Migration, Membership, and the Modern Nation-State: Internal and External Dimensions

of the Politics of Belonging

Author(s): Rogers Brubaker
Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History , Summer 2010, Vol. 41, No. 1
(Summer 2010), pp. 61-78
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40785026

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40785026?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Journal of Interdisciplinary History

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xliii (Summer, 2010), 61-78.

Rogers Brubaker

Migration, Membership, and the Modern Nation-

State: Internal and External Dimensions of the
Politics of Belonging The aim of this article is to reflect
broadly on the themes of migration and membership in the mod-
ern nation-state. But what exactly is a nation-state? The term is oi-
ten used to designate polities that recognize one another's (nomi-
nal) independence. Yet given the range of variation among such
polities on such fundamental dimensions as state structure,
strength, capacity, size, wealth, and cultural heterogeneity, this us-
age risks being analytically vacuous. The risk remains even if we
exclude micro-states and limit attention to, say, the fifty largest
polities.
To be sure, the wide spectrum of polity types found
c. 1500 - ranging from micro-principalities, city-states, and loose
tribal confederations through emerging bureaucratic territorial
polities to vast empires - narrowed substantially in succeeding
centuries, thanks to the military success of centralizing bureau-
cratic territorial states. Convergence is evident in the tasks under-
taken by states (which have everywhere assumed at least nominal
responsibility for such matters as education, health, social welfare,
dispute resolution, the regulation of economic life, and so on); in
certain aspects of their formal structure (characterized by what
Weber called legal authority with a bureaucratic administrative
staff); and in their fundamental modes of legitimation (which gen-
erally involve an appeal to the sovereignty of "the people" or "the
nation"). Yet contemporary states remain strikingly unlike in their
nation-stateness, that is, in the extent to which, and manner in
which, "nation" and "state" are joined. The set includes relatively
(but decreasingly) mono-ethnic states such as Korea, Japan, and
Norway; avowedly binational or multinational states such as Bel-

Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the

author of Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); and, with Margit Feischmidt, Jon
Fox, and Liana Grancea, of Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town
(Princeton, 2006).

© 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary

History, Inc.

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
62 I ROGERS BRUBAKER

gium and Spain; and complex multi-ethnic polities such as India,

Russia, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Nigeria.1
When the term nation-state is not used ostensively to designate
a heterogeneous set of actually existing states, it generally signifies
an analytical or normative ideal type. As an analytical ideal type,
the nation-state is a model of political, social, and cultural organi-
zation; as a normative ideal type, it is a modeler political, social,
and cultural organization. In the former sense, nation-state is a cate-
gory of analysis, used to make sense of the social world. In the lat-
ter, it is a category of practice, a constitutive part of the social world,
a core term in the modern political lexicon, deployed in struggles
to make and remake the social world.2
In both guises - as part of the analytical idiom of social sci-
ence and as part of the practical idiom of modern politics - "the"
nation-state is often understood and represented in a highly ideal-
ized manner - idealized, that is, first and foremost, in a logical
sense not necessarily in a normative sense. Even sharp critics of the
nation-state invoke an idealized conceptual model that is said to
capture the basic "logic" or nature of "the" nation-state. Practical
political invocations of the nation-state as a model for political
organization - that is, nationalist invocations of the nation-state -
also rely on an idealized conceptual model, though, for national-
ists, the model also serves as a normative ideal.
The idealized conceptual model of the nation-state, which
began to take shape during the French Revolution and was elabo-
rated in both political practice and theoretical reflection during the
nineteenth and the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, pos-
its the congruence of nation and state; the hyphen that joins "na-
tion" and "state" suggests - and in practical political contexts may

ι On the narrowing spectrum of polity types, see Charles Tilly, "Reflections on the History
of State-Making," in idem (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton,
!975)> 3-83; on convergence in tasks, John W. Meyer, "The World Polity and the Authority
of the Nation-State," in George M. Thomas, idem, and Francisco O. Ramirez (eds.), Institu-
tional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual (Newbury Park, 1987), 41-70; on
legal authority and bureaucracy, Max Weber (ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich), Economy
and Society (Berkeley, 1978; orig. pub. 1922); and on legitimation by appeal to nationhood,
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London, 1991; orig. pub. 1983).
2 On "models of" and "models for" reality, see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation oj Cultures
(New York, 1973). The distinction between categories of analysis and categories of practice
broadly follows Pierre Bourdieu; see, for example, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge,
Mass., 1 991).

