Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos

Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos This page intentionally left blank Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos EDITED BY Y. Mich...

Author: Y. Michal Bodemann | GokCe Yurdakul

42 downloads 2097 Views 956KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos

This page intentionally left blank

Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos

EDITED BY Y. Michal Bodemann and Gökçe Yurdakul

MIGRATION, CITIZENSHIP, ETHNOS

© Y. Michal Bodemann and Gökçe Yurdakul, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–7102–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bodemann, Y. Michal, 1944– Migration, citizenship, ethnos / Y. Michal Bodemann and Gökçe Yurdakul. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7102–1 1. Emigration and immigration—Europe. 2. Citizenship—Europe. 3. Immigrants—Europe. 4. Europe—Ethnic relations. I. Yurdakul, Gökçe. II. Title. JV7590.B63 2006 325.4—dc22

2005053910

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

C on t e n t s

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Notes on the Contributors

xi

Introduction Gökçe Yurdakul and Y. Michal Bodemann

1

Part I

Citizenship and Incorporation Regimes

1. The Repositioning of Citizenship and Alienage: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics Saskia Sassen

13

2. Citizenship, Statelessness and Market Fundamentalism: Arendtian Right to Have Rights Margaret R. Somers

35

3. Citizenship between De- and Re-Ethnicization Christian Joppke

Part II

63

The Changing Sociopolitical Context

4. Being German and Jewish in Kazakhstan and Germany Ruth Mandel

95

5. The Migration-Security Nexus: International Migration and Security Before and After 9/11 Thomas Faist

103

6. Changing the Rules While the Game Is On: From Multiculturalism to Assimilation in the Netherlands Han Entzinger

121

vi / contents

Part III Muslim Communities and the Politics of Incorporation 7. The Murder of Theo van Gogh: Gender, Religion, and the Struggle over Immigrant Integration in the Netherlands Anna C. Korteweg

147

8. Unveiling Distribution: Muslim Women with Headscarves in France and Germany Pascale Fournier and Gökçe Yurdakul

167

9. Turkish Brides: A Look at the Immigration Debate in Germany Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim

185

Part IV

Labor Migration and Irregular Migration

10. Illegal Migration: What Can We Know and What Can We Explain? Friedrich Heckmann

197

11. Managing Citizenship and Migration: Undocumented Labor Migrants’ Children and Policy Reforms in Israel Adriana Kemp

219

Index

239

List of Figures

10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5

Basic forms of illegal immigration Apprehensions of foreigners attempting to cross national land and sea borders illegally, 1990–2001 Apprehensions of human smugglers and smuggled migrants at German national borders, 1990–2001 Asylum applications (“Erstanträge”), 1990–2002 Persons suspected of a criminal offence without a legal residence status in Germany, 1994–2001

199 201 202 202 203


Acknowledgments

Most of the contributions in this volume were selected from the conference of the same title, organized by Y. Michal Bodemann at the Joint Initiative of German and European Studies at the University of Toronto with the joint sponsorship by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Berlin, October 2–4, 2003. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution by the Goethe Institut in Toronto to make this conference possible. Independently from the conference presentations, this edited volume has developed in its own path with additional contributions by Thomas Faist, Anna Korteweg, Pascale Fournier, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. We would like to thank Ralf Fücks, Rita Süssmuth, Marieluise Beck, Cem Özdemir, Mekonnen Mesghena, Anne Demmer, Edith Klein, and Doina Popescu who contributed to this conference in different ways. Our thanks also go to Nadine Blumer who helped us with the manuscript and the Palgrave editorial team who carefully prepared it for publication.


Notes on the Contributors

Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim is Professor of Sociology at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her fellowships include Cardiff University (1996); Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1997–1998) and Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (2002–2003). Her areas of research are work and employment, family and gender, reproductive technologies, migration, ethnic and race relations. Her most recent book in English is Reinventing the Family: In Search of New Lifestyles, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press (2002). Her most recent book in German is Wir und die Anderen. Vom Blick der Deutschen auf Migranten und Minderheiten, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp (2004). Michal Bodemann is Professor of Sociology and is affiliated with the Joint Initiative of German and European Studies at the University of Toronto. He wrote his dissertation in the Department of Sociology at Brandeis University on rural social structure in central Sardinia, a community study that attempted to reconstruct the politics, kinship, and economic patterns since 1800. In that context, he has written on theories of underdevelopment, patron–client relations, and issues in Marxist theory. Today, his areas of interest and teaching include race and ethnic relations, classical sociological theory, qualitative methods, Jewish studies, and especially GermanJewish relations and memory. He has published numerous articles and books on Jews in Germany. His book, GedáchTnistheater. Die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung (Theatre of Memory: The Jewish Community and its German Invention) was listed as one of the ten best nonfiction books in Germany in June 1996. He has held visiting professorships in various universities including Freie Universität Berlin (1983–1984, 1987–1988), Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik (1990–1991), Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (1990–1992 and 2003), University of Potsdam (1997) and Tel Aviv University (1999). He has received numerous SSHRC and DAAD grants for his research and held Halbert (Jerusalem), Mendelssohn (Potsdam) and Rockefeller (Bellagio) fellowships. Currently, he is conducting further research on Jews in contemporary Germany with Connaught Research Grant from University of Toronto. His most recent

xii / notes on the contributors

book is A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait (Duke University Press, 2004). Han Entzinger studied sociology and economics in Leiden, Rotterdam, and Strasbourg. He was appointed Professor of Migration and Integration Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands) in 2001. From 1986–2001 he held a similar chair at Utrecht University. Earlier he worked inter alia for the International Labour Organization and for the Scientific Council for Government Policy, a think tank close to the Dutch Prime Minister. He is cofounder and member of the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (www.ercomer.org). His research interests include international migration, integration and multiculturalism, migration and the welfare state, Islam in Western societies as well as comparative policies on these matters. His latest book is Migration between States and Markets (Ashgate, 2004, with Marco Martiniello and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, eds.). At various occasions he has been a consultant to the Council of Europe and the European Commission. He is past president of the Research Committee on Migration of the International Sociological Association. Thomas Faist is Chair and Professor of Transnational Relations and Development Sociology at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Bielefeld. He is director of the Center on the Study of Migration, Citizenship and Development (www.comcad-bielefeld.de). Formerly, he directed International Studies in Political Management (ISPM) at Hochschule Bremen. He received his PhD degree from the New School for Social Research in New York. His research focuses on international migration, ethnic relations, social policy, comparative politics, and transnationalization. Thomas Faist was Willy-Brandt-Guest Professor at the University of Malmö and DAAD Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto. Currently, he directs internationally comparative projects on “The Politics of Dual Citizenship in Europe,” funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and “Democracy and Migration,” supported by the German Science Foundation. Thomas Faist is member of the editorial boards of the journals Ethnic & Racial Studies and The Sociological Quarterly. Among his most recent book publications is Transnational Social Spaces: Agents, Networks and Organizations (Oxford University Press, 2004). Pascale Fournier is Boulton Fellow at the McGill Faculty of Law, an SJD Candidate at Harvard Law School, and a Trudeau scholar. She is currently writing a doctoral dissertation that focuses on the interaction between law, Muslim women, and constitutional liberal states. She clerked for the Honorable Claire L’Heureux-Dube at the Supreme Court of Canada, and has

notes on the contributors / xiii

taught at the Institute for Women’s Studies and Research in Tehran, Iran. Her teaching and scholarly interests include comparative constitutional law, identity formation and the law, law and social change, human rights and Islam, critical legal studies, and family law in the context of globalization. She is actively involved in numerous NGOs—she currently serves on the board of directors of Canada World Youth and Fondation Paul Gérin-Lajoie and works as a legal consultant for the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. Her recent articles include: “La femme musulmane au Canada, un être visible caché? Réflexions sur la traduction de l’Autre,” Revue Éthique Publique, “La réligion dans l’espace public,” vol. 8, no. 1 (2006), “The Reception of Muslim Family Laws in Western Liberal States,” Women Living Under Muslim Laws, Dossier 27 (2005), “The Ghettoization of Difference in Canada: ‘Rape by Culture’ or the Danger of a Cultural Defence in Criminal Law Trials,” Manitoba Law Journal, vol. 29, no. 81 (2002) and “The Erasure of Islamic Difference in Canadian and American Family Law Adjudication,” Journal of Law and Policy, vol. 10, no. 51 (2001). Friedrich Heckmann is Professor of Sociology and director of european forum for migration studies at the University of Bamberg. He studied sociology, history, and economics at the universities of Münster, Kiel, Lawrence (USA) and Erlangen-Nürnberg. He received an MA in sociology from the University of Kansas in Lawrence in 1967 and his PhD from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in 1972, where he worked as an assistant and researcher. He was Professor of Sociology at the Hamburg School of Economics and Political Science between 1982 and 1992. In 1992 he became a professor at the University of Bamberg. His main research interests are in the areas of migration, interethnic relations, integration of migrants, social structure of Germany, and sociological theory. He has served as a policy adviser and expert consultant on migration and integration for the German parliament, the German federal government, Länder governments, cities, and nongovernmental organizations. For his publications see: http://www.uni-bamberg.de/~ba6ef3/mithecpe.htm Christian Joppke is Professor of Sociology at International University Bremen. Born in 1959, he graduated from the University of Frankfurt (1984), and received his PhD from the University of California in Berkeley (1989). He previously taught at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (1990–1994), the European University Institute in Florence (1995–2002), and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (2003–2004). In 2002–2003 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. His areas of research are political sociology, citizenship and immigration, ethnic and race relations, nations and nationalism, social movements, comparative methods, and theory. His most recent book is

xiv / notes on the contributors

Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (2005). Adriana Kemp received her PhD in Sociology at the University of Tel-Aviv. Since 2001 she is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her research areas are political sociology, migration, citizenship and national identity, nationalism, territories and boundaries, sociology of Israeli society. She is the coeditor of Israelis in Conflict: Identities, Hegemonies, Challenges, Sussex University Press (2004, with D. Newman, O. Yiftachel, and U. Ram). She is currently preparing a book on Strangers in a Jewish State: The Politics of Labor Migration in Israel (Kibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House with Rebecca Raijman). Her recent articles include “International Migration, Domestic Work and Care Work: Undocumented Latina Migrants in Israel,” Gender and Society 17, 5 (2003) (with R. Raijman, S. Schamma-Gesser); “Labor Migration and Racialisation: Labor Market Mechanisms and Labor Migration Control Policies in Israel,” Social Identities 10, 2 (2003); “Tel Aviv is Not Foreign to You: Urban Incorporation Policy on Labor Migrants in Israel,” International Migration Review XXXVIII 1, 2004 (with R. Raijman). Anna C. Korteweg received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is working on a project on the integration of Muslim immigrants in northern Europe, focusing on the way national identities are constructed as the integration of these immigrants in various nation-states is negotiated. She has published in Theory and Society, The Annual Review of Sociology, and in Qualitative Sociology. She is writing a book based on her comparative ethnographic research at welfare offices charged with transforming single mothers into working mothers in the United States and the Netherlands. She is also writing a series of articles based on her new project. Ruth Mandel received her PhD from the University of Chicago; her doctoral research focused on Turkish migration to Berlin. Over the past several years she has conducted research in Central Asia, and has carried out a longterm project on media and development in Kazakhstan. She has taught social anthropology at University College London since 1990, and has published many articles on her research. Mandel was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy during the fall semester 2000. During her time in Berlin, she worked on her project entitled “Changing Practices of Citizenship and Belonging among Recent Immigrants from the Soviet Union.” This project is a continuation of her research on two immigrant populations: the ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union and former Soviet Jews who have immigrated to Berlin. In particular, she was interested

notes on the contributors / xv

in the difficulty of defining citizenship and nationality, the practical and political problems this presents, and also the social problems these populations have encountered as they seek acceptance in a new land. Saskia Sassen is Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her new book is Denationalization: Territory, Authority and Rights in a Global Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2005). She has just completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for which she set up a network of researchers and activists in over fifty countries. Her most recent books are the edited Global Networks, Linked Cities (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) and the coedited Socio-Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order (Princeton University Press, 2005). The Global City is out in a new fully updated edition in 2001. Her books are translated into fifteen languages. She serves on several editorial boards and is an adviser to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and Chair of the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). Her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Vanguardia, Clarin, the Financial Times, among others. Margaret R. Somers is Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. She is specializing in comparative historical sociology and citizenship formation and democratization. She is the recipient of distinguished awards and fellowships, most recent of which include Rutgers University Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture. She is the chair of the American Sociological Association’s Historical Comparative Sociology. Her recent articles are “From Poverty to Perversity: Markets, Institutions, and the State over Two Centuries of Welfare Debate,” American Sociological Review (April 2005) and “Citizenship Troubles: Genealogies of Struggle for the Soul of the Social” in The Making and Unmaking of Modernity, edited by Julia Adams, Lis Clemens, and Ann Orloff, Duke University Press (2004). Her book Studies in Citizenship, Civil Society and the Public Sphere is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Gökçe Yurdakul studied sociology at Bogazici University, Istanbul and gender and women’s studies at Middle East Technical University in Ankara. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, Department of Sociology. Her dissertation is on immigrant mobilization and political

xvi / notes on the contributors

representation in Germany. Her teaching and research interests include migration, citizenship, race and ethnicity, gender, and women. She is the author of “State, Political Parties, Immigrant Elites: Turkish Immigrant Associations in Berlin” (2006, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies); “Migrant Genealogies: German Turkish Identity in Public Display” (2002, Zeitschrift für Türkeistudien) and coauthor of “Culture of Honor, Culture of Change: A Feminist Analysis of Honor Killings in Rural Turkey” (with Aysan Sev’er, 2001, Violence against Women).

Introduction Gökçe Yurdakul and Y. Michal Bodemann

This volume addresses the problem of how citizenship regimes and immigrant incorporation policies are being transformed in the aftermath of September 11. Our contributors, from Western Europe, Canada, and the United States have entered into a discussion in order to address this problem and further our understanding of the European situation and migration at large. We will raise three interrelated questions: First, how has migration evolved in Europe over the past decades? Here we will deal with basic issues in contemporary German and European migration at large, sketching the situation since 1945 and focusing on the new developments since the early 1980s. Second, how has the citizenship debate evolved and how has the problem of citizenship, in relation to immigration, been dealt with by the receiving states in Western Europe? Third, how have the migrants responded to their situation in various receiving countries? Most importantly, what sort of institutional structures have they elaborated and how do these structures relate to and interact with the host society? In the case of Germany, in a celebrated review of developments since 1945, Günter Grass has pointed out that, in the course of German unification, inequality has been increasing in German society. Germany, in fact, is not the only Western European country that is experiencing these economic changes. Many multinational companies in France and in the Netherlands, for example, started to cut back on the number of employees, and have taken their factories to the peripheries of the European Union, such as Poland, Romania, and Turkey. At the end of the nineties and the beginning of the new millennium, many financially stable companies, such as those in the automotive industry, began to cut back on the number of workers. Many firms undercut industry agreements, and at times even contravened collective bargaining agreements (Thelen and Wijnbergen, 2003).

2 / gökçe yurdakul and y. michal bodemann

The pressing effects of globalization and the onslaught of neoliberal policies dismantled the strong tradition of the German welfare state. The Social Democratic Party-led government made dramatic cuts to sickness benefits and pensions in its first term, between 1998 and 2002. When the SPD was elected for the second time, more dramatic changes were on the way: for example, the reform of employment policy in order to reduce the unemployment level which reached its highest level since World War II. It is quite apparent that the socioeconomic issues Günter Grass has pointed to, and German unification notwithstanding, have long ceased to be a part of a German Sonderweg: over the past two decades, neoliberalism and what is being described as globalization have had a similar impact in especially many other Western European societies, such as the Netherlands and France. Moreover, migration issues and the minority rights debate cannot be discussed without the overall sociopolitical transformation in Europe after World War II. Both of these debates, then, should be seen within both the larger context of economic and political transformation in Europe, and for the purpose of this volume, specifically in the context of Germany. The transformation in Europe from its heavily manufacturing based economy to its deindustrialization has brought about a strong emergence of neoliberal policies and as a result of which it has often ignored drastic changes in the lives of immigrants. Germany has a different history with immigrants as compared to the Netherlands and France. In the 1960s, Germany imported “guest workers” in order to realize the “economic miracle.” The Netherlands and France also had a considerable number of “guest workers,” however the majority of their immigrants are from their former colonies. Although many of the guest workers and the residents from former colonies were expected to stay only temporarily, it soon became apparent that they would stay permanently in the host countries. By the early 1990s, many Turks, Moroccans, Surinamese, and Algerians had already been in their host countries for several decades, the second-generation immigrant children had started to enter the labor market, and the third-generation had become students in schools. The receiving countries introduced reforms which were to facilitate the integration of immigrants. For example, foreigners who reside in the Netherlands for five years can vote in the local elections and take part in referenda since the 1980s. However, in France only French nationals can vote and stand for elections and there are no other political rights for immigrants. The same procedure also goes for Germany (EU Parliamentary Assembly, 2000). France naturalizes its immigrant population according to the ius soli principle, therefore the children of immigrants who are born in France

introduction / 3

automatically become French citizens. On the other hand, the German state recently introduced reforms in line with the changes in European Union policies to facilitate immigrant integration granting them German citizenship. With the introduction of a new citizenship law (Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz) in 1999, the German state partially discarded the concept of ancestral origin, and started naturalizing the migrant population. According to the Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz, children born in Germany after the year 2000 can be granted dual citizenship: they may hold German citizenship and their parents’ native citizenship until the age of twentythree. Although this is a revolutionary change in German citizenship law, it will take a long time for the effects of this law on the immigrant society to be felt. In fact, the socioeconomic inequalities in Western European societies, specifically regarding immigrants, are disturbing: in Germany, the unemployment rate among immigrants was 20 percent in 1999. This is twice as high as the unemployment level among Germans (efms, 2000). In France, “Turks and Moroccans with a high school diploma are more affected by unemployment than the average with same qualifications” (Simon, 2003: 1112, cf. Fournier and Yurdakul in this volume). The Dutch state also has to deal with high unemployment levels and low education levels among its immigrant populations. As a result, many immigrants and second-generation immigrant children are forced to work in the secondary labor market and take over less desirable jobs especially in the service sector. However, since the labor unions have been weakened while the service sector that absorbs most of the immigrant labor is being strengthened, the collective bargaining power of immigrants has decreased dramatically. In order to survive in the context of new market regulations, a declining welfare system, and neoliberal policies, a segment of second and third-generation immigrants tend to withdraw to the closed milieus of their own ethnic and religious communities, ethnic businesses, and religious schools. This, more than anything else has encouraged what in Germany is described as Parallelgesellschaften (parallel societies), blamed on the immigrants—the marginalization and social withdrawal of immigrants in Germany, and in other Western European societies. Indeed, while the German, Dutch, or French media report almost daily about the headscarf issue, forced marriages, and honor killings among immigrants, the European editions of Turkish newspapers primarily address the rising unemployment level and the dismantling of welfare and unemployment assistance. Even these differences in the media reports show that the majority society is mainly concerned about immigrants who are threatening their social values and cultural norms; whereas the immigrants are


mostly concerned about socioeconomic problems that are threatening their survival in the host society. Since the end of the 1990s and the start of the new century, the state policies started to encourage immigrants to adapt to the cultural patterns of the host society. In other words, cultural and behavioral assimilation is now expected from immigrants, and in fact, is enforced by the state authorities through new regulations. This situation, more often than not, leads to greater defensive reactions among immigrants and pits immigrants against the host society and its political institutions; much of this, in turn, has greatly strengthened an array of ethnic organizations. Recently, other European states, such as the Netherlands and France, changed their immigration policies from cultural pluralism to a “new assimilation” (Brubaker, 2001; Entzinger, 2003). The retreat of multiculturalism in Europe is not a coincidence; rather, it is related to the high unemployment levels and economic instability in the countries that carry most of the financial burden of the European Union, such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands. By and large, as borders have become tighter, and immigration regulations have become harsher, the ideology of integration, that of “cultural pluralism” is yielding to another, that of the “new assimilation” in Europe. New assimilation is a term recently introduced by Rogers Brubaker. As he argues in his article “The Return of Assimilation?” (2001), multiculturalist social thought, public discourse, and public policies have exhausted themselves. Now we are observing a change from a multiculturalist era to a new assimilationist one, which is conceptually and in substance different from the assimilatonist policies of the 1960s. The new assimilation is open to difference, but not open to ghettoization, segregation, or marginalization. Christian Joppke (2003) for instance, has noted that recent changes in public policies in Britain and the Netherlands, as well as in Germany and France, indicate a retreat from multiculturalism toward the “civic integration” of immigrants. In other words, the dominant ideology is, as the Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikkan also argues, if immigrants want to be a part of a country, then they have to “do their share” (2001). Their share is as diverse as removing headscarves in public places, attending integration courses, or taking compulsory language courses and tests. In Marshallian terms, migrants cannot merely demand rights; they also have duties, which are determined by the institutions of the receiving state. On the one hand, market-led immigration policies are determining the future of migration in the European countries (Engelen, 2003). On the other hand, the European states are tightening the border to avoid unwanted immigrants, specifically those who cannot be absorbed into the

introduction / 5

labor market in the short term. For example, the Netherlands is discussing whether it should regulate immigration through marriage. And the refugee acceptance level in Germany dropped by 29.7 percent in 2003. In other words, the Western European countries want to decrease the migration levels, specifically if these migrants cannot be employed in their respective labor markets. Moreover, countries in the European Union are drafting new laws in order to regulate the integration of incoming immigrants. Many politicians in Germany, for example, claim that immigrant employment fosters integration into the host society (Jenson, 2001). If these immigrants are not employable, then they should not enter Germany in the first place. If they do manage to enter Germany, as asylum seekers or through marriage, state authorities are attempting to generate “policies that seek to end welfare abuse and make workfare programs compulsory” (Jenson, 2001: 2). These integration policies today, then, are largely a fait accompli. Learning the language of the majority and the cultural and social idiom of the receiving country is turning into a legislated duty for the immigrants, not a natural result of their participation in society. The opposite, “disintegration,” appears as a threat to the European economies, societies, and cultures (Favell, 2001). For instance, in Germany, tax payers do not want to shoulder the living costs of foreigners from obscure lands in addition to the growing retirement costs of the German pensioners. In France, many French citizens do not want children to wear Islamic religious symbols in French public schools, nor do they want “the law of the Republic being challenged by the ‘law of the Koran’ ” (Kastoryano, 2004: 1239). In this sociopolitical context, we are asking here, how have citizenship regimes and immigrant incorporation policies been changed in the aftermath of September 11? We shall address four major themes: the citizenship regimes, the effects of the changing sociopolitical context on immigrant incorporation policies, the politics of incorporation on Muslim communities and irregular migration. In the first section on citizenship regimes, Saskia Sassen, Margaret Somers, and Christian Joppke will guide us through some theoretical perspectives on citizenship. All three contributions deal with the transformations of citizenship and bring different and interesting insights to the questions on state memberships, ethnicity, nationalism, and rights. Saskia Sassen asks where we see the changes toward postnational and/or denationalized features of citizenship. She says that the global cities appear partly as denationalized spaces that allow a partial reinvention of citizenship. In this context, the informal citizenship practices may formalize new types of rights in the global cities. She calls this “claiming rights to the city.” Margaret Somers is also concerned with rights, however in a different way: it is Margaret Somers’ thesis that in contrast to


the stateless refugees of interwar Europe, depicted by Hannah Arendt, who were deprived of the “right to have rights,” today’s socially and politically excluded are being compensated with an “alternative identity of ethnos and nationalism,” and in this respect at least, all other considerable differences between the United States and Europe notwithstanding, her observations hold for both contemporary cases. Christian Joppke is interested in the changing meaning of citizenship through migration. Like state membership, citizenship as well is pushed into two different directions: on the one hand, the liberal states are forced to de-ethnicize state membership through immigration; on the other hand, immigrant sending states want to maintain relations with their citizens which forces them to re-ethnicize their state membership. In his article, he shows that some liberal states, such as the German state, are de-ethnicizing citizenship, whereas others, such as France, are re-ethnicizing it. Joppke, therefore, offers a comparative review of the transformation of citizenship between re- and de-ethnicization in Western Europe. The second section on the changing sociopolitical context discusses the transformation of integration regimes in Western Europe. These discussions include the specific situations of countries and case studies, focusing mostly on Germany and the Netherlands and drawing comparisons to North America in the aftermath of September 11. Here, Ruth Mandel focuses first on the changing socioeconomic context in Europe. Mandel deals with the shifting identities after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She compares practices, processes, and performances of Russian Jews, ethnic Germans, and Turks in Germany. Comparing the three, she interrogates the “genuineness” and “authenticity” of Germanness and Jewishness that determine the membership categories such as “quota refugees,” “resettlers” and “immigrants.” While Mandel looks at the shifting identities that gradually emerged after the end of the cold war, Thomas Faist deals with another key event: September 11. Faist points out to the increasing focus on the migration-security nexus after September 11. As he analyzes the consequences of September 11, he proposes three dimensions of the migration-security nexus: reinforcement of stereotypes, stricter internal and external controls, and questions of immigrant integration, specifically with regard to Muslim populations. Within this framework, he points to the fact that the security threats to Western societies have been present even before September 11 and the political uses of September 11 have only exacerbated the already existing discourses of migration and security. As Faist sets the scene of the changing socioeconomic context after September 11 in Western societies, Entzinger introduces us to the specific case of the Netherlands. In his article, he analyzes the background of immigrant integration policies in the Netherlands over the past decades and

introduction / 7

looks for answers to his question whether the integration of immigrants in the Netherlands has failed. Anna Korteweg’s contribution complements Entzinger’s article. She analyzes the increasingly vociferous calls for assimilation in the context of the murder of film maker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch citizen of Moroccan origin. Both authors highlight the decline of multiculturalism and the rise of assimilation policies in the Netherlands. Where Entzinger focuses on the policy trajectory within the Netherlands, Korteweg shows how gender becomes the arena of struggle in the national debate over immigrant integration. This debate quickly traveled across the border to Germany. Korteweg’s article takes us to the third section of this volume on politics of incorporation and Muslim communities. Interestingly, while it was not a deliberate choice, all three articles in the section on Muslim communities were compelled to address gender. This demonstrates the centrality of women and gender issues within the debates on immigrant integration. While analyzing the gender dimension in the rise of assimilation in the Netherlands, Korteweg in particular points to the centrality of gender issues in the recent immigration debates. Similarly Pascale Fournier and Gökçe Yurdakul argue that the headscarf debates in Germany and France conceal the importance of the socioeconomic status of Muslim women in these countries. According to Fournier and Yurdakul, legal and political debates on the hijab are dominated by the “identity politics” discourse which obscures relevant socioeconomic dimensions. In the last chapter on Muslim communities, Elisabeth BeckGernsheim, aptly complementing the earlier ones, focuses on the icon of the “bartered bride,” by means of a “folklore of superficial knowledge,” in the construction of otherness. Her particular case study in this regard is a highly popular book by the German Turkish writer Necla Kelek, The Alien Bride, and the ways in which this book has been used to feed a moral panic against Turkish/Muslim immigrants in Germany. A survey such as this volume, on the North American and Western European scene, would be amiss if it did not draw comparisons to the incorporation of immigrants elsewhere. The last section on irregular immigration, therefore, compares the cases of Israel and Germany. This section presents cases that move from Latin American immigrants in Israel to Moldovians within the European Union, and it teaches us that migration issues cannot be pinned onto the territories of one nation-state, but that they occur in complex intertwined networks in transnational spaces. While Friedrich Heckmann’s article deals with irregular migration in Germany, Adriana Kemp’s essay on Israel brings a fresh approach to the Western European debates. Heckmann asks whether it is empirically possible to trace illegal or undocumented migration. In his discussion of the social organization of human smuggling, he challenges the theory of organized


crime and offers new concepts from market and networks theory to understand different forms of human smuggling and illegal migration. By analyzing examples of Afghans who arrive in Hamburg to Chinese who came to Manhattan from China, Heckmann explores networks, concepts, and methods to understand human smuggling. The last article in this volume, the Israeli case of undocumented immigrants, puts the European and North American cases into perspective by revealing similarities between immigration to Israel and to Western Europe. Adriana Kemp deals with the administrative and policy initiatives to naturalize the undocumented labor migrants’ children in Israel who are neither Jewish nor Arab. She questions the extent to which “ ‘post-national’ norms and ideas that informed European and North American debates permeated also the public discourse in Israel.” Much like Western European countries, the Israeli state is also forced to recruit labor migrants and then deal with the question of membership within the neoliberal policies of the 1990s. Kemp’s article shows us that the Western Europe or North American experience is not unique; other countries experience the challenges of immigration as well. In fact, migration issues should be discussed in the context of sociopolitical changes that affect the global system, rather than the territorial boundaries of nation-states. Lastly, the volume amply demonstrates that Günter Grass’s observations on the overall collapse of social solidarity and the ridicule on the part of “slick young journalists” and other intellectuals heaped upon those who express warnings about the consequences of this new and seemingly unbridled neoliberal politics, must be taken seriously. References Brubaker, Rogers (2001), “Return to Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and Its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24, 4, pp. 531–548. efms-European Forum for Migration Studies (2000), “Beck presents report on the Situation of Foreigners in Germany,” Migration Report: Chronology of Relevant News and Occurrences in the Area of the Institute’s Work, February, http://www.uni-bamberg.de/~ba6ef3/dfeb00_e.htm Engelen, Ewald (2003), “How to Combine Openness and Protection? Citizenship, Migration, and Welfare Regimes,” Politics & Society, 31, 4, pp. 503–536. Entzinger, Han (2003), “The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism: The Case of the Netherlands,” in Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska (eds.) Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 59–86. EU Parliamentary Assembly (2000), Participation of Immigrants and Foreign Residents in Political Life in the Council of Europe Member States http:// assembly.coe.int/Documents/WorkingDocs/doc00/edoc8916.htm

introduction / 9 Favell, Adrian (2001), “Integration Policy and Integration Research in Europe: A Review and a Critique,” in T. Alexander Aleinetioff and Douglas Klusmeyer (eds.) Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices, Washington: Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, pp. 349–399. Ganssmann, Heiner (2004), “Germany: Capital Flees,” Le Monde Diplomatique, http://mondediplo.com/2004/02/12economy Grass, Günter (2005), “The Gravest Generation,” New York Times, May 7, A27. Jenson, Jane (2001), “Social Cohesion and Inclusion: What is the Research Agenda?” Canadian Research Policy Networks, http://www.cprn.com/ en/doc.cfm?doc ⫽ 690 Joppke, Christian (2003), The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal States, Russell Sage Foundation Working Paper # 203. Kastoryano, Riva (2004), “Religion and Incorporation: Islam in France and Germany,” International Migration Review, 38, 3, pp. 1234–1256. Simon, Patrick (2003), “France and the Unknown Second Generation: Preliminary Results on Social Mobility,” International Migration Review, 37, 4, pp. 1091–1119. Thelen, Kathleen and Christa van Wijnbergen (2003), “The Paradox of Globalization: Labor Relations in Germany and beyond,” Comparative Political Studies, 36, 8, pp. 859–880. Wikan, Unni (2003), Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.


Part I Citizenship and Incorporation Regimes


C h ap t e r 1 The Repositioning of Citizenship and Alienage: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics Saskia Sassen

Most of the scholarship on citizenship has claimed a necessary connection to the national state. The transformations afoot today raise questions about this proposition insofar as they significantly alter those conditions which in the past fed that articulation between citizenship and the national state. The context for this possible alteration is defined by two major, partly interconnected conditions. One is the change in the position and institutional features of national states since the 1980s resulting from various forms of globalization. These range from economic privatization and deregulation to the increased prominence of the international human rights regime. The second is the emergence of multiple actors, groups, and communities partly strengthened by these transformations in the state and increasingly unwilling to automatically identify with a nation as represented by the state. Addressing the question of citizenship against these transformations entails a specific stance. It is quite possible to posit that at the most abstract or formal level not much has changed over the last century in the essential features of citizenship. The theoretical ground from which I address the issue is that of the historicity and the embeddedness of both categories, citizenship and the national state, rather than their purely formal features. Each of these has been constructed in elaborate and formal ways. And each has evolved historically as a tightly packaged bundle of what were in fact often rather diverse elements. The dynamics at work today are destabilizing these particular bundlings and bringing to the fore the fact of that bundling and its particularity. Through their destabilizing effects, these dynamics are producing operational and rhetorical openings for the emergence of new types of political subjects and new spatialities for politics.

14 / saskia sassen

More broadly, the destabilizing of national state-centered hierarchies of legitimate power and allegiance has enabled a multiplication of nonformalized or only partly formalized political dynamics and actors. These signal a deterritorializing of citizenship practices and identities, and of discourses about loyalty and allegiance. Finally, specific transformations inside the national state have directly and indirectly altered particular features of the institution of citizenship. These transformations are not predicated necessarily on deterritorialization or locations for the institution outside the national state as is key to conceptions of postnational citizenship, and hence are usefully distinguished from current notions of postnational citizenship. I will refer to these as denationalized forms of citizenship. Analytically, I seek to understand how various transformations entail continuities or discontinuities in the basic institutional form. That is to say, where do we see continuities in the formal bundle of rights at the heart of the institution and where do we see movement toward postnational and/or denationalized features of citizenship? And where might as yet informal citizenship practices engender formalizations of new types of rights? Particular attention goes to several specific issues that capture these features. One of these is the relationship between citizenship and nationality and the evolution of the latter toward something akin to “effective” nationality rather than as “allegiance” to one state or exclusive formal nationality. A later section examines the mix of distinct elements that actually make up the category of citizenship in today’s highly developed countries. Far from being a unitary category or a mere legal status, these diverse elements can be contradictory. One of my assumptions here is that the destabilizing impact of globalization contributes to accentuate the distinctiveness of each of these elements. A case in point is the growing tension between the legal form and the normative project toward enhanced inclusion as various minorities and disadvantaged sectors gain visibility for their claim-making. Critical here is the failure in most countries to achieve “equal” citizenship— that is, not just a formal status but an enabling condition. The remaining sections begin to theorize these issues with a view toward specifying incipient and typically not formalized developments in the institution of citizenship. Informal practices and political subjects not quite fully recognized as such can nonetheless function as part of the political landscape. Undocumented immigrants who are long-term residents engage in practices that are the same as those of formally defined citizens in the routines of daily life; this produces an informal social contract between these undocumented immigrants and the community. Subjects who are by definition categorized as nonpolitical, such as “housewives” may actually have considerable political agency and be emergent political subjects. Insofar as citizenship is at least partly shaped by the conditions within

the repositioning of citizenship and alienage / 15

which it is embedded, conditions that have today changed in certain very specific and also general ways, we may well be seeing a corresponding set of changes in the institution itself. These may not yet be formalized and some may never become fully formalized. Further, social constructions that mark individuals, such as race and ethnicity, may well become destabilized by these developments in both the institution of citizenship and the nationstate. Generally, the analysis in this paper suggests that we might see an unbounding of existing types of subjects, particularly dominant ones such as the citizen-subject, the alien, and the racialized subject. A concluding section argues that many of these transformations in the broader context and in the institution itself become legible in today’s large cities. Perhaps the most evolved type of site for these transformations is the global city.1 In this process, the global city is reconfigured as a partly denationalized space that enables a partial reinvention of citizenship. This reinvention takes the institution away from questions of nationality narrowly defined and toward the enactment of a large array of particular interests, from protests against police brutality and globalization to sexual preference politics and house-squatting by anarchists. I interpret this as a move toward citizenship practices that revolve around claiming rights to the city. These are not exclusively or necessarily urban practices. But it is especially in large cities that we see simultaneously some of the most extreme inequalities as well as conditions enabling these citizenship practices. In global cities, these practices also contain the possibility of directly engaging strategic forms of power, a fact which I interpret as significant in a context where power is increasingly privatized, globalized, and elusive. Citizenship and Nationality In its narrowest definition citizenship describes the legal relationship between the individual and the polity. This relation can in principle assume many forms, in good part depending on the definition of the polity. Thus, in Europe this definition of the polity was originally the city, both in ancient and in medieval times. But it is the evolution of polities along the lines of state formation that gave citizenship in the west its full institutionalized and formalized character and made nationality a key component of citizenship. Today the terms citizenship and nationality both refer to the national state. In a technical legal sense, while essentially the same concept, each term reflects a different legal framework. Both identify the legal status of an individual in terms of state membership. But citizenship is largely confined to the national dimension, while nationality refers to the international legal dimension in the context of an interstate system. The legal status entails the

16 / saskia sassen

specifics of whom the state recognizes as a citizen and the formal basis for the rights and responsibilities of the individual in relation to the state. International law affirms that each state may determine who will be considered a citizen of that state (see Hague Convention, 1954). Domestic laws about who is a citizen vary significantly across states and so do the definitions of what it entails to be a citizen. Even within Europe, let alone worldwide, there are marked differences in how citizenship is articulated and hence how noncitizens are defined. The aggressive nationalism and territorial competition among European states in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and well into the twentieth centuries made the concept of dual nationality generally undesirable, incompatible with individual loyalties and destabilizing of the international order. Absolute state authority over a territory and its nationals could not easily accommodate dual nationality. Indeed, we see the development of a series of mechanisms aimed at preventing or counteracting the common causes for dual nationality (Marrus, 1985). This negative perception of dual nationality continued into the first half of the twentieth century and well into the 1960s. There were no international accords on dual nationality. The main effort by the international system remained rooting out the causes of dual nationality by means of multilateral codification of the law on the subject (Rubenstein and Adler, 2000). It is probably the case that this particular form of the institution of citizenship, centered on exclusive allegiance, reached its highpoint in the twentieth century. The major transformations of the 1980s and 1990s have once again brought conditions for a change in the institution of citizenship and its relation to nationality. They have also brought about changes in the legal content of nationality. Mostly minor formal and nonformal changes are beginning to dilute the particular formalization coming out of European history. The long lasting resistance to dual or multiple nationality is shifting toward a selective acceptance. According to some legal scholars (Spiro, 1997; Rubenstein and Adler, 2000), in the future, dual and multiple nationality will become the norm. Today, more people than ever before have dual nationality (Spiro, 1997). Insofar as the importance of nationality is a function of the central role of states in the international system, it is quite possible that a decline in the importance of this role and a proliferation of other actors will affect the value of nationality. These transformations may give citizenship yet another set of features as it continues to respond to the conditions within which it is embedded (Sassen, 1996: chapter 2). The nationalizing of the institution, which took place over the last several centuries, may today give way to a partial denationalizing. A fundamental dynamic in this regard is the growing articulation of national economies with the global economy and the associated


pressures on states to be competitive. Crucial to current notions of competitive states is withdrawal from various spheres of citizenship entitlements, with the possibility of a corresponding dilution of loyalty to the state. Citizens’ loyalty may in turn be less crucial to the state today than it was at a time of people-intensive and frequent warfare, with its need for loyal citizen-soldiers (Turner, 2000). Masses of troops today can be replaced by technologically intensive methods of warfare. Most importantly, in the highly developed world, warfare has become less significant partly due to economic globalization. Global firms and global markets do not want the rich countries to fight wars among themselves. The “international” project of the most powerful actors on the world stage today is radically different from what it was in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Many of the dynamics that built economies, polities, and societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contained an articulation between the national scale and the growth of entitlements for citizens. During industrialization, class formation, class struggles, and the advantages of both employers and workers tended to scale at the national level and became identified with state-produced legislation and regulations, entitlements, and obligations. The state came to be seen as a key to ensuring the wellbeing of significant portions of both the working class and the bourgeoisie. The development of welfare states in the twentieth century became a crucial institutional domain for granting entitlements to the poor and the disadvantaged. Today, the growing weight given to notions of the “competitiveness” of states puts pressure on states to cut down on these entitlements. This in turn weakens the reciprocal relationship between the poor and the state (e.g., Munger, 2001). Finally, the growth of unemployment and the fact that many of the young are developing weak ties to the labor market, once thought of as a crucial mechanism for the socialization of young adults, will further weaken the loyalty and sense of reciprocity between these future adults and the state (Roulleau-Berger, 2002). As these trends have come together toward the end of the twentieth century they contribute to destabilize the meaning of citizenship as it was forged in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. Economic policies and technical developments we associate with economic globalization have strengthened the importance of cross-border dynamics and reduced the significance of borders. The associated emphasis on markets has brought into question the foundations of the welfare state. T. H. Marshall (1977 [1950]) and many others saw and continue to see the welfare state as an important ingredient of social citizenship. Today the assumptions of the dominant model of Marshallian citizenship have been severely diluted under the impact of globalization and the ascendance of the market as the preferred mechanism for addressing these social issues. For many critics,

18 / saskia sassen

the reliance on markets to solve political and social problems is a savage attack on the principles of citizenship. Thus Peter Saunders (1993) argues that citizenship inscribed in the institutions of the welfare state is a buffer against the vagaries of the market and the inequalities of the class system. The nature of citizenship has also been challenged by a proliferation of old issues that have gained new attention. Among the latter are the question of state membership of aboriginal communities, stateless people, and refugees (Sassen, 1999; Knop, 2002). All of these have important implications for human rights in relation to citizenship. These social changes in the role of the state, the impact of globalization on states, and the relationship between dominant and subordinate groups also have major implications for questions of identity. “Is citizenship a useful concept for exploring the problems of belonging, identity and personality in the modern world?” (Shotter, 1993; Ong, 1999: chapters 1 and 4). Can such a radical change in the conditions for citizenship leave the institution itself unchanged? Deconstructing Citizenship Though often talked about as a single concept and experienced as a unitary institution, citizenship actually describes a number of discrete but related aspects in the relation between the individual and the polity. Current developments are bringing to light and accentuating the distinctiveness of these various aspects, from formal rights to practices and psychological dimensions (see Ong, 1996; Bosniak, 2000). They make legible the tension between citizenship as a formal legal status and as a normative project or an aspiration. The formal equality granted to all citizens rarely rests on the need for substantive equality in social and even political terms. In brief, current conditions have strengthened the emphasis on rights and aspirations that go beyond the formal legal definition of rights and obligations. This is mirrored most recently in the reinvigoration of theoretical distinctions: communitarian and deliberative, republican and liberal, feminist, postnational and cosmopolitan notions of citizenship. Insofar as citizenship is a status which articulates legal rights and responsibilities, the mechanisms through which this articulation is shaped and implemented can be analytically distinguished from the status itself and so can the content of the rights. In the medieval cities so admired by Max Weber (1958), the urban residents themselves set up the structures through which they could establish and thicken their rights in the space of the city. Today it is the national state that provides these mechanisms and it does so for national political space. But these mechanisms may well be changing once again given globalization, the associated changes in the national state, and the ascendance of human


rights. In each of these major phases, the actual content and shape of the legal rights and obligations also changed. Some of these issues can be illustrated through the evolution of equal citizenship over the last few decades. Equal citizenship is central to the modern institution of citizenship. The expansion of equality among citizens has shaped a good part of its evolution in the twentieth century. There is debate as to what brought about the expanded inclusions over this period, most notably the granting of the vote to women. For some (e.g. Karst, 2000) it is law itself—and national law—that has been crucial in promoting recognition of exclusions and measures for their elimination. For others (Young, 1990; Taylor, 1992) politics and identity have been essential because they provide the sense of solidarity necessary for the further development of modern citizenship in the nation-state. Either way, insofar as equality is based on membership, citizenship status forms the basis of an exclusive politics and identity (Walzer, 1985; Bosniak, 1996). In a country such as the United States, the principle of equal citizenship remains unfulfilled, even after the successful struggles and legal advances of the last five decades (Karst, 1997).2 Groups defined by race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation and other “identities,” still face various exclusions from full participation in public life notwithstanding formal equality as citizens. Second, because full participation as a citizen rests on a material base (Marshall, 1977; Handler, 1995) poverty excludes large sectors of the population and the gap is widening. Feminist and race-critical scholarship has highlighted the failure of gender- and race-neutral conceptions of citizenship, such as legal status, to account for the differences of individuals within communities (Benhabib et al., 1995; Crenshaw et al., 1996; Delgado and Stefancic, 1999; Benhabib, 2002). In brief, legal citizenship does not always bring full and equal membership rights. Citizenship is affected by the position of different groups within a nation-state. Yet it is precisely the position of these different groups that has engendered the practices and struggles that forced changes in the institution of citizenship itself. Thus Kenneth Karst (1997) observes that in the United States it was national law that “braided the strands of citizenship”—formal legal status, rights, belonging—into the principle of equal citizenship. This took place through a series of Supreme Court decisions and acts of Congress beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Karst emphasizes how important these constitutional and legislative instruments are, and that we cannot take citizenship for granted or be complacent about it. There are two aspects here that matter for my argument. This history of interactions between differential positionings and expanded inclusions signals the possibility that the new conditions of inequality and difference evident today and the new types of claim-making they produce may well

20 / saskia sassen

bring about further transformations in the institution. Citizenship is partly produced by the practices of the excluded. Second, by expanding the formal inclusionary aspect of citizenship, the national state contributed to create some of the conditions that eventually would facilitate key aspects of postnational citizenship. At the same time, insofar as the state itself has undergone significant transformation, notably the changes bundled under the notion of the competitive state, it may reduce the chances that state institutions will do the type of legislative and judiciary work that has led to expanded formal inclusions. The consequence of these two developments may well be the absence of a lineal progression in the evolution of the institution. The expanding inclusions that we have seen in the United States since the 1960s may have produced conditions which make possible forms of citizenship that follow a different trajectory. Furthermore, the pressures of globalization on national states may mean that claim-making will increasingly be directed at other institutions as well. This is already evident in a variety of instances. One example is the decision by first-nation people to go directly to the UN and claim direct representation in international fora, rather than going through the national state. It is also evident in the increasingly institutionalized framework of the international human rights regime and the emergent possibilities for bypassing unilateral state sovereignty. As the importance of equality in citizenship has grown and become more visible, and as the role of national law to giving presence and voice to hitherto silenced minorities has grown, the tension between the formal status and the normative project of citizenship has also grown. For many, citizenship is becoming a normative project whereby social membership becomes increasingly comprehensive and open ended. Globalization and human rights are further enabling this tension and therewith furthering the elements of a new discourse on rights. These developments signal that the analytic terrain within which we need to place the question of rights, authority, and obligations is shifting (Sassen, 1996: chapter 2; Sassen, 2003). Some of these issues can be illustrated by two contrasting cases described below. Toward effective nationality and informal citizenship Unauthorized yet recognized Perhaps one of the more extreme instances of a condition akin to effective as opposed to formal nationality is what has been called the informal social contract that binds undocumented immigrants to their communities of residence (Schuck and Smith, 1985). Thus, unauthorized immigrants who


demonstrate civic involvement, social deservedness, and national loyalty can argue that they merit legal residency. To make this brief examination more specific, I will focus on one case, undocumented immigrants in the United States. Individuals, even when they are undocumented immigrants, can move between the multiple meanings of citizenship. The daily practices by undocumented immigrants as part of their daily life in the community where they reside—such as raising a family, schooling children, holding a job—earn them citizenship claims in the United States even as the formal status and, more narrowly, legalization may continue to evade them. There are dimensions of citizenship, such as strong community ties and participation in civic activities, which are being enacted informally through these practices. These practices produce at least a partial recognition of them as full social beings. In many countries around the world, including the United States, long-term undocumented residents often can gain legal residence if they can document the fact of this long-term residence and “good conduct.” U.S. immigration law recognizes such informal participation as grounds for granting legal residency. For instance, prior to the new immigration law passed in 1996, individuals who could prove seven years of continuous presence, good moral character, and that deportation would be an extreme hardship, were eligible for suspension of deportation, and thus, U.S. residency. NACARA3 extended the eligibility of this suspension of deportation to some 300,000 Salvadorans and Guatemalans who were unauthorized residents in the United States. The case of undocumented immigrants is, in many ways, a very particular and special illustration of a condition akin to “effective” citizenship and nationality. One way of interpreting this dynamic in the light of the discussion in the preceding sections is to emphasize that it is the fact of the multiple dimensions of citizenship which engenders strategies for legitimizing informal or extra-statal forms of membership (Soysal, 1994; Coutin, 2000). The practices of these undocumented immigrants are a form of citizenship practices and their identities as members of a community of residence assume some of the features of citizenship identities. Supposedly this could hold even in the communitarian model where the community can decide on whom to admit and whom to exclude, but once admitted, proper civic practices earn full membership. Further, the practices of migrants, even if undocumented, can contribute to recognition of their rights in countries of origin. During the 1981–1992 civil war, Salvadoran migrants even though they were citizens of El Salvador, were directly and indirectly excluded from El Salvador through political violence, enormous economic hardship, and direct persecution (Mahler, 1996). They could not enjoy their rights as citizens. After

22 / saskia sassen

fleeing, many continued to provide support to their families and communities. Further, migrants’ remittances became a key factor for El Salvador’s economy—as they are for several countries around the world. The government of El Salvador actually began to support the emigrants’ fight to get residency rights in the United States, even joining U.S. based activist organizations in this effort. The Salvadoran government was thus supporting Salvadorans who were the formerly excluded citizens—they needed those remittances to keep coming and they needed the emigrants to stay out of the Salvadoran workforce given the high unemployment in the country. Thus the participation of these undocumented migrants in cross-border community, family, and political networks has contributed to increasing recognition of their legal and political rights as Salvadoran citizens (Coutin, 2000; Mahler, 1996). According to Coutin (2000) and others, movements between membership and exclusion, and between different dimensions of citizenship, legitimacy and illegitimacy, may be as important as redefinitions of citizenship itself. Given scarce resources the possibility of negotiating the different dimensions of citizenship may well represent an important enabling condition. Undocumented immigrants develop informal, covert, often extra-statal strategies and networks connecting them with communities in sending countries. Hometowns rely on their remittances and their information about jobs in the United States. Sending remittances illegally by an unauthorized immigrant can be seen as an act of patriotism, and working as an undocumented immigrant can be seen as contributing to the host economy. Multiple interdependencies are thereby established and grounds for claims on the receiving and the originating country can be established even when the immigrants are undocumented and laws are broken (Basch et al., 1994; Cordero-Guzmán et al., 2001). Authorized yet unrecognized At perhaps the other extreme of the undocumented immigrant whose practices allow her to become accepted as a member of the political community, is the case of those who are full citizens yet not recognized as political subjects. In an enormously insightful study of Japanese housewives, Robin LeBlanc (1999) finds precisely this combination. Being a housewife is basically a full-time occupation in Japan and restricts Japanese women’s public life in many important ways, both practical and symbolical. A “housewife” in Japan is a person whose very identity is customarily that of a particularistic, nonpolitical actor. Yet, paradoxically, it is also a condition providing these women with a unique vehicle for other forms of public participation, ones where being a housewife is an advantage,


one denied to those who might have the qualifications of higher level political life. LeBlanc documents how the housewife has an advantage in the world of local politics or the political life of a local area: she can be trusted precisely because she is a housewife, she can build networks with other housewives, hers is the image of desirable public concern and of a powerful—because believable—critic of mainstream politics. There is something extremely important in this condition which is shared with women in other cultures and vis-à-vis different issues. For instance, and in a very different register, women emerged as a specific type of political actor during the brutal dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s in several countries of Latin America. It was precisely their condition as mothers and wives that gave them the clarity and the courage to demand justice and to demand bread and to do so confronting armed soldiers and policemen. Mothers in the barrios of Santiago during Pinochet’s dictatorship, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the mothers regularly demonstrating in front of the major prisons in El Salvador during the civil war—all were driven to political action by their despair at the loss of children and husbands and the struggle to provide food in their homes. Further, and in a very different type of situation, there is an interesting parallel between LeBlanc’s capturing of the political in the condition of the housewife and a set of findings in some of the research on immigrant women in the United States. There is growing evidence that immigrant women are more likely than immigrant men to emerge as actors in the public domain precisely because of their responsibilities in the household. Regular wage work and improved access to other public realms has an impact on their culturally specified subordinate role to men in the household. Immigrant women gain greater personal autonomy and independence while immigrant men lose ground compared to what was their condition in cultures of origin. Women gain more control over budgeting and other domestic decisions, and greater leverage in requesting help from men in domestic chores. Their responsibility for securing public services and other public resources for their families gives them a chance to become incorporated in the mainstream society—they are often the ones in the household who mediate in this process (e.g., Chinchilla and Hamilton, 2001). It is likely that some women benefit more than others from these circumstances; we need more research to establish the impact of class, education, and income on these gendered outcomes. Besides the relatively greater empowerment of immigrant women in the household associated with waged employment, what matters here is their greater participation in the public sphere and their possible emergence as public actors. There are two arenas where immigrant women are active: institutions for public and private assistance, and the immigrant or ethnic

24 / saskia sassen

community. The incorporation of women in the migration process strengthens the settlement likelihood and contributes to greater immigrant participation in their communities and vis-à-vis the state. For instance, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) found immigrant women come to assume more active public and social roles, which further reinforces their status in the household and the settlement process. These immigrant women are more active in community building and community activism and they are positioned differently from men regarding the broader economy and the state. They are the ones who are likely to have to handle the legal vulnerability of their families in the process of seeking public and social services for their families. This greater participation by women suggests the possibility that they may emerge as more forceful and visible actors and make their role in the labor market more visible as well.4 These are dimensions of citizenship and citizenship practices that do not fit the indicators and categories of mainstream frameworks for understanding citizenship and political life. Women in the condition of housewives and mothers do not fit the categories and indicators used to capture participation in political life. Feminist scholarship in all the social sciences has had to deal with a set of similar or equivalent difficulties and tensions in its effort to constitute its subject or to reconfigure a subject that has been flattened. The theoretical and empirical distance that has to be bridged between the recognized world of politics and the as yet unmapped experience of citizenship of the housewife—not of women as such, but of women as housewives—is a distance we encounter in many types of inquiry. Bridging this distance requires specific forms of empirical research and theorization. Postnational or denationalized? From the perspective of nation-based citizenship theory, some of these transformations might be interpreted as a decline or devaluation of citizenship or, more favorably, as a displacement of citizenship in the face of other forms of collective organization and affiliation, as yet unnamed (Bosniak, 2000). Insofar as citizenship is theorized as necessarily national (e.g., Himmelfarb, 2001), by definition these new developments cannot be captured in the language of citizenship.5 An alternative interpretation would be to suspend the national, as in postnational conceptions and to posit that the issue of where citizenship is enacted is one to be determined in light of developing social practice (e.g., Soysal, 1994; Jacobson, 1996; Torres, 1998; Torres, Inda and Miron, 1999). From where I look at these issues, there is a third possibility, beyond these two. It is that citizenship—even if situated in institutional settings


that are “national”—is a possibly changed institution if the meaning of the national itself has changed. That is to say, insofar as globalization has changed certain features of the territorial and institutional organization of the political power and authority of the state, the institution of citizenship—its formal rights, its practices, its psychological dimension—has also been transformed even when it remains centered in the national state. I have argued, for instance, that this territorial and institutional transformation of state power and authority has produced operational, conceptual, and rhetorical openings for nation-based subjects other than the national state to emerge as legitimate actors in international and global arenas that used to be exclusive to the state (see Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 1996). I distinguish what I would narrowly define as denationalized from postnational citizenship, the latter the term most commonly used and the only one used in the broader debate.6 In my reading we are dealing with two distinct dynamics rather than only the emergence of locations for citizenship outside the frame of the national state. Their difference is a question of scope and institutional embeddedness. The understanding in the scholarship is that postnational citizenship is located partly outside the confines of the national. In considering denationalization, the focus moves on to the transformation of the national, including the national in its condition as foundational for citizenship. Thus it could be argued that postnationalism and denationalization represent two different trajectories. Both are viable, and they do not exclude each other. The national, then, remains a referent in my work (e.g., Sassen, 2003). But, clearly, it is a referent of a specific sort: it is, after all, its change that becomes the key theoretical feature through which it enters my specification of changes in the institution of citizenship. Whether or not this devalues citizenship (Jacobson, 1996) is not immediately evident to me at this point. Citizenship has undergone many transformations in its history precisely because it is to variable extents embedded in the specifics of each of its eras.7 Significant to my argument here is also the fact discussed earlier about the importance of national law in the process of expanding inclusions, inclusions which today are destabilizing older notions of citizenship. This pluralized meaning of citizenship partly produced by the formal expansions of the legal status of citizenship, is today contributing to explode the boundaries of that legal status even further. First, and most importantly in my reading is the strengthening, including the constitutionalizing, of civil rights which allow citizens to make claims against their states and allow them to invoke a measure of autonomy in the formal political arena that can be read as a lengthening distance between the formal apparatus of the state and the institution of citizenship. The implications, both political and theoretical of this dimension are complex and in

26 / saskia sassen

the making: we cannot tell what will be the practices and rhetorics that might be invented. Second, I add to this the granting, by national states, of a whole range of “rights” to foreign actors, largely and especially, economic actors— foreign firms, foreign investors, international markets, foreign business people (see Sassen, 1996: chapter 2). Admittedly, this is not a common way of framing the issue. It comes out of my particular perspective about the impact of globalization and denationalization on the national state, including the impact on the relation between the state and its own citizens, and the state and foreign economic actors. I see this as a significant, though not much recognized, development in the history of claim-making. For me the question as to how citizens should handle these new concentrations of power and “legitimacy” that attach to global firms and markets is a key to the future of democracy. My efforts to detect the extent to which the global is embedded and filtered through the national (e.g., the concept of the global city [Sassen, 2001]; see also Sassen, 2000) is one way of understanding whether therein lies a possibility for citizens, still largely confined to national institutions, to demand accountability of global economic actors through national institutional channels, rather than having to wait for a “global” state. Citizenship in the Global City The particular transformations in the understanding and theorization of citizenship discussed thus far bring us back to some of the earlier historical formations around questions of citizenship, most prominently the crucial role played by cities and civil society. The large city of today, most especially the global city, emerges as a strategic site for these new types of operations. It is one of the nexi where the formation of new claims materializes and assumes concrete forms. The loss of power at the national level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at the subnational level. The national as container of social process and power is cracked. This cracked casing opens up possibilities for a geography of politics that links subnational spaces. Cities are foremost in this new geography. One question this engenders is how and whether we are seeing the formation of new types of politics that localize in these cities. If we consider that large cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations— immigrants, many of the disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the megacities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers— then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions. We can then think of cities also as one of the


sites for the contradictions of the globalization of capital, even though, heeding Ira Katznelson’s (1992) observation, the city cannot be reduced to this dynamic. Recovering cities along these lines means recovering the multiplicity of presences in this landscape. The large city of today has emerged as a strategic site for a whole range of new types of operations— political, economic, cultural, and subjective (Allen et al., 1999; Bridge and Watson, 2000; Isin, 2000). While citizenship originated in cities and cities played an important role in its evolution, I do not think we can simply read some of these current developments as a return to that older historical condition. The significance of the city today as a setting for engendering new types of citizenship practices and new types of incompletely formalized political subjects does not derive from that history. Nor does current local city government have much to do with earlier notions of citizenship and democracy described for ancient and medieval cities in Europe (Isin, 2000: 7). It is, rather, more connected to what Henri Lefebvre (1991; 1995) was capturing when describing the city as oeuvre and hence the importance of agency. Where Lefebvre found this agency in the working class in the Paris of the twentieth century, I find it in two strategic actors—global corporate capital and immigration—in today’s global cities. Here I would like to return to the fact of the embeddedness of the institution of citizenship. What is being engendered today in terms of citizenship practices in the global city is quite different from what it might have been in the medieval city of Weber. In the medieval city we see a set of practices that allowed the burghers to set up systems for owning and protecting property and to implement various immunities against despots of all sorts.8 Today’s citizenship practices have to do with the production of “presence” of those without power and a politics that claims rights to the city. What the two situations share is the notion that through these practices new forms of citizenship are being constituted and that the city is a key site for this type of political work and is, indeed, partly constituted through these dynamics. After the long historical phase that saw the ascendance of the national state and the scaling of key economic dynamics at the national level, the city is once again today a scale for strategic economic and political dynamics. In his effort to specify the ideal-typical features of what constitutes the city, Weber sought out a certain type of city—most prominently the cities of the late Middle Ages rather than the modern industrial cities of his time. Weber sought a kind of city that combined conditions and dynamics which forced its residents and leaders into creative, innovative responses and adaptations. Further, he posited that these changes produced in the context of the city signaled transformations that went beyond the city, that could have a far reach in instituting often fundamental transformations. In that regard

28 / saskia sassen

the city offered the possibility of understanding far reaching changes that could—under certain conditions—eventually encompass society at large. There are two aspects of Weber’s The City that are of particular importance here. Weber sought to understand under what conditions cities can be positive and creative influences on people’s lives. For Weber cities are a set of social structures that encourage social individuality and innovation and hence are an instrument of historical change. There is in this intellectual project a deep sense of the historicity of these conditions. For Weber, modern urban life did not correspond to this positive and creative power of cities; Weber saw modern cities as dominated by large factories and office bureaucracies. My own reading of the Fordist city corresponds in many ways to Weber’s in the sense that the strategic scale under Fordism is the national scale and cities lose significance. It is the large Fordist factory and the mines which emerge as key sites for the political work of the disadvantaged and those without power. For Weber, it is particularly the cities of the late Middle Ages that combine the conditions that pushed urban residents, merchants, artisans, and leaders to address them and deal with them. These transformations could make for epochal change beyond the city itself: Weber shows us how in many of these cities these struggles led to the creation of the elements of what we could call governance systems and citizenship. In this regard struggles around political, economic, legal, and cultural issues which are centered in the realities of cities can become the catalysts for new transurban developments in all these institutional domains: markets, participatory governance, rights for members of the urban community regardless of lineage, judicial recourse, cultures of engagement, and deliberation. The particular analytic element I want to extricate from this aspect of Weber’s understanding and theorization of the city is the historicity of those conditions that make cities strategic sites for the enactment of important transformations in multiple institutional domains. Elsewhere (2001) I have developed the argument that today a certain type of city—the global city— has emerged as a strategic site precisely for such innovations and transformations in multiple institutional domains. Several of the key components of economic globalization and digitization instantiate in this type of city and produce dislocations and destabilizations of existing institutional orders and legal, regulatory, and normative frames for handling urban conditions. It is the high level of concentration of these new dynamics in these cities that forces creative responses and innovations. There is, most probably, a threshold effect at work here. The historicity of this process rests in the fact that under Keynesian policies, particularly the Fordist contract, and the dominance of mass manufacturing as the organizing economic dynamic, cities had lost strategic


functions and were not the site for creative institutional innovations. The strategic sites were the large factory and the whole process of mass manufacturing and mass consumer markets, and, second, the national government where regulatory frameworks were developed and the Fordist contract instituted. The factory and the government were the strategic sites where the crucial dynamics producing the major institutional innovations of the epoch were located. With globalization and digitization—and all the specific elements they entail—global cities emerge as such strategic sites. While the strategic transformations are sharply concentrated in global cities, many of the transformations are also enacted, besides being diffused, in cities at lower orders of national urban hierarchies. Furthermore, in my reading, particular institutions of the state also are such strategic sites even as there is an overall shrinking of state authority through deregulation and privatization. A second analytic element I want to extricate from Weber’s The City is the particular type of embeddedness of the transformations he describes and renders as ideal/typical features. This is not an embeddedness in what we might think of as deep structures because the latter are precisely the ones that are being dislocated or changed and are creating openings for new fundamental arrangements to emerge. The embeddedness is, rather, in very specific conditions, opportunities, constraints, needs, interactions, contestations, and interests. The aspect that matters here is the complexity, detail and social thickness of the particular conditions and the dynamics he identifies as enabling change and innovation. This complexity and thickness also produces ambiguities in the meaning of the changes and innovations. It is not always clear whether they are positive—where we might interpret positive as meaning the creation or strengthening of some element, even if very partial or minor, of participatory democracy in the city—and in what time frame their positiveness would become evident. In those cities of the late Middle Ages he saw as being what the city is about, he finds contradictory and multivalent innovations. He dissects these innovations to understand what they can produce or launch. The argument I derive from this particular type of embeddedness of change and innovation is that current conditions in global cities are creating not only new structurations of power but also operational and rhetorical openings for new types of political actors which may have been submerged, invisible, or without voice. A key element of the argument here is that the localization of strategic components of globalization in these cities means that the disadvantaged can engage the new forms of globalized corporate power, and second, that the growing numbers and diversity of the disadvantaged in these cities under these conditions assumes a distinctive “presence.” This entails a distinction between powerlessness and invisibility or

30 / saskia sassen

impotence. The disadvantaged in global cities can gain “presence” in their engagement with power but also vis-à-vis each other. This is different from the 1950s–1970s period in the United States, for instance, when white flight and the significant departure of major corporate headquarters left cities hollowed out and the disadvantaged in a condition of abandonment. Today, the localization of the global creates a set of objective conditions of engagement. This can be seen, for example, in the struggles against gentrification—which encroaches on minority and disadvantaged neighborhoods and led to growing numbers of homeless beginning in the 1980s—and the struggles for the rights of the homeless, or also in demonstrations against police brutalizing minority people. These struggles are different from the ghetto uprisings of the 1960s, which were short, intense eruptions confined to the ghettos and causing most of the damage in the neighborhoods of the disadvantaged themselves. In these ghetto uprisings there was no engagement with power. The conditions that today mark the possibility of cities as strategic sites are basically two, and both capture major transformations that are destabilizing older systems organizing territory and politics. One of these is the rescaling of what are the strategic territories that articulate the new politicaleconomic system. The other is the partial unbundling or at least weakening of the national as container of social process due to the variety of dynamics encompassed by globalization and digitization. The consequences for cities of these two conditions are many: what matters here is that cities emerge as strategic sites for major economic processes and for new types of political actors. Insofar as citizenship is embedded and in turn marked by its embeddedness, these new conditions may well signal the possibility of new forms of citizenship practices and identities. There is something to be captured here—a distinction between powerlessness and the condition of being an actor even though lacking power. I use the term presence to name this condition. In the context of a strategic space such as the global city, the types of disadvantaged people described here are not simply marginal; they acquire presence in a broader political process that escapes the boundaries of the formal polity. This presence signals the possibility of a politics. What this politics will be will depend on the specific projects and practices of various communities. Insofar as the sense of membership of these communities is not subsumed under the national, it may well signal the possibility of a politics that, while transnational, is actually centered in concrete localities. Notes 1. For the fullest treatment of my concept of the global city, see the updated second edition of Sassen (2001), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

the repositioning of citizenship and alienage / 31 2. In Kenneth Karst’s interpretation of U.S. law, aliens are “constitutionally entitled to most of the guarantees of equal citizenship, and the Supreme Court has accepted this idea to a modest degree” (Karst, 2000: 599; see also fn. 20 where he cites cases). Karst also notes that the Supreme Court has not carried this development nearly as far as he might wish. 3. NACARA is The 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. It created an amnesty for 300,000 Salvadorans and Guatemalans to apply for suspension of deportation. This is an immigration remedy that had been eliminated by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996 (see Coutin, 2000). 4. For the limits of this process see, e.g., Parreñas (2001). 5. Thus for Karst “In the US today, citizenship is inextricable from a complex legal framework that includes a widely accepted body of substantive law, strong lawmaking institutions, and law-enforcing institutions capable of performing their task” (2000: 600). Not recognizing the centrality of the law is, for Karst, a big mistake. Postnational citizenship lacks an institutional framework that can protect the substantive values of citizenship. Karst does acknowledge the possibility of rabid nationalism and the exclusion of aliens when legal status is made central. 6. Bosniak (2000) uses the denationalized interchangeably with postnational. I do not. 7. In this regard, I have emphasized as significant (1996: chapter 2) the introduction in the new constitutions of South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, and the Central European countries, of a provision that qualifies what had been an unqualified right—if democratically elected—of the sovereign to be the exclusive representative of its people in international fora. 8. Only in Russia—where the walled city did not evolve as a center of urban immunities and liberties—does the meaning of citizen diverge from concepts of civil society and cities, and belongs to the state, not the city (Weber, 1958).

