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Citizenship 163

of the Federal Republic of Germany even before unifi cation of East and
West in 1990, while people of Turkish descent born and bred in Germany
had to apply for naturalization. In recent years, however, naturalization,

which was very difficult, has been liberalized, and the principle of jus
sanguinis has been supplemented with that of jus soli : children born to
foreign parents may now be attributed dual nationality, and they may
choose to become German citizens when they reach adulthood (Kivisto
and Faist, 2007 : 119). European countries, it seems, are converging
around citizenship criteria to include some racialized groups, where indi-
viduals have shown commitment to the state, whilst retaining tight control
over immigration (Brubaker, 1992, 2002 ). The fact that dual nationality
has been growing, as a legal possibility allowed by states and as a status
that is increasingly taken up in practice, is further evidence that citizenship
is increasingly seen as a civic status: states are allowing the links between
citizenship and ethnic nationality to be loosened (Kivisto and Faist, 2007 ).
This is a relatively new departure. Citizenship always involves more
than simply a matter of legal rights. Assimilationism is the name that is
commonly used for the “ melting pot ” ideal of incorporation into the civic
nation that was such a prominent ideal of immigration into the US since
as early as the eighteenth century. In the “ melting pot, ” immigrants are
supposed to give up distinctive cultural identities so that everyone con-
verges on the norms of the civic nation. In fact, however, civic norms are
never abstract: they are always concretized in particular cultural forms.
Furthermore, dominant forms of the civic nation are those with which
elite groups are most at home. In order to assimilate, people do not learn
norms of civic life in the abstract; they learn how to express civil compe-
tence in new concrete ways: “ as Protestants rather than Catholics or Jews,
as Anglos rather than as Mexicans, as whites rather than as blacks,
as northwestern Europeans rather than as southern or eastern ones ”
(Alexander, 2006 : 422). As a result, there have long been contestations
of this ideal in the US, especially as it has grown more diverse with waves
of immigration from different parts of the world. An alternative image of
the American nation is that of the “ salad bowl, ” in which migrants retain
distinct identities as “ hyphenated ” Americans. According to Alexander,
however, this remains close to the older model of assimilation insofar as
“ the center ” of American life, to which “ hyphens ” attach, is not really
questioned. The dominant culture takes up some of the “ fl avor ” of other
contributions – for example, the way in which Jewish writers like Saul
Bellow and Phillip Roth have contributed to creating America ’ s own
image of itself. But hierarchies in the valuation of the cultural traits of