Paper Titles & Abstracts

Independently of immigration, questions such as "Who are we?" and "Who belongs to us?" (Bauböck 1996, 7) have been at the focus of territories traditionally inhabited by ethno-national minorities - or nations without a state. Immigration alters the population of those regions and raises questions regarding its impact on regional or minority identities. Thus, this is the field where "the politics of immigrant multiculturalism meet the politics of minority nationalism" (Banting and Soroka 2012, 158).The paper firstly elaborates on this relation from a theoretical point of view: How does immigration affect the collective identity of ethno-national minorities? Might immigrants become a factor preserving and strengthening the territory, as argued for Scotland (Mitchell, Bennie, and Johns 2012) and the Basque Country (Jeram 2012)? Or is Kymlicka's argument (2001) that they are, if not controlled, a threat to the distinctiveness of the minority culture still valid? Secondly the paper examines those questions in an in-depth case study of South Tyrol (I), an Italian region characterized by the presence of a large German speaking population and a small Ladin minority. The governing party, the SVP (South Tyrolean People's Party), representing those groups, is currently shifting from a rather exclusive approach towards immigration to an inclusion of immigrants into their own nation building project. With a longitudinal qualitative analysis of party manifestos and government programmes the paper traces these developments between 1990 and 2012 and assesses the role of the consociational power sharing mechanism.