Selected Studies in International Migration and Immigrant Incorporation (Amsterdam University Press - Imiscoe Textbooks)

imiscoe

“The editors have selected from both the grounding classics and the best new work to show how migration is transforming the rich democracies.” Professor John Mollenkopf, The City University of New York “A collection of must-read, though sometimes hard-to-find, pieces that any scholar or student interested in immigration to Europe and its consequences will want to consult.” Professor Roger Waldinger, University of California, Los Angeles “A must not only for courses focused on Europe, but also a most useful tool for shedding new light on North American migration by casting it in an often neglected comparative context.” Professor Aristide Zolberg, The New School for Social Research

Selected Studies in International Migration and Immigrant Incorporation

Marco Martiniello is research director of the National Fund for Scientific Research (frs-fnrs) in Belgium and a professor of sociology and politics at the University of Liège, where he also serves as director of the Center for Ethnic and Migration Studies (cedem). Jan Rath is a professor of urban sociology at the University of Amsterdam, where he also serves as director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (imes).

martiniello & rath (eds.)

Migration and ethnic studies are on the rise. A body of literature has rapidly grown and, within it, a European research area is emerging. Yet, the scholarship is still highly fragmented, being largely orientated towards the United States and other countries with longer, older narratives of immigration. Unlike people, theories and concepts do not travel easily, meaning we cannot take for granted that research results are equally applicable on all continents. The first volume of the imiscoe Textbooks Series answers the pressing need for a European perspective on migration. Assembling for the first time in a single binding are 25 classic papers that have had a lasting impact on studies of international migration and immigrant integration in Europe. Not only is this book a body of knowledge drawing together complementary expertise developed in the field thus far, it is a launch pad for cross-national comparisons around the globe.

TEXTBOOKS

Selected Studies in International Migration and Immigrant Incorporation marco martiniello & jan rath (eds.)

isbn 978 90 8964 160 1

amsterdam university press · www.aup.nl

Amsterdam University Press



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Selected Studies in International Migration and Immigrant Incorporation

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IMISCOE International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe The IMISCOE Research Network unites researchers from, at present, 25 institutes specialising in studies of international migration, integration and social cohesion in Europe. What began in 2004 as a Network of Excellence sponsored by the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission has become, as of April 2009, an independent self-funding endeavour. From the start, IMISCOE has promoted integrated, multidisciplinary and globally comparative research led by scholars from various branches of the economic and social sciences, the humanities and law. The Network furthers existing studies and pioneers new scholarship on migration and migrant integration. Encouraging innovative lines of inquiry key to European policymaking and governance is also a priority. The IMISCOE-Amsterdam University Press Series makes the Network’s findings and results available to researchers, policymakers and practitioners, the media and other interested stakeholders. High-quality manuscripts authored by Network members and cooperating partners are evaluated by external peer reviews and the IMISCOE Editorial Committee. The Committee comprises the following members: Christina Boswell, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Tiziana Caponio, Department of Political Studies, University of Turin / Forum for International and European Research on Immigration (FIERI), Turin, Italy Michael Collyer, Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR), University of Sussex, United Kingdom Rosita Fibbi, Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies (SFM), University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland / Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lausanne Albert Kraler, International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), Vienna, Austria Leo Lucassen, Institute of History, Leiden University, The Netherlands Jorge Malheiros, Centre of Geographical Studies (CEG), University of Lisbon, Portugal Marco Martiniello, National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS), Brussels / Center for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM), University of Liège, Belgium Patrick Simon, National Demographic Institute (INED), Paris, France Miri Song, School of Social Policy and Sociology, University of Kent, United Kingdom IMISCOE Policy Briefs and more information can be found at www.imiscoe.org.

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Selected Studies in International Migration and Immigrant Incorporation edited by Marco Martiniello and Jan Rath

IMISCOE Textbooks

Amsterdam University Press

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The multidisciplinary IMISCOE-AUP Textbook Series encompasses, at present, four volumes, and aims to present both an international comparison of the development of international migration and immigrant integration in Europe and an assessment of theoretical approaches with regard to this issue. Materialisation of this objective strengthens the development and dissemination of a body of common knowledge in this field and consequently boosts the growth of a European research area. The current volume encompasses 25 theoretical papers that have had an impact on research in Europe or reflect a European perspective on international migration and immigrant integration. Our thanks are due to IMISCOE and to all those who have contributed, in whatever way, to the realisation of this first volume. We especially thank Anna Swagerman and, most of all, Kim Jansen.

Cover design Studio Jan de Boer, Amsterdam Layout The DocWorkers, Almere isbn 978 90 8964 160 1 e-isbn 978 90 4851 104 4 nur 741 / 763 © Martiniello and Rath / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2010 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the authors of the book.

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Contents

Marco Martiniello and Jan Rath Introduction: migration and ethnic studies in Europe Part 1 - The migration process  1 Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack  The function of labour immigration in Western European capitalism 2 Tomas Hammar Introduction to European immigration policy: a comparative study  3 Thomas Faist The crucial meso-level  4 Steven Vertovec Conceiving and researching transnationalism 5 Russell King Towards a new map of European migration 6 Virginie Guiraudon The constitution of a European immigration policy domain: a political sociology approach 7 Abdelmalek Sayad Immigration and ‘state thought’ Part II - Modes of incorporation  8 Hans van Amersfoort ‘Minority’ as a sociological concept  9 Tariq Modood ‘Black’, racial equality and Asian identity 10 William Rogers Brubaker Introduction to immigration and the politics of citizenship in Europe and North America  11 Marco Martiniello Ethnic leadership, ethnic communities’ political powerlessness and the state in Belgium 12 Michel Wieviorka Racism in Europe: unity and diversity 13 Rainer Bauböck Changing the boundaries of citizenship: the inclusion of immigrants in democratic polities

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7 19

21

45 59 91 111

141 165 181 183 201

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14 Robert Kloosterman, Joanne van der Leun and Jan Rath Mixed embeddedness: (in)formal economic activities and immigrant businesses in the Netherlands 15 Patrick Simon The mosaic pattern: cohabitation between ethnic groups in Belleville, Paris 16 Hassan Bousetta Political dynamics in the city: three case studies 17 Adrian Favell Integration and nations: the nation-state and research on immigrants in Western Europe Part III - Conceptual issues  18 Fredrik Barth Introduction to ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organization of cultural difference 19 John Rex The theory of race relations: a Weberian approach 20 Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis Contextualizing feminism: gender, ethnic and class divisions 21 John Solomos Varieties of Marxist conceptions of ‘race’, class and the state: a critical analysis 22 Frank Bovenkerk, Robert Miles and Gilles Verbunt Racism, migration and the state in Western Europe: a case for comparative analysis 23 Robert Miles and Victor Satzewich Migration, racism and ‘postmodern’ capitalism 24 Etienne Balibar Class racism 25 Ceri Peach The ghetto and the ethnic enclave About the editors

List of sources



Index

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339 355

371 405

407 437

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517 537 567 581 607 609 613

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Introduction: migration and ethnic studies in Europe Marco Martiniello and Jan Rath

Over the past few decades, practically every country in the advanced world has witnessed a substantial increase in immigration (Castles & Miller 2009). Some countries such as Canada or the United States have hosted immigration for centuries, and their mental map and social fabric are consequently geared to accommodating newcomers. But even for those countries, the magnitude of the current flow of people crossing the border with or without valid documents was unexpected. The US had its version of the guest worker system in the Mexican Bracero Program of the 1940s, but the immigration of Latino workers for the agricultural industry is nothing when compared to what was in store. The previous immigration regime favoured immigrants from Europe, but the abolition of restrictions for immigrants from Africa, Asia or Latin America in 1965 opened the US to nonEuropeans (Cornelius, Martin & Hollifield 1994). Immigration laws were tightened in the 1980s and 1990s in response to growing political pressure against what some regarded as unbridled immigration as well as mounting unemployment and rising public expenditures for documented and undocumented immigrants alike. Meanwhile, Los Angeles outnumbered America’s all-time city of immigration, New York. That being said – and contrary to the general political mood in the US – authorities still maintain that the city warmly welcomes immigrants. Even if immigrants are not always treated as welcome guests, still acknowledged are the contributions they have made to the metropolis’ flourishing, now and in the past. On the other side of the Atlantic, similar developments have occurred, though under different circumstances. One striking difference is that Europe’s nations have never really considered themselves countries of immigration the way North America has. On the contrary, many, including Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal. Spain – sending countries in living memory – and even the Netherlands presented themselves as countries of emigration. International migration and the social problems it allegedly generates – and with which it usually

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is amalgamated – have in recent years emerged as inevitable issues in the media and politics, especially after 9/11. Migration has been constructed as an international and domestic security issue linked to urban unsafety, international organised crime, terrorism, illegality, environmental issues and public health. This has aggravated the fear of an invasion of Europe by cohorts of poor people. Meanwhile, the issue of the co-existence between nationals and migrant communities has become increasingly interpreted in terms of social tensions and problems (criminality, drugs, unemployment, school drop-out, insecurity, etc.). In several European countries, political parties play on the fears of the electorate with regard to migration in order to gather electoral support. More precisely, since 9/11 and the Madrid bombings of 3/11, there has been real intellectual and political panic surrounding the issue of Islam in Europe and elsewhere.1 To be fair, there is also a more positive approach to migration and multiculturalism. Some welcome immigration as an answer to the greying of the population. Others see it as a necessary condition for economic advancement in the framework of the Lisbon Agenda. The same holds for diversity. While many politicians and opinion leaders advance an assimilationist policy and thus aim at abolishing any form of ethnic diversity, urban sociologists, economic geographers and city planners are increasingly identifying diversity as key for economic growth (see for instance Florida 2000). Fractions of the general public also value diversity in their social practices and modes of consumption as illustrated by the success of ethnic food, fashion and world music, for example in most European cities. Nevertheless, public and political debates about migration are hardly serene. In fact, since the early 1980s, migration has become the focal point for passionate debates and controversies on a regular basis.2 In these circumstances, social scientists find themselves caught in a very difficult position, especially if they take seriously the point that their role is to elaborate knowledge free from passions and fears. Their work is, in effect, running the risk of unwillingly reinforcing the excessive dramatisation surrounding migratory phenomena. Even when they assign themselves the precise opposite goal, they are not always immune from distorted interpretations of their work within the public sphere.

migration and ethnic studies

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This ambiguity did not, however, preclude social scientists from becoming very prolific. Proliferation of migration and ethnic studies in Western Europe is a relatively recent phenomenon. This branch of social scientific research took off in several European countries

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introduction

9

in the early 1980s and a little earlier in countries such as the United Kingdom. In the first stages, the study of migration was largely reserved for demographers and political economists. Traditionally, it has been a key area of study for the discipline of demography. Political economy has quite logically developed an interest in this field. Until the oil crisis of 1973, the mere economic dimension of migration was actually assumed to be the most obvious and most natural dimension of the process. It was usually portrayed in terms of the movements of the labour force.

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The aim of the introduction to this textbook is not to present a classic state of the art on migration and ethnic studies. This work has already been done several times and has given rise to many publications in different countries (see for instance Penninx, Berger & Kraal 2006). Instead of repeating what has already been achieved, it seems more fruitful in this context to articulate a number of marked features of the field of study. We will briefly reflect on European migration and ethnic studies and highlight a number of academic publications that were central to this development. In our view, two structural factors shape European migration and ethnic studies. Firstly, there is the structure of European academic research, both in terms of disciplinary and thematic profile and funding. Secondly, we turn our attention to the dominance of American perspectives in this field and the tendency of European researchers to take these perspectives for granted.

European migration and ethnic studies in a wider scientific structure The first feature of European migration and ethnic studies is what may be called the problem of the epistemological break, according to Gaston Bachelard (1983) and Pierre Bourdieu (1973). More precisely, we should say that a major challenge in the study of migration and ethnic relations is the absence of any epistemological break, which is often a result of the aforementioned intellectual emergency and the social conditions of production of the social scientific work. As discussed above, the common sense, led by a biased media socialisation, conceives of immigration in terms of economic, social and political problems. These include insecurity and criminality, unemployment, poverty, urban decay, violence, religious and ethnic conflicts and the dilution of the nation. Since 1973, this mosaic of folk representation has been widely diffused in the public. Surprisingly, the social sciences as a whole and sociology, more specifically, did

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binary perspectives

marco martiniello and jan rath

not represent any exception. Sociologists have actually started categorising the social experience of migrant populations into distinctive domains, which they elaborated as specific social problems to be studied and resolved. In fact, we have observed how construction of the sociological perspectives on migration and ethnic relations in the early hours of the discipline simply mirrored the intuitive theories of migration among the wider public. This led to the development of a literature rife with binary perspectives, such as immigrants and housing, immigrants and school, immigrants and criminality, immigrants and security, immigrants and health, immigrants and culture, immigrants and the labour market. A great number of studies has been produced – and continues to be – in all these sub-fields of research. In the worst cases, they have been either flatly empiricist or simply unfruitful due to their redundancy. On the whole, one must reckon with this first major difficulty in order to account for the relative theoretical stagnation of the field. (For a more critical point of view, see Rath 2001.) It’s as though migration and ethnic studies were meant to contribute to solving the social problems associated with a phenomenon still dominantly perceived as a threat to the social order (Sayad 1984). Insofar as it tends to answer a social demand more or less directly, the sociology of migration has been constrained. It has been forced to internalise the problematised and dramatised perception of the common sense – which is itself largely determined, as stated above, by a concern for social order. In this situation, it is quite difficult to establish a positive assessment in terms of the scientific value of the works produced. As noted by Michel Oriol: In their concern for solving concrete problems quickly, they [the researchers] can only raise the problems in terms comparable to those of the public opinion. It becomes therefore more difficult to break off with ideology in order to establish a properly scientific approach. (1981: 6)3

The tight entanglement of social debates and policies helps explain the weaknesses of the sociology of migration processes and ethnic relations, as well as the predominance in the field of the flattest empiricism (Noiriel 1989). Some claim that it is hard to talk of migration and ethnic studies as a firm, coherent theoretical corpus in Europe. In other words, this field of research would not have reached the status of a branch of

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the social sciences in its own right. The study of migration and ethnic relations could hardly pretend to compete academically with more established branches of sociology, anthropology, political science and so forth because of its major theoretical weaknesses and fragmentation. Others believe that mainstream sociology is not theoretically stronger. As such, the problem would be related to the structure of social science research, which is fairly disciplinarily oriented, with disciplinary-based institutes, evaluations and funding. Meanwhile, migration and ethnic studies is thematically oriented and multidisciplinary. For sociologists, this field is not sociological enough; for anthropologists, geographers and political scientists the same holds true. Consequently, scholars publish in specialised migration and ethnicity journals that attract fewer readers, reach lower citations and have less impact scores. The list goes on. It is apparent that migration and ethnic studies was for a long time marginalised in academic circles and universities. As already underscored by Abdelmalek Sayad (1984) and Philippe Lorenzo (1989), it was an undervalued field of research. The field consequently remained unattractive for academic researchers until not so long ago. This is mainly the case in Continental Europe. In the US and, to a lesser extent, in the UK, things are different. In the New World, the professionalisation of sociology happened in the context of a country conceiving its history as one of immigration. It comes therefore as no surprise that this discipline has grown while maintaining immigration as a central concern. For instance, the research produced in this field has allowed the Chicago School to develop and to become a world-famous school of sociology. In many other European countries, the leading figures of social sciences were until rather recently not interested in these phenomena. When they did show an interest, they did it in a way that was once characterised by Lorenzo (1989) as marginal, periodical and brief.

undervaluation of European migration and ethnic studies

As far as social sciences and the study of migration are concerned, researchers are all too often constrained by having to chase down funding and research contracts at various ministries and governmental agencies. The fact that immigration and integration have, in the course of the last twenty years, remained highly contentious and sensitive from an electoral point of view has had various consequences. Most often, elected politicians holding executive offices are particularly careful in selecting the research projects that may be immediately useful in terms of policymaking. Sometimes, an advantage is given to research projects that give academic alibis – often of a

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quantitative nature – to policies already agreed upon. In other words, politicians in executive offices have a strong tendency to intrude upon the academic debate by imposing the ‘legitimate’ research problematics and themes without taking into account the researchers’ properly scientific concerns and agenda. One can observe how, in recent years, themes worth receiving subsidies were the control of asylum seekers and refugee flows, the control of external borders, criminality, migrant insecurity and employment and unemployment and, last but not least, Islamic terrorism issues. contractualisation of research

The scarcity of sources of funding and the ‘contractualisation’ of research do not easily accommodate the theoretical concerns of the researchers. There is a power struggle between the politicians and policymakers in one camp and the academics in the other. The latter seem to be at the base end of it. However, the relative autonomisation of the academic field is still a precondition for an effective epistemological break in the course of a solid research process. Furthermore, it constitutes an important difference between non-academic expertise and scientific research. Researching and teaching in this field have, for a long time, remained poorly valued on the whole. Nor have the pursuits been very rewarding in terms of academic prestige. Investing in these themes has not been the most direct way forward for those willing to join the elite of social science research. As a respondent of Lorenzo put it: ‘You don’t make a career in academia with immigration’ (Lorenzo 1989: 9). Sayad once asked the very uneasy question: ‘Is the science of the “poor”, of the “small people”, (socially) a poor science, a small one?’4 (1984: 20). There is no doubt about the answer: the sociology of immigration was a minor sociological subject matter. Moreover, it seems that immigration and ethnic relations have almost exclusively been studied by researchers who were in one way or another complacent to the subject. A number of researchers in the field were either migrants themselves or of migrant descent. The same narrow relationship between personal experience and research experience was observable among native researchers. They often had a special relationship with immigrant population, either through marriage or friendship. In other cases, they had close links with the migrants’ countries of origin. It should be said that many of these researchers, both natives and migrants, occupied precarious and unstable positions within the academic world and were often badly dependent on external funding. One could contend that, on the social scale

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of academic prestige, migration and ethnic studies is still too often in the hands of ‘second-class’ researchers. This latter statement is immune from any judgment of their scientific competence. It actually aims to emphasise how their social and national backgrounds, i.e. the weakness of their position in the academic field, do not generally qualify them for the most academically valued positions. Moreover, it is often expected that ethnic minority researchers should work on ethnic and migration issues, just as it is usually considered ‘natural’ that gender studies be foremost a matter for female researchers. This situation has significantly evolved over the course of the 1990s and 2000s. Although theoretical divergence within the European field on the relevance of ethnicity as a mobilising social and political force remains important, a form of decompartmentation and demarginalisation is undoubtedly at work. From either analytical angle, migration and ethnicity have become key issues in the social analysis of contemporary Europe. In the course of the 1990s and the 2000s, European migration and ethnic studies has undergone a process of change, of demarginalisation and of professionalisation. There are many specialised academic journals ranked in the ISI Web of Knowledge (e.g. Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Migration Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Revue européenne des migrations internationales). There are many workshops, conferences and international networks dedicated to the study of migration and integration. There is a number of specialised research institutes at various universities and a growing number of Master’s and PhD programmes in fields related to migration and ethnic studies. Moreover, main funders have launched special programmes for research projects that revolve around migration and integration (e.g. the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme, the New Opportunities for Research Funding Co-operation in Europe network known as NORFACE, the Foundation for Population, Migration and Environment (PME/ BMU) and various national research councils). In short, migration and ethnic studies is, more and more, gaining respect as a legitimate academic field worth an investment by students who hope to find a job in the domain.

second-class researchers

professionalisation of European migration and ethnic studies

European social scientists’ fascination for the Americas The second feature of European migration and ethnic studies is the adoption – without sufficient care – of conceptual and theoretical ele-

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ments developed in other social and national contexts. As observed by Oriol: Sociology has experienced the same enthusiasm as the population in general for the Americas and sought its paradigms there, just as people have sought their fortune. (Oriol 1981: 24)5

theoretical and conceptual imports

In fact, a wide number of theoretical constructions in the European sociology of migration has been imported from the US. The Chicago School and the structural-functionalism among other schools have provided European researchers with a huge stock of concepts. We can mention here a number of examples: assimilation, adaptation, marginality, inclusion, integration. The reason for these abundant theoretical imports seems to lie in the fascination for the US mentioned by Oriol, as well as the fact that the discipline of sociology in America was far more advanced in the study of migration than the European one when this theme became topical among European researchers. Acknowledging the richness and relevance of the American conceptual legacy cannot preclude expressing explicit reservations in terms of the very questionable way in which these concepts were used and applied by European researchers. A major problem lies in the fact that divergence has been underestimated, in terms of the historical, social and economic background of Europe and the US. This divergence should have, at the very least, stimulated a careful transferring of concepts from one context to the other. Indeed, different historical and spatial contexts never correspond in every respect, and therefore it is somehow illusory to use theories and concepts developed for explaining and accounting for the situation in one context for the other. Before they can be introduced in a given context, theories and concepts external to a social formation should first undergo a critical and thorough examination. They must be deconstructed and reconstructed in order to be adapted satisfactorily to a new context. This work has not been sufficiently achieved in this field of study, especially when it comes to importing elements of the American intellectual tradition. Moreover, the intrinsic problems of these imported concepts and problematics were not definitively solved even in the American context. Therefore, by introducing them uncritically in Europe, theoretical difficulties have also been unwillingly taken on board. This factor may in itself account for the uneasy development of a European sociology of migration and ethnic relations.

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These two problems of the theoretical and conceptual imports, especially from the US, may be illustrated briefly through the example of the late introduction and the development of concepts linked to ‘ethnicity’, ‘multiculturalism’ (Martiniello 1997) and ‘underclass’ in Continental Europe. It is unquestionable that these external elements of debate can potentially reinvigorate this field of research. However, these categories must be used carefully. Indeed, can we assert that the concept of ‘ethnicity’ refers to the same intellectual representation in a society that has always conceived of itself as an immigration country? This representation has been shaped for a long time by the powerful ideology of the ‘melting pot’. Countries with old and strong national and nationalist traditions have traditionally considered migrant populations as a temporary labour force. European researchers have often neglected this crucial question. Beyond that, sociological debates about ‘ethnicity’ in the US gave rise to the creation of competing schools of thought. Today, the advocates of the substantialist conception of ‘ethnicity’ seem to be mostly minorised because of the thorough criticism of their position in the early 1960s and, even more sharply, after the publication of the influential works of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan (1972). Now, among European researchers manipulating the concept of ethnicity in migration and ethnic studies, some still adopt an ambiguous position concerning substantialism, which may bring the theoretical debate a few decades back. Another example concerns ‘underclass’. The concept is highly contested in American academia, notably for having a strong moralistic content. By reintroducing it in French social sciences in the early 1990s, Didier Lapeyronnie imported the American controversy and, to a certain extent, the moralistic approach to the issue of social and economic exclusion in Europe. Importing a concept without referring to the context in which it was created or the controversies it has produced is problematic. We cannot assume a priori that underclass is a useful concept for Europe.

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ethnicity

underclass

European migration and ethnic studies The Europeanisation and the internationalisation of research through several networks and programmes, such as those in the European Union’s scientific research frameworks, can give a fresh new theoretical orientation to the discipline. It is indisputable that immense conceptual and methodological problems have yet to be solved (Lloyd

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1995), and that there exist only very narrow margins for developing crucial scientific research activities such as data collection and standardisation on an international level. However, at present, there are wider opportunities being offered to European researchers, allowing them to meet on a more or less regular basis and to exchange ideas in collaborative research projects.

IMISCOE

Cooperation needs to be structured. Research must, above all, focus on European issues. Relevant questions must be asked. For instance, how does one regulate supply- and demand-driven migration? What is the best way to integrate for immigrants who stay? How can institutional arrangements be adapted so that social cohesion does not vaporise? In an effort to answer such questions, the research network IMISCOE, which stands for International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe, implements a rigorously comparative multidisciplinary research programme with Europe as its central focus. This is a promising venture for designing truly transnational and transdisciplinary research projects in Europe, while also fostering cooperation with academics interested in the same issues worldwide. To conclude, it seems indisputable that we need more profound reflection on the core features of European migration and ethnic studies. Such a reflection implies that students of migration and ethnic studies familiarise themselves with key texts in this field. For this volume, we collected a number of texts that we believe were crucial for the development of European research in our field. To first identify these texts, we consulted with several dozen key academics in migration and ethnic studies, asking them to ‘nominate’ Europe’s most classic publications. As could be predicted, we ended up with a very long list of titles and authors. Some names, however, were unanimously regarded as crucial in the development of European migration and ethnic studies. We take sole responsibility for the next phase of the selection process during which we reduced the list to those comprising the chapters of this volume. We acknowledge that the selection process was, at the end of the day, arbitrary since other works could certainly have been chosen. Our selection, however, provides a compelling representation of European migration and ethnic studies. The chapters address the main issues dealt with over the years within different academic disciplines, different schools of thought and in a number of European countries. We chose to organise the chapters themati-

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cally. Chapters 1 through 7 deal with the migration process and its related policies. Chapters 8 through 17 discuss modes of incorporation. Finally, chapters 18 through 25 bring together works dedicated to transversal conceptual issues. Although some formatting changes have been made, the substance of each chapter is a reproduction of the text as it appeared in its original publication. In each thematic section, the chapters appear in chronological order of their publication. We hope this organisation will help contextualise the works, giving readers a sense of when and how these specific topics and approaches in European migration and ethnic studies emerged.

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Notes 1 See for example Johnson & Crawford (2004) ‘New Breed of Islamic Warrior is Emerging: Evidence in Madrid Attack Points to Takfiris, Who Use Immigration as a Weapon’, The Wall Street Journal 29 March: A16. 2 See 2002’s special issue of the Journal of International Migration and Integration, 3 (3/4). 3 Free translation of: Par souci de résoudre vite des problèmes concrets, ils (les chercheurs) ne peuvent guère les poser que dans les termes où l’opinion publique les reconnaît. Il sera alors d’autant plus difficile de s’arracher à l’idéologie, pour essayer de fonder une démarche proprement scientifique... (Oriol 1981: 6). 4 Free translation of: La science du ‘pauvre’, du ‘petit’ (socialement) est-elle une science ‘pauvre’, est-elle une ‘petite science’? (Sayad 1984: 20). 5 Free translation of: La Sociologie a connu la même fascination que les peuples pour les Amériques et vint y chercher ses paradigmes tandis qu’ils y quêtaient fortune. (Oriol 1981: 24).

References Bachelard, G. (1973), La formation de l’esprit scientifique. Paris: Vrin. Bourdieu, P., J. C. Chamboredon & J.C. Passeron (1973), Le métier de sociologue. Paris: Mouton. Cornelius, W., P. Martin & J. Hollifield (1994), Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castles, S. & M. Miller (1999), The Age of Migration, 4th edition (2009). New York: Guilford Press. Florida, R. (2000), The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Glazer N. & D. P. Moynihan (1970), Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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marco martiniello and jan rath

Lloyd, C. (1995), ‘International comparison in the field of ethnic relations’, in A. Hargeaves & J. Leaman (eds.), Racism, Ethnicity and Politics in Contemporary Europe, 31-44. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Lorenzo, P. (1989), Approche qualitative des recherches sur l’immigration en France. Paris: Centre de Recherche et d’Études d’Anthropologie et D’Urbanisme. Martiniello, M. (1997), Sortir des ghettos culturels. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Noiriel, G. (1989), ‘Enjeux: Une histoire sociale du politique est-elle possible?’, Vingtième Siècle October/December: 81-89. Oriol, M. (1981), Bilan des études sur les aspects culturels et humains des migrations internationales en Europe Occidentale 1918-1979. Strasbourg: Fondation Européenne de la Science. Penninx, R., M. Berger & K. Kraal (eds.) (2006), The Dynamics of Migration and Settlement in Europe: A State of the Art. IMISCOE Joint Studies. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Rath, J. (2001), ‘Research on Immigrant Ethnic Minorities in the Netherlands’, in P. Ratcliffe (ed.), The Politics of Social Science Research: ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Social Change, 137-159. Houndmills/ Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Sayad, A. (1984), ‘Tendances et courants des publications en Sciences Sociales sur l’immigration en France depuis 1960’, Current Sociology 32 (3): 219-304.

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Part I The migration process

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1. The function of labour immigration in Western European capitalism Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack

As of the 1950s, migrant workers flocked to Western Europe to take up the manufacturing industries’ low-paid and low-qualified jobs. Some came from former colonial areas. Others were recruited under a guest worker regime. Virtually all occupied an inferior social position in key domains of social life, notably the labour market and housing. A growing number of scholars, many of whom were inspired by Marxist thought, tried to explain this phenomenon. The sociologist and political economist Stephen Castles and the sociologist and ethnologist Godula Kosack formulated this problematic in a comprehensive way in their seminal book from 1973, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Europe. They had previously expounded their views in an article published in 1972 in the journal New Left Review. Here they claimed that migrant work fulfilled an economic and socio-political function for capitalism, being a fresh reservoir of labour and a means of dividing the working class. They further located the origin of racism in capitalist expansion. Castles and Kosack garnered much praise for drawing connections between the political, social and ideological demands of capitalism and migrant labour, and for criticising studies that dealt only with the problems of assimilation of individual migrants. The domination of the working masses by a small capitalist ruling class has never been based on violence alone. Capitalist rule is based on a range of mechanisms, some objective products of the economic process, others subjective phenomena arising through manipulation of attitudes. Two such mechanisms, which received considerable attention from the founders of scientific socialism, are the industrial reserve army, which belongs to the first category, and the labour aristocracy, which belongs to the second. These two mechanisms are closely related, as are the objective and subjective factors which give rise to them.

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mechanisms of domination

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industrial reserve army

labour aristocracy

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Engels pointed out that ‘English manufacture must have, at all times save the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed reserve army of workers, in order to produce the masses of goods required by the market in the liveliest months.’1 Marx showed that the industrial reserve army or surplus working population is not only the necessary product of capital accumulation and the associated increase in labour productivity, but at the same time ‘the lever of capitalist accumulation’, ‘a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production’.2 Only by bringing ever more workers into the production process can the capitalist accumulate capital, which is the precondition for extending production and applying new techniques. These new techniques throw out of work the very men whose labour allowed their application. They are set free to provide a labour reserve which is available to be thrown into other sectors as the interests of the capitalist require. ‘The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends, therefore, upon the constant transformation of a part of the labouring population into unemployed or half-employed hands.’3 The pressure of the industrial reserve army forces those workers who are employed to accept long hours and poor conditions. Above all: ‘Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army.’4 If employment grows and the reserve army contracts, workers are in a better position to demand higher wages. When this happens, profits and capital accumulation diminish, investment falls and men are thrown out of work, leading to a growth of the reserve army and a fall in wages. This is the basis of the capitalist economic cycle. Marx mentions the possibility of the workers seeing through the seemingly natural law of relative over-population, and undermining its effectiveness through trade-union activity directed towards cooperation between the employed and the unemployed.5 The labour aristocracy is also described by Engels and Marx. By conceding privileges to certain well-organized sectors of labour, above all to craftsmen (who by virtue of their training could not be readily replaced by members of the industrial reserve army), the capitalists were able to undermine class consciousness and secure an opportunist non-revolutionary leadership for these sectors.6 Special advantages, sometimes taking the form of symbols of higher status (different clothing, salary instead of wages, etc.) rather than higher material rewards, were also conferred upon foremen and nonmanual workers, with the aim of distinguishing them from other workers and causing them to identify their interests with those of the capitalists. Engels pointed out that the privileges given to some British workers were possible because of the vast profits made by the

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capitalists through domination of the world market and imperialist exploitation of labour in other countries.7 Lenin emphasized the effects of imperialism on class consciousness: ‘Imperialism... makes it economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and thereby fosters, gives shape to, and strengthens opportunism.’8 ‘... A section of the proletariat allows itself to be led by men bought by, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie’, and the result is a split among the workers and ‘temporary decay in the working-class movement’.9 The industrial reserve army and the labour aristocracy have not lost their importance as mechanisms of domination in the current phase of organized monopoly capitalism. However, the way in which they function has undergone important changes. In particular the maintenance of an industrial reserve army within the developed capitalist countries of West Europe has become increasingly difficult. With the growth of the labour movement after the First World War, economic crises and unemployment began to lead to political tensions which threatened the existence of the capitalist system. Capitalism responded by setting up fascist régimes in the areas where it was most threatened, in order to suppress social conflict through violence. The failure of this strategy, culminating in the defeat of fascism in 1945, was accompanied by the reinforcement of the non-capitalist bloc in East Europe and by a further strengthening of the labour movement in West Europe. In order to survive, the capitalist system had to aim for continuous expansion and full employment at any price. But full employment strikes at a basic principle of the capitalist economy: the use of the industrial reserve army to keep wages down and profits up. A substitute for the traditional form of reserve army had to be found, for without it capitalist accumulation is impossible. Moreover, despite Keynsian economics, it is not possible completely to avoid the cyclical development of the capitalist economy. It was therefore necessary to find a way of cushioning the effects of crises, so as to hinder the development of dangerous social tensions.

economic crises

Immigrants as the new industrial reserve army The solution to these problems adopted by West European capitalism has been the employment of immigrant workers from under­ developed areas of Southern Europe or from the Third World.10 Today, the unemployed masses of these areas form a ‘latent surpluspopulation’11 or reserve army, which can be imported into the developed countries as the interests of the capitalist class dictate. In

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employment of immigrant workers

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addition to this economic function, the employment of immigrant workers has an important socio-political function for capitalism: by creating a split between immigrant and indigenous workers along national and racial lines and offering better conditions and status to indigenous workers, it is possible to give large sections of the working class the consciousness of a labour aristocracy. The employment of immigrant workers in the capitalist production process is not a new phenomenon. The Irish played a vital part in British industrialization. Not only did they provide a special form of labour for heavy work of a temporary nature on railways, canals and roads;12 their competition also forced down wages and conditions for other workers. Engels described Irish immigration as a ‘cause of abasement to which the English worker is exposed, a cause permanently active in forcing the whole class downwards’.13 Marx described the antagonism between British and Irish workers, artificially created by the mass media of the ruling class, as ‘the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite their organization’.14 As industrialization got under way in France, Germany and Switzerland in the latter half of the 19th century, these countries too brought in foreign labour: from Poland, Italy and Spain. There were 800,000 foreign workers in the German Reich in 1907. More than a third of the Ruhr miners were Poles. Switzerland had half a million foreigners in 1910 – 15 per cent of her total population. French heavy industry was highly dependent on immigrant labour right up to the Second World War. According to Lenin, one of the special features of imperialism was ‘the decline in emigration from imperialist countries and the increase in immigration into these countries from the more backward countries where lower wages are paid’.15 This was a main cause of the division of the working class. The fascist form of capitalism also developed its own specific form of exploiting immigrant workers: the use of forced labour. No less than 71/2 million deportees from occupied countries and prisoners of war were working in Germany by 1944, replacing the men recruited for the army. About a quarter of German munitions production was carried out by foreign labour.16 Compared with early patterns, immigration of workers to contemporary West Europe has two new features. The first is its character as a permanent part of the economic structure. Previously, immigrant labour was used more or less temporarily when the domestic industrial reserve army was inadequate for some special reason, like war or unusually fast expansion; since 1945, however, large numbers of immigrant workers have taken up key positions in the productive process, so that even in the case of recession their labour cannot be

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dispensed with. The second is its importance as the basis of the modern industrial reserve army. Other groups which might conceivably fulfil the same function, non-working women, the disabled and the chronic sick, members of the lumpenproletariat whose conditions prevent them from working,17 have already been integrated into the production process to the extent to which this is profitable for the capitalist system. The use of further reserves of this type would require costly social measures (e.g. adequate kindergartens). The main traditional form of the industrial reserve army – men thrown out of work by rationalization and cyclical crises – is hardly available today, for reasons already mentioned. Thus immigration is of key importance for the capitalist system.

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The development of immigration since 1945 There are around eleven million immigrants18 living in West Europe, making up about 5 per cent of the total population. Relatively few have gone to industrially less developed countries like Norway, Austria and Denmark, while large concentrations are to be found in highly industrialized countries like Belgium, Sweden, West Germany, France, Switzerland and Britain. Our analysis concentrates on the four last-named which have about 90 per cent of all immigrants in West Europe between them. Immigrants in West Germany, France, Switzerland and Britain19 Immigrants (thousands)

Immigrants as percentage of total population

Date of figures (latest available)

West Germany

2,977

4.8

September 1970

France

3,177

6.4

December 1969

972

16.0

December 1969

2,603

5.0

1966

Switzerland Britain

Most immigrants in Germany and Switzerland come from Southern Europe. The main groups in Germany are Italians (574,000 in 1970), Yugoslavs (515,000), Turks (469,000), Greeks (343,000) and Spaniards (246,000). In Switzerland, the Italians are by far the largest group (532,000 in 1969) followed by Germans (116,000) and Spaniards (98,000). France and Britain also have considerable numbers of European immigrants, but in addition large contingents

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changing function of immigrant labour

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from former colonies in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. France has 617,000 Spaniards, 612,000 Italians, 480,000 Portuguese, as well as 608,000 Algerians, 143,000. Moroccans, 89,000 Tunisians, about 55,000 black Africans and an unknown number (probably about 200,000) from the remaining colonies (euphemistically referred to as Overseas Departments) in the West Indies and the African island of Réunion. The largest immigrant group in Britain comes from the Irish Republic (739,000 in 1966). Most of the other Europeans were displaced persons and the like who came during and after the war: Germans (142,000), Poles (118,000). Cypriots number 60,000. There are also an increasing number of South Europeans, often allowed in on a short-term basis for work in catering and domestic service. Coloured immigrants comprise about one third of the total, the largest groups coming from the West Indies (269,000 in 1966), India (240,000) and Pakistan (75,000).20 The migratory movements and the government policies which direct them reflect the growing importance and changing function of immigrant labour in West Europe. Immediately after the Second World War, Switzerland, Britain and France recruited foreign workers. Switzerland needed extra labour for the export boom permitted by her intact industry in the middle of war-torn Europe. The ‘European Voluntary Workers’ in Britain (initially displaced persons, later Italians) were assigned to specific jobs connected with industrial reconstruction. The reconstruction boom was not expected to last. Both Switzerland and Britain imposed severe restrictions on foreign workers, designed to stop them from settling and bringing in their families, so that they could be dismissed and deported at the least sign of recession. France was something of an exception: her immigration policy was concerned not only with labour needs for reconstruction, but also with permanent immigration to counteract the demographic effects of the low birth-rate. When West German industry got under way again after the 1949 Currency Reform there was at first no need for immigrants from Southern Europe. An excellent industrial reserve army was provided by the seven million expellees from the former Eastern provinces of the Reich and by the three million refugees from East Germany, many of whom were skilled workers. Throughout the fifties, the presence of these reserves kept wage-growth slow and hence provided the basis for the ‘economic miracle’. By the mid-fifties, however, special labour shortages were appearing, first in agriculture and building. It was then that recruitment of foreign workers (initially on a seasonal basis21) was started. Here too, an extremely restrictive policy was followed with regard to family entry and long-term settle-

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ment. ‘Rotation’ of the foreign labour force was encouraged. In this stage, the use of immigrants in the countries mentioned followed the pre-war pattern: they were brought in to satisfy special and, it was thought, temporary labour needs in certain sectors. They were, as an official of the German employers’ association put it, ‘a mobile labour potential’.22 By the sixties, the situation was changing. Despite mild cyclical tendencies it was clear that there was not going to be a sudden return to the pre-war boom-slump pattern. The number of immigrant workers grew extremely rapidly in the late fifties and early sixties. Between 1956 and 1965 nearly one million new workers entered France. The number of foreign workers in West Germany increased from 279,000 in 1960 to over 1.3 million in 1966. In Switzerland there were 326,000 immigrant workers (including seasonals) in 1956, and 721,000 in 1964. This was also the period of mass immigration to Britain from the Commonwealth.23 The change was not merely quantitative: immigrants were moving into and becoming indispensable in ever more sectors of the economy. They were no longer filling gaps in peripheral branches like agriculture and building but were becoming a vital part of the labour force in key industries like engineering and chemicals. Moreover, there was growing competition between the different countries to obtain the ‘most desirable’ immigrants, i.e. those with the best education and the least cultural distance from the receiving countries. The growing need for labour was forcing the recruiters to go further and further afield: Turkey and Yugoslavia were replacing Italy as Germany’s main labour source. Portugal and North Africa were replacing Italy and Spain in the case of France. As a result, new policies intended to attract and integrate immigrant workers, but also to control them better, were introduced. One such measure was the free labour movement policy of the EEC, designed to increase the availability of the rural proletariat of Sicily and the Mezzogiorno to West European capital.24 Germany and Switzerland liberalized the conditions for family entry and longterm settlement, while at the same time tightening political control through measures such as the German 1965 Foreigners Law. France tried to increase control over entries, in order to prevent the largescale clandestine immigration which had taken place throughout the fifties and sixties (and still does, despite the new policy). At the same time restrictions were made on the permanent settlement of non-Europeans – officially because of their ‘greater difficulties in integrating’. In Britain, racialist campaigns led to the stopping of unrestricted Commonwealth immigration in 1962. By limiting the

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mobile labour potential

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permanent employment

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labour supply, this measure contradicted the economic interests of the ruling class. The new Immigration Act of 1971, which could provide the basis for organized and controlled labour recruitment on the German and French pattern, is a corrective, although its application for this purpose is not at present required, since the ruling class has created an internal industrial reserve army through unemployment. In view of the stagnant domestic labour force potential and the long-term growth trend of the economy, immigrant labour has become a structural necessity for West European capitalism.25 It has a dual function today.26 One section is maintained as a mobile fluctuating labour force, which can be moved from factory to factory or branch to branch as required by the development of the means of production, and which can be thrown out of work and deported as required without causing social tensions. This function was shown clearly by the West German recession of 1966-7, when the foreign labour force dropped by 400,000, although there were never more than 29,000 receiving unemployment benefit. As a United Nations study pointed out, West Germany was able to export unemployment to the home countries of the migrants.27 The other section is required for permanent employment throughout the economy. They are offered better conditions and the chance of long-term settlement.28 Despite this they still fulfil the function of an industrial reserve army, for they are given inferior jobs, have no political rights and may be used as a constant threat to the wages and conditions of the local labour force.

Occupational position The immigrant percentage of the population given in the table above in no way reflects the contribution of immigrants to the economy. They are mainly young men, whose dependents are sent for later if at all. Many of them remain only a few years, and are then replaced by others, so that there are hardly any retired immigrants. Immigrants therefore have higher than average rates of economic activity, and make contributions to health, unemployment and pension insurance far in excess of their demands on such schemes.29 Particularly high rates of activity are to be found among recently arrived groups, or among those who for social and cultural reasons tend not to bring dependents with them: Portuguese and North Africans in France, Turks in Germany and Pakistanis in Britain. Immigrant workers are about 6.5 per cent of the labour force in Brirain, 7-8 per cent in France, 10 per cent in West Germany and 30 per cent in Switzerland. Even these

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figures do not show adequately the structural importance of immigrant labour, which is concentrated in certain areas and types of work. The overwhelming majority of immigrants live in highly industrialized and fast-growing urban areas like Paris, the Lyon region, the Ruhr, Baden-Württemberg, London and the West Midlands. For example 31.2 per cent of all immigrants in France live in the Paris region, compared with only 19.2 per cent of the total population. 9.5 per cent of the inhabitants of the Paris region are immigrants.30 In Britain more than one third of all immigrants are to be found in Greater London compared with one sixth of the total population. Immigrants make up 12 per cent of London’s population.31 More important still is the concentration in certain industries. Switzerland is the extreme case: the whole industrial sector is dominated by foreign workers who make up more than 40 per cent of the factory labour force. In many branches – for instance textiles, clothing, building and catering – they outnumber Swiss employees.32 Of the nearly two million foreign workers in Germany in September 1970, 38.5 per cent were in the metal-producing and engineering industry, 24.2 in other manufacturing branches and 16.7 per cent in building. Foreign workers accounted for 13.7 per cent of total employment in metal producing and engineering. The proportion was even higher in some industries with particularly bad working conditions, like plastic, rubber and asbestos manufacture (18.4 per cent). In building, foreign workers were 17.5 per cent of the labour force. On the other hand they made up only 3-4 per cent of all employees in the services, although their share was much higher in catering (14.8 per cent).33 Similar concentrations were revealed by the 1968 Census in France: 35.6 per cent of immigrant men were employed in building and 13.5 per cent in engineering and electrical goods. 28.8 per cent of foreign women were domestic servants. In Britain the concentration of immigrants in certain industries is less marked, and different immigrant groups have varying patterns. The Irish are concentrated in construction, while Commonwealth immigrants are over-represented in metal manufacture and transport. Pakistani men are mainly to be found in the textile industry and Cypriots in clothing and footwear and in distribution. European immigrants are frequently in the services sector. Immigrant women of all nationalities tend to work in services, although some groups (Cypriots, West Indians) also often work in manufacruring.34 In general immigrants are concentrated in certain basic industries, where they form a high proportion of the labour force. Together with their geographical concentration this means that immigrant workers are of great importance in the very type of enterprise and

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concentration in basic industries

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socio-economic distribution

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area which used to be regarded as the strongholds of the class-conscious proletariat. The real concentration is even greater than the figures show, for within each industry the immigrants tend to have become predominant in certain departments and occupations. There can be hardly a foundry in West Europe in which immigrants do not form a majority, or at least a high proportion, of the labour force. The same applies to monotonous production line work, such as carassembly. Renault, Citroen, Volkswagen, Ford of Cologne and Opel all have mainly foreign workers on the assembly line (the British motor industry is an exception in this respect). Perhaps the best indication of the occupational concentration of the immigrant labour force is given by their socio-economic distribution. For instance a survey carried out in 1968 in Germany showed that virtually no Southern Europeans are in non-manual employment. Only between 7 per cent and 16 per cent of the various nationalities were skilled workers while between 80 per cent and 90 per cent were either semi-skilled or unskilled.35 By comparison about a third of German workers are non-manual, and among manual workers between one third and one half are in the skilled category in the various industries. In France a survey carried out at Lyon in 1967 found that where they worked in the same industry, the French were mainly in managerial, non-manual or skilled occupations, while the immigrants were concentrated in manual occupations, particularly semi-skilled and unskilled ones. The relegation to unskilled jobs is particularly marked for North Africans and Portuguese.36 In Britain, only about 26 per cent of the total labour force fall into the unskilled and semi-skilled manual categories, but the figure is 42 per cent for the Irish, 50 per cent for the Jamaicans, 65 per cent for the Pakistanis and 55 per cent for the Italians.37 Immigrants form the lowest stratum of the working class carrying out unskilled and semi-skilled work in those industrial sectors with the worst working conditions and/or the lowest pay.38 The entry of immigrants at the bottom of the labour market has made possible the release of many indigenous workers from such employment, and their promotion to jobs with better conditions and higher status, i.e. skilled, supervisory or white-collar employment. Apart from the economic effects, this process has a profound impact on the class consciousness of the indigenous workers concerned. This will be discussed in more detail below.

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Social position The division of the working class within the production process is duplicated by a division in other spheres of society. The poor living conditions of immigrants have attracted too much liberal indignation and welfare zeal to need much description here. Immigrants get the worst types of housing: in Britain slums and run-down lodging houses, in France bidonvilles (shanty-towns) and overcrowded hotels, in Germany and Switzerland camps of wooden huts belonging to the employers and attics in the cities. It is rare for immigrants to get council houses. Immigrants are discriminated against by many landlords, so that those who do specialize in housing them can charge extortionate rents for inadequate facilities. In Germany and France, official programmes have been established to provide hostel accommodation for single immigrant workers. These hostels do provide somewhat better material conditions. On the other hand they increase the segregation of immigrant workers from the rest of the working class, deny them any private life, and above all put them under the control of the employers 24 hours a day.39 In Germany the employers have repeatedly attempted to use control over immigrants’ accommodation to force them to act as strike-breakers. Language and vocational training courses for immigrant workers are generally provided only when it is absolutely necessary for the production process, as in mines for example. Immigrant children are also at a disadvantage: they tend to live in run-down overcrowded areas where school facilities are poorest. No adequate measures are taken to deal with their special educational problems (e.g. language difficulties), so that their educational performance is usually belowaverage. As a result of their bad working and living conditions, immigrants have serious health problems. For instance they have much higher tuberculosis rates than the rest of the population virtually everywhere.40 As there are health controls at the borders, it is clear that such illnesses have been contracted in West Europe rather than being brought in by the immigrants. The inferior work-situation and living conditions of immigrants have caused some bourgeois sociologists to define them as a ‘lumpenproletariat’ or a ‘marginal group’. This is clearly incorrect. A group which makes up 10, 20 or 30 per cent of the industrial labour force cannot be regarded as marginal to society. Others speak of a ‘new proletariat’ or a ‘sub-proletariat’. Such terms are also wrong. The first implies that the indigenous workers have ceased to be proletarians and have been replaced by the immigrants in this social position. The second postulates that immigrant workers have a different relation-

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inferior conditions

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division of the proletariat

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ship to the means of production than that traditionally characteristic of the proletariat. In reality both indigenous and immigrant workers share the same relationship to the means of production: they are excluded from ownership or control; they are forced to sell their labour power in order to survive; they work under the direction and in the interests of others. In the sphere of consumption both categories of workers are subject to the laws of the commodity market, where the supply and price of goods is determined not by their use value but by their profitability for capitalists; both are victims of landlords, retail monopolists and similar bloodsuckers and manipulators of the consumption-terror. These are the characteristics typical of the proletariat ever since the industrial revolution, and on this basis immigrant and indigenous workers must be regarded as members of the same class: the proletariat. But it is a divided class: the marginal privileges conceded to indigenous workers and the particularly intensive exploitation of immigrants combine to create a barrier between the two groups, which appear as distinct strata within the class. The division is deepened by certain legal, political and psychological factors, which will be discussed below.

Discrimination

institutionalized discrimination

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Upon arrival in West Europe, immigrants from under-developed areas have little basic education or vocational training, and are usually ignorant of the language. They know nothing of prevailing market conditions or prices. In capitalist society, these characteristics are sufficient to ensure that immigrants get poor jobs and social conditions. After a period of adaptation to industrial work and urban life, the prevailing ideology would lead one to expect many immigrants to obtain better jobs, housing, etc. Special mechanisms ensure that this does not happen in the majority of cases. On the one hand there is institutionalized discrimination in the form of legislation which restricts immigrants’ civic and labour market rights. On the other hand there are informal discriminatory practices based on racialism or xenophobia. In nearly all West European countries, labour market legislation discriminates against foreigners. They are granted labour permits for a specific job in a certain firm for a limited period. They do not have the right to move to better-paid or more highly qualified positions, at least for some years. Workers who change jobs without permission are often deported. Administrative practices in this respect have been liberalized to some extent in Germany and Switzerland in re-

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cent years, due to the need for immigrant labour in a wider range of occupations, but the basic restrictiveness of the system remains. In Britain, Commonwealth immigrants (once admitted to the country) and the Irish had equal rights with local workers until the 1971 Immigration Act. Now Commonwealth immigrants will have the same labour market situation as aliens. The threat of deportation if an immigrant loses his job is a very powerful weapon for the employer. Immigrants who demand better conditions can be sacked for indiscipline and the police will do the rest.41 Regulations which restrict family entry and permanent settlement also keep immigrants in inferior positions. If a man may stay only for a few years, it is not worth his while to learn the language and take vocational training courses. Informal discrimination is well known in Britain, where it takes the form of the colour bar. The PEP study,42 as well as many other investigations, has shown that coloured immigrants encounter discrimination with regard to employment, housing and the provision of services such as mortgages and insurance. The more qualified a coloured man is, the more likely he is to encounter discrimination. This mechanism keeps immigrants in ‘their place’, i.e. doing the dirty, unpleasant jobs. Immigrants in the other European countries also encounter informal discrimination. Immigrants rarely get promotion to supervisory or non-manual jobs, even when they are well-qualified. Discrimination in housing is widespread. In Britain, adverts specifying ‘no coloured’ are forbidden, but in Germany or Switzerland one still frequently sees ‘no foreigners’. The most serious form of discrimination against immigrant workers is their deprivation of political rights. Foreigners may not vote in local or national elections. Nor may they hold public office, which in France is defined so widely as to include trade-union posts. Foreigners do not generally have the same rights as local workers with regard to eligibility for works councils and similar representative bodies. The main exception to this formal exclusion from political participation concerns Irish and Commonwealth immigrants in Britain, who do have the right to vote (the same will not apply to those who enter under the 1971 Act). But the Mangrove case shows the type of repression which may be expected by any immigrants who dare to organize themselves. Close police control over the political activities of immigrants is the rule throughout Europe, and deportations of political and trade-union militants are common. After the May Events in France, hundreds of foreign workers were deported.43 Foreign language newspapers of the CGT labour federation have been repeatedly forbidden. The German Foreigners Law of 1965 lays down that the

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political activity of foreigners can be forbidden if ‘important interests of the German Federal Republic require this’ – a provision so flexible that the police can prevent any activity they choose. Even this is not regarded as sufficient. When Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt visited Iran in March 1972 to do an oil deal, the Shah complained strongly about Iranian students being allowed to criticize him in Germany. The Greek and Yugoslav ambassadors have also protested about the activities of their citizens. Now the German Government is working on a new law which would go so far as to make police permission necessary even for private meetings of foreigners in closed rooms.44

Prejudice and class consciousness

racialism and xenophobia

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Discrimination against immigrants is a reflection of widespread hostility towards them. In Britain, this is regarded as ‘colour prejudice’ or ‘racialism’, and indeed there can be no doubt that the hostility of large sections of the population is at present directed against black people. Race relations theorists attribute the problems connected with immigration partly to the immigrants’ difficulties in adapting to the prevailing norms of the ‘host society’, and partly to the indigenous population’s inbred distrust of the newcomers who can be distinguished by their skin colour. The problems are abstracted from the socioeconomic structure and reduced to the level of attitudes. Solutions are to be sought not through political action, but through psychological and educational strategies.45 But a comparison of surveys carried out in different countries shows that hostility towards immigrants is everywhere as great as in Britain, even where the immigrants are white.46 The Italian who moves to the neighbouring country of Switzerland is as unpopular as the Asian in Britain. This indicates that hostility is based on the position of immigrants in society and not on the colour of their skin. Racialism and xenophobia are products of the capitalist national state and of its imperialist expansion.47 Their principal historical function was to split the working class on the international level, and to motivate one section to help exploit another in the interests of the ruling class. Today such ideologies help to deepen the split within the working class in West Europe. Many indigenous workers do not perceive that they share a common class position and class interests with immigrant workers. The basic fact of having the same relationship to the means of production is obscured by the local workers’ marginal advantages with regard to material conditions and status. The immigrants are regarded not as class comrades, but as alien in-

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truders who pose an economic and social threat. It is feared that they will take away the jobs of local labour, that they will be used by the employers to force down wages and to break strikes.48 Whatever the behaviour of the immigrant workers – and in fact they almost invariably show solidarity with their indigenous colleagues – such fears are not without a basis. It is indeed the strategy of the employers to use immigration to put pressure on wages and to weaken the labour movement.49 The very social and legal weakness of the immigrants is a weapon in the hands of the employers. Other points of competition are to be found outside work, particularly on the housing market. The presence of immigrants is often regarded as the cause of rising rents and increased overcrowding in the cities. By making immigrants the scapegoats for the insecurity and inadequate conditions which the capitalist system inevitably provides for workers, attention is diverted from the real causes. Workers often adopt racialism as a defence mechanism against a real or apparent threat to their conditions. It is an incorrect response to a real problem. By preventing working-class unity, racialism assists the capitalists in their strategy of ‘divide and rule’. The function of racialism in the capitalist system is often obscured by the fact that racialist campaigns usually have petty-bourgeois leadership and direct their slogans against the big industrialists. The Schwarzenbach Initiative in Switzerland – which called for the deportation of a large proportion of the immigrant population – is an example,50 as are Enoch Powell’s campaigns for repatriation. Such demands are opposed by the dominant sections of the ruling class. The reason is clear: a complete acceptance of racialism would prevent the use of immigrants as an industrial reserve army. But despite this, racialist campaigns serve the interests of the ruling class: they increase tension between indigenous and immigrant workers and weaken the labour movement. The large working-class following gained by Powell in his racialist campaigns demonstrates how dangerous they are. Paradoxically, their value for capitalism lies in their very failure to achieve their declared aims. The presence of immigrant workers is one of the principal factors contributing to the lack of class consciousness among large sections of the working class. The existence of a new lower stratum of immigrants changes the worker’s perception of his own position in society. Instead of a dichotomic view of society, in which the working masses confront a small capitalist ruling class, many workers now see themselves as belonging to an intermediate stratum, superior to the unskilled immigrant workers. Such a consciousness is typified by an hierarchical view of society and by orientation towards advance-

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ment through individual achievement and competition, rather than through solidarity and collective action. This is the mentality of the labour aristocracy and leads to opportunism and the temporary decay of the working-class movement.

Immigration and society The impact of immigration on contemporary West European society may now be summarized. effects of immigration

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Economic effects: the new industrial reserve army of immigrant workers is a major stabilizing factor of the capitalist economy. By restraining wage increases, immigration is a vital precondition for capital accumulation and hence for growth. In the long run, wages may grow more in a country which has large-scale immigration than in one which does not, because of the dynamic effect of increased capital accumulation on productivity. However, wages are a smaller share, and profits a larger share of national income than would have been the case without immigration.51 The best illustration of this effect is obtained by comparing the German and the British economies since 1945. Germany has had large and continuous increases in labour force due to immigration. At first wages were held back. The resulting capital accumulation allowed fast growth and continuous rationalization. Britain has had virtually no growth in labour force due to migration (immigration has been cancelled out by emigration of British people to Australia, etc). Every phase of expansion has collapsed rapidly as wages rose due to labour shortages. The long-term effect has been stagnation. By the sixties, German wages overtook those of Britain, while economic growth and rationalization continued at an almost undiminished rate. Social effects: The inferior position of immigrant workers with regard to employment and social conditions has led to a division of the working class into two strata. The split is maintained by various forms of discrimination and is reinforced by racialist and xenophobic ideologies, which the ruling class can disseminate widely through its hegemony over the means of socialization and communication. Large sections of the indigenous workers take the position of a labour aristocracy, which objectively participates in the exploitation of another group of workers. Political effects: the decline of class consciousness weakens the working-class movement. In addition, the denial of political rights to immigrants excludes a large section of the working class from po-

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litical activity, and hence weakens the class as a whole. The most exploited section of the working class is rendered voiceless and powerless. Special forms of repression are designed to keep it that way.

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Working-class movement and immigrant labour Immigrant labour has an important function for contemporary West European capitalism. This does not mean, however, that socialists should oppose labour migration as such. To do so would be incorrect for two reasons. Firstly, it would contradict the principle of proletarian internationalism, which rejects the maintenance of privileges for one section of the working class at the expense of another. Secondly, opposition to immigration would cause immigrants in West Europe to regard the working-class movement as its enemy, and would therefore deepen the split in the working class – which is exactly what the capitalists are hoping for. The aim of a socialist policy on immigration must be to overcome the split in the working class by bringing immigrant workers into the labour movement and fighting against the exploitation to which they are subjected. Only by demanding full economic, social and political equality for immigrants can we prevent the employers from using them as a weapon against working-class interests. The policies of the trade unions with regard to immigration have varied widely. The Swiss unions oppose immigration, and have since the mid-fifties campaigned for a reduction in the number of foreign workers. At the same time, they claim to represent all workers, and call upon foreigners to join – not surprisingly, with little success. The British unions opposed the recruitment of European Voluntary Workers after the war, and insisted upon collective agreements limiting their rights to promotion, laying down that they should be dismissed first in case of redundancy and so on.52 The policy towards Commonwealth immigration has been totally different: the TUC has opposed immigration control, and rejected any form of discrimination. This rejection has, however, been purely verbal, and virtually nothing has been done to organize immigrants or to counter the special forms of exploitation to which they are subject. The CGT in France opposed immigration completely during the late forties and the fifties, condemning it as an instrument designed to attack French workers’ conditions. More recently the CGT, as well as the two other big labour federations, the CFDT and the FO, have come to regard immigration as inevitable. All have special secretariats to deal with immigrant workers’ problems and do everything possible to bring

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the formation of immigrant unions

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them into the unions. In Germany, the DGB has accepted immigration and has set up offices to advise and help immigrants. The member unions also have advisory services, and provide foreign language bulletins and special training for immigrant shop-stewards. In general, those unions which have recognized the special problems of immigration have not done so on the basis of a class analysis (here the CGT is to some extent an exception). Rather they have seen the problems on a humanitarian level, they have failed to explain the strategy of the employers to the workers, and the measures taken have been of a welfare type, designed to integrate immigrants socially, rather than to bring them into the class struggle. Therefore, the unions have succeeded neither in countering racialism among indigenous workers, nor in bringing the immigrant workers into the labour movement on a large scale. The participation of immigrant workers in the unions is on the whole relatively low. This is partly attributable to their rural background and lack of industrial experience, but in addition immigrants often find that the unions do not adequately represent their interests. The unions are controlled by indigenous workers, or by functionaries originating from this group. In situations where immigrant and indigenous workers do not have the same immediate interests (this happens not infrequently due to the differing occupational positions of the two groups, for instance in the question of wage-differentials), the unions tend to take the side of the indigenous workers. Where immigrants have taken action against special forms of discrimination, they have often found themselves deserted by the unions.53 In such circumstances it is not surprising if immigrants do not join the unions, which they regard as organizations for local labour only. This leads to a considerable weakening of the unions. In Switzerland many unions fear for their very existence, and see the only solution in the introduction of compulsory ‘solidarity contributions’, to be deducted from wages by the employers. In return the unions claim to be the most effective instrument for disciplining the workers. When the employers gave way to a militant strike of Spanish workers in Geneva in 1970, the unions publicly attacked them for making concessions. Where the unions do not adequately represent immigrant workers, it is sometimes suggested that the immigrants should form their own unions. In fact they have not done so anywhere in contemporary West Europe. This shows a correct class position on their part: the formation of immigrant unions would deepen and institutionalize the split in the working class, and would therefore serve the interests of the employers.54 On the other hand, all immigrant groups do have their own organizations, usually set up on the basis of nationality,

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and having social, cultural and political functions. These organizations do not compete with the trade unions, but rather encourage their members to join them. The aim of the political groups have so far been concerned mainly with their countries of origin. They have recruited and trained cadres to combat the reactionary regimes upon returning home. At present, as a result of greater length of stay and increasing problems in West Europe, many immigrant political groups are turning their attention to class struggle in the countries where they work. It is the task of the revolutionary movement in West Europe to encourage this tendency, by making contact with immigrant groups, assisting them in co-ordinating with immigrants of other nationalities and with the working-class movement in general, giving help in political education and cadre-training, and carrying out joint actions. Such co-operation means surmounting many problems. Firstly, language and culture may make communications difficult. Secondly, the risk of repression to which immigrant militants are exposed may make them reluctant to make contacts. Thirdly, the experience of discrimination may cause immigrants to distrust all local people. This leads in many cases to cultural nationalism, particularly marked for historical reasons among black people. In order to overcome these difficulties, it is essential for indigenous political groups to study the problems of immigrants and the special forms of discrimination and exploitation to which they are exposed. Concrete attempts to combat these must be made. Indigenous groups must offer co-operation and assistance to immigrants in their struggle, rather than offering themselves as a leadership. It is not only when revolutionary groups are actively trying to cooperate with immigrant workers’ organizations that they come up against the problems of immigration. The majority of immigrants are not politically organized, whether through apathy or fear of repression. Groups agitating in factories or carrying out rent campaigns are likely to come up against large numbers of unorganized immigrants in the course of their daily work. It is then essential to take special steps to communicate with the immigrants and to bring them into the general movement. Failure to do so may result in the development of petty-bourgeois chauvinism within factory or housing groups, which would correspond precisely with the political aims of the capitalists with regard to labour migration. In Germany, the large numbers of revolutionary groups at present agitating in factories almost invariably find it necessary to learn about the background and problems of immigrant workers, to develop special contacts with them, and to issue leaflets in the appropriate languages. The same

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applies to housing groups, which frequently find that immigrants form the most under-privileged group in the urban areas where they are working. Immigrant workers can become a class-conscious and militant section of the labour movement. This has been demonstrated repeatedly; immigrant workers have played a leading part in strike movements throughout West Europe. They are at present in the forefront of the movement which is occupying empty houses in German cities. Immigrant workers showed complete solidarity with the rest of the working class in May 1968 in France, they were militant in strikes and demonstrations and developed spontaneous forms of organization in the struggle. But such successes should not make us forget the capitalist strategy behind labour migration. Powerful structural factors connected with the function of immigrants as an industrial reserve army, and with the tendency of part of the indigenous working class to take on the characteristics of a labour aristocracy, lead to a division between immigrant and indigenous workers. Solidarity between these two sections does not come automatically. It requires a correct understanding of the problems within the revolutionary movement and a strategy for countering ruling-class aims. It is necessary to assist the immigrant workers in fighting exploitation and in defending their special interests. At the same time revolutionary groups must combat racialist and xenophobic ideologies within the working class. These are the pre-conditions for developing class-consciousness and bringing the immigrant workers into the class struggle.

Notes 1 Engels, ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, in Marx and Engels, On Britain, Moscow 1962, p. 119. 2 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1961, p. 632. 3 Ibid., p. 633. 4 Ibid., p. 637. 5 Ibid., p. 640. 6 Engels, Preface to the English edition of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, op. cit., p. 28. 7 Engels, ‘The English Elections’, in On Britain, op. cit., p. 505. 8 Lenin, Imperialism – the highest Stage of Capitalism, Moscow 1966, pp. 96-7. 9 Ibid., pp. 99-100. 10 In this article we examine the function of labour migration only for the countries of immigration. Migration also plays an important stabilizing role for the reactionary regimes of the countries of origin – a role which is understood and to some extent planned by the ruling class in West Europe.

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Although we are concerned only with West Eucope in this article, it is important to note that the use of certain special categories of workers, who can be discriminated against without arousing general solidarity from other workers, is a general feature of modern capitalism. The blacks and chicanos are the industrial reserve army of the USA, the Africans of white-dominated Southern Africa. Current attempts by ‘liberal’ capitalists to relax the colour bar to allow blacks into certain skilled and white-collar jobs, both in the USA and South Africa, however estimable in humanitarian terms, are designed mainly to weaken the unions and put pressure on wages in these sectors. 11 Marx mentions several forms taken by the industrial reserve army. One is the ‘latent’ surplus-population of agricultural labourers, whose wages and conditions have been depressed to such an extent that they are merely waiting for a favourable opportunity to move into industry and join the urban proletariat. (Capital, Vol. I., op. cit., p. 642.) Although these workers are not yet in industry, the possibility that they may at any time join the industrial labour force increases the capitalist’s ability to resist wage increases. The latent industrial reserve army has the same effect as the urban unemployed. Unemployed workers in other countries, in so far as they may be brought into the industrial labour force whenever required, clearly form a latent industrial reserve army in the same way as rural unemployed within the country. 12 See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworrh 1968, pp. 469-85. 13 ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, op. cit., p. 123. 14 Letter to S. Meyer and A. Vogt, 9 April 1870, in On Britain, op. cit., p. 552. 15 Imperialism, op. cit., p. 98. 16 Hans Pfahlmann, Fremdarbeiter und Kriegsgefangene in der deutschen Kriegswirtschaft, 1939-1945, Darmstadt 1968, p. 232. 17 For the role of the lumpenproletariat in the industrial reserve army, see Capital, Vol. I, op. cit., p. 643. 18 We use ‘immigrants’ in a broad sense to include all persons living in a West European country which is not their country of birth. Much migration is of a temporary nature, for a period of 3-10 years. But such temporary migration has effects similar to permanent migration when the returning migrant is replaced by a countrymen with similar characteristics. Such migrants may be regarded as a permanent social group with rotating membership. 19 For sources, as well as a detailed analysis of social conditions of immigrants, see Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, London, Oxford University Press for Institute of Race Relations, 1972 (forthcoming). 20 The 1966 Census figures are at present the most recent ones available. It should, however, be noted that, for technical reasons, they seriously under-enumerate the Commonwealth immigrants in Britain. Moreover, the number has grown considerably since 1966, particularly if we look at the whole community including children born to Commonwealth immigrants in Britain, who were not counted by the census. We shall have to wait for the results of the 1971 Census to obtain a more accurate picture of the immigrant population in Britain. 21 Many foreign workers are still employed on a seasonal basis in building, agriculture and catering in France and Switzerland. This is a special form

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of exploitation. The worker has no income in the off-season and is therefore forced to work very long hours for the 9-10 months when he does have work. He cannot bring his family with him, he has even more limited civic rights than other immigrants, and he has absolutely no security, for there is no guarantee that his employment will be continued from year to year. 22 Ulrich Freiherr von Gienanth, in Der Arbeitgeber, Vol. 18, 20 March 1966, p. 153. 23 For Commonwealth immigration see E.J.B. Rose et al., Colour and Citizenship, London 1969. 24 Eurocrats refer to the free movement policy as the beginning of a ‘European labour market’. But although EEC citizens have the right to choose which country to be exploited in, they lack any civic or political rights once there. Moreover, the Southern Italian labour reserves are being absorbed by the monopolies of Turin and Milan, so that intra-EEC migration is steadily declining in volume, while migration from outside the EEC increases. 25 Where formalized economic planning exists, this necessity has been publicly formulated. Prognoses on the contribution of immigrants to the labour force were included in the Fourth and Fifth Five-Year Plans in France, and play an even more prominent part in the current Sixth Plan. See Le VIe plan et les travailleurs étrangers, Paris 1971. 26 Cf. Ruth Becker, Gerhard Dörr, K.H. Tjaden, ‘Fremdarbeiterbeschäftigung im deutschen Kapitalismus’, Das Argument, December 1971, p. 753. 27 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Economic Survey of Europe 1967, Geneva 1968, Chapter I, p. 49. 28 The distinction between the two sections of the immigrant labour force is formalized in the new French immigration policy introduced in 1968. There are separate regulations for South Europeans, who are encouraged to bring in their families and settle permanently, and Africans (particularly Algerians) who are meant to come for a limited period only, without dependents. 29 It is estimated that foreign workers in Germany are at present paying about 17 per cent of all contributions to pension insurance, but that foreigners are receiving only 0.5 per cent of the total benefits. Heinz Salowsky, ‘Sozialpolitische Aspekte der Auslanderbeschaftigung’, Berichte des Deutschen Industrie instituts zur Sozialpolitik, Vol. 6 (8), No.2, February 1972, pp. 16-22. 30 Calculated from: ‘Statistiques du Ministère de l’Intérieur’, Hommes et Migrations: Documents, No. 788, 15 May 1970; and Annuaire Statistique de la France 1968. 31 1966 Census. 32 Statistisches Jahrbuch der Schweiz 1967, pp. 140-1. 33 Ausländische Arbeitnehmer 1970, Nürnberg 1971. 34 1966 Census. For a detailed analysis of immigrants’ employment see: K. Jones and A.D. Smith, The Economic Impact of Commonwealth Immigration, Cambridge 1970. Also Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, op. cit., Ch. III. 35 Ausländische Arbeitnehmer 1969, Nürnberg 1970, p. 86. 36 L’insertion sociale des étrangers dans l’aire métropolitaine Lyon-SaintÉtienne’, Hommes et Migrations, No. 113, 1969, p. 112. 37 1966 Census.

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38 Some employers – particularly small inefficient ones – specialize in the exploitation of immigrants. For instance they employ illegal immigrants, who can be forced to work for very low wages and cannot complain to the authorities for fear of deportation. Such cases often cause much indignation in the liberal and social-democratic press. But, in fact, it is the big efficient firms exploiting immigrants in a legal and relatively humane way which make the biggest profits out of them. The function of immigration in West European capitalism is created not by the malpractices of backward firms (many of whom incidentally could not survive without immigrant labour), but by the most advanced sectors of big industry which plan and utilize the position of immigrant workers to their own advantage. 39 ‘So far as we are concerned, hostel and works represent parts of a single whole. The hostels belong to the mines, so the foreign workers are in our charge from start to finish’, stated a representative of the German mining employers proudly. Magnet Bundesrepublik, Informationstagung der Bundesvereinigung Deutscher Arbeitgeberverbande, Bonn 1966, p. 81. 40 A group of French doctors found that the TB rate for black Africans in the Paris suburb of Montreuil was 156 times greater than that of the rest of the local population. R.D. Nicoladze, C. Rendu, G. Millet, ‘Coupable d’être malades’, Droit et Liberté, No. 280, March 1969, p. 8. For further examples see Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, op. cit., Ch. VIII. 41 For a description of how a strike of Spanish workers in a steel-works was broken by the threat of deportation, see P. Gavi, Les Ouvriers, Paris 1970, pp. 225-6. 42 W. W. Daniels, Racial Discrimination in England, based on the PEP Report, Harmondsworth 1968. 43 See Review of the International Commission of Jurists, No. 3, September 1969, and Migration Today, No. 13, Autumn 1969. 44 Cf. Der Spiegel, No. 7, 7 February 1972. 45 See Mark Abrams’ study on prejudice in Colour and Citizenship, pp. 551-604. The results of the study are very interesting, but require careful interpretation. The interpretation given by Abrams is extremely misleading. The results of the prejudice study, which was said to indicate a very low level of prejudice in Britain, attracted more public attention than all the other excellent contributions in this book. For a reanalysis of Abrams’ material see Christopher Bagley, Social Structure and Prejudice in five English Boroughs, London 1970. 46 We have attempted such a comparison in Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, op. cit., Chapter IX. Historical comparisons also tend to throw doubt on the importance of race as a cause of prejudice: white immigrants like the Irish were in the past received just as hostilely as the black immigrants today. 47 Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class and Race, New York 1970, p. 317 ff. This superb work of Marxist scholarship is recommended to anyone interested in racialism. 48 Surveys carried out in Germany in 1966 show a growth of hostility towards immigrants. This was directly related to the impending recession and local labour’s fear of unemployment.

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49 Historically, the best example of this strategy was the use of successive waves of immigrants to break the nascent labour movement in the USA and to follow extremely rapid capital accumulation. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair gives an excellent account of this. Similar was the use of internal migrants (the ‘Okies’) in California in the thirties – see John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. 50 Although the Federal Council, the Parliament, the employers, the unions and all the major parties called for rejection of the Schwarzenbach Initiative, it was defeated only by a small majority: 46 per cent of voters supported the Initiative and 54 per cent voted against it. 51 Many bourgeois economists and some soi-disant Marxists think that immigration hinders growth because cheap labour reduces the incentive for rationalization. Bourgeois economists may be excused for not knowing (or not admitting) that cheap labour must be the source for the capital which makes rationalization possible. Marxists ought to know it. A good study on the economic impact of immigration is: C.P. Kindleberger, Europe’s Postwar Growth – the Role of Labour Supply, Cambridge (Mass.) 1967. 52 See Bob Hepple, Race, Jobs and the Law in Britain, London 1968, p. 50 and Appendix II. 53 For details of such cases see Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, op. cit., Chapter IV. 54 We do not wish to imply that it is always incorrect for minority groups to form new unions, if the existing ones are corrupt and racialist. It was obviously necessary for militant blacks in the USA to do this, as the existing union structure was actively assisting in their oppression. But organizations like the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), though consisting initially of blacks only, were not separatist. They had the perspective of organizing class-conscious workers of all ethnic groups. Such organizations appear to be neither necessary nor possible in the present stage of struggle in West Europe.

For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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Introduction to European immigration policy: a comparative study Tomas Hammar

This article is the introduction to the book European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study, edited by political scientist Tomas Hammar. At the time of its publication in 1985, the construction of a European immigration policy was not yet a hot policy issue. Moreover, the systematic comparative study of immigration policies across the Continent was underdeveloped. In fact, Hammar’s book was one of the first – and most convincing – collective attempts to compare immigration patterns and policies in different European countries. This is one valuable reason to include the introductory chapter of the book in this volume even though it does not deal with all the member states of the European Community at the time. Another reason is the utility of Hammar’s analytical distinction between two related parts of immigration policy – immigration regulation and aliens control versus immigrant policy – which has become a classic distinction. After more than twenty years, it remains an excellent point of entry into the study of immigration and integration policies in Europe. The six immigration countries studied in this book have experienced a period of large-scale immigration caused mainly by similar factors. None of these countries had planned or even foreseen an international migration of the size that actually occurred. Their reaction to this migration has been strikingly similar and at the same time decisively different, but in the long run immigration control has become more strict everywhere and active labor recruitment has been stopped; at the same time, there have been a number of improvements in the social and cultural situation of immigrants.

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similar experiences

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Selecting six countries

representative countries

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The project countries have been chosen partly because of their size and their large immigrant populations and partly because they offer a high degree of variation in the regulation of immigration and in immigrant policy. Germany, France and Britain were included from the outset because of their sizeable immigrant populations, and Switzerland because of its high proportion of foreigners. In addition these four countries provide examples of very different sorts of international migration as well as different immigration policies. Sweden could not be left out, partly because the initiative and financing of this study was Swedish, but more important it deserves a place as the Scandinavian country which has both admitted the most immigrants and developed first a specific immigration policy. The Netherlands was included as the sixth country because of its mixture of post-colonial and Mediterranean labor immigration, and also because of its traditional emphasis on cultural pluralism and its influence on current “ethnic minorities” policy. The selection of countries was also made with the idea that the two major ways of regulating immigration should be represented: the “guestworker” or rotation system (Germany and Switzerland), and the policy of permanent immigration (Britain and Sweden). The post-colonial immigration that prevails in Britain and has played a major role in France and in the Netherlands is included as well as immigration to countries with no such colonial ties, represented by Sweden, Germany, and Switzerland. We further hoped that our selection would give examples of various types of immigrant policy, based on different welfare ideologies and on the different social and political organizations of the societies represented. Other immigration countries, of course, could have been included as well, had the project resources not required that the number of selected countries be limited. Norway and Denmark have both admitted immigrants from, among other countries, Turkey and Pakistan, and they offer interesting cases for policy comparison. Yet immigration to these two countries has been relatively small, and if only one Scandinavian country can be included, Sweden is the logical choice. Belgium had a large immigrant population of some 900,000 in 1980. The number of foreign citizens residing in Austria at the same time was estimated to be about 250,000. Although both countries have adopted policies directed towards the temporary employment of foreign workers, they have found that their immigrants tend to stay permanently. They would offer excellent additional studies, but their exclusion does not significantly reduce the breadth of our study.

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Since we study changes over several decades in immigration and immigrant policy, we may claim that we cover more than six cases. We are able to present data for each country emanating from different time periods. The comparison of six national cases will improve our knowledge about the preconditions of immigration policy, about the interrelations between regulation of immigration and immigrant policy, and in general about the dynamics of international migration and national policymaking.

Migratory paths Postwar migration to and within Europe has been characterized as a movement from south to north, although such postwar migration would be better characterized as a movement from the periphery to the center. Migration from Italy reached considerable proportions in the 1950s and was joined during the 1960s by an even larger migration from Spain and Portugal in the southwest and from Yugoslavia, Greece, and later Turkey in the southeast. African migration has gone mainly to France, while the bulk of transoceanic migration from the West Indies, Pakistan, and India has gone to Britain. The Netherlands has had immigration from Indonesia and Latin America as well as from Morocco and Turkey. On the map (Figure 1.1) two additional arrows from Ireland to Britain and from Finland to Sweden reinforce the impression of a movement from periphery to center. Nevertheless, although both arrows show a movement across national boundaries, one is reluctant to say that they represent “international migration” in the same sense as do the other arrows. Irish immigrants have always been allowed to enter Britain and seek employment without restriction. Until at least 1948 they were regarded as full British citizens. Finnish immigrants have a similarly privileged position because of the common Nordic labor market and their country’s traditional ties to Sweden. In contrast to the Irish, however, a large number of Finnish immigrants have considerable language difficulties after arrival, and in this respect they resemble the immigrant groups in Sweden that have more distant origins. Eastern Europe is blank on the map, not because it has no migration or exchanges of labor, but because we lack information about it. The sizeable immigration to West Germany from East Germany and from Poland is discussed in the chapter on Germany, but it would also be interesting to have had examples of migration within Eastern Europe. We probably would have found surprising similari-

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movement from periphery to center

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ties and enormous differences from the immigration phenomenon in Western Europe. For example, the German Democratic Republic has signed an agreement with Algeria that provides for the transfer of workers with relatively stringent provisions which might be compared with similar agreements in the West. In the countries of Eastern Europe, however, state planning and control of the economy, including labor mobility, predominates, which means that the background for immigration and immigration policy is completely different there. Thus, we leave this part of the map blank, mainly because a thorough study of migration in Eastern Europe requires a separate research project.

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Figure 1.1. Postwar migration to Europe

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part i – the migration process

More than three fourths of the foreign citizens in the immigration countries live in France, Germany, and Britain. Each of these countries has approximately four million resident immigrants, although the statistics are difficult to compare and in some cases are rather unreliable. Except for Liechtenstein and Luxemburg, Switzerland has the highest percentage of foreign citizens in its population (14.5 percent in 1982). If one compares statistics on the percentage of foreign workers in the project countries, they are about the same as the percentage of foreign residents (see Table 1.1). These figures do not reveal that immigrants in Western Europe represent a great number of different nationalities, nor do they show how immigrants with the same nationality often settle in the same country and even the same region. Spanish and Portuguese immigrants have gone mainly to France, and to a lesser extent to Switzerland. Yugoslavs and Turks have gone mainly to Germany. Italians are an older immigrant group and have settled primarily in Switzerland and to a lesser extent in Germany and France. Immigrants from North Africa have gone to France and later to the Netherlands as well, although the bulk of immigration to the latter country has come from its former colonies in Asia and Latin America.

