As Elaine R. Thomas notes in the opening pages of her book, the conditions under which individuals should become eligible for political membership have been debated for thousands of years. In recent years, the rise in international migration brings new urgency to those old questions because countries around the world now face unprecedented levels of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. This diversity creates social and political issues that force societies to reexamine their policies on membership and access to citizenship.

The empirical material in the book is about immigrants in France and the United Kingdom, but Thomas's conceptual scope is much broader. Her goal is to revise the dominant classification of the ways in which people understand political communities. In doing so, the author uses ordinary language analysis of how people talk about political membership to develop a new typology.

Most research classifies political membership as either “civic” or “ethnic.” According to this framework, civic nations privilege participation in the civic life of the society as the most important precondition for citizenship. In comparison, ethnic nations emphasize blood lineage as the fundamental requirement for membership. Thomas uses ordinary language analysis to demonstrate that this binary framework is overly simplified. She surveys the range of English words that describe membership and sorts the concept of membership into five types: descent, culture, belief, contract, and monetized contract. She argues that this typology is a better way of understanding political membership than the standard civic–ethnic dichotomy because it is more accurate and exposes the true underlying concepts.

In addition to providing a more accurate typology for conceptions of political membership, Thomas claims that her ordinary language analysis can resolve the debate about the way that political membership is changing as nation-state sovereignty is challenged by globalization. One side of this debate argues that globalization fundamentally weakens the nation-state as a unique source of belonging. As a result, states increasingly provide rights to residents based on universal “postnational” norms. Another side claims that national culture is still the dominant way of understanding conceptions of political membership that vary considerably across nation-states. The author argues that each perspective is incomplete and that her five-part typology of membership does a better job of explaining the future complexities of political membership.

To develop her arguments, Thomas examines controversies about immigrant integration in France and the United Kingdom. For France, she reviews debates about immigrant voting rights, citizenship law, and the Islamic headscarf. For the United Kingdom, she analyzes debates around Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988).

One of Thomas's most effective attacks on the civic versus ethnic dichotomy is her analysis in Chapters 4 and 5 of how French nationality and citizenship law was reformed in the 1980s. The “new republican synthesis” that emerged from that reform is often considered a civic conception of political belonging because of its emphasis on open access to citizenship irrespective of national origins. Yet the author shows that it also includes concepts like cultural uniformity that are generally considered part of an ethnic notion of membership. For Thomas, this is evidence that the civic versus ethnic distinction is overly simplified, and her typology categorizes the new republican synthesis as a combination of culture, contract, and belief understandings of membership. This is a welcome contribution as it adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of the French debates. However, she then goes further to claim that the French new republican synthesis was intellectually incoherent because it included such diverse and potentially contradictory conceptual elements. In my view, this critique is too aggressive as it discounts the inevitable practical compromises of any policymaking venture. Nonetheless, overall these chapters are a useful rereading of recent French history.

In Chapters 9 and 10, Thomas further attacks the civic and ethnic distinction by using the controversy surrounding Rushdie's Satanic Verses to demonstrate that civic notions of belonging can be used by a range of political actors who have opposing goals. For example, Muslim activists who wanted to ban the book argued that they had a legitimate civic right to have their desires fulfilled on the basis of living, working, and abiding by British laws. In comparison, activists who opposed the Muslim perspective argued that a civic adherence to the abstract universal principles of Britishness would not allow Satanic Verses to be banned. For Thomas, these arguments should not be classified in the same category. Instead of lumping together both conceptions of political membership as “civic,” her typology categorizes the notion of belonging used by British Muslims as “contract” and the notion of belonging used by their opponents as “belief.”

For the most part, this is a convincing analysis, but if I had to quibble it would be with Thomas's theoretical premise in this section. Her dissection of the Rushdie Affair is based on the notion that it is a contradiction for political actors to draw on different strands of the same concept to support different perspectives. Moreover, she claims that using the same concept to categorize opposing arguments runs the risk of obscuring important political differences. In my view, that is a very strong assumption, which overstates its case. Identifying the similarities between the arguments of British Muslims and of their opponents does not have to obscure reality. Instead, it can reveal the political nature of the controversy and the way in which activists spin concepts for their advantage. Nonetheless, Thomas presents a satisfying analysis that nicely sorts out the arguments in the Rushdie Affair.

To address the debate about the way that political membership is changing as nation-state sovereignty is challenged by globalization, Thomas argues that most evidence contradicts postnational theories. National citizenship remains important, and there has been no universal convergence on the same principles of membership. Yet she also shows that the principles of membership espoused by different countries can change over time. For Thomas, this is evidence of the political nature of political membership, which cannot be understood outside of specific debates located in specific historical periods. The point is well made and is an important rejoinder to arguments about national cultures being time invariant.

Unfortunately, Thomas could have done more to connect this analysis to the unpacking of political belonging that is purportedly the central theme of the book. In Chapters 7 and 8, she analyzes controversies around the Islamic headscarf in France, demonstrating that there is no one French notion of political belonging. She does less to connect those points to her five-part typology of political belonging, however. From a stylistic perspective, the book would have had more coherence with more attention paid to connecting the analysis of the evolution of national political membership to the ordinary language analysis of different conceptions of membership.

Another crucial point not addressed by Thomas was whether her ordinary language analysis of English would apply to other languages. She uses English language conventions as the basis for a broad conceptual theory of membership, but says nothing about whether those conventions are the same in other languages. This omission is most glaring given the fact that the bulk of the book is an analysis of France.

In summary, Thomas's five-part typology of political membership is a welcome addition to the existing debates about civic versus ethnic membership. Any binary framework will inevitably obscure rich diversity, and the author does an excellent job of exploring that diversity, as well as providing us with a new framework and new language for analyzing political membership. Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France should interest scholars and students of immigration, European politics, and the political theory of membership.