References Allen, John, Doreen Massey and Michael Pryke (eds.) (1999), Unsettling Cities, London: Routledge. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton (1994), Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States, Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach. Benhabib, Seyla (2002), Democractic Equality and Cultural Diversity: Political Identities in the Global Era, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benhabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (1995), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, New York: Routledge. Bosniak, Linda (1996), “ ‘Nativism’ The Concept: Some Reflections,” in Juan Perea (ed.) Immigrants Out!: The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States, New York: New York University Press. ———(2000), “Universal Citizenship and the Problem of Alienage,” Northwestern University Law Review 94, 3, pp. 963–984. Bridge, Gary and Sophie Watson (eds.) (2000), A Companion to the City, Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell. Chinchilla, Norma and Nora Hamilton (2001), Seeking Community in the Global City: Salvadorans and Guatemalans in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

32 / saskia sassen Cordero-Guzmán, Héctor R., Robert C. Smith, and Ramón Grosfoguel (eds.) (2001), Migration, Transnationalization, and Race in a Changing New York, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Coutin, Susan B. (2000), “Denationalization, Inclusion, and Exclusion: Negotiating the Boundaries of Belonging,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 7, 2, pp. 585–594. Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (eds.) (1996), Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, New York: New Press. Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic (eds.) (2001), Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. “Feminism and Globalization: the Impact of the Global Economy on Women and Feminist Theory” (1996), Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Special Issue 4, 1. Hague Convention (1954), Available online at http://exchanges.state.gov/ education/culprop/hague.html Handler, Joel (1995), The Poverty of Welfare Reform, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Himmelfarb, Gertrude (2001), One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution, New York: Vintage Books. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette (1994), Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Isin, Engin (2000), “Introduction: Democracy, Citizenship and the City,” in Engin Isin (ed.) Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, New York: Routledge. Jacobson, David (1996), Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Karst, Kenneth (1997), “The Coming Crisis of Work in Constitutional Perspective,” Cornell Law Review 82, 3, pp. 523–571. ———(2000), “Citizenship, Law, and the American Nation,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 7, 2, pp. 595–601. Katznelson, Ira (1992), Marxism and the City, Oxford, United Kingdom: Clarendon. Knop, Karen (2002), Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. LeBlanc, Robin (1999), Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewife, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lefebvre, Henri (1991), The Production of Space, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ———(1995), Writing on Cities, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Mahler, Sarah (1995), American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marrus, Michael R. (1985), The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century, New York: Oxford University Press. Marshall, Thomas Humphrey (1977 [1950]), “Citizenship and Social Class.” Class, Citizenship, and Social Development, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Munger, Frank (ed.) (2002), Laboring Under the Line, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Ong, Aihwa (1996), “Strategic Sisterhood or Sisters in Solidarity?: Questions of Communitarianism and Citizenship in Asia,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 4, 1, pp. 107–135.

the repositioning of citizenship and alienage / 33 ———(1999), Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar (2001), Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Portes, Alejandro (1996), “Global Villagers: the Rise of Transnational Communities,” American Prospect 7, 25, pp. 74–78. Roulleau-Berger, Laurence (ed.) (2002), Youth and Work in the Postindustrial Cities of North America and Europe, Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Rubenstein, Kim and Daniel Adler (2000), “International Citizenship: the Future of Nationality in a Globalized World,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 7, 2, pp. 519–548. Sassen, Saskia (1996), Losing Control?: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, New York: Columbia University Press. ———(1999), Guests and Aliens, New York: New Press. ———(2000), “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization,” Public Culture 12, 1, pp. 215–232. ———(2001), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Second Edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———(2006), Territory, Authority and Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (Under Contract). Saunders, Peter (1993), “Citizenship in a Liberal Society,” in Bryan Turner (ed.) Citizenship and Social Theory, London: Sage. Schuck, Peter and Rogers Smith (1985), Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shotter, John (1993), “Psychology and Citizenship: Identity and Belonging,” in Bryan Turner (ed.) Citizenship and Social Theory, London: Sage. Soysal, Yasemin Nuhogˇlu (1994), Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Spiro, Peter (1997), “Dual Nationality and the Meaning of Citizenship,” Emory Law Review, 46, 4, pp. 1412–1485. Taylor, Charles (1992), “The Politics of Recognition,” in Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann (eds.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Torres, Maria de los Ángeles (1998), “Transnational Political and Cultural Identities: Crossing Theoretical Borders,” in Frank Bonilla, Edwin Mélendez, Rebecca Morales, and Maria de los Ángeles Torres (eds.) Borderless Borders, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Torres, Rodolfo D., Jonathan Xavier Inda, and Louis F. Miron (1999), Race, Identity, and Citizenship, Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell. Turner, Bryan (2000), “Cosmopolitan Virtue: Loyalty and the City,” in Engin Isin (ed.) Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, New York: Routledge. Walzer, Michael (1985), Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, New York: Basic Books. Weber, Max (1958), The City, New York, NY: Free Press. Young, Iris Marion (1990), Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


C h ap t e r 2 Citizenship, Statelessness and Market Fundamentalism: Arendtian Right to Have Rights Margaret R. Somers

The revival of attention to Hannah Arendt’s discussion of stateless people in her magisterial The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) has added enormously to our current understandings of migration, citizenship, and ethnos in the context of globalization (see especially Benhabib, 2004, 2001; Power, 2004). In this chapter,1 I bring Arendt’s analysis to bear on a very different kind of statelessness (to date not yet recognized) one that characterizes, those who hold de jure American citizenship but who are being expelled from the rights-bearing terrain of the rule of the law, from protection by the social state, and from access to the public sphere. My argument is that increasing numbers of market victims are being expelled from meaningful membership in an organized political community—that which confers and recognizes human identity—via a process of the contractualization and commodification of citizenship. Systematically degrading the public sphere and making the institutions of the social state increasingly irrelevant, these market regimes are transforming the foundations of citizenship from social and political to contractual and civil. As both Arendt and Karl Polanyi understood, governing through contractualism returns the social to the tyranny of naturalism and the stateless “freedom” of natural rights. In short, it steals the “right to have rights,” the very precondition for personhood. Arendt’s story is about how the stateless refugees of interwar Europe became little more than the “scum of the earth”—her shocking words for the dehumanization inflicted upon those whose loss of membership in a political community made them into an utterly expendable surplus population. Her association of “scum” and “statelessness” derived from her basic

36 / margaret r. somers

political and moral conviction that the only source of human personhood is membership in an organized political body and full citizenship in a nationstate, which she dubs with the remarkable phrase “the right to have rights.” Three quarters of a century after Arendt’s tale of statelessness, the tyranny of nation over state, and the hypocrisy of the “Rights of Man,” today a similar dynamic is being accomplished through a not altogether unrelated historical decoupling of the two entities that have historically made up the tenuous unity of the nation-state—that unstable marriage of ethnos and demos that has, at least since the early modern era, served as the foundational mechanism for the distribution of peoples into one or another juridical-legal political entity. But what the robustness of de jure national membership promised in Arendt’s mid-century era of burgeoning social states is being denied today by the increasingly expansive regimes of neoliberal market fundamentalism. The status of formal citizenship no longer in itself can endow the personhood (denied by statelessness) necessary to claim the bundle of rights that are due to all citizens. The thesis of this chapter is that while today’s socially and politically excluded are also losing the right to have rights, in contrast to Arendt’s midcentury Europeans they are not landing in a political vacuum. Instead, they are being compensated for their loss of meaningful citizenship via demos with an alternative identity of ethnos and nationalism which has propelled them full force into the political culture of the nation. They have become stateless nationals. The last 30 years of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism in tandem with the new post-9/11 security state has produced this new regime, one that is remaking the political identities of the middle and working classes by increasingly turning them into stateless nationals who take comfort in the compensatory identity of being true patriots. Those familiar with Arendt’s work may question my applying to the internal conditions of a nation-state a conceptual vocabulary she developed in the context of the transformation of the interwar European configuration of geopolitical state formation, and which she used to explain genocide on a massive scale. But as has become increasingly clear over the years, Origins is a great deal more than a brilliant historical analysis; it is equally a political theory of the conditions necessary for enabling full human agency and personhood. Stripped down to its most basic theoretical infrastructure, the story of statelessness and the futility of the rights of man is a robust theory about the constitutive preconditions for the destruction of a people—and by the logic of inversion, for human personhood. As Arendt herself wrote in the 1953 second edition, it was a work of politics more than of history (Kohn, 2002). In what follows I reprise Arendt’s story of Europe in the years from the end of the World War I and the treaty of Versailles through the full-scale

citizenship, statelessness and market fundamentalism / 37

preconditions for genocide. From this narrative I distill concepts, relationships, and causal mechanisms and use them to construct what can be characterized as an Arendtian matrix made up of two binary, and normative, oppositions— between nation and state on the one hand, and between the Rights of Man and the right of law on the other. Both I believe fall under a single more all encompassing “great dichotomy,” one that Arendt shares with other great thinkers of her generation such as Karl Polanyi, namely the opposition between social naturalism and human artifice. For Arendt, just as for many other philosophical veterans of the great horrors of the first half of the twentieth century, the more committed one is to the side of artifice, the safer for humanity as a whole. With these intellectual tools, I return to contemporary American society to construct a social and political hypothesis about a populace that is once again losing its right to have rights while gaining an ever thicker fictive ethnicity of nationalism. Narrating Arendt on the Triumph of the Nation over the State Chapter Nine of Origins, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” divides into two sections. The first, “The ‘Nation of Minorities’ and the Stateless People,” begins with the signing of the peace treaties at the end of World War I where the victorious Western allies engaged in a project to reconfigure the political, social, and ethnic geography of Eastern and Central Europe in the wake of the breakup of the Austrian-Hungarian and the Czarist empires and the emergence of the successor states that followed, such as Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. The question they confronted was: what should be done with over 100 million people who under the different empires had been contained as relatively autonomous ethnic and religious clusters and who now found themselves residing in countries of national identities other than their own. The story Arendt tells is of the so-called Minority Treaties—a stupefyingly arrogant (my words, not hers) set of treaties imposed on the successor states by the League of Nations. The treaties specified that these states were to be governed by the majority ethnic group—“state peoples” they were to be called. But what to do with the large numbers of national ethnic minorities, such as the Croats in Yugoslavia, the Ukrainians in Poland, the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, and the Jews who resided as minorities in every one of the new ethnically defined nation-states? The solution was that all these ethnic minorities would be designated as official “minorities” and for whom an explicit series of protective measures were created (although, one might add, governing was not among them). Intended to guarantee civil rights to the minority ethnicities in the context


of their political subordination to majority ethnic rule, these included religious toleration, for example the right to practice one’s own religion and to learn and teach Hebrew for Jews, as well as cultural and economic freedoms, and what was deemed “political equality.” The successor states signed under protest, pointing to the double standard in which the Western signers did not put themselves under the same set of requirements, and their compliance was reluctant. At first the minority groups were merely “second class citizens,” but citizens nonetheless. It was a condition that Arendt called “half stateless” because while de jure citizens, their minority status meant that while they were excluded entirely from the powers of governance they still held national passports, which actually guaranteed far greater political identity to them abroad than in their own “home” countries (Arendt 1979: 276). At home, however, they were completely vulnerable to whatever political decisions were made by the “state peoples,” including that of being denaturalized and expelled by majority rule. In 1934 Germany instituted the Nuremberg Laws stating that only those of Aryan descent could be German citizens. Long before the Nazis thought up the idea of the final solution and the gas chambers, they understood that the first step in the destruction of the Jews would be to systematically strip them of their citizenship and turn them into stateless peoples, left only to beg for entry into the very countries that had created this disastrous state of affairs. And as Germany had not been subject to the Minority Treaties, Hitler took the neglect of according national rights to German minorities as implicit permission. Inspired by the success of the German Reich, in short order the dominant ethnic groups of the successor states began a domino process of expatriation—the instrument of choice for solving the problem of difference. Thus began the first burst of widespread statelessness in the interwar period. Millions who had been promised guaranteed rights were now thrust outside the pale of law and made into refugees as the states insisted on their sovereign right of expulsion and withdrew the political and legal protections due to all citizens. With the state abrogating all formal national documents, the minorities were now apatrides sans papiers. One might have thought they would have found refuge in the West. But instead, they found themselves unwanted everywhere, including the Western states in which they sought refuge, and reviled as nothing less than the “scum of the earth.” This was the genius of Fascism’s denaturalization policies, which was mimicked by the states that followed the German example. They understood that people outside of any human community were close to losing their very humanity, and thus would provoke repulsion in even the most liberal of Western states. In Arendt’s words, those whom “the persecutor


had singled out as scum of the earth—Jews, Trotskyites, etc.—actually were received as scum of the earth everywhere; those whom persecution had called undesirable became the indesirables of Europe.” The official SS newspaper stated explicitly in 1938 that “If the world was not yet convinced that the Jews were the scum of the earth, it soon would be when unidentifiable beggars, without nationality, without money, and without passports crossed their frontiers.” This kind of “factual propaganda,” Arendt continues, “worked better than Goebbels’ rhetoric” (p. 269). Nation versus State/Law Nation-state creation, according to Arendt, is a deeply historical enterprise, one requiring a whole list of historical prerequisites including homogeneity of population and rootedness in the soil. Without these conditions, the Allies’ attempt to “regulate” the “nationality problem” by means of the Minority Treaties and project of nation-state building was “simply preposterous” (Arendt 1979: 270). That minority rights’ guarantees were recognized as even necessary in the first place was in itself an acknowledgment that the dominant ethnic nationalities—the “state peoples”—were the only ones who could expect real protection by the political and legal institutions of what were in effect merely ethnic polities no longer ruled by law but by nationality. It was unlikely that they would ever accept as full citizens those “minority peoples” who “insisted” on maintaining their own separate “nationality” (i.e. ethnicity). Turning over political rule to the resident ethnic power meant only one thing: the conflation of demos into ethnos. Arendt declares that as soon as the treaties were signed, and before the mass expulsions began, the “transformation of the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation had been completed; the nation had conquered the state, national interest had priority over law long before Hitler could pronounce ‘right is what is good for the German people’ ” (p. 275, my italics). This is the first of Arendt’s normative oppositions—nation versus law, ethnos versus demos, an instrument of nation versus an instrument of state, pre-political identity versus political agency, who you “are” versus what you do, nationalism versus citizenship. These are theoretical principles abstracted from the specificity of the particular story Arendt tells of interwar Europe, principles that serve as the foundation of a more general theory of politics and humanity. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves

40 / margaret r. somers into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police. (p. 290)

The Failure of the Rights of Man But what about the rights guaranteed by the Minority Treaties? Did they not include the promise of civil and political rights that were intended to protect the “non-state people” from the tyranny of the ethnic majority? Indeed they did promise to do so. When the League of Nations signed the treaties they assumed that as long as the minorities were guaranteed the basic juridicalcivil rights they had solved the problem of safeguarding the minorities against majority domination. There was only one problem. The rights specified in the treaties did not provide minorities with the most important right of all—the right without which no other rights would have any meaning, the right without which there would in effect be no legal self to which the other rights could be attached. This primary or foundational right was what Arendt calls “the right to have rights.” She describes it this way: We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation. (pp. 296–297)

The right to have rights, in other words, is nothing less than the right to citizenship in an organized political entity. And without this one right that had not been included—the right to citizenship—there would be no way to guarantee that there even would be a political agent capable of claiming and acting upon the bundle of rights that were included. How was it that the signers of the treaties could have forgotten this when they calculated how to protect the minorities in the new successor states? As Arendt makes clear (without framing it in quite this terminology), as products of Western liberalism the members of the League of Nations would have found the question itself to be outside the boundaries of liberalism’s political and normative lexicon. In the liberal worldview the need for citizenship is precluded by a different set of rights, the Rights of Man. In Arendt’s words, “the secondary category of rights springs immediately from the nature of Man—Man in nature, not God, not history, is the source of Law,


independent of the privileges granted by Sovereign or Estates.” Thus “[citizenship] was never even mentioned among the human rights [because it] cannot be expressed in the categories of the eighteenth century because they presume that rights spring immediately from the ‘nature’ of man” (p. 297). The Lockean fiction imported into the Treaties by the League of Nations, then, was that civil and political rights need no institutional foundations as they simply inhere in the value of persons who bear rights simply because they are human beings: “no special law . . . [had been] deemed necessary to protect them because all laws were supposed to rest upon them” (emphasis added, p. 291). Most relevant to the suddenly rightless European minorities who found themselves outside the pale of the very governments the Treaties’ had assigned to be their protectors, that natural rights are pre-political meant that no written, that is, positive political law acknowledged them, no constitution or international agreement recognized them, and the Covenant of the League of Nations had never even so much as mentioned them. They led, in short, a “somewhat shadowy existence as an appeal in individual exceptional cases for which normal legal institutions did not suffice,” (Arendt 1979: 280–281). For liberalism, then, the only guarantee for the civil rights promised by the treaties was the normative unspoken presupposition that human freedom is rooted in the pre-social, pre-political autonomous natural rightsbearing individual. Because natural rights were in themselves the final arbiters of human freedom, no other authority was invoked to support them: The decisive factor is that these rights and the human dignity they bestow should remain valid and real even if only a single human being existed on earth; they are independent of human plurality and should remain valid even if a human being is expelled from the human community. (pp. 297–298)

Thus the fiction of natural rights, or the Rights of Man, is more complex than the putatively self-evident nature of the rights-bearing individual. It also requires an explicit absence of political authority and the traditional power of positive law issued by the state, as well as a robust and selfsustaining alternative site of social organization to that of the state. If we have Hobbes to acknowledge for the first explicit claim for the existence of natural rights, it is Locke whose thought experiment created the revolution in conceptual space that gave liberalism its permanent foundations. Motivated by the need to find the roots of human freedom in an enduring refuge from the coercion of the absolutist state, Locke posited the heuristic question of what would be the condition of human beings when imagined prior to all the social and political appurtenances with which they were burdened under the tyranny of the state.


The answer produced by his thought experiment was that people would be discovered to be completely autonomous individuals living in a presocial, pre-political “state of nature” solely by virtue of being human—and not by reason of any act of government or national sovereign. To be sure, on the grounds of these originating natural rights, Lockean persons emerged from the state of nature to contractually agree to a civil society and a fiduciary government. But it cannot be gainsaid that it is precisely because human freedoms had been given an actual foundational location in the state of nature that they cancelled out any justification or need for institutional foundations and political intervention into the lives of free persons. The foreboding results were such that once these rights were defined as natural inalienable alternatives to the coercive positive laws issued by governments and administrative states, for two and a half centuries liberal discourse invoked human rights “whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society” (p. 291). And yet, when put to the test, it was precisely against arbitrary state power that these “inalienable” and “indefeasible” rights were utterly unenforceable, hence meaningless: “the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them” (p. 292). And not only in the expelling successor states where nationalism had conquered the rule of law. As became clear in short order, whenever refugees, who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state, actually appeared on their doorsteps asking for admittance, all those countries whose normative foundations were based upon the so-called indefeasibility of human rights displayed equal distain for them as did the ethnic tyrannies. France, the United Kingdom and the United States were no more interested in protecting the putative human rights of the now stateless minorities than were the original expelling states. That the rightless and stateless were perceived and treated as the “scum of the earth” was a matter of ontology even before it was a political decision. Outside of political community, humans lose their very humanity. It is here that the awful hypocrisy of natural rights achieves its most tragic consequences: “[S]tateless people could see . . . that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger. Because of it they were regarded as savages . . . It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man” (p. 300). The Nazis understood this better than anyone: long before they herded Jews and other unwanteds into the gas chambers, they had found “to their satisfaction” that by first depriving them of their citizenship, and thus of all legal and political status, “no country would claim these people” (p. 296). Ontological dehumanization brought forth by


statelessness and the loss of citizenship was the precondition to extermination on a mass scale. Arendt calls this section of her chapter “The perplexities of the rights of man”—perplexing and tragically ironic perhaps because this status of statelessness, the very condition of being outside all human social organization, is the ideal typical liberal utopia, the very state of nature where people should find themselves at the very apex of their freedom and sovereign rights. Precisely because of being absolutely cut loose from government and political community, the stateless had achieved the very telos of natural rights—the perfect liberal model of freedom from the political, existing only in the pure state of nature where right is endowed simply by virtue of being human, prior to governments and institutions, indeed prior to any other human relationships. And indeed, as Arendt points out with irony, the stateless and rightless actually had no shortage of freedom. Those “outside the pale of law” have more freedom of movement than an imprisoned criminal or “more freedom of opinion in the internment camps of democratic countries than they would in any ordinary despotism” (p. 296). In short, “if a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually exactly the opposite is the case” (p. 300). But history has shown us, Arendt points out, that “neither physical safety . . . nor freedom of opinion changes in the least their fundamental situation of rightlessness. The prolongation of their lives is due to charity not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed them; their freedom of movement, if they have it at all, gives them no right to residence which even the jailed criminal enjoys . . .; and freedom of opinion is a fool’s freedom for nothing they think matters anyhow.” Here Arendt truly points to the empty abstractness of rights rooted in a “place” called the state of nature: The fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective. Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which are rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to the community . . . is no longer a matter of course and not belonging not a matter of choice . . . This extremity and nothing else is the situation of people deprived of human rights. (p. 296)

Thus Arendt is insisting that human rights are only viable within an organized political community; that there is no such thing as human rights outside of citizenship since it is only through citizenship that the right to live can only be guaranteed. All the freedom in the world could not change the fact that the stateless found themselves betrayed by liberalism’s very


promise as its anti-statist utopianism turned out to be a dystopia: The rightless and stateless didn’t just suffer the loss of their legal and political identities from their own governments, but from all governments in all countries. The calamity of the rightless . . . is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed, but that nobody even wants to oppress them” (Arendt, 1979: 296). Absolute freedom incites repulsion, not protection, toward the stateless: “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human” (299). Nature versus Political Artifice Beneath the thick brush of Arendt’s chapter on statelessness, there’s a very elegant and stark conceptual infrastructure made up of two sets of oppositions: 1. Nation versus juridical state, ethnos versus demos, naturalized identity versus political identity, community versus civil society. 2. The Rights of Man versus the public sphere, natural law versus Rule of Law, freedom versus citizenship, autonomy versus membership. Arendt’s theory, framed here in its starkest form, is that whether the future bodes more genocide or the actual realization of a culture of human rights requires locating ourselves consistently on the far side of both dichotomies—that is, on the side of political artifice, the rule of law, and a pluralistic political community. The mutual exclusivity between citizenship rights and natural rights is at the heart of Arendt’s second normative opposition—that between the state of nature and the nature of the state, between natural rights and legal citizenship rights, between naturalism and institutionalism, between nature and political artifice. Whereas the first dichotomy contrasts the rule of law and state with the dense quicksand of national and ethnic identity, the second contrasts law with the pure vacuum of abstraction born of a 300-year-old thought experiment appropriated to become the foundation of real political theory. Although these are two separate oppositions, historically they worked in sequence with each other—the first moral failure preparing the way for phase two of the genocide that was inadvertently allowed to happen by liberalism’s failure to understand either nationalism or the institutional foundations of right. In the first phase, only those who belonged to the fictive nation were worthy of inclusion. Those excluded from the imagined nation were made stateless due to their outsider identity. Once thrust outside the only nation-state to which they could make even formal claim to belonging, they were now outside the framework of any organized polity. With this loss of the right to have rights, they ultimately lost the right to live.


Viewed from this angle, the pair of distinctions actually amount to a single more encompassing one between nature versus artifice. Both a nationalism depleted of law and a liberalism depleted of an organized political community amount to the same thing: two kinds of naturalisms set in opposition to the rule of law, to institutional rules, and to the artificial construct of citizenship itself. At first glance, this is may seem puzzling. While liberalism’s natural rights and The Rights of Man are of course immediately recognizable as derived from the fictive state of nature, we are more accustomed to thinking of nationalism and ethnicity not as products of nature but of culture, and which apply to collectivities rather than to autonomous individuals. Indeed the fictive ethnicity of the nation seems to be constitutively based on “groupness,” a very long distance from the individualism of man in the state of nature. Yet identity based in the nation, ethnicity, and “culture” is ultimately no less driven by the seduction of naturalism’s epistemic privilege than is liberalism’s naturalistic ontology. Ethnic and national identities are derived from stories about the essential nature of persons. To be sure, it is in the context of families of origin that individuals usually come to awareness of this identity. But while families, even communities, come and go, identities do not; instead they are ascribed to the self as natural and primordial and rooted in the very “blood and soil” of the nation. Identity myths are thus based on the vertical association of individuals with an essential segment of primordial nature; in the case of the nation they originate from deeply ascribed vertical relationships with a particular territoriality, not from horizontal relations with others. Nor are they the result of actions or politics; instead they are part of the “mere existence that is mysteriously given to us by birth” (p. 301). As such they are rooted in the “whole sphere of the merely given” (ibid.). The group identities of nationalism or ethnicity result from the aggregation of these multiple primordial identities. The illusion of nationalism as a collective construct, rather than a naturalistic and biological one, derives from this secondary moment in which individually defined naturalized identities are aggregated in imagined communities. But ultimately, the communities are held together by the primary function of individual vertical identities defined by “blood and soil,” rather than by the horizontal ties of relationships constructed in communities. Tragic evidence of the naturalization of ethnic and national identity formation comes from the case of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities before the Bosnian war in the former Yugoslavia, despite decades of intermarriage and a culture of deep pluralism among Serbs, Bosnians (Muslims), even Croats. Yet once the Serbs declared a nationalist war of ethnic cleansing, these culturally constructed horizontal


ties among decades-old friends, neighbors, civic groups, and political cultures dissolved in an instant. Instead, the Serbs responded to the cries of hate and violence against their fellow citizens of Sarajevo that were being issued from their “blood” relatives of Serbia—a land of complete strangers which the vast majority of Bosnian Serbs had never so much as visited. In the last instance, the vertically defined naturalized identities of nation and ethnicity proved to be the foundational mechanisms that incited the Bosnian Serbs to genocidal action against their fellow citizens of Sarajevo, a city that in its prewar condition Arendt would have recognized as a result of conscious political action and human artifice–exactly the opposite of the fictive idea of the nation and its “natural” communities. Since the naturalization of identities is equally imposed against the will of the ethnic group as they are embraced, German Jews under the Nazis is the other obvious example of the passive biologization of national identity over the constructed political actions of citizens. Generations of German citizenship convinced Jewish families that they did not need to flee the country under Hitler; as Germans “first and foremost” they were surely not at risk of anti-Semitism. State-sponsored genocide (prefigurative of Bosnia fifty years later) followed when the tragic optimism of the Jewish citizens was felled handily by the tyranny of biology over citizenship. As Brubaker (1992) has demonstrated, little has changed in the domination of Germany’s naturalized “blood” ties over those of citizenship. The naturalism of natural rights theory is of course more obvious. As the central mechanism of liberalism’s great thought experiment, social naturalism underlies all of its philosophical tenets. At the root of all of liberalism’s social naturalism is the stipulation that the inexorable powers of nature and its laws—made conceptually available for the first time by the scientific revolution—are the only conceivable source of countervailing power to that of the coercive state. This allowed for an alliance between freedom and nature— or, put more to the point, between freedom and anti-statism. The mapping of social naturalism’s binary category of the natural and the artificial onto liberalism’s binary of freedom and tyranny sealed the alliance for the next three centuries and continues stronger than ever in the present (Block, 1997; Somers, 1999). It follows readily that “natural” rights became the necessary mechanisms to preserve human freedom against the ever-present threat of state coercion. That meant that as the bearers of these natural rights, humans themselves had to be ontologically pre-social and pre-political in that they are born free in the site of nature, and are ontologically defined by their solitary vertical relationships to nature itself—the site of freedom—and not by relations with others. The concept of natural rights is thus militantly anti-relational, and only grudgingly do these natural rights-bearing persons enter into


contractual relations with others to create civil society, itself intended to be a mirror image of the state of nature. Even then civil society continues to be a pre-political refuge from the presumptively chronic tyranny of the state (Block, 1997; Somers, 1999). Arendt’s view of liberalism, then, is that it as biologically driven as is of nationalism: “Man,” ontologically a product of nature, can preserve his freedom only to the extent that he can preserve his foundational ties to the site of nature or its proxies: “From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an “abstract” human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived in some kind of social order” (p. 291). It is not by accident that Arendt uses the potentially disturbing allusion to “savages” to argue her case for the universality of constructed political arrangements. By treading on the naturalistic terrain of her conceptual opponents, she is saying that social and political rules among “citizens” is always present, even among those who may appear most “primitive” to us in that they live as “natural” an existence conceivable while still being human. And just as it is their humanity, however distant from our “advanced” civilization, that inevitably embeds these “savages” within some kind of political membership and social organization; it is the absence of those products of human endeavor that marks the divide between the recognizably human and those who others refuse to recognize as such: “The loss of “home and political status became identical with expulsion from humanity altogether” (p. 297). Arendt’s two pairs of binary oppositions, between nation and state, between natural rights and law, are thus both instances of a single umbrellalike opposition between nature and artifice that encompasses the first two. Liberalism’s social naturalism with its collapse of law into the tyranny of the unreal idea of an abstract human is simply the other side of nationalism’s collapse of law into the tyranny of nation. Arendt’s metaphor of the stateless as the “scum of the earth” is thus hardly accidental. Whether made stateless on the basis of being the wrong national “blood” or rightless on the basis of being “protected” by natural rights, the results were the same for the Jews and other redundant peoples of interwar Europe. They were biologized, reduced to their animal needs that, as we know from Marx, expelled them from our human species-being, leaving them to be seen by others as outside the spectrum of humanity itself and thus being impossible subjects for human empathy. For Arendt the “abject freedom” of statelessness reduces humans to little more than beasts, a situation in which “rightless people are indeed thrown back into a peculiar state of nature” (p. 300). The mark of what she calls the “dark background of mere givenness,” naturalism, means that “they have lost all those parts of the world and all those aspects of human existence


which are the result of our common labor, the outcome of the human artifice” (pp. 300–301). Here we arrive at the clearest statements of Arendt’s alternative to naturalism, whether that of nationalism or that of liberalism. More is required than merely the institutions of law and states, and even more than the fact of citizenship itself, it requires collective political action in the drive for human justice: “Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given to us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals” (p. 301). By contrast, the inability to act or make any impact on the world, resulted invariably from the conquest by the “background of mere givenness, the background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature.” Thus the stateless and rightless refugees were “persecuted not because of what they had done or thought, but because of what they unchangeably were—born into the wrong kind of race or the wrong kind of class” (p. 294). Whether by expulsion or denial, losing citizenship means finding ourselves in a world of social naturalism in which we cannot act and change at will. It is this inability to matter through our own agency that pushes us to the edge of our very humanity: the stateless “are deprived not of the right to freedom, but the right to action; not of the right to think, but of the right to opinion. . . . blessings and doom are meted out to them according to accident and without any relation whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do” (p. 296). Nature, in short, “the merely given . . . is a permanent threat to the public sphere” (p. 301). In the end, people’s right to have rights are most threatened by their being forced outside the public “common” and being thrown back, “in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness or their mere differentiation”—by ethnicity, that is. No longer citizens of any polity, “they are no longer allowed to partake in the human artifice, they begin to belong to the human race in much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species.” The real “paradox” entailed in the loss of human rights, and that means the right to have rights, is that “such a loss coincides with the instant a person becomes a human being in general—without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify and specify himself— and different in general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality”—that is to say, natural identity (p. 302, my italics). Arendt’s republicanism and her focus on the importance of political membership has led some to worry about her having too great a trust in the


state, with too little recognition of civil society’s necessity in the preservation of freedom (Cohen 1996). As I read her, however, Arendt had no love for the state in and of itself, nor absolute trust in the law and certainly not in political entities as such. As I read it, hers is a dualistic vision: only states can commit genocide, but only states have the potential to prevent it. It is also a tragic vision: cosmopolitan citizenship and human rights are the ideal, but they are as yet unrealizable in an international global universe still driven by nation-states. Despite much hand wringing over the demise of the nationstate, little has changed in the interceding half century to give us any greater optimism for a truly democratic international human rights regime (Power 2004). Statelessness Today Arendt forced our attention to the macro processes of interwar Europe by the striking name she gave the chapter that’s been the subject of this article— “The End of the Nation-State and the Decline of the Rights of Man.” Was she justified in making such definitive declarations of demise about two of Liberalism’s most foundational phenomena of the last three centuries? Certainly hers was a brilliant insight that the nation-state as we knew it had begun a precipitous fall as soon as the post-World War I League of Nations condoned the ethnos of nations supplanting the rule of law in all the successor states of Central and Eastern Europe. And given that Germany’s Nazi era represented the virtual perfection of the subordination of law by nation, at the time of her writing she was surely right about both the end of the nation-state as well as the demise of the hypocritical charade of the Rights of Man. But in the post-World War II period of prosperity and social democracy, nations and states appeared to have seamlessly conjoined once again into a universe of nation-states. Arguably, however, it was a unity that lasted only a few decades. With the beginnings of neoliberalism in the 1970s and the phoenixlike revival of market fundamentalism in the 1980s, the nation-state’s ambiguous unity once again began wresting apart into its two component parts. Over the last decades and radically intensified in the post-9/11 era, from this disarticulation of the culture of nation from the institutional entity of the political we are once again seeing the same dynamics: on the one side the naturalized “imagined community” of the nation; on the other the institutional and legal foundations of the state. From these have emerged two competing spheres of belonging and participation, one associated with a militant security-driven nationalism inflected by conservative moral social control and a radical free market ideology; the other with the rule of law, democratic commitments, and citizenship rights—civil, political, and social, thus


embracing individual liberties, democratic participation, and a socially embedded market. Across this binary divide (often characterized as “red” and “blue” states in the case of the United States), the populations of societies increasingly under the sway of market fundamentalism are distributed in an increasingly polarized and rigidified opposition. This renewed disarticulation of nation from state frames the context of similarity between Arendt’s Europe and the early twenty-first century; we still live in a world in which refugees, apatrides, victims of human rights’ violations, superfluous people, and genocides are the norm, rather than the state of exception. But it is the interior world of what can be characterized as a new neoliberal statelessness to which I now want to draw attention—not in a search for empirical or historical commonalities, but to bring attention to the analytic similarities that emerge by mapping the implications of Arendt’s theoretical work onto the empirical patterns of nation-state uncoupling today. From the four-fold matrix that I developed above from the interior bulwark of Arendt’s thesis, I argued that the minority peoples of Europe became surplus people subject to genocide at the point at which they found themselves on the wrong side of the two-dimensional opposition between nature and human artifice, between social naturalism and the rule of law. In the first instance, they were victimized by the tyranny of ethnic naturalism and the domination of the rule of ethnos over the rule of law; in the second, they were persecuted by a 300-year-old thought experiment about the natural “rights of man” over the putatively coercive institutions of citizenship and political membership. Today, the double binary of nature versus artifice, naturalism versus citizenship, is forging similar analytic dynamics along different historical and empirical axes. The domination of rights’ naturalism today is taking place not in the interstices of nation states, but in the rise of market fundamentalism and its foundational commitment to the fiction of inexorable natural market laws. The result is increasing numbers of socially excluded stateless nationals—people who hold formal de jure citizenship, but from whom the state has withdrawn its institutions of social citizenship (via the privatization of public services, the decline of the social welfare state, etc.), even while expelling the bulk of the population from any meaningful participation in the political realm, and providing only the thinnest of connections to civil and legal rights. In their place, the proportionately tiny slice of the population that comprises the governing elites (governing in the fullest sense of not just politics and law, but equally the economy, the global markets, the media, and popular culture industry) have appropriated for their private site of profit and political control the institutions of power and the state, including those of the rule of law. Being expelled from the zone of the public sphere and cut loose from the state, however, has not propelled these stateless nationals into a vacuum of


identity. Instead, with the degradation of the public sphere and the social state, these increasing numbers of the working poor and degraded middleclasses are being “relocated” into the zone of the nation and its thick identityendowing patriotic and religious culture of belonging and participation. In today’s post-9/11 nation the domination of the naturalism of ethnos over the rule of law and demos (civil and political citizenship) provides the stateless and excluded with an alternative identity from that of rights-bearing citizen, namely that of nationalist patriots—a political garb that works to compensate the excluded for their loss of rights by allying them with the dominant political and social order. This is a curious inversion from the precise pattern of events in the Arendtian story, yet the logic at work is the same. In the case of the European Jews, nationalism and natural rights worked in tandem to expel them from the human community. Today, by contrast, it is the domination of the natural rights claimed by market regimes that are responsible for the dramatic rise of social exclusion, while the rise of nationalism is not amplifying but compensating, mitigating, and transforming this exclusion into an alternative source of human identity—one that allows them to be at the very heart of the included, this time not as rights-bearing citizens but as free market patriots. Losing the Right to Have Rights Through the Contractualization and Naturalization of Citizenship The new stateless peoples are being expelled from meaningful membership in an organized political community—that which confers and recognizes human identity—via a process of the contractualization and commodification of citizenship. In market society, more than mere political membership is required to sustain the right to have rights: market embeddedness is necessary, along with an autonomous public sphere and a non-commodified sphere of civil society—the spaces of citizenship. What the robustness of de jure political membership promised in Arendt’s mid-century era of burgeoning social states is being denied today by the increasingly expansive regimes of neoliberal market fundamentalism. Systematically degrading the public sphere and making the institutions of the social state increasingly irrelevant, these market regimes are transforming the foundations of citizenship from social and political to contractual and civil. As Arendt and Karl Polanyi both understood, governing through contractualism returns the social to the tyranny of naturalism, the stateless “freedom” of natural rights. In short, it steals the “right to have rights,” the very precondition for personhood. The journey from the public to the private, from the social to the “natural,” entails moving from an at least partially rights-driven life with some degree


of market embeddedness to one with full exposure to the discipline of the market. Market fundamentalism, a term popularized by George Soros to capture the religious-like certitude of those who believe in organizing all dimensions of social life according to market principles, is the contemporary form of what Polanyi (2001 [1944]) identified six decades ago as economic liberalism’s “stark utopia”—the idea that society as a whole could be subordinated to a system of self-regulating markets. Today, just as in Polanyi’s early nineteenth century, for most people the years of ever-increasing market fundamentalism have led to a modern dystopia. People in, virtually all corners of social life, civil society, and the public sphere alike are all being subject to renewed commodification, leading to levels of inequality not seen since the gilded age. This commodification of citizenship tout court is a process driven by the withdrawal of the state from its sixty years of social and market embeddedness, accompanied by the systematic dismantling of civil, political, and above all, social citizenship rights. In this process, statelessness is both ends and means of exclusion. “Starving the beast” (as per the Heritage Foundation) is the mechanism by which political expulsion is accomplished while it is also the outcome of that accomplishment. There is no need to reprise the ongoing dynamics of thirty years of market fundamentalism and neoliberalism. What is important here is to simply highlight the state’s increasing abandonment of its institutions of inclusion, protections, and rights (market interferences, employment regulations, and so on) all driven by mechanisms that are forcing people and social life into unmediated and unprotected exposure to market demands, forcing them into commodification and turning them into stateless peoples. “Freed” from the tyranny of the state, excluded from the institutional fetters of law, justice, and public goods, a large segment of society has been catapulted into the liberal dystopia of social naturalism. The end of interference with the autonomous freedom of contract, the end of the minimum wage, the end of restriction on hours of labor—these are only some of the achievements and the desiderata, some accomplished already, some still in planning, that mark the fulfillment of market fundamentalism’s political culture. In market societies, as we know from T. H. Marshall (1950), the measure of social and political inequality and exclusion is directly proportionate to the degree of market embeddedness by the egalitarian institutions of citizenship. And from Polanyi, we know it is proportionate to the degree to which the commodification of citizenship and human communities into factors of labor can be resisted. In today’s culture of market fundamentalism, these struggles over the proportionate balance between the drive to subject all dimensions of social life to market principles and the attempt to restrict marketization to its appropriate sites, are increasingly being defeated as public good after public good, from education to health care to citizenship


itself, are subjected to privatization and, in the case of the public sphere, degradation and stigmatization. Social Exclusion and Losing the Right to Have Rights In Arendt’s schemata, statelessness invoked not only rightlessness but more profoundly an indistinguishable identity with “the scum of the earth.” She uses these shockingly naturalistic words to provoke alarm at the association of humans with “scum”—worms, slugs, and other filthy creatures of the biological world. Arendt’s association of “scum” with “statelessness” derived from her basic political and moral belief that the only source of human personhood—mutual recognition—is membership in an organized political body. To explain how people could be so dehumanized and merely biologized, in world opinion she introduces the concept of the “right to have rights.” Creating a lexical ordering of rights in a single phrase allows Arendt to explain the apparent historical paradox that the minorities of interwar Europe could have been guaranteed their civil and civic rights by the Minority Treaties, but still have found themselves utterly rightless because the promised juridical-political rights were meaningless without a full human being to which they could be attached. Yet the existence of such a human was fully conditional on the first right in the right to have rights—“the right to belong to some kind of organized community” and “to live in “a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions” (p. 297), that is the right to citizenship. In the context of massive European denaturalizations, losing that primary right meant losing de jure and de facto citizenship from the expelling nation-states. Arendt, of course, was making a more general existential and ontological point about human personhood: just as humans became least recognized as such when they were stripped of everything but their “naked lives” as nothing-but-human, conversely, the precondition for rights-bearing is the prior right of inclusion, membership, and mutual recognition. To understand how losing the right to have rights bears on contemporary market regimes and to reorient our thinking from Arendt’s ethnic and nationalist processes of exclusion to the market-driven mechanisms of exclusion prevailing today, it is helpful to introduce the term “social exclusion,” which Europeans today use to refer to poverty. Replacing the term poverty with that of social exclusion is bracingly clarifying. It gives the lie to the current trend of attributing poverty to individual behavioral character traits and substitutes a framework of social relationships that embed and account for market outcomes. Whereas “poverty levels,” moreover, are usually constructed from malleable statistical measurements of governmentdefined income levels, social exclusion begins with the blunt consequences of


poverty—exclusion from the heart of society. Only then does the concept induce us to seek an explanation in patterns of social relationships, exposure to markets, and institutional arrangements. The great achievement of the concept of social exclusion is thus to turn a narrow economic term regarding income into a political category signifying relations of power and conscious choices that are codified in social policies—rather than as the outcome of individual choices or behaviors. T. H. Marshall (1950), an Arendtian contemporary, clearly anticipated the difference in the meaning of poverty between “income” levels on the one hand, and questions of social inclusion and exclusion on the other. In his well-known triptych of citizenship rights—civil, political, and social— Marshall dismisses the oft-thought association of social rights with welfare schemes or income distribution policies. Instead, he defines social citizenship (such as the right to quality health care and public education) in a way that powerfully invokes Arendt’s human ontology of that primary right of membership and citizenship on which all the civic-juridical rights depend: by social citizenship “I mean the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share in the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society . . . which in turn means a claim to be accepted as full members of the society, that is, as citizens” (Marshall 1950: 6, 8, italics added). Then, as if to anticipate and/or echo Arendt directly, Marshall goes on to describe social rights as “necessary requisites of civil freedom” (p. 16). Freedom, in other words, is itself already dependent on prior full inclusion in the standards of the community. Marshall then makes the same point from another angle. Civil rights, the first of his three types of citizenship, is usually associated with the economic and civil freedoms characterized by freedom from the state—the right to property, to liberty of the person, freedom from habeas corpus, freedom of speech and assembly, and so on. But it is the last clause in Marshall’s definition of civil citizenship that is often overlooked, namely what he calls the “right to justice.” This he defines as a “different order” from the other civil rights “because it is the right to defend and assert all one’s rights on terms of equality with others and by due process of law” (p. 8, my italics). All the rights in the world, Marshall is saying here, mean nothing without full access to the rule of law; but that formal right to access will be completely meaningless without the inclusionary resources necessary to create the kind of person capable of acting on those rights of access. This is what he means by terms of equality—it is another way of once again invoking full social inclusion as the prerequisite to equal access to the system of justice. Today both equality and due process are threatened by market-driven exclusions. The subsequent loss of rights that these entail parallel Arendt’s


nationalist and naturalist-driven interwar exclusions. Marshall’s priority of partaking in the social heritage and Arendt’s ontological postulate of political belonging both make membership as citizens the foundational necessity, and right, of human personhood and identity. The implications of Marshall’s argument that both social citizenship and access to the courts are foundational rights, the latter “because it is the right to defend and assert all one’s rights on terms of equality with others and by due process of law” (p. 8), the former because it is “a necessary prerequisite of civil freedom” (p. 16), are now very clear: when market-driven inequalities and social exclusions deny adequate ontological foundations for access to the rights-based institutions of the state—the courts of justice, quality public education, adequate health care, in short, all the aspects of life necessary to live the life of a civilized being—the consequences are people without that primary foundational right of personhood. The inexorable links between social exclusion, statelessness, and losing the right to have rights demonstrate that the formal legal passports carried by today’s socially excluded have no more de facto meaning than did the civic rights guaranteed by the Minority Treaties. By formal law they may be citizens, but today’s socially excluded are no longer rights-bearing citizens; by default they have become mere denizens who reside in the country but are for all effects and purposes stateless and superfluous people (Hammar, 1990). Lack of access to the rights-based institutions of the state thus lead to rightless and stateless people who are nonetheless legal residents of their own countries. The borders demarcating citizen exclusion and inclusion that form the periphery of states, have in the twenty-first century migrated to the center of our social world (Balibar, 2004). From Market Externalities to Storm Troops of Nationalism “Market externalities” is the term used by economists to capture the “imperfections” that result from “interferences” with what under ideal circumstances would be a balanced equilibrium of market forces. Included among such “externalities” are environmental decay, air pollution, shortages of flu vaccines, “sticky” levels of unemployment and underemployment, lack of public health, and wage levels below a living wage. When Karl Polanyi, who had no patience for euphemisms, addressed the similar consequences of the early nineteenth century commodification of land and labor, he saw them as threats to the fabric of the social body. As he unturned earlier episodes of unsustainable levels of inequality and poverty that were ripping apart communities, Polanyi introduced the idea of a “double movement” to characterize the various social groups and movements that


coalesced to counteract the dissolution being foisted upon communities by the marketization of society. These included trade unions and working class mutual societies, as well as cross-class alliances that fought for factory legislation, resistance to poor relief repeal, extension of the franchise, and even revolutionary uprisings. Because market fundamentalism soldiered on in response to these movements by at once subjecting ever greater dimensions of society to market principles while in time intensifying its protectionism toward other countries, by the early twentieth century such massive failures to recognize what Polanyi called the “reality of society” led to fascism and totalitarianism. Only the embedded markets of the American New Deal and English social democracy managed to avoid these latter fates. Given the extent and kinds of market “externalities” being inflicted by today’s neoliberal processes of recommodification, one might expect a similar upsurge in Polanyi’s double movements of resistance. Indeed if we lived in a different political universe, it would not be unreasonable to expect real social unrest, massive working class protest, or at the least widespread union actions and strikes. There are, of course, no such double movements in sight, at least in the Anglo-American world. Instead, the very people most victimized by the vanishing state—the stateless, the rightless, the socially excluded, the working poor and blue collar classes, the déclassé middle-classes—have embraced something that apparently fills a much deeper need than social revolution, namely the identity of the nation and the ethnos of America, namely market fundamentalist nationalism. Nationalism is usually treated as an international phenomenon in which the objects of inclusion and exclusion are marked by the boundaries of nation: “we” are Americans; “they” are foreigners. And to be sure, there is no shortage of xenophobia and American chauvinism passing under the banner of American patriotism (one need only remember how French fries morphed into “freedom fries” after France refused to join in the invasion of Iraq). Moreover, 9/11 so galvanized the patriotic impulse of Americans that for a while nationalist identification seemed to embrace the nation as a whole. “But accusations of questionable patriotism and nationalism are always more directed against fellow citizens, for it is by “othering” internal dissenters that the included are able to distinguish themselves as true patriots ready to defend the nation against the threat from within.” Thus in Arendt’s story of interwar Europe, the processes of genocide began not with Jews being attacked from outside nation-states but with their denaturalizations driven from the dominant ethnic forces within their own states of residence. The excluded were those who by choice or coercion were deemed to be in essence, by nature that is, alien from the dominant “national peoples.” As the polluted within the national body, these minority presences posed a constant threat. Whether it was the Germans toward


the Poles, or the Poles and just about every other state toward the Jews, denaturalizations driven by nationalist purifications were undertaken in the name of national survival. National identity depended on the ability of the included to distinguish themselves from the cancerous growth within the body of the nation making survival itself dependent upon ruthless expulsions of the non-belongers.2 While the weapons of purification may be of a different order today, the foundations of national identity are much the same. Despite the temporary lull of patriotic unification following 9/11, the real enemies to the nation are defined as those within the social body who are either naturalized others—immigrants, nonwhites, non-heterosexuals—or insufficiently part of the dominant ethnos of America by virtue of their cultural “elitism,” their war against “people of faith,” and their inherent “America-hating.” Much more significant, then, than chauvinism toward other countries in shaping the future of democratic citizenship are the kinds of national identities founded in the internal differentiation of “we” versus “them.” Rather than the relatively weak identification with the politically defined nation-state as a whole, it is this attachment to a naturalized pre-political internally differentiated national community that is filling the vacuum left by the social exclusion and statelessness of class. Patriotism, as now asserted, is characterized by identification only with those who are believed to embody the true characteristics of the nation—in this case, “real Americans.” Essential to this identity is the dualistic presupposition that while the real Americans are by far the majority of the population, they are nonetheless the victims of arrogant cultural elites who not only do not share the same love and identification with country, but who by their political dissent are providing comfort to the terrorists. Thus the social exclusion of class resentiment is quelled by the oldest salve known to political rulers—the balm of fictive belonging by virtue of one’s authentic and natural roots in the national cultural soil in tandem with a fervent exclusionary treatment of the internal Others whose questionable degree of patriotism threatens the survival of the true nation.3 Thus without so much as a peep from the media, one of the Right’s most visible public intellectuals had no trouble finding a publisher for her best-selling book on the “treason” of American liberals (Coulter, 2003). Some may object that evangelical right wing Christianity more than nationalism has become the driving force of internal exclusionary identity politics. But this assumption misallocates the distribution of their respective powers. Religious litmus tests, conflating political differences to wars against “people of faith,” and the use of Biblical injunctions as political wedge issues are proxies for the inclusion and exclusions of the nation. Difference from evangelical Christianity, indeed the separation of church


and state itself, today have been made one and the same as hatred of authentic America. Small wonder such differences become threats that need to be purged. And while for the socially excluded blurring the line between church and state provides a mechanism of national belonging and identity simply in the day to day practices of everyday religious commitments, for the governing classes blurring that line provides a mechanism for politically mobilizing support for their continued governance. While national identity is rooted in a naturalistic story of American ethnos it thus always contains within it a set of cultural commitments and practices. Among these, religious orthodoxies are more often than not the first among equals. But the conflation by the socially excluded of nationalist loyalty with a zealous commitment to the idea of the free market (and unfettered commodification) is surely one of the great peculiarities of American nationalism. In light of the long tradition of populist anticapitalism not only on American but also much of European fascist soil, one could almost call it a variety of American exceptionalism. The secret is in the concept of freedom which, more than any other, is the dominant trope of American nationalism. That a passionate anti-statist conception of freedom from government tyranny is the flip side of freedom of property from state interference and regulation, taxes and redistribution, is of course not an American peculiarity but one of liberalism tout court (Block, 1997; Somers, 1999). But that the long tradition of American nativism’s anti-statist righteousness and the demand to “get government off people’s backs” maps perfectly onto a three decades’ long movement by the privileged to restructure the tax system by eliminating all tax on wealth and income from wealth, and shifting it onto income from labor, seems to be a unique cultural indicator of American patriotism only in recent decades. The truly breathtaking achievement of American nationalism is that the current regime of market fundamentalism is well on the way to consolidating an uncontested government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich that is being voted in by people who are not. Indeed one of the most remarkable findings in Thomas Frank’s best-selling What’s the Matter with Kansas? is just this passionate willingness on the part of the socially excluded to take whatever actions necessary to ensure that the largest possible tax cuts go to the wealthiest and most privileged Americans (Frank, 2004, 2005). Today’s peculiar form of nationalist identity formation is one that reproduces the very economic policies that caused those most victimized by them to be expelled into the “freedom” of statelessness in the first place. The socially excluded’s zealous but oft puzzling ardor toward the kind of free market capitalism that does most harm to their material interests can perhaps be explained by the association between the façade of cowboy capitalism and commitment to a nationalist ethnos in general and the peculiar


American obsession with absolute freedom. Inversely, it also explains the vitriol directed by “hardworking patriots who love their country and are persecuted for it” toward liberals, intellectuals, and rich “Hollywood types” who are “either high-born weaklings or eggheads hypnotized by some fancy idea [and] are always ready to sell their nation out at a moment’s notice” (Frank, 2005: 47).4 The social exclusion produced by losing the labor market protections attached to citizenship thus leads to a powerful class ressentiment among today’s stateless nationals; attachment to the nation endows a compensatory identity that gives direction and energy to the rage. It isn’t always possible for the socially excluded “scum” of society to be compensated for their loss of status and rights by being “allowed” into the portals of the nation. Jews and all the millions of other dehumanized apatrides had no such options. Whether national inclusion is available to the rightless detritus of society is entirely dependent on the prevailing distribution of power. Because today power flows in exactly the opposite direction from that of interwar Europe, as they move from the exclusions of citizenship to the inclusions of nationalism, today’s stateless find themselves in a very different position than did the European Jews and others stateless peoples. Today, those who dominate political governance have every reason to encourage those excluded from the rights of citizenship to identify themselves more strongly than ever as included in the nation. Alliances between the politically powerful and the powerless are hardly new in the history of politics, much less so in the history of fascism. Yet the kind of alliance held together between the socially excluded white working classes and the kind of class power represented by the currently hegemonic Republican ruling party is unprecedented in American history.5 And the kind of nationalist fervor whipped up by the governing regime in the hearts of those most victimized by their economic policies, is of a nature guaranteed to at once obscure the source of their exclusion and rightlessness while turning their nationalist pride and anger toward the political rivals. The result is a coalition driven by a rubric of the nation on the part of the socially excluded, by political expediency on the part of their elite allies. After all, whereas the state defines, concedes, enforces, or endows citizenship rights; the nation demands and receives duties. Of all the dimensions of nationalist identity, none of them include the rights attached to the legal institutions of citizenship. Instead, as a pre-political naturalistic identity, nationalism invokes only duties—foremost amongst which is the willingness to die for—and vote for—the regime that has taken on the mantle of true patriotism. The usefulness to the privileged of their alliance with the working poor under the banner of national identity makes these socially excluded patriots unlikely to become victims of the Patriot Act or other forms of political


policing. But it is more than likely, in fact inevitable, that they will become economic victims, as all the righteousness of national inclusion and identity cannot erase the fact that they have lost the right to have rights. Identity tied to ethnos—without the accompanying right to have rights of citizenship institutions—is an identity reduced to biology, to the state of being an animal. Left without the right to have rights, one is “the scum of the earth.” The site of the nation is the space of rightlessness. From status to contract, from public to private, from participation to consumption, from social rights to commodification, from civil and political rights to the civic religion of patriotism and the nation—these signal not the end of citizenship but its remaking and commodification. And the commodification of citizenship is a deeper and even more insidious process than Polanyi’s famous commodification of individual labor. For while the latter throws one to the mercy of the welfare state and the stigma of public assistance, the former destroys the social state altogether. Whereas nation-states have always distinguished themselves from others by means of a thick exterior border based on a territorial “container” of its nation, they have always been simultaneously characterized by an interior seemingly without borders, an open space kept open by the political public sphere where differences are not supposed to discriminate against but to give meaning and historicity to people’s private lives. With this new commodification of citizenship, an interior border has emerged in duplication of that of the exterior. On one side, the people with the power of rule, on the other the people with the privilege of American nationality. The outcome is the dissolution of internal citizenship inclusion to the exclusion brought about by “internal borders” (Balibar, 2004). Just as the stateless peoples of interwar Europe were betrayed by the empty promises and hypocrisy of the rights of man when thrown into the dystopia of having nothing but their natural rights, of being nothing but a human, so too today’s socially excluded, having lost the right to have rights, find themselves victims in a contemporary morality tale that once again touts natural rights—of property, of the market, of free contract—as the foundations of human freedom. The Jews and other nothing-buthumans who lost their rights to have rights became scum of the earth in their naturalized condition, and thus served up the world with a legitimate reason for their annihilation. The Nazis found ways to exterminate the stateless and rightless of Europe in record time. Whether in the long run there will be a similar outcome by natural means (starvation, disease, reduced life expectancy, permanent jail time, etc.) is still an open question. What is clear is that today’s story has a very different twist to it, one that has converted nature into nation and has changed the face of politics in the United States. If they are not extinguished by serving as cannon fodder in


the wars launched by the nation’s governing regime, it is likely that today’s stateless American patriots will die slowly, from the exclusions that Arendt, Polanyi, and Marshall all explained were the very foundations of modern personhood—the rights of membership with which only full citizens are endowed. These rights of citizenship are, of course, civil rights, political rights, and perhaps the set of rights without which no true citizenship is possible, namely the social rights that underlie that primary right of the right to have rights without which there cannot exist the robust mutual recognition between equals that full human identity requires. History discloses that losing the right to have rights entails losing the membership necessary to be recognized as part of humanity itself. Notes 1. This chapter was originally presented as “Social Exclusion, Stateless Citizens, and Losing the ‘Right to Have Rights’ ” at a Presidential Plenary Session on Culture and Political Identities, organized by Craig Calhoun, American Sociological Association Meetings, August 18, 2003, and at “Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos: Incorporation Regimes in Germany, Western Europe and North America,” a Conference sponsored by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the DAAD, and the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, University of Toronto, Canada, October 2–5, 2003. 2. Often subjected to the metaphor of cancer in the body politic, the case is made that if another person has cancer one feels pity but not fear; but when the cancer is inside your own body, then any means necessary are taken to destroy the disease. 3. It is well-known that “those who are not with us, are against us,” just as anyone who raised any criticisms of the current Bush government “aided and abetted the terrorists.” 4. It also explains the fierce loyalty of African Americans to the Democratic Party. As the victims not only of social exclusion but of the association between national identity and whiteness, they have no trouble understanding the true consequences of being stateless in a market fundamentalist regime. 5. In the 2004 U.S. elections, 27% of the white working classes voted Republican.

References Agamben, Giorgio (2000), Means Without End: Notes on Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, Hannah (1979 [1951]), The Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co. Balibar, Etienne (2004), We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benhabib, Seyla (2001), Transformations of Citizenship: Dilemmas of the Nation State in the Era of Globalization, Assen: Koninklijke Van Gorcum.

