In all its chaos, divisiveness, and uncertainty, Brexit has not only raised considerable constitutional questions for the UK but has also led to the EU reflecting on itself, its direction, and how it comprehends and defines its existence both internally and on the global platform. One branch of speculative discussion on what a post-Brexit EU will look like is consideration of the role that the English language will play in the EU's institutions once the EU loses the member state that houses the demos with whom that language is associated. While much of this discussion has necessarily focused on whether a different language could become the unofficial lingua franca of the EU institutions in terms of the practicalities of its day-to-day workings, the future role and use of the English language as a democratic legitimacy tool has barely been remarked upon.

As such, a simple reframing of the component parts of democratic legitimacy (well, as simple as one could hope when attempting to deconstruct and reconstruct the tenets of democratic legitimacy) by means of considering whether the removal of the English language's associated demos could allow for language as a tool to be moved from the social legitimacy forum into the realm of formal legitimacy. And if so, whether this change in the role of the English language could provide the instigating spark for the eventual creation of a European demos, forged on alternative criteria to that constructed out of ideas centered on the post-nation state. Instead, the new European demos would be conceptualized within newly constructed frameworks that are more relevant and appropriate for its post-national (and multilingual) platform.

Social and formal legitimacy

Democratic legitimacy is widely accepted to encompass two distinct component categories: one formal and one social. Formal legitimacy corresponds to legality and thus concerns the democratic institutions and processes of law making within the EU, whereas social legitimacy does not take procedures into account, but rather refers to a broad social acceptance of the system. Consideration of what “social acceptance of the system” means in the EU context has necessarily focused on consideration of how to generate a European people; a single European demos.

To better envisage what European studies entails as a field of inquiry, it is useful to delve into the history of area studies and more generally into the ways in which interdisciplinarity has been advocated for and practiced. Buzzword? Field in its own right? Practice? Method? Genre? Discourse? Institutional framework? Subdiscipline? Ideology? Paradigm? Metaphor? Often considered an elusive and undertheorized pedagogy until a few decades ago, today interdisciplinarity has come to feature at the forefront of scholarly endeavors as grantors have increasingly encouraged collaborative projects. Many “area studies” emerged in the post-World War II era, but did not gather full momentum until the 1960s and 1970s when researchers started looking for alternative structures to organize knowledge and knowledge production to create participatory spaces of increased diversity within the university, with a focus on developing social capital as well as bridging the university with society.

To understand the draw toward interdisciplinarity, the latter must be replaced in the context of the compartmentalizing of the academe and disciplinary epistemological commitments that had existed for centuries. An examination of interdisciplinarity also brings the challenging responsibility of defining it. Theorists generally agree about what it is not. Rather than “pluri” or “multi” disciplinarity, which signifies a juxtaposition of the disciplines, “inter” disciplinarity developed into a critical tool to investigate scholarly expertise and offer new knowledge brought about through encounters between various disciplines. The disciplines have emerged over centuries, producing their specific methodologies, objects of studies, scopes, analytical lenses, and values. Likewise, interdisciplinarity produces specific types of knowledge, methods, and scholarly cultures, yielding collaborative networks and communities of practice that rely on social over economic capital. “Studies” can defragment the university, debalkanize departments, and are unbounded, offering needed alternative models and structures to solve complex contemporary problems.

European studies, as a discipline, developed out of the ruins of Western civilization. In the protests of the late 1960s, Western civilization courses largely fell out of fashion because of their often-explicit Eurocentrism – there was a whole world outside of Europe that had largely been ignored.