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MIGRATION, MEMBERSHIP, AND THE NATION-STATE | 63

demand - a tight coupling. More specifically, the idealized con-

ceptual model posits a set of mappings or congruencies linking
state territory, national territory, national culture, and citizenry.
First, the frontiers of the state as an actually existing territorial or-
ganization should match the frontiers of the nation as an "imag-
ined community" - to use Anderson's overworked but still indis-
pensable phrase., Second, polity and culture should be congruent:
A distinctive national culture should be diffused throughout the
territory of the state, but it should stop at the frontiers of the state.
There should be cultural homogeneity within states, but sharp
cultural boundaries between them. Third, state territory and citi-
zenry should be congruent: Ideally, all permanent residents of the
state should be citizens, and all citizens should be residents. Finally,
cultural nationality and legal citizenship should be coextensive: All
ethnocultural nationals should be citizens, and all citizens should
be nationals. The nation-state, in short, is conceptualized in both
social-scientific analysis and political practice as an internally ho-
mogeneous, externally bounded political, legal, social, cultural,
and (sometimes) economic space.3
This model has important corollaries for mobility and mem-
bership. The nation-state is understood as an internally fluid but
externally bounded space, as a space of free social and geographical
mobility, in both vertical and horizontal dimensions. But geo-
graphical mobility is understood as sharply bounded. There is free
mobility within but not between nation-states, just as - in the ide-
alized conceptual model - there is free circulation of goods, ideas,
messages, and cultural patterns within but not between nation-
states. Mobility within nation-states is facilitated and seen as nor-
mal, even desirable (in that it contributes to the smooth function-
ing of labor and housing markets, and to cultural homogeniza-
tion), but mobility between nation-states is hindered and seen as
anomalous. Insofar as actual regimes of mobility approximate this
pattern, mobility is reciprocally linked to homogeneity within and
heterogeneity between states: The internal mobility of persons is
both cause and consequence of internal cultural homogeneity, and

3 On the conceptual model of the nation-state, see Andreas Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion
and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity (New York, 2002), 199-268; Brubaker, "Immigra-
tion, Citizenship, and the Nation-State in France and Germany," International Sociology,
IV (1990), 380-381.

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
64 I ROGERS BRUBAKER

the external barriers to mobility are likewise both cause and conse-
quence of cultural differences between nation-states.4

the politics of belonging To show how this idealized concep-

tual model of the nation-state can illuminate the politics of mem-
bership or belonging, I begin by drawing four distinctions. First,
the concern herein is with the politics of belonging only at the
level of the nation-state, not at other levels or at other sites. In the
broadest sense, the politics of membership plays itself out in a great
variety of sites. The question "who belongs" can be contested -
and hence, in the broadest sense, politicized - at sites as diverse as
cities, neighborhoods, workplaces, clubs, associations, churches,
unions, parties, tribes, and even families. Yet although the nation-
state is one among many loci of contestation over membership, it
remains - contrary to certain postnationalist arguments - a partic-
ularly consequential one. Indeed, in longer-term historical per-
spective, we can appreciate the increasing importance of the nation-
state as a locus of belonging, as development of increasingly direct,
intrusive, and centralized forms of rule entailed what might be
called, after Noiriel's take on Foucault, the "étatization of mem-
bership."5
Second, the politics of citizenship in the nation-state can be
distinguished analytically from the politics of belonging to the na-
tion-state, though the two are often closely linked in practice. For
some marginal or minority populations, there is no doubt or con-
testation about their formal state membership; they unambiguously
belong to one, and only one, state, the one in which they reside.
But in such cases, there often is doubt or contestation about their
substantive membership or citizenship status - that is, about their
access to, and enjoyment of, the substantive rights of citizenship,
or about their substantive acceptance as full members of a puta-
4 On the nation-state as an internally fluid but externally bounded space, see Ernest Gellner,
Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983).
5 On the variety of sites in which membership matters, see Michael Walzer, Spheres oj Justice
(New York, 1983). Gérard Noriel, "Représentation nationale et catégories sociales: l'éxample
des réfugiés politiques, Genesis, XXVI (1997), 38; Michel Foucault, "Le pouvoir, comment
s'exerce-t-il?" in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds.), Michel Foucault, un parcours
philosophique: Au-delà de l'objectivité et de la subjectivité (Paris, 1984), 308-321; Mara Loveman,
"The Modem State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power," American Journal oj
Sociology, CX (2005), 1651-1683. The more recent withdrawal of the state from some modes
of social provision in some countries does not represent a fundamental change in this long-
term transformation.

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MIGRATION, MEMBERSHIP, AND THE NATION-STATE | 65

tively national "society." In these cases, the politics of belonging is

not generated by migration, at least not in any proximate sense,
but by various forms of social closure, discrimination, or marginal-
ization.

