Remaking Citizenship In Multicultural Europe

This book offers a ground-breaking analysis of how women's movements have been remaking citizenship in multicultural Europe. Presenting the findings of a large scale, multi-disciplinary cross-national feminist research project, FEMCIT, it develops an expanded, multi-dimensional understanding of citizenship as practice and experience.

This title was first published in 2000: This text deals with two intertwined dimensions of multicultural citizenship of the European Union. It studies the theoretical debate over how best to reconcile multiculturalism, citizenship and the need for collective identity at the European Union (EU) level by comparing EU citizenship with cultural citizenship and multicultural studies in the United States. In addition to this, through the study of EU documents, the author contends that there exists such a thing as policies of multicultural citizenship at the European Union level. He then goes on to analyze their key aspects, such as the pursuit of symbolic forms of multiculturalism and the arguments to support affirmative action policies for women. The text also examines the steps taken by certain EU institutions towards creating European identity and improving awareness of citizenship and cultural heritage, while meeting the test of subsidiarity. The author concludes that there are competing discourses in EU institutions concerning the best model for EU citizenship. Among other concepts, they construe multiculturalism and transnationalism as contested and sometimes opposing interpretations of citizenship. The text goes on to reveal a lack of substantive connection between EU citizenship and identity in the European Union, as well as the artificiality of EU attempts to build it anew. It concludes that a plurality of cultural constructions of EU citizenship, within the wider framework of liberal culturalism, may be a viable model of EU citizenship.

From international press coverage of the French government’s attempt to prevent Muslims from wearing headscarves to terrorist attacks in Madrid and the United States, questions of cultural identity and pluralism are at the center of the world’s most urgent events and debates. Presenting an unprecedented wealth of empirical research garnered during ten years of a cross-cultural project, Contested Citizenship addresses these fundamental issues by comparing collective actions by migrants, xenophobes, and antiracists in Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Revealing striking cross-national differences in how immigration and diversity are contended by different national governments, these authors find that how citizenship is constructed is the key variable defining the experience of Europe’s immigrant populations. Contested Citizenship provides nuanced policy recommendations and challenges the truism that multiculturalism is always good for immigrants. Even in an age of European integration and globalization, the state remains a critical actor in determining what points of view are sensible and realistic—and legitimate—in society. Ruud Koopmans is professor of sociology at Free University, Amsterdam. Paul Statham is reader in political communications at the University of Leeds. Marco Giugni is a researcher and teacher of political science at the University of Geneva. Florence Passy is assistant professor of political science at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging pushes debates about citizenship and feminist politics in new directions, challenging us to think 'beyond citizenship', and to engage in feminist re-theorizations of the experience and politics of belonging.

Whilst the politics of reproduction have been at the heart of feminist struggles for over a century and a half, their analysis has not yet come to occupy a central place in the interdisciplinary study of citizenship. This volume takes up the challenge posed by Bryan Turner, when he noted "the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship" (2008), and offers the first major global collection of work exploring this nexus of practices and political contestations. The book brings together citizenship scholars from across Europe, the Americas, and Australia to develop feminist and queer analyses of the relationship between citizenship and reproduction, and to explore the ways in which citizenship is reproduced. Extending the foundational work of feminist political theorists and sociologists who have interrogated the public/private dichotomy on which traditional civic republican and liberal understandings of citizenship rest, the contributors examine the biological, sexual, and technological realities of natality, and the social realities of the intimate intergenerational material and affective labour that are generative of citizens, and that serve to reproduce membership of, and belonging to, states, nations, societies, and thus of "citizenship" itself. This book was published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

This book analyses the changing face of work, gender equality and citizenship in Europe. Drawing on in-depth research conducted in nine different countries, it focuses on the discourses, social relations and political processes that surround paid domestic labour. In doing so, it rethinks the vital relationship between this kind of employment, the formal and informal citizenship of migrant workers and their employers, and the cultural and political value of gender equality. Approaching these as fluid, complex and interrelated phenomena that change according to local context, it will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, geographers, anthropologists and gender studies scholars.

The legal regulation of gender and sexuality has undergone dramatic changes throughout Europe in the last 40 years and this has shaped what it means to be a European citizen. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary research, this book uses the discourses around current European sexual politics as an entry point to interrogate how, and with what effect, the EU and its Member States harness issues of gender and sexuality to support issues of higher political importance. It takes recent and ongoing political debates and legislative changes around prostitution and sexual assault as a focus. Using four national case studies: Poland, Germany, Sweden and Italy it illuminates how the EU’s desire for increased harmonisation across the Union around gender and sexuality norms and values operates differently and with specific effects across Member States. The book’s structure provides a detailed map of how and why contemporary European sexual politics is changing, and how this contributes to establishing European norms and values in developments in law and policy around prostitution and sexual assault. By examining how and why the EU and its Member States implement their policies in these two policy areas we can begin to illuminate how contemporary European sexual politics serve some groups’ interests while marginalizing ‘Others’.