Identity, Integration, and Political Equality
The Fear of Losing a Community
Imagine a town where families have lived for generations. Its people recognize familiar names, share public memories, and know how ordinary disagreements are settled. Then newcomers begin to arrive. They speak different languages, worship differently, or have customs that older residents do not understand.
Some people welcome them. Others worry. Will the schools change? Will public decisions still reflect the people who have built the town? Will the place remain recognizably theirs?
It is easy to dismiss such concerns as resistance to change. That would be a mistake. A political community is not merely a set of laws. People also inhabit relationships, institutions, languages, and memories. Those attachments can matter deeply. A theory that asks communities to welcome new members must take them seriously.
But taking a fear seriously is not the same as granting it authority over the rights of others. A housing shortage is different from an objection to a neighbor’s religion. A dispute about public services is different from a demand that political membership remain reserved for descendants of the original population. Each calls for a different answer.
World Citizen Theory begins with a question: must the political community of one’s birth be the only place where one can ever belong as an equal political member? I have argued that democratic freedom has two dimensions. Hand Democracy concerns the freedom of people within a community to govern their common affairs. Foot Democracy concerns the meaningful freedom to choose a political community—including the possibility of Entry, durable residence, and membership elsewhere.
The second freedom raises a difficult question for the first. What happens when people who did not grow up together seek to become a political people together?
The receiving community cannot be treated as an empty container. Its existing members have legitimate interests and responsibilities. Yet it cannot be treated as the permanent property of those who arrived first, either. The question is what kind of shared life can endure when its membership changes.
Does Diversity Weaken Trust?
The most serious objection is not merely that cultures differ. It is that differences may weaken the trust on which democratic cooperation depends.
In his 2007 essay E Pluribus Unum, Robert Putnam reported that, in the American settings he studied, greater ethnic diversity was associated in the short run with lower social trust. The finding was uncomfortable for anyone who assumed that bringing different people together would automatically produce solidarity. Putnam’s argument was also more complicated than the familiar description of people retreating into separate ethnic groups. In his account, trust could weaken toward people both outside and inside one’s own group. At the same time, he argued that societies could eventually form broader identities capable of including people who had previously been regarded as different.
That tension should not be concealed. If trust is difficult to establish, expanding membership may make self-government more demanding. People must accept public decisions they dislike, contribute to common institutions, and recognize that their opponents nevertheless have an equal standing to participate. These practices become fragile when people suspect that others do not belong to the same political community at all.
Subsequent evidence does not allow a simple dismissal of Putnam’s concern. A 2020 review and meta-analysis by Peter Thisted Dinesen, Merlin Schaeffer, and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov examined 1,001 estimates from 87 studies. It found an overall negative association between ethnic diversity and social trust, particularly for trust among neighbors and for diversity measured in more local settings.
But an association does not, by itself, tell us what causes it or which institutions can change it. A study of Britain published in 2024 found that negative relationships between several measures of diversity and social cohesion largely disappeared after accounting for neighborhood deprivation. This does not overturn every result in the broader literature. It does suggest that the material conditions under which people live may be crucial to what appears to be a problem of cultural difference.
We should therefore resist two easy answers. One is that diversity necessarily destroys trust. The other is that diversity never creates difficulties for trust. Neither follows from the evidence.
The political question is more practical: if trust is not guaranteed by proximity, what makes it possible for people to build it? Housing and schools matter. So do common institutions in which people meet under conditions of equal respect. A community that offers newcomers only precarious work, segregation, and exclusion from decision-making should not be surprised if mutual confidence remains weak.
There is also a difference between describing a problem and justifying a restriction. Even if a relationship between diversity and lower trust is observed, it does not follow that descendants of existing members have an unlimited right to exclude others. That normative conclusion requires an argument of its own.
Integration Without Assimilation
What, then, should newcomers be expected to do?
One answer is assimilation: become as similar as possible to the established population. Learn its language, adopt its habits, and gradually set aside the differences that mark you as an outsider.
But assimilation is not the only route to common political life. The distinction matters because a political community must be able to govern people whose views differ even when they share a birthplace, language, or ancestry. No democratic society contains a single culture or a single conception of the good life.