62 / margaret r. somers Benhabib, Seyla (2004), The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Block, Fred (1997), The Vampire State, New York: The New Press. Brubaker, Rogers (1992), Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, MA: Harrard University Press. Cohen, Jean L. (1996) “Rights, Citizenship, and the Modern Form of the social: Dilemmas of Arendation Republicanism,” Constellations, 3(2):164–189. Coulter, Anne (2003), Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War of Terrorism, New York: Crown Forum. Frank, Thomas (2004), What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, New York: Metropolitan Books. ——— (2005), “What’s the Matter with Liberals?” The New York Review of Books, LII, 8, May 12, pp. 46–51. Habermas, Jurgen (2001), The Postnational Constellation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hammar, Tomas (1990), Democracy and the Nation State: Aliens, Denizens, and Citizens in a World of International Migration, Brookfield, VT: Gower. Kohn, Jerome (2002), “Arendt’s Concept and Description of Totalitarianism,” Social Research, 69, 2, Summer, pp. 621–656. Marshall, Thomas Humphrey (1992 [1950]), Citizenship and Social Class, Concord, MA: Pluto Press. Polanyi, Karl (2001 [1944]), The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston: Beacon Press. Power, Samantha (2004), “The Lesson of Hannah Arendt,” The New York Review of Books, 51, April 29, p. 7. Somers, Margaret (1999), “The Privatization of Citizenship: How to Unthink a Knowledge Culture,” in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds.) Beyond the Cultural Turn, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 121–161. ——— (2005), “Beware Trojan Horses Bearing Social Capital: How Privatization Turned Solidarity into a Bowling Team,” in George Steinmetz (ed.) The Politics of Method, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 346–411. ——— (2005), “Citizenship Troubles: Genealogies of Struggle for the Soul of the Social,” in Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff (eds.) Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 438–469. ——— (2005), “Let them Eat Social Capital: Sociologizing the Market or Marketizing the Social?” Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology, 81, May, pp. 5–19. Somers, Margaret and Fred Block (2005), “From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and Institutions over Two Centuries of Welfare Debate,” American Sociological Review, 70, April, pp. 260–287. Soros, George (1998), The Crisis of Global Capitalism, New York: Public Affaires. ——— (2000), Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, New York: Public Affaires.

C h ap t e r 3 Citizenship between De- and Re-Ethnicization Christian Joppke

Citizenship is one of the most ambivalent though busily utilized and expanded entries in the contemporary social science lexicon. Its ambivalence consists of its dual, and most often overlapping, function as analyticalnormative concept to order multiple realities and empirical object of study itself, with a certain tendency of the first to eclipse the second. If a recent Handbook of Citizenship Studies (Isin and Turner, 2002) identified a good number of hyphenated citizenships, from “cultural,” “sexual,” and “ecological” to “cosmopolitan,” such “citizenship” is less a distinct and clearly demarcated object of study than a conceptual metaphor for a bewildering variety of rights-based claims in contemporary societies, particularly if raised by marginal groups. This chapter1 turns the attention back to what citizenship, underneath its hyphenated forms, essentially is: membership in a state. Contemporary globalizing processes, most notably increased international migration in the context of a world-spanning human rights culture and the transnational linking of segments or subsystems of previously “national” societies with their counterparts abroad, are fundamentally transforming the meaning and regulation of citizenship as state membership. A prominent formula to capture this transformation is “postnational membership” (Soysal, 1994). It depicts a decreasing relevance of state membership, because fundamental (civil, social, sometimes even political) rights are now invested outside a person’s formal citizen status, and are instead tied to her abstract personhood or residence status. Two elements of this scenario stand out. First, its subject is not so much changes of the meaning and regulation of state membership, as of the “rights” that are contingently attached to (or decoupled from) this status. However, there have been important recent changes in how the status of state membership is determined and distributed, irrespective

64 / christian joppke

of the rights attached to it. These changes of the status dimension of state membership are the subject of this article. Second, the trajectory of the postnational membership scenario is linear: “from” citizenship “to” its postnational alternative. Its plausibility rests on the assumption of a golden age of citizenship, which is empirically questionable—not all rights, not even some of the most important (civil and social) rights, had ever been dependent on formal state membership (see Ferrajoli, 1994). There has been great historical and cross-national variation with respect to tying or separating rights from formal citizenship status, which is not captured in the linear “from-to” scenario. In addition, linear reasoning brackets the ambivalences, contradictions, and multiple valences that are the mark of most social phenomena and change processes, the transformation of citizenship included.2 In this article, I argue that international migration in the contemporary context of human rights and transnationalism is impinging on citizenship as state membership in two opposite directions. On the side of immigration, it forces the state to de-ethnicize citizenship, in the sense of grounding access to citizenship more on residence and birth on territory than on filiation. Failing to do so would violate fundamental liberal-democratic precepts that most contemporary states are notionally committed to. On the side of emigration, international migration tips the balance in the opposite direction, toward re-ethnicized citizenship, in the sense of providing incentives for states to retain links with their members abroad, particularly across generations. Failing to do so would not just violate the national vocation of the state, according to which the state is an intergenerational community with “a common ancestry and a common destiny” (Zolberg, 1999: 84); there are also material interests in terms of remittances and influence abroad that move the state in this direction. The opposition between “de-” and “re-ethnicizing” trends and forces is transverse to the “civic” versus “ethnic” distinction known in the nations and nationalism literature. I thus take issue with a second comprehensive account of citizenship in an age of globalization and migration, which appositely redirects the attention from the Marshallian “rights” to the Weberian “status” (or “closure”) dimension of citizenship, but sees the relative openness or closure of citizenship to newcomers determined by inert cultural understandings of nationhood, “civic” or “ethnic” (Brubaker, 1992). This scenario shares with the postnational membership alternative its linearity and de-politicized nature, though diagnosing a resilience rather than transformation of citizenship in light of contemporary challenges. Against this account, this article will show that a traditional “civic” nation-state like France has been subject to significant re-ethnicizing pressures, whereas the traditionally “ethnic” nation-state of Germany has recently moved toward de-ethnicized citizenship in a big way.

citizenship between de- and re-ethnicization / 65

In fact, the tension between de- and re-ethnicization is inherent in what a state essentially is: a territorial unit, whose integrative measures in an age of universal human rights have to become increasingly abstract and procedural; and a membership unit, which one usually enters at birth and exits only at death, and the ties to which continue to exist irrespective of a member’s contingent location and movements in space. The novelty is that the de- and re-ethnicization imperatives impinge on an increasing number of (especially European) states simultaneously, rather than being neatly distributed across predominantly migrant receiving or— sending states, respectively, as it used to be in the past. In the face of global mobility, “emigration” is no longer the prerogative of traditionally poor or underdeveloped states. Two Council of Europe reports in the 1990s addressed the fact that tens of millions of Europeans were living abroad, while there was no “law of expatriates” in most European states to deal with the complications surrounding this phenomenon (from restrictions on the right to vote to the loss of citizenship) in a consistent way, not to mention the absence of a law of expatriates at international and European levels (Council of Europe, 1994; 1999). This is not bound to last, because with increased emigration across all categories of states the latter (and not just migrants) become drawn into the maelstrom of the “deterritorialization of politics” (Council of Europe, 1999: 20) that is a mark of contemporary globalization. The burgeoning literature on transnationalism has largely focused on migrant ties and networks across borders, and ignored the fact that states as membership units are actively (and not just passively) involved in this process (an exception is Glick Schiller, 1999). As this article shall document, it is an increasingly topical question, differently answered by different states, at what point the ties of membership abroad are severed and whether (and by what means) they are recoverable. While the deversus re-ethnicization imperatives are structurally grounded in the immigration and emigration sides of contemporary international migration, there is a simple mechanism to bring them into the open. The political left, true to its universalist vocation, generally supports de-ethnicized citizenship rules, which lower the threshold of citizenship acquisition for immigrants. By contrast, the political right, more on the side of “being” than of “becoming” (see Bartolini, 2000: 9), generally supports re-ethnicized citizenship rules, strengthening the ties with members abroad even across foreign-born generations. Whether de- or re-ethnicized citizenship wins out is then a question of who has the political majority in a given moment and place. Theoretically, a citizenship law is possible that is both generous to newcomers and to long-settled members abroad (up to a certain limit explored below). In practice, however, recent episodes of citizenship reform have unfailingly been moments in which the forces of de- and


re-ethnicization have split across party lines and thus come to a head. While after the demise of the communist alternative the distinction between “left” and “right” may have become meaningless in many other respects (see Giddens, 1994), with respect to the conflict between the de- and re-ethnicization of citizenship, and thus of the state as such, it still works rather neatly. Citizenship without Rights and Identity Before mapping out the countervailing trends and forces of de- and reethnicization, it is important to clarify what citizenship as state membership in essence is: a status, not a set of rights or an identity (as it is commonly understood in contemporary citizenship studies). In German language this is expressed in the notion of Staatsangehörigkeit (state membership), which is separate from that of Staatsbürgerschaft (denoting “citizenship” as a set of rights and duties). A classic study defined citizenship as state membership, as a “status”, that is, “a condition to which certain rights and duties are connected” (Makarov, 1947: 23). By implication, it is irrelevant which rights and duties are connected to that status. Makarov speaks of the “abstract character” of Staatsangehörigkeit, the concrete content of which may be variably and contingently defined by the lawmaker. Another way of explicating this “abstract character” of citizenship as state membership is by delimiting it externally from the “foreigner” or “alien,” and internally from the holder of full citizenship rights, especially political rights. While the foreigner-citizen duality still stands, only recently has the holding of state membership come to coalesce with the enjoyment of full citizenship rights. Colonial, Third-Republican France (as most colonial, pre-universal-suffrage states), for instance, distinguished between “nationalité” (in the sense of formal state membership) and “citoyenneté” (denoting full citizenship rights), the former including colonial subjects and women in the metropole, and the latter being reserved to male metropolitan French.3 Building on Makarov (1947), de Groot (1989: 5) characterized citizenship as state membership as “legal-technical coupling notion (Kopplungsbegriff ) without an essential content.” The formerly communist states went further than this, equating the mere membership in a state with a certain mindset and behavior. This turned state membership into a concept of virtue; note that communist state membership could be lost “for gross violation of (someone’s) citizenship (Staatsbürgerliche) duties” (Article 13 of the GDR Nationality Law, quoted in de Groot, 1989: 14). The impossibility of expelling citizens in today’s nontotalitarian states proves the “abstract character” of state membership, which is notionally decoupled from rights and identity. As de Groot (ibid.) correctly points out, it is therefore odd to


conceive of formal state membership as a “human right,” as does Article 15 of the UN Universal Human Rights Declaration of 1948. State membership is conceptually at a different level from the right to life or liberty, because the rights that are contingently tied to state membership (e.g., the right to diplomatic protection) could also be granted in some other way, for instance, through someone’s state of birth or residence. Strictly speaking, the right to a state membership is “the guarantee of a surprise package” (ibid.), as this membership can take on many a content. If state membership isn’t a right, neither is it an identity. Building on Brubaker’s seminal comparison of Germany and France (1992), the two principal mechanisms of ascribing state membership through filiation (jus sanguinis) or birth in the territory (jus soli) are sometimes construed as implying an “ethnic” or “civic” understanding of membership, as informed by different understandings of nationhood. While this association is empirically possible (and arguably has been made in crucial moments of citizenship reform in Germany and France alike), there is nothing necessary about it. Nationality law, as Patrick Weil has shown along the German and French examples in the early to mid-nineteenth centuries, is carried out by jurists, who are more amenable to copy each other’s inventions across states than to be under the sway of a particular “nationhood” tradition: “Nationality law is not the reflection of a concept of nation” (Weil, 2002: 13). For instance, Prussia’s adoption of jus sanguinis in 1842 and the parallel introduction of a “naturalization” procedure were both borrowed from France, whose switch from jus soli to jus sanguinis in the 1803 Civil Code was emulated in the first half of the nineteenth century across continental Europe, Germany included (see ibid.: chapter 7). Half a century later, the rejection of modifying strict jus sanguinis by jus soli elements in the Reichs-und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz of 1913 was certainly in the explicit intention of keeping ethnically undesired eastern Jews and Poles out of the citizenry. In a pattern that shall be corroborated below, the Socialist opposition to the Conservative majority in the Reichstag held against the conservatives’ notion of the state as a “family” united by common “descent” the contractual notion of a “work community” (Arbeitsgemeinschaft) that commanded to bring all of its participants into the citizenry through eased naturalization and elements of jus soli. However, as Dieter Gosewinkel (2001: 326) argued concisely, the “ ‘blood’ in the principle of ‘jus sanguinis’ was formal and instrumental, not substantial”— it did not prejudge a development toward an ethnic, or even a biological race identity, as some have argued. Jus sanguinis is at heart a formal-legal concept, which is indifferent to the nature and quality of the “blood” that is transmitted by it. Note that through naturalization the German citizenry always remained open to the


outside, until the loss of the African colonies after World War I, even to colonial natives (Gosewinkel, 2001: 303–309). And, in an often overlooked rebuttal of völkisch forces on the extreme right, the 1913 law defined “German” strictly formally through membership in a Bundesstaat or—this was a novelty—immediate Reichsangehörigkeit, thus excluding coethnic German-Austrians but potentially including Slavs through naturalization. Moreover, an interpretation of the 1913 citizenship law in terms of a prestatal “ethnonational” identity (Brubaker, 1992: chapter 6) overlooks some state-national principles that are equally centrally built into it. While removing the automatic loss of citizenship after residing ten years abroad (which had been a uniquely harsh provision in Europe at the time and a major reason of the entire law project), the new law prescribed the general loss of German citizenship when naturalizing abroad, and even prescribed expatriation for Auslandsdeutsche in the case of draft dodging. “No Volksgemeinschaft without Wehrbereitschaft (willingness to be drafted)” was the plainly nationalist slogan that accompanied the making of the Wilhelminian citizenship law, pointing to an important limitation of the ethnonational principle. In short, the jus sanguinis principle enshrined in the 1913 German citizenship law did not per se express or prejudge the turn to an ethnic or even racial identity; on the contrary, the law left ample “spaces for a liberal citizenship policy” (Gosewinkel, 2001: 327). A state qua membership unit is fundamentally an ethnic institution, because membership is usually ascribed at birth. Contrary to the contractual fashioning of the modern state in the European enlightenment, the element of consent and choice touches the institution of citizenship only at the margins; at heart, one belongs to the state into which one is born, which makes it a relationship of origins and thus of ethnicity. The decisive moment in the development of state membership was the turn from “domicile” to “birth” as the main attributive mechanism. As the first modern law that exclusively dealt with state membership, the Prussian Subject Law (Untertanengesetz) of 1842, put it clearly, “domicile within our states shall no longer be sufficient alone to ground the status of ‘Prussian’ ” (Groot, 1989: 312). The distinction between jus soli and jus sanguinis is secondary to this fundamental transition from domicile to birth, because jus soli also makes “birth” the decisive element of citizenship attribution. Interestingly, however, only jus sanguinis was originally the quintessentially modern membership principle, because it made nationality law a “right of the person,” according to which nationality was transmitted like the name of the family, through filiation, and could not be lost by an individual’s contingent movements in space ( Weil, 2000: 12). By contrast, jus soli was then tainted by its feudal origins, because it derived from the ownership of the land by the Lord, its human elements included, who owed the


Lord their “allegiance.” The reinterpretation of jus soli from feudal “allegiance” to democratic “socialization” in late nineteenth-century France prepared the ground for the contemporary view of jus soli as the more modern citizenship principle, simply because it allows to better accommodate the consequences of massive cross-border mobility. Note, however, that jus soli alone, unmodified by jus sanguinis elements, may be equally seen at odds with cross-border mobility, because on its basis even short-term stays (like tourism or merely transiting) could yield the life-long good of membership. Accordingly, Britain and Portugal moved from unconditional jus soli (which had been exceptional in Europe) toward strengthening jus sanguinis elements in the early 1980s with the same justification of better accommodating international migration that also motivated some jus sanguinis states to move in the exact opposite direction in the same period. Rather than reflecting particular visions of “nationhood,” jus soli and jus sanguinis are flexible legal-technical mechanisms that allow multiple interpretations and combinations, and states (or rather the dominant political forces in them) have generally not hesitated to modify these rules if they saw a concrete need or interest for it. De-Ethnicization . . . If citizenship as state membership is inherently ethnic, because it is a nonchosen origin construct that is generally acquired with a person’s birth, the notion of “de-ethnicization” may appear paradoxical, if not nonsensical. I define “de-ethnicization” as the process of facilitating the access to citizenship, either through opening it at the margins in terms of liberalized naturalization procedures, or through adding jus soli elements to the modern main road of birth attributed citizenship jure sanguinis. Through both measures the state opens up its membership to newcomers, and breaks through the closed circuit of exclusively filiation-based membership that constitutes “ethnic” citizenship in the narrow sense. Whereas jus soli elements, as remnants of feudalism, had practically disappeared in continental Europe by 1900, they were successively reintroduced in the course of the twentieth century, mostly driven by the democratic imperative of integrating long-settled migrant populations (see Groot, 1989: 312–316).With a few exceptions, all European Union states today grant as-of-right citizenship to second-generation immigrants, either at birth or—in a kind of delayed jus soli—optionally at a later stage (see Weil, 2001). What has caused this transition toward conditional jus soli citizenship across Europe? Not immigration per se, because at an earlier stage the latter had provoked the exact opposite response, as in the explicit discarding of jus soli elements in the 1913 German Reichs—und


Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz. Rather, it is immigration in a particular historical context that triggers an integrative (rather than exclusionary) response: the context of a global human rights culture. Discussing strong international opposition to disturbingly “ethnocultural” citizenship laws in some post-communist states in eastern Europe, Diane Orentlicher (1998: 312) has argued that “increasingly . . . international law has subtly reinforced territorial/civic conceptions of nationality.” For an earlier period, one author had provocatively stated that international law had boiled down to enshrining the principle of state sovereignty and “deducing some of the consequences” (Herz, 1957). Now human rights constraints have messed up the sovereign order of things. As Orentlicher describes the simple cause of the revaluation of territorial over ethnic citizenship (in the narrow, filiation-based sense), “states owe human rights obligations to individuals who are vulnerable to their exercise of sovereign power” (Orentlicher, 1998: 322, fn. 117). Because the influence of international law on the domain of citizenship and immigration is negligible to non-existing,4 two additional conditions at domestic level must be met for de-ethnicization to take place: first, the decoupling of the state from nation-building; second, the existence of a political force, usually on the left, to wage a reform that promises few if any votes. With respect to the first, de-ethnicization rests on a “self-limiting” understanding of nation-building in a liberal state (see Kymlicka, 2002). What nation-building originally meant has been explicated in detail by James Scott (1998: 82): the creation of “a perfectly legible population with registered, unique names and addresses keyed to grid settlements; who pursue single, identifiable occupations; and all of whose transactions are documented according to the designated formula and in the official language.” Ethnically selective immigration policies and ethnically closed citizenship laws, which predominated throughout Western states from the late nineteenth century into the early second half of the twentieth century, were prime instruments of the “high modernist” state (Scott, 1998: 87–102) that sought to recruit and produce identical units in its serial nation-building exercise. The postwar era of universal human rights withdrew the high modernist state’s basis, which Scott characterized as a “prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist (the state’s) plans” (89). Nation-building became self-limiting and liberal norms constrained what states could do in the domain of immigration and citizenship policy. However, the state must become decoupled from nation-building in yet another sense for de-ethnicized citizenship rules to be possible: the borders of the state must coincide with the boundaries of the nation. Only then can a profoundly illiberal sense that the state is “owned” by a particular nation recede into the background, and the liberal-democratic imperative of integrating foreign migrant populations becomes more urgently felt.


The combination of structural and agency factors in the de-ethnicization of citizenship may be well illustrated by the German case. Though one of the world’s major immigrant-receiving states after World War II, by the early 1900s Germany was one of the few states in Europe that had resisted the trend toward accompanying jus sanguinis citizenship with jus soli elements to incorporate her huge migrant population. The structural reason for this was the non-congruence of state borders and national boundaries: an ethnically closed, exclusively filiation-based citizenship was seen as the bridge to national unity and expression of (West) Germany’s homeland obligations toward the ethnic German diasporas in communist eastern Europe. Even under these structural conditions that favored ethnic citizenship the democracy principle put pressure on this citizenship. In 1984, the conservative-liberal (CDU/FDP) government declared that “no state can lastingly tolerate that a numerically significant part of the population remains outside the political community for generations” (quoted in Hailbronner and Renner, 2001: 140). And in its rejection of granting local voting rights to foreigners in 1990, the Federal Constitutional Court encouraged the lawmaker to “facilitate the acquisition of German citizenship” for the sake of the “democratic idea” (quoted in ibid.: 141). This was precisely the moment where the post-unification congruence of state and nation removed the structural barrier to a de-ethnicization of citizenship law. In 1990, the year of unification, the CDU/FDP government promptly ventured a first cautious liberalization of the naturalization procedure for long-settled foreigners and their offspring. However, all further going changes remained dependent on the political left. A crucial turning point was the so-called Asylum Compromise of December 1992. This was the moment when the German state made a huge stride from defining itself as the ethnic homeland of all Germans in the world, Israeli-style, to the civic-territorial composite of those who resided in it, French-style. More concretely, the oppositional SPD, in a concession for agreeing on a restriction of the constitutional asylum right, achieved a phasing-out in principle of ethnic German immigration and the introduction of as-of-right citizenship for long-settled foreigners and their offspring. By the same token, the conservative party in power (especially its Bavarian sister party, the Christlich-Soziale Union, CSU) blocked all further going changes, most notably jus soli citizenship for second-generation immigrants. The latter was achieved only after a new Left-Green (SPD/Greens) government arrived in the fall of 1998, which had made the creation of a “modern citizenship law” one of its earliest priorities (see Joppke, 2000). The German case not only shows us the structural and agency-based conditions for the arrival of de-ethnicized citizenship, but also some of its


typical features. One element is straightforward: the birth attribution of citizenship jure soli. Note that this is not an unconditional jus soli rule (as in the classic immigration countries) but always in combination with certain residence requirements of the parents. Interestingly, in tying jus soli citizenship to an eight-year legal residence of a parent, Germany’s jus soli rule is more expansive than that currently in place in most West European states, which— like the Netherlands since 1953, Spain since 1954, or Belgium since 1985— require that one parent also be born in the country (the so-called double jus soli, which was pioneered by France in 1889). However, the German jus soli citizenship is in another respect more restrictive than parallel provisions in Western Europe, because—in response to a massive conservative campaign against dual citizenship—at majority age a choice is required between one’s German jus soli and one’s additional jus sanguinis citizenship. A second element of de-ethnicized citizenship, less visible but of no less importance, consists of a liberalization of naturalization, most notably the refusal to make cultural assimilation an individually tested prerequisite of citizenship acquisition. The latter had been a central element of the old German naturalization procedures, according to which the entry into the citizenry of newcomers was always the “exception” and could only occur if there was a “public interest” in this, and which required the “voluntary and permanent orientation to Germany” (which in effect was stating that one had to be ethnoculturally German before being granted German citizenship). With the introduction of as-of-right citizenship for second-generation and long-settled foreigners in 1992, a less demanding, liberal logic has been instituted: the lawmaker explicitly abstained from asking for the cultural “assimilation” of the citizenship applicant; all that was asked for was her “integration,” which was generally presumed to have happened once a threshold of residence time and schooling occurred (Hailbronner and Renner, 2001: 659). Interestingly, the throwing out of the cultural assimilation requirement was initially so radical that even applicants without any knowledge of the German language could in principle be naturalized. This led to the inconsistency that the conditions for being granted a permanent resident permit were more exacting than for the acquisition of citizenship, because the former (but not the latter) required sufficient German language competence. Accordingly, the grand reform of nationality law in 1999 retightened the integration requirements for as-of-right naturalization, in asking for “sufficient knowledge of German language,” as well as for a written “commitment to the liberal democratic order” of the Federal Republic. This, however, was not a return to cultural assimilation. It incorporated the two basic integration requirements that all liberal states today impose on its newcomers: language acquisition and a procedural commitment to liberal-democratic rules (see Joppke and Morawska, 2003: 3–8).


Abstaining from a cultural assimilation requirement in citizenship acquisition epitomizes a more general abstention of the contemporary liberal state from “high modernist” nation-building (à la Scott, 1998). How typical is the German case? The post-birth acquisition differs from the birthattribution of citizenship in being mostly at the discretion of the administrative state.5 In addition to imposing certain residence, economic, and civic status requirements, the naturalization rules of most states make “societal integration” or an equivalent to it a precondition for being admitted into the citizenry. This criterion is mostly vague and indeterminate, leaving a maximum of discretion to the examining state officer. However, there is a certain trend toward curtailing this requirement. Since UNESCO recommended the replacement of the tainted notion of “assimilation” with that of “integration” in 1959, all Western states have notionally desisted from asking for the cultural assimilation of their immigrants. It would therefore be inconsistent to leave such a request in their citizenship laws. Germany, even in its retightened naturalization rules of 2000, has dropped the notion that a citizenship applicant had to show a “voluntary and permanent orientation to Germany,” asking only for a nationally anonymous, procedural commitment to the “liberal-democratic order” (see Hailbronner and Renner, 2001: 439). Belgium, in its 1985 citizenship reform, reduced the societal integration requirement from being “suited” (idoine) to “volonté d’intégration” (Groot, 1989: 251), that is, from integration as a result (which meant cultural assimilation) to integration as an intention. This weaker, processual notion of integration seems to be gaining ground. Only French nationality law still officially asks for the “assimilation” of her citizenship applicants. Article 31 of the implementing rules explicates this as “le degré de leur assimilation aux moeurs et aux usages de la France et leur connaissance de la langue française”. In this respect, French nationality law lags behind official integration policy, which abandoned the notion of assimilation in favor of integration in 1993 (Haut Conseil, 1993: 8). However, the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, has narrowly interpreted assimilation in terms of “sufficient knowledge” of the French language (whose definition further depends on the education and social station of the applicant), and it has repeatedly reined in on overshooting magistrates who refused citizenship requests by Muslim immigrants on capricious grounds, such as wearing a veil (see Lagarde, 1997: 131). Even if reduced to certain procedural commitments and proved language competence, the entire criterion of vaguely defined “societal integration” as a precondition of naturalization contradicts the “abstract character” of state membership (Makarov, 1947: 32). Instead, it pushes the latter toward the virtuous citizenship that had been the mark of the former communist states. It is therefore apposite to argue with Gerard de Groot


(1989: 258): “From the point of view of a modern citizenship conception it is not justified to ask new citizens to be better and more virtuous than many persons who have acquired their citizenship through birth.” Finally, a third element of de-ethnicized citizenship is an increasing toleration of dual citizenship. This development is intrinsically linked to the liberalization of access to citizenship, because many states no longer ask citizenship applicants to first divest themselves of their previous citizenship. Dual citizenship breaks with the segmentary logic of the classic nation-state, according to which one could belong to only one state at a time. Witness that the earlier repudiation of dual citizenship likened the latter to “bigamy.” In U.S. Ambassador George Bancroft’s nineteenth-century words, one should “as soon tolerate a man with two wives as a man with two countries” (quoted in Koslowski, 2000: 206). This has been enshrined in the 1930 Hague Convention’s prescription that “every person should have a nationality and should have one nationality only.” Conversely, the toleration of dual citizenship reflects an invasion into the segmentary nation-state domain of the logic of functional differentiation, which endorses and even requires multiple memberships and allegiances.6 This invasion of a functional logic is very visible in the Carnegie Endowment’s case for tolerating dual citizenship: “Empirically, modern nations in overwhelming proportions tolerate or encourage a wide range of competing loyalties and affiliations in civil society—to family, business, local community, religious denominations, sports teams, nongovernmental organizations promoting both political and nonpolitical causes—and do not treat such allegiances . . . as bigamous or as incompatible with . . . loyalty to the nation-state” (Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, 2002: 29). From the point of view of receiving states, the toleration of dual citizenship is part of the trend from ethnic toward territorial citizenship, which is driven by these states’ need to integrate their growing immigrant populations. This linkage is explicit in the Council of Europe’s new Nationality Convention of 1997, which justifies the departure from its 1963 predecessor’s strict prohibition of dual nationality in reference to “labor migrations between European States leading to substantial immigrant populations (and) the need for the integration of permanent residents . . .”(Council of Europe, 1997: 23). However, not just immigrant integration but the demand for equality between the sexes has driven liberal states into this direction. To the degree that all postwar Western states have abolished patrilinear descent rules in response to feminist concerns, dual citizenship has become a sociological reality in them, even before this became linked to the immigration problem. . . . and Re-Ethnicization of Citizenship While it signifies a “de-ethnicization” from the point of view of receiving states, dual citizenship entails a “re-ethnicization” from the point of view of


sending states. For instance, major migrant-sending states such as Turkey or Mexico have recently allowed their emigrants to keep their citizenship (or at least a reduced “nationality” status) when they naturalize elsewhere, in the interest of retaining materially and politically valuable ties with their expatriates. Dual citizenship is thus a prime example of the same global process— increased personal mobility across borders—spurring the “de-” and “re-ethnicization” of involved states. This dynamic is particularly intricate in some European states that are simultaneously migrant-sending and migrantreceiving. Only a few of them have responded asymmetrically, either showing more lenience toward emigrant than immigrant dual citizenship (as in Germany) or—rather curiously—vice versa (as in Belgium). Instead, most European states have taken a symmetric stance, tolerating both emigrant and immigrant dual citizenship, which makes them subject to a simultaneous “de-” and “re-ethnicization” in this respect.7 As Groot (1989: 285) noted the intrinsic connection between both, “(if ) states tolerate dual citizenship for immigrants, it is unreasonable to make their own citizens lose their citizenship of origin when they voluntarily acquire another one.” The potential of re-ethnicization is grounded in the fact that states are not just territorial but membership units. If borders become more permeable and mobility across them increases, this cuts both ways: nonmembers enter; members leave. While the entering of nonmembers, in the contemporary context of universal human rights, triggers the de-ethnicization of the liberal state, the leaving of members unleashes an opposite dynamic of re-ethnicization. Much as the de-ethnicization trend, which revolves around the territorial nature of the state, re-ethnicization cuts across the “ethnic” versus “civic” distinction known from the nations and nationalism literature, as it is grounded in the ascriptive membership component of the state. All states are “ethnic” in the sense that birth is the usual way of becoming a member of a state: “states are primarily communities of descent,” concede two advocates of liberal citizenship policies for an “age of migration” (Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, 2002: 14). There are two moments in which the descent-based, ethnic quality of the state becomes visible: when nonmembers enter, and when members leave. With regard to the first, nonmembers can never join the citizenry at their discretion, but have to undergo a “naturalization”; its Latin root word nasci (to be born) indicates the quasi-genealogical quality of all postbirth entries into the citizenry too. In turn, members who leave the territory of the state, even for extended periods, do not thereby lose their membership. The state moves with its members, and even beyond its territory it continues to exert a “personal sovereignty” over its citizens.8 Moreover, the ethnic quality of the state qua membership unit is revealed in the fact that all states, even those that are most deeply committed to civic-territorial principles, allow their members to transmit the good of membership to their offspring born abroad, jure sanguinis.9


There is nothing new about the re-ethnicizing thrust of retaining links with members abroad. To retain ties with the Auslandsdeutsche, which had previously lost their German citizenship after only ten years of living abroad, had been the impetus behind the archetype of an ethnic citizenship law, the Reichs-und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz of 1913. What is distinct about the current situation is that there are simultaneously severe new constraints on how far states can go in this direction, while certain old constraints—most notably a rejection of dual citizenship—are crumbling, so that the revaluation of states as space transcending membership units can take on a surprisingly contemporary note. With respect to contemporary constraints on re-ethnicization, the state’s parallel inclination to be inclusive to nonmembers on their territory and the liberal norms that frame this inclusion set limits on any desire to be ethnically inclusive with respect to members abroad. A little noticed but highly significant side effect of the recent introduction of jus soli elements in German citizenship was to put limits on the possibility to transmit German citizenship outside the country, jure sanguinis. Previously, there was no generational stopping point whatsoever to this transmission abroad.10 The demand to “reduce the automatic inheritability of German citizenship in cases of a lacking relationship to the state territory” (quoted in Hailbronner and Renner, 2001: 357) was first raised by the SPD within the Asylum Compromise of 1992, underscoring the significance of the latter for reducing the ethnic while strengthening the civic-territorial contours of the German state. However, only the citizenship law of 1999 introduced such a stopping point for extra-territorial citizenship transmission in terms of the second (“grandchild”) generation born abroad. Their German citizenship is no longer automatic, but conditional upon their parents’ declaration of the fact of birth to a German consulate or embassy within a tight time limit. With this reform Germany adjusted to international standard practice, according to which citizenship should express a “genuine connection” between an individual and her state.11 And, the state being fixed to a territory, a “genuine connection” is obviously more likely to be established within than beyond the state’s borders. If one surveys the regulations of the loss of membership across contemporary states, one is struck by their huge variation, even among states that have taken similarly harsh lines on limiting the transmission of citizenship abroad. In the United States, according to the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, a foreign-born child can be American only when both parents are U.S. citizens and at least one of them had habitually resided in the United States since his or her birth. In the United Kingdom, according to the 1981 Nationality Act, a child born abroad can be British only when at least one parent derived her citizenship not by filiation alone (see Lagarde,


1984: 483). In the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and France, the first foreign-born emigrant generation can lose its filiation-based citizenship when continuing to stay abroad for a certain period (Groot, 1989: 290–295). No such rules for losing one’s citizenship when residing abroad over long periods exist in other European states, Britain included. When acquiring another citizenship, Dutch law always requires the loss of one’s Dutch citizenship; in Germany and Italy, the loss of one’s citizenship of origin is contingent upon giving up one’s domestic residence status, that is, domestic residents can acquire a second citizenship; in Spain, three years of residence abroad must lapse before one’s citizenship of origin is withdrawn for naturalizing elsewhere. And so on. The cross-national variety of rules on the loss of citizenship abroad is astounding, and it defies easy categorization. However, underneath a highly diverse treatment of the cutting, retaining, or recovering of ties with expatriates, there seems to be an informal consensus among contemporary states that beyond the second foreign-born generation of expatriates the ties of membership should either cease to exist or, where they have been cut already, they should not be recoverable in a preferential way. Having said this, the above cited examples suggest that the informal second-generation cap12 on ties with members abroad is not fully exhausted in many contemporary states, not even in those with longstanding emigrant traditions. The reasons for this are manifold and often idiosyncratic. One generic break though has been the traditional hostility toward dual citizenship in the international state system, which has only recently given away to its pragmatic toleration. One also has to see that the “emigrant” has always been a twisted figure in the nation-state imagination, and her image of carrying the national torch abroad has competed with that of traitor to the national cause—in major emigrant-sending, young nationstates such as Turkey or Mexico the negative view prevailed until most recently.13 To the degree that the withering of nationalist interstate rivalry has removed a lingering source of ambiguity surrounding the emigrant, one can observe a growing assertiveness with respect to the sustenance or recovery of ties with emigrant communities abroad. In this respect, the current situation has provided a new opening for re-ethnicization that did not exist in the past. As we shall see, the justification of re-ethnicized citizenship thus takes on a surprisingly contemporary note, invoking themes of the lesser importance of space, distance, and state borders in a global age of timespace compression and increased cross-border mobility. This has set the scene for increasing clashes between the forces of de- and re-ethnicization, particularly in states that are marked by simultaneous immigration and emigration experiences and legacies. The following examples from France, Italy, and Spain shall show14 that in a number of European states recent episodes of citizenship reform have been moments in which the forces of


de- and re-ethnicization have come to a head. While the affinity between de-ethnicization and the political left has already been demonstrated in the German case, the three cases discussed in the following show that re-ethnicization has unfailingly been the project of the political right. The French reform of citizenship in 1993, passed under a Gaullist government, has come to be known for taking away automatic citizenship at majority age from the France-born children of foreign immigrants, making the award of citizenship contingent upon their expressed “volonté” to become French. This focus on volonté was a brilliant rhetorical move by the political right because it allowed an ethnic suspicion (i.e., that North African migrants were not assimilating in the same way as the European immigrants of the past) to be dressed in unmistakably nonethnic Republican cloth, in invoking Renan’s famous definition of citizenship as a “plebiscite of everyday.”15 A little-noticed but important side plot in this drama was the strengthening of jus sanguinis citizenship for French expatriates, which occurred entirely outside of any “Republican” discourse. The bashing of the immigrant and the embracing of the emigrant bears the signature of the political right. On the part of French expatriates, who are formally represented by “Senators for the French Abroad” in the upper house of Parliament (Sénat), a long-standing bone of contention had been provisions in the nationality law that either took away (Article 95) or withheld (Article 144) descentbased citizenship from certain foreign-born children of French emigrants— the condition for this abrogation or denial of citizenship being that their parents had not resided in France for fifty years and that neither parents nor the offspring in question had a “possession d’état de français.”16 Though consistent with the statist-territorial conception of French citizenship, these were undeniably “odious” provisions, which had caused a good deal of individual hardship.17 On their basis, even someone born and raised in France could be stripped of her citizenship, if after emigrating she did not bother to make contact with a French consulate (no legal duty this) over a fifty-year stretch—not to mention that her offspring would thus forfeit her filiationbased citizenship too. The 1993 reform allowed these (first- or secondgeneration) offspring of French emigrants to reclaim French citizenship through simple declaration, yet with the proviso that they could demonstrate “manifest ties of a cultural, professional, economic, or familial order (with France)” (according to the new Article 21–14 of the Code Civil). This was a smallish measure, of which less than 100 French expatriates made use between 1995 and 1997 (Baudet-Caille, 2000: 58). Yet the combination of strengthening jus sanguinis citizenship for expatriates with restricting jus soli citizenship for domestic immigrants made it a symbolically charged affair.18 In a Socialist critic’s eye, this combination revealed the


existence on the Gaullist side of “a certain conception of the ethnic nation, a conception that we condemn absolutely.”19 This was even admitted on the Gaullist side, in their loud and clear rejection of an amendment that would have treated immigrants and emigrants in a symmetric way. This amendment, proposed by a maverick Gaullist, Pierre Mazeaud, in the National Assembly (the lower house of Parliament), would have made citizenship for the second-generation descendants of French emigrants (more precisely, for the offspring of one French parent abroad who was him-or herself born abroad)20 contingent upon their expressed “volonté” around majority age.21 Next to the different foreign(er)-born generations to which this measure was to apply (“first” in the case of immigrants; “second” in the case of emigrants), there was of course one decisive difference in the proposed treatment of both groups: the immigrant did not possess French citizenship before expressing her “volonté,” whereas the emigrant was French at birth jure sanguinis yet risked losing her citizenship if she did not express her “volonté” between the age of sixteen to twenty-one. No wonder that this caused the united wrath of the “Senators for the French Abroad,” and under their pressure the amendment had to be withdrawn. Yet what was more interesting matter was that the Senate commission that recommended the suppression of the amendment denied that both groups should be treated symmetrically: in its view, it was not “acceptable to submit young French born abroad to an obligatory formality . . . like the one that is asked of young foreigners who are born in France of foreign parents.”22 As a communist senator remarked critically, this view established a “net difference” between both groups: a French by descent was “more French” than a young foreigner born in France and residing in France since her birth. To which the Gaullist side emphatically responded: “Mais oui!,” “Par definition!”23 In this small but noteworthy moment the rightist forces of re-ethnicization prevailed over the leftist forces of de-ethnicization.24 In 1998, when under a Socialist prime minister the automaticity of jus soli for second-generation immigrants at majority age was reinstated (though in weakened form), in an equally little known backstage drama the ethnic emigrant lobby on the right tried to further strengthen the ties with later-generation expatriates abroad. According to their proposal, the “manifest ties” proviso as a condition for recovering French citizenship was to be dropped, while this recovery was to be based on filiation alone, even into the second foreign-born generation, the only constraint being a “sufficient knowledge of the French language.” Under the new left majority, catcalls drowned this amendment: “Ça, c’est vraiment archaïque!” exclaimed a Socialist member of the National Assembly in the moment of the suppression of the amendment.25 The 1992 reform of Italian citizenship law, passed under ChristianDemocratic Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, had a similar gist of embracing


emigrants and bashing immigrants. In a striking difference, however, there was not even any verbal opposition by the left. Surely, in a country that had seen some 26 million of its inhabitants emigrating between 1876 and 1976, and whose ethnic-origin community abroad is estimated at 50 million, emigrant concerns had always been an important matter. Tellingly, the career of the 1992 Citizenship Law (Law Number 91) began with a December 1998 draft bill by then minister of foreign affairs, Giulio Andreotti, who a few weeks earlier had chaired a national meeting of the Italian emigrant community in Rome (see Pastore, 2001: 113, fn. 26). As in all recent European attempts to bolster ties with emigrants abroad, the range of the respective provisions in the 1992 Italian citizenship law was inconspicuous, and taken alone they would have hardly raised an eyebrow. The law merely extended some emigrant-friendly measures that had already characterized its 1912 predecessor: the second-generation descendants of Italian expatriates were given the option of Italian citizenship “by choice,”26 if certain conditions applied—such as service in the Italian army, employment by the state (even abroad), or a two-year residence in Italy at majority age. A probably wider circle of potential re-migrants was addressed in a parallel reduction of the minimum residence for discretionary naturalization from five to three years. At the same time, the de facto permission of dual citizenship under the 1912 law was upgraded into an explicit permission. This was not exactly a revolution: the recognition of dual citizenship corresponded to the international trend; the second-generation threshold of citizenship for the foreign-born was not transcended; and the potential of ethnic migration was further reduced by a prior residence requirement in most categories, which made would-be ethnic migrants subject to the normal immigration controls. As in France, the particular venom of this measure consisted of a parallel tightening of immigrants’ access to citizenship, which was a simple result of the conservative parties holding the political majority at the time. First, the minimum residence time for naturalization was doubled, from five to a hefty ten years. Second, Italian-born children of immigrants were given the option of Italian citizenship only if they resided in Italy until the age of majority “without interruption.”27 Without bothering to justify why the immigrants had to suffer when the emigrants were handed out a benefit, a Christian-Democratic senator flatly stated: “Then there is the problem of the immigrants. We have adopted a rather generous regime with respect to the extracomunitari . . . (B)ut it is clear that . . . we have to bestow on our co-citizens (i nostril concittadini) a favorable treatment. The ties with Italy by emigrants on all continents . . . are so strong that they maintain themselves across several generations.”28 When the bill was adopted in the Camera dei Deputati (the lower house of Parliament), the leader of the


Socialist faction meekly gave in: “Surely, there are open questions (for example, the ten year residence requirement for the extracomunitari), but we are altogether convinced that now is not the moment to start this type of discussion.”29 In fact, the bill passed its last hurdle in the lower house without a single “no” vote, with even the Socialists and Communists voting in its favor. If one peruses the justifications given for privileging i nostri concittadini abroad in the 1992 Citizenship Law, one is struck by their contemporarysounding note, invoking themes of globalism and transnationalism, plus a quite ferocious antistatism. According to Senator Mazzola (the ChristianDemocratic rapporteur of the bill), this measure responded to a desire of “our foreign communities . . . to increase and strengthen their ties with the mother country within an international community of increasingly rapid, continuous, and dense communications, dialogue, and relationships.”30 The bill’s Christian-Democratic supporters were anxious to stress that this was not a “politico-nationalist” projection of the Italian state abroad but instead a measure of purely “cultural recognition,” driven by a “vision of the world that transcends the identity of nation-states.”31 In Italy, this was really an old theme because “in catholic political thinking the nation is prior to the State,” as another Christian-Democratic Senator put it.32 Along more contemporary lines, the affirmation of dual citizenship in this law was celebrated as “burying the idea of the State as the only God to whom one owes total and unconditional loyalty.”33 Indeed, the entire debate was permeated by an astonishing (though very Italian) amount of state-bashing by the legislative branch of this very state. Interestingly, the motif of an “ethical obligation” to those who had suffered hardship for helping to “keep up the name of Italy in the world,” while not absent, was clearly secondary to the “interest of our national community . . . to retain the tie of citizenship that has an important sentimental and cultural value, beyond its juridical aspects.”34 In short, this was a measure to strengthen the sense of Italian nationness, separate from and beyond the state, in a world of increased mobility and movement across borders. Epitomizing the left-right divide behind the deversus re-ethnicization contest, leftist governments under Prodi and Amato in the late 1990s sought to undo the hard line on citizenship for foreigners. Prodi established a Commission for Integration Policy that recommended conditional jus soli citizenship for the children of immigrants and other measures to facilitate ordinary foreigners’ access to citizenship (Pastore, 2001: 108–109). However, a first concrete reform proposal by the minister for social solidarity in the Amato government, which was presented in December 2000,35 was never carried any further, and it became irrelevant after the centerright’s election victory in May 2001. Instead, under Berlusconi the concerns


of i nostri connazionali gained new prominence. This is expressed in the addition to the plethora of Italian state ministries of a “Ministry for Italians Around the World,” which is headed by a member of the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale and ancient veteran of Mussolini’s “Salo” government, Mirko Tremaglia. In addition to soliciting a law that allows Italian citizens abroad to vote in national elections, Tremaglia’s major success so far lies in extending ethnic privileges from citizenship to immigration policy. Note that the ethnic privileges in the 1992 citizenship law were granted in a context of “reduced migratory flows” and the “stabilization of our communities abroad”;36 they were not meant to stir immigration. After the recent economic collapse of Argentina, which saw scores of ethnic Italians line-up for Italian citizenship, this has changed.37 At the behest of Tremaglia, the new immigration law of 2002, which is harsh on extracomunitari in any other respect, promptly includes a quota for “workers of Italian origin.”38 Spain is a third case in which recent citizenship reforms have been moments of contestation between the forces of de- and re-ethnicization on the left and right, respectively, though with an interesting twist. For a country of emigration Spain has always been hostile to dual citizenship, as a result of which Spanish emigrants faced severe difficulties in retaining or transmitting their citizenship abroad.39 Only for a brief moment in the 1980s, and characteristically at the behest of a conservative government, Spanish emigrants were allowed to acquire a foreign citizenship without losing the Spanish one.40 This was rescinded by a Socialist government in 1990, whose less protective attitude toward Spaniards abroad was tellingly accompanied by a stronger emphasis on integrating immigrants at home. Throughout the 1990s the Socialists tightly policed the dual citizenship frontier for emigrants, and in turn they were attacked by the conservative Popular Party (PP) for “making the return of Spanish emigrants intentionally more difficult.”41 While the respective regulations have greatly fluctuated over two nationality reforms in 1990 and 1995, the Socialist government’s line on the descendants of emigrants who had lost their citizenship was generally less than generous: the emigrants’ hijos (children) were subject to a one-year residence requirement before they could recover Spanish citizenship, while their nietos (grandchildren) were even relegated to the same naturalization procedures as ordinary immigrants. The newest reform of nationality law, passed by a conservative PP government in 2002, is all about remedying the emigrants’ plight, which became a burning issue with the recent economic crisis in Latin America. The law waives the residence requirement for the hijos, reduces the residence period for the nietos to one year, and generally allows emigrants to hold two nationalities. Consonant with the typical left-right divide in the reform of citizenship law, the Socialist opposition entered the fray with a


counterproposal that would have eased domestic immigrants’ access to citizenship, most notably through granting jus soli citizenship to the children of legal immigrants.42 This was easily rebuffed by the PP government, because a conditional form of jus soli for second-generation immigrants already existed in Spain.43 More interesting than the predictable wrangle between emigrant and immigrant causes was the fact that the Socialists were in a double-bind: most second—and third-generation—emigrants who would profit from the new law were the descendants of civil war exiles, whose citizenship had been taken away from them under General Franco. More than reaffirming the ethnic bonds of the nation in a global era, Italian-style, the 2002 reform of Spanish nationality law could thus be seen as a matter of correcting a historical injustice. This dimension of the law, which was entirely absent in the first PP proposal presented in March 2001,44 was pushed to the fore by the Mexican exile movement “Morados,” which lobbied the Spanish king in a signature campaign. Given the age profile of the descendants of civil war exiles, the Morados brought the nietos (grandchildren) into the debate, who had been absent from the original bill.45 The Socialists and the extreme Left (Izquierda Unida), political descendants of the losers of the civil war, naturally joined the Morados’ (though unsuccessful in the end) quest for exempting the nietos also from any residence requirement.46 Curiously, if the left eventually rejected the 2002 law,47 they did so not only because of the law’s blind eye on immigrants, but also because it was not deemed generous enough to emigrants. Of all recent moves on European states’ emigration frontier the Spanish one has the biggest migration potential: the Spanish Foreign Ministry estimates that the 2002 reform of nationality law has put about one million descendants of Spanish emigrants on a fast track to Spanish citizenship.48 This, however, reflects a unique political history and a prior overshooting zeal in cutting the citizenship ties of emigrants. Spain is no exemption from the informal consensus across contemporary states that the ties of membership should not stretch beyond the second generation of emigrants born abroad. In this one sees the workings of the international norm of citizenship as a territorial construct that should express a “genuine connection” between individual and state (see Orentlicher, 1998). Only where the formal citizenship tie was prematurely cut do we see past emigration as a source of contemporary ethnic migration. This does not diminish the re-ethnicizing thrust of emigration: to the degree that dual citizenship restrictions are weakening around the world, and emigration is unambiguously valued as a political and economic asset by sending states, global mobility is bound to revalorize these states’ non-territorial, ethnic dimension as membership units.


Conclusion Tied to a territory and based on a personal infrastructure that reproduces itself intergenerationally, the modern state is a fundamentally dualistic institution, being territorial and ethnic at the same time. Contemporary globalizing processes impinge on both dimensions simultaneously and in different directions, creating possibilities for the de- and re-ethnicization of the state and its underlying notion of membership. It is this ambivalence and bidirectional possibility, as well as the different articulations according to who is in charge in a given time and place (the left or the right), which is missed by the linear and depoliticized accounts of the coming of postnational membership or of the resilience of national traditions of citizenship. As a territorial unit, contemporary globalizing processes move the state to be more inclusive of the migrant populations residing on its territory, launching a trend toward de-ethnicized citizenship. As a membership unit, the same globalizing processes provide the state with a counter-narrative for being more inclusive of its members abroad, because space and territory are now considered less relevant for retaining a sense of belonging and for building community. This is the one insight of the “transnationalism” literature that has apparently been heeded by the institution that is often believed to be circumvented and weakened by this phenomenon, the state. If migrant transnationalism is indeed a leftist “globalization from below” (A. Portes), the state’s incorporation of transnational rhetoric amounts to a piracy by the right, considering that the emigrant cause is overwhelmingly carried by conservative parties and governments. Which trend prevails, the emigrant cause of the right or the immigrant cause of the left, is most often a simple function of who has the political majority. However, there are severe limitations in how far a state can go in reethnicizing its membership, and these limitations are constituted by the irremediably territorial nature of the state. Since the famous Nottebohm case, the international system prescribes a citizenship that expresses a “genuine connection” between a person and a state, and short of actual residence such a connection is difficult to establish, especially across generations. And, this is the message of the German experience, the very incorporation of elements of territorial citizenship, which is commanded by the democracy principle and human rights considerations, has set limits to the possibility of transmitting citizenship abroad across the generations. All contemporary moves toward re-ethnicizing citizenship have thus remained within a second generation born abroad maximum, as a result of which ethnic citizenship shades into a recognition of family ties that are the incontrovertible building block of all human societies. The “de-” versus “re-ethnicization” contrast lacks the neat simplicity of the “national traditions of citizenship” or “postnational membership”


formulas. Instead it demarcates the range of variation within which contemporary citizenship debates and transitions occur. This is not to say that all states are equally affected by the dynamic depicted here. The very notion of de-ethnicization presupposes an ethnic closure of the citizenry at an earlier point, which in terms of predominantly jus sanguinis citizenship never existed in the unconditional jus soli regimes of Canada or the United States.49 Conversely, the lack of an emigration legacy in settler states makes the latter immune to the temptations of re-ethnicization, and the very concept of a co-national without citizenship (a “patrial” in British parlance), which is central to all re-ethnicizing campaigns, is nonexistent in them. In the strict sense the deversus re-ethnicization notion works best for European states, in which ethnic citizenship jure sanguinis had once been the norm, epitomizing modern nation-stateness, and in which the territorializing move away from it is counteracted by long-standing emigration legacies that are surprisingly compatible with the contemporary rhetoric of globalism and transnationalism. And even within Europe it is obvious that the de-ethnicization trend has been stronger in its northwestern corner, reflecting the stronger presence of long-established migrant populations there, while the re-ethnicization trend has been more marked in the southwest, due to its predominantly emigrant past and a much more recent transformation into an immigrant-receiving region (with the exception of France). Important as they are, these cross-national variations cannot detract from the more general point about the transformation of citizenship as state membership that has been suggested here. Rather than prejudging national identities or reflecting traditions of nationhood, jus sanguinis and jus soli are flexible legal mechanisms that are grounded in the dual nature of the state as ethnic and territorial units, and political elites have not hesitated to manipulate these mechanisms if they saw a need or interest in doing so. Grosso modo, the political left has pushed toward de-ethnicization, whereas the right has pushed toward the re-ethnicization of citizenship. The fact that both projects are compatible with, and even reinforced by, contemporary globalizing and transnational processes and rhetoric guarantees that the deversus re-ethnicizing dynamic will shape citizenship in the years to come, in Europe and beyond. While they are opposite in terms of constituent groups and political thrust, de- and re-ethnicization have the joint effect of enlarging the circle of those who have access to citizenship. Contrary to Makarov’s (1947) classic diction of the “abstract character” of state membership, we saw that the latter has increasingly been couched as a “right” itself, be it for immigrants or for (the descendants of ) emigrants. Turning the access to citizenship into a “right,” which is part and parcel of a rights revolution for aliens (see Soysal, 1994; Joppke, 2001), is intrinsically connected to the hollowing-out


of the content of citizenship, particularly of its redistributive side, and of what “rights” in general are deemed to legitimately consist of (see Abraham, 2002). The rights of citizens once were “positive” rights, conceded through the blood of war, the sweat of work, and the tears of reproduction.50 If everybody has rights, the content of rights is bound to become “negative” only. The nexus between inclusive citizenship and procedurally thinned rights for everyone is unsurpassedly expressed in the 14th Amendment of the American Constitution, which manages to pair a maximally inclusive jus soli definition of citizenship with a list of negative “due process” and “equal protection” rights for all “persons,” independently of their citizenship status. This was a glimpse of the neoliberal fut ure, marked by the decay of substantive citizen rights and the rise of constitutional rights for everyone. The noise of the deversus re-ethnicizing contest masks the secular decline of the entire citizenship construct. But this is the subject of another, more important story. Notes 1. This article was written while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York (2002–2003). I would like to thank the Foundation for superb working conditions. This is the reprint of the article that is published in the Archives Européennes de Sociologie (2003), 44 (3): 429–458. 2. For a general assessment of the role of “ambivalence” in the social sciences, see Smelser (1998). 3. There are multiple contemporary examples of a noncongruence of formal state membership and full citizenship rights. For instance, Puerto Ricans are U.S. “nationals,” but not “citizens”; Mexico recently introduced a distinction between “nationality” and “citizenship” to retain ties with its emigrants abroad, and so on. 4. In the case of postcommunist Eastern Europe, it is not international law but their interest in joining the European Union that has moved the states in the region to cut the roughest edges of their ethnically exclusive citizenship laws. 5. With respect to citizenship law, one must distinguish between two types of state discretion: legislative and administrative discretion. Because at the international level citizenship law falls under the domaine reservé of the sovereign state (see Makarov, 1947: 70), the lawmaker is generally free to regulate citizenship as it sees fit. However, within citizenship law the naturalization procedure is “discretionary” in yet a more extreme sense, as even when certain minimal conditions are met on the part of the applicant the state may still refuse a request. By the same token, Brubaker’s (1989: 108–112) distinction between “as of right” naturalization (in the United States and Canada) and “discretionary” naturalization (in Europe) is overdrawn, because even on the “as of right” end there is still a considerable amount of state discretion (e.g., through the inherently vague “good character” clause in the United States). 6. For the distinction between segmentary and functional differentiation, see Luhmann, 1982. 7. This last group of states includes France, Britain, Italy, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Portugal.

citizenship between de- and re-ethnicization / 87 8. “Personal sovereignty” in international law means that the state may unilaterally grant rights to and impose obligations on its members, even outside its territory (Hailbronner and Renner, 2001: 83). 9. But see Lagarde (1984) for important variations of the length and modalities of transmitting citizenship abroad. 10. Except the prohibition of dual citizenship according to Article 25.1 of the old (and new) citizenship law, whose exceptions in Article 25.2 were tightly policed. 11. “Genuine connection” is the notion coined in the International Court of Justice’s famous Nottebohm decision of 1955, according to which the absence of a “genuine connection” forfeited a state’s right of diplomatic protection. The notion has since been redeployed within a human rights context, referring to a state’s duty to confer citizenship on people in their territory who have a “genuine connection” to that state (see Orentlicher, 1998: 320). 12. If one counts the actual emigrants as “first” generation, the informal cap in question is a “third”-generation cap. Here and in the following, the notion of “second” generation will refer to the second foreign-born generation. 13. In pre-1989 Eurasia, a variant of this was to consider emigrants (as “exiles”), traitors to the communist cause. 14. All of these countries are admittedly classified in a Council of Europe report on “Europeans Living Abroad” (1999: 8) as “proactively” courting their emigrant communities abroad, in contrast to the “laissez-faire” approach prevailing in northern Europe. However, the report also states that to the degree that there is movement across these categories, it moves from “laissez-faire” toward a more “proactive” approach. 15. On the reverse, the left was now forced to define Republican citizenship in rather un-Renanian terms as “appartenance,” sociological rather than will-based belonging that shared its objectivistic thrust with the abhorred ethnic citizenship on the other side of the Rhine (see Weil, 1997 as the central document of grounding Republican citizenship in “appartenance” rather than “volonté ”). 16. The “possession d’état de français” is a sociological concept with juridicial consequences: someone is considered French by public authorities on the basis of a valid passport, electoral registration, inscription in a French consulate, or any other contact with French authorities. Conversely, a person living abroad who fails to renew his passport or make contact with French authorities in any other way over a period exceeding ten years loses his or her “possession d’état de français” (see Lagarde, 1997: 116). 17. See the statement by Jacques Habert, Senator for the French Abroad, Senat, Séance du June 16, 1993: 1376. 18. See Lagarde’s (1993: 558) critique of the “totally exorbitant” preferencing of jus sanguinis over traditional jus soli in the 1993 reform of nationality law. 19. Statement by Jean-Luc Melenchon, Senat, Seance du June 15, 1993: 1304. 20. Limiting this measure to children of one French parent betrays the intention to treat emigrants and immigrants symmetrically with respect to volonté— immigrant children with one French parent, after all, were French jure sanguinis. 21. Assemblée Nationale, Second Session of May 12, 1993: 419. The Mazeaud amendment resembled closely a recommendation of the Long Commission (1998: 178–180).

88 / christian joppke 22. Quoted ibid., p. 103. 23. Ibid. 24. Note that the Socialists and Communists also voted against the Mazeaud amendment, but with the broader intent of rejecting “elective” nationality for all groups, the immigrants included. 25. M. Gérard Gouzes, in: Assemblée Nationale, third session of February 10, 1998: 1438. 26. Citizenship “by choice” means as-of-right citizenship, without the need to naturalize, established by mere declaration of the entitled individual. 27. Previously no such continuous residence was required for second-generation immigrants born in Italy. 28. Senator Toth, in: Senato della Repubblica, 10th Legislature, 524th Session, May 23, 1991: 524. 29. Silvia Barbieri, Camera dei Deputati, 10th Legislature, First Commission, Meeting of January 9, 1992: 79. 30. Senator Mazzola, Senato della Repubblica, 10th Legislature, Disegni di legge e relazioni, documenti 1460 e 1850-A: 41. 31. Senator Mazzola, Senato della Repubblica, 10th Legislature, 524th Session, May 23, 1991: 15. 32. Senator Toth, Senato della Repubblicca, 10th Legistature, 524th Session, May 23, 1991: p. 43. 33. Senator Strik Lievers, Senato della Repubblicca, 10th Legislature, 524th Session, May 23, 1991: p. 10. 34. Senator Mazzola, Senato della Repubblica, 10th Legislature, Documents 1460 and 1850-A., July 31, 1989. 35. “Piu facile diventare italiani,” la Repubblica, December 22, 2000: 1. 36. Senator Mazzola, Senato della Repubblica, 10th Legislature, desegni di legge e relazioni, documenti 1460 e 1850-A: 4. 37. “Argentina, la fuga degli italiani,” la Repubblica, January 11, 2002: 19. 38. “Italian origin” is defined in Article 17 of the new immigration law as having at least a “third-degree (Italian) ancestor in the direct line” (Senato della Repubblica, 14th Legislature, Disegno di legge no. 795-B). 39. The only exceptions to this are the dual nationality regimes with LatinAmerican states. 40. This was also an answer to the post-Francoist constitutional principles that Spaniards of origin could not be deprived of Spanish citizenship (Article 11.2) and that the state had to safeguard the rights of emigrants abroad and further their return (Article 42.3). 41. Statement by Fraga Egusquiaguirre (PP) during the parliamentary debate surrounding the 1990 reform of nationality law (Diario de Sesiones del Senado, no. 38, October 17, 1990: 1949–1981). 42. “La reforma del Codigo Civil sobre nacionalidad se hara por consenso,” El Pais, February 2002. 43. “El PP rechaza que hijos de inmigrantes regulares sean espanoles al nacer,” El Pais, May 24, 2002. 44. Boletin Oficial de las Cortes Generales, Congreso de los Diputados, VII Legislatura, Proposicion de Ley: Modification del Codigo Civil en materia de


45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

nacionalidad. No. 122–1, Presentada por el Grupo Parlamentario Popular en el Congreso, March 16, 2001. “Hijos y nietos de emigrantes y exiliados podran pedir la nacionalidad sin ningun limite de edad,” El Pais, May 18, 2002. A further unsuccessful request was to grant to the descendants of emigrants the equivalent of an originally attributed (rather than later acquired) citizenship. This is an important distinction because Spaniards by birth enjoy certain immunities that naturalized Spaniards do not enjoy (such as the impossibility of being stripped of their citizenship). The PSOE abstained during the final vote; the IU voted against the law. Around 850,000 of those live in Latin America (400,000 in Argentina, 200,000 in Venezuela, 100,000 in Mexico, and 80,000 in Cuba). “Mehr Nachwuchs für Spanien,” Neue fürcher Zeitung, January 28, 2003. However, all settler states had racially exclusive naturalization rules in the first half of the twentieth century. For the distinction between “positive” and “negative” rights, see Berlin, 1969.

References Abraham, David (2002), Citizenship Solidarity and Rights Individualism, The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, University of California-San Diego, Working Paper no. 53. Aleinikoff, Alexander and Douglas Klusmeyer (2002), Citizenship Policies for an Age of Migration, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Bartolini, Stefano (2000), The Political Mobilization of the European Left, 1860–1980, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Baudet-Caille, Véronique (2000), La nationalité française, Paris: Editions ASH. Berlin, Isaiah (1969), “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Isaiah Berlin (ed.) Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brubaker, Rogers (1989), “Citizenship and Naturalization,” in Rogers Brubaker (ed.) Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America, Lanham: University Press of America. –––––– (1992), Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Council of Europe (1997), European Convention on Nationality and Explanatory Report, Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, European Treaty Series No. 166. Council of Europe (Parliamentary Assembly) (1994), Europeans Living Abroad, Strabourg, Council of Europe, Doc. 7078. Council of Europe (Parliamentary Assembly) (1999), Links Between European, Living Abroad and Their Countries of Origin, Strasbourg: Council of Europe, Doc. 8339. Council of Europe (Parliamentary Assembly) (2004), Europeans Living Abroad, Strasbourg: Council of Europe, Doc. 7078. Ferrajoli, Luigi (1994), “Dai diritti del cittadino ai diritti della persona,” in Danilo Zolo, (ed.) La Cittadinanza, Rome and Bari: Laterza. Giddens, Anthony (1994), Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge: Polity Press.