The Anglo-American political sociology of citizenship of

the early postwar era, associated with Marshall and Bendix,
was concerned with this kind of politics of citizenship in the
nation-state - that is, with the substantive civic incorporation of
the working class, whose formal membership in the nation-state
was not in doubt. A similar point could be made about work on
the civic incorporation of African Americans or of indigenous
populations in many countries.6
Even in cases where the politics of belonging arises in re-
sponse to migration, one can distinguish the politics of substantive
membership or citizenship in the state and the politics of formal
belonging to the state. For example, much work on the civil, po-
litical, and social rights of migrant workers in Europe has centered
on substantive citizenship, not formal belonging; such work has
focused on rights that are not contingent on a particular member-
ship status in the state.7
Third, the politics of belonging has both formal and informal
aspects. Certain kinds of membership - legal nationality or state-
membership, for example - are administered by specialized per-
sonnel using formal, codified rules. Nation membership in a more
informal sense, however, is not administered by specialized per-
sonnel but by ordinary people in the course of everyday life, using
tacit understandings of who belongs and who does not, of us and
them. These everyday membership practices of identification and
categorization, and of inclusion and exclusion, may well be at
variance with codified forms of official, formal membership. This
tension is captured in the expression "français de papier" (paper
Frenchman) or in the saying that was current in France during the
late 1980s, "ta carte d'identité, c'est ta gueule" (your identity card is
your face).
6 Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class: And Other Essays (New York,
1950); Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order
(Berkeley, 1977); Talcott Parsons, "Full Citizenship for the Negro American? A Sociological
Problem," in idem and Kenneth B. Clark (eds.), The Negro American (Boston, 1965), 709-754.
7 Brubaker, "Membership without Citizenship: The Economic and Social Rights of
Noncitizens," in idem (ed.), Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North Amer-
ica (Lanham, 1989).

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
66 I ROGERS BRUBAKER

This distinction between the formal and the informal applies

not only to the politics of belonging in and to the nation-state but
also to the politics of belonging at other levels of aggregation and
at other sites. Formal membership in a club, church, family, or as-
sociation does not entail informal acceptance; formal membership
may be informally contested or subverted. But the concern herein
is with the distinction between formal and informal aspects of the
politics of belonging in and to the nation-state.
Fourth, and most important for the discussion that follows,
the internal dimensions or sites of the politics of belonging can be
distinguished from the external dimensions. The internal politics of
belonging apply to populations that are durably situated within the
territorial ambit of a state but are not - or not fully - members of
that state. The external politics of belonging pertain to the mem-
bership status of populations that are durably situated outside the
territorial ambit and jurisdiction of a state but claim - or are
claimed - to belong, in some sense, to that state or to "its" nation.
They may or may not be citizens or otherwise formal members of
the state in question; in either case, their membership status, actual
or claimed, is the focus of contestation.
The internal and external politics of belonging can be
connected in three ways: (i) They can be reciprocally connected be-
tween states. That is, a population subject to an internal politics of
membership in one state may be subject to an external politics
of membership in another state. This reciprocal link can arise
through migration. Mexican migrants and their descendants, for
example, participate as immigrants in an internal politics of be-
longing in the United States, and they have begun in recent de-
cades to participate as emigrants in the external politics of belong-
ing in Mexico. But the reciprocal connection between internal
and external membership politics can also arise without migration.
To take a case from postcommunist Eastern Europe, the ethnic
Hungarian minority is the focus of an internal politics of belong-
ing in Romania, Slovakia, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine and Ser-
bia; at the same time, it is the focus of an external politics of be-
longing in Hungary itself.8
(2) The internal and external politics of belonging may be-
8 David Fitzgerald, Λ Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages Its Migration (Berkeley,
2009); Brubaker et al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvianian Town
(Princeton, 2006).

