In this chapter, I unpack the rationalization for instrumental citizenship by distinguishing between Greek and Roman ways of approaching the concept. Explaining the rise of investment migration around the world is best handled using the Roman ideal, focusing on the status of citizenship as a creature of legal individualism, rather than the participatory dimension of the Greek conception.

Populism is the most visible and controversial political form in which majority nationalism expresses itself in Western societies. A key question is whether populism is commensurable with, or even injects new life into (atrophying) liberal democracies. This chapter answers this question in the negative, because of populism’s inherent illiberalism and anti-pluralism that undermine the “liberal” pillar of liberal democracy, and thus pose a threat to democracy itself. When trying to explain its rise, the unresolved challenge is to calibrate economic and cultural factors. On the one hand, neoliberal globalization’s attack on lower middle-class prosperity and aspirations seems to be a principal cause of the populist upheaval in the West. On the other hand, this populism perceives itself less as a socioeconomic than a cultural cause, mobilizing rooted majority identity against cosmopolitan elites and immigrants particularly. The move onto the cultural terrain, and adoption of the majority–minority binary, conceals the neoliberal demolition of the social rights of all. Preempting populism by cultural majority rights is not only tangential to some of its deeper sources but it also underestimates the capacity of existing legal-political arrangements to deal with cultural majority claims.

Chapter 4 situates changing immigration and citizenship policies within a larger crisis of liberalism. I defend Francis Fukuyama`s (1989) much-ridiculed claim that the “liberal idea” (yet not practice) is without competitor today. However, internal deficiencies of “liberal meritocratic capitalism” (Milanovic 2019), most importantly the elite-generating and -insulating principle of meritocracy itself, will continue to feed a populist challenge. This challenge, paradoxically, is fought more on the cultural than the economic terrain, and liberals are well-advised not to follow the populists into it too quickly. I close with the question what a “liberal” immigration and citizenship policy, unimpeded by the “nexus”, might look like, and the answer is: not much different from the policies that are in place today.

Chapter 2 lays out the dual thrust of immigration policy in the neoliberal era, which is to “court” high-skilled immigrants and to “fend off” all sorts of presumably (but not legally) low-skilled migrants, including family migrants. But the heart of the chapter examines the role of immigration in the populist storm. While immigration has been central to both Brexit and Trump, it has been central in different ways. Brexit, though driven by hostility to large-scale intra-EU migration, does not challenge the structure of (neo)liberal immigration policy—it will even make British policy more universalistic because cleansed of favoritism for other Europeans. By contrast, Trump`s immigration policy breaks with the “antipopulist norm” that Gary Freeman, in a classic paper (1995), held constitutive of a liberal immigration policy. Germany during and after the 2015 Syrian Refugee Crisis is an interesting negative case of stubbornly holding liberal course, though inadvertently fueling populism at home and abroad.

Chapter 1 maps the new nationalism that dramatically burst into the scene in 2016. It includes a detailed account of neoliberalism, which needs to be distinguished and set apart from liberalism. While some, like Michael Mann (2013: ch.6), subscribe to a narrow view of neoliberalism as economic policy that is specific to the “Anglos” and may have long passed its peak, I take it to be a Pan-Western governing and society-making rationale of deeply transformative reach. Neoliberalism thus understood provides the context of the new nationalism, which arises both in opposition to it but, in a statist variant, may also be complementary to neoliberalism or even constituted by it. The constitutive nexus with its “neoliberal nationalism” proper points to a novel phenomenon on the nations and nationalism map that has so far not received the attention that it deserves.

Chapter 3 gathers a variety of restrictive trends in the acquisition and loss of citizenship under the umbrella of “earned citizenship”, which is not a “right”, as in the liberal past, but “privilege”. “More difficult to get” and “easier to lose” are complementary sides of the same neoliberal-cum-nationalist logic of making citizenship more exclusive and conditional on the immigrant`s individual behavior and desert. Being neoliberal and nationalist in tandem, earned citizenship is the clearest expression of a neoliberal nationalism. Earned citizenship`s third element, to be “less in value”, seems to contradict the fact that a rich society`s “citizenship premium” (Milanovic 2016) has never been bigger than today. However, the same citizenship that re-nationalizing states have claimed to strengthen by making it more selective, has become internally devalued through its infiltration by immigration law and a neoliberal welfare-to-workfare devolution.

This article reviews multiculturalism theories and policies.It is argued that “interculturalism” and “diversity,” often seen as follow-up notions to an increasingly discredited multiculturalism, differ from the latter in eschewing the idea of justice for historically wronged minorities.After the retreat, only liberal and individual-centered conceptions of multiculturalism are viable.

Canada, diversity, Europe, interculturalism, liberalism, multiculturalism

Christian Joppke holds a Chair in Sociology at the University of Bern.He is also a recurrent visiting professor in the Nationalism Studies Program at Central European University in Budapest, and an honorary professor in the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University. He is the author of Is Multiculturalism Dead? (2017).