Membership Penalties in Imagined Communities

Kymlicka and colleagues’ recent work on membership penalties in multicultural societies merits praise as an example of a coherent and ambitious empirical research agenda of normative relevance. As a normative political theorist, Will Kymlicka's participation in this set of collaborative studies demonstrates his willingness to pursue his political theoretical agenda beyond disciplinary boundaries. Nonetheless, such great efforts produced disheartening results, showing that majorities fail to consider minorities as deserving members when it comes to accessing social rights, and they doubt their merits as legitimate democratic agents raising political claims. A brief overview of these empirical contributions on deservingness judgments will be the first step in this section. Then I will investigate the overarching reasoning leading to the shift of focus toward membership perceptions. One plausible explanation of the shift, as will be claimed, has to do with the particular conception of nationhood underpinning these empirical research designs, namely, nations understood as “imagined communities.” Through this explanation, the section will claim that the research on membership penalties is deeply influenced by Kymlicka's normative political theory.

In their contribution, Kymlicka and colleagues offered an innovative investigation of the empirical dynamics pertaining to solidarity and political claims-making in multicultural settings (Reference Banting, Allison and WillBanting et al. 2022; Reference Harell, Keith and WillHarell, Banting, and Kymlicka 2024; Reference Harell, Keith, Will and RebeccaHarell, Banting, Kymlicka, and Wallace 2021). They commonly shift the focus from the “majority's own relationship to the nation” to “how the majority population perceives newcomers’ and minorities’ relationship to the nation” (Reference Harell, Keith, Will and RebeccaHarell et al. 2021: 984). These “membership perceptions” measure how majorities in multicultural settings evaluate various minorities’ merits as members rightfully accessing social rights and legitimately acting as democratic agents making political claims, conceptualized together as “deservingness judgments”. The results are particularly disheartening for immigrants, as throughout Western societies, cultural minorities are persistently perceived to be less deserving than majorities. In addition, immigrants are at the bottom of these membership hierarchies, that is, after Indigenous nations and subnational minorities. In turn, minorities face “membership penalties.” Research demonstrates that such negative judgments have to do with majorities’ perceptions of minorities as lacking loyalty and commitment to the overall national community, even when other explanatory factors might coexist, for example, racial prejudice or xenophobia.^{Footnote 3} With regard to political claims-making, for example, majorities perceive majority members as legitimate political agents motivated by the common good, whereas minorities’ claims-making lacks legitimacy, as it is perceived as an expression of selfish group interests.

As Kymlicka contributes to these empirical studies with expertise on multicultural political theory, this expectedly leads to some meaningful connections between his normative theory and these empirical studies. There is a processual dynamic between these empirical and normative contributions, a feedback loop if you wish, whereby empirical studies are informed by Kymlicka's normative theory in their theoretical underpinnings, leading to results that, in turn, inform Kymlicka's political theory. While this latter influence will be addressed in the following section, in the remainder of this section, I will explain how research designs on membership penalties are informed by Kymlicka's broader normative theory.

A good place to start identifying the influence of Kymlicka's political theory would be to look at his interpretation of these alarming results that document membership penalties.^{Footnote 4} For him, the main problem has something to do with the stories of peoplehood that democratic majorities adopt (2022, 2024). As he put it: “Stories of peoplehood differentially locate majorities and minorities” (2022: 114). They make it so that majorities consider even their own most problematic forms of historical political mobilizations as instances of moral commitment to the nation. When it comes to minorities’ political claims and movements, however, these are easily perceived as instances of group egoism, “leading to pervasive and systematic membership penalties” (2022: 116). Although Kymlicka's political theory is influential for interpreting these results, a part of its influence is located within the theoretical underpinnings of these empirical studies. To understand this influence, we need to investigate why exactly it is helpful to focus on majority perceptions in this manner, in the first place.

In my view, one plausible explanation for the link between stories of peoplehood and membership penalties pertains to the particular conception of nationhood underlying these studies, namely, that nations are understood as “imagined communities.” Recall that what makes the membership penalties research innovative has to do with their investigating whether and to what extent minorities are perceived as part of the “we” in the national community (Reference Harell, Keith and WillHarell et al. 2024: 4). The authors motivate their choice in favor of adopting this angle by emphasizing its potential to offer a more comprehensive analysis of existing sociopolitical dynamics. For them, this would complement the negative picture pertaining to majorities’ “out-group exclusive” tendencies, which the existing research has so far documented, through a more positive picture, focusing on “in-group” dynamics. They investigate the conditions under which majorities are willing to extend their “in-group inclusive” tendencies to minorities, although they are traditionally reserved for majority members (Reference Harell, Keith and WillHarell et al. 2024: 2).

