ABSTRACT
Having arrived at the end of our study, we hope to have achieved two aims: on the one hand, our intention was to shed some light on what is going on when alien residents are naturalised in Switzerland, and to better understand why some municipalities pursue a more restrictive citizenship policy than others. On the other hand, we sought to make a more general contribution to the study of citizenship and nationalism and more specifically to the debate about the social construction of nations. Today, most researchers in this field agree that nations and ethnic groups are not fixed and bounded entities, but rather contingent and fluent. Despite this wide consent, the scholarly debate is far from resolved. Do constructivists believe that there are no such things as national and ethnic groups? Are cultural group characteristics and identities completely open to free choice? Our theoretical arguments and empirical results should have made it clear that the answer to the second question is clearly ‘no’. As for the first question, we have argued that nations and ethnic groups are neither a matter of essential commonality nor a matter of free‐flowing constructions. What are nations and ethnic groups then? In this concluding chapter we will summarise our main results and discuss to what extent our project on local citizenship politics in Switzerland has helped us find an answer to this question.
