Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France: A Comparative Framework

By Elaine R. Thomas

Over the past three decades, neither France's treatment of Muslims nor changes in French, British, and German immigration laws have confirmed multiculturalist hopes or postnationalist expectations. Yet analyses positing unified national models also fall short in explaining contemporary issues of national and cultural identity. Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France: A Comparative Framework presents a more productive, multifaceted view of citizenship and nationality.

Political scientist Elaine R. Thomas casts new light on recent conflicts over citizenship and national identity in France, as well as such contentious policies as laws restricting Muslim headscarves. Drawing on key methods and insights of ordinary language philosophers from Austin to Wittgenstein, Thomas looks at parliamentary debates, print journalism, radio and television transcripts, official government reports, legislation, and other primary sources related to the rights and status of immigrants and their descendants. Her analysis of French discourse shows how political strategies and varied ideas of membership have intertwined in France since the late 1970s. Thomas tracks the crystallization of a restrictive but apparently consensual interpretation of French republicanism, arguing that its ideals are increasingly strained, even as they remain politically powerful. Thomas also examines issues of Islam, immigration, and culture in other settings, including Britain and Germany.

Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France gives scholarly researchers, political observers, and human rights advocates tools for better characterizing and comparing the theoretical stakes of immigration and integration and advances our understanding of an increasingly significant aspect of ethnic and religious politics in France, Europe, and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9780812204117

Book preview

PART I

Introduction and Theoretical Framework

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Politics of Belonging

Contemporary politics is increasingly marked by controversies concerning the conditions for political membership. The problem of political membership is by no means new. From the time of citizenship’s classical theoretical formulation by Aristotle, political thinkers have grappled with it. But today it is more pressing than ever. The question of who belongs is one of the most difficult, politically charged, and inescapable political quandaries of our time. It has emerged as a problem that policy makers, political thinkers, and citizens themselves all must confront.

National and international developments are together contributing to the growing urgency of membership issues. Paradoxically, the various cultural and economic processes together often referred to as globalization have by no means consigned questions of political membership to increasing irrelevance. Instead, globalization has in many ways fueled membership politics, often in new forms. Perhaps most dramatically, international migration and its consequences have heightened issues of membership in West European and other economically advanced liberal democracies, to which immigrants—including many Muslims—have been heavily drawn in the years since the Second World War. The salience of the politics of membership has recently been reflected in such developments as the massive March 2006 protests against restrictive new immigration laws proposed in the United States; in these protests, immigrants marched to demonstrate their already integral place in American society and their desire for a legal road to citizenship status. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, broad-ranging public debate over the place of Islam in Europe has become increasingly heated and drawn in leading intellectuals internationally.¹ The politics of the last decade or so

Thomas_ImmigrationIslam Politics_TX.indd 3 has also been marked by a number of other important membership-related issues, including controversies in California and other U.S. states over bilingual education, English only policies, and access of children of illegal immigrants to public education and social services; German and American debates about dual citizenship; political conflicts surrounding Australia’s shift from a white Australia to a multicultural immigration policy; and conflicts over the construction of mosques, public observance of non-Christian religious holidays, or the public presence and visibility of Muslim women and girls in Islamic attire. From North America to Australia to western Europe, immigration and the challenges following migrants’ settlement have provoked a steady series of passionate political discussions about the nature of political membership and the necessary conditions for belonging in particular political communities.

Nowhere have issues of political membership raised by immigration and its aftermath provoked more intense and politically salient public debates than in France. In part, this may be because France has Western Europe’s largest Muslim population and highest estimated percentage of residents of Muslim background.² It may also be because France has been somewhat ahead of many European countries both in the relatively early arrival of many migrants, and in accepting the idea that immigrants and their descendants in principle could eventually become full members of the nation-state, an idea that Germany, notoriously, long resisted (Brubaker 1992; Noiriel 1996). Nonetheless, as the widespread riots of autumn 2005 in France’s often ethnically imbalanced suburbs highlighted, France has clearly had great difficulty coming to terms with the long-term settlement of culturally, religiously, and racially diverse residents of postwar immigrant origin.