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MIGRATION, MEMBERSHIP, AND THE NATION-STATE | 67

come intertwined within a particular state at a particular political junc-

ture. Such was the case in Germany during the 1990s, when de-
bates about the privileged immigration and citizenship status of
ethnic German migrants from Eastern Europe and the former So-
viet Union (the so-called Aussiedler) collided with debates about
the ways in which German citizenship law excluded guest workers
and their children from citizenship. The weak knowledge of Ger-
man displayed by the Aussiedler - especially the increasing number
of them arriving from the former Soviet Union - invited compar-
ison with the fluent German spoken by the German-born children
of guest workers. This situation raised the question: Why were the
children of Turkish guest workers still overwhelmingly foreigners,
despite being born and raised in Germany and speaking fluent
German, while Aussiedler enjoyed all the rights of citizenship, and
special privileges to boot, despite speaking little or no German?
Finally, (3) the internal and external politics of belonging
may be linked sequentially, as when a "homeland state" facilitates
or induces the immigration of external members. Large-scale re-
settlement can generate a new internal politics of membership,
formal and informal, insofar as the re-settlers are not fully inte-
grated or accepted, or insofar as they are accorded certain privi-
leges or benefits that become contested. Germany's policies to-
ward the ethnic Germans of Eastern Europe again furnish an
example. The external politics of membership established immi-
gration and citizenship privileges for these transborder ethnic
"kin" during the 1950s, but the flow of re-settlers was limited by
exit restrictions throughout the Cold War era. The lifting of these
restrictions in the late 1980s generated a huge influx of re-settlers.
The various special rights and benefits that they enjoyed, as well as
their conspicuous lack of integration, generated a new internal
politics of membership, both formal and informal.9

sources of the politics of belonging As noted earlier, a

series of congruencies - of territory and citizenry, state and na-
tion, polity and culture, and legal citizenship and ethnocultural
nationality - are central to the idealized conceptual model of
the nation-state. But in practice, those congruencies are seldom, if

9 Brubaker and Jaeeun Kim, "Transborder Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging in
Germany and Korea," unpub. ms. (University of California, Los Angeles, 2009).

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
68 I ROGERS BRUBAKER

ever, fully realized. It is the lack of congruence that generates both

internal and external forms of the politics of belonging.
In a hypothetical world of "perfect" (in a logical or concep-
tual sense, not in a normative sense) nation-states, characterized by
these congruencies, there would be no politics of membership. It
would be clear who belongs where; there would be no "matter
out of place," in Douglas' words, no internal or external politics of
belonging to the nation-state.10
Nor would there be a politics of membership in the nation-
state. This hypothetical world of "perfect" nation-states would, by
definition, have no marginal, unincorporated minority popula-
tions. The nation-state would be, in fact, just what the nationalist
imagination represents it to be - an undifferentiated, fluid totality,
without fundamental class, regional, ethnic, or caste divisions; a
space of internal equality and mobility; and an internally homoge-
neous and externally bounded sociocultural and sociopolitical
realm. But actual nation-states do not conform to this idealized
nationalist model (or, for that matter, to the ideal-typical concep-
tual model deployed by analysts and critics of "the" nation-state).
Specifying the ways in which they do not conform is one method
of identifying the sources of the internal and external politics of
belonging.
Migration is the most obvious source. It is easy to see how
migration - insofar as it leads to substantial and more or less per-
manent settlement in another state-disturbs the congruencies cen-
tral to the idealized model of the nation-state. But three other
sources of the internal and external politics of belonging deserve
analysis before we discuss migration in more detail.
The internal politics of belonging affecting ethnic Hungarians
in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine, mentioned above, re-
volve around Hungarian-language schooling, the public use of the
Hungarian language in areas of concentrated Hungarian settle-
ment, and the vexed question of territorial and nonterritorial
forms of autonomy. This internal membership politics is recipro-
cally linked to an external politics of belonging in Hungary. The
Hungarian state claims the right to monitor the condition, to pro-
mote the welfare, and to protect the rights of "its" transborder co-

io Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New
York, 1994).

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MIGRATION, MEMBERSHIP, AND THE NATION-STATE | 69

ethnics. A few years ago it caused a stir by adopting the so-called

"Status Law," which established a formal membership status for
which transborder co-ethnics could apply, and to which certain
benefits were attached.
This configuration of the internal and external politics of be-
longing exemplifies a more general pattern involving a triadic
nexus between territorially concentrated national minorities; the
nation-states in which they live, and of which they are citizens;
and the external national "homelands" to which they "belong" by
ethnocultural affinity, though not by legal citizenship. This pat-
tern, characteristic of interwar Central and Eastern Europe after
the breakup of the multinational Habsburg, Ottoman, and Rom-
anov empires, was generated again by the breakup of the Soviet
Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Contemporary cases no-
tably include the relations between the large Russian or Russo-
phone minorities, the nationalizing Soviet successor states in
which they live - especially Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Estonia, and
Latvia - and the Russian Federation. But the pattern is not re-
stricted to Eastern Europe. A similar relational nexus, for example,
exists between Chinese minorities, especially in South East Asia;
the states in which they live, and of which they are citizens; and
China as an external national homeland.11
In interwar Europe, the internal and external membership
politics were generated not by the movement of people over bor-
ders, but by the movement of borders over people. The same con-
dition holds for the Russian case (though not for the Chinese case,
which derives from migration): To be sure, ethnic Russians had
been migrating outward from core areas of Russian settlement for
centuries, but only within the Russian empire or the Soviet
Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, borders moved over
people, not (immediately) vice versa, thus creating the post-Soviet
internal and external membership politics in Russia and the other
successor states.

A second set of configurations do not involve this so

ciprocal connection between the internal politics of be
one state and the external politics of belonging in another.
configurations, the contested membership status is that of

1 1 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationalism and the National Question in t

(New York, 1996).

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
70 I ROGERS BRUBAKER

or minority populations who do not have external "homeland"

states. Such populations include certain ethnoreligious, ethnorac-
ial, ethnoregional, and indigenous minorities, with the caveat that
indigeneity itself is not an uncontested ethnodemographic or
ethnohistorical fact, but a contested political claim.
In these cases, the politics of belonging are generated not
by the movement of people across borders, or by the movement
of borders across people, but by the absence of movement or
mobility - in social space, not geographical space. Gellner called
this condition "obstacles to entropy," by which he meant the
traits, structures, and processes that were resistant to what he saw
as the prevailing feature of industrial society (and its concomitant,
the modern nation-state) - namely, the tendency for the relatively
fixed structures, divisions, and subgroupings of agrarian society to
erode in the "fluid totality" of the nation-state, with its "need for
[a] random-seeming, entropie mobility and distribution of indi-
viduals" throughout social space.12
Despite this prevailing tendency or "need" of "modern" or
"industrial" or "national" societies (more or less equivalent desig-
nations, in his view), Gellner acknowledged the existence of cer-
tain important "entropy-resistant" classifications or traits. People
so classified, he noted, were not "evenly dispersed throughout the
entire society" but remained "concentrated in one part or another
of the total society," particularly - as in the cases of interest
herein - in the lower regions of social space. Gellner was thinking
primarily of ethnoracially and some ethnoreligiously distinct pop-
ulations (African Americans or Muslim immigrants in Europe, for
example), since such markers - and the uneven distributions in
economic and social space with which they are associated - often
persist across generations. Needless to say, this state of affairs con-
stitutes a major anomaly from the perspective of the ideal concep-
tual model of the nation-state as a fluid and egalitarian social
space.13
The internal membership politics in these cases do not corre-
spond to a reciprocal external membership politics, since these

12 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 63-64.

13 Ibid., 64-65. On the well-known problems raised by Gellner's functionalist language, see
Brendan O'Leary, "Ernest Gellner's Diagnoses of Nationalism: A Critical Overview, or, What
Is Living and What Is Dead in Ernest Gellner's Philosophy Of Nationalism?" in John A. Hall
(ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (New York, 1998),
51-52.

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MIGRATION, MEMBERSHIP, AND THE NATION-STATE | 7I

marginalized minority populations do not have an external

"homeland" nation-state with which they identify. Membership
politics in these configurations, however, are not always devoid of
an external reference; sometimes an important international di-
mension is evident. Indigenous peoples, for example, have pressed
claims in various international forums in recent decades, as have
Roma.14
The persisting legacies of empire are a third source of internal
membership politics. Such instances are often conveniently for-
gotten, or seen as marginal and unimportant, but Kymlicka and
others have rightly emphasized their significance. The United
States may style itself a nation of immigrants, but as Thernstrom
wrote, "There are sizable numbers of people whose ancestors did
not come to the US either voluntarily or involuntarily. Instead,
the United States came to them in the course of its relentless ex-
pansion across the continent and into the Caribbean and Pacific."
To the extent that such populations are not fully incorporated and
integrated into the contemporary nation-state, they can become
the focus of an internal politics of membership. Examples in the
American context include Puerto Ricans and Native Hawaiians,
not to mention other Native Americans who mobilize as indige-
nous peoples, as noted above.15
Common to all three sources of membership politics dis-
cussed so far is that they cannot be understood as disturbing the
congruencies that are central to the idealized conceptual model of
the nation-state. More precisely, they can be understood from an
atemporal, logical perspective as deviating from the conceptual
model, but they cannot be understood in historical perspective as
departing from or disturbing a previous condition of congruence.
These are not new incongruencies; they have characterized na-
tion-states from their inception.

migration and the politics of belonging A similar point can

be made about migration as a source of the internal and external
politics of membership. To be sure, large-scale transborder migra-
14 Anna Tsing, "Indigenous Voice," in Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (eds.), Indige-
nous Experience Today (New York, 2007), 33-67; Peter Vermeersch, "Does European Integra-
tion Expand Political Opportunities for Ethnic Mobilization?" paper presented at the 46th
Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, ISA Annual Meeting Paper Ar-
chive (Honolulu, 2005).
15 Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (New York,
!995) (Thernstrom quoted by Kymlicka on p. 21).