Launching the Bologna Process in 1999 was a significant moment or achievement for Europe that continues to impact the present and future of the EU, and beyond, including 48 total participating countries. When this momentum jump-started on 19 June 1999 in the medieval university city in Italy, it was a year after the Sorbonne Declaration meeting of France, Germany, Italy, and the UK's ministers of education in Paris on 25 May 1998. At the time, there were 15 members of the EU, and the Cold War had been over for nearly a decade. A driving purpose of the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) was to complement the economic opportunity provided by the EU single market, as the EU would expand to the east in the next two decades. By providing a harmonized structure for academic degrees, quality assurance, and a framework for recognition of qualifications, the creation of an EHEA facilitates the mobility of graduates and researchers across the region of Europe.

This chapter sketches the historical evolution of higher education policy in Europe since the origins of integration in forming the EU following World War II. An assessment of higher education policy in Europe through the years provides a launching point from which to analyze the political and economic dimensions in the global governance of knowledge as well as the soft power influence of this initiative. Despite the differences in their economic, political, and social circumstances, the 28 countries in the EU and the 20 additional countries that have become participating members of the EHEA share educational values inherent in the Bologna Process. Each country must adopt the European Cultural Convention, which was ratified by the Council of Europe in 1954, to accede to the Bologna Process. The internalization of policies has led to new institutional frameworks, at the national and regional levels of higher education. Since the EHEA, created by the Bologna Process, is the largest regional integration scheme for higher education in the world, there are lessons to apply to higher education coordination efforts in other regions of the world.

T. H. White (2015) wrote The Once and Future King during the Second World War. It is a story of King Arthur and the knights of the round table in five volumes and with two endings. The first ending comes at the close of the fourth volume. Arthur prepares to go to battle with Mordred with the help of a page boy, named Thomas. In a moment of reflection, Arthur tells his page to leave the battlefield. Thomas’ mission is more important than combat. It is to carry the idea that nations should use their might for justice and not for conquest. He knights Thomas – Sir Thomas Mallory – and sends him away to ensure that the dream of Camelot remains alive. When the collection was first published in 1958, only four volumes were included and so this ending was definitive.

The revised collection, published in 1977, added that fifth volume back in and so included the second ending, in which Arthur agrees a truce with Mordred to divide up the kingdom between them. The decision is difficult for Arthur, but he accepts compromise as better than endless warfare. He meets with Mordred on the battlefield to finalize the new arrangement. Before the deal can be done, however, an accidental movement by one of the soldiers reignites the conflict. Both Arthur and Mordred are slaughtered in the ensuing violence.

White wrote his collection as an argument against war and in favor of peace. He also wrote it as a statement on the human condition. Camelot falters not because the idea of justice is unworthy or impractical, but because it is governed by people; even great people – people of legend – make mistakes of judgement and action. The lesson is that we should keep the ideal alive but also that we should prepare for misunderstanding. At its finest, European studies embraces this obligation, promoting an ideal of Europe as a civilizational power or normative superpower, but accepting that Europeans are human and so pushing back against their great potential for violence and misunderstanding.

The last century of European history follows a pattern very close to White's story of Camelot (Jones & Menon 2019).

By most accounts Europe has had a difficult twenty-first century. Those who were of academic age in the 1990s can remember a vision of Europe marked by confidence in the future. The end of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, and the relaunch of European integration offered the promise of unity and harmony in the new century that had eluded the continent in the previous one. Instead of history reaching its end, as some predicted, the past two decades have borne witness to a Europe locked in seemingly perpetual crisis. Observers tasked with selecting a single “biggest” issue facing the continent have a long list from which to choose: the slowing of economic growth, sovereign debt default, immigration, refugees, Russia and Ukraine, the fragmentation of national electoral politics and the rise of populism, a decaying transatlantic relationship, and Brexit, not to mention longer-term challenges such as climate and demographic change, could all qualify.

The biggest issue facing Europe today, however, is not economic, institutional, strategic, or environmental, but lies in the differences among Europeans regarding the purpose and meaning of the nation and the nature of their identification with the national community. Conceptions of the nation serve as the lenses through which leaders and publics interpret their interests, understand problems, and conceive of solutions. These “national” differences exist both within and across countries in Europe, straining politics and constraining policy at the domestic level and thwarting cooperation and joint decision-making at the European level. The net effect is government at both levels that frequently fails to address many of its most pressing problems and finds itself locked in a cycle in which perceived political incapacity feeds public discontent, which itself leads to a hardening of the different perspectives.

