Scaled down to the European continent, Scott’s argument could be used to make the case for a regional dichotomy in the European political culture of public mourning. If the dividing line holds true, then a clinical, aseptic, and sober culture of mourning in Northwestern Europe could be counterposed to a more intimate, and at times quite flamboyant, relationship with death in the public spheres of Southeastern societies. While the former, protestant, political public culture of death is allegedly characterized by funeral parsimony and simplicity, the latter, shaped by the Catholic and Orthodox traditions of faith and ritual praxis, espouses a more intricate ethos of publicly expressing grief and socially performing mourning. It is this insight of an existing cultural divide within European societies in terms of the political culture of public mourning that provides us with the main hypothesis that underpins and drives this research.

The tragic death of Princess Diana on 31 August 1997 unleashed a wave of grief that swept through British society and well beyond it. However, despite and against the impressive display of social grief, British authorities refrained from decreeing national mourning. In the United Kingdom, the funeral institution of declaring national days of mourning is strictly reserved for members of the Royal House and other prominent statesmen such as Winston Churchill, who was nationally mourned in 1965. Diana’s ambivalent status as princess-divorcée disqualified her from benefiting of national mourning being instituted to honor her death. British authorities’ decision to adhere to the rigidly defined state protocol and not to formally declare national mourning contrasted starkly with the popular mourning endowed with social emotion performed by a bereaved society (Walter 1999).

Whereas Diana was denied the formalities of a national mourning, the royal family had the chance to exercise its funeral pomp with full protocolar courtesies five years later. When the Queen Mother passed away on 30 March 2002, age 101, ten days of national mourning were declared. The ethos of parsimony prevailing in the British formal funeral culture was noticed in the necrologue published by The Guardian, which emphasized that ‘The Queen Mother will be only the second British royal consort in modern times to lie in state. Her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, who died in April 1953, was the first’ (Ahmed 2002). Twelve days of mourning will be issued for the monarch herself, for whom the British authorities conducted as recent as June 2018 an ‘unprecedented’ funeral ‘rehearse’ (Wheatstone 2018). In fact, the only other time a national day of mourning has been instituted in the UK’s recent history was on 14 September 2001, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States. However, it is worth mentioning that this act did not represent solely the UK’s state mourning agency, as it was part of a decision of the European Union to declare officially a ‘day of mourning and solidarity with the American people’ in all of its then 15 member states (Truc 2017: 101).

This breach of traditional mourning protocol was not to be repeated. Neither the 2005 London bombings which had a death toll of 56 (including the four attackers) nor the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire with its 74 dead – to mention only the deadliest of events that traumatized time and again British society – did not prompt another national day of mourning. It was this extreme meanness in formally acknowledging meaningful social losses that prompted Daily Mirror to call for a National Day of Mourning (Voice of the Sunday Mirror 2017). ‘Nation in despair needs a day of mourning after so many’, wrote the newspaper, echoing the therapeutic effect anthropologists and sociologists have long claimed mourning rituals to have on bereaved communities affected by loss and social traumas. Indeed, as will be detailed later in this study, mourning rituals in general and those performed in periods of national mourning in particular can be conceived of as performative means of enacting solidarity and refreshing the sense of belonging to the same moral community.

Portugal finds itself at the very opposite side of the national mourning spectrum in terms of the frequency of declaring this funeral institution. Whereas the UK had decreed national mourning only twice in the last three decades, Portuguese people experienced four such periods succeeding in a time span as short as a single calendrical year. In 2004 and then again in 2017, Portugal declared national days of mourning for the death of prominent statemen (António de Sousa Franco, Luís Nunes de Almeida, Mario Soares) and artists (Carlos Paredes), as well as to honor the victims of terror attacks (Madrid bombing) and of various collective tragedies (forest fires and tree falls). Overall, in the last four decades, Portugal declared no less than 27 periods of luto nacional, which contrasts dramatically with the only two periods of national mourning that were declared in the United Kingdom in the half of century passed since the death of Winston Churchill in 1965.

