Titulli: Skandaloze:Greqia, nënshtetësi masive emigrantëve të krishterë shqiptarë.
Models of Citizenship and the Content of Claim-Making
Institutions are “basic rules of the game or principles of order that characterize a particular society at a particular point in time” (Clemens 1998: 110). Such principles can be anchored in a society’s political life and crystallize in concrete power relations and forms of government.
Political opportunity structures represent nothing else than the translation on the terrain of social movement theory of this aspect of institutions. But, as recent trends in institutionalist
7
theory in history, sociology, and political science have pointed out (e.g. Powell and DiMaggio
1991; Scott 1995; Steinmo et al. 1992), institutions also have a cultural side. In this sense,
“durable or regular patterns of social life reflect deeply embedded, at times sacralized, cultural
components” (Clemens 1998: 117). Institutions draw their effectiveness not only from the internalization of norms and practices or from the power of social sanctioning, but also from the collective definitions and public discourses that make them become part of a shared identity.
Although the two are related in many ways, here we analytically distinguish between
the political side of institutions and their cultural side. We have previously operationalized the former aspect for our present purpose through the concept of political opportunity structures.
In this section we discuss the latter aspect. To operationalize the cultural-institutional setting
we suggest to look at models of citizenship. We maintain that the ways in which migrant
populations are incorporated into the host society vary widely among countries and that this has important implications for the content of claim-making by immigrants and ethnic
minorities.
Recent comparative work on national regimes for the incorporation of migrants have
stressed the importance of citizenship rights (Brubaker 1992; Castles 1995; Favell 1998;
Koopmans and Kriesi 1997; Koopmans and Statham 1998; Smith and Blanc 1996; Soysal
1994). Brubaker’s (1992) work is particularly relevant in this context. It points to the cultural foundations of national states and to how present-day formal definitions of citizenship reflect deeply rooted understandings of nationhood. In his comparison of France and Germany, the author shows that the German jus sanguinis legal tradition is based on a conception of the national community in ethnocultural terms, while the French tradition, which emphasizes the jus solis rule, stems from a republican, contractualistic, and political definition of the state. He explains this difference with the divergent history of state formation in the two countries: “n France, then, a bureaucratic monarchy engendered a political and territorial conception of
nationhood; while in Germany, the disparity in scale between supranational Empire and the subnational profusion of sovereign and semisovereign political units fostered the development of an ethnocultural understanding of nationhood” (Brubaker 1992: 4). In brief, German citizenship is ethnic-based and reflects the idea of the nation-state, while French citizenship is civic-based and reflects the idea of the nation-state. Both component are constitutive of the national state, although in diverse mixtures.
8 Models of citizenship and regimes for the incorporation of migrants stem largely from
these conceptions of nationhood, but not only. The cultural obligations posed on immigrants to be accepted in the national community play a role as well (Koopmans and Statham 1998). Just as states have formal criteria for access to citizenship that can vary from one country to the other, they also place different cultural obligations on defining the access to citizenship. Again,we can distinguish between two ideal-types: those states that follow an assimilationist approach and those that privilege a pluralistic view. The former is more demanding as
immigrants are asked to conform to the cultural norms and values of the host society. The latter is less restrictive as it provides for the recognition of ethnic difference and, sometimes,even promotes it.
We can conceptualize the cultural-political setting for the claim-making of immigrants and ethnic minorities as resulting from different combinations of formal criteria of citizenship and cultural obligations for having access to it (Koopmans and Statham 1998). Figure 2 shows the resulting typology. Combining these two dimensions yields three main models of incorporation of migrants. The combination of an ethnic definition of nationhood and citizenship with an assimilationist view of cultural obligations gives us a situation in which it is very difficult for foreigners to become members of the national community. This situation corresponds to the differentialist model of incorporation, or rather of non-incorporation, of migrants. Here minorities face at the same time an exclusionary national community and a demanding environment in terms of the extent to which they have to adapt to the rules and cultural codes of the host country, thus putting aside their ethnic difference. Germany is perhaps the best empirical approximation of this model. Among new countries of immigration,
Italy is another example. Switzerland also tends towards this model, although it is probably less restrictive than Germany as to the assimilationist requirements for obtaining citizenship rights.33 It is in fact not easy to situate the Swiss case in the assimilationist-pluralist continuum. Switzerland is characterized by a high level of cultural heterogeneity and does not have a dominant national culture.