Varying visions of the nation in Europe are not new, but what has changed in the past few decades are conditions both within and outside the nation. The acceleration of interconnectedness brought forth by economic interdependence and free movement across borders, and the adoption of neoliberal economic policies, which tend to create winners and losers and lessen social protections, have dramatically elevated the salience of national differences and the challenge they pose for Europe.

It is not easy to be a Europhile these days. During the early 2000s, all EU member states agreed to set up a European Convention tasked with drafting an EU Constitutional Treaty. That bold idea drew direct inspiration from the 1787 Philadelphia Convention in America. Back then, the EU was widely touted as the next superpower. The books that were written about the EU back then had ringing titles like The European Dream and The United States of Europe. Almost two decades later, it is hard to find anyone taking those ideas seriously. Instead, the EU finds itself in a period of deep introspection, still coming to terms with the fallout of its perfect storm. Multiple overlapping crises – over the euro, immigration, Russian bellicosity, democratic backsliding, Brexit, and how to deal with Donald Trump's America – have made for dire predictions. The books being published and sold these days have titles like The End of Europe and The Strange Death of Europe.

Much of the current pessimism is unwarranted, even though the EU's problems are real. While the end is not nigh for Europe, it is undeniable that Euroskepticism is on the rise, and not just on the political fringes. Over the past decade, what the EU does and how it affects citizens’ everyday lives has become fiercely politicized across the political spectrum. Euroskepticism has made significant inroads into traditional Christian and social democratic parties. With the exception of Germany, where both centrist Volksparteien, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) remain firmly wedded to the European project in its current form, most other EU member states have seen Euroskepticism creep into their political mainstream. Many center-left parties question the EU's orthodox approach to economic policy and excessive focus on market openness and free competition. Center-right parties are deeply uncomfortable with the EU's more progressive stance on questions of migration and identity.

Longstanding patterns of political party competition in much of Europe have been upended by new and old populist movements on both left and right, while centrist forces have struggled to stay in power. The multiple crises of European integration have transformed the reigning elite consensus over EU affairs into skepticism or outright opposition.

The past decade has not seen much celebration of the EU's achievements. EU headlines have been captured by crises in eurozone debt and austerity, in-fighting over migration, Eastern European proto-despotism, and the demagogic circus of Brexit. Even the core EU project to erase barriers to exchange and mobility – the famous “single market” – is perceived as faltering. “In parts it is incomplete and in others actively going backwards”, complained The Economist in September 2019. In their view it falls well short of its aspirations to “a single economic zone much like America, with nothing to impede the free movement of goods, services, people and capital”.

Some good news for Europe, however, is that this gloomy narrative is disconnected from certain aspects of reality on the ground. That is not to say that the headlines get it all wrong, of course. Europe's crises have been severe. Moreover, North–South economic divergences, contestation around free circulation of people, democratic struggles in Eastern Europe, and English nationalism are not going away soon. Also true is that the single market is incomplete in many areas and hitting obstacles in others (without mentioning other gaps in EU economic governance). The crucial correction, though, concerns a clear-eyed assessment of what the EU has done relative to what it concretely set out to do. On its core ambitions it has achieved far more than even most experts seem to recognize.

The concrete goal to which Europeans committed in the 1950s was to change their laws, regulations, and administrative processes to encourage free movement and exchange across national jurisdictions. In the 1980s they reconfirmed and deepened that commitment. Over time they also gradually extended border-opening goals across an increasingly large and diverse group of member states. What today's main narrative overlooks – and even The Economist, usually well-informed, gets wrong – is that the EU's single market has gone well past the United States in removing interstate barriers. It has also done so across far more diverse and powerful states than the US government ever faced.

