Citizenship, National Identity and the Mobilisation of the Extreme Right. A Comparison of France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland

In trying to account for cross-national differences in the strength of the extreme right in four West European countries France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland this paper combines theories of citizenship and national identity with recent developments in the literature on social movements. Regarding conceptions of citizenship and nationhood, we distinguish two dimensions: (1) on the formal, legal level, one can differentiate between countries with ethnic (ius sanguinis) and those with civic (ius soli) definitions of citizenship; (2) with regard to the cultural obligations tied to citizenship we distinguish between exclusive models that exert strong pressures towards assimilation of cultural difference and inclusive models that tolerate or even stimulate cultural heterogeneity. Combining opportunity and framing perspectives on social movements, these different conceptions of citizenship and national identity are seen as discursive opportunity structures that delimit the range of legitimate and "credible" discourses to which collective actors must relate in order to be succesful with their framing and mobilisation efforts. For the extreme right this implies that its mobilisation and success chances will be facilitated or constrained depending on the specific dominant discourse on citizenship and nationhood it confronts. In the empirical part of the paper, these ideas are applied in an analysis of the interdependence between dominant and challenger discourses in the four countries. The results indicate that the substantive success of the extreme right in the form of restrictive immigration and citizenship policies tends to be greatest in countries with an ethnic-exclusivist tradition such as Germany, and most limited in countries such as the Netherlands which adhere to a multicultural model. However, in terms of the level of mobilisation, measured by the electoral strength of extreme right parties, the extreme right tends to be strongest in the two countries, Switzerland and France, that combine inclusive and exclusive elements. We argue that the contradictions and tensions within the dominant discourse and concomitantly also within the political elite of these countries offer particularly favourable opportunities to the extreme right, which on the one hand can draw legitimacy and credibility from the more exclusive elements of accepted discourse, while simultaneously pre-emption which is typical for the German case is prevented by its opposition to other parts of the countries' immigration and citizenship politics. We finally discuss the implications of our findings for the future of citizenship and immigration politics, both nationally and on the European level.