One of the most controversial things that can be said about European countries is that they are “countries of migration.” Certainly, all countries today include some number of foreigners, but the term puts European states – historically deriving their national identities from soil, sacrifice, and traceable lines of heritage – into the same category as the settler states, like Australia or the United States, that they colonized and populated. And yet, Switzerland features among the world's highest shares of the foreign-born, France and Sweden have among the world's highest naturalization rates, and free movement is a cornerstone of the EU itself. This fundamental irony is now at the center of debates over the European future (Boucher & Gest 2018).

National states versus settler states

The tension arises from within the national state. On the one hand, how can the nations of Europe be reinstated when they never truly existed outside the imaginary? On the other hand, acknowledging that European states were never so homogenous, how can globalism be reconciled within the enduring power of nationalism? These are questions that also face the very settler states from which European leaders like to distinguish themselves. However, European governments negotiating transformative demographic change lack the organic advantages that come with having been “settled” as colonies and populated with immigrants.

Settler states crafted civic – rather than ethnocentric – identities that are more open to evolution (Gest 2016). Settler states embrace multicultural policies that recognize the value of diversity. Settler states cite previous generations of immigrants to endow confidence in their capacity to absorb future generations. In short, settler states acknowledge that they are “countries of migration”, which emboldens their citizens to understand immigration as a norm but also to see themselves to some extent in new generations of arrivals. Indeed, Americans treat the assimilation of immigrants with evangelical zeal, as if conversion brings some civic redemption.

Of course, these supposed advantages are mere constructs, institutionalized by settler state governments; they are not off limits to European leaders today. They are not pursued by Europeans simply because of the backlash they fear such moves may generate.