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  • Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe
  • Daniel Levy
Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe By Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni, Florence Passy University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 312 pages. $75 (cloth), $25 (paper)

The elimination of borders has long been part of the lore about the European Union. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, attention has turned to controversies about internal cultural boundaries. Few topics have commanded more public attention than the integration of long-term migrants and the struggles of European nation-states to come to terms with their multi-ethnic compositions. This book is an important corrective to the polemics that have plagued public [End Page 373] debates about majority-minority relations in recent years. Especially since the topic of immigration is often being conflated with a civilizational terminology, serving as a euphemism for the tense relations with Europe's sizable Muslim population. Rather than succumbing to the fallacies of an undifferentiated Huntingtonianism, Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni and Florence Passy, the authors of this impressive volume, turn the table and examine the very contours and policy implications of this increasingly polarizing rhetoric.

Otherwise critical of multiculturalism, the authors supply evidence against those who suggest that the attribution of special cultural rights leads to the creation of "parallel societies." "Images of societies tearing themselves apart at the cultural seams or being fundamentally transformed by migrants' differentialist demands seem to be wide of the mark." (240-41) Instead, the main source for the contested nature of migration and integration, the authors suggest, stems from "fundamental questions about the nation-state: its sovereignty in controlling borders, its attribution of citizenship, and its identity, the self-understanding that defines belonging to a national community." (233) Rather than falling prey to an essentializing rhetoric about categorical group identities, they address questions of migrant integration and the allocation of rights primarily as the result of ongoing negotiations about the reconfiguration of collective identities.

More specifically, they examine political claims making and public discourse about the integration of immigrants and their citizenship status in Germany, France, Britain, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Instead of presupposing that the success of integration is a function of cultural traits or conversely simply a matter of European convergence their analysis is guided by an expanded version of a political opportunity model. Based on the premise that collective action is situated in a political context, they show how negotiations over citizenship are a "central element of the institutional and discursive opportunity structures that shape patterns of contention over immigration and cultural diversity." (7) To capture the central aspects of these contestations they conduct a content analysis of public claim making about immigration in major national newspapers. The book presents a kaleidoscope of viewpoints, with a particular focus on official voices, the positions of migrant groups, racist alliances and anti-racist movements.

The authors use these voices to assess the relevance of competing models of integration: multiculturalism, post- and transnationalism. Perhaps the only shortcoming in this important book is a tendency to draw caricatures of these models by treating them in dichotomous terms, namely as antithesis to the state. To be sure, some of the normative exponents of these isms have indeed put forward (rather naïve) visions in which the state is superseded. Representing these models in such mutually exclusive terms vis-à-vis an ideal-typical nation-state model is problematic, particularly since the authors themselves offer plenty of evidence for important changes that have affected European state-society relations during the second half of the 20th century. Concepts related to the multicultural composition of societies, the impact of nation-transcending rights and the transnational experience of migrants in a global world, have entered the mainstream sociological literature on migration, without denying the fact that states remain loci of power and an important source for the attribution of rights. [End Page 374] It is not about the alleged replacement of the state, but the reconfiguration of contemporary European state practices and the respective balance of universal and particular claim making activities.

However, this is a minor reservation and it does not detract from the seminal importance of this book. One...

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