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Case Studies: Political Incorporation and

Historical Institutionalism

Up until now the extension of voting rights has always been a positive thing in Dutch history. There have always been positions stating why such an extension should perhaps not put into effect, but after a few years one could not imagine it being otherwise anymore.

—Dutch Member of Parliament Peter Lankhorst of the Politieke Partij Radikalen (PPR)

Elections in which foreigners can vote cannot convey democratic legitimacy.

—The German Federal Constitutional Court, The Guardian, November 1, 1990

In the big cities, the immigrants run the city councils. . . .Now that they are going to give them all the right to vote, they will take over the smaller towns too. Pretty soon, we won’t be the boss in our own country anymore.

—A Belgian truck driver, Christian Science Monitor, February 3, 2004

This chapter explores the debate in three states over the enfran-chisement of resident aliens. The statistical analysis in chapter 5 suggests the importance of nationalist factors in explaining why states enfranchise resident aliens. Statistically speaking, birthright citizen- ship is a significant predictor, as nationalist scholars hypothesize. Yet two nationalist factors perform opposite of the expectations: Conservative parties are no less likely to extend the franchise than are left-leaning ones, and activitist judiciaries are less likely to enfranchise aliens, not more so. In contrast, the statistical analysis found little support for transnationalist factors, though the finding of significant

111 Earnest, David C.. Old Nations, New Voters : Nationalism, Transnationalism, and Democracy in the ERA of Global Migration, State University of New York Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3407472. Created from apus on 2018-07-26 20:57:38.

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spatial correlation among the states in the population suggests there are unobserved transnational processes at work. How can one explain these surprising findings? Clearly one must look beyond the large-n statistical analysis for a qualitative assessment of why states enfran- chise resident aliens. This chapter looks at three such states: the Netherlands, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Belgium.

These three case studies present interesting riddles. Why would the Netherlands enfranchise resident aliens with little difficulty in the 1980s, while Belgium experienced three decades of debate and abortive legislation before enacting local voting rights for resident aliens in 2004? Why did Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein’s experi- ment with local voting rights in 1989 fail to survive the constitutional scrutiny of the German Federal Constitutional Court? The answers to these questions lie in the shared, historical understandings of the meaning of “citizenship” in each of the three states. That is, as in all states, citizenship in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany is an institution embedded in the unique historical experiences and societal conflicts of each state. To understand the different patterns of politi- cal incorporation of resident aliens, then, one must first understand how these conflicts have molded the institution of citizenship. This is consistent with the statistical findings of the importance of birthright citizenship in the enfranchisement of resident aliens.

The following analysis uses a controlled comparison of three states to explore the impact of cultural conceptions of citizenship on the political incorporation of resident aliens. The chapter looks at the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium for three reasons. First, all three states are founding members of the European Union. Martiniello, for one, has argued that EU institutions impose citizenship rules “from above” and constrain the citizenship policies of member states.1 Indeed, as noted in chapter 2, the Treaties of Maastricht (Article 8B) and Amsterdam (Article 19(1)) stipulate that member states must establish voting rights in local elections for aliens from other EU member states who reside in their countries.2 Because the three cases are all EU member states, one can assess the importance of the his- torical deep structure of citizenship while controlling for EU institu- tional factors. Second, the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium, each have proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. Because PR systems arguably emphasize the representation of minority groups, one might expect that states with PR systems would be more likely to enfranchise resident aliens than majoritarian states. Not only do PR systems embody civic norms of accommodation of minority groups, they also may create electoral incentives for parties to enfranchise

112 Old Nations, New Voters

Earnest, David C.. Old Nations, New Voters : Nationalism, Transnationalism, and Democracy in the ERA of Global Migration, State University of New York Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=3407472. Created from apus on 2018-07-26 20:57:38.

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societal groups who may favor one party or another. Several scholars have argued that left-leaning parties tend to have more inclusive poli- cies toward resident aliens, though the statistical findings in chapter 5 suggest otherwise.3 Because all three subject states are PR systems, however, the cases control for this rival hypothesis.

