Sammendrag
This article engages critically with the idea of state-centred nationhood,
including its promises and limitations, as a foundation for state
strategies of forging unity in (migration-related) diversity within nations.
As states across Europe grapple with the management of migration-related diversity in contexts of increasing polarization of public debate on
nationhood, which conceptions of nationhood do they draw on? We build
on data from Norway, including policy documents and parliamentary
debates, and draw on ten interviews with eleven bureaucrats in senior
positions. Our interviewees were tasked with different aspects of the
state’s nation building work, such as immigration control, national
minorities (including Sami populations), religious and life-stance
communities, and the 200-year anniversary of the Constitution. When
asking which conceptions of nationhood bureaucrats draw on, we
acknowledge that someone is doing the state’s nation building work. We
find that the bureaucrats draw on a range of conceptions of nationhood,
where ethnic and civic, more open and more closed dimensions, are
mobilized. However, we did not find a cohesive conception of a state-centred nationhood being promulgated. Instead, our interviewees
expressed uncertainty about how and to what extent nationhood could or
should be mobilized to forge unity among Norwegian citizens. We argue
that future research should move beyond dichotomies such as
ethnic/civic or elite/everyday nationhood to theorize the composite
articulations of nationhood which emerge empirically. Who bureaucrats
effectively see as the imagined community, we argue, remains central to
understanding states nation-building efforts
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