Christian Joppke’s new book Neoliberal Nationalism, Immigration and the Rise of the Populist Right offers a very valuable read in several respects. In two rich and very substantial chapters, Chapter 2 on migration policies and Chapter 3 on citizen rights, each around 90 pages long, the author provides a particularly nuanced, detailed, and informative account of the developments in these two domains over the last 20 years or so in the main “target countries”, i.e. Western Europe, North-America and Australia. At the same time, he guides the reader with his solid and sovereign contextualization and assessment of these recent developments. As these questions are regularly so morally charged, so intensively debated and contested, where a requisite analytical distance is so rare to find, and where so much scholarship borders on outright political activism, one must be particularly grateful to the author for his clear, confident judgement and for his not losing the general view. He does not spare with sometimes acid remarks and calls things by their name, as when he labels unwanted immigration “unwanted immigration” (“suffered, not chosen”, Nicolas Sarkozy); as when he states that “the problems of family migration are real” (in particular in the cases of arranged marriages frequent among second and third generation Muslim immigrants [96]); as when he acknowledges that “the typical immigrant in Europe walks straight into unemployment and welfare dependency” especially in countries with a strong welfare state [175]; as when he ridicules some rather shrill reactions to Germany’s most recent asylum reform (“as if the ‘Orbanization’ of German migration policy was night” [276]; as when he makes clear that immigration and citizenship policy are and must be exclusionary and thereby illiberal, “because they erect and police the boundaries that must be an affront to the equality of human dignity and to the unbridled individual freedoms […] that liberalism commands” [269], italics in the original). Many more examples could be given. It would seem that it sometimes helps to look at things from Switzerland, where the debates, all in all, seem to be less dominated by extreme voices, seem to be less contaminated by mutual vituperation, and where realism more often than not seem to prevail over naïveté. Christian Joppke’s devastating assessment of Germany’s asylum politics, characterized by an enormous implementation deficit when it comes to returning those without any legal claim of staying, is particularly noteworthy: “liberalism gone astray, nibbling at the state’s elementary society-protection and security functions” [157].

But the book is more than the sum of two lengthy and extremely well-informed case studies, since—for one—it has the ambition to contextualize these developments, and secondly, also to debate bigger questions, for example about the role of liberalism and neoliberalism in contemporary societies against the depicted developments in these two policy domains. Contextualizing meaning here detecting trends in these policy-areas plus putting them into a longer perspective—the two main trends being “courting the top and fending-off the bottom” in migration policy, and a “more difficult to get, easier to lose, and less in value” trend with respect to citizenship. Both trends, it should be noted, show more or less equally in all the observed cases (“There is, increasingly, only one migration world, at least in the developed West” [273]), variation in detail and with respect to levels of restrictiveness or permissiveness notwithstanding. Here, of course, the excessive punitiveness of the US-American immigration regulations stands out, with all sorts of non-intended, partly counter-intentional, consequences. That this increasing uniformity of policies across countries, at least in the case of EU members, also has something to do with the strong role that European law has come to play in asylum politics finds no detailed reflection in Joppke’s otherwise extremely well-informed treatment of this topic. In this respect the author, somewhat surprisingly, states that immigration and citizenship firmly remain “sovereign state functions under international law, with little leverage by the international human rights regime that has been built since World War II” [269]. That, in my view, does not seem to give full justice to the strong impact of European law in all matters of asylum regulations, in particular in its interaction with—as Joppke pointedly remarks—“the capillary and client-protective rule of public law” in member states [277].

Concerning the fact that the uniformity across states mainly lies in a shared tendency to make entry into a country and access to its citizenship substantially more restrictive (and, that is the “neoliberal” element: both stronger coupled to an economic rationale), one also should note that the author repeatedly and convincingly rejects an explanation linking the tightening of migration- and citizenship-policies to the increasing political influence of the new radical right. The depicted trends are of a longer and broader nature. They began before the rise of the populist, and they are shared by a broader political coalition—and they partly react to real problems.

Yet, Joppke wants to offer more than thick description, solid assessment and contextualization, and this is already indicated by the somehow irritating title of his book. The author aims at linking these recent developments to even more general shifts in the Zeitgeist and to the changing political terms of our present times. So, on top of a nuanced reconstruction of immigration- and citizenship-policies we get a broader discussion about what all this means for liberalism and neoliberalism, for nationalism, conservatism and globalization, for post-democracy, and so on. The introductory chapter, in particular, is not always free from what Joppke himself labelled “grand-scheming” when he characterized the contribution of another author. In these pages, the author once more retells the well-known story of the ascent of neoliberalism––-the Mont Pelerin society, Friedman in Chile, the crisis of Keynesianism and all—as well as discussing several other matters that all seem to matter somehow: the Citizens United versus Electoral Commission-decision of the US-Supreme Court, China’s Social Credit System, the Falklands war, the quantification of the social, the information and communication technology revolution, and so on. The reviewer believes that this introductory chapter would have benefitted from being much shorter and more concise.

It is in this chapter that the author also justifies the somehow strange compositum of his title and his core concept––Neoliberal Nationalism––which, at first sight, would appear to be an oxymoron. Was not at the core of neoliberalism the project to overcome the nation state—as Quinn Slobodian’s “Globalists” reminded us recently? And is it not the political project of the new nationalists, i.e. the populist right, to reinstall national sovereignty vis-à-vis a globalized, neoliberal economy (and supranational politics serving this global economic order)? Of course, Joppke knows all that very well. When he insists on using this concept, he stresses that it understands “nationalism not in opposition to, but fulfilling positive functions for the neoliberal order” [64]. One is reminded of Streeck’s “competition state”, and his diagnosis that the international market is no longer embedded in a state-order, but that states are embedded in an international market-order. This, of course, makes perfect sense. However, whether or not migration-policies that also take the fiscal strain of generous welfare state arrangements into account automatically qualify as “neoliberal” remains to be debated. The reviewer considers that Joppke’s use of the concept shows signs of overstretch. For instance, if the very encompassing and generous Danish welfare state, as Esping-Andersen taught us long ago, is all about refracting, moderating, buffering pure market forces and de-commodifying labour (as well as re-commodifying it into more productive and therefore better paid and more decent jobs), do then concerns about the sustainability of these “politics against markets” (Esping-Andersen) in the context of open borders qualify as “neoliberal” [see: 271]? The author’s important point, however, that the differences between “classical” immigration countries (like Canada, Australia or the US) with their clear economic orientation––that is, their combination of liberalism and neoliberalism––and Western Europe’s more restrictive and rather human rights oriented approach no longer exist, is very well taken.

These points of criticism, some of them perhaps being more points of taste and style than of substance, should not deflect from the fact that Joppke’s monograph is by far the best, most solid and authoritative treatment of migration- and citizenship-policies “in the developed West” that the reviewer has come across so far. I can only highly recommend it to readers.