Eric Kaufmann will deliver a public lecture on ‘Majority Nationalism: from inclusion to exclusion’, as part of a workshop organised at The University of Nottingham.

In this lecture, Professor Kaufmann will make the case that ethnic majorities are powerful actors in the shaping of national identity and are not coterminous with the nation-state. Majorities tend to see the nation as ‘theirs’. However, state elites also desire social peace and are affected by universalist ideologies.

Recent scholarship in nationalism tells us that there is no single national identity within a country, but rather competing modes – such as ethnic and civic. The World Values Surveys show that those lower down the social scale in virtually all countries tend to have a more ‘ethnic’ view of nationhood than the well-educated. When elites need popular support – or when political entrepreneurs challenge them with an ethnic appeal – they turn to more exclusive definitions of the nation. What pushes states in the direction of majority ethnic nationalism is the influence of populism, which is more potent in democracies. We see this in Ireland in 1916, and, more recently, in India and Sri Lanka.

The shift to inclusion, by contrast, tends to be driven by liberal elites backed by a rising educated strata within the population. However, even where this succeeds, it tends to polarize the population between liberals and authoritarians, as is occurring in the West today over questions of immigration and multiculturalism.

Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London.

This event is organised by the Rights and Justice Research Priority Area, the Institute of Asia and Pacific Studies, the Identities, Citizenship, Equalities and Migration Centre and the Centre for Research in Race and Rights at The University of Nottingham.

Please register on our Eventbrite page.