Beyond National Citizenship: Turkish Immigrants and the (RE)Construction of Citizenship in Germany

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a relational perspective on citizenship that captures the meanings and practices of citizenship, and their geographies in the contemporary period of accelerated and globalized movement of people across national boundaries. A relational perspective makes it possible to tease out both the complex articulations of state and civil society in the construction of citizenship, and the intricate local, national and transnational interconnections shaping contemporary state conceptions and social practices of citizenship. Using Turkish immigration to Germany as a case study, we examine the complex negotiations between state and civil society in the (re)construction of German citizenship law, paying particular attention to the role of immigrant institutions in this process. Drawing on an ethnography of Turkish immigrants' social practice of citizenship in Duisburg Marxloh, we show that they simultaneously engage with multiple states and public spheres to express their identities, and confront exclusions and discrimination at multiple scales.