This study is unique in developing and applying a new theoretical framework for analyzing discussions of political membership and comparing such debates in different countries as well as at the global or international level. As the latter part of this chapter argues, a new theoretical framework of this kind is urgently needed. There is a long-standing alternative approach to analyzing and comparing models of membership in different countries and historical periods that is still frequently used—what I call the dichotomy of civic and ethnic—but this approach is both theoretically flawed and ill-suited to the task of analyzing the membership-related discussions prevalent in liberal democracies today.

One alternative to the prevalent but flawed approach would be simply to take each national version of the politics of membership on its own terms. This proposal has the apparent advantage of guarding against the danger of reducing the terms of one country’s debates to those of another. Approaching recent controversies through case-by-case thick description also appears to offer the advantage of interpreting political positions in ways that are meaningful to the actors involved, so that we can make sense of their logic and reasoning rather than merely imputing explanations for their preferences from an outside perspective. For example, American observers may be tempted to assume that opponents of students’ rights to wear traditional religious clothing are opposing freedom of speech or freedom of religion, but French opponents of headscarves often understand the issue quite differently (Bowen 2008).

Unfortunately, the disadvantages of such a case-by-case approach ultimately outweigh its attractions. Simply taking debates on their own terms may avoid the pitfalls of intercultural reductionism, but it allows for little critical distance and generates no possibility of systematic comparison among different countries or over time. Yet, in a field as politically and morally charged as the contemporary politics of membership—citizenship and immigration politics in particular—it is arguably incumbent on political theorists and comparative analysts to offer actors such critical distance, to which systematic comparison can also contribute.

Recent work on the politics of belonging has therefore sought to transcend the inherent shortcomings of case-by-case national accounts, instead developing broader comparative frameworks. The turn to more comparative work in this area, particularly evident since the 1990s, clearly signals progress in understanding how and why different ideas and policies regarding citizenship and nationality have developed in response to immigration and growing cultural diversity. However, as later chapters show, none of the currently prevailing approaches to theoretically or comparatively understanding these developments are fully satisfactory. Each has encouraged false or overly simplistic expectations concerning the emerging shape of current membership policies and politics. With new conceptual and analytical tools honed for that purpose, this book aims to advance further the emerging theoretical and comparative discussion.

Two contrasting perspectives have shaped recent discussion of the relationship between immigration and patterns of citizenship. The first, post-nationalist perspective foresees increasing convergence in national citizenship policies. According to this view, national citizenship is giving way to a new post-nationalist model of membership. Thanks to the increasing international influence of human rights norms and respect for personhood, advocates of this view have argued, rights are increasingly being equalized irrespective of national status. Over time, national citizenship is therefore supposedly losing much of its traditional significance, especially for migrants. Even where nation-states still grant and ensure rights, they increasingly do so on the basis of post-national norms and criteria (Soysal 1994: 136–67; cf. Jacobson 1997).

The other major perspective on changes in citizenship and nationality law emphasizes the importance of national political cultures and traditions. According to this view, countries have distinct, deeply rooted conceptions of nationhood that shape their approaches to political membership. Confronted with similar challenges of immigrant settlement, they therefore respond differently, in keeping with their political cultural traditions. The most important and directly relevant work in this vein (Brubaker 1992) argues that France’s and Germany’s different historical sequences of nation- and state-building led them to develop different conceptions of nationhood. Once established, these conceptions are normally reflected in citizenship and nationality policies in a fairly stable, continuing fashion. Given their symbolic and emotional significance, they are stubbornly resistant to change.³ According to Brubaker’s thesis, in Germany, where nation-building preceded state-building, nationhood is understood in ethnocultural terms. In nationality law, this is expressed through reliance on jus sanguinis, the attribution of national citizenship on the basis of descent. In contrast, where state-building happened first, as in France, nationhood takes on a more civic-political character and is understood in less primordial terms, leading to nationality laws in which jus soli, the attribution of nationality on the basis of birthplace, figures more prominently.⁴

