Abstract
The dialectics of liberal citizenship in Europe
Per Mouritsen
Aarhus University, Denmark
Over the last decade, Christian Joppke has developed a series of arguments about the impact of mass immigration on the politics and institutions of citizenship in western Europe. Most are found, and further refined, in this short, elegant, and immensely readable book, which combines the theorization of citizenship as status (nationality), rights, and identity including good citizenship. All three dimensions, which have each their separate debates and exemplary texts come together in the politics of immigrant incorporation in western states. The same politics, argues Joppke, may also cause them to come apart, or at least profoundly change their content and relative importance.
Joppke recounts a provocative story of triumphant liberalism. Although constituted by sovereignty, and thus restricted and involuntary by nature, contemporary citizenship has ‘continued to evolve, toward becoming more inclusive and universalistic’. Schmittean realism is offset by the principles and politics of abstract individualism and equal treatment, so that ‘citizenship’s internally inclusive core has softened its externally exclusive edges’. As ‘liberal democracy requires the congruence between rulers and ruled’, naturalization, formerly governed by discretionary ethnic preference, has undergone ‘wholesale liberalization’ with dual citizenship, jus soli, and shorter residence requirements (p. 31).The post 9/11 civic integrationist turn still happens ‘within an overall liberal, in some cases even simultaneously liberalizing framework’ (p. 68), taps individual achievement rather than group origins and mimics a liberal contract that anybody can meet in principle. If the balance has shifted from rights and citizenship-as-incentive towards obligations and citizenship-as-prize, this is a transition within liberalism – the immensely suggestive leitmotif of Joppke’s (2009) Veil book and earlier articles – from benign Rawlsian equal treatment and tolerance to perfectionist self-sufficiency and learning-to-be-liberal. External discrediting of old school nationalism is mirrored internally in European Union (EU)-prompted anti-discrimination, whose protection of private cultural expression is superior, in this rather ‘French’ integrationist view, to multicultural perpetuation of minority groups. However, in Joppke’s forecast, the emerging immigration state citizenship Européenne is also likely to be liberal(ist) as in ‘Roman’ rather than ‘Athenian’: More thin than thick, passive and rights-oriented rather than participatory, market-based rather than social, and in fact – despite European politicians talking up loyalty and national identity – increasingly pragmatic and instrumental.
If a liberal is someone who cannot take their own side in an argument, Joppke, who never pulls an academic punch, is not that kind of liberal. His story line of unfolding universalism is as clear as the summary dismissal of multiculturalism and hyperbolic diagnoses of nationalism. Or is it? Throughout the book, crisp conclusions are surrounded by caveats and paradox. Elegant headlines do not quite match the empirical variance and conceptual distinctions produced by the rich comparisons. Naturalization policies are liberalized; yet there are backlashes (Netherlands and Denmark) and variety in what is still a very small corner of the world and only half the EU. Civic integration is liberal and liberalizing; yet some countries cross the line to cultural assimilation or ‘repressive liberalism’, and logics of cultural proximity remain as ‘re-ethnicized’ citizenship. Multicultural policies are in crisis and out of sync with the individual-centred logic of modern states; yet exemption rights and accommodation of Muslim dietary, dress and prayer requirements meet ‘pragmatic concessions’ (p. 100) and judicial re-interpretations of individual rights schemes. Anti-discrimination and anti-racism follow an opposite universalistic logic; yet the definition, targeting, and quasi-affirmative action (by the EU push towards indirect discrimination monitoring) towards specific groups creates ‘unavoidable de facto multiculturalism’ (p. 109).
Perhaps most fundamentally, while he ridicules a ‘strangely anachronistic picture of self-perpetuating, sharply divergent citizenship laws’, a closer look at Joppke’s work reveals that ‘liberalism’ comes in many forms, suggesting some relevance of Brubaker’s ‘cultural idiom’ approach that he so dislikes (pp. 19–20). They include, e.g., Dutch and Scandinavian varieties of ‘progressive mono-culture’ liberalism (p.140); the German relapse into ‘crypto-nationalist’ arguments on the head scarf (p. 136) despite the country’s liberal-constitutional post-war nationhood (p. 20); and the pragmatic Lockean tolerance liberalism-cum-symbolic multiculturalism that oozes from Joppke’s rich account of British civic integration light – all differences that affect, at least in part, the relative harshness, exclusive consequences, and the particular content of naturalization requirements and integration programmes in these countries (Mouritsen, forthcoming).
Joppke’s valuable core insight is that Europe is leaving old school nationalisms and group-preserving forms of multiculturalism behind for a shared universalistic plateau – although some versions of the civic turn go well beyond the semantic confines of ‘liberalism’. Even so, in as much as these processes are subject to the centrifugal pull of economic globalizations, the human rights revolution, and continuing projection of statehood, Joppke surely underestimates the third element here, i.e. of Schmittean (popular) sovereignty. Particularly intriguing is Joppke’s insistence on EU-style citizenship light as the shape of things to come, and the concomitant ambivalence about the otherwise skilfully rebuked post-nationalism thesis. Joppke nicely lays out how mere permanent residence is extremely valuable for those who enter from outside the ‘comfort zone’, whereas even citizenship is less significant for those who have it already, particularly for the affluent and well-educated who do not need it, as long as they can get a green card. There is a sense in which the latter group of movers – particularly if they keep moving – are less interested in either social citizenship or political participation, and receiving states may find it unimportant to impose a ‘heroic’ citizenship of obligations and identity on them. Yet it is simply unclear why the perspectives of this group, or of the global-minded economic agents who receive them, will determine the shape of citizenship, whereas recalcitrant electorates who care about the remains of welfare state solidarity, and politicians who care about social cohesion, will not.