In my view, the particular conception Kymlicka and colleagues commonly operationalize in their empirical work understands nations as “imagined communities” (Reference AndersonAnderson 2016). This claim can be supported by the kind of questions included in their survey, among them: “Compared to other [nationals], how much do you think [1] immigrants identify with the country? . . . [2] care about the concerns and needs of other [nationals]? . . . [3] show willingness to make sacrifices for others in our society?” These all pertain to how majorities evaluate immigrants’ membership commitments to the national political project—that is, how majorities imagine the link between this community and immigrants (Reference Harell, Keith and WillHarell et al. 2024: 25). These questions track the existence of nations understood as entities that have an (allegedly) “intersubjective existence” in the eyes of their members.^{Footnote 5} I wish to emphasize that this conception of nationhood defines nations as pre-political communities with shared cultural features.

These explanations lead me to offer a few remarks that will become important later. First, notice that these two conceptions—nations as intersubjective versus constructed entities—are both prominent conceptions of nationhood endorsed in various social scientific and normative theoretical studies. Second, when operationalized in empirical research designs, they can point in different directions, and perhaps even lead to conflicting explanations. When nationhood is understood as an intersubjective entity, this leads to the kinds of questions mentioned earlier; meanwhile, when understood as a constructed entity, it would raise the kinds of questions that could potentially capture the influence of existing policies on people's perceptions of others as full and equal members. For example, Christel Kesler and Irene Bloemraad's study on immigration and general trust endorses a constructivist conception of nationhood (Reference Kesler and Irene2010). They argue that while immigration can sometimes have negative effects on social trust, this mainly depends on institutional and policy contexts. Remarkably, in policy contexts where egalitarian welfare state policies and multiculturalism is strong, the negative effects are mitigated or even reversed. To some extent the constructivist conception is also present in Kymlicka's interpretation of multicultural policies as a mitigating factor to the documented membership penalties (2022, 2024) but remains secondary to the understanding of nations as imagined communities.

To briefly summarize, research on membership penalties show that majorities fail to consider minorities as deserving members with respect to both accessing social rights as well as acting as political agents. In their theoretical underpinnings, these studies mainly operationalize a conception of nationhood understood as an intersubjective entity, in line with Kymlicka's normative approach. The remainder of this article is devoted to the normative relevance of these empirical findings for Kymlicka's renewed normative project and its critical assessment.

Multicultural Nationalism as a Normative Rearticulation

Empirical research on minority and majority dynamics in multicultural settings are of utmost importance to Kymlicka's political theory, given the major justificatory role played by shared common national identity. This section will explain the normative relevance of membership penalties from within Kymlicka's theory. As will become clear, the challenging results led Kymlicka to recalibrate his multicultural citizenship–infused liberal nationalist project (henceforth, the infusion thesis) into a more synthetic marriage of these two components around “multicultural nationalism.”

Before offering an overview of the infusion thesis, a clarification is in order. Liberal nationalism and multicultural citizenship as two different “labels” might be misleadingly thought of as entailing two significantly different approaches. However, they largely overlap, perhaps even more so in Kymlicka's theory. As Helder Reference De SchutterDe Schutter (2007: 384) puts it: “liberal nationalists are often also multiculturalists” because they are sympathetic to minorities’ claims to rights. One key point where they overlap concerns the defense of a “thin” and “inclusive” common national identity. That said, slight differences exist that relate to their relative emphases and thematic coverages. While liberal nationalism emphasizes what unity requires in a political community, multiculturalism is interested in how various cultural identities can be respected and recognized. In turn, the infusion thesis combines these approaches to address how culturally diverse societies can nonetheless be meaningfully united. Put otherwise, existing cultural diversity as such is not an insurmountable challenge for unity in a political community.