More recent work has applied this kind of national traditions approach to other aspects of the politics of belonging and policy decisions associated with it. For instance, different policy responses to demands for accommodation of new, Muslim religious minorities have been explained by reference to different traditions of church-state relations and their lasting institutional legacies (Soper and Fetzer 2005). Similarly, Hollifield traces states’ different levels of ability to manage immigration-related conflicts over distribution to immigration’s historical relationship to nation-building in different countries. The more centrally immigration figures in the political myths that legitimate and give life to the regime, Hollifield argues, the more politically manageable the negative side effects of immigration have proved, and the less effective public backlash against immigrants has developed (Hollifield 2004: 183–214).

These contrasting perspectives would lead one to expect different specific sorts of changes in citizenship and nationality laws. According to the post-nationalist view, there is a growing dissociation of rights from legal nationality as national-political rights based on membership are increasingly superseded by more universal human rights based on personhood. Certainly, some post-nationalists recognize that this dissociation does not currently extend fully to political rights (e.g., Soysal 1994). However, insofar as it is an ongoing trend, as the post-nationalist perspective suggests, one would expect movements for extending the same post-national logic to political rights to be gaining ground. Furthermore, if national citizenship status is losing importance as a basis for staking claims, one should also expect declining interest in national-level citizenship policy changes. Finally, as citizenship and rights become increasingly post-national, belief in the need for a shared national culture as a basis or precondition for legal citizenship should be waning. As a post-national model of membership takes hold, citizenship rights and national culture should become increasingly dissociated, and assimilation should be of declining significance as a condition for claiming citizenship and rights associated with it.

By contrast, from the national traditions perspective, one would predict that, even if nationality laws are modified over time, they should remain fundamentally consistent in whether they combine jus sanguinis with jus soli. Following a more subtle reading, one would at least expect that criteria for citizenship putting a positive premium on ethnocultural ties should be more significant where nation-building preceded state-building than where state-building came first.

A common weakness of both predominant approaches is that they underemphasize the political interpretation of social developments and the political manipulation of ideas. As the analysis of France’s recent politics of membership and key policy developments associated with it in Parts II and III will show, today’s politics of belonging cannot be properly understood without careful attention to these factors. This book seeks to derive a conceptual framework that offers critical analytical distance and facilitates international and historical comparison, yet also makes meaningful, sympathetic sense of actors’ positions.. This study therefore begins theoretically, by presenting a new framework for identifying different ideas of political membership and tracing and comparing their political invocation over time.

Chapter 2 taps a radically new source of insight for developing such a framework, one never before applied to this area of study—namely, ordinary language philosophy. This approach is applied to patterns of ordinary language use in discussion of various forms of membership. Drawing on the results of that analysis, the chapter presents a new theoretical framework for analyzing and comparing alternative visions of political membership.

Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7 apply the new theoretical framework to the recent politics of citizenship and immigration in France. Issues of political membership have figured centrally in French politics for three decades. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, France has seen a whole series of debates on these issues—from early discussions of a new citizenship that would separate citizenship from nationality, to repeated discussions of the laws granting French nationality to foreign immigrants and their descendants, to discussions of whether and to what extent religious identities should be recognized and allowed expression in the public sphere. These debates have inspired much sustained intellectual reflection and discussion within France, with sometimes surprising results. In examining these key, interrelated debates, this study looks at how key political actors have answered these questions, and how publicly acceptable answers have shifted over time as a result.

The book draws on the rich collection of available primary source materials—editorials, transcripts of parliamentary debates, newspaper articles, radio and television transcripts, and official reports—to document each controversy. It analyzes not only the major actors’ positions, but also their arguments and the models of membership on which they draw. That analysis tells us much about contemporary French cultural politics. Moreover, and more directly, it helps explain how and why particular kinds of policy responses to issues raised by the integration of immigrants and their descendants have taken form, and how they have been publicly justified or legitimated.