Against the background set by these two contrasting cases, the present study raises a series of questions designed to open some insights into how societies mourn what they socially define as meaningful losses through the funeral institution of declaring days of national mourning and observing such periods of social recollection. How can we make sociological sense of these stark differences when it comes to the way nations choose to mourn their dead? Could these national differences be accounted for in terms of various politics of mourning pursued by different nation-states or in terms of cultures of mourning that characterize different societies? How do societies differ in what could be termed as their national thanatopolitics of mourning? Are there indeed various cultures of mourning within the European continent, as Jill Scott speculates, and the examples given above seem to suggest? After presenting the data and method employed in this study, in the following sections we will proceed with exploring the hypothesis that there are different political cultures of public mourning within Europe. Next, we will attempt to account for these expected differences by resorting to a series of statistical analyses in which we will explore the relationship between various political and religious features of European societies and the frequency of declaring periods of national mourning.

Despite their growing incidence in the last three decades in European societies, with few exceptions, sociologists and other breeds of social scientists have systematically eluded periods of national mourning in terms of both theoretical engagement and empirical data collection and analysis. The few inroads made so far into exploring the periods of national mourning have left the territory largely uncharted sociologically. The scanty but nevertheless significant contributions existing in the literature are not enough to constitute a theoretically and methodologically articulated corpus of scholarship in the otherwise thriving field of the sociology of death addressing the issue of national mourning (Walter 2008).

Among these scanty but valuable pieces, the most scholarly acclaimed contributions address the topic of national mourning via particular historical case studies and were done at the junction point of the sociology of memory with death studies. This is the case with Barry Schwartz’s (1991) Durkheimian-inspired analysis of the funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the mourning’s role in transforming a contested political figure into a sacred symbol of American politics. Similar approaches to the sociological study of mourning via collective memory are to be found in Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz’s (1991) paper on the ambivalences surrounding the making of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial and in Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi’s (2002) examination of the ‘fragmented commemoration’ of Israel’s assassinated Prime-Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. What bound these pieces together, besides their common focus on unraveling the entanglements between mourning and the politics of memory, is an explicitly assumed theoretical thread grounded in Emile Durkheim’s functionalist theory of rituals.

In a work that soon became an enduring cornerstone of sociology’s canonical texts – The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life –, Durkheim (1995) [1912] insisted upon the integrative function of ritual behavior in enacting solidarity and in bounding the individual with the social body. Rites and ceremonies are paramount in creating and reviving bonds of solidarity, in drawing and enforcing the boundaries of social belonging, and in shaping and defining group identity. Indeed, the crux of Durkheim’s argument is that ‘human society is created and renewed by the intense arousal that occurs in gatherings and assemblies’ (Fisher and Koo Chon 1989: 1). It is through staging ritual performances which prompt emotional arousal and collective effervescence that the periodic re-creation of society takes place. Mourning rituals, which were categorized by Durkheim in the class of ‘piacular rites’, although differing dramatically from other rituals of joy in terms of their emotional content and lived experience, serve the same social purpose of enacting solidarity and reaffirming society in the face of death (Durkheim 1995: 392).

Other sociological strands of theorizing mourning are sourced out from Sigmund Freud’s (1968) [1917] seminal thoughts on trauma, memory, and bereavement. This is the case with Jeffrey Alexander’s (2004a, 2012) theory of social trauma, through which periods of national mourning could be seen as an attempt pursued by political actors to appease the collective pain created by a traumatic loss experienced in the social body. Moreover, in line with Alexander’s constructivist take on trauma, instituting periods of national mourning could equally be conceived of as political means of ‘trauma-making’. That is to say, political authorities may resort to this funeral institution to stir the public’s emotions, to generate ‘collective effervescence’, and to channel this socially constructed grief towards political ends, ranging from purely pragmatic ones such as gaining electoral capital to more abstract, but just as instrumental, such as legitimizing the status quo. In this regard, national tragedies could lead to ‘mourning populism’, such as was the case with the 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash near Smolensk killing all 96 people on board. The seven days of national mourning and the ‘mourning populism’ that accompanied it culminated with the burial of the President of Poland Lech Kaczyński and his wife in the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, previously reserved for Poland’s monarchs, saints, and heroes (Wróbel 2011: 449).

