Nationalism
THE CONSEQUENCES OF NATIONALISM
In contrast to an ideational model, a national policy model exists in the real world when we observe a relatively coherent set of regulations. For a long time, policy models have been investigated by means of qualitative case studies (Brochmann & Midtbøen, 2021; Brubaker, 1992; Favell, 1998). More recently, various studies have built policy indices that allow for the comparison of a larger number of countries (for overviews, see Bjerre et al., 2015; Helbling, 2013; Solano & Huddleston, 2021). The quantification of policies can also be seen as a response to the discussion initiated by Brubaker himself about the ambiguity and limitations of distinguishing different national models (1999, pp. 59–63). A differentiation between ethnic and civic-territorial forms of nationalism seems to imply that ‘culture’ and ‘will’ are mutually exclusive. However, most often nationalism consists of a combination of these two principles, and policy indices allow for taking such more fine-grained differentiations into account. Some of the index studies have completely abandoned the differentiation between national models and mostly distinguish between more or less restrictive immigration policies (e.g., Howard, 2009). Koopmans et al. (2005, 2012) and Goodman (2010) are the only ones who propose to combine index research with a model approach by proposing quantitative measures to group countries into different categories.
What are the consequences of nationalism?
Brubaker (1992) has shown that the republican and assimilationist model in France has led to liberal naturalisation regulations that also allow dual citizenship, while Germany, which defines citizenry as a community of descent, has adopted very restrictive naturalisation criteria that do not allow dual citizenship. Favell (1998) investigates how ideas and political arguments have affected the shift in policy focus from socioeconomic integration to political integration in France and to a multiculturalism model in Great Britain. Taking up Favell's approach, which looks at the consensual ideas of the elite, Brochmann and Midtbøen (2021) study how different understandings of nationhood have affected citizenship policies in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Koopmans et al. (2012) as well as Koopmans and Michalowski (2017) follow Brubaker's path dependency argument. They show that policy changes between 1980 and 2002 were rather small, thereby reproducing pre-existing cross-national differences. Investigating Denmark, Germany and Great Britain, Mouritsen (2013) also shows that national models remain relatively stable and reflect different understandings of nationhood.
More recently, quantitative studies have appeared that examine how party or government positions affect immigration regulations. Lutz (2019) and Natter et al. (2020) show that the moderate or populist right has an impact on integration policies but hardly on immigration policies. Ko and Choi (2022) conclude that countries with more nationalist governments implement more restrictive immigration policies.
Some studies have investigated to what extent policies have converged between countries, which might be a sign of the increasing irrelevance of national models or nationalism altogether (Goodman, 2014; Helbling & Kalkum, 2018). Especially since the civic turn in integration policies (Entzinger, 2003; Joppke, 2007) and more generally the proliferation of universal liberal values, it has been discussed time and again that nationalism no longer shapes national regulations. According to Joppke (2005), cultural norms cannot be implemented, as universal liberal norms constrain immigration regulations. However, Jensen and Mouritsen (2019) argue that this development does not question the existence of national models, because states prioritise different liberal values, interpret them differently or have institutionalised them in different ways.
What are new research frontiers?
To explore the impact of nationalism on immigration policies in the future, we need a better understanding of where we observe nationalism, how we measure it and how we deal with the potential fact that understandings of nationhood vary between the different spheres of a nation-state. The distinction between ideational and policy models already allows us to study forms of nationalism in political ideologies and policy regulations (Jensen, 2019). Critics of a national model approach have argued that a closer look at policy processes is necessary to see whether understandings of nationhood play the same role in political debates, policy decisions, policy implementation and policy outcomes (Bertossi & Duyvendak, 2012; Finotelli & Michalowski, 2012). Even if regulations reflect a certain understanding of nationhood, their implementation may vary widely across the different regions of a nation-state, for example, and migrant integration or naturalisation rates may not be strongly influenced by policies. Various quantitative studies have investigated how policies affect migrant integration (e.g., Fleischmann & Dronkers, 2010), immigration rates (e.g., Czaika & de Haas, 2014) and natives' attitudes towards migrants (e.g., Schlueter et al., 2013) and have come to different conclusions as to whether policies matter. A differential approach also implies that a specific understanding of nationalism is not necessarily observed everywhere in a nation-state. Already Brubaker (1992, pp. 184 and 242) emphasised that understandings might differ between a nation-state's elite and its population.
For all these different spheres, we need appropriate and comparable measures. Over the last two decades, important advances have been made in the measurement of immigration policies (see Bjerre et al., 2015; Helbling, 2013; Solano & Huddleston, 2021, for overviews) and individual national identities (Bochsler et al., 2021). Where and how to measure nationalist discourses or understandings of nationhood remains less clear. Do we find it in written documents such as constitutions and party programs or in the heads of the political elite? A final challenge constitutes the comparability of such measures across a larger number of countries and especially countries outside the Western world, in which the impact of nationalism on immigration policies has hardly been studied so far.
At the most abstract level, nationalism constitutes a political principle which holds that the world is divided into nations, each an authentic entity with its peculiar history and culture; that political loyalty is primarily structured around nations; and that nations are or ought to be self-governed (Gellner, 1983; Smith, 2008). This root conceptualisation has been applied in multifaceted ways. Scholars use nationalism to describe aspects of political, social and cultural life as different as movements, regimes, policies, ideologies, rhetorical styles, collective emotions and patterns of self-identification.
Nonetheless, upon closer inspection, three distinct perspectives can be identified that make different ontological assumptions about the fundamental properties of nationalism, with far-reaching consequences for how conceptual boundaries are drawn, what kinds of theoretically relevant variations of nationalism can be identified and how to align conceptualisation and measurement strategies:
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