Such legitimation is no mere window dressing: it tells us much about why sometimes seemingly odd or unlikely policy responses to changing social conditions have attracted public support. These patterns of support, as the chapters that follow reveal, have often been rather surprising. Contrary to what many have claimed, conventional distinctions between left and right have not been wholly eclipsed by new issues of membership. Left-right differences in parties’ ways of understanding and responding to the issues of membership raised by immigrants and their integration are discernible, and have played a role in structuring debates on these issues (cf. Hollifield 1997, 2004; Sa’adah 2003: 215–24). But these conventional political categories cannot fully account for the sometimes odd patterns of support for recent policies that have emerged. Parts of the French left have surprised many observers by adamantly eschewing the multiculturalist approach to inclusion embraced by many self-styled leftists and progressives in other countries. Understanding the contextually specific terms in which policy options have been legitimated is essential particularly for understanding the the French left’s positions, and divisions. At the same time, this book aims to transcend the specificities of French politics, comparing aspects of French policy and debates about membership to recent developments elsewhere.

Chapters 3–5 look at two key episodes in France’s politics of membership during the 1980s: demands for extending local voting rights to foreign residents accompanied by promotion of a new citizenship separating citizenship from nationality, and the highly publicized discussions and public hearings of the late 1980s prompted by demands for revision of France’s nationality law (code de la nationalité française). In contrast to other studies that have stressed theoretical commonalities and elements of conceptual consensus at the national level (Brubaker 1992; Favell 1998), my treatment of these early French debates emphasizes the role of competitive political dynamics in shaping the politics of membership. Even the ways recent debates hark back to revered elements of French historical tradition can, in fact, best be understood less as instances of historical overdeterminism than as tactics, or particularly sharp moves, in competitive cultural politics. Just as Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) widely regarded work on nationalism revealed the active political invention of tradition, this study highlights its active political reproduction. The analytic framework introduced in Chapter 2 helps make sense of the symbolic strategies involved in this reproduction.

In actual political debates, the models of membership identified in Chapter 2 do not always simply face off as singular, unified positions. As Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate, they can be strategically combined and recombined in efforts both to construct new alliances and to break up existing alliances by recharacterizing other positions. I call this process, which the theoretical model developed in Chapter 2 helps elucidate, the politics of misrepresentation. Chapters 3–5 show how the politics of misrepresentation shaped French responses to demands for a new citizenship and nationality law reform.

Chapter 6 focuses on the repeated changes in nationality law that resulted from these key moments in France’s politics of membership since the 1980s. This chapter sets developments in French nationality policy in a broader comparative context, examining the extent to which French developments have coincided with immigration-related changes in the nationality laws of Europe’s other two most significant immigration-receiving societies—Britain and Germany. This comparison of developments in French nationality law with policy changes in Britain and Germany sheds light on whether or to what extent recent developments in this area have been confirming the expectations of post-nationalists and multiculturalists optimistic about the likelihood of growing policy convergence, on the one hand, or of analysts stressing the continued, lasting effects of national traditions who are accordingly skeptical regarding future policy convergence in this area, on the other. Post-nationalist, multiculturalist, and national traditions perspectives each capture certain elements of recent developments in nationality policy, but, I show, they need to be combined in order fully to interpret the direction of important immigration-related policy changes. My framework is also helpful for understanding recent developments in this area, particularly where changing assumptions about culture have been involved. Together, Chapters 3–6 form Part II, concerned with how the recent politics of membership relates to attributions of citizenship and nationality as formal legal statuses, conferring particular sets of rights on different categories of people, particularly residents of foreign birth or origin.