The third reason to examine the experiences of the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium is that the three states vary considerably in the voting rights they provide to resident aliens. In the 1980s, the Netherlands first adopted voting rights for aliens of any nationality who satisfied a residency requirement. Though there was some con- troversy, the Dutch parliament pursued this initiative with relatively little public opposition; and the practice has enjoyed broad popular support in the Netherlands. In Belgium, by contrast, opponents repeatedly blocked initiatives to enfranchise resident aliens, a debate that has recurred in Belgium regularly since the 1970s. Only in 2004 did the government finally succeed in extending the vote to resident aliens. Finally, Germany neither succeeded in adopting voting rights for aliens, as the Netherlands did, nor suffered from the protracted debate that Belgium endured. Rather, in 1990 the German Federal Constitutional Court struck down the laws enacted by three länder governments to enfranchise aliens in local elections.

To understand the divergent experiences of these three neighbor- ing states, one must first explore how each society understands the meaning of “citizenship.” These understandings in turn reflect the unique historical paths of political developments of each state and society. The historical nature of these institutions is significant in two respects. First, historically conditioned understandings of citizenship explain why the Netherlands has pursued a relatively assimilationist policy on voting rights while Germany and, until recently, Belgium have excluded aliens from the franchise. Second, one can understand the recent change in Belgium—as well as Germany’s decision in 2000 to enact jus soli provisions in its citizenship laws—as the product of changing historical circumstances at the turn of the millennium.

The Netherlands

Citizenship in the Netherlands reflects what Stuurman has called the “communitarian-liberal” model of citizenship.4 Although the Nether- lands shares many of the jus soli and republican principles of the French conception of citizenship, the two models differ considerably in their views of the nature of the rights of individuals. As Stuurman

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argues, the liberal-republican model of citizenship that typifies French policy conceives of rights as naturally adhering to individuals. This emphasis on individual rights rejects the idea that communi- ties—whether religious, ethnic, or linguistic—should enjoy “quasi- rights” based on group identity. In the liberal-republican model, the only group identity that legitimates political rights is the Republic itself. Inherent in the French model is an illustrative paradox. Because it rejects discrimination based on group attributes, French policy not only allows for the possibility of immigrant assimilation to French society irrespective of ethnic or linguistic origins, it also expects such assimilation. This paradox of republican tolerance was evident recently, for example, in the Muslim foulard, or headscarf, controversy in France.

Though the Netherlands shares a similar liberal and jus soli heritage with France, the Dutch conception of citizenship attrib- utes greater importance to community rights.5 The Netherlands’ history includes a strong tradition of representative government at the local and provincial level, and of progressive and stable enfran- chisement.6 Dutch citizenship policy reflects three important his- torical legacies: religious tolerance of the Reformation and the seventeenth century, the Batavian Revolution of 1795, and the cos- mopolitanism of the Netherlands’ colonial heritage. Together these experiences explain the broad Dutch policy of multiculturalism and tolerance toward noncitizens.

Prak provides a definitive account of how the Batavian Revolution of 1795 took the traditions and rules of local representa- tion and institutionalized them at the state level.7 Prior to 1795, each of the United Provinces maintained its own laws and practices for membership in the political community. A citizen of Gelderland may not have any rights, for example, if he or she moved to Utrecht. Because of the commercial nature of some of the provinces, further- more, many (particularly Holland) had a considerable number of resi- dents who were born in other nations. Several provinces allowed non-natives to purchase citizenship with its attendant rights, includ- ing the right to vote. Although this practice was undeniably discrimi- natory based on individual wealth, it nevertheless reflects the provinces’ conception of the political community as a multiethnic, communal construct rather than a linguistic or ethnic one. When Napoleon’s armies invaded the provinces in 1795, they brought with them a liberal-republican template for citizenship. This model reflected the citoyen conception of membership in the political com- munity that found powerful expression in Jacobite France. To estab-

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lish a “Dutch” citizenry from the disparate provinces, France instru- mentally defined a “Dutch” citizen as any citizen in one of the seven provinces. Given the heterogeneous and multiethnic quality of provincial citizenship, then, the Batavian Revolution ab initio created a polyglot Dutch citizenship that paradoxically emancipated individ- ual rights from ethnicity and religion (as had occurred in France), yet tied them to communal identities.

Dutch citizenship is unique, then, in its combination of French republican liberalism, Protestant religious toleration, and colonial multiculturalism. The historic emphasis in Dutch liberalism on com- munity rights finds expression in the state’s policies for the incorpora- tion of immigrants even to this day. The Netherlands’ decision to enfranchise resident aliens is particularly illustrative of this shared conception of Dutch citizenship. The cities of Rotterdam (in 1979) and Amsterdam (in 1981) first introduced noncitizen voting in local elections. As two large and historic centers of trade and commerce for the Netherlands, both cities had large populations of foreign citizens in the late 1970s.8 Like many other municipalities throughout Europe, furthermore, Rotterdam and Amsterdam experienced a period of voluminous immigration during the 1960s and 1970s. Combined with Surinamese and other immigrants from former Dutch colonies, the two cities faced a yawning inequality between their citizenry and their growing populations of noncitizens. Rotterdam and Amsterdam chose enfranchisement as a means to broaden the integration of aliens into civic life. Three years later, the Dutch Parliament extended the right to vote in local elections to any alien who had resided in the Netherlands for five or more years.9

Two aspects of the Netherlands’ enfranchisement of nonciti- zens deserve emphasis. First, voting rights for the Netherlands’ resident aliens reflected a broader Dutch integration policy that emphasized community rights rather than individual rights. This policy “was set up aimed at emancipation of the official categories of ethnic minorities, with the objective of elevating the ethnicized groups to equal social status with the indigenous groups in Dutch society.”10 The policy sought not only to broaden political rights through the franchise, but also to reform naturalization laws. Here then is evidence of Stuurman’s communitarian-liberal model of cit- izenship rights. Second, as Jacobs notes, the Netherlands’ example is marked by two surprising factors: an absence of agitation for rights among immigrant groups themselves, and a degree of con- sensus on enfranchisement across the spectrum of Dutch political parties and their leaders.11 The left-leaning Social Democrats

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(PvdA), the Christian Democrats (CDA), and the right-wing VVD all supported the 1985 bill to enfranchise noncitizens at the local level. Rath finds that this broad partisan coalition reflected a broad elite consensus favoring enfranchisement.12

The enfranchisement of resident aliens in the Netherlands, then, was an elite-led process characterized by broad societal and partisan support. The absence of political controversy reflects broader Dutch norms of political consensus, and its absence of a nationality qualifi- cation reflects the communitarian-liberal model of community-based rights. Both the decision to enfranchise aliens and the politics sur- rounding it illustrate, then, the Netherlands’ unique historical experi- ences as a multiethnic, pluralist society of diverse communities. The absence of controversy in the Netherlands is all the more striking when juxtaposed with the experiences of Germany and Belgium.

The Federal Republic of Germany

Germany’s policies for the incorporation of noncitizens reflect the ethno-linguistic conception of nationhood that Brubaker illustrated so memorably.13 In contrast with the French republican-liberal model of citizenship, German law and policy reflects a conception of the polity as a pre-political ethnic and linguistic community rather than a construct of the state itself. In practice, German law attributes rights to the German nation as a social collectivity rather than to individuals as political beings.14 This conception is institutionalized in German citizenship law through its historical emphasis on the doctrine of jus sanguinis. Before the state adopted jus soli practices in 2000, an indi- vidual joined the political community through descent rather than by his or her place of birth. An important consequence of this emphasis is Germany’s incorporation policies: Though the state provides exten- sive social and economic rights for resident immigrants, these policies typically reinforce the distinction between citizens and noncitizens rather than erase them. This is true in German law as well as in pop- ular political discourse. The myth of the “guest worker” (gastar- beiter)—of “temporary” immigrant laborers who, despite decades of residence in Germany, will return someday to their countries of origin—is a telling example of how powerfully the distinction between citizens and aliens shapes popular dialogue on issues of immigrant incorporation. These shared understandings of German citizenship help explain why the German experiment with the alien franchise was so short-lived.

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Why does Germany’s citizenship law emphasize ethnic and lin- guistic criteria, whereas other states in the jus soli tradition emphasize residential criteria? Brubaker asserted that it reflects Germany’s his- tory of political development.15 For centuries, Germans were a lin- guistic and (to a lesser extent) religious community without a state. Upon unification in 1870, federal law reinforced the notion of a “German” as one who spoke the language and descended from another German. The process of German unification may explain, furthermore, the “ethnicization” of German citizenship policies.16 Although there is no necessary reason why the historical discontinuity between nation and state should require an ethnic definition of belonging, Preuss argues that the ethno-linguistic conception of citi- zenship enabled elites to control the process of political unification without mass participation.17 In this sense, unification and ethniciza- tion of citizenship are inextricably related, with consequences for contemporary citizenship politics in Germany.

Other scholars have explored the implications of this cultural conception of nationhood for German political development and citi- zenship policies, so it is not necessary to belabor the point.18 It is interesting to consider, however, Joppke’s argument that postwar German history ironically reinforced the notion of the German nation as an ethnic community rather than a political construct:

While in principle delegitimized by its racist aberrations under the Nazi regime, ethno-cultural nationhood was indirectly reinforced and prolonged by the outcome of World War II, with the division of Germany and the scattering of the huge German diasporas in commu- nist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Against this backdrop, the Federal Republic defined itself as a vicarious, incomplete nation-state, home for all Germans in the communist diaspora.19

Not only did the postwar division of Germany give renewed emphasis to an ethno-cultural conception of nationhood, it also shaped incorporation policies through the Federal Republic’s insti- tutions. The Basic Law paradoxically empowered noncitizens through equal protections, yet the federal structure of Germany created disparities in each länder’s enactment of social and eco- nomic programs for Germany’s growing population of guest work- ers. Legislative passivity in the Bundestag only reinforced these disparities.20 As a consequence, Germany’s citizenship politics are characterized by an absence of policy centralization, administrative

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decree rather than legislation, and policy innovation in the judi- ciary rather than the executive.21

Against this institutional backdrop, politicians in the Federal Republic considered the issue of enfranchising resident aliens. Although the federal commissioner on immigration issues raised the possibility of the franchise for aliens as early as 1979, the executive branch remained passive on the issue, while “activist courts have expansively interpreted and defended the rights of foreigners.”22 In 1989, the disparities in local practices clashed with judicial activism over the issue of voting rights for resident aliens. For nearly a decade, various länder in the Federal Republic considered enfranchising at least some of their resident aliens. Influenced by the Netherlands’ and Sweden’s experiences with noncitizen voting rights, the state of Hamburg took the first preliminary steps in 1989, deciding to allow non-German EC citizens who had resided in the state for eight years to vote in “relatively unimportant” neighborhood council elections.23 That same year Schleswig-Holstein enacted provisions for nonciti- zens to vote in local elections, though as in Hamburg the franchise extended only to citizens of specific nationalities.24 Soysal reports that the government of West Berlin also adopted voting rights for resident aliens in 1990.25 These modest innovations are noteworthy in two respects: First, like the Dutch initiatives in Rotterdam and Amster- dam, sub-national governments rather than the national executive propagated these voting rights. Second, the initiatives in Schleswig- Holstein and Hamburg were considerably more restrictive than the Dutch parliament’s initiative to allow resident aliens to vote in local elections. The two German länder not only limited voting to local elections (the only elections over which the states arguably had legal domain), they also coupled this geographic restriction with the requirement that the resident alien satisfy a nationality criterion. Turkish or Polish resident aliens, therefore, had no prospects for voting in these länder. In this sense, even these limited voting rights reflected a logic that the political community is constituted along ethnic, linguistic, or national lines rather than on criteria of locality, residency, economic status, or community.

However, even these relative modest voting rights initiatives met with controversy and political resistance in the Federal Republic. Rath reports that, in contrast with the Netherlands’ experience, polit- ical parties in the Federal Republic divided on the initiatives in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg: Social Democrats and Greens supported the enfranchisement of resident aliens, while the Kohl Government and the CDU/CSU “denounce[d] the immigrant fran-

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chise passionately.”26 These divides perhaps reflected public opinion in the Federal Republic: Rath found that only one-third of Germans favored the enfranchisement of noncitizens. Another difference from the Dutch experience (but similar to Belgium’s experience) is that immigrants’ groups in Germany actively campaigned for the fran- chise. The issue of resident alien voting rights in the Federal Republic consequently was more politically contentious than in the Netherlands, and it lacked the elite consensus and leadership at the national level that characterized the Dutch case. Rather, as the dis- criminatory nature of the rights in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg illustrate, Germany’s experiment reflected both persistent ethno-cul- tural conceptions of the political community and the variation incu- bated by a federal system with weak or perhaps disinterested executive leadership at the national level. One can attribute both the emphasis on nationality and the weak federal structure as a conse- quence of Germany’s historical experiences before and after the Second World War.

