Nation and Migration

Nation and Migration provides a way to understand recent migration events in Europe that have attracted the world's attention. The emergence of the nations in the West promised homogenization, but instead the imagined national communities have everywhere become places of heterogeneity, and modern nation states have been haunted by the specter of minorities. This study analyses experiences relating to migration in 23 European countries. It is based on data from the International Social Survey Programme, a global cross-national collaborative exercise, with surveys made in 1995, 2003, and 2013. In the authors' view, a critical test for Europe will be its ability to find adequate responses to the challenges of globalization.

The book provides a detailed overview of how citizens in Europe are coping with a xenophobia fueled by their own sense of insecurity. The authors reconstruct the competing sociological reactions to migration in the forms of integration, assimilation and segregation. Hungary receives special attention: the data show that people living there are far less closed and xenophobic than they might seem through the prism of a media-instigated moral panic.

György Csepeli is professor emeritus of social psychology, head of the Interdisciplinary Social Research Doctoral Program at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His research areas cover the social psychology of intergroup relations including national identity in a comparative perspective, anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsy feelings. At present he is senior research fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Koszeg (iASK).

Antal Örkény is professor of sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Eötvös Lóránd University of Budapest. He is the director of the Institute for Social Relations; from 2011 he is heading the Post Graduate (PhD) Program in social sciences at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and is a visiting Professor at Central European University, Budapest. As civic engagement, he is the president of the Menedék – Hungarian Association for Migrants.