None of these sociologically-driven forays into the nature of mourning have touched upon the specific issue of national days of mourning. What is national mourning, as well as how it could be conceived of sociologically are questions that are yet to have received satisfying answers in the available scholarly literature. In this study, we conceived of national mourning through the concept of state’s thanatopolitics, that is to say, as a political behavior enacted by state authorities in response to what is deemed as a significant death. National mourning consists in a state-led, political funeral ritual of marking some death(s) as socially meaningful loses. Such deaths, ranging from collective tragedies (natural disasters, accidents, man-made disasters) to individual demises (usually the death of prominent public figures) create a shared sense of social and moral trauma that threatens what Edward Shils (1975) has called the ‘sacred centers’ of a society’s meaning – and value-system. In situating national mourning within a state’s repertoire of thanatopolitical means of coping with loss, tragedy, and grief, the accent falls upon the political nature of responding to death. That is to say, the thanatopolitics of national mourning is based on the state’s power to acknowledge some deaths as socially meaningful while rendering others as socially invisible (notorious examples of the latter include the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the Mourning Mothers of Iran, civic movements which protested against the consistent failure of state authorities to acknowledge massive violent death as a meaningful loss) (Robben 2013). With this caveat in place, it should be clear that not calling for national mourning is as thanatopolitical as observing periods of official mourning.

Anthropologists’ insistence that death threatens to disrupt the social order and to tear apart the very social fabric by ‘destroying the faith society has in itself’ (Pantti and Sumiala 2009: 121) is not restricted to the pre-modern, ‘tribal’ or rural, societies, from where Robert Hertz (1960) [1907] and Arnold von Gennep (1960) developed these insights. Modern nation-states – and even international organizations such as the European Union in the aftermath of 9/11 – react to what is deemed as socially meaningful deaths through instituting periods of national mourning and perform bereavement ceremonies as a ritual means of comforting with, recovering from, and asserting society’s ultimate triumph over death. Seen through such Durkheimian lenses as moments of national communion in grief and recollection over a socially significant loss, national days of mourning are times of joining together in death that recreate the bonds of solidarity and reconnect individuals with the ‘sacred centers’ of secular mass societies.

Whereas the Durkheimian-inspired analysis points out the integrative functions of national mourning, a complementary perspective consists in focusing on the political performativity and cultural pragmatics implied by mourning ritual practices (Alexander 2004b). From such an interpretive angle, national days of mourning could be theorized through Victor Turner’s (1974) conceptual terms as political funeral dramas. Along these interpretive lines, instituting national mourning constitutes a ‘redressive action’ state authorities take in the wake of a ‘breach’ (that is, the collective death or the death of a prominent public figure) that created a state of moral ‘crisis’, with the purpose of achieving societal ‘reintegration’. The redressive action consists in performing a repertoire of ritual acts, which include, but are not limited to, lying in state and state funerals, observing minutes of silence, flags flown at half-mast, funeral marches, and signing condolence books. Besides such explicitly symbolic ritual behavior, the decree instituting national mourning, usually issued by governmental authorities, also comes with other normative restrictions that are imposed upon society writ large. These generally include as a default condition formal requirements to interrupt the media broadcasting and to redirect the televisions and radio’s programs towards covering the mournful ceremonies. In extremis, state authorities could go as far as blocking the media transmission that does not fall under its jurisdiction, such as was the case in 2009, when the Serbian government ‘blacked-out’ all the TV channels of foreign stations during the three days of national mourning decreed for the death of Orthodox Patriarch Pavle (Helsinki Bulletin 2009: 2). In addition, entertainment activities are canceled while cultural, artistic and sport events are rescheduled. But they may also imply stock exchanges suspending their transactions, businesses and shops closed down, public transport brought to a halt, or even sartorial codes as in the case of Thailand (Truc 2017: 101). Thus, once officially declared, the period of national mourning marks a time of sociopolitical liminality – a transient state of exception – during which, through its participation to the funeral ceremonies, society renders itself into a communitas of mourning.

The conundrum of defining national mourning is further complicated by the variety of social practices people enact collectively in mourning their dead. In this regard, public mourning could be conceived of along a spectrum running from the official protocolarity devoid of much emotional content and consisting in formal rites of abstract grief enacted solely by state representatives (statist mourning) to the informal spontaneous eruptions of social grief expressed by ordinary individuals in the absence of state-protocol (popular mourning). In between of these extremes, we find ‘national mourning’, defined here as combining the solemn character of state protocol with emotional resonance and ritual participation from the civic public (see Table 1).

