Contested Citizenship
Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni, and Florence Passy.
Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe.Review by Philippe Couton
Based on this rich data, the book makes a number of strong claims. It confirms the ongoing significance of national states in shaping ethnic and immigrant politics, and conversely challenges the postnational argument that views states as increasingly unimportant in a globalizing world. One of their striking findings is the importance of the administrative categories and modes of recognition adopted by particular states. Whereas France for instance essentially recognizes immigrants, Britain recognizes racial groups and Holland nationality communities. These modes of recognition lead to particular types of mobilization and claims-making. But nothing is simple in the world of citizenship and cultural pluralism. Some of the reported results seem to indicate that immigrant claims-making is also somewhat autonomous from national institutional frameworks (p. 152). Part of the reason for this is the fact that many immigrant claims are actually religious claims, coming especially from Muslim groups and organizations. These seem to transcend the otherwise powerfully influential national frameworks.
Perhaps the most controversial conclusion of the book, based almost solely the analysis of the Dutch case, is that excessive recognition of collective cultural rights pushes immigrant groups inward and out of public politics (p. 80, 245). Excessive recognition may also discourage mainstream society from taking an interest in immigrant issues. This assertion is all the more surprising given the authors’ suggestion, in one of the best chapters in the book, that group-claims by cultural minorities are actually quite rare in most countries (including Holland), and do not seem to cause a direct threat to the social cohesion of these states. They also rightly compare the current difficulties with Islam to past situations, including the experience of Jewish and Irish communities in many immigrant-receiving countries, in the not so distant past (p. 178). It is not clear, in other words, that, historically or today, immigrant-receiving societies are suffering from an excess of minority recognition. This is nevertheless a crucial debate, and this book makes an excellent, well-informed contribution to it. It will probably set the tone of future research on the topic for some time to come.
Philippe Couton is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Ottawa. His areas of interest are migration, political sociology, and labour relations. He is currently conducting research on immigrant activism from a comparative perspective. For CJS Online he has previously reviewed Paul V. Dutton’s Origins of the French Welfare State, and in an review essay, Denise Helly and Nicolas van Schendel’s Appartenir au Québec and Jocelyn Maclure’s Quebec Identity.