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distribution of nationalities

Table 1.1. Foreign citizens residing in the European project countries in 1983 (thousands) All residents

Labor force

Foreign citizens

Percent of total

Foreign citizens

Percent of total

Sweden

405.5

4.9

2227.7

5.2

Netherlands*

543.6

3.7

208.4

3.7

France*

4,459.0

7.2

1,436.4

6.3

Great Britain †

1,705.0

3.1

931.0

3.8

West Germany

4,666.9

7.6

2,037.6

9.2

925.8

14.5

647.9

21.9

Switserland ‡

Source: OECD, Continuous Reporting System on Migration, SOPEMI 1983, for all countries except Great Britain. Notes: * Data from 1982, and for labor force in France 1981. Based on number of residence and work permits, and therefore an overestimate of the size of the foreign population. † Data from 1981, Labour Force Survey. ‡ Yearly average. Seasonal workers (13,400) and frontier workers (108,400) are included.

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bilateral agreements

restricted policies

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The same is true for Britain, where almost all postwar immigration has come from former colonies in the West Indies and from India and Pakistan. The majority of immigration to Sweden has come from Finland and from the other Nordic countries, although there has also been a significant inflow of immigrants from Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. There are a number of possible explanations for the distribution of nationalities among the receiving countries. In many cases bilateral agreements and recruitment practices based on such agreements have led to concentrations of certain nationalities, for example, Turks and Yugoslavs in Germany or Moroccans in the Netherlands. Geographical proximity between sending and receiving countries has often had a similar effect, particularly when accompanied by a history of close relations. Geographical distance has sometimes reduced the potential for certain kinds of immigration. Since Britain and Sweden are located somewhat on the periphery of continental European migration, they have not received as many immigrants from Southern Europe and Turkey. Ex-colonies and countries with whom they have historically had close contact have provided much of the immigration to France, the Netherlands, and especially Britain. Finally, the distribution of immigrants by nationality can also be explained by “chain migration”, which occurs when an initial group of immigrants settles in a country and then, by encouraging others in their home country or by providing a model for them, attract others of the same nationality to a particular receiving country. The sources of migration to Europe have progressively moved to areas farther and farther away. While immigration from Southern Europe, initially quite extensive, has decreased in recent years, immigration from Africa, Asia, and especially the Near East has increased. The change in the sources of immigration has meant that many of the new minority groups are more highly visible, as they differ more in culture and tradition from indigenous European population than did the so-called “traditional” immigrant groups of the past. There are indications that this newer long-distance immigration will continue and increase in the future. An important change in immigration policy occurred during the period from 1970 to 1974. For economic and other reasons the immigration countries of Western Europe heavily restricted or usually stopped recruiting foreign labor, and since then only refugees and the relatives of resident aliens are admitted. Policymakers have now come to realize, to their surprise, that many foreign workers are likely to remain as permanent residents.

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This change in immigration policy, which we will call the “turning point”, was the first clear break with the relatively open and unrestricted policies of the previous two decades. The change was declared in Switzerland (1970), Sweden (1972), Germany (1973), and France (1974). Though it was made with the consent of each national government, it was made without open political debate and without any formal, official decisions. It is important to note that this turning point should be thought of as a policy change towards stricter regulation but not necessarily as a “stop” for labor migration. In Britain and the Netherlands, where most immigrants came from colonies or former colonies and usually held the citizenship of the mother country, the turning point in immigration policy did not occur at a specific time but came gradually. In Britain this process has involved the gradual elimination of the immigration rights of colonial citizens. Though this process began there in 1962 and has not yet ended, one can nevertheless say that the passage of the 1971 Immigration Act was perhaps the most significant legislation in this area. In the Netherlands there was a major revaluation of immigration policy at the end of the 1970s. The number of new work permits issued fell sharply in 1973, but labor immigration was never formally “stopped”. Not until 1980 did the government impose serious restrictions on post-colonial immigration and begin to develop a new immigrant policy. Immigration to the six European project countries has changed during the past decade in other ways as well. While the number of single, male immigrants has decreased, mainly because of the policy change that occurred at the turning point, the immigration of refugees and the dependants of resident aliens has increased. In other words, the total amount of immigration to the project countries has not decreased substantially as a result of the “stop” in labor recruitment, but has remained constant or in some cases has actually increased. Thus, there is a relationship between the imposition of the “stop” and the change in the composition of immigrant population. This relationship is discussed in more detail in the comparative analysis presented in Part II. Immigration policy There are many definitions of immigration policy. They vary even within a single country. Yet when we compare a number of countries, we need a working definition that is relevant to all these countries. Thus, under our scheme, “immigration policy” will consist of two parts which are interrelated, yet distinct: (a) regulation of flows of immigration and control of aliens, and (b) immigrant policy.

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the turning point

a working definition

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regulation

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Immigration regulation and aliens control Regulation of immigration is the oldest, the most obvious, and according to some people the only aspect of immigration policy. Immigration regulation refers to the rules and procedures governing the selection and admission of foreign citizens. It also includes such regulations which control foreign citizens (aliens) once they visit or take residence in the receiving country, including control of their employment. Deportation also falls under these regulations. Employers may be allowed to recruit foreign labor on their own, or labor transfer agreements may be entered into by the state and official information and recruitment bureaux be opened abroad. All this, of course, is a part of immigration regulation and must be included along with measures taken to restrict immigration or to stop it completely. The free movements of peoples, such as occur in the common labor markets of the EEC and Nordic areas, are also an aspect of immigration regulation; even though in these two cases policymakers have decided that certain kinds of immigration should not be regulated. In general, all sovereign states reserve the right to determine whether foreign citizens will be permitted to enter their territory and reside there, and in all the project countries this power of the state is found in law or in administrative regulations. Most changes in immigration policy, for example the changes at what we call the “turning point”, have been made by changing the application of existing aliens laws and not by changing the laws. Such laws were applied in a liberal way as long as immigration was encouraged, but later, when the goal was to limit the volume of immigration, discourage potential immigrants, and reduce the total number of foreigners in the country, the application of the same aliens laws became more strict. At the same time, however, immigration regulation was abandoned for certain groups of foreigners who were admitted without restrictions. Examples of this are, as already mentioned, the free circulation of labor in the EEC and the Nordic area and the acceptance on a permanent basis of political refugees. Immigration regulation implies that foreign citizens remain under some kind of aliens control until they become naturalized citizens. The conditions that foreign citizens are subject to during this period of “controlled” residence vary greatly from country to country. Some countries at an early stage guarantee their foreign residents the right to remain permanently. Other countries keep them in a position of legal insecurity and uncertainty for many years. Some countries admit foreign workers for seasonal employment and require them to leave when the season ends, although they are often

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permitted to return again the following season. Some countries organize so-called “rotation” systems under which foreign workers are allowed to stay in the country only a maximum number of months or years, after which (in theory at least) they must depart to make room for new workers. In this way these countries hope to avoid the establishment of any new, permanent population groups whose needs and demands would be considerably greater than those of temporary “guestworkers”. Even in countries that do not apply seasonal employment or rotation systems, however, it often takes many years before foreign citizens are guaranteed that they will not be forced to leave the country against their will. By delaying “permanent status”, immigration countries retain the legal right to repatriate foreign workers when desired, even those with many years of residence. The conditions attached to permanent status can thus function as a means of controlling the size or composition of immigration and must therefore also be included as a part of immigration regulation. Compulsory repatriation of large groups of immigrants is rare. Nevertheless, it has long been a possibility which hangs over the heads of many of the foreign workers employed in Western Europe. Though seldom utilized, it nonetheless influences their living conditions and their attitudes towards residence in the host country. Thus, the very existence of the possibility of compulsory repatriation is a factor in a country’s immigrant policy. Immigration regulation may be said to foster a considerable degree of legal insecurity because decisions concerning permanent status are made by administrative authorities who have much discretion in interpreting such regulations. Such legal insecurity is made worse when foreign citizens have no right to appeal against the decisions of administrative authorities.

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legal insecurity

Immigrant policy Immigrant policy is the other part of immigration policy and refers to the conditions provided to resident immigrants. It comprises all issues that influence the condition of immigrants; for example, work and housing conditions, social benefits and social services, educational opportunities and language instruction, cultural amenities, leisure activities, voluntary associations, and opportunities to participate in trade union and political affairs. Immigrant policy may be either direct or indirect. Immigrants have a number of special needs to begin with be-

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‘direct’ immigrant policy

‘indirect’ immigrant policy

tomas hammar

cause they are different from the host population. They often speak a foreign language and represent a different culture. Immigrants also have special economic interests and ambitions for the future. All of this may sometimes prompt a country of immigration to devise special measures to improve the situation of its immigrants. Since these measures do not usually apply to the non-immigrant population, we will call them “direct” immigrant policy. Like the non-immigrant population, immigrants are also affected by a country’s general public policy, which involves economic, social, political, and other measures. These measures are not designed with only immigrants in mind; instead, they are intended to apply to all inhabitants of a country whether citizens or not. Yet they may not be applied to all inhabitants in the same way, i.e. there may be discrimination, both positive and negative, in the allocation of resources and opportunities. When general public policy affects immigrants substantially, we will talk about “indirect” immigrant policy. Indirect immigrant policy can be termed “inequitable” or “discriminatory” when immigrants receive significantly less than others, and when they are denied opportunities to participate in society. Even when the distribution of benefits is perfectly equal, however, immigrants can still remain in an inferior position, primarily because they have recently made a new start in the host country and experience less favorable circumstances than the rest of the population. This situation can be ameliorated if immigrants are given greater benefits than other people, e.g. special language instruction, special cultural support, and so on. These measures are the tools of direct immigrant policy. To summarize in outline form, immigration policy comprises: 1. Immigration regulation and aliens control (a) “strict” or “liberal” control of the admission and residence of foreign citizens (b) guarantees of “permanent status”; legal security versus vulnerability to arbitrary expulsion 2 Immigrant policy (a) indirect: immigrants’ inclusion in the general allocation of benefits; “equal” versus “discriminatory” distribution (b) direct: special measures on behalf of immigrants; “affirmative action” and the removal of legal discrimination Although we will in our analysis distinguish between these two parts of immigration policy, they are of course in practice at work simultaneously. What is very often not understood is the profound effect

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that they can have on one another. A system of rotation might, for example, leave most immigrants in a very weak legal position as residents. This may in turn impede integration and the full enjoyment of social and civil rights – both areas of concern to immigrant policy. Another example of the mutual influence between immigration regulation and immigrant policy would be when a country uses instruments of immigrant policy (e.g. housing applications, school registers, and so on) to identify and expel illegal immigrants, thus accomplishing a task of immigration regulation.

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General preconditions Immigration policy should be analyzed in the context of a country’s history, economy, geography, population, international relations, etc., for these are factors that affect immigration to a country, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Valid comparisons between the project countries are possible only when the general preconditions for the countries’ immigration policies are analyzed. Policymakers in each country may have tried to shape immigration policy on the basis of their own experience and their particular national needs, but the policies of all the project countries nevertheless have numerous features in common. Periods of passport exemption, rigid immigration control, and active recruitment of foreign workers have come at the same or almost the same time in every country. Thus, it seems that the shaping of immigration policy is determined in part by conditions beyond the control of policy makers in the individual countries. For example, two world wars have disrupted long-standing patterns of habitation and have forced people to flee their home countries. Economic disruptions, resulting either from the wars or from other causes, have been possibly even more unsettling than the wars themselves. The Great Depression in the 1930s affected the entire industrialized world and resulted in the widespread traumatic belief that future economic crises had to be avoided at all costs. During the following decades, Keynesian economic theory gradually provided new policy options, starting with active budget policies, which were applied to counter depressions. Of course, all countries have not been affected by war and economic crisis to the same degree, and partly because of this, there are significant differences in the immigration policies of the project countries. One might say that although they came from different parts, they are all sailing on the same heaving ocean, all exposed to the same fluctuations in weather, winds, and currents. Yet because

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local conditions matter

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conditional constraints

tomas hammar

they each set a different course and sail in a different kind of vessel, no two voyages are ever exactly alike. Similarly, no two countries’ immigration policies are ever exactly alike, even though all countries are affected by and must contend with the same external conditions. “General preconditions”, as the term will be used here, are background conditions which, on the whole, remain stable for a considerable period of time and are not easily influenced or altered in the short term. For the general as well as attentive public, and also for policymakers, these conditions act as constraints on the possibilities for state action; in other words, they form a factual, concrete framework for immigration policy over a relatively long period of time.

Terminology definition of immigrant and immigration

Two of the key concepts in this comparative study are immigrant and immigration. The term “immigrant” is sometimes used in the very broad sense of its root-word “migrant”, a person who moves from one country to another. In common usage, however, the term “immigrant” has acquired the narrower meaning of “a person who migrates to a country with the intention of taking up permanent residence”, something akin to the term “settler”. The definition of immigrant that will be used in this book lies somewhere in between the broad sense of “migrant” and the narrow sense of “settler”: “Immigrant” is a person who migrates to a country and then actually resides there longer than a short period of time, i.e. for more than three months. “Immigration” refers to the physical entrance of immigrants as here defined, either singly or as a group, into a country.

This definition thus excludes people that pay only a short visit to a country; for example, those who come on vacation or to visit relatives, or those who come on business trips or to do some specific job (a mechanic to install machinery for instance, or artists to give a performance), as long as their stay is for less than three months. On the other hand, “immigrant” does not only refer to those who plan from the beginning to stay permanently in a country. Thus, students, scholars, artists, and others who spend longer than three months as “guests” in a country are considered immigrants although they do not plan to stay permanently. The decisive criterion is the actual length of time that a person

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resides in the country of immigration. People that intend to remain permanently, i.e. “settler” immigrants, are not included in the definition if they return home after only a couple of months; on the other hand, people that intend to remain only a couple of months but later change their mind and stay for several years are included. Obviously, the length of residence necessary for a person to be included in our definition of “immigrant” cannot be determined in any but an arbitrary fashion. Each project country allows most foreign citizens to take up residence for a limited period of time, usually three to six months, without requiring visas or residence permits, and for this reason we have set the residence criterion in our definition at three months. Foreign citizens that remain in a country for longer than three months must usually obtain a residence permit; therefore, any foreign citizen who has such a permit is likely to become an immigrant, and is therefore considered such under our definition. But the definition also includes people who do not have residence permits, in particular illegal or “undocumented” aliens. In general, it is difficult to say with certainty that people are or are not immigrants when they arrive, although those who have applied for residence permits in advance are of course more likely to stay longer than those who have not. Under our definition, the criterion determining whether or not a foreign citizen should be considered an immigrant is if he or she stays in the country for longer than three months. The terms “immigrant” and “immigration” are applied in a different manner in each project country, and their meanings have changed over time. The definition used here will for this reason cause more difficulties in some project countries than in others. As the following chapters will show, there is an obvious relation between a country’s immigration policy and its terminology. In Germany and Switzerland immigrants are “foreign workers” (ausländische Arbeitnehmer in Germany and Fremdarbeiter in Switzerland) and they are controlled by “aliens bureaux” (Ausländerbehörde, or in Switzerland Fremdenpolizei). France has always used the terms les immigrés and l’immigration, and Sweden used similar terms (invandrare and invandring) in the 1960s when its new immigrant policy was launched. In Britain the term “immigrant” has been applied particularly to colored people, while in the Netherlands the new policy envisioned for immigrants is called a “minorities” policy. The technical language used in each country is adjusted so that it best describes and explains the country’s policy. Terminology also influences the way in which immigration policy is conceived and understood in each country; terms that should be instruments of de-

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terminology’s influence

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scription gradually become fixed concepts that limit flexibility and creativity. For this reason it is important that our comparative discussions use terms that are well defined. The above definitions of “immigrant” and “immigration” will be used in a strict sense in the comparative chapters and will also serve as the general frame of reference in the country chapters, although each author has naturally chosen to use the terminology of his particular country by way of illustration.

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For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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The crucial meso-level Thomas Faist1

This article was originally published in 1997 in a volume entitled International Migration, Immobility and Development: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by political scientists Thomas Faist and Tomas Hammar and sociologists Grete Brochman and Kristof Tamas. Historically, most theories of migration have focused either on global and structural factors explaining the different patterns of population movement (macro theories) or on individual determinants of migration (micro theories). The meso level that exists between individuals and larger structures has been, for a long time, relatively neglected. Faist argues very convincingly in favour of meso level theories. It is crucial to understand the impact on migration of social relations or social ties across individuals in kinship groups, households, local settings, formal organisations and friendship circles. It is also vital to examine the relationships between migrants and those who stayed behind since they may explain the reproduction of migration patterns. With his characteristic theoretical rigor, Faist offers here one of the first systematic arguments in defence of meso theories of migration while, at the same time, recognising the importance of micro and macro theories. By doing so, he has promoted a comprehensive, multilevel approach to migration that has since been further developed in the literature. Lacunae in sociological theories of international migration Sociological approaches have presented an impressive array of plausible arguments as to why people move from one place to another, especially across the borders of nation-states. However, these theories have not directly addressed the question of why so few people migrate from so few communities and why so many return. Firstly, the total migrant population in the world is estimated to about 2 per cent of the world’s population. Secondly, return migration constitutes an important fact. The social ties between movers and stayers

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movers and stayers

meso-level

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thomas faist

are not automatically ruptured. For example, between 1960 and 1993 out of an estimated total of 12 million labour migrants and dependants from the Mediterranean countries of Southern Europe and North Africa, 9.3 million returned to their countries of origin from Germany (own calculations, based upon Statistisches Bundesamt 1955-95). Nevertheless, the immigrant population in Germany increased as a result of family reunification during the later 1970s and 1980s after the ending of guestworker recruitment. In short, any theoretical attempt should therefore not focus on movers only, but on both movers and stayers, and also on how stayers who once make a move shuttle back and forth, or become stayers again, be it in the countries of origin or destination. Most theoretical efforts have mostly focused either on global structural factors inducing migration and refugee movements (macro-theories) or on factors motivating individuals to move (microtheories). This review and partial reconstruction of theories about international South to North migration emphasises the meso-level between what are usually called the micro- and the macro-levels, the level of analysis between individuals and larger structures such as the nation-state. It does so in focusing on social relations (social ties) between individuals in kinship groups (e.g. families), households, neighbourhoods, friendship circles and formal organisations. Two strands of literature have paid attention to the meso-level. Firstly, in recent years the processes of immigrant incorporation have been studied in economic sociology (Portes 1995). However, so far little has been said about the costs and benefits involved in transferring human capital abroad or about the mediating role of resources inherent in social relations (social capital) in the decisionmaking process. Secondly, there is a huge and impressive empirical literature on migrant networks (Massey et al. 1993). There are also plausible arguments as to why these migrant networks embedded in migration systems (Kritz and Zlotnik 1992) are crucial elements in explaining international migration. Yet this literature is more successful in explaining the direction (e.g. from former colonies to the European and North American core) than the volume of international movement. In particular, it is not clear what exactly happens in networks and collectives that induces people to stay, move and return. The specific characteristics of social capital are important in explaining the low volume of international movement, chain migration and often high rates of return migration. It is very difficult to transfer social capital abroad; even harder than the transfer of human capital. However, once pioneer migrants have moved abroad, relatives, friends and acquaintances can draw upon social capital and

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processes of ‘chain migration’ develop. Nevertheless, social ties of movers and stayers do not simply vanish in the course of international migration. This is why many movers return to the countries of origin. The following discussion evaluates micro-level rational choice theory and macro-level migration systems theories. Secondly, it introduces three levels of analysis – the structural (political-economic-cultural factors in the sending and receiving countries and at the international level), the relational (social ties of movers and stayers) and the individual (degrees of freedom of potential movers). Thirdly, the decision-making processes and the dynamics of migration are partially reconstructed. Two crucial categories are used as a point of departure: social ties and social capital in social networks and collectives.

Dominant theories of international migration This section appraises micro- and macro-level theories about the volume and dynamics of South to North movement. The idea is not to evaluate these theories as such but what they say about decision making and the dynamics of international migration. Theoretical and empirical work started with Sir Ernest George Ravenstein (1885 and 1889). He perceptively analysed relations between distance and propensity to move, developing seven ‘laws’ of migration. The laws are: (1) The majority migrate only short distances and thus establish ‘currents of migration’ towards larger centres. (2) This causes displacement and development processes in connection with populations in sending and destination regions. (3) The processes of dispersion and absorption correspond to each other. (4) Migration chains develop over time. (5) Migration chains lead to exit movements towards centres of commerce and industry. (6) Urban residents are less prone to migrate than rural people. (7) This is also true for the female population. These observations are a useful starting point as empirical rules of thumb that may apply to certain regions of the world at specific time periods. Ravenstein himself found abundant evidence for these ‘laws’ in mid-nineteenth-century internal English migration. However, his generalisations and later those of Everett Lee ( 1964) must be placed into more general sociological frameworks if we want to know whether and why their rules of thumb are true or not. Rational choice and systems theories may provide such frameworks.

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micro- and macro-level theories

rational choice and systems theories

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basic value-expectancy model

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The rational choice approach: between preferences and opportunities The basic instrumental statement is: In choosing between at least two alternative courses of action, a person is apt to choose the one for which the perceived value of the result is the greater. It is assumed that the actor is able to make rational decisions on the basis of a set of tastes or preference orderings. Some sociological rational choice theories take as the basic component not only the values (goals, preferences) but also the expectancies (subjective probabilities) a potential mover holds (DeJong and Fawcett 1981; see also chapter 3). The basic value-expectancy model is straightforward: MM = S(i) P(i) E(i) where ‘MM’ is the strength of the motivation to migrate, ‘P’ is the preferred outcome, ‘E’ is the expectancy that migration will lead to the desired outcome, and ‘i’ refers to the specific preferences (values) potential movers hold. The preferences may be most diverse. They may be related to improving and securing: wealth (e.g. income), status (e.g. prestigious job), comfort (e.g. better working and living conditions), stimulation (e.g. experience, adventure and pleasure), autonomy (e.g. high degree of personal freedom), affiliation (e.g. joining friends or family), exit from oppression of all kinds (e.g. refugees), meaningful life (e.g. improving society), better life for one’s children, and morality (e.g. leading a virtuous life for religious reasons). In this view the potential migrant might not only be a worker, a member of a household or a kinship group, but also a voter, a member of ethnic, linguistic, religious and political groups, a member of a persecuted minority, or also, among many other things, a devotee of arts or sports. In addition to values (preferences) and expectancies Hartmut Esser explicitly adds a third important element, opportunities and constraints. Therefore, his approach can be called structural individualism. We could restate the above equation to read: MM = S(i) V(i) P(i), depending on O/C ‘O/C’ is the set of external opportunities and constraints encountered by a potential migrant. Esser’s theoretical approach deals with assimilation and acculturation of immigrants in the receiving country. Yet Esser’s premises

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could be used to deal with decision making in the sending countries as well. His first fundamental hypothesis (1980: 210-11) could be restated as follows: The more intense the motives of a migrant are regarding a specific goal, the stronger the expectation that she can fulfil her goals by (temporary) territorial exit, the higher the propensity to attribute a high preference (value) to exit and the fewer the constraints working against exit, the more likely a potential mover will choose the exit option. These constraints and opportunities could include factors such as societal and cultural norms (e.g. gender roles), state policies (admission policies of the receiving countries) and economic differentials related to income or employment. In addition to opportunity structures information plays a decisive role for migration decision making. Depending on the availability of information on transport and opportunities for jobs and housing, potential migrants can optimise their benefits. Such information may flow along various communication channels, such as mass media and friends who migrated before but also pioneer migrants outside the inner circle of relatives and friends. An important prerequisite of immobility then is that a potential mover has sufficient information as to what goals can be better accomplished in the sending or the receiving country. If a potential migrant decides to be mobile, the question arises whether the necessary resources can be transferred abroad. The territorial restriction of certain assets has been termed ‘location specific capital’ (DaVanzo 1981: 116). It is a widespread phenomenon that highly educated and trained movers, especially refugees, cannot enter at the same occupational level in the receiving country. For example, lawyers, physicians and engineers may not get accredited to practise law, medicine and mechanics and may have to look for work outside their field. Information about these and other limitations may prohibit international movements although they would not discourage the internal movement of migrants. In these cases it is more likely that internal and not international migration occurs. Rational choice accounts certainly are a powerful tool with which to model migration decision making and action. Yet, we have to examine what is meant by opportunities and constraints in order to understand more clearly the decision-making process. Sociological and anthropological studies have frequently found that migration decisions are taken in social units such as the family, extended families or even whole communities. These social units use available resources in their perceived self-interest. Often, in patriarchal systems. the male head decides at the expense of females and younger members of the family.

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constraints and opportunities

location-specific capital

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prestige and power

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This problem of defining a supra-individual decision-making unit is partly remedied by the ‘new economics of migration’ (Stark 1991), whose theorists do not prejudge the sole social unit of decision making to be the individual actor but try to aggregate the utilities of the individuals involved, especially in the case of rural economies. Yet by considering family utility in aggregate terms, these theorists have ignored or simplified the relations between family members, the social ties that bind or separate family or household members. If basic social relations are disregarded in this way, we do not get a good idea of power and authority relations, (mis)trust and solidarity. For example, who decides which member of a social unit such as a household migrates and what is the legitimation of the decision maker? Even if we specify the structural opportunities and constraints, we should still explain how they relate to individual rationality. Rational choice approaches to migration do not specify how structural opportunities are translated into individual action and vice versa. In essence, we encounter the problem of linking macro- and micro-levels of analysis: ‘For example, a sophisticated individual might be aware of the level and nature of foreign investment in his or her country, but would still be unlikely to perceive it as immediately affecting a residence desire and possible decision to move’ (Gardner 1981: 73). To make this link we need to complement micro-level approaches with more elaborate concepts of social relations and social ties. The migration-systems approach: between the world system and networks While rational choice theories of migration have evolved from the micro-level to consider macro-level factors also (structural individualism), systems theorists have come full circle: They were at first exclusively concerned with the macro-level (migration systems), but have gradually come to introduce lower-level concepts such as migrant networks. The most elaborate effort at developing a fully-fledged system-theoretic analysis is Hoffmann-Nowotny’s concept. encompassing four levels, the individual, national subsystems, national societies and the international society (1970 and 1973). Hoffmann-Nowotny applies general social systems theory to the phenomenon of international migration. He starts with the fundamental relation between power and prestige in a society. In his conceptual universe ‘prestige’ legitimises ‘power’. Hoffmann-Nowotny posits that in any society there exists some sort of consensus about the value attributed to material and immaterial goods (e.g. education). Power and prestige in a social system are determined by the position and by the status attributed to

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their positions. ‘Structural tensions’ arise from inequalities and status inconsistencies in the sending country. These structural tensions may generate ‘anomic tendencies’, i.e. an imbalance between power and status. Action directed to resolve these tensions may take forms such as social mobility, giving up the social position held or emigration to a country where status aspirations can be attained (HoffmannNowotny 1973: 11-14). In essence, for Hoffmann-Nowotny (international) migration constitutes an ‘interaction between societal systems geared to transfer tensions and thus balancing power and prestige (1973: 19; translation T.F). Later migration-systems approaches have four main characteristics. Firstly, migration-system theories assume that migration systems pose the context in which movement occurs and that it influences actions on whether to stay or to move. An analysis of trade and security linkages and colonial ties helps to explain the origin and direction of international movement. Basically, a migration system is here defined as two or more places (most often nation-states) connected to each other by flows and counterflows of people (see Faist 1995). Secondly, using dependency-theory and world-systems approaches, systems theories have stressed the existence of linkages between countries other than people, such as trade and security alliances, colonial ties and flows of goods, services, information and ideas (Portes and Walton 1981). These linkages often have existed before migration flows occurred. For example, in the case of European receiving countries (e.g. France, Netherlands and Great Britain) most movers come from former colonies. Thirdly, migration systems theory focuses on processes within migration systems. Movement is not regarded as a one-time event but rather as a dynamic process consisting of a sequence of events across time (Boyd 1989: 641). Already Mabogunje suggests in his programmatic article on rural-urban migration in Africa that migration needs to be studied as ‘a circular, interdependent, progressively complex and self-modifying system’ (1970: 4). Theorising the dynamics of migration has thus moved from a consideration of movement as a linear, unidirectional, push-and-pull, cause-effect movement to notions that emphasise migration as circular, interdependent, progressively complex and self-modifying systems in which the effect of changes in one part can be traced through the entire system. For example, once it has started, international migration turns into a selffeeding process. Petersen assumed that pioneer migrants or groups set examples that can develop into a stream of what he called ‘mass migration’ (1958: 263-4). This helps to explain international movement as a self-feeding process that gains in momentum as networks

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reduce both the direct monetary costs of movement and the opportunity costs (that is, the earnings forgone while moving, searching for work and housing, learning new skills), and also decrease the psychological costs of adjustment to a new environment in the receiving country. Movers and stayers are regarded as active decision makers (Fawcett 1989). Fourthly, within the context of important factors such as economic inequalities within and between nation-states and the admission policies of the receiving states, individuals, households and families develop strategies to cope with stay-or-go alternatives. Lately, systems theorists have started to apply social network theory vigorously. The main assumption is aptly summarised in Charles Tilly’s provocative phrase that it is ‘not people who migrate but networks’ (1990: 75). In other words, migrants are not ‘atomistic flies’ (Cohen 1987). Social networks consist of more or less homogeneous sets of ties between three or more actors. Network patterns of social ties comprise economic, political networks of interaction, as well as collectives such as groups (e.g. families, communities) and (public) associations. ‘Network theory builds its explanations from patterns of relations. It captures causal factors in the social structural bedrock of society, bypassing the spuriously significant attributes of people temporarily occupying particular positions in social structure’ (Burt 1986: 106). Migrant networks, then, are sets of interpersonal ties that connect movers, former movers and non-movers in countries of origin and destination through social ties, be they relations of kinship, friendship or weak social ties (see Choldin 1973). In international migration, networks may be even more important than in domestic migration because there are more barriers to overcome, e.g. exit and entry permits, and if not available, costs for illegal border crossing. Concerning migration and non-migration, a system-theoretic perspective emphasises that predisposing factors of very different kinds can enhance migration (e.g. wage differentials between countries, population growth, civil wars) when embedded in the context of historically grown political, economic and cultural linkages between senders and receivers, while other macro-factors may lead to non-migration, such as very restrictive exit and entry policies. Precipitating events (e.g. economic crises in sending countries) and intervening factors (e.g. migrant networks) are then thought to enhance migration. An important insight is that migration processes are accompanied by feedback effects affecting decisions to stay or go. For example, earlier internal migrations may lead to international migration or pioneer migrants may serve as role models for other potential migrants. In sum, migration-systems theories constitute a great advance in

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the explanation of the dynamics of international movements. Yet, the real significance of social and political units between the micro- and macro-levels remains blurred. Contrary to what is claimed, we get no clear understanding of the mechanisms by which macro-factors shape micro-level decision making. To posit the relevance of intermediate structures such as the family, household and migrant networks is not sufficient to establish a meso-level. It begs the question as to how intermediate structures systematically pattern decision making, and are shaped both by the actions of potential and actual movers and by larger social structures. Both rational choice and migration-systems theories have started to place more emphasis on processes linking the micro- and macrolevels: Rational choice theories have come to consider social units such as families and migration-systems theories emphasise networks. But both show a decisive weakness in conceptualising the social ties of movers and stayers within families or households and networks. Processes within these social units and relations between them and larger aggregates (e.g. state institutions) have to be brought into this analysis. One of the crucial factors is the lack of an appropriate conceptual framework. The following exposition of a social relational approach is therefore not meant to substitute but rather to enrich the rational choice and migration-systems approaches to international migration by paying more systematic attention to the meso-level.

linking micro- and macro-levels

Three levels of analysis: macro-structural, relational and individual In its most general form spatial movement can be understood as a transfer not only from one place to another but also from one social unit or neighbourhood to another. This transfer may strain, rupture, change or reinforce previous social ties. In a sociological analysis of international migration three levels are relevant: (1) political-economic-cultural structures on the level of the international system, the country of origin and the country of destination (structural level), (2) density, strength and content of social relations between stayers and movers within units in the areas of origin and destination (relational level), and (3) the degree of freedom or autonomy of a potential mover (individual level), i.e. the degree to which he or she has the ability to decide on moving or staying. (1) Political-economic-cultural structures denote an array of factors in the sending and receiving countries and in the international politi-

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political-economiccultural structures

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density, strength and content

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cal and economic system of nation-states. The nation-states differ in the political realm as political and administrative units. For example, sending countries may vary with respect to political stability. This has consequences for the emergence of refugee flows. The admission and integration policies of sending countries also vary. Nation-states also differ along characteristics such as living standards, jobs and working conditions, unemployment rates and wages in the sending and receiving countries. Such differentials are important prerequisites for migration to occur between nation-states. Finally, in the cultural realm there are differences in normative expectations and collective identity. For example, in some areas of the world, ‘cultures of migration’ have developed (e.g. Caribbean islands and the Indian island of Goa). International norms and organisations also have an impact on the mobility of persons (e.g. international convenants on human and social rights by the International Labour Organisation and the Geneva Convention on refugees and asylum seekers). Research into structural opportunities has been abundant, especially into the history of international labour migration. Hatton and Williamson (1994) summarise their findings on transatlantic migrations from Europe to America around the turn of the century, saying that demographic growth in the sending regions and income gaps between home and overseas destinations were both important, while industrialisation (independent of its influence on real wages) made a modest contribution. Frank Thistlethwaite argued in his précis on earlier transatlantic migrations that ‘the inner secrets of emigration are to be sought in the working of those two revolutions which are so interconnected, the demographic and the industrial’ (1991: 236-7). With respect to political refugees, however, large refugee flows have been caused by international wars, especially the Second World War but also the Cold War. Many more recent refugee flows have originated as a by-product of the formation of new states in the South, or as a result of social transformations (e.g. revolutions) and ethnic conflicts in both old and new states. External intervention in less developed countries has also been a common cause of refugee flows, for example in the South (Zolberg et al. 1989). Also, the very formation of territorially bounded states in the South after decolonisation resulted in migration and refugee flows. Moreover, in processes of state formation and the rebuilding of states the persecution and expulsion of minority groups can achieve a high priority. (2) The social ties of the movers and stayers vary with respect to density, strength and content. These ties may go to the receiving or the sending countries or to both at the same time. They can range from a dense network of social ties to the country of origin to a total break,

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i.e. no social relations anymore and a reorientation to the country of destination in the process of settlement. Yet even in the case of permanent settlement abroad, social ties can be established or reinforced both in the country of origin and in the receiving country. Therefore, permanent settlement in the receiving country does not necessarily mean fewer social ties to the area of origin. If these social ties are systematically patterned in networks and collectives, we can link the relational to the structural level. (3) On the individual level international movements can be characterised by a continuum along the degrees of freedom for potential movers. At one end, in some instances – for example, slaves, convicts, some refugees, contract workers, sometimes children and spouses – the essential decision maker is not the migrant him- or herself. At the other end, there are individuals with a high degree of autonomy, based on resources such as money, information and connections. The degree of freedom or autonomy is circumscribed in a context in which the main sets of parties involved in migration decision making and the dynamics of migration are: (1) individuals in the place of origin; (2) collectives and social networks of potential and actual movers and stayers such as families, households, friendship and kinship circles, neighbourhoods, ethnic, religious and professional associations, but also (3) interested collective actors in the countries of origin and destination (e.g. Non-Governmental Organisations, supra-national organisations such as UNHCR, sending and receiving country governments, political parties, unions and employer organisations). Characteristics of a meso-level approach Firstly, emphasis needs to be placed on how decisions on moving and staying are made in and between groups of people (e.g. families and various forms of larger territorial and extra-territorial communities) rather than by isolated individuals or groups where economicpolitical-cultural structures only come in as external constraints and opportunities. A processual account will help us to specify the mechanisms causing changes in social relations. In this interpersonal and inter-group perspective decisions over moving and staying may be taken on different levels – for example, by individuals and differently sized groups – or imposed upon these groups by outside collective actors such as governments of nation-states. The basic assumption is that potential migrants and groups always relate to other social structures along a continuum of degrees of freedom. Particular units such as households or families therefore deserve special attention. Empirical studies muster abundant evidence that these units have

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degrees of freedom

interpersonal and inter-group decisions

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internal dynamics of migration

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figured most prominently not only in earlier transatlantic migrations from Europe to the white-settler colonies (Bodnar 1985), but also do so in contemporary movements from the South to the North, especially from rural areas in the South (Hugo 1995). It would be naive to conceptualise all social units such as households as single-interest decision-making bodies. There is too much evidence on the importance of diverging interests and of power relations within these units, for example expressed in hierarchical and patriarchal decision making. Secondly, the internal dynamics of migration can indeed be described as self-feeding processes of cumulative causation, usually in ways that reinforce existing staying/moving patterns. Historically, waves of international moving and staying usually had a clearly discernible beginning, a climax and an end – with dynamics somewhat independent even from economic and political conditions in the receiving and sending countries once migration started (Thomas 1973). A relational analysis tries to capture the dynamics of migration by a close analysis of collectives (e.g. families or households) and networks. This implies that international migration is not simply seen as a straight line, only interrupted by external factors that may or may not capture ‘mass migration’. Instead, movers and stayers take advantage of the opportunities offered by macro-level constraints such as demographic, economic and political developments. A pioneering exemplar: the polish peasant in Europe and America One exemplar that implicitly sketches theoretical considerations and empirical evidence along these lines is Thomas’s and Znaniecki’s acknowledged masterpiece on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20). It deals with transatlantic migration of peasants from Russian Congress Poland to the United States. According to Thomas and Znaniecki, the decisions of movers and stayers can be described by reference to the breakup of traditional society, and particularly of its extended-family system due to the marketisation of economic life in the areas of origin. The breakup of the peasant family was said to create new possibilities, especially through the ‘growing assertion of the personality’ (ibid. 2: 217). This evolutionary determinism may be criticised, but the shift from affectual to purposive and rational forms of action is the most relevant aspect of The Polish Peasant for the study of the causes and dynamics of migration. Importantly, Thomas and Znaniecki argued that this development of more abstract, complex and cognitive levels of social reorganisation did not entail the disappearance of primary-group attitudes and values but was largely constituted out of them. Newer research has focused on migration not as an expression

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of societal disorganisation but as an active strategy to diversify income in rural households dependent on crops, etc. Yet what may be needed most for a comprehensive interpersonal and processual account is a focus on migration that includes processes of both societal organisation and disorganisation. Clearly, the focus of these two authors on household, communal and other ties remains valuable because it helps to construct the meso-level, whether we focus on disorganisation (e.g. persecution of political refugees) or organisation (e.g. migration as a household strategy for economic survival or even advancement). Thomas and Znaniecki observed that potential migrants can reorganise both in the country of origin and in the new country of settlement. In the former country examples of co-operative collective action included education of peasants through the press and the emergence of co-operative institutions, such as co-operative shops, lean and savings banks, and agricultural improvement societies (ibid. 4: 178-304). We could add forms of political voice such as peasant protests (see Scott 1976). Indeed, there were alternatives to moving in improving the life situation in the country of origin. In the main country of destination, the United States, Polish immigrants came to be members of various forms of communal life, ranging from mutual aid societies and parishes to cultural organisations. Typically, immigrants such as Poles used their investment in family, ethnicity and religion as resources to redefine their situation, as workers, citizens, and members of household and religious groups. A parallel story could be told about political refugees. Although the root causes may differ and options to stay without endangering their lives may be minimal for refugees at the time of flight, the same principles of social analysis could be applied.

societal organisation and disorganisation

The decision-making process Social ties and social capital Social relations in collectives and social networks constitute distinct sets of intermediate structures on the meso-level. It is via these social relations that the resources of individuals are related to opportunity structures (figure 7.1). According to rational choice approaches decisions to move or to stay are inevitably made by individual or collective actors who weigh the costs and benefits involved. What migrationsystems theories emphasise is that these decisions are always made within specific economic, political and cultural contexts that are de termined by larger opportunity structures – reflected in the family, neighbourhood, workplace and community.

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Figure 7.1. Three levels of migration analysis MACRO-LEVEL: STRUCTURAL

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MICRO-LEVEL: INDIVIDUAL

opportunity structures collectives and social networks

values, expectancies and recources

(political-economiccultural structure)

(social relations)

(degrees of freedom)

social ties: – strong ties: families and households; – weak ties: networks of potential movers, brokers and stayers; – symbolic ties: ethnic and religious organisations

individual values goals, preferences and expectancies) – improving and securing survival, wealth, status, comfort, stimulation, autonomy, affiliation and morality

economics: – income and unemployment differentials; access to capital politics: – regulation of spatial mobility (nationstates and international regimes); – political repression, etnic and religious conflicts – interdependence in international system of states cultural setting: – dominant norms and discourses demography and ecology: – population growth; – availability of arable land – level of technology

social ties and social capital

MESO-LEVEL: RELATIONAL

social capital: resources available to potential movers and stayers by participation in networks and collectives through weak, strong and symbolic social ties

individual resources: – financial capital – human capital: educational credentials; professional skills – cultural capital: common worldviews, forecast, memories, symbols – political capital: voice

The macro- and micro-levels of analysis can be connected by the concepts of social ties and social capital. Movers and stayers are embedded in a social-relational context characterised by social ties, a continuing series of interpersonal transactions to which participants attach shared interests, obligations, understandings, memories and forecasts. Strong ties are characterised by direct, face-to-face trans-

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actions between the actors involved. They are durable and involve obligations and substantial emotions. They are most widespread in small, well-defined groups such as families, kinship and communal organisations. By contrast, weak ties are defined by indirect relationships. They involve no direct or only fleeting contact. Weak ties refer to a more narrow set of transactions. Transactions among ‘friends of friends’ is an apt shorthand for weak social ties. Social capital are those resources inherent in patterned social ties that allow individuals to co-operate in networks and collectives, and/or that allow individuals to pursue their goals.2 Such resources include information on jobs in a potential destination country, knowledge on means of transport, or loans to finance a journey to the country of destination. Social capital also serves to connect individuals to networks and collectives through affiliations. Social capital thus has a dual thrust: it facilitates co-operation between individual (and group) actors in creating trust and links individuals to social structures. Furthermore, social capital serves to mobilise financial, human, cultural and political capital. (For other and differing definitions of social capital, see Bourdieu 1983 and Portes 1995.) Social capital is not simply an attribute of individual actors. The amount of social capital eventually available to individuals depends on the extent of the network of social ties that can be mobilised and the amount of financial, cultural and political capital that members of collectives or network participants can muster. In short, social capital is created and accumulated in social relations, but can be used by individuals as a resource. Social capital is thus primarily a meso-level category. The primary question concerning the meso-level is how social capital is created, accumulated and mobilised by collectives and networks, given certain macro-conditions. Moreover, how is this capital made available to individuals, members and non-members of these collectives? How does it serve to mobilise other forms of capital such as financial, cultural and political capital? It certainly makes a difference whether we deal with first-time movers, return movers or non-movers. For the sake of simplicity this section deals exclusively with first-time movers while the section on the dynamics of migration takes up the issue of return movers and their influence on decision making. Analytically, we can distinguish three different macro-level dimensions for this relational analysis: functional considerations, normative expectations and collective identity (distinction based on Peters 1993; see also Habermas 1981). On the level of potential movers and stayers we can then make an ideal-typical distinction between

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three macro-level dimensions

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interest-related, norm-oriented, and expressive behaviour and action. Along this typology we are then able to chart various forms of social capital that facilitate decision making in collectives and networks – exchange, reciprocity and solidarity (figure 7.2). Figure 7.2. The meso-level: three forms of social capital in interpersonal relations

exchange, reciprocity and solidarity

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macro-level dimensions

functional considerations

normative expectations

collective identity

orientation of movers and stayers

interest-related

norm-oriented

expressive

forms of social capital

exchange

reciprocity

solidarity

The first context in which social capital figures prominently is exchange relationships. This is the classical case analysed by rationalchoice approaches. Accordingly, migrants move when they expect that they can reap higher benefits in another location. Persons who are involved in aiding these movers (facilitators) can also expect to benefit through material (e.g. money) and immaterial (e.g. social status) gains. Favours, information, approval and other valued items are given and received in transactions between movers and facilitators (e.g. pioneer movers who return to the place of origin). In the course of social interaction the movers, stayers and facilitators involved accumulate deposits based on previous favours by others, backed by the norm of reciprocity. Reciprocity does not imply that favours given and received must be of the same value or identical. For example, in many cases the head of the family is responsible for the flow of the household income. Yet this does not mean that the head moves himself or herself in order to supply cash. Reciprocity is a form of social capital when at least two norms are adhered to: Firstly, persons help those who have helped them, and secondly, persons should not harm those who helped them before (Gouldner 1960). Reciprocity may serve to increase the financial capital available in collectives such as families or households. Migrant labour is a means to get much-needed cash to supplement income earned through crops. In case of crop failure income through labour migration can even act as a temporary substitute. In this case reciprocity would mean that, on the one hand, the moving family members remain loyal and actually send money back home and, on the other hand, the remaining family members work in the

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fields. Trust between members of relevant collectives such as families or households is a very valuable resource upholding reciprocity. This norm-related aspect of reciprocal transactions also refers to the third type of social capital, solidarity. Solidarity is based on a group identity (‘we’) that refers to a unity of wanting and action. It is an expressive dimension to be distinguished from interest-based and norm-oriented behaviour. The group’s self- and other-definition makes it meaningful to talk about the importance for potential movers that membership of a collective and participation in a network have. Usually, transactions of the exchange type are characterised by weak social ties, while reciprocity and solidarity require strong social ties (Sahlins 1965). Yet norms of solidarity go with weak social ties, when individual or collective actors feel closely bound to ethnic, religious and national identities. Movers and recipients may be connected through symbolic ties, characterised by transactions based on shared worldviews, understandings, forecasts and memories. For example, in many African countries borders of nation-states are the result of drawing-board exercises by the former colonial powers, and arbitrarily cut across ethnic and linguistic groups. Refugees who cross international borders are often more generously received by groups with whom they share strong ethnic and linguistic affinities. The existence of symbolic ties across nation-states and the fact that most refugees in the South are movers with few resources explain why many refugees, especially in Africa, end up in countries adjoining the state of origin, and why only a minority ever moves on to countries in the North. Taking Talcott Parson’s distinction between self-orientation and collectivity-orientation as a point of departure (Parsons 1951: 60), we can further distinguish between migration decision making that is oriented towards the self and towards relevant collectives. Tensions can arise between, for example, occupational self-fulfilment and the expectation to contribute to the sustenance of the family in the country of origin, as Thomas and Znaniecki have amply demonstrated. For example, movers at the onset of political persecution could decide further to support their family (collectivity orientation) although imminent danger of being singled out as a target of violence strongly suggests that they move immediately, albeit individually. To complicate matters even further, potential movers are not only members of families but also citizens of a nation-state, members of religious or ethnic groups, etc. In short, they occupy several roles, i.e. there are cross-cutting ties.

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social ties and symbolic ties

self-oriented and collectivity-oriented decisions

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high transferral costs

social capital

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The difficult transfer of social capital In order to say what contributes to migration or enhances immobility, we have to start from the fundamental insight that many resources are local assets and transferring them to foreign countries would involve high transferral costs. This does not apply only to the transfer of human capital discussed earlier. Networks of social ties connect migrants to other migrants and natives in the receiving country (who hold various amounts of human, financial and political capital). It takes social capital to build such networks and substantial resources are required. It is quite time- and energy-consuming to construct or join new networks in the receiving country, especially in those cases where it is not the whole family that is moving. It is even more difficult to establish and join new collectives. Also, if a mover leaves behind family, friends and other important persons – relationships that are characterised by strong and affective social ties – it involves high costs to maintain these ties while abroad, for example economic costs (return trips) and psychological costs of adjustment to a new environment. Costs are especially high for pioneer migrants who cannot rely on established networks of movers to guide and facilitate their migration. Only if expected gains in transferring various forms of capital exceed perceived costs are potential migrants seriously encouraged to move. In sum, local assets that are undergirded by financial, human, political and social capital can lead a potential mover to prefer in situ adjustment in the sending country to adjustment abroad because transferral costs are high. Secondly, social capital is often a prerequisite for the accumulation and mobilisation of human, financial, cultural and political capital. New social ties in the receiving countries have to be well established, before migrants can make use of their financial and human capital or that available to other migrants who may help them in finding work and housing. If there is no access to social capital, it is extremely difficult to invest resources such as money and skills in a beneficial way. This is especially true when there are no pioneer migrants and brokers who act as intermediaries for scarce resources. Moreover, without social capital there is no basis for a rich cultural life in migrant communities; for example, no religious institutions will be established. Similar things can be said about political participation. If migrants do not engage in collective action to voice their interests, they will probably face more discrimination in the receiving countries. For a political voice, they need to form associations. Therefore, we would expect that potential migrants prefer those forms of movement that allow them to keep their social ties intact (circular migration), to interrupt them only briefly (seasonal migra-

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tion) or to transfer the whole set of important social ties abroad (e.g. family migration in the context of chain migration). The first-time decision-making process We may now conceptualise decision making and dynamics of movement in various networks and collectives. The most relevant units constituting meso-levels are households and families, groups of kinship, the reference community, but also friends and acquaintances in the workplace, and groupings such as ethnic, religious and political associations. Interest-guided survival strategies, normative obligations of family members to each other and expressions of collective identity are not mutually exclusive realms, the first relating to hard-core purposive (economic) action, the second to the soft fringe of social and the third to the even softer fringe of cultural action. We must analyse the set of social relations that structures decision making and the dynamics of migration, the social connectivity itself, the direct and indirect connections between actors. Here, we have to measure the density, strength, symmetry, range, and so on, of the ties that bind and the transaction and conversion costs and gains of various forms of capital. Furthermore, we must study the cultural content of functional imperatives and normative expectations. Using the threefold typology developed earlier, we can hypothesise that exchange relationships, albeit asymmetrical regarding power and authority, may explain why family or household members engage in a division of labour and migration. Thanks to reciprocity as a form of social capital, household members can count on a fair division of burdens and benefits. As a subsistence and socialising unit, the household allocates economic roles and assigns tasks according to age, sex and kinship ties. It may give incentives to household members – both at home and abroad – to forgo more immediate satisfactions and carry burdens in the expectation that migratory arrangements serve the household and its members in the long run through factors such as acquisition of land, durable consumer goods and improved human capital. Also, reciprocity could lead movers to continue sending remittances home although they do not intend to return. In cases of refugee flows social ties with actors in the country of origin are likely to be severed quite abruptly. Family members are often separated for long time periods. In these situations solidarity between family members really needs a basis in past practices and family bonds, including both reciprocity and solidarity as forms of social capital. On a cautionary note it should always be remembered that families or households are defined by different economic, political, cul-

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tural, demographic and ecological settings and are not social units with universal behaviour (see chapter 8). For example, it certainly makes a difference whether we analyse movement from Africa to Europe or from Latin America to the United States as well as from various communities, regions or countries within these continents. Factors such as household size and expectations directed towards family members are likely to differ, not to speak of the variations pertaining to historical links between sending and receiving regions, current exit and admission policies, income, wage and unemployment differentials between sending and receiving countries.

The dynamics of international migration

subsequent developments of choice processes

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So far, the main question has been why potential migrants decide either to stay or to go. If we consider the dynamics of moving, questions then arise as to what happens after the migrants have moved and why they return to the country of origin or stay in the receiving country. After an analysis of first-time decisions on moving or staying we shall now specify the causal mechanisms that allow us to follow subsequent developments in the flow of choice processes over time. All the previous conceptual considerations on migration decision making at the different levels of households, kinship relations (e.g. families), friends and even larger groups suggest that there is a continuum along the definiteness of the break of social ties with the origin. Return migration is one case in which strong social ties between sending and receiving regions matter. Historical evidence of earlier transatlantic migrations also attests to this thesis: While estimates vary and although most records of immigration are imprecise, return rates probably ranged from 25 to 60 per cent for European immigrants in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Piore 1979: 110). Sometimes, even permanent migrants retained strong ties with their rural regions of origin; they maintained their location-specific human and social capital, e.g. bought land, built houses, and contributed to village and city projects. Furthermore, leaving and returning may not be decisions taken only once. Empirical research suggests that they occur repeatedly over the life course of a mover. This suggests that space in international migration is inadequately described by focusing solely on countries of origin and destination (see chapter 2). Rather, as international migration proceeds, transnational spaces unfold that cross-cut na-

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tion-states. A flow of people, goods, capital and services emerges. In sum, in addition to the interpersonal and inter-group dimension, all these aspects concern the intertemporal dimension of international migration. Three questions have to be addressed: Firstly, how do networks of movers and stayers come into existence? Secondly, how do migration flows turn into ‘chain migration’ – migration as an established pattern that may depart from its original incentive? Thirdly, are there discernible patterns concerning the feedback effects on the sending side? How transnational networks are formed and function Exchange relationships partly account for network formation. Clearly, cost-benefit calculations could lead the actors involved to intensify social contacts. Migrant and refugee networks and organisations facilitate social and individual action in reducing information and transport costs as well as costs of integration in the country of destination. For example, migrants may get information about prospective employment by mail or telephone, and for refugees information about reception centres in potential destination countries may be a valuable resource. Also, exchange relations decrease the risk of not finding a job and income in the country of destination. Very often, movers know who awaits them and many probably already know their prospective employer. For the brokers facilitating international migration, migrant networks can provide a lucrative business. Brokers can be pioneer migrants or refugees who capitalise on their experience, professionals in organisations concerned with labour recruitment, or respected individuals in the sending or receiving communities who facilitate or enable contacts of potential and actual migrants to employers and legal authorities. These brokers or gatekeepers thus turn into transnational entrepreneurs. They benefit through money or social debts incurred to them in the process of migration (exchange). Yet they are themselves constrained by social norms to respond to legitimate claims for assistance (reciprocity transactions). Exchange relationships can also be applied for sending-community strategies chosen. For example, inhabitants in some Mexican villages can best expect to reap results from international migration if they all agree to sponsor selected individuals for graduate studies in the United States (Pries 1996). The individualised strategy would be illegal entry in the country of destination. Reciprocity is another source of network formation. For example, when migrants arrive in the country of destination on prepaid tick-

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selective access

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ets, they are expected to pay back the expenses defrayed beforehand. Often only formal agreements and not legal contracts undergird these kinds of transactions between movers and intermediaries. Solidarity may be a prime resource when the actors living and working abroad send back remittances or arrange for their family members to join them in the country of destination. Access to migrant networks tends to be selective. Usually, it is not open for all members of a sending. Access is governed by available information and financial resources, but also by (in)formal norms of reciprocity and solidarity. For potential movers to get access to migrant networks does not necessarily require everyday social interaction and direct acquaintance within a community. Indirect social contacts maintained over large geographical distances may also work. Although there is no empirical evidence yet, we can draw on the ‘strength of weak ties’ (Granovetter 1973). The argument here is that weak ties may break more easily, but also transmit distant information on migration opportunities more efficiently under certain circumstances, for example, potential movers may remember persons in destination and sending countries with whom some kind of contact existed in the past, or who know friends who know migrants. These persons then serve as brokers of information or even gatekeepers for entry into the receiving countries, and access to jobs and housing. Those to whom potential movers are weakly tied are more likely to move in circles different from theirs and will thus have access to resources such as information different from that of the community of origin. The value of networks for international movers and stayers differs, among other things, by the amount of human, financial, cultural and political capital available to the participants. We may hypothesise that if the amount of financial, human and cultural capital held by individuals or collectives forming a network is very low, networks may act to retard the adjustment of movers into the receiving nation-state (see also Pohjola 1991). The reason is that the capacity to employ social capital crucially depends on the amount of other forms of capital the respective network participants can muster. For example, a comparative study on Colombian and Dominican immigrants in New York City during the 1980s found that movers with higher amounts of human and financial capital were found to be less likely to rely on kin at the place of destination, while movers who had lower amounts of capital depended more on kinship networks to get established (Gilbertson and Gurak 1992). Among others, the latter group relied more heavily on relatives to assist them with housing upon arrival. They received assistance in seeking employment. The

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immigrants who reported heavy assistance from family networks when they arrived were also found to be culturally and socially much less integrated in New York. They had less language ability and held lower-status jobs. Not only individuals can participate in networks but also collectives such as households, kinship groups or organisations (figure 7.3).

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participation of collectives in networks

Figure 7.3. Networks of movers and stayers and organisations in international migration Networks of Movers and Stayers

Organisations

– sending networks: aid with travel arrangements, financial support, etc. – illegal intermediaries (e.g. smugglers)

– elite institutional networks (e.g. transnational corporations) – legal/extra-legal agencies (e.g. recruitment bureaus) – state labour recruitment (e.g. national labour offices) – refugee-aid organisations (e.g. UNHCR and privately sponsored associations)

– receiving networks: aid with legal systems, housing, jobs, schooling, capital for enterprices, language training

– support associations in the receiving country (e.g. human -rights organisations)

Networks with strong ties may constitute secure environments that not only supply valuable information and provide emotional encouragement (or the opposite!) but often arrange for the subsequent move of members from various collectives. Once migrants have arrived at their destination, these collectives lend valuable assistance in adjusting to the new environment, especially in finding housing and employment. Also, the migrant networks in which collectives participate need not only consist of migrants themselves. Often, patronclient relationships emerge in the employment field between natives and newcomers. Finally, the strongest form of regularization of social interaction is found in various organisations in the field of international migration, which for their purposes apply institutional rules and resources. These may be transnational companies sending personnel abroad (e.g. management and/or construction workers), labour-recruitment agencies (often supervised or even run by state institutions in Asian

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sending countries), or human-rights organisations in the countries of origin and destination which extend shelter. The most regularised forms of migrant selection are labour recruitment directly performed by the receiving country in the sending countries (e.g. German labour-office authorities in Turkey during the 1960s), or the selection of refugees in camps near the region of origin (e.g. Canadian government in Africa since the 1980s).

a ‘snowball’ effect

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Chain migration and relative deprivation At some point in migration processes, networks sustain population flows in ways that are less dependent on objective economic-political conditions in the areas of origin and destination (for example, see Shah 1994a: 34). The hypothesis would be that, once the number of network connections reaches a certain level, international movements become self-perpetuating because they create the social structure necessary to sustain them. In other words, it is likely that networks of circular migration – a regular circuit in which migrants retain claims and contacts and routinely return home – transform themselves into chain migration – the following of related individuals or households (‘friends and relatives effect’). The processes can be described as a ‘snowball’ effect: The more immigrants of a given place and state in the destination region, the more want to come. It takes time to develop the chain and this is the reason why we see it fully-fledged only in later phases of international migration. When the accumulated capital finds better opportunities for investment and exchange in the countries of destination, and brokers and gatekeepers find worthwhile benefits in advising and channelling movers (exchange relationships), when norms of reciprocity can be enforced (e.g. money remitted to family) and when forms of mutual aid among migrants create broad commitments to other migrants (solidarity), networks of movers and stayers begin to flourish. For this to occur, those not yet migrating need to receive information from earlier migrants, or even to see the concrete results of the ventures of those who migrated before. Therefore, (pioneer) return migrants play an important role in spreading information on opportunities regarding where to go, work and live. However, this does not answer the question of how the process of chain migration starts, given favourable macro-conditions. To name norms, motives, preferences and various forms of capital that guide the behaviour of potential movers does not suffice to account for a phenomenon such as chain migration. We might compare places of origin that are very similar regarding both people’s preferences to move or stay and the opportunity structures they are faced with. Yet

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it has been repeatedly observed that the number of people moving abroad from two most similar villages in this regard is not seldom vastly different. In this virtually unexplored area, threshold models of collective behaviour could be used to give situation-specific explanations of moving and staying that do not explain outcomes solely in terms of structures, goals and expectancies of actors before the movement begins (Granovetter 1978). Only when we view decisions on moving and staying as being also dependent upon the number or proportion of other potential movers, who must make the decision before another stayer does so, can we start to understand the process of chain migration. The cost-benefit calculations involved in threshold behaviour are easiest to follow in the case of strong, symbolic and affective social ties, for example when all family members move to live together abroad. Migration may bring about more migration by changes in social status and income distribution. Relative deprivation theory posits that individual and household satisfaction arise not only from improvements in absolute economic status but also through comparison with other actors in the reference community. If a potential migrant’s level of income is low, the level of motivation to exit will also be low as long as incomes are low across the board. However, if some actors in the reference community experience an increase, then a poor actor will feel relatively deprived. This can be a direct effect of migration. When household members migrate abroad for work, they earn higher incomes than those available locally, and when they send money home, they increase the amount of income available at the top of the income distribution in the country of origin. This may lead to more international migration. Relative deprivation need not necessarily relate only to income but also to ways of life. For example, in a way that is poorly understood, cultural norms of potential migrants have evolved in the Caribbean to form a veritable ‘culture-of-migration’ (Marshall 1982). One of the key elements introduced by economists into the analysis has been the so-called ‘inverted U-curve’ thesis: development often first enhances and thereafter reduces the scope and incentives for migration (see chapter 4). This inverted U-curve depends upon external factors such as the level of income (economic development). In addition, we could also speculate about an ‘s-shaped curve’ concerning the social diversity of migration (figure 7.4). An s-shaped curve would depend upon factors that arise from the very process of migration itself, i.e. that are internal to migration processes.

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relative deprivation theory

inverted U-curve thesis and S-shaped curve

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The Crucial Meso-Level

Number or Percentage of Migrants (Cumulative)

Time



Figure 7.4. A stylised S-shaped migration curve Massey et al. (1994) found in research on Mexico-US migration that social diversity was low in the initial stages of migration, increased dramatically during the intermediate stages, and then stayed constant or fell slightly as a level of mass migration was reached. In this view migration begins with a narrow range of each community’s socioeconomic structure, but over time broadens to incorporate other social groups. How could we explain this s-shaped pattern? In an initial period, migration turns into a self-feeding process that gradually encompasses more and more groups and social classes from a local community because of declining costs. In a second period, the movement becomes somewhat independent of economic conditions in the host country as immigrants acquire social benefits in the receiving country and as family reunification and marriage migration quicken due to guaranteed civil rights and the establishment of immigrant communities. This contributes both to rising numbers of migrants and to less selectivity as to social class. At this stage even children and older kin migrate in growing numbers. There could be spill-over effects even to relatives and friends in other communities in the same country of origin. In a third phase, migration may become more selective again; this time in favour of groups that have been underrepresented in the beginning (e.g. members of lowerclass or lower-status groups from remote parts of the sending regions). Finally, in a fourth period, as migration has captured virtually all groups and classes, the value of migration declines for potential migrants. Those who could not migrate are not only relatively but also absolutely deprived and even socially and economically margin-

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alised in the community. Yet all those who could participate in migration had a chance trying to overcome their sense of relative deprivation vis-à-vis the early movers. As the migrant potential is gradually exhausted in the sending communities, some migrants settle in the country of destination, some return to the country of origin for good – and others, probably a minority, may continue to move back and forth for extended periods of time. Eventually, the volume declines again. Cumulative causation: feedback effects in the sending regions Some of the feedback effects of migration that lead to further migration are part of a process called cumulative causation, dating back to Gunnar Myrdal’s use of the term. As is clearly seen by the ‘new economics of migration’, temporary migration may be a strategy of risk diversification in rural households. Foreign wages sometimes lead farmers to farm their land less intensively than before or even let it lie fallow. If these migrants buy land, the outcome might be that there is less land under intensive cultivation in the community, that local food production is reduced, the price of staple crops raised and the demand for labour decreased. These consequences may give incentives to the remaining members of the community to move, too. Also, if land is more intensively cultivated, as farmer migrants can now afford more capital, this could lead to more out-movement because less manual labour is needed (Massey (1990). However, remittances spent on agriculture could actually increase agricultural profits. In some Mexican villages, for example, the money from ‘El Norte’ has helped to develop productivity and output, and migrant farmers have even been able to keep marginal land under production (Cornelius 1991: 108). In this latter case we could not expect economic feedback effects to encourage further migration. Even very high and increasing levels of migration do not necessarily imply the exodus of virtually all potential movers or the settlement of all movers in the receiving country. Assets and capital may be location-specific and the transferral costs of social and other capitals may keep the volume lower than expected. As to return rates, movers may maintain social ties with the sending region and build new ones in the receiving country. Caces and others have tried to capture the first phenomenon on the household or family level by using the concept of the shadow household. It includes ‘all individuals whose principal commitments and obligations are to a particular household but who are not presently residing in that household’ (Caces et al. 1985: 8). The intensity of their commitments or obligations can be operationalised as indicators of house-

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virtuous and vicious cycles

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hold affiliation. Of course, they may differ from one culture to another, and depend on the closeness of kinship and other social or symbolic ties that keep the family or household together. Therefore, decisions over moving or staying made by families and individuals not only influence later decisions made by other individuals and households but also the long-term social and economic arrangements within the families, households and the sending communities. Furthermore, changes in the networks and collectives in the country of origin could be expected during the absence of movers and upon their return. For example, migration may entail the reallocation of responsibilities which ultimately impact on the roles and status of household members. In the absence of male adult members of the household, the gendered division of labour may change, as women may take over additional roles, or vice versa. Female contract workers from Indonesia in the oil-exporting countries of the Gulf have often spent months away from their families, and special arrangements have been made for the care of their children. In addition, there is empirical evidence that the traditional division of labour along gender lines has broken down as women have taken pride in autonomy and competence in handling family affairs in the absence of their husbands, or as men have taken more responsibility in childrearing during the overseas employment of their wives or as women have increased their involvement in financial affairs upon returning home (Hugo 1995). Women more than men may be willing to settle in the receiving countries. For example, male and female migrants from a Mexican village in the United States in the late 1980s differed strongly in their responses to whether they planned to return to Mexico on a relatively permanent basis. In general, women looked much less favourably than men on the idea of returning to live in Mexico. It could be that women may not get a job on the formal labour market there, and that women’s housework in the Mexican countryside generally involves more drudgery than it does in US cities. For men, however, rural Mexico represents a place where tradition is adhered to and men can be men through either work or leisure activities, while the United States remains the place of work, proletarian and spatial discipline, and diminished male authority (Goldring 1995). On the community level in the country of origin the feedback effects can be conceptualised as virtuous and vicious cycles: In some cases a virtuous cycle evolves because migration eases the pressure on land and labour. Remittances enable subsistence. However, one also has to consider that the dependence on harvests or crop price is replaced by one on urban wages. Moreover, not only economically,

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but also politically, this may strengthen the voice option. This is especially the case when members of groups opposing the political regime in the country of origin move back and forth between the two regions. Even political campaigning may take place in the country of destination, e.g. Dominicans in New York City and Algerians in France. Refugees in the country of destination may stay in contact with political activists in the sending country. Sikh secessionists in the United Kingdom and Kurdish activists in Germany constitute clear-cut examples of this. It is equally plausible that a vicious cycle evolves. When labour migration grows in importance, this works against economic and political co-operation at the village level. Financially, external links might become the most significant and the nexus of social pressures and economic imperatives that held a subsistence-oriented village together could weaken. Here, new forms of solidarity and reciprocity may arise – as described by Thomas and Znaniecki (1918-20). If efforts to build mutually beneficial arrangements of exchange, reciprocity and solidarity fail, however, social disorganisation may ensue that rules out the mutuality and the shared poverty, replacing it with involution and mutual hostility. What Edward Banfield has termed ‘amoral familism’ in Southern Italy is perhaps the accumulation of migration feedback effects in a village that became economically marginal. According to Banfield this effect has been produced by three factors acting in unison: a high death rate – and important for our context – certain land tenure conditions and the absence of the institution of the extended family (Banfield 1958: 10). The importance of change and stability One hypothesis is: the stronger the commitment of migrants to social units in the country of origin (not only in terms of strength of social ties – weak and strong – but also regarding the content – reciprocity and solidarity), the more likely it is that return migration of successful migrants takes place. In turn, the higher the rate of this kind of return migration, the greater the likelihood that positive economic feedback effects occur. To determine the rates of return, we have to ask to what degree the goals of the actual movers could be fulfilled while living abroad and whether a change in their preferences has taken place in the course of their absence from the sending place. Firstly, high rates of return migration may attest to the fact of the successful achievement of some goals involved (e.g. transfer of remittances and skills). Or, alternatively, it could be an indicator that the goals aspired to could not be achieved, a sign of failure. Secondly, return may also indicate

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goal attainment and social ties

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the existence, maintenance and further development of social ties that bind movers to those left behind, sometimes despite the strains and changes created by international mobility. It would indeed be unwarranted to assume that potential and actual movers can only maintain social ties to either side, the sending or the receiving country. Therefore, it is feasible to assume that migrants use social capital to retransfer various other forms of capital. In an age of increasing international migration we can also observe that migrants not only cultivate social ties to the area of origin but, simultaneously, also in the country of destination. At first sight, this is somewhat counterintuitive. There is a continuum regarding social ties between temporary commuting and circulation, on the one hand, and permanent emigration and immigration, on the other hand. Commuting and circulation are terms that denote a great variety of movement, usually short-term, repetitive or cyclical in nature, but all having in common the lack of any declared intention of a permanent or long-lasting change in residence. They imply few breaks of links with the place of origin and little distance regarding the political, economic and cultural sphere. At the other end of the continuum, permanent emigration and thus immigration are more likely to change significantly the character of social ties and involve greater economic, political and cultural distances. Regarding shortterm movements we would expect a higher degree of a sojourning orientation (e.g. towards seasonal and cyclical movement) than in the case of permanent settlement in the country of destination (Tilly 1978). The intentions of migrants to stay are relatively clear-cut, if we differentiate between those who intend to stay permanently and those who come temporarily. However, there are labour migrants or refugees who did not come to stay permanently, but eventually settle and still indicate that they wish to return to their homeland. This phenomenon has often been referred to as the ‘illusion’ of return. In these cases we must look not only at the social ties of migrants to persons in the sending countries, but also at the symbolic ties, namely the set of collective representations (e.g. religious symbols), memories, forecasts and worldviews that migrants perceive to have in common with those in the sending countries. The prevalence of symbolic ties, a basis for cultural capital, is one important element in the explanation of actual settlement and declared return. In short, it is the differential strength and the content of social and symbolic ties of movers to the place of origin as well as destination that can be used to classify different types of spatial mobility on the domestic and international level across different administrative

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units such as nation-states. However, trans-national social spaces suggest that even more permanent settlement in the receiving country does not necessarily imply a complete rupture of social ties and other forms of linkages. The existence of transnational social spaces attests to the ability of movers creatively to pattern their occupational and personal experience. In this perspective it would often seem appropriate to talk of transnational migrants instead of emigrants and immigrants. We need to develop concepts that can not only be applied in either the sending or the receiving regions but can also refer to emerging transnational social linkages, such as those between Algeria and France, India and the United Kingdom, Turkey and Germany, and Mexico and the Caribbean and the United States. Glick-Schiller and her associates give a vivid picture of social ties in transnational spaces:

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transnational social spaces

Whether the transnational activity is sending the barbecue to Haiti, dried fruits and fabric back home to Trinidad so these goods can be prepared for a wedding in New York, or using the special tax status of Balikbayan boxes to send expensive goods from the United States to families back home in the Philippines, the constant and various flows of such goods and activities have embedded within them relationships between people. These social relations take on meaning within the flow and fabric of daily life, as linkages between different societies are maintained, renewed, and reconstituted in the context of families, of institutions, of economic investments, business, and finance and of political organizations and structures including nation-states. (Glick-Schiller et al. 1992: 11)

Towards a meso-level in international migration This analysis suggests that answers to pressing issues of international migration can be found in supplementing the dominant micro- and macro-sociological theories and including an explicit social relational perspective. Conceptual meso-levels introduce a distinct layer of analysis to the already rich empirical literature working on this level. Ironically, the study that comes closest to the social relational concepts advanced in this appraisal is the one that stood at the beginning of the sociology of international movement, namely William I. Thomas’s and Florian Znaniecki’s theoretical-empirical study on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. These authors have posed the core questions of staying or moving and the feedback effects in a way that also deserves much more attention than it has received

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lately. Looking at moving and staying as both an interpersonal and an intertemporal process, we can analyse first-time moves, repeated migration and return migration with the same conceptual tools. Using these tools we come to realise not only that territorial exit is one of several possible strategies to respond to declining or increasing opportunities. In situ adjustment and change have to be considered as well. We also pay more attention to the importance of local assets, high transaction costs for social capital and the difficulties involved in converting various forms of social capital because they do not seem to be traded in a common ‘currency’. Also, the analysis of transnational social spaces developing within migration systems offers a way to study the transfer and retransfer of various forms of capital. Moreover, various forms of migration and economic mobility always have to be complemented by the possibility for voice. Sometimes voice is directly or indirectly one of the immediate causes for moving, as in the case of persecution. And even in the case of labour migrants the feedback effects of migration on opportunities to express voice can be important. For example, political activists move between and within both the sending and receiving countries. The current conflicts surrounding the political role of Islam in West European and North American countries is a vivid case in point. One of the questions to be addressed is to what degree these conflicts are transferred from the sending to the receiving country, and to what extent these politicisation processes are outcomes of migrant adjustment to new centres of work and life.

Notes 1 The author would like to thank his collaborators in the ‘Migration and Development’ project for fruitful comments. Thanks also go to the author’s colleagues at the centre for Social Policy Research and at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies at the University of Bremen. Moreover, various individuals contributed stimulating criticism that sometimes differs vigorously from the positions taken by the author: Hartmut Esser, Jutta Gatter, Jürgen Gerdes, Hans-Joachim Hoffmann-Nowotny, Stefan Leibfried, Bernhard Peters, Stefan Sandbrink, Charles Tilly, Madeleine Tress and Carsten G. Ullrich. 2 ‘Social capital… is created when the relations between persons change in ways that facilitate action’ (Coleman 1990: 304).

For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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Conceiving and researching transnationalism Steven Vertovec

Anthropologist Steven Vertovec played a crucial pioneering role in the development of transnationalism studies in Europe. In this article published in 1999 in a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies on transnational communities, Vertovec reviews the literature on transnationalism and suggests several themes to disentangle the term. He presents transnationalism successively: as a social morphology, as a type of consciousness, as a mode of cultural reproduction, as an avenue of capital, as a site of political action and as a reconstruction of locality. This categorisation helped to renew the field of transnationalism studies, which was at the time slowly running out of breath and imagination. Furthermore, Vertovec presents a very clear research agenda for his programme on transnational communities, sponsored by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. Today, this programme remains intact as one of the major attempts to systematise research on transnationalism in Europe. It is also one of the more innovative initiatives in the area of marge tekst migration studies. To the extent that any single ‘-ism’ might arguably exist, most social scientists working in the field may agree that ‘transnationalism’ broadly refers to multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states. Of course, there are many historical precedents and parallels to such patterns (see, for instance, Bamyeh 1993 as well as the introduction to this special issue). Transnationalism (as long-distance networks) certainly preceded ‘the nation’. Yet today these systems of ties, interactions, exchange and mobility function intensively and in real time while being spread throughout the world. New technologies, especially involving telecommunications, serve to connect such networks with increasing speed and efficiency. Transnationalism describes a condition in which, despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national nar-

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ratives they represent), certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common – however virtual – arena of activity (see among others, Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton-Blanc 1992; Castells 1996; Hannerz 1996). Transnationalism represents a topic of rapidly growing interest witnessed in the proliferation of academic articles, university seminars and conferences devoted to exploring its nature and contours. While broadly remaining relevant to the description of ‘transnationalism’ offered above, however, most of this burgeoning work refers to quite variegated phenomena. We have seen increasing numbers of studies on ‘transnational...’ communities, capital flows, trade, citizenship, corporations, inter-governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, politics, services, social movements, social networks, families, migration circuits, identities, public spaces, public cultures. These are obviously phenomena of very different natures, requiring research and theorization on different scales and levels of abstraction. In the excited rush to address an interesting area of global activity and theoretical development, there is not surprisingly much conceptual muddling. It is a useful exercise therefore to step back at this point in order to review and sort out the expanding repertoire of ideas and approaches so as perhaps to gain a better view of what we are talking about as transnationalism is variously discussed.

Transnationalism as... In the Introduction to this special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Alejandro Portes, Luis E. Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt (1999) rigorously describe the meaning of transnationalism as it pertains to a significant, and arguably new, category of contemporary migrants. While others have approached migration by way of addressing transnationalism, Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt emphasize that it is the scale of intensity and simultaneity of current long-distance, crossborder activities – especially economic transactions – which provide the recently emergent, distinctive and, in some contexts, now normative social structures and activities which should merit the term ‘transnationalism’. This is a compelling contribution to theory. In a number of recent works on transnationalism (many of which do not focus on migration) the characteristics of intensity and simultaneity are also, in different ways, offered as the term’s hallmarks. However, such works offer an often confusing array of perspec-

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tives. Nevertheless, theory and research on transnationalism has been grounded upon rather distinct conceptual premises, of which six merit closer scrutiny. The different ‘takes’ on the subject are, of course, not exclusive; indeed, some rely on others. Nevertheless, the meaning of transnationalism has been variously grounded upon arguably distinct conceptual premises, of which six merit closer scrutiny. 1. Social morphology The meaning of transnationalism which has perhaps been gaining most attention among sociologists and anthropologists has to do with a kind of social formation spanning borders. Ethnic diasporas – what Kachig Tölölyan (1991, p. 5) has called ‘the exemplary communities of the transnational moment’ – have become the paradigm in this understanding of transnationalism. To be sure, diasporas embody a variety of historical and contemporary conditions, characteristics, trajectories and experiences (see Tölölyan 1996, Cohen 1997, van Hear 1998), and the meaning of the term ‘diaspora’ itself has been interpreted widely by contemporary observers (Vertovec 1999). One of the hallmarks of diaspora as a social form is the ‘triadic relationship’ (Sheffer 1986; Safran 1991) between (a) globally dispersed yet collectively self-identified ethnic groups, (b) the territorial states and contexts where such groups reside, and (c) the homeland states and contexts whence they or their forebears came. Another feature central to the analysis of transnational social formations are structures or systems of relationships best described as networks. This is a handle on the phenomena in line with Manuel Castells’ (1996) analysis of the current Information Age. The network’s component parts – connected by nodes and hubs – are both autonomous from, and dependent upon, its complex system of relationships. New technologies are at the heart of today’s transnational networks, according to Castells. The technologies do not altogether create new social patterns but they certainly reinforce pre-existing ones. Dense and highly active networks spanning vast spaces are transforming many kinds of social, cultural, economic and political relationships. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1992, p. 9) contend that

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ethnic diasporas

Something like a transnational public sphere has certainly rendered any strictly bounded sense of community or locality obsolete. At the same time, it has enabled the creation of forms of solidarity and identity that do not rest on an appropriation of space where contiguity and face-to-face contact are paramount.

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Furthermore, Frederic E. Wakeman (1988, p. 86) suggests that the ‘loosening of the bonds between people, wealth, and territories’ which is concomitant with the rise of complex networks ‘has altered the basis of many significant global interactions, while simultaneously calling into question the traditional definition of the state’. In these ways the dispersed diasporas of old have become today’s ‘transnational communities’ sustained by a range of modes of social organization, mobility and communication (see especially Guarnizo and Smith 1998). The examples and discussions concerning transnationalism and migration offered in the Introduction to this special issue (Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt 1999) clearly contribute to this perspective. In addition to the longstanding ethnic diasporas and newer migrant populations which now function as transnational communities, many illegal and violent social networks also operate transnationally as well. For the United States Department of Defense, transnationalism means terrorists, insurgents, opposing factions in civil wars conducting operations outside their country of origin, and members of criminal groups (Secretary of Defense 1996). These kinds of cross-border activities involving such things as trafficking in drugs, pornography, people, weapons, and nuclear material, as well as in the laundering of the proceeds, themselves require transnational measures and structures to combat them (see, for instance, Stares 1996; Williams and Savona 1996; Castells 1998).

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2. Type of consciousness Particularly in works concerning global diasporas (especially within Cultural Studies) there is considerable discussion surrounding a kind of ‘diaspora consciousness’ marked by dual or multiple identifications. Hence there are depictions of individuals’ awareness of decentred attachments, of being simultaneously ‘home away from home,’ ‘here and there’ or, for instance, British and something else. ‘While some migrants identify more with one society than the other,’ write Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Szanton-Blanc (1992, p. 11), ‘the majority seem to maintain several identities that link them simultaneously to more than one nation.’ Indeed, James Clifford (1994, p. 322) finds, ‘The empowering paradox of diaspora is that dwelling here assumes a solidarity and connection there. But there is not necessarily a single place or an exclusivist nation... [It is] the connection (elsewhere) that makes a difference (here).’ Of course, it is a common consciousness or bundle of experiences which bind many people into the social forms or networks noted in the section above. The awareness of multi-locality stimulates the desire to connect oneself with others, both ‘here’ and ‘there’ who share

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the same ‘routes’ and ‘roots’ (see Gilroy 1987, 1993). For Stuart Hall (1990), the condition of diaspora or transnationalism is comprised of ever-changing representations that provide an ‘imaginary coherence’ for a set of malleable identities. Robin Cohen (1996, p. 516) develops Hall’s point with the observation that

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transnational bonds no longer have to be cemented by migration or by exclusive territorial claims. In the age of cyberspace, a diaspora can, to some degree, be held together or re-created through the mind, through cultural artefacts and through a shared imagination.