In its simplest form, liberal nationalism can be understood as “a theory of cohesion or a model to conceive unity in political community” (Reference De Schutter, Elke, Geert and StefanDe Schutter 2012: 171), asserting not only that liberalism and nationalism are compatible (Reference CanovanCanovan 1996, Reference Canovan2000; Reference De SchutterDe Schutter 2007; Reference GansGans 2002; Reference GustavssonGustavsson 2019; Reference Gustavsson and DavidGustavsson and Miller 2019; Reference TamirTamir 1995), but also that nationalism is necessary for the liberal democratic order. For liberal nationalists, citizens can be considered autonomous and united when (1) they share a common national identity, that is (2) reflected in state institutions. They offer three main justifications for this project. First, liberal nationalism is an intrinsically valuable project that upholds members’ autonomy. This is not only because the state structure cannot be neutral (Reference KymlickaKymlicka 2003: 111), but also (and more importantly), because embeddedness in one's culture within a national political community is a precondition for meeting the demands of the liberal ideal of individual autonomy. As Reference KymlickaKymlicka (2003: 83) puts it: “freedom involves making choices amongst various options, and our societal culture not only provides these options, but also makes them meaningful to us.” Second, the project is also justified instrumentally as enhancing desirable aspects of social cooperation, for example, social justice and democratic politics. Often generalized, trust plays an intervening role between common identity and these aspects.^{Footnote 6} Redistributive policies require people to make sacrifices for anonymous others, and this is easier “when they [people] view those others as part of a shared community, bound together by a common identity and sense of mutual commitment” (Reference KymlickaKymlicka 2003: 175). When it comes to democratic politics, people are willing to make political compromises when they believe their political claims are taken seriously (Reference KymlickaKymlicka 2001: 226–227). Kymlicka sometimes considers the national project to be a precondition for peaceful democratic politics. For him, democratic politics require “a stable and bounded ‘we’ that is widely accepted as the unit for democratic governance” (2024: 160), or that units of governance—that is, states with particular territorial limits—must be fixed for democratic politics to work in a peaceful manner (2022). The final justification supports liberal nationalism as a feasible normative project. In that regard, its proponents have offered various historical illustrations and anecdotal references demonstrating the role of common identities in enhancing social justice; for example, Reference KymlickaKymlicka (2003: 177–180) refers to the cases of Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Liberal multiculturalism, in turn, faces the challenge of sociological cultural diversity by developing models of differentiated citizenship. As a liberal theory, multiculturalism recognizes the intrinsic moral value of cultural identities for various national minorities (Indigenous people and substate nations) as well as immigrant groups, thereby discarding assimilationist policies as desirable options. Indeed, it is argued, minorities should maintain their cultural identities and practices, to the extent that the latter respect liberal limits. They should receive public support as disadvantaged groups given that “public institutions inevitably reflect the history and cultural norms of the majority” (Reference KymlickaKymlicka 2003: 109). Kymlicka offers a twofold solution to this problem. First, a common identity in multicultural societies should be inclusive, that is, limited in its substance by entailing only a few basic elements such as the official language, flags, anthems, public holidays, or educational policies, which are preferably stripped of their marginalizing features for ethnocultural minorities (2001: 225; 2003: 95, 115). Second, minorities should be offered a set of rights as a form of differentiated citizenship, tailored to protect them from majority domination.^{Footnote 7} For immigrants, this means offering them “polyethnic rights” facilitating their integration into the receiving society, including rights such as mother tongue education for children, public enjoyment of minority cultural identities, exemptions from certain laws or regulations, or symbolic recognition of their cultural traditions and identities (2003: 101–114). These rights not only protect immigrants against majority cultural domination, but also “facilitate [their] participation in the wider society” (2003: 127). Moreover, a thin common identity alongside polyethnic rights is taken to facilitate unity in multicultural states, by responding adequately to the challenges of ethnocultural diversity. This is why Kymlicka criticized the failures of the French principle of laïcité, enacting a strict separation of religion and state as an alienating principle for minorities (2001: 208–213) and praised the regional autonomy offered to Catalonia and Flanders as successful models of reconciling national unity with minority rights (2003: 26–30).

Unsurprisingly, empirical research on membership penalties significantly challenges the above picture as a viable normative project, in particular in immigrant-receiving societies. Even though a limited number of the respondents did not endorse such membership penalties vis-à-vis the minorities (instead treating them as full and equal members) (Reference Kymlicka, Thomas, Varun and NasarKymlicka 2024: 161), most of them do. Thus, these results raise serious concern for the normative desirability and feasibility of the infusion thesis. More importantly, they stem from systematic empirical research, increasing their credibility vis-à-vis the traditionally historical, illustrative, and anecdotal defenses offered by proponents of the infusion thesis. As disheartening as they might be, these results are unsurprising, as they arrive in a research context where similar challenges have already been identified (Reference Baycan, Matteo, Jonathan and AndrewBaycan and Gianni 2019; Reference Baycan-Herzog, Corinna and WolframBaycan-Herzog 2021; Reference HoltugHoltug 2017, Reference Holtug2021; Reference Mendoza, Harald and ChristianMendoza 2016; Reference Miller and SundasMiller and Ali 2014). For Reference Kymlicka, Liav and RuudKymlicka (2022, Reference Kymlicka, Thomas, Varun and Nasar2024), membership penalties result from the existing stories of peoplehood that differentially locate majorities and minorities. He believes that multicultural policies have been steps in the right direction, even if they remain insufficient. These lead him to recalibrate the infusion thesis in the direction of conceiving the first steps toward a full integration of liberal nationalism and multicultural citizenship around “multicultural nationalism” (henceforth “McN”).

