Practicing Citizenship and Heterogeneous Nationhood : Naturalizations in Swiss Municipalities

Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2008 Practicing citizenship and heterogeneous nationhood : naturalizations in Swiss municipalities Helbling, Marc Abstract: Switzerland could well have the most peculiar naturalisation system in the world. Whereas in most countries citizenship attribution is regulated by the central state, each municipality of Switzerland has the right to decide who can become a national citizen. By transcending formal citizenship models, the Swiss case thus casts citizenship politics in an entirely new light. This dissertation explores naturalisation processes from a comparative perspective, explaining why some Swiss municipalities pursue more restrictive citizenship policies than others. Through quantitative and qualitative data, this study shows how negotiation processes between political actors produce a large variety of local citizenship models. Integrating Bourdieu’s political sociology, the theoretical framework innovatively combines symbolic and material aspects of naturalisations and underlines the production processes of ethnicity. Die Schweiz hat wahrscheinlich eines der aussergewöhnlichsten Einbürgerungssysteme der Welt. Während in den meis- ten Staaten die Erteilung der Staatsbürgerschaft zentral auf staatlicher Ebene reguliert wird, kann jede Schweizer Gemeinde selber entscheiden wer Bürger oder Bürgerin werden kann. Der Fall Schweiz erlaubt uns über formale nationale Staatbürgermodelle hinauszugehen und Staatsbürgerpolitik aus neuen Per- spektiven zu beleuchten. Diese Dissertation untersucht Einbürgerungspolitik in vergleichender Weise und zeigt auf wieso gewisse Gemeinden eine restriktivere Staatbürgerpolitik verfolgen als andere. Mit Hilfe quantitativer und qualitativer Daten zeigt diese Studie wie Aushandlungsprozesse zwischen politischen Akteuren eine Reihe von unterschiedlichen lokalen Staatsbürgermodellen zur Folge hat. Auf der Basis von Bourdieu’s politischer Soziologie kombiniert der theoretische Rahmen auf innovative Weise die sym- bolischen und materiellen Aspekte von Einbürgerungen und hebt die Produktionsprozesse von Ethnizität hervor. Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-163758 Dissertation Published Version Originally published at: Helbling, Marc. Practicing citizenship and heterogeneous nationhood : naturalizations in Swiss municipalities. 2008, University of Zurich, Faculty of Arts. Practicing Citizenship and Heterogeneous Nationhood. Naturalizations in Swiss Municipalities Thesis presented to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Zurich for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Marc Helbling of Jona / SG Accepted in the summer semester 2007 on the recommendation Prof. Dr. Hanspeter Kriesi and Prof. Dr. Rogers Brubaker Zurich, 2008 To Charlotte and my parents ii iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments v 1. Politics of Citizenship 1 2. From Citizenship to National Self-Understanding 17 3. Nation as a Political Field 41 4. Explaining Rejection Rates 67 5. Comparing Local Citizenship Models 89 6. Four Naturalization Fields 121 7. Local Social Influence Networks 149 8. Contingent Citizenship Politics 167 Annex 177 References 187 iv v Acknowledgments I wish to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation, which generously financed this project for three years (Project-Nr. 404040-101055; from December 2003 to January 2007). Among other things, this funding allowed me to engage two student-assistants for one year. Without the help of Sandra Egli and Silvia Matter I would not have been able to prepare 14 case studies and to conduct over 180 interviews. Both of them have proved to be serious field workers and critical researchers. I want to express my gratitude to Hanspeter Kriesi who supervised my work from the very beginning to the very end: He provided useful advice for the design of the study and the data collection. His comments on early papers, draft chapters and the first version of my dissertation helped me clean up my arguments and improve the presentation of my data. I am also indebted to a number of readers who commented on draft chapters or papers that have been included in this dissertation. In alphabetical order they are Sandra Egli, Philip Gorski, Nicole Hala, Andreas Koller, Silvia Matter, Guido Schwellnus, Hwa-ji Shin, Florian Smutny, Nenad Stojanovic, Jörg Stolz, Vibha Pingle, Ashutosh Varshney, Andreas Wimmer and Ludwig Zurbriggen. Marc Helbling Zurich, January 30, 2007 vi vii Chapter 1 Politics of Citizenship On March 13, 2000, the following headline appeared in The New York Times: “A Swiss Town Votes to Reject Dozens of Would-Be Citizens.” What followed in the article must have sounded very odd