Introduction: The Culturalization of Citizenship

‘Protecting our culture’ has become common code in Western Europe to deny immigrants full citizenship. By ‘full citizenship’ we mean not only enjoying the legal rights that come with citizenship but being recognized symbolically and emotionally as co-citizens. As will become clear in this book, it has recently become much harder for immigrants to acquire this ‘full’ status: legal rights are only granted after lengthy procedures including citizenship exams, while symbolic access to national belonging is still often denied by native majorities to even second- or third-generation immigrants who are legal citizens (cf. Uitermark et al. 2014).