A wealth of personal and collective meanings and perspectives may subsequently be transformed, such that, as Donald M. Nonini and Aihwa Ong (1997) describe, transnationalism presents us with ‘new subjectivities in the global arena’. Further aspects of diasporic consciousness are explored by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge (1989, p. i), who suggest that whatever their form or trajectory, ‘diasporas always leave a trail of collective memory about another place and time and create new maps of desire and of attachment’. Yet these are often collective memories ‘whose archaeology is fractured’ (ibid). Compounding the awareness of multi-locality, the ‘fractured memories’ of diaspora consciousness produce a multiplicity of histories, ‘communities’ and selves – a refusal of fixity often serving as a valuable resource for resisting repressive local or global situations. Finally, in addition to transformations of identity, memory, awareness and other modes of consciousness, a new ‘the transnational imaginary’ (Wilson and Dissanayake 1996) can be observed reshaping a multitude of forms of contemporary cultural production. 3. Mode of cultural reproduction In one sense depicted as a shorthand for several processes of cultural interpenetration and blending, transnationalism is often associated with a fluidity of constructed styles, social institutions and everyday practices. These are often described in terms of syncretism, creolization, bricolage, cultural translation and hybridity. Fashion, music, film and visual arts are some of the most conspicuous areas in which such processes are observed. The production of hybrid cultural phenomena manifesting ‘new ethnicities’ (Hall 1991) is especially to be found among transnational youth whose primary socialization has taken place with the cross-currents of differing cultural fields. Among such young people, facets of culture and identity are often self-consciously selected, syncretized and elaborated from more than one heritage.

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An increasingly significant channel for the flow of cultural phenomena and the transformation of identity is through global media and communications. Appadurai and Breckenridge (1989, p. iii) comment that Complex transnational flows of media images and messages perhaps create the greatest disjunctures for diasporic populations, since in the electronic media in particular, the politics of desire and imagination are always in contest with the politics of heritage and nostalgia.

Gayatri Spivak (1989, p. 276) describes ‘the discourse of cultural specificity and difference, packaged for transnational consumption’ through global technologies, particularly through the medium of ‘microelectronic transnationalism’ represented by electronic bulletin boards and the Internet. Many other forms of globalized media are having considerable impact on cultural reproduction among transnational communities too, for example, diasporic literature (Chow 1993; King, Connell and White 1995). Concerning television Kevin Robins (1998) describes aspects of de-regulation affecting broadcasting regions that effect the emergence of ‘new cultural spaces’ necessitating a ‘new global media map’. The expansion of satellite and cable networks has seen the spread of channels targeting specific ethnic or religious diasporas, such as Med TV for Kurds, Zee TV for Indians, and Space TV Systems for Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Koreans. Viewing is not solely passive, and there are emerging multiple and complex ways in which these media are consumed (see, for instance, Gillespie 1995, Morley and Robins 1995, Shohat and Stam 1996).

transnational corporations

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4. Avenue of capital Many economists, sociologists and geographers have seen transnational corporations [TNCs] as the major institutional form of transnational practices and the key to understanding globalization (see, for instance, Sklair 1995). This is due not least to the sheer scale of operations, since much of the world’s economic system is dominated by the TNCs (Dicken 1992). TNCs represent globe-spanning structures or networks that are presumed to have largely jettisoned their national origins. Their systems of supply, production, marketing, investment, information transfer and management often create the paths along which much of the world’s transnational activities flow (cf. Castells 1996). Alongside the TNCs, Leslie Sklair (1998) proposes that there has arisen a transnational capitalist class comprised of TNC executives,

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globalizing state bureaucrats, politicians and professionals, and consumerist elites in merchandizing and the media. Together, Sklair claims, they constitute a new power elite whose interests are global, rather than exclusively local or national, and who thereby control most of the world economy. In addition to the Big Players in the global economy, however, the little players who comprise the bulk of transnational communities are making an ever greater impact. The relatively small amounts of money which migrants transfer as remittances to their places of origin now add up to at least $75 billion world-wide (Martin 1994). The scale of this activity has soared over the past thirty years: in Algeria, the value of remittances climbed from $178 million in 1970 to $993 million in 1993; in India from $80 million in 1970 to over $3 billion in 1993; and in Egypt from $29 million in 1970 to nearly $5 billion in 1993 (World Bank 1995). Beyond what they mean to the families receiving them, for national governments remittances represent the quickest and surest source of foreign exchange. Indeed, a great number of national economies today, such as the Philippines, Pakistan and many Latin American states, absolutely depend on monetary transfers of many kinds from ‘nationals’ abroad. This fact has prompted many countries to develop policies for the ‘transnational reincorporation’ of ‘nationals’ abroad into the home market and polity (Guarnizo and Smith 1998). One often cited case is India, which provides a range of favourable conditions for ‘non-resident Indians’ [NRIs] to use their foreign-honed skills and capital to invest in, found or resuscitate Indian industries (Lessinger 1992; ct. The Economist, 6 June 1998). Such policies have impacts beyond the economic dimension. As Katharyne Mitchell (1997b, p. 106) observes, ‘the interest of the state in attracting the investments of wealthy transmigrants widens the possibilities for new kinds of national narratives and understandings’. Resources do not just flow back to people’s country of origin but to and fro and throughout the network. Robin Cohen (1997, p. 160) describes part of this dynamic; anywhere within the web of a global diaspora,

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Traders place orders with cousins, siblings and kin “back home”; nieces and nephews from “the old country” stay with uncles and aunts while acquiring their education or vocational training; loans are advanced and credit is extended to trusted intimates; and jobs and economically advantageous marriages are found for family members.

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INGOs

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The strategy is often one of spreading assets (particularly if one of the geographic contexts of activity – ‘at home’ or ‘away’ – is deemed unstable for reasons of political turmoil, racism, legal bureaucracy, shrinking labour market or simply bad business environment). While many transnational communities have found themselves dispersed for reasons of forced migration (van Hear 1998), others have largely spread themselves for economic reasons. Thus among the Chinese diaspora, Nonini and Ong (1997, p. 4) state that ‘it is impossible to understand such transnational phenomena unless strategies of accumulation by Chinese under capitalism are examined, for such strategies penetrate these phenomena and are in turn affected by them’. Yet while economic objectives may be catalyst to the formation of transnational groupings, such activities give rise to a host of others. Transnational activities are cumulative in character, Alejandro Portes (1998, p. 14) notes, and ‘while the original wave of these activities may be economic and their initiators can be properly labeled transnational entrepreneurs, subsequent activities encompass political, social, and cultural pursuits as well’. 5. Site of political engagement ‘[T]here is a new dialectic of global and local questions which do not fit into national politics,’ writes Ulrich Beck (1998, p. 29), and ‘only in a transnational framework can they be properly posed, debated and resolved.’ Such a transnational framework – a global public space or forum – has been actualized largely through technology. Publishing and communications technologies make possible rapid and far-reaching forms of information dissemination, publicity and feedback, mobilization of support, enhancement of public participation and political organization, and lobbying of intergovernmental organizations (see Alger 1997; Castells 1997). Certainly much needs to be done to realize the full civic potential offered by these, yet a considerable amount of political activity is now undertaken transnationally. The most obvious and conventional forms of such activity are represented by international non-governmental organizations [INGOs], including the International Red Cross and various United Nations agencies. Their number has been rapidly increasing and in 1993 INGOs totalled 4,830 (Kriesberg 1997). The transnational dimensions are reflected in their ability to provide and distribute resources (especially from constituent bodies in wealthy countries to ones in poorer countries), facilitate complementary or cross-cutting support in political campaigns, and provide safe havens abroad for activities of resistance which are illegal or dangerous in home con-

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texts. However many INGOs, claims Louis Kriesberg (ibid), simply reflect the status quo of hierarchy and power. Transnational Social Movement Organizations [TSMOs], on the other hand, are INGOs that seek to change the status quo on a variety of levels. ‘TSMOs,’ according to Kriesberg (ibid, p. 12) ‘work for progressive change in the areas of the environment, human rights, and development as well as for conservative goals like opposition to family planning or immigration.’ The issues which concern TSMOs themselves are transboundary in character, and they draw upon a ‘planetization’ of people’s understandings (Cohen 1998). Citing information published in the 1993 Yearbook of International Organizations, Jackie Smith (1997) observes that among 631 TSMOs 27 percent are explicitly concerned with human rights, 14 per cent with the environment, 10 per cent with women’s rights, 9 per cent with peace, 8 per cent ‘world order/ multi-issue’, 5 per cent with development, and 5 per cent ‘self-determination/ethnic’ . Transnational political activities are also undertaken by ethnic diasporas. Robin Cohen (1995, p. 13) reasons that ‘Awareness of their precarious situation may also propel members of diasporas to advance legal and civic causes and to be active in human rights and social justice issues’. Yet the nature of much diasporic politics is quite contested. Katharyne Mitchell (1997a) deeply criticizes the assumptions of many postmodernist theorists (especially Homi Bhabha 1994) who contend that hybrid, diasporic ‘third space’ standpoints are inherently anti-essentialist and subversive of dominant hegemonies of race and nation. Mary Kaldor (1996) points to the presence of both cosmopolitan anti-nationalists and reactionary ethno-nationalists within diasporas. And Arjun Appadurai (1995, p. 220) writes that among transnational communities

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ethnic diasporas

These “new patriotisms” are not just the extensions of nationalist and counter-nationalist debates by other means, though there is certainly a good deal of prosthetic nationalism and politics by nostalgia involved in the dealings of exiles with their erstwhile homelands. They also involve various rather puzzling new forms of linkage between diasporic nationalisms, delocalized political communications and revitalized political commitments at both ends of the diasporic process.

The ‘politics of homeland’ engage members of diasporas or transnational communities in a variety of ways. The relations between immigrants, home-country politics and politicians have always been dynamic, as Matthew Frye Jacobson (1995) and Nancy Foner (1997)

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remind us with regard to the Irish, Italians, Poles and Jews in turnof-the-century America. Yet now expanded activities and intensified links are creating, in many respects, ‘deterritorialized’ nation-states (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton-Blanc 1994). Political parties now often establish offices abroad in order to canvass immigrants, while immigrants themselves organize to lobby the home government. Increasingly, emigrants are able to maintain or gain access to health and welfare benefits, property rights, voting rights, or citizenship in more than one country (around half the world’s countries recognize dual citizenship or dual nationality; see ‘Traces’ world news digest No.1 on the Transnational Communities Programme website, URL address below). Other forms of recognition have developed as well. For instance, in Haiti, a country that is politically divided into nine departments or states, during President Aristide’s regime overseas Haitians were recognized as the Tenth Department complete with its own ministry (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton-Blanc 1994). And in one of the strangest cases of transnational politics, the government of El Salvador has provided free legal assistance to political refugees (fleeing their own regime!) in the United States so that they may obtain asylum and remain there, remitting some $1 billion annually (Mahler 1998).

social fields

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6. (Re)construction of ‘place’ or locality Practices and meanings derived from specific geographical and historical points of origin have always been transferred and regrounded. Today, a high degree of human mobility, telecommunications, films, video and satellite TV, and the Internet have contributed to the creation of translocal understandings. Yet nevertheless, these are anchored in places, with a variety of legal, political and cultural ramifications, not only for the practices and meanings, but for the places as well (cf. Kearney 1995; Hannerz 1996). Some analysts have proposed that transnationalism has changed people’s relations to space particularly by creating ‘social fields’ that connect and position some actors in more than one country (Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton-Blanc 1992; Castells 1996; Goldring 1998). Appadurai (1995, p. 213) discerns that many people face increasing difficulties of relating to, or indeed producing, ‘locality’ (‘as a structure of feeling, a property of life and an ideology of situated community’). This, he reckons, is due not least to a condition of transnationalism which is characterized by, among other things, ‘the growing disjuncture between territory, subjectivity and collective social movement’ and by ‘the steady erosion of the relationship, principally due to the force and form of electronic mediation, between

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spatial and virtual neighbourhoods’. There have emerged, instead, new ‘translocalities’ (Appadurai 1995; Goldring 1998; Smith 1998).

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Researching transnationalism The subject of transnationalism is receiving ever greater attention through a range of approaches and disciplines. Nonini and Ong (1997, p. 13), however, are critical of the creeping dilution of research by a cultural studies approach ‘that treats transnationalism as a set of abstracted, dematerialized cultural flows, giving scant attention either to the concrete, everyday changes in people’s lives or to the structural reconfiguration that accompany global capitalism’ (cf. Mitchell 1997a,b). While there is certainly much to be learned about the construction and management of meaning offered by cultural studies, there is immediate need for more, in-depth and comparative empirical studies of transnational human mobility, communication, social ties, channels and flows of money, commodities, information and images – as well as how these phenomena are made use of. In addition to helping us to understand the rapid forms of change (and their historical antecedents) which transnationalism represents, more social scientific studies will help us to recognize how and why, as Nancy Foner (1997, p. 23) puts it, ‘some groups [and places] are likely to be more transnational than others – and we need research that explores and explains the differences. Within immigrant groups, there is also variation in the frequency, depth and range of transnational ties’. Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Michael Peter Smith (1998) outline some serious shortcomings in contemporary theorization of transnationalism. Perhaps foremost among these is the question of the appropriate level of analysis and the connection between scales. In the introduction to this special issue, Alejandro Portes, Luis E. Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt (1999) have addressed these issues and made significant strides in establishing, delimiting, analytically defining and typologizing transnational phenomena. George E. Marcus (1995) has provided a useful methodological outline of ‘multi-sited ethnography’ essential to the study of transnationalism. Such research involves ‘tracing a cultural formation across and within multiple sites of activity’ (ibid, p. 96) by way of methods ‘designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations’ (ibid, p. 105). Marcus advocates approaches which either ‘follow the...’ people (especially migrants), the thing (commodities, gifts, money, works of art, and intellectual property), the

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metaphor (including signs and symbols or images), the plot, story or allegory (narratives of everyday experience or memory), the life or bio­ graphy (of exemplary individuals), or the conflict (issues contested in public space). While broadly concurring with the advantages of such a methodology, Ulf Hannerz (1998) adds that ‘the research may need to be not merely multilocal but also translocal... Serious effort must thus be devoted to an adequate conceptualization and description of the translocal linkages, and the interconnections between these and the localized social traffic.’ Hannerz (ibid) also sees the need for collaborative, multidisciplinary teamwork among colleagues in a variety of locations, themselves supported by the new information and telecommunications technologies. Following and drawing upon all these approaches and insights, a major new multidisciplinary research programme has been developed with the aim of advancing both our empirical knowledge and theoretical understanding of contemporary forms of transnationalism.

ESRC research programme on transnational communities

four project themes

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In 1997 the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain [ESRC] launched a £3.8 million ($7 million) research programme on the subject of Transnational Communities. Following a national call for projects, some 170 proposals were received. Together with a Selection Committee comprised of fourteen academics and non- academics, over 250 peer referees contributed towards the final choice of projects to be funded. Nineteen projects have been commissioned, some within a single discipline, but most linking several. While the programme’s Directorship is based at Oxford University, the projects themselves are managed from a variety of British universities with multi-site research to be undertaken throughout the world. The programme projects will be linked by common methodological concerns surrounding the formation and maintenance of ‘community’ based especially on social, economic and political networks, the construction and expression of identity focused on the refashioning of cultural forms and symbols, and the reproduction or contestation of social relations including issues of gender and power. The projects are grouped under four themes (which coincidentally parallel themes proposed in the introduction to this special issue):

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1. New approaches to migration • Comparative Diasporas – commissioned studies within this theme look at notions of incorporation within the Armenian diaspora, Hungarians of Hungary’s periphery, Soviet Jews and Aussiedler (returned ‘ethnic Germans ‘) in Germany; • Transversal Migration – projects here concern the social and cultural communities of seafarers and the expansion of transnational Chinese migration circuits; • Refugees and Asylum-Seekers – comprised of comparative research on the role of exiles in post-conflict reconstruction in Eritrea and Bosnia;

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2. Economics • Global Economic Networks – a theme representing a core area of the programme, including a study of the Russian diaspora and post-Soviet economic restructuring, research on British experts in global financial centres, an examination of Chinese global entrepreneurship with special reference to Southeast Asia, plus a study of production and marketing strategies surrounding commodity flows between India and Britain; • Transnational Corporations [TNCs] – focused on a study of Japanese and Korean corporations and their managers in Britain; • Transnational Household Strategies – work assessing the impact of legal status and children on the strategies of female migrant domestic workers in Britain, plus research on remittance patterns among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in Britain; 3. Politics • Global Political Networks – includes research on Turkish political networks in Europe and on the indigenous people’s movement and its localization in Ecuador and Bolivia; • City, Region, National and Supra-National Policies – consisting of a comparative study of dual citizenship strategies, of the state and of immigrants, in Canada, Germany and Britain; • Gender, Communities and Power – addressed by a project examining gendered aspects of British and Singaporian transmigration to China; 4. Society and culture • Social Forms and Institutions – concentrating on a set of three interlinked projects concerning culture flows in societies of the Arab Gulf; • Cultural Reproduction and Consumption – addressed by two teams,

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one concerned with literature and film within a variety of diasporas, the other with the place of broadcast media among Turks in Europe; • Transnational Religious Communities – devoted to a multi-sited study of a prominent Sufi Muslim movement. While conducted independently, the projects will gain a kind of synergy through their coordination as a programme. The programme does not exist solely for the projects, however. Other facets include: a weekly seminar series; an annual conference, each year devoted to one of the programme’s key themes; workshops organized within Britain and abroad focusing on a variety of issues and bringing together academics and non-academics. A Working Paper series including papers by such distinguished writers as Alejandro Portes (1998), Zygmunt Baumann (1998) and Stephen Castles (1998) has been established in both hardcopy and internetdownloadable formats. The Transnational Communities programme will also be supporting a newsletter, world news digest, and three book series. Information on the projects and all other aspects of the research programme can be found on the ESRC Transnational Communities Programme website (http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk). Although invoked with a variety of meanings, ‘transnationalism’ provides an umbrella concept for some of the most globally transformative processes and developments of our time. The term’s multivocality may actually prove to be advantageous: as Alejandro Portes (1998, p. 2) points out, ‘the concept may actually perform double duty as part of the theoretical arsenal with which we approach the world system structures, but also as an element in a less developed enterprise, namely the analysis of the everyday networks and patterns of social relationships that emerge in and around those structures’. The ESRC Transnational Communities Programme, working in conjunction with parallel projects and programmes in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific will add significant new data and analyses to test some of transnationalism’s more speculative conceptualizations.

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References

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ALGER, CHADWICK F.1997 ‘Transnational social movements, world politics and global governance’, in Jackie Smith, Charles Chatfield and Ron Pagnucco (eds), Transnational Social Movements and Global Politics, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, pp. 260-75 APPADURAI, ARJUN 1995 ‘The production of locality’, in Richard Fardon (ed.), Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, London: Routledge, pp. 204-25 – and CAROL BRECKENRIDGE 1989 ‘On moving targets’, Public Culture, vol. 2, pp. i-iv BAMYEH, MOHAMMED A. 1993 ‘Transnationalism’, Current Sociology, vol. 41, no. 3, pp.1-95 BASCH, LINDA, GLICK SCHILLER, NINA and SZANTON BLANC, CRISTINA 1994 Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States, Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach BAUMAN, ZYGMUNT 1998 ‘Europe of Strangers,’ ESRC Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper No.3 BECK, ULRICH 1998 ‘The cosmopolitan manifesto’, New Statesman, 20 March, pp. 28-30 BHABHA, HOMI 1994 The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge CASTELLS, MANUEL 1996 The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell – 1997 The Power of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell – 1998 End of Millennium, Oxford: Blackwell CASTLES, STEPHEN 1998 ‘New Migrations, Ethnicity and Nationalism in Southeast and East Asia,’ ESRC Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper No.9 CHOW, REY 1993 Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press CLIFFORD, JAMES 1994 ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 9, pp. 302-38 COHEN, ROBIN 1995 ‘Rethinking “Babylon”: iconoclastic conceptions of the diasporic experience’, New Community, vol. 21, pp. 5-18 – 1996 ‘Diasporas and the nation-state: from victims to challengers’, International Affairs, vol. 72, pp. 507-20 – 1997 Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: University College London Press – 1998 ‘Transnational Social Movements’, ESRC Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper (in press) DICKEN, PETER 1992 Global Shift: The Internationalization of Economic Activity, London: Paul Chapman, 2nd edn

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FONER, NANCY 1997 ‘What’s new about transnationalism? New York immigrants today and at the turn of the century’, paper for the conference on ‘Transnational Communities and the Political Economy of New York in the 1990s’, New School of Social Research, New York GILLESPIE, MARIE 1995 Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change, London: Routledge GILROY, PAUL 1987 There ain’t no Black in the Union Jack, London: Hutchinson – 1993 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso GLICK SCHILLER, NINA, BASCH, LINDA and SZANTON BLANC, CRISTINA 1992 ‘Transnationalism: a new analytic framework for understanding migration’, in Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch & Cristina Szanton-Blanc (eds), Toward a Transnational Perspective on Migration, New York: New York Academy of Sciences, pp. 1-24 GOLDRING, LUIN 1998 ‘The power of status in transnational social fields’, in Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (eds), Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 165-95 GUARNIZO, LUIS EDUARDO and SMITH, MICHAEL PETER 1998 ‘The locations of transnationalism’, in Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (eds), Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 3-34 GUPTA, AKHIL and FERGUSON, JAMES 1992 ‘Beyond “culture”: space, identity, and the politics of difference’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 7, pp. 6-23 HALL, STUART 1990 ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 222-37 – 1991 ‘Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities’, in Anthony D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System, Houndmills: Macmillan, pp. 41-Q8 HANNERZ, ULF 1996 Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, London: Routledge – 1998 ‘Transnational research’, in H. Russell Bernard (ed.), Handbook of Methods in Anthropology, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press (in press) JACOBSON, MATTHEW FRYE 1995 Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press KALDOR, MARY 1996 ‘Cosmopolitanism versus nationalism: the new divide?’, in Richard Caplan and John Feffer (eds), Europe’s New Nationalism: States and Minorities in Conflict, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 42-58

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KEARNEY, MICHAEL 1995 ‘The local and the global: the anthropology of globalization and transnationalism’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 24, pp. 547-65 KING, RUSSELL, CONNELL, JOHN and WHITE, PAUL (eds) 1995 Writing across Worlds: Migration and Literature, London: Routledge KRIESBERG, LOUIS 1997 ‘Social movements and global transformation’, in Jackie Smith, Charles Chatfield and Ron Pagnucco (eds), Transnational Social Movements and Global Politics, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, pp. 3-18 LESSINGER, JOHANNA 1992 ‘Nonresident-Indian investment and India’s drive for industrial modernization’, in Frances Abrahamer Rothstein and Michael L. Blim (eds), Anthropology and the Global Factory, New York: Bergin & Garvey, pp. 62-82 MAHLER, SARAH J. 1998 ‘Theoretical and empirical contributions toward a research agenda for transnationalism’, in Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (eds), Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 64-100 MARCUS, GEORGE E. 1995 ‘Ethnography inlof the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 24, pp. 95-117 MARTIN, PHILIP 1994 ‘International migration and trade’, HCO Dissemination Notes No. 29, The World Bank MITCHELL, KATHARYNE 1997a ‘Different diasporas and the hype of hybridity’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 15, pp. 533-53 – 1997b ‘Transnational discourse: bringing geography back in’, Antipode, vol. 29, pp. 101-14 MORLEY, DAVID and ROBINS, KEVIN 1995 Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries, London: Routledge NONINI, DONALD M. and ONG, AIHWA 1997 ‘Chinese transnationalism as an alternative modernity’, in Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini (eds), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, London: Routledge, pp. 3-33 PORTES, ALEJANDRO 1998 ‘Globalisation from Below: the Rise of Transnational Communities’, ESRC Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper No. 1 – GUARNIZO, LUIS E. and LANDOLT, PATRICIA 1999 ‘The study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies (this issue) ROBINS, KEVIN 1998 ‘Spaces of Global Media’, ESRC Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper No.6 SAFRAN, WILLIAM 1991 ‘Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora, vo1. 1, pp. 83-99

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SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, UNITED STATES 1996 Proliferation: Threat and Response, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office SHEFFER, GABRIEL 1986 ‘A new field of study: modern diasporas in international politics’, in Gabriel Sheffer (ed.), Modern Diasporas in International Politics, London: Croom Helm, pp. 1-15 SHOHAT, ELLA and STAM, ROBERT 1996 ‘From the imperial family to the transnational imaginary: media spectatorship in the age of globalization’, in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (eds), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 145-70 SKLAIR, LESLIE 1995 Sociology of the Global System, London: Prentice Hall, 2nd edn – 1998 ‘Transnational Practices and the Analysis of the Global System’, ESRC Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper No.4 SMITH, JACKIE 1997 ‘Characteristics of the modern transnational social movement sector’, in Jackie Smith, Charles Chatfield and Ron Pagnucco (eds), Transnational Social Movements and Global Politics, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, pp. 42-58 SMITH, ROBERT C. 1998 ‘Transnational localities: community, technology and the politics of membership within the context of Mexico and U.S. migration’, in Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (eds), Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 196-238 SPIVAK, GAYATRI 1989 ‘Who claims alterity?’, in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (eds), Remaking History, Seattle, WA: Bay, pp. 269-92 STARES, PAUL 1996 Global Habit: The Drug Problem in a Borderless World, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution TOLOLYAN, KACHIG 1991 ‘The nation-state and its others: in lieu of a preface’, Diaspora, vol. 1, pp. 3-7 – 1996 ‘Rethinking diaspora(s) : stateless power in the transnational moment’, Diaspora, vol. 5, pp. 3-36 VAN HEAR, NICHOLAS 1998 New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities, London: University College London Press VERTOVEC, STEVEN 1999 ‘Three meanings of “diaspora”, exemplified among South Asian religions’, Diaspora, vol. 6, No.3 (in press) WAKEMAN, FREDERIC E. 1988 ‘Transnational and comparative research’, Items, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 85-7

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WILLIAMS, PHIL and SAVONA, ERNESTO U. (eds), 1996 The United Nations and Transnational Organized Crime, Special Issue Transnational Organized Crime, vol. 1, No.3 WILSON, ROB and DISSANAYAKE, WIMAL 1996 ‘Introduction: tracking the global/local’, in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (eds), Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1-18 WORLD BANK 1995 World Development Report 1995, Washington, DC: The World Bank

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Towards a new map of European migration Russell King

Geographer Russell King’s work on migration is best described by two key words: interdisciplinarity and innovation. In this article on European migration, first published in 2002 by the International Journal of Population Geography, King seeks to advance the knowledge on migration by systematically questioning what he calls the old dichotomies of migration studies: international versus internal, forced versus voluntary, temporary versus permanent, legal versus illegal. In the new European age of migration, these binary distinctions are increasingly blurred. The motivations and modalities of migrations are much more diverse than in the past. It is therefore useful to explore relatively new patterns of migration, such as retirement migration or the hybrid concept of tourism-migration. To do so, King invites us to develop an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to human spatial mobility and therefore to stretch the frontiers of migration research in a groundbreaking way.

Introduction Established forms of international migration which have historically been very important (nineteenth-century settler migrations from Europe to the Americas, post-war guest-worker migration from the Mediterranean to northwest Europe, refugee migrations post-World Wars) have for too long now shaped our thinking about how migration is conceptualised and theorised.1 These migrations, and their conceptual codification by writers ranging in time from Ravenstein (1885, 1889) to Sjaastad (1962), Lee (1966), Harris and Todaro (1970) and White and Woods (1980), have led to the assumption, or at least the inference, that all migrants are poor and uneducated. This assumption, when applied to European (and other) migrations today, leads to false characterisations: for instance, to the notion that the es-

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sence of a definition of a migrant is someone who is poor, uprooted, marginal and desperate; or to the automatic assumption that all migrants from, say, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Senegal or Albania are uneducated and therefore somehow socially inferior to the members of the host societies with whom they interact.2 We therefore need to appreciate that many of the key questions that were frequently asked in order to frame our understanding of the functioning of migration as a historically ubiquitous social process (Why does migration take place? Who migrates? What are the spatial and temporal patterns of flows? What are the effects of migration on the places of origin and destination and on the migrants themselves?) now have a different array of answers than the mainly economic and political ones which shaped our earlier analyses. Even where economic rationales remain paramount, new mobility strategies are deployed to achieve the economic (and other) objectives. In this paper I attempt to offer an overview of some new geographies and typologies of international migration in Europe. My analysis will not be a rigorous mapping of the new flows, but rather a qualitative, even intuitive, exploration of a range of new, and not-so-new, types of migration and mobility. These relatively new forms of migration derive from new motivations at both macro- and micro-level (the retreat from those Fordist-type migrations which were linked to mass production, and from an individual desire to see migration as a route to a stable industrial job), new spacetime flexibilities, various new globalisation forces and new international divisions of labour, and changing views of consumption and self-realisation. Amongst these changes in migration types, patterns and motivations, there are important implications for defining and studying migration which tend to blur further the never-straightforward boundary between migration and mobility, and to melt away some of the traditional dichotomies which have shaped the study of migration in the past. I propose to deal with some of these conceptual and methodological questions first, and then turn to the new geographies and typologies of migration in Europe.

Towards a more integrated approach to migration studies Despite a long history of scholarly study into the field, today migration still tends to remain a dichotomised and fragmented area of enquiry. More than 30 years ago the sociologist Clifford Jansen (1969: 60) wrote that migration is a problem of many disciplines: it is essen-

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tially geographical, involving human movement across space, influencing and changing the environments of both the places of arrival and of departure; it is demographic, since it affects the structures of the populations at both origin and destination; it is economic to the extent that many shifts in population (especially of workers) are due to economic imbalances between areas; it may be a political problem, where states feel the need to control or restrict departure or entry of international migrants and refugees; it involves social psychology inasmuch as migrants’ motives for leaving and their problems of adapting to the new host society have to be studied; and it is a sociological phenomenon since the social structure and cultural systems, again both in the places of origin and arrival, are affected by migration, and in turn affect the migrant. Anthropologists might feel offended at being left out of the above list, but to some extent their fields of enquiry have been subsumed by Jansen under his definition of migration as a sociological phenomenon; nevertheless, the important recent research by anthropologists on a wide range of migration-related issues to do with culture, identity, transnationalism and gender deserves more prominent mention here (even if nearly all of it post-dates Jansen’s overview). And the above list is by no means exhaustive, given the interest shown in migration studies by historians, lawyers and human rights specialists, social policy analysts, philosophers, literary and media scholars and others. As the map of learning constantly evolves, so fresh perspectives are opened up; in recent years, for instance, migration has come to be seen as a crucial element in cultural studies. The need, therefore, is for an interdisciplinary (rather than a cross-disciplinary or a multidisciplinary) synthesis which brings together and integrates a range of perspectives, frameworks, theoretical stances and methodologies in order to study migration (or the various forms of migration) in a manner which is holistic (embedding migration in its social context) and which recognises its multifaceted diversity. This sounds like a challenging agenda, but it can be (and is being) achieved. 3 Too often, on the other hand, does one read papers which attempt to ‘model’ or ‘explain’ migrant behaviour by reference to economic or psychological variables which seem to have scant linkage with the reality of the migrant experience in the specific context in which they are being studied; too often are the economic data upon which some analyses are built insufficiently scrutinised (if they are questioned at all) for the accuracy and relevance of the sources. Too often, also, does one come across qualitative research which has insufficient claim to rigour or representativeness; the insights might be valid for the group studied, but often the reaction is – so what?

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The results generated by a given micro-scale study may be very different from those of similar groups studied elsewhere, but comparative analysis necessary for migration studies to reach a mature stage as a ‘unidisciplinary’ or ‘postdisciplinary’ branch of the social sciences and humanities is too often lacking. The interdisciplinary study of migration is only achieved over time: by studying migration assiduously in different contexts, by having benefited from an interdisciplinary formation (something not easy to achieve within the UK university system), and by wide reading and engagement with migration scholars from different disciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds. The objective is to overcome single-discipline narrowness – for instance, by exposing the lack of reality and humanity in many econometric studies or by critiqueing the myopia of folkloric studies carried out in some tiny corner of the world – and also to be open-minded towards the numerous ideological paradigms which often underlie discipline-based studies (neo-classical economics, Marxist sociology, systems theory in its various forms, theories of transnational identity or hybridity, etc.). Further barriers to a holistic, synthesising study of migration are posed by the division of the migration process into its many fragmented component stages (departure, arrival, return) and by the hegemonic role of national models and discourses of immigration and ethnicity (assimilation, integration, multiculturalism, ius sanguinis, etc.). In short, disciplinary and paradigmatic closure are the enemy of an effective, sympathetic study of human migration (Castles, 2000: 15-25).

Deconstructing the binaries of migration New forms of mobility and migration, and new integrated ways of studying these mobilities, also imply a reappraisal of the longstanding heuristic divides within the field of migration study. As will become more specifically apparent later on, we need to deconstruct traditional migration dichotomies – or migration dyads as Cohen (1995: 6) calls them. Whilst these binaries perhaps continue to have some use for the beginner to construct a mental map of the field of migration studies, they are less solid devices for understanding migratory phenomena in Europe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. What are these dichotomies? I would list the following.

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Process and product The field of migration studies consists of two rather distinct branches and, hence, two rather separate literatures: the study of the actual act of migration as movement across space (often undertaken by geographers and economists); and the study of the ethnic communities and diasporas that are the product of migration (analyses of integration, ethnic relations, cultural characteristics, etc.). Although these two subfields of migration studies are analytically distinct, the linkages between them have been insufficiently explored. Now this is beginning to be rectified by longitudinal or life-history approaches that trace the migrant from origin to destination (and, where relevant, back again), linking pre- with post-migration characteristics, sometimes across more than one generation, and often employing a social networks approach. According to Castles, this dynamic whole, which encompasses all aspects of the lived reality of migrants:

the migratory process and the product of migration

‘may be referred to as the migratory process, a term which underlines that migration is not a single event (i.e. the crossing of a border) but a life-long process which affects all aspects of a migrant’s existence, as well as the lives of non-migrants and communities in both sending and receiving countries.’ (Castles, 2000: 15-16)

One might also add that migration influences the lives of other migrants in the destinations. The study of transnational communities, for many scholars the new migration paradigm of the last half-dozen years, affords an integration of patterns of movement within the establishment, maintenance and evolution of migrant communities in two or more countries (Glick Schiller et al., 1995; Portes et al., 1999; Pries, 1999; Faist, 2000). Internal versus international migration We have another primary distinction between studies of internal and those of international migration. Again, rather separate literatures have evolved, with somewhat different conceptual frameworks and models.4 Only very recently has research begun to link the two scales: searching for common conceptual models; noting how internal migration is often sequenced or interleaved with international migration; examining how international migrants and ethnic minorities are mobile within the host countries; and realising that, as nationstates become less important, so the distinction between internal and international mobility becomes blurred. This is obviously the case within the European Union, and has particular meaning for thirdcountry nationals for whom different types of European boundaries

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(e.g. within and outside ‘Schengenland’) present different (im)permeabilities for their movement and access to rights. Studies of migration that focus on the household or family have often noted how, within such a unit, different individuals migrate in different ways to different destinations, both internal and international. Often such a division of labour in migration may be gendered, with a difference between men and women as to who goes abroad and who migrates internally. Another blurring of the difference between internal and international migration occurs when international borders change. The breakup of Yugoslavia or the former Soviet Union, or the unification of Germany, are examples of significant international frontier shifts which affect migration status, in effect turning internal migrants into international movers, and vice versa. This raises an interesting question: are there internal migrants who are destined to become international migrants at some stage in the future, not through actual movement but through some hitherto unforeseen political event?

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Voluntary versus forced migration There is a commonly-used distinction between voluntary and forced migration. This is the dichotomy used to structure Aaron Segal’s Atlas of International Migration, for instance, together with a third part on diasporas (Segal, 1993). Whilst it is easy to think of migrations which are unequivocally forced (slave migrations, or migrations of ‘ethnic cleansing’ or of religious persecution), as well as those which are unequivocally voluntary (such as Northern European retirement migrants who settle on the Costa del Sol), in practice many migrations are not so easily categorised. Is a young Filipina woman sent by her family to work as a domestic helper in Rome or Madrid a voluntary or a forced migrant? Segal classifies Asian indentured migration as voluntary – a highly dubious categorisation. Clearly there is a complex continuum of coercion and free-will in migration decisions, as some later examples will testify. Such a continuum might contain the following stages: • Migrants of ‘free will’, who choose to migrate to satisfy largely non-economic life-choice ambitions – for a better education, or to retire to a pleasant scenic or climatic environment. • Migrants who are encouraged or ‘pushed’ to migrate by life circumstances, such as ‘economic migrants’ seeking to avoid unemployment and very low incomes by seeking better-paid jobs abroad. • Migrants who are more or less compelled to migrate by circum-

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stances which are largely beyond their control – extreme poverty, famine, environmental crisis, political chaos, inter-ethnic tension, etc. • People who are forced to migrate by others and who therefore have no control over their decision to move – slave migrations, refugees fleeing to save their lives, extradition, abduction, forced repatriation, or children taken abroad by their parents. However, even between these four types there are blurred boundaries between the ‘migration forces’ of free-will, encouragement, virtual compulsion and force exerted by violence or threat. Moreover, both ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migrants can use similar means of migration (e.g. clandestine border crossing by smugglers) and can have similar impacts on destination areas. Temporary versus permanent migration Next, we can make a basic distinction between temporary migration (followed by return) and permanent migration (where there is no return).5 This seems a simple enough distinction, but often the intention (to emigrate for good, or to return sooner or later) is quite different from the outcome. Also, there are different degrees of temporariness: one year, five, twenty. Return migrants to Greece are defined by the Greek government as those who have lived abroad for at least one year and been resident back in Greece for at least a year, whereas return studies of the Mexico-US labour migration are based on the notion of return to Mexico after ‘settlement’, this being defined as three years continuous residence in the United States (Massey et al., 1987: 310; King, 2000: 9). But the time-space continuum of migration/ mobility is truly continuous; threshold levels are arbitrary tools for statistical measurement (and perhaps too for policy), but they can obscure more than they reveal. For migrants they can have real significance as they trigger residency, citizenship or other rights. Seasonal and shuttle migration of a to-and-fro kind (weekly, monthly, occasional) must also fit into the continuum, blurring the distinction between migration and other forms of spatial mobility which, although they may not be regarded as ‘conventional’ migration, nevertheless carry similar sorts of motivation (for instance, economic) and intentionality. Psychologically, many longer-term migrants are torn between the desire to return and the desire (or need) to stay: the ‘myth of return’ (Anwar, 1979) is just one way of expressing this ambivalence. Another is the notion of ‘being a migrant’ becoming a permanent state of mind: a true home doesn’t exist any more. Perhaps we can

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call this a state of ‘migrancy’ (Chambers, 1994). The construction of transnational communities can be seen as another expression of this condition of being neither (or both) ‘here’ and ‘there’, with the migrant moving back and forth across and within this transnational social and cultural space. For yet others, the true return can never take place, for home is another time, another place – held in the memory by nostalgia but not recoverable because of changes which have occurred in the meantime.

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Legal and illegal migration Reflecting the renewed globalisation of migration over the last 20 years, and the increasing perception – in some quarters – of migration as a ‘crisis’ and ‘unwanted’ (hence the growing discourse of ‘migration control’), we can distinguish between legal and illegal migration. Whilst this may be an easy distinction to defend in strictly legal terms, once again the dichotomy fails to match many aspects of contemporary migratory reality. Many are unhappy with the term ‘illegal’ and prefer terms such as ‘irregular’ or ‘undocumented’. There are many ways of interpreting the growth of ‘illegal’ movement. For some it represents the growing undesirability of ‘mass’ migrations and the need to control and manage migration in the face of apparently increasing pressures for people to migrate. For others it is almost the reverse – a reflection of the fact that the ‘natural forces’ of migration will always overcome regimes of control and containment. Hence, is it something to be repressed or a phenomenon to be creatively managed? Moreover, the boundary between legality and illegality is easily crossed. An amnesty or a regularisation law may transform illegal into legal immigrants virtually overnight. Or an apparently unproblematic legal migrant may suddenly become illegal the moment he or she becomes unemployed, is suspected of a petty crime, or fails to renew the permit to stay. Furthermore, a ‘legal’ migrant may work in the ‘illegal’ (or informal) economy; or an ‘illegal’ migrant may work without hindrance in the legal or formal economy. And who defines a migrant as an ‘illegal’? The country of origin, of destination, of transit, or some international organisation? Blurring the distinction To sum up this part of the discussion, the multiplicity and variety of types of migration and movement observable today blur the distinction between the migratory dyads, turning them into continua and mixing them up into new matrices and combinations rather than preserving them as readily identifiable polar types. The old certainties – if ever they were certainties – disappear. How voluntary is

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voluntary migration? How temporary is temporary? What is meant, exactly, by illegal migration? How is movement within the EU’s ‘Schengenland’ to be defined: as internal or international migration? For individuals who are frequently on the move, circulating between two or more countries, according to fixed or irregular rhythms and circuits, are they engaging in ‘true’ migration? Or is this some other kind of spatial mobility? Finally, I address the wider question: is migration the exception or the norm? On a world scale, about 150 million people are reckoned to be international migrants, less than 3% of the world’s population (International Organization for Migration, 2000: 5). On the other hand, in Europe (and other parts of the more developed world), only a minority of people are born, live their lives, and die in the same community or settlement; some kind of migration inevitably takes place. I wonder how many of you, reading this paper, have never engaged in some kind of migration. We should also remember that there are many people and cultures in the world whose very existence is based on migration or on a history of migration: nomads, transhuman shepherds, Roma, international business executives, and so on. So are migrants therefore still to be regarded as the ‘others’ who are different from ‘us’? Or is it the case that all of us are, in some way or another, migrants or the product of migration? Is it not the case that migrants are the perfect exemplars of the post-modern condition? And if so, does this not bring migration studies from the fringes of the social sciences and the study of humanity in to its very core? The postmodernist emphasis on permeability of borders, connectivities and identities lends itself by nature to the study of migration; and the study of migration, in response, shifts its focus to a new emphasis on culture, subjectivity and identity, reflecting the general cultural turn in the social sciences in the past couple of decades (Cohen, 1995: 8).

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New motivations and settings for migration At a more concrete level, new connectivities, new space-time flexibilities, and the embedding of migration/mobility within the forces of globalisation, have served to blur the correlative conception of migration as a measurable spatio-temporal phenomenon (i.e. a movement across a threshold distance for a specified threshold of time). New mobilities have emerged which confound the conventional divide between migration on the one hand and other forms of human spatial mobility on the other – travel, tourism, circulation, commuting. Globalisation and the post-1989 New World Order cre-

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ate new geographies of movement into and around Europe – from new globe-spanning migrations which have no historical precedent, to local-scale cross-border dynamics where none existed for half a century before. The motivations, too, have fundamentally changed. Under the earlier migration epochs of European transatlantic settlement and postwar European labour migration, linked to the relatively fixed parameters of the respective productive regimes of colonialism and Fordism, the migration variables were more or less certain – the destination, the type of job, the level of pay, the means of transport, the likelihood of stay or return. Now migrants’ motives, and the outcomes of their actions, are far more diverse, as are their geographical origins, destinations, routes and modes of travel. As ‘Fortress Europe’ imposes its own logic of migration control, new migration processes and patterns open up, driven by new market dynamics. Migration has become a new global business with a constantly shifting set of agents, mechanisms, routes, prices and niches. Very different from the Fordist labour migration system of Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s, the new migration regimes of the 1980s and 1990s were based on fast-evolving European and global conditions: the escalation of push pressures from the global South, the new-found economic prosperity of southern Europe (combined with ease of entry), and the removal of the Iron Curtain as a barrier to emigration (only for it to be partly replaced by a West European set of barriers to immigration including a new ‘Fortress Europe’ frontier along the border of the former Soviet Union). Episodic migrations of crisis and flight from political turmoil and environmental catastrophe add to the cocktail of new migration factors. Consistent with the post-Fordist ‘privatisation’ of migration and with the creation of a kind of ‘migration plc’ come other market concepts: growth in the number of agents, intermediaries, traffickers, and a pricing structure for each route, each origin nationality and each destination country. Within this new privatised, semi-illegal international migration regime, some migrants set off with no particular destination country in mind: they go where the agents and smugglers take them, or abandon them. Others are able quite explicitly to ‘shop’ for opportunities and destinations, measuring the costs and benefits of risk, insecurity, quality of life, anticipated income, cultural (un)familiarity, and existence of social and kin contacts.6 These types of migrant, described above, are still largely to be characterised as ‘economic migrants’ although they do differ from the classic ‘labour migrant’ type where recruitment is managed by the host country. Another difference is the diverse educational, skill

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and status levels of recent immigrants to Europe, whether they come from (say) Morocco, Kurdish areas of Iraq or Bangladesh. Many are highly educated and some have considerable professional experience, but the opportunities available to them are severely restricted to the low-status jobs rejected by West European nationals. Rhode (1993) has described this phenomenon as ‘brain waste’; highly educated migrants and refugees are attracted to menial jobs in Europe because the pay they get, even for cleaning houses or selling newspapers at street corners, is much higher than pursuing a professional career in their home countries where jobs are often extremely scarce and incomes very low and unreliable. Yet, perhaps reflecting their more educated background and their possession of a kind of anticipatory socialisation into West European culture by their consumption of global media and images of Western lifestyles, their motives are not necessarily purely economic. For many of these migrants, moving to Europe, by whatever means (and often the price is very high), is part of a dream of self-realisation. self-realisation Their migration may be a gesture of escape, an adventure, a rite of motives passage (King, 1996). Shuttleworth and Kockel (1990), in their study of young Irish emigrants, have described this type of emigration as ‘emigration as walkabout’. Hence to the traditional economic motivation of labour migration we add other rationales: excitement, experience, leisure, ‘seeing the world’. Migration itself becomes a desirable act rather than an economic means to an end: a consumption good rather than a strategy which satisfies the production needs of another country’s economy or the private survival needs of an individual migrant; and the projection of an individual’s identificatory experience beyond what are perceived as the restricting confines of his or her own country.

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New European migrations: some examples To list fully all ‘new’ forms of migration affecting Europe is beyond the scope of this paper, quite apart from the issue of what is new and what is not. What I have tried to do in the preceding sections of the paper is to set out some of the new contexts for recent migratory phenomena and to link these to the need for changing approaches to how we define and study migration/mobility. Let us now be more specific and examine a selection of new migration types and flows in Europe. The following is by no means an exhaustive list and is subject to the caveats drawn above. The list extends and elaborates some of the types identified by Cohen (1997) and its time-frame is roughly

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the last 15 years, since the European migrations of Fordism, family reunion and post-Fordist economic restructuring (King, 1993a; Blotevogel and King, 1996; Koser and Lutz, 1998).

crisis-driven migrations

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Migrations of crisis: refugee, irregular and ‘illegal’ migrations One of the main features of the global and European map of migration since the mid-1980s has been the strong growth in refugee migrations, especially in respect of people who do not satisfy the 1951 UN convention definition of a ‘well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion’, and who are thus condemned to remain asylum-seekers or displaced persons. The UN definition of refugees is being rendered out-of-date by political, religious, ethnic and environmental crises. At the same time, there has been a sharp increase in the phenomenon of ‘illegal’ or irregular migration. An estimated 500,000 foreigners entered the EU clandestinely in 2000, five times the number estimated to have entered in 1994 (Ratnesar, 2001). Of course, such estimates must be regarded as highly approximate given the obvious problems of measuring clandestine migration, but few would dispute the general trend to a marked increase. This has happened in response to strong push factors operating from the countries of origin, and in the context of increasingly harsh regimes of immigration control imposed by West European states, including stricter criteria and more rigid and mechanistic processing of asylum-seekers’ claims for refugee status. Two main mechanisms of irregular migration can be recognised: deliberate illegal entry (forged documents, landing on remote southern European coasts, crossing poorly guarded borders, etc.); and legal entry (e.g. on a tourist visa) followed by overstaying. Increasing evidence exists for the orchestration of illegal entry by semi-criminal organisations – mafia groups, traffickers and agents at various points in key smuggling routes. Laczko and Thompson (2000) and Salt (2000) have provided useful overviews of human smuggling and migrant trafficking in Europe, including conceptual issues, bibliographic surveys and statistical estimates. Crisis-driven migrations affecting Europe as a destination can occur in any part of the world. Since 1990 they have emanated from the Gulf War, the persecution of Kurdish populations in Turkey and Iraq, war and famine in various parts of Africa, and the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. In the last of these cases, war and ethnic cleansing led to massive displacements of population, both within the region and, more particularly, the 1 million Bosnians who became refugees in Western Europe in the early to mid-1990s, many

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of whom have now been pressured to return in the wake of the 1995 Dayton Agreement which ended hostilities in Bosnia and provided for the planned repatriation of the displaced and refugee populations. The Albanian emigration of the last ten years is a good example of how the notion of ‘crisis’ can differentially interact with migration, producing a continually evolving dialogue between the two terms (Pastore, 1998):

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Albanian emigration

• Firstly, the mass exodus of 1991 can be seen as a direct response to the Albanian political, economic and social crisis accompanying the abrupt post-Communist transition. This is an obvious point, but a deep understanding of the Albanian context is necessary to comprehend fully the resultant dynamics of migration to Italy and Greece. To view Albanians fleeing their country in the early 1990s as either refugees or economic migrants fleeing political chaos and economic collapse is too simplistic. As Mai (2001) shows in an interesting analysis of the role of Italian television in the Albanian emigration, the collapse was also a moral and an ethical one. Young Albanians, in particular, were suffering a collective identity crisis which counterposed a forced, ethicised identity of the heroic nature of work in an Albanian society that was projected by Enver Hoxha to his information-starved people as ‘paradise on earth’, with the increasing identificatory appeal of la dolce vita on the other side of the Adriatic. • But the migration of the early 1990s provoked further crisis in Albania, leading to both short- and longer-term instability. The key to this vicious cycle of linkages was the investment of migrant remittances in informal pyramid savings schemes which collapsed in early 1997, bankrupting the majority of the Albanian population and provoking a second mass exodus. Longer-term effects of emigration on the re-making of the Albanian crisis, according to Pastore (1998), were the establishment of criminalised emigration rackets and the demographic distortion of the Albanian population by the emigration of so many young people. • Thirdly, the Albanian migrations were also seen as a crisis for the Italian and Greek states: how were they to deal with the tens of thousands of migrants entering the country without legal documents and by whatever means they could find? As Lazaridis (1996) and Zinn (1996) have shown, policy paralysis, dithering and contradictions have been the main reactive outcomes in both countries. This has had the effect of prolonging and almost institutionalising the ‘crisis’ nature of the Albanian immigration into

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a kind of semi-permanent feature of the Italian and Greek political and press discourse, which tends overwhelmingly to stigmatise Albanians as ‘criminals’ (Jamieson and Silj, 1998; Lazaridis and Wickens, 1999). On the one hand this might be thought to be a negation of the very meaning of the term ‘crisis’; on the other, it asks important questions about how media representations of migrants come to be constructed, and about the power of such representations to influence public opinion.

‘sex, marriage and maids’

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‘Sisters are doing it for themselves’: growth in independent female migration Until the early 1980s, there was an overwhelming and regrettable trend to consider women migrants as dependants or followers of ‘primary’ male migrants – to use Cohen’s (1997) phrase, as the ‘baggage of male workers’. Numerically and sociologically (Cohen’s words again), we have entered a new phase of female migration, characterised by the independent migration of females in response to the needs of the European and global service economies. Campani (1995) and Phizacklea (1998) have been important voices in the debate on the contemporary global and European contexts for female migration. ‘Sex, marriage and maids’ describe, somewhat over-simplistically, the three sectors of activity which are important for female migrants in Europe (Phizacklea, 1998: 31-4), but few data are available to quantify the relative importance of these three female migratory types – the migration (including trafficking) of sexworkers, the international bride trade, and the migration of domestic and care workers. More broadly, it is important to realise how the demand for women migrants has increased through the centrality of the types of service activities in post-industrial society which have traditionally been associated with female labour or are those which only women are willing to supply (Campani, 1995: 546). There has been quite an impressive amount of literature on female migration experiences in Southern Europe published since the late 1990s; of particular value are the collections edited by Anthias and Lazaridis (2000) and Ribas Mateos (2000). Anthias notes that women migrants provide the flexibility and low cost that appeals both to global capital, and to middle-class households seeking to hire domestic help: ‘they are located in or within a secondary, serviceoriented, hidden (economy) ... that reproduces an ethically and gendered divided labour market’ (Anthias, 2000: 25). Against this structuralist perspective are a number of ethnographic documentaries which tell a variety of stories – of exploitation and empowerment, of patriarchy and liberation, of isolation and solidarity, of sacrifice

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and achievement (for some accessible studies in English, see Andall, 1998, 1999, 2000; Chell, 1997, 2000; Escrivà, 1997; Lazaridis, 2000; Zontini, 2001). More often than not, women are the social glue which holds the ethnic community together, especially in national communities (e.g. Filipinos in Spain and Italy, Cape Verdeans in Italy) where women migrants were the pioneers and where they remain in numerical dominance. Moreover, they are playing increasingly active roles in processes of integration with the host society, becoming important agents of cultural change. Undoubtedly, migrant women in Southern Europe are at the forefront of the interesting work being done in gender issues in migration in recent years. Playing the global labour market: skilled and professional migrants This type of migration has been thoroughly researched by Salt (1984, 1992) and Findlay (1993) since the mid-1980s. Hence it is questionable how new it is for the European setting, although new flows of skilled migration have emerged from Eastern Europe since 1989 (Rhode, 1993). Findlay and Salt write about professionals, business executives, accountants, engineers, consultants and the personnel of international organisations. To these I would add sports stars and entertainers. The flows, by and large, are not one-way but multidirectional and temporary, although East-West flows are likely to be more permanent and unidirectional. This is a fluid type of migration which merges with (and is tending to be substituted by) business travel and short-term contract and trouble-shooting visits (Salt and Ford, 1993). Highly-skilled and professional migration also overlaps, at the individual level if not conceptually, with the next two types I am going to consider: cross-border shuttle migration and student migration. The movement of skilled persons lies at the heart of attempts to integrate Europe through the free movement of people, goods, services and capital within the EU. This increasing ease of movement for elites and highly-skilled labour creates a polarisation of migration types with, at the other end, ‘poor’ immigrants and asylum-seekers from outside the EU. This emerging hierarchical division is one of the clearest contrasts opening up in the new map of European migrations (Koser and Lutz, 1998: 2).

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Here and there and back and forth: shuttle migration The bipolar fixity of conventional studies of migration – based on an origin, a destination, and a more-or-less definitive and statistically measurable relocation between the two – has been challenged both by the heightened role of mobility in (European, Western) society

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at large (Urry, 2000), and by new geographies and temporalities of movement (Cwerner, 2001). Now, many movements are multiple and spatially capricious – in Kevin McHugh’s catchy words, ‘inside, outside, upside down; backward, forward, round and round’ (McHugh, 2000). The dual role of borders and frontiers is interesting here: on the one hand the removal of frontiers within the EU facilitates an intensification of mobility between and across the states of the Union; on the other, the juxtaposition of countries at different levels of economic development and with different social and cultural systems, notably inside and outside the EU frontier, creates the conditions for new dynamics of movement. Much of this may be ‘illegal’, but much of it represents an accommodation of new economic mobility types to the visa and access regimes that are imposed by the EU. In particular, since 1989 there has been a sharp rise in cross-border shuttle migration across the eastern frontier of the EU; this has tended to replace the mass East-West migrations originally feared by the West as soon as the Iron Curtain was dismantled. Although some instances of cross-border shuttle migration are of fairly long standing (e.g. that of Slovenians to Trieste), others have risen with dynamic new rhythms during the 1990s, for instance the migration of Poles to Germany (Iglicka, 2000). Iglicka distinguishes shuttle or pendular migrants (who stay for less than three months) from shortterm migrants (more than three months, less than one year), longterm migrants (more than one year), and settler migrants (such as the Aussiedler). Cross-border shuttle migration can be for short-term work opportunities, for instance in construction or agriculture, or for trading – buying and selling of goods with different prices and market situations either side of the border. It is important to emphasise how this type of movement is facilitated by, and represents an adaptation to, the availability of tourist visas; it is also important to realise that many trips are multipurpose, combining tourism and shopping with trading and short-term work.

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Student migrations: from the year abroad to the ‘Big OE’ Student migrations are a long-overlooked but increasingly important form of European mobility. Whilst there are some historical parallels (the medieval wandering scholar, or colonial patterns of student migrations to France, the UK, the Netherlands, etc.), since the 1980s student mobility within Europe has been strongly promoted by the European Commission via schemes such as the Erasmus and Socrates exchanges, whose initial aims – which look unlikely to be achieved, at least for the forseeable future – were to have one in ten

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students studying at a university in another EU country.7 Since the launch of the Erasmus scheme in 1987, around 750,000 university/third-level students have spent a period of 3-12 months studying abroad; this figure covers the academic years 1987-88 to 1999-2000. Numbers have grown steadily year-on-year, with a seven-fold increase in annual movers between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. On a broader front it is important, once again, to recognise the variety of migratory subtypes under this general category. Student migrations are an important part of the internal mobility of young adults within European countries, particularly the UK, where there has been a continuous tradition of ‘going away’ to university (in many other European countries the dominant tradition has been for university students to live at home). Surprisingly, the migrational significance of students going to university has scarcely been studied. This significance lies in two areas: the initial move to university, and the implications of this for subsequent national population distribution (do students tend to stay on in their university towns, return home, or move elsewhere?). For international student migrations, such as those involving a ‘Year Abroad’ at a foreign university, the same questions arise: do students tend to preserve their affective and institutional links to their Year Abroad destination, or are their future migration propensities unaffected? It is also possible to see student migration as a subset of youth migration motivated by a mixture of broader educational goals and experience/travel/pleasure-seeking, perhaps facilitated or interleaved with casual or temporary work. Amongst European students, especially those from northern countries, the ‘gap year’ between school and university, or between graduation and employment, exemplifies this, as does young Australian and New Zealanders’ predilection for their ‘Big Overseas Experience’. Here, again, we see complex overlappings of socio-economic and mobility types (students/workers/ tourists, but also travellers, drifters, hobos...) which defy neat migratory and motivational categorisations (Bianchi, 2000).

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Love migrations: the transnationalisation of intimacy The explanation of contemporary migrations increasingly with reference to individual and personal factors (which, nevertheless, at a societal scale have considerable significance) opens up other possibilities. Students and tourists travel, study abroad, have sex, fall in love.8 Their subsequent locational behaviour and mobility/migration regimes may be more related to this libidinal factor than to any other. Indeed, love migration can probably be found in all types of migration. Maybe, as far as migration factors are concerned, ‘love conquers

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all’. The possibility for the initiation of such ‘transnational intimacy’ is greatly increased by mass travel, study abroad, and tourism; whilst the accelerating speeds and technologies of travel and communication in a shrinking Europe increase the chances of such transnational love being maintained. Technology apart, several important global sociological factors lie behind the growth of love migrations within (and outside) Europe. The expansion of linguistic competence is one factor (young Britons are an exception here: hiding within their global language, they are less multilingual than their other European counterparts). Another is the linked expansion of the ‘global experience’ industries (tourism, travel, leisure, education, networking) with the extension of youthful attitudes and lifestyles to later ages. Together these factors produce an expansion of individual transnational interfaces resulting from mobility and migration; the major cities (London, Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Rome, Geneva – the list is much more extensive), especially those with explicit multinational functions, are the principal nodes for this intensification of cross-national personal contact, relationships, partnerships and marriages. My conclusion is simple: do not underestimate the libidinal factor in migration. You read it here first.

lifestyle migrations

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Heliotropes and rural idyllists: migrations of environmental preference Finally, there has been a steady growth in what we might call environmental preference migration (Williams et al., 1997). These are migrations that are the very antithesis of being economically motivated, and are undertaken by those who prioritise quality-of-life and aesthetic considerations over income. Having said that, they are often undertaken by those who can afford to take such choices, such as people of wealth or independent means, including retired persons. These are ‘lifestyle migrations’ in which a move to a pleasant rural landscape or a sunnier climate enables certain individuals to enjoy a more relaxing and healthier life in a culture which is somewhat different from and more appealing than their own. There are, however, many variants on this theme, including those who wish to ‘escape to the sun’ by settling in a Spanish Mediterranean coastal resort (O’Reilly, 2000), those who are ‘international counterurbanisers’ such as the British home-owners in rural France studied by Buller and Hoggart (1994), and Kockel’s (1991) ‘countercultural migrants’ – Dutch and Germans who have settled along the remote western seaboard of Ireland in order to pursue ‘alternative’ rural lifestyles. Heliotropic migrants – Northern Europeans who spend varying

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amounts of time during the year living and relaxing in the warm south – illustrate very well one of the dimensions along which the divide between migration and more frequent forms of mobility is particularly difficult to draw. The spectrum of movements ranges from tourism through seasonal residence to permanent relocation to a holiday area, such as international retirement migration (Williams and Hall, 2000). In some recently completed work I carried out with Tony Warnes and Allan Williams (King et al., 2000), we found that British retiree migrants to southern Spain and the Portuguese Algarve generally had extensive prior experience of visiting the region on holiday before making the semi-permanent retirement move.9 Repeated holidays in sunny seaside resorts had frequently led to a progressively more committed engagement with a destination which was seen as both enjoyable and desirable, and as increasingly familiar. Often the purchase of a flat or holiday villa as a second home became a stepping-stone to a more-or-less permanent transfer of residence upon retirement. These forms of movement and dual place connections are not dissimilar to movement patterns associated with other kinds of transnational community, although the motivations behind the establishment of such transnational communities may be very different. In contrast to diasporic communities spawned by refugee scatterings or transnational communities built out of labour migrations, the British on the Costa del Sol (or the Germans in Majorca, or whatever) are engaging in migration and resettlement as a ‘lifestyle activity’. They have become heliotropes, permanent sun-seekers, and all the evidence suggests their numbers are set to grow (King et al., 2000).

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Conclusion This paper has attempted to map out both some new migratory forms and processes in Europe, and the attendant conceptual and methodological challenges of how to approach their study. These new forms of migration derive from new international divisions of labour, the new European geopolitics after the Cold War, new motivations of migrants (above all the retreat from labour migrations linked to Fordist production systems), new space-time flexibilities and technologies, and the relatively new notion of migration as consumption and self-discovery. Thus, and in a variety of ways, migration processes in Europe (and globally) have certainly become more diverse in the past 20 years or so. Whilst the structural underpinnings of the new migrations have been implicit throughout much of the forego-

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Mediterranean caravanserai

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ing account, there remain some reservations about how new these migrations are. Koser and Lutz (1998: 4-5), for example, cautioned against a posteriori descriptions of newness and pointed out that historical analysis often exposes the arbitrariness of the application of the term ‘new’ to a social phenomenon such as changing migration. Nevertheless, they seem to have been broadly happy with the appellation ‘new’, and theirs is not the only book on European migration to include this word in its title (King, 1993b; Thränhardt, 1996). This diversification and (albeit contested) newness of migratory forms encourages both the reassertion of some basic tenets of migration study, and opens up the potential, indeed the necessity, of new methodological approaches. Firstly, I reiterate my earlier plea for an integrated interdisciplinary approach which also recognises paradigmatic plurality and the value of mixed methodologies – combining, for instance, economic analysis, class analysis, studies of ethnicity and culture, and attempts to capture the richness of the human experience of migration. Secondly, the need for comparative analysis remains paramount if studies of migration are to rise above the ideographic. Comparisons can be between migratory groups (in the same country), or across countries (comparing similar or contrasting migratory groups), or across time. Thirdly, we need to recognise what I would call the double embeddedness of migration; at the individual scale, migration must be embedded in a migrant’s life-course (and in some cases of the lifecourse of the family, even across generations); and at the macro scale, the study of migration must be embedded in the societies and social processes of both the countries/places of origin and of destination. Fourthly, it has to be acknowledged that many of the new forms of migration/mobility surveyed or mentioned in this paper are inadequately captured by statistics, if at all. There is a tendency for migration not to be documented if it is not seen as problematic. Hence less and less reliance can be placed on data sources such as Eurostat or the OECD’s SOPEMI database for measuring human spatial mobility in Europe. More reliance will need to be put on primary research surveys carried out on the new migratory forms. As well as new data-frames, new terms and metaphors are required to describe the new mobility types which challenge the binary polarisation of origin and destination and the semi-permanence of the common notion of migration. Regarding new metaphors of migration, I am much attracted by the notion put forward by Ribas Mateos (2001) of the ‘Mediterranean caravanserai’ – a common space for migrant groups and flows where they can arrive, stay a

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while, and then move on to other destinations, perhaps returning for a later staging stay prior to other moves. To borrow a current EU mobility term, migrants become stagiaires, interposing migrations and journeys with periods spent sojourning and working in a variety of destinations. In his book Sociology beyond Societies, John Urry (2000) goes much further: for him, mobility is the metaphor of contemporary global society. He goes the whole globalisation hog by concentrating his entire ‘post-society’ analysis on migration, mobility and interfaces, setting aside social structures and processes. Life is a trip engaged on by contemporary, capitalist nomads moving through fluid, deterritorialised spaces; the place-specific metaphors are spaces of movement, pausing and meeting – the hotel lobby, the motel, the airport transit lounge (Urry, 2000: 26-32). Urry would certainly agree with Berger’s (1984) statement that migration is the quintessential experience of our time, even more so at the dawn of the new millennium. But we should be careful not to be carried away by such hyperbole. The shrinking of a borderless Europe is the privilege of a relatively small section of European society – perhaps above all those lucky academics who are amongst the greatest beneficiaries of this travelling, networking, conferencing, migration culture as they move about their spatially extensive but socially restricted ‘small world’ (Lodge, 1983). Of course a globalised Europe is far from a borderless utopia, as any Albanian or Moroccan migrant will affirm (Urry, 2000: 13, 22). Throughout this paper we have seen how the traditional binaries of migration study have been bridged and broken up by new flexible and evolving mobility patterns. How to handle, for instance, crossborder shuttle migration (is it really migration?); or how to categorise migrations driven by poverty as voluntary or involuntary; or how to unravel the space-time configurations of long-stay tourism, foreign second-home ownership, residence abroad and expatriacy? We have also seen how legal versus illegal is a particularly blurred dichotomy of migrant reality. Illegality seems to be constructed in an illogical (but perhaps also cynical) way by host societies which seem willing to exploit cheap migrant labour (and even be structurally dependent upon it) yet at the same time to deny the legal and civic existence of migrants. In this way, migration into Europe has become more and more of a global business (cf. Salt and Stein, 1997) which has its own set of private market mechanisms – competition, prices, agents, brokers, buyers and sellers of migrants and migration services. Moreover, there are other, less often recognised migration dichotomies than those discussed and deconstructed in this paper.

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Migrations can be spectacular or mundane, or, as noted a little earlier, regarded as problematic or non-problematic. By and large, the mundane, unproblematic forms of movement are left unrecorded and often unstudied. The spectacular, problematic ones get all the attention, although here it must be stressed that the nature of the ‘spectacle’ is often exaggerated and distorted by its media portrayal and politicisation. Even the notions of ‘home’ and ‘away’ or ‘abroad’ have become blurred. Members of transnational communities may feel ’at home’ in two or more places (or not feel at home anywhere). Furthermore, one can be ‘homeless at home’, as evidenced by Jansen’s (1998) narratives of post-Yugoslav identities; or one can be ‘transnational at home’, without ever having migrated, as Golbert (2001) demonstrates in her study of Ukrainian Jews. These new, more diverse and flexible varieties of mobility/migration pose obvious challenges for migration policy, especially within the mind-set of ‘Fortress Europe’, and for attitudes towards regulation, governance and citizenship (Pugliese, 1995; Geddes, 2000). The issue is further complicated by the fact that, in contrast to earlier generations of migrants (for example the European ‘guestworkers’ of the 1960s who were functionally and sociologically rather homogeneous and whose migration was highly regulated), many national migration flows into Europe nowadays are mixed flows made up of refugees, economic migrants, people with high skills and those with no skills. Moreover, many migrants change categories in order to maximise the success of their migration project, or they may move between destinations for the same reason. All these facets of the contemporary map of European migration sit uneasily with regulatory regimes of migration management and control. National bodies regulate contiguous space, whereas migrations function in network space. States want to ‘sedentarise’ and ‘integrate’ migrants (or certain accepted categories of them), but mobile people with multiple place affiliations and hybrid or cosmopolitan identities have no wish to fit in to the ideology of one national identity. Meanwhile, all around Europe there seems to be a constantly shifting discourse as to the desirability of migration, now very much related to economic, labour force and demographic projections for the next few decades (see, for instance, Visco, 2000). Finally, in stressing the importance of the new migratory circumstances of a post-industrial, post-modern Europe, I draw attention again to movements motivated above all by non-economic, or only partly economic, considerations – those linked to life-cycle such as student and retirement migrations, both of which have potential

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for future expansion. Within the same vein, the migration of children has scarcely been studied, at least from the child’s perspective (Dobson and Stillwell, 2000). Quite rightly, women have become an important new focus for migration research in Europe, recognising their central role in the migration process and as cultural agents in the structuring of ethnic communities and their relation with host societies. On this, as on so many other topics in the unfolding map of new migrations, much still needs to be done. These are exciting times to be a migration researcher in Europe!

Acknowledgements This paper is a revised version of a keynote address to the conference on ‘Strangers and Citizens: Challenges for European Governance, Identity, Citizenship’, University of Dundee, 17-19 March 2001. Earlier versions were presented and discussed at the conference on ‘Old Differences and New Similarities: American and European Immigration in Comparative Perspective’ (Italian Academy, Columbia University, New York, 12-13 November 1999) and at ‘New Patterns, New Theories: A Conference on International Migration’ (Nottingham Trent University, 11-13 September 2000). I thank contributors to the discussions following the presentation of the paper at these three fora, and also the many postgraduate students in Migration Studies at the University of Sussex for their stimulating conversations – Clara Guillo, Nick Mai, Enric Ruiz-Gelices and Chris Whitwell will all recognise their own individual inputs somewhere in the text.

Notes 1 Curiously, each of these evolved in ways somewhat different to those originally expected and defined by the terminology: for instance ‘settler migrations’ involved a lot of unanticipated (and unrecorded) return, and ‘guestworkers’ generally ended up by staying and transforming themselves into more or less settled ethnic communities (King, 2000). 2 I nominate these examples of particular nationalities because recent work on these migrant groups in Europe has demonstrated that they often have high levels of education and professional expertise which, by and large, they are compelled to leave behind when they take up what are (for them) much more remunerative jobs as cleaners, building labourers, streethawkers or farm workers in destination countries such as France, Italy or Greece: see,

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3

4

5 6

7

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for example, Chell (1997); Knights (1996); Lazaridis and Wickens (1999); Riccio (2001). Whilst experiences and reactions differ between and amongst the various migrant nationalities, some are able to draw strength from their own cultural values and self-knowledge of their own multilingualism and cosmopolitan experiences – see, for instance, Riccio (2001) and Zinn (1994) on the Senegalese in Italy. See, for instance, a number of recent books which attempt an interdisciplinary analysis of the general field of international migration: Brettell and Hollifield (2000), Faist (2000), Hammar et al. (1997), and Papastergiadis (2000). Although it is also true, as Cohen (1995: 5) points out, that some of the early pioneering studies of migration as a generic process sought to minimise or overlook this distinction (cf. Lee, 1966; Petersen, 1958; Ravenstein, 1885, 1889; Zelinsky, 1971). Except, perhaps, after death. The burial place of migrants has particular symbolic meaning, the implications of which have scarcely been considered by researchers. The term ‘migrant shopping’ comes originally, I believe, from a workshop paper prepared by Robin Cohen (1997). Enlarging Cohen’s notion, the ‘shopping market’ for migrants functions in two directions. Firstly, individual countries shop for migrants within a global market in order to satisfy certain needs characterised by domestic labour supply shortfall. The UK, for instance, has recently recruited nurses from Spain and the Philippines. According to Cohen, the two countries which have perfected the system of ‘immigration shopping’ are Australia and Canada. They have structurally linked their economic development, manpower and immigration departments and are intent on finding selected migrants to fill slots in their labour market, including business entrepreneurs who bring investment and create new wealth and jobs, and skilled labour migrants for the labour-short IT sector. The second expression of the migrant shopping market is where individual migrants shop around for possibilities and opportunities in different countries, often moving on when better economic or social openings become available in another country. Andall (1999) presents a well-worked case of this type of migrant shopping in her study of Cape Verdean women in Europe, whilst Guiraudon (2000) tackles the issue of ‘venue shopping’ on the part of asylum-seekers, also in the European context. To be more precise, the target proposed by the then European Commission in 1987 was that, by 1992, a tenth of EU graduates would have spent at least three months of their higher education in another country. By 1992 the achieved figure was 4% rather than 10% (Adia et al., 1994: 2, 39). Although the 10% objective was reaffirmed in 1997, this was accompanied by a statement that its achievement would be unlikely, due above all to financial pressures on students (Jallade et al., 1997). Meanwhile, the total European population of students has grown considerably. At a recent Erasmus conference in Spain, the Italian philosopher and semiologist Umberto Eco said that the main benefits of the EU’s Erasmus programme were as much sexual as cultural. According to Eco, student exchanges and bi- and multi-lingualism encouraged mixed marriages and relationships across Europe’s national frontiers. See report in Times Higher Education Supplement, 6 July 2001.

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9 This experience of holidaying in the region prior to the migration upon retirement was less important in the other two southern European destinations we surveyed, Malta and Tuscany. Here, career links, family ties and military service were common additional factors (King et al., 2000: 94-5).

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The constitution of a European immigration policy domain: a political sociology approach Virginie Guiraudon1 *

This article by political scientist Virginie Guiraudon was awarded the prize for 2001’s best European Union Studies Association conference paper. Combining the insights of James March and Johan Olsen’s Garbage Can Model with a sociological approach focused on power competition between actors, it explains the incomplete and complex constitution of the European immigration policy domain. Guiraudon is one of the first scholars to demonstrate so brilliantly that the melding of policy studies and political sociology can be fruitful. She helps make sense of the gradual Europeanisation of immigration, asylum and anti-discrimination policy. What’s more, Guiraudon’s work seeks to overcome shortcomings of the simple legal approach long dominant in European Union studies. *EDITOR’S NOTE An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper to the 2001 EUSA conference and was awarded the prize for the best 2001 EUSA conference paper. The prize selection committee (Dorothee Heisenberg, James Hollifield, George Ross) noted that Guiraudon’s paper ‘captures the complexity of contemporary EU policy formation in the immigration area ... [and] is remarkable for its recognition and mastery of different streams of policy-making over time. It foregrounds real EU politics in an unstable, constantly changing set of institutional arenas without imposing artificial social science parsimony. Reading the paper we enter the EU as it is, not as we would like it to be in our a priori models. Guiraudon’s refreshing theoretical quest instead goes toward the sociology of organizations, borrowing from March and Olson’s “garbage can” approach.’

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While ‘first generation’ European Community (EC) policies such as the common agricultural policy are under fire, new policy domains are emerging in the European Union (EU) framework. At the 1999 Tampere summit, EU leaders declared that the development of a comprehensive immigration and asylum policy was a top priority and the EU’s next large-scale enterprise after the single market and European monetary union (EMU).2 Three years later, the June 2002 Seville summit was still largely dedicated to immigration as European leaders invoked populist electoral breakthroughs in various European elections to step up the ‘fight against illegal migration’. The official narratives behind the development of this common policy have taken two forms. Before 1992, the predominant discourse within the ‘Schengen laboratory’ and the ‘ad hoc immigration group’ was that free movement within the EC required compensatory measures at the external borders lest Europe become a ‘sieve’. This political version of the ‘spillover’ theory of integration was largely replaced in the 1990s by a more securitarian perspective (Bigo 1996), as the number of asylum-seekers and persons displaced by war rose. ‘Asylum shopping’ and ‘immigration risks’ were now common ‘problems’ that could best be dealt with through co-ordination. The view here resembles liberal intergovernmentalism, which poses that major member states co-operate to upgrade common interests and reduce transaction costs. The reconstruction of the rationale behind the rise of immigration on the political agenda masks the complexity and incompleteness of current EU-level policies and considers them to be an inevitable solution to a commonly defined problem. They postulate a rationality long criticized when analysing national policy processes. Among them, March and Olsen (1989) focused on situations of organized anarchy whereby the elements of decision-making are thrown into the process as they appear as in a ‘garbage can’. The elaboration of an EU immigration policy presents similarities with their model. My main claim is that, regarding both immigrant and migration control policy, only one side of the debate ‘venue shopped’ at the international level to pursue their own ends, primarily to escape domestic adversaries. In the case of migration control, bureaucrats sitting in interior ministries sought to regain the discretion taken away by courts and the leeway lost to inter-ministerial arbitrage. Regarding immigrant policy, the domestic challenge came from electoral politics that forestalled policy change and innovation. The migration policy domain cannot be understood as the bargaining outcome among states with a coherent or aggregated set of preferences on these issues. Instead, only one ‘camp’ in the national policy field went trans-

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national, and this article provides an account of the ways they did so. It thus examines the dynamics of the constitution of this policy domain to better apprehend its timing, form and content. After setting out the analytical framework that focuses on power struggles among groups seeking legitimacy (I), I turn to the main chapters of the story so far: the bureaucratic rivalry that led to Title IV of the EU Treaty and the incorporation of Schengen via protocol at Amsterdam which sets the frame for a common immigration and asylum policy (II); the rivalry of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that carved out a space for EU policy in the area of migrant incorporation, which resulted in Article 13 on anti-discrimination and a ‘race directive’ in 2000 (III); and, finally, the parallel activities of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the Commission Trade directorate in the area of freedom of services that affect migration flows within and into the EU.

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I. Theoretical and contextual premises The story of the rise of immigration on the EU policy agenda is that of governmental and non-governmental actors arriving on the European scene to escape domestic constraints and open up new spaces for action. In this motley crew, we find law and order officials from Interior, Justice and Foreign Affairs ministries, international NGOs, activists and Commission fonctionnaires from different directorates. Although each came to believe that there should be a European immigration policy, they exploited different policy venues and frames resulting in a set of policy instruments involving varying degrees of supranationalization and distinct decision-making rules. These groupings are not monoliths. National and EU bureaucrats, NGOs compete among their own kind as much as they fight among themselves in a struggle for legitimacy and autonomy. In this respect, the Bourdieusian notion of ‘field’ (Bourdieu 1981) is helpful since it focuses on the power struggles within each group of actors (see also Favell 2000). This actor-oriented approach generates several research questions: why did certain groups decide to ‘go transnational’? Who were they competing with at the national and transnational level? Why did certain groups gain a monopoly of expertise in the European sphere? What policy venues and frames did they exploit? What opportunities could they seize upon (allies in EU institutions or member states, actors in other policy areas, treaty revisions, changes in the global economic or strategic context)? The empirical study of these mobili-

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actor-oriented research questions

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zation strategies explains the particular timing, form and content of EU policies that affect both migration flows and the conditions of immigrant minorities in Europe. In other words, our approach should be able to explain: • when international co-operation started and when competence was shifted to the EU (timing); • why certain rules and procedures for EU decision-making were adopted (form); • why a particular policy toolbox was adopted (content). public policy insights

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The insights of public policy studies can be fruitfully combined with that of political sociology to grasp the development of a European policy domain.3 March and Olsen suggest that, although the choices made by the various selfinterested actors can be said to be rational from their perspective, one should not reconstruct a non-linear policy process as inevitable. Contingencies and reversals closed certain paths and cleared others along the way. The ‘garbage can’ model underlines that interests, institutions, ideas, problems and solutions appear in the process in no preordained sequence as ‘exogenous streams flowing through a system’ (Olsen 2001: 191),4 yet, as we will see, the order in which each element appears has a bearing on the eventual outcome.5 I build upon the public policy agenda-setting literature, including John Kingdon’s work (1995) which was directly influenced by the garbage can model and Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones’s concept of policy frames and venues (1993). If a solution is defined before a problem is identified, issue framing will be crucial to reconstitute a ‘causal story’ (Stone 1989). Similarly, the success of a particular frame will depend upon windows of opportunities. This implies that, once actors have decided to shift their strategies to a European policy venue, their ability to do so will depend on the availability of relevant frames and their seizing of opportunities. In methodological terms, I have consequently favoured a genealogical approach that starts before the rise of immigration on the European agenda. To capture the cross-national and cross-sectoral dynamics of EU policy-making, I chose a comparative approach. I focused on immigration politics in three founding members of Schengen (France, Germany and the Netherlands) since the 1970s to apprehend the relative position and constraints of national migration policy players before and during the start of European co-operation. To understand the choices and the fate of the various groups that mobilized transnationally and that of EU institutional actors, I interviewed the national civil servants in charge of immigration issues in

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international forums and also conducted research in Brussels among NGOs and EU institutional actors. Before analysing the scope of EU immigration policy, the contours of national policy-making in this area should be drawn. Migration as a policy issue was never confined to a single ministry since it had implications for labour, economics, foreign affairs, social affairs and internal affairs (etc.). In federal systems, the division of labour is even more complex. There is no tradition in Europe of ‘immigration ministries’ as there is for agriculture or defence. Immigration is a transversal issue where cross-sectoral conflicts often arise. Crossnational convergence was significant in the 1990s, yet there remain different models of incorporation, different priorities in migration control based on previous colonial and labour market histories or geopolitical position. Therefore, for immigration scholars, the question regarding the policy sectors and the national models and priorities that prevail in the European sphere is a fascinating one. Not all sectoral and national interests were weighed in the policy process and not all actors were deemed legitimate to set the agenda. The shift of competence to the EU greatly narrowed the scope of migration-related policies. With regard to migration control, the European Economic Community (EEC) was limited by the treaty to the free movement of EC workers, later EU citizens, although the ECJ has extended some aspects of free movement to the families of Community nationals and to citizens of countries that have signed association treaties with the EC such as Turkey. One of the possible routes that an EU policy could still take but has not, in spite of a 1997 Commission proposal6 is to extend free movement to resident thirdcountry nationals. Instead, migration management in the EU context is focused on preventing unwanted migration, through visa policy and carrier sanctions, the establishment of buffer zones on the east of Europe, the constitution of a database of inadmissible aliens (the Schengen Information System) and of asylum-seekers’ fingerprints (EURODAC). European asylum policies aim at preventing migration with accelerated procedures for examining asylum requests, a common definition of a refugee, the notion of ‘safe third country’ and the 1990 Dublin Convention which organized a system to determine which contracting party is responsible for examining an asylum request. Regarding immigrant policy at the EU level, it has taken two forms. First, the Commission funds projects for the integration of workers and anti-racism, or gives grants to cities and regions that target initiatives at ethnic minorities. Second, in the Amsterdam

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Treaty, an article on anti-discrimination has been added and two directives have since been approved: one covers all forms of discrimination in employment, and the other counter-discriminations on the grounds of race and ethnic origin in many spheres.7 To understand why these particular outcomes and not others such as the extension of free movement or EU citizenship to third-country nationals can be observed, I now turn to the history of EU mobilization around migration, asylum and anti-discrimination.