90 / christian joppke Glick Schiller, Nina (1999), “Transmigrants and Nation-States,” in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz and Josh DeWind (eds.) Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Gosewinkel, Dieter (2001), Einbürgern und Ausschliessen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. Groot, Gérard-René de (1989), Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht im Wandel, Cologne: Carl HeymannsVerlag. Hailbronner, Kay and Günter Renner (2001), Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht, Munich: C.H. Beck. Haut Conseil À L’Integration (1993), L’intégration à la française, Paris: La Documentation française. Herz, John (1957), “The Rise and Demise of the Territorial State,” World Politics, 9, pp. 473–493. Isin, Engin and Bryan Turner (eds.) (2002), Handbook of Citizenship Studies, London: Sage. Joppke, Christian (2000), “Mobilization of Culture and the Reform of Citizenship Law,” in Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham (eds.) Challenging Immigration and Ethnic Relations Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2001), “The Legal-Domestic Sources of Immigrant Rights,” Comparative Political Studies, 34, 4, pp. 339–366. Joppke, Christian and Ewa Morawska (2003), “Integrating Immigrants in Liberal States: Policies and Practices,” in Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska (eds.) Toward Assimilation and Citizenship, London: Palgrave. Koslowski, Rey (2000), “Demographic Boundary Maintenance in World Politics,” in Mathias Albert, David Jacobson, and Yosef Lapid (eds.) Identities, Borders, Orders, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kymlicka, Will (2002), Territorial Boundaries, Typescript. Lagarde, Paul (1984), “Nationalité et filiation,” in Michel Verwilghen (ed.) Nationalité etstatut personnel, Bruxelles: Bruylant. ——— (1993), “La nationalité française rétrécie,” Revue critique de droit international privé, 82, 4, pp. 535–563. ——— (1997), La nationalité française, Paris: Dalloz. Long, Marceau (1988), Être français aujourd’hui, Paris: Olivier Orban. Luhmann, Niklas (1982), The Differentiation of Society, New York: Columbia University Press. Makarov, Alexander (1947), Allgemeine Lehren des Staatsangehörigkeitsrechts, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Orentlicher, Diane (1998), “Citizenship and National Identity,” in David Wippman (ed.) International Law and Ethnic Conflict, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pastore, Ferruccio (2001), “Nationality Law and International Migration: The Italian Case,” in Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil (eds.) Towards a European Nationality, London: Palgrave. Scott, James (1998), Seeing Like a State, New Haven: Yale University Press. Smelser, Neil (1998), “The Rational and the Ambivalent in the Social Sciences,” American Sociological Review, 63, 1, pp. 1–15. Soysal, Yasemin (1994), Limits to Citizenship, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

citizenship between de- and re-ethnicization / 91 Weil, Patrick (1997), Mission d’étude des législations de la nationalité et de l’immigration, Paris: La Documentation française. ——— (2001), “Access to Citizenship,” in Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer (eds.) Citizenship Today, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ——— (2002), Qu’est-ce qu’un Français?, Paris: Grasset. Zolberg, Aristide (1999), “Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration Policy,” in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind (eds.) The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, New York: Russell Sage Foundation.


Part II The Changing Sociopolitical C on t e x t


C h ap t e r 4 Being German and Jewish in Kazakhstan and Germany Ruth Mandel

How can close to 200,000 people, in this instance categorical Jews from the former Soviet Union, be allowed to move to Germany, receive generous state benefits from a state that hopes they will settle permanently and yet not be considered immigrants, but instead find themselves labeled “contingent, quota refugees,” a category generally reserved for those fleeing war-torn regions? By the same token, how can categorical “Germans,” numbering 1.5 million, from the same territory of the former Soviet Union as the Russian Jews, albeit categorical Germans who for the most part speak no German and only some of whom can trace descent from eighteenth-century settlers in Russia, be allowed to enter Germany, also not as immigrants, but instead as Aussiedler (“resettlers”), and be able to instantly to claim all rights as citizens? By contrast, consider the 2.5 million Turks in Germany, part of a community that began to arrive more than 40 years ago as “guest workers”: only since January 2000 have Turkish children born to long-term residents in Germany been permitted to assume German citizenship, thanks to a legislative landmark, giving them a path out of decades of chronic disenfranchisement and marginalization. But this is permitted only if they meet a set of sometimes impossible criteria, including the renunciation of claims to Turkish nationality upon reaching their majority. The following discussion delves into the legal, political, moral, and cultural twists and turns these three parallel instances suggest. One point of theoretical convergence can be identified in the performance strategies members of each group are compelled to deploy in making their separate cases for staking a claim within German society. Turks have long needed to prove their moral and social ability to integrate into German society in order to be granted citizenship. By stark contrast, the Aussiedler, the “ethnic Germans” from the former Soviet Union, must convincingly act out a

96 / ruth mandel

credible version of “authentic Germanness” in order to acquire the desired visa and prepaid plane ticket out of the wretchedness that describes their post-Soviet existence. Though the criteria have since become more stringent, at one time all that was needed was the ability to say Guten morgen (good morning) and they were on their way to a new life in Europe. By the late 1990s, interviews assessing “genuine” Germanness began to be administered, quizzing the applicants on their knowledge of songs, foods, dates of celebrations, and the like. For their part the Jews must enact a similar performance. However, for them, it is not a conscious identification with an imagined German Volk, but instead with a projected ideal of Jewishness, imagined and desired by German consular officials staffing the consulates throughout the former Soviet Union. The Soviet-Jewish “contingent refugees,” though commonly known as “Russian,” in fact come from throughout the former Soviet Union and not solely Russia. The study I undertook, for example, was in post-Soviet, Central Asian Kazakhstan. Their large-scale move to Germany was made possible thanks to an agreement between the former head of the official German Jewish Community organization and the German government to permit 100,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union to immigrate to Germany, via the legal status of Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees) a complicated status shared by certain categories of non-Jewish refugees.1 In a country that, despite ample evidence to the contrary, has adamantly identified itself as a non-immigration land, it was deemed necessary to create a gerrymandered legal space for this group. In this case, the exceptional de facto but carefully not de jure immigration status granted to these Jews can be read as part of a generalized Wiedergutmachungspolitik, the policy of post-War reparations paid to Jewish victims of Nazism. Many Jews come to Germany as an active decision not to go to Israel. Many have already been to Israel and for a number of reasons do not wish to immigrate there. Most Soviet Jews rarely were observant practitioners of religion, so the religious basis of a “Jewish State” generally is not considered in their decision. Many find Israel “too oriental, too Arab, and middleeastern, too hot, too socialist.” The perpetual state of war also has been a disincentive. Furthermore, unlike an Israeli passport, a German passport, which many hope to acquire eventually, is more highly valued, as it is seen as a ticket to nearly anywhere. In addition, for some Jews it can be easier to immigrate to Germany than to Israel. In order to make aliya, to immigrate to Israel, one needs to prove one’s Jewishness. Though not halachically strict (i.e., according to strict interpretation of Jewish law; e.g., one can have a Jewish father and be permitted to immigrate to Israel), nevertheless it is not always straightforward, since some Jews had changed their Soviet-based nationality (natsionalnost) from “Jewish” to “Russian,” and no longer

being german and jewish in kazakhstan and germany / 97

possess the necessary documents proving their Jewish heritage. Some of the Soviet Jews apply to go to Germany after having been refused by the Israelis. Not unlike the ethnicity exam administered to the Russian Germans, in which the applicants must exhibit explicit knowledge of and familiarity with specific Russian-German linguistic and cultural vocabulary, German consular officials in Kazakhstan who vet potential Jewish immigrants query the Jewish applicants about the extent of their Jewishness. They ask about how they learned of the German quota for Jews; they ask if they are baptized, or if they are members of the Russian Orthodox Church. (This is not as absurd as it sounds—I was told of a case in which a Catholic priest, a teacher in a seminary, claimed to be Jewish. Not surprisingly, membership in a church disqualifies an applicant from being considered for Jewish immigration.) The German consular officials I interviewed at the embassy in Almaty, Kazakhstan, who dealt with this area described the process akin to treading on eggshells. When speaking of the interviews held with the applicants, one consular officer explained to me, “history does not allow us to ask about their state of mind—how Jewish they feel, or are. The Israelis can be much more intense in their questioning.” However, some of the German consuls do have images of the sort of Jews they seek. One described to me a family to whom she happily had issued a visa the previous week. They were welleducated intellectuals: the woman was a doctor and her husband a professor. They were very well-spoken, well-read, they even knew Yiddish; she explained, “They were the perfect sort of Jews—the kind of Jews who we want.” The other sort, the unwanted type, were the ones who forged documents (I was told that 80 percent of all submitted documents were forgeries), and were not educated professionals; types who might become involved with unsavory activity once in Germany, rather than helping to build the lively highly cultured (Hochkultur) German Jewish community they sought. I was told about a wide range of forgeries, including a case where to prove one’s Jewishness, an applicant had produced a photograph of a specially commissioned, artificially aged tombstone with Hebrew writing, claiming it to be his grandparent’s gravestone. Unfortunately for this person, the German— and Israeli—consulates had had the foresight to photograph the Jewish cemetery several years before, so could easily verify any new additions to the ancient dead buried there. In many cases, the German and Israel consulates work in tandem, and with the local police services as well, sharing such findings and other information. Though on some levels cooperating, in private, Israeli officials expressed resentment toward the German initiative to attract Jews, seeing it as undermining their own Zionist mission of recruiting Jews in the diaspora to make aliya (immigration) to Israel. In this they are not mistaken. In 2004, for the first time, the numbers of Jews from

98 / ruth mandel

the former Soviet Union coming to Germany exceeded those settling in Israel by more than 1000 (ca. 9400 arrived in Germany in 2004).2 In addition, and perhaps not unrelated, is the German government’s announcement in late 2004 that the virtually unlimited visas offered to Jews from the former Soviet Union would cease by 2006 (ibid.). The numbers of Jewish emigrants are small, even insignificant compared to the number of Aussiedler, the ethnic German resettlers. But the symbolic significance of the Jewish community in Germany cannot be overestimated, for Jews in Germany undertake to do the ideological work of the state and for the state.3 But unlike the native German-born Turkish population, who are called “foreign,” Ausländer, for the purposes of administration and whose interests have been seen to by the Commissioners for Foreigners, the largely Soviet-born population of Jews are administratively deemed Germans—their needs are seen to by the Ministry of Culture, the body that oversees Germans. In a sense, then, the post-Soviet Jews are transformed into symbolic Germans for administrative and ideological reasons. Reflecting this is the financial commitment of the federal government to the Jewish community, an enormous figure when compared to their population (see further). In terms of numbers, by late 2003 approximately 190,000 Jews had arrived from the former Soviet Union to settle in Germany. However, once in Germany, many, if not most, do not register with the official Jewish community organizations. In Berlin, for instance some 12,000 have become registered members of the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin (the officially recognized corporate organization representing the Jewish community) of whom 8000 are Russian born. However, the actual number of Jews probably is closer to 25,000, including several thousand in the former GDR (East Germany) who never openly have expressed a Jewish affiliation. In comparison, Berlin’s Turkish population is close to a quarter million. One observer has commented that the treatment of Jews is a “constant search to create loopholes in the constitution” to ensure their presence in Germany; this contrasts to the treatment of Turks, which reflects a perception that Turks exercise an “exploitation of loopholes” taking undue advantage of their situation in Germany. An official from the Berlin Ministry of Culture put it this way: “[Our treatment of the Jewish Community] is a form of gratefulness. It is not self-evident that Jews would stay in Germany, organize themselves, or want to stay any longer. We thankfully recognize the fact [that they do].”4 The vastly discrepant amounts of state support for the two populations are indicative of the different attitudes toward the two groups. In 1999, according to Laurence (1999), the 145 million DM per annum subsidies to Jewish organizations amortized to ca. 3000 per person. By contrast, the Foreigner Commissioner’s budget of 1.5 million amounted


to ten DM per Turk.5 The current amount that is paid to Berlin’s Jewish community is ca. 27 million Euro (Ben Dor, 2004). There is a perception that Jews possess the capacity for integration into German society while the Turks do not. Turks have been criticized for not possessing Integrationsbereitschaft: “readiness (preparedness) to integrate,” whereas it is assumed that the Jews do possess this essential quality. Jews become symbolically Germans of merely a different shade and different religious persuasion. Whereas on the one hand German society has decided that it wants to revivify its Jewish community, and to mark, to celebrate its difference, its Jewishness; on the other hand, Turks are criticized for being too Turkish, but are also said to be incapable of integrating, in a sort of assimilationist catch-22 argument. Further complicating the equation, the Aussiedler by contrast, once in Germany, have been widely criticized for not transforming themselves into recognizable Germans fast enough. They look, sound, and act too Russian to the generic German gaze, ideologically and politically subverting the extraordinarily costly project that sponsored their “resettlement” into Germany. Thus it would appear that some markers of alterity appear to be more acceptable—even desirable—than others. But integration-readiness might, in fact, have more to do with the readiness of elements of the German state and public to accept certain types and certain signifiers of difference, over others. The incoming Jews are joining the small Jewish community that has established itself after the War. A community that is no stranger to political intrigue and infighting, the postwar Jewish population has itself become Germanized, made up originally of an extremely mixed demographic group, reflecting the postwar environment when displaced persons from throughout Eastern Europe found themselves in Germany. Some in the community can claim only one Jewish grandparent, yet for personal reasons, have chosen to identify with the Jüdische Gemeinde (official Jewish organization). Maintaining a much higher profile than its numerical population would suggest, since the collapse of Soviet and East European states, it has found itself overwhelmed by the large influx from the east. Many are worried that the newcomers, much greater in number, will threaten the hegemony of the local “German Jews.” Significant sums are at stake, as indicated already, thanks to the generous state support. Thus have the new Jews created new rifts within the official ranks, not only in this way, but they are also seen to represent a very different sort of Jew, whose “Jewishness” is often brought into question. One persistent problem is that the Soviet Jews are not German Jews, and in large part have not come to Germany in order to become either practicing Jews on the one hand, or on the other, German in any sense of the word other than perhaps eventually assuming citizenship. There is recognition of

100 / ruth mandel

this and at the state-funded Jewish school in Berlin a special effort is made to teach German to the overwhelmingly Russian-speaking students. For example, in one kindergarten class I regularly observed during fieldwork in Berlin, only one child was not Russian speaking (her native language was Hebrew). Special German language tutoring is mandatory even for threeyear-olds, in an effort to force the issue of integration-readiness, with the intention of transforming these Russians into the desired German Jews. This mission suggests a comparison with nineteenth and twentieth century activities of HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) in this country, whereby earlier communities of largely German Jews took it upon themselves to “Americanize” the new eastern European Jewish immigrants. In Germany, the process of processing the incoming Jews, the ostensible goal of re-creating new/old Jewish communities is itself subverted by the very administrative policies that settle them. Like the Aussiedler, the cost of these newcomers is “equitably” shared among the German states. The regional state governments then distribute the Jews throughout their own regions, often to small towns blatantly lacking anything approaching a critical mass of Jews that might be called a community. Considering the frequent lack of religious knowledge or practice of these post-Soviet Jews, as well as the high rate of their intermarriage with non-Jewish Russians and others, a handful of these families scattered here and there does little to further the project “revivification of Germany’s Jewish communities,” the ostensible justification for their presence. For the most part, these newcomers prefer to live in urban centers such as Berlin or Frankfurt, which maintain sizable Russian-speaking communities, with well-developed infrastructures catering to them. However, in many cases, due to the nature of the settlement practices, to their dismay, Jews have been placed in small East German towns, areas known for their inhospitable practices toward foreigners. Without hard-to-come-by work contracts to guarantee an income, they are not permitted to relocate without jeopardizing their welfare payments. Thus an elaborate underground network to facilitate this practice has been established. Hence, the paradox of imported Jews feeling compelled to engage in illegal activities to live in precisely the communities they were brought to inhabit. The new presence of imported Jews belatedly acknowledges and attempts to rectify the absence of a once dynamic and very present German Jewish community (in 1933, 170,000 Jews lived in Berlin). The psychological fallout of the minimal Jewish presence over the past half-century has never been resolved at national-political, discursive, or, for many Germans, personal levels. Thus these two migration movements—the ethnic Germans, and the Soviet Jews—represent a perplexing attempt by the Federal Republic of Germany to repatriate centuries old diaspora Germans,


that is, to “un-do” one diaspora, and at the same time to create a new diasporic population in its midst, of “ethnicized Germanizable Jews” from the former Soviet Union—a kind of re-placing the dis-placed. The Russian Jews and the Aussiedler, then, are each forced to mimic and assume an ascribed identity, in order to conform to a fixed projected stereotype. The Russian Jews are encouraged to resemble past representations in the attempt to achieve an identity desired by their German sponsors, while the Aussiedler first conform to, then resist their projected representation as authentically German. Ultimately the shock of dissimilarity, of difference, is repressed, as the state attempts to mold these groups into the ideal Jew and German. A similar logic is at work in the processes of exclusion of the Turk, and radical inclusion of the Jew and putative German. In one case an insistence on an intractable difference keeps the Turk beyond the pale. In the other, the imposition and incorporation of desired and projected similarity permits the refashioning of ascribed identity. Returning to the questions posed earlier. I would suggest that it is through the examination of the parallel streams of ethnic Germans, Jews, and Turks vis-à-vis the German state and its patterns of in- and exclusivity that one can better able to understand the processes, practices, and performances not only of Jewishness, but Germanness as well. For it is in their mutual re-creation, not always for complementary purposes, that the emergence of novel Jewish communities is occurring today in Germany. Notes 1. This category generally has applied to populations such as Vietnamese boat people, Bosnians, and Kosovars, and people from other crisis regions who are expected to return home once the crisis has passed. 2. Deutschewelle, 12.12.04, “Berlin to Limit Immigration of Russian Jews.” 3. A vast literature addresses the situation of Jews in postwar Germany; see, e.g., the work of Y. Michal Bodemann (1996, 1997), Michael Brenner (1997), Gilman and Remmler (1994), Laurence (2001), Ostow (1989), Peck (1997), Tress (1997), Schütze and Rappaport (2000). 4. Ibid. 5. Lawrence, 1999. In 2005 the German government earmarked new monies to be used for ‘integration measures’ aimed at the Turkish population. We can expect the per capita expenditure to rise somewhat in the future.

References Bade, K. (ed.) (1992), Deutsche im Ausland—Fremde in Deutschland, München: Beck Verlag. Ben Dor, M. (2004), Jews in Germany, manuscript. Bodemann, Y. M. (ed.) (1996), Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

102 / ruth mandel Bodemann, Y. M. (1997), “Between Fürth and Tel Aviv,” in J. Peck (ed.) German Cultures, Foreign Cultures: The Politics of Belonging, Washington, DC: AICGS. Brenner, M. (1995), After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gilman, S. and K. Remmler (eds.) (1994), Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany, New York: New York University Press. Halfmann, J. (1997), “Two Discourses of Citizenship in Germany: The Difference between Public Debate and Administrative Practice,” Citizenship Studies 13, pp. 305–322. John, B. (2001), “German Immigration Policy: Past, Present, and Future,” in T. Herzog and S. Gilman (eds.) New Germany, New Europe, London: Routledge, pp. 43–48. Kleinknecht-Strähle, U. (1998), Three Phases of Post-World-War II Russian German Migration From the Former Soviet Union to Germany, Ph.D Thesis, Oxford University, United Kingdom. Laurence, J. (1999), (Re)constructing Community in Berlin Turks, Jews, and German Responsibility, Science Center Berlin for Social Research, FS III, pp. 99–102. Ostow, R. (1989), Jews in Contemporary East Germany: The Children of Moses in the Land of Marx, New York: St Martin’s. Peck, J. (ed.) (1997), German Cultures, Foreign Cultures: The Politics of Belonging, Washington, DC, AICGS. Senders, S. (1999), Mimetic Identifications: Ethnic German Repatriation in Post–Cold War Berlin, Ph.D Thesis, Cornell University, New York. Wolff, S. (ed.) (2000), German Minorities in Europe: Ethnic Identity and Cultural Belonging, New York: Berghahn Books.

C h ap t e r 5 The Migration-Security Nexus: International Migration and Security Before and Af t e r 9 / 1 1 Thomas Faist

The ploughman shall go out in March and turn the same earth he has turned before. By then what wrong will the black earth cover, what wrong will have been done. We wait and the time is short, but waiting is long. ––T. S. Eliot

September 11 reminded us that terrorism as a method of spreading mass fear is not only used by authoritarian states and dictatorships but also by non-state actors, in this case, the network Al-Qaeda. Undoubtedly, what is now called 9/11 came as a shock to all of us although it was not the first instance of spectacular non-state violence and terrorism. Yet it was a unique case of wanton destruction directed at a national and global nerve center. It is different from acts grounded in organizations with clear political goals such as ethno-nationalist movements which are usually labeled terrorist by the governments of countries affected—for example, the Basque ETA in Spain or the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland. 9/11 certainly has global ramifications which transcend the regional or national character of the organizations just mentioned. Yet while 9/11 may mark a turning point in the history of non-state terrorism, it is part of the politics of terrorism and reflects the changing trench lines and clashes in world politics, in this case the world after the cold war. To classify the phenomenon is fraught with difficulties, not least because the term terrorism is itself part of a semantic war. For example, during the cold war, the United States spoke of Moscow as the source of terrorism, and in the post–cold war disorder since 2001 the networks of Al-Qaeda around Osama bin Laden have

104 / thomas faist

become the center of attention. Increasingly, fears of communist takeover and infiltration have been replaced in popular and mass media coverage by more diffuse perceptions of transnational threats associated with organized crime, drug trafficking, and environmental disasters—and not to forget, international migration. These policy areas have been characterized by securitization. This refers to the overall process of turning a policy issue such as drug trafficking or international migration into a security issue. The term securitization refers to a perception of an existent threat to the ability of a nationally bound society to maintain and reproduce itself. Securitization has emerged in a new academic literature in the field of international relations and international politics, which even before 9/11, has begun to highlight more fundamental concerns about “new” security issues. Such new security issues comprise very different phenomena ranging from international terrorism, ethnonational strife to environmental degradation, food and energy scarcities, drug trafficking, population growth, illegal, that is unauthorized migration, and organized crime—to mention only the most prominent ones. Most noteworthy, not all of these issues are necessarily state-centered, as in the old paradigm about “national security” (Buzan et al., 1998). It is thus not surprising that the post–cold war period has seen efforts to view international migration as an important regional and geo-strategic dynamic with potentially crucial effects upon states, societies, and their security ( Weiner, 1995). The migration-security analysis extends the nave-gazing view at the OECD world with a more comprehensive analysis including both the developed and developing world. After 9/11, it is worth noting that mass-cultural fantasies about catastrophes caused by terrorists have been around for several decades. Even academic publications, such as Jessica Stern’s The Ultimate Terrorists— published two years before 9/11 (Stern, 1999), start with the scenario of an atomic bomb devastating Manhattan. Quite often, dire and populist scenarios have been connected also to international migration, alluding to the proverbial “other” and “stranger” as a source of threat to “our” jobs, housing, and borders, but also more far-reaching ontological threats to the borders of sovereign states, bodily security, moral values, collective identities, and cultural homogeneity. Examples include not only reports in manifold organs of the popular press but also academic worst-case scenarios in fields such as demography (e.g. Birg, 2001) and political studies (e.g. Kurth, 1994). This connection between international migration, on the one hand, and human and state security, on the other hand, is called here the migration-security nexus. In such a complex setup, the question cannot simply be how international population movements contribute to create conflicts within and

the migration-security nexus / 105

between states. Instead, it is also important to ask why migration has increasingly become a matter of security. Why has the migration-security nexus developed? In other words, why have quite a few citizens in the West taken recourse to sometimes fantastic threats posed by international migrants even before 9/11? And what are the consequences for immigration and immigrant integration? There is ample evidence to look at the consequences. After all, at least in the discursive realm, the responses to the events on 9/11 by politicians and journalists have reinforced the migrationsecurity nexus, dramatizing a publicly convenient link between international migration and security. Governments all over Western Europe and North America have not only strengthened their borders, that is, external controls, but have also strengthened internal controls of noncitizen immigrants. In the country obviously most affected by 9/11, the United States, institutional responses have been the most far-reaching. For example, the new U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which formally opened for business in early 2003, consolidated some 170,000 government personnel from 22 agencies—including the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). It is the largest modification of the U.S. federal bureaucracy since the founding of the Pentagon more than 50 years ago during World War II, and suggests that security threats are now increasingly also seen as internal ones. In Germany, to give another example of the repercussions of 9/11, the reactions first delayed the passage of the new immigration law because governing and opposition parties could not agree on tighter checks upon applicants for citizenship. Eventually, the fallout of 9/11, among other factors, played a role for the law to be delayed indefinitely. These two examples suggest that there is much to be gained from a more systematic analysis of the consequences of 9/11 for the unfolding migration-security nexus. Toward this end three propositions are posited: 1. Context of the migration-security nexus. The end of the cold war has widened the political space for actors in the public sphere to focus on diffuse and hard-to-grasp security threats that do not emanate from sovereign states but from non-state actors, involving issues such as crime, drugs, and migration. International migration has served as a convenient reference point for unspecific fears. The depiction of international migration as a security threat in the West has unwillingly contributed to what the American political scientist Samuel Huntington has termed the “clash of civilizations” (Huntington, 1995). Securitizing migration reinforces the very stereotypes about cultural fears and clashes that politicians publicly deny and abstain. 2. Unintended consequences of securitizing migration. Securitizing policies such as stepped-up border controls and stricter internal surveillance

106 / thomas faist

of immigrants produces manifold unintended effects. Among others, securitizing policy issues creates higher expectations among voters that governments are actually able to effectively control transnational movements. This is in stark contrast to the past few decades, where measures such as border control could be viewed and interpreted as largely symbolic measures. In turn, the rising expectations generated by increased external and internal controls among the populace may lead governments to continue presenting transnational movements as grave security risks. In the end, this may create incentives for political actors to engage in symbolic meta-politics. 3. Consequences for immigrant integration. The 9/11 incident entails ambiguous consequences for immigrant integration. Clearly, the levels of harassment against immigrants from the Middle East increased considerably, at least in the short term. Yet the crisis situation has also sparked internal debates within Muslim immigrant groups and organizations about the mode of accommodation to the societies of settlement. This may even lead to an increased immersion into the politics of the respective national immigration states. General attitudes and the broad outlines of policies toward cultural pluralism will probably not be significantly affected by 9/11. The first part of the following analysis opens the historical window of opportunity in which international migration has turned into a security issue. Specific reference is made to the post-cold war period. The second part briefly lists some of the consequences of securitization of international migration, namely increased meta-politics which connects social problems such as unemployment and security threats to migration and immigration. The third section turns to the less than clear-cut implications of 9/11 for the incorporation of new immigrant groups, in particular the Muslim category. The discussion closes with perspectives for research on the role of non-state, transnational actors in national and world politics. The Historical-Structural Background—Furthering the Linkage of Migration and Security In recent times, migration as a security threat has emerged with end of the cold war. Transnational diasporas, in particular, such as some Islamic groups are seen by some observers to have taken recourse to violent means in order to escape a cul-de-sac in what they perceive as Western values, political orders, and styles of life (cf. Lewis, 2003). While politics has often connected international migration to security issues over the past 150 years, the end of the cold war has been the most recent stimulus which favored the spread of objectless fear. This historical threshold not only meant the disappearance of a powerful external threat to security of the West but also the


loss of an important source of cohesion between the diverse groups which constitute the Western world. This transformation and the fall of some authoritarian regimes opened up a space for marginalized identities in Eastern Europe, Central and even Southeast Asia to more freely and sometimes quite aggressively assert suppressed national and ethnic identities. In this changing inter- and transnational context, even sovereign states have begun to view security as the collective management of sub- or transnational threats and the policing of borders and the internal realm, rather than just the defense of territory against external attack. In Europe, the perceived resurgence of Islam as a political force in increasingly multiethnic societies has often been discussed in connection with Muslim immigrants as such, but above all with regard to diasporas. Relations between countries such as France and Algeria or Germany and Turkey have been fraught by the export and import of conflicts surrounding politicized forms of Islam and national liberation. Apart from substantial human security and state security issues involved in border-crossing authoritarian social movements such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), diasporas have become the quintessential expression of globalization associated with the movement of people across borders—as distinct from the flow of goods, capital, and services (on diasporas and security, see Sheffer, 1993 and Davies, 2000). Such transnational communities are by no means confined to Muslim communities. One specific form of transnational community— diaspora—denotes ethno-national and/or religious groups who have settled in a country different from the country of origin, who have remained or turned into minority groups, are frequently resisting assimilation, and strive for return to an (imagined) homeland, often after the experience of forced dispersal (Faist, 2000a: chapter 7). This description includes the archetypal Jewish experience, followed by Armenians and Palestinians. In other situations, transnational communities comprise political dissidents, such as some Cubans in the United States, former indentured labor, such as Chinese or middlemen minorities such as Indians all over the world. Reference to such groups has been ideal for setting disloyalty on the public agenda in debates over dual citizenship, and lacking accountability, that is legitimacy in conflicts over national unity. Public debates also include the allegations of the extraordinary influence of small lobbies on foreign policies. Notably the Jewish, Greek, and Armenian diasporas in the United States are thought to profoundly affect foreign policy on behalf of their homeland through means such as military and economic assistance, arms sales, media pressure, petitions, and electoral campaign threats (cf. Shain, 1989). Public and academic attention has thus focused almost exclusively on the negative consequences of transnational organizations and communities for the countries of settlement. This is surprising at first sight because such

108 / thomas faist

border-crossing groups can also be thought and may indeed have—under propitious circumstances—positive effects as conduits for the rule of law and the spread of civil and human rights (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Nowadays, the conditions for an effective mix of territorial exit and political voice (cf. Hirschman, 1970) have increased because most emigration countries do not resemble the strong authoritarian states of the early and mid-twentieth century. Transnational activists thus encounter somewhat more propitious conditions to reinforce political transitions toward rule of law in their home countries. And even if we doubted the utopian visions of transnational actors as conduits for human rights and democracy, there is clear evidence not only for the import of conflicts in the wake of migration but also for effects moderating transnational conflicts. For example, Algerian communities and organizations in France, on the whole, have probably had a moderating effect on the situation in Algeria since 1992 (Miller, 2000): in that year the Islamic Salvation Front was barred from attaining power and a civil-war like situation has ensued, which has been going on until today. Also, a balanced appraisal of immigration and security cannot overlook that sometimes immigrants themselves are those interested in dismantling terrorist groups. For example, it was Arab background immigrants who helped French police to dismantle the Armed Islamic Group in 1995. Such evidence comes from Turkish immigrants in Germany and their role in tackling extortion practices by the Kurdish PKK (cf. Faist, 2000b). It is worth noting that substantial conflicts in countries of origin such as Algeria and Turkey have at times spilled over since the 1970s but did at no time significantly endanger state or human security in France and Germany. To draw up an interim balance concerning the post-cold war period, the emergence of the migration-security nexus cannot be explained exclusively by actual threats to state and human security, as threats to the physical integrity of persons in immigration societies or endangering the institutional integrity of states receiving immigration. We thus need to take a closer look at the political psychological mechanisms of threat construction. To start with, 9/11 and the dangers apparent are not simply made up. This was a murderous event. We know from research on intergroup relations, intolerance, elite decision making, and reactions to terrorism before 9/11 that the responses by governments and publics to threats have been going mainly in one direction. The research carried out on these phenomena in various fields of the social sciences such as social psychology, political psychology, and sociology arrives at remarkably similar conclusions. Diverse studies have found that external threat results in a broad tendency to heighten in-group solidarity, vilify the source of threat, limit government actions that might assist members of the threatening group, and support


belligerent solutions directed at the threatening individuals or group (For many, see Coser, 1956; Sales and Friend, 1973; Cottam, 1994; Gibson, 1998) . It is needless to say that these reactions can be readily observed in responses to 9/11. But we need to dig deeper. 9/11 seems to have reinforced the trend toward securitizing migration and immigration—it did not create it from scratch. Immigration—not only when connected to terrorism—has usually resulted in an increase in perceived threats. Even in less dramatic instances not connected to terrorism but to material threats and the import of conflicts from countries of origin into countries of settlement of immigrants, the security narrative demands that fear and objectless fear—Angst—have to be controlled. In the end, the migration-security nexus under the circumstances before 9/11 also dealt with cultural values affected that are linked to ontological security, and thus existential threats. As immigration history shows, foreigners or immigrants were frequently perceived to threaten cultural identity (cf. Zolberg, 1987). Wild swings in immigration policy have not only come about by infrastructural considerations or material threats but also as a result of fears about the cultural fabric of societies. Examples range from anti-Chinese legislation in North America and Australia in the late nineteenth century (Saxton, 1971) to alleged Muslim threats in Europe in the late twentieth century (e.g. Kepel, 1997). Clearly, on the surface 9/11 suggested that international migration is inextricably linked to terrorism, not simply in the indirect ways just mentioned. 9/11 was not about international migrants posing threats to “our” jobs, incomes, housing or culture. It was a direct attack and a threat to life. However, the links between international migration and security threats are inconclusive even after 9/11. Migration and security only superficially share the fact that border crossings are involved. Moreover, not all flows of persons across the borders of sovereign states constitute migration. Tourists and business travelers account for more border crossings than labor migrants or refugees (IOM, 2001). In particular, the link between migration and increases in other phenomena, such as drug trafficking and crime, is vastly overstated. Potentially, large immigration flows may enhance the opportunities and provide low-cost means such as couriers to distribute drugs. Also, immigrant communities such as secluded religious sects could make it easier for would-be terrorists to find anonymity. And in exceptional circumstances of large immigration flows some native workers may be adversely affected by immigrants in terms of jobs and wages. But it is a long stretch from there to argue that even a partial solution to certain countries’ drug, crime, unemployment, and physical security problems would be significantly affected by acting on immigration flows. Moreover, even stricter border controls do not constitute a suitable means to combat

110 / thomas faist

terrorism. Immigration and visa control policies are far less likely to catch a determined terrorist than they are to control unauthorized immigration. Given this context, it is worth noting, however, that migration policies are often even institutionally linked to crime. This clearly goes beyond merely discursive connections. For example, the European Union (EU) created two groups in the 1980s—the TREVI group, in which ministers of justice and interior discussed issues of police cooperation including terrorism; and the Ad hoc Group on Asylum and Immigration, where the same ministers met informally to discuss the harmonization of asylum and immigration policies. These two groups were the forerunners of the Justice and Home Affairs Council and successive institutional EU mechanisms to deal with these policy areas. Such institutional connections between terrorism, crime, and migration—which are distinct from border crossing traffic— send ambiguous signals to populist politicians and audiences. They reinforce—albeit not on the same scale as 9/11—already existing scenarios of threat although politicians of mainstream parties take great care to escape such charges. The political uses of 9/11 have exacerbated the already existing discursive linkages of threat, migration, and the clashes of cultures. Unintended Consequences of Securitizing Migration—Reinforcing Meta-Politics The border control initiatives of national states in Europe and North America before 9/11 were politically successful policy failures that succeeded in terms of their symbolic and image effects even while sometimes or even largely failing in terms of their deterrent effects. According to the Continuing Observation System on International Migration, the estimated number of irregular border-crossings and irregular migrants has by no means decreased during the 1990s—the reverse assumption may render a truer picture (e.g. SOPEMI, 1991). Since 9/11 internal and external control of migrants has increased. In particular, measures which try to handle the migrant as an illegal border crosser make him or her more visible as an alien. For example, due to ever-stricter border controls, unauthorized, that is irregular migration, gains more visibility. The very collection of statistics may legitimize stricter border controls and could further contribute to the perception of the migrant as illegitimate and potentially criminal, although politicians take great care to accuse the traffickers and depict the migrants as victims. All of this has an ironic side to it because border control is one of the few remaining fields in which major immigration states have shown that their autonomy has not been hampered by growing globalization of the flow of people. Yet stepping up migration control visibly, governments will have to show that their increased control efforts show visible results. For example, the


number of illegal border crossers apprehended may need to go up. And governments have to uphold migration as a potential security threat. Otherwise, it would be hard to justify increased resources devoted to the control of internal and external borders. This creates incentives for metapolitics; following a lead by Harold Lasswell who had coined the term “meta-issue” (cf. Faist, 1994): meta-politics connects social problems and security concerns with fears around international migration. Immigration can be referred to by politicians in explaining many social, economic, and security problems—such as unemployment, housing shortages, crime— without having to give concrete evidence, not the least because the effects of immigration are exceedingly hard to establish empirically with a sufficient degree of certainty. The academic and public disputes over the fiscal impact of immigration are just one prominent case in point (for an overview, see Fix et al., 1994). In referring to these fears and in being responsive to the expectations of their constituency, politicians, especially, from populist parties have in fact introduced and reinforced xenophobic tendencies. This is not to say that threats to security in immigration countries are without any real-world foundation. However, through meta-politics, low-level threats usually gain out-of-proportion significance. Meta-politics also means that political decision making engages in symbolic efforts instead of offering substantive policy solutions. Of course, all politics has a symbolic content. Otherwise, political actors could not aggregate and articulate interests and mobilize supporters. However, meta-politics unsettles the always-precarious balance between the material and symbolic content of politics in connecting substantive issues such as unemployment and security to symbols which signify threats in factually incorrect ways. One implication of meta-politics is the ever-renewed juxtaposition and dualism of “us” (the Americans, the Germans, etc.) versus “them” (the immigrants, the Muslims, etc.) which is both deeply regressive and pervasive in a globalizing society. Editorials in leading newspapers around the West have pointed out that after 9/11 postmodern ambiguities are out of date and have been replaced by a clear trench line between liberalism versus terrorism.1 One may easily extend this link further to liberalism versus Islamic or Christian fundamentalism. But such simplicity overlooks the fact that wanton violence is itself aided by globalization and is also reproduced internally in those societies imbued with Western values. The massacre at Waco, Texas, is just one prominent example; the bombing in Oklahoma City another. To state the obvious: the “Una-bomber” of Oklahoma City was not an immigrant with an Arab background but a mentally deranged former American physics professor. Meta-politics may also obscure the fact that an onslaught on civil rights has taken place which not only affects non-citizens such as aliens and

112 / thomas faist

permanent residents, that is denizens but also citizens. Legislation passed in major Western liberal democracies in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 provides ample evidence for this claim. In the United States, Congress passed a bill in October 2001 which increased government’s ability to supervise all residents. The United Kingdom followed swiftly and moved even further in 2003. In Germany, in December 2001, new legislation increased not only funds for the police force but also their powers of investigating and even shutting down suspicious bodies such as religious organizations which are not conforming to constitutional norms. To give one last example, French legislation passed in November 2001 provided more means for police and security forces to invade daily life, such as a new rule connected to quiet behavior in entrance halls to large apartment buildings and the punishment of people who do not “regularly” purchase a valid ticket for public transportation. It is needless to say that this also aims at controlling youth of immigrant background in the banlieue (cf. Césari, 2001). In general, state security institutions such as the armed forces, the police, and intelligence agencies are known to deal with problems such as 9/11 in a way that enables them to use their traditional and familiar solutions (cf. Allison, 1971)—in this case ranging from military attacks to increased external and internal border controls. In this perspective, not only increased control of migrants but the whole “war on terrorism” is a large-scale effort to cast bewildering developments such as non-state terrorism into familiar molds. After 9/11, the state governments and the state security forces have been themselves heavily engaged in the construction of a political threat that can then be addressed by traditional means. Whether or not the threat attacked bears close resemblance with real-world phenomena is another question. Implications for Immigrant Integration—Cultural Pluralism In the country most obviously affected by the aftershocks of 9/11, Muslim organizations and communities experienced a dramatic new situation (Leonard, 2003): the spotlight of politics and mass media was directed toward them. The issues in public debate have focused on issues such as foreign versus domestic rootedness of Muslim organizations, the use of violence, and gender relations. Immediately after 9/11 the U.S. Administration looked for Muslim leaders who would what the government stipulated: “denounce fundamentalist hatemongering.” It found them, often outside the organized Muslim communities. It was not the leaders of mosques and other religious or political organizations who were the most visible spokespersons for Muslim groups after 9/11. This is surprising because


Muslim organizations have been characterized by a new wave of leadership over the past years. This new stratum does not come from spiritual leaders—for example imams—but from professional circles, such as lawyers, medical doctors, or business executives. In short, most Muslim communities in the United States are nowadays run by quite secular leaders who consider good relations to mass media as a prime resource. They played only a marginal role, however, in the media hype following 9/11. Figures marginal to Muslim communities took center stage and commanded national attention immediately after 9/11. One prominent example is Shayk Hamza Yusuf, a white American convert with Sufi leanings. Born Mark Hanson, he converted to Islam at the age of 17 in the San Francisco Bay Area. Widely traveled, he has studied with Islamic scholars in Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania. He is a charismatic speaker and produces numerous, widely circulated videos and cassettes. His public appearances often generate enthusiastic audiences. Hamza Yusuf held no office in national Muslim political organizations. Yet he was one of six religious leaders and the only Muslim to meet President George W. Bush at the White House immediately after the murderous attack on the twin towers. Shayk Hamza Yusuf also denounced all kinds of violence. He thus corresponded to the expectations of journalists and politicians, who sought out moderate Muslims, urging them to speak up, to deplore and repudiate the violent acts and those who would justify them in any way. We might interpret this as a specific American tale of dealing media-wise with 9/11 and Muslim minorities. However, the one-sided media attention on converts as spokespersons has initiated a debate within Muslim organizations not only about media visibility but also about substantial religious and political viewpoints, such as criticism of certain political regimes in the Middle East and South Asia. The hard and frequent look by American mass media on Islam and Muslims has also forced the national Muslim leadership to now speak out more openly about their positions on political accommodation and gender relations. At the same time, their rhetoric against the U.S. government subsided. To say the least, a process of intensified deliberations within Muslim organizations has been started on sensitive and contentious issues. Topics have included, for example, the hiring of local religious leaders, imams. The demand to hire only American-educated imams who are fluent in English and to train both imams and board members has been voiced more frequently in community newspapers. Also, some Muslim political organizations have tried to come up with younger and female leaders (cf. Leonard, 2003). In the short run, all this contributes to more political tensions between Muslim organizations and “mainstream” establishment. Nonetheless, these are signs of incipient political incorporation into American public life.

114 / thomas faist

To take a cursory look at a European example, German political life certainly does not offer so much leeway for marginal yet intellectual and charismatic young religious converts to Islam. This may be, by the way, partly due to the fact that there is much less of a Muslim intelligentsia in Germany compared to the United States. After all, migration of the category of persons called Muslims in Germany has predominantly occurred in the context of former “guestworker” migration, while the mass immigration patterns of Muslims to the United States has been of more recent vintage, mostly since the 1980s. Most important, this immigration has been socioeconomically much more diverse in the United States than in Europe. However, we can observe similar trends of increased public and political dialogue if not cooptation, and efforts by the political gatekeepers to include Muslim organizations at least in consultative roles. Similar to the U.S. Administration, German government officials such as Federal President Johannes Rau have invited religious leaders. Unlike the US-American example, the German corporatist tradition has led to invitations to representatives of a wide range of Muslim organizations. However, the dialogue has not only been across groups but also within. The city of Bremen in the northwestern part of Germany, for example, has figured prominently as a role model to be emulated by others because of its allegedly successful framework of including all varieties of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish organizations and the so-called Islam week, during which representatives from organizations ranging from the Islamist Milli Görüu to secularized Alevi communities are supposed to cooperate in order to enter into a “dialogue” with the non-Muslim public. This bright Bremen public image was stained somewhat when it became known that one of the regular visitors to one of the inner-city mosques had been detained by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, charged with ties to the former Taliban regime and the terrorist Al Qaeda. Nonetheless, in the respective Bremen mosque this sparked an intra-Muslim debate about the relationship of religion and politics, and more nuanced newspaper reporting on the diverse views held in Muslim communities and organizations on this crucial issue. In sum, whether or not the aftermath of 9/11 and heightened public attention to Muslim religious and political organizations in the United States, Germany and beyond will eventually result in increased immersion or even incorporation of such groups in political life, is too early to say. It may suffice to draw the preliminary conclusion that on various sides the awareness to urgently include Muslim organizations in regular political and religious life has grown much stronger. Perhaps we see increased efforts of political gatekeepers to co-opt Muslim leaders; along the lines practiced for two decades by French authorities, which led to the establishment of a beur-geoisie.


We should also be careful about the impact of 9/11 on wider issues of immigrant integration, such as tolerance toward cultural pluralism. Muslims all over Europe and the United States have suffered increased hostility and physical attacks, especially in the first months after 9/11. For example, in the stronghold of European multiculturalism, the United Kingdom alone, more than 300 assaults on Muslims were reported in the first three months after the terrorist attacks (Eurobarometer, 2001). Similar observations can be made for other countries such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands. We would thus expect that public support for state accommodation of Muslims’ religious practices would have decreased after 9/11. Yet, according to data there is some initial evidence that at least public attitude toward Muslim religious practices have not changed dramatically after 9/11 (Fetzer and Soper, 2002): this preliminary evidence comes from a Roper survey on “Religion and the State” carried out in three European countries before 9/11 in July 2001 and after 9/11 in April 2002. The countries included were the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. One item aimed to measure toleration of Islamic religious practices. The questions asked were different in the three countries because state-religion relations and public debates around the integration of new religious beliefs have varied across these countries. The specific item concerned public support of Islamic religious practices pertaining to schools. In the United Kingdom, the question was: should the state continue to fund Islamic schools? In Germany, it read: should the state support Islamic religious instruction in public schools? In France, the question was whether school girls should be allowed to wear a headscarf or whether it was to be tolerated. Interestingly, the empirical results only partially confirm the expectation that public support for state accommodation of Muslims’ religious practices in the schools decreased. In all three countries, respondents were less likely after 9/11 to support the accommodation of Islam in state-run schools. However, in none of the three countries did the interviewees not become markedly anti-Islamic: their propensity to oppose accommodation only changed by a few percentage points in Britain and Germany; while the French result was statistically insignificant. This is noteworthy because most respondents probably knew from mass media reports that some of 9/11 terrorists lived in Germany and Britain. Overall, the respondents in the United Kingdom and Germany seem to be far more tolerant toward Islam than reports in the popular press might suggest. We can only speculate about explanations for this result. Maybe we need to take a closer look at the realms in which immigrants can legitimately express cultural difference from majority groups. Historically, for example, the so-called ethnic groups in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century could continue displaying cultural difference in the field

116 / thomas faist

of religion. This was not seen to contradict assimilationist goals (Herberg, 1955). Religious affiliation has been a legitimate way to express cultural difference. Such a finding should even be more applicable nowadays, as cultural pluralist tendencies have certainly gained increased acceptance over the past decades in the United States and Europe. Conclusion: Vicious and Virtuous Transnationalization The responses to 9/11 and their consequences, such as a rise in metapolitics and discussions on the accommodation of Muslims in Western immigration countries, have profound implications for a research agenda on migration and security. So far, there is an imbalance in research on migration and security. Following public discourses, migration scholars have mostly either defensively argued against making a link between migration and terrorism or have pointed out substantial security threats for people and states emanating out of civil wars, refugee flows, and nationalist struggles involving categories such as militant refugee warriors. Without denying the importance of such analyses, it is vital that they be complemented by two extensions. Obviously, the first task includes the rigorous study of the meta-politics of migration and security as part of migration politics. This does not only include the study of anti-immigrant violence but also the rhetoric of regular immigration politics and thus the securitization of migration and integration issues. The second task is to extend our knowledge about the role of transnational processes in order to counter the easy linkage made between international migration and terrorism. This implies that we not only study the import, that is export of conflicts through international migration such as “longdistance nationalism” (Anderson, 1991) but also more virtuous cycles of transnationalization such as the diffusion of human and civil rights with the help of émigrés, migrants, and refugees. 9/11 has once again confirmed what has already been evident from less spectacular forms and manifestations of international terrorism: the growing importance of non-state actors in the contemporary world system (cf. Held et al., 1999). This implies a study of political, economic, and cultural transnationalization in all its facets. In this way we can hope to unearth both the vicious and the virtuous cycles of transnational processes. This research emphasis would constitute one modest step toward removing fuzzy fantasies about the proverbial “stranger” and “migrant” as a security threat. This is important because, at first sight, the events of 9/11 have dealt another devastating blow to the Kantian utopia of perpetual peace. Yet, we need to be aware of the ambiguous dynamics of globalization. The age of globalization demands a renewal of Kant’s vision. Immanuel Kant argued


that perpetual peace is possible in a system of republics, which we would now call liberal democracies, governed by the rule of law (Kant, 1970). He wrote about a federation of states as one guaranty of peace. Nowadays this vision has to be supplemented by an empirical analysis of how transnationalizing civil societies may underpin the diffusion of human, civil, and political rights. We thus should not only think about the ordering of the “world of states” as a prerequisite for a more peaceful global order, instead, we certainly need to include the “world of societies.” Sometimes we then find ourselves indeed studying instances and vicious cycles of non-state violence crossing borders. This is important because there is a definite trend in our post-Westphalian political world, in which the sovereign powers of states are challenged and essential elements such as territoriality transformed— without being replaced (Ruggie, 1993). International migration is one of the fields in which this can be exemplified. After all, international migrants actively voice ideas and interests in this transnational realm. This could act as a corrective to the current overemphasis on the migration-security nexus. In sum, in the world after 9/11 we need to search for a balanced way to study vicious and virtuous cycles of transnational, non-state collective action and the ensuing responses by states and other governance structures. Note This chapter is based on the Willy Brandt Guest professorship Lecture held on May 15, 2003 at the School of International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER), Malmö University in Sweden. 1. Two of many examples are: Josef Joffe, “Das Weltgericht der Hundert Tage. Der 11. September, der Krieg gegen den Fanatismus und die Wiederentdeckung des Besten am Westen” (The World Judgement of 100 Days: 11 September, the War against Fanaticism and the Rediscovery of the Best in the West), Die Zeit, 27.12.01, 1, and “Der Glaube der Ungläubigen. Welche Werte hat der Westen?” (The Belief of the Non-Believers. Which Values has the West?), Der Spiegel, 52, 2001, pp. 50–66.

References Allison, G. (1971), The Essence of Decision, Boston: Little Brown. Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Second Edition, London and New York: Verso. Birg, H. (2001), Die demographische Zeitenwende. Der Bevölkerungsrückgang in Deutschland und Europa, Muenchen: C. H. Beck. Buzan, B., O. Waever, and J. de Wilde (1998), Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner. Césari, J. (2001), “Islam et l’extérieur, musulmans de l’intérieur: deux visions après le 11 septembre 2001,” Cultures et Conflit, 44, pp. 97–115.

118 / thomas faist Coser, L. (1956), The Functions of Social Conflict, New York: Free Press. Cottam, M. (1994), Images and Intervention: U.S. Policies in Latin America, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Davies, R. (2000), “Neither here nor there? The Implications of Global Diasporas for (Inter)National Security,” in D. T. Graham and N. T. Poku (eds) Migration, Globalisation and Human Security, London: Routledge, pp. 23–46. Eurobarometer (2001), Flash Eurobarometer 114: International Crisis. Released in December 2001, http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/flash/fl114_en.pdf, accessed on July 14, 2003. Faist, T. (1994), “How to Define a Foreigner? The Symbolic Politics of Immigration in German Partisan Discourse, 1978–1993,” West European Politics, 17, 1, pp. 50–71. Faist, T. (2000a), The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Faist, T. (ed.) (2000b), Transstaatliche Räume. Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur in und zwischen Deutschland und der Türkei, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Fetzer, J. S. and J. C. Soper (2002), “Public Attitudes toward European Muslims before and after September 11,” Paper prepared for delivery at the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, August 29–September 1, 2002. http://apsaproceedings.cup.org/Site/abstracts/033/ 033001FetzerJoel.htm, document accessed on July 14, 2003. Fix, M., J. S. Passel, with M. E. Enchautegui and W. Zimmermann (1994), Immigration and Immigrants: Setting the Record Straight, Washington DC: The Urban Institute. Gibson, J. L. (1998), “A Sober Second Thought: An Experiment in Persuading Russians to Tolerate,” American Journal of Political Science, 42, pp. 819–850. Held, D., A. McGrew, D. Goldblatt, and J. Perraton (1999), Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Herberg, W. (1955), Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirschman, A. O. (1970), Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Huntington, S. (1995), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. IOM (International Organization of Migration) (2001) World Migration Report, Geneva: Bernan Associates. Kant, I. (1970), “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Political Writings, H. S. Reiss (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (reprinted in 2000), pp. 93–130. Keck, M. and K. Sikkink (eds.) (1998), Activists Beyond Borders: Transnational Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kepel, G. (1997), Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kurth, J. (1994), “The Real Clash,” The National Interest, 37, pp. 3–15. Leonard, K. (2003), Muslims in the U.S. The State of Research, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lewis, B. (2003), The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, London: Modern Library.

the migration-security nexus / 119 Miller, M. (2000), “A Durable International Migration and Security Nexus: The Problem of the Islamic Periphery in Transatlantic Ties,” in D. Grahm and N. Poku (eds.) Redefining Security: International Migration and Global Security, London: Praeger, pp. 15–27. Ruggie, J. G. (1993), “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization, 47, 2, pp. 139–174. Sales, S. M. and K. E. Friend (1973), “Success and Failure as Determinants of Level of Authoritarianism,” Behavioral Science, 18, pp. 163–172. Saxton, A. (1971), The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shain, Y. (1989), The Frontier of Loyalty. Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Sheffer, G. (1993), “Ethnic Diasporas: A Threat to Their Hosts?” in Myron Weiner (ed.) International Migration and Security, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 263–285. SOPEMI (1991), Trends in International Migration, Paris: OECD. Stern, J. (1999), The Ultimate Terrorists, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weiner, M. (1995), International Migration and Security, Boulder, CO: Westview. Zolberg, A. R. (1987), “ ‘Wanted but Not Welcome’: Alien Labor in Western Development,” in W. Alonso (ed.) Population in an Interacting World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 36–73.


C h ap t e r 6 Changing the Rules While the Game Is On: From Multiculturalism to Assimilation in the Netherlands Han Entzinger

In many countries around the world attitudes toward immigrants have toughened in the past few years, but hardly anywhere has the shift been so dramatic as in the Netherlands. Why is it that a country that had institutionalized the acceptance of difference and that was reputed for its tolerance could shift so quickly to what is perceived as coercive and assimilationist policy? How can such a liberal and politically stable society transform itself almost overnight to one that demands conformity, puts the blame for lacking integration almost exclusively on the newcomers, and threatens them with sanctions and fines if they do not comply with the new rules? Why does a country that has long prided itself for its religious tolerance suddenly blame its Muslims for practicing a “backward religion?” Why did all this come so unexpectedly? True, comparable trends can be distinguished in several other European countries, such as Denmark or Austria, but the shift in policy and the popular backlash appear more extreme in the Netherlands than anywhere else (Vasta, 2005). This is why this chapter makes an attempt to analyze what has been going on in that country and what lessons can be drawn from this for theorizing on integration and multiculturalism. The chapter starts with a brief summary of the immigrant situation in the Netherlands. Next, I give an overview of the history of public policy regarding immigrant integration with its well-known emphasis on multiculturalism (Entzinger, 2003 for more details). I then describe and discuss in more detail developments in the past few years and try to find explanations for the sudden changes in the Dutch political climate that has led to the fall of multiculturalism and to a strong push for assimilation. Are these

122 / han entzinger

indeed signs of a failed integration process, as many observers claim? Has the concept of multiculturalism been ill reflected and is it not suited for coping with situations of relatively large-scale immigration? Or can one claim that the immigrants’ integration has been so successful that their presence can not be qualified as a marginal phenomenon any longer, but rather as one that has fundamentally affected and changed Dutch society? Immigrants in the Netherlands The recent history of immigration to the Netherlands and the immigrant presence in that country are not drastically different from those in neighboring West European countries. Currently, about 11 percent of the Dutch population of 16.3 million people are foreign born and for that reason can be qualified as immigrants. If one includes the second generation the percentage goes up to 20. This means that one in five persons living in the Netherlands is either an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. These figures include people with a background in other EU countries, in western countries outside the EU as well as in pre-independent Indonesia. The number of residents with “non-western origins,” as official Dutch statistics calls them, stands at around 1.6 million, one-tenth of the population. Among these “visible minorities”—to use a Canadian term—three communities stand out in size: Turks, Surinamese, and Moroccans each number between 300,000 and 350,000. The Turkish and the Moroccan communities are legacies of the so-called guest worker policies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which were followed by a rather generous program of settlement and family reunion. Most migrants from Suriname arrived in the 1970s, when this former Dutch colony acquired political independence. Since the late 1980s immigration to the Netherlands has generally been on the increase and its origins have become much more diverse. The end of the cold war led to a significant growth of East European migrants as well as asylum seekers, some of whom later acquired refugee status. Besides, growing numbers of Dutch and foreign residents find their spouses in other countries. Meanwhile, immigration among the three largest communities, the Turks, the Surinamese, and the Moroccans, is continuing, albeit at a slower pace than before. During the past two or three years, however, immigration to the Netherlands has declined significantly. This is believed to be the combined outcome of a stagnant economy and stricter immigration laws and policies. Foreign citizens constitute only a minority of all people of immigrant descent. In fact, only 4.5 percent of the population of the Netherlands does not hold a Dutch passport, less than in most nearby countries. This is largely the outcome of a generous naturalization policy—at least, until

changing the rules while the game is on / 123

recently—and of the fact that nearly all (post-) colonial migrants hold Dutch passports anyway. Yet, unlike many other immigration countries in Europe, citizenship is not generally considered as the primary distinguishing factor between migrants and the native population. Rather, ethnic origin tends to be more relevant in the public perception as a means of differentiating between them and us. The reasons for this approach and its consequences are discussed later. The settlement patterns of immigrants, irrespective of where one places the defining boundary between immigrant and nonimmigrant, are quite unbalanced. Again, as in most other countries in Europe, migrants tend to be overrepresented in the larger cities and underrepresented in the countryside. Initially, most migrants came to the cities, where employment and educational opportunities were best. Once migrant communities had settled there, follow-up migrants tended to join them, taking advantage of the fact that the original population had become socially and geographically mobile, thus leaving the least attractive housing stock to the new arrivals. The four largest cities in the country (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht) house only 13 percent of the total population of the Netherlands, but they accommodate over 30 percent of all immigrants. In Amsterdam and Rotterdam almost half the population has an immigrant background (first and second generation), as do two-thirds of the school-aged children and youth in these cities. Needless to say that in certain neighborhoods only a small native population of students and pensioners has stayed behind. So far, however, there has not been a trend toward ghettoization in the sense that immigrants of one particular ethnic background tend to flock together in specific neighborhoods, as, for example, in certain American cities. The extensive social housing system in the Netherlands with its relatively “color blind” distribution mechanisms has prevented this from occurring. From Multiculturalism to Integration Policies The extensive social housing system is only one aspect of the strong welfare state in the Netherlands that has left its marks on integration policies for immigrants. Back in the 1950s, it was mainly through a limited number of well-chosen social policy measures that large numbers of so-called repatriates from Indonesia were encouraged to assimilate into Dutch society, with which they already had a certain familiarity. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, social workers again played a crucial role in the reception and guidance of newly arriving immigrants, guest workers from the Mediterranean as well as people from Suriname. A major difference, however, was that these migrants’ residence was seen as temporary, both by the authorities and by most migrants themselves. As a consequence, no efforts were made this time

124 / han entzinger

to promote their integration. On the contrary, the migrants were encouraged to retain their own cultural identity. This would help them reintegrate upon their return to their countries of origin. One of the clearest expressions of this approach was the introduction of mother tongue teaching for migrant children in Dutch primary schools from 1974. The authorities also facilitated migrants in setting up their own associations and consultative bodies. To the Dutch this approach of creating separate facilities based on community identities was nothing new. Under the well-known system of verzuiling (pillarization) various religious and ideological communities in the Netherlands had long had their own institutional arrangements, such as schools, hospitals, social support agencies, newspapers, trade unions, political parties, and even broadcasting organizations for radio and television. Each community or “pillar” (e.g. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, but also socialists, liberals, humanists) may set up its own institutions, largely paid for by the state. The state itself can then remain neutral, since it is obliged to treat all communities in exactly the same way. Within their institutions communities are reasonably free to make their own arrangements, which enables them to preserve their specific identity and “emancipate” their own members. This approach is based on the subsidiarity principle, or—to use a classical Dutch Protestant term—“sovereignty in one’s own circle,” which in a more contemporary variant would be “living apart together.” The unifying element in this institutionalized diversity is to be found at the top: the elites of all pillars meet regularly to discuss issues of common concern and to build coalitions that are needed for majority decision making. Hence the metaphor of pillarization: the elites constitute the common roof that the pillars support (Lijphart, 1975). Since the late 1960s pillarization has been losing ground in the Netherlands, partly as a result of secularization and partly because of the rising level of schooling of the population as a whole. Unconditional obedience to paternalistic leaders, a prerequisite for a proper functioning of the system, could no longer be forced upon the followers. However, it was generally believed that what did not work any more for the population as a whole might be good for the migrants who, after all, were perceived as fundamentally different from the Dutch and as people in need of emancipation. Until about 1980 the promotion of institutional separateness could be justified easily with an appeal on the migrants’ presumed temporariness. However, this institutional separateness persisted even after the Dutch government acknowledged in that year that, contrary to earlier beliefs, most migrants would stay in the Netherlands and that their integration should therefore be encouraged. The path that was envisaged for integration was remarkably similar to the one that had worked in the past for the religious and ideological


“pillars,” It was a combination of combating social deprivation through selected support measures, promoting equal treatment, and encouraging “emancipation,” while aiming at the preservation of the communities’ cultural identity. To this purpose the migrants were labeled ethnic minorities, and the policy on their behalf became known as Minorities’ Policy. It was interesting to observe how a country which until then had been remarkably homogeneous from an ethnic perspective, now introduced the notion of ethnicity as a basis for differential policymaking. The authorities and a vast majority of the population were convinced that this was the best way to work on the migrants’ “emancipation.” However, there were also critics who claimed that stressing ethnic differences would risk perpetuating these and therefore become an obstacle to the migrants’ fuller social participation rather than a catalyst of it. This phenomenon is known in the literature as ethnicization or minorization (Rath, 1991). Besides, in quite a few cases defining “minorities” on the basis of their countries of origin disregarded the relevance of ethnic differences that existed within these countries. In the 1980s the term multiculturalism was not as common as it is today. The Dutch government never really used it. In hindsight, however, Dutch Minorities’ Policy of the 1980s certainly can be labeled as multiculturalist. In a number of spheres it provided institutional arrangements that ran parallel to existing mainstream arrangements. The special characteristics of the migrant cultures served to justify such forms of separateness. The parallel institutions were generously supported with public funds. Minorities’ Policy, therefore, can be seen simultaneously as the hallmark of pillarization and of the welfare state; but did it work? In 1989 the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), a think tank close to the prime minister, published a report that stated more clearly than ever before that Minorities’ Policy had not been able to prevent immigrant unemployment from rising to alarming levels (WRR, 1989). The restructuring of Dutch industry in the early 1980s had left many low skilled workers without a job and many of them were of immigrant origin. By the end of the decade more than one-third of all Turks and Moroccans in the Netherlands were unemployed. In contrast to policies pursued by other European countries, such as Germany and Switzerland, most of the Dutch considered it inappropriate to encourage the return of these people, to whom the Dutch economy owed so much. As a consequence, immigration became a growing burden for welfare and social policy regimes, but making mention of this in public was widely considered to be politically incorrect, if not racist. The Scientific Council’s report alone was unable to achieve a turnaround, but under the surface a certain dissatisfaction continued to grow. In 1991 the then parliamentary leader of the opposition Liberal Party (VVD),