The European Union has recognized an important part of this problem for many years. The Common Basic Principles for Immigrant Integration Policy adopted by the Council in 2004 describe integration as a two-way process of accommodation involving immigrants and the residents of receiving states. The idea is not new. What matters for this essay is what it implies when integration is connected to political membership, rather than treated only as successful adjustment to daily life.
The same principles acknowledge the importance of knowledge of the host society’s language and institutions. They also recognize that participation and interaction matter. A newcomer has reasons to learn how a community’s laws and public services work. The receiving community has reasons to make such knowledge accessible and to remove unnecessary obstacles to participation. The responsibilities do not fall on one side alone.
Canada offers another example of a deliberate institutional choice. Its Multiculturalism Act of 1988 recognizes cultural diversity as a feature of Canadian society and supports the ability of people to preserve and share their cultural heritage. The law does not prove that multiculturalism always succeeds, and Canada has its own disputes about immigration and belonging. It does, however, reject the premise that maintaining a political community requires every member to abandon an earlier cultural identity.
In The World Citizen Society, I argued that residence should not become an assimilation test: a community may require particular skills for particular roles, but it should not make cultural sameness a condition of political membership. The evidence on trust and integration allows me to press that argument further.
What must be shared, then?
At a minimum, people living under common political institutions must be able to claim and respect equal civic standing. They must have ways to settle disputes without violence, to contest public decisions, and to protect one another’s basic rights. These are public obligations. They do not require agreement about religion, family traditions, literature, or the government’s policies.
There is a further complication. A demand to “accept our values” can mean respect for the equal rights of other people. It can also become a demand to approve the majority’s prevailing opinions. Those are not the same thing. Someone who criticizes an unjust law is not thereby refusing integration. Democratic disagreement can be evidence of political participation, not an obstacle to it.
Who Must Adapt—and Who Must Be Included?
This distinction becomes concrete when governments require language or citizenship tests for naturalization, permanent residence, or admission.
Language can make ordinary life easier. It helps people communicate with teachers, employers, neighbors, and public officials. Knowledge of basic institutions can help them exercise rights and meet responsibilities. It would be strange for a theory of political participation to deny their value.
But there are at least two very different ways to approach them. A government can provide accessible language classes, civic education, translation, and routes into public life. Or it can make passing a test the gate through which people must pass before they acquire security or recognition. Sometimes a policy contains both elements. Their effects should be evaluated separately.
In 2014, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly adopted Resolution 1973, warning that integration tests may impede settlement and family reunion, especially for people with limited schooling or literacy. More recent European research has found that standardized naturalization requirements can both reduce administrative discretion and create additional barriers. A uniform test can appear neutral while making very different demands on an elderly applicant, a person with a disability, and someone who had extensive opportunities to study.
My position is not that every language requirement for every legal purpose is illegitimate. Requirements must be examined in relation to their purpose, accessibility, cost, reasonable accommodations, and the consequences of failure. A state has a legitimate interest in helping residents communicate and participate. It does not follow that every shortfall in language proficiency warrants permanent political exclusion.
There is a deeper distinction here. Under existing national laws, naturalization is often the route to voting and other rights of citizenship. World Citizen Theory asks whether inherited nationality—or the obstacles to acquiring a new nationality—should continue to determine ordinary political membership. Its principle of Resident Sovereignty gives durable residence a central role in that membership. This does not mean that every arrival must immediately receive every political right. Entry, stable residence, and full membership are distinct stages that need a credible institutional connection. Once people become full political members, Resident Equality rejects an inferior civic category based merely on nationality or birthplace.
Residence alone does not manufacture trust. But a lack of trust should not become a circular justification for indefinitely denying durable residents the opportunities through which they could help create it. If people are told that they must first demonstrate belonging before they can take part in shaping the community, the community may reserve the power to define belonging entirely to those already included.
Evidence from Switzerland offers a reason to question this sequence. Jens Hainmueller, Dominik Hangartner, and Giuseppe Pietrantuono studied municipalities that once decided naturalization applications by popular vote. They found that immigrants who narrowly received citizenship became more socially integrated over time than otherwise similar applicants who narrowly failed. The effects were especially pronounced among more marginalized groups. Their findings concern naturalization, not residence-based political membership. Yet they suggest that legal recognition can help produce integration, rather than merely reward a process already completed.
This is where Hand Democracy and Foot Democracy meet. Existing members have a real interest in how their institutions change. Newcomers who build their lives under those institutions acquire interests that cannot be reduced to the generosity of their hosts.
A Community That Can Change
Ernest Renan offered a famous account of the nation in his 1882 lecture What Is a Nation? He rejected the idea that race or language alone could establish a nation and described its continuing existence through the image of a daily plebiscite. His account placed weight on inherited memories and on a continuing willingness to share a life.
There is something attractive in the idea that a community continues through the choices of those who live within it. But Renan’s metaphor also leaves a question. Who is allowed to take part in that ongoing decision? If newcomers can work, raise children, and live under the laws but can never join the political “we,” the plebiscite remains the privilege of an inherited group.
An older Japanese text offers a different point of comparison. The Seventeen-Article Constitution, traditionally associated with Prince Shōtoku, begins by valuing wa, often translated as harmony. Its seventeenth article also urges consultation rather than decisions taken by one person alone. The text belonged to a hierarchical political order and addressed officials, not a democratic citizenry. Its traditional attribution and historical interpretation require care. It was not a charter of popular sovereignty or immigrant rights, and it should not be read as one.
Still, the juxtaposition invites a question: does harmony require people to become alike, or can it mean learning to deliberate despite differences? The answer cannot be supplied by an ancient text. It must be worked out by people who disagree about how they should live together now.
No political community can promise that every change in its membership will be easy. Public institutions can be strained. Trust can weaken. The memories of established residents need not be dismissed. Newcomers, too, bring attachments they should not have to erase as the price of ordinary dignity.
The strongest version of Foot Democracy therefore cannot be a story about individuals moving freely among passive destinations. Communities are made and remade by those who inhabit them. Hand Democracy matters because people must have a voice in that process. Foot Democracy matters because birth should not decide, once and for all, which process a person may join as an equal.
The aim is not to preserve every custom unchanged. Nor is it to demand that existing communities surrender every legitimate concern. It is to make political equality possible while keeping the institutions of shared life capable of working.
A community may change when it welcomes new members. That much cannot honestly be denied. The harder question is whether change must mean loss. A democratic community that can hear new voices, negotiate disagreement, and recognize new members as equals may preserve something more important than an unchanging identity: the capacity to govern itself together.
References and Further Reading
- Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 137–174. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x
- Peter Thisted Dinesen, Merlin Schaeffer, and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: A Narrative and Meta-Analytical Review,” Annual Review of Political Science 23 (2020): 441–465. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052918-020708
- Tak Wing Chan and Juta Kawalerowicz, “Social Diversity and Social Cohesion in Britain,” The British Journal of Sociology 75, no. 4 (2024): 452–470. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13094
- Council of the European Union, Justice and Home Affairs Council, “Immigrant Integration Policy in the European Union — Council Conclusions,” 19 November 2004, document 14615/04 (Presse 321). https://www.statewatch.org/news/2004/nov/jha-19-nov-prel.pdf
- Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988), section 3. https://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-18.7/section-3.html
- Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assembly, Resolution 1973 (2014), “Integration Tests: Helping or Hindering Integration?” https://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=20481&lang=en
- Djordje Sredanovic, “Standardised Integration Requirements for Naturalisation: Less Rights and Less Discretion?” Comparative Migration Studies (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-024-00391-2
- Jens Hainmueller, Dominik Hangartner, and Giuseppe Pietrantuono, “Catalyst or Crown: Does Naturalization Promote the Long-Term Social Integration of Immigrants?” American Political Science Review 111, no. 2 (2017): 256–276. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055416000745
- Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (1882). https://classiques.uqam.ca/classiques/renan_ernest/qu_est_ce_une_nation/qu_est_ce_une_nation_texte.html
- Columbia University, Asia for Educators, “The Constitution of Prince Shōtoku.” https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/main_pop/ps/ps_japan-shotoku.htm