In taking the first steps in conceiving McN, Kymlicka mainly aims to find ways to transform unfair majority attitudes toward minorities into more sympathetic ones. This normative rearticulation is best understood as a normative “recalibration” (Reference Levey, Thomas, Varun and NasarLevey 2024: 167), because for Kymlicka the overall direction of the infusion thesis and its components remains salvageable, for two reasons. First, given that research results show that not all majority members penalize minorities, this positively encourages reforming rather than completely rearticulating the project. The second is a negative reason against changing course completely toward an alternative non-nationalist normative project: Kymlicka believes that projects devoid of “some degree of society-making and membership-making” do not constitute viable normative solutions (2024: 160). These two reasons together motivate his recalibration in favor of McN, a similar direction to the one taken by other scholars such as Tariq Modood and the Bristol School of Multiculturalism (Reference ModoodModood 2020; Reference Modood, Bhikhu, Colin, Varun and JamesModood et al. 2024).

McN's main aim is to transform stories of peoplehood to allow majorities to perceive minorities as “constituent members of the ‘we’”(Reference Kymlicka, Thomas, Varun and NasarKymlicka 2024: 153). Kymlicka believes that “a just society needs to find a way to eliminate or at least reduce these penalties in perceptions of membership-based deservingness” (2024: 110; my emphasis). On various occasions, he admits that his two suggestions toward this ideal being “speculative” at this stage, because he is convinced that more empirical data should be gathered and interpreted before formulating full suggestions (2022, 2024). The first is to promote an implicit nationhood; that is, to avoid priming nationhood but to give it a place that is simply “part of the habitus” (2022: 96). He relies on empirical results showing that, when nationhood is “pushed to the front of people's minds,” this has a negative effect on minorities (2022: 96). He understands this implicit conception as a “banal or everyday” nationalism and refers to Billig's famous weather maps example. Even though national weather forecasts do not convey an explicit consciousness of nationhood in spectators, “in an unconscious way, [they] operate to reproduce the idea that the . . . Danish people belong together” (Reference Kymlicka, Liav and RuudKymlicka 2022: 96). The second speculative suggestion in turn emphasizes a fuller understanding of multiculturalism, highlighting its transformative potential regarding “the majority conceptions of membership” (2022: 116). He explains how multiculturalism can be understood both as a constraint with respect to nation-building policies (traditionally understood), as well as a factor that can enable minorities’ positive contributions to shared projects (multiculturally understood). For him, it is this second underappreciated function that could make a good recipe for working against membership penalties. The idea is to transform majorities’ perceptions of minority claims’ credibility as facilitating their contribution to the common good: multiculturalism should be “tied to the ideas of participation and contribution—a kind of ‘multicultural nationalism’” (2022: 117) that can alter majorities’ perceptions and thereby reduce membership penalties.

McN could be considered a first step toward a more complete normative revision. In many respects, McN remains within the same normative program as the infusion thesis; its main features remain the same: a nationalist paradigm with fixed political units, inclusive nationhood, and the importance of a common national identity. Unlike before, however, Kymlicka now recognizes that the traditional justifications offered for the infusion thesis, that is, feasibility and normative desirability, are not as solid; in other words, its inclusive potential needs to be enhanced. To address this issue, despite Kymlicka recognizing that a complete normative revision should follow further empirical results, he nonetheless suggests two modifications: promoting an implicit nationhood and emphasizing multiculturalism's public justification as a project that facilitates minorities’ contributions and loyalty to the common political project. That said, this latter has always been one of the justifications, though, different from this new suggestion, it came together with another justification emphasizing multiculturalism as protective and a defensive project. To fully understand McN, however, we need to know more about the status of these recommendations.

The methodological status of both recommendations is not fully clear with respect to Kymlicka's political theory, rendering it difficult to clearly understand the relative novelty of McN. Are these changes meant to be only two public policy recommendations? If so, then McN does not offer a new normative ideal of multicultural nationhood, but offers a non-ideal theory. It simply describes how to (better) achieve the normative ideal endorsed by the infusion thesis in the real world, adequately responding to the negative picture drawn by the research on membership penalties (Reference RobeynsRobeyns 2008: 343). However, if the methodological status of these two modifications is understood as part of a change at the level of the normative ideal (in addition to also being public policy recommendations), this changes the status of McN. In this case, McN consists of imprints of a new normative ideal, entailing a more inclusive ideal of nationhood, one that is flexible enough to respond viably to the changing ethnocultural political landscape—a different ideal than the infusion thesis. My impression is that this second understanding is a better fit, or else, that the suggested changes would not be presented under a new label.

