Migration and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Europe (Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series) 303064068X, 9783030640682

Table of contents :
Series Editor’s Foreword
Acknowledgments
Contents
1 Introduction
Structure, Aims, and Objectives
2 The Dialectics of European Integration
Identity Politics and the Imaginary Past
Identitarian Closure: Europe’s Uneasy Relationship with Muslim Immigration
Concluding Remarks: European Autopoiesis
3 Citizenship in a Post-migrant Europe: Socio-Political Cohesion at Breaking Point?
Political Elites Versus the People
The Specter of Social Disintegration
De-, Post-, Supra-, and Trans-Nationalizing Citizenship
Concluding Remarks: What Future for European Civil Society?
4 Changing Logics of Migration: Immigrant Threat to National Sovereignty?
From Interest to Culture: Changing Politics of Migration
Refugees, Asylum, and the Reassertion of Sovereignty
Concluding Remarks: Insular Logics, Bounded Imaginations
5 The Integration Paradox: Culturalizing Belonging at the End of the “Multiculturalist Era”
The Retreat from Multiculturalism in a Post-migrant Europe
Multiculturalism’s Threat to Liberal Universalism
Symbiosis: From Liberalism of Rights to Multiculturalism of Fear
Concluding Remarks: Regressive Universalism and the Chimera of Emancipatory Liberal Democracy
6 Synthesis: Grand Visions, Fractured Realities
Liberalism in an Age of Fear
The Refugee as Focal Point of Democratic Theorizing
Selected Bibliography

Citation preview

EUROPE IN TRANSITION

Migration and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Europe Christoph M. Michael

Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series

Series Editor Martin A. Schain New York University New York, NY, USA

This series explores the core questions facing the new Europe. It is particularly interested in studies that focus on such issues as the process and development of the European Union, shifting political alliances, military arrangements, the impact of immigration on European societies and politics, and the emergence of ethno-nationalism within the boundaries of Europe. The series includes both collected volumes as well as monographs.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14976

Christoph M. Michael

Migration and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Europe

Christoph M. Michael Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series ISBN 978-3-030-64068-2 ISBN 978-3-030-64069-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64069-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Foreword

I am delighted to introduce Christoph Michael’s study and to welcome this book into the Europe in Transition series. Migration and the Crisis of Democracy argues that European democracy today is being redefined by socio-political trends related to migration and efforts to manage immigration, integration, and reactions to these demographic changes. There is little question that a sustained period of immigration in Europe—both among the countries of the European Union and from outside of Europe into the European Union—has changed European social and political life. Europe is now, and has been for some time, a “country of immigration,” in which tensions have emerged between accepted national values and new values and interests of the migrant communities. Studies of immigrant integration have long recognized that integration is a dialogue, rather than a one-way process. Immigration and integration have been generally managed by European nation-states in ways consistent with democratic values. Michael argues, however, that refugees and refugee policy have presented a more fundamental challenge to sovereignty and even democracy. In political discourse, “The figure of the refugee—not that of the citizen—is located at the center of the fundamental question of what features of the liberal democratic idiom enable, facilitate and provide inroads for the erosion and potentially regressive turn of European liberal democracy.” At stake is the tension between the open values of liberal democracy and the limiting values of sovereignty. v

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Often phrased in terms of “effective management,” the question of restrictive policies has become a focal point for discussion about the decline of sovereignty. Proposals for increasingly restrictive refugee and asylum policies “…have become a vital resource for politicians to perpetuate this sovereign illusion and compensate for the de facto loss of national sovereignty in other areas.” From arguments about a “big beautiful wall” to keep them out, to more arcane discussions about national culture, to commitments to “Make [America, France, England or Poland] great again,” refugees are the challenge to sovereignty, and policy “…has emerged as the main stage on which national sovereignty can be re-enacted,” Michaels argues. While this is a book about migration, it is really about how political elites have used questions of migration and refugees to challenge traditional elements of democracy. If in the nineteenth century, the challenge to democracy in Europe was to find a way to reconcile class conflict with participatory democracy, the challenge to democracy today is to find a way to reconcile participatory democracy with social and religious pluralism connected with migration. At the core of this book is first an exploration of what “diversity” has come to mean in Europe; indeed, what “Europe” has come to mean. Michael begins with an important observation that there has been an “historic shift” of perception of divisions in Europe. It is not so long ago that the demands and organization of the “dangerous class” of working-class and poor whites were the challenges to political stability in Europe. It is now commonly accepted, he argues, that populations from Third World Muslim countries have now become “… the culturalized European Other, with little or no distinction made between citizens, permanent residents, temporary labor migrants or asylum seekers.” In this way, culturalized conflicts around immigration have also tended to diminish the importance of class-based social analysis. In every European country, immigrants comprise a large and growing percentage of permanent residents, as well as citizens. Until the decade of the 1960s, most of these immigrants were other Europeans, but they are now—and have been increasingly for more than 50 years—from mostly Muslim Third World countries. This “shift” is also in what has become the basis for conflict, from class to ethno-religious, as well as what has become the implied limits on European cultural boundaries. As Michael notes, European institutions that now more or less successfully allow “for the negotiation of diversity among national European cultures… [not only]

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relegate non-European cultures and identities to the margins but, in fact, bar the gates before them.” This cultural challenge, argues Michael, is the paradox of European Union. As economic, social, and limited political union has developed among the EU countries, unanticipated nationalism has grown within each of the member states. In most of the countries of the European Union, nationalist sentiment has grown well beyond the supporters of the parties of the extreme right, but this “new nationalism” is more about the limits of inclusion, or perhaps the need for exclusion. Michael outlines two separate, but related, cultural challenges. The first challenge is (as indeed it has always been) that certain forms of cultural difference are deemed to be irreconcilable with liberal democratic values and thus “…threaten to give rise to forms of cultural conflict, both inaccessible to democratic modes of conflict resolution and immune to multicultural policies seeking to institutionalize difference.” The result has been increasing hostility toward resident immigrant communities from countries of origin outside of the European Union. The second challenge is that European Union integration has reinforced national identities among populations of the new Member States of the polyethnic borderlands in the EU’s east. This has led to a growth of exclusionary ethno-nationalism which has been turned against this same immigration from outside of Europe. In this way, the growth of European Union has helped to fuel support for exclusion. Michael’s analysis of European (Union) citizenship supports this analysis. A rights-based idea of EU citizenship appears to offer little support for those who are most in need of protection. He reminds us that, although the “thin” protection of a European citizenship regime is consistently regarded as important to more than half of those surveyed “… this feeling does not correspond to any substantive content beyond legal nominalism.” Eurobarometer surveys have long demonstrated that, regardless of feelings of attachment to the EU in the abstract, “… Europeans remain national in their focus on European [policy] issues, and European elections continue to be dominated by member states’ domestic issues and political cleavages.” In the end, a “post-national citizenship” of transnational rights is blocked by a “new nationalism.” That refocuses questions of rights and obligations back on the nation-state for enforcement. At the heart of this book is the question of identity, the evolving meaning of belonging in Europe, and the process through which this can

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be achieved. Culture has been the overarching, amorphous link that has brought Europeans together, and about which there appears to be neverending conflict. The “…affirmation of (national) culture in the face of large-scale immigration and growing diversity that has occurred since the 1990s” has been a major preoccupation of politics in Europe. At the same time, what exactly is being affirmed is a source of constant discussion. The one thing that Europeans can agree on in large numbers, however, is that it is worth defending. At least this is what the argument about “the retreat from multiculturalism” seems to mean. Multiculturalism in Europe, as it evolved during the 1980s, was “…a normative ideal of recognition and accommodation of cultural pluralism” that was the result of immigration. It was termed, in some cases, a multiculturalism of fear (a term that Michael borrows from Jacob T. Levy) that would enable antagonistic ethnic communities to live together. In others, in Britain and France for example, it would permit state recognition, and even support, for cultural communities. In most cases, it was really a state strategy for incorporating new immigrant communities that was generally regarded as a way-station for integration. Michael analyzes what he calls “the end of the Multiculturalist Era” with considerable skill. In fact, multiculturalism never quite ended, but it has declined “…not despite but because immigrants have increasingly gained access to political institutions and the arenas of political representation and, as a result, their claims to equality (and difference as part of that equality) have gained greater voice.” However, as he also argues in earlier chapters, multiculturalism claims also lost legitimacy as nationalism gained strength in Europe in recent years. Michael makes a convincing case that migration from outside of Europe has challenged traditional European culture, and therefore the identity of what it means to be European. The reason why he sees this as a crisis for democracy, however, is that the continuing entry into Europe of immigrants and refugees is also a challenge for the European political community and European political values. Restrictions on entry challenge European values of human rights, and pressures on citizenship have challenged established rules of access to the political community. This fine analysis traces the impact of immigration on issues and politics in Europe. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that, although the gates of “fortress Europe” have become more difficult to enter, they are not locked. In retrospect, although the impact of immigration can be seen, I find it surprising how strong European democratic institutions

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have remained despite the challenges of the influx of immigration over the past 50 years. Fifty years ago, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (in the introduction to The Civic Culture) reminded us that “We still cannot be certain that the continental European countries will discover a stable form of democratic process suitable to their particular cultures and social institutions; nor can we more than hope that together they will discover a European democracy.” The challenge for European democracy today is certainly less intense and less existential. Nevertheless, as this book makes clear, the challenge is still real. New York, USA 2020

Martin A. Schain

Acknowledgments

Researching and writing any book-length study is a collaborative endeavor in the sense of a sustained dialogue with the work, ideas, and insights of other scholars. Among the scholars whose work has had a lasting and sometimes formative effect on my own work and from whose writings I have learned the most, I should especially mention Gerd Baumann, Agnes Heller, Klaus Eder, Susan Neiman, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Bernard Williams, Saskia Sassen, and Walter D. Mignolo. I’m also especially grateful to Michael Freeden, Jennifer Homans, Wolf Lepenies, Christiane Lierman Traniello, Gabriella Etmektsoglou, and Fritz Stern who all offered their advice and encouragement at crucial moments—personally as well as professionally—in the making of this book. However, by far the largest single contribution was made by Harald Bluhm who never tired to point me to crucial further reading and, by ruthlessly questioning my own assumptions, pushed me to incisive revisions at various times. Through the years, he has encouraged my research with commitment, trust, and critical support. His own work serves as constant reminder that intellectual curiosity and creativity must be matched, and sometimes reined in, by a deep knowledge of disciplinary canons and traditions as well as methodological rigor. Several parts of this book were written while on leave. Research fellowships at NYU’s Remarque Institute and the University of Bonn provided ideal conditions for drawing up large parts of the manuscript. At NYU, I would like to thank Katherine Fleming, Jair Kessler, Maya Jex, and

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Jennifer Ren for letting me share an immensely stimulating and ultraefficient working environment. At the University of Bonn, I’m above all grateful to Grit Straßenberger who provided me with the opportunity for tying it all together. My colleagues at Humboldt-University (Berlin), Martin-Luther University (Halle), and Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (Bonn) have stimulated and enriched my own work throughout many conversations and over many a cup of coffee. I particularly would like to thank Matthias Bohlender, Karsten Fischer, Carlos Lopez-Galviz, André Häger, Eva Hausteiner, Karsten Malowitz, Malte Miram, Joe Peisker, Gregor Ritschel, Axel Rüdiger, and Juliane Victor. Beyond intellectual debts thanks are also due to Franziska Friese, Martin Gebauer, and Thomas Harzer. Martin Schain took an early and unwavering interest in this project. For that, as for kindly offering to include the book in the NYU’s European Studies Series Europe in Transition, I owe him my gratitude. The editorial team at Palgrave has made publication as smooth and efficient a process as I could have wished for. Heartfelt thanks to Michelle Chen, Rebecca Roberts, and Geetha Chockalingam for their expertise and dedication. I’m equally grateful to two anonymous reviewers. Their meticulous engagement with the manuscript and their thoughtful suggestions greatly improved the coherence and persuasiveness of the arguments it advances. Last but not least, sincere thanks go out to the staff at Staatsbibliothek Berlin (Berlin State Library). Without access to their vast printed and digital collections and their assistance, infrastructure, and services, the writing of this book would not have been possible. In its first tentative steps, this book, however, started with dissertational research under the guidance of Tony R. Judt. Until mere days before his untimely death and in spite of the debilitating effects of his condition, he was generous with his time, thoughts, and in his friendship. Migration and the Crisis of Democracy is dedicated to his memory.

Contents

1

Introduction Structure, Aims, and Objectives

2

The Dialectics of European Integration Identity Politics and the Imaginary Past Identitarian Closure: Europe’s Uneasy Relationship with Muslim Immigration Concluding Remarks: European Autopoiesis

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Citizenship in a Post-migrant Europe: Socio-Political Cohesion at Breaking Point? Political Elites Versus the People The Specter of Social Disintegration De-, Post-, Supra-, and Trans-Nationalizing Citizenship Concluding Remarks: What Future for European Civil Society? Changing Logics of Migration: Immigrant Threat to National Sovereignty? From Interest to Culture: Changing Politics of Migration Refugees, Asylum, and the Reassertion of Sovereignty Concluding Remarks: Insular Logics, Bounded Imaginations

1 7 21 25 42 62

95 97 106 119 130

159 163 184 200

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CONTENTS

The Integration Paradox: Culturalizing Belonging at the End of the “Multiculturalist Era” The Retreat from Multiculturalism in a Post-migrant Europe Multiculturalism’s Threat to Liberal Universalism Symbiosis: From Liberalism of Rights to Multiculturalism of Fear Concluding Remarks: Regressive Universalism and the Chimera of Emancipatory Liberal Democracy Synthesis: Grand Visions, Fractured Realities Liberalism in an Age of Fear The Refugee as Focal Point of Democratic Theorizing

Selected Bibliography

237 242 251 264 283 317 319 324 335

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book has been long in the making. Work on it started with an interest in the socially divisive and ultimately politically corrosive impact of socalled Third Way social policy in Europe. Third Way’s shifted focus on social integration through paid work and moral regulation subsequently led to the identification of particular social groups as a problem for social order and cohesion. This conceptual shift also entailed a reversion from seeing unemployment as an economic condition and a social problem caused by structural properties of economic systems to an understanding of unemployment in terms of the moral character of the unemployed.1 Although the widening social gap—often cutting across ethnic, cultural, or religious lines—was addressed as a problem of social cohesion, governmental discourses, however, did not aim at recognizing and incorporating social protests as articulations of the civil sphere and, by taking up these protests, work toward a more egalitarian form of democracy through civil repair. Instead, government objectives were set, rather one-dimensionally, on the creation of an ever more flexible and mobile workforce in pursuit of the “hypothetical utopia of free market growth.”2 The disciplinary approach of these reforms and the punitive logic that especially reforms of unemployment benefits entailed increasingly worked toward social exclusion rather than inclusion.3

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. M. Michael, Migration and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Europe, Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64069-9_1

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I was especially interested in the way welfare and labor market reforms by Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s New Labour in Britain or Gerhard Schröder’s SPD/Die Grünen coalition in Germany were also construing a moralized hierarchy of social citizenship. This hierarchy not only led to the bottom tiers being strongly stigmatized but also to the identification of particular social groups as a problem for social order while, at the same time, generating repressive policy solutions. In consequence, new and sometimes sharp symbolic boundaries were drawn between those included and respected, to whom solidarity extended, and those excluded, who were not full citizens and to whom certain rights did no longer extend. Welfare reform, in this sense, no longer aimed at social inclusion but instead created new social divisions between the “responsible majority” of citizens—the model citizen—and denizens or inadequate citizens.4 This redrawing and reconstituting of internal borders between model citizens and defective citizens not only allowed to pass over the state’s own role in sustaining social inequality and marginalization but, more importantly, established particular modes of thinking that allowed—in seemingly legitimate ways—to portray certain groups of citizens as undeserving, immoral, and even threatening to the nation’s well-being. It soon became clear that this new approach to politics was not limited to social policy but had close links with and spilled over into other policy areas. The punitive logic underlying Third Way social reformism converged, for example, with the increasingly dehumanizing “fortress Europe” approach to migration. It is no mere coincidence that it is in these two areas that the nation-state remains the “main vector” commanding both, the genesis and trajectory of forms of advanced marginality as well as the flow of people across its borders.5 Social policy and migration policy are not only two of the remaining areas in which national sovereignty is being enacted despite—and sometimes against— the pressures of globalization. They have also—in a politically powerful, symbolically charged way—attained the status of an “antidote” to globalization’s denationalizing logic.6 Both policy areas illustrate an increasing dissonance in Western Europe between, on the one hand, citizenship as legal status and a system of rights and duties and, on the other, forms of collective political identity (imagined communities) and civic solidarity. More generally speaking, they mirror changed narratives of civic inclusion. In consequence, both policy areas have become vital resources for the projection and perpetuation but, above all, for the symbolic performance of national sovereignty by the state.

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The moralizing rhetoric of Third Way social policy thus coincided not only with the rather unfortunate, deeply unjust and ultimately unfounded nexus of welfare state retrenchment and anti-immigration discourse but also with an image of the model citizens who not only was economically self-sufficient but also, perhaps inadvertently so, white. From the mid2000s onward, this affected first and foremost former migrant workers from nominally Muslim countries of origin and their second- and thirdgeneration descendants.7 These citizens were not only being transformed from workers into Muslims 8 but turned into a quasi-objectified threat qua being Muslim. The welfare-migration nexus thus also points to deeper ideological divides within societies and construes, as French sociologist Loïc Wacquant showed, those worst off as societal Others who need to be monitored and disciplined.9 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this societal Other has come to be primarily redefined in culturalized terms. The culturalization of mainstream politics, I will argue, must be understood as an attempt to qualify, even curtail universally granted rights (both those of citizenship and international human rights) in fundamentally illiberal ways. The Syrian refugee crisis of 2015/2016 not only effected an even stronger surge in neo-nationalist and right-wing populism and antiimmigrant rhetoric than had already characterized the previous decades. In a structural sense, it also acted both, as a prism and a catalyst through which many longstanding dilemmas and problems of an ever more closely integrated Europe gained greater visibility, renewed urgency and entered again onto national and European political agendas. In fact, as I would argue, it is through resistance to immigration in general and refugee relief in particular as well as through the attempt to hermetically seal off its borders that Western European democracies—perhaps even the European Union—have come to re-imagine themselves as “cohesive” societies. Anti-immigrant mobilization as well as neo-nationalisms thus appears as ambivalent phenomena which, in a strictly structural sense, the EU has helped to generate since the early 1990s by shifting emphasis to the question of identity. This attempt at re-empowerment through identity construction has turned into a political boomerang. As decision-making processes became increasingly remote in an ever more closely integrated and continually enlarging European Union, this process also increasingly prompted individuals to seek refuge in more proximate polities in order to counteract the dissonances produced by the enlargement process. Ironically, the EU’s identity discourse therefore may have contributed

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considerably to a backlash against both, the EU and the growing ethnic and cultural diversity in its member states. Especially in terms of public sentiments, the refugee has emerged as the main focal point of a set of diverse but also diffuse popular fears and the main vehicle of political dissent.10 Indeed, many of the central political debates of the last decades—in political theory as well as on the level of policy—have played out against the backdrop of the increasingly contentious issue of immigration. Strong discursive links have been established between immigration on the one hand, and illegal arms transfers, trafficking in human beings, terrorism and other forms of organized transborder crime. These links have contributed to a climate of insecurity and, as Pierre Hassner put it, a “complex syndrome in which external threats and internal doubts are hard to disentangle.”11 It is these fears— rather than the impact of de facto refugee flows—that produce corrosive effects on civic trust and solidarity but, more importantly, also undermine the foundations of liberal democracy. It is therefore unsurprising that, as documented migration of asylum seekers into Western Europe has been drastically curbed since 2016, these fears should morph into the omnipresent, yet intangible, threat of undocumented—so-called illegal — immigration.12 Anne Demo, with particular clarity, has summed up these complex dynamics: Discourses of criminality, immorality, and disease, which form secondary themes in the literature, further animate economic arguments by scapegoating undocumented immigrants as sites of contagion, prone to criminal behavior. [Thus] by casting undocumented immigrants as an essentially lawless group, the rhetoric … generate[s] added license to defend the sovereignty and virtue of a national community through border control and admissions policies.13

These diffuse sets of fears regarding immigration have also contributed to the politically unfortunate confusion of migration categories—particularly so between irregular/undocumented migration and asylum—with the result of further eroding the human rights guarantees set out in the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.14 On the policy level, European reactions to the Syrian refugee crisis have been defined by both, the refusal to accept that immigration will be part of the EU’s and its member states’ future and a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of twenty-first-century mixed migration.

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Post-Arab Spring migration into Europe should therefore be understood as only the most recent event in a continuum of different waves of immigration that have turned European societies into immigrant nations. That this last wave of immigration—because of its suddenness and large scale but also because of its origin in Muslim countries—has been perceived as a particular challenge to a number of issues currently at the forefront of political discourse is not at all surprising. Apart from questions of how to stem the humanitarian needs of the refugees that have, often under dramatic circumstances, made their way into Europe, the refugee crisis has refueled, not caused, less immediate (but at the same time equally pressing since much more fundamental) concerns effecting the current state and future of European democracy. In the Middle East and North African (MENA) region and beyond, as in the everyday of Syrians, this crisis and its repercussions remain the greatest political, social, cultural, and humanitarian disaster since Syrian independence. But in regard to the EU’s policy toward its wider periphery, the Syrian refugee crisis also mirrored, as Michelle Pace pointedly notes, a “basic failure to understand the core issues at the heart of the MENA people’s frustrations about their autocrat regimes and their relations with external actors such as the EU.”15 As Pace further argued in her 2012 JCMS Annual Lecture: the EU’s strategy of externalizing security co-operation [e.g. combating terrorism, stemming undocumented migration] in the field of Justice and Home Affairs with Mediterranean countries blocked any possibility for a change in its viewpoint as regards political change in the MENA. Thus, the EU bears responsibility for increasing the legitimacy and stability of authoritarianism in the region, which the Union, under its democracy promotion policies, claimed to fight. […]The EU seemed content to back Arab autocrats, as long as they in turn supported EU interests.16

Indeed, EU policies in the fields of democracy promotion, rule of law, and human rights were directly contradicted by externalization measures that led to the coining of the term “fortress Europe.”17 As such bilateral readmission agreements between EU member states and countries in the MENA region were not only in breach of European and international law but also preferred short-term securitization approaches to long-term ones tackling the actual causes of migration.18 This security focus on migration

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contributed to the construction of an “informal alliance” between authoritarian regimes and the EU as well as to an unspoken consensus regarding the securitization and suppression of oppositional groups in the MENA region.19 It thereby enhanced the stability of their autocrat partners.20 A second reason may have been the realization that consolidated democracies in the MENA region would be less likely than pre-Arab Spring authoritarian regimes to cooperate with the EU (or individual member states) in the containment of migrant flows to Europe.21 Thirdly, talk is— politically speaking—cheaper at the EU level since it has not as immediate an electoral price tag attached to it as in the respective national arenas since responsibility for policy decisions is much more difficult to assign to particular actors. It is in this third sense that German chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to waive Dublin III procedures (allowing Syrian refugees to apply for asylum directly in Germany instead of their country of first entry into the EU) was a bold one indeed. But although the Christian Democrats (CDU) incurred substantial losses in subsequent local elections, this decision may have provided Merkel with increased leverage in Brussels, especially so with the EU’s southern member states that—since the inception of Dublin II in 2003—have borne the brunt of irregular migration from the MENA region and were still suffering from harsh austerity measures implemented following the European sovereign debt crisis. Even more important in the context of the present study is the fact that Merkel understood very well the European dimension and normative implications that the handling of the Syrian refugee crisis was likely to have for the EU’s future architecture. As she put it in a press conference in summer 2015: The [European] states must share responsibility for refugees seeking asylum. Universal rights and liberties have been an integral part of Europe and its history. They were part of the original momentum of the European Union. Should Europe fail to [find a solution to] the refugee issue, this constitutive bond to universal rights and liberties will be broken. With this bond severed, it will no longer be the Europe that we envision, nor the Europe the founding myth of which we must continue to advance even today.22

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The EU’s apparent indecision and lack of resolve in backing up its commitment to democratic reform, freedom of expression and association, the strengthening of civil society, and sustainable economic growth for the region’s whole population (instead of a small business elite with close ties to the autocrat ruler) shows the structural constraints of EU decision making as much as the limits of EU external action.23 But more so than the EU’s lack of resolve to support democratization across the MENA region, the ensuing “refugee crisis” revealed a number of longstanding problems and instabilities that have accompanied the European integration process from the beginning.

Structure, Aims, and Objectives Though it figures prominently in this study and is what links the discussions in the following chapters, the Syrian refugee crisis serves primarily a heuristic function regarding the analysis put forth in the chapters that follow. Therefore, I am neither concerned with causalities nor with solutions to the refugee crisis itself but with the systematic links it made visible between the process of European integration, Europe’s imperial legacy and postcolonial reality, the changing and increasingly securitized (even punitive) logics of European migration regimes, Europe’s identity talk and its selective forms of historical amnesia, the demise of European multiculturalism and the discursive construction of a European Other. All these issues have not only been brought into sharp focus by the Syrian refugee crisis but, indeed, found their focal point in the figure of the Middle Eastern refugee. The book has two principal objectives: It identifies a number of paradox constellations afflicting the organizing properties of current European politics but also liberal democracy in particular. It seeks to map some of the distinctive challenges that pervasive ethnic and cultural pluralism present—not only to real politics but also on the level of political theorizing. It further seeks to locate these historically in social contexts, cultural dynamics, institutional logics, and (sometimes recurrent) patterns of thought. Secondly, it attempts a shift in emphasis by moving the figure of the refugee from the irregularity at the margin of liberal democracy (and its status of sub-disciplinary relegation) to the center of democratic theorizing. It is, therefore, a key thesis of this study that it is through the

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figure of the refugee and asylum seeker that the main tensions, challenges, and dislocations faced by European democracy become intelligible. The study subsequently divides into four interrelated, systematic chapters. Each of the chapters that follow examines differing, yet interconnected problem areas and discourses that find their common focal point in the issue of immigration. The main objective across these chapters is therefore one of synthesis. Chapter 2 focuses on European identity politics, both in an administrative-institutional sense as multi-level, governmental discourse (EU, nation-state, regional autonomy, ethno-national minority parties) as well as in terms of a vehicle of public dissent and a tool of grassroots mobilization. It shows how a specific type of identity construction based on normative discourses of Enlightenment values, liberal democracy, and human rights has turned into a legitimating narrative of European integration and enlargement. However, this type of post-national universalism references older, well-ingrained Western-European discourses of orientalism in which Eastern Europe—and sometimes Southern Europe—has been represented as the uncivilized Other. Despite the rejection of nationcentric politics and the commitment to a Europe of unity in diversity, this form of post-national universalism not only brackets and seeks to homogenize what is essentially and increasingly so “a Europe of plural and contentious voices,”24 but also construes newly objectified and essentialist forms of European societal and political cleavages. These boundary constructions effect an identitarian closure of European democracies, at the center of which we find citizens and refugees from nominally Muslim countries of origin. Chapter 3 directly links with the preceding chapter. It suggests that political and administrative elites driving European integration may have underestimated—especially so in the post-Cold War era—the resilience and mobilizing force of the national(ist) idiom. Post-national and cosmopolitan paradigms of democratic politics—despite the deterritorialization of sovereignty—were clearly outpaced by national identity politics and popular opposition to immigration. The political backlash against multiculturalism and public confessions by high ranking politicians as to the failure (or worse, general impossibility) of immigrant integration thus functioned as a kind of discursive emergency break by which mainstream parties may have sought to counter the increasing electoral success of populist parties. The discussion further shows how debates on asylum

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and immigration impacted on debates of social cohesion and the integrative functions of citizenship. This does concern, above all, the question of whether there are any real prospects for European citizenship beyond a thin reality of legal nominalism. How this question is answered, I believe, will not only have direct implications on EU political and social cohesion but on the sustainability of the European project as such. Chapter 4 starts by taking a closer look at changing logics of migration and the varying and unequal politicization of different waves of immigration in postwar Western Europe. When European postwar history of immigration is understood as an interest driven continuum (rather than a number of unrelated crises) the disproportionate shock waves the Syrian refugee crisis sent across Europe appear as the powerful resurgence of Europe’s unresolved and largely invisibilized postcolonial crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. It also becomes clear that it is national institutional contexts, historical narratives and self-conceptions that condition approaches to immigration but also that the ability to regulate immigration is perhaps the most important symbolic marker of sovereignty. The tightening of immigration policies as much as the new toughness, increasing criminalization and externalization (by third country agreements) of asylum thus functions as a powerful—perhaps even indispensable—tool for the reassertion of national sovereignty and the reproduction of territorial notions of the state vis-à-vis globalization. The chapter, therefore, not only presents an altered, if not new, perspective on migration politics in Western Europe but reflects on important conceptual issues that emerge from the political dislocations the Syrian refugee crisis effected. Chapter 5 further expands on these arguments by analyzing discourses on the alleged failure of multiculturalism in Europe and the increasing culturalization of mainstream politics. I argue that this not only presents us with an integration paradox but may, in a much more fundamental sense, also entail a redefinition of the basis of European liberal democracy. The discussion therefore intersects with and substantially draws on the analyses of the preceding chapters. In a sustained theoretical reflection, the chapter argues against conceptions of liberalism that aim to invisibilize problems of cultural accommodation within a sanitized discourse of individual rights. Its core purpose thus concerns—on a theoretical level— a way of turning the experiences of pervasive pluralism and large-scale immigration into emancipatory sources of liberal democracy rather than into driving forces of its erosion.

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The concluding pages in Chapter 6 aim to synthesize the materials and draw out a number of implications for both, the analysis and a more realist theorizing of democracy in Europe. The paradoxical and sometimes self-defeating constellations that were brought into focus throughout individual chapters not only overlap but are often systematically interlinked. The prominent, contemporary figure in which nearly all of these paradoxes converge is, however, not the Islamist terrorist but the refugee seeking protection. The citizens of European democracies currently refuse to acknowledge that Europe is no longer—as during the colonial era and, to a limited degree, still during the Cold War—the driving force behind globalization but has increasingly become the object of dynamics beyond its control. Whereas postcolonial migration could still be territorially contained, depoliticized, and remained largely invisible within national identity constructions and historical master narratives, the Syrian refugee crisis did no longer allow for any of those options. What European nation-states so vehemently reject—with possibly dire consequences for the future of liberal democracy itself—is therefore their own “lesson in alterity.”25 Beyond the fact that all of the issues raised in Chapters 2–5 are marked by intense controversy, their selection is not accidental. I have sketched here four areas in which the standard narrative of liberal democracy is persistently put into question and, at times, has ceased to provide sufficient answers to the challenges of the present. In all these areas, Europe faces somewhat larger challenges then regions elsewhere. Although other regions might indeed experience similar dynamics and resulting pressures on their political architecture, Europe is perhaps unique in regard to the simultaneousness with which these changes occur. The European Union not only has to deal with a crisis of their welfare systems, or needs to find adequate ways of incorporating ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity, it has to perform these tasks while its own institutional political structures have been under constant pressure for transformation, whether due to territorial enlargement, an ever closer federalist integration of its core units or, more recently, a protracted sovereign debt crisis and the increasing success of divisive anti-mainstream, anti-immigration, and anti-EU populism.26 The present study thus integrates a number of research perspectives hitherto insufficiently linked in scholarly discourses but also systematically shows how public discourse, political agendas, legitimizing narratives,

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symbolic practices and old and new political and societal cleavages intersect. It thereby contributes to the understanding of the European refugee conundrum by laying open the constitutive nexus at the heart of the now stalled European integration process between European identity politics, migration regimes, the culturalization of mainstream politics and postcolonial and post-migrant realities in Europe. The book further argues that sustained attention to current paradoxical constellations holds an as yet unrealized potential for a more realist theorizing of liberal democracy in Europe. At the level of political and social theory, this entails categorical and conceptual redefinition but also the fundamental question of liberal instabilities raised, for example, by Paul W. Kahn, Uday S. Mehta, Marla Brettschneider, Bonnie Honig, and others. I aim to redirect attention to the ways in which liberal thought and liberal democratic practices and institutions shape, interact with, and may even provide justification for illiberal and exclusionary practices. This pertains particularly to the hitherto theoretically marginalized figure of the refugee. The figure of the refugee—not that of the citizen—is located at the center of the fundamental question of what features of the liberal democratic idiom enable, facilitate, and provide inroads for the erosion and potentially regressive turn of European liberal democracy. The book’s arguments thus transcend the narrow focus on questions of democratic stability, territorial integrity, legal autonomy, and social cohesion that remain part and parcel of the sovereign illusion of the European nationstate. It shows that rather than constituting a depoliticized question of effective management, restrictive refugee and asylum policies have become a vital resource for politicians to perpetuate this sovereign illusion and compensate for the de facto loss of national sovereignty in other areas. In consequence, migration policy has emerged as the main stage on which national sovereignty can be re-enacted. At the same time and instead of succumbing to the orthodoxies of methodological nationalism or the entertaining of utopias of global citizenship, the book urges that democratic theorizing may profit from a shift of analytical focus on and the sustained engagement with those irregular sites and practices of citizenship that are defined by current refugee regimes. These sites may be understood as the laboratories of a truly emancipatory liberal democracy in Europe. Rather than suffering from a paucity of evidence characteristic of ancient and medieval history, studies of the late twentieth century, Reba N. Soffer poignantly notes, are “buried in avalanches of information.”27

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The aim at synthesis might therefore be the main weakness of this study as it precludes exhaustive analysis of individual problem areas and I do not make any claim to the latter. Instead, I attempt to use existing scholarship and theoretical approaches to think through empirical dynamics in a systematic way. The strength of this approach, so I hope, lies precisely in identifying what binds these problem areas together and how the interconnecting dynamics work, drive, and defeat each other and, at times, effect paradox outcomes and constellations. What follows is thus characterized by a methodological tension between the overall aim at synthesis and the level of discursive complexity and empirical detail. The attempt to sketch broad developments, shifts and tendencies in the cultural, social, and political make up of Europe and to show in what way the refugee and asylum seeker not only figure prominently in them but also provides the main link connecting these developments in a systematic way, thus depends in its persuasiveness on more or less successful contextualization. To base this contextualization on primary sources was clearly beyond my means in terms of ever-present constraints of time and resources as each chapter could have easily been turned into a book-length study in its own right. Not surprisingly, many topics discussed have spurred just such sustained research and this study relies on a large body of often excellent scholarship. Throughout the study, I have therefore tried to indicate core publications, offer suggestions for further reading and point to debates and disputes that I was in no position to discuss in sufficient detail, even less resolve. Given these constraints, the rather extensive notes to the text provide not just indications of the sources used, but also serve a more systematic function in sketching the wider realm of discourse. It will also become clear that the material provided was not chosen because it corresponds well with my own normative dispositions but because of its potential in illustrating the tendencies and shifts at work in a number of different fields pertaining to the relationship of state, society, and citizens. My hope would be that the synthesis I attempt here—and the specific way in which the material has been organized—also allows for a reevaluation of the principles, practices, and representations of European liberal democracy. After all, it is only such larger perspective that allows us to study the dislocations at the margins but—perhaps even more importantly— also in the center of mainstream society and show convergence but also divergence across several spheres.

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Finally, a brief note concerning the interdisciplinary focus of this study: It combines materials and methodological perspectives from the social sciences, history, philosophy, and literature and from a variety of academic environments, even if the bulk is taken from work conducted within European and Anglo-American academia. Tony Judt, in an interview with Historically Speaking, once said that a historian also has to be an anthropologist, also has to be a philosopher, also has to be a moralist, also has to understand the economics of the period he is writing about. Though they are often arbitrary, disciplinary boundaries certainly exist. Nevertheless, the historian has to learn to transcend them in order to write intelligently.28

It seems to me that this equally—perhaps even more so—applies to political theorizing and this study was thus written in this spirit. The decoupling of political theory from history, sociology, economics, anthropology, ethics, psychology, or literature, each with its own methodological orthodoxies, restricts rather than propels our understanding of those entities, practices, and institutions we typically think of when we talk about politics. They include individuals, families, social groups, and classes in both, the public and the private sphere, but also collective identities, cultural practices, public and private imaginations, constitutions, and ethics. Susan Strange put it well: there is no escaping from the imperative of multidisciplinarity in the understanding of change and […] our times no longer allow us the comfort of separatist specialization in the social sciences, and that however difficult, the attempt has to be made at synthesis and blending, imperfect as we know the results are bound to be.29

If this should strike readers as a case of postmodern methodology, I could not find offense in it being thus labeled. Many of our everyday intellectual, social, political, and other activities evolve from and require concepts and explanations which are deeply rooted in our local practices, our culture, and our history. Political theory, even in its most abstract or normative form, cannot sever this connection. If it does so, what is there other to remain than a style of thought, a selfsufficient aesthetics of poetic truth, that finds a false dignity precisely in its ahistoricity and distance from social praxis and meaning and its immunity from the uncertainties and conflicts of political reality? Neither is

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even the most rigorous of empirical political science devoid of normative considerations. These are false antagonisms. To cut a possibly lengthy argument short, without paying sufficient attention to context and practice, political theory runs the risk of gradually evolving into a de-politicized form of literary studies. In this sense, it cannot be the task of political theory to make problems disappear on the conceptual level. Rather dislocations in the political arena need to be represented within political theory itself as the very ruptures, aporias, and contradictions they present on the level of social practice. If this study succeeds in showing how problems are linked with normative questions and contributes to the development of analytical tools to understand the changes currently underway in Europe in these terms, as well as in making plausible the need for further conceptual innovation in order to better capture and reflect these changing realities, it will not have been in vain. What follows should be seen as a contribution to the understanding of these dynamics and, at best, as providing tentative preliminaries toward a differently accentuated political theory of European liberal democracy. Five years after the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, with most migration routes into Europe largely closed and the death toll in the Mediterranean on the rise once again, it was not the populists of the European extreme right but German Federal Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, who claimed that the “refugee question is the mother of all political problems in this country [Germany].”30 It is therefore only an apparent paradox to claim, as I do, that a figure as marginalized in politics as the refugee in fact deserves to be the focal point of democratic theorizing. To speak of margins may strike some readers as an outdated concept, even a contradiction in terms. But as political arenas multiply and diversify, so do margins, while in other areas we observe convergence toward the transnationalization of marginalization not only in terms of creating an outside but also an Other of democratic politics.

Notes 1. Martin Powell argued that New Labour’s welfare reforms were “little more than a more humane version of the ‘less eligibility’ concept of the New Poor Law.” See Martin Powell: New Labour and the Third Way in the British Welfare State: New and Distinctive? In: Critical Social Policy, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2000), pp. 39–60, 56. Whereas the English Poor Law of 1601 aimed at reintegration by returning the uprooted and independent

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poor to their local parishes and communities and enforce their traditional dependencies by means of outdoor relief and charitable work, the 1834 New Poor Law aimed to abolish unemployment related relief to ablebodied men and implemented the new workhouses as a deterrent, thereby also implementing an exclusionary principle of citizenship. The workhouse of the New Poor Law with its aim of moral education by deterrence is the clearest example of the vastly expanded regulatory role of the state in the nineteenth century and its coexistence with the otherwise powerful rhetoric of laissez-faire, claiming that each man (with the right set of beliefs, moral character, and attitudes toward work), when unbounded, would not only seek out his own welfare but would contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. “Less eligibility” is originally a Benthamite principle requiring the conditions of the indigent in the workhouse to be lower than those of the working poor outside so that they are not made more eligible than this poorest class of citizens. See, for example, Lea Campos Boralevi: Bentham and the Oppressed. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984. For a historical overview of the regulation of the English poor before the New Poor Law, see William P. Quigley: Five Hundred Years of English Poor Laws, 1349–1834: Regulating the Working and Nonworking Poor. In: Akron Law Review, Vol. 30. No. 1 (1996), pp. 73–128. On the New Poor Law see also The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Derek Fraser. London: Macmillan, 1976; Margaret A. Crowther: The Workhouse System, 1834–1929: The History of an English Social Institution. London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1981; Mark Blaug: The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New. In: Journal of Economic History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (June 1963), pp. 151– 184; and Mary Poovey: Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 9–13 and 106–114. 2. The phrase is Jack L. Luzkow’s, see The Great Forgetting: The Past, Present, and Future of Social Democracy and the Welfare State. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015, p. 4. For a comparative evaluation of labor market reforms in Europe, see, for example, Ein Triumph gescheiterter Ideen [A Triumph of Failed Ideas ], ed. by Steffen Lehndorff. Hamburg: VSA-Verlag, 2012; and European Employment Models in Flux: A Comparison of Institutional Change in Nine European Countries, ed. by Gerhard Bosch, Steffen Lehndorff and Jill Rubery. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; and Anne Daguerre: Active Labour Market Policies and Welfare Reform: Europe and the US in Comparative Perspective. Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 2007.

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3. See Denise Helly, Robert F. Barsky and Patricia Foxen: Social Cohesion and Cultural Plurality. In: Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 19–42, 24. 4. Ruth Lister: Vocabularies of Citizenship since the 1970s. In: Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe: New Challenges for Citizenship Research in a Cross-national Context. Bristol: Policy Press, 2007, pp. 47–73. 5. Loïc Wacquant: Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. See also Das Problem der Exklusion: Ausgegrenzte, Entbehrliche, Überflüssige [The Problem of Exclusion: The Ostracized, the Expendable, the Redundant], ed. by Heinz Bude and Andreas Willisch. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006. 6. See Challenge to the Nation State: Immigration in Western Europe and the United States, ed. by Christian Joppke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 3. 7. See Peo Hansen and Sandy Brian Hager: The Politics of European Citizenship: Deepening Contradictions in Social Rights and Migration Policy. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010, pp. 33f.; and Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson: Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging. New York: Routledge, 2000, esp. p. 103. 8. Ferruh Yilmaz: How the Workers Became Muslims: Immigration, Culture, and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 9. Again, the work of Loïc Wacquant has been pathbreaking. See Wacquant: Urban Outcasts; and Loïc Wacquant: Punishing the Poor: The New Government of Social Insecurity [orig. Punir the pauvres. Le nouveau gouvernement de l’insécurité sociale]. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 10. Wendy Brown has illustrated this focal capacity of migration with regard to the fortification of borders in the twenty-first century: “Ideologically, the dangers that walls are figured as intercepting are not merely the would-be suicide bomber, but immigrant hordes; not merely violence to the nation, but imagined dillusion of national identity through transformed ethnicized or racial demographics; not merely illegal entrance, but unsustainable pressure on national economics that have ceased to be national or on welfare states that have largely abandoned substantive welfare functions.” Wendy Brown: Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books, 2010, p. 94. 11. Pierre Hassner: Culture and Society. In: The International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1 (January–March 1991), p. 151, quoted in Sarah Collinson: Visa Requirements, Carrier Sanctions, ‘Safe Third Countries’ and ‘Readmission’: Development of an Asylum ‘Buffer Zone’ in Europe. In: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1996), pp. 76–90.

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12. See, for example, Martin Klingst, Mariam Lau, and Karsten PolkeMajewski: Die Unsichtbaren [The Invisible]. In: Die Zeit, Nr. 15 (2019), 4 April 2019, available at: https://www.zeit.de/2019/15/migrationasylantraege-zuwanderung-fluechtlinge-aufenthaltserlaubnis/kompletta nsicht. 13. Anne Demo: Sovereignty Discourse and Contemporary Immigration Politics. In: Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 91, No. 3 (August 2005), pp. 292, 301. 14. See Carl Levy: Refugees, Europe, Camp/State of Exception: “Into the Zone”, the European Union and Extraterritorial Processing of Migrants, Refugees, and Asylum-Seekers (Theories and Practice). In: Refugee Survey Quarterly. Vol. 29, No. 1 (2010), pp. 105; Andrew Geddes: Chronicle of a Crisis Foretold: The Politics of Irregular Migration, Human Trafficking and People Smuggling in the UK. In: The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 7, No. 3 (August 2005), pp. 324–339. 15. See European Commission and High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy: A Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity with the Southern Mediterranean, COM(2011)200 final; March 8, 2011, p. 2, Andrea Teti: The EU’s First Response to the ‘Arab Spring’: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Partnership for Democracy and Shared Prosperity. In: Mediterranean Politics, Vol. 17, No. 3 (November 2012), pp. 266–284, direct quote at 280; and Michelle Pace: The EU’s Interpretation of the ‘Arab Uprisings’: Understanding the Different Visions about Democratic Change in EU-MENA Relations. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 52, No. 5 (2014), pp. 969–984, 979. 16. Michelle Pace: The EU’s Interpretation of the ‘Arab Uprisings’: Understanding the Different Visions About Democratic Change in EU-MENA Relations. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 52, No. 5 (2014), pp. 969–984, 975–76. For a similar assessment see Jan Zielonka: Europe’s New Civilizing Missions: The EU’s Normative Power Discourse In: Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2013), p. 45. 17. See, for example, Andrew Geddes: Immigration and European Integration: Towards Fortress Europe? Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 18. Thomas Demmelhuber: The European Union and Illegal Migration in the Southern Mediterranean: The Trap of Competing Policy Concepts. In: The International Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 15, No. 6 (August 2011), pp. 813–826. UN secretary general, Ban Kin-moon, warned that the tightening of European asylum and refugee policies in response to the refugee crisis may “negatively affect the obligation of member states under international humanitarian law and European law.” See Patrick Kingsley:

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Ban Ki-moon Attacks ‘Increasingly Restrictive’ EU Asylum Policies. In: The Guardian, April 27, 2016. The emblematic expression of individual EU member states’ priorities in the region might have been French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs Michèle Alliot-Marie’s offer to send French paratroopers in order to quell the protests against Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali only days before he was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia. See Pace: The EU’s Interpretation of the ‘Arab Uprisings’, p. 977. See Peter Seeberg: Learning to Cope: The Development of European Immigration Policies Concerning the Mediterranean Caught Between National and Supra-National Narratives. In: Euro-Mediterranean Relations after the Arab Spring: Persistence in Times of Change, ed. by Jacob Horst et al. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 59–77; and Roberto Aliboni and Fouad M. Ammor: Under the Shadow of ‘Barcelona’: From the EMP to the Union for the Mediterranean. EuroMesco Paper, No. 77, January 2009, p. 14. https://www.euromesco.net/images/paper77eng.pdf. For this prediction, see Peter Seeberg: Learning to Cope: The Development of European Immigration Policies Concerning the Mediterranean Caught between National and Supra-National Narratives. In: EuroMediterranean Relations After the Arab Spring: Persistence in Times of Change, ed. by Jacob Horst et al. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 59–77. “Die Staaten müssen die Verantwortung für asylbegehrende Flüchtlinge teilen. Die universellen Bürgerrechte waren bislang eng mit Europa und seiner Geschichte verbunden. Das ist einer der Gründungsimpulse der Europäischen Union. Versagt Europa in der Flüchtlingsfrage, geht diese enge Bindung mit den universellen Bürgerrechten kaputt. Sie wird zerstört, und es wird nicht das Europa sein, das wir uns vorstellen, und nicht das Europa sein, das wir als Gründungsmythos auch heute weiterentwickeln müssen“. Sommerpressekonferenz von Bundeskanzlerin Merkel, August 31, 2015, available at https://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Mitschrift/Pressekon ferenzen/2015/08/2015-08-31-pk-merkel.html. See, for example, Tobias Schumacher: The European Union and Democracy Promotion: Readjusting to the Arab Spring. In: Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring: Rethinking Democratization, ed. by Larbi Sadiki. London and New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 562–566. More generally, observers’ evaluations of how the EU responded to the Arab Spring range from passive bystander (wait-and-see) to Kissinger-type realism (exploiting the Arab Spring for their own economic and geopolitical gains) to declaratory rhetoric (rather self-consciously projecting its utopia of “money, market, mobility” onto the MENA region). For a good sample, see the EU-Washington Forum Debate at https://www.iss.europa.eu/regions/ the-americas/washington-forum-debate/.

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24. Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider: Human Rights and Memory. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010, p. 124. 25. Étienne Balibar: Europe, an “Unimagined” Frontier of Democracy (trans. by Frank Collins). In: Diacritics, Vol. 33, No. 3/4 (Autumn–Winter, 2003), pp. 36–44, 36. 26. The European debt crisis does not figure in the discussions that follow because, where it is of relevance, it has accelerated or blunted the dynamics which are of interest here rather than initiated them. Equally, it has accentuated the cultural, political, religious, and social fault lines and rifts pervading European liberal democracies, but is of no causal relevance. 27. Reba N. Soffer: History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: The Great War to Thatcher and Reagan. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 19. 28. Postwar: An Interview with Tony Judt, conducted by Donald A. Yerxa. In: Historically Speaking—Bulletin of the Historical Society, Volume VII, No. 3 (January/February 2006). 29. Susan Strange: The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. xv–xvi. 30. The German original reads: “Aber die Migrationsfrage ist die Mutter aller politischen Probleme in diesem Land.” See Michael Bröker and Eva Quadback: Horst Seehofer im RP-Interview: ‘Migrationsfrage ist Mutter aller Probleme’. In: Rheinische Post, September 6, 2018, https://rp-online.de/politik/deutschland/horst-seehofer-lehnt-sti chtagsregelung-fuer-fluechtlinge-als-fachkraefte-ab_aid-32736207.

CHAPTER 2

The Dialectics of European Integration

From a contemporary European perspective being faced with Fremdheit and a pluralist future might seem almost alien to Europe’s putative essence. At least if you happen to be born later than 1950. But it should be remembered that Europe throughout its history was itself an amalgamation of multiple, interwoven, and overlapping spheres of cultural traditions and practices with different languages, religions, and histories. From Tórshavn to Jerusalem, from Horta to Baku there were countless interstitial cultures and European unity remained an ideal of the educated, humanist upper classes up until the beginning of World War I shattered such hopes.1 As Kenan Malik has fittingly put it in his discussion of multiculturalist policies in Europe, in the case of post-revolutionary France. only half of the population spoke French and […] modernizing and unifying France in the revolution’s aftermath required a traumatic and lengthy process of cultural, educational, political, and economic selfcolonization. That effort created the modern French state and gave birth to notions of French (and European) superiority over non-European cultures.2

Much has been lost and the turning of European cities into cosmopolitan world cities might indeed signify Europe’s re-entry into history after a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. M. Michael, Migration and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Europe, Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64069-9_2

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long postwar parenthesis.3 For example, already ten years before what came to be represented as a migrant crisis, 30% of London residents had been born outside England while 16.7% of Paris larger metropolitan area’s population were immigrants and 12.4% did not hold French citizenship.4 In 2006, there were people from 183 countries living in the German capital Berlin while, in 2005, London accommodated more than 50 non-indigenous communities with a population of ten thousand or more and some 300 spoken languages. Madrid’s largest immigrant communities are Ecuadorians, Moroccans, Chinese, Colombians, Peruvians, Guineans, Romanians, and Filipinos while people from Ukraine, Cape Verde, Brazil, India, Great Britain, Angola, Moldova, and Russia have made Portugal their home. While in 1960 only 1.3% of children born in Germany had a foreign parent, by 1994 18.8% of all newborns had at least one foreign-born parent.5 The list could be continued for many other places across Europe. There is little in which European cities differ from other cosmopolitan cites like Toronto, where 106 languages are spoken and nearly half of the population belong to visible minority groups while no single one dominates.6 Estimates as of 2006 suggest that one of every three global migrants lives in Europe.7 In total, there are around 64.1 million people in Europe who are living temporarily or permanently outside their home countries amounting to 9 per cent of the total population. Interestingly, by 2005, female migrants outnumbered male migrants in Europe. These figures from the early to mid-2000s document a trend that has become increasingly manifest in Western Europe since the 1970s. They have been purposefully chosen to provide contextualization for what has come to be known as the Syrian refugee crisis or alternatively the European migrant crisis of 2015/2016. Seen in their light, the European Union’s struggle over its identity even prior to the Syrian refugee crisis seems more than anachronistic. It might have led to greater confusion than any degree of actual diversity has done. Secondly, and again in view of the above figures dating back a decade and more, the political commotion and alarmism over the influx of Syrian refugees seems puzzling, all the more since the EU has on average admitted more immigrants from non-EU countries in preceding years than during the so-called European refugee crisis of 2015. Thirdly, though Europe’s preoccupation with shared values might have been a highly functional post-World War II rationale for the transition from conflict to cooperation which—as a very particular form of international governance—has so far even been able to

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contain regional separatist movements within various EU member states,8 today it not only exercises a conservative influence on pressing issues, for example Europe’s relationship with its twenty million Muslims and immigration in general, but also leads to restrictive policies that might in the end betray even liberal democracy’s own promise of a pluralist existence, de-ethnicized version of belonging and truly post-national, European democracy. It is worth recalling here that the struggle over a European polity and its identity is primarily that, a question concerning the normative foundations of democracy beyond the nation-state. A merely technically legitimate form of governance—and for many the EU is a prime example—abandons the idea that political legitimacy must derive from a political community, whatever shape that community might take. It replaces a substantive idea of civil society with an anti-political conception of civil society in which economic and social activities are regulated by legal and administrative procedures alone.9 Transnational democracy was simply not part of the original vision of European integration and today, democratic cornerstones such as the principles of representation and accountability as well as the citizens’ role in European governance are either absent or remain underdeveloped.10 It is important to note that the concept of a European identity is not simply an auxiliary devise on the back of economic and political integration but took center stage precisely when market-driven integration became volatile with the increasing erosion of political control over national economies. It brought to the fore significant differences among political and administrative elite perspectives on social, cultural, and political issues and those of the general population. Despite the introduction of some majoritarian principles and the extension of the rights of the European Parliament in the decisions-making process and the selection of EU officials, “the multilevel construction of the European edifice still attributes a pivotal role to national political and social institutions, and to the elites who are running them.”11 In that sense, the European Union is still a deficient democracy or no democracy at all, even though Public International Law does not require characteristics other than formal citizenship of a people.12 Thus, the question of whether an ever more extensive and ever closer European Union is at all a desirable institutional design for which it is wise to converge on a single shared normative framework has accompanied the integration process from its very beginning.13 And many a critical observer has noticed that to its proponents it has long functioned

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as “a self-evident truth, if not gospel,” that is, an example of political messianism.14 This chapter examines the politicization of history and culture in the process of European integration and the construction of a politicocultural identity for the European Union. In a more general, perhaps also normative sense it concerns the way in which internal ruptures, discontinuities, and conflicts have been marginalized historically as much as politically by the construction of a coherent legitimizing narrative. Drawing on exemplary debates in a number of member states, the first section shows that the EU’s formula of “unity in diversity” in fact masks the deeply self-contradictory nature of European Union identity politics. It explores the teleological assumptions of historical continuity implicit in European identity discourse and takes a closer look at master narratives within European postwar historiography itself. In taking recourse to a European genealogy of moral purpose and success, of coherent character and universal significance (in terms of its Enlightenment legacy), one that firmly situates Europe within the domain of liberty and civilization rather than that of despotism, unreason and immorality, identity talk appears as a tool in the complex renegotiations of symbolic boundaries triggered by both European integration and large-scale immigration. The second section discusses the growing gap between discursive constructions of an open, postcolonial, post-national, and indeed cosmopolitan Europe and the depiction of Muslim immigrants (but also second- or third-generation Muslim citizens) as reactionary and illiberal in outlook and, at least latently, as tending toward religious fundamentalism and political radicalism. In consequence, “Muslim” as a marker of otherness takes on an objectified, essentialist, static, and generalized character irrespective of actual religious beliefs and political and social preferences. This points to a number of important shifts and quasi-hegemonic transformations regarding societal cleavages, new forms of racism, and the construction of new symbolic boundaries. It also points to the transposing of colonial-type reasoning onto European societies themselves. The presence in Europe of immigrants from nominally Muslim countries thus presents a fundamental paradox in terms of effecting a neo-nationalist, identitarian closure of the European project.15 The concluding section argues that national identities as bases for the distinction between “us” and “them” have retained their importance despite European integration. Discourses of European identity,

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on the contrary, have paved the way for exclusionary forms of neonationalism by keeping European identity as well as the limits of diversity chained to the nation-state. The factual recurrence of plurality in terms of language, culture, religion, and ethnicity—often viewed by dominant national groups as manifestation of the hostility of immigrants toward integration—is, I argue, ill-matched with acts of identitarian political closure. There not only may be no need for an overarching, consensually shared European identity but, more importantly, such discourses have had politically and socially corrosive and destabilizing effects, as a result of which the idea of Europe for all became an increasingly counterfactual notion. In a methodological sense, the discussion further suggests that the notion of Europe might be utterly inadequate for the analysis of questions of identity, culture, and belonging of the complex and constantly evolving political, social, and cultural context of the European Union. Europe’s identity discourse is thus perhaps best conceptualized as a case of autopoiesis.

Identity Politics and the Imaginary Past The nationalist rationales that took precedence during the Syrian refugee crisis in many European countries—notably Poland, Hungary, the countries in the Western Balkans but also France—stalled any attempt at an EU-wide solution and hamstrung the drawing up of a common migration policy and, thereby, clearly marked the limits and overreach of the EU integration narrative. Considerable portions of European integration discourse can indeed be seen as examples of functionalist and teleological modi of theorizing about society derived from ideal-typical models of the nation-state.16 Theoretically the debate over the democratization of the European Union also marks the limits beyond which procedural definitions of democracy cannot generate sufficient legitimacy for decision-making processes, the threshold where a rather narrow inputlegitimacy is in need of a benign political culture, that is, more than a teleological mission legitimation. It is not only because of a lack of such culture that Fritz Scharpf has noted that further progress toward an ever closer union might be an illegitimate political goal and Jürgen Habermas critically remarked on the normatively empty core of European democracy.17 Despite such well-founded criticism and the multiple crises afflicting both, the economic and political architecture of the EU as much as that of its members states, the integration rationale of Western

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European political elites seems unbroken—albeit not so much in terms of the earlier, expansionist logic of enlargement but in terms of an ever deeper integration of Europe’s core units. It even presents a default solution to recent governance challenges related to questions of sovereignty, democracy, austerity, identity, and security.18 In 1963, Saul Padover, Raymond Aron, and others cautioned that Europe might well succeed in creating a common material prosperity but, at the same time, may fail in cultural pluralism and human relations, especially concerning church-state relationship.19 By the 1970s labor migration to Europe had produced a contradictory situation in which increasingly anti-immigration rhetoric coincided with the de-facto extension of residence permits and political and social rights for labor migrants. And while within the process of EU integration members states were granted the greatest possible degree of protection for their national cultural identities, on the domestic level many European states were much less generous, especially with their migrant communities. Identity talk in Europe in conjunction with anti-immigration discourse can thus also be understood as a “primary vehicle” for imaginations of national societies in Western Europe. As Willem Schinkel points out, the rearticulation of national identities follows a defensive logic of “highlighting what supposedly does not properly belong to them.”20 Across Europe, anti-immigrant social-breakdown rhetoric reliably surfaces as a kind of objectified figure of speech, often with little to no contextual connection nor adequate validation. For example, in Germany in a nearly cross-party consensus every national government between the late 1970s and early 1990s denied over and over again that Germany was an immigration country.21 Recently declassified records of the British Prime Minister’s Office show that as late as 1982 German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, at a meeting with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, voiced the need to reduce the number of Turkish immigrants resident in Germany by half since it would be impossible to assimilate them.22 Though widely covered by the press at the time the records were released in mid-2013, this was hardly news. The Minutes of Plenary Proceedings at the time the meeting with Thatcher took place clearly showed a broad political consensus of all parties regarding the need to curb immigration—whether labor immigration, family reunification, or asylum—as they allegedly threatened the social cohesion of German society. But whereas the government coalition of

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Social Democrats and Liberals favored a halt to recruitment and immigration, the opposition parties of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) (which would be returned to power within a year’s time) generally thought that Turkish immigrants could neither be assimilated nor successfully integrated. They simply had nothing in common with European ways of life as a result of which the economic, structural, social, and psychological pressure on the German people had reached an intolerable degree. At a time when Turkish immigrants had been working and raising their families in Germany for more than a decade—often even two—the Christian Democrats lobbied for them and their families to be returned to Turkey. Germany for reasons of history and self-conception, the future parliamentary secretary of state for the ministry of the interior in the Kohl government, Carl-Dieter Spranger, explained neither was nor could ever become a multi-ethnic state.23 Most illuminating in this regard is Germany’s more recent debate over the need for a Leitkultur, a defining culture, by now spanning almost two decades. In September 2007, Ronald Pofalla, secretary general of the Christian Democratic Union, the party then providing the largest parliamentary faction in 11 of the 16 German federal states, reasserted the need for preventing cultural fragmentation and for the affirmation of those values which he saw as defining German history and culture.24 Most often cited were diligence, lack of egotism, discipline, a sense of duty and tradition, freedom and patriotism. It is evident that these so-called virtues are empty categories when it comes to drawing up any sufficiently meaningful vision of political and communal life. It should not come as a surprise that most advocates of German Leitkultur exhibit a mentality of resistance to both, structural change and reorientation and feel justified to demand of immigrants to adapt to German structures and culture and abstain from wanting to change the country they have made their home.25 This constitutes not only a denial of pluralism as a basic principle of democracy but also an act of political closure in the sense of impeding the possibility of contestation and revision of existing social institutions and the current organization of social space for specific groups who nevertheless occupy that same space. It is precisely in this possibility of transformation— the recognition that political institutions do not simply reflect pre-given identities and value orientations but play a constitutive role in shaping them—in which democracy’s promise as a peaceful and liberty-enhancing form of government rests. Change of this kind not only is inevitable, but has been a hallmark of most of the postwar period.26 In 2017, partly as

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a reaction to the Syrian refugee crisis of the preceding years and partly as an attempt to gain electoral ground on anti-immigration parties such as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the issue of Leitkultur was again put on the political agenda by then German minister of the interior Thomas de Maizière.27 Historically, however, and already a decade before the Syrian refugee crisis that plunged European politics into a crisis mode, Germany had been the third biggest recipient of immigration, after the United States and Russia, with 7.3 million immigrants. During the 1960s and until the early 1970s, Germany recruited around 14 million guest workers, many of whom also brought their families with them and upwards of 2.6 million of whom settled permanently in Germany.28 French President Nicolas Sarkozy, at the widely publicized start of his 2012 re-election campaign for a second term of the presidency on February 16, 2012 in Annecy, opted for a crisis leadership strategy not only in terms of the Euro-debt crisis but also by declaring that illegal immigration threatens the consensus of French society and that the regularization of illegal immigrants made no political sense.29 Sarkozy’s statement is of particular interest since it illustrates the shift in focus from labor migration to the weakest groups within generally mixed streams of migration: refugees seeking protection and political asylum. However, and paradoxically so, as ethnically visible immigrant minorities integrate into those economic, social, and political arenas from which they were formerly excluded, increasingly exercise full citizenship rights and thereby become more European, they are often viewed “as a greater threat than previously by natives who are already predisposed toward ethnic and racial intolerance.”30 In addition, to expect of immigrants to have a sense of belonging to one society over all others not only goes against the grain of what many have taken to be the spirit of European integration but is a sentiment particularly characteristic of those not involved in binational or multinational networks.31 A corresponding example of assimilationist rhetoric within the United States is Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s diagnosis of an impending danger of the “disunity of America.” Schlesinger assumed social cohesion to rest on shared substantive bonds and practices and emphasizes the need for communality. For him, the continuation of US American society essentially depends on the persistence of the original European English-speaking political culture and its institutions defined by the ideas of individual freedom, liberal democracy, and human rights. These he sees threatened by African

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American radical ideologies, superstition and tribalism and the increasing importance of Spanish as a second language.32 Assimilationism of this type builds on a simple one-dimensional model that posits multiculturalism as a counterpoint to social cohesion. Its narrow and static conception of social order makes it difficult to adequately capture even the functional necessities of difference in modern societies, let alone to appreciate diversity as a potentially valuable addition to or corrective of what is seen as constituting the core values of society.33 Assimilationism views culture as an uncontroversial basis for social integration while, in fact, culture is an open and fluid system of communication consisting of narratives, cognitive models, collective memories, and aesthetic forms among others.34 Although factually Germany had become the most important receiving country for migrants in Europe by the 1990s, its counterfactual insistence of not being a country of immigration was often seen as a symbolic marker for the challenges all European nations were facing in adapting to immigration and new levels of cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity.35 Even in countries with a more pluralist or multicultural history of immigration such as Britain, Sweden, or the Netherlands assimilationist voices were increasingly gaining ground in the late 1990s and early 2000s.36 Not only for the proponents of German Leitkultur, it is especially Muslim immigration that endangers the social cohesion of European societies, a conviction that found its twin in the European debate over the desirability of the accession of Turkey to the EU. In Britain, the issue of and grievances toward immigration seems to have even been the decisive factor in the June 23, 2016 Brexit referendum, narrowly opting for withdrawal from the European Union as of March 2019. Apart from displaying many characteristic traits of conservatism, there are at least three interrelated reasons why in Germany this debate has taken on a cultural form, perhaps in the most pronounced way across Western Europe.37 First, as German sociologist and philosopher Helmuth Plessner suggested in Die verspätete Nation, England’s political liberalism remained as alien to German culture as the democratic rationalism of the French Enlightenment, the rational concept of law which succeeded in breaking the power of tradition. Instead, in the idea of national customs and tradition German public consciousness cultivated an identity of Ursprünglichkeit (primordiality) which continuously immunized against more recent history.38 This specific idea of culture can already be found in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation given during

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the Napoleonic occupation of Berlin in 1807 and it is altogether not overdrawn to say that negative reactions to French occupation contributed to the depreciation of French ideals of liberty and equality.39 Second, there seems to be a particular German concept of culture, a sense of cultural superiority over Western civilization that resulted in putting cultural achievements above politics. This specific attitude of “playing off romanticism against Enlightenment, the Middle ages against the modern world, culture against civilization, and Gemeinschaft against Gesellschaft ” can be traced from the eighteenth century to the present.40 Over a considerable period of time the idea of cultural cohesion among the people in the many German states functioned not so much as a wholesale substitute for politics but, rather, as a makeshift solution in the absence of political unity aiming to compensate for an insecure German national identity. In this view, Germany formed a subjective nation bound by socio-cultural traditions before it became a political entity based in citizenship. Thus a number of historians have argued that it followed a unique historical path—a German Sonderweg —incompatible and incomparable with those of France or Great Britain.41 The view of culture and civilization as being distinctly differing concepts had its peak around the outbreak of World War I when Thomas Mann wrote in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen: “Civilisation (Zivilisation) and culture (Kultur) are not only not one and the same; they are opposites (Gegensätze).”42 Often the United States of America were seen as the ultimate example of a civilization without culture, materially rich but thoroughly soulless. Finally, the idea that an ethnos must precede a demos which then establishes itself as a polity is particularly engrained in German scholarly and political discourse—albeit also present in much of liberal constitutional thought43 —while historically for many European nation-states this sequence did not apply.44 This view gave precedence to collectivist and authoritarian politics over individual rights and, after 1945, led German political elites to view their “country’s own catastrophic past as ‘the other’” of the newly soughtafter postwar identity.45 Meanwhile, however, Citrin and Wright note that in Germany ascriptive traits (as opposed to civic items) are mentioned less often than in the UK or Ireland when defining the important characteristics of national identity.46 France, in contrast, was “accustomed since 1789 to see itself as a republic whose struggles have universal value” and could easily be extended across Europe.47 Charles de Gaulle, by virtue of having been the leader of the Free French Forces during World War II, was able to

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reunite a deeply divided nation, bypass the trauma of Vichy and reconstruct a postwar French nation-state identity linked to the universal values of the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution.48 From the l’Europe des patries under de Gaulle which took the full sovereignty of the nation-state as the indispensable foundational basis for a unified Europe and therefore opposed both political integration and supra-nationality, the mid-1980s saw a decisive shift in French European policy.49 The European Community was now modeled on the French concept of the state and thus to attain a state-like character in as many areas as possible. But this idea was limited to Western Europe. The French approach, Ole Wæver pointed out in the early 1990s, did include Eastern Europe but in a very particular way. It was not as a part of the acting Europe, but as the mission, as the task for Western Europe. Eastern policy thus becomes [in 1990] increasingly important as the essence of the European project, but it is systematically conceived of as the political action of the European Community in the name of the East Europeans.50

France, Wæver argued, tried to maintain its own position in a Europe with a reunified Germany by means of a West European Ostpolitik which aim was to counterbalance German economic dominance in the European East. France’s mission civilisatrice rooted in the historical and cultural legacies of the first nation-state in Europe—enlightenment, democracy, and Republicanism—was Europeanized beginning in the late 1970s and allowed for a particular vision of Europe and its nation-states as children of French values.51 Cultural critique and cultural pessimism have of course not been limited to Germany alone but coupled with nationalist resentment can be found across most of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrés, Karl Lueger, Gabriele d’Annunzio, and Enrico Corradini all stood for a very similar type of nationalist ideology that at the turn of the twentieth century was able to gather ardent adherents, not only among an intellectual elite but also among the less educated and uneducated workers, and thereby make its entrance into politics. Since the 1990s, Huntington’s hypothesis of a “velvet curtain of culture”52 which is to have replaced the iron curtain of Cold War ideology—itself, and remarkably so, an anti-globalization thesis implying that the world is fragmenting into civilizational blocks with societies

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or states as the core actors—has again fuelled culturalist readings of political problems. A trend not limited to Germany, Europe, or the West. But in the sense in that cultural respect on the transnational level mismatches exclusionary dynamics on the level of the nation-state, the German example is perhaps paradigmatic for the deeply self-contradictory nature of European Union identity politics. As Peter Kraus’s appropriation of Lipset’s and Rokkan’s concept of the “freezing of identities” to the European Union suggests, this might be due to the Union’s quasi-constitutional architecture which itself contributes to keeping European identities chained to the nation-state. Just as collective interests continue to be largely defined in terms of national interest, collective identities continue to be defined as national identities.53 This is surprising in so far as one would generally expect national boundaries to become less important as a basis for identity when transnational integration is mostly procedurally based.54 But even before the Syrian refugee crisis gave rise to a resurgence in neo-nationalist identity politics within a number of EU member states, this quasi-constitutional “chaining” of identities to the nation-state had already been strengthened by a decade of austerity measures, often perceived as illegitimate by the populations most affected. However, the EU’s quasi-constitutional architecture nevertheless opens up spaces for internal linguistic and cultural pluralism but this happens within strict European limits and thus produces even stronger symbolic boundaries against European Muslims and the large-scale postArab spring refugee influx from the Middle East and North African (MENA) region as well as all others who do not conform to European self-conceptions.55 The reason for this partly lies in the EU’s inability to form a cultural consensus modeled on the nation-state and the constitutive ambiguity and lack of substance in the “unity in diversity” formula. As Maria Sassatelli argues, this idea is overly optimistic since it excludes the possibility of conflict in an a priori fashion. Diversity is being accepted only as long as it “is consensual, something made possible by a notion of culture that, even if allegedly wide and ‘anthropological,’ draws more on notions of ‘high culture’ (broadly conceived indeed, but still predominantly an aesthetic notion where difference can easily be seen as positive multiplicity)” and, as I would add, severed from questions of politics and ethics.56 The notion of “unity in diversity” can thus be understood as an effectively centralizing, top-down and dirigiste approach to culture suffering from a

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neo-functionalist hangover after questions of culture had been intentionally dismissed from the initially purely economic design of the process of integration from ECSC to the EEC.57 Neo-functionalist approaches simply assumed that political and social integration would quasi-naturally emerge from economic and legal integration, as some kind of unintended byproduct of the single market. It is thus not surprising that the identity issue gained particular importance when the economic basis of the European Union turned into a more ambitious, politically defined one after 1993. It could no longer be confined within the narrow field of cultural politics but started to spill over into other policy areas.58 Today most mainstream discourses on European identity are little more than exercises in a passive nostalgia in favor of the past, remnants of a collective consciousness of unique historical position—that of world leadership—as described by Paul Valéry in The Crisis of the Mind. Valéry, of course, would be quite surprised to see a very similar version of master narrative be resurrected to the “illusion of a European culture” which—so he thought in 1919—had been irrevocably destroyed on the battle fields of World War I.59 The many attempts at historically deciphering a prototypal European identity appear as attempts at prejudicating the shape of the putatively emerging European demos along the cornerstones of common values and common social, cultural, and educational policies. Such historical narratives are not only descriptive but also performative practices legitimizing change and categorical redefinition. At the same time, they remove power structures from view and aestheticize cultural factors. Historical master narratives function, Sara Maza put it well, as “means whereby social actors attempt to impose fixed meaning on social experience in the context of a crisis in which meanings have become indeterminate.”60 Or as Victor Turner put it: “where historical life itself fails to make cultural sense in terms of the formerly held good, narrative […] may have the task of poiesis, that is, of remaking cultural sense.”61 Talking about the identity of Europe and the Europeans in the same breath, however, implies a false analogy. What Europe is, remains a contested notion in political and economic arenas (systems integration) as well as in terms of cultural, normative narratives framing identity (social integration).62 John Pocock demonstrated not only how the concept of Europe migrated geographically—from its first Aegean application to a coastline lying west of the Bosporus then moving outward from this coastline into the hinterlands until finally denoting the large Atlantic peninsula,

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a continent—but also how it came to denote a civilization emerging in the former far western provinces of the Roman Empire.63 As Pocock points out, the geographic regions of Thrace, Macedonia, and Illyria to which the name Europe was first applied, today seem only marginally European, if so at all, while Europe’s eastern borders are not only geographically undetermined but also have no clear cultural, ecclesiastical, or political frontiers. What was originally called Europe “passed increasingly from Greek Orthodox to Turkish Muslim control, culminating in the temporary Ottoman conquest of Catholic-Protestant Hungary in 1526” and the lands to the East were deeply affected by Mongol power and Europe acquired a new meaning by defining itself against the oriental despotism found in the eastern forms of government which derived from the Ottoman and Mongol empires.64 For example, the eighteenth-century Scottish scholar William Richardson (1743–1814), whose Anecdotes of the Russian Empire were at the time perceived as an accurate judgment, generally described the Russians as “bearded children” and classified Russia as “a great oriental empire” in danger of “relapse into its former oriental condition.”65 According to the historian Larry Wolff, this association of backwardness and slavery—which in Richardson’s case was achieved by calling the Russian’s children as infancy was a way of expressing the idea of backwardness—was “important for establishing the relative distinction of civilization in Western Europe and Eastern Europe; it complemented the association of slavery and despotism, which quite broadly encompassed both Eastern Europe and the Orient.”66 That is, “the idea of Eastern Europe was created through a sort of demi-Orientalism that projected the otherness of the Orient onto lands that were indisputably European, characterizing them by a paradoxical combination of resemblance and difference from an implicitly Western sense of civilized Europe.”67 It is of particular significance in terms of the EU’s eastward enlargements because the Cold War division of Europe, Guiliano Amato and Judy Batt argued, reinforced “longstanding prejudices” about the East as backward and less civilized and not fully belonging to Europe. In this sense, the prospect of eastward enlargement appeared as a “uniquely threatening challenge.”68 In a survey of the main themes in the discourse on the European idea Richard Swedberg identified some fifteen different concepts.69 Claims to the birth of a European community range from antiquity to the emergence of the European nation-states in the seventeenth century, from the Carolingian renaissance in the eighth century to the writings of

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Voltaire and Montesquieu. This illustrates both the fluidity of European self-definitions as well as a lack of consensus regarding the content of a European identity.70 But as Denys Hay points out in his own major contribution to the genre: There seems to be a number of new myths in the making in the ‘European idea’ books which have recently appeared. Their authors are concerned to promote European unity; they try to do this by invoking great generalizations about the past.71

Swedberg’s analysis is similarly critical of the linkage of political activism and idealism in the literature on the European idea, its appeals to higher moral values and aversion to utilitarian modes of social associations and European integration. But he also points to the important role of ideas, ideals and cultural symbols in the making of history that is well illustrated by the discourse on the concept of Europe. Beyond historical reconstruction and the re-invention of history, there is another reason why in talking of Europe and Europeans we need to be careful not to transport a false analogy of a shared culture or shared concept of Europe. Neil Fligstein argues that there is an inherent class bias in European identity politics, one that has the potential to undercut ambitions of further European integration.72 Even though this assertion is based on perhaps too slim of a Eurobarometer data basis, by redirecting focus from attitudes to behavior it highlights a sociologically important rift between different socio-economic strata. Fligstein concluded that less financially well-off people, the less educated as well as elderly and working class population of the EU remain “wedded to the national worldview” whereas the highly skilled, welleducated and highly mobile middle- and upper-middle classes are not only positively disposed toward a European identity but are actually able to develop it by virtue of their transnational professional and recreational experiences as well as their language abilities.73 Those European elites are thus characterized by a much greater density of social networks extending into European space, but they are also a minority.74 Fligstein points out that 43.3% of people can be understood as “situational Europeans” in so far as “under the right conditions they will place a European identity over a national identity.”75 What this means is that if they do so, 56% of people will favor a European solution to a problem, but should national perspectives prevail, 87.3% of people will be anti-European, therefore leaving the

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EU with a vulnerable majority foundation.76 This, critics have argued, has been illustrated by the EU’s 2005 constitutional crisis triggered by the failed constitutional referenda in Ireland, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark, a referendum the German government did not even dared to hold. Fligstein based his interpretation on Karl Deutsch’s definition of integration as “an alignment of large numbers of individuals from the lower and middle classes linked to regional centers and leading social groups by channels of social communication and economic discourse, both indirectly from link to link with the center”77 and therefore regards the missing cross-class alliance and horizontal solidarity between disparate social groups (elites and members of the lower middle and working classes) on the European level as problematic and potentially politically explosive. Although some caution should be taken in terms of an overly materialistic understanding of the determinants of European integration—normative commitment to an ever closer European Union seems to carry little causal significance for Fligstein—his argument is supported by evidence for this pattern of class specific distribution of benefits of transnationalization on a global level.78 Recent studies, however, have relativized the image of cohesive European elites considerably. Neither are national political and economic elites merging into a coherent Euro-elite nor are they staunch supra-nationalists. And although Fligstein is right to point out that it is these elites who profit most from the process of European integration, their position vis-à-vis the EU is much less unambiguous than one might expect. In fact, approximately one third of political and economic elites support deeper European integration while, at the same time, wishing to maintain the nation-state as main political actor. The vast majority of elites displays only a weak commitment or weak opposition to the integration process and even strong advocacy turns out to be highly differentiated across specific policy areas. As for their career planning, the nation-state, its polity and labor market, still provides the primary focus for elites just as the nation remains the primary object of identification for the great majority of people.79 The focus on Europe’s heritage—as many-sided as this heritage presents itself—still limits the scope of experiences, practices, ideas, and preferences that will enter into the EU’s transnational identity. The invocation of history functions as a kind of authoritative trump that underwrites a particular, often politically conservative vision of European citizenship, aims to monopolize public debate and seeks to politically

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discredit competing visions. Just as nationalists perceive their national identity as a naturally given rather than a symbolic construction, the boundaries of European identity are often thought to be unchanging and something that could be recovered through historical scholarship or prescribed by political action.80 In this vein, civic political cultures in different nation-states tend to be understood as quasi-anthropological forms of political life and idiosyncratic social customs, resulting in revisionist historical studies. In France, for example, this kind of studies links contemporary France in a kind of mythical continuity with the Third Republic and the classic idea of a republican citoyenneté, downplaying historical ruptures and discontinuities.81 It is not surprising, that reference to Ernest Renan’s concept of the nation in Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? as a single political entity beyond cultural, linguistic, religious, or regional affiliations embodying a collective will has become hegemonic in the discussion of French national identity.82 Writing the history of Europe is always at risk of degenerating into many asymmetrical, polycentric evaluations put to divergent use in the process of identity formation. These evaluations most likely assume a kind of teleological continuity and a centralized perspective in terms of a projected mono-centric spatial organization, both are ultimately based on ethnocentric concepts of historical identity in terms of master narratives. According to such grand narratives, the standard European genealogy is still one of moral purpose and success according to which, as Eric Wolf summed it up, “ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution,” subsequently spreading to North America in pursuit of liberty and happiness.83 In such master narratives history figures in terms of clashes of cultures or between civilizations and barbarism. It therefore reinforces a proto-realist vision of international relations and cultural interaction as struggles for power.84 Riva Kastoryano puts it well: Founding myths fuel the discourse that blends history and ideology with reality, and each nation-state defines itself as the most egalitarian, most democratic, and best suited to the idea of modernity, particularly in its relations to the different social and ethnic groups that constitute the national society. It is in terms of these elements that history is interpreted, facts are reconstituted, and discourse is corrected. The function of these myths is to justify political decisions – resistance or change – and to orient the future

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while remaining loyal to the representation each of the societies, nations, and states has of itself.85

Among others Remi Brague, perhaps exemplarily, argued that Europe is defined along those lines that historically separate it from the Islamic and Orthodox world, thereby reaffirming religious categories of conflict setting Catholic-Protestant-enlightened Europe against the Orthodox and Muslim world. Not only is there hardly any evidence of the alleged civilizational border between Catholic and Orthodox parts of Europe, nor where religious cleavages even remotely decisive for the military escalation of the ongoing conflict between the eastern and western parts of Ukraine in the second half of 2014. Finally objectifying dichotomies as this one gloss over the prolonged history of devastating religious conflict within each of these allegedly distinct civilizational blocs.86 Lines of demarcation such as Brague’s involve the sacralization of space and—though broader than the received wisdom of national historical studies which trace French national history to Frankish origin or speak of a great southward push of Germanic peoples bound by ties of race, kin, language, and culture finally collapsing the Western Roman Empire—are misrepresenting historically the polycentric nature of Europe by projecting particular social identities onto a spatial dimension.87 Therefore, it is important to distinguish between accounts guided by ideological reconstructions and representations “stuck in the past” such as Brague’s and the reality of relations between individuals, groups, and states as much as between rhetoric and more material factors such as legal and institutional structures.88 It should thus not be surprising that critical commentators such as Samir Amin claim the idea of an unbroken European intellectual tradition with a Greek ancestry to be itself a relatively young myth of European history.89 Large-scale postwar immigration has thus turned Europe into a “set of ‘diverse diversities’.”90 What this means is that there is not only a great variation in the ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds of immigrants but also a great diversity in terms of citizenship and civic inclusion policies and philosophies of integration across EU member states. However, since the early 2000s public discourse has centered on what right-wing populists termed the Islamification of Europe, that is, on the alleged corrosive impact of nominally Muslim immigration. These discourses are themselves situated within a complex renegotiation

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of symbolic boundaries triggered by European integration. Older boundaries based on race and nation are being replaced by discourses of religion, language, social capital, or culture. While, for example, religious practice and church attendance continue to decline, references to what can be termed cultural Christianity have occupied a central place in the debate over Europe’s identity.91 Post-Cold War transformations also gave rise to a new line of conflict in Western Europe between universalistic conceptions of community and individual autonomy on the one hand and traditionalist ones emphasizing common moral understandings threatened by multicultural society on the other. This polarization of cultural conflict also reflects in the identitarian turn of right-wing discourse in the 1990s.92 Throughout its history Europe had never had well-defined borders, neither geographically nor culturally, and most of the borders in Europe are a result of state building processes in the wake of nationalist ideology at the turn of the twentieth century and reconfigurations of borders after the end of World War II and the subsequent European Cold War division, separating the Soviet Union and its authoritarian communist satellite states from the newly emerging western democracies. The collapse of state socialism entailed yet another geopolitical reconfiguration of Europe, though the revolutions in central and eastern Europe were understood by others as a mere re-entry into history, as a return to Europe.93 Yet others feared that “another deluge of barbarians” from Eastern Europe and Mediterranean Africa might destabilize the growing European project, thus echoing nineteenth-century discourses on the demise of Western civilization.94 Narrowing down historical perspective to the poleis of Greek antiquity and Christian Europe is not only incorrect from a scholarly point of view and the increasing plurality of the views on the European past but also counterproductive for dealing with today’s challenges to democratic government. As Harold Mattingly put in the introduction to his 1948 translation of Tacitus’ Germania: “All these appeals to ancient history to justify modern politics begin with self-deception and proceed to deceive others.” Of course, Mattingly made reference to the National Socialist’s distorted glorification of Germany’s ancient barbaric history but if we consider his remark in the context of the twenty-first century, what it demands is a critical distance from narratives that portray democracy as an enterprise fundamentally relying on Christian values and hence supposedly incompatible with other, especially Islamic, traditions.

