Estimates of the population of Europe today vary between 502 million¹ and 738 million.² The exact number depends on the way Europe is defined, which is a matter of contention. Indeed, there is no consensus about the precise location of Europe’s boundaries and its exact geographic extent. Some would restrict Europe to the six founding states of the European Community, also recently called ‘Old Europe’ with a somewhat ironic undertone. Others extend Europe to the 28 member states of the present European Union (EU), including some of the countries that belonged to the Soviet Empire before the fall of the...

Citizenship has come to occupy centre stage in the social sciences. It has become a focal point for wide-ranging and varied discussions concerning the future of national welfare states, prospects for democracy in increasingly transnational societies, and the integration of newcomers such as migrants into societies, alongside overall societal integration. The mobility of persons across the borders of national states and the consequences of such mobility for membership, embedded in wider frames of cross-border transactions of goods, services, capital, ideas and fledgling efforts at transnational governance, have become strategic sites for research on the changing boundaries of the political. Migration...

Assimilation was once the indispensable idea in the study of immigrant groups. The theory of assimilation emerged out of the US experience with immigration in the early twentieth century and, for a time, was generalized to all ethno-racial situations. Subject to harsh critique in the closing decades of the twentieth century for its apparent ethnocentrism and other faults, the theory re-emerged in a revised version at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The current chapter considers the amended theory in relation to the assimilation canon of the mid-twentieth century and to the historical experiences that gave rise to the theory...

Numerous key issues have been raised by political theorists and social scientists in their attempts to understand the cultural diversity generated by global migration since the 1950s. Ideally, those issues should be considered in a global context but, given the limited space available here, the focus will be on the North American and Western European regions. To find our way through the complex academic debate concerning cultural diversity in these two regions we need first to distinguish between cultural diversity and multiculturalism. In today’s world, most societies are culturally heterogeneous to various degrees. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, will be...

The unprecedented expansion of race and ethnic studies as a field of scholarly analysis, empirical research and policy engagement has been one of the most prominent developments in the social sciences and humanities over the past four decades. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, these subjects were seen as a relatively marginal area of scholarship and research. Yet in the years since we have seen a rapid growth in research outputs in this area, including books of various kinds, articles in specialised and mainstream journals, and commissioned research reports for governmental and other agencies (Bulmer & Solomos 2004; Collins & Solomos...

It is all too common to hear protest at having chapter on women or gender in any academic volume or handbook. Such a chapter may be used and seen as an excuse for ignoring women or not addressing gender in any of the other chapters. Originally the phrase ‘add women and stir’ was coined to point out that gender equality would not be achieved by simply letting (a few) women enter a profession, or giving women and men equal rights (Noddings 2001; Quay Hutchison 2003). Later authors adapted the phrase: ‘add sex and stir’, ‘add gender and stir’, and finally...

In 2012, migrants made up 215 million of the world’s population of 7 billion (3.1 per cent).¹ One in seven of these migrants was in transit, and 49 per cent were women (IOM 2012; UNCSD 2012). Europe in 2011 had a migrant population of 1.7 million from countries outside of the EU, and 1.3 million citizens of EU-27 states had moved to another member state. The UK received the largest numbers (566,044), followed by Germany (482,422), Spain (457,649) and Italy (385,793), together accounting for 60.3 per cent of all migrants to the EU-27, according to Eurostat data. Some 89 per...

An article in the French newspaperLa Libérationin early 2013 reported on the working life of Fodé Mady Bah, an undocumented Senegalese man who came to France in 2006. Bah first worked in a community restaurant in a southern suburb of Paris and then found a job in 2009 as a dishwasher in a pub in the central part of the capital. In both cases he used false papers he had borrowed from a cousin. He soon joined a group of demonstrators under the auspices of a major French trade union (the CGT). As has been the case for...