For the purpose of this paper, our definition of national periods of mourning will include instances of ‘statist mourning’ (Makley 2014; Samuelson 2007) and those of ‘national mourning’, as characterized in Table 1 above. Grounded on methodological reasons, especially in the practical difficulties of collecting exhaustive data across European societies in a timespan covering three decades, the manifestations of ‘popular mourning’ (Walter 2001) were deliberately left outside of our empirical and analytical scope. Against these considerations, our working definition of national mourning rests on a series of criteria, which include (a) exceptionality, (b) official character, (c) solemn ceremonial nature, (d) ritual sequence, and (e) normative restrictions upon social life. Therefore, by national mourning we will refer to those periods instituted as exceptional states following a socially significant death (individual demise or collective tragedy) that are officially decreed as such through governmental procedures. The institution of mourning period sets in motion a ritual sequence of formal acts and symbolic behavior, solemn in its protocolar ceremoniality, which are enacted by the official representatives of state power (with or without the participation of the general public). In addition, such periods impose certain restriction upon the social life along with moral injunctions and civic calls addressed towards the population to embrace the ethos of solemn recollection and to join in the national community of mourning.

In this study, we look at how European countries mourn their dead by instituting and observing periods of national mourning in a comparative manner – an approach that is conspicuously missing from the extant scholarship done in the sociology of death. By conceptually framing national days of mourning as an expression of states’ thanatopolitics, this paper will shed light on a particular dimension of the various ‘regimes of death’ prevalent in Europe’s political cultures (Shaw 1996). Since these particular regimes of death and their corresponding political funeral cultures are shaped by multiple factors, we will proceed in this analysis by examining the frequency and duration of national days of mourning decreed in Europe in terms of several variables: (a) geographical region, (b) system of government, (c) religious denomination, and (d) societal level of religiosity.

Portugal and the United Kingdom are taken here as contrastive cases meant to emphasize the cultural fault lines delineating starkly different European cultures of national mourning. However, comparing particular case studies constitutes a limited methodological strategy in mapping these cultural systems of officially mourning for the dead across the continent. This synecdochal fallacy, as the error of taking a country as a representative of a regional culture from which it is only a part could be labeled, can be avoided by employing a quantitative cross-national comparative strategy at the European level. The existence of several cultural zones within the European continent is well documented in the social science scholarship. In this sense, based on data from the European Values Survey, Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker (2000) developed a value mapping of Europe. Following in this direction of axiological clustering, Christian Welzel (2013) delineated between the ‘Old West’ (mostly Catholic regions of Western Europe which formed the core parts of the Roman Empire), ‘Reformed West’ (Western European societies shaped by the Reformation), ‘Returned West’ (Catholic and Protestant parts of post-communist Europe returning to the EU), and ‘Orthodox East’ (Christian Orthodox or Islamic parts of the post-communist world, mostly parts of former USSR). In addition, Turkey was classified as the European avanpost of the ‘Islamic East’. Extensive research based on EVS and other survey data have examined the cultural differences across Europe. However, the political cultures of public mourning which are certainly shaped by these value differences have not made the subject-matter of research in the social sciences and the humanities. Against this theoretical background, we set out in this paper to verify empirically a set of hypotheses. In line with Jill Scott’s claim regarding a dividing line demarcating a culturally sober Northern Europe and an emotionally warmer Southern Europe, we will advance the hypothesis that (H1) there exists statistically significant regional differences across the European continent in terms of the thanatopolitical culture of mourning, measured through the frequency of decreeing periods of national mourning and the duration of these days of mourning.

A second hypothesis underpinning this research is worked out around the distinction between republican and monarchical systems of government. What the contrasting examples of Portugal and the UK seem to suggest is a difference in terms of a wider ‘democratization of mourning’ (Bin Xu 2013) present in republican states which rendered these countries’ funeral protocol more flexible, as compared to the basically aristocratically reserved rigid protocol of monarchies. Against these considerations, we hypothesize that (H2) states’ thanatopolitics of national mourning vary with the system of government, in the sense that republican countries will decree periods of national mourning with greater frequency in comparison to monarchical political regimes.

Drawing on the heavy sociological tradition that insisted on how the religious worldview and practices shape a society’s cultural outlook (Lenski 1961), we explore in a further pair of hypotheses two facets of the intricate connections between religion and national mourning by looking at how the latter varies in terms of religious denomination and religiosity. Thus, in a third hypothesis we advance the idea that (H3) the public mourning behavior of European states also varies in terms of the dominant religious denomination, with Protestant countries exhibiting the least propensity towards observing periods of national mourning. This is followed by exploring our fourth and last hypothesis, that (H4) the frequency and duration of national mourning is shaped by the societal level of religiosity, in that societies characterized by secular values will resort less to the state rituals of national mourning than countries where religious beliefs, values and behavior prevail.