Furthermore, it has a long tradition of pluralism with regard to both linguistic and religious minorities. For these two reasons, we would be tempted to place Switzerland on the pluralist pole of the continuum. On the other hand, however, immigrants are asked to adapt to the new cultural context. Of course, they cannot do so with respect to a national cultural model, as it simply does not exist. But the acquisition of Swiss citizenship is locally based and prospective citizens must assimilate to the local habits and values, that is, to the local culture.
Thus, while Switzerland is certainly pluralist towards the cultures traditionally recognized within the context of federalism and of the existing informal procedures for the integration of the minorities that have contributed to 9
At the other extreme, we have a situation in which a civic conception of citizenship combines with a pluralistic view of cultural obligations. This is the multicultural model of incorporation, which is exemplified by Britain and the Netherlands, although some might prefer to avoid calling the former multicultural on the ground that its multiculturalism is limited to racial groups. In this context foreigners born in the host country are in principle granted citizenship regardless of their ethnic origin, and minorities are recognized their right to ethnic difference.
A sort of intermediate but important case is that which combines a civic conception of
citizenship and an assimilationist view of cultural obligations. This is most typically the case of France, which is usually called the assimilationist model of incorporation. It is relatively easy to obtain the French citizenship, but the price to pay for that is the abandoning of ethnic-based identities in favor of accepting the republican ideal of the state.
Finally, the fourth possible type– coupling an ethnic conception of citizenship with a pluralistic view of cultural obligations –does not seem to be empirically plausible as a definition of the national community in ethnic terms seems to exclude the possibility of few cultural requirements for belonging to that community.
Figure 2
Like political opportunities, models of citizenship affect the claim-making by immigrants and ethnic minorities. As we suggested, in this case their impact is less on the forms of action than on the content of claim-making. In other words, different national models of incorporation translate into different distributions of claims made by ethnic minorities. On the more general level, we expect the focus of claims to differ in France and Switzerland.
France’s civic-based model should facilitate the presence of migrants in the national public debates and encourage them to focus on their situation in the host society, while the Swiss ethnic-based model should produce a stronger emphasis on homeland issues, that is, issues pertaining to their country of origin. For the symbolic definition of citizenship – and more generally of the patterns of inclusion in and exclusion from the national community – influences the degree to which they feel as belonging to that community and legitimized to intervene in the national public space. The dominant labels of “immigrants” (immigrés) in France and of “foreigners” (Auslنnder) in Switzerland are the discursive reflect of such varying sense of
belonging and legitimacy. Regarding the content of claim-making, we thus expect that, in a the formation of the state, it is much less pluralist towards ethnic minorities of migrant origins, especially those
who arrived most recently.
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country where a differentialist model of incorporation prevails, migrants address claims primarily to their homeland, whereas the assimilationist model (like the multicultural model) provides them with the opportunities to raise issues pertaining to their situation in the host
society.
Further, the assimilationist model creates a tension between the strong cultural obligations required for the incorporation into the host country and the readiness or willingness of ethnic minorities to be assimilated. As a consequence, we should observe a high proportion of claims aimed at asking for the recognition of difference on the part of minority groups
whose collective identity is endangered by the cultural requirements for assimilation. Thus, our second hypothesis concerning the content of claim-making stems from the assumption that France’s cultural-institutional setting leads ethnic minorities to put much emphasis on their collective identity as a basis for claim-making in the host country. The assimilationist model of incorporation of migrants adopted in France largely denies the recognition of ethnic difference in favor of a civic allegiance to the French habits and values (e.g. Birnbaum 1998; Brubaker 1992; Leca 1992; Schnapper 1991). We therefore expect ethnic minorities to react to such demanding cultural requirements and mobilize primarily on issues pertaining to cultural diversity and for the recognition of ethnic difference.