To summarize, despite its similarities with the infusion thesis, by starting to draw a picture of a new normative project around McN, Kymlicka is promoting a more inclusive ideal of nationhood in multicultural societies. In the next section, I will critically assess whether this is a normatively desirable and convincing ideal.

A Moderate Methodological Nationalist Critique

This section will first offer an overview of the debate on methodological nationalism (henceforth “MN”) and will claim that a moderate version of it can offer a helpful critical lens through which to assess Kymlicka's renewed normative vision. Recall that the McN articulates an inclusive ideal of nationhood, requiring that just societies find ways to eliminate, if possible, or at least reduce membership penalties. Kymlicka believes that this can be achieved when we find ways to transform stories of peoplehood. I will argue that achieving this ideal requires Kymlicka to avoid relying on methodologically nationalist presuppositions. Methodological nationalism is a holistic critique, consisting of a set of epistemically problematic presuppositions that draws a fixed portrait of societies and sociopolitical order as conforming to a world composed of nation-states. This reductive portrait comes with various undesirable normative consequences.

Scholars agree that, in its simplest form, MN is an epistemic shortcoming embedded in social scientific or theoretical work with undesirable normative implications, although the specific nature of the epistemic problem varies: inadequate representation of the society (Reference CherniloChernilo 2011); scholars’ cognitively biased conceptualization of it (Reference DumitruDumitru 2014); or research into it working from reductive assumptions (Reference Wimmer and Nina GlickWimmer and Glick Schiller 2002).^{Footnote 8} One important aspect of the critique is its holistic nature, including various claims regarding some of its particular aspects, such as in conceptualizing society and its membership as culturally homogeneous, and borders as clearly distinguishing the domestic from the international sphere, or the international state system being composed of nation-states. All of these presuppositions correspond to simplified understandings of the sociopolitical world. Bordering processes operate inside the domestic sphere, or even beyond (Reference KukathasKukathas 2021; Reference Shachar, Sarah, Jakob, Chimène I., Noora, Steffen and LetiShachar et al. 2020); many societies include an important number of foreign residents from various ethnocultural backgrounds (consider Switzerland with its one-quarter foreign residents, or Germany with its approximately 3 million foreign residents from Turkey), and many nations lack their own state (e.g., Kurds or Indigenous people), while other states are best described as “multinational states” (e.g., Belgium, Switzerland, and Spain). For scholars of MN, when this complex picture is ignored in theory, they should not be taken as simple “theoretical idealizations” inevitable to the activity of theorizing, as this latter cannot be performed unless some aspects of reality are simplified by means of idealizations. Rather, they should be understood as bad idealizations that offer an inadequate conceptualization of sociopolitical reality. More importantly, such reductive presuppositions lead to undesirable normative analyses. Such shortcomings will most significantly apply to phenomena that deviate from this holistic and fixed epistemic horizon.

Originating in research in the social sciences, critiques of MN have only recently found their place in normative political theory (Reference DumitruDumitru 2014; Reference SagerSager 2016, Reference Sager2018, Reference Sager2021). In its simplest form, MN conceptualizes nations, states, and citizenship as equivalent to society, social cooperation, and membership (Reference Wimmer and Nina GlickWimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). This epistemic shortcoming may be due to a non-intentional cognitive overlook by a scholar or due to a scholar reiterating it by choice despite its reductive nature. More importantly, MN is not only a problem related to the philosophy of social sciences but also a transversal one endorsed by people and operated throughout the common public debate. In turn, a large number of undesirable normative consequences follow, as the nationalist worldview takes a dominant place in its theorizing; its moral prerogatives are emphasized at the expense of the eventual moral claims of migrants and their equal membership, in various ways. By reiterating the nation-centered perspective, MN creates a social scientific and political theoretical imaginary horizon, a fixed background against which the normative justification operates, leading to an unfair distribution of normative justification. It demands too little justification (lacks reflexivity, if you wish) with respect to political arrangements conforming to this epistemic horizon—for example, nation-states, nationalism, national membership—and too much additional justification for deviating arrangements as suspect phenomena, for example, international migration, migrants’ membership. MN sets the norm of political membership to citizens, who possess full sets of formal rights, and contrasts them with immigrants (and other minorities), as exceptions deviating from the norm, leading to a persistent questioning of their membership. The research on MN in political theory remains in its infancy, and it would not be helpful to further elaborate, yet one important distinction warrants further digression. As I understand it, we can distinguish the critique into radical and moderate versions.

