Nation and migration: how citizens in Europe are coping with xenophobia

ENOur first research question concerned testing the validity of Szűcs’s theory in our times, specifically at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Our data makes it clear that the differentiation of the three regions has shortcomings and missing parts and it requires more precision. In our book we have maintained the type of logic employed by Szűcs and constructed a regional typology that pays more attention to differences in modernization. Within the Western European region, we distinguished between the core countries of the region and the countries of Scandinavia. It seemed prudent to differentiate European countries off the continental mainland, including the United Kingdom and Ireland. We treated the countries of southern Europe as a fourth region, which was something Szűcs did not take into consideration. The fifth region is the classic area of Central Europe. And finally, the Eastern pole was represented by Russia and Turkey. [...] Our second research question is closely related to the set of problems brought up by the first. Based on our results we can state that the original form of the cultural nation versus civic nation dichotomy has lost its relevance. On the other hand, we feel that among the six regions there are two (Central Europe and Eastern Europe) in which the political nation has undoubtedly been established, but where the foundation of the political nation concept is derived from the cultural nation definition expressed in an exclusive manner. The cultural nation component legitimates the political nation, which as such becomes “liquid.” The focal point of the nation state is not the legally protected citizen, but instead belongs to the national community, which is much less legally tangible. A poor compromise between political and cultural approaches to the nation is well illustrated in Hungary’s new Basic Law of 2011, which replaced the regime change constitution.Similar tendencies are seen in Poland, Ukraine and Romania. In contrast, the other four regions have seen the political nation maintain its earlier solid contours, allowing for cultural nation interpretations to enter national discourse, competing with the challenges posed by efforts to have historical or new national-ethnic cultural identities prevail. Our third research question concerned the integration of new minorities arising from migration. We identified four strategies, each of which is empirically possible: assimilation, integration, segregation and transnational migration. The prevalence of these depends on the given national history, modernization patterns and the cultural characteristics of minorities. As such, the appearance of the four strategies across countries was very divergent. We saw that each of these strategies is possible, but in terms of the future, it is transnational migration that appears to be the most promising, given a capability of maintaining an original identity while connecting to an overarching identity. The risk of this strategy is that it will come into conflict with the ruling majority’s national identity. Transnationalism is the polar opposite of segregation, in which neither the majority nor the minority can come out on top. Assimilation is a possible solution, but it requires significant self-sacrifice on the part of immigrants. Integration is a working consensus of coexistence, which requires continuous maintenance and mindfulness on the part of both the majority and all minority groups.The volume’s fourth and most important research question was the state of European identity in the various regions. It appears that psychological-cultural considerations were a low priority in the gradual construction of the European Union vis-a-vis the infrastructural construction of economic, political and legal unity. The founders may have thought, paraphrasing Marx, that “European existence” would create “European consciousness.” Based on our data, it is clear that this has not been the case or has only been carried out to a very limited degree. Regarding spontaneous identification, we found that its psychological attraction is lowest in all European countries, and European self-identification is particularly weak in the United Kingdom, Russia and Turkey. But in all member states we see that compared to local, regional and national identities, European identity is always weakest. The proportion of those skeptical of the EU in 2013, with the exception of the United Kingdom, did not exceed one-quarter of the population anywhere. Measured Euroscepticism was lowest among EU core member states. This attitude was most prevalent in the societies of the recently acceded Eastern European states, where they were just a hair shy of one-quarter of respondents. This is interesting because these countries have been receiving an unprecedented level of resources from the EU through structural cohesion and agricultural funds. [...].