Solidarity in Diverse Societies PDF

THE STRAINS OF COMMITMENT
The Strains of
Commitment
The Political Sources of Solidarity
in Diverse Societies
Edited by
K E I T H BA N T I N G A N D
WILL KYMLICKA
1
3
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Acknowledgements
During the last few years, the strains of commitment have pervaded the news,
sparked by the immigration crisis in Europe, the outcome of the Brexit
referendum in the United Kingdom, and the divisiveness of the presidential
election campaign in the United States. However, the origins of this book
stretch back much further. In 2006, we edited a collection on multiculturalism
and the welfare state, also published by Oxford University Press. The debates
since then have convinced us that a broader approach to solidarity and
diversity is essential. This volume takes up that challenge, exploring different
dimensions of social solidarity, different sources of solidarity, as well as
different processes and institutional sites where solidarity can be nurtured or
corroded in contemporary society.
We have accumulated many debts along the way. Our biggest debt is to the
contributors to this volume. We invited leadings scholars in all the fields
engaged in these debates, and no one we approached declined. All the authors
took the assignment seriously, and their contributions advance our under-
standing of the issues in many directions. We are grateful for their commit-
ment to the project.
This initiative was supported by the European Science Foundation through
a grant to the research network Responding to Complex Diversity in Europe
and Canada (RECODE), headed by Peter Kraus, now at the University of
Augsburg. We gratefully acknowledge the intellectual contributions of Peter
and other colleagues in the network, the financial support of the Foundation,
and the administrative guidance provided by Ivan Greguric. First drafts of the
chapters were presented at a workshop held at the European University
Institute (EUI) in 2014. We extend fulsome thanks to Anna Triandafyllidou
and her colleagues in the Cultural Pluralism programme at the Robert Schuman
Centre for Advanced Studies of the EUI. Debates during the workshop were
further enhanced by contributions from Richard Bellamy, Michael Donnelly,
Bonnie Honig, Johanne Poirier, Nils Holtug, Peter Kraus, Hanspeter Kriesi,
Joakim Palme, Birte Siim, and Sven Steinmo.
We also benefitted from discussion of the project at a workshop organized
by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) held in Montreal.
Special thanks are due to Peter Hall and Michele Lamont, co-organizers of the
Successful Societies programme at CIFAR, and to the participants in the
meeting. The volume was further strengthened as a result of panels held at
the Council for European Studies and the American Political Science Associ-
ation, where early drafts of some of the chapters were presented. We
vi Acknowledgements
appreciate the willingness of Virginie Guiraudon, Sheri Berman, and Elizabeth

Theiss-Morse to serve as discussants. Additional thanks go to the four readers
commissioned by Oxford University Press, whose comments sharpened our
thinking in many places.
Finally, we thank Catherine Hart for research assistance, and Valerie Jarus
for help in preparing the manuscript. At Oxford University Press, we are
indebted to Elizabeth Stone for her careful editorial work and Dominic Byatt
for his long-standing enthusiasm for the project.
Keith Banting
Will Kymlicka
Queen’s University
Kingston, Ontario
Table of Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
List of Contributors xiii
1. Introduction: The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies 1

Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka
Part I: The Political Theory of Solidarity

2. Solidarity and Its Sources 61
David Miller
3. Citizenship and Collective Identities as Political Sources of
Solidarity in the European Union 80
Rainer Bauböck
4. Against Fraternity: Democracy without Solidarity 107
Jacob T. Levy
Part II: Public Attitudes on Diversity and Solidarity

5. Solidarity between the Elites and the Masses in Germany 127
Céline Teney and Marc Helbling
6. Diversity and Solidarity: New Evidence from Canada and the US 152
Richard Johnston, Matthew Wright, Stuart Soroka, and Jack Citrin
7. Conceptions of Citizenship and Tolerance towards Immigrants:
A Comparative Study of Public Opinion Data 177
Tim Reeskens and Wim van Oorschot
Part III: The Politics of Diversity and Solidarity

8. The Political Sources of Social Solidarity 201
Peter A. Hall
9. The Electoral Politics of Solidarity: The Welfare Agendas
of Radical Right Parties 233
Zoe Lefkofridi and Elie Michel
viii Table of Contents
10. Making Xenophobia Matter: The Consequences of the 2002

Elections for Immigration Politics in the Netherlands 268
Edward Koning
11. Solidarity, Diversity, and the Quality of Government 300
Bo Rothstein
12. Solidarity and Conflict: Understanding the Causes and
Consequences of Access to Citizenship, Civic Integration
Policies, and Multiculturalism 327
Irene Bloemraad
13. Diversity and Solidarity in Denmark and Sweden 364
Karin Borevi
14. Belgium: A Hard Case for Liberal Nationalism? 389
Patrick Loobuyck and Dave Sinardet
15. Concluding Reflections: Solidarity, Diversity, and Social Justice 420
Philippe van Parijs
Index of Names 427

General Index 437
List of Figures
5.1 Elite–mass gap on civic and redistributive solidarity 138

5.2 Different forms of identification and solidarity among the
general population 140
5.3 Different forms of identification and solidarity among the elites 142
6.1 National identity and support for redistribution 165
6.2 National identity, trust, support for equal rights, and support
for redistribution 166
7.1 Cross-national distribution of tolerance towards newcomers 185
7.2 Theoretical factor model and results from an exploratory factor
analysis of attitudes towards citizenship rights 187
7.3 The spurious relationship between social rights aspirations
and tolerance 191
8.1 The relationship between disposable income inequality and
general support for redistribution 202
8.2 The relationship between national identity and support
for redistribution to the poor 204
8.3 The stability of support for redistribution over time 211
8.4 The relationship between disposable income inequality and
support for redistribution to the poor 213
8.5 The relationship between support for redistribution and
welfare chauvinism 220
9.1 Vote shares of RR and SD parties in Western Europe 244
9.2 Salience of welfare state expansion in RR and SD parties’
manifestos 252
9.3 Position of radical right and social-democratic parties on
a left/right welfare scale 253
10.1 Projected number of seats for Fortuynist parties,
June 2001–May 2003 271
10.2 Attention to immigrant diversity in four major Dutch
newspapers, 1999–2012 277
10.3 Views on asylum seekers and multiculturalism, 1994–2010 278
10.4 Anti-immigrant attitudes in the Netherlands, 1991–2010 279
10.5 Relationship between attitudes on immigration
and self-reported voting behaviour, 1994–2010 280
x List of Figures
10.6 Self-perceived absolute difference between voters and party of
choice on whether ethnic minorities should adjust to Dutch
culture (left panel) and on whether asylum seekers should be
sent back to their country of origin (right panel), 1994–2010 281
10.7 Projected number of seats for anti-immigrant parties, 2000–13 283
10.8 Average support for restrictive integration and admission
policies as expressed in election manifestoes, five mainstream
parties, 1989–2012 285
10.9 Yearly immigrant inflow, 1995–2011, by category of migrant
(left panel) and origin of migrant (right panel) 287
10.10 Naturalization rate, 1995–2011, by country of origin 288
11.1 Empirical, normative, and constructive state theories 303
List of Tables
3.1 Relations and sources of solidarity 90

5.1 Different forms of identification and solidarity among
the general population 141
5.2 Different forms of identification and solidarity among the general
population: A replication with the 2010 World Values Survey Data 142
5.3 Different forms of identification and solidarity among elites 144
6.1 Descriptive statistics 163
6.2 Pathways of impact from national identity 167
7.1 Descriptives of the independent variables 188
7.2 Individual-level model of tolerance towards newcomers
multivariately regressed on attitudes towards citizenship 190
7.3 Country-level model of tolerance towards newcomers
multivariately regressed on national level aspirations/evaluations
of citizenship rights 192
8.1 The relationship between the power and orientation of trade
unions and general support for redistribution 216
9.1 Political parties and elections (N =79) 243
9.2 Top five issues in RR parties’ manifestos since the 1980s 247
9.3 Exclusion of immigrants from welfare benefits 254
10.1 Crucial dates in ‘the long year of 2002’ 270
10.2 Tone of letters to the editor on immigrant diversity before
and after Fortuyn’s murder in major left-wing and right-wing
newspapers 277
List of Contributors
Keith Banting is the Stauffer Dunning Fellow in the School of Policy Studies
and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s
University in Canada.
Rainer Bauböck is Professor of Political and Social Theory at the European
University Institute in San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy.
Irene Bloemraad is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Thomas
Garden Barnes Chair of Canadian Studies at University of California,
Berkeley.
Karin Borevi is Associate Professor in Political Science and Senior Lecturer at
the Department of Social Sciences at Södertörn University in Sweden.
Jack Citrin is Heller Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute
of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Peter A. Hall is the Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies and a
Faculty Associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at
Harvard University.
Marc Helbling is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Bamberg and Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science
Centre in Germany.
Richard Johnston is Professor of Political Science and holder of the Canada
Research Chair in Public Opinion, Elections, and Representation at the
University of British Columbia in Canada.
Edward Koning is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science
at the University of Guelph in Canada.
Will Kymlicka is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philoso-
phy in the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University in Canada.
Zoe Lefkofridi is Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at the University
of Salzburg and Joint Jean Monnet-Max Weber Fellow at the Robert Schuman
Centre, European University Institute.
Jacob T. Levy is the Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory in the Depart-
ment of Political Science at McGill University in Canada.
xiv List of Contributors
Patrick Loobuyck is a Professor in the Pieter Gillis Centre for Pluralistic

Reflection at the University of Antwerp and Guest Professor of Political
Philosophy at Ghent University in Belgium.
Elie Michel is a doctoral student in the Department of Social and Political
Sciences of the European University Institute in San Domenico di Fiesole
in Italy.
David Miller is an Official Fellow and Professor of Political Theory at Nuffield
College, Oxford University.
Tim Reeskens is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Tilburg
University in the Netherlands.
Bo Rothstein is Professor of Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik
School of Government and Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College.
Dave Sinardet is Professor of Political Science at the Free University of
Brussels in Belgium.
Stuart Soroka is the Michael W. Traugott Collegiate Professor of Communi-
cation Studies and Political Science, and Faculty Associate in the Institute for
Social Research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Céline Teney is Assistant Professor for Transnationalization of Society, Pol-
itics, and the Economy at SOCIUM, University of Bremen.
Wim van Oorschot is Professor of Social Policy in the Center for Sociological
Research at KU Leuven in Belgium.
Philippe van Parijs is a Professor in the Faculty of Economic, Social, and
Political Sciences and holder of the Hoover Chair of Economic and Social
Ethics at the University of Louvain, Belgium.
Matthew Wright is Assistant Professor, Department of Government at
American University in Washington, DC.
1
Introduction
The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies
Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka
Building and sustaining solidarity is an enduring challenge in all liberal-

democratic societies. The claims of solidarity require individuals to tolerate
views and practices they dislike, to accept democratic decisions that go against
their beliefs or interests, and to moderate the pursuit of their own economic
self-interest to help the disadvantaged. Ensuring that individuals are willing to
accept these ‘strains of commitment’, to borrow John Rawls’ apt phrase, has
been a worry even in relatively homogeneous societies, and the challenge
seems even greater in ethnically and religiously diverse societies. Anxiety
about the impact of diversity on solidarity has been a recurring theme in
both academic scholarship and public debates around immigration and multi-
culturalism. In order to better understand the nature of this challenge, we need
to understand the meaning of solidarity, and the mechanisms by which it can
be enhanced or diminished.
Our approach to these questions focuses on the sources of solidarity. Recent
research has concentrated on diagnosing the dynamics that undermine soli-
darity and generate backlash and exclusion in diverse societies. This is under-
standable, since political life in democratic countries has been characterized by
both neoliberal attacks on the welfare state and populist attacks on immigra-
tion. However, we look at the politics of diversity from the opposite direction,
exploring the potential sources of support for an inclusive solidarity. How is
solidarity built? How is it sustained over time? How has it been strengthened
as well as weakened in the contemporary era? Reframing the animating
question in this way does not necessarily generate greater optimism about
the future prospects for an inclusive solidarity. But it does point to the need for
a more comprehensive approach, which searches for both the origins of
backlash and the sources of support for inclusive redistribution. Posing the
question in this way also points to the need for longer time horizons, taking
2 Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka
the analysis back into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to understand
how solidarity was built and institutionalized during the transition to indus-
trial society, and then tracing the process forward into the diverse societies of
the twenty-first century.
Our approach also highlights the political sources of solidarity. Consider-
able research has focused on the economic and social factors that influence the
willingness of the public to accept and support newcomers and minorities.
There are many studies of the extent to which attitudes to immigrants are
shaped by perceptions of economic threat and feelings of economic security,
or by interpersonal contact across ethnic lines.1 Economic and social patterns
are undoubtedly important, but they are already well studied, and more
attention needs to be paid now to the broader political context within which
they operate. Solidarity is a highly political phenomenon. While perceptions of
economic threat and patterns of inter-ethnic contact matter, their impact is
conditioned by prevailing political discourses and identities, by the actions of
political agents, and by policy regimes such as the welfare state and citizenship
and integration policies. Our framework is accordingly multi-layered, incorp-
orating three levels of political life: conceptions of the political community,
political agents, and political institutions and policies. In our view, these three
elements—and the interactions among them—are critical.
The volume brings together cutting-edge research to analyse the impact of
diversity on solidarity and to explore the ways in which political contexts
shape this relationship. We also bring normative political theory and empirical
social science together in a mutually enriching way. Political theorists have
invested a lot of time and energy in thinking about the political sources
of solidarity, and arguably have taken this issue more seriously than many
fields of contemporary social science. Political theory, we believe, offers some
important insights into solidarity that can inform social science research,
although equally we look to social science research to temper some of the
more extravagant speculations of theorists.
This then is our initial motivating question: What types of political com-
munities, political agents and political institutions and policies serve to sustain
solidarity in contexts of diversity? Answering this question requires us to step
back and ask some prior questions. Is solidarity really necessary for successful
societies? And if it is needed, is diversity really a threat to solidarity, or are
anxieties about diversity a distraction from, or misdiagnosis of, deeper forces
that are weakening the sense of mutual support in modern societies?
This Introduction is therefore organized around three sets of questions: (1)
What is solidarity and is it important? (2) Is solidarity in decline and is
diversity to blame? And (3) What are the political sources of solidarity in
diverse societies? Based on the evidence provided in the chapters in this
volume and the wider literature, we advance a number of propositions
Introduction 3
which are more than untested hypotheses but less than firm conclusions, and
which represent directions for new research.
It may be helpful to foreshadow our conclusions. Regarding question 1, we
argue that solidarity is indeed important, and that self-interested strategic action
alone is unlikely to generate a just society. Regarding question 2, we argue that
while the overall demise of solidarity has been overstated, inclusionary forms
of solidarity are clearly fragile. Regarding question 3, we argue that solidarity
does not emerge spontaneously or naturally from economic and social pro-
cesses but is inherently built or eroded though political action. The politics
that builds inclusive solidarity may be conflictual in the first instance, but the
resulting solidarity is sustained over time when it becomes incorporated
into collective (typically national) identities and narratives, when it is rein-
forced on a recurring basis by political agents, and—most importantly—when
it becomes embedded in political institutions and policy regimes.
1 .1 WHAT I S S OL I DARITY, WHY IS I T

I M P O R T A N T , AN D H O W WA S I T B U I L T ?
Like most concepts in the social sciences, the idea of ‘solidarity’ admits of a
variety of meanings and uses.2 Our use of the term is distinguished by two key
features that are worth highlighting: we think of solidarity as a set of attitudes;
and we are particularly interested in solidarity at the level of society as a whole.
In both respects, our usage differs from other common approaches to solidar-
ity, and it is important to explain our focus.
First, we use the term to refer to a set of attitudes and motivations, as
opposed to practices or policies such as non-discriminatory hiring practices or
redistributive programmes, which may be sustained by such attitudes. In
particular, we take solidarity to refer to attitudes of mutual acceptance,
cooperation and mutual support in time of need. This focus on attitudes
stands in contrast to other approaches to solidarity, which focus on behaviour
rather than motivations. It is certainly true that pro-social behaviour and
inclusive social practices can arise from multiple motivations, including purely
prudential or self-interested ones. Indeed, Kant famously argued that ‘The
problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even
for a race of devils’, and that a well-ordered state does not require citizens to be
virtuous or altruistic. However, our assumption is that the strains of commit-
ment make self-interest insufficient or unreliable on its own to maintain a
good society, especially in the context of growing diversity, and that citizens
must also have, if not virtue or altruism, at least some degree of solidarity: they
must at times be motivated by attitudes of mutual concern and mutual

obligation towards their fellow co-citizens.
Human solidarity has taken many different forms throughout history,
but in this volume, we are focused on the kind of solidaristic attitudes that
might characterize a modern, culturally diverse, democratic society. In that
context, we have found it useful to distinguish three different dimensions
of solidarity:
• Civic solidarity: characterized by mutual tolerance; an absence of preju-
dice; a commitment to living together in peace, free from inter-communal
violence; acceptance of people of diverse ethnicities, languages and reli-
gions as legitimate members of the community, as belonging, as part of
‘us’; and an openness to newcomers from diverse parts of the world.3
• Democratic solidarity: characterized by support for basic human rights
and equalities, such as the equality of men and women; support for the
rule of law and for democratic norms and processes, including the need to
advance reasoned positions in public debates, equal participation of
citizens from all backgrounds, tolerance for the political expression of
diverse cultural views consistent with basic rights and equalities, and
acceptance of compromises among legitimate contending interests.
• Redistributive solidarity: characterized by support for redistribution to-
wards the poor and vulnerable groups; support for the full access of
people of all backgrounds to core social programmes; support for pro-
grammes that recognize and accommodate the distinctive needs and
identities of different ethnocultural groups.
This tripartite conception of solidarity is distinctive, and differs from the
European tradition of thinking of solidarity in purely redistributive terms. But
exclusive attention to redistribution does not fully capture the strains of
commitment in diverse societies. What we are calling civic and democratic
solidarity are also critical to a just society: societies with robust welfare states
can still be subject to waves of xenophobia or intolerance. We should not
assume that all three dimensions move in tandem over time, or are influenced
by the same factors. Comparing across the three dimensions holds the poten-
tial for generating more nuanced understandings of the impact of ethnic and
religious diversity in the contemporary era. Our aim is, in part, to explore the
ebb and flow of these three dimensions of solidarity, as well as their sources
and functions in contexts of ethnocultural diversity.
Second, we are interested in solidarity at the macro-level of society, which in
the contemporary world means effectively the level of the nation. In this, we
stand in one of the classical traditions in social theory, represented most
clearly by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim insisted in the 1880s that the core
question facing the emerging discipline of sociology was: ‘What are the bonds
Introduction 5
which unite men one with another?’ (Lukes 1972: 139), and he appealed to
solidarity as the glue that binds society and prevents it from disintegrating.
However, this is not the only approach to solidarity in the classical tradition.4
Other theorists saw solidarity as a phenomenon of subgroups, rather than of
society as a whole. Weber located the basis for solidarity in the interests,
norms and duties of social groups or professions; and although Marx seldom
used the term, his few references concerned solidarity within the working
class. Contemporary sociologists, especially in North America, have also
largely shied away from talking about solidarity at the macro level, and instead
explore solidarity at the meso level, with a focus on local communities, social
movements and marginalized populations. Attitudes of solidarity, in much of
the contemporary sociological literature, are seen as creating bonds within
and amongst subaltern groups to help their struggles against oppression or
exclusion by the larger society, not as something that unites citizens as
members of the nation.5 Indeed, if anything, societal-level solidarity is some-
times seen as the cause of this very oppression and exclusion of subaltern
groups. For example, the language of national solidarity has been used in some
countries to justify the imposition of coercive or exclusionary measures on
immigrants and refugees, who are seen as not belonging to, and even as threats
to, the nation. While solidarity within and amongst subaltern groups is widely
seen as a progressive force, the classical idea of societal-level national solidar-
ity is now widely seen, implicitly or explicitly, as at best mythical, and at worst
dangerous and exclusionary.
The result has been what several commentators have described as the
curious absence of solidarity as a subject of research in sociology (Reynolds
2014: 1; Alexander 2014), in political science (Stjerno 2005: 20) or in moral
and political philosophy (Bayertz 1998: 293; Scholz 2008: 10). Wilde specu-
lates that this is because solidarity is seen as ‘confined to the realm of
rhetoric’—as a rhetorical trope of politicians—and not something fit for
serious theoretical work (Wilde 2007: 171).6 Alexander speculates that soli-
darity is ignored because it does not fit well with important theories of modern
society:
Solidarity is a central dimension of social order and social conflict, yet it has
largely been absent from influential theories of modern society. Most of the big
thinkers, classical, modern and contemporary, have conceived prototypically
modern relationships as either vertical or atomized. Modernization is thought
to have smashed affectual and moral fellow-feeling: because of commodification
and capitalist hierarchy (Marx), because of bureaucracy and individualistic
asceticism (Weber), because of the growing abstraction and impersonality of
the collective consciousness which allows egoism and anomie (Durkheim). Post-
modernity is typically seen as liquefying social ties and intensifying narcissistic
individualism (Baumann); or as creating new forms of verticality, for example,
the disciplinary cage (Foucault). (Alexander 2014: 303)
In short, ‘much of contemporary social theory has tried to make solidarity

disappear’. Yet we agree with Alexander that solidarity ‘remains a central
dimension of cultural, institutional and interactional life in contemporary
societies’ (Alexander 2014: 304), and that for justice to be possible, ‘citizens
need to be motivated by solidarity, not merely included by law’ (Calhoun
2002: 153).
While broad in scope, it is important to emphasize that this form of national
or societal solidarity does remain bounded and differs from pure humanitar-
ianism. The attitudes of solidarity we are interested in embody the mutual
concern and obligation we have as members of a society, and typically appeal
to some image of a decent, good or just society. Social justice, in this sense, is
rooted in an ethic of membership. To be sure, a sense of shared nationhood is
not required for us to show a humanitarian concern for the suffering of others.
We can be moved to provide emergency aid in response to famines in distant
societies, or to provide emergency health care for tourists who fall ill. These are
humanitarian responses to needs that do not (or need not) depend on any
sense of bounded solidarity. But social justice involves an ongoing commit-
ment to create and uphold just institutions, including for example the social
policies that help people avoid getting sick in the first place. Canadians have a
humanitarian obligation to assist anyone who has a heart attack on a Toronto
street, whether they are tourists or citizens, but in the case of citizens, we also
have an obligation to identify and address factors such as economic insecurity
that make some people much more vulnerable to heart attacks than others. We
typically do not think we have a comparable obligation with respect to tourists.
We might say that justice amongst members is egalitarian, whereas justice to
strangers is humanitarian, and social justice in this sense arguably depends on
bounded solidarities.7
Some cosmopolitan theorists have raised philosophical objections to this
picture of bounded solidarity, and argue that we should think of ourselves as
equally obligated to all humans, close or distant, insiders or outsiders.8 We will
not enter into that philosophical debate here, except to note that (a) all existing
welfare states do rely on bounded solidarity; and (b) we should not assume that
renouncing appeal to bounded solidarities and removing the distinction be-
tween insiders and outsiders will lead to levelling up the treatment of outsiders.
It might instead lead to levelling down of the treatment of insiders. It may be
that bounded solidarity was (and continues to be) needed to motivate people to
accept obligations beyond duties of rescue and humanitarian need.9
This, then, is the crux of our understanding of solidarity: it is attitudinal in
nature and societal in scope. We are interested in attitudes of mutual accept-
ance, cooperation, and mutual support in time of need, which transcend
ethno-religious differences, operate at a societal scale and have civic, demo-
cratic, and redistributive dimensions.10
Introduction 7
Why is solidarity important? As noted earlier, our assumption is that

solidarity helps motivate people to accept the strains of commitment involved
in building and maintaining a decent, good or just society, particularly in
contexts of diversity. Solidarity, on our view, is important not so much for its
intrinsic value, as a component of individual flourishing or a virtuous life, but
for its functional role in motivating compliance with the demands of justice.11
Of course, if solidarity is to be effective, it needs to be politically mobilized—
solidarity is not self-enacting, and it may sometimes be left untapped or may
be politically blocked. But we nonetheless assume that solidarity is a necessary,
even if not sufficient, condition of a just or fair society. The definition of a ‘just
society’ is controversial, but for our purposes we might define it in a modest
way as a society that seeks to protect the vulnerable, to ensure equal oppor-
tunities, and to mitigate undeserved inequalities particularly if they are at risk
of being passed on intergenerationally.
So this is our first presupposition: (bounded) solidarity is needed for just
institutions. This is by no means uncontroversial. There are those—including
Jacob Levy in this volume—who argue that national-level solidarity is unreal-
istic in modern societies, and moreover is not necessary, since a well-ordered
society can arise even in its absence. Indeed, there are long-standing alterna-
tive explanations for the rise of inclusive politics and redistributive policies
that do not rely on appeal to any pre-existing feelings of national solidarity,
but emphasize instead the role of self-interest, strategic action, contestation,
and conflict. For example, a prominent approach to explaining the historical
development of welfare states has been ‘power resource theory’, which asso-
ciates a strong welfare state with the relative strength of left political coalitions,
incorporating strong labour movements and successful left political parties,
particularly social democratic parties (Korpi 1983; Esping-Andersen 1985,
1990; Stephens 1979). On this view, the size and shape of welfare states is
determined by the balance of power between those who have a self-interest in
expanding the welfare state and those who have a self-interest in reducing it.
The outcome may be a stronger welfare state if trade unions and social
democratic parties are particularly powerful and/or able to form strategic
coalitions with other popular forces. But this need not require or entail that
anyone acts out of national solidarity.12
Similar strategic explanations have been given for what we are calling
democratic solidarity, such as the expansion of the franchise to women, racial
minorities and immigrants. The spread of the franchise was, in at least some
cases, the result, not of a new social consensus on a more inclusive definition of
who belongs to the nation, but of the strategic calculations by some parties that
enfranchising certain outgroups would assist them in their competitive elect-
oral struggle against other parties. This is a central claim in Levy’s chapter,
which emphasizes partisan contestation over solidarity as the explanation for
inclusive politics. Here again, inclusive outcomes can arise without pre-existing
societal solidarity.
Indeed, it is interesting to note that the left itself originally disavowed
appeals to national solidarity in their political struggles for political and social
rights. Socialist parties initially understood themselves as class parties engaged
in class struggle, drawing upon class solidarity to defeat their class enemies.
But the breakthrough for social democracy arguably occurred when they
abandoned this self-conception, and redescribed themselves as a ‘people’s
party’ representing the nation as a whole and appealing to solidarity amongst
co-nationals as a basis for social justice. As Sheri Berman notes, this transition
from class solidarity to national solidarity was bitterly contested on the left in
many European countries, in part due to the lingering influence of Marxism and
its doctrine that all history is the history of class struggle (Berman 2006). But the
idea of the welfare state as an expression of an ethic of nationhood—captured so
evocatively in Per Albin Hansson’s idea of a ‘people’s home’ (folkhemmet), or in
T. H. Marshall’s claim that the welfare state rests on ‘a direct sense of commu-
nity membership based on loyalty to a civilisation that is a common possession’
(Marshall 1950: 96)—proved to be politically more effective.13
Note how the welfare state here is tied to an image of social membership,
not universal humanitarianism. The assumption, for both the Swedish Social
Democrats and the British Labour party, is that we form a community, and
that the function of the welfare state is to ensure that everyone feels equally at
home in the community, that everyone can equally partake in the cultural life
of the community and enjoy its civilization, and that everyone can feel that
they belong to the community and that the community belongs to them. It is
this vision of the welfare state as an expression of national solidarity—and
not just of class struggle or of universal humanitarianism—that powerfully
inspired social democratic politics. On this view, a sense of common identity
and solidarity was needed before encompassing institutions and policies could
be established.
This contrast between solidaristic and strategic approaches is a recurrent
theme throughout the volume. But any plausible account is likely to combine
them in various ways. Indeed, Baldwin argues that although the historical
development of the welfare state was powerfully driven by the politics of self-
interest, more redistributive welfare states, such as those that emerged in
Scandinavia, also required a strong sense of collective identity and solidarity
(Baldwin 1990). Moreover, the power resource approach can be seen, not as
denying the long-term importance of solidarity, but rather as helping to
explain its origins. Inclusive welfare states or expanded enfranchisement
may have initially arisen as a result of strategic behaviour by actors motivated
by partisan or particularistic interests, but these reforms set in motion an
evolutionary process which over time contributed to a more comprehensive
sense of solidarity. As Thelen puts it, commenting on the historical development
Introduction 9
of the famous German training system, ‘these institutions were not designed to
promote equality’; rather ‘their solidarity-enhancing side effects grew as the
system expanded in scope’ to become ‘a national model to which virtually all
youth had access’ (2014: 10). Whatever their origins, however, these reforms
created new conceptions of the nature and boundaries of social membership, of
both who belongs to the nation, and what are rights of membership. Indeed, in
some cases, these attitudes became embedded in the national identity of the
country. The chapters by Peter Hall and Irene Bloemraad discuss how inclu-
sive reforms can emerge through political conflict and later become incorp-
orated into broader ‘collective imaginaries’ in ways that help to stabilize them.
On this view, the ‘direct sense of community membership’ which Marshall
viewed as underpinning the welfare state may actually be the outcome of it.
Moreover, this sense of mutual support should be seen not simply as an
epiphenomenon, but as helping to secure and sustain these reforms over
time as the initial strategic coalitions that built them begin to weaken. After
all, the power of trade unions and social democratic parties has weakened at
various times and places, yet welfare states persist, arguably because they
helped to build the very feelings of national solidarity needed to sustain
them.14 Solidarity may not be the cause of the initial building of inclusive
institutions, but it may be one of the effects of these reforms, and moreover an
effect that works to sustain the reforms over time in the face of new challenges
and new constellations of bargaining power.
Yet solidarity is not always a ‘side-effect’ of inclusive reforms. This may
have been the case of the original German training system, but it seems clear
that in other cases—Sweden paradigmatically—the Social Democrats defined
themselves as ‘people’s party’ at an early stage and quite deliberately used
social policy to strengthen national solidarity, which they hoped could then be
leveraged to promote yet further reforms. If at times Marshall’s picture seems
to suggest that inclusive politics arises bottom-up from the mobilization of
feelings of shared membership, other commentators offer a more ‘top-down’
or ‘from above’ analysis, viewing these feelings of shared membership as
themselves the (intended) outcome of elite-driven reform. The chapter by
Karin Borevi illustrates how Danish and Swedish elites differ on precisely this
issue of the sources of solidarity. Danish elites typically adopt a ‘society-
centred’ approach which assumes that social cohesion amongst the people in
civil society is a precondition to build or sustain the welfare state; Swedish
elites typically adopt a ‘state-centred’ approach which assumes that the welfare
state generates social trust—a difference she argues is rooted in their different
histories of nation-state building.
This suggests that the linkages between strategic and solidaristic accounts
are complex and multi-layered. Successful efforts to create more inclusive
democracies and more redistributive welfare states are typically contested,
rarely the result of any pre-existing feelings of enhanced solidarity, and so
depend on the contingent balance of power resources. Yet these reforms can
over time create feelings of national solidarity which help to secure them
against the vagaries of power politics, as they become seen as common
possessions or achievements of the nation, and not just the spoils of partisan
battles. In the end, there is likely to be an interaction between the two
processes, as T. H. Marshall himself concluded in his discussion of the
emergence of social rights in British experience. The growth of a common
consciousness was, in his view, ‘stimulated both by the struggle to win those
rights and by their enjoyment when won’ (1950: 96).
So this leads to our first set of propositions: Solidarity refers to attitudes of
mutual acceptance, cooperation and support in time of need. In the contem-
porary context of increasingly diverse societies, we are interested in a solidarity
that transcends ethno-religious differences, operates at a societal scale, and has
civic, democratic and redistributive dimensions. Such an inclusive solidarity, we
contend, is needed to sustain just institutions. Although considerable political
conflict attended the emergence of the welfare state historically, just institutions
cannot be built or sustained solely through strategic behaviour and partisan
contestation, or through unbounded humanitarianism.
1.2 IS S OLIDARITY IN D ECLINE AND IS

DIVERSITY TO BLAME?
There is a widespread perception, both in public debate and academic writing,

that solidarity is in decline. This seems to be indicated by growing inequality,
support for parties that cut taxes for the well-off while cutting benefits for the
poor, support for parties that scapegoat minorities, or hardening attitudes
towards recipients of state support, and so on.
Yet it is worth asking how well supported this perception is. It is important
here to keep the three dimensions of solidarity in view. If we focus on civic
solidarity, for example, one could argue that societies today are much more
tolerant than twenty or forty years ago in at least some respects, with dramatic
declines in the number of people who oppose interracial marriages. And so too
there have been significant advances in commitments to political rights for a
wide range of minorities, discussed in Bloemraad’s chapter.
It is primarily in the sphere of redistribution, therefore, that we see the
greatest anxiety about the erosion of solidarity. And yet here too we might
wonder how strong the evidence is for a decline in redistributive solidarity. For
example, several studies suggest that attitudes to the role of the state in reducing
inequalities and ensuring equal opportunities have been remarkably stable
before, during, and after the heyday of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s.15
This period witnessed significant changes in the strategic balance of power held
Introduction 11
by various political actors, but not it seems in underlying public attitudes. One
might speculate with Joseph Schumpeter that ‘attitudes are coins that do not
readily melt’, and that feelings of redistributive solidarity change slowly, perhaps
even only intergenerationally.16
If we dig a bit deeper, however, there is evidence of more subtle changes in
attitudes of redistributive solidarity. Cavaille and Trump (2015) argue that, at
least in the British case, while there has been little change in public support for
the general principle that the state should reduce inequality (what they call
‘redistribution from’), there has been a hardening of attitudes towards specific
recipients (what they call ‘redistribution to’), including the unemployed, single
mothers and immigrants. Put more colloquially, it seems that the public
continues to think that the rich do not deserve their good fortune, and so
should be taxed, but have started to believe that perhaps the disadvantaged do
deserve their bad fortune, and so are less keen to support them.17
What explains this hardening of attitudes to the recipients of welfare?
Commentators typically refer to ‘deservingness’ judgements, which include
judgements about the extent to which someone’s misfortune or disadvantage
was under their voluntary control. But the evidence suggests that deserving-
ness judgements also track other criteria, including ‘identity’ (the extent
to which recipients are seen as belonging to a shared society), ‘attitude’
(the extent to which recipients are seen as being grateful); and ‘reciprocity’
(the extent to which recipients are seen as likely to help others when it is their
turn to do so).18
The relevance of these criteria should not be surprising if, as argued earlier,
the welfare state is not primarily about either class struggle or universal
humanitarianism, but rather about an ethic of social membership. Judgements
of identity, attitude, and reciprocity are all different dimensions of the idea that
the welfare state embodies Marshall’s ‘direct sense of community membership’.
It is also perhaps not surprising that these criteria work to the detriment of
immigrants. While several recipient groups are burdened by deservingness judge-
ments, immigrants in Europe invariably come out at the bottom of the ranking
of deservingness. Van Oorschot indeed calls this ‘a truly universal element in
the popular welfare culture of present Western welfare states’ (2006: 25). This is
arguably a key factor in explaining the rise of welfare chauvinism, at the expense
of a more inclusive solidarity.19
This leads to our second proposition: Solidarity is eroding, at least along the
redistributive dimension, although not as dramatically or comprehensively as
widely assumed. Solidarity seems to change slowly, perhaps over generations.
If solidarity is eroding, is increasing diversity a key factor in this decline?
Clearly it is not the only factor at work. In the 1950s, well before the mobilization
of historic national minorities and the dramatic rise in immigration, commen-
tators were already speculating that long-term trends in Western capitalist
societies, such as the rise of possessive individualism and consumerism, were
eroding solidarity in favour of egoism or apathy.20 These concerns were revived

with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, and further exacerbated by global-
ization, which seemed to diminish the importance of national boundaries.
Other scholars emphasize the rise of ‘postmaterialism’, in which issues of
material gain and loss are displaced by concerns with individual self-expression
and the environment (Inglehart 1997).21 All of these trends and forces would be
reshaping solidarity even if there were no change in the levels or composition of
ethnic, racial, and religious diversity in a society. So diversity is not the only
threat to solidarity.
Nonetheless, ethnic, racial, and religious diversity clearly has the capacity to
weaken the bonds of solidarity. Insofar as just institutions are built on ideas of
bounded solidarity, they require citizens to view themselves as an ethical
community bound together by distinctive obligations to each other. As we
have seen, this feeling has typically been grounded in a sense of shared
nationhood, or Marshall’s national consciousness, or a certain collective
imaginary—a ‘story of peoplehood’ (Smith 2003). It seems plausible that
increasing diversity might make it harder to sustain this sense of shared
identity.22 But one needs to be careful here. A small industry has arisen trying
to test the impact of diversity on various dimensions of solidarity or social
cohesion, and the empirical evidence to date suggests that if diversity does
have a negative impact on solidarity, it is far from inherent or universal. For
example, a recent survey of 464 articles found that ‘there are nearly as many
studies rejecting the negative effects of diversity as arguing for them’ (Schaeffer
2014: 4). Similarly, a meta-analysis of ninety articles found that twenty-six
studies identified a negative impact, twenty-five studies did not, and thirty-
nine studies provide mixed or neutral evidence (Van der Meer and Tolsma
2014). And a third review of the literature adds that the effects, whether
positive or negative, seem to be small (Stichnoth and Van der Straeten 2013;
see also Portes and Vickstrom 2011; Theiss-Morse and Hibbing 2005). In
the words of two leading scholars, ‘the debate about the consequences of
ethnic diversity on social cohesion has reached a stalemate’ (Stolle and
Harell 2015: 117).23
This suggests that rather than looking for universal patterns regarding the
impact of diversity on solidarity, we need to ask more fine-grained questions
about how specific dimensions of diversity affect specific types of collective
identities, under specific political conditions. For example, as we discuss in
greater detail in section 1.3.1, different forms of national identity are more or
less open to diversity. The tension is greatest in the context of traditional ideas
of nationhood, reflecting an amalgam of a common racial/ethnic descent,
common religion, common language, common history, common territory,
common lifestyles—a ‘blood and soil’ nationhood which is especially likely to
exclude immigrants and ethnic minorities. Other stories of peoplehood may
be more open to diversity.
Introduction 13
But these stories of peoplehood are not static or self-enacting: they are
always told and retold by particular social actors. And this points to the
importance of political agency, especially the role of the media and political
elites in shaping the relationship between diversity and solidarity. We noted
earlier that political actors can sometimes have electoral reasons for reaching
out to minorities, but all too often political actors choose to prime and
mobilize divisions between the majority population on one hand and both
newcomers and historic minorities on the other. Although public attitudes
tend to change slowly, the political mobilization of anti-minority sentiment
has considerable flash potential—the capacity to erupt quickly and overturn
existing policy regimes. This process is described in detail in Edward Koning’s
chapter on the rise of anti-immigrant parties in the Netherlands. He suggests
that these parties have not had a substantial impact on public attitudes
towards immigrants, but they have made attitudes towards immigration
more politically salient in ways that produce welfare chauvinism and erode
inclusive politics. The chapter by Zoe Lefkofridi and Elie Michel extends this
analysis to anti-immigrant parties throughout Europe, exploring how they
have (re)positioned themselves as champions of solidarity, albeit an exclusive
form of solidarity that defines immigrants not only as undeserving, but as
threats to the welfare state.
So the tension between diversity and solidarity is mediated by the nature of
national identities and the strategies of political actors. Different forms of
diversity may also play a quite different role. Some scholars, drawing primarily
on the American experience, argue that racialized difference is more corrosive of
solidarity than ethnic, linguistic, or religious diversity. Others argue that reli-
gious diversity is the greater threat, since it raises the prospect of deep conflicts
in core political values (e.g., over secularism or women’s rights), and indeed
even ‘civilizational’ differences. Similar debates arise about whether the bigger
threat to solidarity comes from the growth of ‘new minorities’ created through
immigration, or from the presence of long-standing ethnonational groups and
indigenous peoples (e.g., between whites and indigenous peoples; or between
French and English in Canada; or between whites and blacks in the USA).24
A related issue concerns the timing or sequencing of increased diversity.
There is considerable difference between the American experience of racial
diversity constraining the development of a welfare state from its very begin-
ning, and European countries coming to terms with new forms of diversity in
the context of mature welfare states which are well embedded in national
cultures and voters’ expectations. European welfare states may therefore be
less vulnerable to diversity effects, and more able to include newcomers,
particularly if—as we discuss below—welfare states can help to build the
very solidarities they require (Crepaz 2008; Taylor-Gooby 2005). This suggests
not only that different forms of diversity raise different challenges, but
also that a society’s ability to address those challenges will depend on its
pre-existing matrix of collective identities, political opportunity structures,

and institutionalized policy regimes.
If diversity poses a threat to solidarity, does it pose different challenges
to our three dimensions of solidarity? Some commentators argue that it is a
feature of a neoliberal era that the three dimensions start to diverge, and that a
certain kind of civic tolerance, non-discrimination and multicultural recogni-
tion of diversity may increase even as space for democratic contestation and
redistribution are eroded. (Similar claims have been made regarding gay rights
under neoliberalism.) This is sometimes called ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’, or
more pejoratively, ‘boutique multiculturalism’, or ‘Benetton multiculturalism’.25
In reaction to this neoliberal multiculturalism, traditional defenders of the
welfare state may mobilize to defend redistributive solidarity, yet do so in a
way that excludes newcomers from its benefits, often justified on the basis of
xenophobic rhetoric about the cultural and political threat posed by certain
minorities. This is often called welfare chauvinism, left populism, or left authori-
tarianism. In some countries, these seem to be the two main choices on offer: a
neoliberal multiculturalism that secures civic solidarity at the price of the
hollowing out of democracy and redistribution, and a welfare chauvinism that
secures redistributive solidarity at the price of civic solidarity towards minorities
and newcomers.26 This possibility that civic and redistributive solidarity are
diverging is explored in depth in the chapter by Celine Teney and Marc Helbling
on public and elite opinion in Germany, and the chapter by Tim Reeskens and
Wim van Oorschot on attitudes to social citizenship across Europe.
For those who seek to secure and promote all three forms of solidarity, in
what we might call a democratic multicultural welfare state, we need to think
carefully about each distinct dimension of solidarity, rather than assuming
they stand or fall together.
This leads to our third set of propositions: While diversity has an inde-
pendent effect on solidarity, above and beyond other contemporary social and
economic trends, the relationship between diversity and solidarity is complex
and context-dependent. Different types of diversity seem to affect solidarity
in different ways; and diversity has distinct effects on three dimensions of
solidarity. Civic tolerance and redistributive solidarity in particular may follow
different trajectories in a neoliberal age.
1.3 WHAT ARE THE POLITICAL S OURCES

OF SOLIDARITY?
The evidence reviewed so far suggests that whether diversity erodes solidarity
is not predetermined, but is ultimately a matter of politics. While not the only
Introduction 15
factors mediating the relationship between diversity and solidarity, the pres-
ence of solidaristic political discourses and identities matters, as do the actions
of political agents who seek to reinforce solidarity in daily political life, and the
design of key public institutions and policy regimes, including the welfare
state, rights regimes, and citizenship/integration regimes. Moreover, some of
these political factors may be more subject to conscious redesign than other
factors.27 It is here that we are most likely to find the policy levers that we can
use to sustain and promote solidarity.
As noted earlier, we distinguish three broad categories of political sources of
solidarity, which we refer to in shorthand as ‘political community’,‘political
agents’, and ‘political institutions and policy regimes’.
1.3.1 Political Community
The question of how to sustain solidarity within a liberal democracy has been
a dilemma for contemporary political theorists, in part because the very
principles of liberal democracy contradict and delegitimize older models of
national solidarity based on shared ancestry and religion. At the dawn of
liberal democracy, in 1787, it was still possible for John Jay to say of the United
States that ‘Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to
one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the
same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of
government, very similar in their manner and customs’ (Hamilton, Madison,
and Jay 2008: 7). But today, we are likely to recoil at the idea that solidarity can
be based on shared ancestry and religion, and to view this as a slippery slope to
racial exclusion, ethnic cleansing, even genocide.28 With the spread of human
rights norms and liberal-democratic values in the post-war period, we need to
find new sources of solidarity that do not rely on such thick cultural ties.
For most contemporary liberal democratic theorists, the solution is to
distinguish thicker pre-political cultural traits (like religion and ancestry)
from a thinner and more strictly political culture, rooted in liberal-democratic
values and practices themselves. The fact that human rights norms have
delegitimated long-standing models of national solidarity suggests that polit-
ical values can be powerful forces in modern society, and raises the possibility
that these values can themselves provide the new basis for solidarity. Can
solidarity amongst people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds be
built simply on the basis of a shared commitment to human rights and
democracy, without any thicker pre-political ‘cultural glue’?
This idea has been the focus of a lively debate in contemporary political
theory, and has arguably shaped recent government policies in several coun-
tries. However, there are several different versions of this view, and also several
different labels for it. Some writers use the label of ‘civic nationalism’ for this
view, contrasted with earlier forms of ‘ethnic nationalism’ that appeal to pre-
political cultural traits. But other authors argue that this view is best seen, not
as an alternative form of nationalism, but as an alternative to nationalism—as
a form of ‘post-nationalism’ that breaks decisively with core ideas of nation-
alism. These authors often prefer the language of ‘constitutional patriotism’ to
that of ‘civic nationalism’. Beneath these semantic disagreements over labels
are deeper disagreements about the basis for feelings of shared membership
and mutual obligation within a political community. To oversimplify, we
might distinguish three such accounts:
Liberal value consensus: According to the American liberal political philoso-
pher John Rawls, a shared belief in the principles of liberal-democratic justice
is sufficient to ensure solidarity. On this view, people act with solidarity
because duties of justice are part of their rationally-held beliefs about the
appropriate principles of a liberal-democratic political order. As he puts it,
‘Although a well-ordered society is divided and pluralistic . . . public agree-
ment on questions of political and social justice support ties of civic friendship
and secures the bonds of association’ (Rawls 1980: 540). It is important to
emphasize that for Rawls agreement is only required on political values—the
rules of the political game—not on more personal questions about the good
life, such as religious beliefs, sexual orientations, or cultural practices.
This is an attractive proposal. However, this account fails to explain the
bounded nature of solidarity. The principles of liberal-democratic justice, on
Rawls’s own account, are not distinctive to any particular country. All
countries—at least all Western democracies—are assumed to share essentially
the same set of political principles (human rights, democratic procedures, rule
of law, protecting the vulnerable, etc.). These values are ‘nationally anonym-
ous’, in Joppke’s phrase (Joppke 2004: 253), and indeed are seen by most
citizens as universal values that all societies should uphold. But how can
adherence to universal principles explain bounded solidarity? Why should
we feel more solidarity towards our co-citizens than to other people across the
border or around the world who also share our liberal-democratic values?
Indeed, why should we care about our country as such at all? For example, why
should we try to keep our country together as a single polity, rather than
breaking it into smaller units, or merging it into another country, if such
reconstituted states would respect standard human rights and democracy
measures? In short, there is a logical gap between a cognitive belief in universal
values and a felt solidarity with a bounded ‘we’.
Constitutional patriotism: One way to close this gap is to say that bounded
solidarity emerges not just from a cognitive belief in liberal-democratic justice,
but also from our active participation in collective liberal-democratic decision-
making processes. The underlying values may be nationally anonymous,
but the decision-making processes are nation-specific. And by participating
Introduction 17
in the process, we come to have a stronger sense of identification with our

particular country and our co-citizens. This is the idea that Habermas has
labelled ‘constitutional patriotism’, to emphasize that our patriotic attachment
is not just to universal values, but also to the specific way they are codified
within particular constitutions. This idea can be given a more specifically
republican interpretation. Republicans say that through engagement in
liberal-democratic procedures, we come to see ourselves as ‘co-authors’ of
our own laws and institutions, and hence see the political order as an expres-
sion of our collective will. It may be that the underlying values we attempt to
pursue in our collective institutions are nationally anonymous, but the very
process of collectively pursuing them develops a nationally-specific sense of
collective ownership and collective identity that includes all (and only) our
co-authors. On this model of solidarity, a solidaristic collective identity emerges
from a combination of (nationally-anonymous) shared liberal-democratic
values and (nationally-specific) political participation. As Habermas puts it,
political identity is not derived ‘from some common ethnic and cultural
properties, but rather from the praxis of citizens who actively exercise their
civil rights’ (1992: 3), and this praxis ‘forms the ultimate medium for a form of
abstract, legally constructed solidarity that reproduces itself through political
participation’ (2001: 76).29
This solidarity-through-participation argument faces a number of objections.30
In modern large-scale democracies, most individuals have no direct experience
of ruling, and the likelihood that any individuals’ vote or voice will make a
difference is negligible. If citizens did not already feel a strong sense of belonging
or attachment to a particular political community, the mere act of participation,
in the modest forms available to modern citizens, is unlikely to generate a strong
sense of co-authorship or co-ownership. And indeed the evidence to date suggests
that participation by itself is not consistently associated with increased solidarity
(e.g., Segall 2005).
More importantly, these accounts arguably get the causal arrow backwards.
On the Rawlsian and Habermasian accounts, collective national identities are
an outcome or by-product of shared values and public participation. On their
view, citizens conceive themselves as a nation only because and insofar as they
are co-authors of a constitutional order that enacts universal liberal-democratic
values. But this is backwards, at least for certain key cases. In many contexts, a
common national identity emerged within a core ethnic group before the society
developed into a liberal-democratic constitutional order. The English, Danes,
Dutch, Czechs, Germans, and Portuguese viewed themselves as nations even
when they were ruled by monarchs or aristocrats under constitutional orders
that were neither liberal nor democratic. These societies have now established
liberal-democracies, but they viewed themselves as co-nationals before they
were co-authors of a liberal-democratic order. Indeed, they often demanded
democracy in the name of their (pre-existing) nation, as a form of national
liberation or national self-determination or national advancement. In these cases,

the nation preceded the democratic order.
Some people have even argued that the transition to liberal-democracy is
only possible where such a pre-existing national identity exists (Canovan
1996). A pre-existing sense of nationhood provides the trust, solidarity, and
mutual understanding needed to sustain a liberal democracy. As Mill famously
put it, genuine democracy is ‘next to impossible’ without a sense of nation-
hood because ‘the united public opinion necessary to the workings of repre-
sentative institutions cannot exist’ (Mill 1972: 392).
Nationalist: We can call this the nationalist approach to solidarity: build the
nation, and liberal-democratic solidarity will (or may) emerge. Rawls and
Habermas are aware of this nationalist option, and acknowledge that it reflects
the actual history of most Western democracies, which were national before
they were liberal-democratic. Indeed, Habermas acknowledges that to date
this nationalist approach has provided the only viable route to developing
liberal democracies. As he puts it, ‘Only a national consciousness, crystallised
around the notion of a common ancestry, language and history, only the
consciousness of belonging to “the same” people, makes subjects into citizens
of a single political community, into members who can feel responsible for one
another’ (1999: 113).
However, he insists that this approach is no longer viable or acceptable.
Since the nationalist approach presupposes that we can generate a common
national identity prior to democratic participation, national identity must be
based on what he calls ‘pre-political’ sources of unity, such as a common
language, ethnic descent, traditional ways of life, religion, and attachment to a
traditional territory or homeland. Such pre-political ideas of nationhood, he
argues, are inherently exclusionary, particularly of immigrants and ethnic
minorities. Pre-political nationhood is ‘blood and soil’ nationhood, or ‘ethnic
nationalism’, and so cannot encompass the claims of people who do not share
the same language, descent, historical territory, or religion (1999: 111).
In short, while pre-political nationhood was historically a ‘catalyst’ for
democracy, now it has become ‘superfluous’ (Habermas 2001: 73), and we
need to find a thinner ‘post-national’ conception of solidarity—one that
eschews ideas of pre-political nationhood, and instead defines political identity
solely in terms of universal values and democratic participation.
We seem then to be stuck between two opposite positions. The Rawls-
Habermas view based on shared adherence to universal political principles is
attractively thin, and hence inclusive, but may be unable to stabilize or
motivate bounded solidarities. The traditional nationalist approach is much
thicker, and historically effective in developing bounded solidarities, but it is
too thick, since it excludes all those who do not share the history, language and
culture of the dominant national group.
Introduction 19
Liberal nationalism: Is there another option? Some theorists, known as liberal

nationalists, argue that the nationalist approach can be thinned in order to
make it more inclusive, without losing its motivational efficacy. On this view,
it is important for political communities to continue to promote a kind of
pre-political sense of nationhood. For liberal nationalists, such as Yael Tamir
and David Miller, it is important that citizens do not simply view themselves
as a group of individuals who happen to find themselves in a single state
and who now co-author their own democratic laws.31 Rather, they should
think of themselves as belonging together in a single state because they are the
current members of an inter-generational national community that has a long
history, one that often extends back beyond the emergence of liberal-democratic
constitutional order. This inter-generational national community has a history
of living together on its territory, reflected in its national language, institutions,
and patrimony, and the state is a vehicle by which this historically-constituted
people exercises self-government. Liberal nationalists argue that this sense of
belonging together is needed to secure political stability and solidarity.32
However, as we all know, relying on nationhood to build liberal-democratic
stability and solidarity creates endemic risks for all those who are not seen as
belonging to the nation, including indigenous peoples, sub-state national
groups and immigrants. Since they are not seen as members of the nation or
people in whose name the state governs, and may indeed be seen as potentially
disloyal fifth columns, they are often not trusted to govern themselves or to
share in the governing of the larger society.33 And this exclusion is typically
then buttressed and justified by ideologies of racial inferiority or cultural
backwardness. In short, while liberal democracy has benefitted in important
ways from its link with nationhood, minorities have often paid a high price.
They have been faced with social stigmatization and racialization, at best
offered a stark choice of assimilation or exclusion, and at worst subject to
expulsion or genocide.
Liberal nationalists try to square this circle in two ways. First, in order to
ensure that such pre-political ideas of nationhood are not exclusionary,
they need to be ‘thinned’ to make room for ethnic and religious diversity.
Traditional pre-political ideas of nationhood often invoked an amalgam of
(alleged) commonalities, such as common religion, common racial/ethnic
descent, common language, common history, common territory, and com-
mon lifestyles. According to liberal nationalists, some of these are inherently
exclusionary of immigrants and ethnic minorities, but not all of them. Requiring
shared blood is exclusionary of immigrants, but requiring a shared language
may not be. Requiring a shared religion is exclusionary, but requiring some
knowledge of national history may not be. Requiring a shared ‘ethnic culture’ in
the sense of traditional customs, cuisines, dress, and lifestyles is exclusionary,
but promoting a common ‘public culture’ (reflected in public national media,
museums, symbols) may not be. And so on. The goal, in short, is to draw upon
the idea that nations are historic communities which rightly belong together
in distinct political communities that govern national territories, but to redefine
the character of these nations to make them more open and inclusive.
Some liberal nationalists would go further, and argue that any legitimate
form of liberal nationalism must be supplemented and constrained by multi-
culturalism. It is not enough to thin national identities, one must also give
public recognition to ethnocultural diversity within a shared national identity
and narrative. The idea of ‘multicultural nationalism’ is an oxymoron on
traditional accounts of ethnic nationalism, but is arguably consistent with
liberal nationalism, and may be needed to ensure that the privileging of
national identity does not come at the expense of minorities.34
On our view, some version of a thinned and multicultural liberal nationalism
remains a viable and important political source of solidarity in the contempor-
ary world. However, this account too faces important objections, and many
of the chapters in our volume attempt to probe its strengths and limitations.
Empirical studies: These different models of political community have been

intensely debated within the field of political theory, but this debate has been
surprisingly disconnected from social science research. As mentioned earlier,
one of our aims with this volume is to bridge these fields, and to see if we can
empirically evaluate some of the arguments advanced by political theorists.
This is easier said than done, since the tools of empirical analysis often seem
rather blunt in comparison with the subtleties of theoretical debates. The
distinction between ‘political’ and ‘pre-political’ sources of national identity
may seem clear and important to political theorists, but may be more difficult
to disentangle and to measure in empirical research. Similarly, there is no single
or simple metric to measure how ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ national identities are. It is not
easy to translate these theoretical visions into testable empirical hypotheses.
Nevertheless, important work has been done to start filling this gap, and the
findings are significant, providing both encouragement and substantial quali-
fication. Some studies have tested the Rawlsian idea that solidarity can be
based on a shared commitment to universal (nationally-anonymous) basic
liberal-democratic values. We noted earlier the concern that this idea seems
unable to explain the bounded nature of solidarity, and the empirical findings
seem to confirm this,35 although with an interesting twist. Drawing on Euro-
pean survey data, the chapter by Tim Reeskens and Wim van Oorshot in this
volume concludes that strong supporters of civil and political rights tend to be
much more tolerant of newcomers. So strong commitment to these basic civil
and political rights does seem to readily extend to outsiders. Redistributive
solidarity, however, appears to be more bounded, and whether it is inclusive or
exclusive of newcomers is more contingent. Interestingly, whether a commit-
ment to redistributive solidarity extends to newcomers depends on the extent
Introduction 21
to which people feel their social rights are in fact already protected in their
society: respondents with strong but unfulfilled aspirations for social rights
tend to have more exclusionary attitudes towards newcomers, while their
counterparts who feel social rights are being provided are more likely to
express tolerance.36 Drawing on new data from North America, the chapter
by Richard Johnston and his colleagues also finds that a commitment to basic
civil and political rights can have inclusionary effects, including boosting
support for redistributive solidarity, but that the effect varies across political
contexts. It is especially marked in the United States, reflecting the place of
equality rights in that country’s national narrative. In short, a shared com-
mitment to universal liberal-democratic values can sustain some forms of
solidarity, in some contexts, but in variable and contingent ways.
In contrast, empirical studies of the emphasis on political participation in
theories of constitutional patriotism is less supportive. The evidence suggests
that while participation increases a person’s political skills, knowledge, and
sense of efficacy, it does not increase their solidarity in ways that constitutional
patriots hope (Segall 2005; Mansbridge 2003).37
Not surprisingly perhaps, it is the claims of liberal nationalists that have
attracted the most intensive empirical testing, especially the proposition that
liberal nationalism can enhance support for redistribution. We noted earlier
the concern that appealing to a sense of shared nationhood might be effective
at promoting redistributive solidarity for national insiders, but at the expense
of excluding minorities and immigrants. Interestingly, the results to date
suggest that both the benefits and the risks might be overstated.38 Four
chapters in this volume address aspects of this debate. In their contribution,
Teney and Hebling draw on an innovative survey of the strength of cosmo-
politan versus national identities among elites and masses in Germany, and
conclude that strength of national identity is largely irrelevant: differences in
redistributive solidarity between elites and masses are driven by different
material interests rather than different degrees of national or postnational
identities. Loobucyk and Sinardet argue that while liberal nationalism may
work well in some countries, it is difficult to apply in states such as Belgium
which contain two or more ethnonational groups claiming the right to govern
themselves and their national territory. Similarly, Bauböck emphasizes that
while liberal nationalism can work well to support solidarity at the level of the
nation-state, in a globalized world of multi-level governance we need to find
sources of solidarity above and below the level of the nation, based on different
principles of membership.
However, the chapter that focuses most directly on the liberal nationalism
thesis comes to complex conclusions. In line with liberal nationalist predic-
tions, Johnston and his colleagues find that thin national identity (as measured
by simple national pride) is much less exclusionary than thicker or more
ascriptive forms of national identity (which celebrate being born in the
country, having ancestors in the country, and being Christian). However,

whether national pride supports redistributive solidarity varies across political
systems. In the case of Quebec, for example, national pride is positively
associated with support for redistribution, reflecting the social-democratic
features of Quebec nationalism. This pattern is undoubtedly not unique to
Quebec. The welfare state, or specific programs such as health care, play a role
in the nation-building projects and national narratives of a number of countries
(Johnston et al 2010). As a result, while national identity may not have any
general tendency to strengthen support for redistribution, it may do so when
aspects of the welfare state are seen as having played an important role in
building the nation. In addition, in their chapter in this volume, Johnston and
his colleagues conclude that although a strong sense of national pride does
often weaken redistributive solidarity, its effects depend on which aspects of
identity are triggered, pointing to the importance of political elites in framing
debates over identity and diversity.39 This plasticity in the role of national pride
suggests that the relationship between identity and solidarity is potentially
amenable to cultural engineering by the state, an issue we revisit in section 1.3.3.
Finally, the chapter by Peter Hall argues that while liberal nationalists may be
right to emphasize the need for bounded solidarity and a sense of community,
this should not be reduced to national identity in any simple sense. He agrees that
feelings of mutual obligation are important, but are rooted in wider ‘collective
imaginaries’ that contain not only ideas about who belongs, but also foundational
myths, historical memories, and shared moral understandings. Such collective
understandings structure the discursive opportunities available to political agents
seeking to advance political claims in each country. Hall argues that broadening
our understanding of political community beyond identity requires reframing
traditional questions about the potentially corrosive effects of diversity.
The empirical evidence is important, requiring at a minimum considerable
nuancing of the liberal nationalist approach. Whatever the link between national
identity and solidarity, it is clearly not monotonic or lock-step, and probably
not conscious or direct. Indeed, we might think that nationhood works best
when it is deep in the background, as a taken-for-granted presupposition of social
life. For when nationhood is highlighted or primed—when it is taken from the back
of people’s minds to the front of their minds—it can trigger xenophobia. This is one
of the results of what are called ‘mere mention’ experiments. In these experiments,
one group of respondents is asked ‘do you believe immigrants deserve X’. Another
group of people are asked the same question, but with a national prime: they are
asked: ‘You are Dutch: do you believe immigrants deserve X.’ The ‘mere mention’
of nationhood produces harsher answers in the Netherlands (Sniderman and
Hagendoorn 2007), although not in Canada (Breton 2015). The chapter by
Johnston and his colleagues adds that the culture of every country contains both
thinner and thicker forms of nationalism, and the impact depends heavily on
which dimensions of national sentiment are primed by political agents. This is
a salutary reminder of the importance of political agency, to which we turn next.
Introduction 23
In summary, bounded solidarity seems inextricably linked to an ethic of
shared social membership, and in the contemporary world of nation-states,
nationhood is the default boundary of social membership. The task, then, is to
think about ways of managing diversity that upholds an ethic of membership
without triggering the kinds of exclusionary reflexes that too often characterize
conscious affirmations of nationalism. The challenge is to frame the recogni-
tion and accommodation of diversity, not as a threat to or deviation from an
ethic of social membership, but as a contribution to it. We will return to this
question in our discussion of the role of public policies.
So this leads to our next set of propositions: Conceptions of political
community are potential sources of support for inclusive solidarities, and
theorists have looked to universal political values, practices of democratic
participation, and thinned national identities. Empirical studies seem to sup-
port the role of shared liberal democratic values in underpinning civic solidarity,
but neither universal values nor national identities are consistently or reliably
associated with redistributive solidarity. Yet some form of collective identity and
sense of belonging together seems essential. At a minimum, empirical studies
suggest that for national identity to become a basis for inclusive solidarity in
diverse societies, it must be both thinned and shaped by strategic state policies.
1.3.2 Political Agents
As we have seen, historic forms of solidarity have become embedded in

national identities, collective imaginaries, and shared understandings, helping
them to persist after the original coalitions of support have faded away. But
such path dependency does not last forever. Attitudes of mutual support may
change slowly, but they are not immutable and need continuous reinforce-
ment. Moreover, as societies become more diverse, historic forms of solidarity
need to be stretched to incorporate newcomers. Building an inclusive solidar-
ity is a daily task. Which political agents are today’s bearers of the idea of an
inclusive solidarity? Who are the advocates seeking to reinforce solidaristic
attitudes in political debates and to institutionalize them in party programmes
and public policies?40
The advocates and coalitions that nurture social solidarity today are likely to
differ from earlier historical periods. As we noted, trade unions and social
democratic parties played a vital political role in introducing social pro-
grammes and nurturing the solidaristic attitudes which could sustain them
over time. However, these historic coalitions are shadows of their former
selves. In many countries, trade unions have been weakened and are increasingly
divided; and party systems have restructured, with a growing divide between
social democratic parties and their traditional constituencies (Kriesi et al. 2012).
Another historic bearer of a message of solidarity were Christian Democratic
parties and allied religious lay movements, which were influenced by Catholic
social doctrine, with its emphasis on social integration, class reconciliation and
solidarity between groups (van Kersbergen 1995; van Kersbergen and Manow
2009). Here again, a historic champion plays a more limited role today.
So who might be the new champions of inclusive solidarity? Some com-
mentators have hoped that new social movements—such as feminist, gay,
multiculturalist, or environmental movements—can serve as the new bearers
of solidarity. Stjernø expresses doubts about this idea, arguing that these social
movements define boundaries between themselves and external adversaries—
a clear distinction between us and them—and so are unlikely to contribute to
an inclusive sense of identity and solidarity at the macro level (Stjernø 2005).
But in fact there is considerable evidence that coalitions of progressive groups
have been able to advocate effectively for more inclusive solidarity. In thinking
about these potential coalitions, it is important to distinguish between immi-
gration policy (i.e., who gets admitted) and integration policy (i.e., how
immigrants are integrated into society once they have arrived). For example,
business interests tend to support immigration (Menz 2013; Freeman 1995),
but seem to be less engaged in advancing programmes to ensure the subse-
quent incorporation of newcomers in the civic and political life of the country.
Labour unions, in comparison, have stronger incentives to support the inte-
gration of migrants into the social and political protections. In many countries,
unions have shifted away from their nativist stances of the early twentieth
century, and have come to see exclusionary integration policies not only as
inconsistent with human rights but also as barriers to the organization of
immigrant workers (Haus 2002). Unions regularly join with churches, human
rights organizations, and other liberal civil society organizations to support
migrant rights. This suggests that the potential for a ‘rainbow coalition’ of social
movements and civil society organizations in defence of inclusive solidarity is
more likely in relation to integration policy than the more intensely contested
field of immigration policy—and this is indeed what the empirical evidence
shows (Koopmans et al. 2005).
Moreover, these social movements and civil society organizations have not
just advocated for more inclusive policies, but have also championed more
inclusive identities and narratives—Hall’s ‘collective imaginaries’. Political
activists who support immigrants also articulate an understanding of national
identity and citizenship that is more inclusive of diversity: ‘Instead of seeing
the cultural differences brought by immigration as a threat to national cohe-
sion and identity, pro-migrant and antiracist activists define the nation as an
open and universal sphere’ (Koopmans et al. 2005: 207; also Giugni and Passy
2001). While these collective imaginaries of inclusive citizenship differ across
countries—for example, colour-blind republican discourse is more prominent
in France whereas support for multicultural recognition is more common in
Britain—the common thread is a more civic understanding of citizenship in
diverse societies.
Introduction 25
However, it is far from clear that mobilization by new social movements

and civil society organizations is a sufficient or sustainable basis for inclusive
solidarity. In fact, the growing politicization of immigration policy has tended
to dilute the impact of such civil society mobilization. The successes of
populist anti-immigrant parties have shifted immigration from low politics
to high politics, and disrupted the quiet bureaucratic and interest-group
politics described by earlier observers such as Gary Freeman (Freeman 1995;
see Lahav and Guiraudon 2006).41 This transition is not unique to the
immigration sector. Beramendi et al. (2015) argue that the politics of advanced
capitalist societies generally is experiencing an ‘electoral turn’, in which
political parties no longer define their policies by reference to stable alliances
with specific economic interests (e.g., social democratic party alliances with
labour unions), but rather define their policies so as to build more fluid and
complex coalitions of groups in the electorate. As a consequence, policy is
driven less by interest-group bargaining, and more by electoral outcomes. The
field of immigration is an exemplar of the electoral turn, and political claims-
making has become increasingly dominated by political parties (Statham and
Geddes 2006; Gava, Giugni, and Varone 2013). The impact is most marked in
immigration policy, but integration issues are tugged along its wake.
This suggests that we need after all to return to the original carriers of
solidarity: political parties. While much has been written about the decline of
political parties, reflected in their often dramatic loss of membership and
traditional constituencies, the reality is that they remain important political
actors. Moreover, they have not simply stood still and watched the loss of their
historic constituencies: they have reached out to build new coalitions, often in
successful ways. In the words of a leading analyst, ‘It turns out that these
institutions (of solidarity) may survive least well when they continue to rely
solely on coalitions of the past and remain more robust when they are carried
forward by new coalitions and turned to significantly new ends’ (Thelen
2014: 207). Political parties whose traditional constituencies have dwindled
or deserted them have had a strong incentive to reach out to new
constituencies—including working women, market outsiders, or salaried
professionals—to forge new coalitions (Häusermann 2010). Faced with the
decline of their traditional base in the working class, to take one example, left
parties have tried to attract female voters by adopting policies to support
women’s employment and increasing the number of female parliamentarians
(Morgan 2006, 2012).
From our perspective, however, it is critical whether these new coalitions
also embrace immigrants and other ethnic minorities. There is no guarantee
here. Denmark and the Netherlands are often given high marks for restruc-
turing their welfare states on the basis of new encompassing coalitions,
reducing insider–outsider divides and constraining the overall growth of
inequality. But these countries also have virulent strains of anti-immigrant
sentiment and have excluded newcomers from important social benefits

(Sainsbury 2012; Koning 2013). In these cases, ‘a strong defense of social
solidarity—a strong internal “community of fate”—seems to have come bundled
with strict boundaries to the outside’ (Thelen 2014: 200).
This arguably reflects a structural dilemma for left parties, for whom
immigration/integration politics are difficult to manage (Alonso and da
Fonseca 2012). Left parties often oppose high levels of immigration, but
tend to defend the interests of immigrants once they have arrived, reflecting
both an ideological commitment to social equality and the tendency of
naturalized immigrants to vote disproportionately for the left (Messina 2007;
Hochschild and Mollenkopf 2009). As Lefkofridi and Michel discuss in their
chapter, this position still carries electoral risks, particularly in countries where
populist anti-immigrant parties politicize the alleged ‘coddling’ of immigrants.
As a result, left parties often downplay diversity policy in their election
manifestos, seeking to deflect political contention to other issues (Bale et al.
2010). Their response to populist criticisms of immigrants is not to defend
diversity or champion multiculturalism, but to try to change the topic, and to
reduce the political salience of immigration as an issue.42 Conservative parties
tend to be less enthusiastic about immigrant rights but they too risk losing
votes to populist anti-immigrant parties if they allow the issue to be politi-
cized. As a result, mainstream parties of both left and right sometimes
collaborate in erecting a cordon sanitaire against anti-immigrant parties,
refusing to cooperate with them as in Sweden and Belgium, and this can
help minimize political backlash against immigrants (Dahlstöm and Esiasson
2011; van Spanje and van der Brug 2007; Akkerman and Rooduijn 2015). But
even where such a cordon sanitaire is successful, it rarely involves the vocal
championing of diversity. The goal is not to mobilize in support of diversity,
but rather to depoliticize the issue. It is also striking that the adoption of
multiculturalism policies has often required cross-party support, suggesting
the need for electoral cover on such issues (Westlake 2014).
This analysis of the political champions of inclusive solidarity is discour-
aging, at least in the short to mid-term. The potential role of progressive civil
society coalitions is being displaced by electoral politics, and the electoral
dynamics do not reward the vocal embrace of inclusive solidarity.43 In the
longer term, however, the prospects may be more optimistic, in part because
immigrants themselves will become more significant political actors. As
immigrant communities grow, their capacity to defend their own interests
increases. In the early stages, the most effective recourse is often to the courts
and to anti-discrimination protections inherent in domestic law and inter-
national agreements (Joppke 2001; Guiraudon 2000). In some countries,
immigrants have also been able to develop active pro-migrant lobbies, exploit-
ing the opportunities created by the particular institutional and discursive
structures of their new home. But over time—especially over generations—the
Introduction 27
immigrant community tends to become a growing component of the elector-

ate, strengthening the incentives for political parties to protect migrant
rights. It is not surprising that European countries with larger foreign-born
populations are more likely to adopt stronger citizenship rights for immi-
grants (Koopmans, Michalowski, and Waibel 2012).44 This conclusion is
strongly reinforced by the experience of settler societies such as Canada.
Canadian history in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century is
littered with egregious acts of discrimination and exclusion. It was the political
mobilization of minorities—first French-speakers, then Aboriginal peoples,
later racialized immigrant minorities—that pushed the country onto a new
trajectory. Political parties in Canada now understand that running against
immigrants is a short route to political oblivion. Clearly, much also depends
on political institutions and policies that facilitate minorities’ own political
agency, a topic to which we turn next.
So this then is our next proposition: Solidarity needs to be built continu-
ously, and there are civil society organizations in all Western nations are
dedicated to this process. But the politicization of the immigration sector undercuts
their effectiveness, and in the long term, much will depend on immigrants’ own
political agency and their ability to influence electoral outcomes.
1.3.3 Public Institutions and Policies
Finally, what are the political institutions and policies that political agents can
deploy to reinforce and build solidarity over time? Institutions are obviously
critical in shaping the political opportunity structure in any society, helping to
define the battlefield on which organized interests and political parties engage.
But some analysts insist that political institutions have more direct effects on
the norms and attitudes prevailing in society, both among leaders and the
public, norms and attitudes which in turn can influence the discursive oppor-
tunities available to political agents and the policy responses towards minorities.
For our purposes, we are particularly interested in three broad policy regimes:
welfare state policies, rights regimes, and integration/diversity policies.
Since Marshall (1950), the welfare state has been seen as an instrument of
social integration, which can strengthen the sense of cohesion and solidarity in
diverse societies. Contemporary analysts in this tradition argue that social
programmes—once established—exercise feedback effects on the attitudes of
the public. For example, selective benefits can lock societies into an unending
conversation about deservingness, while universal benefits seem to dampen
discussion of the legitimacy of different groups of recipients (Larsen 2006;
Swank and Betz 2003; van Oorschot 2000a). Others argue that support for
redistribution depends more on trust in government than interpersonal trust,
and that such trust is sustained by the quality of governance, especially fairness
and effectiveness in the actual administration of government programmes

(Kumlin and Rothstein 2010; Rothstein 1998, 2011).
These views imply that the quick and non-discriminatory inclusion of
immigrants into the welfare state is likely to promote their inclusion within
the collective narratives of bounded solidarity, within the imagined ‘we’. Others,
however, have argued that easy access to the welfare state for newcomers
reduces their incentive to integrate socially and economically, and moreover
provokes majority backlash, as newcomers become associated with welfare
dependence (Koopmans 2010). On this view, immigrants will not be included
into the imagined we unless or until the majority sees evidence of their good-
faith effort to integrate and to contribute, and easy or unconditional access to
the welfare state actually impedes this (Miller 2006).
To date, the empirical evidence suggests that the public in countries
with highly selective welfare states are more inclined to welfare chauvinism,
and that egalitarian policies and institutions can help in fighting such senti-
ments (van der Waal, De Koster, and Van Oorschot 2013; Larsen 2006; Swank
and Betz 2003; van Oorschot 2000a). In his contribution to this volume,
Rothstein extends his argument that where institutions are seen as impartial
and non-corrupt, citizens express greater trust in their co-citizens and greater
support for equalizing policies. Effective institutions enhance political trust,
which studies have concluded is more important to redistributive solidarity
than interpersonal trust (Soroka, Johnston, and Banting 2007). Moreover,
Rothstein deploys new research confirming that the trust-building effects of
quality institutions offset the negative effects of greater ethnic diversity on
trust. In effect, where states have been able to build effective and impartial
institutions ‘from above’, these institutions can in turn build their own sources
of support and incorporate wider forms of diversity.
The inclusion of immigrants into the welfare state reflects not only the
internal logic of particular welfare state regimes, but also, at least in some
cases, the logic of judicialized human rights regimes. Indeed, a number of
scholars have concluded that the most important source of protection for
immigrants’ social rights—as well as other basic rights—are domestic and
international rights regimes, especially if interpreted by a strong and activist
judiciary. These constraints are especially important in the European Union
(EU), where member countries are signatories to the European Convention on
Human Rights and are required to open their social programmes to all EU
citizens who work on their territory (Koning 2013; Guiraudon 2000, 2002;
Joppke 2004; Sainsbury 2012). The EU has also strengthened the requirements
for member states to adopt anti-discrimination measures. Such judicialized
rights regimes can be controversial, and governments occasionally seek to
circumvent or nullify them. Indeed, some critics argue that they have so many
loopholes that they indirectly work to legitimize ‘neo-nationalist’ anti-immigrant
policies (Schain 2009). However, an important motivation for many of those
Introduction 29
who campaigned in favour of Britain leaving the European Union during the
2016 referendum was the desire to escape these legal requirements, suggesting
that they do represent real constraints. At a minimum, they provide important
resources for immigrants and their supporters, and also represent a highly
symbolic affirmation by the state of an inclusive conception of solidarity,
which presumably reinforces such sentiments in the wider culture.
More controversial has been the role of integration/diversity policies. While
international human rights norms now set certain minimum standards in
terms of racial non-discrimination, they still leave states a great deal of
discretion about how they seek to integrate immigrants, including fundamen-
tal questions about the terms under which immigrants can gain access to
permanent residency and citizenship, and about the extent to which the
distinctive identities and practices of immigrants are given any form of public
recognition and support. Contemporary democracies have developed distinct-
ive approaches to these questions, with varied choices along two dimensions:
multiculturalism policies and civic integration policies. Some countries have
responded to growing ethnic diversity with the adoption of multiculturalism
policies that recognize distinctive rights or entitlements for ethnic and religious
groups. These policies go beyond the protection of the basic civil and political
rights guaranteed to all individuals in a liberal-democratic state, to also extend
some level of public recognition and support for minorities to express their
distinct identities and practices. While multiculturalism policies have been more
controversial than anti-discrimination policies, many Western democracies
adopted the multicultural approach in the later decades of the twentieth century.
Faced with troubling evidence that many immigrants are not integrating
effectively into the economic and social mainstream, many countries have
also adopted more explicit civic integration policies. Typically, these policies
emphasize the importance of employment as a key to integration. They also
tend to insist on respect for basic liberal-democratic values, and emphasize
the need for newcomers to acquire a basic knowledge of the host society’s
language, history, and institutions. In Europe, this approach is known as ‘civic
integration’ (Council of the European Union 2004; Joppke 2007). Once again,
however, there is considerable variation in integration policies across coun-
tries. Some countries leave newcomers to their own devices; others encourage
integration on a voluntary basis; still others adopt a much more coercive and
paternalistic approach. Countries adopting a voluntary approach emphasize
immigrants’ right to integrate and provide supportive programmes. Countries
adopting a more coercive approach have made integration a duty, establishing
mandatory programmes, and denying immigrants access to social benefits
or residency renewals or to naturalization if they fail to pass certain thresholds
of integration (Goodman 2010, 2012, 2014).
Not surprisingly, there tends to be a relationship between the choices on
the two dimensions of diversity policy. Countries which have adopted
stronger multiculturalism policies have also tended to adopt a more voluntary,

less coercive approach to integration, and easier access to naturalization.
Countries which rejected the multicultural approach in the late twentieth
century are more likely to have adopted more coercive or assimilative inte-
grative strategies in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and more
restrictive access to naturalization (Banting and Kymlicka 2013; Bloemraad
and Wright 2014).45
As with the welfare state, controversy swirls around the impact of these
diversity regimes on solidarity. Do civic integration policies promote or erode
solidarity under conditions of diversity? Do multiculturalism policies promote
or erode solidarity? Critics insist that multiculturalism policies exacerbate any
underlying trade-off between diversity and redistribution, by encouraging
identity politics which crowds out redistributive issues from the policy agenda,
corrodes trust among vulnerable groups who would otherwise coalesce in a
pro-redistribution lobby, or misdiagnoses the real problems facing minorities,
leading them to believe that their problems lie in a lack of cultural recognition
rather than in the economic barriers they confront (Barry 2001; Wolfe and
Klausen 1997; Hooker 2009). Defenders of multiculturalism policies reply that
such policies do not create distrust among groups, but rather can ease inter-
communal tensions over time, and strengthen the sense of mutual respect,
trust, and support for redistribution. More open naturalization policies also
send a clear statement by the state that immigrants are citizens-in-waiting,
who belong here (Morales and Giugni 2011).
Given the intensity of this debate, there has been surprisingly little research
done on the impact of either multiculturalism or civic integration policies on
solidarity.46 A number of social psychology studies suggest that multicultur-
alism policies have beneficial effects on civic solidarity, assessed both cross-
nationally (e.g., Guimond et al. 2013) and experimentally (e.g., Levin et al.
2012). There are fewer studies on the impact of such policies on redistributive
solidarity. A recent study of public attitudes in Denmark suggests that support
for multiculturalism is correlated with redistributive solidarity—indeed, more
so than either national identity or liberal values (Breidahl, Holtug, and
Kongshøj forthcoming ). Similarly, the survey commissioned for this project,
which forms the basis of the chapter by Johnston and his colleagues, finds that
support for multiculturalism policies and support for redistribution are posi-
tively associated in the United States and English-speaking Canada (results
available on request). Earlier studies provided evidence that multiculturalism
policies do not, in fact, weaken the strength of, or public support for, the
welfare state. Countries that have adopted such policies did not experience an
erosion of their welfare states or even slower growth in social spending than
countries that have resisted such programmes (Banting et al. 2006). This
finding has been replicated with updated data and confirmed in other studies
(Brady and Finnigan 2014; see also Sumino 2014).
Introduction 31
There is even less evidence about the impact of civic integration policies on
solidarity, but the evidence to date suggests that they are not overcoming
tendencies towards welfare chauvinism or other exclusionary forms of soli-
darity (Goodman and Wright 2015; Gundelach and Traunmüller 2014).
This debate is explored in depth in the chapter by Irene Bloemraad, who
also draws a distinction between civil and political solidarity on one hand and
redistributive solidarity on the other. The evidence suggests that multicultural
policies make a modest positive contribution to both civic and political
solidarity, but have little direct effect—either positive or negative—on redis-
tributive solidarity. She also cautions about the potentially ‘uncivil’ effects of
civic integration policies with overtones of paternalism and distrust.
Given the relative scarcity of evidence, it is premature to make definitive
pronouncements about the impact of diversity/integration policy regimes on
solidarity. If our previous analysis is correct, however, one key factor will be
the extent to which these different policy regimes enable individuals from
diverse backgrounds to manifest their willing participation in an ethic of
membership, including its norms of belonging, civic friendship, and reci-
procity (Kymlicka 2015). This may mean, on the one hand, that insofar as
current civic integration policies are coercive, they risk becoming self-
defeating as a means of promoting an ethic of membership. When the state
claims that civic integration polices must be mandatory in order to be effect-
ive, then it simply reaffirms public suspicions that immigrants, left to their
own devices, are by inclination uninterested in belonging, and unwilling to
contribute and reciprocate. To counteract harsh deservingness judgements, we
need instead to create opportunities for immigrants to voluntarily indicate
their sense of belonging, civic friendship, and reciprocity (Reeskens and van
Oorschot 2012). Moreover, many civic integration policies, at least in their
coercive form, invoke ideas of national identity in the wrong way. They can be
seen in effect as repeated iterations of the ‘mere mention’ tests discussed
earlier, repeatedly poking and prodding immigrants asking ‘are you Dutch
yet?’, priming national identity in a way that we know is likely to generate
exclusionary sentiments.
On the other hand, this may also suggest the need to redefine multicultur-
alism. A solidarity-promoting form of multiculturalism would connect it to
social membership, enabling immigrants to express their culture and identity
as modes of participating and contributing to the national society. A solidarity-
promoting multiculturalism would start from the premise that one way to be a
proud and loyal Canadian is to be a proud Greek–Canadian or Vietnamese–
Canadian, and that the activities of one’s group—be they religious, cultural,
recreational, economic, or political—are understood as forms of belonging, and
of investing in society, not only or primarily in the economic sense, but in a
deeper social sense, even as a form of nation-building. Indeed, if there is one
thing to be said on behalf of Canadian multiculturalism, it is arguably this:
multiculturalism in Canada has always been seen, by both immigrants and

native-born citizens, as a means of contributing to society, and indeed a form
of nation-building.47 It is a means of staking a claim to social membership, in
part by seeking the accommodations needed to participate more fully and
effectively, but also of fulfilling the responsibilities of social membership. Nor
is this unique to Canada: the same link between multiculturalism and national
contribution is arguably visible in Australia (Levey 2008, 2015) or Scotland
(Hussain and Miller 2006), all of which have appropriately been described as
examples of ‘multicultural nationalism’.
This leads to our final proposition: Policy regimes shape the normative
expectations of social membership, and these in turn shape the prospects of
inclusive solidarity. A universal welfare state, impartial public institutions, and
multiculturalism policies can help build inclusive solidarity, if they are tied to a
broader collective identity and to an ethic of membership and belonging.
1.3.4 Reframing the Diversity-Solidarity Debate
So this returns us to our initial motivating question: What types of political

communities, political agents, and political institutions and policies serve to
sustain solidarity in contexts of diversity?
Framing the question as the political sources of solidarity points to a new
perspective on the debate about diversity and solidarity. While recent literature
focuses overwhelmingly on the politics of backlash and exclusion, there is
much to be gained by broadening the discussion to examine the politics of
diversity from the opposite direction, by exploring the potential sources of
support for an inclusive solidarity, especially the political sources of such
commitments. Posing the question in this way points to the need for a broader
understanding of the relationship, one that adopts long time horizons and
investigates multiple layers of political life. Although we have not provided a
definitive answer to our question, we have identified a number of important
starting points: namely, that solidarity matters to building and sustaining just
societies, that an inclusive solidarity is potentially fragile in the face of diver-
sity, and that the tension between diversity and solidarity is mediated by the
larger political context in which it unfolds. Political communities, political
actors, and policy regimes—and the interactions between them—can mediate
the relationship.
Simple answers are to be distrusted in this area. As we have seen time
and again, relationships are complex and differ significantly from one context
to another. Nevertheless, we have drawn a set of propositions from the mass of
evidence available in the wider literature and in the chapters in this volume.
Introduction 33
Several implications stand out. First, political theorists have established

the importance of a sense of shared membership as a basis for solidarity.
Empirical studies suggest that a shared commitment to universal (nationally-
anonymous) liberal-democratic values can underpin civil and democratic
solidarity, but some more bounded sense of membership seems required to
underpin redistributive solidarity. The evidence to date does not support the
claim that this sense of membership must be rooted in nationhood, or that
stronger national identities are inherently more solidaristic, but nevertheless
some form of collective identity and sense of belonging together does seem
essential to an inclusive solidarity. The empirical studies suggest that if national
identity is to provide a basis for inclusive solidarity in diverse societies, it must
be both thinned and shaped.
Second, solidarity will not emerge spontaneously, but requires political
actors who champion it. Political agents are necessary both to carry the idea
of solidarity into politics and to press for its subsequent institutionalization.
Clearly, both inclusive and exclusionary predispositions coexist in the atti-
tudes of the public of all democratic electorates. The blend of attitudinal
strains undoubtedly differs across countries, but no country is populated
exclusively by Kant’s race of devils or by multicultural angels. Much depends
on the role of the media and political parties in priming and mobilizing
opinion around inclusive rather than exclusionary policy frames. In most
societies, there are also civil society organizations dedicated to this purpose.
But the politicization of the immigration sector has tended to sideline such
organizations, leaving solidaristic policies vulnerable to the vagaries of elect-
oral politics. In the long term, immigrants’ own political agency as voters in
democratic elections probably offers the best protection. But in the short and
medium term, additional protections are often needed.
Third, public institutions and policy regimes do have the potential to shape
the prospects of inclusive solidarity. The evidence suggests that impartial
public institutions, a universal welfare state, strong rights regimes, open
naturalization policies, and a multicultural approach to integration can help
build inclusive solidarity, if they are tied to a broader collective identity and to
an ethic of membership and belonging. This multicultural nationalism seems a
promising avenue for inclusive solidarity, more promising than relying exclu-
sively on the vagaries of power politics or an appeal to universal humanitar-
ianism or on coercive civic integration.
In short, we conclude that solidarity does not emerge naturally from
economic and social processes but is inherently built or eroded though
political action. The politics that builds inclusive solidarity may be conflictual
in the first instance, but the resulting solidarity is sustained over time when
it becomes incorporated into collective (typically national) identities and
narratives, when it is reinforced on a recurring basis by political agents, and—

most importantly—when it becomes embedded in political institutions and policy
regimes.
The idea that state policies can influence identities and collective imagin-
aries is hardly a new theme. In many countries, nation-building projects in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were state led. In Italy of the 1860s,
the Risorgimento did not exist for the bulk of the population, and Mazzini
spoke of the need to use the state to develop ‘a national conception of life’
(quoted in Uberoi 2008: 408). Similarly, Weber argues that the process of
turning ‘peasants into Frenchmen’ was powerfully shaped by public schools,
new roads, and military service (Weber 1976). Hobsbawm broadens the
interpretation: states used all such instruments, above all primary schools, to
spread the image and heritage of the nation, ‘often “inventing traditions” or
even nations for this purpose’ (1992: 92).48 In the contemporary period, the
challenge is to shape the identities inherited from these earlier nation-builders
to help normalize diversity in modern life.
1.4 OUTLINE OF VOLUME
The rest of the volume is organized in four broad parts: Part I focuses on the
political theory of solidarity; Part II explores recent research on public atti-
tudes towards various dimensions of solidarity and diversity; Part III explores
the politics and policies of inclusive solidarity across a range of cases and
contexts; and Part IV contains concluding reflections from Philippe van Parijs
about the implications of these various studies for the future of solidarity in
diverse societies.
1.4.1 The Political Theory of Solidarity
As we have seen, much political theory has implicitly operated on the assump-
tion that solidarity is required within contemporary liberal democracies, and
that national identity is one important source of such solidarity. Insofar as they
operate with these assumptions, most liberals today are liberal nationalists.
However, these assumptions are not always spelled out or defended explicitly—
the roles of both solidarity and nationhood are often left in the background. In
our opening chapter, David Miller brings these assumptions into the fore-
ground, exploring both the value of and the sources of solidarity. As he notes,
the term ‘solidarity’ is used in many different contexts, with different meanings,
but for the purposes of our project, we are primarily interested in the societal-
level feelings that can be mobilized to sustain practices and institutions of
Introduction 35
equality and inclusion. Miller argues that, in this context, solidarity has four
defining features which distinguish it from more diffuse or ephemeral expres-
sions of empathy: it requires a sense of groupness (forming a ‘we’); a sense of
mutual concern (forming a ‘community of fate’); a sense of collective respon-
sibility; and limits on inequality. He argues that where solidarity in this sense
exists, it offers a number of important instrumental benefits: a willingness to
collectively protect members from risks, including redistributive pooling of risk,
a brake on inequality, and nurturing of trust. He acknowledges that solidarity
can also have negative effects, including pressures for internal conformity or
hostility to outsiders, but he argues that these are both contingent and mitiga-
table. The key question then becomes how to nurture this sense of solidarity,
and Miller surveys five contending accounts (expanding circles; interdepend-
ence; associational; national identity; and institutional). While his earlier work
defends the national identity argument, and he continues to argue that it will
play a role, he concludes that none of these accounts seems sufficient on its own,
and that all work better as explanations for how to sustain pre-existing solida-
rities than as explanations for how to generate it in the first place. In that sense,
uncovering the sources of solidarity remains a pressing task.
The liberal nationalist account of solidarity has faced many criticisms. One
of the central challenges is that it seems at odds, not just with the increasing
diversity of contemporary societies, but also with the increasingly multi-level
nature of contemporary politics. Many important political decisions are made
at levels above or below the level of the nation-state, and we need therefore to
think about how to nurture solidarity at sub-state and supra-state levels, where
tropes of nationhood may not be available. In his chapter, Rainer Bauböck
suggests that the three dimensions of solidarity we have identified—civic,
democratic, and redistributive—can be associated with different levels of
political community, each with its own citizenship regime. The local level
defines citizenship in terms of residency, forming a society of co-residents, and
this can sustain civic solidarity; the national or state level defines citizenship in
terms of birthright, forming a transgenerational people, and this can sustain
redistributive solidarity; and finally the regional level defines citizenship in
derivative terms, linking it with state citizenship, and binding together inter-
dependent polities that share a common destiny, which in his view can sustain
democratic solidarity. In each case, he argues, these citizenship regimes need
to be tied to particular narratives or identities that help to activate the potential
solidarities, and each can help offset some of the limits of the others. (For
example, the relatively open nature of local residential citizenship can offset
some of the closures implicit in birthright state citizenship.) However, using
the recent economic crises in the EU as an illustration, he argues that these
narratives are currently neither balanced nor coordinated, and he suggests
ways they need to change to build the sort of solidarity required for contem-
porary multi-level politics.
If Miller wants to defend national solidarity, and if Bauböck wants to extend

solidarity above and below the nation, Jacob Levy argues that we should
abandon the pursuit of solidarity entirely. The assumption that horizontal
solidarity amongst co-citizens is both possible and desirable is widely shared
across otherwise diverse political schools of thought, and is actively reinforced
by political elites and state officials. But Levy’s chapter offers several reasons
for being sceptical of it. Bounded solidarity requires a sense amongst citizens
that they ‘belong together’, whether this shared belonging is based on ethnic
characteristics or civic principles. In reality, however, we are more like
strangers who are thrown together, locked in a room or on a bus, united by
nothing other than shared circumstances. According to Levy, efforts by states
to build a sense of belonging together will inevitably be pernicious and
exclusionary, turning cultural difference and political dissent into disloyalty.
Defenders of bounded solidarity may respond that these risks are worth it, in
order to build a sense of unity. But Levy insists that unity is not necessary.
Strangers can develop norms of civil peace and justice, particularly in demo-
cratic societies where partisan political competition provides political parties
with a self-interested incentive to reach out to excluded groups. For Levy,
partisan competition is both empirically more plausible than, and normatively
preferable to, bounded solidarity as a way of ensuring an inclusive society.
1.4.2 Public Attitudes to Solidarity and Diversity
As the chapters in the first part indicate, a range of views about the value and
sources of solidarity in diverse societies are present in the political theory
literature. One reason for this diversity of views is that, until recently, we have
not had much empirical investigation of this question, leaving ample room for
theoretical speculation. But what do we know about public attitudes towards
solidarity and diversity? The second part of our volume presents three inves-
tigations of this question.
In their chapter, Céline Teney and Marc Helbling explore the results of an
innovative survey of elite opinion in Germany. As we have seen, one part of
the liberal nationalist story is that nationhood helps to link elites to masses:
unlike many other features of contemporary society, nationhood is conceived
of as something that unites the various classes, and so generates a sense of
horizontal fellowship or solidarity. But as Teney and Helbling discuss in their
chapter, this assumption has recently been questioned by the rise of an elite
‘cosmopolitan class’—the frequent flyers who view their world as much larger
than that of the nation. Various commentators have suggested that we are
moving into a new era where there is not only growing economic inequality
between the elites and masses, but also a growing identity gap. According to
this scenario, elites identify as citizens of the world, which makes them more
Introduction 37
tolerant of ethnic diversity and hence more likely to express civic solidarity,
but are losing any sense of national solidarity, and hence less likely to support
redistributive solidarity. Conversely, the masses are said to cling stubbornly to
the social protections that have been built in the name of national solidarity, at
the expense of openness to foreigners, and so exhibit redistributive solidarity
but not civic solidarity.49 Teney and Helbling test this hypothesis in the
German case, and find that it is overstated. While German elites do indeed
express stronger cosmopolitan identities than the masses, and their cosmo-
politanism does lead to higher levels of civic solidarity and multicultural
tolerance, this does not negatively impact their commitment to national
redistributive solidarity. Insofar as elites express less support than masses for
redistributive solidarity—and as they note, this is true of state and business
elites but not of union and social elites—this is explained entirely by differ-
ential material interests. The growth of distinctively cosmopolitan identities
amongst the elites has not exacerbated that elite-mass difference, and may
indeed moderate it. This suggests that, at least in some circumstances, iden-
tities and solidarities are not zero-sum, and that nurturing cosmopolitan
solidarities need not come at the expense of national solidarities.50
The chapter by Richard Johnston, Matthew Wright, Stuart Soroka, and Jack
Citrin analyses the role of national identity in North America. The authors
draw on a survey of public attitudes purpose-built for this project, with
separate samples for the United States, English-speaking Canada and Quebec.
They start by distinguishing between two forms of nationalism: simple patri-
otism or national pride on one hand and thicker, more ascriptive forms of
nationalism (that celebrate being born in the country, having ancestors in the
country and being Christian) on the other. They then analyse the impact of
both forms of nationalism on redistributive solidarity. Several themes emerge
from their complex analysis. First, the form of national identity matters a lot.
More ascriptive forms of nationalism are toxic for an inclusive solidarity in all
three political communities. But simple national pride is much less toxic in the
context of diversity. Second, the role of national pride varies significantly from
one political context to another, absorbing features of the national narrative in
each political community. In Quebec, for example, national pride is positively
associated with support for redistribution, taking on the coloration of the
province’s nationalist movement, which has embraced a social-democratic
ethos since its emergence in the 1960s. Several implications flow from these
findings. The culture of every country contains both thinner and thicker forms
of nationalism, and its impact is shaped by the dimensions of national
sentiment that are primed by the media and political parties. In addition,
however, the plasticity in the role of national pride suggests that national
identities are malleable, and susceptible to cultural engineering by the state.
The normative content of nationhood—what it means to be an American,
Canadian, French—does not fall fully formed from the sky, but is constructed
over time by elite discourse and the operations of institutions and passed on
from one generation to the next by families and other reference groups.
National identities are slow to change, but this team of authors are convinced
it can be shaped by elite rhetoric and state policies.
These findings from both Germany and North America that national
identity may diminish solidarity lead many commentators to seek an alterna-
tive basis for solidarity. One such possibility is the idea of citizenship itself:
perhaps we can build solidarity by viewing others as co-citizens without
having to view them as co-nationals. This is the possibility explored in the
chapter by Tim Reeskens and Wim van Oorschot. The challenge, as they note,
is that citizenship displays many of the same boundary-making characteristics
as nationhood: they are both membership-based concepts. Unlike universal
human rights, citizenship rights are tied to membership, and so an intense
commitment to defending and promoting citizenship rights could have the
tendency to strengthen in-group loyalties and out-group antipathies. Drawing
upon recent European survey results, Reeskens and van Oorschot argue,
however, that attitudes towards citizenship rights have a more complicated
relationship to tolerance. Even if civil and political rights are membership
rights, not universal human rights, they are nonetheless more universalistic
in their impulse, and so ‘reach out’ to newcomers. Social rights, they suggest,
are less universalistic, and so operate to strengthen in-group/out-group
boundaries. Or more exactly, it is (unfulfilled) aspirations for social rights
that may be exclusionary: people who have strong desires for social rights that
are not met by society are more likely to express intolerance. Interestingly,
where citizens feel that social rights are in fact well provided, they tend to be
more tolerant of newcomers. While unfulfilled aspirations for social rights
may be a barrier to tolerance, the fulfilment of those social rights enhances
tolerance. As Reeskens and van Oorschot note, this raises a number of
interesting questions about the mechanisms at work.
1.4.3 The Politics of Solidarity in Diverse Society
The chapters in Part II provide important evidence about the distribution of

attitudes of solidarity in society, and indicate that there are both inclusive and
exclusive strands of public opinion in Western societies. But of course the
relationship between public attitudes and political outcomes is highly indirect
and mediated. Feelings of solidarity may or may not be mobilized, depending
on the strategies of political actors, the effects of policy regimes, and the nature
of public debates and collective narratives. We need to look, in short, not just
at attitudes of solidarity but also at the politics of solidarity.
Part III of our volume explores how ideas of solidarity are framed and
mobilized in political debate and policy regimes. As noted earlier, one premise
Introduction 39
of the volume is that strategic self-interested behaviour is not sufficient to

explain the rise or persistence of civic and democratic inclusion or redistribu-
tion, and that an ethic of membership—feelings of obligation to co-members—
may be needed as well. In his chapter, Peter Hall endorses this general claim, but
disputes that these feelings of obligation are best captured by the idea of
‘national identity’. He suggests instead that national identity is just one dimen-
sion of what he calls ‘cultural frameworks’ or ‘collective imaginaries’ that
contain ideas not only about who belongs, but also about other moral con-
cerns, such as ideas of personal worth and deservingness. He further argues
that these imaginaries do not ‘emerge entirely from some primordial under-
standing of national identity’, but rather are conditioned by political institu-
tions and policy regimes. People’s expectations are shaped by what
institutions tell us are our legitimate expectations, creating relatively durable
‘quasi-equilibria’, fusing ideas of social justice and national identity. The result,
contrary to predictions based on self-interest, is that both low inequality/
high redistribution societies and high inequality/low redistribution societies
can rest upon stable and widespread public attitudes. For Hall, this suggests
that including immigrants in low inequality/high redistribution societies is not
inherently problematic. Since solidarity is not based on ‘primordial’ concep-
tions of national identity, immigration per se is not a threat to the quasi-
equilibria in such societies, so long as their social policy regimes and political
institutions continue to shape the relevant collective imaginaries. He worries,
however, that the main political actors who built these impressive solidaristic
policy regimes and institutions—particularly social democratic parties and
trade unions—have either weakened or lost their historical role as vehicles
for collective imaginaries of justice. And in era of increasing fiscal restraint,
the temptation to exclude immigrants from these regimes—through some
form of welfare chauvinism—is strong. The focus on collective imaginaries,
while offering an important antidote to deterministic claims that diversity
erodes solidarity, also requires us to ask difficult questions about who are
the champions of inclusive collective imaginaries in contemporary Western
societies.
Zoe Lefkofridi and Elie Michel pick up this question of the agents of
solidarity, exploring the extent to which radical right parties have attempted
to displace social democratic parties as champions of solidarity, albeit an
exclusive form of solidarity from which immigrants are excluded. As the
term suggests, ‘radical right’ parties initially located themselves on the right
side of the political spectrum, both in relation to economic issues (i.e.,
defending market liberalization) and on socio-cultural issues (i.e., attacking
immigration and multiculturalism). But over the years, many of these parties
have repositioned themselves as champions of the welfare state, so as to draw
working-class voters away from social democratic parties, and indeed now
attack immigration precisely on the grounds that it is a threat to the welfare
state. The ‘radical right’ can therefore also be seen as ‘left authoritarian’—that
is, left on economic issues, but right on socio-cultural issues. Lefkofridi and
Michel argue that this left authoritarian position appeals to a wide segment of
the working class, as well as to many self-employed and small business owners,
and that it is likely to remain a powerful influence in contemporary Western
politics, reducing the political maneuvering room for champions of a more
inclusive solidarity.
The rise of these anti-immigrant parties in much of Western Europe is
indeed one of the most striking manifestations of the risks to solidarity, and so
they have been the subject of much recent scholarship. They are clearly key
actors in shaping both exclusionary discourses (‘us versus them’ frames) and
exclusionary policies (e.g., welfare chauvinism). But there remains much
debate about whether such parties should be seen as the cause or the effect
of anti-immigrant sentiments. On one view, these parties simply reflect pre-
existing public opinion, which was never as committed to immigration,
diversity, or multiculturalism as elites. On another view, these parties actively
frame the issue of immigration as a threat in ways that both shape and polarize
public opinion, priming voters to blame immigrants for social ills that they
might previously have not interpreted in ‘us versus them’ terms. Edward
Koning’s chapter explores this debate in the particular context of the Pim
Fortuyn List in the Netherlands in the 2002 election, which is widely cited as
one of the most striking cases of the meteoric rise of an anti-immigrant party.
Koning’s analysis of the media, public opinion, and parliament suggests that
the rise of this party had little effect on public opinion towards immigrants,
but did have a significant effect on the extent to which people based their vote
on issues of immigration, with knock-on effects for the platforms of other
political parties (the ‘contagion effect’). This confirms that, while public
attitudes of solidarity (or xenophobia) matter, there is wide variation in the
extent to which these attitudes are politically activated, and that political actors
such as anti-immigrant parties are central to this activation.
The chapters by Hall, Lefkofridi and Michel, and Koning all document a
trend towards the weakening of the (social-democratic) political parties who
traditionally championed inclusive solidarity and the strengthening of new
(anti-immigrant) parties who champion exclusive solidarity. If political parties
are the central actors in mobilizing attitudes of solidarity and in promoting
inclusion,51 a pessimistic conclusion would seem to be inevitable. But perhaps
we should not overstate the role of political parties. Perhaps political institu-
tions and policy regimes can play their own role in sustaining solidarity, and
can continue to play this role even as their traditional partisan champions
have weakened.52
This is indeed the central argument of Bo Rothstein’s chapter. As he notes,
the dozens of studies of the impact of diversity on solidarity seem to reach a
dizzying array of divergent and competing conclusions. But he suggests that
Introduction 41
the results become clearer and more consistent if we take into account the
effect of political institutions. According to Rothstein, what determines public
support for equality-promoting policies is not inherited cultural traditions or
ethnic loyalties, but rather forward-looking predictions about whether one’s
co-citizens will reciprocate rather than free-ride or cheat. Where these expect-
ations exist, citizens support equality-promoting policies even if they diverge
from their narrow self-interest. And these forward-looking predictions are in
turn strongly shaped by perceptions of the quality of public institutions: where
institutions are seen as impartial and non-corrupt, citizens express greater
trust in co-citizens and express greater support for equality-promoting pol-
icies. Or put in the reverse: where citizens perceive public institutions as biased
and corrupt, they will vote against more egalitarian policies, even if they are
ideologically left. Moreover, this effect of high quality public institutions
trumps any negative effect of diversity: findings that diversity erodes trust
disappear when quality of government is controlled for. Rothstein’s optimistic
conclusion is that where state elites have been able to build effective and
impartial public institutions ‘from above’, these institutions can then generate
their own sources of support, even if there were not high levels of pre-existing
solidarity from below.
Rothstein focuses on social policy regimes generally, but as Irene Bloemraad
notes, public debate has tended to focus primarily on policies of multicultur-
alism and immigrant integration. Defenders of multiculturalism argue that it
epitomizes and promotes inclusive solidarity, while critics argue that it under-
mines social cohesion and trust. Her review of the evidence has a mixed
message. On the one hand, she argues that there is good reason to believe
that multiculturalism has had modest positive effects on civic and democratic
solidarity, creating more inclusive national identities and more open political
processes. She thinks that multiculturalism has few if any direct effects on
redistributive solidarity, and its indirect effects are too remote to identify. This
suggests that the ideal of a solidaristic multiculturalism is a realistic goal. On
the other hand, she acknowledges that immigrants are rarely seen as having
the status or legitimacy to demand such policies, and that majorities rarely
have any spontaneous feeling of solidarity towards immigrants. The question
then turns to how such solidarity-enhancing policies get adopted in the first
place. She argues that the emergence of these policies, at least in the ‘early
adopter’ countries of Canada and the USA, was in part a fluke, an unintended
by-product of political claims made by historic minorities (the Québécois and
African-Americans respectively), whose historic role as both victims of legal
injustice and as builders of the country gave their claims a firmer legitimacy.
Their struggles created an opening for diversity policies to emerge ‘without
strong linkages to fears over mass migration or the arrival of people of very
different religious, cultural and racial backgrounds’. Immigrant groups in the
USA and Canada have since ‘appropriated’ these openings, and the resulting
reforms have over time become politically institutionalized and socially

embedded in solidarity-enhancing ways. If multiculturalism is to be adopted
in much of Europe, it is unlikely to follow the same route, as a fortuitous
by-product of struggles by historic minorities. Rather, multiculturalism will
have to emerge out of more explicit political contestation. But as she notes,
solidarity-enhancing policies such as the extension of citizenship rights and
the building of welfare states often had their origins in intense contestation,
and it is only our ‘rose-tinted’ glasses that make us think that such policies
were rooted in pre-existing solidarities.
If Rothstein and Bloemraad are correct, then the prospects for inclusive
solidarity depend less on pre-existing feelings of solidarity and more on the
ability and willingness of political elites to create policy regimes that will over
time foster the very solidarities needed to sustain them. But what explains the
decisions of these political elites? Karin Borevi explores this question in her
chapter, comparing how elites in Denmark and Sweden think about the
sources of, and risks to, solidarity. We have already seen, in the chapter by
Lefkofredi and Michel, that assumptions about solidarity differ between left-
and right-wing parties. Borevi suggests these assumptions may also differ
across countries, leading to different national ‘philosophies of integration’.
This, she argues, is indeed the case with Denmark and Sweden, which have
similar welfare state regimes, yet have very different approaches to immigrant
integration, with Sweden serving as the poster child for multiculturalism in
Europe, while Denmark is often singled out as the representative of a harsh
assimilationist approach. This divergence, she suggests, is at least partly rooted
in underlying differences in how elites conceive of the sources of solidarity.
Danish elites typically adopt a ‘society-centred’ approach which assumes that
social cohesion amongst the people in civil society is a precondition to build
or sustain the welfare state; Swedish elites typically adopt a ‘state-centred’
approach which assumes that the welfare state generates social trust—a
difference she argues is rooted in their different histories of nation-state
building. And this difference in turn makes possible very different attitudes
towards diversity.53
Similar issues regarding elite conceptions of solidarity arise in Patrick
Loobuyck and Dave Sinardet’s study of Belgium. As they note, Belgium is a
fascinating test-case for liberal nationalist theories of solidarity, since it con-
tains ‘nested nationalisms’. Within the larger Belgian nation, the (Dutch-
speaking) Flemings, and (French-speaking) Walloons constitute ‘nations
within’, each with their own nation-building projects at the sub-state level,
including control over immigrant integration policies. This raises the double
challenge of sustaining a sense of mutual obligation between Flemings and
Walloons, while also building inclusive solidarity towards immigrants within
both Flanders and Wallonia. Loobucyk and Sinardet argue that each of these
national projects—the pan-Belgian, Flemish and Walloon—invoke different
Introduction 43
conceptions of nationhood. The sense of pan-Belgian nationhood, while still

strongly expressed in public opinion surveys, is increasingly thinned, and
primarily persists through institutional inertia. This thinned identity may
have beneficial consequences for civic solidarity, but may be incapable of
sustaining let alone enhancing redistributive solidarity. At the substate level,
the Flemish elites promote a vision of multicultural liberal nationalism,
whereas the Walloon elites promote a more French-style vision of assimilation
focused of social rights and difference-blind citizenship, each with its own
benefits and burdens for solidarity. In that sense, Belgium is a virtual labora-
tory for the issues of the links between national identity, policy regimes, and
solidarity.
1.4.4 Concluding Commentary
Finally, in Part IV, we have concluding reflections from Philippe van Parijs,
who opens a new vista for thinking about the future of social justice.
He acknowledges that bounded solidarity grounded in a common identity
has been important historically in building redistributive welfare states and
culturally tolerant democracies, and he identifies several lessons from the
chapters in this volume about how to sustain that sense of solidarity. But he
suggests that it will play less of a role in the future, due to both increasing
diversity and globalization. Future challenges of social justice, such as climate
change, will require us to acknowledge the claims of culturally and geograph-
ically distant others with whom we have little shared identity. As noted earlier,
sceptics question whether ‘unbounded humanitarianism’ can motivate com-
pliance with such demands of egalitarian justice. Van Parijs, however, argues
that there is a third option, beyond bounded solidarity and unbounded
humanitarianism, which is the ‘civilizing force’ of deliberative democracy:
the demand to justify the exercise of power to all those affected by it, no
matter how distant they are from us. As he notes, this presupposes that we can
develop what he calls a transnational ‘justificatory community’ united by
practices of justification, rather than solidarity communities united by com-
mon identities. He optimistically predicts that ‘the pressure of justifiability’
will help advance the demands of justice ‘even under conditions in which
enhanced diversity fragilizes solidarity’.
Van Parijs’s view is ambitious and optimistic. He argues that justice requires
globally egalitarian outcomes, and that the ‘pressure of justifiability’ in a
justificatory community will push us towards global justice even in the absence
of solidarity. Both claims will surely generate debate. As we noted earlier, some
theorists of justice argue that egalitarian principles apply only within societies,
and that justice between societies is more about respect for basic rights and not
imposing harms. If so, then the ‘pressure of justifiability’ might simply
generate duties not to harm outsiders, rather than the egalitarian commit-
ments that domestic solidarity seeks. We can also ask whether ‘justificatory
community’ can be entirely separated from issues of identity and solidarity.
After all, history gives us no reason to think that humans automatically view
themselves as members of a justificatory community with distant others.54 If
justificatory community is our goal, we need to ask what are the political
sources that help to build and sustain a sense of justificatory community. And
at least some of the questions raised in this volume about the political sources
of solidarity are likely to resurface. The conditions under which people
endorse institutionalized practices of justification may not be radically distinct
from the conditions under which they endorse institutionalized practices of
solidarity. In both cases, feelings of community (justificatory or solidaristic)
are likely to be strongly shaped by prevailing political discourses and identities,
by the actions of political agents, and by policy regimes. If so, then many of the
arguments explored in this volume about the political sources of bounded
solidarity can help inform future research on the sources of justificatory
community.
NOTES
1. For overviews of this voluminous literature, see Schaeffer (2014); Laurence (2014);
Hewstone and Swart (2011); Pettigrew et al. (2011).
2. For attempts to distinguish different conceptions of solidarity in the contemporary
literature, see Bayertz (1998); Scholz (2008); and Kolers (2012).
3. It is important to distinguish the question of immigrant admissions policy (who is
allowed in) from the question of immigrant integration policy (how immigrants
are treated once admitted). On our view, civic solidarity is in the first instance
concerned with the latter—it is about how a society treats all those who live and
work within its borders—and does not presuppose or entail a preference to
increase the intake of immigrants. Studies of public opinion suggest that the two
issues are often highly correlated: those who are most committed to the fair
treatment of already-admitted immigrants also tend to support the admission of
more immigrants. As we discuss in section 1.3.2, however, the two are importantly
distinct: trade unions often wish to restrict the admission of new immigrants while
strengthening the rights of existing immigrants, whereas business interests often
have the opposite preference of admitting more newcomers while restricting the
rights of those already admitted.
4. A useful source on conceptions of solidarity among classical social theorists is
Stjernø (2005).
5. This is sometimes described as the ‘agonistic’ conception of solidarity—a resource
to be used by one group in society in political contestation with its adversaries (e.g.,
Mouffe 1995, 1999, 2000; Kolers 2012).
Introduction 45
6. For similar observations about how solidarity has been dismissed by academics as
‘rhetorical’ or ‘ceremonial’, see Reynolds (2014: 1); Laitinen and Pessi (2014: 1).
7. As Laitinen and Pessi put it, ‘as solidarity is often based on we-thinking, it can be
separated from not only anti-social egocentrism, but also from one-sided “thou-
centrism”, such as altruism, sympathy, caring, or Christian charity. While these
concentrate on the wellbeing of the other or you, the target of concern in solidarity
can be us together’ (2014: 2).
8. For key texts in the global justice literature, see Caney (2005); Brock (2009); and
Tan (2004). For an application to solidarity in Europe, see Kochenov (2015).
9. And once bounded solidarity is in place, it may serve as a source for more global
solidarity. A study of ‘global good Samaritans’ showed that, in many cases, the
impulse to global concern was rooted in national identities: acting globally was a
way of expressing one’s identity as a ‘good Swede’ or a ‘good Canadian’ (Brysk
2009). The fact that countries with the highest levels of domestic redistribution
also have the highest level of foreign aid also suggests that ‘the achievement of
justice at home in fact sustains justice abroad’ (Noel and Therien 2002), and that
‘individuals project their values from home abroad’ (Rathburn 2007). This sug-
gests that a commitment to global justice often grows out of national solidarities,
rather than the suppressing of national solidarities. For a more extended discus-
sion of how cosmopolitan concerns can be ‘rooted’ in national solidarities, see
Kymlicka and Walker (2012).
10. This is not to say that we should not seek to promote solidarity at other levels,
above and below the nation-state. For example, as Rainer Bauböck notes in his
chapter, the local level may provide particularly fertile grounds for nurturing civic
solidarity in particular. Yet as he notes, the potential of the local level to promote
civic solidarity may depend on the extent to which the nation-state secures
democratic and redistributive solidarity. As Oosterlynck et al. put it, local practices
of solidarity ‘take place on a terrain structured by the silent operations of the
national welfare state as a territorial “solidarity machine”’ (2016: 777).
11. For a discussion of the intrinsic versus instrumental value of solidarity, see
Chapter 2 by David Miller.
12. Trade unions themselves may depend on solidarity amongst workers, but even if
so, this ‘agonistic’ class solidarity is a different sort of bounded solidarity than that
instantiated in the welfare state.
13. See also historian Ben Jackson’s observation that historically successful appeals for
egalitarian policies in the USA and the UK tended to be expressed in the idiom of
national solidarity, and that ‘redistribution expressed the fairness and solidarity of
the national character’ (Jackson 2009: 239).
14. This is a central theme in Brooks and Manza (2007), who argue that welfare state
regimes endure, despite declining working-class power, in part because they have
become embedded in public discourse and collective memories, albeit to quite
different degrees in different countries.
15. For arguments about the stability of attitudes of solidarity, see Brooks and Manza
(2007); Cavaille and Trump (2015). As van Oorschot puts it, ‘empirical studies on
welfare state legitimacy have not detected any substantial decline in popular
support. On the contrary, the comparative studies all conclude that support for
welfare has remained high from the 1970s onwards’ (2000b: 16).
16. Schumpeter as quoted in Svallfors (2010: 241).
17. See also McCall (2013) on public opinion regarding the undeserving rich.
18. For a review of these findings, see van Oorschot (2006).
19. As van Oorschot notes, deservingness judgements are essentially the flip side of
feelings of solidarity: ‘In fact, one could argue that the difference between both
concepts is more a matter of disciplinary origin and context, with “solidarity”
having a tradition in sociology, and “deservingness” having its roots in social
psychology’ (2005: 10 n. 3).
20. For renewed discussions of the general societal trend towards ‘individualization’,
and its impact on the prospects for solidarity, see Genov (2015) and Edsall (2015).
21. How postmaterialism affects solidarity is a contested issue. While many commen-
tators have assumed that postmaterialists are less solidaristic, others argue that the
sort of individualism that characterizes postmaterialists is not egoistic, but can be
quite solidaristic. See the discussion in Bo Rotherstein’s chapter.
22. For an influential attempt to model the costs of increased heterogeneity, and how
it offsets economies of scale, see Alesina and Spolaore (2005), who use their model
to estimate the ideal ‘size of nations’.
23. These studies are fraught with methodological issues, not least that perceptions
and categorizations of ethnic diversity are socially constructed, and moreover are
endogenous to the very historical processes of state formation and public goods
provision they are intended to explain. For a helpful discussion, see Singh and vom
Hau (2016).
24. In his review of 472 studies from around the world of the impact of ethnic
diversity on social cohesion, Schaeffer notes that a negative impact is more likely
to be found in the context of historic racial/national/indigenous minorities than in
the context of immigrants (2014: 24). For similar findings in Canada, see Soroka,
Johnston, and Banting (2007), and Banting, Soroka, and Koning (2013).
25. For influential discussions of neoliberal multiculturalism, see Hale (2005); Zizek
(1997); and the overview in Kymlicka (2013).
26. On left authoritarianism, see Lefkofridi, Wagner, and Willmann (2014).
27. A fuller historical analysis of the sources of solidarity would likely give a large role
to questions of war and international security. Solidarity has often emerged in
response to perceived threats from external enemies, and some have argued that
war is indeed good for minority rights (Saldin 2011). But this is obviously not a
sustainable (or desirable) basis for a politics of solidarity. Our focus in this volume
is on peaceful and democratic political sources of solidarity.
28. And of course Jay’s conception of nationhood helped make possible the ethnic
cleansing of American Indians.
29. Some theorists would drop the requirement of shared liberal values. For these
‘agonistic’ theorists, it is participation itself that generates a sense of co-authorship
of political life, and this can encompass citizens who differ greatly not only in their
personal conceptions of the good, but also in their fundamental political values.
Indeed, on this model—known variously as a radical democratic, contestatory or
agonistic model, associated with Chantal Mouffe (2000) and William Connolly
(1991)—we should encourage the contesting of liberal-democratic values. To
exclude non-liberal views is to silence dissent and impose a false orthodoxy.
Introduction 47
Defenders of this model argue that insofar as Rawlsian or Habermasian ap-
proaches allow liberal political institutions to determine the permissibility of
minority practices unilaterally and in sectarian terms, the effect is to further
marginalize the groups involved.
30. For discussions, see Canovan (2000); Markell (2000); and Abizadeh (2007).
31. For statements of this liberal nationalist position, see Tamir (1993); Miller (1995);
and Moore (2001).
32. Our focus in this volume is on solidarity, but a central plank in the liberal
nationalist position is that nationhood also helps to stabilize political boundaries,
since a commitment to democracy on its own underdetermines the relevant units
and boundaries (Canovan 1996).
33. For a recent overview of the ‘fear and anxiety’ triggered by immigrants’ perceived
threat to national identities in Europe and North America, see Foner and Simon
(2015).
34. For a defence of a multicultural conception of liberal nationalism, see Kymlicka
(2001) and Levey (2008). Not all liberal nationalists accept its compatibility with
multiculturalism: see Miller (2006).
35. See, for example, the recent study by Bloemraad, Fabiana Silva, and Voss (2016),
showing that in the recent debate over immigrants’ rights in California, framing
the issue as one of universal liberal-democratic values was strikingly ineffective.
36. This reinforces the conclusion of the Noel and Therien (2002) study, cited in note
9, that fulfilled aspirations for domestic justice tend to lead to more cosmopolitan
commitments, whereas frustrated aspirations for domestic justice tend to under-
mine cosmopolitan commitments.
37. But see Loobuyck (2012) and Levrau and Loobuyck (2013) for the potential
importance of participation in building solidarity where a sense of belonging
together is otherwise not available.
38. Shayo (2009) provides the most negative evidence, concluding that a strong sense
of national identity—at both the individual and societal levels—is corrosive of
solidarity in Western nations. See also Harutyunyan (2016). But as Miller and Ali
(2014) note in their review of the literature, most studies find more modest and
mixed effects. For positive effects in the Indian context, see Charnysh, Lucas, and
Singh (2016); and in the Canadian context, see Johnston et al. (2010). For US
evidence, see Theiss-Morse (2009). Singh and vom Hau (2016) argue that these
effects need to be understood in terms of historic trajectories of nation-building:
different models of nation-building, in conjunction with different levels of state-
capacity, generate very different outcomes for the link between national identity,
diversity, and solidarity.
39. In Chapter 6, Johnston, Wright, Soroka, and Citrin are focusing on how different
survey questions in social science research can ‘trigger’ these different aspects of
national identity, but as they imply, this ability to trigger different aspects of
identity is also available to political actors in real-world public debates.
40. On the importance of ‘carriers’ of ideas into politics and the subsequent institu-
tionalization of ideas, see Berman (1998: ch. 2) and Hall (1989, 1993).
41. ‘The role of political parties in politicising immigration issues has heavily in-
creased over the last two decades . . . immigration became the most polarising
issue in the electoral arena during the 1990s as well as the most salient one in
protest politics, and has remained in this position ever since . . . This stands in
contrast to the time up to the mid-1980s, when immigration was one of the least
politicised issues on the political agenda of European countries, and immigration
policy was decided behind closed doors and without public debate’ (Helbling,
Reeskens, and Stolle 2015: 105).
42. A recent study by Helbling, Reeskens, and Stolle (2015) suggests that as immigra-
tion becomes more politically salient, as measured by its presence in party
manifestos, social cohesion declines, regardless of the valence of the discussion. In
other words, even positive discussions of immigration and multiculturalism can
trigger these negative effects, simply by making the issue more salient. This
strengthens the strategic rationale for left parties to avoid the issue.
43. The regressive effects of the electoral turn are likely exacerbated by trends regard-
ing voter turnout. In many Western countries, young people are more supportive
of immigration and multiculturalism, yet are less likely to vote than older gener-
ations, who tend to be the most resistant.
44. As Justwan (2015) notes, however, the willingness of countries to extend voting
rights to immigrants depends in part on levels of trust.
45. On the factors influencing naturalization policies, see Koopmans, Michalowski,
and Waibel (2012); Janoski (2010); and Helbling (2008).
46. There has been considerable research done on the impact of diversity policies on
other outcomes—for example, how they affect labour market outcomes for im-
migrants, or how multicultural or bilingual education affects the educational
outcomes of immigrants, or how they affect voting and volunteering rates. See,
for example, Bloemraad and Wright (2014); Koopmans (2013); Kesler and
Bloemraad (2010); Bloemraad (2006); Kymlicka (2012); and Laxer (2013). But
for the purposes of this project, we are particularly interested in the impact of
these policy regimes on solidarity. A policy reform that helps a society achieve
better economic returns on immigration need not be evidence of solidarity: it
may simply reflect and entrench a view of immigrants as a resource, rather
than as equal members of society. We believe that the impacts of policy on
solidarity need to be studied on their own terms. See Hooker (2009) for a related
plea about the need to consider the interactions between multiculturalism
and solidarity.
47. This analysis is shared by both defenders of Canadian multiculturalism, such as
Varun Uberoi (2008), and critics, such as Gerald Kernerman (2005) or Richard
Day (2000). They view the fusing of multiculturalism with nation-building as an
abandonment of its emancipatory potential. We view it as enabling an ethos of
social membership that affirms both diversity and solidarity.
48. While Benedict Anderson’s influential theory of nations as imagined communities
places less emphasis on the state, political-administrative systems do emerge in his
analysis. In Latin America, for example, he argues the administrative structures of
the Spanish colonies created imagined communities which quickly became na-
tional in character (Anderson 1991).
49. This is one version of the worry, discussed earlier, that we are seeing a split
between a ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ and a ‘populist chauvinism’.
Introduction 49
50. As we will see later, a similar lesson has been drawn in Bloemraad’s chapter from
studies of immigrants’ identities: attachment to their ancestral identities need not
come at the expense of attachment to their new country of residence.
51. Recall that while Levy was sceptical about the role of feelings of solidarity, he too
relied heavily on political parties as engines of inclusion.
52. See the related debate about ‘social democracy without social democrats’—that is,
the surprising resilience of social-democratic-inspired policy regimes even as
social democratic parties decline in membership and votes (Keating and
McCrone 2013).
53. In this respect, her analysis confirms Hall’s point that it is not primordial
understandings of national identity that determine solidarity, but rather the
broader ‘collective imaginary’ that embeds national identity within broader ideas
about the nature of morality, society, and the state.
54. And recall our earlier observation that increased participation is not, by itself,
reliably associated with increased concern for the claims of others. Van Parijs
might respond that existing practices of participation are not sufficiently tied to
practices of justification, but even if so, this just pushes the question back a level:
what motivates people, not just to participate, but to participate in ways that
emphasize justification (rather than, say, strategic bargaining)?
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Part I
The Political Theory of Solidarity
2
Solidarity and Its Sources