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Unless we subscribe to a deterministic view of the distempers, to use a common eighteenth-century expression, of democracy or the nature of (wo)man, we have no reason to believe that the three centuries of American democratic experience can provide a more useful guide for contemporary processes of global democratization than the authors of The Federalist Papers had to think Roman experiences to benefit their own time and problems. Analyzing the myths of national communities and their interaction with processes of collective memory and identity as much as democracy’s challenges and their specific contexts must thus be made an essential part of any study of European identity.95 This also calls for contemporary historiography to integrate a critical, self-reflective perspective onto its own methodological apparatus. German historian Jost Dülffer, for example, has identified five such master narratives within European postwar historiography itself.96 The progressive narrative centers on the political, economic, and social reconstruction and modernization of post-1945 Europe with European integration as a subsequent—albeit more state centered—progressive success story: from the Europe of 6 to the Europe of 28. The tragic narrative pictures Europe’s recent history as moving from failed democracies into totalitarian disaster to a “golden age,” the “Trente Glorieuses” or the miracle years between 1945 and 1973 only to plunge into renewed, multiple crises thereafter.97 The regressive narrative stresses the provincialization of Europe in terms of decolonialization, globalization, and loss of global power. The dialectic narrative recounts Europe’s recent history as a dialectical relationship between the East and the West, an interplay of convergence and repulsion without an ultimate possibility of synthesis or reconciliation, but one which kept the temperature of the Cold War reliably down. Finally, the peripheral narrative which seeks a salutary distance to the representations of those states seen as driving forces and powerful actors of European integration or European history as such.98 Indeed, when the bloc confrontation of the Cold War years was replaced by coreperiphery relations in which the western European member states of the EU formed the core and often dictated policies for the countries in its periphery, the perceptible shift toward a postmodern historiography of diverse and competing counter-narratives left a question mark behind the concept of master narratives. Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford, in their critique of cultural essentialism and state-centric notions of Europe, have instead sought to define Europe as a civilizational constellation. Following Shmuel Eisenstadt and Jóhann Árnason99 they argued that Europe should

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be viewed as a configuration of civilizations, as a set of multidimensional formations in which basic cultural orientations interact with economic, geographical, and political factors constitutive of modernity.100 In this view “… Europe has been formed by precisely the interaction, cross-fertilization, cultural borrowing and diffusions of its civilizations [the Judeo-Christian civilization, the Russian civilization, and the Islamic civilization]. Europe must be seen as a constellation consisting of links rather than stable entities or enduring tradition or an overarching idea that can be the basis of a political design.” [Thus] “the idea of modernity in the European context must be regarded as both multiple and hybrid.”101

When viewed in the wider context of civilizational frameworks as suggested by Delanty and Rumford, the most recent eastern enlargements of the European Union—though institutionally little different from previous rounds of accession—are yet qualitatively exceptional.102 They do not challenge the economically and politically dominant position of the EU’s biggest net contributors Germany, France, and Italy, but represent a breach in the logic of unidirectional societal convergence in terms of significantly changing the cultural composition of Europe. The eastern enlargements advanced a process of reconfiguration and reconstruction of modernities in a polycentric Europe with more than just one historical origin.103 And while European nations are avid champions of liberal democracy and human rights, taking recourse to a specifically European genealogy of values (or even democracy itself) rests uneasily with liberal democracy’s broadly secular understanding of politics as a matter of unfinished debate grounded in the heterogeneity and diversity of the citizenry. It is precisely this diversity, the absolute size of the European citizenry as much as the fact that the “same space may be constructed by different groups in different ways”104 and, therefore, the EU appears as a “multiperspectival polity”105 that make an overly communal European identity politics seem inappropriate. Christian Joerges thus rightly criticized the historical amnesia of the EU’s constitutionalization process for neither taking the importance and the divergent spectrum of European historical experiences nor the salience of memory politics into account.106 The inherent paradox of any memory politics was well put by Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk:

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Peoples never remember a common history, but approach each other from their own unique history. It is like that with the future too. We can plan it as our common future, but as soon as it arrives, it will metamorphose on the spot into the past, and then it is only our personal property, because it is the only thing we have.107

During the Syrian refugee crisis and the EU’s internal dispute over refugee management that effected deep fissures both in its architecture and future vision, the continued importance and divisive potential of memory politics became clearly visible.

Identitarian Closure: Europe’s Uneasy Relationship with Muslim Immigration Among all immigrants in Europe, it is especially those from nominally Muslim countries of origin that have received heightened attention in the aftermath of 9/11.108 This shift of focus, according to Thijl Sunier, can be characterized by at least three features: an increased focus on Muslims as the “principal targets” of integration policies; a securityframing of Muslim immigration; and, lastly, an increased emphasis of European countries on national culture.109 Substantial refugee flows from the MENA region into Europe in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring, the ensuing multi-sided civil wars in Syria and Libya, the swath of death and destruction brought about by ISIS/ISIL as well as the security threat it presented inside Europe in terms of terrorist attacks and the perceived continuity with the earlier Madrid train bombings of March 2004 and the attacks on London’s transportation system of July 2005 all have contributed to a complex mix of anxieties regarding both Muslim minorities and Muslim immigration. The simultaneous backlash against multiculturalism and the push for a stronger assimilationism across European countries110 was, to a considerable degree, fueled by the heightened visibility and increasing political claims making of second- and thirdgeneration immigrants. This included the portrayal of Islamic practices as archaic, illiberal and thus threatening for Europe’s social cohesion and democratic political culture. Observers further noted that the repudiation of multiculturalism in general and Islam in particular had become almost obligatory among European leaders and, therefore, during the mid-2000s concern about immigration could be read as “euphemism for concern about Islam.”111 This shift became even more pronounced after

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a number of high-profile terrorist attacks, for example the Île-de-France attacks of January 7/8/9, 2015 on the Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the coordinated Stade de France suicide attacks and the mass shooting at Bataclan theatre of November 13/14, 2015, and the bombings of Brussels’ Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station in March 2016 that led to scenes of military siege on parts of the immigrant dominated Brussels district of Molenbeek. But even in immigrant nations with a pluralist or multicultural history of immigration such as Britain or the Netherlands assimilationist voices were gaining political ground in the late 1990s and early 2000s.112 It is at this historical point in time that the rift between intellectual discourses of liberal cosmopolitanism, catering to the self-perception of globally mobile, multilingual and economically secure non-migrant Europeans, and the increasing pressure on Muslims to assimilate into and show undivided loyalty toward national European cultures became most apparent.113 Prominent scholars and commentators have also—sometimes decisively—contributed to construing an at best oppositional and at worst Manichean view of the relationship between Western liberal democracy and Islam.114 Others, prompted by their analysis of Islamophobia, feared, as Matti Bunzl put it, that Islamophobia threatened to become the “defining condition of the new Europe.”115 Princeton orientalist Bernard Lewis, for example, talked of a clash of civilizations long before the culturalized obsession with state security in the wake of 9/11, implying that this clash had been on its way for some fourteen centuries, finding its most recent expression in Islamist terrorism and the (possible) undermining by Muslim immigrants of the values of Western democracy from within.116 Lewis, Huntington, and others gave rise to and helped establish the powerful idea of a Muslim threat among politicians, policy advisers, and academics.117 An idea that resonated throughout large parts of the general population across Western Europe and North America.118 Pressed by right-wing, xenophobic parties since the late 1980s and, more recently, also by the left-liberal mainstream as well as feminist groups, representations of Islam in party politics and the European media continually shifted toward a narrow portrayal of Islam as irrational and primitive, reactionary and illiberal, as a medieval religious practice in opposition to the values of Enlightenment liberalism and universal human rights. In consequence, Muslim cultures are seen as inferior to the Western lifestyles and internally unable of reforms. These

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representations equate Islam per se with forms of religious fundamentalism, political extremism, and militancy that threaten to either destroy or subjugate Western democracies to totalitarian-style Shariah law.119 Certain immigrant groups are, therefore, seen as posing particular grave threats to internal security and thus cannot be made part even of a cosmopolitan Europe.120 Regarding multiculturalism’s apparent fall into disrepute, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor further noticed that “almost every reason [for it] concerns Islam.”121 Taylor pointed to an increasingly narrowed perspective in which Islam, despite its varied forms, was treated as a unified threat to western democracies. More recently Kenan Malik, in a much publicized piece for Foreign Affairs, concurred that multiculturalism had become a “proxy” for a whole spectrum of issues regarding immigration, identity, political disenchantment, or working-class decline.122 And Justin Gest argued that although Islamist terrorism remained the main (security) concern within Western democracies, the focus should rather be on the withdrawal of Muslims from civil society and democratic institutions of political activism as well as the inability of public policy to effectively address this dynamic among second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants.123 A dynamic that in many ways was being compounded by anti-multiculturalist and neo-assimilationist discourses. This points to a paradox at the heart of the European postwar project: the mythic construction of the EU as heir to a resolute tradition of fundamental rights and Enlightenment values of secularism and tolerance.124 In actual fact, the EU’s own normative values were in many respects, George Howard Joffé claimed, inverted into statements of cultural intolerance in that, unless they are accepted in their entirety by alien non-European groups within the Union – whether or not they are in the process of being Europeanized through assimilation or integration – such groups are to be excluded from the European project despite their residence in Europe in a deliberate process of migrant cultural and social ‘ghettoization’.125

It is thus that Muslims and other non-European immigrants not only are perceived as cultural threat but also as passive objects of indispensable assimilation since the adoption of certain specific cultural and political values and practices—and more importantly the discarding of innate, premigration values—is thought to eliminate the security threat.126 Even

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in the globalized context, Monique Selim noted from a French vantage point, the discursive link between the internal foreigner and the other, the global enemy, operated primarily in regard to Islam.127 Beyond academic and intellectual discourses, it was the Rushdie affair during the late 1980s that provided a new impetus to anti-Muslim sentiments.128 As Kate Zebiri argues, it shifted the emphasis from race and ethnicity to religion as the core element of Muslim identity. In her analysis of three main themes—gender, violence, foreignness—within neo-Orientalist and anti-Muslim discourses in Britain, Zebiri diagnosed the predominance of issues related to gender that symbolized Islam’s otherness. The h.ij¯ab (headscarf also covering the chest but not the face) acted, as she put it, as a “lightning rod for feelings of hostility” due to its discursive association with violence and terrorism.129 Zebiri also noted that the symbolism of the veil in Western societies has been shifted from the exotic and the sensual toward signifying female repression.130 Although it is certainly true that religion is part of a society’s longstanding cultural tradition and there are good reasons for treating culture analytically as an independent variable,131 this does not mean that there is a historical path-dependency necessarily and inevitably separating such diverse societies with a Muslim majority as Algeria, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Syria, or Morocco from equally diverse Western representative democracies. Nor does it imply that religion is a trump to all other forms of allegiance and belonging. Arguments of this type have little instruction to offer to the political analyst but serve as powerful discursive weapons for the forging of simple antagonistic divides.132 By reducing empirical complexity and finally being completely severed from it, they produce potent barriers—politically as well as culturally—against what is seen as polluting the normative good and what, therefore, must be contained. Muslim immigration into Europe, on the contrary, defies large-scale categorization. It is far too heterogeneous in order to subsume it under any one general heading. Even the term “Muslim immigration” itself is at best of nominal value.133 In France, for example, there was a significant amount of labor and postcolonial migration from the Maghreb region even before World War I, thus predating the end of France’s second colonial empire.134 Muslim immigrants came from Northern Africa, overwhelmingly from Algeria, but also from sub-Saharan West Africa, mainly from Mali and Senegal, as from Turkey. Muslim immigration into Germany, on the other hand, was mainly Turkish but included smaller portions of Moroccans, Tunisians, Iranians, and Lebanese as well.

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In Britain, the largest group of Muslims came from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. A completely different group to immigrate into Britain were Turkish Cypriots following the internal turmoil in the late 1950s. Other groups included Malayans, Nigerians, Iranians, and Afro-Caribbeans. Dutch statistics showed the largest Muslim group to be Turks, followed by Moroccans, Surinamese, Iraqis, Somalis, and Iranians. In Portugal, the largest single source of Muslim immigration were people of Indian origin from Mozambique. Another significant group came from Guinea-Bissau. Smaller numbers migrated from other African countries.135 As this list indicates, social and cultural backgrounds among Muslim immigrants vary greatly and with it also the particular role Islam assumes in specific areas of peoples’ lives. This includes questions of lifestyle, gender roles, and family structure. Islam as such explains very little about attitudes and values of Muslim immigrants. It is at best of secondary importance.136 Western Europe’s Muslim population is mainly concentrated in the large metropolitan areas with, for example, the Muslim population in Marseilles and Malmö making up 25% of its residents (200,000 and 62,000, respectively), 24% (180,000) in Amsterdam, 20% in both Brussels and Stockholm (220,000 and 155,000, respectively), 21.8% (139,771) in Birmingham, and 24.7% (130,465) in Bradford, in between 14 and 15% in the Paris Metropolitan Area, Inner London, (466,265) and The Hague and in between 6 and 10% in Berlin, Vienna, and Copenhagen.137 Questions of whether Muslim immigration into Europe since the 1960s constitutes a “tripartite threat” of jihadism, shari’a law and clandestine anti-democratic radicalization; whether the disconsolate, westernized Muslim offspring of the second and third generation present a threat to the internal cohesion of the European Union, or whether Europe suffers from Islamophobia, or is conducting structured anti-Muslim racism, or both, are of course much disputed.138 However, to many observers it seems that the debate itself is indicative of the exclusionary place envisioned for Muslims in the new Europe.139 While during the 1990s it could be argued that anti-Islam sentiments were still confined to Europe’s right-wing political movements, they have meanwhile moved into both, mainstream media and mainstream party politics. At the same time, mounting evidence of Islamophobia has been discounted either as exaggerated, dismissed as myth and strategic racist anti-racism.140 However, popular anti-Muslim sentiments, cultural reflexes, and stereotyping have also shifted in target away from Islam as religious doctrine to individual Muslims identifiable as members of a visible minority.141

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A prominent example is historian Walter Laqueur’s extended lamentation about the impact of Muslim immigration on the future shape of Europe. Laqueur’s essay seems not only to be stuck in an ethno-national compartmentalization of Europe but does both of the above things, targeting culturally based Muslim deficiencies by asking whether there was “something in the social and cultural background of these families and individuals that prevented them from achieving as much as immigrants from other cultures”142 while, at the same time, dismissing any culturally or religiously based aspect of Islamophobia. He argued quite exemplarily: If there was growing animosity toward Muslims in Europe in recent years, it was not in response to their religion per se but due to the fact that most terrorist attacks were carried out by Muslims; ‘terrorphobia’ would have been a more accurate term, and if those involved in terrorism had been Eskimos, dread and fear would have been directed against them, even though the overwhelming majority of Eskimos had not been involved in violence.143

Laqueur’s focus on the alleged wrongdoings of Muslim immigrants (“‘Barbarians’ seemed a harsh, perhaps even racist, term, but was it wholly unjustified,” he mused144 ), their failure to integrate and the larger threats they allegedly presented to European societies in political, socio-religious, and demographic terms led him to the prediction that “European conditions under the impact of massive waves of immigration could become similar to those prevailing in North Africa and the Middle East.”145 For Laqueur, but also others,146 European Muslims indeed emerged as a most convenient of enemies. However, as Kenan Malik cautioned, the social disengagement, undermining of national identities, and erosion of public trust authors like Laqueur diagnosed was a feature not simply of immigrant communities but afflicted the whole of European society.147 It is an interesting coincidence that Laqueur’s analysis of the putative threat Muslim immigration poses to British but also other European societies comes some one hundred years after Britain introduced its first immigration control with the 1905 Aliens Act. The main objective at the time had been not only to curb Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe—which had significantly increased since the 1880s—but also to control the alleged threat it posed for the English race and to the British nation as the highest expression of that race.148 In a later book, Laqueur

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dismisses Islamophobia as propaganda intended to suppress criticism of Muslim immigrants. If there were genuine political refugees from Muslim countries (as opposed to economic refugees out to get state support), he reasoned, these quite often were radical Islamists under criminal indictment in their countries of origin. Among the younger generation of these immigrants, violence was quite frequent, and they were told by their preachers that assimilation was sinful […] To a significant extend, these immigrant communities were not believers in democracy, which they were told was incompatible with Islam. They were intolerant not only of Jews and gays but also […] wanted to impose an alien belief system and alien laws (the shari’a) on the rest of the population.149

Even from these brief excerpts, it should be sufficiently clear that Laqueur’s discussion of European Muslims—despite its cloak of academic respectability—is precisely an ideal-type expression of what he argued did not exist. As the Turkish non-profit research institute SETA stated in their 2015 European Islamophobia Report: Criticism of Muslims or of the Islamic religion is not necessarily Islamophobic. Islamophobia is about a dominant group of people aiming at seizing, stabilizing and widening their power by means of defining a scapegoat – real or invented – and excluding this scapegoat from the resources/rights/definition of a constructed ‘we’. Islamophobia operates by constructing a static ‘Muslim’ identity, which is attributed in negative terms and generalized for all Muslims.150

Current anti-immigrant, anti-Islam backlash might not only be due to the recent sizable wave of refugees from the MENA region but also to an underlying paradox of ethno-cultural integration. At the time when ethnically visible immigrant minorities exercise full citizenship rights and become increasingly engaged in the political and discursive arenas from which they were formerly excluded and, in that sense, more active in their claims making, these claims are often perceived as a threat rather than a sign of successful integration by natives.151 This is the case, Jocelyne Cesari argued with regard to visible Islamic identities in the West, because of an underlying contrafactual assumption that these identities were “inversely correlated” to civic and political loyalties.152

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While European nation-states have largely lost their discursive hegemony over the definition of citizens’ identities,153 Justin Gest argues that as migrants “pay increased attention to national public discourse, feel involved in policy-making, and seek out opportunities to affect change or express themselves,” they also become “acutely sensitive” to the nonfulfillment of their liberties and rights as to the non-recognition of their legitimate voice in public discourse. The disappointment and disaffection of second- and third-generation citizen-children of immigrant parents may thus be “reflective of a system that is ultimately not interested in the[ir] welfare, equality or future.”154 Gest’s exemplary ethnographic study shows that whereas some may acknowledge instances of non-fulfillment as features of a structurally imperfect, yet legitimate democratic system, others may reclaim and appropriate the stigmatized identities of their parents’ generation as a means of positive identification and opposition to an ultimately discriminatory system defined by double standards. As the agency of immigrant associations visibly increases within public discourse but also in legislative arenas, this might be perceived as a threat by mainstream political parties and associations. Resistance to immigrant engagement and activism may also emerge because such activism undermines the symbolic performance of sovereignty by the state. Immigrant claims making therefore makes visible the regulative incapability of the globalized European nation-state regarding border controls and national economic policy. It also exposes the “fiction of ethnic singularity” on which most nation-states ultimately rely.155 Immigrant activism, particularly so where visible minorities are concerned, therefore, represents a permanent thorn in the flesh of identity constructions based on the naturalization of ethnic singularity. As I point out in Chapter 4, the immigrant associations that emerged during the 1980s often re-appropriated, constructed, or asserted collective identities in which culture appeared as the constituent element glossing over actual linguistic, religious, social, and political diversity.156 In the wake of the public controversy surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the ensuing fatw¯ a issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 as well as assassination attempts on the life of Rushdie and several of his translators, Muslim minorities gained heightened public visibility. But the Rushdie affair also drove a wedge between Muslim communities and European nonimmigrant populations.157 Some observers even consider the Rushdie affair the inaugural event in a narrative historiography linking the former

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with the events of 9/11 and the war on terror.158 But even before that, as Nilüfer Göle argued, it was the Iranian Revolution that reinforced Muslim stereotyping in the West. It led to an identification, above all, of radical Islamism and veiled women by turning the Muslim (female) body into a site for symbolic politics. It gave the veiled bodies of women a “new semantic language” ostensibly directed against Western civilization.159 Generally, class cleavages had since the 1990s increasingly receded into the background of political conflict or had become politically invisiblized by the Social Democrats neo-liberalized Third Way approach to welfare. But the threat of militant Islam returned large parts of the hitherto faceless immigrant workforce—in whose past and future as well as concrete living conditions little political consideration and public interest had been vested during the 1950s and 1960s—into the focus of policy-makers and the larger public by turning guestworkers into Muslims.160 European discourses about the perils of Muslim immigration therefore also mark a historic shift of target away from working class and poor whites toward the culturalized European Other, with little or no distinction made between citizens, permanent residents, temporary labor migrants, or asylum seekers.161 Ferruh Yilmaz describes this shift as a hegemonic transformation. He argues that cultural cleavages reconfigured the European political landscape from the mid-1980s onward and, by 2001, had moved to a hegemonic position. Not only did immigration become the most salient issue in party politics—albeit no longer in the humanitarian framing that had still dominated debates the early 1980s but in terms of the presumed socio-economic and cultural threats it presented—but a strong discursive link emerged between the formerly unrelated debates about the future of the welfare state and the future of immigration. At the beginning of the new millennium, the socio-economically based right-left dimension of the industrial era’s conflict structure had thus been replaced by a sociocultural conflict structure with immigration at its center. As the transformation of the Northern and Western European welfare states, Europeanization and differentiated globalization contributed to popular anxieties, the European right, but increasingly so also mainstream political parties, successfully exploited the discursive linkage forged between welfare state retrenchment and immigration.162 As Betz and Meret point out, the rhetoric of multiculturalism was framed accordingly as a “Trojan horse of globalization” since it was portrayed as invariably leading to the destruction of former national communities and identities.163 It thereby also

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threatened the social rights of the working class by renegotiating distribution in consequence of growing immigration. However, it was not only immigration policy that right-wing parties made considerable inroads into but also the so-called postwar political consensus, the domination of party politics by either center-Right or center-Left coalitions, which had come under strain by economic crises, welfare retrenchment, globalization, and the de-nationalizing pressures of European integration and harmonization.164 The media image of Muslims as unwilling to integrate, mixed in their loyalties to the secular state while, at the same time, sponging off the welfare state and being supportive of extremism resulted in the establishment of strong, interpretative frameworks in which Muslims emerged as European society’s negation.165 Islamic extremists, as John Richardson argued, were thus repositioned as simply “extremely Muslim.” Especially in negative reporting contexts and in moments of social crisis or civic antagonism, Richardson showed, Muslims were routinely “marked out and rhetorically ‘Other-ed’.”166 In such discourses, a sense of national (and European) identity is promoted at the Other’s expense and symbolic boundaries have been constructed to face off globalization’s erosion of territorially based boundaries.167 Despite the diversity in terms of citizenship regimes, immigration policies, and philosophies of integration among EU member states the increasing identitarian closure against both immigrants and citizens from nominally Muslim countries presents a case of convergence in terms of a new, pan-European symbolic boundary. In 2008, Christopher Bail, employing fuzzy-set analysis, identified three main symbolic boundary configurations when comparing the relative salience of multiple symbolic boundaries across twenty-one European countries that were used by majority groups to construct notions of “us” and “them.”168 In addition to an emerging geographical pattern with countries located at the EU’s periphery (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, or the Czech Republic) showing stronger than average racial and religious boundaries and countries representing what has been variously called the European “core” (France, Austria, Germany, Belgium, or the Netherlands) showing stronger than average cultural and linguistic symbolic boundaries, two conclusions drawn by Bail are especially instructive for the present discussion169 : (1) Official state philosophies of integration do not correspond to the symbolic boundaries prevalent in the general public. Although the former differ in key aspects in Britain (multicultural race relations), France (civic republicanism), Germany (ethnic ancestry with jus soli elements

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introduced in 2000), and the Netherlands (religious tolerance) the prevalent symbolic boundaries are near identical. The stronger than average cultural and linguistic symbolic boundaries in those countries may indicate the majority groups’ factual acceptance of the permanency of immigration and cultural diversity but, at the same time, may be read as the attempt to establish culture as the new primary mechanism of intergroup exclusion. (2) Christian Joppke’s hypothesis of a spatial distribution of deethnicization trends (in northwestern Europe) and re-ethnicization trends (in the southwestern Europe)170 along with the Schengen regime’s effect of turning asylum-seekers into a newly racialized group corresponds well with Bail’s findings. The countries located on the EU’s periphery which have only recently themselves become countries of immigration bear the brunt of the EU’s burden shifting exercise resulting from the Schengen and Dublin conventions (safe third country rule and read mission agreements). Thus, the stronger than average racial and religious boundaries in these countries may be explained as a direct consequence of these factors. Given the preoccupation with irregular migration and debates on its impact on social and economic security in the southern EU member states, what these countries might be faced with is an integration deadlock. This is to say that the primary focus on irregular inflow of migrants and the detrimental effects of the Dublin conventions prevents the development of coherent public philosophies of integration in these countries. In the long term this may therefore result in conditions of extensive irregularity.171 The fact of a convergence of symbolic boundaries across Britain, France, Austria, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands despite diverging official philosophies of integration suggest a relative, structural independence of culture regarding the way symbolic boundaries are drawn and enacted. Symbolic boundaries are therefore perhaps best conceptualized as forms of diffused power that affect social practices in formative ways. In terms of social integration, symbolic boundaries may even work against assimilation and prevent those marginalized or excluded from taking recourse to and exercise their guaranteed rights.172 In France, the culturalization of immigration followed a different trajectory than in the Northern European welfare states due to the particularly close and longstanding colonial ties with the Mediterranean countries of the Maghreb. In the French case, however, the shift of focus on immigrant workers as a threat to its distinct socio-economic cultural

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model was displaced by concerns regarding the second generation’s relationship with French culture.173 Nabil Echchaibi argued that the 2005 suburban riots in France reveal “a fundamental turning point” regarding the perception of French republicanism and the relationship between young French citizens of second generation, North African origin and French majority society. As Nabil makes clear, it was this second generation of immigrants who not only exposed both the limits and the mythical nature of the French social model but—far more importantly—threatened it with the specter of Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism, a longstanding political taboo to French republicanism.174 The Paris riots not only reflected the failure of democracy’s promise of upward social mobility but also the ambiguity of French political and administrative discourse.175 It is thus not surprising that French intellectuals reacted with a “defensive nationalism” that quite seamlessly tied in with earlier conceptions of their particular model of social welfare as a symbol of the French “type of ‘civilization’.”176 In politically referring to the children and grandchildren of immigrants, French citizens by birth, as immigrants because of their parents’ and grandparents’ countries of origin while, at the same time, maintaining their invisibility administratively qua their legal status as citizens, French political discourse helped to create a stereotype which was threatening and elusive at once: When French politicians with increasing frequency spoke of their citizens in the suburbs as immigrant communities they were contributing to the persistence of ethnic and cultural concepts of identity in defiance of French republicanism. Subsuming citizens in constructions of immigrant communities also de-individualized these citizens and positioned them as quasi-objectified group, different and distant from the national community. Especially in case of North African immigrants these semantics reinforced the identification with Islam and turned religion into a mobilizing force on either side of the populist anti-Muslim divide. Even though the Paris riots did not have any ethnic or religious character, the dominance of cultural, ethnic and religious explanations downplayed the causal role of socio-economic class and socio-economic inequality. They did raise the central question to what extend legal integration in terms of individual citizenship rights can offer a solution to symbolic exclusion and social inequality.177 French Prime Minister Manuel Valls acknowledged as much when, following the terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 11, 2015, he stated that in France existed “un apartheid territorial, social, ethnique” and societal fractures

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and tensions as much as daily discriminations and social misery have been a longstanding reality.178 The underlying depth structure of this French apartheid, the treatment of colonial and postcolonial North African immigrants “only as Muslims,” Naomi Davidson shows, has its roots in the “reductionist, totalizing religio-cultural category ‘Muslim’.”179 Davidson traces the creation of this category by French officials out of the notion of embodied Islam. She shows that the inscription of Islam on colonial and postcolonial immigrants had its origin in the French belief that Islam was “a rigid and totalizing system” in which “‘Muslim’ was as essential and eternal a marker of difference as gender or skin color.”180 This embodied nature of Islam, accordingly, turned Muslimness into something innate, immutable, and different from French Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism. French policy-makers and intellectuals thereby “racialized Islam and Muslims” by transforming the religious identity of immigrants from North and West Africa into a racialized one. While French citizens were autonomous individuals capable of rationality and conscious choices regarding the norms and customs which governed their lives, Muslims “had a different kind of personhood then they themselves did as rational individuals, and that irrational personhood was inscribed in their very bodies.”181 Even in the twentieth century, a majority of French scholars and policy-makers across different political regimes argued, Davidson shows, that Muslims “were unable to free themselves from their faith’s domination of their very bodies.”182 She contends that in France, it is more productive to think about ‘Muslim’ as a category of racial difference rather than as one of religious difference. That not all Muslims were equally Muslim in the eyes of the French state forces us to rethink the ways in which racial, religious, and national difference mattered in twentieth-century France. Further, it suggests that the ‘Muslim exception’ to laicité is only one way of understanding the historical exclusion of Muslims from membership in the French Republic.183

Integrating Islam, however, does not only present a challenge for republicanism and French laicité but, as Bail’s analysis showed, the culturalized reading of political problems regarding immigrant integration—albeit following different trajectories across the continent—is a pan-European phenomenon. Although Germany and France, the two Western European countries with the largest number of Muslims and the largest percentage

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of Muslims of the total population, respectively, have followed very different trajectories of immigration, there is a notable convergence in the perception of challenges in regard to the presence of Muslims and Islam. In a 2016 poll, 71% of Germans and 68% of French people see Muslims or immigrants from Muslim countries as not well or not at all integrated into society, with the age group of 50 to 64 years expressing the most negative assessment in both countries.184 In Germany, despite Islam being one of the “most actively practiced” religions, public recognition of Islam has long been resisted by state and regional governments. Major opinion polls conducted within the last decade found that 46% of Germans agreed with the statement “there are too many Muslims in Germany” and 58% were of the opinion that “the practice of religion should be severely limited for Muslims.”185 As Özyürek points out, there is of course—and especially so in the case of Germany—a long European history of racializing religion that had a devastating impact on European Judaism during the twentieth century and which was carried to its extreme in the death camps operated by Nazi Germany during World War II. The culturalization of Muslims, however, not only has a clear class dimension but is also a relatively new phenomenon. After the recruitment of foreign workers was halted in 1973 in the wake of the oil price shocks and a general economic recession across Europe with unemployment quadrupling in the six core countries of the European Economic Community, there was an unanimous party consensus that immigration levels—including family reunification and asylum—were unsustainable and presented a threat to the cohesion of German society. In particular Turkish immigrants were thought impossible to integrate, with CSU politician Carl-Dieter Spranger, in 1982 parliamentary secretary of state for the ministry of the interior in the Kohl government, explaining that Germany neither was, nor could ever become, a multi-ethnic state. During the formative decades of Muslim immigration between the 1960 and 1990 European governments, as Jonathan Laurence shows, not only effectively outsourced the shaping of Muslims’ religious and political life to the governments of immigrants’ countries of origin as well as NGOs from the Islamic world while basic protections and freedoms granted to religious communities were “largely out of reach in the absence of citizenship” but, on the basis of their return-oriented policies and administrative practices and in convergence with Muslim sending states, also “purposely worked against integration for decades by promoting

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native language retention and the maintenance of distinct cultural and religious identities that did not mingle with the majority society – the very traits that would later be cited as evidence of immigrants’ failure to integrate.”186 Between the 1990s and the early 2010s European governments finally acknowledged that the former temporary labor migrants from nominally Muslim countries (and their families) were a permanent part of the European social and political landscape. Only then they started to encourage the development of nationalized forms of Islam. Through the establishment of Islam councils and consultative bodies governments aimed—despite passing a number of restrictive laws which prohibited mainstream religious symbols and practices (minarets, h.ij¯ab, halal slaughtering) as well as minority ones (burkas, arranged marriages, polygamy)— to take control of and domesticate Islam. The Islam councils opened up important communicative avenues that helped ease tensions regarding state-mosque relations and recurring Islamophobia. The end of the clearcut bloc confrontation of the Cold War and the rise of radical political Islam also made European governments aware of the geopolitical challenges posed by European religious politics and the targeting of European Muslim populations by transnational Islamist movements. The acceptance of foreign funds and the hitherto tolerated exertion of outside influence on the religious practices of their domestic Muslim population—what Laurence calls “Embassy-Islam”—came increasingly to be seen as threatening to the state and societal cohesion. The creation of institutional links with domestic Muslim communities and Muslim emancipation from the religious institutions of their countries of origin came to be recognized as a vital prerequisite for long-term political integration. But the earlier model of outsourcing and laissez faire had also become counterproductive since Embassy-Islam organizations had little appeal for secondand third-generation European Muslims. The earlier strategy of keeping Islam out of the public sphere and allowing immigrants’ religion to be managed by religious institutions of their sending countries was, Laurence shows, “clearly a hindrance to Muslims’ overall integration.” However, and despite the diversity of sending countries and religious affiliations, European governments came to see “their ‘Muslims’” as a “collectivity, and the object [rather than an equal partner] of public policy making.”187 However, when in 2010 Christian Wulff, then President of the Federal Republic of Germany, said in a speech marking the twentieth anniversary of German reunification that Germans needed “to view German identity

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as […] something broader. Christianity is without a doubt part of German identity. Judaism is without a doubt part of German identity. Such is our Judaeo-Christian heritage. But Islam has now also become part of German identity,” and further encouraged the population to “jointly weave the net that holds our society together, in all its diversity and in spite of all its tensions,” he provoked a storm of outrage from fellow party members, political commentators and parts of the larger public.188 For many of them, one could simply not be German and Muslim at the same time. More recently, the party platform of the German anti-refugee and Eurosceptic party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) not only called for a ban on minarets, mosques, and Muslim religious clothing, but further stated flatly (in section 7.6.1) that Islam had no place in Germany. After more than one million mostly Syrian refugees had arrived in German during the previous year, then party leader Frauke Petry called for border police to be authorized to shoot at refugees trying to enter the country illegally and, in August 2016, for illegal immigrants to be deported to two unnamed islands outside of Europe.189 In Britain, Sweden, or the Netherlands, each of which had a more pluralist or multicultural history of immigration than Germany, assimilationist voices were also increasingly gaining ground in the late 1990s and early 2000s.190 According to Maria Stehle, the portrayal of the failure of multiculturalism in the UK, France, and the Netherlands in the German press “merged into the consensus that in order to make the project of Europe work, the ‘Others’ of and in Europe needed to integrate, assimilate or leave. […] Europe served and serves a complex and contradictory function in politics and the media” in between a substitute for, and a symbol of the loss of identity.191 Both the war on terror and anti-immigration politics have thus produced “intolerable subjects” in the midst of European societies—irrespective of their legal status as (immigrant) citizens, residents or irregular/undocumented aliens—who, as Alana Lentin and Gavin Titley argued, are seen as “culturally unassimilated, ideologically unassimilable and transnationally implicated in disloyalty.”192 Their presence necessitates “the imposition of prohibitions: on forms of dress, religious symbols, marriage partners and ‘unacceptable behaviours’” as much as their recognition is conditioned on their appearance as “‘deserving,’ ‘moderate’ and ‘integrated’.”193 As Lentin and Titley further show, French philosopher Alain Badiou’s critique of Nikolas Sarkozy’s purgative and restorative politics of fear—whatever the merits of its Marxist rhetoric—not only denounced Sarkozy as a

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symbol of “transcendental Pètainism” but also brought into focus “the sustained application of cultural preconditions to […] post-colonial and minoritized French citizens and inhabitants, consistently called upon to symbolically prove their integratedness: by removing the veil in public space, professing their ‘love for France’.”194 The 180-degree turnaround from earlier decades of laissez faire by European governments, Jonathan Laurence argues, thus gave way to a “preoccupation that communities must effectively sacrifice their distinctiveness and collective identity in the name of legal and political equality.”195 For immigrants from nominally Muslim countries, integration turned from benevolent negligence that characterized the Cold War era into a civilizing process at the beginning of the twenty-first century in which the colonial matrix is transposed into the heart of the European metropoles. However, as Matti Bunzl showed, it is no longer a civilizing mission disseminating the virtues of the ethnic nation-state but Islamophobia as a civilizational project “is marshalled to safeguard the future of European civilization” however anachronistic its definition.196 The default argument justifying the legal constraint of European Islam and its public representation—and inversely defending the privileged position Christianity enjoys in most European liberal democracies—is tersely put by Christian Joppke in his rendition of the European headscarf controversy and the putative “affront to liberal self-definition” the headscarf and “the entire challenge of Islam” constitutes: [T]he Islamic view of the individual as ‘self-governing but not autonomous’ cannot but clash with the liberal view. It is unhelpful to deny this clash of principles under the label of ‘racism’. […] If the freely chosen veil, thriving on an individualized, de-ethnicized understanding of Islam, is the biggest casualty of anti-headscarf laws, one has also to see that the choice exhibited in donning it is truncated. If the veil is chosen, this is a choice which immediately denies itself. Because, if the veil were a matter of choice all the way down, why not take it off according to the moment?” Instead, headscarf women say they have no choice because God has chosen for them. […] Samuel Huntington has got it right: ‘The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam.’ In pious Muslims there reverberates the archaic power of religion, which is not merely subjective belief, as which it is processed in the liberal constitutional state, but objective truth, which cannot leave room for choice. […] Even for ordinary Muslims, ‘Islam is an intrinsically public matter’, not to be limited to a merely private sphere.197

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This kind of reasoning—besides the somewhat disconcerting use of the de-individualizing, objectified category of “headscarf women”—is paradigmatic for a regressive type of liberal universalism.198 In its consequence, Muslims are written out of not only the European project but ultimately liberal democracy as such. As long as the secular-liberal ideals of the Enlightenment and Western modernity are defined by secularization as their emancipatory core and, therefore, only secular reason is thought to possess genuine rationality—what Jocelyne Cesari called the “ideological meaning of secularization”199 —and the roots of this process of secularization in Europe are inscribed into the Old Testament, Islam, of necessity, must remain irreconcilable with Western conceptions of diversity and cosmopolitanism. This reasoning not only is wrong in terms of resulting in some sort of Enlightenment fundamentalism but, perhaps more importantly, is politically divisive in an almost Schmittian sense. It positions Muslims as existential negation of European belief, values, and ways of life.200 Even liberal theorists who conceptualize cultural identity as elective matters of individual choice or the manifestation of interests concede that [c]ompelling Jewish or Moslem children from religious homes to come to school bareheaded or without a veil is not merely to demand that they confine the practice of their culture to the private sphere, but requires them to betray fundamental aspects of their culture. In these cases, refusing individuals the right to express their culture in the public sphere in compliance with the ruling culture compels them to forgo their identity.201

Arun Kundnani’s analysis of Britain suggests that multiculturalism may no longer be criticized for destroying “conservative ideas of English civility, but for destroying liberal ideas of the open society.” Secondly, almost all concerns taken up by this discourse are linked to Muslim communities, that is to the perceived negative impact of “separatist Muslim communal identity (sometimes defined as ‘Islamism’), and the liberal values of women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of expression, secularism and anti-totalitarianism.”202 The reductionist construction of diverse groups of immigrants as belonging to a monolithic religio-cultural category “Muslim” with Islam irremovably inscribed into their bodies, must naturally result in an antagonism of liberal values and Muslim identities; an antagonism, Kundnani shows, that is thought no longer dissoluble

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through conventional democratic means of representation and negotiation. Rather, he argues, the crisis is “defined as marking an exception to the normal functioning of politics.”203 Alana Lentin similarly argues that minorities are presented with a “double bind” where “integrating into a prescribed national ‘way of doing things’ is rarely sufficient to ensure their equality.”204 And Esra Özyürek further showed in her study of German converts to Islam, that these converts seek a purified Islam that is dissociated from the stigmatized traditions of immigrant Muslims, but instead based on Enlightenment ideals. And although this culturally cleansed Islam might seem universalistic, Özyürek states clearly that in the contemporary German context it ends up being strictly particularistic or, more precisely, Eurocentric. It assumes that the ‘European’ or ‘German’ mind is truly rational – and hence the ‘Oriental’ mind is not – free of the burden of cultural accretions, and thus uniquely capable of appreciating and directly relating to the real message of Islam in its essential form.205

What these converts thus mirror in their critique of Muslim immigrants’ religious practice, social and cultural traditionalism, in their self-perception as driving force of Islamic reform, as well as in their own socio-political struggle of accommodation within German society parallels what Edward Said called the “extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status”206 of the Orient and Islam in the writings of Western orientalist. Except for the Western expert—or, in the context of Özyürek’s study, German converts to Islam—Islam remains out of reach as “the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself.”207 Consequently, Ian Almond argued in particular regard to postmodern discourses, Islam is being approached as a “purely anthropological phenomenon, a cultural manifestation, an object of primarily material significance” whereas the status of Islam as a transcendental belief system is conveniently omitted by commentators in their eagerness “to recruit the tout autre of modernity.”208 Beyond conceiving of Islam as “pure, unnegotiable resistance against the New World Order” what characterizes Almond’s new breed of orientalists—as much as those examined by Edward Said nearly half a century earlier—is the self-referentiality of the textual corpus of European Orientalism. Despite diagnoses of re-coding, what remains of seemingly unchanged validity—albeit transposed from the more subtle forms of academic discourse to the realm of socio-political analysis and policy-making—is Edward Said’s observation that

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in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, […] the Orientalist would be understood (and would understand himself) as also making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material. And since it was commonly believed that the whole Orient hung together in some profoundly organic way, it made perfectly good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading to a better understanding of such things as the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or world-spirit.209

It is worth quoting anthropologist Gerd Baumann’s observation of ethnic reductionism from his intensive ethnological study of South Asian and Caribbean migrants in the West London district of Southall since it undergirds Said’s textual analysis. Regarding the way in which immigrants, at the time, were being portrayed in the media, in political rhetoric but also in academic literature, Baumann noted: Whatever any ‘Asian’ informant was reported to have said or done was interpreted with stunning regularity as a consequence of their ‘Asianness’, their ‘ethnic identity’, or the ‘culture’ of their’community’. All agency seemed to be absent, and culture an imprisoning cocoon or a determining force. Even their children, born, raised, and educated in Britain, appeared in print as ‘second-generation immigrants’ or ‘second-generation Asians’, and, unlike the children of white migrants like me, were thought to be precariously suspended ‘between two cultures’.

The new emphasis on domesticating and nationalizing Islam in accordance with the respective national cultures and institutional settings still seems to follow similar preconceptions. It has also stalled conceptional openings to other fields of research. And Thijl Sunier argued that this applies in particular to the production of local everyday Islam by ordinary Muslims. Particularly so, as Sunier put it, to the “enormously rich and varied ways in which young Muslims create their religious environments; and the making of modern global Islamic leadership and the sources of authority.”210 Instead of the neo-Orientalization of Muslim immigrants and their second- and third-generation descendants, we need to recognize more fully that the reshaping of diasporic identities involves complex processes of emancipation, coalition building, and objectified othering that defy

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simple categorization in terms of essentialism and universalism, integration and segregation, modernity and unenlightened medievalism. For the scholar this entails above all, as Ibrahim Kalin put it, an imperative for a “radical revisiting of some fundamental assumptions of Western liberalism and secular multiculturalism.”211

Concluding Remarks: European Autopoiesis Liberal democracy’s emphasis on pluralism as the central organizing paradigm is deeply critical to the homogenizing pressures of both, a common good and common purpose. Contrary to more communally minded political agendas that understand society as a substantially integrated entity, and regardless of whether common moral commitments may be nonessential, unattainable (or even undesirable), liberal democracy maintains a basic level of social cohesion by requiring of its members observance of less substantial, procedural rules such as legal codes or mechanisms of political decision making. But pluralism in Europe is no longer just institutional in the sense that society occupies a relatively autonomous position vis-à-vis the polity where horizontal and vertical power distribution guarantees an equilibrium between social and political forces maximizing individual freedom and preventing the abuse of power.212 In today’s Europe, pluralism denotes a multiethnic, structurally differentiated society with multiple publics. It is no longer the ordered, institutionally well-organized pluralism of relatively stable interest groups which still finds its symbolic expression in parliamentary party politics. On the contrary, it is increasingly so of a messy and chaotic sort, pervading the fragmented and inconsistently institutionalized spheres of civil society. As early as 1998, Adrian Favell pointed out that many of the normative features of politicalphilosophical views on citizenship look anachronistic, if not deeply implausible, when measured against the actual politics of contemporary democracies.213 Acknowledging historical contingency, the radical openness and indeterminate nature of the future as well as the dogged Eigensinn and plurality of visions of the good life have, therefore, turned from laudable theoretical postulates of political ethics into the politically necessary recognition of given social facts. However, the European Union’s institutional self-perception—despite its recent crises—is still lagging behind the deep historical shifts in the nature of its constituency

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and the major social transformations of a multi-polar post-Cold War world. Three major overlapping waves of immigration occurring since the end of World War II have contributed to a profound disjuncture of the factual and institutional realities but also of the public rhetoric and legitimating discourses of EU elites and popular beliefs. The effects of both came forcefully to the fore and were projected onto the Syrian refugee crisis. As Raymond Aron, one of France’s preeminent postwar intellectuals, cautioned in 1964: Europe also form[s] a community in itself (an sich) in the sense that they have enough traditions and values in common to merit the recognition as one and the same historical civilization […]; yet this sort of unity … has nothing in common with the political unity aspired to by those who are called ‘Europeans’.214

The discussion in this chapter showed that what has come to be termed Europe has been subject to constant shift and contestation. With the integration process stalled and Britain preparing to leave the European Union there may simply be no longer a need for an overarching, consensually shared European identity vis-à-vis polycentric and multi-perspectival notions of the European polity that have been emerging since the early 2000s. At the same time, the Syrian refugee crisis revealed not only the dramatic inability of the EU in terms of a common, coordinated refugee policy and dramatic lack of solidarity between EU member states but also documented the failure of EU identity politics to generate, let alone impose, any consensually shared notion that would have been able to stabilize the EU in times of crisis. Arguably then, the discourse on European identity is not so much a case of poiesis in the sense of Victor Turner referred to above but rather of autopoiesis in the sense of a circular process of identity reproduction from history. This is the case particularly where the perpetual re-articulation of Enlightenment genealogy is concerned. This process not only functionally parallels Helmuth Plessner’s diagnosis for nineteenthcentury Germany in that it cultivates a primordial European identity based on Enlightenment values that largely immunizes against both, the changes which have fundamentally altered the nature of European societies since the 1970s, as much as against the altered composition of the EU after Eastern enlargement during the 2000s. Apart from its inherent

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teleological continuity the Enlightenment narrative, I would argue, also projects a mono-centric form of organization of the European cultural and political space. As such it is not only deeply conservative but potentially reactionary and must be understood as an act of political closure aiming to forestall the possibility of political contestation of existing political and social arrangements by recent immigrant groups and possible—if currently highly unlikely—future accession. With the 2004 and 2007 waves of enlargement, the contentious relationship between the West and the non-West (read Eastern Europe, the former states of the Soviet Union, the southern Mediterranean and Turkey but also non-Western immigration as such) has since permeated the “Europe of 27” itself. Although much more focused research is needed in this area, there is sufficient grounds to suggest that especially in regard to Eastern European countries the EU operates a racial/cultural hierarchy in which the dominant Western European member states of the EU not only aimed to discipline and educate the newcomers in the East in terms of good governance, human rights, and economic liberalization and deter the people beyond their eastern borders from migrating, but also have tried to control these countries by what can be called a neoor soft-imperial policy subtext. Sometimes this is done rather explicitly as, for example, in the case of restrictions on the rights of work applied to the citizens of the newcomer countries by the core EU member states or a free market and de-regularization agenda that ties loans to particular policy changes. It is also in the above sense that we can see that the EU not only was unable to develop a shared, communal identity in a cultural sense but remains a faceless giant with no political identity derived from a political community in any meaningful way. This constitutive deficiency of the EU’s “unity in diversity” formula became clearly evident after the end of the Cold War division of Europe when the prospect of enlargement to the East was widely regarded as a unique threat to the cohesion of the EU. The latter approached almost breaking point during the Syrian refugee crisis and thereby demonstrated the resilience of nationalist modes of political identity construction. The quasi-constitutional “freezing” of identities to the nation-state discussed above had, in that sense, provided a fertile ground for the more recent developments including the mainstreaming of far-right, exclusionary nationalism. Just as European identities remained “chained” to member states’ national identities, the spaces for diversity and pluralism opened up in the process of European

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integration remained within intra-European limits and therefore continue to predispose it against any substantial post-national, multicultural idea of Europe. In a more general sense this also means that (1) the long dominant progressive narrative of European reconciliation and the overcoming of its nationalist past in favor of an open and closely integrated Europe has lost most of its persuasive power vis-a-vis the renaissance of neo-nationalist versions of political belonging and legitimacy. The self-referential EU identity discourse proved an inadequate substitute for the clear telos and political ethics of the nineteenth-century national paradigm and its imaginary of coherent, homogeneous political communities clearly distinct from each other. While internally solidarity among the EU member states has been severely eroded by harsh austerity measures following the sovereign debt crisis—widely perceived as top-down, elitist, and politically illegitimate in bypassing the needs of national constituencies—and, most recently, the collapse of whatever common refugee policy existed prior to the Syrian refugee crisis, externally the EU has responded by further sealing off its borders. This included the further securitization of migration, the upgrading of externalization measures and, in some cases, such as Bulgaria’s, by militarizing its southern borders. (2) What is striking regarding European identity discourses is not primarily their nationalist hangover but the near total absence of Europe’s colonial and postcolonial history and therefore also of the significant changes effected by both.215 Post-Cold War liberal cosmopolitan visions are not only characterized by the strange invisibility of postcolonial migration into the European metropole but also re-produced strong symbolic boundaries against Europeans of non-European decent. As Feyzi Baban succinctly put it: Just as it is not possible nor desirable to ‘purify’ Europe from cultural plurality or to ask newcomers to shed their previous belongings at the borders of the continent, it is equally not viable to simply recognize cultural plurality without establishing mechanisms through which such plurality can be negotiated in order to create shared norms and understanding in society at large. […] Yet those who continue to be positioned as the Others of Europe are no longer just guests, but residents, citizens, and members of the European people as well as of their respective national communities.216

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The way diversity has been institutionalized within the EU’s constitutional architecture allows for the negotiation of diversity among national European cultures. It, however, not only relegates non-European cultures and identities to the margins but, in fact, bars the gates before them. Ulrich Haltern points to the ambiguity of European fundamental rights and adjudication in terms of a “dark undercurrent,” firmly rooted in a culturally infused stereotyping of the non-European Other.217 It is this largely invisibilized ambivalence of law—its universalistic discursive surface characterized by attributes such as impartiality, rationality, predictability, and justice, on the one hand, and its symbolic and aesthetic depth structure (Tiefenstruktur) as a reservoir of a specific collective value system on the other—that structures, Haltern argues, the imaginations of a polity even before it does its institutions. While this could still be argued to be an unintended byproduct of the European constitutionalization process and its specific history, the concluding section of Chapter 4 illustrates more fully that the cultural closure of Europe is linked with specific types of imaginaries about the identity of Europe. And these are, yet again, linked with a particular type of cultural and economic logic that has its roots in Europe’s colonial history. In that sense—and despite the powerful projection of a cosmopolitan Europe and Europeanness as universality—the imaginary of a culturally homogeneous European space understood as a shared, pan-European civilization represents the EU’s own type of particularistic, identitarian closure. As such, it reproduces well-known topoi of colonial thought. Questions of immigrant identity, on the contrary, are not questions of either/or but of mediating newly emerging spaces in-between 218 with transnational topographies of belonging. European identity talk has produced adverse effects not only for immigrants and citizens belonging to visible minority groups. By inadvertently vacating political space for neo-ethno-nationalist ideologies and providing inroads for populist and extreme-right anti-immigration discourse into mainstream politics via the topos of putatively endangered national identities it has also—almost in a self-defeating way—forestalled whatever prospects of cultural consensus the EU’s formula of “unity in diversity” might have initially entailed. In this sense, it is increasingly Europe rather than immigrants from nominally Muslim countries that, in the everyday of immigrant culturalization, turns itself into the real negation of its own value basis and normative aspirations. This is not the kind of societal suicide Éric Zemmour was toying with in Le Suicide français but an entirely different

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one. It is one animated by diffuse fears shrewdly and successfully exploited by European populist movements and extreme right parties, one in which Laqueur’s “barbarians,” to the contrary of his reasoning, are of no causal driving force. A glimpse of the real future scenario—beyond the right’s favorite phantasm of a continent overrun by immigrants and subjugated by totalitarian-style Shariah law—can be discerned from the controversial course Hungary has taken since the Fidesz landslide victory and Victor Orbán’s subsequent re-election to premiership in 2010. A course, critics have recently described as “death dance of democracy” that, because of the EU’s indecisiveness and inaction, now even threatens to create “a Putin-style frozen conflict on the EU political stage.”219 The vilification of refugees and immigrants, the mass moral panic regarding the putative loss of national identities and autonomy—allegedly endangered as much by “immigrant hordes” as by Brussels bureaucrats—the restriction of civil liberties and encroachment on the freedom of the press as well as the criminalization of dissent, therefore, not only drives discursive wedges into Hungarian and European populations. It also risks the creation of newly objectified and essentialist forms of European societal and political cleavages. Taking again recourse to French President Emmanuel Macron’s Sorbonne speech referred to in the beginning of this chapter, it is unfortunate that his vision for genuine sovereignty, unity, and democracy at the European level—though proposing ambitious institutional reforms—remained quintessentially chained to the past. It lacked any forward-looking account for plausibly seeing Europeans united in their values, outlooks, preferences, and affinities beyond the “never again” born out of the unprecedented degree of devastation wrought by the continents two world wars. The renaissance of nationalism across Europe, in a functional sense, fills this gap as the readily available default option of identification. Macron’s Sorbonne speech must, therefore, also be seen as one further instance of European myth-making, metaphorically turning the pioneers of European integration such as Joseph Beck, Alcide De Gasperi, Walter Hallstein, Joseph Luns, Alain Poher, Carl Romme, Robert Schuman, or Paul van Zeeland into founding fathers akin to the 1887 American precedent. It ties in neatly with other attempts at promoting European unity by creatively generalizing about the past. In trying to resurrect the corpse of an “older Europe” with its global power, dominance, and ambition— now only a shadow of itself—Macron’s vigorous prep talk may indeed be the surest sign of its demise. It echoes the Millennium Declaration

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adopted by the European Council in Helsinki in December 1999 which stated that “We must rejuvenate the idea of a Europe for all — an idea on which each new generation must make its own mark.”220 To secondand third-generation immigrant citizens, especially those from nominally Muslim countries of origin, these words may still sound like mockery, even two decades after their having been put in writing. Despite the well-documented increase in density of the EU’s transnational political space,221 hopes for the emergence of an affective, thick identity based in a shared history and culture are unrealistic as they are unnecessary. Such a European identity would also be likely to suffer from an illiberal and exclusionary turn. It is equally unlikely that Fligstein’s “situational Europeans” will ever become an overwhelming majority, nor will they metamorphose into first-order Europeans who, irrespective of circumstances, will always privilege Europe over their national or regional identities. Evaluative or constructivist identities of those European elites who routinely engage in transnational social networks will most likely continue to suffer from an inherent class bias. The focus on communitarian (cultural, ethnic, religious) and civic forms of identity (of the latter of which the constitutional patriotism of Sternberger and Habermas is a variant222 ) tends to neglect the importance of socio-economic position and inequality and underestimate the salience of socio-economic dislocations for the cohesion of the European Union. The recurrence of plurality in terms of language, culture, religion, ethnicity—often viewed by dominant groups simply as a refusal of integration—also calls on political theorists to develop a decentralized notion of the public sphere beyond the national paradigm as, for example, a multiplicity of intersecting spaces of political action and contestation.223 Though diversity politics have theoretically been debated across the continent following the pioneering work of Iris Marion Young and Nancy Fraser among others, they as yet remain insufficiently linked to actual social praxes. Such task no longer just entails the recognition of shifting boundaries of the private and the public but more so, first, the impossibility of clearly demarcating political from supposedly apolitical spheres and, second, a larger and more general process of fragmentation of national political spaces along socio-economic, ethnic, religious, political, and cultural lines that transcend the realm of minority politics. These spaces are, as Marla Brettschneider points out, “contexts that are charged differently politically, each with its own potential for any combination of exclusion, inclusion, empowerment, disempowerment.”224 Instead of

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operating with a notion of a national centralized public sphere, democratic theory must find ways of conceptualizing politics in a multiplicity of publics (distinct but often also overlapping) on multiple levels of society. However, this does not mean that politics happens everywhere, as some postmodern thinkers would have it, but that the arenas where politics potentially emerges are not limited to the narrow conception of legislative arenas, legal disputes, and national media. All models of citizenship, for example, combine reality and ideology in terms of remembered history, founding principles of the nation-state and its self-perception and, therefore, bridge the gap between (imagined) political traditions and current political practice by allowing the development of a coherent discourse. As far as a shared sense of history is concerned, a suitable common past can of course be construed. But if Andrzej Stasiuk is right, it will never remain so for long.

Notes 1. Karl Jaspers: Vom Europäischen Geist. In: Rechenschaft und Ausblick. München: Piper, 1951 [orig. lecture Geneva, 1946], p. 233. On Germany in particular see Wolfgang Zank: The German Melting-pot: Multiculturality in Historical Perspective. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998. 2. Kenan Malik: The Failure of Multiculturalism: Community Versus Society in Europe. In: Foreign Affairs, March/April 2015, p. 22. 3. See Tony Judt: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin Books, 2005, p. 9. 4. These and the figures that follow came from Every race, color, nation, and religion on earth. In: Guardian Unlimited, January 21, 2005, https://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,2763,139553 4,00.html; Ausländer aus 183 Staaten leben in Berlin, Pressemitteilung 173/06, September 19, 2006. Statistisches Landesamt Berlin, 2006; Immigrés par région. INSEE, Enquêtes annuelles de recensement 2004 à 2006 - Exploitation principale; Imigração regista 24 mil partidas, Ucranianos deixam Portugal. Correio da Manhã, August 28, 2006. 5. Ulrich Beck: What Is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 48. 6. Among these languages spoken are Amharic, Cree, Estonian, Gujarati, Hebrew, Italian, Ojibway, Portuguese, Tamil, Twi, Urdu, and Yiddish. Various Languages Spoken (126), Sex (3) and Age Groups (15) for Population, for Canada, Provinces, Territories, Census Metropolitan Areas and Census Agglomerations, 2001 Census, Toronto. Ottawa: Statistics

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7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

Canada, December 10, 2002. 2001 Census of Canada. Catalogue no. 97F0007XCB2001007; Community Profile Toronto. Statistics Canada, June 27, 2002. 2001 Community Profiles. Catalogue no. 93F0053XIE. These and the following figures came from the United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2009). International Migration Report 2006: A Global Assessment. Available at https://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/2006_Migr ationRep/fullreport.pdf. Flemish and Catalan nationalism in Belgium and Spain, respectively, are first rate examples. For an overview of Belgian ethnonational political parties and their views on Europe, European integration, and immigration, see Anthony M. Messina: The Implications of ‘Super’ Diversity for European Identity and Political Community. In: Europe’s Contending Identities: Supranationalism, Ethnoregionalism, Religion, and New Nationalism, ed. by Andrew C. Gould and Anthony M. Messina. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 62–65. For Catalan nationalism, see Montserrat Guibernau: Prospects for an Independent Catalonia. In: International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 27, No. 1 (March 2014), pp. 5–23. Citrin and Wright offer the inverse hypothesis that the existence of the “EU umbrella” may, and ironically so, have paved the way for regional separatism. See Jack Citrin and Matthew Wright: E Pluribus Europa? In: Europe’s Contending Identities: Supranationalism, Ethnoregionalism, Religion, and New Nationalism, ed. by Andrew C. Gould and Anthony M. Messina. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 51. See Charles Taylor: Invoking Civil Society. In: Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 204–224, esp. 215–220. See Editorial. In The European Journal of International Law, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2011), pp. 3003–3311. See The Europe of Elites: A Study into the Europeanness of Europe’s Political and Economic Elites, ed. by Heinrich Best, György Lengyel, and Luca Verzichelli. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 3. See Article 8 of the Maastricht Treaty. See also Hauke Brunkhorst: Taking Democracy Seriously: Europe after the Failure of its Constitution. In: Law, Democracy and Solidarity in a Post-national Union: The Unsettled Political Order of Europe, ed. by Erik Oddvar Eriksen, Christian Joerges and Florian Rödl. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. From the large body of literature, see, for example, Andreas Follesdal and Peter Koslowski (Eds.): Democracy and the European Union. Berlin: Springer, 1998; and Andreas Follesdal and Simon Hix: Why There Is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Majone

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15.

16.

17.

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and Moravcsik. European Governance Papers (EUROGOV) no. C-05– 02, https://www.connex-network.org/eurogov/pdf/egp-connex-C-0502.pdf. See also Markus Jachtenfuchs, Thomas Diez and Sabine Jung: Which Europe? Conflicting Models of a Legitimate European Political Order. In: European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 4, No. 4 (December 1998), pp. 409–445; Joseph H. H. Weiler: The Constitution of Europe: ‘ Do the New Clothes Have an Emperor?’ and Other Essays on European Integration. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 264–285; Phillippe C. Schmitter: How to Democratize the European Union … and Why Bother? Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000; Étienne Balibar: Is a European Citizenship Possible? In: Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, 2002, pp. 104–128; and Andrew Moravcsik: In Defense of the ‘Democratic Deficit’: Reassessing the Legitimacy of the European Union. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2002), pp. 603–634. For a more recent take on the EU’s democratic deficit, see Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum: A Done Deal? The EU’s Legitimacy Conundrum Revisited. In: Law, Democracy and Solidarity in a Post-national Union, ed. by Erik Oddvar Eriksen, Christian Joerges and Florian Rödl. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 230–252. Karl Loewenstein: The Union of Western Europe: Illusion and Reality. In: Columbia Law Review, Vol. 52, No. 2 (February 1952), pp. 209– 240, 209. See also the editorial reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris in The European Journal of International Law, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2011), pp. 3003–3311. I do not discuss in any depth the issue of religious liberalism. Though it is fundamental to many debates on the presence, visibility, and future of Islam in Europe, the general focus of this study does not concern Islam as a religious phenomenon but rather the culturalization of immigrants from nominally Muslim countries of origin and their portrayal as quasiexistential negation of European values and ways of life by the extreme right, but increasingly so also by commentators from mainstream parties and the liberal left. On the teleological nature of the EU see Bo Stråth: Methodological and Substantive Remarks on Myth, Memory and History in the Construction of a European Community. In: German Law Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2005), pp. 255–271, esp. pp. 267ff. See Fritz Scharpf: Democratic Policy in Europe. In: European Law Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1996), pp. 136–155; and Jürgen Habermas: Ein Pakt für oder gegen Europa? In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 7 April 2011, p. 11. Most recently, this problem-solving rationale of deeper integration has been emphatically advocated by French President Emmanuel

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19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

Macron in his September 26, 2017 speech at Sorbonne University in Paris. Macron called for closer cooperation and further harmonization in regard to the economy, immigration, defence, security, and the environment with France and Germany leading the way in a Europe of differing speeds.Élysée: President Macron Gives Speech on New Initiative for Europe, 26 September 2017, https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2017/09/26/presid ent-macron-gives-speech-on-new-initiative-for-europe.en. Saul K. Padover: Cultural Pluralism in the United States and in the Projected European Union. In: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 348, The New Europe: Implications for the United States (July 1963), pp. 25–33; Raymond Aron: Old Nations, New Europe. In: Daedalus, Vol. 93, No. 1 (Winter 1964), pp. 43–66, 51. Willem Schinkel: Imagined Societies: A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 2, 4. Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, trans. by Allison Brown. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, p. 244. See PREM 19/1036 GERMANY. Prime Minister’s visits to Germany: meetings with Chancellor Helmut Kohl; part 4, The National Archives, Kew. Deutscher Bundestag, Stenographischer Bericht 83. Sitzung, Bonn, February 4, 1982, Plenarprotokoll (Minutes of Plenary Proceedings) PlPr 9/83, Zur Ausländerpolitik, Drucksache 9/1306. Pofalla: Kruzifixe in allen Schulen. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, No. 36, September 9, 2007, p. 7.See also Hartwig Pautz: The Politics of Identity in Germany: The Leitkultur Debate. In: Race and Class, Vol. 46, No. 4 (April 2005), pp. 39–52. See paradigmatically Beckstein: Kein Minarett neben bayerischen Kirchen. Spiegel Online, November 17, 2000. What concerns the longtime Bavarian minister of the interior and later Bavarian Minister President Günther Beckstein most are the supposedly dangerous “parallel societies” he finds, for example, in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin where churches, synagogues, Buddhist temples, and mosques coexist in close proximity. A neighborhood now firmly in the grip of gentrification. See Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller: The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: The Guilford Press, 2003. De Maizière entfacht heftige Debatte über Leitkultur. In: FAZ , April 30, 2017, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/de-maiziere-ent facht-heftige-debatte-ueber-leitkultur-14994920.html.

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28. See UN and IOM figures given in Richard B. Freeman: People Flows in Globalization. In: Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring 2006), pp. 145–170; Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Migration, Flüchtlinge und Integration (Hg.) (2016): Einwanderungsland Deutschland: Die Fakten im Überblick, Stand Mai 2016. https://m.bundesregierung.de/Content/Infomaterial/BPA/IB/ Einwanderungsland%20Deutschland.pdf. 29. In EU official parlance irregular or undocumented forms of immigration are called “illegal.” This terminology has been rightly criticized for criminalizing irregular/undocumented immigration and equating it with cross-border crime. For an illuminating discussion against the background of US immigration practice, see Constructing Immigrant “Illegality”: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses, ed. by Cecilia Menjívar and Daniel Kanstroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 30. Anthony M. Messina: The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration to Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 5–6. 31. See, for example, Mike Featherstone et al. (eds.): Global Modernities. London and New Delhi, 1995; and Roland Robertson: Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. 32. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992, pp. 128, 138; for a critique, see Stanley Fish: Bad Company. In: Transition, No. 56 (1992), pp. 60–67. See also Samuel P. Huntington: The Hispanic Challenge. In: Foreign Policy, No. 141 (March–April 2004), pp. 30–45; and David Hollinger: Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books, 1995. For examples from Germany and France, see Henryk M. Broder: Hurra, wir kapitulieren [Hurray, We Surrender]. Berlin: wjs, 2008; Tilo Sarrazin: Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen [Germany Abolishes Itself: How We Are Jeopardizing Our Country]. München: DVA, 2010; and Éric Zemmour: Le Suicide français [The French Suicide]. Paris: Albin Michel, 2014. Zemmour’s book, although published not until October 2014, was the secondbest-selling book in France that year and prompted the coining of the terms “zemmouriste” and “zemmourien” indicating apocalyptic visions of decline. 33. See Douglas Hartmann and Joseph Gerteis: Dealing with Diversity: Mapping Multiculturalism in Sociological Terms. In: Sociological Theory, Vol. 23, No. 2 (June 2005), pp. 218–240. 34. Klaus Eder: Integration through Culture? The Paradox of the Search for a European Identity. In: European Citizenship Between National Legacies and Postnational Projects, ed. by Klaus Eder and Bernd Giesen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 222–244.

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35. See, for example, Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni, and Florence Passy: Beyond the Nation-State? National and Postnational Claims Making. In: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 1; and Riva Kastoryano: Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany [orig. France, l’Allemagne et leurs immigrés]. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 55. 36. See John Carvel: Opposition to Immigrants Hardens Under Blair: Liberal Intelligentsia Want More Curbs. In: The Guardian, 7 December 2004; and Bruce Crumley: Why European Conservatives Are Bashing Multiculturalism, Global Spin, February 23, 2011, https://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/02/23/why-europeanconservatives-are-bashing-multiculturalism/. 37. I discuss the post-Cold War culturalization of immigration in Europe below and in Chapter 5. 38. Helmuth Plessner: Die verspätete Nation: Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962, especially pp. 22, 48ff. See also Bernhard Giesen: Intellectuals and the German Nation: Collective Identity in an Axial Age. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 39. Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Reden an die deutsche Nation. Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1808. Fichte’s plea for German self-assertion against French domination is based on claims of superiority of national character that finds its expression in primordial customs, attitudes, and morality. For a short summary and contextualization of Fichte’s view on the character of Europe, see Martyn P. Thompson: Ideas of Europe During the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. In: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 55, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 37–58. 40. Wolf Lepenies: The Seduction of Culture in German History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 9; see also, as cited by Lepenies, Norbert Elias: The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. by Michael Schröter. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 126–127. 41. For a critical discussion of the pre-political concept of the Kulturnation as a questionable invention of German romanticism resting on a metaphysical conception of political unity, see Hermann Heller: Staatslehre (1934). In: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3, Tübingen, 1991, p. 263. See also Peter Viereck: Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind (rev. and enl. ed. of Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler). New York: Capricorn Books, 1965, the discussion in Hans-Ulrich Wehler: ‚Deutscher Sonderweg ‘ oder allgemeine Probleme des westlichen Kapitalismus? Zur Kritik an einigen ‚Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung’. In:

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43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

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Merkur, Vol. 35, No. 5 (May 1981), pp. 478–487; and Florence Gauzy: L’exception allemande XIXe-XXe siècle. Paris: A. Colin, 1998. As cited by Raymond Guess: Kultur, Bildung, Geist. In: History and Theory, Vol. 35, No. 2 (May 1996), pp. 151–164, 153. For the English translation see Thomas Mann Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans., with an introduction, by Walter D. Morris, New York: Ungar, 1983. See also Woodruff D. Smith: Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany 1840–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. See James Tully: Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 63–64. This point is made by Phillippe C. Schmitter in: Democracy and Constitutionalism in the European Union. ECSA Review, Spring 2000, pp. 2–7. With regard to the European Union, talk of a European people is largely unwarranted since there is neither a European ethnos in terms of a cultural community, a political community, nor a European demos constituted by its republican civic consciousness. Martin Marcussen et al.: Constructing Europe? The Evolution of Nation-State Identities. In: The Social Construction of Europe, ed. by Thomas Christiansen, Knud Erik Jørgensen and Antje Wiener. London: Sage, 2001, p. 102. Jack Citrin and Matthew Wright: E Pluribus Europa, pp. 46–47. Bernard Bruneteau: The Construction of Europe and the Concept of the Nation-State. In: Contemporary European History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (July 2000), pp. 255–56. Italy, it could be argued, also had a universalistic outlook but one of a very different sort than its French counterpart. It was rooted in what could be called the spirit of Rome, the idea of an accessible political order principally open to peoples of diverse ethnicity, religion, traditions, and culture. Martin Marcussen et al.: Constructing Europe, p. 106. De Gaulle, in some sense, can be seen to have reintroduced the interwar federalist idea of an États-Unis d’Europe which had been embraced by policy-makers of the Third Republic such as Aristide Briand and Eduard Herriot. Briand thought that between the peoples of Europe existed “une sorte de lien federal” and thus that they should be enabled to establish between them “un lien de solidarité”. See Erling Bjøl: La France devant l’Europe. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966, pp. 172–173. Direct quotation of Briand comes from Élisabeth du Réau: L’Idée d’Europe au XX e siècle: des mythes aux réalités. Brussels: Editions Complexes, 2001, p. 102, italics in the original. Ole Wæver: Three Competing Europes: German, French, Russian. In: International Affairs, Vol. 66, No. 3 (July 1990), pp. 477–493, direct quote at p. 481, italics in the original. See Martin Marcussen et al.: Constructing Europe, p. 107.

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52. Samuel Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993), p. 22; see also The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 53. Peter A. Kraus: Legitimacy, Democracy and Diversity in the European Union. In: International Journal of Multicultural Societies, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2006), pp. 203–224, and Peter A. Kraus: A Union of Diversity: Language, Identity and Polity-Building in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 251. See also Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, ed. by Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, New York: The Free Press, 1967. 54. Douglas Hartmann and Joseph Gerteis: Dealing with Diversity, pp. 218– 240, 225. 55. Article 128 of the Maastricht Treaty can plausibly be read to effectively write non-European immigrants’ cultures out of what is deemed of cultural significance and thus to be conserved and safeguarded. Art. 128, for example, stipulates that the European Community “shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity and at the same time bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore” and, if necessary, support the “improvement of the knowledge and dissemination of the culture and history of the European peoples” and the “conservation and safeguarding of cultural heritage of European significance.” 56. Monica Sassatelli: The Logic of Europeanizing Cultural Policy. In: Transcultural Europe: Cultural Policy in a Changing Europe, ed. by Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Anna Triandafyllidou. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 24–42, direct quote at p. 32. 57. Ibid., p. 25; See also Cris Shore: Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 18, 62. 58. Though the term “political union” does not appear in the text of the Maastricht Treaty, Denis J. Edwards and others have argued that it emerges from the intergovernmental agreements in Parts V and VI of the Treaty. See Edwards: Fearing Federalism’s Failure: Subsidiarity in the European Union In: The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Autumn 1996), pp. 537–583, and as cited by Edwards: Deirdre M. Curtin: The Constitutional Structure of the Union: A Europe of Bits and Pieces. In: Common Market Law Review 30 (1993). 59. Paul Valéry: The Crisis of the Mind. In: History and Politics [The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. by Jackson Mathews, Vol. 10, transl. by Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews. With a pref. by François Valery and an introd. by Salvador de Madariaga]. New York, NY: Pantheon, 1962, pp. 23–36, 26 [Orig. publ. in English, in two parts, in The Athenaeum, April 11 and May 2, 1919].

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60. Sarah Maza: Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History. In: The American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 5 (December 1996), pp. 1493–1515, 1500. 61. Victor Turner: Social Dramas and Stories About Them. In: On Narrative, ed. by W. J. Thomas Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 137–164, 164, as quoted by Maza, p. 1500. 62. On the varying impact of EU policy across its member states and policy sectors see also Svein S. Andersen and Nick Sitter: Differentiated Integration: What Is It and How Much Can the EU Accommodate? In: Journal of European Integration, Vol. 28, No. 4 (September 2006), pp. 313–330. 63. See John G. A. Pocock: What Do We Mean by Europe? In: The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Winter 1997), pp. 12–29. 64. Ibid., pp. 19 and 25. 65. Richardson as cited by Wolff, Fn 83. 66. See Larry Wolff: Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994, direct quotes at p. 84. 67. Ibid., p. 7; Larry Wolff: The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 48. 68. Guiliano Amato and Judy Batt: Final Report of the Reflection Group on the Long-term Implications of EU Enlargement: The Nature of the New Border. Florence: Robert Schuman Centre and Forward Studies Unit, EC, 1999, p. 11, quoted in JanZielonka: Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 68–69. 69. Richard Swedberg: The Idea of ‘Europe’ and the Origin of the European Union—A Sociological Approach. In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Vol. 23, No. 5 (October 1994), p. 386. 70. See Jack Citrin and Matthew Wright: E Pluribus Europa, pp. 29–53, direct quote at p. 44. 71. See Denys Hay: Europe: The Emergence of an Idea. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957, p. xvii, cited in Swedberg: The Idea of ‘Europe’, p. 383. 72. See Neil Fligstein: Euroclash: The EU, European Identity, and the Future of Europe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, with direct quote at p. 207. See also Neil Fligstein: Who Are the Europeans and How Does this Matter for Politics? In: European Identity, ed. by Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 132–166. 73. See Neil Fligstein: Euroclash, with direct quote at p. 207.

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74. Richard Münch also argues that “the new mobility [on the EU labor market] is more or less a matter of highly qualified experts in research and development.” See Richard Münch: Democracy without Demos: European Integration as a Process of the Change of Institutions and Cultures. In: Europeanisation, National Identities, and Migration: Changes in Boundary Constructions Between Western and Eastern Europe, ed. by Willfried Spohn and Anna Triandafyllidou. London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 52–82, 55. 75. Fligstein: Who Are the Europeans, p. 140. In Germany, nationwide referenda are prohibited by German Basic Law (Grundgesetz), thus requiring its prior amendment. See also: Jan-Werner Müller: After the Double No: The EU’s Best Hope. In: Boston Review, November/December 2006. 76. Fligstein: Who Are the Europeans, p. 140. 77. Karl W. Deutsch: Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality. New York: The Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1953, as cited in Fligstein, ibid., p. 135. 78. Fligstein’s arguments have been discussed in greater detail by Colin Hay, George Ross, and Wolfgang Streeck, see Review Symposium: Neil Fligstein Euroclash. In: Socio-Economic Review, Vol. 7, No. 3 (July 2009), pp. 535–552; and Adrian Favell: Euroclash: Towards a Sociology of the European Union. In: European Journal of Sociology/Archives européennes de sociologie, Vol. 49, No. 3 (December 2008), pp. 495–501. More recently, see Theresa Kuhn’s extensive analysis of survey data covering the 27 EU member states: Experiencing European Integration: Transnational Lives & European Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, which generally confirms the conclusions drawn by Fligstein. 79. See, for example, The Europe of Elites: A Study into the Europeanness of Europe’s Political and Economic Elites, ed. by Heinrich Best, György Lengyel, and Luca Verzichelli. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012; and Mabel Berezin: Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 8. 80. See Richard Handler: Is “Identity” a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept? In: Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. by John R. Gillis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 27–40. 81. See Gérard Noiriel: The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity [French Orig. Le creuset français: Histoire de l’immigration xixe-xxe siècles ], trans. by G. de Laforcade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996; and Dominique Schnapper: La France de l’intégration.Paris: Gallimard, 1991. These examples are taken from Adrian Favell: A Politics That Is Shared, Bounded, and Rooted? Rediscovering Civic Political Culture in Western Europe. In: Theory and

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Society, Vol. 27, No. 2 (April 1998), p. 214. Critically on such instrumental re-writing of French republican traditions, see Miriam Feldblum: Reconstructing Citizenship: The Politics of Nationality Reform and Immigration in Contemporary France. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Ernest Renan: Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? et autres écrits politiques. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1996. Eric R. Wolf: Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. 5. For a recent example suggesting such “red wire” between antiquity and contemporary democracy, see Robert Senelle, Emile Clément, and Edgard Van de Velde: The Road to Political Democracy: From Plato to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Brussels: Academic & Scientific Publ., 2012. Jörn Rüsen: How to Overcome Ethnocentrism: Approaches to a Culture of Recognition by History in the Twenty-First Century. In: History and Theory, Vol. 43, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 118–129. Riva Kastoryano: Negotiating Identities, p. 39. See Remi Brague: Europe, la voie romaine (Engl. trans. Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization). Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Critically see Jan Zielonka: Europe as Empire, p. 28. On the linkage of barbarism with the Oriental and the imbuing of Christianity with a specific European identity, thus turning Europe into a bastion against the non-Christian world, see Gerard Delanty: Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1995, pp. 25 ff. and, of course, Edward Said: Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. For a critique of this type of teleological continuity and mythicization of history and its theses, see John Breuilly: Nation and Nationalism in Modern German History. In: The Historical Journal, Vol. 33, No. 3 (September 1990), pp. 659–675; Walter Goffart: Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418–584: The Techniques of Accommodation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980; and Walter Goffart: Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. For a detailed discussion of the representation of political traditions, see Riva Kastoryano: Negotiating Identities, pp. 39 ff. See Samir Amin: Eurocentrism. New York: Zed, 1989, pp. 91–92, requoted in: Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 5. Christopher A. Bail. The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries Against Immigrants in Europe. In: American Sociological Review, Vol. 73, No. 1 (February 2008), pp. 37–59, 38.

