Who Is a (good) Citizen? Who Is Italian? Rhetoric Of Inclusion, Exclusion and Belonging Among Young People In Italy

The paper aims to explore the mapping of belonging and identification representations among both autochthonous children and those of immigrants in their later years of secondary education in Italy. It aims to analyse how specific articulations of ethnicity and nationhood contribute to define the social boundaries between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’.

The analysis is based on qualitative data (narrative interviews) gathered among 118 young men (18-22 years old) attending Italian higher secondary school in Milan (Italy). While 74 of them have Italian parents, the other 44 are children of immigrants.

Discussing the criteria for obtaining citizenship, emphasis is placed on the participative dimension rather than on the dimension of attributed belonging. Citizenship remains an important formal question but requires an active attitude in order to be deserved. The ‘honest life’ then becomes the main criterion for granting citizenship. Citizenship has to be deserved, showing ourselves as respectable, economically-independent, observant of the law citizens. Differently from Marshall and his classical analysis, it is possible to note a marked shift of emphasis from rights to duties, undermining the inclusive and universal meaning attributed to citizenship. In fact, despite the apparently universalistic character of duty rhetoric, specific intersections of ethnicity, race, class and gender are important to fix the quality and amount of duties necessary for being recognized as ‘good’ or ‘appropriate’ citizens. In this way, “Italianness” is represented as a ‘natural’ characteristic of the dominant group and ethnic and racial issues remain crucial when identification is the main contend.

Institutional elements – first of all a citizenship law strictly based on jus sanguinis, that considers children of migrants born and grown up in Italy as foreigners and migrants, refusing them full citizenship – contribute to transform ethnic origin, kinship and physical features into tools for differentiation and division between ‘us and them’.