Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas
the Descent perspective entails treating citizenship as a No Exit membership, the corollary of treating it as a Change membership is, instead, the Culture or Cultural Attachment model. According to this perspective, polities, like other Change groups, are permeable; unlike polities in the Descent model, here polities can gain and lose members (by other means besides birth and death). Nonetheless, from this perspective citizenship and nationality, like other Change memberships, are not generally acquired by choice. Proponents of this conception typically understand the origin of political membership as being neither “blood” nor “choice,” but rather socialization.4
From the Culture as from the Descent perspective, the nation is frequently depicted as a family. However, in the Culture conception, the national family is understood primarily as a vehicle for socialization, not biological transmission of inherited characteristics. From this perspective, the role of parents in raising children takes precedence over procreation as such. Logically, adoption into the nation is therefore possible. While, this may appear as a rather trivial point, it often makes a significant difference in immigration and citizenship debates.
History often appears especially important from the Cultural Attachment perspective; learning a particular national history may play a key role in developing a sense of belonging to a particular people. Thus, Argentines, including many descended from twentieth-century Italian immigrants, will say “San Martin liberated ‘us,’” while generations of French children, from Paris to Guadeloupe, long were taught, by French textbooks, about “Our ancestors the Gauls.”
According to the Descent model, membership in a given nation is natural and innate. Here, by contrast, it is cultural and potentially changeable. One cannot change one’s genetic profile, but one may learn a new language or history. Despite the label, not everything that might be referred to as “cultural” is relevant in this conception. Political membership—like other meaningful affiliations—involves the sense of “deep-rooted” attachment normally associated with things toward which one develops deep attachments through primary socialization.
This perspective is readily apparent in, though by no means limited to, the work of contemporary communitarian thinkers. Invoking a Cultural view of membership—with corresponding understandings of justice and obligation—Sandel (1984) defends the communitarian view that the deep-seated attachments to particular groups commonly instilled by primary socialization are necessary in order to understand people:
as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic. Allegiances such as these are more than values I happen to have, and to hold, at a certain distance. They go beyond the obligations I voluntarily incur and the “natural duties” I owe to human beings as such. They allow that to some I owe more than justice requires or even permits, not only by reason of agreements I have made but instead in virtue of those more or less enduring attachments and commitments that, taken together, partly define the person I am. (90)
Although the cultural attachments involved in this sort of belonging can in fact be broken, and the memberships associated with them can thus be changed, their intensity is such that, Sandel warns, breaking them may threaten one’s sense of identity.
The Culture view of citizenship also figures centrally in the thinking of certain noncommunitarians. Slavoj Žižek, for example, argues that membership in “a given community” is not a matter of “symbolic identification,” but results from “that elusive entity called ‘our way of life’.” Žižek understands that as “the unique way a community organizes its enjoyment,” the “social practices” involved, and the “national myths” that sustain them (1992: 194–96).5
While the communitarian sense of membership Sandel describes may appear most characteristic of local and family ties, Gellner argues that cultural attachment is also theoretically definitive of the modern nation-state. He notes:
nations can indeed be defined in terms both of will and culture, and indeed in terms of the convergence of them both with political units. In these conditions, men will be politically united with all those, and only those, who share their culture. Polities then will to extend their boundaries to the limits of their cultures, and to protect and impose their culture within the boundaries of their power. (Gellner 1983: 55, my emphasis)
Gellner maintains that one of the distinctive features of national political units is that “the individual belongs to them directly, in virtue of his cultural style” (138). The fact that he says “will and culture,” and “impose their culture” suggests that forms of political membership not defined by culture are also possible: without “will” and imposition, political and cultural membership might diverge. However, nationalism as understood by Gellner challenges the legitimacy of such disjunctures. Thus, while recognizing a de facto plurality of forms of political membership, Gellner argues that the advent of nationalism marks the ascendancy of the Culture model over others.6 Contrary to what this account would lead one to expect, however, there are actually three other, distinctly different, conceptions of the nature of belonging in given polities that currently actively compete with this perspective.
Belief: Citizenship as Identification with a Polity’s Founding Principles
In contrast to “communitarian” and other advocates of the Culture view, American liberal thinkers often stress political culture and belief in certain common and fundamental liberal political values or principles as the basis of citizenship and national identity, at least in liberal democracies. For instance, the ideas of “constitutional patriotism” (Levinson 1988) or “constitutional faith” are often presented as central and defining elements of American national identity. Jacobsohn (1996: 23) argues, “being an American consists largely of sharing in those constitutive ideas that define membership in the political community. Assimilation in this context relates exclusively to principles” (cf. Huntington 1981: 24).
While many authors present this “Belief” conception of nationality as quintessentially American (Kohn 1957a; Mead 1975; Huntington 1981; Jacobsohn 1996; Walzer 1992), similar arguments also figure centrally in current European political and social theory. Defending the value of understanding political membership this way, Habermas argues that a “liberal political culture has a constitutional patriotism as its only common denominator” and concludes that “democratic citizenship does not necessarily have to be rooted in the national identity of a people” (1992: 28–29). The cultural integration of groups must therefore be distinguished from the “political integration of citizens,” the latter based on shared principles (1994: 132). Similarly, Mouffe (1992) argues, “What we share and what makes us members in a liberal democratic regime is not a substantive idea of the good but a set of political principles specific to such a tradition: the principles of freedom and equality for all.” Such a perspective implies that citizenship is properly understood not as “a legal status,” but as “a form of identification” (231). In other words, from this perspective, citizenship appears as a Leave membership.
While increasingly common among European as well as American defenders of the Belief model, the expression “constitutional patriotism” can actually be somewhat misleading. Examples of a political community united by belief in common values or principles can be found in the absence of constitutions as well, as this idea’s Christian antecedents suggest (Levinson 1988; Mead 1975). Nor need the Belief conception of political membership be limited to nation-states. At points in his writing, St. Augustine advanced what would qualify as a “Belief” vision of citizenship, in the City of God (Augustine 1958: 469–71, 63). And Habermas (1992) sees the Belief vision of political membership as the one most auspicious for development of a supranational European citizenship.
Because of the sense of identification and commitment involved, the Belief conception of citizenship resembles the Culture view. However, in the Belief model, there is also an important element of choice. Citizenship, by this view, is supposed to be a form of membership whose acceptance involves asserting one’s autonomy and individuality.
One shortcoming of the literature praising the Belief model as the basis of U.S. national identity is its partial and selective reading of U.S. history (Smith 1988).The way this literature typically