ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 will discuss how nationalist ideology and national identity was mobilised and identified by some of the same participants as they tried to interpret, explain and solve difficult personal experiences and relate them to a broader terrain of action. It is demonstrated that most of the arguments on which their nationalist (and often racist) politics were based – particularly with regard to immigration – stem from misperceptions framed and fuelled by nationalist ideology. An implication of this and the previous chapter is that the concerns of the ‘overlooked’ (or ‘left behind’, ‘left out’, and so on) relate above all to class, socioeconomic hierarchies, and nationalist, political interpretations of these, more than they do to any sense of ‘cultural threat’ or ‘threatened national identities’.
