Abstract
This article explores the experiences of second-generation migrants with a focus on Chinese in Prato (Italy), for whom the relationship between citizenship and identity is tightly linked. Most studies maintain that the link between citizenship and identity is instrumentalist or ambiguous. In contrast, we focus on the affective dimension of citizenship and identity. We argue that citizenship status functions as a key defining concept of identity in Italy, in contrast to countries like Australia, where the notion of ethnicity is more commonly evoked. Several factors have contributed to this situation: the strong essentialist conception of ius sanguinis in Italian citizenship law, the recent history of Italian immigration, the European politics of exclusion and the repudiation of the concept of ethnicity in Italian scholarship as well as popular and political discourse. We conclude that the emphasis on formal citizenship, and the relative absence of alternative identity concepts like ethnicity, limits the possibilities for expressions of mixity and hyphenated identities in contemporary Italian society.
Preamble
Fieldwork diary entry: Standing in line at the Questura (police headquarters) of Prato on a mercifully mild day in June 2011 there is Stefano, born in Italy in 1937, who migrated to Australia in 1956, requesting a permit of stay so that he can live in Italy for one year to be with his daughter who has just got a temporary transfer to Italy from Australia with her work. Stefano had to give up his Italian citizenship in 1969 in order to attain Australian citizenship. Despite these legal impediments, Stefano states he is ‘100% Italian’ although he also feels ‘a little bit Australian’ after having lived there so long. Stefano is annoyed about having to apply for a permit to live in what he describes as ‘my own country’. He is also distressed by the process of application and dismayed by its many inherent uncertainties: How long will he have to wait in the line? How helpful will the officials be? How long will it take for his application to be processed? Will it be approved and so on …
Accompanying him is his daughter, Elena, born in Australia in 1968, who has both Australian and Italian citizenship (claimed through Stefano, who was an Italian citizen at the time of her birth, which entitled her to dual citizenship in 1992 when the relevant bilateral laws were introduced). 1 Elena identifies as an Italian-Australian and describes herself as having a ‘mixed ethnic identity’. She tries to console her father by pointing to the dozens of non-Italian migrants in the line (mainly Chinese but also Africans, Eastern Europeans and people from the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh and even Peru), who, she says are hoping to get a permit; ‘so they can have a better life for themselves and their children. Just like you when you migrated to Australia where you were lucky to be offered citizenship without having to line up like this’.
With them is Elena's Anglo-Indian husband, Ravi, who has successfully applied for Italian citizenship through his marriage to Elena. Ravi is having difficulty settling in Italy and defines himself as an Australian, having lived there since he was 2 years old. Also in line is their 12-year-old daughter, Sarah (Stefano's granddaughter) who was born in Australia. Sarah has Italian and Australian citizenship like her mother. She says she feels ‘a tiny bit Indian, a little bit more Italian and mostly Australian’. Sarah, clearly amused by the fact, tells us all that her uncle Carlo (Elena's brother) is frustrated that she, his niece, has Italian citizenship when Carlo was told that he had no right to claim it because Stefano became an Australian citizen before Carlo was born.
Also in line is their new friend Ming, Prato-born to Chinese immigrant parents who is making her annual application for a permit of stay. Ming graduated from a university in Italy, speaks fluent Italian including the local dialect and has never been to China. Ming has been trying to get Italian citizenship since she turned 18 and can no longer legally live in Italy without a permit of stay. To qualify for a permit, Ming must have a job. Ming says she is Chinese because she does not have Italian citizenship but that she feels Italy is her home and the only place she really knows, although she can't say she actually belongs there.
Having grown up in Australia, with its multicultural history and related discourses about ethnic mixity and hyphenated ethnic identities, Elena thinks Ming is Italian even though she has Chinese citizenship and ancestry. Having grown up in Italy, with its more essentialist approach to identity, Ming thinks Elena and her daughter, Sarah are ‘really Australians and not Italians’ and that Stefano is ‘definitely an Italian’ even though he does not have Italian citizenship and despite his Australian citizenship. Ming also thinks Ravi is Indian and not Australian, even though Ravi does not feel Indian and self-identifies as Australian.
Over-hearing Ming's comments, a young man also waiting in line confides that he is actually from Albania but that he tries to keep that a secret because people think he looks Italian. He makes everyone laugh by saying that as a result he has no idea who he is ….
Young Sarah sums up the conversation well when she exclaims; ‘it's complicated, isn't it!’
A few minutes later, Stefano, Elena, Ravi and Sarah are pulled out of the line by an official and fast-tracked through the visa offices because of Elena's employment at a high status university in the town.
Introduction
This article explores the tensions and intersections between legal and substantive forms of citizenship and their relationship to ethnicity, identity and belonging for second-generation migrants in Italy, with a particular focus on Chinese in Prato. Legal citizenship refers to the formal and juridical processes of citizenship status, while substantive citizenship refers to the lived experiences, feelings of belonging and processes of identification that can exist without legal citizenship and that often overlap with ethnic, national and transnational conceptions of identity. In examining these complex relationships, we found that for second-generation Chinese youth, substantive citizenship is profoundly intertwined with legal citizenship, and the two are not clearly distinguishable. Consequently, legal citizenship, as defined by Marshall (1950), is a key identity construct that is performed and embodied by Chinese youth in the Italian context. This finding contributes to scholarly debates about the relevance of citizenship status to identity and belonging.
