Nationalisms in the European Arena

This book explores how the multiplicity of nationalist parties across the European Union have embraced or refused the process of European integration and made it a platform for transnational coordination in the European arena. The author analyzes how opposing pro-European minority nationalist parties and Eurosceptic populist nationalist parties have diversely politicized European integration over the past three decades and engage in different patterns of Europeanization. Tracing their divergent trajectories of transnational coordination, the book examines the common challenges these opposing nationalist party families face and their systematic fragmentation in the European arena. The book offers a novel approach to understanding the conditions for the emergence of truly European nationalist party families, based on the interaction of ideological, strategic and institutional variables that underpin the Europeanization of heterogeneous nationalisms.

Nationalisms in the European Arena will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including sociology and political science. It contributes to the increasing literature on identity politics in the European Union and reveals the mechanisms behind why the European arena is adverse to the political translation and organization of domestic nationalisms as distinctive European actors.  

“With minority nationalist political parties politically ascendant in the UK and Spain and populist nationalist parties disrupting embedded party systems across much of contemporary Europe the appearance of Nationalisms in the European Arena could hardly be timelier. In offering an original framework within which the structuring of nationalist political party families in the context of the European cleavage and the respective degrees of Europeanization achieved by minority and populist nationalist party families can be fruitfully analyzed, this insightful book fills a conspicuous gap in the existing literature. As a source of insight into these nationalist party families it is unlikely to be eclipsed anytime soon.” (Anthony M. Messina, Trinity College, USA)

“Analyses on nationalist parties and European integration have focused either on statewide populist parties or on minority political actors. Gómez-Reino’s book has the specialinterest of comparatively studying the programmatic positions and institutional strategies of these two types of actors. In so doing, Gómez-Reino has contributed an innovative, encompassing, and enriching study of the intertwining logics of nationalism and political contestation in Europe.” (Iván Llamazares, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain)

“Drawing on a wide variety of qualitative as well as quantitative sources, the author offers a novel theoretical framework and rich empirical analyses of two party families, ethnoregionalist minority parties and far right populist parties that hitherto are analysed separately, and the impact of European integration on their political success at various levels.” (Lieven De Winter, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)

Margarita Gómez-Reino is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain.