3. Citizenship in a Post-migrant Europe: Socio-Political Cohesion at Breaking Point?

This chapter suggests that political and administrative elites driving European integration may have underestimated—especially so in the post-Cold War era—the resilience and mobilizing force of the national(ist) idiom. Post-national and cosmopolitan paradigms of democratic politics—despite the de-territorialization of sovereignty—were clearly outpaced by national identity politics and popular opposition to immigration. The discussion further shows how debates on asylum and immigration impacted on debates of social cohesion and the integrative functions of citizenship. This does concern, above all, the question of whether there are any real prospects for European citizenship beyond a thin reality of legal nominalism. How this question is answered will not only have direct implications on EU political and social cohesion but on the sustainability of the European project as such.