David Miller
2.1 I NTRODUCTION
In this chapter, I try to answer some basic questions about social solidarity: its
nature, causes, and consequences. In order to do this, we need to be clear about
the phenomenon we are trying to discuss, and not confuse solidarity itself
either with the forces that may help to create it, or with the social policies
through which it may be expressed. I take solidarity to be a feature of
relationships between persons. We often say of a group of people that they
display a high degree of solidarity, a low degree, or none at all. When we say
this we are saying something about the way group members regard and
interact with one another. What exactly we are saying is something that
I shall attempt to pin down shortly. Having done this, we can then go on to
ask why different groups display different levels of solidarity. Is it, for example,
something to do with their individual characteristics—say whether or not they
have the same skin colour or belong to the same religious denomination? Or is
it a matter of the way they have interacted in the past, for example whether the
members have a long history of co-operation? Or perhaps again whether they
have been exposed to particular social or political institutions, for instance
those we associate with the welfare state? We can also ask about solidarity’s
value, and its consequences. Does it actually matter whether we enjoy relations
of solidarity, either within small groups, or across large societies? Does
personal life go better for those who are attached to one another by bonds
of this kind? Or is solidarity’s importance to be found in the way that it enables
groups and societies to achieve goals that they could not realize otherwise—for
example large-scale economic redistribution? Might solidarity also have its
downsides: might it imply too much monitoring and control of our behaviour
by those we are in solidarity with, for instance?
These are all large questions, and it may be necessary for certain purposes to
define solidarity either in a more limited or a more expansive way than I am
62 David Miller
proposing. Some of the contributors to this book do precisely this. In their

‘Introduction’, for example, Banting and Kymlicka offer a wide definition
that encompasses three ‘dimensions’ of solidarity—civic, democratic, and
redistributive (Chapter 1, this volume). These, it seems to me, are best under-
stood as sets of attitudes that we would hope to see adopted by citizens of
modern liberal states as a consequence of their solidarity with one another. In
other words, these dimensions should be read as expressions of solidarity that
are appropriate to societies like ours (I don’t suppose that Banting and
Kymlicka would believe that solidarity among Amazonian Indians, say,
would be expressed in the same way). In contrast, Rothstein understands
solidarity more narrowly as ‘the sum of political practices that increase
equality in people’s life chances (that is, the welfare state broadly understood)’
(Chapter 11, this volume). Here the focus is on institutions and policies that
are conventionally understood as both expressing social solidarity and (as
Rothstein goes on to argue) helping to maintain it. The definition has been
shifted from the phenomenon itself to its main vehicle, in contemporary
societies. Such contrasting definitions reflect the particular normative and
explanatory interests of each contributor, and need not be a source of confu-
sion so long as we are clear about their status.
Here, I begin, in Section 2.2, by identifying the features that characterize
solidarity as a general social phenomenon, without at this stage raising
questions about how widely or narrowly it can extend. Then in section 2.3
I explore solidarity’s value, asking in particular whether it has intrinsic as well
as instrumental value. Section 2.4 addresses the question of how society-wide
solidarity might be achieved, and critically explores five theories that have
sought to explain this. Section 2.5 offers a brief conclusion.
2 .2 W H A T IS S O L I D A R I T Y ?
It does not take long to discover that ‘solidarity’ is a term that can be used in a
variety of different ways without doing violence to the English language. So we
need to identify the sense that concerns us by engaging in a bit of conceptual
analysis. A good place to start is the distinction alluded to by Onora O’Neill
when she separates solidarity among a group of people from solidarity with a
group of people (O’Neill 1996: 201). Experiencing solidarity with a group of
people—for example a group that is suffering hardship at the hands of an
oppressive regime—means identifying with them emotionally, trying to
imagine what it must be like to be in their place, and then taking symbolic
or practical steps to help them. Thus in 1970s Britain, the Chile Solidarity
Campaign, set up in response to the military coup led by General Pinochet,
acted in support of those Chileans victimized by the new regime, holding
Solidarity and Its Sources 63
demonstrations, lobbying the British government, offering practical aid to

refugees from Chile, and so forth. This illustrates ‘solidarity with’. It is a
one-way relationship.1 One group, here the CSC, shows solidarity towards
another, the oppressed Chileans, without any expectation that their expres-
sions of solidarity will be reciprocated. We can presume that the Chileans
welcomed these expressions and the efforts made on their behalf, though this
does not seem to be essential to ‘solidarity with’.
Our interest here, however, is in ‘solidarity among’. What does it mean for a
group of people to be united by relations of solidarity?2 First, there has to be a
sufficiently precise, and shared, sense that they are a group. There must be
some feature or set of features that binds them together. To say this is not to
take sides on the question whether it is possible for solidarity to extend so
widely that it covers the whole of humanity. In this case ‘being human’ would
be the relevant feature that provides the focus of solidarity. Clearly, however,
the scope of solidarity is often much narrower than this in practice: it can exist
among family members, occupational groups, co-religionists, compatriots,
and so forth. There must, in other words, be a ‘we’ that feels and practises
solidarity, and this relationship is reciprocal in the sense that each member
recognizes and is recognized by the others as belonging to this ‘we’, in contrast
to the aforementioned cases of ‘solidarity with’.
Second, the attitude adopted towards fellow-members of the group is one of
concern and support. A person in a relation of solidarity with another is
saddened when the latter runs into trouble, and glad when she does well.
And this translates into obligations of mutual aid, so solidarity is shown by
defending and assisting the person who has got into difficulties. This is done on
the basis that in principle the person being helped would offer help in return
were the situation reversed. But solidarity is not reducible to simple reciprocity.
It does not assume that the person in question will actually be able to recipro-
cate. Suppose in a small neighbourhood one family’s house catches fire. The
neighbours show solidarity by offering accommodation to the family that has
been burnt out and helping to put their house back together, for example by
donating furniture. The family who have been rescued may be in no position to
offer similar help even if the opportunity should arise. But where genuine
solidarity exists, this is not important: what matters is that the family should
‘show willing’, that is be prepared to help others within the group in ways that are
within its capacities. So solidarity is distinguishable from simple reciprocity—the
returning of favours in kind—on the one hand, and from unconditional
altruism—helping people in need with no expectation of return—on the other.
This is sometimes expressed by saying that solidaristic groups are ‘communi-
ties of fate’ meaning that their members implicitly agree to protect one another
from accidents and losses that are outside their control. Of course the extent of
such protection—how much members of the group are willing to do for one
another—will vary according to the degree of solidarity that exists within it.
64 David Miller
This is related to the third aspect of ‘solidarity among’, which is that the
group accepts collective responsibility for what its members do. If we look
back to the origin of the term ‘solidarity’, we find it in the provision of Roman
law whereby members of an extended family or gens were held collectively
liable for debts incurred by one of their number—so that a creditor unable to
reclaim from the person indebted to him could launch a claim against any
member of the association chosen at will.3 This was referred to as obligatio in
solidum (Buckland 1931: 246). Although this legal provision is no longer
generally applicable, its moral equivalent persists, in the sense that those
who belong to solidaristic groups are expected to assume responsibility for
the actions of individual members, insofar as they are acting in a group-related
capacity. If they cause damage for which they cannot make redress, fellow-
members will feel a responsibility to offer compensation on their behalf.4
Fourth, solidarity has some implications for the way in which resources are
distributed within the group. At the very least it implies that the group is
responsible for ensuring that no member should fall below some locally-
defined threshold of neediness. But solidarity usually means in addition that
there should be limits on inequalities within the group, though it is less clear
how stringent these limits are.5 In increasing order of stringency, we have the
following principles: no member should get more where the effect of this is
that other members get less; no member should get more unless other
members also benefit to some extent from the inequality that is thereby
created;6 no member should get more unless other members benefit to the
same extent. These principles appear to correspond to different degrees or
strengths of solidarity. Thus if a group of workers refuse to accept a pay rise
from their employer unless the same increase applies to every worker (the
third principle), this would express a high level of solidarity within that
group.7
Having now listed four defining features of group solidarity—a distinct
‘we’, mutual concern, collective responsibility, and limits on inequality—it is
worth commenting briefly on two features that may be present but are not
definitive.8 First, a solidaristic group need not be a face-to-face group. Some
obviously are—families, factory or office workers, small congregations. But
in other cases solidarity may exist among those who never meet but none-
theless feel themselves bound together as belonging to the same religion, or
profession, or social class. So we should treat direct contact as a possible
source of solidarity, rather than as one of its constitutive features. Second, it
is often assumed that solidarity requires a consensus on values among the
relevant group. In one sense this is true, since the group must internalize the
norms that constitute solidarity itself: mutual concern, collective responsi-
bility, certain limits to inequality. There would be something paradoxical
about rampant individualists attempting to form a solidary group. But apart
from that it does not seem that there must be convergence in values. In some
cases—solidarity among co-religionists—shared values will be an important

criterion of membership, but in other cases it may be a shared interest or a
shared predicament that brings people together. There is nothing paradox-
ical in contemplating solidarity among disabled people, for instance, but
there is no reason to suppose that people with disabilities share any values
other than those that directly reflect their disadvantaged position within the
wider society. Again the sharing of values is better seen as a source than as a
feature of solidarity.
2.3 WHY IS SOLIDARITY VALUABLE?
I turn next to ask why (and when) solidarity should be regarded as valuable.
Again it may be useful to start with a distinction, between solidarity as
intrinsically valuable, and solidarity as instrumentally valuable for some of
the social effects it produces. Why might we think that solidarity, as a form of
human relationship, was valuable in its own right? A possible answer is that it
corresponds to a human need. As a result of their distant origins in small
hunter-gatherer bands, it might be argued, humans need to have the sense of
closeness and mutual support that solidarity gives them. Without it they feel a
sense of despair at their inevitable exposure to the vulnerabilities of the human
condition. They need to be able to count on others (when they fall ill, for
instance) and this reassurance that they are not alone is what solidarity can
provide. However, it seems to me that talk of a universal human need for
solidarity is dubious. Partly this is because human beings array themselves on
a spectrum in terms of how far they wish to be interdependent with others,
with one extreme point being occupied by those who prefer a life of almost
total self-sufficiency. Partly also it is because people can protect themselves
from vulnerability in other ways—by taking out various forms of insurance,
for example, or by supporting institutions that provide the necessary protec-
tions. Solidarity may still be defended as the best way to ensure that various
needs are met—I return to this in the next paragraph—but this is not the same
as the claim that solidarity is itself a human need.
A different answer is that solidarity is a moral imperative. The focus here
shifts to the needs not of the agent herself but of others. These needs impose
moral obligations on us, and the way to respond to them is to enter into
relations of solidarity with the potentially vulnerable, it is claimed. This answer
too looks unconvincing. In general our obligations to the needy can be
discharged by acts of altruism, or by combining with others to set up institu-
tions that cater to needs. Given that solidarity requires an emotional identi-
fication with the rest of the group—what I described earlier as a ‘we’ feeling—it
cannot be presented as a moral imperative (since ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ and we
66 David Miller
cannot will feelings into existence). Having said that, there may be circum-
stances in which a person is unavoidably caught up in relations of solidarity.
For example, his job security and livelihood may depend on the willingness of
his fellow employees to engage in collective action. In those circumstances, the
person concerned should certainly behave as if he felt solidarity with his
workmates, and maybe should try to cultivate feelings of solidarity as far as
he is able to. However, the reason for this is not so much that solidarity within
the group is intrinsically valuable as that it has valuable effects—in this case
securing the livelihoods of many employees.
This brings us then to the instrumental value of solidarity. What benefits
may flow from membership in a solidary group? The first of these is simply
protection: other members can be expected to come to your aid when you get
into difficulties of one sort or another. As noted earlier, protection can of
course be provided in other ways, for example by taking out insurance. But
insurance is always for the misfortunes that are specified in the policy docu-
ment, not for unanticipated hardships. Moreover, the cost of taking out the
policy will typically vary from person to person, because of the way that
insurance markets work. Solidarity can avoid these pitfalls. Although, as
noted earlier, it assumes reciprocity within the group, this is not simple
tit-for-tat reciprocity.9 It can encompass a good deal of redistribution in
favour of those who are either hit by unexpected disasters, or have features
that make them bad insurance risks. This provides the basis for the claim that
welfare states rely on social solidarity for their support, if we assume that they
will not survive, in democratic societies, unless citizens continue to vote for
them. Although a good deal of what the welfare state provides could be justified
by appealing to people’s long-term interests under conditions of uncertainty,
some of its features—such as offering support for congenitally disabled people—
make sense only if we assume that it is also grounded in solidarity.
A second instrumental benefit of solidarity is that it can provide a brake on
inequality. Assume that opportunities exist for people to become very unequal,
say through market competition. Those who feel some degree of group
solidarity may be reluctant to take advantage of these opportunities unless
they can see that other members of the group will gain as well. They will want
others to share in their good fortune. As noted before, this provides one
possible rationale for John Rawls’ difference principle (‘social and economic
inequalities are to be arranged so that they are . . . reasonably expected to be to
everyone’s advantage’).10 Groups with high levels of solidarity may go further
and resist any inequality of material rewards (as in the case of the Israeli
kibbutzim). So if we assume that large social inequalities have further prob-
lematic consequences (see, for example, Wilkinson and Pickett 2010), solidar-
ity can not only serve to limit inequality within groups directly, but also lend
support to public policies aimed at curbing society-wide inequality, such as
redistributive taxation.
Further instrumental benefits of solidarity can be seen by considering its

relationship to trust. This relationship is quite difficult to disentangle. One
interpretation is that solidarity is simply a manifestation of trust. Rothstein
argues that where generalized social trust exists, the natural human tendency
to reciprocate the behaviour of others will produce solidarity as he defines it,
namely as policies aimed at promoting social equality (Chapter 11, this vol-
ume). But there are two problems with this analysis. One is that it sidesteps the
question of how social trust is created, by assuming that it will arise naturally
in response to well-functioning political institutions. I return to this later when
discussing the ‘institutional’ theory of solidarity. The other is that the link
between trust and equality seems fragile. Trust can exist between two very
unequally placed persons—between master and servant, for example—in
which case it is manifested in forms of behaviour that reproduce the inequality
over time: the master trusts the servant to polish his boots, and the servant
trusts the master to pay him his paltry wage. It is more illuminating to see trust
as something that arises naturally in groups that manifest solidarity.11 Because
people identify with and show concern for each other, they are also likely to
trust one another to reciprocate their behaviour. Indeed, it is likely that where
group solidarity exists, the trust that is created among the members will extend
to areas of life that are not covered by the solidaristic relationship itself. The
thought here is that whereas ‘academic solidarity’, for example, involves
trusting my colleagues not to plagiarize my work, to review my papers fairly,
and so forth, it also creates a spillover effect such that I will trust fellow
academics to repay money they have borrowed from me, to look after my
house if they lease it from me, and so on, even though these transactions have
nothing strictly to do with the professional tie that unites us. Now we know
that trust within a group has a wide range of beneficial consequences (for
evidence, see Uslaner 2002). For example, it makes it easier for the group to
solve collective action problems, since members can usually be relied upon to
comply voluntarily with rules that benefit the group as a whole; it reduces the
need for coercive measures to ensure that agreements and contracts are carried
out; and so forth.
But are these positive consequences of solidarity not accompanied by others
that are negative? What are the possible downsides of group solidarity? I shall
consider two charges: one is that solidarity is inimical to individual liberty
because it involves forcing people to conform to the group’s stereotype; the
other is that solidarity inside the group inevitably translates into not merely
indifference but active hostility towards outsiders.
The first charge is implicit in Jacob Levy’s critique of solidarity as the basis
of political association (Chapter 4, this volume). As he points out, correctly,
solidarity on a large scale requires a way of identifying the ‘we’ who are going
to be its subjects. If this is done by reference to a shared culture, as nationalists
would have it, this means that cultural minorities will be excluded. If instead it
68 David Miller
takes a political form—subscription to a set of constitutional principles, for

example—then political dissenters will be excluded. In either case the excluded
group will be put under pressure to fall in line with the majority’s self-
conception.
This is not the place to consider the viability of the rival picture of political
order that Levy presents. The question that his critique raises is just how much
uniformity of culture or belief is necessary for solidarity to flourish. As
I argued earlier, no general consensus on values seems to be required. First,
whether the unifying feature is taken to be a national culture or a thinner
‘purely political’ culture, in either case this is compatible with a kaleidoscope
of private cultures pursued by individuals or groups within the polity. You do
not have to enjoy apple pie in order to be an American. Second, even in the
case of those cultural elements that fall within the public realm, political
cultures—certainly democratic ones—are multistranded, so you do not have
to sign up to everything in order to be included as part of the ‘we’. Loyal
opposition is permissible, even encouraged, so long as it is clear that your
loyalty to the political community itself is not compromised.12
Turning now to the charge that solidarity within the group comes at the
expense of antagonism towards those who are outside, we need to consider the
different psychological mechanisms that might come into play. If we ask, for
example, how local solidarity relates to solidarity in the wider society, we are
presented with two contrasting pictures. One, perhaps most famously associ-
ated with a passage of Edmund Burke’s about the sources of attachment,
portrays solidarity as taking its strongest form within the family group and
then extending progressively outward through wider social circles until it
culminates in the nation. Burke writes:
We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous
citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our habitual provincial connex-
ions . . . . . . so many little images of the great country in which the heart found
something which it could fill. The love to the whole is not extinguished by this
subordinate partiality. (Burke 1967: 193)
Burke’s thought is that the feelings of affection (and solidarity, though our
concept was not available to him) that we first develop in family settings train
us to feel wider attachments—so there is no conflict but rather positive upward
reinforcement between these different modes of connection.
The second picture is the one presented by those who see factional loyalties
as destructive of a wider solidarity. The factions they have in mind often take
the form of extended families, or clans, but the picture itself might apply to any
form of solidarity based on features that are exclusively possessed by a
subgroup. An extreme version of this is the ‘amoral familialism’ that pervaded
the peasant village of Montegrano in Southern Italy in Edward Banfield’s
classic study. Here, the family circle extended only to parents and children,
and pursuit of its interests destroyed any chances of a wider solidarity.

Banfield writes:
In the Montegrano mind, any advantage that may be given to another is neces-
sarily at the expense of one’s own family. Therefore, one cannot afford the luxury
of charity, which is giving others more than their due, or even of justice, which is
giving them their due. The world being what it is, all those who stand outside of
the small circle of the family are at least potential competitors and therefore also
potential enemies. Towards those who are not of the family the reasonable
attitude is suspicion. (Banfield 1958: 116)
Consequently, associational life in Montegrano was virtually non-existent, and
political office regarded simply as an opportunity to pursue private gain.
Solidarity brings its greatest beneficial consequences, then, when it exists
and is practised on a society-wide level, and when smaller and more intense
forms of solidarity act like Burke’s ‘little platoons’ that ‘serve as the first link in
the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind’
(Burke 1967: 44), rather than Banfield’s ‘amoral families’ in which ‘no one will
further the interests of the group or community except as it is to his private
advantage to do so’ (Banfield 1958: 85). So now we must investigate more
specifically the potential sources of solidarity across a large and diverse
modern society, rather than of solidarity in all its many guises.
2. 4 TH E SO U R C ES OF S O L I D A R I T Y : F I V E T HE O R I E S
In this section, I want to review critically five different theories that have been
advanced to explain how solidarity can arise on a scale that is wider than a
face-to-face group. Each theory points to a different mechanism, though it’s
also possible to envisage combined theories since the mechanisms involved
don’t appear to interfere with each other.
1. The expanding circle theory. This is in fact the theory that seems to be
implicit in the passage from Burke I cited in section 2.3. We learn the
rudiments of solidarity by interacting directly with people on a very small
scale, typically within a family. Then having done that we enlarge the circle by
observing similarities between those inside and those outside—or inversely by
coming to see the differences as irrelevant. To increase social solidarity,
therefore, what we must do is get people to regard those who are more distant
from, or more unlike, those they are already close to, as essentially similar.
How this is to be done may be disputed. Some would see it as simply a matter
of overcoming prejudice, which makes us exclude people who we think of as
different because we don’t know them. Others would say that what is involved
is a kind of imaginative stretching—in other words, although it is natural and
70 David Miller
in a sense reasonable initially to confine solidarity to our immediate circle, we

have good reasons for trying to widen it outwards. This is the view of Richard
Rorty, who thinks it may be possible even to move towards global solidarity by
this means:
solidarity is not thought of as recognition of a core self, the human essence, in all
human beings. Rather, it is thought of as the ability to see more and more
traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unim-
portant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation—
the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the
range of ‘us’. (Rorty 1989: 192)
An observation that might lend support to the expanding circle theory is
Uslaner’s claim that a person’s disposition to trust others in general (as
opposed to specific persons) is connected to a broadly optimistic world view
that is formed early in life (Uslaner 2002: esp. ch. 4). The suggestion is that
once the relevant disposition is formed, it will be applied to people about
whom we have no direct knowledge. On the other hand, the theory cannot tell
us what to do about those whose early experience causes them to become
‘particularised trusters’ who ‘rely heavily upon their experiences (strategic
trust) or stereotypes that they believe to be founded in knowledge in deciding
whom to trust’; and who therefore ‘assume that people unlike themselves are
not part of their moral community, and thus may have values that are hostile
to their own’ (Uslaner 2002: 27). People like this do not simply lack the
imaginative ability that Rorty describes; they think they have reasons, based
on experience, not to attempt to exercise it. So the expanding circle theory can
be faulted for being too deterministic. Even if it can show why enlarged
solidarity is possible, it provides no social or political mechanism for bringing
it about. Faced with a case such as Banfield’s Montegrano, which represents a
kind of equilibrium in which no-one is willing to practise solidarity beyond
their own family circle, it has no guidance to offer.
2. The interdependence theory. This holds that the key to solidarity on a
large scale is recognition of the extent to which members of the relevant
society depend upon one another to survive and prosper. Once they recognize
that they are indeed a ‘community of fate’, they will begin to behave like one.
This theory finds its classic expression in Durkheim’s theory of organic
solidarity as presented in The Division of Labour in Society (Durkheim
1964). Durkheim’s claim was that in modern societies such as his own, what
held people together were not similarities of belief or behaviour, but precisely
their individual differences, provided these were organized in such a way that
the contribution of each individual meshed with all the others. For this,
contracts and markets were not by themselves sufficient. What was also needed
was regulation by the state to ensure that ‘abnormal’ forms of the division
of labour, such as antagonistic relations between workers and employers, or
under-employment of labour, do not occur. Durkheim’s assumption was that

where this was achieved, members of a society would indeed recognize their
deep interdependence, and accordingly feel solidarity with one another.
There are a number of questions that one might raise about this theory, but
the key one is perhaps whether interdependence of the kind that Durkheim
describes, which still essentially relies on the market, albeit with extensive legal
regulation, will necessarily produce genuine solidarity. After all market
relations, even if mutually advantageous, retain their competitive character.
In his discussion, Durkheim focuses on functional dependence between
producers, say workers within a single factory, rather than on the relation
between buyers and sellers of goods or between rival firms. The practical
problem of solidarity is usually presented as a problem of how to achieve
relationships that have the features outlined in section 2.2 across a society
with an economy that is largely market-based. Durkheim’s claim that
markets can be ‘moralized’ by regulation so that participants’ understanding
of their relationship is transformed from antagonism into solidarity looks
unconvincing.
3. The associational theory. This view finds the source of social solidarity
in people’s participation in a range of civic and political associations. Its
founding father is perhaps Tocqueville, for his laudatory comments on the
consequences of associational life in America (Tocqueville 1954), but more
recently it has been expressed in, inter alia, theories of social capital such as
Robert Putnam’s. Its starting point is the simple (and plausible) thought that
people are likely to identify with and trust one another when they associate
together on a regular basis, particularly if there is some common project or
purpose that animates the association. This process begins, therefore, with
face-to-face relationships, but the implicit idea is that there can be linkages
such that if A enjoys relations of solidarity with B, and B with C, then A and
C are linked, and so forth. It is important that the associations should
produce ‘bridging’ as well as ‘bonding’ capital, to use Putnam’s terms
(Putnam 2000: 22–3). That is, they should not merely include people who
already feel close to one another on some prior basis such as class or religion.
Associational life should bring people together from different backgrounds
who happen to share in the particular aims of the group. According to
Putnam, the experience of civic engagement can strengthen democracy, as
well as having other good effects:
Associations and less formal networks of civic engagement instil in their members
habits of cooperation and public-spiritedness, as well as the practical skills neces-
sary to partake in public life . . . the more people are involved in networks of civic
engagement (from club meetings to church picnics to informal get-togethers with
friends), the more likely they are to display concern for the generalized other—to
volunteer, give blood, contribute to charity, and so on. (Putnam 2000: 338–40)
72 David Miller
This illustrates the associational theory’s implicit claim to offer a general

theory of social solidarity.
There is evidence that can be used to support the associational theory.
A famous experiment conducted in the 1950s by Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif
involved a group of boys at a summer camp who were initially polarized into
two antagonistic sub-groups through activities that brought them into com-
petition with one another. Having artificially created a position of intense
inter-group hostility, the experimenters were able to re-establish solidarity
between the two sides by presenting them with situations in which to achieve
some important goal members from each had to work together (Sherif and
Campbell 1988: ch. 7). Contact between group members (e.g., sharing com-
munal meals) by itself was not enough to prevent in-group solidarity from
turning into outgroup hostility. Nor was a single episode of co-operation:
intergroup antagonisms did not disappear in one stroke. At first, cooperative

interaction involving both groups developed in specific situations in response to
common problems and goals, only to be followed by a renewal of sharply drawn
group lines and intergroup friction after the challenge had been met. Patterns and
procedures for intergroup cooperation were laid down at first on a small scale in
specific activities. Only during interaction in a series of situations involving
superordinate goals did intergroup friction begin to disappear, and only then
did the procedures for intergroup reciprocity, which developed in specific situ-
ations, extend spontaneously to widening areas of activity.
(Sherif and Campbell 1988: 212)
One can of course question whether the group dynamics that evolved among
young boys in an engineered environment necessarily carry over into social
life generally. But if such doubts are set aside, then the Sherifs’ research
supports the associational theory’s claim that solidarity is produced by people
collaborating together over time on some activity or project that they value.
Those involved need to communicate with one another, find solutions to
common problems, and take decisions. In doing so, they have to set aside
prejudices they might initially feel against some of their associates.
However, the associational theory needs to show that the internal solidarity
thus produced can be extended beyond those who are directly involved in the
co-operation. Here Putnam’s distinction between bonding and bridging social
capital becomes relevant. Putnam himself has a chapter in which he discusses
‘the dark side of social capital’, which refers to the possibility that the creation
of bonding capital through the association of like-minded people may have the
effect of increasing inter-group exclusion and hostility (Putnam 2000: ch. 22).
In this way association may become a motor of inequality rather than of
solidarity. Since association is voluntary, there is no way to ensure that it
generates only bridging capital. If the problem for which society-wide solidarity
is the solution is one of ethnic division, for example, the corresponding
difficulty is that we might expect associations to be formed mainly along ethnic

lines, since they will have culturally specific aims. In later work (Putnam 2007),
Putnam appears to place more emphasis on the creation of identities that can
cross such divisions than on association as such, thus moving towards the
fourth account of sources of solidarity than I want to consider.
4. The identity theory. This holds that the origins of solidarity lie in a
shared identity which not only serves to mark out the ‘we’ among whom
solidarity will be practised, but also helps to create the positive emotional
disposition towards fellow members that solidarity requires. The theory relies
on the simple psychological claim that we are disposed to sympathize with,
help, trust, and take responsibility for those that we perceive to be like
ourselves, and a sense of identity creates this feeling of likeness even with
people with whom we are not in direct contact. There is ample evidence to
bear this claim out, for example evidence from experiments in which partici-
pants are told that they are interacting with people with whom they share
some common attribute, and this information influences their willingness to
engage in various forms of helping behaviour. (I have discussed some of these
in Miller 2013.) The nature of the attribute is not so important—it can be a
style of dress, a political ideology or a skin colour. The important point is that
merely knowing that someone shares your identity in a relevant respect is
sufficient to trigger the disposition, even though you have never encountered
them in person. Thus the identity theory, if valid, is well positioned to explain
how solidarity is possible in large communities.
The problem, of course, is that the identity in question is likely to exclude as
well as include; indeed, it is plausible to assume that the solidarity-generating
features of shared identity are enhanced when the identity also creates an
opposition group against which the relevant ‘we’ can be defined. So the debate
about identity as a source of social solidarity has revolved around the question
of whether it is possible to have a society-wide identity that is strong enough to
generate solidarity but accessible enough to different sub-groups that all are
able to adopt it. More specifically, the debate has been between those who
believe that a thinner ‘citizen identity’ is sufficient to the task, and those who
think that a thicker ‘national identity’ is required—though it can also be recast
as a debate about national identity itself, and the extent to which this needs to
include cultural as opposed to more narrowly political elements. As one might
expect, the evidence suggests that those who adhere to a richer, and therefore
more exclusive, understanding of what it means to belong to nation X are also
likely to identify more strongly with X—and therefore are more willing to
display solidarity with other members of X, so long as these are regarded as
members in good standing (see Miller and Ali 2014; Theiss-Morse 2009: esp.
ch. 4). The corresponding problem, therefore, is how to ensure that those who are
regarded at best as ‘marginal’ members by those who place themselves in the core
are included in the collective ‘we’ when questions of public policy are at stake.
74 David Miller
The identity theory faces other practical challenges. One is that it always
involves distortion: members of the group rely on stereotypes to identify
other members, but few if any actually live up (or down) to them. This,
however, may be less serious than it first appears if, as I argued earlier, one
recognizes that national identities are typically best understood as cases of
‘family resemblance’—there are a number of features that typify those who
belong to this particular nation, but not all of them need to be present in any
one individual in order for us to say that she is a member (see further Miller
1995: 21–7). There might, for example, be a national religion which many
espouse, but dissenters and atheists can still be identified as co-nationals on
the basis of other features that they share with the believers. Another challenge
is that identities, although they are not rigid, are nevertheless not susceptible
to conscious control, so that if we are interested in the sources of solidarity for
practical reasons (we want solidarity to increase, or at least not to decline),
identity does not give us the handle that we are looking for. But again this
seems overstated. Governments, in particular, can and do shape the identities
of their citizens. They do so when they design education systems, plan national
days, choose which citizens to honour and which to vilify, which anniversaries
to remember and which to forget, and so forth. So they also have resources and
opportunities to deal with the problem of exclusion referred to in the last
paragraph.
5. The institutional theory. The last approach I want to consider reverses
the usual way of thinking about the causes and effects of solidarity by claiming
that solidarity is actually an effect of a society’s institutions and policies rather
than their (indirect) cause. This applies particularly to the relationship
between solidarity and the welfare state. In place of the claim that solidarity
provides the basis on which people are willing to support welfare state policies,
especially predictably redistributive ones, the institutional theory holds that
by virtue of being subject to these policies people will feel solidarity with
others who also support and benefit from them. This is not just the claim
that established welfare states ‘generate their own supportive constituencies
among the providers and beneficiaries of social programs’, important as that
no doubt is in explaining their persistence (Banting 2010: 802; see also
additional references cited there). It is rather the claim that the way institu-
tions perform and the incentives they generate may alter people’s perceptions
of their fellow citizens in ways that may either increase solidarity or reduce it.
In the version of this argument presented by Rothstein and Stolle, two
mechanisms are highlighted.13 First, people who are treated fairly and impar-
tially by bureaucrats and officials will tend to generalize from that experience
and assume that their fellow citizens at large can also be trusted to behave
fairly. Second, programmes that are universal in coverage, as opposed to those
that provide selective benefits, since they give no opportunities for cheating or
making false claims, pre-empt any suspicion that beneficiaries are not to be
trusted. Moreover, they avoid the divisive disputes that selective policies
generate about who should be eligible for benefits and how generous these
benefits should be. According to Rothstein and Stolle, ‘in their essence [non-
universal] welfare states are designed to plot groups of the population against
each other’ (Rothstein and Stolle 2003: 197). By contrast, universal systems
encourage generalized trust to flourish.
These claims are undoubtedly plausible, but one may wonder whether they
are sufficient to give us a full theory of the sources of solidarity. They seem
rather to be directed at institutions and policies that have the effect of
undermining solidarity, on the assumption that it already exists: the negative
claim that selective welfare systems (and corrupt officials) tend to destroy trust
does not entail the positive claim that universal systems (and impartial
officials) tend to create it. There is also the implicit assumption that institu-
tional coverage is sufficient to identify the group among whom trust and
solidarity can be expected to develop. That this assumption is somewhat
shaky can be seen by thinking of cases in which subjection to common
institutions, even well-functioning ones, fails to create sufficient solidarity to
hold the constituency together (I am thinking of secessions from democratic
regimes, and also the much-remarked-upon failure of the European Union
(EU) to engender any significant level of solidarity between ordinary citizens
across national borders). In other words, the institutional theory seems in-
complete, if it is treated (perhaps against the intentions of its sponsors) as a full
explanation of the origins and persistence of social solidarity.
2. 5 CON CLU SI ON
This brief (and probably non-exhaustive) review of theories about the sources
of solidarity suggests that no one theory can offer a complete explanation of
this phenomenon. The last three theories in particular—associational, identity,
and institutional—all seem to identify factors that plausibly contribute to
society-wide solidarity, but they also seem to be more powerful where the
mechanisms they identify operate in conjunction. For example, the contrast
between bridging and bonding capital becomes less sharp if potential associ-
ates all share an overarching identity which implies that any association will
have a bonding as well as a bridging aspect. And the institutional theory can be
seen as explaining how solidarity can be reinforced, by the design of appro-
priate institutions and policies, among people who are already disposed
towards mutual attachment, and therefore support the setting up of these
instruments. Nor do any of these theories try to explain the causal role that
political agents may play in bringing about the conditions for solidarity to
76 David Miller
emerge—for example the historical contribution made by trade unions and

social democratic parties to the creation of the welfare state, highlighted in
Peter Hall’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 8). For the same reason they
cannot tell us how to go about creating solidarity in circumstances where it is
entirely absent (say in the aftermath of a civil war). Their role is more modest:
they propose different ways in which solidarity can be sustained in societies
that confront, simultaneously, both increasing economic inequality and deep-
er cultural fragmentation. Whether the main counterforce to these trends
proves to be fostering civic activism, promoting inclusive national identities,
or strengthening the institutions of the welfare state, understanding the nature
and sources of solidarity remains a pressing task.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank participants in the workshop on the ‘Strains of Commitment: The
Political Sources of Solidarity’, and especially Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka, for
helpful suggestions about how to revise the original draft of this chapter for
publication.
NOTES
1. This is emphasized in Rippe (1998), who describes ‘solidarity with’ as ‘project-
related solidarity’.
2. I assume here that solidarity is primarily a property of groups of various kinds,
rather than a relationship between two individuals. This is not to say that it is
grammatically wrong to speak of one person displaying solidarity with another—
as I noted before, the term itself is quite imprecise. For a definition that focuses on
the relationship between agent and recipient, see Wildt (1999: 217–18). Wildt
notes, however, that historically the term evolved primarily within the working-
class movement, where it ‘was always a concept that both articulated a combative
group-consciousness and anticipated a corresponding form of social relations for
all people’ (214). Understanding solidarity as primarily a property of groups
allows us to bring out features (such as collective responsibility—discussed in
the following paragraphs) that would be overlooked if we narrowed our attention
to relations between individuals.
3. See Hayward (1959: 270). Hayward traces the way in which solidarity as a political
idea rose to prominence in France as it changed its meaning over the course of the
nineteenth century. See also Metz (1999).
4. An additional feature of collective responsibility is that members will experience
either pride or shame as the case may be for group successes or failures. Indeed,
Joel Feinberg has suggested that ‘there is perhaps no better index to solidarity than
the occurrence of vicarious pride and shame’ (Feinberg 1968: 677). See, however,
May (1996: 32–3) for a dissenting view.
5. For further discussion of the relationship between social solidarity and equality,
see Weale (1990).
6. John Rawls claims that his difference principle ‘does seem to correspond to a
natural meaning of fraternity: namely the idea of not wanting to have greater
advantages unless this is to the benefit of others who are less well off’ (Rawls 1971:
105). Rawls connects fraternity with social solidarity, but one might think that
fraternity is actually the stronger notion, and points directly to the third option
above, namely wanting any benefits accruing to the group to be enjoyed equally by
all members, rather than the second. For a fuller discussion of which of these
positions best expresses the fraternal element in solidarity, see Segall (2004: ch. 1).
7. Another manifestation of solidarity within a group is reluctance to be seen
performing common tasks at a higher level than other members. Thus observers
of solidaristic work groups have recorded instances where faster workers either
deliberately slow down their performance, or surreptitiously donate part of their
output to fellow-workers. See Sherif and Sherif (1966: 206).
8. There may be others as well. Andrew Mason suggests that solidarity is sometimes
interpreted to mean ‘a commitment to other members of a group to abide by the
outcome of their collective decision-making’ (Mason 1998: 23), though his own
preferred use is to make it synonymous simply with ‘mutual concern: minimally
this means that members must give each other’s interests some non-instrumental
weight in their practical reasoning’ (Mason 2000: 27). The latter characterization
appears to me to be too weak, however.
9. See here Taylor (1982: 28–30) for the distinction between ‘balanced reciprocity’
which involves the strict exchange of equivalents, and ‘generalised reciprocity’
where ‘the obligation to reciprocate is vague and diffuse’. (Taylor credits Sahlins
(1974) as the source of the distinction.) See also Segall (2004: ch. 9).
10. Rawls (1971: 60). Rawls formulates the principle in slightly different ways in
different places, but this formulation like the one cited earlier highlights the
principle’s claim to be an expression of solidarity.
11. I do not claim that this is the only way in which trust can arise. Clearly it can
develop simply from the experience gained in working with others on collective
projects of different kinds. However, it seems to me likely that solidarity is a major
source of trust towards others of whose behaviour one has no direct knowledge.
12. It is arguably at least an advantage of the liberal nationalist position over its rival
‘constitutional patriotism’ that national identities are unavoidably fuzzy, so that
there are no necessary or sufficient conditions for counting as a member—whereas
political principles that acquire constitutional status allow for less latitude. On the
flexibility of national identity, see my discussion in Miller (1995: ch. 2).
13. Rothstein and Stolle (2003). Rothstein and Stolle take social capital, rather than
solidarity, as their explanandum, but I think their claims can plausibly be reinter-
preted as claims about the sources of solidarity, subject to qualifications that I shall
enter shortly.
78 David Miller
REFERENCES
Banfield, E. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Banting, K. 2010. ‘Is There a Progressive’s Dilemma in Canada? Immigration, Multi-
culturalism and the Welfare State’. Canadian Journal of Political Science 43: 797–820.
Buckland, W. 1931. The Main Institutions of Roman Private Law. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Burke, E. 1967. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: Dent.
Durkheim, E. 1964. The Division of Labour in Society, translated by George Simpson.
New York: Free Press.
Feinberg, J. 1968. ‘Collective Responsibility’. Journal of Philosophy 65: 674–88.
Hayward, J. 1959. ‘Solidarity: The Social History of an Idea in Nineteenth Century
France’. International Review of Social History 4: 261–84.
Mason, A. 1998. ‘Solidarity’. In Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, vol. 9, edited by
Edward Craig, 23–5 London: Routledge.
Mason, A. 2000. Community, Solidarity and Belonging. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
May, L. 1996. The Socially Responsive Self. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Metz, K. 1999. ‘Solidarity and History: Institutions and Social Concepts of Solidarity in
19th Century Western Europe’. In Solidarity, edited by Kurt Bayertz, 191–207.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Miller, D. 1995. On Nationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Miller, D. 2013. ‘ “Are They My Poor?”: The Problem of Altruism in a World of
Strangers’. In Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy, 183–205. Cambridge:
Miller, D. and S. Ali. 2014. ‘Testing the National Identity Argument’. European
Political Science Review 6: 237–59.
O’Neill, O. 1996. Towards Justice and Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, R. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
Putnam, R. 2007. ‘E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first
Century’. Scandinavian Political Studies 30: 137–74.
Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rippe, K. 1998. ‘Diminishing Solidarity’. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1: 355–74.
Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rothstein, B. and D. Stolle. 2003. ‘Social Capital, Impartiality and the Welfare State: An
Institutional Approach’. In Generating Social Capital: Civil Society and Institutions
in Comparative Perspective, edited by Marc Hooghe and Dietlind Stolle, 191–209.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sahlins, M. 1974. Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock.
Segall, S. 2004. ‘Cultivating Social Solidarity’. D. Phil Thesis, University of Oxford.
Sherif, M. and D. Campbell. 1988. The Robbers Cave Experiment: Intergroup Conflict
and Cooperation. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan.
Sherif, M. and C. Sherif. 1966. Groups in Harmony and Tension. New York: Octagon.
Taylor, M. 1982. Community, Anarchy and Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Theiss-Morse, E. 2009. Who Counts as an American? The Boundaries of National
Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tocqueville, A. de. 1954. Democracy in America, edited by Phillips Bradley. New York:
Vintage.
Uslaner, E. 2002. The Moral Foundations of Trust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weale, A. 1990. ‘Equality, Social Solidarity, and the Welfare State’. Ethics 100: 473–88.
Wildt, A. 1999. ‘Solidarity: Its History and Contemporary Definition’. In Solidarity,
edited by Kurt Bayertz, 209–20. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett. 2010. The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for
Everyone. London: Penguin.
3
Citizenship and Collective Identities as

Political Sources of Solidarity in the
European Union
Rainer Bauböck
In the Introduction to this volume, Banting and Kymlicka raise the question
what types of political institutions, policies, and discourses can help to sustain
solidarity in contexts of diversity. As they explain, they are concerned with
bounded solidarity among citizens of nation-states rather than with global
solidarity or smaller communities within modern states. In this chapter I try to
address this question for a deeply diverse context that is larger than the nation-
state but has been created by and is composed of such states: the European
Union (EU). Instead of focusing on a single level of political community,
I examine the EU as a multilevel polity consisting of several states, a supras-
tate, and many substate polities.
I use the term ‘polity’ for an institutional ensemble linking a territory, a
citizenry, and government institutions. The term ‘polity’ is the genus of which
the state is merely one species. The point is to include in our discussion also
types of polities other than independent states, such as autonomous regions
and municipalities within states or the supranational EU. ‘Polity’ refers to a
formal institutional structure, whereas ‘political community’ refers to an
identity shared by the citizens of a polity. A political community becomes a
polity when a population supporting a claim for self-government succeeds in
establishing territorial jurisdiction, a citizenship status and government insti-
tutions; a polity becomes a political community when it is successful in
creating a corresponding collective identity shared by its citizens.
Banting and Kymlicka distinguish between three political sources of soli-
darity: conceptions of political community, political agents, and political
institutions and public policies. I will not discuss agents, but will consider
how institutions influence conceptions of community and how these in turn
can be sustained or subverted by policies. The thematic focus of this chapter is
Citizenship, Identities, and Solidarity in the EU 81
on citizenship regimes. I discuss first their general institutional properties that

are similar across states but fundamentally different across levels of the
European polity. My main argument is that the general properties of local,
national, and regional European citizenship support corresponding images of
political community and that these images in turn support certain attitudes
towards diversity and solidarity. Citizenship regimes are, however, only po-
tential sources of solidarity. Whether these sources are activated or wasted
depends also, even if not exclusively, on public policies. I consider two aspects
of citizenship policies that can have such effects: legislation that determines
who is included as an equal citizen with what kind of rights, and political
discourses and narratives of political community that strengthen or under-
mine solidarity among European citizens.
3 . 1 E U R O P E’ S CH A L L EN G E : S O L I D A R I T Y
I N D I V E R SI T Y
What political sources of solidarity are available where national identity is

unavailable? In the EU this is no longer just a theoretical question raised by
cosmopolitan philosophers, but a very practical one, the urgency of which has
been dramatically raised by the strains that the financial and refugee crises
have put on solidarity between member states since 2008.
Solidarity between members of a political community always needs to rely
in one way or another on appeals to collective identities. In this chapter I argue
that national identity is only one possible manifestation of a political collective
identity. This is an objection against liberal nationalists’ claims that a shared
national identity is a necessary source for political solidarity among citizens. I do
not deny that in sovereign states national identity can be a very strong source of
solidarity and that liberal constructions of national identity can help to integrate
democracies with high degrees of diversity and distinct ethnic, linguistic, or
religious minorities. The capacity of liberal nationalism to integrate polities
consisting of a plurality of distinct political communities each of which claims
rights to national self-government is, however, limited. The difficulty in sus-
taining political and social solidarity between Belgium’s linguistic communities,
the recent moves towards independence in Scotland and Catalonia and similar
past attempts in Quebec illustrate failures of nested nation-building (Miller
2000: 110–41). Often, attempts to strengthen a state-wide national identity
have contributed to further disintegration by antagonizing national minorities.
These limits of liberal nationalism as a source of solidarity are blatantly obvious
in the case of the EU, where nation-building at the level of the supranational
polity is categorically ruled out. If there are good reasons for promoting
82 Rainer Bauböck
solidarity across EU member states, then we should better look for alternative
conceptions of political community. And if this search is successful, then it
might also have some bearing on how to promote solidarity among citizens in
deeply diverse states with contested national identities.
My approach looks, however, for similar kinds of sources that liberal
nationalists believe can be best provided by civic or thin nationhood: a sense
of attachment to a political territory, a sense of belonging to a transgenera-
tional community, and a sense of strong interdependence between various
parts of a polity. In this respect it differs from constitutional patriotism
(Mueller 2008; Habermas 2011) that puts too much emphasis on officially
proclaimed constitutional values and democratic procedures but lacks a
plausible account of the motivational forces that could underpin solidarity
among citizens.
I propose a conceptual distinction between territorial, generational, and
federal relations of solidarity as the outcome of a successful process of building
a political community, on the one hand, and sources of solidarity that can be
politically mobilized, on the other hand. I focus in this chapter on two such
sources: public narratives about collective identities and citizenship policies
that determine who is a member and has the right to political participation
and representation. My suggestion is that the three relations of solidarity can
be developed also in non-national or pluri-national polities, such as the EU. In
order to activate them, rules for determining citizens and their rights must
mirror a coherent multilevel conception of political community and must be
complemented with public narratives about corresponding collective identities
that can be widely shared among citizens. I also claim that territorially,
generationally, and federally structured relations of solidarity accommodate
diversity in different but mutually complementary ways. Public policies that
want to promote solidarity in contexts of deep diversity should therefore aim
for a coherent multilevel citizenship regime and promote a sense of belonging
to a multilevel European political community.
In line with the general framework of this volume, I do not address in this
chapter normative objections against the promotion of solidarity among
citizens from a perspective of global justice. I assume instead that citizens
have special associative duties towards each other that can be morally justified
independently of, or in addition to, universal duties they have towards other
human beings.
Let us start by looking at the current legal provisions and official discourses
invoking solidarity in the EU. Since 2000, in addition to a flag and an anthem
(significantly without words), the EU has adopted a motto: ‘unity in diversity’.
The concept of diversity has been interpreted as referring both to cultural
diversity within the member states and to the European-level diversity of
national identities of these member states. Respect for the national identities
of the member states has been a fundamental principle of the EU Treaties
since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. The current version of the Treaty on
European Union includes among the objectives of the Union that it ‘shall
respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity’ (TEU Art. 3(3)), and ‘shall
respect the equality of Member States before the Treaties as well as their
national identities, inherent in their fundamental structures, political and
constitutional, inclusive of regional and local self-government’ (TEU Art. 4(2)).
Diversity in the EU has thus a plurinational as well as a multicultural dimension.
Most interestingly, the rephrasing by the 2007 Lisbon Treaty has added a
multilevel dimension to respect of national identities, so that it refers now also
to sub-state territorial self-government at regional and local levels.
The ‘unity’ part of the motto is much more contested than the fact of deep
diversity in the European polity. In a political union of states, unity arguably
refers not merely to a fact (i.e., the current political institutions and supra-
national law agreed upon by the member states), but also to an aspiration.
European unity as a telos can be interpreted in two main ways: a territorial and
an institutional one. The imperative of European unification was a powerful
one after the fall of the Iron Curtain and was achieved to a great extent
through EU enlargement in 2004, 2007, and 2013. Although the goal of further
enlargement has not been abandoned, enthusiasm has clearly cooled. The
opening of internal borders and labour markets for free access by the new
EU citizens, in particular, has led to a significant political backlash in the UK
and several other states. The second interpretation of unity is expressed in the
objective of ‘an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe’ that is invoked
already in the first sentence of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. The combined fiscal,
banking, and employment crises since 2008 have demonstrated the need
for further economic and political integration as a precondition for coping
with crises of such dimensions as well as the limits of solidarity among
member states when it comes to further transfers of sovereignty and economic
burden-sharing.
There are two contrasting responses to this dilemma. One is the proposal to
reduce integration in the EU to a level where it can continue to function
without having to overstrain weak resources of solidarity between member
states. There are many varieties of this ‘reverse gear’ vision of the future of the
EU. Some are keen on preserving or even strengthening economic integration
while dismantling what they criticize as excessive political integration and a
futile attempt to democratize supranational institutions.1 Others think that
economic integration has gone too far and want to do away with the common
currency.2 Finally, there are right-wing populist and nationalist positions that
do not see any value in either political or economic European integration and
want to return to a Europe of fully sovereign nation-states that control their
own currencies and borders. This latter stance has also resulted in campaigns
for exiting from the Union.3 The fact that disintegration advocates of these
quite different kinds have been gaining political ground is a significant
84 Rainer Bauböck
indicator for the depth of crisis. In the past, demands had more often focused
on stopping further integration and enlargement rather than on dismantling
integration or leaving the EU.
The alternative response to the dilemma is to retain or enhance current
levels of integration while mobilizing existing or new sources of solidarity
among European citizens that could sustain integration. Within this camp, we
notice again a shift in the argument. In the past, political integration was often
explained as functionally necessary for, or as a spill-over effect of economic
integration, which was defended in utilitarian terms as beneficial for most
citizens of Europe. Today, there is an acute awareness among the advocates of
further enlargement and integration that the EU’s crisis is not merely an
economic but also a political one. Even if the EU may have relatively success-
fully muddled through the former, the democratic legitimacy of the EU’s crisis
interventions has been challenged both in crisis-ridden states on the verge of
bankruptcy, where citizens suffer from harsh bail-out conditions, and in
fiscally and economically stable states, where citizens oppose lending money
to profligate ones.4
Although I think there are justice-based arguments against breaking up
democratically legitimate polities that apply to the EU as much as to demo-
cratic states, I will not defend the case against exit and disintegration here.
I will instead explore how those who want to make this case could answer to
the challenge that the available sources of solidarity are insufficient for pre-
serving or enhancing the capacity for EU enlargement and integration.
3.2 THE GEOGRAPH IC DIFFERENTIATION

OF CITIZENSHIP IN EUROPE
Concepts such as solidarity are rather unwieldy for analysing normative

questions that arise in specific empirical contexts. Solidarity can mean many
different things depending on which context we have in mind. Banting and
Kymlicka suggest a distinction between civic, democratic, and redistributive
solidarity that roughly corresponds to T. H. Marshall’s (1949/1965) trichot-
omy of civil, political, and social citizenship. I agree that this is a useful way of
breaking down the concept of solidarity since it allows raising more specific
research questions, such as under which conditions attitudes of civic respect
for cultural difference can be transformed into accepting others as political
equals and into support for policies that aim at equalizing socio-economic
opportunities.
In addition to asking what solidarity implies in terms of attitudes towards
others we also need to consider the relational aspect of solidarity: who are the
others that are perceived as deserving our solidarity because they share with us
membership in a political community and what are the bases for assuming
shared membership? Since the question raised in this book is about the
conditions for solidarity among citizens, it seems quite evident that the
boundaries and content of citizenship are relevant. Citizenship regimes are
potential sources of solidarity because they signal who has a claim to be treated
as an equal member of the polity and whose interests should be taken into
account when deliberating about the common good of the polity. Citizenship
regimes do so by distinguishing members from non-members and by attrib-
uting specific rights and duties to the former.
If citizenship is over-inclusive in a way that undermines a shared sense of
membership in the political community, or if it excludes those who are seen to
belong, then solidarity will become disconnected from citizenship. Similarly, if
citizenship rights at European, state, or provincial levels are not harmonized in
a way that facilitates free movement across internal borders while also ad-
dressing its impact on the destination polities, then solidarity will be eroded
with increasing levels of internal migration. Finally, if citizenship is perceived
to be purely instrumentally valuable as a set of entitlements vis-à-vis states
(such as those of free movement that come with a European passport) without
corresponding responsibilities, then it is unlikely to be effective as a source
of solidarity.5
In Marshall’s theory of the evolution from civil to political and social
citizenship, these questions were set aside because he presupposed a closed
nation-state with a stable border and internally undifferentiated political
territory. These background assumptions can no longer be maintained when
conceptualizing solidarity in contemporary Europe with its relatively open
and historically shifting borders and manifold territorial subdivisions.
Marshall’s theory contains another interesting proposition that I want to
modify when analysing the structure of citizenship in the EU. Marshall argued
that the three dimensions of civil, political, and social citizenship were origin-
ally merged with each other into a bundle of privileges enjoyed by the citizens
of free towns. He describes the evolution of citizenship in England since the
eighteenth century as a dual dynamic of ‘geographic fusion’ at the level of the
nation-state and ‘functional separation’ through the institutional differenti-
ation of independent courts, parliaments, and public administrations deliver-
ing social services (Marshall 1949/1965: 79).
I propose that the background structure of the polity that Marshall took for
granted can be analytically described as consisting of three dimensions: a
spatial, a temporal, and a structural one. The spatial dimension refers to the
territory and the permeability and stability of its borders; the temporal di-
mension refers to the continuity of the political community over time; and the
structural dimension to internal divisions of the polity into component parts.
The ideal-typical nation-state is imagined as having a stable territory with
86 Rainer Bauböck
relatively closed borders, a self-reproducing citizenry across generations, and

purely administrative subdivisions that are not considered as polities in their
own right. In this context, solidarity among citizens is an undifferentiated
relation within a unitary political community ruled by the same government.
Once we consider the structure of the European polity, it becomes obvious
that this image is entirely inappropriate. The EU is a compound polity with
shifting and permeable borders and high rates of change and discrepancies in
the composition of resident populations and the citizenry. Yet there is a
distinct multilevel structure that shapes the evolution of citizenship in Europe.
Instead of geographic fusion, citizenship is undergoing a new ‘geographic
differentiation’. This is not a return to the pre-national world of horizontal
differentiation between local citizenship regimes, but a vertical differential
between geographic levels, where citizenship is articulated differently at local,
regional, state, and supranational levels.
When we examine more closely the citizenship regimes that have emerged
at each level, we find that they emphasize in particular ways territorial
residence, continuity of the citizenry across time, and the structural compos-
ition of the EU polity as a union of states. The geographic differentiation of
citizenship across levels corresponds thus to a differentiation of conceptions of
political community and their internal relations of solidarity among citizens.
The first relation of solidarity is a spatial one between co-residents in a
territorial jurisdiction; the second relation is a temporal one between age
and generational cohorts of citizens;6 and the third relation is a structural
one between component parts of the polity. I will describe next how these are
institutionally expressed and reinforced through citizenship regimes. The
point of this analysis is that each of these relations is specifically expressed
at a particular level of the European polity: co-residence at the local level,
transgenerational relations at the state level, and a structural relation that can
best be described as federal at the supranational level.
What Marshall’s theory of ‘fusion’ suggests is that a conception of solidarity
among citizens remains deficient if it puts all emphasis on one of these
dimensions. Since fusion of the three relations can no longer be achieved at
any single geographic level of the EU, we have to think of these as comple-
menting each other in a comprehensive multilevel political community.
These three relations of solidarity cannot be taken for granted but need to
be built and structured through public institutions and policies, and specific-
ally through citizenship laws and policies (in a wider sense that goes beyond
the attribution of nationality as a legal status and includes political participa-
tion and representation). In section 3.3 I will summarize briefly the structural
features of current citizenship regimes at state, local, and regional levels. The
subsequent sections will then discuss their potential to accommodate diversity
and generate solidarity.
3.3 NATIONAL, LOCAL, AND REGIONAL

CITIZENSHIP REGIMES
States have nationality laws that contain formal rules for the acquisition and
loss of citizenship status. Empirically, these laws differ strongly across demo-
cratic states and under international law states enjoy comprehensive powers to
determine themselves who their citizens are. A broad comparative literature
on nationality laws has emerged that attempts to understand why states
choose different principles or how these affect migrants’ opportunities
(Howard 2009; Janoski 2010; Hansen and Weil 2001; Vink and Bauböck
2013). Yet when comparing the citizenship regimes of states with those at
local or supranational levels, the most striking feature of the former is their
structural similarity. All states determine their citizens automatically based on
their circumstances of birth through descent from citizen parents (ius sangui-
nis) or birth in the territory (ius soli).
These two principles are often contrasted and associated with ethnic and
civic conceptions of citizenship respectively. This contrast is exaggerated for
two reasons. First, nearly all states combine both principles. The difference is
mainly in how much weight each is given. States where ius soli dominates
domestically, such as nearly all American states, have ius sanguinis provisions
for the second generation born abroad. And most states where ius sanguinis
dominates, such as those of continental Europe, also have domestically ius
soli provisions for foundlings or children otherwise born stateless. Second, the
differences between ius soli and ius sanguinis are in many ways less interesting
than their commonalities. Both confer citizenship at birth or based on
circumstances of birth and turn individuals into citizens for an unlimited
time that is normally expected to last a whole life. Birthright and lifetime
citizenship are remarkable features in the context of liberal democracy because
they do not conform to expectations that membership in a liberal polity
should be based on individual consent or on inclusion of all who reside in a
territorial jurisdiction.7
Residence and consent do, however, play a significant role as secondary
principles for correcting an initial birthright allocation of citizenship. Acquir-
ing a new citizenship at a later point in life through naturalization in most
cases requires a period of residence in the country. Conversely, loss of citi-
zenship through withdrawal or renunciation is in most cases conditional upon
residence abroad and access to another citizenship. Yet, unlike acquisition at
birth, naturalization as well as renunciation involve expressions of individual
consent—and often also approval by administrative authorities. Since the vast
majority of citizens are never asked to confirm their membership acquired at
birth in this way, voluntary naturalization and renunciation do not support an
image of the political community as a voluntary association based on individual
88 Rainer Bauböck
consent to a social contract.8 On the contrary, they secure the primacy of

birthright membership as a lifelong status that would be undermined if all
residents were automatically turned into citizens and if all emigrants were
automatically deprived of their status.
The two features of automatic acquisition based on circumstances of birth
and individual consent in changing citizenship status characterize what I will
call a birthright regime. By contrast, contemporary local citizenship is based
on residence rather than on birthright and consent. With very few exceptions,9
municipalities no longer have their own citizenship laws. Yet if we consider
municipalities as polities with their own territorial jurisdiction and institutions
of government, then we can infer who the citizens of the local polity are by
considering which groups enjoy core privileges that are normally attached to
citizenship status.
One of these core privileges is the right to vote. In contemporary democ-
racies all national citizens who take up residence in a municipality automat-
ically acquire the franchise in local elections and become thus members of the
local demos. In seven South American states and twelve EU member states, as
well as in Norway, Iceland, and several Swiss Cantons, the local franchise is,
however, granted to all residents independently of their nationality.10
The other feature distinguishing the local from the national franchise is that
the former is in nearly all cases automatically lost when taking up residence
outside the polity,11 whereas the vast majority of democratic states today grant
voting rights in national elections to their expatriate citizens (IDEA and IFE
2007; Collyer 2013).
The second core privilege of citizens is the right to unconditional territorial
admission, stay, and return. Since contemporary democracies subscribe to a
universal human right of free movement within state territories, municipal
polities de facto have to treat all their residents as citizens in this respect. If we
consider further that the powers and responsibilities of municipal govern-
ments are broadly limited to the provision of public goods to local residents,
then it is reasonable to conclude that local citizenship regimes are based on ius
domicilii, that is automatic acquisition and loss derived from residence.
Birthright citizenship at state level has a sticky quality due to its strong
external dimension. It is not lost through emigration and can be passed on to
at least the second generation born abroad. This is also a main reason why
plural nationality is becoming more frequent. A growing number of children of
migrant origin acquire several citizenships at birth and more and more states
tolerate also dual nationality in case of naturalization or voluntary acquisition of
a foreign nationality. By contrast, local citizenship is fluid and generally singular
at any point in time. Taking up residence in another municipality leads to
automatic acquisition of a new citizenship and automatic loss of a previous one.
If local citizenship is based on ius domicilii, then restricting the franchise to
national citizen residents means excluding some de facto local citizens from
political participation and representation rights. Even if immigrants can

acquire local voting rights indirectly through applying for national citizenship,
in the absence of a local franchise for non-national citizens they cannot access
local political citizenship directly through rules based on those democratic
inclusion criteria that are appropriate for determining the local demos.
The EU, finally, represents a third regime in which citizenship status is
derivative, in the sense that it is constitutionally dependent on a primary
citizenship in another type of polity. According to Art. 20 (1) of the Lisbon
Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, ‘Every person holding the nationality of
a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union. Citizenship of the Union shall
be additional to and not replace national citizenship.’ Derivative citizenship is
characteristic for all federally nested polities. The Fourteenth Amendment to
the US Constitution states the same principle: ‘All persons born or natural-
ized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens
of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.’ What the EU and
US regimes have in common is the strict linkage between citizenship statuses
at different levels of the polity. Where they differ is the direction of deriv-
ation; citizenship in the EU is derived ‘upward’ from member state nation-
ality, whereas citizenship in the fifty states of the US is derived ‘downward’
from federal citizenship. Upward or downward derivation indicate where
constitutional power in a federation is located. With the partial exception of
Switzerland,12 substate regional citizenship is today mostly derived downward.
The EU is, however, constituted as a union of states that are the masters of the
EU Treaties and remain thus the primary locus of constitutional power.
Constructing regional citizenship as derivative and local citizenship as
autonomously based on residence is not a matter of logical necessity. As we
have seen earlier, many democratic states constrain residential membership in
the local demos by making national citizenship a condition for the local
franchise. Conversely, a few states grant also a regional franchise to non-
national residents. In the EU these are Denmark, Hungary, Slovakia, and
Sweden, that is states without a federal constitution and with weak compe-
tencies for regional governments (Arrighi et al. 2013). These exceptions con-
firm the rule that federally nested citizenships are generally linked across levels
through derivation. It is the very nature of a federation that its people consists
of dual citizens of the component polities and of the encompassing federation.
This constitutional logic does not apply to municipalities. In the USA they
are regarded as creatures of the fifty states, in other democracies they are seen
as administrative territorial subdivisions of the national territory. Only few
federal constitutions (such as the Austrian and Swiss ones) define a local
citizenship in their constitutions. Yet none regards municipalities as constitu-
tive polities forming the larger federation.
Although regional citizenships are generally derivative in substate as well as
in suprastate polities, residence plays an important secondary role in defining
90 Rainer Bauböck
them. US citizens are also citizens ‘of the State wherein they reside’. A citizen
of New York who settles in California loses her citizenship in the former and
acquires it automatically in the latter state. This is not the case in the EU. Here,
residence in another member state does not lead to a change of citizenship
status but to an activation of additional citizenship rights. Freedom of move-
ment is the core of EU citizenship and EU law protects specifically those
citizens that are involved in ‘cross-border situations’ through taking up resi-
dence in other member states or having other legally relevant links and
interests connecting them to these. The Court of Justice of the European
Union (CJEU) has expanded the meaning and significance of EU citizenship
by considering it as a ‘fundamental status of the nationals of all Member
States’13 and by widening the scope of relevant cross-border situations.14
I will discuss in the following sections whether and how local, state, and
federal citizenship regimes provide sources for territorial, transgenerational,
and federal solidarity and how these can be combined. Yet it is obvious that
the demarcation of boundaries between members and non-members through
citizenship regimes is not sufficient for activating solidarity. As indicated in
Table 3.1, the institutional resources of the three citizenship regimes must be
translated into corresponding images of the political community—as a society
of co-residents, as a people with a transgenerational collective identity, or as a
federation of self-governing polities that share a common destiny. In order to
become sources of solidarity, these images need to be activated through public
narratives that shape the citizens’ collective identities and their perceived
responsibilities towards other members of the polity. Section 3.6 provides
some illustration for the possibilities and challenges of developing such
narratives in the EU.
Solidarity among citizens always builds on perceptions of what these have in
common. What it is that citizens are seen to have in common can range from
similarity of phenotype, religious belonging or national character at one
extreme end of the spectrum to shared interests based on the fact that they
live under the same government at the other end. Commonality of ascriptive
identities may be a stronger source of solidarity, but is hard to reconcile with
inclusive conceptions of political community in diverse societies. The mere
fact of coercive subjection to a government may support a perception of
shared interest in government responsiveness and accountability but is not a
Table 3.1 Relations and sources of solidarity

sources of solidarity
relations of solidarity citizenship regime collective identity
temporal: generational state level: birthright transgenerational people

spatial: territorial local level: ius domicilii society of co-residents
structural: federal regional level: derivative interdependent community of destiny
sufficiently strong source for horizontal solidarity among citizens. When

painting in more detail the three images of political community as a transge-
nerational people, as a society of co-residents, and as a federated community
of destiny, we ought to think of these as filling the space between the two
extremes so that each can both accommodate diversity and draw on suffi-
ciently strong sources of solidarity among citizens.
The idea of multilevel fusion that I have suggested in section 3.2 implies that
having examined the three citizenship regimes separately, we should look at
them now as components of a larger European citizenship constellation and
consider what each contributes to territorial, transgenerational, and federal
relations of solidarity in the EU polity.
3.4 TRANSGENERATIONAL SOLIDARITY
Let me start again with the image of a transgenerational political community

that is supported by birthright citizenship. What is the purpose of birthright
citizenship and how could it be justified? All modern states construct transge-
nerational political communities of their citizenry and birthright membership
is the crucial mechanism that supports their continuity. It serves thus as a
source of solidarity across age groups and generations. It signals, first, that
citizens should imagine the political community as being linked to past and
future generations, as famously expressed in Burke’s view of the political
community as ‘a great partnership not only between the living, but the living,
the dead and those who are to be born’ (Burke 1987: 118). This view has been a
hallmark of nationalism. How can it be reconciled with liberalism?
Even if we assume stable borders and zero migration, the continuity of
political communities is always exposed to what Hannah Arendt called ‘the
fact of natality, through which the human world is constantly invaded by
strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by
those who are already there and are going to leave in a short while’ (Arendt
1977: 61). Birthright membership is a way of controlling the impact of these
ongoing invasions by signalling to present members that they ought to take
into account the interests of future generations, even if they themselves may
not be biologically connected to these, and by signalling to incoming gener-
ations that their responsibilities towards the polity are not derived from their
own individual choices but attributed to them at birth just like other unchosen
identity features.
Second, as explained in section 3.3, birthright is associated with life-long
membership as a norm. This means that individuals move through all stages of
life as citizens. Solidarity between generations is thus not only a relation
92 Rainer Bauböck
between distinct birth cohorts, but also firmly grounded in every citizens’ past
experience of childhood and youth and future expectation of ageing.
Birthright citizenship is a powerful resource for redistributive solidarity in
democratic welfare states that put considerable burdens on citizens by redis-
tributing resources between age groups or by saving resources for future
generations. The temporal continuity of citizenship that characterizes birth-
right regimes is also important for what Banting and Kymlicka call democratic
solidarity, which in their account includes support for equal participation
rights of citizens, for the rule of law and democratic processes, and a willing-
ness to back up one’s political views with reasons addressed to other citizens.
Governments of independent states wield comprehensive political powers
over their subjects and take decisions that have long-term effects on current
and future citizens. While this may also be true for some powerful non-state
actors, such as big corporations, only democratic governments can be held
accountable by, and be made responsive to, citizens. If most citizens regard
themselves as mere temporary residents living among other temporary resi-
dents, they have little reason to develop attitudes of democratic solidarity
towards their co-residents and even fewer reasons to support long-term
decisions the beneficiaries of which will be future generations of citizens to
whom they do not feel connected (Bauböck 2011). Instead of hoping to win a
political argument or election next time round, exit would become the pre-
ferred response by defeated minorities who regard majority decisions as
contrary to their fundamental interests or convictions.15
The focus of normative critique should therefore not be on birthright as
such, but on those rules that generate unjustifiable exclusion or over-inclusion.
A birthright regime that is not properly corrected by fair access to naturaliza-
tion unjustly excludes first generation immigrants. And a ius sanguinis-based
regime that automatically includes the children of citizens independently of
whether their parents have ever lived in the country is over-inclusive because it
turns extraterritorial populations into citizens based on a criterion that does
not indicate a genuine link to the polity.
How are exclusionary and over-inclusive citizenship regimes likely to affect
the three types of solidarity proposed by Banting and Kymlicka in the
European context? First, most European states have experienced significant
immigration that has resulted in a greater ethnic and religious diversity of
their resident populations. Second, unlike Australia, New Zealand, Japan, or
Canada, European states cannot control much of the ongoing immigration
into their territories because it is either based on free movement in the EU or
because it consists of family reunification, asylum seekers and other forced
migrants who cannot be turned back without jeopardizing human rights.
Third, again unlike some overseas countries of immigration, European states
are legally obliged to provide not only EU citizens but also long-term resident
third country nationals with equal access to welfare.16 These conditions have
been experienced by many native citizens as a loss of national control over the
change of society through immigration and this perception explains signifi-
cant electoral successes of anti-immigrant populist parties. In this context,
constraining immigrants’ access to citizenship status can no longer reduce the
actual scope of redistribution. Instead, it deprives immigrants of electoral
power in democratic arenas and fuels resentment through signalling that
they do not belong to the birthright community of the nation.
Over-inclusive regimes that offer access to citizenship to persons of distant
emigrant ancestry or to co-ethnic kin minorities in neighbouring states are
equally unlikely to strengthen solidarity based on national community. In the
European context, the instrumental value of a European passport for purposes
of free movement provides the main incentive for individuals to take up
ethnically motivated citizenship offers to extraterritorial populations. Ethno-
nationalist citizenship policies can serve three main goals: resettlement of
co-ethnic populations in the national homeland, irredentist mobilizations
that aim to undermine the territorial integrity or stability of neighbouring
states, or symbolic politics of nationalism that rally native populations behind
incumbent political actors. After the end of the Cold War and the phasing out
of Germany’s Aussiedlerpolitik since reunification, only the latter goal is still
alive among member states of the EU. Since over-inclusive citizenship policies
seem to be almost entirely driven by instrumental interests from both the
demand and supply side, they are more likely to undermine solidaristic
relations among citizens than to strengthen them through creating a thicker
national community.
If ethno-nationalist conceptions of citizenship are unlikely to strengthen
solidarity in the European context, can we also show that liberal citizenship
policies do not undermine solidarity through exposing the political commu-
nity to too much diversity? Although this does not yet prove any causal
relation, it may count as preliminary evidence that in Europe the most
developed welfare state has also adopted the most liberal citizenship policy
that carefully avoids both unjust exclusion and over-inclusiveness. Sweden has
consistently scored highest on the MIPEX index of immigrant integration
policies (MIPEX 2015). It grants a naturalization entitlement to third country
nationals after five years without language, civics, or income tests. Sweden
does not have a general ius soli provision but minor children who have spent
five years in Sweden get citizenship by a simple declaration of their parents,
which includes not only most of those born in Sweden but also the so-called
generation 1.5 who immigrated before the age of majority. Those born to
Swedish parents abroad are Swedish citizens iure sanguinis, but will lose their
status at age twenty-two if they never take up residence in Sweden or claim
relevant links to Sweden. Since 2001 Sweden fully recognizes dual citizenship
acquired at birth or through naturalization by immigrants as well as emi-
grants. Since 1975 third country national residents can vote in local and
94 Rainer Bauböck
regional elections after three years. Swedes who reside abroad must renew
their franchise in national elections every ten years and those born abroad do
not acquire it at majority if they have never resided in Sweden.
A birthright regime of this kind maintains a sense of continuity that
supports social and political solidarity among citizens and is at the same
time open for diversity in the right way. Immigrants’ entitlements to natur-
alization imply that ius sanguinis no longer reproduces an ethnically homo-
genous citizenry but produces new cohorts of citizens of national descent
but non-national ethnic origin. The recognition of dual citizenship entails,
moreover, that diversity has a transnational dimension through acceptance of
migrants’ ongoing links to their states of origin. Even external voting rights and
ius sanguinis for children born abroad are not necessarily mechanisms for
reproducing a non-territorial ethnic nation, since involving external citizens
who have genuine links to the polity will also expose the political community
to the emigrants’ experiences of other cultures and political ideas.
Liberal nationalists will be happy to endorse my claim that liberal birthright
regimes serve democratic purposes and do not support ethnic conceptions of
nationhood. Yet birthright citizenship can equally serve to strengthen trans-
generational relations of solidarity in plurinational states, whose citizens do
not share a strong national identity and it did serve the same purpose in earlier
forms of political community, such as the free European city republics before
the age of nationalism. While nationhood always requires a birthright view of
political community, the latter does not always imply a national conception of
the polity.
This brings us to the question whether the derivative nature of EU citizen-
ship makes it possible to imagine also the EU as a transgenerational polity. In
federal democracies, birthright citizenship at the federal level provides a
source for constructing a federal people with a transgenerational identity.
Yet if birthright operates at the state level, it cannot simultaneously operate
at regional levels above or below the state. The citizens of the region are not
those whose circumstances of birth link them to the region. In both the sub-
and supranational case, they are generally the citizens of the state(s) who
currently reside in the region.17 In the EU, the image of birthright community
is further undermined through shifting external borders that have automatic-
ally included the citizens of new accession states and that could in the future
also automatically exclude the citizens of states that exit from the EU or that
have to newly apply for membership after secession from a present member
state. These modes of automatic collective inclusion and exclusion undermine
the continuity of the birthright community that is upheld through individual
naturalization and renunciation. Birthright regimes exist only at the member
state level and this clearly reduces the potential for intertemporal solidarity
among EU citizens. If support for redistribution that finances social citizen-
ship in democratic welfare states—from public education and healthcare
systems to poverty relief and retirement pensions—depends on perceived

temporal continuity of the citizenry, then there is little hope to develop a
social EU citizenship that resembles provisions in the more generous welfare
states inside the EU.
This is, however, the wrong comparison. Instead of asking whether EU
citizenship can autonomously develop the same types and resources of soli-
darity as its member states, we should consider how the existing birthright-
based resources of its member states could be activated and pooled at the EU
level if and when this is necessary for securing the continuity and integration
of the EU polity. This is the question about federal relations of solidarity that
I raise in section 3.6.
3.5 TERR I T O RI A L S O L I D A R I T Y
My claim that political relations of solidarity need not be rooted in shared

nationhood becomes even stronger once we consider polities that are not
states. The concept of ‘citizenship’ refers etymologically and historically to
the status of a free person in a free city. The rise of the modern nation-state has
made local citizenship nearly invisible, but not entirely insignificant. The
dismantling of city walls and privileges of local citizenship entailed also the
abolition of earlier birthright rules for determining who is a local citizen and
their replacement with automatic ius domicilii, as discussed in section 3.3.
Local ius domicilii can again be supported by democratic reasons. Local
governments are responsible for providing public services to local residents
and ought to be accountable to these. Discrimination on grounds of nation-
ality is arbitrary from the perspective of local self-government. But why do
arguments in favour of birthright citizenship not also apply to the local level?
The answer is simply that local residential citizenship is not an independent
structure, but is nested within a national citizenship regime, so that every local
citizen is also a member of a transgenerational political community—either as
an internal citizen of the encompassing state or as an external citizen of a
foreign country.
The absence of birthright does not mean that local polities cannot generate
a sense of membership and stability of the polity over time. It just means
that belonging and continuity will be attached to a distinct place more than to
a distinct people. The territory of the city and its political institutions are
more stable than the migrant populations that take up temporary residence
there. This is often enough to create a general willingness to obey the laws, a
sense of emotional attachment and of stakeholdership in local affairs. More
than this is not needed to justify extending full political rights to migrants in
local elections.
96 Rainer Bauböck
Local polities are structurally more open for diversity than states because
they cannot control and select immigrants. Immigrant cities have to adapt to
the diversity of their populations by providing public services for multiethnic,
multilingual, and multireligious populations instead of expecting immigrants
to demonstrate first their willingness to ‘integrate’ into a given local culture.
Provided that diverse cities are not internally segregated, living there can also
be a school for civic solidarity, which Banting and Kymlicka describe as
‘mutual tolerance; an absence of prejudice; a commitment to living together
in peace, free from inter-communal violence; acceptance of people of diverse
ethnicities, languages and religions as legitimate members of the community,
as belonging, as part of “us”; and an openness to newcomers from diverse parts
of the world’ (Chapter 1, this volume).
What will be harder to find in migrant-majority municipalities is redis-
tributive solidarity at the level of the local political community instead of a
politics of mobilization and bargaining for sectoral interests and reliance on
national or regional policies of social citizenship. Without imagined commu-
nity across generations it is much harder to bring about redistributive
solidarity across generational as well as social class lines.
When considering local and national citizenship as a combined multilevel
structure we can see how the two principles of residence and birthright
supplement each other. The long-term perspective of democratic community
that is supported through birthright at the national level provides a stable
background for more fluid memberships at local level. Local citizenships are
not for life and are as easily acquired as they are lost. Mobile individuals will
therefore be multiple local citizens sequentially over the course of their lives,
but not simultaneously, since local citizenship has only a very weak extrater-
ritorial dimension. Whereas national citizenship policies accommodate diver-
sity if they embrace ius soli, naturalization entitlements and dual citizenship,
local citizenship policies accommodate it best by embracing a pure ius dom-
icilii principle that does not distinguish in any way between citizens on
grounds of origins or circumstances of birth.
Finally, while birthright citizenship serves as a source of solidarity that
connects citizens across generations, residential citizenship connects individuals
as sharing a common relation to a political territory. Territorial belonging is, of
course, not only a source of solidarity at the local level. It is a powerful theme in
nationalist imaginaries, yet mostly in a problematic manner if associated with a
notion of collective ownership. When seen in this way, the relations of residents
to a national territory become inevitably hierarchically structured along a time
dimension with claims of first occupancy or ancestral roots in the territory
strengthening the superiority of native citizens vis-à-vis newcomers.
The alternative interpretation of territorial relations of solidarity at the state
level emphasizes instead the subjection of all residents to the coercive power of
the state (Abizadeh 2012; Blake and Risse 2007; Owen 2012). This is prima
facie a much more attractive basis for solidarity in diverse societies since it
puts all residents into a position of equality vis-à-vis each other. There are,
however, two problems. One is that, as explained in section 3.3, residence does
not operate as either a necessary or sufficient criterion for membership in the
political community at the state level. It is not sufficient because residents who
are not citizens by birth have to apply for naturalization and it is not necessary
because citizens who are no longer residents do not lose their membership
status. There is thus only a broad overlap but no necessary congruence
between territorial subjection, on the one hand, and political membership
and democratic representation, on the other hand. The second problem is that
territorial subjection is a vertical relation between individuals and political
authorities that generates a shared interest in equal protection by the law, but
not a horizontal relation between individuals that makes them equal as
members of a self-governing political community. Only where co-residence
is also a sufficient criterion for political citizenship, as it is at the local level, can
it become a stronger source of democratic solidarity.
The dilemma how to mobilize territorial belonging as a resource for soli-
darity without referring to thick notions of territorial ownership or thin
notions of territorial subjection can be resolved by considering local citizen-
ship as an integral element of a liberal conception of political community.
At the local level, co-residents are not only equally subjected to municipal
governments but also have an equal claim to be represented in government.
Because the borders of municipalities are open for internal migration within
liberal states, the scope of solidarity between co-residents is not necessarily
confined to those who are citizens of a particular local community. Residential
citizenship has therefore at least indirectly a state-wide scope: Every resident
can become a local citizen anywhere in the national territory. Co-residents in
the territory are equal in this respect even if they differ in their national
citizenship status. Mere subjection to coercive law is not a sufficiently strong
basis for solidarity, but the combination of free movement rights in a national
territory with political citizenship at the local level provides support for
relations of solidarity between co-residents.
Let me conclude this section by considering whether there is also a basis for
territorial solidarity within the larger EU polity. In its judgments in the
Zambrano and McCarthy cases,18 the CJEU has given a new significance to
the territory of the EU as a legal concept by extending the right to free
movement across internal borders to a broader protection of EU citizens’
right of residence in the EU territory defined now as a single space of rights. In
Zambrano this protection was granted to the EU citizen children of Colum-
bian national parents in Belgium who faced a threat of deportation. What was
significant about this judgment was that the Zambrano children had neither
migrated across an internal EU border nor had had other relevant cross-
border connections within the EU.
98 Rainer Bauböck
The notion of the EU territory as a space of freedom and rights for EU
citizen could be further developed through Treaty amendments, directives,
and CJEU decisions. However, this does not change the fact that, unlike local
citizenship, EU citizenship remains strictly derivative. Just as the EU cannot be
imagined as a birthright community, it also cannot be imagined as a commu-
nity of co-residents. It is not possible to construct the EU as a political
community membership in which is based on co-residence as long as its
citizens are the nationals of the member states and as long as these national-
ities can only be acquired through birth or naturalization.
There are two further obstacles to promoting territorial relations of soli-
darity in the Union. The first is that the territorial unity of the EU—unlike that
of its member states—is inherently weak because of the internally flexible
geography of its various integration regimes, because of its drive towards
enlargement, and because of the relatively easy exit option. The second
obstacle is that—again unlike in the member states—it is difficult to project
co-residence as a relation that grounds solidarity between citizens from local
to Union level. The reason is that free movement is neither constructed nor
perceived as a right that creates a relation of equality among all Union citizens.
It is not so constructed as long as EU law protects those engaged in cross
border situations much more strongly than the static citizens residing in their
member states. And it is not so perceived as long as only relatively small
numbers of EU citizens make full use of their free movement rights and
internal migration flows remain highly asymmetric. The desolidarization
impact of these two obstacles shows in current efforts by several member
states to curb free movement rights for citizens of new member states.19
This does not mean that the EU cannot draw on the resources of territorial
solidarity provided by local citizenship. Although this seems rather unlikely in
the context of the current crisis, a further loss of significance of internal EU
borders and the blurring of distinctions between free moving EU citizens and
internal migrants from third countries could strengthen the construction of the
EU as a territory in which the freedom and fundamental rights of all residents
are equally protected.20 This would signify the emergence of a residence-based
EU civil citizenship in Marshall’s sense. Political citizenship rights of demo-
cratic participation and representation at EU level will, however, remain
attached to EU citizenship status and thus to membership in a nation-state.
3.6 F EDERAL SOLIDARITY
There are two mechanisms that can bring about a certain level of democratic
and redistributive solidarity at the EU even in the absence of birthright or
residential community. The first mechanism operates at the level of individual
citizenship rights and emerges from the need for harmonization in a context of
freedom of movement that forms the core of EU citizenship. The regulation of
working conditions, of unemployment and sickness insurance, the transfer-
ability of educational credentials and pension entitlements, the harmonization
of EU citizens’ voting rights in local and EP elections, and even the need for a
harmonization of some aspects of income taxation can all be argued as
necessary for removing obstacles to, but also preventing abuse of, free move-
ment within the union. The second mechanism is a collective one and results
from the long-term transformation of member states and their political and
economic interdependence through EU integration. This is the mechanism
behind federal relations of solidarity.
EU citizenship is clearly an unfinished construction marred by several design
flaws that result mainly from the tensions between a goal of promoting deeper
integration through the spill-over effects of free movement, on the one hand,
and a view of citizenship laws as the remaining hard core of member state
sovereignty, on the other hand. I will not discuss here which reforms could
overcome these flaws (cf. Bauböck 2014) and will focus instead on whether EU
citizenship can be regarded as a distinct source of federal solidarity.
In section 3.2, I suggested that, in addition to spatial and temporal relations,
there are also structural relations of solidarity in which citizens are conceived
as members of component parts of a larger polity. These are federal relations if
individuals are simultaneously citizens of constituent polities (the member
states) and of the encompassing polity (the union). EU citizenship is federal in
this sense.
Federal solidarity would be misconceived and much too weakly grounded if
we thought of it merely in terms of associative duties between constituent
polities. Certainly, these have presumably agreed to the terms of federation
and are fairly represented in federal-level legislation. We can assume that a
degree of solidarity between them can be maintained as long as each is
convinced that it is better off inside the federation than outside and none
attempts to dominate the others by grasping too much power in federal
institutions. Yet such an intergovernmental or confederal view of solidarity
does not take into account that individuals are also citizens of the union and
not only of the member states.
Confederal solidarity between the member states taken separately can be
jeopardized by instrumental considerations that non-solidaristic policies might
be advantageous for particular states and by perceptions that the interests of the
politically and economically most powerful states prevail in the Union. The
strong source of birthright citizenship remains unavailable for federal-level
solidarity as long as the Union does not transform itself into a federal state
that relegates its member states to the status of provinces. And federal level
solidarity grounded in relations of co-residence between the citizens of the
Union will remain limited since free movement rights alone cannot support
100 Rainer Bauböck
the idea of political and social equality between all those who reside in the
territory of the Union.
My preliminary conclusions about sources of solidarity in the EU are thus
not very optimistic. Rather than conceding defeat, I would like to conclude by
shifting the terrain of the argument from institutional to discursive sources of
solidarity. Relations of solidarity among citizens need an institutional ground-
ing in laws and policies that demarcate the boundaries of a polity and establish
the rights and duties of its members. But citizenship as an institution is never
enough to support attitudes and actions of solidarity. Without public narra-
tives about shared identities that capture the imagination of citizens, their legal
status and rights remain ineffective sources.
Does the EU have a shared collective identity? Yes, it does, but not just one.
If the EU is to come out stronger from its present deep crisis, it will need to
add to the collective identities that it has successfully promoted in the past a
new one that keeps it going into the future. Collective identities among citizens
should not be understood as rooted in what makes them similar to each other,
but as narratives about their shared interests in membership or, in Rogers
Smith’s apt phrase, as stories of peoplehood (Smith 2003). Are these really
necessary? Can’t we just build liberal democracy on the basis of the rule of law
and democratic procedures and let the citizens embrace whatever identity they
invent for themselves? This is a plausible alternative if we understand Europe
as an integrated market or as a set of institutions for transnational governance
that is not directly accountable to voters. However, the EU has moved beyond
that stage. Its member states have pooled their sovereignty to a large degree
and its citizens enjoy free movement rights throughout the EU and vote for a
European Parliament that has acquired more powers than some national
parliaments.
All democratic states promote stories about their citizens’ collective iden-
tities. They do so because democracy means that most citizens do not get
most of what they want from the state most of the time. If Bavarians or
Catalans no longer think of themselves as sharing a collective identity with
Brandenburgers or Andalusians, it would become really difficult to run the
German and Spanish states in a democratic way. This is also increasingly true
for the EU, with two important differences: EU democracy is still a project in
the making and national identities—which are often deeply contested within
states, as the Spanish example shows—are unavailable for constructing a
collective European identity.
There have been attempts to construct for Europe something that vaguely
resembles a national identity based on a cultural story. This is the story about
the legacy of Athens, Rome, Christianity, and the Enlightenment. It is certainly
possible to make such a story sound coherent. There are continuities of ideas
and values that have had their origin in these periods of European history.
However, the story was never convincing as one that could lend support to
building a democratic EU. The reason is well expressed in the EU’s motto,
‘unity in diversity’, which is significantly different from the American slogan ‘e
pluribus unum’ (from many into one). The diversity of Europe cannot be
reduced to any formula about cultural continuity. Enlargement has not stopped
at the borders of what was once Roman Empire or Christian territory. Intern-
ally, too, European societies now include large immigrant populations whose
origins lie far outside of whatever we may invent as a shared European history
and culture. While Europe’s diversity is too thick to be reduced to any common
denominator, the liberal and democratic values that ground its unity are too
thin and universal to be associated with a specifically European tradition.
There have been three other stories about Europe’s shared identity that
have been more successful in lending support to the actual integration of
the continent. The first one is the story told by ‘founding fathers’ Monnet,
Schuman, and others. It is a story that resonates with the title of Immanuel
Kant’s famous essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’. Europe was a continent of wars
between religions, nations, and political ideologies. It must now be integrated
in such a way that war becomes unthinkable. This requires states to give up on
large parts of their external sovereignty and it requires their citizens to imagine
themselves as belonging to a ‘confederation of free republics’ (Kant).
The second story was about economic prosperity. This was the story told by
Jacques Delors when pushing for the 1986 Single European Act and the
common currency. European integration was sold as a way of achieving
growth and making the quite different European models of welfare and
regulated capitalism fit for global competition. Is this really a story about
collective identities? I think so. Although the market itself does not create or
support these, political efforts to achieve market integration come at a price for
national sovereignty that does require citizens’ support for such a common
project and such support is mobilized through an imagined shared identity.
The third story was about enlargement as a historic mission. Until 1990, the
European Community (EC) and later the EU grew by gradual inclusion of
stable capitalist democracies (or states like Greece, Spain, and Portugal that
had overcome authoritarian capitalist regimes). With the fall of the Iron
Curtain, Europe’s political elites became convinced that it was for the EU to
erase the deep divide of the continent. When ten post-communist states joined
on 1 May 2004, this was a historic day that fundamentally changed Europe’s
collective identity. The burdens of enlargement have been and still are signifi-
cant for both sides and they could hardly have been shared without a story
about Europe’s need for unification.
The three productive stories are neither alternative ones nor even like
sequels; they are instead cumulative. Securing peace, promoting prosperity,
and continental reintegration are far from fully completed tasks. This is why
Europe’s collective identities are plural rather than singular. But today the
three stories are also no longer sufficient. The first one is still very strong and
102 Rainer Bauböck
convincing but is being gradually undermined by Europe’s disunity when

facing wars in its neighbourhood, as during the Russian invasions in Ukraine
and the civil war in Syria. The second story has been deeply shaken by the EU’s
failure to respond promptly and efficiently to the global crisis of financial
capitalism since 2008. The crisis has revealed how weak integration is when
solidarity between member states becomes strained and when the most
powerful ones want to impose their preferred solution on the rest. The third
story is currently being tested by the emergence of ‘illiberal democracies’ in
Hungary and Poland and the threat of permanent breakdown or shrinking of
the Schengen area of open borders.
Stories about collective identity cannot replace audacious policy making
and deep institutional reform that are clearly needed if the EU wants to
emerge from its deepest crisis so far. But one of the most obvious lessons of
this crisis is that it is not merely an economic one but also a crisis of political
legitimacy. And this is why a new story about Europe might be needed in order
to provide legitimacy for the changes that are necessary.
The story that is needed now is a familiar one. It is not about Europe’s past,
but its future. Just as democratic states can only function if they can convince
their citizens that they share a long-term future and should be willing to accept
temporary political defeat and sacrifices for the sake of a better tomorrow, so
the citizens of Europe need to understand that they share an (uncertain)
destiny. There are exit options and variable geometries for European integra-
tion, but sticking together and investing in a common future is the best hope
European citizens have.
Community of destiny should not merely be interpreted as interdependence
between member states that have been brought together through intergovern-
mental agreements and market integration and that now are stuck with path-
dependent necessities to maintain the common currency and internally open
borders since all alternative options are much more risky and costly. This alone
is not a convincing narrative that could promote solidarity at the European
level. The idea of a shared future has to be plausibly linked to citizenship as
entailing not only rights and privileges, but also shared and mutual responsi-
bilities among the citizens of the EU for the future destiny of this polity.
3.7 CONCLUSIONS
Distinguishing relations of solidarity that are lumped together in liberal

nationalist conceptions of political community helps us understand how
local, state, and supranational citizenships provide complementary sources
for integration in the deeply diverse European polity.
The argument can be summed up as follows. Relations of solidarity in a
political community are territorially, temporally, and in many cases also
federally structured. The rules of access to local, state, and union citizenship
articulate these three relations by identifying those who have a claim to be
treated as members because they belong to a transgenerational community,
because they are co-residents and because they are citizens of federally inter-
dependent polities. The correspondence is only a rough one. Local citizenships
remain in many states conditioned by national citizenship. State citizenships
are not exclusively based on birthright but reallocated through residence- and
consent-based rules for naturalization and loss of citizenship. EU citizenship is
derived from member state nationality but activated through taking up resi-
dence in another member state. Yet we can still clearly identify a primary
conception of political community at each of the three levels of citizenship in
Europe that is complemented or corrected by secondary rules. EU citizens
residing in the EU territory are simultaneously citizens at all three levels. The
multilevel structure produces therefore a layered triple image of co-residents
belonging to birthright communities that are federally interdependent.
Citizenship as an institution is, however, not an independent source of
solidarity based on perceptions of political community. These perceptions
need to be activated through corresponding public narratives. My claim has
been that coherent collective identity narratives can be developed for each
level of political community without relying on shared national identity.
There is no doubt that the sources of solidarity in the EU are weaker than
those available in its member states. Yet even relatively weak sources can be
activated if there is a perception among citizens that they share a common
destiny. The crisis seems to have paradoxically strengthened perceptions of a
shared destiny. Instead of referring to what Europeans have in common in terms
of their culture, values, and history, those who want to promote integration
appeal now more often to deep interdependence between the Member States that
has strongly increased the risks and predictable costs of disintegration. It is this
perceived interdependence that could eventually strengthen structural relations
of solidarity between the component parts of the European polity in spite of their
relatively weak institutional sources in the construction of Union citizenship.
Whether European citizenship and collective identity narratives are strong
enough to prevent sliding back into disintegration cannot be conclusively an-
swered based on conceptual and theoretical reflections alone. This question is
ultimately a practical one that will be answered by history, depending on how
political agents respond to the crisis.
NOTES
1. This position is eloquently defended by the British magazine The Economist.
2. The German party ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ established in 2013 originally
campaigned for this position but has since turned into a populist anti-immigrant
and anti-European party.
104 Rainer Bauböck
3. A legal procedure for leaving the EU was only introduced in the Lisbon Treaty
(TEU Art. 50). Before the Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016, the only historical
precedent where this question was decided by democratic vote was the UK
referendum on exit from the European Economic Community in 1975. The
proposal was then rejected with a two-thirds majority.
4. The refugee crisis of 2015/2016 has sharpened this cleavage, with Germany,
Sweden, and Austria carrying initially most of the burdens and accusing Greece
and Italy of refusing to implement European policies of border control and
registration of asylum seekers, while it has also created a new divide between
Western Europe and the 2004 accession states, most of whom refuse to accept
asylum seekers.
5. A Maltese law from December 2013 that put European passports up for sale
provides a good illustration for over-inclusiveness and a purely instrumental view
of the value of citizenship (Shachar and Bauböck 2014). To the surprise of many
observers, the European Parliament passed a resolution in which it argued that
‘EU citizenship should never become a tradable commodity’ (European Parlia-
ment 2014). The European Commission subsequently pushed Malta to introduce
a twelve-month residence condition for investor citizenship in order to secure that
citizenship is based on a genuine link.
6. There are two types of intertemporal relations of solidarity between citizens: first,
relations between birth cohorts, for example between the baby-boomers born
between 1946 and 1964 and those born thereafter or between current citizens
and future generations not yet born, and, second, relations between age groups,
such as those in education, in employment, and in retirement. The former
relations can be called intergenerational, since individual membership in a birth
cohort is fixed for life, whereas each individual belongs sequentially to a different
age category. I use the term ‘transgenerational’ as referring to both types of
temporally structured relations.
7. This paragraph has been borrowed from Bauböck (2014).
8. See Schuck and Smith (1985) for the view that liberal citizenship is based on consent.
9. Among the rare exceptions, we can count the Swiss Bürgergemeinde, which is a
non-territorial association of local citizens, membership in which is acquired
through birth in the municipality.
10. See <http://eudo-citizenship.eu/country-profiles>, last accessed 11 October 2016.
11. In the EU only France grants local voting rights to citizens residing abroad
through a resident proxy citizen. Several other countries have special provisions
for certain categories of non-resident citizens (Arrighi et al. 2013: 21).
12. In Switzerland, federal citizenship is formally derived from local and cantonal
citizenship. However, there is a federal citizenship law that regulates birthright
acquisition and loss and sets minimum conditions for naturalization. In June
2014, the Swiss Parliament adopted a major reform that reduces the length of stay
in the country from twelve years to ten years and requires harmonization of
cantonal and municipal residence requirements. By contrast, there is no such
harmonization of nationality laws in the EU.
13. CJEU Case C-184/99 Rudy Grzelczyk v. Centre public d’aide sociale d’Ottignies-
Louvain-la-Neuve, 2001.
14. See, for example, CJEU Case C-34/09 Gerardo Ruiz Zambrano v. Office national
de l’emploi, 2011.
15. Exit options need not be limited to emigration, which is often costly. They can also
consist in opting out of solidaristic public goods provisions (such as public
education, health, or social security systems) by choosing private providers.
16. Council Directive 2003/109/EC of 25 November 2003 concerning the status of
third-country nationals who are long-term residents.
17. In the EU as well as in a few substate regions, there are additional weak elements of
extraterritorial citizenship, including external voting rights in regional or Euro-
pean Parliament elections and diplomatic protection provided by other member
states for EU citizens residing in third countries where their states are not
adequately represented.
18. Cf. note 13 supra. CJEU Case C-434/09 Shirley McCarthy v. Secretary of State for
the Home Department, 2011.
19. As well as in Switzerland which participates in the EU’s Schengen and free
movement regimes but where a national referendum in February 2014 decided
to subject EU citizens to immigration quota.
20. The Maastricht Treaty has, however, also undermined territorial solidarity at the
local level by connecting local voting rights to EU citizenship instead of encour-
aging member states to disconnect them from nationality altogether.
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4
Against Fraternity
Democracy without Solidarity
Jacob T. Levy
In this chapter I mean to cast doubt on the search for sources of bounded
solidarity among citizens of sovereign states as a foundation for a just polity.1
I argue that the aspiration to ground democratic politics on solidaristic
belonging rests on philosophical mistakes, ideological illusions, and empirical
misunderstandings. That is not, I suggest, reason to worry about the stability
of decent, inclusive, and reasonably just democratic politics. When it comes to
the fraternal solidarity aspired to by many theorists, we can’t have it, and we
shouldn’t want it; and those aren’t truly problems, because we don’t need it.
4 . 1 W E AR E S TR A N G E R S
I begin with what I take to be a moral truth. The inhabitants of a political

community are more like strangers who find themselves locked in a very large
room together than they are like an extended family or a voluntary association
united in pursuit of a common purpose. They are not co-members of some
potentially evolutionarily fundamental unit of human society, like the band
or tribe of 50–500 persons. They are not what nationalists falsely claim
co-nationals to be: members of some pre- or extra-political social whole that
can make its will felt through politics, some social soul that wears the state as a
body. They are not the particular subset of humanity united by allegiance to
some particular political ideal, at any level of abstraction; even if most people
had sufficient political knowledge and sufficiently coherent views to qualify as
holding an ideal, polities contain a perennial diversity of such ideals, and many
political values and norms find adherents across international boundaries.
There is no polity made up entirely of liberals or social democrats or civic
republicans, and each of those is found in more than one polity.
108 Jacob T. Levy
Neither are the inhabitants of a polity the demarcated set of persons who
share in a common inheritance of advantages and disadvantages, resources,
and relationships. Those sets of persons are infinitely complicated, in a way
that the common invocation of ‘a society’ or ‘a fair system of social cooper-
ation’ (Rawls 1999: 84, italics added) cannot recognize. For example, the
accumulated technological knowledge, productive capital, and economic pro-
gress from which most newborn members of contemporary developed societies
can expect to benefit are not bound up with the particular polities into which
they are born, any more than the accumulated environmental damage of
human industrialization is. Neither the United States nor Canada nor Sweden
nor France is corporately responsible for the economic tide that has lifted them
all over the course of centuries; individual persons or firms do not benefit from
that history qua Americans or Canadians, and so on, but qua persons born in
the portion of the whole world that was so lifted. This means that the members
of any particular polity are not united even by a demarcated ‘society’ to which
they owe gratitude for the advantages to which they are born.2
Rather, fellow citizens are in a fundamental sense moral strangers to each
other, united only by the shared circumstances of inhabiting a common
political jurisdiction, and not by any prior relationship that legitimizes,
grounds, underlies, or stands outside of those circumstances. Our moral
relationship to one another differs in degree, not in kind, from the relationship
among the strangers locked in a room, or passengers on a bus, or any other
collection of persons thrown together by happenstance. Statehood is a big
happenstance, much bigger than a bus; but it is still a happenstance. Or, if one
prefers to think in this way, fellow citizens are not strangers for the same
reason and in the same way that fellow humans are not strangers. The shared
circumstance of being subject to rule by the same state is not just the same as
the shared circumstance of living on the same planet, but the difference is,
again, one of scale, not of deep moral kind.
Mary Ann Glendon once wrote, in a memorable passage that has become
beloved of communitarians of all stripes, that ‘[b]uried deep in our rights
dialect is an unexpressed premise that we roam at large in a land of strangers
where we presumptively have no obligations toward others except to avoid
the active infliction of harm’ (1991: 77). From this, those who believe that we
have—and ought to recognize—robust obligations to fellow citizens work
backward to the conclusion that either we do not roam in a land of strangers,
or that we ought not to think that we do. The standard move is to find a way to
reconceptualize the inhabitants of a political community as something more
than strangers to each other.
Indeed, a conviction that runs through not only communitarian and civic
republican but also much constitutional, liberal, and (perhaps especially)
democratic political theory is that decent, successful political life requires
that citizens have (or at least believe that they have) special solidaristic
Against Fraternity: Democracy without Solidarity 109
commitments to one another, commitments that override both loyalties to

