Immigration and the Nation-State

In this important and timely new study Professor Joppke compares the postwar politics of immigration control and immigrant integration in the United States, Germany, and Britain - three liberal states characterized by sharply distinct nationhood traditions and immigration experiences. Mapping out the many variations between these cases, the book focuses on the impact of immigration in the two key areas of sovereignty and citizenship. In Part 1, the author analyses the effect of immigration control on state sovereignty, arguing that liberal states are self-limited by interest-group pluralism, autonomous legal systems, and moral obligations toward particular immigrant groups - the weight of these factors differing across particular cases. In Part 2, he addresses the ways in which immigrant integration impacts upon citizenship, arguing for the continuing relevance of national citizenship for incorporating immigrants, albeit modified by nationally distinct schemes of multiculturalism. In the face of current diagnoses of nation-states weakened by the external forces of globalization and international human rights regimes and discourses, Professor Joppke demonstrates that, in relation to immigration at least, nation-states have proved remarkably resilient. Not only does this book offer an thorough, insightful examination of the immigration experiences of the USA, Germany, and Britain, it also makes a powerful contribution to the growing macro-sociological and political science literature on immigration, citizenship, and the nation-state.

Christian Joppke is Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Florence. He is the author of East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989 (1995), and the editor of Challenge to the Nation-State (OUP, 1998), and Multicultural Questions (with Steven Lukes, OUP, forthcoming).