Throughout history, immigrants have set up businesses in the places where they settled. Members of certain diaspora communities, such as the Chinese, Armenian, Lebanese, Jewish and Greek, have been prominent as entrepreneurs in many countries. Entrepreneurship, then, has been an important avenue of insertion and incorporation into the host society and its economy. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, self-employment became even more important for immigrants and ethnic minorities, as flows of immigration increased while opportunities for small businesses also expanded. There has been a more qualitative shift as well. Due to rising levels of educational attainment, immigrants...

When Barack Obama first won the US presidency in 2008, his election highlighted two contradictory dynamics. On one hand, Obama’s election symbolised the political integration of those with migrant origins. Obama is the son of a Kansas-born mother and a Kenyan-born father. His African roots are planted in migration, rather than the legacy of US slavery. On the other hand, some 21.6 million foreign-born US residents could not participate in this historic election. These residents – who live, work and pay taxes in the USA – lacked US citizenship, which is a requirement for voting. Their lack of voice stands...

The topic of health deserves a much more central place in the field of migrant studies than it has enjoyed up to now. Standing back from the field of migration, it is worthwhile to consider the drastic increase in the importance of health as a factor in everybody’s lives. Of all the aspects of human life that have been transformed by industrial modernisation, health is one of the most striking. This is not to say that technology has released us from the fear of death and disease – far from it. But the meaning of health has changed. From being...

Conflicts over the legitimacy of certain forms of expressing one’s religious belonging within secular states are at the centre of debates about modern democracies and about the future of liberal-democratic cultures in most EU member states. The landscape of religious diversity has been cultivated through a series of public discussions over a variety of issues, such as controversies over editorial comics and notions of blasphemy, questions of family law and polygamy, new religious movements, cults, opposition to minarets, discussions about the headscarf and legislative projects to ban the wearing of burqas in public spaces. The sensitivity of European public opinion...

Artists have migrated for centuries. The painter Peter Paul Rubens, who was of Flemish origin and born near Cologne, lived and worked in Antwerp, Madrid and London. The composer Georg-Friedrich Händel, who was born in Halle, spent most of his life in London. The writer Heinrich Heine, who was born in Düsseldorf, fled from censorship to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. However, these and many other world-famous artists are rarely discussed as migrants. This can be explained by the fact that art, music and literature studies, which were established at the height of nation-building in...

The paucity of research on the interrelationship of sport and migration is increasingly curious, given the centrality of both migration and sport in contemporary life. Additionally, research within this field has tended to have a relatively limited focus on theory, inclining instead towards more empirical studies.

This chapter considers five broad domains in which sport-migration debates may be developed. It starts by examining broad issues related to the social impacts of migration on sport, with particular reference to general debates on integration and differentiation of migrants. Then the theme of cultural imperialism is explored, with reference to debates on the...

This chapter’s objective is to trace the evolving relationship between the welfare state and immigrant incorporation. The rationale and implications of several prominent typologies of national welfare states and incorporation regimes will be considered in turn. It is important to understand that there are problems attendant to such classifications, in no small measure due to the changes that they have undergone in recent decades. Incorporation is giving way to broader conceptions of integration that acknowledge process, policy internalisation, and externalisation, and the ways in which policies steer the evolution of capacities and alliances.

European host societies have distinctive ‘caring strategies’...

Almost an entire generation of students of migration and integration from all over the world have been initiated into this area throughThe Age of Migration, authored by Stephen Castles and Mark Miller. This is an excellent textbook, and there can be no better proof of this than that it has already seen its fifth revised edition. In their book Castles and Miller develop three models that reflect the differences in approach between the three major immigration countries in Europe: the exclusionary model of Germany, the republican or assimilation model of France and the multiculturalist model of Britain (Castles & Miller...

Like all human societies, the EU displays a wide variety of ethno-cultural and national affiliations and identities. This diversity is not going to disappear under the pressure of globalisation. The standardisation of mass culture is certainly a trend that cannot be denied. But at the same time, various forms of cultural, ethnic, national, religious and post-national identities emerge in the public sphere and reconstruct themselves as a response to the standardisation trend.

In a book published in 1995, the American historian David Hollinger introduced the expression ‘diversification of diversity’ to describe the dynamics of cultures and identities in the US...