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91. See European Multiculturalisms: Cultural, Religious and Ethnic Challenges, ed. by Anna Triandafyllidou, Tariq Modood and Nasar Meer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, p. 8. 92. See Simon Bornschier: Cleavage Politics and the Populist Right: The New Cultural Conflict in Western Europe. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. See also Pierre Birnbaum: From Multiculturalism to Nationalism, trans, by Tracy B. Strong, In: Political Theory, Vol. 24, No. 1 (February 1996), pp. 33–45. 93. See the discussion in Gerard Delanty: Europe as a Cold War Construction. In: Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1995, pp. 115–129; and Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford: Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 29. See also Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union, ed. by Jan Zielonka. London and New York: Routledge, 2002; and The Geopolitics of Europe’s Identity: Centers, Boundaries and Margins, ed. by Noel Parker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 94. The template, of course, is the fall of the Western Roman Empire. On the “distorting prism of Roman history” and its reinterpretation in light of European colonial imperialism, see, for example, Norman Etherington: Barbarians Ancient and Modern. In: The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 1 (February 2011), pp. 31–57. See also Peter Wagner: Roman-European Continuities: Conceptual and Historical Questions. In: The Roman Empire in Context: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. by Jóhann P. Árnason and Kurt A. Raaflaub. Chichester, West Sussex, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 387–406. 95. See Bo Stråth: Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community: Historical Patterns in Europe and Beyond. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000; and Bo Stråth: Methodological and Substantive Remarks on Myth, Memory and History, pp. 255–271. 96. Jost Dülffer: Europäische Zeitgeschichte. Narrative und historiographische Perspektiven. In: Zeithistorische Forschungen [Studies in Contemporary History]. Vol. 1, No. 1 (2004), https://www.zeithi storische-forschungen.de/16126041-Duelffer-1-2004. I owe thanks to Siegfried Weichlein for calling Dülffer’s work to my attention. 97. See Eric J. Hobsbawm: Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. London: Michael Joseph and New York: Viking Penguin, 1994; or Walter Z. Laqueur: The Rebirth of Europe: A History of the Years Since the Fall of Hitler[dt. Europa aus der Asche]. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. 98. See, for example, Andrzej Stasiuk: ‘Wild, Cunning, Exotic: The East Will Completely Shake Up Europe’ and Adam Krzeminski: First Kant, Now

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Habermas: A Polish Perspective on Core Europe. Both in: Old Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War, ed. by Daniel Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey. London: Verso, 2005. 99. See Shmuel N. Eisenstadt: Multiple Modernities. In: Daedalus, Vol. 129, No. 1 (Winter, 2000), pp. 1–29; Shmuel N. Eisenstadt: Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. Vols. 1 and 2. Leiden: Brill, 2003; and Jóhann P. Árnason: Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden: Brill, 2003. 100. Here and in the following, see Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford: Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 36–46. 101. Ibid., pp. 38, 42. The term Judeo-Christian tradition only gained currency during the mid-twentieth century, first in the United States, and initially served as an anti-fascist affirmation of a shared religious basis for Western moral values. In the United States, the massive immigration of European Catholics and Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century caused religious tensions often heightened by ethnic, social, linguistic, and cultural differences. The hostilities among ethnoreligious groups “gave way in the twentieth century to a consensus that JudeoChristian believes and teachings should be upheld as the backbone of American society.” See Geoffrey Layman: The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 5. As Swiss Zionist Josué Jéhouda further pointed out, the term is based on a ‘contradiction in abjecto’ since it “introduces a fatal element of confusion to a basis on which some, nevertheless, are endeavouring to construct a civilisation.” See Josué Jéhouda: L’Antisémitisme: miroir du monde. Genéve: Ed. Synthesis, 1958, pp. 135–136. See also Bernard Heller: About the Judeo-Christian Tradition. In: Judaism, Vol. 1, No. 3 (July 1952); Arthur A. Cohen: The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition. New York: Harper & Row, 1969; Mark Silk: Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America. In: American Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 1984), pp. 65–85; and Robert B. Coote and Mary P. Coote: Power, Politics, and the Making of the Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990. For an affirmative position see Marvin R. Wilson: Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1989, p. 23 n. 10. In recent European discourses, its meaning shifted to a kind of secular myth, providing a frame for the values that are said to be compatible with EU constitutionalization. At the same time, the term functions as an ideological tool in promoting the othering of Europe’s Muslim population. Within the United States, it has been recognized—even before 9/11 and the defeat of the Republican Party in the 2012 presidential election that

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102.

103.

104.

105.

106.

107.

108.

the outdated “moral umbrella” of a common Judeo-Christian tradition needs to give way to a new language of inclusion, recognizing Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists alike. See Kenneth L. Woodward: Losing Our Moral Umbrella. In: Newsweek, December 7, 1992. On May 1, 2004, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined the European Union while Bulgaria and Romania followed on January 1, 2007. See the contributions in Contesting Europe’s Eastern Rim: Cultural Identities in Public Discourse, ed. by Ljiljana Šari´c, Andreas Musolff, Stefan Manz and Ingrid Hudabiunigg. Bristol, UK and Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2010; and Living (with) Borders: Identity Discourses on East– West Borders in Europe, ed. by Ulrike H. Meinhof. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. See Nick Hopkins and John Dixon: Space. Place, and Identity: Issues for Political Psychology. In: Political Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 2 (April 2006), pp. 173–185, with direct quote at 176. John G. Ruggie: Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations. In: International Organization, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 139–174, 172. Christian Joerges: Working through the ‘bitter Experiences’ Towards a Purified European Identity? A Critique of the Disregard for History in European Constitutional Theory and Practice. In: Law, Democracy and Solidarity in a Post-national Union: The Unsettled Political Order of Europe, ed. by Erik Oddvar Eriksen, Christian Joerges and Florian Rödl. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 175–192. See also the special issue ‘Confronting Memories: European Bitter Experiences and the Constitutionalization Process’ of the German Law Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2005). Quoted from Wild, Cunning, Exotic: The East Will Completely Shake Up Europe. In: Old Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War, ed. by Daniel Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey. London: Verso, 2005, pp. 103–106, originally published in German in Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 20, 2003. See, for example, Jytte Klausen: The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Paul Silverstein: Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot: Race, Migration, and Immigration in the New Europe. In: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 34 (October 2005), pp. 363–384; Raphael Israeli: The Islamic Challenge in Europe. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2008; Jocelyne Cesari: The Securitization of Islam in Europe. Challenge Research Paper No. 15 (April 2009), https://www. ceps.eu/system/files/book/1826.pdf; and Arun Kundnani: The Muslims

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109.

110. 111.

112.

113.

114.

115.

116.

117.

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Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. London and New York: Verso, 2014. Thijl Sunier: Domesticating Islam: Exploring Academic Knowledge Production on Islam and Muslims in European Societies. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 37, No. 6 (2014), p. 1138. Sunier points to the quickly rising numbers of publication dealing with security issues in regard to Islam in the course of the 2000s, while the number of publications with alarmist undertones increased even more sharply. See Chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion. Lauren Collins: England, Their England: The Failure of British Multiculturalism and the Rise of the Islamophobic Right. In: The New Yorker, July 4, 2011. See, for example, Rogers Brubaker: The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2001), pp. 531–548. See Eleonore Kofman: Citizenship, Migration and the Reassertion of National Identity. In: Citizenship Studies, Vol. 9, No. 5 (November 2005), p. 464; and Ferruh Yilmaz: How the Workers Became Muslims: Immigration, Culture, and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Most prominently perhaps Bernard Lewis: The Roots of Muslim Rage. The Atlantic, September 1990; Samuel Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996; and Walter Laqueur: The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins Griffin, 2009. Matti Bunzl: Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe. In: American Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 4 (November 2005), pp. 499–508. Bernard Lewis: The Roots of Muslim Rage. The Atlantic, September 1990. See also critically Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris: The True Clash of Civilizations. In: Foreign Policy, No. 135 (March–April 2003), pp. 62–70; Michael H. Hunt: In the Wake of September 11: The Clash of What? In: The Journal of American History, Vol. 89, No. 2 (September 2002), pp. 416–425; and Akeel Bilgrami: The Clash within Civilizations. In: Daedalus, Vol. 132, No. 3 (Summer 2003), pp. 88–93. Samuel Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993), and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Renowned German historian and scholar of anti-Semitism Wolfgang Benz noted in 2009 that regarding Islamophobia “parallels to anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism are distinctive.” Jahrbuch für

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119.

120.

121.

122. 123. 124.

125.

Antisemitismusforschung, ed. by Wolfgang Benz, Vol. 17. Berlin: Metropol, 2009, p. 9. See also Bruce Crumley: Why European Conservatives Are Bashing Multiculturalism, Global Spin, February 23, 2011, https://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/02/23/why-europeanconservatives-are-bashing-multiculturalism/. For an early assessment of such tendencies, see John L. Esposito: The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, esp. pp. 168–212. More recently see Liz Fekete: A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia. London: Verso, 2009; Jonathan Lyons: Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006; Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, ed. by John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011; Nathan Lean: The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims. London: Pluto Press, 2012; Raymond Taras: Xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012; Mattias Ekman: Online Islamophobia and the Politics of Fear: Manufacturing the Green Scare. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 38, No. 11 (2015), pp. 1986–2002; and Ferruh Yilmaz: How the Workers Became Muslims: Immigration, Culture, and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Steve Garner: The European Union and the Racialization of Immigration, 1985–2006. In: Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn 2007), p. 70. Charles Taylor: The Collapse of Tolerance. In: The Guardian, September 17, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/sep/ 17/thecollapseoftolerance. Malik: The Failure of Multiculturalism, p. 21. Justin Gest: Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West. London: Hurst & Co., 2010. See Andrew Williams: EU Human Rights Policies: A Study in Irony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; and to the same effect more recently Stijn Smismans: The European Union’s Fundamental Rights Myth. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 (2010), pp. 45–66. George Howard Joffé: The EU and the Mediterranean: Open Regionalism of Peripheral Dependence? In: European Union and New Regionalism: Regional Actors and Global Governance in a Post-Hegemonic Era, ed. by Mario Telò. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 255–275, direct quote at p. 263. Ibrahim Kalin also argued that while the tenets of equal opportunity, cultural diversity, and mutual tolerance are shared by many European governments, the very same governments’ policies in

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127. 128.

129.

130.

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these areas in fact reflected quite different realities. See Ibrahim Kalin: Islamophobia and the Limits of Multiculturalism. In: Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, ed. by John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 7. George Howard Joffé: The EU and the Mediterranean, Fn 155, p. 264. See also Markus M. L. Crepaz: Trust Beyond Borders: Immigration, the Welfare State, and Identity in Modern Societies. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008, John Sides and Jack Citrin: European Opinion about Immigration: The Role of Identities, Interests and Information. In: British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 37, No. 3 (July 2007), pp. 477–504; Paul M. Sniderman, Louk Hagendoorn and Markus Prior: Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities. In: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 98, No. 1 (February 2004), pp. 35–49; and Jack Citrin and Matthew Wright: E Pluribus Europa, pp. 29–53. Monique Selim: Une Anthropoloque entre Banlieues et monde. In: Multitudes, Vol. 7, No. 27 (2007). The killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri, a twenty-six-year-old radicalized Dutch-Moroccan citizen, might be said to have had a similar effect on Dutch society. See, for example, Ian Buruma: Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Kate Zebiri: Orientalist Themes in Contemporary British Islamophobia. In: Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, ed. by John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 173–190, 186. On the relevance of Orientalist discourses in the early 2000s see also Elizabeth Poole: Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims. New York: Tauris, 2002; pp. 28–54. Compare, for example, the 1985 French romantic movie Harem by Arthur Joffé, starring Ben Kingsley and Nastassja Kinski, with the 1991 American drama Not without My Daughter for opposite ends of the spectrum. The latter movie has been strongly criticized for “its reliance on cultural stereotype,” demonization of Eastern men and viewing “fanaticism as the Iranian national character.” See Caryn James: Embrace the Stereotype, Kiss the Movie Goodbye. In: The New York Times, January 27, 1991. See, for example, Jeffrey C. Alexander: Introduction: Understanding the ‘Relative Autonomy’ of Culture. In: Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates, ed. by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 1–27, and Jeffrey

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132.

133.

134. 135. 136.

C. Alexander and Philip Smith: The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics. In: Jeffrey C. Alexander: The Meaning of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 11–26. A fitting example is the term “Islamo-fascism.” On the term’s genealogy, see Anthony James Gregor: The Search for Neofascism: The Use and Abuse of Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 166–196. Gregor states that if, for example, the term fascism could credibly be applied to the authoritarian regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in post-revolutionary Egypt, it needs to be recognized that Nasser forcefully suppressed Islamic fundamentalism whenever its proponents’ views infringed on the political system. In 1960, Hannah Arendt, in a letter to Karl Jaspers on the Eichmann-trial, expressed her apprehension that for political purposes the trial aimed to transpose the singular Nazi crimes on to the Middle East and insert their symbolism into the context of the Arab–Israeli struggle. (I’m grateful to Idith Zertal for pointing this out to me.) See Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992, p. 416. Interestingly, the term has largely disappeared from political and academic discourse over the last decade and has only randomly been applied to ISIS/ISIL. Commentators speculated whether the term’s decreasing usage was due to its dubiousness in a historical but also analytical sense or because of fears of unnecessarily alienating Muslims around the globe. The currently preferred alternative term seems to be “radical Islamic terrorism.” For a more recent usage, see Hamed AbdelSamad: Islamic Fascism[German Orig. Der Islamische Faschismus: Eine Analyse(2014)]. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2016; and the analysis in Tamir Bar-On: ‘Islamofascism’: Four Competing Discourses on the Islamism-Fascism Comparison. In: Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2018), pp. 241–274. It is used here in its strict nominal sense in the absence of a better term. As such it is not suggestive of a monolithic bloc but should be read as a heterogeneous category. For a brief analysis of how “Muslim” as category of self- and other-identification has changed over recent decades, see Rogers Brubaker: Categories of Analysis and Categories of Practice: a Note on the Study of Muslims in European Countries of Immigration. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (January 2013), pp. 1–8. See also the more detailed discussion in Chapter 4. See Jørgen Nielsen: Muslims in Western Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, pp. 8–100. Ibid., pp. 101–120.

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137. Jonathan Laurence: The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 4; UK 2011 Census: Religion, local authorities in England and Wales, Office for National Statistics, Table No. KS209EW; https://www.bradford.gov.uk/bmdc/community_and_ living/population; For individual country profiles of 12 European nations see also https://www.euro-islam.info/country-profiles/. 138. See, for example, Lorenzo Vidino: The Tripartite Threat of Radical Islam to Europe. In: inFocus, (Winter) 2007; Robert S. Leiken: Europe”s Angry Muslims. In: Foreign Affairs, Vol 84, Number 4 (July/August 2005); Francis Fukuyama: Europe vs. Radical Islam. In: Slate Magazine, Feb 27, 2007;and Liz Fekete: Anti-Muslim Racism and the European Security State. In: Race and Class, Vol. 46, Number 1 (2004), pp. 3–29. 139. Esra Özyürek: The Politics of cultural unification, secularism, and the place of Islam in the New Europe. In: American Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2005). pp. 509–512. 140. In France, it is noticeably the Nouveaux Philosophes such as Pascal Bruckner and Bernard-Henry Lévy who have attacked Islamophobia as a myth supposedly playing on colonial feelings of guilt and a means of intimidating liberal Muslims. See Pascal Bruckner: L’invention de l’islamophobie. In: Libération, November 23, 2010; L’islam doit être critique. In: Le Monde, October 31, 2013; and The Tyranny of Guilt [orig. La Tyrannie de la Pénitence: Essai sur le Masochisme Occidental]. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. More generally see From the Far Right to the Mainstream: Islamophobia in Party Politics and the Media, ed. by Humayun Ansari and Farid Hafez. Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus, 2012. For the United States, in an analysis of New York Times headlines, Bleich et al. could not discern a long-term shift toward negativity in tone in the coverage of Islam and Muslims following terrorist attacks. See Erik Bleich, Hasher Nisar, and Rana Abdelhamid: The Effect of Terrorist Events on Media Portrayals of Islam and Muslims: Evidence from New York Times headlines, 1985–2013. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 39, No. 7 (2016), pp. 1109–1127. 141. Fred Halliday: Islamophobia Reconsidered. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 22, No. 5 (1999), pp. 892–902. 142. Walter Laqueur: The Last Days of Europe, p. 80. 143. Ibid., pp. 80–81. Laqueur probably thought of the Inuit of Greenland rather than the Yupik of Siberia and Alaska. 144. Ibid., p. 43. The allusion is to Theodore Dalrymple’s 2002 piece “The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris: Surrounding the City of Light are threatening Cities of Darkness”, https://www.city-journal.org/html/ barbarians-gates-paris-12378.html. 145. Ibid., p. 11.

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146. See, for example, Eric Zemmour: Le suicide français, who popularized earlier ideas of Renaud Camus’s La Grande Déculturation and Le Changement de Peuple and entertained dystopian scenarios of a coming civil war. See also Pascal Bruckner: The Tyranny of Guilt [orig. La Tyrannie de la Pénitence: Essai sur le Masochisme Occidental]. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010; Tilo Sarrazin: Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen [Germany Abolishes Itself: How We Are Jeopardizing Our Country]. München: DVA, 2010; Bat Ye’or: Europa und das kommende Kalifat: Islam und die Radikalisierung der Demokratie [Europe and the Coming Kalifat: Islam and the Radicalization of Democracy]. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2013; Seyran Ates: Der Mulitkulti-Irrtum [Mistaken Multiculturalism]. Berlin: Ullstein, 2007; among many others. 147. Malik: The Failure of Multiculturalism, p. 32. 148. See Bernard Gainer: The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905. London: Heinemann, 1972. 149. Walter Laqueur: After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2012, pp. 138–139. 150. https://www.islamophobiaeurope.com/reports/2015/en/EIR_2015. pdf. 151. Anthony M. Messina: The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration, pp. 5–6. Jonathan Laurence also suggests that the recent anti-Islam backlash is “a natural counterpart to the historic process of Muslim integration into European politics and society.” See Laurence: The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims, p. xviii. 152. Jocelyne Cesari: Why the West Fears Islam: An Exploration of Muslims in Liberal Democracies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. xiv. 153. See Steven Vertovec: Transnationalism and Identity. In: Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (October 2001), pp. 573–582, 575. 154. Justin Gest: Apart, pp. 123, 192–193. 155. Arjun Appadurai: Sovereignty Without Territoriality: Notes for a PostNational Geography. In: The Geography of Identity, ed. by Patricia Yeager. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996, p. 57. 156. Riva Kastoryano: The Invention of the Cultural. In: Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France in Germany. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 85–98. 157. See, for example, Ceri Peach: The Muslim population of Great Britain. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1990), pp. 414–419; and Tahir Abbas: Muslim Minorities in Britain: Integration, Multiculturalism and Radicalism in the Post-7/7 Period. In: Journal of Intercultural

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159. 160. 161.

162. 163.

164. 165.

166. 167.

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Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2007), pp. 287–300. For an early commentary on the Rushdie affair see Malise Ruthven:A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Rage of Islam. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990. Nicole Falkenhayner: The Other Rupture of 1989: The Rushdie Affair as the Inaugural Event of Post-Secular Conflict. In:Global Society, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2010), 111–132; see also Making the British Muslim: Representations of the Rushdie Affair and Figures of the War-on-Terror Decade. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Nilüfer Göle: The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004, pp. 83–130. Ferruh Yilmaz: How the Workers Became Muslims. For Germany see also Rita Chin: The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; and Gökçe Yurdakul: From Guest Workers into Muslims: The Transformation of Turkish Immigrant Associations in Germany. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Ferruh Yilmaz: How the Workers Became Muslims, esp. pp. 59–63, 138ff. See Hans-Georg Betz and Susi Meret: Right-Wing Populist Parties and the Working-Class Vote: What Have You Done for Us Lately? In: Class Politics and the Radical Right, ed. by Jens Rydgren. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 107–121, direct quote at 118, quoted in Yilmaz: How Workers Became Muslims, p. 139. For a discussion from the Nordic countries see Jens Rydgren: Radical Right-Wing Populism in Denmark and Sweden: Explaining Party System Change and Stability. In: SAIS Review of International Affairs, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2010), pp. 57–71; and Laurie McIntosh: Impossible Presence: Race, Nation and the Cultural Politics of ‘Being Norwegian’. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2015), pp. 309–325. Liz Fekete: A Suitable Enemy, p. 2. See John E. Richardson: (Mis)representing Islam: The Racism and Rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004, p. 13. Ibid., direct quotes at p. 231, italics in the original. Elizabeth Poole: Reporting Islam, p. 251. In such re-coded form the Orientalist discourse, Elizabeth Poole further argued, continued to be a “contemporary force.” Christopher A. Bail: The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries Against Immigrants in Europe. In: American Sociological Review, Vol. 73, No. 1 (February 2008), pp. 37–59. Bail: The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries against Immigrants in Europe, p. 54 ff.

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170. See Christian Joppke: Citizenship between De- and Re-Ethnicization. In: Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos, ed. by Gökçe Yurdakul and Y. Michal Bodemann. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 85. 171. See also Carmen González-Enríquez: Spain: Irregularity as a Rule. In: Irregular Migration in Europe: Myths and Realities, ed. by Anna Triandafyllidou. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 247–266. 172. There is at least one caveat to Bail’s approach concerning the question under what situational circumstances symbolic boundaries become the main driver of social action. Bail’s study remains wedded to the European nation-state as category of analysis whereas (a) European integration might result in the same space of belonging being constructed by different groups in different ways; (b) there is growing gap between the increasing importance of more informal, socio-culturally based notions of citizenship (the relationship of individuals and their immediate communities), and the formal political institution (citizenship regimes) of both the European nation-state and the transnational union; and c) private difference may be tolerated as long as it is not pushed into the public sphere. 173. Rodney Benson: Shaping Immigration News: A French-American Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 112– 113. 174. Nabil Echchaibi: Republican Betrayal: Beur FM and the Suburban Riots in France. In: Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2007); pp. 301–316. See also Raymond Taras: Xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 50–61. 175. Based on extensive data, French sociologist Hugues Lagrange controversially argued in 2010 that in fact culturally based factors had a greater explanatory power than socio-economic ones regarding the disproportionately high delinquency rates of immigrants. See Les déni des cultures [The Denial of Culture]. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2010. 176. See Timothy B. Smith: France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality and Globalization Since 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 54–56. 177. See Riva Kastoryano: Territories of Identities in France, at https://riotsf rance.ssrc.org/Kastoryano/. 178. See Manuel Valls évoque “un apartheid territorial, social, ethnique” en France. In: Le Monde, April 7, 2016, https://www.lemonde.fr/politi que/article/2015/01/20/pour-manuel-valls-il-existe-un-apartheid-ter ritorial-social-ethnique-en-france_4559714_823448.html. 179. Naomi Davidson: Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012, p. 4. 180. Ibid., p. 2. 181. Ibid., p. 3.

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182. Davidson: Only Muslim, p. 5. 183. Ibid., p. 11, italics in the orig. 184. IFOP (pour Le Figaro): Regards croisés sur l’Islam en France en Allemagne, JFN° 113,870, IFOP, Département Opinion et Stratégies d’Entreprise, April 2016. Accessible online at https://www.euro-islam. info/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/IFOP-Figaro.pdf. 185. Esra Özyürek: Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 8–9. See also Ahmet Yükleyen: Localizing Islam in Europe: Turkish Islamic Communities in Germany and the Netherlands. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012, pp. 152ff. 186. Jonathan Laurence: The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims, pp. 1, 7, 38. 187. Ibid., pp. 1–12, 69, 245–246. In Germany, for example, the administrative attempt to discern the number of Muslims conceptualized Muslims as an ethno-racial rather than religious group. See Esra Özyürek: Being German, Becoming Muslim, p. 16. 188. Bundespräsidialamt: “Valuing Diversity—Fostering Cohesion”, speech by Christian Wulff, President of the Federal Republic of Germany, to mark the twentieth anniversary of German Unity on 3 October 2010 in Bremen The English translation of the speech can be accessed at https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/ChristianWulff/Reden/2010/10/20101003_Rede_Anlage2.pdf?__blob=public ationFile&v=4. 189. See Programm für Deutschland: Grundsatzprogramm der Alternative für Deutschland, Stuttgart April 30/May 01, 2016. See also Kate Connolly: Frauke Petry: Smiling Face of Germany’s Resurgent Right. In: The Guardian, February 7, 2016, and Michael White: Germany’s AfD needs to learn history’s lesson all over again. In: Guardian, political blocs, March 14, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2016/mar/14/germanys-afd-bad-politics-allowed-in-these-bad-politi cians; and Petry will abgelehnte Asylbewerber auf Inseln abschieben. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 13, 2016, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/ politik/afd-petry-will-abgelehnte-asylbewerber-auf-inseln-abschieben-1. 3120457. 190. See Ferruh Yilmaz: How the Workers Became Muslims, pp. 190– 198; John Carvel: Opposition to Immigrants Hardens Under Blair: Liberal Intelligentsia Want more Curbs. In: The Guardian, 7 December 2004; and Bruce Crumley: Why European Conservatives Are Bashing Multiculturalism, Global Spin, February 23, 2011, https://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/02/23/why-europeanconservatives-are-bashing-multiculturalism/.

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191. Maria Stehle: White Ghettos: The ‘Crisis of Multiculturalism’ in postunification Germany. In: European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2012), pp. 167–181, 170. 192. Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley: The Crisis of ‘Multiculturalism’ in Europe: Mediated Minarets, Intolerable Subjects. In: European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2012), pp. 123–138, p. 124. 193. Ibid. 194. Alain Badiou: The Meaning of Sarkozy. London: Verso, 2008. See also Nina Power and Alberto Toscano: The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May. In: Boundary 2, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 27–46. 195. Jonathan Laurence: The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims, p. 7. 196. Matti Bunzl: Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, 506. 197. Christian Joppke: Veil: Mirror of Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009, pp. 109–112. 198. See Chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion. 199. Joceyline Cesari: Shari’a and the Future of Secular Europe. In: Muslims in the West after 9/11: Religion, Politics and Law, ed. by Joceyline Cesari. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 145–175, 162. 200. The reference is to Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. trans. by George D. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 [expanded edition 2007, with an introd. by Tracy B. Strong], in which Schmitt draws an existential distinction between friend and enemy and claims that all politics can be reduced to these poles. 201. Yael Tamir: Liberal Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 54. 202. Arun Kundnani: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents: Left, Right and Liberal. In: European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2012), pp. 155–166, direct quotes at 156, 158. 203. Ibid. 204. Alana Lentin: Post-Race, Post Politics: The Paradoxical Rise of Culture after Multiculturalism. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 37, No. 18 (2014), pp. 1268–1285, 1280. It is on the basis of such differentialist racism constructing objectified categories of Otherness that German Islam critic and writer Ralph Giordano could speak of “secularized Muslims” without even noting the paradox. See Ralph Giordano: Wortlaut. In: Kölner Stadtanzeiger, June 1, 2007. Giordano claimed to be on the side of all secularized Muslims willing, by means of reform [of Islam], to clear the way for integration. 205. Esra Özyürek: Being German, Becoming Muslim, p. 5. 206. Edward W. Said: Orientalism. New York: Penguin, 2003, p. 283. 207. Ibid.

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208. Ian Almond: The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard. London: Tauris, 2007, pp. 196, italics in the original. 209. Said: Orientalism, p. 255. However, as Robert Irwin points out, the “arbitrary chronological and topographical limits suggested by Said” have led him to “ignore almost entirely the French presence in North Africa and the close collusion that existed there between colonial administrators, academics and artists [and, as a result,] undermined and deformed the account given by Said of French Orientialism, as he relied excessively on the interpretation of a few romantic literary works.” Robert Irwin: The Real Discourses of Orientalism. In: After Orientalism: Critical Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Re-appropriations, ed. by François Pouillon and Jean-Claude Vatin. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015, pp. 18–30, 18. 210. Thijl Sunier: Domesticating Islam, pp. 1138–1155. 211. Ibrahim Kalin: Islamophobia and the Limits of Multiculturalism. In: Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, ed. by John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 5–6. See also Kathleen D. Hall: ‘You Can’t Be Religious and Be Westernized.’ In: Lives in Translation: Sikh Youth as British Citizens. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, pp. 148–169. 212. The meanwhile classic text is Robert A. Dahl: Polyarchy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971. 213. Adrian Favell: A Politics That Is Shared, Bounded, and Rooted? Rediscovering Civic Political Culture in Western Europe. In: Theory and Society, Vol. 27, No. 2 (April 1998), p. 218. Favell lists “an accent on constitutionalism and rights in a bounded political community; a conception of the public sphere in which public virtues are distinguished from private interests; shared principles that all, including culturally diverse members of the polity, can consciously give their consent to; a plea for a more active citizenship participation, competence and transparency.”. 214. Raymond Aron: Old Nations, New Europe. In: Daedalus, Vol. 93, No. 1 (Winter 1964), pp. 43–66, 53. 215. I discuss the impact of postcolonial migration in greater detail in Chapter 4. 216. Feyzi Baban: Cosmopolitanism from the Margins: Redefining the Idea of Europe through Postcoloniality. In: Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts, Practices and Politics, ed. by Sandra Ponzanesi and Gianmaria Colpani. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, pp. 371–390, 386. 217. On a more general level, this covered recourse to a set of particular norms and values also defines the limits to the transnationalization

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218.

219.

220.

221.

222. 223.

224.

of liberal democracy. See Ulrich Haltern: Europarecht: Dogmatik im Kontext. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007 (2nd. rev. ed.), pp 599–656, esp. margin no. 1359 ff. I borrow the term from Silvano Santiago: The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture, ed. by Ana Lúcia Gazzola. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 25–38. See, for example, Beda Magyar: Hungary Is Lost. In: Die Zeit, 9 April 2019, https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2019-04/europeanunion-hungary-democracy-viktor-orban-english/komplettansicht. Beda Magyar is a pseudonym. On the European Parliament’s decision to trigger an art. 7 TEU sanction procedure against Hungary see Klaus Bachmann: Beyond the Spectacle: The European Parliament’s Article 7 TEU Decision on Hungary. In: VerfBlog, September 17, 2018, https://verfassungsblog.de/beyond-the-spectaclethe-european-parliaments-article-7-teu-decision-on-hungary/, https:// doi.org/10.17176/20180917-123637-0. Helsinki European Council, Millennium Declaration, Presidency Conclusions, Annex 1, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/hel2_en. htm. See Thomas Risse: A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010, pp. 127– 56. See the brief discussion in Chapter 3. See the discussion in Marla Brettschneider: Democratic Theorizing from the Margins. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002, esp. pp. 136– 172. Brettschneider: Democratic Theorizing from the Margins, p. 155. I discuss this issue in relation to multiculturalist politics of recognition in Chapter 5.

CHAPTER 3

Citizenship in a Post-migrant Europe: Socio-Political Cohesion at Breaking Point?

It could have been such a pristine success story of catharsis and pioneering political engineering; of a new Europe arising out of the infernal of near self-destruction to collectively sought forms of responsible, cooperative governance transcending its nations and, more importantly still, its nationalisms, of lessons learned and grievances put aside. “And why,” ask Winston Churchill in 1946, “should there not be a European group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship to the distracted peoples of this turbulent and mighty continent?”1 And although the plausibility of framing the history of the European Union in this way cannot be outright denied, the 2005 French and Dutch “No” in the referendum on the Treaty establishing a European Constitution left a massive stain on any such narrative. Popular disapproval made clear that European integration had not been a grassroots democratic process transparent to the respective electorates of the member states but above all a project of political and bureaucratic elites.2 After the French and Dutch rejection of the treaty Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Žižek somewhat reversed the question by asking: “Who – if anyone – will translate it [the French and Dutch No] into a coherent alternate political vision?”3 Whatever the original reasons might have been—an analogy drawn from the American colonies that originally formed a federal union; the reconciliation between the European nations; © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. M. Michael, Migration and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Europe, Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64069-9_3

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the end of the age of nationalism; the cultural unity of Western European civilization; the creation of a single market; or the fear of Soviet military domination and, hence, the need for a European military union4 — today the rationale and normative justification for creating an ever closer union remain vague at best and at its worst an exercise in institutional self-vindication.5 Since the European sovereign debt crisis the phantom of disintegration has surfaced with increasing frequency, most often regarding speculations about Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish euro exits with Greece being the most enduring candidate. However, the preliminary apogee was reached with the Brexit-referendum of June 23, 2016, in which 51.9% of the British electorate voted to leave the European Union. Anxieties over immigration were the dominant issue in the British “Vote Leave” campaign. Those who voted to leave seemed most concerned not with the overall numbers of migrants but with high rates of change in the composition of the population.6 Where foreign-born populations more than doubled between 2001 and 2014 even if the overall proportion of migrants remained relatively low, a leave vote followed in 94% of cases.7 In recounting a conversation from his sustained 5 years ethnological fieldwork in Western London, Gerd Baumann illustrated the absurdity of the muddled, yet dominant discourse of ethnic reductionism. It is worth quoting here: ‘See my friend Jas here’, said Phil, an Englishman, and pointed to his drinking mate at the Railway Tavern bar, ‘he’s an Asian, but he’s born in Africa, so I’d say he’s an African. And me. I was born in Burma, so I’m the Asian here, aren’t I. And Winston here, you think he’s a West Indian: he’s the only one of us born in this town [Southall, London], so he’s the Englishman born and bred!’.8

This chapter divides into four sections. It explores the notion that intellectual, political, and administrative elites have pushed European integration not only beyond the will of their people but also beyond the limits of cohesion of the Euro zone in social, political, and possibly also economic terms.9 Concerted efforts of political symbolism did not manage to secure a degree of loyalty on the European level even remotely comparable to that commanded by the nation-state. Analysis further suggests that there are at least two, rather independent, layers to the European project in the twenty-first century: one concerning common economic and security interests and the other, historically younger one, concerning

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the scope of inclusion in terms of a European identity discussed in the previous chapter. The second section looks at the way in which questions of cultural difference as fundamental barriers to integration and social cohesion have persistently moved to the center of popular attention. The section thus takes a closer look at resulting European and national dynamics and aims to structure and reflect them theoretically. In consequence, neo-nationalisms appear as ambivalent phenomena which, in a structural sense, the EU has helped to produce while at the same time re-empowered itself through them. The third section discusses the changing system of political boundaries since the 1990s and its effects on the meaning, scope, and future prospects of putatively emerging forms of European citizenship as the prime political manifestation of internal cohesion. While to speak of European citizenship makes some sense in terms of a de-territorialization of sovereignty, the rights and practices and symbols of citizenship continue to be tightly interwoven with the institutional matrix of the nation-state. Finally, the concluding section aims to evaluate the profound impact and possible future consequences of the dynamics discussed in the preceding sections in light of both, the Syrian refugee crisis and the earlier sovereign debt crisis. It clearly illuminates the utopian character of the notion of European citizenship and the constitutive paradox inherent in the political architecture of the European Union. It also offers tentative suggestions regarding the possible emergence and shape of emancipatory sites able to redefine the notion of political membership and reconfigure the meaning of belonging.

Political Elites Versus the People French historian Bernard Bruneteau identified three main motives for the enthusiastic but equivocal support for the 1951 Treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (Treaty of Paris) by the “inner six”: to exploit European integration for the benefit of national economic potential; to use the competitive threat of the larger European market to reduce archaisms and regularize the economy at home; and the possibility to pass the burden of restructuring costs on to a European level. In fact, the new Europe had not been the only union imagined by post-war European nations. For example, French officials of the Fourth Republic aiming to secure France’s imperial grip on its overseas territories envisaged a French Union by turning French colonies into overseas départements and governing the union through a federal assembly.

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In this sense, Bruneteau argues, European integration from its beginning was based more on self-interested, determinedly nationalistic calculations and negotiating strategies of its signatories than on any grand moral or humanistic rationale which, for example, surfaces today in form of the self-conscious, narrative construction of human rights as a founding principle of the European Union.10 It is important to note that while within Europe important lessons were seemingly learned, World War II did not do away with European imperialist outlooks.11 The decline and subsequent loss of empire in Belgium, Britain, France, or the Netherlands resulted in a reinterpretation of postwar postcolonial migration as both a new and unprecedented “white man’s burden.”12 It therefore transported resilient colonial mentalities of colonial inferiority into the heart of European societies where the sudden proximity and permanent settlement of large numbers of former colonial subjects lead to cultural anxieties and a “destructive prevalence” of racism.13 On the contrary, each nation sought to model a united Europe on its own political culture. The welcome byproduct, of course, was that European cooperation fostered national consensus by “calming factional demands, glossing over ideological divisions and transcending regional separatism.”14 The question of how a shared sense of justice beyond the nation-state could be sustained was closely linked with the question of what shape and political culture an emerging integrated Europe would adopt.15 The ignorance and failure of technocratic elites spurring economic and legal integration to engage in a substantive, popular debate regarding this question has long contributed to a strong sense of uncertainty, disorientation, and political apathy among Europeans.16 Throughout the 1990s national political elites had, for strategic reasons, tried to keep the issue of further EU enlargement out of the public debate. Only in the beginning of the 2000s did the EU embark on a communication campaign in order to eliminate the public’s fears concerning enlargement, albeit leaving no room in the process for the public’s opposition to be incorporated.17 This attitude is particularly striking in view of the continuous decline in voter turnout in elections to the European Parliament but, in a structural sense, also held clear incentives for the elites driving integration. As ambitious and straightforward cooperative projects were difficult to realize against competing national agendas, the ambiguity and vagueness of cooperative agreements had the benefit of deferring inter-elite conflict and reducing the likelihood of deceleration of the integrative project through public debate within the respective national constituencies.18

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The main reasons for this ignorance on the part of elites can be seen in a near exclusive focus on system integration (institutional level of states, law and markets following instrumental rationality) while disregarding social integration (cultural, social, normative level articulated in communicative and symbolic form) or simply in presupposing an understanding of European integration as system integration while, at the same time, assuming that system integration would quasi-naturally translate into social and cultural cohesion.19 Three further assumptions, Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks argued, were linked with this elitecentered, spill-over theory of integration: (1) that the integration process was “largely a non-issue for the public” and therefore “incapable of providing a stable structure of electoral incentives for party positioning,” (2) that European integration had “little influence on party competition,” and (3) that the issues raised by European integration were “sui generis,” and therefore “unrelated to the basic conflicts that structure political competition.”20 Over the last two decades, each of these assumptions has proven inaccurate. Equally problematic has been the assumption of a transformative impact of system integration on national institutions in terms of slowly “Europeanizing” the behavior and attitude of national and regional agents, itself already a scaled-back version of the spill-over approach.21 Günter Verheugen, the EU Commissioner for Enlargement in the Prodi Commission between 1999 and 2004, realized as much when he stated in 2000 that administrative elites cannot run integration “behind the backs of people.”22 However, both the EU leaders’ reaction to the European sovereign debt crisis and a lingering Greek euro exit throughout 2012/2013 and again 2014/2015 (as well as the way the financial stabilization mechanism was agreed by executive authority) again focused entirely on system integration and stabilization while disregarding the social, political, and symbolic costs this entailed for the cohesion of the Euro zone. The question whether political elites have pushed European integration “beyond the will of the people,” that is, whether there’s a rift between elites and public preferences regarding European integration has been surprisingly sparsely investigated.23 Liesbet Hooghe further suggested that, contrary to general perceptions of a substantial divide between the public and elites (which are also in line with the standard measures of support for European integration), a different picture emerges when the integration process is being disaggregated into its policy components. Whereas aggregate measures of affective support24 or input legitimacy25

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map just the assumed gap with 93% of national elites compared to 53% of the public displaying a positive attitude toward EU membership and 89% of national elites compared to 52% of the public viewing EU membership as beneficial, this gap is far less significant when attitudes are disaggregated for individual component policies. When disaggregated, the mean level of support among Commission officials is 65%, 56% for national elites, and 53% for the public. National elites and Commission officials lead public opinion in policy areas concerned with core sovereignty such as foreign policy, immigration, defense, and monetary policy whereas they trail public opinion—sometimes by a wide margin—in market regulation and redistributive policy areas such as social inclusion, regional policy, health, and education. In these social policy areas, public support for European integration is higher than elite support.26 As Hooghe put it: Elites desire a European Union capable of governing a large, competitive market and projecting political muscle; citizens are more in favor of a caring European Union, which protects them from the vagaries of capitalist markets. They support different aspects of European integration. […] Elite preferences do not follow this logic. Instead, their views are consistent with a functional rationale, which conceives European integration as an optimal solution for internalizing externalities beyond the national state and for reaping economies of scale. The policies elites want to Europeanize most are the ones predicted by functionalism … [but] this logic of functionality does not explain citizens’ preferences.27

In this perspective, two examples where elites have pursued major policies against the preferences and sustained contestation of their constituencies thus present less of a surprise: the introduction of the common European currency, the euro, on the one hand, and the 2004 and 2007 eastern enlargements of the EU on the other.28 Juan Díez Medrano further suggested that the 2005 constitutional crisis attested to “a mismatch between elite consensus and citizen divisions on its cultural and social agenda,” as well as to “divisions between national political elites regarding the transfer of sovereignty to the EU.”29 He concluded that the way in which the constitutional crisis has been resolved was suggestive of a strong temptation for EU-elites to continue to favor the depoliticization of the EU, for example through the use of backdoor bargains.30 If anything, this trend toward depoliticization has been considerably reinforced by the handling of the sovereign debt crisis.

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It however has completely failed the EU in terms of its management of the Syrian refugee crisis and subsequent political repercussions since 2015. Particularly in terms of Europe’s immigration and asylum policies depoliticization as a means of crisis resolution not only has failed but severely backfired on mainstream political parties. It benefitted anti-EU, anti-immigration populist parties and increased conflict between individual member states governments and the EU. The Syrian refugee crisis clearly marked the limits of internalizing conflict and resolving it without spill-over into wider public debate. National political elites demonized Brussels (as in the case of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s harsh anti-EU rhetoric) sharply contested the EU’s authority (as in Hungary’s and Slovakia’s legal challenge at the European Court of Justice of the refugee quota scheme championed by Germany, Italy, and Brussels) and asserted the sovereignty of their national electorates in the matter (by means of questioning the EU’s democratic legitimacy). The differential history and local cultures of the member states that had largely been disregarded by neo-functionalist approach now exerted a decisive influence on how national governments and populations responded to EU immigration policies. Especially so to the EU-set quota scheme for the inner-EU re-distribution of refugees. The stubborn refusal of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic to implement the EU’s “re-distribution law” led then President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, to warn that this was “a crucial moment for the European Union. If we will not facing [sic] that challenge, the deeper split of the Union is a risk we cannot exclude.”31 It is almost ironic that a comparatively small number of refugees from the Syrian theaters of civil war (as measured by the total population of the EU) should have triggered what a full-blown economic crisis could not: to push the EU to the brink of disintegration. From a historical point of view, the concept of European integration was intended to designate an emerging phenomenon that went beyond mere cooperation, the construction of a new entity with a processual character and transformative connotation. More importantly, the concept of integration was embedded in a symbolic context—the shared postwar memory of fear—and soon understood as an evolutionary development, one that set Western Europe apart from Soviet controlled Europe. In their emphasis on liberal market economies and universal welfare, Western European visions of democracy and European integration were little problematized because when seen against Eastern Europe’s authoritarian regimes both seemed unambiguous and well-defined. This understanding

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of integration, however, soon became ruptured as the political economy was increasingly exposed to severe strains during the 1970s and the ability of states to politically control their own national economies continually eroded. It was at this point, when the market-driven project of European integration was at stake, that the concept of identity emerged. The concept of European identity as a vehicle for cohesion was advanced and elaborated first at the Copenhagen European Community summit in December 1973. Yet, even this new interpretative framework eroded shortly after the end of the Cold War when the violent disintegration of former Yugoslavia put a definite end to its capacity as an orienting vision of cohesion. It was then, that the idea of a European Constitution emerged to, Bo Stråth put it, “conjure up a ‘community’, it can be seen as a new link in the chain of integration and identity.”32 Following the Convention on the Future of Europe between February 2002 and July 2003 three normatively distinct option for the future European Union emerged. These options followed different rationalities as distinct strategies and “ideal types of polity formation.”33 They ranged from (1) an instrumental logic seeing the EU as mere problem-solving entity premised on derived legitimacy through nation-state democracy and a narrow economic, stake-holder type of European citizenship entailing little re-distribution on the European level; to (2) a contextual logic conceiving the EU as a value-based community “in which the different national modes of allegiance and identification are to be harmonized,” thus relying on common socio-cultural or ethical-cultural identity in order to secure trust as well as a basis of European citizenship; up to (3) a communicative logic conceiving the EU as a “polity sui generis,” that is a rights-based, post-national union grounded in full political citizenship and direct legitimation through a European demos. All of the options vary considerably in scope, ambition, and focus, each incorporating a different understanding of the meaning of democratic politics and the shape of a European public sphere. Eriksen and Fossum analytically condensed these differing visions and strategies into three corresponding conceptual pairs: instrumental/efficiency, contextual/identity, and communicative/justice.34 In the first pair, the EU’s legitimacy depends on its problem-solving capacity and the promotion of its member states’ interests and, thus, has clear limits. This type of integration is functional and cooperation is managed through intergovernmental institutions. In the second pair, legitimacy is derived from a successfully established shared identity and common

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value basis. Further democratization following the contextual logic is possible but essentially premised on a republican-type, reciprocal recognition as fellow citizens and the successful establishment of solidarity on a European level. The last pair, perhaps, is politically the most ambitious one of the three. Here the EU is in need of direct legitimation and a firm foundation of basic rights and democratic procedures for deliberation and decision-making. Any form of mediated legitimacy, channeled from national governments to EU decision-making forums, will not suffice for this vision of a true European polity. Yet, precisely this third option, the Habermasian pursuit of post-national European political deliberation35 where citizenship and nationality have been divorced, is, in Eriksen and Fossum’s view, normatively the most promising vision. Next to a rights-based procedural notion of legitimation and a cosmopolitan conception of democracy which sees democracy both as an organizational arrangement and a principle of legitimation regarding institutionalized decision making, this perspective includes a notion of EU citizenship. As Eriksen and Fossum put it, only deliberation can ensure democratic legitimacy and thus “the quest for a European public sphere (or a set of strongly overlapping publics) is of utmost importance” for democracy.36 However, in modification of the Habermasian position, Eriksen and Fossum conclude that full parliamentarization will require the transformation of EU member states into federal political entities akin to the German Länder in the German federal model with the European Parliament as “a full-fledged parliament and the Council a ‘second’ chamber and co-legislator” instead of a federation of nation-states with the Council as the main legislative body.37 With the Lisbon treaty considerable progress has been made in this direction, albeit with little attempt at creating spaces for a more direct political participation or the introduction of groups rights into the proto-liberal structural institutional make-up of the EU. Elections to the European Parliament paradoxically continue to be largely dominated by national issues while European discourses and contentious political decisions have rarely surfaced in party’s EU election campaigns. This dynamic should give all the more cause for concern since it coincides with a continuous shift of powers from national parliaments to the EU and, thus, a strengthening of national executive powers, that is, a removal of EU politics from accountability and control.38 There is, of course, another reason, why culture talk and identity politics have somewhat taken center stage in Europe. The tension between

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territorial nation-states and globalization along with the declining importance of territory as a source of power have led to both, a proliferation of transnational networks of de-territorialized communities39 and an even stronger regionalism.40 This, however, does not mean the end of territorial politics but a shifting of focus away from the territorially defined nation-state to regions, no longer confined within national borders. Globalization, European integration, and political decentralization have also transformed the individual hierarchy of identities and thereby altered the shape of and boundaries between European communities of belonging. From the point of political psychology, the pivotal question of EU integration is not only whether democracy can be dissociated from its Westphalian foundation41 but also whether the gap between the increasing importance of more informal, socio-culturally based notions of citizenship, of the relationship of individuals and their immediate communities, or the highly abstract notion of a post-national constitutional patriotism can be bridged. Since the EU’s 2005 constitutional crisis, two divisions have become increasingly visible: a mismatch between the political elites’ conception of the EU and those of a significant part of citizens and, secondly, a strong disagreement among national leaders regarding the EU’s political identity and division of power between both the nation-states and the EU (the transfer of sovereignty) and among the various EU institutions. While political elites have promoted a republican rather than a cultural political identity for the EU and pushed the question of the EU’s social dimension into the background, this has left considerable segments of the population alienated and fearful of the EU’s growing cultural diversity.42 This again illustrates differences in terms of how elites and electorates perceive, define, and frame threats to European cohesion and link those to visions of the European project and the values of the EU. The fact that there is no European demos in any substantive political sense and that the resilience and future direction of the EU continues to depend strongly on the will, attitudes and political rationales of elites, national political arenas nevertheless provide certain checks against elite overreach. As pointed out above, national citizens remain national in their focus on European issues and thus force national politicians to endorse more distanced positions vis-a-vis the EU than they otherwise might have taken. Elite views, however, are by no means simply affirmative of European integration but display the whole spectrum of endorsement and skepticism. Political and economic elites tend to perceive a number of issues as

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directly threatening to the cohesion of the EU with the growth of nationalist attitudes in EU member states as the most defined one. Seventy-five percent of European elites perceive growing nationalism as a big or quite a big threat followed by more than half who see economic and social differences among member states as a “big or quite big threat.”43 Immigration from non-EU countries ranks fifth as a threat to a cohesive Europe with forty percent of the elites perceiving it as a big or quite a big threat, trailing the perceived threat of Russian interference only by a small margin and being closely followed by those threats to national welfare regimes thought to be effects of globalization.44 Irmina Matonyte˙ and Vaidas Morkeviˇcius suggest in their study of elite perceptions that the perception of threats can be mapped onto three dichotomies which they term cultural, socio-economic, and supranationalist vs. intergovernmentalist. The cultural dichotomy refers to the divide between assertions of a Christian versus a secular Europe, the socio-economic one maps the difference of elite attitudes in terms of retaining and strengthening social security versus enhancing the EU’s economic competitiveness, and the third is concerned with the mode of European governance, that is supranational governance versus a stronger reliance on member-state generated legitimacy and authority. They further suggest that what the analysis of these dichotomies shows is that the realist/functional dichotomy of the socio-economic order appears to have much lower differentiating potential regarding the elites’ perceptions of threats to a cohesive Europe than the two constructivist/subjective dichotomies related to elites’ interpretations of European cultural heritage and suggested governance. … [This supports the] assumption that there are two layers to the European project: the old one based on common interest (prosperity and peace) and the new one based on a search for a comprehensive European identity.45

Although political elites usually select ideational frameworks and identity constructions in an instrumental fashion according to their interests, they are also bound by majority public opinion and those identity constructions that are embedded in political, social, and cultural institutions and thus characterized by a greater resilience to change. And as the discussion in Chapter 2 indicates, the protagonists of the process of European integration promoted differing versions of identity constructions according to their political, economic, and security interests.46 Where

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the realist/functional dichotomy is concerned, this seems to have worked rather well. But in terms of identity politics, national and European elites were outpaced by national debates, often playing into the hands of rightwing parties. If anything, this was again clearly recognizable by the debate on and political reactions to the Syrian refugee crisis. No one, not in Brussels nor in the domestic political arenas of the member states, seriously promoted a cosmopolitan political agenda or tried to pacify protests by making reference to an emerging cosmopolitan form of a European polity. Instead, politicians again declared the end of European multiculturalism and imported into the political mainstream positions formerly held only by far-right parties and populist politicians across Europe. Above all, this concerned a marked shift toward a renewed discourse of cultural assimilationism and a culturalization of citizenship.47

The Specter of Social Disintegration The most easily exploited of these constructivist/subjective dichotomies referred to in the previous section is the belief that beyond a certain threshold cultural diversity will inevitably lead to internal social disintegration. It is echoed by many populist demagogues, but has also—and increasingly so—become a routine rhetorical element of the political mainstream, across Europe and elsewhere.48 Jörg Haider and the Freiheitliche Partei (FPÖ) and the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ) in Austria, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF) and Geert Wilders’s Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) in the Netherlands, Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen and the Front National (FN) in France, the Vlaams Belang (Vlaams Blok prior to 2004) (VB) in Flemish Belgium, Pia Kjærsgaard and the Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark, Carl Ivar Hagen, Siv Jensen and the FrP (Bokmål: Fremskrittspartiet, Nynorsk: Framstegspartiet ) in Norway, Daniel Höglund and the Svenskarnas parti in Sweden, Timo Soini and the Perussuomalaiset (PS) in Finland, Umberto Bossi and the Lega Nord in Italy, Christoph Blocher and the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) in Switzerland, Manuel Canduela and the Democracia Nacional in Spain, Gerhard Frey’s Deutsche Volksunion (DVU) and, most recently, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (Movement for a Better Hungary) in Hungary, the Slovenská ˇ národná strana (Slovak National Party, SNS) and Kotleba—Ludová strana Naše Slovensko (Kotleba—People’s Party Our Slovakia, L’SNS) in Slovakia and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) as well as the far more

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radical British National Party all campaigned on an anti-immigration, anti-Islam and often anti-EU platform, in some cases winning considerable percentages in elections.49 At times, the rhetoric employed by some of the above parties involves national and ethnic motivations that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi rationale.50 More recently, the newly formed German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) gained above 20% of the popular vote in a number of German regional elections campaigning on an anti-immigration, anti-Islam platform. Equally and after a decline in the late 2000s due to changes in the electoral system and a shaky financial footing, the French Front National has not only regained, but increased its strength under the leadership of Marine Le Pen winning six of the 12 newly drawn regions of mainland France in the first round of the 2015 regional elections. Le Pen finished ahead of both, The Republicans of former president Nicolas Sarkozy and The Socialists of former president François Hollande measured in total votes. Though not being able to win any of the regional presidencies in the second round of elections, the Front National gained above 30% of the vote in 6 regions with its strongest showings in Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie (42,23) and ProvenceAlpes-Côte d’Azur (45,22). In the 2017 parliamentary elections, the Front National, meanwhile renamed Rassemblement National, gained a stable 13.2% of the vote. As of mid-2020, the AfD was represented in all 16 German state legislators (Länderparlamente) holding between 5.3 and 27.5% of the vote while gaining 12.6% of the national vote in September 2017.51 But even the more moderate forms of this kind of alarmism locate the causes of social dissociation in the weakening of the social glue— whether common religion, values, morality, or ethno-cultural identity— and respond by what Richard Sennett termed the celebration of the ghetto.52 It is a kind of depoliticized politics of withdrawal from the world to a supposedly intimate communal territory to be defended against strangers, changes in beliefs and practices, and the atomizing of social spaces. It regards cultural difference as a fundamental barrier to integration and (national) social cohesion. The inherent paradox of nationalist politics, however, is that it targets only those particular parts of the population receptive to anti-immigrant sentiments and, thus, does not encourage wider scale civic association. Rather, it facilitates a decline in civic engagement and political membership, especially so among immigrant communities.53 Sennett therefore argued that it was not fraternity and solidarity that results from the logic of Gemeinschaft but fratricide.54

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Whereas civic action and membership in local assemblies and associations are generally viewed by social capital theory as furthering participatory democracy and contributing to the education of responsible citizens,55 immigrant associations, on the contrary, are often being portrayed as breeding authoritarianism, intolerance, as well as creating spaces of retreat or insulation from society. The idea that the civic health of a country could be measured, but even more so that the success of integrating cultural pluralism into an overarching civic culture could be measured by the degree to which immigrants participate in the receiving countries civic associations rather than their own, seems to me more of a romantic civic-republican ideal, than a credible rendition of the factors determining successful integration across ethnic, religious, or cultural lines. The reason why in the past ethnicity has become a vehicle for such divisive processes is, according to Sennett, that “ethnicity concerns the recovery in emotional terms of a life which cannot be recovered in political, demographic, and above all religious terms.”56 But for reasons of history, ethnicity and race (perhaps with the exception of Great Britain) are soiled terms in European politics and have thus not been as readily available as the cultural rhetoric that largely prevails. As Sennett shows, it is characteristic of communities thus constituted to exist only by a “continual hyping-up of emotions,” by relying on unstable symbols of impulse and intention: “Community feeling formed by the sharing of impulses has the special role of reinforcing the fear of the unknown, converting claustrophobia into an ethical principle.”57 Both, the federal structure of Western Germany after 1945 and Dolf Sternberger’s concept of Verfassungspatriotismus (constitutional patriotism), later taken up and applied to the EU by Jürgen Habermas as a form of “abstract, legally mediated solidarity between strangers,”58 can be seen as direct conceptual answers to the dangers inherent in an unconstraint passion for the idea of a (Volks)Gemeinschaft and communitarian identity conceptions in general. Any community that seeks a feeling of existential security in an ideal of togetherness, unity and common direction in order to counterbalance, say, the dynamics of modernity, insulate against structural change or follow a goal greater than itself might be heading for disaster. Individual deviation threatens such communities as a whole as they translate the immediate experience of sharing with others into a sectarian social principle of society. Equally, it is impossible for such communities to deal with influx from the outside and they thus

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spawn hostility to outsiders and generally become “at war with societal complexity.”59 Since the end of the Cold War, processes of globalization and European integration have produced and continue to produce substantial cognitive gaps between various segments of society and collective identities are increasingly becoming a question of emotional, rather than territorial space. As the sources of government have become less sharply defined and more remote with the transfer of sovereignty to the European level, this process itself might have contributed to a backlash within Europe in which individuals seek “psychological refuge” in more proximate polities and thereby trying to revitalize a dwindling sense of identity. It is thus no mere coincidence that the denationalizing logic of globalization and the allegedly permissive multiculturalism of political elites find their counterpart in the reassertion of ethnic, cultural, and religious identities. The EU as focal point for citizens’ political identity constructions is deficient precisely because “there are not enough mirrors in everyday life to reflect that identity.”60 This antagonist dynamic of the denationalizing logics of globalization as well as European integration and the reassertion of more proximate identities also points to a significant historical difference in European pre- and postwar nationalism. The old nationalism was often irredentist in character and tried to include as much of the (ethnic) population as possible, while the new nationalism is primarily a nationalism of exclusion.61 As a result, nationalism ceased to function as a comprehensive belief system, modernizing project and nation-building tool by way of efficiently imposing a geopolitical system of governance on a certain people.62 The turning point in the logic of nationalism—though not yet a logic of exclusion—came with the end of World War II when voluntary and forced population exchanges led to an unprecedented homogenization of European nations states. Keeping different people apart was seen as a conflict resolution tool and thus an indispensable element of a European peace strategy.63 In addition, and particularly in the context of European integration debates, these dynamics contributed to loosening the tie between nationality—membership in a community rooted in history, language, and culture—and citizenship.64 This is also the case because of the rift European societies experience along the lines of social class. The agents of European identity are the more privileged strata of society—the educated middle- and upper-middle classes, business owners,

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managers, professionals, public servants, intellectuals, and other whitecollar workers—as those are not only the main beneficiaries of the EU’s single market but also have established routine interactions with people from other European countries. Thus, these eurostars are more likely to see themselves as being involved in a European projects distinct from their national identities.65 The less educated, people with lower incomes, blue-collar and service workers but also older people and those holding conservative political views, in comparison, are far less likely to develop a strong European identity or see the benefits of pushing forward the EU’s integration.66 The new nationalism therefore also provides a new and more moderate mode of ethnocentric argumentation next to the aggressive xenophobia of the European extreme right: a strategy of selfvictimization that conceptually shifts the responsibility for suffering (in a very wide sense including downward mobility) away from structural reasons to the Other.67 Since the end of the Cold War, this Other is increasingly being embodied by the immigrant. In spring 2016 48% of Europeans cited immigration as one of the two issues of most concern facing the EU with the second most importance issue (terrorism) trailing immigration by 9%.68 The percentage of respondents concerned about immigration was highest in Estonia (73%), Denmark (71%), and the Czech Republic, Hungary and Latvia (67% each) while, on the whole, Europeans greatly overestimated the proportion of immigrants of their country’s population. For example, in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, people assumed the proportion of immigrants to be about twice the actual level. In Italy participants estimated it to be almost three times the actual number.69 This is of particular interest since older discourses of belonging such as ethnic nationalism have been de-legitimized by “discursive automatisms” within the institutional structures of the EU. Opposition to European integration, for a long period, has been internally muted by those same mechanism. As I briefly pointed out in the concluding section of the previous chapter, discourses of allegiance to the nation-state as well as anti-integration discourses have been steadily pushed to the political far right. Neo-nationalisms thus appear as an ambivalent phenomenon in that the EU has both helped to produce them as well as re-empowered itself through them.70 Even well-balanced opposition to the integration process suffered the risk of discursive collapse in terms of being silenced with reference to the horrors of Europe’s nationalist past, World War II or, equally, the authoritarian regimes of Southern Europe. This was

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also the case because from the early 1990s the far right has appropriated as discursive weapon the concept of culture along with its metaphorical persuasiveness. It was either directed against the perceived postmodern moral relativism and radical secularism of the weakening European left or the supposed threat of an Islamic take-over of Europe.71 However, the changing demographic make-up of European societies may have itself structurally contributed to the resistance to both immigration and transnational integration. It is in this regard that Ulf Hannerz has questioned the understanding of xenophobia as a youth phenomenon, instead speculating whether ethnographic research would not reveal a causal connection between older age groups and the combination of economic chauvinism and cultural pessimism so characteristic of neo-nationalist political movements.72 The painful historical lessons of World War II not only lay the foundation for the 1951 European Coal and Steel Community and the subsequent process of European integration with its focus on transnational governance but still in the 1990s generated considerable resistance against having, as Albert Hirschman put it, “the reunited Germany propped-up by some Bellah-style ‘civil religion’.”73 However, and compared to the European nationalist imaginary in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, it’s alternative—the political project of constitutional patriotism—remains a somewhat idealistic, somewhat construed, overly legalistic concept, too disconnected from everyday life in being hinged on normative congruence. From the perspective of political sociology, it is even a politically naïve concept. This remains true even for the implied concept of constitutional culture (Verfassungskultur) which suggests that political conflicts regulated by normative accommodation within or update of a specific constitutional structure contribute to its normative force and generate a constitutional culture. This culture, as a particularistic form of political conflict resolution informed by the specific history of the respective polity, is nevertheless thought to be based on universally applicable norms and principles. Within Europe, it is thought to be able to discipline the thick identities—ethnic, national, and otherwise—of its citizens.74 But as Brubaker and others have cautioned, the normative prestige of civic conceptions of national or transnational identities equally rests on common myths, values, and symbols and therefore what differentiates communitarian (e.g., ethnic, religious, cultural, etc.) and civics conceptions of identity is the way in which these features are coded and classified.75 Partisan politics in the United States might also

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serve to illustrate that constitutional provisions and constitutional review can equally be treated as a strategic means rather than something that carries normative authority across all party lines. In Europe, however, even the normative reach of the language of constitutional patriotism—its civic identity conception rooted in the values of liberal democracy, human rights, and the rule of law—seems rather limited even though currently more than two-thirds (68%) of Europeans “feel” as citizens of the EU.76 This may be the case, as Craig Calhoun argued, because the concept’s approach to social solidarity and its notion of constitution needs to be developed beyond a narrowly legal-political focus to include a broader idea of ‘world making’ in Hannah Arendt’s sense. […] If nationalism is to give way to some postnational organization of social life, it will not be simply a matter of new formal organization, but of new ways of imaginatively constituting identity, interests, and solidarity. A key theme will be the importance of notions of mutual commitment – solidarity – that are more than similarities of pre-established interests or identities.77

It is precisely these forms of commitment and general civic interest which transcend particularistic interests that have—if they indeed had begun to exist on a European level—become severely fractured or ever more unlikely as a result of the Economic and Monetary Union’s (EMU) handling of the sovereign debt crisis and internal friction between member states triggered by the Syrian refugee crisis.78 In addition, in large transnational polities such as the EU, there is a general shift away from the traditional focus of citizenship of the individual vis-a-vis an overarching political body toward a more informal, socio-culturally and spatially based notions of citizenship, of the relationship of individuals and their immediate communities. It is not only this disaggregation effect of some of the core components of citizenship—collective (political) identity, political membership, social rights— currently underway in Europe79 but also the point of the cognitive functions of space, the spatial distributions of people’s identities and attachments—a moral topography of place—that is completely missed by the concept of constitutional patriotism. This includes the day-today living out of one’s identities through people’s spatial behavior and the unconscious recognition of borders.80 A concept that mainly hinges on the “civilizing force of democratic legal domestication” ascribes to the process of European unification such a “civilizing role” and, finally,

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projects it onto the global level in terms of a politically constituted world society “beyond all political-cultural divisions,” seems to me to underestimate (while being fully aware of it) the importance of the necessarily bounded character of democratic politics.81 This, I think, holds even if “world citizens need not to be expected to engage in collective willformation in the essentially political sense” but election to the world parliament “only express the in essence morally justified ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the supranational application of presumptively shared moral principles and norms.” Though fully recognizing “communitarian doubts that popular sovereignty can be transnationalized,” such conceptions operate a false intuition in terms of the relationship of law and politics by assuming that there are indeed “a fortiori ‘general’ interests which are ‘depoliticized’ to such an extent that they are ‘shared’ by the world population” and thus also “overriding subjective rights [which] have an exclusively moral content because human rights circumscribe precisely that part of universalistic morality which can be translated into the medium of coercive law.”82 From the perspective of political sociology, it is difficult to see how in such a “cosmopolitan community of states and world citizens”83 reciprocity and solidarity could be produced by simply following the moral demands of depoliticized, universal human rights law. It also seems to me that it jettisons the murky business of politics—of argument, bargaining, compromise, and sometimes incommensurable disagreement—for a sort of “mechanics of adjudication” which denies that the weighing of such supposedly depoliticized fundamental rights is itself political in nature. Equally, the newly emerging European self-conception since the 1960s could neither rely on emotionally charged symbols or a single language, nor on a unified religious orientation. On the contrary, precisely this internal diversity emerged as an affirmative core of European selfdescriptions and thus, figured also as a corrective to overtly ambitious plans of supranational integration.84 In this perspective, internal diversity, polycentrism, and mutual competition was understood as the actual driving force behind European social, political, and economic dynamics.85 And indeed, this corresponds well with the distinctly different nature of European national intellectual debates on the EU. These range from seeing the latter as guarantor of national unity to viewing it as an ethical hazard, from regarding the integration process as “interventionist threat” to the national economic system to seeing it as a “neo-liberalizing threat” to the welfare state.86

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Quite to the contrary of neo-nationalist rhetoric, individualization and pluralization are able to play an important part in stabilizing societies’ key institutions and opening up to a globalizing world. In discussing democracy and its institutions both, James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville, have made similar points in their time. The Federalist, No. 10 famously argued that since people cannot be made alike and by nature are different in opinion, attachments and faculties, controlling the causes of factions would equal the destruction of liberty and thus lead to tyranny. Therefore, it is not factions themselves but their effects that need to be kept in check and Madison thought it less likely that the rights of others are encroached upon by a majority if the electorate is sufficiently large, extended and diverse in interest. This dynamic contributes in contemporary secular societies to the pacification of the Hobbesian distrust of intermediary groups that has its roots in the threat such groups in-between individual and state might pose to undivided sovereign power. Contrary to Hobbes, the institutionalization of such conflicts within political systems does tend, under certain conditions, to strengthen their structures and play an integrative role.87 Equally, agreement on common values by members of a society does not eradicate antagonisms and confrontations.88 In pluralist market societies conflict arises from newly emerging inequalities and sectoral and regional economic decline and, as Hirschman pointed out, when there is freedom of speech and association, such changes affect and mobilize people. He locates the vitality of pluralist market society in its ability to renew itself through the conjunction of individuals’ self-interest and the citizens’ concern for the public good. To him, the reason for the absence of this ability of self-renewal in the former Communist societies of Middle and Eastern Europe lies in the suppression of social conflict.89 There might be an important lesson for all proponents of European identity talk in this: If democratic, pluralist market societies cannot do better than “muddle through”90 as Hirschman suggests, any attempt that aims at presenting a specific form of social conflict as the ultimate, irreconcilable, and irreducible conflict of society must be resisted. Equally, both the idea that there can be definite solutions to such conflicts and the longstanding dogma within sociological theory that modern societies suffer from chronic anomia and a lack of social integration that must be counteracted by the social and moral regulation of the individual need to be abandoned.

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The triggers of social disintegration, however, are no longer located in the dynamics of modernization, industrialization or secularization—as in Durkheim’s sociology of anomia at the beginning of the nineteenth century—not even in the rather extensive de-commodification of labor, austerity measures and the reworking of the European postwar social contract but instead, rather singularly, in ethno-cultural pluralism. A second conclusion is therefore associated with the first: Ethno-cultural pluralism due to large-scale immigration does not present unique challenges for the political functioning of liberal democratic market societies but adds a number of intermediary groups, advocacy groups and possibly novel political coalitions to the ones already existing. From the vantage point of a procedurally defined, secular, liberal democratic political system, the question of whether immigration is desirable or not appears almost as a pre-political one. It is precisely for this reason that such conception of politics remains deficient.91 On the European level, the increasing challenge of ethnic, cultural, and religious pluralism in the wake of immigration and minority conflicts— most notably perhaps the unending and meanwhile pointless debate over whether and how quickly Turkey should be granted full membership in the EU—is revealing in terms of the EU’s favored future shape and the self-perception of Europe’s political elites.92 In the case of Turkey’s possible accession to the EU (which since the mid-2000s never progressed beyond the notion of “privileged partnership” coined by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2004) the two drivers for an ever more extensive and, at the same time, an ever closer European Union collided with each other, one providing an effective barrier for the other. In a more general sense, both had possibly reached the limits of their integrative rationale even before the 2004 and 2007 Eastern enlargements. At the time, Gerard Delanty argued that the inclusion of Turkey conspicuously marks the need for a redefinition of the very meaning of Europe as well as the becoming of post-Western Europe, a Europe beyond a singular Western modernity.93 This is equally important for academic scholarship as the Eurocentric mythologizing is almost axiomatic, especially in its tendency to associate Europe with Christianity.94 Turkey’s ever more unlikely full membership throughout the late 2000s was no longer just a question of compliance with the Copenhagen criteria but became a question of cultural transformation in progress and the willingness of what had so far been perceived as the center of the union to engage in such transformational process. Regarding the

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increasing uncertainty of the basis of people’s horizontal ties and commitments to others, Hirschman’s concern can thus be rephrased through the logic of identity. Beyond utilitarian dilemmas of collective action and their solution, an ever closer European Union depends on a successful projection of vertical and horizontal dimensions of identity, both collective (long-term interests and collective identity of a polity) and personal (particular immediate interests). The question then turns on how interpersonal horizontal and inter-temporal vertical ties of identification can be secured and reflected in stable social structures of recognition.95 As I argued in Chapter 2, the prospects for reconciling both dimensions and developing an integrated, credible, and resilient form of a post-Western European identity are slim at best. Especially so since immigration and Islamic terrorism induce not only vague fears and public anxieties but increasingly so a moral panic regarding the imminent collapse of the continent.96 In these dystopic visions, such fears and anxieties are declared to represent actual reality. Adrian Favell further pointed to a shared bias in the discourse on the basis of civic-political culture that upholds “the necessity of a consensually shared and rooted civic political culture to ground the successful functioning of liberal democratic institutions” in culturally and ethnically pluralist societies.97 In Making Democracy Work Robert Putnam, for example, assumes that the social capital needed to create healthy democratic institutions is at its strongest when “rooted in a long, centuries-old civic political tradition that dates back to the civic republicanism of the early medieval period.”98 Citing Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and others Putnam states that … social patterns plainly traceable from early medieval Italy to today turn out to be decisive in explaining why, on the verge of the twenty-first century, some communities are better able than others to manage collective life and sustain effective institutions.99

The European dilemma, as recognized by Favell, is not only that the public invocation of ideals of citizenship rooted in a nations core values and virtues (a public ideology of exclusion and inclusion) imposes a normative language on politics that can have regressive effects on practical policy outcomes. More so, it is the lack of public consensus on the ideas of citizenship and integration at the European level: a consensus on a European vision that could successfully compete with the various

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national frameworks and ideology of nationalism.100 The preoccupation with issues of identity and difference within the general debate about immigrant incorporation and dual citizenship has “tended to read all dilemmas of immigration and integration in Western Europe as examples of ‘cultural’ conflict.”101 This may indeed be due to the comparatively thicker and more ethno-culturally based traditions of nationhood in European countries, thus resulting in more intense conflicts. Debates on immigration also define imaginary geographies of belonging and forcefully re-inscribe immigrants into their countries of origin, giving voice to a “kind of essentialism from which there can be no escape.”102 A picture often—and wrongly so—taken at face value by non-European commentators.103 The forceful return of assimilationist discourse into mainstream political debate, however, did manifest itself as a “radical reversal” to older forms of assimilationism. It entailed a transformation of the concept of assimilation in both analytical and normative terms. Whereas the older concept was organic, transitive (e.g., objectifying immigrant populations as a moldable, passive mass) and focused on homogeneity, at the beginning of the 2000s conceptions of assimilation were intransitive and primarily focused on the prevention of segregation and ghettoization (social fragmentation) and the adaption of (cultural) difference into modes of heterogeneity not systemically threatening to host societies’ core national culture.104 Meanwhile, this analytically more complex understanding of assimilation has itself given way to newly objectified notions of cultural difference. Certain forms of cultural difference are deemed to be irreconcilable with liberal democratic values and thus threaten to give rise to forms of cultural conflict, both inaccessible to democratic modes of conflict resolution and immune to multicultural policies seeking to institutionalize difference.105 The real challenge for European democracy is not the specter of cultural fragmentation and how to resist or insulate against it, but rather lies in addressing the reality of pervasive and increasing diversity and the complex processes of transculturation accompanying it. Processes of conflicting interactions between very different people, institutions, and cultural practices that are shaped by power relations but also create spaces in-between resisting, appropriating, and influencing the majority culture.106 They are also processes of understanding the past and embracing the present, of remembering and forgetting, of absorbing and assimilating categories, taxonomies and divisions, processes

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of constructing new images of both, the self and the other. Most importantly, such spaces in-between mediate between different and sometimes sharply opposed values, religions and cultural practices. They represent cosmopolitanism in action. A pan-European identity, if at all possible, is bound to remain ambiguous and in flux, a fragile construct with “no truly European demos.”107 A more narrowly defined concept of European society, on the other hand, rests on deficient ideas of democracy, social cohesion, and membership. The insistence on any core of European values, by definition moves immigrant communities to the margins of society and turns them into civil failures, while structural inequalities are either being ignored or relegated to background noise. European identity talk, at times, thus appears thus more as an exercise in the mental and cultural foreclosure of Europe. To put it somewhat bluntly, externally it could be said to have its material expression in the eleven kilometers of two parallel barbed wire topped fences of six meters height that were built in 2005 to seal off the Spanish exclave Melilla from Moroccan territory and the hundreds of kilometers of newly build border fences along the EU’s southeastern borders.108 Internally, it finds expression in the notion of a core-Europe pioneered by Karl Jaspers in 1946 and revived by Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in a joined manifesto in 2003.109 The well-known Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy, among others, questioned the realism of such European cosmopolitan aspirations emanating from a European core (comprising France, Germany, and the Benelux countries) that relegates the Central and Eastern European EU member states to second-class status in the European project. Esterhazy wrote in 2003: Once, I was an Eastern European; then I was promoted to the rank of Central European. Those were great times […] Then a few months ago, I became a New European: But before I had the chance to get used to this status – even before I could have refused it – I have now became a non-core European. It’s like someone who has always lived in Munkács, and has never left Munkács in his entire life and who is, nevertheless, a one-time Hungarian, one-time Czech, one-time citizen of the Soviet Union, then a citizen of the Ukraine. In our town, this is how we become cosmopolitans.110

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The crucial point in the discussions of diversity, however, is not that diversity is a value (or an ill) in itself, but that it could not be eradicated without state administered coercion.111 As Lord Dahrendorf underscored, “diversity is not an optional byproduct of high culture; it is at the very heart of a world that has abandoned the need for closed, encompassing systems.”112 Dual or multiple citizenship as a possible way of adaption to this reality of diversity is often, and wrongly so, viewed as a form of divisive multiculturalism heading straight for the “balkanization” of Europe.113 This perhaps also shows the extent to which the wellentrenched metaphor of the body politic within democratic theory has impeded conceptual innovation in terms of de-territorializing sovereignty because this would mean to compromise the ontological and moral character of the state.114

De-, Post-, Supra-, and Trans-Nationalizing Citizenship Especially in postwar Western Europe where nation and state are understood as co-extensive, the question of the relation, Rogers Brubaker pointed out, between the “imagined community of the nation and the territorial organization of the state,” between “ethnocultural community and political authority,” does rarely surface.115 But in Central and Eastern Europe, that is for those states joining the EU in the 2004 and 2007 eastern enlargements, state and nation continue to be understood as independent orders of phenomena. It is thus that Jan Zielonka complained that eastern enlargements were often treated within a (Westphalian type) statist frame. They appeared as “a routine institutional operation […] unlikely to change the course and nature of European integration” and disregarded the “enormous import of diversity” that was left unaddressed by the new members’ “formal adoption of the entire body of European laws and regulations.”116 The prevailing normative model of the nationstate which presupposes the coincidence of cultural, religious, linguistic, and political boundaries and the identity of the imagined community of the nation with the institutional and legal reality of the state could neither grasp the reality of relations between state and nation in the EU-28, nor can the newcomers in the European east be easily made to fit without turning a blind eye to their historical legacy of extraordinary ethnonational heterogeneity. Even if it may indeed be “a thing of the past”

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which has “disappeared” over four decades of homogenizing communist rule,117 this region’s history of coming to terms with socio-cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and political inequality might provide us with a conceptual mirror of what lies ahead for the European Union. It is no simple coincidence that it was from the Middle and Eastern European “latecomers” that the most vocal opposition to the EU’s immigration policy emerged. Particularly the plans for an inner-EU re-distribution of refugees sparked the reaffirmation of (ethno)nationally based versions of identity and showed that, in these member states, nationalism is still the dominant ideological framework despite transnational integration and (visible) ethnic and cultural similarity continues to function as the basis for political legitimacy. However, this argument does not amount to an endorsement of post-nationalism which sees the nation-state as increasingly unable to “control its borders, regulate its economy, impose its culture, homogenize its population, address a variety of border-spanning problems, and command the loyalty of its citizens.”118 Brubaker’s analysis suggests that, contrary to the “sociologically naïve” view that sees assimilation and nationalistic closure as things of the past, national homogenization in Eastern Europe in fact continues, but is driven by migration rather than ethno-political contention. The process of European integration, instead of weakening or transcending the nation-state, may have therefore contributed to strengthening it. The eastern enlargements may have reinforced ethno-national allegiances and thereby inhibited the development of a post-national European identity.119 But as the national homogenization of the polyethnic borderlands in the EU’s east continues, exclusionary ethno-nationalism has increasingly turned on immigration from extra-European countries of origin. While the legitimacy of the Westphalian state rested substantially on its capacity to manage violence within its territory and provide a “hard shell of impenetrability” against threats from outside, it also provided a reliable territorial basis to fix and enforce boundaries of identity.120 This happened via a gradual reshuffling of identity hierarchies, so that citizenship and nationality anchored in territory took precedence over identities arising from religion, class, ethnicity, and locality. “The modern territorial state,” John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge show, steadily replaced the plurality of hierarchical bonds with an exclusive identity based upon membership in the common juridical space defined by

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the writ of the state. […] Identification of citizenship with residence in a particular territorial space became the central fact of political identity.121

One important intervention to remedy the conceptual crisis of the Westphalian paradigm with regard to European integration has been put forward by Jan Zielonka in 2006. Zielonka argued that the Westphalian paradigm was no longer a fitting description of the enlarged Union. Its external borders were soft and in flux while internally the EU was increasingly characterized by a polycentric system of government, the interpenetration of various types of political units and loyalties, multiple and overlapping jurisdictions, striking cultural and economic heterogeneity, the absence of a coherent demos, diversified types of citizenship with different sets of rights and duties, and thus divided sovereignty.122 Instead, what the EU increasingly resembled was a neomedieval empire.123 But even though Zielonka did not intend it to signal a possible return to a pre-Westphalian state of unreason, disorder, and violence, it is hard to see how this metaphor adds substance to long established notions of the EU as multi-level, polycentric system of governance, that is the recognition of the emergence (and possible re-emergence) of regional and sub-national cleavages and systems of “overlapping authority and multiple loyalty.”124 It is in terms of European foreign policy and EU conditionality, however, that the concept of neo-medieval empire transcends a mere impressionistic usage. If neo-medievalism has heuristic merits in avoiding the lofty kinds of cosmopolitan postmodernism, it also has an epistemic aim and a normative concern. It makes clear that “cultural pluralism is not necessarily linked with anarchy, nor is universalism with a global super-Leviathan.”125 By trying to preserve and recover “a proper space for political action” and thereby an alternative locus to the Westphalian nation-state for guaranteeing fundamental democratic values and human rights standards, the concept of neo-medievalism, Jörg Friedrichs argued, stands in opposition, both analytically and normatively, to the “postmodern overlap of multiple identities” and the eraticism of political allegiances.126 Regarding the underlying question of which space is deemed proper for political action within the European Union, European citizenship regimes too face a number of dilemmas. This is the case both within the political-legal architecture of the nation-state as well as on the transnational level.127 Since the mid-1990s a growing number of scholars have argued in regard to the concept of sovereignty that there was no reason why it

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should be limited to the scope of a strictly bounded territory. Rather, effective sovereignty—as opposed to the normative concept of de jure sovereignty—needs not to be conceptually “predicated on and defined by strict and fixed territorial boundaries.”128 However, democratic theory and practice rest on a “necessary fiction” in that absolute popular sovereignty is vested in a territorially political community and thus gives rise to state sovereignty as “the absolute territorial organization of political authority.” This fiction has been continuously undermined by the EU with its permanent logic of expansion, ever closer integration of its core units, and its “open, variable spatial structure”129 which entailed a progressive opening up of a “new phase of boundary redefinition in all functional spheres [i.e. economic, cultural, political, and coercive].”130 One of the analytically most useful accounts of the meaning and scope of citizenship as a system of political boundary drawing has been put forward by Linda Bosniak. Bosniak argues that to talk about citizenship in ways that acknowledge an “increasingly transterritorial quality of political and social life” and thus locate it beyond the boundaries of the nationstate does not “require a complete repudiation of national conceptions of citizenship.”131 This becomes clear when recognizing that the concepts of citizenship branches out into a number of distinct understandings and discourses designating a variety of different social practices and experiences: citizenship as legal status, as a system of rights, as a form of political activity, and as a form of identity and solidarity. It is the latter of those understandings that features most prominently in debates on European social cohesion and the supposed impact of large-scale immigration from extra-European countries of origin.132 The Syrian refugee crisis, Jürgen Mackert and Bryan S. Turner pointed out, has “most urgently” brought back to mind the bounded reality of modern citizenship and its function as gateway for “processes of inclusion and exclusion.”133 Citizenship as legal status refers to formal or nominal membership in an organized political community and thus pertains to legal recognition. But despite the differences and conflicting views expressed by scholars in debates concerning the question whether citizenship ought to be an exclusive status and the wide range of other controversies regarding equally fundamental questions, Bosniak points out that the premise that “the locus, or site, of citizenship status is the territoriallybounded nation-state” is nearly universally shared. The exclusiveness of national membership, for example, allowed European nation-states to develop, maintain, and legitimize communitarian forms of welfare regimes

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combining obligatory insurance schemes and extensive public social and health services. What then about European citizenship as a form of supranational or post-national status recognition? European citizenship remains limited, a thin reality of nominal status, and is often characterized as “nearly exclusively a symbolic plaything without substantive content.”134 The formal equality established among individuals by EU citizenship has to be understood as equality among nationalities because access continues to be defined via national citizenship laws. As the member states remain gatekeepers for national citizenship privileges, EU citizenship does not formally entail a reduction of the exclusivity of nationality, nor is it post-national in character. It reflects only “an indirect link” between the individual and the EU.135 The creation of citizenship at the EU level, however, spawned hopes that the welfare state as one of the central institutions of citizenship could be recreated at the European level, thus giving rise to a European social contract. But, as pointed out above, the idea of constitutionalizing social rights was strongly disputed among the member states and the 1989 Community Social Charter was only fragmentary in character. It included only provisions on workers’ rights. In redistributive policy areas, perhaps not surprisingly, public support for European integration is higher than elite support.136 The argument that the legitimacy of the European Union depends on its ability to ensure a minimum standard of social equality in terms of a reduction of socio-economic disparities among its citizens illustrates the link between questions of formal equality as legal status and the second, more substantial, notion of citizenship in Bosniak’s typology. The citizenship-as-rights tradition is perhaps the most widely taught across social and political science departments due to the meanwhile classic formulation it found in the Marshallian genealogy of citizenship. Thomas Marshall portrayed it as the successive development of legal, political, and social rights (and equality) in the emergence of Western liberal democracies.137 This tradition usually assumes that rights-based membership is fought for, enacted and contested within the nationstate. Some scholars, however, have suggested that the emergence and consolidation of the international human rights regime, and the rights guaranteed under it, signal a post-national turn in rights-based forms of citizenship.138 Post-national citizenship rights based in one’s humanity rather than in membership in national communities indeed transcend—at last normatively—the nation-state by being universally held by everyone. These authors also suggested that these rights were no longer subject to

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the authority of national institutions which were “experiencing a decline in their ability to provide for equality, liberty and civic participation” but that safeguards and enforcement of these new universally held rights of cosmopolitan citizenship were increasingly sought from supranational institutions.139 However, this should not be understood as a claim of an “overwhelming, irreversible trend to post-national citizenship” but as a number of empirical observations of a shift to the supranational level concerning the definition and legitimation of rights once associated with the nation-state.140 The limits of the international human rights regime as post-national form of citizenship—with the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) law and ECtHR (European Court of Human Rights) litigation as central elements—are perhaps most apparent in regard to the mobilization of European Muslims and their appeal to supranational institutions such as the ECtHR. Rather than seeing the fact that Muslim organizations in Europe increasingly target transnational public spheres and institutions in their claims-making as evidence for the erosion of the “national monopoly on rights and practices of citizenship”141 and with it of traditional (e.g., ethnic, national) forms of identity, Kathleen Cavanaugh, June Edmunds, Jennifer Westerfield, and others have been more hesitant in their assessment. They argued that European human rights jurisprudence has sustained and reinforced ethnic and nationally based stereotyping, deeply rooted fears about Islamic religious practices and underwritten forms of “illiberal secularism expressed in illiberal restrictions on religion in the public sphere” instead of facilitating the recognition and legal protection of religious and cultural rights of Muslim minorities.142 Where questions of religious freedom are concerned, national citizenship regimes take precedence by slipping in question of national identity and cohesion through the back door of the subsidiarity principle.143 This might well be seen as a reaffirmation of Alan Milward’s thesis that the “reinvigorated nation-state had to choose the surrender of a degree of national sovereignty to sustain its reassertion.”144 Rather than providing a body of redress beyond the nation-state which would ensure states’ compliance with human rights norms, these scholars argue that ECtHR case law, in fact, protects the member states’ sovereignty from outside interference. This also suggests that the ECtHR’s understanding of human rights issues is relative to certain ideas of living together, while representing those ideas in a universal sense. ECtHR case law could thus be said to illustrate a form of communitarian republicanism that gives

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human rights a binding status only as long as they remain within a society’s collective self-understanding.145 Just as the notion of European citizenship, the notion of the international human rights regime (as representing a form of post-national citizenship), Bosniak argued, continues to remain more symbolic than real and risks “overstating the degree to which the international human rights regime actually protects the individual” while disregarding “the serious constraints individuals ordinarily face in enforcing their rights.”146 It also risks reproducing “liberalism’s errors at a broader level of generality.”147 Instead of facilitating the emergence of a global civil society and the spread of universal human rights, economic and financial globalization seem to have rather invigorated than reduced ethnically based forms of identity.148 The claim that “the logic of personhood supersedes the logic of national citizenship”149 —even if desirable in a normative sense—does not provide satisfactory answers regarding the disentanglement of citizenship’s substance from the question of its domain or location. The common EU immigration and asylum policy that Andrew Geddes and others have duly termed fortress Europe 150 tells a different story. National sovereignty has not given way to a universal logic of personhood, nor has it been trumped by universal subjective rights. What seems clear is that democracy, when framed as a system of rights, may do without a clear definition of the demos or the people while the concept of popular self-government essentially requires such definition. It is thus hard to see how a separation of rights—or the rule of law for that matter—from majoritarian procedures can be achieved without compromising both, the legitimacy of the bodies monitoring and enforcing those rights and the specific institutional conditions required for exercising them.151 Citizens are not just bearers of rights but must also be able to see themselves as authors of the law, however contested the process of legislation itself. Democracy thus always entails a historical dimension giving shape to a self-governing body of individuals. Beyond all primordial notions of community, it is from this history that a morally justifiable, bounded sense of obligation among citizens arises. The third notion of citizenship pertains to this sense of democratic authorship. The notion of citizenship as a mode of political participation, as the active engagement in the life of the political community, is at the core of civic republican theory and the concept of participatory democracy. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, the idea that political legitimacy must derive from a political community—“the distinct institutional context …

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[of] a formal, organized, territorially-based community with some degree of self-governance,” as Bosniak put it152 —is deeply ingrained in the conceptual matrix of democracy. Political structures of active participation beyond the nation-state, however, were simply not a core concern of the original design of European integration. Rather, the process of integration has often been perceived by European electorates as further reducing the “capacity of citizens to exercise control over matters of vital importance to them.”153 Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks argued that in systems of multi-level governance such as the EU the functional need for human co-operation rarely coincides with the territorial scope of community. Governance, next to being a means to “achieve collective benefits by co-ordinating human activity,” is also, Hooghe and Marks point out, “an expression of community” but while the “jurisdictional shape” of Europe has changed, the “way in which citizens conceive their identities” has not.154 Critics therefore seem to agree that proponents of post-national democracy not only replace the substantive idea of civil society as a political community with an anti-political conception of civil society in which economic and social activities are regulated by legal and administrative procedures alone but, at the same time, wrongly claim to empower citizens by enlarging the scope of their political autonomy beyond the narrower confines of parliamentary party politics.155 Linda Bosniak rightly points out that in terms of their normative ideal, transnational civil society theories “place engagement in public life at the center of their understanding of citizenship” and thus cater to a republican notion of an active political life.156 But Adam Przeworski is equally right in his skepticism of extending a “Tocquevillian vision of associated, active citizens” beyond the confines of the nation-state. Participation in transnational networks is resource-dependent and thus likely to undermine egalitarian political mechanisms instituted at the national level. It therefore potentially yields unequal results.157 As I argued in the preceding chapter, if it is at all justified to speak of a European civil society, these transnational alignments of individuals are characterized by a missing cross-class alliance and horizontal solidarity between European elites and members of the lower middle and working classes; that is between those who are well-educated, highly mobile and part of social networks extending across national borders, and those who tend to remain stuck with their region or nation.158 Overenthusiastic proponents of the transnational civil society thesis thus might need to be reminded of the importance

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of socio-economic position and inequality. The same applies to those who have argued that the emergence of a “coherent and unified public sphere would create various avenues through which citizens could have their voices heard” and that European transnational democracy would be significantly enhanced by “equal and open access to public debate fostered by a European public sphere,” thus endowing it with legitimacy.159 Today, democratic cornerstones such as the principles of representation and accountability as well as the citizens’ role in European governance are either absent or remain underdeveloped.160 Despite the introduction of some majoritarian principles and the extension of the rights of the European Parliament in the decisions making process and the selection of EU officials, the multi-level construction of the EU, Heinrich Best et al. claimed, “still attributes a pivotal role to national political and social institutions, and to the elites who are running them.”161 Normatively, however, the notion of transnational activism as transnational citizenship “does not suffer the thinness and passivity of status-based and rights-based conceptions,” rather it reflects active engagement in public life.162 What is lacks, nevertheless, is a concern for democratic equality in terms of respect. “[…] it is very difficult to see,” the late Ronald Dworkin put it, “how a government could, in good faith, claim to show equal respect to all its citizens if it allows only some to participate in the collective decisions that dominate the lives of all.” This does not simply translate into majoritarian rule but—as an ideal—means, Timothy Garton Ash reminds us, “that each citizen must be thought by other citizens to have an equal stake, as well as equal voice, in the outcome of the democratic process.”163 Finally, citizenship as identity/solidarity concerns peoples’ collective experience of themselves and their “affective ties of identification and solidarity,” that is the subjectively “felt aspects of social membership” whether in terms of trust, patriotism or, more recently, a politics of recognition.164 Nativist resentment and xenophobia, most visible in Europe as resistance to immigration and the admittance of asylum seekers, are the dark side of this type of citizenship. Though it is certainly true that the cultural, social, and economic capital of the majority of Europeans remains firmly wedded to the nation-state,165 collective identities are—as argued above—increasingly becoming a question of emotional, rather than territorial space and thereby either transcend or subvert the boundaries of the nation-state.

