ABSTRACT
Introduction In the modern world, membership in a territorial state is usually regulated by nationally defined rules of citizenship. In some of the literature on citizenship, a trend is detected towards – or a concept is prescribed in terms of – some version of ‘multicultural’ or ‘post-national’ citizenship (see Kymlicka 1995; Soysal 1994). But while layers of transnational or group rights of citizenship are introduced and the European Union (EU) established its own Union citizenship, the fact remains that individual rights and nation-states are still the cornerstones of membership rules in nation-states – neither group rights nor EU or other forms of trans-or post-national citizenship are in the process of – or meant to be – replacing national citizenship (see Joppke 1999; Koslowski 2000; Thränhardt 2003). However, national citizenship itself has effectively replaced other forms of membership rules in larger communities or the territorial state which were tied to the logic of group rights. As Tomas Hammar reminds us, the very concept of citizenship has religious roots, as in the pre-modern past it was closely connected to religion, i.e. membership in a religious community (Hammar 1990: 49-51). Hence, modern citizenship can be seen as one of the results of secularisation.1 But until today, in many countries national identity and the logic – if not code – of nationality are tied to cultural and in some cases (e.g. Poland, Ireland, Greece) explicitly religious criteria (see Bruce 2003; Mavrogordatos 2003). The wellknown argument by Rogers Brubaker (1992) about the role of ‘cultural idioms’ for citizenship can be linked to religious components of cultural and national identities. Finally, the current debates of Muslim integration in Western democracies or Turkey’s status as a membership candidate for the EU most vividly illustrate how religious arguments draw distinct dividing lines of access and membership. Yet very few studies in the field of comparative politics ask what role religion plays in the politics of immigration and the functioning of multicultural societies, and if they do, they tend to focus on the religious background of migrants rather than that of the host society and polity. This chapter attempts a more systematic analysis of the relationship between religious legacies of receiving countries of immigration and the politics of citizenship. Citizenship here is defined not in the general sense of certain rights
enjoyed by the status of a ‘citizen’, along with more universal rights, but in a stricter sense of formal membership rules which determine who is a member of a nation-state, i.e. nationality. In general we should expect religious legacies to somehow inform these modern concepts of membership in political communities. Hence, one of the central questions of this chapter is: does variation in the politics of citizenship correlate with cultural and religious variations, and to what extent can it be attributed to these differences within the world of Western democracies? One might hypothesise that cultural heritage in Western democracies (i.e. Catholicism versus Protestantism) is a significant predictor for variation in these policies, as has been found for other policy areas as well (Castles 1998; see also below). This, however, needs to be tested in comparison with other dimensions of the religious factor, in particular the institutional arrangement of church-state relationship and official recognition of organised religion, the degree of secularisation and also the existence and importance of religiously oriented political parties. For example, one recent study on state accommodation of Muslim religious practices in three Western European countries (the UK, France, Germany) argues that the inherited particularities of church-state relations can better explain a nation’s approach to Islam and the type of religious demands that Muslims have made than can the political resources of the Muslim communities, the political opportunity structures available to them or ideological factors such as a nation’s ideas on citizenship and nationality (Fetzer/Soper 2005). Other studies emphasise the importance of a Christian Democratic model of politics and policies (van Kersbergen 1995) which, by implication, means that a vigorous role of Christian Democratic parties in a nation’s politics should also affect the politics of citizenship. In light of this, the chapter tries to ‘map’ the patterns of religion with regard to the politics of citizenship and, having established the general patterns, asks which role particular religious factors play in shaping them. The chapter is built on the conceptual framework developed elsewhere with regard to 19 Western democracies, a group of countries characterised by a certain size (i.e. certain levels of internal variation), high levels of socio-economic development, stable democratic systems and a (Latin) Christian religious legacy (Minkenberg 2002, 2004).
