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Abstract
This article builds on a growing body of research that shows an intrinsic but complex relationship between the concepts and the ideologies of nationalism and racism. In doing so, it investigates how different, meaningful national and ethnic in-group identifications of a dominant national/ethnic group (Greek-Cypriots) within a given national context (Cyprus) influence their perceptions of different, meaningful ethnic and racial minority out-groups. Logistic regression analysis of quantitative survey data with secondary school children (N = 738) in Cyprus shows that the relationship between national/ethnic in-group identifications and out-group perceptions varies according to the social and political relationships between particular national/ethnic in- and out-groups. The findings show that future research on the relationship between nationalism and racism should consider the overlap between and context specific nature of national and ethnic in-group identification processes and the historical, political relationships between different in- and out-groups.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation and the Foundation for Scientific Research Flanders (Belgium) for financially supporting the project on which this article is based and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. Finally, we would like to thank the participating schools, teachers and students for their generous time.
Funding
This work was supported by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation under grant number [ANΘPΩΠIΣTIKEΣ/KOINΩ/0308(BIE)/08] and the Foundation for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO) under grant number [1.2.533.09.N.00].
Notes
[1] Sociological research usually conceptualises racism as consisting of discrimination and/or prejudice (Quillian Citation2006). While the former reflects a behavioural dimension, the latter consist of both an affective (a dislike of a particular group) and a cognitive dimension (unfounded beliefs about a particular out-group). However, research on the relationship between nationalism and racism tends to focus primarily on prejudice and, more specifically, on negative perceptions of ethnic/racial out-groups.
[2] This study focuses on both national/ethnic in-group identifications as in the context of Cyprus notions of national belonging overlap with notions of cultural or ethnic belonging (or being a Cypriot means being a Greek (Cypriot) or a Turk or Turkish-Cypriot).
[3] See Footnotenote 2.
[4] Some scholars seem to oscillate between the third and second position, sometimes suggesting that racism and nationalism are not only two distinct concepts but also arguing that they cannot be analysed as distinct concepts.
[5] This concept also appears as ‘racial nationalism’ and ‘racist nationalism’.
[6] We defined Greek-Cypriots as young people who have at least one parent that speaks Greek to them and at least one parent that was born in (the northern or southern part of) Cyprus.
[7] Although the opening of some checkpoints in 2003 allowed people to move more freely between the two main communities, social interactions between members of the two communities remain very limited.
[8] Although this study only involves statistical analyses of quantitative survey data, the research project underpinning this study employs a mixed-methods design, including qualitative interviews from over 100 students sampled from the same schools that participated with the survey. The initial analyses of the qualitative interview data strongly suggests that the selected national/ethnic in- and out-groups in this quantitative study are meaningful to the respondents in our study in that they describe themselves spontaneously in terms of belonging to these groups.
[9] As a result, this study is not representative of the Cypriot context in that considerably more Greek-Cypriot students in this study had the opportunity to interact personally with Turkish-Cypriot students.
[10] The highest correlations between the independent variables are those between centrality and in-group regard (R = .61), centrality and cultural essentialism/nationalism (R = .50) and in-group regard and cultural essentialism/nationalism (R = .83). However, these correlations are not sufficiently large to suffer from multicollinearity.