Diversity and Nationality: Contemporary Developments in Five European Citizenship Regimes

Abstract

This chapter shares the core focus of the book in considering some key contemporary social and political developments relating to cultural diversity in five EU states. These span topics of naturalization processes, anti-discrimination measures and strategies for political participation, as well as civic integrationist and educational measures (Triandafyllidou et al., 2011). By identifying some of the most salient changes, and accepting that in different countries these may turn on different cases, the chapter offers a theoretically driven attempt to conceptualize various European states from the point of view of multiculturalism. This helps us to understand the alleged ‘retreat’ of multiculturalism as well as advances in multiculturalism, and so enables us to evaluate in a non-quantitative way the extent and manner in which a state or polity is and is not multiculturalist. This is assisted by tabular representations marking out the core theoretical criteria of multiculturalist and non-multiculturalist modes of integration, before these criteria are tested against contemporary developments in existing cases.KeywordsPolitical OrientationNational IdentityCivil Society ActorEuropean RegimeFlemish GovernmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.