Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)

This section elaborates a typology of strategies of boundary-making in relation to immigrants and emigrants building extensively on previous works by Bauböck et al.

(1998), Zolberg et al. (1999) and Wimmer (2007, 2008a,b).

In relation to those who came:

a) Expanding the boundary consists in creating a more encompassing boundary including immigrants and their descendants. This can be achieved by making the gate to citizenship easier to cross for foreign-born residents and equalizing the rights of foreign nationals with that of citizens.

b) Contracting the boundary consists in narrowing down the pool of eligible members by drawing a sharper line between natives and immigrants. This can be achieved by downgrading the rights of foreign residents and strengthening the rules of acquisition of citizenship.

26. These two ideal-types far from exhaust all the possibilities, and are merely meant to address the purpose of the dissertation. For an exhaustive list of boundary-making strategies, see Wimmer (2008b: 1025:1055).

32 c) Blurring the boundary consists in reducing the salience of the boundary between natives and immigrants by overcoming ethnicity as the dominant form of categorization (Wimmer 2008: 989), or by tolerating multiple affiliations “hitherto thought to be separate and mutually exclusive” (Zolberg et al. 1999: 21). This can be achieved by appealing to another form of classification, such as class or residency, or by institutionalizing immigration-induced pluralism and recognizing multiple affiliations as a legitimate form of full and equal membership in the political community.

A territorializing boundary-making strategy consists in blurring ethnic boundaries within the homeland and expanding the membership boundary to immigrants and their descendants. Conversely, an ethnicizing boundary-building strategy consists in contracting the membership boundary, mechanically excluding foreign-born residents and their descendants.

In relation to those who left:

a) Expanding the boundary consists in creating a more encompassing boundary including emigrants and their descendants. This can be achieved by upgrading the rights of non-resident citizens or modifying the rules of acquisition of citizenship by reinforcing jus sanguinis provisions.

b) Contracting the boundary consists in narrowing down the pool of eligible members by drawing a sharper line between internal and external citizens. This can be achieved by excluding non-resident citizens from the electoral franchise or weakening jus sanguinis provisions in order to limit the right of expatriates to pass their citizenship over to their descendants.

c) Blurring the boundary consists in reducing the political salience of the ethnic bonds and ties with emigrants and their descendants by overcoming ethnicity as the dominant form of categorization or tolerating multiple affiliations. This can be achieved by

33 appealing to another form of classification such as class or residence, or by encouraging emigrants’ full incorporation in the host country.

A territorializing boundary-building strategy consists in blurring and ultimately contracting the membership boundary in relation to emigrants and their descendants.

Conversely, an ethnicizing boundary-building strategy consists in expanding the membership boundary to expatriates and/or their descendants, on the basis of a putative shared ethnicity.

The tables below illustrate the different boundary-making strategies along the four units of analysis to which I apply the conceptual and explanatory framework by contrasting the cases of Catalonia and Scotland. The list is far from being exhaustive and the examples can in many ways be challenged and contradicted. However, they are merely meant to provide the reader with a general idea of boundary-making strategies and their empirical manifestations.

Table 1: Examples of boundary-making strategies in relation to immigrants

Boundary-making Strategies

Boundary blurring Boundary contraction Boundary expansion

Prior to

35

Table 2: Examples of boundary-making strategies in relation to emigrants

Boundary-

36 1.4. Explanatory framework

This section introduces a theoretical framework determining which strategies of boundary-making nationalists are more likely to adopt. The main hypothesis states that nationalists seeking control over a territory have a vested interest in expanding the membership boundary to immigrants while contracting it towards emigrants as they will, by doing so, increase their internal and external legitimacy. While the main hypothesis emphasizes agential factors, actors’ capacity to articulate and institutionally entrench a terrorializing boundary-making strategy is also affected by the relative openness of the Territorial Opportunity Structure, which comprises three dimensions:

the formal distribution of migration-related competencies, the initial boundary and its implications for later developments, and the dynamics of party competition at sub-state level. The first dimension stresses how nationalists are more likely to expand the boundary to immigrants if given the institutional means to regulate immigration and integrate immigrants into their own political community. As the devolution of migration-related powers weakens the importance of ethnic affiliations, so does the perceived need to maintain a strong link with emigrants and their descendants. The second dimension suggests that the way the boundary was initially created in relation to immigrants and emigrants provides an institutional and discursive path that conditions later developments to a considerable extent. Lastly, the third dimension emphasizes how the way in which the nationalist cleavage overlaps and cuts across ideological cleavages shapes the struggle over the making and unmaking of the boundaries.