In its most radical form, the critique of MN rejects using any distinction between migrants and citizens in normative analysis. It claims that we should exclude all state-centered perspectives and its specific categories (e.g., temporary, regular, irregular, settled migrants/citizens, etc.) from forming an epistemic background, as these latter are deemed to prevent an adequate understanding of the ethical dilemmas related to migration. Recently, Speranta Reference DumitruDumitru (2023) has offered a prominent example of this radical critique. Dumitru argues that unless a political theoretical account applies ethical principles such as equality of opportunity or non-discrimination to everyone consistently—that is, without any additional normative consideration offered to peoples’ migration status—the account remains within the grid of methodologically nationalist cognitive biases at the disadvantage of migrants. As many accounts fail to do this, Dumitru identifies the normative problem as a cognitive bias distorting the ethical analysis throughout the field. For her, this bias led the field to defend the exclusion of migrants rather than offering a critique of the existing injustices that they are subjected to (Reference DumitruDumitru 2023: 46). This is not the kind of critique that will inform my main argument, as it does not have anything more to say than to dismiss Kymlicka's projects altogether.

I think a moderate understanding of MN is more helpful. For the critique to remain helpful, it should not conflate all normative disagreement with “ethical distortion.” In scholarly and common public debates, there are normative and political disagreements inter alia between the nationalist and cosmopolitan views. Claiming that every political theoretical account reiterating state categories offers an ethically distorted analysis leads to placing these disagreements outside of the theoretical landscape, rather than engaging with them. In addition, this prevents MN from remaining a meaningful critique by fruitfully engaging with various political theoretical works, allowing a normative endorsement of nationalism, rather than dismissing it as an ethical distortion simpliciter. Finally, it is sometimes impossible to articulate specific moral problems related to the existing injustices produced by state categories without including them in our theories. For example, scholars must refer to bordering processes and multiple injustices produced by the formal lack of host-country citizenship in the domestic sphere, in order to articulate the specific moral problems produced by them, for example, immigrants’ difficulties in accessing several important rights at once, such as the right to marry, change employers, and so forth (Reference Lenard and ChristineLenard and Straehle 2012; Reference Ottonelli and TizianaOttonelli and Torresi 2012). Articulating the grievous ethical issues raised by the pervasive influence of bordering processes on the liberal democratic ethos in host-societies requires scholars to pay attention to, rather than avoid, state categories in their analyses (Reference BosniakBosniak 2008; Reference KukathasKukathas 2021; Reference LimLim 2024). I do not claim that disengaging from state categories can never help, as this can help in capturing ethical dilemmas outside of a nation-centered perspective (see Reference SagerSager 2018). My claim is that the gist of the MN critique is not about avoiding these categories but about thinking of creative ways to adequately theorize ethical issues of migration, sensitive to the specific issues at hand. Some subjects would require disengagement whereas others would require critical engagement. For moderate critiques, MN can be helpful even within nationalism by enhancing its reflexivity in clearly separating its descriptive and prescriptive dimensions (Reference CherniloChernilo 2007: 35). In sum, the moderate MN, as I understand it, does not shy away from being informed by state categories or reflecting normative disagreements in theorizing, to the extent that these serve to articulate theories that adequately capture the ethical dilemmas related to the complexities of migration governance.

In my view, the critique of MN holds the potential to normatively improve McN. First, notice that both McN and the moderate methodological nationalist critique share an inclusive ideal of membership for all and identify national-order of things as burdening minorities. To the extent that MN is a transversal problem influencing not only philosophical and political–scientific studies, but also people's worldviews, part of the exclusion in stories of peoplehood that Kymlicka aims at transforming can be attributed to people endorsing this fixed sociopolitical horizon themselves. Hence, it would be helpful if Kymlicka recognized its relevance to adequately theorizing an ideal of inclusive nationhood and thereby realizing his aims of reducing, if not eliminating, membership penalties. Second, MN is also relevant for the way Kymlicka defends implicit nationhood as a (or as a more) normatively desirable ideal (than primed nationhood). In contrast, MN attributes an exclusive normative influence to such an ideal, whereby nationhood implicitly operates in the back of peoples’ mind in an unreflective manner, similar to banal nationalism.^{Footnote 9} If scholars of MN are right, this implies that unless McN considers this aspect, it could perhaps reduce membership penalties (relative to priming nationhood at least) but most certainly not reduce them meaningfully, let alone eliminate them. In other words, the MN critique raises concerns that Kymlicka's project is not sufficient to offer an adequately inclusive ideal in post-immigration societies, to the extent that his project relies on such presuppositions.^{Footnote 10}

Given the holistic nature of the MN critique, in the following section I will focus on one problematic epistemic presupposition to illustrate its undesirable normative implications for Kymlicka's renewed project of McN, and offer a few recommendations for future research.