Chapters 7–8 focus on a second key face of recent membership politics, one that has become increasingly central since 1989: whether and how expressions of cultural and religious difference are recognized and accommodated in the public sphere. The most important debates raising this issue in France have been those about whether female students should be permitted to wear Islamic headscarves in public schools, and those about veiling in public spaces generally. Chapter 7 looks at the emergence of the first affaire du foulard or headscarves affair in 1989–1990, a dramatic and divisive debate of lasting consequence in France. The chapter examines the initial local context of the debate and then its national-level politicization. Using the framework presented in Chapter 2 to analyze the affaire du foulard of 1989–1990, Chapter 7 characterizes the nature of the political alliances and divisions that formed in the course of the first affaire du foulard much better than could the prevailing dichotomy of civic and ethnic. Like earlier debates about French nationality law, the affaire du foulard was mainly a civic-civic issue, not one that simply pitted civic perspectives against more ethnic ones. To understand what divided the two sides, the more precise terms suggested by ordinary language analysis are needed. The seemingly reasonable policy compromise that emerged in response to the initial affaire du foulard was relatively short-lived. In 2004, France passed a law prohibiting students from wearing Islamic headscarves or other conspicuous religious signs in French public schools. This unusual law shocked and puzzled many observers in other countries. Chapter 8 looks at the reasons for this surprising development. Some observers, especially in France, would prefer to explain the law as a simple reflection of deep traditions of republican thinking about citizenship and its relation to other forms of membership. However, to understand why policy in this area has been changing, one must look beyond long-standing republican traditions to more recent social, political, and legal developments. Contrary to what post-nationalists might assume, developments in international human rights law did not prevent French policy from taking this restrictive new direction. French policy makers’ reading of cases in the European Court of Human Rights may even have encouraged a more symbolically charged framing of the issue, and a more rigid resolution.

The final chapters conclude the book by showing how the new analytic framework can be used to compare membership-related debates in different national settings, and to analyze current debates about citizenship at the global and international levels. Chapters 9–10 examine a key British political controversy also deeply concerned with understandings of political membership: the Rushdie affair. Like France’s affaire du foulard, the Rushdie affair in Britain concerned dangers to national integrity and social cohesion perceived as associated with settlement of Muslim immigrants coming mainly from the country’s former colonies. Participants in both debates contested the desirability of a postcolonial multiculturalism as well as its preconditions and necessary limits. While sparked by very different substantive policy issues, both debates also raised questions about what makes particular residents of a country bona fide members of the political community.

Chapter 9 looks at the nature and origins of the Satanic Verses controversy, particularly as a discussion of political membership. Analyzing the different perspectives on political membership articulated in the course of the affair in Britain, Chapter 10 shows that recent French and British politics of membership have had more in common theoretically than has often been thought. Approaches contrasting distinct, internally unified national models have highlighted many of the key differences between the two countries’ assumptions and beliefs about membership—Britain’s multiculturalism versus France’s insistence on republican integration (Favell 1998), French color-blindness versus British Anglo-Saxon anti-racist race-consciousness (Bleich 2003), or the often noted more general historical contrast between France’s tradition of transformative statism and Britain’s predilection for gradual social evolution. By contrast, the approach to analyzing and comparing competing positions in membership-related controversies developed here reveals a surprisingly rich set of underlying similarities in the two cases. In Britain, as in France, immigration-related debates about the nature and condition of political membership are today giving rise to heated civic-civic conflicts that conventional anti-racism strategies are ill-equipped to engage or resolve, and that the prevailing dichotomy of civic and ethnic is unable even clearly to diagnose.

Unlike frameworks designed only to guide comparison at the national level (e.g., Brubaker 1992; Favell 1998), the approach offered in this book is applicable to debates about global, international, and transnational forms of political membership as well, as Chapter 11 shows. Contrary to what postnational accounts would suggest, global and international visions of citizenship do not fully transcend existing theoretical understandings of political membership. Rather, the same kinds of ambivalence and disagreement about the nature of political membership are reproduced in the context of emerging discussions of new forms of citizenship no longer centered on nation-states. Like the most heated national-level debates in today’s liberal democracies about citizenship and immigration, the civic-ethnic dichotomy does not adequately capture the nature of these debates. As political membership at the international and even global level is increasingly imagined and contested, it is not impossible that the current role of the nation-state as the most salient locus of political membership in large parts of the world will to some degree wane. However, this turn is not likely to bring the politics of belonging as we now know them to an end. On the contrary, contemporary discussions of the terms of global and international level political memberships to a surprising extent recapitulate the terms of disagreement over political membership at the national level. Discussions of such non-national levels of political membership thus appear as an area of growing importance in which the theoretical framework introduced in the next chapter may find further application.

