Discursive opportunities, citizenship regime and the production of national identity in Quebec

A key objective of state nation-building processes as well as nationalist movements is the construction of « citizenship regimes » (Marshall 1964; Jenson, 1997; Papillon and Turgeon, 2003, Paquet et al., 2018) through which political communities can build social cohesion and collective identities, as well as assert their distinctiveness in a “world of nations” (Billig, 1995). As TH Marshall theorized, social policies were historically critical to the development of distinct citizenship regime in the postwar era. Building on this insight, a body of literature in the 2000s showed how small nations such as Quebec and Scotland developed distinct approaches and discourses around the welfare state to mark their distinctiveness in Canada and the UK, among other cases (Béland and Lecours, 2008 ; McEwen, 2006; Papillon and Turgeon, 2003). Over twenty years later, what is happening to these substate citizenship regimes? Using Quebec as a case study, we argue that citizenship-building is still critical to substate nationalism, but the focus as fundamentally shifted, at least in Quebec. Substate citizenship building in Quebec today has less to do with a distinctive version of the welfare state and more to do with assertion of national boundaries through discourses and policies related to immigration, secularism and diversity. In this paper, our goals are: 1) to document this shift , drawing on an analysis of party manifesto and policy documents; 2) theorize it, by locating it in the broader context of worldwide challenges to liberal democracy; and 3) discuss the political implications of this shift for substate national projects in the current era of growing polarisation and democratic backsliding.