Data and Methods
In line with our theoretical aim to combine political and cultural variables in the study of contentious politics in general and of the claim-making by immigrants and ethnic minorities in
particular, the method we adopt is an attempt to integrate two approaches that have traditionally been associated with one or the other of these two research strands: protest event analysis and public discourse analysis. The former has been used by political opportunity
theorists to gather systematic evidence on the levels and forms of social movement mobilization. The latter has often been adopted by cultural analysts to support theoretical ideas with empirical material. Public claims analysis hopefully takes the strengths of both
approaches, while avoiding their weaknesses, as it combines the systematic observation of events with a richer attention to detailes concerning the content of claims (Koopmans and
Statham 1999a).
The data with which we confront our theoretical arguments come from an ongoing comparative research project on the mobilization on ethnic relations, citizenship and 11 immigration (MERCI).4 Using one national newspaper in each country (Le Monde in France and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in Switzerland) which provides a good source for the coverage
of news of national scope and significance – that is, those we are particularly interested in –,four broad types of public claims were coded: (1) protest actions and collective mobilizations (street demonstrations, petitions, confrontational and violent actions, etc.), (2) speech acts(public statements, written reports, media-addressed events in general, etc.), (3) political decisions (laws, administrative acts, judicial decisions, etc.), (4) repressive measures by the
state against extreme-right and ethnic-minority actors.5 All reported claims were coded which refer to immigration, asylum, and aliens politics, minority politics (including citizenship), and
antiracism. This defines the field of ethnic relations, citizenship, and immigration (henceforth ERCI fields). In addition, we coded all claims by ethnic minorities, regardless of whether they pertained to this field. Homeland politics is included in this subsample. Finally, we coded all
claims by extreme-right actors. Claims were sampled by coding every second issue of the newspaper source. The data gathered in the research project cover the period from 1990 to 1998 included, but in this paper we limit our analyses to the 1990-1994 period.
Findings
Legitimacy and Access to the National Public Space In the remainder of the paper, we try to explain by means of empirical evidence cross-national variations (1) in the presence of immigrants and ethnic minorities in the national public space,(2) in the modalities of their collective claim-making, and (3) in the content of claim-making.
We confront our hypotheses on the impact of political opportunity structures and models of citizenship with our sample of public claims in France and Switzerland.
To begin with, we argue that the presence of ethnic minorities in the public space is largely constrained by the larger cultural-institutional context, specifically by the national models of citizenship and of incorporation of migrants. As Brubaker (1992) has pointed out,
models of citizenship contribute to defining the symbolic relationship between migrants and the national state, and therefore affect the collective definition of migrant populations. In other words, they influence the shared understanding that nationals have of migrants. Switzerland’s differentialist model implies a sharp distinction between citizens and non-citizens, a distinction4 The MERCI project includes the following country studies, in addition to France and Switzerland: Germany (Ruud Koopmans), Britain (Paul Statham), and the Netherlands (Thom Duyvené de Wit).
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that implies an exclusionary labeling of migrants as “foreigners.” In contrast, France’s assimilationist and hence more inclusive model of citizenship yields a definition of migrants in less exclusionary terms, attaching to them the label of “immigrants.” The multicultural model
has yet another definition of migrants as “ethnic minorities,” thus stressing the recognition of ethnic difference.
This collective attribution of identity influences both the distribution of cultural resources and the space for the political participation of migrants in the host society. As Koopmans and Statham (1998: 17) have recently stated, “t makes a difference whether one
is ‘foreigner’, ‘immigrant’ or ‘ethnic minority’; these are not just symbols but forms of social relationships which legitimate and facilitate certain types of participation in society, whilst delegitimating and negatively conditioning others.” Accordingly, we argue that models of
citizenship define to a large extent the legitimacy of minority groups to participate in public debates and determine the access for their intervention in the national public space. As we said,
migrants are usually labeled in Switzerland as “foreigners,” that is, individuals who symbolically do not belong to the national community and who have little legitimacy to publicly address their collective claims. As a result, they face an unfavorable cultural-institutional
setting to intervene in the national public space. In a way, migrants in Switzerland are denied the status of political actors.