126 / han entzinger

Frits Bolkestein, triggered a public debate on the presumed incompatibility of Islam and “western values” (Bolkestein, 1991). He did so in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair in Britain and an affair about wearing the headscarf in public schools in France. The debate calmed down after a while, but some uneasiness with the strong cultural relativism that underlay at the basis of Minorities Policy remained. Didn’t this approach promote the ethnic minorities’ isolation from mainstream society rather than their integration into it? In the 1994 parliamentary elections the Christian Democrats (CDA) were defeated and they remained outside the government for the first time in almost a century. Traditionally, the Christian Democrats had been the champions of pillarization. This explains why the incoming “purple” coalition of Labour (PvdA), Liberals (VVD), and Democrats (D66), headed by Labour Party leader Wim Kok, was able to shift the focus of its policies from respecting cultural diversity to promoting the immigrants’ social participation.1 Quite significantly, Minorities’ Policy was rebaptized Integration Policy. From that moment on culture was largely seen as a private affair; providing jobs to immigrants had become the main objective. Mother tongue teaching was removed from the core curriculum and later disappeared altogether from the schools. Besides, it was recognized that the migrants’ lack of integration was also due to their insufficient familiarity with the Dutch language and society. A program of mandatory language and inburgering (civic integration) courses was launched. These courses were free of charge, but every newly arrived migrant from outside the European Union would be obliged to attend. The initial opposition to these courses (“why should migrants now be forced to do what has so long been denied to them?”) gradually faded away. In 1997 the Newcomers’ Integration Act (WIN) was introduced. The courses were not an immediate success, largely for organizational reasons. Nevertheless, a considerable number of other immigration countries in Western European have emulated this Dutch example in the meantime, and introduced integration courses in some form or another (Michalowski, 2004). The ambition to improve the migrants’ position in employment, education, housing, and a few other significant spheres of society proved to be more successful than the integration courses. During the second half of the 1990s registered unemployment among people of immigrant origin dropped dramatically, though it still remained substantially above the national average. It is generally assumed, however, that it has been the prospering economy rather than targeted government policies that have led to this improvement. Also in education the position of immigrants, particularly the second generation, improved significantly during the later 1990s. They are still overrepresented in lower forms of secondary education, but


their participation in higher education is rising, and school dropouts among immigrants have become a less serious problem. As we have seen before, the housing situation of immigrants no longer differs significantly from that of the native population of similar income levels (Dagevos et al., 2003). However, certain problems that explain the immigrants’ marginal position turned out to be more persistent. Rising expectations about the migrants’ Dutch language proficiencies could not be met by the still rather amateurish integration courses. Even more worrying were the alarming delinquency rates among certain immigrant communities (Junger-Tas, 2002). These were generally seen as a sign of lacking integration, but also of lacking opportunities. Equally worrying, but perhaps less noticed, was the finding that inter-ethnic contacts at a personal level had decreased rather than increased during the 1990s (Dagevos et al., 2003: 334–339). To a large extent this may have been an effect of increased segregation in cities, where immigrants continue to take the places of native Dutch who have moved to the outskirts (Uitermark and Duyvendak, 2004). School segregation has become an even more serious problem than segregation in housing. In certain neighborhoods only few native Dutch children are left anyway and the pillarized school system allows publicly funded confessional schools to refuse children of a denomination that is not their own. As a consequence, many schools have become even more segregated than the neighborhoods in which they are located, although schools with large numbers of immigrants are not automatically of poorer quality than schools with few or no immigrant children. In addition to this, concerns were also growing, though seldom expressed, over the relatively strong reliance on various social policy provisions among ethnic minorities. As we have seen, ten percent of the population of the Netherlands can be classified as a first or secondgeneration immigrant of non-western origin. However, 40 percent of those who qualify for social assistance belong to this category, and the gap between natives and immigrants is widening (De Beer, 2004). Signs of a Turnaround At the start of the new millennium two contradictory narratives began to emerge in the Dutch public debate on integration. One was the “official” one of a considerable progress that had been achieved on all major indicators, such as participation in the labor market, in education, housing, and so on. Overall, the second generation was doing considerably better than their parents, particularly among the Surinamese (Veenman, 2002; Dagevos et al., 2003). The continuing identification among Turks and Moroccans with their countries of origin and also with Islam was taken as a sign of a successful multiculturalism: institutional integration could indeed go hand

128 / han entzinger

in hand with preservation of the original cultural identity. The sharp rise in naturalizations during the 1990s was yet another sign that growing numbers of immigrants saw a future for themselves in the Netherlands. Critics, however, claimed that above all it was the possibility to retain dual citizenship as it had existed between 1992 and 1997 that had caused the rise in naturalizations (De Hart, 2004). It enabled the new citizens to claim the practical advantages of having an EU passport without being forced to break their ties with the mother country. The more cosmopolitan part of the nation, by contrast, saw this refusal to choose as a natural expression of growing transnationalism and globalization. The competing view was much less optimistic. Paul Scheffer, a historian and a prominent member of the Labour Party was among the first to voice this view, thus risking the wrath of the established order. In a much-debated article called “The Multicultural Tragedy” published in January 2000 in the leading newspaper NRC Handelsblad he stated that Dutch multiculturalism had failed (Scheffer, 2000). Instead, a new ethnic underclass of people was emerging who did not feel attached to Dutch culture and society, and who were unwilling and unable to integrate. Scheffer voiced the concern that many Dutch people felt, but did not express about continuing immigration, stagnant integration, increased segregation, and a rapidly growing Muslim population. Eventually, in Scheffer’s view, this would undermine social cohesion and the functioning of the liberal democratic state, particularly because of the supposedly illiberal ideas of the Muslims among the immigrants. Scheffer accused the Dutch elite of having remained largely indifferent to these developments. Their ideology of cosmopolitanism and their cultural relativism had allegedly prevented them from demanding that the newcomers learn to adapt. Respect for cultural difference had prevailed over defending the principles of liberal democracy. The only possible answer, in Scheffer’s view, was a “civilization offensive,” which would include more coercive policy efforts to overcome deprivation as well as stronger appeals on the immigrants to adapt to the principles of liberal democracy. Immigrants should also have a much better knowledge of “our” culture and history. Scheffer’s observations, which ten years earlier would have been dismissed as conservative or possibly even as racist now generated considerable support, but also strong criticisms. Initially, it was a debate among the Dutch elite, in which only very few people of immigrant origin took part. Critics claimed that Scheffer seemed to ignore that official policy had already made the move away from multiculturalism, although more so at the national than at the local level. They also pointed to Scheffer’s tendency of appealing to the familiar stereotypes of immigrants. Although many immigrants are not Muslims, the stereotype easily makes all of them


sympathize with Muslim fundamentalism and reject liberal democracy. Scheffer was accused of ignoring the immense diversity among immigrants as well as their progress in education and employment. He also seemed to ignore that cultures are not static, particularly in situations of immigration. In a survey, for example, among youngsters of Turkish and Moroccan origin in Rotterdam, which we carried out in that same year 2000, we found that many of our respondents indeed experienced a certain tension between Islamic and European values, particularly family values. However, most young Muslims have developed a highly personalized or “westernized” interpretation of Islam, and are in full agreement with principles such as individual freedom and equality, which are fundamental for liberal democracies. Besides, as their educational level goes up and their length of residence increases, their ideas become more liberal and differences with Dutch young people of the same educational background virtually disappear (Phalet et al., 2000). From these research findings we may conclude that Scheffer seems insufficiently aware of the dynamics of integration. Five years later, however, his outcry is generally seen as the beginning of a dramatic turnaround in the Dutch public debate and in Dutch policymaking regarding immigration and integration. Since then, these two issues have not only risen to the top of the political agenda, but they have also led to vivid debates and considerable unrest in the country. Apparently, Scheffer and a few others, such as De Beus (1998), Schnabel (2000) and Van der Zwan (2001) had a good nose for an undercurrent in Dutch society, which the major politicians had not been able to sense. Since 2000 public opinion in the Netherlands has become much more sensitive to presumed attempts, particularly by Muslims, to undermine basic values in western society, such as individualism and secularism, or classic freedoms and civic rights. Teachings at the fifty-odd Muslim primary schools in the Netherlands are being followed with great scrutiny. The pillarized system qualifies these schools for full financial support by the state under the same conditions as Catholic or Protestant schools. In this climate of increased sensitivity regarding immigration in general and Islam in particular, the events of 9/11 in New York and Washington could only reinforce the impression that a “clash of civilizations,” as first predicted by Samuel Huntington in 1993, would be imminent (Huntington, 1998). Around that same time Pim Fortuyn’s star began to rise in the Netherlands. Until then he had been a relatively marginal academic, known for his powerful antiimmigrant and antiMuslim columns in the right-wing weekly Elsevier (Pels, 2003). In the post-9/11 climate his radical views and his charisma quickly made him into a media star. He was elected leader of the newly established party Leefbaar

130 / han entzinger

Nederland (Liveable Netherlands), an anti establishment party of dissatisfied local politicians in a number of cities. After some pseudo-racist statements in a newspaper interview Fortuyn was quickly dumped and he decided to participate in the May 2002 parliamentary elections with his own party, List Pim Fortuyn (LPF). Fortuyn’s program was quite radical and not very coherent in many places, but he appealed to the feelings of dissatisfaction present among the electorate after eight years of “left-right” coalition, that was seen as having swept all controversies under the carpet (Fortuyn, 2002). As a consequence, large segments of the electorate had become weary of public authorities and dissatisfied with their policymaking and the provision of public services. This proved to be a good breeding ground for populism. Fortuyn’s views against immigration became a central element in his program, but not the only one. Fortuyn’s views were different from those advocated by politicians such as Le Pen in France, Haider in Austria or De Winter in Flanders. He was not really against immigrants as such, but his primary concern was the assault on democratic liberties that might result from the presence of so many people unfamiliar with western values, particularly Muslims. Further immigration, he argued, would only exacerbate these problems (Wansink, 2004). In fact, with almost one million the Netherlands has the second highest per capita share of people of Muslim origin in Europe, after France (Phalet and Ter Wal, 2004). Assimilation after Fortuyn The sudden rise of Pim Fortuyn ended even more abruptly than it began with his assassination on May 6, 2002 by an animal rights activist. In the parliamentary elections, nine days later, his party list LPF obtained 26 out of 150 seats in parliament, thus becoming at once the second largest party after the Christian Democrats. The “purple” coalition parties were dwarfed and lost their parliamentary majority after having been in power for eight years. In the new right-wing government, headed by Jan Peter Balkenende, the Christian Democrats again took the lead, along with the Fortuynists and the Liberals. Curtailing immigration and promoting a more coercive integration policy were high on the new government’s agenda. The predominant view was that it was primarily the immigrants themselves who were to blame for their lacking integration. However, the new government was very unstable, and it fell within three months. In the new elections, in January 2003, the Fortuynists fell back to only eight seats and a new coalition was formed, again headed by Jan Peter Balkenende, who swapped the Fortuynists for the Democrats as a junior partner. Like its predecessor, this government also opted for a rather


populist agenda regarding immigration and integration (De Heer, 2004). In immigration policy the fight against illegal immigration has been reinforced and family migration from outside the European Union has been severely curtailed. Asylum policies have become much stricter and procedures for obtaining residence permits have been made more cumbersome and much costlier. Consequently, immigration to the Netherlands significantly dropped in the past three years. In 2004 the country’s migratory balance was negative for the first time since 1967. This is the result partly of a decrease in arrivals and partly of a rise in departures among both people of immigrant origin and native Dutch. In integration policy a new approach has been developed as well. The overall idea was that migrants were to blame for their slow integration, while efforts to step up the process should come from their side. Some lip service was paid to the idea that integration should be a two-sided process and that the established population should also leave some space to the newcomers, but concrete policy measures hardly pointed in that direction. Acquiring Dutch citizenship, for example, was made much more difficult and costly, which provoked a plunge in naturalizations. Moreover, a significant change in the mandatory integration courses has been announced. These courses will no longer be offered free of charge by the local government. In line with free market ideologies it will be the newcomer’s own responsibility to find a course, to register and pay for it and, eventually, to qualify for a mandatory language-and-culture test that has to be taken within five years after the initial settlement in the Netherlands. Immigrants who fail to pass the test will be fined and will be disqualified from permanent settlement. The government also intends to mandate that potential immigrants to pass a relatively simple Dutch language-and-culture test in the Netherlands embassy in their country of origin before granting them a first entry permit. This is to prevent semiliterate people with dim employment prospects and a high potential for reliance on social assistance from coming. Finally, the government is also planning to introduce mandatory integration courses for certain categories of long-established migrants, including holders of a Dutch passport. These so-called oldcomers will have to attend these courses at their own expenses; failure to pass the final test will also result in a fine (Entzinger, 2004). In many other fields of government policy similar compulsory measures have been taken or have been announced that aim at stepping up the migrants’ integration. In Rotterdam, for example, the stronghold of Pim Fortuyn, an old debate on the mandatory dispersal of immigrants over different neighborhoods was picked up again (Bolt, 2004). It is not clear, however, to what extent this can be implemented as a policy, given the freedom of settlement and the nondiscrimination principle. Other policy initiatives,

132 / han entzinger

local and national ones, may be violating international obligations, such as the right to family life as laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights. Most of the measures proposed leave little or no room for a public recognition of the migrants’ cultural identity. Even the Christian Democrats, the traditional champions of pillarization and therefore of multiculturalism, emerged from their eight years in opposition as fervent nationalists and as proponents of immigrant assimilation. This led to the paradox that migrants who initially had been encouraged to preserve their own identity were now blamed for insufficiently identifying with Dutch culture. Today, acknowledging religious and ethnic diversity is no longer considered a public responsibility, let alone facilitating its institutionalization. Therefore it is all the more surprising that so many public and parliamentary debates focus precisely on religion. That focus, however, is usually on ways of banning what are seen as undesired practices in Islam, such as genital mutilation, honor killings, or incitements to Jihad, or terrorism, practices that are not really widespread among Muslims in the Netherlands. Yet, one can only guess what impact the constant linking of Islam, security, and immigration has had on public opinion in the Netherlands, both on the native population and on immigrants (Phalet and Ter Wal, 2004). Several members of parliament and other politicians, including some who are of immigrant origin themselves, have been threatened and are now under constant security protection. Such a situation was totally unknown in a country where ministers were used to cycling to work. Regular surveys held by the Social and Cultural Planning Office indicates, a decline in acceptance of cultural diversity among the population of the Netherlands (Dagevos et al., 2003). More than before, immigrant integration appears to be defined in terms of their loyalty to and identification with “Dutch values and norms,” rather than in terms of their social and institutional participation. Several observers have signaled a decrease in mutual understanding and acceptance between the native Dutch and the immigrant communities, particularly in situations where the latter are seen as insufficiently loyal to Dutch culture and Dutch society. The killing, on November 2, 2004, in Amsterdam, of film maker Theo van Gogh, reputed for his powerful anti-Muslim statements, by a Muslim fundamentalist born and raised in the Netherlands led to a public outcry comparable to that following the Fortuyn assassination. It set in motion a countrywide series of assaults against mosques and Muslim schools, thus adding to the preexisting social and political instability in a society apparently in search of a new identity. Explanations for the Turnaround For a long time the Netherlands was seen by many as a shining example of multiculturalism and respect for cultural diversity. We have just seen how,


in only a few years time, the country has become one of the harshest advocates of straightforward assimilation. What accounts for this sudden shift? It is not so easy to find an answer to this obvious question, particularly not when it is difficult to distance oneself sufficiently from a process that still appears to be in full swing. In what follows I try to explore some possible explanations. One of the most obvious explanations is the economy. It is a well-known fact that a downturn in economic growth has a negative impact on feelings toward immigration and immigrants, who easily become scapegoats. The Dutch economy boomed far beyond the European average in the 1990s, but has been almost stagnant since 2001. While employment opportunities increased dramatically for the population as a whole and even more so for immigrants during the 1990s, unemployment has been on the rise again since 2001, even though the gap between immigrants and nonimmigrants has not widened. However, the disproportionate reliance on social policy instruments by immigrants is a fact, but has not really become a major issue in Dutch politics. Social security reforms have upset the trade unions, but certainly not to the same extent as in Germany, France, or Italy. Some sectors of the economy continue to be in need of manpower, but find it increasingly difficult to recruit people from outside the EU, given the stricter entrance requirements. A common understanding is emerging that more foreign recruitment will be needed in a few years time, when the first postwar baby boomers will retire. Thus, the economic situation does not seem to offer very convincing explanations for the shift. Another explanation may be found in the growing numbers of immigrants. Promoting cultural diversity and even institutionalizing it may be acceptable as long as minority cultures clearly remain minority cultures. At present, however, almost half of the inhabitants in the major Dutch cities are of immigrant origin and many of them are Muslims. In several neighborhoods the traditional Dutch majority now constitutes a minority. Thus, continuing immigration may have fundamentally changed the nature of the issue. To many people it has become increasingly evident that cultural diversity can only flourish in a situation where a clear majority is in agreement with a society’s basic values and identifies with them. Many Dutch people doubt whether that really is the case for immigrants. About half a million of them do not speak or understand Dutch, although some may have lived in the country for a generation. Numerous satellite dishes in immigrant neighborhoods are believed to reflect where the loyalties of these people really lie. In our 2000 Rotterdam survey, mentioned earlier, we found that almost three-quarters of all Turkish and Moroccan youngsters—including those born in the Netherlands—identified more strongly with their country of origin than with the Netherlands (Phalet et al., 2000). In the long run, a large-scale lack of identification with one’s immediate environment is

134 / han entzinger

believed to undermine social cohesion and disrupt social order. This may explain the widespread belief that migrants should be forced into developing a stronger loyalty or, briefly, assimilation into mainstream Dutch culture. On the other hand, there are those who argue that it is precisely the successful integration process of many immigrants that has turned them into a social, political, and cultural factor that can no longer be denied. In their view, initial ideas of temporary residence, followed by a period of institutionalized multiculturalism along the traditions of pillarization—briefly, their ethnicization—had kept migrants and their offspring in the margins of Dutch society for too long. Only after the efforts to promote immigrant participation in mainstream institutional settings had been stepped up, more and better opportunities had emerged for them to familiarize themselves with Dutch society and therefore to become more vocal. Besides, since guest workers had been recruited almost exclusively from rural areas, it took a while, probably a generation or more, before these communities were able to develop a more western oriented, well-educated elite. In this view, a majority of the second-generation migrants are no longer locked up in their own cultural “ghettos”—as many of their parents are— but are very much familiar with Dutch urban culture and society, which have changed significantly because of their very presence. Of course, that does not prevent some of these young people from also preserving strong ties with their country of origin and its culture and others from being lured into delinquent behavior or even fundamentalism. From the older integration literature we know that such extremist forms of behavior may serve as alternative channels for upward mobility in situations where the regular channels are blocked, for example as a result of persistent discrimination (Sowell, 1980). In this view, therefore, the turnaround in the debate on immigration can be seen as a reaction to the growing influence of the second generation and their demarginalization, rather than as a sign of a persistent marginality. That reaction, therefore, is largely conservative and prompted by a wave of nostalgia among people who perceive Dutch identity as being under threat. One of the peculiarities in the Dutch debate, in comparison to that in other European countries, has been its emphasis on civil liberties, especially in the last few years. Many freedom loving Dutch see their liberties threatened by orthodox or even fundamentalist Muslims, allegedly wishing to curtail freedom of speech and religion or to undermine equality, individualism, and secularism by imposing their values on the host society. In the early 1990s Frits Bolkestein already addressed the issue of value clashes between Islam and the West. Apparently, he came too early, but the debate was picked up again, and more successfully, ten years later by Paul Scheffer,


Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Liberal parliamentarian of Somali origin strongly opposed to Islam, as well as many others, politicians as well as academics. They fear that non-western values imported by certain immigrants may undermine the foundations of western liberal democracy (Cliteur, 2002; Scheffer, 2004). Therefore, expressing those values should not be tolerated. Others argue, however, that recognizing all values, including strongly antiliberal ones, is a fundamental characteristic of classical liberal democracies. The underlying assumption here is that democracy is strong enough as a system to eliminate undemocratic elements or to make their adherents change their minds. In fact, in our Rotterdam survey we found no fundamental differences in their adherence to (Western) public values between Muslims and non-Muslims. However, in a situation of institutionalized multiculturalism this must not always be so, as it tends to confirm immigrants in their traditional values. This may explain why the debate on this aspect has been sharper in the Netherlands than elsewhere (e.g. WRR, 2003). Of course, in the search for explanations of the sudden shift in the assessment of integration, some people also point at the role of the media, primarily television. The media always take a greater interest in the unusual rather than in the ordinary, in the exception rather than in the rule. Thus, the media have been under fire for depicting immigrants primarily as “people of concern.” It was the media that made Pim Fortuyn into a true “hype” by letting him dominate most talk shows during the months prior to his assassination. A serious analysis of the issues at stake was lacking in many of these programs. Politics had become entertainment and Fortuyn was a genius in playing on his political opponents (Wansink, 2004: 220). True as this may be, I do not think that the media should be blamed for this. The media may act as a catalyst, but does not have the power to set an agenda that is not broadly shared by their audience, that is, the electorate. Their persistent feelings of dissatisfaction with politics in general and with immigration and integration in particular account for the structural nature of the shift in public opinion over the past few years. The “new politics,” as it is commonly called in the Netherlands, appear to understand that it is the message that matters, not the messengers. Conclusion: Has Integration Failed? All possible explanations put forward in the previous section may have certain validity. In such a complex situation it seems impossible to single out one specific cause. In September 2002, few months after the landslide victory of the late Pim Fortuyn in the national elections, Parliament installed a commission, chaired by the liberal backbencher Stef Blok, to

136 / han entzinger

investigate “why the integration of immigrants had failed and why integration policy had been unable to prevent this.” In its final report, published in January 2004, the commission qualified immigrant integration in the Netherlands as “moderately successful, notwithstanding government policy.” The commission’s relatively mild findings were immediately put to the sword by nearly all political leaders. The initial parliamentary verdict had been clear, and facts and nuances were not supposed to trouble the bosses, whose views found large support in public opinion. There was an obvious need to break with the past. In the analysis of what went wrong a distinction must be made between the process of integration as such and integration policy. The process as such has an institutional and cultural dimension. Institutional integration refers to an increase in immigrant participation in the receiving society, while cultural integration or acculturation is generally understood as the degree to which newcomers adopt its dominant values, identify with them, and let their actual behavior be guided by these values. Under Dutch Minorities’ Policy, promoting immigrant participation was an objective, but acculturation was not. In line with Dutch traditions of pillarization, migrants were recognized as separate communities and they were encouraged to develop their own institutional arrangements in certain fields, generously supported and funded by the authorities. After about a decade it became clear that the two major objectives of Minorities’ Policy were hard to reconcile. High unemployment and low educational achievement figures, particularly among the Turkish and Moroccan communities, witnessed that their institutional participation had not really advanced. What had been intended as a respectful acknowledgement of cultural difference ended in cultural “ghettoization” in densely populated, somewhat neglected, and relatively unsafe urban neighborhoods. The “purple” coalition, which took office in 1994, opted for a different approach. It defined integration primarily in terms of institutional participation, and it considered culture to be a private affair. For the first time, citizenship also became an issue in Dutch integration policies. Under Minorities’ Policy immigrants had not been encouraged to opt for Dutch citizenship, as this could have been taken as an assault on their identity. Instead, special provisions were created to enable non-Dutch residents to participate in public life. The granting of local voting rights to foreign residents, introduced almost without any debate in 1985, should be seen in this perspective as well as the establishment of large numbers of consultative bodies. The “purple” coalition did not primarily perceive of citizenship in its legal meaning, but rather took it as an incentive for immigrants to identify more strongly with the Dutch political community and to take part in decision making. It introduced mandatory inburgering (civic integration),


largely consisting of Dutch language courses. Consequently, the focus of immigrant incorporation policies shifted from the group to the individual, from ethnic minorities to individual migrants, from culture to citizenship or, in terms of political philosophy, from a predominantly Christian Democratic communitarian approach to a liberal individualistic approach. During the 1990s the migrants’ integration at the institutional level progressed substantially, largely as an effect of the booming economy, but a clear shift in their cultural and civic orientation did not occur. The “purple” coalition with its liberal outlook remained rather indifferent on this. It argued that culture was “free” and that a culture shift required time. However, the general public began to be annoyed by the growing numbers, both of “regular” migrants and of asylum seekers, by their increased appeal on welfare state provisions and by certain “strange” habits. Policies of affirmative action in a number of fields reinforced the impression among parts of the native population that it was they who were put at a disadvantage. Initially, openly expressing such feelings of dissatisfaction was not considered appropriate or politically correct, but the Scheffer debate and, later, 9/11 and the emergence of Fortuyn served as pretexts “to say aloud what so many people had felt, but not dared to speak up about.” Consequently, the definition of immigrant integration changed once more in the early years of the new millennium. Institutional participation alone was no longer enough as an objective, but immigrants were also expected to behave in line with Dutch habits—most of all to speak the language—and to identify with Dutch values and with the Netherlands in general. The cultural dimension had gained renewed significance as a factor in the incorporation process, but the policy objectives had become diametrically opposed to those of the days of Minorities’ Policy: assimilation to Dutch mainstream culture, rather than preservation of the communities’ cultural identities. Thus, in the past twenty-five years the main objectives of Dutch policy for migrants changed three times in a very fundamental manner. This makes it understandable why in 2002 Parliament decided that “integration had failed.” The better analysis, however, would have been that the integration process had been steadily progressing, but that the standards by which integration is measured had been changed repeatedly because of changes in integration policies. This was also the conclusion of the Blok Parliamentary Investigation Committee, albeit in different wordings (Onderzoekscommissie, 2004). However, this still does not fully explain the actual reasons for the changes in policy. Thränhardt (2004), a German political scientist familiar with the Netherlands, has suggested that, all things considered, the Dutch welfare state ideologists have had too high expectations of the outcomes of their social engineering efforts. Formulating policy objectives is not the same as achieving them, while certain processes,

138 / han entzinger

such as immigrant integration, may also take place without any specific policies, as many classical immigration countries have experienced. Others have pointed at “democratic impatience” as an explanation: politicians need to show quick results of their policies (Vermeulen and Penninx, 1994). However, integration processes are nearly always long haul and, therefore, integration is an unattractive field for scoring. Dutch politicians, used to thinking in terms of social engineering, may have underestimated this at first and, once they had realized it, decided to further neglect the issue. As a consequence of this, popular dissatisfaction with immigration had remained largely unnoticed until it came to an outburst around 2001. What has happened since then bears many signs of an identity crisis in Dutch society: Who are we, what makes us different from them, and why do they not want to be like us? As we have seen, religion plays a central role in the debate, which is not uncommon in the light of Dutch history. However, the debate is strongly biased toward the perceived threats of a militant Islam. Even cabinet ministers have recently argued in public that “Muslims are more sensitive to criticism than Dutch are, and that they must change such practices” or—to explain the shortage of organs for transplants—that “Islam forbids Muslims to donate their organs, but not to accept organs from non-Muslims.” Vasta claims that the current debate on Islam in the Netherlands shows signs of racism. She argues that economic and security issues have been translated into cultural and religious ones, so that an outcry emerges against “different values” and “backward religions” (Vasta, 2005). The renewed interest in national history and the perpetual debate on what is to be understood by “Dutch values” are equally illustrative of the current crisis (RMO, 1999). However, such a crisis is not unique to the Netherlands. In the past years, other European countries have experienced similar debates, such as Germany on its presumed Leitkultur (guiding culture), France on laïcité (i.e., the relationship between church and state), and Britain on a national curriculum in her schools. Apparently, European societies feel a need to reaffirm from time to time who they are and where they stand. Therefore, it is quite possible that other European countries will experience similar shifts in their debates on immigration and identity as the Netherlands has, even though the positions taken in this country seem to be more extreme than elsewhere. It has been suggested that international factors such as continuing globalization, the ever-advancing European integration process, international terrorism, Muslim fundamentalism, along with the perceived inability to control international migration effectively have all given rise to feelings of anxiety, threat, and insecurity among the Dutch. These feelings have been projected on the immigrants and their presumed unwillingness to become like “us.” Ethnocentric views covered up


the fact that immigrants had never been invited, let alone encouraged to actually do so. Initially the policy focus was on separateness; later it shifted to institutional integration and only very recently assimilation has become the norm. In fact, the rules were changed while the game was on. A Theoretical Post-Script The remaining question is what academics can learn from developments in the Netherlands for their theorizing on phenomena such as multiculturalism and integration. We may conclude that Dutch multiculturalism, modeled after the pillarization experience, was ill reflected. Pillarization had fostered the emancipation of indigenous religious and ideological communities. It had worked not only because the minorities needed one another to build majorities, but also, and primarily, because there existed a common ground for mutual understanding. Notwithstanding their institutional separateness all communities shared the same language, the same laws, and national symbols and, to a large extent, the same history. Pillarization was possible thanks to a paternalistic way of seeking consensus at the top of what Lijphart (1975) labeled a “consociational democracy.” For the immigrants the situation was very different. The Netherlands had acknowledged only reluctantly that most of them were to stay for good and their numbers were not relevant for majority building. Institutional separateness was presented as a sign of respect for cultural diversity, but in reality there was a strong undercurrent of indifference, if not ethnocentrism (Scheepers et al., 2003). In practice, therefore, it served as a means of excluding immigrants from mainstream society. The Dutch multicultural model failed to achieve incorporation because the native population had too little in common with the newcomers, who in return did not identify sufficiently with their new country and who were not asked to do so either. This is why Castles and Miller (2003: 44) are right when they claim that in immigrant societies multiculturalism only works if the migrants’ primary loyalty lies with the place where they live. Given a growing transnationalism among migrant communities, the search for new and different models of incorporation seems urgent (Engbersen et al., 2003). Such models should no longer be based on the idea of an exclusive loyalty to one nation-state. This is probably why classical immigration countries such as Canada and the United States—and to a lesser extent Australia—have been more successful in incorporating their newcomers while recognizing the value of cultural difference. Their definition of what constitutes a nation leaves more room for ethnic and cultural diversity than most European definitions do. Adherence to certain cultural values and membership of a state (i.e. citizenship) are not as closely

140 / han entzinger

linked to one another, as is the case in most European countries. Kymlicka may be right when he argues that Canada’s multiculturalism has been less disputed than its European counterparts, at least so far, since in that country diversity has become an unalienable element of nation building (Kymlicka, 1998). This is not so in Europe where, historically, most nation-states define themselves in “ethnic” rather than in “civic” terms (Brubaker, 1992). However, irrespective of the way it is being institutionalized, there are obvious limits to the degree of diversity that a country can cope with. Institutionalized multiculturalism must not necessarily fail, but it is likely to be more successful as 1. The cultures concerned have more in common with each other 2. The role of the state is more limited, so that there is less need for a codification of cultures in a vast range of policy areas, and 3. It is inclusive rather than exclusive, which means that it must be based on principles of equal rights and nondiscrimination. All these conditions were not met in the Netherlands during the early days of immigrant incorporation. Later, the need for certain commonly shared values, for some form of linguistic assimilation, and for an effective antidiscrimination policy has become more generally recognized (RMO, 2005: 54). This recognition may have come too late, not because the migrants had become “inassimilable” in the meantime, but because the Dutch had come to see them as such. Dutch multiculturalism thus helped perpetuate the migrants’ marginal situation in society, but it was not the only mechanism of exclusion. The low employment and educational levels had fostered the migrants’ dependency on public support. Of course, welfare benefits and other social policy instruments guaranteed them a reasonably decent standard of living, but only in the margins of society. Actually, it can be argued that it is precisely the generous welfare system that has trapped many migrants in a quasiunderclass position. Returning to the countries where they felt were home would imply losing their only source of income, but staying on led to a further marginalization, a dilemma that others have also pointed at (e.g. Bommes, 1999; Brochmann and Hammar, 1999). In the Dutch case, however, it may have manifested itself more strongly than elsewhere, since it was superseded by the dominant multiculturalist ideologies that equally promoted the migrants’ isolation. The combination of these specific circumstances may also explain why the assimilative response has been stronger in the Netherlands than in other European countries (Koopmans, 2003). What type of assimilation are we thinking of here? In his comparison of changing perspectives on immigration and its sequels in France, Germany,


and the United States, Brubaker concludes that a new form of assimilation is emerging (Brubaker, 2003). In all three countries he observes a shift from “an overwhelming focus on persisting difference, to a broader focus that encompasses emerging commonalities as well” (Brubaker, 2003: 51). True as this may be, also for the Netherlands, the accent on commonalities has become so strong in the current Dutch political and social discourse that it can almost be qualified as what Brubaker calls “a return to the bad old days of arrogant assimilationism.” This form of assimilationism sees populations of immigrant origin as moldable and meltable. Brubaker qualifies this type of assimilationism as transitive (“to make similar”), whereas he rather advocates an intransitive understanding (“to become similar”) of the process. Intransitive assimilationism, according to Brubaker, is a characteristic of social processes at an aggregate level, rather than something that takes place at the level of individual persons. It designates a direction of change, not a particular degree of similarity. As such it is largely unintended and often invisible. It is not something done to persons, but rather something accomplished by them. In a liberal democracy transitive assimilation seems hard to achieve and against fundamental principles. Forcing “them” to become like “us” in the old-fashioned assimilative way is not only counterproductive, but it may also provoke a re-ethnicization, as can be observed in the Netherlands today. The better way, therefore, seems to encourage newcomers and minority members to participate on an equal footing in a society’s mainstream institutions and to facilitate them in doing so. Intransitive assimilation will then occur more or less automatically, even though it may take some time. This was the dominant view in the Dutch integrationist approach of the 1990s, but it was thwarted by the Fortuynist revolution. True liberal democracies may still find it more appropriate to strive for this than to force old-fashioned forms of transitive assimilation upon their new citizens, as the present Dutch approach advocates. Note 1. This government was actually a coalition of the main liberal parties (in a philosophical sense). In the Netherlands it is commonly referred to as the “purple” coalition, since purple is the color that results from the blending of the colors of the three constituent parties: red (Labour), blue (Liberals), and green (Democrats).

References Bolkestein, Frits (1991), Address to the Liberal International conference at Luzern (Friday, September 6), The Hague: VVD.

142 / han entzinger Bolt, Gideon (2004), “Over spreidingsbeleid en drijfzand,” Migrantenstudies, 20, 2, pp. 60–73. Bommes, Michael (1999), Migration und nationaler Wohlfahrtsstaat. Ein differenzierungstheoretischer Entwurf, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Brochmann, Grete and Tomas Hammar (eds.) (1999), Mechanisms of Immigration Control. A Comparative Analysis of European Regulation Policies, Oxford: Berg. Brubaker, Rogers (1992), Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (2003), “The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and its Sequels in France, Germany and the United States,” in Christian Joppke and Eva Morawska (eds.) Toward Assimilation and Citizenship; Immigration in Liberal Nation-States, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 39–58. Castles, Stephen and Mark Miller (2003), The Age of Migration, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Cliteur, Paul (2002), Moderne Papoea’s. Dilemma’s van een multiculturele samenleving, Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers. Dagevos, Jaco, Mérove Gijsberts, and Carlo van Praag (2003), Rapportage minderheden 2003, Den Haag: SCP. De Beer, Paul (2004), “Insluiting en uitsluiting: de keerzijden van de verzorgingsstaat” in Han Entzinger and Jelle van der Meer (eds.) Grenzeloze solidariteit. Naar een migratiebestendige verzorgingsstaat, Amsterdam: De Balie, pp. 26–42. De Beus, Jos de (1998), De cultus van vermijding, Utrecht: Forum. De Hart, Betty (2004), “Political Debates on Dual Nationality in the Netherlands (1990–2003),” IMIS-Beiträge, 24, pp. 149–162. De Heer, Jan-Coen (2004), “The Concept of Integration in Converging Dutch Migration and Minorities Policies,” IMIS-Beiträge, 24, pp. 177–188. Engbersen, G., E. Snel, A. Leerkes, M. van San, and H. Entzinger (2003), Over landsgrenzen. Transnationale betrokkenheid en integratie, Rotterdam: Risbo/Erasmus Universiteit. Entzinger, Han (2003), “The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism: The Case of the Netherlands,” in Christian Joppke and Eva Morawska (eds.) Toward Assimilation and Citizenship; Immigration in Liberal Nation-States, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 59–86. ——— (2004) Integration and Orientation Courses in a European Perspective, Nürnberg: Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge. Fortuyn, Pim (2002), De puinhopen van acht jaar paars, Uithoorn: Karakter. Huntington, Samuel P. (1998), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, London: Touchstone. Junger-Tas, Josine (2002), “Etnische minderheden, maatschappelijke integratie en criminaliteit,” in Jan Lucassen and Arie de Ruijter (eds.) Nederland multicultureel en pluriform?, Amsterdam: Aksant, pp. 247–277. Joppke, Christian and Eva Morawska (eds.) (2003), Toward Assimilation and Citizenship; Immigration in Liberal Nation-States, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Koopmans, Ruud (2003), “Het Nederlandse integratiebeleid in internationaal vergelijkend perspectief: Etnische segregatie onder de multiculturele oppervlakte,” in Huub Pellikaan and Margo Trappenburg (eds.) Politiek in de multiculturele samenleving, Amsterdam: Boom, pp. 64–100.

changing the rules while the game is on / 143 Kymlicka, Will (1998), Finding Our Way. Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada, Don Mills: Oxford University Press. Lijphart, Arend (1975), The Politics of Accommodation. Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands, Berkeley: University of California Press. Michalowski, Ines (2004), “Integration Programmes for Newcomers—a Dutch Model for Europe?” IMIS-Beiträge, 24, pp. 163–175. Onderzoekscommissie Integratiebeleid (Parliamentary Investigation Committee for Integration Policy) (2004) Bruggen bouwen, Tweede Kamer, vergaderjaar 2003–2004, 28 689 nr. 9, Den Haag. Pels, Dick (2003), De geest van Pim; Het gedachtegoed van een politieke dandy, Amsterdam: Anthos. Phalet, Karen, Claudia van Lotringen, and Han Entzinger (2000), Islam in de multiculturele samenleving. Opvattingen van jongeren in Rotterdam, Utrecht: ERCOMER. Phalet, Karen and Jessica Ter Wal (eds.) (2004), Moslim in Nederland, Den Haag/ Utrecht: SCP/Ercomer. Rath, Jan (1991), Minorisering: de sociale constructie van ‘etnische minderheden,’ Amsterdam: Sua. RMO (Council for Social Development) (1999), Nationale identiteit in Nederland, Den Haag. RMO (2004), Over insluiting en vermijding. Twee essays over segregratie en integratie, Den Haag. RMO (2005), Eenheid, verscheidenheid en binding. Over concentratie en integratie van minderheden in Nederland, Den Haag. Scheepers, Peer, Marcel Coenders, and Marcel Lubbers (2003), Historisch overzicht van etnocentrische reacties in Nederland aan het einde van de twintigste eeuw, B en M, 30, 2, pp. 80–89. Scheffer, Paul (2000), “Het multiculturele drama,” NRC Handelsblad, January 29, 2000. ——— Scheffer, Paul (2004), “De vermijding voorbij,” in RMO, pp. 51–90. Schnabel, Paul (2000), De multiculturele illusie. Een pleidooi voor aanpassing en assimilatie, Utrecht: Forum. Sowell, Thomas (1980), Ethnic America. A History, New York: Basic. Thränhardt, Dietrich (2004), “Turkish Immigrants in Germany and the Netherlands. Facts and Perceptions,” Paper presented at Bogazici University, Istanbul. Uitermark, Justus and Jan Willem Duyvendak (2004), “De weg naar sociale insluiting. Over segregatie, spreiding en sociaal kapitaal,” in RMO, pp. 7–49. Van der Zwan, Arie (2001), “Het klassieke drama van een nieuwe maatschappelijke onderklasse,” Socialisme en Democratie, 58, 4, pp. 131–146. Vasta, Ellie (2005), “From Ethnic Minorities to Ethnic Majority Policy: Changing Identities and the New Assimilationism in the Netherlands,” Paper presented at IMES, University of Amsterdam. Veenman, Justus (ed.) (2002), De toekomst in meervoud. Perspectief op multicultureel Nederland, Assen: Van Gorcum. Vermeulen, Hans and Rinus Penninx (eds.) (1994), Het democratisch ongeduld. De emancipatie van zes doelgroepen van het minderhedenbeleid, Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis.

144 / han entzinger Wansink, Hans (2004), De erfenis van Fortuyn. De Nederlandse democratie na de opstand van de kiezers, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. WRR (Scientific Council for Government Policy) (1989), Allochtonenbeleid, Den Haag: Sdu. ——— (2003), Waarden, normen en de last van het gedrag, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Part III Muslim Communities and the Politics of Incorporation


C h ap t e r 7 The Murder of Theo van Gogh: Gender, Religion, and the Struggle over Immigrant Integration in the Netherlands Anna C. Korteweg

I find out about the murder of Theo van Gogh by a radical young Muslim man days after it happened. It’s Saturday, November 5th and just as Shabbat ends, my husband asks me “what do you think of that murder in Holland?” I ask him “what murder?” And he tells me the little bit that he knows. I fly up the two flights of stairs to my third floor study, turn on the computer, hit the newspapers, and start reading. The next day, I talk to my mother on the phone. “Isn’t it terrible,” I say. “Yes, it’s not that I liked him; he could be really rude and obnoxious,” she responds, “but to be killed like that . . .” A few days later I call my sister, a lawyer in Amsterdam. I didn’t know much about van Gogh and we talk about him. She tells me that he made a habit of saying the most offensive things about all kinds of minority groups. “However,” she continues, “when he said something about the Jews, they took him to court and got him to stop. This is what that Moroccan should have done. That’s the problem; they should realize that we have a court system.” A bit later in the conversation, she nuances this statement. “The trouble is that after his libel suit about his statements about the Jews, he got more careful. Where he had libeled individuals in that case, he now confined himself to making blanket statements about groups, which meant that nobody could take him to court. Nonetheless, killing is not the way to show that you are offended.”

These two conversations in a nutshell summarize the response in Dutch newspapers and media immediately after the murder of Van Gogh.1 First, there was the shock, the sense that such things do not happen in Holland— though this feeling seemed a bit stale two years after the murder of

148 / anna c. korteweg

Pim Fortuyn, the popular antiimmigrant populist politician. Then came the anger, condemnation, and frustration—feelings that were quickly aimed at Muslim immigrants, particularly those of Moroccan descent. Two elementary schools were burned down, mosques and churches were attacked. Third, not captured in these conversations with my family, was the search for ways to protect Dutch society against acts of terror—a debate that skirted close to classifying all Muslims as potential perpetrators of such acts. In this chapter, I analyze the Dutch newspaper reports from the first ten days after the murder as a catalyst for thinking through the situation of Muslim minority groups in the Netherlands at the beginning of this century.2 When it comes to immigrant incorporation regimes, the Netherlands has exemplified two trends. During the 1980s and early 1990s, policymakers and researchers looked toward the Netherlands as an example of a successful multicultural approach to immigrants (Entzinger, 2003; Joppke and Morawska, 2003, chapter 6). The Dutch version of multiculturalism aimed to protect group rights and group identity while promoting participation in Dutch society.3 By the early 1990s, however, it became clear that while group rights were protected, participation did not follow. Dutch researchers on immigration then successfully promoted a more activist, individualized approach to immigrants (see Entzinger, 2003). “Integration” became the leitmotif of Dutch policy toward what they call newcomers and “oldcomers”—earlier immigrants who have long-established residence in the Netherlands but who have not become full participants in Dutch society. The programs that aim at further integration have provided a much imitated model of immigrant integration both within and outside of Europe (Joppke, 2003). In Dutch policy documents and policy analyses, integration has three aspects: economic, social, and cultural. In 1990, the unemployment rate for Turkish and Moroccan immigrants hovered around 30 percent (Dagevos, 2001b, 14). The comparable rate for the Dutch population was 6 percent. While there was tremendous improvement in immigrants’ labor force participation rates during the strong economy of the late 1990s, they continued to suffer far greater rates of unemployment than the general Dutch population (Dagevos, 2001b: 14). In the early 1990s, the systemic exclusion of long-term unemployed from Dutch society became a primary concern for Dutch welfare policymakers who connected employment to social participation. Under pressure of welfare state restructuring, individual social integration came to focus on individual economic participation. More recently, however, integration policy has been shifting toward emphasizing the need for the cultural integration of individuals. This started with calls for language-learning as part of increasing the employability of immigrants, but more recently people have argued that immigrants should learn

the murder of theo van gogh / 149

Dutch history and adopt Dutch culture (see Scheffer, 2000; Entzinger 2003, chapter 6). What is of particular interest for this chapter is the way cultural integration is operationalized in Dutch studies (often sponsored directly by the government or one of its research arms); cultural integration is measured in terms of the level of secularization and acceptance of gender equality (see also Favell, 2001; Dagevos, 2001a; Commissie Blok, 2004; SCP, 2004). As policy support for multiculturalism declines, integration focuses increasingly on the creation of a modern individual in both the public and the private sphere. Cultural integration, in this context, is not simply about universal requirements for the maintenance of liberal democracy such as language competence and knowledge of liberal norms and values. Rather, the current boundary line between private and public that is at the root of the liberal ideal of individual freedom is being breached by implicit demands that immigrants adopt private practices with regard to religion and gender that are similar to those of the receiving society (see Benhabib, 2002; Kastoryano, 2004).4 In Dutch newspapers, the murder of Van Gogh was tied directly to (the failure of ) these private forms of cultural integration. By analyzing these newspaper accounts in the context of Dutch integration policies, I foreground not only the oft-discussed factor of religion but I also show how gender becomes the terrain upon which the battle for the modern individual is fought (see also Okin, 1999; Benhabib, 2002). Ultimately, I argue that as culture, in the form of secularization and egalitarian gender practices, becomes the focus of integration, integration becomes a quest for strong forms of assimilation, or the absorption of newcomers in the culture of the receiving country (Brubaker, 2003). As Brubaker (2003) rightfully claims, the goal of strong, or what he calls transitive, assimilation died with the realization that there exist no unified cultures into which newcomers can integrate. However, I argue in this chapter that the calls for assimilation are an attempt to resurrect a unified sense of “Dutch culture” and, ultimately, of “Dutch nationality.” Integration, then, is not (only) about adopting universal liberal values, but (also) about (re)establishing the ethnic basis of the Dutch nation-state, one that is defined via particular gender and religious practices. In what follows, I first discuss the murder and the three figures most directly involved—Theo Van Gogh, Mohammed B.,5 and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In the next section, I tie this discussion to the issues surrounding immigrant integration that face Dutch society. Lastly, I analyze the implications for general theories of immigrant integration, highlighting the need to seriously engage not only with religion but also with the gendered aspects of current integration policies.


The Murder of Theo Van Gogh On the morning of November 2, 2004, Theo Van Gogh was bicycling to work to finish the final edits on a movie about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch populist politician. Halfway to work, he was attacked by Mohammed B., who shot Van Gogh multiple times before knifing him and slashing his throat. Mohammed B. then used two knives to pin two letters to Van Gogh’s body. One of these letters was a farewell poem, the other a death threat addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Mohammed B. walked away but was arrested within minutes, after a gun fight with the police that shattered his thigh bone but failed to give him the martyrdom he desired. Over the course of the next few days, it became clear that Van Gogh had been targeted not only for his extremely offensive public denunciations of Islam but also for his role in the making of the movie Submission Part 1. This movie accuses Islam of promoting violence against women by projecting Koranic verses that seem to justify the mistreatment of women on the naked bodies of veiled actresses. Van Gogh made this movie in collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch Muslim parliamentarian of Somali descent. In what follows, I look at each person in this deadly triangle. In the ten days after November 2, 2004, De Volkskrant printed 40 and NRC Handelsblad 69 articles that focused on aspects of the murder. Based on my reading of these articles, I take each figure in this tragedy as a jumping off point to describe the trends and issues facing immigrant integration in the Netherlands. De Volkskrant is historically the paper associated with the labor party, or the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA), while NRC is a more centrist paper appealing to a more academically informed public. De Volkskrant had the highest distribution among “quality” papers and NRC the second highest (see also Phalet and van Praag, 2004: 27). Two themes stand out in the discussion of the murder: religion/secularization and gender equality. In what follows, I show how the stories attached to each of the three actors in this drama highlight different facets of these two themes. In the week that followed his murder, friends and collaborators of Van Gogh described him in newspaper articles as a talented moviemaker who could have been “the Van Gogh of the silver screen,” following in the footsteps of his talented great-uncle Vincent (Fallaux in NRC, November 5, 2004). Journalists covering his life story added a portrayal of van Gogh as a highly problematic, polarizing public figure whose denouncements of Jews and Muslims shocked and irritated many (NRC, November 3, 2005). For example, he greatly offended the Dutch Jewish community when he described the Dutch Jewish writer Leon de Winter as somebody who tried to get rich off Jewish suffering and when he joked “it smells like caramel


here . . . They must be burning the diabetic Jews today.” He also steadfastly referred to Muslim as “goat fuckers” or as the “fifth column of goat fuckers” (NRC, November 3, 2005). While such comments are extremely offensive to most, Dutch journalists grappled with the fact that Van Gogh seemed to be in touch with popular sentiments that had earlier lead to the real possibility of Pim Fortuyn, the antiimmigrant populist politician, becoming prime minister. While Van Gogh’s movies address social issues, they do so obliquely. It is in his writings—mostly columns for a variety of newspapers—that he echoed similar sentiments as Pim Fortuyn. Like Fortuyn, Van Gogh railed against what he saw as the backwardness of Muslim culture, a backwardness that in his perception threatened Dutch society. Gender and sexual politics were key in this take on the purported practices of immigrants. When asked why he referred to Muslims as “goat fuckers,” Van Gogh appealed to the writings of the late Ayatollah Khomeini who apparently wrote that a man in great sexual need should turn to a goat. Muslim women, then, seem invisible in Van Gogh’s universe. Defining an entire community through the purported sexual practices of the men in that community is one way to reinforce hegemonic masculinity both within one’s own community and vis-à-vis a nondominant group of men (see Connell, 1995; Kimmel, 2003a). By tying these purported sexual practices to a particular religion, Van Gogh also portrayed the absence of secularization as a key reason for the cultural backwardness of the Muslim community.6 While some policymakers and others search for gender equality in the relationships between women and men, Van Gogh inadvertently shows us how the struggle over the meaning of Islam in Dutch society is also a gendered struggle about the definitions of hegemonic masculinity. Insofar as newspaper reports recognized these complex interlocking themes of religion/secularization and gender equality in Van Gogh’s life and work, they tied them to the right to free speech and freedom of movement in liberal democracies. To van Gogh, this movie, as well as his writings, were a line in the sand against those who would argue that Dutch tolerance toward others required careful speech. Instead, shocking speech should dislodge the complacency of multiculturalism. Newspaper articles recounted how van Gogh told Ayaan Hirsi Ali when they were making Submission that the worst thing he could imagine was that nobody would care about the movie’s contents. Van Gogh’s defense of Dutchness extended to a refusal of police protection (like Fortuyn before him) after he had started to receive death threats. Accepting such protection would have meant accepting an altered Dutch moral landscape. In this context, riding his bicycle to work, something many politicians in the Netherlands continue to do as well,


became a defiantly Dutch act, aimed, in its own small way, at safeguarding Van Gogh’s interpretation of Dutch national identity. van Gogh’s method for defining both Islam and Dutch national identity were not universally accepted in the days after his murder. Some writers criticized the type of free speech that Van Gogh practiced. Remco Campert, a writer and columnist for De Volkskrant, argued that, given the content of what Van Gogh had to say, people should not turn him into the “hero of free speech” (De Volkskrant, November 3, 2005). Free speech should not be solely hurtful speech; if it is hurtful, it should also contain a positive contribution to society. Similarly, Hans Van der Ven, a professor of comparative religion and human rights, wrote in his column for the NRC that free speech needs to always be judged in context of the common good (NRC, November 4, 2005). The right to human dignity might trump the right to free speech, he argued. However, these critical assessments of the boundaries of free speech did not address the content of Van Gogh’s writings or movies. Thus, the tensions emanating from Van Gogh’s definition of Dutch society as secular and gender equal and of Muslim culture as religious and rife with gender inequality did not become an explicit focus in the reporting on his life. The content of Van Gogh’s writings and of Submission tested the limits of tolerance that were also at the foundation of Dutch multicultural policies. After all, Dutch multiculturalism, tied as it was to the tradition of “pillarization” or the recognition of political-religious group differences that lies at the foundation of the Dutch welfare state, meant largely “you can do what you want to as long you leave me (or us) alone to do what I (or we) want to” (see also Joppke, 2003 and Entzinger, 2003, chapter 6). Thus, the much-vaunted Dutch tolerance never implied acceptance of (groups of ) others but rather emphasized coexistence without interference. Increasingly, this coexistence has come to mean indifference (see also Ten Hooven, 2002: 9). Van Gogh’s public discourses shook the foundation of this indifferent coexistence by increasing the tension between the nonimmigrant Dutch population and Muslim immigrants. His writings as well as the movie he made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali were extremely offensive to Muslims and ultimately made him the target of murder. At the same time, his writings fueled popular antiimmigrant sentiments. That antiimmigrant feelings are on the rise in the Netherlands is evident in a recent survey, where almost 60 percent of nonimmigrant Dutch responded that they would not like to have an “ethnically different” neighbor, up from about 45 percent in 1995 (SCP, 2004: 159). Similarly, in a survey administered by De Volkskrant about Dutch attitudes toward Islam, 48 percent of respondents agreed that they would move to a “more white neighborhood” if their neighborhood became predominantly nonwhite


(De Volkskrant, January 22, 2005). That gender plays an important role in these attitudes toward Islam is clear from the fact that in the same survey 43 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “I am afraid that Dutch women won’t be able to behave in public the way they want to.” These statistics explain the popularity of politicians like Fortuyn (and more recently, the politician Geert Wilders) who argue that Islam as a religion is tied to gender practices that signify a backward culture. Given the continuing rise of the Muslim population in the Netherlands, there is an increasing sense that Muslim culture, here seen as a unified whole, threatens the freedoms of Dutch society, particularly freedoms associated with gender. The movie Submission that Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali made represented an attempt to safeguard what each believed are the principles of Dutch society—secularization and the ability to speak one’s mind for Van Gogh, and gender equality, in particular the defense of Muslim women against the purported dangers of Islam, for Hirsi Ali. However, their methods of communicating this might well have contributed to an increased polarization within Dutch society around the issue of immigrant integration. Theo Van Gogh, then, stands for the values of the nonimmigrant Dutch population, and his life and death reveal the Dutch discomfort with religious expression as well as Dutch understandings of gender equality. Mohammed B., by contrast, represents the tensions that come with dual citizenship, multiculturalism, and the quest for immigrant integration. At the time of the murder, Mohammed B. was a 26-year-old Dutch and Moroccan citizen, born in the Netherlands and raised in Amsterdam by parents who emigrated from Morocco. Mohammed B., then, is not the stranger to Dutch society that the label “radical Muslim terrorist” might evoke. Rather, his radicalism is very much the product of his experiences growing up in the Netherlands as a Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent. From the newspaper accounts, it becomes clear that Mohammed B. was meant to be a Dutch immigrant success story. These same newspaper accounts create two kinds of narratives to explain why this story ended differently than expected. The first maps Mohammed B.’s relationship to Dutch institutions and practices. In the second story, Mohammed B. is a member of a radical Muslim network with ties to Al-Qaeda. In this story Mohammed B. is no longer a subject of a nation-state but becomes a postnational figure. Both are narratives of alienation, and, in different ways, encapsulate the mediating role of gender in the tensions between liberal political values and adherence to a particular form of Islam. The first story is one in which particular national troubles are embodied in the figure of Mohammed B. Here Mohammed B.’s life reveals the limits of both multiculturalism and of individualized economic integration. Unemployment among Moroccans in the Netherlands has been high for


decades. In 2004, the figure stood at 22.3 percent against a general unemployment rate of 6.4 percent (CBS, 2005). Such high levels of unemployment in part explain why 38 percent of all Moroccans in the Netherlands live in poverty (SCP, 2004: 147–148). Reports on immigrant integration see low levels of education and difficulties with the Dutch language as a barrier to the improvement of the lives of Moroccan immigrants. Mohammed B. seemed destined to buck this trend. He was a good high school student who attended the HAVO, which prepares students for professional and managerial careers. However, he was not able to convert the intellectual abilities and drive his high school teachers still remember into a postsecondary degree and career (NRC, November 5, 2005). Although he attended a professional program for cultural social work, he did not finish. Briefly involved with street crime, he became an active volunteer in the local neighborhood community center where he counseled other Moroccan youth to continue their education and stay off the streets. But two years prior to the murder, he demanded that the center allow him to organize study sessions for men only. This kind of gender-segregated learning does not fit with Dutch perceptions of modernity and gender equality. In addition, it arouses a Dutch discomfort with organized religion and in the newspaper reports, these requests are seen as an early sign of his radicalization. When Mohammed B. made these requests, the center where he volunteered asked him to end his volunteer work. In this narrative, then, Mohammed B. becomes successively unmoored from Dutch society as he loses his ties first to the economy and then to the society. He is unable to find paid work and becomes unable to retain his volunteer position in an organization whose definition of Dutch culture rejects the separation of the sexes valued by certain orthodox forms of Islam. However, the reports on Mohammed B. do not connect his radicalization to the forces within Dutch society that prevented his successful participation in social and economic spheres. Rather, the turning point in Mohammed B.’s life, according to the papers, is the death of his mother from cancer two years prior to the murder (NRC, November 4, 2005). In this gendered explanation for Mohammed B.’s actions, mothers, not social institutions and practices, anchor children in society. The death of his mother is where the second story begins. In this second narrative, Mohammed B. ceases to be Dutch as he transforms into a radical Muslim terrorist who is no longer regulated by the laws of the nation-state or the tenets of Dutch culture. His life going nowhere, Mohammed B. becomes the figure of the young man in search of meaning. Many second and third-generation Muslims in the Netherlands are becoming more secular, not in their identification as Muslims, which increasingly becomes an ethnic identification, but in their religious practices (Phalet and van Praag,


2004: 10–11). However, Mohammed B. belongs to a small percentage of Dutch youth who are turning to more fundamentalist forms of Islam. According to the newspapers, Mohammed B. ended up ever more interested in the teachings of a Syrian teacher known as Abu Khaled who advocates a particular form of jihad (NRC, November 9, 2004). This Syrian teacher is apparently a member of a radical, separatist sect, Takfir wal Hijra, that aims to restore a unified Muslim community, umma, under a single religious ruler (NRC, November 10, 2004). This sect, which has ties to Al-Qaeda, justifies attacks on all who do not abide by its tenets, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, while glorifying “martyrdom” among its followers. Some read such desire for martyrdom as an attempt by young men with failed middle-class aspirations to reassert their masculinity (Kimmel, 2003b). However, while Mohammed B. might have rejected Dutch society and the Dutch nation-state, the state continues to control his life. Rather than becoming a martyr, as Mohammed B. had envisioned, he is now awaiting trial in jail, and he remains, at least for now, a Dutch citizen, subject to Dutch laws. In both stories of Mohammed B.’s life, the label “Dutch” is increasingly confusing and this confusion is important. Mohammed B.’s passport is Dutch and his education is Dutch but that did not make him Dutch even before the killing. And after the killing, he has placed himself, and is placed by others, outside Dutch society rather than seen as an outgrowth of it. In the newspaper articles that tell the two stories, Mohammed B. responds to the obstacles to his economic and social integration into the Netherlands by rejecting cultural integration. He targets Van Gogh for his slurs against Islam in general and for his making of a movie that questions Muslim gender relations in particular. In this reading, Mohammed B. comes to represent a particular form of postnationalism that threatens the integrity of the Dutch nation. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the third figure in this tragedy, seems at first sight to be an example of successful integration into Dutch society. The daughter of Hirsi Magan, one of the political leaders in Somalia’s long struggle, and the second of his four wives, Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and (mostly) Kenya. She was allowed to go to school but experienced the version of Islam her family lives by as extremely restrictive. In 1992, her father married her to a distant cousin in Canada. En route to her new husband, Hirsi Ali escaped from an airport in Germany and took the train to the Netherlands. She was granted political asylum under the old, more lenient, asylum laws, and became a naturalized Dutch citizen in 1997. After arriving in the Netherlands, she first learned Dutch and then went to college and obtained a master’s degree in political science. In 2001, Hirsi Ali started working for the research institute of the Dutch Labor Party (PvdA).


