If we find however that within the set of liberal democracies, those that belong to the world's most advanced supranational project, the EU, are more similar to each other than to liberal democracies outside the EU, this would be compelling evidence in favour of the influence of post-national constellations.
The latest edition of the MIPEX indicator system of immigrant rights (MIPEX 2010) offers an opportunity to test this hypothesis. For the 2010 edition, the MIPEX team have gathered information on immigrant policies and rights in 33 countries – the 27 EU member states, two non-EU European countries (Norway and Switzerland), and four non-European OECD countries (the USA, Canada, Australia, and Japan) – in the domains of access to nationality, long-term residence, labour market mobility, family reunion, education, political participation, and anti-discrimination. Looking at the results of this exercise, one is hard-pressed to discover any particular pattern of rights that distinguishes EU countries from the rest. In fact, both the country that is most generous in extending rights – Sweden, with a score of 83 on the scale from 0 to 100 – and the most restrictive country – Latvia with a score of 31 – are EU countries. That makes Sweden quite similar to Canada (score 72) and Latvia to Japan (score 38), but neither of the two typical for some kind of EU regime of immigrant rights. We find the same pattern if we look at the seven domains of immigrant rights that MIPEX distinguishes separately: the EU always emerges as an extremely heterogeneous bunch with even more variation in immigrant rights than there is between self-proclaimed ‘multicultural’ classical immigration countries such as Canada and Australia, on the one hand, and classically ethnic-exclusivist Japan, on the other. Even if we only focus on European countries and thus control for the cultural and institutional differences between the classical immigration countries, Japan, and Europe – which anyway following Soysal's argument amounts to controlling for something that is no longer very relevant when it comes to rights – we find that the two non-EU member states do not stand out. Norway (66) is halfway between Sweden (83) and Denmark (53) and very close to Finland (69), and Switzerland (43) very close to Austria (42). That doesn't sound like post-nationalism, but more like the persistence of shared institutional and cultural patterns among kin nations, regardless of EU membership...