For the purpose of exploring this largely uncharted territory and verifying the four hypotheses, data were gathered regarding periods of national mourning observed between 1989 and 2018 in European societies, starting with the reburial of Hungarian prime minister Imre Nagy on 16 June 1989 (Ittzés 2005) and ending with the national mourning decreed by Polish government on 22 December 2018 in honor of the twelve Poles who died in a methane blast at a Czech mine (President of Poland 2018). Since no dataset was available in the extant literature, we proceeded by identifying every period of national mourning for each European country through online data mining. Officially declared periods of national mourning were recorded after examining various credible sources such as news reports, governmental decisions, and scholarly works. Methodological precautions were taken by double-checking the validity of a national mourning in at least another reliable source. In accordance with the definition we worked out in the previous section, only officially declared periods of national mourning were recorded in the dataset we compiled, which means that other funeral dramas, such as those performed on Princess Diana or Johnny Hallyday’s deaths in the UK and France respectively are not part of this analysis. Neither are other symbolic forms of political behavior through which states usually honor a socially significant loss, such as flying the flag at half-mast, lying in state, and state funerals (which may or may not overlap with declaring days of national mourning).

Before exploring the regional fault lines in Europe’s political cultures of public mourning, it is instructive to present first an overview picture through some descriptive statistics. In total, between 1989 and 2018, in the 43 European countries for which data was gathered, we recorded 415 periods of national mourning, with an overall duration of 709 days of national mourning. Most of these periods (306 cases) comprised one day of national mourning. The longest duration recorded was the month national mourning declared in Monaco (2005) and Denmark (2018) after the death of Prince Rainier and Prince Henrik respectively. This European record in mourning duration falls short of matching the mourning longevity of monarchies from other parts of the world, such as the full year of mourning decreed for the death of Thailand’s ‘eternal king’, Bhumibol Adulyadej (1927–2016) (DW 2017). The longest period of national mourning lasted for three years, declared in 2011 after the death of North Korea’s second supreme leader, Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) (Chol Jon Jin 2014). Between these extremes, most periods of national mourning lasted for two and three days (20 and 72 cases respectively). The remaining fifteen periods which were observed between four and ten days of mourning were usually reserved to mark the death of royal figures (such as was the case with the 2002 death of the Queen Mother in the UK which was followed by ten days of national mourning). Given the formal restrictions imposed upon social life, such prolonged periods of national mourning might create difficult situations for the government to manage, such as the black clothes shortage produced in Thailand (England 2016). When the Queen will eventually pass away, the mourning protocol stipulates that the London Stock Exchange will be closed for at least the day of the funeral, which is expected to take its toll on British economy (Wheatstone 2018).

However, prolonged periods of mourning also open up unexpected business avenues for opportunistic entrepreneurs to exploit. Such was the case with Thai King Bhumibol mourning, when retailers raised the prices of black garments and clothes dyeing stations have popped up across the country, as the government issued a decree requiring its citizens to wear only black and white for the first month of the one-year mourning period (England 2016). In France, in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks from 13 November 2015, sales of tricoleur flags rose as the nation was preparing for the three days of national mourning decreed by president François Hollande (Chrisafis 2015). In this regard, scholars have documented the financial commodification of death, especially in the case of celebrity demises, such as was the case of Australian television personality Steve Irwin. From such celebrity deaths, as Margaret Gibson (2007) has argued, ‘media corporations create news headlines, programs, stories, and products for profit’ (1). Beyond public mourning into posthumous remembering, the media has the financial incentives to render the death anniversary into a commercial opportunity and for this reason ‘deceased celebrities are resurrected year after year’ (Gibson 2007: 2).

Table 2 presents the data at country level grouped in regional clusters. In the time span under consideration, a group of countries sets themselves off in terms of instituting periods of national mourning, with fifteen or more of such events observed during the last three decades (RUS, POR, UKR, BGR, and POL). What is immediately noticeable is that with the exception of Portugal, all the other countries presenting such a high frequency of state mourning behavior come from the former Socialist bloc from Eastern Europe, with Russia as a top performer in this hierarchy. At the other end of the spectrum, we find countries from Western and Northern Europe, which observed, on average, less than four periods of national mourning.

