Many authors have written about the 'civic turn' in European migrant integration politics and policy that began in the late 1990s, but few have focused on the conceptual or normative dimensions of this turn. The purpose of this special issue is to help correct this situation. In this substantive introductory article, we begin with a discussion of the 'convergence or national models' debate that dominated early work on the subject. The next section presents the argument that civic integration is best understood as an ideological turn. It expands 'good citizenship' into personal conduct and values, shifts the responsibility for integration from the state to individuals, and institutionalises incentivising and disciplining integration processes, which are often really just a means of migration control. This is accompanied, we argue, by a civic nationalist conception of membership that appeals to shared political values, but defines those values through the culture of the state's national majority. We then move on to the mechanisms and effects of civic integration, followed by a discussion of its normative analysis, before finally summarising the articles included in this special issue and how they address the concerns that we have raised.

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South Tyrol is an autonomous, predominantly German‐speaking province in Italy, and one of the most successful cases of power‐sharing in the world. Nevertheless, the Province recently conducted a participatory‐democratic process known as the ‘Autonomy Convention’ to debate and draft a proposal for revising the 1972 Autonomy Statute. It is the first such process with the stated intent of amending a power‐sharing arrangement, and our research questions are whether this represents a new type of consociational negotiation, and what made it possible. The answer to the first question is ‘no’, and the Convention is best seen as a ‘participatory‐ish consultation’ which had no formal power. But the problems that it faced, and the fact that it occurred at all, are evidence of consociational democracy's potential to transform conflicts. The Convention, we argue, is the result of ‘normal’, not ‘ethnic’ politics, and two generations of successful power‐sharing made that possible by desecuritising the relationship between South Tyrol's three official linguistic groups.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the term “ethnic” has come to mean “member of a group of people with a set of shared characteristics,” including a belief in common descent. As such, “ethnic groups” refer to human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical or customs type or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration. Ethnic phenomena are primarily explained through the “primordialist” and “instrumentalist” explanations. Primordialism holds that ethnicity is a constitutive and permanent feature of human nature. Instrumentalists argue that ethnicity is a social construct with the purpose of achieving political or material gain. However, the real debate is among constructivists over whether ethnicity should be studied from the participant or the observer perspective. Meanwhile, it is difficult to determine exactly when and where “the nation” first became identified with “the people” as it is today, but the process is closely tied to the rise of popular sovereignty and representative democracy. When nations and nationalism became the subject of academic inquiry, three positions emerged: “modernism,” which holds that both nations and nationalism are modern phenomena; “perennialism,” which argues that nationalist ideology is modern, but nations date back to at least the Middle Ages; and “ethno-symbolism,” a combination of the previous two. Most contemporary classifications of nations and nationalism are typological, the most prominent of which identify two dichotomous types, such as the distinction between “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism. Other classifications are better described as taxonomies.

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