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More recent studies have also undermined the view that institutions such as the welfare state can only be sustained on a sense of community or presuppose shared categorical markers such as race, religion, ethnicity, and language. As paradoxical as it might seem, these studies show that it is citizens with a more expansive attitude of morality, those with a ‘cosmopolitan’ understanding of the relationship between humans, [who] stand ready to engage in the personal sacrifices necessary if a redistributive system is to be maintained. In times of significant immigration, it appears that the welfare state’s future does not lie with tightly drawn circles of identity but exactly the opposite, with attitudes that highlight commonalities among humans.166

Ruud Koopmans et al. have further argued that it is due to national configurations and collective definitions of citizenship rather than ethnic competition over scarce resources that specific discursive opportunities for social movements opposing immigration and defending exclusionary forms of identity as the cement of society arise. Negative effects of ethnic diversity on generalized trust could not be confirmed at the aggregate (country) level across Europe and migration or diversity indicators were neither strongly nor consistently related to levels of generalized trust. In this sense, groups in opposition to the rights and interests of immigrants are often generally opposed to rights-based conceptions of citizenship (especially so social citizenship) and its underlying principle of universality.167 More generally—and in stark contrast to populist radical right discourses discussed above that demand a cleansing of citizenship through the exclusion of strangers—post-national citizenship theories can be understood as “an effort to claim attention and significance and legitimacy for certain recent transnational political and social practices” in an attempt to move these practices closer to the center of mainstream political thought.168 It is with this in mind when anthropologist Peter Geschiere commented that appeals to history and culture, central in such claims to belonging, offer quite slippery footholds for defining who can qualify as a full citizen and who can be excluded as a ‘stranger’. The culturalization of citizenship, which seems to be a recurrent aspect of the “global conjuncture of belonging,” has great emotional appeal in many settings. Juridical or

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economic aspects are thus relegated to the background. Yet, precisely because such cultural and historical claims to belonging are, despite apparent self-evidence, beset by deep uncertainties, they confound issues of citizenship rather than clarify them.169

The comparative historiography of nested or multi-level citizenship shows, Willem Maas importantly notes, that its institutions became “ever more oriented away from the original constituent units and toward the central (national) level of government.” But to argue that the introduction of EU citizenship at Maastricht “recalls the earlier introduction of a national layer of citizenship over preexisting municipal or regional versions” and thus the “introduction in the nineteenth century of an initially ‘thin’ layer of nation-state citizenship rights over the existing structure of well-established, ‘thick’ municipal citizenships parallels the current overlaying of a ‘thin’ EU citizenship over those same nationstate citizenships” seems to me to draw a false and potentially dangerous analogy.170 Though rightly pointing to the tight linkage between the historical development of nation-state sovereignty and the institutions of citizenship, transposing the nation-state’s past into a post-national European future does not seem to give adequate recognition to structural preconditions as well as the extraordinarily high prize by which the linguistic, ethnic, religious, and cultural homogeneity of European nation-states was come by during an age of extremes.171 One observation, however, strikes me as particular plausible, itself drawing a parallel between the late-medieval world and the current European trajectory: It is the recognition of the central and innovative role of (global) cities as some of the most important sites where processes of globalization crystalize in concrete, localized form and from which newly contextualized types of citizenship practices emerge: a reconfigured, “partly denationalized urban space that enables a partial reinvention of citizenship as practice and as project.”172 Again, this is not establishing a historical analogy in terms of a return to medieval forms of (cité)zenship and local government. On the contrary, the analogy hinges on the structural function of the city as a key site for producing new forms of citizenship and for creating, Sassen argued, not only “new structurations of power but also operational and rhetorical openings for new types of political actors that may have been submerged, invisible, or without voice.”173

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Concluding Remarks: What Future for European Civil Society? In conclusion, it is worth quoting Linda Bosniak at length who states that positing the nation-state as the scope of our moral identifications, solidarities, and responsibilities, that is as a sphere of completion and closure, thwart[s] the development of a full descriptive accounting of the nature of citizenship as it is enacted within the national society. […] Politically, borders are neither fixed nor static; what counts as part of the inside or outside is subject to ongoing negotiation and contestation. And whatever the prevailing understanding of their character and location, as a practical matter national borders are very often tested, stretched, permeated, or breached. Any vision of the world that presumes a stark dichotomy between a political society’s inside and out, in other words, is unequipped to contend with the complex interpenetration of institutions and practices and persons across borders that characterizes the contemporary landscape. A habit of dichotomous inside/outside thinking disables theorists from seeing, among other things, that the global is not merely situated ‘out there’ but is also located, increasingly, within national borders.174

This observation applies to the European Union in an exemplary manner, concerning not only the history of its development through successive waves of enlargement, but also its current state as a political entity. European Union policies on immigration most clearly illustrate the blatant paradox between the EU’s supranational—and indeed global—aspirations and the reality of the spatially divided and exclusionary practices of treating the Schengen area as a “closed system isolated from other societies.”175 The process of European integration also brings out—again in a particularly clear manner—the basic, constitutive tension between liberal and republican traditions of citizenship, between citizenship conceptualized as rights and status of individuals and citizenship understood as active engagement in a political community, between a potentially universal(izing) drive and the (necessarily) exclusionary boundedness of membership.176 Irrespective of questions of descriptive validity and normative coherence regarding notions of post-national or cosmopolitan citizenship as well as claims of new forms of territorial, social and political organization, mobilization and practice, it seems to me most promising to focus

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on those newly emerging sites of citizenship that possess a recognizable emancipatory potential, whether within or beyond the nation-state. What emerges quite clearly from the discussion in the preceding chapter is that transnational identity building can neither serve such an emancipatory function nor ensure European social and political cohesion beyond the nation-state. Equally so, the appeal to quasi-universal European values strong enough to reconcile the different sets of values found across the EU-28 and foster solidarity on such large pan-European level— without, however, basing citizenship on substantial social and cultural predispositions—is merely a normative abstraction from communitarian theories that see shared substantive bonds and practices as a precondition for societal cohesion. Beyond appeals to a false unity of Europe—and instead of attempting to transpose thin notions of constitutional patriotism onto a supra- and possibly post-national level—Erik Eriksen and John Fossum argued that any meaningful political version of EU citizenship would necessarily need to entail the full parliamentarization of the EU and, consequently, a truly post-national form of political deliberation.177 Both saw the “need for reconstituting democracy” on a European level, that is, democratizing European decision-making processes as well as intergovernmental institutions, as the real challenge facing the EU.178 However, as I suggested above, the way the 2005 constitutional crisis was resolved demonstrates a strong temptation for EU elites to favor depoliticization. If anything, this trend toward depoliticization has been considerably reinforced by the handling of the sovereign debt crisis while the Syrian refugee crisis led to an unprecedented surge in politicization spilling over and impacting other policy areas than migration. Although the European sovereign debt crisis can be seen as a critical juncture that would have allowed for differing institutional paths to be taken in its resolution, the Commission and the European Parliament were quickly sidelined or left altogether dormant and no supranational approach was seriously sought. This may be attributed to the lack of initiative on part of both the Commission and the European Parliament, but also resulted from the reluctance of larger euro-area member states.179 The approach chosen meant a repatriation of powers to the nation-state, the strengthening of national elites through intergovernmental institution as well as the establishment of uneven relations between EU member states of different economic capability and, thus, a weakening of supranational federalism.180 At the same time, the meaning of EU citizenship in a genuine political sense has been called into question even more

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profoundly than before and the EU’s democratic credibility substantially undermined. For the creditor countries among the EU member states, nationalism might indeed be strengthened, bargaining power gained and national boundaries reinforced. But for debtor countries (or those with strong regional identities such as Belgium, Italy, or Spain), the nation-state as sovereign actors and point of reference for citizens’ identity formation might come under increased pressure. Particularly since many regions have already gained a quasi-autonomous status vis-à-vis their national government and exercise control over those policy areas closest to citizens’ concerns. What this means is that power will be more likely to be dispersed in Europe, political loyalties may multiply, governance structures gain in complexity and open-endedness and territorial authority may become more elusive. This led Jan Zielonka to conclude that “integration will continue, but it will not be led by the EU and controlled by European nation-states” and, therefore, citizens’ involvement and participation will prove a continuing challenge for European democracy.181 The depoliticized handling of the euro crisis contrasts sharply with an increased scrutiny by national publics of EU-governance and the latter, therefore, can be seen as a heightened politicization of EU’s decisionmaking processes. The burning of EU flags in Southern Europe and the violent protests that erupted across the continent opposing what is seen as an illegitimate stranglehold of austerity measures dictated by the Troika (EC, ECB, IMF) should not be dismissed as instances of leftist radicalism—an accusation also leveled against the Greek Tsipras government and the Spanish Prodemos party—but illustrate a rift in both perception and vision between governing elites and their constituencies. As Sergio Fabbrini succinctly put it: Rather than a multi-speed EU, that is, an EU constituted by member states moving at different speeds towards a common goal, what has emerged in the euro crisis is a Union constituted by member states and citizens with different perspectives on it.182

This leads, on a speculative basis, to at least three potential scenarios. 1. If Michael Marder is right and the Troika cannot be shown to emanate from a procedurally well-defined source but instead from the “indeterminacy built into the Union’s constitutional basis” and

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its policies, therefore, signify the usurpation by “a previously unspecified actor, or group of actors” of the “vacant political space of decision making,” this not only demarcates the limits of liberal intergovernmentalism183 but must be seen as a sovereign act “in the distinctly Schmittian sense,” that is, as “extralegal decisions on exception.”184 Beyond illustrating the post-democratic exercise of executive federalism185 within the vacant political and constitutional space of the EU and the potential for antagonistic (instead of simply agonistic) relations between a European core and its wider periphery (composed of both EU member states and neighboring countries), this perspective gives rise to the unsettling question of who—again in terms of Schmittian existentialism—will emerge as the EU’s Other? 2. If, however, the decision making regime during the Euro crisis can be understood in empirical terms as “functionally equivalent” to the faltering constitutional regime formalized by the Lisbon Treaty, that is, as an intergovernmental constitution (with the European Council as the most powerful institution within the decision-making system of the European Monetary Union), then the crisis signifies less a state of exception than the taking precedence of one constitutional regime (intergovernmental) over another (supranational). Both of these have been inscribed in the process of European integration from its beginning.186 In view of the rising intergovernmental tensions in post-crisis Europe, the future prospects for the perpetuation and further institutional integration of the intergovernmental union seem slim at best. They are likely not only to impede the supranational expansion of solidarity between European peoples but prone to erode whatever degree of solidarity may have previously existed. In this case, European citizenship is bound to remain a thin reality of nominal status without any substantive political or social content unable to provide for citizens’ collective experience as Europeans, nor capable to instill affective ties of identification and solidarity. 3. Should both of the above interpretations prove inaccurate and postcrisis Europe, as Jan Zielonka suggests, will increasingly resemble “a maze without a clear hierarchy and structure” with both nationstates and EU institutions weakened, and, therefore, an uneven and asymmetrical dispersion of power throughout the EU will lead not only to the emergence of local hegemons (whether cities, regions,

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or states) but also unstable peripheries unable to function without external intervention, than the question arises what the dominant markers of social difference under conditions of “plurality, hybridity and heterogeneity” will turn out to be?187 Beyond ifs and buts, subsequent chapters will also provide tentative suggestions regarding this divisive, discriminating, and exclusionary power of citizenship— the dark undercurrent of its emancipatory potential—and the type of individuals and groups likely to be affected by it. Which of the overlapping and interrelated meanings, practices and experiences of citizenship is emphasized, depends considerably on whom policy-makers, scholars, public intellectuals, political activists and others with a recognizable voice in the debate have in mind when speaking of Europeans. It is this performative function of the European identity discourse that links European citizenship regimes with immigration policies. As a European demos remains a discursive construction—a political imaginary rather than a socio-political reality in any material sense—the increasing focus on the question of Europe’s Other consequently appears as a quasi-Schmittian substitute for the absence of a shared transnational, collective political identity. While the EU as “a polity composed of ‘others’” was “designed to encourage certain virtues of tolerance and humanity”188 it—perhaps not so ironically after all—fueled the reemergence of divisive identity politics precisely by aiming to depoliticize thick identities in favor of a potentially universal, civic conception of a community of values. This pertained not necessarily to older ethnonational imaginaries of world making (which despite being propagated by the European far right had lost both their coherence and compelling sense of moral truth) but rather to the mainstreams politicization in cultural terms of certain forms of difference supposedly irreconcilable with the civic values and universally shared fundamental rights and norms European democracy is based on. Instead of the decoupling of citizenship from nationality we currently see a “re-nationalization” of the “thicker” components of citizenship. Other, more nominally based elements may indeed continue to be transferred to Brussels, and yet others—such as social rights—may be further written out of the European political imaginary and the vocabulary of citizenship in particular. The status of citizenship might therefore become an even more ambiguous one due to both, an increase of the horizontal (civic

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stratification) and vertical (region, nation-state, EU) and the “discontinuities” of different aspects of citizenship.189 European identity, where it has approximated a thick variant, remains elitist in character. For the majority of the population, European identity constructions have not superseded national ones. In a crisis-ridden EU, they are ever more unlikely to do so. On the contrary, national identities have increasingly given way to regionally based competitors, especially so in those members states with historically deeply ingrained regional identities. This trend was exemplified more recently in late 2017 and early 2018 by the powerful drive for Catalan independence from Spain that led to the biggest political crisis since the Spanish transition to democracy starting in 1975 and the recognition of the right to self-governance of the “nationalities and regions” comprised within a common and indivisible Spanish nation in the 1978 Spanish Constitution. Future, large-scale migration to Europe is also likely to produce a greater number of transnational networks of further de-territorialized feelings of belonging. In terms of the meaning and scope of citizenship understood as a legally cemented system of political boundary drawing, the primary Other of the EU’s identity construction is no longer “its own, war-torn past.”190 Despite the multiple security challenges emanating from the European periphery such as ISIL/ISIS’s nihilistic frenzy of death and destruction (thankfully greatly diminished since the liberation of Mosul in mid-2017) or Russia’s will to impose its own geopolitical vision on its neighbors— it is the immigrant, the refugee, the asylum seeker who symbolically threatens to import instability and crisis into the heart of the EU. The Middle Eastern and African refugee—just as the stateless of the interwar period191 —became the symbol of the European crisis during the second decade of the 2000s. Once again: The question of who European’s will regard as their (potentially existential) Other is tightly linked with the question of who will be able to acquire full citizenship and who, in contrast, will remain perpetually excluded as undeserving stranger. It is perhaps the constitutive paradox of EU politics that (1) while Europeans overwhelmingly feel as European citizens, this feeling does not correspond to any substantive content beyond legal nominalism and (2) while more than half feel attached to the EU, Europeans remain national in their focus on European issues and European elections continue to be dominated by member states’ domestic issues and political cleavages. We should therefore ask whether self-identifications as European citizens and affection for the European idea are at all systematically related to political

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choices. We should further ask if these self-identifications do not in fact reflect symbolic identifications, quite divorced from political preferences or actual issue beliefs. Lastly, we must ask what, if anything, could plausibly replace the civic utopia of European citizenship or give substance to it. Contrary to the imputed universalizing role of human rights in terms of transcending national boundaries and furthering a denationalized understanding of political legitimacy and the progressive dissolution of the national/international distinction associated with the cosmopolitan vision of the EU, the building of border fences and walls as well as the reethnicization of mainstream politics in the wake of post-Arab Spring mass immigration to Europe mark the downside of the EU’s cosmopolitan vision. They show how questions of culture, language, human capital, and civil equality, among others, forcefully resurface within the European nation-state and turn into individual-level mechanism of exclusion. They also present a sustained challenge not only to the integrative function of citizenship on both the national and European level but also to the sustainability of the European project as such. The Syrian refugee crisis acted merely as an accelerant but did not cause the resurgence of neo-nationalist dynamics and exclusionary forms of political membership. These dynamics have severely undercut the emancipatory potential of post-national forms of citizenship in Europe—whether in terms of differentiated citizenship,192 differentiated universalism,193 or subaltern cosmopolitanism194 —and refocused the question of rights, authority, and obligations unilaterally on the nation-state, while the EU’s hostility to refugees of war, violence, and persecution increasingly erodes the assertiveness of the international human rights regime.

Notes 1. Speech at Zürich University, 19 September 1946. 2. For an analysis of the French referendum results see Paul Hainsworth: France Says No: the 29 May 2005 Referendum on the European Constitution. In: Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. 59, No. 1 (2006), pp. 98–117. More generally see Susan Watkins: Constitutional Tremors. In: New Left Review, Vol. 33 (May–June 2005), pp. 5–21; and James Tully: A New Kind of Europe? Democratic Integration in the European Union. In: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 71–86.

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3. Slavoj Žižek: Against the Populist Temptation. In: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Spring 2006), pp. 551–574, 551. 4. Karl Loewenstein: The Union of Western Europe: Illusion and Reality. In: Columbia Law Review, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Feb., 1952), pp. 209–240, 209. 5. See Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks: Europe’s Blues: Theoretical SoulSearching after the Rejection of a European Constitution. In: Politics and Political Science, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2006), pp. 247–250. 6. Britain’s Immigration Paradox. In: The Economist, July 8, 2016. 7. Britain’s Immigration Paradox. In: The Economist, July 8, 2016; see also Thomas Sampson: Brexit: The Economics of International Disintegration. In: Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Fall 2017), pp. 163–184. 8. Gerd Baumann: Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London. Cambridge University Press, 1996 [2006], p. 5. 9. The term “elites” is employed here in the neo-functional sense of Ernst B. Haas and others because the neo-functionalist school assumed that Europe could be made “without Europeans,” that public opinion could be dispensed with or, at least, that no more than a permissive consensus was required. From such neo-functional perspective, conflict could be resolved through deconstructing highly contentious political issues into technical ones. These elites include public policy-makers, economic elites lobbying decision-making processes but also public intellectuals, professional associations, and trade unions. See for example, Ernst B. Haas: The Uniting of Europe. Political, Social, and Economic Forces 1950–1957 . London: Stevens, 1958; and Philippe C. Schmitter: Ernst B. Haas and the Legacy of Neofunctionalism. In: Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2005), pp. 255–272. 10. Andrew Williams: EU Human Rights Policies: A Study in Irony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; and to the same effect more recently Stijn Smismans: The European Union’s Fundamental Rights Myth. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 (2010), pp. 45– 66. The conceptualization of the human rights narrative as a founding principle of the European Union in terms of a “mythic construction” that “depended on the ‘invention of a tradition’” (Williams, 129) is unfortunate regarding its proximity to anthropological and ethnographic concepts as put forward by Mircea Eliade, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, or Hans Blumenberg. Instead, the EU’s fundamental rights myth serves the very rational function of legitimization which is closer to what Barbara Czarniawska termed “dramas of institutional identity.” See Barbara Czarniawska: Narrating the Organization: Dramas of Institutional Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

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11. See, for example, Miles Kahler: Decolonialization in Britain and France: The Domestic Consequences of International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984; Tony Chafer: Decolonization Through Assimilation: The Struggle for Emancipation, 1946–50. In: The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? Oxford: Berg, 2002, pp. 84 ff.; and John Springhall: Decolonization since 1945: The Collapse of European Overseas Empires. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 12. Elizabeth Buettner: Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 251–252. 13. Ibid., p. 254. 14. See Bernard Bruneteau: The Construction of Europe and the Concept of the Nation-State. In: Contemporary European History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (July 2000), pp. 245–260, direct quote at 250. 15. Whatever sense of social justice might have existed, this seems to have been chattered by the European debt crisis management. It should also be noted here that the original EEC Treaty did not include any reference to fundamental rights and the later idea of constitutionalizing fundamental social rights was strongly disputed. The 1989 Community Social Charter, when adopted, was thus only a fragment including only workers rights instead of broader social citizenship guarantees. In addition, it had no binding force and the UK had opted out altogether. See Daniel C. Thomas: Constitutionalization Through Enlargement: The Contested Origins of the EU’s Democratic Identity. In: Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 13, No. 8 (December 2006), pp. 1190–1210; and Stijn Smismans: The European Union’s Fundamental Rights Myth. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 (January 2010), pp. 45–66. 16. See Giandomenico Majone: An Elitist Project. In: Europe as the Would-be World Power: The EU at Fifty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 22–45. 17. See Atsuko Higashino: For the Sake of ‘Peace and Security’? The Role of Security in the European Union Enlargement Eastwards. In: Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 347–368. 18. See Jan Zielonka: Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 5. Zielonka cites the European Defence Community proposed by René Pleven in 1950 as an example of a clear cut cooperative project that collapsed due to French concerns regarding its national sovereignty and German remilitarization. 19. See Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford: Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 10 as well as the references cited there. 20. Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks: A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus.

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22. 23.

24.

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27. 28.

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In: British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 39, No. 1 (January 2009), pp. 1–23, direct quotes at 6–7, italics in the original. Interestingly Zoe Lefkofridi and Phillippe C. Schmitter argued that neofunctionalism as a theory of transnational regional integration could be put to use in predicting “’spill-backs’ rather than ‘spill-overs’” and thus also serve as a theory of European disintegration. See Lefkofridi, Zoe and Schmitter, Phillippe C.: Neo-Functionalism as a Theory of Disintegration. In: Chinese Political Science Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 2016), pp. 1–29. Cited in European Union: Power and Policy Making, ed. by Jeremy Richards, Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 47. Liesbet Hooghe: Europe Divided? Elites vs. Public Opinion on European Integration. In: European Union Politics, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2003), pp. 281–305, 282. Affective support is understood as “a reservoir of favorable attitudes or good will that helps members to accept or tolerate outputs to which they are opposed or the effects of which they see as damaging to their wants.” See David Easton: A Re-assessment of the Concept of Political Support. In: British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 5, No. 4 (October 1975), pp. 435–457, p. 444. See also Leon N. Lindberg and Stuart A. Scheingold: Europe’s Would-be Polity: Patterns of Change in the European Community. New York: Prentice Hall, 1970, p. 40; and Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Governance, ed. by Pippa Norris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Input legitimacy refers to collective decisions that “reflect the general will.” See Fritz Scharpf: Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 7–10. Liesbet Hooghe: Europe Divided? Elites vs. Public Opinion on European Integration. In: European Union Politics, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2003), pp. 283–285. Ibid., p. 296. Some scholars have critically noted that trans-national scenarios “tend to bring the logic of politics into line with functional social integration thereby reducing political citizenship to its moral and legal dimensions” and thus undermine the political rationality of democracy as political practice. See, for example, Winfried Thaa: ‘Lean Citizenship’: The Fading Away of the Political in Transnational Democracy. In: European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2001), pp. 503–523, 504. Juan Díez Medrano has further pointed to a lack of adequate statistical models to account for the causal influence of local histories and cultures in regard to substantial variation in support for European integration by ordinary citizens and local elites alike. Comparing long lists of explanatory variables cannot sufficiently explain why and when “history

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29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

and culture trump economics and geopolitics as the major forces behind European integration.” Juan Díez Medrano: Framing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 4. Juan Díez Medrano: The Public Sphere and the European Union’s Political Identity. In: European Identity, ed. by Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 89. Ibid., pp. 106–107, direct quote at 106. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=437 291726. For this temporal sequencing of integration, identity and constitution see Bo Stråth: Methodological and Substantive Remarks on Myth, Memory and History in the Construction of a European Community. In: German Law Journal, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2005). Here and in the following see Erik O. Eriksen and John E. Fossum: Europe in Search of Legitimacy: Strategies of Legitimation Assessed. In: International Political Science Review, Vol. 25, No. 4 (October 2004), pp. 435–459. Ibid., direct quotes at pp. 437–438, italics in the original. See Jürgen Habermas: The Post-national Constellation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. See also David Held: Democracy and the Global Order. Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995; and Joseph H. H. Weiler: The Constitution of Europe: ‘Do the New Clothes Have an Emperor?’ and Other Essays on European Integration. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Erik O. Eriksen and John E. Fossum: Europe in Search of Legitimacy: Strategies of Legitimation Assessed. In: International Political Science Review, Vol. 25, No. 4 (October 2004), pp. 445ff. Ibid., p. 446 and fn 13 on p. 456. The EU co-decision procedure grants essential weight to the EU Council made up of the member states’ government representatives vis-a-vis the elected members of European Parliament. Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach: Global Politics at the Turn of the Millennium: Changing Bases of “Us” and “Them”. In: International Studies Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (summer 1999), pp. 77–107. See, for example, Michael Keating: The New Regionalism in Western Europe: Territorial Restructuring and Political Change. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1998; and Regions and Regionalism in Europe. Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004. See also Regions in Europe: The Paradox of Power, ed. by Patrick Le Gales and Christian Lequesne, London: Routledge, 2013; and Bernard Voutat: Territorial Identity in Europe: The Political Processes of the Construction of Identities in Corsica, the Basque Country, Italy, Macedonia and the Swiss

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44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

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Jura, In: Contemporary European History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Jul., 2000), pp. 285–294. See Law, Democracy and Solidarity in a Post-national Union: The Unsettled Political Order of Europe, ed. by Erik Oddvar Eriksen, Christian Joerges and Florian Rödl. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 2. Juan Díez Medrano: The Public Sphere and the European Union’s Political Identity. In: European Identity, ed. by Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 82. See Irmina Matonyte˙ and Vaidas Morkeviˇcius: The Other Side of European Identity: Elite Perceptions of Threats to a Cohesive Europe. In: The Europe of Elites: A Study into the Europeanness of Europe’s Political and Economic Elites, ed. by Heinrich Best, György Lengyel, and Luca Verzichelli. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 94–121. The survey data that from that basis of Matonyte’s ˙ and Morkeviˇcius’ analysis date from 2007. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 106–107, direct quote at p. 120. See Martin Marcussen et al.: Constructing Europe? The Evolution of Nation-State Identities. In: The Social Construction of Europe, ed. by Thomas Christiansen, Knud Erik Jørgensen and Antje Wiener. London: Sage, 2001. See Chapters 4 and 5 for a more detailed discussion. On the resurgence of racism in Europe see Sheila Allen and Marie Macey: Race and Ethnicity in the European Context. In: British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 41, No. 3 (September 1990), pp. 375–393; and Lutz Holzner: Minority Relations and Conflict in the Emerging European Community, Specifically Germany, France and Great Britain. In: Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 157–192. Koopmans et al. have calculated the average percentages of votes received by extreme-right parties in five European countries during the 1990s: France: 12.2%; Switzerland (excluding the SVP): 8.4%; Netherlands: 2.5%; Germany: 2.1%; and Britain: less than 1.0%. See Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni, and Florence Passy: The Extreme right: Ethnic Competition or Political Space? In: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 184–186. During the 2000s, Blocher’s ultra-nationalist SVP won 28% of the popular vote in 2003, while it’s highly contested 2007 election campaign led to violent clashes between SVP supporters, counterdemonstrators, and riot police. See Immigration, Black Sheep and Swiss Rage. In: The New York Times, October 8, 2007. In 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen won second place in the

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French presidential elections narrowly surpassing the Socialist’s candidate Lionel Jospin in the first ballot by a margin of under 200,000 votes (0.68%) while clearly losing to Jacques Chirac by a margin of 64.4% in the second. The shock of April 25, 2002 was also so pronounced because in the first ballot only a mere 3% separated Chirac from Le Pen. The election result led to one of the largest political demonstration in the history of France on par with the May 1968 student protests and 1998 World Cup celebration. See Un des plus grands défilés parle plein depuis la libération. In: Le Monde, May 3, 2002, p. 3, quoted in Mabel Berezin: Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 159. 50. In general, Koopmans et al. could not discern any systematic relation suggesting a direct impact of the size of migrant population or immigration rate on the success of extreme-right parties. Rather, the success of extreme-right parties seems to be determined by the interplay of three factors: national configurations of citizenship, the institutionalized political system, and strategic and organizational repertoires of extreme-right actors. Messina, among others, has stressed a political institutional breakdown perspective arguing that the long-term erosion of the main political institutions in their capacities as policy-making bodies and vehicles for popular representation is primarily responsible for the popularity of anti-immigration parties and the increasing loss of control of political discourse and policies concerning immigration by traditional political parties. Though immigration has accelerated this process, it is a decline that was precipitated by factors unrelated to immigration. See Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni, and Florence Passy: The Extreme right: Ethnic Competition or Political Space? In: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 184–186; and Anthony M. Messina: The Logics and Politics of PostWWII Migration to Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 8. From the quite substantial literature see also Anthony M. Messina: Race and Party competition in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989; Martin Schain: The Extreme-Right and Immigration Policy-Making: Measuring Direct and Indirect Effects. In: West European Politics, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2006), pp. 270–289; Pippa Norris: Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Cas Mudde: Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; and

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Michael Bruter: Mapping Extreme Right Ideology: An Empirical Geography of the European Extreme Right. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. From the growing literature on the AfD see, for example, Kai Arzheimer: “Don’t Mention the War!” how Populist Right-Wing Radicalism Became (Almost) Normal in Germany. In: JCMS, Vol. 57, No. S1 (September 2019), pp. 90–102. Richard Sennett: The Fall of Public Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992, pp. 294ff. For a more general argument of how the changing nature of political institutions and media coverage can contribute to undercut civil cooperation and the mobilization of broad-based constituencies and lead to very particularistic demands see Margaret Levi: Social and Unsocial Capital: A Review Essay of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work. In: Politics and Society, Vol. 24, No. 1 (March 1996), p. 49; and, as cited by Levi, Stephen Rosenstone and John M. Hansen: Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America. New York: Macmillan, 1993. Richard Sennett: The Fall of Public Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992, p. 300. Although in The Fall of Pubic Man Sennett focuses on communities in cities, I believe his core argument can also be extended to social dynamics of larger scale since it is especially the cultural dimension that is well suited for community processes that aim at the projection of a collective identity. See Benjamin R. Barber: Strong Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; Robert D. Putnam: The Decline of Civil Society: How Come? So What? In: Optimum, The Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 27, No. 1 (June 1996), pp. 28–36; Robert D. Putnam: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000; Bob Edwards, Michael W. Foley, Mario Diani (Eds.): Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001: and Michael Walzer: The Civil Society Argument. In: Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, citizenship and Community, ed. by Chantal Mouffe. London: Routledge, 1992. Richard Sennett: The Fall of Public Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992, p. 306. Ibid., p. 310. Dolf Sternberger: Verfassungspatrioitismus, ed. by Peter Haungs. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1990; Jürgen Habermas: Citizenship and National Identity. In: Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. See also Jan-Werner Müller: Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

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59. Richard Sennett: The Fall of Public Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992, p. 311. 60. Here I drawn on an argument by Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach: Global Politics at the Turn of the Millennium: Changing Bases of “Us” and “Them”. In: International Studies Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (summer 1999), pp. 77–107, 85. Direct quote comes from Antonio V. Menéndez-Alarcón: National Identities Confronting European Integration. In: International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 8 No. 4 (1995), pp. 543–562, p. 555. 61. Dani Flic argues along similar lines that European populism is mostly exclusionary as opposed to inclusionary forms of Latin-American populism and that this fact results from the legacy of colonialism. See Dani Flic: Latin American Inclusive and European Exclusionary Populism: Colonialism as an Explanation. In: Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Nov. 2015), pp. 263–283. 62. For the changing nature of territoriality see the work of John Agnew, most recently Reinventing Geopolitics: Geographies of Modern Statehood. (Hettner-Lecture) Heidelberg: Department of Geography, University, 2001; and Globalization and Sovereignty. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. 63. See Saskia Sassen: Guest and Aliens. New York: The New Press, 1999, pp. 88–90, who places these population exchanges within the contexts of European migration history. 64. See Eric Hobsbawm: Ethnicity and Nationalism Today. In: Anthropology Today, 8 (1992), pp. 3–8; Michael Ignatieff: Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. London: Catto and Windus, 1994; and Tony Judt: The New Old Nationalism. In: New York Review of Books, 41, No. 10 (May 26, 1994), pp. 44–51. 65. The term is Adrian Favell’s. See Adrian Favell: Eurostars and Eurocities: Free Movement and Mobility in an Integrating Europe. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. 66. Neil Fligstein: Who Are the Europeans and How Does this Matter for Politics? In: European Identity, ed. by Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 132– 166. See also the discussion in Chapter 2. 67. The exceptions are the conservative, middle-right governments of Italy which have steadily and resolutely pushed for European integration. For a more general argument in terms of ethnocentric historical narratives see Jörn Rüsen: How to Overcome Ethnocentrism: Approaches to a Culture of Recognition by History in the Twenty-First Century. In: History and Theory, Vol. 43, No. 4 (December 2004). 68. In the 2015 Eurobarometer survey at the height of the refugee crisis, the gap was even more pronounced with immigration at 58%

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70.

71. 72.

73.

74.

75. 76.

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and terrorism at 17%. See https://ec.europa.eu/COMMFrontOffice/ publicopinion/index.cfm/Survey/getSurveyDetail/instruments/STA NDARD/surveyKy/2098. See Pamela Duncan: Revealed: The Gap Between What You Know About Your Country and the Reality. In: The Guardian, December 2, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/society/datablog/2015/dec/ 02/revealed-gap-between-your-knowledge-reality; and Eurobarometer data for 2016 at https://ec.europa.eu/COMMFrontOffice/publicopi nion/index.cfm/Survey/getSurveyDetail/instruments/STANDARD/ surveyKy/2130. Maryon McDonald: New Nationalism in the EU: Occupying the Available Space. In: Neo-nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology, ed. by André Gingrich and Marcus Banks. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, pp. 218–234. Ibid., p. 228. See Neo-nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology, ed. by André Gingrich and Marcus Banks. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 275. A good example exhibiting this combination of cultural pessimism and xenophobia (primarily toward nominally Muslim Europeans) is Walter Laqueur: The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Albert O. Hirschman: Social Conflicts as Pillars of Democratic Market Society. In: A Propensity to Self-Subversion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 234. Hirschman’s reference is to Robert N. Bellah et al.: Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. On the concept’s relation to the EU see Jan-Werner Müller: A ‘Thick’ Constitutional Patriotism for the EU? On Morality, Memory and Militancy. In: Law, Democracy and Solidarity in a Post-national Union: The Unsettled Political Order of Europe, ed. by Erik Oddvar Eriksen, Christian Joerges and Florian Rödl. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 193–210. For the related concept of “civic nationalism” see Jack L. Snyder: From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict. New York: Norton, 2000; and Liah Greenfeld: Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. See Rogers Brubaker: Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 136–139, n. 20 p. 226. It is somewhat unfortunate that the Eurobarometer item by using the term “feel” does not sufficiently differentiate between the emotional, political, and legal components of citizenship. We would also do good to not take such self-ascriptions at face-value because they do not

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77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

82.

83. 84.

85.

readily translate into political preferences. See Standard Eurobarometer 87—Spring 2017, First Results, https://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoff ice/publicopinion/index.cfm/Survey/getSurveyDetail/instruments/ STANDARD/surveyKy/2142. For a critical overview of the concept see Craig Calhoun: Constitutional Patriotism and the Public Sphere: Interests, Identity, and Solidarity in the Integration of Europe. In: Global Justice and Transnational Politics, ed. by Pablo De Greiff and Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, pp. 275–312, direct quote at pp. 276–277. Habermas is probably right that next to the general “panic-stricken incrementalism” of national political elites, especially the German government has become “the catalyst of a Europe-wide erosion of solidarity.” See Jürgen Habermas: The Crisis of the European Union. A Response. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, p. 4. See Seyla Benhabib: The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 178 f. See Joe Painter and Chris Philo: Spaces of Citizenship: An Introduction. In: Political Geography, Vol. 14, No. 2 (February 1995), p. 115. For the receding importance of national identities as focal points for identity formation see also Richard Münch: Democracy Without Demos: European Integration as a Process of the Change of Institutions and Cultures. In: Europeanisation, National Identities, and Migration: Changes in Boundary Constructions Between Western and Eastern Europe, ed. by Willfried Spohn and Anna Triandafyllidou. London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 52–82. These and the following quotations come from Jürgen Habermas: The Crisis of the European Union in Light of a Constitutionalization of International Law—An Essay on the Constitution for Europe. In: The Crisis of the European Union. A Response. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, pp. 1–70, direct quotes at pp. 3, 11, 62, 64–66, all italics in the original. My emphasis here, to be clear, is on the assumption of the overriding nature of such subjective rights and the general possibility of universal moral justification. This should not be confused for a particularistic claim, advancing a position of moral relativism, but simply urges to firmly uphold the difference regarding the status of arguments on a conceptual or normative level and the historical-contextual level of social and political practice. See Ibid. The term is Habermas’, ibid., p. xi, italics in the original. Prominently so Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent [orig. Ach Europa: Wahrnehmungen aus 7 Ländern]. New York: Pantheon, 1988. On European self-conceptions see generally Hartmut Kaelble: Europäer über Europa: Die Entstehung des europäischen Selbstverständnisses im

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87.

88.

89.

90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95.

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19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2001. pp. 218ff; and Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford: Is there a European Identity? European Self-Understanding Beyond Unity and Diversity. In: Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 50–68. See European Stories: Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts, ed. by Justine Lacroix and Klaypso Nicolaïdis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; and Nicole Lindstrom: New Europe, Enduring Conflicts: The Politics of European Integration in the Enlarged EU. In: Europe’s Contending Identities: Supranationalism, Ethnoregionalism, Religion, and New Nationalism, ed. by Andrew C. Gould and Anthony M. Messina. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 219–230. Classic texts in favor of this argument include Niccolò Machiavelli: That the Disunion between the Plebs and the Senate Made That Republic Free and Powerful In: Discourses on Livy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 16–17; Edward A. Ross: The Principles of Sociology. New York: The Century, 1920, pp. 164 f.; Georg Simmel: Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955; and Lewis A. Coser: The Functions of Social Conflict. New York: Free Press, 1964. See Ralph H. Turner: Value Conflict in Social Disorganization. In Seymour M. Lipset and Neil J. Smelser (eds.), Sociology: The Progress of a Decade. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1961, pp. 522–527. Albert O. Hirschman: Social Conflicts as Pillars of Democratic Market Society. In: A Propensity to Self-Subversion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 243. See. Charles E. Lindblom: The Science of Muddling Through. In: Public Administration Review, 19, No. 2 (Spring 1959), pp. 79–88, and Still Muddling, Not Yet Through. In: Public Administration Review, 39, No. 6 (1975), pp. 517–526. For a more detailed discussion see Chapter 5. I cannot sufficiently reconstruct the course of this debate here, but will instead focus on some crucial points. Gerard Delanty: Europe Becoming: The Civilizational Consequences of Enlargement. In: The Shape of the New Europe, ed. by sRalf Rogowski and Charles Turner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 125–146. Daniel Goffman: The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 4. See Alessandro Pizzorno: Some Other Kinds of Otherness: A Critique of ‘Rational Choice’ Theories. In: Development, Democracy, and the Art of Trespassing: Essays in Honor of Albert O. Hirschman, ed. by Alejandro Foxley, Michael S. McPherson and Guillermo O’Donnell. Notre Dame,

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96. 97.

98. 99.

100. 101.

102.

103.

104.

105. 106.

107. 108.

IN: Published for the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies by University of Notre Dame Press, 1986, pp. 355–373. For an extended argument see Zygmunt Baumann: Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016. Adrian Favell: A Politics That Is Shared, Bounded, and Rooted? Rediscovering Civic Political Culture in Western Europe. In: Theory and Society, Vol. 27, No. 2 (April 1998), p. 217. Ibid. Robert D. Putnam: The Civic Legacies of Medieval Italy. In: Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 121–137, 121. Adrian Favell: Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, p. 251. Adrian Favell: A Politics That Is Shared, Bounded, and Rooted? Rediscovering Civic Political Culture in Western Europe. In: Theory and Society, Vol. 27, No. 2 (April 1998), p. 229, italics in the original. Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni and Florence Passy: Beyond the Nation-State? National and Postnational Claims Making. In: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 2; and Nadejda Alexandrova and Dawn Lyon: Imaginary Geographies: Borderplaces and Home. In: Woman Migrants from East to West: Gender, Mobility and Belonging in Contemporary Europe, ed. by Luisa Passerini, Dawn Lyon, Enrica Capussotti and Ioanna Laliotou. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007, p. 96. For example, Jeremy Rifkin claims that European cultures “have existed often in the same region for millennia of history.” See Jeremy Rifkin: The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004, p. 250. Rogers Brubaker: The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and Its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2001), pp. 531–548. I discuss such forms of differentialist racism in regard to European Muslim minorities in Chapter 1. See Silvano Santiago: The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture, ed. by Ana Lúcia Gazzola. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 25–38. Jan Zielonka: Europe as Empire. The Nature of the Enlarged European Union. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 1. See, for example, Jørgen Carling: Migration Control and Migrant Fatalities at the Spanish-African Borders. In: International Migration Review, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2007), pp. 316–343. Another example might be former

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German Interior Minister Otto Schily’s 2004 proposal to build extraterritorial holding centers for asylum seekers in North Africa, widely perceived as an attempt to seal off Europe from an estimated two million people on the North African coastal line seeking to travel to Europe. Most recently, Austrian foreign minister Sebastian Kurz called for the replication of the Australian model by the EU, holding migrants in detention camps on Mediterranean islands rather than letting them enter mainland European territory. See On Italian Isle, Migrant Plight Draws Scrutiny. New York Times, October 5, 2004, Late Edition. See also Italy and Libya in joint offensive on migrants. The Guardian, August 12, 2004; and European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) Press Release: EU Shouldn’t Shift its Responsibility for Refugees to Africa, 17 June 2009, https://www.ecrre.org/component/news/news/10eu-shouldnt-shift-its-responsibility-for-refugees-to-africa.html; and Put Migrants on Islands, says Austrian foreign minister. In: The Times, June 6, 2016, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/put-migrants-on-islandssays-austrian-foreign-minister-rglwms8xv. 109. See Karl Jaspers: Vom Europäischen Geist. In: Rechenschaft und Ausblick: Reden und Aufsätze. München: Piper, 1951 [orig. lecture Geneva, 1946], pp. 233–264; and Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas: Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 31, 2003, simultaneously publ. as: Europe: plaidoyer pour une politique extérieure commune. In: Libération, May 31, 2003, Engl. version reprinted as: February 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together: Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe. In: Old Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War, ed. by Daniel Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey. London: Verso, 2005, pp. 3–13. Historically see Michael Gehler and Wolfram Kaiser: Toward a ‘Core Europe’ in a Christian Western Bloc: Transnational Cooperation in European Christian Democracy, 1925–1965. In: European Christian Democracy: Historical Legacies and Comparative Perspectives, ed. by Thomas Kselman and Joseph A. Buttigieg. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003, pp. 240–266; and Wolfram Kaiser: Creating Core Europe: the Rise of the Party Network. In: Christian Democracy and the Origins of the European Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 191–252. See also Johnathan Story: The Idea of the Core: The Dialectics of History and Space. In: The Politics of European Treaty Reform, ed. By Geoffrey Edwards and Alfred Pijpers. London: Pinter, 1997, pp. 15–43. 110. Péter Esterházy: How Big is the European Dwarf? In: Old Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War, ed. by Daniel Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey. London: Verso, 2005 [orig. publ. as:

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112.

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116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121.

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Wir Störenfriede: Wie groß ist der europäische Zwerg? In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 11, 2003], pp. 74–79 with direct quote at p. 74. For a brief discussion of the pluralist tensions in the theory of political liberalism see Chantal Mouffe: Politics and the Limits of Liberalism. In: The Return of the Political. London: Verso, 2005, pp. 135–154. Ralf Dahrendorf: The Third Way and Liberty: An Authoritarian Streak in Europe’s New Center. In: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 5 (September/October 1999), pp. 13–17, 15. Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni and Florence Passy: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 13. The term “Balkanization” is employed here for its symbolic value though it should be clear that it’s symbolism does not represent or correspond to any innate qualities of South-Eastern Europe. John Agnew: Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics. In: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 95, No. 2 (June 2005), p. 440. Rogers Brubaker: National Homogenization and Ethnic Reproduction on the European Periphery. In: La teoria sociologica e lo stato moderno: saggi in onore di Gianfranco Poggi, ed. by Marzio Barbagli and Harvie Ferguson. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009, pp. 201–221, direct quotes at p. 201. Jan Zielonka: Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 2. Brubaker: National Homogenization and Ethnic Reproduction, p. 206. Here and for the following paragraph see ibid., pp. 210–215, 219–221. Àgnes Er˝ oss et al.: On Linkages and Barriers: The Dynamics of Neighbourhood along the State Borders of Hungary since EU Enlargement. In: Negotiating Multicultural Europe: Borders, Networks, Neighbourhoods, ed. by Heidi Armbruster and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 69–93. John H. Hertz: International Politics in the Atomic Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959, chaps. 2–4. John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge: Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory, and International Political Economy. London: Routledge, 1995, p. 85. Jan Zielonka: Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Page 12 provides a contrasting juxtaposition of the Westphalian and Neo-medieval model of the EU. It should be clear that Zielonka did not aim to establish a historical analogy by arguing that the EU resembled the Middle Ages or was on its way back into them in terms of economics, governance, and foreign

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126. 127.

128.

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relations but that it could be conceptually productive to work with this metaphor. Neo-medievalism as a conceptual metaphor describing emerging multi-level systems of governance has been employed by scholars of international relations for some time. See, for example, Alain Minc: Le Nouveau Moyen Âge. Paris: Gallimard, 1993; James Anderson: The Shifting Stage of Politics: New Medieval and Postmodern Territorialities? In: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1996), pp. 133–53; Markus Jachtenfuchs: Conceptualizing European Governance. In: Reflective Approaches to European Governance, ed. by Knud-Erik Jorgensen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997; and Ole Wæver: Europe, State and Nation in the New Middle Ages. In: Organized Anarchy in Europe: The Role of the Intergovernmental Organizations, ed. by Jaap de Wilde and Håkan Wiberg. London: Tauris Academic, 1996. Critically see Jörg Friedrichs: The Meaning of New Medievalism. In: European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 7, No. 4 (December 2001), pp. 475–501; and Chris Rumford: Cosmopolitan Spaces: Europe, Globalization, Theory. New York: Routledge, 2008. Hedley Bull: The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977, p. 254. Jörg Friedrichs: The Meaning of New Medievalism. In: European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 7, No. 4 (December 2001), p. 494. Ibid., pp. 494–495, 497, fn 27. European citizenship was formally established as a legal category with the Maastricht Treaty on January 1, 1993. It guarantees the right to free movement and choice of residence within the territory of the member states, political rights on the local and supranational level, and economic rights in terms of the free choice to work anywhere in the EU and be granted access to national institution of social security. See John Agnew: Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics. In: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 95, No. 2 (June 2005), pp. 437–461. Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande: Empire Europe: Statehood and Political Authority in the Process of Regional Integration. In: Political Theory of the European Union, ed. by Jürgen Neyer and Antje Wiener. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 34. Stefano Bartolini: Restructuring Europe: Centre Formation, System Building, and Political Restructuring between the Nation-State and the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 116. Linda Bosniak: Citizenship Denationalized. In: Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Vol. 4 (2000), p. 450.

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132. For this typology of different meanings of citizenship and in the following (unless otherwise noted) see Linda Bosniak: Citizenship Denationalized. In: Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Vol. 4 (2000), pp. 447–508. Bosniak also states that questions of citizenship contain three “inevitably overlapping” categories concerning the substance of citizenship, its domain of action or location, and the class of citizenship’s subjects. See Linda Bosniak: The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 17. 133. Jürgen Mackert and Bryan S. Turner: Citizenship and its Boundaries. In: The Transformation of Citizenship, Vol. 2: Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion, ed. by J. Mackert and B. S. Turner. London and New York: Routledge, 2017, p. 1. 134. Damian Tambini: Post-national Citizenship. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (March 2001), pp. 195–217, 201. Direct quotation comes from Hans Ulfich Jessurun d’Olivera: Union Citizenship: Pie in the Sky? In: A Citizen’s Europe: In Search of a New World Order, ed. by Allan Rosas and Esko Antola. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1995, pp. 82–83, cited in Bosniak: Citizenship Denationalized, p. 458, fn. 33. 135. See Carlos Closa: Some Skeptical Reflections on EU Citizenship as the Basis of a New Social Contract. In: The Future of European Welfare: A New Social Contract?, ed. by Martin Rhodes and Yves Mény. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998, pp. 266–283, 270. 136. Liesbet Hooghe: Europe Divided? Elites vs. Public Opinion on European Integration. In: European Union Politics, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2003), pp. 283–285. 137. Thomas H. Marshall: Citizenship and Social Class, reprinted in Thomas H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore: Citizenship and Social Class. London: Pluto Press, 1992. 138. See, for example, Yasemin Nuho˘glu Soysal: Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994; Yasemin Nuho˘glu Soysal: Changing Parameters of Citizenship and Claims-making: Organized Islam in European Public Spheres. In: Theory and Society, Vol. 26, No. 4 (August 1997), pp. 509–527; and David Jacobson: Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 139. See, for example, Damian Tambini: Post-national Citizenship. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (March 2001), pp. 195–217, direct quotes at pp. 200, 201. 140. Ibid., p. 201. 141. Alan S. Milward: The European Rescue of the Nation State. London: Routledge, 1992, as cited in June Edmunds: Human Rights, Islam

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146. 147. 148.

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and the Failure of Cosmopolitanism. London and New York: Routledge, 2017, p. 38. See Kathleen Cavanaugh: Islam and the European Project. In: Muslim World Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 4, No. 1 (January 2007), pp. 1– 19, direct quote at p. 2; June Edmunds: The Limits of Post-national Citizenship: European Muslims, Human Rights and the Hijab. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 35, No. 7 (2012), pp. 1181–1199; and Jennifer Westerfield: Behind the Veil: an American Legal Perspective on the European Headscarf Debate. In: The American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Summer 2006), pp. 637–678. June Edmunds: The Limits of Post-national Citizenship: European Muslims, Human Rights and the Hijab. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 35, No. 7 (2012), pp. 1189, 1195f. See also, as cited by Edmunds, Tom Lewis: What not to Wear: Religious Rights, the European Court and the Margin of Appreciation. In: International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April 2007), pp. 395–414, p. 396. Alan S. Milward: The European Rescue of the Nation State. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 45. This rescue of the nation-state was conceptualized as a win–win situation for both, nation-states and European institutions. Jan Zielonka, however, recently argued that this win–win logic has been replaced by a bipolar logic of, on the one hand, repatriation of powers to the nation-state and increased federalization on the other. Jan Zielonka: Legitimacy in a Neomedieval (Postcrisis) Europe. In: The Future of the European Union: Democracy, Legitimacy and Justice after the Euro Crisis, ed. by Serge Champeau, Carlos Closa, Daniel Innerarity and Miguel Poiares Maduro. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, pp. 211–223, p. 212. For this criticism of communitarian versions of democratic legitimacy see Jürgen Habermas: Three Normative Models of Democracy. In: The Inclusion of the Other. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, pp. 239ff.; as cited in Erik O. Eriksen and John E. Fossum: Europe in Search of Legitimacy: Strategies of Legitimation Assessed. In: International Political Science Review, Vol. 25, No. 4 (October 2004), p. 443. Linda Bosniak: Citizenship Denationalized. In: Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Vol. 4 (2000), p. 467. Ibid., p. 469. Ilan Peleg: Democratizing the Hegemonic State: Political Transformation in the Age of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 22. Yasemin Nuho˘glu Soysal: Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 164.

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150. Andrew Geddes: Immigration and European Integration: Towards Fortress Europe?. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 151. See the detailed discussion in Adam Przeworski: Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 152. Bosniak: Citizenship Denationalized, pp. 474–475. 153. The formulation is Robert Dahl’s from Democracy and its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 321. But whereas Dahl focused at the sub-national level to enhance democratic life in regard to matters such as education, health, questions of infrastructure and public sector provisions, proponents of transnational forms of democracy want to entrust the participatory political dimension of citizenship to postnational (potentially global) networks of civil society. From the wealth of literature see, for example, Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order, ed. by Daniele Archibugi and David Held. Cambridge: Polity, 1995; Daniele Archibugi: The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008; and Jürgen Habermas: The Crisis of the European Union. A Response. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, esp. pp. 53–70. See also Michael Zürn: Vier Modelle einer globalen Ordnung in kosmopolitischer Absicht. In: Politische Vierteljahresschrift, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2011), pp. 78–118. 154. See Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks: A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus. In: British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 39, No. 1 (January 2009), pp. 1–23, direct quotes at 2, 12. 155. See, for example, Charles Taylor: Invoking Civil Society. In: Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 204– 224, esp. 215–220. 156. Bosniak: Citizenship Denationalized, p. 478. 157. Adam Przeworski: Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 169. 158. Socio-economic cleavages have been a defining feature of citizenship from the beginning. See, for example, Saskia Sassen’s examination of property ownership as a specific prerequisite for political rights in England and the United States, that is, of the dichotomy between the fully enabled property-owning citizen and the disadvantaged subject of the factory worker. Saskia Sassen: Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 74–140. 159. For a critical review of such positions see Cristian Nitoiu: The European Public Sphere: Myth, Reality or Aspiration? In: Political Studies Review, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 2013), pp. 26–38.

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160. See Editorial. In The European Journal of International Law, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2011), pp. 303–311. 161. See The Europe of Elites: A Study into the Europeanness of Europe’s Political and Economic Elites, ed. by Heinrich Best, György Lengyel, and Luca Verzichelli. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 3. 162. Bosniak: Citizenship Denationalized, p. 478. 163. Timothy Garton Ash et al.: Liberalisms in East and West (The record of a conference held at the University of Oxford in January 2009). Oxford: Medical Informatics Unit, NDCLS, 2009, p. 150. 164. Linda Bosniak: The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 20. On the politics of recognition see Iris Marion Young: Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990; Charles Taylor: Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992; and Axel Honneth: The Struggle for Recognition: the Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts [orig. Kampf um Anerkennung]. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1995. 165. See Mabel Berezin: Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 8. 166. Markus M. L. Crepaz: Trust Beyond Borders: Immigration, the Welfare State, and Identity in Modern Societies, foreword by Arend Lijphart. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008, pp. 254–255. 167. See Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni, and Florence Passy: The Extreme right: Ethnic Competition or Political Space? In: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 180–204; and Marc Hooghe, Tim Reeskens, Dietlind Stolle and Ann Trappers: Ethnic Diversity and Generalized Trust in Europe: A Cross-National Multilevel Study. In: Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2 (February 2009), pp. 198–223. 168. Bosniak: Citizenship Denationalized, p. 490. 169. Peter Geschiere: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion—Paradoxes in the Politics of Belonging in Africa and Europe. In: Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 321–339, direct quote at p. 339. See also Peter Geschiere: The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009. 170. Willem Maas: Varieties of Multi-level Citizenship in Europe. In: Multilevel Citizenship, ed. by Willem Maas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, pp. 1–21, direct quotes at 17, 18.

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171. For structural preconditions and the dynamics of mobilization associated with the consolidation of European nation-states see Eric J. Hobsbawm: Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 172. This observation features prominently in the work of Saskia Sassen. See her Who’s City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims. In: Cities and Citizenship, ed. by James Holston. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 177–194; and Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 280–281, 314–319, direct quote at 281. See also, more recently, Catherine Neveu: Sites of Citizenship, Politics of Scales. In: Multi-level Citizenship, ed. by Willem Maas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, pp. 203–212. 173. Saskia Sassen: Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 315, 316. See also Paul Scheffer: The World in the City. In: Immigrant Nations [orig. Het land van aankomst ], transl. by Liz Waters. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011, pp. 42–71. 174. Linda Bosniak: The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 7. 175. The phrase, also discussed by Linda Bosniak, is of course John Rawls’. In: A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 8. 176. The inevitable boundedness of the space of citizenship has led some scholars to argue that even liberal citizenship theories are implicitly communitarian. See Richard Bellamy: Tre modelli di cittadinanza. In: La cittadinanza: Appartanenza, identità, diritti, ed. by Danilo Zolo. Roma: Laterza, pp. 223–61. 177. Erik O. Eriksen and John E. Fossum: Europe in Search of Legitimacy: Strategies of Legitimation Assessed. In: International Political Science Review, Vol. 25, No. 4 (October 2004), pp. 435–459. 178. Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum: A Done Deal? The EU’s Legitimacy Conundrum Revisited. In: Law, Democracy and Solidarity in a Post-national Union. The Unsettled Political Order of Europe, ed. by Erik Oddvar Eriksen, Christian Joerges and Florian Rödl. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 230–252. 179. Sergio Fabbrini: Which European Union? Europe After the Euro Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 49–63. 180. Already during the process of Eastern enlargement the EU has used discriminatory transition agreements on the prospective member states for the benefit of the old member states. Michael Marder further argues that economic inequalities among EU member states have become “levers for the uneven distribution of sovereign decision making” not

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182. 183.

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only regarding the future course of the EU but also “on the national policies of countries steeped in the crisis.” See Thomas Plümper and Christina Schneider: Discriminatory Membership and the Redistribution of Enlargement Gains. In: Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 51, No. 4 (August 2007), pp. 568–587; and Michael Marder: Carl Schmitt and the Deconstruction of Europe. In: The Future of the European Union: Democracy, Legitimacy and Justice After the Euro Crisis, ed. by Serge Champeau, Carlos Closa, Daniel Innerarity and Miguel Poaires Maduro. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, p. 96. See Jan Zielonka: Legitimacy in a Neomedieval (Postcrisis) Europe. In: The Future of the European Union: Democracy, Legitimacy and Justice after the Euro Crisis, ed. by Serge Champeau, Carlos Closa, Daniel Innerarity and Miguel Poaires Maduro. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, pp. 212–214, direct quote at 215. Sergio Fabbrini: Which European Union? Europe After the Euro Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 89. For Greece, Portugal, and Spain it would be hard to claim that the implementation of austerity measures resulted from a domestic policy process and reflected the interests of dominant domestic interests groups. This begs the question whether the relative power of member states in the EU has not become so uneven that it is no longer possible for states dissatisfied with patterns of asymmetrical interdependence to react by means of differentiated integration in order to realize their preferences. Differentiated integration seems, under current conditions, to lead to paralysis or incur prohibitive negative externalities. On liberal intergovernmentalism see Andrew Moravcsik: Preferences and Power in the European Community: A Liberal Intergovernmentalist Approach. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4 (December 1993), pp. 473–524; and Andrew Moravcsik: The Choice for Europe. Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Michael Marder: Carl Schmitt and the Deconstruction of Europe. In: The Future of the European Union: Democracy, Legitimacy and Justice After the Euro Crisis, ed. by Serge Champeau, Carlos Closa, Daniel Innerarity and Miguel Poaires Maduro. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, pp. 96–97. Jürgen Habermas: The Crisis of the European Union. A Response. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, p. viii. Sergio Fabbrini: Which European Union? Europe after the Euro Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 62–63. See Jan Zielonka: Legitimacy in a Neomedieval (Postcrisis) Europe. In: The Future of the European Union: Democracy, Legitimacy and Justice After the Euro Crisis, ed. by Serge Champeau, Carlos Closa, Daniel

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189.

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191.

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Innerarity and Miguel Poaires Maduro. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, direct quotes at 214. J.H.H. Weiler: To Be a European Citizen—Eros and Civilization. In: Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1997), pp. 495–519, 511. Especially the decline of the nationally oriented European welfare states since the mid-1970s has turned the social inclusion of migrants into an ever more contentious and explosive political issue. See Peo Hansen and Sandy Brian Hager: The Politics of European Citizenship: Deepening Contradictions in Social Rights and Migration Policy. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010, pp. 33f.; and Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson: Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging. New York: Routledge, 2000, direct quote at p. 103. Thomas Diez: Constructing the Self and Changing Others: Reconsidering ‘Normative Power Europe’. In: Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (June 2005), pp. 613–636, 634. Hannah Arendt: We Refugees. In: Menorah Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1, (1949), pp. 69–77. The Syrian refugee crisis serves as a reminder that the statelessness is not a problem of the past but due to gender-biased nationality laws in Syria (Syrian nationality laws do not allow women to transfer nationality to their children) and ineffective legal regulation within the EU member states, children born to Syrian refugees face the risk of becoming a “stateless generation” within Europe. See Stateless in Europe: ‘We are no people with no nation’. In: The Guardian, December 27, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/27/statel ess-in-europe-refugee-crisis-we-are-no-people-with-no-nation; for a preSyrian refugee crisis assessment see Statelessness in the European Union: Displaced, Undocumented, Unwanted, ed. by Caroline Sawyer and Brad K. Blitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Iris Marion Young: Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship. In: Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 (Jan 1989), pp. 250– 274. Ruth Lister: Citizenship and Difference: Toward a Differentiated Universalism. In: European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 1, No. 1 (July 1998), pp. 71–90. Žiga Vodovnik: The Performative Power of Translocal Citizenship. In: Dve Domovini/Two Homelands (Slovenian Migration Institute), Vol. 34 (January 2011), pp. 7–20.

CHAPTER 4

Changing Logics of Migration: Immigrant Threat to National Sovereignty?

The preceding chapters make clear that discussions of national and European identities and social cohesion not only directly relate to debates on immigration but also are being prompted by them. A large percentage of political discontents and conflicts in Europe is tied to the impact—real and imagined—of immigration on European societies and the increase of cultural diversity. The end of World War II had the paradoxical result of producing largely ethnically homogeneous nation-states by way of allied backed large scale and mostly forced mass migration and expulsion of twelve to fourteen million people across the whole of war-torn Europe.1 Several waves of decolonization triggered by the comprehensive postwar restructuring of the international system ultimately led to the collapse of Europe’s late colonial empires and resulted in substantial postcolonial migration to the European metropole. Finally, the 2004 and 2007 Eastern enlargements of the European Union also contributed to what has variously been called “super diversity” and pushed intra-European questions of who legitimately can and should belong to the EU to the fore.2 Friedhelm Neidhardt and Dieter Rucht, for example, estimated that in case of Germany roughly one-third of all protests in the first half of the 1990s were related to immigration.3 Immigrants, Riva Kastoryano further argued, are no longer perceived as individuals but increasingly as members of ethnic communities considered either to be opposed to the national © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. M. Michael, Migration and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Europe, Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64069-9_4

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community of the receiving country or a security risk. The reality and experience of more recent immigration in general and the often difficult relationship of immigrants and both, national institutions and nationally bound society in particular have resulted in increasing clashes of immigrants’ perspectives and orientations and the dominant and sometimes hegemonic national representations in Western EU member states. This may be the case partly because of a common overlap of culture and politics despite different founding concepts of European nation-states. For example, German national identity until recently had been based on ethnic ancestry and a concept of citizenship that excludes cultural differences.4 Thus, in Germany an ethno-cultural identity constituted the basis of a political identity, whereas in France, the political identity of republicanism forms the basis of French cultural identity excluding racial categories.5 As a rule, European nations have generally been closer to some modified version of jus sanguinis-citizenship or ethnic citizenship regimes since immigration did not occupy a central place within their national narratives.6 In consequence, the territorial scope of sovereignty—a strictly bounded territory—carries perhaps greater weight in Europe with its Westphalian heritage and nationalist imaginaries than elsewhere. However, this understanding of sovereignty as “unlimited and indivisible rule by a state over a territory and the people in it” as much as the assumption of equal sovereignty of states has increasingly come under scrutiny since the early 1990s.7 But while most countries reduced trade barriers, liberalized financial markets and deregulated the flow of information and services, they, at the same time, tried to limit immigration resulting in the labor market being the least developed part of economic globalization.8 Scholars of migration have also argued that there was no trade-off between trade liberalization and migration liberalization in the sense that countries of emigration would condition—even threaten to block trade liberalization—on the liberalization of European migration.9 In addition, national, supranational, and transgovernmental actors do not only disagree on who constitutes a refugee deserving protection but also on the factual representation of the so-called refugee problem and the normative orientation of a common European refugee policy. Specific national institutional contexts condition those representations and limit the spectrum of political action perceived as legitimate.10 It would thus seem that regulating the flow of people is a remainder of national sovereignty. It may even

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function as a substitute for the loss of sovereignty and exclusive territoriality in other areas, that is, as “antidote to the ‘denationalizing’ logic of globalization.”11 That this is in fact the case clearly surfaced in the way the EU—or more precisely its member states—sought to stem the Syrian refugee crisis during its height in 2015 and 2016 and reframe its policy toward the postArab Spring MENA region.12 Restrictive immigration policies, in that sense, function as a powerful politically tool to alleviate substantive cognitive dissonances produced by globalization. What Bauman and others have termed “moral panic”—a diffuse set of public anxieties and fears prefiguring not only the end of sovereign nation-states but also the demise of any distinctly European ways of life—was clearly visible across Europe in heated political debates, public anti-immigration rallies and violent attack on refugees in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis.13 Despite the development of distinct national approaches to postwar migration, European perceptions of immigration as inherently problematic became increasingly linked with long-standing and deep-seated social, political, and economic anxieties triggered by both globalization and European integration. Since the early 1990s, successive EU enlargements and the feelings of insecurity accompanying these processes have also contributed to a marked resurgence of the European right and a populist political backlash against mainstream political parties.14 In spite of globalization and the Schengen Agreement abolishing internal border controls within the EU, national borders continue—even increasingly so—to function metonymically as both a symbol and an index of state sovereignty. That is to say that dominant modes of visualizing borders do function as means by which political, social, and cultural norms are being reified in ways in which, Anne Demo put it, “the ‘look of deterrence’ may have constituted the ultimate symbol of sovereignty.”15 Borders, thus, function as an index of sovereignty because their very presence (real or imagined) symbolizes claims of authority over a territorial entity. Contemporary border control imagery thus functions as a form of sovereignty discourse because it seeks to recast the transnational economic and social conditions of contemporary border life as an erosion of national autonomy.16

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The temporary reintroduction of border controls by seven Schengen countries as a response to the 2015 refugee crisis presents a case in point. This chapter historically situates the politicization of immigrants’ culture within three overlapping, but nevertheless distinct waves of migration since the end of World War II and, politically, within three broader policy dynamics of national immigration regimes. It thus makes clear that what divided the continent well into the 1980s was intra-European, transnational labor migration, not migration streams from non-European countries of origin. Especially the latter have become increasingly politicized since the 1970s. However, since I draw on the postwar history of migration with a distinctly analytical purpose, this chapter does not provide a substantial historical account, even in the briefest of forms. To claim it did would be wholly unwarranted. The first section discusses the changing logics of migration in postwar Europe and links them to the postwar politicization and contemporary culturalization of immigration manifesting itself throughout Western Europe.17 I argue that the so-called asylum crisis did not result from entirely new forms of postwar migration but was primarily due to semantic shifts and the blurring of concepts and categories that moved the emphasis on national integration from a political trajectory to a cultural one. Both the examples of the German guest-worker myth and of postcolonial migration into France, Britain, or the Netherlands suggest that it is continuum rather than crisis that characterizes postwar migration into Western Europe. The history of postwar immigration also suggests that the identity crisis Europe finds itself presently confronted with marks— in a particular powerful way—the resurgence of a “postcolonial crisis” largely invisible within European public memory. It thus illustrates a widening paradox between (national) political logics driving migration regimes and the increasingly de-politicized handling of immigration and especially asylum claims. The second section explores the way in which the issue of migration is linked with questions of political membership, security agendas, transnationalization, and sovereignty and shows why migration occupies such a prominent place within political discourse. I argue that European migration policy—especially regarding extraterritorialization, detention, and forceful removal—serves the reproduction of territorial notions of sovereignty and, perhaps more importantly, the renationalization of European political space. It therefore adversely impacts on the cohesion of the European Union itself. The discussion therefore illustrates the important link between the culturalization of immigration,

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the stratification and increasing inaccessibility of citizenship for certain migrant groups and their link to racialized frameworks of cultural difference. It also points to the systematic difference between earlier forms of racism and the current postcolonial politicization of cultural identities in Europe. This chapter further illustrates the genuine—but insufficiently analyzed—interconnection of what I term the culturalization of territorial sovereignty, the inherent fault lines within the political architecture of the EU, the largely invisibilized impact of postcolonial migration on European societies and, finally, the resilience of national identities vis-à-vis an integrated Europe. It is thus one of the key theses of this chapter that without taking these interconnections into account we cannot make sense of the fundamental and strikingly disproportionate impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on both, the European Union and its member states and the political dislocations it effected. This, I argue, also effects a number of important conceptual and methodological issues.