As is evident in the ethnographic scene recounted above, the relationship between citizenship, ethnicity and belonging is complex and varies between different national contexts. Most studies argue that the link between citizenship law and ethnic identity is instrumentalist or ambiguous and that substantive forms of citizenship are more relevant than formal citizenship status to the experience of belonging (Brubaker et al., 2006; Modood et al., 1994; Portes and Rumbaut, 2001; Reed-Danahay and Brettell, 2008; Riccio and Russo, 2011; Zhou, 2009). In contrast, we focus on the affective dimension of citizenship and identity, in the context of Chinese youth in Prato, where the relationship between legal citizenship and national identity is tightly linked, with important everyday implications as a result. We argue that citizenship status functions as a key defining concept of migrant identity in the Italian case (a point also made by Stanley 2008), in contrast to so-called multiculturalist nations like Australia, the UK and Canada, where the concept of ethnic (and racial) identity is more commonly featured and is not directly linked to formal citizenship. In the absence of discourses and conceptualisations of ethnic (as distinct from national) identities, migrant identities in Italy are defined by essentialist conceptions of ‘otherness’ (i.e. their non-Italianess), which limits the possibilities for expressions of mixed or multiple identities, and renders formal citizenship status a key identity marker. We explore this argument through a series of ethnographic case studies that help to illuminate the factors and processes that form and constrain migrant identities in Italy including: (a) the strong essentialist conception of ius sanguinis in Italian citizenship law, (b) the recent history and relative ‘newness’ of Italian immigration, (c) the overall social context of ‘fortress Europe’ and (d) the ambiguous status of the concept of ethnicity in Italian scholarship as well as in popular and political discourse. We conclude that formal citizenship status can be an important and embodied experience of belonging and identity in Italy particularly in light of the relative absence of ethnicity as a central identity construct in Italian society. These factors together limit the possibilities for expressions of mixity and hyphenated identities among second-generation migrants. This is especially true for Chinese in Prato, who, more than any other migrant group in the province, embody otherness.
In Brubaker's (1992) civic/ethnic nationalism continuum, Italy's citizenship history is closer to the German than the French case, where belonging to the nation is conceived as a cultural-linguistic (rather than a political) community, making Italian citizenship for (non-Italian) migrants a particularly contentious issue. Key sociological and anthropological research on substantive forms of citizenship has tended to downplay the role of legal citizenship in everyday life experiences (Holston and Appadurai, 1999) in favour of an understanding of ‘citizenship as a more total relationship, inflected by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, institutional practices and a sense of belonging’ (Werbner and Yuval-Davies, 1999: 4). For example, Ong (1996) makes a compelling case for the notion of ‘cultural citizenship’ defined as contemporaneous processes of self-making and being-made. While this approach is important in the way it merges political economy considerations with the exploration of cultural processes, it tends to overlook the legal dimension of citizenship. As Isin and Turner (2002: 4) observe, there is ‘a sociologically informed definition of citizenship in which the emphasis is less on legal rules and more on norms, practices, meanings and identities’. Not surprisingly, legal citizenship is hardly the preferred concept for discussions about identity. Wise and Velayutham (2009) employ the notion of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ to emphasise how the legal aspects of citizenship can be largely irrelevant to the way belonging and identity is performed in quotidian practices in Australia. Similarly, Alba and Waters (2011: 13) draw a clear distinction between the formal legal processes of categorisation and the substantive experience of social practices of belonging in the US, implicitly downplaying the relevance of the former.
In summary, there is a strong consensus in the literature that citizenship law is not in general a good overall guide to the comparative study of incorporation. While researchers agree that citizenship is a pertinent factor in integration, identity and belonging, it is generally claimed that the substantive (social and cultural) experiences are most important. The formal aspects of citizenship status are thus seen, or implied to be, less relevant as well as easily separated out from (or even mutually exclusive of) substantive experiences. In this article, we report on macro, meso and micro ethnographic case study examples to show how each of these different levels of discourse complicate the division between formal and substantive citizenship in the Italian context. From our research, we identify practices and understandings of identity that are tightly linked to legal citizenship, making it an important measure of inclusion that reflects both externally and internally ascribed identities, despite the fact that it may not ensure either participation or a sense of belonging. We show that legal citizenship, particularly in the context of Chinese second-generation migrants in Prato, has clear affective, embodied and performative dimensions.
The focus in the socio-anthropological literature on substantive forms of citizenship is arguably the result of liberal aspirations in debates about multiculturalism that encourage the separation of legal citizenship from its socio-cultural aspects – often defined as ethnicity – especially in so-called ‘immigrant nations’. Joseph Carens (1997: 815), for example, argues that we should disentangle legal citizenship from culture and ethnicity by relying solely on those essentials of democratic liberalism that are ‘needed to maintain and reproduce liberal democratic institutions and practice’, thus achieving Habermas's (1994: 142–144) ideal of ‘constitutional patriotism’. Indeed, nation-state and culture/ethnicity are not necessarily tied together (Tambini, 2001: 204). The rich body of ethnography of transnational experiences reveals that identity formation takes place at multiple local and transnational levels, often transcending the national scale (Baubock and Faist, 2010; Kivisto and Faist, 2009). We balance this view with an appreciation of the ties that bind people in particular national contexts, as argued by Calhoun (2003: 536): …it is impossible not to belong to social groups, relations, or culture. The idea of individuals abstract enough to be able to choose all their ‘identifications’ is deeply misleading. Versions of this idea are, however, widespread in liberal cosmopolitanism… Treating ethnicity as essentially a choice of identifications, they neglect the omnipresence of ascription (and discrimination) as determinations of social identities. And they neglect the extent to which people are implicated in social actions that they are not entirely free to choose.
