The looking glass: From the citizen to the migrant in Italians’ naïve imagery

The paper discuss the concept of citizenship both from a critical-theoretical point of view and in the light of the findings research conducted in Italy taking a socio-psychological perspective. We show how the contemporary foreigner figure, that we have come to know as ‘the migrant’, is a political and legal figure but it is also the result of a symbolic construction which is shaped through a social comparison process between citizens and not-citizens. The European political space has always implicitly attributed sovereignty to specific ethno-political groups thanks to the creation of internally homogeneous (or presumed such) national identities, and establishing the necessary criteria in order to define the most exclusive form of belonging, i.e. that of citizenship. This is the reason why it is often difficult to distinguish between forms of citizenship defined according to political and legal criteria, from those based on ethnic or cultural elements, as shown by current policies regarding the naturalization of ‘immigrants’. The issue of citizenship raises a specific form of the subjectivity-alterity relationship: a subjectivity tied up to the social and legal identity of citizens, that involves the acknowledgment, or the lack of acknowledgment of the not-citizens.