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Multiculturalism, Assimilation, and Challenges to the Nation-State Irene Bloemraad, Anna Korteweg, and G¨Ok¸Ceyurdakul Pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp153

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Multiculturalism, Assimilation, and Challenges to the Nation-State Irene Bloemraad, Anna Korteweg, and G¨Ok¸Ceyurdakul Pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp153 ANRV348-SO34-08 ARI 4 June 2008 7:48 ANNUAL REVIEWS Further Citizenship and Immigration: Click here for quick links to Annual Reviews content online, including: Multiculturalism, • Other articles in this volume • Top cited articles Assimilation, and Challenges • Top downloaded articles • Our comprehensive search to the Nation-State Irene Bloemraad,1,∗ Anna Korteweg,2,∗ and Gokc¸e¨ Yurdakul3,∗ 1Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-1980, United States; email: [email protected] 2Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2J4, Canada; email: [email protected] 3Department of Sociology, Trinity College, University of Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008. 34:153–79 Key Words First published online as a Review in Advance on integration, rights, transnationalism, postnational citizenship, dual Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008.34:153-179. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org April 3, 2008 by Stanford University - Main Campus Green Library on 10/20/09. For personal use only. citizenship, participation The Annual Review of Sociology is online at soc.annualreviews.org Abstract This article’s doi: Citizenship encompasses legal status, rights, participation, and belong- 10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134608 ing. Traditionallyanchored in a particular geographic and political com- Copyright c 2008 by Annual Reviews. munity, citizenship evokes notions of national identity, sovereignty, and All rights reserved state control, but these relationships are challenged by the scope and di- 0360-0572/08/0811-0153$20.00 versity of international migration. This review considers normative and ∗The authors’ names are listed in alphabetical empirical debates over citizenship and bridges an informal divide be- order; they are equal coauthors. tween European and North American literatures. We focus on citizen- ship within nation-states by discussing ethnic versus civic citizenship, multiculturalism, and assimilation. Going beyond nation-state bound- aries, we also look at transnational, postnational, and dual citizenships. Throughout, we identify methodological and theoretical challenges in this field, noting the need for a more dynamic and comprehensive un- derstanding of the inter-relationships between the dimensions of citi- zenship and immigration. 153 ANRV348-SO34-08 ARI 4 June 2008 7:48 The large number and diverse origins of inter- spective, we examine three literatures. One national migrants increasingly challenge long- studies the foundations of citizenship, linking held notions of citizenship within nation-state particular conceptions of national belonging or borders. The United Nations estimates that, institutional configurations to conceptions of in 2005, 191 million people lived outside their citizenship as legal status or rights. A second, country of birth, a figure that has doubled since largely from normative political theory, debates 1975 and continues to rise (UN Popul. Div. the advisability of multiculturalism and links 2006). At the dawn of the twenty-first century, group rights to citizenship. A third literature, about one in four or five residents in countries on immigrant integration, investigates equality such as Australia (24%), Switzerland (24%), of participation in a host country’s economy, New Zealand (19%), and Canada (18%) were society, and political system. To some degree, foreign-born, as were one in eight in Germany these literatures consider how one dimension (13%), the United States (13%), and Sweden of citizenship might affect others, but future (12%) (OECD 2007).1 What happens to citi- work needs to examine more deeply how all zenship, as a potential force of justice, equal- dimensions of citizenship interact. We suggest ity, and national cohesion, when large numbers that a more integrated approach can show, for of people from diverse linguistic, ethnic, racial, example, that the presumed chasm separating religious, and cultural backgrounds cross state multicultural and assimilatory accounts of boundaries? How do they affect citizenship in citizenship might be overdrawn. the country to which they move and, if their The presence and activities of migrants have attachments and activities span borders, what led some scholars to call into question the rele- are the consequences for the meaning and sub- vance of a single, state-centered notion of citi- stance of citizenship? zenship, instead conceptualizing citizenship be- Citizenship is usually defined as a form of yond or across borders. One approach relocates membership in a political and geographic com- the source of citizenship rights from the state munity. It can be disaggregated into four di- to personhood, giving rise to a cosmopolitan mensions: legal status, rights, political and other or postnational citizenship that transcends bor- forms of participation in society, and a sense of ders. A second literature focuses on citizenship belonging. The concept of citizenship allows us across borders, either as a legal status in the to analyze the extent to which immigrants and form of dual citizenship or as participatory cit- Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008.34:153-179. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by Stanford University - Main Campus Green Library on 10/20/09. For personal use only. their descendants are incorporated into receiv- izenship based on transnational practices and ing societies. attachments. Our review suggests that global- Immigration challenges—and in some ization challenges simple understandings of cit- cases reaffirms—notions of national identity, izenship as state-centered and state-controlled. sovereignty, and state control that have his- However, nation-states continue to hold sub- torically been linked to citizenship. These stantial power over the formal rules and rights challenges can be studied at two levels of of citizenship and to shape the institutions that inquiry: one as citizenship within national provide differentiated access to participation borders, and the second placing those borders and belonging, with important consequences into question. From the within-borders per- for immigrants’ incorporation and equality. Throughout this review, we try to bridge an informal divide between scholarship on 1 Migration across international borders usually means the citizenship in Europe with parallel litera- movement of people with one citizenship to a country of a different citizenship, but this is not necessarily the case. For tures in North America, especially the United example, migration from former colonies to the colonizing States. For example, debates over postnational country is international, but these migrants might hold the citizenship are more prevalent in Europe, citizenship of the destination country. Alternatively, birth in a country does not necessarily guarantee citizenship in that whereas the transnational perspective predomi- country. nates in the United States. It is unclear whether 154 Bloemraad · Korteweg · Yurdakul ANRV348-SO34-08 ARI 4 June 2008 7:48 differences in orientation reflect empirical dif- out, we outline the methodological and theoret- ferences in immigrants’ experiences or the need ical challenges confronting sociologists in this for greater academic exchange between Euro- field. pean and North American scholars. We also seek to generate a dialogue between the polit- ical theory of citizenship—often presented as THEORIZING CITIZENSHIP normative theory—and the sociology of immi- Citizenship entails a tension between inclusion gration and integration—often presented as an and exclusion. In the Western tradition, citi- analysis of empirical conditions. zenship was born in the Athenian city-state, Finally, some caveats. We focus on immi- a participatory model in which political en- grants in industrialized states, in particular in gagement in a male-only public sphere was North America and Western Europe, leaving the highest form of activity (Aristotle 1992, citizenship and immigration within the global Dynneson 2001, Heater 2004). This con- South outside our purview. We use the words ception of citizenship restricted participation, “immigration” and “immigrant” because they excluding women, those without property, are common in U.S. studies of migration, but slaves, and newcomers to Athens (Heater 2004, we recognize that these terms connote a sense Pocock 1995). of permanent settlement that might not oc- An alternate Western tradition, developed cur. They also obscure the motivations of mi- from Romans’ need to incorporate disparate gration (political upheaval, economic needs, peoples within the empire, resulted in citi- family reunification, etc.) and immigrants’ zenship as a juridical concept of legal status, particular status (undocumented, temporary in which the citizen is a subject of a state or permanent legal resident, refugee, asylum (Dynesson 2001). During the Enlightenment, seeker, etc.). We touch on some possible reper- justification of subjecthood led to Lockean no- cussions of status differences, but space con- tions of consent and contract, opening the way straints limit our ability to flesh out fully the to liberalism’s language of individual rights, a impact of large numbers of undocumented eco- central part of contemporary citizenship. The nomic migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees in extension of rights language in the twentieth North America and Europe on the meaning and century produced ideals of inalienable human practices of citizenship. We further limit our- rights, although as Arendt’s
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