Nationhood as cultural repertoire: Collective identities and political attitudes in France and Germany

This chapter outlines a new approach to comparative research on nationalist beliefs in established democracies, using evidence from France and Germany. Instead of assuming the existence of a unitary and homogeneous national identity at the country level or reducing nationalism to isolated variables, I identify subsets of survey respondents in each country who espouse distinctive combinations of attitudes toward the nation. The resulting repertoires of nationhood are strikingly similar in content-but not prevalence-across the two countries, which helps shed light on aggregate patterns of nationalist beliefs in the two populations. Moreover, adherence to each type of nationalism consistently predicts support for anti-immigrant attitudes, Euroscepticism, economic protectionism, and radical-right party support. The results suggest that competing popular understandings of the nation are likely to constitute salient and mobilizable cultural cleavages in contemporary European politics.