smaller groups (ethnic, religious, ideological, regional) and international,
transnational, or cosmopolitan identities. Most fundamentally, states rely for
their continued existence on the willingness of some of their citizens to kill and
die on their behalf. More broadly, they rely on a willingness to sacrifice in the
pursuit of political cooperation, and that willingness in turn depends on a
substantial degree of horizontal trust that others will do likewise. We need to be
willing to pursue the common good (however that is defined) rather than letting
politics devolve into everyone grabbing whatever they can, whenever they can.
We need a shared commitment to justice so that each of us will know that our
rights will be protected even if we happen to be in a minority. We need a sense of
belonging together, and not with others, in order to defuse secession from within
and conquest or irredentist capture from without. We need strong sentiments of
unity to see us through times of political turmoil. For those who place emphasis
on democratic values in particular, it seems particularly important to find a
shared sense of belonging so that there can be a ‘people’ that meaningfully rules,
a people that shares ‘identity, affect, and agency’ (Ferguson 2012: 23).
It is conventional to distinguish accounts of the sources of this solidarity
into the civic and the ethnic, or the patriotic and the nationalistic. I think
neither of these distinctions is especially satisfactory. Still, there is some
intuitive sense in which solidarity could be grounded either in a community
that precedes and stands apart from the polity, or else in one constituted in
and through political life and political commitments.
The criticisms of the pre-political views—the criticisms of ‘ethnic’ or cul-
tural or nationalist conceptions of membership from the ‘civic’ side—are too
familiar to demand much rehearsal.3 The conceptions of peoplehood involved
in them treat imagined constructions as natural facts that can command
allegiance. Now, the mere fact that some social entity is imagined or con-
structed does not mean that it is especially plastic, that it is morally unworthy
as an object of loyalty, or that it is a bad thing. But it does mean that it can’t
occupy the place demanded of it by normative nationalism, in which it must
be a true fact of the social world independent of and prior to the beliefs of
putative members that can generate a valid criticism of putative members if
they are not (or are not sufficiently) loyal to it. Moreover, ethno-cultural
conceptions of peoplehood are difficult to reconcile with full equal member-
ship for those outside the relevant group, and they provide normative reason
to press for greater homogeneity in order to engender greater solidarity. Even
when the grounds of membership are cultural and linguistic rather than ethnic
or racial, the tight link between shared citizenship and shared nationality
easily slides into unattractive majoritarian identity politics and threats to the
liberty, equality of rights, and equality of standing of nonmembers.
Indeed, members routinely come under such threat, since (at least in the
absence of outside injustice) it is their actions and choices—whom to marry,
110 Jacob T. Levy
whether to have children or not, how to raise their children, what language to
speak, what norms to follow—that decide whether and how the cultural people
will persist. These two central difficulties of cultural peoplehood interact: if
cultural peoplehood really were a simple fact about the social world, if
humanity did naturally divide into relatively immutable nations, then identi-
fying them and perpetuating them would not require nearly so much
boundary-policing or control over putative members. But in fact the cultural
unity that is supposed to ground political solidarity itself takes a great deal of
political work to create and enforce.
The difficulties and paradoxes associated with supposedly ‘civic’ conceptions
of the sources of solidarity remain less familiar, though they have by now been
analyzed in depth as well (e.g., Yack 1996; Kateb 2008). The idea that what we
members of a political community share is our adherence to a set of ideals and
a constitutional order, and that this constitutes us as a solidaristic people, is
almost always a way to obscure an underlying cultural nationalism of one sort
or another. It is we Americans, or we French, who are joined together in this
way, not just anyone in the world who happens to affirm the supposedly shared
political values; and the shared commitment does not provide the answer to the
question ‘who are these Americans or these French in the first place?’ ‘Consti-
tutional patriotism’ still depends on the prior existence of a particular patrie.
And the supposedly civic conceptions overlay all of this with a doctrine that is
difficult to reconcile with political dissent. The person who does not support
[the dominant understanding of] the shared political values is not merely a
political opponent; he or she is, for example, ‘un-American’ or ‘counterrevolu-
tionary’. If the civic understandings of solidaristic belonging sometimes pro-
vide an antidote to pernicious racial or ethnic exclusions within a polity, they
are capable of generating a differently pernicious slide from political disagree-
ment into the charge of disloyalty. It is no more true that the citizens of a state
all endorse the same political beliefs—no matter how vaguely specified—than it
is that they are all ethno-cultural kin.
We are thus left in the following difficulty. We supposedly need to regard
each other as something other than strangers in order to ground a decent and
humane political life together, and to justify the boundary between our
political lives and those of our neighbours. But all of the ways of defining
ourselves, such that what unites us internally is more important than what
divides us and yet what divides us from our neighbours is more important
than what might unite us—racial kinship, a shared language, common reli-
gious, or political beliefs—are artificial. They all require exaggerating both
internal commonality and external differences for political effect, to distort
members’ identities and self-conceptions into a closer match with the firm
juridical boundaries of the (extant or aspirational) state.4 Here the state is
sovereign, across that line it is not; so here we must be us, and across that line
they are not. And identity policing of this kind is persistently unfriendly to the
decent, humane politics we were ostensibly trying to ground in the first place.
In order to get the benefits of treating each other as civic friends, we justify the
constant threat of treating each other as enemies. As Michaele Ferguson (2012:
27–8) puts it, the ‘commonality orientation’ towards the preconditions of
democratic politics ‘pathologizes uncertainty and disagreement, viewing
these as threats to democracy [ . . . ] it cannot tolerate forms of diversity and
disagreement that defy commonality’.
To all of this I would add the concern that there is no non-question-begging
reason that we should only care about decent, or liberal, or just coexistence with
our fellow subjects of the same state, and that the aspiration to solidarity almost
intrinsically comes at a cost to just policies with our fellow persons outside the
state’s boundaries. By this I do not only mean such obvious but grave problems
as that nationalist and patriotic sentiment can be marshalled in support of war.
Thinking of justice as tightly connected with shared membership is all too
compatible with treating non-members outside the borders as outside of
considerations of justice. Guantanamo Bay is a conspicuous example, of course.
But consider too the grave injustices—distributive and otherwise—associated
with the policing of borders against immigration. For the sake of preserving a
political community’s sense of mutual belonging that is said to underlie its
members’ just and peaceful coexistence, the poor from elsewhere are turned
away with barbed wire and bullets, or live vulnerable extra-legal lives if they
succeed in entering. There is, I think, something especially perverse about
justifying the right of states to unilaterally limit immigration for the sake of a
solidarity that is supposed to ground social justice, as if outsiders to the state are
outsiders to the moral category of those owed just treatment. The enthusiasts
for bounded solidarity often reason on the basis of a crisis within democratic
states about how citizens view each other; I confess that I see graver moral
crises in the world about how those inside each state treat those outside of it
(see also Abizadeh 2008, 2012.)
This is my basis for saying of bounded solidarity as a foundation for decent
liberal democratic politics that we can’t have it and shouldn’t want it. The
solidaristic description of what those subject to the same government share is
too far from the truth about our social condition; and in trying to hide or
change that truth, states and nation-building projects do too much real moral
damage. In the remainder of this chapter I will argue that this is not a counsel
of despair, because we don’t need it.
4 .2 TH E J U S T I C E OF BA B Y L O N
It has been very common not only in contemporary political theory but also in
among canonical political philosophers of the past to claim some foundational
112 Jacob T. Levy
unity for political society, whether by nature or by common will and choice,
whether pre-political or civic.5 But there is, at least, one important exception:
Augustine.
In Jeremiah 29, the prophet Jeremiah tells the Jews held captive in Babylon
that God has instructed them to continue to live their lives: build houses, plant
fields, marry, and have children in the place where they now find themselves.
‘And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away
captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have
peace’ (Jeremiah 29:7). The Israelites are not told to enter into fellow-feeling
with their captors, or to forget that they are in captivity; but the peace of the
city is peace for them as well.
While Augustine believed that the City of God offered a true unity of those—
living, dead, and angelic—united by a common love (of God), he denied that
worldly cities, real political societies, could do so. The great mass of humanity,
the sinful inhabitants of the City of Man (which encompasses the fallen angels
and the living and dead damned), could hardly truly unite among themselves,
each being driven primarily by a love of his or her respective self. Still less could
they truly morally unite with the inhabitants of the City of God with whom
they are intermixed in this life. A polity is necessarily disunited in the most
profound way possible: it encompasses the saved and the damned.
In Book XIX of The City of God, however, Augustine draws on the example
of the Jews in Babylon in order to deny the inference mentioned earlier, made
by Mary Ann Glendon, from ‘land of strangers’ to ‘no obligation’. While the
inhabitants of the City of God and those of the City of Man cannot combine
into any truly morally unified whole in a political city, they are nonetheless
bound together by circumstance, and that circumstance calls forth obligations.
They benefit from ‘the temporal peace which is for the time being shared
by the good and the wicked alike’. He calls this ‘the peace of Babylon,’ because
it is of this world, where the saved live in captivity for a time. This differs from
the ultimate peace available to the saved in Heaven, but is a genuine temporal
good nonetheless (1998: 962). Those who love God know that this world is not
their true destination, but they relate to it as morally responsible travelers
should to their means of travel. The saved regard themselves in their time
on earth as ‘a captive and a pilgrim’ (1998: 946); but during the pilgrimage,
‘even the Heavenly City’ [that is, the community of the saved, part of whose
membership is at any time alive on earth] ‘makes use of earthly peace . . . and
desires and maintains the cooperation of men’s wills in attaining those things
which belong to the mortal nature of man’ (1998: 947). ‘For the time being
[ . . . ] it is advantageous to us also that [those estranged from God] should
have such peace in this life; for, while the two cities are intermingled, we also
make use of the peace of Babylon’ (1998: 962).
It seems to me that the value of this account does not lessen in any way if we
do not share Augustine’s belief in the Christian God, or his hopes for the City
of God. Even in the face of the most metaphysically profound disunity, even
in the face of a kind of moral enmity, we who live in Babylon together make
use of its peace together, and ought to try to cooperate in attaining that peace
as best we can. If we do not share his theological commitments, we might not
think that our mutual estrangement has metaphysical significance; we might
think that we are never so wholly alien from our fellow humans as he
imagines. We might only be Jews in literal Babylon, not Christians in meta-
phorical Babylon; but we could still draw the lesson from Augustine that even
radical estrangement is compatible with a shared duty to the peace of the
shared city.
We might even think that our captivity lacks the possibility of later liber-
ation promised both to the Jews and (in Heaven) to the saved Christians. We
might think that our shared journey lacks an emancipating destination. But we
could still regard each other as fellow travellers with a shared responsibility to
the means of our travel, as fellow captives in a social world we did not make or
choose,6 with a shared responsibility to its maintenance.7 And our under-
standing of that peace, of those responsibilities, ought to be such that it could
call forth support even among strangers.
The division of citizens between the saved and the damned is an especially
politically problematic one, and not only because of the moral distance
between the two camps. In contemporary terms, each of these groups is a
transnational as well as substate community; we might easily think that
Christians in the Roman Empire share a more important community with
Christians in other polities than they do with their fellow citizens. Indeed,
Augustine does think that. But that sense of ‘more important’ does not lead
him to advocate secession or irredentism; neither does it lead him to tell
Christians to judge whether they should serve in the military based on the
religious identity of Rome’s enemies. The peace of Babylon and the political-
legal order that makes it possible is not to be broken in the pursuit of substate
of transnational Christian unity. (Neither, of course, should it be broken in the
pursuit of any political unity of the City of Man.) It has its own claims on us.
Now, Augustine followed Jeremiah in describing what we achieve in Baby-
lon as ‘peace’; he specifically denied it the higher word ‘justice’. But this was
not at all because justice required solidarity. Augustine makes frequent sar-
donic use of a definition of a true republic or commonwealth found in Cicero:
it is the affair and property of a people, and a people in turn is ‘not every
assembly of a multitude, but an assembly united in fellowship by common
agreement as to what is right [justice, ius] and by a community of interest’
(1998: 78).
That kind of unity we can never really have, since the inhabitants of the Two
Cities live side by side, with some loving God and others loving themselves;
and so we can never have a true people or a true republic. ‘Justice’ is what those
united in such an imaginary republic would pursue, but is conceptually
114 Jacob T. Levy
independent of the unity. (Being a people, a republic, or a commonwealth
conceptually depends on unity; justice does not.) Rather, Augustine reserves
the word for a condition in which each is rendered their due—including the
Christian God. ‘What justice can we suppose there to be in a man who does
not serve God?’ (1998: 952). And this is not to be expected in the fallen world;
‘[t]rue justice [ . . . ] does not exist other than in that commonwealth whose
Founder and Ruler is Christ’ (1998: 80). Justice is more than we can ever
expect on earth, not because we lack unity, but because justice is so elevated a
moral condition that fallen humans cannot reach it on their own. This, I think,
is why David Miller (2012) treats Augustine as a source of a political theory
that aims impossibly high, almost precisely the opposite of the way in which
I am using his thought: Miller emphasizes Augustine’s use of the concept
‘justice’ at the expense of his broader treatment of political life.
I see no compelling reason to follow Augustine in his idiosyncratic usage of
‘justice’. The deformed ‘peace’ that even members of a robber band seek to
maintain among themselves echoes the deformed ‘justice’ Plato identifies in
the equivalent circumstance. Augustine holds that what a human polity offers
is sufficiently valuable that Christians are called to civic participation and
service, even as soldiers or judges who risk spilling innocent blood. His strange
usage, however, requires him to characterize the legal system and its officials as
only serving peace, when it would have been far more natural for Romans (as it
is for us) to maintain the linguistic connection through ius between judges and
a judicial system on the one hand and justice on the other.8 The rendering to
each their due—punishment to the criminal, possession to the owner, restitu-
tion and damages to the injured, payment to the creditor—is for us as for the
Romans the core enterprise of a legal system, and justice is the virtue of that
system. Augustine distinguished the true eternal peace of Heaven with the
limited but valuable peace of Babylon; he might easily have done the same with
justice. If we can have a peace of Babylon, a peace shared with strangers, we can
have a justice of Babylon, too. Indeed, what Augustine insists on only calling
‘the peace of Babylon’ is a kind of ‘justice of Babylon’: justice among strangers
who take seriously their shared circumstances without ceasing to be strangers.
This is of course a partial sense of what we mean by ‘justice’, and an
advocate of solidarity might emphasize this. Strangers interacting at arm’s
length can—so the objection would go—work out mutually-disinterested
reasons for respecting each other’s negative rights to life and limb, and
institutions for the protection of property and enforcement of contract.
‘Justice’ in the sense usually meant by Hume or Smith thus might be sustain-
able in the absence of feelings of affirmative mutual commitment among the
citizenry. But what we mean by ‘justice’ is often more expansive than that—
especially since the rise of welfare-state liberalism and social democracy, and
since Rawls shifted the philosophical terrain by arguing for ‘justice as fairness’,
but not only since then (Fleischacker 2009).
Although I think that the ‘justice’ of life and limb, property and contract is
the core meaning of the concept and has been unduly neglected in some recent
philosophy, I do not mean my critique of solidarity to depend on that thought.
Distributive justice, too, is possible among strangers; I do not think it is
different in moral-psychological kind from ordinary justice. There is a com-
mon view that treats the preservation of peace and the protection of negative
rights as sociologically and psychologically easy, and distributive justice of
various kinds as hard. The better argument seems to me that provided by
Canovan (1996) that liberal negative rights, the rule of law, and social peace
rest on a social foundation of mutual trust in much the same way that
redistributive policies do. She takes this to mean that liberal states need, or
benefit from, a sense of national belonging as much as social democracies do,
but we might as easily say that social democracies need it as little as liberal
states do. Both, to be sure, rely on norms of trust and reciprocity to some
degree, but these need not extend either to all fellow citizens/nationals or only
to fellow citizens/nationals.
The Augustinian, chastened, sceptical view about how little fellow citizens
have in common is always difficult for many to accept, even among those who
recognize both the imaginary basis of national or patriotic identity, and the
problems with suppressing internal diversity and exaggerating international
difference. Even they commonly dismiss the option of treating each other as
strangers. Augustine’s advice seems too psychologically unlikely; it requires
that we be detached and yet engaged, alienated and yet active. Without some
sure way to bind us together, we must fly apart into our interest-group corners
or individual self-interest or worse.
I think this is a mistake, one born in part of theorists’ greater trust in
hypothetical guarantees than empirical likelihoods. If we begin as a people,
then (theorists imagine) all of our decisions will be made in a unified spirit and
in ways that treat each other morally well, and so the problem is to find a
foundation for that peoplehood. I suggest that we will never have political
stability guaranteed with the certainty of a philosophical proof, and yet
wealthy constitutional democracies have a great deal of political stability and
peace to them. While there is perennial injustice even in constitutional
democracies (on more or less any theory of justice), there is a great deal
more justice than we should expect if justice had to rest on a deep political
consensus or cultural unity that we have yet to attain.
The theory that members of a political society must have a consensus about
justice and/or a shared sense of belonging that unites them to each other and
differentiates them from the rest of the world before they enter into ordinary
politics, or else they will not be willing to make sacrifices for each other’s sake
and will not be willing to treat each other justly, predicts a very different world
from the one we inhabit. I don’t mean to romanticize really-existing constitu-
tional democracies, but only to emphasize that they really do exist, and that
116 Jacob T. Levy
there is considerable justice in them. There might be more or less at one time or
another, in one democracy or another, but there is never as little as we would
imagine if unity, solidarity, and consensus were the prerequisite to attaining it.
This is partly because procedures to allow us to live with disagreement are a
deeper fact of human sociability than philosophy has traditionally been
comfortable acknowledging (Hampshire 2000). Some have thought that this
meant making particular political procedures the objects of consensual alle-
giance and shared loyalty, but that view rapidly turns into a variant of
constitutional patriotism, demanding a more enthusiastic endorsement of
the locally-operative rules than seems either called for or compatible with
dissent. We are capable of cooperating under institutions that we don’t feel
deep allegiance to, that we view as only provisionally and instrumentally
useful: the political procedures of Babylon, as it were. Even without a deep
hold on our allegiances, those procedures can help us live with our disagree-
ment; and even in the face of that disagreement, we are capable of making
progress towards justice.
4 . 3 DI S A G R E EM E N T AN D P A R T I E S
Citizens of constitutional democracies typically interact with their states’

political processes in a mediated way: through political parties. Many of
them, much of the time, seem to care more intensely about their parties’
fortunes than they do about the procedures regulating partisan contestation.
They might believe in fair play and believe that in a general way their party
ought to play by the really important rules (though they are often quick to
think that the other side ‘started it’ when it comes to dirty political tricks, and
to excuse their own side on that basis). But they feel a greater passion about
their party than they do about the arcana of electoral law, the choice between
parliamentarism and presidentialism, or the difference between proportional
representation and first past the post.
This imbalance of passion of course led early modern republicans to think
that factional—partisan—disagreement was incompatible with republican
self-government. What we have found since the eighteenth century is just
the opposite; contestation among organized political parties are apparently a
prerequisite for democratic politics in a large modern state. There are democ-
racies with proportional representation and those without, democracies with
independently elected executives and those without, democracies with mon-
archs and those without, democracies with judicial review and those without,
democracies with written constitutions and those without; but there is no
democracy without political parties. There is a kind of organized disharmony
or disunity that sits at the heart of modern democratic politics, while theorists
still struggle to articulate the bases for unity. Moreover, these parties can
seemingly violate the basic commitment to the self-contained unity of the
state. There are stable constitutional democracies with secessionist parties,
and there are stable constitutional democracies with parties that belong to
transnational assemblies of parties that emphasize political cleavages across
national boundaries.
Empirical political science has been well ahead of normative political theory
or philosophy in the study of parties in democracy (see Stokes [1999] for an
overview). There has begun to be some work that takes partisanship seriously as
a part of democratic theory (Rosenblum 2008; Muirhead 2006), alongside some
other work that puts disagreement and contestation at the centre of democracy
(Waldron 2000; Honig 1993; Shapiro 2003; Bellamy 2007; Ferguson 2012, and
to a lesser extent Pettit 2012). But the idea of regulated disagreement, of partisan
contestation rather than solidaristic commitment as foundational, has been
slow to take hold in other areas of political theory—or in the tacit political
theory often relied upon in political science or political sociology. This is,
perhaps, especially surprising given the role that parties have had in shaping
the boundaries of civic inclusion. The expansion of the franchise has routinely
very often been driven by partisan contestation: a winning party enfranchises a
pool of voters who it thinks will disproportionately support it: propertyless
white males, African-Americans, the working class, women, eighteen-year-olds,
and so on. This has most often been the party aligned with the group’s
underlying political preferences; it has occasionally been another party that
sees the enfranchisement as inevitable and hopes to win political gratitude from
the previously excluded. (Think of the lowering of the American voting age to
eighteen under Richard Nixon.) In either case, the franchise has not typically
been extended on the basis of the universalistic solidarity among citizens.
Parties, with long time horizons that extend beyond one parliamentary or
presidential term, have used expansions to secure electoral advantage.9
I do not mean to be a Polyanna or Whig about this process. (I am too
Augustinian to be a good Whig.) I mean only to point out that, once political
parties took on their modern form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, they became the vehicles for the expansion of civic inclusion in
democratic states. It was a kind of antagonism, not solidarity, that defined the
sphere of membership. Indeed, I think this has been true in more ways than
just the expansion of the franchise. Parties have acted as intermediaries
between marginally-included groups (e.g., new immigrant populations) and
the state, providing access to public services and public protection in exchange
for electoral support. Those populations did not have to wait for a universal
consensus that they were equal members of a solidaristic whole; party ma-
chines acted long in advance of that consensus. The process was imperfect,
corrupt, and exploitative; but the alternative was exclusion, not a normatively
more-attractive mechanism for inclusion.
118 Jacob T. Levy
And so, to return to a question from the previous section: this dynamic has
applied not only to the protection of such civil rights as voting but also to the
so-called social and economic rights. The electoral dynamic is clear: parties
have reason to secure the long-term loyalty of segments of the electorate by
providing them with material benefits. And, while the growth in benefits may
slow or stop, we almost never see them genuinely taken back as a matter of
domestic politics; the party that opposed their creation rarely repeals them
once in power. There are occasionally genuine reductions driven by serious
threats to a state’s international fiscal viability, but not by ordinary electoral
politics and alternation in power. Thus, as Robert Dahl (1995) noted long ago,
‘all democratic countries have mixed economies’.
I said in section 4.1 that among the reasons for worry about solidaristic
foundations for justice within the state is that they push against consideration
of justice outside the state, philosophically and psychologically. If I am right in
the first-order judgement that immigration barriers and trade restrictions
between rich and poor countries are crucial cases of injustice in the contem-
porary world, or if for that matter a shortage of international development aid
is such a crucial case of injustice, then it is perverse to seek greater justice by
encouraging greater nationalistic solidarity. At this stage one might reasonably
ask how matters are improved by relying instead on partisan contestation,
which is after all contestation for votes among voters and potential voters, that
is usually to say, among citizens and potential citizen residents. Where is the
mechanism for taking the just interests of outsiders into account here?
As I emphasized in section 4.2, nothing here is meant to offer guarantees;
I think the search for them at the level of normative theory is misguided. But it
remains true that partisan contestation involves a two-level commitment,
neither of which is obviously internationalist or cosmopolitan: first, solidarity
of a sort among partisans, and second, commitment of a drier sort to the
procedures and institutions that regulate the contestation. The potential immi-
grants, potential traders in poor countries, or potential aid recipients are not
constituencies to which parties have any electoral incentive to appeal; and the
commitment to the procedures is state-level just as much as civic patriotism is.
And yet, it seems to me, this two-level character itself marks a relevant
difference from solidarity bounded by the nation-state. To see why, consider
the arguments offered by anti-immigration parties and candidates—an obvious
place to look when objecting to the idea of partisan democracy as generating
fair treatment of outsiders. It is hardly ever the case that anti-immigration
parties openly argue that immigration should be reduced or stopped for
the sake of the party. In the USA, conservative and Republican critics of
immigration have often expressed this thought sotto voce, worrying that the
demographic changes associated with Hispanic immigration will gradually
doom Republican electoral prospects. But even in the case of Republican
campaigns built primarily around attacking immigrants and immigration,
this idea rarely plays any noticeable part in public argument. Candidates don’t
run for office on the platform that immigration is bad for the Republican
Party; they do so on the platform that immigration is bad for the United States.
In other words, they do so with reference to (bad) arguments about the
American national community, while making solidaristic appeals to voters
qua members of the national community.
If such appeals are seen as suspect, they could not easily be replaced by
appeals to partisan solidarity. The two-level character of partisan democracy
makes naked appeals to partisan interest obviously ugly, whereas the idea of
solidaristic belonging morally whitewashes exclusionary appeals to the sup-
posed interest of the nation-state community as a whole. To make an appeal in
terms of the welfare of the Republican Party is to offer one’s own desire for
political power as a reason to others, in a way that is self-undermining. To
make an appeal in terms of the well-being of Americans has the appearance of
moral virtue: patriotism, other-regardingness. Insofar as parties contest for
control of the government of a state, and have to appeal to the electorate as a
whole, their public normative arguments are drawn away from their own
narrow interests. Their actions in government may be narrowly partisan, but
they face rivals with an incentive to call them to account for that. ‘Your
promotion of your party’s interest is unfair’ counts as a serious criticism;
‘your promotion of our co-nationals’ interest is unfair’ sounds almost para-
doxical against the background of solidaristic beliefs, and is likely to sound to
nationalistic voters like praise. This means, I think, that a diminished belief in
bounded solidarity at the level of the nation-state will not just be replaced with
comparably exclusionary membership at the level of the party. This is no
guarantee that partisan democracy will be fair enough to outsiders; but it is
reason to suspect that it will be more fair, as the force of national solidaristic
appeals diminishes.
4.4 THE CONTRACTARIA N DISTRACTION
The American and French Revolutions took place under the influence of the
republican hostility to parties, and an element of normative opposition to
partisanship is perhaps explicable in those countries’ constitutional traditions
as stemming from that source. But the persistent philosophical attraction to a
foundational idea of solidaristic unity, and a reluctance to embrace partisan
contestation, seems to me older and more widespread than the American and
French republican traditions.
At the risk of extreme oversimplification: the natural law tradition stem-
ming from Aquinas adapted Aristotle’s naturalism. Political societies tend
towards justice and true community; they naturally express and reinforce an
120 Jacob T. Levy
underlying natural social unity. Humans’ natural political-sociability leads to

the organization of real political societies, which habituate us towards and
enable us to pursue our true virtuous purposes. The early-modern Protestant
transformation of natural law theory that became social contractarianism did
away with the idea that polities or social unity were natural, but retained the
very strong link between a polity and a social unity organized around the
pursuit of justice. Indeed, contractarians foregrounded this emphasis on unity,
and laid the intellectual groundwork for our contemporary debates on hori-
zontal solidarity as a foundation of political life.
This does not mean that social contract theory was consciously a propa-
ganda tool in the hands of centralizing modernizing states seeking to defeat
medieval institutions and their ancient-constitutionalist defenders. Although
it is plausible that Hobbes, Grotius, and Locke in various ways hoped to serve a
legitimizing function, they were engaged in genuine philosophical enquiries.
But as I have argued elsewhere (Levy 2009, 2014) there was a powerful fit
between the emerging early modern political form, the Weberian state, and
this early modern intellectual school. The unitary state—by which I mean state
officials and the institution of the state itself, not the citizenry—benefits from
citizens’ belief that unity is legitimate, even normatively demanded. It tends to
seek ways to encourage that belief (‘One nation, indivisible’). What contrac-
tarianism offers philosophically, the modern state looks for ideologically—
using ‘ideological’ in something like a Marxist sense, though substituting the
modern state itself for the capitalist class. Those who govern a state (even a
temporary partisan majority) have a perpetual reason to pretend that a state is
solidaristically unified, and to try to perpetuate the belief that good member-
ship in a polity requires placing the polity ahead of subgroup loyalties or
international sympathies.
I think something like this helps to explain the use of contractarian
fictions in democratic societies such as the nationalistic American Pledge
of Allegiance, and the widespread use of a language of universal consent and
civic or national solidarity belied by the partisan and contestatory practices
discussed earlier. This is especially true for a state at war or at risk of war,
but the phenomenon is more widespread. From the origin of the American
party system onwards, Presidents have come to office claiming—falsely—
that ‘we’ are all Federalists, ‘we’ are all Republicans. Partisan triumph is
rhetorically dressed up as an overcoming of division.
This ideological use of unity, I suspect, reinforces the philosophical preju-
dice in its favour, a prejudice diagnosed in different ways by the sceptical or
‘realist’ liberal school and by agonistic democratic theorists (Honig 1993;
Williams 2005; Galston 2010; Levy Forthcoming). Neither social contract
philosophy or its contemporary neo-Kantian offshoots is mere ideology, but
they fit into a background narrative about the shape of the social world that we
accept too uncritically.
Indeed, I think that my argument in this chapter is an extension of one part of

David Hume’s critique of social contract theory. Hume argued—rightly—that
hypothetical or imputed consent never adds the normative force to the legitim-
acy of the state or the duty to obey it that contractarianism supposes. Consent is
a valid source of obligation, so those seeking to legitimate the state and ground
obligation to it characterized our relationship to it as consensual. There was no
relevantly real or explicit consent, so they described those subject to a state as
having implicitly consented or as being legitimately treatable as if they had
consented. This was justified in turn by the usefulness of the state, one way or
another: it kept persons safe from the war of all against all, or protected their
property and liberty against the inconveniences of social life without known and
impartial judges of disputes, for examples. Hume’s insight was that this last step
did all the normative work: we are bound to the state because the state is useful.
The detour through consent was a loop that could be snipped out of the path.
Good or bad, the argument rested on that last step, and sending it the long way
around via imaginary consent couldn’t improve it.
Much the same is true for arguments for the motivational or normative
force of national solidarity. I don’t at all deny that our social life together
requires some degree of moral commitment, some sense of justice, in order to
have some chance of being just. My claim is not that just institutions are likely
to arise or be stable out of nothing but calculative self-interest. Augustine, after
all, was making an argument to Christians that they had moral reason to
participate in, support, and protect the Peace of Babylon, not that it would
arise naturally and needed no looking after. But at best, it seems to me that
bounded solidarity is a way of describing an unnecessary loop in the path
between the beginning sense of justice and the eventual willingness to pursue
just policies: I believe in justice, therefore I feel an affective connection to my
co-nationals and co-citizens, because it is through such affective connection
that I will be motivated to pursue just policies. And at worst, it can be much
worse than that: a moral-psychological perversion of the sense of justice into
action that promotes injustice. The strategy of indirection, of trying to culti-
vate an enhanced sense of justice by cultivating a stronger commitment to
national solidarity seems to me both unnecessary and dangerous.
The possibility of political life amongst strangers whom one knows to be
strangers, of politics being one social thing that has its uses and its rules rather
than the social thing that trumps all others, of civil arm’s-length relationships
with those who are neither friends nor enemies (though they are sometimes
rivals), of living with disagreement and managing it with no real hope of
reconstituting as based on some deeper agreement: we easily imagine these
to be harder than they are. Conversely, we imagine it to be easier than it is
to find some way of redefining those who share our accidental circumstance
of politics as brothers in fraternité. We overlook what works in practice, as
the joke goes, because it does not work in theory. But in so doing, we
122 Jacob T. Levy
perpetuate the intellectual drive for a unity than is deeper than we should
really hope for.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I presented this chapter at the ‘Strains of Commitment’ conference at the European
University Institute; the annual meeting of the Association for Political Theory; the UC
Berkeley workshop on moral, political, and legal theory; Duke Law School; the Centre
de Recherche en Éthique; and the University of Tulsa. Thanks to David Miller, Clarissa
Rile Hayward, and Renata Barreto-Montenegro for comments in those settings, and to
Diane Shnier, Elisa Muyl, and Kelsey Brady for research assistance. I thank Keith
Banting and Will Kymlicka and two anonymous referees for comments on the
manuscript, and Banting and Kymlicka for generously accommodating this chapter’s
contrarianism in the present volume. Research for this chapter was supported by a
grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
NOTES
1. See Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka’s Introduction to the present volume.
2. In an American context, that means that the view espoused by Senator Elizabeth
Warren and President Barack Obama and famously summarized by the sentence
‘you didn’t build that’ is more wrong than right. It is true that the individual
entrepreneur, firm, or wealthy individual benefitted tremendously from the social
position of coming into existence in an already-wealthy world with technological,
financial, and infrastructural contributions made by others over centuries. It is not
true that the United States government is even a fair proxy for all of those
contributors, to say nothing of actually itself being the cause of the contributions.
In philosophical terms I have in mind both John Rawls’ (1999) idea of a shared
system of social cooperation and David Miller’s (2007) sense of intergenerational
national responsibility for social success and wealth.
3. See Brubaker (1996, 2004); I expand on these ideas and their relevance for norma-
tive theory in Levy (2000: ch. 3, 2004).
4. On the dishonesty involved in this, see Kateb (2008); on ‘extant or aspirational’,
Brubaker (1996).
5. I offer an extended critique of such doctrines of unity in the history of political
thought in a companion paper to this chapter, ‘Contra Politanism’, available at:
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2125187> (accessed 1 Octo-
ber 2016). This paper’s sympathetic use of Augustine is meant to complement that
paper’s critical account of many modern political theories.
6. NB: This is not at all the same as the Marxist ‘fellow-travellers’.
7. I did not come to Augustine through Arendt, and it is only well after I began to
think along these lines that I recognized the overlap with her theory of politics.
Accordingly, I have nothing to add about the literature on Arendt and Augustine,
but I should note the connection. See Arendt (1996) for the beginning of her
reflections on Augustine, though he remained a constant presence as she developed
her mature political ideas. See Arendt (1958) for her fullest account of the import-
ance and the challenge of thinking of worldly polities in foundationally pluralistic
rather than monistic terms.
8. As an aside, I also think it is odd within Christianity to think of the human
relationship to God in the legalistic terms of repayment of debt; the Latin caritas
and the Greek agape are far more usual, both in different ways suggesting a
generous love very different from the remedial and legalistic virtue of justice.
9. We rarely see the reverse phenomenon happening openly: disenfranchising the
other side’s voters is risky and invites severe electoral punishment. The post-
Reconstruction Democratic Party in the American South is the only example I
can think of. Disenfranchisement at the margins, for example, the contemporary
American Republican Party’s efforts to lower African-American turnout indirectly
through voter identification laws and felon disenfranchisement, are of course
possible.
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Part II
Public Attitudes on Diversity
and Solidarity
5
Solidarity between the Elites and

the Masses in Germany
Céline Teney and Marc Helbling
5.1 I NTRODUCTION
While citizens’ solidarity towards co-members of their political community is

vital to national social cohesion, congruence between citizens’ and elites’
positions on the extent of this solidarity is another essential component of
social cohesion. Indeed, the lack of representation of masses by their elites is
said to be a source of growing citizen disaffection (e.g., Crouch 2004) and one
of the core elements of the democratic deficit. Accordingly, if citizens perceive
that their own interests are not adequately represented by elites, they will
either withdraw from the public space or consider populist radical right-wing
political actors to be a serious alternative (Mudde 2004). Consequently, the
issue of a potential elite–mass incongruence in opinion is a crucial element for
the preservation of social cohesion within a political community.
The aim of this chapter is to investigate the existence of such an elite–mass
opinion incongruence on solidarity and the extent to which national and
supranational (or cosmopolitan) identities explain this gap. We first discuss
to what degree this incongruence can be explained by a rational-choice
perspective. We then argue that identification with supranational communi-
ties also plays a significant role in supporting solidarity. The borders of the
national political community have become increasingly permeable as a result
of globalization. This, in turn, has led a growing number of citizens to develop
a sense of belonging with people living beyond their national community. The
development of such supranational identification is likely to have important
implications on the level of solidarity with the national community. It, thus,
might be that the elite–mass incongruence in positions towards solidarity is
partly due to the varying degrees of cosmopolitan identification between
citizens and elites.
128 Céline Teney and Marc Helbling
In line with the elite positional approach, we define elites as ‘incumbents of

leadership positions in powerful political institutions and private organiza-
tions who, by virtue of their control of intra-organizational power resources,
are able to influence important (political) decisions’ (Hoffmann-Lange 2008: 53).
We apply the definition of solidarity discussed by Banting and Kymlicka in
the introductory chapter of this edited volume: solidarity relates to attitudes
of mutual acceptance, cooperation and mutual support at the society level.
Furthermore, solidarity is composed of three distinct dimensions that are
inherent features of a decent, just, and functioning society: civic, redistribu-
tive, and democratic solidarity. In this chapter, we focus on the first two
dimensions. Like the editors of this volume, we understand redistributive
solidarity as support for redistribution towards the poor and vulnerable
groups and for redistributive policies leading to more equality. By contrast,
civic solidarity stands for acceptance of people of different ethnicities and for
openness to ethnic diversity. As civic and redistributive solidarity constitute
two distinct dimensions, they are likely to have their own causes and effects.
A comparison of elites’ and masses’ level of solidarity along these dimensions
can, therefore, provide a nuanced assessment of national and cosmopolitan
identities in relation to solidarity.
We use data from the elite survey ‘Decision Makers in Germany: Values and
Attitudes’ (2011/12), one of the few representative elite surveys that consists of a
relatively large sample, includes the main relevant sectors of society, and focuses
not only on socio-structural characteristics of elites but also on their values and
attitudes (Bunselmeyer, Holland-Cunz, and Dribbisch 2013; Allmendinger et al.
2013). The phrasing of the questions matches the item wording from the 2006
World Value Survey (WVS). We are, thus, able to directly compare attitudes
among the general population and the elites in Germany.
We find that elites show overall more civic solidarity than the general
population, but less solidarity when it comes to redistributive issues. There
are, however, large differences between elites from different societal sectors
concerning social issues, whereas they take very similar positions when con-
cerning civic solidarity. Looking at how the two solidarity dimensions are
related to national and cosmopolitan identities, it appears that for the masses,
civic solidarity is associated with cosmopolitanism not with national identity.
Redistributive solidarity is not related to either form of identity. For the elites,
we find that cosmopolitan identity plays an important role in understanding
their support for both civic and redistributive solidarity, whereas national
identity is not related to these forms of solidarity. From a normative perspec-
tive, we can conclude that neither national nor cosmopolitan identities have a
detrimental effect on national solidarity. While it could be expected that cosmo-
politan identity leads to less redistributive solidarity towards co-nationals, it
appears that especially cosmopolitan elites are not only more open towards
immigrants, but also more supportive towards their co-citizens.
Solidarity between Elites and Masses in Germany 129
5.2 RATIONAL I NTERESTS AND THE

ELITE – MASS GAP
Discrepancies in attitudes and opinions of citizens and their elites have long
been observed by social scientists in various democracies. For instance, elites
have been shown to consistently endorse more liberal positions than the
general population on issues such as environmental protection, gender equal-
ity, law enforcement, or postmaterialist values (see, for example, Holsti 2004;
Kaina 1997; McAllister 1991). Furthermore, various studies have recently
focused on the lack of elite–mass opinion congruence in the process of
European integration, with elites being enthusiastic supporters of the Euro-
pean integration in contrast to the more skeptical general population (e.g.,
Best, Lengyel, and Verzichelli 2012; Hooghe 2003).
With regard to opinions towards solidarity: if we follow a rational-choice
perspective, we would expect elites to be less supportive of redistributive
solidarity than the general population. Indeed, elites belong to the most
privileged segment of population and, thus, are the ones who are the least
likely to ever benefit from redistributive solidarity. On the other hand, the
rational-choice perspective would predict elites to be more supportive of civic
solidarity than the general population: immigration by and large brings eco-
nomic advantages to social groups at the top of the social ladder while it tends
to be perceived as a threat among low status social groups (Cook-Martin and
Fitzgerald 2010: 9; Hjerm and Nagayoshi 2011). Furthermore, according to
Kriesi et al. (2008), the immigration issue has been polarizing elites and citizens
and contributing to the rise of a new political cleavage within Western European
countries. Van der Brug and van Spanje (2009) also showed that citizens who
endorse redistributive solidarity and oppose civic solidarity are not represented
any longer by any mainstream parties, since left-wing mainstream parties who
are supportive of redistributive solidarity tend to be committed to civic soli-
darity. This literature on the rise of a new globalization cleavage further
stressed the idea of a representative gap between (political) elites who endorse
civic solidarity to a much larger extent than the overall population.
Thus, following this rational-choice perspective, we expect elites to be more
supportive of civic solidarity than the general population (H1a) and less
supportive of redistributive solidarity (H1b). Furthermore, elites from differ-
ent societal sectors are unlikely to show homogeneous attitudes towards
solidarity. According to Putnam (1976), (positional) elites’ opinions tend to
reflect the interests of the institutions they represent. We would, therefore,
expect elites working in societal sectors with conflicting interests to be polar-
ized on the issue of solidarity.
More precisely, we expect business elites to endorse civic solidarity more
and redistributive solidarity less than elites from the other sectors (H1c).
Indeed, civic solidarity goes in line with the interests of the business elites:
the opening up of borders to immigrants increases, among other things, the

competitiveness of the national labour force. On the other hand, redistributive
solidarity with its purpose of redressing social inequality conflicts with the
interests of the business elite. By contrast, elites from the labour unions
and civil society are expected to endorse attitudes towards solidarity that are
the most similar to the ones held among the general population, since these
sectors aim at representing the interests and positions of the general population.
5.3 NATIONAL I DENTITY: A NECESSARY FEATURE

OF N ATIONAL SOLIDARITY?
However, as discussed at length in this volume, such an interest-based ap-

proach cannot entirely account for solidarity towards co-members of the
national community. Hence, the rational-choice perspective can explain
some disparities in support for solidarity along social classes: members of
privileged social classes are less likely than members of low-status classes to
have redistributive solidarity and more likely to endorse civic solidarity.
However, the association between social classes and support for solidarity is
far from being deterministic: various privileged social groups endorse redis-
tributive solidarity towards their national co-members, despite the fact that
their social position makes them unlikely to ever benefit from this solidarity.
National identity which has been said to act as a glue that links together
members of a national community might explain this puzzling phenomenon:
it is widely argued that a common national identity is necessary to create a
feeling of solidarity among members of a nation (Walzer 1983; Miller 1995;
see also Banting and Kymlicka, Chapter 1, this volume). Opinions, however,
diverge on what such an identity should look like—whether civic, liberal forms
of nationalism suffice or rather thicker forms of identities are necessary. It is
not our intention here to investigate the effects of different forms of identity
on solidarity. Rather, we like to know whether people who do identify with
their nation show different degrees of civic and redistributive solidarity.
Nationalism and citizenship make people potentially equal and erase social
inequalities, thus, creating internal integration (Bendix and Rokkan 1991;
Bendix 1977). According to Nairn (1977: 41), ‘[t]he arrival of nationalism in
a distinctively modern sense was tied to the political baptism of the lower
classes […] Although sometimes hostile to democracy, nationalist movements
have been invariably populist in outlook and sought to induct lower classes
into political life’. Nationalism and citizenship have, thus, fostered a sense of
community and loyalty towards the nation (Marshall 1950). According to
Tilly (1999), nation-states are not simply territorial entities, but rather mem-
bership organizations. This membership can also be seen as some kind of a
return service for paying taxes and serving in the military (Tilly 1994: 138–9).
According to Tilly (1994), creating a sense of belonging and attachment was
necessary in the process of nation-building in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries when states started to depend on people’s taxes to build up standing
armies and national administrations.
Nationality, however, not only creates relationships of loyalty and commit-
ment between the state and its citizens, it also fulfils ethical functions and
asserts the idea that citizens care for each other (Miller 1995). As mentioned
earlier, when it comes to welfare, rich citizens might resist redistribution and,
thus, defend very different interests than citizens with low income who
support the welfare state (Johnston et al. 2010: 351). In such a situation
national identity can be seen as a mechanism that creates a sense of mutual
obligations. This is especially relevant when it comes to policies that do not
simply protect a society as a whole, for example, against unpredictable risks
such as accidents that can affect everyone but particularly concern the poor
(such as housing policies or unemployment benefits) (Miller 2006).
Nations can, therefore, be seen as moral communities where people help
each other not for strategic and rational reasons but because citizens know that
their support strengthens the community from which they also benefit (Miller
1995). Nationhood provides citizens with a sense of belonging as well as trust
and rescues them from solitude and anonymity (Tamir 1993, 1995; Calhoun
2003: 546–50). While Tilly (1999) speaks of membership organizations,
Walzer (1983) compares nations with families whose members have special
obligations among each other as they are morally connected.
In sum, national identification and a national sense of belonging is a
prerequisite for national solidarity which in turn is essential for a functioning
welfare state. While widely discussed in the political theory literature, this
relationship has hardly been investigated empirically. The few studies that
do exist, come, however, to different conclusions. Martinez-Herrera (2004)
does not find any effect of national identity on welfare state support and
Shayo (2009) shows that national identification tends to reduce support for
redistribution. Johnston et al. (2010) show that there is a positive relationship
between national identity and welfare state support that is, however, contin-
gent on distinctive features of nation-states.
There are various authors who question the integrative force of national
identity especially as it implies that solidarity cannot be produced in culturally
heterogeneous societies (Abizadeh 2002; Özkirimli 2005: 76–81). While ac-
cepting that the welfare state is also supported in multicultural societies, one
might still wonder whether a common national identity helps to predict such
support without being a necessary condition. A major problem in these
debates is often that it does not always become clear what is understood by
a common national identity: a common culture, shared political values, or the
same understanding of social justice? Moreover, it might also be that the
causal relationship goes in the other direction: redistribution might foster
mutual identification (Lacroix 2004: 291). As Helbling (2009) argues, the

debate about the relationship between nationhood and solidarity is often
more about degrees than completely opposite positions. Nowadays hardly
anyone would defend an essentialist position and argue that solidarity is
only possible in a culturally homogeneous society.
In contrast to this far from settled theoretical debate on redistributive
solidarity, the empirical literature has shown so far consistent findings when
it comes to civic solidarity: a strong sense of belonging to the national
community goes together with a tendency to reject those who do not belong
to this national community (Theiss-Morse 2009). Exactly because such iden-
tities lead to a strong sense of community, it becomes even more difficult for
outsiders to be accepted. Or as Theiss-Morse (2009: 174) puts it, ‘An increased
sense of obligation to the community can be applied only to those fully in the
community and lead to exclusion.’ Thus, even if the association between
national identity and civic solidarity is not a deterministic one, the empirical
literature has repeatedly shown that a strong national identity implies a
tendency to reject newcomers or outsiders (e.g., Ceobanu and Escandell
2008; Coenders and Scheepers 2004; Green et al. 2011).
However, the association between national identity and different solidarity
dimensions has been shown to differ from one national context to the other (see
also Johnston et al., Chapter 6, this volume). Indeed, national identities are built
on components that are culturally specific and vary across countries (Jiménez
et al. 2004). In the case of Germany, the reinvention of national identity after the
Second World War trauma has been explicitly directed towards European and
international components. Germany’s responsibility towards countries that
suffered from the Second World War is, for instance, a core component in
the supportive discourse of German elites towards the European integration
project (Diez Medrano 2003). The particularities of German identity are likely
to result in associations between identity and solidarity that are different from
the aforementioned studies carried out in other countries.
Nevertheless, we derive our hypotheses from the international literature,
since too little is known on the link of solidarity and identity in Germany for
us to specify these hypotheses to the German case. We, therefore, argue that
strong national identity is associated with less support for civic solidarity (H2a),
but with more redistributive solidarity among both mass and elites (H2b).
5.4 COSMOPOLITAN I DENTITY: A THREA T

TO N ATIONA L SOLIDARITY?
As a result of globalization and regional integration, the borders of the political

community become increasingly blurred. Indeed, the democratization of
travel and communication has facilitated social interactions between people

across national borders. This, in turn, has led to a growing number of citizens
sharing the feeling that the world has become a village. This process has been
maximized within the European Union (EU) as a result of the free movement
rights: borders between national states do not hinder any longer the circula-
tion of citizens across European countries.
This increasing permeability of national borders has led to a growing sense
of belonging to entities beyond the national community—hereafter cosmo-
politan identification—such as to the EU (Fligstein 2008) or to the global
community (Calhoun 2002). More and more citizens do not only define
themselves as members of their national community, but consider themselves
also as members of the European community or as world citizens. Similarly to
the positive association between national identity and solidarity towards the
members of the national community, cosmopolitan identification also implies
a sense of moral obligation towards the people belonging to this supranational
entity (Helbling and Teney 2015): a cosmopolitan sense of belonging is closely
linked to the support of a cosmopolitan order and the protection of and
solidarity towards members of this supranational community. Thus, cosmo-
politan identity is closely related to cosmopolitan solidarity.
The emergence of cosmopolitan identities and solidarities raises new types
of questions regarding solidarity towards the members of the national com-
munity. Indeed, besides the question whether the absence of national identity
erodes solidarity between co-nationals, one might also wonder whether iden-
tification with supranational entities affects support of solidarity towards
co-nationals. Might, for example, a cosmopolitan identity endanger national
cohesion?
A common argument among right-wing populist political actors is that
globalization and cosmopolitanism undermines the foundations of local com-
munities and social cohesion (Mudde 2004; see also Gustafson 2009: 25–6).
Various studies have, however, pointed to the compatibility of supranational
and national identities among the general population: one can, thus, identify
simultaneously as world citizen and as member of a national community (e.g.,
Hanquinet and Savage 2012; Teney, Lacewell, and de Wilde 2014). According
to Favell et al. (2011: 15), citizens are able to add a supranational dimension to
their collective identities as long as the group memberships are constructed as
nested (conceived of as concentric circles) rather than as mutually exclusive
(see also Risse 2005).
Moreover, as we have already shown, elites feel even more attached to their
nation and their municipality than the average citizen (Helbling and Teney
2015). It appears that people who travel a lot, have spent longer periods abroad
and have postmaterial values are by no means less attached to their nation or
municipality. This confirms the work by Gustafson (2009), who concludes that
concerns that the cosmopolitan elites might undermine social cohesion are
exaggerated.
However, beyond this work, little is known so far about the empirical
association of cosmopolitanism with national redistributive solidarity.
Calhoun (2003) argues that the defenders of the cosmopolitan ideal hold a
thin conception of social life and belonging, tend to deny the reality of the
social realm and stigmatize social solidarity. The cosmopolitan discourse is
typically based on individualistic terms and neglects the vital role that social
solidarities play as a resource among the less powerful and privileged citizens
(Calhoun 2003: 545). Accordingly, we would expect cosmopolitan identity and
solidarity to be associated with less support of redistributive solidarity.
In contrast to the lack of empirical findings on the relationship between
cosmopolitanism and (national) redistributive solidarity, evidence on the
positive relationship of cosmopolitan identity and support of civic solidarity
is extensive (e.g., Phillips 2002; Pichler 2009, 2012; Teney, Lacewell, and de
Wilde 2014). Because cosmopolitanism implies the respect of every human
being’s status as ultimate units of moral concern (Pogge 1992), it comes as no
surprise that citizens holding cosmopolitan identity and solidarity show a
large degree of civic solidarity: considering immigrants as full members of
the community belongs to the cosmopolitan ideal.
From this brief literature review of cosmopolitan identity and solidarity, we
derive the two following hypotheses: Cosmopolitan identity and solidarity are
positively associated with civic solidarity (H3a), but negatively associated with
(national) redistributive solidarity (H3b). These two hypotheses will be tested
by controlling for left-right political orientation. People holding strong cosmo-
politan identities are likely to be left-wing orientated. Thus, a significant
association between cosmopolitan identity and national solidarity might be
due to the fact that left-wing citizens tend to endorse stronger cosmopolitan
identities. Therefore, we will test these hypotheses by ruling out political
orientation as a potential confounder for the relationship of cosmopolitanism
with national solidarity. In this way, we will assess the extent to which
cosmopolitan identities contribute to understand the support of solidarity in
addition to political orientation that has been shown to be largely associated
with attitudes towards solidarity.
Cosmopolitan identity and solidarity are far from being equally distributed
within the population. Indeed, in his famous essay, Calhoun (2002) describes
cosmopolitanism as the ‘class consciousness of the frequent travelers’. He
argues that cosmopolitanism is an attractive rhetorical discourse to the fre-
quent travelers who hold social relations all around the world, but above all, to
those who possess visa-friendly passports and credit cards. In a similar vein,
Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis (2009) argue that cosmopolitan dispositions
can act as a new status marker and become a new means of distinction among
the upper classes.
This criticism of cosmopolitanism as an elite affair has proven to be an
empirical valid argument. Indeed, those who hold cosmopolitan dispositions
and identities are more likely to be highly educated and from high socio-
economic status (e.g., Pichler 2012; Teney, Lacewell, and de Wilde 2014).
Thus, elites are likely to hold stronger cosmopolitan identities than the general
population. Variation in the endorsement of cosmopolitan identity might, in
turn, explain the elite–mass gap in attitudes towards solidarity. Hence, since
cosmopolitan identity is expected to be linked to higher civic solidarity and
lower redistributive solidarity, the fact that cosmopolitan identity is more
widespread among elites might explain why elites support civic solidarity to
a larger extent and redistributive solidarity to a lower extent than the general
population. We, therefore, hypothesize that the elite–mass gap can be partly
explained by varying degrees of cosmopolitan identity (H4).
5.5 DATA AND OPERATIONALIZATION
We combine two types of data to test our hypotheses. First, we use the data
from the elite survey ‘Decision Makers in Germany: Values and Attitudes’,
which has been carried out at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center
(Bunselmeyer, Holland-Cunz, and Dribbisch 2013; see also Allmendinger
et al. 2013; Hartmann 2013; Helbling and Teney 2015; Teney and Helbling
2014). It is one of the few representative elite surveys that consists of a
relatively large sample, includes the main relevant societal sectors and focuses
not only on socio-structural characteristics of the elites but also on their values
and attitudes.
The face-to-face survey has been carried out in 2011/2012 among elites
holding the highest positions in a various range of societal sectors in Germany.
Following the positional approach, those persons, who hold dominant posi-
tions in the most important organizations and, thus, have a formal influence
on important social and political decisions and developments, were selected
(Mills 1956; Bürklin 1997: 15–18). First, the relevant sectors were selected,
then the most important organizations within these sectors and finally the
formal leading positions of each organization.
The original elite survey sample was composed of the 956 top positional
elites in eleven societal sectors (Bunselmeyer, Holland-Cunz, and Dribbisch
2013). The survey response rate was 37 per cent, which can be considered as
high, considering the difficulties of surveying this very privileged population
(Hoffmann-Lange 2008).1 The data are composed of 354 top elites holding the
highest positions in the following sectors: economy (n=103), professional
lobbyists (n=6), politics (n=29), bureaucracy (n=93), military (n=9), research
(n=40), media (n=10), labour union (n=13), justice (n=29), church (n=6), and
civil society (n=16).
The elite survey aimed at collecting precise socio-demographic character-

istics and at measuring elites’ positions and attitudes towards various relevant
domestic and international policy issues. The questionnaire contained several
closed questions on civic and redistributive solidarity and on national and
cosmopolitan identification. The phrasing of these questions matches the item
wording from the 2006 WVS (N=2064 for Germany). This elite survey
questionnaire design allows us to combine the elite survey data with the data
from the WVS for the purpose of comparing the attitudes. A drawback of this
comparative design is, however, the five years gap between the data collection
among elites and the general population. Unfortunately, the 2010 WVS wave
does not contain the same civic solidarity items that have been asked in both
the 2006 WVS wave and in the elite survey. Therefore, our main analysis will
be carried out with the 2006 WVS data. We will nevertheless discuss in
footnotes whenever possible the differences in the distribution of the main
items between the 2006 and the 2010 WVS waves for the German population
in order to shed light on potential changes in public attitudes between 2006
and 2010.
We test our hypotheses with two distinct analyses. First, we assess the elite–
mass attitudinal gap by comparing the means of the redistributive and civic
solidarity items of the elite and mass surveys. Second, we investigate with
linear regression analysis, the association of national and cosmopolitan iden-
tities with the redistributive and civic solidarity dimensions among elites and
the general population.
The items used to measure the civic and redistributive solidarity dimensions
are classical items that have been repeatedly used in various waves of several
international mass surveys such as the European Social Survey or the
WVS. Civic solidarity is measured in both the elite and mass survey data
with the following item: ‘Ethnic diversity erodes a country’s unity vs Ethnic
diversity enriches life’. It ranges from 0 (lowest support for civic solidarity) to
1 (largest support for civic solidarity). This civic solidarity measure refers to
the acceptance of and openness to ethnic diversity. In the elite data it has an
average of 0.79 (SD: 0.20). Among the general population, this civic solidarity
scale has a mean of 0.62 (SD: 0.31).2 Redistributive solidarity is measured in
both the elite and mass survey data with the items ‘We need larger income
differences as incentives for individual effort vs Incomes should be made more
equal’ and ‘People should take more responsibility to provide for themselves vs
The government should take more responsibility to ensure that everyone is
provided for’. Both items range from 0 to 1, where 1 represents the largest
support for redistributive solidarity. We constructed an alpha scale ranging
from 0 to 1 based on these two items. Our redistributive solidarity index refers
to support for state redistribution towards vulnerable citizens and for redis-
tributive policies leading to less income inequality. Among the masses, the
redistributive solidarity scale has an average of 0.62 (SD: 0.23) and among
elites of 0.49 (SD: 0.23).3
The items on national and cosmopolitan identification differ somewhat in
the mass and elite surveys. National identity is measured in the WVS with the
item ‘I identify with Germany’ ranging from 0 (strongly disagree) and 1
(strongly agree). In the elite survey, national identity was measured with the
question ‘To what extent do you feel close to the people in Germany?’ ranging
from 0 (not at all) to 1 (very strongly). Among the general population, the
average value for national identity item is 0.73 (SD: 0.26) and among elites
0.80 (SD: 0.18).4
Among the masses, cosmopolitan identity is measured with an alpha index
summarizing the items ‘I identify with the EU’ and ‘I see myself as a world
citizen’. Among elites, cosmopolitan identity is measured with an alpha index
summarizing the questions ‘To what extent do you feel close to the people in
the EU?’ and ‘To what extent do you feel close to people around the world,
regardless the country and part of the world they live?’ The indices for both
elites and masses range from 0 to 1, where 1 corresponds to the strongest
supranational identity. Among the general population, this cosmopolitan
identity scale has a mean of 0.46 (SD: 0.26) and among elites of 0.58 (SD:
0.18).5 These items among masses and elites measure attachment to the
national and supranational entities respectively, which is one of the four
dimensions of collective identity conceptualized by Miller and Ali (2014).
Moreover, these items are classical identity measurements used in various
cross-national surveys (Hanquinet and Savage 2012).
Items on moral cosmopolitanism have been administered to elites, but
unfortunately not to the general population. We will nevertheless use this
scale for the regression analysis on the elite data in addition to the cosmo-
politan identity scale. The first item is: ‘I have a strong moral obligation to
help other Europeans solve their problems, who are in existential distress
through no fault of their own.’ The second item is: ‘I have a strong moral
obligation to help people in the world solve their problems, who are in
existential distress through no fault of their own.’ The answer categories for
these items range from 0 (disagree completely) to 1 (agree completely). We
summarized these two items with a cosmopolitan solidarity index ranging
from 0 to 1, where one corresponds to the strongest support for cosmopolitan
solidarity (mean: 0.59; SD: 0.19). We also use a similar question on moral
nationalism that asks elites the same question about their willingness to help
Germans (mean: 0.76; SD: 0.23): ‘I have a strong moral obligation to help
other Germans solve their problems, who are in existential distress through
no fault of their own’.
We will test our hypotheses among the general population by controlling
for the following variables: the mean centred left-right political scale (mean:
−0.0003; SD: 0.20; Min: −0.42; Max: 0.58), the mean centred income (mean:
0.0002; SD: 0.20; Min: −0.39; Max: 0.61), the mean centred age (mean: 0.44;
SD: 17.49; Min: −32; Max: 43), education (at most primary education 42.9 per
cent; at most secondary education 43.8 per cent; tertiary education 13.3 per
cent) and gender (male: 44.1 per cent).
For the elites, we controlled for the following factors: to measure left-right
political positions we used the same left-right political scale as for the general
population (mean: −0.00003; SD: 0.16; Min: −0.50; Max: 0.39). We do not
control for education and income as among elites there is relatively little
variation in our sample with regard to education; almost 90 per cent of all
respondents have a university degree. As income constitutes a sensitive issue
among the elites this question was not asked. Instead of education and income
we control for the sector in which a person is working. Finally, we controlled
for mean centred age (mean: 0.0002; SD: 7.12; Min: −19.1; Max: 21.9) and
gender (male: 88 per cent).
5 . 6 . E L I T E– M A S S A TT ITUD I N A L DI V I D E ON CI V I C
AND REDISTRIBUTIVE SOLIDARITY
Figure 5.1 presents the average opinion of the German population and elites
on four questions measuring civic and redistributive solidarity. All items range
Immigration as cultural enrichment
Immigration as economic enrichment
More state responsibility
Less income inequality
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

Population Politics, administration
Unions, society Business
Figure 5.1 Elite–mass gap on civic and redistributive solidarity

Note: For the population, the average opinion has been calculated with the German data from the European
Social Survey (2008) for the item ‘Immigration is an economic enrichment’ and from the 2006 World Value
Survey for the three other items. For the elites, the average opinion has been calculated by regrouping
respondents from the 2011 elite survey ‘Decision Makers in Germany: Values and Attitudes’ into three main
societal sectors.
from 0 to 1, where 1 refers to the position with the highest civic or redistribu-
tive solidarity. Elites have been regrouped into three groups: (1) elites belong-
ing to the sector of union and society, (2) elites from politics and
administrative sectors, and (3) business elites. The attitudinal gap between
the general population and the three groups of elites is similar for the items
measuring the same solidarity dimension. This points to the robustness in the
strength of the elite–mass gap on the two solidarity dimensions.
First of all, these descriptive results confirm our first hypothesis (H1a): elites
from all sectors support civic solidarity to a larger extent than the general
population. However, the results concerning redistributive solidarity are more
contrasted: elites from politics, administration, and business are less likely
than the general population to support redistributive solidarity. By contrast,
elites from unions and civil society hold positions on redistributive solidarity
that are very similar to the positions of the average population. We can, thus,
only partly confirm H1b, since only elites from two out of the three societal
sectors support redistributive solidarity to a much lower extent than the
general population.
Lastly, this graph provides some evidence in favour of H1c, which states
that elites’ support for civic and redistributive solidarity will reflect the inter-
ests of the sectors they represent. Indeed, and as expected, business elites
compose the societal group which opposes redistributive solidarity the most.
Furthermore, elites from unions and civil society are the elites reflecting the
opinion of the general population on redistributive solidarity the most. However,
these results cannot be generalized to the other solidarity dimension. Elites
from the three sectors share rather homogeneous opinions on the civic
solidarity dimension. Thus, our results suggest that elites hold positions on
the redistributive solidarity dimension that represent the interests of their
sector. However, this is not true for civic solidarity that is strongly upheld by
elites independent of their sectors of activity.
5.7 THE ROLE OF NATIONAL AN D

COSMOPOLITAN IDENTITIES
In the second part of our analysis, we ran linear regressions on the civic
solidarity item and the redistributive solidarity index. Because some of the
variables differ for the mass and elites (see section 5.5), we ran the regressions
on the mass and elite data separately. In each regression model with the mass
data, we control for education, income, age, gender, and the left-right political
placement scale. Figure 5.2 displays the associations of national and cosmo-
politan identification with the civic and redistributive solidarity dimensions
0.7 0.7
0.65
0.6
Solidarity
Solidarity
0.6
0.5
0.55
0.5 0.4
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
National Identification Cosmopolitan Identification
Civic Solidarity Redistributive Solidarity Civic Solidarity Redistributive Solidarity
Figure 5.2 Different forms of identification and solidarity among the general
population
Note: Estimated predictions with 95% confidence intervals by controlling for left-right political placement,
education, income, gender, and age.
among the German general population. Table 5.1 presents the regression
coefficients of the different models from which these graphs are derived.
Moreover, Table 5.2 shows the replication of these regression models with
the 2010 WVS survey data. The strength and directions of the coefficients of
independent variables with the redistributive solidarity index remain quite
stable in the 2010 WVS data.
The left-hand side of Figure 5.2 presents the associations of national iden-
tification with the civic and redistributive solidarity dimensions. National
identification is significantly associated with neither the civic nor the redis-
tributive solidarity dimensions. Based on these results, we can confirm neither
H2a (i.e., national identity is related to lower civic solidarity) nor H2b (i.e.,
national identity is associated with higher redistributive solidarity) for the
general population.
The right-hand side of Figure 5.2 shows the associations between cosmo-
politan identification and civic and redistributive solidarity dimensions among
the German population. Cosmopolitan identification turns out to be insignifi-
cantly related to redistributive solidarity. By contrast, cosmopolitan identifi-
cation shows a significantly positive association with civic solidarity. In other
words, German citizens who consider themselves members of a supranational
community are more likely to strongly agree that ethnic diversity enriches life.
These results confirm our H3a (i.e., cosmopolitan identity is positively asso-
ciated with civic solidarity), but do not provide any support to H3b (i.e.,
cosmopolitan identity is negatively related to redistributive solidarity)
among the general population.
Turning now to our analyses among elites, Figure 5.3 presents the associ-
ations of moral nationalism, national identification, moral cosmopolitanism,
and cosmopolitan identification with civic and redistributive solidarity among
the elites. These associations have been estimated by controlling for elites’
Table 5.1 Different forms of identification and solidarity among the general population
Civic solidarity Redistributive solidarity
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)
National identity −0.018 0.010 −0.044* −0.027

(0.023) (0.023) (0.020) (0.021)
Cosmopolitan identity 0.253*** 0.230*** −0.013 −0.021
(0.023) (0.023) (0.021) (0.022)
Left-Right −0.257*** −0.235*** −0.163*** −0.170***
(0.030) (0.029) (0.027) (0.027)
Primary education −0.026 −0.015 −0.018 −0.008 0.035** 0.042*** 0.031* 0.038**
(0.013) (0.014) (0.013) (0.013) (0.012) (0.012) (0.012) (0.012)
Tertiary education 0.127*** 0.115*** 0.090*** 0.082*** 0.008 −0.005 0.009 −0.005
(0.019) (0.019) (0.018) (0.019) (0.017) (0.017) (0.017) (0.017)
Income 0.150*** 0.152*** 0.111*** 0.126*** −0.270*** −0.256*** −0.270*** −0.254***
(0.030) (0.031) (0.029) (0.029) (0.026) (0.028) (0.026) (0.027)
Male 0.024* 0.015 0.031** 0.022 0.007 −0.001 0.009 0.000
(0.012) (0.012) (0.011) (0.012) (0.010) (0.011) (0.010) (0.011)
Age −0.001* −0.001* −0.000 −0.000 0.001* 0.001* 0.001 0.001
(0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000)
Constant 0.537*** 0.515*** 0.406*** 0.416*** 0.641*** 0.631*** 0.616*** 0.621***
(0.021) (0.021) (0.015) (0.015) (0.018) (0.019) (0.014) (0.014)
N 1,751 1,598 1,743 1,592 1,787 1,620 1,775 1,611
R² 0.070 0.114 0.132 0.163 0.085 0.102 0.078 0.099
Note: Standard errors in parentheses

***p<0.001, **p<0.01, *p<0.05
Table 5.2 Different forms of identification and solidarity among the general popula-
tion: A replication with the 2010 World Values Survey Data
(1) (2) (3) (4)
National identity −0.037 −0.021

(0.021) (0.021)
Cosmopolitan identity −0.012 −0.014
(0.020) (0.020)
Left-Right −0.229*** −0.232***
(0.025) (0.025)
Primary education 0.022 0.030* 0.023 0.031**
(0.012) (0.012) (0.012) (0.012)
Tertiary education −0.040** −0.046** −0.036** −0.043**
(0.014) (0.014) (0.014) (0.014)
Income −0.216*** −0.183*** −0.222*** −0.184***
(0.026) (0.027) (0.026) (0.027)
Male −0.020* −0.021* −0.022* −0.022*
(0.010) (0.010) (0.010) (0.010)
Age −0.000 −0.000 −0.000 −0.000
(0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000)
Constant 0.683*** 0.669*** 0.662*** 0.661***
(0.018) (0.018) (0.014) (0.014)
N 1,924 1,792 1,929 1,801
R² 0.064 0.104 0.064 0.105
0.85
0.9
0.8
Civic Solidarity
Civic Solidarity
0.75 0.8
0.7
0.7
0.65
0.6 0.6
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
National Identification Moral Nationalism Cosmo. Identification Moral Cosmopolitanism
0.6
0.55
Redistributive Solidarity
Redistributive Solidarity
0.55
0.5
0.5
0.45
0.45 0.4
0.4 0.35
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
National Identification Moral Nationalism Cosmo. Identification Moral Cosmopolitanism
Figure 5.3 Different forms of identification and solidarity among the elites
Note: Estimated predictions with 95% confidence intervals by controlling for left-right political placement,
sectors, gender, and age.
sectors of activity, gender, age, and the left-right political placement. The
regression coefficients of the corresponding models can be found in Table 5.3.
Starting with the graph at the top left of Figure 5.3, we see that national
identification and moral nationalism are slightly positively associated with
civic solidarity (these associations are significant at the 0.01 level; see
Table 5.3). In other words, elites who feel close to the people in Germany
and who consider a moral obligation to help other Germans in existential
distress tend to support civic solidarity to a slightly larger extent. In contrast to
civic solidarity, redistributive solidarity is related neither to national identifi-
cation nor to moral nationalism among elites (see graph at the bottom left of
Figure 5.3). These results contradict both H2a and H2b (i.e., national identity
is related to lower support of civic solidarity and to higher support of redis-
tributive solidarity) among elites.
While national identification and moral nationalism are either not related
or only weakly associated with civic and redistributive solidarity, cosmopol-
itan identification and moral cosmopolitanism are significantly and positively
associated with the two solidarity dimensions (see the right-hand side of
Figure 5.3). Elites who identify strongly with a supranational entity and who
feel morally obliged to help people in need beyond their national community
tend to agree to a larger extent that ethnic diversity enriches life (see the graph
at the top right-hand side of Figure 5.3). Moreover, elites who consider their
moral obligation to help people beyond their national community in existen-
tial distress, support national redistributive solidarity to a larger extent. The
association between cosmopolitan identification and redistributive solidarity
is positive, but remains insignificant (on the bottom right-hand side of
Figure 5.3). These results confirm H3a (i.e., cosmopolitan identification and
solidarity are positively related to civic solidarity), but reject H3b (i.e., cosmo-
politan identification and solidarity are negatively associated with national
redistributive solidarity) among elites.
All in all, the results for both the general population and elites provide
evidence in support of our hypothesis referring to the relationship of solidarity
with national and cosmopolitan identification: among both elites and the
general population, holding a strong cosmopolitan identity is associated
with a larger support for civic solidarity (H3a). By contrast, the results
among both elites and the general population cannot confirm the three
other hypotheses on the association of identification with solidarity.
Lastly, in the light of these results, we also need to reject our last hypothesis:
the elite–mass gap on attitudes towards solidarity cannot be explained by
varying degrees of cosmopolitan identities. While our descriptive statistics
show that elites identify more strongly with a supranational entity than the
general population, introducing this variable into our models could not help
reduce the elite–mass gap in support of solidarity: the constant of the regres-
sion models for the elites does not become much more similar to the constant
Table 5.3 Different forms of identification and solidarity among elites
Civic Solidarity Redistributive Solidarity
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)
National identity 0.119° 0.015

(0.062) (0.055)
Moral nationalism 0.086° 0.029
(0.047) (0.042)
Cosmopolitan identity 0.168** 0.066
(0.061) (0.054)
Moral cosmopolitanism 0.096* 0.115**
(0.045) (0.040)
Left-wing 0.148* 0.125° 0.116 0.109 0.644*** 0.641*** 0.634*** 0.612***
(0.073) (0.073) (0.073) (0.074) (0.065) (0.065) (0.065) (0.065)
Sector: Society 0.136** 0.142** 0.121* 0.135** 0.140** 0.143** 0.132** 0.127**
(0.051) (0.052) (0.051) (0.052) (0.046) (0.046) (0.046) (0.046)
Sector: Unions 0.171* 0.174* 0.137* 0.163* 0.254*** 0.253*** 0.239*** 0.238***
(0.068) (0.068) (0.069) (0.068) (0.061) (0.061) (0.062) (0.060)
Sector: Politics 0.024 0.026 0.010 0.023 0.060 0.050 0.053 0.044
(0.055) (0.054) (0.055) (0.054) (0.049) (0.048) (0.049) (0.048)
Sector: Administration 0.072° 0.070 0.059 0.064 −0.052 −0.053 −0.058 −0.065°
(0.043) (0.043) (0.043) (0.043) (0.039) (0.038) (0.039) (0.038)
Sector: Business 0.074° 0.073° 0.066 0.076° −0.057 −0.059 −0.062 −0.061
(0.043) (0.043) (0.043) (0.043) (0.039) (0.038) (0.039) (0.038)
Sector: Science 0.144** 0.145** 0.120* 0.138** −0.018 −0.016 −0.028 −0.031
(0.048) (0.049) (0.049) (0.049) (0.043) (0.043) (0.044) (0.043)
Age −0.003 −0.003° −0.002 −0.003 −0.002 −0.002 −0.002 −0.002
(0.002) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001)
Male −0.004 0.001 0.004 0.011 −0.053° −0.052° −0.050 −0.041
(0.035) (0.035) (0.035) (0.035) (0.031) (0.031) (0.031) (0.031)
Constant 0.619*** 0.644*** 0.621*** 0.644*** 0.535*** 0.526*** 0.513*** 0.474***
(0.066) (0.058) (0.056) (0.055) (0.059) (0.051) (0.050) (0.048)
N 322 319 322 318 324 321 324 320
R² 0.084 0.087 0.096 0.090 0.453 0.459 0.455 0.472
Note: Category of reference for sector is judiciary. Standard errors in parentheses

***p<0.001, **p<0.01, *p<0.05, °p<0.1
of the regression models for the general population once we control for the
cosmopolitan identity variable (see Table 5.3).
5. 8 CON CLU SI ON
In this chapter, we have looked at the positions of elites and masses on civic
and redistributive solidarity in Germany. Besides investigating the role of the
rational interest and collective identity perspectives in explaining the elite–
mass gap in positions towards solidarity, our results enable us to assess more
generally the representative gap in civic and redistributive solidarity. Indeed,
while union and civil society elites support redistributive solidarity in much
the same was as does the general population, the positions of political elites on
redistributive solidarity deviate widely from the positions of the masses.
Furthermore, none of the elite groups seem to represent to any extent the
general population in their attitudes towards civic solidarity. Our findings,
therefore, shed light on a large representative gap, with political elites showing
much more civic and much less redistributive solidarity than the general
population. This representative gap can in turn become an additional chal-
lenge for preserving social cohesion within a national political community that
is becoming more ethnically diverse.
The exponential increase in refugee flows that Germany has been facing since
2015 clearly illustrates the emergence of such challenges for social cohesion.
Indeed, parties from the entire left-right political spectrum that compose the
federal parliament (with the exception of the Christian Social Union for Bavaria,
the Bavarian sister of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union) are op-
posed to the idea of closing the national borders to refugees and restricting
refugee flows with the implementation of an upper limit to the total number of
refugees allowed to enter German territory (as of writing this chapter in
February 2016). By contrast, a large majority of the population believes that
Germany will not be able to cope with the high number of refugees (ZDF
Politbarometer 2016). The current refugee crisis makes this elite–mass incon-
gruence in support for civic solidarity highly salient and points to wide discrep-
ancies of opinion between parties in the federal parliament and their electoral
bases. This, in turn, leads to political discontent among growing segments of the
population and to the increasing success of political challengers such as the
right-wing populist party founded in 2013, ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD), or
the right-wing social movement ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of
the West’ (PEGIDA) which started to organize large demonstrations in 2014.
This example illustrates the extent to which a relative degree of elites–mass
congruence in support for solidarity (in this case civic solidarity) is crucial for
the preservation of social cohesion within a (national) political community.
Turning now to the power of the two theoretical perspectives in explaining

positions towards civic and redistributive solidarity among elites and masses,
the evidence regarding the role of rational interest in the attitudinal gap on
solidarity is by far the most conclusive finding from our analyses. Indeed, the
direction of the elite–mass gap in support for solidarity can be largely interpret-
ed in terms of the conflicting interests among elites and masses regarding civic
and redistributive solidarity: elites support to a much larger extent civic solidar-
ity and to a much lesser extent redistributive solidarity than the average citizen.
Furthermore, this interest-based approach can also explain the attitudinal gap in
redistributive solidarity among elites along their sector of activity: business elites
are the ones supporting redistributive solidarity the least, while elites from the
unions and society show positions towards redistributive solidarity that are very
close to the positions of the general population. This interest-based explanation
shows, however, some limitation, since it fails to explain the large homogeneity
in the attitudes of elites concerning civic solidarity. Thus, by and large, the
rational interest approach has a strong power in explaining the attitudinal
divides between elites and masses on the civic and redistributive solidarity
dimensions: differences between elites and masses as well as within elites can
largely be interpreted in terms of diverging personal interests.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the role of national and cosmo-
politan identification in the support for solidarity: the role of national and
cosmopolitan identities in national solidarity has shown to be much more
limited than expected. First, we could not find any evidence among masses
and elites for a link between national identity and solidarity, both in its civic
and redistributive dimensions. Thus, our results show that support for civic and
redistributive solidarity is not affected by the degree to which elites and masses
identify with their national community. Second, the role of cosmopolitan
identification in the support for solidarity shows more contrasting results.
Among both the masses and elites, cosmopolitan identity goes indeed hand
in hand with support for civic redistribution. Nevertheless, the extent to which
the general population and elites identify with a supranational community is not
related to their positions towards redistributive solidarity. Thus, redistributive
solidarity remains independent from the level of national and cosmopolitan
identification, once we control for the main socio-demographic characteristics
and respondents’ political orientation. By contrast, civic solidarity is endorsed to
a larger extent by elites and the general population who identify strongly with a
supranational entity. Civic solidarity remains nevertheless unaffected by the
degree of national identification.
Besides the role of national and cosmopolitan identification in supporting
civic and redistributive solidarity, we also investigated the relationship of
moral cosmopolitanism with the civic and redistributive dimensions of
national solidarity among elites. We measured moral cosmopolitanism as to
which extent respondents feel morally obliged to help people in existential
distress who live outside of their national community. Unexpectedly, our

results show that elites that are strongly committed to people in need belong-
ing to a supranational entity tend to support both the civic and redistributive
dimensions of solidarity. Thus, moral cosmopolitanism does not imply the
rejection of the importance of the welfare state for the less privileged citizens
belonging to a national community. On the contrary, moral cosmopolitanism
goes hand in hand with more support for redistributive and civic solidarity at
the national level. These findings should reassure Calhoun (2003) in his
concerns that cosmopolitans stigmatize social solidarity and deny the import-
ance of community resources for the less powerful and privileged citizens.
Moreover, the association of moral cosmopolitanism with national redistribu-
tive and civic solidarity is robust: it remains significant even when we control
for elites’ left-right political orientation. In other words, people who support
solidarity will show solidarity towards anyone, regardless of his or her specific
national and ethnic belonging. Thus, according to our results, neither nation-
alism nor cosmopolitanism is detrimental to national solidarity in its civic and
redistributive dimensions. Moreover, our results highlight the role that moral
cosmopolitanism can play in strengthening the endorsement of national civic
and redistributive solidarity. Unfortunately, questions on moral cosmopolit-
anism were only administered in the elite survey. Future studies among the
general population should assess the extent to which the positive relationship
between moral cosmopolitanism and the civic and redistributive dimensions
of national solidarity can be generalized to the average citizen or whether this
relationship remains an elite affair.
Moreover, we measured civic and redistributive solidarity as well as national
and supranational identities with one or two attitudinal items due to data
limitations. Obviously, we could not take the multidimensionality of these
concepts into account of our analyses. Future research could shed light on the
extent to which the relationships of national and supranational identification
with civic and redistributive solidarity varies along these multiple dimensions.
Furthermore, the cross-sectional design of our data did not allow us to
investigate the causality behind these correlational findings. Whether cosmo-
politan identity and moral cosmopolitanism affect the level of redistributive
and civic solidarity or vice versa remains an open question for future studies
that are specifically designed to test the causality of these relations.
Future research should also investigate the extent to which our results
are generalizable to other Western democracies. Indeed, the relationship be-
tween national identity and the various solidarity dimensions has been shown to
vary across countries (see Johnston et al., Chapter 6, this volume). In the
German case, the reinvention of the national identity after the Second World
War has explicitly included cosmopolitan components. The normative pressure
on elites to fit a cosmopolitan ideal is, therefore, likely to be much stronger in
Germany than in other European countries. Assessing the relationships of
cosmopolitanism and national identities with various dimensions of national

solidarity in other Western democracies will enable us to shed light on the
specificities of the German case and test the generalizability of our findings.
NOTES
1. By comparison, the German telephone survey composed of MP’s and business elites
carried out in 2007 by Best, Lengyel, and Verzichelli (2012) has a response rate of
13.7 percent.
2. Unfortunately, this item was not asked in the 2010 WVS wave. The only item that
approximates civic solidarity and that has been asked in both 2006 and 2010 WVS
waves is the following one: ‘When jobs are scarce, employers should give priority to
Germans over immigrants.’ The distribution of this item in the 2010 data is: Agree:
43.12%; Neither, nor: 23.28%; Disagree: 33.60%. By contrast, the distribution of this
item in 2006 was: Agree 56.44%,; Neither, nor:16.84%; Disagree: 26.72%. Thus,
German respondents of the 2010 wave tend to support civic solidarity to a larger
extent than German respondents in the 2006 wave.
3. The redistributive solidarity scale built with the exactly same items from the 2010
WVS wave has an average of 0.65 and a SD of 0.22. Thus, the distribution of the
redistributive solidarity index is very similar in both waves.
4. The distribution of the national identity item in the 2010 WVS wave is very similar
to the 2006 national identity item (Mean: 0.75; SD: 0.24).
5. The cosmopolitan identity index in the 2010 WVS data for Germany has a higher
average than the 2006 cosmopolitan identity average: Mean: 0.54 and SD: 0.25.
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6
Diversity and Solidarity

New Evidence from Canada and the US
Richard Johnston, Matthew Wright, Stuart Soroka,

and Jack Citrin
6.1 I NTRODUCTION
Does identification with a nationality promote or inhibit other kinds of solidarity

within the physical bounds of the state? This question has been the subject of
debate in recent years, a product of increasingly international migration flows,
deepening intra-national ethno-racial diversity, and consequent concerns about
how both native and foreign-born populations might best be able to cope with,
and even embrace, the new demographic landscape. Our aim here is to provide
some answers to this increasingly important question.
We take as the starting point David Miller’s claims for national identity as a
pillar of the welfare state (Miller 1995; Miller and Ali 2014). Our primary
objective is to examine the links between national identity and ‘redistributive
solidarity’, as defined by Banting and Kymlicka in the Introduction to this
volume. So far, empirical work has yielded mixed results: negative findings
predominate, with occasional exceptions that reflect either distinctive identity
contexts (Johnston et al. 2010) or distinctive components of redistributive
effort (Wright and Reeskens 2013). Further complicating enquiry is the
increasing diversity of populations in rich nations, driven mainly by acceler-
ating rates of international migration.
This chapter probes fundamental questions about the putative link between
national identity and redistributive solidarity. Beyond the basic issue of
whether identity matters and how, we outline new empirical claims on the
under-explored questions about when it matters and why. The former speaks
to a burgeoning literature on the moderating role of multiculturalism policy,
whereas the latter speaks to the validity of the causal mechanisms suggested in
Miller’s theory. We review these relevant literatures first. We then turn to
Diversity and Solidarity 153
empirics, relying on a purpose-built web survey fielded in Canada and the US

in January 2014.1 Although we hope to take the logic of the Canadian and US
comparison further afield, the North American pattern is fruitful in itself.
Americans and English-speaking Canadians have much in common, but their
discourses of nationality have arguably been diverging for forty years or more.
Quebec, for our purposes, is a piece of Europe in North America: Quebeckers
deviate from the Canadian enthusiasm for multiculturalism even as they
inhabit a somewhat besieged linguistic bastion. And having this third ‘nation-
al’ context turns out to be critical to our analysis: a comparison of the US,
Quebec, and the ROC (‘Rest of Canada’) reveals some important differences in
the nature of the impact of national identity on social solidarity.
6.2 REDISTRIBUTIVE SOLIDARITY
‘Solidarity’ and ‘social cohesion’ are widely used (usually in tandem with
‘challenged’, ‘declining’, ‘strained’, or the like) concepts, and their presence
generally is considered of paramount importance for a functioning democ-
racy. Most will agree about what these macro-level conditions are good for—
tamping down social conflict, oiling the machinery of the democratic process,
generating cross-cutting ties of obligation—but it is surprisingly difficult to
nail down exactly what it means for a society to be ‘solidaristic’ or ‘cohesive’,
and how we would know if it was. We should also acknowledge that our
approach to the problem is through a psychological lens, with a focus on
individual differences within countries rather than on aggregate differences
among countries.2 But our three-sample comparison allows us to think about
how the individual-level relationships vary by aggregate context.
Banting and Kymlicka’s Introduction provides operational definitions of
each of three dimensions of solidarity—civic, democratic, and redistributive.
We focus this discussion solely on redistributive solidarity, which includes
‘support for redistribution towards the poor and vulnerable groups; support
for the full access of people of all backgrounds to core social programs; support
for programmes that recognize and accommodate the distinctive needs and
identities of different ethnocultural groups’ (Banting and Kymlicka, Chapter 1,
this volume). Within the category of economic redistribution, we differentiate
between support for the welfare state in general, and ‘welfare chauvinism’. We
take chauvinism to include both wanting to restrict immigrants’ access to
benefits and a more general sentiment that immigrants disproportionately
burden the welfare state (Kitschelt 1997). It is clearly possible for citizens to
favour welfare redistribution in a general sense, but not when it is targeted to
immigrants or seen as disproportionately benefiting them (Gorodzeisky and
Semyonov 2009; van der Waal et al. 2010). Debate on this issue is ongoing in
154 R. Johnston, M. Wright, S. Soroka, and J. Citrin
Europe, where many political parties, especially at the populist right, advocate
a move to the Danish model of restricting social benefits for newly arrived
citizens and offering instead active labour market policies (Clausen et al.
2008). Support for the welfare state in general also surfaces in our analysis,
but more as a factor that helps us understand the sources of and challenges to
support for redistribution.
6 .3 CH A L L E N G ES T O S O L I D A R I TY
The challenge of maintaining solidarity is endemic to democracy. No society is

so homogeneous in interests and values that perfect harmony follows auto-
matically. But if solidarity is always problematic, recent decades have intensi-
fied the challenge. In particular, increased volumes of international migration
and concomitant increases in ethnic and cultural diversity may have diluted
the figurative glue that binds members of a polity to each other.
Most important for our purposes is that diversity challenges redistributive
solidarity. Diversity plays a key role in various accounts of why the welfare
state is weaker in the US than in European countries (Alesina et al. 2001;
Gould and Palmer 1988), a finding that also appears among US cities and
states (Alesina, Baquir, and Easterly 1997; Hero and Tolbert 1996; Plotnick
and Winters 1985) and in comparisons across the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) (Soroka, Johnston, and Banting 2006).
A recurring theme in this literature is the elevated salience of in-group/
out-group distinctions as heterogeneity increases. From the standpoint of
those in the majority, willingness to support government redistribution erodes
when the recipients are ‘outsider’ minorities (Banting 1999, 2000; Carens 1988;
Kitschelt 1997; Soroka, Banting, and Johnston 2006). And when the ‘outsiders’
are recent immigrants, they can more easily be portrayed as not deserving to
benefit from taxes they have not paid.
6 .4 NA T I O N A L I DE N T I T Y
For all that nations may be only ‘imagined communities’, references to a

common ‘we-feeling’, a sense of mutual belonging and obligation abound
(Anderson 1991; Deutsch 1966). Nationhood is ‘a claim on people’s loyalty,
on their attention, on their solidarity’ (Brubaker 2004: 116). It is a complex
claim, to be sure: social-psychological work on national identity has empha-
sized its multi-faceted nature, for instance, distinguishing its affective
character in feeling towards one’s own nation and others (patriotism, national
chauvinism, etc.) from its normative content—what it means to belong (e.g.,
Citrin and Sears 2009, 2014).
According to Miller (1995), identification with the nation increases the
likelihood that people will place trust in their fellow citizens: ‘trust requires
solidarity not merely within groups but across them, and this in turn depends
upon a common identification of the kind that nationality alone can provide’
(1995: 140; also 2000). According to Kymlicka (2010: 225), this kind of trust is
essential because it encourages us to make sacrifices for ‘anonymous others
whom we do not know, will probably never meet, and whose ethnic descent,
religion and way of life differs from our own’. The central premise is that a
common shared identity functions as a category superordinate to ethnic,
religious, or linguistic ties and can function as a kind of ‘glue’ that holds
society together. It represents, from this standpoint, a political source of
solidarity that derives from political community rather than state policy per se.
This argument is echoed in other literatures as well. For example, Social
Identity Theory predicts that collective identification prioritizes group welfare
over individualism in decision-making (Kramer and Brewer 1984), and that a
strong over-arching national identity mitigates competition among subgroups
(e.g., Gaertner and Dovidio 2000; Transue 2007). In Social Capital scholarship
the nation-state exemplifies ‘bridging’ social capital (Paxton 1999; Putnam
2000): it brings together people of different class, religious, and ethnic back-
grounds under a common banner.
This argument is appealing to those concerned about the robustness of
welfare states in the face of immigrant-driven diversity. For liberal nationalists,
part of what it means for a nation to be an ‘ethical community’ is that it entails
duties to one’s co-nationals (Miller 1995: 11). This is essential, because the
willingness to make sacrifices for them is what underpins redistributive social
policies. Without ties of nationality among citizens, large-scale redistribution
is infeasible, as there is much less incentive for people to go beyond strictly
reciprocal interactions and to uphold norms of redistribution to unknown
‘others’. For liberal nationalists, such an ethical community must be thickened
by a common culture, without connoting ethnic ties or ancestry; the latter
would be both normatively illiberal and, in a diverse polity, more likely to
promote strife over solidarity.
Empirical findings about the impact of national identity are mixed, how-
ever. Johnston et al. (2010), Schildkraut (2011), and Theiss-Morse (2009)
confirm Miller’s intuition but Shayo (2009) does not. Findings are similarly
mixed for other pro-social behaviours. For instance, Wong (2010) finds a
positive link to law-abidingness. Others see a darker side with national identity
underpinning anti-immigrant sentiment (Pehrson, Vignoles, and Brown 2009;
Shayo 2009; Wong 2010; Wright, Citrin, and Wand 2012), intolerance (Wong
2010), and welfare chauvinism (Wright and Reeskens 2013). Still others see a
mixed and conditional picture (Citrin, Johnston, and Wright 2012; Reeskens
and Wright 2013; Wright and Reeskens 2013).
The empirical confusion may reflect the complexity of the idea of national
identity. There are several approaches to how national identity is conceptual-
ized and measured, with scholars variously emphasizing affective and norma-
tive considerations. That is, one needs to distinguish between the extent of
warm feelings towards the nation, and the specific social contours ascribed to
it. Early arguments emphasized the affective dimension. This approach has
been challenged on both normative (Miller and Ali 2014) and empirical
grounds (e.g., Reeskens and Wright 2013; Wright and Reeskens 2013). Dif-
ferent indicators yield different patterns, reflecting the relative balance between
affective and normative considerations. But common indicators yield different
patterns across countries. In short, where we are asking the question may
matter. From this we infer that both dimensions must be in play. For example,
Citrin, Johnston, and Wright (2012) suggest that simple expressions of pride
cash out differently in Canada and the US because of the divergence between
those countries’ national narratives. Normative content—how the idea of the
nationality is framed—may condition how its affective content plays out.
Johnston et al. (2012) take this intuition global with a multi-country compari-
son that conditions impact from identity on both immigrant numbers and the
strength of the multicultural signal. The complexity of national identity hints at
its malleability and opens up possibilities for cultural engineering. In social
science terminology, the link between national identity and other phenomena
may be moderated, its effects may be conditional on context.
Also open for interpretation is how any of this work is done inside citizens’
heads. What are the mechanisms that mediate the identity-redistribution
relationship? For Miller, the key factor is trust, promoted by thick national
identity and necessary for citizens to pool risk and hand resources over to their
disadvantaged co-nationals. For others, the more critical thing about identity
is its exclusionary dimension, which can extend even to persons nominally
inside the national tent. And the questions here intersect with those in the
preceding paragraph: different national narratives may shift the balance
between identity’s exclusionary and inclusionary components.
6.5 MODERATION: CULTURAL POLICY REGIMES
By moderation, we mean that features of the national context affect the structure
of relations among psychological predispositions. For example, a national
narrative that presents diversity as a positive value might make the national
identity–redistribution relationship positive (or less negative), in contrast, say,
with an exclusionary narrative. Another possibility is that the longstanding
presence of immigrants habituates the native-born (themselves often the chil-
dren of immigrants) to diversity (Citrin and Sides 2008; Johnston et al. 2012).
Of particular interest is the potentially moderating role of multiculturalism
policy. Some argue that providing immigrants with citizenship alone is insuffi-
cient for inclusion (Bauböck 2003). Countries should also recognize and ac-
commodate minorities’ cultural beliefs and practices (Kymlicka 1995; Parekh
2006; Taylor 1992). By fostering minorities’ sense of legitimate membership and
encouraging minorities to adopt hyphenated or nested identities, multicultur-
alism putatively attenuates the potential problems of pluralism. Indeed, the
failure to adopt multiculturalism might alienate immigrant minorities from
their adoptive nation’s political life. An even stronger claim is that by generating
more positive attitudes about diversity among the native-born, multiculturalism
can serve as glue for society as a whole (Banting and Kymlicka 2014).
The main objection to this line of reasoning is that multiculturalism
imperils the common sense of ‘we’. This is implied in the Social Identity
school, mentioned earlier, in that strong versions of multiculturalism may
impede the formation of ‘superordinate’ identities by officially sanctioning the
boundaries between groups in society and elevating their salience (Gaertner
and Dovidio 2000; Transue 2007). Similarly, validation of ethnic differenti-
ation undermines the sense of common purpose (Miller 1995) and jeopardizes
guarantees of individuals’ equal status, both of which are necessary to foster
trust and reciprocity (Barry 2002). Trust and reciprocity, in turn, undergird
people’s willingness to contribute to the public good, for example, through
civic engagement and voluntarism (Putnam 2000) or by supporting the
redistributive welfare state (Banting et al. 2006).
Empirical evidence on the issue is mixed. Wright (2011) finds that citizens
in more multicultural nations move to embrace more ascriptive—and
exclusionary—conceptions of their national community over time, relative
to those in less multicultural contexts. On the other hand, Kesler and
Bloemraad (2010) find in the context of ongoing immigration that populations
under aggressive multicultural regimes are less likely to report declines in trust,
organizational membership, and political participation than are populations
under weak or nonexistent regimes. From the standpoint of immigrants, the
level of political multiculturalism adopted by the host country appears not
to hinder, and more often to help, political incorporation (Wright and
Bloemraad 2012).
6.6 MECHANISMS: TRUST AND P REJUDICE
While the hypothesis that national identity somehow engenders increased

willingness to support redistribution has been tested elsewhere in a
rudimentary way (e.g., Johnston et al. 2010; Citrin, Johnston, and Wright
2012; Wright and Reeskens 2013), we as yet have very little sense of what
mechanisms link them. By mechanism, we mean how other psychological
predispositions are affected by national identity and how in turn such predis-
positions affect support for redistribution. Two alternative pathways come
to mind.
One is the identity–trust–redistribution sequence that lies at the heart of
Miller (1995). The core proposition is that national identity works by gener-
ating psychological affinity towards co-nationals, creating incentives to go
beyond strictly reciprocal interactions. Believing that co-nationals will pay
their taxes and not abuse the system seem like obvious preconditions for
supporting redistribution (Soroka, Johnston, and Banting 2006). Identification
with the nationality may not actually generate trust so much as stand as an
alternative manifestation of a certain generosity of spirit. Either way, a positive
link between identity and trust speaks to national identity as an inclusive force.
On the dark side, a mechanism linking identity and redistribution might be
resistance to minority claims. To the extent that the nationality is seen as
unitary, minority claims would seem to derogate from overarching national
ones. Moreover, national identity itself may encourage members of the self-
understood majority to draw on ‘group-related’ considerations when formu-
lating attitudes about redistribution. If so, one could easily imagine that
support for redistribution, particularly to immigrants, might decline among
the native-born. The racialization of poverty in the US (Gilens 1999) exem-
plifies this mechanism.
These mechanisms are not logically opposed, and it is an open question
which (if either) serves as a better explanation for the identity–redistribution
link. A basic test is to start with the simple bivariate relationship between
identity and redistribution. If some psychological indicator—trust, say—is
then entered into the estimation the original bivariate coefficient should
shrink: if it is originally negative, it should become less so; if originally positive
it should become less positive. This tells us that some of the bivariate rela-
tionship travels through the control variable—it is, in a word, ‘mediated’ by
that variable.
6 . 7 I M P L I C A T I O N S A ND I N D I C A T O R S
We start with the basic relationship in summary form, the link between
identification with the nation and support for redistribution. Identification
may signify an ability to transcend parochialism, resistance to local-majority
triumphalism, or a philanthropic disposition, as Miller (1995) supposes.
Conversely, it may signify an exclusionary orientation and a propensity for

categorical us-versus-them thinking.
Conceptually, both images of identity seem apt, and many individuals may
harbour both impulses. Which impulse dominates may depend on context.
Where the national discourse is triumphalist—emphasis on imperial glories,
prowess at war, or cultural superiority, for example—intensity of identification
may be driven by exclusionary dispositions. Where the discourse is
inclusionary—an emphasis on success in welcoming newcomers or a liberal
discourse about democracy, parliamentarism, or the rule of law—the effect
may be the opposite. As the examples suggest, the possible coexistence of
positive and negative charges also aligns roughly with affective and normative
content.
We represent national identity in two ways. One is affective, an expression
of simple pride in the nationality:
• ‘How proud are you to be Canadian/American/Québécois?’ There are
four responses—extremely proud, very proud, somewhat proud, or not at
all proud, which are scaled from zero to one where one indicates high
levels of pride.3
The other is normative, capturing what it means for someone to truly
belong to the national community:
• ‘Some people say the following things are important for being truly
Canadian/American.4 Others say they are not important. How important
do you think each of the following is?’ (1) ‘To have been born in
[COUNTRY]’, (2) ‘To have [COUNTRY] ancestors’, and (3) ‘To be
Christian’. Responses are cumulated.
For a study that seeks to explore alternative meanings of national identity, it
is awkward that both indicators carry exclusionary freight. But one is much
more exclusionary in tone than the other and this difference enables us to
explore contours of malleability. Miller and Ali (2014) show that pride carries
a generally negative tone, more than certain other generalized identity indi-
cators. But almost all identity indicators carry this tone, and most correlate
closely with pride (Miller and Ali 2014: table 1). The only indicator that
does not relies on questions purportedly about ‘civic’ identity (Miller and
Ali 2014: table 1; de Figueiredo and Elkins 2003; Johnston et al. 2012). In our
view the civic indicators are weak; in particular, they generate very little
variance, in that almost nobody endorses the view that to be ‘truly’ part of
the national community does not involve one’s respect for institutions and
laws (a typical ‘civic’ indicator). For this reason, we did not devote scarce
survey time to them. Our normative indicator carries an even more exclu-
sionary charge, as it asks about the importance of ascriptive categories to
definitions of nationhood.5
For all this, the affective indicator, pride, does not go out of its way to
convey an exclusionary emphasis. It also picks up response to the more
transcendent dimension of nationality that Miller idealizes (Johnston et al.
2012). For any given dependent variable, the link to pride should be more
positive than the link to the normative indicator. The impact of pride on other
variables should be quite plastic, reflecting both the content of the other
variables and the context. To the extent that the other variable in the estimation
invites exclusionary response, so should its relationship to pride be relatively
exclusionary, and vice versa. Similarly, pride should exhibit a more exclusion-
ary relationship with a given variable as the national context primes such a
connection, and vice versa. Impact from the normative indicator, in contrast,
should be relatively invariant across dependent variable and across context.
The ultimate dependent variable in all of this is redistributive solidarity, for
which we consider two representations:
• General support, a two-item index based on the following questions: (1)
‘The government should (a) see to it that everyone has a decent standard of
living, or (b) leave people to get ahead on their own.’ (2) ‘The government
should (a) spend more on programs even if that means that taxes go up, or
(b) reduce taxes even if that means cuts in programs.’ Each question was
presented as a slider along an eight-point scale. Respondents drag the slider
to indicate their position between the two poles. For interpretive simplicity,
the measure is rescaled from zero to one.
• Welfare chauvinism, a three-item measure based on these questions:
‘Thinking of immigrants, after how many years living in [COUNTRY]
do you think they should obtain the same rights to government benefits
and services as citizens already living here? (a) publicly-funding health
insurance, (b) old-age pensions, (c) cash welfare.’ Responses were cap-
tured by a slider on a scale from 0 years to 10 years (as well as a ‘never’
category). Results were combined and scaled from zero to one where one
indicates a high level of chauvinism.6
At the most general level, the following are observable implications of the
rival perspectives:
Implication 1a: If identification with the nationality is inclusionary, then
it should be positively related to support for redistribution.
Implication 1b: To the extent that identification is exclusionary, even
co-nationals may be excluded from the benefits of belonging and strength
of identification should be negatively associated with willingness to
redistribute.
These propositions refer most readily to the general indicators of identity and
redistributive orientation.
Regardless of the dominant tone—positive or negative—of the generalized

relationship, the direction and strength of relationships are subject to moder-
ation from priming. The most important implication refers to the national
context:
Implication 2a: The identity–redistribution relationships should be more
negative for the US sample than for the Canadian ones.
Simply put, political discourse in Canada is shot through with (mostly sup-
portive) language about multiculturalism, as compared to a much more
assimilationist discourse in the US. Accordingly, the two countries differ in
the extent to which they are multicultural in a policy sense. As such, if it is
indeed the case that multiculturalism reconstructs the social boundaries of the
nation in a way that benefits immigrants, this difference should be evident
across the forty-ninth parallel. And indeed, shards of evidence on the field
point to this conclusion. For instance, Citrin, Johnston, and Wright (2012)
show that Canada and the US differ in this way for the impact of pride on
immigration and multicultural attitudes, so it seems natural to conjecture that
a similar difference holds for redistributive solidarity. Johnston et al. (2010)
find a weak positive relationship with Canadian data, where the dependent
variable is like the measure used here.
Although we frame the implication as a Canada–US contrast, there is, of
course, not one Canadian sample but two. On a set of issues obliquely related
to those here, Citrin, Johnston, and Wright (2012) find that Quebeckers are in
some ways even more distinct from Americans than are Canadians outside
Quebec. As mentioned earlier, Quebec residents occupy a quasi-European
world, as a national group for which the physical setting is strongly bound to
history and ancestry. What is more, in recent decades, a collective self-image
has been cultivated for Quebec as North America’s social democratic bastion.
Quebec may, in fact, exemplify Miller’s (1995) notion of nationality as a force
for burden-sharing.
Context also varies within our survey instrument. The follow is implied in
the contrast between the affective and normative indicators:
Implication 2b: Relationships should be more negative for the normative
identity variant, given its cultural content, than for the affective one.
Our normative index specifically invites exclusionary response. It is possible
that exclusion reflects warmth of feeling towards the in-group; possible but
improbable. More plausible is that the index captures a general conservatism.
On the same logic, relationships should vary across indicators of the
dependent variable:
Implication 2c: Impact from either identity indicator should be more
negatively toned for welfare chauvinism than for generalized
redistributive support. Given that the indicator is of chauvinism, such

that high scores represent negative sentiment, the predicted sign of the
difference is positive.7
The logic here is essentially the same as for the difference between the identity
indicators. The chauvinism indicator is also prescriptive and invites punitive
response. Although it presents immigrants as the immediate target, it also
creates a general opportunity for denial of benefits.
Finally, there should be an interaction between survey context and national
context:
Implication 2d: On either redistribution indicator, variation across con-
texts in impact from identity indicators should be greater for the affective
indicator than for the normative one.
This reflects the fact that the pride question is usefully vague. The normative
index, in contrast, is clearly prescriptive and less susceptible to projection of
content by respondents. It follows from this that for exploration of ‘mechan-
isms’ the focus should be on the general indicator of pride. For similar reasons,
our dependent-variable focus is also on the general indicator, not on the
measure of welfare chauvinism.
To test the mechanisms of mediation we use the following indicators of
trust and prejudice:
• Generalized trust: This is a four-item index based on the following
questions: ‘If you lost a wallet or purse that contained two hundred
dollars, how likely is it to be returned with the money in it if it was
found by: (a) someone who lives close by, (b) a complete stranger, (c) a
police officer, (d) a clerk at the grocery store where you do most of your
shopping.’ Responses are very likely, somewhat likely, and not at all likely;
all responses are combined and rescaled from zero to one where one
indicates a high level of trust. This measure was pioneered in Soroka,
Johnston, and Helliwell (2006).
• Minority Rights: a two-item index based on the following: (1) ‘We have
gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country’, and (2) ‘Govern-
ments spend too much time listening to minorities.’ These are agree/
disagree items with five response categories ranging from ‘agree strongly’
to ‘disagree strongly’. We reverse the polarity of the items, combine them,
and rescale the measure from zero to one, where one indicates high levels
of support for minority rights.
As mentioned earlier, these propositions are not necessarily incompatible
empirically. And each rests on a two-step sequence. Pride must be linked to
the intermediate sentiment, trust or minority-rights orientation. And each
intermediate sentiment must be linked to support for redistribution. For each
Table 6.1 Descriptive statistics
Mean Std. Dev N
National Pride
Rest of Canada 0.82 0.25 1,058
Quebec 0.87 0.22 1,014
United States 0.78 0.27 2,214
Ascriptive National Identity (3-Item Index)
Quebec 0.52 0.27 1,042
General Support for Redistribution
Quebec 0.53 0.20 1,008
Welfare Chauvinism
Rest of Canada 0.51 0.24 885
Quebec 0.47 0.26 865
Interpersonal Trust
Rest of Canada 0.61 0.24 858
Quebec 0.37 0.14 625
Minority Rights
Quebec 0.40 0.25 1,012
chain, if either link—identity to trust/minority rights or trust/minority rights

to redistribution—is broken then the pathway is inoperative.
Trust pathway: Identification with the nation is positively related to
generalized trust and generalized trust is positively related to support
for redistribution.
Minority rights pathway: Identification with the nation produces resist-
ance to minority claims where support for minority claims is a positive
factor in support for redistribution.
Descriptive statistics for all the key variables in our analysis are presented in
Table 6.1, with all variables scored from 0 = least to 1 = most. As seems
generally the case when identity measures are fielded, national pride is readily
expressed but chauvinism about the normative content of national identity
much less so. While Americans tend to be the most chauvinistic and
Quebeckers the most proud, what jumps out of the top panel is similarity
rather than difference.8
All three populations are about evenly split on the questions about general
welfare support and welfare chauvinism, with the US a slight laggard in both
domains. In the realm of trust, the US and ROC samples are very similar. The
exceptional group is respondents from Quebec, who seem very wary about
their wallets. On minority rights, finally, the outstanding group is the US
sample: Americans are rather more sympathetic to minority claims than either
type of Canadian. The distinctiveness of the US is almost entirely the product
of Blacks and Hispanics in the sample. US Non-Hispanic Whites are only
slightly more pro-minority rights than respondents in ROC. We mention this,
as it becomes interpretively important as shown in section 6.8. All analyses in
section 6.7 include controls for age, gender, education, and income. Estima-
tions exclude immigrant respondents.
6 . 8 AN A L Y S E S
6.8.1 National Identity and Redistributive Solidarity
We begin with the broad relationship between national identity and redis-
tributive solidarity, as moderated by the context of history and sociology.
Figure 6.1 starts with relationships defined in non-specific ways: simple
pride in the nation and support for redistribution at the level of principle.
Then it alters course slightly, first for the independent variable—identity—
then for the dependent variable—redistribution—and finally for both. The
characteristic mode of presentation, here and later in the chapter, is to present
slopes of relationship for each national group in the same graph, with 95 per
cent confidence intervals for predicted values.9
The polar cases are Quebec and the US. In Quebec, pride in the collectivity
is positively related to redistributive support, consistently with the social
democratic self-image cultivated by the province’s elites. Awkwardly for this
interpretation, however, is the fact that that overall support for redistribution
is slightly lower in Quebec than in the rest of Canada. In the US the relation-
ship is strong and negative. For English Canadians pride in nationality is
unrelated to redistributive opinion. Statistically speaking, the US relationship
is significantly more negative than either Canadian one.
If we alter the independent variable, as in the top right panel, differences in
slopes among the samples largely vanish. In each sample, the more ascriptive
characteristics the respondents require for defining the ‘true’ co-national, the
lower the support for redistribution. Visible differences among the samples are
mainly in overall redistributive support and directly parallel the simple pattern
in Table 6.1.
Where the redistribution indicator carries an exclusionary charge, as with
welfare chauvinism in the bottom panels, the dark side of national identity
burns through. Even where the independent variable is simple pride (bottom
0.70 0.70
Predicted Redistributive Solidarity

Predicted Redistributive Solidarity
0.65 0.65 ROC
ROC
0.60 0.60
0.55 0.55 Quebec
0.50 0.50
US
0.45 Quebec 0.45
US
0.40 0.40
0.35 0.35
0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
Pride in Canada/Quebec/US Ethinic definition of nationality
0.70 0.70
0.65 0.65
Predicted Welfare Chauvinism
Predicted Welfare Chauvinism

US
0.60 0.60
US
0.55 0.55 ROC
ROC
0.50 0.50
0.45 0.45
Quebec
Quebec
0.40 0.40
0.35 0.35
0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
Pride in Canada/Quebec/US Ethinic definition of nationality
Figure 6.1 National identity and support for redistribution
left) the relationship is null to positive although it is stronger in the US sample

than in the others. Where both the identity and the redistribution indicators
carry a negative charge, as in the bottom right panel, the relationship is strong
across the board, and contextual differences disappear. None of this should be
surprising. Almost regardless of place, if you invoke exclusionary consider-
ations, exclusionary response will follow. We see this as validating our inter-
pretation of the basic comparison: the relationship between general
expressions of national sentiment and general expressions of redistributive
solidarity in each sample reflects a mix of exclusive and inclusive consider-
ations. The particulars of the mix are context-specific, and are more exclu-
sionary in the US than in either Canadian group.
6.8.2 National Identity and Its Intermediaries
Figure 6.2 elaborates on the identity–redistribution link with a focus on the

two posited mechanisms, interpersonal trust and support for minority rights.
The indicators of pride and redistribution are general, the better to see the
Impact of pride on:
Interpersonal trust Support for minority rights
0.70 0.75
0.65 ROC 0.70
0.60
0.65
Trust - wallet indicator
Predited Equal Rights

0.55 US
US
0.45 0.60
0.40 0.55
0.35
Quebec 0.50 ROC
0.30
0.25 0.45
0.20 0.40
0.15 Quebec
0.35
0.10
0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1 0 0.25 0.5 0.75 1
Pride in Canada/Qubec/US Pride in Canada/Qubec/US
Impact on support for redistribution from:

Interpersonal trust Support for minority rights
0.80 0.80
ROC
Predicted Redistributive solidarity
Predicted Redistributive solidarity
0.70 0.70
0.60 ROC 0.60
Quebec Quebec
0.50 0.50
US
0.40 0.40
US
0.30 0.30
0.20 0.20
0.00 0.20 0.40 0.60 0.80 1.00 0.00 0.20 0.40 0.60 0.80 1.00
Interpersonal Trust - General Commitment to Equal Rights
Figure 6.2 National identity, trust, support for equal rights, and support for
redistribution
effect of context. For trust, the sharpest contrast is within Canada, between the
English-speaking and the French-speaking samples. Pride is slightly more
closely linked to interpersonal trust in ROC than in the US, but in both places
the relationship is strongly positive. For Quebeckers on the other hand,
national identification is neither here nor there, and the trust level is rather
lower overall. Broadly speaking, the evidence at this point vindicates Miller
(1995), identification with the nationality breeds trust in others, or at least the
two move together.
But the evidence also supports the dark side, as the link between national
identity and minority rights is generally negative. Nowhere is it positive and
the negative link is especially marked in the US. This reflects the distinctive
place of rights discourse in the US. Recall from Table 6.1 that American
respondents generally affirm the equal rights agenda more than Canadians
do. Gaps in affirmation are widest at low levels of national pride. For
Quebeckers the relationship is effectively null. Many Quebeckers, we might
suppose, class themselves as an affected minority. The US–Canada difference
is not a compositional byproduct of ethno-racial differences inside the
US. Blacks and Hispanics are not a bit less proud of the US than Non-
Hispanic Whites are. And the slope of relationship between pride and minor-
ity support is also identical between blacks and Non-Hispanic whites. Among
whites, the slope for Hispanics is less negative than for Non-Hispanics, but still
more negative than in ROC.
None of this matters if the link is broken at the second stage, which captures
the impact of trust or minority rights on support for redistribution. And for
trust there is essentially no relationship, or only the slightest hint of a negative
one for US respondents. So the Miller thesis is half right: pride in country is
linked positively to trust in one’s fellow citizens but this trust is of no relevance
to opinion on redistribution.
Instead, the action is on the other side. The bottom right panel of Figure 6.2
shows that opinion on minority rights affects redistributive solidarity, and
does so in all three samples. The link is weakest in Quebec, but even there is
unmistakable. The relationship is twice as strong in the rest of Canada and
is stronger still in the US. The US slope is 1.6 times greater than the Canadian
one. Traversing the full range on support for minorities pushes one almost half
the possible distance on the redistribution scale. This can be read two ways.
Support for minority rights is part and parcel of a redistributive mindset. Read
the other way, antipathy to minority claims undermines support for redistri-
bution in general. This is especially true in the US, as Gilens (1999) also shows.
The impressions given by visual inspection of Figure 6.2 are confirmed by
the multivariate analysis in Table 6.2: all the action is on the side of minority
rights, and most of what there is to say concerns the US sample. To see how
this is so, walk through the stages in the table. Start with the leftmost column
Table 6.2 Pathways of impact from national identity