II. Immigration and asylum: bureaucratic rivalry and security frames

law and order

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‘When policemen replace diplomats’: the emergence of intergovernmental co-operation on migration control ‘Quand les policiers succedent aux diplomates’: the title of this French Senate report (Turk 1998) sums up in a nutshell the increasing involvement of law and order personnel at the European level since the early 1980s and, among them, civil servants in charge of migration management. Migration control experts took advantage of new organizational models: the transgovernmental working groups on security-related issues such as the 1970s Trevi group. These groupings with varied membership were flexible, informal and secretive. This built trust among officials who set the agenda of transgovernmental co-operation by emphasizing the kind of technical solutions that required their expertise. They became inevitable interlocutors at the first negotiation stage, that of the Schengen Implementation Agreement (SIA). While the 1985 Schengen agreement only contained three articles on immigration, the issue came to dominate the discussion of the four Schengen groups in charge of the SIA. During the 1985-90 period when the SIA was drafted, inter-ministerial quarrels in the founding Schengen countries flourished. Michel Portal at the French Ministry of Interior recalls that ‘the inter-ministerial conflicts were and still are considerable, terrible, especially when the political leaders totally lost interest’.8 Vendelin Hreblay, a negotiator from the French police, admits that Foreign Affairs ministries – and in Germany the Chancellery – were progressively ousted by Justice and Interior ministries (1998: 28).9 Given that an international agreement was being negotiated and that Foreign Affairs ministries deliver visas through consulates abroad (visa policy being a cornerstone of European co-operation on remote border control), there was no a priori reason to expect a

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monopoly of Interior and Justice personnel. Notwithstanding, their domination accounts for the security-oriented content of the SIA and subsequent decisions. It also explains the emphasis on technical issues, border control and surveillance technologies such as the Schengen Information System. Migration control bureaucrats went transnational at that particular moment because they had seen their action increasingly constrained in the early 1980s (Guiraudon 2000a). First, landmark court decisions in the main European receiving countries that date from the late 1970s had circumscribed administrative discretion. They established in particular the right to normal family life and to secure residence for long-term residents. In effect, governments could no longer prevent family reunification, diminish the ‘stock’ of legal residents except by financial incentives as the new Kohl government did in 1983, and certain categories of foreigners could no longer be expelled. This period also saw the first major clashes between agencies in charge of the integration of settled foreigners and those in charge of migration control. The incentive to seek new policy venues sheltered from national legal constraints and conflicting policy goals thus dates from the beginning of the 1980s (see Guiraudon 2000c on this case of ‘venue shopping’). This explains the timing of transgovernmental co-operation and its character: an emphasis on non-binding decisions and secretive arrangements. Rather than creating an ‘international regime’, i.e. a constraining set of rules with monitoring mechanisms (Ruggie 1982), national civil servants sought to avoid domestic legal constraints and scrutiny. In 1990, only some elements of March and Olsen’s ‘garbage can’ were to be found in the migration policy domain at the European level. ‘Solutions’ had been devised before ‘problems’ had been defined. The solution was police cooperation and reinforced controls. The problem that these means were meant to address soon became apparent after the end of the Cold War in the form of an influx of asylum-seekers in Germany and many emotional debates over immigration in other core member states, largely covered in the media which prophesized ‘tides’ of ‘bogus refugees’. International migration was also added to the list of transnational phenomena considered by a plethora of experts as the ‘new threats’ which replaced Cold War ideology: Islamic fundamentalism, global mafias and terrorism (Huysmans 2000). While the 1980s had seen the emergence of a particular group of policy actors seeking to further their interests in transgovermental forums on migration and asylum, ideas and institutions were still in their infancy. The ideas that framed intergovernmental co-operation

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solution invented before problem defined

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hinged on linking migration and crime and considering that they constituted the dark side of ‘globalization’ requiring a supranational response. The lack of an alternative policy frame can be attributed not only to the end of the Cold War security paradigm but also to economic slump and high unemployment, which demobilized business interests, which traditionally lobby for openness. These conjectural elements should not be neglected in understanding why migration became a ‘security’ (as opposed to a labour market) issue in the 1990s. The institutional framework set up at the EU level with the creation of a Third Pillar on Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) confirmed that European cooperation allowed Justice and Interior personnel to regain a certain margin of manoeuvre and can be described as flexible multilateralism. One full group (GDl) of the K4 committee of the Third Pillar was dedicated to asylum, visa and migration yet the framework required unanimous decisions by the Council and remained outside the community legal order, thereby excluding the ECJ and the European Parliament. The Commission did not have a right of initiative and thus could not play its agenda-setting ‘entrepreneurial’ role. Although a small task force was set up within the General Secretariat of the Commission to liaise with the Council on JHA migration discussions, they did not come from the units that had always defended the rights of thirdcountry nationals (the Employment and Social Affairs and the Internal Market Directorate-Generals (DGs)), which task force personnel considered ‘oldfashioned’ and ‘maximalist’. According to Wenceslas de Lobkowicz of the task force, they wanted to leave the field to the discretion of member states and avoid debates over sovereignty (1994). Jean-Louis de Brouwer, now head of the Commission unit ‘External Borders, Immigration and Asylum’, also points out that ‘one need[ed] to talk to the big players, the ministers of Interior of the member states who usually are political heavyweights in their respective governments’. 10 From Maastricht to Amsterdam, the JHA Council only agreed on one joint position on the common definition of a refugee and on five legally binding joint actions, for instance, on school travel for thirdcountry national children and airport transit procedures. The lack of formal agreements has been attributed to the complicated decisionmaking structure of the Third Pillar. Yet, it is the same large member states (France, Germany) most concerned with immigration that stalled the process by insisting on labyrinthine procedures and unanimous voting, thus undermining Ugur’s intergovernmentalist account of the upgrading of common interests in the face of massive

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asylum requests (1995). The only operative agreements, the 1990 Dublin and Schengen agreements, were in fact adopted outside the EU framework and their implementation delayed respectively until 1997 and 1995. Moreover, a number of parallel forums on migration and asylum were set up during this period, making the ‘Third Pillar’ one of many other venues: among them and aside from the Schengen executive committee, Intergovernmental Consultations on Asylum, Refugees and Migration Policies, the Vienna Club (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Italy), the Vienna Group and Budapest process, the Central European initiative, the Ad Hoc Committee of Experts for Identity Documents and the Movement of Persons, the Council of Europe Committee of Experts on the Legal Aspects of Territorial Asylum, Refugees, and Stateless People, the UN Commission on Crime Prevention, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The institutions of the EC were not considered as the legitimate set of institutions to develop common policies, thus contradicting the neo-functionalist account of a spillover of the creation of the EC single market. 11

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The diplomats strike back? Amsterdam and beyond The decisions to shift co-operation on migration into the Community framework and incorporate Schengen via protocol during the last stage of the Amsterdam negotiations came as a surprise. The Commission negotiating team headed by Michel Petite won a battle if not the war in Amsterdam. Interior officials were taken aback since the Amsterdam they themselves were unclear about the content of the Schengen ac- Treaty quis, 3,000 pages of various legal standing. They did not want the acquis published and given a legal character. The Treaty actually came into force in May 1999 before member states had agreed on its content and its incorporation. To understand the Amsterdam outcome, one must remember that ministries of Foreign Affairs negotiate treaty revisions in the EU. They were not concerned with the consequences of the Schengen protocol, a task that their colleagues sitting in Interior and Justice ministries would have to undertake.12 Having seen their negotiating role diminished during the Schengen process, Foreign Affairs were keen to rein in transgovernmental processes dominated by law and order civil servants which had multiplied and run amok. By neglecting the Third Pillar and preferring the Schengen group, the bureaucrats in the Schengen founding member states had unwittingly contributed to that outcome. They could not count on the support of later Schengen members such as Italy or Greece who had not been treated

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as equal partners. Among the three founding Schengen members studied, only the Dutch favoured a ‘communitarization’ of asylum and immigration. Given that the interests of the larger member states (France and Germany) were better preserved in a flexible multilateral setting such as Schengen, the Dutch preference for the inclusion of Community actors and a more constraining framework should not be surprising. Even less so given that the French in particular had bullied the Dutch in the Schengen context over drugs policy. Notwithstanding, the German and French delegations successfully lobbied for provisions that limited the role of EC institutions in the new Title IV of the Amsterdam Treaty on the progressive establishment of an ‘area of freedom, security and justice’. The Germans obtained unanimous voting in the Council of Ministers and, under French pressure, the role of the ECJ was circumscribed. The application of preliminary rulings to the ECJ in areas covered by Title IV is restricted since only courts of last instance will be able to use Article 177. Furthermore, the Court of Justice cannot rule on national measures adopted in relation to the crossing of borders to safeguard internal security, and its rulings ‘shall not apply to judgments of courts or tribunals of the Member States which have become res judicata’. The defended position reflects the original motivation of intergovernmental co-operation, which was to avoid judicial scrutiny that had undermined migration control policy at the domestic level. 13 It remains puzzling that the state most concerned with the issue (Germany) did not wish to shift competence to the Community or ‘lock in’ commitments, and lobbied for unanimity, given that their priority was refugee ‘burdensharing’.14 We know that, during negotiations, like-minded officials and national governments do not share the same ‘preferences’ (Lord and Winn 2000) and here it seems that the German Interior officials’ reluctance to depart from a Schengen model of secretive inter-bureaucratic co-operation led to a sub-optimal outcome for Germany, the main recipient of asylumseekers and displaced persons. Yet this only points to the lack of domestic co-ordination on the issue in the German case. This is why the Interior-Foreign Affairs Chancellery rivalry that dated from the Schengen negotiations still mattered at Amsterdam. It led to what Andrew Moravcsik has termed an ‘aggregation failure’ whereby the emergence of a coherent national position out of disparate demands is blocked, a situation that, in his view, allows supranational entrepreneurs to play the role of ‘two-level network manager’ (1999: 283): here the rejoicing Michel Petite who could claim victory for the policy shift from the Third to the First Pillar, although with limitations on the role of EC institutions.

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Amsterdam has also not solved the question of ‘opt-outs’. Amsterdam consecrates the idea of a Europe à la carte. The UK, Northern Ireland and, consequently, the Republic of Ireland have opted out of the new area of freedom, security and justice. Denmark, albeit a member of Schengen, is not bound by the new title and cooperates only on visa policy – a legal nightmare since it requires the signing of a separate Danish-EU treaty every time a decision is taken. Since Amsterdam, developments suggest that, given the rules of the game, the logic of the policy process has not drastically changed. The Commission 2000 Communication on a community immigration policy resubmitted texts that had been discussed under the Third Pillar framework.15 It faces competition from member states that have a right of co-initiative. Typically, the country that holds the Presidency of the Union uses this platform to push its pet projects to satisfy its domestic electoral interests. Law enforcement measures such as those proposed by the French Presidency in the fall of 2000 have been more successful than those emphasizing migrants’ rights. The French proposals on carrier sanctions, expulsion of third-country nationals or the fight against smuggling were adopted in May 2001 under the Swedish Presidency, while the latter had to accept a much watered down version of its own text on temporary protection status to ensure passage. What has been confirmed is the importance of migration in the foreign relations of the EU. For instance, all concerned parties agree that the JHA acquis has gone up the agenda in the accession negotiations in which Justice and Interior ministers take a large part (Lavenex 2001). Ten per cent of PHARE funding (130.7 million Euros in 2000) goes to JHA issues, half of which concern border issues (House of Lords Select Committee on European Union 2000, part 3, p. 4). ‘Preventing migration at the source’ has become an EU mantra.16 It has resulted in an number of initiatives including the Dutchinspired cross-pillar High-Level Working Group (HLWG) set up in December 1998. The latter drew up action plans for the six main countries of origin of unwanted migrants in Europe to assess, inter alia, the possibility of readmission agreements, ‘safe returns’ and ‘transit zones’. The HLWG’s 1999 report stressed the ‘general recognition that a cross-pillar and comprehensive approach [was] needed’ and stated that ‘the expertise of the Member States needs to be made available in various policy fields’.17 The group’s ‘trans-pillar’ approach seemed to herald a new era when the prevailing ‘prevention-by-policing’ policies would be accompanied by policies that addressed the root causes of migration. Yet, the country reports simply restated the six ‘action points’ set out by the JHA K4 Committee in

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March 1998 regarding immigration from Iraq in which Turkey was expected to prevent Iraqis from arriving in the EU. Thus, although diplomats at Amsterdam took their revenge on Interior and Justice personnel, the latter still dominate and are becoming more involved in diplomatic forums. For instance, in February 2000, during the negotiations of the revision of the fourth Lome Convention between the EU 15 and seventy one Mexican, Caribbean and Pacific countries, Interior ministers insisted that a clause of readmission of illegal migrants be included in the final text at the risk of blocking the agreement. In sum, transgovernmental co-operation allowed law and order officials to gain autonomy and devise policies without accommodating judges or conflicting sectoral interests. They successfully defined a frame that equated migration with transnational security threats and favoured intergovernmental secretive forums. Over time, they were perhaps too successful and, after Amsterdam, they have to cooperate with EU institutions and publish their decisions. They do remain key players.

III. Pro-migrant forces go transnational too: NGO rivalry and the social exclusion paradigm

pro-migrant transnational organizations

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In 1985, when the first Schengen agreement was signed, the Commission issued new guidelines on migration (CEC 1985) and argued that European integration entailed a better access to rights for foreign residents. In July, it adopted a Decision setting up a procedure for prior consultation of new policy in this area. Five member states contested the move and the ECJ annulled the Decision in 1987.18 The Commission’s competence was confined to the free movement of EU citizens. Yet, this did not deter the Commission unit that had been pushing for this change and pro-migrant transnational organizations such as the Churches’ Commission for Migrants from carving out a space for the defence of the rights of ethnic minorities in Europe. The unit (0.4) within the Commission Directorate for Employment and Social Affairs now called ‘Free Movement of Workers, Migrant Integration and Anti-racism’ was created in 1958 to handle issues related to free movement of labour and later handled many budget lines related to the integration of migrants and refugees and, since 1986, anti-racism.19 Annette Bosscher, the head of the unit until the late 1990s, and Giuseppe Callovi, who later moved to other directorates, firmly believed that European integration should go hand in hand with the integration of non-Europeans.

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Their unit has faced many challenges, given the thin treaty basis for its actions. Its ‘institutional activists’ (Ruzza 1999) had to find other bases for intervention. As Adrian Favell recalls:

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as a ‘political’ as opposed to ‘economic’ agenda began to differentiate itself in the Commission’s corridors, certain DGs less powerfully placed in the central drive towards EMU, seized on alternative European ‘public interest’ agendas, following the path pioneered by the highly active and progressive minded DG XI (Environment). (Favell 2000: 167)

Indeed the attitude of civil servants in the Employment and Social Affairs DG resembled the ‘purposeful opportunism’ (Cram 1997) found in other directorates whereby larger policy agendas are instrumentalized to increase their scope for action. A few individuals committed to a progressive agenda in fairly marginal parts of the Commission could become ‘policy entrepreneurs’ (Geddes 2000a, 2000b) precisely because their activities were sheltered from public scrutiny. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) who once headed the Frankfurt Bureau for Multicultural Affairs, has thus analysed the situation: ‘Europe is full of promises for the future because the Commission and the Parliament are not exposed to immediate electoral pressures.’20 Similarly, the successful initiatives in the area of immigrant policy concerned a few Commission insiders and small NGO structures that may have publicly decried the ‘democratic deficit’ yet practised top-down élite politics. The first opportunity before Maastricht was to build upon the notion of ‘European citizenship’ that was meant to herald a ‘people’s Europe’ and the end of the ‘democratic deficit’. To help mobilization on this agenda, the Commission sought to increase its legitimacy as a spokesperson for ‘civil society’ by engineering an official channel of interest representation. In 1991, the European Commission acting upon an initiative of the European Parliament founded the Migrants’ Forum that spoke for 130 migrant associations that held an annual general assembly. Yet, the Migrants’ Forum failed to find common ground (Kastoryano 1994; Geddes 1998).21 Turks and Moroccans vied for control of the organization, with the Moroccans eventually winning out and giving the organization a Francophone cast that set it apart from the largely Anglophone NGO world of Brussels. The Forum’s activists also had different conceptions of citizenship and cultures of contention depending on the nation states in which they had settled.

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In any case, using the concept of citizenship to further the rights of third–country nationals failed in 1992. The gap between EU and non-EU citizens widened when the Treaty on European Union granted special rights to EU citizens residing in other member states such as local voting rights. Both the Commission and the Brusselsbased NGO Migration Policy Group (MPG) refocused their agenda.22 They jumped on the bandwagon of the EU war on ‘social exclusion’ (Article 137 of the Treaty of Amsterdam). Commission documents insist that migrants and their descendants are prime victims of social exclusion and that NGOs know best how to fight it.23 Social exclusion encompasses a wide range of programmes and the MPG promptly responded to this signal by linking migrant integration in the 1996 Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) to this agenda rather than to the debates on European citizenship, which had focused the energies of the Migrants’ Forum (Geddes 2000b). Indeed, the ‘social exclusion’ frame benefited pre-existing transnational networks that could draw upon their credentials and expertise in the area of antidiscrimination.24 In fact, the Starting Line Group (SLG) founded in 1992 by academic and NGO legal experts and co-ordinated by the MPG to draft an anti-discrimination article for the pre-Amsterdam IGC included members from national anti-discrimination boards: the British Commission for Racial Equality and the Dutch National Bureau against Racism. Citizenship or social exclusion, EU citizenship for third-country nationals or anti-discrimination policies? In the NGO battle for legitimacy, the SLG supported by the MPG clearly had the organizational structure, and the local and legal knowledge to successfully lobby for its anti-discrimination agenda while the Migrants’ Forum with its cumbersome structure remained focused on citizenship. Moreover, the SLG matched EU technocratic standards. The anti-discrimination clause project was reminiscent of Article 119 and the 1976 Equal Treatment Directive on gender equality in a very Euro-correct way. Leading up to the 1996 IGC, initiatives that showed a gentler, kinder Europe were welcome. The timing was ripe for the SLG initiative. With Commission officials, they were able to informally set the agenda at the 1996 IGC, thereby confirming accounts of Amsterdam negotiations that build upon Kingdon’s model, such as Mark Pollack’s (1999), and those that focus on the importance of ‘policy framing’, such as Mazey and Richardson’s (1997). Policy framing was key because, if the problem is defined as ‘social exclusion’, the range of solutions is wide. As Andrew Geddes has pointed out:

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it can be advantageous that the terms inclusion and cohesion are vague and their meanings unclear because it implies that the quest for inclusion is likely to be able to sustain itself in the long term and potentially be institutionalized at the European level. (Geddes 2000a: 224)

Like ‘sustainable development’, ‘social inclusion’ is an objective that one can hardly oppose. ‘Anti-discrimination’ for its part presented the advantage of not being solely targeted at migrants. Article 13 protects people with disability, the elderly and other groups – a plus given that measures specifically protecting migrants are a hard sell. Most member states that did not want to shift competence on immigrant policy to the EU level nevertheless did because they were led to believe that in fact the issue was social exclusion of a number of groups. The ambiguity of the ‘anti-discrimination’ frame also partly explains the rapid adoption of the so-called ‘race directive’ in June 2000 (directive 2000/ 43/EC) seven months after the Commission’s proposal – ‘a record for the adoption of a piece of Community law requiring substantial legislative changes at national level’ (Tyson 2001: 112). The directive also required a unanimous decision in the Council and had an inter-sectoral character that implied interministerial co-ordination making it a ‘least likely case’. The single factor most often mentioned by the Council Social Affairs working group interviewed in Brussels is Jorg Halder.25 France was most vocal at condemning the Austrian government for integrating the Freedom Party in February 2000. Ironically, their enthusiasm towards a directive that resembled Dutch or British tools for integrating ethnic minorities stemmed from an event, the success of a far-right leader who had praised the Waffen SS, that easily fitted the French conception of anti-racist measures as a means of fighting ideas inspired by Nazi Germany. In a classic ‘Baptist-bootlegger coalition’ situation, the German delegation was also extremely co-operative lest it be associated with the Austrians. The initial policy linkage between the anti-discrimination package and the Austrian far right ensured the passage of a directive. Just as law and order officials, NGOs expanded the realm of competence of the EU to include immigrant-related issues. Their agenda had more chances of succeeding through lobbying techniques sheltered from public scrutiny than at the national level where public opinion, media coverage and the mobilization of anti-immigrant parties made the advancement of migrant rights unlikely. Even in the Council, negotiations focused on reaching compromises on techni-

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cal issues and legal wording rather than on the normative underpinnings of immigrant policy and can be contrasted to the emotional partisan debates observed in many European countries. This closed venue of debate allowed policy change in favour of migrants that is arduous in open national venues.

IV Indirect policy effects: migration and freedom of services

Rush Portuguesa decision

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Beside conscious efforts to mobilize around migration at the European level, one must take into account decisions by EU institutions and transnational non-state actors that indirectly bear on migration flows to complete the complex and contradictory set of EU rules that affect migration within and into the EU. The ECJ has traditionally been concerned with extending its jurisdiction. The Court has had to strike a balance between expanding EC competence and remaining within the legitimate bounds of its sphere of duty (economic rights rather than people’s rights and EC citizens rather than non-EC citizens). Therefore, its jurisprudence on third-country nationals has not been based on human rights but on freedom of services or association treaty provisions. In the Rush Portuguesa decision of 27 March 1990 (C-113/89, ECR 1-1417), the ECJ reiterated that the provisions for the suppression of restrictions to the freedom to deliver services entailed that a company could move with its own staff. If the company employs third-country nationals, member states cannot refuse them entry to protect their labour market on the grounds that immigration from non-EU states is a matter of national sovereignty. The Court decision was in line with the drive towards the single market, which resulted in the 1993 liberalization of service provision. It stirred a controversy in Germany given the important number of posted workers in the construction industry denounced by trade unions as a form of ‘social dumping’. Indeed, no comprehensive supranational regulation has been passed on the social and wage conditions applicable to posted workers. Instead, a 1996 directive has allowed member states to apply a minimum level of national regulations to these posted workers and the Commission has proposed two directives to implement this derived right of third-country nationals (OJ 1999 C 67/9). Meanwhile, at the Trade Commission directorate, developments suggest that the mobility of personnel in the services sector will be extended at the global level and thus affect flows into the EU. Cooptation strategies are at work between the Trade Commission staff

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and business interests. One particular non-governmental forum supported by the Trade Commission is the European Services Forum (ESF), an official NGO in the Seattle EU delegation whose focus is to support the Commission’s viewpoint during the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) negotiations. At a conference of the ESF under the patronage of the Commission, Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy expressed this sentiment: ‘I particularly welcome the participation of ... NGOs. The key to the success of the ESF is that it is a forum, open to all stakeholders, including civil society.’26 Pascal Lamy has experience in setting up ‘partnerships’ that short-circuit member states since this was a key strategy of Jacques Delors when Lamy was his chef de cabinet (Ross 1995). Lamy’s reference to civil society is misleading. In fact, the ESE based at UNICE, the European employers’ federation, includes thirty-six European trade federations and fifty EU-based international companies in sectors such as banking, insurance, telecommunications, postal services, aviation, shipping, tourism, retail, legal services, accountancy, management consulting, architecture, engineering, IT services, publishing, audiovisual, energy and environmental services. Part of their agenda is lobbying against ‘barriers to the movement of people’ and in particular the ‘complex, cumbersome, and timeconsuming procedures to obtain work permits and visas’ (ESF 2000) and they favour a GATS visa or passport.27 The adversaries are clearly identified: the ESF managing director describes them as ‘the understandably defensive interests of WTO Member Countries’ immigration and labor market developments officials’ (Kerneis 2000). At an MPG meeting on this issue organized in Brussels in March 2001,28 immigration officials’ jaws dropped in silent disbelief when they heard multinational corporations proposing ‘their’ passport. The meeting also showed that strange bedfellows emerge at the European level. European pro-migrant NGOs are not used, as are their American counterparts, to engaging in client politics with business interests (on the US case, see Freeman 2001). Yet there seems to be a fast learning curve, which is fostered by the MPG’s ‘transatlantic dialogue’ with US think-tanks. Strategic alliances between NGOs and business interests are signs that some of the actors in our story are trying to co-ordinate their scripts to seize upon the opportunity of the new economic climate and the older free movement and neo-liberal agenda of European integration.

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Conclusion conflicting discourses

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The coexistence of conflicting discourses that do not speak to one another, competition among like-minded actors, diverse modes of decision-making (depending on their level of supranationalization), in a period of numerous and rapid ED constitutional changes explains the autocratic and contradictory character of law-making in EU immigration-related policies. Both in the case of migration and asylum and that of anti-discrimination policies at the EU level, we observe parallel dynamics. First, a group of actors vie to become the legitimate policy interlocutors against other similar groups: interior civil servants vs. their foreign affairs counterpart, MPG and the SLG vs. the Migrants’ Forum. Each group has a pre-formatted set of policy solutions based on their expertise: policing for the former, anti-discrimination for the latter. They succeeded by momentously seizing upon an emergent broader policy frame: immigration officials built upon the post-1989 new security agenda while NGOs joined calls for the fight against ‘social exclusion’ during the 1996 IGC. They were helped by their adversaries’ weaknesses or errors, respectively the lack of supervision of other key ministries whose attention was fixed on the fall of the Berlin Wall when Schengen was being negotiated, and the structural and chronic problems of the Migrants’ Forum. It is telling that initially there was little supervision of these experiments that grew on the margins of the core market-driven project of European integration. Our goal has been to account for the particular timing, form and content of the immigration policy domain. Our focus on the actors who prevailed and the interests that they represented explains the content and form of the European immigration policy domain. Immigration officials sought to avoid national judicial constraints and conflicting bureaucratic views that were experienced in the early 1980s. They consequently favoured a secretive intergovernmentalism where they could exclude other ministries and escape judicial monitoring. Similarly, they have privileged informal co-operation and ‘soft law’. Their own professional identity explains the bias towards control and policing. Pro-migrant groups knew that, as in a national context, the institutions most receptive to defending migrant interests are restricted venues of debate sheltered from electoral fallout such as social administrations and courts. They found European ‘functional equivalents’ in the Commission and the ECJ and have focused on legal solutions such as the inclusion of Article 13 in the Treaty. At the European level, small lobby-like structures are the most efficacious which explains the success of the Dutch-British

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activists and therefore the emphasis on anti-discrimination. Success only came once they could co-ordinate with Commission officials, who had first sought to build upon free movement to expand their competence and later had tried to foster a more representative assembly. The timing of the constitution of the immigration policy domain itself depends on the windows of opportunity constituted by the emergence of new frames, changes in the strategic or economic context, or constitutional openings such as IGCs or Schengen negotiation working groups. In this respect, this is not a straight ‘path- dependent’ account. Today’s winners may yet face challenges if the context changes or at the next constitutional moment. Notwithstanding, they have accumulated a legitimacy capital and the policy domain has been institutionalized in a way that cannot be easily undone. For instance, we have seen that the diplomats’ ‘revenge’ at Amsterdam has not altered the predominance of Interior and Justice interests in the management of EU migration policy. It cannot be denied that following 9/11 and the concert of European leaders’ calls for a European border police prior to the Seville summit, a security/restrictive take may prevail. For politicians, this is a convenient way of shifting blame and responsibility. Yet, few concrete decisions were taken at Seville and harmonization is slow, and EU measures have not resulted in a decrease in illegal immigration. In the end, this strategy may be as dangerous as ‘activating xenophobia’ at the national level. Populist parties, which are generally both anti-immigrant and anti-EU, will be further strengthened by the failure of European leaders to support more proactive immigration and integration policies.

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Notes 1 The author thanks Martin Schain and participants of the 2001 EUSA meeting who commented on an earlier version of this paper, Andrew Moravcsik for his incisive reading, as well as the two anonymous referees for their insightful suggestions. 2 Before 2004, the Council should unanimously adopt measures on asylum, refugees and displaced persons, on the absence of any controls on persons crossing internal borders and on external border control (including rules on visas for stays of less than three months), and on the free travel of thirdcountry nationals within the EU for short-term stays. After 2004, measures should be adopted with respect to refugee ‘burden-sharing’, and the harmonization of the conditions of entry and residence, standards for the issue of long-term visas and residence permits, or the right of residence for thirdcountry nationals wishing to stay in EU states other than their country of residence.

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3 For a fuller treatment of the application of political sociology to EU studies, see Guiraudon (2000b). 4 ‘The central idea of the garbage can models is the substitution of a temporal order for a consequential order’ (March and Olsen 1986: 17) and thus our research paid particular attention to temporal ordering. 5 Given the recent debate in the American Political Science Review on the ‘garbage can’ (see Bendor et al. 2001 and the reply by Olsen 2001), I clarify that my reference to Cohen et al.’s famed 1972 article respects the spirit of their work: the metaphor was not meant as ‘the’ theory but rather as ‘a’ model to ‘comprehend some features of decision-making ... to extend, rather than replace, understandings gained from other perspectives’ (March and Olsen 1986: 12). 6 Proposal for a Council Act establishing the convention on rules for the admission of third-country nationals to the member states. COM/97/0387 final - CNS 97/0227 [Doc 597PC0387]. 7 Respectively, Council Directive 2000/43/EC of 29 June 2000 [Official Journal L 180, 19/07/2000, pp. 22-6] and Council Directive 2000/78/EC 0(27 November 2000 [O. J. L 303, 02/1212000, pp. 16-22]. 8 Interview with Michel Portal, chef de bureau, Sous-Direction de la Circulation Transfrontiere et des Visas, Ministry of Interior, Paris, December 1994. Also interviews with M. Malwald, German Federal Ministry of Interior, Bonn, April 1995, with Jürgen Haberlandt, German Federal Ministry of Interior, Berlin, June 1995, and with Nicolas Franzen, Immigration and Naturalization Department, Ministry of Justice, The Hague, February 1995. The lack of political leadership was heightened by glasnost and Germany’s unwillingness to build a wall to its east. 9 Transport ministries had also signed the original 1985 agreement and later disappeared. 10 Interview, General Secretariat of the European Commission, Brussels, March 1999. 11 See Guiraudon (2000c) for a fuller analysis of alternative explanations. 12 Interview with Michel Petite, chief negotiator for the 1996 IGC, European Commission, Cambridge, MA, April 1999. 13 Stetter (2000) refers to these decisions as ‘principals’ seeking to prevent ‘agency loss’ when delegating authority. I would add that, once delegation had occurred against their views, migration bureaucrats did indeed seek to limit agency loss but that the rules and procedures adopted to do so seem to have been counterproductive given what he views as the motivation for shifting competence, which, again, was not the ex ante preferred option for French and German officials. 14 For a thorough test of alternative theories of EU burden-sharing in this area, see Thielemann (2002). 15 COM(2000) 757 final, 22/1112000. 16 COM(2000) 757 final, 22/11/2000, section 2.1 ‘partnership with countries of origin’. 17 Press release, ‘Final Report of the High-Level Working Group on Asylum and Migration’, 18/9/1999. 18 See 9 July 1987 decision in joint cases 281,283-5,287/85, Rec. 1987, 3023. 19 The Unit administers about 10 million ECUs for refugee integration, 6 million for migrants, and 7 million for anti-racism every year. A 1995 report

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assessing 200 of the 560 projects on migrant integration that DG V funded between 1991 and 1993 demonstrates that only 32 (16 per cent) were migrant-led (CEC 1995: 10). NGOs, churches, trade unions, etc., made up the rest of the beneficiaries. After 1995, Brussels-based NGOs that had submitted 2.6% of the proposals received 6.8% of the total funding – a clear success (CEC 1998). 20 Interview, Brussels, May 1995. 21 After several mismanagement crises, the Forum has been suspended. 22 The MPG staff acknowledged that supranational competencies that would affect diverse national concepts of citizenship or change nationality law were anathema ro member states (Hix and Niessen 1996). 23 See Guidelines on Preparatory Measures to Combat Social Exclusion (CEC 1998). 24 French or German national activists were interested in citizenship issues yet were rarely present among the personnel of pro-migrant Brussels NGOs. 25 Interviews in Brussels with Claire Aubin, Social Affairs attaché, French permanent delegation to the EU, 5 December 2001, Porfirio Silva, Social Affairs attache (in charge of presiding Social Affairs and Employment Council working group), Portuguese permanent delegation to the EU, 6 December 2001, John Kittmer, Social Affairs attaché, British permanent delegation to the EU, 6 December 2001. 26 Speech given at the conference ‘The GATS 2000 Negotiations: new opportunities of trade liberalization for all services sectors’, Hotel Sheraton Brussels Airport, Brussels (Zaventem), 27 November 2000. 27 The idea of a ‘GATS visa’ emerged in 1993 at the end of the Uruguay Round and is understood as a passport for different categories of natural persons permitted entry under the schedule of commitments at the horizontal and sectoral levels like Information and Communication Technologies (lCTs), business visitors, contract personnel. 28 Transatlantic Workshop on High Skilled Migration (Brussels, 5-6 March 2001).

References Baumgartner, Frank and Jones, Bryan (1993) Agendas and Imtability in American Politics, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bendor, Jonathan, Moe, Terry and Shotts, Kenneth (2001) ‘Recycling the garbage can: an assessment of the research program’, American Political Science Review 95(1): 169-90. Bigo, Didier (1996) Polices en réseaux. L’expérience européenne, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale de Sciences Politiques. Bourdieu, Pierre (1981) ‘La répresentation politique: éléments pour une théorie du champ politique’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 36/37: 3-24. CEC (Commission of the European Communities) (1985) Orientation pour une politique communautaire des migration, COM(85) 48 def. Brussels: CEC.

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CEC (Commission of the European Communities) (1995) Assistance Given to Migrant Association, Brussels: DG V. CEC (Commission of the European Communities) (1998) European Year Against Racism Directory of Projects, Brussels: DG V. Cohen, Michael, March, James and Olsen, Johan (1972) ‘A garbage can model of organizational choice’, Administrative Science Quarterly 17 (March): 1-25. Cram, Laura (1997) Policy-Making in the European Union: Conceptual Lemes and the Integration Process, London and New York: Routledge. European Services Forum (ESF) (2000) Second Position Paper on the Temporary Movement or Key Business Personnel, Brussels: ESF, 24 October. Available at www.esf.be Favell, Adrian (2000) ‘L’Européanisation ou l’émergence d’un nouveau “champ politique”: le cas de la politique d’immigration’, in Virginie Guiraudon (ed.), Sociologie de l’Europe: élites, mobilisation et configuration institutionnelles, special issue of Cultures et conflits 38(9): 153-85. Available at www.conflits.org Freeman, Gary (2001) ‘Client politics or populism? The politics of immigration reform in the United States’, in Virginie Guiraudon and Christian Joppke (eds), Controlling a New Migration World, London: Routledge, pp. 65-95. Geddes, Andrew (1998) ‘The representation of “migrants’ interests” in the European Union’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 24(4): 695-713. Geddes, Andrew (2000a) ‘Thin Europeanisation: the social rights of migrants in an integrating Europe’, in Michael Bommes and Andrew Geddes (eds), Immigration and Welfare. Challenging the Borders of the Welfare State, London: Routledge, pp. 209-26. Geddes, Andrew (2000b) ‘Lobbying for migrant inclusion in the European Union: new opportunities for transnational advocacy?’, Journal of European Public Policy 7(4): 632-49. Guiraudon, Virginie (2000a) Les politiques d’immigration en Europe. Allemagne, France, Pays-Bas, Paris: L’Harmattan. Guiraudon, Virginie (2000b) L’espace sociopolitique européen, un champ encore en friche?’, in Virginie Guiraudon (ed.), Sociologie de l’Europe: élites, mobilisations et configurations institutionnelles, special issue of Cultures et conflits 38(9): 7-37. Available at www. conflits.org Guiraudon, Virginie (2000c) ‘European integration and migration policy: vertical policymaking as venue shopping’, Journal of Common Market Studies 38(2): 249-69. Hix, Simon and Niessen, Jan (1996) Reconsidering European Migration Policies, Brussels: Churches’ Commission for Migrants in Europe.

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House of Lords Select Committee on European Union (2000) Seventeenth Report on Enlargement and EU External Frontier Controls, London: House of Lords, published 24 October. Hreblay, Vendelin (1998) Les accords de Schengen. Origine, fonctionnement, avenir, Brussels: Bruylant. Huysmans, Jef (2000) ‘The European Union and the securitization of migration’, Journal of Common Market Studies 38(5): 751-77. Kastoryano, Riva (1994) ‘Mobilisations des migrants en Europe: du national au transnational’, Revue européenne des migrations internationales 10(1): 169-81. Kerneis, Pascal (2000) ‘Letter to Pascal Lamy dated 8 November 2000’, Brussels: ESE Available at www.esf.be Kingdon, John (1995) Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, 2nd edn, New York: HarperCollins. Lavenex, Sandra (2001) ‘Migration and the EU’s new eastern border: between realism and liberalism’, Journal of European Public Policy 8(1): 24-42. Lobkowicz, Wenceslas de (1994) ‘Intergovernmental cooperation in the field of migration – from the Single European Act to Maastricht’ in Joerg Monar and Roger Morgan (eds) , The Third Pillar of the European Union: Cooperation in the Fields of Justice and Home Affairs, Brussels: European University Press, pp. 99-122. Lord, Christopher and Winn, Neil (2000) ‘Garbage cans or rational decision? Member governments, supranational actors and the shaping of the agenda for the IGC’, Current Politics and Economics of Europe 9(3): 237-56. March, James and Olsen, Johan (1986) ‘Garbage can models of decision making in organizations’, in James March and Roger Weissinger-Baylon (eds), Ambiguity and Command. Organizational Perspectives on Military Decision Making, Marshfield, MA: Pitman, pp. 11-35. March, James and Olsen, Johan (1989) Rediscovering Institutions. The Organizational Basis of Politics, New York: Free Press. Mazey, Sonia and Richardson, Jeremy (1997) ‘Policy framing: interest groups and the lead up to the 1996 Intergovernmental Conference’, West European Politics 20(3): 111-33. Moravcsik, Andrew (1999) ‘A new statecraft? Supranational entrepreneurs and international cooperation’, International Organization 53(2): 267-306. Olsen, Johan (2001) ‘Garbage cans, new institutionalism, and the study of politics’, American Political Science Review 95(1): 191-8. Pollack, Mark (1999) ‘Delegation, agency and agenda setting in the Treaty of Amsterdam’, European Integration online Papers (EIoP) 3/6 at http://eiop.or.at/eiop/ texte/1999-006a.htm

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Ross, George (1995) Jacques Delors and European Integration, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruggie, John (1982) ‘International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order’, International Organization 36(2): 379-415. Ruzza, Carlo (1999) ‘Normal protest: social movements and institutional activism’. Unpublished ms. Stetter, Stefan (2000) ‘Regulating migration: authority delegation in justice and home affairs’, Journal of European Public Policy 7(1): 80-103. Stone, Deborah (1989) ‘Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas’, Political Science Quarterly 104: 281-300. Thielemann, Eiko (2002) ‘Between interests and norms: explaining burden-sharing in the European Union’. Paper for the UACES Workshop on European Burden Sharing and Forced Migration, London: LSE, 12 January. Turk, Alex (rapporteur) (1998) Quand les policiers succèdent aux diplomates. Rapport d’information 523 (97-8) de la Commission des lois du Sénat, Paris: Sénat. Tyson, Adam (2001) ‘The negotiation of the European Community Directive on Racial Discrimination’, European Journal of Migration Law 3: 111-229. Ugur, Ehmet (1995) ‘Freedom of movement versus exclusion: a reinterpretation of the “insider-outsider” divide in the European Union’, International Migration Review 29(4): 964-99. Final version accepted for publication 9/10/02

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Immigration and ‘state thought’ Abdelmalek Sayad

In France and in French-speaking academia, the sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad is unanimously considered one of the very best thinkers on migration. His oeuvre, though quantitatively not huge, is qualitatively outstanding. Unfortunately it is not well known beyond the francophone world. This article was first published in French in 1996. It develops one of the major themes in Sayad’s work, the notion of ‘state thought’. As explained here, it can be summarised in the following way: to think about migration is always to think about the state, and more precisely it is to think about the state that thinks about migration. Although it is a universal phenomenon, migration is always discussed within the framework of the local unit and, insofar as we are concerned, within the framework of the nation-state.1 Despite the extreme diversity of situations in which it occurs and despite the variations it displays in time and space, the phenomenon of emigrationimmigration does exhibit constants, in other words characteristics (social, economic, juridical and political) that reappear throughout its history. These constants constitute, as it were, a sort of common and irreducible basis, which is both a product and an objectification of ‘state thought’. State thought is a form of thought that reflects, through its own structures (mental structures), the structures of the state, which thus acquires a body (see Bourdieu 1993). The categories through which we think about immigration (and, more generally, our whole social and political world), or our social, economic, cultural and ethical categories – and we can never place too much emphasis on the role morality plays in the way we perceive the phenomenon of immigration – and, in a word, our political categories, are definitely and objectively (that is, without our being aware of it and, therefore, independently of our will), national or even nationalist categories. The structures of our most ordinary political understanding, or of the

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understanding that is spontaneously translated into our world-view, shape our perception of immigration, but they are at the same time shaped by it. They are basically national structures and they therefore act as such. They are structured structures in the sense that they are socially and historically determined products, but they are also structuring structures in the sense that they predetermine and organize our whole representation of the world, and therefore the world itself. It is, without any doubt, because of all this that the migratory phenomenon as a whole – emigration and immigration – can only be described and interpreted through the categories of state thought. That mode of thought is completely inscribed within the line of demarcation that radically divides ‘nationals’ from ‘non-nationals’. The line itself is invisible or scarcely perceptible but it has major implications. On the one hand, we have those who have quite naturally, or, as the lawyers put it, have ‘by right’, the nationality of the country (their country) from which they come – in other words of the state whose nationals they are and of the territory over which that state has sovereignty – and, on the other, we have those who do have the nationality of the country in which they are resident.

The spirit of the state

immigration

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It is also for all these reasons that we can say that thinking about immigration means thinking about the state, and that it is ‘the state that is thinking about itself when it thinks about immigration’. And this is perhaps one of the last things we discover when we reflect upon the problem of immigration and work on immigration, whereas we should of course have begun with this, or at least should have known this before we started. What we discover in this way is the secret virtue of immigration: it provides an introduction, and perhaps the best introduction of all, to the sociology of the state. Why? Because immigration constitutes the limit of what constitutes the national state. Immigration is the limit that reveals what it is intrinsically, or its basic truth. It is as though it were in the very nature of the state to discriminate and, in order to do so, to acquire in advance all the necessary criteria of pertinence that are required to make the distinction, without which there can be no national state, between the ‘nationals’ it recognizes as such and in which it therefore recognizes itself, just as they recognize themselves in it (this double mutual recognitioneffect is indispensable to the existence and function of the state), and ‘others’ with whom it deals only in ‘material’ or instrumental terms. It deals with them only because they are present within the field of

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its national sovereignty and in the national territory covered by that sovereignty. It has been said that this diacritical function of the state, which, strictly speaking, is one of definition, i.e. delineation,2 is in the very nature of the state, and that it constitutes the state in all its forms and throughout its history. The need to discriminate is, it would seem, more imperative and by that very fact more prescriptive in the case of a republican nation-state. Such a state aspires to total national homogeneity – in other words homogeneity at every level: political, social, economic, cultural (and especially linguistic and religious). Quite aside from the fact that it disturbs the national order, blurs the divide or the border line between what is and what is not national, and therefore perturbs or disturbs the order based upon that separation, immigration, or in other words the presence within the nation of ‘non-nationals’ (rather than those who are simply foreign to the nation), infringes upon the integrity of that order. It disturbs the mythical purity or perfection of that order, and it therefore prevents the full realization of that order’s implicit logic. We can thus understand why, without taking to extremes the logic implicit in this state of affairs – that is, without perverting it – there is always a great temptation to lapse into a form of fundamentalism that is known all over the world, and that is cultivated and celebrated all over the world (today’s religious fundamentalism is no more than a variant, and not even a new variant, as it exists prior to national fundamentalism, having existed before the reality of the nation itself, and because it has always coexisted alongside that fundamentalism). For those who take a ‘purist’ (or fundamentalist) view of the national order, immigration is supposedly the agent of the perversion of the national social order in its integrity and integrality because it concerns people who should not be there (if the national order were perfect, it would not have this flaw, this inadequacy) but who are there (rather as though they were the objectification or materialization of that flaw, that inadequacy and that inability to complete the nation). Immigration is undeniably a subversive factor to the extent that it reveals in broad daylight the hidden truth and the deepest foundations of the social and political order we describe as national. Thinking about immigration basically means interrogating the state, interrogating its foundation and interrogating the internal mechanisms of its structuration and workings. Using immigration to interrogate the state in this way means, in the final analysis, ‘denaturalizing’, so to speak, what we take to be natural, and ‘rehistoricizing’ the state or that element within the state that seems to have been afflicted by historical amnesia. It means, in other words, recalling the social and historical conditions of its genesis.

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critical reflection of state thought

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Time helps us forget all these things, but time is not the only factor involved: time can succeed in this repressive operation only because it is both in our interests and in the interests of the state itself to forget its history. The ‘naturalization’ of the state, or of the state that exists inside our heads, makes it seem as though the state were an immediate given, as though it were an object that existed by itself or that was created by nature. It makes it seem that the state has been in existence from all eternity, that it has been freed of all determinations external to itself. It appears to exist independently of all historical considerations, independently of history and of its own history, from which we prefer to divorce it for ever, even though we never stop elaborating and telling that history. Immigration – and this is of course why it is so disturbing – forces us to unveil the state, to unveil the way we think about the state and the way it thinks about itself. And it is the way it thinks about immigration that gives this away. Being children of the nation-state and of the national categories we bear within us and which the state has implanted in us, we all think about immigration (in other words about those who are ‘other’ than ourselves, what they are, and through them, what we ourselves are) in the way that the state requires us to think and, ultimately, in the way that the state itself thinks. ‘State thought’ or ‘spirit of the state’ as analysed by Pierre Bourdieu is a mode of thought and a distinct way of thinking. The two appear to be inseparable. It is state thought that creates the state’s mode of thinking about everything it is and about all the domains to which it is applied. In the same way, state thought may, as a result of its constancy, its repetitions, its own strength, and its ability to impose its way of thinking on others, have generated durable modes of thinking that are typical of state thought. We must therefore subject the postulates of state thought to critical reflection, to a process of ‘delegitimizing’ what is legitimate, of what goes without saying. We must delegitimize it in the sense of objectifying what is most deeply rooted within us, what is most deeply hidden in our social unconscious. Such an operation makes a desanctifying break with doxa. We have here an undertaking that everything within us resists: our entire social being (individual and collective) and everything that we commit to it with such passion – in other words our whole national being. For we exist only in this form and only within this framework: the framework and form of the nation. To take jurists as an example, it took all the audacity of a Hans Kelsen to free himself from state thought and even to rebel against that thought, and ultimately to contest the opposition that is de rigueur amongst jurists and (elsewhere) between ‘national’ and ‘non-national’ by demonstrating the arbitrary

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(or conventional) character of that distinction: the ‘national’ exists de jure, and belongs by nature or by virtue of state (the possession of the state of nationality) to the population that constitutes the state. Anyone who is ‘foreign’ (non-national) is subject to the competence and authority of a state in which he plays no part, and on whose territory he resides, lives and works only as a result of his presence there and for the duration of that presence. His presence does not have the same status as the presence within that territory of a national. Kelsen regards this difference as purely conventional or non-essential, and that leads him to reject the idea that the state is necessarily the juridical expression of a community.

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The crimes of immigration; immigration on trial Why this preamble about state thought? First, because immigration constitutes the privileged terrain on to which this form of thought is projected, as though on to a mirror. Second, because of all the domains of existence and of all the sectors of social life, delinquency is the one that owes, so to speak, most to this way of thinking. In the case of immigration, delinquency implies not only the offences that the police have to deal with or those recorded by the crime statistics but also, as one delinquency can hide another, a delinquency that might be described as situational or statutory (and almost ‘ontological’) because, at the deepest level of our mode of thought (i.e. state thought), it is synonymous with the very existence of the immigrant and with the very fact of immigration. Unconsciously, or even when we are not fully conscious of it, the fact of being an immigrant is far from being a neutral element within the whole gamut of evaluations and judgements that are passed, should an offence be committed, on the delinquent. Even though those who pass these judgements (both the ones handed down by the juridical apparatus and those of the social apparatus – i.e. social judgements) are unaware of the fact, and even though they almost always do so against their will, the fact of being an immigrant delinquent (or a delinquent immigrant) constitutes, as a general rule, something of an aggravating circumstance. Because we spontaneously endorse expressions of public opinion, which exists inside our heads just as it exists inside the heads of everyone around us (this is doxa), we even see such circumstances as a supplementary offence in addition to the offence that has been committed and that has to be judged. Immigration is a latent, camouflaged offence (that of being an immigrant – an offence for which the subject in question bears

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double punishment

historically situated sins

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no responsibility), which is brought to light by the actual offence that has been committed, by the objectified offence that has to be brought before the courts. Any trial involving a delinquent immigrant puts the very process of immigration on trial, first as a form of delinquency in itself and second as a source of delinquency. Before we can even speak of racism or xenophobia, the notion of ‘double punishment’ is therefore present within any judgement passed on the immigrant (and not only in the judgements handed down by judges sitting in court). It is rooted in state thought, and is the anthropological basis on which all our social judgements rest. ‘Double punishment’ exists objectively in our way of thinking, even before we make it exist in the objectified form of either the sanction of a legal tribunal or an administrative decision. ‘Double punishment’ exists inside our ‘national’ heads, because the very fact of immigration is tainted with the idea of being at fault, with the idea of anomaly and anomie. The immigrant presence is always marked by its incompleteness: it is an at-fault presence that is in itself guilty. It is a displaced presence in every sense of the term. It is physically and geographically displaced: in other words, it is spatially displaced because migration is primarily a spatial displacement. It is displaced in the moral sense too, in the sense in which we speak, for instance, of ‘speaking out of turn’ or of ‘misplaced’ discourse. It is as though our categories of thought, which are in this respect and as can never be said too often national categories, saw immigration itself as a form of delinquency, as an intrinsic delinquency. It is as though, because the immigrant is already in the wrong simply because he is present in a land of immigration, all his other sins are reduplicated and aggravated by the original sin of immigration. That is his first sin in the chronological sense because it necessarily precedes all the other sins that might be committed during the lifetime of an immigrant. It is a generative sin in the sense that it is the cause not of his actual sins themselves, but of the place, time and context (in other words of the social, economic and economic conditions) in which those sins are committed. Because it is an objective sin, immigration can never be totally bracketed out or neutralized, even when we try to do so in all objectivity. Immigration, with all the disparagement, disqualification and stigmatization it implies, affects all the most ordinary acts committed by immigrants and, a fortiori, their criminal acts. Conversely, all immigrant behaviour, and especially deviant behaviour, has repercussions on the phenomenon of immigration itself, and leads to greater disapproval, greater disqualification and greater stigmatization. We therefore have two kinds of sin or guilt: a historically situated

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sin (that of immigration) and what might be called behavioural sins or crimes, or actual sins that figure in the taxonomy or the usual table of sins that are reprehensible, sanctionable and sanctioned as such (with varying degrees of severity) by the provisions of the Penal Code which, in law (in theory, which means in accordance with a law that has lost all sense of reality), apply to all offenders, whoever they may be. What relationship is there between the two orders of crime? On the one hand, we have a crime that has not been committed intentionally. To that extent, none of those involved, or who become involved despite themselves – immigration and the country of immigration – can admit to it. Even when it is officially authorized, the ‘presence’ of the immigrant is still, as we have said, basically at fault (it is a presence that cannot be an end in itself and which, no matter whether it is accepted or denounced, requires constant justification). Those who are most concerned, namely the emigrant-immigrants themselves, appear, finally, to be the real victims of the gigantic farce that is being acted out at their expense. On the other hand, we have the crime that has been committed, reported and recorded in canonical fashion. It is viewed and seen in itself for what it is in its materiality and, whenever possible, in the same light as all the crimes of the first kind. What is the relationship between the two? In law, there is none. Historically situated sins or crimes cannot be used as an argument for either the defence or the prosecution of second-order crimes, even when those crimes make the criminal liable to the ever-present sanction of deportation, irrespective of whether or not it is actually implemented. Second-order crimes cannot serve as a pretext for making a more serious and unjust case against immigration. But, in practice, there is a relationship that is always present in everyone’s mind. Some strongly deny being influenced in one way or the other by that relationship. Some claim to be totally neutral and to know nothing about the guilty party’s previous record or, in this case, his status and quality as an immigrant. Others, in contrast, do not conceal or hide their satisfaction at seeing two different modalities of crime and the two punishments that sanction them overlapping and aggravating one another – in their view, this is only fair and, basically, something that is quite normal and that should be the rule. The case against immigration is always inseparable from the case made against the immigrant because of some offence, even a minor one, that he has committed. The case against immigration in fact involves the whole system of representation through which we constitute immigration, and the deviancy or delinquency of immigration, through which we define the immigrant and the acts, criminal

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behavioural sins

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mental representations

object representations

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or otherwise, he is permitted to commit. These representations are of two kinds. First, we have mental representations that are translated into acts of perception and evaluation, cognition and recognition. They are translated into a whole series of acts in which agents invest their material and symbolic interests (and the symbolic are perhaps invested with more force and passion than the material), their social prejudices, their presuppositions and, in a word, their whole social being. Second, we have what we might call object representations. These consist in all the external signs, all the indices, all the features and all the characteristics that can become the object of the manipulative symbolic strategies we use to determine the (mental) representations that others have of those properties – which are all perceptible from the outside – and their bearers. (In the practical mode, an individual exists mainly in the sense that he is seen and that he allows some part of himself to be seen; and the identity we talk about so much is basically this being-perceived that we all share in a social sense, and which basically exists only because it is recognized by others.) That is the way it is in social life, which is an incessant struggle between the perceptions and classifications these representations impose. Everyone would like to impose the definition or (mental) representation that flatters him most and is in his best social interests by using the properties at his disposal and his self-authorized (object) representation. Courts of all kinds are full of these classification struggles, and the greatest condemnation consists, of course, in the a priori denegation and dispossession of all the social attributes – even the most elementary, which are also the most essential – that make it possible to take part, even at the lowest and most dominated level, in the play of these struggles between representations, in the sense of both mental images and manifestations designed to act upon those mental images. The situation of criminality in immigration – a situation which implies, rather than its objective probability, a guaranteed rise in racism, as it always exists in the presence of and under the gaze of the other – raises the issue of the relationship between politics and politeness. When an immigrant is involved, breaking the law also means breaking the unwritten law imposing the reserve and neutrality (real and feigned) that befits a foreigner. In such cases, breaking the law means more than the infraction in question: it is an error of a different order, a lack of politeness. This demand for simple politeness, for good manners and nothing more, in reality implies the renunciation of many things. The apparently minor or purely normal concessions known as ‘politeness’ are valuable only because they are, in reality, or deep inside us, political concessions: enforcing respect for forms

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comes down to demanding every form of the respect that is owed to order. The political neutrality that the political demands of foreign residents who are confined to the non-political is certainly more acceptable and more easily obtained if we locate it in the register of politeness rather than in the sphere of the political, even though that is its true territory. At an unconscious level, it is politeness that prevents the foreigner from playing a political part in the political affairs (internal and external) of the host country.

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Allaying suspicion A sort of social hyper-correction is required of the immigrant, especially one of lowly social condition. Being socially or even morally suspect, he must above all reassure everyone as to his morality. There has never before been so much talk of ‘republican values’ in France. That is because it is a way of denouncing what the social and political morality of French society regards as the deviant behaviour of Muslim immigrants: wearing veils to school, statutory discrimination against women, the political use of religion, which is referred to as fundamentalism, and so on. Being conscious of the suspicion that weighs upon him and which he cannot escape because he is confronted with it throughout his immigrant life and in every domain of his existence, it is up to the immigrant to allay it constantly, to foresee it and to ward it off by repeatedly demonstrating his good faith and his good will. He finds himself caught up in social struggles despite himself, because they are of necessity struggles over identity. Because he is involved in them as an isolated individual and almost without wishing to be involved – especially in the interindividual interactions of everyday life – he has no choice but to exaggerate in one way or another. Making a virtue of necessity, and to a large extent because of the dominated position he occupies in the structure of symbolic power relations, the immigrant tends, no doubt rightly, to exaggerate each of the contradictory options he thinks he has chosen, whereas they have actually been forced upon him. He is condemned to exaggerate everything; everything he does, everything he experiences and everything he is. At times, he must, as an immigrant (when he is at the bottom of the social hierarchy within the world of immigrants), assume the stigmas which, in the eyes of public opinion, create the immigrant. He must therefore accept (resignedly or under protest, submissively or defiantly, or even provocatively) the dominant definition of his identity. We need only recall, in this connection, the fact that the stigma itself generates a revolt against the stigma, and that

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conscious of suspicion

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assimilation

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one of the first forms of that revolt consists in reappropriating or laying claim to the stigma, which is converted into an emblem in accordance with the classic paradigm of black is beautiful. This can even lead to the institutionalization of the group, which thus turns the stigma – in other words and roughly speaking the social, economic, political and cultural effects of the stigmatization of which it is the object and in part the product – into its foundation. At other times, in contrast, the immigrant devotes himself to the quest for so-called assimilation. This presupposes putting a great deal of effort into his self-presentation and representation (the representation others have of him, and the representation he wishes to give of himself). The effort is therefore focused essentially on his body, his physical appearance, and those forms of external behaviour that are most loaded with symbolic attributes or meanings. It is intended to remove all the signs that might recall the stigma (physical signs such as complexion, skin colour, hair colour, etc; cultural signs such as accent, manner of speech, clothes, the wearing of a moustache, a whole lifestyle, etc.). The other strategy involves conspicuous mimicry and the adoption of features which, in contrast, seem to be emblematically characteristic of those to whom he wishes to assimilate. Whilst they are not mutually exclusive, the two strategies, or at least parts of them, can be simultaneously juxtaposed, though there is a danger that this will exacerbate the contradictions. In all these examples, no matter how contrasted, the issue appears to centre on the use of strategies of simulation and dissimulation, pretence and bluff, and the acquisition and projection of a self-image that pleases [qui plaît] others and in which the immigrant delights [se complaît], the image he would like to be in keeping with his material and symbolic interests, or the image that is least removed from the identity he is laying claim to. On the one hand, his original identity is credited with having a greater authenticity – the identity of the ‘old man’ which he refuses to kill off. He must preserve, or believe he is preserving, his original identity because he thinks he is doing so in order not to have to experience it in shame, timidity and scorn, and to avoid the risk of exoticism, all of which can encourage the racism of which they are a component element. On the other hand is the new identity he wishes to create in order to appropriate, if not all the advantages bound up with the possession of the dominant identity, at least the legitimate identity (i.e. the identity of the dominant) that he will never have and at least the negative advantages he can expect to derive from no longer having to be judged, or having to judge himself, by criteria that he knows will always, and of necessity, work to his disadvantage. There is another point on which the two strategies are basically in

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agreement: both contain within them, each in its own way, a forced recognition of legitimate identity. The former recognizes it by refusing it, by keeping as great a distance as possible, and by avoiding any superfluous contact or any contact that is not indispensable. The latter, in contrast, recognizes it by taking its inspiration from it, by taking it as a model, by simulating it and by trying to reproduce it as faithfully as possible, but also as slavishly as possible. In both cases – and this is another reason why they converge – what is really at stake in these strategies for social struggles, which are found in any struggle between the dominated and the dominant, or in the face of domination, is not, as is commonly said, the conquest or reconquest of identity. It is the ability to reappropriate for oneself the possibility of constructing one’s own identity and of evaluating that identity in complete autonomy. This is the ability that the dominated are obliged to surrender to the dominant, so much so that anyone who finds himself in the dominated position within the field of symbolic power relations has only two possible ways of gaining recognition or, more prosaically, continuing to exist. Either he must be negated, and must therefore consent to his own negation and disqualification, or he must accept the risks involved in any attempt to assimilate. If he adopts the first strategy, he must do what he is being asked to do even though he cannot resign or withdraw completely in the strict sense of the term from a game he knows to be basically stacked against him. He must, that is, simply withdraw from the struggle, as he is being asked to do – in other words, abandon it without necessarily leaving the arena (i.e. immigration) in which such struggles take place. He must agree to do no more than watch the struggle being played out, through him and in front of him, without intervening. He must agree to play the role of the victim designate. This is the fate to which one is almost always condemned when one is involved in a game one is not equipped to play and which one can never master (a game one has not chosen to play, which is always played on the home ground of the dominant, in their way, in accordance with their rules and with their weapons of choice). The alternative is to accept the risks involved in any attempt at assimilation, in other words in any form of behaviour that is explicitly calculated, designed and organized with a view to bringing about a change of identity, or what he believes to be the transition from a dominated identity to a dominant identity. This implies the danger of denying himself and, correlatively, all of his fellows who reject that choice, who cannot or do not want to act in that way, and thus deny themselves. Abandoning an identity, be it social, political (or more specifically national, as in the case of naturalization), cultural, religious or whatever is not without its ambigu-

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constructing and evaluating one’s identity

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reassuring others

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ity, especially when it is an identity that is dominated from every point of view, an identity that is stigmatized and despised. In the eyes of those who are being abandoned and left behind, this borders upon treachery; in the eyes of the others, or those one dreams of joining, that one aspires to being, it undeniably implies allegiance, but there is still a suspicion of pretension and selfish calculation. Reassuring others and giving them a sense of security, as well as reassuring oneself, and giving oneself a sense of security, constitute an imperative incumbent upon any foreign presence. This is the constant preoccupation of any foreigner or anyone who has the feeling of being a foreigner where he is living, of any foreigner to the country and the society in which he lives, often continuously, but who does not experience them as his country and society. He is a foreigner to the economy and culture of that country, and a foreigner amongst the population of that country. As a general rule, this is the case with all traditional immigrants, who never stop emigrating from their homeland. Their children may feel the same even though they are not always or not necessarily, foreigners in the national sense. Anyone who is not in a position of strength, when the balance of power, and especially symbolic power, is not in one’s favour (which is collectively the case with immigrants, or, let me repeat, all those who have a feeling of not really being at home in the place where they are), is anxious not to frighten others. He is anxious not to do so even when there is, objectively, no reason for them to be afraid of him (the immigrant himself has no control over the phantasmatic fears he inspires). He is, to be more accurate, always anxious not to disturb them because a foreign presence is (rightly or wrongly, not that it matters) always a cause for concern (foreigners are those of whom we like to say we don’t know who they are. We don’t know what they are like; we don’t know what makes them tick; we don’t know what they are thinking or how they think; we don’t know what is going on inside their heads; we don’t know how they might react; we cannot understand them; you never know with them). Reassuring the other is often a precondition for one’s own security. There are only two ways of providing reassurance and self-reassurance, only two ways of succeeding in reassuring both oneself and others. They complement one another because they are both ways of dispelling the mutual fears. They dispel both one’s own fear (the foreigner’s fear of being in a foreign country) and the fear of others (their fear of a foreigner who is in their country). Both fears (which are different in terms of their form and especially their content) are shared – unequally and differently, of course – by both parties, or by both the dominated and the dominant. The two different fears

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feed on one another; and despite all the differences that may exist between them, they are part of the same attempt to reassure. On the one hand, there is the fear of the dominant – in other words and in this case, the masters of the house – who are all nationals, no matter which social class they belong to. It can be allayed by the strength of those who know they are dominant (because they know that they are naturally at home, and know that they are the country’s natural inhabitants), and who know they are in a position of strength because they possess a legitimacy that merges into domination (a legitimacy which, as such, does not realize that it is dominant). On the other hand, there is the fear of the dominated (i.e. immigrants), of the weak who have, in these circumstances, been deprived of all power and all legitimacy. For the dominant, being reassured means no longer having to reassure themselves in the face of some danger (even though there is nothing for them to be afraid of, and even when the danger is completely imaginary) and, at the same time, reassuring others whose fear is, so to speak, constitutive of their immigrant condition. For the dominated who, despite their structural weakness, or perhaps because of that weakness, are perceived as dangerous (or at least as constituting a collective danger) or, which is worse, are regarded as ‘enemies’ (and not only as the ‘class enemies’ of old, with whom we were used to coming into conflict), reassuring the dominant is without doubt the price that has to be paid to ensure their own security (which is purely relative). As this self-assurance depends upon a security that has to be won from the other or in the face of the other, certain immigrants prefer to withdraw, to take refuge in their hidden fear, and choose (or chose, in an earlier state of immigration) to opt for the greatest possible discretion or, in other words, to become as invisible as they can. They are helped here by the social and spatial relegation of which they are the victims (relegation in space and by space). They also simultaneously turn it into self-relegation: relegation and self-relegation into the same spaces, the space of social relations, the space of housing and, primarily, the space of work. These are all spaces where they find themselves to be in the majority and amongst other immigrants of the same background (originally from the same country, the same region, the same village, the same kinship group). These are the immigrants of whom it is said that they ‘hug the walls’, which can only please those who tend to see their reserve as a sign of politeness, or even the eminently reassuring subservience they expect and demand from foreigners. For other immigrants who are sufficiently selfconfident, or convinced that they can allay suspicion, providing reassurance appears to consist in simulating the greatest resemblance

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to take refuge

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children of immigrants

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to or similarity with those they are trying to reassure by disguising their own features, or at least by attenuating the distinctive signs that make them stand out and which are normally described as stigmas. In a word, they do all they can to deny and abolish the radical alterity (or the radicality of the alterity) of which they are the bearers. This attitude, which corresponds to a quest for the greatest proximity and which in fact contains within it all the marks of the allegiance shown to the dominant, is inevitably – despite the objective intentions behind it and its self-proclaimed finality – and paradoxically retranslated into potential conflicts. It is always liable to be interpreted in terms of rivalry – of unseemly rivalry, illegitimate rivalry and unfair competition. This is an indication of the relatively narrow limits that are ascribed to assimilation, of the limits within which the dominant inscribe the assimilation they wish to impose upon those they dominate, and which they are also happy to see them succeed in assimilating,3 by conceding them the form without always recognizing its content. But the height of both civil and political impoliteness, and the height of rudeness and violence towards national understanding, seems to be attained by those ‘immigrants’ who are not immigrants: the children of immigrants, those ‘hybrids’ who do not fully share the properties that ideally define the integral immigrant, or the accomplished immigrant who conforms to the representation we have of him. And nor do they really share the objective, and especially not the subjective, characteristics of nationals. They are ‘immigrants’ who have not emigrated from anywhere. They are immigrants who are not, despite that designation, immigrants like any others, in other words foreigners in the full sense of the term. They are not foreigners in cultural terms, as they are integral products of this society and its mechanisms of reproduction and integration, of a language (a language into which they were born and which, in this country, is not their mother tongue in the literal sense), of education and of all the other social processes. Nor are they foreigners in national terms, as they usually have the nationality of the country in which they are living. In the eyes of some, they are no doubt ‘bad’ products of French society, but they are still products of that society. Rather like disturbingly ambiguous agents, they blur the borders of the national order, and therefore the symbolic value and pertinence of the criteria that found the hierarchy of groups and their classification. And what it is no doubt most difficult to forgive this category of immigrants for is of course the fact that they disrupt the diacritical function and meaning of the divorce that state thought establishes between nationals and non-nationals. We therefore do not know how to regard or treat

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these new-style immigrants, and nor do we know what to expect of them. And at this point, ordinary fear, if we can put it that way, or the personal or individual fear inspired by the foreign immigrant, turns into a collective anxiety as the traditional separations are abolished and as we lose the simultaneously physical, moral and mental or intellectual security and comfort afforded by those eminently reassuring separations to the extent that they constitute a protective barrier behind which we can take shelter by asserting that we are ‘at home’, safe from outside interference. This form of anxiety, or this new fear of the immigrant, against disseminated fear which the demand for politeness is powerless, is even more difficult to dispel. It can be disseminated more widely and projected on to a whole series of related objects: young people, difficult neighbourhoods, bad estates, the suburbs, the unemployed, delinquents and so on. It can be projected on to the same individuals and the same places (the children of immigration or ‘second-generation immigrants’). From that point of view, a radical transformation has taken place within immigration, and the suspicion that continues to weigh upon these new-style immigrants is proportional to the changes brought about by the immigration of families and by their reproduction on the spot. And given these new conditions, we have to go back to the genetic crime that is consubstantial with this immigration, and all the other crimes that have been committed in practice. Basically, we have to go back to the reactions provoked by these crimes, to the way they are judged, and to the ways in which they are assessed. Crimes and infractions are not just forbidden. When they are committed, they are punished accordingly, in other words for what they undoubtedly are, but they are also, surreptitiously and secretly, punished because of the nature of the offender. Even though the immigrant has changed with regard to the outside world, this type of offender is regarded as being illegitimate, as not being allowed to commit infractions, as being forbidden to offend and as not having the right to offend. The suspicion always weighs on the same people. It weighs upon people whose every characteristic – their history and their birth (and in this case, their immigration and their having been born in immigration) and, correlatively, their social position, their status, the social and especially the symbolic capital they have acquired – designates them as perpetual suspects. The stigmatization revealed by this form of generalized suspicion derives from a schema of thought and social perception with which we are already familiar. In more general terms, it derives from the suspicious and accusatory relationship we have with the popular classes, which are viewed as dangerous classes. This schema, which is always the same, is as true today as it

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deportation

abdelmalek sayad

was yesterday, as every age has its own dangerous classes. If the situation specific to the delinquent foreigner (and even more so the ‘immigrant’, even if he does have the nationality of the country), who is guilty in two ways, or guilty of being guilty, is not necessarily to work to his disadvantage and is not to act as an aggravating circumstance, judges must display great restraint and a lot of self-control, and make an attempt at self-correction. Even when it is not openly talked about, this implicit combination of crimes and therefore punishments does give rise to another sanction that is often imposed in addition to the other two. It is intrinsically bound up with the foreigner’s condition, as a foreigner is by definition liable to be deported, even if, as does happen, it has been agreed not to deport him. Whether the deportation actually takes place or not, the foreigner’s liability to deportation is the sign par excellence of one of the essential prerogatives of national sovereignty. This too is a characteristic of state thought, which is not to say that it is state thought. It is in fact in the very nature of the sovereignty of the nation to be able to deport those foreign residents (foreign in the nationality sense) it sees fit to deport, and it is in the very nature of the foreigner (speaking nationally) to be liable to deportation, regardless of whether or not he is actually deported. Whilst it is not a juridical sanction in the strict sense, as it is not normally pronounced by a court of law, deportation from the national territory, which is an administrative or politicoadministrative measure – taken as a result of the judicial condemnation it extends beyond its effects – clearly demonstrates the risks run by any foreigner who infringes the rules of good conduct. Having supplied proof of his lack of discretion, he is subject to administrative sanctions. The same logic governs, a fortiori, the operation of naturalization: the nation and nationality do not naturalize and nationalize just anyone. Being an act that basically results from a decision, naturalization may be incompatible with certain social and cultural characteristics or with certain customs (in the sense of habits and customs). In the French case, it is incompatible with polygamy, which is regarded as an offence against public order in the particular sense in which international private law understands that term. Naturalization may be incompatible with certain criminal penalties. The nature and hierarchy of some penalties disqualify anyone from claiming the quality of being French, but they also vary according to the context and the moment. Not surprisingly, these crimes reproduce their punishments and bring them into line, roughly speaking, with those that lead to deportation, rather as though the conditions for entering a nationality obeyed, no doubt even more strictly, the same principles as the conditions for entering and residing in the nation, because they precede and prefigure them. For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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Part II Modes of incorporation

marge tekst

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‘Minority’ as a sociological concept Hans van Amersfoort

At a time when most scholars were writing about migratory workers and the European guest work system, the geographer Hans van Amersfoort published a study addressing some important questions. Which factors determine the social position of different categories of migrants in the host society? To what extent and under what conditions do ethnic minorities form via the migration process? Van Amersfoort’s work relied heavily on American sociological scholarship, resulting in a typology of majority-minority relations and a definition of immigrant ethnic minorities. The study strongly influenced the theoretical basis of both integration studies and integration policy in the Netherlands. Introduction The terms ‘minority’ or ‘minority group’ are widely used in the sociological literature. ‘Minority’ appears to be a word with a broad, diffuse meaning and an emotional appeal, exactly the qualities to make it a candidate for political debate. Unfortunately, almost the opposite properties are required if the term is to be used in scholarly analysis. In fact, there are such a variety of meanings and contradictory properties attributed to the term in the scholarly literature that we can hardly speak of a concept that can serve as an analytical tool. The origins of this lack of precision can be traced back to that essay by Louis Wirth which most social scientists take as the starting-point of their analyses. Wirth initially describes a minority as: ‘A group of people who, because of their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from the others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment and who therefore regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination’ (Wirth 1945: 347). This is not a very satisfactory definition because it makes the exis-

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diffuse meaning of minority

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conceptual confusion

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tence of minorities completely dependent on the feelings of minority group members. It is not surprising that Wirth finds it necessary to add new elements to his definition throughout the course of his argument, adding that ‘minorities objectively occupy a disadvantageous position in society’ (Wirth 1945: 348). In subsequent passages Wirth mentions a great number of additional properties that are ‘often’ or ‘not necessarily’ present, but which all have some connection with the broad field that he is trying to encompass. He concentrates increasingly on the disadvantageous social position of the minority and tends to neglect its numerical relationship to the wider society, so that ‘the people whom we regard as minority may actually, from a numerical standpoint, be a majority’ (Wirth 1945: 349). If we accept this point of view, in addition to the importance attached to the subjective definition of the situation by the minority found in Wirth’s earlier statements, then every instance of group conflict in society becomes a ‘minority problem’. Other authors have taken even less care about the question of definition. Simpson and Yinger, for example, do not arrive at anything like a definition in their textbook Racial and cultural minorities and conclude their introduction with the remark: ‘... we have tried to develop a meaning that will be useful in the study of the relationships with which we are concerned’ (Simpson and Yinger 1953: 32). These are simply all kinds of relationship between groups that differ according to ‘racial’ or cultural criteria. As their starting point for dealing with minority group situations they take an earlier classification by Cox in which we find yet another category called a ‘ruling class minority’, such as the Dutch in the colonial East Indies (Simpson and Yinger 1953: 23). This illustrates the conceptual confusion surrounding the term ‘minority’, for Wirth would never have spoken of a ruling class minority, given the weight he attached to the disadvantageous position and his tendency to disregard the question of numbers. However, Rex has declared that it could never have been Wirth’s intention to go so far as to call, for instance, the Indians during the British raj a minority (Rex 1970: 25). But Rex seems to underestimate the consistency with which Wirth’s confusing statements are followed. Thus, in a more recent work, Bloom states explicitly: ‘Minority-majority situations do not depend on mere numbers. In South Africa the twenty-five per cent of the population that is white is the effective majority’ (Bloom 1971: 30). To my mind this is a confusing and inaccurate play on words. Moreover, it shows insufficient awareness of the nature of the problem to be analysed, which is the manner and extent to which social position and numerical strength are related.

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One valuable attempt to make the concept of ‘minority group’ more useful can be found in the work of Wagley and Harris. In their introduction and conclusion to Minorities in the New World they link the concept of minority to the process of state formation and especially to the rise of the modern state (Wagley and Harris 1967: 5, 242 ff). It is only in the course of this process that people with different cultural backgrounds become incorporated into one organization that influences an increasing number of aspects of social life. Therefore minorities have the following major characteristics: (1) minorities are subordinate segments of complex state societies; (2) minorities have special physical or cultural traits which are held in low esteem by the dominant segments of society; (3) minorities are self-conscious units bound together by the special traits which their members share and by the special disabilities which they bring; (4) membership in a minority is transmitted by a rule of descent which is capable of affiliating succeeding generations even in the absence of readily apparent special cultural or physical traits; (5) minority peoples, by choice or necessity, tend to marry within the group (Wagley and Harris 1967: 10). On this last point, Wagley and Harris indicate more clearly than Wirth that a minority situation is not only objectively disadvantageous; by drawing attention to the continuity of the membership of the minority group over several generations, they stress a subjective side to the definition, a feeling of belonging. Thus minorities are not only categories but collectivities whose sense of solidarity is based on shared values. However, it is especially the first point that adds a valuable element to the discussion and makes it possible to come to a more accurate definition of the concept of a minority.

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Minority and state The state monopolizes the use of violence within its territory and restricts, as far as it is successful, the exercise of power by other units. In this way the state increasingly influences the institutionalized life of society. This says nothing about the question of the relative numerical strength of different groups in society. As we emphasized earlier, the concept of minority implies that the numerical strength of a group is connected with its social position. It is not only cumbersome to call the Africans in South Africa a minority, it is also based on the hidden supposition that every state is based on the universalistic idea of equality. Petersen has rightly pointed out that the use of the term ‘minority’ implies a ‘democratic moral judgement’ (Petersen 1965: 235). We therefore have to look for situations in which the state

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democratic moral judgement

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nation-state

three basic rights

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is sufficiently developed to exercise a profound influence on social life, and where the numerical size of groups is a decisive factor in the process of policy-making. Wagley and Harris have made this connection between the concept of minority, the formation of states and the increasing influence of national, state-controlled institutions on social life. In the Western world, this process runs parallel to the development of the idea of ‘the sovereignty of the people’ and the rise of the nation state. The nation state has, on the one hand, to define who belongs to the ‘nation’ and, on the other hand, to decide what are the rights each member should possess. Since the French Revolution the traditional response has been to favour the ‘equality’ of citizens, but this makes it necessary to define more carefully what is meant by the terms equality and citizen. Marshall has made a classic analysis of this problem and defined three kinds of basic rights and corresponding social institutions: (a) Civil Rights, such as ‘liberty of person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice’; (b) Political Rights, such as the franchise and the right of access to public office; (c) Social Rights, ranging from ‘the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards in the society’ (Marshall 1964: 71-3). These rights find their expression respectively in the courts, the various representative bodies, the social services and the schools. Bendix and Rokkan have analysed how these formal rights have been extended to increasingly larger sections of the population. Exceptions that were made for categories such as illegitimate children, Jews, women and illiterates have vanished in the course of time (Bendix 1964: 74104). In the first instance this applied only to the recognition of formal rights, leaving open the question of how far these rights could be exercised in practice. Such a discrepancy between formal rights and the actual possibility of exercising these rights produced an important focus of social tension during the course of this process. A complete realization of these rights, developed on the basis of individual equality can, in certain cases, result in a burden rather than a privilege. Rights in these circumstances acquire the character of duties imposed by the state. Examples of such duties might be the introduction of compulsory education or compulsory vaccination against certain contagious diseases. In the course of time, state-controlled institutions founded on a conception of ‘equal rights’ replace the institutions of the pre-industrial society based on a kinship and locality. Those sections of

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the population that lag behind such developments – for whatever reasons – will also stay behind in their degree of participation in society. When this ‘backwardness’ is defined as a problem it raises the dilemma of how far the state should transform rights into duties. This is a conflict that often arises with minority groups and deserves attention, because the nature of the conflict is rarely given sufficient emphasis in minority studies. There are many examples of such conflict, especially in the sphere of education where the absolute authority of the father, an integral part of the culture of many minorities from a peasant background, clashes with the state’s desire to uphold the individual rights of women and children. Finally, we must draw attention to the process of decision-making in modern states. As citizens are rarely unanimous, decisions are taken by a majority vote. It is in this situation that the term ‘minority’ becomes salient. For in the feudal, colonial or totalitarian state the question of majority or minority participation in the decisionmaking process simply does not arise. The relative numbers of the different segments of the population and the various strengths of interest groups do not count in the political process, political life being by definition a matter for the elite alone. Inequality for these states is a natural condition, for they are based on it. In such states the emancipation struggle of underprivileged groups aims primarily at establishing formal political rights. As the ruling elites are small they would soon lose much of their power if formal political rights were used effectively. The characteristic problem for a minority group is not so much that it is difficult to ensure formal rights, but that the numerical situation restricts the possibility of translating such rights into social influence. The concept of citizenship, as it has been developed by Marshall, is used by Parsons in his analysis of the social position of the American Negro (Parsons and Clark 1965: 709-54). Rose also falls back on the concept of citizenship in the introduction to his work on the coloured immigrants in Britain, because it is particularly useful for describing a situation of social deprivation and oppression in general terms (Rose 1969: 13-17, 27-33). But it is even more valuable in that it makes it possible to isolate a few strategic fields in which we can compare the situations of minorities in different states, or of different minorities in one state. In the first place we can turn our attention to the legal position. Is the minority situation characterized by a special legal position as compared to the majority? These legal rights can apply to all three spheres of citizenship – civil, political and social. The difference between formal rights and the actual possibility of using them is much

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decision-making

legal position

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labour and housing markets

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more difficult to establish. But it is important to examine, when the formal position of the minority is one of equality, whether the minority can in fact use the formal rights in the same ways as the majority. Secondly, the position of the minority with respect to the education system is of great significance. The school is a strategic institution in modern society and regulates further participation in most other social institutions and activities. Organizing and controlling the education system is therefore one of the major tasks of modern governments. Besides these two areas that are controlled directly by the state, there are other fields in which, at least in Western countries, the control is not direct, but in which, nevertheless, the state exercises a substantial influence. These are the crucial areas of the labour market and the housing market. One’s position in the labour market in a modern society is the key to the distribution and personal allocation of goods and services, and it also regulates, to a large extent, an individual’s chances in the housing market. Although this is not completely true, as governments also have a direct influence on the housing market under several types of legislative-provision which may vary between different countries, it does demonstrate that some form of government regulation is generally thought necessary. For the sake of argument, so far I have described the state as a uniform, monolithic body, which is, of course, a gross oversimplification. But I do want to stress that these four fields – law, education, employment and housing – can be looked upon as being in the ‘public’ domain. They are, therefore, open to regulation or ‘interference’ by the state, although this clearly varies from one society to the next. A number of interest groups, operating both outside and within political parties, try to steer government policy in their direction, and it is certainly possible that some groups are more successful than others in getting their wishes fulfilled. It is not the author’s intention to suggest that there is a necessary or ‘inevitable’ development in the direction of increasing equality. It is exactly in the case of minorities that such a development is not in the least clear. For they are a relatively permanent collectivity opposed in many respects to the majority. This is the crucial distinction between minorities and interest groups, such as farmers, pensioners, higher civil servants or divorced women. All these categories are also minorities from a numerical point of view, but their position is not continuously opposed to that of the majority. They can trade their interests in the process of bargaining, propaganda and, most importantly, by forming coalitions. It is precisely in this last respect that a minority does not form part of the political arena. The forma-

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tion of a coalition presupposes that there is not a permanently dominant majority; if there is such a dominant group then the rationale for coalitions collapses. This is decisive in the case where the formal rights of minorities are recognized. For in mass societies there are always more needs and wants than can be fulfilled at any given moment. The political goal of each group is to get its own needs and wants placed somewhat higher on the priority list than those of other groups, and the formation of coalitions is an essential part of this process. By concentrating on these four basic fields we can substantiate more precisely the claim that a minority must be in a disadvantageous position. It is in these fields that the norms of public life should prevail, and these norms are derived from the concept of the ‘equality of the citizen’ and are not based on ascriptive criteria. This implies that there must be a degree of consensus about the prevailing norms in public life. Alternative norms in these fields would not only be an impediment to required social interaction, but would undermine the whole idea of equality on which it is based. It is on this point – the necessity for uniform norms regulating public life – that many studies about the relation between majority and minority concentrate.

