Theoretical and normative approaches regarding the question of diversity and integration, such as multiucluturalims and interculturalims compete in an attempt to redefine citizenship and nationhood. Most analyses have been single-theory-oriented, leading to multiple, contested and controversial interpretations of integration and democratic public spaces.Transnationalism raises the question of the limits of national public space and extends the concept of cultural integration beyond borders challenging the normative theories of multiculturalism and interculturalism bounded to national societies. Whatever the ideology and objective in the understanding of integration, states are confronted today with the transnational actions of activists who try to bypass states in order to reach a global perspective of their identification and action. Solidarity beyond borders involves a multilevel interaction between home and host countries and leads the states to develop strategies of integration – territorial and non-territorial – as a way of including identity issues developed in a minority situation into their political strategy to “re-territorialize” them. The objective then is to counter non-territorial solidarity expressed in global religious terms, mostly virtual, diffused by the Internet, which attracts the young generation, urging them to reject any or all national identification, to develop a new pride, a sense of community based on a global identification.

International migration has given rise to emerging communities which may be described as 'transnational'. This term refers to communities made up of individuals or groups, settled in different national societies, sharing common interests and references -territorial, religious, linguistic -and using transnational networks to consolidate solidarity beyond national boundaries (Faist, 1998).The emergence of transnational communities is a 'global phenomenon', principally concerning post-colonial immigration. Immigrants are involved in networks based on economic interests, cultural exchanges, social relations and political affiliations. Their action is de-territorialised. Transnational communities may thus be considered as a new kind of migrant community. Clearly, migrants have always lived in more than one setting, at least for one or two generations, maintaining ties with a real or imagined community in the state of origin (Anderson, 1983). But in the recent years they have also taken into account "the context of globalisation and economic uncertainty that facilitates the construction of social relations that transcend national borders" (Rivera-Salgado, 1999). Increasing mobility and the development of communication have contributed to such relations, and create a transnational space of economic, cultural and political participation.The emergence of transnational communities is also a post-national phenomenon. That is, emigration took place after the age of nationalism, and the immigrants involved in constructing transnational communities do not refer to a 'mythical' (quote and quote rather to mythical territorial state, but come from and refer to a territorialised nation-state. In some cases, such as Turkey, the state of origin is centralised with unified national and political culture. In other cases, such as India or China, it has a federal structure maintaining cultural and political heterogeneity. In all cases, it is the chosen identity -linguistic, religious, regional -that constitutes a basis for transnational organisation.Transnational organisation allows the immigrant populations to escape national policies, and generates a new space of socialisation for immigrants involved in building networks beyond national borders (Appadurai, 1996;Gupta and Ferguson, 1997, Hannertz, 1996). The cultural and political specificities of national societies (host and home) are combined with emerging multilevel and multinational activities in a new space beyond territorially delimited nationstates, inevitably questioning the link between territory and nation-state. Moreover,

This article attempts to examine religion, particularly Islam, as an emergent type of corporate ethnicity in France and Germany and how Islam is represented and recognized in relation to the established principles governing the interaction of church and state both in the histories of each country and in comparison to the United States. Although religion constitutes one element of pluralism and diversity in which Islam would be the “religion of a minority” among other ethnic groups in the United States, in Europe Islam emerges as a “minority religion” in European nation‐states. Such a conceptual difference is reflected in the understandings and applications of multiculturalism and recognition in European countries and the United States. The question then is how to insure a historical continuity between principles and ideals of states on the one hand and how to integrate the religious diversity raised by Islam into the secularism of liberal European societies on the other.