Multicultural citizenship within multination states

Abstract

In many western democracies today, there are calls to strengthen a sense of common citizenship as a way of building ‘social cohesion’ in increasingly diverse societies. Citizenship is to be promoted by, amongst other things, adding or strengthening citizenship education in schools, providing citizenship classes to immigrants, imposing new citizenship tests for naturalization, and holding citizenship ceremonies. In this article, I will examine this new citizenship agenda in the specific case of ‘multination’ states — that is, in states that have restructured themselves to accommodate significant sub-state nationalist movements, usually through some form of territorial devolution, consociational power-sharing, and/or official language status. What does it mean to promote a sense of common citizenship in multination states, and how does the new immigration-focused citizenship agenda relate to older debates on multinationalism? I will argue that in the particular context of multination states, these new citizenship agendas must promote a distinctly multinational conception of citizenship if they are to be fair and effective. But equally, we need to adapt familiar models of multinational citizenship to be more inclusive of immigrants. In short, if the citizenship agenda is to be effective, and to be fairly inclusive of both sub-state national groups and of immigrants, we need a more multinational conception of citizenship, and a more multicultural conception of multinationalism.

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