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Minority and pluralism It is possible to think of many different relationships between minority and majority groups. Several writers have categorized these relations and have tried to construct systematic classifications. This raises a fundamental question: is it possible that a minority position can cease to exist without the disappearance of the collectivity? Wirth sees such a possibility as the most desirable solution to majority-minority relations and calls it ‘pluralism’, a term used by many other writers after him. This term, however, appears to have a great variety of meanings and it is sometimes used with a favourable connotation, and on other occasions in a negative sense. This diversity of meaning has also led to subtle variations in the term; sometimes a distinction is made between plural, pluralistic and pluriform. I think it is unwise to elaborate on these distinctions: rather, the content of the term could be analysed more carefully. Wirth describes pluralism as: ‘the conception that variant cultures can flourish peacefully side by side in the same society. Indeed cultural pluralism has been held out as one of the necessary preconditions of a rich and dynamic civilization under conditions of freedom’ (Wirth 1945: 354). He adds the important qualification that

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pluralism

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need for consensus

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the majority must not feel threatened, thus implying that there is a limit to the degree of pluralism that a society can tolerate. Simpson and Yinger also seem to recognize this limitation when they define pluralism as ‘cultural variability within the range still consonant with national unity and security’ (Simpson and Yinger 1953: 27). However, neither Wirth nor Simpson and Yinger are explicit about the precise limits of pluralism. It is difficult to see what Wirth has in mind, since pluralism, which seems to me to be a property of society, for Wirth appears to be primarily a property of the minority group. Moreover, there are situations of pluralism which hardly can be looked upon as favourable; for Wirth also states: ‘If there is a great gulf between their own status and that of the minority groups... the toleration of minorities may go as far as virtually to perpetuate several sub-societies with the larger society’ (Wirth 1945: 355). This is not a case of toleration in the accepted meaning of the term but a strategy for oppression, and pluralism, in this sense, is in total contradiction with the previous definition of the concept. To make things even more complex, there is another scholarly tradition which uses the term ‘pluralism’ in the analysis of societies that have a culturally diversified population. As Wirth is writing within the American political tradition he tends to use the term in a positive sense. The other tradition stems from the description of colonial and post-colonial societies and there it generally has a negative connotation. These traditions form separate circuits and most writers do not appear to link the two, thus giving us a second reason for analysing the use of the term in both contexts. But our main aim remains to find an answer to the question of what degree of normative consensus is necessary to allow a minority full participation in society. Furnivall introduced the term ‘plural society’ to describe the colonial societies of South East Asia. He regarded such societies as the product of the colonial state that brought a number of peoples and cultures together as far, and only as far, as this was necessary for economic purposes (Furnivall 1948: 304). In Holland, the Furnivall tradition has been continued by van Lier in his social analysis of the history of Surinam. He argues that ‘every reasonable complex society is made up of elements held together by the state’. In a non-segmented or ‘pluralistic society’ the component parts are the result of a strict division of labour and an unequal distribution of the material and cultural property of the population. This results in the appearance of social strata with different styles of life and diverse customs and traditions. But these differences are mere gradations within one and the same culture, the major portion of which is the common property of

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all. Moreover, the members of a pluralistic society are usually of one race and share a common language and religion, and the economic behaviour of the different groups is generally governed by the same motivation. A plural society is marked by an absence of unity of race and religion and, furthermore, the different groups live in separate economic spheres. The differences that arise in this type of society are not gradations within a single culture, but are the result of groups stemming from different ethnic origins and diverse cultural backgrounds. Social strata usually coincide with groups that differ ‘on the basis of racial, cultural and economic criteria as well’ (van Lier 1971: 10). It is especially this last sentence that points to the central issue of the whole discussion: are these plural or segmented societies really different from societies that are ethnically stratified? M.G. Smith, who has used the concept of the ‘plural society’ particularly for describing situations in the British Caribbean, is strongly opposed to this view. He states, ‘what characterizes a plural society is that its different segments have different institutional systems. Such institutional systems include kinship, religion, property and economy, recreation etc....’ The only common institutional system is the state or, as Smith phrases it, ‘government’. There is no common value system and, in the Parsonian tradition where stratification is seen as the result of the value system, Smith finds ‘no inherent reason why all cultural sections in a plural society should be ranked hierarchically’ (Smith 1965: 82-3). I think it is necessary to stress the word ‘all’ in the preceding sentence, because it is certainly not true that access to the only joint institution, ‘government’, is shared equally by all segments. This is not only historically the case in the Caribbean, but it is also necessary, from a theoretical point of view, that there should be a centre of integration that keeps the different segments together in one society. The vagueness about the extent to which there is a single hierarchy is a problem that keeps emerging with writers who work with a more or less modified model taken from Smith. These modifications sometimes go to extreme lengths. Rex, for instance, has used Smith’s plural concept in an article on South Africa where he modifies it to the point where it is virtually unrecognizable (Rex 1971). He emphasizes the hierarchical relations in the field in which they are concluded: the labour market. It is a major conceptual weakness of Smith’s analysis (as it is in van Lier’s work) that he evades the problem of the values that operate when there is interaction between the members of different groups. In fields in which there is no interaction, such as leisure activities or religious

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no common value system

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social distance

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ceremonies, the distinct groups can adhere to their own value systems, but, in a domain where they interact, the pattern of relationships will be dominated by a single value system. However, it is far from clear how significant the cultural differences must be before we can speak of a plural society. Van Lier, for instance, stresses differences in religion and it is generally agreed that, from an historical or theological standpoint, the gulf between the religions in Surinam is greater than the differences between, for example, Protestants and Catholics in Holland. But does this mean that the saliency of religion as a factor in social life is therefore automatically greater? The Northern Ireland situation might cause us to hesitate before jumping to such a conclusion. All these reservations about the way various authors use the concept of ‘plural society’ does not alter the fact that there are societies in which we not only have stratification but also a significant degree of social distance of a non-hierarchical character. To a certain extent we find examples of such social distance in all societies. There is everywhere a social distance between rural and urban peoples, between groups with different religions and philosophies of life, and these need not be hierarchical. When such differences become institutionalized then we see the emergence of a plural society. Van den Berghe describes this as follows: ‘social structure is compartmentalized into analogous, parallel, non-complementary sets of institutions’. Moreover, there is: ‘primacy of segmental utilitarian nonaffective and functionally specific relationships between corporate groups and of total, nonutilitarian affective, diffuse ties within such groups’ (van den Berghe 1967: 34-5). Van den Berghe calls this ‘social pluralism’, which he distinguishes from ‘cultural pluralism’. The emergence of ethnic groups in a society he calls ‘cultural pluralism’, whereas a society that is racially structured, but culturally homogeneous, such as the South of the United States, he terms a socially plural society (van den Berghe 1967: 35-6, 132-3). It seems difficult to make this distinction operational because, in order to be stable, cultural pluralism must result in a certain degree of institutionalization. ‘Any form of cultural pluralism’, writes van den Berghe, ‘has a structural facet which can be treated as social pluralism.’ Furthermore, a culturally homogeneous society in which the social strata have no interaction except in strictly specified roles, will become divided into clearly distinguished subcultures (van den Berghe 1967: 135). This is of little help if, instead of trying to analyse an historical situation with the benefit of hindsight, we are confronted by a concrete society. The more so because the significance of these parallel, non-complementary institutions for the functioning of the society as

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a whole is not made more explicit. As I argued before with regard to Smith, so with van den Berghe it is clear that access to the political arena is not in the least organized through these parallel, non-complementary institutions. On the contrary, political power is vested in one of the segments of the population which looks upon this ‘cultural pluralism’ as a strategy to continue its monopoly of power. It follows from what has been said about the concept of minority so far, that it is the spheres of public life, those that are important for all the inhabitants of the state, that deserve most attention. Cultural diversity in itself is not a problem but is a reality in all states, and particularly the modern industrial state. Structural pluralism, in the sense of parallel institutions, is the accepted rule in areas that are now considered to be part of the private domain, as religion has become with the rise of the secular state in the West. How far these parallel institutions may promote or hinder minority participation in the general ‘public’ fields is a separate question, which Gordon has put forward sharply with regard to the United States (Gordon 1964: 233-65). However, the more important question is the extent of these ‘public’ or joint fields. If we want to identify a position as ‘disadvantageous’ there has to be a standard of comparison, there must be a field of interaction where the roles of the parties can be described as asymmetrical. ‘Plural’, according to this definition, is a term that can only be applied to a society when: (a) the ‘plural’ organization regulates ‘communal’ fields, that is, the public domain; (b) the ‘plural’ organization consists of institutions that are indeed parallel. Where the organization brings groups together in an hierarchical order, we should rather speak of ethnic stratification. One of the few democratic societies meeting these conditions seems to be the Dutch society, as described by Lijphart. Lijphart uses the term plural in the American political science tradition and not in the Furnivall-Smith sense. He calls every society plural that exhibits: ‘clearly discernible, racial, linguistic and religious differences’ (Lijphart 1968: 3). This description applies to almost every modern society, as long as we do not specify how significant these differences must be. However, he adds two further elements. The first is the obvious point that differences must be institutionalized or, in his words, ‘organized’ (Lijphart 1968: 5). Although this comes close to the ideas of Smith and van den Berghe, Lijphart argues that such a society could hardly continue to exist unless these organized contacts are cross-cutting rather than reinforcing. His third condition is that there must be a diffusion of solidarity because participation, or potential participation, is ‘overlapping’. We can easily imagine a society

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Lijphart’s three conditions

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Dutch society: pillarization

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where linguistic, religious and economic lines do not run parallel to each other, and where there is such a diffusion of solidarity. To a certain extent Belgium fits this model. This last condition represents a development of the concept that brings it into total contradiction with the formulations of Smith and van den Berghe. These writers would never call a society ‘plural’ if it had cross-cutting loyalties. The interest of the Dutch case, however, is that it does not meet Lijphart’s third condition. Dutch society is, or was at least until the 1960s, organized in a pattern of parallel, mutually reinforcing institutions. That Lijphart continues to label it plural seems inconsistent, but, because we have now reached the situation where writers from the other tradition would use the term, it is interesting to follow his analysis. The Dutch ‘pillarized’ (verzuilde) society corresponds to the picture of a society where there is a lack of consensus between the constituent parts of the population, so that it is on the verge of conflict and instability unless power can be monopolized by one of the segments. This raises the key question of Lijphart’s book: how can democracy function under such circumstances? In order to answer this question, Lijphart looks to the specific rules of the political game as they are accepted in this type of society. The fundamental rule is that leaders are obliged to find, in some form or another, a practical compromise. Furthermore, these rules stipulate that every type of coalition must be possible, thus giving every pillar a realistic chance that a good deal of its objectives could be achieved at some time or other. The Dutch system seems to correspond quite closely to the central feature of plural societies as expounded by Smith and van den Berghe. It is a society in which the population segments are integrated into ‘blocks’ that are not hierarchically ranked one over the other. Such pluralism seems to be only possible under three conditions. In the first place, none of the pillars must be able, through numerical strength or any other factor, to monopolize political power. Should there be a dominant party then there will inevitably develop a system of stratification. Secondly, no party or block must be permanently excluded from participating in government. In Holland there have always been some smaller splinter parties, but these have traditionally associated themselves with one of the main pillars. For instance, several of the more strictly orthodox Protestant churches have given birth to such mini-parties, but they have always considered themselves to be the ‘conscience’ of the major parties. In the third place, these pillars or blocks must succeed in integrating the total population by these indirect means. It is very doubtful whether this pillar system can be still regarded

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as an accurate description of Dutch society. Increasingly individuals and groups have broken away from the traditional pillars so that this third condition is no longer satisfied. Further, it can also no longer be taken for granted that the second condition will be met in the future. Immigration since the Second World War has brought several categories of immigrants into the country that cannot be regarded as becoming integrated into any of the existing pillars, neither can they hope to develop into a pillar of their own. This is the case with the Islamic peasant migrants from Morocco and Turkey, a category, even when it possesses the vote, that is too small to create its own pillar. Consequently, for groups that are numerically small relative to the society in which they live, a plural organization in itself does not guarantee participation in social life. If we use the term ‘plural’ in the very vague sense of ‘heterogeneous’, it has hardly any meaning. We can say, for example, that Dutch society has become more plural because of the immigration of Muslims, but this obscures more than it illuminates. There is a good example of the confusion to which the unspecific use of the term may lead in Bagley’s study of race relations in Holland (Bagley 1973). By using the term plural he suggests a consistency and continuity in Dutch policy towards immigrants that simply is not supported by the facts. This policy could only be labelled plural if the aim was either to integrate newcomers into one or all of the existing pillars, or to let them develop into a pillar of their own. This last possibility has never been attempted and is, in any case, political nonsense. Furthermore, there can also be cited examples of a great variety of reactions of Dutch society towards immigrants. The early Roman Catholic immigrants from Poland and Italy were absorbed in the Roman Catholic pillar; the Indo-Dutch were absorbed in all three pillars. In the case of the Ambonese soldiers, now generally known as ‘South Moluccans’, absorption was explicitly excluded as an aim during the first decade of their stay. Prior to 1975, there was simply no policy at all with regard to the West Indians. To label all these reactions as ‘plural’ does not clarify the situation in the slightest. If we use plural in the strict sense, as outlined above, it offers a model for social organization that can be profitable to countries which have a population divided along cultural lines, provided there is a certain balance of power between the blocks. However, if we have segments that are numerically small, relative to the other blocks in the total population, such an organization would not give them a chance to promote their interests or to participate in public life.

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Towards a typology of majority-minority relations In the preceding discussion it has repeatedly been stressed that the disadvantageous position of a minority must be distinguished from other positions of disadvantage in which categories and collectivities might find themselves. Schermerhorn has characterized the position of minorities by constructing a typology which is presented here in a somewhat modified form (Schermerhorn 1970: 13). Schermerhorn’s typology Numerical strength

three dimensions of minoritymajority relations

Social power

Strongest party

Weakest party

Dominant

Majority

Elite

Subordinate

Subordinated masses

Minority

In his comment on this typology, Schermerhorn stipulates that there are two characteristic configurations: elite – masses and majority – minority. This is helpful in that we can at least distinguish between these two fundamentally different situations. There are still many other factors that can cause differentiation between the concrete situations of minorities. Wirth has made a classification based on the objectives of the minority, and distinguished between minorities aiming at pluralism, assimilation, secession and domination (Wirth 1945: 354 ff). A practical difficulty with these categories is that it is not always easy to establish what the aims of the minority are. A far more serious criticism for the present discussion is that such a classification does not take into account enough dimensions to construct a global typology. If the orientation of the minority is important, we should at least expect that the aims of the majority should also be taken into account. In my opinion, there are at least three dimensions along which minority-majority relations are basically differentiated. Concentration-dispersion In the first place a distinction should be made between concentrated and dispersed minorities. If we take the state as the unit of analysis it is possible that a minority may be numerically stronger in a particular region. This makes it difficult to apply the central idea of the concept of minority group, and it will be necessary in such situations to consider the four public fields with due regard to regional varia-

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tions. For ‘concentrated minorities’ other factors play an intervening role in minority situations, and these include the absolute size of the group, its size relative to that of the majority at the national and regional level and the practical support given to the group from other countries. These factors will also influence the situation of a dispersed minority but, because such minorities have no core area, their whole orientation will be different and their aspirations will acquire a different political expression.

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Particularism-universalism We have already mentioned Wirth’s idea that minorities differ in their aims and that this can be seen as an important aspect of their situation. It is also possible to introduce the orientation of the minority as a simple, dichotomous variable in the construction of a typology. Either the minority can aim at participation in society, or it can be focused exclusively on its internal affairs. In the first case the objective will be to remove any barriers preventing participation. The minority bases its demands in such a situation on the principle of ‘equality’, and, in general, will also demand the preservation of alternative roles. The objective is precisely to get these kinds of roles recognized as ‘alternative’. One wishes to be free to participate as a Jew, Sikh or Black in the society because the public domain ought to be ‘neutral’ with regard to these properties. I will use the standard sociological term ‘universalism’ to label such situations. In the case of concentrated minorities, this orientation can acquire the specific form of regionalism. Particularistic minorities also aim at improving their position but their perception of rights and duties is fundamentally different. They do not demand ‘equal’ rights with the majority, but derive their rights from their own particularistic value system. The extreme case of this is when the minority aims at dominating the majority. Emancipation, continuation and elimination A third possibility for classifying minority situations is to use the aims of the majority as a criterion. Simpson and Yinger have made such a classification, but because they do not combine this variable systematically with others, their approach has little practical value. For instance, they give as an example of their variant ‘pluralism’ only cases of what I have called concentrated minorities. (Simpson and Yinger 1953: 24ff). However, the policy of the majority is an important aspect of the relationship between majority and minority, and it is possible to distinguish between three major types of objective.

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(a) Emancipation: The aim is that there should be full participation by the minority in the society. Special legal and social measures may be undertaken to achieve this end. It presupposes that there is a sufficiently clear definition of what is thought to be ‘participation’ in society. The vital distinction between other reactions that I will call ‘elimination’ is that such participation need not result in the minority group becoming invisible or ceasing to exist as a collectivity. (b) Continuation: Another objective of the majority can also be to continue the present situation. This is an obvious possibility when the minority fulfils certain functions for the majority, as when the minority is exploited. However, this is not necessarily the case, for it depends on the fact that the absolute and relative ‘size of the minority must be substantial. In some situations the goal of minority group continuation may be the result of passive rather than active policies. It is not so much that the objective is to exploit the minority, for the simple reason that there is little to exploit, but rather there is a refusal to pursue a policy of active emancipation for a minority that has become part of the society in the course of historical development. (c) Elimination: The majority can also aim at the elimination of the minority as a recognizable collectivity. We can distinguish between two variants of this category. In the first case, the majority can aim at forced assimilation by suppressing the constituent elements of a minority such as language or religion. In the second case, the majority can attempt the physical extermination of the minority by deportation, population transfer or even genocide.

particularism

From a logical point of view these three variants could be subsumed under the same dichotomy that we used when describing the minority’s orientation. In that case the categories continuation and elimination would merge and come under the label ‘particularism’. However, I think that the distinction between the two categories is sufficiently illuminating to justify retaining this subdivision.

The construction of a typology

advantages

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By using these three dimensions we can construct a typology of twelve cells which represent different types of minority-majority relations. While such a typology has its limitations, it also has a number of advantages. It demonstrates how rare are the possibilities for a positive development of relationships between majority and minority. Only

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the cells marked ‘emancipation process’ and ‘federalism’ suggest the prospect of a stable form of minority participation in society. All other forms are unsatisfactory for one or both of the parties and are therefore inherently unstable, though the majority may be successful for a period of time in consolidating its position by repression. There may also be a temporary acceptance of the continuation of the status quo by a strongly particularistic minority, which is in effect accepting a reservation situation. The development of communications in modern societies, however, is so strong that such groups tend, in the long run, to adopt the wider society as their frame of reference. Thus over several generations they will develop a desire for participation, be it initially only in such fields as consumption and education. In the dimension of ‘elimination’ it is possible to reach a stable situation, although this will also result in the end of the majority- minority relationship. Particularly in the case of concentrated mino­ rities the outcome of the conflict may be strongly influenced by the international political scene, as has clearly been the case in the population transfer between Greece and Turkey after the First World War and in the secession of Bangladesh. It is not my intention to suggest that the development in the first two cells I mentioned will necessarily run smoothly. On the contrary, these processes generally provoke a number of disputes and conflicts concerning the extent of emancipation and the degree of autonomy, and the relationship between rights and duties. However, such conflicts can be resolved within these basic processes. There are a number of objections that can be raised against the ty- disadvantages pology. First, it may give the impression that once they have acquired a certain character these relationships are unchanging. In reality, majority-minority relations can change their character in the course of time, but the typology gives us no information about the direction in which these processes develop. A second objection is the unspecific nature of the classification criteria. How are we to determine the ‘orientation’ or the ‘objectives’ of a majority or a minority? There are situations in which these orientations are relatively homogeneous and it is not difficult to state in what direction they are pointing. But in many cases the majority or the minority are far from homogeneous and may aim simultaneously at several different goals, which may even be contradictory. Nevertheless, this typology represents an improvement as compared to the lack of precision which characterizes the scholarly, and the more popular literature, on the subject of minorities. It should be remembered that the typology is an elaboration of the one developed by Schermerhorn, and it only deals with majority-minority relation-

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ships. It combines two dimensions that appear in the literature, but only as separate criteria for classification. Schermerhorn has stipulated that the similarity in orientation between majority and minority is in itself an important variable in minority situations (Schermerhorn 1970: 83). The combination of orientations can be clearly seen in our typology. Moreover, I have clearly differentiated between concentrated and dispersed minorities because I have not found this distinction systematically treated elsewhere. It seems, however, that this is a basic variable in the situations in which minorities find themselves.

Conclusion: a revised definition

revised definition

To conclude this analysis of the concept of minority or minority group, it is necessary to present a revised definition. It is essential that the concept contains no contradictory properties and that these properties are sufficiently explicit to distinguish the phenomenon from any other phenomena. As a result of the present analysis, it could be argued that a minority has three constituent properties that can be summarized as follows: 1 A minority is a continuous collectivity within the population of a state. This continuity has two important aspects: (a) the minority consists of several generations, (b) membership of the minority has priority above other forms of social categorization. 2 The numerical position of a minority excludes it from taking effective part in the political process. 3 A minority has an objectively disadvantageous position in the sense that its members do not participate to the same degree as the majority population in the four following ‘public’ fields: (a) the legal system (b) the educational system (c) the labour market (d) the housing market. The translation of this chapter first appeared, in slightly modified form, in Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, April 1978, 218-33. I am grateful to the editor, John Stone, for his help with the translation and for his permission to reproduce it here. For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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‘Black’, racial equality and Asian identity Tariq Modood

In the 1980s, within the sociology of race, a particular concept of blackness was de rigueur. This political concept, inspired by the struggle of racialised minorities in American society, was appealing – at least for those who embraced it – because it lumped all non-white groups together, thereby suggesting they had a lot in common. In an influential, provocative article published by the journal New Community in 1988, the sociologist Tariq Modood criticised the hegemony of this concept because it would not do justice to the history and experiences of Asian immigrants. The concept of blackness, even when used in a political way, overstates the significance of colour and colour discrimination, while simultaneously understating the ethnic identity of Asians and the ethnicisms they suffer from. The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Over the last few years a consensus had developed amongst race equality professionals and activists that the term ‘black’ should be used to describe all those who because of their race are unfavourably treated within British society. While this idea originated in the contracts with the US Black Power groups and is associated with the Left, particularly with the Black Section movement in the Labour Party, and indeed is most zealously pursued by some Labour controlled local authorities, it has become a commonplace so that, for instance, it is now current practice of the media not least the BBC. The argument behind this usage of ‘black’ is that it provides the means of affecting a unity between otherwise very diverse, powerless minorities that is necessary for an effective anti-racist movement. This argument is thought to be so decisive that it is rare, at least in print, to see it critically considered.1 I believe however, that it required too

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high a price in terms of loss of principle from anti-racists and sells short the majority of the people it identifies as ‘black’. In particular it has the effect of imposing a professional-political consensus on the Asian community that was formed by those largely outside it and at a time when Asians as a community were barely participants in debates on race. In the use of the term ‘Asian’ I assume that ethnic identities can coexist at different levels of generality (e.g. Mirpuri, Pakistani, Asian). What I mean by an ‘Asian’ identity is some share in the heritage of the civilisations of old Hindustan prior to British conquest. Roughly, it is those people who believe that the Taj Mahal is an object of their history. As neither they nor the British public in general have yet discovered the academic term ‘South Asian’ I shall refer to such people in Britain as ‘Asian’.

Racial simplicities

simplistic dualism

The idea that race equality involves the recognition of cultural and ethnic diversity is one that is widely paid lip-service. It is true that talk about cultural variety is sometimes ill-informed or patronising and all too often an evasion from a serious commitment to fighting against racial discrimination. Indeed, the factual recognition of cultural plurality is not logically incompatible with forms of hierarchy. Apartheid is a classic case in point. Nevertheless an organisation which is itself pledged to racial equality cannot but be opposed to the crude categorisations which divide societies and humanity into white and black. While the reduction of an over-lapping and interrelated plurality into a simplistic dualism is the stock-in-trade of racist thinking it is not a tool available for anti-racists. For the latter are committed to challenging the gross ignorance about peoples and the indifference to their variety that racists utilise. If anti-racists borrow the racists’ classifications in order to defeat racism (‘racists have no trouble in saying who is black, so why should we?’ it is often said)2 then however successful or not they may be as an interest group they will have lost their opposition to racism as a way of thinking. In particular, they will have lost the ideal of a multi-racial society for a model of society as composed of two and only two ‘races’ which for the forseeable future must live in conflict. If this seems somewhat abstract it is worth noting, in contrast to say the USA or Canada, which are often the models for British race

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egalitarians in respect of government action especially in employment policy, the decline of the vocabulary of multi-racialism in the UK. Similarly, one has to note the divergence of the new British race vocabulary from that of America, Africa, India or just about any other part of the globe where ‘black’ continues to mean ‘of sub-Saharan African origin’ (cf. ‘black is beautiful’, ‘black music’, ‘black Africa’). An anomaly which, for example, leads to even greater confusion in the international than the British press as to how many ‘black’ MPs were elected in June 1987.3

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Description and identity One justification for the new use of the term ‘black’ is that regardless of these inadequacies in other respects it is said to have a descriptive clarity in objectively and factually picking out all those who suffer in common ways from a single form of racism. The drawback here, however, is that most ordinary people wish to be defined in terms of a historically received identity, a distinctive set of beliefs and practices or in terms of their aspirations for themselves and their families. They may seek more government attention for their problems but just as they wish not to be trapped in a problematic condition – in inner-city decay, in conflict with authority, in alienation from the mainstream, without hope of winning acceptance and graduated progress for their children – so most people do not wish to be defined in terms of a problem or as victims. The situation is exactly analogous to the one where social theorists identify persons as proletariat who may have nothing else in common other than this condition and are then surprised to find that the people in question do not make that identity their own; or that the term ‘working class’ fails to offer inspirational identity to a large number of people who on all socioeconomic criteria are evidently working class. Most people wish to put on show their best features, those qualities in which their individual and collective pride resides in and by which they want the rest of the world to know them. They wish to be known for what they are, not for what others find problematic about them.

A black identity Now, of course, for many who suffer from white domination ‘black’ has become a focus of collective pride. This is certainly true of many ‘black’ activists and is perhaps quite widely true now of Afro-

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Caribbeans here4 and particularly so of Afro-Americans. They may not all share identical notions of black let alone a common political perspective but they do all believe that the term ‘black’ should be used to promote a positive identity. The important point to note is that this use of the term ‘black’, unlike the one I started off with, is no longer descriptive. It is evaluative or aspirational for it denotes not just the negative treatment of others to oneself (of white people to those of another colour) but what one wishes to be or ought to wish to be. One important implication is that, to be slightly technical for a moment, the generic term ‘black’ covers cases which are not equally examples of the genus. Let me illustrate what I mean by an example. ‘Democracy’ is an evaluative generic term which may be used to cover a range of organisations some of which may be more democratic than others, and so the term applies more to some of the organisations than to others. And there is a further assumption that the lesser cases ought to be more like the major cases for the genus is something worthy: the less democratic ought to be more like the more democratic. So similarly the aspirational use of the term ‘black’ implies that while some persons or groups are more black than others, insofar as being black is something to be encouraged, the lesser or more ambiguous blacks ought to aspire to be more like the ‘true’ blacks.

British Asians

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This use of the term ‘black’ may not in itself, any more than ‘democracy’, present any special difficulties. However, there are several factors about the British situation that conspire to make this positive notion of black harmful to British Asians.5 Firstly, because as a matter of historical and contemporary fact this positive black identity has been espoused by peoples of sub-Saharan African roots, they naturally are thought to be the quintessential or exemplary cases of black consciousness and understand black consciousness to be at its fullest, something only achieved by people of African ethnicity. The Handsworth Harambee organisation thus defined itself on a BBC ‘Open Door’ television programme as rooted in a belief system ‘influenced by Pan-Africanism, African socialism, and parts of the black power philosophy. It is believed that though conditions of black people are influenced by what happens in Africa, in this way black people can carve out for themselves a decent existence in Handsworth’.6 So if Asians in Britain, by virtue of the discrimination practised against them, come to believe that they too are black in a positive sense it is obvious that only some of the concepts forged by creators of black consciousness will be applicable to Asians so that they will necessarily not be capable of being black in the full sense but be only secondary or ambiguous blacks.

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Secondly, some may claim that when Asians are encouraged to think of themselves as black what is on offer is not the old black consciousness, the one forged exclusively by people of African ethnicity and for people of African ethnicity, but a new Afro-Asian identity. Leaving new Afro-Asian aside the question of what is supposed to be the link here between identity the old and the new, the problem here is to know what content this new identity has. For the attempt to reduce several groups who have nothing more in common with each other (except the negative condition of discrimination) than any of those groups have with white people to a single identity makes, I must confess, such little sense to me that this concept to me is nothing but a meaningless chimera. At best it marks not so much a positive identity but a positive determination to oppose white racism, and the adoption of the term ‘black’ here usually means by implication and certainly as a matter of fact, the acceptance by Asians of an Afro political leadership. The latter is evidenced by the relative numbers and especially positions of power (e.g. Chairs of Committees) of Afro and Asian members in inner London Councils’ ruling groups,7 black workers groups such as that in the National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO), black caucuses and other similar organisations prefixed by the term ‘black’.8 An Afro leadership has of course had some benefits for Asians, as for example in the West Indian lobbying which led to the inclusion of the concept of indirect discrimination in the 1976 Race Relations Act, but presumably it need not be, as it has presently become, at the price of subordinating their identity to political concerns. Indeed, if the primary mode by which Asians are made to publicly relate to the rest of British society is through a black political identity then no one should be surprised if Asians remain politically under-represented and misrepresented and increasing numbers of successful Asians try to make themselves inconspicuous and opt for a path of apolitical assimilation.

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That Asians cannot be served by a black identity equal to its use for, say, Afro-Caribbeans is perhaps most pointedly illustrated by the fact that when even explicit users of the new concept, in the moments they wish to refer only to Asians do so by the term ‘Asian’, while a book sub-titled ‘West Indians in British Politics’ after a few introductory remarks about the wider ‘black’ community thereon confidently speaks of West Indians as the ‘black community’.9 What is particularly significant here is not that the author, Trevor Carter, in writing exclusively of West Indian experience should use the term ‘black’ as an ethnically specific term. What is significant is that Carter, despite his introductory remarks, is able to use the term in this narrower

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way without any loss of intelligibility or plausibility. More damaging still to the desire of any Asians to be included in a ‘black’ identity is Peter Fryer’s history of ‘black’ people in Britain which, again, despite the usual prefatory remarks about Asians as an integral part of black Britain devotes less than twenty of its six hundred pages to them.10 This process of paying lip-service to the idea of British Asians as blacks while actually being interested in developing a black ethnic identity reaches its apogee in Paul Gilroy’s recent book in which, despite some occasional and incidental uses of ‘black’ as a descriptive term (e.g. pp. 45-46), the interest in Asians, spanning two or three sentences only, is confined to the extent that they approximate to black youth culture11. A far more honest approach is that of Fraser’s and Douglas’s Black Heroes in the Hall of Fame in which there is no place for Asians – not out of any hostility but simply inappropriateness.12

‘Doublespeak’ and racial inequality unconscious doublespeak

The drawback with ‘black’ used as a descriptive term, then, is that it defines people not in terms of their own identity but by the treatment of others; the aspirational use, on the other hand, overcomes this deficiency but at the price of making British Asians have to define themselves in a framework historically and internationally developed by people in search of African roots. These two situations, of course, describe ideal or abstract cases. Real life is never so simple and the present British situation certainly is not. For that consists of a largely unrecognised ambivalence or confusion arising from the following: i) wishing that a single term could be used for all non-white peoples; ii) feeling that ‘non-white’ is a term of negative contrast and noting that at least for some of the referent groups ‘black’ is a positive term and hence to be preferred; iii) noting that the term ‘black’ is not adequately comprehensive nor neutral between different ethnic minority groups for it seems much more apt for some of those groups rather than others. Hence we have a kind of doublespeak which in charity one has to suppose is unconscious for otherwise one would have to question the intelligence and/or motives of its users. A sentence like the following is what I have in mind:

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Too often when the party discusses the membership of black and Asian people it centres on the level of black public representativeness, magistrates and MPs, rather on ways in which black people can play a role in the party without necessarily aspiring to hold office; this is not to diminish the important point that many more black people should hold such offices.13

A sentence which boldly begins with one meaning of ‘black’ immediately gives way to an entirely different meaning without any suggestion of having done so. Another example of the same general phenomenon is when local authority job advertisements proclaim a desire to attract applications from ‘black and other ethnic minorities’ or ‘black and Asian people’. That in each case the second half of these conjunctions is very definitely secondary, an irritating addition, is clear from the fact that regardless of how often these conjunctions are used their order always follows strict precedence. Rare indeed in these contexts would a statement be made in terms of ‘all ethnic minorities including black people’. And to expect a phrase such as ‘Asian and Black’ might not seem unreasonable given the size of the respective populations14 or even the convention of alphabetical precedence, let alone the variety normal in the use of language; but it is an expectation which will invariably be disappointed for it misses the hierarchical politics of such formulae. When added to this an institution as central to public opinion formation as the BBC decides that the term ‘Black or Asian’ is too cumbersome and that for the sake of editorial simplicity programme makers have the right to abbreviate that term to ‘Black’, what are Asians in Britain supposed to conclude about their significance as a community in Britain? What is the message that is being sent out to them? As anyone involved in race equality issues knows, constantly being described as an appendix or as an afterthought erodes one’s sense of one’s worth so that one comes to believe that one perhaps is as secondary or inferior as the benevolent authorities and the media imply.

Ethnic self-definition This brings us to the central point at issue, namely, the principle of ethnic self-definition as a basic element of racial equality and multiracialism. When some time ago American blacks insisted on calling themselves ‘black’ and on being so-called by others this was rightly thought to be an assertion of collective self-respect and respect for which by other races was a basic step towards racial equality.

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Afro-American collective self-respect

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Similarly, a while ago when many people here of West Indian origins took on the term Afro-Caribbean it was part of a search for an identity in which one could have a sense of worth and resist denigrators. And yet Asians in Britain who do possess a sense of common history and ethnic identity are finding it difficult to hold on to, let alone develop, this identity by the activities of the very people who publicly profess racial equality and in many cases are publicly invested with the task of promoting it. Let me confine myself to one example, the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE). The CRE in so much of its publicity literature, videos, recommended ethnic monitoring categories, through the work of its professionals and so on, increasingly refers to the people about whom it is concerned as ‘black’.15 Yet it denies treating Asians in any way less than their due and rejects that it is smothering any distinctive group identity. The CRE’s view seems to be that its proposed categorisation of Asians as black for, say, purposes of ethnic monitoring as a tool in equal opportunity strategies, is not an attempt to define Asians as such. Rather it is to pick out an important but limited feature about Asians in Britain while leaving them free to develop their distinctive identity along lines congenial to themselves.

late political selfconsciousness among Asians

If I am right in thinking that this is the CRE’s view (in the absence of any official statement it is gleaned from private correspondence and conversations) then it is morally fraudulent. For when local authorities,16 academics, politicians, the media and public in general in unison use the categories by which Asians are blacks, and this categorisation becomes second nature so that anyone who questions it is thought to be out of touch, there can be no doubt that the fundamental identity of Asians in Britain has been defined for them by the mode of reference of the race relations establishment. When I raised this matter with the Community Relations Council of one London Borough I was told that this issue was out of date, that it had already been settled by various conferences of professionals and that the fight against racial discrimination would be best served if the Asian community – coming late to political self-consciousness – accepted it as a fait accompli.

Who knows what Asians think? Who cares? Of course some Asians, including prominent figures, do accept the term ‘black’ of themselves. However, this fact has to be balanced by three others. Namely, that there are three other groups of Asians,

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each of which is larger than the group just referred to. The largest perhaps is the group that knows that society now refers to them as black, tolerates this while studiously avoiding referring to themselves as black. Then there is the group that feels politically obligated to talk of themselves as black for they see that their political champions, sponsors and other sympathisers talk of them in these ways and expect them to do so too. Finally, there is the group of Asians to whom it simply has not occurred that when local authorities, politicians, media, etc. speak of ‘blacks’, for example as in job advertisements which say ‘applications from black people are welcome’, that they are being referred to.17 It might be thought that this last group must consist of those who are least educated, least connected to British society and live in areas of the country where race equality is not a major issue. My experience is that this is not so at all and this group can still be found in large numbers in areas such as Brent in London. They persist in a cocoon of ignorance because their own understanding of themselves and of other groups is so different from the assumptions of the local public vocabulary that those assumptions do not even register as possibilities within their framework of understanding.18 I have made assertions here about what I believe to be true about the large majority of Asians in Britain. It may be asked of me how I can prove these assertions. Perhaps the strict answer is that I cannot and that no one can prove the opposite either. For – and this speaks more loudly than any words – there are very few figures available on this matter. Virtually no one, certainly not the CRE nor the local authorities who confidently assume that Asians think of themselves as ‘black’, nor again those who despite what they know feel no inhibition in imposing this identity upon Asians, has thought the Asian community important enough to merit this research and consultation.19 The one research project that has specifically examined grassroots thinking on this matter has been recently published by the Office of Population and Censuses Surveys (OPCS).20 Their research consisted of three separate field tests using three different question formats and on each occasion in several parts of the country. They found that when in the few cases that Asians ticked themselves as ‘Black’ it was mainly done in error due to the design of the form.21 While it did not specifically test for this it found no wish amongst Asians to be subsumed under a black identity. It will be interesting to see whether the issue is thought important enough for others to undertake further research and for race relation professionals to finally come to respect the principle of ethnic self-definition.

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It will, incidentally, also be interesting to see if the government itself listens to the message of the OPCS research. For while it has been the case that the Civil Service Commission has for a number of years been using ethnic classifications which are in tune with OPCS findings, the Home Office in its recent ethnic survey of probations service staff and the Department of Education and Science’s survey of schoolchildren and teachers to begin in autumn 1988 have used the categories fashioned by the CRE and in the former case despite the protest and noncooperation of the National Association of Asian Probation Staff.22 It seems that some government departments have been persuaded by race professionals on this issue just at the moment when Asian opinion is beginning to stir on this point.

Political realism and Asian identity

a ‘rainbow coalition’

restoration of ethnic pride

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I said at the start that the argument behind the new usage of ‘black’ consists in the unity it provides for anti-racism. Against this I have tried to show how the argument is not worthy of race egalitarians and necessarily devalues Asians, the numerically larger party in this prospective unity. What now in conclusion must be stressed is that one does not necessarily have to choose between these rival two positions, between an anti-racist common front on the one hand and a respect for Asian identity on the other. What does follow, however, is that it is foolish to expect a ‘rainbow coalition’ (as Jesse Jackson calls the non-white political alliance in America) to be successful if it involves asking a partner to this coalition to adopt an identity false to their own being. Such a coalition will be only skin-deep and will be betrayed at the first opportunity.23 It is already quite clear how unattractive current race equality campaigning is to the majority of Asians who consistently cross the street to avoid it unless some grantaid is in prospect. The current uses on the term ‘black’, particularly those which associate it with what is coming to be called a ‘culture of resistance’,24 may create unity amongst a band of militants but will lead more Asians to seek a life of quiet assimilation than otherwise would. If we follow further the reference to Jesse Jackson and look more clearly at the American experience we will learn, I believe, that racial inequality and exclusion is overcome not simply by political institutional change but with an accompanying restoration of ethnic pride. This latter was achieved by the ‘black is beautiful’ campaign and is to some extent being emulated by Afro-Britons. Similarly, it is my con-

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viction that what we Asians need at present is to develop and project a public identity which will be readily communicable and be true to our own being and our own sense of worth. Only this will give us the confidence to play a more active role in public affairs and assert ourselves as we are and not as others – friend or foe – would wish us to be. An identity which, on the one hand, is capable of fostering pride in our historical heritage and ethnicity and, on the other hand, which can earn us the respect due to us in British society by virtue of the hard work and disciplined commitment that we or our parents have made in establishing ourselves in this country, and by virtue of our growing contribution in the many areas of commerce, law, medicine, education, science, technology and so on. A public identity which is true to our thinking and being is of value in itself; it is also of benefit against those who would distort us into schemes and theories for their own political purposes; and finally, it is of benefit in inspiring and achieving those aspects of racial equality and social success that political initiatives by themselves cannot deliver.

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The development of an authentic public identity is, of course, not an alternative to a politics along the lines of a ‘rainbow coalition’ or a common front against racism. But – and this is important – nor is it in opposition to it. The real question is whether current modes of anti-racism will be sufficiently adaptive on this point. For Asians cannot be expected to embrace a political race equality which denies them the distinctive public recognition that they seek. The choice, then, is not between a separatist Asian ethnicity and unity of the racially oppressed; the choice is between a political realism which accords dignity to ethnic groups on their own terms and a coercive ideological fantasy.

Notes 1 See, however, Sandip Hazareesingh’s excellent ‘Racism Cultural Identity: An Indian Perspective’, Dragon’s Teeth 1986, 24:4-10. See also the brief editorial in the ‘Race and Society’ supplement of New Society, 6.11.1987. For an example of the anti-Asian prejudice that the latter hints at, see the editorial and ‘Voice of Alex’ in Platform, October 19 and 25, 1987 respectively. 2 This argument is often generalised from a reference to racists to white society in general: ‘the dominant popular culture continues to insist on using the word ‘black’ to identify people of both Afro-Caribbean and South Asian descent’ (Richard Jenkins ‘Countering Prejudice – Anthropological or Otherwise’, Anthropology Today 1987, 3:2). Popular culture, however, has yet

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to oblige: it is a common experience of race/racism awareness trainers that most white people use the term ‘coloured’ when they should use ‘black’ and that they need to be taught the new vocabulary. 3 See, for example, Newsweek, 4 January 1988: 32-33. Newsweek, however, can be forgiven for overlooking that in Jonathan Sayeed, the Conservative M.P. for Bristol East, Westminster has had a half-Indian M.P. since 1983 for none of the British media has noted the fact either. 4 This is not, of course, universally so even amongst the younger generation. For a voice of dissent see Ferdi Dennis ‘History – Fact or Fiction?’, The Voice, week ending 25 March 1987. Indo-Caribbeans of course are defined out of existence by the current idea that the term ‘Afro-Caribbean’ is simply an update on the term ‘West Indian’, see Lynette Lithgow ‘East Indians and the West Indies’, Asian Times, 4.3.1988, pp. 4-5. 5 Probably also harmful to (amongst others) some black people: it can’t be much help to develop a term of ethnic pride and then see it applied indiscriminately to non-white peoples. I confine my concern here to Asians. 6 Quoted in John Rex and Sally Tomlinson Colonial Immigrants in a British City, London, 1987, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 260. 7 See Peter Hamid ‘Asian Involvement in the Political Life of Great Britain with Parallels Drawn from the Afro-Caribbean Experience’, Shakti, November 1986, pp. 16-17. 8 Research suggests that not only do the majority of Asians not join such organisations but they do not even approve of their existence. The Harris poll for Caribbean/Asian/African Times found only 31 per cent of Asians in favour of the setting up of a Black Section in the Labour Party (African Times, 5 June 1987: 22). 9 Trevor Carter Shattering Illusions, West Indians in British Politics, London, 1986, Lawrence and Wishart. 10 Peter Fryer Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, London, 1984, Pluto Press Ltd. 11 Paul Gilroy There Ain’t No Black In The Union Jack, London, 1987, Hutchinson. 12 Flip Fraser and J.D. Douglas Black Heroes in the Hall of Fame, a stage musical currently (December 1987) showing at the Astoria Theatre, London to wide critical acclaim, not least because of its contribution to black pride. 13 Chosen at random from Positive Discrimination: Black People and the Labour Party (The Labour Party, 1985: 20). ‘Doublespeak’ sentences like these can be found daily in virtually any book, article or newspaper item on race. Even an Asian paper like New Life which is normally very clear on these matters can occasionally find itself in this sort of incoherence (see the editorial 19 June 1987: 6). 14 Most lay (and some professional) white, black and Asian people seem to be actually unaware of the numbers - for example, that there are more than twice as many British Asians as British Afro-Caribbeans. If as some guess (Gujarat Samachar, Special Issue, August 1987, p. 19) that over 35 per cent of West Indian immigrants were people of Asian origin then the statistics are considerably further complicated. 15 This is particularly true of the Employment Division. See, for example, its Positive Action and Equal Opportunity in Employment (CRE, 1985) which on p. 3 states that ‘the term “black” is used as a general description for ethnic minority groups, including those of Afro-Caribbean and Asian origin and

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other groups who experience discrimination on grounds of race, colour or national origins.’ This comprehensive use sits cheek by jowl with a quote on the very next page from the White Paper preceding the 1976 Race Relations Act which speaks of ‘black and brown workers’. 16 Taking the country as a whole many local authorities do not yet think of Asians as ‘blacks’ though it certainly is a growing trend. When they do switch to the new usage the usual justification is that they are merely following CRE guidelines. Nevertheless a noticeable counter current too has emerged. In the face of local Asian protest some councils, usually only in areas where Asians greatly outnumber Afro-Caribbeans, have recently formally decided to not classify Asians under the term ‘black’. Three cases known to me are Leicestershire, L.B. of Hounslow and Peterborough City Council. The issue is at the centre of considerable controversy in L.B. of Brent where Asians outnumber Afro-Caribbeans by only two to one, and is a live issue in L.B.s of Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Hillingdon. 17 In which case such job advertisements seem to be prima facie unlawful indirect discrimination though as far as I know no cases have appeared before an industrial tribunal. 18 Richard Jenkins in ‘Countering Prejudice – Anthropological and Otherwise’ in Anthropology Today 1987, 3:2 offers ethnic chauvinism as the one and only reason why Asians cannot identify themselves as ‘blacks’. This is, of course, as absurd as saying the only reason the Welsh have for objecting to the popular international conflation between English and British is Welsh chauvinism! Anti-racist intellectuals, even when friends, would do well to extend the sources of their ethnic understanding. 19 I understand that the CRE is coming to the view that this is an issue which will not go away and some consultations ought to be undertaken. If this is indeed so I hope that these consultations will not be confined to or centre on race professionals and CRCs (their majority view is not a secret and indeed is the problem) but will be directed to Asian organisations and could very simply be supplemented by commissioning an opinion poll. 20 Office of Population, Census and Surveys Developing Questions on Ethnicity and Related Topics for the Census, Occasional Papers, 36, 1987. 21 Ibid: 64. Indeed, two details which emerge from this research show that Asian and black modes of self-identity continued to diverge rather than converge. While in the course of their field tests OPCS removed ‘West Indian’ and ‘African’ as sub-sections of ‘Black’ because a distinct number of black people objected to being defined in terms of overseas origins and any sub-divisions, Asians while accepting ‘Asian’ as a generic term wished to be further classified by reference to national origins (e.g., ‘Indian’). Similarly, while a number of young blacks advocated the category ‘Black British’ for blacks born in the U.K., Asians deprecated the category ‘British Asian’ for it implied that British Asians were not British unless born here. Asians, it seems, are searching for a British identity which is not incompatible with overseas origins and, no doubt, continuing overseas links. 22 The National Association of Asian Probation Staff described the use of a ‘black/white’ classification as ‘divisive and itself racist’ (quoted in New Life, 25 December 1987: 2). 23. Consider the Harris Poll, op. cit., which suggests that the Conservative vote amongst Asians living in areas of low ethnic concentration is now not much below the national average.

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24 See, e.g., C. Gutzmore ‘The Notting Hill Carnival’, Marxism Today, August 1982. Though I cannot speak with any authority here I do not believe that many black people welcome such descriptions of themselves.

For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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Introduction to immigration and the politics of citizenship in Europe and North America William Rogers Brubaker

This article is the introductory chapter of a 1989 publication edited by sociologist Rogers Brubaker, entitled Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America. The book was one of the first transatlantic comparisons of the links between immigration and citizenship. Though the volume only deals with six countries, Brubaker’s introductory chapter well places the debates on citizenship, membership and immigration in a historical perspective. It also elegantly presents the major issues to be discussed when dealing with issues of nationhood and citizenship in a migratory context.

Massive postwar migrations have posed a fundamental challenge to the nation-states of Europe and North America. They have compelled these countries to reinterpret their traditions, to reshape their institutions, to rethink the meaning of citizenship – to reinvent themselves, in short, as nation-states. This book addresses one important aspect of this challenge. It is concerned with the implications of immigration for the theory and practice of citizenship and membership in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and Sweden. Much has been written about immigration to these countries, but little has been written about citizenship.1 Through a broad comparative discussion of citizenship and social membership – the first of its kind – the book aims to bring fresh perspectives to bear on the intensifying policy debates about immigration and citizenship. The authors make arguments about how citizenship and membership ought to be organized. And they make clear how citizenship and membership are in fact organized. The essays in the first part of the book incline toward political argument, the essays in the second part toward policy analysis. But the distinction is not a rigid one. Most of the essays involve both argument and analysis.

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citizenship

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The essays in the first part of the book articulate a wide variety of viewpoints. This reflects the preference of the German Marshall Fund (and of this writer) for a lively clash of perspectives over a chorus of carefully orchestrated bromides. The authors challenge traditional views of citizenship and membership. Joseph Carens disputes the traditional, state-centered view that moral considerations are out of place in decisions about admission to citizenship. Peter Schuck argues that American citizenship has lost much of its value and meaning. Kay Hailbronner challenges the widespread notion that the Federal Republic of Germany has an unreasonably restrictive citizenship policy. And Tomas Hammar takes issue with the traditional negative attitude towards dual citizenship. The essays in the second part of the book look through a comparative lens at citizenship and membership policies and practices. I discuss citizenship law and naturalization practices. Mark Miller, questioning the traditional view of noncitizens as politically passive, analyzes the many ways in which noncitizen immigrants participate in politics. And in the concluding essay, I discuss the economic and social rights of noncitizens. The six countries examined in the book have very different traditions of immigration and citizenship. Canada and the United States are classical countries of immigration whose citizenship policies have long been geared to mass immigration. Britain and France are former colonial powers whose immigration and citizenship policies reflect in complex ways the legacy of colonialism. Sweden and Germany are traditional countries of emigration whose postwar prosperity led to the recruitment, initially on a temporary basis, of migrant workers.2 Despite these differing traditions, each of these countries today confronts similar problems. During the last quarter-century, each has experienced a “new immigration” – to borrow the expression used to describe the surge in immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the United States in the late 19th century. And the United States has experienced a “new ‘new immigration.’” Thus Asia is now the leading source of immigration to both Canada and the United States; the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean displaced Ireland in the 1960s as the leading source of immigration to Britain; half of the foreign population in France is now from Africa or Asia (mainly from North Africa); Turks surpassed Italians during the 1970s as the largest group of foreign workers in Germany; and Asia has recently displaced Nordic countries as the leading source of immigration to Sweden. Contemporary debates about citizenship are simultaneously de-

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bates about nationhood. They are debates about what it means, and what it ought to mean, to be a member of a nation-state in today’s increasingly international world. To place these debates in perspective, this introductory essay begins by evoking in general terms the challenge posed by immigration to the nation-state and sketching the historical background to current debates about immigration and citizenship in each of the six countries. Next, it outlines the major questions facing policy makers and sketches the options they have in addressing these questions. The introduction concludes with some remarks about the individual essays.

The challenge to the nation-state Citizenship today means membership of a nation-state. To note this is to point to a basic fact of political and social organization. We live in a world of nation-states. Each claims a certain fraction of the human population as its own, and each aspires to mould this population – its citizenry – into something more than a mere aggregate of individuals or a mere congeries of groups. Each aims to create a cohesive and in some respects homogeneous nation. The persistent ethnic strife that afflicts many polities is a brutal reminder that this aspiration often goes unrealized. The aspiration, though, is shared even by such fundamentally multicultural polities as India and the Soviet Union. But the nation-state is not only a fact. It is also an idea or ideal – a way of thinking about political and social membership.3 It is a deeply influential model of membership that informs much current debate on immigration and citizenship. Membership, according to this model, should be egalitarian, sacred, national, democratic, unique, and socially consequential. The membership status of postwar immigrants to Europe and North America, however, deviates from this model in every respect. This has strained deeply rooted shared understandings about the way social and political membership ought to be organized, and it has occasioned talk of a “crisis of the nationstate.” Because it remains so influential, I want to look more closely at this model of membership and say something about each of its components. In sketching this model, I am not endorsing it. I want simply to summarize certain inherited ideas and ideals that continue to inform political debates and discussions about immigration, about nationality and citizenship, about patriotism and national identity, about military service and the welfare state. I want to sketch the back-

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ideal of nation-state

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six ideals of statemembership

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drop of taken for-granted ideas and ideals against which the politics of membership unfolds today. What are these ideas and ideals? First, state-membership should be egalitarian. There should be a status of full membership, and no other (except in the transitional cases of children and persons awaiting naturalization). Gradations of membership status are inadmissible; nobody should be a second-class citizen. Second, membership should be sacred. Citizens should be prepared to make sacrifices – etymologically, to perform “sacred acts” for the state. They should be willing to die for it if need be. “Profane” attitudes toward membership, involving calculations of personal advantage, are profoundly inappropriate. Third, state-membership should be based on nation-membership. The political community should be simultaneously a cultural community, a community of language, mores, or belief. Only thus can a nation-state be a nation’s state, the legitimate representative and authentic expression of a nation. Those aspiring to membership of the state must be or become members of the nation. If not (presumptively) acquired through birth and upbringing, such nation-membership must be earned through assimilation. Fourth, membership should be democratic. Full membership should carry with it significant participation in the business of rule. And membership itself should be open: since a population of longterm resident nonmembers violates the democratic understanding of membership, the state must provide some means for resident nonmembers to become members. Over the long run, residence and membership must coincide. Fifth, state-membership should be unique. Every person should belong to one and only one state. Statelessness can be catastrophic in a world in which even so-called human rights are enforceable for the most part only by particular states. And dual (or multiple) citizenship has long been considered undesirable for states and individuals alike. There are legal techniques for regulating and mitigating the conflicts, inconveniences, and ambiguities it causes. But these techniques cannot solve the central political problem of dual citizenship – the problem of divided allegiance. Lastly, membership should be socially consequential; it should be expressed in a community of well-being. Membership should entail important privileges. Together with the duties mentioned above, these should define a status clearly and significantly distinguished from that of nonmembers. Membership should be objectively valuable and subjectively valued – it should be prizeworthy and actually prized.

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This model of membership is largely vestigial. It is riddled, moreover, with unresolved internal tensions. The idea of an egalitarian and democratic membership points in one direction; the idea that membership should be sacred and based on cultural belonging points in a very different direction, with different policy implications. That the model survives is due mainly to the lack of a coherent and persuasive alternative. We lack a developed political theory of partial or limited state-membership. We lack a political theory of “desacralized” membership, based solely on calculations of personal advantage, or of political membership dissociated from cultural belonging, or of dual or multiple membership. Because it is vestigial, the model is significantly out of phase with contemporary realities of state-membership. There are conspicuous deviations from the model that have nothing to do with immigration. The desacralization of state-membership, for example, has more to do with the emotional remoteness of the bureaucratic welfare state and the obsolescence of the citizen army in the nuclear age than it does with immigration and occasional naturalizations of convenience. And if modern-day citizenship is not very robustly democratic, this has more to do with the attenuated participation of most citizens in the exercise of sovereignty than it does with the exclusion of noncitizens from the franchise. Still, the postwar immigration has accentuated existing deviations from the nation-state model and generated new ones. These include the proliferation of statuses of partial membership; the declining value of citizenship; the desacralization of membership through the calculating exploitation of the material advantages it confers; the increasing demands for, and instances of, full membership of the state without membership of the cultural nation; the soaring numbers of persons with dual citizenship; and the long-term exclusion of large numbers of apparently permanent residents from electoral participation. These membership trends deviate from every component of the nation-state model. And each one arises from the unexpected development of postwar immigration. Unexpected especially on the Continent: for what has become a settlement immigration began in France and Germany and Sweden as a temporary labor migration. Neither a strictly temporary guestworker system nor unambiguous and accepted settlement immigration poses insuperable problems of membership. But an imperceptible slide from labor migration to settlement immigration, a slide only partially and belatedly acknowledged by the immigrants themselves and by the country of immigration, could not help generating delicate problems of membership. And equally delicate problems of

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fundamentalism

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membership are posed by the gradual settlement of undocumented alien workers and their families in the United States. The membership status of these migrants-turned-immigrants has developed on the Continent in an ad hoc fashion with the piecemeal administrative, legislative, and judicial acknowledgment of their membership status.4 This piecemeal process of inclusion contrasts with the “total” transformation effected by naturalization. Paradoxically, the further this process has gone, the weaker the incentive to naturalize. Ad hoc enlargements of migrants’ rights may obstruct rather than clear the path to full membership, trapping large numbers of migrants-turned-immigrants in an intermediate status, carrying with it many of the privileges and obligations of full membership but excluding two of the most important, symbolically and practically: the right to vote and the duty of military service. The immigration was unexpected, too, in its volume and in its steadily increasing ethnic diversity. This holds for the United States and Britain (and, as far as ethnic diversity is concerned, for Canada) as well as for the Continent. Against the backdrop of the model of membership sketched above, this threefold unexpectedness helps to explain the profound political uncertainty of North America and especially Europe in the face of today’s increasingly settled and increasingly assertive immigrant population. Not everyone shares this uncertainty, of course. Fundamentalists defend the traditional model of the nation-state, stressing in particular the idea that state-membership presupposes nation-membership. Multicultural pluralists, on the other hand, deny any validity to this model, arguing for new forms of political membership that would mirror an emerging postnational society. Fundamentalists demand of immigrants either naturalization, stringently conditioned upon assimilation, or departure; multicultural pluralists demand for immigrants a full citizenship stripped of its sacred character and divorced from nationality. Neither position is particularly nuanced. Fundamentalists treat the nation-state as something frozen in social and political time; theirs is a profoundly anachronistic interpretation. Multicultural pluralists, in their haste to condemn the ‘nation-state to the dustbin of history, underestimate the richness and complexity of the nation-state model. If suitably reinterpreted to take account of the changing economic, military, and demographic contexts of membership, the nation-state model may have life in it yet. Traditions of nationhood and the politics of citizenship The ideas and ideals sketched above inform the politics of citizenship on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, for historical reasons, the contours of debate vary from country to country.

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Above all, there is a basic difference between nations constituted by immigration and countries in which occasional immigration has been incidental to nation-building. Canada and the United States have a continuous tradition of immigration. They were formed and reformed as nations through immigration, and immigration figures prominently in their national myths. No European country is a classical country of immigration in this sense. This is not to say that Europe has no historical experience with immigration. Industrialization in Europe as elsewhere was accompanied by massive labor migrations, often across state boundaries, and often leading to settlement. Poles in the coal mines of the Ruhr and on the Junker estates of Prussia, Irish in the northern industrial cities of England, Belgians and Italians in the frontier and industrial regions of France – these and other labor migrants of the second half of the 19th century became permanent settlers. Yet immigration has not been central to European nation-building, not even in France. Concerned about the low birth rate and about the devastating losses in the world wars of this century, the French state has long promoted immigration for demographic reasons. In sheer numbers, immigration has been much more important in France during the last hundred years than in any other European country. Yet not even in France does immigration form part of the national myth. The massive immigration of the last quarter-century has not transformed European countries into countries of immigration in the classical North American sense. Even Sweden, which has gone furthest in acknowledging and accepting its postwar labor migrants as permanent settlers, makes it clear that it is not and cannot become a country of immigration in the classical sense. Debate about immigration and citizenship in each of our six countries is informed by distinctive traditions of nationhood – by deeply rooted understandings about what constitutes a nation. A few observations about these traditions may help to explain some of the striking national differences in the contemporary politics of citizenship. France was the first nation-state, and it has remained the nationstate par excellence. French conceptions of nationhood and citizenship bear the stamp of their revolutionary origin. The nation, in this tradition, has been conceived mainly in relation to the institutional and territorial frame of the state: political unity, not shared culture, has been understood to be its basis. “What is a nation?” asked Abbé Sieyès in his famous pamphlet of 1789, and answered: “a body of associates living under one and the same law and represented by one and the same legislature.” But if political unity has been funda-

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mental, the striving for cultural unity has been crucially expressive of French nationhood. Political inclusion has entailed cultural assimilation, for regional cultural minorities and immigrants alike. The universalist, inclusive theory and practice of citizenship have depended on confidence in the assimilatory workings of schools, the army, the church, unions, and political parties – confidence that has waned markedly in recent years.5 If the French conception of nationhood has been universalist, assimilationist, and state-centered, the German conception has been particularist, organic, and Volk-centered. Because national feeling developed before the nation-state, the German idea of the nation was not originally a political one, nor was it linked with the abstract idea of citizenship. This pre-political German nation, this nation in search of a state, was conceived not as the bearer of universal political values, but as an organic cultural, linguistic, or racial community – as a Volksgemeinschaft. On this understanding, ethnic or cultural unity is primary and constitutive of nationhood, while political unity is derivative. While this way of thinking about nationhood has never had the field to itself, it took root in early 19th century Germany and has remained available for political exploitation ever since; it finds expression even in the Basic Law of the Federal Republic.6 One would expect citizenship defined (as in France) in political terms to be more accessible to culturally distinct immigrants than membership defined (as in Germany) in ethnic or cultural terms. This is in fact the case. The policies and politics of citizenship in France and Germany have been strikingly different since the late 19th century, and they remain so despite converging immigration policies and comparable immigrant populations. As a result, a substantial fraction of the French immigrant population has French citizenship, while only a negligible fraction of the corresponding West German population has German citizenship. The postwar migrations, to be sure, have placed considerable strain on French and German traditions alike. The French tradition of assimilation finds few defenders today: the multiculturalist left and immigrant organizations argue that immigrants should not be assimilated, the exclusionary right that they (the North Africans in particular) cannot be assimilated. The far right, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, has embarked on a major campaign to “revalorise” French citizenship by restricting immigrants’ access to it. Le Pen’s slogan – ”Etre français, cela se mérite” – means roughly: “to be French, you have to deserve it.” Nor is it only the French tradition of inclusion via assimilation that is under strain. The current conservative government of West

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Germany has had to acknowledge that large numbers of Turkish migrants have in fact become permanent immigrants. It has even proclaimed a public interest in the naturalization of second-generation immigrants. It is too early to predict the outcome of the contemporary politics of citizenship in France and West Germany. But the bearing of traditional shared understandings of nationhood on this politics is clear. French moves toward a more restrictive and German moves toward a more liberal politics of citizenship have encountered strong resistance. The French government withdrew its proposed, mildly restrictive reform of nationality law in December 1986 after meeting unexpectedly strong opposition. (Dissenters included the venerable Council of State, which criticized the reform as “contrary to republican tradition and principles.”) It subsequently appointed a nonpartisan commission to study the issue; the changes proposed in the commission’s report, if enacted, would actually liberalize access to French citizenship for second-generation immigrants. On the other hand, every recent proposal to liberalize German nationality law has foundered in the upper house. A central argument has been that the current restrictive nationality law is appropriate for a country that, by inescapable tradition, is not and cannot become a country of immigration.7 In Sweden, as in France, national feeling and state institutions developed in tandem long before the age of nationalism. The sense of nationhood emerged in the course of political and military struggles against Denmark in the late 15th and 16th centuries, before a distinctively Swedish culture existed. Literature, art, and language were then permeated by Danish and German influence. Nor were there sharp ethnic distinctions between Swedes and Danes. In these circumstances, national feeling was expressed in an attachment to political and institutional traditions, not in the sense of ethnic or cultural distinctiveness. Later, to be sure, national feeling did find expression in a distinctive culture. And contemporary Sweden certainly has a relatively homogeneous national culture. But this national culture has never carried a strong political charge in the Swedish tradition. It was not harnessed to a project of domestic assimilation and overseas imperialism, as in France, nor to a movement for national unification, as in Germany, nor to a campaign for national autonomy or independence, as occurred in 19th century Finland and Norway, neither at that time a sovereign state. Sweden’s long, continuous history as an independent state with a more or less homogeneous population, and its position as the dominant Scandinavian power from the 17th century on, provided no occasion for the politicization of cultural identity.

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Sweden: absence of ethnic nationalism

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England: fuzzy conception of citizenship

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The absence of a tradition of ethnic or cultural nationalism may help explain why Sweden has been able to make citizens of its postwar immigrants with so little fuss or friction. A further reason is to be found in the composition of the immigrant population, which, until recently, was two-thirds Nordic and overwhelmingly European. The ethnic diversity of the immigrant population has increased markedly in the last decade, as large numbers of refugees from Chile, Turkey, Vietnam, Iran, and Iraq have been granted immigrant status. And a small fundamentalist opposition has recently made some gains. But while this may encourage centrist politicians to adopt a more restrictive policy on refugee admissions, it seems unlikely to affect Sweden’s liberal policy on admission to citizenship. Early political unification led to the early development of national feeling in England. Yet neither England nor Britain ever became a nation-state on the French model – a tightly integrated political and cultural community. English rule over Scotland, Wales, and especially Ireland gave the state a composite character, and nationhood an ambiguous character. British national feeling developed, but it did not supersede English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish national feeling. Just as there has been no clear conception of British nationhood, so too there has been no clear conception of citizenship. The concept of citizenship as membership of a legal and political community was foreign to British thinking. Legal and political status were conceived instead in terms of allegiance – in terms of the vertical ties between individual subjects and the king. These ties of allegiance knit together the British empire, not the British nation. Until 1948, all persons born within the dominions of the king were British subjects. There was no specific citizenship status for the colonies, for Britain itself, or even for the independent Commonwealth countries. With the dismantling of its empire, Britain has had to redefine itself as a nation-state, and to create for the first time a national citizenship. The transition has been an awkward one. France too had to negotiate the dismantling of a huge colonial empire. And, unlike Britain, it became involved in a bloody, bitter, protracted war. But at least France already had a strong identity as a nation-state and a well established national citizenship. Britain had neither, and this contributed to the confused and bitter politics of immigration and citizenship during the last quarter-century. Lacking a national citizenship until 1981, Britain lacked a clear criterion for deciding whom to admit to its territory. In the early postwar years, inspired by a heady vision of itself as the center of a vast multiracial Commonwealth of Nations, it continued the traditional practice of admitting all British subjects – a category now includ-

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ing citizens of the independent Commonwealth countries. But controls were imposed on this latter group in 1962 after a significant immigration developed from Jamaica, India, and Pakistan. This was inevitable, in view of the huge population disparity between the independent Commonwealth countries and Britain itself. More troubling was the fact that the government later drew distinctions in immigration law between persons possessing the same formal citizenship status – citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies. While other countries were debating the citizenship status of immigrants, Britain was debating the immigration status of citizens.8 Britain now has a national, postcolonial citizenship, and with it a clear criterion of admission to the territory. But it achieved this, in the eyes of some critics, only by drawing the lines of the national community of citizens too narrowly, and by creating a special second-class citizenship status, without the right of immigration, for residents of Hong Kong and others. In the domain of economic, social, and political rights, immigrants in Britain generally have more rights than elsewhere. This too results from the fact that Britain has not traditionally defined itself as a nation-state. British law imposes relatively few disabilities on aliens; more important, relatively few of Britain’s postwar immigrants have been aliens. Neither Irish citizens nor citizens of independent Commonwealth countries are considered aliens. Outside the domain of immigration law itself, immigrants from the Caribbean, from India, from Pakistan, and elsewhere have virtually the same rights as British citizens, including the right to vote and to run for office. American and Canadian conceptions of citizenship and nationhood reflect the historical and contemporary importance of immigration. This distinguishes them sharply from their European counterparts. Even before American independence, the pressing need for settlers had established naturalization as central to the theory and practice of citizenship. Characteristics of naturalization – a process through which an individual expresses his or her voluntary adhesion to a state – came to be ascribed to American citizenship as such. The War of Independence reinforced this understanding of citizenship, for it led to sharp criticism of the British conception of unchosen and perpetual subjectship.9 And since the new nation lacked a distinctive ethnic or cultural identity, American nationhood and nationalism had to be defined in terms of a universalistic political formula that would set it apart from the mother country.10 The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment of 1868 definitively established birth in the territory (jus soli) as the criterion

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Europe vs. America

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phases of exclusiveness

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for the attribution of citizenship and affirmed, in principle, the primacy of national over state citizenship. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the affirmation of jus soli and of national citizenship had an explicitly egalitarian, inclusive meaning. The traditional inclusive and universalistic self-understanding of the United States has always stood in tension with a much less pretty practice. Free blacks, as well as slaves, were excluded from U.S. citizenship before the Civil War, even when they possessed state citizenship. Blacks continued to be excluded from full citizenship after the Civil War through a restrictive judicial reading of the 14th Amendment. American Indians were not granted automatic citizenship at birth until 1924. And the category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” first introduced to exclude Chinese in 1882, was not finally abolished until 1952. Ethnic exclusion based on national-origin immigration quotas, moreover, persisted until 1965. Still, the voluntaristic and universalistic understanding of citizenship helped eventually to undermine the legitimacy of these exclusionary practices. High rates of immigration, liberal naturalization provisions, and the jus soli rule have made the United States, for most of its history, exceptionally open to the political incorporation of ethnically and culturally distinct immigrants. This tradition of inclusion has been interrupted by periodic phases of exclusiveness. One such phase, marked by the surge of the KnowNothings in the 1850s, occurred in response to the dramatic increase in Catholic immigration after 1830; another, culminating in the severely restrictive legislation of 1917-1924, occurred in response to the “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe after 1890. Today, after twenty years of the “new ‘new immigration’” ushered in by the liberal Hart-Celler Act of 1965 and twenty years of high levels of illegal immigration, we may be entering another such phase. Even in the present political climate, however, debates about immigration and citizenship continue to be informed by the distinctly inclusive American understanding of nationhood. Thus the legalization program of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 acknowledged the legitimate membership claims of long-settled undocumented immigrants and of seasonal agricultural workers. And it has been taken for granted that legalized immigrants would become citizens. Newspaper reports on the legalization program sometimes described undocumented aliens as applying for citizenship, although in fact they were applying for temporary resident status and, if successful, would qualify for permanent resident status only after 18 months, and for citizenship only after another five years.11 Canada, in some respects, has been even more strongly marked

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by immigration than the United States. Immigration has amounted to as much as five percent of the total population in a single year (1913), more than three times the highest percentage ever recorded in the United States. And the foreign-born are currently twice as numerous, in relation to population, in Canada. Immigration policy has followed similar rhythms in the two countries. Canada, too, excluded the Chinese in the late 19th century, restricted entry after World War I, abolished discrimination by national origin in the 1960s, and has since admitted immigrants of steadily increasing ethnic diversity. Rapid naturalization has long been promoted in Canada, perhaps somewhat more vigorously than in the United States. Yet the centuries-old French-English dualism has complicated the relation between immigration, citizenship, and nationhood in Canada. The tensions that peaked in the late 1970s have abated, but Canadian nationhood remains ambiguous and problematic. The most basic question – is Canada one nation, or two ? – remains controversial.12 Immigration has been related in complex ways to this dualism. Historically, dualism has not meant pluralism. Immigrants have been expected to assimilate to the French- or the English-speaking community. The large majority, even those settling in Quebec, have done the latter – a fact that sparked French resentment of immigration as an instrument of English domination. On the other hand, dualism may have engendered in recent years a greater sensitivity to the cultural identity of immigrants. A few years after becoming bilingual on the federal level, Canada adopted an official policy in support of multiculturalism. It is not clear what this means in practice. But it may encourage Canada’s increasingly diverse immigrants to naturalize quickly, without feeling that they must thereby abandon their cultural identity.

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Questions of membership13 The nation-state is doubly bounded. It has a bounded territory and a bounded membership. States make decisions about whom to admit to their territories, and about whom to admit as members. This book is not concerned with admission to the territory. Not that this is unimportant. Quite the contrary: the intensifying demand for entry raises urgent and troubling questions about territorial boundaries. Most fundamentally: what right do states have forcibly to deny entry into their territories – particularly to persons in urgent need of food, shelter, or protection?14

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Questions of membership, though, differ from questions of entry. Questions of membership concern persons already present in the territory (although not all such persons: the vast majority of those admitted to the territory of another state are short-term visitors for business or pleasure; their membership status is not in question). Problems of membership arise, rather, for persons whose residence and participation in the economic and social life of a country have engendered significant ties to that country.15 It is of course impossible to delimit this group with any precision. Ties develop gradually, and there is no sharp divide between shortterm visitors whose attachments remain firmly anchored in their country of origin and persons whose developing attachments to a new country begin to raise questions of membership – personal questions in the mind of the migrant, and policy questions for the country in which he or she resides. It is just for this reason that the personal questions and the policy questions are such difficult ones. The policy questions are of two sorts. First, under what conditions and on what terms should such persons be admitted to full citizenship? Second, what is the appropriate status for persons who are not, or not yet, full citizens? What civil, political, economic, and social rights should they enjoy? To what obligations should they be subjected?

weighing interests

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Access to citizenship Citizenship is at the vital center of the political life of the modern nation-state. Whom should the state admit to the privileges of citizenship, and on what terms and conditions? The individual essays have much to say about this question. Without rehearsing their arguments here, let me simply note that the essays of Part One make arguments about admission to citizenship on two levels, linking political philosophy and public policy. They raise broad questions of political philosophy, but these questions have definite – and sometimes quite far-reaching – policy implications. Central to the essays of Joseph Carens and Kay Hailbronner, for example, is a perennial conundrum of political philosophy: how should one weigh the claims and interests of individuals against the claims and interests of the state? Professor Carens articulates and asserts the claims of individuals, Professor Hailbronner the claims of the state. These arguments have diametrically opposed implications. Carens would compel the state to grant citizenship to all persons requesting it, providing they meet minimum residence requirements. Hailbronner defends the state’s discretionary power to grant or deny naturalization in accordance with its own interests.

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Tomas Hammar, too, considers the interests of individuals and the interests of the state in his discussion of dual citizenship. Traditional antipathy to dual citizenship, he suggests, results from the tendency to look at the matter primarily from the point of view of the state. From the point of view of the individual, which Hammar thinks ought to be given much more weight, the inconveniences of dual citizenship are minimal, the advantages considerable. These essays make arguments about how the state should regulate access to citizenship. My own essay on citizenship law and naturalization practice looks at the way states do regulate access to citizenship. I consider in detail the choices open to policymakers. And I discuss the reasons that have led some countries to base citizenship on birthplace, others on parentage, some to adopt liberal, others restrictive naturalization policies. There is thus no need for further discussion here of the problem of admission to citizenship. The membership status of noncitizens Citizenship is a neat category. It is simple and straightforward from the point of view of the individual and from the point of view of the state. One either is or is not a citizen of a particular state. There is no middle way, no more or less, no ambiguity – except, of course, when one is a citizen of two or more states. Membership, in contrast, is a messy category. It is complex and ambiguous from the point of view of the individual and from the point of view of the state. Unlike citizenship, membership is not an all-or nothing, yes-or-no variable. The world cannot be neatly divided into those who are and those who are not members of a particular state. One can be more or less a member; one can be a member in one respect but not in another. One of the major themes of this volume – developed in different ways by Carens, Schuck, and Hammar, and in my own concluding essay – is that membership is a broader and more inclusive category than formal citizenship. In each of our six countries, there is a large and growing group of noncitizen members. What sort of membership status should these resident noncitizens enjoy? There are two ways of approaching this tangled and complex question. One can focus on different types of membership. This approach asks what distinctions should be drawn between citizens and noncitizens, and between different categories of noncitizens. Alternatively, one can focus on different types of membership goods. One would then ask what sorts of goods should be reserved for citizens, and what sorts of goods should be made available to noncitizens as well. Consider each approach in turn.

