Ethnic and civic dealings with newcomers: naturalization policies and practices in twenty-six immigration countries

Abstract

Over the last decade or so, the comparative study of nationalism has produced a large number of cogent critiques of classifying nations according to how ethnic or civic they are. In fact, these critiques have been so convincing that many scholars today seem to agree that any mention of the words ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ is unwarranted. This is unfortunate, because the distinction still offers a useful heuristic device to compare and classify different nation-building practices. This article analyses naturalization policies in twenty-six Western immigrant-receiving democracies in order to show that the distinction constitutes a valuable analytical tool to explore how different countries deal with newcomers. The naturalization policy index developed in this article proves to have a high degree of face validity, to be a good predictor of actual naturalization practices, and to match up well with previous classifications of ethnic and civic nation-building practices.

Keywords:

• Ethnic-civic
• nation-building
• immigration
• naturalization policy
• citizenship
• inclusion

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Zsuzsa Csergo, Caroline Duvieusart-Déry, Rémi Léger, Harris Mylonas, and two anonymous reviewers of Ethnic and Racial Studies for their many valuable comments on previous drafts of this paper. Any remaining errors are, of course, mine.

Notes

1. Even though Kohn's typology can be clearly traced back to Meinecke's distinction, it would be wrong to suggest that the two are identical. As Tim Nieguth (1999, p. 163) points out, one of the most important differences is that the concept of ethnicity, which is hardly of any relevance in Meinecke's typology, is central in Kohn's work.

2. Obviously, there are several membership requirements – such as culture, religion, or language – that in terms of the difficulty of acquisition fall in between adherence to political values and (perceived) ancestry. I discuss ways to deal with these grey areas in Sections 2.2 and 3.

3. In order to avoid the normative association, one might propose alternative terms to describe the distinction. However, I am not convinced that the alternatives that are sometimes suggested – such as inclusive and exclusive nationalism, political and cultural nationalism, or liberal and illiberal nationalism – are less normatively laden than the original terms.

4. Bernard Peters (2002, p. 6) criticizes studies that apply the distinction to nation-building policies, because, so he argues, they often take policies ‘as indicators of evidence for the character of the respective national identities’. For the sake of clarity, I wish to emphasize that no such assumption is made here. Because I share the critique that it is difficult to apply the distinction unproblematically to national identities or ‘nations’, I use it instead to categorize nation-building policies.

5. Theoretically, the sample of this study could be extended to include countries such as Iceland, Malta, the Baltic states, or Central European countries such as Bulgaria and Romania. For reasons of data availability, however, I limit the analysis to these twenty-six cases.

6. Obviously, in each of these countries there are other groups of people – besides immigrants and potential immigrants – that are included or excluded by state policies, such as national minorities and indigenous peoples. Even though exploring how these groups are included or excluded by state policies poses an interesting research agenda, I limit myself in this article to policies directed at immigrants. The most important reason is that national minorities and indigenous peoples do not aspire to become members of the majority nation. In other words, if the goal is to establish how and to what extent national policies exclude or include others from membership, it makes sense to focus on those people that actively try to achieve that membership.

7. As Howard (2009, pp. 20–2) points out, even citizenship laws that are based on the ius soli principle have some elements of the ius sanguinis. For example, a child from Australian parents who was born and raised in another country can use the ‘blood law’ to be granted naturalization upon application. I assign a score of 0 to those countries that grant citizenship to the children of non-citizens who are born within their borders.

8. Most countries explicitly refer to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) in specifying how well applicants should understand the language in order to pass the test. I classify a level of A2 or lower as ‘easy’, of B1 as ‘medium’, and B2 or higher as ‘difficult’.

9. Some countries’ self-declared ‘citizenship test’ is in fact nothing more than a language test. I classify such countries as having a language but not a citizenship test.

10. A reliability analysis yields a Cronbach's Alpha of .669, which suggests these indicators can be safely combined into one index. Moreover, deleting any of the components of the index does not improve the fit (in fact, the Cronbach's Alpha only increases slightly to .720 if one deletes the citizenship test indicator, and decreases quite significantly after deleting any of the other indicators).

11. One could argue, however, that in the Czech Republic the requirement of clean criminal records has been used as a way to exclude members of the Roma population, where every Roma individual was stripped of Czech citizenship after the Velvet Divorce in 1993 (Šiklová and Miklušáková 1998). The naturalization policy index of this study is unable to account for this idiosyncrasy.

12. Even though it is not readily clear what accounts for the outlying position of Ireland, we can speculate about at least two possible explanations. First, since Ireland is a relatively young immigration country (its annual inflow of immigrants has quadrupled from 1998 to 2007, and it has only had a positive net migration rate since 1995), a comparatively large proportion of its foreign population consists of immigrants who do not meet the residency requirement for naturalization, which obviously decreases the naturalization rate. Second, and related to this point, it could be argued that the naturalization policy of Ireland reflects its modest experience as an immigrant-receiving country, and that in future years, Ireland will change some of its naturalization policies in a more ethnic direction. In fact, the Irish government is preparing to implement a language test as part of the naturalization requirements (O'Brien and Mac Cormaic 2007).

13. The only purpose of this exercise is to acquire a tentative idea of the external validity of the naturalization index. Considering that the measurements I compare my index with have been done at different points in time and with different tools (and my index only captures current naturalization policies), I am merely looking for rough similarities.

14. It would have been interesting to compare my index to the data of Ceobanu and Escandell (2008) as well, but unfortunately they do not report raw data (and instead only the result of bivariate and multivariate analyses). However, it is unlikely that such a comparison would have yielded significantly different results, since Ceobanu and Escandell (2008) rely on the same data source as Jones and Smith (2001).