Worlds Colliding? Multiculturalism in Theory and Practice Immigration, Minorities and Multiculturalism In Democracies Conference Ethnicity and Democratic Governance MCRI project October 25-27, 2007 Montreal, QC, Canada Annika Hinze The University of Illinois, Chicago Department of Political Science (M/C 276) 1007 West Harrison Street Chicago, IL 60607 [email protected]
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Worlds Colliding? Multiculturalism in Theory and Practice
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Worlds Colliding?
Multiculturalism in Theory and Practice
Immigration, Minorities and Multiculturalism In Democracies Conference
Ethnicity and Democratic Governance MCRI project October 25-27, 2007
Montreal, QC, Canada
Annika Hinze
The University of Illinois, Chicago Department of Political Science (M/C 276)
include the Quebecois, we would have to decrease intension and end up with a concept that is
very general but would contain a minimal amount of information.
I use this example to make it clear that though it may be a conceptual problem to generalize from
the French Canadian case (as Kymlicka and Taylor have done) to all other cases of minority
rights, the Canadian case may still have some commonalities with other cases. This means, in
turn, that we do not have to discard all our concepts. However, we have to be very careful in
terms of applying very specific categories. For example, when it comes to the application of
group rights for French Canadians, to a great variety of cases (i.e. “minority populations in
general”), the specific history of the French Canadian case, and the special awareness of
Canadian scholars in this context, will cause them to come to conclusions that will not
necessarily be applicable to minority groups elsewhere. Will Kymlicka seems somewhat aware
of this problem when he suggests that there should be a difference between “involuntarily
colonized groups” and “voluntary immigrant groups” in terms of how many individual group
rights we attribute to them. However, as I have mentioned before, there may be certain
communalities of immigrant groups in general, which we can capture conceptually in very
general terms. Further, we may find more commonalities between a certain two or three
immigrant groups than between others. Concepts that refer only to these groups will be more
specific. Depending on how general we want our concept to be, we can move up and down the
ladder of abstraction, giving our concepts less specific attributes to make them more general, or
giving them more specific attributes to make them more specific and informative.
Despite our responsibility as scholars to create general theories, should we acknowledge the
detail of social construction specific to each encounter? I would respond with yes, absolutely, in
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order to be able to give meaningful answers to our own research questions about specific places,
interactions, and dynamics, and to understand the issues of minority groups in specific places.
We must try and avoid conceptual stretching and acknowledge the fact that each cultural, social,
and political encounter between a majority and minority group is shaped by the dynamic among
these particular groups, their characteristics, their histories, and their rules of interaction. This
precondition, however, should not keep us from forming general concepts. What we have to be
careful about is how many attributes we should include in a concept that we want to be as all-
encompassing as possible. If we find our concept too general and not really informative, we
might want to consider narrowing down the number of cases we want it to apply to. Another
option would be to supplement a general concept with specific information about two or more
different cases that are both captured by the same general concept but may display great
particular difference. We might for example argue that all minority groups (simply because they
are minorities) are faced with a certain issue of adequate political representation. We may then
show that minority groups that are condensed territorially (as the Quebecois) have a better
chance for collective political action and representation than say African Americans, who are
more territorially dispersed across the country, and who face the additional issue of
gerrymandering (to their advantage or disadvantage depending on the current administration) and
majority voting districts in their quest to gain better voter representation as a minority group.
Human behavior cannot be measured by rules as generalizable as those that can be found in the
natural sciences. Hans Georg Gadamer (1989) recognized that when he found that truth and
method in the humanities were at odds with each other and criticized the fact that methodology
in the humanities was increasingly modeled after the natural sciences. He also recognized that
the author of any scientific text has a historically shaped consciousness, which has evolved
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through the specific cultural and personal experience shaping each human being. We can expand
this view to the inherent tension in the way that scholars understand the issue of minority groups
and the majority population within the context of what they have experienced or studied and the
way that this understanding is often generalized like a mathematical rule to the dynamic between
any other majority and minority group. In the Behavioral Sciences, we can only go so far in
terms of finding grand theories and concepts that explain the dynamics of human behavior. The
most important thing, it seems then, is for us to beware of generalizing from specific findings.
Rather, we should look at the variety of cases that we are including in our generalizations about
our specific findings. Most likely, what we sought to generalize to will have to be adjusted if an
all-encompassing concept is to be established.