Joppke’s account of the demise of social citizenship in the context of immigration is exaggerated, even in some respects misleading. Although careful not to accept causal relationships between immigration/liberalized citizenship and the rolling back of the welfare state, he accepts the Putnam–Miller account of a conflict between diversity and trust/solidarity that does not stand up to scrutiny in places where a hard test is available, namely Scandinavian countries. Here, research suggests that neither trust nor core commitment to the welfare state is diminished by immigration; that by the second generation immigrants from low-trust countries such as Turkey have reached the same trust level as others, and that equality and welfare state reciprocity may be more important (and realistic) than homogeneity as trust facilitator. The Nordic model, according to Bo Rothstein, is a machine that runs as long as people see each other as equals and contributing, according to the ability of each (=holding a job; paying tax), to the common good of Folkhemmet or Velfærdssamfundet (Kumlin and Rothstein, 2005). Maintaining equality and demanding from everybody that they must work – and also shed any cultural or religious particularity that prevents them from one or the other – is the key to Nordic integration politics, as probably to that of other countries too, certainly the Netherlands and to some extent Germany.
Hence, Joppke, misreading T.H. Marshall through Esping-Andersen’s decomodification, announces the death of social citizenship prematurely. The virtue of productive work was always part of social democratic ideology (Brochmann and Hagelund, 2010), and Marshall himself clearly assumed an obligation to work, indeed to put one’s heart into it. Workfare and the scaling down of unconditional transfer benefits is less important as long as shared and fair welfare service consumption and public acceptance of taxpaying remain in place. If social citizenship is no longer (as it was for a brief period in very few countries) independence from the labour market, but more a paternalist state that helps citizens to be fit for that market by the provision of, e.g. day care, training, sick leave, health service, schools, and flexible tax/pension schemes – then it is alive and kicking.
Many countries seek to reserve some of this package for full citizens, or to minimize its attraction to unwanted immigrants by delaying, stratifying, or revoking access to services. Here, Joppke’s analysis of the many cracks in the ‘crown of post-national membership’ is excellent. Still, whatever the legal and moral difficulties of either strategy, the crucial point, which gets lost, is that electorates who appreciate the welfare state will also continue to demand that it be guarded, thus rendering it and threats against it (un-modern Middle Eastern Muslims) the securitized stakes of identity struggles. And if EU movers and green card holders may get there more easily, there is no shortage of conspicuously ‘malfunctioning’ refugees and families reunified in need of ‘fair and firm’ induction into the virtues (working, paying tax, cultural flexibility) and values (substantial equality) of the welfare state.
Joppke appears to view civic integration policies as part of a futile rear-guard action of nation states to pacify electorates who have not appreciated the inevitable future lightness of European citizenship in the face of globalization. But nothing currently indicates that these electorates will change their minds. More importantly, just as politicians and voters in some quarters agree on tough integration measures to keep the welfare state bumble bee flying, it is not clear that such measures are in tension with the functionalities of labour market globalization, particularly if green card talent is exempted (as is the trend). The other side to productive diversity management is companies’ interests in flexible and well-integrated labour. Indeed, countries themselves, particularly smaller European ones with large public sectors, are increasingly company-like competition states (Pedersen, 2011), reducing costs and maximizing the value of labour, where ‘social cohesion’ and ‘voluntary citizenship’ become part of nation-level Human Resource Management. This – in Schmittean terms – is the return of the sovereignty/citizenship nexus.
Are not such civic requirements, deemed increasingly important by integrating nation states, exactly the contemporary stuff of citizenship’s identity-and-virtue dimension, which Joppke clearly thinks is on the wane in Europe although national politicians continue to conjure it up to appease voters? This good citizenship may be ‘post-heroic’, but it is hardly just symbolic. It represents what newcomers should do and become capable of doing well for their new country. EU citizenship may contain ‘almost no duties’ (p. 161), but national citizenship – indeed already the right to have permanent residence – certainly comes with obligations and expectations.
Joppke’s European smoke-and-mirrors diagnosis of re-nationalized citizenship may derive less from integration requirements and more from his nicely sarcastic treatment of reinvented national identities of shared values, be they cultural or Christian, or even liberal. One may share his hope that these discourses, so inflated since 9/11, will recede, but as civic identity politics – directed towards old as much as new citizens – they are not unstable and temporary just because they are incoherent. Joppke demonstrates well the modern tension between naming the particular nation to facilitate belonging and on the other hand sanitizing identities by investing them with universal values. He credits this reader for showing how, in a Danish context, national identity often invokes mainstream liberal–civic values as ‘ours’ in the manner of a ‘particular universalism’ (Mouritsen, 2006) and provides further national examples. However, the way that I used this concept also covered the possibilities: (1) that universal values were particularly rooted in our history – a self-congratulatory version of Habermasian Vergangenheitsbewältigung; and (2) that ours was a particular version, flavour, and institutionalization of universal values (particularly advanced, particularly suited for us) – in both cases essentializing ever-so-civic national identities, protecting them from critique, and excluding newcomers from their ambits. While such a thing as Joppke’s liberalism-as-identity certainly exists, there is also still nationalism. The fact that contemporary Euro-nationalism is different from the traditional ethno-cultural phenomenon from Germany’s and Europe’s past, which Joppke employs as template, does not make it less exclusive. If the liberal and civic values that are claimed as a national heritage are indeed almost like those of any other country, the logic of minor differences is not new in the history of nationalism. Nor does it matter much that countries do not distinguish themselves much from any other, as long as the values projected serve to question the belonging of Muslims.
A final element of Joppke’s European lightening of citizenship concerns its political element, which is part of Europe’s move towards a ‘Roman’ rather than ‘Athenian’ model. Political citizenship is not in fact discussed in the book: immigrants are less interested in political participation than in jobs and social rights and, at any rate, Joppke oddly notes, this remains a heartland of national sovereignty that has undergone very few changes. Surely, the fact that voting rights are so jealously guarded would warrant not excluding them from a discussion of how immigration impacts on national citizenship. On the one hand, voting rights, while individually inconsequential for immigrants, when used collectively affect the political scene significantly. On the other hand, the exclusivity of political citizenship – as mirrored in discussions on ‘public reason’ in political theory – is exactly linked, in countries such as Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, to the tough core of civic integration: solemn declarations on liberal values, calls on Muslim politicians to renounce sharia, Verfassungsschutz screening of ‘radicals’, continuing resistance to dual citizenship, and anti-radicalization policies through ‘democratic education’ and ‘democratic mentoring’.
