The four articles that make up this symposium on Tariq Modood's recent collection, Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism (2019), are based on a public conversation and research colloquium held at Utrecht University on 18 February 2020. In the first article, Modood introduces the conversation with a statement of his thinking over two decades on the subjects of secularism and multiculturalism. This is followed by responses by Pooyan Tamimi Arab and Ernst van den Hemel and, in the fourth and final article, Modood has the last word.

In this paper, Rheindorf and Wodak provide a discourse-historical analysis of extreme-right cultural politics in Austria, ranging from the blatant racism in the speeches of Vienna's former Deputy Mayor Johann Gudenus (now MP in the Austrian parliament) to the construction of an idealized national body in the election campaigns of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), its programmatic agenda in handbooks and pamphlets, and the performances of far-right pop singer Andreas Gabalier. Rheindorf and Wodak argue that such cultural politics use a wide spectrum of discursive strategies both inside and outside established party politics and that the accompanying production of an ideal extreme-right subject is informed by nativist ideology. The cross-sectional analysis demonstrates that the cultural politics of the Austrian extreme right ranges from appropriated national symbols to coded National Socialist iconography. These politics pervasively construct a gendered and racialized national body, policed by a 'strict father' and nurtured by a 'self-sacrificing mother', vis-à-vis an apocalyptic threat scenario identified with migration, intellectual and political elites, cosmopolitanism and progressive gender politics.

Turda's article explores the diverse ways in which racial research conducted on prisoners-of-war (POWs) and soldiers contributed to the emergence of anthropological narratives of national identity in Romania between 1914 and 1944. It first discusses racial typologies produced by Austrian, German, Italian and Polish anthropologists investigating POWs during the First World War, and then examines how Romanian physicians and anthropologists engaged with these typologies while refining their own scientific and nationalist agendas. An essential corollary to this development was a strong commitment to the cultivation of distinct Romanian racial types. The interwar and Second World War periods witnessed the full flowering of a Romanian race science that accommodated a racial hierarchy as the basis for national difference. Moreover, by identifying the racial types purportedly constituting the Romanian nation, anthropologists not only hoped to develop a systematic racial inventory of Romania's ethnic communities, but also to reinforce the myth of ethnogenesis, which described the Romanians as worthy of their noble European origins and legitimized their territorial claims.

The debate on where Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, the founder of modern Turkey and universally known as the "Father of the Turks," stood in regard to the colossal violence committed against Armenians during the First World War has become a fiercely contested part of the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation process, especially within the past few years. Ulgen aims to clear away the clouds of dust surrounding Kemal by delving into his texts and examining his role in the reification of Turkish denial of the destruction of Ottoman Armenians. Based on a textual analysis of his entire corpus, including Nutuk-the Great Speech of 1927 and the master-narrative of modern Turkish history and national identity-her article examines and documents how his charismatic leadership helped to consolidate both the myth of "murderous Armenians" and that of the Turks as an "oppressed nation" (mazlum millet), monumentalizing both in official Turkish historiography. Ulgen argues that Kemal's portrayal of Armenians and the Armenian Question was generally consistent across the years and in various political documents, as well as being consistent with contemporary Turkish representations of the events of 1915. What really tips the balance towards Turkish innocence in Kemal's representation of the conflict is not his framing of the issue per se but the stark difference in the rhetoric he deploys in depicting Armenian and Turkish atrocities and, hence, Armenians and Turks. The undeniable authority of this discursive regime is central to the resilience of Turkish denial today.

Rughiniş discusses three controversial issues with regard to surveys of the Romani population: ethnonym use, self-identification versus hetero-attribution of Romani ethnicity, and the use of variables in reference to Romani settlements. She uses data sets from ten surveys of Romanian Roma between 2000 and 2008 as well as the 2002 Romanian Census to compare two types of samples, and to explore the consequences of several research choices for the quality of the data. In addition to specific methodological issues, Rughiniş addresses the relevance to such surveys of qualitative research in Romani communities.

The scale and scope of the "final solution" of the "Jewish question" were extreme even in the horrific annals of genocide. Bloxham attempts to shed light on the pattern of mass murder in its expansion and contraction by viewing the Holocaust in a set of temporally and culturally specific contexts. It places the Holocaust into a broader European framework of violent ethnopolitics and geopolitics from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The Holocaust is depicted as an only partially discrete part of a continental process of traumatic flux, and a part, furthermore, that can itself be partially disaggregated into national and regional components. Bloxham moves from a general consideration of patterns of ethnic violence in the period to a closer causal explanation that shows the different valences of Nazi policy towards Jews in the lands directly ruled by Germany and those of Germany's allies respectively. He shows that the peculiarly extensive ambitions of the "final solution" at its most expansive can only be explained when wider geopolitical and strategic contextual terms are factored in along with consideration of Nazi ideology and the internal dynamics of some of the key institutions of the perpetrator state.

Yuval-Davis discusses three interconnected questions relating to identity. She first examines whether and in what ways the notion of identity should be theorized, on the one hand, and empirically researched, on the other, focusing on the opposing views of Stuart Hall and Robin Williams. She then examines the contested question of what is identity, positioning it in relation to notions of belonging and the politics of belonging, and in relation to several influential schools of thought, especially those that construct identity as a mode of narrative, as a mode of performativity or as a dialogical practice. Her third interrelated question concerns the boundaries of identity and the relationship between self and non-self. She explores both social psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to that question, and deals with questions such as reflexivity, identifications and forced identities. The last part of the article explores several types of relationships between self and non-self, such as: 'me' and 'us'; 'me/us' and 'them'; 'me' and other 'others'; 'me' and the transversal 'us/them'. Yuval-Davis's basic argument here is that dichotomous notions of identity and difference, when theorizing boundaries of individual and collective identities, are more misleading than explanatory.

Saraçoğlu deals with the ways in which the Kurdish migrants living in the western cities of Turkey have been identified in middle-class discourse by certain pejorative labels and stereotypes. He argues that this new Kurdish image demonstrates the ethnicization of longstanding anti-migrant sentiments in Turkey. He develops and substantiates the argument by means of qualitative data gathered in a field study in zmir between June 2006 and July 2007. The study involved ninety in-depth interviews with middle-class individuals living in the city and explored their anti-Kurdish attitudes. Through a close analysis of two of the common stereotypes that these interviewees deployed in the interviews-namely, that the Kurds were 'benefit scroungers' and that they 'disrupt urban life'- Saraçoğlu explores the formation of the urban social context in which such perceptions have emerged. Close examination of the narratives of the middle-class respondents indicates that the development of a new image of the Kurds has occurred in an urban context shaped by the neoliberal transformation of Turkish cities, on the one hand, and the internal displacement of Kurdish migrants, on the other.