From Interest to Culture: Changing Politics of Migration During the 1950s, European unification was perceived as imperative to counter Soviet aggression, even if beyond political elites Europeans tended to be somewhat unconcerned with the threat of Soviet communism. Europe’s population on both sides of the Iron Curtain was profoundly adverse to the notion of a European “comradeship-in-arms” and suggestions of a military solution were viewed as even more devastating and inconclusive, hence undesirable, as the one they had just emerged from.18 Cold War Angst in Germany, for example, not only presented a paradox in so far as in the late 1950s the majority of WestGermans opposed rearmament and particularly nuclear weapons while an absolute majority cast their vote for the pro-rearmament, pro-nuclear weapons CDU/CSU coalition of then-chancellor Konrad Adenauer. It also proved more pervasive and enduring than many politicians had initially assumed. While anti-rearmament sentiments were successfully thwarted by power elites who dangerously toyed with Nazi stereotypes of a Russian menace and fears subsided in the 1960s and early 1970s, antimilitary sentiments and nuclear anxiety resurfaced powerfully in the late 1970s and early 1980s.19 But even if the conflict between the Soviet bloc and the West dominated European politics for a considerable

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time immediately after the end of the war, it contributed to the longstanding quarrels between the European nations subsequently losing their traditional meaning and relevance. Had the French right, for example, after World War I favored a nationalist politics that opposed the policy of reconciliation with the Weimar Republic because of security concerns and the “ennemi héréditaire” doctrine, after World War II they welcomed the unification of Europe and the membership of the Federal Republic in the Atlantic Alliance as suitable instruments directed against Soviet power. Nationalist sentiments were thus seemingly trumped by cold war strategic considerations. By the mid-1960s, however, the idea of European unity had separated quite clearly from Cold War conflict.20 With the end of the Cold War, fears of communism and large-scale nuclear destruction have been increasingly replaced by diffuse perceptions of transnational threats to national sovereignty, be it organized crime, environmental disasters, or uncontrollable immigration. With it, an important source of socio-political cohesion in the West disappeared virtually overnight, entailing a change of geopolitical perspective most notable perhaps in post-Cold War, pre-unification Germany.21 The post-Cold War reemergence of culture as conceptual category also happened to be that pronounced, because Cold War ideology had pushed ethno-cultural distinctions within Europe into the background.22 The virtual disappearance of identity discourse had its basis in the denial of ethnic or cultural identities within Soviet-controlled territory but also in Western European assumptions that rejected identity—even national identity—as a legitimate basis of political discourse in favor of economic performance and cosmopolitan versions of democratic liberalism. This is to say that the political legitimacy of the two opposing political systems was tightly related to the success and progress (socially as economically) of their economic systems, while the deliberate politics of amnesia in the postwar decades did their share to repress notions of race and ethnicity, preventing them from becoming politically influential.23 Especially after 9/11 rather pervasive anxieties in terms of cultural fears have become linked with international migration. They readily lent themselves to symbolic meta-politics, thereby reinforcing cultural stereotypes and implying causal connections between a number of societal problems and immigration.24 Whereas the early 1990s were characterized by an interpretative reframing of immigration and asylum, but also by a broad politicization of European integration beyond economic rationales, the

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early 2000s were defined by the emergence of new geopolitical fissures. These included the new ideological and military frontiers created by militant Islamism which increasingly replaced the ideological void left by the end of the global confrontation with communism. While European integration long seemed uncontentious in a political and cultural sense, the prospect of post-Cold War eastern enlargement and the threat of Islamist terrorism led to the reemergence (concerning Eastern Europe) and the creation (concerning nominally Muslim immigration) of identity-forming concepts in which culture was of central importance. This culturalization of migration from the early 1990s onwards has further been aided by the largely contra-factual construal of an “asylum crisis” in which refugees from outside Europe are portrayed as an entirely new experience on a scale surpassing all previous waves of refugees. However, rather than in the changing nature of migration itself, this construal was largely based on a reinterpretation of European history. What this means is that the so-called asylum crisis was not the result of entirely new forms of migration but was primarily due to semantic shifts and the blurring of concepts and categories. The normative core of the asylum concept, for example, had been increasingly undermined by the linkage of refugees to economic and non-documented forms of migration not meriting protection under international law.25 Peter Geschiere showed accordingly that the policy shift in immigrant legislation and integration policies since the 2000s also moved the emphasis on national integration from a political trajectory to a cultural one, thus initiating the culturalization of citizenship regimes across Europe.26 As I argued in the preceding chapter, this resulted in the strengthening of the European nation-state as the dominant frame of governance in terms of migration policy. Although analytical frames concerning the impact of immigration to Europe are varied and range from the liberal state thesis (control of immigration flows and immigration policy is constrained by domestic and international law and long-standing institutional arrangements) across embedded realism (in addition to institutional and legal policy constraints interest-driven immigration policy is further limited by self-imposed moral obligations toward particular immigrant groups) to the declining sovereignty thesis (a major erosion of the ability to control immigration and pursue self-interested immigration policies),27 postwar immigration into Western Europe was, and continues to be, primarily defined by national governments and driven by the narrow economic and political considerations of individual member states. The failure to agree on a common

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European migration policy and the dominance of unilateral rather than coordinated responses by EU member states during the Syrian refugee crisis is yet another instantiation of such policy priorities. The history of postwar migration shows that each phase of immigration was driven by a political logic that acted as trump for economic and humanitarian imperatives whenever these conflicted with domestic political pressures. The main fact to be drawn from it is this: immigration into Europe was interest-driven rather than a phenomenon governed by outside pressures. As Anthony Messina put it: It is politics, and specifically the role of politics in adjudicating the often competing claims thrown up by the domestic economy and domestic economic actors, foreign policy pressures and commitments, and humanitarian norms within the domestic and international arenas, that is primarily responsible for creating and sustaining an environment that allows significant migration to Western Europe.28

Postwar immigration into Western Europe was itself situated within three broader dynamics: a convergence in policies, effects, and public reactions to immigration in industrialized, labor-importing countries; a growing gap between policy goals and their actual effects; and a large and systematic gap between an increasingly hostile public opinion and the content and goals of immigration policy in liberal democracies.29 World War II had represented a break in European migration in two ways: first, it led to the largest forced migrations in European history and, second, it accelerated the disintegration of European colonial empires.30 It is therefore not surprising that in addition to the temporary guest worker policies of the first postwar decades in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland as well as the Netherlands, postcolonial migration to Britain and France constituted the other of the two most important sources of migration to Europe.31 However, as Klaus Bade points out, it was not until the 1960s that immigration into Europe would counter-balance European overseas emigrations with a net loss of 2.7 million people between 1950 and 1959.32 This reversal had its primary origins in the postwar economic boom resulting in acute labor shortages in Western European domestic labor markets. Postwar immigration thus presents itself as at least three major overlapping waves33 consisting of primary labor immigration from 1945 to 1979, secondary (family) immigration from 1973 to 2007, and asylum and

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irregular/undocumented immigration from 1989 to present. According to Messina, each of the waves was governed by its own logic and accompanied by a unique set of short-term stimuli.34 But these waves of immigration did not only differ by their causes, origins and timing but also in terms of the position immigrants attained in the labor market and the policies of civic inclusion and philosophies of integration in each of the receiving countries.35 Though immigration was economically motivated and followed a political rationale that often was discriminative against certain immigrant groups, first wave labor immigration largely happened in an apolitical context. In fact, in the mid-1950s there had been no acute labor shortage in macro-economic terms within the receiving countries with relatively high overall unemployment rates.36 This is to say that not only had immigration policies not yet become an electoral issue but also policies aimed at economic and political reconstruction were not yet part of party politics but the domain of bureaucrats and the political executive.37 According to Messina, there are several reasons for the insular and perhaps politically naive mentality of many policy makers, particularly so in Germany, the Netherlands and in Switzerland. For example, the guest worker myth led policy makers to assume—perhaps in a peculiar reversal of imperialist administrative logics—that foreign workers would not settle permanently, and thus labor immigration did not require the political endorsement of the electorate. It is thus paradoxical that labor immigration entered seriously into public discussion and party politics only after it virtually ceased and had been replaced by family reunification as the main source of immigration in the beginning of the 1970s.38 Although immigrants initially often lacked sufficient command of the language of the receiving country and had little educational qualifications (and those they did have were only very rarely formally recognized), as members of the workforce they were much needed and welcomed, albeit for purely economic reasons. Gianni D’Amato highlights the labor migrants’ function as economic buffer, primarily in terms of offsetting domestic labor shortages due to the strictly temporary character of their contracts. More importantly, labor migration seems to have been “a viable response to the diminished recruitment flexibility” mainly due to the expansion of the European welfare states.39 This, of course, was only the case as long as migrant workers remained excluded from access to social rights. However, by the mid-1970s a considerable part of this imported makeshift labor reservoir had not only settled permanently in the migrant-receiving countries of Western Europe but also gained access

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to the institutions of the respective welfare stats. It was at this point in time that labor migration became politicized in Western European guest worker regimes. Contrary to self-prescribed countries of immigration such as the United States or Canada which up until recently accepted refugees as a quasi-natural part of their migration policies and national narratives, “Europe wanted an immigrant labour force without an immigrant society.”40 One of the discernable effects of more restrictive migration policies in Western Europe since the 1970s has thus been an increased strain on ethnic relations giving rise to the emergence and electoral success of extreme-right parties.41 In West-Germany, for example, the so-called postwar economic miracle 42 and the newfound West-German pride that came with it was seconded by bilateral recruitment agreements concluded with Italy (1955), Spain and Greece (1960), Turkey (1961), Morocco (1963), Portugal (1964), Tunisia (1965), and Yugoslavia (1968).43 Eastern Germany also concluded bilateral recruitment agreements with other socialist “sister nations” in order to alleviate labor shortages, first with the Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa) in 1963 and the Hungarian People’s Republic (Magyar Népköztársaság) in 1967. From the 1970s onward, agreements followed with Algeria (1974), Cuba (1975), Mozambique (1979), Vietnam (1980), Angola (1984) and, on a smaller scale, with Mongolia (1982), the People’s Republic of China (1986) and North Korea.44 However, compared to the West German guest worker the so-called contractual laborers (Vertragsarbeiter) in the German Democratic Republic were subject to tight regulations and controls and did not enjoy the liberties of their counterparts in the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1989, the year the GDR regime collapsed, the overall number of contractual laborers present in Eastern Germany lay in the range of 91,000–94,000 people and thus pales in comparison with their West-German counterparts.45 What is intriguing about the West-German case—especially so in comparison with the largely colonial and postcolonial migration regimes in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium—is the apparent rupture in historical perception regarding its most recent record of labor migration. It contributed to the fiction that there was no relevant precedent to the wave of labor migration starting in the mid-1950s.46 While in the Wilhelminian period, large-scale seasonal employment on the large Eastern German agricultural estates and supplementary recruitment in the coal mines of the Ruhr valley were commonplace until World War

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I,47 the Nazi war economy heavily depended on forced labor with almost 8 million foreign workers (6 million civilians and 2 million POWs from 26 different countries) registered in October 1944. These forced laborers were no negligible group but made up roughly one-quarter of all registered workers, among them 1.2 million from France and several hundred thousand workers each from Italy and Yugoslavia.48 Following the end of the war, as these workers were liberated from slave labor and returned to their countries of origin, their jobs were taken in large part by German refugees and expellees (Aussiedler or Übersiedler) from Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Soviet-occupied zone. Up until the early 1960s, these German refugees numbered approximately 13.2 million, nearly a quarter of the total West-German population at that time. They were mostly unwelcome, seen as dispossessed intruders or undeserving rivals over scarce resources. Hostilities and verbal abuses as “Polacks” or “gypsy scum” (Zigeunerpack) were commonplace. The general unsettledness of German postwar society and the problems and conflicts associated with the integration of those refugees from the East itself contributed to the complete omission from public discussion of the crimes perpetrated against these foreign forced laborers when the “organized (re-)recruitment of foreign workers” restarted in the 1950s.49 The way in which the guest worker myth as a societal concept was deeply ingrained into West German public discourse could thus be said to have its historical roots in both, the Imperial Germany’s employment of seasonal and supplementary foreign workers and the Nazi system of forced labor during World War II. These historical continuities might have also contributed to the restrictiveness and often contradictory nature of West German immigration laws as well as to the resistance of political elites and the West German public to acknowledge that this first wave of postwar primary labor migration had already turned Germany into a major country of immigration. Rita Chin’s detailed analysis of the German guest worker question further shows that the guest workers of the 1950s and 1960s remained as faceless as the millions of forced laborers in the Nazi war economy. There were little consideration and public interest in the guest workers’ past and future, no sense of their social isolation resulting from their physical dislocation and separation from family as well as from xenophobia. There was also no recognition of the strenuous labor, poor working conditions and poor housing in derelict and impoverished neighborhoods these foreign workers faced.50 In 1990, thirty-five years after the foreign labor recruitment program

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first commenced, West Germany had a foreign migrant population with permanent resident status of 5,242,000, nearly approximating—even if accidently so—that of forced civilian laborers during World War II.51 Analytically, this would suggest that it is continuum rather than crisis by which postwar migration into Western Europe is best explained. Whether or not cheap migrant labor delayed economic restructuring and modernization by keeping low-productivity, break-even level industries in competition longer than otherwise viable, or a capital-intensive strategy would have been a more productive solution, mass labor migrations clearly facilitated upward social mobility and qualification of native (white) workers. This was also the case since the possibilities of professional advancement were not open to labor migrants who thus uplifted local labor by replacing it and generally providing a sub-stratum in a divided labor market. The function of filling the lower stratum in the labor market as local workers advanced socially was itself passed on within this substructure of migrant labor to more recently immigrated groups.52 Indeed, the formation of an underclass of unskilled foreign workers to function as an industrial reserve army and economic buffer can be seen as one of the central principles of the recruitment of foreign workers.53 Santel and Hollifield, for example, point to the important function of the West German welfare state and social security system in preventing structural marginalization as well as the creation of an ethno-cultural sub-proletariat, while educational and labor market discrimination and inequality persisted and even worsened in the 1990s following German reunification.54 There is a second reason why the example of German postwar labor migration is particularly instructive for the overall perspective of this chapter. Despite the containment strategy to limit public discussion of the guest worker issue to a narrow economic perspective, the foreign labor recruitment program, Rita Chin shows, ultimately produced the opposite effect, a broader and more consequential debate about the parameters of German identity and the prospect of a new multiethnic nation. Guest workers, in other words, were never marginal to the core concerns of German society. Rather, these migrants occupied a central place in the most important and enduring question of the postwar period: How would West German national identity be reconstituted after the Third Reich?55

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In the German case, the homeopathic integrationist impulses of the 1970s and the broad public debate of West European multiculturalism of the late 1980s56 quickly took a backseat when questions regarding German collective national identity and the reunited Germany’s place in Europe came to the fore following the reunification of East and West Germany. The uncertainty of the divided Germany’s postwar identity, the uneasy relationship with the notion of “Germanness” (Deutschtum) and displays of national pride, and the strong European integrative drive of German political elites all contributed to a renewed reluctance to “expand the boundaries of identity and citizenship to include guest workers” and pushed the massive labor migrations further to the periphery of the “master narratives of West German history: such as Allied occupation, democratization, and the problem of two states and one nation,” and, finally, German reunification and Europeanization.57 By the 1990s, of course, migrants from Turkey had fully captured public attention as the largest group of foreign labor migrants, a group whose members— contrary to the Italians, Spanish, and Greeks of earlier phases of recruitment—had not been granted reciprocal labor rights via a common EEC Member status and, thus, were reluctant to risk giving up their permanent residence permits by leaving the country for longer periods. The close link to discussions of German identity is itself an overarching continuity of the different phases of foreign employment and processes of structural socio-economic change in Germany.58 Xenophobia, Überfremdungsangst (fear of unwanted foreign proliferation), and the presumed immediate dangers to German national identity are all perennial topics of German political debate throughout the twentieth century. Prior to World War I, this concerned foreign Polish workers in the East. The economically based rational for their recruitment ran directly counter the nationalist politics of the Prussian government aiming at the Germanization of the annexed, formerly Polish territory.59 In 1910 Wilhelm Stieda, a professor of political economy at Leipzig University and later its chancellor, warned that if labor migration continued at the current rate Germans “would be put in serious jeopardy,” as the mixture of “foreign elements” spelled disaster for the “purity of Germanic tribes.” He could only hope that providence prevented Germany “from seeing its own children deteriorate on behalf of foreign citizens.”60 One hundred years later Thilo Sarrazin, a former senator of finance for the State of Berlin and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, later a director of the Deutsche Bundesbank (German Federal Reserve), echoed

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similar sentiments denouncing the failure of German postwar immigration policy. In a 461-page polemic which sold 1.5 million copies in just under nine months, Sarrazin lamented the decline of the German nation and occidental culture (Abendländische Kultur), conquered—as Sarrazin had it—by “constantly produced new headscarf-girls” of Germany’s Muslim Turkish and Arab population, themselves descendants of the guest workers of the first postwar wave of labor immigration. These make up a mere 6% of Germany’s total population, however: “The only sensible thing to do,” according to Sarrazin, “would be to generally prohibit immigration from the Middle East and Africa. This of course demands that we vigorously oppose the high and ever-growing migration pressure from these regions.”61 The West-German case not only is paradigmatic for European guest worker regimes but also, as Emmanuel Comte argued, West Germany was the most important actor in the postwar European migration system. It led the way toward an open migration regime and, as such, proved instrumental for the cohesion and closer cooperation of non-communist Europe and the containment of Soviet influence. Neither France nor Britain, for that matter, were enthusiastic about such an open migration system.62 Politicization of immigration in the countries with colonial and postcolonial migration regimes—albeit those regimes constituted a mixture with guest worker approaches rather than a distinct category in itself— followed a different trajectory. Instead of exploiting a readily available supply of unskilled workers from their colonial holdings, policy-makers especially in France and the UK but, to a lesser degree, also in Belgium and the Netherlands, faced an inability to secure (white) workers from Europe and were thus forced to tap into the reservoir of colonial migrants to meet demand. In Germany colonial migration from its short-lived African colonies was insignificant at best and postwar economic and cultural ties with African and Asian countries did not follow a colonial or postcolonial trajectory.63 In the 1950s, the UK’s citizenship regime included some 600 million colonial subjects.64 Political pressure as well as racial rioting by white residents in Birmingham, Nottingham, and, most notoriously, the west London district of Notting Hill—a once tight-knit, severely deprived, poverty-stricken white working-class area, bulldozed in the 1960s (mainly the pourer northern Notting Dale part) and since the mid-2000s turned affluent, super-gentrified neighborhood—as well as

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the “deeply-entrenched colonial ideologies and prejudices”65 of “absentminded imperialists”66 at home had a deep impact on British society. It not only shattered the imperial concept of Britain as the “mother country”67 but also led to successive rounds of immigration legislation. It subsequently and progressively so curtailed the unhindered right to enter and stay in Britain for anyone carrying a British passport originally granted by the British Nationality Act of 1948. Although the 1960s saw a shift from the ideal of assimilation toward the promotion of integration— often linked to a 1966 speech by Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins on “Racial Equality in Britain”68 —by 1972 British citizens from former colonies could only settle in Britain if they could, firstly, prove that a parent or a grandparent had been born in the UK and, secondly, obtain a work permit. This meant a significant cut in primary immigration since only the children born to white families in overseas territories or former colonies could continue to enter Britain while their colored counterparts were barred from doing so. By that time, approximately 1.4 million non-white residents had settled in Britain. They mainly came from the Caribbean, East Africa and from India and Pakistan. They, for example, also included approximately 27.000 of the 50.000 South Asians forcefully expelled from Uganda by then-president Idi Amin (Dada Oumee) during the second half of 1972.69 However, the largest immigrant group in Britain, even in the 1970s, were the Irish.70 But despite the protracted Northern Ireland conflict and the IRA’s Border Campaign, it was postcolonial migration that became the focal point of a veritable moral panic during the late 1950s and early 1960s and which, by the mid-1960s, played an increasingly polarizing role within British party politics.71 This moral panic—the resemblance of which to the “public anxieties and fears […] ostensibly overwhelming Europe” diagnosed by Zygmunt Bauman72 in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2016 is by no means accidental—found its most notorious expression in leading Conservative Member of Parliament and Shadow Secretary of State for Defence Enoch Powell’s “River of Blood” speech in 1968. Powell powerfully refocused Britain’s “imperial neurosis” to the threat to national identity that, so he argued, postcolonial immigration presented.73 Nearly a decade later, in April 1976, Powell reiterated:

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The nation has been and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by implantation of unassimilated and unassimilable populations – what Lord Radcliffe once in a memorable phrase called ‘alien wedges’ – in the heartland of the state. […] The disruption of the homogeneous ‘we’, which forms the essential basis of parliamentary democracy and therefore of our liberties, is now approaching the point at which the political mechanics of a ‘divided community’ … take charge and begin to operate autonomously.74

As historian Elizabeth Buettner argued, the appropriation of Powellite ideas and extreme-right positions on immigration by the British Conservative Party during the late 1970s sent the extreme right into political decline during the following decade but, at the same time, “lent legitimacy to its positions on questions of race, immigration, and nationality.”75 By the early 2000s, however, even New Labour had reversed its earlier, integrationist positions and reverted to “the assimilationist language of the sixties” and “well-worn patterns of patronage and assimilation” while, at the same time, producing “a proliferation of ‘diversity talk’”.76 New Labour’s ambivalence regarding the legacy and transformational impact of postcolonial migration on British society was itself part of a larger phenomenon that Paul Gilroy termed “postcolonial melancholia.”77 It denoted both a fundamental uncertainty about the challenges postcolonial immigration posed to the very constitution of the British nation and—particularly in terms of New Labour’s Third Way, as Les Back et al. put it—an “ambivalence around the melancholic desire for an imperial past [which sat] alongside the contradictions that surface in both liberal models of social inclusion and the attempt to define a social democratic model of national economic growth in a globalised economy.”78 The long shadow of empire and the migratory movements connected to it became powerfully visible in 2018 when the “Windrush scandal” led to the resignation of British Home Secretary Amber Rudd and forced Prime Minister Theresa May to issue a formal apology for the treatment of the so-called Windrush generation.79 In June 1948, the HMT Empire Windrush was one of the first carriers to bring Caribbean ex-servicemen to the UK who—as a result of the 1948 British Nationality Act—could legally settle in the UK without restrictions.80 The Windrush generation came to be known as a shorthand for West-Indian81 immigration

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to Britain with an estimated 300,000 living in Britain in the beginning of 1964, despite the 1961 census only recording 172,877 persons born in the West Indies.82 The Conservative government, in 2014, had initiated a so-called hostile environment policy aimed at undocumented immigrants resulting in members of the Windrush generation—mostly elderly, working-class people from the Caribbean—and their children being unlawfully denied healthcare, pensions and benefits and—in some cases being threatened with deportation and held at deportation centers. With xenophobia and hatefulness toward migrants running high, the Independent candidly asked whether the outrage over the mistreatment of the Windrush generation would also have “stretch[ed] to Muslims of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin” or, indeed, the 3,000 Syrian refugee children May had turned away a year earlier. The Independent concluded that “whether the same pressure, or any at all, would be generated by similar cruelty to British Muslims must be doubtful.”83 As in the case of Britain, France’s history of colonial immigration to the metropole dates back into the nineteenth century. Postwar France, however, had initially set up recruiting offices exclusively in southern Europe in order to avoid having to take recourse to the Algerian labor force. But despite the liberal hiring practice with companies directly hiring colonial migrants and only later regularizing their status with the National Office of Immigration (Office National d’Immigration)—as opposed to the tight regulation of guest workers in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland—the French economy found it soon difficult to compete for south European workers with Germany or Switzerland.84 Algerian workers, by comparison, had gained the right to move to mainland France in 1914 and acquired full citizenship rights in 1947.85 Although concerns over the impact of immigration on French national identity were already present in the immediate postwar years, the need to procure a sufficient labor force took precedence. By encouraging greater immigration from “LatinChristian origin” administrative authorities sought to balance out the immigration of Algerians who, until Algerian independence, continued to emigrate freely to mainland France. In the late 1950s, an estimated 400,000 Algerians worked in French factories supporting close to twenty percent of Algeria’s non-European population at home.86 The issue of immigration was by no means depoliticized or uncontentious but conflict about its meaning and consequences remained within the administration. For nearly 30 years, it did neither become an issue of parliamentary debate, party politics or an electoral issue of high salience,

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nor the subject of legislation. Immigration was dealt with by means of ministerial directives (circulaires ) under the purview of government ministers. Even the administration’s suspension of immigration in 1974, Martin Schain showed, “was not a highly political decision.”87 It was only with the electoral breakthrough of the Front National in 1983/1984 that immigration could no longer be ignored as an electoral issue. But even before that, administrative policy preferences had moved from “an understanding of immigrants as manpower for settlement, to a concern about ethnic balances, to deep concern about integration, to – finally in 1972-74 – a view that undesirable immigration must be suspended.”88 Despite France’s republican vision of itself which entailed an inclusive orientation, a strong assimilationism—Le creuset français 89 —as the model of immigrant integration and, in consequence, an administrative blindness to issues of race, ethnicity, and minority religion, actual political behavior has been “conditioned to a significant degree by consciousness of ethnic difference.”90 As Alec Hargreaves argued, this amounted to an increasing ethnicization of immigration policies as well as the ethnic hierarchization of immigrants. This apparent opening up to ethnic-based difference can be seen as the result of a dilution of the republican ideal of the one and indivisible French republic and its cultural uniformity by the state’s interest in recruiting, controlling, and integrating immigrants, that is, by a gap between official rhetoric and actual administrative practices. Or, as Martin Schain put it, French immigration policy created a situation on the ground where “the best Jacobin traditions of French governments are tempered by emerging realities” and thereby created a de facto multiculturalism.91 While until the early 1960s, French political elites had staunchly defended Algeria as an integral part of France (as opposed to a colonial possession) and colonized elites and members of the educated middles classes had often migrated to mainland France in order to deepen their cultural identification and pursue university-based education,92 by the 1990s, the debate on the presence of North Africans in France—by then France’s largest immigrant group—was dominated by the catchwords “ghetto” and “Islam.”93 Contrary to mainstream perceptions, the curtailing of primary (male) immigration from outside the EEC—thereby effectively terminating free immigration for people from former French colonies in Africa—was not primarily a reaction to or a result of the economic crisis of the 1970s. It was largely brought about by the administrations concerns about assimilation and social cohesion. As Buettner put it: “‘colonial propaganda remains present’ past the end of

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empire itself, the imperial ‘civilizing mission’ having become transferred to the metropolitan soil.”94 In France, the curtailing of postcolonial migration was decisive for the transition from “first wave” primary labor immigration to “second wave” (family) reunification after 1974.95 Postcolonial migration as result of postwar decolonization was also of considerable significance in Belgium and the Netherlands. But, as Elizabeth Buettner argued, postcolonial immigration to Belgium, when compared to Britain, France, Portugal, or the Netherlands, “differs markedly” concerning the degree to which it can be understood as “explicitly postcolonial.” This is the case because, on the one hand, there was little exchange—neither in terms of people or ideas—between Belgium and the État indépendant du Congo, the personal colony of the Belgian King Leopold II.96 Even after the Belgian state annexed the Congo in 1908, the colony remained isolated and separate from the Belgium metropole.97 The fact that shortly after Congo gained independence, there were only 2,585 Congolese in Belgium (compared to a Belgian population of 88,913 out of a total 112,753 Europeans in the Congo in 195998 ) clearly attests to that. It was not until the Congo wars (triggered by the Rwandan genocide in 1994) that significant numbers of Congolese refugees immigrated to Belgium, by now representing the country’s third largest immigrant group.99 However, by the year 2000 they still represented only 2 percent of Belgium’s entire foreign population approximating 21,000 people growing to 27,000 in 2006, while the unofficial figure is estimated around 80,000 Congolese immigrants fleeing civil war, violence, poverty, and lack of educational and employment prospects.100 On the other hand, Idesbald Goddeeris argued that the rise of Flemish nationalism and the Belgian identity crisis it entailed as well as the absence of critical voices of postcolonial migrants in the metropole itself issued in and allowed for a “great nostalgia for the Belgian Congo” that “drastically contrasts with the postcolonial memory in neighbouring countries.”101 Not only does Belgian self-perception of “Leopold as a genius and a visionary” and the “Belgian Congo as a model colony” seem strangely undisturbed by international scholarship—mostly characterizing the Belgian Congo as one of the worst examples of colonial rule and racial, social, or cultural segregation on par with South Africa or Rhodesia—but criticism of Belgian colonialism also came to be viewed as “a Flemish-nationalist complot against the king and the Belgian union.”102 Buettner further points to the exploitative rationale

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in economic terms that, in the view of Belgian authorities, made manual Congolese labor more valuable in the colony itself than in the Belgian metropole. This supposedly economic motivation to keep the Congolese in the Congo was underpinned by cultural ones “seeking to uphold white superiority in the Congo by severely limiting Africans’ ability to benefit socially, culturally, and politically […] and preserving the racial and social hierarchy that favoured Europeans […], priorities [that] outlasted colonial rule.”103 The postwar decades, however, not only saw large numbers of former colonial subjects move to the center of the metropole in the wake of collapsing European overseas empires but also significant numbers of socalled repatriates —returning colonizers’ communities; whether settlers, soldiers or civil servants.104 Many had never before set foot on the European continent. Successive decolonization spanning several decades brought more than half a million (white) imperial Britons back to the UK, while between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s approximately 1.5 million people were repatriating to the French metropole, constituting 3 percent of its total population.105 Of those, the pied-noirs, a term post-dating Algerian independence, numbered close to a million of whom nearly half a million arrived in just a few months during the summer of 1962.106 In the Netherlands, roughly 300.000 Europeans and Eurasians (Indisch Dutch) arrived after Indonesian independence in 1949. Close to 89.000 Belgian nationals returned in a hurried and dramatic fashion from the Congo often carrying little more than “the clothes on their backs” when they stepped off Sabena airplanes at Brussels airport after fleeing the political chaos and violence after the transfer of power.107 However, it was Portuguese retornados who represented “the most numerically significant influx of all decolonization migration into Europe.” In a “panicked mass exodus,” approximately 800.000 retornados from Angola and Mozambique (including 200.000 soldiers) effected the Portuguese population at home to grow by 5–10%.108 Contrary to the prima facie plausible assumption that the “return” to their respective European mother countries caused little controversy, repatriates were often unfavorably associated with the loss of empire and seen as a possibly domestically destabilizing group. In France, for example, the pied-noirs were greeted with suspicion and hostility; not only in terms of the drain on national resources they represented but also as politically bringing “the OAS,109 torturing policemen and fascists, paratroopers

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plotting putsches” from the three former départements in Algeria into the heart of the French Republic. Especially the French new left seized the opportunity to refocus their attention—even if only temporarily—from “Gaullist Bonarpartism”,110 the critique of French society or Western imperialism to the pied-noirs whom they saw as having “nourished a new fascism during the Algerian War” that was the negation of France and the anti-thesis to the values embodied by the French revolution.111 OAS violence thus provided a possibility to “resituate the fight against the Reaction […] that the ‘French of Algeria’ embodied.” Contrary to such fears, the pied-noirs neither consolidated into a collective extremeright political force, nor were they ever intend on or “capable of derailing mainstream politics.” In Portugal, so-called retornados from Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau were equally unwelcome and viewed by the metropolitan population with widespread suspicion. According to Stephen Lubkemann, they were treated as internal strangers (sometimes even within their own families) since their inclusion as part of the Portuguese civitas – their legal status and consequently rights as citizens – was broadly acknowledged, while at the same time their membership in Portuguese societas – as members of the community, of Benedict Anderson’s ‘deep horizontal comradeship’ – was placed in question in everyday forms of social interaction.112

In fact, negative stereotyping and social stigma became quickly attached to retornado-identity and the former colonialists were not only accused of “‘stealing housing and jobs’” from continental Portuguese residents but also thought to represent “a ‘foreign’ element … embodying a past age of colonial exploitation.”113 However, and especially in view of the then only recent collapse of the authoritarian Estado Novo and the ensuing uncertainty, social turmoil and economic crisis of the immediate post-revolutionary years, metropolitan fears that the returnees also posed a reactionary threat proved ultimately unfounded.114 The central and enduring part of their stigmatization proved to be the connection with Africa. In the popular imagination of the metropole, the retornado label worked also as a signifier of racial difference which suggested that their status as (white) Portuguese had become inhibited by having been exposed to and, indeed, having been part of a multiracial African society.115 Portuguese in the metropole were thus giving voice to a

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“moral economy of whiteness” in which the returning Portuguese-born, colonial population was categorized as “not-quite-white,” albeit—as Lubkemann importantly notes—the exclusion that followed from it was “performative” rather than “essentialized.” That is, the retornados ’ otherness was seen as “the product of voluntary choices [of emigration] rather than inherent essences” and thus opens to be amended by counterperformances of “public commitment to community and family.”116 This showed the peculiar character of Portuguese national identity at the time, which had its roots in the concept of Luso-tropicalism in which nation and empire were represented in moral terms and which “promoted an image of exceptionalism regarding racial and cultural mixing.” The image of the “universalist and humanist character of Portuguese national culture create[d] a culture of denial, where prejudice and racism are perceived as non-existent problems in Portugal given its supposedly tolerant and non-racist culture.”117 State policy, thus, has been characterized by an cegueira multicultural (multicultural blindness) reproducing the myth of the Portuguese nation as a country of fusion with the colonial (non-white) other.118 At the same time, mass immigration from the colonies in conjunction with the Carnation Revolution (Revolução dos Cravos ) at home made possible a “discursive strategy of temporal and spatial containment” in which metropolitan Portugal could deflect colonial responsibility by reinventing and reframing colonialism as “a product of the agency of stigmatized individuals or groups, the social elites and retornados.”119 The slow (re-)integration of retornados emphasizes the fragmented and “interstitial character” of national identity among this group and illustrates the “contradictions of popular conceptions of ‘race,’ culture, and nation and their complex relationship with national identity.” More generally, it also highlights the “dissonance between legal and social/cultural definitions of nationness, emphasizing the potential distance between nationality (citizenship) and nationness (imagined community).”120 Interestingly so, although Germany experienced no comparable degree of postcolonial migration, the immigration of 2.3 million ethnic Germans (Spätaussiedler) from the territory of the former Soviet Union since the mid-1980s fits best the category of postcolonial repatriates rather than any other postwar category of migration. Just as in the case of Portuguese retornados, the legal right of the Spätaussiedler to “return” to Germany was largely uncontested while, once in Germany, they were

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seen as culturally deviant and became stigmatized as “fraudster-Russians” with no legitimate basis in and no claims on German society.121 The question of asylum in Western Europe, on the other hand, was governed by Eurocentric, “one-dimensional east-west notions.” Refugees from the east—whether 3.5 million East Germans before the Berlin Wall finally cut off GDR territory from the allied sectors of West Berlin in 1961; 194.000 Hungarians following the suppression of the 1956 revolution; 170.000 Czechs and Slovaks after the crushing of the Prague Spring; or approximately 250.000 Poles following the suppression of the Solidarno´sc´ -movement and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981—were largely welcomed for their political heroism and defiance of Eastern European Communist regimes. But already with the latter group, a growing skepticism toward political asylum became noticeable, one that had developed into “aggressive mistrust” by the mid-1980s. On the quantitative side, the number of asylum applications multiplied tenfold between the early 1980s and early 1990s, peaking around 700,000 in 1992. By the early 1990s, the mistrust and misgivings directed at asylum seekers had consolidated in demagogic anti-asylum campaigns, defensive ethnonational and racist sentiments, as well as dystopic public imaginations of an imminent threat of mass invasion of Third World misery. As Bade points out, the electoral appeal of populist anti-asylum rhetoric greatly and successfully fueled by the European far right “seemed irresistible” to moderate parties as well.122 The iconic image of the “Asylum scare” in the early 1990s was that of Albanian freighter “Vlora” mooring at a coal dock in the Italian port of Bari carrying an estimated 10.000–15.000 Albanian refugees.123 Above all, the 1980s and early 1990s were the time when western European countries came—often reluctantly so and with substantial domestic political turmoil—to terms with their transition from laborimporting countries to immigration countries.124 However, regarding quasi-naturalized notions of public discontent one should bear in mind that in most cases, as Magdalena Lesinska ´ reminds us, “public sentiments follow cues – as well as arguments – coming from ‘above’, that is, from political leaders, especially the leaders of mainstream political groups.”125 Regarding the progressive closing-off of Western Europe by means of safe-country doctrines and bilateral readmission agreements, the defensive measures taken in early 1990s also affected both geopolitical perceptions and symbolic representations of an enlarging European Union. Europe’s borders were transforming from fixed, clear-cut and—in the case of the

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Iron Curtain—impenetrable lines of demarcation to insulation or buffer zones, and these zones were themselves gradually shifting eastward. In this sense, the building of new walls and border fences in Eastern Europe in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis (both along the EU’s external border and between eastern European member states) are not so much manifestations of changed political attitudes of right-wing governments toward immigration and the EU itself, but merely the symbolic visualization of the concrete effects of European migration and asylum policies, that is, of the gatekeepers shutting the gates.126 Tentative proposals by the European Commission in November 2000 and the Nice Intergovernmental Conference in December 2000 at revising Europe’s zero immigration policy suggested the reopening of channels of legal immigration for labor migrants.127 It also urged governments to improve on the status of long-term resident third-country nationals by essentially granting equality of treatment with Union citizens. At the time, the integration of third-country nationals was seen as conducive to the enhancement of economic and social cohesion. The early 2000s, thus, initially “might have signaled a paradigm shift in European Union immigration policy” but after the events of 11 September 2001, the trend toward liberalization was “stopped dead in its tracks.” The subsequent securitization of migration and refugee policy contributed to the normative blurring and the practical erosion of the distinction between economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. The ongoing public and political debate on the issues of asylum and refugee protection since the early 2000s—and especially so during the Syrian refugee crisis— clearly illustrate a gradual shift toward an understanding and portrayal of the granting of protection as an act of charitableness, a gift of individual nation-states, rather than an obligation under international law. Carl Levy thus warned in 2005 that increasingly “restrictive conditions for the recognition of refugees in Europe” as well as the securitization of refugee or subsidiary protection in the face of global terrorism “would in effect empty the 1951 Convention of any real content.”128 Curtailing refugee protection, it was feared, would not only be increasingly seen as the “lesser evil” but also locate the refugee “beyond the domain of justice,” that is, lead to the introduction of “a permanent state of exception in asylum and migration policies.”129 A point well illustrated by the horrific conditions in Italian and Greek refugee camps in the Mediterranean.

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This more recent shift of focus toward the European Other was not the result of a shift in actual forms of migration but primarily constituted a semantic shift in terms of immigration rhetoric. This shift originated in postcolonial discourses on immigration and, from the mid-1990s onward, concerned primarily the meaning of asylum and a redefinition of government attitudes toward asylum seekers. Especially where migration from poor, non-European countries has been concerned, national publics’ attitudes have taken a marked turn to the negative.130 Concern over specific categories of migrants including undocumented immigrants, unskilled, economic migrants, suspected bogus asylum seekers and Islamists have tended to be generalized to all forms of migration. Magdalena Lesinska ´ put this succinctly when she argued that changing attitudes and policies towards immigrants should be seen as parts of political responses to a ‘path dependent’ social process that starts with the revival of the ‘right-authoritarian’ movements and parties in the 1990s, followed by the post-9/11 security scares. Both revived concerns about ‘foreigners’, especially those of different culture, skin colour and religion. Political successes of these xenophobic movements and parties have, in turn, provoked defensive reactions from the leaders of the political mainstream, thus creating a gradual shift in the views of the elite, in public sentiments and, eventually, in immigration policies.131

Postwar European discourses about the perils of immigration thus generally mark a historic shift of target away from “lower orders” (the urban and rural poor of the nineteenth century; and the increasingly politically organized working-class and lower middle-class whites at the beginning of the twentieth century) toward the racialized European Other (be it colonial repatriates, postcolonial labor migrants and their second- and third-generation descendants, refugees, or asylum seekers) as the primary suspect threatening to destabilize the liberal European order and its internally open migration regime. This shift did not originate with the “Muslim scare in Europe” (Ian Buruma) in the wake of 9/11 but had taken shape already in the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, its considerable historical links with colonial rationales and postcolonial stereotyping are clearly evident. Once again, and without discounting the importance of the security-migration nexus in terms of Muslim immigration, we need to make analytical space for continuum regarding European attitudes toward non-European immigration rather than conceptualize

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hostility and rejection toward immigrants as ad hoc reactions to external shock leading to one migration crisis after the other. Buettner also importantly reminds us, that historically “[r]endering former colonials who came home socially invisible and ignoring their overseas histories arguably facilitates a similar erasure of the domestic dimensions and aftereffects of European empires.”132 One of these aftereffects impacting Europeans was that “the growing presence of formerly colonized racial ‘others’ in post-1945 Europe enabled ex-colonizers who had been overseas to converge with those who had never left their homeland – often on account not only of shared ethnicity, but also shared understandings of racial difference.”133 Racial identity thus functioned as one of the most crucial determinants for the reintegration of ex-colonizers into postcolonial Europe.134 The fervent anti-immigrant rhetoric accompanying the Syrian refugee crisis could thus be plausibly seen as manifestation of the European colonial unconscious. In that sense, it is no coincidence that editors of a recent volume on the colonial legacy in France have labeled the period from 2005 to 2015 “a decade of postcolonial crisis.”135 The identity crisis that not only France but the whole of Western Europe finds itself presently engaged in, can be conceptualized as the powerful resurgence of a “postcolonial crisis that can partially be explained by the profound economic, political, and social asymmetries associated with the so-called Global South.”136 At the time, many small-scale, local wars of decolonization were “all too easily […] buried under the ‘greater’ concerns of postwar reconstruction and the Cold War” but it is important to note, that war in a variety of novel forms was “a defining experience” for more than two decades of the immediate postwar peace in Europe.137

Refugees, Asylum, and the Reassertion of Sovereignty The fall of the Iron Curtain and the implosion of Communist rule in Eastern Europe had in the first half of the 1990s resulted not only in a fundamentally changed geopolitical landscape but also in the perception of a threatening disorder in the East soon to increase to nightmarish proportions with the outbreak of hostilities and genocidal ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. Western European countries responded with more restrictive migration policies that effectively turned the central and eastern European states into buffer zones for asylum and irregular migration (but

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also cross-border crime) while concerns over earlier forms of migration (labor migration and family reunification) receded into the background of public discourse. In contrast to the bipolar world and clear-cut confrontation of the Cold War, the 1990s saw both a diversification of security dilemmas as well as the renationalization of security interests. Instead of “military security dilemmas between states” the nexus of European agendas shifted toward refugee flows, illegal arms trade, terrorism, organized crime and trafficking in drugs and human beings to which the Iron Curtain had previously constituted an insurmountable barrier.138 The geopolitics of migration control in Western Europe and especially the asylum system thus came under increased pressure. Sarah Collinson clearly illustrated the connection between the instability of the former Eastern Bloc states, the uncertain geopolitical shape of Central and Eastern Europe, and a fearfully perceived potential for massive uncontrolled migration flows in the early 1990s. Collinson argued that the prominent place of migration on European political and security agendas is explained “primarily by the particular way in which the issue has developed as a simultaneous reflection and component of the geopolitical transformations taking place […] in the aftermath of the cold war.”139 The dynamics of globalization and transnationalization during the last half century—the European single market, transnational regionalism, the delegation of fundamental elements of national sovereignty to Brussels and the decoupling of citizenship and social rights—have made it more clear than ever that the nation-state’s claim to territorial jurisdiction and the control over the movement of people is not only inherent in the nature of sovereignty but perhaps its most important ingredient. The “spectacle of large numbers of migrants evading immigration rules” therefore provides both the most visible and dramatic example of the “erosion of state sovereignty,”140 whether in the early 1990s or during the Syrian refugee crisis. While the delegation of a number of important elements of sovereignty to transnational or supranational entities may be relatively uncontentious and is more likely to be conceptualized as the exercise rather than an erosion of sovereign power (the sharing of authority in the EU being a prime example), territorial sovereignty in terms of control over the movement of people across the state’s borders represents a core element of sovereignty, one that cannot as easily be delegated without undermining the authority of the state. Undocumented immigration, accordingly, represents not only a clear challenge to the state’s authority but also to the state’s capacity to exercise this authority

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and hence maintain territorial sovereignty. If the state is seen as unable to exercise its authority and wield power (ultimately through the use of force) over those challenging its claims to effective control, this may also undermine its domestic authority.141 How uncontested this notion of territorial sovereignty indeed is, can also be seen by the comparatively little attention that forms of state violence such as immigrant detention and deportation have received, both politically and academically. Within liberal democracy, these deprivations of liberty qua detention and forced removal are seen as uncontentious “routine administrative state practice” in which the use of physical violence is routinely employed, often at severe personal costs of those affected.142 It is in this sense, that national governments of EU members states enhance their domestic authority at the expense of human rights protection of non-citizens while, in comparison, the submission of southern European member states under the Troika’s (EC, ECB, IMF) dictate of austerity measures equaled a near-complete relinquishment of sovereignty.143 While retaining international legal sovereignty, these members states (Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, but also Hungary, Latvia, and Romania) were akin to failed states as they, at least temporarily, lost their sovereignty in Westphalian terms as external actors decisively intruded on and reshaped their domestic authority configurations.144 The hostile climate toward refugees and the progressive discursive delegitimization of claims to protection based on the United Nations 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees thus appears as part of a much broader mechanism of compensation for the loss of control, perhaps even as a result of the provincialization of postcolonial Europe.145 Even before the Syrian refugee crisis triggered spasms of fear and antiimmigrant violence among Europeans of being overrun by hordes of Muslim immigrants and ostentatiously bellicose fantasies of civilizational survival at stake, Wendy Brown perceptively analyzed the “paradoxes of walled democracy” at the nexus of anxieties generated by declining state sovereignty and globalization, immigration and the resurrection of myths of national autonomy and coherent nationhood.146 The unique function of contemporary wall building, as opposed to their historical counterparts, lies, Brown showed, in the performative staging of “political sovereignty that globalization is draining out of state institutions, providing a visual emblem of power and protection that states increasingly cannot provide, […] they intensify nationalist identifications that in turn spur demands for

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greater exercises of state sovereignty, more effective walling, and less flexibility in responding to globalization’s vicissitudes and volatilities.”147 In a new 2016 preface Brown—albeit within a broader conceptual matrix of neoliberalism—links these developments to the EU’s sovereignty struggles with the two intersecting crises of the last decade: the financial crisis and the migration crisis that have both thrown the EU and its member states into sustained political crisis. In Eastern Europe, it propelled rightwing parties into power while in Germany, it led to the most protracted cabinet crisis since German reunification.148 Whatever common immigration and asylum policy existed prior to it, these have de facto collapsed and been successively undermined by unilaterally implemented migration policies at the national level. Brown, thus, argues that “the new walls increase the fragility of the EU […] with gestures of sovereign state power” but must also be seen as “reactions by nation-states against inegalitarian postnational and even global institutions on which they and their populations also depend and to which they are bound.” Wall building in reaction to the challenges presented by mass immigration in Europe not only reconfigures European geopolitics. It is also an expression of “complex sovereignty contests” between national and post-national powers, economic arrangements, and demographic trends.149 The practice of domestic and extraterritorial immigration detention and the removal of undocumented migrants and unsuccessful asylum applicants—by no means a recent invention150 —therefore do not only reproduce territorial notions of sovereignty. More importantly they also, and especially in terms of the failed EU quota scheme for the innerEU redistribution of refugees, re-nationalize European political space by reaffirming the national imaginary as legitimate basis for both, territorial sovereignty and the exercise of state-administered violence against refugees. This potentially entails its generalization to all non-nationals who cannot be plausibly integrated into the respective national narrative. What this means is that while domestically there is “no more serious interference with an individual’s fundamental rights as depriving him or her of his or her liberty,” the same “utmost scrutiny when assessing the indiscriminate detention of thousands of people in light of traditional safeguards against sovereign power” is gradually being eroded and “regular constitutional norms that apply to domestic deprivations of liberty”151 are being evaded by extraterritorialization measures where unwanted immigration is concerned. However, if Wendy Brown’s diagnosis is correct, we are not seeing a renationalization of sovereignty but rather a new

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configuration of the inside/outside divide “where otherness and difference are detached from jurisdiction and membership”152 and therefore also transcend the nation-state territorially. Across Europe, this reconfiguration is perhaps best described as a culturalization of sovereignty which is predicated both on myth and spectacle. The myth concerns the notion that national sovereignty still governs and contains the political within largely homogenous nation-states while the spectacle concerns the staging of “a sovereign capacity … woefully limited by globalization – that of producing political order as such,” one that finds its paradox expression in and is publically performed at the newly fortified intra-EU borders since 2015.153 Earlier diagnoses on the nexus of identity politics and immigration in Europe comprised several thematic areas in addition to the sovereign control over external borders, for example, changes in and the “diminished selectivity”154 of national citizenship regimes, or national and European self-perceptions.155 These diagnoses ranged from the reassertion of national identities, the reethnicization of citizenship and the racialization of European immigration policy to the de-ethnicization of citizenship and the decoupling of rights and identity.156 Each of these positions makes differing claims regarding the degree to which the role of the nation-state has or has not been superseded by supra- or even post-national governance regimes. These claims affect two dimensions: first, a vertical dimension of multilevel governance regarding the tension between national sovereignty and supranational governance regimes and, secondly, a substantive dimension concerning the tension between internal security and human rights, that is, between national interests and universal rights.157 Whereas post-national citizenship theories suggest an increasing importance of universalistic personhood-based rights beyond membership in national political communities, others consciously place the nation-state at the center of analysis of the politics of immigration and argue that the European nation-state has reclaimed and consolidated its role in defining the political geography of citizenship and the management of cultural diversity. By means of a managed migration approach, the abandonment of multiculturalist positions and the revival of neo-assimilationist agendas, often misleadingly termed integration, states have rather successfully “reasserted their authority in shaping national identity and citizenship.”158 Vis-a-vis the denationalizing logics of economic globalization and European integration, national immigration policies and citizenship regimes have thus become a vital resource for national politicians to

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perpetuate the ideal of national sovereignty. As Arjun Appadurai argues along similar lines, the cultural field currently remains as “the main one in which fantasies of purity, authenticity, borders, and security can be enacted” while the nation-state “has been steadily reduced to the fiction of its ethnos as the last cultural resource over which it may exercise full dominion.”159 In fact, cross-national variance in contention over immigration has been shown to primarily depend on the “sedimentation” of different conceptions of national identity in nation-specific integration and citizenship policies. These conceptions and policies, it is argued, function as a matrix of discursive and institutional opportunities and constraints which facilitate the mobilization of specific groups of collective actors while constraining others.160 French republicanism, for example, faces countervailing pressures. By denying immigrants ethnically or culturally based group rights—up to 1981 even outlawing organizations based on migrants’ ethnicity—it delegitimizes political claims based on such differences. This insistence on civic equality may actually prevent France from effectively combating the social exclusion of migrants. However, there is also an ambiguity in French political and administrative discourse in terms of semantically referring to the children and grandchildren of immigrants—citizens by birth—as immigrants because of their parents’ and grandparents’ origin while maintaining their invisibility in terms of bureaucratic categorization. When French politicians, with increasing frequency, spoke of citizens as “immigrant communities” they are contributing to the strengthening of ethnic or religious concepts of identity in defiance of French republicanism and its universal values.161 This trend chimes in with the rhetoric of the French right, propagating—for a time rather successfully—the abolition of jus soli as the principle of French citizenship in favor of a more assimilationist ethno-cultural model. It is not surprising that this constellation renders the French model of liberté et égalité vulnerable. The problems faced by Great Britain and the Netherlands, on the contrary, emerge from their multicultural approaches to immigrant incorporation. Policies designed to combat discrimination of immigrants have led to the labeling of migrant groups as disadvantaged minorities in constant need of state assistance and thereby reified race and ethnicity as bases for social discrimination precisely through minoritization and administrative othering. These processes have been aggravated by those countries’ “postcolonial hangovers” resulting in a strange mixture of benevolent paternalism and colonial guilt.162

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But although French republicanism and British and Dutch multiculturalism represent different models of integration, an undue emphasis on policy preferences and citizenship regimes, Paul Scheffer cautions, “tends to obscure the many similarities between living conditions [of migrants] in the major conurbations of Europe” and the comparable social dynamics that result from migration.163 The integral link between primary labor migration, postcolonial migration, and the changing nature of European societies is illustrated well for the French case by Alastair Horne: The Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) not only worsened the already heavy fiscal deficit at the end of the Fourth Republic but also caused a considerable labor shortage because of the absence, from 1956 onwards, of 500.000 soldiers and military personnel serving in Algeria. This labor shortage also coincided with the demographic long-term repercussions of World War II (the missing cohorts not born during the war) and serious inflation. Paradoxical as it may seem, it led French administration to substantially increase the numbers of Algerian immigrant workers employed in French industry and agriculture but also enabled the F.L.N. [Front de Libération Nationale] fund-raisers in France “to purchase more weapons with which to shoot at the French conscripts whose places they were filling at home [in the French metropole].”164 A different strand in the academic discourse on immigration in Europe argues that there is a de facto common immigration and asylum policy that attempts to and increasingly is succeeding in transferring the policing and processing of immigration to non-EU countries in the immediate periphery. However, this is not a straight forward argument in support of post-national perspectives on governance but rather focuses on the complex configuration of intergovernmental immigration policies and its institutional effects beyond de jure regulation. Neither is it endorsing a kind of abstract and metaphysical aesthetics of disaster and the excluded bodies of ‘bare life’ regarding the situation of refugees and migrants in extraterritorial processing and transit camps.165 Interestingly, such Agamben’esque approaches further contribute to the orientalization of the refugee as a specific type of othering.166 According to Steve Garner, the development of a common European immigration policy does not signify the loss of sovereignty of the nation-state over its borders but rather a loss of autonomy in the sense of coordinated internal visa and working regulations. Key regulations such as labor migration and welfare regimes remain firmly with the nation-state and are differing substantially across EU member states.167 Whereas so-called third-country nationals

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do not usually benefit from the Schengen agreement’s waiver of visa and working permit requirements and the ensuing freedom of movement, nationals of EU member states do so via their national citizenship status. However, the main thrust of this common immigration regime regarding the Schengen area’s external border is linking immigration to security rather than justice or humanitarian concerns as set down in the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.168 In fact, Garner argues, the Schengen regime on immigration effectively turns asylum seekers into a newly racialized group often portrayed as undeserving others in European public discourse. Racialization, accordingly, is therefore “not exclusively based on colour, but on tying culture to bodies that are placed in a social hierarchy.” Importantly, even “multiracial” groups (in the sense of phenotypical difference) such as asylum seekers or Muslims “can be racialized by constructing it as a bounded entity, and conferring a homogenous set of characteristics upon it.”169 That race is a contingent discursive construction rather than a given— both in terms of an imposed, objectified identity and as a vehicle for establishing minority group cohesion and solidarity—is well illustrated by the history of postcolonial migration to Europe briefly discussed above. This racialization of immigration is further aided, Garner argues, by an administrative-bureaucratic terminology that creates a five-tiered hierarchy of spatial mobility in the EU. Whereas EU nationals (including European Economic Area nationals as well as Swiss nationals) enjoy an absolute right to residence, work, movement, and welfare in other EU states, the bottom tiers in the hierarchy—undocumented migrants and asylum seekers—are subjected to severe restrictions. This is the case because asylum seekers “embody a range of anxieties about the disruption of culture and undermining of local, regional, and national economies” and thus pose a threat to actual as well as symbolic national boundaries.170 Contrary to social constructivist accounts of identity formation and othering which state that social reality is to a large extent shaped by discourses about social entities that do not reflect any essentialist, “bodily” nature of these entities, racialization “incessantly amalgamat[es] bodies with putative characteristics.”171 The European immigration system— through producing an essentializing ideology of asylum seekers—not only creates a newly objectified category of people but because of its denial of protection and access to relief constitutes, Garner claims, the “most significant and sustained challenge to the international human rights order Europe has seen since World War II.”172

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The administrative hierarchy of mobility also represents a hierarchy of rights (or rather the denial of rights) as a consequence of both intended (e.g., legal) and unintended (e.g., structural) dynamics. Parallel policy dynamics of civic stratification can also be observed on the national level of individual European states. It showed most clearly perhaps in New Labour’s idea of “managed migration” which can be understood as a complex exercise in the civic stratification of migrants. Managed migration put well-educated and highly skilled workers in relatively privileged positions while creating an effectively rightless group of unskilled workers and asylum seekers at the bottom of the newly stratified hierarchy of rights.173 Poor housing, low income and limited upwards mobility have always affected immigrants and, in turn, shaped the immigrant communities’ reaction to their host countries.174 In most countries, immigrants earn less than comparable natives with the same level of qualification and have higher unemployment rates. The UK, again, is an interesting case as immigrants have higher skills and earnings than the native-born but still retain higher unemployment rates than natives.175 Whereas the children of early twentieth-century immigrants saw their parents’ heritage “as a nostalgic relic or source of embarrassment,” the second generation of late twentieth-century immigrants “are often more alienated” from their receiving country’s culture than their parents.176 Interestingly in this regard, Kitty Calavita argues that vocational training as a vehicle for socio-economic integration is bound to fail in contexts where [c]ontrary to conventional wisdom, this concentration of immigrants in low-end jobs, and … their apparent ‘aspiration’ to such jobs, has nothing to do with their skill levels or educational achievements. In Spain, non-EU immigrants are twice as likely to have college degrees, and are 30 percent more likely to have completed high school, than the native population. Instead, it reflects their function as a labor supply on the margins, taking jobs under conditions that unemployed citizens will not move for ….177

The immigrants’ marginality, Calavita concludes, thus surfaces as their most marketable skill. It is here that the racialization of immigration since the mid-1980s has relevance beyond the issue of migration policy since it corresponds to a far broader racialization of mainstream politics that calls into question the idea of universally and the equal distribution of individual civil

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rights associated with the status of citizenship. Historically states have, of course, always differentiated not only between insiders and outsiders. But also within their citizenry in terms of the granting of rights, the allocation of resources and the performance of obligations. Citizenship has therefore not only acted as a powerful instrument of social closure178 but also as an internal mode of differentiation in terms of a system of internal boundaries to inclusion. What Garner terms Euro-racism is closely linked to the postwar history of de-colonialization and postcolonial immigration. Despite citizenship status and linguistic-cultural bridges facilitating Euro-colonial immigration, Klaus Bade points out that: Mental structures of subordination, racist thinking and latent or even open discrimination that had characterized colonial rule sometimes survived in Europe beyond the end of colonialism overseas. Many non-European immigrants from colonies that had obtained independence long remained economically and socially disadvantaged ….179

In the British case, for example, the rebirth of conservatism issued in a public discourse of “new racism” in the beginning of the 1980s. Contrary to extreme-right positions of biologically based racial superiority, British conservatives argued that it is in the “human nature” to “form a bounded community, a nation, aware of its differences from other nations” and, thus, to defend one’s “way of life, traditions and customs against outsiders.”180 These differences were defined in national and cultural terms and racial distinctions thus reframed, with immigrants emerging as fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed to the British way of life. And while contemporary EU border policy is tightly linked with a ‘logic of defense’, internal debates about European values and national cultures may well be proxies for race. States as well as individuals view migrants primarily through the lens of national identity and an increased need to protect diminishing national resources in times of austerity politics.181 Most famously perhaps, Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism commented on the sub-current of racism within Western European nationalism. European imperialism undermined the self-limiting structure of the nation-state and gave primacy to the self-assertion of national ethnic or racial identity as well as a sense of European racial superiority. For Arendt, Dana Villa notes, “Europe’s imperialist expansion encouraged the creation of a moral world articulated primarily not in terms of

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law, institutions, and rights, but rather in terms of the distinction between one racial group and another.”182 This history of racism was one piece of the answer to the question of how European culture, the culture of the West, home of the Enlightenment, and the Rights of Man could give birth to the pathologically murderous forms of political experiments in what Arendt calls “total domination.” Racial and ethnic categories, not the legal category of citizenship, functioned as the fundamental prism— the moral epistemology of the identity politics of nationalism—through which Europeans perceived the world and which they would eventually turned against themselves. A number of factors, however, left little room for the examination of “the shifting place of ‘race’ in western Europe’s postwar political imaginaries” and of how it continued to “function[s] in European political and social life.”183 The factors included the totalitarian bequest to European re-democratization in the second half of the twentieth century; the genealogies of racial thinking and the legacy connected with the acquisition and loss of Europe’s colonial empires; and the gradual discovery of the full scope of the holocaust. Nationally organized forms of postwar European identities—itself at least partly product of forced migration, mass expulsion, and displacement occurring at the end of World War II184 —quickly acquired a quasi-natural, uncontentious status. Whereas colonial representations of extra-European populations under European rule externalized racialized frameworks of cultural difference, evolutional backwardness, and other hierarchies such as savagery, the image of children, or primitivism; inside Europe distinctions revolved around the new language of mass society. Mass society and the so-called Americanization of Western-European societies carried with it a “negative representational repertoire of ‘un-culture’ and disorder, of drunkenness, gambling, undisciplined sexuality, violence, criminality, unstable patriarchy, and dissolute family life.” Within this new social imaginary, popular culture was negatively viewed as morally corrupting and distinguished from more authentic forms of social life. Whether as highbrow conservative variants of cultural critique and narratives of cultural decline or in from of the social-democratic denunciation of working-class backwardness, educational sloth, and escapist popular culture, this common discursive representation of mass society also had a distinct political meaning. The expansion of democracy and the extension of political and social rights were repeatedly accompanied by diagnoses of moral decline and antidemocratic charges imputing the dilution of values and national

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cultural heritage. In the late twentieth century, the opposition between high and low culture, healthy and unhealthy social existence, authentic civic conduct and morally degenerated ways of life “became transcribed into the racially constructed image of the immigrant urban poor” and therefore doubled with earlier (colonial) racialized representations and hierarchies.185 The coming to terms with new forms of diversity and incipient challenges to national identity produced new lines of division. For example, in Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s there was a clear trade-off between combating racial discrimination and extending social citizenship rights across racial lines on the one hand, and the tightening of immigration laws and the stigmatizing of colored immigrants on the other. Labour’s Race Relation Acts of 1968 and 1976 were bought at the price of the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts of 1962 and 1968 and the 1971 Immigration Act as well as the 1981 British Nationality Act.186 At the time, ideas of racial difference and distinction by skin color were entrenched across the political spectrum and ethnicity was a key element of citizenship. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act curtailed the extensive migration rights enjoyed by citizens of the British Commonwealth and was so plainly directed against “colored” overseas immigration that the Labour Party leader at the time, Hugh Gaitskell, called it “cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation.” However, in the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act the Labour government itself played the race card.187 Whereas the 1968 and 1971 Acts further restricted the future right of entry for Commonwealth citizens by abolishing the right of Commonwealth citizens to become British citizens by registration, and non-citizens could no longer acquire an unrestricted right to live in Britain, later rounds of legislation in the 1990s and 2000s modified the jus soli basis of British citizenship law. They established mandatory citizenship tests as a prerequisite for naturalization and permanent residence, introduced extraterritorial screening, restricted the grounds for appeals against the refusal of entry, granted immigration officers police-like powers such as detention, and introduced a probationary citizenship status depending on a point scale rather than an automatic right to apply for British citizenship after five years of residence, thereby effectively extending the application process by a further one to five years.188 This latest attempt to restrict access to full citizenship rights via a points-based test aimed to evaluate the applicants earning potential, degrees, and civic merits but also included the possibility to deduct point for so-called anti-social behavior.

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Such behavior could include anti-government protesting, e.g., anti-war protests, while the Home Office’s list of acceptable activities must be understood as a potentially illiberal strand of social engineering.189 In his analysis of post-1990 immigration policies, Andrew Geddes shows that the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation came at the expense of extending citizenship rights to legally resident third-country nationals (non-EU foreign nationals). Instead of taking up the 1996 Intergovernmental Conference proposal of the European Union Migration Forum (EUMF) to amend Article 8 of the EU Treaty on EU citizenship along with Articles 48-66 covering free movement—which would have resulted in extending EU citizenship and free movement rights to third-country nationals lawfully residing in the territory of a member state for a minimum of five years—a new Article 13 was introduced with the Amsterdam Treaty followed by the Racial Equality Directive in 2000.190 What this meant was that the member states, most vocally the French, German and UK governments, opted for repairing incomplete EU membership of third-country nationals by acquisition of the nationality of their states of residence rather than Europeanized denizenship. The extension of citizenship rights on the basis of legal residence was also forestalled by Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaty declarations precluding EU involvement in the nationality laws of the member states.191 This clearly illustrated the limits of the post-nationalization of citizenship in Europe. Theoretically, it is important to note that the historical weight of Nazi racial politics might have functioned—in Germany, Austria, and France more so than perhaps in Britain or the Netherlands—as an effective block to the perception of race as a social reality, a material presence in social life. As Geoff Eley argued: Rather than being defined just by ideational habits of thought, unexamined assumptions, bodies of prejudice, and reflective representations existing in people’s heads, race needs to be approached as a social formation structured around instituted practices and organized relations, which entail both material continuities and processes of reproduction.192

Despite the descriptive accuracy of Garner’s and Eley’s analysis, their plea for the continued relevance of ‘race’ as a category of social science analysis193 is unfortunate in semantically obscuring the difference between earlier biological discourses of racial superiority and post-World War II

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shift toward culturalized readings of race but also in regard to administratively constructed hierarchies between different immigrant groups. Pierre-Andrè Taguieff, Etienne Balibar and others have commented on the “naturalization of culture” and the increasingly culturalized reading of political problems in regard to immigration and immigrant communities.194 Culturalized readings entail an equally reductionist construction of immigrant groups as monolithic entities whose culture and religious affinities putatively set them against European ways of life and who are therefore ill-disposed toward the values of European liberal democracies.195 Biologically based discourses of racial supremacy have been replaced by a focus on social cohesion, (European) identity and liberal values, to each of which large-scale immigration is thought to present serious challenges. Although a racialization perspective might accurately capture the stigma and essentialism at work in the differential treatment, for example, of Hungarian and Romanian economic migrants to Western Europe and the links of current discourses of racialization to past practices and the history of European colonialism,196 I would nonetheless argue, that what Garner termed “the racialization of mainstream politics” is more fittingly described as the politicization of cultural identities, that is, as a re-ethnicization of citizenship regimes within European liberal democracy on the basis of cultural differentialism. Race as a category of analysis only insufficiently captures these shifts from biology to culture and from ethno-nationalism to the idiom of Enlightenment liberalism and an exclusionary language of European values.197 An over-emphasis on historical continuity risks missing the specific changes in the nature of both, migration trajectories and the current political discourses of othering. Questioning the analytic usefulness of racialization approaches, however, does neither preclude critical engagement with, nor stifles political action against everyday experiences of discrimination. What proponents of culturalization approaches (who argue that rather than racialization it is the re-ethnicization of citizenship regimes which shapes the experiences of migrants and minority communities) and those of a racialization-migration nexus have in common, is the critique of liberal political philosophies and policies that tend to theoretically delegitimize the claims of culture and promote staunchly individualist, difference-blind strategies in redressing social and political inequality. This also applies to arguments stressing the post-racial, cosmopolitan nature of the EU’s

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political identity.198 In such depoliticized portrayals of cultural differentialism, racism is conceptualized as merely one form of discrimination among many others. As Willem Schinkel pointedly put it: “From there, it is only a small step toward the idea that discrimination, while unfortunate, is simply a fact of life.”199 Culturalized conflicts around immigration have also tended to diminish the value of class-based social analysis that saw class as the primary factor in determining structural social contradictions and political consciousness.200 The political climate in which culture became “the constituent element” in the construction of new solidarities was also aided by the emergence of immigrant associations which sought the recognition of cultural identities during the 1980s.201 These associations seemingly reaffirmed essentialist collective identities by reconstructing culture as a social fact. The reference to culture, however, concealed the reality of social and political divisions. As Riva Kastoryano argued for immigrant associations in France and Germany: All the diversity of complex societies appears within boundaries that are initially national, drawn by the associations: social diversity (class, age, sex) and cultural diversity, which is sometimes linguistic (Turkish/Kurdish, Kabyl/Berber/Arab), sometimes ethnic, and often regional. […] All the anthropological diversity that had been eclipsed by a concern for cultural homogeneity in the formation of the native nation-state seems to have reappeared in some form, as if it were liberated in the country of immigration, where each specific feature constitutes an element of distinction. […] In short, the creation of associations resulted in a fragmentation based on what Freud called ‘the narcissism of minor differences’.202

Immigrant associations can thus be understood as important players in identity politics that sought to “transform an informal local community, constituted de facto by spatial proximity, into a cultural one, from a local community to a transnational one, imagined in terms of common identifications.”203 What is more, both, political conflicts as well as the tensions between conceptions, principles, and policies, differ not only across nation-states but also within each form of migration, be it labor migration, or related to family reunification or asylum.204 In this sense, the social cohesion discourse in the social sciences, by more or less implicitly carrying a threshold notion, links up with political discourses in lending itself to, if not producing, scientific legitimization for antiimmigration related policies. Again New Labour’s immigration policy

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is instructive here: While exhibiting a strong opposition to immigration legislation passed by Conservative governments, the continuation of anti-immigration policy when in office must be attributed to a growing concern of the political center-left with the internal social cohesion of British society rather than racial ideology. But whatever the underlying rational, the anti-immigration stance of New Labour led to a de facto culturally based re-ethnicization of immigration in public discourse and policy.205 The defeat of New Labour in the 2010 British general election further convinced many Labour Party members that a more restrictive approach, as opposed to the hitherto more liberal approach to immigration, must become the party’s future position.206 Finally, xenophobia as an often synonymously used term insufficiently captures the racialized matrix in its specific European genealogy, linkage to postwar labor migration, social perpetuation, and wider cultural consequences. Regarding the current representation of the East-European and non-European other and the public construction of the image of immigrants, Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood have pointed to the nexus of racialization, the commodifying logic of capitalism, the structural crisis of the postwar European welfare state, and postwar labor migration: The universalization of the commodity form creates ideologies of formal equality which are contradicted by the endemic inequalities of capitalism; racism enables a justification of inequalities by naturalizing them through conceptions of fixed attributes. Moreover, resistance to commodification and capitalist transformation allows recalcitrant populations to be racialized as primitive, […] and the contradiction between the universalizing thrust of capitalist relations and the formation of nation-states creates populations that are constantly being collectivized through identifications that posit national and ‘racial’ essences.207

Considering the pervasiveness of culturalized anxieties regarding the dystopic jumble of lost identities, overburdened labor markets, and eroded social cohesion, it is, as Geoff Eley remarks, indeed striking that (apart from the overt racism of the European Far Right) race is at the same time so profoundly embedded in the discursive architecture of political debate yet still remain[s] unspoken. […] What remains remarkable is the performance of reluctance and disavowal through which so many European commentators still seek to avoid arriving at a language – of politics, of culture, of theory – that can openly address this phenomenon.208

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Concluding Remarks: Insular Logics, Bounded Imaginations In this chapter, I argued that the postwar history of migration to Europe is best analyzed as a continuum rather than a series of supposedly unconnected instances. Though I concur with Messina and others that immigration into Europe to a large part was interest-driven, its history is not one of successfully managed migration but rather that of unforeseen trajectories, largely unintended consequences. Most importantly it is the multiethnic and multicultural reality imposing itself on Europe’s postwar nation-states. It is also a history of politicization in the sense that increasingly hostile publics—often cued by political elites—opposed liberal immigration policies and favored Fortress Europe over humanitarian and even economic imperatives. Despite initially differing policy frameworks of colonial and postcolonial migration regimes on the one hand and guest worker policies on the other, this constitutes the real convergence of the politics of migration across Europe. The brief portrayal of the postwar history of migration in Western Europe has the nation-state at the center of comparison and, in that sense, seemingly follows a national framework indebted to nineteenth-century state-building processes. Although this seems warranted considering that the nation-state remains the defining vector regarding current trajectories of migration, the discussion of postcolonial migration clearly shows the limits of such framework, both in terms of the sealing of borders and the securitization of migration as well as regarding the EU’s efforts at European identity construction. But as Anthony G. Hopkins cautioned, the “national epic” that has replaced the grand narratives of European empires not only marginalizes international influences but also resulted in “that peripheries have become detached, not only from former centers of influence, but also from one another” as postcolonial studies have “reinforced this decentralized view of the world by … rejecting the totalizing project associated with it.”209 It is in this sense, that the EU—despite its transnationalizing drive—has replicated the insular logic of the nation-state by its quest for unity and a common identity resulting in the artificial construal of borders and the turning into peripheries of regions and countries that only fifty years ago were still understood to be integral parts of Europe. Postcolonial migration into Europe perhaps most clearly illustrates the essential connection between imperialism, immigration, and transnationalism and as such calls into question both, canonical narratives of European integration in terms

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of peace, prosperity, democracy, and human rights as much as “the normative nation-state”210 as the proper object of analysis and the assumption implicit within it that (1) there exist clear distinctions between what is French, German, Dutch, etc. and between what counts as relevant to European historiography (e.g., the European metropole) and what is classified as non-European and thus remains irrelevant (e.g., the European colonial legacy), and (2) that the national, or indeed a European analytical frame still circumscribes the political in a meaningful way. To put it differently, the fact that the nation-state remains the main political arena and pre-eminent actor in terms of the allocation, administration, and contraction of rights resulting in civic stratification dynamics linked with immigration provides no argument for methodological nationalism. This is the case because of the complex multi-level system of EU governance and the divergent responses to both immigration and integration across European nation-states, including the non-recognition of status decisions of asylum applications of individuals of one member state by the others. These have their roots as much in national histories and institutional structures as in differing temporal experiences of older and newer immigration countries.211 The task of analyzing the contemporary dynamics of European policies on migration and asylum does not necessarily require an entirely new research design but could rely on well-developed structural institutionalist approaches which analyze “organizations and networks connecting large and constantly changing structures, and by focusing on the multivalent, networked, vertical, and horizontal linkages” with a particular eye to intermediary groups and diversity management, even if this might come at an expense of cultural and ideational factors.212 What the analysis of postwar history of migration in Western Europe also shows—and here the discussion is perhaps most clearly linked with that in Chapter 2—is that even in its supposedly most open formula— as a cosmopolitan utopia—discourses of European identity invisibilize substantial parts of European imperial legacy, the changes brought about by postwar postcolonial migration and primary labor migration. They have also paved the way for far-right exclusionary nationalism by keeping European identity chained to the nation-state. Equally, it seems surprisingly obvious (especially so given the widespread negligence of the impact primary labor migration in discourses on European integration213 ) that intra-European labor migrants—the so-called guest workers from southern European countries of emigration of the postwar years—are

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the real pioneers of European integration while non-European labor migrants along with postcolonial migrants must be seen as the real social, cultural, and political entrepreneurs of European cosmopolitan democracy in any substantive sense. In a longue durée-perspective, intense faces of migration appear as a European normality rather than crisis.214 Especially postwar Europe profited enormously—not only in an economic sense—from migrant labor and considering Western Europe’s current demographic crisis with an over-aging population (declining fertility rates and rising life expectancy215 ), a trend that is likely to continue for a number of decades, hostile attitudes toward immigration become almost unintelligible when the symbolic boundaries that structure immigration discourse are being disregarded. However, the politicization of culture does not represent a simple continuity in that it is a mere cipher for race but signals a conceptual shift. Contrary to the portrayal of Europe as a cosmopolitan, post-national and post-ethnic political space, this chapter argued that the European nation-state has reclaimed and consolidated its role in defining the political geography of citizenship and the management of ethnic and cultural diversity. This is most visible in the debate on multiculturalism and the shift away from policies of cultural recognition toward a renewed assimilationism.216 The amnesia of Western Europe about the history of its own fractious prejudices, its colonial legacy, the substantial waves of immigrants and the benevolent narrative of the EU as a purely civilizational and consistently humanitarian project not only marks a striking parallel to European colonial discourses of modernization and civilization but, more importantly, turns this history itself into a historical taboo.217 That is, the European human rights myth presents, Julien Bobineau put it, “an identity-forming, emotionally charged and only partially verifiable narrative of the past” that functions as a “dynamic narrative extension” bridging and invisibilizing Europe’s colonial past.218 Andrew Williams, Stijn Smismans, and Christoffer Kølvraa have persuasively shown how claims about a common European heritage and its inherent principle of fundamental rights protection have been consistently put forward by both, institutional and civil society actors.219 As Kølvraa put it: The basic plot here was that Europe would transfer its ‘miracle’ from the domestic to the foreign space and apply its special brand of ‘normative’, ‘civilian’ or ‘transformative’ power for the benefit of non-Europeans, who

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were in turn consistently (and rather self-congratulatorily) portrayed as gazing towards Europe in almost longing admiration. Most famously articulated by Habermas and Derrida in the shadow of the Iraq war, this idea of Europe as a new kind of global player […] basically recycled the narrative of Europe’s foundation and moral meaning as a community of peace, only to exchange the domestic utopia of peace in Europe for a new and much wider global ambition to be achieved by the same values, means and experience which Europe itself had acquired and enjoyed.220

The widespread reluctance and hostility toward Syrian refugees thus may be read as part of a deeply ingrained contra-factual denial of the extent to which Europe, its people and its culture(s) have been shaped by colonialism and the migration streams it entailed. At the same time, it illustrates how the truly remarkable postwar pacification of Europe’s internal relations has not been paralleled by the civilization of Europe’s relations with non-European others once colonial domination ended but has “creat[ed] a Fortress Europe vis-à-vis the world outside.”221 Historians Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper put it thus: “Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself.” Colonialism not only raised the profound question if, and to whom, in the overseas empires the supposedly universal principles and rights of an increasingly powerful Enlightenment discourse should extend but also “about the universality of citizenship and civil rights within Europe” itself. The colonial question, therefore, was present from the start in debates on the extension of citizenship (not only to colonial subjects but also to the disenfranchised white working class) and in “transfigured form” remains “resilient” even today.222 What it meant to be European, who qualified as “Homo Europeaus ”—and therefore as “fit to rule, at home and abroad”—and where the boundaries of the supposedly universal metropolitan political culture were to be drawn was not worked out in dimly lit studies of philosophers in Edinburgh, Geneva, Königsberg, London, Paris, or Weimar but in the “imaginary and physical space” constituted by the “colonies of France, England, and the Netherlands – more ambivalently, of Spain and Portugal.”223 European integration and the debates on the 2004 and 2007 enlargements saw the powerful resurfacing of these very same questions in the European East that had first been seen through the lenses of “demi-Orientalism” and later that of “arrested development” due to Communist oppression. Beyond the

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“end of history,” the post-Cold War decades were thus not only characterized by ideological wear-out and seismic geopolitical shifts but also by the search for intellectual reorientation. This “search for the historical roots of the new present” gave rise to a renewed scholarly interest in the historiography of imperial formations and shifted Cold War ideological polarization, Dirk Moses argued, “onto the alternative although familiar axis of the West and its non-Western others.”224 What Stoler and Cooper urged on the study of European imperialism, a “careful interrogation of the relationship of colonial state to metropolitan state and of the making of nation to the making of empire [that treats] metropole and colony in a single analytic field,”225 also holds for the study of migration and the complex dynamics that demarcate desirable from undesirable migration and shape citizenship regimes, philosophies of inclusion and strategies of exclusion. It is one of the central theses of this chapter that the colonized and the modern-day migrant or refugee therefore share a functional homology: they represent the Other against whom ideas of civilization, rationality, modernity, progress and Europeanness were and are being expressed. What Garner termed a “moral economy of whiteness” therefore links European colonial pasts and its crisis-ridden present. The point here is not that citizenship regimes or those of spatial mobility are stratified in the way that Steve Garner and others have illustrated but that the bottom strata in the hierarchy—undocumented immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers—are becoming increasingly cemented and impenetrable, that is, they form absolute categories of human beings that find themselves permanently excluded from any legal-administrative avenue to the attainment of full citizenship but, more importantly still, even from the protection of their human rights within Europe. Hostility toward refugees and asylum seekers, instead of being conceptualized as extremeright backlash or expression of economic concerns amidst a protracted sovereign debt crisis needs to be situated in a much broader analytical frame. Rather than in a conveniently compartmentalized historical memory that severs the interwar years from World War II from the postwar Cold War period, from the “end of history,” from the war on terror, and the history of colonial empires from that of the European metropole scholarly attention needs to refocus on functional equivalents, continuities, and resilient pattern of how cultural boundaries are maintained and against whom sovereignty is enacted, but also on how these

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boundaries become subject to change. This also concerns the opportunities for the reinvention of both, national cultures and Europeanness that have been produced specifically by the denationalizing processes of globalization.226 This leads to a paradox conclusion: it is in the opposition of Europeans toward immigration that Europeans appear most Europeanized in the sense that the territorial logic of the nation-state has been transcended by a broader regional, geopolitical identification. Ironically, rather than consolidating a shared sense of identity among Europeans, the EU’s selfcentered identity discourse produced strong symbolic boundaries against non-European refugees that can be seen as one of the main drivers for the surge in anti-immigrant backlash since 2015. Even more ironic is the fact that within the EU’s respective member states, these strong external boundaries increasingly trump intra-EU solidarity and stalled European intergovernmental frames of policy making in terms of a common European migration and asylum policy. Large-scale immigration, rather than presenting a threat to national sovereignty and issuing in a further transferal of sovereignty to Brussels in terms of a common European migration policy, has resulted instead in the rejuvenation of a national “ontology of power”227 and in a new, spatially bounded assertiveness vis-à-vis European governance portrayed as intrusive and illegitimate. This is the case, even though the EU has itself reproduced a territorially exclusionary regime akin the nation-state with strong external boundaries (but, as discussed in the preceding chapters, no shared, substantive understanding of social cohesion and mutual obligation on the inside) rather than a progressive cosmopolitanism in which racial, ethnic or cultural diversity are of no specific political significance. Europe’s de facto vision of cosmopolitanism, while purporting to be universal in expanding fundamental rights and freedoms, is not only resolutely introspective and self-referential but may also illustrate the gap between “the inclusionary pretentions of liberal theory and the exclusionary effects of liberal practices” and thus can be understood, in the words of Uday Singh Mehta, as the projection “onto a larger canvas [of] the theoretically veiled and qualified truth of liberal universalism.”228 The criticism of and, indeed, the theoretically condescending attitude of certain liberal philosophers toward theories of multiculturalism and the notion of cultural recognition are intrinsically linked with this fundamental tension in liberal universalism. The failure of liberal theory to define (a) what is meant by the concept of the people and (b) to falsely identify the rights of

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man with those of the citizen resulted, according to Galina Cornelisse, in that the “potential for nationalist claims is strengthened in a system where the organization of political life on the basis of clear territorial demarcations is a fact.”229 While theoretically, liberalism responds to the challenge of cultural pluralism by turning questions of identity into questions of individual interest (and thus conceptualize(s) them as expressions of power struggles or socio-economic conflicts), in practice, the neutrality and impartiality of the liberal state regarding conflicting visions of the good life amounts, at times, to the reification and preferential treatment of the majority culture and the classification of others as backward, infantile, irrational, or illiberal. In that sense, Paul Kahn put it well, “liberalism turns out to be less a product of reason than of the bounded character of the imagination.”230 This closely links with a shift in the meaning of sovereignty from Westphalian notions of territorially defined populations to culturalized notions of belonging that effect a reversal of the rights and safeguards of the international human rights regime for non-Europeans trying to make their way into Europe. Most forcefully, member states’ governments in Eastern Europe, but also Austria and Denmark, have attempted to draw shut a “velvet curtain of culture”231 and portray violations of individual rights of refugees and migrants as legitimate exercise of national sovereignty. This shift has therefore come at the expense of fundamental individual rights beyond the nation-state that many thought had become customary among liberal democracies. While mainstream parties have long been champions of European integration and—as argued in Chapter 2—ever deeper integration even constituted a quasi-default solution to governance challenges and crises of vastly differing kinds,232 those pro-European parties—in calling for European solutions to the refugee crisis—appeared weak in terms of national self-determination and the exercise of sovereignty. The success of populist right-wing parties propagating neo-nationalist agendas happened in this sovereignty vacuum. It also highlighted the missing horizontal solidarity between national populations on the European level and the growing discontent with asymmetric EU power structures—whether real or imagined. In the Middle and Eastern European “latecomers,” this manifested itself in terms of opposition to core-periphery relations in which Western European member states continued to impose their social, political, and economic preferences, values, and laws on these member states. The perceived burden-shifting of “core-Europe” onto its periphery in terms

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of immigration policy and the more general (and partly inherent) fault lines within the EU’s political architecture became clearly visible in the political dislocations that followed the Syrian refugee crisis. Cultural notions of territorially based sovereignty were being reproduced through the progressive securitization of immigration, the detention, deportation and criminalization of refugees and asylum seekers, and the criminalization of those providing humanitarian aid,233 as much as by the ever-increasing construction of border fences and impassible, militarized barriers. From a Cold War perspective, and especially so from a Eastern European one, it is indeed remarkable and oxymoronic that a walled Europe should be seen as an expression of freedom merely three decades after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. The increased securitization of the EU’s external borders as much as the newly erected ones separating its member states, therefore have also become a negative index of social cohesion. The inattention and silent acquiescence to death and human rights violations—at Europe’s borders as in processing and detention centers as well as during forced deportation—are no simple byproduct of sovereignty discourse. Rather, as I would argue in appropriation of Demo’s phrase quoted at the beginning, it is the refugee drowned in the Mediterranean and the asylum seeker denied protection and who is carried dead from a deportation flight234 that constitute the ultimate symbol of territorial sovereignty. While in 2010, Cornelisse could still argue that [e]ven if contemporary movement controls arguably give rise to the most glaring examples of entrenched social division and hierarchy globally, a belief in their abolishment or transformation will have to form part of a vision that encompasses much more than the way in which legal and political discourse perceives of human, cross-border movement and the relationship between political authority and territory. […] we need to distance ourselves from contemporary forms of static social organisation in order to be able to imagine different ways of organising our world. By the very act of challenging the neutrality of territorial sovereignty, a stubborn and consistent application of human rights claims to deprivations of liberty in immigration procedures may well contribute to the opening up of such a space,235

from the vantage point of early 2020, such hope not only has clearly been in vain but has taken on a decidedly utopian character. We might therefore wonder whether the post-Cold War decades, rather than heralding an age

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of global liberal democracy, universalized moral imperatives and humanitarian interventions reflecting an unprecedented human rights revolution, on the contrary, issued in a new racial century.236

Notes 1. The total number of European refugees, expellees, and deportees (including the European part of Russia) between 1939 and 1945 is being estimated as 50–60 million or more than 10% of Europe’s total population at the time. See Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, trans. by Allison Brown, Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 204– 205. For the phase of German military expansion from 1939 to-1943 see, as cited by Bade, Eugen M. Kulischer: Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948, p. 264. 2. See Anthony M. Messina: European Disunion? The Implications of ‘Super’ Diversity for European Identity and Political Community. In: Europe’s Contending Identities: Supranationalism, Ethnoregionalism, Religion, and New Nationalism, ed. by Andrew C. Gould and Anthony M. Messina, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 54–78. 3. Friedhelm Neidhardt and Dieter Rucht: Protestgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1950–1994: Ergebnisse, Themen, Akteure. In: Protest in der Bundesrepublik: Strukturen und Entwicklungen, ed. by Dieter Rucht, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2001, pp. 27–70. For an analysis of the patterns of immigrant-native and immigrant-state conflicts in Britain, France and Germany see Rafaela M. Dancygier: Immigration and Conflict in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 4. Although de jure this changed with the introduction of jus soli elements in 2000 turning the children born in Germany of those who were either born in Germany themselves or have been in the country for a minimum period of eight years automatically into German citizens, public perception and discourse seem not to have caught up with this switch in citizenship regime all the way. 5. Riva Kastoryano: Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany [orig. France, l’Allemagne et leurs immigrés]. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 38 ff. 6. Carl Levy: Refugees, Europe, Camp/State of Exception: “Into the Zone”, the European Union and Extraterritorial Processing of Migrants, Refugees, and Asylum-Seekers (Theories and Practice). In: Refugee Survey Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2010), p. 103; and Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Peo Hansen and Stephen Castles: Migration, Citizenship, and the European Welfare State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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7. John Agnew: Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics. In: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 95, No. 2 (June 2005), pp. 437–461. 8. Richard B. Freeman: People Flows in Globalization. In: Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring 2006), pp. 145–170, 150; and Anthony H. Richmond: Global Apartheid: Refugees, Racism, and the New World Order. Toronto, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 106. 9. Emmanuel Comte: The History of the European Migration Regime: Germany’s Strategic Hegemony. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. p. 3. 10. Sandra Lavenex: The Europeanization of Refugee Policies: Normative Challenges and Institutional Legacies. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 39, No. 5 (December 2001), p. 855. 11. Challenge to the Nation State: Immigration in Western Europe and the United States, ed. by Christian Joppke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 3. On the tension between the denationalization of economic space and the renationalization of political discourse see Saskia Sassen: Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization. Columbia University Press, 1996, pp. 63–105. See also Eleonore Kofman: Citizenship, Migration and the Reassertion of National Identity. In: Citizenship Studies, Vol. 9, No. 5 (November 2005), pp. 453–467. See also Susan Strange: The Retreat of the State: the Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; and Edgar Grande: Cosmopolitan Political Science. In: British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 57, No. 1 (2006), pp. 87–111, who argues that, despite many diagnoses to the contrary, the nation-state remains the primary actor in the allocation and administration of rights. 12. See Susi Dennison: The EU and North Africa after the Revolutions: A New Start or ‘plus ça change’? In: Mediterranean Politics, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2013), pp. 123–128; esp. p. 125. 13. Zygmunt Bauman: Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016, pp. 1–2, 10. See also Bill Jordan and Franck Düvell: Migration: The Boundaries of Equality and Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003, p. 17. For an assorted sample of more prominent instances of such alarmism see Walter Laqueur: The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007; and Christopher Caldwell: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. Immigration, Islam and the West. London: Allen Lane, 2009. For an example from the United States see Charles Murray: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. New York: Crown Forum, 2012. 14. For a diagnosis from the early 2000s see Andrew Geddes: The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe. London: Sage, 2003; see also

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15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

Magdalena Lesinska: ´ The European Backlash against Immigration and Multiculturalism. In: Journal of Sociology, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2014), pp. 37– 50. Anne Demo: Sovereignty Discourse and Contemporary Immigration Politics. In: Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 91, No. 3 (August 2005), pp. 291–311, with direct quote at 298, my italics. Ibid., pp. 294–295. I explored the culturalization of immigration with a specific focus on immigration from nominally Muslim countries of origin in greater detail in Chapter 2. Karl Loewenstein: The Union of Western Europe: Illusion and Reality. In: Columbia Law Review, Vol. 52, No. 2 (February 1952), pp. 209– 240. See Michael Geyer: Cold War Angst: The Case of West-German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons. In: The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. by Hanna Schissler, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 376–408 and the sources cited therein. Raymond Aron: Old Nations, New Europe. In: Daedalus, Vol. 93, No. 1 (Winter 1964), pp. 43–66, 48–49. See, for example, Jürgen Ossenbrügge: Territorial Ideologies in West Germany 1945–1985: Between Geopolitics and Regionalist Attitudes. In: Political Geography Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4 (October 1989), pp. 387–399; and Andrew Moravcsik: The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 412f. Heinz Magenheimer argued that postCold War Germany functioned both as an anchor and a bridge between Eastern and Western Europe. See Heinz Magenheimer: The Revival of Geopolitics in Europe. In: Redefining European Security, ed. by Carl. C. Hodge, New York: Garland Publishing, 1999, p. 33. Cold War predictions of the Soviet Union’s collapse might present a partial exception since they focused on the potential militancy latent in Muslim-Soviet relations. See Michael Rywkin: Moscow’s Muslim Challenge: Soviet Central Asia. London: C. Hurst, 1982, Rev. ed. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1990; and Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Broxup: The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Ilya Prizel: Identity Discourse in Western Europe and the United States in the Aftermath of 9/11. In: Immigration, Integration, and Security: America and Europe in Comparative Perspective, ed. by Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia and Simon Reich, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008, pp. 23–43. In some regards, the gap between the Soviet Union and the United States in terms of de facto economic dynamics is

4

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25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

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surprisingly small. See, for example, James C. Scott: Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams. In: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 193–222. Thomas Faist: The Migration-Security Nexus: International Migration and Security Before and After 9/11. In: Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos, ed. by Gökçe Yurdakul and Y. Michal Bodemann, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 103–119. See Emma Haddad: The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 167–171. Peter Geschiere: The Perils of Belonging. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 155. The liberal state thesis is perhaps most closely associated with the work of James F. Hollifield, see most recently Talking Across Disciplines: Migration Theory in the Social Sciences, ed. by Caroline Brettell and James Hollifield, New York: Routledge, 2000; and James Hollifield, Barbara Schmitter-Heisler, and Dietrich Thränhardt: Beyond Exceptionalism: Immigration and Integration in Germany and the United States. London: Palgrave, forthcoming. For the embedded realism thesis, see Christian Joppke: Immigration and the Nation State: The United States, Germany and Great Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; and Christian Joppke: Citizenship Between De- and Re-Ethnicization. In: Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos, ed. by Gökçe Yurdakul and Y. Michal Bodemann, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 63–91. On the declining sovereignty thesis see, for example, Virginie Guiraudon and Gallya Lahav: A Reappraisal of the State Sovereignty Debate: The Case of Migration Control. In: Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2000), pp. 163–195; and Gary P. Freeman: The Decline of Sovereignty? Politics and Immigration Restrictions in Liberal States. In: Challenge to the Nation State: Immigration in Western Europe and the United States, ed. by Christian Joppke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. For this categorization of research perspectives, see Anthony M. Messina: The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration to Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 6–9. Anthony M. Messina: The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration, direct quote at 11. For a political economy reading of the interest-driven immigration policy thesis see Gary P. Freeman: Winners and Losers: Politics and the Costs and Benefits of Migration. In: West European Immigration and Immigrant Policy in the New Century, ed. by Anthony M. Messina, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002, pp. 77–96. See Gary P. Freeman: Winners and Losers, pp. 77–78; and Sarah Spencer: The Migration Debate. Bristol: Policy Press, 2011, p. 1. Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, p. 217.

