Nationalist parties and the transnational cleavage

European party politics has been realigning around a transnational dimension of competition that pits cosmopolitan parties — favouring immigration, European integration, and climate policy — against radical right parties that oppose these. Radical right parties are sometimes equated with nationalist parties. However, nationalism is highly diverse in Europe’s multinational democracies. Multinational democracies are characterised by a salient centre-periphery conflict, in which majority nationalist parties confront minority nationalists representing peripheral nations. While majority nationalists can be expected to converge on the particularist pole of the transnational cleavage, minority nationalists have strategic reasons to adopt more cosmopolitan stances: they need international allies and seek to differentiate themselves from majority nationalists, their main domestic opponents. The analysis draws on the 2023 edition of an expert survey designed to measure nationalist ideology separately from cultural values, and to differentiate majority from minority nationalism. Analysing 89 nationalist parties in 21 countries confirms that while majority nationalists position themselves on the particularist pole of the transnational cleavage, minority nationalists are more pro-European and more in favour of climate policy — but not more in favour of immigration — than majority nationalists. Interestingly, cosmopolitanism appears also among majority nationalists in smaller peripheral countries, like Bosnia and Herzegovina or Kosovo.