Ethnicities

This article investigates multiculturalism by examining the relationship between migrants’ group demands and liberal states’ policies for politically accommodating cultural and religious difference. It focuses especially on Islam. The empirical research compares migrants’ claims-making for group demands in countries with different traditions for granting recognition to migrants’ cultural difference – Britain, France and the Netherlands. Overall, we find very modest levels of group demands indicating that the challenge of group demands to liberal democracies is quantitatively less than the impression given by much multicultural literature. Group demands turn out to be significant only for Muslims, which holds across different countries. Qualitative analysis reveals problematic relationships between Islam and the state, in the overtly multicultural Dutch approach, within British race relations, and French civic universalism. This implies that there is no easy blueprint for politically accommodating Islam, whose public and religious nature makes it especially resilient to political adaptation.

This article builds on recent efforts to cast the understanding of ethnic and racialized tensions less in terms of a coarse logic of racism than within an analytical frame of struggles over national belonging. This theme is developed with respect to intercultural relations in Australia, in all the complexities of its white settler, migrant, and indigenous formations. The article develops a ‘multiscalar’ focus that takes in the global circuits of movement and relationship linked to British colonialism and international migration, through to contests over the meanings, management and stewardship of local places. In so doing, we also highlight some contextually specific versions of ‘whiteness’ whose various mobilizations help to undo a sense of their fixed status as core attributes of Australian nationhood. The article concludes with a case from Jervis Bay, New South Wales, where contested imaginings of, and investments in, appropriate land uses, have given rise to disputes that are productively conceived in terms of a multiscalar politics of national belonging. Although thus grounded in the circumstances of Australian culture, we believe the core argument can be extended (with all the normal caveats) to other ex-British colonial, immigration nations.

A number of liberals defend nationalism as compatible with, even an aid in realizing, the values of liberty, democracy and social justice. In the process, they also defend the doctrine that it is legitimate to grant moral priority to conationals or compatriots. While not hostile to national attachment in all circumstances, and conceding a limited universalist case for prioritizing fellow group members, this article argues that even liberal nationalism is liable to be found wanting in situations where dominant-group nationals are called upon to show fulsome solidarity with their oppressed national ‘other’. It focuses on the way liberal nationalism and sentimental partiality to conationals can distort moral judgement, rendering it difficult for dominant-group nationalists to recognize and fight oppression. The case is illustrated by way of a critical discussion of the reaction of liberal Zionists to the second or Al Aqsa Intifadain Israel–Palestine.

This article aims to show the varying constructions of the Polish–German border in the Polish border town of Zgorzelec. We are interested in how informants from three generations discursively position the frontier itself and the two towns on its either side: Polish Zgorzelec and German Görlitz. The data comes from a Europe-wide ethnographic project studying communities living on the borders between the European Union (EU) and its ascendant nations, funded by the European Commission's Fifth Framework Programme.

We suggest that the inhabitants of Zgorzelec construct the border on two planes: public and private. In the public sphere, the border is constructed as a means of identifying ‘us Poles’ against all those living on the other side. In those nationalized terms, the border is also constructed as protecting Poland and Zgorzelec's (Polish) community. On the other hand, in the private sphere, the border is represented as virtually invisible allowing the individual to cross it for shopping or entertainment. The border becomes a gateway in which the individual becomes a customer, a shopper with his or her national identity pushed to the background. We also show that the two spheres intersect, creating spaces in which the two orders of discourse are made to co-exist and the discursive mechanisms of separation run next to the mechanisms of inclusion.

We explore our informants’ discourses as mediated by the historical context of common experience (eviction, displacement, communism) pertaining mostly to the older generation and by the cultural-economic context (shopping, entertainment) largely in the case of our younger informants.

Globalization has led to semiotic forms in general taking on new values. We report on the trends and values of photographic images in a sample (1948–2001) of a North American newspaper (Y Drych), established in 1851 to serve the Welsh migrant community there. For such diasporic groups, visual imagery of this kind potentially links them with their ‘roots of origin’, provides opportunities for representing their conditions and contemporary trajectories, as well as possibly functioning as a resource for constructing social identities. We consider the images partly in distributional terms – whether they are of scenes or of people in North America or in Wales – and partly through qualitative analysis. We report shifts in the photographic content during our sample period, from primarily images reflecting status and hierarchy in North America, towards the inclusion of more photographs of place (buildings and landscapes) and people in Wales, emphasizing tradition, history and cultural continuity. We consider these findings, first, in relation to selectivity of resources for constructing social identities, and second, in relation to the contestation in Wales between folk and vernacular conceptions of Welshness.