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• W2110178395 abstract "Scholarly exchanges provide opportunities to clarify one's own positions as much as they can further analytical imageries. My response to the commentators falls under the first category. Lydia Morris reads the underlying argument of my article in light of the emergence of new ‘governance’ practices creating and reproducing the ‘welfare subject’ needed for the efficient operation of post-Keynasian globalized capitalism. Oliver Schmidtke sees it as the penetration of ‘neoliberal logic that favours market solutions’ into social citizenship and migration policies. Despite the commonplace familiarity of such views in the social science literature, I am not convinced that it is productive to attribute a wholesale causality to the ‘neoliberal logic’ or the functional necessities of global capitalism in explaining transformations of citizenship and migration regimes. European states have certainly adopted a range of policies that can be located within the neoliberal paradigm consonant with the development of global regulations of capitalist markets. However the newly emergent European social project, and its divergence from T.H. Marshall's ideal of social citizenship and the associated social justice norms, as I sketched in the article, is not singly a product of such policy shifts. Indeed my distinct argument, rather than a ‘qualification’ as Schmitdke (2012: 35) puts it, is that the primacy of individuality that underlies current citizenship developments in Europe has its roots in the broader set of trends in the post-World War II period and predates the ‘neoliberal transformations’. In the article, I have outlined the further institutionalization of this principle in the new European social project as it has interacted with welfare, migration, and education policy fields. The profusely ‘expanded’ individual and her ‘actorhood’ across a variety of sites, legitimated by universalist rights frameworks, is hardly a ‘brave’ argument as Ruud Koopmans (2012: 22) seems to think (although I accept the compliment!), but one that is supported by extensive empirical research and evidence (see Meyer 2010: 9 for an overview). In the face of subverted public protections and shorn of social safety nets in the current global economic regime, a fortified principle of individuality and its expected transformative capacities fail to ensure parity in participation and generate further inequalities, for citizens and non-citizen migrants alike. This is the fault line Europe is facing. Both Morris and Koopmans raise points regarding the analytical and empirical persuasiveness of my approach. I take their comments in turn. Morris (2012: 41) is concerned about ‘the role and treatment of normative ideals in social change and sociological analysis’. She makes two points. First, she emphasizes the deployment of ‘normative ideals’ of (citizenship and human) rights as a rhetoric or counter-rhetoric in political struggles. Rights accordingly emerge as ‘a political battlefield on which conflicting influences meet . . . [and] . . . negotiat[e] the profile of rights which are rarely demonstrably self-evident’ (Morris 2012: 45). Here I have a substantive difference with Morris. As in all my previous work, moving from a sociological institutionalist perspective, I treat ‘normative frameworks’ as institutionalized templates for action – not necessarily as ideological positions or rhetorical formulations strategically serving interests but as cognitive models rendering standardized expectations and legitimate schemes of action. As such they are exogenous to any given society or culture, and located in a broad institutional environment (national and transnational), and not simply in individual or elite sentiments (for a discussion of the analytical reach of sociological institutionalism, see Jepperson 2001; Meyer 2010). Unlike Morris (2012: 43), I see the change dynamic not in the ‘indeterminancy’ or ‘uncertainty’ of human rights, which, she argues, provides opportunities for negotiation of ‘contested visions of society’, but in their increasing institutionalization at various levels and sites: in law, education, science and medical fields, as well as public policy. Empirical studies reveal educational, health, and legal professionals, and social movements of various sorts acting as ‘receptor sites’ for rights principles and standards that evolve in wider, increasingly transnationalized, institutional environments (Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan 1997; Barrett and Frank 1999; Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer 2000; Boyle 2002; Suarez 2007). Morris's (2009) latest work itself focuses on this process through the legal profession and judicial reasoning. Second, referencing David Lockwood, Morris (2012: 42) argues that the actualization of rights and citizenship is ‘always less than complete’. Here I have more affinity with her position. The decoupling of policy and action, norms and practices, is a central empirical observation of sociological institutionalism. But more than that this empirical observation is central to the explanatory dynamic of the perspective. The inconsistencies between standards (as embodied in policies and institutionalized norms) and practices create continuing bases for mobilization, both in terms of challenging the ensuing injustices and also elaborating further standards. This is not the same argument as transnational human rights guarantees filling in when national citizenship rights fail. Decoupling applies to both human and citizenship rights. Morris however has a further point in bringing up Lockwood's work. She suggests one function of rights (and thus citizenship) is to stratify along two axes: ‘the presence or absence of a right, and the possession of moral and material resources [for actual enjoyment of rights]’ (Morris 2012: 41). I certainly agree that one can empirically analyse the role of rights, as well as actual access to these rights, in societal stratification. Recent research shows that formal access to citizenship status and rights, as well as migrant-specific integration provisions, do not have a significant and consistent impact on the educational and labour market outcomes of migrant populations (Fleischmann and Dronkers 2010; Cebolla and Finotelli 2011). Such findings further point to the need for assessing informal processes and other institutional factors (e.g. discrimination, type of schooling system, economic growth and the up- or downsurge of labour markets) that might facilitate or hinder exercise of rights – a necessary and promising avenue of research. Koopmans’ commentary concerns the relationship between the national and transnational. Unwilling to engage with the central theses of the article, Koopmans argues against a straw man ‘theory of postnational rights’, which he postulates as European convergence. Accordingly he reads my analysis mistakenly as ‘a case for the influence of European integration on the rights of immigrants’ (Koopmans 2012: 22). The diffusion of standards of rights, and the role legitimacy concerns and cognitive processes play in diffusion, is indeed a backdrop to my work. However, far from a simple European convergence argument, I locate the European Union developments within the broader institutional environment. Within that broad environment, not everything diffuses. It might help to clarify briefly what the postnational argument is. Postnational citizenship is not a legal status – it is an analytically heuristic device to explain the reconfiguration of citizenship in the post-World War II period, and as with much of institutional analysis, the comparative vantage point is much longer than 1980–2002, Koopmans’ time frame in his commentary. It offers an explanation for the radical expansion of individual rights in the latter half of the twentieth century, increasingly legitimated on the basis of universalistic conceptions of personhood, as institutionalized in transnational conventions but also in national constitutions, rather than belonging to a national collective. If Koopmans was interested in analysing the changes in rights extended to migrants that the postnational argument postulates, a comparison of such rights from the turn of the twentieth century (this would be particularly apposite as he ends his commentary with a Joe Hill song from 1911) and turn of the twenty-first century, and before and after the widespread institutionalization of human rights, would have been appropriate. Although the ‘convergence of migrant rights’ is not the analytical or substantive focus of the current article that is supposed to be debated, I nevertheless offer here some testable hypotheses in light of the postnational citizenship argument: Independent of country-specific characteristics, over time, we should expect the distance between citizens and resident non-citizens to narrow in terms of their formal rights, whether expanding or contracting. This distance should be even shorter between citizens and the European Union migrants given the extra layer of rights arrangements the EU provides. As a corollary to the above hypothesis, rights extended to non-citizens should correlate higher with the existing citizenship schemes within the country than rights extended to non-citizens across countries (e.g. if denominational schools are part of the national education system of the country, it is more likely that migrants will have a similar entitlement). Predicting country-specific pathways is hardly a contradiction to the postnational argument (Soysal 1994). Over time and across countries rights that are based on individual personhood should expand more than those that are based on corporate or collective identities. Similarly, we should expect to see more of such rights granted to non-citizens than those that are closely affiliated with cultural collectivities and collective fate. Beyond his misreading of the postnational argument, I also find the evidence, and the conclusions on the basis of this evidence, that Koopmans provides to refute the postnational argument highly wanting. I will raise only the two most problematic points. Regarding the operationalization of ‘migrant rights’: In his analysis of both the MIPEX data and his own (Koopmans, Michalowski and Waibel 2012), Koopmans does not differentiate among entry regulations (immigration and asylum policy); access to naturalization (legal status); civic, political, and social rights (citizenship rights in T.H. Marshall's classification); and targeted integration provisions (e.g. language support for newly arrived migrant children in schools). These are certainly not the same conceptual and institutional constructs and are likely to have different determinants and trajectory over time. Some are more receptive to human rights frameworks, others come to conflict more intensely with sovereignty principles (Soysal 1994). One would expect stricter regulation of entry in times of economic contraction and in relation to ‘national security’ but it might be difficult to deny the right to schooling to migrant children once in the country even in times of economic downturn. Regarding the evidence and conclusions: On the basis of the MIPEX 2010 data, Koopmans concludes that rather than European convergence what we are observing is ‘the persistence of shared institutional and cultural patterns among kin nations’. He does not elaborate, so it is not clear what the underlying ‘cultural’ argument is regarding kin nations. Regardless, his evidence fails to support the conclusion. According to the MIPEX data Koopmans cites, in terms of the generosity of integration policies, Denmark is closer to Switzerland and Austria (only 10 points above Switzerland and 11 above Austria) than its so-called kin nation Sweden (30 points below), and the difference between the other two kin nations Norway and Sweden is 17 points (2012: 25). The strong correlation Koopmans (2012: 27) finds between country scores in 1980 and 2001 (path-dependency) does not necessarily contradict the postnational argument either, as I already pointed out above. Schmidtke argues that, beyond the socio-economic vulnerabilities it generates, the new European social project has significant implications for recognition and belonging. I agree with Schmidtke, however I consider the question of recognition from a broader angle, as I alluded in my article, than the ‘commodification of migrants under neoliberal auspices’ and the associated ‘culturalist agenda’ (Schmidtke 2012: 34, 38). A comparison of Europe with North America regarding their different route to the recognition of ‘others’ would be helpful. In the USA, the postwar transformations of citizenship and nation have transpired largely via a multiculturalist project, in response to the injustices of slavery and discriminations in the context of immigration. The establishment of a multiculturalist orientation meant not only the recognition of the nation's multi-ethnic origins but also the attempt to offset a dominant ‘Eurocentric’ universalism, coupled with extensive anti-discrimination and affirmative-action policies and measures. In contrast, European transformations took root via a transnational and universalistic route. It was through the transnational normativity of the universalistic human rights that European nation-states dealt with their horrific nationalist pasts, while they externalized their ‘colonial memory’. The teaching of the holocaust, human rights, and cosmopolitan diversity has become a staple of citizenship education in postwar Europe. On the other hand, colonial oppression and resulting inequalities as they intimately link with postwar migration trajectories have not been equally built on in citizenship identities. As a liberal ideal the multiculturalist discourse certainly floated around in European public spheres, and certain cultural provisions were granted in adherence to universalistic dictums. Even so, multiculturalism as a coherent model for managing ethnic and racial relations, or as a remedy for past injustices and discrimination, was not really entertained in Europe. The EU Racial Equality Directive (2004) has now been adopted into the national law in almost all the member states, but its implementation is lacking and positive discrimination schemes are rare. Thus while the universalistic outlook ‘tamed’ the nation and national, European nation-states on the whole have not developed effective mechanisms for cultural and societal recognition of immigrant ‘others’. Schmidtke (2012: 31) is right that expanding postwar economies and generous welfare states, as extended beyond national citizenry, compensated for the lack of such mechanisms to a great extent. As European welfare states lose some of their redistributive capacities, the exclusionary tendencies become manifest. The political rhetoric of immigrant integration is clearly linked to the increased (moral and socio-economic) insecurities of Europeans in the current economic climate, and plays conveniently into the xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiments. Integration requirements may also function as restrictive migration control (particularly in the case of family unification – a significant source of continuing migration in Europe). But more to the point, the migrant integration agenda and tests reflect the broader shifts in conceptions of good citizenship and its constitutive grammar, as I have argued. Koopmans (2012: 27) states that I refer to citizenship tests ‘as evidence for the penetration of supranational human rights norms’. This is not correct. The point is straightforward: the tests themselves, unlike the argument in the literature (which also seems to be Koopmans’ argument), do not represent a return to nation-centered citizenship projects, but convey an integration and cohesion model that takes individuality, and individuals’ capacities and efforts, as its premise. Koopmans’ point about language and citizenship tests being administered only for immigrants is simply moot. Children of citizens, and non-citizen immigrants for that matter, are obliged to be schooled. National education systems are in place, and not too different from integration and citizenship tests, school curricula also convey a citizenship model that takes individuality, and its associated values and expectations, as its basis (Soysal and Szakács 2010; Bromley, Meyer and Ramirez 2011). It is this model, its transnational references, discontents, and contingent accomplishments, I hope(d) to be on the agenda for debate." @default.
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• W2110178395 title "Individuality, sociological institutionalism, and continuing inequalities: a response to commentators" @default.
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