Migration and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Europe

This innovative and thought-provoking study puts forth a compelling analysis of the constitutive nexus at the heart of the European refugee conundrum. It maps and historically contextualises some of the distinctive challenges that pervasive ethnic and cultural pluralism present to real politics as on the level of political theorizing. By systematically integrating hitherto insufficiently linked research perspectives in a novel way, it lays open a number of paradoxical constellations and regressive tendencies in contemporary European democracy. It thereby redirects attention to the ways in which liberal thought and liberal democratic institutions shape, interact with, and may even provide justification for illiberal and exclusionary practices. This book thus makes an important contribution to the analysis of post-migrant realities in Europe and the ways in which they are defined by imperial legacies, punitive migration regimes, the culturalization of mainstream politics, and the discursive construction of a European Other.

Links key debates in European politics and provides a rereading of European migration history Contextualizes the 2015/2016 Syrian refugee crisis within the current challenges to European liberal democracy Locates the refugee at the center of democratic theory

Autorentext

Christoph M. Michael is Senior Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His research interests lie at the intersection of political theory, comparative politics, anthropology and the history of political thought.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. The Dialectics of European Integration.- 3. Socio-political Cohesion at Breaking-point? Citizenship in a Post-migrant Europe.- 4. Changing Logics of Migration: Immigrant Threat to National Sovereignty?.- 5. The Integration Paradox: Culturalizing Belonging at the End of the 'Multiculturalist Era'.- 6. Synthesis: Grand Visions, Fractured Realities.