Practising Citizenship and Heterogeneous Nationhood IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion) IMISCOE is a Network of Excellence uniting over 500 researchers from various institutes that specialise in migration studies across Europe. Networks of Excel- lence are cooperative research ventures that were created by the European Commission to help overcome the fragmentation of international studies. They amass a crucial source of knowledge and expertise to help inform European leadership today. Since its foundation in 2004, IMISCOE has advanced an integrated, multidis- ciplinary and globally comparative research programme to address the themes specified in its name, short for: International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe. IMISCOE members come from all branches of the eco- nomic and social sciences, the humanities and law. 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Practising Citizenship and Heterogeneous Nationhood Naturalisations in Swiss Municipalities Marc Helbling IMISCOE Dissertations Cover design: Studio Jan de Boer BNO, Amsterdam Layout: The DocWorkers, Almere ISBN 978 90 8964 034 5 NUR 741 / 763 © Marc Helbling/Amsterdam University Press, 2008 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright re- served above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or in- troduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. To Charlotte and my parents Table of Contents Acknowledgments 9 1 Politics of Citizenship 11 1.1 What is to be explored? 12 1.2 Why explore local naturalisation politics? 17 1.3 Culture and power: how to explain local naturalisation politics 22 2 From Citizenship to National Self-Understanding 27 2.1 What is citizenship? 27 2.2 Becoming a new member: from local to national citizenship 28 2.3 Two modes of social closure: immigration policy and national citizenship 31 2.4 A new form of political community: popular sovereignty, equality and self-determination 33 2.5 Citizenship and national self-understanding: analytical ambiguities 41 2.6 Citizenship as a contested instrument of social closure 45 2.7 Conclusion 47 3 Nation as a Political Field 49 3.1 From the practice of citizenship to the logic of practice 49 3.2 Rethinking the social construction of nations 51 3.3 The actors’ perceptions and categorisations 57 3.4 Limited contestations 62 3.5 The political field and cultural compromise 64 3.6 Empirical implications: the design of the study 67 4 Explaining Rejection Rates 75 4.1 A first glimpse at rejected applications 75 4.2 Competing explanations 78 4.3 What is to be explained: the rejection rate 82 4.4 Operationalisation of the independent variables 85 8 PRACTISING CITIZENSHIP AND HETEROGENEOUS NATIONHOOD 4.5 Results 87 4.6 External influences I 92 5 Comparing Local Citizenship Models 95 5.1 Introduction 95 5.2 Understandings of citizenship 96 5.3 Structure and influence 107 5.4 External influences II 119 6 Four Naturalisation Fields 123 6.1 Introduction 123 6.2 Bernhigh and Bernlow 126 6.3 Aargauhigh and Aargaulow 138 6.4 Controversies and occurrences 146 7 Local Social Influence Networks 149 7.1 Introduction 149 7.2 How to explain individual understandings of citizenship: classic approaches 150 7.3 Social influence and norm formation 157 7.4 Explanatory model and results 160 7.6 Conclusion 164 8 Contingent Citizenship Politics 167 8.1 Local struggles over cultural boundaries 167 8.2 Towards a sociology of citizenship and nationalism 170 8.3 Contingent naturalisation politics: arbitrary decisions 174 Notes 177 Annex Questionnaire for Interviews with Local Politicians 185 1. Personal attitudes 185 2 Influence and contacts 189 3 Swiss identity and foreigners 191 4 General questions 194 References 197 Acknowledgments First of all, I would like to emphasise that it was a particular privilege to work together with Hanspeter Kriesi who supervised my work from the very beginning to the very end. Having had different academic backgrounds at the moment we started to work together, we have not always had the same ideas on how the social world can be understood. This is, however, the best thing that can ever happen to a researcher – challenging one’s own perspectives and learning from other research traditions. His unresting will to improve the work of his doctoral stu- dents and his openness to new ideas helped me a lot to clean up my ar- guments. His enthusiasm to make the world we live in more compre- hensible has attracted a lot of people and has united a big crowd of very interesting researchers around him. Thus, I have not only had the opportunity to meet a lot of inspiring colleagues in Zurich, but also to make many good friends. Moreover, I also want to express my grati- tude to Rogers Brubaker and Simon Hug, who were part of my disser- tation committee and provided many helpful comments and valuable suggestions. I wish to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation, which gener- ously 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 fourteen case studies and to conduct over 180 in- terviews. Both of them have proved to be serious field-workers and cri- tical researchers. The various parts of this book have benefited from presentations and discussions at different conferences and workshops. I have had several opportunities to discuss my work with my colleagues at internal work- shops at the Center for Comparative and International Studies in Zur- ich. It always was particularly challenging for me to present my disser- tation topic to audiences outside of Switzerland, as I had to find a way to convince people that the awkward Swiss naturalisation system could also be of interest for a broader audience that is interested in citizen- ship politics. I particularly remember stimulating discussions at a sum- mer school course on Ethnicity and Nationalism organised by Ashu- 10 PRACTISING CITIZENSHIP AND HETEROGENEOUS NATIONHOOD tosh Varshney at the Central European University in Budapest. During my stay as a visiting scholar at New York University, I found it a parti- cular privilege and very inspiring to present my dissertation at a work- shop of the Center for European Studies at NYU and the Contentious Politics workshop organised by Charles Tilly at Columbia University. Moreover, I was twice invited for conferences in Turin and Edinburgh organised by the IMISCOE Network that brought me together with many interesting researchers who work in my field. I like to thank Maarten Vink who invited me for a very inspiring NORFACE work- shop in Maastricht and thereby gave me the opportunity to meet some of the leading scholars in citizenship and immigration studies. I am also indebted to a number of readers who commented on draft chapters or papers that have been included in this dissertation. In al- phabetical order, they are Sandra Egli, Philip Gorski, Nicole Hala, An- dreas Koller, Silvia Matter, Guido Schwellnus, Hwa-ji Shin, Florian Smutny, Nenad Stojanovic, Jo¨rg Stolz, Vibha Pingle, Ashutosh Varsh- ney, Andreas Wimmer and Ludwig Zurbriggen. Finally, I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers for useful suggestions for revision. Marc Helbling Zurich, May 2008 1 Politics of Citizenship On 13 March 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 Lu- cerne 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 considerable margins (Olson 2000). 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 naturalisations happen at the local level.