As was ostentatiously put forth by Jorge Luis Borges’ whimsical taxonomy of animals from the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, classifying objects in distinct categories always retains a degree of arbitrariness (Foucault 1970). Grouping countries in geographical regions makes no exception. Europe itself constitutes a fluid concept, especially so regarding its eastern border, which could be drawn anywhere between the Urals and the Caspian Sea. In this paper, we have employed a comprehensive understanding of ‘Europe’ so as to include Russia and Turkey within its otherwise porous frontiers. For the sake of simplicity, we have resorted to classifying countries in one of the four cardinal regions. As such, within the continent, countries were clustered along the East–West and North–South axes. To do as little classification violence as possible, various permutations were performed, especially with countries whose geographical location and cultural specificity cast doubt upon a definitive categorization. The findings revealed that the regional differences uncovered by our analysis are not sensitive to these ambiguous categorizations of countries in one or another of the four cardinal regions.

Table 3 summarizes the comparison between the countries grouped in Eastern (ALB, BLR, BIH, BGR, CZE, CYP, EST, FYR, GRC, HRV, HUN, LVA, LTU, MDA, MNE, POL, ROU, RUS, SRB, SVK, SVN, TUR, UKR, XKX) and Western Europe (AUT, BEL, CHE, DEU, DNK, ESP, FIN, FRA, GBR, IRL, ISL, ITA, LUX, MCO, MLT, NLD, NOR, PRT, SWE) respectively. The result of the t test reveals that there are indeed statistically significant differences with regards to the frequency with which countries from the Eastern and Western parts of the European continent declare periods of national mourning (p = 0.017). Whereas countries from Eastern Europe observed on average twelve periods of national mourning, for the same timeframe, Western European countries have instituted national mourning significantly less (M = 6.68). On the other hand, the t test returned a statistically non-significant result (p = 0.677) on the means difference between Eastern and Western European countries in the duration of periods of national mourning.

To avoid doing categorical violence by committing the fallacy of dichotomy, we regrouped the countries in four cardinal regions. Table 4 below details the results of One-Way Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) performed on our two dependent variables, the frequency and duration of periods of national mourning in terms of the four regions. Since a society’s proclivity towards observing periods of official mourning is correlated positively with population size (frequency r = 0.476, p = 0.001, duration r = 0.346, p = 0.023), the analysis controls for the effects of country population.

The One-Way ANCOVA returned a statistically significant result for both variables (frequency, p = 0.001 and duration, p = 0.014), which suggests that states’ thanatopolitics of national mourning do vary across European regions. The specific differences between the four regions are further explored in Table 5 below, which details the multiple comparisons for frequency and duration of national mourning.

In terms of the frequency of declaring national mourning, statistically significant differences were obtained between Eastern and Southern Europe, on the one side, and Western and Northern Europe, on the other side. These findings provide further support to the hypothesis that there are two main cultures of mourning splitting diagonally the European continent. Our results endorse the idea of a Northwestern political culture of public death characterized by a parsimony of declaring periods of national mourning and a Southeastern ethos of political mourning defined by an increased propensity towards decreeing and observing such mourning periods.

As the example of the 2002 UK’s ten days of mourning for the Queen Mother’s death shows, the longest periods of national mourning were observed in honor of Europe’s royal figures. In this section we look at how the frequency and duration of national mourning periods vary in terms of a country’s system of government. The theoretical expectation is to find a significantly higher frequency of observing mourning in republican states. However, this differential in frequency should be balanced in terms of the duration of national mourning (measured in days), given the monarchies’ tendency to observe longer periods of mourning for the members of royal houses.

To explore this possibility, we performed a t test for independent samples, comparing the mean scores for frequency and duration of periods of national mourning, this time in terms of the type of government, monarchical (BEL, DNK, ESP, GBR, LUX, MCO, NLD, NOR, and SWE) or republican (the remaining 34 cases). The results are detailed in Table 6 below.

Table 6 shows that the frequency of declaring periods of national mourning differs in a statistically significant manner (p = 0.24), with republican countries observing on average twice more mourning periods than monarchies (10.94 compared to 4.78). In terms of duration, as expected, we found no significant difference. One possible reason that could account for the frequential differential is that in monarchies such as the United Kingdom, the state protocol of instituting national mourning is much stricter and rigid than in republican systems of government. In the former, national mourning is usually declared exclusively for prominent members of the royal family (and sometimes, as the case of Princess Diana had shown, not even for them; exceptions are also possible, as in the case of Winston Churchill). Instead, republican countries tend to have laxer state mourning protocols and as a result, these systems of government mourn a wider variety of victims. In post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, it is not uncommon for non-royal figures to be granted the state honors of a national day of mourning. This democratization of public mourning (Bin Xu 2013) is most visible in instances otherwise inconceivable for the British society – such as when FYR Macedonia instituted in 2007 a national day of mourning after the car crash of ‘the Elvis Presley of the Balkans’, Toše Proeski; or, when the Republic of Moldova observed a day of national mourning for actor Mihai Volontir in 2015.

