Multilevel Citizenship by Maas Willem;

Author:Maas, Willem;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

Local, Multinational, and Postnational

Chapter 8

Local Citizenship Politics in Switzerland: Between National Justice and Municipal Particularities

MARC HELBLING

Introduction

Although the nation-state is commonly regarded as a crucial actor and the most relevant level when it comes to citizenship politics, related policies are often executed or even shaped at the regional and the local levels. As a consequence, policies can vary from region to region or from town to town within the very same nation-state. Switzerland constitutes the most extreme case when it comes to local-level variations in citizenship policies. In this country, every municipality—be it a city of 100,000 inhabitants or a village of 400—has the right to decide its own criteria for naturalizing foreigners. As a result, we observe a large range of different naturalization policies—from the very generous to the very restrictive—between regions, cities, and even villages. As regulations on the national and cantonal (subnational) levels are very sparse, each local political entity decides the formal procedures and criteria by which its alien residents are naturalized. Given the high degree of autonomy possessed by municipalities in this area, the naturalization procedures, the applied criteria, and consequently the ratio of rejected candidates vary greatly from one municipality to another.

This chapter explores local naturalization politics in an effort to explain why in some municipalities more candidates for naturalization are rejected than in others. I advance three political and cultural factors to clarify why some municipalities pursue a more restrictive naturalization policy than others. Given the high degree of Swiss federalism and the autonomy of local units in citizenship matters, I expected to find different understandings of citizenship; that is, diverging ideas of what it means to become a Swiss citizen. Although such ideological aspects certainly play a crucial role, I also investigated the contentious and political nature of citizenship politics, which led to a focus on the political actors in these municipalities and how influential they are in local politics. The results of this investigation appear to show that municipalities in which the Swiss People’s Party—a major right-wing populist party—is powerful reject more applicants than others. Finally, I tested whether or not direct democratic decision-making procedures led to more rejections. My results demonstrate that such procedures provide an opportunity for right-wing populist parties to mobilize the people. Moreover, the rule of anonymity favors discriminatory decisions, as social control and external checks are absent to inhibit selfish behavior.

Besides exploring municipal naturalization politics in Switzerland, a second aim of this chapter is to discuss local citizenship politics more generally. Diverging applications of citizenship laws and understandings of nationhood are not found only in Switzerland. In fact, naturalization politics in many nation-states, as is the case in many policy fields, are decentralized to a certain extent. Especially in federal states such as Germany, but also in centralized states such as France, we can observe diverging applications of national regulations. Discussing a large variety of cases permits us to abolish the idea of homogeneous nation-states and demonstrate that citizenship can take different forms and meanings within a nation-state.

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