Amid concerns of increased populist right-wing movements in Europe and the US, this dissertation research uncovers a core contradiction at the heart of modern nation-states: the ethnic underpinnings of the “civic nation.” In recent years, nativist and ultra-nationalist movements opposing immigration have gained popularity in Western democracies. These movements draw on “hard” boundaries such as race or religion to exclude “others” from the “nation.” However, sociological research on the nation has consistently found that most people in Western countries publicly oppose these ideas and embrace civic conceptions of the nation. At the same time, research on immigrants' experiences in these same countries suggests that “civic” conceptions of the nation may be much more exclusionary than what survey research has shown. To reconcile this tension in the nationalism and immigration integration literature, I label the mismatch between people’s stated preferences and their actual behaviors as “colorblind ethnocentrism.”
By analyzing the extent to which nations are imagined to be racially restrictive by their inhabitants, my research offers a new understanding of national identity that has consequences for the integration of non-white groups into Western societies. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, I analyze the way that the category of “nation” is socially constructed, and in what ways this social construction overlaps with the socially constructed category of “race,” particularly in countries where “race” does not exist as a state-sanctioned classificatory system (unlike the US). Finally, I use these theoretical insights to reframe a classic debate in political economy and show that natives' normative understandings about national belonging moderate the way that non-White populations are perceived as an outside group and a threat to economic redistribution.
This dissertation combines novel methodology from political science with advanced statistical analysis as well as qualitative content analysis research to investigate (1) the role of ancestry, and race in defining the imagined community, (2) the ways that race and nation are empirically related, and (3) to what extent different ideas of the “nation” mediate the relationship between increased racial diversity and decreased support for redistribution.
Building on previous work, in chapter 1, I consider the “nation” as a cognitive category used to create social distinctions between those who “belong” in the nation-state and those who do not. Using a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in representative samples across France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, I challenge the long-standing assumption in the literature that the dominant conception of the “nation” in the West is based on inclusive and civic symbolic boundaries. I show that the most important characteristic across all country contexts for natives when making decisions about who is and is not a member of the nation is their ancestry: whether a given profile's parents and grandparents were all born in the country or not. I also find that people who answer in surveys that ancestry is important to be truly national in fact are espousing a racial and religious preference for White and Christian nationals. Then, I show how this colorblind ethnocentrism affects symbolic integration of non-white profiles with immigrant backgrounds.
Finally, I find that racial preferences in who belongs in the nation are the most pronounced in continental Europe, where “race” is not an institutionalized categorization system (i.e. countrieswhere racial statistics and “race” is taboo). This provides some evidence in favor of my theory that countries that do not have an available discourse around race tend to use “nation” as a proxy for it. I further investigate the origins of this discrepancy in the next chapter.
In chapter 2, I leverage a drastic change in curriculum in the mid-1990s in Spain that led to the sudden and (almost) complete removal of racial vocabulary from social-science textbooks to explore what happens to the construct of race once racial language has been removed. Through my analysis of 82 textbooks from 1975 to 2017, I find that a racial classification system was replaced by one based on cultural categories. Yet, far from moving away from essentialist beliefs about human nature, culture continues to reproduce the social hierarchies previously associated with phenotype. Because the books present culture as a scientifically valid classification system, the use of culture legitimizes and entrenches those same beliefs in racial differences, while creating a new double meaning for cultural categories (often “national cultures” or “nation”), i.e. its purported meaning and a short-hand for “race”.
In chapter 3, I follow up on a question that emerged from my textbookstudy: to what degree do Europeans believe (or not) in biological racial differences? I find that people in Europe hold racist beliefs at similar rates to the United States. I also show that an under-studied source of variation across countries is the differences within a country between the proportion of people who believe in one racial belief but not another.
In my final chapter, I investigate the consequences of this racialized “imagined community” for support for welfare in contexts of increased immigration. In this chapter, I shift the focus of attention from “immigrants” to “natives.” I argue that the well-documented reduction of native support for redistribution in the presence of immigrants is moderated by how strongly the natives imagine the “nation” as racially white. Using survey and census data from 30 European countries and 270 regions, I show that the negative association between the share of immigration and support for welfare is driven by those who imagine the nation in racial terms. Moreover, I show that ethnic nationalists’ support for welfare policies is only sensitive to non-European foreign-born immigration, not European foreign-born immigration. This suggests that racism, more than xenophobia, is the mechanism behind the withdrawal of solidarity.
Finally, I conclude with a discussion of implications and directions for future research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/a02p-p022 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Triguero Roura, Mireia |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
Page generated in 0.0032 seconds