Alien Citizens seeks to explain why and how the state undertook reforms to improve the status of Christian minorities in Turkey in the 2000s, whereas the rights of the Muslim minority in France were restricted in the same period. The dependent variable is “change in state policies toward religious minorities,” and it is measured by looking at “the changes in domestic law (judicial codes, laws, and constitutions)” (p. 29). Ramazan Kılınç argues that the “policy changes toward religious minorities in Turkey and France became possible only when domestic actors utilized the opportunities provided by the international context in pushing their policy agendas”; he identifies “two mechanisms through which the international context influences domestic policymaking: strategic interaction and normative commitment” (p. 23). Empirically, he argues that “Turkey’s process of negotiation for membership in the EU [European Union] constituted the international context for reform of policies toward Christian minorities, while the rise of Islamophobia in Europe helped frame policy changes toward the Muslim minority in France” (p. 27).

Kılınç’s argument is akin to the extant scholarship on the EU’s role in bringing about a liberal democratic transformation in East-Central European polities, including minority rights legislation (e.g., Milada Anna Vachudova, Europe Undivided, 2005, cited on p. 24). Following the introduction, two chapters each are devoted to the historical institutions of secularism (chaps. 2 and 3), international context (chaps. 4 and 5), and domestic actors and policy change (chaps. 6 and 7) in Turkey and France. The penultimate chapter seeks to demonstrate the applicability of the argument to the policies toward the Jewish minority in Turkey and “sects” (e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses) in France; it is followed by the conclusion. The book presents a rich description of the debates around 10 “reforms improving the status of Christian minorities” in Turkey (Table 2.1, pp. 58–59) and the attempts to ban headscarves in French public schools since 1989, along with a brief discussion of the burka ban in 2010 and the “burkini” ban in 2016 (pp. 192–93).

The book presents a plausible causal narrative of the reforms that benefited Turkey’s Christian minorities between 2002 and 2010 when “Turkey was under intensive, persistent, and systematic international pressure with regard to its policies toward Christian minorities” (p. 87), as demonstrated by periodic reports of the EU and other international organizations. The reforms discussed in the most detail are the laws allowing non-Muslim community foundations to acquire and dispose of property and to reclaim their previously expropriated properties, with a final law passed in this direction in 2008. Turkey’s effort to join the EU was indeed one of the justifications voiced by members of the AKP government in the successful effort to pass these laws that further religious minorities’ rights.

In contrast, Kılınç’s argument is much less convincing when one considers other landmark political initiatives and policies that improved the status of Christians and Jews in Turkey after 2010, which are not mentioned in the very brief discussion devoted to this period (pp. 186–88). Kılınç unequivocally emphasizes the year 2010 as the critical turning point (pp. 32, 35, 40, 92, 204, etc.), and he argues that the government did not improve the rights of religious minorities after 2010. He attributes this shift to the rapid decline in the EU’s leverage over Turkey. Most scholars, including me, would agree that EU pressure ceased to be a major cause of policy changes in Turkey after 2010, if not even earlier. Yet this poses a paramount challenge for Kılınç’s argument, given that major improvements in the political representation and rights of Turkey’s religious minorities occurred well after 2010. Whereas there were no Christian members of the Turkish parliament when the reforms discussed in this book were passed (2000–10), four Christian legislators entered the Turkish parliament in 2015 from three political parties, including the governing AKP. This was a political watershed, because there had not been any Christian members of the parliament for more than 50 years before then. The building of the first new Assyrian church in the history of the Turkish Republic was authorized in early 2015, and its construction began in 2019, roughly a decade after the independent variable of this study (i.e., EU leverage) became insignificant. Similarly, in Turkey the Grand Synagogue of Edirne was restored and opened with much political fanfare in 2015. On April 24, 2014, Erdogan became the first Turkish president to issue a condolence message “commemorating and sharing the memories of suffering Armenians as well as other Ottoman citizens [who] lived through in that period,” a political milestone of momentous significance for Turkey’s largest religious minority. Similarly, Turkey officially commemorated the Holocaust for the first time on January 27, 2015, in a ceremony attended by the deputy prime minister among other officials. These developments of significance for Turkey’s religious minorities in the 2010s, which are not mentioned in the book, pose a major challenge for Kılınç’s argument.

In the French case, the main challenge for Kılınç is to demonstrate the causal link between his independent variable (global Islamophobia after September 11, 2001) and the outcome (e.g., the French headscarf ban in 2004) through two causal mechanisms: strategic interaction and normative commitment. “Strategic interaction” is hypothesized to tilt the domestic balance of power in favor of the actor(s) pushing for the policy change. In France, the socialists, such as former prime minister Laurent Fabius (p. 78) and the center-right together passed the headscarf ban, and yet it was the French far right (e.g., Front National) that paralleled discursively and benefited electorally from the rising wave of global Islamophobia. Thus, the logic of strategic interaction does not seem to work as hypothesized in the French case.

What about the mechanism of “normative commitment”? Global or supranational framing of the Islamic fundamentalist and terrorist threats is not visible in the arguments voiced by key proponents of the headscarf ban that are extensively quoted by Kılınç. Hypothetically, France fighting as part of Western/European civilization against global Islamist terrorism could have been the discursive frame in the debates on the headscarf ban, but there are no examples of such a global/supranational framing in the book. On the contrary, many political actors seem to have articulated narrowly French national(ist) arguments in supporting the headscarf ban, rather than liberal democratic international norms, quite the opposite of the Turkish case study. For example, Jean-Marc Ayrault, the leader of the Socialist Party at the time, argued that “France is the only nation in Europe having a secular constitution,” while another socialist, Gilbert Le Bris, argued that “fanaticism of Islamists was replacing French values” (p. 165). Different parliamentary deputies’ invocations of “French specificity,” “our collective history,” “our nation,” and the “sacred value of… our Republic” (p. 166, quoted from Christian Joppke, “State Neutrality and Islamic Headscarf Laws in France and Germany,” Theory and Society, 36(4), 2007, p. 326) in defense of the headscarf ban rely on narrowly French national justifications, rather than invoking novel Islamic threats at a “global” scale after the attacks of September 11. Furthermore, “nationwide teachers’ strikes protesting the appearance of headscarves in schools” (p. 75) as early as 1993 indicate significant nationally specific demand for anti-Islamic legislation well before the post-2001 rise of global Islamophobia. Similarly, the ministerial circular banning ostentatious religious symbols including headscarves was disseminated in 1994, many years before 2001. Therefore, it is questionable whether “Islamophobia” in France should be considered an international-level (rather than domestic/national) variable similar to the EU’s monitoring of Turkey’s treatment of Christian and Jewish minorities in Kılınç’s causal argument.

Overall, Alien Citizens provides a rich description of pivotal transformations in state policies toward religious minorities in France and Turkey, including detailed expositions of different political actors’ discourses and voting records at critical junctures. It invites us to rethink the intricate relationships between international and domestic factors during these processes.