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
72 I ROGERS BRUBAKER

tions leading to more or less permanent settlement do seem to in-

troduce a new "disturbance," or new incongruencies, into the sys-
tem of nation-states. But that disturbance - like those considered
above - has been part of the system of nation-states from the be-
ginning. Only in an atemporal, logical sense, not in an historical
sense, can migration be said to disturb the congruencies that con-
stitute the ideal conceptual model of the nation-state.
With this caveat in mind, it can still be heuristically useful to
consider the ways in which migration departs from this model.
First, and most obviously, migration engenders a discrepancy be-
tween long-term residence and citizenship, which, in turn, can
generate an internal - and, reciprocally, an external - politics of
membership. Internally, this involves contestation over the terms
of access to full formal citizenship, whether through naturalization
on application or through automatic attribution, as well as con-
testation over the definition and content of other membership sta-
tuses short of full citizenship.
In an inclusive vein, this internal politics of belonging is fo-
cused on efforts to bring the formal membership status of migrants
(or their descendants) into alignment with their substantive posi-
tion as long-term residents whose lives - notwithstanding certain
transborder engagements - are firmly anchored in the country of
settlement. The longer the period of settlement without citizen-
ship, and the more integrated such resident non-members are
in the economic, social, and cultural life of the country of settle-
ment, the more anomalous is their status, and the stronger is their
case for full membership. The case is especially strong for second-
and third-generation immigrants. In countries without provisions
for automatic civic incorporation through jus soli (which confers
citizenship based on birth in a particular territory), immigrants and
their descendants can remain indefinitely without citizenship in
the country of settlement, even though they may be residing in
the only country that they have ever known. This sort of predica-
ment was crucial to the debates that led to the introduction of cer-
tain elements of jus soli in Germany in 1999. 16
Migration does not just engender a discrepancy between resi-

16 Phil Triadafilopoulos and Thomas Faist, "Beyond Nationhood: Citizenship Politics in

Germany since Unification, " paper prepared for the 2006 Meeting of the Canadian Political
Science Association, York University, Toronto, at http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2006/
Faist-Triadafilopoulos.pdf.

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MIGRATION, MEMBERSHIP, AND THE NATION-STATE | 73

dence and citizenship. Insofar as migrants are understood to be

outside the imagined national community of their state of settle-
ment, migration also engenders a discrepancy or incongruence be-
tween nation and state, or, put in slightly different terms, between
culture and polity. This second incongruence can generate a more
restrictive, or at least a more assimilationist, politics of belonging,
premised on the claim that migrants must become members of the
nation before they can become full members of the state. In many
European countries, the center of gravity in struggles over the
terms of membership has recently shifted back in this assimilation-
ist direction, as the luster of previously fashionable differentialist
policies and practices has faded. This trend was powerfully rein-
forced after 9/1 1 and after the attacks in London and Madrid.17
By virtue of the discrepancy between long-term residence
and citizenship, migration can engender not only an internal poli-
tics of belonging in the state of settlement but also an external pol-
itics of belonging in the state of origin. On the one hand, the dis-
crepancy between residence and citizenship may be seen as a
problem in the homeland state, which may prevent emigrants
from retaining citizenship or from transmitting it to their children.
But the main trend in recent decades is in the opposite direction.
The discrepancy between residence and citizenship now looks
more like an opportunity than a problem. From this standpoint,
the politics of belonging is about maintaining ties with emigrants;
making it easier for them to retain their citizenship, even when
they acquire citizenship elsewhere; and facilitating home-country
involvement in such matters as voting, property ownership, and
remittances.18

TRANSBORDER KIN AND THE POLITICS OF BELONGING The emerg-

ing literature about the external politics of belonging focuses pri-
marily on recent migrations between established nation-states.
This trend is in keeping with the literature's general emphasis on
recent transformations of polity, economy, culture, technology,
17 Brubaker, "The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and Its
Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States," Ethnic and Racial Studies, XXIV (2001),
531-548; Christian Joppke, "The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and
Policy," British Journal of Sociology, LV (2004), 237-257.
1 8 On the increasing de facto and de jure tolerance of dual citizenship in Europe, see Faist
(ed.), Dual Citizenship in Europe: From Nationhood to Societal Integration (Burlington, 2007); on
other forms of home-country involvement, FitzGerald, Nation of Emigrants.

