This Special Issue presents seven papers addressing the processes and problems faced by multicultural societies in developing common citizenship as a mechanism for conferring the rights of membership and the duties of participation to migrant people. Papers explore the following topics; differences in national systems of civic society, and their principles of inclusion and exclusion, in France, Germany, Netherlands, and the UK; theories of citizenship and the problems involved in immigation and the integration of ethnic minorities, with applications to France; attempts to adopt standards of human rights for immigrants and the resulting trend towards a decline in liberal democracy; comparisons of systems of citizenship and political participation operative in France and the Netherlands; flaws in employment equality practice for minorities; lessons to be drawn from the Canadian experience of multiculturalism and their applications to Europe; developing an index to measure legal obstacles to the integration of migrants. Individual abstracts are available on Geobase for all of these papers.

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cultural politics multiculturalism Europe citizenship human rights cultural assimilation North America immigrant population