to the non-Swiss reader: “Provided with information about an applicant’s salary, tax status, background and hobbies, voters in an industrial suburb of Lucerne decided that only four families, all of Italian origin, were suitable to become Swiss—8 individuals out of a total of 56. The rest, many from the former Yugoslavia, were voted down, most by con- siderable margins.” Indeed, the way one gets a passport in Switzerland is very different from the procedures in other countries. To our knowledge, Switzerland is the only nation-state in the world where naturalizations happen at the local level. Every municipality, be it a town of 100,000 or a village of 400 inhabitants, is accorded the right to decide who can become a Swiss citizen. As the regulations on the national and cantonal (sub-national) levels are very sparse, each political local entity decides according to which formal procedure and criteria its alien residents are naturalized. ‘Popular votes’ are only one possible form of decision-making procedure—but the most controversial one, leading time and again to violent political debates and to a great deal of astonishment beyond Swiss borders. Given the high degree of autonomy possessed by municipalities in this policy field, the naturalization-procedures, the applied criteria, and con- sequently the ratio of rejected candidates vary greatly from one municipality to another. The main goal of this study is to explore these municipal naturalization procedures and to demonstrate that local political struggles leading to specific national self-understandings ex- plain why some municipalities pursue a more restrictive naturalization policy than others. Before we lay out our arguments in more detail, however, this first chapter will present the peculiarities of municipal naturalization procedures in Switzerland and raise the question of how the case of Switzerland’s local naturalizations enables us to make a more general contri- bution to the study of citizenship and nationalism. 1 What is to be explored? A Swiss is not only a citizen of his or her country but also of a canton (sub-national state) and of a municipality. Nowadays, due to increased mobility, most Swiss are no longer citizens of the municipalities where they live but of a municipality from which their families originate. It also happens (rather rarely) that Swiss citizens apply for local citizenship in their new home- municipality. The singularity of local citizenship is partly a relic of former times when each town and village was responsible for taking care of its poor and when only citizens (and not the inhabitants) of a municipality were allowed to participate in local politics. Already in 1551, the Diet1 of the Swiss Confederation required that every municipality nourish and lodge its poor (Simon-Muscheid 2002: 508-509). It was therefore in the interest of every municipality to control access to local citizenship and to send beggars and other people in need back to their home-municipalities (Kleger and d’Amato 1995: 260; Gruner 1968: 29-31). The way political rights were attributed at the local level changed when the modern Swiss federal state was founded in 1848. The first constitution held that each Swiss who moves to a new canton is accorded full civic rights after two years of residence. From 1874 on, all Swiss obtained local and cantonal political rights after three months of residence in a new canton (Aargast 2004: 53). Nowadays, a Swiss immediately profits from the political rights of his or her new home-municipality. In other words, the ‘municipality of citizens’ ceded political competencies and other responsibilities to the ‘municipality of inhabitants’. As for the question of poor relief, in most cantons the situation changed only in the second half of the 20th century. In the aftermath of the First World War, it was more and more common that local authorities also took care of Swiss who were living in, but were not citizens of, their municipalities. Only in 1975, however, did the Swiss Confederation obligate municipalities to sup- port all Swiss who are in need and live on their territories (Argast 2004: 54). Today, the federal constitution stipulates that the cantons are responsible in the domain of poor relief (Cat- tacin and Tattini 2002: 826). While some cantons are exclusively responsible in this policy field, many cantons delegate the financing and organization of benefit payments and poor relief of local residents to their municipalities. From the foundation of the modern Swiss state in 1848 until 1874, the federal state had no competences for establishing citizenship regulations. The federal constitution specified only that citizens of a canton who were at the same time citizens of a municipality were also

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