Immigration and Membership Politics in Western Europe

Why are traditional nation-states newly defining membership and belonging? In the twenty-first century, several Western European states have attached obligatory civic-integration requirements as conditions for citizenship and residence, which include promoting language proficiency, country knowledge, and value commitments for immigrants. This book examines civic-integration-policy adoption and adaptation through both medium-N analysis and three paired comparisons to argue that while there is convergence in instruments, there is also significant divergence in policy purpose, design, and outcomes. To explain this variation, this book focuses on the continuing, dynamic interaction of institutional path dependency and party politics. Through paired comparisons of Austria and Denmark, France and the Netherlands, and Germany and the United Kingdom, this book illustrates how variations in these factors as well as a variety of causal processes produce divergent civic-integration-policy strategies that, ultimately, preserve and anchor national understandings of membership."