Dutch national identity in a majority-minority context: when the dominant group becomes a local minority

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Abstract
With increasing ethnic diversity in Western European cities, more and more inhabitants without a migration background find themselves a local minority in majority-minority neighbourhoods, where less than half of the inhabitants have no migration background. We investigate whether this affects how they define national identity. We compare Dutch inhabitants without a migration background in majority-minority neighbourhoods in Amsterdam and Rotterdam to a representative sample of the overall Dutch population without a migration background and investigate how people describe what they see as truly Dutch. We find that national identity content is seen in the same way by both groups. The majority views Dutch identity as mostly achievable but does attach some importance to ascriptive characteristics. A smaller class of people is more restrictive and attaches quite some importance to both ascriptive and achievable characteristics. The smallest class considers Dutch identity achievable and not ascriptive at all. All three national identity content classes involve drawing boundaries around the nation-state, but with different degrees of permeability. Our finding that these patterns are almost identical, both in majority-minority neighbourhoods as in the overall population, suggests an important role of national public discourse on national identity formation.

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