This is a truly extraordinary achievement. Characterizing it accurately alters our sense of the EU's present and future. The EU attracts so many challenges today mainly because its core project has gone so far, not because it is weak and incomplete.

European studies in the next 50 years will see humanities and social studies scholars working with colleagues in professional schools to bring more Bologna Process reforms to Africa. Africa has already adapted the Bologna-style bachelor’s, master's and doctoral degrees. Reforms of Francophone Africa's grandes ecoles in business and engineering have added doctoral and bachelor's programs to the traditional master's degrees, and they are expanding to continuing education, online degree programs, and English-only programs and tracks. The future of European studies in Africa will expand applied research and applied teaching, learning, and assessment with African partners. Faculty and students interested in European international business, health care, sustainable development, and peacebuilding will engage in public–private partnerships where Africa serves as a laboratory. Making Africa a more prosperous, healthier, and stable continent will also help to reduce migration and improve social justice in Europe.

Bringing the Bologna Process to Africa

As an expert on France, I summarized French successes and challenges in developing the Bologna Process in higher education in earlier publications. French Presidents François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron successfully expanded interdisciplinary master's degrees delivered in more than one language. They launched online education initiatives and encouraged public–private partnerships. The greatest challenge was the inability to serve all qualified students seeking university admission. A cumbersome centralized system for faculty recruitment still poses obstacles to allowing competitive international salaries. A centralized Ministry of Higher Education awards tenure (titularization) and approves endowed chairs.

Francophone Africa admits an even lower percentage of qualified students, and recruiting and retaining faculty stars are beyond reach. Europe's goal to climb university rankings resulted in new centers of excellence, in funding reforms that create tiers of institutions based on mission, and new funding sources to support the highest levels of international research. My work in Francophone Africa, where higher education follows a French model, encountered even greater obstacles to building a strong and independent university system. In the future, European studies scholars with the right political, linguistic, and intercultural expertise will have opportunities to transform African higher education using models that worked in Europe.

If we follow the Humboldtian ideal, then teaching should derive from research. Our chapter argues that one of the reasons that Europe and the EU are hard to communicate to students is that we have a violation of this Humboldtian ideal. We have a mismatch between teaching and research in European studies, especially as concerns the role of culture. We take the notion of culture as our starting point, because it is a “softer” notion than, for example, economic or political institutions. While there are ample debates about the working of European economic or political institutions, at least for the most part, scholars agree on their basic properties. Not so with culture. Culture is an interdisciplinary topic that attracts many students to European studies programs, but it is even harder to pinpoint and research than economic or political institutions. Culture has long been understood as a difficult phenomenon. Some scholars understand culture to be made, claimed for political reasons, changing, and hybridized. Others consider it as fixed, or at least as a common basis for actions, motivation, and communication.

We argue that in European studies teaching, culture is often used to denote commonalities among European societies. Many master's programs emphasize (and advertise) that they teach a “common European culture”. European studies scholarship, however, often emphasizes and researches variation between different national cultures. Our chapter explores this phenomenon and offers advice on how to deal with the paradoxical mismatch between teaching and research.

Teaching: one European culture, source of unity

Many European studies programs have the idea of one European culture in their title or in their teaching program. A quick browsing of the relevant websites is instructive: The Ruhr-Universität Bochum offers the Master's in European Culture and Economy that sees Europe “as a cultural space”. Similarly, the Master's of European Culture at Kent University “makes it possible to study the history, literature, and political philosophies of the continent” and has modules like “The Idea of Europe”. The Master's in Cultural History of Modern Europe at Utrecht University conceptualizes European history as one shared cultural history. The Erasmus mundus Master's in European Literary Cultures at Bologna has a unit called “European History and Civilization” and one of the program's main educational goals is that a graduate “know[s] the history and culture of Europe in order to contextualize the literary production in the broader context of European cultural history”.