The situation is quite different in France, where they are usually labeled as “immigrants” rather than “foreigners.” In other words, they are considered as belonging to the national community, although not necessarily fully so. Tallien’s public declaration in the
aftermath of the French revolution is symptomatic of this state of affairs: “Il n’y a d’étranger en France que les mauvais citoyens”6 (quoted in Azimi 1988: 702). It is in this period that
France built the republican ideal of an inclusive immigration country (Leca 1992). Migrants in France are not considered as guestworkers, as still occurs in Switzerland and Germany for example, but rather as people living permanently or at least for a long period in the country and
who are entitled to participate in the public debates on an equal basis as nationals. Such inclusiveness, however, has a price, namely that immigrants conform to the republican values of liberté, égalité, fraternité and to the principles of laïcité. They are asked not to distinguish themselves from nationals in the name of these values and principles. The important point for 5 Repressive measures are excluded from the sample used in this paper. 6 “There is no foreigner in France but the bad citizens.”
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our present purpose is that the French assimilationist model therefore legitimizes newcomers to intervene in the national public space not in their quality of minority groups, but rather as individuals who belong to the national community as any other citizen. They have little
legitimacy and few opportunities to participate in the national public debate as ethnic minorities, that is, by putting forth their ethnicity. Instead, they are free to participate as workers, parents, residents of suburbs, and other categories based on economic or social
characteristics rather than cultural and ethnic ones. While the assimilationist model provides larger opportunities than the differentialist model, it therefore limits the access for the intervention of migrants in the public space on behalf of their collective interests as minorities.
7
The findings largely support our argument about the impact of the cultural-institutional setting on the presence of immigrants and ethnic minorities in the national public space. As Table 1 shows, the participation of migrants in the national public debates in Switzerland is
very limited. Of all the speech acts and collective mobilizations we gathered for the first five years of the nineties, only 4.5 % have been made by minority groups. In contrast, the latter are
more widely present in French public debates as 13.3 % of claims have been made by immigrés. However, the presence of immigrants and ethnic minorities in the public space is rather limited in both countries. If we confront these results with comparable evidence from
Britain, where about one fifth of the claims come from minorities (Koopmans and Statham1998: 38), we see that France is an intermediary case between Switzerland and Britain.
According to our argument, this is largely due to variations in the prevailing regimes of incorporation: Switzerland’s differentialist model gives migrants little legitimacy as well as few resources and opportunities to intervene in the national public space; Britain’s multicultural model encourages them to participate more frequently in the national debates, and moreover they do so largely on the basis of their ethnic identity; France’s assimilationist model, which
implies no clear-cut distinction between citizens and immigrants, scores better than the Swiss case, but does not facilitate the claim-making by migrants to the same extent than Britain.
Table 1
In spite of nearly 20 % of its population being made of foreigners, Switzerland does not legitimate them as political actors and does not offer them viable opportunities for claimmaking.
To be sure, foreigners in Switzerland do mobilize, yet not to address their grievances 7 This effect should contrast with the emphasis given to ethnic difference in the multicultural model, which is expected to offer migrants a favorable cultural-institutional setting for participating in the national public 14
to the host country but rather to their homeland. Turks, Kurds, former Yugoslavians,Albanians, Tibetans are among the most active minorities in Switzerland. As can be seen in the right-hand column of Table 1, if we consider also claims outside the ERCI field migrants are
responsible for 15.8 % of the claims. However, as Table 2 makes clear, 67.2 % of their claims refer to the issue field of homeland politics and are thus not related to the national political agenda. Not being integrated in the host society, migrants who reside in Switzerland keep strong ties with their country of origin. The fact that they have long been considered and are in part still considered as temporary guestworkers who will one day return to their country and
therefore do not need to be integrated, as the lack of a coherent integration policy attests,encourages them to maintain the links with their homeland and to be active with respect to it rather than to the host society. In contrast, although a large part of France’s migrant
populations come from countries with dramatic internal conflicts such as Algeria, Iran, and former Yugoslavia, which would more than justify their involvement in their homeland’s affairs, only a small part of the claims made by ethnic minorities refer to their country of origin.
The way in which they are incorporated into the French national community leads them to be politically active in France and to participate in the French political life rather than to keep strong ties with their homeland.
Table 2
The Forms and Content of Claim-Making
Let us now focus on the forms and content of claim-making by immigrants an ethnic minorities within the ERCI field. The political-institutional context allows us to explain variations in the
forms of claim-making. Following “classical” political opportunity theories, we have hypothesized that the forms of action depend on certain characteristics of the state and on the behavior of authorities vis-à-vis social movements. Specifically, we expect collective
mobilizations by migrants to be more radical in France, where political institutions and prevailing strategies yield closed political opportunity structures as compared to Switzerland, where the particular combination of these two dimensions offers a more favorable context. The findings presented in Table 3 confirm this hypothesis.8 In France, more than half of the
collective mobilizations are either confrontational (44.6 %) or violent (11.9 %). If they want to
debates in their quality of minorities.