The “middle road” to multiculturalism would then require two things: a generalizable
definition and consensus on what multiculturalism actually is, with regards to different
contexts, as well as the awareness that policy recommendations must be case-specific and can
hardly be generalizable in the case of multiculturalism.
III - Two European Cases: France and Germany
In the last part of this paper, I want to see how comparable two countries, which could be
characterized of having similar issues regarding their minority populations, really are.
Germany and France have been described and cited as two opposite approaches to citizenship.
France has been characterized as the classic example of a civic nation, where based on the
respect for and identification with the French Republic, technically anyone can become a
“good Frenchman”. Germany, on the other hand, has been viewed as a classic example of the
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ethnic nation, where national identity is rooted in blood and ancestry and cannot be acquired
through practice but only be inherited by blood. Thomas (2001: 6) argues that “If ethnic
nations are based on decent, civic nations – which are supposedly their opposite – must,
therefore, be based on consent.” However, France’s and Germany’s approaches at first sight
are not as clear-cut as the concepts they stand for, especially in the light of the most recent
immigration policies and debates in both countries. France’s perceptions of immigrants has
been mixed for a while. Since colonial times, there had always been the perception of
“particular inferiority” of North African “colonial subjects” as opposed to other “Caucasian”
immigrant groups. Clifford Rosenberg (2004) describes Albert Sarraut, who led France’s
Interior Ministry between World War I and World War II and exerted tremendous influence
regarding French immigration policy at the time.
By the interwar years, North Africans had replaced Italians as the most recent immigrant group in French
public opinion. Employed in the most unpleasant, poorly paid, dangerous positions, North Africans were
disdained not only by French workers but by other immigrants as well. (…) Their anxieties about
degeneration and racial mixing led them to impose formidable administrative hurdles to limit the number
of North Africans on the French mainland, and to monitor all who made the journey with a series of
invasive hygiene programs. (…) Their political commitments powerfully influenced their perception, and
ultimately their treatment, of those colonial immigrants during the interwar years and for generations to
come. (Rosenberg 2004, 48-49)
In fact, North African immigrants were said to be less adaptable to French culture and French
Republican values than European immigrants and therefore less desirable immigrants all
together (Rosenberg, 2004). Despite this, France has retained a relatively open immigration
policy. This policy, however, goes along with the expectation of all immigrants to become
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“good Frenchmen” and adhere to the values of the Republic, which means, above all,
secularism. These values oftentimes clash with the religious attachments of many immigrants
from France’s former colonies in the Maghreb. In addition to the religious conflict around
Islam, which has been prevalent in France especially with regards to the headscarf, the election
of Nicolas Sarkozy as French president in 2007 has brought about speculations of a change in
French citizenship law, away from the more open jus soli principle2 closer to jus sanguinis3.
In Germany, since the founding of an official German state in 1871, citizenship was tied to
German blood and ancestry only. This long tradition as an ethnic nation was changed in 1999
with a new citizenship law. The ancient citizenship law dating back to 1913 was finally
abandoned, and immigrants, who have lived in Germany legally for a certain amount of time,
as well as their children, can now acquire German citizenship. This has come as an
improvement in the situation of many former Turkish “guest workers”. Turkish immigrants
started coming to Germany in the late 1960s as part of Germany’s guest worker program,
through which a number of low-skilled workers were hired from Turkey and the
Mediterranean. Upon their arrival, those guest workers stayed in barracks separate from the
German population and were intended to be sent back to Turkey after their work was done.
Many of those former “guest workers” ended up staying in Germany for generations, and have
now become German citizens or permanent residents. Germany still grapples with the full
integration of many of its Turkish immigrants, who are confronted with the stigmas of not
being European and Islamic. Tellingly, Germany until recently defined itself as kein
Einwanderungsland (not a country of immigration). This is hardly the case. The German
2 The right of soil, granting each individual born on French soil French citizenship. 3 The right of blood, granting only those of French ancestry/French blood French citizenship.
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Ministry of the Interior estimates the number of foreign nationals living in Germany to be
around 7.3 million, about 9% of the total population.
Despite its more inclusive approach to citizenship, Germany is experiencing a debate
particularly around Islam in the public sphere, which marginalizes those former Turkish
immigrants, who are citizens because of their religion and culture. The controversy around the
headscarf in Germany is a more recent one than in France but the arguments are the same for
both.
