INTRODUCTION

Having explored the themes of historical variation and contemporary continuity and change in a broad comparative sweep, the next set of chapters delves more deeply into individual cases. This chapter focuses on the five countries that liberalized their citizenship policies in the 1990s and especially in the early 2000s. It seeks to understand the political dynamics that can account for the changes that took place, by highlighting both similarities and differences. The findings from this more in-depth analysis of these five cases support the general argument developed in Chapter 3, as they show that the various international and domestic pressures for liberalization were able to result in institutional change – in the form of a new citizenship law – because of the absence of a significant far right party or organized movement to channel the latently anti-immigrant sentiment that exists in these societies.

The chapter is organized as follows: the next five sections present “mini-case studies” of Sweden, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Portugal – organized roughly in chronological order based on when the liberalization took place – with the objective of specifying the nature of the recent citizenship reform and describing the political process that led to it. Following the general methodological technique of “structured, focused comparisons,” each section highlights in particular the effect of the demographic situation in each country, the role of the ideological orientation of political parties in government, and the main actors and forces that supported the change.