Immigration and Self-government of Minority Nations

Book excerpt: During the last two decades, the debate on multiculturalism has been one-dimensional. It has deployed arguments related to cultural demands linked either to feminism, immigration, or national minorities. Little attention has been given to the relations between these dimensions, and how they affect each other. The purpose of this book is to set a research agenda around the interaction between cultural demands of immigrants and minority nations. The primary aim is to establish basic normative arguments while advancing an institutional analysis in three contexts: Quebec, Flanders and Catalonia. Each part contains two chapters that address the topic in terms of how immigration is seen from a self-government perspective, or how self-government is interpreted from an immigration perspective. The different chapters raise questions related to how this interaction challenges the idea of a culturally homogeneous nation-state, and also pushes us to other conceptualisations of «political community» and de-nationalised forms of citizenship. Current debates on diversity have failed to address these issues in societies where a dual belonging exists.