Publication Announcement: The New Politics of Nationalism in Contemporary Europe (Understanding Europe Book Series with Agenda Publishing).
By Gregory C. Baldi
This month our new edited volume The New Politics of Nationalism in Contemporary Europe will be published by CES in collaboration with Agenda Publishing as part of the Understanding Europe book series, overseen by editor-in-chief Mark Vail. The series supports research that promotes understanding of Europe, its nation-states, institutions, and societies. To mark the publication of our book, several contributors and I will participate in a live webinar discussing The New Politics of Nationalism on Friday, November 14 at 10:00 am Eastern US Standard Time/4:00 pm Central European Time. In this blog post, I outline the organization of and motivation for the book and highlight some of its key findings that will discussed further in our webinar.
As the book’s title indicates, our volume examines the surge in support for nationalist parties and movements across the countries of Europe. Few states have managed to avoid the rising nationalist tide; even those that were thought immune by virtue of their institutions, political culture or historical legacies have seen nationalist parties claim greater vote shares in elections, raise their influence in policy debates and – increasingly – enter governments. Our book includes case studies of nine European countries– Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and the UK – spanning the continent written by country experts with deep understanding of the historical, cultural, and political factors shaping present-day nationalist politics.
The contributions in the book address broadly the development of nationalist politics in the current period, while considering three more specific elements of nationalism for each country. The first involves providing an overview of the nationalist inheritance, or the myths, symbols, ideas, rituals and shared assumptions that have become part of the fabric of a country’s national vision. Second, the authors sketch out the landscape of contemporary nationalist politics, identifying nationalist parties and movements, and considering the ways in which the present nationalist moment reflects – or rejects – the nationalist inheritance. Finally, they consider the factors that have contributed to the reassertion of nationalist movements and ideologies and influenced the nationalist trajectories within the countries under consideration. In addressing these issues, contributors did not limit themselves to a single variety of nationalist politics, but considered a range of nationalist types, including sub-state nationalism that advocates territorial separatism, left- wing and liberal nationalism that promotes a multicultural vision of the nation, and right-wing populist nationalism that envisions membership in the national community in exclusionary terms and calls for the protection of national identity from perceived outside threats.
Across these different nationalist varieties, our contributors largely find contemporary nationalist programs to be not merely continuations or revivals of past nationalist movements, but new political projects, characterized by a view shared by actors the nationalist continuum that the nation has become hollowed out and needs substantive restoration and reconstruction. These contemporary nationalist narratives are largely unfettered by inherited notions of national identity, custom and tradition, which are regularly rejected or repurposed, sometimes in radically inconsistent ways. Hence, the French National Rally, which in its first decades adopted a Catholic identity, has seized upon the secularism of traditional French republicanism, which it has discursively redirected away from its initial purpose, namely the assumption of control by the French state over social institutions long controlled by the Catholic Church, towards efforts to exclude Islam from public spaces. The Italian regional nationalist party, the Northern League promoted the narrative construction of a new nation called Padania in the north of Italy, despite the fact that the territories lacked a shared history, dialect or common traditions, much less past nationhood. In Serbia, the populist nationalist Serbian Progressive Party has identified itself with the Serbian Kosovo cause, long a core element of the Serbian nationalist narrative. Yet it was the same party that was a signatory to the 2013 Brussels Agreement, that moved the country towards effectively assenting to Kosovo’s independence and helped it maintain its image to external actors as moderate and pro-European.
The studies further find a deterioration of once-pervasive national identities, particularly among the West European countries examined. Long-standing forms of identity do not claim the allegiance of populations as they once did and contemporary nationalists have sought to construct new forms of identity that – depending on the context – extend, revise or reject elements of the traditional identity forms. We thus see right-wing parties such as the Alternative for Germany calling for a nativist nationalism emphasizing ethno-cultural features instead of the Federal Republic’s constitutional patriotism, and the regional-nationalist Scottish National Party embracing a pro- European, multicultural vision of an independent Scottish nation to supplant a fading Britishness centered on empire, monarchy and victory in the Second World War.
A perceived decline in states’ sovereign decision-making authority is also noted in the book’s chapters. For many European nationalists, developments such as globalization and European integration have weakened the authority of nation-states over both policy and territory, resulting in efforts to promote nationalist-centered responses. In Poland, membership of the EU was widely celebrated when the country joined in 2004, but over time the delegation of certain powers to the EU following the country’s accession has become a core source of political division among parties, with right-wing nationalists such as the Law and Justice party consistently fighting what it views as interference from Brussels and seeking to reclaim powers from EU institutions. Hungary’s populist nationalist government not only defied EU directives in its response to the 2015 migrant crisis, but promoted an anti-migrant campaign that associated refugees fleeing conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan with terrorists seeking to destroy European civilization.
The regulation of membership is a further area where competing visions and historical memories of nationalism play out in debates over access to citizenship, residency and access to social and political rights. In countries with more liberal traditions of citizenship such as France, right-wing nationalists such as the National Rally party calls for ending jus soli and abolishing automatic naturalization through marriage; in countries with traditionally restrictive citizenship regimes, such as Germany, the populist-nationalist Alternative for Germany has sought to reverse liberalization and reinstate an unqualified jus sanguinis. On the other side of the spectrum, the Law on Historical Remembrance passed in 2007 by a Socialist government in Spain opened up the possibility of citizenship for the descendants of Spanish republican exiles and members of international brigades that participated in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side.
Recent years have seen the publication of many studies on nationalism in Europe but we believe that our book’s cross-national approach, its wide geographical scope, and its consideration of a variety of nationalist politics can make fresh additions both to discussions of contemporary European politics and efforts more generally to understand the present nationalist moment. It is our hope that scholars and students of nationalism, European politics, European postwar history, and those with an interest in the individual countries represented in the volume find it useful and engaging and we look forward to seeing readers of the CES newsletter at our November webinar.
Join us on Friday, November 14, at 10 am EDT/4pm CET for an online book launch with Gregory C. Baldi and contributors to the volume.
Register today: https://temple.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8jGaco8hSm-N7F5DCnLyyA