From a Durkheimian perspective, national days of mourning could be conceived of as politically staged ritual performances enacted into the public sphere as a means of sacralizing what becomes framed as socially meaningful death. This is achieved by honoring the deceased publicly through a variety of funeral ceremonies, ranging from state funerals and lying in state to flying the flag at half-mast. Given the civic sacredness of the moment which calls for respect and solemnity, periods of national mourning bring societies to a halt by imposing an ethos of social silence and restricting the range of cultural activities that could be performed during the mourning period. Seen from such an interpretative vantage point, religion in general and religiosity in particular might interact with a society’s regime of death as expressed in its political culture of public mourning. Based on our findings which already revealed significant variation across European regions, we can expect, first, that countries historically shaped by Protestantism to observe fewer periods of national mourning in comparison to those countries where the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches are the dominant denominations. Second, in the light of these considerations, it is also expectable to have a higher frequency of national mourning periods in countries with higher levels of religiosity.

To explore these hypotheses, we first categorized European countries based on the dominant confession, defined in terms of the majority of believers. Next, we performed a One-Way Analysis of Covariance to check if there are statistically significant differences between these religiously defined groups of countries (while controlling for the effects of country population size). The results are detailed in Table 7 below.

The One-Way ANCOVA returned a statistically significant result for the frequency of national mourning periods (p = 0.015), while the analysis revealed no statistical significance for the duration of these periods (p = 0.286). As expected, the six protestant countries in our sample (DNK, FIN, GBR, ISL, NOR, and SWE) observed the lowest mean value of national mourning periods (M = 3.50). The five countries categorized as non-religious (CZE, DEU, EST, LTV, and NLD) ranked close to the Protestant group, while at the other end of the spectrum, Orthodox countries located in Eastern Europe recorded the highest mean value. They are followed by the three Muslim countries (ALB, BIH, TUR, and XKX) located in the Balkans, and the Catholic countries from Southern and Western Europe. These statistical results endorse our hypothesis that religion does play a role in the frequency with which a country declares periods of national mourning. Moreover, it further consolidates the general argument put forward in this paper, that there are two main religiously informed and geographically embedded political cultures of national mourning, a frugal Northwestern one influenced by Protestantism and a rather lavish Southeastern culture of declaring national mourning shaped under the religious influence of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam.

To verify our last hypothesis, which states that the frequency of national mourning periods varies positively with the level of religiosity, we used data from the European Values Survey (EVS). In particular, we employed the Religiosity Index computed by José Pereira Coutinho (2016) and the Secular Values Index developed by Christian Welzel (2013) for each European country. Religiosity was measured along three dimensions – (a) ideological, (b) ritualistic, and (c) consequential –, each of these further defined by several indicators – belief in personal God, life after death, hell, heaven, and sin (a); religious service attendance, and prayer outside religious services (b); and agreement on homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia, and casual sex (c). Using data from the same EVS, the secularity index was computed based on twelve indicators measuring a national culture’s distance to ‘sacred’ sources of authority, grouped in a series of components: (a) religious authority (faith, commitment, and practice), (b) patrimonial authority (the nation, the state, and the parents), (c) order institutions (army, police, courts), and (d) normative authority (anti-bribery, anti-cheating, and anti-evasion norms). We then proceeded with a correlation analysis to examine the relationship between these religiosity indicators and the frequency and duration of periods of national mournings at the country level. The results are detailed in Table 8 below.

The findings presented in Table 8 indicate moderate and positive, statistically significant relationships between the level of religiosity and both the frequency and duration of national mourning periods. The Secular Values Index does not vary in a statistically significant way with state mourning behavior. However, we found a statistically modest, but theoretically meaningful negative association between the disbelief component of the Secular Values Index, which is computed based on the level of religious beliefs and practices (frequency, r = –0.262; duration, r = –0.350). This result further consolidates the emerging conclusion that states characterized by secular values and low levels of religiosity manifest a lower frequency of declaring periods of national mourning.

