This project investigates how ideas concerning nationhood and social cohesion have informed and legitimized the divergence of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian immigrant integration policies in the last 15 to 20 years. The project situates the Scandinavian comparison within the broader discussions about the civic turn in West European immigrant integration policies. Against the diagnosis of liberal convergence, the thesis maintains that there has not been a retreat from nationalism within Scandinavian politics. However, the commonly used typologies of nationhood or national models cannot adequately capture how Scandinavian politicians think differently about nationhood. The thesis aims to alleviate this conceptual shortage by decomposing the ethnic-civic distinction and distinguish a (normative) content dimension from a (functionalist or sociological) process dimension of national identity conceptions. It is within the latter dimension that we primarily find the ideational differences between the Scandinavian countries.

Besides examining the politics of permanent residence and naturalization in all three countries, the project also takes a closer look at the politics of citizenship education in Denmark and Sweden. Within both of these areas of integration policy, the countries have diverged. Since the late 1990s, the Danish integration requirements for permanent residence and naturalisation have almost exclusively been developed in a more restrictive direction through a long succession of more or less incremental policy changes. In the same period, Sweden has barely changed their (now) exceptionally permissive policies, while Norway has taken somewhat of a middle road. A similar story can be told about citizenship education policies. While Denmark has refrained from changing an officially monocultural approach to common schooling that relies on the assimilation of minorities, Sweden has moved in the opposite direction through an officially intercultural school approach that actively accommodates diversity.