Paper Titles & Abstracts

In Flanders, Quebec, Scotland, and South Tyrol, claims for further devolution are closely tied to minority community affirmation. Immigration, in such contexts, raises a dilemma: to include newcomers in the construction of a unified national minority identity could alienate core supporters of the nationalist movement, but to exclude immigrants could alienate those who support universal and inclusive values of citizenship. The nationalist governments of these regions exhibited puzzling approaches in the policies of immigrant integration: in Flanders and South Tyrol, nationalist elites have set demanding requirements to exclude immigrants from sub-state citizenship privileges; whilst in Scotland and Quebec, regional governments have advanced inclusive citizenship rules that extend welfare entitlements to new immigrants residing in the region. The paper would proceed from the following question: what conditions might be responsible for influencing minority governments to make the devolution project inclusive? Drawing from the literature that framed nationalist regional governments as providers of social rights and services, the comparison of the four case studies shall uncover the key strategic factors that help explaining why a nationalist intelligentsia supports inclusive policies for immigrant inclusion, even though these are inconsistent with demands from core nationalist supporters. By hypothesizing that sub-state citizenship policy could represent a strategic opportunity for nationalist regional governments to make choices even against the opposition of core nationalist supporters, the research calls into question the notion that nationalist policy-making is solely based on ideology and identity politics.