Questions about Europe's future are best answered by making reference to three key trends: the increasing pressures from the international system that challenge Europe to adjust in the economic and defense realms; the domestic preferences of Europe's most powerful countries in determining how to respond; and the continued use of non-EU institutions by powerful member states to solve deadlocks in the European Council and Parliament. These three trends have become increasingly visible over the last decade of EU politics, and add to it developments of the broader international system based on the domestic ambitions and priorities of China, the United States, Russia, and the UK as the key challengers of European interests, and the countries that are bound to put the EU under the greatest strain.

This chapter explores Europe's response to these developments through principles of realist institutionalism (rather than standard integration theory). Realist institutionalism has three premises: that great powers are interested in upholding interdependence; that they pay attention to distributive gains in the institutions that provide this; and that they select, abandon, reshape, create, and nest institutions as required to secure those gains, in ways that cost the least (borrowing from historical institutionalism). Unlike classic EU integration theory, non-EU institutions are an expected outcome when there are strong threats to European interdependence, when distributive outcomes of a Council compromise would threaten a powerful country's interests (in the narrow, unenlightened sense), and when they ensure strong control over future choices.

Given the challenges it must face, the EU will continue to develop institutionally, becoming more important. But it will do so in the context of other institutions outside the EU that are led by Germany for the eurozone and by France for European defense. Such institutions provide elements of government rather than governance that the EU cannot, given the diversity of domestic political preferences across EU member states.

External pressures on Europe

Europe lives and evolves in a world that is becoming increasingly realist. That world will continue to challenge the EU and its member states to grow as a community. The United States, China, the UK, and Russia have a considerable impact on the pressures that Europe faces in order to develop.

The CES shares its golden anniversary with the Werner Report, a major milestone on the road to EMU. Although it was not the first high-level study on this subject, the Werner Report was the first to be taken up by member states, which set 1980 as a target date for the irrevocable fixing of exchange rates by current and aspiring members of the EC. This commitment was dropped amid the economic turmoil that followed the demise of the Bretton Woods System and the first oil shock. But the Werner Report's vision of what is needed to make EMU work has endured, more so, in some respects, than the Delors Report, which formed the blueprint for the euro's eventual launch in 1999.

Asymmetry

The Delors Report envisaged an asymmetric EMU. Monetary policy was placed under the control of a single decision-making body while economic policy remained in the hands of member states. The report implicitly rejected the link between EMU and political union, concluding that a Community with a single currency could “continue to consist of individual nations with differing economic, social, cultural and political characteristics … and autonomy in economic decision-making” (Committee for the Study of Economic and Monetary Union 1989: 17).

No mention was made in the Delors Report of a fiscal transfer mechanism. Preoccupied with the harmful effects of national economic policies on monetary policy and the Community's economic situation more generally, it instead proposed that macroeconomic policy be subject to binding procedures and rules. So was born the excessive deficit procedure (and later the Stability and Growth Pact), with its threat of financial penalties and fines against member states that posted excessive budget deficits and unsustainable public debt. A coordinated rather than a centralized approach to banking supervision was also proposed.

The Werner Report imagined a more symmetrical EMU in which monetary policy was delegated to a Community organ modeled on the United States Federal Reserve, while economic policy was subject to the control of a supranational Centre of Decision for Economic Policy. It saw political union not only as essential for the sustainability of EMU but an inevitable consequence of it.

Pessimism about democracy is pervasive. Freedom House's most recent survey of the state of democracy in the world is entitled “Democracy in Retreat”. Even in the West, where democracy has long been taken for granted, scholars and observers wonder whether it will survive assaults from within by populists and from without by resurgent authoritarianism. Reflecting these trends, scholarship and commentary is consumed by debate about illiberal democracy, global authoritarianism, and democratic backsliding. Summing up what has become a widespread view, Viktor Orbán, Hungary's current prime minister, recently proclaimed: “The era of liberal democracy is over.”