In drawing on the methods and insights of ordinary language analysis to develop a new, more subtle theoretical framework better adapted to contemporary quandaries, this study seeks to bridge several usually disparate fields of inquiry—philosophy, political theory, and comparative political analysis. These are fields that should work in tandem but are currently troublingly disconnected. It is my hope that this study may encourage comparativists and political theorists alike to think creatively about how their methods, insights, and findings might work together more productively to enhance the ability of all of us to think more effectively about the most pressing political problems of our day.

The Quest for Good Nationalism and Its Analytical Aftermath

This study offers a new solution to a central theoretical and conceptual problem in existing analyses of the politics of membership. Too often, studies concerned with the politics of membership in different countries have approached the task of analysis and comparison armed with binary, overly simplistic theoretical tools. Most commonly, comparative analysts have approached such work using various versions of a basic binary framework that I call the dichotomy of civic and ethnic.

Kohn’s Dichotomy of Eastern Versus Western Nationalism

Since the late nineteenth century, the nation-state has figured as one of the most important loci of political membership, particularly in Europe, but also increasingly in other parts of the world. Innumerable typologies and classifications of nationalism have been proposed.⁵ A few of these have categorized nationalisms on the basis of citizens’ and others’ ideas of the nature and basis of political membership.⁶ Our current ways of analyzing conceptions of political membership comparatively can be traced to this now neglected branch of the literature on nationalism.

The most influential, current dichotomous approach to ideas of political membership can be traced back to the early postwar work of Hans Kohn. Kohn identified two main concepts of nation and fatherland that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one in the West, the other in the East. The Western concept of nation—developed in England, France, the United States, and the Netherlands—was that of a community of citizens integrated around a political ideal and project. The Eastern concept was of a biologically based, natural folk community resulting from a mystical integration around the irrational, precivilized folk concept. These two forms of nationalism were, in Kohn’s theory, diametrically opposed in every respect. Western nationalism was forward-looking, whereas Eastern nationalism was backward-looking. The irrational and nostalgic nationalists of the East were fixated on monuments and graveyards and preoccupied with preserving their particularistic ancient lore and myth. As a political project with a universal message and mission associated with a rational and universal concept of political liberty and the rights of man, Western nationalism was rational and universal (Kohn 1967; also Kohn 1946, 1949, 1957b; Snyder 1954: 117–22). As this summary suggests, Kohn’s observation was by no means politically impartial. Western nationalism was clearly good, while the Eastern variant was, as Tom Nairn (1993) writes, reactive, envious, ethnic, racist and generally bad (quoted in Xenos 1996: 214).

The reason for the dichotomous nature of the Kohnian perspective becomes clear if we look to the political and historical context of his work. Writing just after World War II, Kohn wanted to explain the emergence of fascist nationalism in Eastern Europe, but without delegitimating the patriotism of the war’s Western victors.⁷ Like other German émigrés of the 1930–50s, he also hoped to salvage a legitimate variety of national community to serve as a basis for a Weimar-style project of constitutional liberalism (Vincent 1997: 278). In other words, recent historical experience made it impossible for Kohn to deny that nationalism could be linked to violence and intolerance, but the issues and developments of his time also made him sympathetic to national consciousness. The intellectual task he set himself, then, was to separate the good from the bad, salvaging the former and explaining the latter. Kohn’s interest in distinguishing good from bad forms of nationalism undoubtedly contributed to the rigorously dichotomous structure of the theoretical framework he developed.

Kohn’s distinction between the form of nationalism that developed in Western countries and that which subsequently emerged in Eastern ones informed the work of a generation of historians. Writing in 1954, Louis Snyder noted simply, The Kohn formula has served a generation of historians well, and there have been no significant attempts to alter or modify it (1954: 122). Nonetheless, Kohn’s work subsequently fell into desuetude as interest in nationalism waned and new nation-states emerging in former colonial areas failed to fit neatly into his typology (Xenos 1996: 217).