The secularization thesis, once upheld as a universal sociological prediction encompassing the modern condition in its entirety, has recently been drastically amended by empirical research (Clark 2012; Swatos and Christiano 1999). Following this barrage of critique, the thesis’ scope of validity was restricted to Protestant Northwestern Europe. In this regard, Max Weber (1930) had famously argued that, by injecting the ethos of rationality into the religious outlook, Protestantism sowed the seeds of its own demise. The secularized Northwestern protestant part of the continent is also Europe’s cultural and geographical area expressing the least frequent state mourning behavior. Extending the Weberian line of thought, it could thus be argued that Protestantism did not erode only the foundations of religiosity; the secular values off-shooting from the protestant ethics also sapped the political culture of public mourning, as evident in the scarcity of state-declared periods of national mourning.

Periods of national mourning have been observed increasingly across the European continent as part of a wider historical process of democratization. Starting with the post-war period, ‘public mourning has shifted from a privilege reserved for leaders and dignitaries, to one that increasingly honors celebrities, public figures of all kinds, and even ordinary individuals’ (Bin Xu 2013). Bin Xu’s thesis stating the ‘democratization of public mourning’ – formulated based on an acute sense of observation and sociological intuition rather than grounded on empirical documentation – finds strong support in the data collected and analyzed in this paper. Indeed, the death of a prominent public figure accounts for only a quarter of the total periods of national mourning declared in European countries between 1989 and 2018 (111 out of 415, representing 26.7%). Most public mournings were instituted to honor the victims of collective accidents and natural disasters (44.8%), the victims of terrorist attacks (13.7%), while the remaining 14.7 percent were observed to commemorate the victims of political and/or military violence, especially in the Balkans. This distribution indicates that the absolute majority of the periods of national mourning were instituted to honor the mass death of ordinary citizens, while only a relatively small percent was reserved for individualized high-profile public personalities. As ‘mourning becomes democratic’, political cultures of honoring the dead also move towards a collectivization of its victims.

However, this trend towards the democratization and collectivization of mourning implied by the intensification of the frequency with which European states institute periods of national mourning is not felt equally across the continent. As our study has pointed out, there are significant regional variations in what we have termed as states’ thanatopolitics that delineate various political cultures of public mourning. Most striking is that between Eastern and Western parts of the continent, with the former Socialist bloc exhibiting a much higher propensity towards honoring meaningful losses through observing periods of national mourning. Further refining the analysis by employing a cardinal category system, we found that there are statistically significant variations across the four regions of Europe, with the most starking contrasts between the Northern and the Eastern parts of the continent.

These regional differences can be partially accounted for in terms of two main factors: the system of government and the dominant religion. Our analysis revealed that republican states resort to the funeral institution of declaring national days of mourning significantly more frequent than their monarchical counterparts. The main reason for this could be the constraining effect exerted by the rigid protocolarity of mourning existing in monarchies, where this form of honoring an important loss is usually strictly reserved for the members of the royal family only. In contrast, republican states exhibit a much flexible thanatopolitics of national mourning which enables governmental authorities to employ this political ritual of societal recollection in the face of death much more freely. The lack of such a dead hand of the past weighing upon the death politics of republican states also means that political actors in these countries are unbound by the formal protocol in exercising their right of instituting periods of national mourning. This possibility of abusive political instrumentalization also comes with the perils of trivialization, as the repeated use and abuse of national mourning lead to the political profanation of what is otherwise framed as a sacred political ritual.

In addition to the system of government, religion is another major factor underpinning the variance in Europe’s political cultures of public mourning. Our analysis uncovered important differences in terms of a country’s dominant confession. In particular, states rooted in the Orthodox, Muslim, and Catholic traditions of faith and ritual practices declare periods of national mourning significantly more than those countries where Protestantism prevails, or the majority of their population have turned away from the church. Shedding another ray of light on our understanding of the states’ thanatopolitics of mourning, we found a significant positive relationship between a country’s frequency of declaring periods of national mourning and its level of religiosity. Conversely, a state’s mourning behavior seems to be a negative function of that society’s level of secularism. All these findings point towards a diagonal line crossing across the continent and delineating between a sober Northwestern political culture of public mourning founded upon the Protestant ethos of parsimony and simplicity, which contrasts starkly with a rather lavish Southeastern political culture of public mourning shaped under the ritual intricacies of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Mihai Stelian Rusu is a lecturer at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. His research interests span across the social sciences, ranging from the politics of memory and the political sociology of nationalism to death studies.

Mihai Stelian Rusuhttp://orcid.org/0000-0001-5474-3895