How can we understand the state of democracy in the world today? What makes liberal democracy work well in some places and times and not others? These are questions of the utmost theoretical and practical import. But as I found when writing Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day (Berman 2019), studying Europe is the perfect way to begin answering them. European history makes clear that much contemporary commentary on the state of democracy is implicitly based on mistaken assumptions about how political development unfolded in the past as well as a warped understanding of what it takes to make democracy work. If we do not study democracy's past, it is hard to fully understand its present.

Painful transition, difficult consolidation

An examination of European history reveals, for example, that quick, painless transitions to democracy are extremely rare. Europe's struggle for democracy began in 1789 with the French Revolution. During the next 150 years, many transitions to democracy occurred in France and other European countries. Most failed, many spectacularly and violently, as in Italy, Germany and Spain during the interwar period. Even the few European countries that had relatively peaceful paths to liberal democracy – Britain being the prime example – took an extremely long time to get there, from the 1688 Glorious Revolution until the extension of universal male suffrage in 1918. (The same could be said of the United States, by the way, which required an immensely bloody civil war and then another hundred years of struggle before it could be considered a full liberal democracy where all citizens had access to their political rights.)

The European project is built on the concepts of freedom, rule of law, and social justice. Over the course of almost 70 years, this project has transformed a continent that was shattered by World War II into one of peace, stability, and economic prosperity. Too often, however, the success of a shared economy has been seen as the key to European integration. On the contrary, economic progress has proven insufficient in the fostering of political unity and social cohesion across an increasingly heterogeneous continent. Indeed, using economic growth as a barometer of European success is misleading. Economic factors on their own fail to account for the values, customs, and understandings of identity within each participating country. It also fails to reveal how tightly these considerations are bound to a sense of belonging within local and national communities. Among many factors, national identity and religion play a key role in shaping people's sense of belonging and loyalty toward their community. Indeed, the interplay between national identity and religion may represent one of the greatest challenges to the European project.

Instrumental faith

The challenge arises from efforts to construct exclusive identities for political mobilization. A wide network of political actors, agents, and parties use religious symbols to advance a specific political and anti-European agenda. Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy's Northern League and former minister of the interior, is a case in point. His speeches often reference the cross and the rosary in an attempt to reassert the country's Catholic identity and legitimize his extreme approach to the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean.

Both Christian faith and Greek-Roman traditions have played important roles in the shaping of Europe's historical trajectory. Nevertheless, the separation of church and state remain key to the past, present, and future of European democracies. In criticizing Salvini's use of religious symbols, Antonio Spadaro, a priest who is also a close advisor to Pope Francis, made it clear that, “the cross is a sign of protest against sin, violence, injustice and death. It is NEVER a sign of identity” (Giuffrida 2018). In this statement, Spadaro warned against the peril that the use of religion for political purposes poses to modern societies.

One of the most controversial things that can be said about European countries is that they are “countries of migration.” Certainly, all countries today include some number of foreigners, but the term puts European states – historically deriving their national identities from soil, sacrifice, and traceable lines of heritage – into the same category as the settler states, like Australia or the United States, that they colonized and populated. And yet, Switzerland features among the world's highest shares of the foreign-born, France and Sweden have among the world's highest naturalization rates, and free movement is a cornerstone of the EU itself. This fundamental irony is now at the center of debates over the European future (Boucher & Gest 2018).

National states versus settler states

The tension arises from within the national state. On the one hand, how can the nations of Europe be reinstated when they never truly existed outside the imaginary? On the other hand, acknowledging that European states were never so homogenous, how can globalism be reconciled within the enduring power of nationalism? These are questions that also face the very settler states from which European leaders like to distinguish themselves. However, European governments negotiating transformative demographic change lack the organic advantages that come with having been “settled” as colonies and populated with immigrants.