All this and more signal the hard edges of the right to participate in popular sovereignty. They are so many more elements of citizenship as a disciplining of modern virtue, of which self-dependence, the civic chauvinism of national Leitkultur, and adaptation to the welfare state-community are others. Although Joppke acknowledges these trends – elements in his perfectionist-Foucauldian liberalism-as-autonomy – he sees them as part of a civic Abendland panic of nation states, where backward-looking electorates and politicians have not yet given up integrationist illusions, but where ‘repressive liberalism’ will soon play second fiddle. This is hoping too much and maybe the author knows it. Christian Joppke, the most interesting and original writer on European migration and citizenship, has written a book that, while rich in empirical analysis, in many ways is a form of realist critical theory – as in Habermas meets Carl Schmitt meets neoliberalism. It interprets unfolding ideals (a thin, disenchanted constitutional patriotism (p. 116)) as latent in the institutional dynamics and structural conditions of European modernity. From Joppke’s (German!) social theory vantage point, it makes sense to cut through the maze of national diversities and die-hard forces of old, provocatively sharpening the conclusions of comparative discussions that in other ways look open-ended. Maybe it is a matter of this reader’s Scandinavian perspective – sometimes quite far from ‘Europe’ – that I find his diagnosis of the citizenship light to come insufficiently dialectical.
Per Mouritsen, Aarhus University, Department of Political Science, Bartholins Allé, Aarhus, DK-8000, Denmark. Email:
References
Migration, national identity, and solidarity
Augustana College, USA; University of Turku, Finland
If true that the social sciences progress only insofar as they expand their vision by standing on the shoulders of giants, the two giants in question when it comes to what was, until relatively recently, the oft-neglected topic of citizenship are undoubtedly T.H. Marshall and Talcott Parsons. They are present in Christian Joppke’s provocative and sometimes interpretively challenging analysis of the significance of citizenship in an age of migration. Parsons is remembered, either favorably or critically, as seeking, over the course of his career, to produce a general theory for the social sciences that was presumably distilled from a select number of classic theorists, none less important than Weber and Durkheim. His work on citizenship was part of this larger project, one that bears a substantial debt to Durkheim’s work on solidarity. In contrast, Marshall is remembered today primarily for one small book, Citizenship and Social Class (1987 [1950]). This was a book that had a profound impact on Parsons and was to become for virtually everyone entering into contemporary debates concerning the fate of citizenship the touchstone, the begining point for engaging the discourse.
Joppke is no exception, for early on he offers a summary of Marshall’s book, which he describes as the ‘most influential work on citizenship ever written’ (p. 9). The four elements of citizenship are all present in Marshall’s work: membership, identity, rights and obligations. Yet he has relatively little to say about three of them. Membership and identity are noted, as is the idea that they are linked. But since Marshall assumed that there was nothing on the horizon to suggest the imminent break-up of the state and that a shared sense of British identity was embedded in the culture, he gave these two elements relatively short shrift. Likewise with the duties attached to citizenship. This he did because he was a liberal rather than a republican (or as Joppke might put it, a Roman rather than a Greek). The famous passage about the Dunkirk spirit was his way of saying that, in normal times, the mass of the citizenry would be assumed to be politically passive. Not necessarily apathetic or ill-informed, but definitely not actively engaged in the civic arena in the normal course of events. Instead, they would rely on, not only representative government where their electoral support would serve as a source of legitimation for political office holders, but where the nation could also count on a committed and well-educated cadre of dedicated ‘civil servants’ whose primary function it is to look after the public’s interests.
Thus, one can appreciate why the focus of the book is on the evolution of rights, particularly the emergence of social rights, as an antidote to the inequalities that are as much a part of capitalism as its remarkable productive capacity. As such, as Joppke rightly notes, Marshall’s argument is meant to be a rejoinder to Marx, an argument that abandons the idea of advocating for a socialist alternative to capitalism, but instead seeks to find a new form of legitimate inequality within the confines of capitalism that is based on merit and not on inherited wealth. Joppke is also right to describe Marshall’s position as ‘naively optimistic’ (p. 12). Nonetheless, he sees the main achievement of Marshall in salvaging a notion of citizenship from Marx’s critique of it as a sham. That being said, when Parsons offered his own analysis of modern citizenship, building explicitly on Marshall, capitalism dropped out of the frame – a major instance of a larger effort in the social sciences after the Second World War to offer what intellectual historian Howard Brick (2006) depicts as the transcendence of capitalism. Transcendence, it should be said, looks a lot like avoidance. In this regard, Joppke parallels Parsons and key social theorists from his generation in approaching the social and the political with a sense that one could by-and-large disregard what others might see as the capitalist elephant in the room.
Joppke pays relatively little attention to Parsons, which is surprising given what he sees as the core issues confronting citizenship regimes in the liberal democracies today: identity and solidarity. Parsons paid scant attention to the issue of social citizenship, presuming that, in the post-Second World War era, the welfare state that Marshall had advocated for was rather well-embedded in the social systems of the liberal democracies. Whereas Marshall had concerned himself with social class divisions and defined inequality in class-specific terms, Parsons focused on ethnic divisions. His empirical referents were the third-generation and beyond offspring of European immigrants to the USA, and not the major wave of global migrations that commenced during the second half of the past century. I think Giuseppe Sciortino (2010) is quite right when he argues that Parsons’s significance in these matters is his appreciation of the fact that in the modern world of multiple intersecting identities, ethnic pluralism need not be a threat to a more overarching national solidarity, but rather ethnic attachments, so long as they are not inflamed, can easily become subsidiary identities in an identity structure consisting in part of concentric circles, with national identity as the most generalizable, overarching one. This particular contribution of Parsons has been, curiously, overlooked in most of the literature on contemporary citizenship in increasingly diverse societies, and is a position that Joppke appears to unprepared to accept as a solution to societal integration.