Recalibrating Multicultural Nationalism?

Multicultural nationalism (McN) relies on a set of methodologically nationalist epistemic presuppositions. This section will extensively focus on one such presupposition on states territory informing Kymlicka's theory to illustrate how this leads to an inadequate diagnosis, and thereby to an undesirable normative evaluation. With this illustration, I wish to show that the main normative aim of offering a renewed normative project based on an ideal of inclusive nationhood requires adequately diagnosing the existing exclusive tendencies. In addition, I briefly mention another epistemic shortcoming related to methodological nationalism (MN), relying on a limited epistemic horizon centered on the nation-state. Such a stance leads to a less reflexive normative view of nationalism. Using these two aspects, I will demonstrate that the critique of MN can improve McN in fulfilling its normative aims.

One misleading epistemic presupposition on the part of the critique of MN concerns its simplistic understanding of state territories. Relatedly, the MN critique claims that a reductive understanding of the territorial aspect can impoverish the adequate theorizing of the sociopolitical order. Typically, this occurs when state territories are idealized as simple containers neatly separating the domestic from the international sphere, without an eye on how the latter shapes the domestic sphere. Kymlicka's claim that democratic politics requires “political units” that need to be stabilized can be critically examined in light of this presupposition. It is not clear why this idealization is maintained. To be fair, Kymlicka discusses alternatives to such a vision, but he decides to maintain it, partially because in his view, “it is not clear how a stable democratic order can be constructed without some degree of society-making and membership-making” (2024: 160; my emphasis). Most certainly, this “unclarity” is partially a symptom of difficulty in accessing an alternative epistemic horizon outside of the grid of the nation-state, a point that scholars of MN have emphasized.^{Footnote 11} Of course, as the previous section also asserted, this failure is not as such a sufficient justification on its own, as it simply reiterates a fixed epistemic vision. What is more interesting, however, is that even if Kymlicka were to prefer such units to remain stable for good reasons, his normative analysis is misinformed when he transforms this presupposition into a theoretical idealization, to say that the existing units can be best idealized as stable and peaceful. In what follows, I will show that doing so prevents him from offering an adequate idealization of the state of affairs that corresponds to an increased political instability with respect to political units. In addition, and more importantly, it leads McN to fail to meaningfully articulate and address various ethical dilemmas. As will become clear, these will be unfair to immigrants’ equal membership and normative perspectives.

Even in the wake of empirical research results on important membership penalties that majorities impose on minorities (Reference Kymlicka, Liav and RuudKymlicka 2022, Reference Kymlicka, Thomas, Varun and Nasar2024), Kymlicka surprisingly maintains his claim that entrenching political units is necessary for a peaceful and stable liberal democratic life. The units in question here refer to “units of governance.” Different from empires with ever-expanding territorial ambitions, modern states govern specific territories limited by their borders; entrenching these units from one generation to the next is of utmost importance for peaceful politics. What is more, for Kymlicka, a successfully inculcated idea of nationhood plays a vital role in entrenching these units and stabilizing “democracy by helping to create this (overall puzzling) combination of diverging preferences on policy but converging preferences on units” (2022: 90). Given that liberal democratic principles would lead us toward diverging preferences, such entrenchment cannot be achieved, unless it is complemented by nationhood. To illustrate this role, Kymlicka refers to the case of Northern Ireland (2022: 90). Historically, Irish Catholic Republicans and British-Protestant Unionists persistently disagreed about the adequate unit of governance for Northern Ireland, claiming that it belonged with Ireland and Britain, respectively. This disagreement led to political paralysis and even to violence. In contrast, stable units of governance in France, Germany, and Denmark illustrate how peaceful liberal democratic orders can be created when successful stories of nationhood generate ties that bind.