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
74 I ROGERS BRUBAKER

and social relations, transformations that are usually subsumed un-

der the heading of globalization or transnationalism. According to
this view, these transformations have engendered a world of newly
pervasive and largely uncontrollable cross-border flows of people,
goods, images, data, ideas, political projects, and social move-
ments, in which loyalties, identities, solidarities, and membership
structures increasingly cut across the borders of nation-states.19
The literature gives scant attention to the external politics of
belonging generated by earlier migration flows. As a result, its un-
derstanding of the external politics of belonging is too presentist. It
neglects sources of the external politics of belonging that antedate
the current phase of capitalist globalization, recent advances in
communication and transportation infrastructures, and the puta-
tive epochal shift toward a transnational, diasporic, postnational,
or postmodern world.
Consider two cases that highlight a key issue neglected in the
recent literature about migration and the external politics of be-
longing. The German population in Eastern Europe and the for-
mer Soviet Union and the Korean population in Japan and China
share four characteristics from the perspective of their putative
"homeland" states: First, they have long resided outside the terri-
tory of the state - or indeed, in the case of many Germans, have
never resided in that state. Second, they do not (for the most part)
possess citizenship in that state. In fact, they could not (for the most
part) possess German or Korean citizenship, since neither Ger-
many nor Korea existed as a modern nation-state with its own cit-
izenship when their ancestors emigrated. Yet, third, these
transborder populations have been represented as belonging to the
German or Korean nation, and, fourth, they have been under-
stood, though not uncontroversially, as having a legitimate claim
on the "homeland" state.20
Why have West Germany, post-unification Germany, South

19 See, among others, Kim Barry, "Home and Away: The Construction of Citizenship in
an Emigration Context," Working Paper No. 06-13, public law and legal theory research pa-
per series (New York University School of Law, 2006); FitzGerald, "Rethinking Emigrant
Citizenship," New York University Law Review, LXXXI (2006), 90-116; Nancy L. Green and
François Weil (eds.), Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatria-
tion (Urbana, 2007).
20 This section draws on Brubaker and Kim, "Transborder Nationhood." For other exam-
ples, see Joppke, Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State (Cambridge, Mass.,
2005).

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MIGRATION, MEMBERSHIP, AND THE NATION-STATE | 75

Korea, and, in certain contexts, North Korea treated these trans-

border populations as "their own" and extended rights and privi-
leges to them? More generally, how and why are certain popula-
tions, but not others, construed as "belonging" in some respect to
states other than those in which they are settled? This question is
seldom raised in the literature treating the external politics of be-
longing, which tends to take the existence of such transborder
populations for granted. The literature has not been centrally con-
cerned with the social and political processes through which states
identify and constitute some - but not other - transborder popula-
tions as "their own." It has focused on configurations in which the
identification of transborder kin has been relatively straightfor-
ward because of the recent movement of people over borders, or
of borders over people, which generates relatively clear-cut rela-
tions between home states and their transborder emigrant popula-
tions, or between territorially restructured, often "downsized,"
states and their newly transborder ethnonational kin. In both
configurations, the transborder populations have been relatively
bounded and identifiable because they are not simply emigrants or
ethnonational kin but also either citizens or former citizens of the
"homeland" state in question, or descendants of such persons.
In the German and Korean cases, the identification of trans-
border kin has been much more complicated. For most of their
centuries-long existence, the German-speaking settlements of
Central and Eastern Europe had no particular connection to Ger-
many, which, after all, did not even exist as a unified state un-
til 1 871. Even after 1871, the ties between scattered German-
speaking communities and Germany were tenuous and - until
World War I - politically insignificant. The complex chain of
events that led the postwar West German state to embrace these
populations and to extend certain rights and privileges to them in-
cluded the German defeat in World War I; the rise of völkisch na-
tionalism; the Nazi eastward expansion, and Nazi resettlement ini-
tiatives for transborder Germans; the Soviet deportations of
Germans to Central Asia; the postwar expulsions of ethnic Ger-
mans from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other countries; and the
restrictive exit policies (and assimilationist cultural policies) of East
European communist regimes. In the post- Cold War era, the
privileges extended to these transborder coethnics became increas-
ingly difficult to justify and were gradually withdrawn. Transbor-

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
76 I ROGERS BRUBAKER

der Germans of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union

were thus only contingently and temporarily defined as belonging
to Germany.
Identification of transborder kin in the Korean case was prob-
lematical and contested for different reasons. Large-scale emigra-
tion from the Korean peninsula to northeastern China, Japan, and
the maritime provinces of Russia began only in the late nineteenth
century and intensified under Japanese colonial rule. These emi-
grants and their descendants were clearly considered Koreans in
vernacular understanding, which the colonial regime reinforced
by establishing a separate family registry for Koreans, regardless of
where they resided in the Empire. But the collapse of the Empire
and the division of Korea confounded the question of belonging.
Colonial-era migrants had never possessed Korean nationality,
since the precolonial dynasty had not adopted modern nationality
legislation. Their connection to the two postcolonial states was
therefore legally ambiguous.
During the Cold War era, North Korea sought (with some
success) to induce the repatriation of Korean Japanese, while
South Korea courted the political alignment of Korean Japanese,
urging them to register as South Korean nationals. Both states ne-
glected transborder Koreans in the Soviet Union and China. The
easing of geopolitical tensions in the aftermath of the Cold War
prompted renewed South Korean interest in Korean Chinese,
who (after sustained contestation) were recognized as transborder
"kin." The Korean case thus highlights the contested and con-
juncturally specific processes through which the state has em-
braced some - but not other - transborder coethnics. Like the
German case, it reveals the social and political processes through
which states constitute, recognize, or claim certain external popu-
lations as "their own."