8 This table includes collective mobilizations only (i.e. non-verbal actions), thus excluding speech acts.
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be heard in closed opportunity structures, minority groups must act, as any other protest
group, with some degree of radicalness. In Switzerland, in the rare instances in which migrants
address the host country, they do so in a more moderate fashion, mostly by means of
demonstrative and peaceful actions. Unlike in France, social movements in Switzerland do not
need to make use of radical forms of action to get their claims on the political and public
agendas. Of course, this is not equivalent to say that protest in Switzerland is more successful
than in France. The opportunity to engage in encounters does not necessarily translate into a
positive outcome of the encounters.
Table 3
Political opportunity theorists have no doubt contributed to our knowledge of the
forms of claim-making and their variation according to the institutional context, but have little
to say about its content. Following the way paved by scholars who have stressed the role of
cultural variables in contentious politics, we maintain that models of citizenship provide the
cultural-institutional setting that shapes the content of claim-making by immigrants and ethnic
minorities. We argue that the claim-making by minorities varies cross-nationally according to
the collective definition of migrants, which in turn stems from the dominant model of
citizenship and defines their status in the host society. As we said, France’s assimilationist
model defines outsiders as “immigrants” who must integrate into the national community. This
leads us to make three predictions regarding the content of claim-making in such a context.
First, migrants tend to loosen the ties with their homeland in favor of a privileged relationship
with the host society and to make claims related to their situation in the latter. Second, they are
to some extent accepted as part of the national community and often have citizen status.
Therefore they can focus on issues pertaining to their quality of members of the French
community, and specifically on the recognition of their rights vis-à-vis the national majority.
We thus expect claims by immigrants and ethnic minorities to deal primarily with their situation
into the host society rather than with the entry in and exit from the country.
Third, on the basis of the principle of equality among human beings brought to the fore
by the French revolution, France avoids making a distinction between nationals and immigrants
with regard to social rights and welfare provisions. The application of the principle of equality
to migration policies impacts on the claim-making by immigrants and ethnic minorities. The
latter should not be so much concerned with their social rights, for they have already obtained
these rights or, at a minimum, French authorities pay much attention to this issue. Furthermore,
the principle of universal rights, another fundamental tenet of the French revolution, implies the
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refusal of any particularism and the denial of claims for the recognition of ethnic difference and
cultural diversity. This principle has contributed to bring about the assimilationist model of
citizenship. However, it sometimes might be impossible to adapt to the French dominant
culture, especially for migrants who come from a very different type of society. As Kymlicka
(1995) has pointed out, cultural rights are inherent in individual personality, and it is often
psychologically difficult and socially quite destructive to have to downplay ethnic difference.
Migrants in France face a situation in which they are asked to avoid expressing cultural
diversity in the name of the respect of French republicanism, and we may think that they try to
redress this situation by asking the authorities and more generally the French society to remove
such constraints from their everyday life. We thus expect claims for cultural rights and the
recognition of difference to be quite frequent in France as compared to Switzerland.
In effect, the situation as regards the content of claim-making is very different in
Switzerland. The differentialist model conveys an exclusionary definition of citizenship which
implies a sharp distinction between citizens and aliens and which excludes migrants from the
national community. This has two important consequences for the content of claim-making by
immigrants and ethnic minorities in such cultural-institutional setting. On the one hand, since
they are defined as “foreigners,” migrants tend to be denied certain rights to which citizens are
entitled. Most important, migrants themselves share this perception of their status in the host
society and feel that they are not fully legitimized to address their demands to the host country.
