Routledge Catholicism and Nationalism: Changing Nature of Party Politics (Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy)

This book addresses the adaptation of nationalism to the sharing of sovereignty with other nations in supranational arrangements beyond the state or with nations and nationalities within the state. It compares two cases, Poland and Spain, where the outcome of this processes of transformation differed: whereas in Spain a unified right wing partially reconciled Spain with the Catalonian, Basque and Galician nationalisms, in Poland the right wing was structured around two opposed conceptions of Polish nationalism and their relation to other nations. The book relates the transformation of nationalism in Poland and Spain, where the national and religious identity was closely interconnected, with the interaction between the Catholic Church and the political regimes in the second part of the 20th century. Catholicism and Nationalism argues that the decision of the Polish hierarchy to mobilize National Catholicism as a political identity in the early years of democracy had a lasting impact on the shape of the right wing and, ultimately, also on the consolidation of an introverted nationalism skeptical of European integration. Review "...the book taps into an under discussed, albeit relevant political phenomenon, and offers ground for a potentially fruitful avenue of research. The configuration of state nationalisms has many policy implications, and heavily influences the descisions that governments take in both foreign and internal policy areas. Therefore, understanding the confitions under which these nationalisms will take a more open or closed approach to their external relations seems a particularly pertinent research topic. Madalen Meyer-Resende's book is certainly a good point of depature for further explorations of the issue"-- Jordi Munoz, Autonomous University of Barcelona About the Author Madelena Resende  is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanistics, New University of Lisbon.