Migrants, Minorities, Belongings and Citizenship. Glocalization and ...

The models which advocate radical openness for internal systemic changes through direct
democracy, and which at the same time assume that individuals’ basic features such as
culture, life-style, identity and political preferences are unalterable, prescribe the most
restrictive models (e.g. communitarianism). On the other end of this continuum, those
models which advocate radical openness for systemic changes and which simultaneously
hold that human identity is utterly changeable, prescribe the most radical models of
citizenship (e.g. libertarianism).
The five conceptual frameworks in Figure 2 comprise various relationships between
norms, institutions, policies of citizenship (the perpendicular axis) and individuals’
belongings and identities (the horizontal axis). Using such a variety of models of the
relationship between citizenship and belonging will certainly enable any researcher to
conceptualize his or her empirical observations better. In this sense, deploying such a
framework with multiple theoretical perspectives enables one to conceptualize the
relationships between different aspects of citizenship in a pluralistic manner and, thus, in
a more fruitful way than a singular approach would provide. It is also important to
underline that these citizenship models can be operationalized for all levels of analysis
(features of political systems, features of social groups, and individual attitudes). This is
what QC-CITKIT does. These normative analysis and interpretation tools allow
interdisciplinary and inter-paradigmatic collaboration at all levels of analysis. Most
important of all, these theory frames each conceptualize and connect all the phenomena
mentioned in Figure 2 to each other in different ways; that is, citizenship, multiple
identities, diversity, coexistence, mobility, belonging, collective and individual identities,
identity formation, citizens’ involvement, participation, and European citizenship have all
been already interrelated conceptually in these models. The meta-theoretical framework
presented in Figure 2 is Glocalmig’s method of systemizing the existing perspectives and
conceptualizations in relation to its own diversity perspective; i.e. it is basically a
heuristic conceptualization tool.
In this short presentation, it will suffice to exemplify Glocalmig’s multi-theoretical and
multi-paradigmatic conceptual approach only with respect to some specific dimensions,
which are listed in the first column of Table 2. This is in order to demonstrate the rigor in
such a conceptualization strategy without going into too many dimensions of the models
(e.g. institutional frames, minority rights, welfare schemes, mobility and residence rights,
etc.), which would otherwise complicate this illustrative presentation. Table 2 comprises,
thus, four citizenship models’ policy implications concerning only the identity and
belonging dimension (the first three lines) on the one hand, and on the other, their
principles for foreigners’ acquisition of citizenship. The other dimensions and their subdimensions
are listed in the following sub-sections.
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