Legal citizenship is therefore not simply an irrelevant set of abstract concepts; it can also be an embodied practice. In examining these issues, we attempt to tease out the dichotomy between abstract ‘top down’ and ethnographic ‘bottom up’ approaches to citizenship, responding to the call for more empirical studies of citizenship (Lister, 2007: 58). Our aim is to critique the distinction between macro and micro dimensions of citizenship, and to argue that legal citizenship can be more intimately connected to identity and belonging. Our ethnographic findings mark the significance of the affective aspects of legal citizenship, its performativity and practice in the Italian context. In the process, we became acutely aware that one of the major impediments to examining the concepts of legal and substantive citizenship, ethnicity, and belonging, is that they can have diverse meanings in different national contexts (including in academic, political and popular discourses). Peggy Levitt (2012: 493) made a similar claim, reflecting on the gaps still to be filled in migration studies: We had sidestepped the challenge of translating within and across continents – that is, of doing the difficult work of uncovering and then explaining what the taken-for-granted categories we use really mean in the places where we use them. […] we need to do a better job of incorporating how the history of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ or ‘nationalism’ in a particular place shapes how these words are used and what they ultimately capture.
Methods: Ethnographic fieldwork in Prato
This article derives from a research project focused on issues of social inclusion in Prato, in which the authors conducted extensive periods of participant observation and semi-structured interviews (over 70 formal and numerous informal) with a range of people including politicians, public servants, teachers, young people and labour migrants, which began in 2009 and is ongoing. Although the focus was not only on the Chinese population, during the research, it became clear that to speak of immigration in Prato is first and foremost to speak of the Chinese presence in the city. The interview data with second-generation migrants were triangulated with participant observation field notes as well as the analysis of relevant media articles, websites, the built environment, state laws and academic literature to deliver the case studies that feature in this article. 3
Prato is an especially pertinent place to examine citizenship, identity and belonging because in the space of just a few decades it has become home to one of the largest communities of Chinese immigrants of any province in Italy. In 1990, there were just 500 China-born registered residents and by 2010 this number had grown to almost 12,000 (Sambo, 2013: 110). 4 The majority of the Chinese in Prato (and Italy) come from the port city of Wenzhou in the region of Zhejiang, on the central-southern coast just south of Shanghai. We have no room in this article to explain the local economic context in detail, except to say that the Chinese are perceived to be in direct economic competition with locals in the historic textile industry, a situation that has fostered extreme segregation and prejudice fuelled by the Global Economic Crisis (Dei Ottati, 2014). Anti-Chinese sentiment is clearly evident in public life as well as in the private conversations of individuals, attracting negative press in local, national and international papers (Baldassar et al., 2015). This sentiment took an especially hostile political form in 2009 during the local municipal elections when the major contesting party ran its campaign on an overtly anti-Chinese platform, eventually winning office and subsequently approving a military presence in the town to assist with the so-called ‘Chinese problem’ (Raffaetà and Baldassar, 2015).
Citizenship in practice: Emotional and embodied dimensions
Italian citizenship law is defined by ius sanguinis. This means that individuals born in Italy to immigrant parents have no direct access to citizenship. When they turn 18, immigrant children have 365 days to opt for Italian citizenship, 5 provided they can prove their uninterrupted residence. Beyond this period, they are no longer eligible for this privilege and must apply like any other (foreign-born) immigrant. Many Chinese families have been living in Prato for over 20 years. Their children have grown up there. Citizenship rights have thus become a key symbol of tensions around identity and belonging for second-generation migrants in Italy. In this section, we describe three representative case studies to illustrate our arguments about citizenship and identity in the Italian case, with particular reference to Chinese young people. The first, an example from a community or ‘meso’ structural level, is a posting on the Associna (Second-Generation Chinese Italian Association) website. The second, an example of a state or ‘macro’ level intervention, is the G2 (Second-Generation Italian Association) public response to the 2012 ‘Miss Italia nel Mondo’ competition and the third, a private micro level experience, is an excerpt from an interview with a key Second-Generation Chinese Prato informant.
Associna – Citizenship embodied online (and in the line) – A ‘meso’ community level of association
In Italy, whether individuals want to pursue employment, enrol their children in school, start a business, request an ID or simply take a fitness class, they are hailed by bureaucratic demands to prove their claims about themselves through appropriate paperwork. Frequently frustrating encounters with local bureaucracies generate time-consuming and costly trails of certificates meant to demonstrate that individuals ‘exist and are alive’, have a clear criminal record, really reside where they claim to, are indeed children of their parents and parents of their children, are legally married to their spouses, and so on. To Italians, this is a largely anticipated and expected annoyance that most can normalise. For non-citizens, however, the coercions generated through convoluted and self-referential red tape practices may create hurdles that are exponentially more difficult to overcome. This regular checking of one's ‘various particulars’ may end up frequently obstructing the flow of everyday life, making the attainment of legal citizenship status even more essential – and even more embodied – than ever, a point similar to that made by Cook-Martin (2013: 97, 124) in his analysis of the ‘tremendous lengths’ Italian migrants must go to in Argentina to procure dual citizenship. Lining up outside the Questura in Italy is arguably the quintessential example of this process.
For ‘extra-comunitari’ (or third country nationals, to use the terminology of the EU, foreigners from outside Europe), the Questura line is something of a gauntlet, a challenge of survival. People speak of lining up at the Questura in tones of fear and foreboding. The line is invariably long, exposed to the elements, and to the gaze of the outside world. In Prato, it is often punctuated by armed police. The atmosphere in the line is often one of anguish and turmoil, even desperation. This is especially confronting because of the relative predominance of small children and young women. Colombo and Domaneschic (2011: 338), in a discussion of immigrant children in Italy, report a similar atmosphere at the Questura. However, they limit their analysis to the visa document itself – as invested with a ‘performative strength’ – overlooking the significance of the process and the performance enacted to obtain it.
