Immigration, Islam and the Politics of Belonging in France (review)

This is an insightful and thought-provoking book about citizenship which will have wide scholarly appeal. The title suggests a narrow focus on immigration, Islam, and belonging in France; however, this does not do justice to the ambitious scope of the work. Thomas's focus is not just on France, but rather on conceptualizing citizenship and belonging in an increasingly diverse and complex world. For the most part, she does a very good job of presenting a new typology of citizenship and applying this to the French case.

The typology is developed in chapter two, and is referred to throughout the book in relation to the case studies explored. This is, therefore, a crucial chapter, and Thomas provides a suitably nuanced account of some very complex issues. What emerges, on the basis of ordinary language analysis, is a framework of five membership types which moves the debate about citizenship far beyond the traditional ethnic and civic dichotomy. It builds on the many critiques of this approach to offer a robust and detailed alternative, which is then used as a tool for exploration throughout the remainder of the chapters.

The bulk of the central chapters are focused on the French case study. One of the challenges in moving beyond the ethnic/civic approach to citizenship types is that it demands a far more complex and challenging means by which to classify regimes. Rather than shy away from that, Thomas uses her case study of France to demonstrate how her own typology can assist in understanding and classifying such a complex picture. The classifications of descent, culture, belief, and contract are used to achieve this, but so too are broader concepts such as the distinction between national citizenship and emerging post-national conceptions.

The analysis takes on a strongly historical nature, showing what being French has meant at different times and which of those ideas have gained the most salience and why. As such, citizenship is shown to be complex and multi-faceted, as well as fluid and changing. It is not only about what French citizenship and identity has come to involve at certain moments in time, but also the reasons why, and the power struggles present in the debates between key stakeholders.

The first stage of this case study work is focused on nationality law reform, and to finish this section Thomas offers a chapter comparing the French case to Britain and Germany. This comparative chapter, other than offering an opportunity to reflect on some of the issues raised, adds little to the debate and rather seems to detract from the overall contribution of the book. Clearly, Thomas is keen to demonstrate that her typology is not unique to the French case, but there is simply not enough space in this chapter to provide a detailed consideration of the comparative cases. The more focused comparison with Britain, which I will come to shortly, is significantly more worthwhile. However, this book is ambitious and the comparison with Britain and Germany at this stage seems to do little other than tread over old ground without offering the depth of analysis present in the French study.

The book then returns to this French study, focusing now on the headscarf affair—that is, controversies surrounding the wearing of Muslim headscarves in France in the late 1980s and early 1990s—with additional mention of more recent debates on the same subject. This detailed account of a particular incident is valuable in demonstrating the usefulness of Thomas' typology, and is also very timely in its subject matter. It serves to broaden the scope of the book beyond the study of citizenship to some very current issues. Given the contemporary nature of these debates, the discussion might benefit from a more detailed consideration of the context of the French debates at a time of, for many commentators, increasing Islamophobia in Europe and beyond. Perhaps this was beyond the scope of the work, but a...