A Critical Theory of Ethno-nationalist Ideology in the Developed West: a Social and Psychoanalytic Approach

This book attempts to address the recent development of ethno nationalism in Western Europe and North America. It engages with Kleinian psychoanalytical concepts, balancing these with a broader socio-economic emphasis, to argue that a certain type of nationalism is becoming more prevalent. The book seeks to suggest, through an interpretation of political culture, that contemporary ethno nationalism is linked to the decline of a sense of the self. Contemporary service based economies tend to favour a lack of personal reality or connectedness to social traditions. Individuals gain emotional solace for this lack of selfhood in an insecure phantasy of total omnipotence and self creation. They deposit the all powerful part of themselves into an invincible racial body, and hence a more radical, atomised nationalism may become more rather than less prominent in the contemporary world.