This excursus into these two ‘giants’ of citizenship studies can help to locate the argument advanced in Joppke’s new book. He writes at a time that the welfare state no longer has the permanance that was presumed by Parsons and his contemporaries. On the contrary, citizenship has been impacted by the neoliberal assault on the welfare state, which took off with a vengeance in the Anglo-American world during the ideologically rather than pragmatically driven administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and that spilled over in less radical form elsewhere, including the social democracies. While the challenge to the social rights that had been carved out over an extended period of time began in response to the emerging new global economy that saw deindustrialization take root in the old industrial superpowers, immigration exacerbated the strains on the welfare state and immigrants were thus ripe for scapegoating. One of the confounding aspects of continuing public support for the welfare state is, as Joppke notes, predicated on sufficient levels of trust and – as Putnam (2007) in particular has claimed – such trust is eroded when ethnic diversity increases, at least in the short term. This, of course, is central to Joppke’s focus because he writes about a historical juncture characterized by mass migration, which has had profound impacts on not only the historic settler nations, but western Europe, as well.
What, then, is Joppke’s main claim? It is, in essence, an argument he has developed in previous work, most notably in Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State (2005). In contrast to what he reads as Brubaker’s static view of national differences in citizenship type and Soysal’s post-nationalist view of the erosion of the efficacy of state citizenship regimes as they confront the growing influence of trans-state actors and the emerging global human rights regime, he seeks to stake out an alternative to both. As he puts it: ‘The central claim in this book is that, rather than reproduced in nationally distinct ways or being set on a global path of decline, citizenship continued to evolve, toward becoming more inclusive and universalistic. In a way, citizenship’s internally inclusive core has softened its externally exclusive edges’ (p. 31). Joppke thinks that this general trend amounts to the world’s liberal democracies following the pattern first made evident in the case of the USA, and in this regard he notes a similarity between his thesis and that of Parsons four decades earlier. And like Parsons, he is attentive to countertrends that can retard or complicate the master trend. He points to two countertrends: making naturalization more rather than less difficult to achieve, which he sees as the product of anti-Muslim sentiment that includes a conviction that Muslims cannot be integrated; and what he calls the ‘re-ethnicization’ of citizenship as states seek to enhance ties with their expatriate communities. While the evidence in many countries – particularly those that have experienced the growth of right-wing populist parties – provides ample evidence of the former trend, I would suggest that the latter is far less consequential.
The evolution of citizenship, in Joppke’s assessment, does not signal its increased robustness. On the contrary, the net result of growing inclusiveness and universalistic definitions of what it means to be a citizen is that whatever was once distinctive about particular national citizenship regimes erodes. A convergence occurs that make for what he calls ‘citizenship lite’. In this move, Joppke’s perspective is one of rather stark dichotomies and paradoxes, none less significant than that betweeen the universalizing character of the values associated with liberal democratic politics and the particularities of identity. If the values associated with being a citizen of a modern liberal democracy are essentially the same across nations then what happens to the specificity of national identity? Joppke is clearly on to something here, and it is this that leads him to suggest that ‘citizenship lite’ is the order of the day – and that the idea or ideal of EU citizenship constitutes the paradigmatic instance of this thinner citizenship. In the contemporary world, little is asked of citizens, while rights are depicted as expanding. Given the three-decade long neoliberal assault on social rights, I find the latter claim surprising. Perhaps the welfare state has managed in large part up to the present to tread water, but there is much countervailing evidence to challenge Joppke’s claim. However, this is not his central concern. On the contrary, he pays far more attention to the issue of national identity, which he sees as becoming increasingly ‘thin and procedural’ (p. 171) a description he views as especially apt when describing EU citizenship.
It is this view that explains his animus towards multiculturalism, which he sees as exacerbating the weakening of overarching national identity. This occurs as collectivities mobilize, borrowing from Joppke’s language, to pursue their ‘cultural demons’ (p. 98) not only in the private sphere but by making demands on the state to play a role in protecting their cultural legacy. His criticism is familiar enough to anyone who has followed the critics’ arguments over the past two decades. Of central significance in his argument is the contention that diversity inevitably undermines a more universalistic form of solidarity – that the solidarities of particular groups impede or undermine national solidarity. In this connection, it is worth recalling the late Iris Marion Young’s (1990) emphasis on the gulf between the universalistic claims of core groups and reality.
Joppke contends that the pursuit of a multicultural agenda spells trouble for a politics of redistribution, for the politics of identity is viewed as antithetical to the pursuit of social equality. His emphasis on paradoxes results from his view that in these matters we are dealing with either/or possibilities, in effect a zero sum game. As he puts it, multiculturalism produces a shift ‘from redistributive social rights to procedural civil rights’ (p. 1), a formulation that I suspect both Marshall and Parsons would find perplexing because they certainly did not think that civil or political rights were threatened by the emergence of social rights. Joppke might argue that this was because they took for granted national solidarity, a presumption that is undermined by the growing diversity of liberal democracies. While true for Marshall, Parsons was specifically interested in American racial and ethnic diversity as an enduring feature of the society, as his work written during the height of the civil rights movement and the ‘ethnic revival’ attests.
