Date:
Location:
"Is Civic Nationalism Necessarily Inclusive? Conceptions of Nationhood and Anti-Muslim Attitudes in Europe"
Speaker:
Bart Bonikowski, Director, Undergraduate Student Programs; Executive Committee; Faculty Associate; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Populism. Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Harvard University.
Contact:
Ilana Freedman
ifreedman@g.harvard.edu
Chairs:
Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Department of Anthropology, and the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University.
Abstract:
Despite the centrality of national identity in the exclusionary political discourse of the European radical right, scholars have not investigated how popular conceptions of nationhood are connected to dispositions toward Muslims. Using latent class analysis and multilevel models of survey data from 41 European countries, we demonstrate that respondents’ definitions of legitimate criteria of national belonging (a) are heterogeneous within countries, (b) predictive of anti-Muslim attitudes, and (c) varied in their effects between countries. Specifically, and contrary to existing theories, we find that civic nationalism is associated with greater antipathy toward Muslims, but only in Northwestern Europe. We argue that this is a legacy of historically contentious church-state relations and the dominance of Lutheranism in the region, which have served to relegate religion to the private sphere. As a consequence, elective criteria of belonging have become fused with exclusionary notions of national culture that portray Muslims as incompatible with European liberal values, effectively legitimating anti-Muslim sentiments not only on the radical right, but also in mainstream political culture.