When they do so, they ask for social rights, that is, rights that facilitate their living conditions
in the host society in areas such as education, health care, social security, and so forth. On the
other hand, unlike the civic conception of citizenship, which makes the assertion of cultural
diversity easier, the ethnic conception underlying the differentialist model of incorporation
tends to discourage this kind of claims. Specifically, we expect migrants to stress three types of
claims in a differentialist context such as Switzerland’s. First, since their exclusion from the
national community tends to encourage them to keep strong ties with their country of origin,
homeland politics is the focus of claim-making. Second, when they act within the national
public space, claim-making by ethnic minorities refers for the most part to the fragility of their
presence in the host country. In other words, claims aim to raise the problem of their unstable
position and the potential or actual threat of being expulsed. Third, in spite of their precarious
status and the lack of an effective integration policy, migrants who reside in Switzerland
permanently (or virtually so) ask for increased social equality with nationals. Thus, we expect
them to raise demands for social rights which may improve their living conditions. In contrast,
17
we should observe a low proportion of claims for cultural rights, that is, claims for the right to
ethnic difference and cultural diversity.
These hypotheses are supported by our data. To begin with, as can be seen in Table 2,
only a small part of the claims in France (12.4 %) are in the field of homeland politics. Second,
claims related to French debates and policies deal mostly with minority politics, Furthermore,
as Table 4 shows, a large part of them focus on cultural rights (26.7 %), whereas little is done
concerning social rights. These patterns are substantially different in Switzerland. Migrants in
Switzerland enter the public space most of the time with claims related to their homeland,
either addressing the authorities in the country of origin or the Swiss authorities with regard to
homeland issues. When migrants engage in claim-making on issues pertaining to their situation
in the host country, which occurs only one out of three times, the thematic focus of claims is
on immigration, asylum, and aliens politics, that is, on migration flows, (Table 2). Migrants are
mostly concerned with the fragility of their status as “foreigners,” specifically with the potential
threat of expulsion or deportation. They are much less concerned with their situation in the
Swiss society as only 23.2 % of the claims address minority politics, against 51.2 % referring
to migration flows (Table 4). Furthermore, when they address the host country’s authorities on
minority issues, they ask for social rather than cultural rights.
In sum, public claims analysis seems to confirm that the cultural-institutional setting, as
reflected in the dominant models of citizenship and regimes for the incorporation of migrants,
shapes the content of claim-making by immigrants and ethnic minorities in France and
Switzerland.
Table 4
Discussion and Conclusion
Recent work has stressed the importance of dominant definitions of citizenship and regimes for
the incorporation of migrants to explain cross-national variations in the nature and type of
relations between national majorities and ethnic minorities of migrant origin (e.g. Birnbaum
1998; Brubaker 1992; Kastoryano 1996; Leca 1992; Schnapper 1991). Many of these studies
address theoretical issues. Others try to establish a link between such long-standing cultural
traditions and the formulation and outcomes of migration policies, in particular policies
regarding the access to citizenship (e.g. Freeman 1995; Hollifield 1992; Joppke 1999; Safran
1997). Yet little has been done so far on the dynamics of collective mobilization and claimmaking
around issues pertaining to immigration and ethnic relations (e.g. Blatt 1995; Fibbi and
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Bolzmann 1991; Ireland 1994; Koopmans and Statham 1998; Soysal 1997). Our contribution
inquires into the impact of models of citizenship on processes of collective mobilization and
claim-making by immigrants and ethnic minorities. We have proposed to conceptualize regimes
of incorporation as the cultural-institutional setting which determines the possibilities for the
intervention of migrants in the national public space and affects the content of claim-making.
Migrants’ claims vary according to the degree of inclusiveness of the host country’s national
community and to the cultural obligations posed upon them as a condition to become part of
that community. Models of citizenship affect, on the one hand, the legitimacy these groups
have to participating in national public debates and hence their presence in the national public
space. On the other hand, models of citizenship define the legitimacy of migrants to intervene
on the basis of their ethnic identity and thus shape the content of their claims.
