The rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment that is fueling a surge in far-right political support across Europe can no longer be ignored as a fringe phenomenon peripheral to normal democratic politics or inclusive EU policies. Linda Cook's new book, Welfare Nationalism in Europe and Russia, offers a novel and comprehensive explanation that will be essential reading for understanding the deeper and systemic causes of anti-immigrant politics in Europe and Russia, as well the larger implications of debates over welfare benefits.

Rather than focusing only on identity politics or economic factors, Cook deftly documents how decades of cuts to welfare benefits and labor market stress drove vigorous debate about who should get what kinds of benefits. While many scholars have studied anti-immigrant public attitudes, racism, religious discrimination, and identity politics more generally, and while there is a wealth of work on welfare state politics and regimes, Welfare Nationalism builds on prior work to concretely link the debates about welfare policies with the evolution of migration policies, in order to demonstrate the systematic connections between welfare state retrenchment and the rise of anti-immigrant politics.

Although welfare policy is on the one hand an economic question, the question of “deservingness” inevitably brings u