Despite the recent proliferation of literature on nationalism and on social policy, relatively little has been written to analyse the possible interaction between the two. Scholars interested in social citizenship have indirectly dealt with the interaction between national identity and social programs such as the British NHS, but they have seldom examined this connection in reference to nationalism. Specialists of nationalism rarely mention social policy, focusing instead on language, culture, ethnicity, and religion. The main objective of this book is to explore the nature of the connection between nationalism and social policy from a comparative and historical perspective. At the theoretical level, this analysis will shed new light on a more general issue: the relationships between identity formation, territorial politics, and social policy.

Although this book refers to the experience of many different countries, the main cases are three multinational states, that is, states featuring strong nationalist movements: Canada (Québec), the United Kingdom (Scotland), and Belgium (Flanders). The book looks at the interplay between nationalism and social policy at both the state and sub-state levels through a detailed comparison between these three cases. In its concluding chapter, the book brings in cases of mono-national states (i.e. France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States) to provide broader comparative insight on the meshing of nationalism and social policy. The original theoretical framework for this research is built using insight from selected scholarship on nationalism and on the welfare state.

Daniel Béland est titulaire de la Chaire de recherche du Canada en politiques publiques à la Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (Université de la Saskatchewan). Détenteur d’un doctorat en sociologie politique de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), il a été chercheur invité à l’Université Harvard, à l’Université de Chicago et à l’Université George Washington, ainsi qu’au Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Ses travaux portent principalement sur les transformations de la protection sociale dans les sociétés contemporaines.

Daniel Béland's profile page

André Lecours est professeur titulaire à l’École d’études politiques de l’Université d’Ottawa. Il détient un doctorat en science politique de l’Université Carleton (2001). Il s’intéresse principalement au nationalisme, au fédéralisme et à la politique européenne et canadienne. Il est le coauteur (avec Daniel Béland) de Nationalism and Social Policy: The Politics of Territorial Solidarity, publié par l’Oxford University Press en 2008. Il est également l’auteur de Basque Nationalism and the Spanish State, publié par l’University of Nevada Press en 2007, et le directeur de New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis, publié par l’University of Toronto Press en 2005.

André Lecours' profile page