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This article analyses the racialization of discourses about national identities, and explores the implications for populations racialized as white. Two extensive datasets have been brought together, spanning a decade and 560 interviews, to explore discursive interplay, the oppositional nature and relationality of majority and minority claims about national belonging. We demonstrate that national identity claims are constructed discursively from positions of relative advantage and disadvantage: here the English majority and Polish minority. Discourses of national identity involve positioning and using resources differentially available. Dominant majority groups, perceiving themselves as entitled through their conceptualization of the nation-state and indigeneity, interpret and police minority claims in ways that equate to a gate-keeping function. The analysis examines the contingent hierarchy of whiteness and the discursive implications for entitlement, deservingness and resentment. The framework of whiteness helps illuminate the construction and contested racialization of hierarchies around national identity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Introduction begins by outlining the general theme of this special issue, "Race and Crisis". It then moves to examine populist right-wing politics from 2015. Of the various ways in which the rise of such politics could be charted in this period, here the "success" of anti-immigrant and anti-E.U. parties in national-level elections is the focus. Success is understood in terms of share of the popular vote at national level, and the appeal of the right-wing parties in question gauged from their manifestos. In particular, manifesto proposals for renegotiating the principles of citizenship are considered, and their implicitly racist underpinnings noted. The final part of the Introduction presents some general observations on coded ways of evoking race and prompting racialization in contemporary political discourse. How the contributions to this special issue deal with that is briefly summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the national populisms of Northern and Western Europe form a distinctive cluster within the wider north Atlantic and pan-European populist conjuncture. They are distinctive in construing the opposition between self and other not in narrowly national but in broader civilizational terms. This partial shift from nationalism to “civilizationism” has been driven by the notion of a civilizational threat from Islam. This has given rise to an identitarian “Christianism”, a secularist posture, a philosemitic stance, and an ostensibly liberal defence of gender equality, gay rights, and freedom of speech. The paper highlights the distinctiveness of this configuration by briefly comparing the national populisms of Northern and Western Europe to the Trump campaign and to the national populisms of East Central Europe. It concludes by specifying two ways in which the joining of identitarian Christianism with secularist and liberal rhetoric challenges prevailing understandings of European national populism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Enjoying a surge of national pride, the German media celebrated the 2010 German World Cup team's success in South Africa. A dominant theme in this coverage was the 'immigration background' of 11 of the 23 players on the team and their claim to German identity despite their ethnic diversity. Amid debate over the changing nature of German citizenship, the national team's 'multicultural kickers' became the focal point for those who wished to reframe German identity. This article examines German newspaper and magazine coverage of the national soccer team emphasizing the role that media played in constructing competing definitions of the German citizen and nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical research on western racial theories has grown exponentially in the past few years. A number of scholars have also investigated various cases of ethnic prejudice beyond the western pale, for instance against Koreans in Japan or Muslims in India. Yet, little attention has been given to the modalities in which European nineteenth-century racial thought was adopted in other parts of the world. This article attempts to broach a discussion on this under-analysed aspect of race studies by reviewing one case, that of Arab-hatred in modern Iran. I argue that the intense hatred of Arabs in Iranian nationalist texts derives from a racialized vision of Iranian history born in nineteenth-century European texts. Racialized historiography was selectively imported by the ideologues of Iranian nationalism as it allowed them to explain Iran's weakness in terms of a loss of racial purity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the restrictive turn towards immigrants in European countries like Denmark? Are countries returning to nationalism, or are they following a general European trend towards a perfectionist, even ‘repressive’ liberalism that seeks to create ‘liberal people’ out of immigrants? Recent developments in Danish policies of integration and citizenship, education and anti-discrimination suggest a combination of these two diagnoses. The current Danish ‘integration philosophy’ leaves behind a previous concern with private choice and equal rights and opportunities to emphasize other historical elements, especially the duty to participate in upholding democracy and the egalitarian welfare community, and to promote autonomous and secular ways of life. However, the virtues of this ‘egalitarian republicanism’ are seen by right-of-centre intellectuals and politicians as rooted in a wider Christian national culture that immigrants must acquire in order to become full citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study explored feelings of European identity and attitudes towards Europe manifested in two groups within the British population: the indigenous white British population (N = 58) and the South-Asian ethnic minority (N = 44). A social survey approach was used with scales to evaluate British, European and ethnic identities and also attitudes towards Europe. Perceived compatibility of identities was also assessed using a visual representation of identities task. Previous research findings were confirmed with the indigenous white British respondents, who displayed a strong sense of national identity negatively correlated with European identity. In contrast, the South Asian respondents displayed positive feelings of identification on all three levels, and a British identity that correlated positively with European identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most influential theories in the study of nationalism has been the ethnic-East/civic-West framework developed by Hans Kohn. Using the 2002 Eurobarometer survey on national identity and building on earlier survey studies, this article examines whether the Kohn framework is valid at the level of popular understandings of nationhood. It scrutinizes the framework both conceptually – do people define nationhood in civic or ethnic terms? – and regionally – is the East indeed more ethnic than the West and the West more civic than the East? It will show that identity markers cluster in a political, a cultural and an ethnic dimension. Respondents do not see these dimensions as competing sources of nationhood, however. The article further lends some support for the regional component of the framework. Lastly, it argues that it is the intensity of national identifications rather than their qualitative nature (ethnic-civic) that correlates with xenophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans Kohn's definition of a more "liberal, civic Western" and "illiberal, ethnic Eastern" nationalism has been highly influential in providing a framework for our understanding of different types of nationalism. This article challenges the Kohn framework as idealized and argues that it did not reflect historical reality and is out of step with contemporary theories of nationalism. Its continued use also ignores the evolution from communist to civic states that has taken place in central-eastern Europe during the 1990s. The assumption that Western nation-states were always "civic" from their inception in the late eighteenth century is criticized and a different framework is proposed that sees Western states as only having become civic recently. In times of crisis (immigration, foreign wars, domestic secessionism, terrorism), the civic element of the state may continue to be overshadowed by ethnic particularist factors. The proportional composition of a country's ethnic particularism and civic universalism has always been in tension and dependent not on geography but on two factors: the historic stage of the evolution from ethnic to civic state and nationhood and the depth of democratic consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most volatile and dangerous global issues today is the growth of political separatism. In Africa it has become a major factor in the East-West power struggle, where it threatens the integrity of fragile new states. In Asia it has provided intractable problems for the many military regimes. In the view of several commentators, is the renaissance of ethnic nationalisms in the West, in the old established and democratic states of Western Europe. A more important distinction is that between ethnic and territorial movements for autonomy and separation. In the latter, geography itself played the major role in inducing populations to regard themselves as distinct and separate. Given the state of social communications at various periods, it is not difficult to see how, with the growth of local networks, distant islands such as Iceland and the West Indies should grow away from the imperial or mother-country. Similarly with overseas colonies. In many of these cases, it was the sense of distance and of remote government that spurred a sense of apartness. The classic instance is that of the thirteen colonies, whose ethnic fusion and nationalistic phase began after the War of Independence, but whose leading strata had even before felt themselves different and standing apart from their counterparts in the British Isles.