Brubaker, Between Nationalism and Civilizationism Page 1 of 51 Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European populist moment in Comparative Perspective 1 Rogers Brubaker Published in Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 8 (2017): 1191-1226 Abstract This paper argues that the national populisms of northern and western Europe form a distinctive cluster within the wider north Atlantic and pan-European populist conjuncture. They are distinctive in construing the opposition between self and other not in narrowly national but in broader civilizational terms. This partial shift from nationalism to “civilizationism” has been driven by the notion of a civilizational threat from Islam. This has given rise to a an identitarian “Christianism,” a secularist posture, a philosemitic stance, and an ostensibly liberal defense of gender equality, gay rights, and freedom of speech. The paper highlights the distinctiveness of this configuration by briefly comparing the national populisms of Northern and Western Europe to the Trump campaign and to the national populisms of East Central Europe. It concludes by specifying two ways in which the joining of identitarian Christianism with secularist and liberal rhetoric challenges prevailing understandings of European national populism. 1 The original impulse for this paper came from an invitation to participate in a panel on “Religion and the Politics of National Identity” at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Seattle, August 22, 2016. Later versions of what had become a very different paper were presented as the Edward Westermarck Lecture in Helsinki, November 24, 2016, and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, November 29, 2016. I thank the organizers of these events for the opportunity to present work-in-progress and the participants for their comments and questions; and I thank the Wissenschaftskolleg for the residential fellowship that allowed me to work on this paper in ideal circumstances. Thanks also to three ERS reviewers, and to Matías Fernández, Michael Lambek, Victoria Koroteyeva, Susan Ossman, and Claus Offe for their comments on earlier versions.