Despite Muslims comprising only one to eight percent of the population in various Western countries, their very presence has become one of the defining issues of the populist era, dividing left and right in stark fashion. Right-wing populist parties differ considerably on economic and social policy. But nearly every major right-wing populist party emphasizes cultural and religious objections to specifically Muslim immigration as well as to demographic increases in the proportion of Muslim citizens more generally.
It would be a mistake, however, to view the debate over Islam and Muslims as only that. The rise of anti-Muslim sentiment signals a deeper shift in the party system away from economic cleavages toward “cultural” ones. With this in mind, attitudes toward Muslims and Islam become a proxy of sorts through which Western democracies work out questions around culture, religion, identity, and nationalism.
Focusing on nine European countries and the United States, this project—The One Percent Problem: Muslims in the West and the Rise of the New Populists—will examine how the growth of Muslim minority communities and fears around Islam’s public role are shaping the formation of new “populist” identities and ideologies in Western democracies. This unique focus offers an important entry point to address increasingly salient questions around what it means to be a nation—and who constitutes its members—at a time when elections are increasingly fought around so-called “who we are” questions.
This project is led by Brookings Senior Fellow Shadi Hamid and Fellow Alina Polyakova along with Visiting Fellow Sharan Grewal, and is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. It will cover nine European cases—Germany, Austria, Italy, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, and Hungary—along with the United States, capturing a wide diversity of experiences and contexts.
No comments:
Post a Comment