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ambiguity of membership

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Types of membership. The ideal of equality – more precisely, formal equality of status – is deeply rooted in the Western political tradition. With philosophical sources in Stoicism and Christianity, this ideal was elaborated by liberal political philosophers, propagated by the French Revolution, and gradually realized in practice over the 19th and 20th centuries. I noted above the central place of this ideal in our inherited understanding of nation-state membership; Peter Schuck discusses its importance in the American political tradition. Given the strength of this egalitarian ideal, partial membership is always in need of special justification. It is always vulnerable to condemnation as second-class citizenship. To our modern egalitarian sensibility, partial membership is legitimate only if it is temporary. Partial membership may be a way station on the road to full membership; or it may accommodate temporary participants in our society who remain full members of another. Even ardent egalitarians would be willing to accept some kind of transitional status for permanent immigrants and some kind of temporary status for resident sojourners – persons whose attachments remain anchored elsewhere but whose residence and participation in the society distinguish them from short-term visitors such as tourists and business travellers. If the principle of transitional or temporary partial membership is acceptable, why is the practice so problematic? The reason, I think, is that the social realities of partial membership do not correspond to the models just sketched. Millions of people in Europe and North America have been partial members for a decade or more. They are not – or not any more – the sort of temporary participants for whom partial membership is appropriate. And if they are on the road to full membership, the road is a long one indeed. By their own accounts, though, many do not seem to be on the road to citizenship at all. They seem likely to remain partial members for the indefinite future. There are strong arguments, informed by the principle of equality, for extending to these long-term residents the rights enjoyed by full citizens. Yet as Peter Schuck points out, to carry this process of inclusion to its logical – or illogical – conclusion would erase the distinction between citizens and resident aliens and deprive the status of citizenship of any distinctive value or meaning. Given the importance of citizenship in the theory and practice of democratic nationstates, this would be deeply problematic. Indeed, fundamentalists argue that the process of inclusion has already been carried too far; they propose to restore value and meaning to citizenship by reserving a wider range of rights for citizens. The ideal of equality and the ideal of citizenship are both deeply ingrained in the political culture of Western nation-states. The two

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ideals need not clash. Indeed citizenship is an inherently egalitarian ideal. It implies full legal and political equality among citizens. Yet the equality inherent in the idea of citizenship is a bounded equality. It is necessarily restricted to citizens. Full equality between citizens and noncitizens would render citizenship meaningless. For this reason, the ideal of citizenship may clash with the principle of equality. This makes the question of the extent to which long-term resident noncitizens ought to share in the rights of citizenship a difficult and deeply contested one. The tendency seems to be to extend many, even most of the rights of full membership to long-term resident aliens, while reserving certain core political rights and functions to citizens. Another response to long-term partial membership is to encourage naturalization. This sounds innocuous enough, and it would seem to be less controversial than extending citizenship rights to noncitizens. But in practice it too is controversial. For one can promote the passage to full citizenship with a carrot or with a stick. One can liberalize access to citizenship, or one can make partial membership less attractive. The latter can be done by limiting the rights of partial members or by imposing new obligations on them (e.g., military service). At the limit, it can be done by requiring partial members to apply for naturalization or leave the country.16 Partial membership for immigrants, then, too often becomes a final station rather than a way station on the road to full citizenship. Partial membership for short-term sojourners poses a different set of problems. Should sojourners have the chance to become settlers? If so, which sojourners, and under what conditions? What provisions should be made for the passage from temporary to permanent membership? These questions are difficult partly because the category of shortterm sojourners is so heterogeneous. It includes all short- to mediumterm residents whose attachments and interests remain centered in their country of origin, but who are in the process of creating a new set of attachments and interests. One large group includes those who are resident in order to receive some kind of education or training. Even this category is quite heterogeneous, with the education varying from the general to the highly technical and the length of residence from a couple of months to several years. Persons resident for work or business represent an equally heterogeneous category, ranging from unskilled laborers to the international professional and corporate elite; for this group, too, stays may be measured in months or in years. Can the state insist on a sharp distinction between immigrants

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immigrants and sojourners

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and sojourners, keeping the latter in a strictly temporary status? Or must it grant them the opportunity to become permanent members? The question is by no means academic. Each of our six countries, wary of increasing “backdoor” immigration on the part of persons admitted for temporary stays, has taken steps in recent years to restrict passage from temporary to permanent status. When directed against tourists or persons on short-term business visits, such measures seem unobjectionable. But when directed against students or workers whose stays may span several years, they raise difficult questions. These questions arise even when persons are admitted on the explicit understanding that they will eventually have to leave. When the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service recently announced that tens of thousands of nurses admitted on non-immigrant H-1 visas would not be able to extend or renew their visas after six years, it was only confirming the explicit terms on which the visas had been issued. 17 Yet the decision does seem troubling. The state was under no obligation, legal or moral, to admit the nurses in the first place. But having permitted them to work and live and form ties for six years, it may have acquired a moral obligation to let them remain. The debate about seasonal worker programs pivots on similar questions. Seasonal workers permit states to meet certain manpower needs cheaply while externalizing various costs, including the cost of unemployment. Although the limitation of work and residence to a certain number of months per year is intended to hinder the formation of social ties and thus to prevent settlement, many seasonal workers – particularly those hired year after year – develop significant attachments to the country in which they work. It seems only fair that they be given the chance to graduate to permanent status. What about students? Most countries discourage the settlement and naturalization of foreign students. One important rationale – since many of the students are from developing countries – is that this policy will hinder the brain drain from the third world to the first. This is surely a legitimate consideration, but what exactly justifies the differential treatment of workers and students? One could argue that, for equal periods of residence, work in a country creates a stronger claim to membership than study. Work – so the argument might run – makes a direct contribution to the wealth and welfare of a country, while study primarily prepares an individual for his or her own projects. But would this apply to all types of work? Does it apply equally to the executive of a multinational corporation and to the unskilled laborer? Or is there a sense in which the latter has special membership claims, perhaps because his or her presence in the territory is the result of what some analysts characterize as an “un-

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equal exchange”? Certainly persons actively recruited by employers or the state to perform work shunned by citizens – as is the case for the nurses mentioned above – would seem to have especially strong membership claims. Perhaps the only point on which wide agreement might be secured is one developed in this volume by Joseph Carens. Professor Carens argues that the claim to citizenship varies directly with the strength of social ties and thus, normally, with length of residence. One implication of this view is that whatever right the state might have to limit noncitizens’ stays must be exercised sooner rather than later. It is not a right that can be reserved for eventual use whenever this might seem opportune. Failure to exercise it within a reasonable period leads to its expiration. State acquiescence in continued residence eventually creates an individual right to remain. This, by the way, is no mere philosopher’s argument; the principle has been acknowledged by courts, among them the highest administrative court in West Germany. Special problems of partial membership are raised by persons residing and working in the territory without the permission of the state. This question has dominated the politics of immigration and citizenship in the United States, and it has been important in France as well. To what extent should such persons be included in the benefits of membership? In the United States, this is in part a constitutional question, resting on the interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. It is on the basis of this clause, for example, that the Supreme Court ruled that undocumented immigrant children could not be excluded from the public schools. But it is more profoundly a political question. To what extent do their economic contribution, their de facto integration, and what Senator Simpson has called the “statutory encouragement to migrate illegally” (i.e., the absence of penalties on employers) give undocumented immigrants a claim to some form of membership? Most would probably agree that the prolonged government acquiescence in massive employment of undocumented immigrants gives these immigrants a stronger membership claim than those who entered the country after the imposition of employer sanctions (assuming that these are actually enforced). The goods of membership. An important aspect of citizenship (and other forms of state-membership) is the access it provides, directly or indirectly, to a wide range of goods. These include such basic goods as public order, physical safety, and access to a labor market; the complex array of civil, political, social, and economic rights; and even intangibles such as a feeling of belonging or collective identity.

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agreement on the meaning of goods

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The enjoyment of some of these goods depends directly on membership status – on citizenship, permanent residence, or some other status. Other goods, though, do not depend directly on membership status, being available to all persons who happen to be present in the territory. The public peace, for example, may be enjoyed by those illegally or temporarily in the territory as well as by members. Yet even this good depends indirectly on membership, for only some form of membership can secure long-term residence and thus long-term enjoyment of the good. From a global perspective, the most important basic goods today are public peace and access to a relatively promising labor market (one affording a reasonable chance of realizing personal or familial aspirations). Both goods depend at least indirectly on membership, and both goods are distributed among states in a highly unequal manner. It is this that accounts for the unprecedented migratory pressure and for the increasing salience and urgency of the politics of immigration and citizenship today. What is it about the various membership-dependent goods that makes it reasonable to set different conditions of eligibility for them? What goods ought to be reserved for full citizens, and why? At the other end of the spectrum, what goods should be extended to all persons in the territory, regardless of membership? Michael Walzer has suggested that shared understandings about the meaning of goods should guide policy deliberations about their distribution.18 The principle can be applied to the goods of membership. It is the different moral and political meanings of these goods, I think, that may explain why some are reserved for citizens, others extended to permanent residents, and others available to all without regard for membership. To agree on this principle is simply to agree on a mode of argument. It does not, of course, settle any substantive questions of eligibility. Disagreement about the meaning of particular goods or about the implications of this meaning for eligibility is not only possible, it is inevitable. The following remarks are merely illustrative; I make no attempt to establish the meanings of different sorts of membership goods. Consider voting. Even those who wish to extend to noncitizens most rights of citizenship often concede that there is something special about voting in national elections. The fact that national elections influence policy in the domains of defense and foreign affairs may justify reserving the right to vote in such elections to citizens, bound to the state by ties of allegiance and obligations of service. Voting in local elections, however, has a different meaning. It involves lo-

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cal self-administration, not high politics on the international scene. Questions of ultimate allegiance, it maybe argued, are simply irrelevant to local voting. Thus voting rights in local elections have been granted to resident noncitizens in a number of European countries. Or consider social benefits. Some derive their meaning and justification in reference to work: they are intended to replace lost income when a person is unable to work because of injury, involuntary unemployment, or old age. Such benefits are financed through employer and employee contributions. Worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, and social security are examples. Other social benefits have a different meaning. They are justified with reference to membership and financed out of general revenues. Family allowances, housing assistance, and income-supplement programs in general are examples. A third type of benefit is justified with respect to urgent need: this includes emergency medical care and emergency assistance generally. The meanings of these goods have implications for eligibility. Most people would probably agree that anyone granted access to the labor market, whatever his or her membership status, should qualify for such directly work-dependent benefits as worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, and social security. Membershipindependent eligibility for family allowances or housing assistance, however, is more controversial. This is because these latter could be understood as a form of mutual aid provided by members of a polity for one another. (“Members” might be interpreted restrictively to mean citizens only, or it might include permanent resident aliens as well.) The meaning of emergency assistance, finally, requires that it be extended to all persons in need, whatever their membership status. This includes illegal immigrants.

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eligibility

For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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Ethnic leadership, ethnic communities’ political powerlessness and the state in Belgium Marco Martiniello

Based on political sociologist Marco Martiniello’s doctoral study, which won the award for best thesis at the European University Institute in Florence in 1993, this article was first published by the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies in the same year. Presented here are the results of one of Continental Europe’s first studies on the links between ethnic leadership formation, the role of the state and the reproduction of political powerlessness among immigrant ethnic communities. Martiniello articulates a theoretical approach inspired by Marxian insights combined with Stephen Lukes’ theory of power and American theories of ethnic leadership, on the one hand, and a qualitative empirical research, on the other. The article sparked renewed interest in the issues of political inclusion, inclusion of immigrants and their descendents in Western Europe. It also showed how American theoretical categories need to be reconstructed to fit the European migration and post-migration context. Introduction Although to state that no human society is homogeneous appears to be a banal remark, this simple observation constitutes the very basis of diverging sociological approaches. In our post-industrial Western societies there are various principles of division, the relative importance of which social scientists have long been discussing and arguing about. For many Marxian scholars class constitutes the foremost criterion for the breakdown of our societies and, in their view, should therefore be the basic unit of social and political analysis. For other social scientists gender division seems to be a more significant dimension of differentiation in human societies and gender for them, should therefore be the main unit of research. Yet a third group stresses the predominance of divisions along racial and ethnic lines which they consider to be the chief organizational principles in

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our societies. Race and ethnicity then become central to their work. Social scientists who definitely and exclusively choose one rather than another of these division principles grow fewer and fewer in number. There is currently some kind of recognition that a better understanding of our societies stems from a masterly combination of all those dimensions in sociological analysis. It is more and more accepted that class, gender, race and ethnicity, seen as research units, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In this view, either none of those principles is crucial or they all are. In other words, independently of how they are conceptualized, class, gender, race and, ethnicity appear to be interrelated and in some cases even to overlap. Furthermore, the nature of such interrelations and overlaps is neither definite nor fixed in time. One of the issues facing social research is precisely to try to understand and explain those historical changes. The interrelations and overlaps concern class, gender, race and ethnicity, whether they be considered as analytically distinct research units or as a basis for individual identity formation, or, as mobilizing principles for collective action. On the one hand, more and more scholars seek to discover the connections between race and class (Anthias 1990), between class and gender, and between class, gender and race. On the other hand, individuals seldom define themselves simply as ‘black’, or ‘female’ or ‘Moroccan’. Usually a person’s identity is a combination of several of those dimensions, which prefer to as many identification processes. At the level of collective action, the same phenomenon may be empirically observed. Frequently, several of the four dimensions presented are used simultaneously as organizing principles. The aim of the present article is not to tackle the issue of the interconnection between class, gender, race and ethnicity in a straightforward manner. However, in looking at our post-industrial post-World War II societies – especially Belgium – as massive international labour and political immigration countries, it will be dealt with indirectly. The arrival and settlement of immigrants have had significant and complex effects on the class, gender, racial and ethnic composition of Belgium, as well as on the emergence of new forms of identity and collective action. In order to avoid a sterile and endless theoretical discussion about the interconnection between class, gender, race and ethnicity, it is useful to introduce the concepts of ‘labour’ and ‘political immigration’ as an alternative division principle in our societies. From this standpoint, Belgium can be characterized by the presence of two types of human groups: the ‘native’ population, and the population

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resulting from post-World War II mass immigration. Both are culturally, socially and politically heterogeneous and socio-economically stratified, even though the socio-economic: stratification follows different patterns in each case. Situated in that broad context, this article deals mainly with the relations between the Belgian state and political system on the one hand, and the ethnic communities from immigrant origin on the other. In Brass’s (1985) terms, this is a study of the relations between ‘ethnic groups’ and the state in which only specific ethnic groups are concerned. However, the use of the concept ‘ethnic community from immigrant origin’ does not imply that central importance is given to ‘substantial’ (i.e., which had a substance, a content) ethnicity. As is shown in the following section, the proposed definition of ethnic groups is largely non-ethnic in the primordialist sense of the expression. In order to clarify the concepts and to avoid confusion about terms, the next section specifies the main units of analysis used in this article. The central hypothesis will be dealt with in the second section. The third and final section presents the main results of an empirical case-study in Belgium and an evaluation of the previously stated hypothesis as well as two sets of conclusive remarks.

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the state

The units of analysis As Brass (1985) correctly observed, most studies of the relations between ethnic groups and the state present two limitations. Firstly, they show a tendency to ‘reify’ ethnic groups – to attribute to mere categories a reality that they may not necessarily have. Secondly, one can observe a certain ‘objectification’ of the units of analysis, whereby one or other dimension is considered to be of greater importance than any of the others, the latter being seen as secondary. One way to avoid such problems is to draw a clear-cut distinction between objective and subjective social entities. In this article, two types of ethnic collectivities from immigrant origin are distinguished, namely ethnic categories1 and ethnic communities. This conceptualization is analogous to the Marxist distinction between class-in-itself and class-for-itself (Marx 1956). An ethnic category is a collection of individuals who share a set of common objective features and who live generally in an analogous situation characterized by a set of collective disadvantages that define a status of minority. The first objective feature is national origin (Schermerhorn 1974). It is somehow linked to cultural features such as language, dietary habits and religion but these elements are not constitutive of the definition. Here,

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‘ethnicity’ refers only to national origin (Alba 1976; 1895) that stems mainly from a juridical classification2 of human beings. Paradoxically, the definition of ethnic collectivities is largely nonethnic because it is not based at all on ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic’ (in the primordialist sense) elements beyond national origin.3 The second objective feature is the migratory origin that people have in common. The reason why people are classified in an ethnic category can be traced back to one and the same phenomenon, namely post-World War II international labour and political migration. At the origin, an ethnic category is made up or can be constituted by migrant workers or political refugees, that is, by people who came from abroad. However, their family and children, often born in their parents’ arrival country, are also part of the ethnic category, even though they have no personal experience of migration and cannot therefore be considered as immigrants. Consequently, and this is the third feature, ethnic categories are reproduced over several biological generations (Keyes 1976). Their lifetime is thus of long duration. The collective disadvantages that people classified into ethnic categories face can be observed in many spheres of human life. As far as the socio-economic sphere is concerned, they are usually concentrated at the level of manual unskilled or semi-skilled labour, often in declining industries but also in other sectors, such as the services sector. This relative homogeneity in the weakest positions on the labour market is to a certain extent reproduced over the biological generations.4 It is rooted in the history of post-World War II labour migration which concerned mainly unqualified – or at least used as such – manpower. In the legal-political sphere their position is also weaker than that of the ‘natives’. As foreigners they are often deprived of basic political rights such as the right to vote and to be elected. Even where they have obtained the relevant nationality, and consequently those basic rights, they are often the targets of unequal treatment, for example by the police. Their position in education and housing is also disadvantaged in many ways. Furthermore, ethnic categories are numerically small compared to the population of the society at large. Finally, there can be as many ethnic categories as there are successive labour or political migratory waves in one country. The notion of ethnic category as used here, is an abstract one. As a research construction, it is based exclusively on objective criteria. To be part of an ethnic category, it is not necessary to have a selfconsciousness or an identity. There is no membership, no belonging to an ethnic category. People are assigned to an ethnic category by a researcher on the basis of some objective features that they share and some common disadvantages that they face.

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Besides this scientific classification, ethnic categories are also the object of symbolic social categorizations. This means that the objective features and disadvantages mentioned above are socially perceived as being valid classificatory items on which a set of more or less negative images of the ethnic categories is built and reproduced until they become a set of prejudices. These prejudices then become yet another disadvantage that the ethnic category faces. For example, because many Turks live in an old and deteriorating part of Brussels (objective disadvantage), they will be spoken of as ‘dirty Turks’ (symbolic categorization) and the prejudice that all Turks are dirty will take the upper hand. In other words, ethnic categories are the products of both a sociological construction and a social construction. However, not all the groups constructed as ethnic categories in the first way are constructed as such in the second way or vice versa. Compared to the ethnic category, the ethnic community has two additional characteristics: identity or self-consciousness and organization. Along with Barth (1969) and Weber (1971), it is held that the basic constitutive element of an ethnic community is not a shared culture but rather a feeling of ‘being a member’, a self-consciousness of belonging. The emergence of this identity may be interpreted as a response to the symbolic social categorization and the prejudice mentioned above, though it is not the only possible interpretation of the process of identity formation. Membership is crucial because it creates the basis for the appearance and development of the organizational dimension, which is the second basic characteristic of the ethnic community. In other words, it is only when certain people, who are ethnically categorized, develop a common subjective selfconsciousness about some of the objective features which they share or which they are convinced they share, and about some interests which they believe they have in common, that an organizational, institutional and relational web will emerge progressively in order to promote and defend those interests. As a result of the definitions presented above, the ethnic community will be much smaller quantitatively than the ethnic category. All the members of the ethnic community are also part of the ethnic category but the contrary is not only not necessarily true in theory – it is never true empirically. It is outside the scope of this article to enter into a detailed discussion about the definitions of state and polity. It suffices here to state, along with Brass (1985), that the state is looked at neither as a mere arena for group conflicts nor as an instrument of domination in the hands of one social class against the other. The state is conceived as a relatively autonomous entity that tends to act independently in

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what it presents as the nation’s interest by classifying and making distinctions among the population and by distributing collective resources in a differentiated way. In this view, the state acts primarily to preserve its monopolistic position and the definition, imposition and representation of the nation’s values, goals and interest, and also to preserve its distributive function. In this sense, the state warrants the conservation and the perpetuation of the existing social order. Formally, it is a set of persisting institutions about the control of which there is a constant conflict between individual and collective actors. Nevertheless, there is a minimal consensus between the various conflicting parties about the fundamental role of the state as defined above. This study goes beyond the concept of state by using the notion of polity. By doing so, reference is made to the set of political institutions, or, more precisely, to the set of collective political actors present in society. This means that, besides the executive, legislative and judiciary powers, the notion of polity includes all the other political actors and institutions who, in one way or another, at least theoretically in a modern democracy, take part in the definition and the management of society’s collective affairs. For instance, political parties, unions and lobbies of every kind are all part of the polity. It is important to underline that in this study about the relationship between the state and the polity on the one hand, and the ethnic communities on the other, no postulate is made beforehand about the position of the ethnic communities with regard to the state and the polity. The object of investigation does not imply a prejudgement as to whether or not ethnic communities are included in the state and the polity. Rather, their inclusion or exclusion is precisely a crucial issue to be examined thoroughly: how to characterize the ethnic communities’ position with regard to the state and the polity and how to explain it? The central role given to the concepts of ethnic leaders and elites in this theoretical approach appears to be obvious for two reasons. Firstly, it seems very difficult to analyse the relations between state and polity on the one hand, and ethnic communities on the other, without using the units of ethnic leadership and elites. This is because the state and the polity’s authorities cannot deal with abstractions, but have recourse to privileged actors or individuals, namely, to ethnic leaders and ethnic elites. The theoretical importance of those units is that they can be used to take into account internal conflicts within the ethnic communities, their external relations, as well as several points of intersection between the two. Secondly, defining ethnic categories in terms of collective features and disadvantages

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does not imply that they are fully homogeneous and ‘undifferentiated’. Furthermore, the concepts of ethnic elites and ethnic leaders are very useful when it comes to grasping the social and economic differentiation within ethnic collectivities. The concept of ethnic elite refers to people from the ethnic category who have reached a significant degree of success – as compared to the average success level of their fellow ‘ethnics’ – in the larger society involving one or more of the various fields of human activity (work and profession, arts and culture, politics, business, etc.). Along with Pareto (1986), one can talk of a plurality of elites, in this case ethnic elites, each one of them corresponding to one specific field of human activity. In any case, ethnic elites are a small but variable subcategory of the ethnic category. Moreover, the dividing line between elite and non-elite is defined in relative terms. It depends on each category’s economic, social and political characteristics and history in the immigration country. The concept of ethnic leader refers to those members of the ethnic community who have the ability to exert intentionally some variable degree of influence on the preferences and/or behaviour of the other members of that community, the aim being to obtain satisfaction of the group’s objective interests as perceived by the leaders. When the influence is exerted effectively, it is done through the leaders-followers’ interactions in the ethnic community’s institutions. Ethnic leaders necessarily enjoy some degree of recognition by their followers in the ethnic community on which the leadership’s legitimacy is based. Finally, the approach taken in this article centres on the concepts of power and powerlessness as a valid alternative to the dominant perspective, at least in continental Europe, that focuses on cultural or ethnic relations using notably the concept of integration (Martiniello 1992). The definitions adopted here are largely inspired by the work of Lukes (1974; 1986). Power is conceived as the ability of an ethnic collectivity as a group to control results related to issues affecting its interests. Consequently, an ethnic collectivity is politically powerless, if it is unable to promote and defend its collective interests in the web of political relations in a given society. On the basis of the units of analysis defined above, the next section develops the main theoretical hypothesis of this article before turning to the case-study.

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State and ethnic collectivities’ powerlessness in Belgium

collective reactions

two phases

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As clarified above, the ethnic collectivities dealt with here are mainly characterized by the objective disadvantages they collectively face in many fields. Nevertheless, their disadvantaged position is not perfectly stable in time and space. Furthermore, it varies according to the type of migratory experience of each receiving country and the ethnic, collectivity in question. Consequently, not all ethnic collectivities face the same degree of objective disadvantage. For example, the ethnic collectivities from member states of the European Community [EC] are in many ways privileged compared to non-EC ethnic collectivities. As workers, they are protected by European law and as ethnic categories they are much less stigmatized than, for example, North African collectivities. However, a certain degree of disadvantage always persists and is reproduced over the biological generations. This can be reduced or. increased, but fundamentally, the ethnic collectivities studied live in a chronically disadvantaged position in the receiving society. To the extent that the continuation of this situation is contrary to the rankand-file ethnic’s objective interests, which are not efficiently promoted and defended through an ethnic community collective action, ethnic collectivities are politically powerless and this powerlessness is thus fundamentally persisting as well. This article does not concern either the so-called ‘middleman minorities’ (Bonacich 1973) or the powerful ethnic lobbies acting in particular political systems. From an analytical point of view, various forms of ethnic collectivities’ reactions to their condition can be conceived. Firstly, they can simply accept their position passively, either individually or collectively, in which case no form of active response is elaborated. Secondly, a fraction of the ethnic category can seek individual success in areas that are left relatively open by the native society through mobilizing personal resources in individual strategies. This process of escape or exit gives birth to the ethnic elites. Thirdly, there is in theory the possibility of elaborating active collective responses to political powerlessness. This process of active collective response could be seen analytically as a two-phased one. In the first phase, the ethnic collectivity gives itself some kind of structure and constitutes itself in a single collective actor or set of juxtaposed collective actors. A more or less dense web of ethnic organizations and institutions takes shape in which emerging ethnic leaders play a central initiating role, notably through moulding and constructing some kind of mobilizable collective identity. This move towards ethnic-community building can be

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interpreted as a first reduction in the degree of political powerlessness of the ethnic category. In the second phase, ethnic leaders will try to promote and defend the ethnic community’s interests, notably through their relations with the state and the polity. They will also strive to keep the support of their fellow ethnics and to reaffirm constantly the existence of the ethnic community. The constitution and the structuration of a collective actor is a crucial and much contested issue but one which is not dealt with here. Rather, the problem is considered to have been solved by taking the existence of ethnic communities as defined above as a premiss. Seen in this context, the relations between the ethnic community and the state and polity are the main focus of analysis. In this respect, the study of the role of ethnic leaders in the reduction of the degree of the ethnic community’s powerlessness through those relations is thought to be of utmost importance. The central hypothesis is this. In Belgium, ethnic leaders generally fail to reduce significantly their ethnic community’s political powerlessness. They tend either to increase it or to maintain the status quo. The fundamental reasons for that inability are not to be found in the intrinsic characteristics of the ethnic leaders, such as their political inexperience, say, or their incompetence. Rather, it has to be explained by reasons that relate to the general political climate in Belgium and its repercussions on the way in which the state and polity tackle the relevant issues of the ethnic collectivities. Diffused racism and xenophobia characterize the political climate in Belgium and this explains the development of the state and polity exclusion strategies directed towards ethnic collectivities. In other words, the current political climate does not seem to be favourable to the empowerment of ethnic collectivities through their leaders’ actions, no matter how competent the latter may be. The general will to keep ethnic communities outside or at the margin of the political system is translated into two related strategies as far as ethnic leaders and elites are concerned: the neutralization of ethnic leaders, and the ‘depoliticization’ of their action. The neutralization of ethnic leaders is done in comparable ways by the state and other political actors, mainly the political parties and the unions, notably through the establishment of ad hoc peripheral institutions or sub-institutions to deal with the problems of ethnic categories. Furthermore, individual social and economic upward mobility often accompanies the processes of neutralization and depoliticization of ethnic leaders. In this second process, politicized ethnic leaders are transformed into apolitical ethnic elites. The neutralization and depolitization processes can be clarified

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by adopting a historical perspective. In the beginning there is a group of ethnic leaders whose inclusion in the polity follows a threefold pattern. Firstly, they are often co-opted; that is, they are chosen ‘from above’ by the ‘native’ political institutions. Secondly, they can be supported by a more or less massive mobilization of the ethnic community. Thirdly, they can be elected through some kind of formal representation process. However, after intervention by the state and other political actors, the previous group of ethnic leaders is divided into two new groups. On the one hand, some of these leaders continue to act as defenders and promoters of the community’s interests, but since they have been included in powerless ‘buffer’ institutions, and despite the fact that they are still politicized, they are unable to produce any significant effect on the community’s powerlessness. In this sense, they have been neutralized. On the other hand, some ex-leaders are no longer involved in ethnic-community politics. They have been depoliticized and have simultaneously achieved individual success, thereby becoming ethnic elites or confirming their precious position ‘above’ the collectivity’s average. Thus, the role of ethnic leaders is to be analysed in relation to the state and polity’s more or less imposed management of ethnic collectivities’ related issues. It could be claimed that the state and polity usually tolerate only those leaders who do not oppose the dominant view on ethnic collectivities’ issues, one important aspect of this being the generally shared willingness to keep immigrant communities outside or at the margin of the political system. Therefore, a corollary hypothesis would be that ethnic leaders could help to reduce the ethnic-collectivity powerlessness only if the state and polity were open enough to accept a real dialogue with them. These hypotheses have been worked out in fieldwork research concerning the collectivity of Italian origin in French-speaking Belgium. The next section presents a summary of the results of that empirical research, as well as a few conclusive remarks.

Italians in French-speaking Belgium: a powerless ‘model of integration’ The history of the Italian presence in Belgium dates back to a remote past. It is outside the scope of this article, however, to trace the historical origins of the phenomenon. Rather, the focus is put on the post-World War II period in which Italian labour immigration can be subdivided into three consecutive phases, according to the type of recruitment of the Italian workforce and its position in the productive

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system. Between 1946 and 1957 Italian immigrant workers were directly recruited in Italy by the Belgian coal industry, with the help of the government and the acceptance of the reluctant unions, to work in the coal mines. An agreement between the Belgian and Italian governments, signed in Rome in 1946 (Morelli 1988), provided for 50,000 workers to be ‘exported’ annually to Belgium. Every week, tightly controlled rail convoys were organized in Italy to bring immigrants to Belgium. In the early years, these contingents of workers were housed in former German prisoners camps. Immigrants had all signed temporary contracts to work in the mines, and any occupational mobility outside the extractive sector was legally prohibited. The period of ‘contingented’ Italian immigration ended with the accident at the Marcinelle mine when 136 Italian miners lost their lives. Between 1958 and 1968 immigration continued at a slower pace and was mainly spontaneous. Italians were coming to Belgium as tourists and usually found a non-qualified manual job in the building industry, in the iron industry, metallurgy or the extractive sector quite easily. Since 1968, Italian immigration in Belgium has slowed down considerably and is governed by the principle of free movement of workers in the EC.5 Italian workers have entered every sector of the Belgian economy and their settlement has become more and more visible through the continuation of the family reunification process. As a result of these three migratory phases, the Italian population in Belgium nowadays amounts to about 240,000 people (Martiniello 1990). Including Belgians of Italian origin, the Italian collectivity reaches almost 300,000, which is roughly 3 per cent of the country’s total population and 25-30 per cent of the total immigrant origin population in Belgium. Italians and Belgians of Italian origin are the largest ethnic collectivity living in Belgium. Seventy per cent of them are settled in the French-speaking part of the country (Martiniello 1990). The Italian population is increasingly presented as a ‘model of perfect integration’, to be followed and imitated by all other immigrant origin populations – mainly Moroccans and Turks – present in Belgium. In the discourse of politicians and many social scientists, Italians are no longer included in the ethnic categories issue. However, this is popular science which is not supported by fact. On the contrary, fieldwork results show that Italians in Belgium are still an ethnic category as defined above. Taking into account their socioprofessional position, their juridico-political status, their positions in education and housing as well as the prejudices they still face, Italians are nevertheless disadvantaged compared to native Belgians. At the same time, when their position is compared to that of the Maghrebins and to that of the Turks, it is a privileged one.

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a disadvantaged position

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The relatively disadvantaged position that Italians occupy in Belgium can be briefly illustrated by the following points. Firstly, Italians are to a large extent still concentrated in unskilled and semiskilled manual jobs. According to different sources, the rate of Italian male workers occupying such jobs varies between 69 and 76 per cent (Martiniello 1992). For Belgians the rate is 47 per cent (Martinello 1992), while 88 per cent of male Moroccans and 92 per cent of male Turks are part of the unskilled or semi-skilled labour force. As stated above, Italians clearly appear to be in a sort of intermediary position between Belgians and other immigrant origin workers. As far as male unemployment is concerned, a recent study shows that the average rate is around 6.4 per cent for Belgians, 15 per cent for Italians, 20 per cent for Turks and 25 per cent for Moroccans (Bastenier and Dassetto 1988). For women, the rates are as follows: approximately 17 per cent for Belgians and between 30 and 40 per cent for Italians, Moroccans and Turks (Bastenier and Dassetto, 1988). Secondly, being foreigners Italians are still deprived of the main political rights, such as the right to vote and to be elected at all levels (local, provincial, regional, national). In theory, they are free to join a Belgian political party, a union, or a voluntary association. Before the end of 1994 EC citizens may be granted the right to vote at local level, though not necessarily to be eligible, if agreement is reached within the framework of the European Political Union. In practice, this would mean that Italians could vote in Belgium for the first time in the year 2000, since the next local elections will take place in October 1994 and it is improbable that a positive decision on the matter will be taken before then. As far as Belgians of Italian origin are concerned, they enjoy full citizenship the same as any other Belgian. Thirdly, the position of the Italian category in the educational system is as weak as that of the Belgian working class. Italian youth is largely concentrated in technical schools, which are at the bottom level of the secondary school system. Not surprisingly, therefore, they are also underrepresented at university and post-university level. Fourthly, Italians are still disadvantaged compared to Belgians in terms of access to housing and the quality of housing. For example, in Brussels 35 per cent of Belgians own their own house as against only 27 per cent of Italians – taking into account that many of them are probably European civil servants – 12.5 per cent of Turks and 9.5 per cent of Moroccans (Kesteloot 1987). Finally, there still seems to be a disguised hostility towards Italians among the native Belgian population, even though the main targets of racism and xenophobia are the Moroccans and the Turks. A distinction should be introduced at this stage between Flanders

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and Wallonia. There are few Italians in Flanders, except in the mining area of Limburg. Nevertheless, the common prejudices against Italians, notably concerning the mafia, seem to find some echo in parts of the Flemish population. In Wallonia, one is used to the presence of Italians. Walloons and Italians mix socially and at work, especially in working-class areas, None the less, a recent poll6 shows that an anti-Italian tendency subsists among the Walloon population. To paraphrase Romeo and Juliet, nobody knows why there is a war but there is a war. In the present case, the word ‘war’ cannot be used, but the process is the same, since no one can remember the origin of the hostility. However, the situation, globally speaking, is better than it was forty years ago. Italians no longer live segregated in prisoner-of-war camps like the ‘pioneers’ who arrived in 1945 to work in the coal mines. Nowadays Italians are present in almost all sectors of the economy: furthermore, there are businessmen, doctors, lawyers and university students of Italian origin. There are even some Belgians of Italian origin occupying positions of power in politics; For example, the Minister of Education in the French Community government7 is Elio Di Rupo, the son of an Italian mineworker who arrived in Belgium after 1945; The period of gang warfare between Belgian and Italian youth in the discotheques during the late sixties and seventies is over, and open racism against Italians is often socially condemned. Yet this incontestable improvement of the Italians’ position in Belgian society is much more the result of general improvements that have affected the whole of Belgian society since World War II, and of a collection of individual and familial efforts, than it is of the collective action of an Italian community organized around its leaders in the Belgian state and polity. In that sense, the Italian community as such is still as politically powerless as it was in the past. Contrary to a largely diffused view, ethnic communities are rarely strongly structured groups of people obeying a single leadership. This observation applies perfectly to the present case. The Italian community is no exception. It is a split, heterogeneous and complex set of local micro-communities each consisting of people with family or local association links. These micro-communities are guided by as many local leaders in competition with one another. In 1985 there were more than 300 Italian voluntary associations in Belgium.8 In the Liege area alone there were already around ninety associations in 1989.9 Nevertheless, it is important to note that the web of ethnic institutions effectively gathers together a maximum of 10 per cent of the ethnic category (Martiniello 1989), that is less than 30,000 people. Furthermore, there is no ‘institutional completeness’

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politically powerless

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(Breton 1964) in the Italian community, although its organizational complexity, in spite of the fact that the potential public is decreasing with time, is very high and stable. In order to describe the Italian community in Belgium better, a double distinction can be made. Firstly, some institutions are mainly orientated towards the ‘well-being’ of the collectivity, while others are more orientated towards economic profit (Gans 1962; Nelli 1983). Secondly, the first group of institutions is divided into two subgroups: the institutions transplanted from Italy, and those created in Belgium. There are four main types of transplanted institutions: (1) the institutions emerging from the Roman Catholic Church, whose main aim is the spiritual welfare of the Italian immigrants; (2) the national associations that correspond to the social and cultural associations organized at the national level in Italy; (3) the patronati, that is, the social services of the Italian trade unions; and (4) the Italian political parties’ sections that usually follow the line defined in Rome in their respective decision-making centres. Among the institutions created in Belgium, there are all kinds of cultural, folkloristic and sports associations – especially football. There are also regional associations that are in touch with Italian regional governments as well as two newspapers printed in the Italian language for the Italian collectivity. There is no central coordination of all these institutions at the national level in Belgium. At local level some coordination exists by way of various committees linked to the Italian diplomatic institutions. More significantly, networks of ethnic institutions are formed on the basis of political allegiance. As in Italy, all the institutions can be classified as three ‘families’: the Catholic family, the Communist or, more precisely, the ex-Communist family, and the Socialist family. It is thus easily understandable that any collective action at the community level faces serious internal obstacles. As far as leadership is concerned, the situation is equally complex. There is no unique leadership recognized by the Italo-Belgians. Italian leadership is as fragmented as the community itself. However, three empirical profiles of Italian political leaders have been distinguished. The ‘traditional’ leaders came to Belgium as migrant workers. They are now in their sixties and have a low level of education, usually not beyond the end of primary school. Their activity in the community is voluntary and generally directed towards Italy. They are recognized as leaders within the community at the local level and they mainly use cultural references from Italy. Most ‘modern’ leaders were born in Belgium or arrived there at an early age. They are between thirty and thirty-five years old, and have been educated in

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Belgium up to medium or high level. There are professional community workers among them, but mostly they remain involved in community affairs on a voluntary basis. They enjoy internal and external recognition at local level and sometimes also at regional level. They direct their action towards life in Belgium where they are culturally at ease. The ‘imported’ leaders are neither immigrant workers nor were they born in Belgium. They came from Italy to take care of immigrants on a professional basis. Usually they tend to be elderly people and mostly well educated. Before being recognized within the community, they are recognized by Belgian and Italian authorities at local and regional level. Their cultural references and their activity concern Belgium as much as Italy. In their relations with members of the community most leaders tend to adopt an autocratic, sometimes even dictatorial, style. This is only possible because of the relative apathy of the community. In their relations with the external society, most Italian leaders tend to be accommodation leaders in Myrdal’s (1962) use of the term. Even though there is no single coordinating body in which all leaders come together, Italian leadership is to some extent structured in the following way. An important characteristic of most leaders is their ‘multipositionality’. They are simultaneously members of several community institutions of the same political ‘family’, in which they are to a greater or lesser degree always active and influential. In addition, they represent one or more of those institutions in the ad hoc bodies established for the relations between the community and the states (Belgian as well as Italian). Leaders get to know each other, therefore, through the various meetings that their ‘multipositionality’ implies and a certain form of privileged relationship develops between them. A relatively small circle of competing leaders is thus constituted inside the same political family. Yet even across the borders of these political ‘families’, the leaders mutually recognize each other as being the only legitimate and valid political opponents. Consequently, there is a kind of common consciousness of ‘being leaders’ in leadership circles that must surely be considered as a structuring factor. As far as the Italian leaders’ relations with the Belgian state are concerned, they mainly develop in two specifically created institutions: the immigrants’ Communal Consultative Councils [ICCC] that depend on the local level of the state; and the Foreign Origin Populations’ Consultative Councils [FOPCC] that depend on the communitarian level of the state.10 As far as their relations with the rest of the polity are concerned, some Italian leaders also belong to Belgian trade unions and political parties.

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The fieldwork based on semi-participant observation, semi-directive depth interviews and documentary data did not lead to a rejection of the hypothesis, mentioned above, about the inability of ethnic leaders to reduce the ethnic community’s powerlessness in spite of their personal political skilfulness.11 In that sense, the reproduction of the group’s powerlessness is an indicator of the Italian leaders’ powerlessness – as ethnic leaders – in the Belgian polity. The Italian leaders’ incapacity is to be explained by the state and polity mode of action towards them. The state and polity have neutralized and depoliticized Italian leaders in two ways. Firstly, they have been confined in consultative structures completely subordinated to the state both at the legal level and at the material level. The weight of structures like the ICCC and, FOPCC has always been virtually nil in Belgian political life. Trade unions have followed the same logic by creating specific sub-sections for ‘immigrants’, far removed from their decision-making centre. Secondly, some Italian leaders and other Italian-Belgians have individually reached positions of power within the polity – some have achieved significant success in other fields of human activity too – but have renounced their leadership role in the Italian community. As such, there are a few important trade unionists of Italian origin, a minister of Italian origin, and a slowly growing presence of Italians in the political parties. These people, who were once actual or potential community leaders, have thus changed into collectivity elites. In other words, the state and the other main political actors have always either to keep Italian leaders outside the centres of power or to allow some of them in on the more or less implicit understanding that they renounce their leadership role. Moreover, the divisions that exist within the Italian community have also been stressed by the state in order to complicate further the task of the ethnic leaders. The emergence of an Italian elite is just the other face of the exclusion strategies adopted by the state and the polity. Italian leaders have a choice between two options: they can either stick to their leadership role in peripheral and uninfluential institutions or they can seize the opportunity to achieve individual success by escaping from the community. That choice is the core of the Belgian model of insertion of ethnic categories, which is constituted by a certain level of social and economic achievement and, simultaneously, by complete political powerlessness. By offering this choice, the state has kept its autonomy towards ethnic communities and replaced the never-made, let alone implemented, global and coherent ethnic collectivities policy. How can one explain these exclusion strategies? Part of the an-

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swer is to be found in Belgian political history and part in the inherent characteristics of Belgian political life. Belgium has known political unity but never national unity. In the view of many observers, Belgium is a mere accident of history which could be countered at any time. Belgians themselves often question the reality, the existence and the survival of their society (Fox 1978). Since its creation, Belgium has always had to face tensions, divisions, centrifugal forces towards decentralization and centripetal forces towards centralization. In these conditions, a set of processes and mechanisms aimed at constantly assuring and reassuring the unity and global viability of the society has emerged and become institutionalized. The famous pacte à la belge is one of them. When critical issues are discussed, conflicting groups never oppose each other beyond a certain point which is considered to be dangerous for the survival of the state. They then engage in extraordinary negotiations in an ad hoc commission aimed at re-establishing harmony and peace between the groups in a climate of moderation. This willingness to prevent divisions and conflicts which might lead to the dissolution of the state has been observed since its very creation. Belgium has thus developed the ‘art of temporizing’ through setting up multiple commissions and councils, usually consultative bodies, and habitually finding harmonious solutions to serious problems on the quiet. As Fox (1978) lucidly states, Belgium is sufficiently concerned ‘with its potentiality for internal conflicts and with its intrinsic risk of self-demolition to establish and maintain permanent pacts between the various actors about social issues considered to be critical’. The hypothesis can be advanced that immigration and the presence of immigrant origin populations are precisely seen as one such critical issue. To the extent that ethnic categories represent about 8 per cent of the total population and that they come from various countries whose cultural differences are commonly underlined, their presence is considered to be a potential danger because it complicates even more the already intricate ethno-national Belgian context. This hypothesis is supported by the recent political discourse, admittedly during a period of relatively bad relations between the Flemish and the Walloons, in the context of the new discussions about the further federalization of the state after the legislative elections of November 1991. A large consensus has developed between the various Belgian political actors to keep the threat, that is, immigrants and their descent as communities, outside, or at the margin of, the polity. The inclusion of ethnic communities in the polity is thought to introduce a new and dangerous dimension of the ‘ethnicization’ of Belgian political life. The generally ‘accepted refusal’ of this new

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risk of ‘ethnicization’ of political life is then to be interpreted, in the dominant approach, as a condition for the survival of the present precarious equilibrium in the state. In this sense, the exclusion of ethnic communities from the polity can be explained as a survival strategy by a state that feels itself subjectively threatened as well as constituting a symbolic sign of a unity that is unfounded. The issues of the creation and the development of various institutions and councils to deal with the ethnic categories issues under the state’s supervision have to be analysed in that general context. They represent different forms of exclusion and ‘peripheralization’ of ethnic categories through the neutralization and ‘depoliticization’ of potential and existing ethnic leaders. The Belgian processes of categorization, exclusion and reproduction of powerlessness could be termed ‘immigrization’, because the official vocabulary used refers predominantly to the notions of immigration and immigrants. They constitute the Belgian model of ‘integration by exclusion’: the Belgian state and polity offer some opportunities of social and economic promotion to ethnic communities whilst simultaneously keeping them out of the state and polity by ‘using’ ethnic leaders. The Belgian model of integration, as described above, seems to have worked rather well with the ethnic communities and leaders whose presence is the result of the first waves of immigration after World War II. The Italian leaders have been depoliticized and neutralized quite easily and, consequently, the Italian community has been kept out or at the margin of the state and polity. Will this model be equally effective when applied to ethnic categories whose presence is more recent – mainly the Moroccans and Turks – not to mention current immigration and the movements of political refugees that will certainly lead to the settlement of new ethnic categories in Belgium? At present this crucial question remains unanswered. What is certain, however, is that the social, economic and political conditions are very different now compared to what they were in the sixties, seventies and even the early eighties, so that the viability of the Belgian model of integration can seriously be questioned. Firstly, the working-class organizations, especially the unions, which played such an important role in the processes of creating an Italian sociopolitical elite and of neutralizing Italian leaders, are less willing and able to exert the same role as far as Moroccan and Turkish leaders and elites are concerned. Secondly, the economic success that some Italians enjoyed in the past is much less evident today, because of the continuing economic crisis that began in the early seventies, because of the high rate of unemployment, and because of a growing dualization of society. Thirdly, the electoral success of the Vlaams Blok and

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extreme-right-wing parties in the general elections of November 1991 could provoke a further radicalization of the general political climate and of the discourse of traditional parties on ethnic communities and immigration issues. Fourthly, the domestic ethnic tension between the Flemish and the Walloons has never before been as acute and dangerous for the existence of the Belgian state. The combination of these four elements can, at least in the short and medium term, lead to a radicalization of the exclusion processes towards non-European ethnic categories. At least three types of reactions can then be expected in terms of ethnic leadership and elites. Possibly, there will be an emergence of more radical ethnic leadership, especially among the youth, in selfmade political and cultural organizations. Attempts to create ethnic lobbies in party politics will become increasingly probable, since more and more young people of ethnic categories acquire Belgian nationality. Finally, a further development of individual exit strategies, for example through small businesses and education, can be envisaged. It should be noted that, in the latter, women could play a vanguard role in the sense that their results seem to be much better than those of male counterparts. Will this lead to the emergence of a female ethnic leadership? This remains another open question. In any case, it would be a great novelty in ethnic leadership in Belgium, since until now it has been almost exclusively a male phenomenon.

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three types of reactions

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Rainer Bauböck, John Bade, Alec Hargreaves, Ronald Kaye, Zig Layton-Henry, Jan Rath and Giovanna Zincone for their helpful comments on a draft version of this article.

Notes 1 In the remainder of this article the phrase ‘from immigrant origin’ will no longer be used, since it is now clear that the study deals with populations whose presence is a consequence of international labour and political immigration in the post-World War II period. 2 The expression ‘national-origin category and community from immigrant origin’ might have been used instead of ‘ethnic category and community of immigrant origin’ to avoid any possible confusion in the meaning of ethnicity. However, for elegance sake, the ethnic vocabulary has been kept. 3 The question until which biological generation does an ethnic category continue to be named as such will not be addressed here, because it is mainly an empirical one.

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4 Of course, the reproduction is not perfect. There is an individual upward mobility process among ethnic categories, the importance of which will vary from case to case. 5 Regulation no. 1612/68 of the EC Council, Official Journal of the European Communities, no. L257, 19 October 1960. The poll was published by the weekly, Pourquoi Pas?, 17 March 1988. 7 The Belgian quasi federal state consists of two kinds of federal institutions, namely the Regions (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels) and the Communities (French, Flemish and German). Each Community has a government that is responsible for culture, education, sport, tourism, etc. 8 Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Direzione Generale dell’Emigrazione e degli Affari Sociali, Associazioni ltaliane nel mondo 1984, Roma, 1985. 9 Official data from the General Consulate of Italy in Liège, October 1989. 10 The very complex structure of the Belgian state is very well synthetized in Mean (1989). 11 For an extensive analysis of the fieldwork results, see Martiniello (1992). For details about the methodology, see Martiniello (1990).

References ALBA, RICHARD D. 1976 ‘Social assimilation among American Catholic NationalOrigin groups’, American Sociological Review, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1030-1046 – 1985 ‘The twilight of ethnicity among Americans of European ancestry: the case of Italians’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 134-58 ANTHIAS, FLOYA 1990 ‘Race and class revisited – conceptualizing race and racisms’, Sociological Review, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 19-42 BARTH, FREDRIK (ed.) 1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Differences, London and Oslo: Allen & Unwin/Forgalet BASTENIER, ALBERT and DASSETTO, FELICE 1988 Cycles migratoires, espaces, insertion, Brussels: CCPOE BONACICH, EDNA 1973 ‘A theory of middleman minorities’, American Sociological Review, vol. 38, no. 5, pp. 583-94 BRASS, PAUL (ed.) 1985 Ethnic Groups and the State, London and Sidney: Croom Helm BRETON, RAYMOND 1964 ‘Institutional completeness of ethnic communities and the personal relations of immigrants’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 70, no. 2, pp. 193-205 FOX, RENÉE 1978 ‘Why Belgium?’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 205-28 GANS, HERBERT S: 1962 The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans, New York: The Free Press

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KESTELOOT, CHRISTIAN 1987 ‘Le marché du logement et les immigrés à Bruxelles’, Tribune Immigree, nos 26-27, pp. 5-15 KEYES, CHARLES 1976 ‘Towards a new formulation of the concept of ethnic group’ Ethnicity, vol. 3, pp. 202-13 LUKES, STEVEN 1974 Power, A Radical View, London: Macmillan – (ed.) 1986 Power, Oxford: Blackwell MARTINIELLO, MARCO 1989 ‘L’associationisme regional italien en Belgique: point final de l’immigritude?’, paper presented at the Conference ‘Hommes, cultures et capitaux dans les relations italobelges aux 19ème et 20ème siècles’, Rome: Academia Belgica – 1990 ‘Élites, leadership et pouvoir dans les communautes ethniques d’origine immigrée: le cas des Italiens en Belgique francophone’, Florence: European University Institute, unpublished PhD thesis – 1992 Leadership et Pouvoir dans les Communautes d’Origine Immigrée, Paris: CIEMI/L’Harmattan MARX, KARL 1956 The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow: Progress Publishers [First published in French as Misère de la Philosophie in 1847] MEAN, ANDRE 1989 Comprendre la Belgique fédérale. Les nouvelles institutions, Brussels: La Libre Belgique MORELLI, ANNE 1988 ‘L’appel de la main-d’oeuvre italienne pour les charbonnages et sa prise en charge à son arrivée en Belgique dans l’immédiat apres-guerre’, Revue Belge d’Histoire Contemporaine, vol. 19, nos 1-2, pp. 83-130 MYRDAL, GUNNAR 1962 An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, New York: Harper and Row NELLI, HUMBERT S. 1983 From Immigrants to Ethnics: the ItalianAmericans, Oxford: Oxford University Press PARETO, WILFREDO 1986 The Rise and Fall of Elites, Salem: Ayer Company SCHERMERHORN, RICHARD A. 1974 ‘Ethnicity in the perspective of the sociology of knowledge’, Ethnicity, vol. I, no. I, 1974, pp. 1-14 WEBER, MAX 1971 Économie et société, Paris: Pion. [First published in German in 1922]

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Racism in Europe: unity and diversity Michel Wieviorka

In the early 1990s, the sociologist Michel Wieviorka was one of the leading specialists on racism in Europe. He published several books in French on the issue. This article was published in 1994 in a book entitled Racism, Modernity and Identity. Here Wieviorka convincingly defends the idea that any analysis of racism in Europe has to recognise the links between racism and modernity. Furthermore, Wieviorka distinguishes four forms of racism: universalistic, the ‘poor white’ response, anti-modernist and a form of racism linked to intergroup conflict in the modern era. This distinction has become a classic one in the European study of racism. Observing growing racist tendencies that affect most European countries, an increasing number of scholars feel an urgent need for a comparative reflexion that may bring answers to a central question: over and beyond the empirical evidence of differences, is there not a certain unity in contemporary racism in Europe? Is it not possible to elaborate a reasoned set of hypotheses that could account for most national racist experiences in Europe, while shedding some light on their specificities? European unification, in so far as it exists, and the growth of racism are obviously distinct phenomena, and it would be artificial to try and connect them too directly. The most usual frame of reference for any research about racism and race relations remains national. And even the vocabulary or, more deeply, the analytical and cultural categories that we use when dealing with this issue vary so widely from one country to another that we meet considerable difficulties when trying to translate precise terms. There may be large differences in language, and words with negative connotations in one country will have positive ones in another. Nobody in France, for instance, would use the expression relations de race, which would be regarded as racist, although it is commonly employed in the United Kingdom.

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unity in racism

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The key preliminary task, therefore, is not to contribute direct empirical knowledge about the various expressions of racism in Europe, as can be found, for instance, in the important survey of ‘Racism and xenophobia’ published in 1989 by the European Community (CCE, 1989). Nor is the initial task to compare elementary forms of racism, such as harassment, stereotypes, discrimination or political racism in a certain number of countries, in order to prove that they are more or less similar, or that they follow a similar evolution. Rather the problem is primarily conceptual. If we want to test the idea of a certain unity of contemporary racism in Europe, we must elaborate sociological and historical hypotheses, and then apply them to the facts that we are able to collect. Thus the most difficult aspect of a comparative approach is not to find data, but to organize it with wellthought-out hypotheses. My own hypotheses can be formulated in two different ways, one of which is relatively abstract and the other more concrete.

Racism and modernity

sociological unity of racism

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An initial formulation of the problematic, in effect, consists in the construction of a global argument enabling us to demonstrate that racism is inseparable from modernity, as the latter developed from European origins, and from its present crisis (Wieviorka, 1992a). Racism, both as a set of ideologies and specious scientific doctrines, and as a set of concrete manifestations of violence, humiliation and discrimination, really gathered momentum in the context of the immense changes of which Europe was the centre after the Renaissance. It developed further in modern times, with the huge migrations, the extension of trading relationships, the industrialization of Western society and colonization. But racism, in its links with modernity, cannot be reduced to a single logic, and even seems to correspond to processes which are sometimes so distinct that numerous demands are made for the discussion of racisms in the plural. This in fact gives rise to a debate the terms of which are badly posed. It is effectively possible to set up an integrated, global argument in which the various forms of racism, including anti-semitism, find their theoretical place, and which goes in the direction of a sociological, even anthropological, unity of racism. One can also consider each of these forms in its historical specificity, which goes in the opposite direction. Both approaches are legitimate and complementary, but since we are thinking here about the unity of contemporary forms of racism in Europe, it is clear that we should privilege the former. This leads us

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to distinguish four main lines of argument which cross the space of racism in its relation to modernity. In the first instance, as the companion of modernity triumphant, racism is universalist, denouncing, crushing and despising different identities. Whence the apparition of inferior ‘races’ as an obstacle to the process of expansion, in particular colonial expansion, or destined to be exploited in the name of their supposed inferiority. Next, linked to processes of downward social mobility, or exclusion, racism is the expression, as well as the refusal, of a situation in which the actor positively values modernity, but lives, or is afraid he/she will be exposed to a form of expulsion which will marginalize him/her. The actor then assumes a reflex or an attitude of ‘poor white’, particularly common in contexts of economic crises or of retraction from the labour market. Racism here is a perversion of a demand to participate in modernity and an opposition to the effective modalities of its functioning. A third line of argument corresponds not to a positive valorization of modernity, the rise of which must be ensured, or from which one refuses to be excluded, but to appeals to identity or to tradition which are opposed to modernity. The nation, religion and the community then act as markers of identity, thus giving rise to a racism which attacks those who are assumed to be the vectors of a detested modernity. The Jews are often the incarnation of these vectors, as are, in some circumstances, those Asian minorities who are perceived as being particularly economically active. Finally, racism can correspond to anti- or non-modern positions, which are displayed not against groups incarnating modernity, but against groups defined themselves by an identity without any reference to modernity. It expresses, or is an extension of, intercultural, intercommunity, interethnic or similar tensions. It is therefore possible to represent the space of racism around four cardinal points:

the space of racism

Modernity against identities Identities against identities Identities against modernity Modernity against modernity

In a space of this type, the racist actors do not necessarily occupy one single position, and their speech and their behaviour are frequently syncretic and vary over time. There are even sometimes paradoxical mixtures of these various positions, when people, for instance, reproach a racialized group with symbolizing at the same time mo-

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dernity and traditional values which they consider deny modernity: in the past, but also today, Jews, in many cases, fulfil this double function (Wieviorka, 1992b). They are hated in the name of their supposed identification with political power, money, the mass-media and a cosmopolitan internationalism, but also because of their difference, their visibility, their nationalism and support or belonging to the state of Israel, or because they flaunt their cultural traditions or their religion. This theoretical construction of the space of racism may help us to answer our question. In effect, it enables us to read the European experience, and above all its recent evolution. The latter has long been dominated, on the one hand, by a racism of the universalist, colonial type and, on the other hand, by oppositions to modernity which have assumed the form of anti-Semitism; today, much more than previously, it is directed by the fear or reality of exclusion and downward social mobility, and on the other by tensions around identity and vague fears of which the most decisive concern the question of belonging to the nation.

Formation and restructuration of the European model of national societies The argument outlined above can be completed by a much more concrete historical analysis of the recent evolution of most of the major western European countries. The latter, throughout this century, and up to the 1960s or 1970s, can be defined on the basis of a model which integrates three elements which are then weakened and destructured, reinvigorating the question of racism.

colonial racism

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The era of integration In most western European countries, racism, before the Second World War, was a spectacular and massive phenomenon, much more widespread than today. Colonial racism postulated the inferiority of colonized people of ‘races’, and modern anti-Semitism gave a new and active dimension to former anti-Judaïsm. This is why we must introduce a sense of relativity into our perceptions of contemporary racism. This is why we must also think in terms of periods, with the idea of a certain unity in time for the phenomenon that we are discussing. This idea means not that there is no continuity in racist doctrines, ideologies, prejudice or more concrete expressions, but that a new era in the history of racism began with the retreat, as Elazar Barkan (1992) says, of scientific racism, the end of decoloniza-

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tion, and, above all, the ‘economic crisis’ that has in fact meant the beginning of the decline of industrial societies. Until that time, i.e. the 1960s and 1970s, most European countries had succeeded, to a greater or a lesser extent, depending on the country, in integrating three basic components of their collective life: an industrial society, an egalitarian state and a national identity. Most European countries have been industrial societies: that is, they have had a set of social relations rooted in industrial labour and organization. From this point of view, they have been characterized by a structural conflict, which opposed the working-class movement and the masters of industry, but which extended far beyond workshops and factories. This conflict gave the middle classes a possibility to define themselves by either a positive or negative relationship towards the working-class movement. It brought to unemployed people the hope and sometimes the reality of being helped by this movement. It was also the source of important political debates dealing with the ‘social question’. Furthermore, it influenced intellectual and cultural life profoundly, and acted as a point of reference for many actors, in the city, in universities, in religious movements and elsewhere. European countries, and this is the second basic component of our model of analysis, have also been able to create and develop institutions which aimed at ensuring that egalitarian treatment was imparted to all citizens as individuals. The state has generally taken over various aspects of social welfare and security. It has become a welfare state. The state also introduced or defended a distance between religion and politics. Although countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece have recently experienced dictatorial regimes, states in Europe have generally behaved, since the Second World War, as warrants for democracy. Lastly, most European countries have given a central importance to their national identity. This identity has usually included two different aspects, sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary. On one hand, the idea of a nation has corresponded to the assertion of a culture, a language, a historical past and traditions, with some tendencies to emphasize primordial ties and call for a biological definition loaded with racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. On the other hand, the nation has also been defined in a more positive way, as bound to the general progress of mankind and to universal values that could be defined in economic, political or ethical terms. In this last perspective, a nation is related to reason, progress, democracy of human rights. Industrial society, state and nation: these three basic elements have

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never been consonant with their highest theoretical image. One can easily show the weakness of the working-class movement in some countries, or its constant subordination to political forces, the limits of the welfare state everywhere in the past, and the domination of the reactionary and xenophobic aspects of nationalism in many circumstances. Moreover, some European countries have defined themselves as bi- or plurinational. But since we recognize these limits, and since we recognize many differences between countries, we can admit, without the danger of creating a myth, that our three basic elements are typical of European countries until the 1960s and 1970s. Not only have they characterized three countries, but they have also been relatively strongly articulated, so much so that various terms are used to express this articulation: for instance, integration, nationstate and national society. We must be very cautious and avoid developing the artificial or mythical image of countries perfectly suited to the triple and integrated figure of an industrial society, a two-dimensional nation and a modern and egalitarian state. But our representation of the past is useful in considering the evolution of the last twenty or thirty years, an evolution which is no doubt dominated by the growing weakness and dissociation of our three basic elements.

transformation

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The era of destructuration All European countries are experiencing today a huge transformation which affects the three components of our reflection, and defines what I have called, in the case of France, ‘une grande mutation’ (Wieviorka, 1992c). Industrial societies are living their historical decline, and this phenomenon should not be reduced to the spectacular closing of workshops and factories. More important in our perspective is the decay of the working-class movement as a social movement. In the past, the working-class movement was, to various degrees, capable of incorporating in a single action collective behaviour corresponding to three major levels. There could be limited demands, struggles based on the professional defence of political demands, dealt with by the institutional system, and, at the highest level of its project, orientations challenging the control and the direction of progress and of industry. These orientations are quite out of place today: the working-class movement is breaking up, and this decomposition produces various effects (Touraine et al., 1987). Among workers, there is a strengthening of tendencies towards corporatism and selfishness – those workers who still have a certain capacity of action, because of their skill or their strategic position in their firm, develop struggles in the name of their own interests, and not in the name of more general or universal ones.

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Sometimes workers’ demands can no longer be taken up by the trade unions, which have been considerably weakened. This can result in violent forms of behaviour, or in spontaneous forms of organization, such as the recent ‘co-ordinations’ in France, which are easily infiltrated by extremist ideologies. In such a context, the middle classes no longer have to define themselves by reference to class conflicts, and they tend to oscillate between, on the one hand, unrestrained individualism and, on the other, populism or national-populism, the latter being particularly strong among those who experience downward mobility or social exclusion. These two distinct phenomena are closely related to social and economic dualization. In the past, most people could have a strong feeling of belonging to a society, ‘down’ as workers, or ‘up’ as éites, or middle classes. Today, a good number of people are ‘in’, and constitute a large middle class, including those workers who have access to jobs, consumption, health or education for their children, while a growing proportion of people are ‘out’, excluded and marginalized. Such an evolution may lead to renewed expressions of racism. Those who are ‘out’, or fear to be, have a feeling of injustice and loss of previous social identity. They think the government and the politicians are responsible for their situation, and may develop populist discourses and attitudes in which anti-migrant or ethnic minorities racism can take place. They then impute their misfortune to migrants, even if these migrants share the same experience. And those who are ‘in’ may develop more subtle forms of racism, trying to secure themselves with a colour bar or by individual or collective behaviours that create social and racial segregation and build symbolic but also real barriers. Furthermore, the logic of segregation, particularly at the political level, is always likely to become indistinguishable from a national and populist form of discourse which amalgamates the fears, anger and frustrations of the excluded and the social selfcentredness of those who wish to defend their status and their way of life. This merging therefore gives a result which is only paradoxical in appearance, since it results in an identical form of racism in those people who have experienced living with, or close to, immigrants or similar categories of people, and in those who have not actually done so, but who have heard about it through the mass-media or from rumours. A second element of destructuration deals with the state and public institutions, which encounter increasing difficulties in trying to respect egalitarian principles, or in acting as welfare states. Everywhere in Europe, the number of unemployed people has grown, creating

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not only a great many personal dramas, but also a fiscal crisis of the state. The problems of financing old-age pensions, the health care system, state education and unemployment benefits are becoming increasingly acute, while at the same time there is a rising feeling of insecurity which is attributed, once again, to immigrants. The latter are then perceived in racist terms, accused not only of taking advantage of social institutions and using them to their own ends, but also of benefiting from too much attention from the state. At the same time, the ruling classes have been tempted since the 1970s by liberal policies which in fact ratify and reinforce exclusion and marginalization. The crisis of the state and the institutions is a phenomena which must be analytically distinguished from the decline of industrial society and the dualization which results from its decline. But the two phenomena are linked. Just as the welfare state owes a great deal, in its formation, to the social and political discussions which are inseparable from the history of the working class, which is particularly clear in the countries endowed with strong social democracy, so too the crisis of the welfare state and the institutions owes a great deal to the destructuration not only of these discussions and conflicts, but also of the principal actor which informed them, the working-class movement. A third aspect of the recent evolution concerns the national issue, which becomes nodal – all the more so as social issues are not politically treated as such. In most European countries, political debates about nation, nationality and citizenship are activated. In such a context, nationalism loses its open and progressive dimensions, and its relationship with universal values, and is less and less linked with ideas such as progress, reason or democracy. National identity is increasingly loaded with xenophobia and racism. This tendency gains impetus with the emergence or growth of other identities among groups that are defined, or that define themselves, as communities, whether religious, ethnic, national or regional. There is a kind of spiral, a dialectic of identities, in which each affirmation of a specific identity involves other communitarian affirmations among other groups. Nationalism and, more generally speaking, communal identities do not necessarily mean racism. But as Etienne Balibar explains, racism is always a virtuality (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1988). This virtuality is not nurtured uniquely by the presence, at times exaggerated and fantasized, of a more or less visible immigration. It also owes a considerable amount to phenomena which may even have nothing to do with it. Thus national identity is reinforced in its most alarming aspects when national culture appears to be threatened by the superficial and hypermodern character of an internation-

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al culture which originates primarily in America, by the political construction of Europe or, again, by the globalization of the economy. At the same time, it becomes more and more difficult to assert that society, state and nation form an integrated whole. Those who call for universal values, human rights and equality, who believe that each individual should have equal opportunities to work, make money and then participate fully in cultural and political life – in other words, those who identity themselves with modernity – are less and less able to meet and even to understand those who have the feeling of being excluded from modern life, who fear for their participation in economic, cultural and political life, and who retire within their national identity. In extreme cases, social and economic participation are no longer linked with the feeling of belonging to a nation, the latter being what remains when the former becomes impossible. Reason, progress and development become divorced from nation, identity and subjectivity, and in this split, racism may easily develop. In the past, industrial society often offered workers disastrous conditions of work and existence. But the working-class movement, as well as the rulers of industry, believed in progress and reason, and while they were opposed in a structural conflict, this was precisely because they both valorized the idea of progress through industrial production, and both claimed that they should direct it. The nation, and its state, as Ernest Gellner explains (1983) were supposed to be the best frame for modernization, and sometimes the state not only brought favourable conditions, but also claimed to be the main agent of development. Nationalism could be the ideology linked to that perspective, and not only a reactionary or traditionalist force. Today, waters divide. Nationalism is mainly expressed by social and political groups frightened by the internationalization of the economy and culture. It is increasingly differentialist, and racism develops as social problems such as exclusion and downward mobility grow, and as anxiety develops in regard to national identity.

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The categories of the sociological analysis of racism The argument outlined above is historical and sociological in nature, but a closer examination of the contemporary phenomena of racism requires explicitness in the instruments and, therefore, the categories of analysis of racism properly speaking (Wieviorka, 1991). The two logics of racism Contemporary sociological literature increasingly insists on the idea

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classical racism

differentialistic racism

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of changing forms of racism. Some scholars, relying on American studies, oppose the old ‘flagrant’ racism to the ‘subtle’ new versions (Pettigrew, 1993). Others emphasize a crucial distinction, which could, in an extreme interpretation, lead to the idea of two distinct kinds of racism. Following authors such as Martin Barker or PierreAndré Taguieff, we should distinguish between a classical, inegalitarian racism and a new, differentialist one (Barker, 1981; Taguieff, 1988). The first kind considers the Other as an inferior being, who may find a place in society, but the lowest one. There is room for inferior people in this perspective, as long as they can be exploited and relegated to unpleasant and badly paid tasks. The second kind considers the Other as fundamentally different, which means that he/she has no place in society, that he/she is a danger, an invader, who should be kept at some distance, expelled or possibly destroyed. The point is that for many scholars the new racism, sometimes also referred to as cultural racism, is the main one in the contemporary world, while the inegalitarian one becomes secondary. As long as this remark is intended as a statement of historical fact, based on the observation of empirical realities of present-day racism, it is acceptable. But it must not take the place of a general theory of racism. First, cultural or differentialist perspectives in racism are not new. It is difficult to speak of Nazism, for instance, without introducing the idea that anti-Semitism in the Third Reich was deeply informed by these perspectives. Jews were said to corrupt Aryan culture and race, and the ‘final solution’ planned not to assign them to the lowest place in society, but to destroy them. Second, the opposition between the two main logics of racism should not conceal the main fact, which is that a purely cultural definition of the Other, as well as a purely social one, dissolves the idea of race. On one hand, Claude Levi-Strauss is not a racist when he emphasizes cultural differentiation. One is a racist only when there is any reference to race in a cultural opposition, when beneath culture we can, explicitly or implicitly, find nature: that is, in an organicist or genetic representation of the Other as well as oneself. On the other hand, when the Other is defined only as socially inferior, exploited or marginalized, the reference to race may disappear or become, as William J. Wilson suggests (1978), less significant. In fact, in most experiences of racism, the two logics coexist, and racism appears as a combination of them both. There are not two racisms, but one, with various versions of the association of cultural differentialism and social inegalitarianism. The general analysis that has been presented for contemporary Europe helps us to refuse the idea of a pure, cultural racism, corresponding to a new paradigm that

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would have taken the place of an old one. The sources of European contemporary racism, as I have suggested, are in the crisis of national identities and in the dualization of societies, which favour a differentialist logic. But they are also connected with phenomena of downward social mobility and economic crisis, which lead to populism and exasperation and have an important dimension in appeals for an unequal treatment of migrants. Two main levels As I have indicated in a recent book (Wieviorka, 1991), we may distinguish four levels in racism. The way that experiences of racism are articulated at the different levels where they act may change with their historical evolution. Our distinction is analytical, and should help us as a sociological tool. A first level refers to weak and inarticulated forms of racism, whatever they may consist of: opinions and prejudice, which are more xenophobic and populist than, strictly speaking, racist; and diffuse violence, limited expression of institutional discrimination or diffusion of racial doctrines, etc. At this first level, racism is not a central issue and it is so limited, quantitatively and qualitatively, that I have chosen to use the term infraracism to characterize it. We may speak of split racism at a second level, in reference to forms of racism which are still weak and inarticulate, but stronger and more obvious. At this stage, racism becomes a central issue, but does not give the image of a unified and integrated phenomenon, mainly because of the lack of a strong political expression. We may speak of political racism, precisely, when political and intellectual debates and real political forces bring a dual principle of unity to the phenomenon. On the one hand, they give it an ideological structure, so that all its expressions seem to converge and define a unique set of problems; on the other hand, they offer it practical forms of organization. At the fourth level, we may call total racism those situations in which the state itself is based on racist principles. There is nowadays no real threat of total racism in our countries; and we may now simplify the distinction into four levels of racism by reducing them to two main ones, the infrapolitical level, including infra and split racisms, and the political one. We can now come back to our general analysis of European contemporary racism and be more precise. This rise of the phenomenon, following what was previously said, is due to the evolution of three basic elements, and to their destructuration. We may add that it appears first at an infrapolitical level, and that it then ascends to the political level, with variations from one country to another.

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four levels of racism

infrapolitical to political level

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In certain cases, a rather important political party appears and develops quickly, as in France with the Front National. In other cases, such a party appears but quickly declines, which means not that racism necessarily stays at the infrapolitical level, but that it informs political debates without being the flag of one precise strong organization – this could define the English experience. But above all, the analytical distinction into levels enables us to introduce a central question: is there not throughout Europe the same danger of seeing political actors capable of taking over and of directing infrapolitical racism? On the one hand, we observe in several countries the growing influence of racist ideologies, but also of political organizations which are no longer small groups of activists and which may occupy an important space in political life. The French Front National appears as a leader in Europe, and sometimes as a model, but other parties or movements should be quoted too: the Deutsche Volksunion and the Demokratische Partei Deutschlands in Germany; the FPO in Austria, which gained 22.6 per cent of the votes in the November 1991 elections in Vienna; the Vlaams Blok in Flanders, with twelve members of Parliament since November 1991; and the Italian Leagues. One must be careful, however, not to exaggerate. The more extreme-right parties occupy an important place, the more they appear as populist rather than purely racist. Racism, strictly speaking, is only one element, and sometimes a minor one, along with strong nationalism or regionalism. Moreover, political and electoral successes force these parties to look respectable, and avoid overtly flagrant expressions of racism. On the other hand, racism appears in non-political contexts, when prejudice and hostile attitudes to migrants develop, when social and racial segregation is increasingly visible (which is the case in France, where the issue of racism is constantly related to the so-called urban crisis and ‘the suburban problem’), when violent actions develop, sometimes with a terrorist aspect, when various institutions including the police have a responsibility for its growth, when discrimination is obvious (for instance, in relation to housing or employment), and when the media contributes to the extension of prejudice. In such a perspective, all the European democracies have to face the same problem. There is a growing opportunity for extreme-right forces to capitalize on fears, frustrations, unsatisfied social demands and feelings of threat to national identity. Even worse, there is a danger that these forces will introduce new elements into infrapolitical racism. This is the case in France, for instance, where popular racism is strongly hostile to migrants, to black people and to gypsies, rather

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than to Jews, and where the Front National tries constantly to instill anti-Semitism. More generally, there is still a real distance between infrapolitical and political racism, and this means that racism is not so much a widely extended ideology offering people a general framework in which to interpret their own lives and personal experiences, but rather a set of prejudices and practices that are rooted in these concrete lives and experiences, and which could possibly evolve. In the present state of things, the development is dominated by a process of populist fusion in which popular affects and political discourse converge, but which, paradoxically, protects our societies from extreme and large-scale racist episodes. However, populism is never a stable phenomenon and is always potentially open to more frightening processes.

The diversity of European racist experiences In contemporary Europe, our general analysis does not apply everywhere in the same way. Many factors intervene, which do not invalidate our global hypothesis, but which oblige us to introduce much more diversified images. Some are related to the social history of each country, to its industrialization, or to the making of its working-class movement. Some are related to its political history, to the making of its state, institutions and political system, and, possibly, to its dictatorial or totalitarian recent past. Some also deal with the specificity of its culture and national identity, and with its international past. Countries that have experienced colonization and decolonization, or that have to face domestic tensions due to what many nationalist actors and intellectuals have called ‘internal colonialism’ differ between themselves, and from countries that are not concerned with these issues. For many years, some European countries have experienced the presence of migrants who have been attracted by agriculture and industry, or who came for other reasons, including political ones. Others, like Italy, are only now discovering this phenomenon. The list of factors of this kind could certainly be extended, but the most important thing is to see that they each affect at least one of the three basic elements of our global analysis. The latter insists on the twofold idea of a process in which, in the first place, industrial society breaks down, the egalitarian state enters into crisis and the nation becomes paralysed in differentialist and defensive terms; and in which, secondly, these three elements are increasingly dissociated. The pat-

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Italy

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tern of this process of destructuration and dissociation depends on the various capacities of resistance to decline or crisis of each basic element, and consequently on the various factors listed above. In Germany, for instance, industrial society adapted to the change more efficiently than elsewhere. Trade unions, and mainly the DGB, maintain a much higher capacity for action and bargaining than most of their counterparts in the world. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, West Germany had a state and a political system which seemed less affected by the crisis than other countries, and it is only recently, with the huge price of the reunification with East Germany, that fiscal and political problems developed and took on acute forms. At the same time, the third element of our general analysis, the national issue, appears as a crucial topic. Racist and neo-Nazi violence, and the extension of skinhead groups, express primarily symbolic and concrete difficulties in implementing national unification, and are particularly important in the former East Germany, where immense social tensions and fears for the future are interpreted within the category of nation. The centrality of this issue is also important in Austria. In these two countries, the experience of the 1930s and 1940s informs present political debates, and references to a national culture and identity are so significant that theoretical priority should be given to the national issue. The strength of popular and political anti-Semitism in these countries reinforces this point; it strongly supports the hypothesis of anti-modern attitudes linked to a traditional nationalism, or to its revival due to the economic crises that transform social demands into nationalist and racist attitudes. In Italy, to introduce a different case, the decline of industrial society and the crises of trade unions are obvious, but they do not constitute the main problem. In this country, national unification came late, and localism or regionalism are strong, but they do not constitute the heart of the problem. Analysing the emergence of racism in Italy, interest must focus on the crisis of the state, of institutions and of the political system, which is expressed by the recent electoral successes of the Leagues in the northern part of the country, by the incapacity of the state to deal with the mafia, and by the renewal of debates concerning the mezzogiorno. Italy has long been a country of emigration, and is just discovering that it has now become a country of immigration. The first expressions of racism should not be overestimated. The Leagues are much more populist than racist, and concrete discrimination and acts of violence are not so frequent. When they appear, they express a will for the economic inferiorization of black or Arab migrants; they are not strongly linked to a cultural and differentialist affirmation. The possible extension of the racist

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phenomenon, at least at the political and ideological level, should be analysed in terms of the crisis of the state and the political system. This implies paying special attention to intellectual and political actors, who in Italy sometimes have a paradoxical role: by importing, mainly from France, the issue of anti-racism in a context of weak forms or racism, and by developing the image of a differentialist racism. While the main popular expressions are inegalitarian, they are perhaps creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other countries such as France, Belgium or the United Kingdom, there is a temptation to use as a starting point for analysis the decay of industrial society and the decline of the working-class movement, one consequence of this being that migrants are defined less as workers and more as members of religious or ethnic communities, even if the very existence of these communities may be overestimated. But French, Belgian and British experiences deserve in fact an analysis that is directly three-dimensional and that gives equal importance to the decomposition of industrial society, to the crises of the state and institutions, and to the national issue. Let us add that, at least in the Belgian and British cases, the unit for analysis of racism should not be the whole country, but smaller entities, so that differences between, for instance, Scotland and England, or Flanders and Wallony could be seriously taken into account: English nationalism, for example, is much closer to xenophobia and racism than Scottish nationalism. There are therefore considerable differences between countries, but these do not fundamentally challenge our global analysis. Each national experience must be approached in its three-dimensionality, even if, depending on the country, it is better at the outset to focus thinking on only one or other of the three basic elements in our argument. In any event, it is effectively the image of the dissociation of these three elements – society, the state and the nation – which is the origin of the spread of racism.

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dissociation of society, state and nation

References Balibar Etienne, and Wallerstein, Immanuel (1988) Race, classe, nation, Paris: La Découverte. Barkan, Elazar (1992) The Retreat of Scientific Racism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barker, Martin (1981) The New Racism, London: Junction Books. CCE (1989) Eurobaromètre: L’opinion publique dans la Communauté Européenne, Brussels: Commission des Communautés Européen­ nes.

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Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Pettigrew, Thomas, and Meertens R.F. (1993) ‘Le racisme voilé: composants et mesure’, in Racisme et Modernité (under the direction of M. Wieviorka), Paris: La Déceouverte. Taguieff, Pierre-André (1988) La force du préjugé, Paris: La Découverte. Touraine, Alain, Wieviorka, Michel, and Dubet François (1987) The Working Class Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wieviorka, Michel (1991) L’espace du racisme, Paris: Seuil. Wieviorka, Michel (1992a) ‘Racism and modernity’, paper presented at the Congress of the American Sociological Association, Pittsburgh. Wieviorka, Michel (1992b) ‘Analyse sociologique et historique de l’antésimitisme en Pologne’, Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, vol. 93, pp. 237-49. Wieviorka, Michel (ed.) (1992c) La France raciste, Paris: Seuil. Wilson, William J. (1978) The Declining Significance of Race, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Changing the boundaries of citizenship: the inclusion of immigrants in democratic polities* Rainer Bauböck

Normative political philosopher Rainer Bauböck has been a leading world scholar on citizenship issues for over twenty years. This article is the last chapter of his edited book from 1994, From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe. He suggests a threefold typology of membership in contemporary liberal states: territorial sovereignty, nominal citizenship and social membership. Bauböck is one of the very first European thinkers to argue forcefully that a substantial improvement of the legal integration of immigrants can be achieved by combining ‘residential citizenship’ for foreigners with optional naturalisation as well as the toleration of dual citizenship. To this day, these arguments are hotly debated, though not as much as they were during the early 1990s. In any case, this article remains an important contribution to European citizenship and migration studies. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him (Plato on the “anarchic temper” of democracy, Republic, VIII, 562e)

Who is included in democratic legitimation? Every scientific discipline has its own core question. For the philosophically oriented branches of social science, their core questions seem to be unanswerable in the sense of finding a definite solution that will be accepted by all rational participants in scientific discourse. At the same time, these questions appear to be unavoidable and capable of stimulating never-ending debates that reassure social theorists that there is, after all, a raison d’être for their disciplines. I think that the core question for normative political theory has been: What are the conditions for making political rule legitimate? A general answer that has strongly prevailed, at least since Thomas

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rational consent

Hobbes, is the following one: Political rule must be of a kind that those who are subject to it could rationally consent to being ruled in this way. Theories that have tied political legitimacy to democratic rule have specified further conditions, such as the following ones: The collective of all subjects must be regarded as the ultimate sovereign in a political system. Subjects are entitled to elect their political representatives, counting every vote as one and one only. They can appeal to an independent judiciary against the unlawful exercise of political power and enjoy a right of resistance against illegitimate rule. It is conditions like these that mark the transformation of subjects into citizens. When elaborating such answers we will find that the core question can be split into two separate ones: How can political rule be made legitimate? and Who are those towards whom it must be legitimated? It appears that most contemporary democratic theories regard the “how” as much more important than the “who”. There are two reasons for this unequal emphasis. First, contemporary liberal democracies differ strongly in their constitutional structures such as in their legal traditions, electoral systems or separation of powers; this variety stimulates the comparison of the virtues and disadvantages of different solutions to the problem of democratic legitimacy. In contrast, the ranges of inclusion appear to be rather similar in all these political systems and minimum standards are much more firmly established in this regard. The exclusion of blacks or women from the franchise, or a decision to deprive an ethnic minority of its citizenship, would be clearly regarded as unjustifiable today.1 The second reason is that most people would probably agree that there is a straightforward answer to the who-question: All those who are affected by political decisions, and who are able to participate in the legitimating activities, should be included in the democratic polity. Of course there are some significant exceptions where contemporary democracies seem to fail by this principle. It is by examining the reasons for these exceptions that we can best distinguish the inherent limitations of democratic inclusion from unjustified exclusion. I will group these exceptions into three; (1) external exclusion, (2) internal exclusion and (3) internal exclusion with reference to external affiliation.

external exclusion

(1) Citizens of state A may be strongly affected by political decisions taken by state B and legitimated only towards B’s citizens. The waging of an offensive war, occupation and colonization of another country are the most blatant cases where, by definition, the victimized population is excluded from legitimation of the action (although

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many of these actions have been labelled by the aggressor’s propaganda as liberating or civilizing missions). In other examples, a damage inflicted upon the population of A may be the by-product of some action on the part of B, which is less intended to harm A than to serve B’s interests. Take, as an illustration, the depletion of natural resources at the detriment of some neighbouring country (e.g. when the water of a river is diverted or used at the expense of those living downstream at the other side of the border). Regarding environmental pollution across international borders it is not only the neighbouring areas which suffer, but generally the damage is even greater among the population of the country from which the emissions originate. Politically speaking, the former are nonetheless in the worse position because they and their representatives are formally excluded from controlling what affects them. In these cases interstate treaties, rules of international law or pressure may help to restrain the ruthless pursuit of a national policy which does not consider the effects on populations beyond the border. However, a fundamental difference remains between such remedies and the kind of popular involvement which is regarded as essential for democratic legitimacy. Yet another problem of external exclusion results from the operations of a global economy. In the 1980s monetarist policy of Western states pushed up interest rates with the effect of reducing the ability of highly indebted countries in both Eastern Europe and the so-called Third World to pay back credits, forcing many of them to adopt severe austerity policies. One could argue that in this example, governments of debtor nations had agreed to terms of contract which included such a risk. Yet this objection does not fairly represent the unequal balance of power by virtue of which creditor nations can unilaterally influence the capacity of debtors to comply with their obligations. Many more examples could be given of policies that strongly affect populations which are excluded from democratic legitimation simply because they live outside the territory of the state which determines and controls this policy. The general problem is that of the disjunctures of globalization (Held, 1991; Held and McGrew, 1993). The territorial ranges of ecological systems do not coincide with the boundaries of states and modernization makes economic systems increasingly transnational or even global. The modern bureaucratic state, however, is solidly tied to a territory within which it claims a monopoly of legitimate violence. Democratic legitimation therefore also refers to a territorially bounded population. Involving the populations of other countries in the legitimation of national political de-

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cisions can normally only be achieved indirectly within a framework of peaceful international cooperation. internal exclusion

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(2) However, democratic legitimation may in certain ways also exclude parts of the population living in the territory of a state. In pre-modern democratic constitutions, free citizens were generally a minority of the population. Slaves and women were not considered to be members of the polity. Nineteenth-century democracies still maintained gender and property requirements for active citizenship2 and racist exclusion was widespread. In contemporary liberal democracies three groups remain internally excluded: minors, the severely mentally handicapped and convicts. There are two significant shifts in the patterns of justification from pre-liberal to contemporary exclusions. Firstly, pre-liberal requirements for citizenship referred to generalized social conditions for individual autonomy which were seen as preconditions for the formation of an independent judgement about the common good and the interests of the state. Paupers, workers and women had to be excluded from full citizenship because their economic dependency and lack of education presumably prevented them from developing that kind of judgement. This was clearly also a self-defeating ideological argument. How could the privileged class of male property owners be trusted to develop an unbiased view of the common good? Isn’t it more reasonable to assume that they would rather defend their own interests against those of excluded groups? Since then it is not only the argument but also social conditions which have changed so that the argument has lost whatever force it once might have carried. On the one hand, almost everybody receives nowadays that kind of elementary education which may be said to be necessary for an active citizen and, on the other hand, a broad middle class now has to rely on wages and salaries for their income and on state bureaucracies for their social security. The capitalist welfare state has thus created a new social basis for including broader populations into citizenship by generalizing education as well as economic dependency. Any remaining citizenship disabilities are seen to result from a lack of relevant mental capacities and moral qualities of individuals rather than being attributed to them as permanent members of ascriptive social groups. Minors are automatically included on reaching their age of majority and convicts may regain the status of full citizenship when being released from prison. Mentally handicapped persons may remain permanently disenfranchised but this is justified with regard to a minimum of dialogic capacities that are essential for participating in political deliberation (see Ackerman, 1980: 78-80).