Controls
None Trust Support for equal rights Both
ROC 0.02 0.04 0.03 0.03

(0.04) (0.04) (0.04) (0.04)
Quebec 0.06 0.06 0.06 0.06
(0.04) (0.04) (0.04) (0.04)
US −0.17 −0.16 −0.08 −0.08
(0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02)
Note: Entries are regression coefficients for the relationship between national pride and
support for redistribution, with and without trust or support for equal rights also in the
equation. Entries in parentheses are standard errors. Estimation by OLS. Each estimation also
includes controls for age, gender, education, and income. Foreign-born respondents excluded.
on the bottom row. The estimated slope is −0.17. This is, in effect, the total
estimated relationship between identity and redistribution support, averaged
across all native-born US respondents. We now add the interpersonal trust
indicator to the setup, to estimate how much of the overall impact of pride
operates through the association between pride and redistribution. The answer
is none: the null relationship in the bottom left cell of Figure 6.2 neutralizes the
link. If, instead, we control minority opinion (second column from the right),
the slope is cut more than in half. And comparison of the rightmost column
with those to its left shows that minority rights are the entire story. Now
compare the Canadian and US coefficients in the first and third columns. The
summary gap of 20 points or so (0.23 in Quebec, 0.19 in ROC) in the first
column is cut nearly in half by introducing the minority rights indicator (the
gaps are now 0.11 for ROC and 0.14 for Quebec).10
6.9 RECAPITULATIO N AND DISCUSSION
Two things stand out in our data. First, identification with one’s nationality
has a variable and contingent relationship with support for redistribution.
Most importantly, the relationship differs between Canada and the US and
within Canada, between Quebec and the rest of the country. But it also shifts
as we tweak survey questions. Second, of the plausible mechanisms that link
identity to redistributive support, opinion on the rights of minorities is far
more important than interpersonal trust.
Identification with nationality carries a dual charge, as both a transcendent,
inclusionary sentiment and as an exclusionary one. This makes expressions
of identity susceptible to induction from context, most importantly from
the national context. The generalized indicator, which asks only about pride,
has a negative link to redistribution in the US, a positive one in Quebec, and
no link at all in the rest of Canada. Psychological investment with nationality
is not a sure basis for supporting the welfare state, but neither is it absolutely
precluded.
We conjectured that identity–redistribution relationships would be more
negative—or less positive—in the US than in either Canadian sample. The
conjecture was based on comparative evidence on pride and immigrant
accommodation (Citrin, Johnston, and Wright 2012) and on Canadian evi-
dence for pride and the welfare state (Johnston et al. 2010). This conjecture
was consistently borne out, suggesting that the relative balance between the
inclusionary and exclusionary tendencies in identity is malleable.
The potential for the ‘engineering’ of identity is also revealed by our own
questionnaire. In addition to asking how proud respondents are of their
nation, we also asked normative questions. These questions invite respondents
to indicate if certain ascriptive characteristics—characteristics over which

persons have no or little control—are necessary to be ‘real’ Canadians, Qué-
bécois, or Americans. Not all respondents do require such things but variation
on this dimension is clearly exclusionary and the link between this national
identity indicator and support for the welfare state is consistently more
negative than the link with mere pride. And yet the normative and the
affective indicators of identity are positively correlated.
On a similar logic, how you ask about redistribution conditions how
support for the policy is linked to national identity. Where redistribution is
posed as a general value, its link to national pride varies by context, as already
mentioned: positive in Quebec, negative in the US, and neutral in Canada
outside Quebec. But once we shift to negatively toned questions about immi-
grants’ access to the welfare state—welfare chauvinism—the mood turns
consistently sour. Even with the simple pride measure, all relationships turn
negative. Both Canadian groups remain less negative than Americans but for
no group does national pride make persons resist the temptation to exclude.
When the exclusionary rendering of identity is linked to the exclusionary
rendering of the welfare state, relationships are powerfully negative and the
three samples are scarcely distinguishable. At one level, of course, this just
shows the perils of survey research, as appearances can be manipulated by
survey primes. At another level, however, this manipulation is exactly what
politicians—and cultural policy makers—do.
What, then, are the mechanisms that link identity to support or opposition
to redistribution? And can these mechanisms help us interpret differences
between Canadians and Americans? One possible pathway runs through
interpersonal trust. Ability to identify with the nation indicates a philanthrop-
ic disposition, one aspect of which is to believe that co-nationals will not cheat,
even when they face no sanctions for doing so. This in turn is a precondition
for incorporating those citizens into schemes of social insurance and redistri-
bution. And national pride is consistently positively correlated with interper-
sonal trust. And yet, the pathway is blocked: interpersonal trust is basically
unrelated to willingness to redistribute.
What matters instead is the extent to which the welfare state is seen as
catering to minorities. In all three samples, pride in the nation is negatively
related to support for such minorities. The relationship is especially strong in
the US. And in all three samples, support for minority rights is positively
related to support for redistribution. Again, the link is strongest for the US,
and by quite a margin. Putting the relative strengths of the two links—the
negative one from pride to minority support and the positive one from
minority support to redistribution—together dissolves about half the overall
Canada–US difference in the identity–redistribution relationship.
Are these Canada–US differences the product of self-conscious cultural
engineering, in particular of Canada’s greater commitment to official
multiculturalism? Perhaps. We can at least say that Canada’s multicultural

commitment is not just a re-expression in our time of a long-standing
openness to newcomers. Although Canada did not close its doors as the US
did in the 1920s, Canada’s immigration and immigrant-incorporation history
is full of exclusionary moves. Non-European immigration was routinely
discouraged—indeed, forbidden—and Canada’s unwillingness to admit Jew-
ish refugees from Nazi Germany is an especially sorry tale. At the same time,
‘old’ Commonwealth immigration was encouraged and such immigrants
enjoyed the full benefits of citizenship immediately upon arrival. Other im-
migrant groups, once inside the Canadian tent, were often subject to discrim-
inatory laws and actions. And for many decades, Canada’s Britishness
(conveniently leaving French Canada out of the equation) was compared
favourably with the mongrel society to the south. So Canada’s official adoption
of multiculturalism represents an original turn, an attempt to reshape the
national consciousness.
But whether that policy choice accounts for the differences we observe on
redistribution is an open question. Students of the size of US welfare state—in
particular of ‘why Americans hate welfare’ (Gilens 1999)—do not look to
Canada for the explanation. Rather, the focus is on the US’s own history of
troubled race relations, in particular on the racial turn in the depiction of
poverty that occurred in the 1960s. This strikes us as the most parsimonious
account of the patterns in this chapter.
Beyond race, it is useful to bear in mind that the prime mover in main-
stream studies of the rise of the welfare state is not the psychology of social
capital. Rather it is the distribution of power resources in society. Particularly
important is the strength of organized labour and of the social democratic
left. The other big factor is the strength of traditionalist anti-capitalism,
embodied in the Roman Catholic church (Esping-Andersen 1990). In respect
of capital and labour, the US, and Canada have changed places. Where the
US union movement was once stronger than its Canadian counterpart—
indeed, US-based international unions were critical organizers of Canadian
labour and the creation of the AFL-CIO was a necessary condition for a
similar merger north of the border—the reverse is now true, in spades.
Similarly, before the 1960s many Canadians looked south for models, notably
to the Social Security system. The most important fact on the ground may be
that Canada achieved universality in its version of Medicare where the US got
stalled with a scheme confined mainly to retired Social Security beneficiaries.
That difference may reflect the fact that by 1960s, a Canadian social demo-
cratic party came of age and was able to exploit a parliamentary contingency to
demand a generous policy response from an otherwise reluctant governing
party of the political centre.
So the Canadian edge that we observe in redistributive attitudes may reflect
a structural compound: a modestly more inclusive welfare state that is
propped up by stronger labour and partisan left and yet is relatively unen-
cumbered by race. The cultural differences seem real and may be a critical
political resource in their own right. Whether they are the key reason for the
Canada–US policy differences in policy is a matter for another chapter.
APPENDIX: THE IDENTITY DIVERSITY AND SOCIAL

SOLIDARITY SURVEY (IDSS)
The IDSS was an online survey fielded simultaneously in Canada and the US in the last
week of January 2014. The survey comprises three separate samples: 1,076 French-
language respondents in Quebec, 1,144 English-language respondents in the Rest of
Canada, and 2,281 respondents in the US. The questionnaire was produced in Qualtrix
and sample was furnished by Survey Sampling International (SSI, available at: <https://
www.surveysampling.com/> (accessed 2 October 2016)) with all respondents directed
to a server at the University of California, Berkeley. Unweighted samples are reason-
ably representative of the three populations:
• The percentage foreign-born corresponds to the census for the Quebec (7.7 per
cent foreign-born) and Rest of Canada (20.5 per cent) samples but is on the low
side for the US (7.5 per cent).
• All samples are broadly representative of racial and ethnic groups. The US
sample is 65.6 per cent Non-Hispanic White, 14.7 African American, 14.1
Hispanic, and 5.7 per cent Asian American. The Rest of Canada sample is
84.4 White and 15.6 Visible Minority. For Quebec the corresponding shares are
96.9 and 4.1 per cent.
• All samples are more highly educated than the populations at large. In the US
sample, 44 per cent has a Bachelors degree or higher (as compared with 33 per
cent in the most recent Current Population Survey). For Canada, the comparable
number may be as high as 52 per cent. In the latter, the coding is ambiguous, as in
Canadian usage ‘college’ does not necessarily indicate university-level work. The
most recent population estimate (itself suspect as part of the 2011 National
Longitudinal Survey) is 25.9 with a Bachelor’s degree or higher.
• All samples have approximately equal numbers of males and females.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada and from the Universities of California and British Columbia is gratefully
acknowledged, as is research assistance from Eric Merkley and Charles Breton. Keith
Banting and Will Kymlicka were part of the planning team for data collection.
Comments from Banting, Kymlicka, and Michael Donnelly materially improved the
text. None of the foregoing is responsible for any errors of analysis or omission.
NOTES
1. This is the Identity Diversity and Social Solidarity (IDSS) survey, described in
detail in the Appendix.
2. Note that some claims may be more properly conceived as referring to collectiv-
ities—‘how solidaristic is a given society?’—rather than to individuals—‘how does
solidarity vary across individuals within a society?’ That is, the idea of ‘solidarity’ is
inherently a property of the collective; so it may make sense to ask not about ‘how
much does solidarity vary across individuals within a society?’ but rather ‘how
much do individuals within a given society express feelings of solidarity with both
the imagined construct of the nation and/or his or her fellow co-nationals’. Both
questions are important, however; our focus here is on the former.
3. This measure is widely used, for example in the World Values Study and the
International Social Survey Programme.
4. Awkwardly, the question for Quebec respondents uses the word ‘Canadian’.
5. These are the items, drawn from the ISSP, that Miller and Ali call ‘cultural’. They
subtract the civic items from these cultural ones to get an identity indicator purged
of cultural content. We see this as no improvement. To the extent that the
indicator has content, it is cultural content reversed with noise added from the
civic element.
6. The redistributive indicators overlap but only only modestly, with correlations of
0.30, 0.16, and 0.21 in ROC, Quebec, and the US respectively. These relationships
are all statistically significant (p <0.05) but not strong enough to justify combining
them into a single index.
7. For ease of visual interpretation we were tempted to reverse the polarity of the
chauvinism indicator. But the language of welfare chauvinism is more natural
than the opposite so we decided to keep the coding consistent with the wording.
8. It may come as a surprise that Quebeckers are the least likely to impose an
ascriptive identity. The key is religion: Quebeckers are sharply more secular, less
likely to impose a religious test, than either other group. Correlation between the
affective and normative dimensions is generally positive—that is, ‘proud nation-
alists’ are more likely to also be ‘ethnic nationalists’—but relatively modest in
substantive terms, with strength of correlation (Pearson’s r) running from 0.15 in
Quebec to 0.37 in the US.
9. Underlying each plot is a ‘fully dummy interactive’ setup. In the core of each
estimation is completely specified interaction between the independent variable at
issue and the respondent’s sample. Each estimation also includes controls for age,
gender, education, and income. As income is underreported (typical of survey
samples), we include a dummy for missing income data. The visual images in
Figures 6.1 and were extracted from the regression estimations by margins and
marginsplot in Stata. The confidence intervals in the figures convey the general
credibility of the estimates and of differences among the samples. Note, for
instance, that confidence intervals tend to be very wide for low values of pride;
all three samples are very proud of their nationality, such that there are few
respondents at the low end. In contrast, confidence intervals are narrow at the
highly populated top end.
10. Another manifestation of how controlling ‘equal rights’ explains differences
among the samples is the shifts in intercepts. When pride appears in the estima-
tion by itself, the range of the intercept across the samples is 0.13. This is basically
the picture in the top left panel of Figure 6.1, with US respondents who express no
pride in being American most supportive of the welfare state, more so that
similarly situated Canadians of either language group. Once equal rights enters
the estimation, gaps among the intercepts shrink dramatically.
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7
Conceptions of Citizenship and Tolerance

towards Immigrants
A Comparative Study of Public Opinion Data
Tim Reeskens and Wim van Oorschot
7.1 I NTRODUCTION
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, solidarity of Europeans with

newcomers in their host societies is still at the heart of lively social and
political debates (OECD 2013). The economic downturn following the finan-
cial crisis of 2008 initiated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers has again raised
questions of how open national borders can be. Due to armed conflict in
various parts of the world, current anxieties and debates focus not only on
labour migrants, but on political refugees as well. Welfare chauvinism is an
oft-observed public reaction to the increasing diversity of advanced industri-
alized societies, that is, the idea that the provision of welfare and social rights
should be preserved for country natives while simultaneously excluding migrants
(‘welfare for us, not for them’; see Kitschelt 1997; van der Waal et al. 2009).
Although in most European countries only a small proportion of the majority
population wants to categorically exclude all immigrants from welfare rights
(Reeskens and van Oorschot 2012), politically the issue of such exclusion is
captured, exploited, and stimulated by radical right-wing populist parties
(Kitschelt 1997). The concept of welfare chauvinism shows how intimately
linked public opinion on the boundaries of membership of a socio-political
community and related citizenship rights can be. Where welfare chauvinism
exists, it testifies to a bounded solidarity that excludes migrants from social
rights on account of their being non-members.
Despite the fact that a large scholarship has evolved to explain levels of
solidarity with immigrants across European democracies (for a review, see
Ceobanu and Escandell 2010), insights into the origins of (in)tolerance with
newcomers can be explored more fully. Whereas traditional accounts have
178 Tim Reeskens and Wim van Oorschot
predominantly relied on economic explanations, such as tensions over scarce

resources, and on interpersonal contacts across ethnic lines (e.g., Esses et al.
2001; Laurence 2014), other research underscores the importance of defin-
itions of membership into national political communities (Sides and Citrin
2007). For instance, several studies show that people with inclusive orienta-
tions of national identity are least intolerant towards immigrants, while those
with exclusive orientations are most intolerant (Pehrson, Brown, and Zagefka
2009; Pehrson, Vignoles, and Brown 2009).
However, in our view, definitions of membership of a political community
and (in)tolerance towards allowing migrants into such an imagined commu-
nity, are shaped not only by feelings of national identity but also by attitudes
towards the rights that are usually attached to citizenship. In the case of
welfare chauvinism, for instance, social rights seem to be valued as something
that is closely linked to membership of the political community: non-members
should be excluded from them. But, what about the other important types of
citizenship rights, namely civil and political rights, that are distinguished by
Marshall (2009) in addition to social rights? The debate about ideas of
citizenship and tolerance towards newcomers is mostly concerned with social
rights for citizens, but would it be right to assume that the same logic of
chauvinism applies to these other types of rights as well? That is, would it be
the case that natives who attach stronger value to civil and political rights also
impose stronger symbolic defensive boundaries against newcomers, in order
to reserve these rights for members only? We feel that such a supposition is too
simple and not justified.
In particular, we propose that our thinking about the relationship between
opinions on citizenship and tolerance requires nuance from two angles. First,
while the logic of welfare chauvinism implies that a strong commitment to
social rights is incompatible with tolerance towards newcomers, we will
suggest that civil and political rights have a stronger universalist appeal, and
as a result, commitment to these rights has the potential to be more inclusive
of newcomers (cf. Rothstein and Stolle 2008; Weldon 2006). Second, we will
follow Norris’s approach (2011) by distinguishing between aspirations—
popular preferences about the desired level of citizenship rights—and
evaluations—popular perceptions about the extent such rights are applied in
any given political community. We will argue that aspirations for citizenship
might raise symbolic boundaries against outsiders, whereas positive evalu-
ations of democratic citizenship might reach out towards newcomers.
In this chapter we will empirically verify how opinions about citizenship
relate to attitudes towards newcomers with data from the 2012 Round 6 wave
of the European Social Survey. In the following sections we will discuss our
concepts and the expected effects in more detail, explain our data and
methods, and present the results of our analysis. We conclude with a brief
discussion on the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of citizenship.
Citizenship and Tolerance towards Immigrants 179
7.2 CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS AND TOLERANCE

TO NEWCOMERS
7.2.1 Citizenship Rights
Tolerance towards immigrants has mostly been explained by economic fac-

tors, as for instance, favourable economic conditions may temper conflicts over
scarce resources between native citizens and newcomers (Esses et al. 2001;
Quillian 1995). Other research findings, however, emphasize the importance
of the absence of symbolic threats such as status and power (Hainmueller and
Hiscox 2007; Paxton and Mughan 2006). More recent also is the emphasis on
definitions of membership into the political community, where a role is played
by popular fears that ethno-racial diversity would change the national imprint,
leading to hostile reactions towards newcomers (Sides and Citrin 2007;
Wright 2011). In his seminal paper on cultural configurations across Euro-
pean societies, Bail describes citizenship laws (i.e., immigrant naturalization
laws) as an example of ‘rigid social boundaries’ (Bail 2008: 39) that in turn rest
on symbolic boundaries, that is, ‘conceptual distinctions made by social actors
(…) [that] separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity and
group membership’ (Lamont and Molnar 2002: 168). Clearly, citizenship, as
defining the rights associated with formal membership into a political com-
munity, distinguishes insider citizens from outsider non-citizens. It therefore
makes sense to assume that conceptions of citizenship and related rights spill
over into opinions about newcomers.
Studies on the relation between such citizenship conceptions and tolerance
towards newcomers have mainly been limited to the question whether toler-
ance is related to macro-level institutional factors such as political regimes and
national legislation describing citizenship (Weldon 2006; Schlueter, Meuleman,
and Davidov 2013). Here, however, inspired by the phenomenon of popular
chauvinism regarding social rights, we are specifically interested in the question
whether (in)tolerance flows from popular opinions about citizenship rights.
We follow Marshall’s threefold typology as presented in his essay on
‘Citizenship and Social Class’ (Marshall 2009). Marshall described the evolu-
tion of citizenship in developing and advanced nation-states by distinguishing
between civil, political, and social rights. Civil rights, introduced first, are those
rights ‘necessary for individual freedom’ (Marshall 2009: 148), which often are
specified as individual property rights, the rule of law, and freedom of speech.
Political rights followed suit and regard the rights of individuals to ‘participate
in the exercise of political power’ (Marshall 2009: 149), which is often,
although not exclusively, exemplified by universal suffrage. Social rights,
often introduced last, are those rights that enable all members of a nation-
state ‘to enjoy and to share at least a basic level of social-economic and cultural
well-being’ (Cohen 2010: 81).
When analyzing these three dimensions of citizenship, Marshall was already

confronted with difficulties in distinguishing among them and their order
of introduction, as the institutions that undergird them are ‘amalgamated’
(Marshall 2009: 149). By now, however, there is consensus that civil and
political rights are in some ways different from social rights. Civil and political
rights are often grouped as being ‘first generation’, ‘negative’ rights, while
social rights are regarded as ‘second generation’, ‘positive’ rights (Savak 1977;
Berlin 1969). First generation rights refer to the fact that civil and political
rights precede the establishment of social rights in the chronology of nation
building: civil and political rights were comprehensively introduced in Western
democracies in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, while
social rights expanded only substantially after the Second World War. The
distinction between negative and positive rights is of more importance, as
the ‘negative’ rights of civil and political citizenship protect individuals against
state power, that is, ‘their respect requires that the state do nothing to interfere
with individual liberties’ (Savak 1977: 29), while the ‘positive’ social citizenship
rights allow individuals to make demands on the state. Although Marshall’s
account has been criticized on various grounds, we will apply it here, with due
attention to the suggestion that there is a split between civil and political rights
versus social rights.
7.2.2 Aspirations and Evaluations
As the boundaries-literature indicates (Lamont and Molnar 2002; Bail 2008),

attitudes about citizenship might serve as symbolic boundaries that define who
is and who is not included. Such strong boundaries might foster categorization
between in- and out-groups and then be detrimental for tolerance towards
newcomers. Brewer (2000: 166) argues that out-group derogation requires a
‘social situation in which a particular ingroup–outgroup categorization is
made salient’. Strong opinions about inclusive rights for insiders, that is fellow
citizens, might therefore simultaneously be exclusive for outsiders, that is
noncitizens. In this line of reasoning, precisely because of the fact that out-
group hate might originate from in-group love, one might expect that attitudes
towards citizenship are negatively related to tolerance towards newcomers.
However, we contend that strong opinions towards citizenship may not always
impose strong symbolic boundaries against newcomers. Firstly, we will argue
that attitudes towards citizenship can be disentangled into aspirations and
evaluations, and that it is aspirations in particular that have boundary-
marking potential. Secondly, building on this distinction, we further propose
that civil and political citizenship rights are more universal in character than
social rights, and therefore may have a stronger capacity to reach out to
newcomers.
As mentioned, to fully comprehend opinions about citizenship, we borrow

Norris’s (2011) distinction between aspirations—that is, the level of civil,
political, and social rights people want—and evaluations—perceptions of the
actual implementation of civil, political, and social rights in their country.
Comprehensive studies on Europeans’ aspiration for and evaluations of citi-
zenship are scarce. If we proxy civil and political rights by democratic rights,
then Norris’s (2011) study into democratic deficits informs us that Europeans
have high democratic aspirations. Residents of the most developed democra-
cies have aspired more for democracies over time. At the same time, residents
of the most democratic societies are also most satisfied with its functioning,
meaning that there is a positive feedback between democratic governance and
its public legitimacy (Norris 2011). However, the opposite seems to be the case
with social rights. Although ample evidence suggests that Europeans are
overwhelmingly in favour of welfare redistribution, highest support for gov-
ernment intervention in the provision of welfare is given in the least developed
welfare states. Van Oorschot, Reeskens, and Meuleman (2012) attribute this to a
so-called ‘improvement effect’: although residents of the most comprehensive
welfare states cherish their model of redistribution, Europeans of the least
developed welfare states perceive that desired social outcomes are not adequately
delivered and are therefore even stronger supporters of a well-providing welfare
state (see also Roosma, van Oorschot, and Gelissen 2014). Put another way,
whereas aspirations and evaluations of civil and political rights tend to go
together—citizens in better-performing democracies also have higher aspirations
for democratic rights—aspirations and evaluations tend to diverge more dras-
tically in the case of social rights, with citizens in the lowest-performing welfare
states having the highest aspirations for social rights. As we will see, this may be
important for attitudes towards newcomers.
7.2.3 Individual Opinions and National Cultures
7.2.3.1 Individual Opinions

How can aspirations for and evaluations of citizenship translate into more or
less favourable opinions towards immigrants? As we have explained, opinions
about citizenship, like views of national identity, reflect the normative
contours of the nation-state. Because of the parallels, we base our argument
on findings on national identity (Pehrson, Brown, and Zagefka 2009; Pehrson,
Vignoles, and Brown 2009; Wright and Reeskens 2013). These findings
show that ethnic conceptions of national identity are negatively related with
tolerance towards immigrants, but this is less true of people with more
‘civic’ conceptions of national identity, implying that not all boundaries are
equally exclusive.
Similarly, some aspirations about citizenship rights might be more inclusive
than others. The distinction between ‘negative’ civil and political rights and
‘positive’ social rights (Savak 1977; Berlin 1969) stimulates us to think about
different aspects of citizenship having different relationships with inclusive-
ness to outsiders. In case of social rights, the state actively intervenes to reduce
socio-economic cleavages. For this reason, we might expect that a stronger
demand for social justice conflicts with tolerance towards newcomers. The
causal mechanism is precisely the idea that Marshall (2009) also proposed: in
order to achieve social justice by welfare state expansion, some level of ethno-
racial homogeneity is required. Those who strongly favour income redistribu-
tion might be inclined to provide it only to fellow compatriots. Further, ideas
are widespread that newcomers are a burden for the welfare state (Wright and
Reeskens 2013), and although a plurality of Europeans is not in favour of
excluding newcomers categorically from welfare, conditionality is asked for
(Reeskens and van Oorschot 2012). In any case, ample evidence suggests that
strong attitudes about social rights are negatively associated with tolerance
towards immigrants.1
By contrast to social rights, the ‘negative’ rights of civil and political rights
deal less with socio-economic divisions within society but rather seek to free
individuals from socio-political constraints that were imposed by existing
hierarchies and the rise of nation-states. Civil and political rights have a
stronger universalistic appeal as individual human rights than social rights
(Marks 1980). The logic undergirding the establishment of civil and political
rights was to create equality before the law, and to give all an equal voice in
the political decision-making process, with valid alternatives for dissent
voices. Although such civil and political rights are also nation-state bounded,
covering the position of national residents, they also embody notions of
universality, impartiality, and fair treatment, which are values that have
shown to spill over into favourable opinions to immigrants (Weldon 2006).
The demand to treat all equally before the law might, indeed, not necessarily
be state-bounded.
How to understand, then, the relationship between evaluations of full
citizenship and opinions towards immigrants? Positive evaluations of citizen-
ship originate from reduced inequalities. If people perceive that the govern-
ment provides civil, political, and social rights, then everyone is equal before
the law, and redistribution from the rich to the poor is taking place. From the
social capital literature we borrow the insight that generalized trust—trust in
people different from you—is higher in the absence of large inequalities
(Uslaner 2002)2 and in a context that treats all citizens in a fair and impartial
manner (Rothstein and Stolle 2008). In equal societies, it is argued, people
experience a higher sense of togetherness and the feeling that people look after
each other’s interest is more widespread (Uslaner 2002). In other words,
institutions that embody equality have spill-over effects on its citizens, making
people more likely to have trust in others (Freitag and Buhlmann 2009). More
importantly, trust is especially fostered when people perceive that institutions
treat all in a fair and equal manner, implying that perceptions prevail over the
objective working of institutions (Rothstein and Stolle 2008). If we extrapolate
from the trust literature, a positive association between the evaluation of the
implementation of full citizenship and tolerance towards newcomers can be
expected.
7.2.3.2 National Cultures

Thus far we have addressed individual-level factors that may relate to citizen-
ship rights and affect attitudes to newcomers. The literature on policy regimes
suggests that country contexts might play a role as well (Weldon 2006;
Schlueter, Meuleman, and Davidov 2013). Once again, we approach such
regimes as symbolic boundaries, implying that we study attitudes about citi-
zenship aggregated at the national level, constituting a national culture—a set
of values and moral beliefs that are, to a certain extent, shared in a country—
which socializes residents (cf. van Oorschot, Reeskens, and Meuleman 2012).
In contrast with micro-level mechanisms, this cultural approach identifies
what Huckfeldt (1986: 13) refers to as a contextual effect, that is ‘instances
in which individual behavior is affected by the presence of a societal property
in a population regardless of whether the individual possesses the property in
question’. So, even if a resident of a certain country has no strong opinions
about citizenship rights, the fact that he/she lives in a country with such strong
attitudes might have a bearing on his/her tolerance towards newcomers.
Expectations that are proposed at the individual level can simultaneously be
applied at the national level, with the expectation that all citizens will be
affected by living in a context where certain ideas about citizenship are
expressed. As at the individual level, we challenge the expectation that a
national culture with outspoken strong demands for citizenship rights inevit-
ably forms a symbolic boundary of in-group love that brings about out-group
hate. Rather, we expect that more intolerant opinions towards immigrants are
present in countries characterized by a higher popular demand for social
rights in particular. The assumption that welfare state expansion requires
some ethno-racial homogeneity (Marshall 2009) is the leading proposed
mechanism for why strong support for social rights conflicts with tolerance
to immigrants. Second, we expect that in a national culture in which citizens
make a strong plea for civil and political rights, tolerance is higher, because a
context of a strong demand for equality before the law might reach out to
outsiders as well (Weldon 2006).
Similar assumptions can be made for evaluations of citizenship rights
and whether they spill over to tolerance towards immigrants. In a context
in which people perceive that government is treating all equally before
the law, and actively reduces socio-economic disparities, such perceptions

might spill over into positive opinions towards newcomers (also by those
who do not have such strong citizenship evaluations themselves), precisely
because the perception that institutions treat all in a fair and impartial manner
spills over into favourable opinions towards outgroups (Rothstein and Stolle
2008).
7.3 ANALYTICAL STRATEGY
To untangle the relationship between attitudes about citizenship rights and

tolerance towards newcomers, the 2012 Round 6 of the European Social
Survey is analysed. This cross-national survey project was fielded in 2012 in
twenty-nine countries but our sample is limited to twenty-three countries due
to limitations in the availability of harmonized country-level data.3 Because we
are interested in opinions towards the influx of immigrants, we exclude
respondents who have been born abroad or have at least one parent who
was born abroad, which accounts for 16 per cent of the sample. After elimin-
ating these respondents, our final data set includes 34,742 respondents, or
about 1,511 respondents per surveyed country.
7.3.1 Dependent Variable
Tolerance towards newcomers in European countries is measured using a

scale combined from two items surveying the extent to which one thinks that
the country he/she lives in should allow few or many people to come and live
here: (1) of a different race or ethnic group from most [country] people; (2)
from the poorer countries outside Europe. Response categories varied between
‘allow none’ (code 1) to ‘allow many’ (code 4). These two items stress the
‘difference’ between newcomers and mainstream native respondents, which
means that we may expect that respondents refer in their answers to non-EU
(European Union) migrants with a different cultural background. Because of
the high correlations between the two items a scale was created (Cronbach’s
alpha = 0.89), ranging from 1 to 4 with higher scores indicating higher
tolerance towards immigrants. The average score on this scale is 2.5, indicating
that Europeans hold rather lukewarm feelings regarding newcomers. As
Figure 7.1 shows, in spite of noteworthy exceptions, Eastern and Southern
European countries have a more intolerant population, whereas a majority of
citizens of Nordic societies is tolerant. At the same time, the graph also shows
that Poland and Italy, to give but two examples, do not follow this regional
4.00
3.50
3.00
2.50
2.00
1.50
1.00
SE PL DE NO IT DK ES CH NL LT BG SI BE FR IE FI SK EE GB CZ PT HU CY
Figure 7.1 Cross-national distribution of tolerance towards newcomers

Note: Figure 7.1 represents the mean values per country on the dependent variable ‘tolerance towards
immigrants’. The scale runs from 1 to 4 with higher values indicating more tolerance. For country labels,
check note 3.
pattern, with citizens who more likely than in other Eastern and Southern
European countries to welcome newcomers.
7.3.2 Independent Variables
To study whether tolerance towards newcomers is rooted in attitudes towards

citizenship, a number of survey items reflecting the civil, political, and social
rights attitudes are selected from the ESS 2012. For civil rights, we consider the
role of the media (whether they are free to criticize the government, and
whether they provide reliable information) and the rule of law (whether the
rights of minority groups are protected and whether courts treat everyone the
same). For political rights, we select items on free elections, and the role of
political parties (i.e., if they offer alternatives to each other, and if they are
free to criticize the government). For social rights, the selected items regard
governments’ effort to protect all citizens against poverty, and their role in
reducing income differences. Importantly, all selected items are offered
twice in this survey. To measure aspirations, these items were introduced
with ‘Please tell me how important you think [item] is for democracy in
general’, whereas evaluations were preceded by the statement ‘Please tell me
to what extent you think each of the following statements applies in [coun-
try].’ All items were offered with response scales ranging from 0 to 10. For
aspirations, the scale ends ranged from 0 (‘not at all important for democ-
racy in general’) to 10 (‘extremely important for democracy in general’). The
scale ends of the evaluations-items ranged from ‘does not apply at all’ (0) to
‘applies completely’ (10).
To test whether in the sample of populations attitudes on these items really
go together as we suggest, that is, whether the items really represent distinct
underlying civil, political, and social rights attitudes, an exploratory factor
analysis with Varimax rotation was performed on respectively the set of nine
aspirations and nine evaluations items. Based on Marshall’s distinction be-
tween civil, political, and social rights, we expect that three distinct factors
are also present in public opinion (see the left pane of Figure 7.2). However,
for both aspirations and evaluations, this technique produced a two- instead
of the assumed three-factor solution (right pane of Figure 7.2). The analysis
presents one factor for selected civil and political rights items, and one for
social rights items. This dichotomy reflects the distinction between ‘negative’
and ‘positive’ rights (Savak 1977). Yet, not all selected items pass the conven-
tional tests of unidimensionality, and some items show inconsistencies across
the analysis of the aspirations and evaluations. Three items are therefore
excluded from scale construction: that is, the protection of minority group
rights, equal treatment by courts, and parties that provide reliable alternatives.
Based on this factor solution and scale reliability tests, four independent
variables have been constructed: ‘civil and political rights’—aspirations and
evaluations; and ‘social rights’—aspirations and evaluations.
Table 7.1, presenting descriptive information on the four variables, shows
that Europeans on average attach strong importance to civil and political,
as well as to social rights. However, civil and political rights (mean of 8.5) are
regarded as slightly more important for democracy, than social rights (8.4).
With regard to evaluations about the implementation of those rights in the
country they live in, Europeans perceive that civil and political rights to a large
extent are preserved (7.1), while they are of the opinion that full social rights
are not really in place (4.1).
7.3.3 Control Variables
In our analyses we include a number of characteristics of respondents that

also might influence their tolerance and their rights attitudes. In that way
we want to avoid the possibility that we identify an effect of a citizenship
aspiration or evaluation that is actually produced for instance by a respondent’s
The media are free to The media are free to
criticize the government criticize the government
The media provide citizens with reliable The media provide citizens with reliable
information to judge the government information to judge the government
Civil
rights
The rights of minority groups The rights of minority groups
are protected are protected
Civil and
The courts treat The courts treat
political
everyone the same everyone the same
rights
National elections are National elections are

free and fair free and fair
Political Opposition parties are free to Opposition parties are free to

rights criticize the government criticize the government
Different political parties offer Different political parties offer

clear alternatives to one another clear alternatives to one another
The government protects The government protects

all citizens against poverty all citizens against poverty
Social Social
rights rights
The government takes measures to The government takes measures to
reduce differences in income levels reduce differences in income levels
Figure 7.2 Theoretical factor model and results from an exploratory factor analysis of attitudes towards citizenship rights
Note: For the exploratory factor analysis, as presented in Figure 7.2 (left pane), check Online Appendix Table 7.A1, available at: <http://www.timreeskens.net/strains.pdf>.
Table 7.1 Descriptives of the independent variables
Variable Mean Std Dev
Civil & Political Rights Aspirations 8.508 1.572

Social Rights Aspirations 8.351 1.880
Civil & Political Rights Evaluations 7.133 1.925
Social Rights Evaluations 4.113 2.681
Note: All four scales have a scale range from 0–10.
age or educational level. A second reason to include control variables is that it

allows checking whether and to what degree differences in tolerance between
countries are due to differences in rights attitudes or to the composition of
populations (in terms of, for example, their age structure).
At the individual level, we control for gender, age, educational level, work
status, income, and political ideology. For gender, the expectation is that women
are less prejudiced than men because of a lower tendency of being authoritarian
(Adorno et al. 1950). Further, we include age, in case people become less
tolerant with age (Coenders and Scheepers 1998) and younger generations
are more tolerant towards immigrants (Ford 2008). We also need to control
for levels of education, measured by the ISCED (The International Standard
Classification of Education) classification ranging from less than lower second-
ary (code ‘1’) to higher tertiary education (code ‘7’), because tolerance increases
with education (Coenders and Scheepers 2003; Sullivan and Transue 1999).
Conflict theories further predict that intolerant views towards immigrants are
most common among vulnerable labour market groups,that is, the unemployed
and lower income groups, because of economic threat (Bonacich 1972; Bobo
1983). We therefore distinguish between those in paid work (reference cat-
egory), the unemployed, students, and those in another employment situation.
Income is included, too, which in the ESS is measured using a decile distribution
going from 1 (lowest income decile) to 10 (highest income decile). To cope with
the considerable non-response on income, we apply means substitution, imply-
ing that respondents with a missing value receive the mean value on this
variable. A dummy indicating item non-response on the income variable is
included in the model as well.
We also include control variables at country level. Following realistic group
conflict theory (Esses et al. 2001) we control for the unemployment rate with
the expectation that tolerance is more widespread in countries with lower
unemployment. We further control for the share of foreign-born residents
based on the expectation that tolerance is higher in more homogenous
countries. Data on both variables is obtained from the World Bank (2014).
In addition, we also test the argument that opinions towards newcomers are
more favourable in more generous welfare states (van Oorschot and Uunk
2007; Crepaz and Damron 2009).
7.3.4 Methodology
Because respondents are nested in countries, we need to apply multilevel

analysis to control for the nested data structure of the ESS in order to obtain
reliable estimates (Hox 2010; Gelman and Hill 2006). An analysis of a so-
called ‘null model’ indicates that tolerance towards immigration depends to a
considerable extent upon the country clustering: the intraclass correlation of
14.9 indicates that almost 15 per cent of the variation in tolerance towards
newcomers can be attributed to the fact that the survey respondents live in
different countries of Europe.4
7.4 RES ULTS
7.4.1 Individual-Level Findings
We present the results of our analyses in steps, each time distinguishing

between models without, and models with inclusion of the control variables.
In Model 1a of Table 7.2, we present the results of a multilevel multiple
regression model containing only citizenship aspirations as determinants of
variance in tolerance towards newcomers. The analysis shows contrasting
findings for both scales. On the one hand, aspirations towards civil and
political rights are positively associated with tolerance towards newcomers
(see Table 7.A2 of the online appendix for full models).5 Those who hold the
opinion that civil and political rights are highly important for democracy rank
0.66 higher on their tolerance towards immigrants, compared to those who
find civil and political rights not important at all. On the other hand, we see
that a demand for full social rights conflicts with tolerance, as those who find
reducing inequalities important are 0.10 more opposed to newcomers. This
finding supports the existence of welfare chauvinism, as strong demands for
social justice conflict with positive views on newcomers.
Importantly, however, when control variables are included, the effect of civil
and political rights aspirations on tolerance somewhat weakens, while the
effect sign of social rights aspirations completely turns. However, subsequent
analyses (see Table 7.A3 of the online appendix) indicated that socio-
economic positions influence the relationship between social rights aspirations
on tolerance towards newcomers. Particularly lower educated and lower
income groups make stronger demands for social equality (correlations between
education and social rights aspiration are −0.08; between income and social
rights aspirations, the correlation coefficient is −0.12). At the same time,
vulnerable socio-economic groups also hold the most intolerant opinions
Table 7.2 Individual-level model of tolerance towards newcomers multivariately
regressed on attitudes towards citizenship
Model 1a: Model 1b:
Aspirations Evaluations
Fixed Effects Effect Effect Effect Effect

(Std Error) (Std Error) (Std Error) (Std Error)
Control variables included No Yes No Yes
Intercept 1.989*** 1.854*** 2.188*** 2.013***

(0.075) (0.074) (0.071) (0.071)
Civil and political rights aspirations 0.066*** 0.042***
(0.003) (0.003)
Social rights aspirations -0.010*** 0.007**
(0.003) (0.002)
Civil and political rights evaluations 0.029*** 0.026***
(0.003) (0.003)
Social rights evaluations 0.017*** 0.015***
(0.002) (0.002)
Random Effects Estimate Estimate Estimate Estimate

Individual variance 0.637*** 0.599*** 0.640*** 0.600***

(0.005) (0.005) (0.005) (0.005)
Country variance 0.111*** 0.101** 0.107*** 0.097***
(0.034) (0.031) (0.032) (0.029)
R2 Individual level 1.417% 7.197% 0.850% 7.101%
R2 Country level 1.715% 11.130% 5.713% 14.407%
* p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001.

Note: Entries represent the results of four multilevel regression models.
towards newcomers. In sum, the negative bivariate relationship between social

rights aspirations and tolerance towards newcomers is spurious to vulnerable
socio-economic position (see Figure 7.3).
When we look at the relationship between evaluations of citizenship and
tolerance towards newcomers (Model 1b of Table 7.2), we see that Europeans,
who evaluate more positively their country’s actual implementation of civil
and political rights, as well as that of social rights, are more tolerant towards
newcomers. The effect parameters indicate that this positive effect is larger
though for civil and political rights, than for social rights. The effects remain
when control variables are included.
7.4.2 Country-Level Findings
Our analyses revealed that tolerance towards immigrants also depends on the
national context: as noted earlier, the so-called intra-class coefficient (ICC) is
Social rights –
Tolerance
aspirations
Social rights +
Tolerance
aspirations
–
Income +
Education
Figure 7.3 The spurious relationship between social rights aspirations and tolerance
15 per cent, which means that about 15 per cent of the individual variability in
tolerance can be explained by the fact that people live in a particular country.
In this step, we address the question whether this country-effect on tolerance
towards migrants stems from differences in national cultures of aspirations for
and/or evaluations of citizenship rights or whether this effect (also partly)
stems from differences in unemployment rates, the share of foreign-born
people, and welfare state effort. Our analyses also revealed that 11–14 per
cent of the variation between countries can be explained by differences in
population composition (e.g., in some countries, levels of education are
higher). It is important to account for such compositional differences before
assessing contextual effects.
In Model 2a of Table 7.3, we first look at the contextual effects of the
national-level aggregated citizenship aspirations. In this bivariate analysis
(controlled for the individual-level variables of Model 1a of Table 7.2), none
of the national-level aspirations explains cross-national differences in immi-
grant tolerance. Adding welfare expenditure, unemployment rates, and the
share of foreign-born residents does not change this. Of these additional
context factors, welfare expenditure has a slightly significant effect, indicating
that tolerance tends to be a bit higher in more generous welfare states, which
confirms earlier studies (van Oorschot and Uunk 2007; Crepaz and Damron
2009). By contrast, unlike previous studies (e.g., Meuleman, Davidov, and
Billiet 2009; Quillian 1995; Schneider 2008), the data for 2012 provide little
support for the realistic group conflict theory; although unemployment rate
and the share of foreign-born residents show the expected negative effect
direction (indicating that people living in more diverse societies and countries
with higher levels of unemployment are more negative about immigrants),
both fail conventional significance test.
Model 2b of Table 7.3 shows the bivariate effect of national-level evalu-
ations of full citizenship. This bivariate analysis also reveals no significant
Table 7.3 Country-level model of tolerance towards newcomers multivariately re-
gressed on national level aspirations/evaluations of citizenship rights
Model 2a Aspirations Model 2b Evaluations
Fixed Effects Effect Effect Effect Effect

Intercept 1.970 1.310 2.164* 2.504*

(1.704) (1.709) (0.827) (0.931)
National-level civil and political 0.084 −0.015
rights aspirations (0.207) (0.206)
National-level social rights −0.099 0.083
aspirations (0.156) (0.173)
National-level civil and political −0.066 0.008
rights evaluations (0.161) (0.161)
National-level social rights 0.073 −0.181
evaluations (0.099) (0.153)
Welfare expenditure 0.038° 0.073°
(0.023) (0.038)
Unemployment rate −0.014 −0.016
(0.028) (0.026)
Share of foreign-born −0.015 −0.016
(0.016) (0.016)
Random Effects Estimate Estimate Estimate Estimate
Individual variance 0.593*** 0.593*** 0.592*** 0.592***

(0.005) (0.005) (0.005) (0.005)
Country variance 0.112** 0.100** 0.105** 0.094**
(0.037) (0.036) (0.034) (0.033)
R2 Individual level 6.950% 6.950% 6.978% 6.978%
R2 Country level 4.546% 14.620% 11.897% 20.114%
°p < 0.10; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.
Note: Entries represent the results of four multilevel regression models. All models are controlled for
individual level variables. Spain was excluded from the analysis because of its extraordinary
unemployment rate.
findings, indicating that tolerance towards immigrants is not more present in

countries where the population perceives that citizenship rights are largely
implemented. Moreover, the inclusion of the context control factors does not
change the findings. And here again we see that welfare spending has a slight
positive effect, while the effects of the unemployment rate and the percentage
foreign-born citizens are not significant.
The absence of an effect from aspirations might have to do with the fact that
Europeans, by and large, are strongly in favour of full citizenship rights,
making cross-national variation rather low. A first hint about this low
variation was already visible in Model 1a of Table 7.2, where a relatively low
variation between countries could be explained by differences in country
compositions.6 More surprising is the finding that a context of positive
evaluations of citizenship is unrelated to tolerance. The implication of the
sizeable effects of citizenship evaluations at the individual level without con-
textual effects means that those who live in a context in which people generally
think that full citizenship rights are present, are not necessarily more tolerant
towards immigrants. The relationship between opinions about citizenship and
tolerance operates for the largest part at the individual level, and very little at
the country level.
7.5 CO NCLUSIONS
Understanding the roots of tolerance towards the influx of immigrants

requires a thorough understanding of boundaries that are drawn to distin-
guish insider citizens from outsider non-citizens. Citizenship not only demar-
cates members from non-members, but also prescribes the rights that come
with such formal membership of a political community. Ideas about citizen-
ship rights might serve as a symbolic boundary that spills over into opinions
about newcomers; yet studies explaining tolerance towards newcomers by
reference to ideas of membership of the political community have largely
been limited to national identity. The lack of empirical research connecting
ideas about citizenship to attitudes about immigrants makes this contribution
novel in various ways.
Departing from the seminal distinction between civil, political, and social
rights (Marshall 2009), our analysis shows that public opinion across European
countries does not neatly distinguish those three dimensions. Rather they
differentiate between civil and political rights on the one hand, and social
rights on the other hand, reflecting the distinction between the first generation
of human rights, or the ‘negative’ civil and political rights that prevent states to
intervene in individual liberties, and the second generation of ‘positive’ social
rights that requires government to intervene in the private sphere to ensure an
individual standard of living. Europeans overwhelmingly are supportive of full
civil and political rights, and slightly less so of full social rights. At the same
time, they perceive that civil and political rights are to a large extent imple-
mented, whereas they are of the opinion that governments are underachieving
when it comes to the implementation of social rights.
These individual attitudes about citizenship rights shape favourable opin-
ions towards immigrants; yet they do so in an inconsistent manner. Aspiring
for full civil and political rights is positively related to tolerance towards
newcomers. The desire for a democratic society that includes free media,
rule before the law, free elections, and the freedom to participate in politics
reaches out to immigrants. One might argue that tolerance towards immi-
grants results from the desire for a society in which there are institutions that
not only offer opportunities for civil and political development, but also have
mechanisms that correct in case behaviour conflicts with social norms. By
contrast, aspiring for social rights is negatively correlated with tolerance
towards immigrants. While this association becomes insignificant when con-
trolling for socio-economic vulnerability, it does indicate that tolerance
towards immigrants does not originate from the desire for socio-economic
equality, and this helps to understand the rise of welfare chauvinism in Europe
(Kitschelt 1997; Reeskens and van Oorschot 2012).
Whereas aspirations for civil/political and social rights have divergent
effects, the same pattern does not hold for evaluations of citizenship rights.
An individual’s perception that governments have implemented citizenship
rights—including social rights—well contributes to tolerance towards immi-
grants. This may be because trust levels are higher among people who perceive
their country to be successful in promoting legal, political, and social equality
in impartial ways.
Interestingly, while individual-level symbolic boundaries seem to have
effects, differences in citizenship opinions at country-level are unrelated to
tolerance to newcomers. As a result, the fact that some countries have
citizens that are more opposed to immigrants cannot be explained by the
fact that people in some of those countries are more supportive of citizen-
ship rights, or have stronger perceptions of the implementation of such
rights. At the country level, it is objective spending levels that seem to
influence tolerance. In countries that spend more per capita on welfare,
residents tend to be more tolerant. Interestingly, traditional group threat
explanations, referring to negative effects of the size of the immigrant group
and general unemployment levels, do not explain difference in tolerance
levels, contra previous studies on realistic group conflict (Quillian 1995;
Meuleman, Davidov, and Billiet 2009). Future studies need to untangle
why these explanations lost power for the 2012 data, as well as whether
competing explanations, such as welfare state effort (cf. van Oorschot 2008),
are better able to explain the considerable cross-national variation in
immigrant tolerance.
To be sure, this study presents some shortcomings and future analytical
challenges. To start with, citizenship in a certain political community is not
only limited to rights that are defended by the government, but also is about
individual obligations. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, membership is not
only about ‘what your country can do for you’, but also about ‘what you can do
for your country’. Future studies should include opinions on for instance civil
duties and social responsibilities, not just rights. Second, the timing of the
2012 ESS is amidst the economic recession, which has affected European
societies quite substantially. Our cross-sectional findings show that economic

conditions are unable to explain cross-national differences in favourable
opinions about newcomers. Future studies should investigate why the current
recession does not seem to generate higher negative out-group sentiments.
Third, we have untangled general trends across a set of European countries.
It is highly plausible that the association between views on citizenship and
tolerance towards newcomers differs from country to country. This should be
addressed in further studies. Fourth, and finally, some causality warnings need
to be articulated too. As Banting (2000: 15) argues, there is the threat that
‘cultural diversity fragments the sense of a common community, and weakens
political support for social citizenship’ (see also Mau and Burckhardt 2009).
Negative opinions towards immigrants might therefore also make aspirations
for citizenship less inclusive (cf. Gilens 1999).
NOTES
1. A reverse mechanism has been proposed by Gilens (1999), who argues that because
welfare is racialized in the US, people who hold negative opinions towards minor-
ities are also opposed to welfare redistribution.
2. Evidently, generalized trust is not equal to tolerance towards newcomers. However,
Delhey, Newton, and Welzel (2011) argue that generalized trust strongly relates to
out-group trust, that is, trust in people you meet for the first time, people from
another religion, or people from another nationality.
3. These countries are Belgium (BE), Bulgaria (BG), Switzerland (CH), Cyprus (CY),
Czech Republic (CZ), Germany (DE), Denmark (DK), Estonia (EE), Spain (ES),
Finland (FI), France (FR), United Kingdom (GB), Hungary (HU), Ireland (IE), Italy
(IT), Lithuania (LT), Netherlands (NL), Norway (NO), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT),
Sweden (SE), Slovenia (SI), and Slovak Republic (SK).
4. Which can be obtained by dividing the country-level variance by the total variance.
5. The online appendix is available at: <http://www.timreeskens.net/strains.pdf>.
6. The logic of such compositional effects is that because our individual-level inde-
pendent variables have an effect on tolerance towards immigrants, high r-squared
values at the country level would mean that differences between countries in
tolerance could be explained by differences in the distribution of the independent
variables between countries. However, because the r-squared is low, the implication
is that the cross-national variation is rather low.
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Part III
The Politics of Diversity and Solidarity
8
The Political Sources of Social Solidarity

Peter A. Hall
This chapter explores the roots of redistributive social solidarity in the devel-
oped democracies. Banting and Kymlicka (Chapter 1, this volume) define
social solidarity as a worldview widespread among the populace, with civic,
democratic, and redistributive dimensions, whereby individuals tolerate views
and practices they dislike, accept democratic decisions even if those run
counter to their beliefs or interests, and support relatively generous provisions
to help the disadvantaged. Although solidarity can also be judged by the
policies of a community, in this formulation, solidarity refers to a set of
attitudes widely shared within the community or nation. My focus is on the
redistributive dimension of social solidarity, namely the willingness of people
to see governments redistribute resources to the less advantaged, and my
interest is in understanding how such attitudes come to be widely shared and
sustained within a society. Although the sources of support for social rights are
not identical to those for civil and political rights, this account can inform our
more general understanding of the roots of social solidarity (Marshall 1950).
Two bodies of literature frame this analysis. The first is a literature in
comparative political economy, which explains support for redistribution—
understood as policies designed to make incomes more equal—largely as a
matter of self-interest on the part of people who might benefit from this
redistribution. This view finds classic expression in the influential Meltzer-
Richard (1981) model, which predicts that effective support for redistribution
will increase as the income distribution of a society becomes more unequal,
because that increases the benefits the median voter might draw from redis-
tribution. There is undoubtedly some truth in such formulations—since
people on lower incomes almost always express more general support for
income redistribution than do people on higher incomes (Finseraas 2008).
From the perspective of social solidarity, however, this literature has at least
two problematic features. First, it explains support for redistribution in terms
that could be considered inimical to the concept of social solidarity, namely on
the basis of personal self-interest rather than out of a concern for others in
202 Peter A. Hall
5
4.8
General support for redistribution
LA PT
4.6 BU RU
4.4 SK
H
SL PO
4.2 CZ
AT FR SP
4
UK
3.8 SW
JP NO
3.6 DE AL
CA NZ
3.4 US
3.2
3
0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5
Disposable income inequality
Figure 8.1 The relationship between disposable income inequality and general sup-
port for redistribution
Sources: ISSP (1999); LIS; Dallinger (2010). R2 = 0.03; SE: 0.43.
society. At a minimum, we need a fuller understanding of how self-interested

actions might feed into something broader that can be described as social
solidarity. The second problem is that this approach does not explain very well
the differences in attitudes to inequality observed across nations. Because
attitudes to inequality are multidimensional and the available measures for
them limited, there is controversy about this point. However, studies looking
for Meltzer and Richard (1981) effects find that the existing distribution of
national income explains at best only some of the cross-national variation in
attitudes to redistribution (Lübker 2007; Kenworthy and McCall 2008).
Figure 8.1 provides an illustration of the issues based on a measure that
assesses general support for redistribution in each nation.1 Inside Western
Europe, there appears to be a relationship between the distribution of dispos-
able income in 1999 and support for redistribution, of the sort comparative
political economists would expect. But the relationship disappears when a
wider range of countries are considered. There are indications here that
support for redistribution depends on more than existing levels of income
inequality. We need accounts of the underpinnings for such support that take
a wider range of factors into consideration.
The second literature framing this discussion is an influential body of
work that views national identity as the crucial basis for social solidarity.
While political economists explain support for redistribution via mechanisms
rooted in self-interest, the national identity literature argues that solidarity
The Political Sources of Social Solidarity 203
depends on concerns for others, thereby directing our attention to images

of who belongs to the community. The central debates in this literature focus
on whether attachment to the nation fosters social solidarity and whether
some types of national identity promote solidarity more than others (Miller
1995; Abizadah 2002; Kymlicka 2001). On the first of these issues, however,
the empirical evidence is mixed at best. At the individual level, Johnston et al.
(2010) find that feelings of attachment to the Canadian nation are associated
with slightly more support for redistribution. But Shayo (2009) finds lower
support for redistribution among people who have higher levels of pride in
their nation (see also Theiss-Morse 2009). On balance, it seems that stronger
attachment to the nation does not promote support for redistribution in
any unmediated way. Instead, the relationship between national identity
and solidarity may depend on the type of national identity prevalent in a
country, including features of national identity distinctive to that nation
(Miller and Ali 2013).
Some claim, for instance, that the levels of inclusiveness required for
solidarity, especially in multiethnic societies, will be present only where
national identity takes a ‘civic’ form that associates the nation with shared
commitments to a common set of principles or political institutions.
Habermas (2001) describes this as ‘constitutional patriotism’; and Pehrson,
Vignoles, and Brown (2009) note that levels of hostility to immigrants are
lower in countries where civic conceptions are more prevalent than ethnic
conceptions of national identity. By contrast, others contend that civic
national identities do not provide a sense of communal belonging deep enough
to sustain the tolerance, mutual trust, and support for redistribution associated
with social solidarity (Tamir 1993; Miller 1995). On this view, solidarity must be
rooted in a national identity that has some sort of ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic’ character,
based on a shared culture, ethnicity, or territorial history.2
Does support for redistribution depend on national identities that are civic
or ethnic? Once again, the evidence is not dispositive partly because the
available measures are so limited, but we can form a preliminary assessment
by comparing the character of each country’s national identity with support
for redistribution there. To assess a country’s national identity, I use the
average national score on indices for civic and ethnic nationalism derived
from a factor analysis by Helbling, Reeskens, and Wright (2016) of respond-
ents to a 2003 ISSP (International Social Survey Programme) survey.3 When
these scores are compared to general support for redistribution as measured in
Figure 8.1, the bivariate relationships (not shown) are entirely insignificant.4
However, we might also consider the relationship between conceptions of
national identity and support for redistribution to the poor, arguably a more
direct feature of social solidarity. To assess the latter, I use a measure of the
extent to which respondents ascribe poverty to factors beyond the control of
the individual rather than to the laziness or lack of willpower of the poor.5 The
204 Peter A. Hall
(a) Civic identity
95
Support for redistribution to the poor
SW
90 NO
SP NE
85 FI
FR
IR DE
80 DK
UK
75
70 PT
65
60
1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8
Civic national identity
(b) Ethnic identity

95
90 SW NO
NE SP
85 FI
FR
DE IR
80 DK
UK
75
70 PT
65
60
1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.4
Ethnic national identity
Figure 8.2 The relationship between national identity and support for redistribution
to the poor
Sources: Eurobarometer 56.1 (2001); ISSP (2003); Helbling, Reeskens, and Wright (2016). For 2(a) R2 = 0.05;
SE = 6.08. For 2(b) R2 = 0.43; SE = 4.70.
results are reported in Figure 8.2. The presence of a more civic national
identity does not seem to be related to support for redistribution to the
poor. Moreover, in countries where ethnic conceptions of national identity
are more prevalent, there is actually less support for such redistribution
(r2 0.43). In short, some minimal national identity may be a necessary
prerequisite for redistribution, but stronger civic or ethnic identities do not
seem to increase support for it.
8.1 AN ALTERNATIV E APPROACH: S OCIAL

SOLIDARITY AS QUASI-EQUILIBRIUM
There is certainly something to be explained here. As Figure 8.1 indicates,

across the developed democracies, popular support for redistribution varies
dramatically. While two-thirds of Germans thought that it was the govern-
ment’s responsibility to reduce income inequality in 1992, only 38 per cent of
Americans did so (Svallfors 1997: 288, 2012). If existing explanations give us
little purchase on the problem, how are such variations in redistributive
solidarity to be explained?
In what follows, I propose an alternative approach to this problem, breaking
it down into two component parts. The first is the problem of understanding
how the attitudes embodied in redistributive solidarity, once established, are
sustained, while the second is the problem of explaining how such attitudes
develop in the first place, which I will treat in that order. My perspective on
the first problem can be labelled a ‘quasi-equilibrium’ approach to the issue.
The micro-foundations for this perspective lie in the observation that the
conceptions of ‘self-interest’ and ‘altruism’ that figure prominently in most
discussions of redistribution are misleading—because they are usually con-
strued in terms that are too narrow or overly abstract. In the abstract form in
which they are typically adduced, those concepts are too distant from the
social, economic, and political contexts that give such motivations concrete
meaning and operative force in the world.
In many accounts that turn on self-interest, for instance, the latter is
construed primarily as the desire of the individual for more income. This is
recognizable enough as a potential motive and important to some degree, but
it is far from the only way in which people construe their self-interest. People
often act out of self-interest, but they do so in pursuit of a wide range of goals,
which includes immediate material interest but can easily extend to other
dimensions of well-being, including ones that turn on the provision of col-
lective as well as individual goods. For example, a voter might well ask: am
I going to support this candidate because he promises to lower my taxes or
that one because he is going to protect my environment? Thus, there are often
trade-offs between the goals engaged by self-interest; and individuals are
continuously making judgments about which ones to privilege at any given
time that are deeply conditioned by the institutional and cultural frameworks
in which they live. If the politicians seeking my vote preside over a highly
corrupt state, for instance, I might well vote for the one who will lower my
taxes rather than trust the other to improve the environment, although in a
different institutional context I might do just the reverse.
Much the same is true of the generalized concepts of altruism that figure in
analyses of redistribution. A person who is said to be acting out of altruism is,
206 Peter A. Hall
in fact, usually acting out of a complex set of understandings about his or her
obligations to specific kinds of people and principles; and those conceptions of
obligation are conditioned by cultural frameworks that vary systematically
across nations (Wuthnow 1991). These frameworks specify social boundaries,
namely images of who belongs to the community, and criteria of social worth
conventionally used to judge the worthiness or deservingness of others
(Lamont and Molnar 2002; Hall and Lamont 2013a, 2013b). In many cases,
they reference conceptions of social justice linked to wider frameworks of
ideas embodied in folk wisdom about such matters as the role of effort and
fortune in people’s lives or the value of self-discipline versus self-expression
(Lamont 2000).
Several important points follow from these observations. First, they suggest
that redistributive solidarity can be underpinned by both altruism and self-
interest, if people are understood to operate from a self-interest enlightened by
the institutional and cultural frameworks in which they live. I may support a
programme that redistributes to others partly because it has the potential to
redistribute to me. In other words, self-interest can underpin attitudes of
generalized support for a redistributive welfare state. Second, this perspective
suggests that the attitudes to redistribution common to any society are rooted
in a wider set of institutional frameworks that organize its incentive structures
and in cultural frameworks connected to the cognitive, symbolic, and norma-
tive repertoires that people use to navigate the choices in their lives (Swidler 1986;
Markus and Nurius 1986). In many cases, these institutional and cultural
frameworks may reinforce one another to create consistent patterns of atti-
tudes analogous to the ‘embedded preferences’ described by Brooks and
Manza (2007; see also Hall 2005, 2010).
Thus, if attitudes to redistribution are conditioned by mutually-reinforcing
processes between institutions and cultural frameworks, they may reflect
quasi-equilibria of redistributive solidarity that are nationally-specific and
relatively-stable over time. Instead of being relatively-evanescent phenomena,
susceptible to annual fluctuations in socioeconomic or demographic variables
such as levels of income inequality or rates of migration, national attitudes to
redistribution may be relatively durable, because they are rooted in cultural
and institutional frameworks that change relatively slowly, even though they
are susceptible to change.
8.2 M ECHANISMS BEHIND QUASI-EQUILIBRIA
What sorts of mechanisms might underpin these quasi-equilibria? The field

does not yet have a complete answer to this question but, if we take support for
programmes that redistribute to the less advantaged as the phenomenon to be
explained, the literature points to several mechanisms. In some cases, the

shape of prevailing institutions conditions support for such programmes; in
others, institutions promote wider worldviews that bear on such support.
Some analyses emphasize the ways in which existing levels of social
provision condition general support for redistribution. Of course, social pro-
grammes create a base of support among their beneficiaries, although that is
not deeply reflective of social solidarity. But the network externalities gener-
ated by such programmes can also induce support for them among wider
segments of society who are not direct beneficiaries (Pierson 2000).6 More-
over, expanding the beneficiaries in some programmes may build a general-
ized support for the welfare state that sustains components that are more
redistributive, a phenomenon especially important where the legitimacy of
governmental efforts to redistribute income is an object of political competi-
tion. Similarly, support based on self-interest for programmes that provide
equivalent levels of benefits to people across different levels of income often
sustain programmes whose benefits are worth much more to people at lower
levels of income.
Support for redistribution to the disadvantaged can also be affected by the
design of social programmes. There is evidence, for instance, that programmes
presented as contributory social insurance attract more social support than
non-contributory programmes, regardless of whether the benefits are funded
from those contributions (Larsen 2006; Jaeger 2009). Programme design can
also reinforce or erode worldviews that are central to redistributive solidarity.
By virtue of how they discriminate among the recipients of benefits, for
instance, social programmes contribute to the drawing of social boundaries
(Esping-Andersen 1990; Lamont and Molnar 2002). Thus, some scholars
argue that ‘universal’ programmes which distribute benefits widely as a right
of citizenship reinforce social solidarity, because they promote the view that
every citizen is entitled to social protection (Rothstein 1998). By contrast,
means-tested programmes tend to stigmatize the poor, singling them out as
dependents on society rather than contributors to it—thereby promoting
images of the poor as indolent or undeserving, which, in turn, reduce popular
support for redistribution (Esping-Andersen 1990; Larsen 2008).
There is controversy about the strength of such effects (Linos and West
2003; Jaeger 2006). However, Jaeger (2009) (see also Larsen 2006) presents
evidence that the extensive use of means-tested programmes in the liberal
welfare states of the Anglo-American democracies reduces support for redis-
tribution, while Larsen and Dejgaard (2013) found many more negative
images of the poor in the media of Britain, where means-testing is prominent,
than in the media of Denmark or Sweden, whose universal social programmes
promote a rhetoric of social citizenship. Moreover, although racial boundaries
can also impinge on support for redistribution, they found that media refer-
ences to the poor were less negative in the two Nordic nations than in Britain
208 Peter A. Hall
even when the poor were identified as racially distinct (cf. Alesina, Glaeser,
and Sacerdote 2001).
Note that there are some dynamic dimensions to these effects that tend to
reinforce quasi-equilibria. Where social programmes are expansive, contribu-
tory, or universal enough to foster worldviews supportive of redistribution,
redistributive spending is likely to increase, thereby building further support
for the welfare state, at least up to some limit. By contrast, where means-tested
programmes stigmatize the poor, popular support for redistribution is likely to
be fragile, making it politically more difficult to expand social programmes
and easier to cut them back. Over time, ceteris paribus, the effect should be to
sustain, if not widen, cross-national differences in the generosity of social
policy regimes.
Since the primary responsibility for redistribution in the developed dem-
ocracies usually falls on governments, support for redistribution can also
be affected by the institutional character of the state. There is evidence that,
where governments are corrupt, inept, or highly particularistic in the delivery
of benefits, citizens are less likely to support redistribution (Edlund 1999;
Rothstein 2011; Svallfors 2013). At least two mechanisms operate here.
On the one hand, political corruption tends to reduce levels of general social
trust, which is widely thought to be a determinant of levels of social solidarity,
including support for redistribution (Halvorsen 2007). On the other hand, even
when citizens are willing in principle to support redistribution, they may be
reluctant to let a state they distrust undertake such tasks. Once again, mutually-
reinforcing interactions between institutions and worldviews make it difficult for
countries to escape this kind of social trap (Rothstein 2005; Mungiu-Pippidi 2013).
The belief that institutions are corrupt renders citizens more likely to engage
in corrupt behaviour themselves and correspondingly less likely to trust one
another. As a result, it becomes more difficult for them to engage in the kinds
of collective action necessary to reduce corruption and restore trust.
There can also be important interaction effects between economic policy
regimes or the institutions of the political economy and popular attitudes to
redistribution. In a seminal article, Benabou and Tirole (2006) show how a
specific set of institutions (in this case policy regimes for taxing and spending)
and a particular cultural framework (namely, beliefs about deservingness
which they call ‘beliefs in a just world’) can underpin one another to create
quasi-equilibria reflecting two different levels of redistributive solidarity. Their
argument turns on a comparison between two stylized country cases.
In one of these cases, which resembles the US, policy regimes keep both
taxes and social spending low, so there is not much of a social safety net. As it
happens (for reasons that might be exogenous), in this country, parents believe
and teach their children that what one gets in the world is mainly a reflection
of one’s own efforts. As adults imbued with this worldview, those children will
tend to work hard and support keeping taxes low, so they can keep the fruits of
their effort, while opposing increases in social spending out of a belief that
poverty results from a lack of effort. The resulting policy regimes will then
reinforce their beliefs.
In the second case, which resembles Sweden, policy regimes provide gen-
erous social benefits sustained by high rates of tax. For these (or exogenous)
reasons, parents are less inclined to teach their children that what they get will
depend entirely on their own efforts and more inclined to suggest that fortune
plays a large role in how one’s life turns out. As adults equipped with such
beliefs, those children will be more inclined to rely on the social safety net and
to associate poverty with bad luck rather than a lack of effort. As a result, they
will provide more political support for generous social benefits and the taxes
required to fund them, which will help sustain those beliefs.
The result is two equilibria in which popular beliefs—about the extent to
which income is dependent on effort rather than luck—and institutions—in
the form of policy regimes—are mutually reinforcing. In one case, low taxes
and a meagre social safety-net promote worldviews resistant to increasing
taxes and benefits. In the other, higher taxes and generous benefits promote
worldviews that mandate higher levels of redistribution. This argument fits the
observation that 60 per cent of citizens living in generous European welfare
states think income is more dependent on luck than effort, while only 30 per
cent of Americans do. Moreover, it suggests that very general beliefs (in this
case about luck and effort) may be just as important to redistributive politics as
explicit policy preferences.
Popular beliefs do not have to be accurate to be consequential. Consider the
case of American beliefs about social mobility. Even though American rates of
mobility are not especially high and possibly declining, some argue that a
widespread belief in the possibility of upward social mobility suppresses
support for redistribution in the US (Piketty 1995; Alesina, Di Tella, and
MacCulloch 2004; Corak 2013). In such instances, however, where beliefs
and institutions are incongruent, levels of support for redistribution may be
less stable. There are some indications, for instance, that the precondition for
high rates of social mobility may be a generous set of redistributive social
programmes (Mitnik, Cumberworth, and Grusky 2013). Thus, beliefs about
social mobility in the US may be sustaining policies that are gradually under-
mining the material or institutional basis for such beliefs.
Indeed, to suggest that support for redistribution turns on institutional and
cultural frameworks, rather than on a small number of fluctuating variables, is
not to say it is immutable. I use the term ‘quasi-equilibrium’ precisely in order
to signal that attitudes to redistribution are susceptible to change as institu-
tions and cultural frameworks shift. We do not yet know much about how
such changes take place. However, they seem to do so gradually via processes
like Bayesian updating that are heavily biased towards the status quo. Thus,
Europeans living under more egalitarian conditions were rendered more upset
210 Peter A. Hall
by increases in income inequality than Americans were, a reaction that might

inspire further support for redistribution (Alesina, Di Tella, and MacCulloch
2004; Barnes and Hall 2013). Similarly, Kerr (2013) finds that, when actual
levels of income inequality rise, people’s views about the appropriateness of
differences in income between occupations also shift upward, although that
does not entirely suppress support for redistribution (see also Medgyesi 2013).
8.3 E MPIRICAL IMPLICATIONS AND EV IDENCE
Is there evidence for this quasi-equilibrium perspective? A full evaluation is

beyond the scope of this chapter, but the perspective carries two empirical
implications that can be assessed against basic cross-national data. First, if this
quasi-equilibrium approach to redistributive solidarity is correct, there should
be a certain durability to national attitudes about redistribution. Such attitudes
can and do change over long periods of time; but, over the short to medium
term, cross-national differences in them should be broadly stable.
Investigating that proposition involves finding data that is comparable
across countries and time in a context where relatively few good indicators
are available cross-nationally. We should also note that support for redistri-
bution is a multidimensional phenomenon (Janmaat 2013). Those who favour
redistributing from the rich do not always support redistribution towards the
poor; and some people want to exclude immigrants or others from such
programmes (Cavaillé and Trump 2015; McCall 2013).
Therefore, based on Cavaillé (2014), I draw a distinction between general
support for redistribution, understood as people’s desires to see incomes made
more equal, and a second dimension, that is, support for redistribution to the
poor, understood as people’s willingness to redistribute resources to the least
advantaged in society. To assess the former, I follow common practice and use
the level of agreement with survey questions that ask whether incomes should
be made more equal and whether the government has a responsibility for
making them more equal. To assess support for redistribution to the poor,
following Larsen (2006), I use the percentage of respondents who attribute
poverty in their country to structural factors, such as bad luck, injustice, or
inevitability, as opposed to the personal attributes of the poor, such as lack of
willpower or laziness. The premise is that people who attribute poverty to
laziness or a lack of willpower should be less willing to redistribute resources
to them.
Are cross-national differences in attitudes to redistribution broadly stable?
Using national averages, Figure 8.3 compares general support for redistribu-
tion in the ISSP surveys of 1992 and 2009 and support for redistribution to the
poor in the Eurobarometer surveys of 1989 and 2007—the longest periods for
(a) General support for redistribution
4.5 H
RU SL
General support for redistribution 2009
4.3 IT
PL BG
4.1
AT
3.9
CZ
3.7 DE
SW UK
3.5
3.3 AL NO
3.1 NZ
2.9
2.7 US
2.5
2.5 2.7 2.9 3.1 3.3 3.5 3.7 3.9 4.1 4.3 4.5
General support for redistribution 1992
(b) Support for redistribution to the poor
95
Support for redistribution to the poor 2007
90
FR NE
85 DK
SP
DE
BE
IT
80 LU
GR
75
UK
PT
70
70 75 80 85 90 95
Support for redistribution to the poor 1989
Figure 8.3 The stability of support for redistribution over time

Sources: (a) ISSP (1992, 2009). (b) Eurobarometer 31A (1989) and 279 (2007); For 1989 Germany is West
Germany. For 3(a) R2 = 0.80; SE = 0.25. For 3(b) R2 = 0.08; SE = 4.81.
212 Peter A. Hall
which I could find comparable data. Although general support for redistribu-
tion (in panel a) declines slightly in the US, New Zealand, and Norway and
increases in Russian and Hungary over this seventeen-year period, it remains
relatively stable in most countries (as indicated by proximity to the 45-degree
line) and the national ordering of attitudes does not change much. Panel b
shows that there is more movement in support for redistribution to the poor
over a similar period, marked by some convergence, as support rises in
countries where it was initially low and declines where it was higher. The
most striking feature is a notable decline in support for redistribution to the
poor in Portugal and Britain. But, with those exceptions, the country ordering
does not change much.
A second empirical implication follows from the causal mechanisms I have
adduced to explain quasi-equilibria of redistributive solidarity. At the cross-
national level, we can expect to see wide variation in national attitudes to
redistribution, because there is plenty of room for variation in the multiple
institutional and cultural frameworks constitutive of such quasi-equilibria.
Within that range, however, we should observe what can be described as
‘low solidarity’ and ‘high solidarity’ equilibria, characterized by relatively low
or high levels of support for redistribution. Moreover, because of the ways in
which economic and social policy regimes reinforce existing attitudes, support
for redistribution should generally be higher in countries where disposable
incomes are more equal as a result of redistribution, while support for it
should be lower in countries where there is less redistribution and more
unequal disposable incomes. This pattern is the opposite of the one predicted
by standard political economy models whose premise is that increasing levels
of income inequality increases support for redistribution.
Of course, this prediction should be qualified in several ways. Although a
quasi-equilibrium perspective suggests that income inequality will not dictate
cross-national support for redistribution, inequality may condition that sup-
port at the margin; and thermostatic effects that would see support for
redistribution decline as redistribution reaches high levels or increase when
redistribution falls to very low levels might also affect these patterns (Soroka
and Wlezien 2010). But I expect cross-national differences in support for
redistribution and inequality in disposable income to be broadly aligned.
Do we observe the high and low solidarity equilibria that this perspective
predicts? Figure 8.4 addresses this issue with a focus on support for redistri-
bution to the poor, arguably a better reflection of redistributive solidarity than
general attitudes to redistribution. It is based on the 1990 World Values
Survey, which is one of the few sources for data on this topic extending
beyond Europe.7 The broad direction of the relationship displayed in
Figure 8.4 supports the contention: in countries where national support for
redistribution is higher, inequality in disposable income is lower. Although
every country occupies a distinctive position in this space, reflecting
95
90
NO
DE
85 NE FR
SW
80
IR
BE
75 DE SP
FI
IT UK
70
CA
65
AT
US
60
55
50
0.2 0.22 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.3 0.32 0.34 0.36
Disposable income inequality
Figure 8.4 The relationship between disposable income inequality and support for
redistribution to the poor
Sources: LIS Gini index and World Values Study (1990). R2 = 0.19; SE = 7.83.
nationally-specific circumstances, the distribution is anchored by the Nordic

countries, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, closely followed by the Netherlands
and France, which might be said to reflect ‘high solidarity’ equilibria, while the
United States embodies a ‘low solidarity’ equilibrium, closely followed by
Canada and Britain (see also Paskov and Dewilde 2012).8
For an assessment of whether general attitudes to redistribution also reflect
this perspective, we can turn back to Figure 8.1. Here, Russia and Portugal are
outlying cases and support for redistribution is higher across an arc of East
Central European countries but, if they are excepted, national patterns bear some
resemblance to those of Figure 8.4. The US again anchors the low solidarity end
of the chart, closely followed by New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, while
general support for redistribution is higher in countries such as France and
Austria where disposable income inequality is lower. On the whole, however,
support for redistribution to the poor conforms to these quasi-equilibrium
expectations more closely than does general support for redistribution.
If this quasi-equilibrium perspective helps explain how particular levels of
redistributive solidarity are sustained, we must still ask how these quasi-
equilibria are generated in the first place—a task to which the next sections turn.
214 Peter A. Hall
8.4 THE POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION

OF SOCIAL SOLIDARITY
How is redistributive solidarity created? What historical processes give rise

to it? A quasi-equilibrium approach to solidarity carries implications for the
answers to those questions. In particular, it directs our attention to the ways in
which the institutions and cultural frameworks underpinning quasi-equilibria
were constructed.
Of course, that is also where theories that associate social solidarity with
specific conceptions of national identity also take the enquiry. They look for
the origins of solidarity in the development of particular forms of national
identity—often seen as a highly diffuse process involving the construction of
cultural categories and the influence of formative national events (Miller and
Ali 2013). In some respects, that is entirely appropriate; but most such
accounts construe the relevant cultural frameworks in terms that are overly
narrow. To put the core contention succinctly, we need to see that social
solidarity flows—not just from national identity per se, whether construed in
ethnic, cultural, or civic terms—but from visions of social justice that become
prominent in national discourse. In some cases, those visions themselves
become components of national identity; but we need to look more closely
into how that coupling happens and why it takes on particular forms if we
want to understand the role that national identities play in the process
whereby social solidarity is created.
For this purpose, instead of fastening on national identity qua identity, it is
useful to consider the broader collective imaginary from which such identities
emerge. Hall and Lamont (2009: 12) define collective imaginaries as ‘sets of
representations composed of symbols, myths and narratives that people use to
portray their community or nation and their own relationship as well as that
of others to it’ (see also Bouchard 2013). Such imaginaries are a feature of the
public sphere in all societies. At their heart are sets of narratives linking a
nation’s past to its present and specifying its aspirations for the future.
Collective imaginaries define the boundaries of membership in the commu-
nity and offer conceptions of what its members can legitimately demand of
others and expect in return. Thus, although more comprehensive than redis-
tributive solidarity per se, these imaginaries bear both on the inclusiveness of
the community and on visions of social justice. Among other things, they join
popular images of the nation to specific conceptions of social justice. One
reflection can be found in familiar notions of the ‘American Dream’
(Hochschild 1986; Cullen 2003) and another in the organizing ideas of French
Republicanism (Jennings 2011; Lamont 2000).
As cultural frameworks, collective imaginaries have a structural quality that
lends them durability over time and the potential to affect multiple dimensions
of people’s worldviews (Sewell 2005). Because they can comprehend competing

or ambiguous narratives, these imaginaries are not entirely objects of consen-
sus, but rather repertoires of collective representations that provide the tools
out of which contemporary debates are constructed. As such, they can push
debates in particular directions, and their boundaries circumscribe what is
likely to be seen as a legitimate argument. Their power comes partly from
how their narratives resonate with the emotional attachments people feel to the
nation. But it also resides in the capacities of those imaginaries to condition folk
wisdom about such things as what constitutes commendable action and how
people make their way in the world, notions that Swidler (1986) terms the
‘strategies for action’ available to individuals. This folk wisdom may be broadly
cognitive in content, but it carries normative implications for issues of redis-
tribution that are all the more influential because the normative content is often
implicit rather than explicit (Powell and DiMaggio 1991).
How were the components of such imaginaries relevant to redistributive
solidarity constructed? As the literature on the development of the welfare
state indicates, in the developed democracies, the answer must be: by historically-
important and highly-political movements for social justice. In some cases, as
Baldwin (1992) notes, these were largely middle-class movements, such as the
one led by Léon Bourgeois in nineteenth-century France (Hayward 1961). In
others, they were movements based on cross-class coalitions in which agrarian
and Christian Democratic parties played often prominent roles (Swenson
2002; Mares 2003). Religious movements influence the views of their adher-
ents about personal obligation and, through Christian Democratic parties in
particular, they have sometimes conditioned national visions of social justice
(Lichterman 2005; Manow and van Kersbergen 2009).
Over the twentieth century, however, these movements for social justice have
been spearheaded by social democratic parties and the representatives of orga-
nized labour (Huber and Stephens 2001; Bradley et al. 2003; Korpi 2006). Social
democratic parties and trade unions contributed to the construction of regimes
of solidarity in two ways. On the one hand, they helped put in place social policy
regimes that, once institutionalized, fostered ongoing support for redistribution.
Social democratic parties were especially important to the construction of
regimes built on expansive conceptions of social citizenship (Esping-Andersen
1990). On the other hand, as part of an active politics of coalition-building, these
parties promoted visions of social justice that left an imprint on national
collective imaginaries. Prior to the Second World War, social democratic parties
used the term ‘solidarity’ primarily to refer to class solidarity but, after the war,
social democrats began to speak of solidarity as a national value (Stjernø 2004).9
Thus, two features of the labour movement were important to cross-
national variation in support for redistribution. One was the political strength
of trade unions and parties on the political left. Where they commanded more
216 Peter A. Hall
members and votes, more generous and universalistic policy regimes were
likely to be put in place. The other was the orientation of the trade unions,
namely, whether they construed their mission in broad political terms—as
tribunes for the people—or in narrower terms as defenders of their members
in the industrial relations arena. Where unions embraced a wider political role,
they were more likely to promote generous social programmes and advance
ideals of social justice.
The orientation of the trade union movement was conditioned by its
organization. Where wage bargaining was concentrated at the peak level
under the aegis of one powerful confederation, as in Sweden, trade unions
tended to mount solidaristic appeals that influenced the wage structures and
social policies of many Nordic countries (Iversen 1999; Martin and Thelen
2007). Even in the absence of a single powerful confederation, however,
if wage bargaining was conducted primarily by national confederations
organized along ideological lines, as in France, the trade unions were also
more likely to act as tribunes for the people, partly in order to compete with
their rivals (Andolfatto and Labbé 2010). By contrast, union appeals tended to
be less solidaristic in countries where labour was organized by industrial
sector, as in Germany, or where many unions were organized by skill category,
as in Britain. In these cases, sectarian wage competition often took precedence
over national appeals for social justice.
A full discussion of this point is beyond the scope of the chapter, but
Table 8.1 provides some illustrative support for it. Here, I use the data of
Table 8.1 The relationship between the power and orientation of trade unions and
general support for redistribution
Orientation of Trade Unions
Solidaristic Sectoral Defence
Stronger Austria 6.4 Sweden 5.1

Finland 6.4 Ireland 5.1
Norway 5.7 Denmark 4.3
Power of Trade Unions Belgium 5.5
Average 6.0 Average 4.8
Weaker France 6.2 Germany 5.6
Portugal 6.1 UK 5.4
Spain 5.9
Italy 5.0
Nthlds 4.9
Average 5.6 Average 5.5
Note: The figures in each cell report the support for redistribution in that country based on average responses
on a ten-point scale running from ‘income differences should be larger to provide incentives for individual
effort’ to ‘incomes should be made more equal’ in 2000. Higher values indicate more support for redistribution.
Sources: European Values Survey (2000); Hamann, Johnston, and Kelly (2012); ICTWSS Version 4.0.
Hamann, Johnston, and Kelly (2012) on the incidence of general strikes in

Europe to measure the extent to which labour movements mount national
appeals for social justice. Union movements that sponsored a general strike in
the 1980–2006 period have been classified as solidaristic (see also Lindvall
2013). Movements are classified as stronger or weaker, based on whether
union membership as a percentage of the workforce exceeded the median in
the sample in 2000. The cells in the table report the average level of support for
redistribution within the national electorate in 2000.10 Although other factors
could be driving these outcomes, the table shows that support for redistribu-
tion is higher in countries where the orientation of the labour movement is
solidaristic, even when trade unions are weak.
Of course, other factors affected which types of trade unions and political
parties were influential and the kind of appeals they made. Electoral rules
mattered: social democratic parties were more successful under systems of
proportional representation (PR) than in those operating on first-past-the-post
rules (Iversen and Soskice 2006). Across PR systems, Christian Democratic
parties promoting generous but conservative welfare states prospered where
religious cleavages were prominent in the early twentieth century, while social
democratic parties fared better in countries where they could form alliances with
agrarian parties (Manow and van Kersbergen 2009). In such cases, the need to
appeal beyond workers to farmers, who preferred universal benefit schemes
because they lacked the employment histories for social insurance, inclined
Nordic governments towards the welfare regimes based on social citizenship
that built social solidarity. In any one nation, a number of factors could condition
the strength and complexion of the relevant political actors, but the underlying
point is that redistributive solidarity did not emerge entirely from some prim-
ordial understanding of national identity. It was constructed by political actors,
campaigning in the name of social justice, who put in place the institutions and
encouraged the worldviews that sustain social solidarity.
Moreover, in order to build coalitions for this purpose, political leaders
often tied their programmes to particular images of the nation. In this respect,
the process whereby welfare states were built can be seen as a distinctive
stage in nation-building—one in which specific ideals of social justice were
built into the imagery of the nation at the same time as they were being
institutionalized into the frameworks of national social programmes. At critical
moments in the politics of social policy, national collective imaginaries were
inflected in ways that consolidated or redrew social boundaries, redefined
the rights associated with citizenship, and re-specified the obligations of
individuals to the community (Béland and Lecours 2005). The resulting
amalgam of national images and ideals of social justice became a basis for
social solidarity in the nation.
Sweden is a paradigmatic case. In 1928, when Per Albin Hansson became
leader of its influential social democratic party, the SAP, he confronted the
218 Peter A. Hall
challenge of how to mobilize support for the party’s egalitarian social pro-
gramme. Faced with a small industrial sector and substantial agrarian popu-
lation, he could not build a large enough coalition on appeals to class
solidarity. Instead, he decided to present his party’s aspirations as an effort
to build a certain kind of nation, which he described as the ‘people’s home’
(folkhemmet). In his words:
The basis of the home is community and togetherness. The good home does not
recognize any privileged or neglected members, nor any favourite or stepchildren.
In the good home there is equality, consideration, cooperation, and helpfulness.
Applied to the great people’s and citizens’ home this would mean the breaking
down of all the social and economic barriers that now separate citizens into the
privileged and the neglected, into the rulers and the dependents, into the rich and
the poor, the propertied and the impoverished, the plunderers. and the plundered.
(quoted in Berman 1998: 157)
This powerful metaphor was to be a centrepiece of the party’s campaigns in
ensuing years; and, reiterated by successive social democratic governments, it
became an important element in how Swedes began to think about their
nation (Tilton 1991; cf. Kettunen 2012). Egalitarian ideals became a part of
Swedish identity. The Swedish social democrats reshaped the national collect-
ive imaginary in ways that reinforced social solidarity for decades to come.
By contrast, consider how Franklin D. Roosevelt built a coalition for his
social policies in the US at roughly the same time. In many respects, those
policies were as radical a break with the past as those of the Swedish SAP
(Gourevitch 1986). The Social Security Act of 1935 laid the foundations for the
American welfare state. But the political challenges facing Roosevelt were quite
different. In Congress, his own party was dominated by representatives from
the South who were suspicious about federal intervention and unenthusiastic
about extending social benefits to African-Americans. Partly for these reasons,
agricultural and domestic workers were exempted from some provisions of the
Act; and Roosevelt decided to present his programme of social benefits as a
social insurance scheme, whose legitimacy was based on its actuarial principles
rather than on its contribution to social equality (Lieberman 1995; Jacobs
2011; cf. Davies and Derthick 1997). Compare the words of Per Albin Hansson
with the speech Roosevelt gave on passage of the Act, when he declared:
This law represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no
means completed—a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future
depressions, to act as a protection to future administrations of the Government
against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy—a
law to flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation—in other
words, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide
for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.
(Hamen 2010: 75)
The Social Security Act was a triumph of social and political engineering; but it
did nothing to overcome the racialized social order that was still a prominent
part of the American collective imaginary and little to advance the place of
egalitarian ideals in that imaginary (Smith 1999). To this day, racial divisions
continue to haunt American debates about social policy (Alesina, Glaeser, and
Sacerdote 2001; Steensland 2006).
8.5 S OCIAL S OLIDARITY I N A

TRANSNATIONAL W ORLD
What are the implications of this analysis for securing a social solidarity in
societies marked by more racial, ethnic, and religious diversity? This is an
important issue at a time when immigration has become a prominent feature
of a globalizing world and crucial to the prosperity of many nations with aging
populations.
I have argued that redistributive social solidarity takes the form of a quasi-
equilibrium underpinned by institutions and cultural frameworks that are
deeply-entrenched and mutually reinforcing. These frameworks were con-
structed over long periods of time and, although susceptible to change, often
evolve only gradually. Thus, they constitute important background conditions
for countries dealing with higher levels of diversity. One of the implications is
that countries that have already developed relatively expansive conceptions of
social citizenship, such as those with social democratic welfare states, should
be better able to extend redistributive solidarity to immigrants of diverse
backgrounds. Conversely, countries whose welfare regimes militate against
redistributive solidarity, such as those with liberal welfare states that draw
sharper symbolic divisions between recipients of social benefits and other
citizens, should find it more difficult to treat new groups of immigrants in
solidaristic terms.
Although the issue is far from fully resolved, there is some evidence for this
proposition. In the social democratic welfare states of Norway, Denmark,
Sweden, and Finland, for instance, popular opposition to extending social
benefits to immigrants—a set of attitudes often described as welfare
chauvinism—has been generally been low, although it may be increasing in
countries such as Denmark in the wake of recent mass migration (Mewes and
Mau 2012; Bay and West Pedersen 2006). Figure 8.5 indicates that welfare
chauvinism has historically been somewhat higher in countries, such as France
and Germany, with conservative welfare states based on social insurance
principles, but highest of all in liberal welfare states, such as Britain, where
means-testing is used to target benefits on the poor.11 By contrast, a history of
220 Peter A. Hall
(a) General support for redistribution
10
9 UK
Level of welfare chauvinism
8
7
DE
6 BE
SP
5 FR
4 PT
3 NE FI
2 DK NO
1
SW
0
3 4 5 6 7 8
General support for redistribution
(b) Support for redistribution to the poor
10
9 UK
Level of welfare chauvinism
8
7 DE
6 BE
SP
5 FR
4 PT
3 NE
2 DK
1
SW
0
60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95
Figure 8.5 The relationship between support for redistribution and welfare
chauvinism
Sources: European Social Survey (2008); European Values Study Round 6 (2008); Eurobarometer 279 (2007).
For 5(a) R2 = 0.07; SE = 2.48. For 5(b) R2 = 0.33; SE = 2.20.
racial, ethnic, or religious homogeneity does not seem to promote welfare

chauvinism, which is lowest in the Nordic countries that have historically been
racially and religiously homogenous. Moreover, the more influential factor
seems to be conceptions of the poor rather than general attitudes to inequality.
As Figure 8.5 (panel a) indicates, there is no obvious relationship between
general support for redistribution and welfare chauvinism (cf. Reeskens and
van Oorschot 2012). However, panel (b) suggests that, in nations where
support for redistribution to the poor is higher, welfare chauvinism is lower

(R2 0.30). People’s willingness to extend redistributive solidarity to new groups
is apparently conditioned by the terms on which solidarity has been extended
in the past.
Within these parameters, however, there is still room for social solidarity to
change. As we have seen, support for redistribution tends to be higher in
countries where there is more redistribution. Therefore, if governments begin
to redistribute more generously or more universally, the social solidarity
reflected in popular support for redistribution may rise and extend to more
diverse groups of people. However, contemporary governments interested in
expanding redistribution face serious economic constraints. Social spending
increased most rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s when the governments of
the developed democracies believed high rates of economic growth would
continue, thereby giving them ample revenues from which to redistribute.
But rates of economic growth in the OECD (Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development) countries have fallen by half since the
1970s, and entitlement spending as a share of national budgets has increased
dramatically, leaving less room for expansion. Because governments ran
deficits to avoid reducing social spending when growth declined, some now
face levels of debt that limit their capacities to expand spending further
(Schäfer and Streeck 2013).
Partly as a result, instead of moving towards more universal programmes
that accord benefits as a right of citizenship, many governments have tight-
ened eligibility requirements and begun to target more benefits on the poor—
even in some of the Nordic welfare states (Lindbom and Rothstein 2004;
Hemerijck 2012). From the perspective of relieving poverty, targeting benefits
on the poor is a cost-effective strategy; but it can render redistributive soli-
darity more fragile by virtue of how it sharpens the symbolic boundaries
between benefit recipients and other citizens. It is notable, for instance, that,
in the liberal welfare states of Britain and the US which rely heavily on means-
testing for social assistance, support for redistribution to the poor has
declined, even though general attitudes to redistribution have not shifted
much despite three decades of rising income inequality (Cavaillé and Trump
2015). As more governments turn towards targeted benefit programmes in
order to limit their outlays, redistributive solidarity may decline in other
countries as well.
Other factors are also contributing to that decline. Higher levels of immi-
gration sometimes reduce support for redistribution, and economic devel-
opments play a role (Burgoon 2014; cf. Mewes and Mau 2012). Higher levels
of income inequality in the bottom half of the income distribution seem to
reduce support for redistribution, as the social distance between the median
voter and the poor increases (Lupu and Pontusson 2011). Where income
differences are associated with high levels of spatial or social segregation, it
222 Peter A. Hall
may be more difficult for people on average incomes to regard the poor as
members of their own community. And rising levels of economic insecurity,
linked to the loss of good middle-class jobs, can engender sauve-qui-peut
attitudes that militate against redistributive solidarity (Hacker, Rehm, and
Schlesinger 2012; Autor and Dorn 2013; Oesch 2013). Mewes and Mau
(2012) find, for instance, that one of the best predictors of welfare chauvinism
is the extent to which an individual feels economically-vulnerable (see also
Alt 1979).
Moreover, although collective imaginaries have some intrinsic durability,
concerted political action may be necessary to sustain them; and, in its
absence, they may be vulnerable to changes in contemporary discourse.
Iversen and Soskice (2012) find, for instance, that among people with similar
incomes trade union members are more likely than non-members to favour
redistribution (see also Kumlin and Svallfors 2007). Helbling, Reeskens, and
Wright (2016) note that, when partly platforms make more nationalist
appeals, whether of a civic or ethnic nature, popular hostility to immigrants
also increases (see also Cavaillé 2014). Thus, redistributive solidarity may be
harder to sustain after three decades marked by the ascendance of a neoliberal
rhetoric. That rhetoric downplays issues of social justice and emphasizes
market-oriented values such as self-reliance, entrepreneurialism, and pay for
performance, which permeate the views of ordinary people and militate
against programmes of generous redistribution (Boltanski and Chiapello
1999; Barnes and Hall 2013). Neoliberal values have also been associated
with racial or ethnic prejudice (Son Hing 2013). Although it is difficult to
separate out the effects of such factors, some features of contemporary political
discourse in the developed democracies may be limiting redistributive soli-
darity and its extension to more diverse groups.
Moreover, the political voices calling for redistribution are weaker now than
they were when the solidaristic social programmes of the post-war years were
put in place. Since 1980, trade union membership in the OECD has fallen by
half, and many unions have turned away from the politics of social justice
towards a politics of sectoral defence in order to retain a dwindling member-
ship (Baccaro and Howell 2011; Pontusson 2013). Social democratic parties are
still a prominent part of the European landscape, but they have moved even
more sharply to the right than their conservative counterparts over the past
three decades (Iversen 2006). In many countries, their electoral base is being
sapped by rising parties of the radical right. Although radical right parties have
recently become more supportive of redistribution for native-born citizens,
they are determined opponents of redistribution to immigrants; and their
prominence raises the electoral salience of a narrow nationalism inimical to
the extension of redistributive solidarity (Norris 2005; Shayo 2009; Helbling,
Reeskens, and Wright 2016). As a result, even mainstream parties are hedging
on the question of promoting rights for immigrants and ethnic minorities.
Can the European Union (EU) serve as an alternative vehicle for the
promotion of social solidarity? Its officials have long had that aspiration and
the EU has had some success at securing basic rights for migrants. But the
financial crisis of the Eurozone and the response of the member governments
to it have damaged the wider prospects for European solidarity. Policies of
austerity following that crisis have forced cutbacks in redistribution and
generated the kind of difficult economic conditions that do not encourage
people to support further redistribution to immigrants. Moreover, the political
response to the crisis has revealed the limits to social solidarity in Europe.
Instead of reacting to the crisis as if the continent were a common community
of fate, in which the success of each state depends on the prosperity of all, the
creditor countries led by Germany responded in terms that gave priority to
their own national interests (Hall 2012, 2014). Pronouncements that laid
the blame for the crisis on the debtor countries fed popular stereotypes of
‘lazy Greeks’ that evoked longstanding images of the undeserving poor. As a
result, social solidarity in Europe currently seems to stop at national borders
(Pew Research Center 2012).
In this context, one can reasonably ask whether the redistributive solidarity
reflected in western welfare states is not an artefact of a specific place and time
when trade unions and social democratic parties were especially strong. The
factors conducive to solidarity in the developing world are somewhat different,
and, even in Europe, it remains an open question whether new vehicles for the
promotion of redistributive solidarity will appear with enough influence to
sustain it (Lieberman 2003; Singh 2015). In Europe and America, the loudest
voices currently promoting social solidarity across ethnic, racial, and religious
lines are non-governmental and quasi-governmental organizations, such as
the Council of Europe (2012). They have gained new momentum and influ-
ence in an era of social media, not least because their appeals resonate with a
venerable set of Western values. But it is not clear they can sustain redistribu-
tive solidarity amidst a cacophony of voices that challenge it.
Of course, there is also some support for according social benefits to
immigrants at official levels, notably in ministries of social services and the
judiciary, which have long been institutional enclaves for such values
(Guiraudon 2000). In a few countries, judicial decisions have been crucial to
securing social benefits for immigrants, and Ferwerda (2014) shows that such
decisions can reshape political dynamics. Where courts mandate social bene-
fits for immigrants, thereby taking the issue off the political agenda, political
parties are more willing to liberalize citizenship requirements in the hope of
securing the votes of such groups. Many European countries provide resources
to immigrants through official channels such as these that operate under the
radar screen of national politics.
However, is this kind of social solidarity by stealth really social solidarity?
Some might say that the solidarity of a nation can be assessed by the level of
224 Peter A. Hall
resources it distributes to those in need. But, in the terms of this volume, social
solidarity is embodied in the attitudes of the populace rather than in levels of
public provision. As such, it is a social construction, produced over long
periods of time by historic struggles about social justice that are a dimension
of nation-building and sustained by the institutions and cultural frameworks
that emerge from this process. However, even when they have mutually-
reinforcing qualities, institutions, and cultural frameworks can decay without
periodic efforts to mobilize support for them (Thelen 2004; Hall 2013). Thus,
like all such constructions, solidarity is vulnerable to the vicissitudes of history;
it will ultimately be maintained and extended to more diverse communities
only if social and political leaders continue to argue for inclusive visions of
social justice.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For comments on earlier versions, I am grateful to Keith Banting, Marius Busemeyer,
Charlotte Cavaillé, Mareike Kleine, Will Kymlicka, Nicola Lacey, Christian Albrekt
Larsen, Jane Mansbridge, Waltraud Schelkle, Anna Skarpelis, Rosemary Taylor, and the
members of the CIFAR (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) Successful Societies
programme. Revision of this chapter was supported by a World Politics Fellowship at
Princeton University.
NOTES
1. This measure for general support for redistribution reports average national
responses to adjacent questions in the 1999 ISSP cross-national survey that ask
whether respondents agree or disagree (on a five-point scale) that income inequal-
ity is too high and that the government has a responsibility for reducing it. For a
discussion of the measure’s validity, see Dallinger (2010).
2. On distinctions among types of national identity, see also Reeskens and Hooghe
(2010); Helbling, Reeskens, and Wright (2016); and Bonikowski (2013).
3. The indicators are based on the criteria people see as most important for being
(nationality). The measure for ethnic identity loads more heavily on native birth,
longstanding residence, having citizenship and subscribing to the country’s dom-
inant religion, while the measure for civic identity loads more heavily on respect
for the country’s political institutions, speaking its language and feeling (nation-
ality). For further description, see Helbling, Reeskens, and Wright (2016). Note
that national averages have to be used with caution as indicators because they can
hide different national distributions of opinion (Davidov 2009; Heath, Martin, and
Spreckelsen 2009; and Osberg and Smeeding 2006).
4. For civic identity, this accords with the individual-level results of Wright and
Reeskens (2013), although they find a relationship between ethnic identity and
attitudes to redistribution.
5. This is one of the few indicators for assessing support for redistribution to the
poor available across multiple country cases that extend beyond Europe. In
national cases, it correlates highly with support for policies of social assistance
specifically directed at the poor. For more details about it and a rationale, see
Larsen (2006) and p. 250. Here, it is drawn from a 2001 Eurobarometer.
6. Social insurance programmes, for instance, can inspire support, not only among
the financial institutions, insurance companies, and others involved in their
administration, but also among others whose investments turn on expectations
about the behaviour of others that is dependent on the existence of such
programmes.
7. As noted, the measure is the percentage of respondents who attribute poverty to
structural factors rather than to the laziness or lack of willpower of the poor.
8. Austria is an outlier, which may reflect data issues since reported support for
redistribution to the poor there was at least 15 percentage points higher in several
surveys conducted in the 2000s than in this 1990 survey.
9. The importance of trade unions and social democratic parties is highlighted by
power-resource theories advanced to explain the development of the welfare state
(Bradley et al. 2003). But those theories emphasize social spending, while I am also
interested in how the campaigns of these organizations shift the symbolic reper-
toires and discursive frameworks of national collective imaginaries.
10. Support for redistribution is measured here by the level of agreement on a
ten-point scale with the statement that incomes should be made more equal versus
the statement that income differences should be larger to provide incentives for
individual effort.
11. Welfare chauvinism is measured here by the national percentage of respondents to
the European Social Survey of 2008 who said immigrants should never get the
same social benefits as native citizens even after they have become citizens or
fulfilled other requirements. General support for redistribution reflects the average
national score on a ten-point scale in which respondents to the European Values
Survey of 2008 were asked whether incomes should be made more equal or
income differences should be larger to provide incentives for effort. Support for
redistribution to the poor is measured by the national percentage of respondents
to a 2007 Eurobarometer survey who ascribed poverty to structural factors rather
than the laziness of the poor.
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9
The Electoral Politics of Solidarity

The Welfare Agendas of Radical Right Parties
Zoe Lefkofridi and Elie Michel
9.1 I NTRODUCTION
In representative democracies social cleavages seek expression via parties

(Sartori 2005) that are not always successful in picking up changes in the
fabric of their electorates.1 In Europe and beyond, we are currently witnessing
high degrees of electoral volatility, voters’ de-alignment and re-alignment, and
the rise of radical right parties (RR). RR parties typically mobilize voters on the
socio-cultural dimension (Rydgren 2007, 2005a), and their most publicized
issue is their opposition to immigration (Arzheimer 2009; Van der Brug,
Fennema, and Tillie 2005; Van der Brug, Fennema, and Tillie 2000). They
have acquired coalition potential and in some countries they have even
become partners in the formation of cabinets at national and local levels
(e.g., Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands). In contrast, mainstream, moderate
parties, such as Social Democratic (SD) and Christian democratic/conserva-
tive parties (which have been part of government coalitions in the post-Second
World War era) are in decline (see Figure 9.1).
A key social segment that has realigned during the last decades is the
working class: formerly the key electoral clientele of parties on the left (Social
Democrats, socialists, and communists), workers now constitute the core
supporters of the RR in Western Europe (Oesch 2008a; Rydgren 2012). This,
in turn, has raised the question of how does the RR, which typically supports
a free-market economy, appeal to the working class on economic, and espe-
cially welfare state issues. As the working class is most exposed to market
risks its support for RR parties opposing left-wing policies (e.g., state inter-
vention in the economy) has been puzzling. Oesch (2008a) investigated why
workers are more likely than other classes to support the RR and found that
‘questions of community and identity (the defence of national identity against
234 Zoe Lefkofridi and Elie Michel
outsiders and the upholding of an exclusive form of community)’ seem to be

more important than economic grievances in motivating the working class to
cast an RR vote in Austria, Belgium (Flanders), France, and Norway (Oesch
2008a: 369).
However, as recent research shows that RR parties also achieve high degrees
of congruence with their supporters on the socio-economic dimension
(Lefkofridi and Casado 2012), we need to dig deeper into RR economic
agendas. Although most scholarly attention has been paid to how negative
attitudes towards immigrants translate into RR support, the present contribu-
tion sheds light on the role played by redistributive solidarity in RR parties’
electoral strategy. We ask: ‘Has the attention RR parties pay to welfare state
expansion increased over time? (How) do RR parties promote redistributive
solidarity?’ As RR parties are powerful players in contemporary politics, a
deeper knowledge of their strategy enhances understanding of how RR dis-
course affects the way redistributive solidarity is conceived, justified, and
pursued in contemporary Europe.
The argument we advance here is that although the RR’s success in the 1980s
was mainly due to their mobilization of socio-cultural issues and immigration,
their contemporary strategy relies on a combination of (left-wing) socio-
economic and (right-wing) socio-cultural ideas. These ideas entertain popular
fears of cultural and economic threats, which together produce an anti-
immigrant, exclusionary approach to perceiving and pursuing redistributive
solidarity. By framing redistributive solidarity in such a way, that is, promoting
a welfare state for ‘blood and soil’ nationhood (Banting and Kymlicka,
Chapter 1, this volume), RR parties have been able to compete against the
Left as the agents of redistributive solidarity. As a consequence, the effort of RR
parties to optimize votes energizes the division between diversity and solidarity
(Chapter 1, this volume).
Overall, we find that the salience of redistributive issues has increased for
RR parties in Western Europe over the last thirty years. The SD parties’
positions on these issues do not seem to have dramatically changed, but RR
parties seem to be aligning with them. More precisely, we observe a shift
among RR parties to the traditionally left side of welfare politics—for example,
in favour of more generous redistribution (with some notable exceptions like
the Swiss SVP (Schweizerische Volkspartei)). Finally, our qualitative analysis
illustrates that this positional shift of the RR parties comes with the definition
of a strictly restrictive concept of redistributive politics: exclusive solidarity.
In what follows, we first introduce the theory of issue salience and owner-
ship and develop hypotheses about the RR’s engagement with redistributive
solidarity in section 9.2. Following Peter Hall (Chapter 8, this volume), we
discuss why and how the issue ownership of redistributive solidarity is currently
contested and how RRs compete with SD parties over the agency of redistribu-
tive solidarity. We formulate two hypotheses: first, RR parties have increasingly
The Electoral Politics of Solidarity 235
invested in the politics of redistributive solidarity, which suggests that the
importance of the welfare state in their electoral agendas should increase over
time. In this way, RR parties are crowding out Social Democrats by competing in
the same policy space on issues of welfare. As the welfare state and redistribution
are issues traditionally owned by Social Democrats, however, our second hy-
pothesis is that RR parties use their own issue (immigration) to frame welfare
issues; this suggests that in their electoral rhetoric the deserving recipients
of welfare benefits should be clearly defined and differentiated from those
undeserving ones along ethnic and national lines. In section 9.3 we elaborate
on the methodology and data we used to test these expectations empirically.
In sections 9.4 and 9.5 we present our results and discuss whether they (dis)
confirm our expectations about the quantitative (salience) and qualitative
(inclusive/exclusive) aspects of redistributive solidarity. In the conclusion, we
explain how this study extends our knowledge of the welfare state agendas of RR
parties and discuss important questions that this study generates.
9.2 I SSUE SALIENCE IN PARTY COMPETITION

AND VOTING BEHAVIOUR
In electoral campaigns, parties face two key constraints: resources and the
attention span of voters. This forces parties to prioritize and condense their
messages. The salience theory of party competition posits that parties select-
ively emphasize topics where they feel they have a good reputation, while
deemphasizing those that may be electorally costly or put them at disadvan-
tage against their competitors. So parties emphasize some issues more than
others in their competition against each other (Sjöblom 1985; Budge and Farlie
1983; Petrocik 1996; Meguid 2008; Bélanger and Meguid 2008). In this way,
parties seek to prime the salience of their own issues in the decisional calculus
of voters. The tendency of parties to focus on the issues of electoral advantage
is relatively path-dependent given the role of parties’ institutional and organ-
izational legacies in determining their policy package (Marks and Wilson
2000). Within a certain historical context, the argument goes, political actors
favour a specific policy direction and each party identifies a set of policy issues
that they ‘own’ (van der Brug 2004).
9.2.1 The Supply Side: Redistributive Solidarity—a SD Agenda?
In the course of modern political history, socialist and SD organizations

promoted social solidarity and justice; the concession of conservatives to
sharing the burdens (via welfare institutions) has typically been part of a
strategy to appease the electoral appeal of socialists and social-democrats.2
Due to the essential role that socialist and SD organizations and movements
have played in the forming of the welfare state, they have ‘embodied’ the
politics of solidarity (Esping-Andersen 1990). They have done so by fostering
high levels of redistribution and by constructing the collective imaginary of
solidarity at the national level across Europe. As a result, SD parties have thus
come to own (i.e., they are considered the most competent to handle) the
issues of social solidarity, equality, redistribution, and the expansion of the
welfare state.3
However, the environment in which SD parties operate has changed
because of the processes of globalization and European integration. As forces
of globalization became more visible and key steps towards economic inte-
gration within Europe were taken, the room for policy maneuver in areas with
European Union (EU) competences became increasingly constrained for
mainstream office-seeking parties (Mair 2007). The Single Market and the
Maastricht Treaty fundamentally changed the policy arena of national parties
and dampened important policy conflicts between left and right, especially
regarding the management of the national economy (e.g., Mair 2007, 2000;
Johansson and Raunio 2001; Hix and Goetz 2000). According to Mair (2007,
2000) EU law, policies, and institutions have been increasingly limiting the
policy space, the policy instruments, and the policy repertoire at parties’
disposal. This, in turn, led to dampening the competition between mainstream
parties on policy domains where the EU has increased competences (Nanou
and Dorussen 2013), such as the Common European Market. This led to
convergence between mainstream SD and centre-right parties on economic
matters.
More often than not, national parties in office have been experiencing a
growing tension between responsibility and responsiveness (Mair 2011). Be-
cause of the political constraints posed by non-majoritarian institutions and
international agreements (e.g., the 1992 Maastricht Treaty of the European
Community), SD parties have found it increasingly hard to promote ambitious
redistributive positions in response to the demands of their core electorates.
The need to act responsibly vis-à-vis their international commitments has
pushed office-seeking SD parties towards the right on socio-economic issues,
including the role and size of the state in society and economy. Social
Democrats in government have had to implement treaties signed by preceding
governments that set the long-term neoliberal trend in motion, but have also
been themselves signatories of treaties promoting economic liberalism. They
have initiated reforms in the way welfare benefits are distributed, such as the
well-known Schröder’s Agenda 2010 reforms, which touched upon the heart of
the German social security system. The drastic cuts in the German unemploy-
ment and pension system caused friction within the Sozialdemokratische
Partei Deutschlands (SPD) but were enthusiastically supported by conserva-

tive and Christian Democratic parties: Christlich Demokratische Union
Deutschlands (CDU), Christlich Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU), and the
Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP). So, although SD parties have historically
served as the key agents of redistributive solidarity in the post-Second World
War era, during the process of European integration they found themselves
compromising a lot of their welfare-related policy goals to adapt to a neo-
liberal environment. SD parties’ ideological support for the welfare state did
not decline (Häusermann 2014), but they gradually befriended the neoliberal
framework and the concepts of (pro-business) freedom, liberalization, com-
petition, and privatization (Lavelle 2013; Pierson 2001).
Processes of globalization, as well as economic integration within Europe,
have thus created a new cleavage of winners and losers, those who can engage
and benefit from these processes and those that cannot (Kriesi et al. 2006).
The traditional socio-economic cleavage between the left and the right has
been shifting into a new cleavage between integration (openness to global-
ization) and demarcation (protection from globalization) (Kriesi et al. 2012).
Liberalization and economic competition brought about by globalization
and European integration has been especially harmful for the poorer strata:
as the working class lacks the resources (e.g., education, trade unions at the
global level) to survive in a global market, its jobs, wages and welfare benefits
are endangered.
9.2.2 The Demand Side: Working-Class

and Left-Authoritarianism
The working class has constituted the key social group favouring welfare state
expansion on the demand side. As SD parties were the agents for those issues
on the supply side of electoral politics, the working class stood at the core of
SD electorates. For a long time socialist and SD parties were highly in sync
with the working class; however, because of the constraints of globalization,
the room for policy maneuver on socio-economic issues available to Social
Democrats became ever more narrow, the policy tools they could use were
increasingly more limited and pressures to liberalize even those services
provided by the welfare state increased. Moreover, among SD supporters,
the middle class increased, while the working class shrank (Gingrich and
Häusermann 2015).4 Large numbers of working-class citizens now tend to
either abstain or support other parties, such as RR parties.
To understand workers’ realignment (from parties on the left to those on
the RR), we need to consider that a large segment of the working class holds
left-authoritarian views, namely left-wing positions on socio-economic issues
(pro-welfare) and authoritarian positions on socio-cultural issues (law and

order, immigration, etc.). Some fifty years ago Lipset (1966: 101–2) wrote that
The poorer strata everywhere are more liberal or leftist on economic issues; they
favour more welfare state measures, higher wages, graduated income taxes, sup-
port of trade-unions, and so forth. But when liberalism is defined in noneconomic
terms—as support of civil liberties, internationalism, etc.—the correlation is
reversed. The more well-to-do are more liberal, the poorer are more intolerant.
In an ideal world of representation, Lipset’s (1966) average ‘authoritarian

worker’ would be best represented by parties with left-wing positions on the
socio-economic dimension and right-wing positions on the socio-cultural
dimension. Left-authoritarian voters used to support communist and SD
parties (Lipset 1966, 1959a, 1959b).
Research has shown that such a group of voters still exists (Kriesi et al. 2008)
but, in the absence of parties combining such views, it is underrepresented
(Thomassen 2012; Van der Brug and Van Spanje 2009). In 2009, the left-
authoritarian combination of views could not find correspondence at the party
level, as no party in Western Europe offered at the same time both left-wing
and authoritarian policy proposals (Lefkofridi, Wagner, and Willmann 2014).
While parties on the left advocated pro-welfare economic positions but pro-
gressive stances on socio-cultural issues (e.g., women’s and gay rights’, social
diversity), the right, which was more traditional/authoritarian in the cultural
sphere, supported a free market economy and a small state. Hence, left-
authoritarians were cross-pressured between different issue dimensions: they
had to make a choice between parties on the RR (who advocated their
authoritarian socio-cultural views) or on the SD and radical left that supported
a strong state (left-wing socio-economic views). Their party choice depended
on prevailing concerns; voters chose those parties that had similar views on the
issue that they considered salient to them personally (Lefkofridi, Wagner, and
Willmann 2014; see also Giger and Lefkofridi 2014): those concerned more
about immigration would support the RR; the same type of voters, however,
who were more concerned about the economy, chose parties on the left.
The size of the left-authoritarian group within the electorate varies across
European countries; in 2009 it ranged from 7 per cent among Danes and 36.2
per cent among Greeks (Lefkofridi, Wagner, and Willmann 2014). Within the EU,
the threshold for parliamentary representation does not exceed 5 per cent; so,
even at its minimum (7 per cent) the percentage of left-authoritarians would
be enough to secure parliamentary representation for any party organization.
The vacant left-authoritarian policy space presented a unique opportunity
for the RR to stabilize its electoral support (which had been generated based
on an anti-immigration agenda).
In sum, by offering a policy platform that combines pro-welfare socio-
economic views and authoritarian socio-cultural attitudes, RR parties could
appeal to left-authoritarians, who compose a very important part of the

electorate across Western European countries. In what follows, we argue
that the development of radical parties’ welfare agendas is filling exactly this
gap in the political space that previous research identified (Lefkofridi, Wagner,
and Willmann 2014; van der Brug and van Spanje 2009; Kriesi et al. 2008).
In response to left-authoritarian voters’ demands, the RR moved towards the
left on welfare issues, while preserving its right-wing socio-cultural profile.
9.2.3 RR Parties’ Welfare Agendas: Research Hypotheses
The initial response of RR parties to globalization and European integration

was to pursue a rightist path in both the economic and cultural dimensions.
Indeed, a couple of new RR parties even contain the word ‘freedom’ in their
names as a result of their originally neoliberal anti-statist economic beliefs,
such as the Austrian Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) and the Dutch
Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV). In a seminal piece, Kitschelt (1995) argued that
the winning formula for RR parties was the combination of neoliberal views
on socio-economic issues and authoritarian views on socio-cultural issues.
While in the economic dimension they advocated a free market economy,
RR parties capitalized on the cultural threats of globalization (e.g., on how
immigration threatens the national identity and way of life). As SD and
Christian democratic/conservative parties that alternated in government
were converging on economic matters, RR parties seized the opportunity to
shift the focus of voters to the cultural dimension of political conflict
(McGann and Kitschelt 1995): they emphasized tradition, cultural heritage,
law and order as well as a negative perception of immigration.
Indeed, the key to their electoral success and the succeeding transformation
of cleavages was ‘not the economy, stupid!’ (Mudde 2007) but the most salient
issues in their electoral campaigns were law and order, morality and authority,
the national way of life, and opposition to immigration. Through the advocacy
of authoritarian and nationalistic imageries of society RR parties have not only
rendered socio-cultural issues, and especially immigration, highly salient but
they have even shifted entire party systems towards their preferred positions on
these issues (e.g., Lefkofridi and Horvath 2012; Van Spanje 2010). Under the
pressure of competition from the RR, Christian Democratic/conservative parties
have shifted to the right; immigration gets ever tougher, including in one of the
most liberal economies within the EU, the United Kingdom. Hence, even when
not in government, the RR has been very successful in achieving its policy goals.
Although they emerged as the opponents of cultural globalization, RR parties
later also tackled the consequences of economic globalization (Kriesi et al.
2006) to respond to changes on the demand side, where the boundaries
between economic and cultural conflict started to become increasingly blurred
(Häusermann and Kriesi 2015). On the one hand, the cultural dimension of
conflict in Europe today encompasses questions beyond cultural liberalism
(e.g., immigration, European integration), such as issues of distribution
(welfare chauvinism and welfare misuse). On the other, voters’ contemporary
preferences on distributive issues fail to form a single economic dimension
(Häusermann and Kriesi 2015). Hence, welfare issues are hard to classify
either on the socio-economic or socio-cultural dimension (see also Koster,
Achterberg, and van der Waal 2013).
Since the mid-1990s (when SD parties, in particular, came under pressure to
compromise policy goals) RR parties started revising their electoral agendas to
fully exploit the left-authoritarian niche in the electoral market. Compared
with other party families, the RR nowadays frames economic globalization in
terms of ‘labor and social security’ more than any other party family besides
the radical left (Höglinger, Wüest, and Helbling 2012). Some scholars have
argued that new RR parties have adopted ‘leftist’ preferences in terms of
redistribution (Derks 2006). The development of welfare agendas helped the
RR expand its competitive strategy against parties of the left, and especially
mainstream SD and socialist parties who had traditionally been the main
proponents of the welfare state and its expansion. If RR parties tried to
adapt to the views of these (potential) supporters (Rydgren 2007), it follows
that over time we should observe an increase of attention paid to welfare state
issues by RR parties:
H1: Welfare state expansion becomes an increasingly important policy

issue in RR parties’ electoral agendas.
That said, RR parties face important constraints in their pursuit of a program-

matic shift towards the left on issues of redistribution: the two core groups
voting for the radical right, namely blue-collar workers and self-employed,
small-business owners have opposite preferences on welfare issues, with the
former supporting extensive redistribution and the latter favouring limitation
of the welfare state (Ivarsflaten 2005). Hence, RR parties’ positioning on
welfare issues has to resolve the problem of accommodating the contradictory
preferences of these two groups (Afonso 2015). If RR parties move too far left
to match SD parties on welfare state expansion, they are in danger of alien-
ating their conservative supporters.
Hence, although we expect RR parties to pay increasing attention to redis-
tributive issues and to promote welfare expansion, we acknowledge that they
have to do so carefully, so that their gains among industrial workers would not
be offset by losses among conservative supporters in small business, rural
areas, and middle-class voters. In this regard, while some scholars have argued
that RR parties abandoned formerly market liberal positions in favour of more
centrist positions on the economy (de Lange 2007; Kitschelt 2007), others have
talked about RR parties masking their economic platforms via position blur-
ring (Rovny 2013). For instance, they promoted protectionist trade policies
that would benefit certain groups while at the same time they supported cuts
on welfare policies (Heinisch 2003). Over time, the strategy of the RR started
deviating from Kitschelt’s (1995) winning formula of neoliberal views in
support of a free market economy (socio-economic right) combined with
illiberal views on society (socio-cultural right). The new winning formula of
the RR (de Lange 2007) sought to respond to the aforementioned changes at
the level of their electorates.
Given that SD parties who owned welfare issues have been adopting liberal
positions towards labour mobility, multiculturalism, and social diversity,
RR parties have invaded the welfare policy space with a chauvinist agenda.
At the abstract level, this is the case of a party family (RR) reacting to the issue
ownership of another party family (Social-Democrats) in order to compete for
votes.5 We argue here that the support of RR parties for welfare state expan-
sion competes against Social Democrats, the historical proponents of the
welfare state, by tactically tying it to their preferences and rhetoric on socio-
cultural issues, for which they have a good reputation. RR parties are essen-
tially movements of exclusion (Rydgren 2005b) and this should be reflected in
their discourse about redistribution. In addition to their well-documented
cultural preferences they have developed a more generous, yet ethnically
exclusive, position regarding the welfare state (Svallfors 2012; de Koster,
Achterberg, and van der Waal 2013). This is in line with the expectation
that RR parties would move towards a nationalist-interventionist position
(Kriesi et al. 2012: ch. 1). Using their best weapon (immigration) in political
competition RR parties seek to mobilize globalization and the so-called losers
in European integration by appealing simultaneously to their cultural fears
(e.g., erosion of traditional cultural and national way of life) and their
economic insecurities (need for protection). Drawing on their issue compe-
tence in the area of immigration, they frame the politics of solidarity in an
anti-immigrant way so that they can be perceived as owners of a refined,
exclusionary concept of solidarity: welfare chauvinism. In this way, their
electoral discourse would promote an exclusive conception of solidarity that
is specifically directed against migrants who usurp social benefits. It follows
that the pro-welfare agenda advocated by RR parties should be clearly a
chauvinist one (only for the natives):
H2: In their electoral manifestos, radical right parties are likely to advo-
cate that only natives should benefit from the welfare state.
In this vein, an inclusive welfare state that gives migrant labour access to
welfare benefits should appear as problematic, so that the RR would strive to
solve this problem by re-defining the boundaries of access to the welfare state
and the criteria of its deservingness. In its electoral rhetoric the deserving
recipients of welfare benefits should be clearly defined and differentiated

from the undeserving along ethnic and national lines.
9.3 METHO DOLOGY AND DATA
To test these expectations empirically, we follow Lieberman (2005), who

argues in favour of what he calls a nested research design. Combining large-N
and small-N studies can add a ‘synergetic value’ to the analysis: while the
statistical analysis can guide case selection for in-depth research and provide
direction for more focused case-studies, the (b) small-N analysis can be used
to assess the plausibility of observed statistical relationships between variables
(Lieberman 2005). Hence, we combine quantitative and qualitative methods,
and exploit two different sources of data. First we analyse quantitatively
(salience of issues) and qualitatively (issue framing: economic/cultural; exclu-
sive/inclusive) the manifestos that parties used to compete in elections at the
national level. These have been collected and coded by the Comparative
Manifesto Project (Volkens et al. 2013), which includes the political pro-
grammes of parties from around fifty countries since 1945. The quantitative
codes are generated from counts of sentences and quasi-sentences where
parties position themselves on policy issues; the coding is essentially
salience-based (Laver 2013). These party manifestos have been coded in a
similar, systematic way across countries, and are thus comparable (notwith-
standing language differences and the variation in length of manifestos across
countries) (Volkens 2001). The score associated to each issue represents the
percentage of manifesto length devoted to such issue. Thus, the higher the
score, the more salient an issue is to the party (Spoon, Hobolt, and de Vries
2014). This constitutes an ideal data collection for investigating the evolution
of issue salience in parties’ electoral discourse, and, more precisely, preferences
regarding the redistributive and welfare politics (Nygård 2006). Second, we use
the data collected by the euandi project,6 a scientific data collection of party
positions on a wide range of policy issues that have been derived by both
parties’ self-placement and experts’ judgements of party positions. More
specifically, we use the data on parties’ welfare preferences, as well as their
positions on migrants’ deservingness of social benefits.
To examine the first hypothesis about the extent to which RR parties engage
in the politics of solidarity, we conduct a cross-country comparison and
consider countries with an electorally significant right-wing party, setting
the threshold of electoral significance at 5 per cent in the latest national
parliamentary elections. We choose this number because, as mentioned
earlier, this is also the highest threshold for parliamentary representation
within the EU. This leaves us with nine European countries: Austria, Belgium,
Table 9.1 Political parties and elections (N =79)
Country Parties Elections N
(first–last)
Austria Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreich (SPÖ) 1983–2008 9

Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ)
Belgium Socialisten en Progressieven Anders (SP.A) 1981–2010 9
Vlaams Block + Vlaams Belang (VB) (1985)
Denmark Socialdemokratiet (SD/SDDK) 1981–2011 10
Dansk Folkeparti (DF) (1998)
Finland Suomen Sosialidemokraattinen Puolue (SDP) 1983–2011 8
Perussuomalaiset (TF) (2011)
France Parti Socialiste (PS) 1981–2012 8
Front National (FN) (1986)
Netherlands Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA) 1981–2010 10
Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) + Partij Voor de Vrijheid
(PVV) (2002)
Norway Arbeiderpartiet (AP) 1981–2009 8
Fremskrittspartiet (FrP)
Sweden Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti (SAP) 1982–2010 9
Sverigedemokraterna (SD/SwD) (2010)
Switzerland Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz (SPS) 1983–2011 8
Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP)
Source: CMP data.
Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzer-

land. Table 9.1 presents the cases selected for our study. In some countries, the
RR has not been present since the early 1980s; in such cases the first election
year with a RR party is specified in parenthesis. In total, we look at nine
different countries and 79 elections: in 54 out of these elections both
RR parties and SD parties are competing.
Figure 9.1 shows RR and SD parties’ trends of electoral success over time:
while support for the RR is on the rise uniformly, the decline of SD is evident
in most cases under study, except for France and Norway.
To what extent do RR parties emphasize redistributive politics in their
manifestos compared with SD parties? Is the salience of the welfare state stable
over time, or is it changing? Is there a strong difference between the issues
emphasized by RR parties compared with the rest of the party system? How
‘leftist’ are RR parties on welfare issues? To answer these questions, we proceed
in three steps.
First, we use data from the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) to
enquire about the five most salient issues in the RR parties’ manifestos in
the nine countries under study; three points in time are selected to grasp the
evolution of agendas: early 1980s, mid-1990s, and the most recent election
Austria Belgium Denmark
50 15 40
40 30
30 10
20
20 5
10 10
0 0 0
1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010
SPÖ FPÖ SP.A V.Block V.Belang SDDK DF
Finland France Netherlands

30 40 40
20 30 30
20 20
10 10 10
0 0 0
1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010
SDP TF PS FN PvdA LPF PVV
Norway Sweden Switzerland

40 50 30
30 40 25
30
20 20
20
10 10 15
0 0 10
1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010
AP FrP SAP SwD SPS SVP
Figure 9.1 Vote shares of RR and SD parties in Western Europe

Source: CMP (1980–2014).
available in our data.7 The frequency of each of the top five issues mentioned
in RR manifestos is also compared with the mean salience of this issue in the
system (by taking into account all the other parties competing in that election)
(see also Cole 2005).
Second, we focus exclusively on the salience of politics of solidarity in time
and space using, once again, the CMP data. Our goal here is to trace the
evolution of salience in RR manifestos in comparison to the manifestos of
SD parties in the same system. Hence, we consider the 1980s as the decade
when globalization effects start being visible, and SD parties came under
pressure to revise their policy goals and adapt them to an increasingly
neoliberal economic context. We examine the period beginning in the
1980s until the latest election available in the CMP dataset. The key variable
in this step of the analysis from the CMP data is welfare state expansion.8
This category corresponds to favourable mentions of the need to introduce/
maintain/expand any public social service or social security scheme. For
instance, this category covers health care, child-care, elder care, and pensions
and social housing.
Third, to better understand RR parties’ agendas, we look more closely at
their current substantive preferences on welfare issues. The data collected by
the euandi project allows us to map and compare the welfare preferences of
RR and SD parties across Western Europe. Since the data was collected to
study 2014 European Parliament Elections, Switzerland and Norway, which
are not members of the EU, are excluded from this step of analysis. We map all
other countries’ RR and SD parties on a left–right space based on their
positions on five welfare issues. The specific items used to construct the
welfare preferences’ index are: (1) social programmes should be maintained
even at the cost of higher taxes; (2) pension benefits should be reduced to limit
the state debt in [country]; (3) government spending should be reduced in
order to lower taxes; (4) the government should reduce workers’ protection
regulations in order to fight unemployment; and (5) the state should provide
stronger financial support to unemployed workers.
Finally, we explore, in two steps, the hypothesis that the welfare state
propagated by RR parties is clearly an exclusionary one. First, we conduct a
cross-party family comparison based on the euandi data. This data enables us
to examine the positions of RR and SD parties in all countries under study
about whether immigrants should have more difficult access to social benefits
than the country’s citizens.9 This question allows us to see whether and to
what extent the two party families that compete on the welfare state do or do
not subscribe to a concept of solidarity that includes immigrants.
Second, we conduct two in-depth case studies: the French Front National
(FN) and the Austrian FPÖ. France and Austria have strong welfare states and
powerful RR parties, yet they differ in a key determinant of citizens’ parlia-
mentary representation: electoral rules, that is, proportional representation
versus a majoritarian system. This has had consequences for the opportunities
(e.g., participation in government) available to the RR. In the Austrian case
the RR can, in theory, participate in government coalitions, provided that
the mainstream parties coalesce with it (which has happened in the past).
We examine the content of the RR parties’ most recent programmes and
analyse whether they promote welfare state expansion, how they frame their
pro-welfare arguments,10 and to what extent they juxtapose the concept of
solidarity with that of diversity.
In the case of the FN, we analyse the document titled Notre Projet: Pro-
gramme Politique du FN. This contains 106 pages and was issued for the
purpose of the 2012 presidential campaign; at the time of writing, it was still
considered the major and most up-to-date programmatic document of the
party in 2015.11 Contrary to the FN, the FPÖ programme is very short, but this
length is typical for this party. The sixteen-page electoral programme issued
for the legislative 2013 election is entitled Österreich im Wort.12 When report-
ing our qualitative findings, we will make us use specific words or phrases in
quotation marks (that we translate from the original texts) for the purpose of
illustrating the language used to frame redistributive solidarity.
9. 4 E MPI RI C A L F I N D I N G S I : THE RR I N F A V O U R
OF REDISTRIBUTION?
In this section we present our results regarding the salience of redistributive

issues in RR parties agendas. In the first step of the analysis, we look at the top
priorities of RR parties over time. The second and third steps concern welfare
preferences of RR parties in comparison to that of SD parties, which trad-
itionally own these issues.
Table 9.2 reports the top five issues of RR parties, the percentage of the
manifesto devoted to it, and the mean salience for that election.13 At first sight,
we see that issues of a socio-cultural nature (e.g., support for traditional
morality, the national way of life, and law and order, as well as opposition to
multiculturalism) always appear within the top five of their agendas. During
the period under study, however, we see that RR manifestos also reflect a
concern for broad redistributive solidarity. About 20 per cent of the top five
issues can be considered as directly or indirectly related to redistribution.14
That said, there is wide variation in the salience of redistributive solidarity
politics over time and countries.
We take a closer look at issues related directly to the welfare state (expan-
sion or limitation) and more indirect elements, such as fostering a free market
economy or economic orthodoxy, which are negatively associated to expanding
Table 9.2 Top five issues in RR parties’ manifestos since the 1980s
Early 1980s Mid 1990s Latest election
Austria 1983 Frequency Mean 1993 Frequency Mean 2008 Frequency Mean
1. Traditional Morality: 8.1 8.5 (7.8) 1. Traditional Morality: 11.4 9.9 (7.7) 1. National Way of Life: 11.3 17.6 (5.7)
Positive Positive Positive
2. Free Market Economy 7.9 7.6 (1.5) 2. National Way of Life: 11.0 5.5 (8.8) 2. Political Authority 7.8 8.3 (3)
Positive
3.Governmental and 4.8 4.3 (3.6) 3. Law and Order: Positive 8.1 6.8 (5.8) 3. Traditional Morality: 7.5 3.2 (2)
Administrative Efficiency Positive
4. National Way of Life: 4.6 5.9 (3.5) 4. Free Market Economy 5.3 4 (3) 4. Traditional Morality: 6.9 3.7 (2.2)
Positive Negative
5. Law and Order: Positive 4.2 3.5 (3) 5. Environmental 4.7 5.6 (6.3) 5. Agriculture and Farmers: 6.6 4.7 (4.1)
Protection: Positive Positive
Belgium 1981 1995 2010
1. Governmental and 11.1 5.6 (3.9) 1. Political Authority 14.9 5.8 (5.2) 1. Political Authority 18.9 8.1 (6.3)
Administrative Efficiency
2. Education Expansion 7.9 3.9 (1.8) 2. Federalism 10.9 4.8 (4.4) 2. Law and Order: Positive 18.6 7.4 (4.8)
3. Welfare State Expansion 6.1 4.2 (2.7) 3. Environmental 9.9 5.4 (4.4) 3. Federalism 14.5 5.4 (5.4)
Protection: Positive
4. Freedom and Human 5.0 2.5 (1.7) 4. Governmental and 9.7 11 (3.5) 4. Multiculturalism: Negative 7.8 1.9 (2.9)
Rights Administrative Efficiency
5. Culture: Positive 5.0 2.9 (2.6) 5. Welfare State Expansion 9.2 9.4 (4.1) 5. National Way of Life: 4.0 0.5 (1.1)
Negative
Denmark 1998 2011
1. Multiculturalism: 15.1 5.3 (2.3) 1. Multiculturalism: Negative 16.1 3.3 (6.2)
Negative
2. European Community/ 13.7 2.8 (4.6) 2. Law and Order: Positive 12.4 3.8 (6.1)
Union: Negative
3. Governmental and 11.0 4.1 (3.7) 3. Freedom and Human 10.4 7.6 (9.3)
Administrative Efficiency Rights
4. Welfare State Expansion 11.0 6.6 (3.8) 4. Political Authority 8.6 6.1 (4.4)
(continued )
Table 9.2 Continued
Early 1980s Mid 1990s Latest election
5. Free Market Economy 6.8 1.9 (2.6) 5. Education Expansion 7.8 9 (5.3)
Finland 2011
1. National Way of Life: 10.5 1.5 (3.6)
Positive
2. Agriculture and Farmers: 10.2 2.5 (3.4)
Positive
3. Welfare State Expansion 9.6 12.9 (6.4)
4. Democracy 6.7 2.5 (2.3)
5. Freedom and Human 5.3 1.5 (1.7) 5. Market Regulation 5.7 3.2 (1.8)
Rights
France 1986 1993 2012
1. Traditional Morality: 8.1 1.6 (3.2) 1. Traditional Morality: 11.4 2.2 (4.6) 1. Law and order: Positive 13.1 4.2 (3.9)
Positive Positive
2. Free Market Economy 7.9 4.8 (5.1) 2. National Way of Life: 11.0 2.2 (4.4) 2. Welfare State Expansion 11.4 11.7 (3.9)
Positive
3. Governmental and 4.8 2 (2.5) 3. Law and Order: Positive 8.1 1.7 (3.1) 3. National Way of Life: 9.4 2.4 (3.3)
Administrative Efficiency Positive
4. National Way of Life: 4.6 2.3 (1.9) 4. Free Market Economy 5.3 2.2 (2) 4. Market Regulation 8.1 9.4 (5.3)
Positive
5. Law and Order: Positive 4.2 2.7 (2.3) 5. Environmental 4.7 5.3 (5.3) 5. Agriculture and Farmers: 7.1 3.8 (3)
Protection: Positive Positive
Netherlands 2002 2010
1. Governmental and 15.0 6.7 (4.6) 1. Law and Order: Positive 15.5 6.8 (3.7)
2. Technology and 8.7 7.6 (2.2) 2. Multiculturalism: Negative 13.6 2.6 (4)
Infrastructure
3. Political Authority 7.1 4.5 (2.8) 3. Economic Goals 6.5 2.9 (2.4)
4. Welfare State Expansion 7.1 6.4 (2.3) 4. Education Expansion 5.5 5.7 (2.5)
5. Equality: Positive 5.5 2.6 (1.3) 5. European Community/ 5.3 1 5 (1.6)
Union: Negative
Norway 1981 1993 2009
1. Free Market Economy 16.0 4.2 (6.3) 1. Free Market Economy 20.4 5 (7.8) 1. Welfare State Expansion 10.4 14.4 (2.1)
2. Governmental and 13.7 4 (4.5) 2. Freedom and Human 10.6 4.9 (3.8) 2. Technology and 9.4 5.8 (1.8)
Administrative Efficiency Rights Infrastructure
3. Economic Orthodoxy 11.5 2 (4.2) 3. Military: Positive 6.4 2.1 (2.1) 3. Education Expansion 8.4 10.6 (1.8)
4. Welfare State Limitation 4.8 1.2 (1.9) 4. Technology and 4.9 4.6 (2.5) 4. Governmental and 7.8 2.3 (2.7)
Infrastructure Administrative Efficiency
5. Military: Positive 4.7 2 (1.5) 5. Governmental and 4.4 2.3 (1.3) 5. Free Market Economy 6.8 1.7 (2.5)
Sweden 2010
1. Welfare State Expansion 13.7 15.2 (5.1)
2. National Way of Life: 12.3 1.7 (4.3)
Positive
3. Law and Order: Positive 8.8 4 (3.4)
4. Non-economic 8.3 4.4 (2.8)
Demographic Groups
5. Multiculturalism: Negative 7.4 0.9 (2.6)
Switzerland 1983 1995 2011
1. Non-economic 10.0 5 (5.1) 1. Economic Orthodoxy 11.5 4.8 (5.2) 1. European Community/ 35 4.4 (10.8)
Demographic Groups Union: Negative
2. Environmental Protection: 6.9 12.8 (9.5) 2. Law and Order: Positive 10.8 4.1 (4.3) 2. Democracy 27.5 3.8 (8.5)
Positive
3. Culture: Positive 5.6 1.8 (1.9) 3. Governmental and 8.1 4 (5.9) 3. Political Authority 16.7 5.6 (8.7)
4. Freedom and Human 5.4 8.9 (14) 4. Welfare State Expansion 5.8 7.7 (5.7) 4. Law and Order: Positive 6.0 6 (7.1)
Rights
5. Education Expansion 5.1 2.1 (1.8) 5. Education Expansion 5.5 2.3 (1.7) 5. Multiculturalism: Negative 5 0.6 (1.6)
Source: CMP data.

welfare state solidarity. We observe three different patterns regarding the evolu-
tion of redistributive economic policy preferences of RR parties (Table 9.2):
The first group, which is composed of France and the four Scandinavian
countries in our sample, tends to support our first hypothesis: welfare politics,
and more precisely welfare state expansion, is gradually becoming a central
feature of the RR agendas. In this respect, the Norwegian Progress party
Fremskrittspartiet (FrP) and French FN are model cases. In the case of Norway,
free market economy and economic orthodoxy made up more than 25 per cent
of the RR party manifesto in 1981 but in 1993, this proportion shrunk. In 2009
welfare state expansion constituted the most important issue for the FrP. In the
case of France, free market economy in the 1980s used to rank among the top
five most salient issues and constituted 7.9 per cent of their manifesto. In 2012,
however, free market economy does not appear anymore among the top five;
welfare expansion has taken its place with a score of 11.4 per cent. In both cases,
we see a clear shift from the liberal economic agenda of the 1980s to a more
welfare-oriented manifesto in the most recent election. As the other RR
Scandinavian parties are much younger, we cannot talk about evolution over
time like in Norway. However, they all advocate welfare state expansion, and
this is top-issue for Sverigedemokraterna (SwD) in 2010—a year when it
achieved an electoral breakthrough.
Second, Austria constitutes a single category where pro-redistributive policy
preferences do not appear among the top five issues of the FPÖ. Still, this RR
party evolved on these issues: it used to be a fervent proponent of free market
economy in the 1980s. In the 1990s this preference was still a top issue but less
salient. Support for free market economy has disappeared from the more
recent manifestos available in the CMP data. The question remains, however,
whether the shift away from more right-wing economic policies has been
accompanied by an increase in redistributive and pro-welfare preferences—a
question, which we will address in the final empirical section.
The third group of countries in our sample includes Switzerland, the
Netherlands, and Belgium. Contrary to our hypothesis, the relevance of
welfare-oriented issues in RR parties’ manifestos in these cases is decreasing
over time. Although RR parties in these countries used to rank welfare
expansion among their top priorities, this is not the case in their more recent
manifestos. We must note, however, that in Belgium and the Netherlands, the
parties changed during the period under study. This may not be as relevant for
Belgium, since the Vlaams Belang (VB) is the direct successor of Vlaams
Block; it is, however, important in the case of the Netherlands, where the
PVV has taken up the space on the RR after the disappearance of the Pim
Fortuyn List (LPF). Not only did the LPF push forward welfare state expansion
and social justice (labeled equality positive), but it did so in greater proportion
than other parties competing in the same election. On the other hand, the
PVV does not emphasize these issues in its manifesto.
Overall, RR parties in Western Europe can by no means be considered

indifferent to issues of redistribution, although different patterns emerge over
time and across countries. We move on to narrow our analytical lens and focus
on the salience of welfare state expansion in particular. This refers to introducing,
maintaining or expanding any type of social service or social security scheme
(except for education). Not only does this indicator allow us to see if RR parties
have really invested in the issue of solidarity but it also allows us to observe to
what extent RR parties challenge SD parties on their key issue: the welfare state.
Figure 9.2 presents the salience of welfare state expansion in the manifestos of
RR and SD parties for every election they have competed in since 1980 until
the most recent election in the CMP data (which varies across countries).
Two patterns emerge in Figure 9.2: the divergent and convergent evolution
of salience of welfare state expansion. Divergent evolution happens when the
salience of welfare expansion increases for the RR parties, while at the same
time it decreases for SD parties (e.g., Austria, Belgium, and Finland) or the
other way around (e.g., Switzerland). In Austria and Finland, for instance, we
clearly see not only that the salience of welfare state expansion of SD parties
declines but that it is even surpassed by that of the RR parties in the late 2000s.
This is less evident in Denmark and the Netherlands, though they seem to
experience similar evolutions. In the case of the Netherlands, the LPF in the
early 2000s had similar levels of salience as the PvdA (Partij van de Arbeid),
and the PVV is following a similar trend. Though in Denmark the evolution is
less clear, the gap in salience between the two party families is decreasing.
In the case of Switzerland the salience levels of welfare expansion between the
SVP and the PSS are clearly diverging but in a different direction than in
Austria, Belgium, and Finland. Over time, the SVP is the only RR party for
which the salience of welfare expansion is decreasing neatly; it reaches the
lowest level of any RR party considered in this study.
The second pattern that emerges from these data is the convergent evolu-
tion of SD and RR parties’ advocacy in favour of welfare state expansion. This
is very clear in France and Norway (where salience increases for both parties).
The case of France is an illustration of a dramatic change: the FN did not
advocate welfare state expansion in the 1990s but in 2012 it reached a similar
level of salience as the PS (Parti Socialiste). The salience of welfare expansion
for RR parties is highest in Norway and Sweden, where, as we saw earlier, this
is their most salient issue (albeit of lower salience than SD parties).
The two previous steps have shown that welfare expansion is a relevant
issue for the RR and it is particularly salient for Scandinavian RR parties. This
finding also reflects the fact that preference for welfare expansion is high for all
parties in these universalistic welfare regimes. However, the picture is not as
clear for the other RR parties.
Trends of salience over time are a good indicator to show the importance of
welfare issues for the RR parties; yet, it is not sufficient. We can get a more
Austria Belgium Denmark
15 20 30
10 15 20
10
5 5 10
0 0 0
1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010
SPÖ FPÖ SP.A V.Block V.Belang SD DF
Finland France Netherlands

40 15 10
30 10 8
20 6
10 5
4
0 0 2
1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010
SDP TF PS FN PvDA LPF PVV
Norway Sweden Switzerland

20 20 30
15 15 20
10 10
10
5 5
0 0 0
1980 1990 2000 2010
1980 1990 2000 2010 1980 1990 2000 2010
AP FrP SAP SD SPS SVP
Figure 9.2 Salience of welfare state expansion in RR and SD parties’ manifestos

Source: CMP (1981–2011).
Welfare related Left/Right positions of political parties
SDDK DF
DK
SAP SwD
SE
PvdA PW
NL
PS FN
FR
PvA VB
BE
SDP TF
FI
SPÖ FPÖ
AT
PS SVP
CH
–10 –5 0 5 10
Left: Welfare Expansion Right: Welfare Limitation
Figure 9.3 Position of radical right and social-democratic parties on a left/right

welfare scale
complete picture once we examine the positions of parties on welfare issues, to

which we now turn. In the third step of our cross-country and cross-party compari-
son, we look at RR and SD parties’ positions on welfare state issues in 2014, which
are displayed in Figure 9.3. Negative values (-10) represent left-wing positions on
welfare issues, and positive values (+10) represent right-wing positions.
The left–right positioning of RR and SD parties reveals that parties from
both families are located rather on the left side of welfare politics. As expected,
all of the SD parties position themselves on the left side of welfare politics, and
so do three out of the seven RR parties under study (DF (Dansk Folkeparti),
PVV, SD). French FN and Belgian VB are exactly at the centre of the axis,
whereas FPÖ and the True Finns have slightly more right-wing welfare posi-
tions than all other RR parties in the sample. We should underline that none of
the RR parties under study is located on the extreme right of the axis, which
would classify them as against the welfare state and its expansion. Looking at
the distance between the national pairs of parties, we observe that on this
twenty-point scale, the mean distance between the RR and the SD parties on
welfare issues is 4.5. Most notably, there is no real difference in the left-right
positioning of the two party families in Denmark and the Netherlands.
To sum up, our hypothesis that welfare issues are increasingly salient for the RR
parties, and that these parties are contesting the SD parties on their issue tends to
find partial support in the data. Redistribution is an increasingly salient issue for
RR parties, and their position on this issue is very close to that of the SD parties. In
particular, this hypothesis is confirmed in the Scandinavian countries, and to
some extent also in the Netherlands. That said, Belgium and Switzerland tend to
disconfirm our hypothesis, as RR parties in these countries tend to focus on
non-economic issues, or adopt rightist positions on redistribution and welfare.
9.5 EM P IRI CS I I: SOLID ARITY V S . DIVERSITY

IN RR DISCOURSE
In this section we analyse whether the concept of solidarity that parties

promote is inclusive or exclusive. First, we comparatively examine the positions
of SD and RR parties of six European countries (Austrian SPÖ (Sozialdemok-
ratische Partei Österreich) and FPÖ; Belgian SP.A (Socialisten en Progressieven
Anders) and VB (Vlaams Block + Vlaams Belang); Danish SDDK (Socialde-
mokratiet) and DF; French PS and FN; Dutch PvdA and PVV; Swedish SAP
(Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti) and SwD). Table 9.3 shows clearly
that all RR parties (marked in bold) either tend to agree or strongly agree with
the exclusion of immigrants from welfare benefits. SD parties are supportive of
an inclusive concept of solidarity, with the exception of the Austrian SPÖ
which positions itself in the middle of the scale, thus supporting neither harder
nor easier access of immigrants to social benefits. In what follows, we analyse
whether and to what extent this tension between solidarity and diversity is
visible in the manifestos of RR parties in Austria and France.
To recall, the quantitative analysis of Austria and France showed change
over time (Figure 9.2): although RR parties in these countries used to have
economically liberal preferences in the 1980s, they have moved towards the
left on welfare issues. This is very clear in the case of France: for the FN, which
used to hold an economically orthodox neoliberal position in the 1980s,
welfare state expansion became a prominent issue in more recent decades.
We saw earlier (Table 9.2 and Figure 9.2) that welfare state expansion has
become a salient issue for the FN—most likely a result of Marine Le Pen’s
takeover of the party presidency in 2011. In the remainder of this section, we
Table 9.3 Exclusion of immigrants from welfare benefits

Completely disagree Tend to disagree Neutral Tend to agree Completely agree
PS, SAP, SP.A PvdA, SDDK SPÖ SwD, FPÖ PVV, FN, DF, VB
Source: euandi (2014).

will see how this quantitative trend translates in qualitative terms in their most
recent programme. In the case of Austria, we saw that the FPÖ and the SPÖ
have been converging regarding the degree of attention they pay to welfare state
extension. Moreover, in terms of positions on welfare issues (Figure 9.3), FN is
exactly at the 0 point on the scale, while the FPÖ is only slightly more on the
right side of the scale.
If the FN and the FPÖ have embraced the concept of solidarity, and promote
welfare-related policy preferences, what kind of solidarity are they expressing in
their electoral manifestos? Do they advocate in favour of generous welfare
policies, but on an exclusive basis? In what follows, we tackle these questions
through a careful qualitative study of recent programmes issued by FN and
FPÖ. We focus on the promotion of welfare state expansion, and the framing of
pro-welfare arguments and solidarity and present our cases separately.
9.5.1 The FN’s Left-Wing Economic Turn
The FN’s left-wing shift is confirmed by its programme: it presents itself in

clear rupture with former references to a free market economy, and the first
strong economic argument of the programme is to re-build a strong state, and
to protect the public services ‘that have been decimated by privatization and
three decades of ultraliberal politics’. Another example of the FN’s shift is its
determination to keep the thirty-five-hour working week. This policy is very
much an indicator of the left-right economic divide for parties in France; it
was implemented by a socialist government in 1998 and has been fought
against by all centrist and right parties. The FN claims to be a forceful
proponent of social justice and advocates rather progressive social policies,
such as higher taxes for the wealthiest, a return to full retirement at the age of
sixty, and an ambition to defend and improve social security.
9.5.2 Immigration: An Economic Problem
In the case of the FN, immigration is undeniably one of the most salient issues
in the programme and it is primarily framed in economic terms. For the FN
immigration is a tool of ‘big corporate interests’ to exert pressure and lower
the wages. Immigration is presented as a ‘weapon in the service of capital’.15
From the perspective of immigrants, the FN explains that they move to France
because of the ‘most generous social advantages in Europe’. The FN claims
that social programmes would function as a ‘sucking pump’ pulling legal and
illegal immigrants to France.
To illustrate how immigrants are blamed for ineffective social justice and
failed social programmes, we examine the case of French public housing,
which is directed at the less well-off. The FN considers that immigrants, both
legal and illegal, are the first cause of the housing crisis. The FN claims that
immigrants are more favoured in terms of housing than French citizens. Thus the
FN’s economic framing of immigration is expressed both in terms of causes and
consequences: immigrants move to France because of generous social benefits,
and they threaten social security and welfare programmes by abusing it.
9.5.3 The FN’s Generous but Exclusive Welfare

Policy Preferences
Overall, when dealing with specific redistribution policies, the FN makes two
major claims: to increase the benefits for the less well-off and to ensure a
‘national priority’. This concept is sometimes also labelled ‘national preference’
or ‘citizen priority’ and it is central to the welfare agenda of the FN. To illustrate
the FN’s dual claim well, we will focus on their rhetoric about healthcare and
family policy. The FN has made ‘securing’ social security, and thus health
insurance, one of its priorities. But the social model of solidarity that the FN
seeks to defend, however, is explicitly exclusive. One of the main policies the FN
defends is the suppression of the Aide Médicale d’Etat (AME), a medical
insurance for the poorest, whatever their legal immigration situation. Naturally
this absolutely universalist policy is the FN’s nemesis. The suppression of AME
would, according to the FN, not only improve social security finances, but on a
more normative level it would also mean ending the assistance to individuals
that are ‘undeserving’ of national solidarity. This measure is characteristic of the
FN’s ideology of solidarity, but it is a one-off policy.
Furthermore, the FN position on social security goes much further in terms
of exclusiveness: the suspicion that immigrants are benefiting from the system
goes hand in hand with the claim that they are ‘undeserving’. The FN even
wants to set up an ‘observatory for the social rights of foreigners’. Its mission
would be to control immigrants more thoroughly and make sure that they are
not ‘abusing’ the system. For instance, one of its measures would be to make
identity checks stricter (e.g., with biometric documents) to ensure that ‘im-
migrants do not duplicate their IDs in order to benefit from the same social
service several times. With regard to social security, immigrants are not
considered as deserving as French citizens, even when they are not breaking
any rules. For instance, the FN wants to introduce a waiting period of one year
in which an immigrant would work and contribute through taxes to social
security, without receiving any benefits. Once this extra contribution has been
paid, immigrants would be seen as more fit to become integrated into the
reciprocal system of social security.
Family policy is also a good example of the FN’s exclusive redistributive
solidarity. The party is the proponent of a very generous family policy: a large
increase in family subsidies, but also in subsidies for people with special needs,
and for the elderly. All these financial or fiscal aids should, however, be
restricted to French citizens. The FN details their exclusiveness by considering
that a family needs ‘a least one French parent’ to be eligible for family-related
social benefits. The division between solidarity and diversity is crystal clear in
the case of the FN.
9.5.4 The FPÖ’s Blurred Economic Policy
The FPÖ has a more inconsistent economic message compared to the FN. It
preserves some key elements of neoliberal rhetoric: it argues in favour of a
‘thin’ state that should limit itself to its ‘genuine’ tasks so that costs for
administration sink and taxes are reduced, private investments would fol-
low, jobs would be created, which would lead to more prosperity for all.
Contrary to the FN, the FPÖ does not travel too left on the economic
dimension, but it does send blurry messages: on the one hand it seeks to
reduce taxes whereas on the other it wants to maintain the existing social
security and pension systems. The solution to this paradox is to confine the
welfare state to the natives. More specifically, the FN’s ‘sucking pump’
argument mentioned above is exactly what the FPÖ uses against a basic
social security for all people living in Austria: the FPÖ opposes such a
scheme as it would create ‘an unequal form of redistribution’ and would
encourage the immigration of people who are ‘exclusively interested in the
Austrian social services’.
9.5.5 Immigration: A Cultural Problem?
The FPÖ starts by framing immigration in purely cultural-religious terms:

decades of immigration from ‘foreign cultural circles’, the FPÖ argues,
brought about ‘radical changes in the structure of the population’, whereby
Islam became the second biggest cultural community in Austria. The FPÖ
perceives this as a threat for the (cultural) future of Austria: the Islamic
community would, by the end of the century, become the ‘strongest’ group
in the entire country. Moreover, the FPÖ portrays peoples of Islamic culture as
non-conforming to Austrian constitutional principles and as undercover
‘conquerors’.16 In its chapter ‘Women-Men-Partnership-Family’, the FPÖ
states clearly that immigration from non-European countries has even endan-
gered equality of opportunity between women and men in Austria.17
Although having framed immigration as a cultural threat in the introduc-
tion of its electoral programme, the FPÖ then links immigrants to economic
problems, such as abuse of the welfare state and unemployment. In the first
chapter, titled ‘Austria first’, the FPÖ begins with facts about immigration to
elaborate more on the extent to which immigrants are welcome and under
what conditions.18 At this point the FPÖ proposes that Austria should start
sending foreigners back to their countries of origin: foreigners who misuse the
social system, delinquents, those whose asylum application was rejected, and
those for whom there is no job or adequate housing in Austria should be
repatriated. Moreover, the FPÖ’s chapter ‘social justice’ very much resembles
the FN programme in that it emphasizes the economic aspects of migration.
Without presenting any specific statistics, the FPÖ writes that ‘a large part’
among migrants either has no job or is over- proportionately hit by unemploy-
ment because of their low education level. It is here that the FPÖ places the
image of a ‘strained social system’—a welfare state under pressure because of
‘economic refugees’ (Wirtschaftsflüchtlinge).
The FPÖ puts ‘Austrians first’, to the extent that it even contradicts its own
neoliberal ideas of free market competition. For instance, the FPÖ proposes
that in sectors where there is strong need for labour (e.g., health and care),
there should be no demand for foreigners immediately after the liberalization
of the market. Instead, the AMS (Austrian unemployment agency) should,
based on long-term planning, train Austrians so that they can qualify for these
posts. In other words, rather than give the jobs to qualified immigrants, more
public money should be spent training Austrians so that they get the available
jobs instead.
9.5.6 Saving the Strained Welfare State
In the case of FPÖ, the solution to the problem of a strained welfare state is to
create a social security tailor-made for ‘temporary’ Gastarbeiter, which would
give them access to medical care and would be financed by their own contri-
butions. Non-natives who are frequently or long-term unemployed should
lose both their residence and working permits. The FPÖ makes it very clear
that the Austrian social security system should not include immigrants, for
whom different arrangements should be made. Although the FPÖ does not go
into as much detail as the FN does (note, however, that the FPÖ programme is
only sixteen pages), in the FPÖ’s ideal world immigrants should be nothing
more than temporary workers who will soon leave and should not be part of
the Austrian welfare system.19 The ‘already expensive welfare state (7 billions
per year)’ should target those really in need and the FPÖ does support social
programmes for the elderly, people with special needs and the unemployed,
but membership in all these categories is reserved to native Austrians.
Although the FPÖ is not as left-wing on welfare issues, it shares the concept
of exclusive solidarity with the FN, which expresses even greater degrees of
distrust towards immigrants.
9.5.7 Immigration: A Threat to the Austrian

and French Welfare States
Immigration remains at the core of both FN and FPÖ programmes. RR parties

in both countries perceive immigration, and consequently also diversity, as a
threat to the welfare state and thus propagate an exclusive, chauvinist concept
of solidarity. The FN and FPÖ are very similar in that they portray social
programmes as ‘endangered’ by immigration. In both parties’ discourse,
immigrants are held responsible for the failure of some social programmes,
and are certainly threatening the financial equilibrium of social security. Immigra-
tion is conceptualized as creating social injustice, and every ambitious welfare
policy of the FN and FPÖ is tied to an exclusive concept of ‘national priority’.
9.6 D ISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Globalization and economic integration processes have challenged the capacity

of SD parties to deliver on their welfare policy promises. This is important
because these parties have functioned as the traditional agents of redistributive
solidarity and the major proponents of welfare state expansion in Western
European political history (Hall Chapter 8, this volume). By embracing neo-
liberal policies (liberalization and privatization) its relationship with its supporters,
and especially the working class, which is in need of protection, came under strain.
We have argued here that the RR grasped the opportunity to appeal to the
working class by moving to the left on socio-economic issues, while remaining
on the right on socio-cultural issues and especially immigration. Aiming at a key
niche in the electoral market, left-authoritarianism, the RR sought to redefine the
politics of solidarity by developing chauvinist welfare agendas.
We have explored empirically the proposition that RR parties gradually
invaded the political space traditionally occupied by SD parties: over time,
welfare state expansion became a salient topic for many RRs. Our research
shows clearly that while SD parties did not abandon economic equality and
the promotion of welfare state expansion, RR parties made a gradual yet
radical move towards the left on redistribution, abandoning their pro-market
neoliberal ideology to adopt pro-welfare positions. SD parties combine their
(moderate left) position on economic issues with socially and culturally
progressive liberal values, but RR parties combine it with socially and cultur-
ally conservative attitudes. Future studies should enquire about whether (and
how much) the RRs’ increasing attention to welfare expansion contributed to
their electoral successes given that their initial victories were mainly based on
anti-immigrant proposals.
In addition to the salience of welfare state expansion, we have looked at

party positions on welfare issues. Our data shows that SD parties and
RR parties nowadays reside in the same segment of the policy space when it
comes to welfare preferences. Future research should address the variation in
levels of welfare-related salience and the positions of RR parties and explain
why some parties (e.g., FN) travel more to the left than others (e.g., FPÖ) by
considering country-level factors such as type of welfare regime, electoral
system, or party system polarization. Party-specific characteristics may also
play a role, such as the age of RR parties and their participation in government.
This variation, in turn, affects the room for maneuver available for SD
parties in their competition for votes and their pursuit of policy (at the
national party system level). To successfully promote a combination of egali-
tarian pro-redistributive policies SD parties should, in all probability, seek
alliances with the Greens, and the Radical Left, where they exist. Once again,
majoritarian systems and PR differ in the extent to which SD parties face
competition at the left-liberal location of the policy space. Variation across PR
systems plays a role in affecting party competition and coalition potential. Yet
the Left can unite precisely on defending these values: democracy, equality,
and social commitment to redistribution.
Another question that remains open is whether SD parties attract right-
liberals, as they gradually became more moderate on the economy and more
liberal on socio-cultural issues. The right-liberals form a group that previous
research identified as lacking a match at the party level (e.g., Lefkofridi,
Wagner, and Willman 2014), similarly to the left-authoritarians that RR
parties sought to pair. In majoritarian contexts, right-liberals could ‘cross
the line’ and support a party of the ‘other’ ideological block—a switch that
could benefit SD parties. In a proportional multi-party system, however,
party-switches usually occur within the left- or within the right-bloc (intra-
bloc volatility) (Bartolini and Mair 2007).
Furthermore, we have conducted a cross-party family comparison of cur-
rent positions on immigrants’ deservingness of welfare services that portrayed
SD and RR across Europe as have opposing views: the former oppose and the
latter favour more difficult access for immigrants to social benefits. Here, the
exception is the Austrian SPÖ, which neither favours nor opposes more
difficult access for immigrants to social benefits. This may be reflecting
how much pressure the SPÖ currently is under; the FPÖ appeals more and
more to those segments of the electorate that used to support the SPÖ in past
decades, namely those people that have been benefiting from the welfare
state promoted by the SPÖ. We have argued in this chapter that the FPÖ,
like other RR parties in Europe, tries to steal those voters from SD parties by
linking the welfare state to immigration, thus juxtaposing solidarity and
diversity. Our in-depth study of the FN and FPÖ electoral programmes
makes it clear that the promotion of welfare state expansion occurs within
an anti-immigrant frame, the issue around which the RR are perceived as most
competent.
Drawing on their credibility on matters of immigration, RR parties advocate
against further immigration and existing immigrants’ access to the same social
benefits as the natives and even argue in favour of repatriating immigrants,
thus presenting immigrants’ exclusion as the solution to a complex economic
reality. The imagery of immigrants is based on a series of negative stereotypes:
immigrants come to one’s country not in search of a better future (e.g., civil
liberties) but because of the existing welfare benefits. The abuse of the social
system by immigrants is portrayed as the cause of welfare state failures.
Immigrants are also presented as the double cause of rising unemployment:
on the one hand, they lack education and skills so they are more likely to be
unemployed and in need of unemployment benefits; on the other, if they are
skilled and are allowed to work in the country they get those jobs that could
have gone to natives, if the welfare state would invest in training the natives.
Solidarity is thus eroded by the electoral strategy and discourse of the RR,
which entertains simultaneously both economic insecurities and cultural fears.
Given the changes in their economic agendas and positions documented
here, perhaps we should rethink the term ‘radical right’ as a label for parties
that promote a pro-welfare agenda in the context of populist-nationalist
(regionalist), anti-immigrant, and exclusionist rhetoric. Authors who study
the RR’s success in Western Europe have used different labels for this party
family: radical right (Kitschelt 1995; Norris 2005), populist radical right
(Mudde 2007), or extreme right (Ignazi 2003; Carter 2005). According to
Kitschelt (2007) this debate is ‘futile’ because, despite their conceptual disagree-
ments, authors agree on the cases that belong to this party family. By empha-
sizing the socio-economic preferences of radical right parties, our contribution
reopens this debate. However, instead of focusing on how to label these parties,
our study questions their conventional placement on the political spectrum.
The rhetoric of ‘natives first’ employed by the RR is particularly dangerous
during the current economic crisis, which has put more pressure on European
economies and welfare systems. Instead of searching for the causes of their
problems in the regulation of the financial sector, the irresponsible behaviour
of banks or the fact that multinational capital has the power to threaten
governments by relocating their investment/industry to countries with lower
wages and weaker labour rights, the RR in creditor states emphasized the
cultural and moral differences (working and spending habits) between North
and South and blamed the crisis on lazy and corrupt Southerners. Now that
Southern European economies are plagued by unemployment and some of
their citizens are forced to migrate to the North, the RR is expected to intensify
this chauvinist discourse and energize the division between solidarity and
diversity by accentuating the differences among Europeans, not just between
European and non-European (e.g., Islamic) cultures.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Earlier versions were presented at the workshop ‘Welfare State and the Radical Right’,
20–21 May 2014 and at the RSCAS Seminar Series, 12 November 2014 that took place
at the EUI in Florence. We are grateful to the participants for their comments.
NOTES
1. This relates to the fact that parties are conservative organizations that in principle
resist change (Wilson 1989, 1980). A related problem is how (well) parties
communicate with their base of supporters and the broader electorate. As western
European democracies matured and technology advanced, electoral politics be-
came more professionally organized (e.g., polls and TV instead of members and
posters); however, the distance between mainstream party organizations and the
social groups they used to voice became greater (e.g., see also party membership
decline, Mair and van Biezen (2001); Van Biezen, Mair, and Poguntke (2012)).
This has contributed to electoral volatility and voters’ realignment.
2. Even Bismarck’s ‘modicum of redistribution in the form of pensions, sickness
insurance and workers’ compensation was to preempt the Social Democrats from
winning a greater following and pursuing greater attempts at social justice’
(Baldwin 1990: 3).
3. Accordingly, conservative/centre-right parties have been typically considered to
own the issues of security and defence; the greens are perceived as most competent
on environmental issues, while the RR parties are considered to be best in
handling immigration issues.
4. Moreover, as the composition of the SD constituency changed to include more
middle-class rather than working-class voters, SD parties had to respond to the
preferences of the middle class for cultural liberalism (Kriesi et al. 2008); a fine-
grained analysis of class voting in Germany, Switzerland, and Britain (Oesch
2008b) shows that, within the middle class, it is especially salaried professionals
in the social and cultural services that rally the culturally-liberal left.
5. See Spoon, Hobolt, and de Vries (2014) for a similar argument about party
competition on environmental issues.
6. The euandi is a Voting Advice Application for the 2014 European Parliament
Elections developed by the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. For
further details see official website of euandi: <http://euandi.eu/abouteuandi.html>
(accessed 3 October 2016).
7. In some cases, RR parties did not compete in elections as early as the 1980s. We
then selected the election they contested that was closest to our time reference
points.
8. We decided not to include here the item ‘welfare state limitation’, as it is, for most
parties, of negligible proportions. Items selected for welfare expansion form a
homogeneous scale (Cronbach’s alpha of 0.81, confirmed by factor analysis).
9. The exact wording of the question in English is ‘ It should be harder for EU
immigrants working or staying in [country] to get access to social assistance
benefits than it is for [country]'s citizens.’ This question targets immigrants from
within the EU, but it can be used as a proxy of inclusiveness/exclusiveness of
welfare benefits. Most likely, the exclusiveness of RR parties for EU immigrants is
at least as strong, if not much stronger, for immigrants coming from non-EU
countries. Because there is missing data, the Finnish parties of interest (SDP/TF)
are excluded from this step of the analysis.
10. Note that these programmes have not yet been coded by the CMP team; and to the
best of our knowledge our study constitutes the first analysis of these programmes.
11. The document is available on the party’s official website: <http://www.
frontnational.com/pdf/Programme.pdf> (accessed 31 July 2014).
12. The document is available on the party’s official website: <http://www.fpoe.at/
fileadmin/Contentpool/Portal/wahl08/FP_-Wahlprogramm_NRW08.pdf> (ac-
cessed 31 July 2014).
13. Table 9.2 shows that some of the issues mentioned in RR manifestos are salient for
all parties in the system, whereas others are not salient for most parties in the
system, and in some cases, issues appear to be salient for certain parties only, and
thus have high standard deviations.
14. Such as the following items: welfare state expansion, education expansion,
positive perception of equality policies or social groups (farmers, special interest
groups). Out of the 110 salient issues, 22 qualify as related to redistributive
solidarity.
15. Both terms ‘grand patronat’ (big corporate interests) and ‘grand capital’ (big
capital) are symbolically associated with the rhetoric of the left.
16. The FPÖ goes so far as to say that it opposes the construction of anything that
symbolizes the desire to conquer Austria, masked under freedom of religion, such
as minarets. It also clarifies that violation of the Austrian constitution, such as
violence against women, lack of respect towards the freedom of press and opinion
and the torture of animals, are not covered by freedom of religion and should thus
be punished.
17. The FPÖ specifically refers to forced marriage and the headscarf as well as genital
mutilation as ‘clear signs’ of women’s oppression, which cannot be accepted in
Austria.
18. Every sixth resident of Austria and every third resident of Vienna has foreign
roots; in 2007 there were 820,000 legal and 100,000 illegal immigrants in the
country.
19. For an analysis of conflicting rationalities and the role of the RR in the case of the
Austrian Seasonal Worker Scheme, see Horvath (2014).
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10
Making Xenophobia Matter

The Consequences of the 2002 Elections
for Immigration Politics in the Netherlands
Edward Koning
1 0 . 1 IN TR O D U C T I O N
In studies of immigration and diversity, the Netherlands often appear as a

negative example. Many scholars have noticed that while the Dutch historic-
ally employed a relatively generous approach to newcomers, it has undergone
a dramatic transformation over the last twenty years or so (De Hart 2007;
Korteweg 2006). As we will see, over time immigration-related problems have
come to occupy a larger part of public discourse, public attitudes have become
more hostile, political parties have taken more restrictive positions, and
policies have become less generous. If we want to understand how to ensure
social cohesion in a diverse society, the Dutch case thus offers us insight into
the factors that can threaten such a project.
While some scholars have tried to explain the restrictive transformation in
the Netherlands, so far there does not seem to be a clear scholarly consensus.
In fact, some authors even contest there is much to be explained in the first
place. For Maarten Vink, for example, the entire discussion about a Dutch
turn to assimilation is premised on a misclassification of institutions from the
era of pillarization as multicultural (Vink 2007). Others interpret recent
changes in Dutch immigration politics mostly as a concerted effort to protect
traditional Dutch tolerance from illiberal immigrant influences (Sniderman
and Hagendoorn 2007). For those authors, the phenomenon to be explained is
not why some restrictions were implemented, but why the Dutch were for
such a long time caught in a ‘conspiracy of silence’ (Messina 2007).
In this chapter, I explore an explanation that has commonly been invoked
but has not been investigated systematically, namely that the change in Dutch
Making Xenophobia Matter 269
immigration politics was triggered by the rise and murder of Pim Fortuyn
(November 2001–May 2002), the charismatic anti-establishment politician
who was the first to run a successful anti-immigrant campaign in the Netherlands
and was assassinated before the election. As such, this chapter investigates
the effect political actors can have on social cohesion in diverse societies. If
Fortuyn’s uproarious political career can really be understood as a turning
point in Dutch immigration politics, it suggests that solidarity in diverse
societies is so frail that a single politician can change a place of peaceful
multiculturalism into a hotbed of interethnic tension.
As we will see, such a depiction would be an exaggeration. There are clear
signs of ‘strains of commitment’ in the Netherlands well before Fortuyn’s
campaign, and his imprint on Dutch immigration politics is more visible in
some areas than in others. More specifically, we find little evidence that the
year 2002 made the average Dutch person more hostile towards immigrants,
or made the average Dutch discussion on immigration more negative. Instead,
what seems to have happened is that after 2002, already lingering anti-
immigrant attitudes have become more politically consequential. The events
of 2002 created a permanent space in the Dutch party system for an anti-
immigrant party, made voters more likely to determine their vote on the basis
of their views on immigration, planted restrictive ideas among the political
elite (particularly in the area of integration policies), and created an incentive
for mainstream parties to take a more restrictive stance on immigration. For
those reasons, the turn the Netherlands have undergone towards a more
assimilative and immigrant-unfriendly society can indeed be partially traced
back to Fortuyn, but not for the reasons that are often suggested.
This chapter is structured as follows. The next section summarizes the
history of the 2002 elections and their immediate aftermath. Section 10.3
raises some methodological considerations, after which I turn to the heart of
my analysis. Section 10.4 first investigates Fortuyn’s effect on immigration-
related discourse and attitudes. Section 10.5 then repeats that analysis for party
politics and legislation. The conclusion reflects on what these findings suggest
about the relevance of political actors to social cohesion in diverse societies.
1 0 . 2 A B R I E F H I S T O R Y O F FO R T U Y N’S RI S E
AND M URDER
The short political career of Pim Fortuyn has been extensively documented
(Chorus and De Galan 2002; De Vries and Van der Lubben 2005; Snel 2013;
Stiphout, Wynia, and Wytzes 2013; Van Holsteyn and Irwin 2003). This
section provides but a brief summary of what has become known as ‘the
270 Edward Koning
Table 10.1 Crucial dates in ‘the long year of 2002’
25 November 2001 Fortuyn appointed as leader of Liveable Netherlands (LN)

9–11 February 2002 After controversial interview, LN fires Fortuyn; Fortuyn starts new party
called List Pim Fortuyn (LPF)
6 May 2002 Assassination of Fortuyn
15 May 2002 Parliamentary elections, landslide for LPF
22 July 2002 Appointment of first cabinet-Balkenende (coalition of Christian
democrats, LPF, and conservatives)
16 October 2002 Fall of first cabinet-Balkenende—new elections called
22 January 2003 Parliamentary elections, LPF reduced to 8 seats
long year of 2002’ in Dutch politics (Andeweg and Irwin 2005: 16–17).
Table 10.1 lists the most relevant dates.
Pim Fortuyn did not make his definitive entrance on the political scene until
November 2001, when the members of newly minted anti-establishment party
Liveable Netherlands (LN, Leefbaar Nederland) elected him leader for the
upcoming parliamentary elections. While Fortuyn had had political ambitions
long before then (Snel 2013),1 at that point he was primarily known as a
disgruntled sociologist (he was fired in 1996 from a research chair at the
University of Rotterdam for a lack of scholarly output) and controversial
columnist in the right-wing weekly magazine Elsevier. He was an outspoken
critic of many social and political issues, but was best known for his stance on
immigrant diversity. He published a book entitled Against the Islamization of
Our Culture (Fortuyn 1997),2 and dedicated many of his columns to criticizing
existing immigration and integration policies for being too permissive. In a
nutshell, his position on immigration consisted of three points: (1) many
immigrants, in particular from Turkey and Morocco, are not integrating
properly; (2) we therefore have to curtail further immigration as much as
possible; and (3) we should celebrate ‘traditional’ Dutch values and demand
that newcomers assimilate to those values. The following excerpt from a
column he wrote in December 1998 is typical:
At best they [Turkish and Moroccan migrants] see our country as a good shelter
and a nice source of income. At worst they despise our country, culture and
mentality, which incites a shameless exploitation in all (numerous) possible
areas. . . . We are facing the task here of forming a people and a nation to survive
and that means that they either have to fully participate and sympathize and feel
Dutch, or go back to where they came from. (Fortuyn 2001: 153)
As LN leader, Fortuyn did not soften his tone and he became the subject of
extensive media attention—especially since besides being controversial, he was
also theatrical and funny. His popularity grew quickly. By the beginning of the
35.0 Fortuyn
murdered
30.0 LN fires Fortuyn;
founding of LPF
25.0
Fall of
20.0 Fortuyn Balkenende-I
appointed
15.0 LN leader
10.0
5.0
0.0
Jun '01
Jul '01
Aug '01
Sep '01
Oct '01
Nov '01
Dec '01
Jan '02
Feb '02
Mar '02
Apr '02
May '02
May '02
Jun '02
Jul '02
Aug '02
Sep '02
Oct '02
Nov '02
Dec '02
Jan '03
Feb '03
Mar '03
Apr '03
May '03
Jun '03
LPF LN
Figure 10.1 Projected number of seats for Fortuynist parties, June 2001–May 2003
Source: Synovate (2014).
new year, polls suggested that no less than 10 per cent of the Dutch electorate
was planning to vote for him, and the percentage did not seem to stop
increasing (see Figure 10.1).
In February, Fortuyn experienced a minor setback. In an interview with the
leftish newspaper De Volkskrant, he argued in favour of repealing the non-
discrimination principle from the Dutch constitution, and described Islamic
culture as achterlijk—which can be translated as both ‘backward’ and ‘retard-
ed’. When he was asked whether such statements would not get him into
trouble with his party, he responded that he did not really pay much attention
to the official party line (Poorthuis and Wansink 2002). After a crisis meeting,
the LN executive decided to run with a different candidate. As Fortuyn left the
meeting, he immediately made it clear to the press that was waiting outside
that he was not dropping out of the election. Two days later he announced the
birth of his new party, the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF, Lijst Pim Fortuyn).
This little episode hardly seemed to hurt Fortuyn’s campaign. The LPF
quickly rose in the polls, and on 6 March Fortuyn won a big victory in
the municipal elections with Liveable Rotterdam, the local offshoot of the
LN he was still associated with. Nine days before the national parliamentary
elections, one poll projected Fortuyn to become the largest party in parlia-
ment, winning no fewer than 38 of the total 150 seats.3 On this same day,
Fortuyn was killed. On the way to his car after a radio interview, he was shot
repeatedly from close range. He died soon after.
272 Edward Koning
After long deliberation and explicit consultation with the leaders of all
parties (De Vries and Van der Lubben 2005), the council of ministers decided
to proceed with the election as planned but to suspend all campaign activities.
In the end, the LPF won a total of twenty-six seats, second only to the forty-
one of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA, Christen Democratisch
Àppel).4 Within just over two months, a coalition government was formed,
consisting of the CDA, the LPF, and the conservative Popular Party for
Freedom and Democracy (VVD, Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie).
Without its leader, the LPF turned out to be unmanageable and rife with
internal divisions. A conflict between two of the LPF ministers eventually led
to a very premature fall of the government, less than three months after its
appointment. At the next election in January 2003, the LPF—despite an
impressive fundraising campaign—was reduced to 8 seats.5 The party did
not fare much better as an opposition party. Four of the eight remaining
MPs left the faction and continued as independents. In the 2006 election, the
party received a meager 0.2 per cent of the vote. It was formally abolished on
1 January 2008.
10.3 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
This episode should be of interest to students of immigration politics not only

because of its clear societal relevance. There is also large methodological
appeal to studying the Dutch 2002 elections. The effect anti-immigrant parties
can have on voters and policy-making has occupied many political scientists
(Gibson 2002; Kitschelt and McGann 1995; Loxbo 2010; Norris 2005;
Østergaard-Nielsen 2003; Rydgren 2003), but the identification of such an
effect is troubled by a major methodological problem: since anti-immigrant
parties can only be successful in the context of xenophobia, it is difficult to
establish empirically to what extent these parties themselves contribute to
public support for immigrant exclusion once they become active. In the case
study under investigation, this problem of endogeneity is alleviated to an
important extent. Not only were the 2002 elections the first to see large success
for an anti-immigrant party in the Netherlands, but the elections were also
characterized by at least three highly contingent aspects that make the char-
acterization of Fortuyn as an exogenous factor more defensible.
First, a confluence of events made the elections of 2002 a particularly
opportune time for a challenger of mainstream political parties. For the
entire postwar history until 1994, Dutch coalition governments were com-
posed of Christian democrats alternating with either the social-democratic
PvdA on the left or the conservative VVD on the right. In 1994, however, the
PvdA and VVD decided to sideline the Christian democrats and form what
became known as the ‘Purple’ coalition. After eight years of a government

consisting of the parties that traditionally shaped the main fault line of Dutch
politics, it was easy for a newcomer to paint the established elite as a
homogenous group that does not offer any real alternatives. Rudy Andeweg
pointed this out before Fortuyn became politically active: ‘without some
meaningful choice within the system, voters may choose against the system’
(Andeweg 2001: 119).6 The chance of this anti-system vote was heightened by
two additional reasons. While the Dutch economy was in a hausse for most
of Purple’s incumbency, it had gone into recession towards the end of the
century and reached its nadir in 2002 with only 0.08 real GDP growth
(OECD 2014). This is important because we know that anti-immigrant
parties tend to do better in economically more difficult times (Lubbers,
Gijsberts, and Scheepers 2002; O’Connell 2005). In addition, it is worth
emphasizing that Fortuyn appeared prominently on stage shortly after the
attacks on the World Trade Center. While the consequences of 9/11 have
undoubtedly been exaggerated on numerous occasions, there is evidence that
it led—at least in the short run—to heightened anti-immigrant sentiment
(Hopkins 2010).
Second, Fortuyn did not only seem to be at the right place at the right time,
he also seemed to be the right man to be there. The most important reasons
are twofold. In contrast to previous politicians who suggested radical restric-
tions in immigration policies, it is difficult to accuse Fortuyn of voicing
no views on any other policy area. While he had written much on immigra-
tion, he had been equally prolific in disseminating his views on health
care, labour market regulation, and law and order issues (Fortuyn 2002; Snel
2013). Indeed, his overarching stance on diversity (namely that immigration
and integration policies had been unreasonably generous because a mostly
left-wing elite that does not take the views of ordinary citizens seriously had
been in power for too long) fit seamlessly into his more general anti-
establishment message. As such, he was able to fish from a larger pool of
potential voters. In addition, in even sharper contrast to the National Popular
Union’s (Nationale VolksUnie, NVU) Joop Glimmerveen and the Center
Democrats’ (CentrumDemocraten, CD) Hans Janmaat, Pim Fortuyn was
comparatively effective at avoiding being categorized as an anti-democratic
extremist. This was not only because of some of his personal characteristics (in
particular, it is difficult to believe that a gay man would oppose minority
rights, let alone be a closet Nazi), but also because of his discursive strategy.
Fortuyn framed his opposition to generous immigration policies explicitly in
liberal-democratic terms: the main reasons for his views, so he maintained,
was that illiberal views (in particular sexism and homophobia) among (in
particular Muslim) immigrant groups threatened the existing liberal tolerance
in the Netherlands (Fortuyn 1997), and that restrictions were what the silent
majority in the Netherlands was asking for (Fortuyn 2002).
274 Edward Koning
The third and most obviously contingent aspect was that Fortuyn was killed
during the election campaign. This is particularly relevant because an import-
ant component of Fortuyn’s discourse was that discussions on immigration
were suffering from a smothering political correctness. His assassination
seemed a gruesome confirmation of this argument.
All in all, the 2002 elections were in many ways unpredictable. Unfortu-
nately, this does not remove concerns about endogeneity altogether. For one
thing, the socio-structural and institutional conditions at the beginning of the
century were not very different from those in Austria, Belgium, Denmark,
Norway, or Switzerland, where long before Fortuyn’s career anti-immigrant
movements were already well represented in parliament. As these other five
countries, the Netherlands had a sizeable immigrant population, the largest
groups finding their roots in the ‘guest worker’ programmes of the 1960s
(Messina 2007; Van Amersfoort and Penninx 1994; Vellinga 1993). After the
oil crisis of 1973, Dutch governments decided to close the borders for labour
migration, and from that moment on and until well into the 2000s effectively
only accepted family and refugee migrants. As in other Western European
countries, therefore, there was a strong overlap between ethnicity and class in
the population—a well-known recipe for xenophobia (Horowitz 2000).
In addition, with the most proportional electoral system in the world (the
electoral threshold is only 0.67 per cent), the Dutch party system has always
been very open to new political parties.
That Dutch anti-immigrant politicians had not been successful before
Fortuyn, then, has much to do with those politicians and their parties them-
selves. The NVU, which peaked at 0.4 per cent of the vote in 1977, for
example, was too closely associated with anti-democratic and racist thought
to appeal to the broad public (Voerman and Lucardie 1992). The CD did
slightly better and managed to win three seats in the 1994 elections, but its
leader Janmaat still struggled to shake off the image of a fringe radical. In a
2000 analysis, Cas Mudde and Joop van Holsteyn attributed the lack of CD’s
success entirely to Janmaat’s limited leadership skills: ‘Should Janmaat [ . . . ] be
replaced by a person of higher calibre, then the Dutch extreme right arguably
would enjoy success, like its Flemish or Austrian counterparts’ (Mudde and
Van Holsteyn 2000: 163).
Despite the obvious contingent characteristics of the 2002 elections, it
would thus be wrong to characterize the rise of Fortuyn as entirely unpredict-
able and exogenous. In attempting to avoid conflating cause and effect, I rely
on a series of longitudinal analyses of different aspects of immigration politics.
If we are to see a clear break in long-term trends on various indicators around
2002, this would suggest the elections are of causal relevance. If, on the other
hand, we see that long-term developments remain unchanged around the year
2002, we would conclude the ‘long year of 2002’ is but a manifestation of a
more general restrictive trend. The next section will use this approach to first
investigate the effects on discourse and attitudes, after which section 10.5 will
turn to party politics and policy.7
10.4 THE SCARCITY OF ATTITUDINAL

AND DISCURSIV E EFFECTS
While Fortuyn has often been accused of changing the tone of debate about
immigration in a more accusatory direction and fuelling anti-immigrant
sentiment, the evidence for such effects is surprisingly limited. While there
are certainly indications that Dutch discourse and public opinion on immi-
grant diversity has become more hostile over time, this trend has started well
before 2002 and experienced no significant increase afterwards. Importantly,
the only evidence of a ‘Fortuyn effect’ is that from 2002 onwards, views on
immigration seem to have become a more important predictor of party
preference. In other words, while it is difficult to substantiate that the 2002
elections increased xenophobia in the Netherlands, they did seem to make this
xenophobia more politically consequential. Before I discuss this evidence in
more detail, I will first briefly discuss why these findings are unexpected on the
basis of existing theoretical literature.
Since no Dutch politician with an anti-immigrant platform had ever
assumed the prominence Fortuyn did, existing theory would suggest that the
sudden entrance on centre stage of an anti-immigrant politician has had
considerable ‘priming’ and ‘framing’ effects (Chong and Druckman 2007;
Iyengar and Kinder 1987). More specifically, the prediction would be (1)
that Fortuyn made immigration a more salient issue in political discourse,
(2) that the tone of this discourse became more accusatory and critical, and (3)
that as a result concerns about immigration spread among the public. In line
with these predictions, many scholars have found evidence that anti-
immigrant politicians increase the prominence of anti-immigrant discourse,
and that such politicization leads to increased anti-immigrant sentiment
(Green-Pedersen and Odmalm 2008; Hopkins 2010; Mehan 1997; Rydgren
2003; Sales 2007: 10).
It is worth emphasizing why anti-immigrant rhetoric in general and Fortuyn’s
discursive strategies in particular can be expected to have such large ideational
effects (larger than, say, pro-environment discourse). First, critiques of immi-
gration are easily framed in ‘us-versus-them’ terms, which encourages the
psychological process of in-group and out-group thinking. In the words of
Frank Mols, ‘it is the extent to which a frame mobilises social identity that
determines whether a frame is strong and persuasive’ (Mols 2012: 332). Paul
Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn (2007: 120) find that the very act of
276 Edward Koning
drawing attention to social identity can already be enough to mobilize anti-

immigrant sentiment. Second, we know that frames are likely to be more
effective when they are repeated frequently without being challenged by
alternative frames (Soroka 2002). While the rhetoric of anti-immigrant poli-
ticians is certainly contested regularly by their political opponents, it seems
safe to conclude that immigrants—the target of anti-immigrant frames—do
not have the organization and mobilization potential to wage an effective
‘framing contest’ (Boin, ‘t Hart, and McConnell 2009). Third, and finally, we
know that frames are more likely to be effective when they invoke issues that
many people are worried about (Kelleher and Wolak 2006; Soroka 2002). It
seems plausible that the rise and, in particular, murder of Fortuyn has
increased public worries about immigration, and that anti-immigrant frames
in the Netherlands have therefore become more effective after his death.
In sum, there are good reasons to expect that the political history of 2002
has had large discursive and attitudinal effects. As said, however, empirical
evidence only lends modest support for this expectation.
To start with the evidence on discursive effects, many scholars have
observed that there is more attention to immigration in public and political
discussions in the Netherlands today than there used to be, and also that the
tone of these discussions has become more negative over time (Korteweg 2006;
Vink 2007; Vliegenthart and Roggeband 2007). The evidence is weaker,
however, that 2002 was the turning point in this regard. At any rate, we can
certainly encounter criticisms of immigrants and generous immigration pol-
icies in mainstream discourse before then. For example, in the 1998 election
campaign then VVD leader Frits Bolkestein explicitly criticized the integration
of Moroccan and Turkish migrants (Bale et al. 2010; Erk 2011). And in 2000,
Labour intellectual Paul Scheffer spoke in a now almost legendary op-ed of a
‘multicultural drama’ that had been ignored for too long (Scheffer 2000).
The evidence from more systematic investigation is ambiguous. On the one
hand, if we look at the sheer volume of attention in mainstream newspapers to
the subject of immigration and integration (see Figure 10.2), there is indeed a
clear increase in the immediate aftermath of 2002.8 On the other hand,
however, we find less evidence of a 2002 effect when we focus on the tone of
discussions about immigration. In probably the most extensive analysis of
immigration discourse in parliament and the media, Rens Vliegenthart and
Conny Roggeband (2007: 307–8) find that the tendency to frame Muslim
immigrants as a threat started to increase as early as 2000 and stayed relatively
stable after 2002.
Similar conclusions emerge from an analysis of letters to the editor that
appeared in the period from 2001 to 2003 in two major Dutch newspapers: the
right-of-centre tabloid De Telegraaf and the leftish newspaper De Volkskrant.
Of course, letters to the editor do not give a representative picture of public
opinion (in particular, we can expect their authors to be more opinionated and
1.4
0.6
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Figure 10.2 Attention to immigrant diversity in four major Dutch newspapers,

1999–2012
Table 10.2 Tone of letters to the editor on immigrant diversity before and after
Fortuyn’s murder in major left-wing and right-wing newspapers
1/1/2001–6/5/2002 7/5/2002–31/12/2003
Volkskrant (left-wing) Positive 54.9% (45) 44.5% (53)

Neutral/unclear 30.5% (25) 36.1% (43)
Negative 14.6% (12) 19.3% (23)
Telegraaf (right-wing) Positive 8.7% (2) 28.6% (14)
Neutral/unclear 43.5% (10) 20.4% (10)
Negative 47.8% (11) 51.0% (25)
to have more extreme views than the public at large),9 but there are distinct
advantages to their use as well (Sigelman and Walkosz 1992). For current
purposes, the main appeal of this method is that it allows for a relatively fine-
grained longitudinal investigation of non-elite discourse.10
This analysis shows no clear evidence of a harshening in the tone of letters
to the editor that discuss immigration and immigrant integration in the period
immediately following Fortuyn’s murder. As we see in Table 10.2, after
Fortuyn’s assassination positive letters became somewhat less common in
De Volkskrant, and slightly more common in De Telegraaf.11 Again, the
conclusion seems to be that it might be true that public discourse on immi-
gration in the Netherlands has become more negative over time,12 but that it is
not clear that the rise and murder of Fortuyn was the immediate source of this
development.
When we turn our attention to public attitudes, we again find only modest
evidence of a 2002 effect. Existing research suggests that especially when it
278 Edward Koning
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1994 1998 2002 2003 2006 2010
Ethnic minorities should adjust to Dutch culture
Asylum seekers should be sent back to their country of origin
Figure 10.3 Views on asylum seekers and multiculturalism, 1994–2010

Source: DPES and author’s calculations.
comes to identity issues, Dutch attitudes have recently become more restrict-
ive (Government of the Netherlands 2007; Sniderman and Hagendoorn 2007).
For example, the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) has asked
Dutch respondents on two occasions about their views on the meaning of
national identity, and the answers were very different before and after the turn
of the century. Respondents appeared significantly more likely in 2003 than in
1995 to think that different ethnic groups should blend into larger society and
that in order to be truly Dutch it is important to speak Dutch, to respect Dutch
laws, to be a Dutch citizen, and to be a Christian.13 However, just like we saw
in the discussion of discourse, it is not evident that this restrictive turn was
initiated in 2002. This becomes clearer when we turn to survey questions that
have been asked over a longer period of time.
The Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies (DPES) have asked respondents
for each election since 1994 whether ethnic minorities should be allowed to
preserve their own customs, and has since 1998 included a question on
whether more asylum seekers should be accepted. Figure 10.3 shows the
trend in answer patterns over time. For both questions we see that attitudes
are more restrictive in 2002 and later years than in the wave(s) before that
year.14 This conclusion is somewhat qualified, however, by the differences
between 2002 and 2003. While respondents expressed more sympathy for Pim
Fortuyn in 2003 than in the 2002 wave which was conducted just before his
murder,15 there is no evidence of a concomitant rise in anti-immigrant
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Foreigners should cling Reservations about Admission policy for Dutch people should
less to their culture neighbour with different economic refugees get housing first
race should be strict
Figure 10.4 Anti-immigrant attitudes in the Netherlands, 1991–2010 (light bar

is 2002)
Source: CCNS and author’s calculations.
sentiment (in fact, on both questions respondents’ views were slightly less
restrictive in 2003 than in 2002).
The richest longitudinal data on immigration attitudes in the Netherlands
can be found in the Cultural Changes in the Netherlands Survey (CCNS),
which ran on a yearly or biyearly basis from 1975 to 2010. Since 1991, the
CCNS has asked a total of twenty-two questions about immigrant diversity in
multiple surveys. Figure 10.4 shows the results of four questions that tap
different dimensions of immigration attitudes and that have been asked in
several waves of the CCNS.16 The results certainly do not suggest that the year
of 2002 has had an important impact on all dimensions of immigration
attitudes. In fact, the picture seems very different from one question to
another. When it comes to attitudes about having neighbours of a different
race or attitudes about admission policy, the year 2002 appears as an ephem-
eral peak in an overall declining trend in hostile attitudes. On the issue of
whether Dutch citizens should be favoured in access to housing, 2002 curi-
ously appears as a low point in chauvinism. Only on the issue of immigrant
culture do we see some evidence of a recent xenophobic turn, but again it is
important to qualify that the turnaround point appears to be before 2002.
In sum, there is little evidence of a 2002 effect on aggregate views on
immigration. In fact, available data do not even suggest that the elections
have made immigration a more salient subject in the minds of voters: in
2002 just over one in six respondents of the DPES (17.7 per cent) mentioned
‘immigration’ or ‘refugees’ as one of the top three problems facing the
Netherlands, which is considerably lower than in 1994 (44.7 per cent) and
negligibly different from other years this question has been asked in a
280 Edward Koning
0.35
0.3
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0
1994 1998 2002 2003 2010
Ethnic minorities should adjust to Asylum seekers should be sent

Dutch society back to their country of origin
Figure 10.5 Relationship between attitudes on immigration and self-reported voting

behaviour, 1994–2010 (Cramer’s V; all associations are statistically significant at p <
0.001)
comparable way.17 Similarly surprising is that there is hardly any evidence

for a polarization effect either: the share of respondents that picked the
most extreme answer options (either positive or negative) on the various
immigration-related questions in the DPES and CCNS did not increase
significantly after 2002.18
The only detectable effect of ‘the long year of 2002’ is that it seems to have
made a person’s stance on immigration a better predictor of party preference
(Van Holsteyn, Irwin, and Den Ridder 2003). This is most obvious in the
DPES data.19 Figure 10.5 shows, for each wave since 1994,20 the strength of the
association between the two immigration-related questions and respondents’
voting behaviour. As it turns out, views on whether immigrants should adjust
to Dutch society and on whether asylum seekers should be allowed to stay in
the Netherlands are much more strongly related to vote choice from 2002
onwards.
A different way to investigate whether the elections of 2002 have made
immigration attitudes more relevant in determining vote choice is by compar-
ing respondents’ views on these two questions with what they perceive to be
the views of the party they voted for. This investigation is illustrated in
Figure 10.6, which shows the average difference between respondents’ position
and the position they ascribe to the party they voted for. On almost all the
trend lines in Figure 10.6, the year 2002 stands out as marking a break with the
past. As illustrated by the solid black lines, on aggregate voters perceived
themselves to be closer to their party of choice on immigration issues in
2002 and later years than before. On both questions, this development is
most pronounced for respondents who indicate to have voted for social
1.2 1.2
0.9 0.9
0.6 0.6
0.3 0.3
0 0
1994 1998 2002 2003 2006 2010 1998 2002 2003 2006 2010
All respondents CDA voters PvdA voters VVD voters
Figure 10.6 Self-perceived absolute difference between voters and party of choice on
whether ethnic minorities should adjust to Dutch culture (left panel) and on whether
asylum seekers should be sent back to their country of origin (right panel), 1994–2010
democratic party PvdA (illustrated by the dashed black line): the gap between
voter and party is between two and three times as small by 2010 as it was
before anti-immigrant parties were part of the Dutch party system.21
All in all, there is very little evidence of lasting discursive and attitudinal
effects of the remarkable 2002 elections. It does seem to be the case that the
issue of immigration has become a more prominent part of discourse, and that
some attitudes (in particular those regarding immigrant culture) have become
more negative over time. However, we find no effects when it comes to the tone
of public discourse, and there is little evidence that the increase in anti-
immigrant attitudes really started in 2002. The only real change that 2002
seemed to have ushered in is that views on immigration have become more
important in determining respondents’ vote choice. While there was no cred-
ible party available for citizens who favoured restrictions in immigration policy
before 2002, this changed dramatically with the arrival of Pim Fortuyn. The
next section traces the consequences of this change for party politics and policy.
10.5 PARTY-POLITICAL AND L EGISLATIVE EFFECTS
While the effect Fortuyn has had on immigration-related discourse and

attitudes is thus modest at best, his imprint on party politics and legislation
is much clearer. This section discusses three pathways through which the
arrival of Fortuyn has had a lasting influence.
282 Edward Koning
First, and perhaps most obviously, an anti-immigrant party can have an

immediate effect on legislation if that party makes it into the government or if
it is so large that it has an inescapable influence on voting behaviour in
parliament. In the case of the LPF, this effect seems rather modest, but closer
inspection suggests it should not be understated.
In July 2002, the LPF became part of a coalition government, delivering four
ministers and five junior ministers to a cabinet of twenty-eight. The coalition
partners agreed to found a new ministry, entitled Foreigners’ Affairs and
Integration, and to place an LPF minister (Hilbrand Nawijn) at its head.
In addition, chief LPF negotiator Mat Herben managed to have many points
from the LPF campaign manifesto translated into the coalition agreement:22
the agreement between CDA, VVD, and LPF announced restrictive policy
changes in family migration (increasing the minimum age, lowering the
maximum age, and establishing that sponsors should make at least 130 per
cent of minimum wage), asylum migration (reducing available appeal proced-
ures, cutting claimants’ legal aid, and cutting development aid to countries
that do not facilitate return migration of unsuccessful claimants), the treat-
ment of undocumented migrants (making it a crime to lack proper documen-
tation), and integration policy (making immigrants pay for mandatory
integration classes and cutting benefits for those who do not successfully
complete the classes) (Government of the Netherlands 2002: 15–17). None
of these policy changes materialized during the incumbency of Balkenende-I,
simply because the government fell within less than three months after its
appointment. Nevertheless, this agreement was important because many of
these suggestions were picked up by parties afterwards, and a good number of
them have since become law.23 If not through direct policy changes, then, the
LPF’s brief spell in government has been important for coining ideas that were
taken up in later years.
Second, as has been noted in previous research (Pellikaan, De Lange, and
Van der Meer 2007; Thomassen 2012) and supported by the findings in the
previous section, the arrival of the LPF turned the immigration issue into an
important political cleavage. Even though the LPF itself turned out to be short-
lived, it still proved consequential by leaving an electoral vacuum for new
anti-immigrant parties. Those new parties, in turn, have subsequently been
able to influence legislative behaviour.
As said, there were certainly parties before the LPF that ran (either partly or
entirely) on an anti-immigrant platform. None of these, however, came even
remotely close to the LPF in terms of electoral success: the best result before
2002 was the three seats the CD obtained in the 1994 elections. Since Fortuyn,
however, there has consistently been a sizeable anti-immigrant presence in the
Dutch parliament: 19 per cent of the seats from 2002 to 2003, 5 per cent from
2003 to 2006, 6 per cent from 2006 to 2010, 17 per cent from 2010 to 2012, and
10 per cent since 2012.
Indeed, when the LPF’s demise became clear, many parties tried to occupy
the electoral space it left behind. Winny de Jong, who initially entered parlia-
ment as an MP for the LPF but quickly turned independent, ran (unsuccess-
fully) in the 2003 election with a party called conservatieven.nl. The 2006
election saw the arrival of two new contenders. In 2004, MP Geert Wilders left
the VVD over a disagreement about the potential accession of Turkey to the
European Union (EU), stayed in parliament as an independent, and formed a
party of his own to participate in the upcoming elections: the Freedom Party
(PVV, Partij voor de Vrijheid). Less successful was OneNL (EénNL), a party
forged by former LPF MP Joost Eerdmans and Marco Pastors, former alder-
man for Liveable Rotterdam.
After winning the battle for the anti-immigrant vote in 2006, the PVV faced
a more formidable contender in the run-up to the 2010 elections. Rita
Verdonk, a former minister of integration who left the VVD after losing the
internal election for party leader, founded a movement called Proud of the
Netherlands (TON, Trots op Nederland). Her popularity initially surged
(by mid-2008, polls predicted she would win twice as many seats as the PVV),
but after highly visible internal disputes within her movement she dropped
in the polls. In the end, the 2010 elections made it very clear which party was
the LPF’s ultimate successor. The PVV won twenty-four seats—almost as
many as the LPF in 2002—and became the third largest party. Verdonk was
left with no seats at all. Figure 10.7 shows the projected number of seats for
anti-immigrant parties from 1997 to 2013 according to a weekly poll.
35
30
25
20
15
10
0
Jan '00
Jul '00
Jan '01
Jul '01
Jan '02
Jul '02
Jan '03
Jul '03
Jan '04
Jul '04
Jan '05
Jul '05
Jan '06
Jul '06
Jan '07
Jul '07
Jan '08
Jul '08
Jan '09
Jul '09
Jan '10
Jul '10
Jan '11
Jul '11
Jan '12
Jul '12
Jan '13
Jul '13
TON PVV LPF LN
Figure 10.7 Projected number of seats for anti-immigrant parties, 2000–13

Source: Synovate (2014).
284 Edward Koning
Because of its longevity, the PVV has been able to exert more direct
influence over policy-making than the LPF. Most importantly, after the 2010
election the party pledged guaranteed support to the minority government of
VVD and CDA in return for a number of policy concessions. Predictably,
these concessions were mostly in the area of immigration and integration
policies (Government of the Netherlands 2010a: 4–10). They included: restric-
tions in asylum (further reducing appeal procedures and enhancing identifi-
cation control), family migration (increasing requirements of the sponsor and
extending the period during which the migrant’s residence permit is
dependent on the sponsor), and labour migration (reducing inflow from
outside the EU and extending the ‘transitional’ period curtailing the migration
of new EU citizens from Bulgaria and Romania); the criminalization of
undocumented status; the deportation of foreigners who commit a crime in
the Netherlands; a reduction in the right to transfer or ‘export’ social benefits
outside of the EU; and restrictions in naturalization policy (in particular the
introduction of a five-year period of ‘probationary citizenship’ during which
citizenship can be revoked in case of serious crimes). One of the most
frequently discussed suggestions was the clearly Muslim-targeted proposal
to cut welfare benefits ‘in case someone’s clothing effectively reduces
their chances to be available on the labour market’ (Government of the
Netherlands 2010a: 9).
The government began work on virtually all of these suggestions. Some of
them proved legally unfeasible (such as the criminalization of undocumented
status), others were not completed before the government fell in 2012 (such as
the restrictions in family migration), but some of these legislative proposals
did pass through parliament (such as the reductions in benefit export and the
extension of transitional rules for Bulgarian and Romanian migrants). In sum,
we can see that the PVV successfully occupied the electoral space that Fortuyn
left behind, and as a consequence has had real legislative influence.
The third and final effect has to do with the behaviour of parties other than
the LPF and PVV. Many scholars have noticed that faced with the success of
anti-immigrant parties, some mainstream parties have out of electoral con-
siderations moved in a more restrictive direction on the immigration file.
Pippa Norris (2005) theorized that mainstream right-wing parties are particu-
larly susceptible to what she coined the ‘contagion’ effect. In subsequent
research, Joost van Spanje (2010) and Tim Bale and his colleagues (Bale
et al. 2010) observed this effect for some left-wing parties as well.
There is certainly considerable evidence of such ‘contagion’ in the
Netherlands. 24 In the first full plenary session after the appointment of the
Balkenende-I cabinet, Jan Marijnissen, leader of the Socialist Party (SP,
Socialistische Partij), proposed a parliamentary enquiry to find out why ‘integration
policy had been insufficiently successful so far’ (Hansard of Lower House of
Dutch Parliament, 19 September 2002). All mainstream parties voted in
More restrictive
Keep as is
More generous
Integration Admission
Figure 10.8 Average support for restrictive integration and admission policies as
expressed in election manifestoes, five mainstream parties, 1989–2012 (light bar
is 2002)
favour of his motion.25 Even more telling was the reaction when the findings
of the enquiry were made public in January 2004. CDA, VVD, and also PvdA
spokespeople criticized the report for concluding that ‘the integration of many
immigrants has been entirely or partially successful’ (Lower House of Dutch
Parliament 2003: 520) and for proposing solutions that were ‘too soft’ (Ten
Hoove 2004).
More systematic evidence confirms that political parties have become more
restrictive in their views on immigration, in particular concerning integration.
Figure 10.8 shows the results of a content analysis of the party manifestoes
since 1989 of the five largest mainstream parties. We can see that on average,
mainstream Dutch parties have become more likely to propose restrictive
integration policies in their party platforms after 2002 than they did before
(although no such effect can be established in the area of admission policies).26
In interviews I conducted in early 2011 with the immigration spokespeople
of all major Dutch political parties, some interviewees freely admitted that
their move to the right on the immigration file was at least partially in
response to the increased popularity of anti-immigrant parties (Koning
2013). CDA spokesperson Eddy van Hijum, for example, explained the
changed position of his party by referring to ‘the societal debate that at a
certain moment had been set in motion about the lack of successful integra-
tion policy’. In addition, he lamented that his party had not been quick enough
to ‘identify and translate’ public discontent about immigration, and that
‘therefore let us say populist parties [got] the chance to cater to this in an in
my view rather unhealthy way’. The SP’s Paul Ulenbelt was even clearer on
this point: ‘parliament represents the people. That means you need to repre-
sent public opinion in politics. If you do not do so, you will not be elected and
someone else will. It’s as simple as that.’
286 Edward Koning
In sum, the evidence that 2002 has left its mark is much clearer when we
look at party politics and actual legislation than in the investigation of
discourse and attitudes. Before I reflect on the implications of these findings,
I will further demonstrate the policy consequences of 2002 by discussing
long-term developments in Dutch immigration policies. I will divide this
discussion in three parts: integration policy, admission policy, and natural-
ization/citizenship policy.
10.5.1 Integration Policy
The evidence of a 2002 effect is most robust in the area of integration policy.
There were important changes that predated Fortuyn, in particular the Purple
government’s revamping of extant ‘minorities policy’ into a more assimilative
‘integration policy’ (Entzinger 2006; Vink 2007). But the pursuit of a mono-
cultural integration strategy became much more aggressive and dramatic after
Fortuyn’s death. Over the period of ten years, successive governments imple-
mented a wide array of restrictive changes: a requirement for prospective
migrants to take Dutch integration classes in their country of origin before
their arrival; a requirement for all newcomers to complete their integration
courses in three years; a reduction in welfare and unemployment benefits for
migrants with a low proficiency in the Dutch language; a reduction in funding
for accommodative services such as public language assistance; a repeal of
minority-targeted employment projects; a reduction in the benefit for elderly
migrants who have not been long enough in the country to build up a sizeable
pension; the abolition of all mother tongue education; and a reduction in the
levels of pension benefits that are enjoyed outside of the country. All in all, the
budget of integration has been reduced spectacularly since 2002, and the first
Rutte cabinet (2010–12) even proposed to cut it altogether (Government of the
Netherlands 2010b: 10, appendix).
10.5.2 Admission Policy
The year 2002 seems to have been somewhat less important in admission
policy. Scholars widely agree that Dutch admission policy has become more
restrictive in recent years (Lechner 2008; Minderhoud 2004). And as discussed
earlier (see section 10.5), many of the legislative changes can be traced back to
the year 2002. It is important, however, to emphasize that the most important
reform of the last twenty years took place before then. In 2000, an overwhelm-
ing majority of the Dutch parliament passed the Alien Act Reform,27 which
entailed sharp restrictions in asylum migration. Many of the amendments to
120000 120000
100000 100000
80000 80000
60000 60000
40000 40000
20000 20000
0 0
1995
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
1995
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
Other Family Refugee Labour Rest of world 'Muslim country' EU
Figure 10.9 Yearly immigrant inflow, 1995–2011, by category of migrant (left panel)
and origin of migrant (right panel)
Source: CBS (2014) and author’s calculations.
admission policy since 2002 are relatively minor in comparison. Most signifi-
cant have been two reforms: the 2004 introduction of the so-called ‘knowledge
migrant regulation’ (kennismigrantenregeling), which aimed to ensure a larger
inflow of high-skilled migrants; and the 2010 Modern Migration Policy Act, a
bill that went into effect in 2013, simultaneously making admission easier for
high-skilled labour migrants and more difficult for others. In addition, since
2002 governments have repeatedly tried to introduce restrictions in family
migration policy, but all of these attempts have been thwarted, either by legal
obstacles (in particular the right to a private and family life as enshrined in
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights), or the premature
dissolution of the government.
The trend becomes clearer when we look at annual inflow data. Figure 10.9
shows the number of immigrants the Netherlands accepted each year from
1995 to 2011. One of the most obvious observations regards the sharp
reduction in the inflow of migrants who have most frequently become the
target of critique: refugee migrants and immigrants from ‘Muslim countries’.28
More relevant to our current discussion, the figure shows the impact of the
2000 reform restricting refugee migration, and the 2004 knowledge migrant
regulation, which increased the intake of (especially EU) labour migrants.29
In terms of sheer numbers, then, the most significant change seems to have taken
place before Fortuyn’s political career.
10.5.3 Naturalization/Citizenship Policy
When it comes to naturalization and citizenship policy, finally, we find the

least evidence of a 2002 effect. The most important restrictive reforms, in
288 Edward Koning
20
18
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011
Total 'Muslim country' Morocco
Figure 10.10 Naturalization rate, 1995–2011, by country of origin

Source: OECD (2014b) and author’s calculations.
particular the abolition of dual citizenship (De Hart 2007) and the intro-
duction of more difficult naturalization exams (Joppke 2010), took place
well before then (in 1997 and 2000, respectively). Certainly, after Fortuyn
many more suggestions for further reforms (including further restrictions
on dual citizenship, the introduction of probationary citizenship, and the
sharpening of naturalization requirements) were made by both the LPF and
PVV on the one hand and mainstream parties (in particular the VVD) on
the other. However, none of these suggestions have so far made it into
policy. These conclusions are confirmed when we look at naturalization
rates from 1995 to 2011. Figure 10.10 illustrates that a downward trend in
naturalization rates started long before 2002, and that after 2004, this trend
actually seemed to reverse for those immigrant groups that have received
most scrutiny.
All in all, the analysis in this section suggests that the rise and death of
Fortuyn has had important identifiable impacts on party politics and legisla-
tion in the area of immigration. In particular the indirect effects seem clear:
not only did Fortuyn’s success plant ideas for restrictive reforms that have
been taken up by successive governments, but it also changed the nature of the
Dutch party system in a way that left a space for future anti-immigrant parties.
At the same time, we cannot depict 2002 as a fundamental break in all aspects
of immigration politics. In the areas of admission and naturalization policies,
it seems we can better understand the year 2002 as a catalyst for a restrictive
trend that had already been initiated.
10.6 CON CLUSIONS
This chapter has aimed to shed light on the relevance of political actors for
social cohesion in diverse societies. The Dutch elections of 2002 offer a
methodologically attractive case study for such an investigation. Because we
can understand the rise and murder of Pim Fortuyn as a relatively unpredict-
able ‘exogenous shock’, we are able to isolate the effect of an anti-immigrant
campaign much better than in a context where such a campaign is more
intimately tied up with previously initiated processes. In other words, it is
easier to trace the effect of Fortuyn’s 2002 anti-immigrant campaign than, say,
the consequences of more recent election campaigns by the Dutch PVV, the
Norwegian Progress Party, the Danish People’s Party, the Swiss People’s Party,
or the Austrian Freedom Party.
All in all, the findings in this chapter suggest that the elections of 2002 have
left a tangible imprint on the nature of Dutch immigration politics, although
there is little evidence of some of the effects that have often been attributed to
anti-immigrant politicians. Fortuyn is important not because he increased
public unease about immigrant diversity, but because he made that unease
more politically consequential. Ever since his arrival on the political scene,
voters with reservations about immigration have had the opportunity to
express those concerns by voting for an anti-immigrant party. Once elected,
these parties have had two important effects on immigration policy-making.
First, they have brought restrictive ideas that had not been considered before
into the area of political contestation, and some of these ideas have led to
important policy changes. Second, they served as an incentive for other
parties to move in a more restrictive direction and adopt more restrictive policy.
This process is clearest in the area of integration policies: while the Purple
government of the 1990s had already undertaken some steps towards a less
multicultural integration policy, it was in the years after Fortuyn’s death that
Dutch governments have most aggressively moved in an assimilationist direction.
All in all, it would be an exaggeration to suggest that Pim Fortuyn has been
solely responsible for the restrictive turn in Dutch immigration politics. He
clearly could not have become popular in the absence of anti-immigrant
sentiment, and relevant changes in some areas (in particular admission and
naturalization policies) had already taken place before his arrival. Nevertheless,
the year 2002 does show that cohesion in diverse societies is influenced in non-
trivial ways by the behaviour of politicians. This conclusion has important
societal and theoretical implications.
For one thing, it suggests that societies that so far have managed to avoid the
Dutch scenario are not necessarily isolated from it into the indefinite future. If
by some unexpected confluence of events an anti-immigrant politician would
make a sudden electoral breakthrough, the politicization of immigration could
290 Edward Koning
quickly activate lingering anti-immigrant attitudes in society, turning the

subject into an important political cleavage, and making future governments
consider policy changes that at the time had not been taken seriously. In this
light, the recent strides of the so far relatively unsuccessful anti-immigrant
party in Sweden and the efforts to forge a modern anti-immigrant party in
Germany warrant close attention.
In more theoretical terms, this chapter speaks to the literature on the
political representation of immigration attitudes. Often referred to as the
‘conspiracy of silence’, a persistent argument among academics, public com-
mentators, and, indeed, anti-immigrant politicians, is that immigration has
predominantly been an elitist project, run by multiculturalist ethnic engineers,
immigration advocacy groups, and employers looking for cheap labour
(Bosma 2010; Freeman 1995; Menz 2013). Our findings suggest that the
arrival of anti-immigrant parties on Dutch soil can indeed be understood to
have allowed for a better representation of citizens’ views on immigration. But
there is another side to this observation as well. Anti-immigrant politicians
have the potential to change the nature of immigration politics even when the
population does not clearly favour more restrictions or see immigration as a
salient issue to begin with. In other words, while ‘conspiracy of silence’ might
be a good label to describe the Dutch approach to immigration before Fortuyn,
the term ‘elite overreaction’ is perhaps more apt today.
Finally, and perhaps most relevant to this volume, this chapter illustrates
that the functioning of diverse societies depends on more than demographics,
structural conditions, and political institutions. The social, structural, and
institutional context obviously matters, but the way political actors interact
with that context is what shapes its consequences.
METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX
Figure 10.2 Attention to immigrant diversity in four major Dutch newspapers,

1999–2012
This figure shows the trend in the annual number of articles the four largest Dutch
national newspapers (Telegraaf, De Volkskrant, NRC/Handelsblad, and Trouw) pub-
lished on issues of immigrant diversity. I used newspaper databank LexisNexis to
identify all articles that mentioned terms such as ‘immigrant’, ‘foreigner’, and ‘refugee’
(the exact search term in Dutch was ‘immigr! OR allochto! OR buitenlande! OR
vreemdel! OR asielz! OR vluchtel!’). I then expressed the number for each year as a
ratio of the annual average for each newspaper, and then averaged these average ratios
to produce Figure 10.2. The empirical domain is limited to the period from 1999 to
2012 because of data availability.
Table 10.2 Tone of letters to the editor on immigrant diversity before and after
Fortuyn’s murder in major left-wing and right-wing newspaper, 2001–2003
This table shows the tone of letters to the editor dedicated to immigration and
integration that appeared in the main left-of-centre and right-of-centre newspaper
(De Volkskrant and De Telegraaf). To identify these letters I used a very broad search
term in LexisNexis (the exact term in Dutch was ‘immigr! OR migr! OR allochto! OR
buitenlande! OR vreemdel! OR asielz! OR vluchtel! OR Islam! OR mosl! OR Fortuyn
OR LPF OR “Leefbaar Nederland” OR CD OR Janmaat OR Marokk! OR Turk! OR
Antill! OR Kaapverd!’) and manually filtered out irrelevant letters. Since the goal of
this exercise is to measure the development in non-elite discourse, I excluded letters
from politicians. For the period 2001–2003, I identified a total of 201 relevant letters in
De Volkskrant and 72 in De Telegraaf. Because these numbers are relatively small,
I kept the coding exercise very simple and for each letter, recorded whether the author
expressed a mostly sympathetic or positive view about immigrant diversity, or a mostly
hostile or negative view. In a significant number of letters (88 of the total 273), this was
difficult to establish either because the author’s position was unclear or because it
expressed both arguments in favour and against immigrant diversity. All those letters
are coded as having a ‘neutral’ view.
Figure 10.3 Views on asylum seekers and multiculturalism, 1994–2010
The question on asylum seekers was as follows: ‘Some people think that the
Netherlands should admit more asylum seekers. Others think that the Netherlands
should send the asylum seekers who are already here back to their country of origin as
much as possible. How would you rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means
that more asylum seekers should be admitted and 7 means that asylum seekers should
be sent back?’ (The bars in Figure 10.3 represent the percentage that gave a score of 5,
6, or 7.) The question on cultural integration was as follows: ‘Some people think ethnic
minorities in the Netherlands should be allowed to preserve their cultural customs.
Others think that ethnic minorities should adjust to Dutch culture. How would you
rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means that ethnic minorities should be
allowed to preserve their cultural customs and 7 means that ethnic minorities should
completely adjust to Dutch culture?’ (The bars in Figure 10.3 represent the percentage
that gave a score of 5, 6, or 7.)
Figure 10.4 Anti-immigrant attitudes in the Netherlands, 1991–2010
The CCN has asked a total of twenty-two questions about immigrant diversity in
multiple waves. A factor analysis with varimax rotation of the 2006 wave (in which all
twenty-two questions were asked) suggested four underlying dimensions (of the twenty-
two questions, only four had a factor loading of over 0.3 on more than one factor).
Figure 10.4 shows results for the questions that loaded most strongly on each of the
factors and had been surveyed in at least seven waves. As an indicator of general
attitudes towards cultural diversity, I use the question: ‘Do you strongly agree, agree,
neither agree nor disagree, disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement:
foreigners shouldn’t cling so much to their own culture and customs?’ (The bars in
Figure 10.4 show the percentage that picked ‘strongly agree’ or ‘agree’.) As an indicator
of social distance attitudes, I use the question: ‘If you would get people of a different race
as next-door neighbours, would you have no problem with that, would you accept it but
not be very happy, or would you actively oppose it?’ (The figure shows the percentage
that picked one of the last two options or volunteered the answer ‘it depends’.) As an
indicator of attitudes on admission policy, I use the question: ‘How generous should the
292 Edward Koning
Dutch government be in extending a residence permit to someone who because of the
economic situation in their country of origin hardly has any means to survive?’ (The bars
show the percentage that picked the options ‘not generous’ or ‘it should not extend a
permit at all’.) Finally, as an indicator of attitudes about favouritism, I use the question:
‘Which of the following two families would you say should in times of housing scarcity
be the first to get housing: a guest worker’s family, a Dutch family, or should it make no
difference?’ (The figure shows the percentage that picked ‘a Dutch family’.)
Figure 10.5 Relationship between attitudes on immigration and self-reported voting
behavior
This figure shows, for each wave, the Cramer’s V for the association between the
two immigration-related questions of the DPES and the question ‘Which party did you
vote for in this election?’ To avoid small cell counts, I recoded the latter variable by
party family and distinguished between social democratic (PvdA), Christian demo-
cratic (CDA and smaller Christian parties CU, SGP, GPV, and RPF), conservative
(VVD), social liberal (D66 and GL), socialist (SP), and anti-immigrant (CD, LN, LPF,
TON, and PVV) parties. All other parties were coded as missing.
Figure 10.6 Self-perceived absolute difference between voters and party of choice on
immigration-related questions, 1994–2010
In addition to asking respondents what they think, on a scale from 1 to 7, about
whether ethnic minorities should adjust to Dutch culture and whether asylum seekers
should be sent back to their country of origin, the DPES has also asked respondents to
place each of the major political parties on this 1–7 scale. Figure 10.6 shows, for each
available wave of the DPES, the average distance between respondents’ own score and
the score they attribute to the party they self-reportedly voted for. The figure shows
absolute differences only. (In most cases, respondents’ perceived themselves to have
more restrictive views than their party of choice. Those who voted for the VVD, LPF,
and PVV, on the other hand, on average perceived themselves to have more permissive
views than the party they voted for.)
Figure 10.8 Average position of five mainstream parties on immigrant integration
and admission policy in election manifestoes, 1989–2012
This figure is based on a content analysis of the 1989, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006,
2010, and 2012 election manifesto of the five largest parties in this time period: CDA,
VVD, PvdA, D66, and SP. In each of these forty manifestoes, I coded the sections on
integration policy and on admission policy on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 means the
party proposes policies that are much more generous than the ones in place, 3 means
the party does not propose change in existing policies, and 5 means the party proposes
policies that are much more restrictive than the ones in place. For each year, I averaged
the score of all parties. No score for admission policy could be calculated in 1989
because the SP’s manifesto did not dedicate a single word to the subject.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Jeroen Kester of Ipsos Netherlands for providing the data presented in
Figure 10.1 and Figure 10.7.
NOTES
1. Interestingly, Fortuyn was a Marxist during his undergraduate studies, and was a
member of labour party PvdA (Partij van de Arbeid) from 1973 to 1989. In 1981,
he actively (and unsuccessfully) pushed his own candidacy as junior minister in
the centre–left coalition government that was being formed at the time.
2. All translations in this chapter are mine.
3. The projections in other polls were more conservative.
4. There is much speculation about the effect of the murder on the election results.
Some argue that Fortuyn would have won even more seats if he were still alive
(Stiphout, Wynia, and Wytzes 2013). Others maintain that the LPF actually
benefited from the assassination, reasoning not only that many voters might
have cast a vote for the LPF to express their abhorrence with the murder, but
also that the LPF was the only party that could get away with ‘covert campaigning’
in the nine days before the election.
5. The LPF raised more money than all other parties combined (Chorus and De
Galan 2002).
6. It is worth noting that the CDA calculated early in the election campaign that
Fortuyn’s critique of the existing government would mostly be to its advantage
and therefore decided to strike a ‘non-aggression pact’ with Fortuyn for the entire
campaign (De Vries and Van der Lubben 2005: 25).
7. My separate discussions of discursive/attitudinal effects on the one hand and
party-political/legislative effects on the other should not be understood as a
suggestion that these two areas are unrelated. There is evidence that the nature
of nation-building policies has an effect on popular understandings of national
identity (Kesler and Bloemraad 2010; Weldon 2006; Wright 2011), and thus it is
possible that the changes discussed in section 10.5 might have brought about some
of the processes in section 10.4. See also the concluding discussion.
8. To preserve the flow of the prose, most discussion of methodological details has
been moved to an appendix.
9. Another disadvantage is that letters to the editor that are published cannot be
assumed to be a random sample of the letters the newspapers received. For
that reason, I will refrain from drawing any inferences from the number of letters
that appeared (after all, we cannot be certain that letters on diversity were equally
likely to be published before and after Fortuyn’s death), and will limit my
comments to the tone of the letters instead. Of course, the interpretation of the
tone of published letters is still haunted by this same problem, but at least it is
mitigated by the inclusion of two newspapers with a very different ideological
orientations.
10. In addition, one might argue that the main weakness of this method is actually a
strength in this analysis. By oversampling the opinionated, not only do we avoid
the problem of non-attitudes (Converse 1964), but it also seems likely that we
sample exactly the type of person that would disseminate discursive frames in
non-elite settings.
11. Tau-c values are 0.11 for De Volkskrant, and -0.07 for De Telegraaf.
294 Edward Koning
12. An analysis of letters to the editor in De Telegraaf over a longer time span, from 2001
to 2008, indeed suggests such a development. While in 2001 about 43.8 per cent of the
letters had a decidedly negative tone, that percentage had increased to 78.1 by 2008.
13. Two-tailed independent samples t-tests show that all differences are statistically
significant at level p < 0.001. Respondents were also asked how important they
consider being born in the Netherlands and having lived in the Netherlands for
most of one’s life. On these questions the differences between 1995 and 2003 were
smaller and statistically insignificant.
14. All differences between pre-2002 waves and other waves are statistically significant
at p < 0.05.
15. Respondents were asked to give a sympathy score from 0 to 10. The mean score for
this question was 3.8 in 2002, but 5.0 in 2003 (difference significant at p< 0.001).
16. A factor analysis of the entire twenty-two questions suggests there are four under-
lying dimensions of immigration attitudes: general attitudes towards (cultural)
difference, social distance attitudes, attitudes about admission policy, and attitudes
about favouritism. For each of these dimensions, I picked one question on the basis
of the factor loading and the number of waves in which it has been included.
17. The percentages were 19.4 in 1998, 15.3 in 2003, and 20.4 in 2006.
18. In the DPES, the percentage of people giving the most extreme answers on the
question whether immigrants should adjust to Dutch culture were 31.1 in 1994,
19.4 in 1998, 24.8 in 2002, 17.9 in 2003, 30.4 in 2006, and 21.9 in 2010. The trend is
similar for the question whether asylum seekers should be sent back to their
country of origin: 15.3% in 1998, 14.7% in 2002, 12.6% in 2003, 20.8% in 2006,
and 15.0% in 2010. In the CCNS, on only eight of the sixteen questions that have
been asked both before and after 2002 do we see that the average share of
respondents picking extreme answer options is significantly higher after 2002
than before. On three questions, the differences are statistically insignificant,
whereas on the other five the data actually suggest a depolarization effect. More
details of these analyses are available upon request.
19. These findings are largely replicated in the CCNS data, although they are slightly
less robust. On twelve of the sixteen questions that have been asked both before
and after 2002, the relationship with vote intention is higher after 2002 than
before. Full results are available upon request.
20. The year 2006 is omitted from this analysis because the PVV was not coded as a
separate answer in that wave.
21. What seems to have happened is that voters who have comparatively restrictive
views on immigration but relatively left-wing views on issues of redistribution
have moved away from the PvdA, leaving the social democrats with voters who see
more eye to eye with the party on immigration issues. Before 2002, respondents
who gave a score of higher than 4 on the question of ethnic minorities and a score
of higher than 4 on a similar Likert scale regarding income distribution (where 1
means the government should make income differences larger and 7 means the
government should make income differences smaller) were about 50 per cent
more likely to vote for the PvdA than the average voter. In 2002, such voters were
slightly less likely (by about 2 per cent) to vote for the social democrats. This
difference is even starker for the question on asylum seekers: those who preferred
fewer asylum seekers but more redistribution were 26 per cent more likely to vote
PvdA in 1998, but 30 per cent less likely to cast a vote for the social democrats in
2002. For a wider discussion of the challenges anti-immigrant parties pose to
social democratic parties, see Chapter 9, this volume, by Zoe Lefkofridi and Elie
Michel.
22. Nevertheless, Herben was heavily criticized by LPF backbenchers after the signing
of this agreement for having made too many compromises (Chorus and De Galan
2002).
23. For example, since 2006 immigrants can be cut in their benefits if they do not
participate successfully in integration classes, and since 2010 all immigrants have
to pay themselves for taking them. A large-scale reform in admission policy, which
took up many of the suggestions related to restricting asylum procedures, went
into effect in July 2013. Moreover, the government is currently negotiating at the
EU level to be able to push through almost exactly the restrictive changes in family
migration the LPF proposed.
24. Indeed, Bale et al. (2010) include the Dutch case in their analysis, and conclude
that while mainstream parties were already moving in a more restrictive direction
before Fortuyn, since 2002 a clear pro-diversity message can only be heard from
social liberal party Democrats’66 (D66) and the environmentalist GreenLeft
(GL, GroenLinks) (from 2002 to 2013, these two parties occupied only about 10
per cent of the seats together). Van Spanje (2010) also studied the Netherlands, but
his analysis is limited to investigating the effect of the CD.
25. Ironically, the largest no vote came from the LPF itself—twenty-five of its twenty-
six MPs voted against the motion.
26. Interestingly, however, in comparing 2001 and 2006 MP survey data on this issue,
Jacques Thomassen (2012: 23) concluded that ‘hardly any change has occurred’.
Only MPs of the SP gave on average more restrictive answers on immigrant
integration in 2006 than in 2001—for all other parties the differences are negli-
gible. It is worth mentioning, however, that the SP achieved its best ever result in
the 2006 elections, winning twenty-five seats and becoming the third largest party
in parliament.
27. Seventy per cent of all MPs voted in favour of the legislation. The CDA (occupying
another 19 per cent of the seats in parliament) voted against it because it felt the
restrictions did not go far enough.
28. The conceptually dubious term ‘Muslim country’ has entered public parlance in
the Netherlands, and is defined as any country (or territory) in which more than
half of the population is Muslim according to most recent data. For the analyses in
Figures 10.9 and 10.10, this includes: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan,
Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt,
Gambia, Guinea, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan,
Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Oman,
Pakistan, Palestinian administrative areas, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra
Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United
Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
296 Edward Koning
29. One might suggest that the increase in EU migrants starting in 2004 had more to
do with the accession of ten new member states to the EU than with the legislative
change in that year. However, it is important to consider that the Netherlands
introduced a transitional period of three years during which the new member
states could not yet enjoy the privileges of the free movement of goods, people, and
services to the Netherlands.
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11
Solidarity, Diversity, and the Quality

of Government
Bo Rothstein
11.1 P OINTS OF DEPARTURE
Looking out over the world, both the rich industrial nations as well as the less
developed countries, it is striking how large differences there are in social,
economic, and political equality. Measures of political and legal rights, which
can be understood as expressions of democratic or political solidarity, vary
enormously also between countries that have about the same level of prosper-
ity (Bohara et al. 2008; Donnelly 2003). The same goes for measures of
economic inequality as well as most measures of human well-being such as
poverty, literacy, and population health that all can be seen as aspects of
redistributive or social solidarity. Social solidarity, understood as the sum of
political practices that increases equality in people’s overall life chances (that
is, the welfare state broadly understood) is also something that varies a lot also
between otherwise quite similar countries (Radcliff 2013). This raises a simple
yet important question: What makes some societies more prone to political
and broad-based social solidarity than others?
The starting point for this chapter is based on the results from several
empirical studies showing that for a vast majority of people, human well-being
would be improved if political and social inequality would decrease in their
society (Radcliff 2013; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009; cf. Hall and Lamont 2009).
The first question that then needs to be answered is how the necessary amount
(and type) of solidarity that is needed to produce the policies that will enhance
social and economic equality can be politically manufactured. The second
question concerns the relation between various forms of diversity and the
possibility to generate broad-based social and political solidarity (Banting
2010). Based on the notion that there is a causal link between the level of
generalized social trust in a society and its propensity for social solidarity
Solidarity, Diversity, and Quality of Government 301
(Rothstein and Uslaner 2005), the problem is that a large number of studies
have shown that increased diversity has a negative effect on social trust
(Schaeffer 2013, 2014). As argued by Putnam (2007: 138), ‘immigration and
ethnic diversity challenge social solidarity and inhibit social capital’.
A second point of departure is that the level of solidarity in a country is not
culturally determined. For example, the Nordic countries are not more egali-
tarian and less corrupt than Italy, the UK, Kenya, Brazil, Hungary, or the US
because there is something special with the Nordic culture. This is an often
heard argument, for example, John Roemer argues that the reason the Nordic
countries developed more extensive systems of redistribution is due to the
educational and cultural homogeneity of their population (Roemer 2009). The
problem is that his argument is empirically unsubstantiated and from what is
known from the historical research about the history of class structure in the
Nordic countries, inaccurate. For example, Finland had very low levels of
education well into the first decades of the twentieth century and a severe
conflict between the Finnish- and Swedish-speaking population (Uslaner and
Rothstein 2016). Moreover, the country endured a gruesome civil war in
1918 in which, as a percentage of the population, more people were killed
than in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s. The high levels of cooperation
and solidarity in the Nordic countries is thus not culturally or historically pre-
determined. The broad-based political support for the welfare state has instead
been politically constructed ‘from above’ by the universal (or near universal)
design of the policies (Rothstein 1998; Alestalo, Hort, and Kuhnle 2009;
cf. Anttonen, Häikiö, and Kolbeinn 2012). The same institutionally driven
broad-based support for universal type of social policies can be found in the
UK for the National Health Service (Klein 2010) and in the US for Social
Security (Béland 2005). In fact, the International Social Survey carried out in
2009 shows that support for the idea that ‘the government should spend
(much) more on old age pensions’ is higher in the United States than in the
Nordic countries (64 per cent compared to 58.5 per cent) (Bechert and Quandt
2009; see also Kenworthy 2014: 150–5). I agree with Kenworthy’s argument
that ‘the difference between Nordic and American policies is one of degree,
not of kind’ (2014: 121). One can also argue that the success of the ‘bolsa
familia’ conditional cash transfer programmes in many Latin American coun-
tries indicates that it is the design ‘from above’ of social policies that explain
solidarity, not the other way around (Rawlings and Rubio 2005; Sugiyama and
Hunter 2013). The recent introduction of more universal types of social policy
reforms in several Latin American countries in areas such as health care,
pensions, and education shows the existence of the same causal logic as in
the Nordic countries (Pribble 2013). It thus seems that it is the institutional
design of the policies and not the specific national culture or history that
determines if a country will have social policies that can be seen as expressions
of broad-based social solidarity. In political terms, as stated by Tsebelis (1990),
302 Bo Rothstein
designing institutions is the sophisticated equivalent to designing policies.

