This is a well-written, rigorous, empirical contribution to scholarship on immigration and ethnic relations in post–World War II Europe. The study adds particular value through its grounded evaluation of basic assumptions concerning multiculturalism. Ruud Koopmans and colleagues coded political claims of migrant, extreme-right, and pro-migrant/anti-racist actors in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, as reported in a prominent newspaper in each country. These data inform the authors' assessment of whether migrant group makeup, national conceptions of citizenship, or supranational institutions drive the various actors' political behavior. The authors conclude that different national citizenship models best explain variations in political claims making. Postwar migration to Western Europe generates intense political conflict, according to the authors, because it raises questions about basic aspects of national sovereignty, including border control, citizenship attribution, and the principles of nationhood.
The authors make their case in seven chapters bracketed by an introduction and methodological appendix. The introduction develops a framework for understanding diverse approaches to national citizenship based on how each conception addresses individual integration and cultural diversity. The typology distinguishes, on one dimension, between ethnic and civic-territorial attribution of individual citizenship. The second dimension differentiates between cultural monist and cultural pluralist approaches to differential group rights. The two dimensions yield four ideal-typical conceptions of citizenship: segregationist (ethnic attribution of citizenship and a cultural pluralist approach to group rights), assimilationist (ethnic attribution of citizenship and a cultural monist approach to group rights), universalist (civic-territorial attribution of citizenship and a cultural monist approach to group rights), and multiculturalist (civic-territorial attribution of citizenship and a cultural pluralist approach to group rights). The authors integrate their typology into a set of conceptual political opportunity models, which explain political contention as a function of the dynamic interaction between institutions and claims making.
Chapter 1 develops empirical indicators for individual access and differential group rights and uses them to assess the evolution of the five countries' citizenship configurations. The authors find clear differences among the five countries: Germany and Switzerland are relatively assimilationist, France relatively universalist, the Netherlands relatively multiculturalist, and the UK between France and the Netherlands. Germany and Switzerland, in adopting and upholding more civic-territorial approaches over time, have reinforced the view that liberal states cannot justify alienating large numbers of permanent-resident migrants from the polity, according to the authors.
Chapter 2 investigates the relevance of national versus postnational claims making and finds that most collective actors in all five countries made demands in a national context and did not project their organizations and strategies beyond the nation-state level. In fact, combined data on all five countries during the 1990s indicate a slight decrease over time in postnational claims making.
Chapter 3 assesses whether host-country political opportunities or migrant backgrounds better explain contentious politics and claims making in the five countries. The chapter concludes that host-country citizenship regimes best explain the level and form of migrant claims. Although migrants have reacted to exclusionary citizenship and high barriers to political integration with resilient transnational politics, the authors find that the Dutch multicultural model also has stimulated durable homeland identities and active diaspora politics more than in Britain and France. This finding challenges empirically the normative theories of multiculturalism by showing that policies formally and symbolically offering equality to ethnic and religious groups can in fact deepen polarization along communal lines and reproduce “segregation on a distinctly unequal basis” (p. 246).
Chapter 4 evaluates the importance of migrant claims for special cultural and religious rights compared to other migrant claims, focusing specifically on the compatibility of Muslim cultural claims and liberal democracy. The authors claim that religion is a particularly resilient part of migrant culture and that Islam is exceptionally resistant to the designs of the liberal nation-state. This incompatibility, according to the authors, drives public controversies in Western Europe concerning migrants' cultural group demands. Chapter 5 examines the extreme Right's contentious politics in opposition to migrants. The authors find that the political space that host countries provide for expressing anti-migrant grievances best explains the nature of extreme-right claims making. Chapter 6 analyzes anti-racist and pro-migrant mobilization to determine whether altruism or political opportunism better explains this activity. The chapter shows that pro-migrant supporters in the host society are not simply altruistic, but that they mobilize around migrant issues because these contentious issues best capture the conceptions of inclusive citizenship they wish to champion. Chapter 7 summarizes the authors' argument and offers ideas for future related research. The authors provide a detailed explanation for their content-coding methodology and take on various issues related to their data-gathering techniques in the appendix.
Overall, the argument that political opportunity structures based on national conceptions of citizenship in the five Western European countries best explain claims making on issues of migration is compelling. However, the explanation in Chapter 4 for Islam's exceptional role in migrant claims making undermines their fundamental theoretical argument and highlights some underlying, untested assumptions that warrant investigation. If religious identity is resilient and stable, as the authors argue in Chapter 4, then can host- and home-country agents use institutional opportunities and claims making to influence it in the same way that political entrepreneurs work with other identities? If Muslim identity carries such weight in the authors' explanation of migrant mobilization in Western Europe, what does this imply about the role of Christian identity, whether in its secular or nonsecular form? Is religious identity a cultural superstructure limiting the extent to which the opportunity structures in a liberal democracy can alter behavior and shape immigrant integration patterns?
Evidence provided in Chapter 4 suggests that practical accommodations and corrective courses of action undertaken by the host state and society can even alter identity based on religious underpinnings, albeit over generations rather than months or years after policies are in place. The book points out that some of these host societies overcame their discriminatory biases toward their Jewish minorities after persecuting them for centuries. The fact that the UK has laws to prosecute people for blasphemy against Christianity but do not extend these laws to Islam (p. 157 and n. 8 in chap. 4) suggests some of the more civic territorially oriented and multiculturally tolerant liberal democracies have yet to dismantle discriminatory religious institutions. However, the critical case for hypotheses concerning the resilience and stability of religious identities in the liberal democracies of Western Europe might be France: Why in a state fitting the authors' universalist conception of citizenship do “mosques, minarets, and public calls to prayer readily become a public controversy and a French-style clash of cultures” (p. 156), but churches, steeples, and church bells do not?
The abovementioned issue notwithstanding, this book would add great value to graduate courses in comparative politics, political theory, and research methods. The authors engage major theoretical contributions on multiculturalism, social movements, immigrant politics, extremist politics, and immigration policy. They also explain links among theory, research design, data collection, and analysis clearly and effectively, and this will serve teachers well in helping students conceptualize original research. Using political claims analysis, the authors bridge the political-opportunity structure, resource mobilization, and framing strands of social movement theory and apply the derivative hypotheses effectively.
Opportunity models of collective action as conceived by John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, Douglas McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Hanspeter Kriesi et al., and others have focused on institutions, structures, and processes given a well-formulated set of goals and grievances, but they have not explained how groups adopt particular political claims over others. The framing approach to social movements (by William Gamson, David Snow et al., David Snow and Robert Benford, for example) emphasized the constructed nature of collective identities and the significance of discursive strategies, but they did not systematically evaluate why various discursive strategies succeed or fail. Ruud Koopmans et al. bridge these two strands of social movement theory by integrating discursive variables into a political opportunity model; they specify discursive and institutional variables by focusing on citizenship, national identity, and migrants in five Western European countries; they have systematically collected claims-making data and institutional information across time, and they use this information to test their hypotheses. In doing so, the authors not only advance our understanding of the emergence and success of social movements, but also provide a welcome example of how social scientists can design effective empirical analysis.
