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Paper short abstract:

My proposal to this communication highlights the results of an on-going analysis of the socio-legal modalities transforming bi-national couples into Swiss couples. My aim is to understand the normative bases that legitimize the legal conceptions relating to genuine bi-national marriages.

Paper long abstract:

In Switzerland, the socio-legal definition of the different foreigner statuses is legitimized by the concept of cultural proximity: it (re)produces a distinction between foreigners perceived as more or less desirable and undesirable, from a social and economic point of view, and more or less culturally close or distant, due to their national origins. Evolving at the intersection of this policy of control of migrant populations and the matrimonial law, the facilitated naturalization procedure by marriage produces a socio-legal conception of the genuine relationship. In order to grasp the normative support associated with binational marriages and mobilized by the Swiss state authorities, I explore the arguments used by officials, on the one hand, to assess the successful integration of applicants married to a Swiss national and, on the other hand, to cancel facilitated naturalisations acquired through marriage: what are the conceptions of a good marriage allowing the acquisition of Swiss nationality? And how can we understand the social dimensions underlying these concepts? In order to do this, I analyse the first and second instance court rulings pronounced between 1992 and 2019, using a structural approach, based on the articulation of the social relations (gender, culture, age, class, etc.) linked to the (re)production of the categories of foreign nationality spouses. I demonstrate that the deliberations find a normative basis in the conception of the good family leading to the (re)production of the nation. My paper focuses on the presentation of results that are currently being analyzed.