Who belongs to the ‘historic nation’? Fictive ethnicity and (il)liberal uses of religious heritage

Scholars in various academic disciplines have pointed out how national
religious heritage is increasingly appropriated by the far right, to construct a
false binary between secular Christian European states on the one hand, and
Islam on the other. This article contributes to this literature by examining
how these political developments, often deemed “illiberal”, are enabled by
“liberal” uses of religious heritage. Using the lens of what Étienne Balibar calls
“fictive ethnicity”, the article examines how both liberal and illiberal uses of
religious heritage in Western Europe construct a historic nation to which only
dominant groups can lay claim, which contributes to the symbolic and
material marginalisation of minorities. This has repercussions for analyses of
socio-political exclusion and for liberal nationalist theory: addressing
contemporary inequalities requires not only limiting explicitly exclusionary
forms of nationalism, but also actively unsettling the widespread ontology of
homogeneity underpinning national fictive ethnicities.