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Secondly, and I think more importantly, those who remain disenfranchised are no longer excluded from citizenship. Minors, mentally handicapped persons and even criminal convicts are citizens in the latter sense even though they may be excluded from the vote. Basic mental capacities and moral qualities are not required for membership in the polity but serve as criteria for the distribution of the core rights of political participation within the polity. Citizenship is acquired at birth rather than at the age of majority and generally it cannot be taken away by the state or abandoned by citizens themselves as long as they live in the territory. From a liberal democratic point of view, the status of citizenship, by which a state recognizes an individual as its member, is not a formal legal concept lacking any particular content;3 it implies substantial rights to protection, as well as those against interference, by the state. Democratic legitimation is not confined to the activity of political participation but rests on this more comprehensive bundle of rights. For a liberal conception, in contrast with the republican tradition of Aristotle, Rousseau or Hannah Arendt, the inclusion of the inactive and even the incompetent as equal members in the polity is a basic achievement of contemporary democracy. This is a guarantee against the degeneration of democracy into the rule of a self-proclaimed enlightened elite. Modern liberal citizenship therefore emerges from a dual movement of (a) turning the narrow privileges of active political participation into general rights and (b) enriching the generalized condition of protected subjecthood with the enjoyment of basic rights.

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(3) There is, however, one kind of persistent internal exclusion which can only be justified by arguments for external exclusion. This is the peculiar status of resident aliens. Their position in contemporary democracies is a paradoxical one. They are clearly affected by political decisions in much the same way as citizens. Provided that they speak, or have learned to speak, the language of their country of residence, they are not different in their general capacities that quality them for citizenship. They do, in most cases, enjoy fundamental rights, such as equal rights in court, civil liberties, social rights to elementary education and equal employment-related benefits of social security. Their rights thus go considerably beyond universal human rights, however, they are granted to them as residents rather than as citizens. On the one hand, this convergence between the rights of residents and of citizens demonstrates that the basic democratic norm of legitimation applies to a resident population rather than only to those individuals who are formally recognized as members of a polity. On the other hand, why are there still so many significant distinctions

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between the status of aliens and of citizens, especially concerning the right to permanent residence and voting rights? Do not states of immigration with a large and growing disenfranchised alien population fail to meet the norm of inclusion which characterizes liberal democracy? Yet the charge that these distinctions of rights and status between citizens and foreigners lack democratic justification raises some additional questions which might be more difficult to answer. Should one draw from this the consequence of automatically naturalizing all alien residents? Or should one go even further and abandon the formal concept of citizenship altogether? What do we need a formal status of citizenship for if all residents already enjoy equal rights? The dynamics of modernization implies a long-term trend towards increasing international migration. Assuming that liberal democracies will be preferred targets and should be relatively open to new admissions, they will have to rethink their principles for the allocation of rights and membership among citizens and foreigners. This will inevitably break up national frameworks which have been used to define the boundaries of membership. But what should replace them? These are some of the questions I aim to address in this paper.

Limits for inclusion: individual choice, political allegiance and societal membership reasons for exclusion

choice

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Two kinds of reasons might be given for the substantial curtailment of rights and formal exclusion of foreign residents. The first one is that this alien status is essentially a chosen one. Immigrants are supposed to have come of their own free will and to know that they will not be regarded as equal citizens.4 Their discriminated status as aliens is the result of a social contract by which they gained the desired admission. Furthermore, many who could have naturalized have not chosen this option and thus seem to voluntarily accept their exclusion and discrimination. This line of argument does not apply to those who have come as refugees rather than as voluntary immigrants. They have not chosen their fate and have been deprived of their rights as citizens of their home countries. If there is a reasonable presumption that the situation causing their flight will not persist for long, they will need temporary protection and assistance in order to return to their homes. But if they need more permanent protection, an appropriate answer to their plight is to offer them the citizenship of the country which has granted them asylum.5 However, the argument referring to choice is difficult to accept,

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even for voluntary migrants. Most foreign citizens are not given the option of naturalization. Admission procedures in ordinary naturalizations are normally discretionary - the final decision is taken by the naturalizing state, not by the applicant.6 Now suppose, for the sake of argument, that naturalization became fully optional, i.e. available upon request after a relatively short time of residence and without further conditions attached.7 Even then, the question remains why full rights for resident immigrants should depend upon their opting for legal membership. Native citizens who enjoy these rights have not chosen to be members, but have acquired their status at birth and they are generally denied an option to renounce it while staying in the country. This indicates that, from the perspective of a liberal democratic polity, inclusion seems to be more important than choice. If a substantial number of the population is excluded from the polity because of their foreign citizenship, this creates a problem for the legitimacy of political decisions – even if this exclusion were a voluntary one. Nevertheless, migrants may have special reasons not to choose naturalization which ought to be taken into account. Intuitively, it seems obvious that forcing a migrant to adopt a citizenship she or he does not want cannot be compared to the automatic attribution of citizenship at birth. So the balance between inclusion and choice should be a different one for native citizens and migrants. However, this argument does not provide a justification for any kind of discrimination. The question which I shall take up again in the concluding section is rather: How different should the status of citizens and resident aliens be in terms of rights in order to make opting for naturalization a meaningful choice? The second type of reasoning for maintaining a clear line between foreigners and citizens emerges from the perspective of the receiving state. The argument is that this line is constitutive for the polity itself and thus cannot be blurred by some democratic principle. Democracy would become self-destroying if the imperatives of legitimation made it impossible to maintain the boundaries of the polity. In the framework of Carl Schmitt’s politics of friend and foe, and Thomas Hobbes’s view of international relations as a latent state of war, it is quite plausible to deny foreigners essential rights of citizenship as well as the optional access to naturalization. The reason for this is that their allegiance and obligations tie them to another sovereign. It may be in the interest of a state to encourage immigration (if there is a strong demand for labour), it may even be expedient to naturalize immigrants in great numbers (if there is a lack of soldiers). However, admission to the polity must remain under the control of the receiving state in the same way as immigration8 and

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political allegiance

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societal membership

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the essential qualifying criterion for naturalization is not the period of residence but a credible change of loyalty. In this view, the boundaries of a polity do not relate to a territory or to the population living there, but define mutually exclusive sets of persons who are citizens or subjects of sovereign states. These boundaries emerge in interaction and confrontation with other polities by identifying those who cannot be included because they belong somewhere else. Such a definition of external boundaries is not arbitrary and can be well combined with a broad internal inclusion. It need not fall back on Joseph Schumpeter’s dictum that a general theory of democracy must “leave it to every populus to define himself” (Schumpeter, 1950: 245).9 At the same time, it postulates that the democratic norm of inclusion ceases to apply where another sovereign state has a prior claim to regard some individual as its member. A foreigner may live permanently in the territory of state A, but, as a citizen of B, all claims of democratic legitimation which she or he might raise are addressed to that state. Such membership is not a social relation which might become weaker as time passes but a legal one that retains its binding force over time and might even be transferred to the immigrant’s children. As above with the argument referring to voluntary choice, this argument about the mutually exclusive nature of sovereignty does not apply to refugees and stateless immigrants. But it is still the conventional wisdom which supposedly justifies the legal discrimination of foreigners and the discretionary procedures of naturalization. I believe that this view is at odds with modern liberal conceptions of democracy. It is also incapable of accounting for the dynamics of the extension of legal rights for long-term resident foreigners, for the tendency to recognize that immigrants may acquire a moral entitlement to be naturalized and, finally, for a trend in Western Europe to tolerate dual citizenship. Just as I have acknowledged that a certain differentiation of status between foreigners and citizens may be justified within a framework of choice, I am also inclined to support the idea that in an international system with a multiplicity of states, polities have to be externally bounded. However, it is far from obvious that these boundaries have to be mutually exclusive in the way that territorial ones are. If it is not membership in a different polity which sets the external limits for the range of inclusion in democracy, what could then determine these limits? I want to defend the proposition that the basic standard for inclusion in a liberal democratic polity is based on a specific notion of society – the outlines of which can be determined by applying the norm of democratic legitimacy to the social instead of the political sphere.

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From the perspective of individuals, a society in this sense comprises all whose social position durably relates them to a certain state so that they depend on this state for their protection and rights. Seen from the perspective of a state, a society is the basic ensemble of populations permanently affected by its collectively binding decisions. We might characterize this as the political concept of society. It contrasts with the narrower notion of the polity, on the one hand, and with the wider sociological concept of society as an open system of interaction and communication, on the other. A polity only includes citizens, i.e. those whose state membership is of a political rather than a social nature. The boundaries of polities can be controlled by the political decisions made on membership so that individuals who are not admitted, or who are excluded, will clearly not be members regardless of their social relation to the state. The boundaries of society are not subject to political decision in this way but they result from the exercise of political power. Liberal democratic legitimation requires inclusion of the whole society in the sense that the distribution of rights must correspond to the impact of political power and in the sense that the polity must be genuinely open for the admission of everybody who can claim membership in society. As we shall see later on, this does not bring with it a total equality of political status and rights of citizenship throughout society. In contrast with the world economy of modern capitalism and global flows of information, the global political system remains segmented into a multitude of states. This is why there is also a multiplicity of societies which relate to these states. However, while the political image of societies (in contrast with a sociological or economic one) is always one of bounded populations, the shape of these boundaries remains to be determined. I will defend the idea that from the perspective of a system of liberal democratic states they are permeable and overlapping, and they include foreign residents in the territory as well as citizens, and even some foreigners living abroad. Nevertheless, political societies are not unbounded and societal membership will set the limits within which the norm of inclusion applies.

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Orders of membership: territorial sovereignty, nominal citizenship and societal membership Before discussing the norms that can be applied to determine the status and rights of immigrants in receiving societies in more detail, let me first take a bird’s-eye view of the kinds of orders of membership

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that states produce among populations. As I use the term here, an order does not refer to an internal structure (such as the hierarchical or egalitarian features of a political system) but simply to the sorting of individuals into different sets which are characterized by their relation to a state. The following diagram graphically symbolizes three different types of orders for three states A, B and C.

A

B

C

state’s monopoly of violence

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A

B

C

A

B

C

The simplest order is that of territorial sovereignty. Each state rules a particular stretch of land and everybody who happens to be in that land is, in an elementary way, subject to that state’s monopoly of violence. States generally also claim the right to make laws that are binding for anybody who is in the territory even for a short time. Exceptions do exist but they are few and well-defined. Apart from situations of military conflict, these exceptions result from legal norms or coordinated actions of the international community of states rather than from uncoordinated policies of individual states. Foreign diplomats enjoy a special immunity that partially exempts them from the rules of territorial sovereignty as they apply to persons. Exceptions with regard to unique sovereignty over a territory may occur after a war when one or several victorious powers occupy the aggressor state (as was the case with Germany and Austria after the Second World War), or when an embattled territory is temporarily put under the authority of the United Nations. Another unique exception is the international status of Antarctica which, however, is due to the fact that there are no permanent resident populations in this territory. Apart from this continent, the whole land mass of the globe is now divided into mutually exclusive state territories and all human beings relate to the state of their present abode as their territorial sovereign. A substantial body of international law has attempted to resolve any remaining ambiguities such as that concerning the status of persons on board of ships in international waters. The order that territorial sovereignty produces can thus be called complete and discrete. I define these two features in the following

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way: Completeness means that everybody is at any point in time subject to the territorial sovereignty of a state; discreteness implies that nobody is subject to more than one state simultaneously. Such an order can be represented, as in the above diagram, by a political map of states without stretches of no-man’s land or water between them. However, in contrast with such a geographical representation, this order can be highly volatile. We can define the stability of an order as the average probability that an individual who is classified as a member of set A in t1 will be classified as a non-member of this set in t2. Individuals who cross international borders will be subject to different territorial sovereigns before and after this move. The second kind of order is that of citizenship in the sense which is also called nationality. I will use the term “nominal citizenship” when I want to distinguish it from the substantial aspect of citizenship as a bundle of rights and obligations that individuals hold in their relation to a state. Citizenship in the former sense identifies persons in the international arena by using the name of a country in a manner similar to the use of family names in social interaction outside the family. Both indicate that an individual belongs to a state or family, but the name also belongs to the individual; it is a personal attribute which the individual has the right to carry.10 If we put individuals into sets, first, with regard to their subjection to territorial sovereignty and then once more with regard to their citizenship, we shall find that the sets broadly overlap but are usually not identical. Foreign residents will be included in the former but excluded from the latter, while the reverse is the case with emigrant citizens. Apart from this incongruency, the above-mentioned characteristics clearly distinguish the two kinds of orders from one another. Firstly, the order of nominal citizenship is more stable than that of territorial sovereignty, secondly, it is neither discrete nor complete. Citizenship is acquired at birth and most people never change it during their lives. Citizenship is not an ascriptive feature like gender or “race” where the immutability of societal membership is emphasized by relating it to innate differences of human bodies, but it is still intended to last for life. All states’ rules for naturalization emphasize this temporal stability by inhibiting frequent change. This can be achieved by residence requirements, by extended waiting periods prior to naturalization, by an oath of allegiance which is meant to express commitment for an indefinite future and by denying or delaying expatriation even after emigration. There are important political reasons for enhancing stability. The exercise of state power that turns people into subjects is spatially constrained by the range of territorial sovereignty, but it does not require all who are liable to

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nominal citizenship

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stateless

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obey the law to be bound to the state by any lasting ties of membership. However, any system of government also calls for a durable relation between the state and those who can be identified as subjects in a narrower sense of the term. Obligations that states impose on their subjects can only be enforced when the relation is relatively stable. Conscription, collecting taxes or enforcing criminal punishment require that people can be identified and that they cannot evade their obligations by simply moving somewhere else. There is also a strong democratic argument in favour of stability. Citizens who participate in political deliberation or who elect representatives who are to take collectively binding decisions need a common temporal perspective that reaches back into the past and forward into the future. They cannot form reasonable judgements on political matters unless they share some experience with past decisions and given institutions of their state. Furthermore, they must also share a perspective of knowing that they themselves, or their children and others close to them, will be affected by the decisions they support. In contrast with republican thinking, liberal democracy allows for a wide diversity of interests that can be legitimately expressed in political choices. While in such a polity common interests may be reduced to quite a small number, there must nevertheless be a common time-horizon for all interests that are put forward in the process of political deliberation. While the nominal order of citizenship is more stable over time than that produced by territorial sovereignty, it is at the same time less perfect with regard to the criteria of discreteness and completeness. Individuals may be multiple citizens or stateless. These phenomena are widely perceived as irregular. Yet, in contrast with a breach of the principles of territorial sovereignty, such irregularities generally do not cause conflicts between states and they emerge from the very rules that guide the allocation of nominal citizenship in the international system of states. State sovereignty ends where the territory of a neighbouring state begins, but it does not necessarily end where another state claims an individual as a member. Each state reserves the right to set up its own rules for the acquisition and loss off citizenship as a core expression of its sovereignty. Statelessness and multiple citizenship can thus emerge from a conscious policy of ignoring the rules of another state or as an unintended side-effect of rules applied separately by each state involved. Let me give a few examples. Political refugees who want to naturalize in their state of asylum are sometimes denied voluntary expatriation by their state of origin or they are unwilling to submit to the procedures for obtaining it from the authorities of the persecuting state. Western democracies normally accept that the person will

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become a dual citizen in this case. Dual citizenship may also result from rules of optional or automatic admission that are applied by some Western European states to foreigners born in the country when attaining their majority or to those who have been married to a citizen for a certain time. Most cases of dual citizenship emerge from birth in mixed marriages if both countries involved apply ius sanguinis from both parents11 or result from a simultaneous application of ius soli by the state of birth and ius sanguinis by the parents’ state. In contrast to dual citizenship, statelessness may be the intended effect of a policy of disenfranchising an ethnic minority or depriving it of any kind of state protection. Another origin of statelessness is the denaturalization of emigrants regardless of whether they have already acquired their host country’s citizenship or not. Finally, statelessness may also result from voluntary expatriation. The right to a nationality has been established in Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and many states have signed the 1961 United Nations Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. I think that normative arguments for avoiding statelessness are strong enough to warrant making the emigrants’ right to expatriation conditional upon another state’s willingness to naturalize them. However, the rules of international law still do not provide sufficient guarantees for preventing the re-emergence of these areas of no man’s land in the international order of citizenship. What I have called the political concept of society points to a third kind of order. In contrast to the two preceding ones, this order of societal membership is not formalized in the legal relations between individuals and states. Its contours emerge, on the one hand, from sociological observations about the role the state plays in regulating the conditions for the individual’s life prospects and opportunities. On the other hand, the order is constructed from a normative point of view in order to answer the question posed in this paper: Who can claim a right to inclusion in a liberal democratic polity? As illustrated in the diagram above, such an order resembles that of nominal citizenship because there are overlapping areas, only that here these are much more extensive. Individuals can be members of more than one society simultaneously without this fact being reflected in multiple citizenship. At the same time, the order of societal membership shares the feature of completeness with that of territorial sovereignty. There are hardly any individuals for whom we cannot identify at least one state to which they are socially tied. Statelessness is not a condition of cosmopolitan detachment but just on the contrary; it is a status of extreme dependency upon the protection offered by specific states without the formal entitlement to claim that protection.

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general indicator

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Within the state territory international migration makes the number of societal members larger than the population of nominal citizens, but smaller than the aggregate of everybody physically present at a certain point in time. Resident foreigners have to be regarded as members of society but individuals who are passing through on their way to another destination or who have come for a short temporary stay need not be counted.12 Outside the state’s territory the number of societal members may be either larger or smaller than that of emigrant citizens. If a state adopts a policy of indefinite transmission of citizenship by ius sanguinis, a third or later generation may still be registered as citizens of the state where their ancestors have come from without having any significant social ties to that country themselves. Conversely, an individual may have strong social ties to a state or depend upon its protection without living there or being one of its citizens. Two relevant examples may be mentioned as an illustration. The first is ethnic diaspora minorities who regard a foreign state as their national homeland from which they expect protection of their rights. Frequently, these rights will include that of being admitted to the territory of that state. Some states recognize these claims and treat such minorities as “ethnic citizens” abroad without nominal membership. Germany and Israel are extreme cases who grant their co-ethnics not only a right of immigration but also immediate access to nominal citizenship thereafter.13 A second example is that of family members of immigrants who have stayed in the country of origin, or of migrants who had to return there after a long residence abroad. Maybe the most obvious case of societal membership of foreigners who are neither citizens nor residents is that of second-generation young people who were born in the country of immigration but were turned into aliens by ius sanguinis and later had to return to their parents’ country of origin, either because their parents demanded it or because they had lost their residence permit.14 In its temporal aspects the order of societal membership is certainly more stable than that of territorial sovereignty but need not be as rigid as that of nominal citizenship. People can change their social affiliations that tie them to a state several times during their lives and, coming to a country where one takes up a permanent residence does not imply a promise or commitment to stay there for good. Societal membership does not strictly require a perspective which reaches back into the past and forward into the future (as democratic citizenship does). The time of residence is no more than a general indicator for the consolidation of social ties. Along the time axis, the transition from one societal membership to another may follow different paths for different categories of mi-

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grants. For some, emigration means dissolving their households in their country of origin and dissociating themselves from that state. This will be often true for refugees who have little hope of returning but it may also be the case for some long-distance migrants who consciously choose another state as their home for the rest of their lives. For these people, migration does not generate an overlapping area of societal membership. They simply cross a societal border and a territorial one simultaneously. The number of migrants of this kind is rapidly diminishing and has probably always been overestimated for most migration flows. Even for the classical overseas labour migration from Europe to North America around the last turn of the century the idea that most immigrants had simply burned the bridges is a misconception. Immigration history is always written from the perspective of the receiving country and if that country, moreover, sees itself as a nation of immigrants, cyclical and return migration simply drop out of sight. For a second group of migrants the time of dual societal membership may be a transitional period. They leave family members behind and frequently contribute remittances to their household budget; they visit their country of origin during vacations or at least on the occasion of important family events such as births, marriages, or deaths; they often also plan themselves to return after having achieved a certain target in savings, when retiring or when the economic and political situation has improved there. For some, these plans may work out and their dual membership was a temporary extension of their societal affiliation during a certain period of their lives. If their stay abroad has been a prolonged one, they will, nevertheless, normally also retain significant social ties to that country after returning to their country of origin. Others may finally bring all their close family into the country of immigration and cut their ties to the society of origin after a long residence abroad. In this case, the overlapping area forms a passage in a slow but unidirectional shift of membership. An ever-growing number of migrants, however, acquires a social status as dual members for the rest of their lives, regardless of whether they stay or return.

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Contractarian, libertarian, republican and nationalist inclusion I have said above that the political concept of societal membership emerges not only from sociological observation but also from a normative perspective of inclusion in a liberal democratic polity. This liberal democratic seems to lead into a circular argument where the norm of inclusion polity

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first refers to the reality of spatially bounded societies whose boundaries are, then, defined by specifying to whom the proposed norm should apply. I admit that some circularity of this kind appears to me unavoidable. It mirrors the fact that transnationally mobile societies do not only overlap but are also blurred at their margins. There is thus always some latitude for the contestation of societal membership which can only be decided by specifying normative criteria within the context of a particular society. By contrasting the liberal democratic perspective with alternative ones, I hope to be able to show that it is not quite so indeterminate as it might seem. No comprehensive political ideology and system of political rule can do without a political concept of society that sets a standard for inclusion. However, rival strands of political thought differ in how they construct their respective concepts of societal membership.

subject by birth

(1) For a Hobbesian Leviathan the basic relation between individuals and states is that of subjection to a territorial sovereign. However, as I have already pointed out above, the dense web of obligations that binds the subject to the sovereign does not necessarily include everybody in the territory nor exempt all those living abroad. The question is how those who are permanently obliged in this specific way can be distinguished from those who are only temporarily subject to territorial sovereignty. The most plausible answer to this is that anybody born within the territory has to be regarded as a subject by birth. Ius soli has its roots in feudal and absolutist systems where the rule over people is derived from ownership of the land. The basic idea about the status of foreigners under the latter kind of rule is concisely expressed by Hobbes: But he that is sent on a message, or hath leave to travel, is still Subject; but it is, by Contract between Soveraigns, not be vertue of the covenant of Subjection. For whosoever entreth into anothers dominion, is Subject to all the Laws thereof; unlesse he have a privilege by the amity of the Soveraigns, or by speciall license (Hobbes, 1973, XXI: 117).

John Locke’s reformulation of the social contract allows for a different and somewhat more liberal interpretation that concedes a claim to protection to foreigners and opens the door to voluntary naturalization but still emphasizes their exclusion, as foreigners, from the commonwealth:

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[F]oreigners by living all their lives under another government, and enjoying the privileges and protection of it, though they are bound even in conscience to submit to its administration as far forth as any denizen, yet do not thereby come to be subjects or members of that commonwealth. Nothing can make any man so, but his actually entering into it by positive engagement, and express promise and compact (Locke, 1956, VTII, §122: 62-63).

The status of foreign residents is defined as one of non-membership in both cases. At the times of Hobbes and Locke, the very idea of society as a conceptual unit for the study of human relations and interaction, independent of a country’s political constitution, probably made no sense. The notions of commonwealth or civil society refer, in Locke’s words, to a “political society” constituted by the original contract of which resident foreigners were clearly not seen to be party. (2) A political theory which would tie societal membership even more strongly to territorial sovereignty is the libertarian utopia of Robert Nozick (1974). Nozick’s world is one of minimal states whose functions are reduced to exercising a territorial monopoly of violence. Nozick dismisses the idea of social compact (p. 131-132) and replaces it with an “invisible-hand” explanation (p. 118-119) of how such a state might come about from the rights of individuals to ownership, self-defence and free association for purposes of protection. In contrast with an “ultraminimal state” whose monopolistic protective agency only protects clients who have purchased its services, a minimal state protects everybody living permanently in a territory. So resident foreigners cannot be excluded just because they have never formally joined and this kind of protective association neither has the right not to admit them as formal members if they wanted to join. As far as Nozick’s extreme individualism allows for any conception of society at the level of states,15 the range of this society should relate to all residents of a state territory. I refrain from speculating how Nozick would define the status of transient migrants and temporary residents. Generally speaking, his kind of theory would maximize inclusion with regard to territorial sovereignty while leaving little scope for also taking the social affiliations that go beyond this into account. More importantly, the deficiency of the theory is that it achieves inclusion only at the expense of reducing the substance of rights, which citizens expect to enjoy in a democratic state, to a bare minimum.

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republican conception

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(3) The republican tradition of political thought has emphasized active participation by citizens in politics more than passive recipience of protection by a state. Citizenship is seen as a set of obligations more than of rights, as an office more than a status.16 Inclusion in citizenship is not so much connected to territorial residence but to mutual recognition within a community of equal members of the polity who experience themselves to be the sovereign political authority. In this approach, the order of citizenship seems to be the only reference point to which the norm of inclusion can be applied. A republican conception thus appears to come close to Schumpeter’s self-defining populus. However, republican norms of inclusion would still not be completely redundant. Firstly, they can specify certain features of a desirable order of citizenship. Republican thought has always strongly objected to multiple membership in different polities, whereas multiple subjecthood in a Hobbesian world could be perfectly acceptable as long as it is supported by “the amity of the soveraigns”. A person can be the loyal servant of two masters but nobody can simultaneously be a full member of two collectives that regard themselves as sovereign. Secondly, in contrast with the ancient conception of the polis, modern republicanism has to answer the question: What status should be given to those who do not qualify as active citizens? Even if active citizens are seen as an egalitarian political elite among a broader population, they must refer to a broader concept of society in their pursuit of the common good. Passive citizenship thus complements the activist conception as a second and wider frame of inclusion. In this respect, the problem with contemporary neo-republican thought is not the range of inclusion but the dichotomy of active and passive citizenship that is overemphasized within this range. Seeing active political participation and voluntary compliance with civic duties as the core expression of citizenship leads to a devaluation of the enjoyment of rights and liberties as a merely passive experience. In contrast, a liberal democratic perspective would emphasize the enabling and activating qualities of civil and social rights which are the essential precondition for making democracy representative of a broad population with widely diverse interests, rather than of a small and socially homogeneous political elite. The active/passive dichotomy that tends to split the polity into two classes of citizens is complemented by a second one that divides a state’s population into those included in, or excluded from, the polity. Republicanism conceives the bond of citizenship as the essential factor of social cohesion. From classic contractarian doctrines it inherits the idea that the mere social fact of residence in a territory cannot qualify individuals for full membership. This does not rule out a

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policy of encouraging naturalization. Citizenship results from an act of will and mutual consent, and each naturalization is a particular instance which highlights and celebrates this general idea that citizens freely consent to their membership. However, the republican view is incompatible with a flattening of the threshold of citizenship by granting foreigners rights that ought to remain a prerogative of active citizens only. Voting rights of any kind (even at the local level) must be strictly denied to those who have not been recognized as citizens. In contrast with Locke’s proposal that each individual should individually decide on her or his membership on attaining the age of majority (see section “Tensions between...” below), Rousseau’s formula for the social contract envisages a ritualistic mutual confirmation of membership: Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole (Rousseau, 1973, VI: 192).

If a common will, rather than a shared experience of dependency and need for protection, unites the political community, then the act of will that marks the boundary between foreigners and citizens must be regarded as truly constitutive for the polity. (4) Ethnic nationalism is the strongest rival for liberal democracy, not in the field of political theory where it has hardly a significant following, but in the discursive struggles for political legitimation that unfold in the public arenas of Western democratic states. The two competitors have one feature in common: both support a strong norm of inclusion that applies to a conception of society which does not coincide with the polity. However, they are fundamentally opposed to each other in the way they determine the boundaries of society. A nation shares a comprehensive and peculiar culture and historical experiences which reach back many generations into the past. Ethnic nationalism conceives of the nation also as a self-reproducing biological group of common descent. In nations like the French or U.S. American ones the ethnic interpretation that searches for its origins in some mythical ancestry (the Gauls or the Pilgrim Fathers) is counterbalanced by others which refer to a historical event of state foundation (the French and American Revolutions). This “political nationalism” comes much closer to the truth, i.e. that it was the modern nation-state which created the nation as a cultural community rather than the other way round (Gellner, 1983). However, even this

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version is still fundamentally opposed to a liberal conception of society. For nationalism of any kind, the character and boundaries of the community have been shaped by some irreversible historical process or event. They are thus given independently of the present shape of a state territory or the network of social interactions that connect a population to a state. The nationalist programme is to emancipate the nation in a sovereign state by uniting its dispersed communities, by conquering or liberating the territories they inhabit or where their origins lie, and by assimilating, expelling, or keeping out minorities that do not fit into the national community. Nationalism thus attempts to make the boundaries of territory and of cultural groups coincide (Gellner, 1983). Nationalism’s success is rooted in the drive for cultural homogenization of populations within state territories that comes with the development of industrial economies and of the modern state bureaucracy. Nationalism’s failure lies in the proliferation of rival claims to nationhood that have led to an uneasy truce between national factions in pluri-national states, to the survival or new formation of ethnic and linguistic minorities resisting assimilation, and to chain-reactions of separation into ever smaller states that can hardly claim to be independent in their economic or foreign policies (Hobsbawm, 1990). Nationalisms operate with an imaginary map of spheres of hegemony that nations claim over territories and populations. Seen from the point of view of each single nation, this map resembles that of territorial sovereignty. It is discrete in terms of populations – nobody can be simultaneously a member of two nations – and complete in terms of territories. It need not, however, be complete for all human groups: some have been denied the capacity of belonging to any nation or of forming one themselves. This is a characteristic of racism in both its anti-Semitic and anti-Black varieties. Moreover, the territorial map is no longer discrete when combining the perspectives of nations that raise rival claims to the same stretch of land.

Inclusion in mobile societies paradox

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A liberal democratic norm of inclusion with reference to a political concept of society faces a paradox. On the one hand, if people did not move across state borders the whole range of inclusion would be perfectly identical with that of territorial sovereignty and the very notion of social ties as different from political subjection would become redundant. On the other hand, once societies become transnationally mobile, there is no hard criterion for determining individual membership.

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We might reassure ourselves that only borderline cases will be indeterminate. There is no natural threshold in the time of residence after which a foreigner must be regarded as a member of society. However, agreement about when a person has in fact acquired a kind of residential membership should be rather easy to find if one detaches the question in a first step from its political consequences in terms of the implied entitlements. It should neither be difficult to establish a list of indicators that obviously turn a person into a member of society in a liberal view, although they might not qualify from the nationalist or republican perspectives: being born in a country and spending one’s early childhood there;l7 being a member of a household where one lives for at least several months each year; going to school or being regularly employed. Other criteria are of a more dubious nature. Consider for example the frequently heard argument that immigrants ought to be given the vote because they pay taxes just as citizens do. However, tax requirements have been generally abolished for the franchise. Why should the political rights of foreigners depend upon their contributions if modern liberal citizenship has generally dissolved the former nexus between such rights and obligations of this kind? A more difficult criterion is that residence must have been legal in order to qualify for membership. Certainly, a liberal welfare state must be interested in maintaining the rule of law and, more specifically, in preventing the spread of illegal employment. However, the facts of societal membership depend on the time of residence more than on legal status. If a state has been unable or unwilling to control illegal entries, residence and employment, it ought to consider the claims of those who have been residing in the country for a long period of time as relevant. This line of reasoning could support a general amnesty or an individual procedure for regularization of long-term irregular immigrants. The implications of liberal norms of inclusion are more obvious with regard to deportations of legally resident foreigners who have committed a crime. There can be little objection against expulsion when the crime has been committed shortly after a temporary admission into the country. But the current practice of some European states (among them my own country, Austria) of deporting even young foreigners, who have committed minor offences, from their state of birth is certainly indefensible. This idea of inclusion with reference to membership in politically bounded societies would fail to provide a satisfactory solution for nomads. However, the post-modern metaphor of “the new nomads” for modern migrants is completely besides the point when applied to modern migrants. Nomads do not move as individuals but it is rather

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three policy propositions

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their societies which move. Social structures, and the individual’s positions in them, are generally rigidly fixed. This creates a kind of societal membership which is dissociated from territorial location. Contemporary migrations show hardly any resemblance with those societies whose movement in space does not expose their internal structure to change. Modern states are strictly tied to a territory not only with regard to their boundaries but even in their microstructure of local administrations. Societies, however, become mobile in the transition from the agrarian to the industrial age and this territorial mobility increasingly affects large majorities. The process is like the transition of a liquid matter into a gaseous state with the effect that the rapid movement of molecules can no longer be contained within the old vessel. International migration expands mobile societies beyond the borders of territorial states. This does not dissolve the borders; it even leads to their fortification in attempts to enforce political control over the movement of people, but it changes the composition of society as well as internal social and cultural structures. In democratic political systems this change must be reflected in the membership composition of the polity as well as in the public recognition of specific interests of migrants. From the perspective of individual migrants, the difference between their situation with that of nomads is that their homes do not move along with them but they have to leave them in search of new ones.18 Two different types of migration result from this, none of which resembles nomads: those who have lost their membership without gaining a new one and those who have retained it until, or even after, they have found a new one. For the latter group, three policy propositions can be derived from the liberal norm of inclusion: optional naturalization, toleration and recognition of dual citizenship and residential citizenship, i.e. equal basic rights for all residents independent of their nominal citizenship. The former category is that of refugees. In refugee policies norms of admission must precede and supplement those of inclusion. Refugees can raise a claim to be admitted because they have been deprived of membership whereas family members of immigrants can raise similar claims that are based on their existing ties of membership. I think that both claims are strong and there is no need to give general priority to one or the other.19 The question as to which norms of admission could be defended from a liberal democratic point of view goes far beyond the scope of this paper.20 Here I only want to point out that the perspective of inclusion may be widened in order to address one of the most difficult normative problems of refugee policies. The problem can be stated

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generally as that of unallocated state obligations (see O’Neill, 1991). One may easily agree that those who have been deprived of their state’s protection and have left that state’s territory can raise individual claims towards liberal democracies to receive protection there. However, which is the one state, among all possible states of asylum, that is obliged to honour this claim? Virtually all states of Western Europe have now adopted the principle that it is only the first state on the asylum seeker’s route where he or she could file an application for admission. Yet this principle of first country of asylum obviously leads to an inequitable distribution of obligations and burdens and means that large numbers have no chance to be admitted into those countries where they could be most easily accommodated. Even the fact that refugees may already have close family members in some European state is deliberately ignored in order to curb the inflows. After serious consideration one can come to the conclusion that quite often the same circumstances that drive refugees to seek specific destinations should also be given some weight in deciding whether a particular state rather than another one ought to admit them. Among such factors may be: economic prosperity which enhances immigration capacities, a common history (often that between a former colony and its colonizing state), cultural ties such as a common language or religion, economic or political involvement of the target state in the state of origin and, finally, geographical proximity. The logic of inclusion might in all these circumstances be extended beyond the boundaries of societal membership in order to determine the special obligations of receiving states. There will be many remaining catastrophes such as the present one in Rwanda where only a joint effort by the international community and a commitment to cooperate in schemes of burden-sharing will be an adequate answer to a refugee crisis. However, in a world of sovereign states, special obligations always carry more weight than those that fall upon the community of states. These rather sweeping generalizations do not exclude the possibility that there are, or will be in the future, new nomads whose inclusion in territorial states raises a different set of problems. It is quite possible that we may see the emergence of tightly-knit ethnic groups who develop a nomadic way of life because they adapt in this way to special niches in a global economy. However, in most cases, those who are perceived as nomads in Western societies are simply forced to move because they are not allowed to stay anywhere. Central Europe’s Romanies have been often quoted as an example for the former category, i.e. as an ethnic group whose nomadic behaviour results from a mutual reinforcement of cultural traditions

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forced movement

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liberal citizenship with transnational elements

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with a specialization in certain trades. Today, however, they clearly find themselves, once again, in the latter situation of people who are forced to cross borders in order to escape racist discrimination or miserable economic conditions. What often distinguishes them from refugees with similar motives is that they have learned not to expect protection from state authorities and consequently frequently resort to irregular routes of entry. Without societal membership acquired through continuous residence and without seeking protection by a state, how can they be included in a liberal democratic polity? The answer probably lies in the difficult task of combining a general improvement in their social conditions with respect for cultural differences and with the recognition of special minority rights, including an extended right to travel across borders. The overall direction of policies suggested in this section can be characterized as an enrichment of liberal democratic citizenship with transnational elements. How does this compare with the supranational citizenship of the European Union that has been strengthened by a number of provisions in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty? In addition to existing protection against the discrimination of citizens of other member states with regard to civil and social rights, the treaty creates three new rights, two of which penetrate into traditional spheres of national sovereignty. These are: equal active and passive voting rights for resident citizens of other member states in local elections and in elections for the European Parliament (Article 8b), diplomatic protection of European Union citizens in third countries by the representatives of other member states if there is no representation of their own state (Article 8c) and a right to petition European Parliament (Article 8d). The most essential rights conferred by EU citizenship are, however, those of free movement across internal borders and of settlement and access to employment for EU residents in other member states. Such rights to admission go beyond imperatives of inclusion derived from societal membership. In other aspects, European Union citizenship has remained deficient with regard to this same norm. There is as yet no generalized option of naturalization for EU citizens in other states of the Union. Cases of multiple citizenship have strongly increased in number, some states have recently changed their laws and have abandoned the requirement to renounce a previous citizenship on naturalization and there are attempts at the level of the European Council to eliminate obstacles to the toleration of multiple citizenship which have been enshrined in a 1963 convention. However, so far there is no policy of harmonizing and liberalizing citizenship laws at the level of the Union.

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The most glaring discrepancy between the supranational model of European Union citizenship and the transnational approach which I try to defend concerns the exclusion of “third country aliens”. Only those foreigners who are nationals of a member-state are also recognized as members of the wider community and can enjoy the new rights conferred by citizenship of the Union. Constitutional amendments have become necessary in several member states in order to extend local voting rights and access to employment in the civil service to all Union citizens. By simultaneously confirming the exclusion of extracommunitari from these rights, the states of the European Union have actually moved away from a liberal democratic model of inclusion.21 Instead of widening the range of inclusion beyond the combination of national citizenships, EU membership has been constructed by using them as the elementary building blocks. It links the separate columns of national citizenship by developing the common structure of a roof above them. The foundations of residential rights for all remain as low, and spaces between the columns as empty, as before, only that now these gaps have become much more visible as an element in the design of the building. It looks like the lofty structure of a Greek temple rather than like the much-quoted European house that would accommodate all who live on this continent in its many rooms. A general objection might be raised against my model. Inclusion of migrants will increase the internal heterogeneity of political communities and could thereby diminish social resources for solidarity among its members. If those who have not been born and raised in the society, and who have not pledged their commitment by naturalizing, are given equal rights of membership, will this not further strain the attenuating sense of mutual obligations in modern societies? I readily concede that it is generally easier to foster such motivations within homogeneous and immobile communities. However, I do not think that this argument provides support for maintaining present forms of exclusion. Firstly, it could also have been used against the dismantling of gender, race and class barriers which had maintained a high level of homogeneity among the citizenry for a long time. Achieving the minimum levels of social welfare throughout society which are essential for participatory citizenship was relatively easy in earlier forms of democracy, when citizens were a socially rather homogeneous group. This has become a much more difficult task in modern welfare states where it requires extensive redistribution. Secondly, the exclusion of immigrants from rights of citizenship reinforces their social segregation within receiving societies. It makes these societies more unequal and their democratic systems

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increase of internal heterogeneity

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less representative over time. Thirdly, cutting back immigration cannot be accepted as a long-term strategy to increase homogeneity for both pragmatic and normative reasons. The acceleration of territorial mobility is inherent in the process of modernization. Contemporary democracies have to accept this as a fundamental condition of modernity which will undermine their bases of legitimacy unless they adjust to it. This does not mean denying the necessity or legitimacy of immigration control, but it does imply that such control must itself be constantly scrutinized for how well it complies with universal human rights and with specific rights that can be derived from existing ties of membership.

Tensions between inclusion, equality and consent

equal polity

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Inclusion is not the only relevant norm for the allocation of membership status and rights in liberal democratic polities. After discussing the range of claims to societal membership let me now turn to the question as to how such wider inclusion could affect the two other norms for the allocation of membership in liberal democratic polities: the norms of equality and choice. The liberal idea of equality is much stronger with regard to the polity than with regard to society. As citizens, individuals must be treated with equal respect and concern (Dworkin, 1977), no matter how unequal they may be in their social status. This equality of citizenship rests on a foundation of basic individual rights, such as those of equal status in court, equal entitlement to school education or voting rights. However, not all rights of citizenship are perfectly equal and individual. The wider the social range of inclusion becomes, the stronger becomes the urgency to take social inequalities and differences into account by differentiating rights according to social positions and groups. Citizenship in a multi-ethnic welfare democracy is a complex bundle of equal individual rights, as well as of highly differentiated collective ones. Nevertheless, the norm of equality provides the yardstick. A justification of collective rights must show that they contribute towards equalizing the standing of individuals in the polity. In contrast with Hannah Arendt’s strict division between the polity as the sphere of equality, and society as that of discrimination (Arendt, 1958), a liberal democratic approach uses political instruments for combating social discrimination. This fight is a precondition for including discriminated groups as equal citizens in the polity. The norm of equality is thus in a relation of productive tension rather than of contradiction or identity with that of inclusion. Wider

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inclusion transforms simple into complex equality (Walzer, 1983: 330), while liberal equality drives formal inclusion in terms of legal status towards substantial inclusion in terms of positive rights. Equality thus implies, first and most obviously, that the status of nominal citizenship is a homogeneous one. Distinctions between legal categories of citizens that exclude some from the enjoyment of basic rights are not permissible (with the three exceptions of minors, convicts and mentally handicapped mentioned above). This is a rather recent achievement. Until not so long ago, a number of Western democracies distinguished citizens according to their country of birth or their mode of acquiring citizenship. In France naturalized citizens were excluded from public offices until as late as 1983. Only last year Belgium abolished the distinction between naturalisation ordinaire and grande naturalisation which reserved voting rights to those who had passed the second admission procedure. An example of largely symbolic significance is that in the USA only a native-born citizen can become President. The more important question is: In which ways does the norm of equality extend beyond nominal citizenship and territorial residence? The bundle of rights enjoyed by emigrant citizens can never be the same as that of citizens living in the territory. Too many elements of citizenship are conditional upon residence. Emigrants will also require specific rights that only concern them, such as diplomatic protection by their country of citizenship or the right to return to this country. However, monetary entitlements of social citizenship and voting rights can also be exercised while staying abroad. Social security benefits such as retirement pensions are now mostly transferable between states and bilateral agreements often also allow contributions and employment periods accumulated in other countries to be added to the claims attained in the country of present residence. Others, like unemployment benefits generally cannot be transferred in this way because they are granted under the condition of searching for a job in a national labour market. Traditional states of emigration often not only discourage expatriation but also try to integrate emigrant citizens actively into the polity by granting them the right to participate in national elections. From the point of view of liberal democracy this may be seen as an ambiguous achievement. On the one hand, retaining one’s citizenship voluntarily when living abroad can be taken as an indicator of subjective affiliation and possible intentions of returning which give some credibility to the claims of emigrants to be included in elections on equal terms. On the other hand, most among them will not be affected by the decisions taken by their representatives in parliament and they cannot participate

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nominal citizenship and territorial residence

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voting rights

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fully in public political discourse and deliberation before elections and referenda. There is certainly some scope for reasonable difference of opinions on this. States with a long tradition and constant stream of emigration will have stronger reasons for enfranchising emigrant citizens than nations of immigrants. In this respect, the limit to acceptable diversity in this regard should be that subsequent generations born abroad might have a claim to their parents’ citizenship but certainly not to representation in political decision-making if they have never lived in the country. The norm of equality applies much more extensively to resident foreigners than to emigrant citizens.22 This means that foreigners do not just enjoy protection and rights in their host states (as is already implied by John Locke in the above citation), but that the rights of resident citizens provide the benchmark for the normative evaluation of their claims. This idea could be operationalized as a constitutional principle: There ought to be a general presumption in favour of the equal treatment and rights of foreign residents and citizens unless expressly decided otherwise by legislation. Furthermore, no such discriminatory exception should be derived from criteria such as national, ethnic, or “racial” origins. This seems to conform to the current interpretation of the equal protection clause in the U.S. American constitution. However, most continental European constitutions still do not support such a principle but assume the contrary, i.e. that foreigners will be unequal with regard to public law unless their rights have been explicitly legislated. Only in the realm of private law is there a general presumption of equality independent of a person’s citizenship. Listing all the different areas of legal discrimination of foreign residents in European countries of immigration would take up too much time and space. I will thus concentrate on the issue which is probably the most controversial one from the point of view of a normative theory of democracy. This is the question of voting rights. Voting rights for foreigners in general and state elections have a venerable tradition which starts with the French revolution. In the USA in the 1880s, 18 states granted alien suffrage to foreigners who had simply filed a declaration of intent to naturalize. These voting rights were only finally abolished after the First World War (Ueda, 1982: 128f.). Today, New Zealand is the only country I know of that grants foreign citizens a general franchise in national elections. Others like Great Britain, give, however, such rights of political participation to a large number of non-citizens from Ireland and Commonwealth states. In Sweden, plans to introduce national suffrage for foreigners were seriously considered in the 1980s but were later abandoned.

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Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, the Irish Republic and the Swiss cantons of Neuchâtel and Jura do, however, grant active and passive local voting rights to foreigners. In France and Germany, an extensive debate during the 1980s ended with a defeat of the proponents of local franchise for foreign residents. Local voting rights have been proposed or defended with the argument that municipalities, in contrast with provincial or national parliaments, do not exercise legislative functions. This would imply that foreigners could only be admitted for second-rate political participation. I think there is a much stronger argument for a specific priority of access to the local vote. Firstly, just as nominal citizens, foreigners do not formally choose to be members of a certain local community; membership results automatically from residence. It therefore makes sense to also derive the rights of active participation directly from that fact of residence rather than from nominal citizenship. Secondly, in contrast with nation-states, local communities are without proper borders. They are open for access to anybody who has a right to live in the national territory, citizens and foreigners alike.23 Local democracy does not have to operate under the same constraints of bounded territorial sovereignty as democracy at the national level. This shows that, ultimately, the control over the movement of people is also no necessary condition for democratic legitimacy within territorial states. A further implication of this view is that municipalities are no longer seen as merely the local sub-units of a single sovereign political power, but on the contrary. They are political communities of a particular character whose rights to local self-determination of their own affairs under democratic control of their own citizenry can be seen as an important contribution towards making representative democracy less indirect.24 Thus, the justification for equal political rights of foreigners at the local level could enhance rather than devaluate this form of citizenship. Still, this argument does not fully satisfy the criterion of democratic legitimation. There is no reason to assume that local decisions affect foreigners more than national ones. Just on the contrary, their specific discrimination as aliens is rooted in national legislation and this seems to provide a strong argument for also including them in parliamentary elections. I think that this demand is irrefutable from a liberal democratic point of view, as long as we only apply the norms of inclusion and equality. It is at this point that we have to consider whether contractarian and republican arguments still carry some weight when deciding about the rights of resident foreigners. In my view, they fail to provide any reason for denying long-term immigrants the quintessential

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right which enables them to claim substantial equality with citizens: the right of permanent residence (which in a wider sense includes the right to family reunification and to return after a temporary stay abroad). Once this is granted, the scope for redefining the rights of citizenship so that they become rights of residents instead has been considerable extended. Why would this not also apply to national voting rights? The answer is that nominal citizenship would then no longer make any difference. But why should it? What is the value of a status that merely serves to discriminate against some residents? The basic idea captured by contractarian and republican doctrines is that the status of citizenship is not only inclusive and egalitarian, but also expresses consent. As I have stated in the first section, democratic legitimacy is based on rational consent, but not necessarily on active, direct, and explicit consent of each individual with each collective decision by which she or he is affected. In some theories, political legitimacy is achieved by hypothetical consent only. Representative democracy requires more than this, although it generally gives only mediated and diluted expression to popular consent in legislation and government. Individuals must be empowered to actually express consent or dissent in a way that has an impact on collectively binding decisions. Public discourse and deliberation among citizens precede decision-making by their representatives. A similar pattern of mediated consent can also be found in the allocation of nominal citizenship. For contractarian theorists it was essential to demonstrate that legitimate rule depends upon individual consent in membership of the polity. Locke was the most radical thinker in this respect when he stated that a child is born a subject of no country or government. He is under his father’s tuition and authority till he comes to age of discretion, and then he is a freeman, at liberty what government he will put himself under, what body politic he will unite himself to (Locke, 1956, VIII, §118: 61).

Yet this requirement is not met by any contemporary liberal democracy. Consent to membership is generally not expressed on its acquisition but only on its loss in voluntary expatriation and even then the choice of exit from citizenship is made conditional upon a previous exit from the territory and society. In naturalization, on the other hand, the requirement is heavily biased against the individual who is not at all “at liberty to decide what body politic he will unite himself to”. The choice is restricted to that between the countries of origin and of present residence and it is normally the state authorities who

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grant admission rather than the applicant who simply chooses a new membership. As I have explained above, I think that a strong case can be argued in favour of enhancing the element of choice by making expatriation and naturalization symmetrical. Both should be individually chosen rather than either imposed or discretionarily denied and the option to change one’s membership should be only conditional upon the criteria of residence and societal membership in both cases. Liberalism increases the scope of individual rights and choice by normatively constraining the requirement of collective or majoritarian consent where it threatens to interfere with equal individual liberties and opportunities. This should hold for naturalization in the same way as it holds for expatriation. However, why should nominal citizenship not be imposed on foreigners if the norms of inclusion and equality are of overriding importance for liberal democracy? The answer is obvious, as long as we assume that multiple citizenship is not generally tolerated. In contrast with new-born natives, foreigners have a citizenship to lose which might be of essential value for their life-projects. Their multiple societal membership gives migrants a strong claim that a naturalizing state must respect their existing affiliation and should not require its renunciation as the price for the ticket of entry. However, I do not think that choice loses all importance once dual citizenship has been granted. A receiving state should not naturalize foreigners without their consent even if their previous citizenship remains unaffected. One potential consequence of citizenship which makes the importance of choice obvious is that of military conscription. Not every state imposes this obligation on its citizens and most states which do, impose it only on their male citizens of a certain age group. Moreover, liberal democracies permit conscientious objectors to refuse military service without forcing them out of the country or denaturalizing them. Even under these preconditions, I think that resident foreigners have a stronger reason not to be drafted than either native or naturalized citizens. U.S. law is rather unique in making foreign residents liable to be drafted (in case that general conscription were introduced). This seems to result from a biased view on immigration that sees the choice of a country of residence as already implying a decision for the rest of one’s life and regards naturalization as the natural outcome of the process of settlement. If there is any obligation of citizenship which can be said to require a conscious expression of consent, it must certainly be that to kill or die in the defence of one’s country. While under certain conditions of

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making expatriation and naturalization symmetrical

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emergency, conscription of native citizens may be justified by invoking their hypothetical rational consent without giving them an actual choice, I believe that no such implication can be inferred from the fact of residence and societal membership of foreigners. Apart from this example, the main reason for insisting on the importance of choice of membership in the polity is the following one: When applied to migration, liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights and choice means that the long-term political target is to turn all migration into voluntary movement, rather than to eliminate all root causes of emigration. Enhancing the scope of choice between different migration targets is one principle that can be derived from this guideline. As I have argued above, it applies even to involuntary forms of migration such as refugee migration. It would be inconsistent with this line of argument to deny immigrants the choice as to whether they want to become nominal citizens of their country of residence. The imperatives of inclusion and equality are not strong enough to override the manifold individual reasons migrants may have to refuse applying for naturalization. This is only so because substantial and nominal citizenship need not be strictly tied to each other. Resident foreigners can be included and enjoy equal rights without and before naturalization as “residential citizens” or, in the terminology revived by Tomas Hammar, as “denizens” (Hammar, 1990). In spite of its emphasis on choice, this is not an altogether voluntaristic conception of citizenship. Inclusion primarily relates to an objective criterion of societal membership and makes optional naturalization only available to persons who have entered this range – just as voluntary expatriation is only offered to those who have moved out of it. The same criterion also prevents that the toleration of dual citizenship could lead to an accumulation of memberships which no longer correspond to a social involvement of individuals in the affairs of the polity whose members they are. Neither is mutual consent replaced by unilateral individual choice. It is still the political community which grants naturalization and thereby expresses its consent. What changes with the move from discretionary to optional naturalization is the sequence of interaction. In the usual procedure, the last word is said by the authorities of the receiving state after the applicant has already documented her or his will and qualification. In optional naturalization, the state first lays down the rules for eligibility and the final decision is then the applicant’s. This still does not fully answer the question where the importance of the choice lies if it does not imply any consequences for the legal status and rights of those who have to choose. I think that there

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are two different answers to this question and each of them seems to me defensible from a liberal democratic point of view. The first answer could be called a liberal-communitarian one. It would affirm that in spite of reasons for differentiating certain obligations such as military service between citizens and foreigners, there is indeed no reason for differentiating citizenship rights. This means that in addition to all the rights foreigners have already been granted in different countries, they ought to enjoy the full franchise as soon as they satisfy the general conditions of residence. This total equalization of rights need not deprive the status of nominal citizenship of any attraction and meaning. It would retain its symbolic value as a formal expression of membership in the polity, whereas the others would be only informal members. Immigrants could choose this status as an expression of their commitment to their society of residence. Indeed, we can assume that an equalization of rights before naturalization will strengthen such feelings of commitment and compensate for the decline in instrumental rationality of naturalization.25. As long as a sufficient number of immigrants can be motivated to make a voluntary choice in favour of naturalization, there is little reason to abandon the nominal distinction between foreigners and citizens, even though it might have turned into a largely symbolic one. One might object that commitment of a purely symbolic nature is always likely to assume a nationalist tinge. However, opting for naturalization under conditions where full rights can also be enjoyed without taking this step would express a rather harmless kind of patriotic pride in the achievements of a liberal democratic polity. There may be reasonable disagreement about such a total dissociation of legal status and rights of citizenship. If the essence of democratic legitimacy lies in the kinds of rights that it establishes for citizens, should not admission to the polity be more than a merely symbolic inclusion into the community whose process of democratic decision-making establishes and confirms the validity of these rights? After all, individuals are actively involved in democratic legitimation as members of the polity rather than of society. A collective constitutes itself as a polity distinct from society by institutionalizing democratic deliberation at the highest level of sovereignty. Should this not be reflected in making the suffrage at this level conditional upon a decision to become a member of the polity for all those who had previously been a member of a different polity? Again, I think there are some drawbacks in this argument. The most important one is that if the incentives for naturalization are not strong enough, a large percentage of the population in societies of immigration might remain permanently excluded from the most important mechanism

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of democratic legitimation. However, under ideal conditions of optional naturalization, there is little reason to fear such an outcome. This solution, which we could call liberal-republican, would therefore be equally permissible as the liberal-communitarian one. In any case, both solutions go far beyond present policies of inclusion in all Western democracies. There is considerable scope for a simultaneous improvement of records along all three normative dimensions of inclusion, equality and consent before one reaches the point where tensions between them might manifest themselves as dilemmas.

Conclusions

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I have argued in this paper that the norm of inclusion is central to a liberal understanding of democracy and that it refers to a concept of society that is wide enough to include foreign residents and their family members abroad as well as emigrant citizens. Nonetheless, inclusion is not the only relevant norm for liberal democracy. Equality of membership and of rights in the polity, and consent expressed in political deliberation and in agreement to membership are of the same significance. Inclusion and equality may come into conflict when individuals enjoy a common status of membership, but unequal rights or, inversely, when they enjoy equal rights, but unequal nominal status. While the former tension develops with the accumulation of collective rights in addition to individual ones, the latter one results from the extension of citizenship rights beyond nominal membership in the polity. Both these outcomes can be well justified in a liberal approach. Inclusion comes into tension with consent already with the automatic attribution of citizenship at birth. The conditions of consent in membership can, however, be restored by making both expatriation and naturalization optional. This may diminish formal inclusion of resident foreigners compared with a solution that would attribute a status of citizenship automatically after some time of residence. But that latter policy would ignore the specific interests and autonomous choices of immigrants. So the balance seems to be well-drawn in the way that I have suggested. Finally, equality and consent seem to conflict with each other if equal rights can be had without any conscious decision for membership. However, as I have argued, even this radical solution would not make the choice of membership meaningless. A different position that insists on tying national voting rights to nominal citizenship

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seems to be equally defensible within a framework where resident foreigners can freely choose to be naturalized. None of these solutions takes fully into account the situation of those who have not, or not yet, achieved full societal membership. Transient and temporary migrants as well as those who have just arrived but intend to stay will not be fully included, will not enjoy completely equal rights, and will not be offered all the options of membership. However, in Michael Walzer’s words, the basic norm of inclusion requires that they “must be set on the road to citizenship” (Walzer, 1983: 60). At first sight, the overall distribution of rights and legal status in liberal democracy, which emerges from our normative discussion, seems to violate all three principles of inclusiveness, equality and consent. Instead of being a homogeneous status, citizenship is acquired in a different way by natives and naturalized immigrants; it is different in its meaning of affiliation to a polity for single and dual citizens; it is different in its substance of rights for emigrant citizens, for temporary immigrants and for long-term residents. Nevertheless, this multi-layered structure of citizenship can be regarded as a consequence of combining the three norms and applying them to a world where societies have become mobile across state borders. However, the very same principles which can justify such distinctions also point to many obstacles which ought to be removed from the path to citizenship before the terms of admission can be regarded as fair.

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guiding principles

Notes * This contribution draws on arguments developed at more length in a forthcoming book: Transnational Citizenship. Membership and Rights in International Migration, Edward Elgar, Avebury, UK, 1994. It was first presented at a panel organized by Joseph Carens at the 90th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 14 September in New York. Amy Gutman’s critical comments at the conference stimulated some clarifications in revising the paper. Credits are also due to Ulrike Davy for challenging me to elaborate the apparent contradictions between a strategy of equalizing rights for foreign residents and citizens and one of making naturalization optional. 1 The last relics of gender discrimination in Western European systems of franchise have been abolished with the recent introduction of full voting rights for women in the Swiss canton Appenzell-Innerrhoden. The problem of denaturalization of ethnic minorities is still acute in some newly democratized states of Central and Eastern Europe. In June, the Latvian parliament adopted a citizenship law that would make 500,000 ethnic Russians who have immigrated after 1940 stateless until the year 2000. (The Latvian presi-

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dent objects to the law which has not yet come into force.) In July, the Czech republic turned 70,000 Roma into a stateless minority because they had not applied in time for citizenship of the new state. John Stuart Mill, for example, denounced the exclusion of women but defended a franchise limited to taxpayers and a system of plural votes for citizens with a higher education (Mill, 1972, On Representative Government, chapter 8). As regarded by legal positivists (see de Groot, 1989: 10-17). Joseph Carens has objected that “[a]fter a while, the terms of admission become irrelevant” (Carens, 1989: 44). Article 34 of the Geneva Refugee Convention obliges states of asylum to facilitate the integration and naturalization of refugees and to reduce the costs of the procedure as far as possible. A number of signatory states take this into account by reducing the required period of residence prior to the naturalization of refugees. In some Western democracies an option exists for those foreigners who are not immigrants but have been born in the country, or for immigrants who have married a citizen. Canada and Australia are probably the two countries of immigration that today come closest to this model of optional naturalization. The Canadian Citizenship Act includes ordinary naturalization in a section under the title “The Right to Citizenship”. Article 5 of the Act specifies that the Minister shall grant citizenship to any person who meets the requirements whereas the Minister may, in his discretion, waive on compassionate grounds some of these requirements in favour of the applicant. David Hendrickson points out that in a realist perspective “[t]he acquisition of nationality is a more momentuous step, and it would not be inconsistent with this formulation to hold that the state’s discretion is much wider in deciding upon membership and nationality than in rejecting admission to visitors” (p. 219). A view which has been strongly criticized by Robert Dahl, who insists that “[t]he demos must include all adult members of the association except transients and persons proved to be mentally defective” (Dahl, 1989: 129). See de Groot, 1989: 12-13. This has been an unintended effect of eliminating gender discrimination in citizenship laws. Until well after the Second World War, citizenship was transmitted only by the father in most Western democracies. The mother’s membership became then only relevant if the child was born out of wedlock. Apart from being subjected to territorial sovereignty these “transients” (Robert Dahl) may certainly have rights towards their temporary host country but such rights are not based on their societal membership. They result rather from a commitment to respect human rights when no significant ties of membership are involved. This same kind of commitment opens the boundaries of liberal polities to claims of refugees that their admission is a matter of right rather than merely of generosity, clemency or expediency. Claims to external ethnic membership can be based on a purely nationalist line of argument that replaces the political concept of society with that of a national community of descent and culture. In a liberal democratic view membership requires ongoing social ties of interaction and communication and/or dependence from a state for protection. Where neither is the case the claims to national solidarity beyond borders become spurious.

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14 The German Aliens Act of 1990 has, for the first time recognized that young foreigners who had to return to their parents’ country of origin enjoy a right to re-immigration into Germany, i.e. a prerogative that has traditionally been reserved for citizens only. However, beneficiaries are defined very narrowly as those who have spent at least eight years in Germany and have visited school there for six years, who have sufficient means of subsistence and who apply for return between their 15th and 21st birthdays and within five years after leaving Germany (Gesetz zur Neuregelung des Ausländerrechts, § 16). 15 Nozick’s theory defends an atomistic individualism only at the level of states but envisages the flourishing of a multiplicity of associational communities within that framework (Nozick, 1974: chapter 10). 16 See, for example, Oldfield (1990) or van Gunsteren (1992). 17 The extreme interpretation of ius soli in the USA, which merely focuses on territorial birth and attributes citizenship automatically even if a child is born on board an aircraft flying over the territory, need not necessarily be seen as a model for other countries of immigration. (For an interesting controversy about the attribution of citizenship to native-born children of illegal immigrants see Schuck and Smith, 1985 and Carens, 1987.) For European states that consider reforming their ius sanguinis laws, it would probably make more sense to apply ius soli to native-born children under the condition that one parent has been resident in the country for at least a short period of time. The solution that seems most attractive to me would be to give alien parents a choice, whether they want their children to acquire citizenship at birth and to give the children themselves a second option at an age well before they attain the age of majority. However, a third generation, i.e. children born in the country of parents themselves born in the country, ought to be attributed automatic citizenship. This is the rule of double ius soli which is, among others, established in French and Belgian law. 18 This criterion distinguishes migrants not only from nomads but also from tourists who visit other countries without searching for a new home. International tourism is a major consequence of the modern revolution in transportation technology. It strongly affects the economy, ecology and culture of states but it raises no challenge for their definitions of membership. In nomadic migration, societies move while individuals stay put within their structure; in tourism, societies stay put while individuals move. In modern migration the movement of individuals causes an expansion of the social basis of membership. 19 As Mark Gibney does when he defends a liberal admission policy for refugees by attacking the U.S. immigration priority for relatives of citizens and immigrants (Gibney, 1986). 20 I have tried to address this question in two other papers (Bauböck, 1994a, 1994b). 21 See Marco Martiniello’s contribution in this volume. 22 The third category of persons to whom the norm of inclusion may apply are those who are neither citizens nor residents. For them there is little substantial equality. They may claim admission to the territory but not many other rights which they could exercise beforehand. 23 See Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 24 The classical statement on this point is Tocqueville’s analysis of New England township democracy (Tocqueville, 1954: chapter 5).

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25 Relatively high rates of naturalization in countries such as Sweden, Australia, Canada, which grant both easy naturalization and substantial rights for foreign residents, seem to provide empirical illustration for this point.

References Ackerman, Bruce A. (1980) Social Justice in the Liberal State. New Haven: Yale University Press. Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bauböck, Rainer (1994a) ‘Citizenship and Ethical Problems of Immigration Control’, in Robin Cohen (ed.) (1994) The Cambridge Survey of World Migration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauböck, Rainer (1994b) ‘Legitimate Immigration control’, in Adelman, Howard (ed,) Legitimate and Illegitimate Discrimination: New Directions in Migration. Toronto: York Lane’s Press and UNESCO. Carens, Joseph H. (1987b) ‘Who Belongs? Theoretical and Legal Questions about Birthright Citizenship in the United States’, The University of Toronto Law Journals 37: 413-443. Carens, Joseph H. (1989) ‘Membership and Morality, in Brubaker, Rogers W. (ed.), op. cit. de Groot, Gerard-René (1989) Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht im Wandel. Eine rechtsvergleichende Studie über Erwerbs- und Verlustgründe der Staatsangehörigkeit. Köln: Carl Heymans Verlag. Dworkin, Ronald (1977) Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gibney, Mark (ed.) (1988) Open Borders? Closed Societies? New York: Greenwood Press. Hammar, Tomas (1990) Democracy and the Nation State. Aliens, Denizens and Citizens in a World of International Migration. Aldershot: Avebury. Held, David (1991b) ‘Democracy, the Nation-State and the Global System’, in Held, David (ed.), op. cit. Held, David/McGrew, Anthony (1993) ‘Globalization and the Liberal Democratic State’, Government and Opposition 28, no. 2. Hendrickson, David C. (1992) ‘Migration in Law and Ethics: A Realist Perspective’, in Barry, Brian/Goodin, Robert E. (eds), op. cit. Hobbes, Thomas (1973) Leviathan. London: Everyman’s Library. Hobsbawm, Eric (1990) Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Locke, John (1956) The Second Treatise of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. Edited with an Introduction by J.W. Gough. New York: Macmillan. Mill, John Stuart (1972) Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. London: Everyman’s Library. Nozick, Robert (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Oldfield, Adrian (1990) Citizenship and Community. Civic Republicanism and the Modern World. London: Routledge. O’Neill, Onora (1991) ‘Transnational Justice’; in Held, David (ed.), op. cit. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1973) The Social Contract and Discourses. London: Dent, Everyman’s Library. Schuck, Peter H./Smith, Rogers M. (1985) Citizenship without Consent. Illegal Aliens in the American Polity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1950) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, third edition. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Tocqueville, Alexis de (1954) Democracy in America, vol. 1. New York: Random House. Ueda, Reed (1982), ‘Naturalization and Citizenship’, in Thernstrom, Stephan (ed.) Immigration, Dimensions of Ethnicity, A series of Selections from the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. van Gunsteren, Herman R. (1992), Eigentijds Burgerschap. Den Haag: Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid. Walzer, Michael (1983), Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books.

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Mixed embeddedness: (in)formal economic activities and immigrant businesses in the Netherlands* Robert Kloosterman, Joanne van der Leun and Jan Rath

In the field of immigrant or ethnic entrepreneurship, several theoretical approaches have emerged. Some emphasise the cultural endowments of immigrants (such as a cultural inclination in certain groups towards risk-taking behaviour), while others highlight racist or ethnic exclusion and blocked mobility in the mainstream labour market. Other approaches revolve around issues of social embeddedness, arguing that individual entrepreneurs take part in ethnically specific economic networks that facilitate their business operations. The economic geographer Robert Kloosterman, the criminologist Joanne van der Leun and the sociologist Jan Rath have explored these complex interactions along with the array of regulatory structures that promote certain economic activities while inhibiting others. This innovative approach – dubbed ‘mixed embeddedness’ – emphasises the importance of regulation and market dynamics. It is more encompassing in that it links social relations and transactions to wider political and economic structures. Moreover, it acknowledges the significance of immigrants’ concrete embeddedness in social networks while understanding that their relations and transactions are more abstractly embedded in wider economic and political-institutional structures. Immigrant entrepreneurs and advanced urban economies The impact of immigrants has very noticeably changed the outlook of larger Dutch cities in the last quarter of this century. Beginning with the crowds in the streets, by now this demographic shift has also manifested itself in the rising number of immigrant entrepreneurs. Because of this, the four largest Dutch cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht) have not only acquired a distinctly more cosmopolitan outlook (Rath and Kloosterman, 1998b), but have also be-

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cosmopolitan outlook

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come more like other advanced urban economies, such as New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Marseilles, where immigrants and immigrant entrepreneurs are a prominent presence as well (BodyGendrot and Ma Mung, 1992; Barrett et al., 1996; Häußermann and Oswald, 1997). These immigrant entrepreneurs are affecting cities in numerous – and sometimes quite unexpected – ways, as, for example, by revitalizing formerly derelict shopping streets, by introducing new products and new marketing strategies (Rath and Kloosterman, 1998a), by fostering the emergence of new spatial forms of social cohesion (see, for example, Tarrius and Péraldi, 1995; Simon, 1997), by opening up trade links between faraway areas that were hitherto unconnected through so-called transnational communities (Tarrius, 1992; Portes and Stepick, 1993; Portes, 1995b; Guarnizo, 1996; Faist, 1997; Wallace, 1997; The Economist, 1998) and by posing challenges to the existing regulatory framework through being engaged in informal economic activities (Kloosterman et al., 1998). As for the latter, contemporary urban economic sociological studies suggest that immigrants and especially immigrant entrepreneurs play a pivotal role in these informal economic activities. According to Portes and Sassen-Koob (1987: 48), ‘immigrant communities have provided much of the requisite labor for these activities, have frequently supplied sites for their development, and have furnished the entrepreneurial drive to initiate them’. Below, we explore the role of immigrant entrepreneurs in informal activities. We will show that the socio-economic position of immigrant entrepreneurs – and, consequently, also their prospects with respect to upward social mobility – can only properly be understood by taking into account not only their embeddedness in social networks of immigrants but also their embeddedness in the socioeconomic and politico-institutional environment of the country of settlement. We therefore propose the use of a concept mixed embeddedness, which encompasses both sides of embeddedness to analyse processes of insertion of immigrant entrepreneurs. Complex configurations of mixed embeddedness enable immigrant businesses to survive partly by facilitating informal economic activities – in segments where indigenous firms, as a rule, cannot. With the rising number of immigrants and, more particularly, of immigrant entrepreneurs in Dutch cities, the issue arises of whether the small shop run by an immigrant is a step up on the avenue of social mobility or whether it is located on a dead-end street. Exploring these forms of mixed embeddedness among immigrant entrepreneurs in concrete Dutch metropolitan milieus will eventually allow us to assess to what extent immigrant entrepreneurship in conjunc-

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tion with informal economic activities constitutes a distinct trajectory of incorporation. We will start with a short overview of recent developments in immigrant entrepreneurship in the Netherlands. After that, we will present a more thorough account of mixed embeddedness and its relationship with informal economic activities. We will then use this concept to explore a case study of a specific group of immigrant entrepreneurs in more depth, namely, that of Turkish and Moroccan Islamic butchers. Finally, we will offer some conclusions on the relationship between immigrant entrepreneurs and the context of the receiving country.

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The rise of immigrant entrepreneurs in the Netherlands At first glance, the rise in immigrant entrepreneurship in advanced cities seems to be the obvious outcome of, on the one hand, the inflow of immigrants and, on the other, the resurgence of self-employment in general (OECD, 1992; Martinelli, 1994; Light and Rosenstein, 1995). The share of a particular group or category among the ranks of the self-employed is, however, anything but a straightforward reflection of its share of the population as a whole. The rate of participation in entrepreneurship of a particular group of immigrants depends on the intricate interplay between socio-economic and ethno-social characteristics of the group in question and the opportunity structure. This opportunity structure – which in itself is primarily a function of the state of technology, the costs of production factors, the nature of the demand for products and the institutional framework – determines when, where and to what extent openings for such businesses will occur. Immigrants in the Netherlands, have found themselves – from a socio-economic point of view – in a rather marginalized position. Despite the fact that the Dutch job machine has been churning out jobs at a very high rate almost continually in the 1990s, unemployment among immigrants has remained relatively high. In 1997, when the Dutch economy was booming, the average rate of unemployment among immigrants still stood at 18%; whereas only 6.3% of the indigenous workforce was out of work. Turks (31%) and Moroccans (24%) are especially hard hit by unemployment (CBS, 1998). Excluded to a considerable extent from the mainstream labour market, an increasing number of immigrants have opted to set up shops themselves. In 1986, 11,500 firms in the Netherlands were run by immigrant entrepreneurs. This number had doubled in 1992 and trebled to 34,561 in

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1997, which amounts to about 5.5% of all non-agricultural firms in the Netherlands. The share of self-employed in the total population of immigrants from non-industrialized countries rose from 3.3% in 1986 to 7.4% in 1997 (Tillaart and Poutsma, 1998: 40-6). Figure 1 The number of immigrant entrepreneurs in the four largest Dutch cities, 1989-97 7000 6000 5000

Amsterdam

4000

Rotterdam

3000

Den Haag

2000

Utrecht

1000 0 1989

1991

1993

1995

1997

Source: Based on van den Tillaart & Poutsma 1998: 186

uneven distribution

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This spectacular rise of immigrant entrepreneurship has not been evenly distributed in a spatial sense nor with respect to economic activities (cf. Kloosterman, 1996; Kloosterman and Van der Leun, 1999). Firstly, immigrant entrepreneurs are heavily concentrated in the four largest cities and especially in Amsterdam. In 1997 about 40% of all immigrant entrepreneurs could be found in these cities and about 20% in Amsterdam alone. The rise of the number of immigrant entrepreneurs in the four largest Dutch cities is shown in Figure 1. This specific spatial pattern clearly reflects the demographic distribution of immigrants in the Netherlands: about 44% of the population of immigrants from non-industrialized countries live in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague or Utrecht (CBS, 1997). Kloosterman and Van der Leun (1999) have shown that the relationship between demographic trends and the development of immigrant entrepreneurship also holds within cities. Neighbourhoods with high shares of immigrants in their population turn out to be those with a relatively high number of business start-ups by immigrants compared to business start-ups by indigenous entrepreneurs.1 This relationship suggests the importance of social networks that are mainly based on the proximity of co-ethnics for fledgling firms run by immigrants.

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Immigrant entrepreneurship is not just selective in a spatial sense but also heavily skewed towards specific economic activities. Lacking in most cases access to substantial funds of (financial) capital and also deemed lacking in appropriate human capital (educational qualifications), most fledgling immigrant entrepreneurs from non-industrialized countries can, generally, only set up shop at the lower end of this opportunity structure, i.e. in markets with low barriers of entry in terms of capital outlays and required educational qualifications. Notwithstanding these ostensibly atavistic characteristics, these markets are part and parcel of advanced urban economies (cf. Sassen, 1991; Barrett et al., 1996). As Figure 2 shows, about three in five of the immigrant entrepreneurs in the largest four cities in the Netherlands have set up shop in either wholesale, retail or restaurants.

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specific economic activities

Figure 2 Immigrant entrepreneurs in wholesale, retail and restaurants as a share of the total number of immigrant entrepreneurs in the four largest Dutch cities, 1997 30 25

Wholesale

20

Retail

15

Restaurants

10

Utrecht

The Hague

Rotterdam

0

Amsterdam

5

Source: Based on van den Tillaart & Poutsma 1998: 186

These are not only economic activities that may cater for an ethnic demand (ethnic foodstuffs, specific clothing), but also sectors where businesses may be started with, in principle, relatively small outlays of capital and limited educational qualifications. Our research findings show that immigrants gravitate to businesses at the lower end of the market (Kloosterman et al., 1997; Rath, 1998b; 1999a). Low barriers of entry is one side of the coin, fierce competition the obvious flip side in these highly accessible economic activities. Survival, therefore, is generally difficult and profits can be very low and in many cases even non-existent. The survival of immigrant businesses in these cut-throat markets depends to some extent on

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the fact that many immigrant entrepreneurs (and their families) have different sets of preferences still partly rooted in the sending countries that allow for long hours and low pay (Waldinger, 1996). Their survival is, however, also possible because of the fact that entrepreneurs are embedded in specific social networks that enable them to reduce their transaction costs in formal but also in informal ways (Zhou, 1992; Portes and Sensenbrenner, 1993; Roberts, 1994; Portes, 1995a). Informal practices can thus be seen as an intrinsic part of contemporary capitalism, especially as the rise of the service sector contributes to a more favourable environment for small firms that partly rely on informal production (Castells and Portes, 1989; Fainstein et al., 1992; Tarrius, 1992; Engbersen, 1997; Kloosterman et al., 1997; 1998; Rath, 1998b).