Intellectual Revival of Kohn’s Dichotomous Approach

In the context of a new, post-Cold War constellation of concerns, however, Kohn’s theoretical approach has made a dramatic comeback. In the wake of the Cold War, intellectuals were anxious, first, to account for the atrocities in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, which were widely seen as linked to irrational nationalist sentiments.⁸ At the same time, scholars were concerned to salvage a positive model of political community, whether for its own sake or as a counter to the ideological appeals of nationalist demagogues (Lind 1994: 87–99). Advancing both arguments, Yael Tamir exhorted liberals not to dismiss nationalism altogether, warning that, Liberals who give up this term [nationalism] and surrender it to the use of conservative political forces, or note the difference, to chauvinist and racist ideologies, alienate themselves from a whole set of values that are of immense importance to a great many people, including liberals (Tamir 1993: 5). Or, as Michael Ignatieff, whose work played an important role in in reviving the dichotomy of civic and ethnic in the 1990s, contended, The only reliable antidote to ethnic nationalism turns out to be civic nationalism (Ignatieff 1993: 185; quoted in Nairn 1995: 99).⁹

In extolling the need to stave off bad nationalism with good, intellectuals thus made common cause with politicians, policy makers, and other public figures who called on citizens to participate in similar ideological strategies. French minister of education Jean-Pierre Chevènement contrasted xenophobic nationalism with republican patriotism, and accordingly encouraged schoolchildren to learn the French national anthem. Also seeking to counter racist nationalist appeals like those of the far-Right National Front, France’s leading anti-racism group, SOS-Racisme, devised a poster featuring the slogan, We all love the same country. Similarly, though in a very different context, on his trip to Croatia in September 1994, Pope John Paul II said: It is necessary to promote a culture of peace which does not reject a healthy patriotism but keeps far away from the … exclusions of nationalism (Jennings 1992: 499–500; Levinson 1995: 626).

In this context, a new wave of dichotomous theoretical treatments of nationalism indebted to Kohn’s approach emerged. In the most popular revamping of this approach, the notions of civic and ethnic nationalism have been substituted for Kohn’s Western and Eastern varieties (Greenfeld 1992: 44–45; Jowitt 1992: 319–26). Recent work has also been marked by other pairs of terms that represent variations on the same theme and often figure as theoretical equivalents of the distinction between civic and ethnic (Nielsen 1996–1997: 44–45). For example, Smith distinguishes ethnic from territorial nationalist movements (1983: 218), while Brubaker contrasts the organic or ethnocultural, differentialist view of Germany with the political or state-centered, assimilationist perspective of France (1992: xi, 1–4, 8–14). Other authors have sought to distinguish liberal nationalism from illiberal nationalism, zealous nationalism, or nativism (Lind 1994: 94; 1995: 7–8, 260–62, 298; Tamir 1993: 3–11). Still others have aimed to distinguish nationalism theoretically from a more positive idea of patriotism (Viroli 1995; cf. Schaar 1981: 285–311). Admittedly, a number of authors begin by laying out a wider range of theoretically possible or historically known options. With remarkable regularity, however, all but two rapidly disappear for all practical purposes, deemed historically obsolete, purely fictive or ideological, or of limited relevance for purposes of contemporary political analysis.¹⁰

Like Kohn, some authors have been concerned primarily with characterizing the understandings of nationalism that have developed in different countries, or their consequences in terms of regime type or policy choices, including policies regulating civic incorporation of immigrants and their descendants (Greenfeld 1992; Brubaker 1992).¹¹ Other authors, however, have applied the same categories to controversies within a particular country, or to making sense of current Western European political conflicts concerning immigration (Ignatieff 1993: 8–16; Brubaker 1992: 138–64; Jowitt 1992: 319–26). Thus, recent comparative and theoretical work on political membership has been characterized by a binary perspective that continues to owe much to Kohn’s dichotomy, even where the intellectual project is no longer a Kohnian comparative historical analysis, but instead the comparative mapping of ideological positions in domestic debates.