The enfranchisement of resident aliens in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg never led to a non-German casting a ballot. Soon after the states adopted these measures, opponents filed court challenges that quickly found their way to the Federal Constitutional Court. Joppke notes that “The German debate over alien suffrage was a foundational debate over the meaning of membership and citizenship in the nation-state.”27 In October 1990, the Court took up this debate. Ruling that the enfranchisement of resident aliens violated the Basic Law, it threw out the länders’ laws. Neuman describes the Court’s rationale as grounded in an understanding of citizenship as an ethnic and social construct rather than as a political community. The Court ruled that voting rights for resident aliens violated the Basic Law because the law grants the franchise to the German nation as a collective right, rather than as an individual right.28 The emphasis on both adjectives is important: The opinion implies that the right to vote adheres to a pre-political community, rather than to individuals as citizens or as political subjects of the state’s sovereign authority.

The Federal Constitutional Court’s decision is ironic in a couple of respects. First, as Joppke notes, the judiciary had served as the leading institutional advocate for the social and economic rights of aliens in Germany, and had progressively extended rights to these groups in a manner that the Federal Republic’s elected officials did not.29 Yet judicial activism cuts both ways: While the courts willingly found social and economic protections for resident aliens in their reading of German law, the courts constructed political rights in a

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different way. Judicial activism need not be a progressive or liberaliz- ing force, and may vary among issue areas. Because the vote speaks to membership in the polity in a way that economic and social rights do not, it is no surprise that the constitutional court found the alien fran- chise to violate a widely held conception of the German nation as an ethno-linguistic community that itself antedates the German state.30 The second irony is that the Court’s decision in 1989 to hear argu- ments over the enfranchisement of resident aliens occurred on the eve of the Berlin Wall’s fall; the Court delivered its verdict a week before the Federal Republic consolidated with East Germany. The postwar division of Germany that perpetuated the notion of a German diaspora thus ended even as the Court reaffirmed the German nation as an ethnic construct. Hence, historical differentialist conceptions of the nation collided with the inclusive issue of nonciti- zen voting rights in ironic ways:

In major intersections around [recently reunified] Berlin the dominant conservative CDU has put up large placards with two dialogue-bal- loons: “I’m against voting rights for foreigners.” “So am I. Only a CDU majority will put a stop to it.” Winning issue or not, it seems an odd source of imagery to appeal to people who recently won back their own voting rights under such duress.31

Belgium

Unlike Germany’s abortive consideration of noncitizen voting rights, Belgians engaged in a debate over the enfranchisement of aliens for more than three decades. Rath notes that the earliest attempts to enfranchise resident aliens date to around 1970, with nearly a dozen bills introduced in Parliament in the 1970s and 1980s.32 Unlike the Dutch experience, furthermore, immigrants’ associations themselves, rather than political elites, have been the main proponents of voting rights for noncitizens. Political parties in Belgium have divided, fur- thermore, along both ideological and linguistic lines. In the absence of the elite consensus that typified the Dutch initiative, furthermore, partisan competition in Belgium became important with extremist parties from both ends of the spectrum opposing enfranchisement. Therefore, the patterns of contestation as well as the recurrent debate distinguish Belgium’s experiment with noncitizen voting rights. Only recently have Belgians finally agreed to grant aliens with five years’ residency the right to vote in local elections.33

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The Belgian experience unsurprisingly reflects the politics of consociational democracy and linguistic communities. The divi- sion of Belgium in Francophone and Dutch-speaking populations (plus a substantial German-speaking population) reflects both the relative brevity of Belgium’s statehood and its longer cultural asso- ciations with France and the Netherlands. Though this history did not necessarily imply linguistic and cultural segmentation, the lin- guistic divisions coincided with social and economic divisions, with Francophones enjoying both greater wealth and greater political power than Flemings did.34 Belgium’s early political his- tory, therefore, is one of socioeconomic and political divisions as well as linguistic ones. These fault lines run deep in nearly all con- temporary politics in Belgium: Not only does the state’s consocia- tional structure represent the tension between group identities and statehood, but also public discourse in Belgium over many issues often focuses on the implications of policy for the delicate balance between Belgium’s linguistic communities. Furthermore, the state’s political evolution has recurrently codified the identities of distinctive linguistic communities. The constitutional reform of 1993 identified, for example, French-speaking, German-speaking, and Dutch-speaking communities as fundamental cultural groups within the nation. These divisions found profound expression during the electoral crisis of 2007, when some Belgian politicians called for the dissolution of Belgium into sovereign Flemish and Francophone states.35

