Citation: ANTONSICH, M., 2016. International migration and the rise of thè civil' nation. Abstract: Scholars largely agree that immigration policies in Western Europe have switched to a liberal, civic model. Labelled as 'civic turn', 'civic integration' or 'liberal convergence', this model is not identically applied across countries, since national institutions, traditions, and identifications still matter. Even so, the main focus is on processes which allow or prevent migrants to be

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... d into nations usually taken for granted in their meanings. Moving from policies to discourses, this article aims to interrogate what kind of nation is behind these policies as a way to further scrutinize the 'civic turn'. Exploring how the term 'civility' and its adjectivizations are discursively deployed in Italian parliamentary debates on immigration and integration issues, the article points to two opposite narratives of nation. While one mobilizes civility in order to rewrite the nation in terms of a common, inclusive, civic 'we', the other uses civility to reaffirm the conflation between national identity and the identity of the ethno-cultural majority. These findings suggest the importance of exploring the 'civic turn' not only across countries, but also across political parties within the same country to capture the ways in which a liberal, civic convergence in political discourses might hide divergent national boundary mechanisms.