When, in 2002, she argued in a television show that the Prophet was a pervert for marrying a nine-year old, she received death threats and had to go into hiding. During this time, Liberal politician Neelie Kroes and liberal feminist journalist Cisca Dresselhuys persuaded her to become a candidate for parliament for the (right) Liberal party (VVD) and she has been a member of Dutch parliament representing the VVD since 2003.7 Hirsi Ali’s goal in life and in politics is to liberate Muslim women (NRC, August 28, 2005). This liberation is not about reforming Islam but takes the form of rejecting Islam and its tenets, tying gender equality firmly to secularization. As a victim of female genital mutilation at age five, a fact mentioned in many of her biographies, Hirsi Ali uses her position in Dutch society to agitate for the liberation of Muslim women. As part of this work, Hirsi Ali wrote the script for Submission and approached Van Gogh in the summer of 2004 to ask if he was interested in making the movie with her. While Van Gogh initially thought the movie lacked a sense of humor, he agreed to shoot it (NRC, August 28, 2004). When in August of that same year, Hirsi Ali was invited to create an evening of television programming for one of the Dutch networks, she decided to show this eleven minute long film. Death threats followed and she received round-the-clock protection, probably the main reason why she is still alive. Van Gogh, not a politician and therefore not mandated to accept such protection, rejected similar offers.8 The death threat that Mohammed B. pinned to Van Gogh’s body caused Hirsi Ali to go into hiding again. She did not return to parliament until mid-January 2005. In this story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s life and political career, she both bridges and intensifies the separation between Dutch and Muslim society. On the one hand, as a successful woman from a Muslim background who actively participates in Dutch society, she exemplifies to many the possibility of integration. However, her very participation seems predicated on the renunciation of Islam. Her advocacy on behalf of Muslim women reinforces the perception of Islam as inherently and always backward also put forth by her collaborator, Van Gogh. Drawing such stark lines between two ways of being reinforces a sense of coherence for each community that negates the differences within (Benhabib, 2002). Ultimately, her presence in this drama reflects how gender and religion become the arena of struggle in the battle over integration between newcomers, “oldcomers,” and native-born Dutch. What these three figures stand for in Dutch public discourse, then, captures some of the major issues facing not only Dutch society but many immigrant-receiving nations. Their lives represent the tension between free speech and respect for others, they capture the limits of liberalism and the tension between individual and group rights, they signify both the


perceived failures and successes of economic, social, and cultural integration, and they exemplify the link between gender and secularization that is at the heart of the battle over the participation of Muslim immigrants in Western nation-states. Implications for Immigrant Integration Policies in the Netherlands When it comes to facilitating the participation of Muslim immigrants, the Netherlands offers an example of a nation-state in which the policy of multiculturalism of the 1980s gave way to an emphasis on (individual) integration by the mid-1990s. By making this explicit shift toward the goal of immigrant integration, the Netherlands became a European model for this approach to immigrants (Entzinger, 2003). However, when the commission charged with investigating the successes and failures of immigrant integration declared the Dutch approach a (limited) success, many critiqued these conclusions, painting a far bleaker picture (Commissie Blok, 2003; see also Entzinger, this volume). The murder of Van Gogh seemed to confirm these more pessimistic assessments. Indeed, a feeling of terror and a desire to manage and regulate that terror emanates from the newspaper responses to Van Gogh’s murder. There are two linked sets of fear: (1) the presence of Muslims threatens freedom of speech and Dutch cultural practices; and (2) by extension, radical Muslim terrorists threaten to generally destabilize the country through terrorist attacks (see particularly Jozias Van Aartsen in NRC, November 3, 2004). The first set of fears is about the failure of multiculturalism or the failure of coexistence. The second set of fears centers on the opposite outcome of integration, which is not multiculturalism but societal disintegration (Favell, 2001). In the Dutch newspaper accounts of the murder and the policy proposals that follow, the failure of multiculturalism and the fear of disintegration are linked explicitly to religion, and implicitly to gender differences. To lessen the sense of panic and anger that arose after the murder, Prime Minister Balkenende and various cabinet ministers and party leaders appealed for calm and a continuation of “Dutch” tolerance. However, even established politicians, like Finance Minister Zalm, spoke of a need to go to war against radical Islam. In doing so, Minister Zalm gave voice to an underlying sense that the threat to Dutch society is no longer the slow disintegration of Dutch society under the weight of increasing numbers of immigrant “others,” but an immediate threat of terror and its acute disruptions. Cabinet and parliament also tried to inspire calm by (re)iterating a series of policy recommendations that focused on the management of Islam


within Dutch society. Within the week following the murder, they proposed to take away the Dutch passport of Muslim dual nationals who are convicted of terrorism. In addition, the opposition Labor Party (PvdA) proposed to cease granting residency permits to foreign imams as of 2008, a proposal that met with approval from the governing Christian Democrats (CDA) and Liberals (VVD), and the opposition Greens (GroenLinks). Instead, imams were to be trained by Dutch educational institutions. The Dutch tradition of pillarization had left the Muslim community to regulate their own religious affairs. While the issue of the education of imams had come up before in parliamentary debate, now their dangerous teachings were directly linked to an act of terror.9 In addition to these policy debates, cabinet authorized an in-depth investigation into the potential failure of the Dutch security services (AIVD) to track radical Muslims (it turns out they were monitoring the network that Mohammed B. was part of but that they saw him as a peripheral figure). These policy proposals and this investigation are ultimately about the question of whether security can (only) be guaranteed through external surveillance or whether security can best be guaranteed by the individual and communal internalization of Dutch values. Internalization of values has been the form of social regulation favored in the Dutch policy context since the 1960s (Korteweg, 2004; see also Bussemaker, 1998). However, in anticipation of further extreme expressions of the failure of integration Dutch policymakers seem increasingly willing to move away from relying on the passive internalization of values toward external surveillance and explicit forms of social control. In all these responses to the murder, the focus on immigrant “others” is about averting terror inspired by particular forms of religious fundamentalism. Indeed, within the next three months, the cabinet ministers developed an anti-terror plan that contained many of the proposals uttered in the first week after the murder (some of which had been uttered before). This plan contains proposals such as the jailing of (Muslim) terror suspects without clear proof of wrongdoing, that has led Dutch prosecutors to warn that the foundation of the Dutch rechtsstaat (the rule of law) was being undermined (NRC, February 12, 2005). Not only is there an attempt to create policies that allow for the detention and expulsion of radical (Dutch) Muslims, there is also an increased effort to keep out people who have not already adopted Dutch values. In particular, Minister Rita Verdonk of Foreigners’ Affairs and Integration now heavily promotes her restrictive integration proposals. She is increasing her calls for an extensive and expensive citizenship exam for “non-Western” immigrants to be taken before entry into the Netherlands. The targets here are primarily reuniting family members and prospective spouses of Dutch Muslims of Turkish and Moroccan descent.


In addition, Verdonk proposes that those who have resided in the Netherlands for a long time but who did not receive eight years of schooling while in the Netherlands also be required to take the exam. In the process of articulating these proposals, the blame for the perceived failure of integration is placed squarely in the midst of immigrants, rather than in the potential shortcomings of the receiving nation (see also Entzinger, chapter 6). The newspaper reports contained only a few calls for measures to further immigrant integration that focus on the receiving side of the immigrant integration equation. Sadik Harchaoui, the acting head of Forum, a Dutch organization that promotes multiculturalism and shared citizenship, is himself an immigrant success story. Immediately following the murder, he appealed to a strong Dutch metaphor by calling for the development of a “deltaplan”—the civil engineering plan formed in response to the flooding of a large part of the Netherlands and the loss of 2000 lives in 1953—to prevent the reoccurrence of such crimes (NRC, November 3, 2005). While focusing on Moroccan youths as the ones who need to change, he also argued for a systematic analysis of radical Islam’s attraction for Dutch Muslim youth. In doing so, he tried to restore the seemingly forgotten linkages between economic exclusion and social and cultural participation that received little attention in the debates following the murder. However, his was a lonely voice. In the majority of responses to the murder, we see how the purported causal mechanism of integration increasingly becomes one in which cultural integration precedes social and economic integration. In these analyses, the onus is on immigrants’ ability to adopt the receiving nation’s cultural practices. The idea that prominently shapes this implicit causal argument is that immigrants remain other, different, and ultimately outside Dutch culture even if they possess dual citizenship, or even if they are very much the products of Dutch society, unless they adopt secular practices and a concomitant, particularly Dutch interpretation of gender relations. Their “otherness” is maintained as the aspirations of Muslim immigrants and their children are thwarted by a Dutch inability to see religious people as modern. Here, being modern is a prerequisite for participation in economic and social institutions. Under the prior, multicultural incorporation regime, this “otherness” was bracketed by allowing communities of people, defined by religion and origin, their own religious and other organizations. Now that the emphasis has shifted toward individual integration this bracketing no longer works. Instead, secularization and gender equality become the prerequisites of membership in Dutch society. To begin to understand this murder, then, we have to analyze it in light of the goals of cultural integration: secularization and adherence to gender equality. Van Gogh seemed to represent both with his attacks on Islam and


in the making of the movie Submission. However, Van Gogh’s strong negative response to newcomers might reflect that these processes of secularization and creating gender equality are incomplete even among nonimmigrant Dutch. Mohammed B.’s murderous response to Van Gogh’s attacks on Islam and attendant gender practices, then, signifies a rejection of the movement toward secularization and gender equality. In this reading of the discussions surrounding the murder, Theo Van Gogh represents what it means to be Dutch, while Mohammed B., although very much a product of Dutch society, does not. However, as Fred Leemhuis, an Arabic language scholar specializing in the translations of religious texts, observes in his analysis of Mohammed B.’s writings, his farewell letter would have enabled him to pass his integration course with flying colors, being able to make perfect Saint Nicolas rhymes, the ones that people attach to the presents exchanged on Saint Nicolas’ birthday in December (NRC, November 6, 2004, 11.6.04). However, while Mohammed B.’s life was shaped by Dutch society, as long as he was not secular and adhered to gender relations that looked different than the Dutch norm (whatever that norm may be), he could not be of that society. By contrast, Theo Van Gogh, in all his rudeness, was embraced as a symbol of the Dutch nation, even as people critiqued what he actually said. The figure of Hirsi Ali, however, complicates this neat bifurcation of “us” and “them,” Dutch and “other.” In what she stands for, and the very public ways in which she stands for it, she shows that there is no single response to growing up Muslim. Mohammed B. and Ayaan Hirsi Ali represent the extreme poles of Muslim life in the Netherlands, illustrating that the range of interpretations of Islam is vast. Indeed, despite what the figure of Mohammed B. might suggest, social scientists are actually tracking a process of, if not secularization, then a reinterpretation of Islam among Muslim second-generation immigrants in the Netherlands (Phalet and van Praag, 2004; see also Phalet, et al., 2000). However, such findings get snowed under in the policy responses to the failure of integration that the murder of Van Gogh comes to signify. And here, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s strategy does not help. To see this, we have to distinguish between the perception of Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a Muslim woman and the particular content of her speech. On the one hand, she shows that Muslims can be extremely critical of Islam. On the other hand, in her portrayal Islam she reinforces a very unidimensional image of Muslim culture. Hirsi Ali complicates not only the image of Muslim religious life, she also problematizes the extent to which Dutch women are themselves liberated and the extent to which women’s issues are taken seriously within Dutch politics. Contrary to popular belief, Dutch culture is marked by a traditional gender regime in which women continue to be primarily


responsible for home and hearth and men for breadwinning (Bussemaker, 1998; Plantenga, 1998; Korteweg, 2004). Note, for instance, that a substantial segment of the increase in women’s labor force participation over the past few decades is in part-time work that does not threaten women’s primary identity as mothers. Dutch sexual politics seem quite liberal, see the (half ) naked women on the beach, the general acceptance of teen sexuality and homosexuality, and the legality of prostitution. However, the pressure on women to conform to the traditional care for the home remains strong, even among highly educated women. Furthermore, as Hirsi Ali discovered recently during a policy meeting on honor killings, protecting women against domestic violence takes a back seat to protecting against Muslim terrorism (De Volkskrant, February 11, 2005). The issue of domestic violence and violence against women, within or outside the Muslim community, is seen as far less socially disruptive than events like the murder of Van Gogh. Equality between the sexes seems a key measure of cultural integration in Dutch government reports (Commissie Blok, 2003; see SCP, 2004). In the report written to advise the government on how to proceed with immigrant integration policy, the Commissie Blok singles out women and girls for special attention in many subsections of the report and advises that equal participation in integration programs needs to be assured. However, some of its policy recommendations reproduce the forms of gender inequality that exist among the nonimmigrant Dutch. Witness the emphasis on teaching immigrant women Dutch because they are the ones most closely involved with raising children. Such emphases reinforce a rather traditional division of labor. Thus, while in her work Hirsi Ali might make it appear as though the struggle over gender equality is about the extension of modernity to those who are perceived as non-modern groups, when we go beyond the surface, we see the illiberalism of Dutch gender politics, an illiberalism obscured in this comparison between Islam and the West. Ultimately, the murder of Theo Van Gogh makes clear that secularization/ religion and gender relations are the primary terrain of struggle in the cultural integration of Muslim immigrants in Dutch society. Submission, a movie that aims to address violence against women in the context of Islam, becomes the precipitating factor in killing Van Gogh. Mohammed B.’s alienation from society is linked to the rejection of his proposal to create male-only space at the community center and to the death of his mother. When his turn to radical Islam leads him to murder Van Gogh, Mohammed B. comes to stand for the familiar figure of the threatening male other, one who in this case is no longer embedded in the nation-state. The killing itself also leads to the obscuring or erasure of the female body as Hirsi Ali goes into hiding to avoid being killed herself and as the content of the movie,


no matter how unidimensional in its attack on women’s oppression within Islam, is rendered irrelevant in the debate surrounding the killing. This narrative of the murder mirrors larger issues in Dutch society—the tension between varied expressions of cultural identities, the uneasy accommodation of religious practices, and the struggle over gender equality—that are increasingly addressed through policies that emphasize individual integration over the maintenance of difference. Implications for Theories of Immigrant Integration When during the 1990s, political theorists started to articulate the liberal democratic bases for group rights, in particular the rights of minorities and immigrants within nation-states, the Netherlands quickly became an example of a nation-state with explicitly multicultural immigrant policies (Kymlicka, 1995, 2001; Entzinger, 2003). While many European nations grapple with the fact of being multicultural, that is, of containing increasingly diverse populations, only a few explicitly created policies to recognize these populations as groups. Ironically, as the Netherlands was thus labeled, multiculturalism in the Netherlands was on the decline as the guiding principle in the Dutch policy domain. The rise of Pim Fortuyn indicated the demise of popular support for both multicultural policies and a multicultural society. Attacks on multiculturalism from the right have filtered through to the left, as the debate led by the left-liberal writer Paul Scheffer in 2000 shows. The murder of Theo Van Gogh, then, coincides with increasingly restrictive immigration policy discourses in which individual integration becomes the goal. Of course, Dutch multicultural policies, grafted as they were on pillarization, the very Dutch method of dealing with group difference, already contained a strong emphasis on recognition as a way of integrating into Dutch society (see also Dagevos, 2001a; Entzinger, 2003; Joppke, 2003). The Netherlands continues to be a multicultural society as increasing numbers of immigrants from diverse backgrounds make the Netherlands their home. However, there has been a distinct shift away from multiculturalism in policies toward immigrants. By the early 1990s, economic integration became a primary focus of integration policies, supplemented by social and cultural integration (SCP, 2004: 132). In the current climate, I argue, the focus of integration is shifting. Certain groups of immigrants and their adult children have continued to lag behind native Dutch-born citizens on economic indicators and continued cultural differences centered on religious and gender practices are receiving the blame. As the failure of cultural integration is posited as the main problem with immigrant others, assimilation becomes an explicit policy goal.


In the European context, integration often already means some form of assimilation as integration often refers to language competency and respect for liberal political practices ( Joppke and Morawska, 2003). Brubaker (2003) captures this form of assimilation as an assimilation of similarity, oriented not to one dominant culture but to multiple points of overlap between various groups within societies. By contrast, the strong assimilation that was both the object of study and the goal of policy in Western nation-states prior to the 1960s focused on complete absorption into the receiving nation and on the elimination of difference (Brubaker, 2003). Strong assimilation as a policy goal holds out the normative superiority of a purported national core identity the existence of which, Brubaker argues, cannot be sustained empirically (Brubaker, 2003). However, rereading the Dutch policy analyses of the shifts in policies toward immigrants in light of the responses to Van Gogh’s murder leads me to argue that these policies are increasingly inspired by such a strong form of assimilation. This form of assimilation reflects a felt need for a unified sense of Dutchness. Echoing the old modernization thesis that was applied to the third world, immigrant others are now to become modern by interacting with Dutch neighbors, coworkers, and friends, and by adopting Dutch practices of secularization and gender equality. This return of assimilation as the guide for integration policy is not simply Brubaker’s limited form of adopting similarities but, I would argue, contains components of the old assimilation, absorption, and disappearance into the new culture. In addition, it is not simply about adherence to universal liberal values of respect for life and property and the liberal requirement of a shared language to facilitate political participation (Joppke, 2003). In the reporting after the murder of Theo Van Gogh there is very much a sense that a core aspect of Dutch national identity is violated. In the discussions that followed the murder, as well as in current policy proposals, this core Dutch national identity is reinscribed. This identity is constructed around forms of secularism and gender equality that are particularly Dutch in their content. We can read this process of reinscription as the search for a national identity that renders citizens and denizens safe from bodily harm, and that limits restrictions on freedom of movement and on freedom of expression. While this search for a unified national identity, then, seems to be about basic, universal liberal values that undergird liberal democracies, it is also about the loss of culture, and the fear of society’s disintegration that are nationally specific in their content. It is in the tension between this search for Dutch national identity and the perceived undermining of this identity by the practices of immigrant “others,” particularly Muslim “others,” that a strong form of assimilationism seems to return. What I have argued in this chapter is that this assimilationism has a focused target, namely the purported religious and gendered practices of


these immigrants. Within liberal doctrine such practices pertain to the private sphere, and they should only be interfered with if these practices undermine the public sphere of civil society and politics. However, as much feminist theorizing has shown, this division between public and private is untenable (Fraser, 1989a, 1989b; Pateman, 1989). The state continuously interferes with and crosses over these boundaries, using them and abusing them to uphold or undermine gender inequality, to manage differences between groups within society, to justify the allocation of social rights and so on. Yet it is not only the state that negotiates and regulates these boundaries. Practices associated with “women and children, and the regulation of sex, birth, and death,” in other words practices of the private sphere, are often the source of the most cherished sense of community and identity (Benhabib, 2002: 83). This means that intercultural conflict is most deeply felt when it involves defining the private (Benhabib, 2002: 83–84). Indeed, as this chapter shows, religion is deeply intertwined with the private domain as it often provides the justification for the organization of these seemingly private practices. Attempts to redefine practices, as in the movie Submission, or to ridicule practices, as in the writings of Theo Van Gogh, are experienced as profound attacks by communities of “others.” At the same time, the attack on religious and gendered practices unifies Muslim culture in unproductive ways. In the Dutch policy domain, the current conceptualization of cultural integration posits Muslim culture as a unified whole—perhaps separated into Moroccan, Turkish, and “other” versions (see also Phalet and Van Praag, 2004). It then poses assimilation to a similarly reified Dutch identity as the solution to economic and social marginalization. However, cultures are far more fluid than that. Benhabib argues that we should “[modify] our understandings of culture; [reject] cultural holism, and . . . [have] more faith in the capacity of ordinary political actors to renegotiate their own narratives of identity and difference through multicultural encounters in a democratic civil society” (Benhabib, 2004: 104). Reconceptualizing culture as constantly created, we can spare ourselves the dangers of returning to an assimilationist nationalism that prevents the development of truly inclusionary immigrant policies. Notes 1. I would like to thank Thomas Faist, Gökçe Yurdakul, Marnie Bjornson, Daiva Stasiulis, Han Entzinger, and Jim Davis for their feedback and support in writing this chapter. 2. All translations of Dutch sources are my own. 3. The label multicultural is applied retroactively and some say, inaccurately (see for example, De Hart 2005 and also Entzinger, chapter 6). It might well be that the promotion of multicultural differences was the unintended effect of a


4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

historically Dutch way of dealing with religious and political differences between major groups in society. Some, such as Dagevos (2001a) and the Commissie Blok (2004) are careful to emphasize that cultural integration requires the adoption of values that affect the public sphere and that matters of family relations and religion should be under the individual’s control. However, this approach obscures that the boundary between public and private is constantly negotiated, and that such boundaries are easily breached. I am following the Dutch convention of not identifying the last name of those accused (or convicted) of crimes. The reference to goats also echoes the urban myth that I grew up with in the 1970s that newly arrived Muslim immigrants slaughtered goats on the balconies of their Amsterdam apartments. This account is mostly based on NRC, August 28, 2004 also on a story about her on the BBC website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3322399.stm), and Hirsi Ali’s official CV as a Dutch parliamentarian (http://www. tweede-kamer.nl/leden_commissies_fracties/griffie_lfc/kamerdet7798.html). After the murder of Pim Fortuyn, Dutch politicians were required to accept police protection if they are deemed to need it. Ironically, while Mohammed B. did attend services at a mosque known to adhere to a radical form of Islam, his radicalization took place under the influence of teach-ins in living rooms, a much harder to control forum.

References Benhabib, S. (2002), The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brubaker, R. (2003), “The Return of Assimilation?: Changing Perspectives on Integration and its Sequels in France, Germany and the United States,” in C. Joppke and E. Morawaska (eds.) Toward Assimilation and Citizenship, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 39–58. Bussemaker, J. (1998), “Rationales of Care in Contemporary Welfare States: The Case of Childcare in the Netherlands,” Social Politics, 5, 1, Spring, pp. 70–96. CBS (2005), Central Bureau vodr de Statistiek. http://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/ cijfers/statline/toegang/default.htm Commissie Blok—Tijdelijke Commissie Onderzoek Integratie Beleid (2004), Chapter 10. Summary, Conclusions and Recommendations, KST73269, ‘s Gravenhage: Sdu uitgevers. Connel, R. W. (1995), Masculinities, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dagevos, J. M. (2001a), Perspectief of Integratie: Over de Sociaal-Culturele en Structurele Integratie van Ethnische Minderheden in Nederland, Den Haag: Wetenschappelijke Raad voor de Regering (WRR). ——— (2001b), Rapportage Minderheden 2001—Deel II Meer Werk, Den Haag: SCP. De Hart, Betty (2005), Multiple Nationality, Integration and Terrorism: Political and Public Debates on Dual Nationality in the Netherlands. Paper Presented at the Conference Dual Citizenship-Democracy, Rights and Identity in a Globalising World, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, March 17–19.

166 / anna c. korteweg Entzinger, H. (2003), “The Rise and Fall of Multiculturalism: The Case of the Netherlands,” in C. Joppke and E. Morawaska (eds.) Toward Assimilation and Citizenship, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 59–86. Fallaux, Emile (2004), “Een groof filmer zou hij Worden,” NRC Handelsblad, November 5. Favell, A. (2001), “Integration Policy and Integration Research in Europe: A Review and Critique,” in T. A. Aleinikoff and D. Klusmeyer (eds.) Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices, Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pp. 349–399. Fraser, N. (1989a), “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation,” in Unruly Practices, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, pp. 144–160. ——— (1989b), “Struggle over Needs: Outline of a Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory of Late Capitalist Political Culture,” in Unruly Practices, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, pp. 161–187. Joppke, C. (2003), “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State,” New York: Russell Sage Foundation, Working Paper #203. Joppke, C. and E. Morawska (2003), “Integrating Immigrants in Liberal NationStates: Policies and Practices,” in C. Joppke and E. Morawska (eds.) Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–36. Kastoryano, R. (2004) “Religion and Incorporation: Islam in France and Germany,” International Migration Review, 38, 3, pp. 1234–1256. Kimmel, M. (2003a [1994]), “Masculinity as Homophobia,” in E. Disch (ed.) Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology, Third Edition, Boston: McGraw-Hill, pp. 103–109. ——— (2003b), “Globalization and its Mal(e)contents: The Gendered and Moral Political Economy of Terrorism,” in International Sociology, 18, 3, September, pp. 603–620. Korteweg, A. C. (2004), The Masculine Worker versus the Hybrid Citizen: Welfare Reform in the United States and the Netherlands, PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Kymlicka, W. (1995), Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press. ——— (2001), Politics in the Vernacular, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Okin, S. M. (1999), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pateman, C. (1989), “The Patriarchal Welfare State,” in The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Phalet, K., C. van Lotringen, and H. Entzinger (2000), Islam in de multiculturele samenleving. Opvattingen van jongeren in Rotterdam, Utrecht: ERCOMER. Phalet, K. and M. van Praag (2004), Muslim in Nederland, Den Haag: SCP. Plantenga, J. (1998), “Double Lives: Labour Market Participation, Citizenship and Gender,” in J. Bussemaker and R. Voet (eds.) Gender, Participation and Citizenship in the Netherlands, Vermont: Ashford Publishing, pp. 51–64. Scheffer, P. (2000), “Het Multiculturele Drama,” NRC Handelsblad, January 29. SCP (2004), Social-Cultureel Rapport 2004. Hoofdstuk 3. Den Haag: SCP. Ten Hooven, M. (ed.) (2002), De Lege Tolerantie: Over Vrijheid en Vrijblijvendheid in Nederland, Second Revised Edition, Uitgeverij Boom: Amsterdam.

C h ap t e r 8 Unveiling Distribution: Muslim Women with Headscarves in France and Germany Pascale Fournier and Gökçe Yurdakul

What constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most productive effect. ––Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter

Introduction Despite an official separation between state and religion in France and a Volk-centered idea of nationhood in Germany,1 it becomes less and less plausible to define French and German societies in culturally homogeneous terms. Throughout both countries, in fact, more and more Muslims2 are expressing and demanding recognition of their religious particularity. Such demands are translated, understood, and produced through the lens of “identity politics,” a discursive framework for the interaction between the Liberal state and minorities that has become, we argue, the hegemonic and inescapable way in which the situation of Muslims in general and Muslim women in particular has been framed in France and Germany. In this chapter, we critically investigate the case of Muslim women with headscarves facing a French legislator or a German judge. In reflecting upon the nature of power in producing subjectivity, and questioning its relation to the sexed/asexualized female subject, we focus on the ways in which legal rules in French and German liberal states have attempted to discipline, punish, and regulate the body of the Muslim woman, thereby producing her as the subject of an anxious sexuality. This chapter will also and most importantly provide an opportunity to examine what identity politics can and cannot do for Muslim women, particularly with regard to distributional

168 / pascale fournier and gökçe yurdakul

preoccupations. After having discussed the legal contexts in both European countries, we ask whether identity politics, by so perfectly capturing the multiple meanings of the headscarf (“the headscarf as a political threat,” “the headscarf as a symbol of gender oppression,” “the headscarf as a religious sign”, “the headscarf as a form of terrorism”), has, in fact, rendered invisible the distributional stakes of such a display of identity (“the headscarf as related to socio-economic conditions”). France: The Headscarf as a Symbol of Gender Oppression The most important feature of current French politics is its neo-republican discourse on French identity (Leruth, 1998) in which membership in the national community involves an absolute commitment to the Republic and to its core values of égalité (equality) and laïcité (the separation of state and religion). This republican model was forged in the context of the French Revolution, as a direct reaction to the historical French struggle against its own monarchy, ruling aristocracy, and religious establishment. In France, the strict separation of Church and state is explicitly affirmed by two legal documents. First, by Article 1 of the Constitution of October 4, 1958, which holds in part that “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic”;3 and, second, by the Separation of Churches and State Act 1905,4 which states that there is no recognition and no direct public funding of any religion in France. Consequently, France does not allow the state to officially support any exemption for or special representation of immigrant or national minorities.5 While strategies are employed for individual integration into the French state, the formation of “communities” of immigrants is highly discouraged (Safran, 1991). It is in this context that French President Jacques Chirac established, in July 2003, an investigative committee (la commission Stasi) to examine how the principle of laïcité should apply in the context of educational settings. The Stasi Commission published its report on December 11, 2003, ruling that ostentatious displays of religion violated the secular rules of the French school system.6 The report recommended a law forbidding pupils from wearing “conspicuous” signs of belonging to a religion, meaning any visible symbol meant to be seen. Prohibited items would explicitly include headscarves for Muslim girls, yarmulkes for Jewish boys, turbans for Sikh boys, and large Christian crosses, whereas discreet symbols of faith, such as small crosses, Stars of David or Fatima’s hands, would be allowed.7 The report also emphasized the duty of the French State to protect Muslim girls from several forms of violence, including genital mutilation and polygamy.8 The Commission clearly identified the role of publicly funded schools in France, which is to “transmit knowledge, teach students critical awareness,

unveiling distribution / 169

assure autonomy and openness to cultural diversity, and encourage personal development. Schooling aims both to train students for a professional career, and to train them to become good citizens of the French Republic.”9 Such a mission, according to the report, presupposes fixed common rules, like gender equality and respect for secularity. Following entirely the Commission’s recommendations, the French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools was adopted on March 15, 2004.10 In many ways, the existing conception of “laïcité” marks identity as necessarily “private,” and thus demands on the part of the state to preserve the “neutrality” of the public sphere by excluding in advance any sign of religious beliefs. The commission states: “For the educational community, the headscarf is too often a source of conflicts, divisions, and even suffering. The visible aspect of a religious sign is perceived by most people as contrary to the educational mission: to offer a neutral space where critical conscience may grow.”11 But can neutrality truly be neutral? The headscarf debate in France, far from being simply about dress codes in French educational settings, speaks of the impossible neutrality of the French state when it so perfectly reveals its hidden mission of “saving brown women from brown men.”12 The commission, in fact, sees the headscarf not as an article of clothing but rather as an implicit sign of Muslim women’s domination by their male relatives: Young women are victims of a form of sexism that manifests itself through various social pressures and physical, psychological or verbal abuse. They are forced to cover themselves to the extent of becoming asexualized and to lower their gaze in the presence of men; if they do not respect these measures, they are stigmatized as “sluts.”13

While Islamic norms are equated with gender oppression, French cultural practices are viewed as secular emancipatory norms. Caught up in liberal arguments around the choice/coercion divide, the commission thus identified the headscarf as the ultimate symbol of coercion, one that the state can and should prevent. Muslim women, who are assumed to have no choice but to wear the ideological flag of patriarchy imposed by their religious group, are depicted as passive subjects produced by a system of authority in which they have no say. Surely, the idea of representation of Muslim women (and the role of law in speaking for its subjects) is itself a representation that serves the purpose of ideology:14 French assimilation.15 Whereas it is clear that the French state aims at producing “docile subjects”16 through legislating against the veil, subjects that will “recognize” the existing Republic and be obedient to the state, to the president, to the school, to the teacher, to the unveiled majority, one may wonder about how


effective banning the veil is outside this legal intervention. Could it possibly have the counter-effect of more veiling? What would a cost/benefit analysis of legislating against the veil reveal? In advocating for a nondiscriminatory system of education, legislating against the veil will very likely create and reinforce the very discrimination that it so hopes to eradicate, that is, indirectly exclude Muslim women from the public school system and hence infringe upon their right to education. Those are the conclusions reached by Human Rights Watch: The impact of a ban on visible religious symbols, even though phrased in neutral terms, will fall disproportionately on Muslim girls, and thus violate antidiscrimination provisions of international human rights law as well as the right to equal educational opportunity. Indeed, the promotion of understanding and tolerance for such differences in values is a key aspect of enforcement of the right to education. In practice, the law will leave some Muslim families no choice but to remove girls from the state educational system. (Human Rights Watch, 2004)

As stated by Human Rights Watch, legislating against the veil in the name of “neutrality” will further ghettoize some Muslim girls (probably the most vulnerable ones) and encourage them to either join or remain within the traditional Islamic private schooling. Such social costs are systematically ignored by identity politics in its attempt to regulate Muslim girls’ sexuality from the perspective of “the law in books” rather than “the law in action.”17 Moreover, imposing “freedom” through “coercion” by banning the veil does little to address the concerns expressed by the Stasi Commission, that is the pervasiveness of several forms of violence experienced by Muslim girls in French suburbs (including rape, forced marriages, and sexual mutilations). If anything, the ban obscures the logic and dynamics of the social and economic conditions under which Muslim girls live in France as well as the possible relationship between the headscarf and political defiance in the face of such economic and social marginalization by the larger culture. Germany: The Headscarf as a Political Threat Germany has historically characterized itself as a nation based on common blood decent (Brubaker, 1991: 82). It is important to note that the idea of German nationhood was partly formed in opposition to Napoleon, an external threat, whereas the idea of French nationhood was forged internally in the struggle against its own monarchy and religious establishment. It may be because of these differences that Germans cannot easily accept that Islamic religious communities be granted the legal status of a corporation under public law.


In fact, Islamic groups have been trying to obtain legal status for their religious communities since the early 1970s but their petitions have until now been rejected by the courts. According to the 1949 Constitution, religious denominations can acquire the status of public-law corporation provided that they guarantee continuity with their bylaws and the number of their members.18 If these requirements are not met, these religious denominations must organize themselves as mere associations under private law. In 1977, the Islamic community in Germany applied for the status of a corporation of public law19 so that Islam would be publicly recognized and acknowledged as an equal religion before the law.20 The District Court of Baden-Württemberg rejected the application (Jonker, 2000: 313). Two years later, a similar attempt was launched in Cologne with no success, although the applicants referred explicitly this time to Article 4 of the German Constitution, which guarantees freedom of faith and religious practice.21 For Mathias Rohe, an expert on the legal treatment of Islamic minorities in Germany, the applications made by various Muslim groups to obtain such status have been rejected on the ground that insufficient guarantees of their duration and stability were provided: “According to a decision of the conference of the state ministers of interior in 1954 the necessary stability of the community has to be proven over a period of 30 years. Up to now, the Jewish community reached this status, whereas no Muslim community succeeded in that so far. This is certainly due to the fact that there were no ideas of a long-lasting presence among larger groups of Muslims until recent times” (Rohe, 2004: 87). Gerdien Jonker, a scholar well-known for her empirical work on religious minorities in Germany, has expressed the opposite view. She believes that the verdict was based not only on the fact that the judges believed the applicants to be pursuing right-wing activities but also due to the impression that “ ‘Islam’ shaped the everyday life of its followers in a way that was not acceptable and not in accordance with the German understanding of what religion is about” (Jonker, 2000: 314). Moreover, she further suggests, these court rulings were “signals toward segregation and have had a palpable effect on contemporary Islamic religious life. For those Muslims who are observant, the clash between Islamic legal concepts and German legal guidelines has resulted in social isolation” (Jonker, 2000: 312). At present, no Islamic religious community has the legal status of a corporation under public law, unlike Christian churches and the Jewish community; Islamic organizations are rather considered private associations without legal standing. On September 30, 2003, the German Supreme Court in BVerfGe, 2BvR, 1436/02 upheld a Muslim woman’s right to wear the headscarf as a teacher in a public school,22 but solely on the ground that Baden-Württemberg


lacked, at the time, any statutory law explicitly authorizing the school-board to ban the headscarf. While the court’s opinion emphasized the importance of freedom of conscience as a principle, the court nevertheless transferred the final say on the matter to the democratic legislatures: However, the Land legislature responsible is at liberty to create the statutory basis that until now has been lacking, for example by newly laying down the permissible degree of religious references in schools within the limits of the constitutional requirements. In doing this, the legislature must take into reasonable account the freedom of faith of the teachers and of the pupils affected, the parents’ right of education and the State’s duty of ideological and religious neutrality. Under the Constitution, however, the restriction of fundamental freedoms and the balancing of conflicting fundamental rights are reserved to parliament, in order to ensure that decisions with such repercussions result from a procedure that gives the public the opportunity to develop and express its opinions, and that requires parliament to clarify the necessity and extent of encroachments upon fundamental rights in public debate.23

Ultimately adopting a state neutrality approach, the German Supreme Court decided not to constitutionally protect minority rights against the will of democratic legislatures. With growing cultural and religious variety, the requirement of state neutrality has become more and more important, warns the court. And so it comes as little surprise that the state government in Stuttgart enacted a law forbidding the hijab in its schools in April 2004, a move promptly taken by a handful of other states on the basis of state’s religious neutrality.24 In exploring the complex semiotic of the headscarf, the German Supreme Court first departs from the French approach by giving agency to Muslim women to re-signify the meaning of the headscarf outside of the patriarchal structures of the family: “. . . the interpretation of the headscarf may not be reduced to a symbol of the social repression of women. Rather, the headscarf can for young Muslim women also be a freely chosen means to conduct a self-determined life without breaking with their culture of origin.”25 Presented as creating a “potential situation of danger”26 in the classroom, the court rather regards the headscarf as an expression of political Islam: “In the most recent times, it is seen increasingly as a political symbol of Islamic fundamentalism that expresses the separation from values of western society.”27 Even though, “according to the findings of fact in the oral hearing, this is not the message that the complainant wishes to convey by wearing the headscarf,”28 the court still expresses fear that such symbol


would, in and of itself, threaten the educational mission: If teachers introduce religious or ideological references at school, this may adversely affect the state’s duty to provide education which is to be carried out in neutrality . . . . It at least opens up the possibility of influence on the pupils and of conflicts with parents that may lead to a disturbance of the peace of the school and may endanger the carrying out of the school’s duty to provide education. The dress of teachers that is religiously motivated and that is to be interpreted as the profession of a religious conviction may also have these effects . . . . If a teacher wore a headscarf in lessons, this could lead to religious influence on the students and to conflicts within the class in question, even if the complainant had credibly denied any intention of recruitment or proselytising. The only decisive factor was the effect created in students by the sight of the headscarf. The headscarf motivated by Islam was a plainly visible religious symbol that the onlooker could not escape.29

The causal relationship between, on the one hand, the headscarf as a religious (dangerous) symbol and, on the other, the ideological (negative) influence it may have on German students is not supported by the empirical evidence put before the court. In fact, not only is this line of reasoning not introduced by any of the expert witnesses but it is further explicitly stated by the court as not reflecting the reality of students’ experience: “No tangible evidence could be seen in the proceedings before the constitutional courts that the complainant’s appearance when wearing a headscarf created a concrete endangerment of the peace at school.”30 Moreover, the actual dynamic created by the court may pave the way to the Muslim woman’s early and premature departure from the “public political culture” to an increasingly ghettoized, Islamic cultural space. Although power struggles and competing negotiations have occurred over the symbolic dimension and function of the headscarf for the Muslim women wearing it in Western educational settings,31 we have tried to demonstrate how recent legal cases in France and Germany have not captured these contradictory voices. Reading both the Stasi Commission’s analysis and the German Supreme Court’s decision within the paradigm of identity politics allows one to examine the techniques of power that are being used in Western liberal states to hide those structures and practices in which socioeconomic inequality is rooted and reproduced. If strong political emphasis is placed on depicting the French headscarf as gender oppressive, as unfair, as unfortunate, and the German headscarf as threatening, unfamiliar, and dangerous, then an examination of state power expressed as techniques of maintaining class domination is surely not undertaken. In the same manner with which it portrays religious references at school as a threat to education,


and in the same manner with which it produces the headscarf as an individual, personal, subjective, and discretionary gesture, identity politics mystifies the powers that hide, construct, and veil the Muslim woman. Is the Muslim woman wearing the headscarf worse off economically? Where does she live and where does she go? What is her background legal situation as determined by immigration laws, social security, and employment law? The Headscarf as Related to Socioeconomic Conditions In political discourse, egalitarian social movements have shifted away from the politics of distribution to the politics of recognition (Fraser, 1995). Proponents of the politics of recognition argue that the liberal state has betrayed its commitment to neutrality by privileging the ways of life of dominant groups.32 Yet because oppressed groups have distinct cultures, experiences, and perspectives on social life, the appropriate remedies on the part of constitutional liberal states consist of affirming cultural differences in the public sphere. While proponents of the politics of recognition emphasize notions of identity, rights, and mutuality, a distributional analysis of justice focuses rather on class conflict within liberal constitutional regimes and demands the fair distribution of material goods as a response to material inequality generated in capitalist societies. The modern extension of this approach goes beyond class issues, however, and addresses the distribution of wealth and power between men and women as well as between racial groups,33 and explores how law participates in the bargaining power within different structures such as the state or the family unit.34 A liberal theory of minority rights, we argue, not only reduces the issues of immigrants and minorities to mere “identity politics,” but it simultaneously de-historicizes the immigrant rights debate and neglects the capitalist social formation and related socioeconomic realities that immigrants face in their struggle to “live the life of a civilized being”35 (Marshall, 1965: 78). In this section, we use the example of Muslim women with headscarves in France and Germany to show that the political and legal debate over religious symbolism has removed questions of socioeconomic inequality from the political arena. Although we are interested in the distributional consequences of identity politics on the gendered lives of Muslim women living in constitutional liberal states in general, we develop in this section a sociological analysis in particular of Turkish immigrants living in Germany as well as of Muslim immigrants established in France. Turkish Communities in Germany The improper balance of socioeconomic distribution in Germany is clear: for example, non-EU citizen immigrants in Germany receive an unequal


share of such material goods as education, income, wealth, and jobs. In February 2000, the German Federal Commissioner for Foreigners, Marieluise Beck, admitted that “the unemployment rate among immigrants remains at almost 20 percent, demonstrating that foreigners continue to be subject to unemployment twice as often as Germans” (efms, 2000). The plight of Turkish immigrants is even more devastating: 26.2 percent of all immigrants in the Turkish enclave of Kreuzberg are unemployed, and 42 percent receive social assistance.36 In fact, immigrants form the majority of workers in the cleaning sector, the care of the elderly, and construction; moreover, they are at the bottom of the hierarchy in each of these sectors. Czarina Wilpert (1990) showed that 73 percent of immigrant women workers were employed in manual jobs, such as cleaning and service sector jobs, whereas only 30 percent of German women were employed in these sectors. In a recent study of Turkish immigrant women in Berlin, 59 percent of the participants stated that they are employed as cleaners; 43 percent of the currently unemployed women who participated in this research stated that they worked as cleaners in their last job (Erdem, 2004). Not only are Turkish immigrants poor but they also and most importantly live and work as an insular group, in territorially defined subdivisions. The problem of chronic unemployment is exacerbated by a difficult integration of immigrant children in the German education system. Second and third-generation German citizens of Turkish background, and Turkish immigrant children, complain that they are not given equal opportunity in the education system (am Orde, 2002). First, the German education system determines a child’s prospective school career at an early age. Many German Turkish children are sorted out to lower levels of schooling, because they mostly speak Turkish at home and their language skills may be less developed than their German counterparts. Second, discrimination against immigrant children in German schools has had a tremendous effect on the German Turkish population (Keskin, 2002), and as a result many children drop out of school. Thus, “while only eight percent of German young people and adults remain without vocational training, the rate of unskilled Turkish young people is five times higher, at about 40 percent” (The Federal Government’s Commissioner for Foreigners’ Issues, 2000). Many German state authorities argue that high levels of unemployment and low levels of educational achievement are related to immigrant incorporation. That is, in their view, once immigrants are better integrated into the German society, the problems of unemployment and educational achievement will automatically be solved. To this end, and in order to accelerate immigrant incorporation, German state authorities recently introduced several new measures, among them a new citizenship law. With this law, Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz, the German state partially discarded in


1999 the traditional idea of ancestral origin, and began to naturalize the migrant population.37 According to the Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz, children born in Germany after the year 2000 can be granted dual citizenship: German and their parents’ native citizenship.38 Although many Turkish immigrant associations encourage Turkish immigrants to apply for German citizenship, there has been a decreasing trend in these applications, specifically after the year 2000, arguably because according to article 85 of the Zuwanderungsgesetz (immigration law), German citizens are not allowed to hold the citizenship of another country, unless they can prove that they will suffer financial or legal loss39 by this abandonment. Because German state authorities do not allow dual citizenship, the Turkish state introduced in 1995 a legal status for Turkish citizens who had to give up their citizenship; this status is known as the Pembe Kart (Pink Card ) among immigrants. What it means is that Turkish immigrants who give up their Turkish citizenship in order to become German can maintain most of their legal and financial rights in Turkey simply by receiving the Pink Card from the Turkish embassy. According to Turkish law, Pink Card holders can buy and sell land in Turkey40 and are entitled to inherit. There has been much confusion over the use of the Pink Card, and the arbitrariness of the German citizenship law has caused a certain amount of distrust among immigrants. As a result, many Turks have chosen to keep their Turkish passport until the chaos surrounding the Pink Card and the Turkish and German citizenship issues is clarified. Muslim Communities in France France represents a case different from Germany, partly because of its history of colonialism. Up to 1962, the largest number of immigrants came to France from its former colony, Algeria. Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Mali, and the Indian Ocean, all former French colonies, have also sent immigrants. And while Turkey was never a French colony, there are a significant number of Turks in France. Thus, when one talks about “foreigners” or “immigrants” in France, one is generally thinking of North Africans and/or Turks, all of whom are of predominantly Muslim background. In fact, Islam is France’s second largest religion (Viorst, 1996). Because of its jus soli principle in the Code de la nationalité (law of French citizenship), French state authorities encourage the naturalization of immigrants, especially the second generation, until, ideally, there are no “foreigners” left among second-generation immigrants. In fact, many Muslims have become French citizens either by birth or by naturalization (Bowen, 2004; also see Venel, 2004). Moreover, as in Germany, immigrants


are, de jure, entitled to employment, education, health insurance, and pensions. Unfortunately, however, neither the encouragement to naturalize nor the official equality of immigrants with respect to social rights eliminates the effects of segregated territorial boundaries on socioeconomic opportunities in French society. In fact, Patrick Simon shows, based on data from Enquête Histoire Familiale, that the vast majority of immigrant groups are living in poverty in France (2003). He also reports that second-generation youths, whose parents are from Turkey and Morocco, are twice as likely to be unemployed as others among the total youth population (Simon, 2003; also see Tribalat, 1995). This alarming phenomenon is even more pronounced in the case of better-educated second-generation youth: “Turks and Moroccans with a high school diploma are more affected by unemployment than the average with same qualifications” (Simon 2003: 1112). Moreover, the education statistics of the second-generation Turkish and Moroccan youth show high levels of school dropout: 46.4 percent of all Turkish second-generation youth, and 24.3 of all Moroccan and mixed-marriage41 second-generation youth drop out of school. The education level of Moroccan women is better than the Turkish women, however. On the one hand, while 22.6 percent of all Moroccan women drop out of school, 28. 3 percent make it to university. On the other hand, 51.6 percent of all Turkish women drop out of school, and only 7.7 percent go to university. Simon compares these numbers to the French working class, and discovers that 26.5 percent of French working-class women drop out of school, a figure which is slightly higher than the number of Moroccan women who drop out (22.6 percent). However, almost twice as many Turkish women (51.6 percent) drop out of school (Simon, 2003: 1105). The unemployment level among second-generation immigrants is significantly gendered in France as well. More women than men are unemployed. Further, unemployment rates are higher among certain immigrant groups. The unemployment rate of second-generation Turkish women stands at 47 percent, compared to Moroccan women, whose rate is 29.7 percent. This is dramatically different from other immigrant women groups, such as Portuguese immigrant women, who have a 20.4 percent unemployment level (Simon, 2003: 1112). Conclusion In contemporary constitutional democracies, the rise of “identity politics” has been concurrent with the delegitimation and de-centering of class struggle


as a political model for achieving social justice. Nancy Fraser has argued that economic injustices are compounded by persistent patterns of cultural denigration, while misrecognition harms are often increased by economic deprivations (1995). Hence, she concludes that “justice today requires both redistribution and recognition” (1995: 68). What is the relationship between recognition and redistribution in the headscarf debate in France and Germany? What are the social costs and shortcomings at stake in the legal monopoly of identity politics as the hegemonic emancipatory discourse? Does capturing the headscarf as a manifestation of self-identification simultaneously obscure the institutional arrangements that distribute powers and desires in the form of background legal rules and background social norms? In France and Germany, Muslim immigrant groups often work in the segmented labor market and experience little, if at all any, social mobility. The unequal distribution of resources is structurally maintained in these receiving societies through the segregation of immigrant groups into certain sectors and themes. In both countries, however, the state apparatus discussed the headscarf in terms of religious rights, equality before the law, or state neutrality, while ignoring the socioeconomic aspects of Muslim women’s lives. This empirical “disappearance” is no surprise, given the limited scope and discursive power of identity politics. The “recognition” discourse in constitutional liberal states also casts as “private” potentially political contests about distribution of resources. We have argued against the French and German approaches that have reduced the headscarf to an individual symbol of either gender oppression or political threat while simultaneously failing to address the broader collective role of constitutional liberal states in ensuring true and effective integration of immigrants at the socioeconomic level. Analytically, the “imagined communities”42 created by identity politics, and the representation of space as images of break, rupture, and discontinuity with the dominant society, has the effect of veiling the uneven distribution of goods and resources to immigrant Muslim groups. In this article, we have attempted to bring back to the fore such issues of material (mal)distribution—systematic impoverishment, increasing material inequality, “structural” unemployment, economic segmentation, and so on—systematically ignored by the categorical framework of the theory of recognition. In order to “ ‘transform’ the[m] into subjects” (Althusser, 1971: 118), the ideological state apparatus of constitutional liberal states must interpellate Muslim girls by encouraging meaningful integration; such metissage may well change, for the better, “the very parameters of what is considered ‘possible’ in the existing constellation” (Zizek, 1999: 119).


Notes An earlier version of this article was presented at the Racisms, Sexisms and Contemporary Politics of Belonging/s International Conference of the international Sociological Association, Panel VI: Gender and Nation, August 25–27, 2004, London, UK, as well as at Princeton University (Human Rights and Comparative Constitutionalism, Professor Oliver Gerstenberg, April 12, 2005). The comments made by participants and students have significantly improved the text. For helpful and insightful suggestions, we thank Alia Hogbens on behalf of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, Roderick A. Macdonald, Shauna Van Praagh, Evan Fox-Decent, Mairtin Mac Aodha, Alexandra Popovici, Kirsten Anker, Oliver Gerstenberg, Xavier Milton, and Michal Bodemann. For the criticism, advice, and trust, we especially acknowledge the contribution of Janet Halley. 1. German nationhood is rooted in the concept of the Volksgeist (spirit of the people), i.e., the people as an organic cultural and racial entity marked by a common language. See Von Savigny (1975 [1831]). Savigny’s theory of law was directed in part against ideas that had come to prevail in France after the French Revolution and that had spread throughout Europe: that legislation is the primary source of law, and that the legislator’s primary task is to protect the “rights of man.” In opposing these views, Savigny considered law to be an integral part of the common consciousness of the nation, organically connected with the mind and the spirit of the people. 2. Estimates from 2004 show over five million Muslims in France, which is about 8% of the French population. That is the highest percentage of Muslims in a Western European country. See Basdevant-Gaudemet (2004: 62). In Germany, the Muslim community counts more than three million members out of a total population of 82 million, of whom the majority (89 percent) are Turkish. See Rohe (2004: 83). 3. Constitution du 4 octobre 1958, Article 1: “La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale. Elle assure l’égalité devant la loi de tous les citoyens sans distinction d’origine, de race ou de religion. Elle respecte toutes les croyances.” 4. Loi du 9 décembre 1905, Loi concernant la séparation des Eglises et de l’Etat. Article 2 reads: La République ne reconnaît, ne salarie ni ne subventionne aucun culte. En conséquence, à partir du 1er janvier qui suivra la promulgation de la présente loi, seront supprimées des budgets de l’Etat, des départements et des communes, toutes dépenses relatives à l’exercice des cultes. Pourront toutefois être inscrites auxdits budgets les dépenses relatives à des services d’aumônerie et destinées à assurer le libre exercice des cultes dans les établissements publics tels que lycées, collèges, écoles, hospices, asiles et prisons. Les établissements publics du culte sont supprimés, sous réserve des dispositions énoncées à l’article 3. 5. However, there are some exceptions to this rule. As correctly suggested by Basdevant-Gaudemet (2004: 59). “Equally, although there is no direct funding of religions from the public budget, public communities are not prohibited from granting subsidies to

180 / pascale fournier and gökçe yurdakul cultural or social institutions of a religious nature, and religions can also benefit from major forms of indirect aid in the form of tax deductions, in the context of private denominational schools, or by other means.” 6. Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République, Rapport au Président de la République, France, December 11, 2003. 7. Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République, Ibid. The translation is ours: “Les tenues et signes religieux interdits sont les signes ostensibles, tels que grande croix, voile ou kippa. Ne sont pas regardés comme des signes manifestant une appartenance religieuse les signes discrets que sont par exemple médailles, petites croix, étoiles de David, mains de Fatimah, ou petits Coran.” 8. Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République, Supra, note 7, at Par. 3.3.2.1. 9. Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République, Supra, note 7. The translation is ours: “La question de la laïcité est réapparue en 1989 là où elle est née au XIXème siècle: à l’école. Sa mission est essentielle dans la République. Elle transmet les connaissances, forme à l’esprit critique, assure l’autonomie, l’ouverture à la diversité des cultures, et l’épanouissement de la personne, la formation des citoyens autant qu’un avenir professionnel. Elle prépare ainsi les citoyens de demain amenés à vivre ensemble au sein de la République.” 10. L. n⬚ 2004–228, 15 mars 2004, art. 1er et 3, March 15, 2004. 11. Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République, Supra, note 7. The translation is ours: “Pour l’ensemble de la communauté scolaire, le port du voile est trop souvent source de conflits, de divisions et même de souffrances. Le caractère visible d’un signe religieux est ressenti par beaucoup comme contraire à la mission de l’école qui doit être un espace de neutralité et un lieu d’éveil de la conscience critique.” 12. We borrow this expression from Spivak (1994). 13. Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République, Supra, note 7. The translation is ours: “Les jeunes femmes se retrouvent victimes d’une résurgence du sexisme qui se traduit par diverses pressions et par des violences verbales, psychologiques ou physiques. Des jeunes gens leur imposent de porter des tenues couvrantes et asexuées, de baisser le regard à la vue d’un homme; à défaut de s’y conformer, elles sont stigmatisées comme ‘putes.’ ” 14. For an analysis of the “ideological state apparatus” as producing legitimating discourses, see Althusser (1971: 85–126). 15. The model of French individual assimilation is analyzed by Taguieff (1995: 13–28). 16. We borrow this expression from Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, Volume II, the Use of Pleasure (1992). 17. See D. Kennedy (1997), A Critique of Adjudication (fin de siècle), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, particularly Chapter 11. 18. This status provides far-reaching rights, such as the right to levy taxes from members of the community and to organize a parish, the right to employ people under a belief-oriented labour-law, the right to nominate members to

unveiling distribution / 181 broadcast-councils, tax reductions for property placed under public property law, etc. See Rohe (2004: 87). 19. Körperschaftsstatus. 20. See Vocking (1993). 21. Article 4 (Freedom of faith, conscience, and creed) reads: 1. Freedom of faith and conscience, and freedom to profess a religious or philosophical creed, shall be inviolable. 2. The undisturbed practice of religion shall be guaranteed. 22. BVerfGe, 2BvR, 1436/02, Judgment of the Second Senate of September 24, 2003 on the basis of the oral hearing of June 3, 2003. 23. Ibid, at Par. 72. 24. See http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0, 1246372,00.html. 25. BVerfGe, 2BvR, Supra, note 24, at Par. II (5). This emphasis is ours. 26. BVerfGe, 2BvR, Supra, note 24, at Par. III (1). 27. BVerfGe, 2BvR, Supra, note 24 at Par. II (5) a. 28. Ibid. 29. BVerfGe, 2BvR, Supra, note 24, at Par. I (6). 30. BVerfGe, 2BvR, Supra, note 24, at Par. II (5) d. 31. See Ahmed (1992: 144–169). 32. See W. Kymlicka (1995); J. Spinner (1994); J. Baker (1994); M. L. Minow (1995); C. Taylor (1994). 33. See K. Crenshaw (1989); R. T. Ford (1992); bell hooks (1990); J. C. Williams (1991); J. Butler (1990); D. Cornell (1991); E. Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990). 34. See R. Hale (1923). 35. According to T. H. Marshall, the social element of citizenship involves “the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society” (1965: 78). 36. See I. Beer and Reinfried Musch (2005) http://www.sozialestadt.de/en/ veroeffentlichungen/zwischenbilanz/2-berlin-english.shtml#2. The data is from 2000, except the social assistance data which is from 1998. 37. One of the strongest reactions to this came from the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/ Christian Social Union) parties. In January 1999, they organized a campaign against the changes and were supported by such dignitaries as the mayor of Berlin, Eberhardt Diepgen (Hürriyet, 1999). A major slogan of the campaign was “For integration—against dual nationality” (Klopp 2002: 2). Two Turkish immigrant associations, the TBB and the Cemaat, quickly responded with a joint counter campaign. In a press release, they said that the CDU/CSU campaign should be perceived as a prevention of immigrant integration, and they emphasized that a new definition of “German” should rightly include Germans with non-German background (TBB press release, January 12, 1999). 38. However, this major change from jus sanguinis to jus soli also hinges on the following paradox: in order to be granted German citizenship, a child born in Germany has to give up the citizenship of his/her parents’ native country between the ages of eighteen to twenty three (Joppke, 1998; Beauftragte der


39. 40. 41. 42.

Bundesregierung für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration, 2000; Schirmer, 2002). The citizen should prove that her/his financial loss is more than 10,000 Euro per year. Until 2004, foreign citizens could not buy and sell land in Turkey. This law has changed recently and now non-Turkish citizens can also buy and sell land in Turkey. It should also be noted that mixed-marriages among the second generation of Turks is lower than among Moroccans (Simon, 2003). We borrow this expression and use of term from Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

References Ahmed, L. (1992), “The Discourse of the Veil,” in Women and Gender in Islam, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, pp. 144–169. Althusser, L. (1971), “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster Publisher, pp. 85–126. Am Orde, S. (2002), “Türken Fordern Vorschule für Alle”, die Tageszeitung, February 21. Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised edition, London, New York: Verso. Baker, J. (1994), Group Rights, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Basdevant-Gaudemet, B. (2004), “Islam in France,” in B. P. R. Aluffi and G. Zincone (eds.) The Legal Treatment of Islamic Minorities in Europe, Leuven: Peeters Publishers. Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Migration Flüchtlinge und Integration (2000), Einbürgerung: Fair, Gerecht, Tolerant, http://www.einbuergerung.de/ Beer, I. and R. Musch (2005), “Berlin-Kreuzberg—Kottbusser Tor” Soziale Stadt: Bundestransferstelle. http://www.sozialestadt.de/en/veroeffentlichungen/ zwischenbilanz/2-berlin-english.shtml#2 Bowen, J. R. (2004), “Muslims and Citizens: France’s Headscarf Controversy,” Boston Review, http://www.bostonreview.net/BR29.1/bowen.html Brubaker, R. (1992), Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” New York: Routledge. BVerfGe, 2BvR, 1436/02, Judgment of the Second Senate of September 24, 2003 on the basis of the oral hearing of June 3, 2003. Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République, Rapport au Président de la République, France, December 11, 2003. Cornell, D. (1991), Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law, London: Routledge. Crenshaw, K. (1989), “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Chicago Law Forum, pp. 139–148.

unveiling distribution / 183 efms-european forum for migration studies (2000), “Beck presents report on the Situation of Foreigners in Germany,” Migration Report: Chronology of Relevant News and Occurrences in The Area of The Institute’s Work, February, http:// www.uni-bamberg.de/~ba6ef3/dfeb00_e.htm Erdem, E. (2004), “Migrant Women’s Work in the Cleaning Industry,” Paper presented at the conference Insider-Outsider: Images, Participation and Ethnoscapes, Bilgi University/Istanbul, 22–24 October. Ford, R. T. (1992), “Urban Space and the Color Line: The Consequences of Demarcation and Disorientation in the Postmodern Metropolis,” Harvard Blackletter Journal, 9, pp. 117–147. Foucault, M. (1992), History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, London: Penguin. Fraser, N. (1995), “From Redistribution to Recognition?: Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” New Left Review, 212, pp. 68–93. Hale, R. (1923), “Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non Coercive State,” Political Science Quarterly, 38, pp. 470–494. Hooks, Bell (1990), Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Boston, MA: South End Press. Human Rights Watch (2004), France: Headscarf Ban Violates Religious Freedom by Disproportionately Affecting Muslim Girls, Proposed Law is Discriminatory, New York, February 27. Hürriyet (1999), “Türkler: CDU, Yabancıları Politik Malzeme Yapiyor,” Hürriyet Daily Turkish Newspaper, European Edition, January 19. Jonker, G. (2000), “What is Other About Other Religions? The Islamic Communities in Berlin between Integration and Segregation,” Cultural Dynamics, 12, 3, pp. 311–329. Joppke, C. (1998), Challenge to the Nation State: Immigration in Western Europe and the United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kennedy, D. (1997), A Critique of Adjudication (fin de siècle), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Keskin, H. (2002), “Alman Enitiminde Reform Gereni,” Hürriyet Daily Turkish Newspaper, February 25. Klopp, B. (2002), German Multiculturalism: Immigrant Integration and the Transformation of Citizenship, Westport: Praeger. Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (1990), Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995), Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leruth, M. F. (1998), “The Neorepublican Discourse on French National Identity,” French Politics and Society, 16, 4, pp. 49–60. Marshall, T. H. (1965 [1949]), “Citizenship and Social Class,” in G. Shafir (ed.) The Citizenship Debates: A Reader, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 93–111. Minow, M. L. (1995), “The Constitution and the Subgroup Question,” Indiana Law Journal, 71, pp. 1–26. Rohe, M. (2004), “The Legal Treatment of Muslims in Germany,” in The Legal Treatment of Islamic Minorities in Europe, Lèuven: Peeters. Safran, W. (1991), “State, Nation, National Identity, and Citizenship: France as a Test Case,” International Political Science Review, 12, 2, pp. 219–238.

184 / pascale fournier and gökçe yurdakul Schirmer, D. (2002), “Closing the Nation: Nationalism and Statism in 19th and 20th Centuries Germany,” Paper presented at the German Studies Association’s Conference, San Diego, October. Simon, P. (2003), “France and the Unknown Second Generation: Preliminary Results on Social Mobility,” International Migration Review, 37, 4, pp. 1091–1119. Spinner, J. (1994), The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1994), “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds.) Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Columbia University Press. Taguieff, P. -A. (1995), ‘L’Identité Nationale: Un Débat Français,’ Regards Sur l’Actualité, 209–210, pp. 13–28. Taylor, C. (1994), “The Politics of Recognition,” in A. Gutmann (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 25–73. The Federal Government’s Commissioner for Foreigners’ Issues (2000), Facts and Figures on the Situation of Foreigners in the Federal Republic of Germany, 19th edition, Berlin. Tribalat, M. (1995), Faire France. Paris: La Découverte. Türkischer Bund Berlin Brandenburg (1999), “Türken Entäuscht von Diepgen,” Press Release in the TBB archives, January 12. Venel, N. (2004), Musulmans et citoyens, Presses Universitaires de France. Viorst, M. (1996), “The Muslims of France,” Foreign Affairs, New York, 75, 5, pp. 78–97. Vocking (1993), “Organisations as attempts at integration of Muslims in Germany,” in G. Speelman, J. van Lin, and D. Mulder (eds.) Muslims and Christians in Europe: Breaking New Ground: Essays in Honour of Jan Slomp, Kampen: Kok Pharos. Von Savigny, F. C. (1975 [1831]), Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence, trans. A. Hayward, London: Arno Press Reprint. Williams, J. C. (1991), “Dissolving the Sameness/Difference Debate: A Post-Modern Path Beyond Essentialism in Feminist and Critical Race Theory,” Duke Law Journal, pp. 296–323. Wilpert, C. (1990), “Immigrant Women in The Federal Republic of Germany” http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/paper/issr512.pdf. Zizek, S. (1999), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London, New York: Verso.

