Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany - Hardcover

Brubaker, Rogers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674131770 ISBN 13: 9780674131774

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1992

Synopsis

The state, wrote Aristotle, "is a compound made up of citizens; and this compels us to consider who should properly be called a citizen and what a citizen really is." These are the questions, with their broad implications for the modern nation-state, that Rogers Brubaker addresses here. In a time when the flow of information, capital, and immigration has blurred the definition of the state, Brubaker's sustained analysis of the origins and vicissitudes of citizenship in France and Germany reveals much about civic boundaries in the modern world.
The difference between French and German definitions of citizenship is instructive - and, for millions of immigrants from North Africa, Turkey, and Eastern Europe, decisive. Brubaker explores this difference - between the territorial basis of the French citizenry and the German emphasis on blood descent - and shows how it translates into rights and restrictions for millions of would-be French and German citizens. Why French citizenship is territorially inclusive, and German citizenship ethnically exclusive, becomes clear in Brubaker's historical account of distinctive French and German paths to nation-statehood. Two fundamental legal principles of national citizenship emerge from this analysis, leading Brubaker to broad and original observations on the constitution of the modern state.
We live in a world bounded and defined by the legal institution of citizenship. The plight of immigrants moving across Western Europe has made this a particularly salient point, one frequently missed but finally brought into sharp focus here. Linking law, state, economy, and culture across two countries and centuries, this book offers a powerful explanation of forces that shape the modern world and delineate its future.

About this title

About the Author:

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

Review:

[A] concise and elegant comparison of the national identities of France and Germany, and the citizenship policies that flow from them...Brubaker's excellent study is the best available guide to the intellectual background of the current crisis in German self-identity.
--Michael Ignatieff (New Republic)

Brubaker's extremely timely book traces the history of citizenship-legal status, heartfelt identity-in France and Germany. Each nation had, and still has, a very different idea of citizenship...Brubaker is erudite and clear, and keeps an acutely open mind-no easy thing in these murky waters. (Village Voice Literary Supplement)

Learned, shrewd, and demanding. (Foreign Affairs)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0674131770
• ISBN 13: 9780674131774
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288