Anti-immigrant politics along with institutional incorporation?

Abstract

The growth of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe over the last two decades is pushing towards the renationalizing of particular features of membership politics (Giugni 2006; White 1999; Vertovec and Peach 1997; Weil 2008; Body-Gendrot and de Wihtol de Wenden 2007; Delanty 2011). Yet, this renationalizing of membership, even when ideologically strong, is institutionally weak given the increased formalization of the EU level. And although the EU level is still thin compared to that of the national state, it is beginning to alter the underlying conditions, which have fed the articulation between citizenship and the national state (Baubock 2006). At its most formal, the institutional development of the European Union and the strengthening of the European Human Rights Court, push the question of political membership towards a kind of European universalism (Jacobson and Ruffer 2006; Rubenstein and Adler 2000). I prefer to think of it as a trend towards the denationalizing of European politics. This is a denationalizing that (a) is fed by the emergence of multiple actors, groups, and communities increasingly keen on broader notions of political membership and unwilling automatically to identify with a national state (Soysal 1997; Tunstall 2006), and (b) can coexist with virulent nationalisms, a subject I have developed at length elsewhere (2008: ch 4).