International migration represents a major challenge to state sovereignty. It creates the need to control entry and residence on state territory and to regulate full access to citizenship rights by defining who deserves to be a state citizen (and who does not). Here, the powerful forces that push migration flows are often contrasted with restrictionist state approaches that try to limit immigrants’ chances for inclusion. How can such a tension be resolved? What are the factors that may contribute to progressive openings against restrictionist tendencies? In his book Becoming Multicultural Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos argues that the international normative context that emerged after World War II played a fundamental role in the transformation process of discriminatory and exclusionary politics and policy making into liberal membership regimes. Starting from what he calls the “migration-membership” dilemma, or the struggle between the need to accept immigrants and the protectionist attitude of state actors, the author analyses this question using Canada and Germany as comparative examples.

After a brief theoretical introduction, in the second chapter Triadafilopoulos analyses Canada and Germany’s early migration histories, showing that they implemented similar exclusionary policies against unwanted immigrants despite differences in their historical, political and socioeconomic contexts. Politics and policies aimed at protecting national identity in both countries marked this early era of mass immigration. Only after World War II did the rise of human rights as well as the blame on racist discourses and positions force both countries to revisit this early and illiberal approach to immigration. In this vein, the third chapter outlines how the new human rights regime after World War II stood inevitably in contrast with old policy frameworks to regulate entry and, foremost, membership. The author highlights how both countries were initially reluctant to change their rather protectionist concept of immigration regulation. On the one hand, the Canadian government maintained exclusionary clauses against Asian immigration despite cosmetic changes in the formulation of immigration policies. On the other, the German guest worker rotation system seemed to be a useful instrument for the country to benefit from immigration without risking the consequences of permanent migration.

However, domestic protectionist strategies were increasingly put under pressure by foreign policy considerations. In Canada, domestic criticism against discriminatory policies was growing due to the country’s increasing relevance as a “middle power” in the international arena. In Germany, the guest worker rotation system was increasingly challenged by the country’s growing commitment to the construction of a European space of free movement of people and goods. These new pressures forced national governments to ‘stretch’ and ‘unravel’ established control and membership regimes in order to respond to increasing criticism. Such policy “stretching and unravelling” as the author defines it, which started in the 1960s, finally resulted in a consistent immigration policy ‘shifting’ and the adaptation of the old regimes to the liberal principles of new international normative contexts. As the author intelligently shows in the fourth chapter, the definitive shift in Canadian immigration policy was eventually supported by a growing political consensus on the country’s positive economic situation, the need to support Canada’s tolerant and open profile in the international arena and the awareness that otherwise Canada’s policy would have come dangerously close to the anti-Civil Rights movement in the United States. The two new pillars of the Canadian migration regime, multiculturalism and the Points-Based System represented Canada’s official farewell to forms of racial discrimination in the name of a universal immigration policy based on the attraction of highly skilled workers and the mutual acceptance of diversity.

In contrast with the rapidity of change in Canada, and despite having experienced similar pressures in the post-war period, Triadafilopoulos shows how policy shifting in Germany came with a twenty-year delay. German policy makers decided that the oil crisis and the related recruitment stop of 1973 were a useful solution to overcome the uneasy tension between old immigration policy approaches and new foreign policy commitments. As the author outlines, nobody really expected in the 1970s that a large number of foreign workers would remain in Germany as foreign residents and that their presence would have paradoxically promoted an important policy shift in the country’s immigration approach. Certainly, and in clear contrast to the Canadian case, the lack of political consensus, high unemployment rates and a very polarized immigration debate during the 1990s initially prevented the German government from resolving the migration-membership dilemma. However, the inevitable costs of non-immigration dogmas, together with the high number of second-generation immigrants, eventually paved the way for establishment of more liberal immigration and citizenship policies at the beginning of the new century. Even though, as the author rightly argues, such a paradigm change is still partially limited by the persisting pressure of a powerful oppositional minority, it is unquestionable that the current migration regime in Germany is a result of the “stretching, unravelling and shifting” processes that profoundly changed its immigration and membership regime.

To sum up, Becoming Multicultural shows how initially restrictive membership regimes in countries as different as Germany and Canada responded to similar international pressures through a progressive, sometimes burdensome and only symbolic, but eventually successful liberalization of their membership regimes. In this respect, Triadafilopoulos’ analysis successfully demonstrates how such policy change did not occur abruptly but incrementally over time, and how it created new spaces for policy action in old structures until the final paradigm shift. The “stretching, unravelling and shifting” formula used in his book perfectly describes what has occurred in the two countries’ migration regimes since the end of World War II. A further value of the book is the way it shows that such a process of transformation occurred in two countries that are traditionally considered opposites, with different traditions in nationhood and political contestation. In contrast with this prevalent view, and without neglecting their differences, the author shows that Canada and Germany’s migration regimes have been moving in the same direction over the last fifty years, despite differences in timing and in policy content. Finally, but not lastly, the book reinvigorates the debate on the relevance of supranational and international rules on immigration policies, transmitting an optimistic view on the future of new membership regimes and their effects on the formation of new political elites.

For all these reasons, Becoming Multicultural can be considered an outstanding analysis of how liberal democratic countries have solved the membership-migration dilemma thanks to the influence of liberal international normative contexts on domestic politics and policies since the end of World War II.