The problem with the above analysis is that it idealizes the existing state borders wrongfully as stable or peaceful, and this in turn leads to undesirable normative consequences for immigrants. It is not because there are nation-states, neatly separated from each other in a world system understood as a container model, that the units are peaceful or not fundamentally questioned; borders are shifting and constitute the locus of significant political disagreement within the domestic sphere. Consider migration policies and laws that continuously and rapidly change to transform who is a member and who is not, in the blink of an eye, in a given territory. The case of Britain illustrates this point perfectly: through each change of the British nationality law, various former Commonwealth citizens who were legitimate members in Britain turned into immigrants; more recently, the same happened for immigrants of EU origin in the wake of Brexit. Many states mainstreamed permit degradations to settled immigrants in their migration policies (Reference EllermannEllermann 2020) and withdrew citizenship of minorities of migration background (Reference GibneyGibney 2020). My worry is that such units are easily considered to be stable, mostly because theoretical idealizations misrepresent the nature of political units in the first place. Although this simplistic portrait could perhaps overlap with the way that some majority members consider such units, the same cannot be said for immigrants whose belonging remains persistently questioned. To the extent that a normative political theory should rely on idealizations offering a balanced epistemic portrait of the phenomena and articulate ethical dilemmas adequately, it should avoid such idealizations. This idealization makes it difficult to articulate ethical dilemmas, in particular those caused by exclusive nationhood and its accompanying border policies operating within the domestic sphere. While these remain unaddressed, it is impossible to identify what Kymlicka's claim, asserting the stability of political units, concretely entails in terms of public policies in immigrant-receiving societies under these circumstances. Should entrenchment of such political units be understood as there being no new immigrant admission, once and for all? Or entrenching a particular migration policy and law once and for all? These are very important and relevant questions, yet they cannot be answered. All this seems to suggest that Kymlicka's characterization non-intentionally entails that such questions, and an important level of exclusion faced by immigrants, can be legitimately neglected within the multicultural project. In other words, even if McN were to resolve membership penalties, it would not be able to eliminate such injustices, and hence would not be able to offer equal membership to immigrants. In other words, departing from such reductive epistemic presuppositions and reiterating them in the form of theoretical idealizations stunt McN in fulfilling its own normative aim.

Through this illustration, I hope to have clearly demonstrated the relevance and normative added-value of MN for Kymlicka's project by focusing on only one of the many reductive presuppositions that McN relies on. Given that MN is a holistic critique including various similarly reductive presuppositions, other points could be articulated as well. Before concluding, I wish to briefly mention another epistemic shortcoming, namely adopting a nation-statist epistemic horizon. This leads to offer an inadequately reflexive normative view of nationalism. Typically, this occurs when prescriptive (normative) and descriptive (empirical) dimensions of nationalism are not clearly identified (Reference CherniloChernilo 2007: 35). This worry applies to both former and recalibrated ideals of nationalism that Kymlicka defends. Recall once more the conception of nationhood underlying the empirical studies on membership penalties, namely nations conceptualized as imagined communities, stemming from Kymlicka's normative political theory. It is one thing to identify a conception of nationhood as normatively desirable, quite another to think it is empirically adequate. If the aim is to capture the empirical complexity, normative desirability of a conception is insufficient, it might even be epistemically misleading, by preventing the identification of a more adequate conception. After reading Kymlicka's and colleagues work, we still do not know which conception of nationhood would be more adequate. What are the epistemic reasons operationalizing nations mainly as intersubjective entities rather than testing them as constructed ones? What are the epistemic reasons not to ask immigrants about their views on the relationship between majorities and the nation? These show the limits of Kymlicka's work in adequately capturing the nature of dynamics in multicultural societies. Another similar problem pertains to the relative defense of an implicit ideal of nationhood. If minorities are penalized due to the prominence of the stories of peoplehood, then we need to know descriptively why this is the case. While Kymlicka discusses various accounts that focus on majority/minority dynamics, a similar perspective to Kymlicka's political theory, alternative accounts remain unaddressed. There is at least one very important alternative account that remains absent, namely the literature on political parties and political behavior. According to this account, exclusive nationhood is produced by the successful narratives of right-wing populist parties in constructing hostility toward immigrants (Reference Alrababah, Andreas, Dominik and DalstonAlrababah et al. 2024). This can have major influences on social norms of acceptability of such views, in particular when, instead of offering alternative narratives, other parties either endorse such views themselves or form alliances with right-wing populists. All these lead to normalizing such views and lead them to significantly shape sociopolitical norms (Reference ValentimValentim 2024). My point is, such absences result from MN bias impoverishing the reflexivity of normative views of nationalism, as its descriptive horizon remains undesirably conditioned by its normative perspective. Neither the infusion thesis nor McN offer clear priority rules among various justifications of normative desirability and feasibility: what happens when the project turns out to be unfeasible yet normatively desirable, or vice versa? My impression is that such questions have not yet been sufficiently raised; without them, the infusion thesis and McN seem to work smoothly, yet once we raise them, things seem to be less and less clear.