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31. Randall Hansen: Migration to Europe Since 1945: Its History and Its Lessons. In: The Politics of Migration: Managing Opportunity, Conflict and Change [Special issue of The Political Quarterly], ed. by Sarah Spencer, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 25–38. 32. Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, p. 217. 33. I am retaining the term ‘wave’ for purposes of analytical clarity but it has been rightly criticized for being suggestive of a quasi-natural force that overwhelms, floods or washes over countries of immigration. As such, it contributes to the conceptualization of migration as exogenous shocks with causes independent of or eluding the reach of host countries regulative capacity. As I argued in the introduction, the Syrian refugee crisis is a case in point. 34. See Anthony M. Messina: The Origins and Trajectory of Post-WWII Immigration. In: The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration in Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 19–53. 35. Christopher A. Bail. The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries Against Immigrants in Europe. In: American Sociological Review, Vol. 73, No. 1 (February 2008), p. 39. This categorization somewhat invisibilizes the legacy of European colonialism by conflating in its first wave two historically distinct sources of migration within and to Europe: firstly, Euro-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial in-migration of about 7 million immigrants who arrived from the colonies between 1940 and 1975 and, secondly, transnational migration within Europe which was far greater in volume than migration to Europe, especially so during the major European migrant labor movements. European transnational labor migration thus divided the continent into a north-western in-migration region and a southern out-migration region well into the 1980 s, a time when the influx of refugees and asylum seekers was already dominating public discussion while numerically being distinctly secondary to family reunification of labor migrants up until the late 1980s. See Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, pp. 218–222. See also Eleonore Kofman: European Migrations, Civic Stratification and Citizenship. In: Political Geography, Vol. 21, No. 8 (November 2002), pp. 1035–1036. 36. Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, citing Bernhard Santel: Migration in und nach Europa [Migration within and to Europe]. Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1995, p. 57. 37. See, for example, the study commissioned by the Swedish Government in the beginning of the 1980s: European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study, ed. by Tomas Hammar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; and Tomas Hammar: The Politicisation of Immigration. In: Immigration and Race Relations, ed. by Tahir Abbas and Frank Reeves, London and New York: Tauris, 2007, pp. 99–110.

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38. Anthony M. Messina: The Origins and Trajectory of Post-WWII Immigration. In: The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration in Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 28; see also Marcel Berlinghoff: Das Ende der “Gastarbeit“. Europäische Anwerbestopps 1970–1974. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012. 39. Gianni D’Amato: Vom Ausländer zum Bürger. Der Streit um die politische Integration von Einwanderern in Deutschland, Frankreich und der Schweiz [From Foreigner to Citizen: The Dispute Over the Political Integration of Immigrants in Germany, France and Switzerland]. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001, pp. 61–67. 40. Carl Levy: Refugees, Europe, Camp/State of Exception, p. 102. 41. Christina Boswell: The ‘Eternal Dimension’ of EU Immigration and Asylum Policy. In: International Affairs, Vol. 79, No. 3 (May 2003), pp. 619–638, 619. 42. Critically on the myth of a West-German economic miracle, see Henry C. Wallich: Mainsprings of the German Revival. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955; and Werner Abelshauser: Wirtschaft in Westdeutschland 1945–1948: Rekonstruktion und Wachstumsbedingungen in der amerikanischen und britischen Zone [Economy in West-Germany 1945–1948: Reconstruction and Conditions for Economic Growth in the American and British zones]. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1975, pp. 23–30, 168–170. 43. See, for example, Eric Hobsbawn: The Golden Years. In: The Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991. London: Abacus, 1995, pp. 257–286; and Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, pp. 242–245. For Germany see Werner Abelshauser: Die langen Fünfziger Jahre: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1966 [The Long 1950s: Economy and Society in the Federal Republic of Germany 1949–1966]. Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1987. 44. Sandra Gruner-Domi´c: Zur Geschichte der Arbeitskräftemigration in die DDR. Die bilateralen Verträge zur Beschäftigung ausländischer Arbeiter (1961–1989). In: Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Juni 1996), pp. 204–230; Mirjam Schulz: Migrationspolitik in der DDR. Bilaterale Anwerbungsverträge von Vertragsarbeitnehmern. In: Transit/Transfer: Politik und Praxis der Einwanderung in die DDR 1945–1990, ed. by Kim Christian Priemel, Berlin: be.bra wissenschaft verlag, 2011, pp. 143–168. 45. Ibid., p. 229. 46. See Ulrich Herbert and Karin Hunn: Guest Workers and Policies on Guest Workers in the Federal Republic: From the Beginning of Recruitment in 1955 Until Its Halt in 1973. In: The Miracle Years: A Cultural

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47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. by Hanna Schissler, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 187–218. See Andreas Kossert: Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945. München: Pantheon, 2009; and R.M. Douglas: Orderly and Humane. The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012, pp. 301–325. Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, p. 206. Ulrich Herbert and Karin Hunn: Guest Workers and Policies on Guest Workers in the Federal Republic, pp. 187–188. Hanna Schissler makes the interesting point that the fact that certain themes were altogether absent from public discussion might “signify something beyond mere repression”. Ibid., p. 236. See Rita Chin: The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 5, 41–52. See Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller: The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: Guilford Press, 2003, p. 81. See Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, pp. 230–233; Klaus J. Bade: Vom Auswanderungsland zum Einwanderungsland? Deutschland 1880–1980 [From Emigration Country to Immigration Country? Germany 1880–1980]. Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1983, pp. 73–75, 78; and Anthony M. Messina: The Origins and Trajectory of Post-WWII Immigration. In: The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration in Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 22. Ulrich Herbert and Karin Hunn: Guest Workers and Policies on Guest Workers in the Federal Republic, p. 189. See Bernhard Santel and James F. Hollifield: Erfolgreiche Integrationsmodelle? Zur wirtschaftlichen Situation von Einwanderern in Deutschland und den USA. In: Migration in nationalen Wohlfahrtsstaaten [Migration in National Welfare States], ed. by Michael Bommes and Jost Halfmann, Osnabrück: Rasch, 1998, pp. 123–145. Rita Chin: The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany, p. 7. See Rita Chin: The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe. A History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 254 ff; Christoph M. Michael: Der Mythos vom europäischen Multikulturalismus und die Kulturalisierung des Politischen. In: Berliner Debatte Initial, Vol. 28, No. 4 (2017), pp. 50–65. See ibid., pp. 11–13. Chin diagnoses a curious absence of guest workers in the German historiography of the postwar period as well as a resistance of historians to addressing the labor recruitment programs. The guest worker question has instead been relegated to the separate field of migration and minority studies. For Example, Heinrich August Winkler, to

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many the dean of modern and contemporary German history, mentions it in his 685-page study of German history from 1933 to 1990 only in passing, devoting not even a full paragraph to it. See Heinrich August Winkler: Germany: the Long Road West, 1933–1990 [orig. Deutsche Geschichte vom “Dritten Reich” bis zur Wiedervereinigung], trans. by Alexander Sager, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 58. On the question of German postwar identity see In:Search of Germany, ed. by Michael Mertes, Steven Muller, and Heinrich August Winkler, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996. 59. See Ulrich Herbert: Geschichte der Ausländerbeschäftigung in Deutschland, 1880–1980: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter. Berlin: Dietz, 1986, esp. pp. 28–33. [Engl. trans. by William Templer as A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.] Paradigmatically for the ‘(labor) displacement theory’ holding the influx of foreign Polish workers (Auslandspolen) responsible for the westward move of German agricultural workers see Max Weber: Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland. Dargestellt aufgrund der vom Verein für Socialpolitik veranstalteten Erhebungen. In: Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik, Vol. 55, No. 3, Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot, 1892; Max Weber: Die ländliche Arbeitsverfassung. In: Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik, Bd. 58, Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot, 1893; and Max Weber: Entwicklungstendenz in der Lage der ostelbischen Landarbeiter [1894]. In: Gesammente Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 1924, pp. 470–507. See also Max Sering: Die innere Kolonisation im östlichen Deutschland [The Inner Colonialization in Eastern Germany]. Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot, 1893. For a brief overview of the larger ‘displacement’ debate see Klaus J. Bade: Massenwanderung und Arbeitsmarkt im deutschen Nordosten von 1880 bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. In: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, Vol. 20 (1980), pp. 317–323. 60. The original German reads “[…] gehen wir ernsten Gefahren entgegen. Denn die Vermischung mit all diesen fremden Elementen kann für die Reinheit der germanischen Stämme nur verhängnisvoll sein. Möge die Vorsehung Deutschland davor bewahren, seine eigenen Landeskinder zu Gunsten fremder Staatsangehörigen verkümmern zu sehen!” Quoted in Ulrich Herbert: Geschichte der Ausländerbeschäftigung in Deutschland, p. 32. At the time, this is by no means radical but can be seen as a moderate mainstream position. See also Annemarie H. Sammartino: The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.

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61. The original German reads: “Die einzig sinnvolle Handlungsperspektive kann nur sein, weitere Zuwanderung aus dem Nahen und Mittleren Osten sowie aus Afrika generell zu unterbinden. Dies erfordert freilich auch, dem hohen und in Zukunft wohl noch wachsenden Einwanderungsdruck mit Energie entgegenzutreten.” Thilo Sarrazin: Deutschland schafft sich ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen [Germany Abolishes Itself: How We Are Putting Our Country at Risk]. München: DVA, 2010, esp. chapter 7. See also the scathing review by Timothy Garton Ash: Germans, More or Less. In: New York Review of Books, Vol. 58, No. 3 (March 9, 2011), pp. 22–24. 62. Emmanuel Comte: The History of the European Migration Regime: Germany’s Strategic Hegemony. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018. 63. On German Colonialism see, for example, German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, ed. by Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011; Sebastian Conrad: German Colonialism: A Short History [Orig. Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte], transl. by Sorcha O’Hagan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; and German Colonialism in a Global Age, ed. by Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 64. Randall Hansen: Migration to Europe Since 1945, pp. 25–38, 26. 65. Elizabeth Buettner: Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 259ff. 66. Bernhard Porter: The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt famously claimed that the British had “acquired their empire in a fit of absent mindedness” rather than as the result of a rational and purposeful imperialist policy. Arendt has often been criticized for imputing the “negative elements of cruelty and violence” to the non-European Other while colonial violence was portrayed as somewhat accidental and not intrinsic to British imperialism. Most recently on the link of anti-Semitism, (anti-Black) racism and colonialism in Arendt’s work see the brief discussion in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, ed. by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 70 ff. 67. Mark Olden: White Riot: The Week Notting Hill Exploded. In: The Independent, 28 August, 2008, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ uk/home-news/white-riot-the-week-notting-hill-exploded-912105. html. 68. See Racial Equality in Britain. In: Roy Jenkins: Essays and Speeches, ed. by Anthony Lester, London: Collins, 1967, pp. 267–273.

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69. In the early 1970s, these South Asians had been living in Uganda for three, sometimes four generations and had originally been resettled under British colonial rule in order to create a wedge in between Ugandan natives and British colonialist. See Jan Jelmert Jørgensen: Uganda: A Modern History. London: Croom Helm, 1981, pp. 285–290. 70. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/brave_new_ world/immigration.htm. 71. See Chris Waters: “Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963. In: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (April 1997), pp. 207–238; Steve Garner: A Moral Economy of Whiteness: Behaviours, Belonging, and Britishness. In: Ethnicities, Vol. 12, No. 4 (August 2014), pp. 445–464; and Mica Nava: Sometimes Antagonistic, Sometimes Ardently Sympathetic: Contradictory Responses to Migrants in Postwar Britain. In: Ethnicities, Vol. 14, No. 3 (June 2014), pp. 458–480. 72. Zygmunt Bauman: Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016, pp. 1–2. 73. See Camilla Schofield: Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 160 ff. 74. Enoch Powell: Extract from speech by the Rt. Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MP, at a public meeting of the Hampshire Monday Club in the Avenue Hall, Southampton, 7.30 pm, Friday, 9 April 1976, The Speeches of John Enoch Powell, POLL 4/1/11 File 3, January–April 1976, pp. 4–5, available at http://enochpowell.info/Resources/Jan-April%201976.pdf. 75. Elizabeth Buettner: Europe After Empire, pp. 352–353. 76. See Paul Gilroy: Joined-up Politics and Postcolonial Melancholia. In: Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 18, No. 2–3 (June 2001), pp. 151–167. 77. Paul Gilroy: Postcolonial Melancholia (The Welleck Library Lectures). New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 78. Les Back, Michael Keith, Azra Khan, Kalbir Shukra and John Solomos: New Labour’s White Heart: Politics, Multiculturalism and the Return of Assimilation. In: The Political Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 4 (October 2002), pp. 445–454. 79. Amber Rudd resigns hours after Guardian publishes deportation targets letter. In: The Guardian, 30 April 2018, https://www.theguardian. com/politics/2018/apr/29/amber-rudd-resigns-as-home-secretaryafter-windrush-scandal. 80. See Tony Kushner: The Empire Windrush: the Making of an Iconic British Journey. In: The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys, 1685 to the Present. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, pp. 163– 185. 81. Nanton points out that “West Indian” has been used alongside other categorization such as “Guyanese,” “Afro-Caribbean,” “Black” and

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82.

83.

84.

85.

86. 87.

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“Black Caribbean.” Philip Nanton: Migration Dynamics: Great Britain and the Caribbean. In: Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 22, No. 4 (1999), pp. 449–469. G. C. K. Peach: West Indian Migration to Britain. In: The International Migration Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1967), pp. 34–45. On West Indian migration see also Laurence Brown: Afro-Caribbean Migrants in France and the UK. In: Paths of Integration: Migrants in Western Europe (1880–2004), ed. by Leo Lucassen, David Feldman and Jochen Oltmer, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006, pp. 177–198; Margaret Byron and Stéphanie Condon: Migration in Comparative Perspective: Caribbean Communities in Britain and France. New York and London: Routledge, 2008; and Amanda Bidnall: West Indies to London. In: The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945– 1965, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017, pp. 22–60. Matthew Norman: The Windrush generation are the ‘right kind’ of immigrants, otherwise we wouldn’t care. In: The Independent, April 29, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/windrush-generationscandal-racism-muslims-pakistanis-theresa-may-amber-rudd-a8328141. html. Randall Hansen: Migration to Europe Since 1945: Its History and Its Lessons. In: The Politics of Migration: Managing Opportunity, Conflict and Change [Special issue of The Political Quarterly], ed. by Sarah Spencer, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 25–38, 27. Elizabeth Buettner estimates that during World War I approximately 300,000 Algerians—but also Antilleans, Indochinese, and West Africans—either worked as agricultural and industrial workers or fought and died on the battlefields and in the trenches of the Western Front. See Buettner: Europe After Empire, pp. 284, 290. Ibid., pp. 288–289. Martin Schain: The Politics of Immigration in France, Britain and the United States: A Comparative Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 93, and, as cited by Schain, Patrick Weil: La France et ses Etrangers. Paris: Gallimard, 1991, pp. 63–75. Ibid., pp. 102–103. See Gérard Noiriel: The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity [French Orig. Le creuset français: Histoire de l’immigration xixe-xxe siècles ], trans. by G. de Laforcade, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. On the history of immigration in France see also Patrick Weil: La France et ses Etrangers: l’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration de 1938 à nos jours, Nouv. éd. refondue, Paris: Gallimard, 2005; Alec G. Hargreaves: Multi-ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society, New York: Routledge, 2007; and

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90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

97.

98.

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Histoire politique des Immigrations (post)coloniales: France 1920–2008, ed. by Amhed Boubeker et Abdellali Hajjat, Paris: Éd. Amsterdam, 2008. Alec G. Hargreaves: Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France. London and New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 180–196. Martin Schain: Minorities and Immigrant Incorporation in France. In: Multicultural Question, ed. by Steven Lukes and Christian Joppke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 199–223, 214; cited in Andrew Geddes: The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe, p. 67. Elizabeth Buettner: Europe After Empire, pp. 285–286. Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, p. 224. Buettner: Europe After Empire, p. 296. Buettner quotes Juliette Minces: Les travailleurs étrangers en France: enquête. Paris: Seuil, 1973, p. 407. See also Maxim Silverman: Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France. London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 46–53; and Patrick Weil: La France et ses Etrangers: l’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration de 1938 à nos jours, Nouv. éd. refondue, Paris: Gallimard, 2005, pp. 69–87. The so-called Congo atrocities sparked a heated debate in Belgium society with the publication of Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), who claimed that the harsh systems of forced labor and exploitation that Leopold II condoned ultimately amounted to genocide in which half of the Congolese population (10 million people) perished over the 23 years of his reign. Others, such as the Royal Belgian Union for Overseas Territories, vigorously attacked Hochschild’s account, claiming that a “black legend has been created by polemicists and British and American journalists feeding off the imaginations of novelists and the re-writers of history.” See Hochschild, pp. 225–233; Guy Vanthemsche: Belgium and the Congo, 1885–1980 [French Orig. La Belgique et le Congo: Empreintes d’une colonie 1885–1980], trans. by Alice Cameron and Stephen Windross, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 23–26; David Renton, David Seddon and Leo Zeilig: The Congo: Plunder and Resistance. London and New York: Zed Books, 2007; and The Hidden Holocaust. In: The Guardian, May 13, 1999. On the ensuing controversy, see Michel Dumoulin: Léopold II: un roi génocidaire? Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 2005. Matthew G. Stanard: Belgium, the Congo, and Imperial Immobility: A Singular Empire and the Historiography of the Single Analytic Field. In: French Colonial History, Vol. 15 (2014), pp. 87–110, 98–99. See Ministère des Affaires Économiques: Annuaire Statistique de la Belgique et du Congo belge 80. Brussels: Institut National de Statistique,

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99.

100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106.

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1959, p. 531, as cited in Stanard: Belgium, the Congo, and Imperial Immobility, p. 94. Idesbald Godderis: Postcolonial Belgium: The Memory of the Congo. In: Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2015), p. 444. Buettner: Europe After Empire, p. 312. Idesbald Godderis: Postcolonial Belgium, pp. 434–451. Ibid., p. 439. Apart from the German-speaking community in the province of Liège (Lüttich), Belgium is regionally divided with Dutchspeaking Flemish region (Vlaams Gewest) in the north and Frenchspeaking Wallonia in the south (albeit Wallonia remains distinct from the French-speaking community). Each community has significant political autonomy extending even to independent foreign policy. On Belgium see Buettner: Europe after Empire, pp. 311–317, here 312– 313. Buettner: Europe After Empire, p. 214. Buettner: Europe After Empire, pp. 224, 236. On the creation of the pied-noirs as a new postcolonial collective identity and distinct collective memory for the French settler community of Algeria, one that had not existed as such in colonial Algeria, see JeanJacques Jordi: The Creation of the Pieds-Noirs: Arrival and Settlement in Marseilles, 1962. In: Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. by Andrea L. Smith, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003, pp. 61–74; and William B. Cohen: Pied-Noir Memory, History, and the Algerian War. In: Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. by Andrea L. Smith, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003, pp. 129–145. Buettner: Europe After Empire, pp. 217, 228–229. Ibid., pp. 242–243. The arrival of retornados coincided with socially significant numbers of emigrantes into Western Europe (mainly France, Switzerland, West Germany, and Luxembourg) of approximately 700.000 people during the 1960s and 1970s, who were looking for economic betterment or trying to avoid compulsory military recruitment for the regime’s colonial wars. See José Carlos Pina Almeida and David Corkill: On Being Portuguese: Luso-tropicalism, Migrations and the Politics of Citizenship. In: Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, ed. by Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodriguez and Shirley Anne Tate, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015, pp. 157–174, 165. The OAS (Organisation armée secrète) was a reactionary, paramilitary organization aiming to prevent Algerian independence by carrying out terrorist attacks, bombings and assassinations, including ultimately unsuccessful attempts on Charles de Gaulle, André Malraux and JeanPaul Sartre, the latter’s apartment at Rue Bonaparte in St-Germain-desPres was bombed twice. It was ultimately OAS-terrorism that moved the

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110.

111.

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113. 114.

115. 116.

117.

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Algerian crisis and an, by the early 1960s, already unpopular war into the center of metropolitan France. More importantly, OAS terrorism turned the pied-noirs into the bêtes noires of France. See Alistair Horne: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, with a new preface by the author, New York: New York Review Books, 2006, p. 503; and Todd Shepard: The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006, pp. 192ff. For the left’s association of Bonapartism and de Gaulle see, for example, Pierre Frank: Gaullist Bonapartism Throws off its Camouflage. In: Fourth International, No. 9 (March 1960), pp. 20–25. See also René Rémond: Les droits en France. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1983, pp. 322– 323; and Robert Gildea: The Past in French History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 62–89. Rémond differentiated three currents within the French right: plebiscitary Bonapartism (mainly Gaullism); the liberal Orléanism of the center-right; and the reactionary extreme-right which, in the early 1960s, found its incarnation in OAS terrorism. Here and in the following see Buettner: Europe after Empire, pp. 239– 242; See also Todd Shepard: The Invention of Decolonization, pp. 193– 197. Stephen C. Lubkemann: Race, Class, and Kin in the Negotiation of “Internal Strangerhood” Among Portuguese Retornados, 1975–2000. In: Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. by Andrea L. Smith, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003, pp. 75–93, 76. Ibid., p. 78. Ricardo E. Oballe-Bahamón: The Wrinkles of Decolonization and Nationness: White Angolans as Retornados in Portugal. In: Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. by Andrea L. Smith, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003, pp. 147–168. Buettner: Europe After Empire, p. 246. Lubkemann: Race, Class, and Kin in the Negotiation of “Internal Strangerhood” among Portuguese Retornados, p. 84. Lubkemann also stresses the importance of socio-economic success. Retornados living in the bairros sociais or the peri-urban shantytowns on the outskirts of Lisbon, Cascais or Leiria faced “a more essentialized and less performative form of ‘internal strangerhood’” and “were often conflated with groups regarded as ‘ethnic others’.” Contrary to France and its piedsnoirs, “there is no publically recognized retornado ethnic minority in Portugal”, ibid., pp. 88, 90. José Carlos Pina Almeida and David Corkill: On Being Portuguese: Luso-tropicalism, Migrations and the Politics of Citizenship. In: Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, ed. by Encarnación

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118.

119.

120.

121.

122.

123.

124. 125. 126.

Gutiérrez Rodriguez and Shirley Anne Tate, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015, pp. 157–174, 164–165, 168, italics in the original. Luís Souta: Multicultaralidade et Educação, with a foreword by Raúl Iturra, Porto: Profedições, 1997. See also Neusa Maria Mendes de Gusmão: Os Filhos da África em Portugal: Antropologia, Multiculturalidade e Educação. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2013, p. 257. Ricardo E. Oballe-Bahamón: The Wrinkles of Decolonization and Nationness: White Angolans as Retornados in Portugal. In: Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. by Andrea L. Smith, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003, p. 166. Ovalle-Bahamón: The Wrinkles of Decolonization, pp. 147–148. In Portugal itself, the experiences of (white) Portuguese in the colonies, whether as soldiers or settlers, gained broader public and indeed international attention perhaps most famously in Lídia Jorge’s novel A Costa dos Murmúrios (The Murmuring Coast) and in several, widely translated novels of former military surgeon and novelist António Lobo Antunes. See Ekaterina Dajs: Russlanddeutsche als unsichtbares Volk [Russian Germans as Invisible Nation]. In: Rückkehr in die Fremde? Ethnische Remigration russlanddeutscher Spätaussiedler, ed. by Birgit Menzel and Christine Engel, Berlin : Frank & Timme, 2014, pp. 267–276; and Maria Savoskul: Russlanddeutsche in Deutschland: Integration und Typen der ethnischen Selbstidentifizierung [Russian Germans in Germany: Integration and Types of Ethnic Self-identification]. In: Zuhause fremd Russlanddeutsche zwischen Russland und Deutschland, ed. by Sabine Ipsen-Peitzmeier and Markus Kaiser, Bielefeld: transcript-Verl., 2006, pp. 197–222. See Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, pp. 263–267; Sarah Collinson: Visa Requirements, Carrier Sanctions, ‘Safe Third Countries’ and ‘Readmission’: The Development of an Asylum ‘Buffer Zone’ in Europe. In: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1996), pp. 76–90, 79. Clyde Haberman: Italy Moves to Stem Wave of Albanians. In: New York Times, August 9, 1991. See also Luigi Quaranta: La vita altrove nei giorni della Vlora [Life elsewhere in the days of the Vlora]. In: Corriere della Sera, October 25, 2011, http://www.corriere.it/economia/italie/ puglia/notizie/quaranta-vita-altrove-giorni-vlora_4a3e927a-feed-11e0b55a-a662e85c9dff.shtml?refresh_ce-cp. Bade: Migration in European History, pp. 244, 261–262. Magdalena Lesinska: ´ The European Backlash, pp. 38–39. For an early assessment of these policies, see Milada Anna Vachudová: Eastern Europe as Gatekeeper: The Immigration and Asylum Policies

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128. 129.

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136. 137.

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of an Enlarging European Union. In: The Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North America and Europe, ed. by Peter Andreas and Timothy Snyder, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, pp. 153–172. Here and in the following see Carl Levy: The European Union after 9/11: The Demise of a Liberal Democratic Asylum Regime. In: Government and Opposition, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 26–59, esp. 33–37. Ibid., pp. 57–58. Gregor Noll: Visions of the Exceptional: Legal and Theoretical Issues Raised by Transit Processing Centres and Protection Zones. In: European Journal of Migration and Law, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2003), pp. 303–341, 338. 2016 European Social Survey: Attitudes towards Immigration and their Antecedents: Topline Results from Round 7 of the European Social Survey, p. 12, https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/docs/findings/ ESS7_toplines_issue_7_immigration.pdf. Magdalena Lesinska: ´ The European Backlash, pp. 37–50, 38. Buettner: Europe After Empire, p. 247. Ibid., p. 250. Ibid., p. 247. The Colonial Legacy in France: Fracture, Rupture, and Apartheid, ed. by Nicholas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Dominic Thomas [French Orig. La Fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial ], trans. by Alexis Pernsteiner, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 1–39. Ibid., pp. 2–3, italics in the original. Martin Shipway: Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 140–141. Sarah Collinson: Visa Requirements, Carrier Sanctions, ‘Safe Third Countries’ and ‘Readmission’, pp. 76–90. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., pp. 76–90, 77. Maritain pointed to a number of dysfunctionalitites that sovereignty, understood as supreme authority within a territory, produces. In terms of domestic sovereignty’s “inner logic,” the notion of an absolute supreme power of the state over the body politic results in that “the pluralist idea is not only disregarded, but rejected by necessity of principle”, See Jacques Maritain: Man and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, p. 51. Galina Cornelisse: Immigration Detention and Human Rights: Rethinking Territorial Sovereignty. Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff,

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143.

144.

145. 146. 147. 148.

149.

2010, p. 229. In a comparative study of the politics of coercive social regulation in Germany and the United States, Antje Ellermann situates state practices of immigration detention and deportation in the much broader context of the “progressive expansion of the socially coercive state in the advanced industrialized world.” Liberal democracies have “enacted far-reaching measures of social control” in policy areas such as migration control, criminal justice, homeland security but also welfare services and “funded the rapid growth of coercive bureaucracies.” What is intriguing here is that this has happened in a general climate of neoliberal deregulation and government downsizing, that is, “the growth of law enforcement is the most prominent exception to the general retreat of the state.” See Peter Andreas: Border Games. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000, pp. 25–26, quoted in Antje Ellermann: States Against Migrants: Deportation in Germany and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 2. It undermined the authority and domestic control of member states’ governments and limited the notion of agency of those governments (and therefore also popular sovereignty) to the procurement of formal consent to the Troika’s non-negotiable demands and financial measures under the European Financial Stability Mechanism and, since September 2012, the European Stability Mechanism. For an excellent overview, see Politics in the Age of Austerity, ed. by Armin Schäfer and Wolfgang Streeck, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. On Westphalian sovereignty see, for example, Stephen D. Krasner: Problematic Sovereignty. In: Problematic Sovereignty, ed. by Stephen D. Krasner, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, pp. 10–12; and Andreas Osiander: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth. In: International Organization, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Spring 2001), pp. 251–287. Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Wendy Brown: Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Ibid., pp. 9–10. See Jon Henley, Kate Connolly and Sam Jones: Merkel coalition at risk as talks on refugee policy falter. In: The Guardian, June 14, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/14/merkel-coalitionat-risk-as-talks-on-refugee-policy-falter; and Jennifer Rankin and Philip Oltermann: Future of EU hinges on solving migration issue, says Merkel. In: The Guardian, June 28, 2018, https://www.theguardian. com/world/2018/jun/28/future-of-eu-hinges-on-solving-migrationissue-says-merkel. Wendy Brown: Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, pp. 15–17.

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150. The Schengen Agreement itself can be understood as “a classic example extraterritorial control” one that by creating buffer states attempted to shift “some of the burdens and dilemmas of control outside the jurisdiction of the liberal states of western Europe.” See James Hollifield: Immigration and the Politics of Rights: The French Case in Comparative Perspective. In: Immigration and Welfare: Challenging the Borders of the Welfare State, ed. by Michael Bommes and Andrew Geddes, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 109. See also Virginie Guiraudon: Before the EU Border: Remote Control of the ‘Huddled Masses’. In: The Search of Europe’s Borders, ed. by Kees Groenendijk, Elspeth Guild and Paul E. Minderhoud, The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2003, pp. 191–228, who argues that extraterritorializing migration control by “short-circuiting judicial constraints on migration control” aims to avoid the guarantees of substantive rights and procedural avenues for legal recourse set down in domestic as well as international law (p. 194). For an instructive overview of extraterritorial strategies of immigration control, see the introductory chapters by the editors in Extraterritorial Immigration Control: Legal Challenges, ed. by Bernard Ryan and Valsamis Mitsilegas, Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2010, pp. 3–65. 151. Galina Cornelisse: Immigration Detention and Human Rights, pp. 238, 245. 152. Wendy Brown: Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, p. 94. 153. Ibid., direct quotes at pp. 105, 115. 154. Bade: Migration in European History, p. 262. 155. For a concise discussion of typologies of citizenship regimes and their drawbacks, see Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni and Florence Passy: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 8–10. 156. See Yasemin Nuho˘glu Soysal: Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994; David Jacobson: Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; Jean L. Cohen: Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos. In: International Sociology, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1999), pp. 245–268; Linda Bosniak: Citizensip Denationalized. In: Indiana Journal of Global Law Studies, Vol. 7 (2000), pp. 447–508; Sandra Lavenex: The Europeanisation of Refugee Policies; Liza Schuster and John Solomos: Rights and Wrongs Across European Borders: Migrants, Minorities and Citizenship. In: Citizenship Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2002), pp. 37–54; Eleonore Kofman: Citizenship, Migration and the Reassertion of National Identity, pp. 453–467; Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham,

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163.

164. 165.

Marco Giugni and Florence Passy: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, esp. pp. 74–106; and Christian Joppke: Citizenship Between De- and Re-Ethnicization, pp. 63–91. See Sandra Lavenex: The Europeanization of Refugee Policies, p. 852; and Galina Cornelisse: Immigration Detention and Human Rights. With regard to counter-terrorism measures, see also Verena Zöller: Liberty Dies by Inches: German Counter-Terrorism Measures and Human Rights. In: German Law Journal, Vol. 5, No. 5 (2004), pp. 469– 494, http://www.germanlawjournal.com/pdfs/Vol05No05/PDF_Vol_ 05_No_05_469-494_special_issue_Zoeller.pdf. See Eleonore Kofman: Citizenship, Migration and the Reassertion of National Identity, pp. 454–455; and Bruce Crumley: Why European Conservatives Are Bashing Multiculturalism, Global Spin, February 23, 2011, http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/02/23/why-europeanconservatives-are-bashing-multiculturalism/. Arjun Appadurai: Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 23. Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni and Florence Passy: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. See Riva Kastoryano: Territories of Identities in France, at http://riotsf rance.ssrc.org/Kastoryano/. These examples are discussed in Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni and Florence Passy: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 14f. Paul Scheffer: Immigrant Nations [orig. Het land van aankomst ], transl. by Liz Waters, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011, p. 34. Alistair Horne: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–62, with a new preface by the author, New York: New York Review Books, 2006, p. 539. See, for example, Mark B. Salter: When the Exception Becomes the Rule: Borders, Sovereignty, and Citizenship. In: Citizenship Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2008), pp. 365–380. For a critique of Agamben’s State of Exception see Philippe Mesnard: The Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Evaluation [trans. by Cyrille Guiat]. In: Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2004), pp. 139– 157; and Elspeth Guild: Security and Migration in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010, p. 25, who argues that refugees are “neither victims nor Homo Sacer”. More sympathetic to Agamben is Charles T. Lee: Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Space of Citizenship. In:

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168.

169. 170.

171. 172.

173.

174. 175.

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Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2010), pp. 57–81. Carl Levy: Refugees, Europe, Camp/State of Exception, p. 101. Here and in the following see Steve Garner: The European Union and the Racialization of Immigration, 1985–2006. In: Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn 2007), pp. 61–87. See Sarah Collinson: Visa Requirements, Carrier Sanctions, ‘Safe Third Countries’ and ‘Readmission’, pp. 76–90; Paul Statham: Understanding Anti-Asylum Rhetoric: Restrictive Politics or Racist Publics? In: The Politics of Migration: Managing Opportunity, Conflict and Change, ed. by Sarah Spencer, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp. 163–177; and Jef Huysmans: The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration, and Asylum in the EU . London: Routledge, 2006. Steve Garner: A Moral Economy of Whiteness: Four Frames of Racializing Discourse. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 4–6. Steve Garner: The European Union and the Racialization of Immigration, 1985–2006. In: Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn 2007), direct quote at p. 80. Garner: Moral Economy, p. 5. Steve Garner: The European Union and the Racialization of Immigration, 1985–2006. In: Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn 2007), p. 80. See also Paul Silverstein: Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot: Race, Migration, and Immigration in the New Europe. In: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 34 (October 2005), pp. 363–384; and Inga Schwarz: Racializing Freedom of Movement in Europe: Experiences of Racial Profiling at European Borders and Beyond. In: movements. Journal für kritische Migrations- und Grenzregimeforschung, Vol. 2 No. 1 (September 2016), pp. 253–266. See Lydia Morris: Civic Stratification and the Cosmopolitan Idea. In: Control of Rights: the Rights of Workers and Asylum Seekers under Managed Migration. Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants Discussion Paper, 2004; and more generally Lydia Morris: Asylum, Welfare and the Cosmopolitan Ideal: A Sociology of Rights. Oxon: Routledge, 2010. For earlier discussions, see David Lockwood: Civic Integration and Class Formation. In: British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 47, No. 3 (September 1996), pp. 531–550. For Muslim immigrant communities see Jørgen Nielsen: Muslims in Western Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 101. See Stephen Glover et al.: Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis. UK, Home Office, Research and Development Statistical Occasional Paper No. 67.

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176. Though this is certainly an interesting observation, more work needs to be done on the actual factors determining such generational shift. My impression is that this is less to do with questions of identity, cultural factors, or religious orientation but primarily with socio-economic inclusion. See Ilya Prizel: Identity Discourse in Western Europe and the United States in the Aftermath of 9/11. In: Immigration, Integration, and Security, p. 27. 177. Kitty Calavita: The Everyday Dynamics of Exclusion: Work Health and Housing. In: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 102. 178. See, for example, Rogers Brubaker: Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992; and Jürgen Mackert: Kampf um Zugehörigkeit: Nationale Staatsbürgerschaft als Modus sozialer Schließung [Struggle for Inclusion: National Citizenship as mode of social closure]. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999. 179. Klaus J. Bade: Migration in European History, pp. 224–227. See also Robert Miles: Racism: The Evolution of a Debate About a Concept in Changing Times. In: Europe—A New Immigration Continent: Policies and Politics Since 1945 in Comparative Perspective, ed. by Dietrich Thränhardt, Münster: Lit, 1996, pp. 75–104; and Étienne Balibar and Immanuel M. Wallerstein: Race, Nation and Class: Ambiguous Identities [orig. Race, Nation, Classe: les Identités ambigues ]. London and New York: Verso, 1991. 180. See Martin Barker: The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe. London: Junction Books, 1980, pp. 1–53. See also Colin Holmes: A Tolerant Country? Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities in Britain. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. 181. Steve Garner: The Racialization of Mainstream Politics in Europe. In: Ethical Perspectives: Journal of the European Ethics Network, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2005), pp. 123–140. See also Linda McDowell: On the Significance of Being White: European Migrant Workers in the British Economy in the 1940s and 2000s. In: New Geographies of Race and Racism, ed. by Claire Dwyer and Caroline Bressey, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, pp. 51–64; Randall Hansen: Migration, Citizenship and Race in the EU: Between Incorporation and Exclusion. In: European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 35, No. 4 (1999), pp. 415–450; and Anthony M. Messina: Race and Party Competition in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Helen Quan advances a similar argument for the United States, showing that culture talk obscures the fundamentally racial, political, and economic dimensions of immigration. See H.L.T. Quan: Race, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship. In: Race and

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185. 186.

187.

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Human Rights, ed. by Curtis Stokes, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009, pp. 169–184. See the introduction in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. by Dana Villa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Geoff Eley: The Trouble with Race: Migrancy, Cultural Difference, and the Remaking of Europe. In: After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe, ed. by Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann, Ann Arbot: The University of Michigan Press, 2009, pp. 138–139. Most recently see The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–9, ed. by Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. See Geoff Eley: The Trouble with Race, pp. 141–144. Bob Alexander Hepple: Have Twenty-Five Years of the Race Relations Acts in Britain Been a Failure? In: Discrimination: The Limits of the Law, ed. by Bob A. Hepple and Erika M. Szyszczak, London: Mansell, 1992, pp. 19–34; and the discussion in Geoff Eley: The Trouble with Race, pp. 160–165. For a short analysis of the motives of the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, see Mark Lattimer: When Labour Played the Racist Card. In: New Statesman, January 22, 1999. These succeeding Acts are the 1990 Dublin Convention, the 1993 Immigration and Asylum Appeals Act, the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act, the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, the 2002 British Overseas Territories Act, the 2004 Asylum and Immigration Act, the 2006 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act, the 2007 UK Borders Act, and the 2009 Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act. On the so-called journey to citizenship via “Life in the UK tests” see Josie Appleton: Citizens, Do Your Civic Duty. In: The Guardian, November 11, 2009; and Nick Saville: Immigration: the Test Case. In: The Guardian, December 12, 2009; and lifeintheuktest.ukba.homeoffice. gov.uklifeintheuktest.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk. For a pre-1999 overview see Helen Staples: The Legal Status of Third Country National Resident in the EU . The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1999; see also Virginie Guiraudon: Third Country Nationals and European Law: Obstacles to Rights’ Expansion. In: Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (October 1998), pp. 657–674. Andrew Geddes: The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe, pp. 145–146. Geoff Eley: The Trouble with Race, p. 161. Umut Erel et al. equally argue for the continued analytical centrality of race as a category of social science research. See Umut Erel, Karim Murji

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194.

195. 196.

197.

198.

199.

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and Zaki Nahaboo: Understanding the Contemporary Race-Migration Nexus. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 39, No. 8 (2016), pp. 1339– 1360. See Pierre-André Taguieff: The Force of Prejudice: on Racism and Its Doubles [Orig. La force du préjugé: Essai sur le racism et ses doubles]. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001; Les métamorphoses idéologique du racism et la crise de l’anti-racisme. In: Face au racisme, Tome II: Analyses, hypothéses, perspectives, ed. by Pierre-André Taguieff, Paris: La Découverte, 1991; Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein: Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, 1991; and Verena Stolcke: Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe. In: Current Anthropology, Vol. 36, No. 1 (February 1995). I discuss these dynamics regarding Europe’s Muslim minorities in more detail in Chapter 2. See, for example, Jon E. Fox, Laura Moro¸sanu and Eszter Szilassy: The Racialization of the New European Migration to the UK. In: Sociology, Vol. 46, No. 4 (2012), pp. 680–695. Alana Lentin argues that culturalization should be seen as a continuation of racialization since it essentializes and naturalizes cultural difference and, therefore, “today, interchangeable racial and cultural frames inform interpretations of belonging, rights, equality, citizenship.” See Post-Race, Post Politics: The Paradoxical Rise of Culture after Multiculturalism. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 37, No. 18 (2014), pp. 1268–1285, 1281–1282. It is no coincidence that Carl-Ulrik Schierup detected a link between the culturalization of immigration discourses and the increasingly cultural focus of social science research, whether in terms of a clash of cultures or the debate on multiculturalism. Carl-Ulrik Schierup: På kulturens slagmark- mindretal og størretal taler om Danmark. Esbjerg: Sydjysk Universitetsforlag, 1993. See also Jeffrey C. Alexander: Introduction: Understanding the ‘Relative Autonomy’ of Culture. In: Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates, ed. by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 1–27; and Tony Bennett: Cultural Studies and the Culture Concept. In: Cultural Studies, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2015), pp. 546–568. Willem Schinkel: Imagined Societies: A Critique of Immigrant Integration in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 114. See Paul Gilroy: One Nation Under a Groove: The Cultural Politics of ‘Race’ and Racism in Britain. In: Becoming National: A Reader, ed. by Geoff Eley and Ronald Grogor Suny, New York: Oxford University

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205.

206.

207.

208.

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210.

211.

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Press, 1996, p. 367; and George M. Fredrickson: The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. 77. Riva Kastoryano: Negotiating Identities, p. 85. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid. George M. Fredrickson: Racism: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 75; and Eleonore Kofman: Citizenship, Migration and the Reassertion of National Identity, p. 457. Indeed, there’s evidence for a spatial distribution of culturalization processes across Europe with ethno-cultural readings being more salient in Western Europe than in the European South. See Juan Díez Medrano: Nation, Citizenship and Immigration in Contemporary Spain. In: International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 7, No. 2 (2005), pp. 133– 156; and Anna Triandafyllidou: Immigrants and National Identity in Europe. London: Routledge, 2001. See the contribution of Tim Bale, Elena Jurado and Shamit Saggar in: Exploring the Cultural Challenges to Social Democracy: Anti-migration Populism, Identity and Community in an Age of Insecurity, ed. by Michael McTernan, London: Policy Network, 2011. See Daniel Trilling: Should Labour Become the ‘Anti-immigration Party’? David Goodhart Is Wrong—And So Was New Labour. In: The New Statesman, May 18, 2010. Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood: Modern Racisms, Racialized Identities. In: Racism, Modernity, and Identity: On the Western Front, ed. by Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, p. 9. See also the contribution by Robert Miles: Explaining Racism in Contemporary Europe, pp. 189–221. Geoff Eley: The Trouble with Race, p. 147. To the same effect see Alana Lentin: Postracial Silences: The Othering of Race in Europe. In: Racism and Sociology, ed. by Wulf D. Hund and Alana Lentin, Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014, pp. 69–104. A. G. Hopkins: Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History. In: Past & Present, Vol. 164, No. 1 (August 1999), pp. 198– 243, 198, 203. See the programmatic chapter by Gary Wilder Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies beyond National Identity. In: After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and Through the Nation, ed. by Antoinette Burton, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 125– 143. Andrew Geddes: European Integration and Reconfigured Immigration Politics. In: Immigration and European Integration: Beyond Fortress Europe? Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008,

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212.

213.

214.

215.

216. 217.

218.

pp. 16–41. See also Sandra Lavenex: Mutual Recognition and the Monopoly of Force: Limits of the Single Market Analogy. In: Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 14, No. 5 (August 2007), pp. 762–779. See, for example, Karen Barkey: Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 6. I do agree with Barkey that the historical study of empire can serve as a valuable analytical analogy for current question regarding how political and economic cohesion can be achieved under conditions of ethnic and cultural diversity while retaining the structural flexibility and capacity to adapt and innovate. The notable exception is Ettore Recchi and Adrian Favell’s Pioneers of European Integration. In: Pioneers of European Integration: Citizenship and Mobility in the EU . Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009, pp. 1–25. The pioneering effect of primary labor migration—albeit limited in case of Recchi and Favell to the Inner Six—retains significance, even if we dispute their guiding hypothesis that “EU movers are the prototypical ‘Highly Europeanized Citizens’”. Ibid., p. 3. Dale Tomich, importantly, points out that the longue durée “is not a structure in the sociological sense of the word, that is a fixed attribute of the social system (as in Parsons’ sociology or Althusser’s Marxism). Nor is Braudel’s historical account a ‘grand narrative.’ Rather, the longue durée is a more or less stable historical relation that allows an open and experimental approach to the theoretical reconstruction of longterm, large-scale world historical change.” Dale Tomich: The Order of Historical Time: The Longue Durée and Micro-History. In: Almanack. Guarulhos, No. 2 (2011), pp. 52–65, 54. See also David Armitage: What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée. In: History of European Ideas, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2012), pp. 493–507. United Nations: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division: World Population Ageing: 1950–2050, https://www.un.org/ esa/population/publications/worldageing19502050/. See Chapter 4 for a detailed discussion. For a typology of historical taboos see Antoon van den Braembussche: ´ The Silenced Past. On the Nature of Historical Taboos. In: Swiat historii. [Prace z metodologii historii i historii historiografi i dedykowane Jerzemu Topolskiemu z okazji siedemdziesi˛eciolecia urodzin], ed. by Wojciecha Wrzoska and Jerzy Topolski, Poznan: ´ Inst. Historii UAM, 1998, pp. 97–112. See also Antoon van den Braembussche: The Silence of Belgium: Taboo and Trauma in Belgian Memory. In: Yale French Studies, No. 102 (2002), pp. 34–52. Julien Bobineau: The Historical Taboo: Colonial Discourses and Postcolonial Identities in Belgium. In: Werkwinkel, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2017), pp. 107–123, 111.

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219. Andrew Williams: EU Human Rights Policies: A Study in Irony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; to the same effect more recently, Stijn Smismans: The European Union’s Fundamental Rights Myth. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 (2010), pp. 45– 66; and Christoffer (Leiding) Kølvraa: European Fantasies: On the EU’s Political Myths and the Affective Potential of Utopian Imaginaries for European Identity. In: JCMS (Journal of Common Market Studies), Vol. 54, No. 1 (2016), pp. 169–184. 220. Christoffer (Leiding) Kølvraa: European Fantasies, pp. 169–184, 179. 221. See Jeffrey C. Alexander: Struggling Over the Mode of Incorporation: Backlash Against Multiculturalism in Europe. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Jan. 2013), pp. 531–556, 539–540. 222. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper: Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda. In: Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, pp. 1, 2. 223. Ibid., p. 3. 224. See A. Dirk Moses: Das römische Gespräch in a New Key: Hannah Arendt, Genocide, and the Defense of Republican Civilization. In: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 85, No. 4 (December 2013), pp. 867–913, 867–868. 225. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper: Between Metropole and Colony, p. 4. 226. See, for example, Klaus Eder: Integration through Culture? The Paradox of the Search for a European Identity. In: European Citizenship between National Legacies and Postnational Projects, ed. by Klaus Eder and Bernd Giesen, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 222–244; and Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford: The New Cultural Logic of Europeanization: Citizenship, Memory, and Public Discourse. In: Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 87–105. Though Delanty and Rumford’s emphasis on culture as a system of communication that is not fixed but rather fluid and negotiable is to be welcomed, they have a very peculiar and strikingly ill-informed reading of Europe’s post-communist societies in stating “Not everyone was a perpetrator, but almost everyone was complicit in the Stasi [short for ‘Staatssicherheit’, the East German Secret Service] operations.” Delanty and Rumford: New Cultural Logic, p. 99. 227. Wendy Brown: Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, p. 93. 228. More specifically, Mehta states regarding the anthropological basis of universalistic claims that this “manifests an aspect of its theoretical underpinnings and not merely an episodic compromise with the practical constraints of implementation. […] [T]he exclusionary basis of liberalism

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229. 230. 231. 232.

233.

234.

235.

does, I believe, derive from its theoretical core, and the litany of exclusionary historical instances is an elaboration of this core. It is not so because the ideals are theoretically disingenuous or concretely impractical, but rather because behind the capacities ascribed to all human beings there exists a thicker set of social credentials that constitute the real basis of political inclusion. The universalistic reach of liberalism derives from the capacities that it identifies with human nature and from the presumption, which it encourages, that these capacities are sufficient and not merely necessary for an individual’s political inclusion. It encourages this presumption by giving a specifically political significance to human nature.” Uday S. Mehta: Liberal Strategies of Exclusion. In: Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, pp. 59–86, 59–61, italics in the orig. Galina Cornelisse: Immigration Detention and Human Rights, pp. 80– 81. Paul W. Kahn: Putting Liberalism in Its Place. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 126, my italics. Samuel Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993), p. 22. Most recently see French President Emmanuel Macron’s September 26, 2017 speech at Sorbonne university, Paris in which Macron advocated the creation of a joint eurozone budget, fiscal and social convergence with a common finance minister and parliamentary supervision at the European level, a joint foreign policy doctrine and a common European asylum agency. Most recently see the amendments introduced into Hungarian law in 2018 that allow for the prosecution of persons aiding non-documented immigrants but also, at least theoretically, for the prosecution of lawyers aiding migrants in administrative and court procedure and NGOs distributing food and clothing. See Meret Baumann: Ungarn kriminalisiert Flüchtlingshilfe. In: Neue Züricher Zeitung (NZZ), 20 June 2018, https://www.nzz.ch/international/ungarn-verabschiedet-gesetzgegen-fluechtlingshilfe-organisationen-ld.1396589. For a case list of death during forced deportation compiled for the Institute of Race Relations by Liz Fekete in the early 2000s see http://www. irr.org.uk/news/analysis-deaths-during-forced-deportation/. Galina Cornelisse: Immigration Detention and Human Rights, pp. 343– 344. See also Colin Harvey: Time for Reform? Refugees, Asylum-seekers, and Protection Under International Human Rights Law. In: Refugee Survey Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1 (March 2015), pp. 43–60.

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236. The term was coined by Australian historian Dirk Moses. See A. Dirk Moses: Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust. In: Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 36, No. 4 (2002), pp. 7–36.

CHAPTER 5

The Integration Paradox: Culturalizing Belonging at the End of the “Multiculturalist Era”

Whereas the colonial era was characterized by a civilizing mission that denied the colonized the capacities of self-rule because of their irrationality that manifested itself in an enchanted world caught up in myth, fetishism, and idolism, toward the end of European colonialism this civilizing mission turned into one of the modernizations captured well by the French colonial term of évolué. This term designated an evolving native, skilled middle class who spoke French, had adopted French customs and culture, and thus—at least in theory—would eventually themselves become truly French and enjoy full citizenship rights. Hannah Arendt perhaps best illustrates the ambivalence of such European sentiments. Despite her critical analysis of racism and race-thinking as “ever-present shadow accompanying the development of the comity of European nations” and the “powerful ideology of imperialistic policies,”1 Arendt, through a number of startlingly sweeping generalizations, de facto denies the entire indigenous (black) populations of Australia and Africa participation in the concert of civilized nations throughout a number of notorious passages of The Origins of Totalitarianism.2 Even though Arendt does not explicitly racialize Africa’s and Australia’s indigenous populations, the rhetorical function of her remarks (and that of the cues she incorporates from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ) is rather clear.3 Both, however, go beyond rhetorical emphasis in projecting © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. M. Michael, Migration and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Europe, Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64069-9_5

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onto the “savages” of the African continent “a consistent antiprimitivism that by turns converges with and disjoins from racial discourses.”4 They are conceptualized as people in the state of nature without “the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment” of whom exists “no historical record and which [the prehistoric tribes] do not know any history of their own.”5 Historicity, that is, “the cultivation of an enduring human world,” becomes the differentia specifica between natural humans—humans “in potentia”—and those exhibiting the specifically human character of cultured humanity. This loss of historicity is also linked with the loss of the capacity to bear moral responsibility.6 The real problem with Boer racism, in that sense, lay not in enslaving and killing Africans but in the Boers’ own alienation from European civilization and their degeneration to the same primitive status of passive vegetation that characterized their black slaves.7 The real scandal lay in the Boer’s moral failure (something the Hottentots because of their prehistoric status were incapable of), in civilization undone. Casas Clausen puts this well when summarizing that: While both Boers and Hottentots ultimately failed the test of acculturation (human self-cultivation as historic transcendence of nature), it happens that the Boers should have known better but Hottentots could not have. Hottentots have underdeveloped potential; […] their arrested moral development casts them as innocent betrayers of humanity. […] By contrast, the Boers stand morally culpable for the active willfulness that marked their betrayal. […] The Hottentots’ culturelessness relieves them of specifically human moral agency, which only properly originates with the cultivation of an enduring human world. The Boers could have exercised such moral capacity: however, in shirking historic duties of colonization, they shed cultivated humanity and the moral condition that distinguishes it. Hence, the Boers’ betrayal of humanity is the more flagrant because it represents a thoughtless abdication of responsibility for divinely granted human agency.8

Whether Arendt’s preconceptions were based in Aristotelian political anthropology, result from a specific notion of Kulturvölker (civilized peoples of culture) and its opposite Naturvölker (primitive peoples in the state of nature) within German philosophical anthropology, are a case of racism toward people of color, methodologically result from heteroglossia, or simply represent an aberration compared with the overall character of her work, the point is that Arendt, in these instances but

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also elsewhere throughout her work,9 presents us with a culturalized scientific discourse that not only has clear dehumanizing implications but establishes a “threshold of humanity” criterion. As Moses put it: For rather than positing ‘the political’ as a domain in which the right to participate can be claimed and contested, she [Arendt] ascribed nonpolitical status to entire categories of humans – indigenous peoples, those engaging in animal laborans, and others reduced to ‘bare life’ – who were thereby excluded from civilization and its emoluments.10

However, despite these well-justified criticisms and Arendt’s seeming inability to appreciate the push of colonial peoples for national liberation from imperial domination—and, more importantly still, beyond scholarly strategies of indictment and exoneration—the importance of her analysis of imperialism in Origins of Totalitarianism lies in drawing attention to the systematic interrelatedness of European imperialism, racism, and proto-genocidal forms of colonial violence and their subsequent destructive effects on political and moral values within Europe itself. What may have captivated Arendt in regard to Heart of Darkness may have been that Conrad’s “narrative is partly about the struggle to maintain a humane morality when that morality no longer seems to bear guaranteed validity.”11 Arendt thus provided part of the “groundwork”—however ambivalent—for later historians of colonialism and genocide who no longer conceptualized the Holocaust as the singularly horrific result of a German Sonderweg (special path), and therefore as a specifically German form of race-imperialism, but rather as the culmination of a dark undercurrent of modern Western civilization itself and a single, all-European “modernization process of accelerating violence” of which genocidal colonial policies were an integral part.12 While the Boers presented a deterritorialized “laboratory test” of “race organizations” because the Boers “had transformed themselves into a tribe and lost the European’s feeling for a territory, a patria of his own,” in Europe, concentration camps functioned “as special laboratories to carry through its [totalitarianism’s] experiment in total domination.”13 Postwar, post-colonial Europe retained a colonial-type interpretation within the bounds of what anthropologist Johannes Fabian called “the denial of coevalness.”14 Just as Arendt, distinguished British historian Hugh (Redwald) Trevor-Roper may have taken his cues from Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History when, in a series of public lectures at

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the University of Sussex in the fall of 1963, he remarked that “[p]erhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely … darkness. And darkness is not a subject of history.” TrevorRoper further added that “the history of the world for the past five centuries, in so far as it has significance, has been European history” and historians therefore could not “afford to amuse [them]selves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”15 The difference to denials of coevalness and significance (other than that of being passive objects of European history) is that backwardness, since the end of the Cold War, has no longer been understood in terms of modernization theory but rather as political backwardness, as not yet having caught up with democracy, European knowledge systems, and subsequently human rights standards.16 In 2002, prominent German historian Heinrich August Winkler, for example, commented on the accession negotiations with Turkey that: [i]n all countries that have been granted the status of accession candidate by the EU, there exist, even if to varying degrees, historical pre-conditions for a European ‘shared identity’. None of these states would contest the values of Western democracy once made a member of the EU. […] Of the majority of the Anatolian population this cannot be said. […] Historical characteristics are irreplaceable; identities cannot be prescribed.17

Winkler thus was suggestive both of an important shift and of continuity in European perceptions of non-European populations. Whereas traditional forms of imperialism relied on military domination and physical violence, current forms of domination are perhaps best described as an imperialism of law seconded by economic liberalization which intends to make use of and structure the periphery while, at the same time, abandoning an integrative rational and closing its doors to it. The evolving international human rights regime, humanitarian interventionism, and doctrines such as the responsibility to protect (RtoP)—an international principle adopted at the United Nations 2005 World Summit in New York City18 —in their own way augmented “the vocabulary of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ that animated the older Western-dominated international order.”19 It is in this sense that Winkler seemingly attempts to write out certain peoples from participation in the political project of European integration in much the same vein in that, half a century earlier, Arendt

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refused to include the Hottentots and Boers in the ranks of civilized peoples. Whereas for Arendt the African “savage” had no history and no identity beyond bare existence, while the Boers had forsaken theirs, for Winkler the Anatolians are seemingly determined by the wrong kind of history—one that collectively predisposes them against membership in the comity of European liberal democracies. Both strategies provide the ground for political exclusion, whether of pre-political (Arendt’s Hottentots) and post-political (Arendt’s Boers) peoples or of those peoples (Winkler’s Anatolians) whose identity, defined by the unfortunate course of their own history, must remain incommensurable with the European world of politics and culture. Ironically, and contrary to Winkler’s contention, it was the Central and Eastern European member states that most forcefully contested the values and political principles of transnational European democracy and threatened to break up the EU’s unity over the contentious issue of cultural diversity during the so-called European refugee crisis. This chapter analyzes the shift away from multiculturalism and the subsequent affirmation of (national) culture in the face of large-scale immigration and growing diversity that has occurred since the 1990s. I argued in the preceding chapter that this process gave rise to a “second postcolonial crisis.” The first section expands on this argument. Discourses on the alleged failure of multiculturalism provide what I call an integration paradox in the sense that multiculturalism’s aims in terms of the recognition and fair balancing of difference under conditions of pervasive pluralism are congruent—rather than antagonistic—with those of European integration and liberal democracy. The backlash against multiculturalism during the mid- and late 2000s has happened not despite but because immigrants have increasingly gained access to political institutions and the arenas of political representation and, as a result, their claims to equality (and difference as part of that equality) have gained greater voice. I subsequently explore what I term the culturalization of politics, that is, the redefinition of the political basis of European liberalism. My aim is to highlight a normative shift away from the ideal of liberal universalism toward a type of liberalism that, while keeping up universal pretensions, effectively rearticulates superiority in terms of value difference targeting non-European immigrants. In its rejection of multiculturalism, this type of liberalism equates liberal democratic values with Europeanness and redefines Enlightenment ideals as boundaries against minorities and immigrants alike. The section also takes a closer look at the nexus

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of difference-blind liberalism, identity politics, and anti-multiculturalist theorizing that centered on the systematic status of culturally based group rights. I argue that the backlash against multiculturalism can be understood as resistance to the representation of diversity at the heart of the liberal idiom, one that potentially rationalizes anti-immigrant sentiments as a defense of liberal democratic values. This section therefore closely intersects with the discussion of European citizenship in Chapter 3 in the sense that this new type of “muscular liberalism” introduces a second logic beneath that of citizenship. As such, it aims to qualify and govern the latter and therefore also qualifies liberal core values or, at least, makes them contingent on a number of culturally impregnated eligibility criteria. In the third section, I defend an alternative, “symbiotic” conception of liberalism best described as a multiculturalism of fear, a term I borrow from Jacob Levy. It entails important consequences for liberal theorizing under conditions of pervasive pluralism. Its theoretical core presupposes a symbiotic relationship between a liberalism of rights and a liberalism of fear. First, I provide a brief contour of the general climate of crisis and fear experienced by European publics during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The figure of the refugee and asylum seeker, I argue, is not only of key importance in the imagination of a bleak and crisisridden future but also the prime mover of political dissent and populist party campaigning.20 The challenge at the heart of discussion in this section thus concerns—on the level of political theory—a mechanism for turning every day of pervasive pluralism and large-scale immigration into experiences of learning to the enrichment and strengthening of liberal democracy rather than its erosion by construing antagonisms on the basis of culture. This discussion again closely links with Chapter 3 because it highlights the importance of symbolic migrant inclusion beyond the formal status of citizenship. The concluding section shows how key theses of this chapter intersect and link with arguments made in previous chapters.

The Retreat from Multiculturalism in a Post-migrant Europe At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, multiculturalism—in the sense of state policies of cultural recognition—was not only pronounced dead by leading mainstream politicians across Europe— something the Le Pen’s and Wilders’ on the populist right had, by that

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time, campaigned on for more than two decades—but the so-called differentialist turn had seemingly exhausted itself in social thought as much as in public discourse and public policy.21 The notion that due to growing numbers of immigrants Europe’s liberal democracies were increasingly threatened by pervasive cultural pluralism and related crises of integration and social cohesion that were inevitably to follow in its wake has turned into a quasi-objectified, rhetorical topos. Even before it became mainstream, and indeed a kind of symbolic signifier of political realism, to claim that multiculturalism “divide y debilita a las sociedades” (José María Aznar) is “absolut gescheitert” (Angela Merkel) and “a failed politics of the past” (David Cameron) that is “clairement oui, c’est un échec” (Nicolas Sarkozy)22 a “relatively modest and uneven shift” away from multiculturalism toward a renewed assimilationism had become manifest.23 Throughout the 2000s, various scholars of European policies of migration have noted quite significant attitudinal changes of both, political elites and the general population toward immigration and ethnic minorities.24 Even those countries with traditionally liberal immigration regimes gradually shifted toward assimilatory notions of integration. Rather, high levels of goodwill toward refugees and acceptance of religious and ethnic minorities—what the extreme right termed multicultural permissiveness—were superseded by the securitization of immigration and growing levels of distrust and increasing scrutiny directed toward immigrants and their second- and third-generation offspring. It is important to note that, as Christian Joppke pointed out, the “seismic shift” from multiculturalism to civic integration in terms of not only imposing a liberal minimum but also of an “affirmation of one’s own [majority] culture” occurred in case of Britain and the Netherlands (but also other European societies) before the appearance on the national level of a “politically significant” extreme right. Rather than solely resulting from a politically successful right, it was “masterminded by impeccable liberals” and thus also a sign of “a liberal distemper.”25 The anti-European, extreme right, of course, saw this new “muscular liberalism” (David Cameron) as clear affirmation and endorsement by the political mainstream of the critique of Europe’s increasing diversity that had been the centerpiece of their electoral campaigns since the early 1990s. Multiculturalism proved an especially suitable target of critique because of its relative conceptual openness and discursive indeterminacy that allowed for its versatile utilization within political debate. This was the

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case because multiculturalism not only designated a number of different phenomena but also because—even within political theory—there is no agreed core of what multiculturalism comprises beyond the regulation of cultural diversity.26 Precisely, the question of how Europeans saw themselves in relation to other ethnic or racial groups gained renewed urgency with the EU’s successive enlargements, especially so the accession negotiations with Turkey.27 Large-scale immigration (whether of economic migrants from Eastern Europe or refugees from protracted conflicts in the Middle East and North African [MENA] region) further aggravated the question. This was by no means new but the key difference of the postwar and postcolonial era lies in the reversal of migratory patterns. Whereas for centuries Europeans had been moving into the world and tried to shape it according to their ideas, the world, in all its diversity, was now moving into Europe. This reversal not only “shifted the process of European self-definition in a dramatic way” but made multiculturalism “a central fault line” in European societies, history, and politics rather than something external, peripheral, or irrelevant to “the central narratives of European history.”28 As I argued in the preceding chapter, the fervency of the European identity debate is perhaps best conceptualized as the resurgence of a postcolonial crisis akin to that of the 1950s and 1960s which, up until the mid-2000s, had remained largely marginalized in between the master narratives of postwar European reconstruction, Cold War ideological battles, and European integration. The multiplicity of multiculturalism thus has its roots in complex and interwoven frames of reference including, among others, the historical legacies of European imperialism, two world wars, decolonialization, and genocide at home and abroad. It is also intrinsically linked with the narrative of universal human rights, the reworking of the postwar European social contract, and the slow death of the European working class. In a narrower, state-centered sense, multiculturalism can be further understood as specific form of nation building in immigrant countries.29 Where policies of cultural recognition are geared toward national consolidation, multiculturalism is closely linked to dynamics of globalization in that, as a tool of political differentiation, it aims to foster social and systemic integration by construing and legitimizing new distinctions between inside and outside and thereby counteracting social and political fragmentation on the basis of older (ethnic, cultural, or religious) demarcations. In this sense, the aim of multicultural policies is congruent with those

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of European integration. The political discourse on the failure of multiculturalism thus directly impacts on the prospects for the emergence of a post-national, cosmopolitan form of European democracy. More importantly, it creates the impression of hardened internal conflict, that is, of legitimate “willful exclusion” on part of the majority culture and illegitimate resistance toward integration on part of so-called immigrant communities. This discourse, however, at least recognizes the empirical reality of European ethnic and cultural diversity even though it is portrayed as inherently problematic. The indeterminacy of multiculturalism, historian Rita Chin argued, not only has made it easy for critics to “vilify the concept without being especially clear about what in particular they are condemning” but also, due to its contested nature, “facilitated contentious debate about how to manage social diversity in the context of law and politics, education, and popular culture.”30 While pluralistic understandings of persisting diversity had become conventional wisdom in much of Northern and Western Europe, what collapsed in the riots of Oldham, Leeds, Burnley, and Bradford in summer 200131 was a particular model of top-down multiculturalism that had sought, since the 1980s, to institutionalize cultural diversity by officially recognizing it and thereby using multicultural policies as a tool for managing diverse communities and prevent ethnic tension as well as preempt urban unrest. Local authorities in Britain, in the wake of largescale urban disturbances during the early 1980s, had seen “the allocation of resources to different ethnic groups on the basis of ‘cultural’ needs […] as a way of absorbing political protest.” However, as Arun Kundnani argued, in 2001 this focus on the ‘cultural’ came itself to be perceived as the problem in that the riots were “thought to have been caused by the emergence of separatist identities which had been encouraged […] by the multiculturalist policies introduced from the 1980s.” The policy agenda that emerged from mid-2001 onward under British home secretary David Blunkett shifted away from the recognition of cultural and ethnic identities toward “a notion of community cohesion,” defined as the “active promotion of a set of shared national values.”32 There are good reasons to view the overlapping waves of postwar immigration into Europe discussed in Chapter 4 not as a challenge to the standard model of the liberal democratic nation-state (in which the religious, linguistic, and cultural boundaries of nations coincide with political ones), but rather as the historical realignment of European postwar

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nation-states to the pervasive historic legacy of multiethnic and multinational states (comprising various groups differentiated by their particular histories, origins, languages, religious affinities, founding myths, and aspirations). The near realization of ideal-type nation-states of “every nation a state,” and “only one state for the entire nation”—a formula often attributed to either Giuseppe Mazzini or Johann Caspar Bluntschli— however, must be seen as a regulative aberration, produced by an “age of extremes”33 rather than as a quasi-natural state of social and political organization.34 As the “disabling consequences of identity politics” became apparent in both theory and practice, the “moral and political ambiguity” and the “exclusionary potential of culturalist differentialism” were brought into sharp focus.35 This did not only concern issues of immigration but also opposition to the “homogenizing, centralizing claims of the modern nation state” in a much more general sense. This included claims on behalf of regional languages, indigenous minorities, difference feminism, the multiculturalist revision of school and university curricula, alternative sexualities, and so on.36 Policies of cultural recognition, in this regard, suffered the same fate as policies of gender mainstreaming in being dismissed by its critics as mere political correctness. Rodgers Brubaker, however, claims that the differentialist turn was “much stronger in rhetoric than in reality,” remained “largely symbolic,” and was embedded “only relatively weakly in policies and institutionalized practices” while Jonathan Laurence questioned the premises of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric. He argued that “if there was ever a mythical postwar era of ‘multiculturalism’,” it has been replaced by “a new and more demanding phase.”37 It is indeed striking that amidst the resurgence of neo-republican, neo-universalist, and neo-assimilationist discourses during the 1990s, it was precisely assimilationist discourses on immigration that took center stage. Assimilation, however, no longer focused on the need to keep national populations sufficiently homogeneous in terms of language, religious affinity, or ethnicity but, by the beginning of the new millennium, had metamorphosed into larger civilizational arguments about Enlightenment values. The European legacy of the Enlightenment that the most fervent of its advocates defended against the threat of multiculturalist policies more often than not took the form of a narrow secular salvation myth which confuses the liberal commitment to a secular public sphere with the blanket vilification of religion; secular humanism with the claim that in order to become European especially Muslim immigrants needed

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to abandon their faith. This antagonistic positioning of immigrant’s culture and religion against European values led some commentators to characterize such positions as “Enlightenment fundamentalism.”38 In Britain, Anthony Heath and Neli Demireva argued, there is little evidence that cultural recognition through multiculturalist policies intensified the alleged corrosive effects of large-scale immigration on societal trust and solidarity by sanctioning the development of parallel societies of ethno-religious groups.39 Instead of a process of radicalization triggered by the doctrine of state multiculturalism that “tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values,”40 as suggested by Prime Minister David Cameron in 2011, high levels of in-group orientation were found to be compatible with the adoption of a British identity and a positive orientation toward British mainstream society. Equally, the groups whose claims for recognition were successful displayed no signs of “slower intergenerational progress towards integration,” that is, no signs that bonding social capital—reinforcing exclusive identities and homogeneous groups—at the expense of bridging social capital—generating reciprocity across different groups and broader societal identities—were promoted by multicultural policies.41 Moreover, discrimination of immigrant minorities, Heath and Demireva concluded, proved “as plausible an explanation” for integration failure.42 Other studies corroborate this view that “the most important rationale for the political backlash against multicultural policies—that they impede or hurt socio-political integration”—empirically appears without foundation.43 In European countries with stronger policies of multicultural recognition, there is no evidence, Matthew Wright and Irene Bloemraad argued, that immigrants are less engaged in the political community and its institutions than in countries with a low level of such policies while the comparison with Canada suggests that “multiculturalism promotes hyphenated or nested identities rather than exclusive ethnic identities,” the latter of which—as critics of multiculturalism charge—lead to civic fragmentation and the development of parallel societies, especially among first-generation immigrants. On the contrary, Wright and Bloemraad find that what policies of cultural pluralism offer to minorities is a greater sense of legitimacy and recognition. They thereby facilitate “cognitive and emotional allegiance” to the adoptive country which ultimately results in political cohesion. They further suggest that mandatory civic integration policies (language courses, civics classes) that have become

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increasingly employed throughout Europe might not be seen by immigrants as quasi-discriminatory or assimilatory in nature when policies of cultural recognition are in place. More generally then, the repeal of multicultural policies—where they existed—is seen as undermining the future of liberal democracy by potentially contributing further to the marginalization and alienation of immigrant populations and thus undercut civic inclusion and social cohesion.44 The portrayal of Europe as a cosmopolitan, post-national, and postethnic political space has been rightly criticized for invisibilizing ethnic tensions and persisting immigrant marginalization at the nexus of social and socio-economic integration. At the same time, the successful careers of a few second and third-generation immigrants such as Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim major and son of an immigrant Pakistani bus driver, were taken as proof that firstly, European liberal democracies have indeed entered into a period of post-racial politics; secondly, that immigrants have gained access to mainstream political institutions and thereby political representation; and finally, that the model of differenceblind liberalism indeed functioned to generate equal opportunities for all citizens no matter what their ethnic, religious, or cultural background.45 Alana Lentin argued, however, that it is precisely this notion of postracial politics which “is in fact the dominant mode in which racism finds discursive expression today.”46 The debate on multiculturalism’s failure thus intersects with the post-racial logic in that it should be understood “not as a critique of highly criticizable multiculturalist policies, but of lived multiculture per se; that is of the racial/ethnic/cultural diversity […] of post-immigration societies.”47 Arun Kundnani further showed, how the idea of a Third Way nationalism based on liberal values promoted by David Goodhart “transcends the thin and abstract language of universal rights on the one hand and the defensive, nativist language of group identity on the other.”48 The emergence of a new discourse on Britishness, for example, marshaled arguments which “attested to the ways in which popular liberal discourses of women’s rights, gay rights, antitotalitarianism and secularism were becoming closely tied to rejection of multiculturalism and anxieties about the Muslim presence in Europe” in an effort to “recharge the batteries of national belonging.”49 And whereas the Left in the 1950s saw ethnic diversity as potentially undermining class solidarity, the question of social cohesion is now being framed in terms of a “recasting of a liberal-Left, anti-totalitarian political tradition, with Islamism being regarded as the new ‘Muslim face’ of fascism.”50

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In France, the Nouvelle Droite, despite its still limited political influence at the time, sought to establish its own “Third Way” transcending the traditional left–right dichotomy by endorsing a concept of differentialist ethno-pluralism and a “new type of leftist regionalism” as opposed to “old-style right-wing nationalism and racism.”51 Alberto Spektorowski further argued that the idea of “differentialist ethno-pluralism, which […] sets the basis for a right-wing theory of multiculturalism pitted against liberal multiculturalism, and the idea of ethno-regionalism, which […] provides a social and political content to the concept of right-wing multiculturalism” provided the building blocks for a “a non-liberal, culturally assertive Europe.”52 The idea of a Third Way nationalism, in this sense, attests to the New Right’s impact on European intellectual discourse and, more importantly, to its success in penetrating and capturing the discourse of the post-modern Left, pushing it toward a stronger emphasis on national culture.53 The political discourse on the failure of multiculturalism thus also marks both the failure and lack of vision of the European project itself, that is, the inability to overcome the regressive idea of the monocultural, homogenous nation-state—the congruence of state and nation with just one culture, language, religion, and identity—and, secondly, to establish a genuine and sustainable version of post-national democracy beyond a narrowly technocratic sense of supraand intergovernmental integration. Kenan Malik much reported on verdict of 2015 that Europe was in need to rediscover a progressive sense of universalism, something, he contended, “that the continent’s liberals have largely abandoned” is much to the point.54 Malik argued that multicultural policies had rested on a paradox, recognizing growing diversity but, at the same time, constraining its scope by seeking to “institutionalize diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes”—into singular, homogeneous communities—and define their needs and rights “accordingly.” Multicultural policies thereby created the very divisions and resentful citizenries they were meant to prevent.55 Rather than seeing secondgeneration immigrants as citizens, “politicians tend to assume minorities’ true loyalty is to their faith or ethnic community.”56 While most European politicians and public intellectuals resolutely defended individualist versions of liberalism and oppose culturally based group rights, European immigrants and their European-born descendants were increasingly treated not as individuals but as objectively definable, clearly demarcated, and potentially antagonist communities. But already before Malik’s more

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recent contention that multiculturalism has become a proxy-issue for immigration, identity politics, or working-class decline, Charles Taylor noticed in an op-ed for the Guardian newspaper that it had “become a suspect term almost everywhere in the world nowadays, and particularly in Europe. […] Almost every reason for toleration’s apparent fall into disrepute,” Taylor further argued, “concerns Islam.”57 The limits of multiculturalist policies in Europe have indeed been most often debated in regard to the civic integration of Muslim communities. Ibrahim Kalin thus contended that the more recent attacks on multiculturalism should be recognized for what they were: “indirect attacks on Islam and Muslims.”58 More systematically, Jørgen Nielsen identified three problem areas that emerged within the larger phenomenon of postwar labor migration into Europe: the liberal myth of a multicultural Europe, the divergent social reality of a de facto multicultural Europe, and the unreality of cultural encounter.59 Proponents as well as critics of multiculturalism were not only reacting to developments in all of the above areas but multiculturalism itself mirrored them conceptually. Multiculturalism, I argue, is therefore best understood as a cipher for at least three phenomena: (1) It describes Europe’s multicultural makeup in terms of its empirical ethnic and cultural diversity (descriptive content); (2) it imputes a causal link between a perceived lack of social cohesion and rising numbers of immigrants (performative content); and finally, (3) it denotes a set of normative or principled approaches toward pervasive cultural diversity in the sense of policy framings for the recognition and fair balancing of differing interest arising from cultural difference (prescriptive content).60 European multiculturalism is therefore mainly a performative phenomenon rather than—perhaps with the notable exception of Great Britain—any consolidated policy agenda.61 But its success in Europe since the 1970s has been prescriptive in nature; that is, it successfully redefined the discursive framing of public debate and introduced a specific, differentialist vocabulary. This vocabulary of multicultural difference and its inherent claims to recognition and equal (cultural) rights not only gave greater visibility to immigrants but also was indispensable in providing greater political representation for their interests within Western European societies. As I argue in the preceding chapter, it also greatly facilitated the coming to terms with and the recognition of the largely invisibilized impact of postcolonial migration on European societies. Both the debate on European identity and the resurgence of national identities vis-à-vis an integrated Europe, however,

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mark the conceptual and symbolic limits to this process of historical acknowledgment and re-evaluation. Kundnani’s and Malik’s diagnoses are of particular interest because political anti-multiculturalist rhetoric is paralleled by a language “of liberal universalism that dominates public debate [and] ignores the real affinities of place and people,”62 on the one hand, and by strong attempts by liberal political theorists to either invisibilize culture theoretically or delegitimize the political claims of culture on the other. Goodhart argued that “these affinities are not obstacles to be overcome on the road to the good society; they are one of its foundation stones [and that] it is the task of a realistic liberalism to strive for a definition of community that is wide enough to include people from many different backgrounds, without being so wide as to become meaningless.”63 In the present context, I cannot comprehensively discuss this normative dynamic within liberal political theory itself but simply aim to analyze the opposition of liberal universalism to policies of cultural recognition and illustrate some of its rather unfortunate exclusionary consequences.