Joppke correctly stresses the significance of identity, and sees overlapping identities as characteristic of the modern world. But he is suspicious of theoretical accounts of how integration is achieved, pointing in particular to Parsons. Somewhat surprisingly, a more recent effort to provide a theory of solidarity and justice, one that explicitly defends multiculturalism as a new mode of incorporation, is ignored: Jeffrey Alexander’s The Civil Sphere (2006). I suspect that if Joppke had traversed a path from Durkheim through Parsons to Alexander, and paid somewhat less attention to the state and more to civil society, he might have had a clearer vista of the world of everyday life where ordinary people seek to find ways to live harmoniously in the midst of diversity, which is not repudiated, but accepted. This is not to embrace a naive optimism, for it is also clear that elements in society are hostile to people who are culturally, religiously and racially different. Nor is it to ignore the point Joppke makes about the salience of individual autonomy in the world of modern individualism, for autonomy makes unstable all forms of collective identity – both particularistic ethnic identities and more overarching national identities. In this regard, finding ways to simultaneously embrace difference and see the other as a member of a shared national identity – or as cosmopolitans and postnationalists would prefer, of a shared humanity – is always an ongoing and inevitably partial achievement.
References
‘If perhaps only in Canada’: Reflections on citizenship and immigration by Christian Joppke
University of Victoria, Canada
I suspect that, upon reading Christian Joppke’s Citizenship and Immigration, even those who have been involved in the local and international debates raging during the past 10 or 15 years around these issues will have a renewed appreciation of the more subtle and complex features of their field of interest. Joppke offers readers both a panoramic account of the historical, social and philosophical forces at work in the political debates around citizenship, and numerous credible and well-documented illustrations of the ways these issues are expressed and managed in particular states.
Joppke explores the theory and practice of citizenship and immigration in North America, western Europe and Australia across three particular dimensions: status (regarding formal membership in a state); rights (regarding the privileges to which one might be entitled in one’s own state or in another); and identity (regarding the beliefs and values citizens of a particular state or society might be expected to espouse). These three dimensions are interpreted in light of changes occurring in international norms (such as the emergence of human rights as a core concept in western societies), economic realities (such as the fate of guest-worker programmes and the emergence and subsequent restructuring of the welfare state), civil society, universalizing liberal institutions (such as the EU), and national peculiarities (such as the existence of right-wing nativist parties in one country but not in another).
Joppke’s ambitious and accessible book allows readers to situate their own interests within both particular national and broader international debates around nationalism, globalization, multiculturalism, integration and pluralism. My interpretation of this work grows out of my own background as a Canadian religious studies scholar with an interest in the ways religious, ethnic and national identities are redefined in the contexts of global migration and integration within liberal democratic societies.
Let me begin at home. In his discussion of Irene Bloemraad’s 2006 study of Canada’s warm (relative to the US) welcome of newcomers, Joppke concludes that ‘promoting citizenship and official multiculturalism policies need not be contradictory, as they are in Europe today, but may happily complement one another, if perhaps only in Canada’ (p. 40; italics added).
Is Canada so different from the other liberal democracies Joppke considers? Yes and no. First, yes: while Canadian approaches to citizenship and immigration began over a hundred years ago with all manner of legal exclusions and overt racism, they were reinvented in the late 1960s only to benefit massively from the state’s booming economy, vast land mass, relatively secure border, heterogeneous immigrant cohort, two official languages, and – best of all – geographical remoteness from the world’s poor and unwashed. Moreover, as Varun Uberoi (2009) argues, Canadian leaders used key policies such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), the Multiculturalism Policy (1971) and Multiculturalism Act (1988) to re-shape our national narrative such that religious, ethnic and cultural forms of diversity were no longer construed as menaces to an unchanging collective identity. This was no small feat, and it helps to explain why debates about immigration and citizenship are often less volatile in Canada than in many other places. Will Kymlicka observes that, ‘If we look at the evidence dispassionately, … it is clear that ethnic relations in Toronto are not like those in Paris, Amsterdam or Bradford’ (2010: 17). As such, he contends that scholars and policymakers who are critical of Canadian multiculturalism ought to ‘set aside the pervasive tendency to look at the Canadian experience through the lens of the European backlash against multiculturalism’ (2010: 21).
Scholars continue to debate whether, in other states, multicultural policies are ‘in retreat’ (Joppke, 2004; cf. Bramadat, 2011) or in the midst of both real and rhetorical rearticulations (Meer and Modood, 2009; cf. Giddens, 2006). In Canada, it is highly unlikely that we will see anything like a full retreat from multiculturalism in the foreseeable future, although the concept and policy will necessarily evolve over time. It would have been worthwhile, therefore, to reflect on why in Canada, civic integration and multicultural policies can co-exist – can even nurture one another in many instances – whereas within other countries these forces are understood to be locked in a ‘zero-sum game’ (Meer and Modood, 2009: 475) 1 Deeper reflection from Joppke on what we might call ‘Canadian exceptionalism’ with respect to citizenship and immigration might illuminate interesting alternatives to the polarized approaches one sees outside of Canada.
Second, no: while it is the case that, not withstanding some notable cultural counter-currents, public support for multiculturalism remains quite high in Canada, 2 this society is subject to some of the same forces at play in the states Joppke uses as his main examples. For example, Canada’s political parties strain mightily both to attract the essential ‘ethnic vote’ they need to win a majority of seats and to cater to some members of the electorate who have concerns about the ‘limits of multiculturalism’ and incipient ‘home-grown’ terrorism among Muslim and Sikh communities. In fact, Canada’s current Conservative Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, has been nick-named the minister of ‘curry in a hurry’ because of his Herculean efforts to convince Canada’s ethnic minorities that his party shares their interests. The ethnic vote might be somewhat more important in Canada than in the states featured prominently in Joppke’s book, but demographic trends in liberal democracies suggest that these variables will soon be commonplace elsewhere.
