Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas
and international visions of citizenship do not fully transcend existing theoretical understandings of political membership. Rather, the same kinds of ambivalence and disagreement about the nature of political membership are reproduced in the context of emerging discussions of “new” forms of citizenship no longer centered on nation-states. Like the most heated national-level debates in today’s liberal democracies about citizenship and immigration, the civic-ethnic dichotomy does not adequately capture the nature of these debates. As political membership at the international and even global level is increasingly imagined and contested, it is not impossible that the current role of the nation-state as the most salient locus of political membership in large parts of the world will to some degree wane. However, this turn is not likely to bring the politics of belonging as we now know them to an end. On the contrary, contemporary discussions of the terms of global and international level political memberships to a surprising extent recapitulate the terms of disagreement over political membership at the national level. Discussions of such non-national levels of political membership thus appear as an area of growing importance in which the theoretical framework introduced in the next chapter may find further application.
In drawing on the methods and insights of ordinary language analysis to develop a new, more subtle theoretical framework better adapted to contemporary quandaries, this study seeks to bridge several usually disparate fields of inquiry—philosophy, political theory, and comparative political analysis. These are fields that should work in tandem but are currently troublingly disconnected. It is my hope that this study may encourage comparativists and political theorists alike to think creatively about how their methods, insights, and findings might work together more productively to enhance the ability of all of us to think more effectively about the most pressing political problems of our day.
The Quest for “Good Nationalism” and Its Analytical Aftermath
This study offers a new solution to a central theoretical and conceptual problem in existing analyses of the politics of membership. Too often, studies concerned with the politics of membership in different countries have approached the task of analysis and comparison armed with binary, overly simplistic theoretical tools. Most commonly, comparative analysts have approached such work using various versions of a basic binary framework that I call the dichotomy of civic and ethnic.
Kohn’s Dichotomy of “Eastern” Versus “Western” Nationalism
Since the late nineteenth century, the nation-state has figured as one of the most important loci of political membership, particularly in Europe, but also increasingly in other parts of the world. Innumerable typologies and classifications of nationalism have been proposed.5 A few of these have categorized nationalisms on the basis of citizens’ and others’ ideas of the nature and basis of political membership.6 Our current ways of analyzing conceptions of political membership comparatively can be traced to this now neglected branch of the literature on nationalism.
The most influential, current dichotomous approach to ideas of political membership can be traced back to the early postwar work of Hans Kohn. Kohn identified “two main concepts of nation and fatherland” that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one in the “West,” the other in the “East.” The Western concept of nation—developed in England, France, the United States, and the Netherlands—was that of a community of citizens “integrated around a political ideal” and project. The Eastern concept was of a biologically based, “natural” folk community resulting from a “mystical integration around the irrational, precivilized folk concept.” These two forms of nationalism were, in Kohn’s theory, diametrically opposed in every respect. Western nationalism was forward-looking, whereas Eastern nationalism was backward-looking. The irrational and nostalgic nationalists of the East were fixated on monuments and graveyards and preoccupied with preserving their particularistic “ancient lore and myth.” As a political project with a universal message and mission associated with a “rational and universal concept of political liberty and the rights of man,” Western nationalism was rational and universal (Kohn 1967; also Kohn 1946, 1949, 1957b; Snyder 1954: 117–22). As this summary suggests, Kohn’s observation was by no means politically impartial. Western nationalism was clearly good, while the Eastern variant was, as Tom Nairn (1993) writes, “reactive, envious, ethnic, racist and generally bad” (quoted in Xenos 1996: 214).
The reason for the dichotomous nature of the Kohnian perspective becomes clear if we look to the political and historical context of his work. Writing just after World War II, Kohn wanted to explain the emergence of fascist nationalism in Eastern Europe, but without delegitimating the patriotism of the war’s Western victors.7 Like other German émigrés of the 1930–50s, he also hoped to salvage a legitimate variety of national community to serve as a basis for a Weimar-style project of constitutional liberalism (Vincent 1997: 278). In other words, recent historical experience made it impossible for Kohn to deny that nationalism could be linked to violence and intolerance, but the issues and developments of his time also made him sympathetic to national consciousness. The intellectual task he set himself, then, was to separate the good from the bad, salvaging the former and explaining the latter. Kohn’s interest in distinguishing good from bad forms of nationalism undoubtedly contributed to the rigorously dichotomous structure of the theoretical framework he developed.
Kohn’s distinction between the form of nationalism that developed in Western countries and that which subsequently emerged in Eastern ones informed the work of a generation of historians. Writing in 1954, Louis Snyder noted simply, “The Kohn formula has served a generation of historians well, and there have been no significant attempts to alter or modify it” (1954: 122). Nonetheless, Kohn’s work subsequently fell into desuetude as interest in nationalism waned and new nation-states emerging in former colonial areas failed to fit neatly into his typology (Xenos 1996: 217).
Intellectual Revival of Kohn’s Dichotomous Approach
In the context of a new, post-Cold War constellation of concerns, however, Kohn’s theoretical approach has made a dramatic comeback. In the wake of the Cold War, intellectuals were anxious, first, to account for the atrocities in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, which were widely seen as linked to irrational “nationalist” sentiments.8 At the same time, scholars were concerned to salvage a positive model of political community, whether for its own sake or as a counter to the ideological appeals of nationalist demagogues (Lind 1994: 87–99). Advancing both arguments, Yael Tamir exhorted liberals not to dismiss nationalism altogether, warning that, “Liberals who give up this term [nationalism] and surrender it to the use of conservative political forces, or note the difference, to chauvinist and racist ideologies, alienate themselves from a whole set of values that are of immense importance to a great many people, including liberals” (Tamir 1993: 5). Or, as Michael Ignatieff, whose work played an important role in in reviving the dichotomy of civic and ethnic in the 1990s, contended, “The only reliable antidote to ethnic nationalism turns out to be civic nationalism” (Ignatieff 1993: 185; quoted in Nairn 1995: 99).9
In extolling the need to stave off bad nationalism with good, intellectuals thus made common cause with politicians, policy makers, and other public figures who called on citizens to participate in similar ideological strategies. French minister of education Jean-Pierre Chevènement contrasted “xenophobic nationalism” with “republican patriotism,” and accordingly encouraged schoolchildren to learn the French national anthem. Also seeking to counter racist nationalist appeals like those of the far-Right National Front, France’s leading anti-racism group, SOS-Racisme, devised a poster featuring the slogan, “We all love the same country.” Similarly, though in a very different context, on his trip to Croatia in September 1994, Pope John Paul II said: “It is necessary to promote a culture of peace which does not reject a healthy patriotism but keeps far away from the … exclusions of nationalism” (Jennings 1992: 499–500; Levinson 1995: 626).
In this context, a new wave of dichotomous theoretical treatments of nationalism indebted to Kohn’s approach emerged. In the most popular revamping of this approach, the notions of “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism have been substituted for Kohn’s “Western” and “Eastern” varieties (Greenfeld 1992: 44–45; Jowitt 1992: 319–26). Recent work has also been marked by other pairs of terms that represent