The architecture and practices, the habitus embedded in the every-day experience of lining up at the Questura to apply for citizenship or for a Permit of Stay, creates and reinforces the subject's experience of non-belonging and non-Italian identity that simultaneously reinforces their outsider, foreign identity. Informants, particularly the Italy-born, described this practice as an experience of institutionalised exclusion. The following excerpt from an on-line post by a young woman provides a compelling account of the affective, embodied and performative dimensions of citizenship as a practice. The source of this post is the Associna website, an association founded in 2005 by second-generation Chinese in Italy. This will be another of my unforgettable dates, another indelible stain that will remain with me, in this my life as the daughter of immigrants, growing up in Italy. Yes, an entire adolescence lived in fear of documents, of running between municipalities, police stations, immigration offices, prefectures, of worries and of prayers that everything will go well. Wake up at 6:45, a quick rinse and then immediately to the station. The wait for the bus… Meanwhile, a thousand questions rush through my head: how will it go this time? What will happen? Will I be reduced to tears like last time? Many, too many anxieties. I arrive at the police station at 8:35 am, a line of 10 people, two policewomen at the door to the fingerprint machine. I sit and wait. My legs suddenly begin to tremble, my hands close in tight fists trying to relieve the tension, while all the anxiety accumulates in my stomach, a mass similar to a giant bomb ready to explode. Shivering, continuous tremors throughout my body, my teeth grind, I look into emptiness, VULNERABLE, UNPROTECTED, ALONE …. I feel ill, I run out, I get some air and I read the sign on the door; desk open for foreigners from 8:30 to 13:00 and I think, why am I here? Why am I in a facility for ‘foreigners’? I feel out of place, I feel a great urge to get away but I cannot. I cannot because I grew up in Italy but I am counted among the so-called ‘foreigners’. I hear a voice come from afar [calling out my name]… It's my turn… I arrive, I deliver photos, passport and I smile because, in times of difficulty, it is the only weapon I have to resist, to not succumb. Thumb, index, middle, ring and little finger, here are the fingerprints of my right hand that are loaded onto the PC… Done… Quick and painless… Yet, these few seconds remain forever etched in your memory, in your life, they are the source of your anger and your desperation… My mind is bombarded with flashbacks, memories of when I was 16, when I entered the room with fear and they took my fingerprints, painting my hand black. …I remember with pride and dignity that little girl, hurt by something greater than her age. I remember especially the questioning looks of the people, but you're not Italian? No, I'm not. I have Chinese citizenship, ITALIAN ONLY BY CONCESSION, ITALIAN WITH A PERMIT OF STAY. I remember everything, every single moment, every single instant in which I was humiliated, in which they made me believe that I was no one. I am bitter; saddened by all that in recent years I have had to give up due to greater powers.
6
Miss Italia nel Mondo – Citizenship embodied in the flesh–The ‘macro’ state level
Miss Italia is a national competition whose aim is to select the most beautiful Italian woman. Its first edition dates back to 1946, a sign of national reconstruction after the Second World War. Its regulation and organisation has adapted, over the years, to the socio-cultural shifts in Italian society. For example, in 1994, participation was opened to mothers and married women and in 1996 the winner was a black woman, born in Santo Domingo, although in possession of Italian citizenship. The show is well attended and could arguably be defined as a national rite. The final is broadcasted worldwide. Since 1991, it has included a special section – Miss Italia nel Mondo – for young Italian women living abroad, evidence of the strong cultural allegiance of Italy with its emigrants. In 2012, for the first time, organisers decided to also include immigrants, by permitting the participation of women living in Italy without Italian citizenship. The 2012 special edition of ‘Miss Italia nel Mondo’ was used as a platform to generate maximum public visibility for G2, another second-generation organisation, whose mission is the attainment of citizenship rights for all children of migrants living in Italy.
7
One of the participants read this letter during the event: … I am a girl who is participating in the competition, Miss Italia, held in Montecatini. I am 18 years old and I was born in Rome. I do not have Italian citizenship, citizenship which I would like to have the right to, because I was born in Italy to parents from Sri Lanka who have been living for decades in your (our) country. Although the current laws say that I am not, I feel Italian in every possible way, I live a normal life and I am perfectly integrated into the social fabric of Rome, a city I love and in which I live. In Montecatini, in the section Miss Italy in the World, I was able to meet other girls who, like me, speak perfect Italian, study, work and who wish to build a life here in your (our) country. The other 22 girls and I, despite not being born in Italy, share together the adventure of Montecatini and wish to be considered Italian, capable of contributing with a sense of civic and moral pride, working together to deliver a future for this country, which we feel a part of, that is modern and cosmopolitan. Thank you, Mr President, for your kind consideration and best wishes.
The emphasis on cosmopolitan rather than mixed identities is reminiscent of Ong's (1999) critique of the notion of ‘hybrid identities’, which are – in her perspective – a middle class academic intellectual fantasy (13). In the case of the transnational Chinese she studied in the USA in the ‘90s, Ong argues that they occupy flexible identity positions, both at legal, economic and identity levels. Ong emphasises that despite these positions being flexible, they are localised and defined by specific contexts and conditions, a finding that is also relevant to the ethnographic cases presented in this article. It is therefore not surprising that in the 2014 Miss Italia contest, the admission (for the first time) of (non-citizen) immigrant women (born in Italy to non-Italian parents) became restricted to those who have not yet received citizenship, but who have a right to it. Here again is evidence that in the Italian context, the attainment of formal citizenship becomes a primary means for inclusion and recognition of being Italian. 8 In our third and final example, we contrast the macro-level public testimony of desiring to be Italian with a more intimate, private one.