A first conclusion is that if increased social solidarity is the goal, thinking
about how to design the institutions that implement social policies turns out to
be of the upmost importance.
11. 2 CO N S TR UC T I V E P O L I TI C A L T HE O R Y
Empirical research and normative theory seldom meet. Not least political
science is a highly compartmentalized discipline with surprisingly little com-
munication, not to say collaboration, between its various specializations. This
lack of intra-disciplinary communication between political philosophy and
empirical research severely limits the capability to provide useful knowledge
(Dryzek, Honig, and Phillips 2006). To manufacture a sustainable solidaristic
society, we need knowledge from political philosophy for understanding what
social solidarity ought to be about. From empirical research we need know-
ledge about at least three things. First, what type of public programmes can
governments implement without creating administrative nightmares that are
likely to delegitimize the policies in the eyes of the majority of the electorate?
Secondly, we need to know what type of public policies for increased social
solidarity can generate broad-based and sustainable electoral support. Lastly,
we also need knowledge about what can motivate or turn people away from
supporting policies for social solidarity. Following Lundquist, I call this effort
to combine insights from political philosophy and empirical research about
the possibilities for getting electoral support and being able to implement
social policies ‘constructive theory’ (Lundquist 1988).
Although analyses in political philosophy about social justice can be utterly
sophisticated and complex, the basic ambition is to answer a fairly simple
question, namely: What ought the state to do? Or a little more precisely: What
should be the responsibility of the individual and for what can citizens’ claim
support from the state (Rothstein 1998)? The empirical research into the
possibilities for governments to get support for and also actually implement
policies for increased social solidarity can be seen as answering the issue
known as ‘state capacity’, or in other words: What can the state do? This can
be understood as an ambition to establish an empirical theory of the state
while the philosophical enterprise can be seen as a normative state theory.
The idea behind establishing a constructive state theory is to analyse where
these two intellectual enterprises intersect. Needless to say, there are many
things states can but which they, according to the ‘findings’ in political philoso-
phy, should not do. However, the opposite is also true. As I argue in the
following paragraphs, there are many policies that one, from various theories
of justice, may argue they state ought to do but for which the empirical research
Empirical Constructive Normative

State State State
Theory Theory Theory
Figure 11.1 Empirical, normative, and constructive state theories
comes with a clear result—namely that they can either not be implemented
without creating massive administrative problems or it will turn out to be
impossible to get the necessary electoral support (see also Wolff 2011).
Figure 11.1 intends to show how empirical, normative, and constructive theories
of the state are related.
This argument for a constructive theory of the state and politics differs from
the argument presented by Raymond Geuss (2008) and other so-called ‘pol-
itical realists’ who argue for a non-ideal political philosophy that is particu-
laristic and historicist. I agree with the critique launched by Erman and Möller
(2015) that this type of ‘political realism’ risks throwing out the baby with the
bathwater by closing the normative space upon which political legitimacy
must rely. In order to determine the ‘space’ for a constructive theory, ‘ideal
theory’ of for example liberal egalitarians such as John Rawls and Ronald
Dworkin is essential (Erman and Möller 2013). Figure 11.1 also intends to
show that holding on to ‘ideal theory’ in political philosophy does not neces-
sarily imply that ‘real politics’ should be seen as a subordinate arena where
moral principles are just to be applied. Instead, the constructive approach
implies that the empirically based knowledge about how this arena works and,
most importantly, what it can and cannot accomplish when it comes to
increased social justice, should be given equal weight to the arguments pre-
sented in political philosophy.
This constructive approach implies that we do not follow the advice given
by Bruce Ackerman, namely that we should start from the the assumption of
‘a polity possessed of a perfect technology of justice’ or that we should assume
that we ‘live in a place where there never is any practical difficulty implement-
ing the substantive conclusions’ (Ackerman 1980: 23). Another example
comes from Richard Arneson, who discusses the problem if welfare distribu-
tion should be tailored to people’s preferences. First, he recognizes that this
would perhaps be impossible because we could not imagine public authorities
with the capacity to collect and use the amount of information necessary
to accomplish such a task. Nevertheless, he states that he will ‘ignore these
304 Bo Rothstein
practical feasability problems’ and instead ‘assume that correct and full infor-
mation regarding people’s preferences is available at no cost whatsoever to
whatever institutions we establish to implement the principles of distributive
justice that we accept’ (Arneson 1990: 158f). Although such reasoning may be
justified as interesting thought experiments, they are outside the field of what
I define as constructive state theory and come with, as I show later in this
section, obvious risks concerning the possibilities to transform normative
principles of justice into policies for social solidarity that can be realized.
Needless to say, empirical research into this area that is carried out in the
absence of a serious reflection of its normative implications is also dangerous
and irresponsible since it is likely to end in mindless utilitarianism where the
dignity and rights of individuals may be sacrificed for some future overall
good. As is well-known, Rawls philosophical project started out from a
critique of the utilitarianism he spotted in the Third Reich reacting to the
idea that the majority for its own utility could exterminate a minority
(Nussbaum 2001).
When using political philosophy in this constructivist way, one problem is
that many political philosophers are uninterested in and unaware of the
political importance of the organizational and institutional sides of politics.
When they deal with the question of what the (democratic) state ought to
do, they often ignore the problem of what this state is capable of doing.
David Estlund even claims that political philosophy is easily distorted by an
‘ever present thought that it might be of practical importance’ (2008: 1).
Political philosophers have also shown remarkable little interest in research
about what types of social policies can generate enough electoral support to be
sustainable.
A central problem is thus that issues about the institutional design or
implementation of policies are, with a few exceptions, ignored in modern
political philosophy. As Wolff states, philosophers tend to ‘fall short of taking
up the challenge of thinking hard about questions of the process and, even more
importantly, consequences of implementation’ (Wolff 2011: 192). One example
comes from the so-called ‘luck egalitarians’ in political theory who argue that
citizens should only be compensated for problems in their lives that they
themselves cannot be held responsible for. This main idea is that differential
impact of circumstances for which an individual cannot reasonably be held
responsible (‘brute luck’) are to be neutralized, by some type of public policy
whereas consequences due to the different choices people make (‘option luck’)
are to be left intact. A typical case is John Roemer’s idea that when deciding if
people who have developed lung cancer should get medical treatment by a
public programme, patients should be divided into classes which would give us
information about whether their decision to smoke was their own responsibility
or not. As he argues, the choice to smoke is ‘determined’ by a person’s
social circumstances such as her class, ethnicity, gender, education, and so on.
As Roemer argues, a steel worker should get the costs for treating his lung
cancer covered by the state because he is in a social category where say 90 per
cent smoke so smoking is not a choice he can be seen to be responsible for.
However, our solidarity should, according to Roemer, not be extended to a
female college professor who gets this disease because in her ‘class’, less than ten
per cent smoke so smoking is a choice she has made and she has to take the costs
for medical treatment herself (Roemer 1996, 1995, 1998). The problem with this
approach is that anyone with the slightest knowledge in research about imple-
mentation problems in public policy would realize that having a bureaucracy
that would a) collect all this information about citizens and b) make decisions
based on this mountain of information would create an administrative Levia-
than that would severely delegitimize any public health care insurance system
(Rothstein and Uslaner 2005). How could the information and integrity prob-
lems for solving the problem of personal responsibility for issues like obesity,
venereal diseases, and injuries from dangerous sport activities be solved? What
type of administration could handle the issue if unemployment is due to ‘brute
luck’ for which the individual has the right to receive unemployment insurance,
or a result of the choices for which the individual should be held responsible,
such as not showing enough efforts in getting new skills following the changes in
the global economy (Risse 2002). I wish the ‘luck-egalitarians’ best of luck with
solving these issues because they will for sure need it. In sum, the policies that
would follow from ‘luck egalitarians’ such as Roemer are likely to result in
implementation nightmares that from what is very well known from empirical
research would create a political majority against increased efforts for social
justice.
Another similar example is the extended debate about the idea of an
unconditional basic income (Birnbaum 2012; Veen and Groot 2000; Van
Parijs 1992; Offe 2004). As shown by De Wispelaere and Stirton (2011), the
proponents of this policy have disregarded a number of very difficult imple-
mentation issues. One is to decide who has the right to this benefit? Should it
be only citizens or also immigrants? Should this include also temporary
immigrants (guest workers) and tourists that just have decided to stay in the
country? What about citizens that have decided to emigrate or immigrants
that have left for another country? Can a payment system that includes the
homeless be organized? Moreover, the most likely outcome of such a policy is
that many young citizens would start their independent life living on such a
basic income. One likely result of this is that in many cases their ambitions to
increase their human capital by entering into types of education where they
would have to study hard would be thwarted. Instead, after a couple of years
living on this meagre benefit, many would try to increase their incomes by
working on the ‘black market’ or by other (and worse) forms of illegal
behaviour. This would create a political majority that would demand cuts in
the basic income level, which in its turn would increase the number of people
306 Bo Rothstein
supplementing their basic income with illegal types of income, and so on.
Leading proponents of the basic income idea generally argue that issues
about political feasibility are of ‘little relevance’ when they formulate their
ideas (Van Parijs 2013: 178). However, from what is known from research
about political support for social policies, the basic income idea is in all
likelihood a sure recipe for creating an electoral majority against increased
social solidarity because it fails what I would call ‘the reciprocity test’ (see
section 11.3 and also Svallfors 2013, 2007; Larsen 2013; Cavala and Wildavsky
1970; Scharpf 2000; Bay and West Pedersen 2006; Kumlin 2004; Solevid 2009).
To summarize, much of what is produced by modern political philosophy
for increasing social solidarity is at an ethical level that can be compared to if
medical researcher would prescribe drugs and treatments without considering
any side effects for the people they have set out to cure.
11.3 W HAT S HOULD S OCIAL

SOLIDARITY BE ABOUT?
Anyone who is interested in increasing social solidarity for achieving a more

equal society needs to be in possession of a correct understanding of ‘the
nature of the problem’. To achieve this, one has to answer three questions. The
first is the ‘what is it’ question, namely what should social solidarity be about?
The second is the ‘how to get it’ question, that is, what can be expected from
(the vast majority of) humans when it comes to their propensity for solidarity.
The third question is about strategy, namely how to make social solidarity
politically (electorally) sustainable in a democracy.
The first question, known as ‘equality of what?’, has turned out to be
complicated (Sen 1979). In an era of ‘conspicuous consumption’ and increased
individualism and social heterogeneity, it is difficult to argue that the govern-
ment has a responsibility to equalize all or even most forms of consumption.
First, consumption cannot be an end in itself, and secondly, many believe we
should reward ambition and maybe also talent. The best answers to the
question ‘equality of what’ have been given by liberal right-based philosophers
such as John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum (Rawls 1971; Sen
2010; Nussbaum 2001). They differ in certain important respects, but they
agree that equality should be about guaranteeing access to a specific set of
goods and services that are important for people in order for them to be
capable to realize their various potentials as human beings. The central term
for Rawls is ‘primary goods’, and for Sen and Nussbaum ‘capabilities’. The
terminology implies that the problem is not to equalize economic resources or
social status as such, but to ensure all individuals a set of basic resources that
will equalize their chances to reach their full potential as humans. Standards
are access to high quality health care and education, basic food and shelter,
equality in civil and political rights, equal protection under the laws, basic
social services and social insurance systems that support people that for
various reasons cannot generate enough resources from their own work,
support for persons with disabilities, and so on. The set of such capabilities
enhancing goods and services can of course vary, but it is important to realize
that equality, as a politically viable concept, has to be about specific things.1
There is simply no way we, by political means, can equalize the ability to be a
skilled musician, to be creative, to be loved, to be an outstanding researcher, a
good parent or a first rate ballet dancer. What is possible to do by political
means is to increase the possibility for those who happen to have ambitions in
these (and many other) fields to realize their talents even if they have not
entered this world with the necessary economic endowments to do this. This
can be done by giving them access to a certain bundle of goods and services
that are likely to enhance their capabilities of reaching their full potential as
human beings.
One problem is that any set of such basic resources that are politically
decided will carry a strong notion of collectivism. In a society where cultural
differences are small, this may not be a problem. However, for most advanced
Western societies, survey studies give a clear picture of an increasing indi-
vidualism which is not only related to diversity but that seems to be a universal
phenomenon. However, this increased individualism should not be conflated
with increased egoism (Welzel 2010). A detailed analysis of the data from the
World Value Study shows that the individualism-collectivism dimension is
unrelated to the egoism-civicness dimension. Already in 1992, analysing the
Swedish data from the World Value Survey, Pettersson and Geyer concluded
the following about the then ‘new individualists’:
Compared with the less individualistically-inclined, moreover, they do not show
any stronger interest in increasing today's wage differentials, they do not evidence
any greater tendency to view the poor with a ‘they-just-have-themselves-to-
blame’ attitude, they do not show any stronger tendency to regard their fellow
beings in less of a spirit of trust and fellowship. ... They are neither the irrepress-
ible entrepreneurs imagined by the neo-liberals nor the selfish egoists supposed
by the social democrats (cited in Rothstein 1998: 198).
Using the 2010 data from the World Value Study, we have been able to
replicate this result.2 However, one conclusion from this empirical result is
that we can think about this value-orientation as ‘solidaristic individualism’ as
opposed to ‘solidaristic collectivism’ which implies that policies for increased
social solidarity need to take this into account. One implication from this is
that equality should be about individuals, not collectives such as classes, groups,
clans, or tribes whether these are based on social class, occupation, kinship,
308 Bo Rothstein
religion, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientations, or any other form of collective

categorization. In addition to the empirical findings showing that collectivism
is at odds with a major trend in citizens’ values, a normative reason for this is
that many of these collective belongings or identities are floating and that
branding individuals (especially children and young people) into such collect-
ives by administrative means can result in gross violations of their rights (Okin
and Cohen 1999; Talbott 2005; Neier 2002). A second, and more important,
argument is that there is no guarantee that the majority in groups like these
will not oppress or exploit individuals that are put under their surveillance or,
even worse, jurisdiction (Talbott 2005; Rawls 2005). In sum, arguments for
increased equality should not be based on utilitarian group theory but instead
theories about individual rights. This does not necessarily rule out what has
been defined as multi-cultural policies. For example, for a Swedish-speaking
Finn, a Danish-speaking German, or a French-speaking Canadian, the right to
learn and use one’s native language in one’s country need not be framed as a
‘group right’ but can instead be framed as an individual right. Similarly, the
right to have the availability of a set of cultural institutions should for a person
belonging to a cultural/ethnic minority be seen as an individual right and not
necessarily as a group right that may contribute to essentializing culture and
ethnicity (cf. Kraus 2012).
11.4 RECIPROCITY AS THE BASIC TEMPLATE

FOR HUMAN INTERACTION
When striving for increased social solidarity, it is important to start from a

correct understanding of ‘human nature’, especially if you want your policies
to have a lasting (sustainable) impact. Needless to say, ideas about ‘basic
human nature’ have had a long history in the social sciences. The most
compelling and empirically supported theory I have found is the work done
in experimental research based on the idea of reciprocity (Fehr and
Fischbacher 2005; Henrich et al. 2001; Gintis et al. 2005; Bicchieri 2006; cf.
Ostrom 1998). To make a long story short, the idea of man as a ‘homo
economicus’ has simply been refuted by this type of research. The results
from laboratory, fieldwork, and survey research speaking against man as a
utility-maximizing rational agent is by now overwhelming. Self-interest is for
sure an important ingredient when people decide how to act, but it is far from
as dominating as has been portrayed in neo-classic economics. Moreover, it
would be impossible to create solidaristic or cooperative institutions of any
kind (including democracy, the rule of law, and respect for property rights) if
individual utility-maximizing self-interest would be ‘the only game in town’.
The reason is that such individuals would sooner or later fall for the tempta-
tion to ‘free-ride’ and if a majority do this, such institutions would never be
established and if they existed (for some other reason) they would soon be
destroyed (Miller 2000). If all agents act out of the template prescribed in neo-
classic economic theory, they will sooner or later outsmart themselves into a
suboptimal equilibrium. Also known as a ‘social trap’ this is situation where all
agents will be worse off because even if they know they would all gain from
cooperation, lacking trust that the others will cooperate, they will themselves
abstain from cooperation.
However, this new experimental (and to some extent field) research does
not present humans as benevolent altruists (Henrich and Henrich 2007;
Bicchieri and Xiao 2009). True, there is altruistic behaviour, but it is usually
restricted to very small circles of family and close friends. Or it is simply too
rare and also too unpredictable for building sustainable systems for solidarity
at a societal level. This lesson is important since it tells us that trying to
mobilize political support for increased equality by referring only to peoples’
altruistic motives is likely to fail (Svallfors 2007). What comes out from this
research is instead that reciprocity is the basic human orientation. The central
idea here is that people are not so much motivated ‘from the back’ by utility-
based calculations or culturally induced norms. Instead, human behaviour is
to a large extent determined by forward looking strategic thinking in the sense
that what agents do, depends on what they think the other agents are going to
do (Gintis et al. 2005). Experimental studies show that people are willing to
do ‘the right thing’ but only if they can be convinced that most others are
willing to do the same (Bicchieri and Xiao 2009; Strimling et al. 2013). Thus,
the idea of reciprocity recasts fundamentally how we should understand and
explain human behaviour. Instead of looking backwards to background vari-
able for explaining what causes variation in utility-based interests or culturally
induced norms, the important lesson from the research on reciprocity is to
understand how people’s forward looking perceptions about ‘other people’ are
constructed. Historical experiences and ‘collective memories’ certainly play a
role here, but research also shows that people update their perceptions based
on new information (Boyd, Gintis, and Bowles 2010).
Regarding the prospect for solidarity, results from research show that most
people are willing to engage in solidaristic cooperation for common goals even
if they will not personally benefit from this materially (Levi 1998). However,
for this to happen, three specific conditions have to be in place. First, people
have to be convinced that the policy is morally justified (substantial justice).
Secondly, people have to be convinced that most other agents can be trusted to
also cooperate (solidaristic justice), that is that other agents are likely to
abstain from ‘free-riding’. Thirdly, people have to be convinced that the policy
can be implemented in a fair and even-handed manner (procedural justice)
(Levi 1991; Rothstein 1998). For the first issue, the work from the philosophers
310 Bo Rothstein
mentioned here will come in handy. The second requirement, which is as

important for generating support for solidarity for policies for increased
equality, has to be resolved by institutional design where knowledge from
research in policy implementation and public administration in general are
needed. For example: It is not difficult to argue that universal access to high
quality health care and sickness insurance qualifies as a ‘primary good’ in the
above-mentioned sense. However, if a majority cannot be convinced that a)
most people will pay the increased taxes required for producing these goods,
or that b) the good will not be delivered in a manner that is acceptable, fair,
and respectful, they are not likely to support this policy (Rothstein, Samanni,
and Teorell 2012). If the health personnel are known to be corrupt, unprofes-
sional, or disrespectful, support for this policy will dwindle. The same goes for
sickness insurance. People are likely to support insurance for people that are
ill, but if perceptions of misuse or overuse (that is, ‘free-riding’) become
widespread, support will decline (Svallfors 2013; Rothstein 2011). In other
words, solidarity is conditioned on the institutional design of the systems that
are supposed to bring about the policies that will enhance equality. This has
been formulated in the following words by John Rawls:
A just system must generate its own support. This means that it must be arranged
so as to bring about in its members the corresponding sense of justice, an effective
desire to act in accordance with its rules for reasons and justice. Thus, the
requirements of stability and the criterion of discouraging desires that conflict
with the principles of justice put further constraints on institutions. They must
not only be just but framed so as to encourage the virtue of justice in those who
take part in them. (Rawls 1971: 261)
The central idea in this quote is how Rawls specifies that for making a
solidaristic system sustainable, we have to be aware of the existence of a
‘feed-back mechanism’ between people’s support for just principles and their
perceptions of the quality of the institutions that are set up to implement these
principles (Kumlin 2004). Recent empirical research strongly supports Rawls
argument in the sense that individuals’ perceptions of forms of unfairness (or
inefficiency) in the public services influences political views about support for
social solidarity. Using survey data for twenty-nine European countries that
includes questions about the fairness of public authorities (health sector and
tax authorities) as well as questions about ideological leanings and policy
preferences, Svallfors (2013) has shown the following: Citizens that have a
preference for more economic equality but that live in a country where they
perceive that the quality of government institutions is low, will in the same
survey indicate that they prefer lower taxes and less social spending. However,
the same ‘ideological type’ of respondent but who happens to live in a
European country where he or she believes that the authorities that implement
policies are basically just and fair, will answer that he or she is willing to pay
higher taxes for more social spending. This result is supported in a study using
aggregate data about welfare state spending and quality of government for
Western liberal democracies (Rothstein, Samanni, and Teorell 2012)—the
higher the quality of government the more countries will spend also when
they control for variables that measures political mobilization and electoral
success from left parties. To summarize my interpretation of these studies—
citizens that live in a country where they perceive that corruption or other
forms of unfairness in the public administration is common are likely to be
less supportive of the idea that the state should take responsibility for policies
for increased social justice even if they ideologically support the goals such
policies have. The most likely reason is that they will believe that their
solidarity will not be reciprocated.
Many scholars have generalized trust and reciprocity as if they are equiva-
lents (Putnam 1993: 171ff; Ostrom 1990: 12). It should be obvious that they
are not because reciprocity can have a very dark side. History and many
contemporary events as well as experimental evidence show that ‘ordinary
people’ are willing to engage in the most horrible atrocities to other people
(again, also if they do not personally benefit from their actions) if they are
convinced that those ‘other people’ would otherwise harm them (Browning
1992; Mann 2005). However, bad reciprocity also exists in less dramatic (and
horrible) circumstances. Distrust in other agents or in the institutions may
lead to a vicious circle that can break any system or policy set up to increase
solidarity. Again, Rawls did clearly see this problem between institutional
design and support for solidarity and justice (which has sadly been neglected
by most of his followers in political philosophy):
For although men know that they share a common sense of justice and that each
wants to adhere to existing arrangements, they may nevertheless lack full confi-
dence in one another. They may suspect that some are not doing their part, and so
they may be tempted not to do theirs. The general awareness of these temptations
may eventually cause the scheme to break down. The suspicion that others are
not honoring their duties and obligations is increased by the fact that, in absence
of the authoritative interpretation and enforcement of the rules, it is particularly
easy to find excuses for breaking them. (Rawls 1971: 240)
It is clear that Rawls pointed to the problem of reciprocity in the form of trust
in others (‘confidence’) and that he argues that it is the existence of institu-
tional arrangements that can handle ‘free-riding’ and other forms of anti-
solidaristic and opportunistic behaviour that are needed to avoid that systems
based on principles of justice break down.
Thus, we arrive at the conclusion that regarding solidarity and justice, the
basic nature of human behaviour—reciprocity—can go both ways. On the one
hand, the idea of reciprocity stands against the cynicism about human nature
that has been central to interest-based theories that have dominated most
312 Bo Rothstein
economic approaches in the social sciences (Ostrom 1998, 2000). On the other
hand, reciprocity is also in conflict with a naïve idea about human nature as
genuinely benevolent, which many equality-enhancing policies have been built
on. Instead, reciprocity tells us that if we through the design of institutions can
make people trust that most other agents in their society will behave in a
trustworthy and solidaristic manner, they will do likewise. If not, they will
defect, even if the outcome will be detrimental to their long-term interests.
That reciprocity can go in different directions is also what we see if we take
just a simple look at most of the rankings of countries’ performance that have
now become abundant. The level of corruption, to take just one example,
shows staggering differences between countries (Rothstein 2011). This par-
ticular ‘social bad’ also serves as a good example of why reciprocity is a better
starting point for understanding human behaviour than its rivals. If we relied
on cultural explanations, we would have to say to our sisters and brothers in,
for example, Nigeria that the extremely high level of corruption in their
country is caused by their corrupt culture. Or if we started from interest-
based explanations, we would be unable to explain why the huge variation of
corruption exists without relying on either genetic or cultural explanations.
However, if we base our explanations on the idea of reciprocity, the explan-
ation for the high level of corruption in, for example, Pakistan is that the
institutions in place make it reasonable for most people to believe that most
other agents will be engaged in corrupt practices, and thus they have no reason
not to engage in these practices themselves (Rothstein 2011). Simply put, it
makes no sense to be the only honest policeman in a thoroughly corrupt
police force. It is important to underline that, contrary to what is taken for
granted in neoclassical economics, we have absolutely no reason to believe
that societies (or any group of agents) are able to produce the type of
institutions that they would prosper from. A quick look at available measures
shows that a vast majority of the world’s population live under either deeply or
fairly corrupt public authorities (Holmberg and Rothstein 2012). This, it
should be added, turns out to have devastating effects on their prosperity,
social well-being, and possibility to launch policies based on solidarity that will
increase equality.
11.5 RECIPROCITY VERSUS SOLIDARITY
A central conclusion is thus that reciprocity, as the baseline for human agency,
can go in two directions. One will result in more solidarity and cooperation for
increased equality and thereby increased human well-being. The other one
is exactly the opposite resulting in all sorts of bad outcomes such as high levels
of corruption, discrimination, civil wars, massive exploitation, and ethnic
cleansing even in democratic societies (Mann 2005). Given what is known

from the record of human history, it is not advisable to be naïve in these
matters. We should never forget that even societies known for their high level
of civilization have shown themselves to be capable of the worst imaginable
forms of atrocities.
The most important thing we need to know is then what it is that makes
reciprocity turn bad or good. Theory and research gives a reasonably clear
answer to what determines the direction reciprocity will take society, namely
the level of social or generalized interpersonal trust. Simply put, if most people
in a society believe that most other people in that society can be trusted, they
have good reasons to support policies that are based on solidarity and thereby
will increase equality as it has been specified above. However, if they believe
that most people should not be trusted, the outcome will be the opposite
(Svallfors 2013; Rothstein 2011).
As with corruption, research on social trust (and the related concept of social
capital) has increased tremendously since the mid-1990s. This is in part because
empirical research shows that high levels of social trust at the individual level is
connected to a number of important factors such as tolerance towards minor-
ities, participation in public life, education, health, and subjective well-being. At
the societal level, high trust societies have more extensive and generous social
welfare systems (Rothstein and Uslaner 2005). However, how to understand a
concept such as social trust is not easy; obviously when asked in surveys, most
people do not really know if most other people in their society can be trusted.
One interpretation is that social trust is an expression of optimism about the
future (Uslaner 2002). Another interpretation is that when people answer the
survey question whether they believe (or not) that most other people can be
trusted, they are in fact answering another question, namely that they are
making an evaluation of the moral standard of the society in which they live
(Uslaner 2002; Delhey and Newton 2003). Both interpretations should be seen
as answers to the central question for the way in which reciprocity will turn,
namely what people believe about what other people will do if they try to engage
in some collaborative effort with them. Again, the notion of reciprocity says that
what people do depends on what they think other people will do, and this is
likely to be determined by how they think about other people’s trustworthiness,
which of course can be seen as how they interpret the general moral standing of
their society. For the case of creating a more equal society, the results are quite
clear. Although not a perfect correlation, societies with more interpersonal trust
have more political, economic, and social equality, including gender equality
(Rothstein 2005). It is important to note that I am here referring to what is
known as generalized trust, that is, trust in people in general of whom there is no
way to have anything that comes close to perfect information. This is different
from particularistic trust which refers to trust in small groups of friends, clans,
or (social and professional) cliques.
314 Bo Rothstein
11 . 6 P O L I T IC A L I N S T I T U T IO N S, S O C I A L T R U S T ,
AND SOCIAL S OLIDARITY
How then, can generalized trust be generated? Again, recent empirical

research gives a reasonably clear answer to this question. A high level of
generalized trust is caused by what has been called high quality government
institutions, especially the institutions that implement public policies (Stolle
2003). The central basic norm for these institutions is impartiality. This
implies that things such as discrimination (whether based on ethnicity, gen-
der, class, etc.), corruption (in its many forms), clientelism, nepotism, and
political favouritism are very rare or non-existent when public officials or
professionals implement public policies. Social trust is thus not generated
‘from below’, for example from civil society or voluntary associations, but
‘from above’, by how people perceive the fairness and competence of govern-
ment institutions (for an overview of this research see Rothstein (2013)). In
other words, it is trustworthy, uncorrupt, honest, impartial government insti-
tutions that exercise public power and implement policies in a fair manner
that create generalized social trust. For example, using survey data from the
World Value Study, Delhey and Newton concluded that ‘government, espe-
cially corruption free and democratic government, seems to set a structure in
which individuals are able to act in a trustworthy manner and not suffer, and
in which they can reasonably expect that most others will generally do the
same’ (2004: 28). Another study, also based on comparative survey data,
concludes that ‘the central contention . . . is that political institutions that
support norms of fairness, universality, and the division of power contribute
to the formation of inter-personal trust’ (Freitag and Buhlmann 2005).
Using scenario experiments in low trust/high corruption Romania and in
high trust/low corruption Sweden, Rothstein and Eek (2009) found that
persons in both these countries who experience corruption among public
health care workers or the local police when travelling in an ‘unknown city
in an unfamiliar country’ do not only lose trust in these authorities but also in
other people in general in that ‘unknown’ society. Another example is
Svallfors’ (2013) study based on survey data from the European Social Survey
carried out in 2008 that covers twenty-nine countries in both western and
Eastern Europe. This survey had questions related to corruption such as if
people perceived that the tax authorities or the public health care gave ‘special
advantages to certain people or deal with everyone equally?’ The results are the
following: Citizens that state in the survey that they have a preference for more
economic equality but that live in a country where they perceive that the
quality of government institutions is low, will in the same survey indicate that
they prefer lower taxes and less social spending. However, the same ‘ideo-
logical type’ of respondent but who happens to live in a European country
where he or she believes that the government authorities are guided by
norms such as impartiality and fairness, will answer that he or she is willing to
pay higher taxes for more social spending.
This result is supported in a study using aggregate data about welfare
state spending and quality of government for Western liberal democracies
(Rothstein, Samanni, and Teorell 2012) showing that the higher the quality
of government, the more countries will spend on social services and benefits
also when they control for variables that measure political mobilization and
electoral success from left parties. To summarize—citizens that live in a
country where they perceive that corruption or other forms of unfairness in
the public administration is common are likely to be less supportive of the idea
that the state should take responsibility for redistributive policies even if they
ideologically support the goals such policies have. One probable reason is that
they lack trust in other citizens to a) pay their taxes and b) not overuse or
abuse the social insurances. Thus, designing institutions that implement public
policy is to create (or destroy) social trust and thereby social solidarity. The
reason for this effect is that when people make up their mind if most people in
their society can be trusted, they make an inference from how they perceive
the authorities. If the local policeman, schoolteacher, social insurance admin-
istrator, judge, or doctor cannot be trusted (because they discriminate against
people like you, or ask for bribes, or give preferential treatments to some
groups, etc.), then it is reasonable to assume that neither should you trust
‘people in general’ in your society. And vice versa, if they are known to be
honest, impartial, competent and fair, then it is likely that this will spill over to
‘people in general’. Moreover, if the public authorities are known to be
engaged in the type of ‘bad’ practices mentioned earlier, then many people
will come to think that in order to get what they need in life (immunization to
their children, building permits, employment in the public sector, etc.) most
people will have to be engaged in these kinds of bad practices, and thus they
should not be trusted (Rothstein 2011) The empirical evidence from both
experimental and survey research gives a very strong support for this theory of
how social trust is generated ‘from above’ (Rothstein 2013).
For social policy and many other policies that are intended to cater to
increased equality in the above-mentioned sense, this has a number of implica-
tions regarding institutional design. The most important is to strive for universal
systems and avoid, as much as possible, systems that are directed to supporting
‘the poor’ or ‘the vulnerable’ (Rothstein 1998). Universal programmes, such
as, for example, universal child allowances, universal pre-schools and
schools, universal pensions, universal health care, are to be favoured instead
of specific programmes directed at ‘the poor’. The reasons for universalism
are fivefold: First, universal systems entail a minimum of (if any) bureau-
cratic discretion. Thereby, not only corruption, but all forms of bureaucratic
intrusions connected to needs-testing can be avoided. Secondly, since uni-
versal programmes in principle cater to ‘all’, they will include the middle
316 Bo Rothstein
class and thereby almost automatically secure a political majority and
thereby make the programme politically sustainable. Programmes that are
built solely on interest group mobilization will always be vulnerable to
interest-based counter-mobilization. Sooner or later, a Thatcher or a Reagan
will appear and these ‘types’ will be able to construct a new alliance between
the very rich and the middle class based on such interest mobilization.
Thirdly, universal programmes avoid the problem of stigmatization of spe-
cific groups and individual ‘stereotype-threat’ that in experimental work has
been shown to seriously hurt the ability of members of the ‘target group’ to
reach their potential (Steele 2010). Fourth, although they give benefits also
to ‘rich’ people, universal programmes turn out to be very redistributive,
more so than programmes which ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’.
The reasons are that the benefits are usually nominal in money or costs of
services, but taxes are either proportional to income or progressive (Korpi
and Palme 1998; Rothstein 1998). Even when universal programmes are
income-related, such as, for example, many pension systems in more devel-
oped countries, there is usually a ‘cap’ which makes them redistributive.
Fifth, universal programmes, especially when it comes to services such as
education or elderly care, will usually be of high quality since the need to
keep the more well-to-do people ‘on board’ will make it difficult for politi-
cians to lower the quality of the services if they want to stay in power. In
sum, universal programmes have the capacity to ‘generate their own sup-
port’ as stated by John Rawls in section 11.4.
Admittedly, there are policies when universal institutions will not work. It
is difficult to have a universal policy for active labour market policy since
each unemployed person is different and will need different types of support
in order to find a new job. The same goes for much of social assistance to
dysfunctional families since each decision of whether or not to take a child
into custody must be based on a professional judgement of the specificities of
the particular case. In these areas, it is important to try as much as possible to
use other means to ensure impartiality and fairness in how decisions are made
in the implementation process. High quality training for professionals and
civil servants, systems for accountability and control, possibilities to appeal,
are but a few such possibilities.
1 1 .7 HOW TH E NE GATIV E EF F E CT OF DI VE RS I TY
ON SOCIAL TRUST CAN BE OVERCOME?
A central question is if this can work in societies with a high degree of

ethnic/cultural/religious diversity? The initial positive view of the many good
effects of social trust has been tampered by findings showing that societies
with a high ethnic diversity tend to have lower social trust (Schaeffer 2014).
Some economic studies claim that ethnic diversity, through its negative
effects on social trust and social cohesion, explains why many poor countries
fail to produce the amount of public goods necessary for social and economic
development (Easterly and Levine 1997; Habyarimana et al. 2007). Putnam
(2007) and Alesina and La Ferrara (2002) have also reported evidence for
this causal link at the sub-national level for the US. Others have claimed that
the increasing ethnic diversity in Western Europe will make redistribution to
various welfare state programmes more difficult (Alesina, Glaeser, and
Sacerdote 2001; Eger 2010). This argument has not gone without criticism
and several studies have pointed out that ethnic diversity does not necessarily
or only under certain specific conditions destroy social trust (Banting and
Kymlicka 2006; Uslaner 2012, Kumlin and Rothstein 2010; Gesthuizen, van
der Meer, and Scheepers 2009). In a recent overview of this research,
including no less than 480 empirical findings from 172 studies, Schaeffer
(2013, 2014) convincingly shows that many studies about this controversial
issue reach very different conclusions. This inconclusiveness is according to
his analysis due to variation in research design such as which region of the
world is analysed, which type of ethnic diversity is scrutinized and also what
type of measure is used for the dependent variable (production of public
goods, collective action, civic engagement, social trust, trust related senti-
ments, or support for redistribution). Schaeffer points out that while there is
a slight overweight for the confirmatory studies, discipline matters a lot.
Many more studies published in economics journals confirm the negative
effect of ethnic diversity on social trust, and so on than studies published in
political science or sociology journals. However, he also shows that for the
fifty-eight studies that have generalized (social) trust as the dependent
variable, there is close to a draw: thirty empirical results confirm and
twenty-eight confute the hypothesis that diversity has a negative effect on
social trust (Schaeffer 2013: 12).
What is missing in most of these analyses is a variable of some significance,
namely the state, or to use another terminology, the quality of government.
First, as mentioned earlier, a large number of studies have shown that gener-
ally, perceptions of living in a society with impartial, honest, and largely
un-corrupt government authorities has a positive impact on social trust.
Secondly, three recent empirical studies have shown that if the quality of
government factor is brought in, the negative effect of ethnic diversity on
social trust either disappears or is strongly reduced. Using a survey from
Sweden containing detailed questions about perceptions of how fairly
respondents were treated by government authorities, Kumlin and Rothstein
(2010) found that for (non-Nordic) immigrants, perceptions of having been
treated fairly by government authorities and public services had a significant
318 Bo Rothstein
positive effect on their social trust also when controlling for income, left–right
orientation, being unemployed, membership in voluntary associations, age,
and gender.
Dinesen (2011) has carried out what is close to a natural experiment. He
has studied what happens with immigrants from low trust countries when
they immigrate to Western countries where the average level of social trust
is higher. His results show that ‘immigrants who have migrated to countries
with lower levels of corruption tend to have higher levels of trust than
immigrants who have migrated to more corrupt countries’ (Dinesen 2011:
56). In a study of immigrants to Denmark, which has the record in high social
trust, Dinesen found that ‘perceptions of Danish institutions treating immi-
grants and native Danes evenhandedly have a strong impact on trust’ and that
this impact is particularly strong for immigrants (Dinesen 2011). With a
special focus on young first- and second-generation immigrants, Dinesen
found that ‘perceptions of institutional fairness at an early contribute to the
general adaption of immigrants to the level of trust’ of the native Danes (2011: 57;
see also Sønderskov and Dinesen (2016) as well as Nannestad et al. (2014)).
The third study is built on two surveys carried out in 2010 and 2013 by the
Quality of Government Institute at University of Gothenburg (Charron and
Rothstein 2014). The 2010 sample consisted of about 34,000 citizen interviews
and the more recent survey sampled over 85,000 individuals making this the
largest empirical investigation of this topic so far. The respondents have been
sampled by regions in European countries, in total 212 so-called NUTS 1 and
NUTS 2 regions for twenty-five European countries.3 These surveys have
focused on citizen perceptions and experiences of the quality of their regional
government institutions (the police, public health care, and public schools)
and included both perceptions regarding fairness and impartiality as well as
questions about personal experiences of corruption (Charron, Lapuente, and
Rothstein 2012).
These surveys show that the regional-level variation in social trust across
Europe is striking, ranging from mere 8 per cent social trusters in Východné
Slovensko region in Slovakia to a stunning 80 per cent in the Copenhagen
region in Denmark. There are also high differences between regions in the
same country. Not only as could be expected in Italy between the northern and
the southern regions, but also in Germany with Saarland scoring 34 per cent
social trusters compared to Schleswig-Holstein, where almost double the share
of the respondents say that they believe that ‘most people can be trusted’
(Charron and Rothstein 2014). Giving ‘one number’ for variables such as
social trust, ethnic diversity, and the quality of government to whole countries
in Europe can thus for many of these countries be highly misleading. This
means that the advantage of using a regional sample not only comes from
getting a larger number ‘societies’ to compare but also that the quality of the
measures is increased.
Combining this survey data with register data for the various regions in
the European countries give a unique opportunity to analyse the effects of
several competing explanations of social trust. The register data used for
measuring ethnic diversity is the percentage of the population in the 212 regions
that are born outside Europe. A simple bivariate analysis confirms the existence
of a negative effect of ethnic diversity on social trust. However, this effect
becomes negligible when the index for the quality government in the regions
is entered.4 Furthermore, when controlling for quality of government (QoG),
the impact of activity and membership in voluntary associations for social trust
also disappears while the importance of economic inequality remains signifi-
cant. In other words, in those regions within European countries where people
perceive that their public authorities are corrupt, dishonest, and/or partial, this
study confirms that ethnic diversity does have a negative effect on social trust.
However, in regions where people perceive and experience that their regional
authorities are reasonably impartial, honest, and non-corrupt, the effect of
ethnic diversity on social trust disappears (Charron and Rothstein 2014).
The micro-level theory behind this could be understood in the following
sense. Citizens facing increased diversity in a society with low quality of
government may start thinking that people that are from a different ethnic
group are getting away with overusing or misusing public and social services
as well as avoiding taxes and therefore they should not be trusted. However,
this type of suspicion is less likely in a society with high quality government
which implies that not only the ethnic majority but also the newcomers have
to play by the rules which give reason to believe that ‘most people in general
can be trusted’. As stated by the behavioural economists Fehr and Fishbacher
about how to understand reciprocity: ‘If people believe that cheating on
taxes, corruption and abuses of the welfare state are wide-spread, they
themselves are more likely to cheat on taxes, take bribes or abuse welfare
state institutions’ (2005: 167). In sum, leaving the quality of the government
out of the equation when studying the effect of ethnic diversity on social trust
and solidarity turns out to be a mistake. As shown by Larsen (2013),
although Denmark and Sweden have received a large amount of immigrants
from countries outside Europe since the early 1980s, social trust as measured
by the World Value Surveys have increased (from already high levels) under
the same period.
11.8 CON CLUSIONS
The result from using the constructive theory approach for the problem of
how to increase social solidarity can be summarized in one sentence. High
quality of government institutions will increase the level of social trust, which
320 Bo Rothstein
will make reciprocity turn into solidarity despite the degree of ethnic diversity,
which in turn will increase the possibility for creating sustainable social soli-
darity. One counterintuitive result from the studies discussed is perhaps that a
high level of QoG ameliorates the negative effects of ethnic diversity and
immigration on social trust, a problem that has been reported in a large
number of studies and which has become known as ‘the new liberal dilemma’.
Another counterintuitive result from this analysis is perhaps that in order to
support the ‘needy’, ‘poor’, or ‘discriminated’ one should avoid policies that
are directed specifically at these groups. Because of their lack of interest in the
implementation issues and also research about public opinion about support
for policies for social justice, many well-known political philosophers have
failed to see this. To the list mentioned here, Brian Barry and Amy Gutman
can be added since both have argued against universal policies because they
wrongly believed that such policies will not help poor people (see Rothstein
1998: 148f). The issues about how people perceive the fairness, impartiality,
and justice in the implementation of policies for social justice have been
greatly underestimated. When striving for increased social solidarity, universal
policies are much more likely to be implemented in ways that are considered
fair, impartial, and just than are policies that are targeted to ‘the poor’.
Moreover, it is countries that ‘taxes all’ and ‘supports all’ through universal
programmes that succeed in redistribution while countries that ‘tax the rich to
give to the poor’ fail to do so. The logic is quite simple, services and benefits
intended ‘for the poor’ are likely to be ‘poor’ services and benefits thereby
increasing stigmatization of the group one wants to support. If the ‘middle
class’ is left out of the system for social solidarity, there will neither be an
electoral majority for policies for social solidarity nor enough taxes to pay for
such policies. To paraphrase Rawls (1971: 261), such a system for social justice
will be unable to ‘generate its own support’.
NOTES
1. Increased equality in the work life and in the family is for sure also important, but
for reasons of space, I leave this out.
2. Data can be obtained from the author.
3. NUTS refer to ‘Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics’, and are EU (Euro-
pean Union) statistical regions, for more information, see <http://epp.eurostat.ec.
europa.eu/portal/page/portal/nuts_nomenclature/introduction>.
4. In order to avoid the problem of simultaneity, the measure of social trust is taken from
the 2013 survey and the measure of quality of government (QoG) for the regions is
from the 2010 survey which implies that data about social trust and the data about
experiences and perceptions of QoG are not from the same people in the same survey.
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12
Solidarity and Conflict

Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Access
to Citizenship, Civic Integration Policies, and
Multiculturalism
Irene Bloemraad
The editors of this volume distinguish three threads of solidarity: democratic,

civic, and redistributive. Woven together, these threads bind together a dis-
tinctive ‘we’ such that those in a particular society feel a sense of obligation to
others. This sense of community and obligation leads, they posit, not only to
civil democratic decision-making but also to concern for social justice among
members of society. With ever-deepening globalization, a collective sense of
obligation and a collective ability to act on feelings of solidarity may be critical
to mitigate or even reverse social and economic inequality in Western dem-
ocracies. Banting and Kymlicka ask whether the bonds of solidarity might fray
more in the context of diversity, and they raise a series of questions about how
political institutions, policies, and discourses can knit the bonds more tightly
or stretch them to the point of snapping.
In this chapter, I focus on the relationship between solidarity and policies
directed to immigrants.1 These policies—citizenship regulations, civic integra-
tion policies, and multiculturalism policies—are loosely linked to Banting and
Kymlicka’s three threads of democratic, civic, and redistributive solidarity,
although they tend to emphasize the civic and democratic spheres more than
redistribution. I consider whether and to what extent pre-existing solidarities
produce these policies, as well as the degree to which these policies produce
solidarity or, instead, generate social isolation and backlash. I pay particular
attention to multiculturalism, that is, political discourse and policies that seek
to recognize, support, and accommodate ethno-racial and religious diversity.
In the past fifteen years, multicultural policies have faced particularly intense
criticism as a source of fragmentation and declining social cohesion
(Koopmans 2013; Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010).
328 Irene Bloemraad
Surveying the empirical evidence, I contend that two of the three

immigrant-oriented policies examined here—more open access to citizenship
and policies of multiculturalism—contribute to immigrants’ democratic and
civic inclusion, and they likely increase democratic solidarity among the
native-born population. In contrast, civic integration policies, despite their
name, probably do less to enhance solidarity between those of the majority
society and those of immigrant origins unless they are intertwined with some
support for pluralism in the public sphere. That is, equitable ‘civic’ integration
works best when diversity of background is recognized and legitimated in the
civic sphere, rather than when the ‘civic’ sphere is a verbal fig leaf for the
majority culture and its ways. It is, however, difficult to identify a direct link
between citizenship, civic integration, or multiculturalism policies and what
Banting and Kymlicka call redistributive solidarity, beyond the important
point that if immigrants acquire citizenship, it is much harder to exclude
them from social benefits than when they are legal foreigners.
In the discussion that follows, I consider whether solidarity is a precondi-
tion for generous citizenship and diversity policies. I suggest it is not. Indeed,
such policies appear in part a product of conflict and tensions over long-
standing diversity unrelated to immigration. Old colonial empires tend to have
citizenship laws more open to immigrants, while the rise of multiculturalism
and remaking of national identities in Canada and the United States after the
Second World War had as much to do with responding to Québécois nation-
alism and the African-American civil rights movement. Solidarity may not be
a necessary precondition for the rise of immigrant-inclusive policies and
discourses. Indeed, political conflict may be critical to raising the saliency of
diversity and driving home to elites and the general public the necessity of
dealing with existing inequalities.
If accurate, conflict then becomes productive for solidarity, but only to the
extent that policies and ideas related to citizenship and multiculturalism
become broadly accepted into national identities and conceptions of ‘we’
that Banting and Kymlicka equate with solidarity. This requires a set of
institutions through which political contestation can be worked out. Using
the North American case, I posit that immigrants confront legitimacy chal-
lenges in demanding recognition. Multicultural diversity policies that include
immigrants gain more legitimacy and staying power when they follow claims
by native-born minorities for equality and recognition. The opening created
by native-born minorities subsequently has a greater chance of including
immigrant-origin groups if the political system is open to immigrant political
engagement (underscoring the importance of citizenship access), and if diver-
sity gains are institutionalized in policy, bureaucracy, courts, and educational
systems.
In short, I argue that certain immigrant-directed policies generate solidarity
in the face of diversity, but such outcomes are not organic off-shoots of social
Solidarity and Conflict 329
cohesion. Rather, they are a product of political contestation in which immi-

grants and majority members both need a voice. When groups make claims
about legitimacy and standing in a society, such claims are often resisted by
others, producing distrust and conflict in the recasting the boundaries of ‘we’.
Working out such conflicts becomes a new thread woven into the national
story, and thus a potential basis of collective solidarity.
12.1 DIVERSITY AND SOLIDARITY: SOME CAUTIONS
‘Diversity’ can mean many things, including the long-standing cohabitation

of groups that differ in religious faiths, language, race, ethnicity, or claims to
territory (as in the case of indigenous peoples). This volume is, however,
primarily interested in the strains of commitment produced through migra-
tion and the settlement of people who bring new religious traditions, cultural
practices, and racial phenotypes to a country. Indeed, migrant-induced diver-
sity is part and parcel of the globalization trends pushing at welfare-state
arrangements. States arguably regulate the movement of people more tightly
than the flow of goods, services, and capital. Nevertheless, the OECD (Organ-
isation for Economic Co-operation and Development) estimates that over
13 per cent of the population in its member states was born in another
country, a proportion that rises to over one in five residents in Canada, New
Zealand, Israel, Australia, Switzerland, and Luxembourg (OECD 2013).
Posed as a question of solidarity on one hand, and (immigrant-generated)
diversity on the other, some readers might interpret these questions using
a ‘then/now’ dichotomy, although this is never articulated by Banting and
Kymlicka. Using rose-coloured glasses to view an imagined past, some might
understand the questions of this book as, ‘Back then, we had [generous social
policies, a sense of community, more civil political discourse]. But today, with
lots of immigration, we have [a bankrupt social safety net, no more social trust,
a broken political system].’
Such an articulation—heard with some frequency across Western
democracies—makes me uneasy about solidarity/diversity juxtapositions.
It casts the past in a rosy glow at odds with historical reality. ‘Back then’—
just four or five decades back—solidarities across Western democracies
were also challenged by boundaries of religion, language, race, ancestry, and
region, whether we consider religion in Northern Ireland or the Netherlands,
language in Belgium or Spain, race and indigeneity in the United States,
Canada, and Australia, or any of the struggles around decolonization involv-
ing Western nations. It is thus questionable how much progressive solidarities
in decades past—ones focused on social justice, civic inclusion, and demo-
cratic participation—were rooted in homogeneity or, conversely, the degree to
330 Irene Bloemraad
which contemporary diversity undermines such solidarities. Prior conflicts,

ones that had to be worked out for good or ill, are easily forgotten in the face of
current diversity challenges.
While problematic, articulations of then/now and homogeneity/diversity do
not undermine the importance of the questions raised by the editors. But it
does suggest caution about the contours of solidarity, its production, and its
putative effects. I am deeply ambivalent about the term ‘solidarity’. A sense of
solidarity might be the post-hoc emotions (and rationalizations) that follow
political conflict and institutional change, once most members of a society
come to accept new social and political realities.
Given that post-Second World War immigration is still largely a first- and
second-generation phenomenon across most Western democracies, conclu-
sions about solidarity and immigrant-driven diversity can only be tentative, at
best. As the ensuing discussion suggests, analysts need to pay attention to the
political and social conflicts that might drive the development of more just
democratic and redistributive policies and political norms. Conflict—worked
out in productive ways—might be the better object of study than ‘solidarity’.
12.2 CITIZENSHIP ACCESS AS A WAY TO FOSTER

DEMOCRATIC SOLIDARITY
Banting and Kymlicka define ‘democratic solidarity’ as support for basic

human rights and equalities, and equal participation in democratic processes.
Significantly, they articulate democratic engagement for ‘citizens’ of all back-
grounds. The language of citizenship immediately underscores the distinct
position of immigrants in most Western societies, namely as people not born
with the status of a national or citizen, and who enter a country (or are even
born in a country) under the legal status of ‘foreigner’. Broader access to
citizenship can be seen as a key pathway to democratic solidarity in diverse
societies.
The degree to which citizenship status matters or, conversely, the degree to
which legal status as a non-citizen carries a distinct bundle of rights, varies
from country to country. Most liberal democracies accord basic civil and
human rights to all people on their territory, regardless of legal status, from
the right to due process in criminal proceedings to the provision of emergency
health care in life-threatening circumstances. But most countries also restrict
other rights and benefits, reserving the most expansive or generous to citizens.
With regard to democratic solidarity, most Western countries restrict electoral
politics to citizens, especially the right to vote and stand for office. Among the
thirty-seven countries surveyed by the Migrant Integration Policy Index
(MIPEX) in 2010, only one, the UK, gave some non-citizens the right to vote
in national elections, although nine countries extended non-citizen suffrage in
local elections.2 Of course, even without the vote, non-citizens can exercise
political voice in other ways, such as through protest, political expression in
media and in speech, or by contacting public officials. Nevertheless, citizen-
ship still serves as a primary boundary to full political rights and, arguably, the
legitimacy to speak up. Citizenship can also affect economic condition when
particular jobs or social benefits are linked to citizenship status. One OECD
report suggests that acquiring citizenship might act as a mechanism signalling
greater integration and skills to potential employers, improving job outcomes
(OECD 2011). This begs the question, who can become a citizen and under
what circumstances? How inclusive are the rules and process?
Two sorts of citizenship policies are germane for immigrants. First, natur-
alization laws determine how those who are foreigners can access citizenship
through administrative or legal request. This usually requires some length of
residence in a country, a lack of a serious (or any) criminal record, and an
administrative fee. It also often entails proving some ability in a country’s
primary language(s) and/or knowledge of politics, history, and social practices.
In some cases, citizenship can be denied if an applicant receives public
benefits, or a country might require evidence that prior citizenship has been
renounced. A second pathway to citizenship, for those born in a country to
non-citizen immigrant parents, is by according jus soli citizenship based on
territorial birth. For example, under the Fourteenth Amendment of the US
Constitution, passed to ensure the citizenship of black Americans following
the Civil War, virtually any baby born in the US acquires citizenship at birth,
even if his or her parents are undocumented or temporary residents.3
Countries vary dramatically in how easy or difficult it is for foreigners to
acquire citizenship through naturalization or territorial birth. MIPEX scores
countries on ‘access to nationality’ using a scale from 0 (completely exclu-
sionary) to 100 (extremely open), evaluating requirements for naturalization
such as length of residence, language, and civic knowledge as well as provi-
sions for jus soli citizenship and cost considerations. Country scores range
from an exclusionary 15 (Latvia) to an inclusive 82 (Portugal). Countries such
as Sweden, Canada, and Belgium sit among the most open, while Austria,
Lithuania, and Estonia are among the most closed.
Citizenship policies matter for democratic inclusion. Countries with more
open naturalization laws have higher rates of citizenship acquisition, especially
among immigrants from less-developed countries (Vink, Prokic-Breuer, and
Dronkers 2013). Nationality acquisition across both the first- and second-
generation is also higher where laws are more generous (Janoski 2010). The
link between open laws and high immigrant citizenship appears perhaps self-
evident, but it is not necessarily straightforward to evaluate. Dramatic differ-
ences in the type and origins of migrants who move to different countries also
332 Irene Bloemraad
affect who applies for or can meet the criteria for citizenship, beyond the
barrier of law alone. Nevertheless, in one careful analysis across sixteen
European countries, Vink and colleagues estimate that moving from a country
with a score of about 30 on the MIPEX index for naturalization to a country
with a score of 80—roughly the equivalent of moving from Hungary to
Sweden—doubles the probability of citizenship from about 40 to 80 per cent
for someone from a country of low or moderate development, holding per-
sonal characteristics and length of residence constant (Vink, Prokic-Breuer,
and Dronkers 2013: 13).
It is not a far stretch to imagine that democratic solidarity is enhanced in
places where access to citizenship is more open. Naturalized immigrants in
Europe report greater political interest than non-citizens, although the rela-
tionship is not constant across countries (Kesler and Demireva 2011: 220,
223). Examining municipal and provincial elections in Sweden, in which non-
citizens can cast ballots, Bevelander and Pendakur (2011) find that attaining
citizenship significantly increased the probability of voting among the foreign-
born. It is also likely that when immigrants acquire citizenship in high
numbers, it becomes harder for native-born citizens in liberal democracies
to articulate a discourse—or enact policies—that place foreign-born fellow
citizens outside the circle of ‘we’ that determines access to redistributive social
policies, government jobs and benefits, and democratic deliberation. Studying
a range of European countries, Kesler and Demireva find that immigrants who
acquire citizenship report less discrimination than those without citizenship
(2011: 215, 222).4 Thus citizenship policy probably has direct effects on
democratic solidarity, and likely on civic and redistributive solidarity as well.
But how do more open citizenship policies become enacted in the first place?
It appears that countries with stronger pre-existing ethnic notions of solidarity
are less likely to have open citizenship policies that promote democratic soli-
darity in a context of migration. Already two decades ago, Rogers Brubaker
(1992) argued that a stronger sense of ethnic nationhood in Germany closed off
citizenship to immigrants while in France, a political or civic conception of
nationhood enabled greater immigrant inclusion through citizenship.
Scholars have subsequently problematized a simple civic/ethnic conception
of nationhood and citizenship, but there is strong evidence that early experi-
ence with diversity, including through colonialism, makes open citizenship
policy more likely. But this is not necessarily due to strong, cohesive civic
solidarity. The political and military necessities of holding an empire, fraught
with diversity and conflict, are an important predictor of more open citizen-
ship policies in late-twentieth-century Europe, according to Janoski (2010).
A similar logic, centred on the need to forge civic or political solidarity out of
disparate peoples, applies to the Anglo-settler colonies, which have among the
most open citizenship laws of Western nations despite historical exclusions
on the basis of race and gender. The needs of state-building in the nineteenth
century, rather than social solidarity, might well have set the stage for immi-
grants’ access to citizenship in the early twenty-first century.
More recently, citizenship laws also have been shaped by battles between
political parties of the left and right (Howard 2009; Janoski 2010; Goodman
2014). Here ideological solidarities might matter more, but so too does the
process of political contention. This was true for the extension of social rights to
male workers in Britain, celebrated in T. H. Marshall’s famous account of
citizenship: the militant activism of unions and political actors favourable to
labour, within a context of recent all-out war, expanded citizenship beyond civil
and political rights to social inclusion and benefits. Today, a discourse of social
solidarity and equality on the left is often correlated with more inclusive
citizenship rules for immigrants, while anti-immigrant rhetoric on the right
and far-right correlate with calls for more stringent language and knowledge
requirements, longer residency requirements or higher fees to access citizenship
and even to migrate in the first place (Goodman 2014). In these cases, discourses
of social solidarity arguably intertwine with those of democratic solidarity.
12.3 ‘C I V I C’ INT E G R A T I O N P O L I C I E S: I N T E N S IO N
WITH SOLIDARITY?
Since the late 1990s, Western states, especially in Europe, have passed new
‘civic integration’ policies for immigrants that, in the words of Sara Wallace
Goodman, ‘consist of cultural requirements, namely language and knowledge
of society, that empower individuals to act independently’ in political and
economic spheres. Rather than ‘national’ identity, these policies are advanced
to build common ‘state’ identity, which will ‘foster cohesion and imbue
newcomers with a sense of belonging’ (Goodman 2014: 16).
Despite the shared use of the adjective ‘civic’, these policies have only a weak
relationship with Banting and Kymlicka’s articulation of ‘civic solidarity’.
Banting and Kymlicka define the latter as people living together in peace,
without communal violence and with acceptance of diversity. This definition
applies to an entire population. However, the civic integration policies passed
since the turn of the twenty-first century target immigrants, not the native-
born population, sending a message that cohesion problems lie with immi-
grants, not majority residents. Indeed, some political leaders have suggested
that to fight the specter of imported or home-grown terrorism, states must
enact ‘muscular liberalism’ to teach immigrants and religious minorities
mutual respect and a common identity.5 In this way, civic integration policies
can become articulated as a project to make immigrant-origin residents more
tolerant and less violence-prone, rather than as a goal for the whole society.
334 Irene Bloemraad
As I argue in section 12.4, Banting and Kymlicka’s notion of ‘civic solidarity’,

with its application to all residents and its focus on accepting diversity, is better
reflected in the aspirations—and some outcomes—of multicultural policies.
Indeed, countries appear to adopt either extensive civic integration policies
or extensive multiculturalism policies, but rarely both. This suggests a tension
between the recent expansion of civic integration policies and promotion of a
diverse public sphere. As with citizenship, scholars have constructed indices to
measure variation in civic integration policies across states. The Civic Inte-
gration Policy Index (CIVIX) evaluates whether there are language and civic
knowledge requirements for entry into a country, for acquiring permanent
residence, or for acquiring citizenship, as well as whether such requirements
and attendant training courses are mandatory or preparatory (Goodman
2014). Based on this measure, Goodman shows that European countries had
very few civic integration requirements in 1997, with those in existence almost
exclusively linked to citizenship. This, for example, is the case in North
America, where would-be citizens must demonstrate some majority language
ability and knowledge of the country’s history and political system to acquire
citizenship, but not to migrate or to secure permanent residency status.6
The normative legitimacy of linguistic and knowledge requirements, espe-
cially as linked to acquisition of citizenship, is ambiguous. On one hand, they
set up a barrier to state membership that is qualitatively different from that for
people who acquire citizenship at birth; the latter are not required to prove
political or civic knowledge (or linguistic ability) to get their passport. While we
might assume such knowledge based on schooling and time spent in a country,
this is not necessarily the case. Keith Banting reports on a public opinion
survey done in Canada analogous to the citizenship test that had a 60 per cent
failure rate among Canadian citizens, but only a 30 per cent failure rate among
first generation immigrants (2014: 77). On the other hand, if basic language
and civic requirements are articulated as part of a project that welcomes
immigrants into state membership and it is done in such a way that knowledge
of the majority language and society is in addition to, rather than in place of,
alternate linguistic and civic knowledge, one might argue that this is a low and
normatively appropriate bar to political inclusion. In fact, Bloemraad and
Wright (2014: S302) find no correlation, at the country level, between a state’s
score on the CIVIX index in 2000 and the extent of their multicultural policies.
The lack of correlation lies in part in the fact that relatively few countries
had extensive civic integration requirements in 2000. By 2013, however,
various European states passed requirements for immigrants to prove ‘civic
integration’ during earlier stages in the migration process. Goodman docu-
ments substantial variation between countries’ requirements and whether
requirements are coercive (mandatory) or voluntary. Based on her CIVIX
scale, countries in 2013 ranged from an absolute low of 0 (in Sweden, where
there are no civic integration requirements, not even a language requirement
for citizenship), to a high of 8.25 (in Denmark, with extensive requirements at

multiple points of time). The median score across fifteen European states was
4.25, the score in Italy. This indicates a much broader set of civic integration
requirements than was the case in 1997, when Goodman calculates the median
policy score as 1 among these countries. Indeed, by 2010, Bloemraad and
Wright (2014: S302) find a significant and strongly negative correlation
(−0.54) between a country’s CIVIX scores and national multiculturalism
policies. Thus, countries with stronger integration demands were less likely
to have extensive multiculturalism policies, whereas those with more multi-
cultural policies had fewer civic integration requirements.
By putting up language and knowledge barriers for entry and permanent
residence, countries that adopt civic integration policies also make it harder
for immigrants to acquire citizenship, especially in places where citizenship is
already restricted. This suggests that despite a rhetoric of social inclusion often
accompanying the adoption of civic integration policies, such initiatives likely
undermine immigrants’ ability to engage in democratic participation. Given
that one of the pillars sustaining the normative legitimacy of Western nations
is democratic inclusion, civic integration policies may erode rather than build
democratic solidarity, unless civic integration policies are intertwined with
some level of support for pluralism in the public sphere.
12.4 THE CON SEQUENCES OF

MULTICULTURALISM FOR S OLIDARITY
Notions of a plural public sphere bring us to policies of multiculturalism.

‘Multiculturalism’ can be used as a descriptive term for demographic plural-
ism, a set of normative claims in political philosophy, or a set of policies and
public discourse that recognize and accommodate pluralism (Bloemraad and
Wright 2014). I focus on discourse and policy since it is here that advocates
and detractors have levelled the strongest claims about multiculturalism’s
beneficial impact on justice and solidarity or its corrosive effects on cohesion,
integration, and the welfare state.
Those who champion multiculturalism contend that when discourse and
policy valorize and accommodate cultural specificity, members of minority
communities will feel increased connection to and engagement in the polity
and society where they live. In the terms of this volume, multicultural policies
may increase democratic and civic solidarity, certainly among immigrants,
and hopefully among native-born majority populations.
Critics worry, however, that excessive emphasis on diversity reifies differ-
ences, undermines collective identity, and hinders common political projects,
336 Irene Bloemraad
including the ability to raise taxes for social spending, thereby hurting redis-
tributive solidarity (Gitlin 1995; Goodhart 2004a, 2004b; Huntington 2004;
Miller 1995; Scheffer 2000). Others claim that multiculturalism promotes
cultural isolation and ‘parallel lives’ in which minorities live in self-segregated
communities. This may, some suggest, permit the advancement of illiberal,
‘non-Western’ values that can lead to women’s oppression, homophobia, and
encourage violence and terrorism, especially among young Muslim men
insufficiently integrated into mainstream society. Still others worry that multi-
culturalism impedes majority-language learning and weakens social ties with
those outside the ethnic enclave, hurting socio-economic integration and
increasing welfare dependence (Koopmans 2010). Overall, critics suggest
that multicultural discourse and policy erode solidarity, whether civic, demo-
cratic, or redistributive. The dangers lie not only in impeding immigrants’
integration, but also in producing backlash among long-time citizens and
weakening social capital among all members of society.
A variety of indices measure the degree to which countries adopt multicul-
tural policies (see discussions in Helbling (2013) and Koopmans (2013)). One
of the most widely used is the Multiculturalism Policy Index (MCP), construct-
ed by Banting and Kymlicka. It measures, across twenty-one Western nations
at three time points (1980, 2000, and 2010), eight types of policies as indicators
of ‘some level of public recognition and support for minorities to express their
distinct identities and practices’ (Banting and Kymlicka 2013: 582).7 According
to MCP, Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland are
among the least multicultural countries, while Australia, Canada, and Sweden
rank as having adopted the broadest range of multicultural policies.
Surprisingly, given political rhetoric and academic claims of a multicul-
tural ‘retreat’, there is strong evidence of an expansion in multicultural
policies. Policies of cultural pluralism expanded in twelve countries from
2000 to 2010, remained stable in nine others, and only decreased in three
nations: Denmark, Italy, and the Netherlands (Banting and Kymlicka 2013;
see also Bloemraad and Wright 2014; Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010).
Among the three countries that have retreated from multiculturalism, only
the Dutch case is dramatic; Denmark and Italy had few multicultural policies
to begin with. Thus, although the Dutch case has become a touchstone for a
narrative of backlash, it does not represent the general trend. Analysis of
policy over time indicates resilience or even expansion of multiculturalism,
even as the label has fallen out of favour.
12.4.1 Multiculturalism and Immigrants’ Democratic Solidarity
Does recognizing and supporting pluralism undermine democratic solidarity

or common citizenship? If we take the question literally, to mean immigrants’
acquisition of citizenship status, we find a strong, significant positive relation-

ship with multicultural policies. Estimates by Liebig and Von Haaren (2010:
27–8) indicate that 89 per cent of working age (15–64) immigrants living in
Canada for at least ten years had adopted Canadian citizenship by 2007, a
larger share than among any other country studied. The top three countries in
naturalization, Canada, Sweden (82 per cent), and Australia (81 per cent), are
also the three countries with the highest MCP scores. Conversely, countries
with low MCP scores such as Switzerland and Germany have among the
lowest levels of citizenship acquisition, 35 and 37 per cent, respectively, for
working-age immigrants with over a decade of residence. Indeed, the relation-
ship between aggregate citizenship levels calculated by Liebig and Von Haaren
and MCP score in 2010 is 0.70 (p<0.01) (Bloemraad and Wright 2014: S309).
The positive link between multicultural policies and immigrants’ acquisi-
tion of citizenship might reflect lower barriers to citizenship among countries
that embrace multiculturalism, but it likely also stems from greater symbolic
inclusion and support for citizenship in more multicultural states. In field
research seeking to understand higher levels of naturalization in Canada than
the United States, I elaborate how Canadian multicultural (and settlement)
policies provide more instrumental assistance and encouragement for natur-
alization, and also how the policies provide symbolic resources and interpret-
ations of belonging that are more favourable to membership via citizenship
than in the United States (Bloemraad 2006). Since citizenship is required for
electoral engagement in national politics, states with multicultural policies
likely also foster more democratic solidarity since a greater proportion of
immigrants have the rights and standing to participate.
Considering other political behaviors, data on claims-making suggest that
immigrant-origin minorities living in more multicultural countries are more
likely to engage in nonviolent political activities than those in more mono-
cultural societies, and that activism in the former is directed more at the
country of residence than the homeland (Koopmans et al. 2005: 128, 137).
Preliminary investigation of minority representation in national legislatures
hints that within distinct electoral systems, more multicultural states have
higher minority representation, perhaps because of higher citizenship among
immigrants, but also possibly because political parties are more likely to
recruit minority candidates to run for office (Bloemraad 2013). Strikingly,
countries that do well on gender representation, such as Denmark and Norway,
do quite poorly on minority representation, perhaps a function of limited
multicultural discourse or policies.
Using an alternative measure of political participation based on individuals’
actions, one that summarizes six political activities ranging from contacting a
public official to signing a petition, Wright and Bloemraad (2012: 87; see also
Bloemraad and Wright 2014) find no statistically significant relationship,
positive or negative, between multicultural policy context and political
338 Irene Bloemraad
behaviours for first- or second-generation residents of immigrant-origins in

Europe. Examining trust in and attachment to political institutions—of im-
portance given worries that immigrants bring illiberal, undemocratic values
that they are unlikely to shed in a context of multiculturalism—they also find
no statistically significant relationship between multicultural policies and trust
or attachment (Bloemraad and Wright 2014). A similar analysis, comparing
Canada (scored high on the multiculturalism policy index) with the United
States (which scores moderately) finds higher political trust in Canada than
the United States among first-generation immigrants, a distinction that
strengthens with socioeconomic controls (Wright and Bloemraad 2012: 85).8
When it comes to the second generation, the pattern is primarily one of
integration to the majority’s level of political trust or engagement, irrespective
of multiculturalism. An open question is whether multicultural policies are
raising all residents’ trust and attachment, irrespective of immigrant origins,
which could produce a ‘regression to the mean’ that is higher in multicultural
countries, precisely the claim and aspiration of multicultural theorists.
In sum, whether one considers citizenship, political representation, political
participation, or political attachment, there is no evidence that the adoption
of multicultural policies has a negative effect on indicators that we might consider
tied to democratic solidarity, and there is some evidence for a positive effect.
12.4.2 Multiculturalism and Civic Solidarity
Banting and Kymlicka’s definition of civic solidarity overlaps with some key
elements of multiculturalism, namely acceptance of diversity and a belief in a
communal ‘us’ despite pluralism. People’s self-identification is one way to
measure this. A key critique of multiculturalism is that such policies and
discourse encourage minorities to retain separate identities and reify differ-
ences between groups rather than foster a common identity. Asked how
important their ethnicity and ‘the nation’ were to their sense of who they
are, respondents in more multicultural Canada do indicate a higher salience of
ethnicity than in the United States, among both immigrant and native-born
Canadians (Wright and Bloemraad 2012: 84–5). Stronger ethnic identity does
not, however, come at the cost of identification with Canada. Among non-
white immigrants, national identification is higher in absolute terms than
among those in the United States and equal across the two countries after
socio-economic controls. Distinguishing between second-generation and
other native-born respondents, we find a lower mean ethnic identification
among the second generation in Canada than among those in the United
States, but higher national identification, although differences are not statis-
tically significant (Bloemraad and Wright 2014: S306). Thus, in both Canada
and the United States, the importance of ethnicity decreases from the first to
second generation, and the second generation in both countries report more
identification with the nation than the foreign-born first generation (see also
Berry 2013). Since, based on policy indices, Canada is one of the most
multicultural Western democracies, these findings challenge the idea of an
automatic zero-sum relationship between attachment to minority and majority
identities. Indeed, some argue that far from being zero-sum, hyphenated or
nested identities produce socio-psychological benefits that are easier to achieve
in more multicultural settings (Berry 2005; Nguyen and Benet-Martínez 2013).
An alternative way to judge the existence of a communal ‘we’ is to inves-
tigate discrimination, which can be viewed as evidence of exclusion or lack of
equal membership. Unfortunately, as outlined in an excellent OECD report,
rigorous analysis of cross-national variation in discrimination towards immi-
grants and ethnic minorities is virtually impossible at present (OECD 2013).
The report’s authors consider data on formal discrimination complaints,
minorities’ self-reported perception of discrimination, statistical analyses
(for example, of education or employment outcomes that investigate the
presence of ‘ethnic penalties’), and field experiments where identical resumes
with minority or majority names are submitted to the same job opening or
where similar individuals of different races apply for jobs or housing. All
provide a window onto discrimination, but differences in countries’ institu-
tional and policy structures, a study’s research design, the groups considered,
immigration law, and so forth make cross-national conclusions difficult to
draw, especially as most studies are conducted in only a single country. The
overview of recent field experiments suggests no clear relationship between a
country’s multiculturalism policies and differential call-back for job inter-
views; across many countries surveyed, ethnic and racial minorities have to
apply for almost twice as many jobs in order to secure the same number of
interviews as a majority resident (2013: 199–200).
Data on immigrants’ perception of discrimination are also inconclusive,
although there is a bit more evidence of a positive effect of multicultural
policies. Wright and Bloemraad (2012: 83) find that foreign-born residents
in contexts with more multicultural policies report less discrimination in
European Social Survey data collected between 2000 and 2008, a result that
is robust to individual-level controls, but not conclusive given large confidence
intervals. Distinguishing first- and second-generation respondents in an ex-
panded dataset running to 2012, results change a bit; a hypothetical minority
male first-generation immigrant with modest education is roughly 3 percent-
age points likelier to perceive discrimination in more multicultural countries
than in less multicultural ones, but this difference disappears in the second
generation (Bloemraad and Wright 2014: S308). An OECD comparison across
four slightly different sets of questions in Europe, North America, and New
Zealand also finds no conclusive pattern of reported discrimination by multi-
cultural context in the first generation, but stronger evidence that second-
340 Irene Bloemraad
generation residents in Europe are more likely to perceive discrimination than

in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. The latter three countries
score high or moderately on MCP, but they are also traditional immigrant
settler countries and, according to MIPEX, Canada and the United States have
the strongest anti-discrimination policies in place to protect minorities. It is
thus hard to tease out an effect of multicultural policy, per se, independent of
(just) anti-discrimination legislation or affirmative action policies, although it
is also likely that the two sets of public interventions, combined, are more
powerful in establishing institutional and normative frameworks to prevent
discrimination.
When it comes to statistical analyses of actual outcomes, such as attempts to
evaluate whether ethnic penalties exist in employment, one careful examin-
ation suggests that, across eleven OECD countries, the median male minority
unemployment rate was 1.6 times as high as that of the majority group, a
similar ratio to the minority-to-majority call back differences in the field
studies. Across countries, Austria, Belgium, and Germany exhibit particularly
large ethnic penalties, with relatively low ones in Australia, Canada and the
United States, and somewhat larger, but still modest penalties in the United
Kingdom and Sweden (OECD 2013: 209–10). These groupings fall roughly,
though imperfectly, into less multicultural and more multicultural camps.
Still, we can also imagine other factors at play, such as welfare state regime.
Perhaps most important for responding to critics of multiculturalism, there is
no evidence that people living in places with more and broader multicultural
policies discriminate against or exclude immigrants to a greater extent than in
‘colour-blind’, ‘republican’, or assimilatory policy contexts. If anything, the
evidence hints at the opposite, though better cross-national studies are needed.
Examination of discrimination highlights how solidarity involves both
minority and majority members of a society. Do multicultural policies increase
majority residents’ sense of solidarity with immigrant-origin minorities? The
assumption of proponents is that they do, by broadening notions of national
identity to include ethno-cultural minorities. A shift in national identity could
be important since, on balance, those who conceive of national identity as
based on common political principles rather than ascriptive traits tend to
express more tolerance for members of out-groups (Weldon 2006; Wright
2011b). In Canada, multiculturalism serves as an identity touchstone for the
majority population: only 12 per cent of Canadian residents believe that multi-
culturalism is unimportant to Canadian national identity (Reitz 2011: 15).
Indeed, in Canada, those who express the greatest patriotism are also those
more likely to support immigration and multiculturalism (Citrin, Johnston, and
Wright 2012).
But perhaps, beyond Canada, multiculturalism instead produces backlash,
undermining collective solidarity. Multiculturalism might thus facilitate im-
migrants’ civic and democratic solidarity with the native-born, but generate
exclusionary nationalism among the majority, undermining all three solida-

rities identified by Banting and Kymlicka. Few empirical studies evaluate this
question, though the discrimination data speak to this question in part since
evidence of discrimination is a likely indicator of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamics.9
Studying national identity across eighteen democracies, Wright (2011a)
finds that more open citizenship regimes and high levels of social spending
correlate with more immigrant-inclusive definitions of the national commu-
nity. However, he also finds that citizens in more multicultural nations have
moved to slightly more ascriptive—and exclusionary—conceptions of nation-
al identity, evidence consistent with backlash narratives. Among those strong-
ly opposed to immigration in sixteen European countries, anti-immigrant
attitudes become more tightly tied, over time, to distrust of parliament,
politicians, the judicial system, and police in places with more multicultural
policies (Citrin, Levy, and Wright 2014). The authors speculate that this link
could facilitate the rise of far-right parties. At the same time, Citrin, Levy, and
Wright (2014) find no evidence that multicultural policies have a net effect
on political trust, suggesting a countervailing dynamic among those with
moderate attitudes. This result is consistent with a study of nineteen Western
nations that finds more extensive multicultural policies (and more economic
equality) mitigate or reverse the erosion of aggregate trust or civic and political
participation among the majority population given demographic change
(Kesler and Bloemraad 2010; see also Crepaz 2006; Weldon 2006). These
studies hint that different segments of the majority population likely react to
multicultural policies in distinct ways, responses that are also conditioned by
other political and economic dynamics in a country.
12.4.3 Multiculturalism and Redistributive Solidarity
Some observers worry that multiculturalism might affect the feelings of

solidarity posited as necessary for public support of taxation and the provision
of public resources, a hypothesis called the ‘progressives’ dilemma’ (Barry
2002; Goodhart 2004a, 2004b; Miller 1995). Generous welfare states in
Scandinavia, it is argued, were founded on homogeneous populations; the
diversity of the United States, in contrast, plays into a weak welfare state
(Alesina and Glaeser 2004). How might multicultural policies aggravate or
ameliorate the potential relationship between greater diversity and less redis-
tributive generosity? Banting et al. (2006) find, on average, no greater erosion
of the welfare state in places with stronger multiculturalism policies, whether
one measures social spending, redistribution through taxes and transfers,
levels of child poverty, or income inequality.
Indeed, empirically, it is hard to elaborate clear mechanisms through which
policies centred on diversity affect something as amorphous as redistributive
342 Irene Bloemraad
solidarity, net of other policies and a host of causal factors driving welfare
state arrangements. Not only do analysts need to take into account the compos-
ition of minority populations, but they must also contend with other predictors
of social policy that have nothing to do with diversity, from party systems to
unionization. The empirical difficulty in linking multiculturalism to redistribu-
tive solidarity is, I believe, thornier than links to democratic or civic solidarity.
12.4.4 Summarizing the Evidence on Multiculturalism’s

Consequences
So do countries with more robust multicultural policies experience greater

solidarity? Among the immigrant foreign-born generation, there is no evi-
dence to support the claim that diversity policies undermine civic or demo-
cratic solidarity, and modest evidence to indicate that multiculturalism
facilitates citizenship acquisition and minority representation, increases iden-
tification with the nation of residence and reduces feelings of exclusion or
discrimination. When it comes to the majority population, political discourse
and surveys provide evidence of backlash among some people, yet when policy
is separated from demographic multiculturalism, it is hard to find evidence of
greater declines in trust and participation among the general public in coun-
tries with more multicultural policies. Multiculturalism does not appear to
have affected welfare policies and, as noted earlier, more countries had adopted
recognition and accommodation policies in 2010 than in 2000, though the term
‘multiculturalism’ has clearly lost favour, despite policy expansion. Dissatisfac-
tion with diversity has generated coercive civic integration policies targeting
immigrants in some countries, but this appears to have occurred more in
nations and among people who were ambivalent, or even hostile, towards
immigration and diversity to begin with.
12.5 THE DEVELOPMENT AND PERSISTENCE OF

MULTICULTURALISM: ELITES, CONFLICT,
AND N EW SOLIDARITIES
Most early adopters of multiculturalism have stayed the course, and more
countries have enacted multicultural (and anti-discrimination) policies over
time. The persistence and expansion of multiculturalism might flow from policy
successes, even though these are not often lauded in public debate. But what of
origins—how were existing multicultural policies developed, and what might
these origins tell us about the potential for policy adoption in other places?
Surprisingly, we have little comparative research on the development and

persistence of multicultural policies. As a first step, I examine a few countries
that were among the first to articulate a discourse and policy of multicultur-
alism. Early development and diffusion were primarily elite-led, related to
desires for integration through recognition of diversity rather than assimila-
tion, and often were related to challenges of minority inclusion that went
beyond immigrant-origin populations. Elites were thus also engaged in incre-
mental policy change to manage minority claims more broadly. I examine the
Canadian and American cases in more detail to identify mechanisms of
change, especially in the development of a pluralistic national identity,
which can generate a new discourse of civic and democratic solidarity.
I remain cautious, however, over the language of solidarity. In North
America—and likely elsewhere –change was not as an organic outgrowth of
broad-based solidarity, but a product of political conflict.
12.5.1 Adoption and Diffusion of Multiculturalism
There is no strong evidence that multicultural policies arose from a broad

policy preference by majority voters or extensive lobbying by immigrant-
origin groups. Rather, among early adopters—Canada (1971), Australia
(1973), and Sweden (1975)—multicultural discourse and policy were often
elite-driven by domestic actors, such as politicians, civil servants, academics,
and key civil society actors, including leaders from some (often European-
origin) ethnic communities.10 Usually promoted by centre-left or social demo-
cratic political actors, multiculturalism was favoured as an integration strategy
that negated prior assimilation or racial purity orientations. It would be
wrong, however, to link the development of multicultural policy tightly to a
particular political ideology or agenda. For example, Borevi (2013a) notes that
initial support for diversity policies in Sweden in the 1960s came from the
Conservatives, with subsequent support by the governing Social Democrats.
In Canada, expansion of multiculturalism in the 1980s was undertaken by the
right-of-centre Conservatives. A common theme among accounts of early
policy development suggests a top-down process in which elites conceptual-
ized and advanced multiculturalism primarily to answer current or potential
social problems, to intervene on the issue of diversity management, and to
reject an assimilatory rhetoric and policy.
Early multiculturalism was arguably as much about changing symbolic
hierarchies and instituting a new public discourse of minority equality as
about advancing laws and policies. The Canadian Prime Minister’s 1971
speech announcing multiculturalism in the House of Commons challenged
the country’s traditional English–French duality, claiming ‘there is no official
culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other’. At the
344 Irene Bloemraad
same time, the speech emphasized immigrant and ethnic minorities’ ‘full
participation’ in Canadian society and the goal of ‘national unity’. In Australia,
a multicultural society was part of a model of immigrant settlement around
equal opportunity and a ‘voluntary bond’ of unity (Koleth 2010). In Sweden,
multicultural policies were tied to eliminating socio-economic inequality
and as a rejection of Sweden’s pre-war focus on the ‘purity’ of the Swedish
population. As a result, the Swedish immigrant and minority policy of 1975
initiated a special ‘freedom of culture objective’ to help immigrants and their
children retain their language and culture (Borevi 2013b: 149). Once initi-
ated, subsequent pressure by immigrant-origin communities pushed policy
evolution in all three countries. For example, as migration shifted to non-
European countries, anti-racism initiatives gained prominence. Each story of
adoption also has important country-specific elements, related to indigenous
populations, fears of separatism, and development of the welfare state. In the
words of Keith Banting, policy and institutional change occurred through
incremental adaptation, through layering, policy drift, and institutional
shifting reminiscent of the layers of physical history studied by archaeologists
(2014: 70).
The spread of multiculturalism to other countries requires further research.
Diffusion mechanisms likely include international networks of academics and
elite policy-makers (including those embedded in regional institutions such as
the European Union (EU)), as well as changing legitimacy norms, linking
multiculturalism with a modern approach to minority relations. Active pro-
motion by early adopters might have encouraged the practice elsewhere,
especially as politicians in places such as Canada held up multiculturalism in
the international arena as a success story to be emulated (Kymlicka 2004). The
role of courts in advancing cultural or group rights, through domestic law or
within the EU, is disputed (e.g., Joppke 2010; Koopmans, Michalowski, and
Waibel 2012). Transnational social movements and norm diffusion through
school systems might also be at play, although many accounts of multicultur-
alism’s spread in the 1980s and early 1990s privilege elite-driven change rather
than bottom-up mobilization.
12.5.2 Rejection or Persistence
To the extent that multiculturalism was ‘imposed’ in a top-down manner,

one could argue that elites were engaged in a form of social engineering
potentially at odds with how many ordinary residents viewed their member-
ship in the state and to each other. In the Netherlands, it is argued, retreat
from multiculturalism has been caught up in a general populist backlash,
especially among those who feel left behind by globalization (Buruma 2006;
Entzinger 2014). Some observers argue that voters punished elites for forcing
multiculturalism on them and paying insufficient attention to majority
citizens’ desire for a core culture and national values. Populism also goes
hand in hand with what might be a new type of elite-led policy change: far-
right political leaders have politicized multiculturalism for political gain over
other issues of public concern, such as economic globalization (Helbling,
Reeskins, and Stolle 2013).
Those on the political left also worry about multiculturalism, especially the
progressives’ dilemma that diversity might undermine support for the welfare
state (Goodhart 2004a, 2004b; Scheffer 2000) and fear that identity politics
deflect attention from other progressive causes (Gitlin 1995). Muslim immi-
grants are most often targeted as bringing illiberal values into host nations,
especially over gender equality, which can spur feminists to mobilize against
multiculturalism (Thomas 2006). Multicultural discourse and policies seem to
stand little chance when condemned by parties of the right and activists on the
left. Unlike with immigration or citizenship policies, courts or international
institutions do not appear to act as a strong bulwark to protect multicultur-
alism from domestic political backlash.
Sketched in such broad strokes—namely, multiculturalism as elite-driven
social engineering which then flounders in the face of popular backlash urged
on by political parties—the persistence and even expansion of multicultural
policies are mystifying. In Sweden, multiculturalism elicits debate, especially
with the rise of the right-wing Sweden Democrats, yet all other political parties
support a self-understanding of Sweden as a culturally diverse society (Borevi
2013a). Open and humanitarian nationhood is juxtaposed to a much older,
and discredited, notion of Swedish racial ‘purity’ and the perceived exclusion-
ary stance of Sweden’s neighbours, notably Denmark. In Canada, reaction to
rising Québécois nationalism, combined with desires to forge an identity
distinct from the United States and the United Kingdom, raised multicultur-
alism to a core part of Canadian identity (Bloemraad 2006; Winter 2011). In
the terms of this volume, how did notions of multiculturalism become a source
of solidarity, or at least an accepted part of national identity, in some countries?
12.6 COLLECTIVE I DENTITY I N CANA DA AND THE

UNITED STATES: FROM RACIST TO POST-RACIAL?
The embrace of immigrant-generated diversity and multiculturalism as part of a

country’s national identity is difficult because immigrants might not hold
citizenship and they may have their legitimacy challenged in a country that is
not their birthplace. Focusing on the North American experience, I posit that
diversity discourse and policies that include immigrant groups are more likely to
gain and retain legitimacy if they develop in conjunction with claims-making by
native-born minorities. As native-born minorities seek greater recognition and
346 Irene Bloemraad
equality, which usually includes a call to celebrate their community and pro-
mote initiatives to right inequities, policy space opens for immigrant-origin
communities. This opening must be reinforced and embedded into the collect-
ive imagination and into concrete institutional change through law, bureau-
cracy, policy, and the educational system in order to stick. These gains can be
extended to immigrant-origin populations and reinforced in a context of
relatively generous citizenship policy—through birth or naturalization—and a
political system open to, but which can contain, ‘ethnic’ politics.
In sketching this story, it is important to remember that, from the vantage
point of the late 1940s, it was far from evident that Canada or the United
States would celebrate diversity as part of national identity half a century later,
identities that remain contested. Laws and practice kept most non-white
immigrants from moving to North America, restricted their naturalization,
and denied people of colour full rights, even if they held citizenship. Members
of US Congress refused to change immigration laws in large part over worries
about racial mixing; the prime minister of Canada in 1947 vowed to limit
‘Oriental’ migration so as not to alter the ‘fundamental character’ of the
Canadian population. Yet by 2009, almost two-thirds of American and Can-
adian survey respondents agreed that immigration enriches their country’s
culture with new customs and ideas (German Marshall Fund 2009: 19). In
Canada, when a 2010 opinion survey asked residents what was ‘very import-
ant’ to Canadian national identity, 56 per cent of respondents underscored the
centrality of multiculturalism, more than the 47 per cent who supported
hockey. Indeed, with the election of Barack Obama to the US Presidency in
2008, some even talked about a ‘post-ethnic’ or ‘post-racial’ social order
(Hollinger 2011). In Canada, two recent Governors General—the Queen’s
representative in Canada and nominal head of state—have been women of
immigrant and racial minority background, Adrienne Clarkson, born in Hong
Kong, and Michäelle Jean, born in Haiti. The label of ‘post-racial’, applied to
the United States or Canada, is problematic: it ignores the empirical reality
of very different life chances based on racial minority status, from one’s
chances to live in poverty, end up in jail, or die a pre-mature death to one’s
wealth, health, and happiness. The 2016 US election further challenges such a
label. Yet at the same time, whether in the United States or Canada, the
political ‘face of the nation’ has undergone a transformation unimaginable
seven decades earlier.
12.6.1 Legitimating National Identity Shocks:

Actors and Timing
Religious, ethnic, and racial hierarchies were integral to early North American
immigration, with striking similarities on either side of the forty-ninth
parallel. In the late nineteenth century, the most desirable immigrants, in the
view of the public and government, were western and northern Europeans
(preferably Protestant), followed by other white Christians, Jews, and at the
bottom, non-European peoples. Starting in 1882, the United States enacted a
series of Chinese exclusion acts that barred almost all Chinese immigration; in
1885, Canada instituted a head tax, directed only at Chinese, with the same
purpose (Daniels 2004; Ong Hing 1993; Kelley and Trebilcock 1998). In the
first decade of the twentieth century, both countries entered into agreements
with Japan to eliminate Japanese migration. At the subnational level, states
such as California and the province of British Columbia reinforced Asian
migrants’ legal and social inequality by passing laws restricting Asians’ access
to land, licences, juries, and the ballot box.
These attitudes remained largely intact after the Second World War. In
1947, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King famously re-affirmed the
government’s commitment to a white, British-centred immigration policy.
Speaking to the House of Commons, he declared, ‘The people of Canada do
not wish . . . to make a fundamental alteration in the character of our popula-
tion . . . . Any considerable Oriental immigration would give rise to social and
economic problems’ (cited in Kelley and Trebilcock (1998: 312)). A similar
sentiment and logic were articulated by southern Democrats in the US Con-
gress. They defended the United States’ national origin quotas, which heavily
favoured migrants from northern and western Europe, as facilitating social
and cultural assimilation (Tichenor 2002: 179, 192). Rogers Smith (1993)
argues that ‘ascriptive’ Americanism was a constituent element of American
nationhood. The same was true in Canada, which used both law and practice
to keep non-Europeans out of the country. In 1966, two-thirds of new
immigrants to Canada came from just five countries: the United Kingdom,
Italy, the United States, Germany, or Portugal (Canada 1966).
Against this backdrop, the 1960s were a period of enormous change for
both countries. In immigration policy, the Canadian government began to
remove race or nationality criteria from entrance requirements starting in
1962, while the US Immigration and Nationality Act, passed in 1965, ended
the system of national origin quotas. These changes occurred in tandem
with momentous challenges to each nation’s self-image. The US civil rights
movement demanded equality for African-Americans and other native-born
minorities; in Canada, rising separatism among Francophone Quebecers
raised the fear of national dissolution.
Importantly, changes in immigration law were largely tangential to native-
born minorities’ activism. Immigration reform was not a central issue for the
civil rights movement; in 1970, less than five per cent of the US population
was foreign-born (Campbell and Lennon 1999). Indeed, few anticipated the
demographic transformations that the new immigration law would bring,
given its focus on family reunification as the main pathway into the United
348 Irene Bloemraad
States. One of the bill’s sponsors, Emanuel Celler testified, ‘Since the peoples
of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could
immigrate from those countries’ (cited in Wolgin and Bloemraad (2010: 50)).
The domestic fight against racial exclusion animated some progressives’
support for change to US immigration law, but as important, and likely
more so, were foreign policy considerations and the build-up of incremental
policy changes over prior decades (Daniels 2004; Tichenor 2002; Wolgin and
Bloemraad 2010).
In Canada, changes to immigration law flowed from economic consider-
ations (Green 1976; Kelley and Trebilcock 1998) and concern over Canada’s
moral and political standing in the international community (Triadalopoulos
2012). Largely articulated by civil servants and key politicians, change was
divorced from the central national identity challenge of the day: growing
Québécois nationalism and grievances over French Canadians’ status and
socio-economic position in the country. Many Francophone separatists saw
common cause with the situation of black Americans and those in the Third
World, equating the place of Francophones within English Canada to internal
colonialism. Their activism occurred within a broad arc of gradually loosening
ties to Great Britain—as seen in the adoption of a Canadian passport and
citizenship in 1947—and a desire to distinguish the country from the United
States. To respond to growing Francophone nationalism, the federal govern-
ment established, in 1963, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Bicul-
turalism to report on and make recommendations for the development of the
Canadian confederation. Although the Commission’s terms included a nod to
‘the contribution made by other ethnic groups’, its primary mandate was to
further the equal partnership between ‘the two founding races’, the British and
the French.11 The use of the word ‘race’ to refer to the two groups, which
represented the national identity understanding of the time, is striking.
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we can see that the
1960s and 1970s represented a watershed, a moment when claims to inclu-
sion (or independence) made by long-standing minorities forced the two
nations to articulate a national identity that embraced diversity much more
than previously. In the United States, ideas of assimilation or Americaniza-
tion lost their luster. This was in part due to the continuing cultural pride of
later-generation European Americans, but even more because of the civil
rights movement. Black power and black pride movements, and complimen-
tary efforts by Chicano, Asian American, and Native American activists,
brought attention to claims for equality, inclusion, and the valorization of
cultural heritage.
In Canada, lobbying by European-origin Canadians led to the abandon-
ment of biculturalism, but the retention of bilingualism. In 1971, Prime
Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau committed the government to a new policy
of multiculturalism that would remove barriers to participation and
integration, but also support groups’ efforts to maintain their cultural heritage.
Trudeau apparently took little interest in the policy after his speech, and some
commentators see the embrace of multiculturalism as a federal ploy to under-
mine Francophones’ claims to special status (Labelle, Rocher, and Rocher
1995). At the time, multiculturalism was envisioned rather narrowly, centred
on recognizing European immigrants and mostly focused on folkloric aspects
of diversity (Brotz 1981; Kallen 1982).
Why were civil rights and Francophone nationalism so central to immi-
grants’ ability to be part of the American and Canadian national communities?
Two elements stand out: the actors involved and the timing. Because the key
actors were native-born minorities with long-standing roots in the two coun-
tries, it was hard for elites and majority citizens to dismiss claims of inequality
and calls for recognition. Whereas foreigners can be seen as ‘invited’ guests
who should not ask for too much (or, alternatively, unwanted guests), the
claims of African-Americans and Francophones were less easily dismissed.
The two countries’ respective national narratives—including a civil war fought
in the United States to end slavery, and the notion of two founding peoples in
Canada—provided normative weight for elites and many ordinary people to
consider changes in discourse and policy.
The relative unimportance of immigration during this period was,
I hypothesize, also an asset for expanding diversity narratives and policies to
those of immigrant-origins. In Canada, immigration in the 1960s and 1970s
was still dominated by Europeans, while in the United States, little new
migration occurred from the mid-1920s into the 1960s. This provided a period
during which institutional changes such as civil rights law, multicultural
programmes, and curricular changes could begin without strong linkages to
fears over mass migration or the arrival of people of very different religious,
cultural, and racial backgrounds.
12.6.2 Policy Drifts: The Importance of Political Inclusion

and Contestation
Early transformations initiated by native-born minorities must, however, be

reinforced—even appropriated—by immigrants, their descendants, and advo-
cates for new minorities in order to include immigrants into rhetoric and
policies of multiculturalism. Here, in North America, the political incorpor-
ation of immigrants and their children is a critical part of the story, including
open naturalization policy, relatively high levels of citizenship acquisition,
birthright citizenship, and active participation in electoral and protest politics.
Absent a vigorous and vocal mobilization that carries political clout, assimi-
lationist or anti-immigrant mobilization can gain traction against perceived
elite-imposed diversity management.
350 Irene Bloemraad
Immigrants’ acquisition of citizenship has long been a normative expect-

ation in Canada and the United States, although historically naturalization was
only envisioned for those of European origin.12 Post-Second World War,
immigrants in both countries faced a relatively accessible citizenship process:
a short residency period (three to five years), demonstration of majority
language ability, and evidence of some civic knowledge, including familiarity
with government institutions. In the early 1970s, over three in five immigrants
living in Canada and the United States held the citizenship of their adopted
nation (Bloemraad 2006: 31). Furthermore, both North American nations
accord automatic birthright citizenship to those born on their territory,
ensuring the political inclusion of the children of immigrants. Birthright
citizenship is given regardless of parents’ status, even if parents are temporary
labour migrants or international students, or even if they have no legal
residence papers at all.
This open political incorporation, through naturalization or birthright
citizenship, makes it harder to adopt an anti-immigrant narrative of demo-
cratic or civic solidarity as articulated by far-right parties in Europe. Thus, in
the American context, when socially conservative politicians and interest
groups worry about immigration, they often distinguish between unwanted
‘illegal’ migrants, on the one hand, and hardworking immigrants who ‘play by
the rules’, on the other (Brown 2013). In making these distinctions, they allow,
even if grudgingly, that some immigrants are part of the national community.
Politicians or pundits must specify their objections to immigration and diver-
sity more carefully in the face of politically active immigrant communities.
Citizenship status also provides legitimacy for claims-making.
In the Canadian case, the transformation of the political right is particularly
instructive, in part because the political incorporation of immigrants occurs
more quickly in Canada than in the United States (Bloemraad 2006). At its
founding in 1987, the Reform Party, a Western populist party, was antagon-
istic to multiculturalism and suspicious of immigration; it was the closest
cousin to the anti-foreigner populism found in many European countries.
In its 1988 ‘Blue Book’, the Reform Party outlined a political platform that
used language akin to Mackenzie King’s views from four decades earlier. With
the caveat, ‘Immigration should not be based on race or creed, as it was in the
past’, the Blue Book nevertheless proclaimed that immigration policy should
not ‘be explicitly designed to radically or suddenly alter the ethnic makeup
of Canada, as it increasingly seems to be’.13 The Reform Party’s 1991 Blue
Book dropped the language of Canada’s ‘ethnic makeup’, but it committed the
party to opposing ‘the current concept of multiculturalism and hyphenated
Canadianism’ by abolishing the programme and ministry dedicated to
multiculturalism.14
This populist party succeeded in first displacing, then taking over the
traditional right-of-centre party in Canada, leading to the creation of a new
Conservative Party in 2003. As party leaders sought to contest national

elections coast to coast within a ‘winner-take-all’ electoral system, the party’s
tenor towards diversity and its outreach efforts to immigrant-origin voters
changed markedly. This was due, in no small part, to the electoral power of
immigrant-origin Canadians. In 2006, an astounding 86 per cent of foreign-
born adults who had lived in Canada at least three years (the minimum
residency requirement for citizenship) reported Canadian citizenship.15
While not all vote, enough do that politicians must be attentive to this
electorate.
The Canadian—and American—electoral and party systems also help mod-
erate the political expression of anti-diversity and anti-immigrant sentiment.
In many European parliamentary systems, a radical party can gain some seats
in the national legislature—and consequently political voice—by garnering a
low proportion of total votes. In the Swedish case, the Sverigedemokraterna
Party needed only four per cent of the vote to gain parliamentary representa-
tion in 2010. In North America, political parties seeking national office must
engage in a ‘big tent’ strategy, trying to reconcile diverse opinions on immi-
gration within the party. When the re-fashioned Canadian Conservative party
won a majority in the 2011 federal elections—headed by former Reform Party
member, Prime Minister Stephen Harper—it succeeded in part because it
sought out immigrant-origin voters, including those termed ‘visible minor-
ities’ in Canada. In contrast to the Reform Party’s early platform, the govern-
ment did not eliminate the country’s multiculturalism policy or rescind the
1988 Multiculturalism Act, and it continued to admit significant numbers of
immigrants from around the world. In 2015, when the Conservative party
embraced a strong anti-Muslim rhetoric, this served as one target for the
eventual triumphant Liberal party to win national elections.
The effects of the electoral and party systems can also be seen in the United
States when Republican candidates take ‘harder’ stances on immigration
during primary elections (which select the party’s nominee), then subsequently
moderate their position and tone in the general election. This was presidential
candidate Mitt Romney’s (unsuccessful) strategy in the 2012 general election.
In 2016, Republican candidate Donald Trump did not follow this pattern,
retaining a strong, negative stance against Mexican and Muslim immigrants.
Such rhetoric was popular among his strongest supporters, and perhaps helped
him secure victory in 2016. But survey evidence also suggests a significant cost
to the Republican Party among nonwhite voters: the 2016 election appears to
have pushed majorities in the Latino, Asian American and Muslim commu-
nities to vote for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Given that the
proportion of white Christians in the US population is on a steady decline, such
partisan realignment bodes ill for the future fortunes of the Republican Party.
A possible implication for Europe is that as immigrants and their descend-
ants make up a growing share of the electorate, they might open up national
352 Irene Bloemraad
identity discourses. More generally, when immigrants and their descendants

enjoy a relatively high level of political incorporation, and politicians decide to
solicit the support of immigrant-origin voters, those on the right (and left)
must temper anti-immigrant or anti-minority rhetoric, and they are more
likely to articulate a national identity or notion of solidarity that includes
people from a variety of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds.
12.6.3 Institutionalizing Change
Political activism is insufficient without legislative, bureaucratic, and policy

changes that institutionalize multiculturalism and embed it within more
inclusive notions of national identity. Civil rights legislation, the enshrinement
of equality guarantees, and anti-discrimination efforts are also critical. Not
only do they offer real protections for minorities, but with time such laws and
policies become a taken-for-granted part of society, changing political culture
in gradual but consequential ways. Attitudinal change is further spurred by
curricular initiatives and the efforts of teachers to promote multiculturalism
among the younger generation.
To borrow from the field of international relations, such institutionalization
provides immigrants and their descendants with both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power
(Nye 1990). In foreign relations, ‘hard power’ is harnessed when countries
resort to military force and economic clout to cajole or coerce particular
results. Applied domestically, minorities can use courts and legal protections
to force changes on people and organizations. But coercion can also lead to
resistance and push-back. Concurrent ‘soft’ power, the ability to achieve ends
through persuasion and attraction rather than coercion, plays out through
diversity instruction in classrooms and a discourse of multiculturalism that
can serve as a symbolic resource that immigrant-origin groups use to make
claims for recognition. In this way, legislative and bureaucratic changes not
only modify hierarchies of power and inequality, but they also alter cultural
notions of the nation and who fits in.
This process is readily apparent in the American case. The civil rights
movement brought about a ‘minority rights revolution’ (Skrentny 2002) that
has facilitated immigrants’ claims-making and national inclusion. The 1964
Civil Rights Act outlawed racial segregation in schools, workplaces, and public
accommodations. These protections were extended in ensuing years through
amendments and further legislation. Federal and state governments also
initiated policies to open up schools, small business opportunities, and jobs
through ‘affirmative action’, such as preferential admissions, contracting, and
hiring of minorities. As Congress and state legislatures developed new legal
protections and bureaucracies implemented policies, the ideals of equity and
pluralism were legitimized. As Kasinitz (2008) argues, the original goal of
righting historical injustices against native-born African-Americans was recast

as a means to promote diversity and minority representation more broadly,
benefiting racial minorities of immigrant origin.
Civil rights legislation also put into motion special policies for linguistic
minorities, regardless of national origin, which were particularly relevant to
immigrant communities (Bloemraad and de Graauw 2012). The President and
US Congress used Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to mandate that
administrative agencies hire bilingual personnel and translate forms, notices,
and applications for limited-English proficient (LEP) individuals in certain
contexts. Similarly, Section 203 of the 1975 amendments to the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, another piece of civil rights legislation, mandates the provision of
voting information and ballots in non-English languages for certain US juris-
dictions. Another product of the 1960s, the federal Bilingual Education Act of
1968 provided—until it expired in 2002—a federal remedy for discrimination
against public-school students who did not speak English and made federal
funding available for programmes taught in languages other than English.
Of course, processes of institutionalization are not uni-directional. In edu-
cation, the 2001 federal English Language Acquisition Act (ELAA), enacted as
Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act, replaced prior legislation and
contained no reference to bilingual education. Concurrently, voters in Cali-
fornia, Arizona, and Massachusetts passed ballot measures to ban bilingual
education in state public schools in 1998, 2000, and 2002, respectively. The
federal 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act, also known as the Welfare Reform Act, denied social welfare benefits to
many legal permanent residents, drawing a bright boundary between citizens
and immigrants with permanent residency, a possible case of welfare chau-
vinism and indicator of more limited redistributive solidarity.
Nevertheless, policy and legislative changes begun in the civil rights era have
decisively moved policy and discourse beyond a singular focus on American-
ization. Even without bilingual education, many US schools regularly incorp-
orate activities such as ‘Hispanic Heritage’ month into the curriculum or
spotlight the contribution of specific groups in history, government, and English
classes. California public school curricula—like those in British Columbia—
now underscore the important contributions of Chinese migrants 150 years
earlier in building railroads and participating in the Gold Rush. The ability to
use judicial review and the legitimacy of law and courts as an avenue to fight for
civil rights—now extended to immigrant rights—has also led courts to protect
immigrants and helps legitimate the demands of immigrant-origin minorities.
In Canada, one seldom hears the term ‘civil rights’ to encompass the
demands for equality by minority groups, though the two countries enshrine
many of the same protections. Instead, Canadians speak of equality guaran-
tees, Charter protections, anti-discrimination initiatives, and human rights.
The difference in the language lies in part in the relative newness of a written
354 Irene Bloemraad
set of rights guarantees in Canada. The fundamental nature of certain rights

and freedoms was only established in Canada in 1982 through the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms, providing individuals with a means to challenge gov-
ernment in court. The Charter gave constitutional strength to the prohibition
against discrimination, it affirmed equality guarantees, it protected equity
hiring (a Canadian form of affirmative action), and it even instructed judges
to keep the multicultural heritage of Canada in mind when rendering deci-
sions. The MIPEX ranks Canada and the United States as the two countries
with the strongest anti-discrimination infrastructure of the thirty-seven coun-
tries surveyed.16 The enshrinement of the Charter precipitated the Canadian
version of a rights revolution (Cairns 1992). It has become a legal resource that
minorities can use to combat unequal treatment, and it has become a foun-
dation stone of contemporary notions of Canadian identity.
Official multicultural policy, combined with immigrant settlement pro-
grammes, has also promoted immigrant civic and political incorporation
within a context of pluralism (Bloemraad 2006). As a ‘hard resource’, project-
ed spending for Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s integration pro-
grammes, including transfers to provincial counterparts, stood at slightly
over $1 billion in the 2010–11 fiscal year (Seidle 2010: 4). But there are also
important symbolic repercussions. Not only does public funding communi-
cate that multiculturalism ideology is important for national identity, but the
way funding is administered also sends a message. A substantial portion of
monies for diversity and integration initiatives get channelled to community-
based organizations. By contracting with civil society groups, governments
send a message that they want to work in partnership with immigrant
communities and that they trust them to use public funds in line with national
goals. Such funding also feeds back into political mobilization and voice, since
public support helps build an organizational structure and leadership base that
immigrants can use to advocate on their own behalf (Bloemraad 2006).
Of course, multiculturalism and diversity discourse are not a panacea, and
there are definite limits in the public’s mind. In Canada, there have been
controversies about the use of shari’a law during arbitration in the Ontario
judicial system, the right of Sikhs to wear turbans in the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police or to carry the kirpan in schools, and over the accommoda-
tion of religious minorities in Quebec. The success of multiculturalism as an
ideology and idiom for national identity must be understood as part and
parcel of a complex web of minority relations: a non-British, non-American
Canadian national identity was (and is) negotiated within an underlying threat
of Quebec separation and vocal claims-making by Canada’s aboriginal popu-
lation (Bloemraad 2006; Winter 2011). In the United States, despite the
election of a president with African origins, and a much more diverse and
open collective understanding of ‘we’ than existed even fifty years earlier,
white police shootings of black citizens still occur and generate outrage,
while public debate over immigration continue to contain racialized language

and references to crime that renders certain people ‘others’ who should be
excluded from the national community at all costs.
It is important to underscore that none of the national identity changes
in post-Second World War Canada or the United States—changes that we
could consider possibly analogous to re-imagined national solidarity—came
easily. Changes arose out of contestation. Political and civic battles were
fought in legislatures, in courts, through the ballot box, and on the streets.
They occurred when native-born minorities militated for inclusion and when
immigrants mobilized. The election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency
is likely to drive a cycle of increased political conflict. Yet the role of
contestation is often lost in contemporary politicians’ or academics’ worries
about how diversity undermines social trust and social capital. In this sense,
contemporary calls for ‘social cohesion’, in Europe and elsewhere, which are
predicated on fears that ethno-racial diversity undermines collective solidarity
misread the history of collective identity change.
12.7 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
If solidarity out of diversity must be forged—and the story of North America

suggests that this is the case—what are the prospects for European countries?
Many Europeans, including politicians, academics, and ordinary citizens,
claim that building solidarity out of immigrant-origin diversity is more diffi-
cult for their nations, given the weight of history. Canada and the United
States, it is claimed, have always been immigrant nations. A frequent corollary
to this contention is that while North Americans might embrace a discourse of
multiculturalism, robust anti-discrimination policies, relatively open citizen-
ship, and non-coercive civic integration policies, European countries must do
the opposite: privilege civic integration into a majority core, police citizenship
through linguistic, civic, and even economic integration requirements, and
strike diversity discourse from public law and policy to avoid popular backlash
and divided societies. A simplistic version of this argument is that while open
citizenship and multiculturalism might work in North America, they do not
in Europe.
As argued in the first part of this chapter, claims of policy failure have little
empirical foundation. There is no solid evidence that countries that have
adopted open citizenship, voluntary civic integration policies, and multicul-
turalism have experienced greater problems with immigrant integration or
civic and political solidarity. If anything, the evidence points to the opposite:
greater inclusion through citizenship status and political engagement, less
discrimination, and greater identification and trust in political processes and
356 Irene Bloemraad
institutions. As regards redistributive solidarity, it is hard to link, empirically,

multiculturalism with socio-economic integration outcomes, positively or
negatively, especially given all the other institutional arrangements, political
actors, and globalization pressures that come into play. There is a tendency for
more market-oriented Anglo-settler states to have a broader array of multi-
cultural policies, but Sweden offers a case of a social welfare state that
combines public discourse and policy favouring recognition and accommo-
dation of minorities along with strong universalistic, redistributive policies.
The successes of multiculturalism, even if rarely lauded in European public
debates, are perhaps recognized in the on-the-ground, daily work that local
bureaucrats, planners, educators, and others do within increasingly diverse
settings. In the United States, scholars have noted processes of ‘bureaucratic
incorporation’, in which librarians, front-line workers, educators, and others
help undocumented migrants because the mission of their jobs embrace an
ethos of inclusion, either as residents in the same community or based on a
belief in universal access to services such as education (Jones-Correa 2008;
Marrow 2009). Diversity-oriented incorporation might be happening at the
local level in Europe, with trickle-up to national policies. This could explain
the expansion of multiculturalism policies from 2000 to 2010, despite heated
rhetoric to the contrary, and the steady liberalization of citizenship rules in
multiple countries, even as some states also expand coercive civic integration
policies.
A simplistic analysis of easier political and civic inclusion of immigrant-
origin residents in North America, as compared to Europe, also profoundly
misreads a complex historical reality. Getting to a more diverse understanding
of ‘us’ in Canada or the United States was no easy, pre-determined process. We
cannot expect it to be in Europe, either. Learning from past successes and
mistakes—including past horrors related to the Holocaust and colonialism—
has parallels with North Americans’ need to confront the legacies of slavery,
oppression of indigenous peoples, or racist immigration and citizenship policies.
I have argued that in North America, inclusion of immigrants was facili-
tated by the mobilization of native-born minorities and timing that put
diversity challenges on the agenda before large-scale non-European migration
arrived on the continent. Early multicultural adopter Sweden might have
followed a similar path. Today’s historical moment is quite different in
Europe. Still, North American changes were grafted onto prior minority
accommodations; this could occur in Europe, too. As the second and, increas-
ingly, third generation of immigrant-origin Europeans come of age, they will
benefit from more legitimacy in claims-making than was the case for their
foreign-born immigrant parents and grandparents. Born, educated, and set-
tled in Europe, it is morally and politically harder to exclude later generations
from the circle of ‘we’.
As important, with the extension of citizenship and political rights to

immigrants and their children in Europe, the second key mechanisms behind
North American transformations looms large: the ability to enact change from
within, through political voice. Decisions about citizenship rules or multicul-
tural policy were not necessarily linked to immigrants’ political activism in the
past, but this is less true in the contemporary period. Many scholars argue that
the foundation stones of citizenship regimes were crafted during state-
building and constructions of national identity in the nineteenth century
(Brubaker 1992) or in response to the demands of settlement or colonial
empires (or their lack) (Janoski 2010). Multicultural policies are much more
recent constructions, but largely arose in the 1970s from elites’ attempts to
craft new integration approaches for minority populations. However, starting
in the 1990s, citizenship laws, multiculturalism and integration policies have
changed more rapidly as part of jockeying between political parties of the right
and left that articulate different ideologies of inclusion (Howard 2009; Janoski
2010; Goodman 2014).
This means that as citizenship, integration policy and multiculturalism
become more politicized, having and using political voice becomes much
more important. And there is evidence that immigrant mobilization in Europe
might be having an effect in a parallel way to what has been the case in North
America. An analysis of the extension of rights to immigrants across ten
European countries from 1980 to 2008 found that one of the best predictors
of rights expansion was growth in the immigrant electorate (Koopmans,
Michalowski, and Waibel 2012). If these gains can be institutionalized and
passed on to majority populations through educational reforms and public
acknowledgement of diversity by thought-leaders, an expanded, more pluralistic
national identity is possible. The North American experience shows that the
(re-)creation of imagined national communities was a conflictual experience. If
solidarity through a notion of a pluralistic ‘we’ is a cord bundling people
together, the working out of conflict is a key thread in that national story.
NOTES
1. This chapter builds on Bloemraad (2015) and Bloemraad and Wright (2014).
2. Author’s analysis of Migrant Integration Policy Index raw data for 2010, available
at: <http://www.mipex.eu/download> (accessed 4 October 2016). This statistic
does not include reciprocal voting agreements.
3. For the myriad rules and regulations pertaining to citizenship, as well as concrete
country-level information, see the EUDO Observatory on Citizenship, available at:
<http://eudo-citizenship.eu/> (accessed 4 October 2016).
4. Kesler and Demireva note a third, perhaps contradictory, correlation between
holding citizenship and expressing less satisfaction with the host society along five
358 Irene Bloemraad
dimensions: economy, government, democracy, education, and health services
(2010: 221–2). The researchers speculate that with citizenship come higher ex-
pectations. For six other potential measures of social cohesion—generalized trust,
institutional trust, life satisfaction, happiness, social activity, and organizational
participation—Kesler and Demireva find no statistically significant relationship
with naturalization.
5. Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron made this phrase famous in a speech
on 5 February 2011 in which he outlined a stance against Muslim extremism and
terrorism in which he blamed passive tolerance and weak national identity as
partially at the root of home-grown extremism.
6. In Canada, speaking English or French can help a would-be immigrant get
selected for permanent settlement through the ‘point system’, used to select
economic migrants. Language ability has not been required of immigrants spon-
sored by family members.
7. MCP scores countries for an official affirmation of multiculturalism; multicultur-
alism in the school curriculum; inclusion of ethnic representation/sensitivity in
public media and licensing; exemptions from dress codes in public laws; accept-
ance of dual citizenship; funding of ethnic organizations to support cultural
activities; funding of bilingual and mother-tongue instruction; and affirmative
action for immigrant groups. See < http://www.queensu.ca/mcp/immigrant-mi
norities> (accessed 21 October 2016). MCP is highly correlated with another
cultural pluralism index constructed by Koopmans and colleagues (Koopmans,
Michalowkski, and Waibel 2012).
8. Analyses of the North American-born second generation shows a decline in
second-generation trust in Canada that brings attitudes much closer to the third
and later generations; the cross-national difference with the United States, signifi-
cant in the immigrant generation, disappears in the second (Bloemraad and
Wright 2014).
9. The distinction between meanings of multiculturalism is important here. Some
backlash might stem from frustration over accommodating diversity in public
policy and institutions (the sort of multiculturalism considered here), but backlash
may also stem from demographic diversity, that is, the sheer presence of
immigrants.
10. On Canada, see Triadafilopoulos (2012) and Winter (2011); on Australia, see
Lopez (2000) and Koleth (2010); and on Sweden, see Borevi (2013a, 2013b).
11. As outlined in Order in Council P.C. 1106, 19 July 1963.
12. US law and courts restricted naturalization to white (and later black) immigrants,
leaving all those not deemed ‘white’ as racially ineligible for citizenship; these
provisions were only eliminated definitively in 1952.
13. Platform and Statement of Principles of the Reform Party of Canada (1988: 23).
Available at: <http://contentdm.ucalgary.ca/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/
reform&CISOPTR=197&REC=9> (accessed 4 October 2016).
14. Reform Party of Canada: Principles and Policies (1991: 35). Available at: <http://
contentdm.ucalgary.ca/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/reform&CISOPTR=
2212&REC=6>(accessed 4 October 2016).
15. Author’s calculation of 2006 Canadian Census data. Available at: <https://www12.
statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/hlt/97-557/T406-eng.cfm?Lang=
E&T=406&GH=4&GF=1&SC=1&S=99&O=A> (accessed 21 October 2016).
16. See <http://www.mipex.eu/anti-discrimination>> (accessed 4 October 2016).
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13
Diversity and Solidarity in Denmark

and Sweden
Karin Borevi
Denmark and Sweden are two countries with manifold features in common;
they belong to the same welfare state regime type, often referred to as the
Nordic welfare state or the Social Democratic welfare state (Esping-Andersen
1990), characterized by its application of comprehensive, generous, and re-
distributive benefits and welfare services that are universal in the sense that
they are intended for the whole population and not only for particularly
vulnerable groups (Korpi and Palme 1998).
Not only is the welfare state similarly organized in Denmark and Sweden, it
also constitutes a strong vision and mobilizing image in public debate (Ryner
2007) and it plays a crucial role in each country’s understanding of its
particular national identity and self-image (Mouritsen 2006; Mouritsen and
Olsen 2013; Stråth 2000; Berggren and Trägårdh 2006). Similar to other
modern liberal democracies, political formulations of Danish and Swedish
national identities tend to be expressed in ‘nationally anonymous’ universal
values and not in the ‘blood and soil’ language associated with old-style ethnic
nationalism (Joppke 2004). The strong references to welfare state values could
be seen as a particular ‘Scandinavian brand’ in this regard where principles
such as equality, individual autonomy, and consensual democracy are associ-
ated with the particular welfare state system of the respective country. In both
Denmark and Sweden the historical achievements and the redistributive
capacity of the welfare system is a source of national pride, and inhabitants
will typically refer to some type of welfare state egalitarianism when trying
to pinpoint what it means to be Danish or Swedish, respectively. In sum, in
both countries values and principles associated with the welfare system are at
the core of understandings about national identity. For such reasons, an
outside spectator may indeed have problems distinguishing the one from
Diversity and Solidarity in Denmark and Sweden 365
the other; Danish and Swedish national identities may appear to be more or
less identical.1
As striking the similarities mentioned here, as conspicuous are the differ-
ences between Denmark and Sweden when it comes to issues about immigra-
tion and cultural diversity. Sweden in the 1970s introduced a policy which was
characterized by an intention to combine welfare state inclusion with the
recognition and encouragement of ethno-cultural diversity. The country is
often mentioned as one of the most manifest examples in the European
context, of the multicultural model of immigrant integration (e.g., Castles
and Miller 1993; Koopmans et al. 2005; Freeman 2004). Denmark instead
stands out as one of Europe’s most distinct assimilatory approaches towards
immigration, particularly due to the exceptionally harsh immigration and
integration policies implemented by Danish governments since the early
2000s. But even prior to that, Denmark’s approach towards immigration in
significant ways differed from the Swedish. Hence, whereas Sweden has
become multiculturalism’s poster child (Borevi 2013b), anti-multiculturalism
seems to be a more appropriate characterization of the policy approach
adopted in Denmark (Jensen 2010; Holtug 2013; Laegaard 2013).2
How should we understand this situation? Indeed, the striking dissimilar-
ities between the two countries in the area of immigrant policies may appear as
a puzzle. Not only do they challenge general understandings of Denmark and
Sweden as being similar in terms of political system and policies. More
specifically, it is puzzling that two countries referring to the same set of welfare
state values and symbols in the formulation of their national identities have
arrived at strikingly divergent policy responses towards immigrant integration.
In this chapter I suggest that the situation described above becomes less
puzzling if we interrogate in what way the welfare institutions are believed to
function as a source of national cohesion and solidarity. Hence, my argument
is that despite similar references to welfare state symbols, national identity
constructions in Denmark and Sweden represent distinctly different ideal
typical views on how social solidarity is generated and maintained.
In Denmark official political discourse reflects the predominance of what
can be termed a society-centred perspective emphasizing social cohesion as a
necessary precondition for public institutions to be sustained. The particular
quality and spirit of the Danish people is not only given credit for the creation
of Danish democracy and welfare state, but is also thought indispensable for
democracy and the welfare state to endure. This idea is arguably reflected in
the Danish immigrant policy approach, where the inclusion of newcomers is
conditioned on them acquiring a comprehensive set of demands defining a
predefined (and ‘settled’) idea of Danishness. In comparison, the prevailing
Swedish idea about national identity is more oriented towards a state-centred
approach, in the sense that the capacity of the political institutions—notably
the welfare state—is typically emphasized as the core promoter of social
366 Karin Borevi
inclusion and sense of national belonging. In the field of immigrant integra-

tion, this idea is mirrored in the perception that it is the organization of
welfare state institutions, rather than the spirit of the people, which is referred
to as the crucial condition for creating and sustaining national cohesion and
integration. In stark contrast to the Danish comprehensive set of integration
demands, Sweden also applies exceptionally liberal criteria for newcomers to
acquire formal rights on an equal footing with natives.
The aim of this chapter is to identify and compare core ideas and imagin-
aries which are operating in the political discourses in Denmark and Sweden
concerning sources of solidarity and national identity. The object of study is
the political discourse on an ‘elite’ level (as expressed in arenas such as the
parliament or government) in relation to immigrant integration. My ambition
may be described as trying to detect the ‘official public theory’ or the ‘phil-
osophy of integration’ underpinning the integration policy approaches in
Denmark and Sweden, respectively (cf. Favell 2001). More specifically, I am
interested in examining whether the ideal typical notions, briefly mentioned
earlier, of a ‘state centred’ and a ‘society-centred’ perspective on the political
sources of solidarity can contribute in capturing core differences in how
Danish and Swedish policy-makers seem to reason in relation to immigrant
integration.3 The idea is not that we would find only one singular understand-
ing about national identity in each country, or that understandings are cut in
stone. Therefore, it is perhaps more fruitful to talk about competing frames of
national identity, which are constantly subject to political negotiation and,
hence, constantly subject to potential change. Historical narratives arguably
play a role in how policy-makers approach current political issues, not least in
the area of immigrant integration, which is why I include a brief historical
account of the nation building processes in the two countries.
It is worth underlining again that the above-mentioned ideal types are used
to capture core differences in the character of elite discourses in Denmark and
Sweden. An alternative research approach could have been to understand the
ideal types as representing a dichotomy between bottom-up and top-down
modes of governance and use them to measure possible cross-country vari-
ations in democratic governance.4 This is, however, not the way they will be
used in this text.
13.1 OUTLINE
In section 13.2 I present the theoretical argument. Thereafter follows the

