ABSTRACT
Identity politics is a particularly relevant issue in contemporary Europe, with the current politicisation of immigration, the ‘problematisation’ of asylum seekers, the revival of regionalism, and the success of extreme right-wing political parties (Laffan 1996). The European context is also characterised by conflicting discourses of integration and regionalism; de Cillia, Reisigl, and Wodak (1999, p. 150) have noted that the propagation of the European identity has been accompanied by the (re)emergence of “seemingly old, fragmented and unstable national and ethnic identities”. The overt resistance generated within some countries during the first phase of negotiations for the admission of the secular Islamic state of Turkey to the European Union seems to illustrate this issue well. Such events not only highlight the complex inter-relationships between national identity, integration, and nationalism, but also feed post-9/11 debates about the desirability of multiculturalism. This has led, in some cases, to the politicisation of immigration and the stigmatisation of minority ethnic groups. Immigration has increasingly become a core political issue in Western Europe as countries begin to deal with the populations of immigrants, and their necessary integration into society. If immigration seems to have become increasingly politicised, it is also, Baldwin-Edwards and Schain (1994) argue, because of the agenda-setting power of many extreme right-wing parties across Western Europe who have managed to make immigration a central contemporary political issue.
