Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas

       Chapter 1

      Introduction: The Politics of Belonging

      Contemporary politics is increasingly marked by controversies concerning the conditions for political membership. The problem of political membership is by no means new. From the time of citizenship’s classical theoretical formulation by Aristotle, political thinkers have grappled with it. But today it is more pressing than ever. The question of who belongs is one of the most difficult, politically charged, and inescapable political quandaries of our time. It has emerged as a problem that policy makers, political thinkers, and citizens themselves all must confront.

      National and international developments are together contributing to the growing urgency of membership issues. Paradoxically, the various cultural and economic processes together often referred to as “globalization” have by no means consigned questions of political membership to increasing irrelevance. Instead, globalization has in many ways fueled membership politics, often in new forms. Perhaps most dramatically, international migration and its consequences have heightened issues of membership in West European and other economically advanced liberal democracies, to which immigrants—including many Muslims—have been heavily drawn in the years since the Second World War. The salience of the politics of membership has recently been reflected in such developments as the massive March 2006 protests against restrictive new immigration laws proposed in the United States; in these protests, immigrants marched to demonstrate their already integral place in American society and their desire for a legal road to citizenship status. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, broad-ranging public debate over the place of Islam in Europe has become increasingly heated and drawn in leading intellectuals internationally.¹ The politics of the last decade or so

      Thomas_ImmigrationIslam Politics_TX.indd 3 has also been marked by a number of other important membership-related issues, including controversies in California and other U.S. states over bilingual education, “English only” policies, and access of children of illegal immigrants to public education and social services; German and American debates about dual citizenship; political conflicts surrounding Australia’s shift from a “white Australia” to a “multicultural” immigration policy; and conflicts over the construction of mosques, public observance of non-Christian religious holidays, or the public presence and visibility of Muslim women and girls in “Islamic” attire. From North America to Australia to western Europe, immigration and the challenges following migrants’ settlement have provoked a steady series of passionate political discussions about the nature of political membership and the necessary conditions for belonging in particular political communities.

      Nowhere have issues of political membership raised by immigration and its aftermath provoked more intense and politically salient public debates than in France. In part, this may be because France has Western Europe’s largest Muslim population and highest estimated percentage of residents of Muslim background.² It may also be because France has been somewhat ahead of many European countries both in the relatively early arrival of many migrants, and in accepting the idea that immigrants and their descendants in principle could eventually become full members of the nation-state, an idea that Germany, notoriously, long resisted (Brubaker 1992; Noiriel 1996). Nonetheless, as the widespread riots of autumn 2005 in France’s often ethnically imbalanced suburbs highlighted, France has clearly had great difficulty coming to terms with the long-term settlement of culturally, religiously, and racially diverse residents of postwar immigrant origin.

      This study is unique in developing and applying a new theoretical framework for analyzing discussions of political membership and comparing such debates in different countries as well as at the global or international level. As the latter part of this chapter argues, a new theoretical framework of this kind is urgently needed. There is a long-standing alternative approach to analyzing and comparing models of membership in different countries and historical periods that is still frequently used—what I call the “dichotomy of civic and ethnic”—but this approach is both theoretically flawed and ill-suited to the task of analyzing the membership-related discussions prevalent in liberal democracies today.

      One alternative to the prevalent but flawed approach would be simply to take each national version of the politics of membership on its own terms. This proposal has the apparent advantage of guarding against the danger of reducing the terms of one country’s debates to those of another. Approaching recent controversies through case-by-case thick description also appears to offer the advantage of interpreting political positions in ways that are meaningful to the actors involved, so that we can make sense of their logic and reasoning rather than merely imputing explanations for their preferences from an outside perspective. For example, American observers may be tempted to assume that opponents of students’ rights to wear traditional religious clothing are opposing freedom of speech or freedom of religion, but French opponents of headscarves often understand the issue quite differently (Bowen 2008).

      Unfortunately, the disadvantages of such a case-by-case approach ultimately outweigh its attractions. Simply taking debates “on their own terms” may avoid the pitfalls of intercultural reductionism, but it allows for little critical distance and generates no possibility of systematic comparison among different countries or over time. Yet, in a field as politically and morally charged as the contemporary politics of membership—citizenship and immigration politics in particular—it is arguably incumbent on political theorists and comparative analysts to offer actors such critical distance, to which systematic comparison can also contribute.

      Recent work on the politics of belonging has therefore sought to transcend the inherent shortcomings of case-by-case national accounts, instead developing broader comparative frameworks. The turn to more comparative work in this area, particularly evident since the 1990s, clearly signals progress in understanding how and why different ideas and policies regarding citizenship and nationality have developed in response to immigration and growing cultural diversity. However, as later chapters show, none of the currently prevailing approaches to theoretically or comparatively understanding these developments are fully satisfactory. Each has encouraged false or overly simplistic expectations concerning the emerging shape of current membership policies and politics. With new conceptual and analytical tools honed for that purpose, this book aims to advance further the emerging theoretical and comparative discussion.

      Two contrasting perspectives have shaped recent discussion of the relationship between immigration and patterns of citizenship. The first, post-nationalist perspective foresees increasing convergence in national citizenship policies. According to this view, national citizenship is giving way to a new “post-nationalist model of membership.” Thanks to the increasing international influence of human rights norms and respect for “personhood,” advocates of this view have argued, rights are increasingly being equalized irrespective of national status. Over time, national citizenship is therefore supposedly losing much of its traditional significance, especially for migrants. Even where nation-states still grant and ensure rights, they increasingly do so on the basis of post-national norms and criteria (Soysal 1994: 136–67; cf. Jacobson 1997).

      The other major perspective on changes in citizenship and nationality law emphasizes the importance of national political cultures and traditions. According to this view, countries have distinct, deeply rooted conceptions of nationhood that shape their approaches to political membership. Confronted with similar challenges of immigrant settlement, they therefore respond differently, in keeping with their political cultural traditions. The most important