Ethnonational Parties & Political Change: The Belgian & British Experience

The apparent stability of European nations, formed over centuries through force or as a result of the logic of necessity, has proved deceptive in the latter part of the twentieth century. Nationalistic emotions of ancient ethnic groups are progressively asserting themselves against the demands of politico-economic reason. Rudolph examines the impact of the increasingly powerful ethnonational parties in Britain and Belgium upon structural political change in a multinational context with regionally delineated ethnic cleavages. The value of his analysis goes well beyond the British and the Belgian case. It sheds light also on the general problems of the ethnic factor as an instrument for party-building, its impact on political organization, and the difficulty of accommodating mobilized ethnonational sentiment in multinational states.