Lee's experience – Citizenship embodied in relational interaction – The ‘micro’ individual level
It is useful to examine in some detail an interview with Lee, a second generation Prato born Chinese who is fortunate enough to have a long-term employment contract. Although Lee does not have Italian citizenship, he is very actively engaged with local community politics for the integration of the Chinese community in Prato, and as a consequence is often asked to discuss his experiences, and those of his peers, in public forums. We had worked closely with Lee on several community-based projects and had come to know and respect each other greatly. It was in this context that he agreed to a formal interview. When asked to define his ethnic identity, Lee's response came in four quite distinct parts.
At first, Lee expressed a mixture of surprise and bewilderment, and commented at some length about how unusual and strange the question seemed. It was obvious the question took him by surprise and had a visible impact on his demeanour. Lee was unsure how to respond and clearly had to stop and think. This perplexity gave way to a sense of embarrassment, as if we were discussing inappropriate topics. The first word Lee offered in response reveals his discomfort: ‘Blood’. This word was delivered with an uneasy laugh, an emotional release, followed by an almost whispered ‘Chinese’, as if this were his blood type. After this small catharsis, Lee recovered his bearing on the situation and began to take a more measured and dispassionate approach to our question, in line with his usual quietly confident demeanour. Lee began to reason that ethnicity does not exist, that it is just a construction. He drew on discourses of genetics to report that we are all of us a mixture of genes.
A comfortable silence descended on the conversation and it seemed Lee felt sure he had answered the question well. We let the silence rest, inviting further reflection, and Lee went on to ponder our question in a more reflexive way. He confided that, in fact, he feels ‘both Italian and Chinese’ but that despite his ‘personal feeling’ he cannot label himself in this way because he is ‘defined by others as Chinese’ and ‘constrained’ by his ‘blood’, which ‘clearly manifests’ through his ‘phenotype’, which is Chinese. Astutely aware of the disjuncture he had identified and reading the acute interest in our faces, Lee seemed to be encouraged to reflect further. Sometimes, when I am relaxing with friends in a familiar and warm encounter they might actually forget…. who I am…. and they say… ‘the Chinese are like this…’ and then they realize… and they say, ‘Oh, sorry, but you are Chinese…’ For an intimate moment they forget, but then, when I go out into the street, I am Chinese.
Citizenship and identity from above, between and below
Our interviews with Lee and other second-generation Chinese in Prato, along with our analysis of the Associna posts and the G2 initiative at the Miss Italia Contest reflect what we argue is the historical and continuing absence of substantial engagement with notions of ethnicity and mixed ethnic identities in the popular, political and academic discourses surrounding immigrant identity in Italy and in relationship to Italian national identity and citizenship. This absence facilitates the particular role played by legal citizenship and its relationship to identity and belonging in the Italian context. In this section, we examine the ethnographic case studies in relation to the history of migration, social and legal policy and academic literature in Italy.
The Associna post reveals how citizenship law, with its acutely affective and embodied procedures and practices, contributes to the construction of immigrant identity in Italy as deficient, threatening and inadequate. The G2 intervention in the Miss Italia Competition presents a very public perspective on citizenship rights by the second generation and is remarkable for its lack of reference to notions of mixity or multicultural policy. Lee's responses to our questions about ethnic identity support our argument about the general absence of discourses of ethnicity in the Italian context and the tendency to link the concept directly to notions of race – especially in the case of visible difference as Chinese versus Italians – eliciting real discomfort. Our ethnographic research in Prato has led us to examine these experiences of citizenship, identity and belonging in a wider socio-historical and legal context, mirroring our findings that the substantive and lived experiences of citizenship in Italy is tied to the formal legal aspects of citizenship. In the next section, therefore, we examine some of the factors that have contributed to this particular rendering of the politics of recognising difference in Italy. It is important to highlight that the relationship between the lived experiences of citizenship illustrated above, and the history and politics of recognising difference in Italy outlined below, is not one of cause-effect but of intra-action, that is ‘the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ in which ‘distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’ (Barad, 2007: 33). While these levels may not be easily distinguishable in practice, we distinguish them here for analytical purposes.
The strong essentialist conception of ius sanguinis in Italian citizenship law
Italian citizenship, defined by ius sanguinis, represents a narrow and specific understanding of identity as an essentialist concept of blood and family. Italian citizenship law is also deeply shaped by the ideology of the family, also based on notions of blood ties (Zincone, 2006). The current Italian citizenship law (dating from 1992) significantly favours access to citizenship through descent (ius sanguinis) and marriage (ius conubii), rendering membership to the ‘family of Italian citizens’ extremely difficult for people who are in Italy for reasons not linked to family ties (ius soli or ius domicilii) (Zincone, 2006). Indeed, two years of marriage is enough to obtain Italian citizenship while the European average is higher (France, 4 years; Germany and Great Britain, 2–3 years; Austria, 5 years). Even if in recent years, naturalisations by residence have overtaken naturalisations by marriage, in the 90's and early 2000s citizenship through marriage accounted for the majority of recorded naturalisations (Zincone, 2006). To gain citizenship in Italy without blood descent or marriage, applicants must prove 10 years of uninterrupted residence (absences above six months are not permitted) and the declaration of incomes (at least a gross salary of 8263 euro for singles, 11,362 euro for couples with dependents, with an additional 516 euro for each child) and the regular payment of taxes. Citizenship is here conceptualised as a privilege or concession, not a right. Applications often take two years and commonly up to four years to be processed and can be refused with no obligation to provide a reason.
