Migration, citizenship and race in Europe: Between incorporation and exclusion

The article examines four recent studies, which represent the scholarly divisions in and the strengths and the weakness of current research on migration, citizenship and race in Europe and, to a lesser degree, the USA. Organising the review around three themes - the causes of post-war migration, integration and race, and the relationship between citizenship and state sovereignty, it reviews the studies in the context of broader debates about postnational citizenship, the decline of state sovereignty and the role of theory in the study of citizenship. It argues that the studies of postnationalism (Jacobson) and race and racism (Solomos & Back) suffer from faults common to macro-sociological approaches and unfocused attempts to blend normative theory and causal explanation, while the studies of integration (Favell) and citizenship, immigration and the state (Joppke) are exemplars of approaches that successfully pair an interest in theory with detailed causal analysis. The article concludes by suggesting that the debate between `nationalists' and `postnationalists' can now be transcended. Postnationalism, it concludes, contains two theses, not one: an empirical and a causal. The empirical thesis - that universal personhood has decoupled rights and identity - is incontrovertible; the causal - that this development resulted from the 'internationalisation' and 'universalisation' of human rights legislation and discourse - is, in the light of Joppke's and other's research, false. The sources of third-country nationals' social and economic status, the foundations of the distinction between rights and identity, are domestic.