Choose your target wisely: how the EU shapes nationalism in contemporary Europe

Abstract

Nationalism has experienced a resurgence across Europe since 1980, and one common explanation for this resurgence is that the backlash to European integration aids radical right parties, which prioritise cultural protectionism in the form of anti-immigration and anti-ethnic minority appeals. In contrast, this article argues that, through the policy-making avenues available to certain parties, but not others, European integration encourages a different form of nationalism in highly regionalised countries: ethnoregionalism, which seeks either greater autonomy or independence for a sub-national unit. By examining how nationalist parties combine both cultural protectionism and ethnoregionalism, and the relative saliency that they attach to each, this article provides a novel way to disentangle the EU’s different potential effects on nationalism. Through a quantitative analysis of party manifestos across 33 European countries for 1980–2019, this article finds that European integration has a significantly stronger effect on the saliency of ethnoregionalism than cultural protectionism.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: [DOI].

Keywords:

• Nationalism
• radical right
• ethnoregionalism
• EU
• political parties

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Emanuel E. Coman, for his constant feedback and advice throughout the development of this article. In addition, I would like to thank those within Trinity College Dublin’s Department of Political Science that have given me important feedback on the paper at various stages, especially Gizem Arikan and Constantine Boussalis. I would also like to thank Audrey M. Plan and Jesper Lindqvist for their advice, feedback, and support during the development of this article. This article was also presented at the Political Studies Association of Ireland conference in 2020 and the European Political Science Association conference in 2021, so I would like to thank those who attended these panels and gave me suggestions for how to improve the paper. Finally, I would like to thank the reviewers for their detailed and constructive feedback, which considerably strengthened the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This research was supported by the Irish Research Council’s Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship (project ID GOIPG/2019/378).

Notes

1 Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samuel A. T. Johnston

Samuel A. T. Johnston is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science in Trinity College Dublin. His primary research interests lie in different forms of nationalist parties across Europe, especially radical right and ethnoregional parties, and how the EU influences political parties. He also researches Irish Politics and party politics across Europe more generally. [[email protected]]