The particularities of Italian citizenship law and the provision of dual citizenship rights in 1992 have given rise to several anomalies. For example, many Italian emigrants (like Stefano) are unable to easily re-obtain Italian citizenship (for example, they need to meet the lengthy Italian residency rules), while their diaspora-born children, who may never have been to Italy and may not speak Italian, have access through a relatively simple process of application (like Elena). At the same time, Italy-born immigrants who have spent all their lives in Italy (like Ming and Lee) have no formal rights to citizenship. According to Italian law, blood – even if very diluted – is more important than felt or lived belonging. Lee's linking of ethnicity with blood clearly reflects this perception. Italian legislation, like that in other historical countries of emigration, reproduces the myth of ethnic common descent, highlighted by Smith (1986) as a family matter. In this context, Italian identity is directly linked to blood; it is seen as the prerequisite for the sharing and appropriation of cultural, social and national resources. Those who are Other must go through expulsion practices embodied in the application process for permits of stay and citizenship, lining up at the Questura. In the past, Italy had the lowest access to citizenship of OCSE countries. Recently this has changed, although it remains one of the lowest.
The recent history and relative ‘newness’ of Italian immigration
Massive immigration to Italy occurred relatively late compared to other European countries. The workforce needed to support the post-war industrialisation of Italy's northern provinces was initially supplied by the arrival of Italians from the south (Pastore, 2001). The influx of immigrants from outside Italy only began to outnumber the internal migratory movement after 1974. While academics are right to argue that immigration is no longer new (Sciortino and Colombo, 2003), at the public and political levels, the response is still largely reactionary. The flow of immigrants into Italy has not been managed in any explicitly or politically coordinated manner and the overriding public sentiment is that they do not belong (Ambrosini, 2014).
The first Italian law concerning immigration dates back only to 1986, and it was formulated under pressure to adopt European standards. In practice, up until 2009, Italy showed substantial tolerance towards undocumented immigrants, manifest in particular through sporadic and unpredictable regulations like the periodic amnesties (seven amnesties in 25 years). The number of foreign workers who can enter Italy is decided by each province by means of the Workflow Decree (law 40/1998 Turco-Napolitano). The decree determines that as soon as the immigrant enters Italy, they must sign an employment contract together with their employer at the police headquarters and provide evidence of their accommodation. However, the immigrants are often already in Italy and the procedure becomes a charade, used mainly to regularise irregular immigrants (Ceccagno et al., 2008). Obtaining the stay permit, which is only valid for two years, is dependent on having a job. Renewal of the permit requires evidence of employment and suitable accommodation. These processes create a situation where the same individual might move into, and out of, undocumented status over time. During fieldwork, we encountered several migrants who could not obtain citizenship after many years of work in Italy and frequent attempts. If they lose their job – a common situation in times of economic crises – these individuals are forced to risk living as undocumented (and therefore illegal) migrants in Italy, even if they were born or lived most of their life in Prato. While, in practice, it is uncommon for migrants to lose their permit to stay in Italy, this condition of precariousness strongly impacts on their quality of life and on their perception of belonging, as is abundantly clear in the Associna post. Moreover, those we met who had decided to return home felt their lives had been a failure.
The broader social context of ‘fortress Europe’
A number of commentators have highlighted that several EU countries, including Italy, have responded to the challenges presented by immigrant integration by introducing more restrictive immigration and citizenship measures. Benton and Gomez (2014) point out that the Chinese have been especially vulnerable due to their perceived economic competition. Any substantive tolerance towards undocumented immigrants in Italy changed with the introduction in 2009 of the so-called ‘security package’ (law 94). Here we see evidence of the rise of the ‘fortress Europe politics of fear’ where the issue of immigration is used as a means of local political propaganda. In this context, citizenship is used as a tool to limit immigration, at least in legal terms.
As immigrants cannot easily attain citizenship, they are not easily afforded a sense of ‘belonging’ to the nation either. Even children of immigrants who were born in Italy or have lived there all their lives (like Ming, Lee, the author of the Associna post and the beauty pageant entrant cited above) are not considered Italian (Andall, 2002). Hence, formal citizenship rights become an important avenue to an, at least partial, Italian identity, so blurring the distinction between legal and substantive citizenship. Immigrants might have a Permit of Stay, but this is designed to encourage the creation of a community of workers with limited participation in public and political life in Italy (cf. Zincone, 2006). Second-generation migrants pose a series of new challenges to Italian politics of recognising difference because they claim belonging, not simply the right to stay. In response to this highly divisive political situation, Carrera (2006) argues that, ‘[m]any EU states need to go through a painful process of readjusting their own conceptualisation of their perceived national identities and values from one that emphasises a mythical national unity to one that is heterogeneous, diverse and multicultural’. Countries like Australia and Canada are usually held up as the premier examples of the latter, wherein notions of mixed ethnicity feature as key elements of heterogeneous, diverse and multicultural national identities.