Moreover, the Canadian federal as well as its 10 provincial governments – just like the governments Joppke surveys – arguably manage their settled majority populations partially through discourses that would appear to restrict minority newcomers’ citizenship rights as well as their status; in fact, as he notes, the vast majority of policies and laws in virtually all liberal democracies remain relatively welcoming (at least when such societies are viewed historically and in contrast with non-liberal states). Nonetheless, in Canada as in Europe, there are anxieties over the implications for citizenship of the cultural and religious diversity fostered by immigration from non-European source countries (Bramadat, 2011; Kymlicka, 2010). This is certainly evident in the controversies in 2007–08 that swirled around the publicly funded study that had the philosopher Charles Taylor and historian Gérard Bouchard hosting televised and often raucous community fora across the province of Quebec in order to gather feedback on the accommodation of cultural (read: mostly religious) differences. Their landmark report was mostly ignored or dismissed by politicians, but it captured the uneasy nature of debates around citizenship and immigration in Quebec. 3
While Canada’s multiculturalism and liberalism are distinctive, the above incidents and the demographic, regional and political forces they bespeak do not categorically distinguish our policies and public discourses from those found in the states Joppke discusses at greater length. Unfortunately, when Joppke does (rarely) discuss Canadian policies around citizenship, they are either portrayed positively (e.g. p. 39) or not subjected to the kind of critical analysis Canadian readers might expect.
Beyond Canada, one might also raise questions about the broader argument being advanced. Joppke’s focus is on state and civil society discourses on citizenship and immigration. He observes that, in the decade since 9/11, although particular states have seemed to retreat from multiculturalism and liberal openness, in many other liberal democracies there has been a strengthening and even universalizing of liberal rights frameworks. As I noted above, Joppke is right that those well-known retrenchments have perhaps less to do with punishing or managing immigrants than they do with addressing the needs and anxieties of the majority population (Bramadat and Koenig, 2009).
Nevertheless, these discourses – perhaps it would be better to call them ‘political performances’ – about ‘shared values’, the meaning of being British, American, etc., call upon minority religious groups to assume particular roles in national narratives. Two obvious choices emerge: to use relatively new human rights norms, legal protections and identity politics to defend their ‘right’ to be religious citizens, or to assuage the worries of their neighbours by insisting that they, too, want nothing more than to embrace the normative identity of good liberal citizens. Of course, both strategies can be pursued simultaneously. Muslims may say: ‘As German citizens we have the right to express our Muslim identities and the state has a responsibility to accommodate these expressions to some degree; and in any case, we are here because we are also interested in living in a liberal democracy’.
However, with Talal Asad (2003) in mind, we might ask how and why this liberal discursive arena was constructed in the first place; moreover, we might ask whether the options now available to religious minorities in liberal democracies constrain both the minorities and the democracies.
Here it would be helpful to reflect at greater length on an observation Joppke makes briefly – that the changes in citizenship and immigration policies in the latter half of the last century must be understood as likely irreversible consequences of the horrors of the Holocaust and Second World War more generally (p. 148). These events shone a bright light on the grotesque possibilities of radical nationalism and racism, and in their aftermath the West embraced new liberal human rights norms and far more inclusive citizenship policies. Of course, for many the events of 9/11 would reveal a new enemy for the liberal state, and in the term ‘Islamo-fascism’ we see a (perhaps fitting) conflation of the horrors of the 1940s and 2001.
Joppke describes the expansion of liberal institutions, laws, policies and societies following the Holocaust and continuing, with some notable set-backs, even in the wake of the events of September 2001. Surely this is a testament to the merits and resilience of liberalism – but the putative barbarians at the gate of liberalism probably outnumber the liberals, and include both illiberal states and illiberal minorities within our states. Thanks both to the efforts of people such as the ‘new atheists’ and, we should add, the ‘more lunatic strands of Islam’ (Joppke, 2009: 561) and other religious groups, orthodox religionists have been framed in this new post-2001 drama as the spoilers, the proto-liberals at best, minorities in need of management (cf. Meer and Modood, 2009: 486).
The supposed antagonism between the liberal and the religious pre-dated the Holocaust and 9/11 by about two or three centuries, of course, but these two events (especially the latter) have re-inscribed this cultural clash in new and problematic ways. For some, this has led to an excessive focus on religious conflicts, for example, over the extremely small number of veiled Muslim women who wish to vote (a dilemma revolved to the satisfaction of almost all parties by allowing the women to show their faces to female officials). For others, it has led to an overly generous reification of religion that is evident in its apotheosis into a pure repository of moral and spiritual beneficence that is sometimes ‘hijacked’ by psychopaths who do not understand their own religion. Neither of these caricatures of religion seems likely to help us resolve the issues that have so complicated political debates about citizenship and immigration in the West.
If we are, as Joppke argues, moving in the direction of ‘citizenship light’ (p. 145) a liberal and procedural citizenship regime that demands little in the way of substantive and distinctive beliefs from its citizens and offers them both a great many rights and unprecedented latitude, we will want to pay special attention to the way religion is invoked in this new era. Will it become one more elective or ‘light’ feature of a person’s or a community’s identity, and as such will it have less potential to galvanize and radicalize minority sentiments? Will the procedural turn make it impossible for us to learn about, much less benefit from, some of the substantive ethical insights contained in religious traditions? Will religion become an increasingly important lightning rod for ambient anxieties in the West related to cultural identity? Will religion destabilize – or perhaps strengthen – some of the key features of liberalism? Regardless of the forms religion is likely to take in the West, Joppke’s masterful account of the history and future of citizenship and immigration should help us anticipate and respond sensibly to a wide range of possibilities.
Notes
Meer and Modood question the claim or the assumption that we are seeing a full retreat from multiculturalism. Instead, they contend that, in Britain, they are witnessing a ‘re-balancing of multiculturalism rather than its erasure’ (2009: 490).
In a document prepared by the social and political affairs branch of the Canadian Parliamentary Information and Research Services, Michael Dewing and Marc Leman observe: ‘Recent polls show that acceptance of diversity is becoming the norm in Canada. A survey published by the Centre for Research and Information on Canada (CRIC) in October 2003 found that 54% of those surveyed said that multiculturalism made them feel very proud to be Canadian. This figure rose to 66% among those between the ages of 18 and 30. Support for multiculturalism does not appear to have weakened in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001. A CRIC survey published in October 2005 found that two-thirds of Canadians see multiculturalism as guarding against extremism rather than leading to it.’ http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/LOP/ResearchPublications/prb0920-e.pdf. See also the recent Environics(2010) Focus Canada study.