C h ap t e r 9 Turkish Brides: A Look at the Immigration Debate in Germany Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim

Introduction: On the Popularity of Simple Images Fifty years ago, in 1955, Germany was ethnically a largely homogeneous country: the proportion of foreigners living here was around 1 percent.1 In that same year, however, a momentous agreement was signed by West Germany and Italy, the first labor recruitment treaty, which initiated the recruitment of Gastarbeiter (guest workers). In the years that followed 14 million labor migrants came into the country—not only from Italy, but also from Turkey, from Spain, from the former Yugoslavia and from other countries. They were followed by the family members of the labor migrants, by Germans from Eastern Europe, by refugees and asylum seekers. Today, according to official statistics, the so-called “foreigners” make up 9 percent of the population,2 and it should also be added, that among the “natives” there are more and more people with an immigrant background.3 In other words the year 1955 saw the start of a new development. Germany is gradually becoming—something that at first no one wanted and no one expected—a country of immigration. Whereas at first this development was ignored by both politics and the media, the situation has meanwhile completely changed. There have been countless studies, commissions, media reports, and countless institutions, committees, conferences, have addressed the subject of “immigrants in Germany” and provided information on it. Whether it’s a question of the labor market, housing market, education, or of income, health, marriage patterns—immigrants have for some time now been the object of intense interest on the part of both scholarship and the media. Yet the image of the “immigrants,” that was and is conveyed in this way on several levels, displays many simplifications and distortions, as well as

186 / elisabeth beck-gernsheim

characteristic omissions and gaps.4 So in the cruder versions of media reporting, we find masses of poor and exotic “others” flooding in, pressing in on the native Germans, threatening their affluence.5 Of course there are also other representations, more moderate in tone, not dominated by a desire for dramatization. But they, too, like to play up anything that underlines the impression of exoticism and strangeness. Particularly popular, for example, is the picture of the Turkish woman, if possible with a headscarf, an image which is part of the basic repertoire of all debates on immigrant women, and has virtually come to stand for women as immigrants.6 In the social sciences, on the other hand, immigrants are not much mentioned in general descriptions of the social structure of the population, although numerically they by now form a group of considerable size. They are not treated as part of the receiving society, but rather as a separate group, put in the box marked “immigrants,” classified as a “marginal group” along with the disabled and the homeless.7 Beyond that, there are numerous specialist studies dealing with the subject of immigrants, but they are frequently essentially practice and problem oriented. From education studies to psychology to sociology a “series of problematisers”8 everywhere determines the scope of the topic. And the resulting description is a predictable one: it’s always the “immigrant problem” or the “problem of integration” that is the focus of attention.9 As a consequence the picture that dominates the media is a very plain and over-simplified one, relying on a basic pattern of a few stereotypes. Whatever doesn’t fit the perspective is largely ignored. In particular what often disappears from sight, is the fact, that the immigrant population is anything but homogeneous, but includes the most diverse groups. In the foreground of an imbalanced public perception stand the classic labor migrants, who have come to Germany from poorer countries, and here again primarily those who remain stuck at the lower end of the social ladder. The Sixth Family Report of the German government, which deals with families of foreign origin living in Germany and which provides a critical review of the literature, has drawn attention to the resulting distortions: the public discourse about immigrants and their families is “marked by extreme simplifications.” Many descriptions adhere to the basic pattern of a “rhetoric, which accentuates differences, focuses on the unusual and exotic.” They thereby produce a “folklore of superficial knowledge,” which is forever self-perpetuating and self-verifying.10 In the following section I use one case to describe in exemplary terms, what this folklore of superficial knowledge looks like, how it spreads and not least, what political consequences it has. In addition I have chosen a topic which is the focus of media attention at the moment, that of “Turkish brides.” These are women from Turkey, who came to Germany as wives

turkish brides / 187

when families joined husbands and fathers—or more precisely, were brought here involuntarily and by compulsion. This topic already attracted notice at the end of the 1970s. And today, a good quarter of a century later, it is yet again provoking headlines and heated debates. “Turkish brides” in the 1970s The image of the immigrant woman in Germany is above all an image of the Turkish woman, first, because the Turks are numerically the largest immigrant group, second, because in the eyes of Germans she in particular represents foreignness.11 What constitutes this foreignness or otherness, what is so striking about it, is graphically described in a text by Susanne von Paczensky.12 Her text is the foreword to a book about Turkish women, which appeared in 1978 as part of a popular series, Frauen aktuell (Women now), published by the Rowohlt Verlag, one of the biggest German publishers. It was reprinted several times.13 Because Paczensky’s description reads very fluently and at the same time contains all the classic ingredients, I quote at length from it. Touching Description Around one million Turks live in West Germany and West Berlin and perhaps a third of them are women. They live amongst us, [are] far from invisible, on the contrary: thanks to head scarf and floral pattern trousers, gestures and behavior they are very visible, evidently strangers. Strangers, that is to say, strange . . . They adjust more slowly than the other immigrants from southern countries to the language, clothing, manners of their German neighbors; they make contact with the world around them even more hesitantly than their husbands, their sons. Anyone who has anything to do with Turkish families, . . . discovers that meetings take place only with the men. The women may be physically present, they remain a mute background. Often there is not even eye contact. Of course there are exceptions . . . but they are rare. The overwhelming majority of women, who come here to find work, come from the countryside, from the remote villages of Anatolia, and they are clearly marked by this origin. Now they live in our cities as indigestible foreign bodies . . . they stand close together all muffled up, speak an incomprehensible language, cook unfamiliar dishes. They walk submissively two steps behind their husbands, and even the most typical domain of women, the purchase of groceries or dress material, they leave to their husbands and children.14

Women immigrants, as Paczensky describes them, are therefore not simply invisible, no, quite the opposite: they are conspicuous, because they appear so unapproachable, so impenetrable, so mute. And, of course, they are one thing above all, they are oppressed. The book, to which Paczensky


writes the introduction, bears the significant title Die verkauften Bräute (The Bartered Brides).15 What does that mean? It means, according to Paczensky, that many of the women “can neither read nor write, that they were sold into marriage while still half children, that in return for the bride price the husband acquired the unquestioning submission of his wife— finally it also means, that most of the women were never even asked, whether they want to emigrate to Germany. Such decisions are taken exclusively in the male family council. They came to our cities, our factories as bartered brides without having any say in the matter themselves.”16 This description and others like it display a tone typical of the time, especially pronounced in many social work and social education studies dealing with immigrants in general and immigrant women in particular. Such studies were usually written with the best of intentions—or as Paczensky puts it: this book is not only intended to convey information, but also a “sense of outrage”17—yet they are often based on the scantiest knowledge, which is used to make crudely sweeping statements. An example is the sensationalizing title The Bartered Brides. How do the authors substantiate the associated assertion that the overwhelming majority of the Turkish women were brought to Germany by force? Not in any serious way. Toward the end of the book they refer to a few statistics from another study, to a table indicated in very cursory form; and if one looks more closely, these figures do not at all demonstrate, that the majority of women followed a husband to Germany under compulsion.18 Victim Perspective and Pretension to Superiority It is, of course, undoubtedly true, that women immigrants are often exposed to particular burdens, and that it is therefore justified, even necessary, to draw attention to that. Nevertheless from a contemporary perspective most of the texts of the time, which tried to address the problems of women immigrants are handicapped by considerable distortions, limitations, and false assumptions. If one looks more carefully at what they are based on, then one encounters a small number of very sketchy and methodically extremely dubious sources, which were quoted so often, that they assumed the character of recognized facts.19 The practice and experience of advice centers was also frequently reported. The fact, however, that such reports are extremely one-sided, indeed selective—because it is those immigrant women who find themselves in serious difficulties who turn to them—did not for a long time appear to bother either authors or readers. And so the message could spread unhindered, that the life of women immigrants as a whole was unhappy and pitiable.20 More recent texts emerging from women’s studies and the women’s movement have criticized the simplifications of such images. Two aspects in


particular are central to their critique: first, the ubiquitous victim perspective, second, the pretension to superiority of the German authors. Victim Perspective The first and most obvious problem, is that texts of the kind I have described always see women immigrants from only one perspective, as passive victims— victims of German society, victims of Turkish men, victims of the capitalist economy. Never do women immigrants appear as active subjects, never as persons with desires and hopes of their own, who sometimes make their own plans, make decisions, also try to carry out these decisions—no matter how difficult the circumstances—at the same time developing strategies of their own, with cunning, tenacity, and determination. The determinist perspective denies the “poor immigrant woman” any response of her own, any individuality, any trace of freedom: unimaginable, that she should ever laugh, love, feel pleasure. There’s only one thing the women immigrants seem to be capable of, that is, to live in the monotony of their misfortune and to patiently bear this misfortune. Reflection, consciousness, on the other hand, is reserved to German women. Their motto is: we know, how you’re feeling.21 Pretension to Superiority There’s always also something condescending about such a pitying gaze, it looks down. And this is precisely where the next problem lies. Many of the German women involved in the women’s movement, in social work and social sciences have defined women immigrants as a problem group, in need of care and guidance. They tend to feel superior to the immigrant women and behave in a superior manner, and the sometimes implicit, sometimes also openly expressed belief is: we know, what’s good for you.22 Such an attitude is characteristic of hierarchical structures, of the benevolent condescension of those higher in status to those of lower status, which also has something disparaging about it. Reduced to a stereotype: “The welleducated, socially and linguistically competent German takes care of the . . . ‘deficient’ woman immigrant.”23 With the development of such criticisms the days seemed past in which it was possible to present a crudely simplified picture of the “poor oppressed immigrant woman” in the context of serious debate. The time for a more careful look, for more careful arguments had begun. Or at least that is what one could hope. Turkish Brides in 2005 And then came Necla Kelek with her book Die fremde Braut (The Unknown Bride).24 Both in its title, but also in other respects it displays parallels to the


“bartered brides” of the late 1970s. One feature of the earlier book by Baumgartner-Karabak and Landesberger is that the authors repeatedly insert diary entries, impressions of a four-week trip to Turkey, picturesque scenes of everyday village life, of work in the fields including women’s songs and dances into their more general statements on the situation of Turkish women. It all lends their descriptions an air of directness and authenticity. However, Necla Kelek—who is of Turkish origin, born in Istanbul, where she spent the early years of her life—can provide even more authentic insights. Large parts of the book consist of an account of her own family history. That includes the oppression of her mother by a pitiless father, related in detail right down to her mother’s secret curses, and that very much includes the lengthy description of her brother’s wedding, from the drummers to the silver dagger, from the entry of the bride and bridegroom on horseback to the sheep roasting on the spit; the exotic East, the readers can imagine themselves there. And if Baumgartner-Karabak and Landesberger wanted to produce a feeling of outrage in the public, then that’s even more true of Kelek. Combatively she places herself on the side of Turkish women, more precisely of the many women, who—according to her account—were forcibly married when they were very young to a Turkish man who had grown up in Germany. Before the wedding, says Kelek, they have no opportunity to get to know the bridegroom; and immediately after the wedding they have to follow him to distant Germany, where they have to be at the beck and call of the husband and his family, where they are at his mercy, where they are oppressed and without rights. And combatively Kelek settles accounts: on the one hand with the Turks in Germany, who oppress women or at least tolerate it by their silence. On the other hand, and this above all, with the well-meaning Germans, who are blind to the facts, and who with all their multicultural romanticism don’t want to see the injustice going on in their country, in their cities. In this respect Kelek’s book should be read primarily as an indictment. But when one looks more closely the details of her case remain rather vague. The blurb and later reports on the book note that the author has a doctorate in sociology, that she has carried out research among Turkish women, consequently her statements have a scholarly foundation. Yet the book lacks all solid and verifiable data. Instead, wherever it suits her argument, central concepts are used in an extremely imprecise way, and like and unlike are declared to be the same thing: the author simply equates arranged marriage with forced marriage, as if there were no essential differences between the two. And what she bases her tough statements and judgments on, remains completely unclear. Kelek relates personal observations, however random they may be, she describes a few conversations with Turkish women—and


from a mosaic of such impressions she draws conclusions as to what, in more or less similar form, is happening “everywhere” in Turkish communities and Turkish families in Germany. It’s careless, it’s highly questionable as scholarship—but it’s a hit with the media and the public. Kelek’s book is a success, and a brilliant one at that. It has been reviewed in all the major media, in the news magazine Der Spiegel even by the minister of the Interior, Otto Schily, in person. The author is much sought after for interviews, readings, round table discussions, for talk shows and conferences, she has become the authentic source of information when it comes to the subject of “The oppression of the Turkish woman.” Her book very quickly went onto the best-seller lists. Kelek is certainly right in one respect: every forced marriage of the kind she describes is an injustice, and a violent and cruel injustice, at that, and the German state must do everything it can to punish such injustice and prevent it from occurring in the future. And Kelek is perhaps right in one further respect: there may be more forced marriages in Germany, than we have previously suspected. But, as already mentioned, Kelek can offer us no figures. Instead it’s more a kind of generalized suspicion, that she expresses, and which—without any possibility of scrutiny—is simply being ascribed to the Turkish communities. And it’s in her description of the Turkish communities, in particular, that Kelek draws a very crude sketch indeed. Kelek claims to have written a “report from inside Turkish life in Germany” (the subtitle of the book). And what is presented to the reader, appears to be drawn from the worst nightmares of xenophobic Germans. Not only is forced marriage “normal practice” among Turkish immigrants25 and not only are the wives brought to Germany “kept like slaves,”26 but more than that: “the Turks have withdrawn en masse to their mosques and are defending their Islamic world. They have long ago created their own parallel society,”27 all this of course with the assistance of the German achievements of social insurance and unemployment benefit,”28 and benevolently subsidized in this way “they celebrate their Turkish nationalism.”29 Their religion, Islam, is particularly dangerous. It does not acknowledge tolerance in the Western sense, only “respect for the strong” and “submission,”30 which is why many Muslims “despise German laws and only exploit them,”31 of course to dubious ends: to “expand their religious influence and to continue their reactionary practices.”32 In short, the multicultural dreams have not been fulfilled. The reality looks different. In fact: “The integration of the majority of Turks living in Germany has failed.”33 Perhaps it’s such passages that explain the meteoric ascent and enormous success of the book. It’s not by chance that the headline above one review reads: “How Islam is conquering our cities.”34 Kelek’s book is not only a


colorfully related family history, not only an attack on wrongs done to women, it is also and not least an indictment of Islam and of the Turks in Germany. And Kelek is the principal witness for the prosecution. She provides arguments for those who always knew, what “the” Turks are like, how alien and threatening they are. Threatening to their own womenfolk, and no less threatening to us, the all-too gullible Germans. The Turks are coming! And we must defend ourselves, otherwise we will be overrun! That is a message, which many like to hear—and especially from an authentic source, from a Turkish woman in person. As has already been said: Kelek is undoubtedly right to fight against forced marriages. Nevertheless the discussion she has triggered has extremely problematic features. Once again the simple, the simplifying images have won out. Whether that is healthy for the coexistence of Germans and Turks, whether it furthers the much-demanded, often evoked integration—that is another matter. The authors of the Sixth Family Report already noted: “Readily welcomed are all reports, which contain particularly blatant examples of the oppression and abuse of Turkish women—if . . . they can be portrayed as a striking example of the way of life of an alien culture. Then . . . pity for ‘the’ Turkish woman can be combined with hostility to ‘the’ Turkish man and be used as legitimation for ethnic dissociation.”35 Prospects Images are always more than just images: they also have extremely political consequences. Anyone who comes across portrayals in which immigrants are overwhelmingly very foreign, very exotic, very different, is much more likely to feel increasingly threatened. “They” are supposed to come here to “us”? If such groups bring their manners, habits, and customs to Germany will our own way of life gradually disappear? What will become of everything that is familiar to us, that means home to us? Anyone who has such pictures and questions in his head, feels himself under pressure. He (or she) will believe the slogans of those who see the dominant German culture under threat. Hence he (or she) will reject immigration and immigrants. That can hardly be the aim of Necla Kelek. But it is perhaps the aim of some of those, who praise her book with particular fervor. Notes This chapter has been translated by Martin Chalmers. 1. Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (ed.) (2000), Familien ausländischer Herkunft in Deutschland (Families of foreign origin in Germany), Sechster Familienbericht (Sixth Family Report), p. 33.

turkish brides / 193 2. Migrationsbericht (2004), Bericht des Sachverständigenrates für Zuwanderung und Integration im Auftrag der Bundesregierung in Zusammenarbeit mit dem europäischen forum für migrationsstudien an der Universität Bamberg, Berlin, p. 67. 3. That is: Germans from Eastern Europe, technically described as Aussiedler (resettlers); citizens of non-German origin; children of German-foreign marriages; and children of foreign parents, who in accordance with the new law on citizenship become—if certain conditions are fulfilled—German citizens at birth. 4. See in greater detail on this, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2004), Wir und die Anderen. Vom Blick der Deutschen auf Migranten und Minderheiten, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. 5. See for e.g. Franz Nuscheler (2004), Internationale Migration. Flucht und Asyl, second edition, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, p. 21; Stefanie Schröder (2000), Fremdheit als Konstrukt. Das Bild des türkischen Gastarbeiters in ausgewählten Titelgeschichten des Nachrichtenmagazins Der Spiegel, MA thesis, Erlangen University; Andreas Klärner (2000), Aufstand der Ressentiments. Einwanderungsdiskurs, völkischer Nationalismus und die Kampagne der CDU/CSU gegen die doppelte Staatsbürgerschaft, Cologne: Papyrossa Verlagsges, p. 51. 6. Familien ausländischer Herkunft, p. 89. 7. See for e.g. Bernhard Schäfer (2004), Sozialstruktur und sozialer Wandel in Deutschland, 8th completely revised edition, Stuttgart: UTB, 88; Stefan Hradil (2001), Soziale Ungleichheit in Deutschland, 8th edition., Opladen: Leske und Budrich, p. 318. 8. Sökefeld, Martin (2004), “Das Paradigma kultureller Differenz: Zur Forschung und Diskussion über Migranten aus der Türkei in Deutschland,” in Sökefeld (ed.), Jenseits des Paradigmas kultureller Differenz. Neue Perspektiven auf Einwanderer aus der Türkei, Bielefeld: Transcript, p. 15. 9. Familien ausländischer Herkunft, p. 7; Sökefeld, Des Paradigmas kultureller Differenz. 10. Familien ausländischer Herkunft, p. 5 and p. 75. 11. The arguments of this section are developed in detail in Beck-Gernsheim, Wir und die Anderen, p. 52. 12. von Paczensky, Susanne (1978), “Vorwort” in Andrea Baumgartner-Karabak und Gisela Landesberger (eds.), Die verkauften Bräute. Türkische Frauen zwischen Kreuzberg und Anatolien, Reinbek/Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, pp. 7–9. 13. Ibid. Susanne von Paczensky was the editor of the series, there were nine editions with a total print run of 45,000 copies (information from the Rowohlt publishing house). 14. Ibid., p. 7. 15. Baumgartner-Karabak/Landesberger, Die verkauften Bräute. 16. von Paczensky, Vorwort, p. 9. 17. Ibid. 18. Baumgartner-Karabak/Landesberger, Die verkauften Bräute, p. 72; with reference to this criticism see also Yolanda Broyles-Gonzáles (1990), “Türkische Frauen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Die Macht der Repräsentation,” in Zeitschrift für Türkeistudien, 3, 1, pp. 107–134, in particular p. 114.

194 / elisabeth beck-gernsheim 19. See on this for e.g., the critique by Broyles-Gonzáles, Türkische Frauen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, p. 111. 20. See Berrin Özlem Otyakmaz (1995), Auf allen Stühlen. Das Selbstverständnis junger türkischer Migrantinnen in Deutschland, Cologne, p. 14. 21. See on this for e.g., the critique by Martina Schöttes and Annette Treibel (1997), “Frauen-Flucht-Migration,” in Ludger Pries (ed.) Transnationale Migration, Sonderband 12 of Soziale Welt, Baden-Baden, p. 85–117, in particular p. 110. 22. Ibid.; Broyles-Gonzáles, Türkische Frauen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 23. Schöttes and Treibel, Frauen––Flucht––Migration, p. 111. 24. Kelek, Necla (2005), Die fremde Braut. Ein Bericht aus dem Inneren des türkischen Lebens in Deutschland (The Unknown Bride. A report from inside Turkish life in Germany), Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. 25. Ibid., p. 255. 26. Ibid., p. 20. 27. Ibid., p. 258. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., p. 263. 30. Ibid., p. 236. 31. Ibid., p. 265. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., p. 260. 34. Review by Hans-Peter Raddatz in Die Welt (February 12, 2005). And the headline chosen by him is not at all chosen by chance, but refers directly to a passage in the book. There Kelek first of all describes the Turkish parallel world, which according to her is spreading in German cities; and then she quotes her little son, who after a visit to this parallel world had asked: “Mummy, when did the Turks conquer this town?” p. 213. 35. Familien ausländischer Herkunft, p. 89.

Part IV Labor Migration and Irregular Migration


C h ap t e r 1 0 Illegal Migration: What Can We Know and What Can We Explain? Friedrich Heckmann

Introduction Imagine two scenes at the German-Czech border. Scene One: it is night, a group of illegal migrants from Moldavia are sneaking through the bushes, led by a villager from a Czech border village, trying to cross the border to get into Germany. Their goal is to work there in the shadow economy. But they are spotted by a night vision camera of the border police, are arrested and questioned, some of them sent back, others brought into court. Scene Two: The next morning a group of Romanians, comfortably sitting in the leather seats of their bus, present their passports to the border officers and are allowed into the country. Their intention, however, is not tourism in Germany, but—like the Moldavians—to work there in the shadow economy. While scene one is what one commonly associates with illegal immigration1 scene two is a case that is occurring more and more frequently at present. The difference between the two groups: Moldavians need visas to travel to Germany, Romanians don’t need visas any more. Other groups cross the border with falsified documents. In the following paragraphs we see in a more detailed way that there are many forms of illegal immigration. Illegal or undocumented migration is a multifaceted phenomenon. As the related term “undocumented migration” suggests there are not and there cannot be any exact figures on the size and the kinds of migrants of this type. A first methodological problem we deal with in this paper is whether there are still some ways to at least get an estimate of the size of this form of migration. We ask: are there any indicators which allow for an estimate of the size and/or for trends of the development of the phenomenon? We shall argue that illegal migration is not completely undocumented, that

198 / friedrich heckmann

there are indicators, but that the indicators available depend largely on nationally specific conditions. The focus of our discussion for this part of the paper will be conditions and indicators in Germany. Experts agree that most undocumented migration in the modern world is done through different forms of human smuggling and that human smuggling is a business. Little is known, however, in a systematic way, about the organization of the smuggling process. The idea of an internationally operating, highly organized and centralized, pyramid-like mafia organization that does not only trade in migrants, but also with prostitutes, weapons, and drugs is very popular, but has not been convincingly verified by police investigations or by research (Kyle and Koslowski, 2001b: 13; Içduygu and Toktas, 2002: 26). Conceptual terms that are used for the analysis of the smuggling process imply a variety of theoretical ideas: “migration merchants” (Kyle and Dale, 2001), “large and well-organized transnational criminal organizations” (Kyle and Koslowski, 2001b: 11), “crime that is organized” (Finckenauer, 2001: 173), “mom-and-pop operators” (ibid., 183) or “smuggling industry” (Meyers III, 1997: 108), are some of these. If methodology in the sense referred to above is related to questions of measurement, a second methodological focus that we want to address concerns ways to theorize on the phenomena to be analyzed. Thus a second methodological—theoretical problem that this chapter discusses is the development of concepts for analyzing the smuggling process. There is a growing research interest in illegal migration and human smuggling from different disciplines and different perspectives such as legal and criminological perspectives, labor market and social policy views, looking at illegal migration from a standpoint of national security and controlling immigration, or focusing on issues of human rights connected with human smuggling and trafficking. The research interest that we focus on will be primarily the social organization of the smuggling process. This shall be done by looking at general concepts from sociology and economics and by asking whether they can be applied to explain phenomena of human smuggling, and if so, in which ways. The phenomena to be explained concern the whole smuggling operation, including mobilization in the country of origin, the travel-transport phase and the “integration” or insertion into the immigration country. The social organization and technology of human smuggling are in a constant process of adapting to new environmental conditions. To explain the dynamics of this change is another focus of the chapter. The context from which I have written this chapter is an ongoing project at the european forum for migration studies (efms) at the University of Bamberg. It is called “Human Smuggling and Trafficking in Migrants.

illegal migration / 199

Types, Origins and Dynamics in a Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspective” and is financed by the National German Research Foundation within the framework of a “European Collaborative Research Project.”2 We begin by discussing the measurement aspects of our topic. Estimating Trends in Illegal Immigration into Germany Illegal immigration takes on many different forms that depend much on existing legal regulations, policing, border regimes, reactions of smugglers and migrants toward these conditions, and physical characteristics of the border areas. There are, however, three basic forms or types of illegal migration that may have many subtypes and variations depending upon the conditions mentioned (figure 10.1). Apart from the illegal and clandestine crossing of a border there is— according to police experts—the increasingly important crossing of a border in a seemingly legal way, either by using falsified documents or by using legal documents one is not entitled to, or by using legal documents for illegal purposes. The third form is—in a strict sense—not so much a form of immigration, but of not remigrating and staying in a country after one’s legal status has expired, for instance a tourist or temporary student visa (“overstayers”). The quantitative side of the phenomenon of illegal immigration has been approached in some countries on the basis of amnesty measures for illegal immigrants. Such amnesty or legalization campaigns have been organized in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United States (Lederer, 2003: 194). Depending upon the

Illegal immigration

Illegal crossing of a border

Crossing of a border in a seemingly legal way, using falsified documents, or using documents one is not entitled to, or using legal documents for illegal purposes

Figure 10.1 Basic forms of illegal immigration.

Staying after expiration of legal status


scope and the “generosity” or openness of such programs more or less accurate estimates of the stock of the population can be gained for a particular moment in time. These stock data, however, become quickly outdated, since amnesty programs form an incentive for new migrants to come in the same way hoping or believing that they will gain a legal status in the future. Germany has not had and will most probably not have such programs which means that this method of measurement is not and will not be available. How much the recording of illegal immigration is dependent upon very specific historic national and regional conditions may be demonstrated by another example from research at the US–Mexican border in the 1980s. Bustamente (1989: 100) was interested in flow data. He writes: a photographic technique “systematically examines the habitual gatherings of people once they have crossed the US–Mexican border ‘without inspection’ by US immigration authorities . . . Photographic slides of the two principal gathering places for undocumented immigrants crossing through Tijuana are systematically taken each day.” The research was undertaken to evaluate possible effects of the 1986 legislation foreseeing sanctions against firms employing illegal migrants. It seems questionable whether this technique ever could be regarded as valid and reliable. With operations like “Gatekeeper” and “Hold the line” and the total change in the control regime at the US–Mexican border this method certainly could not be repeated. Researchers in the United States have used—among others—census data for the estimation of the stock of illegal migrants in the country (Heer, 1990 in Lederer, 2003: 203). The rationale behind this is convincing evidence that a substantial part of the illegal migrants would be registered in the census. It is unthinkable that such a method could be applied in Germany, since anyone without a legal status who would be detected in the census data collection would have to be reported to the authorities. The efms at the University of Bamberg has been writing reports on immigration into Germany for the Federal Government (Beauftragte, 2001). When reporting on illegal immigration we work with the basic idea that illegal immigrants are traceable to some degree in certain data and statistics. These data, like apprehension statistics, can never, of course, measure exactly the size of illegal immigration into the country. But they can be analyzed for trends. We first look at some statistics which indicate flow, then at others which indicate stock of illegal immigrant population. Flow Data Data indicating flow of illegal immigration may be divided into statistics that in reality indicate unsuccessful attempts of illegal border crossing and,


on the other side, data that indicate “successful” illegal border crossing. The data on unsuccessful attempts all stem from the German Border Police. The most important statistic is on apprehensions for illegal border crossing. Figure 10.2 shows apprehension cases at German borders from 1990 to 2001. Comparing 1990 and 2001 the figures are four times higher in 2001. A very sharp increase occurred particularly between 1990 and 1993 from 7,152 to 54,298 cases. After 1993 numbers have gone down, and numbers remain at a relatively consistent lower level since then. The next statistic available to look at is apprehensions of human smugglers and apprehensions of smuggled persons. Figure 10.3 shows apprehensions of smugglers and smuggled persons from 1990 to 2001. The numbers for smuggled people are five times higher in 2001 compared to 1990, and there has been a rather continuous increase. Whether this is due to an increase in smuggling or an intensification of border controls or both we cannot infer from these statistics. If these statistics indicate unsuccessful attempts of illegal border crossing asylum statistics indicate “successful” illegal crossing of the border. The statistic referred to in this context is people asking for asylum within the country (figure 10.4). Due to the safe third country regulation of 1993 any person asking for asylum at a land border will be turned back, since Germany is surrounded only by “safe” countries in which a person might find asylum and would not have to go to Germany to be safe from political persecution. Once a person is in the country, asks for asylum and doesn’t tell authorities about the true route and mode of traveling or being smuggled into the country an asylum procedure is started. Authorities know that the person

60,000

54,298

50,000

44,949 40,201

40,000

35,205 31,065 29,604

30,000 23,587

37,789 31,485

27,024

28,560

20,000 10,000

7,152

0 1990 1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

Figure 10.2 Apprehensions of foreigners attempting to cross national land and sea borders illegally, 1990–2001. Source: Federal Border Guard (Bundesgrenzschutz).

202 / friedrich heckmann 14,000

Apprehensions

12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 Year Apprehensions of smuggled migrants

Apprehensions of human smugglers

Figure 10.3 Apprehensions of human smugglers and smuggled migrants at German national borders, 1990–2001. Source: Federal Border Guard (Bundesgrenzschutz).

43

8,

19

1

500,000 450,000

2,

59

9

400,000

11

2

32

350,000 3 25

6,

300,000

27

87

,1

,2 71

64 ,5

88

44

,1 78

95

,6 98

100,000

13

3 35 4, 10

11

6,

36

93

7

7

0 7,

12

150,000

12

7,

21

200,000

19

3,

06

250,000

50,000 0 1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

Figure 10.4 Asylum applications (“Erstanträge”), 1990–2002. Source: Federal Office for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees (BAFI).

applying for asylum has illegally entered the country across a land or sea border, but accept it within the asylum seeking process. A “regular” way to get access to the asylum procedure without crossing the border illegally is possible only through airports or the sea. Between 1990 and the end of 2002, almost two million people applied for political asylum in Germany. Since 1993, application figures have been decreasing continuously, mainly due to the following factors: the reform of asylum law, the stabilization of Eastern European countries, and the resolution of the conflict in former Yugoslavia (Beauftragte, 2001: 39). The remarkable feature of asylum migration in Germany is that one gets a (temporary) legal


status for the asylum procedure despite an illegal crossing of the border which “normally” constitutes a criminal act. Stock Data Contrary to the United States long term or even permanent illegal stay in the country is very difficult in Germany. The country is much smaller and controls are more effective and regarded as legitimate (e.g. ID cards, “verdachtsunabhängige Kontrollen”3). Thus it is very likely that in most cases illegal immigration and stay in Germany is temporary or a kind of pendulum movement. Welfare organizations and churches in Germany lately have begun to recognize the existence of a population of illegal immigrants who are in need of help. They have started certain programs for these migrants and authorities who would be obliged by law to record such cases and take action against illegal migrants seem to tolerate such activities. For an estimate of the development of the size of the illegal population in the country it is possible to have experts’ judgments of social workers who work with this population. This, of course, is a “soft” indicator, but social workers or some social workers in urban areas are among the very few persons who have knowledge of this hidden part of social life. Another indicator originates in crime statistics and looks more exact and gives numbers and time series data: suspected criminal offences of foreigners without a legal resident status. German police continuously collects data on suspected criminal offences of all kinds and records the resident status of foreign citizens being suspected of crimes. The number of suspects without a legal resident status marks the bottom line of the illegal migrant population in the country (figure 10.5). 160,000 140,000

125,038

131,456

137,232

138,146

140,779 128,320

124,262

122,583

1999

2000

2001

120,000 100,000 80,000 60,000 40,000 20,000 0 1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

Figure 10.5 Persons suspected of a criminal offence without a legal residence status in Germany, 1994–2001. Source: Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (Police Crime Statistics).


In 2001, for instance, there were 122,583 cases of apprehensions of people without a legal stay. Subtracting the number of apprehension cases at the border that are also recorded in this statistic one arrives at a number of about 94,000 people without a legal stay for the year 2001, who are suspected of having committed a crime.4 Looking at the statistic of suspected criminal offences of people without a legal title to stay in the country during the 1994 to 2001 period (figure 10.5) one could say that the numbers remain at a rather constant level. Other statistics which reflect to a certain degree the development of the number of illegal migrants in the country are cases of document fraud by foreigners, false marriages, cases of illegal employment and of illegal work. All of these data have risen sharply in the first half of the 1990s and remain at a rather constant lower level in the second half of the 1990s (Lederer, 2003: 232–247). What do we know from the different data about illegal immigration to Germany? In terms of stock data we have a minimum number of people that must live in the country. We may infer that at present5 the population of illegal migrants is at least about 94,000. As to flow data a trend can be identified: a steep increase in the first three to four years after 1990, and a somewhat lower and rather constant level for the second half of the 1990s.6 Illegal Migration and Human Smuggling Illegal migration can be organized in different ways. In an ideal typical way we may discern forms of illegal migration that are totally self-organized by the migrating person(s). In other cases migrating persons may “buy” certain smuggling services that are necessary at certain points or intervals of being “en route.” A third ideal type could be a network or an organization that has the whole smuggling operation—from recruitment to insertion—under its control and is operating both in the country of origin and the immigration country. Self-organization of the illegal migration process to Europe is more of an exception in modern times.7 Illegal migration mostly involves organized human smuggling of some kind and of some degree. Human smuggling is planned and performed in quite different ways. The social organization of this smuggling process is the main focus of this section of the chapter. In terms of methodology and theory we are interested in concepts and theories that could help explain the existence and functioning of different forms of organization of the smuggling process. Before discussing concepts for the analysis of human smuggling I first like to turn to possible sources of information that could help to describe the phenomenon, with particular reference to Germany.


Data Sources The following data sources may be used: ● ● ● ● ●

Interviews with smuggled people Experts’ interviews (police, social workers, health services personnel) Final reports of police investigations Reports by public prosecutors Court records.

Interviews with smuggled persons—for obvious reasons—are possible only after the person has achieved a safe and legal status. In countries with legalization programs and amnesties such interviews are possible. Germany is not a country with legalization programs, but people whose asylum application has been positively decided might be ready for interviews. Police, social workers, and supporting health services personnel are the main experts on illegal immigration. Churches and welfare organizations in Germany have started in the last two or three years to realize the need for a program for helping illegal migrants. Authorities are interested in avoiding the development of a problematic situation and are tolerating the work of the welfare organizations. Thus expertise on illegal migration and the social situation of these migrants is developing among small groups of professionals, particularly in big cities. The most valuable information for our research project has come so far from the police and the Federal Border Police. Expert interviews with police investigators have proven very informative. The other source we are using for our research are final reports of police investigations on cases of human smuggling and trafficking that are sent to the public prosecutor. Court verdicts are another source of information. Cases of Human Smuggling Before approaching the discussion on possible concepts for the analysis of human smuggling we describe three cases of smuggling that have been reconstructed from twelve intensive experts’ interviews with police investigators within the efms project mentioned earlier in the introduction.8 A fourth case has been taken from the literature. These cases shall demonstrate the broad variety of the phenomenon of human smuggling. Case One: Mr. A is standing at the railway station in Prague and is waiting for customers. He approaches people in Russian who, in his opinion, might be potential clients for his smuggling services. Judging that they are interested in getting to Germany he offers to organize the transport to the German


border for $300. He tells them that they would be brought to a pub near the border where they would surely meet on-foot smugglers who would lead them through the forest across the border. A “customer” accepts the offer and on the following day Mr. A. picks him up by car. He collects the money and takes the person, as previously agreed upon, to the pub near the border. Case Two: Mr. B. lives as a foreigner in Germany and organizes the smuggling of fellow countrymen from the Middle East. A relative of his is his contact person in his home village for the organization of the beginning of a smuggling operation. Many people in the village have plans of migration and the activities of Mr. B’s relative are well known. A person who wishes to be smuggled pays Mr. B. for a first stage of the journey via a form of shadow banking, which is called Hawala.9 The person to be smuggled receives a mobile phone with the number of Mr. B. so he may contact him in case of complications. The crossing of the first border is eased by Mr. B’s contact bribing the border guard. After that the migrant is left on his own. Mr. B. has further contact people in Ankara, Istanbul, and Athens. The smuggled person approaches these people after receiving orders from Mr. B. via phone and pays a required sum of money for the next stage of the trip. He then continues to travel to Patras where he manages to hide under the tarpaulin of a truck and reaches Italy. Mr. B. then sends his uncle with a hired camper van to Italy in order to pick up the smuggled person near the harbor and takes him to Germany. Upon arrival the smuggled person has to pay the final sum. In Germany the smuggled person is received by his relatives. Case Three: Two Afghans met at a Czech university and are now living in Hamburg and Moscow. As they were sent to Europe during Soviet times and were supported by the regime, they could not return to Afghanistan after the fall of the communist regime. They have developed numerous contacts to fellow countrymen in many other countries. Without having been involved in criminal activities before they are now using their contacts to organize human smuggling operations. All along the route from Afghanistan to Hamburg they have cooperating contacts who help them. Only the two smugglers know all these persons, but the latter don’t know either of the smugglers. The smugglers use the method of recruitment to get customers. The recruitment activities are carried out in Kabul by local accomplices and the journey begins as soon as relatives of the person to be smuggled who live in Hamburg have paid the first installment for the trip via Hawala. The persons to be smuggled are taken out of the country in a minibus and are taken care of along the route to Moscow by the different accomplices of the two Afghans, who provide them with food and lodging and who bribe the border guards. After the arrival in Moscow, a Moscow based Afghan


organizes a trip with other Afghans to Prague. The smuggled group carries a mobile phone during the whole journey enabling them to contact the two core smugglers in case of problems. In the communication on the phone no names are used which the smuggled persons wouldn’t have known anyway. In Prague the smugglers use the assistance of locals to organize a ride to the border and the last smuggling stage on foot to Germany. With the arrival of the smuggled person the work of the smugglers is finished and the final sum is paid. Case Four:10 this case deals with smuggling from Fujian province in China. “Fujianese migration began a slow but steady increase as it entered the . . . phase in 1986. Spurred by the Taiwanese development of the transportation networks, the smuggling industry developed the basic structure that exists today. Networks created by guanxi partnerships11 made access to illicit transportation easier, and guanxi wove globally distributed specialist entrepreneurs into highly flexible networks to form the smuggling industry. Mostly by letter, frequently through a returning relative, and sometimes by phone, pleas and demands for migration assistance from Fujianise in the source villages poured into the US Fujianese community. The members of that community were established, had the funds and obligations, and, most important, had guanxi with the smugglers . . . the market for smuggling services was in the United States, not Fujian Province. Manhattan’s Chinatown . . . was the point of contact for those seeking illicit transportation services and those brokering them . . . The terms, almost always oral, included a total payment, usually US $18,000; a down payment, usually US $1,000; undertakings of performance by the broker; and a final balance due on delivery . . . Because broker and client had a guanxi relationship . . . neither could breach their obligations without incurring a loss of face . . . and a resultant social and economic ostracism, or risking rectification of a breach by a progression of informal means, culminating in terror— induced performance at the hands of a criminal gang retained by the aggrieved party” (Myers III, 1997: 108). Concepts for Analyzing the Organization of Smuggling Operations The cases just described represent different forms of organizing human smuggling processes. In terms of general sociological and economic theory (working with the assumption that human smuggling is a business) what kind of structures and processes can we identify here? In a methodological sense the literature on human smuggling is rather weak on this issue and often uses vague and ad hoc concepts when approaching this question: smuggling industry, networks of smugglers, migrant merchants, mom-andpop-smugglers, organized crime, or crime that is organized, to name a few


(cf. Introduction). Often the word used does not seem to be more than a metaphor. First attempts to describe the organizational structures of human smuggling and trafficking in a publication by the International Organization for Migration ( Juhász, 2000: 196–197; Okólski, 2000: 261) look rather “voluntaristic”; in addition the empirical basis for the argument is not made clear. The public perception of the organization of human smuggling conveys the notion that pyramid-like, hierarchical organizations of a mafia type are dominating the smuggling process. “Human trafficking and even smuggling are often visualized as a global business involving well organized criminal, mafia-type formations involving countries of origin, of transit and of destination world wide” (Içduygu and Toktas, 2002: 29). Many law enforcement agencies or jurists seem to share that view and talk of organized crime (see for example Yates, 1997; for Germany, Albrecht, 2002; Nowotny, 2002). The case material we have just described, however, clearly demonstrates a variety of forms of human smuggling. This does not necessarily mean that the pyramid type of organization does not exist: organizational purposes, a membership structure, a hierarchy and a division of labor, rules and sanctions and definitions of what one has to do for the organization and what one can expect as a return. We have, however, so far not seen convincing evidence that the pyramid like criminal mafia organization exists. Trying to identify the cases in terms of general theoretical concepts: case one, first of all, is about a single actor and seems to be the very opposite of case four: while in case four we have a large organized structure with complete “service” from recruiting to insertion in the country of immigration, white only a partial service is being offered by a provider in a market type of situation. The provider is in competition with other providers of similar or identical services. About the market as a form of providing “smuggling services”: are there any special characteristics of this form of market versus “more normal” markets? Of course, market is an exchange process that is based on the interest of the actors. But we have learned that market exchange processes, in particular well-functioning markets, are not based on interest alone, but require certain rules that help to minimize risks involved in the exchange. These rules, on the one hand, could be given by the state in the form of market regulations, and on the other, by a system of market morals and of mutual trust (Esser, 2000: 172). The particular risks in a smugglers’ market as described in case one seem to be constituted by a lack of such rules and by the fact that the exchange usually is a single exchange which gives the buyer hardly any sanctioning power. He could only inform other potential migrants about the case, but it would be difficult for them to use this


information. Thus the smugglers’ market with an exchange of a limited and short term service is a market with high risks involved for the “customers” and a high probability of the migrants being cheated. The actions of certain Pateros, that is single smugglers at the Mexican–Texas border, may serve as an illustration of this risk. “This type of smuggler can frequently be found loitering around international bridges in addition to the bus stations of Mexican border cities. Migrants who are unaware of the realities of the journey they have undertaken are often victimized by these smugglers, who take their money in advance, lead them across the river, and abandon them to their fate once they are on the Texas side. This fate usually includes quick apprehension by the Border Patrol and often includes assault and worse by bandits who lurk in the darkness near the river on the U.S. side. A frequent complaint is that the assailants in these cases include the smugglers themselves” (Spener, 2001: 135–136). Police experts and literature (Içduygu and Toktas, 2002) tell us that cases two and three, and variants of these, quantitatively have become the most important contemporary forms of organizing human smuggling operations. In sociological terms, what kind of structure do we have in these cases? How does it rise, how can we explain its functioning, and its adaptation to changing environmental conditions? This is the main focus of our attention for the discussion ahead. A first and general answer is that the two cases represent network relations among smugglers. Concepts of network analysis can help us to describe and understand these relations. A network consists of units and their relations. With reference to cases two and three we could say that there is a unit of an initiating and organizing individual or of a (small) group of individuals who are the “entrepreneurial” part of the network. The other units are locally and internationally spread out “helpers” or “contacts.” Since human smuggling in present times almost exclusively is a business the relations between “entrepreneur” and “helpers” are characterized by mutual economic interest. In case the relations are, moreover, kin and/or ethnic relations communication in the net is eased and the relations could be more stable. This is what can explain the ethnic homogeneity of the smugglers’ networks. The difference between case two and case three is that case two has this type of closer relations which is further strengthened by kin and ethnic ties. Also, there are elements of self-organization of the migration process in case two. Kin and ethnic ties are connected with obligations of solidarity which can be mobilized for the network activity. In case three it is “only” a relation among members of the same ethnic or national group, bound together by their economic interests. Much has been written about the social embeddedness of economic activities. This is another case, though in a context one is not used to associate with this hypothesis.


Despite kin and ethnic relation the human smugglers’ network is one of high asymmetry. The entrepreneurial core person(s) clearly dominate and profit most from the network or even from exploiting the helpers. The smugglers’ network, in addition, is highly centralized, mostly even an extreme case of centralization. In terms of network concepts it represents a star configuration. All relations are from the core to the other units, but there are no relations among the other units. This constitutes a singular power for the core. On the basis of an analysis by Phillip Bonacich on the different effects of power versus prestige relations Hartmut Esser (2000: 196–197) distinguishes networks of negativer Verbundenheit or negative union from networks of positiver Verbundenheit or positive union. They constitute very different “worlds” in which very different strategies of action are prevalent. Networks of positiver Verbundenheit are characterized by relations of prestige, mutual sympathy, trust; and help; hence they are mutually supportive and complementary. The value of an actor’s relation to another actor increases with the value of this actor’s relations and resources. Networks of negative union are characterized by unequal power relations and the competition for the control of scarce goods among the actors. Despite the ethnic bond in the network of case three the smugglers’ networks is a case of negativer Verbundenheit. The function that ethnicity plays is one of easing communication, but not of establishing mutual relations of sympathy and help. Case two could be said to have elements of both negativer and positiver Verbundenheit. The difference between positive and negative union is very helpful particularly to explain the difference between networks in which human smuggling is a business—which is today’s normality—and idealistic networks of human smugglers. The network that smuggled German-Jewish intellectuals and artists out of Germany during the Nazi rule or student groups of Fluchthelfer from the Free University of Berlin who smuggled East Germans through the Wall after the 1961 erection of the Wall clearly are characterized by different relations of positive union than contemporary commercial smuggling networks. Let us now turn to the analysis of case four, the case of Chinese human smugglers. What kind of relations do we have here, how is the smuggling process organized? Is it a case of a large, hierarchical, pyramid-like mafia organization that we hear so much about, or does it have network characteristics? Looking at cases two and three versus case four we could first say that case four has a much larger and globally more extending structure. Its elements have, at least partly, the characteristics of an organization—like for example the transportation organization—but the structure of operations as a whole does not seem to show one organization, but interconnected


organizations. It is a network that consists of organizations, hence an interorganizational network. Most of the numerous publications referring to human smuggling as an activity of “organized crime” assume the existence of a large organization performing the operation. Neither the hypothesis of organized crime nor that of the existence of large total organizations “doing the job” have been convincingly verified. We rather follow Ko-lin Chin who has interviewed more than three hundred smuggled people and concludes: “migrant smuggling . . . is a global business initiated by Chinese Americans of Fuzhou extraction and supported not only by Taiwanese but also by Chinese and non-Chinese in numerous transit countries. In short, the human trade is in many ways like any other legitimate international trade, except that it is illegal. Like any trade, it needs organization and planning, but it does not appear to be linked with traditional “organized crime” groups (Chin, 2001: 225). Europol states in its report for the years 1996–1997 that “there is no clear proof that illegal immigration is . . . organized by internationally acting criminal groups” (Salt and Hogarth, 2000: 54). Coming back to case four and continuing to work with the assumption that human smuggling is a business we have in case four a network of business organizations. Gerum (2001) has carried out a broad theoretical analysis of the network concept with special emphasis on networks of business organizations—Unternehmensnetzwerke—that can be applied to explain the working of the case four relations. His analysis refers to relations between legal businesses. We assume that a network of businesses engaged in illegal activities follows the same or similar basic logics. For understanding the functioning of networks between business organizations it is helpful to differentiate these from markets and hierarchies. Markets and hierarchies represent ideal types of forms of coordination of economic activities. On the basis of analyzing a broad sociological and economic literature Gerum (2001: 11–13) argues convincingly that networks represent an independent form of coordination of economic activities. He lays down the basic functional principles of such interorganizational networks: networks of organizations are formed of self-reliant, independent actors and usually are based on long-term relationships. There is—at least partially—a common interest between the organizations, yet cooperation coincides with competition in the relationship. The relationship is stable as long as profit gained form cooperation in the network is greater than profit gained from truly competitive behavior by each individual organization. This creates mutual dependency. Complementary resources are the basis for the creation of a network among organizations. The value of the network as a whole is dependent upon the actions of all partners, which determines the specific network risk.


The distribution of profit in an organizational network is another interesting point. In a market—under conditions of perfect information—the distribution of profit is regulated ex ante with the conclusion of a contract. In a hierarchy or formal organization the profit is distributed according to an employment contract and, in case of several owners, according to the charter of the company. The employment contract regulates clearly the amount and size of income, while the Gesellschaftsvertrag (charter) could only regulate the distribution of (potential) profits. During the formation of a network, however, neither the size of profit nor the mode of distributing profits are known. Negotiations ex post are therefore necessary for the regulation of these issues. Hence high risks are involved in network structures of organizations. This applies to any interorganizational network. The risks are even higher for organizations engaged in illegal activities. As a consequence of illegal activities smugglers and traffickers operate in a clandestine way and use particular techniques to hide their activities like forging documents or changing mobile phones continuously to ensure secrecy of communication. Decisions have to be made under conditions of limited information and uncertain outcomes. In this situation organizations in the network have to resort to forms of trust. “Trust is the central coordinating mechanism in a network” (Gerum, 2001: 11–13). In our example of case four this relationship is called guanxi as a relation of trust between people not related by kinship. Whereas in networks of positiver Verbundenheit sympathy and trust are a founding principle of the network, trust in case four is a necessity resulting from the logics of the business. The Interaction between Law Enforcement and Smugglers: The Development of an Arms Race While in the previous section we have been interested primarily in the possibilities of analyzing different types of social organization of human smuggling we want to add in this section some elements for a possible explanation of the dynamics of the organization of human smuggling. Human smuggling arises out of the existence of borders and because border crossing is possible only under certain defined legal conditions, while the motivation for global migration exceeds the given legal possibilities. At the same time the abilities of states to control immigration are limited and migration policies often fail to achieve their intended objectives (Castles, 2003). Experts agree that the process of human smuggling is under constant pressure for adaptation to change. The dynamism in the social organization of smuggling evolves from the relation between law enforcement and smugglers’ networks. The basic pattern is an interaction process: the action of one actor


provokes a reaction of the other which in turn leads to another action. Each action is influenced by the actor’s anticipation of possible reactions of the other actor. The whole process takes on the form of an arms race. The state’s and law enforcement’s actions and measures generally include: ● ● ● ●

an increase in financial means and personnel for border control an increase in material and technological resources changes in legislation and administrative rules cooperation with other states and training of their personnel.

These elements do not come all at once, but in phases and lead to a spiral in the intensity of competition with the smugglers. The smugglers’ response and arsenal of reactions include: ● ● ● ● ●

●

changes in routes increase in technological sophistication professionalization and specialization increase of juridical sophistication development of marketing strategies such as more systematic recruitment and improvement of “services”: guaranteed smuggling and special fees for certain groups12 attempts to corrupt state officials.

From general theory of economic competition we can infer that the intensity of competition is evident in the speed with which one side can make up for the advantages of the other side (Kantzenbach, 1967). An arms race will end with the exhaustion of one of the competitors. In human smuggling, however, we seem to be far from that moment. What Peter Andreas (Andreas, 2001) has found for the US–Mexican border—a conflict and simultaneously a kind of symbiotic relationship between law enforcement and smuggling—is most probably true for the European scene as well: as the demand for smuggling services and the risks of illegal migration have grown, the price for smuggling has gone up. This has enhanced the wealth and power of smuggling groups, but not of all groups. Better controls have removed some smugglers out of the business, but improved the market position of others. “Moreover, many of those arrested are the lowest-level and most expendable members of smuggling organizations— the border guides and drivers who are the ‘foot soldiers’ of the business” (Andreas, 2001: 117). From a perspective of the migrants the risks for illegal migration have grown for those with few resources. Law enforcement and migration policy decision makers are well aware of the dilemmatic situation. But since the control over territory, population and—as a consequence—borders are core parts of a state’s sovereignty a


state cannot simply withdraw from the arms race with the smugglers. For a union of states—like the Schengen States within the EU, who have removed border controls among them—the same holds true for the policies regarding their common outside borders. Conclusion The chapter consists of two parts: the first part is an analysis of possibilities to empirically trace illegal or undocumented migration, with special reference to Germany. The second part is a discussion of the ability of certain concepts and hypotheses to describe and explain the social organization of human smuggling. As to documents on undocumented migration Massey and Capoferro (2004) has described an impressive range of methods which seem to have some universal applicability. At the same time it is evident that the possibilities to empirically trace this type of migration much depend on nationally and historically very specific conditions. Referring to Germany we have argued that official statistics on apprehensions, asylum applications, and criminal offences indicate trends of illegal migration and allow for the estimation of a minimum number of illegal migrants in the country. These possibilities are related to the existence of a rather strict border and particularly to an internal control regime in Germany. Much of the discussion on human smuggling is dominated by the hypothesis of mafia type, pyramid-like organization performing the operations. We have given evidence for a variety of forms that represent different types of social organization of human smuggling. We have discerned single actors, networks of smugglers, and interorganizational networks. Each type of social organization operates under particular conditions with particular implications for the smugglers as well as for their customers. In ongoing research which investigates files of police investigations and court verdicts we further differentiate our models of human smuggling organization. Evidence for the activities of large scale criminal organizations has not been found as yet. Also a connection between the smuggling of humans and of drugs and/or weapons has not been empirically established. Notes 1. In accordance with most literature in Germany we are using the term “illegal migration” synonymously with “undocumented” or “irregular” migration. 2. The project partners are: IMIS (University of Amsterdam), Centro Studi di Politica Internazionale (Rome), ICMPD (Wien), SFM (Neuchatel) and Intstituto


3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

Universitario de Estudos sobre Migraciones (Madrid). The efms project team consists of Friedrich Heckmann, Thomas Müller-Schneider, and Matthias Neske. Checking on a person who has not behaved in a suspicious way. Such controls are possible for instance in airports, railway, or bus stations. Since this statistic records cases and not only persons the number of people for which this statistic stands must be somewhat smaller; a few people will have been apprehended twice or even more often. We have the most recent figures for 2001. The statistic on smugglers and smuggled people caught (figure 10.3) does correspond to this trend in the first half of the 1990s, but not to the second half. Whether this is due to a rather continuous increase in smuggling or reflects tighter controls by the border police or both we do not know. What can be stated with certainty is that border controls have strongly and continuously been intensified at the Schengen borders. For the crossing of the US–Mexican border self-organization of illegal border crossing still seems to be relevant. For first trips migrants rely on help from smugglers and social ties, but on consecutive trips self-organization on the basis of experience gained during the first border crossing plays an important part (Singer and Massey, 1998). The interviews have been conducted by Matthias Neske; he has also reconstructed the cases. The interviews were done with officers from the Bundesgrenzschutzinspecktion Furth im Wald, Bundesamt für die Anerkennung ausländischer Flüchtlinge, Kriminalpolizei Nürnberg, Bundesgrenzschutzpräsidium Süd Müchen, Bundesgreznschutzamt Schwandorf, Bundesgrenzschutzpräsidium Ost Berlin, Bundesnachrichendienst Pullach, Bundesgrenzschutzamt Frankfurt Oder, Bundesgrenzschutzdirektion Koblenz, Landeskriminalamt Niedersachsen Hannover, Landeskriminalamt Bayern München and Bundeskriminalamt Wiesbaden. Hawala is . . . based on the principle of two “containers”: one in the country of origin and one in the country of destination. As an example: Mr. A. who works in Hamburg, wants to transfer money to Mr. B. in Kabul. He approaches a Hawala banker in Hamburg and gives him the amount of money. The banker charges a commission . . . (and) calls his banker colleague in Kabul, Mr. B. standing right next to him in the Kabul bank, and confirms that the amount has just been paid in Hamburg. As a result, the banker in Kabul pays the money to Mr. B. The proceedings are therefore based on complete mutual trust among all participants and have the advantage of being considerably faster, more effective, and cheaper than Western bank transfers. There are also no written traces of the transfer so that incriminate funds can be transferred, too. In order to balance the two cash “containers,” couriers with money fly from Hamburg to Kabul. Imports or exports are another form of balancing the assets (Neske, Müller-Schneider, and Heckmann, 2002: 4). While cases one to three were drawn from the experts’ interviews with police experts in an ongoing efms research project, case four is from Meyers III (1997: 108–1099). Guanxi is a mutual-obligate dyadic relationship outside the family (Meyers III, 1997: 127). For instance for children and for people who can swim (!) (v. Liempt, 2003: 8).


References Albrecht, H. J. (2002), “Eine kriminologische Einführung zu Menschenschmuggel und Schleu-serkriminalität,” in E. Minthe (ed.) Illegale Migration und Schleusungskriminalität. Schriftenreihe der kri-minologischen Zentralstelle, Wiesbaden, Band 37, pp. 29–53. Andreas, P. (2001), “The Transformation of Migrant Smuggling Across the US-Mexican Border,” in D. Kyle and R. Koslowski (eds.) Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 107–128. Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Ausländerfragen (2001), Migrationsbericht der Ausländerbeauftragten im Auftrag der Bundesregierung, Berlin, Bonn. –––––– (2002), Migration Review, English Version of Beauftragte 2001 on CD ROM. The CD can be ordered from efms (www.uni-bamberg.de/efms). Bustamente, J. A. (1989), “Measuring the Flow of Undocumented Immigrants,” in A. Cornelius and J. A. Bustamente (eds.) Mexican Migration to the United States, San Diego: University of California Press, pp. 95–106. Castles, S. (2003), “The Factors that Make and Unmake Migration Policies,” International Migration Review, 38, 3, pp. 852–884. Chin, K. L. (2001), “The Social Organization of Chinese Human Smuggling,” in D. Kyle and R. Koslowski (eds.) Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Esser, H. (2000), Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen. Band 4: Opportunitäten und Restriktionen, Campus: Frankfurt, New York, pp. 210–234. Europol (1999), General Situation Report 1996–1997: Illegal Immigration, The Hague: File No. 2562–52. Finckenauer, J. O. (2001), “Russian Transnational Organized Crime,” in D. Kyle and R. Koslowski (eds.) Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 166–187. Gerum, E. (2001), Unternehmensnetzwerke: Ein Grundlagenstreit. Vortrag im Workshop der Kommission Wissenschaftstheorie des Verbandes der Hochschullehrer für BWL, Augsburg 29–30.06.2001. Heer, D. M. (1990), Undocumented Mexican Americans in the United States, Cambridge University Press. Içduygu, A. and Toktas, S. (2002), “How Do Smuggling and Trafficking Operate via Irregular Border Crossings in the Middle East? Evidence from Field Work in Turkey,” International Migration, 40, 6, pp. 25–54. International Organization for Migration (IOM) (ed.) (2000), Migrant Trafficking and Human Smuggling in Europe. A Review of the Evidence with Case Studies from Hungary, Poland and Ukraine, Geneva: IOM Publication. Juhász, J. (2000), “Migrant Trafficking and Human Smuggling in Hungary,” in IOM (ed.), Geneva: IOM Publication, pp. 65–232. Katzenbach, E. (1967), Die Funktionsfähigkeit des Wettbewerbs, Göttingen. Kyle, D. and Dale, J. (2001), “Smuggling the State Back In. Agents of Human Smuggling Reconsidered,” in D. Kyle and R. Koslowski (eds.) Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 30–57.

illegal migration / 217 ——— (2001a), Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press. –––––– (2001b), “Introduction,” in D. Kyle and R. Koslowski (eds.) Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 1–25. Lederer, H. W. (2003), Indikatoren der Migration, Manuskript der Dissertation, Universität Bamberg. v. Liempt, I. (2003), Human Smuggling. In: Migrants: Towards a Typology, Unpublished Paper, Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, University of Amsterdam. Massey, D. S. and C. Capoferro (2004), “Measuring Undocumented Migration,” International Migration Review, 38, 3, pp. 1075–1103. Minthe, E. (ed.) (2002), Illegale Migration und Schleusungskriminalität. Schriftenreihe der kri-minologischen Zentralstelle, Wiesbaden, Band 37. Myers III, W. H. (1997), “Of Quinging, Qinshu, Guanxi and Shetow: the Dynamic Elements of Chinese Irregular Population Movement,” in P. J. Smith (ed.) Human Smuggling. Chinese Migrant Trafficking and the Challenge to America’s Immigration Tradition, Washington DC: The Centre for Strategic and International Studies, pp. 93–133. Neske, M., T. Müller-Schneider, and F. Heckmann (2002), The Social Organization of Human Smuggling, Project Paper, european forum for migration studies. Nowotny, K. (2002), “Schleusungskriminalität aus staatsanwaltlicher Sicht,” in E. Minthe (ed.) Illegale Migration und Schleusungskriminalität. Schriftenreihe der kri-minologischen Zentralstelle, Wiesbaden, Band 37, pp. 98–104. Okólski, M. (2000), “Migrant Trafficking and Human Smuggling in Poland,” in IOM (ed.) Migrant Trafficking and Human Smuggling in Europe. A Review of the Evidence with Case Studies from Hungary, Poland and Ukraine, Geneva: IOM Publication, pp. 233–328. Salt, J. and J. Hogarth (2000), “Migrant Trafficking and Human Smuggling in Europe: A Review of the Evidence,” in IOM (ed.) Migrant Trafficking and Human Smuggling in Europe. A Review of the Evidence with Case Studies from Hungary, Poland and Ukraine, Geneva: IOM Publication, pp. 11–164. Singer, A. and D. S. Massey (1998), “The Social Process of Undocumented Border Crossing Among Mexican Migrants,” International Migration Review, 32, pp. 561–592. Smith, P. J. (ed.) (1997), Human Smuggling. Chinese Migrant Trafficking and the Challenge to America’s Immigration Tradition, Washington DC: The Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Spener, D. (2001), “Smuggling Migrants through South Texas: Challenges Posed by Operation Rio Grande,” in D. Kyle and R. Koslowski (eds.) Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 129–165. Yates, K. (1997), “Canada’s Growing Role as a Human Smuggling Destination and Corridor to the United States,” P. J. Smith (ed.) Human Smuggling. Chinese Migrant Trafficking and the Challenge to America’s Immigration Tradition, Washington DC: The Centre for Strategic and International Studies, pp. 156–168.


C h ap t e r 1 1 Managing Citizenship and Migration: Undocumented Labor Migrants’ Children and Policy Reforms in Israel Adriana Kemp

During the nineties, a rich body of scholarship has evolved in the attempt to grasp the challenges that the phenomenon of migration poses to the nation-state in relation to one of its main foundations: citizenship (Brubaker, 1989; Bauböck, 1994; Sassen, 1996, 1998; Joppke, 1999). While the nature of this challenge and its scope have been subject to serious debate (Soysal, 1994; Brubaker, 1998; Joppke, 1998), there is a common understanding that the globalization of human and capital flows, has yielded to new definitions of membership and participation that are not necessarily congruent with the limits of the nation-state. Broadly speaking, two main interpretations have accompanied the discussion on the modes in which migration challenges the nation-state. The first one stresses the territorial and national character of migration and citizenship policies. It stems from the assumption that, in the absence of a viable alternative political framework to the nation-state, we are not yet equipped with a political theory of “partial and limited state-membership” that could transcend the holistic and universal nature of citizenship in the national era (see Brubaker, 1989: 5). The second interpretation examines the ways in which migration is transforming, rather than reaffirming, the national model of membership and the very politics it ensues, leading to the development of postnational forms of membership. According to Soysal, postnational citizenship is characterized by the loosening of the Gordian knot—“decoupling”—that linked rights and national identity since the French Revolution, and that became established after World War I (1994: 3). In contrast to those who see the partial incorporation of non-European

220 / adriana kemp

migrants in European states as an intolerable “deviation” from the “normal” model of citizenship, the “post-nationalist” research agenda seeks to show how escalating international migration functions as a major catalyst for a rescaling of critical concepts such as “citizenship,” “sovereignty” and “national identity.”1 Both interpretations have not gone unchallenged. Rather than leaning on a dichotomous distinction between prophetic postnational and static national models of membership, a third line of research proposes a more subtle understanding of “membership” and “citizenship” as embedded in particular social and political contexts and yet at the same time, as part of broader trends that blur the line between domestic and international spheres, between the legal jurisdiction of individual states and globalized migration systems (Aleinikoff and Kluesmeyer, 2000). Thus, for instance, Feldblum (1998) argues that the penetration of postnational norms, epitomized by the proliferation of partial and dual modes of membership, and their implementation with regard to foreigners in west European states, constituted a catalyst for the rise of neo-national trends that call for a “Fortressed Europe” against foreigners. Martiniello (1994) and Koslovski (1998) point to the formation of two opposite and yet simultaneous regimes of incorporation within the geopolitical space of Europe: while at the national level, European states’ regimes of incorporation became more inclusive, at the supranational level of the apparently borderless European Union, the definition of membership was anchored in national definitions, and “freedom of movement,” as it appears in clause eight of the Maastricht Agreement, became a privilege for the extremely small numbers of those considered “European,” while more clearly than ever excluding migrants from nonmember countries (third countries).2 And more recently, Joppke and Morawska have concluded that, by and large, Western liberal states have responded to migratory challenges either by liberalizing their citizenship regimes or by upgrading the rights attached to citizenship. Though opposite in their restrictive versus liberalizing thrusts, they argue, these developments have coexisted resulting, by and large, in a revaluation of citizenship as a dominant membership principle (2003: 1–2). Accordingly, it would seem that postnational ideas and norms are not replacing national definitions of membership. They rather exist side by side as part of the policymakers’ tool-kit, allowing states to “manage” the structural contradictions that they themselves created in their simultaneous, albeit often incongruent, pursuit of cheap labor force and cultural homogeneity. Much of the migration and citizenship debate has been typically located within the geopolitical space of western European states and the

managing citizenship and migration / 221

United States. However, the dynamic that brought about the reconfiguration of national forms of membership—namely, a dynamic of mass migration of immigrants perceived as non-assimilable in terms of the political and cultural tapestry of the nation-state, has overstepped the northern transatlantic axis. The geopolitical and cultural space of Israel is a case in point. Debates on citizenship and migration became relevant in Israel during the 1990s when new kinds of immigration patterns added to the returning ethnic migration of Jews, most prominently the immigration of non-Jews from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) as part of family reunification that constitute nearly 25 percent of the FSU immigrants, and the official and nonofficial recruitment of overseas migrant workers to replace Palestinian daily commuters in the labor market. Proceeding from 72 different countries, non-Jewish and non-Palestinian labor migrants comprised 240,000 migrant workers in 2002, 60 percent of whom were without permits, and they constituted 8.7 percent of the Israeli labor force (Kemp and Raijman, 2003). Indeed the increasing number of non-Jews who are also non-Palestinian in Israel is leading to an interesting situation in which it is no longer a simple matter to classify the Israeli population by national and ethnic categories. As Cohen remarks, “what was possible twenty years ago when all immigrants were Jews, all non-Jews were Arabs, and all labor migrants were Palestinian daily commuters, is no longer the case in contemporary Israel” (2001: 44). There are several crucial respects in which both patterns of migration of the nineties differ as most non-Jewish immigrants from FSU enter Israel within the framework of the 1970s reform to the Law of Return,3 and therefore they are accorded citizenship,4 while labor migrants, either documented or undocumented, are not perceived as prospective immigrants and the channels to naturalization are de facto hermetically closed to them. However, differences notwithstanding, patterns of non-Jewish and nonPalestinian migration in Israel are of far-reaching sociological and political import in that they “mess up” the central rubrics through which discussions on citizenship and nationality have been carried out in Israel up until now: Jews and Palestinians (Shafir and Peled, 2002). As such, their presence have raised questions about the fundamentals of the incorporation regime, not from within, as it has been the case in Israel until recently, but rather “from without,” meaning from beyond the formal framework of the category of “citizenship.” Indeed, less than a decade ago, the argument that immigration is a challenge to the Israeli nation state was far from self-evident. Committed to the immigration of Jewish immigrants and to their successful accommodation, “absorption” in Israeli vernacular, the underlying assumption of policymakers and researchers alike was that migration should be treated

222 / adriana kemp

as “endogenous” phenomenon that ratifies rather than transforms the fundamental principals of the Jewish nation-state (see Shuval and Leshen, 1998). Though institutionally and ideologically this assumption still holds true, it stands at odds with sociological developments that have transformed Israel into a de facto non-Jewish immigration state and society. This chapter traces recent trends in the management and distribution of citizenship5 within the Israeli context, as these have evolved in the wake of new modes of migration. Debates on migration and citizenship are particularly acute with regard to those labor migrants who, against all odds, have settled down in Israel, established families, and formed active communities in the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv, where the proportion of labor migrants reached at its height nearly 20 percent of the population within the municipal boundaries of the city (Kemp and Raijman, 2004). The question is to what extent have new definitions of membership developed so as to incorporate—both conceptually and practically—the new category of “minorities,” who are neither Jewish nor Arab? What challenges, if any, would they pose to the ethnonational regime in Israel? To what extent have “post-national” norms and ideas that informed European and North American debates permeated also the public discourse in Israel? The article focuses on administrative and policy initiatives taken up since September 2003 that deal with the naturalization of undocumented labor migrants’ children. The vulnerable status of labor migrants as unrecognized residents and candidates for deportation makes these initiatives and measures particularly surprising. But they also reveal the boundaries of liberalizing reforms as they become part of general trends, initiated by the state as a means of managing membership. After a brief presentation of the background to the new labor migration in Israel during the nineties, I analyze the public debate on the new reform initiatives, and trace the political struggles that such initiatives have engendered, identifying the main social and political actors involved in the struggle over citizenship reforms. Based on the Israeli case, my argument is threefold: first, liberalizing policy initiatives toward labor migrants’ children are guided by pragmatic considerations rather than ideological transformations; second, administrative and legislative reforms that concern the status of unwanted immigrants can be attained insofar they are premised on personal and humanitarian considerations; third, personalized and humanitarian channels for naturalization do not entail major transformations of the citizenship regime, they rather attest at a broader trend of reinvigorating state citizenship in face of new challenges to the ethnonational character of Israel in the guise of non-Jewish immigration.


