National identities in the age of globalisation: the case of Western Europe

In an age of increasing globalisation and political fragmentation, does the nation have the relevance it once had? Is the re-scaling of political and economic processes associated with a similar re-scaling of national identities? The aim of the present paper is to offer an answer to these two questions on the basis of both quantitative and qualitative data recently collected for Western Europe. Cross-country trends for both national pride and national attachment are analyzed through Eurobarometer Standard surveys. Furthermore, the notion of national attachment is discussed in relation to qualitative data collected in four regional case-studies in Western Europe. On the basis of this analysis I argue that, when viewed ‘from below’, i.e. from the eyes of ordinary citizens, national identity continues to shape the predominant ways in which people make sense of themselves and others

Exploring the demands of assimilation among white ethnic majorities in Western Europe

Since the mid-1990s, assimilation has gradually regained momentum as both a normative and an analytical concept for understanding the ways in which migrants are incorporated into societies at large. Although scholars have investigated various dimensions of this process, they have tended to privilege the experience of migrants themselves. Comparatively little attention has been dedicated to the perspective of the dominant groups, particularly in relation to what ethnic majority people demand that migrants do in order to be accepted. This article explores these demands of assimilation through qualitative data collected among white local elites in four regional case-studies in Western Europe. The analysis reveals a different picture from the one usually portrayed by 'new assimilation theory'. Accordingly, I suggest rethinking assimilation in ways which incorporate more fully the plurality of demands put forward by dominant ethnic groups. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

International migration and the rise of the ‘civil’ nation

Scholars largely agree that immigration policies in Western Europe have switched to a liberal, civic model. Labelled as ‘civic turn’, ‘civic integration’ or ‘liberal convergence’, this model is not identically applied across countries, since national institutions, traditions and identifications still matter. Even so, the main focus is on processes which allow or prevent migrants to be incorporated into nations usually taken for granted in their meanings. Moving from policies to discourses, this article aims to interrogate what kind of nation is behind these policies as a way to further scrutinise the ‘civic turn’. Exploring how the term ‘civility’ and its adjectivisations are discursively deployed in Italian parliamentary debates on immigration and integration issues, the article points to two opposite narratives of nation. While one mobilises civility in order to rewrite the nation in terms of a common, inclusive, civic ‘we’, the other uses civility to reaffirm the conflation between national identity and the identity of the ethno-cultural majority. These findings suggest the importance of exploring the ‘civic turn’ not only across countries, but also across political parties within the same country to capture the ways in which a liberal, civic convergence in political discourses might hide divergent national boundary mechanisms

Linguistic commonality between universalism and particularism: a reply to Ipperciel (2007)

Linguistic commonality between universalism and particularism: a reply to Ipperciel (2007

On territory, the nation-state and the crisis of the hyphen

In an epoch of networks, flows and global mobility, the notion of territory as a politico-institutional bounded space needs further investigation. Besides studying territory as a symbolic resource in nationalist discourses, a control device in the hands of the state or a 'spatial fix' in the process of capital accumulation and reproduction, geographers should also explore how territory remains implicated in and implicates discourses and practices of societal integration, belonging and loyalty beyond the national rhetoric of 'one territory, one people'. The article illustrates this argument by focusing on the case of Western Europe. © The Author(s), 2009

Grounding theories of place and globalisation

In the 1990s, under the perception of increasing transformations brought about by globalization, scholars started investigating what happened to the notion of place. Among others, the views of Manuel Castells, Robert Sack, and Doreen Massey contributed to construct an opposition between a parochial, bounded, and reactionary notion of place versus a global, unbounded, and relation one. This latter view, under the label of ‘progressive sense of place’, has since become a dominant paradigm in geography. The present article aims to ground these theoretical arguments in relation to how people understand place today. Qualitative empirical information collected in four different regional contexts in Western Europe confirms the discursive existence of the above opposition. Yet, it also challenges the ways in which notions of thickness/thinness and bounded-ness/unbounded-ness relate to the regressive or progressive character of place

Rethinking territory

This critical commentary engages, both methodologically and theoretically, the notion of territory as discussed by Stuart Elden (2010). Methodologically, I suggest that Elden's philological concern with the term 'territory' rather than with the idea of 'bounded political space' risks producing a partial historical account. As a way to enlarge the scope of analysis and include also forms of 'bounded political spaces' which existed before, during, and after the emergence of modern territory, I propose a new theoretical category, 'territorial'. This category reinstates the importance of 'b-ordering' practices, downgraded as second-order problem by Elden. Theoretically, the commentary also suggests the importance of 'peopling' territory, in order to bring social agency back in and avoiding treating modern territory as a mere terror(izing) tool. Prompted by Elden's account, this piece aims to stimulate a 'territory debate'

In defense of "geopolitical remote sensing": reply to Moisio and Harle

The author of a recently published paper on Finland's identity politics and national identity (Antonsich, 2005) responds to comments presented in the preceding paper in this issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics (Moisio and Harle, 2006). The rejoinder focuses on the nature of place knowledge acquired "in place" versus "at distance" as well as on more specific differences in perspective (e.g., use of sources, terminology, critical geopolitcs). Copyright © 2006 by V. H. Winston & Son, Inc. All rights reserved

The face of the nation. Troubling the sameness-strangeness divide in the age of migration

Over the last two decades, banal and everyday nationalism have been the main theoretical and methodological approaches for studying how nations are reproduced ‘from below’. The present article advances this literature by paying close attention to racially-differentiated subjects and, more precisely, to subjects who are perceived to look different from, but sound like the national majority group. Building on the feminist attention to the corporeal, I argue that face-to-face encounters with the simultaneous embodiment of (somatic) strangeness and (linguistic) sameness generate a sense of surprise which interrupts the reproduction of the nation. This, in turn, allows for the ‘troubling’ of the very identity category (nation) which both banal and everyday nationalism avoid interrogating directly. I support and illustrate this argument by focusing on the case of the children of migrants born and raised in Italy and their personal experiences in mundane settings. The article discusses the implications of this short circuit in the banal and everyday processes of national reproduction in terms of potential openings of the nation to more inclusive forms

The neoliberal culturalist nation: voices from Italy

The impact of neo-liberal globalisation on the nation-state has been extensively studied in terms of politico-economic restructuring and forms of governmentality and securitisation. While the former speaks of a process of de-nationalisation, the latter brings about a re-nationalisation process. In both cases, though, the focus has only been on one component of the nation-state, i.e. the state. The nation has either been treated as a given backdrop or merely ignored. This articles aims to bring the nation back as a way to better contextualise practices of socio-spatial exclusion associated with one particular aspect of neoliberal globalisation, namely international migration. By analysing parliamentary debates in Italy between 1986 and 2014, the article explores the intersections between neoliberalism and cultural essentialism as they conflate in what I call the ‘neoliberal culturalist nation’. This construct permits to identify the role that a national culturalist imaginary plays in prompting and justifying governmental practices of securitization, which in turn are implicated in the production of vulnerable and expendable labour force. Moreover, it reveals how a neoliberal workfarist and individualised logic is functional to the ‘normalisation’ of the foreign immigrant and the reproduction of the national titular group. My argument is that a national culturalist imaginary exists in a mutually reinforcing relation with, rather than in opposition to neoliberalism. Far from keeping nation and state as ontologically distinct or theorising their decoupling, the article points instead to a renewed spatial isomorphism between nation and state which comes indeed to epitomise the very process of current re-nationalisation