With this public discord in mind we should not have been surprised when Quebec’s provincial politicians erupted into cheers in February 2011. Four Sikhs had been invited to the provincial legislature to address the politicians about Bill 94, an act that would, in effect, deny government services to the 20–50 Quebec women who wear the Muslim niqab (the population of Quebec is roughly 8 million). When the invited Sikh guests refused to remove their kirpans at the security desk, they were asked to leave the building. The 113 elected members of the legislature voted unanimously to uphold the ban on kirpans, though in fact the kirpan is allowed in schools, the federal parliament buildings in Ottawa and in most other provincial legislatures and courthouses. The bill would exclude anyone who covers his or her face from receiving government services, but its origins are clearly in the widespread concern over Muslim head-coverings in Quebec society. For the text of the bill, see Assemblée Nationale Quebec (2011); for newspaper coverage, see thestar.com (2010).
References
University of Bern, Switzerland
Citizenship and Immigration tries to put into one coherent statement seemingly disjoint observations I had made in the past few years about various aspects of citizenship in a context of migration, from the dry domain of nationality law to the loftier debates surrounding multiculturalism. The conceptual framework, which distinguishes between the status, rights and identity dimensions of citizenship, owes much to a research proposal that had been my bid for entry into the fabulous ‘Transformation of the State’ research center of the University of Bremen and International University Bremen (now Jacobs University). Stephan Leibfried and his exceptional colleagues pushed me to polish the proposal to a degree that the book was little more than filling boxes. Alas, a move from Bremen to Paris prevented me from joining the research center, and the work had to be done solitarily, and without the help of the German taxpayer. If the product may still be worth the while, this is also a commentary on the industrial Drittmittelforschung that, lamentably, has become the gold standard of the academic profession.
While the book was commissioned by the publisher as a state-of-the-art review of the field designated by its bland title, I have smuggled into it a contestable view of changing citizenship in the context of migration. The argument is arrestingly simple: citizenship as ‘status’ has become easier to access (note the proliferation of jus soli citizenship and as-of-right naturalization in Europe), there are now fewer ‘rights’ exclusively attached to citizenship so that its value has decreased, and the ‘identity’ of citizenship has become thin and universalistic, a kind of copy-cat constitutional patriotism everywhere. Looking for a label that sticks, I chose that of ‘citizenship light’ (it should be ‘lite’, I know), with the maturing EU citizenship as less of the ‘bread and circus’ affair that the Euro-lawyer Joseph Weiler had suspected it to be than the very future of citizenship in the West (the book regrettably does not talk about the Rest). On the academic front, this view of evolving, ‘liberal’ citizenship is my answer to ‘nationalist’ and ‘postnational’ theories of citizenship, represented in the well-known works by Rogers Brubaker and Yasemin Soysal, respectively, which both contain elements of truth yet, in their one-sided visions, have got it wrong, or so is my claim.
One must probably read this as a ‘story of triumphant liberalism’, as Per Mouritsen does in his delightful review. But when buying a Coke, I instinctively grab the red classic, not the silverish dilution for the weight-conscious. And this is where the personal blends with the sociological. Hastening from land to land, more pushed than pulled, and at first oblivious that life is finite, I am unlikely to be the first to hit on the pension question as the penultimate end of the swing. Then liberalism’s smile turns to grimace. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a ‘country’ to fall back on when the batteries run out? I am not sure whether citizenship ever was this: haven in a restless world, though T. H. Marshall’s celebration of social citizenship suggested something like it. The comfort found in this vision is clearly not of ‘liberal’ vintage, and here is something that citizenship has lost, unlikely to retrieve. Not just are the solidarities gone, but when hyped up into ‘identity’, liberal citizenship has exclusive, even repressive, possibilities, as liberalism’s sometimes real but most often imagined Other, Muslims, currently experience, especially in Europe. Surely, the triumphs of ‘triumphant liberalism’ are heavily dented by losses and losers that my book has not at all been silent about.
Of the three reviews, Peter Kivisto’s is the most reserved, as he dislikes my cavalier attitude to ‘theory’ and, above all, my ‘animus towards multiculturalism’. Let me confess: I once had the new Jeffrey Alexander on my desk (it’s not even the newest anymore), but I decided that life is too short. Its 800 pages would not have convinced me of ‘multiculturalism as a new mode of incorporation’, if this is the claim. Here is also a principled disagreement about how to do sociology. My instinct is to start with something in the world, not with theory about the world (and certainly not the type of theory that is theory about theory). In a word, less theory is better theory. No need for Alexander. No need even for Parsons whose views about citizenship do not rock the boat (and the best translation of his contorted prose remains the sarcastic four paragraphs in C. W. Mills’ Sociological Imagination (1959: 32f)). I was still surprised that Kivisto depicts Parsons as a champion of multiculturalism before the word. Parsons was an American liberal, having no problem with ‘ethnic attachments’ co-existing with ‘national identity’, but only as ‘subsidiary identities’. Kivisto posits this Parsonian view as ‘a solution to societal integration’ that ‘Joppke appears to be unprepared to accept’. But why? If this is multiculturalism, I am all in favor. I don’t quite know what is meant by ‘ordinary people seek(ing) to find ways to live harmoniously in the midst of diversity’, but who would mind such a harmless thing, particularly if the place of it is ‘civil society’, as Kivisto perfectly agreeably submits, and not the state? I reserve the notion of ‘multiculturalism’ to something narrower, spicier, a state-level ‘politics of recognition’ à la Charles Taylor or Iris Young that busts the private–public divide as we (liberals) know it. This I do find wanting, for all the reasons that cannot be repeated here. Not to mention that, whatever you or I may think about it, such ‘multiculturalism’ proper has been practically obviated by contemporary states’ discovery of citizenship as tool of integration (depicted in the ‘identity’ chapter of the book).
