Testing the Relationship between Nationalism and Racism: Greek-Cypriot Students' National/Ethnic Identities and Attitudes to Ethnic Out-groups

This article builds on a growing body of research that shows an intrinsic but complex
relationship between the concepts and the ideologies of nationalism and racism. In
doing so, it investigates how different, meaningful national and ethnic in-group
identifications of a dominant national/ethnic group (Greek-Cypriots) within a given
national context (Cyprus) influence their perceptions of different, meaningful ethnic
and racial minority out-groups. Logistic regression analysis of quantitative survey data
with secondary school children (N = 738) in Cyprus shows that the relationship between
national/ethnic in-group identifications and out-group perceptions varies according to
the social and political relationships between particular national/ethnic in- and outgroups.
The findings show that future research on the relationship between nationalism
and racism should consider the overlap between and context specific nature of national
and ethnic in-group identification processes and the historical, political relationships
between different in- and out-groups.