Immigration, racism and nationalism have become hotly debated issues in the Western world. This highly original and controversial work focuses on the language used by the vast majority who regard themselves as being open to a multi-cultural society.
Using Belgium as a case study and drawing parallels with the UK, US, Europe and the former Yugoslavia, the authors analyse this language and reveal a remarkable consistency between these liberal voices, such as in news-reporting, and the language used by radical racist and nationalist groups.

In this work, the authors focus primarily on the rhetoric of the tolerant majority - those who view themselves as being open to a diverse society. An analysis is presented of this rhetoric of tolerance which is prevalent in news media, influential social-scientific research reports, the policy statements of major political parties, and in government-sponsored expressions of anti-racism.T he authors use empirical data taken from the context of migrant policies in Belguim, and connect this with wider European nationalist ideologies, and conclusions of research on racism and nationalism...

The relationship between language and ideology has long been central to research in discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and has also informed other fields such as sociology and literary criticism. This book, by one of the world's leading pragmatists, introduces a new framework for the study of ideology in written language, using the tools, methods and theories of pragmatics and discourse analysis. Illustrations are drawn systematically from a coherent corpus of excerpts from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history textbooks dealing with...