Our empirical evidence on claim-making by immigrants and ethnic minorities in France
and Switzerland largely support our theoretical arguments. First, migrants have mobilized
around issues pertaining to their situation in the host country more often in assimilationist
France than in differentialist Switzerland, where they have focused primarily on homeland
issues. However, the more frequent presence in France is conditioned by the strong cultural
obligations posed on migrants, which discourage them to engage in claim-making on the basis
of their ethnic difference. Second, we have observed important variations in the general focus
of claims. On a general level, minority politics is a much more important issue field in France
than in Switzerland, where migrants address most of the time issues pertaining to immigration,
asylum, and aliens politics. On a more specific level, immigrants and ethnic minorities focus on
cultural rights in France, whereas in Switzerland the thematic focus is on the fragility and
instability of their situation in the host country, particularly on the issue of expulsions. Finally,
we were able to show that closed political opportunity structures in France force migrants to
adopt radical forms of action if they are to be heard by the authorities, while a more favorable
political-institutional setting in Switzerland facilitates the use of moderate forms of action in
the rather rare instances in which migrants have access to the national public space.
On a more general level, our paper brings evidence about the claim-making by
immigrants and ethnic minorities to bear upon an important theoretical discussion in the
literature on contentious politics. Following recent calls for a more careful attention to cultural
variables in the study of social movements (Gamson 1992; Johnston and Klandermans 1995;
McClurg Mueller and Morris 1992; Melucci 1996; Snow et al. 1986), we stressed the impact
of the cultural-institutional context on migrants’ public claims in France and Switzerland.
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Much if not most work on social movements during the last two decades has focused upon
political and institutional opportunities as key variables for explaining their mobilization. This
has strengthened our knowledge of the conditions under which social protest arise and remain
sustained over time. Yet political opportunity theorists, safe a few still too rare exceptions (e.g.
Diani 1996; Gamson and Meyer 1996; Koopmans and Statham 1999b), have largely
overlooked the impact of cultural variables. We think that this is one of the reasons why the
political process approach to social movements has been strong in explaining the rise and fall
of protest, its extent, and variations in the forms of actions, but has remained rather silent
about its content. The difficulty to explain the content of claim-making clearly limits the
explanatory power of this approach. As we have tried to show, once we bring cultural factors
back in our explanations, we are in a better position to account for variations across countries
as well as over time in what is claimed through protest activities.
There is more than that, though. We think that cultural variables can as well help
explain the emergence and extent of protest insofar as the cultural-institutional context sets the
preconditions for challengers to enter the public space. Our study indicates that the prevailing
models of citizenship determine the legitimacy of migrants for participating in the national
public debates. This, together with the effect on the content of claims, leads to the conclusion
that we should pay much more attention to cultural variables in the study of social movements
and, more generally, contentious politics. However, we should not throw the baby with the
water. Political institutions do matter. In a way, ours is an attempt to combine cultural and
political explanations of claim-making. Models of citizenship allow us to understand the
presence of immigrants and ethnic minorities in the national public space and the content of
their claim-making, but political opportunities remain crucial to account for variations in the
forms of their actions. Yet cultural-institutional settings determine the extent to which political
institutions provide real opportunities for their mobilization. The Swiss political system offers
social movements a favorable setting for mobilizing insofar as it provides multiple points of
access to the political arenas due to the combination of open institutional structures and
inclusive prevailing strategies of the authorities (Kriesi et al. 1995). However, ethnic minorities
cannot fully take advantage of such opportunities as they are not legitimate actors in the
political process and, as a result, also lack strong political alliances which are crucial to benefit
from institutional opportunities (Kriesi et al. 1995). For example, in Switzerland leftist parties,
who are potential allies of minorities, are not connected to these groups or have at best only
sporadic and weak contacts with migrant organizations. Although in a different way, the
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difficulty for immigrants to intervene in the national public space in France with an emphasis on
their ethnic identity also reduces the political opportunities for claim-making, which are already
relatively poor. The difficulty encountered by migrant organizations to enter the political
arenas and especially to remain active in them is a good illustration of such poor opportunities
(Blatt 1995; Ireland 1994; Withol de Wenden 1988).
To conclude, we want to reiterate the importance of combining political and cultural
aspects of the institutional context to reach a better explanation of processes of collective
mobilizations and claim-making. We need to bring culture back more firmly in the study of
contentious politics, but without for that matter neglecting the important role played by
political institutions, which was one of the major advances of social movement theory in the
last couple of decades. Here we have proposed one way to do so in the case of immigrants and
ethnic minorities. There are others, of course. We are only at the dawn of such an endeavor,
and we need to integrate more thoroughly and more systematically the advances made in two
research areas – contentious politics and migration studies – that much too often tend to ignore
each other instead of interacting in a fruitful way.