The “New” Labor Migration in Israel The recruitment of labor migrants during the 1990s is one of the most notable expressions of the insertion of Israeli economy and society within the neo-liberal global system. Labor migration from overseas countries is a relatively new phenomenon in Israel. It started in the early 1990s, when the government authorized the recruitment of a large number of labor migrants to replace Palestinian workers from the occupied territories (Bartram, 1998). The deterioration of the political and security situation triggered by the 1987 Intifada brought about a severe labor shortage in the construction and agriculture sectors, in which Palestinian workers had been concentrated since the early 1970s (Semyonov and Lewin-Epstein, 1987). However, it was not until the Israeli government decided to seal the border with the occupied territories, at the beginning of 1993 that the large-scale recruitment of overseas workers began, primarily from Romania (construction sector), Thailand (agriculture), and the Philippines (geriatric care, nursing, and domestic services). The recruitment of overseas workers was consistent with the interests of both the state and the employers, as it was considered a temporary, low-cost solution to a temporary problem (Bartram, 1998). The result was that in the 1990s the ground was prepared for the transformation of overseas labor migration from a negligible phenomenon—as it had been until then—into an institutionalized process. As in other countries, the official recruitment of labor migration brought about an influx of undocumented migrants. According to the Ministry of Interior Affairs’ data, non-Jewish undocumented foreign workers arrive in Israel from almost every corner of the world— though mainly from East Europe, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America—and are employed primarily in the services sector. Israel has instituted a labor migration policy that has been by and large forsaken by most Western European nation states since the 1970s (see Castles, 2000: 63–78). The Israeli laws and regulations governing labor migration are much more akin to the patterns of labor migration regulation and control in the Gulf system and in the newly industrialized countries (NICs) in Southeast Asia, and are much stricter than those prevailing in states with longer histories of foreign labor recruitment. Similar to the Gulf states and to Taiwan, in Israel work permits are granted to employers, to whom the migrant worker is indentured, thereby maximizing employers’ and state control over the foreign population. The state does not allow residence without a work permit; does not recognize any right of asylum or any right of family reunification, nor does it guarantee access to housing, social benefits, or public medical care. Finally, the state carries out a blatant deportation policy that allows the arrest and expulsion of undocumented

224 / adriana kemp

migrants at any time by simple administrative decree.6 In that sense, Israel’s labor migration policy reflects the Janus face of labor migration systems: labor migrants are seen by the state as both an indispensable answer to economic issues and as a threatening problem to the national community.7 As the official recruitment of labor migrants in Israel has resulted in an increasing number of undocumented migrants, some of who have meanwhile settled and created families and whole communities, state policies have had to address ever more complicated situations (Kemp et al., 2000; Kemp and Raijman, 2003). The answer to the new sociological realities enacted by the labor migration system has mainly taken the shape of a deportation policy. Indeed, except for a six month period of respite between January–June 2000, deportation has operated since 1995 up until today as the main if not the only means to deal with undocumented labor migration. There is little surprising or unique in governments resorting to deportation when dealing with unwanted migrants. According to Castles and Miller, this has been the case in most labor importing countries whose responses have almost invariably been piecemeal and ad hoc, oblivious of long-term objectives and strategies. However, shortsighted policies apply particularly where governments have been unwilling to admit the reality of long-term settlement and continued immigration (Castles and Miller, 1993: 24). In August 2002, a new Immigration Police was established, with the ambitious objective of deporting 50,000 undocumented migrants within a year. For that sake, several additional steps have been taken such as the opening of new detention facilities for both men and women that tripled the number of places for detainees and the allocation of some 480 positions to the new police force, among others. According to official reports, since the creation of the Immigration Police, a total of 40,000 migrant workers have been deported, and an additional 80,000 (38,500 during the first year) have left “voluntarily.” Police spokesmen admit that it is difficult to estimate whether these numbers are directly related to the reinforcement of activities or whether they are part of the natural turnover of temporary migrants and economic recession. Also the results of enforcement measures against illegal employment are far from self-evident, as it seems that so far the toll of illegality is much heavier on migrant workers than on their employers (www.agira.gov.il).8 More crucially, the arrest campaigns at the worksites, public places, and at the domiciles of labor migrants have entailed the violation of basic human rights and have been target of harsh criticism.9 Uncertainty and violence notwithstanding, the government regards the new Immigration Police and the reinvigorated deportation policy as a “success story.” This perception is hardly surprising as is the timing in which the Immigration Police was set off. The establishment of the Immigration


Police coincided with the government attempt to implement a new economy plan that encroaches considerably on protective systems and on local workers rights in general. As such, the Immigration Police blueprint is to apply the political economy theory on which labor migration systems are premised: migrant workers should be ready to go to work when needed, should be gone when not needed (Calavita, 1992: 21). The simplicity of the formula whereby labor migrants perform as a low-cost solution to both labor shortage and to raising unemployment was not lost in the eyes of policymakers and their critics. It has however, so far, not prevented the implementation of massive deportation and the manufacturing of public consent around it. At the start of summer 2003, the deportation of undocumented migrants took a more systematic and dramatic turn as it targeted whole communities. Under the title “Operation Voluntary Repatriation,” the Immigration Police launched a two stage plan design to encourage undocumented migrant workers to voluntarily leave the country. In the first stage, the police called on families to register at Immigration Police stations. This registration guaranteed the families two months of protection from arrest, during which they are supposed to settle all their affairs in Israel and purchase airline tickets. In order to make the registration easier, the Authority promised to grant families a grace period and not to arrest them at all until the beginning of September. In the second stage, the Authority would resume arresting families, apart from those who have registered and who have a departure date. Information about the campaign was presented in press conference, meetings with representatives of organizations working with migrants, circulation of leaflets, and the like. Conspicuously missing from it, was the third stage envisaged by authorities, in which whole families including children would be arrested and detained until their deportation. This stage, regarded by authorities as the “last and final stage of the operation,” was supposed to commence toward the end of October 2003 but was busted by the new minister of Interior Affairs.10 The “Civic Revolution” In February 2003, Avraham Poraz from Shinui, a secular liberal party, assumed office as minister of Interior Affairs with the declared purpose of waging a “civic revolution” that would undo years of orthodox religious parties monopoly over state-religion relations matters effected, among others, via control of the ministry of Interior Affairs. The impact of the orthodox religious policies was felt first and foremost by those immigrants that were not Jewish according to the halakhic definition and therefore had to overcome serious difficulties in dealing with civic matters.11

226 / adriana kemp

Upon his appointment, Poraz pledged to change Israel’s immigration policy and established new criteria that would ease the granting of permanent legal status to those ineligible to become Israeli citizens by virtue of the Law of Return. His proposal engaged first and foremost non-Jewish (and non-Arab) IDF (Israeli army) soldiers, non-Jewish partners of Israeli citizens, parents of new immigrants from the FSU and migrant workers’ children.12 Poraz’ proposals were rather unprecedented in their liberal thrust. For the first time they entertained the idea of transforming what until then had been piecemeal decisions regarding the status of non-Jewish foreigners, which are under the discretionary power of the Interior Affairs minister, into a more generalized immigration policy that targeted whole categories of the new immigrant population, including those who are undocumented. The situation of undocumented migrants that have settled, formed families, and established whole communities (such as African, Latin American, and Filipino migrant workers) is the starkest reminder of the unintended consequences of labor migration systems and of the racialization processes geared by neoliberal labor market policies that aim at creating an insurmountable wedge between labor and migrants. On February 23, 2003, the High Court of Justice deliberated on a petition submitted by various Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) against the massive deportation but it did not reverse the government decision. In the officials’ view, the “Voluntary Repatriation” operation had yielded to satisfactory results, as in October 2003, 1,300 migrant workers and their families, 500 from Ghana, left the country in organized flights.13 Aware of the challenges entailed in the phenomenon, politicians in office had time and again presented the undocumented migrants’ communities as a “ticking bomb.” “They have to be deported before they become pregnant” warned repeatedly the former minister of Labor and Interior Affairs, Eli Yishai, who initiated the deportation policy in 1995 and became its most enthusiastic advocate.14 Politicians addressing their constituencies had not been the only ones concerned by the demographic issue. In an interview with the former Head of the Population Registar, he declared that his main mission was to put a halt to the chaotic situation reigning in the Ministry of Interior Affairs that allegedly allowed for one million non-Jews to enter the country all through the 1990s.15 In September 2002, Schlomo Benizri, then minister of Labor, resumed the work of the Public Council on Demography that comprise academic, political and public figures alike. Presented as a practical answer to demographic anxiety over the Jewish majority in Israel, the council has set among its main objectives, to address the “problem” of migrant workers’ settlement.


This is the background against which the minister of Interior Affairs introduced the “civic revolution” that instead of debating on the traditional question, “Who is a Jew,” would open a debate on a different, albeit until then closely related matter, “who is (or can be) an Israeli.” For the first time a public debate on citizenship and belonging in Israel was to be carried out with no reference either to Jews or Arabs. While some of the proposed reforms have been approved and applied, the proposal to naturalize migrant workers’ children has been seriously contested by both political adversaries and public servants within the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Justice initiating a saga that would last for over a year, until the dismissal of the Shinui party ministers by the prime minister in December 2004. The debate over the naturalization of migrant workers children still remains pending with the appointment of a new minister of Interior from the Labor party, Ophis Pinnes-Paz who seems to hold similar views to those of his predecessor in office.16 The Battle Over Naturalization The significance of Poraz’s proposal was not lost on the eyes of his political adversaries. However the battle against Poraz’s “revolutionary” reforms was initially led not by a politician but by the former attorney general Eliyakim Rubinstein. In May 2003, the attorney general thwarted for the first time the initiative maintaining that, since the proposed policy entailed a drastic immigration reform that could change not only the country’s demographic composition but also the Jewish character of Israeli society, it was for the entire cabinet to decide on that issue. For that sake, a Population Registry ministerial panel was set up under the auspices of the prime minister to debate the proposal and submit its own recommendations.17 The immediate meaning of such a decision was that the authority to decide on matters related to population administration and registration policy, which had been until then attached to the minister of Interior, was transferred to a special ministerial panel established by the government and that the interior minister was not allowed to reach the decisions in question, of his own accord, without the approval of the ministerial panel (Government Decision Nr. 1289). A less expected and less intended corollary of the government decision, was the creation of a governmental body whose main mandate is to deal with immigration matters that had until now been confined to the jurisdiction of the Aliya (jewish immigration) and Absorption Ministry, that tied immigration matters to the endogenous realm of the diasporic imagined community. The ministerial panel, chaired by Poraz himself, held its first debate in February 2004 and objected that since the estimated number of migrant

228 / adriana kemp

workers children amounts to some 10,000, regulating their status would therefore entail naturalizing at least 30,000 migrant workers. Basing its objections on the size of the children population paved the way for a politics of numbers that was thought to be crucial in winning the battle by all sides involved. The estimations over the number of undocumented migrants in general and their children in particular had varied enormously according to circumstance and interests all through the 1990s (Kemp and Raijman, 2001). Poraz rejected these figures, and preferred instead those provided by the Knesset’s research center indicating that only 1,987 foreign workers’ children live in Israel, almost all of them in Tel Aviv. These data were based on the December 2003 report commissioned by the Knesset Committee on Labor Migrants whose purpose was to provide information on the volume and the socio-demographic composition of labor migrants’ children population. According to the report, though there were no official data on these children, both academic research and official, mostly local, bodies estimated that since the massive crackdown by police on undocumented communities, the number of children had been reduced to about 2,500, three-quarters of them under the age of five, most of whom (between 1,500 to 1,700 children) live in the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv.18 Most of these children were born and grew up in Israel but they lack any legal status and are not eligible for naturalization. Once they reach the age of 18 they become undocumented residents and are doomed to deportation. Though authorities had refrained from deporting parents who live with their children in Israel, the new policy would be thorough and also target entire families.19 The report did not provide clear statistics on the distribution per parents’ country of origin, but most children were found to be born to African parents, mostly from Ghana, South American, (mainly Colombians), and from the Philippines. Based on those figures, and in response to reservations raised by the Labor and Social Affairs minister from the national religious Mafdal party, Zevulun Orlev, the final proposal drafted by Poraz had to be seriously watered down.20 Finally, Poraz recommended that migrant workers’ children aged ten–eighteen, whose parents had originally entered Israel legally, would become permanent residents and that their parents could remain with them and receive a work permit that would be valid until their children reached the age of twenty-one. The proposal established two categories of children: (1) High-school-age children (16–18 years) or those graduated and have been living in Israel for five years at least: this category would qualify for permanent resident status provided they did not have a criminal record; (2) Children aged ten or more that have been living in Israel for at least five years: these would be granted a temporary resident status for two years and then would become eligible for permanent residence and eventual


naturalization.21 According to these new criteria, it was anticipated that about 650 children attending school starting from third grade would initially be eligible for citizenship along with their parents.22 “Today these children are in fact non-existent,” Poraz said. “Although Israel is the only country they know, they have no identity card number, and therefore, cannot be given medical insurance, get a passport, and visit their land of origin. They become prisoners here, and when they graduate from high school, they cannot find regular work or continue to higher education.”23 Meanwhile, all deportations of undocumented children and their parents were banned by the minister until December 2004. Indeed the politics over numbers proved to be crucial in abating anxieties over identity politics but yet not enough. In drafting his proposal, Poraz had to cater to yet another reservation put forward by the ministerial panel regarding the alleged threat to the country’s Jewish character. Poraz’s opponents in the government claimed that legalizing undocumented migrants amounts not only at opening the door for further unwanted migrants to hail the country but also at rewarding those that have breached the law. Therefore, the proposal carefully emphasized that regulating migrant workers’ children situation would be a “one-time arrangement” based on “individual” and “humanitarian principles” and not on criteria ascribed to generalized groups or categories of people. As the juxtaposition of “individual” and “humanitarian” sparked contradictory interpretations,24 a corrected version of the proposal stated unequivocally that the arrangement does not hold for migrant workers’ children who were born in the country or entered it after its approval, thereby limiting considerably the scope of the reform as a long-term channel to naturalization. The legitimacy to such a decision drew on the policy vacuum left by previous governments all through the 1990s who chose not to deal with the issue and by doing so, helped creating the situation they now want to repress.25 The contentious dynamics around Poraz’s proposal opened the way for a public debate that had not taken place before: whether the state should recognize non-Jewish immigrants and grant them the possibility to become part of the increasing non-Jewish and non-Arab minority in Israel’s extended population. However, opening the stage for new questions on whether children born to Ghanaian, Philippine, or Colombian non-Jewish parents could become legitimate members of the next Israeli generations, also paved the road for setting the same questions for noncitizen Palestinian children living within the state of Israel. Indeed, in October 2004, the Ministry of Justice again raised its objections to the proposal, on the grounds that from a legal point of view, there is no possibility of distinguishing between undocumented labor migrants’ children and Palestinian undocumented children. In an opinion submitted

230 / adriana kemp

by the director of the Supreme Court Appeals Division, she argued that the humanitarian principle according to which children should not be removed from the country and the culture where they grew up, applies also to Palestinian children who have been living without legal status in Israel. “It has to be taken into account,” she explained, “that the difference in living conditions between Israel and Judea, Samaria and the Gaza strip, involve also humanitarian aspects that are directly incumbent upon the lives of Arab children.”26 Minister Poraz rejected the comparison straightforwardly. Indeed, Poraz was a strong advocate of a governmental decision passed in May 2002 that introduced a reform to the Nationality Law geared at preventing Palestinians from the Palestinian Authority to be granted citizen status in Israel through family reunification.27 However, following the demand from the ministerial panel to carefully examine this matter, and aware of the taboo prevailing in Israel over Palestinians naturalization as a mode of materializing de facto their right to return, Poraz outlined his final proposal in consultation with the new attorney general Menachem Mazooz. The latter concluded that, from a legal point of view, the proposed reform on undocumented migrant workers’ children does not discriminate against undocumented Palestinian children, thereby reaffirming an hermetic line between the non-Jewish new populations in Israel and Palestinians. Toward the end of November 2004, the final proposal of the reform had to be approved by the ministerial panel and put in motion. On December 5, and following a coalition crisis in the government, Prime Minister Sharon submitted dismissal letters to all Shinui ministers in his government. Expectedly, the ministerial panel on Population Registration did not approve the proposal on the eve of Poraz’s resignation, indeed the panel dispersed and suspended its meetings until the creation of a new coalition and the appointment of the new minister of Interior Affairs. Just before leaving office, Poraz took a drastic step that showed his commitment to the reform. He instructed the director of the Population Administration Division within the Interior office to grant undocumented families with children immediate residency rights in accordance with his proposal.28 However, attorney general Mazuz overturned this directive, saying that according to the new situation only the ministerial panel committee had the power to ratify Poraz’s recommendations and instruct that they will be applied. The last minute decision taken by Poraz was not a mere result of frustration and hastiness but rather a premeditated and strategic one, for it paved the way for NGOs’ future legal action against the Ministry of Interior.29 Poraz’s last decision did not lack dramatic overtones as he elected to make the announcement in a letter addressed to ACRI, a prominent Israeli NGO that advocates on civil rights issues. In the letter he spelled out the


moral principles that led to his decisions. “The Jewish people, who suffered in exile for 2,000 years, cannot harden its heart to the plight of others, and is not morally permitted, in its sovereign state, to act with callousness and cruelty,” he wrote.30 Poraz words were directed at several audiences: the bureaucracy at the Interior office that posed unrelenting obstacles before implementing his decisions; orthodox religious parties that were Shinui’s long time political foes and his predecessors at the office; but first and foremost he voiced his grievances against his partners at the ministerial panel on Population Registration, mainly those from the Likud party who thwarted the vote on the reform at the last minute. According to him, the Likud party “spirit” is closer to religious parties in its affinity to antiliberal and non-secular values than to its own self-image as a center of the map-secular party.31 Meanwhile, the ban against deportation of undocumented children and their families has been extended until further notice and the reform has been frozen awaiting for the new minister in office to draft his conclusions. Conclusions Traditionally depicted as representing a paradigmatic case of deeply divided societies, in which one out of every three Israelis is an ( Jewish) immigrant and one out of five citizens belongs to the Arab minority, Israel has been recently defined as a “misfit” in relation to all typological exercises set forth by comparative research on citizenship (Zolberg, 2000: 384). And indeed, without pretending to be unique in its uniqueness, Israel poses a true challenge to ready-made ideal types. However, neoliberal trends of the 1990s associated among others with the intensive recruitment of labor migrants, and their unintended albeit expected settlement, have forced Israeli society and state to face dilemmas that have engaged western European and northern American countries in the post-World War II years. First and foremost, the dilemma of a non-immigrant nation state turned into a de facto immigration society, without it being ready—either ideologically or structurally—to deal with the substantive questions that the phenomenon raises. In fact, the new labor migration, and the formation of a new category of non-Jewish– non-Palestinian immigrants, has “normalized” the Israeli debate on citizenship and migration, transforming it into one that deals not only with endogenous questions that pertain to the realm of a more or less well defined “community of descent” or conversely with the various “degrees of citizenship”32 to which various minorities within the citizenry are subjected, but rather with questions over who is entitled to become a citizen and what grounds.

232 / adriana kemp

Recent reforms over the naturalization of labor migrant children bear witness that the debate has been already set in motion, even though its resolution still looms unclear. Interestingly enough, such a debate has not been triggered by “grassroots” dynamics or by the academy. On the contrary the debate on “post-ethnonational” membership of labor migrants in Israel has been by and large, conducted at the ministerial and parliamentary level.33 Surely, the proposed reform has not been the first attempt at tackling the issue of undocumented labor migrants’ children in Israel. It has been preceded by a host of practices geared at the de facto incorporation of otherwise invisible children within the educational and health systems. Most of these inclusionary practices have been led at the local government level in the field of education or through semiprivate subsidiaries in the health system, and they have been conceived as a localized response to practical and individual problems (Kemp and Raijman, 2004). Hypothetically the state could have gone on playing make-believe as if this unrecognized population was about to vanish and conveniently keep the spontaneous division of labor that evolved all through the 1990s whereby the national government has the authority on citizenship and migration policies while the local government bears the responsibility over residents and immigrants. However, unsurprisingly, the urge to “do something” about undocumented children and their families, came at the moment the government was determined to reduce significantly the number of labor migrants and tackle the issue of irregular migration in 2002, under the aegis of the “closed skies” policy. Reminiscent of other historical precedents, closing the skies to future labor migrants from abroad, also forced Israeli authorities to open their eyes to the host of unwanted immigrants from within.34 Thus, the naturalization reform proposed by Poraz was about to send out the “quiet revolution” that had already taken place within the local bounds, into the national playground. The top-down character of the debate set forth by the reform has set its contours defining the possibilities inherent in it as well as its limitations. Grounded on humanitarian and personal criteria and defined as a one-time arrangement, that will apply to a rather limited fragment of the relevant population, the proposed reform exemplifies the modes in which the ethnonational state is ready to allow certain degrees of managing citizenship, without upsetting its identity politics. As translated into the Israeli context, the “post-national” amounts less to new form of membership than to a political instrument through which the state manages nonethnic immigrants, without having to substantively reconstruct its regime of citizenship and the economy of cultural identities embedded in it.


Notes 1. On postnational forms of membership, see also Hammar (1990); Guiraudon (2000); Jacobson (1996); Castles (2000). 2. On the standardization of the politics of migration in European Union countries, see Sassen (1999) and Wihtol De Wenden (2000). 3. In this context, it is important to emphasize that not all of the “non-Jewish immigrants” are not Jewish. Some of them are indeed not Jewish according to any criteria, while others are not Jewish only according to the Halakha (Halakha-Code of Jewish Law that establishes a matrilineal definition of who is a Jew). According to Al-Haj and Leshem (2000) during the first half of the nineties the non-Jewish immigrants constituted about 20% of all immigrants, while between 1995–1999 the proportion of non-Jews or those married to non-Jews rose to 41.3%. 4. For an extensive discussion on the formal aspects of citizenship acquisition in Israel, see Shachar (2000). 5. I borrow the concept “managing citizenship” from Feldblum (2000). 6. Entering without a work permit or overstaying the work visa are not the only ways of becoming undocumented migrants in Israel. The third most common way is to leave one’s original employer, to whom the worker was indentured. Such workers are called “runaways” by the employers, and are an expression of the illegality created by the way the indenture system works. 7. For a discussion on the labor migration in Israel see Kemp (2004); in the Gulf System, see Massey et al. (1998); Castles (2000); in Taiwan, see Cheng (2003). 8. According to police data, during the last two years, only 39 criminal convictions were filed against manpower firms that fraud labor migrants and 1,480 files on documents falsification were opened but not prosecuted (Ruty Sinai “After Two Years and Half, Immigration Police has no one to deport,” Ha’aretz, February 3, 2005, a-1 and a-5). 9. On the violations incurred since the creation of the Immigration Police see Ruth Sinai, Ha’aretz, “NGOs accuse immigration police of brutality, human rights violations,” Ha’aretz, May 20, 2003; Sara Leibovich-Dar “I came with nothing, I leave with nothing,” Ha’aretz, Friday Edition, May 9, 2003; Joseph Algazy, “14 days without seeing a judge, sometimes more”, Ha’aretz, August 7, 2003; Nurit Wurgaft, “Life in the Shadow of Deportation,” Ha’aretz, September 29, 2003. 10. Nurit Wurgaft, “Here there is no mercy,” Ha’aretz, August 6, 2003, B-3; Michele Chabin Who’ll Clean the House? New crackdown on foreign workers is talk—and worry—of Israel’s privileged class The Jewish Week, October 10, 2003. 11. From the mid-1990s the Interior Ministry’s policy concerning non-Jewish immigrants became particularly stringent. As a result, and in accordance with decisions that fall under the minister of Interior jurisdiction, not all of the nonJewish immigrants from the FSU are entitled to enter Israel via the Law of Return, and are thus not recognized by the state as deserving citizenship. Such immigrants are subject to strict limitations that stem from their undefined status. For instance, they cannot leave and enter the country at their will; they are not entitled to social insurance, public health insurance, and other public

234 / adriana kemp

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

services; they face serious difficulties in the labor market, and they have a general feeling of being unwanted in Israel. Members of this group include non-Jewish partners of Israeli citizens whose marriages were conducted via consular authorities; immigrants who have converted to Judaism through other than orthodox state-sanctioned institutions; great-grandchildren of Jewish immigrants who are not entitled to citizenship through the 1970 reform to the Law of Return; non-Jewish parents of immigrants, and more. These constitute a new social category of immigrants, most from the FSU, that has been increasing in numbers in the last decade, with scant attention paid by either the public or the academy to the meaning of the phenomenon. For a thorough picture on the phenomenon, see ACRI (2004), “The Ministry: Violations of Human Rights by the Ministry of the Interior’s Population Registar,” www.acri.org.il. Other reforms include: according civil status to both parents of an IDF soldier, who are not entitled to enter Israel according to the Law of Return; according work and residence permits for two years to foreign citizens who have been wounded in terror attacks and to their families; according permanent residence to noncitizen partners of Israeli citizens, including same-sex partners. While only reforms regarding the status of IDF soldiers and their parents have been implemented, the other reforms had been blocked mostly by the ministry of Interior Affairs bureaucracy, specially, the Division of Population Registar. According to figures from the IDF more than 51% of the immigrants recently recruited soldiers are “non-Jews” according to the Halakha. The total number of non-Jewish soldiers in 2003 amounts to 8,000 (Yiediot Achronot, May 27, 2003: 21). Sinai R. “Immigration Police started arrest of migrant workers that did not leave voluntarily,” Ha’aretz, October 15, 2003, A-10. Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Eli Yishai, meeting of the Knesset committee on foreign workers, May 16, 2000. Michal Graibski and Meli Kempner-Kritz, “Herzl Gedezj, ‘One million non-Jews entered the country in last decade,’ ” Yiediot Ahronot, August 9, 2002., Weekend Supplement, 14–15, 29. New minister Pinnes-Paz performed as one of the first chairs at the Knesset Committee on Migrant Workers and he expressed often liberal opinions closer to those of Poraz. Relly Sa’ar, “Panel to discuss naturalization of foreign workers children,” Ha’aretz, February 29, 2004. Friedlander-Lipsik, A., R. Bar-Tzuri, and M. Bar-Ilan Yirushalmi (2003), Knesset Special Report on the Situation of Migrant Workers’ Children, Knesset Research Center. There are reports of many cases in which one parent has been deported, in the hope that the other parent and children will follow voluntarily. Nurit Wurgaft “Once again the deportation Police causes the abandonment of baby,” Ha’aretz, February 24, 2003., “Here there is no mercy,” Ha’aretz, August 6, 2003; Ina Friedman, “Israel: Mean Streets,” The Jerusalem Report, May 21, 2003. The politics over the numbers is far from being over and done with. In a meeting held on December 7, 2004 at the Knesset Committee on Migrant Workers, the chair of the Population Registry at the Ministry of Interior, Sassi Katzir brought new numbers. Drawing on Education ministry and Social Security records, he


21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

concluded that there are at least some 3,000 children of foreign citizens aged six–eighteen. It does not include children below six, most of whom are not in state schooling system. As mentioned, according to Tel Aviv municipality data 75% of the estimated 2,500 children are under the age of five. These figures were seriously objected by representatives of Tel Aviv municipality (December 7, 2004: 13–15). Relly Sa’ar, “650 foreign workers’ children expected to get civic status this week,” Ha’aretz, November 28, 2004. a-1. Relly Sa’ar, “Poraz’s proposal 800 foreign workers children to be deported, 600 will stay,” Ha’aretz, October 17, 2004, a-1. Relly Sa’ar, “Panel to discuss naturalization of foreign workers children,” Ha’aretz, February 29, 2004. See Knesset Committee on Migrant Workers debate on what qualifies as “humanitarian” (December 7, 2004: 4–5). Relly Sa’ar, “650 foreign workers’ children expected to get civic status this week,” Ha’aretz, November 28, 2004. a-1. Relly Sa’ar “Poraz’s proposal 800 foreign workers children to be deported, 600 will stay,” Ha’aretz, October 17, 2004, a-1 and a-7. The reform has been brought to Supreme Court which in December 2004 called the government to revise it carefully. See Yuval Yoad “Supreme Court to Government: the reform that prevents citizenship from Palestinian through family reunification, problematic and needs thorough revision,” Ha’aretz, December 17, 2004, a-7. Poraz also issued instructions to formalize the civic status of four children of foreign workers who reached adulthood, whose petition was filed eighteen months ago by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and was still being debated by the Tel Aviv District Court. Relly Sa’ar, “Mazooz vetoed Poraz decision to grant civic status to labor migrants’ children,” Ha’aretz, December 6, 2004, a-10. Relly Sa’ar, “Poraz’s grand exit: Residency for foreigners’ kids,” Ha’aretz, December 5, 2004. The main objections within the ministerial panel against Poraz’s proposal were raised by ministers from the Likud party, the largest party in the coalition that Poraz had just left. However in raising their objections they had already in mind the future partners in Sharon’s coalition from orthodox religious parties. I borrow this concept from Shachar (2000). There is one important caveat to this argument, human and civil rights organizations have been all through the 1990s actively engaged in advocacy campaigns, legal action, and service provision on behalf of labor migrants and their communities. However, they focused mainly on labor, detention, health and civil rights issues, and less so with naturalization matters. The exception being ACRI’s intensive legal activities on the subject in the last years. See ACRI (2004). As already mentioned, the naturalization reform came at a moment when the government had decided to wage a comprehensive deportation campaign that would include also families with children, most of whom born in Israel, many of whom knew no other home but Israel.

236 / adriana kemp

References Aleinikoff, T. A. and D. Klusmeyer (eds.) (2000), From Migrants to Citizens: Membership in a Changing World, Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Al-Haj, M. and E. Leshem, (2000), Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union: Ten Years Later. A Research Report, Haifa: The Center for Multiculturalism and Educational Research, University of Haifa (Hebrew). Bartram, D. (1998), “Foreign Workers in Israel: History and Theory,” International Migration Review, 32, pp. 303–325. Bauböck, R. (ed.) (1994), From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe, Averbury: Aldershot. Brubaker, R. (1989), “Introduction,” in R. Brubaker (ed.) Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. ——— (1998), “Immigration, Citizenship, and the Nation-State in France and Germany,” in G. Shafir (ed.) The Citizenship Debates: A Reader, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 131–166. Calavita, K. (1992), Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration and the INS, New York: Routledge. Castles, S. (2000), Ethnicity and Globalization, London: Sage Publications. Castles, S. and M. Miller (1993), The Age of Migration. International Population Movements in the Modern World, New York: Guilford Press. Cheng, S. A. (2003), “Rethinking the Globalization of Domestic Service: Foreign Domestics, State Control and the Politics of Identity in Taiwan,” Gender & Society 17, 2, pp. 166–186. Cohen, Y. (2001), “From Haven to Heaven: Changing Patterns of Immigration to Israel,” in D. Levy and Y. Weiss (eds.) Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 36–56. Feldblum, M. (1998), “Reconfiguring Citizenship in Western Europe,” in C. Joppke (ed.) Challenge to the Nation State, Immigration in Western Europe and the United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 231–270. ——— (2000), “Managing Membership: New Trends in Citizenship and Nationality Policy,” in T. A. Aleinikoff and D. Klusmeyer (eds.) From Migrants to Citizens: Membership in a Changing World, Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pp. 475–499. Guiraudon, V. (2000), “European Courts and Foreigners’ Rights: A Comparative Study of Norms Diffusion” International Migration Review 34, 4, pp. 1088–1125. Hammar, T. (1990), Democracy and the Nation-State: Aliens, Denizens and Citizens in a World of International Migration, Aldershot: Averbury. Jacobson, D. (1996), Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Joppke, C. (ed.) (1998), Challenge to the Nation State, Immigration in Western Europe and the United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (1999), Immigration and the Nation State: The United States, Germany and Great Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

managing citizenship and migration / 237 Joppke, C. and E. Morawska (2003), Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–36. Kemp, A. (2004), “Labor Migration and Racialisation: Labor Market Mechanisms and Labor Migration Control Policies in Israel,” Social Identities 10, 2, pp. 267–292. Kemp, A. and R. Raijman (2001), “Non-state Actors and the New Politics of Labor Migration in Israel,” Israeli Sociology 3, 1, 79–127 (Hebrew). ——— (2003), “Labor Migrants in Israel,” Adva Institute Report on Inequality, July (Hebrew). ——— (2003), “Christian Zionists in the Holy Land: Evangelical Churches, Labor Migrants and the Jewish State,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10, pp. 293–231. ——— (2004), “ ‘Tel Aviv is Not Foreign to You’: Urban Incorporation Policy on Labor Migrants in Israel,” International Migration Review 38, 1, pp. 26–51. Kemp, A., R. Raijman, J. Resnik, and S. Schammah-Geser (2000), “Contesting the Limits of Political Participation: Latinos and Black African Migrant Workers in Israel,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, 1, pp. 94–119. Koslowski, R. (1998), “European Union Migration Regimes, Established and Emergent,” in C. Joppke (ed.) Challenge to the Nation State, Immigration in Western Europe and the United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 153–188. Martiniello, M. (1994), “Citizenship of the European Union. A Critical View,” in Rainer, B. (ed.) From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe, Averbury: Aldershot, pp. 29–48. Massey, D., J. Arango, H. Graeme, A. Kouaouci, A. Pellegrino, and J. E. Taylor (1998), Worlds in Motion Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sassen, S. (1996), Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, The Columbia University Schoff Memorial Lectures, New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (1998), Globalization and its Discontents, New York: New York Press. ——— (1999), Guests and Aliens, New York Press: New York. Semyonov, M. and N. Lewin-Epstein (1987), Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water. Noncitizen Arabs in the Israeli Labor Market, New York: ILR Press. Shachar, A. (2000), “Citizenship and Membership in the Israeli Polity,” in T. A. Aleinikoff and D. Klusmeyer (eds) From Migrants to Citizens: Membership in a Changing World, Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pp. 386–433. Shafir, G. and Y. Peled (2002), Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shuval, J. T. and E. Leshem (1998), “The Sociology of Migration in Israel: A Critical View,” in E. Leshem and J. Shuval (eds.) Immigration to Israel: Sociological Perspectives, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, pp. 3–50. Soysal, Y. N. (1994), Limits of Citizenship. Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

238 / adriana kemp Wihtol De Wenden, C. (2000), “Post Amsterdam Migration Policy and European Citizenship,” Refugee Watch, 9 (March), pp. 17–20. Zolberg, A. (2000), “Ethnic Republics? Citizenship in Israel and Japan: Introduction” in T. A. Aleinikoff and D. Klusmeyer (eds.) From Migrants to Citizens: Membership in a Changing World, Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pp. 383–385.

Index

Page numbers referring to figures are in bold face. Abraham, David 86, 89 Adams, Julia 62 Adler, Daniel 16, 33 Agamben, Giorgio 61 Ahmed, L. 181, 182 Albert, Mathias 90 Albrecht, H. J. 208, 216 Aleinikoff, T. Alexander 9, 74, 75, 89, 91, 166, 220, 236, 237, 238 Al-Haj, M. 233, 236 alienage and citizenship 13, 15, 31, 33, 62, 66, 85, 111, 236 aliya (immigration to Israel) 96, 97, 227f Allen, John 27, 31 Allison, G. 112, 117 Alonso, W. 119 Al-Qaeda 103, 114, 153, 155 Althusser, Louis. 178, 180, 182 Aluffi, B. P. R. 182 Am Orde, S. 182 Anderson, Benedict. 116, 117, 182 Andreas, Peter 213, 216 apatrides 38, 50, 59 apprehension of illegal immigrants 200–01, 202, 204, 209, 214 Arango, J. 237 Arendt, Hannah 6, 35–56, 61, 62 assimilation British 4 and citizenship 8, 72–3, 90, 107 cultural 4, 7, 72–3

Dutch 4, 7, 8, 121, 130, 132–43, 149, 162–5 French 4, 73, 107, 169, 180 German 99, 107 Asylum Compromise of December 1992 71, 76 asylum seekers 5, 122, 137, 185 Aussiedler, “resettlers” 95, 98–101, 193 Bade, Klaus 101 Balibar, Etienne 55, 60, 61 Baker, J. 181, 182 bartered brides 188, 190 Bartolini, Stefano 65, 89 Bartram, D. 223, 236 Basch, Linda 22, 31 Basdevant-Gaudemet, B. 179, 182 Bauböck, Rainer 219, 236 Baudet-Caille, Véronique 78, 89 Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth 7, 185, 193 Beer, I. 181, 182 Ben Dor, M. 99, 101 Benhabib, Seyla 19, 31, 35, 61, 62, 149, 156, 164, 165 Berlin, Isaiah 89 Birg, H. 104, 117 Blanc-Szanton, Cristina 31 Block, Fred 46, 47, 58, 62 Bodemann, Michal 1, 101, 102, 179 Bolkestein, Frits 126, 134, 141 Bolt, Gideon 131, 142 Bommes, Michael 140, 142

240 / index Bonilla, Frank 33 Bosniak, Linda 18, 19, 24, 31 Bosnian Serbs 45 Bowen, J. R. 176, 182 Brenner, Michael 101, 102 Bridge, Gary 27, 31 Britain and citizenship 69, 77 Brochmann, Grete 140, 142 Brubaker, Rogers 4, 8, 46, 62, 64, 68, 89, 140, 141, 142, 149, 163, 165, 170, 182, 219, 236 Bussemaker, J. 158, 161, 165, 166 Bustamente, J. A. 200, 216 Butler, Judith 31, 167, 181, 182 Buzan, B. 104, 117 Calavita, K. 226, 236 Canadian citizenship 85, 86, 139 Capoferro, C. 214, 217 Castles, Stephen 139, 142, 212, 216, 223, 224, 233, 236 Césari, J. 112, 117 Cheng, S. A. 233, 236 Chin, Ko-lin 211, 216 Chinchilla, Norma 23, 31 Chrisman, L. 184 Christian Democrats 79–81, 126, 130, 132, 137, 158, 181 Christlich-Soziale Union (CSU) 71, 181, 193 citizenship deconstructing 18 dual 3, 75 law, Germany 3 managing of citizenship 232 regimes 1 rights 54, 69 social 54, 63, 64 and social class 17, 18, 38 universal 219 citizenship and children 3, 21, 78, 80–83, 87, 95, 176, 193, 219–35 citizenship of housewives 14, 22, 24 City, The 28, 29, 33

Civil Rights Act of 1964 19 Clemens, Elisabeth S. 62 Cliteur, Paul 135, 142 Coenders, Marcel 143 Cohen, Jean L. 49, 62 Cohen, Y. 221, 236 Cold War 6, 62, 102, 103–6, 108, 122 Communists 81 Connel, R. W. 151, 165 Cordero-Guzmán, Héctor R. 22, 32 Cornelius, A. 216 Cornell, Drucilla 31, 181, 182 Coser, Louis 109, 118 Cottam, M. 109, 118 Coulter, Anne 57, 62 Council of Europe 8, 65, 74, 87, 89 Coutin, Susan B. 21, 22, 31, 32 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 19, 32, 181, 183 crime organized 104–5, 109, 198, 207–8, 211, 216 cultural differences 136, 139, 162, 164, 174 cultural identity 109, 115–16, 124–5, 128, 132 cultural pluralism 4, 106, 112, 115 Dagevos, Jaco 127, 132, 142, 148, 149, 162, 165 Dale, J. 198, 216 Davies, R. 107, 118 De Beer, Paul 127, 142 De Beus, Jos de 129, 142 De Groot, Gérard-René 66, 73 De Hart, Betty 128, 142, 164, 165 De Heer, Jan-Coen 131, 142 De Wilde J. 117 de-ethnicization 6, 64, 65, 69–72, 74–75, 78–79, 84–5 Delgado, Richard 19, 32 Delinquency 127 demos 36, 39, 44, 51 De Ruijter, Arie 142

index / 241 DeWind, Josh 90, 91 diasporas Germany 71, 97, 100–1 Israel 97 die fremde Braut 189, 194 dual nationality 16, 33, 74, 88, 142, 181 Duyvendak, Jan Willem 127, 143 Enchautegui, M. E. 118 Engbersen, G. 139, 142 Engelen, Ewald 4, 8 Entzinger, Han 4, 6, 7, 8, 121, 131, 142, 143, 148, 149, 152, 157, 159, 162, 164, 166 Erdem, E. 175, 183 Esser, Hartmut 208, 210, 216 ethnic minorities 37, 53, 107, 113, 125–27, 136–7, 143, 167 ethnicization 125, 134 ethnos 6, 35–6, 39, 44, 49–51, 56–61 EU see European Union European Forum for Migration Studies (efms) 198 European Union 1, 65, 220 and immigration 5 evangelical Christianity 57, 237 Faist, Thomas 6, 103, 107, 108, 111, 118, 164 Fallaux, Emile 150, 166 Favell, Adrian 5, 9, 149, 157, 166 Feldblum, M. 220, 233, 236 Feminism 24 and globalization 18 Ferrajoli, Luigi 64, 89 Fetzer, J. S. 115, 118 Finckenauer, J. O. 198, 216 Fix, M. 111, 118 Fluchthelfer 210 Fordist contract 28, 29 Ford, R. T. 181, 183

Fortuyn, Pim 129–144, 148–53, 162, 165 Foucault, Michel 180, 183 Fournier, Pascale 3, 7, 167 France Muslim women 130,168, 172–176 see also Muslim Frank, Thomas 58, 59, 62 Fraser, Nancy 31, 164, 166, 174, 178, 183 French Turks 3, 176–7 Ganssmann, Heiner 9 gender equality 149–63, 169 genocide 36–37, 44, 46, 49, 50, 56 German Jews 46, 99–100 German Turks 3, 6, 95–102, 175–6, 187, 190–4 Gerum, E. 211, 212, 216 ghetto 4, 30, 123, 134, 136, 170, 173 Gibson, J. L. 109, 118 Giddens, Anthony 66, 89 Gijsberts, Mérove 142 Gilman, Sander 101, 102 Glick Schiller, Nina 31, 65, 90 Global city 15, 26, 28 globalization and digitization 28–30 Goldblatt, D. 118 Gosewinkel, Dieter 67, 68, 90 Gotanda, Neil 32 Graeme, H. 237 Grass, Günter 1, 2, 9 Grosfoguel, Ramón 32 guest workers 2, 95, 122–23, 134, 185 Guiraudon, V. 233, 236 Gutmann, Amy 33, 184 Habermas, Jürgen 62 Hague Convention 16, 32

242 / index Hailbronner, Kay 71, 72, 73, 76, 87, 90 Hale, R. 181, 183 Halfmann, Jost 102 Hamilton, Nora 23, 31 Hammar, Tomas 55, 62, 140, 142, 233, 236 Handler, Joel 19, 32 Hansen, Randall 90 Hayward, A. 184 headscarf debate in France 3–4, 115, 126, 167–70, 173–4, 178, 182, 183 in Germany 3–4, 170–74, 178, 182, 186 Heckmann, Friedrich 7, 8, 197, 215, 217 Heer, D. M. 200, 216 Held, D. 116, 118 Herberg, Will 116, 118 Herz, John 70, 90 Herzog, T. 102 hijab 7, 172 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 24, 32 Hirschman, Albert. O. 108, 118 Hirschman, Charles 90, 91 Hobbes, Thomas 41 Hogarth, J. 211, 217 Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette 24, 32 human smuggling and an arms race 212–14 human smuggling and trafficking 198–99, 201, 202, 204–17 Huntington, Samuel P. 105, 118, 129, 142 Içduygu, A. 198, 208, 209, 216 illegal immigration in Germany 197, 199, 199–200, 203–5 illegal immigration reform and immigrant responsibility act 31 immigrant community 105, 109, 112, 121, 127, 132

integration 5, 6, 74, 138, 157, 181 Jewish 97, 100, 221, 233–4 in the Netherlands 121, 122 undocumented 8, 14, 20–2, 200, 216 see also migrants immigration associations 176 debate in Germany 1, 114, 178, 185 in France 169, 172, 178 in the Netherlands 127–8, 134, 148 in Israel 227 see also aliya inclusion and exclusion 51–55 incorporation regimes 11, 61, 148, 159, 221 Inda, Jonathan Xavier 24, 33 integration policy 9, 73, 81, 126, 130–1, 136, 143, 148, 161, 163 international human rights 13, 20, 49, 170 International Organization of Migration (IOM) 208 Ireland 86 103 Isin, Engin 27, 32, 33, 63, 90 Islam in France 168, 178 in Germany 114–15, 178 in multiethnic societies 107 in the Netherlands 121, 127 in the United Kingdom 115 Israel citizenship and migration 8, 96, 221, 231 labor migrants 4, 222–4, 231–3, 237 naturalization reform 232, 235 Italy citizenship 77, 80, 185 Jacobson, David 236

24, 25, 32, 90, 233,

index / 243 Japanese housewives 22, 32, 238 see also women Jenson, Jane 5, 9 Jewish immigrants 97, 100, 221, 233–4 John, B. 102 Jonker, Gerdien 171, 183 Joppke, Christian 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 63, 71, 72, 85, 90, 142, 148, 152, 162, 163, 165, 166, 181, 183, 219, 220, 236, 237 Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin 98 Juhász, J. 208, 216 Junger-Tas, Josine 127, 142 Justice and Home Affairs Council 110 Kant, Immanuel 116, 117, 118 Karst, Kenneth 19, 31, 32 Kasinitz, Philip 90, 91 Kastoryano, Riva 5, 9, 149, 166 Katzenbach, E. 216 Katznelson, Ira 32 Kazakhstan 95–101 Keck, M. 108, 118 Kelek, Necla 7, 189–92, 194 Kemp, Adriana 8, 219, 221, 222, 224, 225, 228, 232, 233, 237 Kennedy, D. 180, 183 Kepel, Gilles 109, 118 Keskin, H. 175, 183 Kimmel, Michael 151, 153, 166 Kleinknecht-Strähle, U. 102 Klopp, B. 181, 183 Klusmeyer, Douglas 9, 74, 75, 89, 91, 166, 236, 237, 238 Knop, Karen 18, 32 Kohn, Jerome 36, 62 Kontingentflüchtlinge (quota refugees) 96 see also refugees Koopmans, Ruud 90, 140, 142 Korteweg, Anna C. 7, 147, 158, 161, 166

Koslowski, Rey 74, 90, 198, 216, 217, 237 Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. 181, 183 Kouaouci, A. 237 Kurdistan Workers’ Party 107 Kurth, J. 104, 118 Kyle, D. 198, 216, 217 Kymlicka, Will 70, 90, 140, 143, 162, 166, 181, 183 labor market 2, 5, 78, 198 labor migration 74, 195, 222–6, 231–3, 237 labor relations in Germany 9 Lagarde, Paul de 73, 76, 87, 90 Lapid, Yosef 90 Laurence, Jonathan 33, 98, 101, 102 law immigration 21, 82, 88, 105, 122, 174, 176 international 16, 32, 70, 86–7, 90 League of Nations 37, 40, 49 LeBlanc, Robin 22, 23, 32 Lederer, H. W. 199, 200, 204, 217 Leerkes, A. 142 Lefebvre, Henri 27, 32 legal residence in Germany 72, 203 in the United States 21 legal status 15, 25, 96, 171, 205 citizenship in Israel 226 Leonard, K. 112, 113, 118 Leruth, M. F. 168, 183 Leshem, E. 233, 236, 237 Lewin-Epstein, Noah 223, 237 Lewis, B. 106, 118 liberal democracy 128–9, 135, 141, 149 liberalism 40, 44, 52, 58, 157 liberal states 6, 9, 72, 74, 90, 167, 173–4, 178, 220 Lijphart, Arend 124, 139, 143 Locke, John 41, 42 Long, Marceau 90

244 / index Lubbers, Marcel 143 Lucassen, Jan 142 Luhmann, Niklas 86, 90 Mahler, Sarah 21, 22, 32 Makarov, Alexander 66, 73, 86, 90 Mandel, Ruth 6, 95 market fundamentalism 35, 36, 49–52, 56, 58 market fundamentalist nationalism 56 market externalities 55, 56 Marrus, Michael R. 16, 32 Marshall, Thomas Humphrey 17, 19, 32, 52, 54, 61, 62, 174, 181, 183 Martiniello, M. 220, 237 Marxism and the City 32 Massey, Doreen S. 31, 214, 215, 217, 233, 237 McGrew, A. 118 Mélendez, Edwin 33 Mexico 75, 86, 89n.48 Michalowski, Ines 126, 143 migrants smuggling of 7, 198, 201, 206 see also immigrant migration illegal 8, 104, 131,197–215, 224 international 63, 104–17 irregular 5, 7, 110, 195, 214, 232 and security 6, 103–6, 108–9, 116, 119 women 23–26 see also immigrant Miller, Mark 108, 119, 139, 142, 224, 236 Minorities 14, 20 see also ethnic minorities minority rights 2, 39, 172,174 Minow, M. L. 181, 183 Minthe, E. 216, 217 Miron, Louis F. 24, 33 Mobility 65, 69, 75, 81 see also social mobility modernity 154, 161

Morales, Rebecca 33 Morawska, Ewa 8, 72, 90, 142, 148, 163, 166, 220, 237 Mulder, D. 184 Müller-Schneider, T. 215, 217 Multiculturalism 4, 115, 121, 132, 148, 151, 157, 162, 164, 191 Munger, Frank 17, 32 Musch, R. 181, 182 Muslim Convention of 1997 74 Women 7, 151, 156, 167–79 see also women Muslim communities in France 7, 176–79 in Germany 7, 178–79 in the United States 112–14 Myers III, W. H. 207, 217 NACARA see 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, The Nationality Act in the United Kingdom 76 Dual 16, 74 effective 14, 20 see also citizenship natsional state 13–15, 18, 20, 25–7, 77, 110 nativism 56 natsionalnost 96 naturalism 35–52 naturalization 51, 67, 72, 80, 105, 128,177, 222, 227, 235 and citizenship 228 natural rights 35, 41–7, 51, 60 Nazism 38, 42, 46, 49, 60, 96 negative Verbundenheit 210 Neske, M. 215, 217 Netherlands, The, 45, 72, 115, 121–66 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, The 21, 31

index / 245 9/11 see September 11 North America 6, 105, 109, 222 Nowotny, K. 208, 217 Nuremberg Laws 38 Okin, S. M. 149, 166 Okólski, M. 208, 217 Ong, Aihwa 18, 32 Orentlicher, Diane 70, 83, 87, 90 organized crime see crime Origins of Totalitarianism, The (1951) 35, 61 Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar 31, 33 Passel, J. S. 118 Pastore, Ferruccio 80, 81, 90 Pateman, C. 164, 166 Peck, J. 101, 102 Peled, Y. 221, 237 Pellegrino, A. 237 Peller, Gary 32 Pellikaan, Huub 142 Pels, Dick 129, 143 Penninx, Rinus 138, 143 Perea, Juan 31 Perraton, J. 118 personal sovereignty 87 Phalet, Karen 129, 130, 132, 133, 143, 150, 154, 160, 164, 166 Plantenga, J. 161, 166 pluralism 45 see also cultural pluralism Poku, N. 118, 119 Polanyi, Karl 35, 37, 51, 52, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62 police brutality and minority people 30 political parties in the Netherlands 124–130, 150–158 in Israel 20, 168 in the United States 2, 59, 61

political recognition 22, 53, 61, 81, 132, 167, 174 political representation 20, 168 Portes, Alejandro 33, 84 positiver Verbundenheit 210, 212 postindustrial city 33 postnational 8, 220, 222 postnational or denationalized 24 poverty and exclusion 53ff Power, Samantha 35, 49, 62, 237 Privatization 50 Protection Diplomatic 67–8 Prussian law 67–8 Pryke, Michael 31 Puerto Rico 86 n.3 Race theory, critical 19, 32, 183 Raijman, R. 221, 222, 224, 228, 232, 237 Rath, Jan 125, 143 re-ethnicization 63–91 refugees contingent 96 quota 6, 95–6 stateless 6, 48 Reiss, H. S. 118 Religion in France 167, 176 and gender 149ff, 161 and politics 114ff, 225 Remmler, K. 101, 102 Renner, Günter 71, 72, 73, 76, 87, 90 residence status 63, 77, 203, 228, 232 Resnik, J. 237 Rights of Man 36–7, 40–5, 49–50, 60 Rohe, Mathias 171, 179, 181, 183 Roulleau-Berger, Laurence 17, 33 Rubenstein, Kim 16, 33 Ruggie, J. G. 117, 119 Russia 95–101

246 / index Russian Germans 97–101 Russian Jews 6, 95–6, 98–101 Safran, W. 168, 184 Salt, J. 211, 217 Sassen, Saskia 5, 13, 16, 18, 20, 25, 26, 30, 33, 219, 233, 237 Saunders, Peter 18, 33 Saxton, A. 109, 119 Schammah-Geser, S. 237 Scheepers, Peer 139, 143 Scheffer, Paul 128–9, 134, 135, 137, 143, 149, 162, 166 Schirmer, D. 182, 184 Schnabel, Paul 129, 143 Schuck, Peter 20, 33 Scott, James 70, 73, 90 Security 103–117, 138, 158 Semyonov, Moshe 223, 237 Senders, S. 102 September 11 1, 5–6, 103, 118 Serbs 45–6 sexual orientation 19 Shachar, Ayelet 233, 235, 237 Shafir, G. 183, 221, 236, 237 Shain, Y. 107, 119 shanty dwellers 26 Sheffer, G. 107, 119 Shola Orloff, Ann 62 Shotter, John 18, 33 Shuval, Judith T. 222, 237 Sikkink, K. 108, 118 Simon, Patrick 3, 9, 177, 182, 184 Singer, A. 215, 217 Slomp, Jan 184 Smelser, Neil 86, 90 Smith, P. J. 217 Smith, Robert C. 32 Smith, Rogers 20, 33 Snel, E. 142 social exclusion 51, 53–9, 61 social mobility 134, 178

Somers, Margaret R. 5, 35, 46, 47, 58, 62 Soper, J. C. 115, 118 Soros, George 52, 62 Soviet Jews 95–100 Soviet Union 95 Sowell, Thomas 134, 143 Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu 21, 24, 33, 63, 85, 90, 219, 237 Spain 72, 77, 82, 103, 199 Speelman, G. 184 Spener, D. 209, 217 Spinner, J. 181, 184 Spiro, Peter 16, 33 Spivak, G. C. 180, 184 Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz 3, 67, 70, 76, 175, 176 State authority 16, 29 statelessness 35, 36, 38, 43–44, 47, 49–50, 52–53, 55, 57–58 status citizenship 21, 36, 63–4, 86, 228 rights 14, 66, 96, 171 Statham, Paul 90 Stefancic, Jean 19, 32 Stern, J. 104, 119 Supreme Court of the United States 19, 31 n.2 of Germany 171, 172 of Israel 230 Switzerland 77, 125 Taguieff, P.-A. 180, 184 Taylor, Charles 19, 33, 181, 184 Taylor, J. E. 237 Ten Hooven, M. 152, 166 Terrorism 103, 108f, 110–12, 116,132, 138, 158, 168 Ter Wal, Jessica 130, 132, 143 Thelen, Kathleen 1, 9 Thomas, Kendall 32

index / 247 Thränhardt, Dietrich 137, 143 Toktas, S. 198, 208, 209, 216 Torres, Maria de los Ángeles 33 Torres, Rodolfo D. 24, 33 Totalitarianism 56 transnationalism 7, 30, 32, 63, 84, 106–8, 116–17 Trappenburg, Margo 142 Tribalat, M. 177, 184 Turkey 1, 75, 77, 107, 176–7, 185, 190 Turkish brides in Germany 185–91, 193–4 Turkish communities 174, 191 in Germany 95, 174–6, 185, 191–2 nationality 95 Turks Legal status of 176 Turner, Bryan 17, 33, 63, 90 Uitermark, Justus 127, 143 UNESCO 73 United States 6, 20, 30, 42, 50, 60, 76, 103, 107, 113, 115, 141, 200, 207 Citizenship 19, 85 Congress 19 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 105 Immigration 21 1952 McCarran-Walter Act 76 see also immigration Van der Meer, Jelle 142 Van der Zwan, Arie 129, 143 Van Gogh, Theo 7, 132, 135, 147–66 Van Liempt, Ilse 215, 217 Van Lin, J. 184 Van Lotringen, Claudia 143, 166 Van Praag, Carlo 142, 150, 154, 160, 164, 166 Van San, M. 142 Van Wijnbergen, Christa 1, 9 Vasta, Ellie 121, 138, 143

Veenman, Justus 127, 143 Venel, N. 176, 184 Vermeulen, Hans 138, 143 violence against women 150, 161 Viorst, M. 176, 184 Voet, R. 166 Von Savigny, F. C. 179, 184 Waever, O. 117 Walzer, Michael 19, 33 Wansink, Hans 130, 135, 144 Watson, Sophie 27, 31 Weber, Max 18, 27, 28, 31, 33 Weil, Patrick 67, 68, 69, 87, 90, 91 Weiner, Myron 104, 119 welfare abuse 5 benefits 140 Dutch 137, 148, 152 German 2, 203, 205 women 166 welfare state 2, 17, 50, 54, 123–5, 137, 148, 152, 165 benefits 2, 95, 100, 137, 140, 223 Wihtol de Wenden, C. 233, 238 Wikan, Unni 9 Williams, J. C. 181, 184 Williams, P. 184 Wilpert, Czarina 175, 184 Wippman, David 90 Wolff, S. 102 Women and gender 7, 19, 23, 26, 66, 150, 156, 160ff, 167–79, 185–192, 224 and impact of global economy 16 Japanese housewives 22–23 Muslim 153, 156 see also Muslims Workfare 5 World War I 36–7, 68, 219 World War II 2, 49, 71, 102, 105, 231

248 / index Yates, K. 208, 217 Young, Iris Marion 19, 33 youth and work 112, 123, 154, 155, 159, 177 Yurdakul, Gökçe 1, 3, 7, 164, 167

Zimmermann, W. 118 Zincone, G. 182 Zizek, S. 178, 184 Zolberg, Aristide 64, 91, 109, 119, 231, 238 Zolo, Danilo 89

Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos

Citizenship and Migration

International migration and citizenship today

The Politics of International Migration Management (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Labour Migration in Europe (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Ethnicity, Migration and Enterprise (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe

Citizenship Acquisition and National Belonging: Migration, Membership and the Liberal Democratic State (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Citizenship, nationality, and migration in Europe

Citizenship in A Global World: Comparing Citizenship Rights for Aliens (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Of States, Rights, and Social Closure: Governing Migration and Citizenship

Migration

Migration

Migration

Migration

Migration

Global Changes in Asylum Regimes (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Senior Citizenship?: Retirement, Migration and Welfare in the European Union

Challenging Racism in Britain and Germany (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Of States, Rights, and Social Closure: Governing Migration and Citizenship

European Anti-Discrimination and the Politics of Citizenship: Britain and France (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Social Capital, Political Participation and Migration in Europe: Making Multicultural Democracy Work? (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Migration

Migration

Migration

The Migration-Development Nexus: A Transnational Perspective (Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship)

Ethnic Citizenship Regimes: Europeanization, Post-war Migration and Redressing Past Wrongs (Citizenship and Identity)

Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos

Citizenship and Migration

International migration and citizenship today

The Politics of International Migration Management (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Labour Migration in Europe (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Ethnicity, Migration and Enterprise (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe

Citizenship Acquisition and National Belonging: Migration, Membership and the Liberal Democratic State (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Citizenship, nationality, and migration in Europe

Citizenship in A Global World: Comparing Citizenship Rights for Aliens (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Of States, Rights, and Social Closure: Governing Migration and Citizenship

Migration

Migration

Migration

Migration

Migration

Global Changes in Asylum Regimes (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Senior Citizenship?: Retirement, Migration and Welfare in the European Union

Challenging Racism in Britain and Germany (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Of States, Rights, and Social Closure: Governing Migration and Citizenship

European Anti-Discrimination and the Politics of Citizenship: Britain and France (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Social Capital, Political Participation and Migration in Europe: Making Multicultural Democracy Work? (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Migration

Migration

Migration

The Migration-Development Nexus: A Transnational Perspective (Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship)

Ethnic Citizenship Regimes: Europeanization, Post-war Migration and Redressing Past Wrongs (Citizenship and Identity)

Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe (Migration, Minorities and Citizenship)

Recommend Documents