Paul Bramadat also blows into the multiculturalism horn. How couldn’t he, the Canadian? But he finds my few lines on ‘Canadian exceptionalism’ too positive, wishing I had done a more ‘critical analysis’ of the Canadian situation, particularly considering the lot of its ‘visible minorities’ that endure discrimination and sustained disadvantage despite all multiculturalism. To this I respond that a synoptic view of changing citizenship in the West can impossibly do justice to any one country, even though the case of Canada is clearly more interesting than many others. Canada is interesting precisely for the achieved and apparently stable synthesis of multiculturalism and citizenship that Citizenship and Immigration seems to discount in principle. However, the Canadian model does not travel well to other places, it is no ‘model’ at all. If, indeed, ‘multiculturalism’ has become a matter of Canadian identity, this cannot be decoupled from the need to demarcate ‘Canada’ in a positive way from its far more powerful and resourceful southern neighbor, which from the Canadian optic appears to be still ‘assimilating’ its immigrants, ‘melting-pot’ style. Posed as a counterfactual, without the need to delimit itself from the USA on the identity front, there would be much less stability to Canadian multiculturalism – witness, for instance, the waxing and waning of Australia’s multiculturalism in the past 20 years, which had started quite similarly as an identity option for a post-British, post-Imperial, post-racist society. But there are other reasons for Canada’s happy marriage of multiculturalism and citizenship, which is nowhere better articulated than in Will Kymlicka’s notion of ‘liberal multiculturalism’. Reflecting on multiculturalism’s retreat in other parts of the world, Kymlicka now submits that liberal multiculturalism presupposes liberal credentials on the part of newcomers, who must not be suspected to be ‘disloyal’ to their host society and to harbor ‘illiberal’ leanings. But these are the two suspicions that are held against Muslim immigrants and their offspring in Europe, right or wrong, and they are driving the retreat from multiculturalism there. I only touched on the Muslim and Islam issue in this little book (as I avoided the question of religion more generally, as Bramadat rightly points out), but I think it is absolutely central to multiculturalism’s undeniable retreat in Europe. By the same token, the Islam issue in Europe is perhaps less a question of religion than of failed socioeconomic integration, where ‘Islam’ figures as politicized protest ideology that, in other circumstances, might well have sprung from other sources, such as Marxism–Leninism.
From Per Mouritsen’s elegant review I learned so much, and it so nicely balances the encouraging and the critical, that silence would be the most apposite response (also because my assigned lines are running out). He outs me as a ‘realist critical theorist’, ‘as in Habermas meets Carl Schmitt meets neoliberalism’ (surely, a few sizes smaller than that …). My Habermasian origins must have left traces, and I also think that a sharper diagnosis of the limits of liberalism than Schmitt’s is difficult to find. Mouritsen only bemoans that this bizarre marriage works out ‘insufficiently dialectical’, with too little regard for ‘Schmittian (popular) sovereignty’. The ‘particular universalism’ of the Nordic states (I borrow the notion from Mouritsen) is, well, ‘still nationalism’, and ‘the logic of minor differences is not new in the history of nationalism’. Agreed: even if the self-same ingredients go into it (those of the French triptych plus diversity and tolerance), the stew turns out slightly different in every country, as each has a different history of realizing or failing these liberal values. Perhaps I bought too much into Verfassungspatriotismus, or rather did not take serious enough its German inflection, where any other patriotism is crossed out by its – uniquely bestial – mid-20th-century history. But then we have nationalism again, if only in the negative.
Citizenship is subject to a tug of war between nationalizing and de-nationalizing forces, but at least in the West, which is driving the economic and technological project of globalization, the ‘lite’ side must win. The exotic footballers and other winning sportsmen and women who are acquiring German or Italian citizenship at ‘Olympic’ speed herald the future of citizenship for all. Because, before we all drown or get stir-fried, our future is one of a global business civilization, with the first pages of the Communist Manifesto as its unsurpassed description, only without any redemption in sight.
Apart from insisting on the Schmittian harder edge of citizenship, Mouritsen points to an omission in Citizenship and Immigration that I, in fact, had thought hard about: the neglect of ‘participation’ (or of the political) as a fourth dimension of citizenship, next to status, rights, identity. This absence of the political was programmatic, as I think that citizenship’s ‘Roman’ variant of rights-holding is winning out against the ‘Greek’ ideal of virtuous and participatory citizenship. But then there are serious objections to excluding the political, two of which Mouritsen mentions. First, the ethnic vote (or the absence of it in restrictive regimes) counts, and the political dynamic in western societies is ever more one where immigration occupies center-stage. Second, and this I found a really good observation, the ‘tough core of civic integration’ is precisely to make sure that the one privilege that still comes with citizenship, which is the right to vote and to stand for office, will be exercised in a prudent and non-destabilizing way. In sum, as immigration is a recurrent and growing phenomenon, the question of political incorporation cannot but grow in importance too. This is a valid objection that a second edition of Citizenship and Immigration (tongue-in-cheek) will have to ponder more seriously.
A synthetic account of changing citizenship across its dimensions – status, rights, identity – cannot avoid the question of how it all hangs together, or the question of causality. Interestingly, none of the reviews touched on this, yet it is a central question for the book. When the project was in its infant stages, my Bremen colleagues pushed me hard on the causality question. But my proposition appears in the final version more as fiction than reality, immediately debunked: the liberalized access to the ‘status’ of citizenship diluting and fragmenting its ‘rights’ implications, with states responding to the increased heterogeneity of the citizenry by pushing the ‘identity’ of citizenship, if only in a paradoxically universalistic idiom. This is a plausible view, but it cannot pass as causal analysis, and, in fact, I immediately take distance from it. There are instead only partial causalities within distinct legal–political domains, say, nationality, antidiscrimination, or welfare law, and only at the cost of undue simplification does one arrive at a domain-transcending dynamics, a ‘bigger picture’ as it were. However incompletely, this little book tries to do justice to both, the detail as much as the bigger picture. This remains a challenge for future work on citizenship and immigration, may, for any effort to push knowledge.