The ambiguous status of the concept of ethnicity in Italian habitus
Of particular interest to us in this analysis of citizenship and identity is the apparent absence of the concept of ethnicity in popular, political and academic discourses in the Italian case. In contrast, notions of ethnic identity have become commonplace and embedded in each of these discourses of identity and belonging in multiculturalist societies like Australia and Canada (Grillo, 2011). Notwithstanding the important critiques of ethnicity and its relationship to so-called new ‘cultural’ forms of racism (Brubaker, 2004), the concept of ethnicity in these countries is a legitimate one, often used in public and political discourses about celebrating multicultural diversity. While there is a great degree of diversity in its application, the concept of ethnicity is certainly not unfamiliar to private and intimate culture, where, in the company of family and friends, people are used to reflecting, often playfully, on the diversity of national identities. In summary, we would venture that there is general agreement that the popular imaginary in these countries includes a relative openness to mixity and hybridity, evident in the use of the hyphen to demarcate ethnic identities (e.g. Moran, 2011).
In Italy, the notion of ethnicity has a different set of connotations – it represents a different habitus. For example, Antonio Marazzi (2005: 70) argues: Ethnicity should be distinguished from ‘etnicità’, which would seem to be its translation, at least in the predominant usage of the term in the Italian literature. In our language, the meaning is … an expression of something concrete, and which refers to an origin, or tradition…
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In today's Italy, is there a model concerning the immigrant foreigner? Or rather, is there an Italian way to relate to difference? […] We offer a hypothesis: that Italian society has delegated the politics of recognizing difference to legal and political frameworks and that popular imaginaries reflect this.
Sciortino provides an historical argument to explain the marginality of the concept of ethnicity in Italian scholarship. First he argues that Italy was not forced to reflect deeply on the coexistence of people with different ethnic origins because, compared to other European nations, Italy does not have a substantial or glorious colonial past. In other words, there was no need to go through the painful process of admitting the colonial subject into the homeland, as has been a major feature of UK ‘post-colonial’ identity studies (e.g. Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1992). 10 In the post-war years in Italy, there was, instead, a need to remove the memory of the short Italian colonial experience, given the humiliating failure of its aspirations (Mellino, 2006). At the same time, there was a shameful rejection of the Fascist rhetoric and propaganda, which widely employed the notion of race. Both these elements (colonial failure and shame at Fascist collaboration) worked against the propensity to consider ethnicity as a phenomenon to be analysed.
We saw this reluctance in Lee's response to our questions about ethnic identity. He began to rhetorically deconstruct the idea of ethnicity – recalling Sciortino's point about the absence of the concept of ethnicity in scholarly and public discourse in Italy. Historically, the notion of ethnicity in Italian scholarship was relegated to the study of distant and exotic cultures in situ – following the very broad distinction in the Italian academy between the discipline of sociology (the study of contemporaneity) and the disciplines of ethnology, folklore studies and anthropology (the study of the ‘other’ and of the subaltern) (see Dei, 2012). In addition, and more broadly influenced by the French academic tradition (Amselle, 2001; Gallissot et al., 2000), ethnicity in Italian anthropology was viewed as a negative concept in need of radical deconstruction (Palmisano, 2010; Remotti, 2007). According to Sciortino, the diffusion of the paradigm of modernisation on an international scale legitimised and reinforced the Italian attitude, not so much by dismissing ethnicity as a relevant concept, but by viewing it as a form of residual resistance to the deterministic forces of modernity. Thus, Sciortino concludes that ethnicity has not been a topic of academic debate in Italy because it has been ‘hamstrung between primordialism and ideology’ (1991: 64). It is only in recent years that the concept of ethnicity has been revaluated in anthropology (Fabietti, 1995; Li Causi, 2008) and in dialogue with a growing international literature (Maher, 1994). The analysis of ethnicity has entered Italian socio-anthropological debates about migration in particular; contemplating the way migrants might strategically employ their ethnic identities to enhance their agency and social capital (Riccio, 2004, 2014; Scarduelli, 2007). These studies are, however, quite recent and present emerging meanings and practices lived by migrants but not yet commonplace in Italian everyday life and popular discourse.
In addition, the peculiar process of nation-state formation in Italy (Gramsci, 2008) is another reason the concept of ethnicity has been overlooked in Italian political discourse. Indeed, great efforts had to be made to create the myth of a homogenous Italianità (Bollati, 1983; Rusconi, 1993). Regional and provincial identities remain of central importance to the way many people identify, making Italian national identity a precarious one for Italians themselves. Since the creation of the Italian nation in 1861, a major fault line has centred on the north–south divide. People of the northern regions have often treated people from Southern regions as inferior – ‘Terroni’ being the common, demeaning term to describe them. In this context, the rejection of ethnicity was also a way to accommodate Italy's strong tradition of regionalism; it's most recent political manifestation being the Lega Nord. The creation of nationhood was thus predicated on a denial of (local, regional and provincial) ‘otherness’. We might argue that this has resulted in an inability to permit the alterity of immigrants within the national imaginary because Italians themselves have had to surrender their own ‘otherness’ in order to vindicate nationhood.
In other words, the process of nation building demanded the marginalisation and subordination of internal differences, which thus provides the context and process of incorporating the immigrant other. Francesco Ricatti (2013), in a psychoanalytical analysis, argues that this history resonates and re-emerges in what he defines as an ‘uncanny perception’, where Italians see reflected in the migrant ‘other’ their own regional subalterity. In this historical context, the recent and dramatic phenomenon of immigration in places like Prato has contributed to the creation of a sense of ‘we, Italians’, against a foreign otherness which unifies the nation. The jury is still out on whether immigration in Italy has reinforced a sense of unity or, rather, has been an element of internal political division (Triandafyllidou, 2001: 77). Whatever the case, there is no doubt that the immigration phenomenon in Italy, since it began, has been deeply and disturbingly politicised as a central public issue around state making and belonging (Sciortino and Colombo, 2003, 2004).