Belgium citizenship policy thus embodies a conception of nation- ality that differs from both the ethno-linguistic conception of Germany and the communal-liberal model of the Netherlands. It is a curious hybrid, rather, of the French liberal-republican ideal and the Dutch emphasis on community rights.36 Because integration policy is a local and regional prerogative in Belgium, furthermore, these com- peting ideas create important differences in incorporation policies at the local level. Flemish political parties and policies support migrants’ organizations as the means for incorporation, while Francophone parties generally propose problem-oriented policies rather than group-specific initiatives. Therefore, the rights and benefits that immigrants receive depend upon regional and partisan differences, factors that the consociational institutions and norms of political life reinforce. In this sense, the state’s institutions organize these con- trasting conceptions of individual rights and membership into dis- crete parts of the political community. One might even argue there are two distinct models for immigrant incorporation.

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The role of the state in ordering multiculturalism in Belgium means that questions about the rights of immigrants invariably become intertwined with broader public debate over the rights of lin- guistic communities. The multicultural conception of rights ironically serves to delimit the economic, social, and particularly political opportunities for immigrants. Dutch-speaking Belgians not only emphasize the community-rights model typical of the Netherlands but also view such community rights as a necessary protection of their own political prerogatives in light of the historical dominance of Francophones in political and economic life. Flemish parties strongly oppose initiatives that explicitly or implicitly challenge this commu- nity-rights model. In this sense, the recurrent debate and political conflict over voting rights for resident aliens illustrates how pro- foundly the issue touches upon the broader balance of political power in Belgium.

Partisan competition also played an important role in Belgium’s contestation over enfranchisement. While the debate touched on foundational debates about the relationship between Belgium’s lin- guistic communities, Jacobs finds that parties reacted tactically as well.37 For much of the three decades of Belgium’s debate, opposition to the enfranchisement of aliens crossed the linguistic divide. Both Flemish and Francophone moderate parties of the right opposed enfranchisement in part because they feared a backlash among voters, but also to keep extremist xenophobic elements of both parties within the fold. When Belgium granted voting rights to EU nationals in 1999, however, Francophone parties changed their positions while Flemish parties remained opposed to enfranchisement. Right-center Francophones (particularly the VLD party) gradually came to support enfranchisement, in part to appeal to the growing ethnic Turkish population around Brussels that otherwise tends to be socially conser- vative. This tactical shift by right-center Francophones created new opportunities for immigrant groups and leftist parties to advance the cause of immigrant voting.

The Dutch-speaking community nevertheless resisted enfran- chisement on the ground that it will strengthen Francophone par- ties at the polls, an intuition that the Francophone parties supporting legislation apparently also shared.38 Rath asserts that attempts to enfranchise resident aliens in Belgium regularly failed due to “the fear that the ethnic vote might disturb the equilibrium between the Flemish- and French-speaking communities.”39 Jacobs argues that the implications of the alien franchise are profound for Belgian politics:

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Flemish resistance to the enfranchisement of foreigners boils down to defending the power and positions of the Dutch-speaking. Enfranchisement is said to disrupt the existing system of checks and balances between Flemish and Francophones, which ultimately is the basis for the federal structure of the country.40

In this respect, the franchise for noncitizens touches on both consti- tutional issues and norms of consociational democracy. If individuals may join the political community irrespective of their community identity, then one must question whether or not the constitutional construction of Belgium as three distinctive cultural communities would survive. This was the crux of the issue. Belgium’s decades-long debate over whether or not to enfranchise resident aliens thus reflects both this constitutional debate and the differences between Flemish and Francophone conceptions of individual rights.