Danish–Swedish comparison organized in three sections. In section 13.3,
I make a brief account of the historical nation state building process and the
role of the welfare state in the two countries. In section 13.4, policy approaches
established in the two countries in relation to post-war immigration are

presented. In section 13.5 I sketch the different policy stances taken by
Denmark and Sweden, in relation to the so-called civic integration policy
trend, starting from the late 1990s. In section 13.6 I draw some conclusions
and discuss future prospects for the characterized national identity
constructions.
13.2 S OCIETY-CENTRED OR S TATE-CENTRED

CONSTRUCTIO NS OF NATIONAL IDEN TITY
In ideal typical terms, two distinct understandings could be constructed, about

the relationship between the welfare state and social cohesion,5 where the
crucial difference is a matter of where one puts the stress. The relationship
could be formulated in formalized terms: The first ideal type sees the welfare
state as the dependent variable, which is to be explained by the existence of
social solidarity and cohesion (typically via some sort of cultural homogen-
eity). The second ideal type instead puts its emphasis on the welfare state as a
potential promoter of social cohesion and integration, thereby treating it as the
independent variable, which may lead to more or less social cohesion (be more
or less successful in providing integration), depending on the organization and
implementation of welfare state policies. Another way of characterizing the
two ideal typical notions about what is the crucial source of solidarity and
national cohesion is to formulate them as two opposite perspectives. Whereas
the first ideal typical notion implies a society-centred approach (social trust is
necessary for welfare states to endure), the second ideal type embodies a state-
centred perspective (welfare states are necessary for social trust to endure).
First, adopting the society-centred perspective, and the importance of an
already existing social cohesion for welfare state arrangements to emerge,
Alesina and Glaeser have, for example, famously argued that the existence of
relative cultural homogeneity, and absence of racial divisions, explains why
Europe established comprehensive welfare states, while the US did not. In the
same vein, the exceptional cultural homogeneity of the Scandinavian countries
is often taken to account for why they managed to develop comprehensive
universal welfare regimes. The prediction, according to this perspective, is
furthermore that European states will undergo a process of ‘Americanization’
due to the growing diversity in the wake of current mass-immigration. In
other words, increased ethno-cultural heterogeneity will undermine common
class-based identities, and thereby also the support of the welfare state
(Alesina and Glaeser 2004). Increased cultural diversity will lead either to a
more selective welfare state in general or to welfare chauvinism; that is, a
368 Karin Borevi
divided welfare state in which the majority population is entitled to universal

programmes and the minority population to selective programmes (Joppke
1999). And again, since the Scandinavian countries represent the most gen-
erous and comprehensive welfare state arrangements, they are also thought to
be the most vulnerable in relation to this cultural diversity challenge
(Brochmann and Hagelund 2012).
Second, we may identify arguments in this debate which instead take the
state-centred perspective, thereby putting less emphasis on what solidarity is
needed for the welfare state to prevail, and more stress on the potential
capacity of the welfare state as a promoter of social integration. In response
to the argument made by Alesina and Glaeser, it has, for example, been
pointed out that whereas the modest American welfare system was at its origin
in a societal context which was characterized by racial division, in Europe the
institutionally strong welfare states were already in place before the new
comprehensive immigration sparked off. European welfare states, it is argued,
should therefore be more robust, and have greater ability to include new-
comers (Crepaz 2008; Taylor-Gooby 2005). From a similar perspective, where
the welfare state as a promoter of social cohesion and solidarity is emphasized,
it has further been argued that the Scandinavian type of universal welfare
states should in fact be less vulnerable to immigration (than those relying on
means-tested schemes), because of the political dynamics of inclusion that
they entail (Banting 2000; cf. Sainsbury 2012).
These two ideal-typical perspectives (emphasizing the society-centred and
state-centred approach respectively) could also be identified in the large
literature on diversity and social trust. Here, Robert Putnam’s studies could
for example be taken to represent the pessimistic position (from a society-
centred point of view) where diversity arguably undermines social contact and
social trust (Putnam 2007). Bo Rothstein and Erik Uslaner instead take a
typical state-centred perspective in their argument that welfare state institu-
tions with a redistributive capacity will lead to more trust and social cohesion,
precisely because of the integrative dynamics which political institutions
potentially entail; ‘the direction goes from equality/inequality to trust, not the
other way around’, explicating the particular integrative logic—or virtuous
circle—of the Scandinavian type of welfare states as follows: ‘Universal social
programs that cater to the whole (or very broad sections) of society promote a
more equitable distribution of wealth and more equality of opportunity in areas
such as education and the labour market. Both types of equality lead to a
greater sense of social solidarity—which spurs generalized trust. Generalized
trust, in turn, provides at least part of the foundation for policies (such as
universal benefits) that lead to more equality’ (Rothstein and Uslaner 2005: 48).
In sum, the society-centred and the state-centred models constitute two
distinct hypotheses about the relationship between, on the one hand, the
existence of social cohesion, particular trust, cultural homogeneity, and on
the other, the sustainability of welfare state institutions (or indeed, of the
democratic system at large). The examples from the literature given here are to
illustrate these divergent hypotheses. Hence, the intention is not to determine
which is the more plausible or gets the most empirical support. Instead, the
two hypotheses are here used as ideal types and the point is to examine if they
can be used to capture predominant views among policy-makers in Denmark
and Sweden.
13.3 HISTORICAL SOURCES OF S OLIDARITY
In this section we will go back in time to briefly point out some historical
sources to the Danish and Swedish imaginaries which are to be found in
current political discussions concerning immigration. The aim with this
historical genealogy is to pinpoint similarities and differences in the political
constructions of the ‘imagined community’ in both these countries and
provide an overview of historical repertoires which may be used (or not) by
contemporary politicians. Then following the thought that core parts of
historical narratives are crucially pulled together under crisis conditions we
take as the point of departure major national crises in the history of Denmark
and Sweden.
The experienced Danish trauma in 1864 in losing the German-speaking
parts of the country Schleswig Holstein to Prussia is an obvious candidate in
this regard, and mentioned by commentators as a determining factor in the
development of the Danish nation-state (e.g., Korsgaard 2006; Østergaard
2006). The defeat meant that state-nationalism was seriously weakened and
that the political and academic elite (who had been defending multi-nation-
state solutions) lost much of its political and cultural legitimacy. In this
power-vacuum, the peasants appeared as a new influential group and,
mobilized by the national ideology preached by the poet priest and politician
N. F. S. Grundtvig, they became a large and influential political movement
(Østergaard 2006). The Grundtvigism emphasized the unity of land, coun-
try, God, and people (folk). In particular it put the focus on the people, the
down-to-earth attitude, and a sense of national identity coming from below;
in the words of Uffe Østergaard: ‘At a time when the overwhelming majority
of intellectuals in a Europe of rising nation-states talked of the necessary
“nationalization of the masses” or the necessity of transforming peasants
into citizens through top-down policies, Grundtvig developed an ideology
centered on the concept of folkelighed (“popular”), denominating a common
feeling in the population’ (Østergaard 2006: 83).
The defeat in 1864 also meant a groundbreaking change in Danish political
thinking in yet another sense. Due to the expansionist German politics under
370 Karin Borevi
the leadership of Bismarck which followed, the issue was now how Denmark,
given its geo-politically vulnerable position, should act in order to maintain
its political sovereignty: ‘Should state security be based on military might?
Or, should the future of the nation be grounded in the hearts of the people?’
(Korsgaard 2006: 147). Given the lack of capacity to defend the country
militarily, Denmark chose the second strategy. Outer loss was to be turned
into inner gain. This idea was recalled by Peter Munch, leader of the small
Social Liberal Party founded in 1905 (Det Radikale Venstre) and later Minister
of Foreign Affairs, in the stance that Denmark should avoid military conflicts
with Germany. In this context, Munch argued that the only strategy for
Denmark was to develop a strong national community which could resist
the external enemy: ‘We can no more defend the Danish state with culture
than with fortification. Culture can, however, forge the Danish people in a
spiritual protection . . . If the sad situation occurred that the Danish state was
conquered, then a unique and highly developed Danish culture as far removed
from the militaristic culture of the conqueror state as possible, would guaran-
tee that the Danish People could preserve its own national life until external
independence was returned’ (Munch (1908), quoted in Kaspersen (2006:
114)). Furthermore, Munch juxtaposed the external defense strategy of the
state with the internal organization of society, with an emphasis on the need to
develop education and to level out social differences, which have been pointed
out as crucial in enabling the Social Liberal party to build a bridge to the Social
Democrats (Kaspersen 2006: 115).
In Sweden, the traumatic loss in 1809 of Finland to Russia first comes to
mind when thinking of national crises. The defeat marked the definitive end of
Sweden’s period as a great power and the focus was now directed ‘inwards’ to
consolidate and construct a national self-image which better corresponded to
the new land borders. In the decades that followed, figures like Esaias Tegnér
and Erik Gustaf Geijer produced poetry and historical writings which were
widely spread and which resemble that of Grundtvig’s in Denmark, with a
national romantic idea of an homogenous ethno-cultural past and egalitarian
qualities of the freedom-loving peasants. A crucial difference is, however, that
Grundtvig talked about the Danish popular feeling (folkelighed) which existed
in opposition with the state, while Geijer emphasized the Swedish individual-
ism which required strong state institutions to do justice (Larsmo 1997;
Fransson 1998; Pedersen 1998).
The dissolution of the union with Norway in 1905, or even more import-
antly the massive emigration to North America, should further be highlight-
ed as major crises sparking off processes of national identity formation in
Sweden. The emigration lasted from 1850 to 1930, during which in total about
1.5 million people left Sweden.6 When it was subject to political discussions
for the first time, in the 1880s, no calls for state interventions were made,
partly because emigration was not yet regarded as a big problem. But when
the issue was brought to the fore again, in the early 1900s, this situation had
fundamentally changed—emigration was now understood entirely in negative
terms and as something that called for active state interventions. Concerns
about emigration were typically expressed in a racist language; people leaving
the country meant that Sweden was losing its ‘blood’ and its ‘vitality’, which
was regarded as a severe challenge for the nation’s survival. As expressed in
1906 by social scientist Gustav Sundbärg, one of the leading figures in this
debate: ‘If it is a matter of life or death for a people not to sink down to
numerical insignificance, then emigration is also a matter of life and death for
our country’ (cited in Hall (2000: 229)). Ideas about racial purity implied that
immigration was not regarded as a solution to the perceived threat of Sweden
becoming underpopulated. The same blood metaphors used to highlight the
concerns about emigration were also deployed to justify why immigration of
Polish and Russian Jews, Romas and others groups must be rejected; these
were thought to risk the purity of the ‘Swedish blood’ (Hammar 1964).
In 1907 the Emigrant Enquiry (Emigrationsutredningen) was appointed to
examine the causes behind the emigration and suggest state measures to
prevent it. The enquiry worked for six years and produced in total twenty-
one reports, which included analyses by a large number of social scientists.
The enquiry concluded that efforts must be made to improve conditions in
Sweden, to attract more people to stay, and suggested a number of economic
and social reforms. It has been argued that the Emigrant Enquiry meant the
breakthrough of Swedish ‘social engineering’ and political planning, with a
strong advocacy for a rational cooperation between state, industry, and science
(Ruth 1984). Indeed, it sparked off a comprehensive state-led policy campaign,
which would become famous as the Swedish miracle or success story; from
having been Europe’s poorest country in the beginning of the century, thirty
years later the country had managed to become one of the most prosperous
and modern societies in the world (Musiał 1998).
In the interwar period, both Denmark and Sweden developed and consoli-
dated strong links between national identity and the welfare state. It is
noteworthy that both the Swedish and the Danish Social Democratic parties
celebrated democratic and universal principles alongside communitarian val-
ues. In Sweden, such ‘double’ references were, for example, expressed in the
vision of the ‘People’s Home’ (Folkhemmet); where strong communitarian
associations, with the image of the Swedish population as a family, existed
alongside with references to democracy, citizenship, and modernity.7
Likewise, the Danish Social Democrats in 1934 adopted the programme
‘Denmark for the People’ (Danmark for Folket), where all social classes and
groups were encouraged to rally behind their vision of a ‘people’s community’
(Folkefællesskab) (Christiansen and Petersen 2001: 183). Further, both Social
Democratic sister parties emphasized popular nationalism. In the Danish
context with references to the Grundtvig tradition and in Sweden with the
372 Karin Borevi
slogan ‘Sweden for the Swedes’ (Sverige åt svenskarna), intended to summarize

the Swedish people’s struggle to be masters in their own house (Berggren
2001: 81).
Different experiences of the countries during the Second World War had a
crucial impact on national identity constructions in the aftermath of the war.
Denmark had been going through occupation, resistance movements, and
liberation which meant a boost for national identity sentiments in a sense
which was not the case in Sweden, which had been standing outside the war.
In Sweden, the notion of ‘people’ was more or less dropped from the political
vocabulary after the war, and today the Social Democratic slogan from the
1930s, mentioned earlier, is recognized as notoriously racist, typically used by
the neo-nazi ‘Party of the Swedes’ (Svenskarnas parti). In Denmark, in con-
trast, qualities and values associated with the ‘Danish People’ remained as a
core political idea, and as we will see in the following, they have become
particularly salient in contemporary debates on immigration. The Second
World War therefore stands out as something of a watershed in the construc-
tion of divergent national identity ideas in the two countries.
In sum, historical experiences such as those highlighted here can be regard-
ed as a kind of early ‘formative moments’ in the development of the philoso-
phies of integration of the two countries, and as examples of historical
repertoires contemporary political actors may refer to (or not). In relation to
our ideal typical models, Denmark comes close to the idea that national
solidarity and belonging emerges from processes going on among ‘the People’
on the society-level, while Sweden comes close to the state-centred ideal type,
in representing the idea that national cohesion and integration can be polit-
ically promoted and is reproduced via political institutions. One important
conclusion is further that in both countries, up to the Second World War, the
notion of ethno-cultural homogeneity constituted a crucial part of the national
identity, and also a perceived precondition for the development of the welfare
state. In the post-war period, this idea would undergo a transformation in
Sweden while it remained more or less intact in the Danish context.
13.4 P OLICY RESPONSES TO POST-WAR

IMMIGRATION
In order to reconstruct the ‘philosophies of integration’ as they play out in

relation to post-war immigration in the two countries, I will start with the
period lasting up to the late 1980s. Generally speaking, this is a period where
the differences between Denmark and Sweden are much less outspoken than
they would become later on. But the policy approach towards immigrant
integration, established in Sweden in the 1970s, proved to be not only more

ambitious and comprehensive than the Danish, but also differed in percep-
tions about the role of the state in relation to immigrants’ ethno-cultural
identities.
In Sweden, multicultural ideas were brought to the fore for the first time in
the mid-1960s, in the context of labour immigration. At that point in time
Sweden had already received large groups of post-war immigrants. The end of
the Second World War marked an important change in the Swedish attitude
towards immigration. The previous strict immigration regulations introduced
in the 1930s were liberalized, and assumptions that had informed former
policies, that the Swedish labour market must be protected from foreign
competition and that there was a need to preserve the purity of ‘the Swedish
race’, were abandoned (e.g., Svanberg and Tydén 1992). Likewise there were
relaxations in wartime regulations that had limited foreign citizens’ rights to
influence Swedish politics, motivated by the interest to protect security and
law and order (Hammar 1964). Industrial expansion led to a huge demand for
foreign labour and Sweden removed previous barriers so as to make it easy for
immigrants to enter the country, and also created a system of organized
recruitment from other European countries (Lundh and Ohlsson 1994).
By the 1960s, the immigrant issue had long ago been taken out of the
‘security box’ where it had belonged before and during the war, and it was
instead put in the ‘democratic politics box’, to use formulations suggested by
Will Kymlicka (2007: 120). Hence the goal—officially declared in 1968—was
to enable immigrants to achieve a situation of equal political and socio-
economic standing in relation to the native population. The question was
how this goal should be reached. From the perspective of the prevailing Social
Democratic welfare state ideology, the default answer had been that any efforts
to achieve equality presupposed a certain level of cultural homogeneity (Borevi
2013a, 2013b). The fundamental idea behind the welfare state project was that
a feeling of solidarity or integration would be achieved by reducing the gaps
between various strata in society, and the goal was therefore to eliminate
differences between various classes. Indeed, assimilation had been the pro-
gressive answer to the question of how the process of democratic ‘citizeniza-
tion’ (to again borrow an expression from Kymlicka) of various marginalized
groups should be brought about.8
From the mid-1960s, voices in the political debate, however, began to
challenge this assimilationist logic of the welfare state project. It was now
argued that state authorities should make active efforts to integrate the
newcomers into the Swedish mainstream society, but that they could not
demand of immigrants that they abandon their original cultural identities or
practices. Moreover, the argument won influence that Swedish authorities
must not only tolerate cultural pluralism but also actively promote immigrants’
preservation of their distinct cultural identities in Swedish society. The
374 Karin Borevi
discussion resulted in the adoption, in 1975, of a comprehensive immigrant

and minority policy. Paraphrasing the French revolution’s liberté, égalité et
fraternité, the goals were formulated as ‘equality, freedom of choice and
partnership’. The aim of equality was to ensure that immigrants were provided
with conditions equal to those of the native population. The freedom of choice
objective meant ‘that members of linguistic minorities living in Sweden must,
via efforts taken by society, be given the opportunity to choose for themselves
the extent to which they are to retain and develop their original cultural and
linguistic identity, and the extent to which they are to become part of a
Swedish cultural identity’ (SOU 1974:69: 95). Additionally, the cultural rights
of immigrants were protected in a new formulation in the constitution (SFS
1974: 152). The third policy goal of partnership implied that immigrant and
minority groups should work together as partners in the development of
society, which presupposed that immigrants received public support to build
and maintain their own associations (Government Bill 1975/76: 26).
What we see in Sweden, in the 1960s and 1970s, is thus a kind of reformu-
lation of previous assumptions about cultural homogeneity being the neces-
sary source for social solidarity and national unity. Several factors could be
highlighted to understand why this change occur, many of which are related
to the importance of timing. The Swedish policy programme was formulated
in the context of labour migration, where immigration was naturally regard-
ed as (economically) beneficial; possible to control, and the immigrants who
arrived did not seem to involve strong differences in relation to cultural
features (a majority of the immigrants came from neighbouring Finland).
Immigration was not a salient political issue. This gave other actors, besides
the political parties, great chances to exercise influence. The immigrant
policy adopted in Sweden in the 1970s could therefore be read as a product
of successful lobbying from a rather limited number of bureaucrats; interest
groups representatives; researchers and, not least, activists with immigrant
background who represented a kind of ‘ethnic elite’ (Hammar 1985; Wickström
2013; Borevi 2013a).9
But the policy approach also fitted well with the Swedish national self-image
developed in the post-war period of Sweden as a pioneer in human rights
issues (cf. Demker and Malmström 1999; Johansson 2008). In the era of
decolonization Sweden had acted as a champion of the rights of minorities
internationally, but as long as the country was unable to improve the situation
for its own minorities, it was difficult ‘to boast about its international com-
mitment’ (Hansen 2001). The minority political goals of the new immigrant
policy therefore constituted an effort to dissociate from the history of assimi-
latory and ‘Swedifying’ policies directed, for example, at the Sámi minority in
the Northern part of the country (Mörkenstam 1999). Sweden’s introduction
of multiculturalism was part of a general endeavour to spread human rights,
which in turn reinforced the Swedish conception of itself as a moral
superpower (Johansson 2008). When the immigrant and minority policies

were passed in parliament, in 1975, Social Democratic Minister of the Interior,
Anna-Greta Leijon, noted with satisfaction that a political consensus had
emerged on the new policy approach, stating that ‘this bodes well for our
efforts to turn Sweden step by step into something of a pioneer country within
the field of immigrant policy’ (Parliamentary Records 1975).
Turning to the Danish case, the situation was different. Post-war labour
immigration to Denmark occurred much later and in smaller quantities than
to Sweden. We do see strong indicators of policy learning in the early stages of
policy development. Denmark introduced a number of innovative Swedish
reforms, such as the right of resident foreign citizens to vote and run as
candidates in local elections, mother tongue training in the public school
system and financial support for immigrant organizations. In comparison
with Sweden, Danish reforms, however, came much later, were differently
framed and surrounded by party disagreement and controversies. For
example, while local political rights were decided in unison by the members
of the Swedish parliament in 1975, in Denmark the proposal was delayed
because of opposition within the Social-Democratic–Liberal coalition govern-
ment. It was not until 1981 that a Social Democratic minority government
managed to get through the reform in parliament, but the Conservatives,
nearly all the Liberals and the populist radical right Progress Party voted
against it (Togeby 2003: 50).
The notion of equality, at the core of Swedish policies, was less emphasized
in Denmark. In part, this relates to differences in the initial framing of post-
war immigrants—in Denmark they were regarded as guest workers and not as
settlers and new community members. At times, equality in the Danish
context was used as an argument against the social rights of immigrants, to
stress that benefits of foreigners must not be different from those of Danes
(Sainsbury 2012; cf. Borevi and Bengtsson 2014). Further, whereas mother
tongue education and support to immigrant organizations in the 1970s were
formulated as core parts of the multicultural ideology in Sweden, in Denmark
the introduction of such reforms was understood solely as an instrument for
immigrants’ adjustment to mainstream Danish society. Moreover, already at
this stage we see a Danish stress on the importance of immigrants assimilating
to ‘Danish values’, and less references to ideas of Danish institutions accom-
modating cultural diversity or ideas. There seems to be no Danish equivalent
to the comprehensive campaign launched in Sweden, as part of the 1970s
immigrant policy, targeted at the Swedish majority intended to inform, edu-
cate, and influence people to be tolerant towards immigration and cultural
diversity. The idea to view immigrants as equal partners in the development of
society is also missing from the Danish discourse and whereas liberalization of
naturalization rules was an important part of the Swedish 1970s policy
approach, no such changes were made in Denmark.
376 Karin Borevi
In sum, already at the initial stage significant differences are to be identified

in how Denmark and Sweden approached immigration. The decades that
followed would mean a reinforced polarization where the Swedish inclusion-
ary approach remained more or less intact, while Denmark’s incorporation
regime moved from a position of ‘reluctant inclusiveness’ (Sainsbury 2012:
228) to explicit exclusion. The 1980s were a decade of contradictory develop-
ments, including both rights extension and restrictions, but in retrospect they
formed a turning point, in the Danish embarking on an explicitly exclusionary
path. Restrictions (e.g., in relation to permanent residency and naturalization)
increased in the 1990s but took on new dimensions after the 2001 elections,
where the populist radical right Danish People’s Party obtained influence over
government. As a result, immigrants’ social rights were substantially weakened
and the exclusionary character of Denmark’s incorporation regime was
reinforced even further (Sainsbury 2012: 228).
13. 5 TH E CI V I C I N T E G R A T I O N I S T T U R N
The reinforced polarization of Danish and Swedish policies during recent

decades has occurred in the larger context of policy changes in countries all
over Europe, often referred to as the ‘civic turn’ in immigrant integration
policies (Joppke 2004, 2007) heavily informed by a larger activation and
workfare paradigm, where stricter demands are being formulated for the
allocation of social allowances, and beneficiaries are required to make an
active effort to become self-supporting (Ferrera and Rhodes 2001; cf. Joppke
2007: 14).
Denmark has gone further than most countries in introducing aforemen-
tioned strict integration demands. To gain permanent residence status in
Denmark, new arrivals must have participated in the mandatory introduction
programme and also obtained a passing mark on a language test, plus have a
total residence period in Denmark of seven years. As regards naturalization to
Danish citizenship, the rules have been sharpened considerably over the past
fifteen years. For instance, the residence requirement has been raised from
seven to nine years and applicants must declare their allegiance and loyalty to
the Danish nation; they must not have received social benefits for more than
one of the preceding five years and they must pass a language test and a test on
Danish culture and history (Ersbøll 2006; Adamo 2008). Regarding integra-
tion requirements for family members to gain admission to the country,
Denmark has further introduced a number of restrictive reforms, including
an age limit of twenty-four years for marriages with third-country nationals
and a required bank deposit (of approximately €7400) before family reunifi-
cation is possible (e.g., Vad Jønsson and Petersen 2012). Denmark also had
plans to introduce a ‘points system’ for immigration; however, these were

cancelled by the new Social Democratic Government that took office in 2011.
The Swedish policies stand in stark contrast to the Danish but could in fact
be described as something of an exception to the larger integration policy
trend described earlier (Borevi 2010, 2014). The country has introduced
neither formal language requirements nor other tests of knowledge as condi-
tions for naturalization. The stipulated residence requirement of five years,
introduced in 1975, still applies and in 2001 Sweden introduced an important
liberalization of its naturalization rules, in the form of a right to dual citizen-
ship. Indeed, an activation trend in the integration policies is clearly visible
also in Sweden. New arrivals have a right and a duty to participate in
‘introduction programmes’, and since December 2010 the mandatory element
in these programmes has become more pronounced, with the introduction of
a centralized administration and a common principle that new arrivals’ non-
participation is sanctioned by withdrawing or reducing benefits (Government
Bill 2009/10: 60). Such economic incentives contain a certain de facto man-
datory element (programme participation becomes compulsory for those
unable to support themselves financially). In principle, however, participation
in these programmes importantly remains optional and is not linked to the
individual’s chances of achieving residency or citizenship.
Arguably, the divergent policy positions described here could be under-
stood as expressions of the two different ideal typical ‘philosophies of
integration’ or ‘policy theories’ previously described. The Danish approach
indicates the working of a policy theory where a society-centred perspective
prevails. Here, an already existing cultural homogeneity and interpersonal
trust is typically thought to be the necessary precondition for the welfare
state—and democracy at large—to sustain. In Per Mouritsen’s words, social
cohesion in Denmark is ‘about the value of sameness, in itself and as
foundational of trust and of the welfare state’ (Mouritsen 2012: 98). From
this perspective, immigration and the cultural diversity it brings about, is
ultimately perceived as a threat to the very survival of the welfare state,
democracy—and the nation. Numerous commentators of the Danish
political debate on immigration describe the prevailing perception about
Danishness as a set of particular values which must be defended and
preserved from external influences. The Danish political culture is thought
to be settled, predefined, non-contestable, and politicized. Immigration—in
particular immigration of Muslims—is correspondingly understood as a chal-
lenge, a threat, or an ‘external shock’ (Mouritsen 2006, 2012; Mouritsen and
Olsen 2013; Hedetoft 2006a; Rostbøll 2010; Jensen 2010). Danish values are
predominantly formulated in universal or ‘civic’ (hence, not ‘ethnic’) terms.
Still, these principles are crucially thought to express a pre-existing, settled
idea about Danishness, as argued by Christian Rostbøll: ‘liberal values are
presented as so entangled in Danish culture that in order to understand and
378 Karin Borevi
accept them, one must understand Danish history and assimilate into Danish
culture’ (Rostbøll 2010: 405).
This explicates the Danish engagement in formulating evermore restrictive
requirements for new arrivals to get access to residence rights and full citizen-
ship rights. Indeed, various reforms to strengthen naturalization requirements
over the years have been justified as a way to signal that ‘Danish nationality
should be something to strive for; a carrot for foreigners to adapt to Danish
society, be independent, learn Danish and be able to socialize with the Danes’
(Ersbøll 2006: 131) and as a way to ‘make sure that they [new citizens] love
Denmark and prefer Denmark’ (Mouritsen 2012: 98). To this should be added
the more extreme position taken by the Danish People’s Party, rejecting the
very notion that citizenship can be earned at all (‘citizenship tests only work
well if many fail’), which has had significant influence on the debate and policy
development (Mouritsen 2012; Adamo 2008; Ersbøll 2006).
Turning to the Swedish case, the state-centred understanding of how
integration comes about is arguably helpful in explicating why the country
has so far rejected the idea to introduce the kind of integration requirements
that we currently see not only in Denmark but also in a large number of
European states. In Sweden the predominant idea is to regard the welfare state
more as a promoter of integration, and less as an outcome of a pre-existing
social and cultural homogeneity. This implies a stronger stress on the political
institutions’ capacity to integrate immigrants, and also an understanding of
the Swedish national identity as less settled, more open to change, as com-
pared with Denmark (cf. Jensen 2014). For example, all Swedish parliamentary
parties, except the Sweden Democrats, support the 1997 integration policy
goal ‘to promote a notion of societal community that is based on social
diversity’ (Government Bill 1997/98: 16). Not only does this goal express a
conspicuously different view than the Danish, in the sense that the foundation
of the national identity is understood as diversity, not homogeneity. What is
more, it indicates that the predominant view is that national identity could in
fact be promoted by the state.
The prevailing Swedish perspective, characterized in the previous para-
graph, is clearly expressed, for example, in the 1999 committee on citizenship,
in its rejection of a proposal to introduce official language requirements for
naturalization to Swedish citizenship. In the opinion of the committee major-
ity, such a reform was not needed, as good teaching facilities together with the
required five years of residence was enough to ensure that the absolute
majority of those granted Swedish citizenship had acquired sufficient language
skills. What is more, the committee majority held that an official language
requirement could even work to obstruct integration: ‘the committee regards
citizenship as a path to societal cohesion and as an essential part of the
integration process. Increasing the qualification demands would instead
have the counterproductive result of decreasing cohesion in the nation as a
whole’ (SOU 1999:34: 318). Hence, the view expressed here was that immi-
grants’ access to equal rights was indispensable not only for their individual
integration process, but also for sustaining the entire national identity. In a
similar fashion, in 2010 a government-appointed enquiry on the question
whether Sweden should introduce a civic skills-requirement for citizenship
reached an answer in the negative. According to the enquiry, such a require-
ment would mean ‘a historical breach of the supporting, solidarity-based and
inclusive idea underlying the Swedish people’s home and welfare state’ (SOU
2010:16: 25). Finally, it should be noted that although the policy position on
citizenship policy described earlier is still predominant in Sweden, alternative
views have become stronger since the mid-2000s.10
13.6 CO NCLUDIN G DISCUSSION
Welfare state values and principles play a crucial role in the national identity and
self-image of both Denmark and Sweden. The argument of this chapter is,
however, that the countries display striking differences in how the welfare state
is linked to national cohesion and solidarity. My suggestion here is that the
political ideas which prevail in Denmark and Sweden could be understood as two
distinct policy theories or ‘philosophies of integration’. In ideal typical terms they
rely on two different ideas about the relationship between the welfare state
and social cohesion, where the crucial difference is a matter of where one puts
the stress.
In Denmark, a society-centred perspective is predominant, which means that
social cohesion and cultural homogeneity are perceived to be the causal prior.
It explains both how the welfare state historically emerged and why it con-
tinues to exist. From this approach, immigration constitutes a challenge
insofar as it entails any essential changes of this particular Danish culture.
In Sweden, a state-centred approach instead prevails where the welfare state is
rather seen as a potential promoter of social inclusion. The Swedish approach
entails a stronger reliance on the integrative dynamics of the universal
welfare institutions. The challenge from immigration, from this perspective,
has more to do with the capacity of the system to include everybody on equal
terms, in order not to undermine the integrative logics or dynamics of the
political institutions. The dominant idea in Denmark, that national identity
stems from the values of a particular societal culture, has been taken to justify
the development of one of Europe’s most assimilatory and exclusionary
immigrant integration policies. The way of seeing national identity as deriving
from common political institutions, which dominates the Swedish discourse,
instead forms the argumentative base for the emergence of a significantly more
inclusionary approach. In conclusion, this should suggest that multicultural and
380 Karin Borevi
inclusionary policies are much easier to reconcile with the state centred version
of national identity than with the society centred one.
Let us finally turn to the issue of stability. What are the future prospects
for the national identity constructions characterized here? My conclusion that
the two ideal typical logics have been proven useful in characterizing domin-
ant understandings under a long period of time in Danish and Swedish
political elite discourse does of course not preclude that they may yet be
subject to change. Indeed, national identities are constructions, constantly
subject to political negotiation, and therefore constantly subject to potential
change. But do we have reason to believe one of the models to be more
susceptible to change than the other? In the following paragraphs I will briefly
respond to the possible concern that particularly the state-centred idea of
national identity, predominant in Sweden, is doomed to fail. Formulated
differently, even if my argument is correct that this model is less prone to
assimilatory integration policies than the society-centred one, one may still
wonder whether it is perhaps also more fragile and susceptible to challenges to
democratic legitimacy. Here, the retreat from multicultural policies in other
countries may come to mind. A widespread interpretation of the failure of
multiculturalism in the Netherlands is, for example, that well-meaning Dutch
state elites foisted multiculturalism on a society that was not supportive of it
which inevitably generated backlash. Would we have reason to expect some-
thing similar to happen in Sweden?11
First, it is pertinent to recall here how the ‘society centred’ vs ‘state centred’
ideal types are used in this text. They are intended to describe the character of
elite discourses (ideas and imaginaries) on national identity, not the political
process leading up to the formulation of certain policies. Hence, my claim here
is not that Danish policy approaches towards immigrants result from a
political process which should be characterized as more ‘society-centred’
than the Swedish counterpart, for example, in the sense that popular move-
ments would have had greater influence over policy-making processes in
Denmark than in Sweden (to my knowledge, there is no such evidence).
Indeed, the point of departure here is that the political imaginaries operating
in the Danish and in the Swedish political discourses are equally ‘elite-driven’.
Instead, my point is that elite discourses are constructed in conspicuously
different ways in the two countries, which arguably has had important impli-
cations for the two countries’ formulation of immigrant integration policy
approaches.
Acknowledging that the models are elite constructions, the reader may still
wonder whether the approach found in Sweden is more prone to democratic
legitimacy challenges than the one which dominates in Denmark. One way of
finding out whether there is any truth in such a suspicion is to consult public
opinion polls. Following the idea of lacking democratic legitimacy we should
expect to find a greater gap between elite discourse and public attitudes in
Sweden than in Denmark. Such a suspicion is, however, refuted by evidence

from research on attitudinal data. Studies rather indicate that people in
Sweden does not perceive immigration as a threat in the same way and in
the same proportion as people in Denmark do, for example some 33 per cent
of the Swedish population think it is a good idea to allow many immigrants of
a different race/ethnic group compared with 12 per cent in Denmark (Demker
2012; cf. Lolle and Torpe 2010). Interesting differences along political cleav-
ages are also reported in this research. In Denmark, 11 per cent of left-wing
voters think that immigration is undermining their country’s cultural life, an
opinion shared by only 6 per cent of Swedish left-wing voters. When it comes
to right-wing voters, 17 per cent in Denmark and 7 per cent in Sweden
perceive immigration as a threat to their national culture (Demker 2012).
Swedish opinion polls also document a steadily increasing tolerance over
time,12 which has been explained with the growth of popular mobilization
against xenophobia as a reaction against the sudden emergence and parlia-
mentary success of the populist radical right party New Democracy (Ny
Demokrati) in the early 1990s (this party held seats in parliament 1991–4).
In a 2010 study, a clear majority (57 per cent) of the respondents said they
would be ready to take part in an organization fighting racism and xenophobia
while 10 per cent said they could imagine joining an organization to stop
immigration (Demker 2010). In sum, figures like these do not easily lend
credit to the idea that the state-centred approach, as such, would be more
susceptible to democratic legitimacy challenges than the society-centred one.
Nevertheless, the claim in itself, that inclusionary and multicultural immi-
grant integration policies are an inherently undemocratic elite project, is a
powerful armory which can easily be deployed by populist political forces.
This has recently been illustrated in relation to the success of the populist radical
right party the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), which won parlia-
mentary representation in 2010 and became the third largest party in 2014 (with
13 per cent of the votes). Indeed, the success of this party, which is campaigning
to introduce the prevailing Danish view in Sweden, represents a challenge
towards the dominant Swedish conception on national identity. As noted
before, the ‘political philosophies’ described in this chapter are not cut in
stone; populist forces may yet lead to transformations in the political formula-
tions of how national identity and solidarity are reproduced. Particularly
important here seems to be the political dynamics and the strategic game and
coalition buildings between parties in the wake of right wing populist successes
(e.g., Bale 2008; Green-Pedersen and Odmalm 2008; Howard 2009). The recent
refugee crisis has also led to some rather rapid and drastic changes in the
Swedish context. In 2015 more than 162,000 asylum seekers arrived to Sweden,
an all-time high also taking into account the country’s experiences of the Second
World War refugee migration. In the late fall 2015, the Social Democratic and
Green Party coalition government presented a number of restrictions on
382 Karin Borevi
new arrivals’ rights (notably limitations of family reunification rights and a new
rule to only grant temporary residence status). The proposal, which was justified
as a temporary measure to halt refugee immigration by adjusting the Swedish
policies to existing minimum levels within the European Union (EU), is ex-
pected to be approved by the parliament and take effect in May 2016. Current
developments constitute a challenge to the Swedish inclusionary policy ap-
proach, but it is too soon to say what impact they may have on the collective
imaginaries on national identity and solidarity described in this chapter.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Earlier versions of this text have been presented at the GGP and RECODE Workshop
in Florence, February 2014; the CIFAR Successful Societies Program workshop in
Montreal, May 2014; the IBF Uppsala University research seminar, May 2014; the
ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in Warsaw, March 2015; and the CES International
Conference of Europeanists in Paris, June 2015. The author would like to thank the
participants at these various occasions and in particular discussants Christian Albrekt
Larsen, Per Gustafson, Stephen Larin, and Birte Siim for valuable comments.
NOTES
1. The same features an outside spectator will take as conspicuous similarities
between the countries, may in the eyes of an insider instead be highlighted as
essential differences. This is not only due to the internal observer’s possession of
more detailed and contextual information, but indicates that country comparisons
may play a vital role in the process of national self-identification. Indeed, Den-
mark and Sweden have a long history of using each other as negative contrasts in
the articulation of one’s own national identity; features associated as Swedish
therefore play a crucial role in defining what Danishness is not, and vice versa.
2. It has been suggested that the Danish–Swedish divergence in the area of immi-
grant integration takes place primarily on the discursive level while there is
convergence on a ‘practical’ policy level (Hedetoft 2006b). Whereas similarities
in some respects can certainly be identified, for example, as regards policies
intended to integrate new arrivals into the labour market (Breidahl 2012), this
argument, however, risks being misleading since Danish and Swedish policies (i.e.,
not only the public discourses) in substantial ways do differ from each other,
particularly in relation to ‘membership issues’ such as the regulation of immi-
grants’ acquisition of residency and citizenship status.
3. It should be noted that ‘state-centred’ does not refer to the degree of state
involvement in immigrant integration measures; the Danish state is as actively
involved as the Swedish in such efforts, if not more.
4. Along such an alternative research question further distinctions can be made: First,
the policy-making process leading up to the establishment and development of
immigrant integration policies may be characterized as ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’,
depending on the degree of influence, for example, from popular movements (bot-
tom-up) or state elites (top-down). Second, the implementation of the immigrant
integration policies may either be described as a bottom-up form of governance—
what in the literature is sometimes referred to as ‘new modes of governance’ including
phenomena such as network governance, stake-holderism, and user boards. Or they
may come closer to a more traditional representative (top-down) form of democratic
governance. For each ideal type pros and cons regarding democratic legitimacy could
further be discussed (e.g., Peters and Pierre 1998; Føllesdal 2011).
5. Here, one could also be more general and talk about ‘political institutions’, but in
the following I will primarily stick to ideas about maintenance of welfare state
institutions.
6. Danish emigration was also significant. With a total population in the range of two
million, the country sent over 300,000 migrants to North America between 1840
and 1914 (Hvidt and Laursen 1975: 9). Unlike Sweden, emigration did, however,
not provoke a crisis, which could be related to Denmark’s better economic
situation. Following an epoch-making agricultural reform in the mid-1860s,
switching from cereal to livestock production, the country was able to turn the
international financial crisis, with falling prices on cereal, to its own advantage
which formed the basis for Denmark’s development into a prosperous country
(Fransson 1998).
7. In his famous ‘folkhemmet speech’ after the elections in 1928, the Swedish Social
Democratic leader Per Albin Hansson described the ideal state alternately as ‘the
citizens home’ and ‘the people’s home’. And in another speech from the 1930s,
both concepts of solidarity were again touched upon: ‘For good reasons, we
Swedes are proud of our country. It is a beautiful and good country. It is a country
with liberty not only in the constitution, but likewise in our traditions and our
disposition.’
8. In Sweden, this logic was particularly evident in relation to the Roma minority
whose ‘unsuitable’ way of life was regarded as an obstacle to its becoming
emancipated and integrated into mainstream society and achieving living condi-
tions equal to the rest of the population. The official goal of Sweden’s ‘Gypsy
policies’ (Zigenarpolitik) was therefore to help the Roma abandon their cultural
practices and distinct way of life, so that they could integrate into the Swedish
welfare state.
9. The Finnish government also exerted direct pressure on the Swedish government
to enable Finnish-speaking children in Swedish schools to receive mother tongue
instruction in Finnish, and also to have Finnish as a teaching language (Jacobsson
1984: 75).
10. For instance, influential political actors—most notably the Liberal Party (Folkpar-
tiet) and the Moderate Party (Moderaterna)—have advocated an official language
requirement. The Liberal Party has also proposed that a completed civic education
course should become a condition for being eligible for Swedish citizenship. Such
proposals are, however, still politically controversial and typically accused of
representing a ‘flirtation’ with the xenophobic parts of the electorate.
384 Karin Borevi
11. Note, however, that Swedish multicultural policies in significant ways differ from
the policies that existed in the Netherlands prior to the multiculturalism backlash
in the 1990s. For a discussion, see Borevi (2013b).
12. Respondents agreeing that ‘there are too many foreigners in the country’ has
steadily decreased, from 52 per cent 1993 to 36 per cent in 2009 (Demker 2010).
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14
Belgium
A Hard Case for Liberal Nationalism?
Patrick Loobuyck and Dave Sinardet
14.1 INTRODUCTION
In the aftermath of the so-called liberal-communitarian debate of the 1980s,

several political philosophers argued for liberal nationalism (Tamir 1993;
Miller 1995; Canovan 1996; Kymlicka 2001; Moore 2001). On the one hand,
they agreed with the communitarian critique that the traditional (Rawlsian)
liberal theory did not pay enough attention to the social conditions (mutual
identification, a sense of belonging together) required for the effective fulfil-
ment of its democratic and egalitarian interests. On the other hand, they
disagreed with the communitarians that a politics of liberal neutrality and
anti-perfectionism should be replaced by a politics of the common good. For
liberal nationalists the social condition for solidarity and deliberative democ-
racy is a shared, but thin national identity. The state can implement nation
building policies without any interference with state neutrality, because the
national identity has nothing to do with ethnicity, religion, or a common way
of life. The national identity is open, based on a common language, public
sphere, and historical consciousness, and shared media and political institu-
tions. Liberal nationalists do not insist that every nation would have its own
state, or that every state would contain one and only one nation, but they do
claim that if a state contains the territory of two or more national groups, then
each national group should be accorded some form of self-government,
perhaps through federalism.
The claim of the liberal nationalists is normative and descriptive. They not
only argue that a state should promote a thin national identity and that
national minorities have a right of self-government; liberal nationalists are
also convinced that every successful (social) liberal state adopted nation-
building programmes to establish a thin national identity as a precondition
390 Patrick Loobuyck and Dave Sinardet
for political stability, redistribution, and a democratic praxis (Kymlicka 2001:

25). Also the rise of demands for secession or at least more political autonomy
for national minorities/groups in ‘multinational’ states is considered as an
illustration of the liberal nationalist logic (Kymlicka 2001: 91ff.; Miller 2000:
chs. 7 and 8; Margalit and Raz 1990) and as an endorsement of what
John Stuart Mill already mentioned in his Consideration on Representative
Government (1861: ch. 16): ‘Free institutions are next to impossible in a
country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-
feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public
opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.’
As such federalism is not only considered just (for the national minorities/
groups) but also effective (for social and liberal democracy) (for discussion see
De Schutter (2011)).
At first glance, the current situation in Belgium confirms the liberal nation-
alist hypothesis that a shared national identity is a necessary condition for a
liberal democracy and a social welfare system based on solidarity. The process
of adopting all kinds of federal arrangements to increase the political auton-
omy of the language groups, the absence of Belgian statewide political parties,
the electoral success of Flemish nationalist political parties, the different
political discourses concerning redistributive justice and the different practices
concerning immigrant integration policies in Flanders and the French-
speaking part of Belgium—all these tendencies are in line with what liberal
nationalists would have expected to happen in a multinational state like
Belgium. Also, the political and institutional crises of recent years seem to
illustrate how difficult it is to construct and maintain a shared but ‘multi-
national’ identity as the necessary basis for sustainable government and
democracy (cf. Kymlicka 2001: 314).
However, Belgium can also be used by the critics of the liberal nationalist
hypothesis. Belgium is not founded upon a pre-political national identity, a
common language or a shared history (Zolberg 1974; Stengers 1990; Kesteloot
2013b) and until today there are several issues illustrating the lack of fit with
the standard model of a nationalist theory. That the Belgian social welfare
system still exists, the persistent multinational and multi-lingual situation in
Brussels, the capacity of the Belgian government to secure peace, freedom, and
a high degree of economic prosperity, the fact that political consensus at the
Belgian level continues to be found, the fact that Belgian national identity is
still strong among the population and popular demand for regional autonomy
is rather limited—all these facts challenge and even seem to falsify (at least
some aspects) of the liberal nationalist thesis. As such Belgium can be invoked
as an example to support the thesis of constitutional patriotism, rather than
liberal nationalism: deliberative democracy and egalitarian politics are not
necessarily based on a shared national identity in the classic sense, but on the
citizens’ loyalty to their political institutions, their identification with liberal
Belgium: A Hard Case for Liberal Nationalism? 391
values locally embedded and codified in the constitution of the state, and a
shared ‘praxis of citizens who actively exercise their civil rights’ (Habermas
1992: 3l, 1996: 264–71, 2001).
This brings us to the question of this chapter: is Belgium a confirmation
or ‘a note-worthy exception’, an evident illustration or ‘a hard case’ (cf. Miller
1995: 88, 2000: ch. 8) for the liberal nationalist hypothesis? For a better
understanding of the complex and puzzling Belgian situation, we make a
distinction between several elements and causes which contribute to the
concept of a shared but thin national identity: language, public sphere, and
identification with the country. We take up a suggestion of the already
mentioned John Stuart Mill (1861: ch. 16): he argued that there are several
elements and circumstances that can foster a shared national identity, but
none of them, ‘however, are either indispensable or necessarily sufficient by
themselves’. And indeed, he mentioned Belgium as an example: ‘The Flemish
and the Walloon provinces of Belgium, notwithstanding diversity of race and
language, have a much greater feeling of common nationality than the former
have with Holland, or the latter with France.’ So it seems that language, for
instance, can stimulate a shared national feeling, but a shared (weak) national
feeling is also possible without a common language; and the other way around:
a shared language is not enough to create a shared national identity.
After a clarification about the several causes and elements of a shared
national identity in the Belgian context, this chapter elaborates on the question
whether the conceptions of solidarity and political community are different at
the level of Belgium, Flanders, and the French-speaking part of the country. In
the next section we try to find out if the different conceptions of a political
community are linked with different conceptions of democratic, civic, and
redistributive solidarity. In the last section we will focus especially on the issue
of whether the different conceptions of solidarity and community building
have influenced different migrant integration policies in the two language
communities. As we will see, the prospects for inclusive solidarity with
immigrants within either Wallonia or Flanders is intimately linked to the
unresolved issues between Wallonia and Flanders.
14. 2 O N E C O U N TR Y , DI V I DED I N STI T U T I O N S /

PUBLIC SPHERES/IDENTITIES?
14.2.1 Basic Features of Belgian Federalism
Since the 1960s the unitary Belgian state has been subject to a process of
devolution that eventually led it to officially become a federal state in 1993.
This resulted in a very complex institutional landscape. In contrast to other

federations, two types of federated entities that partly overlap were created:
three territorially based regions (the Flemish, Walloon, and Brussels regions)
and three language-based communities (the Flemish, French-speaking, and
German-speaking communities). The Flemish and French-speaking commu-
nity overlap in the Brussels region, where they are both competent for matters
such as education, culture, and media. The borders of regions and communi-
ties have been based on those of the four language areas (Dutch-speaking,
French-speaking, German-speaking, and the bilingual Brussels area), through
which language use is officially regulated: only the official language(s) can be
used in administration, education, and justice. Since 1963 the borders of these
language areas have been fixed, through a linguistic border line. The system
is thus based on territorial unilingualism (except in the bilingual Brussels
region). However, some exceptions exist: sixteen communes (of which six
border the Brussels region) with significant linguistic minorities enjoy ‘lan-
guage facilities’ which grant inhabitants the right to communicate with the
authorities or have primary school organized in another than the official
language.
Notwithstanding the existence of three regions, three communities and four
language areas, the federal political dynamic in Belgium is mostly based on the
two large communities of Dutch-speakers (approx. 6.5 million) and French-
speakers (approx. 4.5 million). On the level of federal parliament and govern-
ment, a number of consociational devices, institutionalizing power-sharing
between representatives of the two large language groups, were introduced in
1970: all MPs have to belong to either the Dutch or French language group, a
number of ‘special majority laws’ concerning institutional reform can only be
passed by a majority in both language groups (and an overall majority of two-
thirds), an ‘alarm bell procedure’ permits three quarters of a language group to
temporarily halt the parliamentary procedure of a proposal of law and send it
to the council of ministers (this is the federal government with the exception of
secretaries of state), which in turn is composed in linguistic parity and
traditionally decides in consensus (Deschouwer 2009; Sinardet 2010).
14.2.2 Party System and Electoral System
The consociational logic (see Lijphart 1981, 1999) can also be witnessed in
how Belgium’s party system is organized. Indeed, consociationalism entails a
far-reaching segmentation between groups and sees political elites as repre-
sentatives of their own group who then have to build bridges to the elites of
other groups. This is reflected in how Belgium’s party system is split on
language basis and electoral districts are confined to the borders of the regions.
The role of political parties is very prominent in Belgium, which is often
characterized as a partitocracy (De Winter, Della Porta, and Deschouwer
1996; De Winter 1998; Deschouwer 2009)—which in turn cannot be dissoci-
ated from the consociational character of the Belgian system (Deschouwer
1996: 296; Sinardet 2010). The Belgian party system has changed dramatically
between 1968 and 1978 due to the split-up on a linguistic basis of the three
traditional political parties: the Christian-Democrats in 1968, the Liberals in
1971, and the Social-Democrats in 1978. One of the reasons for this split was
the rise from the 1960s onwards, of parties confined to sub-national areas:
sub-state nationalist or regionalist parties such as the Volksunie, the Rassem-
blement Wallon, and the Front démocratique des francophones put linguistic
and decentralization issues on the agenda forcing other parties to take a clear
stand. Parties that were created later such as the Greens followed the same
organizational logic, although the Greens do form a common political group
in the federal parliament and most explicitly profile themselves as one party
family. The absence of country-wide political parties, which is unique for a
federal state (Swenden 2005; Deschouwer 2009; Sinardet 2010) has resulted in
the existence of two party systems in one polity (De Winter, Swyngedouw, and
Dumondt 2006: 934–8).
The organization of the electoral system strongly contributes to this
dynamic. While electoral districts for the federal Chamber of Representatives
are organized on a provincial basis since 2003, electoral reforms for other
assemblies deliberately installed a language group logic, combined with a fixed
distribution of seats. In 1979 Belgium was divided into two electoral colleges for
the European Parliament elections: a Dutch-speaking and a French-speaking
college, both electing their own representatives on the basis of a fixed distribu-
tion of seats. A similar system was introduced for the Parliament of the Brussels
Capital Region in 1989 and for the directly elected representatives in the federal
Senate between 1995 and 2010. As from 2014, the Senate—whose powers were
strongly reduced—is mainly composed of indirectly elected representatives that
already have a seat in the parliaments of the federated entities. For all these
elections, electoral districts do not cross the borders of the regions. In combin-
ation with the split party system, this causes voters—with the exception of those
living in the Brussels Region—only to be able to vote for representatives of their
own language community.
This has remarkable consequences. For thirty-seven years, voters in the
Walloon Region have not been able to pronounce themselves on the Prime
Minister leading their country or on his party, since all Prime Ministers
between 1974 and 2011 belonged to a Dutch-speaking political party,1 which
only presented itself to voters in the Flemish and Brussels Region. Since
Elio Di Rupo (from the French speaking Parti Socialiste: PS) became prime
minister in 2011 and Charles Michel (from the French speaking liberal party
MR [Mouvement réformateur]) in 2014, the situation was reversed, as voters
in the Flemish Region cannot vote for him or his party. Moreover, voters in
general are not able to electorally legitimize policies of some key federal
departments, as they are headed by ministers from parties of the other
language community.
Of course, one could argue that a similar dynamic can also in part be
witnessed in other federal, multilingual countries such as Switzerland or
even in majoritarian systems such as the UK or France that privilege (narrow)
regional representation. However, the crucial difference is the existence of
nation-wide parties in these other countries, which assure the link between
national policy-making and regional voting.
14.2.3 Public Sphere and Mass Media
The dynamics of the party and electoral system are also related to other
aspects, such as media reporting on federal politics and the lack of a genuine
country-wide public sphere (Sinardet 2012a). The almost total absence of
nation-wide structured mass media is indeed another remarkable feature of
the Belgian polity. In most federal, multilingual countries, such as Switzerland
and Canada, different language regions also have their own media, but
nevertheless some kind of overarching federal structure unites them. In
Belgium, however, there are no structural ties between the two public broad-
casting companies, except for the common central office building in Brussels.
In 1960, a new broadcasting law split the previously unitary broadcaster into
two quasi-autonomous companies, a Dutch-speaking and a French-speaking
one. When in 1970 language communities were established and granted
their own councils, the competence over radio and television was largely
transferred to these councils as part of the ‘cultural matters’. Moreover,
Belgian regional governments explicitly assign broadcasters to stimulate the
cultural identity of their language community while in most other federal
countries, broadcasters are instructed to also disseminate national culture and
to stimulate national cohesion.
Dutch-speaking and French-speaking media are exclusively embedded
within their own language community, but they nevertheless still function
within a federal political system. This situation brings along a certain tension
between ‘community media’ and federal politics. Debates on federal politics
are largely conducted amongst only Dutch-speaking or only French-speaking
representatives. This is most striking in election times. For instance, in the
2007 elections Flemish candidates for the office of federal Prime Minister
hardly ever presented their political programme in French-speaking media. In
addition, debates in Dutch-speaking media on federal policies such as justice
and finance were held in the absence of the incumbent Ministers of Justice and
Finance or of any other representatives of the parties these ministers belonged

to (Sinardet 2012a).
This misfit is not only visible at election time. While Belgium’s federal
government is composed in linguistic parity and while decisions made by
any federal minister are applicable to the entire Belgian population, this is not
reflected in political reporting. For instance, on Dutch-speaking television’s
main news programmes (public as well as commercial), 80 per cent of the
federal ministers interviewed are Dutch-speaking, while on French-speaking
television news, 70–80 per cent are French-speaking (Sinardet 2012a). The
news value of a federal minister thus seems to depend on his or her belonging
to a language group. This media dynamic is clearly interwoven with political
dynamics as Flemish and French-speaking federal ministers in Belgium have
the tendency to communicate their decisions primarily through their ‘own’
media. The discourse of politicians also tends to vary, depending on whether
they are interviewed by Dutch-speaking or French-speaking media. This is in
line with how media frame political information according to the political
consensus within their own community, particularly on linguistic matters.
Political reporting on the controversial matter of the electoral district of
Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, for instance, clearly emphasized elements that
were congruent with the political consensus of the ‘own’ community while
omitting elements that weren’t (Sinardet 2013). The linguistic segmentation of
the media landscape thus contributes to a democratic deficit, as viewers are
not fully informed of all actions and policies of the federal government and
cannot witness debates on these issues where all relevant viewpoints and
arguments are exchanged.
The Belgian public sphere issue might lead some to make a comparison
with the absence of a public sphere in the European Union (EU), but there are
nevertheless important differences. Belgian federal matters may often be
reported on one-sidedly in the media, but coverage of federal politics as
such is still high, actually higher than coverage of regional politics. Addition-
ally, while federal actors of the ‘other’ language community in Belgium are not
featured very much, they are not as invisible as most European actors are in
national media. Nevertheless, while the lack of a polity-wide public sphere is
not as outspoken in Belgium as it is on the EU level, it is also true that the type
of public sphere that exists in most of the EU member states is not present in
Belgium.
Another important nuance that has to be added is that while there may not
be a genuine public sphere on the political level such as often understood in
democratic theory, there are a number of common national cultural refer-
ences. According to Billiet, Maddens, and Frognier (2006: 918) a Belgian
feeling still exists and has actually been on the rise in recent years, coming
to the surface in ‘emotionally charged events’ such as football, tennis, the
‘white marsh’ of 1996, and the Belgian feelings following the death of King
Baudouin in 1993: ‘The fact that the Belgians mourned their deceased mon-
arch en masse was regarded by observers as a sign that Belgian national
consciousness is still widespread and deep-rooted.’ The new King that came
to the throne on 21 July 2013 has also been able to garner public support,
although he was initially met with much scepticism by most analysts. Next to
the Royal Family, sports are undoubtedly the best example of important
Belgian cultural references, with the enormous nation-wide popular success
of the Red Devils, the national football team, whose recent successful matches
led to patriotic outbursts. While it is often said that Flemish and francophone
viewers have a totally different media consumption, the best watched pro-
gramme ever on the Flemish as well as the French-speaking public broadcaster
was a World Cup match of the Belgian Red Devils against the US in July 2014.
Combined with other international successes that boosted a form of national
pride, such as those of Belgian singers like Stromae and the winning of the
Nobel Prize for Physics by François Englert, this has even led to analysis
stating the existence of a new ‘Belgitude’.
Paradoxically, the long political crisis since 2007, while exacerbating polit-
ical tensions between representatives of the two large language communities
and spawning speculation on a split of the country, also was the trigger for a
quite opposite dynamic of more interaction and exchange between the com-
munities. Although this is certainly still far from being the case for all of them,
more politicians than in the past address the two language communities, also
because news media tend to invite more politicians, but also journalists and
experts from across the language border. Newspapers from both communities
also collaborate more in recent years, especially on federal politics. In general,
the debate on what the relation between both communities should be has been
much stronger and also more conflictual. But because of that indifference
towards the other community it has also diminished to some extent. And
probably as a reaction to the success of the Flemish-nationalist party N-VA
[Nieuwe Vlaamse Alliantie] (the largest Flemish political party at the federal
and regional elections of 2014), which is undoubtedly most credible when it
comes to Flemish nationalism, other Flemish parties tend to focus less on
Flemish identity and nation-building. For instance, the call of the Minister-
President of the Flemish government (N-VA) in March 2016 to revive an old
debate about the development of a Flemish constitution as a nation-building
tool, was critically received by the other parties. Also, while the institutional
debate was hitherto about to what extent competences should be further
defederalized, recently the idea to refederalize some competences has gained
intellectual and political ground. A survey among federal and regional MPs
(Sinardet, Reuchamps, and Dodeigne 2016) showed that an increasing num-
ber of them favoured more competences to be attributed to the Belgian level.
Within the Flemish party system this reinforces the division on the autonomy
question as Flemish-nationalist MPs remain in favour of regionalizing a

maximum of competences.
The N-VA itself has also in part redefined its relation towards Belgium. In
2014, to the surprise of many, the party decided to take part in a centre-right
federal government without any guarantees for further constitutional reform
and ensuing increase in Flemish autonomy. This made a historical break
with the strategy of Flemish nationalist parties: in the past they would only
participate in Belgian governments if a new constitutional reform that would
entail large steps towards more Flemish autonomy was agreed in advance.
Now they signed a federal government agreement which for the first time in
thirty years does not contain any reference to constitutional reform. The
remarkable step follows on from the move of the party in recent years to
largely drop traditional nationalist discourse, focusing on how the state
should be congruent with the nation, as this was not a guarantee for electoral
success. Rather, N-VA shifted its emphasis to a liberal socio-economic
platform and a strict stance on migration. Flemish autonomy was no longer
presented as being a goal in itself but as a means to be able to conduct a more
right-wing policy in tune with electoral results in the Flemish part of the
country and to no longer have to be governed by the French-speaking
socialist party, traditionally dominant in the south of the country. When
we reverse left and right this is a discourse quite similar to that of the
Scottish nationalists who in the recent referendum campaign presented a
‘yes’ to Scottish independence as opening the way to a left-wing future, freed
of the Tories who dominate Great-Britain. Given that autonomy as a means
for a right-wing policy became the central argument in the N-VA’s discourse,
when this goal could be attained by joining a federal government this became
a quite logical step to take. It is the first federal government since 1988 in
which the French-speaking socialists are not present, which is presented by
the party as a revolution in itself. Also, it is the first time that a government is
supported by less than one-third of the French-speaking seats in the parlia-
ment. However, the main political figures of N-VA have reassured their rank
and file that a form of separatism remains the long-term goal of the party.
And even though, the broadening of its discourse has not only attracted new
voters but also new political personnel, the N-VA remains in the first place a
Flemish nationalist party. They also argue that conducting right-wing pol-
icies will lead Walloon socialists to demand more autonomy, thus precipi-
tating a break-up of the country. Indeed, a past drive for economic autonomy
in Wallonia came from the left and was also to a large extent motivated by
similar socio-economic concerns.
Nevertheless, despite these recent evolutions, the structural segmentation
on the political and media level remains and continues to have a dominant
influence.
14.2.4 Identities and Attitudes among Public Opinion
Somewhat surprisingly, this segmentation is not strongly reflected in terms

of identity feelings and attitudes towards regional autonomy (which is one
of the explanations for the evolution of Flemish nationalist discourse and argu-
mentation). Research on national-territorial identity feelings (Billiet, Maddens,
and Frognier 2006: 916–17; Deschouwer and Sinardet 2010; Deschouwer et al.
2015) shows a majority of citizens still identify in the first place with Belgium.
Also a large majority does not consider Flemish or Walloon/francophone
identity, on the one hand, and Belgian identity, on the other, to be mutually
exclusive. The data confirm what David Miller (2000: 129) argues about the
existence of multiple, ‘nested nationalities’: citizens can think of themselves
as belonging both to the smaller community and to the larger one, without
suffering schizophrenia.
However, when people are put before the choice between different identities,
it is remarkable that for many the Belgian national identity consistently remains
stronger than the complementary regional identities, including in the Flemish
part of the country. In 2014, 56 per cent of Flemish voters identified in the first
place with Belgium and 21 per cent with Flanders, which puts first identification
with Belgium at the highest level and first identification with Flanders at the
lowest level in decades. The figures for 2014 also show an increase in the
number of Flemings that declare to feel ‘only Belgian’, rising to 23 per cent
while only 9 per cent considers themselves ‘only Flemish’ (Deschouwer et al.
2015). Identification with Belgium is even stronger in the south of the country,
where regional identification is much more limited. The Belgian sense of identity
is thus not gradually being eroded as the federalization process continues. Also,
immigrants and people with an immigrant background—an increasing part of
the Belgian population—identify themselves with the Belgian or the local city
level rather than with the regions/communities (Vancluysen and Van Craen
2009; Morelli and Schreiber 1998). The generally stronger identification with
Belgium strongly contrasts with how the Flemish political elite has since the
1970s actively pursued Flemish nation-building.
Moreover, public opinion research shows that conflicts between communi-
ties/regions and the regional autonomy question generally score among the
lowest as vote-determining issues among Dutch-speaking as well as French-
speaking voters (Deschouwer and Sinardet 2010; Swyngedouw, Abts, and
Galle 2014; Deschouwer et al. 2015). The support for more political autonomy
is higher in Flanders than in Wallonia though. In 2014, 38.5 per cent of the
Flemish and 25.8 per cent of the Walloon were in favour of more competences
for the federated entities, figures which are about 10 per cent lower than in
2009. However, given that at that moment all of the Flemish political elite were
in favour of this, the figure is still quite low, certainly when one takes into
account the fact that one fifth was in favour of more competences for the
federal level. The percentage of Flemish voters in favour of an independent
Flanders has also dropped to around 5 per cent in 2014 (Swyngedouw, Abts,
and Galle 2014; Deschouwer et al. 2015). Before, it had been quite stable for
years around 10 per cent, which is quite similar to the support for a return to a
unitary Belgium. The percentage of separatists in the French-speaking part of
the country generally remains under 5 per cent.
However, a difference in general political orientation can be noticed, with
right-wing parties being stronger in the north than in the south of the country.
The catholic party and socialist party were always the leading political forces
in, respectively, the Flemish and Walloon region, which often contributed to
their stances being associated with those of Flanders and Wallonia as a whole.
Today, the dominance of the catholic party in Flanders is less strong but the
N-VA has been able to become the largest party largely based on an econom-
ically right-wing discourse. This of course has an influence on the represen-
tation of ideological positions in both communities. However, again, these
differences in party political strength do not necessarily translate into strongly
divided public opinions. Indeed, a 2014 survey concerning all the main federal
competences showed only very small differences in opinions between Flemish
and Walloon respondents. This means that on a number of issues public
opinion in the north is more represented by politicians in the south and vice
versa. For instance, while political support for a wealth tax is fairly limited in
Flanders, there is strong public support among Flemish public opinion for
this. Similarly, the strong support for obliging the unemployed to perform
civic service in the south is not translated in support among French-speaking
parties. This seems to suggest that there is more of a gap between public and
political opinion on some issues than between public opinion in north
and south.
However, the dominant image that Flemish and French-speaking politi-
cians form two homogeneous blocs, with clear-cut and well-defined points of
view should also be nuanced even where state reform is concerned. Research
among all Belgian MPs at the time of the political crisis (Reuchamps 2015)
shows that, within the two main language groups, differences of opinion are
sometimes very large, particularly on the Flemish side. Indeed, the greatest
difference of opinion in respect of the distribution of power between the federal
level and the federated entities is between two Flemish parties, the greens and
the extreme right. Consequently, some francophone parties are in favour of a
greater degree of regional autonomy than some of their Flemish colleagues.
Also the sense of identity and the perception of community relations shows no
clear division between the Flemish and francophones. On many levels, it is the
nationalist parties who clearly stand apart from the rest. They are also the most
incongruent with their own voters on matters of identity and nationalism.
In other words, a common public sphere (such as often understood in

democratic theory) and a common (national) identity should not necessarily
be considered as synonyms. The first is not a prerequisite for the latter.
1 4. 3 D I V E R G I N G NA T I O N BU I L D I N G P O L I C IE S
ON DIFFERENT LEVELS
The institutions and federal arrangements of Belgium and its increasingly

politically autonomous regions and communities are both a product and a pace
maker of (political) identity construction: ‘they created permanent boundaries
that gave additional subjective meaning to cultural markers and/or territory in
addition to favouring identity politics’ (Lecours 2001: 63). Devolution is in part
the result of different forms of cultural identity, but it also gives the regions and
language communities tools to enforce that identity with nation building
policies. Culture, education, and immigrant integration are important in this
respect, as they have all been brought under the jurisdiction of the Flemish and
French-speaking community. As a result, Belgium increasingly became a coun-
try with several, competing identity politics and (sub)nation building policies
on different levels.
When it was installed in 1970, the Flemish government—then still called the
Flemish executive—almost immediately started with a liberal nationalist pol-
itical discourse and a genuine policy of nation building. In fact, even before the
creation of Flemish politically autonomous institutions, the creation of a
Flemish national consciousness was part of the project of most of the Flemish
political elites. For instance, the creation of a Flemish television channel in
1953—then still in the framework of the unitary Belgian public broadcaster—
was regarded by the then Flemish catholic elite as a means to create and
reinforce a Flemish identity and culture (Van den Bulck 2001). When
Flemish political institutions were created in 1970, they started to develop
nation building policies, amongst other things by adopting official symbols
such as a flag and national holiday. In the 1980s the Flemish identity increas-
ingly started to be represented in more economic terms, such as through
projects like Flanders Technology. The 1990s also saw the Flemish govern-
ment adopt an explicit nationalist discourse, trying to develop and reinforce
Flemish identity, partly as a means to advocate more competences. This type
of nationalist discourse disappeared from the forefront at the turn of the
century, although policies such as the support for all kind of festivities to
celebrate the day of the Flemish Community on 11 July remained. More focus
was also put on citizenship trajectories with language and civic integration
courses for newcomers. The aim is a thin Flemish national identity which is
open for ethno-cultural and religious diversity, but is strong enough to create a
real Flemish political community. This discourse, in combination with the
idea of subsidiarity as an element of good governance, is of course predom-
inantly used by the Flemish nationalist party N-VA, but is at least implicitly
supported by all Flemish political parties.
In the French-speaking part of Belgium the desire to implement a liberal
nationalist strategy is much less obvious. Similar to its Flemish counterpart,
the French-speaking community also adopted ‘national’ symbols such as a flag
and a national holiday and particularly in the 1990s the Walloon region also
developed its own nation building, even adopting its own national anthem, as
a sort of response to Flemish policies. But the effort was never as continuously
and structurally conducted as in Flanders. Although a Walloon nationalism/
regionalism does exist, it is weaker than its Flemish counterpart (Kesteloot
2013a; Adam 2013; Deschouwer 2009). There are several reasons for this
difference. First, the identification with the Belgian identity—although also
still strong among Flemish public opinion—is stronger in French-speaking
Belgium. Second, there is no uniform object of identification. While Flanders
is a rather homogeneous sub-nation, where the Flemish Region and the
Flemish Community have merged and have one government and parliament,
the Walloon Region and the French Community form two separate institu-
tions. The fact that Dutch-speakers living in Brussels only make up a very
small percentage of the total Flemish community in comparison to the
French-speakers of Brussels, who represent almost a quarter of the French-
speaking community, helps to explain this. There is also a division between
citizens and movements promoting the Walloon regional consciousness and
others who want to promote identification with the so-called Communauté
Wallonie-Bruxelles (Billiet, Maddens, and Frognier 2006: 915). In recent years,
a Brussels regional dynamic has also been coming to the forefront, stimulating
a specific Brussels urban identity.
The Flemish government is strongly involved with the definition of a
collective Flemish ‘us’, while in francophone Belgium the establishment and
definition of a collective ‘us’ is more left to the Belgian government. As a
consequence, there is a tendency in Flanders to use the term ‘new Fleming’
instead of immigrant or ‘allochtoon’, while an analogue terminology is absent
in Wallonia (Adam 2013: 17). To become a new ‘Flemish citizen’, immigrants
must learn the language and agree with the ‘Flemish’ values of pluralism,
democracy, the rule of law, freedom, equality, solidarity, respect, and citizen-
ship (cf. Bossuyt 2006). This is an example of how universal liberal values can
function as part of a particular national identity and (liberal) nationalist
discourse. These values cannot by themselves generate the differentiation
between nations, but they can be used in such a performative way that they
serve the purpose of distinguishing ‘us’ (the nation) from ‘them’ (Zimmer
2003; Laegaard 2007).
In the literature and in public debate, reference is also made by several

authors to the different conception of a nation (and nation building) in the
two language communities. While Flanders has a tradition of ‘cultural nation-
alism’, the French-speaking community would be more in line with the so-
called ‘civic nationalism’.2 The latter is based on the (French, Enlightened)
idea that a nation is formed by a voluntary union of equal and free individuals.
The nation is defined as a political community, based on a constitution, laws,
and equal citizenship. In Flanders on the contrary the perceived concept of a
national identity would be much more influenced by the (Romantic, German)
idea of the nation a Volk, that is, a pre-political entity with an organic
character that pre-exists and transcends the life of its members. The national
identity is then based on a narrative of common ancestry and a common
heritage, language, religion, and history. And indeed, Flemish nationalism
was in the beginning, essentially a movement for Flemish cultural and lin-
guistic emancipation in the context of a state dominated by francophones.
It was a struggle for cultural autonomy and for the affirmation of a denied
Flemish identity.
However, it is not clear if this difference on both sides of the linguistic
borderline is fully true. Empirical research shows that the inhabitants of
Wallonia and Flanders find ethnic indicators for citizenship just as important
(Billiet 2011: 228).3 Nevertheless the alleged different understanding of
national identity is still often used to explain why Flanders would be less open
for newcomers, why Flemish extreme right anti-immigrant political parties are
so successful, and why Flanders focuses more than the French community on
special integration programmes for immigrants.
At the Belgian level, the government is weakly equipped for nation build-
ing policies. As we mentioned, the different languages and divided (and
divisive) institutions contribute to the existence of different public spheres
and limited interaction between the language groups. Secondly, because of
the devolution process the central Belgian authority has barely any policy
instruments to structurally promote a shared Belgian culture. Last but not least,
there are no Belgian-wide political parties anymore and therefore almost no
politicians who propagate a genuine Belgian project. Legislation on nationality
and naturalization is one of the few relevant policies that is still a Belgian
responsibility. However, it could be considered symptomatic for the lack of a
shared Belgian political project that Belgium had for a long time one of the most
open and liberal nationality laws in the world. In contrast to the Flemish
community, where the idea of ‘Flemish citizenship’ was (conforming to the
liberal nationalist logic) linked with language requirements and citizenization
trajectories (Loobuyck and Jacobs 2006, 2009; Foblets and Yanasmayan 2010),
between 2000 and 2013 no integration or language conditions were required to
get the Belgian nationality. Adults born in Belgium or who had been living in
Belgium for seven years with a permanent resident status could simply opt for
Belgian nationality, without any further requirements. Ironically, under the
Michel government that came into power in 2014 and of which the N-VA is the
largest party, legislation on nationality became much stricter. On the one hand,
this was in tune with the conservative immigration platform the party ran on in
recent years but on the other hand this also simultaneously implied developing a
form of Belgian nation building policy. Emblematic for this is the project of a
‘newcomer’s declaration’ which was launched by N-VA’s secretary of state
for asylum and immigration in the federal government. The idea, launched in
the aftermath of the Paris and Brussels attacks in 2015 and 2016, is that
newcomers have to sign a declaration in which some of the common values of
their host country are listed (such as freedom of expression, gender equality,
etc.). It came under criticism for being stigmatizing against Muslims. An advice
of the Council of State was also quite critical on the project. Amongst other
objections it noted that the division of competences in Belgium had not been
respected, as the ‘newcomers declaration’ was also related to integration which
is a competence of the communities. It is of course quite ironic that a Flemish
nationalist politician does not respect Flemish autonomy to be able to imple-
ment a policy that at least implicitly contributes to a form of Belgian nation
building. It is also telling for the paradoxical position the N-VA finds itself
in, trying to combine conservative liberal policies and Flemish-nationalist
positions. Another example is the proposal of the party to make newcomers
pay more for their naturalization process, which was supported by the argument
that the Belgian nationality is too valuable to not ask a reasonable price for it. It
must be said, though, that naturalization policies had already become stricter
before the N-VA joined the federal government, although they did have a hand
in the process. The change was agreed on in parliament during Belgium’s long
period without a federal government with full powers in 2010–11 and during
which the N-VA was part of the ongoing negotiations. Since January 2013 to get
the Belgian nationality, immigrants should speak one of the official languages in
Belgium and should give evidence that they are socially and economically
integrated in their new, Belgian society. The participation in an integration
course or citizenization trajectory is also an advantage.
14.4 THREE DIMENSIONS O F SOLIDARITY
Next, we will try to find out if the different conceptions of a political commu-
nity are linked with different conceptions of solidarity on the three dimensions
mentioned in the introduction of this book by Banting and Kymlicka: civic,
democratic, and redistributive solidarity. We do not have enough data to make
straightforward conclusions about the dimensions of democratic and redis-
tributive solidarity. For these two dimensions, we focus on respectively the
debate on voting rights for immigrants and support for splitting up the social
welfare system.
14.4.1 Civic Solidarity
The combination of the alleged link between Flemish nationalism and cultural
(ethnic) nationalism on the one hand and the electoral success of the Flemish
extreme right in the 1990s and 2000s on the other hand suggests that the
attitude towards newcomers, immigration, and cultural diversity is less open
and more ethnocentric in Flanders than in the rest of Belgium.
However, empirical research does not fully confirm the hypothesis that
there is such a big difference on the dimension of civic solidarity between the
regions. There are only a few differences and they are rather gradual than
absolute. There is, for instance, almost no difference between the language
groups in their feeling of being threatened by the presence of immigrants in
terms of employment, social provisions, and culture. But Flemings usually feel
somewhat more threatened in their cultural individuality, while in franco-
phone Belgium, particularly in Wallonia, where the economic situation is
worse, people feel most threatened at an economic level and in terms of social
provision (Billiet 2011: 224–6; Billiet, Maddens, and Frognier 2006: 923–4;
Billiet, Carton, and Huys 1990).
Another difference, as data of the European Value Study 2009 show, is that
compared with other Belgian citizens, Flemings are less likely to seek social
contact with foreigners. They also tend to have a more negative attitude
towards the idea of foreign neighbours, especially Muslims (Billiet, 2011:
224; Billiet, Jaspaert, and Swyngedouw 2012). There seems to be a greater
social distance towards foreign groups in Flanders than in the rest of Belgium
(see also Billiet, Doutrelepont, and Vandekeere 2000; and earlier: Billiet,
Carton, and Huys 1990: 70).
Moreover, in Flanders there is a negative relationship between attitudes
towards ethnic minorities and Flemish consciousness. The more people feel
Belgian, the more open they are towards newcomers. In the Walloon sample,
the reverse relation was found (Billiet 2006: 53; Maddens, Billiet, and Beerten
2000; Billiet, Maddens, and Beerten 2003; Maddens, Beerten, and Billiet 1998).
These findings can be nuanced because it is only a particular Flemish nation-
alism that correlates with a negative attitude towards foreigners. People with a
strong Flemish identification based on a rather civic conception of nationalism
do not have these negative attitudes (Vanbeselaere, Boen, and Meeus 2006).
The success of an extreme right anti-immigrant party in Flanders, while this
kind of party is absent in Wallonia, cannot be explained by reference to a
much more ethnocentric Flanders (Coffé 2005). The success is rather the
result of the existence of competent populist extreme right politicians and
probably also of the fact that the French-speaking socialist party was able to
keep its traditional labour electorate while in Flanders a number of those
voters went to the extreme right in the 1990s. The success of N-VA in recent
elections makes the extreme right much less attractive and successful, but
there are no indicators that the Flemish electorate is now less ethnocentric
and anti-immigrant than before. This is not to deny that the negative attitude
towards immigrants proved to be the best predictor of voting for the Vlaams
Blok (VB) during the 1991 and subsequent elections (Billiet 2006: 38).
Approximately 50 per cent spontaneously cite the immigration issue as a reason
for their choice to vote for extreme right. Only 5 per cent refer to Flemish
autonomy—which is extremely low for a nationalist party that argues for an
independent Flanders. Moreover, it is also due to the successful far-right party
that immigration and integration have become much stronger politicized issues
in the Flemish than in the Walloon region.
14.4.2 Democratic Solidarity
On 8 October 2006, third country nationals could participate in local elections

for the first time, albeit only as voters and not as candidates. For them, voting
is voluntary, while for Belgians it is compulsory. Belgian politicians of both
language groups have been remarkably reluctant in enfranchising foreign
residents (Jacobs 1999, 2000). They argued that such voting rights are super-
fluous, since it was very easy to acquire Belgian nationality and all the political
rights associated with it. It took until early 1999 before Belgium finally
enfranchised EU citizens in compliance with the Maastricht Treaty and the
derived European directive. The Belgian government was even urged to
legislate by a judgement of the European Court of Justice in 1998. The delay
was the result of a sub-state nationalist electoral rationality: the Flemish
politicians were afraid that the enfranchisement of EU citizens in Brussels
and its periphery would result in electoral advantage for the francophone
political parties.
For non-EU citizens, the electoral law was modified in 2004, following
heated political debates. The opposition and delay were organized by a
number of Flemish political parties (especially by the liberal VLD [Vlaamse
Liberalen en Democraten] in government and the extreme right Vlaams Blok
in the opposition), while a consensus about local enfranchisement existed
between most of the francophone parties and the Flemish left. As far as we
can see, this partial language cleavage is not the result of a different conception
of the political community in Flanders and the French speaking part of
Belgium. Apart from the fact that VB, as an anti-immigrant party, is logically
against enfranchisement, there are mainly two political reasons (Jacobs and
Swyngedouw 2002). Firstly, Flemish democratic parties were more reluctant
than their francophone colleagues because they feared a white backlash and
further growth of the extreme right. Indeed, various studies showed that a
vast majority in Flanders opposed enfranchisement, while in Wallonia and
Brussels around 45 per cent were against (Billiet 2006: 923). Secondly, the
Flemish parties were afraid that the foreign vote would immediately benefit
French-speaking politicians thus weakening the electoral position of Flemish
politicians in Brussels and its periphery, a reason already invoked when talking
about EU nationals.
14.4.3 Redistributive Solidarity
As far as we know, there are no data directly measuring (the evolution of)
socio-economic solidarity between the different language regions. That the
socialist party is much stronger in the south than in the north of the country
suggests that the electorate in Wallonia is more left wing and progressive on
social economic issues than the Flemish electorate. As a consequence, there
should be more support for redistributive solidarity in Wallonia than in
Flanders. However, it is not clear if this also has any implication for the
ideas about redistributive solidarity between the regions.
In the public and political debate, however, the intra- and trans-regional
solidarity discourse is clearly less popular in Flanders than in the French-
speaking part of Belgium. This may be the result of the fact that solidarity is
mainly perceived now as an issue of Flanders having to pay for the economically
weaker francophone region (cf. Béland and Lecours 2005: 694). This probably
better explains the different political and public support for interpersonal
solidarity at the Belgian level than the difference in socialist electoral success
in the different regions. It would not be surprising if this was the other way
round until the Second World War, when Flanders was clearly the region with
most poverty and unemployment and thus gained from national solidarity.
One of the indicators for trans- and intra-regional solidarity we can use is
the willingness to divide the Belgian social security system. As we mentioned
earlier, the idea is indeed more popular in Flanders than in Wallonia. Flemish
nationalist parties have regularly argued that Flanders pays too much for social
security, unemployment, and health care of Walloons and that this solidarity
with Wallonia is expensive, ineffective, and unjust. Sometimes, it seems that
Brussels as a bilingual obstacle is the only reason why the Belgian social
security system still exists. Many politicians and political parties use this
pragmatic argument against the split of the social security system; they do
not often use a political discourse about solidarity with compatriots of the
other language group. However, the theme has faded from the forefront in
recent years, which is linked to N-VA’s shift in discourse. Nevertheless, it
tends to be one of these issues that never completely disappears.
For liberal nationalists, this should come as little surprise: Belgium is a
multinational state with different languages, and different media and political
spheres—and therefore, the willingness for solidarity on the Belgian level will
be weak. It sounds plausible but for the moment we do not have empirical data
to confirm or to falsify if this liberal nationalist thesis is indeed true for

Belgium. However, we can certainly not exclude that the ongoing process of
state reform will end up in an erosion of interpersonal solidarity at the Belgian
level. Indeed, the sixth reform of the Belgian state, which was voted in 2013,
for the first time already regionalized aspects of social security, such as child
benefits and some health care benefits, although the financing of these systems
largely remained federal. The more a government has the political tools and
responsibilities to cope with the redistributive challenge for its own region, the
less it will be interested in solutions for redistribution between autonomous
regions. For a multilingual federal country as Belgium, here lies an undeniable
tension and trade-off between devolution and generous intra- and inter-
regional solidarity (Van Parijs 2011: 211–14).
Nevertheless, it is not unthinkable that (some) solidarity policies might stay
at the Belgian level for the time being, mainly as a result of institutional veto
points by francophone political parties. It is also possible that if in the longer
term socio-economic differences between the regions would be inversed,
this might also become the case with demand for more autonomy in social
security. However, while institutional vetoes may make it possible to maintain
existing schemes of pan-Belgian social security, they will not be able to
underpin any further expansion. Moreover, this way social redistribution
becomes more a matter of inertia than of positive solidarity. Maintaining, let
alone further developing, pan-Belgian redistributive solidarity therefore prob-
ably needs a more explicit Belgian narrative about politics, solidarity, and
identity which could build on the Belgian identity that still exists among the
large majority of the Belgian population. Such a narrative would not have the
intention to deny national and regional differences, but the existence of
different public and political discourses in the different regions should not
exclude the idea of a Belgian public and political discourse. One important
element that could contribute to this is the introduction of a country-wide
electoral district for Belgium’s federal parliament (cf. Van Parijs and
Deschouwer 2011; Sinardet 2012b). Such a ‘common voting space’, which is
also considered as a factor in the rise of solidarity in multilingual Switzerland
(cf. Lacey 2014), would provide a common intentional object which is an
important element to be able to speak of a democratic community. And
without democratic community it becomes difficult to establish a sustainable
policy of redistribution and solidarity. A similar type of democratic reform is
also a potential basis for building solidarity at the European level.
Next to the Belgian level, we can expect that the regions will also build
their own welfare system when they get the political tools and competences.
The discussion about how this will and can be done in complex and multi-
level Belgium is technical as well as ideological. At present, social federalism
in Belgium is still at an immature stage (Cantillon, Popelier, and Mussche
2011). The rise of Flemish nationalism and the ongoing process of
constitutional reform are making it more difficult to achieve significant

improvements in redistributive solidarity on the pan-Belgian level, but liberal
nationalists would expect that this will be offset and compensated by
improvements in redistributive solidarity on the regional level. Unfortunate-
ly, it is too early to see how Flemish nationalism will and can influence the
politics of redistributive solidarity on the Flemish level. Until today the
regional governments did not have the main tools for that kind of policy
since social security, health care, unemployment, were all on the Belgian
level. Moreover, the Flemish nationalist movement was for a long time
mainly linked with the fight for more language and cultural autonomy and
recognition, and less with a particular social policy model. Flemish nation-
alism did not associate itself with progressive social policies and values in the
same way as Scottish and Québécois nationalism did (Béland and Lecours
2005: 693–6), in recent years. Rather to the contrary.
During the 1990s, however, the Flemish region did develop a new branch of
social policy, by introducing a Flemish care insurance system (Cantillon 2011:
69–75). While this could be read as Flemish autonomy leading to a develop-
ment of social policy at the Flemish level, it can also be read in the opposite
way as this was rather used by a number of Flemish political actors as a way to
create an alternative to or even to ‘hollow out’ federal social security. This is
also the reason why French-speaking parties opposed this development, which
they saw as a transgression of competences by the Flemish authorities and as a
first step towards dismantling the federal system of interpersonal solidarity as
the French-speaking community did not have the financial means to develop a
similar system. The decision of the Flemish coalition parties during the
Flemish government formation of 2009 to develop an additional system of
Flemish child benefits as well as an additional Flemish hospital insurance can
largely be situated in the same vein. These were demands of the N-VA, which
wanted to develop a Flemish system of social policy again in competition with
the federal system. The fact that this was never developed after the decision
was made in 2011 to split the federal system of child benefits, indicates that
these decisions had more to do with nationalism than social policy.
The implementation of the aforementioned sixth state reform, which gives
the Flemish region more autonomy on matters such as the activation of the
unemployed, family allowances and the political fight against (child) poverty
might be a test case to see whether Flemish nationalism is working to build
redistributive solidarity or not. In this respect, it has to be noted that the
arguments, mainly of the N-VA, to further split up the Belgian state has
shifted away from a traditional nationalist discourse focused on the existence
of a Flemish identity, nation, and culture towards more instrumental argu-
ments, stating that Flemish voters vote for more right-wing policies which
cannot be implemented due to the dominance of francophone left-wing parties
at the federal level. In the 2014 electoral campaign, the N-VA mainly advocated
issues such as important tax reductions, socio-economic reforms in the direc-

tion advocated by the European Commission in recent years and often asso-
ciated with austerity, limiting unemployment benefits in time, a less important
role for the state and a stricter migration policy. The legitimacy of the federal
government is thus put into question because it cannot deliver the more right-
wing policies the Flemish electorate voted for. This suggests that the type
of policies that will be conducted at the Flemish level will not tend to a
development of welfare programmes. However, while the N-VA is now often
considered as a socio-economically liberal party in Belgian political debate,
it remains a nationalist party in the first place and it is therefore likely that
their social policy will largely be determined by that agenda.
14.5 DIFFERENT MIGRANT AND

I NTEGRATIO N P OLICI E S
The Belgian federation has originally been designed to prevent intergovern-

mental co-operation as much as possible (Swenden and Jans 2006: 886). Also
with regard to immigrant integration policy, horizontal intergovernmental
dialogue, let alone co-operation between regional governments was absent.
Since the state reform of 1980, the Flemish and French-speaking communities
have jurisdiction over the reception and integration policies of migrants. From
1984 onwards, the Flemish and French Communities’ immigrant integration
policy started to diverge showing different perspectives on integration (Adam
2013: 7ff.; Martiniello 2012, 1995). But recently they have become much closer
as the French-speaking community gradually took over the Flemish approach.
In general, we could say that the Flemish government clearly adopted a target
approach towards immigrants from the beginning, while the francophone gov-
ernment has for a long time deliberately opted not to develop any categorical
policy towards immigrant groups. The French Community focused on socio-
economic equality and the integration policies were included in broader social
policies to the benefit of all citizens. Concerning cultural issues the French
Community tended towards a laissez-faire, or even assimilationist policy.
In Flanders ethnic and cultural diversity was much more an issue in political
and public debate. While the francophone governments were unwilling to
recognize ethnic-cultural groups as specific entities in their policies, Flemish
policy documents explicitly used the term ‘ethno-cultural minorities’. Until 2000
the Flemish government established a multicultural policy which has been
supplemented after 2000 by a more ‘assimilationist’ policy of civic integration.
Several examples can illustrate this difference. Contrary to Wallonia, in
Flanders and in Brussels, there have been experiments with education in the
language and culture of the immigrants. The Flemish policy has also had a
clear preference for supporting grassroots ethnic minority organizations.
Consultation with immigrant organization representatives has become good
practice in several political domains, while this is much less the case on the
francophone side. The Flemish Community supported therefore the creation
of the ‘Minorities Forum’ to allow ethnic minority’s organizations and their
federations to prepare joint positions and perspectives. In the south of the
country, there was no specific policy for addressing the problems of immi-
grants as ethnic minorities. The issues were not formulated in cultural terms
but in the more general and inclusive terms of economic marginalization,
social exclusion, citizenship, and social cohesion. Activities that promoted the
culture of the country of origin or that were aimed at one specific target group
with an immigrant background were explicitly rejected.
Typical for the Flemish approach since 2003 is a civic integration programme
for newcomers. The programme is compulsory for most of the non-EU-citizens
and includes Dutch-language courses, a course on social orientation, and a
trajectory for professional integration on the labour market. This kind of
reception policy with citizenization trajectories was completely absent in the
south of the country until 2014. The policy statement of the French-speaking
community of 2009 showed for the first time the explicit intention to organize
some reception policies. In February 2016 the Government of the French-
speaking community agreed to introduce a law which makes 120-hours lan-
guage course and 20-hours citizenship education compulsory for newcomers of
non-European countries. This course is also relevant for acquiring Belgian
nationality later on.
The introduction of and focus on the civic integration courses after 2000,
however, does not imply that Flanders is abandoning its former multicultur-
alist approach. The Flemish government sees no contradiction in combining a
(more multicultural) targeted ethnic minorities policy with a (more assimila-
tionist) programme for citizenship trajectories (Jacobs and Rea 2007: 268;
Jacobs 2004; Adam 2013: 11). The Flemish authorities have a combination
model that contains both assimilationist and multiculturalist policy instru-
ments. Cultural distinctiveness, in particular language, serves as a relatively
straightforward criterion for defining the Flemish national community, that is,
for specifying who should be included and excluded. However, the Flemish
government defines the ‘Flemish values’ always in terms of general liberal
values and it keeps insisting that its civic integration policy is open to diversity
and is not aimed at ‘assimilation’:
We want to achieve social cohesion in which everyone’s particularity and cultural
identity can prosper, but in which the current values, norms and rules of our
democratic state and the rule of law, remain the corner stone of Flemish society.
The Flemish government judges it to be important that allochtonous Flemings do
not give up their cultural and religious values, but rather integrate these as added
values to Flemish society. Respect of diversity is one of the fundamental values of
Flemish society: just like the equality of all humans, the separation of church and
state and the freedom of expression. (Flemish government 2004: 5)
The difference between the philosophies on integration between the two
language communities were and are, at least to a certain extent, determined
by a different view on national identity and community building. The political
autonomy makes it possible that both Communities could establish a minority
or integration policy in line with their own ‘national’ history, identity, and
sensitivities. It is not by accident that the francophone approach of immigrant
integration is inspired by the model developed and used in France and that in
Flanders there is a lot of emphasis on language competence and the importance
of ethnic cultural identities—two issues which have had a prominent role in the
history of the Flemish nationalist movement. The Flemish approach is based on
the belief that preservation, valorization, and development of its own cultural
heritage and identity is important and can stimulate and promote the immi-
grant’s emancipation and participation within the host society. This echoes the
Flemish history of being dominated by other cultures and languages.
It has been argued several times that the Flemish integration policies are
based on a more ethnic, cultural nation, while Walloon policies are an expo-
nent of civic or territorial nationalism (cf. Martiniello 1995, 2012). And
indeed, without the peculiar notion of Flemish nationalism, it would be
impossible to understand the process of policy making of the last decades
concerning immigration and integration in Belgium and Flanders. However,
the relationship between Flemish nationalism and the Flemish approach to
newcomers and migrants is complex and Janus-faced (Loobuyck and Jacobs
2010). On the one side, the Flemish history of nationalism and the struggle for
autonomy, language rights, and cultural emancipation are used to accept that
newcomers are bound to their own language, culture, and so on. It supports
the multicultural stance and the idea of ‘emancipation without loss of cultural
identity’. On the other hand, the Flemish history of nationalism is used as an
argument for assimilation and civic integration. The languages, cultures, and
religions of the newcomers are conceived of as a (new) threat for the Flemish
culture. As the Belgian anthropologist Eugeen Roosens (1994: 269) notes,
‘natives, who closely associate language, territory, and culture, view it as
somewhat ironic that after winning their long battle against the Walloons,
they are now in danger of forfeiting their cultural rights to foreigners on their
own soil’. This explains why language assimilation and civic integration is
much more emphasized in Flanders than in French-speaking Belgium. In sum,
the cultural identity of minorities is important, but the Flemish culture always
had to take precedence.
All this confirms that much more than Wallonia, Flanders is an example of
the liberal nationalist strategy. The integration policy in Flanders has been
used and is still used as an element of a sub-state nation building project, while
in Wallonia it is rather an element of a policy for equality of opportunities

without any reference to national identity and culture. The Flemish integra-
tion policy is from the beginning much more active and much more inter-
ventionist in the cultural dimension of integration as well as reflecting both an
assimilationist and a multiculturalist direction. The focus on nation building
in Flanders, which was much weaker in Wallonia, may explain the cultural
interventionism of the Flemish integration policies (Adam 2013: 16).
Quite often it has been suggested that the increased implementation of civic
integration programmes in Western immigration countries, is an element of a
more general evolution: the retreat of multiculturalism. The idea is then that
‘countries which have adopted stronger multiculturalism policies have also
tended to adopt a more voluntary, less coercive approach to integration’ and
‘countries which rejected the multicultural approach in the late twentieth
century are more likely to have adopted more coercive or assimilative inte-
grative strategies in the first decade of the twenty-first century’ (Banting and
Kymlicka, Chapter 1, this volume; see also Joppke 2004, 2007). Also in nor-
mative political philosophy contributions, multiculturalism is contrasted with
civic integration policies that ‘opted for more aggressive means of integrating
immigrants into their societies’ (Triadafilopoulosa 2007: 861). Flanders with
its liberal nationalist strategy is an interesting falsification of this thesis. It is
because culture and language is important that Flanders combines a focus on
compulsory civic education programmes with a multicultural approach. And
indeed, this combination of civic integration policies with multiculturalism is
actually fully in line with the argument for liberal nationalism—that is often
defended by authors who are also in favour of liberal (multi)culturalism
(Modood 2007; Kymlicka 2001; Tamir 1993).
1 4 .6 CO N C L US I O N
Is Belgium a falsification or rather a confirmation of the liberal nationalist

thesis? To answer this question it can be helpful to distinguish between the
strong and the weak nationalist thesis (cf. Loobuyck 2012). The strong
thesis holds that a shared national culture based on a common language, history,
and public sphere is necessary to create a sense of belonging together—which
is necessary for an egalitarian, deliberative democracy. In short, ‘without a
common national identity, there is nothing to hold citizens together’ (Miller
1989: 245; see also Kymlicka 2001: 239; Miller 1995: 98, 1998: 49; Canovan 1996:
87, 101–2; and Tamir 1993: 117, 121). The weak nationalist thesis holds that a
shared national culture based on a common language, history, and public sphere
is particularly well suited, but not necessary to create a sense of belonging
together (cf. Mason 1999: 278, 2000: 134; Moore 2001: 2, 17). A shared national
identity is a facilitating condition for solidarity, social justice, and democracy,

but it is not a conditio sine qua non. The weak thesis accepts that a political
community is indeed based on a sense of belonging together, but this kind of
reciprocal identification with each other can also be established without (all
the elements of) a shared national identity. Or with John Stuart Mill (1861:
ch.16): ‘Yet in general the national feeling is proportionally weakened by
the failure of any of the causes which contribute to it’, but we do not need
all the causes (language, public sphere, media, politics) to establish a (weak)
national feeling.
Belgium is in the first place a confirmation of this weak thesis: different
languages and public spheres as well as divided (political) institutions make it
more difficult to create the necessary sense of belonging together on the
Belgian level than it is the case on the sub-national level. Belgium illustrates
indeed that in divided states, social justice, solidarity, and deliberative dem-
ocracy may be more precarious over the long term, than in a situation where a
shared national identity is present.
It is also clear that the process of constitutional reform and devolution
illustrates the liberal nationalist logic. The political autonomy of the Flemish
and French-speaking community concerning culture, education, migrant
integration, and language is indeed fully in line with the liberal nationalist
thesis and arguments that it is more efficient, easier, and possibly also more
just to organize politics on the sub-national level where people share a more
substantial cultural identity.
However, the Belgian situation illustrates that the strong thesis ‘without a
common national identity, there is nothing to hold citizens together’ should
be nuanced. As we have seen, it seems to be possible that many citizens share
a Belgian identification without a common language. And we have also seen
that it is not impossible to create a thin shared public sphere above and next
to the more robust public spheres of the sub-national language communities.
As a consequence it seems that the Belgian government is not limited to what
has been called constitutional patriotism to create a sense of belonging
together. It can do something more than that, but still less of what genuine
liberal nationalism requires. Different languages, largely distinct public
spheres, and divided institutions may make it more difficult to establish a
common political and national identity, but they do not render this com-
pletely impossible. If Belgium has a future (and probably it has, at least
because nobody has a real solution for Brussels in case of secession and
many people still share a Belgian identity and national events together) and
if the weak liberal nationalist thesis is right, Belgian politicians should be
more creative and assertive to establish modest and feasible nation-building
policies on the Belgian level.
Belgium is a multilingual and federal state with different community and
(sub-)nation building strategies. We have shown that the different integration
policies on the different levels are the result of these different conceptions of
the political community in Flanders on the one hand and French-speaking
Belgium on the other hand. The Flemish integration policy is clearly inspired
by liberal nationalism and the policy is used as a tool for nation-building. Until
recently, this was almost absent in the rest of Belgium. The importance of
cultural identity and language; a history of struggle for language and cultural
rights and recognition; and a liberal nationalistic idea about the political
community resulted in state policies in Flanders that combine multicultural-
ism and (compulsory) civic integration courses.
The Belgian situation is interesting because it gives us the opportunity to
fine-tune the concept of a shared national identity. Analysing the different
elements of which it is built shows complexity, certainly in the case of
Belgium: it is possible to have different languages, divided political institu-
tions, largely different public spheres but at the same time also a common
national identity, a number of shared cultural references, and similar public
opinions. In line with the weak nationalist thesis we conclude that it would
be unwise not to stimulate a shared national identity where it is possible to
do so, within the liberal constraints of state neutrality and respect for
citizens as equal and free individuals. However, a shared national identity
should not be considered from the perspective ‘all or nothing’. It is rather
something gradual and the existence of linguistic and cultural differences,
bilingual regions, and sub-state nationalism does not exclude an overarch-
ing common sentiment of nationality on the Belgian level. In a famous
Letter to the King Jules Destree (a Walloon lawyer, cultural critic, and
socialist politician) wrote in 1912: ‘Sire, there are no Belgians.’ In his
opinion there were only Flemings and Walloons. If this was the case,
Belgium would be an anomaly. However, as we have seen, the Belgian
situation is more complex and it is thanks to and in spite of this, that
Belgium still exists and will continue to exist.
NOTES
1. With the exception of Paul Vanden Boeynants, member of the French-
speaking Christian-democrats who led a ‘transitory cabinet’ during five months
in 1978–9.
2. For this distinction see Brubaker (1992).
3. Approximately 50 per cent find these criteria important for citizenship: ‘people
should be born in Belgium’, ‘people should live here for a long time’, and ‘people
should have Belgian ancestors’. The latter is even stronger in Wallonia (52 per cent
thinks this is (very) important) than in Flanders (40 per cent finds this (very)
important).
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15
Concluding Reflections
Solidarity, Diversity, and Social Justice
Philippe van Parijs
‘What types of political institutions, policies and discourses serve to sustain

or to erode solidarity in contexts of diversity?’ This is, Keith Banting and Will
Kymlicka write in their Introduction, the motivating question of this volume.
I live in a city that is home to over one-third of foreign nationals and to
another third of citizens of recent foreign origin. I also believe in the great
importance of solidarity. Hence my intense interest in this question and in the
many answers to be found in this extremely instructive volume.1 In this
epilogue, I shall not summarize all I have learned from it and from the
conference that led to it. Instead, I briefly state how I think about solidarity
and its relationship to social justice.2 And I explain how this leads me to walk a
long way along the path which Banting and Kymlicka invite us to follow, in
both research and action, but also to tread a different path, the importance of
which is bound to grow as diversity increases.
15.1 S OLIDARITY AS COUNTERFACTUAL

RECIPROCITY
To my continental European ears, the term ‘solidarity’ does not cover the first
two aspects of solidarity discussed in this volume: ‘civic solidarity’ or mutual
tolerance and ‘democratic solidarity’ or support for equal basic rights. But it
definitely covers ‘redistributive solidarity’. The French term solidarité was in
use long before it spread to other languages.3 It is currently used mainly to
denote three distinct concepts. Firstly, it can refer to an objective situation of
Concluding Reflections 421
mutual dependence, to the ‘de facto solidarity’ of people stuck in the same boat
or countries stuck with the same currency. Secondly, it can refer to a subset of
feelings, attitudes, dispositions, and motives that lead to actions that benefit
others. And thirdly it can refer to a subset of institutions that transfer
resources from some people to others. In this note, I shall focus on these
two last senses of solidarity—motivational and institutional—and their rela-
tionship with each other and with social justice.
As a motive for benefiting others, solidarity can usefully be characterized as
located between insurance and charity. It differs from the insurance motive in
being irreducible to individual self-interest. It differs from the charitable
motive in being symmetrical. The insurance motive can be understood as
probabilistic reciprocity: ‘I help you, now that you are in trouble, because that
will make you help me later if and when I shall be in the same trouble.’ The
solidarity motive can be understood as counterfactual reciprocity: ‘I help you
now that you are in trouble because you would have helped me had I been in
the same trouble, and this even if I know that this will never be the case.’ This
symmetry, essential to solidarity, is absent from the charity motive. But it does
not rest on a mutually advantageous insurance contract, explicit or implicit. It
rests on the assumption of a common identity: ‘I do this for you because you
are one of us and because therefore you would also do this for me if our
situations were swapped.’
A parallel contrast can be drawn to characterize solidarity in the institu-
tional sense. As clearly expounded by Juan Luis Vives in his De Subventione
Pauperum (1526), public assistance was born and developed as a more
efficient way of organizing charity. And as succinctly outlined by Condorcet
in his Esquisse d’une histoire des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), social
insurance was born and developed as a way of using probabilities to enable
workers to protect themselves, in their own interest, against the risks they all
run. Social insurance, stricto sensu, involves no ex-ante redistribution, only ex
post redistribution. Some people turn out to be net beneficiaries and other
net contributors of the scheme, but they do not know in advance which of
these two categories they will belong to. Nonetheless, as in any form of
insurance, they all benefit from the greater security. However, as explained
for example by Peter Baldwin in his Politics of Social Solidarity (1990), the
so-called social insurance systems gradually involved more and more ex-ante
redistribution. The uniform funding of health risks that are known in
advance to be unevenly distributed, the imposition of floors and ceilings to
earnings-related unemployment benefits and old age pensions and other
features of contemporary welfare states have turned the latter into institu-
tions of solidarity, that is of counterfactual reciprocity, not only of probabil-
istic reciprocity.
422 Philippe van Parijs
1 5 . 2 S U ST A I N A B L E I N S T ITU TI O N A L S O L I D A R I T Y
How can institutional solidarity so characterized develop and be made sus-

tainable? Solidarity in the first sense of interdependence can certainly help. If
how well you thrive depends on how well others in your neighbourhood
thrive, even your self-interest will recommend that you should not be too
petty: ex-ante redistribution away from you may turn out to return a net
benefit. Even more certainly, solidarity in the second sense of a disposition
towards counterfactual reciprocity will facilitate the expansion and sustain-
ability of a welfare state that transcends social insurance. The more the
members of a political community are bonded by feelings of solidarity, the
easier it will be to garner political support for the creation, preservation, and
development of ex-ante redistributive institutions that cover a wide variety
of risks.
Can political action affect the conditions that favour or undermine sustain-
able institutional solidarity? Certainly, and many examples are discussed
throughout this volume. Such political action can take the form of measures
that increase mutual dependence, ‘solidarité de fait’, as was intended, for
example, by the Coal and Steel Community pace Jean Monnet. It can also
endeavour to strengthen a common identity through nation-building rhetoric
and thereby foster solidarity feelings among those who share it. In addition,
deliberate political action can promote the creation, preservation, and devel-
opment of institutionalized solidarity directly, without passing through soli-
darity in either the objective or the motivational sense. It can consist in
bottom-up class struggle on behalf of those who stand to gain from solidarity.
It can also consist in top-down Bismarck-type institutionalization of solidarity
in order to strengthen national unity. Moreover, the prospects for sustainable
solidarity can be affected unwittingly, for example as a by-product of the
development of trustworthy, corruption-free public institutions, of measures
that reduce primary income inequality (and thereby the ex-ante redistribution
required by institutionalized solidarity), or of political designs that confer veto
power to the representatives of social or territorial categories that comprise
particularly high proportions of net beneficiaries.
15.3 TH E C H A L L EN G E OF DI V E R S I TY
These various patterns are illustrated throughout the contributions to this

volume. However, the latter’s central question—or at least the part of this
question I wish to address in this note—is about the impact on solidarity, both
motivational and institutional, of ethnic diversity, that is of a diversity of race,
religion, language, and culture that tends to be perpetuated intergeneration-

ally. This issue has grown increasingly salient in Europe, for two distinct
reasons. One is that, over the last decennia, a number of relatively homoge-
neous countries, including some of those with the highest level of institution-
alized solidarity, have become increasingly heterogeneous as a result of high
levels of immigration. The other is that, as a consequence of economic
globalization and above all of the deepening of the European single market,
the sustainability of national-level ex ante redistribution is called into question
and therefore the possibility of institutionalized solidarity needs to be explored
at a supra-national, unavoidably more heterogeneous level. If diversity has a
negative impact on motivational solidarity and, thereby, on the sustainability
of institutionalized solidarity, those who attach great importance to the latter
have every reason to be concerned.
Why should one expect there to be a negative impact? Fundamentally
because, unlike charity or insurance, solidarity in the motivational sense
rests on the assumption of a common identity. As explained in section 15.1,
it amounts to a sort of counterfactual reciprocity that can be expressed as
follows: ‘I do this for you now that you are in trouble because you are one of us
and because therefore you would also do this for me if I was the one in
trouble.’ Other things equal, the more diverse the community concerned, the
weaker this fellow-feeling and therefore the assumption required for acting out
of solidarity. Motivational solidarity must not be confused with institutional
solidarity but it affects the achievability and sustainability of the latter in two
ways: through the general support for ex-ante redistribution in the population
and electorate as a whole, and through the cohesion and fighting capabilities of
the groups that have most to gain from this redistribution. If diversity under-
mines motivational solidarity, the prospects for sustainable institutional soli-
darity would be weakened through these two channels.
Some of the empirical results reported and analysed in this volume provide
empirical support for this conjecture, but certainly not all. The apparent
contradictions stem in part from variations in the choice of indicators for
both diversity and institutional solidarity. They also stem in part from the fact
that the effect of diversity on motivational solidarity may differ significantly
depending on the type of diversity (recent or established, religious or linguis-
tic, refugees or economic migrants, high-skilled or illiterate), on the fine grain
of the redistributive institutions (cash or in-kind, workfare or welfare) and on
various contingent features of the context (labour shortage or unemployment,
electoral system, type of popular press, etc.). And they also result, as persua-
sively argued in several contributions to this volume, from the role played by
the many determinants of institutional solidarity other than motivational
solidarity that may mitigate, neutralize, or more than offset the decline in
motivational solidarity induced by greater diversity.
15.4 TWO STRATEGIES
Nonetheless, if and when there is such a negative impact on motivational

solidarity and if the latter helps strengthen institutional solidarity, those who
care about genuinely redistributive institutions should not be too complacent.
What should they do? Two main things, in my view. One consists, as consist-
ently advocated by Banting and Kymlicka, in developing and popularizing an
inclusive and hence territorial (as opposed to ethnic) identity. Such an identity
is one that expresses respect for diverse cultural traditions and encourages the
transmission of all languages, one that roots the fellow feeling in the place
where one has chosen to live rather than in a common ancestry, one that gains
strength in a collective effort to make that place a better place, not least by
developing countless public spaces where all components of the population
can meet and interact, one that does not deny the challenge posed by diversity
but untiringly insists that this challenge comes along with unprecedented
opportunities. Starting from the local level, one can so hope to create and
constantly recreate a municipal patriotism, an urban fraternity, a sort of fellow
feeling that may remain more fragile and shallow than a strong sense of
national belonging but may still be sufficient to help sustain the sense of an
‘us’ required by motivational solidarity and therefore most welcome for the
stability of institutional solidarity.
The second thing that needs doing is to develop and popularize a sense of
fairness that can support genuine redistribution without appealing to coun-
terfactual reciprocity and the shared identity it supposes. When Thomas
Paine, in Agrarian Justice, argues for a universal basic endowment or a
universal basic pension to be funded out of a rent on land, or when climate
justice activists plead for a high carbon tax with proceeds to be distributed
worldwide, they are demanding redistribution, on grounds of justice, not of
charity—nor of solidarity.4 Solidarity, like insurance, is always a matter of risk
compensation, of the lucky helping the unlucky. There is none of this in the
fair distribution of the value of land or of the value of the digestive capacity of
our atmosphere. The justice that is here being appealed to is not a matter of
helping those in trouble and has no need to presume that the one we help,
being one of us, would have done the same for us. Justice is not reducible to
solidarity.
There is no reason why this sense of justice should be restricted to the
distribution of natural resources. What social justice requires is that all
resources should be distributed in a way that can be justified to people who
regard themselves and each other as free and equal persons.5 This takes us in
the direction of equality of opportunities, or life chances or real freedom,
which is not the same as helping those in need, even out of solidarity rather
than out of charity. In this light, the key condition we must try to realize is not
a common identity sufficiently strong to trigger feelings of solidarity. It is
rather a public space in which those holding power or aspiring to do so are

forced to justify their policies and proposals to all those affected. What is
needed is a justificatory community, a set of people who are called upon,
directly or through their representatives, to justify whatever inequalities pre-
vail between them, rather than a community united by common sympathies.
This important distinction does not invalidate Banting and Kymlicka’s view
that solidarity ‘is important not so much for its intrinsic value, as a component
of individual flourishing or a virtuous life, but for its functional role in
motivating compliance with the demands of justice’. What follows from
solidarity with those in trouble often leads to a fairer distribution of life
chances, and conversely. What is being challenged, however, is their list of
instruments available to make our institutions more just. Inclusive solidarity is
needed, they contend, to sustain just institutions because ‘just institutions
cannot be built or sustained solely through strategic and partisan contestation
or through unbounded humanitarianism’. Next to the mobilization of those
most unjustly treated and to more or less spontaneous feelings of solidarity,
there is not only ‘unbounded humanitarianism’. There is also the operation,
admittedly always imperfect and messy, of deliberative democracy, that is, of
the civilizing force of hypocrisy.6 With public spaces, oppositions, media,
NGOs, academics, whistle blowers, and all the rest doing their jobs not too
badly, we can hope that the pressure of justifiability will help along demands
of justice even under conditions in which enhanced diversity fragilizes
solidarity—that is under conditions that will increasingly prevail as migration
keeps happening and as decisions increasingly need to be taken above the
national level.
NOTES
1. This question was at the core of a conference I organized in Brussels in 2003 with the
participation of several contributors to the present volume (see Van Parijs 2004) and
some of the answers I found for it keep motivating some of my present engagements
(see especially <www.marnixplan.org> and <www.rethinkingbelgium.eu>).
2. See Van Parijs (1995, 1996).
3. In the graphs provided by <books.google.com/ngrams>, the 0.001 mark was
reached by the French ‘solidarité’ around 1850, by the Italian ‘solidarietà’ around
1890, by the Spanish ‘solidariedad’ around 1905, by the German ‘Solidarität’ in
1950 and by the English ‘solidarity’ only in 1980.
4. Elizabeth Anderson (2015) rightly stresses the novelty of Paine’s approach relative to
the Poor Laws’ charity perspective, but misleadingly assimilates his approach to the
one represented by the development of social insurance systems. For a clear char-
acterization of the three forms of social security (there termed ‘social assistance’,
‘social insurance’, and ‘basic income’), see, for example, Atkinson (2015: 206–9).
5. This amounts essentially to satisfying John Rawls’s ‘criterion of reciprocity’, which
‘requires that, when terms are proposed as the most reasonable terms of social
cooperation, those proposing them must think it at least reasonable for others to
accept them, as free and equal citizens, and not as dominated or manipulated or
under pressure caused by an inferior political or social position’ (Rawls 1999: 14).
Despite what the choice of the term may suggest, nothing in this definition
establishes a conceptual link with reciprocity understood as a quid pro quo, albeit
only counterfactual.
6. To use Jon Elster’s (1998: 111) apt formulation of the core of a deliberative
democracy.
REFERENCES
Anderson, Elizabeth. 2015. ‘Thomas Paine’s “Agrarian Justice” and the Origins of
Social Insurance’. In Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy, edited by Eric Schliesser,
55–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Atkinson, Anthony B. 2015. Inequality. What Can Be Done? Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Baldwin, Peter. 1990. Politics of Social Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Condorcet, Antoine Caritat Marquis de. [1795]1988. Esquisse d’un tableau historique
des progrès de l’esprit humain. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion.
Elster, Jon. 1998. ‘Deliberation and Constitution Making’. In Deliberative Democracy,
edited by Jon Elster, 97–122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Van Parijs, Philippe. 1995. Sauver la Solidarité. Paris: Cerf.
Van Parijs, Philippe. 1996. Refonder la Solidarité. Paris: Cerf.
Van Parijs, Philippe (ed.). 2004. Cultural Diversity versus Economic Solidarity. Brussels:
De Boeck Université. Available at: <www.uclouvain.be/8608> (accessed 5 October
2016 ).
Vives, Johannes Ludovicus. [1526]2010. ‘De Subventione Pauperum’ (English trans-
lation: ‘On the Relief of the Poor, or of Human Needs’). In The Origins of Modern
Welfare, edited by Paul Spicker, 1–100. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Index of Names
Abizadeh, Arash 47, 49, 96, 105, 111, 123, Barnes, Lucy 210, 222, 226
131, 148, 202, 225 Barreto-Montenegro, Renata 122
Abts, Koen 398, 419 Barry, Brian 30, 50, 157, 173, 320, 341, 359
Achterberg, Peter 240, 241, 265 Bartolini, Stefano 260, 265
Ackerman, Bruce C. 303, 321 Bauböck, Rainer 21, 36, 45, 80–105, 106,
Adam, Ilke 401, 409, 410, 412, 415 157, 173
Adamo, Silvia 376, 378, 384 Baudouin, King of Belgium 395–6
Adorno, T. W. 188, 195 Baumann, Zygmunt 5
Afonso, Alexandre 240, 263 Bay, Heléne 219, 226, 306, 321
Akkerman, Tjitske 26, 49 Bayertz, Kurt 5, 44, 50
Alesina, Alberto 46, 49, 154, 173, 208, 209, Bechert, Insa 301, 321
210, 219, 225, 226, 317, 321, 341, 359, 367, Beerten, Roeland 404, 415, 418
368, 384 Béland, Daniel 217, 226, 301, 321, 406,
Alestalo, Matti 301, 321 408, 415
Alexander, Jeffrey 5, 6, 49 Bélanger, Éric 235, 264
Ali, S. 47, 55, 73, 78, 137, 150, 152, 156, 159, Bellamy, Richard v, 117, 123
172, 175, 203, 214, 230 Benabou, Roland 208, 226
Allmendinger, Jutta 128, 135, 148 Bendix, Reinhard 130, 148
Alonso, Sonia 26, 49 Benet-Martínez, Veronica 339, 362
Alt, James 222, 226 Bengtsson, B. 375, 384
Anderson, Benedict 48, 49, 154, 173 Beramendi, Pablo 25, 50
Anderson, Elizabeth 425, 426 Berggren, H. 364, 372, 384
Andeweg, Rudy B. 270, 273, 298 Berlin, Isaiah 180, 182, 196
Andolfatto, Dominique 216, 226 Berman, Sheri vi, 8, 47, 50, 218, 226
Anttonen, Anneli 301, 321 Berry, John W. 339, 359
Aquinas, Thomas 119 Best, Heinrich 129, 148
Arendt, Hannah 91, 105, 122, 123 Betz, Hans-Georg 27, 28, 57
Aristotle 119 Bevelander, Pieter 332, 359
Arneson, Richard J. 303, 304, 321 Bicchieri, Christina 308, 309, 321
Arrighi, Jean-Thomas 89, 104, 105 Billiet, J. 191, 194, 197, 395, 398, 401, 402,
Arzheimer, K. 233, 263 404, 405, 415, 418
Atkinson, Anthony B. 425, 426 Birnbaum, Simon 305, 321
Augustine of Hippo 112, 113, 114, 115, 121, Bismarck, Otto von 262, 370
122, 123 Blake, Michael 96, 105
Autor, David H. 222, 226 Bloemraad, Irene 9, 10, 30, 31, 42, 47, 48,
49, 50, 53, 157, 176, 293, 297, 327–59,
Baccaro, Lucio 222, 226 361, 363
Bail, Christopher 179, 180, 196 Bobo, Lawrence 188, 196
Baldwin, Peter 8, 49, 215, 226, 262, 264, Boen, Filip 404, 419
421, 426 Bohara, Alok K. 300, 321
Bale, Tim 26, 49, 276, 284, 295, 296, 381, 384 Boin, Arjen 276, 296
Banfield, Edward 68–9, 70, 78 Bolkestein, Frits 276
Banting, Keith 1–49, 50, 53, 57, 62, 74, 76, 78, Boltanksi, Luc 222, 226
80, 84, 92, 96, 122, 128, 130, 150, 152, 153, Bonacich, E. 188, 196
154, 157, 171, 173, 174, 175, 195, 196, 201, Bonikowski, Bart 224, 226
224, 229, 234, 300, 317, 321, 327, 328, 329, Borevi, Karin 9, 42, 343, 344, 345, 358, 359,
330, 333, 334, 336, 338, 341, 344, 359, 368, 360, 364–84
384, 403, 412, 420, 424, 425 Bosma, Martin 290, 296
Baquir, R. 154, 173 Bossuyt, Marc 401, 415
428 Index of Names
Bouchard, Gérard 214, 226 Cicero 113
Bourgeois, Léon 215 Citrin, Jack 37, 47, 152–73, 174, 176, 178, 179,
Bowles, Samuel 309, 321 198, 340, 341, 360
Boyd, Robert 309, 321 Clarkson, Adrienne 346
Bradley, David 215, 225, 226 Clausen, J. 154, 174
Brady, David 30, 50 Clinton, Hillary 351
Brady, Kelsey 122 Coenders, Marcel 132, 149, 188, 196
Breidahl, Karen 30, 50, 382, 384 Coffé, Hilde 404, 416
Breton, Charles 22, 50, 171 Cohen, Joshua 308, 324
Brewer, M. B. 155, 175, 180, 196 Cohen, M. 179, 196
Brochmann, Grete 368, 384 Cole, Alexandra 245, 264
Brock, Gillian 45, 50 Collyer, Michael 88, 106
Brooks, Clem 45, 50, 206, 226 Condorcet, Antoine Caritat Marquis de
Brotz, Howard 349, 360 421, 426
Brown, Hana 350, 360 Connolly, William E. 46, 51
Brown, R. 155, 175, 178, 181, 197, 203, 230 Converse, Philip E. 293, 296
Browning, Christopher R. 311, 321 Cook-Martin, David 129, 149
Brubaker, Rogers 122, 123, 154, 173, 332, 357, Corak, Miles 209, 227
360, 414, 415 Crepaz, Markus 13, 51, 188, 191, 196, 341,
Brysk, Alison 45, 50 360, 368, 385
Buckland,W. 64, 78 Crouch, Colin 149
Budge, Ian 235, 264 Cullen, Jim 214, 227
Buhlmann, M. 183, 196, 314, 322 Cumberworth, Erin 209, 230
Bunselmeyer, Elisabeth 128, 135, 149
Burgoon, Brian 221, 226 da Fonseca, Saro Claro 26, 49
Burke, Edmund 68, 69, 78, 91, 105 Dahl, Robert 118, 123
Burkhardt, C. 195, 197 Dahlstöm, Carl 26, 51
Bürklin, Wilhelm 135, 149 Dallinger, Ursula 202, 224, 227
Buruma, Ian 344, 360 Damron, Regan 188, 191, 196
Busemeyer, Marius 224 Daniels, Roger 347, 348, 360
Davidov, Eldad 179, 183, 191, 194, 197,
Cairns, Alan C. 354, 360 224, 227
Calhoun, Craig 6, 50, 131, 133, 134, 147, 149 Davies, Gareth 218, 227
Cameron, David 358 Day, Richard 48, 51
Campbell, Donald 78 de Figueiredo, R. J. P., Jr 159, 174
Campbell, J. Gibson 347, 360 de Galan, Menno 269, 293, 295, 296
Caney, Simon 45, 50 de Graauw, Els 359, 363
Canovan, Margaret 18, 47, 51, 115, 123, 389, De Hart, Betty 268, 288, 296
412, 415 de Jong, Winny 283
Cantillon, Bea 407, 408, 415, 416 De Koster, W. 28, 58, 241
Carens, Joseph 154, 173 de Lange, Sarah L. 240, 241, 264, 282, 298
Carter, Elisabeth 261, 264 De Schutter, Helder 390, 416
Carton, Ann 404, 415 de Vries, Catherine E. 242, 262, 267
Casado-Asensio, Juan 234, 265 De Vries, Jouke 269, 272, 293, 296
Castles, Stephen 365, 385 de Wilde, Pieter 133, 134, 135, 151
Cavaillé, Charlotte 11, 45, 51, 210, 221, 222, De Winter, Lieven 393, 416
224, 226 De Wispelaere, Jürgen 305, 322
Cavala, Bill 306, 321 Dejgaard, Thomas Engel 207, 229
Celler, Emanuel 348 Delhey, J. 195, 196, 313, 314, 322
Ceobanu, Alin 132, 149, 177, 196 Della Porta, Donatella 393, 416
Charnysh, Volha 47, 51 Delors, Jacques 101
Charron, Nicholas 318, 319, 322 Demireva, Neli 332, 357, 358, 361
Chong, Dennis 275, 296 Demker, M. 374, 381, 384, 385
Chiapello, Eve 222, 226 den Ridder, Josje M. 280, 299
Chorus, Jutta 269, 293, 295, 296 Derks, Anton 240, 264
Christiansen, N. F. 371, 385 Derthick, Martha 218, 227
Index of Names 429
Deschouwer, Kris 392, 393, 398, 401, 407, FitzGerald, David 129, 149
416, 419 Fleischacker, Samuel 114, 123
Destree, Jules 414 Fligstein, Neil 133, 149
Deutsch, Karl W. 154, 174 Foblets, Marie-Claire 402, 416
Dewilde, Caroline 212, 230 Føllesdal, Andreas 383, 385
Di Rupo, Elio 393 Foner, Nancy 47, 51
Di Tella, Rafael 209, 226 Ford, Robert 188, 196
Diez Medrano, Juan 132, 149 Fortuyn, Pim 269–74, 275, 276, 277, 278, 281,
DiMaggio, Paul J. 215, 231 282, 284, 286, 288, 289, 290, 291, 293, 297
Dinesen, Peter Thisted 318, 322, 325 Foucault, Michel 5
Dodeigne, Jérémy 396, 419 Fransson, O. 370, 383, 385
Donnelly, Jack 300, 322 Freeman, Gary 24, 25, 51, 290, 297, 365, 385
Donnelly, Michael v, 171 Freitag, M. 183, 196, 314, 322
Dorn, David 222, 226 Frognier, André-Paul 395, 398, 401, 404, 415
Dorussen, Han 236, 266
Doutrelepont, René 404, 415 Gaertner, S. L. 155, 157, 174
Dovidio, John F. 155, 157, 174 Galle, Jolien 398, 419
Dribbisch, Katrin 128, 135, 149 Galston, William 120, 124
Dronkers, Jaap 331, 332, 363 Geijer, Erik Gustaf 370
Druckman, James N. 275, 296 Gingrich, Jane 264
Dryzek, John S. 302, 322 Giugni, Marco 30, 51, 55
Dumondt, Peter 393, 416 Gava, Roy 25, 51
Durkheim, Emile 4, 70–8 Geddes, Andrew 25, 57
Dworkin, Ronald 303 Gelissen, J. 181, 197
Gelman, A. 189, 196
Easterly, William 154, 173, 317, 322 Genov, Nikolai 46, 51
Edlund, Jonas 208, 227 Gesthuizen, Maurice 317, 322
Edsall, Thomas 46, 51 Geuss, Raymond 303, 322
Eek, Daniel 314, 324 Geyer, D. 307
Eerdmans, Joost 283 Gibson, Rachel K. 272, 297
Eger, Maureen A. 317, 322 Giger, N. 238, 264
Elkins, Zachary 159, 174 Gijsberts, Mérove 273, 298
Elster, Jon 426 Gilens, Martin 158, 167, 170, 174, 195, 196
Englert, François 396 Gingrich, Jane 237, 264
Entzinger, Han 286, 296, 344, 360 Gintis, Herbert 308, 309, 321, 322
Erk, Jan G. 276, 297, 416 Giugni, Marco 24, 25, 51
Erman, Eva 303, 322 Gitlin, Todd 336, 345, 360
Ersbøll, E. 376, 378, 385 Glaeser, Edward L. 173, 208, 219, 225, 317,
Escandell, Xavier 132, 149, 177, 196 321, 341, 359, 367, 368, 384
Esiasson, Peter 26, 51 Glendon, Mary Ann 108, 112, 124
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta 7, 51, 170, 174, 207, Glimmerveen, Joop 273
215, 227, 236, 264, 385 Goetz, Klaus H. 235, 236, 264
Esses, Victoria M. 178, 179, 188, 196 Goodhart, David 336, 341, 345, 360
Estlund, David 304, 322 Goodman, Sara 29, 31, 51, 333, 334, 335,
357, 360
Farlie, Dennis J. 235, 264 Gorodzeisky, A. 153, 174
Favell, Adrian 133, 149, 365, 385 Gould, S. 154, 174
Fehr, Ernst 308, 319, 322 Gourevitch, Peter A. 227
Feinberg, Joel 77, 78 Green, Alan 348, 361
Fennema, Meindert 233, 267 Green, Eva G. T. 132, 149
Ferguson, Michaele 109, 111, 117, 123 Green-Pedersen, Christoffer 275, 297,
Ferrera, M. 376, 385 381, 385
Ferwerda, Jeremy 223, 227 Groot, Loek 305, 326
Finnigan, Ryan 30, 50 Grotius, Hugo 120
Finseraas, Henning 201, 227 Grundtvig, N. F. S. 369, 370, 371
Fischbacher, Urs 308, 319, 322 Grusky, David B. 209, 230
430 Index of Names
Grzelczyk, Rudy 105 Hjerm, Mikael 129, 150
Guimond, Serge 30, 52 Hobbes, Thomas 120
Guiraudon, Virginie vi, 25, 26, 28, 52, Hobolt, Sara B. 242, 262, 267
54, 223, 227 Hobsbawm, E. J. 34, 53
Gundelach, Birte 31, 52 Hochschild, Jennifer 26, 53, 214, 228
Gustafson, Per 133, 149, 382 Hoffmann-Lange, Ulrike 128, 135, 150
Gutmann, Amy 320 Höglinger, Dominik 240, 264
Holland-Cunz, Marc 128, 135, 149
Habermas, Jürgen 17, 18, 47, 52, 82, 106, 203, Hollinger, David A. 361
227, 391, 416 Holmberg, Sören 312, 323
Habyarimana, James 317, 322 Holsti, Ole R. 129, 150
Hacker, Jacob 222, 227 Holtug, Nils v, 30, 50, 365, 386
Hagelund, A. 368, 384 Honig, Bonnie v, 117, 120, 124, 302, 322
Hagendoorn, Louk 22, 57, 268, 275, 277, 299 Hooghe, Liesbeth 129, 150, 224, 231
Häikiö, Liisa 301, 321 Hooker, Juliet 30, 48, 53
Hainmueller, J. 179, 196 Hopkins, Daniel 273, 275, 297
Hale, Charles 46, 52 Horowitz, Donald L. 274, 297
Hall, Peter v, 9, 22, 24, 39, 40, 47, 76, 201–25, Hort, Sven E. O. 301, 321
226, 227–8, 234, 259, 264, 300, 323, Horvath, Kenneth 239, 263, 265
371, 385 Howard, Marc M. 87, 106, 333, 357,
Halvorsen, Kurt 208, 228 361, 381, 386
Hamann, Kerstin 216, 217, 228 Howell, Chris 222, 226
Hamen, Susan E. 218, 228 Hox, J. J. 189, 196
Hamilton, Alexander 15, 52 Huber, Evelyne 215, 228
Hammar, Tomas 371, 373, 374, 385, 386 Huckfeldt, R. 183, 196
Hampshire, Stuart 115, 124 Hume, David 114, 121
Hanquinet, Laurie 133, 137, 149 Hunter, Wendy 301, 325
Hansen, L-E. 374, 386 Huntington, Samuel P. 336, 361
Hansen, R. 87, 106 Hussain, Asifa 32, 53
Hansson, Per Albin 8, 217, 218, 383 Huys, Rik 404, 415
Harell, Allison 12, 57 Hvidt, K. 383, 386
Harper, Stephen 351
Hart, Catherine vi Ignazi, Piero 261, 265
Hartmann, Michael 135, 149 Inglehart, Ronald 12, 53
Harutyunyan, Ari 47, 52 Irwin, Galen A. 269, 270, 280, 296, 299
Haus, Leah 24, 52 Ivarsflaten, Elisabeth 240, 265
Häusermann, Silja 25, 52, 237, 240, 264 Iversen, Torben 216, 217, 222, 228
Hayward, Clarissa Rile 122 Iyengar, Shanto 297
Hayward, J. 76, 78, 215, 228
Heath, Anthony 224, 228 Jackson, Ben 45, 53
Hedetoft, U. 377, 382, 386 Jacobs, Alan 218, 228
Heinisch, Reinhard 241, 264 Jacobs, Dirk 402, 405, 410, 411, 416, 417
Helbling, Marc 14, 21, 36, 37, 48, 52, 127–48, Jacobsson, B. 383, 386
149, 150, 151, 203, 204, 222, 224, 228, 240, Jaeger, Mads Meier 207, 228
264, 336, 345, 361 Janmaat, Hans 273, 274, 290
Helliwell, John 161, 175 Janmaat, Jan Germen 210, 229
Hemerijck, Anton 221, 228 Janoski, Thomas 48, 53, 87, 106, 331, 332,
Henrich, J. 309, 323 333, 357, 361
Henrich, Natalie 308, 309, 323 Jans, Maarten 409, 419
Herben, Mat 282, 295 Jarus, Valerie vi
Hero, Rodney, E. 154, 174 Jaspaert, Eva 404, 415
Hewstone, Miles 44, 53 Jay, John 15, 46, 52
Hibbing, John 12, 58 Jean, Michäelle 346
Hill, J. 189, 196 Jennings, Jeremy 214, 229
Hiscox, M. 179, 196 Jensen, K. K. 386
Hix, Simon 235, 236, 264 Jensen, T. 365, 377, 378, 386
Index of Names 431
Jeremiah 112 Kriesi, Hanspeter v, 23, 54, 129, 150, 237, 238,
Jiménez, Antonia M. R. 132, 150 239, 240, 241, 262, 264, 265
Johansson, C. 374, 375, 386 Kuhnle, Stein 301, 321
Johannson, Karl 235, 236, 265 Kumlin, Staffan 28, 54, 222, 229, 306, 310,
Johnston, Alison 216, 217, 228 317, 323
Johnston, Richard 21, 22, 28, 37, 46, 47, 53, Kymlicka, Will 1–49, 50, 53, 54, 62, 76, 80, 92,
57, 131, 132, 147, 150, 152–73, 174, 175, 96, 122, 128, 130, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157,
202, 229, 340, 359, 360 171, 173, 174, 175, 201, 202, 224, 229, 234,
Jones-Correa, Michael 356, 361 317, 321, 327, 328, 329, 330, 333, 334, 336,
Joppke, Christian 16, 26, 28, 29, 53, 288, 297, 338, 341, 344, 359, 362, 373, 387, 389, 390,
344, 361, 364, 368, 376, 386, 412, 417 403, 412, 417, 420, 424, 425
Justwan, Florian 48, 53
La Ferrara, Eliana 317, 321
Kaina, Viktoria 129, 150 Labbé, Dominique 216, 226
Kallen, Evelyn 349, 361 Labelle, Micheline 349, 362
Kant, Immanuel 3, 33, 101, 120 Lacey, Joseph 407, 417
Kasinitz, Philip 352, 362 Lacey, Nicola 224
Kaspersen, L. B. 370, 386 Lacroix, Justine 132, 150
Kateb, George 110, 122, 124 Lægaard, Sune 365, 387, 401, 417
Keating, Michael 49, 53 Lahav, Gallya 25, 54
Kelleher, Christine A. 276, 297 Laitinen, Arto 45, 54
Kelley, Ninette 347, 348, 361 Lamont, Michelle v, 179, 180, 197, 206, 207,
Kelly, John 216, 217, 228 214, 229, 300, 323
Kendall, Gavin 134, 150 Lapuente, Victor 318, 322
Kennedy, John F. 194 Larin, Stephen 382
Kenworthy, Lane 202, 229, 301 Larsen, Christian A. 27, 28, 54, 207, 210, 224,
Kernerman, Gerald 48, 53 225, 229, 306, 319, 323, 382
Kerr, William R. 210, 229 Larsmo, O. 370, 387
Kesler, Christel 48, 53, 157, 174, 293, 297, Laurence, James 44, 54, 178, 197
332, 341, 357, 358, 361 Laursen, V. 383, 386
Kesteloot, Chris 390, 401, 417 Lavelle, Ashley 237, 265
Kester, Jeroen 292 Laver, Michael 242, 265
Kettunen, Paul 218, 229 Laxer, Emily 48, 54
Kinder, Donald 275, 297 Le Pen, Marine 254
King, Mackenzie 347, 350 Lechner, Frank J. 286, 298
Kitschelt, Herbert 153, 154, 174, 177, 194, Lecours, André 217, 226, 400, 406, 408,
197, 239, 240, 241, 261, 265, 272, 297 415, 417
Klausen, Jyette 30, 58 Lefkofridi, Zoe 13, 26, 39, 40, 46, 55, 233–63,
Klein, Rudolf 301, 323 264, 265, 295
Kleine, Mareike 224 Leijon, Anna-Greta 375
Kochenov, Dimitry 45, 53 Lengyel, Gyorgy 129, 148
Kolbeinn, Stefánsson 301, 321 Lennon, Emily 347, 360
Kolers, Avery 44, 53 Levey, Geoffrey Brahm 32, 47, 55
Koleth, Elsa 344, 361 Levi, Margaret 309, 323
Kongshøj, Kristian 30, 50 Levin, Shana 30, 55
Koning, Edward. 13, 26, 28, 40, 46, 50, 54, Levine, Ross 317, 322
268–96, 297 Levy, Jacob 7, 36, 49, 67, 68, 107–23, 124
Koopmans, Ruud 24, 27, 28, 48, 54, 327, 336, Levy, Morris 341, 360
337, 344, 357, 358, 361, 362, 365, 386 Levrau, François 47, 55
Korpi, Walter 7, 54, 215, 229, 316, Lichterman, Paul 215, 229
323, 364, 386 Lieberman, Evan 223, 229, 242, 265
Korsgaard, O. 369, 370, 386 Lieberman, Robert C. 218, 229
Korteweg, Anna C. 268, 276, 297 Liebig, Thomas 337, 362
Koster, Willem de 240, 265 Lindbom, Anders 221, 229
Kramer, R. M. 155, 175 Lindvall, Johannes 217, 229
Kraus, Peter v, 308, 323 Linos, Katerina 207, 230
432 Index of Names
Lijphart, Arend 392, 417 Meltzer Alan H. 202, 230
Lipset, Seymour M. 238, 266 Menz, Georg 24, 55, 290, 298
Locke, John 120 Merkel, Angela 145
Lolle, H. 381, 388 Merkley, Eric 171
Loobuyck, Patrick xiv, 21, 42, 47, 55, Messina, Anthony 26, 55, 268, 274, 298
389–414, 417 Metz, K. 76, 78
Lopez, Mark 358, 362 Meuleman, B. 179, 181, 183, 191, 194,
Loxbo, Karl 272, 298 197, 198
Lubbers, Marcel 273, 298 Mewes, Jan 219, 222, 230
Lübker, M. 202, 230 Michalowski, Ines 27, 48, 54, 344, 357,
Lucardie, Paul 274, 299 358, 361
Lucas, Christopher 47, 51 Michel, Charles 393
Lukes, Stephen 5, 55 Michel, Elie xiv, 13, 26, 39, 40, 233–63, 295
Lundh, C. 373, 387 Mill, John Stuart 18, 55, 390, 391, 413, 418
Lundquist, Lennart 302, 323 Miller, David xiv, 19, 28, 32, 34–5, 36, 45, 47,
Lupu, Noam 221, 230 55, 61–77, 78, 81, 106, 114, 122, 124, 130,
131, 137, 150, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159,
McAllister, Ian 129, 150 160, 161, 166, 172, 175, 202, 203, 214, 230,
McCall, Leslie 46, 55, 202, 210, 229, 230 336, 341, 362, 389, 390, 391, 398, 412, 418
McCarthy, Shirley 97, 105 Miller, Gary 309, 323
McConnell, Allan 276, 296 Miller, M. J. 365, 385
McCrone, David 49, 53 Miller, William L. 53
MacCulloch, Robert 209, 210, 226 Mills, C. Wright 135, 150
McGann, Anthony J. 239, 272, 297 Minderhoud, Paul E. 286, 298
Maddens, Bart 395, 398, 401, 404, 415, 418 Mitchell, Neil J. 321
Madison, James 15, 52 Mitnik, Pablo A. 209, 230
Mair, Peter 235, 236, 260, 262, 265, 266, 267 Modood, Tariq 412, 418
Malmström, C. 374, 385 Mollenkopf, John 26, 53
Mann, Michael 311, 313, 323 Möller, Niklas 303, 322
Manow, Philip 24, 58, 215, 217, 230 Molnar, V. 179, 180, 197, 206, 207, 229
Mansbridge, Jane 21, 55, 224 Mols, Frank 275, 298
Manza, Jeff 45, 50, 206, 226 Monnet, Jean 101, 422
Mares, Isabela 215, 230 Moore, Margaret 47, 55, 389, 412, 418
Margalit, Avishai 390, 418 Morales, Laura 30, 55
Marijnissen, Jan 284 Morelli, Anne 398, 418
Markell, Patchen 47, 55 Morgan, Kimberley 25, 56
Marks, Gary 235, 266 Mörkenstam, Ulf 374, 387
Marks, S. P. 182, 197 Mouffe, Chantal 44, 46, 56
Markus, Hazel 206, 230 Mouritsen, Per 364, 377, 378, 387
Marrow, Helen B. 356, 362 Mudde, Cas 133, 150, 239, 261, 266, 274, 298
Marshall, T. H. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 27, 55, 84, 85, Mueller, Jan-Werner 82, 106
86, 98, 106, 130, 150, 178, 179, 180, 182, Mughan, A. 179, 197
183, 186, 193, 197, 201, 230, 333 Muirhead, Russell 117, 124
Martin, Cathie Jo 230 Munch, Peter 370
Martin, Jean 216, 224, 228 Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina 208, 230
Martinez-Herrera, Enric 131, 150 Musiał, K. 371, 387
Martiniello, Marco 409, 411, 418 Mussche, Ninke 407, 416
Marx, Karl 5 Muyl, Elisa 122
Mason, Andrew 77, 78, 412, 418
Mau, Steffen 195, 197, 219, 222, 230 Nagayoshi, Kikuko 129, 150
May, Larry 77, 78 Nairn, Tom 151
Mazzini, Giuseppe 34 Nannestad, Peter 318, 323
Medgyesi, Márton 210, 230 Nanou, Kyriaki 236, 266
Meeus, Johan 404, 419 Nawijn, Hilbrand 282
Meguid, Bonnie 235, 264, 266 Neier, Aryeh 308, 323
Mehan, Hugh 275, 298 Nepal, Mani 321
Index of Names 433
Newton, K. 195, 196, 313, 314, 322 Pierson, Paul 207, 209, 231, 237
Nguyen, Angela-MinhTu. D. 339, 362 Piketty, Thomas 231
Nixon, Richard 117 Pinochet, Augusto 62
Noël, Alain 45, 47, 56 Plotnick, R. D. 154, 175
Norris, Pippa 178, 181, 197, 222, 230, 261, Pogge, Thomas W. 134, 151
266, 272, 284, 298 Poguntke, Thomas 262, 267
Nurius, Paula 206, 230 Poirier, Johanne v
Nussbaum, Martha C. 304, 306, 323 Pontusson, Jonas 221, 222, 230, 231
Nye, Joseph 352, 362 Poorthuis, Frank 271, 298
Nygård, Mikael 242, 266 Popelier, Patricia 407, 416
Portes, A. 12, 56
Obama, Barack 122, 346 Powell, Walter W. 215, 231
O’Connell, Michael 273, 298 Pribble, Jennifer E. 301, 324
Odmalm, Pontus 275, 297, 381, 385 Prokic-Breuer, Tijana 331, 332, 363
Oesch, Daniel 222, 230, 233, 234, 262, 266 Promise Lacewell, Onawa 133, 134, 135, 151
Offe, Claus 305, 323 Putnam, Robert D. 71, 72–3, 78, 129, 151,
Ohlsson, R. 373, 387 155, 157, 175, 301, 311, 317, 324, 368, 387
Okin, Susan Moller 308, 324
Olsen, T. V. 364, 377, 387 Quandt, Markus 301, 321
O’Neill, Onora 62, 78 Quillian, L. 179, 191, 194, 197
Ong Hing, Bill 347, 362
Oosterlynck, S. 45, 56 Radcliff, Benjamin 300, 324
Osberg, Lars 224, 230 Raheem, Nejem 321
Østergaard, U. 369, 387 Rathbun, Brian 45, 56
Østergaard-Nielsen, Eva 272, 298 Raunio, Tapio 235, 236, 265
Ostrom, Elinor 308, 311, 312, 324 Rawlings, Laura B. 301, 324
Owen, David 96, 106 Rawls, John 1, 16, 17, 18, 20, 47, 56, 66, 77, 78,
Özkirimli, Umut 131, 151 108, 114, 122, 124, 303, 304, 306, 308, 310,
311, 316, 320, 324, 389, 426
Paine, Thomas 424, 425 Raz, Joseph 390, 418
Palme, Joakim v, 316, 323 Rea, Andrea 410, 417
Palme, P. 364, 386 Reagan, Ronald 316
Palmer, J. 154, 174 Reeskens, Tim xiv, 14, 20, 31, 38, 48, 52, 56,
Parekh, Bhikhu 157, 175 152, 155, 156, 158, 175, 176, 177–95, 197,
Paskov, Marii 212, 230 198, 203, 204, 220, 222, 224, 225, 228, 231,
Passy, Florence 24, 51 232, 345, 361
Pastors, Marco 283 Rehm, Philipp 222, 227
Paxton, Pamela 155, 175, 179, 197 Reitz, Jeffrey G. 340, 362
Pedersen, K. A. 370, 387, 388 Reuchamps, Min 396, 399, 418, 419
Pehrson, S. 155, 175, 178, 181, 197, 203, 230 Reynolds, Paul 5, 45, 56
Pellikaan, Huib 282, 298 Rhodes, M. 376, 385
Pendakur, Ravi 332, 359 Richard, Scott F. 202, 230
Penninx, Rinus 274, 299 Rippe, K. 76, 78
Pessi, Anne Birgitta 45, 54 Risse, Mathias 96, 105, 133, 305, 324
Peters, B. G. 383, 387 Risse, Thomas 151
Petersen, K. 371, 376, 385 Rocher, François 349, 362
Petrocik, John R. 235, 266 Rocher, Guy 349, 362
Pettersson, N. P. 307 Roemer, John E. 301, 304–5, 324
Pettigrew, Thomas F. 44, 56 Roggeband, Conny 276, 299
Pettit, Philip 117, 124 Rokkan, Stein 130, 148
Phillips, Anne 302, 322 Romney, Mitt 351
Phillips, Tim 134, 151 Rooduijn, M. 26, 49
Pichler, Florian 134, 135, 151 Roosens, Eugene 411, 418
Pickett, K. 66, 79, 300, 326 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 218
Pierre, J. 383, 387 Roosma, F. 181, 197
Pierson, Christopher 266 Rorty, Richard 70, 78
434 Index of Names
Rosenblum, Nancy 117, 124 Siim, Birte v, 382
Rostbøll, C. F. 377, 378, 387 Silva, Fabiana 47, 50
Rothstein, Bo xiv, 28, 40–1, 42, 46, 54, 62, 67, Simon, Patrick 47, 51
74, 75, 77, 78, 178, 182, 183, 184, 197, 207, Sinardet, Dave xiv, 21, 42, 389–414,
208, 221, 229, 231, 300–20, 322, 323, 324, 418, 419
325, 368, 387 Singh, Prerna 46, 47, 51, 57, 223, 231
Rovny, Jan 241, 266 Skarpelis, Anna 224
Rubio, Gloria M. 301, 324 Skrbis, Zlatko 134, 150
Ruth, A. 371, 387 Skrentny, John D. 352, 362
Rydgren, Jens 233, 240, 241, 266, 267, 272, Slöblom, Gunnar 235, 267
275, 298 Smeeding, Tim 224, 230
Ryner, J. M. 364, 387 Smith, Adam 114
Smith, Rogers M. 12, 57, 100, 104, 106, 219,
Sacerdote, Bruce 173, 208, 219, 225, 317, 321 231, 347, 362
Sahlins, Marshall 77, 78 Snel, Bert 269, 273, 299
Sainsbury, Diane 26, 28, 56, 368, 375, Sniderman, Paul 22, 57, 268, 275, 277, 299
376, 388 Solevid, Maria 306, 325
Saldin, Robert 46, 56 Son Hing, Leanne 222, 231
Sales, Rosemary 275, 298 Sønderskov, Kim M. 318, 325
Samanni, Marcus 310, 311, 315, 324 Soroka, Stuart xiv, 28, 37, 46, 47, 50, 53, 57,
Sartori, Giovanni 233, 267 150, 152–73, 174, 175, 212, 229, 231, 276,
Savage, Mike 133, 137, 149 299, 359
Savak, K. 180, 182, 186, 197 Soskice, David 217, 222, 228
Shachar, Ayelet 104, 106 Spolaore, Enrico 46, 49
Schaeffer, Merlin 12, 44, 46, 56, 301, 317, 325 Spoon, Jae-Jae 242, 262, 267
Schäfer, Armin 221, 231 Spreckelsen, Thees 224, 228
Schain, Martin 28, 56 Statham, Paul 25, 57
Scharpf, Fritz W. 306, 325 Steele, Claude 316, 325
Scheepers, Peer 132, 149, 155, 188, 196, 273, Steensland, Brian 219, 231
298, 317, 322 Steinmo, Sven v
Scheffer, Paul 276, 298, 336, 345, 362 Stengers, Jean 390, 419
Schelkle, Waltraud 224 Stephens, John 7, 57, 215, 228
Schildkraut, D. J. 175 Stichnoth, Holger 12, 57
Schlesinger, Mark 222, 227 Stiphout, Robert 269, 293, 299
Schlueter, E. 179, 183, 197 Stirton, Lindsay 305, 322
Schneider, S. 191, 198 Stjernø, Steinar 5, 24, 44, 57, 215, 231
Scholz, Sally 5, 44, 57 Stokes, Susan 117, 124
Schreiber, Jean-Philippe 398, 418 Stolle, Dietlind 12, 48, 52, 57, 74, 75, 77, 78,
Schröder, Gerhard 236 178, 182, 183, 184, 197, 314, 325, 345, 361
Schuck, Peter H. 104, 106 Stråth, Bo 364, 388
Schuman, Robert 101 Streeck, Wolfgang 221, 231
Schumpeter, Joseph 11, 46 Strimling, Pontus 309, 325
Sears, D. O. 155, 173, 174 Stromae 396
Segall, Shlomi 17, 21, 57, 77, 78 Sugiyama, Nastascha Borges 301, 325
Seidle, F. Leslie 354, 362 Sullivan, J. L. 188, 198
Semyonov, M. 153, 174 Sumino, Takanori 30, 57
Sen, Amartya 306, 325 Sundas, Ali 150
Sewell, William H. Jr 215, 231 Sundbärg, Gustav 371
Shapiro, Ian 117, 124 Svallfors, Stefan 46, 57, 205, 208, 222, 229,
Shayo, Moses 47, 57, 151, 155, 175, 231, 232, 241, 267, 306, 309, 310, 313,
203, 222, 231 314, 325
Sherif, Carolyn 72, 77, 78 Svanberg, I. 373, 388
Sherif, Muzafer 72, 77, 78 Swank, Duane 27, 28, 57
Shnier, Diane 122 Swart, Hermann 44, 53
Sides, John 157, 174, 178, 179, 198 Swenden, Wilfried 393, 409, 419
Sigelman, Lee 277, 299 Swenson, Peter 215, 232
Index of Names 435
Swidler, Ann 206, 215, 232 Vad Jønsson, H. 376, 388
Swyngedouw, Marc 393, 398, 404, 405, 415, Van Amersfoort, Hans 274, 299
416, 417, 419 Van Biezen, Ingrid 262, 266, 267
Van Craen, Maarten 398, 419
‘t Hart, Paul 276, 296 Van den Bulck, Hilde 400, 419
Talbott, William J. 308, 325 Van der Brug, Wouter 26, 58, 129, 151, 233,
Tamir, Yael 19, 47, 57, 131, 151, 203, 232, 389, 235, 238, 239, 267
412, 419 Van der Lubben, Sebastiaan 269, 272,
Tan, Kok-Chor 45, 57 293, 296
Taylor, Charles 157, 175 Van der Meer, T. 12, 58, 282, 298, 317, 322
Taylor, Michael 77, 78 Van der Straeten, Karine 12, 57
Taylor, Rosemary 224 Van der Waal, Jeoren 58, 153, 176, 177, 198,
Taylor-Gooby, Peter 13, 57, 368, 388 240, 241, 265
Tegnér, Esaias 370 van Holsteyn, Joop J. 269, 274, 280, 298, 299
Ten Hoove, Sanne 285, 299 Van Kersbergen, Kees 24, 58, 215, 217, 230
Teney, Céline xiv, 14, 21, 36, 37, 127–48, van Oorschot, Wim xiv, 11, 14, 20, 27, 28, 31,
150, 151 38, 45, 46, 56, 58, 177–95, 197, 198, 220, 231
Teorell, Jan 310, 311, 315, 324 van Parijs, Philippe xiv, 34, 42, 49, 305, 306,
Thatcher, Margaret 316 325, 407, 419, 420–6
Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth vi, 12, 47, 58, 73, 79, van Spanje, Joost 26, 58, 129, 151, 238, 239,
132, 151, 155, 175, 203, 232 267, 284, 295, 299
Thelen, Kathleen 8, 25, 26, 58, 216, 224, Vanbeselaere, Norbert 404, 419
230, 232 Vancluysen, Kris 398, 419
Thérien, Jean-Philippe 45, 47, 56 Vanden Boeynants, Paul 414
Thomas, Elaine 345, 362 Vanderkeere, Michel 404, 415
Thomassen, Jacques 238, 267, 282, Varone, Frédéric 25, 51
295, 299 Veen, Robert van der 305, 326
Tichenor, Daniel J. 347, 348, 362 Vellinga, Menno 274, 299
Tillie, Jean 233, 267 Verdonk, Rita 283
Tilly, Charles 130–1, 151 Vertovec, Steven 327, 336, 363
Tilton, Timothy 218, 232 Verzichelli, Luca 129, 148
Tirole, Jean 208, 226 Vickstrom, E. 12, 56
Tocqueville, A. de 71, 79 Vignoles, V. L. 155, 175, 178, 181, 197,
Togeby, L. 375, 388 203, 230
Tolbert, C. J. 154, 174 Vink, Maarten P. 87, 106, 268, 276, 286, 299,
Tolsma, J. 12, 58 331, 332, 363
Torpe, L. 381, 387 Vives, Johannes Ludovicus 421, 426
Trägårdh, L. 364, 384 Vliegenthart, Rens 276, 299
Transue, J. E. 155, 157, 175, 188, 198 Voerman, Gerrit 274, 299
Traunmüller, Richard 31, 52 Volkens, Andea 242, 267
Trebilcock, Michael 347, 348, 361 vom Hau, Matthias 46, 47, 57
Triadafilopoulos, Triadafilos 348, 358, 363, Von Haaren, Friederike 337, 362
412, 419 Voss, Kim 47, 50
Triandafyllidou, Anna v
Trudeau, Pierre Elliott 348–9 Wagner, Markus 46, 55, 238, 239, 260, 265
Trump, Donald 351, 355 Waibel, Strinnbe 27, 48, 54, 344, 357, 358, 361
Trump, Kris-Stella 11, 45, 51, 210, Waldron, Jeremy 117, 124
221, 226 Walker, Kathryn 45, 54
Tsebelis, George 301, 325 Walkosz, Barbara J. 277, 299
Tyden, M. 373, 388 Walzer, Michael 130, 131, 151
Wand, J. 155, 176
Uberoi, Varun 34, 48, 58 Wansink, Hans 271, 298
Ulenbelt, Paul 285 Warren, Elizabeth 122
Uslaner, E. 67, 70, 79, 182, 198, 301, 305, 313, Weale, Albert 77, 79
317, 324, 325, 368, 387 Weber, Eugen 34, 58
Uunk, W. 188, 191, 198 Weber, Max 5
436 Index of Names
Weil, Patrick 87, 106 Wolff, Jonathan 303, 304, 326
Weldon, S. 178, 179, 182, 183, 198, 293, 299, Wolgin, Philip 348, 363
340, 341, 363 Wong, C. J. 155, 176
Welzel, C. 195, 196, 307, 326 Woodward, Ian 134, 150
Wessendorf, Susanne 327, 336, 363 Wright, Matthew xiv, 30, 31, 37, 47, 48, 50,
West, Martin 207, 230 51, 152–73, 174, 175, 176, 179, 181, 182,
West Pedersen, Axel 219, 226, 306, 321 198, 203, 204, 222, 224, 225, 228, 232, 293,
Westlake, Daniel 26, 58 299, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341,
Wickström, Mats 374, 388 357, 358, 359, 360, 363
Wildavsky, Aaron 306, 321 Wüest, Bruno 240, 264
Wilde, Lawrence 5, 58 Wuthnow, Robert 206, 232
Wilders, Geert 283 Wynia, Syp 269, 293, 299
Wildt, A. 76, 79 Wytzes, Liesbeth 269, 293, 299
Wilkinson, R. 66, 79, 300, 326
Williams, Bernard 120, 124 Xiao, Erte 309, 321
Willmann, Johanna 46, 55, 238, 239,
260, 265 Yack, Bernard 110, 124
Wilson, Carole J. 235, 266 Yanasmayan, Zeynep 402, 416
Wilson, Frank, L. 262, 267
Winter, Elke 345, 354, 358, 363 Zagefka, H. 181, 197
Winters, R. F. 154, 175 Zambrano, Gerardo Ruiz 96, 105
Wlezien, Christopher 212, 231 Zimmer, Oliver 401, 419
Wolak, Jennifer 276, 297 Zizek, Slavoj 46, 58
Wolfe, Alan 30, 58 Zolberg, Aristide R. 390, 419
General Index
9/11 273 assimilation 19, 42, 43, 161, 268, 289, 343,
347–9, 373, 409–12
Aboriginals 27 associational theory of solidarity 71–2
access to nationality 331 asylum 258, 284, 403
admission policies 279, 285, 291, 292, applications 258
294, 295 migration 282, 286
Netherlands 286–7 seekers 92, 104, 280, 295, 381
and restrictive integration, average and multiculturalism, views on
support for (1989–2012) 285 (Netherlands, 1994–2010) 278, 291
Afghanistan 295 should they be sent back to country of
Africa 348 origin (graph) 281, 294
African-Americans 41, 117, 123, 218, 328, attachment 17, 18, 49, 68, 75, 82, 95, 131, 137,
347, 349, 353 203, 215, 338, 339
Against the Islamization of Our Culture attitudinal nature of solidarity 5
(Fortuyn, 1997) 270 Aussiedlerpolitik 93
Agenda 2010 236 Australia 32, 92, 213, 329, 336, 337, 340, 344
agonistic conception of solidarity 44 Austria 89, 104, 213, 216, 225, 233, 234, 242,
Agrarian Justice (Paine) 424, 426 244–7, 250–4, 274, 331, 336, 340
Albania 295 Freedom Party 289
Algeria 295 Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) 239,
Alternative für Deutschland 103 245, 254, 257, 258, 263
altruism 3, 45, 63, 65, 205–6 immigration as threat to welfare
Amazonian Indians 62 state 259–61
American Pledge of Allegiance 120 Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreich
American Revolution 119 (SPÖ) 243
Americanization 348, 353, 367 Azerbaijan 295
Americanism 347
amoral familialism 68 Babylon
Andalusians 100 justice of 111–16
anti-capitalism 170 peace of 114, 121
anti-discrimination measures 26, 28, 29, 340, backlash 1, 327, 336, 340–2, 344, 345, 355,
342, 352–5 358, 380, 384, 405
anti-immigrant attitudes 290, 341 Bahrain 295
in Netherlands (1991–2010) 279, 291 balanced reciprocity 77
anti-immigrant parties 13, 25, 26, 40, 272, Bangladesh 295
273, 281–5, 288, 290, 295 banking crises 83
projected number of seats in Netherlands Bavaria(ns) 100
(2000–13) 283 Christian Social Union 145
anti-racism 344 Belgium 21, 26, 42, 43, 81, 97, 195, 216, 234,
anti-social egocentrism 45 243, 247, 250–3, 274, 329, 331, 340
ascriptive national identity 163 basic features of federalism 391–2
Asia 348 Chamber of Representatives 393
Asians 171, 347, 348, 351 Christian-Democrats 393, 414
aspirations Communauté Wallonie-Bruxelles 401
for domestic justice 47 Council of State 403
and evaluations for citizenship 178, 180–2, different migrant and integration
185, 186, 188–92, 195 policies 409–12
for social rights 21, 38, 188–90, diverging nation building policies on
192, 194 different levels 400–3
438 General Index
Belgium (cont.) bolsa familia conditional cash transfer
Flemish nationalist party (N-VA) 396, 397, programmes 301
399, 401, 403, 404, 406, 408, 409 boundaries 9, 24, 26, 38, 85, 90, 100, 111, 117,
Front démocratique des francophones 393 157, 177, 181, 193, 214, 215, 239,
Greens 393, 399 241, 329, 400
hard case for liberal nationalism? international 107
389–414 juridical 118
identities and attitudes among public national 12, 117
opinion 398–400 political 47
Liberals 393 racial 207
Minorities Forum 410 social 161, 179, 206, 207, 217
Mouvement réformateur (MR) 393 symbolic 178–80, 183, 194, 221
pan-Belgian nationhood 42–3 bounded solidarity 6, 7, 12, 16, 22, 28, 36, 43,
Parliament of the Brussels Capital 44, 45, 80, 107, 111, 119, 121, 177
Region 393 ‘boutique multiculturalism’ 14
Parti Socialiste (PS ) 393 Brandenburgers 100
party system and electoral system 392–4 Brazil 301
public sphere and mass media 394–7 Brexit referendum v, 29, 104
Rassemblement Wallon (party) 393 Britain see Great Britain
Social-Democrats 393 British Columbia 171, 347, 353
Socialisten en Progressieven Anders Brunei 295
(SP.A) 243, 244, 252–4 Brussels attacks (2016) 403
three dimensions of solidarity 403–9 Bulgaria 195, 284
civic solidarity 404–5 Burkina Faso 295
democratic solidarity 405–6 business elites 37, 129, 139, 146, 148
redistributive solidarity 406–9
Vlaams Belang (VB) 243, 250, 253, California 347
254, 405 Canada
Vlaamse Liberalen en Democraten Citizenship and Immigration Canada 354
(VLD) 405 diversity and solidarity in 152–73
Volksunie (party) 393 Francophone nationalism 348
belonging, sense of 17, 19, 23, 31, 33, 36, 47, Reform Party 350
82, 109, 115, 127, 131–3, 333, 389, Blue Book 350
412, 413 ROC (Rest of Canada) 153
benefits 10, 43, 66, 77, 118, 120, 153, 160–2, Royal Canadian Mounted Police 354
170, 201, 207, 208, 221, 282, 295, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
315, 316, 320, 330, 331–3, 339, 364, (CIFAR) v
368, 375, 377 Catalans 100
child 407, 408 Catalonia 47, 81, 90, 347, 353
health care 407 centre-left 293, 343
needs-testing 315 centre-right 236, 262, 397
pension 245, 286 centrist parties 240, 255
selective vs universal 27, 74, 75 Chad 295
social 26, 29, 154, 209, 218, 219, 223, 225, child benefits 407, 408
241, 242, 245, 254, 256, 257, 260, child poverty 341, 408
261–3, 328, 331, 353, 376 Chile 62–3
unemployment 131, 261, 286, 409, 421 Chile Solidarity Campaign (CSC) 62–3
welfare 235–7, 241, 242, 254, 261, Chinese 347, 353
263, 284, 353 Christian Democratic parties 23, 145, 215,
see also welfare state 217, 233, 237, 239, 272, 292
‘Benetton multiculturalism’ 14 Christianity 45, 100, 101, 112–14, 123, 159
bilingual education 48, 353 Christians 22, 37, 113, 114, 121, 278, 347, 351
birthright citizenship 88, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99, citizen identity 73
349, 350 citizenship
black market 305 access as way to foster democratic
‘blood and soil’ nationhood 12, 18, 234, 364 solidarity 330–3
General Index 439
aspirations 189 coalitions 7, 9, 23–6, 215, 217, 218, 233, 246,
birthright 87, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99, 349, 350 260, 270, 272, 273, 282, 293, 375,
causes and consequences of access 381, 408
to 327–59 collective action 66, 67, 208, 317
civil 84, 98 collective identities 12, 14, 133
and collective identities as political sources and citizenship as political sources of
of solidarity in EU 80–105 solidarity in EU 80–105
common 336 in Canada and US: from racist to
democratic 84, 178 post-racial? 345–55
derivative 89 collective imaginaries 9, 22–4, 34, 39, 214,
Europe, geographical differentiation 215, 217, 222, 225, 382
of 84–6 as quasi-equilibria 205–13
laws 88, 179 collective responsibility 35, 74, 76
lifetime 87 commitment, strains of 1, 3, 4, 7, 269, 329
local, regional, and national regimes 87–91 common citizenship 336
parents 87 Common European Market 236
policy common identity 8, 43, 333, 338, 421–4
Netherlands 287–8 commonality orientation 111
political 84, 97, 98, 180 communal violence 4, 96, 333
regimes 85 communist parties 233, 238
rights 38, 179–80 community of destiny 90, 91, 102
aspirations and evaluations 180–1 community of fate 26, 35, 70, 223
individual opinions 181–3 Comoros 295
national cultures 183–4 Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) 242,
and tolerance to newcomers 179–84 243–5, 249–52, 263
social 14, 84, 85, 94, 96, 180, 195, 207, 215, confederal solidarity 99
217, 219 conflict and solidarity 327–58
and tolerance towards immigrants 177–98 conservatives 26, 235, 237, 239, 262,
‘Citizenship and Social Class’ (Marshall, 270, 343, 375
2009) 179 Consideration on Representative Government
City of God 112 (Mill, 1861) 390
City of God, The (Augustine) 112 constitutional patriotism 16, 17, 21, 77, 82,
City of Man 112, 113 110, 116, 203, 390, 413
civic engagement 71, 157, 317 constructive political theory 302–6
civic friendship 16, 31 empirical, normative, and constructive state
civic indicators 159 theories 303
civic integration 32, 33, 400, 410–12, 414 contagion effect 40, 284
policies 29–31, 327–59, 367, 409, 410, 412 contractarian distraction 119–22
in tension with solidarity? 333–5 corruption 208, 311–15, 318, 319, 422
turn 376–9 cosmopolitan elites 36, 133, 134
Civic Integration Policy Index (CIVIX) 334, cosmopolitan identification 133, 136, 137,
335 139, 140, 143, 146
civic knowledge 331, 334, 350 cosmopolitan identity 21, 37, 109, 127, 128,
civic nationalism 15, 16, 402 132–7, 140–8
civic solidarity 4, 10, 14, 23, 30, 35, 37, 38, and national identity, role of 139–45
43–5, 96, 128–30, 132, 134–6, threat to national solidarity? 132–5
139–48, 332–5, 338, 342, 350, 420 cosmopolitan issues 6, 45, 47, 81, 118
in Belgium 404–5 cosmopolitan order 133
and multiculturalism 338–41 cosmopolitan solidarity 37, 133,
civil rights 17, 118, 174, 185, 187, 349, 391 134, 137
legislation 352, 353 cosmopolitanism 37, 134, 148
movement 328, 347, 348, 352 moral 137, 140, 142–4, 146, 147
civil war 76, 102, 301, 312, 331, 349 cross-national distribution of tolerance
civilizing force of deliberative democracy 43 towards newcomers 185
class struggle 8, 11, 422 cultural engineering 22, 37, 156, 169
clientelism 314 cultural pluralism 336, 358, 373
440 General Index
Cyprus 195 racial 152, 179, 219, 327, 355, 391
Czech Republic 195 regimes 30
religious 19, 92, 219, 316, 327, 401
De Subventione Pauperum (Vives, 1526) 421 and redistribution 30
‘Decision Makers in Germany: Values and responsible for declining solidarity? 10–14
Attitudes’ (2011/12) 128 social 238, 241, 378
deliberative democracy 43, 309, 390, 412, and solidarity 15, 43, 47, 48, 81, 86, 234,
413, 425 260, 261
democracy in Canada and US 152–73
deliberative 43, 309, 390, 412, 413, 425 in Denmark and Sweden 364–84
without solidarity 107–23 electoral 233–63
democratic citizenship 84, 178 public attitudes to 36–8, 125–95
democratic solidarity 4, 7, 18, 33, 35, 41, 92, and quality of government 300–20
97, 128, 328, 335, 340, 342, 343, 420 in Radical Right discourse 254–9
in Belgium 405–6 reframing diversity–solidarity
citizenship access as way to foster 330–3 debate 32–4
immigrants’, and multiculturalism 336–8 and social justice 420–6
Denmark 25, 30, 42, 89, 195, 207, 213, 216, some cautions 329–30
219, 233, 244, 247, 251–3, 274, 318, solidarity in, in EU 81–4
319, 335–7, 345 ‘unity in’ 82, 101
Dansk Folkeparti (DF) 243 differentiation of citizenship in Europe,
‘Denmark for the People’ (Danmark for geographical 84–6
Folket) 371 discrimination 27, 95, 312, 314, 332, 339–42,
diversity and solidarity in 364–84 353–5
‘people’s community’ (Folkefællesskab) 371 disposable income inequality and support for
People’s Party 289 redistribution to poor 213
Social Liberal Party (Det Radikale distributive justice 115, 304, 390
Venstre) 370 Division of Labour in Society, The (Durkheim
Socialdemokratiet (SD/SDDK) 243 1964) 70
deservingness 27, 39, 206, 208, 241, 242, 260 Djibouti 295
judgements 11, 31, 46 dual citizenship 93, 94, 96, 288, 358, 377
disagreement and parties 116–19
disposable income inequality 213 Eastern European countries 184
and general support for redistribution 202 economic globalization 239, 240, 345, 423
diversity v, 1–4, 7, 22–4, 32–5, 40–3, 80, 91, economic inequality 36, 76, 300, 319, 327, 344
93, 94, 96, 111, 115, 156, 157, 177, economic insecurity 2, 6, 222
246, 273, 293, 295, 307, 328, 333–5, economic issues 39, 40, 236–9, 259, 406
338, 341–3, 345, 346, 348–58, 367, economic orthodoxy 246, 249, 250
410, 411 economic redistribution 61, 153
challenge of 422–3 economic threat 2, 188, 234
cultural 20, 82, 83, 154, 195, 316, 365, 367, education 104, 140, 164, 167, 172, 189, 191,
368, 375, 377, 401, 404, 409 237, 247–9, 251, 261, 263, 304, 305,
ethnic 20, 28, 29, 37, 46, 128, 136, 140, 143, 307, 313, 316, 339, 356, 358, 368,
152, 154, 179, 219, 301, 316–20, 327, 370, 392, 400, 409, 413
355, 365, 401, 409, 422 bilingual 48, 353
how negative effect on social trust can be citizenship 410
overcome 316–19 civic 383, 412
and identity 22 credentials 99
immigrant 155, 268, 270, 275, 279, 289–91, and income 138
329, 345 level 188, 191, 258, 301
attention to in four major Dutch mother tongue 286, 375
newspapers (1999–2012) 277 multicultural 48
linguistic 83, 391 primary 138, 141, 142
management 343, 349 public 94, 105
policies 26, 27, 29, 31, 41, 48, 328, 342, 343 reforms 357
politics of 1, 199–425 secondary 138
General Index 441
systems 74, 328, 346 ethnic minorities 12, 18, 19, 25, 222, 278, 291,
tertiary 138, 141, 142, 188 292, 294, 339, 344, 404, 410
Egypt 295 should they adjust to Dutch culture
elections and political parties 185, (graph) 281
240, 243 ethnic nationhood 332
electoral campaigns 235, 239 ethnic nationalism 16
electoral politics of solidarity 233–63 ethnocultural groups 4, 153
empirical findings 246–59 ethnonationalist citizenship policies 93
RR in favour of redistribution? 246–54 ethno-racial diversity 152, 179, 355
solidarity vs diversity in RR ethno-religious differences 6, 10
discourse 254–9 Europe, geographical differentiation of
issue salience in party competition and citizenship in 84–6
voting behaviour 235–42 European Commission (EC) 101,
methodology and data 242–6 104, 409
elites and masses European Convention on Human Rights
attitudinal divide on civic and redistributive (ECHR) 28, 287
solidarity 138–9 European Court of Justice 405
graph 138 European integration 83, 101, 102, 129, 132,
identity gap 36 236, 237, 239–41
rational interests and 129–30 European Parliament 100, 104
tensions between in Germany 127–48 Elections 105, 245, 262, 351, 393
emergency health care 6, 330 European Social Survey 178
employment 29, 71, 104, 188, 217, analysis of Round 6 (2012) 184–9
340, 404, 408 results 189–93
crises 83 country-level findings 190–3
women’s 25 individual-level findings 189–90
English-speaking Canada 30, 37, 153 European unification 83
entrepreneurialism 222 European Union (EU) 28, 29, 75, 133, 184,
environmental protection 129, 247–9 223, 236, 283, 320, 344, 382, 395
equal rights 162, 167, 173, 379 citizenship and collective identities as
and national identity, and trust, and political sources of solidarity
support for redistribution 166 in 80–105
equalities 4, 9, 35, 41, 43, 62, 67, 77, 83, 97, 98, Court of Justice (CJEU) 90
109, 128, 182, 183, 218, 236, 260, shared collective identity 100
263, 306, 308–10, 312, 313, 315, 320, Treaty on 83
328, 330, 333, 343, 346–8, 352–4,
364, 368, 373–5, 401, 411 factional loyalties destructive of wider
economic 259, 300, 310, 314, 341, 403 solidarity 68
gender 129, 313, 345, 403 fairness 27, 45, 114, 310, 311, 314–16, 318,
of opportunity 257, 412, 424 320, 424
political 300, 307 far-right 333, 341, 345, 350, 405; see also
positive 248, 250 radical right
rights 21, 109, 307 federal constitution 89
social 26, 100, 189, 194, 218, 313 federal solidarity 82, 90, 98–102
socio-economic 194 federalism 120, 247, 389–92
equality-promoting policies 28, 41; see also Belgian, basic features of 391–2
redistribution social 407
Esquisse d’une histoire des progrès de l’esprit Finland 195, 216, 219, 244, 248, 251, 252, 301,
humain (Condorcet, 1795) 421 370, 374
Estonia 104, 195, 331 Suomen Sosialidemokraattinen Puolue
ethical community 12 (SDP) 243
nations as 155 Perussuomalaiset (TF) 243
ethnic diversity 20, 28, 29, 37, 46, 128, 136, first generation rights 180
140, 143, 152, 154, 155, 179, 219, Flanders 42, 234, 390, 391, 398–402, 404–6,
301, 316–20, 327, 355, 365, 409–12, 414
401, 409, 422 Flemings 42, 398, 404, 410, 414
442 General Index
Fortuyn, Pim 269–74, 275, 276, 277, 278, 281, ‘grand patronat’ 263
282, 284, 286, 288, 289, 290, 291, Great Britain 24, 29, 62, 207, 212, 213, 216,
293, 297; see also Netherlands: Lijst 219, 221, 262, 333, 348, 397
Pim Fortuyn (LPF) Greece 101, 104
‘Fortuyn effect’ 275 Green parties 260, 262, 393, 399
France 1–4, 24, 76, 104, 108, 195, 213, 215, Grundtvigism 369
216, 219, 234, 243–5, 248, 250–2, Guantanamo Bay 111
254–6, 332, 336, 391, 394, 411 guest workers 305, 375
Aide Médicale d’Etat (AME) 256 Guinea 295
Francophone nationalism 348, 349
Front National (FN) 245 Habermasian approaches 17, 47
generous but exclusive welfare policy health care 6, 245, 273, 301, 305, 307, 310,
preferences 256–7 314, 315, 318, 330, 406–8
left-wing economic turn 255 high solidarity equilibria 212, 213
Parti Socialiste (PS) 251 Hispanic Heritage month 353
fraternité 121, 374 home-grown terrorism 333
free market economy 238, 239, 241, homophobia 273, 336,
246–50, 255 horizontal solidarity 36, 91, 120
free movement 85, 92, 93, 105, 296 housing policies 131
right to 88, 97–100, 133 human behaviour 309, 311, 312
French Canada 170, 348 human interaction, reciprocity as basic
French Revolution 119, 374 template for 308–12
human rights 4, 15, 16, 24, 28, 29, 38, 92, 182,
Gambia 295 193, 247–9, 330, 353, 374
gay rights 14, 238 humanitarianism 6, 8, 11, 32, 33
gender equality 129, 313, 345, 403 unbounded 10, 43, 425
general support for redistribution 160, 163, Hungary 89, 102, 195, 212, 301, 332
202, 203, 207, 210–13, 216,
220, 224, 225 Iceland 88
generalized reciprocity 77 identification and solidarity 143
generalized trust 75, 162, 163, 182, 195, 311, among elites 142–4
313, 314, 358, 368 among general population 140–2
generational relations of solidarity 82, 94 identity 11, 22, 24, 30, 45, 73–5, 91, 109,
geographic fusion, Marshall’s theory of 85–6 156, 160–3, 168–9, 172, 233, 256,
geographical differentiation 86 278, 411
of citizenship in Europe 84–6 and attitudes among public opinion,
Germany 14, 21, 36, 39, 93, 104, 170, 195, 211, Belgium 398–400
216, 219, 223, 262, 290, 318, 332, citizen 73, 80
336, 337, 340, 347, 370 civic 159, 204, 225
Alternative for Germany (AfD) 145 collective 8, 17, 22, 32, 33, 80, 81, 90,
Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 100–3, 137, 145, 335
145, 237 in Canada and US 345–55
Christlich Soziale Union in Bayern common/shared 8, 12, 43, 73, 101, 155,
(CSU) 237 333, 338, 421–4
Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) 237 of EU 100
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands cosmopolitan 128, 140–8
(SPD) 236–7 threat to national security? 132–5
tensions between masses and elites cultural 374, 394, 410, 411, 413, 414
in 127–48 ethnic 204, 224, 225, 338
global good Samaritans 45 gap between elites and masses 36, 140–4
global justice 43, 45, 82, 124 indicators 159
globalization 12, 43, 127, 129, 132, 133, 236, linguistic 374
237, 239–41, 245, 259, 327, 329, 344, national see national identity
345, 356, 423 policing 110
Gold Rush 353 political 17, 18, 81, 400
‘grand capital’ 263 politics 345, 400
General Index 443
post-war 367, 372–6 inclusive solidarity 1, 3, 10, 11, 23–6, 32–4,
religious 113 37, 40–2, 391, 425
social 157, 275–6 independence 81, 348, 370, 397
and solidarity 44 individual-level model of tolerance towards
supranational 133, 137, 147 newcomers 190
territorial 424 individualization 46
theory, of solidarity 73–4 Indonesia 295
transgenerational 94 inequality 7, 10, 11, 25, 39, 64, 66, 67, 72, 182,
Identity Diversity and Social Solidarity Survey 189, 220, 328, 349, 352, 368, 425
(IDSS, Canada and US, 2014) 171 attitudes towards 202
illiberal democracies 102 economic 36, 66, 76, 300, 319, 327
imagined communities, nations as income 136, 138, 202, 205, 206, 210, 212,
48, 154 213, 221, 224, 341, 422
immigrant diversity 155, 270, 275, 279, limits on 35, 64, 66
289–91, 329, 345 political 300
attention to in four major Dutch social 66, 67, 130, 300, 347
newspapers (1999–2012) 277 socio-economic 344
immigrants 2, 4, 5, 7, 11–13, 14, 18, 19, 21–33, in-group loyalties 38
38, 39–42, 44, 46–9, 89, 91, 92–4, 96, injustice 41, 109, 111, 115, 118, 121, 353
118, 129, 130, 132, 134, 148, 153, insiders and outsiders 6, 21, 180
154, 157, 158, 159, 160–2, 169, 170, institutional design 301, 304, 310, 311, 315
177–85, 188–90, 192, 194, 195, 203, institutional inertia 43
210, 219, 222, 223, 225, 234, 245, institutional theory of solidarity 74–5
254–63, 268, 269, 270, 276, 280, 282, institutionalized solidarity 422–3
285, 286, 294, 295, 305, 317–19, instrumental benefits of solidarity 66–7
327–40, 342, 345–7, 349–58, 365, integration 15, 25, 95, 98, 103, 130, 276, 283,
366, 368, 373–6, 378–82, 391, 398, 291, 295, 366, 372, 373, 379, 382,
400, 401–5, 409, 410, 411, 412 403, 405
admissions policy 44 civic 29–33, 327, 367, 376–9, 400,
democratic solidarity and 410–12, 414
multiculturalism 336–8 cultural 291
exclusion from welfare benefits see welfare economic 83, 236, 259
chauvinism and employment 29
integration policy see integration EU 99, 101, 102, 129, 132, 236, 237, 239–41
tolerance towards 177–98 immigrant 41, 42, 44, 93, 277, 293, 365,
yearly inflow (1995–2011) by category and 366, 379–81, 390, 391, 400, 402,
origin of migrant 287 403, 413
immigration v, 1, 11, 13, 24–7, 33, 39, 40, 47, national philosophies of 42, 366
48, 92, 93, 105, 111, 118, 119, 129, policies 2, 24, 29–31, 269, 270, 273, 282,
138, 157, 161, 170, 189, 219, 221, 284–6, 289, 292, 327–59, 366, 381,
233–5, 238–41, 260–2, 301, 320, 383, 390, 391, 413–14
328–30, 339–42, 345–51, 355, 356, and migrant policies, Belgium
365, 367–9, 379, 381, 382, 403–5, 409–12
411, 412, 423 Netherlands 286
cultural problem? 257–8 political 83, 84
economic problem 255–6 politics 26, 27
and political parties 13, 25–7, 40, 47, 93, social 24, 27, 368
118, 205, 261, 268, 272, 273, 281–5, inter-communal violence 4, 96
288–90, 292, 295, 402 interdependence 35, 70, 71, 82, 99, 102,
politics of, in Netherlands 103, 422
and 2002 elections 268–96 inter-ethnic contact 2
post-war, policy responses to 372–6 inter-group antagonisms/hostility 72
threat to Austrian and French welfare inter-group reciprocity 72
states 259 international migration flows 152
impartiality 182, 314–16, 318, 320 International Social Survey Programme
improvement effect 181 (ISSP) 172, 278
444 General Index
interpersonal trust 27, 28, 163, 165, 166, 168, laissez-faire policies 409
169, 313, 377 language(s) 4, 5, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 29, 62, 93,
intolerance 4, 38, 155 96, 110, 120, 161, 171–3, 224, 242,
Iran 295 246, 286, 308, 329–31, 333–6, 343,
Iraq 295 344, 350, 353, 355, 358, 364, 371,
Ireland 195, 216 376–8, 383, 389, 390–6, 399–406,
Iron Curtain 83 408, 410, 411–14, 420, 423, 424
ISCED (The International Standard Latvia 331
Classification of Education) 188 law enforcement 129
Islam 257, 261, 271, 291 law and order 238, 239, 246–9, 273, 373
Islamization 145, 270 Lebanon 295
Israel 66, 329 left authoritarianism 14, 46, 259
issue salience in party competition and voting and working-class 237–9
behaviour 235–42 left-liberal parties 260
Italy 34, 68, 104, 184, 195, 216, 262, 301, 318, left parties 7, 25, 26, 48, 129, 233, 237,
335, 336, 347 238, 240, 284, 311, 315, 333, 333,
ius domicilii (automatic acquisition and loss 357, 408
derived from residence) 88, 95 left political coalitions 7
ius sanguinis (descent from citizenship left populism 14
parents) 87 legal injustice 41
ius soli (birth in the territory) 87 Lehman Brothers 177
liberal-democratic values 15–17, 20, 21, 29,
Japan 92, 347 33, 46, 47
Jews 112, 113, 347, 371 liberal nationalism 19–21, 43, 47, 81
Jordan 295 hard case for, in Belgium? 389–414
just institutions 6, 7, 10, 12, 121, 425 Libya 295
just society 3, 4, 6, 7 lifetime citizenship 87
justice 6, 7, 36, 39, 69, 84, 109, 118–21, 123, Lisbon Treaty on the Functioning of the
135, 335, 370, 392, 394 EU 83, 89, 104
of Babylon 111–16 Lithuania 195, 331
distributive 115, 304 local, regional, and national citizenship
domestic 47 regimes 87–91
egalitarian 43 low solidarity equilibria 212
global 43, 45, 82 ‘luck egalitarians’ 304, 305
liberal-democratic 16 Luxembourg 329
procedural 309
redistributive 390 Maastricht Treaty 83, 105, 235, 236, 405
social 6, 8, 16, 39, 43, 111, 131, 182, 206, mainstream political parties 26, 129, 233,
214–17, 222, 224, 235, 250, 255, 258, 236, 246, 269, 272, 284, 285, 288,
259, 262, 302, 303, 305, 311, 320, 292, 295
327, 329, 413, 420–5 majority-language learning 336
and solidarity and diversity 420–6 Malaysia 295
solidaristic 309 Maldives 295
substantial 309 Mali 295
justifiability, pressure of 43, 425 Malta 104
justificatory community 43–4 market liberalization 39
transnational 43 Marxism 8, 120, 122, 193
mass migration 41, 219, 349
Kazakhstan 295 masses and elites, tensions between in
Kenya 301 Germany 127–48
Kuwait 295 Mauritania 295
Kyrgyzstan 295 media 13, 19, 33, 37, 40, 135, 185, 187, 193,
207, 223, 270, 276, 331, 358, 389,
labour migration 274, 284, 374 392, 394–7, 406, 413, 425
labour movements 7, 217 ‘mere mention’ tests 31
labour parties 8, 293 middle-class voters 240
General Index 445
minority rights 46, 162–9, 172, 273, 352 146–8, 152–9, 169, 178, 181, 193,
MIPEX index of immigrant integration 202–4, 214, 217, 224, 233, 239, 270,
policies 93, 331, 332, 340, 354, 293, 333, 340, 341, 343, 345, 352,
357, 359 354, 355, 357, 358, 364–7, 369–72,
moderation 156, 161 378–82, 389–91, 398, 400–2, 411–14
cultural policy regimes 156–7 ascriptive 163
moral cosmopolitanism 137, 140, 142–4, and cosmopolitan identity, role of 139
146, 147 and its intermediaries 165–8
moral nationalism 137, 140, 142–4 legitimating shocks of 346–9
Morocco 270, 295 necessary feature of national
motivational solidarity 423, 424 solidarity? 130–2
‘multicultural drama’ 276 pathways of impact from 167
multicultural nationalism 20, 32, 33 and redistributive solidarity 152,
multiculturalism v, 1, 14, 20, 26, 29–32, 164–5, 204
39–42, 46–8, 152, 153, 157, 161, 170, and trust, and support for equal rights, and
241, 246–9, 269, 279, 291, 327–59, support for redistribution 166
365, 374, 380, 384, 412, 414 see also identity
adoption and diffusion of 343–4 national, local, and regional citizenship
and asylum seekers, views on (Netherlands, regimes 87–91
1994–2010) 278 national philosophies of integration 42
and civic solidarity 338–41 national pride 21, 22, 37, 163, 167, 169,
consequences for solidarity 335–42 364, 396
development and persistence of 342–5 national solidarity 5, 7–10, 15, 36, 37, 45, 120,
and immigrants’ democratic 121, 128, 146–8, 256, 355, 372, 406
solidarity 336–8 cosmopolitan identity as threat to? 132–5
and redistributive solidarity 341–2 national identity as necessary feature
rejection or persistence of 344–5 of? 130–2
summarizing evidence on redistributive 134
consequences 342 nationalism 18, 19, 37, 67, 83, 107, 109, 118,
Multiculturalism Policy Index (MCP) 336–8, 120, 130, 172, 222, 239, 241, 261,
340, 358 390, 397, 398, 401, 403, 408, 411,
muscular liberalism 333 412, 414
Muslim(s) 276, 284, 336, 345, 351, 358, 377, nationalist parties 119, 390, 393, 397,
403, 404 399–401, 405, 406, 409
countries 287, 288, 295 nationality 86–9, 95, 103–5, 109, 131, 152,
immigrant 276 153, 155, 156, 158–61, 164–6, 168,
mutual acceptance 3, 6, 10, 128 173, 195, 224, 347, 378, 391, 402,
mutual concern 4, 6, 35, 64, 77 403, 405, 410, 414
mutual cooperation 6 access to 331
mutual support 2, 3, 6, 9, 23, 65, 128 laws 87, 104
nationhood 6, 8, 12, 18, 19, 21–3, 34–8, 43, 46,
nation-building 31, 32, 34, 42, 47, 48, 81, 47, 82, 94, 95, 131, 132, 154, 159,
111, 131, 217, 224, 396, 398, 413, 234, 332, 345, 347
414, 422 pan-Belgian 42–3
diverging policies on different levels, nations
Belgium 400–3 as ethical communities 155
national borders 75, 145, 177, 223 as imagined communities 48, 154
increasing permeability of 133 natural law 119, 120
national community 19, 93, 119, 127, 130, naturalization 29, 30, 33, 48, 87, 88, 92–4,
132, 133, 140, 143, 146, 147, 157, 96–8, 103, 104, 179, 284, 286, 289,
159, 341, 348, 350, 355, 370, 410 331–2, 337, 346, 349, 350, 358,
national consciousness 12, 18, 170, 396, 400 375–8, 402, 403
national cultures 13, 183–4, 191 policy (Netherlands) 287–8
national identity 9, 12, 17, 18, 20–4, 30, 31, Nazism 170, 273, 372
33–5, 37–9, 43, 47, 49, 73, 77, 81, 94, needs-testing 315
100, 103, 128, 133, 137, 140–4, negative rights 114, 115, 180, 182
446 General Index
neoliberal multiculturalism 14, 46, 48 Socialistische Partij (SP) 284
neoliberalism 10, 12, 14 views on asylum seekers and
nepotism 314 multiculturalism (1994–2010) 278
nested nationalisms 42, 398 Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie
Netherlands 13, 22, 25, 40, 195, 213, 233, (VVD) 272
243, 244, 248, 250–3, 329, 336, yearly immigrant inflow (1995–2011) by
344, 380, 384 category and origin of migrant 287
admission policy New Zealand 92, 212, 213, 329,
and restrictive integration, average 339, 340
support for (1989–2012) 285 newcomers see immigrants
Alien Act Reform (2000) 286 Niger 295
anti-immigrant attitudes (1991–2010) Nigeria 312
279, 280 non-discrimination 14, 29, 271
anti-immigrant parties in 13 non-national residents 89
projected number of seats Nordic societies 184
(2000–13) 283 normative political theory 2, 117
attention to immigrant diversity in four and empirical and constructive state
major Dutch newspapers theories 303
(1999–2012) 277 North America 5, 21, 37, 38, 47, 153, 161, 328,
CentrumDemocraten (CD) 273 334, 339, 343, 345, 346, 349–51,
Christen Democratisch Àppel (CDA) 272 355–8, 370, 383
citizenship policy 287–8 Northern Ireland 329
crucial dates in ‘long year of 2002’ 270 Notre Projet: Programme Politique du FN 246
Cultural Changes in the Netherlands Survey Norway 88, 195, 212, 213, 216, 219, 234,
(CCNS) 279 243–5, 248, 250–2, 274, 337, 370
De Telegraaf 276 Arbeiderpartiet (AP) 243
De Volkskrant 276 Fremskrittspartiet (FrP) 243, 250
Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies Progress Party 289
(DPES) 278
integration policy 286 Oman 295
‘knowledge migrant regulation’ Ontario 354
(kennismigrantenregeling) 287 Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Leefbaar Nederland (LN) 270 Development (OECD) 154, 177,
Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) 40, 243 221, 329, 331, 339, 340
Liveable Rotterdam 271 out-group antipathies 38
Ministry of Foreigners’ Affairs and
Integration 282 Pakistan 295, 312
Modern Migration Policy Act (2010) 287 Palestinian administrative areas 295
Nationale VolksUnie, NVU) 273 Paris attacks (2015–16) 403
naturalization parliamentary representation 238, 242, 245,
policy 287–8 351, 381
rate (1995–2011) by country of participation 4, 16–18, 21, 23, 31, 46, 47, 49,
origin 288 71, 82, 86, 89, 92, 98, 114, 157, 246,
Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA) 251 260, 313, 329, 330, 335, 337, 338,
Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) 239 341, 342, 344, 348, 349, 358, 377,
party-political and legislative effects 281–8 403, 411, 425
politics of immigration in 268–96 party position on left–right index of welfare
projected number of seats for Fortuynist issues 253
parties (2001–2003) 271 party system and electoral system, in
Proud of the Netherlands (TON, Trots op Belgium 392–4
Nederland) 283 Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization
Purple coalition 273 of the West (PEGIDA) 145
should asylum seekers be sent back to patriotism 37, 118, 119, 155, 340, 424
country or origin (graph) 281 constitutional 16, 17, 21, 77, 82, 110, 116,
should ethnic minorities adjust to Dutch 203, 390, 413
culture (graph) 281 peace of Babylon 112–14, 121
General Index 447
pension(s) 95, 99, 160, 236, 245, 257, 262, Greens 260, 262, 393, 399
286, 301, 315, 316, 421, 424 and immigration 13, 25–7, 40, 47, 93, 118,
‘people’s home’ (folkhemmet) 8, 218, 371, 205, 261, 268, 272, 273, 281–5,
379, 383 288–90, 292, 295, 402
peoplehood 12, 13, 100, 109, 110, 115 labour 8, 293
philosophies of integration 42, 366, 372, left 7, 25, 26, 48, 129, 233, 237, 238, 240,
377, 379 284, 311, 315, 333, 333, 357, 408
pluralism 157, 328, 335, 336, 338, 352, 354, left-liberal 260
358, 373, 401 liberal 16, 393, 405
Poland 102, 184, 195 mainstream 26, 129, 233, 236, 246, 269,
police 314, 315, 318, 341, 354, 355 272, 284, 285, 288, 292, 295
political action 3, 33, 222, 422 nationalist 119, 380, 393, 396, 397,
political agents of solidarity 2, 23–7; see also 399–401, 405, 406, 409
political parties: as agents of populist right 93, 154, 177, 285
solidarity; social democratic parties; radical right (RR) 39, 40, 127, 177, 222,
trade unions 239, 375, 376, 381
political association 67–8, 71 in favour of redistribution? 246–54
political citizenship 84, 89, 97, 98, 180 solidarity vs diversity in discourse 254–9
political community 2, 32, 35, 37, 68, 80–2, top five issues in manifestos since
85–7, 90, 91, 93–8, 102, 103, 107, 1980s 247–9
108, 110, 111, 127, 145, 155, 177–9, vote shares of in Western Europe 244
193, 194, 391, 401–3, 405, 413, 414 welfare agendas of 233–63
as political source of solidarity 15–23 right 42, 154, 255, 284, 333, 345, 357, 399
political construction of social right-liberal 260
solidarity 214–18 social democratic (SD) 7, 9, 23, 25, 39, 40,
political favouritism 314 76, 170, 215, 217, 218, 222, 223, 225,
political inclusion 334 233, 272, 292, 294, 295, 307, 343,
and contestation, importance of 349–52 370–2, 375, 377, 381, 383, 393
political institutions 2, 3, 15, 27, 32, 34, social liberal 370
39–41, 47, 61, 67, 80, 83, 95, 128, socialist 8, 233, 240, 284, 397, 399, 404, 406
203, 224, 290, 327, 338, 365, 368, political rights 10, 21, 29, 38, 95, 178–83,
372, 378, 379, 383, 389, 390, 400, 185–90, 192, 193, 201, 307, 331, 333,
413, 414, 420 357, 375, 405
as political source of l solidarity 27–32, political sociology 117
314–16 political sources of solidarity 2, 14–34, 44, 46
political integration 83, 84 citizenship and collective identities as, in
political participation 17, 21, 82, 86, 89, 157, EU 80–105
337, 338, 341 in diverse societies 1–49
political parties 7, 25, 27, 36, 37, 40, 47, 116, of social solidarity 201–25
117, 154, 187, 217, 223, 268, 272, political agents 23–7
292, 333, 337, 345, 351, 374, 390, political community 15–23
393, 396, 401, 405, 406, 407 public institutions and policies 27–32
as agents of solidarity 2, 3, 8, 13, 15, 23–7, reframing diversity–solidarity debate 32–4
32–4, 39, 40, 44, 49, 117, 119, 129, political theory of solidarity 34–6, 61–124
215, 234, 236, 237, 254, 259, 260 constructive 302–6
centre-left 293, 343 Politics of Social Solidarity (Baldwin,
centre-right 236, 262, 397 1990) 421
centrist 240, 255 populism 1, 14, 25, 26, 48, 83, 93, 103, 127,
Christian democrat 23, 145, 215, 217, 233, 130, 133, 145, 154, 177, 261, 285,
237, 239, 272, 292 344, 345, 350, 375, 376, 381, 404
communist 233, 238 populist right parties 93, 154, 177, 285
conservative 26, 235, 237, 239, 262, 270, Portugal 101, 195, 212, 213, 216, 331, 347
343, 375 positive rights 180, 186
and disagreement 116–19 postmaterialism 12, 46, 129
and elections 185, 240, 243 post-nationalism 16
far-right 333, 341, 345, 350, 405 post-racial social order 345–55
448 General Index
poverty 95, 158, 170, 185, 187, 203, 209, 210, top five issues in manifestos since
221, 225, 300, 341, 346, 406, 408 1980s 247–9
power resource theory 7, 8 vote shares of in Western Europe 244
prejudice 4, 69, 72, 96, 120, 188, 222 welfare agendas of 233–63
and trust 157–8, 162 rational interests and elite–mass gap 129–30
pressure of justifiability 43, 425 Rawlsian approaches 17, 20, 47, 389
pride 76, 77, 156, 159–69, 172, 173, reciprocity 11, 31, 63, 66, 72, 115, 157, 313,
203, 348 319, 320, 422–4, 426
as affective indicator 160 balanced vs generalized 77
national 21, 22, 37, 163, 167, 169, 364, 396 as basic template for human
primary good 306, 310 interaction 308–12
procedural justice 309 counterfactual, solidarity as 420–1
proportional representation (PR) 116, 217, vs solidarity 312–13
245, 260 test 306
pro-social behaviour 3, 155 redistribution 1, 4, 10, 11, 14, 21, 22, 27, 37,
prosperity 101, 219, 223, 257, 300, 312, 390 39, 45, 61, 66, 93, 94, 128, 131, 136,
Protestantism 120, 347 146, 153–8, 160–70, 181, 182, 195,
Prussia 369 201–13, 215–17, 220–5, 234–6, 240,
public attitudes on diversity and 241, 257, 259, 260, 262, 294, 295,
solidarity 36–8, 127–98 301, 317, 320, 327, 341, 390, 407,
public health care 305, 314, 318 421–4
public institutions and policies 86 and diversity 30
as political source of solidarity 27–32 national identity and support for 165
public opinion 18, 38, 40, 43, 44, 46, 275, 276, and trust and support for equal
285, 320, 334, 380, 390, 401, 414 rights 166
comparative study 177–98 over time, stability of support for 211
identities and attitudes among, Radical Right in favour of? 246–54
Belgium 398–400 support for
public schools 34, 318, 353 and disposable income inequality
public sphere 214, 328, 334, 335, 389, 391, 202, 213
400, 402, 412–14 and national identity 204
and mass media, Belgium 394–7 and power and orientation of trade
unions 216
Qatar 295 stability over time 211
quality of government (QoG) 41 and welfare chauvinism 220
and solidarity and diversity 300–20 –trust relationship 156
Quality of Government Institute, University of redistributive solidarity 4, 10, 11, 14, 20–3, 28,
Gothenburg 318 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, 41, 43, 45, 84, 92,
quasi equilibria 39, 214 96, 98, 128–30, 132, 134–48, 152–4,
empirical implications and 160, 161, 166, 167, 205–8, 210,
evidence 210–13 212–15, 217, 219, 221–3, 234, 246,
mechanisms behind 206–10 256, 259, 263, 327, 328, 332, 336,
of redistributive solidarity 206 353, 356, 391, 403, 406, 420
social solidarity as 205–6 in Belgium 406–9
Quebec 22, 37, 41, 81, 153, 159, 161, 163–9, index 139
171, 172, 328, 345, 347, 348, and multiculturalism 341–2
354, 408 and national identity 152, 164–5
Social Democratic agenda? 235–7
race relations 170 refugee(s) 5, 63, 81, 104, 145, 170, 177, 258,
racial diversity 152, 179, 219, 327, 355, 391 274, 279, 287, 290, 381, 382, 423
racial minorities 7, 339, 353 regional, local, and national citizenship
racial purity 343, 371 regimes 87–91
radical right (RR) parties 39, 40, 127, 177, relations and sources of solidarity (table) 90
222, 375, 376, 381 religious backgrounds 15, 352
in favour of redistribution? 246–54 religious diversity 4, 12, 13, 19, 92, 219, 316,
solidarity vs diversity in discourse 254–9 327, 401
General Index 449
‘reluctant inclusiveness’ 376 social cohesion 9, 12, 41, 42, 46, 48, 127,
residency renewals 29 133, 145, 153, 268, 269, 289, 317,
restrictive integration 285 327, 355, 358, 365, 367, 368, 377,
right-of-centre conservatives 343 379, 410
right-liberal parties 260 social conflict 5, 153, 330
right parties right 42, 154, 255, 284, 333, 345, social contract theory 120–1
357, 399; see also centre right; social democracy 8, 37, 49, 161, 164, 170, 219,
far-right; radical right (RR) parties; 364, 373
right-liberal parties social democratic (SD) parties 7, 9, 23, 25, 39,
rigid social boundaries 179 40, 76, 170, 215, 217, 218, 222, 223,
ROC (Rest of Canada) 153, 163, 164, 167, 225, 233, 272, 292, 294, 295, 307,
168, 171 343, 370–2, 375, 377, 381, 383, 393
Roman Catholicism 170 vote shares of in Western Europe 244
Roman Empire 101, 113 social diversity 238, 241, 378
Romania 284, 314 social engineering 344, 345
Rome 100, 113 social identity theory 155
Treaty of 83 social insurance 169, 207, 217–19, 225, 307,
Russia 102, 212, 213, 370, 371 315, 421, 422, 425; see also benefits;
welfare state
Saudi Arabia 295 social integration 24, 27, 368
Scandinavia 8, 250, 251, 253, 341, 364, social justice 6, 8, 16, 39, 43, 111, 131, 182,
367, 368 206, 214–17, 222, 224, 235, 250, 255,
Schengen area 102, 105 258, 259, 262, 302, 303, 305, 311,
Schleswig Holstein 318, 369 320, 327, 329, 413, 420–5
Scotland 32, 81, 397, 408 and solidarity and diversity 420–6
Second World War 132, 147, 180, 215, 233, social liberal parties 370
237, 328, 330, 347, 350, 355, 372, social membership 8, 9, 11, 22, 23, 31, 32, 48
373, 381, 406 social mobility 209
self-employed 40, 240 social policies 6, 61, 155, 216, 218, 255, 301,
self-interest 1, 3, 7, 36, 39, 41, 115, 121, 201, 302, 304, 306, 329, 332, 408, 409
202, 205–7, 308, 421, 422 social rights 8, 10, 21, 28, 38, 43, 177–83,
self-reliance 222 185–94, 201, 256, 333, 375, 376
Senegal 295 social science 2, 3, 20, 47, 156, 308, 312
sense of belonging 17, 19, 23, 31, 33, 36, 47, social security 170, 218, 219, 236, 240, 245,
82, 109, 115, 127, 131–3, 333, 389, 251, 255–9, 301, 406–8, 425
412, 413 Social Security Act (US, 1935) 218–19
sexism 273, 274 social solidarity v, 23, 26, 61, 62, 66, 69, 71–3,
shared identity 8, 12, 43, 73, 101, 155, 333, 75, 77, 81, 134, 147, 153, 235, 236,
338, 421–4 300–2, 304, 310, 314, 315, 319, 320,
of EU 100 333, 365, 367, 368, 374, 421
shared membership 9, 16, 33, 85, 111 political construction of 214–18
Sherif social experiment on solidarity and political institutions and social
(1950s) 72 trust 314–16
sickness insurance 99, 262, 310 political sources of 201–25
Sierra Leone 295 as quasi-equilibrium 205–6
Sikhs 354 in transnational world 219–24
Single European Act (1986) 101 what should it be about? 306–8
Single Market 236, 423 social spending 30, 208, 209, 221, 225, 310,
Slovak Republic 89, 195, 318 311, 314, 315, 336, 341
Slovenia 195 social trust 9, 42, 67, 208, 300, 301, 313–20,
small business owners 40 329, 355, 367, 368
social capital 71, 77, 155, 170, 182, 301, 313, how negative effect of diversity can be
336, 355 overcome 316–19
‘dark side of ’ 72 and political institutions and social
social citizenship 14, 84, 85, 94, 96, 180, 195, solidarity 314–16
207, 215, 217, 219 socialist organizations 235
450 General Index
socialist parties 8, 240, 284, 397, 399, 404, 406 how was it built? 7–10
societal-level solidarity 5 and identification
society-centred approach 365, 377, 379 among elites 142–3
to solidarity 9, 42 among general population 140–2, 144
or state-centred constructions of national identity theory 73–4
identity 367–9 inclusive 1, 3, 10, 11, 23–6, 32–4, 37, 40–2,
socio-cultural issues 39, 40, 234, 238, 239, 391, 425
259, 260 institutional theory 74–5
socio-economic integration 336, 356 institutionalized 422–3
soft power 352 instrumental benefits 66–7
solidaristic justice 309 interdependence theory 70–1
solidarity liberal vs consensus approach 16
absence of research into 5–6 liberal nationalist approach 19–20
agonistic conception of 44 as moral imperative 65–6
associational theory 71–2 motivational 423, 424
attitudinal nature of 5, 6 national see national solidarity
bounded see bounded solidarity national redistributive 134
challenges to 154 nationalist approach 18
civic see civic solidarity as phenomenon of subgroups 5
civic integration policies in tension and political action 3
with? 333–5 political sources see political sources of
confederal 99 solidarity
and conflict 327–58 political theory of 34–6, 61–124
consequences of multiculturalism politics of, in diverse society 38–43
for 335–42 public attitudes to 36–8, 127–98
constitutional patriotism approach 16–18 vs reciprocity 312–13
cosmopolitan 37, 133, 134, 137 redistributive see redistributive solidarity
as counterfactual reciprocity 420–1 reframing diversity–solidarity debate 32–4
critiques of relations and sources of (table) 90
antagonism towards outsiders 68 as set of attitudes and motivations 3
political association issues 67–8 social see social solidarity
de facto 421 society-centred approach to 9, 42
in decline? 10–14, 98 societal-level 5
diversity to blame? 12–14 sources 1, 61–77
definitions 3–6, 62–5 political
democracy without 107–23 citizenship and collective identities as,
democratic see democratic solidarity in EU 80–105
and diversity in diverse societies 1–49
in Canada and US 152–73 of social solidarity 201–25
in Denmark and Sweden 364–84 state-centred approach to 9, 42
and quality of government 300–20 sustainable institutional 422
and social justice 420–6 territorial 82, 95–8, 105
some cautions 329–30 three dimensions of (Belgium) 403–9
in diversity, in EU 81–4 transgenerational 91–5
vs diversity in RR discourse 254–9 two strategies 424–5
electoral politics of 233–63 welfare state as expression of national
empirical studies 20–3 solidarity 8
equilibria 212 why is it important/valuable? 7–10, 65–9
high 212 ‘with’ vs ‘among’ 62–4
low 212 Somalia 295
as eroding 11–12 South America 88
expanding circle theory 69–70 Southern European countries 184, 185, 261
federal 82, 90, 98–102 Spain 100, 101, 192, 195, 216, 329
generational relations of 82 Spanish Civil War 301
historical sources of 369–72 state-centred approach 9, 42, 365, 368,
horizontal 36, 91, 120 379, 391
General Index 451
or society-centred constructions of national transgenerational solidarity 91–5
identity 367–9 transnational justificatory community 43
to solidarity 9, 42 transnational world
statehood 108 social solidarity in 219–24
‘strains of commitment’ 1, 3, 4, 7, 269, 329 Treaty of Rome (1957) 83
strangers, inhabitants of political communities trust 9, 18, 27, 28, 30, 35, 41, 42, 48, 67, 70, 71,
as 107–11 73, 75, 77, 109, 115, 131, 155–8,
substantial justice 309 162–9, 182, 183, 194, 195, 203, 205,
Sudan 295 208, 300, 301, 307, 309, 311–20, 329,
support for redistribution 338, 341, 342, 354, 355, 358, 367,
and disposable income inequality 213 368, 377
and power and orientation of trade generalized 162
unions 216 interpersonal 163
stability over time 211 and national identity, and support for equal
and welfare chauvinism 220; see also rights, and support for
redistributive solidarity redistribution 166
supranational identities 133, 137, 147 and prejudice 157–8
sustainable institutional solidarity 422 –redistribution relationship 156
Sweden 9, 26, 42, 89, 93, 94, 104, 108, 195, social see social trust
207, 209, 213, 216, 217, 219, 244, Tunisia 295
249, 251, 252, 290, 314, 317, 319, Turkey 270, 283, 295
331, 332, 334, 336, 337, 340, 343–5, Turkmenistan 295
356, 358
diversity and solidarity in 364–84 Ukraine 102
‘Party of the Swedes’ (Svenskarnas parti) 372 unbounded humanitarianism 10, 43, 425
Social Democrats 8 unemployment 99, 188, 194, 236, 245, 257,
Sverigedemokraterna (SwD) 250 258, 261, 305, 315, 339, 406, 423
Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti benefits 131, 286, 409, 421
(SAP) 243 rates 188, 191, 192, 340
‘Sweden for the Swedes’ (Sverige åt United Arab Emirates 295
svenskarna) 372 United Kingdom v, 195, 239, 340, 345, 347
Switzerland 88, 89, 104, 105, 195, 245, 249–51, Brexit referendum on leaving EU v, 29, 104
254, 262, 274, 329, 336, 337, 394, 407 Labour Party 8
People’s Party 289 United States (US) v, 15, 21, 30, 37, 108, 122,
Sozialdemokratische Partei der Schweiz 163, 213, 301, 328, 329, 337, 338,
(SPS) 243 340, 341, 345–51, 354–6, 358
Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) 234 Bilingual Education Act (1968) 353
Syria 102, 295 Civil Rights Act (1964) 352
Congress 218
Tajikistan 295 Constitution 89
taxation 66, 99, 341 14th Amendment 89, 331
territorial solidarity 82, 95–8, 105 diversity and solidarity in 152–73
terrorism 333, 336, 358 English Language Acquisition Act (ELAA,
Third Reich 304 2001) 353
tolerance 4, 14, 21, 37, 38, 96, 177–86, Immigration and Nationality Act
188–95, 203, 268, 273, 313, 340, 358, (1965) 347
381, 420 No Child Left Behind Act 353
towards newcomers 179–84 Personal Responsibility and Work
country-level model of 192 Opportunity Reconciliation Act
cross-national distribution of 185 (1996, aka Welfare Reform
individual-level model of 190 Act) 353
and social rights aspirations 191 Republican Party 118–19
trade unions 7, 9, 23, 39, 44, 45, 76, 215–17, Voting Rights Act (1965) 353
223, 225, 237, 238 ‘unity in diversity’ 82, 101
power and orientation of, and general universal programmes 207, 221, 315, 316,
support for redistribution 216 320, 368
452 General Index
universal suffrage 179 expansion 240, 250, 251, 253, 259, 262
us versus them 40, 159, 275 salience of in RR and SD parties’
Uzbekistan 295 manifestos 252
issues 235, 239, 240, 241, 243, 245, 251,
visa-friendly passports 134 254, 258, 260
voluntary associations 314, 318, 319 party position on left–right index
voluntary naturalization 87 of 253
vote shares of RR and SD parties in Western policy 241, 259
Europe 244 preferences of FN 256–7
voting 117, 262, 289, 332, 353, 357, 394, 405, 407 redistribution 153, 181, 197
behaviour 280, 282, 292 expansion 182, 183, 234, 237, 240, 241,
and issue salience in party 245–52, 254, 255, 259, 260, 263
competition 235–42 as expression of national solidarity 8
rates 48 as territorial solidarity machine 45
rights 48, 88, 89, 94, 99, 104, 105, 118, and immigrants 28
403, 405 immigration as threat to Austrian and
French 259
Wallonia 42, 391, 397–9, 401, 402, 404–6, and multiculturalism v
409, 411, 412, 414 saving the strained, in Austria 258
Walloons 42, 406, 411, 414 Western Europe 40, 104, 202, 233, 234,
we-feeling 154 238, 245, 251, 261, 317, 347
we-thinking 45 vote shares of RR and SD parties in 244
welfare agendas of radical right see also benefits
parties 233–63 women 4, 7, 13, 25, 117, 188, 238, 257, 263,
welfare state v, 1, 2, 7–11, 13–15, 27, 30, 32, 336, 346
33, 39, 42, 61, 62, 66, 74, 76, 93, 114, working-class 39, 45, 262
131, 147, 152–4, 157, 168–70, 173, and left authoritarianism 237–9
181–3, 191, 194, 206–8, 215, 218, voters 39
225, 233–8, 243, 245–55, 257–63, working conditions 99
300, 301, 311, 315, 317, 319, 329, World Trade Center attacks, 9/11 273
335, 340–2, 344, 345, 356, 364–9, World Value Survey (WVS, 2006) 128, 138,
371–3, 377–9, 383, 422 307, 319
benefits 235–7, 241, 242, 254, 261, 263,
284, 353 xenophobia 4, 22, 40, 381
chauvinism 11, 13, 14, 28, 31, 39, 40, 153, 155, and immigration policies in
160–5, 169, 172, 177, 178, 189, 194, Netherlands 268–96
219–22, 225, 240, 241, 254, 353, 367
and support for redistribution 220 Yemen 295

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THE STRAINS OF COMMITMENT

appreciate the willingness of Virginie Guiraudon, Sheri Berman, and Elizabeth

1. Introduction: The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies 1

Part I: The Political Theory of Solidarity

Part II: Public Attitudes on Diversity and Solidarity

Part III: The Politics of Diversity and Solidarity

10. Making Xenophobia Matter: The Consequences of the 2002

Index of Names 427

5.1 Elite–mass gap on civic and redistributive solidarity 138

3.1 Relations and sources of solidarity 90

Patrick Loobuyck is a Professor in the Pieter Gillis Centre for Pluralistic

Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka

Building and sustaining solidarity is an enduring challenge in all liberal-

1 .1 WHAT I S S OL I DARITY, WHY IS I T

must at times be motivated by attitudes of mutual concern and mutual

In short, ‘much of contemporary social theory has tried to make solidarity

Why is solidarity important? As noted earlier, our assumption is that

1.2 IS S OLIDARITY IN D ECLINE AND IS

There is a widespread perception, both in public debate and academic writing,

eroding solidarity in favour of egoism or apathy.20 These concerns were revived

pre-existing matrix of collective identities, political opportunity structures,

1.3 WHAT ARE THE POLITICAL S OURCES

1.3.1 Political Community

in the process, we come to have a stronger sense of identiﬁcation with our

liberation or national self-determination or national advancement. In these cases,

Liberal nationalism: Is there another option? Some theorists, known as liberal

Empirical studies: These different models of political community have been

country, having ancestors in the country, and being Christian). However,

1.3.2 Political Agents

As we have seen, historic forms of solidarity have become embedded in

However, it is far from clear that mobilization by new social movements

sentiment and have excluded newcomers from important social beneﬁts

immigrant community tends to become a growing component of the elector-

1.3.3 Public Institutions and Policies

and effectiveness in the actual administration of government programmes

stronger multiculturalism policies have also tended to adopt a more voluntary,

multiculturalism in Canada has always been seen, by both immigrants and

1.3.4 Reframing the Diversity-Solidarity Debate

So this returns us to our initial motivating question: What types of political

Several implications stand out. First, political theorists have established

narratives, when it is reinforced on a recurring basis by political agents, and—

1.4 OUTLINE OF VOLUME

1.4.1 The Political Theory of Solidarity

If Miller wants to defend national solidarity, and if Bauböck wants to extend

1.4.2 Public Attitudes to Solidarity and Diversity

1.4.3 The Politics of Solidarity in Diverse Society

The chapters in Part II provide important evidence about the distribution of

of the volume is that strategic self-interested behaviour is not sufﬁcient to

reforms have over time become politically institutionalized and socially

conceptions of nationhood. The sense of pan-Belgian nationhood, while still

1.4.4 Concluding Commentary

Solidarity and Its Sources

proposing. Some of the contributors to this book do precisely this. In their

demonstrations, lobbying the British government, offering practical aid to

cases—solidarity among co-religionists—shared values will be an important

2.3 WHY IS SOLIDARITY VALUABLE?

Further instrumental beneﬁts of solidarity can be seen by considering its

takes a political form—subscription to a set of constitutional principles, for

and pursuit of its interests destroyed any chances of a wider solidarity.

in a sense reasonable initially to conﬁne solidarity to our immediate circle, we

under-employment of labour, do not occur. Durkheim’s assumption was that

This illustrates the associational theory’s implicit claim to offer a general

intergroup antagonisms did not disappear in one stroke. At ﬁrst, cooperative