Conclusions
In this article, we have emphasised the affective dimension of citizenship processes and practices to provide a counterpoint to the dominant focus on its more instrumentalist motivations. The strong essentialist conception of ius sanguinis in Italian citizenship law, the recent history and relative ‘newness’ of Italian immigration, the broader social context of ‘fortress Europe’ and the ambiguous status of the concept of ethnicity in Italian popular, political and academic discourse are all elements that have shaped the Italian politics of recognising difference, impeding a widespread use and analysis of the notion of ethnicity in discussions of national identity. One consequence of this is the relative absence of notions of mixity within the idea of ‘Italian-ness’, a point clearly articulated by Donatella Schmidt and Antonio Marazzi: if there had been a politics of recognizing difference that was not confined to legal frameworks, and therefore situated beyond the contingencies which animated it [e.g. in the popular and academic realms], and if institutional spaces had been activated where this could find a voice, it may even have been possible for the emphasis to fall the other way, to that concerning the inclusion of migrants, bringing balance to a public image that solely recognized a one-dimensional concept of difference [and thus disallowing mixity]. (2004: 17).
Second generation in Italy, regardless of their substantive cultural experiences of being born in Italy and of having grown up there, are ascribed an identity based on their visible phenotype and essentialist notions of citizenship. This ascription occurs at all levels; externally at the level of popular, political discourses, as well as internally, at the level of the migrant community and self-ascription. The politics of recognising difference in Italy is a politics that does not permit mixed ethnic or migrant heritage to be a part of Italianness and therefore defines ‘Italianità’ as an essentialist construct, very much aligned to the ius sanguinis conception of citizenship by blood. In this context, the gaining of citizenship becomes the only avenue that permits identification as Italian.
In April 2013, for the first time in history, Cecile Kyenge, a non-Italy born person was elected as Minister of Integration. Born in Congo, she migrated to Italy as a teenager. Since the commencement of her ministry, her major campaign was to propose some form of ius soli to integrate or substitute ius sanguinis for the attainment of legal citizenship. In one of her first public discourses, she declared: From everything that I have seen come out [in the media], difficulties in identifying me, even difficulties in talking about me, I want to say right away that I am black and I am Italo-Congolese, and it is important to me to highlight this. I am Italo-Congolese because I belong to two cultures, two countries that are inside me and I could not be entirely Italian, I could not be entirely Congolese. This also explains my double identity, it explains what I bring with me as well, and so this is the first thing by which I would like to be identified. […] And I think it is right for many people who are part of this country to start to use the right terminology and also the right ways to refer to people. This will strengthen our identity. With regards to changing the law […] I am certain that, by changing language, changing ways, changing approach, many things can be done, they have to be done. Above anything else you have to look at what the lived reality is. The lived reality … tells me that there are people who are born and grow up in Italy and who have no identity. They do not feel Italian, they do not even feel they belong to the country of origin of their parents, and you have to start from this, from understanding what this country is showing me, and to begin to talk with everyone and find answers.
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In conclusion, our analysis of the politics of recognising difference in Italy is not meant to suggest that formal citizenship is adequate for the attainment of a sense of belonging, nor that the ethnicity concept offers a necessary solution to the lack of scope for the concept of mixity. In previous work (Raffaetà et al., 2015), we argue that participation and social inclusion are best understood as a set of dynamic practices of belonging rather than of identity formation. We have shown that young people in Prato can express an (albeit muted) sense of belonging even without formal citizenship and in contexts of discrimination characterised by an absence of positive/appropriate ways to speak about mixed identities. This has been confirmed by other work on second generation in Italy (e.g. Bosisio, 2005; Colombo and Domaneschic, 2011; Colombo and Rebugnini, 2012). We also argue, however, that identity is not excluded in this dynamic understanding of belonging, but is rather one important component, including of citizenship. Identity may at times play a role and people can experience their identity as fixed, mixed and ‘in-between’ even concurrently. Therefore, in this article, we want to draw attention, by way of comparison, to the gap between popular, academic and political discourses and experiences of identity in Italy. As evident in Kyenge's passionate address, people need an adequate terminology with which to imagine and construct their identities. Similarly, Calhoun (2002: 169) argues, ‘If it is impossible to communicate seriously about basic differences among members of a public sphere, then it will also be impossible to address the difficulties of communication across such lines of basic difference’. Against these risks, Italy's rich intellectual debate, which has always emphasised the embodied, processual and situated aspects of human experience in the social sciences (e.g. Pizza, 2012) and philosophy (e.g. Esposito, 2010), offers productive ground where innovative approaches to identity and citizenship might flourish (Raffaetà et al., 2015; Ravenda, 2011). Our article is also an example of the productive space that can be opened up through a consideration of both the Italian emigration and immigration literatures, which to date have been largely mutually exclusive.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This paper has a long history that weaves together the city of Prato with our lives and those of our informants and closest colleagues. We would like to thank all of them, in particular Ralph Grillo, Anita Harris, Peter Kivisto, Giulia Marchetti, Anthony Moran, Bruno Riccio, Giuseppe Sciortino, Catriona Stevens, and the anonymous reviewers. This paper is the outcome of joint and indivisible work by the authors; however, if for institutional reasons individual authorship is to be assigned, Loretta Baldassar wrote the first half, and Roberta Raffaetà the second half, of each section of the paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research reported in this paper was supported by a Monash University DVC Global Engagement Project Grant.