The Civic Versus Ethnic Perspective in Political Theory

Political theorists have also recently begun to examine the idea of civic or liberal nationalism. They have, however, been interested primarily in determining whether at least some forms of nationalism may be morally defensible, as the terms civic and liberal suggest, and if so, how commendable forms of nationalism may be distinguished from those to be condemned. Political theorists have therefore primarily examined the internal coherence of civic or liberal nationalism and the ethical arguments in its defense (e.g., Nielsen 1996–1997; Xenos 1996; Vincent 1997; Tamir 1993; Levinson 1995; Jennings 1992; Resnick 1992: 511–17; Lichtenberg 1996).

However, while increasingly engaged in debates about the value of liberal nationalism, political theorists have generally displayed little interest in gauging the heuristic value of the dichotomy between civic and ethnic, which is how comparativists principally use the dichotomy. Political theorists have devoted little attention to the Kohnian perspective’s usefulness or limitations as a framework for empirical investigation. Recent discussions of nationalism in the political theory literature have thus contributed little toward developing a framework for interpreting and comparing nationalist ideas, political movements, or conceptions of political community within or between countries. Relative to comparatively oriented researchers in sociology, political science, or history, political theorists have had little interest in how to characterize, distinguish, and classify the different ideas of political membership observable internationally. Consequently, despite the seeming convergence of theoretical attention around ideas of nationalism, across both subfields and disciplines, there has been troublingly little real intellectual connection between the work of political theorists and comparativists—whether political scientists, or sociologists or historians. These closely related areas of study, which should work together, instead mostly continue to talk past one another.

Limitations of the Existing Dichotomy of Civic and Ethnic

The contrast between civic and ethnic views of political membership is, unfortunately, unsatisfactory in a number of respects. Precisely by its dichotomous structure, this approach appears to be a clear and simple way of categorizing, and simultaneously evaluating, senses of nationhood and conceptions of political membership. However, superficial agreement in favor of civic or liberal forms and against the ethnic or illiberal ones actually conceals various theoretical confusions and apparent inconsistencies.

As the chapters that follow will show, the dichotomy of civic and ethnic is ill-suited for grasping the differences of perspective that structure today’s immigration-related controversies about political membership in liberal democracies. The dichotomy of civic and ethnic does not provide suitable terms for naming the different sides in these debates or identifying the theoretical differences that divide them. Even before looking to those debates, however, one must note some other important theoretical limitations of the dichotomy of civic and ethnic, which demonstrate the need for an alternative theoretical perspective.

Membership in a national cultural community is one of the most widely held ideas of what nationality is; yet there is a remarkable lack of theoretical consensus as to how this idea is to be classified. Some authors classify culturally defined nationhood as ethnic (e.g., Smith 1983: 215–18; Ignatieff 1993: 6–8; Breuilly 1982: 62, 113, 349). Others suggest, sometimes indirectly, that cultural definitions of the nation are, or can be, civic or liberal (Tamir 1993: 83–86, 166–67; Greenfeld 1992: 11–12; Nairn 1995: 103; Lind 1994: 94–98).¹² Given the world-historical significance of culturally based definitions of nationhood, this is a significant divergence.

One might argue that the relevant question in deciding whether a given idea of nationhood is civic or ethnic is not whether membership in the nation is defined by members sharing a culture, but by whether it is assimilationist. On this view, the perspective of those believing in the possibility of assimilation is theoretically inclusionary and thus not ethnic. Accordingly, some authors distinguish civic from ethnic forms of cultural nationalism this way (e.g., Greenfeld 1992; Brubaker 1992). However, as Nieguth (1999: 163) notes, the civic/ethnic dichotomy is commonly, though not necessarily correctly, equated with Meinecke’s distinction between Staatsnation and Kulturnation. Consequently, culturally defined nationhood is