Both, France and Germany, are also experiencing the impact of an overarching EU-policy
towards migration within the EU. That means that any citizen of any of the EU-member states
can freely move around the EU, but those immigrants from outside the EU still face heavy
restrictions. This means that immigrants of North African decent in France and Turkish
immigrants in Germany face much higher restrictions to entering either country than
immigrants from, say, Greece or Italy.
Do Turks in Germany and Maghrebis in France face similar issues, particularly in terms of the
stigma that goes along with their religion? Can policy recommendations for the implementation
of a more tolerant policy towards these minority groups in these two very particular cases be
the same?
I am well aware of the fact that Muslims are not just Muslims. In other words, the Muslim
religion is characterized by an immense variety. Within it exist many different Muslim faiths and
cults as well as radically different interpretations of the Koran. Similarly, as Benhabib (2002) has
argued, not all the minority groups in Germany and France are homogeneous wholes. Turks in
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Germany are not just Sunni Muslims, they are Shiites, Alevis, or secular. The same is true for
North Africans in France – they are no homogeneous bloc and come not only from different
religious, but also from different national traditions. As different as these immigrant groups may
be, however, they face similar barriers from the dominant population groups in both countries.
What is key here is to take into consideration not just the way the groups of immigrants differ in
both countries and within themselves, which is very important to note, of course, but also the
way those immigrants are perceived by the dominant population group in the country.
Perception, in this case, may be influenced by the dynamic between the dominant and the
minority group in a certain country. It might be shaped by the way the media and influential
politicians construct the image of a minority group in an either favorable or unfavorable way,
and the way the minority group reacts to this image construction. This kind of reasoning is based
on the assumption that groups and societies do not divide along ethnic lines because of deeply
held primordial identities, attachments, and values, “that issues, problems, interests, and
identities are not soundly anchored to an objective empirical reality but are themselves images or
reality created through discursive processes that define or assign meaning to social phenomena;
that is they construct social reality” (Croucher 1997, 173). In this view, the dynamic between
minority and majority groups within a society is socially constructed and constantly in flux
through action and reaction. This dynamic, but especially the way that Turkish immigrants in
Germany and Maghrebis in France are perceived by the dominant population group, is what is
really comparable in France and Germany. In other words, both groups in both countries might
face similar issues in terms of the socially constructed dynamic between the European majority
group and the “Muslim” minority group, whose difference on the side of the Europeans is
predominantly observed based on their religion, whether the minority group explicitly identifies
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itself as Muslim or not. The headscarf is an interesting example of this. The headscarf has
become a symbol for the otherness of Islam in comparison to the West on both sides. It
represents the grounds for rejection of the other by the West (portraying Islam as intolerant and
discriminatory) and it symbolizes the resistance of the other against the West and its portrayal
as inferior by the West. The point here is the fact that the role that Islam plays in the way that
it is portrayed by the West as well its role as an identity of resistance against the West is
merely an image and a social construction, and it is also the point on which the French and the
German case are quite comparable.
VI - Conclusion
The awareness about the possibilities and pitfalls of comparison as well as the specificities of
different countries is what may lead to more helpful policy recommendation and a more
differentiated and case-specific definition of a multiculturalist policy. What I have attempted to
illustrate in my reference to the cases of France and Germany is the idea that by knowing the
details and divergences of both cases, we might more easily identify aspects that both cases
have in common. The approach to concepts such as multiculturalism through a “middle road”
between an abstract and general concept and the specificity of particular case studies might be
a key factor in theory building around certain issues and the construction of policy
recommendations that really fit specific cases. Awareness of the differences between the
German and the French case might lead us to certain commonalities between the two cases. At
the same time, however, it is important to be aware of the fact that the issue that France and
Germany grapple with is a very specific one, and that its adaptability to other national contexts
may be extremely limited. It seems that precisely because the theory of multiculturalism is so
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closely related to specific national contexts and policy recommendations about a “policy of
multiculturalism”, it is especially important that we become aware of the inherent difference
of issues of integration within different national and historic contexts. Maybe then, we might
see a lesser divide between theory and actual social reality.
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Bibliography
Appiah, K. Anthony: “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social
Reproduction.” In: Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by
Amy Gutman. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1994.
Benhabib, Seyla: The Claims of Culture. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002.
Brubaker, Rogers: Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA 1992.
Bundesministerium für Inneres (German Federal Ministry of the Interior): Statistics.