Migration is as old as human history, and so too are questions of

membership and belonging. The development of the modern na-
tion-state fundamentally recast both migration and membership,
subjecting both to the classificatory and regulatory grid of the na-
tion-state. Some argue that a movement beyond the nation-state is
currently recasting migration and membership again in a
postnational mode, but there is little evidence for such an epochal
shift.

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
MIGRATION, MEMBERSHIP, AND THE NATION-STATE | 77

Far from escaping the control of the state, migration is sub-

jected to ever-more sophisticated technologies of regulation and
control. This does not mean that states have become hermetically
sealed; they never were in the past either. But there is no indica-
tion that states have lost their capacity to regulate the flow of per-
sons across their borders, nor that membership has been recast in a
way that bypasses or transcends the nation-state. The nation-state
remains the decisive locus of membership even in a globalizing
world; struggles over belonging in and to the nation-state remain
the most consequential forms of membership politics.
By disturbing the congruencies - between residence and citi-
zenship, between nation-membership and state-membership, and
between culture and polity - central to the idealized model of the
nation-state, migration has long generated, and continues to gen-
erate, both an internal and an external politics of belonging. The
former concerns those who are long-term residents but not full
members of a state, the latter those who are long-term residents
(and perhaps citizens) οι other states, yet who can be represented as
belonging, in some sense, to a "homeland" or "kin" state or to
"its" eponymous nation.
Recent scholarly attention has focused primarily on the exter-
nal politics of belonging. New forms of external membership have
indeed been instituted in recent years, but they are hardly unprec-
edented: Numerous examples of external membership politics are
available from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Moreover, the recent forms of the external politics of belonging
are neither postnational nor transnational; they are forms of
transborder nationalism. They do not presage the transcendence of
the nation-state; they indicate, rather, the resilience and continued
relevance of the nation-state model.
Nationalism is a remarkably flexible and adaptable political
idiom, as recent trends in external membership politics demon-
strate. Today, the language of nationalism is used to identify and
constitute certain transborder populations as members of a nation
and to justify maintaining or re-establishing ties with them; in
other contexts, the language of nationalism is used in effect to "ex-
communicate" certain transborder populations.
The current situation does not evince a shift from a national
to a postnational mode of membership politics, and even less a
shift from a state-centered to a non-state mode of organizing mi-

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
78 I ROGERS BRUBAKER

gration and membership. On the contrary, state ties to transborder

populations and claims of transborder populations on "homeland"
states are expanding and strengthening, and both are legitimated
by the language of nationalism.
The ways in which the conceptual model of the nation-state
is construed, however, are changing. The various idealized con-
gruencies highlighted in this article - between the boundaries of
the state and those of the nation, between polity and culture, be-
tween residence and citizenship, and between cultural nationality
and legal citizenship - are not all of a piece. They can be priori-
tized, and interpreted, differently. The recent wave of external
membership policies reflects a movement toward ways of inter-
preting these congruencies that are decidedly less territorial. Con-
gruence between state and nation can mean, for example, the need
for the territorial frontiers of a state to match the (imagined) terri-
torial boundaries of the nation. But it can also entail another kind
of matching between state and nation, one that extends the reach
of the polity to embrace transborder members of a nation who do
not reside within the territory of the state. This interpretation,
rather than the territorial interpretation, has informed the recent
versions of external membership politics.
In this regard, the literatures of trans-nationalism and post-
nationalism are correct to stress the diminished significance of
territoriality. The point should not be overstated; the nation-state
remains fundamentally a territorial organization. But it is also a
membership association, and the frontiers of membership increas-
ingly extend beyond the territorial borders of the state. These new
forms of external membership, however, are neither trans-state
nor transnational; as forms of transborder nationalism, they repre-
sent an extension and adaptation of the nation-state model, not its
transcendence.21

2 1 On the duality of the state as a territorial organization and membership association, see
Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 22-23.

This content downloaded from

130.125.140.171 on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:11:18 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms