Le sfide della cittadinanza fra appartenenza e pluralismo. Una prospettiva comparata.

The research study is part of the present renewed interest in citizenship and aims at exploring the ways through which citizenship, intended as membership and belonging in a social and political community, is under pressure and subjected to powerful changes due to the increasing ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural pluralism that characterizes contemporary Western societies. The research examines "citizenship as belonging" in its three main "dynamics": acquisition of citizenship – notably naturalization –, denationalization and dual citizenship. At the end of the comparative analysis – which takes Canada, UK and Australia as prototypical case studies – it could be argued that "citizenship as belonging" is undergone a restrictive and cultural turn that ends up excluding some classes of people. This restrictive and cultural turn results in the so-called culturalization of citizenship, in the worrying return to “citizenship as a privilege” rhetoric and in the promotion of the sole formal belonging to the community.