Multiculturalism’s Threat to Liberal Universalism Arun Kundnani argued that rather than the considerably more conservative notion of Judeo-Christian civilization, “it is a certain core of liberal values at the heart of European identity […] that functions as a Burkean ‘inheritance’: the founding cultural and moral habits to which all political differences must be constrained for the sake of preserving European identity.”64 However, this inheritance is both particular—defining the local identity of European nations—and universal—in setting the standard by which all other cultures can be measured and critiqued—and thus “constitutes a rearticulation of notions of racial and civilizational superiority in an ostensibly liberal idiom.”65 Kundnani’s contention points to the changed nature of contemporary racism. As Pierre-André Taguieff showed, the biological basis of earlier racist discourse has been replaced by culturalization or differentialist racism, that is, by no less a reductive claim that views people as defined by their cultural environment effecting a naturalization of culture by treating it as an inescapable biological reality.66 This culturalization of the notion of race has been well documented over the last few decades.67 A recent illustration of the lure of culturalization is put forward by distinguished economist Paul Collier in his much debated book Exodus.68

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Collier argued—well intentioned as it may have been—that the extension of trust and cooperation beyond the family was a distinctive characteristic of modern and prosperous society. African societies were poor, among other reasons, because of the perpetuation of the lack of trust and an attitude of cooperation. Citing historical research which recorded “over eighty violent intergroup conflicts that occurred prior to 1600,” Collier then goes on to state that in the case of Africa “the violence of over four hundred years ago proved to be disturbingly persistent today.” He thus concludes that “[o]pportunism is the result of decades, probably of centuries, in which trust would have been quixotic, and it is now ingrained in ordinary behavior.” What this means for immigration Collier reasons is that “uncomfortable as it may be, there are large cultural differences that map into important aspects of social behavior, and migrants bring their culture with them.” Collier continues to suggest that “differences in the rule of law can be traced yet further back to the difference between moralities based on loyalty to the honor of the clan, and moralities based on the Enlightenment concept of good citizenship.”69 It is evident that the “backwardness” and economic plight of African societies in this reasoning—whether thinly cloaked in scientific rigor or simply intransparent to its author—are no longer rooted in the “Africans”’ race but transposed into their culture and unenlightened morality and, therefore, the “racial threat” of classical colonialism has been transformed into the “cultural threat” posed by immigration. Both constitute a naturalization of culture in which not only Africans but especially Europe’s diverse Muslim minorities emerge as a monolithic and objectified Other. Consequently, being Muslim is irremovably inscribed into immigrants’ bodies and therefore remains inaccessible to conventional processes of conflict resolution within liberal democracies. Whereas older ideas defined an essentialist ethno-cultural basis for political life as the distinction from other nations, liberal discourses emphasize abstract components of the Enlightenment’s legacy in Europe (such as individualism, secularism, freedom of speech) and define superiority in terms of value difference. Liberal critics of immigration can therefore rationalize anti-immigrant sentiments as a critique of the failure of immigrant communities to adjust to liberal democratic values while, at the same time, the “dividing line between an ‘alien’ non-western identities and liberal Europe serves as the basis for dividing populations into fixed, immutable ‘natural’ identities.”70 In their rejection of multiculturalism, “liberal integrationists” also conflate, Kundnani shows, liberalism with

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Europeanness and turn both into “markers of civilization” vis-à-vis the failure of immigrant cultures to modernize and produce rational political subjects.71 And Ibrahim Kalin rightly points out that the integration of Islam and the social inclusion of Muslims in Western societies require “a radical revisiting of some fundamental assumptions of Western liberalism and secular multiculturalism.”72 This is the case, because “when Enlightenment values are held up as the non-negotiable core of Europe’s political identity, what liberals have in mind is that Muslims should repeat Europe’s historical rejection of organized Christianity.”73 Within political philosophy, multiculturalism can be conceptualized as a moral and political discourse at the nexus of identity politics, the politics of difference, and the politics of recognition. While mostly focused on ethnic or religious groups—indigenous or immigrant—other disadvantaged groups defined by gender, regional languages, or sexual orientation have also figured in debate.74 Multiculturalism, as a multifaceted umbrella term, cannot be linked with any particular political or philosophical agenda beyond resisting society’s homogenizing tendencies and assimilatory thrust and the institutional privileging of certain (European) cultures and identities under the smoke screen of universal (Enlightenment) reason and the principle of state neutrality.75 Much of the philosophical debate on multiculturalism centered on whether exceptions from general laws are justifiable on the basis of collective or group rights, with groups differentiated by culture. Ilan Peleg rightly observed that the most fundamental issue (not only in a normative sense) in regard to the solution of ethnic and cultural conflicts in a multiethnic polity “is whether it adopts an individual-based approach or a group-based approach as a fundamental strategy for dealing with majority-minority conflicts.”76 Next to simply acknowledging the de facto multicultural makeup of most liberal democracies, multiculturalists also advance normative claims in favor of diversity as something not merely to be tolerated but something that enriches the fabric of society and should therefore find public recognition within society’s representative institutions as well as public policies. This may even include the selfdetermination of cultural groups as quasi-sovereign polities within the nation-state. My concern in what follows lies mainly with the tension between liberal individualism and culturally based group rights. Among many vocal critics of multiculturalism, Brian Barry, for example, conceptualized the question posed by it as one of whether liberal principles “offer a fair way of adjudicating between conflicting interests”

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and whether “liberal institutions provide a fair distribution of rights, resources and opportunities,” which Barry thought they did.77 Multiculturalist claims, according to him, were not only an alien presence within the framework of liberal rights but also “a formula for manufacturing conflict” because they allegedly rewarded “the groups that can most effectively mobilize to make claims on the polity, or at any rate it rewards ethnocultural political entrepreneurs who can exploit its [the politics of difference] potential for their own ends by mobilizing a constituency around a set of sectional demands.”78 And Todd Gitlin saw multiculturalists as struggling to “change the color of inequality […] at the expense of political citizenship” while faulting them for remaining silent on “the biggest sources of social misery: the devastation of cities, the draining of resources away from the public and into the private hands of the few.” In such circumstances, Gitlin warned: If multiculturalism is not tempered by a stake in the commons, then centrifugal energy overwhelms any commitment to a larger good. This is where multiculturalism as a faith has proved a trap even – or especially – for people in the name of whom the partisans of identity politics purport to speak. Affirming the virtues of the margins, identity politics has left the centers of power uncontested.79

Instead, what was needed, Barry argued, was an institutional mechanism to ensure that “people who are different are treated equally.” In short, instead of group-differentiated rights on the basis of culture, what was in fact called for was a way for combining liberal institutions with some form of a common nationality without compromising ethical individualism by subscribing to however minimalist communitarian forms of particularism.80 Barry conceded that a purely formal understanding of inclusion via citizenship in order to “satisfy ‘the basic liberal principle of equal concern and respect for everybody who depends on a government for a guarantee of her or his rights’” is inadequate without the existence of a reciprocal sense of empathy, solidarity, and trust among citizens fostered by common institutions. This entails that citizens must be “capable of recognizing a common good.” This cluster of attitudes among citizens is described by Barry as “civic nationalism” which differs from both the formal membership in an organized political community “embodied in a passport” and “the ethnic interpretation of nationality.”81 Civic nationalism in Barry’s conception is to do the same work that

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multiculturalists hope to accomplish by policies of cultural recognition, “that people may be able to assimilate (or be assimilated) to the common nationality without giving up distinctive cultural attributes and – equally important – without losing a distinctive identity.”82 British nationality, for example, once denoted a privileged position in relation to the British Empire but has been eroded by both the concept of European identity and the dynamic of Scottish and Welsh devolution and therefore, according to Barry, has become “a very thin glue to rely on if one is concerned about social cohesion.” However, what can be observed in Britain, Barry reasoned, is that while “ethnic identification persists,” it has become “increasingly drained of cultural content” and therefore “culture is not at the heart of the matter” that concerns multiculturalists.83 More recently, Alessandro Ferrara has argued that the answer to the fundamental democratic challenges presented by the phenomenon of “hyperpluralism” (of which multiculturalism is one aspect) lies in the renewal and reinterpretation of political liberalism, one which abstains from the “exclusionary immunization of the constitutional essentials.”84 Multiculturalism, if properly understood, “not only is perfectly compatible with the fundamentals of a liberal-democratic polity, but in a sense also represents a completion of political liberalism.” As a normative concept, it is centered on an intersubjective view of the self, on the value of diversity, and on the principle of equality and individual freedom and should be understood as “a specification of the problem of political justification in a multiethnic context.”85 Ferrara emphatically, and rightly so, states that: We simply cannot accept, consistent with our intuitions concerning the nature of a democratic polity based on a constitutional pact subscribed to be free and equal citizens, a situation in which one cultural group among the many coexisting in the polity becomes hegemonic, monopolizes the public space with its symbols, mores and normative intuitions, inscribes segments of its conceptions of the good into law, and through the law imposes these intuitions through the force of legal sanctions and furthermore uses the public sphere for targeting the other cultures with symbols and attestations of denigration.86

Ferrara cites James Tully’s critique of liberal constitutionalism’s ethnocentric residues which he sees as “concise summary of all the unexamined presuppositions underlying the liberal-democratic ideal [and] the

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moment of closure […] hidden underneath the rhetoric of openness typical of liberal-democratic discourse.”87 According to Tully, multiculturalism cannot be conceptualized as an extension of “three centuries of multinationalism with no fundamental change in constitutional thinking required,” thus continuing “one of the oldest conventions of modern constitutionalism: every culture worthy of recognition is a nation, and every nation should be recognized as an independent nation state.”88 Many of the core concepts of liberal constitutionalism such as the people, popular sovereignty, citizenship, unity, equality, recognition, and democracy, Tully further argues, “presuppose the uniformity of a nation state with a centralized and unitary system of legal and political institutions,” and therefore, multiculturalist demands for cultural recognition appear as “threat to democracy, equality and liberty, rather than as forms of recognition that can be […] justified in accordance with the principles of constitutionalism.”89 Among the presuppositions written into the deep structure of liberal constitutionalism that remains largely unexamined and theoretically impedes the aligning of multiculturalism and liberal democracy is, for example, the assumption that a culturally homogenous ethnos precedes the self-constituting demos which implies that “culture is either irrelevant […] or capable of being transcended […] or uniform.”90 Another concerns the supposed self-reflexivity of modern liberal constitutionalism in the sense that “even though it may incorporate elements of tradition and customary law, it does so after due critical reflection on the merit of these elements, which are then incorporated in positive law not because they are traditional, but because they pass the test of critical scrutiny.”91 A third assumption particularly relevant to the present context is the equation of modern constitutionalism with “a given set of specific institutions (e.g., representative government, the separation of powers, a bill of rights, a public sphere of a certain type, etc.)” with all other forms seen as “‘lower, stateless, irregular and ancient’.”92 Connected with it is an ahistorical myth of a founding moment of modern constitutionalism preceding democratic politics rather than developing coevally with it, an image that according to Tully is “enhanced by the myths of the single lawgiver in the republican tradition, the original consensus of the community or nation in the nationalist tradition and the original or hypothetical contract, to which all citizens today would consent if they were rational, in the liberal tradition.”93

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These criticisms, however, do not, Ferrara argued, apply to the Rawlsian type of political liberalism.94 This is provided that the Rawlsian framework can be extended to include legal-pluralist institutions and therefore “accommodate a plurality of legal practices […] in carefully delimited areas of law” in a way that does not infringe on the constitutional essentials and allows for the combination of “aspects of overlapping consensus and aspect[s] of modus vivendi” as a multivariate mode of political integration.95 Far from condoning unreflective and anti-liberal forms of cultural parochialism, the multiculturalist recognition of “the crucial nexus of culture, identity and individual autonomy,” in order to truly protect individual freedom, requires that, Ferrara states, each and every individual be granted the possibility of having his or her own culture among the diverse backgrounds available for making sense of action. Should a possible updating of the Rawlsian list of ‘primary goods’ be envisaged, such enlargement ought to certainly include the good of ‘having the concrete choice of living one’s life in the culture of one’s upbringing’ as the primary good in its own right and not simply as included in the larger set of the ‘social bases of self-respect’.96

A recognition that is well documented within the history and internal transformation of liberalism itself. Such an account, however, “ultimately collapses into a specific type of liberalism,” and the defense of democratic institutions thus becomes synonymous with the defense of political liberalism.97 As it turns out, Barry and other liberals and intellectuals on the left were attacking precisely the current within political philosophy that sought to remedy both the shortcomings of a difference-blind liberalism of rights and the increasing politicization of cultural identities against indigenous cultural minorities and immigrant communities.98 In Europe, as it became more and more recognizable from the early 1990s onward, postwar liberalism had in fact never been differenceblind but was affirming what Joppke fittingly called “local versions of the liberal state.”99 True, these versions were marked in some cases by a hopeful vision of a post-national and indeed multicultural shape of the union of the European nations.100 But the liberty and equality granted to immigrant communities remained relative to and conditioned by the majority societies’ collective self-understandings and national cultures. These collective representations as well as institutional self-perceptions of European nation-states were, in this regard, clearly lagging behind the

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deep shifts and major transformations that had occurred in the nature of their constituencies during the postwar decades. It was in this sense that the Canadian example of conflicting identities and conceptions of nationhood illustrated by the Québécois drive for autonomy—which figured prominently in academic discussions of the politics of cultural recognition—was misleading for the European case. The European debate on multiculturalism was not initiated by some well meaning and, as Barry had it, ultimately misguided philosophers whose supposedly “antiliberal rhetoric [was] not uncongenial to the reactionary right”101 but occurred at the time when immigrants were no longer subjects to a separate body of legislation but gained inclusion through citizenship rights and with it increased discursive and political leverage. The legal and institutional frameworks for the promotion of equal opportunities of immigrant minorities—often simply termed multiculturalism—that existed in the Netherlands and Britain generated its discursive legitimacy from the symbolic value of formal inclusion through citizenship,102 whereas in Germany or in Switzerland immigrants continued to lack the political legitimacy and public resonance necessary to put issues of cultural and social rights on the political agenda.103 Rather than as resistance to policies of cultural recognition and minority anti-discrimination measures, the backlash against multiculturalism should be understood as resistance to representing diversity at the heart of the nation-state’s key social and political institutions and therefore as an attempt to keep ethnic and cultural diversity confined at society’s political, social, and economic margins. This also concerns the fact (discussed in Chapter 2) that notions of distinct national identity have increasingly turned into regressive historicized fictions. Anti-multiculturalism on the ground, however, also doubled with the anti-elitist anti-politics of populist movements and an increasing antipolitical climate in which the institutions of parliamentary democracy are seen as firmly in the grip of hegemonic political elites deeply out of touch with the needs and values of the majority of citizens.104 Rather than a case of democratic pathology, populist movements pose legitimate questions about the state of liberal democracy—in particular in regard to democratic dilemmas that elude clear solutions, e.g., the boundary problem of how to democratically define the people—even though the solutions offered by populist leaders are often controversial and at times disconcerting.105 As the mainstream left and right have become equally tied up in controversies over questions of national and European identity over the

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past decades, the populist far right has been able to capitalize precisely on such democratic dilemmas rather than its overt racist rhetoric. Racism, by itself, would have attracted a mere fraction of the votes the far right gained in local, national, and European elections. The exploitation of the ambivalences and instabilities of liberal democracy by propagating core principles of nationalism—a people bound by a common history, culture, religion, and destiny characterized by mutual trust and solidarity—and privileging the national interest above all other concerns including the universal values of democratic civil society points to an alternative ethical core that presents a substantial and systematic challenge to mainstream political parties and the legitimacy of democratic institutions.106 It is in this regard that theoretically bypassing the inescapability of ethical conflict within society by conceptualizing liberal democracy as the product of public reason misconceives the politics of popular sovereignty, overestimates the reach of reason, and fails to acknowledge that the categories of liberal thought are “inadequate to the task of explaining the experience of the political as an autonomous form of meaning.”107 Liberalism, in seeking to “regulate behavior among individuals who do not agree on the sources of meaning in their lives,”108 therefore, is hard pressed to provide an alternative vision to the powerful neo-nationalist imaginary of populist discourses. Within political philosophy, opposition to theories of multiculturalism was less motivated by resistance to the political recognition of indigenous minorities or rising levels of cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity due to immigration but rather by refusing to allow for special, culturally based group rights beyond formal integration via individual citizenship rights.109 Brian Barry’s condescension toward theories of multiculturalism, at least theoretically, resulted from the fact that culture as much as the accommodation of group differences had no place in the type of liberal theory he was defending.110 In the most charitable way of interpretation, his likening of claims for cultural recognition to the interests of pedophiles and rapists in having their desires met, or those cultivating expensive tastes, stems from a profound confusion as to the proper status of such claims. For him, the claims of culture as much as religious beliefs are mere inclinations and interests and as “people are perfectly free to adapt their beliefs […] or to leave them unchanged” there is no principled reason to change any uniformly applied system of laws because “some people will find compliance with certain laws more burdensome than will others.”111 Equally, there was no reasonable complaint by people

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about “burdens placed on them by their own beliefs, whether these arise directly from those beliefs or out of the interaction of those beliefs with the law.”112 Ultimately, this amounts to arguing that immigrants’ cultural or religious claims are in fact costs originating from their culture or religion. They are being self-imposed by the act of migration and, therefore, provide no reasonable grounds for legitimate complaints against their host societies (provided the laws infringing upon the cultural or religious practices of immigrants can be shown to be a product of public reason).113 As a principled stance, this is not only disingenuous but will also produce illiberal and potentially coercive results and as such represents a failure to recognize the crucial ways in which culture shapes individual identities. Construing an either/or dualism between loyalty to the state or exit also seriously understates the importance of voice and the political nature of civil society.114 I would thus concur with Alison Dundes Renteln that it is incomprehensible that individuals [by forcing them to change what they eat, wear, how they raise their children, how they heal their relatives, how they react to particular gestures and insults, and so on] should have to reinvent themselves to such an extent in countries that claim to protect religious liberty, freedom of association, and other fundamental rights.115

Barry’s criticism of multiculturalism took neither the demands for cultural recognition nor the need for multicultural policies seriously because in his conception of liberal egalitarianism there was nothing wrong with the refusal to recognize immigrants’ cultural claims, nor with the expectation that they should integrate into the majority (or national) culture as long as the state and its institutions could be shown to provide a neutral and impartial framework for the pursuit of conflicting views of the good life. It was based on “a calculus of liberal rights” and focuses on the judiciary as the site of political contestation and the solution of multicultural conflicts while neglecting civil society as an equally important part of the public sphere where “political and moral learning and value transformations occur.”116 Barry equally seemed to assume, as Seyla Benhabib points out, that representative institutions within liberal democracies are insulated from multicultural conflicts by a “baseline of a nonpolitical culture” that precludes certain domains of culture from ever becoming proper subjects of public debate and matters of collective concern.117 Questioning such position entails precisely the politicization of culture, of a

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political culture that sees liberal democracy as a product of Enlightenment reason universally acceptable by all, rather than a persistent process of political contestation and civil transformation in which representative institutions are themselves suffused with culture. Barry also underestimated, and might even have condemned, the role of public opinion and activism within civil society in bringing about changes in the way conflicts of cultural recognition are adjudicated. In a sense, proponents of egalitarian left liberalism critical of multiculturalism were also reaffirming the older paradigm of social class as the main source of inequality and political conflict118 while denying the theoretical (and sometimes also practical) necessity to incorporate issues of gender, race, culture, or sexual orientation in public reasoning, and thus privileging redistribution over recognition. At least implicitly, the resistance of political philosophers to policies of cultural recognition and multiple citizenships must also be seen as resisting the separation of the political from the Western concept of the nation-state. Multiculturalism, on the contrary, emphasizes the importance of politics beyond matters of the state and rights adjudication for the social cohesion and stability of liberal society. Key critics of liberalism agreed that “as a principle of social order, liberalism in mass democracy seems necessarily to lead to an unstable social order, because it is inextricably intertwined with self-destructive tendencies.”119 As Harald Bluhm persuasively argued, such critiques of liberalism put forward during the twentieth century are far from having become outdated, obsolete, or even overcome. The fear of pluralism and multiple ways of life prevalent at the time of liberalism’s transition to mass democracy which was often thought to play a central role in destabilizing liberal democracies “is in fact merely a secondary effect” of inbuilt destabilizing tendencies within liberalism’s architecture.120 It is in this sense that the fear of liberal political elites of unruly and morally deficient underclasses gaining their political voices at the beginning of the twentieth century and the fear of cultural and moral pluralism at the beginning of the twenty-first century can be considered homologous. A further, more general problem with versions of liberalism such as the one Barry defended seems to lie in the assumption that questions of identity are in fact matters of individual choice and the manifestation of interests. Consequently, all that liberalism needs to be concerned with are the reasons given to justify the choices which determine cultural and religious affinities. Cultural identities are thus seen as entirely elective and

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cultural groups, in Barry’s reading, were little—if at all—different from what Robert Bellah et al. had termed “lifestyle enclaves” as opposed to genuine communities.121 The non-recognition of cultural group rights thus appears to affirm the principle of state neutrality in that in diverse societies the state should not promote particular versions of the good. Equally, such rights were seen as conflicting with the ideal of public reason because in order to secure the allegiance of citizens in pluralistic societies, public justification in politics must be sharable by all and thus exclude appeals to controversial conceptions of the good life as much as comprehensive doctrines about human life.122 Therefore, Barry reasoned: Ways of life that are compatible with liberal institutions are not threatened by those institutions. Therefore, the only ways of life that need to appeal to the value of cultural diversity are those that necessarily involve unjust inequalities or require powers of indoctrination and control incompatible with liberalism in order to maintain themselves. Since such cultures are unfair and oppressive to at least some of their members, it is hard to see why they should be kept alive artificially.123

Thus, while liberal philosophers were faulting the culturalization of problems they understood as economic, social, or religious in origin, that is, as individual cases of inequality, discrimination, or injustice to be remedied within the existing institutional structure of liberal democracy, anti-immigrant and especially anti-Muslim populists across Europe have perceived socio-political problems (e.g., rising crime rates, youth unemployment, ethnic segregation, or terrorism) as rooted in the immigrants’ culture and religion and consequently sought culturalized solutions, for example, in the banning of Islamic practices, traditional dress codes, and religious symbols from the public sphere.124 In theory, Samuel Scheffler argues, there are only two options available when large-scale immigration alters the shape of societies and “modes of dress, habits of thought, styles of music, humor, and entertainment, patterns of work and leisure, attitudes toward sex and sexuality, and tastes in food and drink” turn into contentious issues. The first is the nonrecognition of immigrants’ “traditions, customs and values, habits and ceremonies” as equal to those of the host country and ultimately to limit immigration in order to preserve its distinctive national culture and identity. The second option entails the reconceptualization and reconfiguration of the host society as a multicultural one with a pluralistic

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identity.125 But as Scheffler points out, in practice the most popular option is to avoid honestly confronting the choice between the first two options, and to muddle along trying to have it both ways: paying lip service to the ideas of pluralism and multiculturalism without abandoning the privileged position of the dominant culture, and resorting to serious national soulsearching only when, periodically, the conflict simmering just below the surface of the social fabric erupts into a full-fledged crisis.126

It is precisely this third option that has been allowed to run its course in Western European countries which have been turning into immigrant nations for most of the period since the end of World War II. As I argue in Chapter 3, it is not coincidental that the denationalizing logic of globalization finds its counterpart in the resistance against the allegedly permissive policies of multiculturalism and the reassertion of traditional ethnic, cultural, and religious identities, even if these amount to little more than a nostalgia for a past. Anti-immigrant mobilization and populist politics precisely aim to revitalize a dwindling sense of identity and, through the promise of more proximate polities, also offer psychological refuge from the cognitive and emotional challenges produced by, and the profound disjuncture experienced as a result of European integration that Rattansi fittingly described as a “triple transition”: post-nationalism, post-industrialism, and post-welfarism.127 These broader political, economic, and social shifts, perhaps more than any other factor, have played a decisive part in turning popular sentiments and political preferences against immigration and multiculturalism. The retreat from multiculturalism, however, may well result in outcomes which neither multiculturalists nor their liberal critics will be able to appreciate. While controversies over multiculturalism predominantly play out in national arenas, the record on the European level, Borg and Diez argued, remains inconclusive. European integration has reproduced and continues to reproduce “the problematic practices which enact the modern state” including the “problematic aspects of boundarydrawing characteristic of the modern state” but, at the same time, it has also “challenged boundaries and exclusionary identities at national levels.”128 Although there has been a marked shift away from territorial nation-states toward the proliferation of transnational networks of belonging, political and social practices, and a growing independence

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of European regions cutting across national borders, this has not led to a strengthening of post-national forms of European citizenship, even though dual/multiple citizenship provisions have been incorporated in most European countries.

Symbiosis: From Liberalism of Rights to Multiculturalism of Fear At the end of the first decade of the new millennium, Slavoj Žižek suggested that official multiculturalism was nothing other than a mechanism of neutralization which resulted in “the Other [being] deprived of its Otherness” and “today’s Brasillachs”129 were endorsing “‘reasonably’ racist protective measures” against immigrants while at the same time “rejecting direct populist racism as ‘unreasonable’ and unacceptable for our democratic standards.”130 What is currently threatened in Europe is not a way—or ways—of life, or one national culture over another, nor Western civilization but Europe’s liberal political culture. This, however, is not the equivalent of a long-standing liberal Enlightenment tradition forcefully articulated by John Locke or John Stuart Mill some three hundred years ago and firmly rooted in Europe’s political institutions ever since, but something that only came into its proper existence after World War II. This threat to liberal political culture does, however, not unilaterally emanate from the “barbarians” at the gates of Europe but springs from within, that is from anti-political populist movements, the extreme right, and the anti-immigrant mainstream exploiting diffuse fears of the population.131 But there are also structural causes within the architecture of the European Union itself, for example, its democratic deficit—which, while persisting, has seemingly exhausted scholarly interest—its technically legitimate mode of governance which borders on an anti-political conception in its overly reliance on proceduralism, as well as the overall remoteness from the everyday life of European citizens. The cautious, pragmatic, and resolutely antiutopian political liberalism which might have emerged in postwar Europe was, in fact, thrice transformed: first by the onset of the Cold War, second by the emergence of consumer society in Western Europe132 —both bracketing politics to a considerable degree—and third by “a political culture of total optimism” that characterized European integration.133 The fear of the Other—whether postcolonial citizen, foreign worker, or refugee—that has been exploited by the European mainstream and far right since the early 1990s is the

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long-term, antagonistic counter-image of this kind of “a priori optimism” but also of the European project of “unity in diversity” as such. The increasing popular resentments against the multi-billion euro bailouts for Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Cyprus; homegrown Islamist terrorism; and the mounting number of refugees following the destabilization of the Middle East and North African (MENA) region since 2010 have all become mingled and diffused in a general climate of crisis and precariousness that seems to hold Europeans in its grip. Paralleling the early 1990s, the figure of the refugee has emerged as the main focal point of popular fears and political dissent. This is the case even in countries, such as Germany, whose population is principally satisfied with their country’s economic performance and crisis trajectory.134 Europeans fear economic domination by the emerging economic powers of East and South Asia but also the United States, they fear terrorist attacks and sectarian violence bringing geopolitical conflicts to their doorstep, but they also fear the loss of their respective national identities and a decline in economic well-being. Tzvetan Todorov, appropriating—albeit with a different focus—Dominique Moïsi’s argument regarding the geopolitical distribution of emotions, suggests that European nations are increasingly characterized by a feeling of fear.135 Whereas countries such as China, India, Brazil, or South Africa can be characterized as “countries of appetite” in their attempts to make up for their hitherto missed share of global wealth, consumption, and leisure by utilizing globalization to their advantage, a second set of countries in the Middle East, Northern Africa, but also in South Asia and Latin America such as Pakistan or Venezuela are characterized by an attitude of resentment resulting from “humiliation, real or imaginary, allegedly inflicted on [them] by the countries with the most wealth and power.” Therefore, the “targets of this resentment are the old colonial countries of Europe and, increasingly, the United States [which] are held responsible for private misery and public powerlessness.”136 While the countries of appetite challenge the political and economic boundaries imposed by Western geopolitics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, jihadist terrorism and militant Islamist groups which emanate from the countries of resentment deny not only the legitimacy of Western democracy and international organizations (e.g., International Monetary Fund or the G7) in a political sense but the West’s very right of existence.

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It is these fears, I claim, rather than actual refugee flows, which have corrosive effects on civic trust and solidarity but also on the foundations of liberal democracy. Observers have long suggested that, in addition to an anti-immigration stance, Islamophobia would become not only the main expression of European fears but also “the defining condition of the new Europe.” More recently, they noted that Islamophobia has “passed the dinner-table test” in becoming “socially acceptable.”137 The demands of immigrants from the countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa, especially regarding their religious freedom, indeed, have been increasingly countered in Western European countries with the staunch affirmation of the values of secularism and state-church separation. This firmness, Todorov thinks, is a “euphemism for intolerance,” and Haleh Afshar has emphasized that by “categorizing Muslims as a single group with the potential of terrorism, the policies that ensue leave little room for manoeuvre within and across the communities. The only choice is between solidarity among Muslims or internecine struggles and contestations with ‘white’ host communities.”138 This kind of ascribed identity, she argues, may have the adverse effect of silencing internal debate, hampering critique, and delegitimizing progressive voices. The nation-state as dominant form of political organization entailed a concept of identity that—irrespective of how mythical or invented— presented a common culture as distinctive feature of the nation. While the national theme became dominant in the beginning of the twentieth century, it was strongly interlinked with the socially modest but educated middle strata of society, whose stakes and social positions directly depended on it. In fact, it was not the reference to a common culture but the ethnic-linguistic criterion that, albeit very late in the process, became dominant in defining the nation.139 At its height, nationalism, it could be argued, assumed the qualities of a secular ersatz-religion.140 Underneath it, European societies remained rather heterogeneous. While many areas of European conurbations can be factually described as multicultural, this does not imply that they are intercultural as well. What Nielsen calls the “unreality of cultural encounter” refers to the limited amount to which interstitial cultures have developed. Many European nations already struggle with the equal representation of women in their parliaments. The point is that the mono-cultural myth of most European democracies predisposes them against a multicultural model.141 The permanent presence of nominal Muslim communities in Europe, more than of any

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other immigrant group, poses a productive challenge to European selfperception and European national identities. However, especially in the current situation, accommodating claims for recognition by Europe’s Muslim minorities is likely to be viewed as giving in to radicalism and religious fundamentalism and thus to substantially threaten the reelection prospects of every party or politician advocating it. However, since the establishment of overarching (civil) identity shared by all citizens is a persistent challenge in diverse societies, claims making for cultural and religious recognition should be seen as a commitment to the ideal of liberal democracy and basic freedoms and thus as affirming rather than undermining European democracy. Affirmative action, Peleg contends, “emphasizes rather than detracts from the main ideological goal of most liberal democracies: the creation of a transcendental and overarching identity that stands over and above all other identities.”142 This is the case, since institutional conflicts are created through competing standards of evaluation, be they religiously, politically, culturally, ethnically, or gender based. Jacob Levy has offered a compelling, extended theoretical argument why “a much more active, muscular liberalism” which no longer “stands neutral between different values” is as erroneous a response to the challenges of cultural and religious pluralism as the radical and illiberal solutions put forward by the European far right.143 Levy’s line of argument starts from the recognition that ethnic and cultural pluralism, as much as religious pluralism, presents limitations to political theory and, at least for the time being, should be conceptualized as inescapable features of human existence that “cannot be evaded by labeling a theory ‘ideal’ or ‘non-ideal’.” This is the case because, Levy states, a number of aspects of life in a multicultural, multiethnic world must be taken as given in view of the “enduring power of group loyalty and attachment, and the durability of ethnic and cultural groups,” importantly also because attempts to deny or transform them have “systematically been bloody failures.”144 What Levy terms “multiculturalism of fear” in appropriation of what Judith Shklar saw as the essence of liberalism—the prevention of cruelty—thus places “an unusual degree of emphasis on recurrent social and political dangers which must be avoided but cannot be escaped.”145 Ethnic and cultural conflicts equally direct attention away from ideal political theory and refocus it on politics. “[I]t underlines,” Levy programmatically states, the need for “a political theory concerned with preventing cruelty and making it possible for members of potentially antagonistic

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groups to live together peacefully.” For such kind of political theory, context matters and it thus “must incorporate psychological, historical, and other empirical information.”146 Following Shklar, the summum malum to be avoided in regard to multiculturalism is not one of dichotomy between preserving ethnic and cultural identities or overcoming them—equally not between a policy of assimilation or laissez-faire. Rather, the aim is one of “mitigating the recurrent dangers such as state violence toward cultural minorities, interethnic warfare, and intra-communal attacks on those who try to alter or leave their cultural communities.”147 More generally, this summum malum is not only cruelty but also “the fear it inspires, and the very fear of fear itself.”148 Cruelty, importantly, must not only be understood in a physical sense but also as “moral cruelty” in terms of humiliation and a “humanitarianism unshaken by skepticism and unmindful of its own limitations.”149 Though it is tempting to conclude that different cultures embody different and sometimes incommensurable moral views and thus to understand cultural pluralism as a case of moral pluralism, Levy convincingly argued that such identification of moral and cultural pluralism is not only a misconception but counterproductive. Recognizing the disjuncture between moral and cultural pluralism prevents us from “characterizing any culture as intrinsically liberal, illiberal, patriarchal, traditionalist, hierarchical, and so on”150 but, instead, focuses on the possibility of internal reform. The possibility of cross-cultural moral criticism at the reflective level also marks the difference between moral pluralism and relativist accounts which simply—and wrongly so—conceive of cultural pluralism as mutually exclusive, incompatible and agonistic.151 Equally, this is not only a problem for countries of immigration but one of the persistent challenges of the European Union as a political entity. It is a challenge of devising institutional mechanisms able to turn every day of multicultural societies into experiences of self-reflection and learning instead of a source of fear and hostility. Levy provides a useful systematization of cultural claims, one that makes clear that the central point in the discussion of individual versus collective or group rights is whether beyond equal individual rights there are claims which are normatively plausible. Levy differentiates claims to exemptions from laws which penalize or burden cultural practices; assistance to do those things, the majority can do unassisted; claims to self-government for ethnic, cultural, or national minorities; external rules

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restricting non-members’ liberty to protect members’ culture; internal rules for members’ conduct enforced by ostracism or excommunication; recognition and enforcement of traditional legal code by the dominant legal system; representation of minorities in government bodies; symbolic claims to acknowledge the worth, status, or existence of various groups.152 In the present context, it is especially two types of such claims that are most relevant. Exemption rights are “individually exercised negative liberties granted to members of a religious or cultural group” on whom general law places a distinctive burden as such that the law “would impair a minority’s religious practices, or would compel adherents to do that which they consider religiously prohibited.”153 Exemption, Levy argues, is justified in terms of the recognition of the distinct status and meaning a practice has in the minority culture but which is “banned, regulated, or compelled because of the very different meaning it has for the majority culture.” This distinction cannot be captured by the type of liberal legalism advocated by Brain Barry which supposes that there is only one right answer to the questions whether “a general law illegitimately violates liberty and should be repealed or it is justified and should be uniformly enforced.”154 Exemption rights thus present a particular challenge to liberal theories which (a) “place overwhelming importance on equal liberty” and (b) subscribed to a “conception of the rule of law that emphasizes the general applicability of laws.” But exemption rights are not subject to liberal criticisms of group rights since “while they are group differentiated they are not ‘group rights’ in any meaningful sense.” It is important to note here, Levy rightly emphasizes, that some violations of liberty “intrude closer to the core of a person’s dignity, sense of self” than others. Such violations are not all mere inconveniences as Barry argued. The difference between an inconvenience and deep offenses to the self, however, depends precisely on cultural and religious understandings and, especially in the latter case, these understandings “make sacred the otherwise profane.”155 Secondly, symbolic claims are aimed at recognition, that is, the recognition of the presence as well as the contribution of immigrant groups to the country they have made their home by way of making space in the polity’s symbolic repertoire. The legal bans on traditional Muslim clothing and religious practices as well as the building of mosques and minarets enacted in a number of European countries are just one example of legislation that attempts to keep certain symbolisms and architectural representations out of the public sphere and the national or regional

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imagery. Even though for the majority society there are hardly any costs associated with allowing the presence of different religious groups to manifest itself architecturally, resistance to acknowledging the actual ethnic, cultural, or religious composition of society might be experienced from the minority culture’s perspective as a hostile statement, the infringement of their negative liberties as much as a carefully targeted act of willful exclusion.156 Levy discusses the issue of symbolic recognition based on, among others, the example of Greek/Macedonian unrest and violence in Australia following the recognition of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in early 1994 by Paul Keating’s Labor government.157 The dispute between Greek and Macedonian communities in Australia over the name and national symbols (e.g., the 16-ray Vergina Sun or Macedonian Star) of the newly independent Macedonian republic turned unexpectedly violent, including firebombing churches, community centers, private homes, and businesses spreading from Victoria to New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. The violence between the two communities led to criticisms of Australia’s multicultural policies with multiculturalism being portrayed as “a recipe of social fragmentation that undermined Australian society.”158 This case is particularly instructive for immigrant relations in European countries because it is wholly unrealistic to expect immigrants to abstain from all interest, allegiance, and commitment to their country of origin and its future. Especially, where there is no freedom of expression and dissenters to state policies may face reprisals, there is no reason why European democracies should not allow immigrants to publically voice critique or pledge support and thereby stimulate a broader spectrum of public debate that may be impossible in the respective country of origin, nor why this should be understood by European governments as a sign of disloyalty to the country of immigration. As the recent experiences of the Arab Spring show, critique by expatriates and support for protesters easily transmitted via social media networks can have much greater impact on the course of events than exerting pressure via conventional diplomatic channels. This fact, however, constitutes a growing sense of uneasiness of European governments regarding their immigrant population and a possible undermining of national sovereignty by outside influences. Although symbolic ethnic and cultural disputes often concern “imaginary” rather than “material” issues, they nevertheless can turn out “particular potent and difficult to resolve.” As Donald Horowitz notes in this regard:

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Symbolic claims are not readily amenable to compromise. In this, they differ from claims deriving wholly from material interest. Whereas material advancement can be measured both relatively and absolutely, the status advancement of one ethnic group is entirely relative to the status of others.159

Levy rightly emphasizes that in the Hobbesian solution, symbolic zerosum conflicts are therefore sought to be pacified by both mutual disinterestedness (e.g., the relegation of religion to the private sphere) and “the self-interested pursuit of non-zero-sum goods (material goods as opposed to status and honor)” which is thought to act as “a moderate and moderating kind of vice.” However, since in conflicts regarding symbolic issues there is “no self-interested incentive for moderation,” there is also “little natural incentive to avoid extreme demands.”160 It is especially theories based on neo-Kantian versions of a liberalism of rights which find it difficult to acknowledge that “there can be important political questions which do not affect the rights or resources of individual persons.” But to deduce from this position that “words, expressions, and symbols are not the stuff of justice or morality, or even of morally interesting politics” and are thus “immune from political and moral criticism, unlike material harms” fails to draw the necessary distinction between the guarantee of individual freedom of expression and the liberal state’s own speech and the (national) symbolism underwritten by it.161 Enacting legal bans on traditional and religious practices—which may or may not form an integral part of the identity of large groups of recent immigrants—seems to me not only a deeply reactionary attitude and a manifestation of helplessness in the face of the challenges presented by large-scale immigration, but also illiberal in being inconsistent with liberal democracy’s ideals and aspirations. Normatively, relegating questions of religious and cultural accommodation to the private sphere relies on a misrepresentation of the public/private distinction as “the great dichotomy”162 of Western political thought. Instead of being a unitary distinction and a comprehensive dichotomous model of society, it “comprises not a single paired opposition” but a complex set of “multiple (but also overlapping) discourses of public and private [which] do not simply point to different phenomena; [but] often they rest on different underlying images of the social world, are driven by different concerns, and raise very different issues.”163

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The ambiguous character of the public/private distinction cautions against “any single or dichotomous model of the public/private distinction to capture the institutional and cultural logic of modern societies.”164 Such model is, according to Jeff Weintraub, simply inadequate and while drawing the distinction between public and private should not be abandoned “we should not expect the public/private distinction to provide us with easy or straightforward solutions to our social, political, and moral dilemmas.”165 To argue that the building of mosques, the wearing of traditional dress including the niq¯ab, the continuation of practices such as halal slaughtering are a private matter, viewing claims for public recognition of these practices as pursuing a special interest implies not just that the state has no meddling in these matters but rather that they are not in the public interest.166 The Hobbesian solution to religious conflict thus cannot provide guidance to European liberal democracy at the beginning of the twenty-first century as it should be clear that “the peculiar identification of Leviathan as the very archetype of liberal philosophy” is “a truly gross misrepresentation which simply assures that any social contract theory, however authoritarian its intentions, and any anti-Catholic polemic add up to liberalism.”167 The Hobbesian solution, in positing the need for a coercive authority that stands above society and guarantees internal peace and order, achieves its goal “by manipulating the structure of rewards and punishments within which individuals pursue their ‘rational’ interests.”168 But the public/private distinction, Judith Shklar argued, is a shifting boundary, one that “leaves liberals free to espouse a very large range of philosophical and religious beliefs.”169 Shklar states it clearly: Any free citizen must insist that a line be drawn somewhere between the private and the public so that the state will be prohibited from entering into the many aspects of our lives where we have the right to act as we choose. The exact point of its exclusion is, however, historically moveable, and few are the liberals who would now treat domestic violence against women and children as a protected private sphere. The way to decide when an injustice is so evident as to require citizens and officials to interfere cannot, however, be found in the difference between publicly recognized injustices and merely subjective reactions. That distinction is, in fact, no more secure, and no less political, than that between nature and culture or between the objective and the subjective view. It is a question of who has the power to define the meaning of actions.170

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More importantly, Shklar also contended, as Marc Hulliung shows, that the real significance of citizenship “has not been civic participation but social inclusion.”171 This points not only to the issue of moral complexity and value pluralism but also to a much more complex understanding of the public sphere beyond and in between the “visible hand” of state regulation and coercion and the “invisible hand” of the market facilitating the quasi-natural harmonization of citizens’ interests. Such an understanding comprises not just the formal institutions of the state and confines politics to rights discourses and adjudication but does also includes “a sphere of fluid and polymorphous sociability, distinct from both the structures of formal organization and the ‘private’ domains of intimacy and domesticity.”172 It is here that minorities can most effectively challenge the institutions and power of the hegemonic state and majority culture but also that of corporate economic actors, agencies, and financial markets.173 Other claims discussed by Levy include external and internal rules as well as claims for self-government including the pursuit of secession, on the other hand, are of a minor importance in terms of immigrant recognition and incorporation in European societies. Though claims for self-government have led to the bloodiest and most devastating intraEuropean conflicts since the end of the Cold War,174 regional separatist movements within EU member states such as Flemish nationalism in Belgium, Basque nationalism in Spain, Catalan nationalism in Spain and France, or Corsican nationalism in France could so far be contained within the process of European integration which increased the importance of European regions.175 Levy’s systematization of cultural claims is thus useful in order to ascertain what is really at stake in the recognition and accommodation of the cultural claims of immigrants in Europe. Most of these claims affect immigrants’ negative liberties, and some of them are questions of symbolic representation. None of these claims challenge the political-legal foundations and territorial integrity of European nation-states. Not only theoretically, the multiculturalism of fear is thus compatible with a liberalism of rights since it does neither attempt to preserve ethnic and cultural diversity nor tries to transcend ethnic and cultural attachments, for example, by endorsing concepts such as that of constitutional patriotism discussed in Chapter 3. As Shklar put it: The liberalism of fear is a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrates on damage control. […] For this liberalism the basic units of political life are not discursive and reflecting persons, nor

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friends and enemies, nor patriotic soldier-citizens, nor energetic litigants, but the weak and the powerful. And the freedom it wishes to secure is freedom from the abuse of power and intimidation of the defenseless that this difference invites.176

Though the liberalism of fear might be nowhere near as elaborate and comprehensive a theory as Rawlsian liberalism or Habermasian social theory and thus normatively much less interesting for political philosophers than the latter two, it might actually provide a better starting point for European societies in defending both the liberal in liberal democracy and an open society. This is also a question of choosing the least harmful approach to the solution of political problems over what appears right on normative grounds. It demands the choosing of history and pragmatism over principled reason. As I argued in the preceding sections, this applies with particular urgency to the utopian telos and moral purpose of the European project as well as to exclusionary dynamics in terms of civic stratification and the re-ethnicization of politics. Bernard Williams importantly argued that while there’s an absence from much political philosophy of “any sense of political contest,” the liberalism of fear “does not displace politics” and thus speaks to humanity as such “because its materials are the only certainly universal materials of politics: power, powerlessness, fear, cruelty, a universalism of negative capacities.”177 Williams thus argued that this awareness of situational politics theoretically places the liberalism of fear in a better position than the liberalism of rights and virtues to recognize the “actual limitations of state power,” because in its bottom-up approach the liberalism of fear does not aim “to determine in general what anyone has a right to under any circumstances and then apply it. It regards the discovery of what rights people have as a political and historical one, not a philosophical one.”178 Judith Shklar’s point, as Katrina Forrester shows, “is precisely that it is not possible to de-ideologize politics” and any attempt to do so forces us to lose sight of political reality.179 This is the case, because by deliberately isolating, for example, the rule of law from politics, “legalism creates an artificial ‘thereness’ that does ‘considerable violence to political actualities’”180 and thus mistakes an “ought to” for an “is.” Shklar’s liberalism of fear, Forrester contends, is thus “a minimal liberalism grounded in psychology rather than rights or nature; […] a politics grounded in everyday life that closed off appeals to any order other than ‘actuality’.”181 It resolutely defends the liberal democratic values of resistance,

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non-domination, and self-governance, not only from encroachment by the state, but also puts it over the moral paternalism of expert opinion. The colonial history of apparently benevolent liberal paternalism and the Eurocentric bias in much of modernization theory should give reason for pause when applying similar arguments to immigrants’ conceptions of the good, however controversial they may initially seem. Scholars from Tocqueville to, most recently, Paul Rahe have also convincingly argued that it is not only explicit cruelty and humiliation and the fear thereof that present a danger to liberal democratic institutions but also the implicit soft despotism which exploits rather than suppressing democracy by imperceptibly increasing and expanding its power in all directions.182 In Tocqueville’s warnings of a decidedly modern form of depoliticizing, despotism which “renders voluntary action rarer and less useful and restricts the activity of free will to a smaller space; and little by little […] robs each citizen of the use of these faculties”183 lays perhaps the great achievement of second volume of Democracy in America, the intimation, as Sheldon Wolin put it, of “a postdemocratic ‘beyond’ that did not yet exist.”184 This was not, Wolin points out, an anticipation of twentieth-century totalitarianism but of “the evils of banality” which point to “a politics expressed primarily through cultural forms of everyday life and the unremarkable strivings of ordinary and mostly upright individuals.”185 The roots of soft despotism thus lay in a specific configuration of the modern liberal democratic state in which, Wolin argued, political stability and freedom posed an impossible demand under conditions that combined a democratic conception of popular sovereignty with a strongly centralized, highly bureaucratized state. The demands for extending equality would drive the state to greater and greater penetration of everyday life. Stability could then be achieved only at the expense of free politics.186

This form of Tocquevillian despotism, for example, has allegedly crept into the liberal, democratic, and federal beginnings of American government to such an extent that Gary Gerstle felt compelled to call it a twenty-first-century Leviathan.187 A number of critics have further argued that a purely negative politics in general, and the liberalism of fear in particular, not only is unable to provide a foundation for moral and political argument but also may

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give rise to a non-political, or even an anti-political, attitude. This particularly concerns an alleged disavowal of “the difficult and strenuous tasks of social reconstruction” and the emancipatory content of liberal principles.188 But Tocqueville’s soft despotism, rather than being a result of domination, is precisely the “product of democratic hopes” and aspirations in the service of some outward forms of freedom.189 It might yield results that may be democratic but, at the same time, illiberal in encroaching on the sovereignty of the individual and the scope of choices at his or her disposal. That the negatives of the liberalism of fear do not correspond to a well-defined positive but, instead, require us to defend a potentially highly diverse set of positives which may include a wide range of regimes and societies irrespective of our reservations about or opposition to what is protected, does not mean that it lacks foundations. Negative politics, as Michael Walzer shows, “always has a substantive subject – a certain necessary positivity.” This positivity is located in “the social space within which free men and women enact their life plans” and it is these individuals who “constitute liberal positivity.”190 The liberalism of fear, therefore, can be conceptualized, Walzer argues, as “a culture of barriers, animated by a deep suspicion of power, protecting every individual member against the rampages of the powerful.”191 And even though the liberalism of fear cannot provide the content of a way of life, “negativity penetrates more deeply into substantive liberalism than into any other political formation.”192 This does not mean that the liberalism of fear is opposed to the idea of entrenched rights as means of protecting the individual. What is to be rejected in certain conceptions of liberalism, I argue, is not the understanding of cultural rights as non-fundamental rights but its justification as an imperative of principled reason which transcends all cultures and traditions. Such position readily invites moral as well as epistemological criticism in privileging order over liberty by falsely assuming that the meaning of justice can be stabilized irrespective of political actualities and that the increasing pluralism and diversity due to large-scale immigration does not entail ethical implications. Rationalist ethics not only abstracts from reality but misrepresents it in denying its epistemic limitations.193 Walzer importantly notes that the liberalism of fear is contingent on the formation of “positive subjects of negative freedom” and thus necessarily premised upon a positive vision of what it means to be liberal. Such vision obviously has “positive content and (value)” but it is negative “because [its] content is not given by liberal doctrine.”194 It is, in this sense, a

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particular social–historical formation among others and its point is to “open up social space for many liberalisms, including our own.”195 If we think that the anthropologist, the ethnologist, or the sociologist of culture has indeed anything meaningful to contribute to political theory and, in fact, may even provide a sort of check to normative pretensions—in terms of both cultural essentialism and moral universalism—then it is clear that any liberal political philosophy that chooses to invisibilize existing problems of cultural accommodation within a sanitized discourse of rights contributes to precisely this type of pretensions. While anthropologically and sociologically culture is indeed fundamental for individual self-realization and not at the individual’s disposal to the degree that the categorization of cultural belonging as purely elective would suggest, the political essentialization of culture should be resisted. Obviously, this is not equivalent to saying that culture is politically irrelevant, should be suppressed in the public sphere, or can be permanently transcended. Multiculturalist challenges preclude the elegant and theoretically satisfying solutions of difference-blind liberalism. Taking the nexus of culture, identity, and individual autonomy seriously does not mean to abandon reflection over tradition but to critically scrutinize, as Ferrara phrased it so well, the “chimera of the ‘view from nowhere’ in favor of integrating a judgement-based appraisal of the functional needs of identity within [political liberalism’s] approach to justice.”196 More importantly, it makes clear that the balancing of diverse and opposing claims of cultural recognition has to be negotiated and renegotiated in practice. Ferrara pointedly argued that from the point of the participant: who is always ‘thrown’ into a context only partially of his or her own choosing, a context within which the choice of a line of conduct, be it individual or collective, always takes place against the background of configurations of meaning or cultures assumed to persist unchanged for the predictable time frame of the action. […] Cultures are in constant flux for the observer, here and now they are given and fixed for the participant, they mutate but their mutation is not at the actors’ disposal.197

But there is also a deeper sense, as Bernard Williams persuasively showed, that marks the difference between observer and participant. People’s thick ethical concepts (as opposed to another community’s concepts whether distant in place or time) often are characterized by an unwieldy singularity in meaning ineliminably tied to practice that might

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not permit an observer to apply them in the same deep and substantial sense.198 The case for “irreducibly social goods” Charles Taylor makes in his Philosophical Arguments aims at this “peculiar strong relation” that presupposes and requires a particular background of shared meanings and practices, but, as critics have noted, it is slightly off target.199 It remains unclear how it follows from the irreducibly social conditions in which thick ethical concepts historically develop that these concepts, but not only those, also the whole culture in which they have developed, are intrinsically good: To say that a certain kind of self-giving heroism is good, or a certain quality of aesthetic experience, must be to judge the cultures in which this kind of heroism and that kind of experience are conceivable options as good cultures. If such virtue and experience are worth cultivating, then the cultures have to be worth fostering, not as contingent instruments, but for themselves.200

In case of people’s thick ethical concepts, there is a condition that needs to be satisfied in order to use those concepts. It is a matter of belonging to that culture; that is, it is a matter of belonging to a certain practice. But to judge that certain cultures are good cultures, the way Taylor has in mind involves concepts on the level of reflective generality.201 Since in all societies there is some degree of reflective questioning or criticism, the relation between practice and reflection raises a question Williams phrased as follows: “Does the practice of the society, in particular the judgements that members of the society make, imply answers to reflective questions about that practice […]?”202 It seems sufficiently clear to me that the general answer to this question must be in the negative. It depends on the model of ethical practice we are adopting—an objectivist or a non-objectivist one—and this, in turn, will determine whether we grant members of a particular ethical practice to possess ethical knowledge or simply see their practice as an unreflective contingent cultural artifact. The ethical knowledge in question is knowledge involved in people’s making of judgments that employ their thick ethical concepts. Taylor’s judgment on the intrinsic goodness of cultures is clearly located on the reflective level and reflection, as Williams notes, characteristically disturbs and might even destroy the ethical knowledge those cultures unselfconsciously have. It is difficult to see how, at the reflective level, there can be an adequate body of ethical knowledge that would

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allow us to make judgments about what is worth cultivating.203 On the contrary, if we subscribe to a non-objectivist view of ethical practice, as Taylor would surely do, it is simply not possible at all to advance such a claim. Williams’ argument therefore also reminds us that there is a tension between the thick description of cultural practices and the reflective theorizing about the nature, values, and ethics of ethnic and cultural communities and the conflicts between them. This tension, however, is not theoretical but a very real one in anthropological, sociological, and political terms. Reasoning about the principles that define our basic rights and liberties requires us to engage directly with such conflicts. Most multicultural contentions, Alessandro Ferrara notes, are in fact characterized by this relation of our reflective judgments regarding the requirements of justice to judgments on “the authenticity of an identity and its chances for flourishing.”204 Although equal individual rights in the tradition of liberal democracy may normatively be the most plausible foundation for equality but also stability and democracy, the liberalism of rights approach to conflict resolution proves, political scientist Ilan Peleg shows, “rather problematical on an empirical basis.”205 Peleg argues that despite the arguments opponents of special recognition for ethnic and cultural minority rights have made in terms of the general principles of liberal democracy, “recognizing the special identity of certain groups could and should be integrated into a liberal regime.”206 This is the case because group-based differentiation might be the most effective way of dealing with either historically well-established inequalities or immigration-based exclusionary dynamics in liberal democracies where the majority enjoys overwhelming superiority and a dominant institutional position. The liberal argument for the ethical neutrality of the state (and against group rights) may camouflage majority domination.207 As pointed to above, the propagation of civic integration signifies not only the defense of a liberal minimum but, increasingly so, the affirmation of the receiving country’s (majority) culture.208 With regard to political stability, Peleg thus rightly argues that especially in hegemonic polities stability “depends on the ability of the dominant group to adopt a policy of inclusion toward the minority.”209 Civic nationalism as put forward by Barry or Tamir, Levy persuasively argues, “can’t be used as a stand in for ‘humanity’ or ‘universal principles’ in order to make ethnic identities seem narrow and particularistic,” since civic nationalism appears itself as a particularistic culturally impregnated identity.

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The multiculturalism of fear, just as Shklar’s liberalism of fear, has no consolation to offer in form of “a summon bonum toward which all political agents should strive” such as a theory of moral pluralism or a grand future vision of unison and accord. It has no wish to deliver us from the messiness and tensions of everyday politics but urges us to conceptualize politics within those limitations. But just as the new nationalism I discussed in the preceding chapter is no longer irredentist in character and thus ceased to function as a comprehensive belief system and modernizing project, the resurgence of assimilationism diagnosed by Brubaker in terms of a “normatively charged concept” is no longer opposed to difference per se but to “segregation, ghettoization and marginalization.”210 It thus no longer builds on a simple one-dimensional model that posits multiculturalism as a counterpoint to social cohesion and employs a linear understanding of more or less difference.211 Instead of a static assimilationist understanding of integration, it has shifted to a multidimensional question, an agnostic stance, varying by domain and reference population, concerning both the likelihood and the desirability of assimilation. Reformulated in this manner, and divested of its ‘assimilationist’ connotations, the concept of assimilation – if not the term itself – seems not only useful but indispensable. It enables us to ask questions about the domains and degrees of emergent similarities, and persisting differences, between multi-generational populations of immigrant origin and particular reference populations.212

What is affirmed by the retreat from multiculturalism is therefore not a “nostalgia for the monoculture of old” but “local versions of the liberal state.”213 In consequence, both neo-nationalism and neo-assimilationism appear as ambivalent phenomena in terms of the changing system of political boundaries since the 1990s and its effects on the meaning and scope of a putatively emerging form of European citizenship. As European citizenship is seen as the prime manifestation and guarantor of internal cohesion, the EU—in a structural sense—has been argued to re-empower itself through these kinds of discourses.214 However, as Christian Joppke shows, the tension between de- and re-ethnicization dynamics is written into the blueprint of the modern nation-state.215 Which dynamic prevails depends not on the level of immigration per se but on the specific historical context in which immigration happens.

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Multiculturalism as a normative ideal of recognition and accommodation of cultural pluralism disputes claims that pluralism can only safely manifest itself between nations but what is required within the nation-state (beyond the definitional issue) is either assimilation or secession.216 In a longue durée perspective, ethnically selective immigration policies as well as ethnically closed citizenship laws were characteristic of the apogee of the national building era in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. In comparison, the EU context of intergovernmental modes of cooperation and increasingly supranational legal and political order brought elements to the fore that can be described as a de-ethnicization dynamic: (1) the reintroduction of conditional jus soli elements (originally inherited from feudalism before the Code Napoléon217 ) into citizenship law across Europe; (2) the liberalization of naturalization in the sense that cultural assimilation ceases to be a prerequisite for citizenship acquisition; and (3) the increasing toleration of dual citizenship.218 This dynamic is thus embedded in the broader geopolitical history of the evolution of Europe’s “territorial, organisational and conceptual borders” as well as in socio-economic dynamics that have run against fortress Europe’s restrictive immigration policies.219 This liberalization toward de-ethnicization—and especially so the trends under points (2) and (3)—has been considerably weakened and partially reversed by measures (re-)introduced over the last decade. However, prior to the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015/16, there was no clear trend in either direction. While, for example, the Czech Nationality Act,220 which took effect on January 1, 2014, no longer insists on single nationality and permits dual and multiple nationality and thus follows a de-ethnicization logic, re-ethnicization of citizenship has been advanced by calls for repealing dual citizenship laws in Germany, Norway’s ban on dual citizenship, as well as the introduction of citizenship tests across a number of European countries, for example in the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Austria, Spain, or Hungary. Due to the differential history of citizenship laws across EU member states, de-ethnicization and re-ethnicization dynamics have been spatially distributed with stronger de-ethnicization trends in northwestern Europe and re-ethnicization trends in the southwest.221 Generally, access to nationality is most difficult to obtain in Estonia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Austria while naturalization is easiest in Portugal, Sweden, and Germany.222

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What this means for the broader theoretical debate is that extension of immigrant rights, where it has taken place, was dependent on domestic rather than post-national factors. Koopmans et al. have argued that the evidence for the importance of politics beyond the nation-state is often unsystematic, containing little more than a few examples, however representative these are said to be. More specifically, while in Germany or Switzerland migrants lack the political and discursive leverage which could be derived from voting rights and thus remain subject to a separate body of legislation, in the Netherlands and Britain there exist rather extensive legal frameworks and institutions for the promotion of equal opportunities. As pointed out above, the few claims regarding cultural or social rights in Germany and Switzerland suggest that without symbolic inclusion through citizenship it remains extremely difficult for migrants to put such issues on the political agenda, not to mention gaining discursive legitimacy or finding public resonance.223 Therefore, it is the respective national legal and institutional frameworks that continue to decisively determine what kind of issues and which types of actors are able to successfully politicize. It is within these particular national context that identity politics become vital since such frameworks not only determine policies on the ground but contribute to the institutionalization of meaning. Immigration and asylum policies in Europe are perhaps the clearest example of the interdependence of the ideational and the organizational-coordinative dimensions of European integration. When immigrant groups are the target of demands for cultural assimilation (or worse the subject of exclusion) and public recognition is thus withheld, immigrants may pursue the collective affirmation and continuation of cultural and religious practices privately which, in turn, might give rise to the accusation of forming parallel societies, threatening the social and political cohesion of the majority polity. Optimists may see the public manifestations of solidarity extending across Europe in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 as pointing into the direction of a “multiculturalist nationalism” which rests on mutual tolerance rather than a shared culture as spelled out by David Hollinger in his Post-Ethnic America.224 But if the description of an increasing politicization of immigrants’ culture is correct, it appears counterintuitive to argue that immigration also forces states to further de-ethnicize citizenship in the sense of moving away from cultural understandings of nationhood, both civic and ethnic. Indeed, in the increasing

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electoral success of the European anti-immigration right and the shifting political rhetoric of mainstream parties, the opposite can be observed.

Concluding Remarks: Regressive Universalism and the Chimera of Emancipatory Liberal Democracy This chapter argued that the backlash against multiculturalism is best understood as a forceful resurgence of a postcolonial crisis. This crisis has been largely invisibilized politically, first by Cold War ideology and conflict, and later by progressive European integration, including the introspective soul searching that characterized the public debate on European identity from the 1990s onward. Multicultural discontents are thus part of a continuum of politicization regarding immigration and increasing diversity, rather than to be treated as the result of policy failure, a reaction to terrorist threats or particular waves of immigration. As I argued in Chapter 4, the critique of multiculturalism—indeed its disavowal by the political mainstream—can be seen as the continuation of a historical taboo regarding Europe’s colonial legacy and postcolonial reality. This taboo already surfaced during the 2004 and 2007 waves of EU enlargement, but most forcefully during the Syrian refugee crisis. What links both postcolonial silence and anti-multiculturalism campaigning is the functional homology of the colonial subject, the colonial migrant, and the Syrian refugee as representations of Europe’s Other. The political discourse on the failure of multiculturalism, I therefore argue, provides us with an integration paradox because it runs counter to the portrayal of Europe as a post-ethnic, post-national, cosmopolitan democracy in which cultural difference no longer serves as the basis for exclusion, whether social, political, symbolic, or otherwise. In fact, this very image of Europe may have itself contributed to ethnic tensions, immigrant marginalization, and the non-recognition of immigrant claims. It provided a pretext for describing cultural non-recognition and immigrant marginalization as a seemingly non-discriminatory but in fact emancipatory defense of liberal democracy and the universalism of its principles. Analytically, the chapter established a key distinction between two types of liberal universalism: “emancipatory universalism” and “regressive universalism.”225 I argued that the latter made it possible to re-introduce

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a stronger emphasis on national culture in form of a sanitized idiom of liberal democratic universalism. Regressive universalism thus functions as an emancipatory chimera while in fact producing illiberal outcomes. It is in that sense that the ability of right-wing discourse to penetrate the language of political liberalism manifests itself. More importantly, this shift away from emancipatory universalism emerged with equal forcefulness from the liberal left. But rather than constituting a relapse into earlier forms of ethno-nationalism, liberal democratic and potentially universalistic ideals now function as concrete boundaries of integration targeting certain groups of immigrants. For these immigrant groups, being criticized for their culture’s nonconformance to the values of liberal democracy has taken on a concretely exclusionary rather than a progressive and inclusionary meaning. As I argued more fully in Chapter 2, this shift toward regressive universalism entails a naturalization of culture that sees anti-democratic and illiberal attitudes as inherent and irreducible characteristics of certain immigrant groups. The most significant narratives employed by those struggling for justice or equality are not only independent of their structural position in the particular and differentiated spheres that make up society but involve transcending, overarching symbolic frameworks.226 It is by reference to an ideal blueprint of society—such as liberal democracy—that social movements are able to project problems in a particular sphere onto society at large. It is the existence of this regulating ideal, and its promised or partial realization in the communicative and regulative institutions at a particular time, that allows protests that emerge in one structural sector to be transferred into the domain of civil society. Problems then concern society itself, not just a particular institution or a particular social group. It is for this reason, Jeffrey Alexander shows, that claims for inclusion and equality have the potential of creating social crisis.227 Success of claims for recognition and accommodation thus depends on using this “civil metalanguage” to relate sphere-specific problems to the “symbolic centers of society” and its utopian premises. Domination in a particular sphere is challenged not because it violates a particular institutional culture but because it is constructed as violating the collective representations of civil society. As Alexander further shows, for such political discursive struggles across highly structured and interlocked symbolic sets, recognition, representation, and symbolic representation are decisive.228 Dominating powers, however, are themselves candidates for exclusion, in terms of the very anti-civil categories they employ to justify the subordination

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and exclusion of others. Regressive universalism presents a case in point because it undermines the emancipatory potential of liberal democracy by culturalizing its civil metalanguage. It is in that sense that the backlash against multiculturalism can be understood as resistance to the representation of diversity at the heart of the liberal democratic idiom and to the separation of the political from the Western concept of the nation-state and its imaginary of a homogenous national culture. Perhaps, this resistance to diversity and the fear of cultural and moral pluralism can also be historicized as resisting liberalism’s transition from mass democracy to multicultural and/or postnational forms of liberal democracy. It may therefore be considered analytically homologous to the fear of liberal political elites of unruly and morally deficient underclasses gaining their political voices at the beginning of the twentieth century. The antithesis to this new stage of political emancipation is twofold. It consists, firstly, in a relapse into the national(istic) idiom and a culturally bounded version of liberal democracy and, secondly, in ultimately misguided ideas of cultural defense that amount to separatist forms of pluralism and fortified, antagonistic and potentially belligerent identities on all sides; between immigrant groups and the collective identities of Europe’s indigenous groups but also between different immigrant groups. The political backlash against multiculturalism, I therefore argue, does not only seem to target the normative core of multiculturalism. Policies of cultural recognition and accommodation—as multiculturalism itself—can be seen as the least established and thus the weakest point of entry for a much more general set of anti-democratic, anti-politic, and potentially illiberal sentiments that increasingly gain voice through populist parties across Europe. The backlash against multiculturalism thus constitutes nothing less than a backlash against the emancipatory core of liberal democracy itself. This allows for at least two conclusions regarding the current state of political liberalism in Europe: Either liberalism has itself been culturally impregnated, particularly so due to its association with European nationalism. Liberal democracy therefore not only relies on specific historic constellations for its success—the argument made by Winkler in the chapter’s beginning—but has always been affirming distinct national cultures and, in consequence, was always particularistic rather than universal in nature. Or, secondly, liberalism suffers from a fundamental architectural weakness which renders liberal democracy unable to adequately address problems of accommodation arising in societies characterized by pervasive

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pluralism. Arguments such as Winkler’s persist in both crudely ethnonational and ever more refined versions of value difference and can be classed—following the above typology—as examples of regressive liberal universalism. I believe that they not only are wrong and politically divisive but, more importantly, suffer from a misunderstanding regarding the meaning of liberal within liberal democracy. I therefore negate the correctness of the first of the above conclusions. It is such reasoning— not cultural pluralism or terrorist ideologies—that currently presents the greatest threat to European democracy. Consequently, I firstly argue against conceptions of liberalism that aim to cleanse questions of culture from politics and thus invisibilize problems of cultural accommodation within a sanitized discourse of individual rights. This approach misconceives the status of cultural claims as merely another set of elective affinities or else unreflective and wholly contingent cultural artifacts. Hence, cultural claims are thought to lose their persuasiveness, and indeed relevance, at the reflective level. On the contrary, such claims are neither politically irrelevant nor can they be permanently relegated to the private sphere but should be incorporated into liberal reasoning. Secondly, conceptualizing resistance to diversity merely as cases of culturally impregnated or local versions of the liberal state precludes the probing into the foundations of liberalism at a more fundamental level. The architecture of liberalism, I claim, is not so much particularistic in the sense of favoring one culture over another but suffers from a more general conceptual inability to incorporate “culture per se.” To put it differently, liberal theory has not yet developed an adequate mechanism to balance and adjudicate potentially adverse claims arising from peoples’ thick ethical concepts. Liberalism devoid of nationalism (or any other overarching ideology) has no adequate means for constructing its own basis of political inclusion able to provide sufficiently thick “substitute identities,” neutralize conflict between peoples’ thick ethical concepts, and reliably foster political inclusion and social cohesion. Simply put, the question left unanswered is that of belonging beyond self-interest. Liberal constitutionalism offers no political answer to that questions other than the highly abstract and, in terms of practice, vacuous substitute of constitutional patriotism.229 As I argued in Chapter 3, this also illustrates the instability of post-national networks of civil society and their limits in terms of the level of mutual commitment and solidarity they are able to foster. The same weakness, however, is written into the conceptual matrix of liberal democracy and

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is best described as the necessarily bounded character of the liberal imagination.230 Liberal democracy without the idea of the nation-state lacks a durable ideological foundation that would enable it to compete on par with thicker ideologies, religious radicalism, or populist travesties. If the above is correct, a number of consequences arise and political theorists would be called on—as James Tully, Alessandro Ferrara, and others have pointed out—to (1) re-examine the deep structure of liberal constitutionalism and, in case of the EU, the particular way in which culture has been inscribed into its fundamental treaties231 ; (2) to re-evaluate liberal constitutional myths such as that of a founding moment, or a single lawgiver, or in fact auxiliary hypothetical constructions such as that of an original consensus; and (3) to refocus attention on liberal democracy’s emancipatory potential, not from the illegitimate clutches of culture but on the potential for internal reform. This entails the rejection of any essentialization of cultural or ethnic groups as illiberal, backward, irrational, or otherwise intrinsically deficient and, consequently, the necessity to resist the identification of cultural and moral conflict. The bête noire of cultural pluralism is not moral relativism. Neither do the cultural claims made by immigrants challenge the political-legal foundations of European democracies. As Jacob T. Levy shows, these claims overwhelmingly pertain to the protection of immigrants’ negative liberties and the symbolic representation of diversity. The “muscular” liberalism advocated by mainstream politicians across Europe precisely targets immigrants’ negative liberties and therefore not only aims to limit their exercise by a number of barriers and constraints not equally present for other groups but also limits the scope of choices at the disposal of certain groups of individuals. It therefore encroaches—at least symbolically—on the sovereignty of the individual which constitutes one of the most important building blocks and sources of the legitimacy of liberal democratic rule. As I argued in Chapter 2, pluralism in today’s Europe denotes a multiethnic, multicultural, and structurally differentiated society with multiple publics and a fragmented and inconsistently institutionalized sphere of civil society. The task of maintaining pluralism in European liberal democracies consequently no longer consists in the mere balancing of relatively stable interest groups within an ethnically, culturally, and otherwise homogenous nation-state. Nor can the homogenous nationstate or for that matter a union of homogenous nation-states serve as an emancipatory ideal.

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Chapter 4 explored the way in which regimes of spatial mobility pertaining to migration—but also citizenship regimes themselves—are becoming increasingly stratified. Again, the crucial point here is not that stratification exists within these kinds of regimes but that certain strata are becoming increasingly cemented and impenetrable. They form, as I put it, “absolute categories” in which “human beings that find themselves permanently excluded from any legal-administrative avenue to the attainment of full citizenship but, more importantly, also from the full protection of their human rights within Europe.” The strong symbolic boundaries against non-European refugees that the EU’s self-centered identity discourse helped to produce therefore not only resulted in strong external boundaries but also had strong divisive impacts on the inside in terms of alienating long-standing citizens of immigrant origin. The Europeanization of citizenship and the emancipation of citizenship from the nation-state are thus being thwarted by the simultaneous, regressive drive toward the culturalization of belonging. Once again, if we put emphasis on historic continuities, there is perhaps analytical value in conceptualizing this culturalization of belonging as a further translocation of colonial hierarchies into the heart of Europe itself. In drawing further analogies with colonial-type terminology, one might thus argue that the new type of postcolonial évolué is the assimilated, non-European migrant who has relinquished all previous affinities, religious beliefs, and visions of the good life, especially where they come into conflict (legally, morally, aesthetically, or otherwise) with those of the non-immigrant population. In a structural sense, the strong external boundaries and the renewed focus on cultural assimilation even increasingly trump intra-EU solidarity between member states, particularly so in terms of a joint migration policy and a EU-wide quota system. Finally, to reject liberalism because of its conceptual problems is not only uncalled for but also beside the point. The perhaps paradox conclusion to be drawn is precisely this weakness that turns liberal democracy into the most potent form of political organization under conditions of pervasive pluralism. As already pointed out in the end of Chapter 2, liberal democracy strives to maintain social cohesion not by committing its citizens to particular, substantial versions of the good life, but by regulating conflicting visions thereof by principled, procedural rules such as legal codes. At the same time, the real basis of political inclusion is only inadequately—if at all—captured by conceptual constructions such as that of constitutional patriotism. Rather, they are governed by

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people’s thick ethical concepts. These concepts are not only characterized by an unwieldy singularity in meaning but they are also ineliminably tied to practice. Allegiance to the liberal democratic state—contrary to nationalist versions of patriotism—does not and cannot trump all other allegiances nor override people’s thick ethical concepts. In that sense, the liberal state—so to speak—can only take second rather than first place vis-s-vis citizen’s own affiliations and visions of life.232 Under conditions of pervasive pluralism, a principled liberalism of rights must therefore be augmented by a pragmatic form of liberalism in order to provide a potent alternative vision to the neo-nationalist, exclusionary imaginary of populist discourses. Liberal democracy should thus resist both the temptation to identify particular historical traditions, ethical practices, religious beliefs, or moral values with liberalism itself and the drive for rationalist ethics in which the ideal of public reason serves to displace politics and transcend the actualities of diverse cultures and traditions. The multiculturalism of fear recognizes this ethical indeterminacy of liberal democracy as the necessary preconditions for its political success. The actual content of liberal politics is not given and cannot be rationally deducted from liberal principles themselves. The formation of a positive vision of liberal negativity—that is of a well-defined positive content of negative freedom—is best served by opening up social space for as many different choices as possible. Multiculturalism and pervasive cultural pluralism, rather than conflicting with the values of liberal democracy, actually expand the liberal universe by increasing the number of positives available to individuals’ life plans. The regressive universalism of assimilatory forms of liberalism thus manifests, to use Alexander’s words, a sharp, anti-civil narrowing of “the range of primordial identities that are available for expressing civil competence in a positively evaluated way.”233 Liberal assimilationism is, therefore, itself best conceptualized as a form of cultural differentialism. Although seemingly depoliticized, it is not only functionally comparable to biologically or ethnically based forms of racism but, in fact, figures as racism’s whitewashed discursive double. As I argued above, the racial threat of colonialism has been transformed into the cultural threat of immigration. In this sense, the shift of European liberal democracies toward newly assimilatory notions of integration parallels imperial mode of thought, colonial stereotypes, and modernizing myths that claim legitimacy based on the idea of a civilizing mission in terms of controlling (dominating) or neutralizing (liquidating) ethnic and cultural difference.

