Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Attachment--and loss.

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Series Editor's Preface. Introduction by John Breuilly. Acknowledgements. 1. Definitions. State and nation. The nation. 2. Culture in Agrarian Society. Power and culture in the agro-literature society. The varieties of agrarian rulers. 3. Industrial Society. The society of perpetual growth. Social genetics. The age of universal high culture. 4. The Transition to an Age of Nationalism. A note on the weakness of nationalism. Wild and garden culture. 5. What is a Nation. The course of true nationalism never did run smooth. 6. Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society. Obstacles to entropy. Fissures and barriers. A diversity of focus. 7. A Typology of Nationalisms. The varieties of nationalist experience. Diaspora nationalism. 8. The Future of Nationalism. Industrial culture - one or many?. 9. Nationalism and Ideology. Who is for Nuremberg?. One nation, one state. 10. Conclusion. What is not being said. Summary. Select bibliography. Bilbliography of Ernest Gellner's writing: Ian Jarvie. Index

Nations and Nationalism

Preface Introduction: Traditions of Nationhood in France and Germany I. The Institution of Citizenship 1. Citizenship as Social Closure 2. The French Revolution and the Invention of National Citizenship 3. State, State-System, and Citizenship in Germany II. Defining The Citizenry: The Bounds of Belonging 4. Citizenship and Naturalization in France and Germany 5. Migrants into Citizens: The Crystallization of Jus Soli in Late-Nineteenth-Century France 6. The Citizenry as Community of Descent: The Nationalization of Citizenship in Wilhelmine Germany 7. \"Etre Francais, Cela se Merite\": Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in France in the 1980s 8. Continuities in the German Politics of Citizenship Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany.

This article scrutinizes the theoretically proposed positive sides of different forms of civic national attachment. Data come from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 1995, which is a programme for cross-country comparative attitude studies. Two different forms of attachment and their relationships to xenophobia have been examined, namely national identity and national pride. In order to dismiss possible country-specific phenomena, four Western countries, Australia, Germany, Britain and Sweden were studied. The choice of countries was based on the different policy regimes implemented in the areas of citizenship and immigration, which illustrate how the nation-state is conceptualized in the different countries. The results show that both civic national identity and national pride go together with xenophobia, whereas the reverse holds for ethnic national identity and national pride in all four countries, despite their different conceptualizations of the nation-state. In all, the article gives empirical support for the proposed theoretical argument of a separation of the civic and ethnic in society.

National Identities, National Pride and Xenophobia: A Comparison of Four Western Countries:

A specific case of group threat theory states that the size of a given minority has a direct bearing on anti-immigrant attitudes amongst the majority, a hypothesis that has been shown to have some merit, especially in the USA. This article embarks on group threat theory by focusing on the actual as well as the perceived size of a minority under different political circumstances. Data are drawn from the European Social Survey. After using multilevel analysis for 20 European countries, the paper concludes that neither actual nor perceived size matter for anti-immigrant attitudes in Europe. Nor does size have any effect under different economic or political contexts. This challenges both the theoretical foundation of this specific case of group threat as well as the European political discourse that claims that immigration needs to be reduced in order to lessen tension and, in the long run, preserve a stable democracy.

Do Numbers Really Count? Group Threat Theory Revisited

In this article, I set out to test a specific case of group threat theory, namely the size of the minority population. My general aim is to test whether the proportion of immigrants in Swedish municipalities has any effect on anti-immigrant attitudes. More specifically, I examine whether visibility of immigrants matters, via country of origin, as well as whether different contexts intensify the relation between size of the minority population and anti-immigrant attitudes. I conclude that the proportion of the foreign-born population has no effect on anti-immigrant attitudes, whereas people have fewer anti-immigrant attitudes in municipalities with a high proportion of the most visible groups of immigrants. A recent influx of immigrants to the municipality does not matter for levels of anti-immigrant attitudes. However, the economic context matters in that anti-immigrant attitudes of people are strongest in poor municipalities with a large share of immigrants. The political context, on the other hand, does not matter.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25652097.pdf

Anti-Immigrant Attitudes and Cross-Municipal Variation in the Proportion of Immigrants

This paper sets out to scrutinise the relation between levels of education on the one hand, and nationalist sentiment and xenophobia on the other. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme it empirically compares ten carefully chosen countries in order to be able to assess the relation between education and the attitudes expressed. The article concludes that the effect of levels of education is not country-specific. In other words, levels of nationalist sentiment as well as of xenophobia decrease with increasing levels of education in all the countries examined, despite substantial differences between the educational systems in the countries.

Education, xenophobia and nationalism: A comparative analysis

This article sets out to develop a classical theme of empirical research within group threat theory, namely the argument that the size of the minority population threatens the majority population. To be able to clarify the mixed empirical results within this version of group threat theory, the article focuses on the composition of the immigrant population. The article tests both objective sources of cultural threats (linguistic composition and the Muslim population) and economic threats (the proportion of working-class individuals and the unemployed among the immigrant population). The study concludes that, first, the composition of the immigrant population is of utter importance for the size argument to be valid for cultural threats (proportion of Muslim population), whereas for economic threats it does not matter. Second, compositional economic threats matter strongly to the group that genuinely competes for scarce resources - the working class is more xenophobic when the immigrant working class is large. Third, the study brings some clarity with regard to the cultural composition of the immigrant population: it is shown that the relationship between Muslims and European majority populations mirrors the relationship between whites and African-Americans in the US.

Mikael Hjerm

Papers

National Identities, National Pride and Xenophobia: A Comparison of Four Western Countries:

Do Numbers Really Count? Group Threat Theory Revisited

Anti-Immigrant Attitudes and Cross-Municipal Variation in the Proportion of Immigrants

Education, xenophobia and nationalism: A comparative analysis

The composition of the minority population as a threat : Can real economic and cultural threats explain xenophobia?