The Return of the Native - Can Liberalism Safeguard Us Against Nativism?

In The Return of the Native, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Josip Kesic explore how nativist logics have infiltrated liberal settings and discourses, primarily in the Netherlands as well as other countries with strong liberal traditions like the US and France. They deconstruct and explain the underlying logic of nativist narratives and show how these narratives are emerging in the discourses of secularism, racism, populism, and left-wing politics. By moving systematically through these key iterations of nativism, Duyvendak and Kesic show how liberal ideas themselves are becoming tools for claiming that some people do not belong to the nation.