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At the same time, liberal democracy must resist the tendency to commodify the status and the attainment of citizenship and resolutely oppose the moralization of individual liberty. Insightful and important critiques of neo-liberalism have pointed to functional analogies between post-multicultural versions of muscular liberalism and neoliberal governmentality, since in both “control through freedom” serves as primary mode of control over citizens.234 In the present context, this intersection between neoliberal forms of governmentality, the culturalization of belonging, the moralization of freedom, and the securitization of migration, however, cannot be explored further.

Notes 1. Hannah Arendt: Race-Thinking before Racism. In: The Review of Politics, Vol. 6, No. 1 (January 1944), pp. 36–73. 2. The core of these passages is found in Part 2, Chap. 7, Section I: “The Phantom World of the Dark Continent” and Chap. 9, Section II: “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man” and does not need to be repeated here. For illustrative rather than systematic purposes consider: “What made them [black Africans] different from other human beings was not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality – compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike. They were, as it were, ‘natural’ human being who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.” In “Introduction into Politics,” it is clear that Arendt tries to make a systematic point when stating: “Those worldless human beings left on earth would have little more in common with us than those isolated tribes who were vegetating their lives away when first discovered on new continents by European explorers, tribes that the Europeans then either drew into the human world or eradicated without ever being aware that they too were human beings. In other words, human beings in the true sense of the term can exist only where there is a world, and there can be a world in the true sense of the term only where the plurality of the human race is more than a simple multiplication of a single species.” Hannah Arendt: Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1968, p. 192; Hannah Arendt: Introduction into Politics. In: The Promise of Politics, ed. and with an introd. by Jerome

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Kohn. New York: Schocken Books, 2005, p. 176. See also Tony Barta: On Pain of Extinction: Laws of Nature and History in Darwin, Marx and Arendt. In: Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide, ed. by Richard H. King and Dan Stone. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007, pp. 87–108. Conrad’s novella, first published as a three-part serial in the February, March, and April 1899 issues of Edinburgh-based Blackwood’s Magazine, received little critical acclaim during his lifetime but, according to literary scholar Harold Bloom, by the 1960s was widely read throughout US colleges and high schools. For a critique of the damaging stereotypes of Africans transported in Heart of Darkness, see Chinua Achebe’s Chancellor’s Lecture given at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in February 1975 published as: An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’. In: Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–1987 . London. Heinemann, 1988. See Jimmy Casas Clausen: Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism. In: Political Theory, Vol. 38, No. 3 (June 2010), pp. 394–423, 395. Hannah Arendt: Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1968, pp. 190, 192, 291. Casas Clausen: Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism, p. 405. Arendt, however, clearly sympathizes with the Boers’ “plight”: “Boer racism, unlike the other brands, has a touch of authenticity and, so to speak, of innocence. […] It was and remains a desperate reaction to desperate living conditions which was inarticulate and inconsequential as long as it was left alone.” Ibid., p. 196. Jimmy Casas Clausen: Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism, pp. 400–401, 404. Clausen not only draws attention to the invention by European anthropologists and social theorists (and two-century-long reiteration) of the Khoikhoi’s and San’s primordial stagnation in their “Paleolithic forager status” (n. 37) but importantly contextualizes Arendt’s portrayal of the Boer-Hottentot relationship using J. M. Coetzee’s study of idleness in accounts of Cape life. Coetzee shows how the alleged indolence of Hottentots was conceptualized in proto-ethnographic accounts of travel writers as a “betrayal of [their] humanity”: “What is common to these charges is that they mark the Hottentots as underdeveloped – underdeveloped not only by the standard of the European but by the standard of Man.” See J. M. Coetzee: Idleness in South Africa. In: White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 21, 22. See, for example, Casas Clausen: Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism; Anne Norton: Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt. In: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. by Bonnie Honig. University Park: Pennsylvania State University,

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10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

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1995, pp. 247–261; Dan Stone: White Men with Low Moral Standards? German Anthropology and the Herero Genocide. In: Colonialism and Genocide, ed. by A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone. London and New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 181–194; Patricia Owens: Racism in the Theory Canon: Hannah Arendt and ‘the One Great Crime in Which America Was Never Involved’. In: Millennium, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2017), pp. 403– 424; and Ayten Gündo˘gdu: Arendt on Culture and Imperialism. In: Political Theory, Vol. 39, No. 5 (October 2011), pp. 661–667. A. Dirk Moses: Das römische Gespräch in a New Key: Hannah Arendt, Genocide, and the Defense of Republican Civilization. In: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 85, No. 4 (December 2013), pp. 867–913, 907– 908. This point about the narrative in Heart of Darkness is made by Cedric T. Watts in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ed. and with an introd. by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009, p. 89. Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski: Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz. In: Central European History, Vol. 42, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 279– 300, 280; and A. Dirk Moses: Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust. In: Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 36, No. 4 (2002), pp. 7–36, 34. Historians named by Gerwarth and Malinowski include Paul Gilroy, Richard H. King, Mark Levene, Sven Lindquist, Benjamin Madley, Dan Stone and Enzo Traverso. Hannah Arendt: Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1968, pp. 196, 392, italics in the original. The term refers to an implicit temporal (or simply hierarchical) structure that sees Europe (or the West) as the original and the advanced. See Johannes Fabian: Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Rise of Christian Europe. In: The Listener, LXX (November 28, 1963), p. 5; reprinted as The Rise of Christian Europe. London: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965. See also Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Past and Present: History and Sociology. In: Past and Present, Vol. 42, No. 1 (February 1969), pp. 3–17, 6. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider: East Meets West: Europe and Its Others. In: Human Rights and Memory. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 2010, pp. 122–141; and Antony Anghie: Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 245. See also Diane Otto: Rethinking the “Universality” of Human Rights Law. In: Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Vol. 29 (1997), pp. 1–46.

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17. The German original reads: “In allen anderen Staaten, denen die EU den Kandidatenstatus verliehen hat, gibt es, wenn auch in unterschiedlichem Maß, historische Voraussetzungen für ein europäisches “Wir-Gefühl”. Keiner dieser Staaten würde als Mitglied der EU die Werte der westlichen Demokratie infrage stellen. […] Von der großen Masse der Bevölkerung Anatoliens kann man das nicht sagen. […] Historische Prägungen sind nicht auswechselbar; Identitäten lassen sich nicht verordnen.” Heinrich August Winkler: Wir erweitern uns zu Tode [We are enlarging ourselves to death]. In: Die Zeit, 46/2002. 18. See Carsten Stahn: Responsibility to Protect: Political Rhetoric or Emerging Legal Norm? In: The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 101, No. 1 (January 2007), pp. 99–120; Jacinta O’Hagan: The Responsibility to Protect: A Western Idea? In: Theorizing the Responsibility to Protect, ed. by Ramesh Thakur and William Maley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 285–304; Siddharth Mallavarapu: Colonialism and the Responsibility to Protect. In: Theorizing the Responsibility to Protect, ed. by Ramesh Thakur and William Maley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 305–322; and Michael W. Doyle: The Politics of Global Humanitarianism: R2P Before and After Libya. In: The Oxford Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect, ed. by Alex J. Bellamy and Tim Dunne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 673–691. 19. A. Dirk Moses: Das römische Gespräch, p. 869. 20. This “functional” importance of the figure of the refugee for antiestablishment and anti-mainstream political party campaigning can already be observed during the early 1990. 21. See Rodgers Brubaker: The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2001), pp. 531–548; and The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices, ed. by Steven Vertovec and Susanne Wessendorf. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010. For a dissenting voice, see Gary Younge: The Multiculturalism the European Right Fears So Much Is a Fiction—It Never Existed. In: The Guardian, March 14, 2011. 22. Merkel hält Multikulti für absolut gescheitert. In: Die Welt, October 16, 2010, https://www.welt.de/videos/politik_original/video1034 0788/Merkel-haelt-Multikulti-fuer-absolut-gescheitert.html; Full transcript, David Cameron, Speech on radicalisation and Islamic extremism, Munich, 5 February 2011. In: New Statesman, February 5, 2011, https://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/02/terror ism-islam-ideology; Sarkozy estime que le multiculturalisme est un «échec». In: La Libération, February 11, 2011, https://www.libera

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23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

tion.fr/france/2011/02/11/sarkozy-estime-que-le-multiculturalismeest-un-echec_714298. Rodgers Brubaker: The Return of Assimilation, p. 533. The date is decisive here since in post-9/11 discourse there is a marked shift toward politicizing migrants’ religious and cultural affiliations and presuming that “the adoption of certain specific cultural and political values and practices could eliminate the security threat, provided that [migrants’] innate and indigenous parallel values are discarded.” The threat of political Islam came to dominate the larger and more complex question of accommodating difference. See George Howard Joffé: The EU and the Mediterranean: Open Regionalism of Peripheral Dependence? In: European Union and New Regionalism: Regional Actors and Global Governance in a Post-Hegemonic Era, ed. by Mario Telò. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 255–275, direct quote at p. 264. See, for example, Mabel Berezin: Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Christian Joppke: The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy. In: British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 55, No. 2 (June 2004), pp. 237–257, 249. For a differentiation of types of multiculturalism see, among others, Steven Vertovec: Multi-Multiculturalisms. In: Multicultural Policies and the State, ed. by Marco Martiniello. Utrecht: ERCOMER, 1998, pp. 25–38; Stuart Hall: Conclusion: The Multicultural Question. In: Unsettled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglement, Transruption, ed. by Barnor Hesse. London: Zed Books, 2000, pp. 209–211; and Gerard Delanty: Community and Difference: Varieties of Multiculturalism. In: Community. London and New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 111–131. From the large body of commentary see Meltem Müftüler-Baç: Divergent Pathways: Turkey and the European Union: Re-thinking the Dynamics of Turkish-European Union Relations. Berlin and Toronto: Barbara Budrich, 2016. Rita Chin: The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 2–3. For this argument, see Catherine Dauvergne: The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Societies. New York: Cambridge University, 2016. Rita Chin: The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe, pp. 20–21. See, for example, the analysis in Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain: Riotous Citizens: Ethnic Conflict in Multicultural Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Arun Kundnani: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents: Left, Right and Liberal. In: European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2012),

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35. 36. 37.

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pp. 155–166, 157. On the emergence of the concept of community cohesion, see also Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain: Riotous Citizens, pp. 159–174. Eric J. Hobsbawn: Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914– 1991. London: Michael Joseph and New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. Anthony Smith has drawn up seven core propositions of the “nationalist doctrine” as follows: (1) Humanity is naturally divided into nations; (2) each nation has its peculiar character; (3) the source of all political power is the nation, the whole collectivity; (4) for freedom and self-realization, men must identify with a nation; (5) nations can only be fulfilled in their own states; (6) loyalty to the nation-state overrides other loyalties; (7) the primary condition of global freedom and harmony is the strengthening of the nation-state. See Anthony D. Smith: Theories of Nationalism. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1971, p. 21. Rodgers Brubaker: The Return of Assimilation, p. 536. Ibid., p. 532. Ibid., pp. 533, 536; Jonathan Laurence: The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 2. Laurence’s study suggests that what is commonly termed “multiculturalism” would, in fact, be better described as laissez-faire or benevolent negligence. For a similar argument to Brubaker’s, see also Anne Phillips and Sawitri Saharso: The Rights of Women and the Crisis of Multiculturalism. In: Ethnicities, Vol. 8, No. 3 (September 2008), pp. 291–301, esp. pp. 291–292. See, for example, Timothy Garton Ash: Islam in Europe. In: The New York Review of Books, Vol. 53, no. 15 (October 5, 2006); and Liz Fekete: Enlightened Fundamentalism? Immigration, Feminism and the Right. In: Race & Class, Vol. 48, No. 2 (2006), pp. 1–22. Ernest Gellner argued that “Enlightenment rationalist fundamentalism” was one of the three principal options—next to religious fundamentalism and relativism—available in the contemporary intellectual climate. By Enlightenment fundamentalism, Gellner meant the absolutizing not of substantive convictions but of procedural principles of knowledge and (Kantian) moral valuation—an absolutist, non-relativistic, trans-cultural scientific method codified by the European Enlightenment. A view, Gellner himself subscribes to and which might fall under Edward Said’s dictum of the “extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status” which ascribes to the not-yet enlightened and the Enlightenment’s Other the impossibility of self-representation. See Ernest Gellner: Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, esp. pp. 80–96; and Edward W. Said: Orientalism, with a new preface. New York: Penguin, 2003, p. 283.

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39. Anthony Heath and Neli Demireva: Has Multiculturalism Failed in Britain? In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2014), pp. 161– 180. 40. Cabinet Office: PM’s Speech at Munich Security Conference, February 5, 2011, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-atmunich-security-conference. 41. For the terminology, see Robert D. Putnam: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000, pp. 22–24. 42. Anthony Heath and Neli Demireva: Has Multiculturalism Failed in Britain, p. 177. See also David Cameron: PM’s Speech at Munich Security Conference, February 5, 2011, https://www.gov.uk/government/ speeches/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference. 43. Matthew Wright and Irene Bloemraad: Is There a Trade-off Between Multiculturalism and Socio-Political Integration? Policy Regimes and Immigrant Incorporation in Comparative Perspective. In: Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 10, No. 1 (March 2012), pp. 77–95, 88. 44. Ibid., pp. 87–88, 88, 89. 45. Other examples include Sayeeda Warsi, Shahid Malik and Sir Anwar Pervez in Britain; Rachida Dati, Rama Yade and Kader Arif in France; Souad Sbai and Ali Rashid Khalil in Italy; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ahmed Aboutaleb and Nebahat Albayrak in the Netherlands; or Cem Özdemir, Aydan Özo˘guz, Bassam Tibi and Navid Kermani in Germany. 46. Alana Lentin: Post-Race, Post Politics: The Paradoxical Rise of Culture After Multiculturalism. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 37, No. 18 (2014), pp. 1268–1285, 1270. 47. Ibid., italics in the original. 48. David Goodhart: Too Diverse? In: Prospect, No. 95 (February 2004). Goodhart is a former editor of Prospect magazine and advisory group member of the British think tank Demos. See also Goodhart: Britain’s Glue: The Case for Liberal Nationalism. In: The New Egalitarianism, ed. by Anthony Giddens and Patrick Diamond. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005, pp. 154–170. A similar ideal has been formulated in the US by David Hollinger. Hollinger, however, does not argue for a separation of culture from politics but for a reduced significance of ethnoracial distinctions in both political and cultural identity constructions in favor of a strengthened civic community. See Hollinger: Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books, 1995, rev. and updated edition 2000, esp. pp. 105–129. 49. Arun Kundnani: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents, p. 157. 50. Arun Kundnani: Islamism and the Roots of Liberal Rage. In: Race & Class, Vol. 50, No. 2 (October 2008), pp. 40–68.

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51. Alberto Spektorowski: The New Right: Ethno-Regionalism, EthnoPluralism and the Emergence of a Neo-fascist ‘Third Way’. In: Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2003), pp. 111–130; and Thijl Sunier: Domesticating Islam: Exploring Academic Knowledge Production on Islam and Muslims in European Societies. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 37, No. 6 (2014), pp. 1138–1155. For a contrasting exploration of the Third Way politics of the European far right and New Labour in the beginning of the 2000s, see Steve Bastow: A Neo-fascist Third Way: The Discourse of Ethno-Differentialist Revolutionary Nationalism. In: Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2002), pp. 351–368. 52. Spektorowski: The New Right, pp. 111–130. 53. Ibid. 54. Kenan Malik: The Failure of Multiculturalism: Community Versus Society in Europe. In: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 94, No. 2 (March/April 2015). 55. Ibid., pp. 21–22. For an extended argument, see Kenan Malik: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents: Rethinking Diversity After 9/11. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014. 56. Ibid., p. 29. Most recently, this assumption was mirrored by the German Federal Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maizière’s call for repealing dual citizenship because it constitutes “a serious impediment to integration”, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/innere-sic herheit-unionspolitiker-planen-abschaffung-der-doppelten-staatsbuerge rschaft-14380353.html. Such plans, as Imran Ayata rightly points out, suggest that the challenges of immigration could be solved by curtailing citizenship rights, while German sociologist Thomas Faist has argued that the German debates on dual citizenship have been characterized by their “principled ideological nature” with proponents of dual citizenship advancing “mainly moral arguments, while the opponents focused on expressive arguments, emphasizing the perspective of the state and thus loyalty of citizens to the state.” See Dual Citizenship in Europe: From Nationhood to Societal Integration, ed. by Thomas Faist. London and New York: Routledge, 2016, p. 195; and Imran Ayata: Antwort auf Augstein: Der Doppelpass ist kein Geschenk. Spiegel Online, August 8, 2016, https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/doppelte-staatsbue rgerschaft-doppelpass-ist-nur-ein-zwischenschritt-a-1106370.html. 57. Charles Taylor: The Collapse of Tolerance. In: The Guardian, September 17, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/sep/ 17/thecollapseoftolerance. 58. Ibrahim Kalin: Islamophobia and the Limits of Multiculturalism. In: Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century, ed. by John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 4.

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59. Jørgen Nielsen: Muslims in Western Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, pp. 154f. 60. Alternatively see Ulf Hedetoft: Multiculturalism: Symptom, Cause or Solution? In: Challenging Multiculturalism: European Models of Diversity, ed. by Raymond Taras. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, pp. 319–334; Enzo Colombo: Multiculturalisms: An Overview of Multicultural Debates in Western Societies. In: Current Sociology, Vol. 63 (2015), pp. 800–824. 61. Martina Wasmer: Public Debate and Public Opinion on Multiculturalism in Germany. In: Challenging Multiculturalism: European Models of Diversity, ed. by Raymond Taras. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, pp. 163–189. 62. David Goodhart: Too Diverse? In: Prospect, No. 95 (February 2004). 63. Ibid. 64. Arun Kundnani: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents, p. 159. 65. Ibid. 66. See Pierre-André Taguieff: The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and Its Doubles [Orig. La force du préjugé: Essai sur le racism et ses doubles ]. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001; and Les métamorphoses idéologique du racism et la crise de l’anti-racisme. In: Face au racisme, Tome II: Analyses, hypothéses, perspectives, ed. by Pierre-André Taguieff. Paris: La Découverte, 1991, esp. pp. 35–36. 67. See, for example, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein: Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso, 1991; and Verena Stolcke: Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe. In: Current Anthropology, Vol. 36, No. 1 (February 1995), pp. 1–24, both cited in Arun Kundnani: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents, p. 160. 68. Paul Collier: Exodus: Immigration and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. 69. Ibid., direct quotes at pp. 64–68, my italics. 70. Arun Kundnani: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents, p. 166. 71. Ibid., 160–161. Although Kundnani’s focus is on Britain, his argument can be extended to other European countries. 72. Ibrahim Kalin: Islamophobia and the Limits of Multiculturalism, p. 6; see also Tariq Modood: Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. 73. Ibid., p. 163; see also Ibrahim Kalin: Islamophobia and the Limits of Multiculturalism, pp. 5–6. For a case study see Kathleen D. Hall: You Can’t Be Religious and Be Westernized. In: Lives in Translation: Sikh Youth as British Citizens. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, pp. 148–169. 74. The most influential theory of multiculturalism has been developed by Canadian political philosopher Will Kymlicka. See his Liberalism,

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77. 78.

79. 80.

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Community, and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989; Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; and Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; and Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. See, for example, Bernard Yack: Multiculturalism and the Political Theorists. In: European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2002), pp. 107–119. Ilan Peleg: Democratizing the Hegemonic State: Political Transformation in the Age of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 28–29. For general overviews of the debate on multiculturalism see, for example, Will Kymlicka: Multiculturalism. In: Contemporary Politics Philosophy: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 327–376; Tariq Modood: Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007; Ali Rattansi: Multiculturalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; George Crowder: Theories of Multiculturalism: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013; as well as the essay collections Liberalism, Multiculturalism and Toleration, ed. by John Horton. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993; Multiculturalism, Identity, and Rights, ed. by Bruce Haddock and Peter Sutch. London and New York: Routledge, 2003; and Multiculturalism and Political Theory, ed. by Anthony Simon Laden and David Owen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Brian Barry: Liberalism and Multiculturalism. In: Ethical Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 1 (April 1997), pp. 3–11, 11. Brian Barry: Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 21. On Barry’s position see also Multiculturalism Reconsidered: Culture and Equality and Its Critics, ed. by Paul Kelly. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Critically see also Jacob T. Levy: Liberal Jacobinism. In: Ethics, Vol. 114, No. 2 (January 2004), pp. 318–336. Todd Gitlin: The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995, pp. 236–237. As pointed out above, taking recourse to the European genealogy of core ethical and political values of the Enlightenment is often not viewed as a case of cultural particularism because these values are usually held by liberal theorists to be universally justifiable. As Daniel Bell notes, Brian Barry, for example, has upheld the ideal of a universally valid liberal theory in his book Justice as Impartiality while appearing “distinctly uninterested in learning anything worthwhile from non-Western political traditions.” Bell’s work, on the contrary, has also focused on persuasive

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East Asian arguments for cultural particularism vis-à-vis liberal universalism. See Daniel Bell: Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, esp. Chap. 3; and Bell: Communitarianism. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta (Summer 2016 Edition), https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism/. 81. I discuss different conceptions of citizenship and their relevance for social cohesion in Chapter 2. 82. Brian Barry: Culture and Equality, pp. 77–81. For a similar, neoRawlsian approach, see Yael Tamir: Liberal Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Tamir endorses a form of liberal nationalism based on voluntary association and individual selfauthorship, but one which is embedded “in a particular social and cultural environment that offers … evaluative criteria.” However, if obligation is viewed as a matter of free, rational choice, Ralph Gaebler notes in his review of Tamir’s book, “why should the moral agent feel bound to his state, rather than whichever one has the fairest government?” Nationalism requires the “surrender of individual identity, or at least the equation of individual identity with that of the cultural group to which one belongs,” while “[t]ruly liberal nationalism does not supply a rationale for any special political or cultural entity.” Gaebler thus rightly points out that liberal nationalism is an oxymoron in that it must presuppose the existence of prior associative obligations. See Ralph F. Gaebler: Is Liberal Nationalism an Oxymoron. In: Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Fall 1995), pp. 283– 293, direct quote at p. 293. Rather than being linked with illiberal, reactionary, and potentially authoritarian forms of political organization, David Miller argued that nationalism could not only be normatively and morally defended but was in fact compatible with liberalism and social democracy. National identities, according to Miller, are valid sources of personal identity rather than purely imagined ones or instruments of manipulation, and since nations are ethical communities “we owe special obligations to those we regard as our compatriots” and it is thus legitimate “to create institutions such as the welfare state that provide goods and services only to fellow nationals. This claim directly challenges liberal doctrines of human rights and cosmopolitan individualism by calling into question the proposition of ‘equal concern and respect for every human being’ and the universality of moral obligations. Equally and despite the multi-ethnic social reality in almost all contemporary states, nations have a valid claim to self-determination in order to decide all matters ‘which primarily concern their own community’ – whether in the traditional

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85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

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form of a sovereign state or through some other arrangement.” In particular, the redistributive policies of the welfare state, Miller argues, depend on considerable levels of social solidarity and it is “the nation-state as an institution that can make such solidarity politically effective.” See David Miller: On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, direct quote at p. 92; and, summarizing the main arguments of the former, his essay with the same title in Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 2, No. 3 (November 1996), pp. 409–421, direct quotes at pp. 410–411. Brian Barry: Culture and Equality, pp. 83, 87–88. Alessandro Ferrara: The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, direct quote at p. 16. Hyperpluralism as a social phenomenon markedly differs from how standard liberal theory conceptualizes society and is defined by Ferrara as a condition “where massive immigration from all regions of the world” has shifted mainstream democratic culture “from assimilationist ideals – turning immigrants into members of the hegemonic culture – into allowing for a more flexible pattern of integration, which includes multicultural provisions of diverse scope” and thus given rise to “the presence on the ground of cultural differences that exceed the range of traditions that Rawls sought to reconcile within Political Liberalism, and of comprehensive conceptions that are only partially reasonable, display an only partial acceptance of the burdens of judgement or make their adherents endorse only a subset of the constitutional essentials.” Under the conditions of hyperpluralism, “public reason often might idle in utter impotence for lack of a sufficiently thick layer of ‘shared premises’.” Ibid., pp. 88, 100–101. Ibid., p. 142, my italics. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 160. James Tully: Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 8–9. Ibid. See the concise summary in Alessandro Ferrara: The Democratic Horizon, pp. 158–159, italics in the original. Ibid. Ibid. Tully: Strange Multiplicity, pp. 69–70. John Rawls: Political Liberalism (The John Dewey Essays in Philosophy, No. 4). New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Alessandro Ferrara: The Democratic Horizon, pp. 161–162. Ibid., p. 156. See Mathias Thaler: Book Review of ‘The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism’. In: Political Theory,

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98.

99. 100.

101. 102.

103.

104.

Vol. 44, No. 3 (June 2016), pp. 431–437. Similar tendencies to narrow down the whole of Western Enlightenment to a progressive convergence on liberalism can also be observed within the study of the history of ideas. See my ‘The Most Powerful of Men’. In: Soziopolis, February 17, 2016, https://www.soziopolis.de/lesen/buecher/artikel/the-most-pow erful-of-men/. Most prominently in the line of fire were Charles Taylor: Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992; Will Kymlicka: Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; and Bhikhu C. Parekh: Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, but also Iris Marion Young: Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Christian Joppke: The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State, pp. 249, 254. See, for example, Yasemin Nuho˘glu Soysal: Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994; Yasemin Nuho˘glu Soysal: Towards a Postnational Model of Membership. In: The Citizenship Debates: A Reader, ed. by Gershon Shafir. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 189–220; and Damian Tambini: Post-national Citizenship. In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (March 2001), pp. 195–217. Brian Barry: Culture and Equality, p. 11. This was largely due to both countries’ colonial history. Commonwealth citizens in the UK, for example, essentially enjoyed the same civic rights as British citizens such as the right to vote in local, national, and European elections, to stand for elections to the House of Commons or hold public office. See Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni, and Florence Passy: Beyond the Nation-State? National and Postnational Claims Making. In: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 76– 77 and 90–91. For an analytical anatomy of populist politics, see Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? ed. by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; and Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser: Populism. In: The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. by Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 493–512.

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105. See Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser: The Responses of Populism to Dahl’s Democratic Dilemmas. In: Political Studies, Vol. 62, No. 3 (October 2014), pp. 470–487. 106. For a discussion of the architectural instabilities of liberal democracy, see Paul W. Kahn: Putting Liberalism in its Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 113–142. For an insightful analysis of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, see Noga Wolff: Exploiting Nationalism in Order to Repudiate Democracy: The Case of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In: Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (April 2015), pp. 86–108. 107. Paul W. Kahn: Putting Liberalism in Its Place, p. 114. 108. Ibid., p. 116. For an exposition of the crucial role of participatory and deliberative mechanisms for this task, see Claudia Chwalisz: The Populist Signal: Why Politics and Democracy Need to Change. New York and London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 109. Will Kymlicka calls such rights “group-differentiated rights” while Alison Dundes Renteln argues that cultural rights should be distinguished from group rights or collective rights because there is “no reason why membership in a group or only particular generation should have any bearing whatsoever on the question of who is entitled to exercise cultural rights.” See Will Kymlicka: Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; and Alison Dundes Renteln: The Cultural Defense. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 212, 214. 110. In the introduction to his Culture and Equality, Barry writes that in his “naively rationalistic way, I used to believe that multiculturalism was bound sooner or later to sink under the weight of its intellectual weaknesses and that I would therefore be better employed in writing about other topics.” See Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 6. 111. Brian Barry: Liberalism and Multiculturalism, p. 6. 112. See Brian Barry: Liberalism and Multiculturalism, pp. 3–14, 5–6. 113. The idea of public reason as an impartial method of moral and political justification has been criticized, for example, by Benhabib who argues that public reason, for example in Rawls’s theory, “is best viewed not as a process of reasoning among citizens, but more as a regulative principle, imposing certain standards upon how individuals, institutions, and agencies ought to reason about public matters. The standards of public reason are set by a political conception of liberalism.” Benhabib also faults Barry’s blanket dismissal of multiculturalism as a case of bad sociology since the “global emergence of the politics of identity/difference, of which multiculturalism is but a subset, cannot be dismissed as if it reflected merely

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114.

115.

116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121.

122.

123. 124.

the inventions and faulty reasoning of elites.” See Seyla Benhabib: The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 108 and 133, italics in the original. See, for example, Albert O. Hirschman: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970; and Marla Brettschneider: Democratic Theorizing from the Margins. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002, pp. 136–172. Alison Dundes Renteln: The Cultural Defense. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 219. A similar argument is made by Will Kymlicka in Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 44. See also the discussion in Madhavi Sunder: Cultural Dissent. In: Stanford Law Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (December 2001), pp. 495–567, who argues for the US that “[u]nder current law, cultural dissenters have either a right to culture (with no right to contest cultural meaning) or a right to equality (with no right to cultural membership), but not to both.” In consequence, current law “stuck in a nineteenth century understanding of culture as fixed and stable” leads to the reestablishment of traditional cultural boundaries. This point is made by Seyla Benhabib: The Claims of Culture, pp. 21, 106. Ibid., 120–121. See Gitlin quoted above. See Harald Bluhm: Three Strategies for Criticizing Liberalism and Their Continued Relevance. In: Reorienting the Political: Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-Speaking World, ed. by Carl K. Y. Shaw and Kai Marchal. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016, pp. 17–36, 23–24. Ibid., p. 24. See Robert Bellah et al.: Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, pp. 73ff. It seems questionable whether in the version of liberalism Barry defended there could ever be genuine communities who could also be justified by public reason. For this type of liberal political philosophy, irrespective of actual criticism directed to multiculturalism, see the work of John Rawls, Brian Barry, Ronald Dworkin or Thomas Nagel among others. Brian Barry: Culture and Equality, p. 135. A particularly fitting example is Marine Le Pen’s 2014 announcement that “school cafeterias would no longer serve non-pork substitution meals to children living in towns won by FN [Front National] candidates” because there was “no reason for religion to enter the public sphere.” See Gavan Titley: Pork Is the Latest Front in Europe’s Culture Wars—The Far Right Is Fixated on Pork and Is Using It as an Excuse

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125.

126. 127. 128.

129.

130. 131.

132.

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to Target Yet Another Aspect of Muslim Life. In: The Guardian, April 14, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/ apr/15/le-pen-pig-whistle-politics. Samuel Scheffler: Immigration and the Significance of Culture. In: Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Spring 2007), pp. 93–125, direct quotes at pp. 93–94. Ibid., p. 94. Ali Rattansi: Multiculturalism: A Very Short Introduction, pp. 143–147. Stefan Borg and Thomas Diez: Postmodern EU? Integration Between Alternative Horizons and Territorial Angst. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1 (January 2016), pp. 136–151, 142. Robert Brasillach, was “a sentimental romantic who considered politics a form of aesthetics,” described National Socialism as “the poetry of the twentieth century,” considered himself a “moderate” anti-Semite and argued for a “reasonable antisemitism” which, according to Alice Kaplan, was “cruelty clothed in the rhetoric of moderation.” He became editor of the French fascist magazine Je suis partout and, after the liberation of France, was tried for treason and collaborating with NaziGermany. His sentencing to death was famously protested by Jean Anouilh, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Valéry, among others. See The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, pp. 716–717; and Alice Kaplan: The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, direct quote at p. 24. Slavoj Žižek: Liberal Multiculturalism Masks an Old Barbarism with a Human Face. In: The Guardian, October, 3, 2010. The fear of barbarians, Tzvetan Todorow argues, “is what risks making us barbarian” and may lead us to “commit a worse evil than that which we initially feared.” See his The Fear of Barbarians [Orig. La peur des barbares ]. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010, p. 6. From the 1950s onward, Europeans tended to be somewhat unconcerned with the threat of Soviet communism, and Maurice Duverger, for example, opinioned in the French weekly L’Express in March 1964 that Communism was no longer a threat but there was “only one immediate danger for Europe, and that is the American civilization,” especially in the western part of divided postwar Germany attention “did not need to be diverted away from politics and towards producing and consuming: it moved wholeheartedly and single-mindedly in that direction.” See Karl Loewenstein: The Union of Western Europe: Illusion and Reality. In: Columbia Law Review, Vol. 52, No. 2 (February 1952), pp. 209– 240, 230–233; and, containing the quote from Duverger, Tony Judt:

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Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin Books, 2005, pp. 275, 353, italics in the original. 133. Giandomenico Majone: Rethinking the Union of Europe Post-Crisis: Has Integration Gone Too Far? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 58–59. 134. On the negative perceptions of the benefits of European integration, see the extensive 2012 Pew Research Center survey European Unity on the Rocks, Greeks and Germans at Polar Opposites at https://www.pewglo bal.org/2012/05/29/european-unity-on-the-rocks/. According to an Infratest dimap exit poll at German regional elections in the federal state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania in September 2016, an overwhelming majority of voters across all political parties—with the notable exception of Die Grünen (The Greens)—thought that the number of refugees should be limited while 47% of all voters agreed with the statement “The number of refugees scares me”; in percent: Alternative für Deutschland (AfD): 100, Christian Democrats (CDU): 92, Social Democrats (SPD): 83, The Left (Die Linke): 72, Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen): 39. A majority of AfD (76%) and Left (52%) voters were also dissatisfied with the general functioning of democracy. See https://wahl.tagesschau.de/ wahlen/2016-09-04-LT-DE-MV/umfrage-fluechtlingspolitik.shtml. 135. The key idea is that older formulas for making sense of international geopolitics no longer adequately capture the changed global circumstances since it is no longer possible to readily use differentiating concepts such as East/West, North/South, and Authoritarian/Democratic. Instead, countries are distinguished by Montesquieu’ian social passions structuring social life and dominating the decisions—not of everyone and all activities—but of influential social and governing minorities. See Dominique Moïsi: The Clash of Emotions. In: Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007; and The Geopolitics of Emotions: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope Are Reshaping the World. New York: Doubleday, 2009. Moïsi’s and Todorov’s emphasis on the geopolitical importance of emotions in terms of large-scale, geographically distributed emotional dispositions can be seen as the recognition on a global level that collective identities are increasingly becoming a question of emotional, rather than territorial space as suggested in Chapter 2, despite the fact that the social and economic capital of the majority of Europeans remains firmly tied to the nationstate. It is worth requoting Richard Sennett’s perceptive contention that these dynamics concern “the recovery in emotional terms of a life which cannot be recovered in political, demographic, and above all religious terms.” It might also be because of this emotionalization of politics that election results of populist, but especially anti-immigrant, parties seem

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136.

137.

138.

139.

140.

141.

142. 143.

144. 145.

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little affected by their de facto political performance. Richard Sennett: The Fall of Public Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992, p. 306. Tzvetan Todorov: The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations [orig. La peur des barbares ], trans. by Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010, pp. 4–5. See, for example, Matti Bunzl: Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe. In: American Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 4 (November 2005), pp. 499–508; and James Kirkup: Tory Chief Baroness Warsi Attacks ‘Bigotry’ Against Muslims. In: The Telegraph, January 19, 2011, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ religion/8270294/Tory-chief-Baroness-Warsi-attacks-bigotry-againstMuslims.html. Interestingly, popular Islamophobia and government measures have primarily targeted the dress code of Muslim women which, official rhetoric had it, was symbol of oppression and a political threat to the values of liberal democracy. Tzvetan Todorov: The Fear of Barbarians, p. 8; Haleh Afshar: The Politics of Fear: What Does It Mean to Those Who Are Otherized and Feared? In: Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (January 2013), pp. 9–27, direct quote at p. 23. See Eric J. Hobsbawn: Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 101– 119. See Juan J. Linz: Der religiöse Gebrauch der Politik und/oder der politische Gebrauch der Religion: Ersatz-Ideologie gegen Ersatz-Religion. In: Totalitarismus und Politische Religionen: Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs, ed. by Hans Maier, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996, pp. 129–154. See Linda G. Basch et al.: Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. London and New York: Routledge, 2003; and Cristina Szanton Blanc: Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992. Ibid., p. 34. Jacob T. Levy: The Multiculturalism of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Such form of liberalism has been advocated most prominently by former British Prime Minister David Cameron. See David Cameron: PM’s Speech at Munich Security Conference, February 5, 2011, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-at-mun ich-security-conference. Jacob T. Levy: The Multiculturalism of Fear, p. 5. Ibid., p. 11.

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146. Ibid., pp. 31, 33. As Levy points out, “the identification of a summum malum will not suffice to generate particular political rights and duties” and political theory, therefore, cannot “be built entirely on fearful grounds.” This, of course, is mitigated by the fact that the liberalism of fear does not aspire to construct a political theory from scratch but starts from the already well-defined historical context of Western liberal democracy which, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, necessarily presupposes a symbiotic relationship between the liberalism of fear and the liberalism of rights. Ibid., pp. 34, 37, italics in the original. 147. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 148. Judith Shklar: The Liberalism of Fear. In: Political Thought and Political Thinkers, ed. by Stanley Hoffmann. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998, p. 11 (originally published in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. by Nancy L. Rosenblum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 21–38). 149. Judith Shklar: Putting Cruelty First. In: Ordinary Vices. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. pp. 7–44, 37. As Shklar points out in Ordinary Vices, humiliation “is not a matter of hurting someone’s feelings. It is deliberate and persistent humiliation [especially when it is institutional], so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else.” As Shklar clarifies, this is to be distinguished from the self-torment of internalized Puritan morality as paradigmatically exemplified in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlett Letter first published by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields in 1850. 150. Jacob T. Levy: The Multiculturalism of Fear, p. 99. 151. Ibid., p. 104. As I argue in Chapter 3, the danger that other cultural communities are not treated positively as a welcome source of ideas for modifying one’s own way of life but instead as endangering both the integrity and cohesion of one’s own cultural group which leads to an apolitical logic of withdrawal and entrenchment is inherent in multicultural settings. 152. Ibid., p. 127, Table 5.1. 153. Ibid., p. 128. 154. Ibid., p. 130. 155. Ibid., p. 131, 132, italics in the original. 156. Another case of symbolic exclusion is the absence of guest workers in the German historiography of the postwar period mentioned above. See FN 54. 157. Jacob T. Levy: The Multiculturalism of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 222f. 158. See Chris Najdovski: Contested Identity: Macedonians in Contemporary Australia. MA Thesis, No. 305.891819094 NAJ, 30001004896058,

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159.

160. 161.

162.

163.

164. 165. 166.

167.

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Department of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Technology, October 1997, pp. 176–177, accessible online at https://vuir. vu.edu.au/17937/. Jacob T. Levy: The Multiculturalism of Fear, pp. 227, 228; and, as quote therein, Donald Horowitz: Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, pp. 223–224. Levy: Multiculturalism of Fear, pp. 228–229. Ibid. The Impact of values, moral psychology in general, symbolic manifestations, or ideas on politics are notoriously difficult to quantify. It is equally difficult to ascertain under what circumstances they take precedence over other factors in causing and constraining human behavior. See, for example, Murray Edelman: The Symbolic Uses of Politics (with a new afterword). Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985; Tobias Theiler: Political Symbolism and European Integration. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005; Michael C. Williams: Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007; and Strategies of Symbolic Nation-Building in South Eastern Europe, ed. by Pål Kolstø. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016. A particularly useful, recent collection on the causal agency of ideas is Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox (eds.): Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Norberto Bobbio: The Great Dichotomy: Public/Private. In: Democracy and Dictatorship: The Nature and Limits of State Power, transl. by Peter Kennealy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 1–21, 1. Jeff Weintraub: Public/Private: The Limitations of a Grand Dichotomy. In: The Responsive Community, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring 1997), pp. 13–24, p. 14, my italics. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid. Criticizing the cruelty of halal-slaughtering while remaining silent about the practice of industrial livestock farming and industrial mass-killing of animals not only operates a double standard, but the critique may, in fact, be directed against halal forms of religious slaughtering because these ritual forms of killing animals are not removed from public view and therefore cannot be repressed by society. They thus serve as an unwelcome reminder of the approximately 360 million animals (cattle, pigs, sheep, goats) slaughtered for meat each year in the EU. Judith Shklar: The Liberalism of Fear, p. 6. For Hobbes, as Michael Williams succinctly argues, the task of the Leviathan is not simply to remedy the lack of authority or coordination in the state of nature but, more importantly, the absence of “truth in the conventional sense.”

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168.

169. 170.

171. 172. 173. 174.

175.

176.

Contrary to those who believe that there are objectively right answers to ethical dilemmas, Hobbes reminds us that “human beings have no natural way of agreeing upon what things are – what the reality of the world is – in either an empirical or a straightforwardly moral sense. Perceptions of what is good as well as bad, potentially beneficial as well as threatening, are at the most basic level inescapably relative.” See Michael C. Williams: The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 39–40, italics in the original. As Weintraub shows, Albert Hirschman in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty has clearly outlined the limitations of the Hobbesian model in that exit becomes “the only option for the ‘rational’ individual of liberal theory” and the denial of the important role for voice in decisions regarding matters of common concern. See Jeff Weintraub: Public/Private, p. 18. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Judith N. Shklar: The Faces of Injustice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 7, my italics. This passage also bears on the discussion of multiculturalism and its critics in the preceding section. See Marc Hulliung: The Use and Abuse of History. In: The Responsive Community, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring 1997), p. 72. Weintraub: Public/Private, pp. 16, 18. Marla Brettschneider: Democratic Theorizing from the Margins, p. 159. Starting with the Slovenian declaration of independence on June 25, 1991, and subsequently leading to a number of military conflicts on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Wars were ethnicreligious conflicts that became internationally known for the horrific and genocidal war crimes perpetrated in the course of events. Most well-known perhaps are the Srebrenica massacre and the war crimes perpetrated during the siege of Sarajevo. See Regions in Europe: The Paradox of Power, ed. by Patrick Le Gales and Christian Lequesne, London: Routledge, 2013; and Bernard Voutat: Territorial Identity in Europe: The Political Processes of the Construction of Identities in Corsica, the Basque Country, Italy, Macedonia and the Swiss Jura. In: Contemporary European History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (July 2000), pp. 285–294. Other commentators argued to the contrary that was in fact the existence of the “EU umbrella” which may have paved the way for an increase in claims to regional independence. See Jack Citrin and Matthew Wright: E Pluribus Europa? In: Europe’s Contending Identities: Supranationalism, Ethnoregionalism, Religion, and New Nationalism, ed. by Andrew C. Gould and Anthony M. Messina. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 51. Judith Shklar: The Liberalism of Fear. In: Political Thought and Political Thinkers, ed. by Stanley Hoffmann. Chicago and London: Chicago

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180. 181. 182.

183. 184.

185. 186. 187.

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University Press, 1998, p. 9 (originally published in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. by Nancy L. Rosenblum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 21–38). Bernard Williams: The Liberalism of Fear. In: In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, ed. by Geoffrey Hawthorn. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 52–61, 58–59. Ibid., p. 61. See also Bonnie Honig: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Katrina Forrester: Judith Shklar, Bernard Williams and Political Realism. In: European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 11, No. 3 (July 2012), pp. 247–272, 250. Ibid. Ibid., p. 252. See Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America [Orig. De la démocratie en Amérique], Vol. 2, Book 4, Chap. 6, first published 1840 in Paris by Librairie de Charles Gosselin; and Paul A. Rahe: Soft Despotism, Democracies Drift. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. In warning of this tutelary power which “doesn’t break their wills, but … softens, bends, and directs them” and, over time, “reduces each nation to a mere flock of timid and industrious animals,” Tocqueville came to think, was where “all the originality and depth” of his thought resided. See Leo Damrosch: Tocqueville’s Discovery of America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, p. 213. Tocqueville: Oeuvres Completes, ed. by Jacob P. Mayer et al., Paris: Gallimard, 1951–, I (2), p. 324. Sheldon S. Wolin: Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 339. Ibid., pp. 342, 343. Ibid., p. 505. Gary Gerstle: Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. The paradox lies in putting to use governmental power to impose partisan views regarding marriage, abortion, the regulation of sexual behavior, religion, schooling, immigration, national security, or environmentalism on those who dissent, effectively violating their individual rights, while at the same time lamenting the influence of “big government.” The European Union, in comparison, is not characterized by similar forms of soft despotism but, following Gerstle’s reasoning against the history of American liberalism, by the full-blown despotism of a strongly centralized, highly bureaucratized government insulated from popular sovereignty.

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188. Corey Robin: Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 251. 189. Lida Maxwell: Liberalism and Fear. In: Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2006), pp. 506–509. 190. Michael Walzer: On Negative Politics. In: Liberalism without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar, ed. by Bernard Yack. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 18–19. 191. Ibid., p. 22. 192. Ibid. 193. For a sustained argument, see Bernard Williams: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. 194. Michael Walzer: On Negative Politics, pp. 19, 21. Shklar developed the positive account underpinning her liberalism of fear in the Tanner lectures on human values published as American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. 195. Ibid., p. 23. 196. Alessandro Ferrara: The Democratic Horizon, p. 163. See also Thomas Nagel: The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 for a philosophical exposition of such a position. 197. Alessandro Ferrara: The Democratic Horizon, p. 158, italics in the original. 198. Bernard Williams: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, esp. pp. 133– 139, and Bernard Williams: Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. In: Philosophy, Vol. 75 (October 2000), pp. 477–496. 199. Charles Taylor: Irreducibly Social Goods. In: Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 127–145, 132. 200. Ibid., p. 137. 201. Williams grants that general and abstract ethical concepts within the perspective of practical reason might come to have a sort of weak objectivity in arriving at the truth about the ethical after having considered all ethical experience. Even so, Williams cannot see how reflective ethical thought could be epistemologically convincingly modeled to converge on ethical reality. It has been argued, though, that thick and thin ethical concepts might not be as different with regard to objectivity as Williams thought. See Warren Quinn: Reflection and the Loss of Moral Knowledge: Williams on Objectivity. In: Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 16 (Spring 1987), pp. 195–209. 202. Bernard Williams: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 146. 203. See Ibid., p. 148. 204. Alessandro Ferrara: The Democratic Horizon, p. 163. 205. Ilan Peleg: Democratizing the Hegemonic State, p. 27.

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206. Ibid., 31. To the same effect, see Will Kymlicka: Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 126. 207. Ilan Peleg: Democratizing the Hegemonic State, p. 31. 208. In France and in Germany, the predication of civic integration on the absorption of French and German culture has been the case for a long time, while in case of Britain or the Netherlands this shift toward cultural assimilation has been more recent. Integrative models have thus moved closer to a bargaining situation in which the renouncement of collective claims to recognition of difference is rewarded by civic equality and the guarantee against discrimination. 209. Ilan Peleg: Democratizing the Hegemonic State, p. 26. 210. Rodgers Brubaker: The Return of Assimilation, p. 543. 211. See Douglas Hartmann and Joseph Gerteis: Dealing with Diversity: Mapping Multiculturalism in Sociological Terms. In: Sociological Theory, Vol. 23, No. 2 (June 2005), pp. 218–240. 212. Rodgers Brubaker: The Return of Assimilation, p. 544. 213. Christian Joppke: The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State, pp. 249, 254. 214. Maryon McDonald: New Nationalism in the EU: Occupying the Available Space. In: Neo-nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology, ed. by André Gingrich and Marcus Banks. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, pp. 218–234. 215. See Christian Joppke: Citizenship Between De- and Re-Ethnicization. In: Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos, ed. by Gökçe Yurdakul and Y. Michal Bodemann. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 63–91. 216. See, for example, Isaiah Berlin: In Conversation with Steven Lukes. In: Salmagundi, No. 120 (Fall 1998), pp. 52–134. 217. Rogers Brubaker: Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 95. 218. On dual citizenship see Dual Citizenship in Global Perspective: from Unitary to Multiple Citizenship, ed. by Thomas Faist and Peter Kivisto. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 219. Andrew Geddes: European Integration and Reconfigured Immigration Politics. In: Immigration and European Integration: Beyond Fortress Europe? Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008, pp. 28ff., direct quote at p. 28. As shown above, discourses on European identity oscillate in between these notions of borders as territorial (pertaining the geographical borders of nation-states, the Schengen area, and the EU), organizational (pertaining to the membership and access regulations to labor markets, welfare state institutions, and citizenship), and conceptual (pertaining to the relative distance to or consonance with local traditions and culture).

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220. Act No. 186/2013 concerning the nationality of the Czech Republic and amending certain acts. 221. Christian Joppke: Citizenship Between De- and Re-Ethnicization, p. 85. 222. https://www.mipex.eu/access-nationality. 223. Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham, Marco Giugni, and Florence Passy: Beyond the Nation-State? National and Postnational Claims Making. In: Contested Citizenship: Immigration and Cultural Diversity in Europe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. 76– 77 and 90–91. 224. David Hollinger: Post-Ethnic America. 225. I appropriated and expanded on this distinction from Kenan Malik: The Failure of Multiculturalism. 226. Jeffrey C. Alexander: The Civil Sphere. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 213ff. 227. Ibid., p. 231. 228. Jeffrey C. Alexander: The Civil Sphere, pp. 231–232. 229. See the discussion in Chapter 3. 230. See the discussion in Chapter 4. 231. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of how cultural diversity has been institutionalized within the EU’s constitutional architecture and why this results in the marginalization of non-European cultures. 232. There is an important parallel with the “paradox of religious liberalism”: Where religious pluralism and the potential conflicts it may give rise to are concerned, liberal democracy reacts by means of a politics of omission (Holmes, 202) and the division between public and private spheres, that is, with the secularization of political life. Liberal democracy thus aims to “remove from the public agenda issues that are impossible to resolve by either argument or compromise” (Holmes, 10). This, however, cannot, I would argue, be applied in the same sense to cultural claims as this would come close to cleanse all questions of ethics from the public sphere. In these cases, pragmatic compromise and accommodation— rather than relegation to the private sphere—is not only not impossible but should be sought-after. On the paradox of religious liberalism, see Karsten Fischer: Hobbes, Schmitt and the paradox of religious liberalism. In: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2010), pp. 399–416; and, as quoted by Fischer, Stephen Holmes: Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 10, 202ff. 233. Jeffrey Alexander: Theorizing the ‘Modes of Incorporation’: Assimilation, Hyphenation, and Multiculturalism as Varieties of Civil Participation. In: Sociological Theory, Vol. 19, No. 3 (November 2001), pp. 237–249, 245.

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234. One of the best recent exploration of the nexus of multiculturalism, anti-immigration political movements, and neo-liberal governmentality is Dorota A. Gozdecka, Selen A. Ercan, and Magdalena Kmak: From multiculturalism to post-multiculturalism: Trends and paradoxes. In: Journal of Sociology, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2014), pp. 51–64. More generally, see, for example, Wendy Brown: Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006; Alana Lentin and Gavin Titley: The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age. London: Zed Books, 2011; Thomas Lemke: Foucault, Governmentality and Critique. London: Paradigm Publishers, 2012.

CHAPTER 6

Synthesis: Grand Visions, Fractured Realities

In the introduction, I cautioned readers that this was not a book about the good and bad of immigration, nor one which sought to devise solutions to so-called crises of migration and the challenges posed by refugees seeking protection, assistance, and also new and permanent futures in Western European democracies. I do regard these expectations, hopes, and claims of refugees against the governments (but also the populations) of some of the richest countries in the world as legitimate and a morally justified imperative. More importantly, I see them as increasingly inescapable and undeniable in the decades that lie ahead without further compromising the international human rights regime. But this too has not been what concerned me here. More than a decade after European intellectuals wondered whether any alternative political vision for the EU would emerge after the rejection of the treaty establishing a European Constitution by French and Dutch voters in 2005, some observers now see the EU as “split into antagonistic groups” and have started to ask the far more fundamental question of “Who will reintegrate these groups in the future?”1 As one might add: For how long can the EU navigate the dilemma between “impossible unity and improbable collapse.”2 Or, to push the question in a decidedly polemical way, will the raison d’être of the European project finally

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come to depend on the shutting out, refoulement, and—worst of all—the letting drown of migrants in the Mediterranean?3 If the European sovereign debt crisis and its aftermath should not have already been enough to permanently frustrate remaining teleological expectations of the EU’s gradual convergence toward a supranational, fully parliamentarized constitutional regime (the idea of which was still kept alive in the notion of a “Europe of different speeds”) and convince even the most fervent of its proponents that member states had, in fact, stopped to move toward shared goals, the Syrian refugee crisis put a definite end to further supranational ambitions. The stranglehold of austerity measures during the early 2010s made it more than clear that member states had begun to move in different directions and to follow their own, often mutually inconsistent incentives. Intergovernmental integration increasingly started to resemble asymmetrical, even hierarchical relations between member states. However, though austerity measures and the Troika’s crisis management could still be rationalized as instances of further fiscal and economic system integration to which there was no alternative, the burning of EU flags, anti-austerity riots across the continent and the likening—by Greek protesters—of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Adolf Hitler provided clear indications that a number of implicit assumptions inherent in the integration process had been unfounded, if not sociologically naive. Chiefly, this concerned the idea that system integration would eventually translate into social integration and, thus, result in the social and cultural cohesion of the EU. Whatever the future imaginaries of the European Union—whether a Macronian European superstate,4 a pluralistic institutional order that recomposes intergovernmental and supranational institutions into a compound union,5 a post-democratic executive federalism,6 a republican Europe of sovereign states,7 or any of the scenarios enumerated in the concluding section of Chapter 3—they will remain, for better or for worse, bound by the EU’s own instances of political mythmaking. They will be further weakened by the autopoietic nature of identity discourse and the persistence of the EU’s democratic deficit, but also destabilized by the resilience and increasing neo-nationalist disenchantment with the project of European integration, dreams of regional independence (most forcefully put forth in recent times by Catalonia), and the harsh anti-EU rhetoric of the populist right. Fissures have started to appear across the EU’s “unity in diversity” formula and ideological chasms and political cleavages (beyond the mere fluctuating of coalitions of interest)

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are becoming increasingly manifest within the bodies of the European Parliament itself. Finally, Europe still appears to be haunted by the ghosts of its own dark past and the very divisions between its nations that the European project sought to overcome. The reopening of old wounds and grievances— most recently the decision of Greece to pursue diplomatic and legal steps regarding demands for 300 billion Euro in wartime reparations for the Nazi occupation of Greece8 —and increasingly illiberal dreams of national pride in several of the EU’s Middle and Eastern European member states are, once again, threatening to drive Europeans further apart after more than half a century of pursuing a common future. In fact, synthesis may be too grand a term for the final pages of this book. Nevertheless, it best reflects the design and aims of this study as well as key insights, heretofore insufficiently taken note of in scholarly and political discourses. First, that the political and societal cleavages, paradoxes, and dislocations that were brought into sharp focus by the Syrian refugee crisis do not pertain to the protracted humanitarian crisis that unfolded in Syria, spilled into neighboring countries and finally reached Europe. They instead stem from structural and often interlinked features of European liberal democracy that pervade its pluralistic, highlydispersed, multi-level system of governance. Secondly, sustained attention to these paradoxical constellations holds an as yet unrealized potential for a more realist theorizing of liberal democracy in Europe. The results of the analyses in individual chapters have been discussed in their respective concluding sections and I will not repeat them here. Rather, I take a brief look at a number of issues that seem to me particularly pertinent but also particularly promising for further research.

Liberalism in an Age of Fear The irony of the anti-immigration and anti-EU rallying cries of the European populist right claiming that “This is our country!” lies in that within the theory of liberal democracy the our has, in a strictly principled sense, no correlate beyond a thin civic identity conception rooted in the values of liberal democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. It may be correct that democracy cannot do without a demos but in today’s Europe this demos is no longer identical with the demos (or rather the national demoi) of mid-twenty-century postwar Europe. And it is certainly not

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based in an ethnos. Although it is, in fact, in the interest of democracy— perhaps even existentially so—to achieve a certain degree of internal social cohesion, and thus also for the state to exercise its public power to uphold it, this sense of cohesion, I believe, can no longer be drawn from the homogeneity of the demos in terms of religion, culture, or shared history, nor based on fictions of national character. At least not without effecting illiberal ends that, in turn, may readily lend themselves to the erosion of democracy itself. Under the prevailing conditions of pervasive diversity, citizens of Europe can neither be bound by Europe’s history. The equation of liberal democratic values with expressions of Europeanness must, therefore, be resisted as the regressive drive toward the culturalization of belonging it represents. In itself, it might in fact signify the transnationalization of the political-cultural capital of nationalism and offer a way for expanding the reach of nationalist sentiments onto the European sphere. The history of liberal democracy—to date no doubt the most sweeping, sustained, and successful drive for human liberation—shows that liberalism has never been a universal concept but always thrived on inegalitarian ideologies, ascriptive hierarchies, and substructures of entitlement and exclusion, whether those were defined by aristocratic birth, class, race, gender, nation, or pretensions of civilizational superiority. As distinctions between liberal subjects (with equal rights and a voice in political deliberation) and those who remained mere objects of governmental decree have persistently changed their character from systems of internal legal and political stratification to ever more sharply drawn boundaries between an us on the inside and a them on the outside. After having been successively pushed outward in the course of European integration, it would seem only logical that these boundaries should now divide the European citizen from non-European peoples beyond the EU’s borders. The growing anti-immigrant distemper of Europeans since the early 1990s may thus also have reasons in the process of European integration itself, and popular opposition to the more recent waves of Eastern enlargement during the mid-2000s may have already signaled this shift in boundary drawing. This underscores both that liberal theorizing suffers from a boundary problem of how to democratically define the people and that liberal democracy vitally depends on a socially integrative base structure (an ethnos preceding the demos; a shared religion, language, or culture, etc.) or an overarching ideology (Enlightenment values vs. archaic myth, civilization vs. barbarism, secularization vs. religious fundamentalism, constitutional patriotism vs. ethno-nationalism, free-market

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economy vs. Communist dirigisme) that makes possible a crucial distinction liberal democracy cannot draw on its own terms. Neither liberalism, nor cosmopolitanism, let alone human rights with its utopian agenda of universal protection of liberal freedoms and individual dignity can perform this task. As the preceding chapters show, several large-scale and clearly interestdriven waves of postwar immigration into Europe and, to a more limited degree, also the post-Cold War Eastern enlargements of the EU have turned formerly relatively uncontentious issues into triggers of political mobilization. They have also pushed dividing lines back into the heart of European societies and reactivated—perhaps even lent new legitimacy to—ethno-national idioms of belonging. Racism in Europe has taken on culturalized forms of differential racism with the “racial threat” of classical colonialism having been transformed into the “cultural threat” posed by immigration. As I argued in Chapter 5, Europe’s colonial history of supposedly benevolent paternalism should give reason for pause to those applying the concept of liberal democracy in a quasi-civilizational manner. The current culturalization of belonging—unflinchingly promoted by the European populist right but increasingly taking hold throughout the political mainstream and even permeating left-liberalism—can, in that sense, be conceptualized as the translocation of former colonial hierarchies into the heart of the European Union. In this perspective, it is indeed remarkable that in Europe theoretical debates on the issue of liberal democratic pluralism seem not to have duly registered nor been met with sufficient attention in regard to immigration.9 I believe this to be no coincidence. Neither is the fact that liberal discussions of the limits of pluralism ultimately tend to revolve around symbolically charged markers of difference such as various forms of headscarfs, the Sikh dastar,10 burkinis, minarets, certain slaughtering practices, and so on. Ironically, the wearing of certain items of clothing and the performance of religiously imbued practices that have figured most controversially in public and academic discourse have no recognizable negative impact on the core tenets of liberal democracy. Suggesting they do is not only disingenuous and misguided in principle but, from a perspective truly committed to pluralism and individual liberty (the individual exercise of negative liberties), borders on the disgraceful.11 European liberal democracy must put an end not only to the infringement on individual rights and liberty of certain migrant groups and resist the attempt to cleanse representations of difference from the civil sphere but,

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perhaps more importantly still, refrain from justifying these infringements precisely as a defense of individual liberty or, for that matter, as a liberal imperative to deliver certain migrant groups from the putative bondage of their culture. The challenge for European liberal democracy under conditions of pervasive pluralism, as Alessandro Ferrara put it poignantly, consists in the renewal and reinterpretation of political liberalism that is no longer predicated on the exclusionary immunization of constitutional essentials but has to overcome the impotence of public reason conceptions which are counterfactually based on a thick layer of supposedly “shared premises.”12 In Chapter 4, but chiefly in third section of Chapter 5, I have indicated a possible direction for liberal theorizing which under conditions of pervasive pluralism seems to me the most promising for the strengthening of liberal democracy in Europe (and the European project as such), but also for the defense of liberal democratic principles against sustained attacks and erosion by neo-nationalist, anti-European, and antidemocratic forces, all of which converge in their sharp opposition to immigration. That this does not and could not evolve into a fully elaborated theory of liberalism in pervasively pluralistic, post-migrant, and possibly also post-national societies is obvious. I belief there’s an analogy here between liberal theorizing and the political reality of European liberal democracy in that both struggle with the representation of difference, whether at the heart of the liberal idiom or in terms of lessons of alterity urged on European liberal democracies by the increasing pluralism and diversity of its society. However, this does not mean that whatever is deplorable in existing liberal democracies constitutes relicts of the past or blind spots insufficiently pervaded by liberal principles. What is at stake in terms of the increasingly pervasive pluralism of European democracies is not comprehensively dealt with by the question of liberal pluralism alone but entails the more fundamental questions of liberal instabilities raised, for example, by Paul W. Kahn, Uday S. Mehta, Marla Brettschneider, Bonnie Honig, and others. To rephrase Honig, this question pertains to the way in which European liberal democracy’s fraught relationship with foreignness may be generated by certain needs and demands of liberal democracy itself rather than merely by psychological demands to counteract the cognitive dissonances produced by globalization and European integration or by decidedly illiberal ideologies of racism, nativism, and xenophobia.13

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To put it again differently: The question is not, whether it is primarily liberal sources of exclusion or illiberal, ascriptive ideologies and practices distinct from liberalism that effect the instances of identitarian closure, culturalization of belonging, and illiberal turn that can currently be observed in European democracies. The answer to this question amounts to an exercise in theoretical blame shifting which, in itself, not only misses the point but is also uninteresting as well as uninviting to further research. Rather than vilifying liberal democracy or devising ever more impenetrable philosophical justifications in order to insulate liberalism from critique, I believe it to be more fruitful and instructive to redirect attention to the ways in which liberal thought and liberal democratic practices, structures, and institutions shape, interact with, and may even provide justification for illiberal and exclusionary practices. The present study has attempted to contribute to precisely this type of analysis. The move away from the fixation on questions of sovereignty perhaps also entails a conceptual shift to thinking about democracy primarily as a political culture instead of a form of territorial organization predicated on specific (Western) institutional arrangements and constitutional regimes. Such a shift may correct still widespread explanatory patterns which link Western values, modernity, and democracy while contrasting them with other cultures’ absence of modernity—either not yet modern or distinctly anti-modern—and the non-democratic, illiberal political systems that govern these cultures or are putatively governed by them. Patterns that have enjoyed a considerable renaissance in the wake of September 11, 2001, and the war on terror. Beyond a singular narrative of European modernity, Europe perhaps has yet to rediscover, first and foremost in its own history, the enriching spectrum of experiences, beliefs, and values that come into view once the social, political, and intellectual hallmarks of European modernity are recognized as more often than not opposing and contradictory experiences rather than representing a singular, quasiteleological logic of development. The view to the past aims to preserve values and cultures, an Old Europe, but Europe today faces perhaps similar challenges as it did on the advent of nationalism more than a century ago: to develop a new political culture and a new social identity in order to, as Hobsbawm put it, “ensure or express social cohesion and structure social relations”14 while, at the same time, resisting the turning of citizenship into an expression of new cultural hierarchies of belonging and thereby ushering in a new racial century.

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But even on the level of citizens’ everyday experience, there is something wrong with a society that puts a premium on individuality, authenticity, individual liberty, and self-determination but, at the same time, exerts increasing pressure to assimilate vis-à-vis its immigrants and a— perhaps equally high—pressure of (neo-liberal) self-optimization vis-à-vis its native population. That racial differentialism to a considerable degree has been able to colonize liberal language in portraying exclusion based on culture as a defense of liberal democracy must, therefore, be recognized for what it essentially is: a cheap but all the more dangerous travesty of the emancipatory ideals of liberal democracy.

The Refugee as Focal Point of Democratic Theorizing Why put the refugee at the center of democratic theorizing? Rather than solely consisting in a methodological exercise of shifting perspective and in addition to the heuristic advantages this entails, the analyses and discussions of the preceding chapters have made it obvious—at least so I hope—that the future prospects of liberal democracy (in the sense of a form of government truly committed to the ideals of emancipatory liberalism, individual liberty, and human rights) is tied in a fundamental way to those of refugees trying to reach European shores. The refugee and asylum seeker is not only the new enemy of choice for anti-democratic, neo-nationalist populist movements in Europe and, for them, epitomize all that is wrong with liberal democracy. But also in a theoretical sense, the figure of the refugee—not that of the citizen—is located at the center of the fundamental question of what features of the liberal democratic idiom enable, facilitate, and provide inroads for the erosion and potentially regressive turn of European liberal democracy. Whereas the citizen is caught up in the state’s “sovereignty game” of self-assertion, collective identity construction, hegemonic control of territory, demands for exclusive allegiance and loyalty, and so on, the refugee transcends this narrow focus on questions of democratic stability, territorial integrity, legal autonomy, and social cohesion that are part and parcel of the “sovereign illusion”15 of the European nation-state. The refugee, therefore, makes visible the obsolescence and impotence of sovereign practices written into the matrix of the (Westphalian) nationstate. In twenty-first-century Europe, these practices have not lost their meaning but are defined more often than not in terms of symbolic

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performance, rather than through the actual exercise of sovereign power. Increasingly restrictive immigration policies, the criminalization and securitization of migration, and the abrasive treatment of asylum seekers have turned into a vital resource for politicians to perpetuate the semblance of national sovereignty and compensate for the de facto loss of sovereignty in other areas. The culturalization of belonging and the culturalized reading of contested political issues are closely related to the erosion of national sovereignty. Both signify the fact, to rephrase Arun Appadurai’s accurate observation quoted in Chapter 4, that the cultural field currently remains as the main arena in which fantasies of cultural purity, authenticity, and national sovereignty can be re-enacted because this arena constitutes the last resource over which the nation-state may be able to exercise full dominion. Culture itself is thus being turned into an instrument of governing European societies. Chapter 2 has pointed to the vivid paradox presented by the quixotic search for the deep roots of European identity and the teleology and tunnel vision at the heart of the European postwar project of integration. I argued that these exercises in European myth making obscured many decisive changes in Europe’s postwar history—particularly so regarding the altered composition of European societies following several waves of large-scale immigration but also of the EU itself after Eastern enlargement during the 2000s—and were, therefore, best conceptualized as a case of autopoiesis. These instances, I further argued, also project a fictitious, mono-centric form of organization onto the European cultural and political space that neither has any historical correlate, nor corresponds to current constellations. At the same time, they effect a Europeanized cultural hierarchy which privileges European origins over non-European ones. Over the last decades, European states have adopted a number of supranational strategies to prevent unauthorized migrants from entering its territory by a “process of ‘shifting and multiplication’ of the European external border”16 but also resorted to strategies of extraterritorial immigration control. These strategies can be understood as an attempt to circumvent political, social, logistical, and legal domestic dilemmas by “short-circuiting judicial constraints on migration control,” that is, by avoiding the guarantees of substantive rights and procedural avenues for legal recourse set down in domestic as well as international law.17 Both the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as well

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as the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights have criticized, for example, the Dublin regulation for not providing effective protection to third country nationals or stateless persons applying for international protection and, thus, factually undermining refugee rights by putting security concerns over human rights commitments.18 Rights guaranteed by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) and the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees are, however, not only differently defined within individual member states but also play out differently in interaction with domestic work, residence, movement, and welfare provisions. The securitization frame of migration policies in Europe can thus also be understood as aimed at the exclusion of particular groups (or categories of people) by portraying them as a danger to the EU’s value system, internal cohesion, public safety, health, or sustainability of its welfare state regimes.19 This also entailed a symbolic dimension regarding the definition of European identity in terms of insiders and outsiders but also in defining “good governance in Europe” by means of repositioning the migration frontier. The ability to control and curb unwanted forms of migration into the EU was seen as an important indicator for accession readiness and considerable pressure was being put on candidate countries.20 By the beginning of the 2000s, this externalization of traditional tools of national or EU migration control under the Justice and Home Affairs pillar—despite still being in its infancy—had laid the basis for what later came to be commonly termed “fortress Europe.” While European intellectuals continued to celebrate the victory and eastward expansion of liberal democracy, for newly arriving refugees Europe increasingly became a continent of prolonged imprisonment, deportation (according to Dublin II regulation), and human rights violations. Immigration detention in prison-like facilities, it may be necessary to point out, does not concern only a few isolated cases but, on the contrary, has increased enormously over the past decades.21 Again, the treatment of refugees at Europe’s outer borders is a suited prism through which to evaluate, as Stuart Hall put it, “the logic within which the racialized and ethnicized body is constituted discursively, through the regulatory normative ideal of a ‘compulsive Eurocentrism’”22 but also the link of human rights discourses and the securitization frame of European migration policies. As Galina Cornelisse remarked:

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… human rights norms have significantly limited the state’s claim to decide matters of inside and outside within its territory by reference to identity. Nevertheless, when sovereignty’s claim to distinguish the inside and the outside is based on territory, human rights law has not achieved a similar transformation. In spite of notions of post-national citizenship, the modern version of the rule of law remains territorially limited ….23

While the 2004 and 2007 enlargement meant inclusion for the Central and Eastern European candidate countries and their populations, it also entailed the creation and recreation of new dividing lines in terms of the enlargement of fortress Europe. Itself a forceful reminder that: … the modern version of the rule of law has not acknowledged the interrelatedness between the nation state’s exercise of jurisdiction over people within a given body politic and the territorial framework in which those jurisdictional claims take place is a particularly serious concern when it comes to the national state’s perception of and responses to ‘new threats’ such as immigration, which by its very nature engage sovereignty’s territorial frame as well as its jurisdictional content.24

Hannah Arendt’s famous paradox of “the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inalienable’ those human rights, which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves” refers to this depth structure of sovereignty outlined by Cornelisse.25 For Arendt, nothing illustrated the impotence and the decline of the European system of sovereign nation-states better than the fate of minorities and stateless people. This, I believe, constitutes a stern reminder and should urge political theorists to engage in a much more concerted fashion with the contemporary figure of the refugee. However, the figure of the refugee—just as Bonnie Honig’s foreignfounder—is not intrinsically problematic. On the contrary, it has the potential to act as a positive corrective, stabilizing entity and socially transformative societal force. This is particularly evident throughout European cosmopolitan cities and metropolitan areas. Europe is increasingly characterized not only by socio-economic regionalization but also by a spatial, social, and cultural divide between its cosmopolitan cities and metropolitan areas shaped by decades of intense immigration and its surrounding rural areas of small town and village life which often

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remained largely unaffected by migration. This societal rift between multicultural cities and largely mono-cultural, more rural areas has so far only insufficiently been absorbed into democratic theorizing. In Chapter 3, I briefly argued for the central and innovative role of multicultural, globalized cities as some of the most important sites for the emergence of newly contextualized types of citizenship practices, whether in terms of cosmopolitan and hence denationalized territories or regarding emancipatory sites for the reinvention of citizenship practices beyond the political, social, cultural, and legal marginalization and forced illegality produced by sovereign practices of migration control. Instead of succumbing to the orthodoxies of the nation-state or entertaining utopias of global citizenship and globally shared political institutions, political theory may profit from a stronger focus on such irregular sites of citizenship as laboratories of democracy. If it were not so disconcerting, it would almost be amusing that Europeans seem to think that they—not Jordan, Lebanon, or Turkey—were in the epicenter of the Syrian refugee crisis and bore the brunt of the human displacement and humanitarian emergency caused by the multisided and increasingly protracted armed conflict in Syria. This, it seems to me, does not only entail a blatant misrepresentation of the proportions of actual suffering inflicted on Europeans as compared to the refugees themselves, but also constitutes a moral failure of staggering proportions. Although the purpose of this book has not been one of the moral evaluations, it may, however, be necessary to note that—especially in case of the Syrian authoritarian regime of Baschar al-Assad—the EU has seemingly sacrificed the values of liberal democracy—of popular sovereignty, resistance, non-domination, and self-governance—for geopolitical considerations and interest-driven politics. More than anything, it has been subjected to ridicule the EU’s professed commitment to the protection of refugee rights via the international human rights regime and the implementation of the principle of the responsibility to protect (RtoP). To reiterate the EU’s official position regarding refugee protection put in almost PR fashion by Emma Haddad: protection is supposedly something “that the EU can more easily help make available outside the Union. Via regional protection Member States therefore contribute to the guaranteeing of refugee rights beyond the borders of EU international society.”26 The irony is pungent.

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In a structural sense, the European Union has not engaged in a sustained effort to combat and alleviate the causes of large-scale displacement and emigration in its periphery. On the contrary, if there is anything close to a common European migration policy, it is targeting the migrants themselves via sustained efforts of externalization. Although regional protection is clearly preferable—not only in a normative sense—as a longterm strategy, it severely underestimates the fragility of the system of international humanitarian law. Above all, it does not release the EU of its more immediate responsibility for the refugees’ plight in its periphery, nor lends itself to the justification of push backs and indefinite detention of refugees destined for Europe by member states and third countries. It is not only naive but constitutes a striking case of willful historically amnesia to assume that the violence, human rights violations, and racism exercised against refugees will not turn onto Europe itself. Every death in the Mediterranean, in that sense, signifies a “nail in the coffin” of European liberal democracy. Finally, the refugees from the MENA region have provided an unprecedented opportunity of close intercultural contact, one which may have— in the best of cases—been able to contribute to a long-term stabilization and the political and social reconstruction necessary in order to turn Syria, Northern Iraq, and Lebanon from regions plagued by authoritarian regimes, insurgencies, and civil war into ones able to provide a credible future vision and actual prospects for its displaced residents. This might have also contained the possibility—as slim as it might seem to hardened political realists—to turn parts of the Middle East from a region of resentment into one of hope and thereby establish enduring ties—an entente cordiale—between those European countries that have opened its borders in humanitarian response to the refugee crisis in this region. This opportunity, I believe, has been let negligently pass by the indecision and lack of resolve of the European Union as both a geopolitical actor and a normative power committed to democratic rule and human rights. For the time being, we have to content ourselves with the small, everyday utopias that are turning a seemingly hostile continent into a place of welcome and refuge.

Notes 1. Jan Zielonka: Legitimacy in a Neomedieval (Postcrisis) Europe. In: The Future of the European Union: Democracy, Legitimacy and Justice After the

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2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

Euro Crisis, ed. by Serge Champeau, Carlos Closa, Daniel Innerarity, and Miguel Poaires Maduro. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, p. 219. I am indebted for this characterization—even more apt today than at the time of its writing—to Timothy Garton Ash. See ‘The European Orchestra’. In: New York Review of Books, Vol. 48, No. 8 (May 17, 2001). As of April 25, 2019, an estimated 4,220 migrants have died in the Mediterranean since the inception of the Syrian refugee crisis while approximately 49,000 have been rescued by Operation Sophia since 2015. In March 2019, the EU decided to cease its maritime rescue operations, instead opting for—in diplomatic parlance—“closer coordination” with Libya, a country that even before its plunge into civil war in 2011 had an extremely dubious human rights record. See the data collected by the IOM’s Missing Migrant project, https://missingmigrants.iom.int/reg ion/mediterranean; and the devastating recent report by Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders): Human Suffering: Inside Libya’s Migrant Detention Centers, 2017, https://www.aerzte-ohne-grenzen. de/sites/germany/files/attachments/2017-libya-publication-human-suf fering-in-detention-centres.pdf. See also Jennifer Rankin: EU to Stop Mediterranean Migrant Recue Boat Patrols. In: The Guardian, March 27, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/27/eu-tostop-mediterranean-migrant-rescue-boat-patrols. Élysée: President Macron Gives Speech on New Initiative for Europe, 26 September 2017, https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2017/ 09/26/president-macron-gives-speech-on-new-initiative-for-europe.en. See Sergio Fabbrini: Which European Union? Europe After the Euro Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 257–288. See Jürgen Habermas: The Crisis of the European Union: A Response [German Orig. Zur Verfassung Europas. Ein Essay]. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Richard Bellamy: A Republican Europe of States: Cosmopolitanism, Intergovernmentalism and Democracy in the EU . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. See Helena Smith: Greece to Ask Germany for Billions in War Reparations. In: The Guardian, April 21, 2019, https://www.theguardian. com/world/2019/apr/21/greece-to-ask-germany-for-billions-in-war-rep arations. See, for example, Will Kymlicka: Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; James Tully: Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Michael Keating: Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations in a Post-Sovereignty Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; George Crowder: Liberalism and Value Pluralism. London and New York: Continuum, 2002; William A. Galston:

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11.

12. 13.

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Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; Robert A. Talisse: Pluralism and Liberal Politics. New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012; and Alessandro Ferrara: The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Most recently, see Cécile Laborde: Liberalism’s Religion. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2017; and Peter Balint: Respecting Toleration: Traditional Liberalism and Contemporary Diversity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. The dastar is the traditional Sikh turban worn mainly by men in order to cover their hair which, for religious reasons, remains uncut. I have not discussed this issue in any detail but the question controversially debated is whether Sikhs are to be granted exemption from traffic safety regulations by being allowed to ride their motorcycles without helmets. Helmets cannot accommodate the dastar and sometimes even the head of hair by itself. Recently, the governments of four Canadian provinces have effected just such exemption right in a move of recognition of Sikh’s liberty of religious expression. Such exemption right has, for example, been implemented in the UK since 1976. In France, women have been fined and even arrested by the police for wearing so-called burkinis at the beach while Laurence Rossignol, then French minister for women rights, justified instances of forcible removal of clothing by armed police as “because it is the symbol of a political project that is hostile to diversity and women’s emancipation.” The EU’s public policy of gender mainstreaming, in these instances, is turned into the assimilatory mainstreaming of gender in Europe. See Sheryl Garratt: The Burkini Ban: What It Really Means When We Criminalize Clothes. In: The Guardian, August 24, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/the-bur kini-ban-what-it-really-means-when-we-criminalise-clothes. See the discussion in Chapter 5. See Bonnie Honig: Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 11. Honig’s analysis of the figure of the foreign-founder in classical and contemporary political thought not only partially parallels that of the refugee in the present study but has provided invaluable guidance through the “thicket” of European migration dynamics. See Eric J. Hobsbawm: Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914. In: The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 263.

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15. Didier Bigo: Criminalization of ‘Migrants’: The Side Effects of the Will to Control the Frontiers and the Sovereign Illusion. In: Irregular Migration and Human Rights: Theoretical, European and International Perspectives, ed. by Barbara Bogusz, Ryszard Cholewinski, Adam Cygan, and Erika Szyszczak. Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2004, pp. 61–91. 16. Maarten den Heijer: Europe Beyond Its Borders: Refugee and Human Rights Protection in Extraterritorial Immigration Control. In: Extraterritorial Immigration Control: Legal Challenges, ed. by Bernard Ryan and Valsamis Mitsilegas. Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2010, pp. 169–198, p. 169. 17. See Virginie Guiraudon: Before the EU Border: Remote Control of the ‘Huddled Masses’. In: The Search of Europe’s Borders, ed. by Kees Groenendijk, Elspeth Guild, and Paul E. Minderhoud. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2003, pp. 191–228, direct quote at p. 194. For an overview of extraterritorial strategies of immigration control, see the introductory chapters by the editors in Extraterritorial Immigration Control: Legal Challenges, ed. by Bernard Ryan and Valsamis Mitsilegas. Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2010, pp. 3–65. 18. See, for example, Jonathan P. Aus: Logics of Decision-making on Community Asylum Policy: A Case Study of the Evolvement of the Dublin II Regulation, ARENA Working Paper, No. 3, February 2006; Sonia Sirtori and Patricia Coelho: Defending Refugees’ Access to Protection in Europe. ECRE Report, December 2007, https://www.ecre.org/ topics/areas-of-work/access-to-europe/95-defending-refugees-access-toprotection-in-europe.html; UNHCR: Response to the European Commission’s Green Paper on the Future Common European Asylum System. Brussels and Geneva, September 2007; and ECRE Press Release: Returns Directive: EU Fails to Uphold Human Rights, 19 June 2008, https:// www.ecre.org/component/news/news/23.html; and UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR comments on the European Commission’s Proposal for a recast of the Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing the criteria and mechanisms for determining the Member State responsible for examining an application for international protection lodged in one of the Member States by a third country national or a stateless person (“Dublin II”) (COM(2008) 820, 3 December 2008) and the European Commission’s Proposal for a recast of the Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council concerning the establishment of ‘Eurodac’ for the comparison of fingerprints for the effective application of [the Dublin II Regulation] (COM(2008) 825, 3 December 2008), 18 March 2009, https://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/49c0ca922.html.

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19. Jef Huysmans: The European Union and the Securitization of Migration. In: Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 38, No. 5 (December 2000), pp. 751–777. 20. Catherine Phuong: Enlarging ‘Fortress Europe’: EU Accession, Asylum, and Immigration in Candidate Countries. In: The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 3 (July 2003), pp. 641–663, 641. 21. Galina Cornelisse: Immigration Detention and Human Right: Rethinking Territorial Sovereignty. Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2010. 22. Stuart Hall: Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’? In: Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage, 1996, p. 16. 23. Galina Cornelisse: Immigration Detention and Human Right, p. 129. 24. Galina Cornelisse: Immigration Detention and Human Right: Rethinking Territorial Sovereignty. Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2010, p. 131. 25. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1968, p. 279. 26. Emma Haddad: The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 185–186.

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