Nationalism and European Integration : The Need for New Theoretical and Empirical Insights

Nationalism has long excited debate in political and social sciences and still remains a key field of research among historians, anthropologists, sociologists, as well as political scientists. In the time of the European integration, and particularly as a result of the recent crisis of the European constitution, it has become one of the critical media issues. There are, however, surprisingly few studies that examine the relationship between nationalism and European integration. This volume is a collection of essays by a multinational group of authors - from Germany, Poland, Great Britain, Canada, Turkey, the United States and Belgium - who examine the link between nationalism and European integration using comparisons and in-depth analysis, by using the institutional approach, the actor-centered approach, as well as the discourse analysis or multivariate regression analysis. Some topics of discussion include the EU-enlargement as a mobilizing agent for nationalism, a ground-breaking hypothesis in the research of nationalism, the influence of Europeanization on the nationalist parties in selected EU member states as well as the concept of nationalism as a modernizing project in the post-modern European Union, and the question of both the negative implications of the nationalism discourse and the antithetical construction of the national and European identities.