Settler states crafted civic – rather than ethnocentric – identities that are more open to evolution (Gest 2016). Settler states embrace multicultural policies that recognize the value of diversity. Settler states cite previous generations of immigrants to endow confidence in their capacity to absorb future generations. In short, settler states acknowledge that they are “countries of migration”, which emboldens their citizens to understand immigration as a norm but also to see themselves to some extent in new generations of arrivals. Indeed, Americans treat the assimilation of immigrants with evangelical zeal, as if conversion brings some civic redemption.

Of course, these supposed advantages are mere constructs, institutionalized by settler state governments; they are not off limits to European leaders today. They are not pursued by Europeans simply because of the backlash they fear such moves may generate.

Europe today faces a succession of major challenges. Some of the most daunting of these relate to climate change and its attendant ecological, societal, and economic impacts; continued and rapid globalization that easily outstrips the pace of change within political and legal institutions; growing pressure on welfare systems in countries characterized by aging populations and aggressive tax avoidance by elites and major corporations; the economic, security, and legal implications of increased automation and artificial intelligence; rising economic inequality; and the growing geopolitical influence of regimes that show scant concern for the protection of human rights.

Selecting which among these challenges will be the most significant is almost certainly an impossible task, not least because of the complex feedback loops already evident between a number of these issues. What we can say is that for Europe to respond to these issues effectively, and without major damage to its social and political fabric or harm to its citizens, European societies must also address two further challenges.

Lack of trust

First, is Europe able to rebuild trust in its public institutions? While there are important national and subnational variations, trust in key political institutions is worryingly low across much of Europe. In a 2018 YouGov poll, across the EU only 42 per cent of those polled said they trusted the EU, and just 34 per cent said that they trusted their national government. Such low levels of trust undermine the effective functioning of governments and other public institutions and hinder public participation in formal political processes. It also favors the politics of polarization and conflict, creating discursive opportunities for political entrepreneurs to claim foul play whenever events don't work out quite as they hoped, or promised – a tactic deployed frequently, although certainly not uniquely, by a number of leading Euroskeptic voices and parties around Europe.

Perhaps more worrying still, distrust of public institutions corrodes the hegemonic position of democracy itself. While support for overtly authoritarian forms of government remains low across Europe, public satisfaction with democracy in some countries is astonishingly low.

Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville famously claimed America and Americans to be “exceptional”, comparisons between the United States and Europe have privileged differences over similarities. We have seen this in many scholarly fields, but the emphasis on differences is particularly noticeable in the field of migration studies. While immigration and diversity are burning issues on both sides of the Atlantic, the framing of the debate in the United States – at least until recently, and in contrast to many European countries – did not focus on the failure of ethnic and racial minorities to integrate into the native majority. Blacks in the United States are of course not postcolonial immigrants, but the descendants of slaves with histories in the country going back centuries. Many authors thus consider blacks in the United States as natives, as African-Americans.

But what about the rise of political nativism in the United States today? “The rapid growth of Mexican immigration and most especially undocumented immigration since the early 1990s has led to a growth in nativist rhetoric and punitive laws targeting both legal and illegal immigrants and even their children” (Waters 2014: 153). Is the new American nativism comparable to developments in Europe? How did nativism emerge in a country where immigration is so central to national identity, where nobody (except Native Americans) can claim proprietary rights based on historical rootedness?

Myths and ideologies

A common claim is that nativism as an ideology is more likely to flourish in Europe because of how countries construct and teach their national histories. Scholars here suggest that migration plays a limited role in the “origin myths” and “national identities” of European countries; while the history of immigration is mobilized as a core feature of American identity, European national myths hold that there are “true” Europeans who are geographically and historically rooted in the land. Alba and Foner (2015) suggest that it is much more challenging for European societies to include newcomers in the national “we”. North Americans, looking at West European anxieties about immigration – especially the cleavages between the European secular/Christian mainstream and Muslim immigrants and their children – often see confirmation of this idea.