So why did Belgium finally enfranchise resident aliens in February 2004? Clearly, the change in position of rightist Franco- phone parties gave rise to a broader coalition in support of enfran- chisement. This tactical change by Francophones occurred, however, about the same time as Belgium enfranchised EU nationals to con- form to the Treaty of Amsterdam. Because Belgium had already enabled EU nationals to vote in local elections, the enfranchisement of non-EU resident aliens was a relatively modest extension of the franchise. In this respect, international factors interacted with parti- san competition in Belgium to create a new opportunity for enfran- chisement. Another reason may be the examples set by other nearby states that had enfranchised noncitizens. Proponents of enfranchise- ment in Belgium cited the success of similar measures in the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, and Finland.41 In these respects, Belgium’s enfranchisement of resident aliens may reflect some of the international factors that transnationalist scholars emphasize. It remains to be seen, however, whether or not Belgium’s enfranchise- ment will undermine Fleming rights and upset the delicate consocia- tional balance. While Belgium has successfully enfranchised its resident aliens after three decades, it has yet to resolve the implica- tions of this policy for Belgium’s consociational norms.

Conclusion

One irony of Belgium’s experience is immediately apparent. Whereas the liberal-communitarian model in the Netherlands encouraged

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elites to enfranchise noncitizens, in Belgium the importance of com- munity rights stalled enfranchisement for decades. This fact illus- trates that one cannot separate conceptions of nationality or citizenship from their historical and contemporary context: In Belgium and the Netherlands similar conceptions of rights produced widely different outcomes. To explain such variation, one must understand the unique configurations of both historical and contem- porary social and political features in each state. While each state’s history of political development has produced unique Dutch, German, and Belgian (or perhaps Fleming and Francophone) concep- tions of membership in the polity, it is political parties, immigrant groups, citizens, and elites who contest these conceptions within the confines of contemporary institutions. In this respect, historically conditioned definitions of citizenship are an important feature of modern citizenship politics, but they are not determinative.

One important difference between Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany is the role played by political elites. In the Netherlands, elites led the push to enfranchise resident aliens, and crafted a careful consensus based on the compromise that resident aliens would vote only in local elections. In Germany and Belgium, by contrast, elites played less of a role. Proposals in both Germany and Belgium reflected the initiatives of immigrants’ groups themselves and left- leaning political parties. In Germany, local governments enfranchised aliens before elites at the national level had constructed a consensus (or perhaps because they had failed to do so). The role of the German länder illustrates a second important difference between the three cases: The issue of enfranchisement often arises at the level of local politics before it becomes a salient issue for national debate.42 In the Netherlands as in Germany, localities enfranchised resident aliens before the national government did. In Belgium, the national initiative to enfranchise floundered for years because linguistic communities viewed it as an infringement on their local rights of self-governance.

The most important difference between the three cases appears to be, however, distinctive and historically conditioned conceptions of the political community. In Germany, the polity is an ethno-linguistic and pre-political community, a reflection not only of Germany’s late unification as a nation-state but also its postwar division. In the Netherlands, the polity reflects Protestant norms of pluralism and tolerance and the state’s colonial heritage. Belgium’s political commu- nity reflects its consociational lineage: It is not one but several lin- guistic polities, each of which enjoys constitutional status as a fundament of the state. In Germany and Belgium, furthermore,

124 Old Nations, New Voters

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debate over voting rights for noncitizens were debates about founda- tional and constitutional conceptions of the political community in a way they never were in the Dutch debate. In each of the three cases, citizens and political elites debated voting rights for noncitizens through the prism of these understandings. Germany’s abortive experiment with noncitizen voting rights failed because the Federal Constitutional Court interpreted the franchise as a collective rather than an individual right. Belgium’s initiatives stalled because they directly challenged the constitutional definition of Belgium as a com- munity of distinctive cultural and linguistic groups. The Netherlands enacted voting rights with little conflict, by contrast, because its com- munitarian conception of the polity flexibly allowed for pluralism. In each case, then, the terms of debate reflected histories of unique political and social development. These histories continue to condi- tion the experiences and rights of immigrants in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany today.

These case histories illustrate how some of the important factors identified in the statistical analyses played out in three states. Cultural understandings embodied in the jus soli variable condi- tioned the voting rights debates in all three. In none of these cases did political parties exhibit a clear left–right difference. Rather, as was clear in the Belgian and German cases, political parties reacted tactically to opportunities for electoral gain, often with local party leaders disagreeing with national party leaders.43 In Germany, the federal courts foreclosed opportunities for immigrants, as the statis- tical analysis indicated activist judiciaries tend to do. The qualitative research thus illustrates some of the factors that the study’s quantita- tive analysis has uncovered.

Case Studies 125

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