Informal economic activities income generation

five observations

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Informal production encompasses those ‘activities aimed at producing a positive effect on income (for the person executing the activities and/or for the person receiving the results), for which the terms of legislation and regulations (planning requirements, social security legislation, collective labour agreements, and the like) applicable to the activities are not being met’ (Renooy, 1990: 24). Portes and Sassen-Koob (1987: 31) explain that ‘although this definition encompasses criminal activities, the term is customarily reserved for such activities as those in the food, clothing, and housing industries that are not intrinsically illegal but in which the production and exchange escape legal regulation’. The informal economy is thus conceived as a process of income generation rather than a characteristic of an individual (if only because a moonlighter may have an entirely legal job at another time of the day). The decisive characteristic of the informal economy which distinguishes it from the formal economy is the lack of governmental control (Renooy, 1990: 25). Although a useful definition, five observations have to be made. Firstly, this definition is wholly contingent on the regulatory context and this may differ from time to time and from place to place. What is informal in one place may be completely legal in another. Prostitution, for instance, is completely illegal in a number of American states but (partly or entirely) legal in other states such as Nevada or in countries like the Netherlands. Moreover, specific regulatory contexts may even create distinct informal economic activities. By establishing monopolies for the sale of cigarettes, the Italian government – inadvertently, one presumes – also created the somewhat

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peculiar sight of African immigrants selling cigarettes along major exit routes in cities. This points to the dynamic character of the informal economy. Activities that are entirely legal at one time, may turn out to be illicit at another. Only three decades ago, the Dutch government welcomed undocumented immigrants who were represented as ‘spontaneous guestworkers’ (Wentholt, 1967: 189; Rath and Schuster, 1995: 103). They were duly regularized as soon as they found a job. Today, the Dutch government perceives undocumented immigrants as ‘profiteers’ who should be expelled instantly. Secondly, being contingent on the regulatory framework also precludes an unequivocal description of the nature and extent of the informal economy. Depending on the rules and regulations one takes as a point of departure, one may, in one case, describe and measure the informal economy in terms of money (e.g. the amount of evaded tax money). In another case, however, the unit of measure could be in terms of persons (e.g. the number of undocumented workers). Thirdly, the difference between informal economic activities and criminal activities is not always easy to make. If certain activities are illegal under certain circumstances, does breaching of the rules imply an informal or a plain criminal activity? In the Netherlands, legal actions are taken against people who trade in hard drugs; their economic activities are considered as violations of the Criminal Law. The tax authorities, however, usually consider these same activities as just another form of income generation and, accordingly, levy taxes. By the same token, the criminal is entitled to the same kind of tax deductions with respect to the costs accrued in the process of income generation. Having said this, it can be argued that the risks of criminal activities are higher and this may affect the strategies of the (criminal) entrepreneur. However, this makes the criminal economy at best a special variant of the informal economy. Fourthly, within one given regulatory context and regardless of its potential criminal content, it may still be hard to delineate formal and informal economic activities. If an employee of a firm parks their van without paying the parking fee to deliver a package, should this be considered as a form of informal production? Furthermore, no ordinary person of flesh and blood is capable of knowing all the rules and regulations by heart, let alone live by them. Especially in advanced welfare states such as the Netherlands with its enormous corporatist legacy of rules and regulations, it seems nigh impossible to avoid some form of informal production. What is considered to be an informal economic activity then becomes, to a certain extent, a matter of arbitrariness. Fifthly, to examine informal economic activities one also has to

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implications

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take into account the ways in which government agencies actually deal with these activities. Law enforcement is not self-evident nor does it follow a fixed course. This has, amongst other things, to do with the way in which it is organized. The government may assign many or only a few powers to enforcement agencies, and/or may give them the power to establish their own priorities. These priorities are affected by political decisions as well as the caseload, the interpretation of the job, the motivation and the efforts of the law enforcers themselves. The system of law enforcement may undermine itself when the financial or other costs of policing the rules become a greater burden to society or to the industry concerned than taking a more lenient position. For this reason, the new Labour government in Britain intended to relax the procedures regarding the employment of illegal immigrants (The Independent, 29 May 1997). Labour, moreover, believes that strict law enforcement has deterred many employers from giving jobs to immigrants and that it has created a new market for false ID papers. By relaxing the rules the government tries to prevent such perverse effects. This actual law enforcement is to some extent dependent on the culture of public administration in general and the enforcing agencies in particular. Perhaps partly as a result of their plethora of rules, the Dutch have developed a rather awkward way of dealing with certain infringements: they are officially tolerated as part of the typical Dutch policy of gedogen, ‘a nigh-untranslatable term that means looking the other way when you must’ (The Economist, 12 October 1996; see, for a more sophisticated view, Blankenburg and Bruinsma, 1994). Most famous (or notorious) in this respect is the Dutch policy towards soft drugs; although illegal, they are tolerated within certain limits. This same approach of gedogen is also used towards certain activities by immigrants. The sale of foodstuffs in mosques in Rotterdam, for instance, provides the cemaat with important financial resources which it otherwise cannot obtain. This sale is illicit but nevertheless tolerated (Rath et al., 1996). Likewise, the government has designed a quite flexible set of transitional arrangements for Islamic butchers working with no permits because of the prevailing importance of the sale of hâlal meat. We will turn to this issue in more detail below. The implications of these observations are far-reaching. Against the grain of many popular views, there is no sharp demarcation between ‘the’ formal and ‘the’ informal economy. On the contrary, there is an extensive and ever changing transitional area in which the formal economy gradually transforms into a more informal one. How can the emergence of immigrant businesses and their involvement in the informal economy be understood?

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Mixed embeddedness Embeddedness has become a crucial concept in explaining the success of entrepreneurs in general and that of immigrants in particular (Granovetter, 1985; Granovetter and Swedberg, 1992; Portes, 1995a; Waldinger, 1995; 1996; Rath, 1999b), in the latter case especially with respect to informal economic activities as they take place outside the regular framework (Epstein, 1994; Roberts, 1994). Embeddedness, however, tends to be mainly used in a rather one-sided way, referring almost exclusively to the social and cultural characteristics of groups that are conceived a priori to consist almost solely of co-ethnics. Using embeddedness in this circumscribed way, neglects the wider economic and institutional context in which immigrants are inevitably also inserted or embedded (cf. Cassarino, 1997; Rath, 1997; 1999b; Rath and Kloosterman, 1998a). We therefore propose to use the more comprehensive concept of mixed embeddedness – a concept that is much closer to the original meaning of embeddedness as intended by Polanyi (1957) – encompassing the crucial interplay between the social, economic and institutional contexts (Kloosterman et al., 1998). In this view, the rise of immigrant entrepreneurship is, theoretically, primarily located at the intersection of changes in sociocultural frameworks on the one side and transformation processes in (urban) economies on the other. The interplay between these two different sets of changes takes place within a larger, dynamic framework of institutions on neighbourhood, city, national or economic sector level. As such, relevant research into immigrant entrepreneurship (and its relationship to informal economic activities) has to be located at the crossroads of several disciplines (cf. Granovetter, 1994: 453; Martinelli, 1994: 487; Rath and Kloosterman, 1999). The exact shape of the opportunity structure with respect to openings for businesses that require only small outlays of capital and relatively few educational qualifications constitutes a crucial component in this mixed embeddedness. Market conditions determine to a very large extent in which segments these kinds of openings occur. These conditions have to be taken into account to explain (immigrant) entrepreneurship. Markets and economic trends themselves, however, are embedded and enmeshed in institutions (cf. Esping-Andersen, 1990; 1996). Institutions such as the welfare system, the organization of markets, the framework of rules and regulations together with their enforcement, housing policies (impacting on the residential distribution of immigrants) and also business associations and specific business practices which regulate particular markets significantly affect opportunity structures at national, sector and local lev-

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low-end opportunity structure openings

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els (Freeman and Ögelman, 1999; Kloosterman, 1999; Kloosterman and van der Leun, 1999; Rath, 1999b). In the case of the Dutch corporatist welfare state, as in other continental European welfare states, the opportunity structure at the lower end is – in marked contrast to the United States – curtailed by relatively high minimum wages which choke the growth of lowvalue added activities. These low-value added activities include location-bound manufacturing such as sweatshops, but also potentially booming post-industrial personal services such as child care and housecleaning. Openings at the lower end of the opportunity structure do occur even in these highly regulated welfare states as invasion and succession processes in neighbourhoods affect local businesses (Kloosterman, 1999). Two types of processes by which openings are created can theoretically be distinguished, although they tend to blend in the real world. Firstly, openings are created by the emergence of a demand for ‘ethnic’ products, such as specific clothing and foodstuffs. Secondly, long-established, native shop owners leave neighbourhoods where the number of immigrants rises and they are replaced by immigrant entrepreneurs. Partly driven by the lack of prospects as employees, and by the near absence of openings in personal services, immigrant entrepreneurs in continental European states flock towards these kinds of opportunities and set up shop in especially wholesale, retail and restaurants (cf. Body-Gendrot, 1992; Body-Gendrot and Ma Mung, 1992; Barrett et al., 1996). As we have seen, this pattern is also found in the Netherlands (Figure 2). Many of the markets where these kind of openings emerge will be near saturation given the easy entry and the push to become selfemployed due to exclusion from the labour market. Inevitably, cutthroat competition will evolve in these already shrinking markets. Firms that operate in these markets at the lower end of the opportunity structure, compete primarily on flexibility of supply and on price rather than on quality. Hence, the most evident route to survival is cutting (labour) costs. This strategy, however, is only partly feasible within the prevailing regulatory framework. If one goes beyond this framework, by, for instance, evading payment of taxes or social contributions or by ducking the minimum wage and working-hour regulations, the room to manoeuvre increases considerably. These strategies – illegitimate as they may be – can be very profitable, as production at the lower end of the opportunity structure is typically very labour intensive. The entrepreneurs may, moreover, tap resources such as social capital. Through their networks of relatives, co-nationals or co-ethnics they have privileged and flexible access

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to information, capital and labour at relatively little (monetary) cost. The use of social capital within the current opportunity structure gives these businesspeople a competitive advantage, both within the formal and informal economies. Mixed embeddedness does not only refer to market conditions on a more structural level. Immigrant entrepreneurs are also concretely embedded in Dutch society in other ways as they operate in cities with their own morphology, socio-economic, cultural and political dynamics as well as in sectors with more or less established traditions of doing business. Immigrant entrepreneurs in the Netherlands are predominantly to be found in neighbourhoods with high shares of immigrants. Due to the particular history of migration in conjunction with Dutch housing policies, levels of ethnic concentration in most of these neighbourhoods remain rather low (Musterd, 1997). This implies that immigrant neighbourhoods in the Netherlands have a very diverse immigrant population and cannot be equated with American ‘ethnic neighbourhoods’. This diversity may reduce the possibilities for immigrant entrepreneurs catering for a groupspecific demand by lowering the number of potential consumers in the vicinity. Being embedded in Dutch society may also refer to (voluntary or obligatory) membership of organizations such as shop-owner associations (based either on operating in a common line of business or on being located in the same street). These organizations may provide mutual assistance and may also furnish a common set of largely unwritten rules with respect to business practices. In Dutch society, displaying its outspoken corporatist legacy, these kinds of organization are quite important. They tend to protect the insiders – the already established entrepreneurs – at the expense of the outsiders – the would-be entrepreneurs – by throwing up barriers of entry such as minimum requirements with regard to the shop interior. Configurations of mixed embeddedness may be very complex and manifold. We now turn to a specific case of immigrant entrepreneurship to investigate this mixed embeddedness in more depth.

low levels of ethnic concentration

The case of Islamic butchers In their recent report to the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Tillaart and Poutsma (1998: 50) counted 360 butcher shops run by immigrant entrepreneurs in the Netherlands in 1997. These shops are almost exclusively run by Moroccans (51%) and Turks (38%). Islamic butchers are located at the lower end of the market where

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openings are created by vacancy-chain processes of markets in neighbourhoods where indigenous butchers quit the business. In the case of Islamic butchers, the vacancies are, however, only part of the story. Islamic butchers cater for a group-specific demand by selling hâlal meat. Islamic dietary laws prescribe Muslims to refrain from eating pork and animals that have not been slaughtered according to the Islamic rite. These products are considered unclean (haram) and therefore strictly taboo. Consequently, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Islamic immigrants, particularly immigrants from Turkey and Morocco, from the 1960s onwards has had a substantial impact on the market for meat in the Netherlands. In the early 1960s, when the first Turkish and Moroccan guestworkers arrived, hâlal meat was obtainable virtually nowhere. This was, of course, due to the then extremely small size of the market, but also to the fact that there were legal impediments to Islamic slaughtering. Jews, long-term citizens in the Netherlands, had already obtained special statutory arrangements for slaughtering but these did not apply to Muslims. In order to meet the demand for hâlal meat, immigrants from Turkey and Morocco slaughtered animals illegally. These illegal butchers got caught every now and then and were fined under the Law on Economic Criminal Offences. According to Bakker and Tap (1985: 37), the first Islamic butchers set up shop in the late 1960s. They started without the proper permits and in accommodation that hardly resembled that of regular butchers. The demand for hâlal meat rose steadily, however, and in the 1970s a few dozen Islamic butchers were already running their businesses. It was not until 1975, that a small number of butchers received temporary official permission to slaughter animals according to the Islamic rite. This interim ruling was replaced two years later by a more definitive regulation when the Ministry of Public Health and Environmental Protection altered the Ministerial Order on Meat Inspection (Vleeskeuringsbesluit) (Bakker and Tap, 1985: 36; Rath et al., 1996). In 1985, the total number of Islamic butchers amounted to 224, 138 of which were in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. Today, the number of Islamic butchers officially stands at 340. However, according to the Commodity Board for Cattle, Meat and Eggs (Produktschap voor Vee, Vlees en Eieren) there are actually more than 500 butchers, as some Islamic butchers work ‘on the sly’ (de Volkskrant, 8 March 1996). Some slaughterhouses supply private customers too, while meat is also obtainable (informally) from coffee shops and mosques.

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Islamic butchers initially catered almost solely for a specific ethno-religious clientele, mainly made up of Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese and other Muslims from other countries. This clientele can be seen as a captive, but relatively stable market in the sense that Islamic customers will rarely if ever buy their meat from native Dutch butchers. Whether this will continue remains to be seen as some Dutch supermarkets have started selling pre-packed hâlal meat and have thus become potential competitors (de Volkskrant, 27 March 1996). On the other hand, there seems to be a growing native Dutch clientele. These customers, mostly living nearby in these mixed neighbourhoods, want to prepare ‘exotic’ meals, are attracted by the low prices or do not want to queue up in supermarkets. Some of the indigenous Dutch customers also appreciate the cutting of the meat in their presence (Baetsen and Voskamp, 1991: 55-6). Islamic butchers, however, are still trapped in severely limited markets as many native Dutch customers do not feel encouraged to enter their shops, partly because of doubts concerning hygiene. These limited opportunities for market expansion are reflected in the fact that only a few Islamic butchers are doing well. In the 1970s, on Fridays and Saturdays, numerous customers queued at their shops; but these ‘golden years’ are over as the market has become saturated with Islamic butchers. Too many butchers set up shop in a neighbourhood, which subsequently leads to cut-throat competition. A Turkish entrepreneur wonders:

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limited opportunities for market expansion

Who starts a butcher or greengrocers where four others are perishing? I do not understand how they can make a living, really I don’t. But I do know three businessmen who are nearly bankrupt (quoted in de Volkskrant, 4 June 1995).

This saturation of the market has led to high turnovers and a relatively short average life span of Islamic butcher shops (Bakker and Tap, 1985: 82). Most do not exist for more than three or four years. Operating in saturated markets, Islamic butchers are clearly constrained on the demand side. They do possess, however, certain competitive advantages with respect to their production costs in comparison to indigenous Dutch butchers. Firstly, Islamic butchers can make use of many more parts of a body of an animal than their Dutch counterparts who mostly only sell legs and haunches. Secondly, they can keep a smaller range of meat and related products and they also invest much less money in their presentation and their shop interior. The Trading Association of Butchers (Bedrijfschap

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Slagersbedrijf) – a key institution in the field promoting the interests of butchers – voices the opinion that the shop fittings, the range of products and the marketing strategy are rather ‘unusual’, ‘messy’ and ‘old-fashioned’. Thirdly, they accept smaller profit margins than Dutch butchers do. Faced with stiff competition, Islamic butchers in many cases revert to cutting costs by paying workers off the books, by saving on investments, or by selling products that are allegedly not in their line of business like bread and other foodstuffs. They also cut corners by insufficiently observing the Code of Hygiene for Islamic Butchers (Groeneveld-Yayci, 1996). In particular, butchers reduce labour costs, firstly, by only employing assistants during peak hours, especially on Friday afternoon. These predominantly male assistants – females are rarely to be found behind the counter, they do mostly back-office tasks – are generally recruited from their own group of relatives and friends of co-ethnics and are in many cases employed on an informal basis. Sometimes families enter into an agreement to assist each other (Bakker and Tap, 1985: 110-12). The rewards can be in financial terms, but also payment in kind or in terms of strengthening social relationships. The shop assistant, for instance, may be allowed to bring foodstuffs home, learn the tricks of the trade as an apprentice or invest in his social relations with his dad or uncle. The butcher, for his part, gets the opportunity to invest in social relations with people that might be beneficial to his enterprise either as potential employees, clients or suppliers. This constitutes a clear case of Portes’ relational embeddedness (Portes, 1995a). These informal economic activities are not only enabled by social networks based on trust, but also by management practices that contribute to obscuring what is going on in these butcher shops. There are reports that financial management is in many cases totally unsound. Financial reserves are practically non-existent, partly due to the cut-throat competition, but also due to the inefficient way of price-fixing. A (Turkish) counsellor working for the Trading Association of Butchers commented that ‘those people’ lack the necessary know-how in the field and ‘just mess around with the meat’. They: haven’t a clue about bookkeeping.... A kilo of minced meat for which they themselves paid six guilders is sold in the shop for eight guilders. They seem to forget completely that they have to pay taxes, levies and rent (quoted in de Volkskrant, 8 March 1996).

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In the corporatist and highly regulated Dutch economy, every butcher is legally obliged to register at the Chamber of Commerce and the Trading Association of Butchers and is also required to have proper professional qualifications. Exemption from the legal requirements regarding professional skills can be granted if the applicant supplies a need that otherwise cannot be filled. Such exemptions have often been granted. Initially, it was assumed that butchers were eligible to exemption if catering to less than 1000 Islamic inhabitants in a neighbourhood. In the meantime, this threshold has been raised to 2000 inhabitants for the first butcher in an area, 3000 for the second one, 5000 for the third one and so forth.2 Butchers-to-be mostly do sign up at the Chamber of Commerce. However, many of them do not have the proper professional qualifications, according to the Trading Association of Butchers. Due to communication difficulties, inadequate counselling and the immigrants’ poor insight into the highly opaque Dutch bureaucracy, many ‘forget’ to apply for an exemption, making their enterprise informal outright. This also excludes them from support by the Trading Association of Butchers. The Chambers of Commerce are not authorized to close a shop down, while the Economic Control Service has given its priorities to other matters and does not take firm action (anymore). De facto, Dutch authorities tend to turn a blind eye to this kind of informal economic production by immigrant entrepreneurs. Butchers can qualify for proper professional qualifications after following courses at centres of the Butchers Vocational Training (Slagers Vakopleiding SVO). Not all of the Islamic butchers who are aware of this are willing or able to leave their (informal) shop for these courses. In addition, for many candidates who did follow these courses, the exam proved to be too difficult. The Dutch language appeared to be an insurmountable obstacle and the same could be said for the questions on pork (Tunderman, 1987: 23). In 1975, the exam was replaced by a ‘professional test on the Mohammedan rite’.3 In the late 1980s, the Trading Association of Butchers announced that it would provide training specific to immigrants (Tunderman, 1987: 24), but it was not until 1993 that the training really proceeded. Since then the special policy regarding Islamic butchers – including the right to obtain an exemption from the legal requirements – has entered a new stage. The changes add up to a policy that is supposedly more strict on these matters, although it is still possible to apply for an exemption if the entrepreneur supplies a need that otherwise cannot be filled. An Islamic butcher is now eligible to exemption if the owner enrols in the Butchers Vocational Training and passes its exam and if the manager receives the Training on Commercial

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Practice (Cursus Handelskennis – see Handboek Minderheden, 1994: 8). Whereas informal production by Islamic butchers is, at least partly, tolerated by Dutch state agencies, the Trading Association of Butchers has actively set out to reduce informal production by Islamic butchers (and thus stamp out, in a typically corporatist fashion, what is considered as unfair competition). They have appointed a special councillor and set up a special Committee for Islamic Butchers, the objective being to bring the Islamic butchers to ‘a higher standard of quality’. By improving communication with Islamic butchers, promoting the Butchers Vocational Training, and by making an inventory of specific problems, the Trading Association of Butchers attempts to combat informal economic practices. The association has entered into discussion with the Chambers of Commerce about reducing the ‘mushrooming’ of Islamic butchers. Furthermore, they have also put pressure on the Economic Control Service as well as the SocialEconomic Council to enforce the laws more strictly and put a halt to tolerating informal economic activities. These endeavours are hampered by the fact that the Trading Association of Butchers has not managed to organize Islamic butchers yet. A key-informant of the Association told us that ‘these people are not capable of organizing. It is not in their culture’. Although this culturalistic statement is clearly at odds with evidence from other fields (cf. Tillie and Fennema, 1997), it does show that there is still a gulf between an established and formal institution like the Association on the one hand and Turkish and Moroccan Islamic butchers on the other.

Conclusions

informal economic activities

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An increasing number of immigrants from non-industrialized countries are starting businesses in advanced urban economies. Lacking both in financial and human capital, many of these fledgling entrepreneurs can only set up shop in specific segments of these urban economies that allow for small-scale, labour-intensive, mainly lowskill production. In the Netherlands, with its extensive welfare system and its relatively high minimum wage, these kinds of openings primarily occur in wholesale, retail and restaurants. To survive in these mostly saturated markets, many (immigrant) entrepreneurs cut corners by engaging in informal economic activities. This informal economic production can only take place on a more permanent basis if a framework of trust exists. This trust can

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be generated by social networks that are based on either a shared migration experience or a shared non-indigenous identity. Because of its link with social capital and its subsequent enabling of informal economic activities, the embeddedness of immigrants has quite rightly come to occupy central stage in research into the socio-economic aspects of immigration. Focusing on embeddedness this way, however, tends to cloud other aspects of embeddedness. Economic activities by immigrants are situated in a wider institutional context. To a large extent this institutional context determines on a macro-level the opportunity structure for businesses in general. Firms are not only embedded in these macro-economic structures but also in sets of rules and regulations, neighbourhoods, associations and business traditions. To address the socio-economic position of immigrant entrepreneurs in general and in particular with respect to informal economic activities, one has to incorporate this side of embeddedness as well. We have, therefore, proposed the use of mixed embeddedness to grasp im- mixed embeddedness migrant entrepreneurial activities. We have illustrated this mixed embeddedness by exploring the case of Islamic butchers in the Netherlands. A complex configuration of different types of embeddedness emerged. Islamic butchers in the Netherlands are clearly located at the lower end of the opportunity structure in openings that are partly vacancy-chain and partly groupspecific (hâlal meat) driven. They set up butcher shops in neighbourhoods with high shares of immigrants. Low barriers of entry and a lack of opportunities in other segments funnels many would-be immigrant entrepreneurs towards this specific line of business. The ensuing cut-throat competition in these highly saturated markets puts pressure on the entrepreneurs to cut costs. This is partly done in informal ways, for instance by selling meat off-the-books and employing relatives who are (partly) paid in kind or not at all and, moreover, by setting up a butcher shop without the necessary qualifications. This informal production is clearly linked to the fact that Islamic butchers in the Netherlands benefit from being embedded in social networks that mainly consist of co-ethnics and co-religionists. These networks generate clients, employees, capital and trust, enabling them to start a business and engage in informal economic practices. These informal economic activities by Islamic butchers clearly show the dynamic interaction between different domains of embeddedness. Although by definition unlawful, informal production is to some extent tolerated by government agencies as they consider Islamic butchers to be meeting a demand that otherwise would not

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be met. Moreover, some rules and regulations are changed in such a way that specific informal economic activities become formalized. The case of Islamic butchers also shows that in the specific corporatist context of the Netherlands, the role of business associations is very important in embedding entrepreneurs. The Trading Association of Butchers is much more active in combating informal production by Islamic butchers than state agencies. Both immigrant entrepreneurs and indigenous institutions are thus interactively negotiating new territories and, hence, creating new forms of mixed embeddedness. These dynamic processes of constructing new forms of mixed ernbeddedness will be crucial in determining to what extent forms of self-employment will constitute an avenue of social mobility in post-industrial Netherlands. Islamic butchers are located in a specific corner of a stagnant market selling hâlal meat in neighbourhoods with high shares of immigrants. A successful trajectory of incorporation of immigrant entrepreneurs will – after having started on the basis of being embedded in immigrant networks – largely depend on the way they manage to become embedded in the overall Dutch context. The case of the Islamic butchers shows that this is not a wholly one-way process nor solely a government affair. Changing the mix of embeddedness is an open, contingent social process in which many social actors may take part and on which the insertion of immigrant entrepreneurs depends.

Notes * This research project is part of Working on the Fringes: Immigrant Businesses, Economic Integration and Informal Practices, a thematic European network for exchange of knowledge and experiences. This international network, coordinated by Jan Rath and Robert Kloosterman and funded by the European Commission under the Fourth Framework, involves both international comparison and collaboration with regard to research on immigrant entrepreneurs in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Italy and the Netherlands. 1 This relationship between the share of the immigrant population and the ratio of immigrant business start-ups and indigenous business start-ups was found to be statistically significant across all neighbourhoods in Amsterdam and Rotterdam (excluding the centres). By using this ratio, other neighbourhood characteristics that may influence the number of business start-ups in general (such as the availability of cheap business accommodation) were eliminated and the focus was solely on the number of firms set up by immigrant entrepreneurs relative to those started by indigenous entrepreneurs (see Kloosterman and Van der Leun, 1999).

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2 See Handboek Minderheden (1994: 8). Recently it was decided that the SocialEconomic Council had to grant exemptions, but the Trading Association of Butchers was still unfamiliar with its policy (see Groeneveld-Yayci, 1996). 3 There too, a separate set of regulations was drawn up, which was approved in 1977 by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (see Bakker and Tap, 1985: bijlage III).

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The mosaic pattern: cohabitation between ethnic groups in Belleville, Paris Patrick Simon

In the early 1990s, the demographer Patrick Simon studied the multiethnic neighbourhood of Belleville, Paris. He analysed how different social groups live together to constitute a complex network of relations organised around cultural associations, community services or economic niches. Simon showed how the various concrete forms of ethnic ‘cohabitation’ at the local level cannot be adequately captured by integration models – e.g. assimilation, multiculturalism – that always refer to the nation. Neither can this reality be understood in bipolar terms such as whites versus blacks. In a local context, the various social and ethnic groups need to negotiate their position vis-à-vis the others and, in doing so, they follow a rationale that is not necessarily compatible with national integration models. The division of urban, political and symbolic space may, paradoxically, promote a certain degree of social cohesion, provided that specific conditions be met for a sharing of these divided spaces. The image of Paris as a ‘cosmopolitan’ city is as old as Paris itself is. However, only in the 1920s and 1930s did Paris earn its reputation of being a writers’ city, an ‘international republic of artists’, to quote Alejo Carpentier. It became a centre of attraction for the intelligentsia worldwide.1 After a period of decline, Paris has once again become a centre of convergence for the world’s elite, a ‘global city’ where international executives and financiers run the global economy and redistribute the world’s resources. The City of Light owes its cosmopolitan nature not only to its cultural and artistic aura, or to its role in economic exchanges and technological innovation. It also, and maybe even especially, owes it to the fact that from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, immigrants from foreign countries and from the provinces began to flow in massively, fostering an unprecedented economic and demographic boom. As in all the other international metropolises, immigrants arriv-

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ing in Paris were sorted and oriented towards different parts of the segmented city. Throughout the twentieth century, Paris has consistently been a centre of attraction and integration. The 1901 census shows that, at the time, a little over 9 per cent of the population was of foreign origin and 56 per cent had been born in the provinces. In 1990, over 25 per cent of the population of Paris were of foreign origin. Since 1982, the proportion of immigrants, which had risen sharply between 1954 and 1975 (from 6 to 14 per cent), has not much changed. As the presence of immigrants in the city increased, two main transformations occurred. First, the origins of the migrants changed as new waves of immigration followed in the wake of those of the 1920s and 1930s. And second, the city’s functional reorganization modified their distribution in space (Guillon, 1996). One can identify a succession process according to the classical model established by the urban ecologists of the Chicago school. The Italians, Belgians and Poles who came in the 1920s were followed in the 1950s and 1960s by Algerian, Portuguese and Spanish immigrants. Thus emerged the ‘ethnic neighbourhoods’, as they are now called, and as a result, the immigrants became highly visible in the city. The aim of this chapter, however, is not to provide a detailed list of Paris’s immigrant neighbourhoods, but to study their multiethnic aspects.2 One of the most striking characteristics of Paris’s ‘ethnic neighbourhoods’ is that they bring together people of many different origins. In addition to ethnic diversity, there is also a certain amount of social diversity. Indeed, the social and symbolic value of neighbourhoods with high immigrant concentration has changed since the 1970s. ‘Gentrification’ has led many middle- and upper-class households to move to immigrant and working-class neighbourhoods. For these reasons, the bipolar model, such as the ‘whites versus blacks’ model, does not really apply to the patterns of segregation and cohabitation observed in Paris. We must imagine a complex network of relations involving many different groups that are more or less organized around cultural associations, community services or economic ‘niches’, and often circumscribed within a specific area. The various ‘integration models’ – assimilation, multiculturalism, pluralism, melting-pot – whose context of reference is always the nation, can thus be re-examined and contrasted with actual local situations of ethnic cohabitation. Indeed, by analysing situations from a local point of view, one can avoid the political implications of an analysis of social interactions carried out at the national level. By looking at a neighbourhood, we need not be concerned by questions of nationality and citizenship, which are of crucial importance in France. Their importance there results from the historical significance of the nation as a political concept in the organization of French society.

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In a local context, social and ethnic groups negotiate their position with their own rationale, which often differs from the national integration model. To quote de Certeau (1986), theirs is a ‘pedagogy of diversity’. We study ‘inter-ethnic’ situations to ‘analyse the conditions for the creation of new sociopolitical contracts and in particular shed light on the internal transformations which occur within a dominant group as a result of the presence of other groups’ (de Certeau, 1986: 790-1). To illustrate this point, we have chosen to look at ethnic and class relationships in a formerly working-class neighbourhood of Paris, the Belleville quarter, which has become today an emblematic place for several ethnic groups. Our approach is to study the system of regulation of ethnic differences by examining how urban, political, symbolic space is shared between different groups that play an active role on the local scene. We will show how this system, by ensuring a certain degree of social cohesion, promotes the integration of the inhabitants into the city, if not into the nation.

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The Belleville context The Belleville quarter, one of Paris’s former working-class neighbourhoods, is located in the eastern part of the city. It was urbanized at the end of the nineteenth century and its architecture is typical of working-class areas, with artisan workshops and low-quality apartment buildings. By the early 1960s, the state of upkeep of these buildings was so poor that Belleville had become one of the most insalubrious neighbourhoods in Paris. The first massive demolitions, carried out in 1956, forced much of the native population out of the neighbourhood. As a consequence of urban renewal, the area ceased to act as a ‘shelter’ for needy people, as it had since the end of the nineteenth century. We have chosen the term ‘shelter’ in reference to Belleville’s role in the wider context of the Paris area housing market. Indeed, since housing in this neighbourhood was cheap, poor households still wishing to remain in Paris could, as a last resort, find affordable housing in Belleville. The low level of rents was also due to the neighbourhood’s poor reputation. Belleville, home of the lower classes, was considered a dangerous hideout for criminals and political troublemakers, anarchists or communists; for this reason, the area came to represent the epitome of all social ills. Those who first came to live in Belleville were the households evicted from the centre of Paris during Haussmann’s renovations in the 1860s. This population was socially homogeneous: for the most part skilled workers working in small artisan industries. In 1871,

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during the Paris Commune, this working-class identity was emphasized: the actions of revolutionaries from Belleville gave the neighbourhood the reputation of a hotbed of rebellion, a reputation it has practically never lost since (Merriman, 1994; Jacquemet, 1984). As a result, Belleville became a socially isolated area with a strong sense of its own identity. In the 1920s, Armenians, Greeks and Polish Jews began to move in. At this time, Belleville became the social and political centre of the Yiddish and Armenian communities. Stores, workshops, cafés, places of religious worship or assembly, political newspapers, Zionist, Bundist or communist discussion groups, common interest groups, Jewish or Armenian trade unions formed a dense and dynamic network of community organizations (Roland, 1962). During the 1950s, the neighbourhood’s ‘Yiddish period’ slowly became history, while a new era of immigration dawned with the arrival of massive contingents from Algeria; also came the Tunisian Jews fleeing North Africa in the throes of decolonization. This new wave marked the beginning of Belleville’s ‘North African’ period. At the same time, the neighbourhood’s social composition was changing as French workers, who previously lived in insalubrious housing, moved to the new public housing buildings at the city’s outskirts, or to the suburbs. Immigrants from the transit housing projects or other forms of temporary housing then replaced them and, as a result, the insalubrious housing stock remained permanently occupied. Contrary to what is commonly thought, the departure of French residents was not caused by the arrival of immigrants; instead, the latter’s arrival was made possible by the departure of French residents and the resulting vacancies. Between 1954 and 1982, in a context where the overall density of the neighbourhood dropped considerably, the population of French citizens fell to one-half of what it had been (from 45,263 to 24,654), whereas the number of foreigners doubled (from 4696 to 9470). The diversity of origins is quite impressive. In 1990, the major groups were Algerians (15 per cent of immigrants), Tunisians (15 per cent), sub-Saharan Africans (9 per cent), Moroccans (8 per cent) and former Yugoslavs (7 per cent). Asians, Turks and Sri Lankans complete the picture of Belleville as a global village (Simon, 1993). Added to the diversity of ethnic origins, there has been a recent increase in the variety of socio-professional statuses. Whereas in 1954 the neighbourhood was essentially working class, the professional profile of the working population is now changing. The gentrification process began in 1980, after the partial renovation of several old buildings and the launching of urban renewal programmes. Middleand upper-class households moved into new apartment buildings

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and into existing buildings that were still in good condition; the numerous new public housing programmes in renovated areas also attracted new residents. The working-class population fell from 59 per cent in 1954 to 31 per cent in 1990, whereas the proportion of liberal and upper-level professionals increased from 4 per cent to 13 per cent. Over a period of 30 years, from 1955 to approximately 1985, the neighbourhood underwent several population changes. The pace of these transformations was relatively swift, a fact that partially explains why the recently arrived populations were able to take over the area’s public space with such ease. Indeed, according to the paradigm of Elias and Scotson (1965), ‘established’ residents strongly resist the efforts of new residents, or ‘outsiders’, to penetrate the various spheres of local power. In most cases, the transfer of power from one group to the other occurs over a long period of time. However, in the case of Belleville, the massive departure of part of the population led to the disappearance of traditional forms of neighbourhood organization; the loss of original structures made it easier for the newcomers to take over. This situation occurs quite frequently in run-down neighbourhoods, before they are renovated (Coing, 1966). Due to the departure of a portion of the ‘established’ population and the ageing of another portion, many small businesses and artisan workshops closed and a large share of the quarter’s economic infrastructure was left vacant. Since, due to the neighbourhood’s bad reputation, real estate prices were extremely low, commercial leases became available to people who in normal circumstances would not have been able to afford them. At the same time, immigrants began to purchase property in ‘rundown’ apartment buildings. The fact that the ‘native population’ of Belleville lost interest in the neighbourhood’s public social life is apparent today in the surprising visibility of several ethnic groups. North African Muslims and Jews, Asians and to a lesser extent Africans can be observed mainly in the local businesses and in the public space. Linked to ‘territorialization strategies’, each group has created highly structured enclaves to serve its own needs; they represent the organizational basis of ethnic cohabitation.

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swift population changes

A fragmented area Though Belleville as a whole ranks quite low in the hierarchy of Parisian neighbourhoods, it is far from being socially and ethnically homogeneous. At the local level, one can observe the same inequalities in the distribution of social or ethnic groups as in the city overall

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and as in its different parts. Thus, the middle and upper classes live in the high-quality apartment buildings of Belleville heights, whereas the working classes and lower level staff live in the nether part of the neighbourhood, in rundown buildings awaiting demolition. Between 1954 and 1982, the area’s social geography changed as the demolition programmes progressed. As a result of the demolitions, the affordable housing space available to immigrants became scarcer, while the latter’s numbers increased. This led to the ‘crowding’ of many people into a small area, almost reminiscent of a ghetto, unmarked by material boundaries but in fact strictly circumscribed, owing to the pressure of the housing market. Immigrants ended up all living in the same buildings because they used family and community networks whose market was limited. Usually, upon their arrival, Algerian immigrants temporarily settled in cheap hotels whose managers came from the same district as they did (Sayad, 1977). Later on, when their families joined them, they moved to neighbouring flats. A few years later, African immigrants followed the same itinerary, though the starting points were hostels for migrant workers instead of cheap hotels. Community networks also played an important role in helping immigrants from former Yugoslavia or Portugal settle into vacant apartments with their families. The Tunisian Jews were helped not only by family and friends but also by community associations. The Unified Jewish Social Fund3 helped ‘refugees’ who had had to flee Tunisia during the political crises the country was going through after independence. A strategy consisting of channelling the poorest fringe of immigrants towards Belleville apparently led to the emergence of a ‘Tunisian Jewish ghetto’ (Simon and Tapia, 1998). Finally, the Asians moved into the renovated stock. The latter’s strategy involved property investments thanks to collective funding. Furthermore, special aid programmes also entitled Asian refugees to public housing space. Despite these ‘channelized migration flows’, as B. Thompson (1983) calls them, buildings are never wholly occupied by a single ethnic group. The distribution of apartments among immigrant groups reflects their diversity, except in the case of hostels and cheap hotels. Thus, at this level, the only really active type of segregation is social segregation. Housing status is determined by income: there are no upper-level professionals living in rundown buildings. Conversely, very few members of the working class can afford to live in renovated buildings with amenities, even if these buildings belong to the public housing stock. From one building to the next, the difference in rent can range from one to ten! Insalubrious buildings thus house immigrants of all origins, and their only ‘native’ neighbours are working

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class. The mixing of different immigrant groups is thus reinforced by social segregation. Although the different ethnic groups tend to mix inside the residential area, the more dynamic groups have divided up public space through a strategy of occupation and control. This strategy is based on the presence of numerous businesses managed by members of the community and aimed mainly at meeting the community’s needs. The shops are used as identity markers (Raulin, 1986): the shop windows convey specific signals (through signs, displays, and linguistic and colour codes) and sell specific products. When several shops belonging to the same ethnic group are located side by side, they constitute a continuous ‘area’ through the repetition of these ‘community markers’. ‘Centres of activity’ thus develop around the business areas with community services, leisure clubs, cafés, cultural centres, doctors and places of religious worship. In Belleville, not only are there many shops and businesses, but these are playing an important role in establishing a community’s territory. For example, out of 86 shops in the lower Belleville area, 46 can be considered ‘ethnic’ in the sense that they carry mainly imported products that are sold in a specific decor or display according to specific, culturally determined selling practices. (For a description of ethnic shops, see de Rudder, 1987.) Of these 15 belong to the ‘exotic’ type, meaning that though their clientele is not restricted to a single ethnic group, they still refer to a specific culture, visible in the shop windows and on the signs. The three largest communities of the neighbourhood – Sephardic Jews (mainly from Tunisia), Southeast Asians and North African Muslims – manage two-thirds of the local stores. The Sephardic Jewish neighbourhood is located in a small area between the Ramponneau and Dénoyez streets and along the Boulevard de Belleville. Originally, it was much larger, but renovations and the departure of part of the Tunisian Jewish community have reduced the ‘little Goulette’ of Paris to its tiny dimensions. Jewish commercial activity in this neighbourhood is linked mainly to the food industry, with kosher butchers, oriental bakeries and grocery shops. There are ‘bazaars’ that sell kitchen utensils and various plastic items, a religious bookshop and several services. Most members of this community participate in its overall economy and its social aid programmes take care of many of them. Several Jewish community organizations are located in the neighbourhood, such as the Paris Jewish social action centre and a Lubavich centre, which has opened two schools in the area. Thanks to the community associations, Belleville is both a commercial and a cultural centre and this enhances its attractiveness for the Tunisian Jewish community

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in Paris and entrenches their presence in the area even if most have moved. Thus, Jewish clients who live elsewhere come to shop in local stores. Before religious feasts, as many as 55 per cent of the stores’ clients come from other neighbourhoods or from the suburbs.4 The commercial infrastructure is an extremely important factor in a community’s visibility: not only do ‘ethnic’ stores mark the neighbourhood with their presence, but they also make the community seem larger than it actually is. On the other half of the Boulevard de Belleville is the Arab city; its restaurants and grocery stores look very much like those of the Jewish sector, except that the butcher shops are no longer kosher but halal. Mosques have replaced the synagogues and Muslim skullcaps the Jewish kippas. The cheap Kabyle hotels of the 1950s have gone; they have been replaced by a profusion of stores mainly centred on food distribution. This shopping area, which spreads from Ménilmontant to the Père Lachaise cemetery, includes bazaars, cafés, restaurants, travel agencies, secondhand clothing stores, import-export offices, grocery stores, butcher shops and fruit and vegetable stores. In addition to these ordinary commercial activities, a centre of Muslim activity has developed near the Couronnes metro station. Two mosques have been opened there, along with several religious bookshops. In this area, meat sold as strictly halal is under very strict control. Kepel (1984: 190ff.) calls this neighbourhood ‘Paris’s Islamic quarter’. It is controlled by the Tabligh, who are members of the international movement jama’at al tabligh (faith and religious practice). In the Muslim sector, except on market days, far fewer women than men are seen on the streets. The men gather in small tight-knit groups in the central square where Belleville’s market stands are set up twice a week. These groups are often extremely dense, with very little space left unoccupied. The presence of North African Muslims is most noticeable during Ramadan, in which the whole neighbourhood becomes involved. Social control reaches its highest point during this period when a Muslim, or a person considered as such, cannot be seen drinking or smoking during the day; if he does, more or less aggressively voiced reprobation will force him to stop. However, Muslims are not the only people concerned with Ramadan: the entire Belleville neighbourhood cannot help but participate in preparations for the feast. Vendors set up shop along the boulevard pavement and sell flat bread, herbs, fruit and sour milk. Shops held by Muslims add special Ramadan products to their usual display. Even Jewish shopkeepers stock up on fruit and drink for the occasion. North African Muslims and Jews have a lot in common, and this is particularly evident when one looks at their economic activities.

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Many kosher restaurants employ Muslim waiters, who for a long time made it possible for them to open on the Sabbath.5 The majority of the Jewish bakeries employ Muslims. After emigration, the rules governing the cohabitation of the two communities in North Africa (Lewis, 1986; Memmi, 1974) were reactivated. Tunisian Jews very often speak Arabic, and the memories of Jews and Muslims complement each other within a single North African identity, recognized as such by both groups. They agree to identify the neighbourhood as ‘Maghrebian’, meaning neither Jewish nor Muslim. The Asian area was at first limited to the renovated sector of the rue de Belleville; it subsequently rapidly spread to neighbouring streets.6 Asian businesses are extremely varied in nature and meet most of the Asian community’s needs: they include food shops, jewellers, supermarkets, record and video shops, restaurants, bakeries, estate agents, wholesale dealers in fabrics for clothing and leather goods manufacturers. In addition to these businesses, there is a dense network of community services, including doctors, letter writers, leisure clubs, cultural associations, and formal and informal information networks. Although the Asians first settled in Belleville at the end of the 1970s, their presence became significant only in the mid-1980s. One reason for their choice of this area was that the Asian quarter of the thirteenth arrondissement was reaching saturation point. The strategy of implantation in Belleville just about matched that applied in the ‘Choisy triangle’: their arrival coincided with urban modernization programmes (Raulin, 1988). This ‘penetration’ phase, when Asians began to move into the neighbourhood, mainly into recently built housing, was followed by a ‘consolidation’ phase with the development of community-oriented businesses. These businesses attracted other Asians to the neighbourhood, and many in turn ended up moving there. Between 1982 and 1990, the Asian population increased by 63 per cent, the highest increase after that of the Turkish population (76 per cent). The non-Asian shopkeepers feel threatened by the Asian community’s vitality and expansionist drive, but so far no collective solution enabling them to ensure their own survival has been devised. There has been little group reaction to the massive implantation of Asian businesses, which is so extensive that Belleville is now considered to be Paris’s second ‘Chinatown’. Despite their commercial expansionism, there are few Asians in Belleville’s other areas, and it is only at the points of contact between areas that they mix with other groups. This strategy of isolation, though not specifically Asian, tends to support the stereotype of a secretive community that keeps to itself and is unwilling to conform to the neighbourhood’s social order (Live,

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stratified structure

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1993). The other groups, which consider themselves much poorer than the Asians, are exasperated by their real or imagined financial power. They are envious of their sense of solidarity, thanks to which Asians are much more successful in the interethnic competition than their partners or rivals. However, the population increase in Belleville has led Asian households to disperse, after an initial period of concentration. Thanks to personal contacts made in their residential context, Asians are perceived as individuals instead of simply members of an ethnic group. As grossly simplified ethnic divisions break down and are replaced by daily exchanges - which involve negotiation - the Asian population is gradually adapting to the common social order. Within this overall commercial structure, various other ethnic groups have opened businesses: there are several Spanish grocery stores and restaurants, one or two African restaurants and an increasing number of Turkish small businesses, mainly ‘fast food’ outlets (for example, pizza and doner kebab restaurants). Relics of the previous era, the few remaining French-owned shops, are located mainly at the corner of the rue de Belleville and the Boulevard de Belleville. They remain isolated amid the stars of David, Chinese ideograms and Arabic characters and have no influence at all on the atmosphere generated by the dominant groups. The municipality’s renovation plans have included attempts to establish new commercial activities aimed at modifying the neighbourhood’s image, which the authorities perceive as too ‘immigrant’. All new apartment buildings include commercial space, but so far Asians or North Africans lease them all. This demonstrates that both communities are trying hard to maintain their presence in Belleville and that this strategy has won over the municipality’s attempt to ‘requalify’ the neighbourhood. Public space is thus appropriated by means of easily identifiable markers: buildings, facilities and other public places are marked off as belonging to a specific, almost private, territory. Those who share its ‘identity’ frequent this territory. These identity signs or markers can be read in shop windows, in the way housing space is occupied, in the playing out of social relationships, or even in people’s personal attributes (such as their clothing and personal demeanour). Schematically speaking, the spatial and social morphology of Belleville is a juxtaposition of ethnic strata, alternately dominated by one or another of the ethnic groups. The strata themselves are first the buildings, then the streets, then the shops, cafes and parks, and finally the whole picture is crossed by a transversal stratum represented by community associations and political groups. The way the various groups adjust to this stratified structure determines the Belleville cohabitation model.

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Cohabitation models Now that the framework for our analysis has been established, we can revert to our initial question: how does integration work in Belleville? The restriction of certain ethnic groups to a circumscribed territory, the public display and even the exacerbation of one’s specificity, whether religious (Islamic fundamentalism or Jewish orthodoxy) or cultural, are in contradiction with the ‘French model of integration’. According to this model, integration is an individual process enabling immigrants to participate in the activities of mainstream society on condition they accept its rules and that the society in turn is prepared to integrate the immigrants.7 This process is based on a strict distinction between private and public spheres. In the private sphere, cultural specificities can be maintained if they do not contradict the fundamental ‘values’ of the Republic. In the public sphere, however, one must remain ‘neutral’ or, in other words, one’s behaviour must be in conformity with the norms of mainstream society. What is the situation in Belleville? Here, cultural differences, instead of being downplayed, are emphasized and play an important role in the definition of relations between the various ethnic groups. Far from being neutral, public space is the object of competition for control over it; but instead of being a cause for social disorder, this competition ensures social stability. Ever since the French working class ceased to be the dominant group in the area, no other group has been able to impose its norms of values on the others. The concept of normative behaviour is no longer relevant, and has been replaced by a much more general attitude based on tolerance and respect of proprieties. Social order in Belleville8 is based first and foremost on a charter of practices devoid of ethnic or cultural references. To use a popular cliché in studies on integration, Belleville’s social order is universalist in both spirit and practice. The coexistence of these groups within a circumscribed area has led to a division of the neighbourhood into small plots. To describe the spatial organization of the groups living in Belleville, the most accurate image is that of a mosaic, ‘separate and closed-in worlds which exist side by side but do not mix’, to quote R.E. Park (1925). Each urban segment has its own ‘local colour’ and the atmosphere can differ completely from one street to the next. Each area has its users who feel at home in its atmosphere and contribute, by their presence, to spreading it. These ‘microenvironments’, in which urban functions, users and specific practices are combined, are undoubtedly ‘quasicommunities’ (Gans, 1962). The division of space must not be interpreted as a sign of hostility between the different groups. Indeed, it

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is the only way these groups can use the city while maintaining their own specificity. Without such borders, ethnic groups could not keep the distance necessary for them to be able to live together. At the same time, thanks to these borders, which are constantly shifting, a group can define itself in opposition to the ‘others’, as Fredrik Barth (1969), whose book has become a work of reference, has pointed out. As competition for space is high, conflicts can only be regulated if compensation is provided to those groups that are not present on the public scene. If one considers the city according to three important aspects – urban, political and symbolic – the sharing of space requires that a considerable number of elements be taken into account. Thus, added to the issue of concrete urban space, there is the neighbourhood’s history and collective memory, and in parallel, the political forces and the associations that control the terms of this division: three distinct yet interlinked spheres of action, whose collective actors may differ. If an actor ceases to participate at one level, his participation may increase at another.

The myth and the multiculturals

‘imagined community’

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To create this system, history had to be rewritten and the collective memory condensed into a ‘Belleville myth’. The myth has made it possible to create a common area, open to all, and to transcend deeply ingrained cultural specificities. The myth has created the ‘imagined community’ B. Anderson (1983) described when speaking of nations. Here it is, in a few words. The Belleville myth is based on two assertions: ‘Belleville is an old working-class neighbourhood’ and ‘a neighbourhood where immigrants first settled long ago’. These two assertions are of course based on historical fact, but the latter has been modified, in the spirit of what Roland Barthes (1957) called ‘the naturalization of history’. The elements that constitute the Belleville myth are no doubt historically true. But, and it is this sense that a myth has been created, they had neither the impact nor the importance they are believed today to have had. Thus, Belleville is not an old immigrant neighbourhood. Quite the contrary, censuses from the first half of the twentieth century show that Belleville then had the highest proportion of Parisian natives in the city. The immigrant presence in Belleville has never been as strong as it is today. Similarly, although Belleville was a working-class neighbourhood until the 1970s, this was no longer the case at the time the myth crystallized. What is the function of this myth and who perpetrates it? A myth is defined first and foremost by its aim, which is usu-

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ally the desire to overcome contradictions. The aim of the Belleville myth is to defuse ethnic conflicts by making them seem outdated. As Claude Levi-Strauss (1958: 231) said:

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A myth is always based on events which occurred in the past: ‘before the creation of the universe’, or ‘at the beginning of time’, in any case, ‘a long time ago’. But the myth’s intrinsic value comes from the fact that these events, which took place at a given time, create a permanent structure; this structure determines the past, the present and the future.

By associating the immigrants with the neighbourhood’s collective memory, the myth acts as a ‘nativity factory’; thus, ethnic conflicts cannot be based on the refusal of one group to accept the other’s presence, since they both equally belong to the neighbourhood. In other words, using Elias and Scotson’s (1965) paradigm, thanks to this myth, immigrants cease to be outsiders and can aspire to the more legitimate status of the established. Thanks to the contraction operated by the myth, attitudes of intolerance and rejection, which are often observed in situations where local residents emphasize their cultural specificity, become totally irrelevant. The myth also concerns relations between social classes. By laying emphasis on the neighbourhood’s identity as working class, it aims to make up for the social inequalities reflected in the housing conditions. Acceptance of this myth represents, for members of the middle and upper classes, a guarantee of their own integration into the neighbourhood. Even more so, they play a significant role in creating and spreading the myth, in particular through the action of La Bellevilleuse, a local residents’ association devoted to fighting the neighbourhood renovation programme. Local residents wishing to weigh upon decisions about the lower Belleville area’s renovation programme created the association in 1988. Today, it has 500 members, mainly from the recently settled middle and upper classes. Participation in this neighbourhood association enables them to express, through militant action, their faith in a certain vision of society. Furthermore, they take an active part in local politics and play a crucial role as intermediaries between society as a whole (represented here by the public authorities and the technical services of the City of Paris) and the minority groups. Because of their strong attachment to ethnic, cultural or social ‘mixing’ or diversity, these new residents may be called ‘multicultural’. Their commitment to collective action, aimed at defending the right of immigrants and the working class to remain in Belleville, can be interpreted on two levels.

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By insisting on people being rehoused in the same neighbourhood, the ‘multiculturals’ anticipate changes in Belleville’s population: they wish to prevent the too rapid gentrification of the neighbourhood and preserve the atmosphere they came for in the first place. Thus, they have become the advocates of a working-class identity, which is not theirs but for which they feel sympathy. They are themselves often of working-class background, and participation in community action is a manner of ‘reparation’. The aim is to promote, at the local level, a social model that has not taken shape at the national level. The commitment of the ‘multiculturals’ has provided the working class with a new edge in power relations. Indeed, when dealing with the authorities, immigrants and French workers are usually deprived of means of pressure; the ‘multiculturals’ are thus able to serve as mediators, which is what they did in relation to the neighbourhood renovation programme. On a wider scale, their role as mediators has enabled them to create a more positive image of a social world that so far had been perceived as impoverished and pernicious. Through their joint reaction of protest against the renewal programme and the bureaucratic monster that supports it, the neighbourhood’s different groups were able to get together symbolically and, to a certain extent, to come closer operationally. W. de Jong (1989) described a similar process in an old neighbourhood of Rotterdam, ‘Het Oude Westen’, which resembles Belleville in many respects. There, ethnic conflicts were overcome thanks to associations of local residents committed to preventing the deterioration of their neighbourhood. The Belleville model can thus be seen as a successful system of regulation of differences; these differences are asserted within separate and structured ‘communities’ and expressed in ‘community areas’, which are interlinked without competing one against another. Urban space is identified as belonging to North African Jewish or Muslim immigrants, to Asians and, to a lesser extent, to Africans. Even though they do not have their specific ‘turf’, the ‘native’ residents, that is to say the French workers, who represent the neighbourhood’s living memory, are a significant component of the Belleville identity. Last, the recently-arrived middle and upper classes, which have the financial means and the extremely valuable ability to circulate with ease in the world of social relationships and contacts, have a specific role to play in the sphere of political and community action. In Belleville, each person has a place, has his or her own place within a dynamic system that is constantly changing. Only on this condition can people overcome their objective differences and share a strong local identity. To describe this model, we chose to compare it with a mosaic, a composite image that refers to a surface made up

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of assembled pieces as well as to the political system of the ancient Ottoman Empire. Belleville can be compared with both: on the one hand, it is made up of juxtaposed, heterogeneous parts and, on the other, the Ottoman Empire is part of the historical and political background of two of the neighbourhood’s main groups. In this respect, the Ottoman Empire, as an attempt to reconcile different cultures within a unified political system, represents a historical precedent, which has yet to be studied in all its implications (Courbage and Fargues, 1992; Valensi, 1986). The mosaic model owes its existence to historical circumstances in which different population groups going different ways found themselves at the same time in the same place. Many immigrants who managed to improve their social status moved out of the insalubrious buildings, whereas rehabilitation programmes gradually evicted others. The gentrification process has increased in scope and is now reaching out for the last fragments of territory still accessible to immigrants. Belleville is undergoing a gradual transformation, from ‘ethnic neighbourhood’ to ‘urban immigrant centre’ (espace de centralité immigrée) (Toubon and Messamah, 1991). Even when the members of a community move to another area, they maintain their ties with Belleville, which continues to develop its community-oriented economic, cultural and social activities: the area is thus becoming a centre of attraction for both symbolic and practical reasons. This phenomenon of ‘territorial dissociation’, which is characteristic of a ‘networked’ society, has been observed in several ethnic neighbourhoods in Paris, such as the Goutte d’Or (Toubon and Messamah, 1991) and the Choisy triangle (Raulin, 1988). This new function seems to be a new stage of ‘transitional area’, or rather, to use the term Ernest Burgess (1928) coined, of ‘first entry ports’, which enable immigrants gradually to adapt to their new society without experiencing a total break with their past way of life. The future of these neighbourhoods remains uncertain; the opinion most commonly held is that they will disappear through acculturation. In our opinion, this is not happening in Belleville. Thanks to new forms of ‘distance shopping’ practised by both the older and more recent diasporas immigrants from Southeast Asia, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, Armenians, North Africans, Africans, Turks and others - ethnic territories can remain a permanent aspect of the urban environment. They can perhaps even serve as a basis for the elaboration of a community structure of national scope.

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Notes

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1 Cf. Hemingway’s celebration of Paris in Paris est une fête, quoted in Ory (1994). 2 This approach owes a great deal to the pioneer (in France) research work carried out by V. de Rudder, M. Guillon and I. Taboada-Leonetti. They focused on multiethnic cohabitation in several neighbourhoods of Paris (the Choisy neighbourhood in the thirteenth arrondissement, the Aligre and Lot Chalon neighbourhoods, and the wealthy neighbourhoods of the sixteenth arrondissement). Summing up the team’s approach, Taboada-Leonetti (1989) writes: ‘Our aim was to carry out empirical studies to show how people manage their differences in an ad hoc manner, depending on the issues at stake and the circumstances, and how they produce collective identities which can vary from one situation to the next without necessarily generating social crises, social dysfunction or ethnic identity crises.’ 3 Unified Jewish Social Fund: this is the main source of funding supporting the various Jewish cultural, social and community institutions in France. 4 Survey conducted in front of shops in Belleville for a study on economic activity in the lower Belleville area (see Fayman and Simon, 1991). 5 The religious revival, which has affected the Jewish community in France, was also felt in Belleville. Today, most kosher stores close on the Sabbath. 6 A detailed map of Asian businesses in Belleville can be found in Ma Mung and Simon (1990: 99). However, this map dates back to 1985 and the neighbourhood’s business infrastructure has changed considerably since then. More recent information is available in Live (1993). 7 This formulation is a condensed synthesis of the definitions of integration as given by two official sources; the Commission de la Nationalité (1988) and the Haut conseil à l’intégration (1991). 8 The notion of ‘local social order’ refers to the one G. Suttles formulated about a slum in Chicago. Even though those who live there have been rejected by mainstream society as ‘people with disreputable characteristics’, slums are not ‘disorganized’ (Suttles, 1968). Social order is interpreted here as a system of rules, norms and values making it possible for different social groups, which are interdependent yet reject each other, to live together. In Belleville, where residents belong to very different ethnic or social groups, the neighbourhood stands for a reference. Since all these groups live in the same area, to get along, they must develop a common code of behaviour for the neighbourhood.

For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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Political dynamics in the city: three case studies Hassan Bousetta

The article by political scientist Hassan Bousetta first appeared in 2000 in an edited book entitled Minorities in European Cities. Bousetta’s doctoral thesis, from which this article is drawn, is one of the first systematic qualitative comparisons of the collective dynamics, the socio-political participation and the ethnic mobilisation of immigrant minorities in three mid-size European cities. It was followed in the 2000s by several other studies using a similar theoretical framework and an analogous research methodology. Bousetta’s work is considered pioneering in the field of comparative studies of immigrant associations in Europe. This chapter on the collective dynamics, sociopolitical participation and ethnic mobilization of immigrant minorities is based on comparative case studies of Moroccan communities in three small and ethnic mobilization medium-sized cities in Belgium (Liège), the Netherlands (Utrecht) and France (Liège). Three main ideas inform the design and rationale of this research. The first is that immigrant incorporation is increasingly being shaped by socioeconomic and political dynamics at work locally. In this age of postindustrial transition, inter-ethnic relations are increasingly entangled with broader social and economic phenomena affecting cities. In countries like France, the Netherlands and Belgium, this is reflected in patterns of policy management of ethnic diversity. The policy interventions of these countries’ public authorities have gradually begun to address the socio-spatial dislocations confronting urban areas. A significant feature of European governments’ policy response to urban decline and immigrant integration has been to decentralize power to local authorities. Whereas migratory flow regulation remains a matter for governmental and European intergovernmental approaches, the integration part of migration policies is often tailored to fit immigrant policy issues emerging in the big cities.

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Second, it is important to emphasize that migrant communities are not necessarily at the forefront of the new relationship between economy and society, for which the city has set the stage. From a political sociology point of view, the city has surfaced as a relevant and privileged unit for empirical investigation. For political and social scientists, issues such as the political incorporation of migrants, the enfranchisement of foreigners and immigrant ethnic mobilization provide the basis for a new appraisal of relations between civil and political society. They raise the question of how best immigrant minority groups can organize and participate in local decision-making to defend and preserve their collective interests. The third idea at the heart of this research is its focus on the collective response of one immigrant minority group in three settings and to study the focus and patterns of its collective sociopolitical insertion.

Ethnic mobilization and sociopolitical participation

immigrant labour force

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Immigrant Sociopolitical Participation Earlier research on postwar immigration showed that immigrants recruited as a labour force of guestworkers quickly confronted the need to organize their collective interests. Initially, they did it within the framework of industrial relations, but their claims quickly moved beyond that arena. Mark Miller (1981) and Catherine Withol de Wenden (1977, 1978, 1988) were among the first to reflect on these realities and to challenge the then dominant Marxist assumptions about the political quiescence of the immigrant labour force (Miller, 1981: 229). Both authors suggested that migrants were becoming more than a temporary labour force and were developing new kinds of political mobilizations that did not rely on electoral politics. In the framework of this theoretical and empirical reconsideration, immigrants came to be regarded as political subjects, rather than the political objects they had been seen as until then to sustain class divisions and the conservative needs of the capitalist economy. Earlier work on the political sociology of immigration reintroduced some basic reflections on the boundaries of the nation-state’s political community and on the sustained challenge migration posed to classical conceptions of citizenship and nationality. In most cases, first-generation migrant workers in continental Europe acquired differentiated and inferior citizenship statuses, to which Hammar later attached the label denizenship (Hammar, 1990). As non-nationals, immigrant workers in countries like France, the Netherlands and

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Belgium were granted access to various social and civil rights, but their political rights were restricted.1 They were, in effect, excluded from electoral participation. An important exception to this rule occurred when the Dutch, Irish and Scandinavian governments gave foreigners the franchise at the local level. Unlike their counterparts in France, Germany and Belgium, immigrants in these countries were allowed active electoral participation (the right to vote and be elected) at the local level. In terms of political analysis, this was and still is a significant factor because immigrant communities in Belgium, Germany and France have never represented a significant electoral force.2 For a number of reasons, the sociopolitical participation of immigrant ethnic minorities is an important and worthwhile subject of study for the political sociology of liberal democratic societies. In recent years, it has become a bit more multicultural, multiethnic and multi-religious. Withol de Wenden and Hargreaves (1993: 2-3) identify three reasons for the continuing significance of immigrant sociopolitical activism. First, are the memories of alternative means of political participation open to disenfranchized immigrant communities, such as strikes, hunger strikes and marches? Second, consultative institutions have been established in many countries where, as foreigners, immigrants are not entitled to full political rights. Third, immigrants have, to varying degrees, been granted access to nationality in their receiving countries. This option, which opens the door to full citizenship, has had particular relevance for the second and third generation, particularly in countries that have traditionally based their naturalization procedures on jus soli.3 A fourth reason for studying the sociopolitical involvement of immigrants is because the binding relationship between nationality and citizenship, at least in its political dimension, has over the last 20 years been seriously thrown into question. Citizenship of the European Union and foreigners’ experiences of enfranchisement at the local level are instances of a decoupling of citizenship and nationality, the main consequence of which is to open the door towards granting some political rights to non-nationals. These elements indicate that, over the past 20 years, the situation in northwestern immigrant receiving European countries, such as the Netherlands, Belgium and France, has changed qualitatively. Immigrants and their supporters have gained some important victories. Whereas migrant workers and their families were left with practically no access to mainstream political institutions in the 1970s, most immigrant receiving European countries have now established a number of procedures and institutions to increase their political

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institutions and policies

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participation and representation. Though some convergence is observable, the nature and scope of these channels of participation differ from one country to another (Layton Henry, 1990). Nevertheless, there are now a number of formal channels through which immigrants can articulate their political demands. These institutional developments have influenced methods of theorizing immigrants’ political inclusion. Breaking away from culturalist interpretations of immigrants’ sociopolitical behaviour, recent literature has paid increasing attention to the role and influence of institutions and policies. It has been argued, for instance, that both the nature and impact of immigrant political participation predominantly depend on the political context they confront (Ireland, 1994). This approach leads to a crucial point for European comparative research, for it holds that most of the variations that can be identified across national boundaries are more dependent on the specificities of the domestic political context than on the deliberate strategic choices of minority groups. Without going deeper into the complexities of the theoretical debate, a cautious interpretation of the actual role of institutions and policies is called for to avoid turning the proper role of immigrants into that of a passive agent determined by structural political and institutional factors. Any attempt to influence politics and to gain more access to the political process necessarily implies the mobilization of collective actors. The organizational basis of immigrant political action should therefore be taken as a focal point in studying immigrant participatory patterns. Before discussing this in relation to the Moroccan experiences in three cities, a clarification of two related concepts of particular relevance to the problématique is proposed in the next section, namely the concepts of ethnic mobilization and of ethnic minority associationism. Ethnic mobilization and ethnic minority associationism As suggested earlier, several channels to political participation are open to ethnic minorities. In the three countries central to this analysis, social scientists have pointed out the importance of the liberalization of foreigners’ rights of association to the political participatory opportunities available to immigrant communities (Layton Henry, 1990). The setting up of independent associations has been a major development for immigrant communities denied all the attributes of citizenship of the majority. It has opened a door for them to organize their own sociopolitical interests in institutions independent both of the country of origin and of the host country’s various solidarity organizations. Ethnic minority associational life has in many instances

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provided the organizational basis for new types of identity-driven mobilizations, such as ethnic mobilization. However, and this is the point to emphasize here, ethnic minority associations have a twofold orientation, which allows them to distinguish between their role as conveyors of ethnic solidarity and their role as ethnic political actors. The point is that the study of immigrant minority associational life does not provide the basis for a single conceptual approach in terms of ethnic mobilization. Ethnic minority associations can provide an organizational vessel to some forms of ethnic solidarity without necessarily being the vector of ethnic political mobilizations. By introducing this distinction, I wish to reinstate a point expressed earlier by ethnic competition scholars who established a theoretical and empirical distinction between the concepts of ethnic solidarity and ethnic mobilization (Olzak, 1983; Olzak and Nagel, 1986). There has been a tendency in the English-speaking literature to subsume all forms of immigrant collective action under the category of ethnic mobilization. Positing an immigrant ethnic mobilization needs a priori definition of what is ethnically defined in their mobilization, as well as a conceptual framework that allows one to account for forms of immigrant mobilization that are not organized solely along ethnic lines. As John Rex’s Barthian perspective on ethnic mobilization suggests, this should depend above all on a situational definition of the projects in which ethnic groups engage (Barth, 1969; Rex, 1991, 1994). In other words, the meaning of ethnic political mobilization does not rest on the cultural values and norms of the group’s membership, but on a process, which includes boundary drawing, in which ethnicity serves as an instrumental resource for collective action. This conception of ethnic mobilization is of interest because it provides one with a pivotal concept on which to build a broader conception of multicultural society. For Rex, ethnic mobilization in a multicultural society is a valuable strategy of collective action, which immigrant ethnic minorities should pursue to defend and preserve their collective interests (Rex, 1985, 1991, 1994). He does not see ethnic mobilization as being at odds with the definition of the idea of equal citizenship of all individuals of the liberal democratic tradition. As he put it (Rex, 1994: 15), ‘In fact, one of the goals of ethnic mobilization is precisely the achievement of this kind of equal citizenship and it may well be that ethnically mobilized groups will act together to achieve such an end both with other ethnic groups in a similar position and with indigenous peers.’ With this clarification, we can now turn to the role of immigrant ethnic associations in relation to their communities and to the political process. Ethnic associations have received unequal interest from

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academics. In France, they have formed the subject of numerous works; in other countries, such as the Netherlands, they have been almost ignored in social science research.4 A brief international overview of studies of immigrant ethnic associational life shows a great variety of interests and approaches, which cannot be encompassed within a single problématique. Though social science researchers tend to view their roles and functions quite positively, ethnic associations have been analysed in different countries at different times for different analytical purposes. In an international comparative study, S. Jenkins and her co-authors looked at ethnic associations from the point of view of the satisfaction they provide to fellow co-ethnics. They suggested that their role be reconsidered for inclusion as policy actors in the delivery of social services (Jenkins et al., 1988). The role and functions of ethnic associations have also received consideration in Rex’s classic community study of Sparkbrook (Rex, 1973). Another study by Rex, Joly and Wilpert (1987) looked at the functions of ethnic associations from an international comparative perspective and viewed them as a non-transitional phenomenon offering a range of identity options to immigrant populations. Schoeneberg (1983) provided an interesting and comprehensive assessment of the role and functions of ethnic associations in Germany. He sought to establish the relationship between organizational participation in ethnic associations, direct contact with majority group members and cultural assimilation. From his research, he concluded that these relationships are complex and depend largely on the nature of the organizations, though they can be assumed to have a general positive effect.

Three local case studies5

weak mobilization

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Liège In 1996, the Moroccan community of Liège numbered 5270 individuals, most of who had come as immigrant workers or student migrants. This community included numerous organizations displaying diverse profiles. Moroccan ethnic associations in Liège are structured along a number of well-established cleavages, including gender, age, ideological orientation towards the country of origin, ideological orientation towards the country of residence, religion or secularism and regional identities (Berbers versus non-Berbers). Though the Moroccan community’s formal organizational structure in Liège does not reveal much variation in comparison with the two other cities, one can contend that this community is weakly mobilized in the formal political field. It has also failed to establish a

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coherent political movement in the face of deteriorating socioeconomic conditions. A good illustration of this is the absence of any significant involvement in electoral politics by Moroccans of Belgian nationality.6 The relationship between the Moroccan community in Liège and local political parties is a chapter that still has to be written. Another indication is that Moroccan ethnic associations are clearly under-represented in local inter-organizational networks mobilized around immigration/integration issues. A range of multiethnic and Belgian solidarity organizations, such as human rights associations and antiracist groups, dominate the mobilized actors. The ideological fragmentation of these organizations may partly explain the Moroccans’ under-representation. Many solidarity organizations are either affiliated to a specific segment of Belgium’s rather pillar-like society, such as the Christian or socialist movement, or are close to alternative political parties such as Ecolo, the green party in Frenchspeaking Belgium. To explain this situation, it is necessary to go beyond normative judgements about the capacity of leaders to articulate the demands of their community. More interestingly, the point is to analyse the interaction between the internal and institutional factors that shaped the sociopolitical trajectory of the Moroccan community in Liège. The most important obstacles that Moroccans, like other smaller ethnic and religious minorities, have repeatedly confronted in Liège is a shared consensus among the political elite of the majority about the normative meaning of integration. So far, the dominant assimilationist ideological framework has impeded the emergence of alternative ways of representing ethnic minorities either in the formal political process or in the implementation of public policies. To some extent, one could contend that this has resulted in the reproduction of immigrant’s powerlessness through a systematic non-politicization and non-specific decision-making. In comparison with the three other case studies, the absence of a specifically local policy theorizing on integration issues is evident. In 1973, Liège had, however, experienced a pioneering initiative with the establishment of a consultative institution. This consultative council, the CCILg (Conseil consultatif des Immigrés de la Ville de Liège), was for a long time the only formal institution where immigrant minority communities could articulate their political demands. Like many peer consultative bodies, the CCILg has steadily confronted a number of difficulties in its communication with the local council and has never managed to increase its power within local politics (see Martiniello, 1992). The CCILg stopped its work in 1991 and the new municipal authorities, elected in 1994, have ten-

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institution building

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tatively begun to develop a policy of interculturalism. This new policy framework has for the first time sought to stimulate a few associative projects promoting ‘intercultural encounters’. However, the relationship between local authorities on the one hand, and multiculturalist and ethnic activists on the other, have suffered from the enduring lack of communication between the local council and voluntary associations. An illustration of this was given recently by a confrontational mobilization against the local authorities and Department of Intercultural Relations on the issue of the voluntary sector’s representation in the newly established regional centres of integration, a new institution promoted by the Walloon government. The lack of consistent and coherent avenues of political participation did not, however, lead to political quiescence. The public political sphere’s lack of investment is counterbalanced by vigorous activity within the community’s institutions and associations. In fact, the context in which Moroccan sociopolitical action takes place in Liège emerges from a historical outlook towards its institution building. In the earlier phases of Moroccan settlement in Liège, collective structuration took on two main orientations, in opposition to one another. The two dominant organizational forms were initially developed by Islamic groups under Moroccan government control7 and by secular leftist groups. The former’s objective was to establish Islamic associations committed to setting up and managing mosques. Political issues in the homeland, though, largely informed the political activities of the secularists of the left. However, these types of organizations, which included the Liège section of the National Union of Moroccan Students (UNEM) and Solidarité Arabe, have gradually focused their activities on local issues. Members of the Moroccan secularist left wing have for instance been involved in consultative politics at the city level in Liège within the CCILg and at the level of the French-speaking community within the CCPOE (Conseil consultatif pour les Populations d’origine étrangère). A number of Moroccan Islamic organizations have in the past struggled for autonomy against Moroccan consular representatives and have fed a number of conflicts that have resulted in the creation of new mosques.8 These conflicts involved mixed issues of identity, ideology and theology. It is apparent from these internal debates, however, that the sociopolitical interests and attitudes of Moroccan Muslims are fragmented and not amenable to a single strategy of ethnic mobilization. Empirical studies of Islamic institution building reveal considerable dissent among the membership of Islamic associations over the issue of publicizing Islam. Whereas some streams have pleaded for a more visible positioning of Islamic identi-

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ties in the public sphere, others have opposed and mobilized to keep their religious space immune from public concern. The El Itissam mosque has undoubtedly gone furthest in the first strategy, while the El Mouahidin mosque has traditionally opted for the second one. The El Iman mosque, a stronghold of Moroccan consular agents and of the friendship societies of Moroccan merchants and workers (amicales), has on the other hand relied on forms of ethnic lobbying based on individual networks among the local political elite. These amicales have also had two representatives elected after the CCILg’s elections of 1984. Islamic associations in Liège enter the public political arena not only over local matters, such as a request for Islamic cemeteries9 and the organization of educational activities, but over national issues such as the representation of Islam according to the Belgian law of 1974 (see Panafit, 1997). The Islamic association El Itissam is at the forefront of this claim and has developed a strategy of vertical integration (at both national and regional levels) with Brussels-based Islamic groups. Unlike the secular left wing, Islamic groups have not participated in regular political relays within the local political arena and have only managed to find occasional access to the policy process on issues of direct concern to them.

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national issues

Lille The 6260 Moroccans in Lille represent the most important group of non-nationals. Apart from a small minority who acquired French citizenship, first-generation Moroccan immigrants have had no access whatsoever to the electoral process. Their status as non-nationals has denied them access to the most formal political arena. The first significant developments in terms of electoral political participation appeared with the political emergence of the second generation. In Lille, the most recent municipal elections confirmed the slow and uneasy emergence of second-generation individuals in the political arena. In 1989, three candidates from North African youth organizations were put forward by the socialist party. One of them, a co-founder of Les Craignos, was elected and appointed the mayor’s delegate for ‘citizenship and human rights’. In 1995, several North African candidates ran again for a seat in the local council. Among them, two well-known figures in second-generation North African associational life and a social worker of Moroccan origin have been successful.10 Before the second generation started to organize politically and to set up its associations in Lille, first-generation Moroccans had been less quiescent than Beur historiography has sometimes tended to

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suggest. In Lille, as in other European cities, the Moroccan government became involved early on in setting up collective infrastructures for Moroccan migrants. Setting up a federation of amicales in the north was here again the Moroccan regime’s pivotal instrument for strategy of control. The role of Moroccan diplomats in this process of community organization and control was never clearer than in the 1986 conflict when Moroccan miners of the northern French coalfield opposed the Charbonnages de France. After a long strike led by a group of Moroccan miners from the French trade union CGT (Conféderation générale du Travail), 3600 Moroccan miners were unfairly dismissed after an agreement was reached between the Moroccan embassy and their employer, the Charbonnages de France (for more details, see Sanguinetti 1991: 75-8). Although many Moroccan miners were forced to return to Morocco, the struggle for their social and economic benefits is still going on today. In 1987, the former Moroccan leaders of the CGT who remained in France founded an independent association (Association des Mineurs Marocains du Nord) and joined the national federation of the Association des Travailleurs Marocains en France (ATMF). Parallel with the first-generation community organizations the second generation, most often headed by young Algerians, has emerged in the sociopolitical field at both local and national levels. As Bouamama recalls, the mobilization of the second generation and the setting up of associations started to become a central issue in Lille with the first nationwide ‘Marches des Beurs’ of 1983 (Bouamama, 1989). Texture and Les Craignos are two important associations that were founded in this period. The setting up of a large number of smaller associations, most often youth associations involved at a neighbourhood level, has recently followed their pioneering work in the city of Lille. While Les Craignos has set up a federation of neighbourhoods youth associations, the Fédération des Associations des Jeunes de Quartier (FAJQ), Texture has supported the foundation of a multiethnic immigrant women’s association called Femmes d’ici et d’ailleurs. In Lille, as in Liège and Utrecht, in recent years there has been a strong development of Islamic associations. The Lille Sud mosque is at the forefront of the mobilization of North African Muslims in the north. Its activities are strikingly similar to those of the El Itissam association in Liège. Vertical integration with regional Islamic associations and Paris-based federations, mobilization on educational matters, and the provision of services and activities to the second generation are some of the issues with which the Lille Sud mosque is engaged.

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There are two interesting points about the nature of North African political incorporation. First, there seems to be a strong generational divide between firstand second-generation collective action. Whereas the first generation relied mostly on ethnic mobilization within trade unions, independent associations and mosques, the second generation tends more towards universalistic political inclusion. This has given rise to some interesting debates among members of North African associations in Lille. Texture has promoted the idea of intergenerational solidarity within the migrant population and has sought to distance itself from narrow forms of ethnic mobilization. In 1989, for instance, it sponsored an electoral list purportedly composed of an aggregate of candidates from migrant communities and socially excluded populations. The mobilizations of France Plus and Espace Intégration are further examples of ethnic mobilizations not necessarily fitting the nature and profile of the organizations in question. In Lille and in the north of France more generally, these two organizations have developed a discursive strategy of republican integration (namely assimilation) into French society, while at the same time activating ethnic boundaries as a basis for political bargaining. This apparent contradiction has been widely discussed in the French literature; it is what Vincent Geisser (1997) tentatively identified as the emergence of a ‘republican ethnicity’. Unlike Texture, which has deliberately avoided grounding sociopolitical activism in ethnic identifications, the latter are interesting examples of ethnic mobilization being embedded in discursive strategic use of an assimilationist vocabulary. Second, the so-called town policy (la politique de la ville), which has been implemented as a partnership between national government, regions and municipalities, has provided a number of professional opportunities to individuals formerly involved in immigrant associational life. This policy has created and sustained a demand for leadership within impoverished immigrant neighbourhoods. One can speak here of the institutional production of an immigrant associational life of proximity. The seamy side of the story, however, is that it has increased control over the practices and ideologies of second-generation activists, while weakening the autonomous political action of civil society (Bouamama, 1989).

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universalistic political inclusion

Utrecht The Moroccan population in Utrecht consists of 13,595 individuals. Unlike their counterparts in Lille and Liège, Moroccans in Utrecht have been enfranchized for local elections since 1986. The Moroccan community has also been identified as a specific target group for the

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amicales

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national minority policy implemented since 1983. At the Utrecht city level, integration has been under constant consideration for at least two decades. In 1973, a consultative council was created in Utrecht to advise local authorities on community relations issues (Feirabend and Rath, 1996). The amicales responded very early on to the opening up of this avenue of participation. In Utrecht, as in several other Dutch cities, the amicales, with the support of Moroccan diplomats and through their networks of personal contacts within the Moroccan communities, have been acknowledged as legitimate representatives of the political interests of this population,11 though for a very short period. After 1976, the amicales were vigorously challenged by the creation of a nationwide independent organization of Moroccan workers, the KMAN (van der Valk, 1996). Most activists involved in establishing left-wing Moroccan associations in Utrecht have had some initial involvement with the KMAN. This was so for the founders of two very influential associations in Utrecht – AMMU and the KMANU, breakaways from the KMAN. Once the amicales had lost their influence in Utrecht (and in the Netherlands in general), AMMU played an important role as policy adviser to the local council and has come to be the most central actor in Utrecht’s Moroccan community. AMMU has also stimulated the creation of separate ethnic associations for Moroccan women and for Moroccan youth (PMJU). The activities of left-wing Moroccan activists in Utrecht raise important questions about the co-optation of elites. The minority policy in Utrecht (and more generally in the Netherlands) has created and sustained an impressive number of social work, multicultural and antiracist institutions and agencies. This has created numerous opportunities for elites, both as professionals and as leaders of ethnic communities. Minority representation of these institutions by an elite clearly creates a number of non-political opportunities to voice immigrant claims within the mainstream. However, Moroccans have also pursued strategies that challenge the integrationist approach of Utrecht’s Moroccan leaders of the secularist left. Among these are forms of ethnic mobilization around regional identities in the cultural field. Rifan Berbers are currently the most active in this area. Their strategy of institution building has steadily confronted the opposition of Moroccan left-wing associations. Ethnoreligious mobilization within Islamic associations is another strategy pursued by Moroccans in Utrecht.12 As Feirabend and Rath (1996) point out, Utrecht is more reluctant than other Dutch cities to create a space for Islamic institutions within local sociopolitical life. This development is reflected in

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the decision to stop funding the educational activities provided by the El Dawa mosque,13 the biggest mosque in Utrecht. Over the last year or so, the city of Utrecht has completely reconsidered its policy options in relation to immigrant minority communities. Publication of research the local council commissioned from the University of Utrecht was at the source of a new assessment of the problématique. The Burgers Report called for a shift from a mi- the Burgers Report nority policy towards corrective measures focused on socioeconomic differences (Burgers et al., 1996). The ensuing debate between the municipality and representatives of ethnic minorities led to the definition of a new policy hinged on the operationalization of the concept of ‘interculturalization’ – a far cry, however, from the intercultural approach of the city of Liège. One element of this policy, besides its attempt to combat a dualization of urban life along ethnic lines, is a new partnership between ethnic minority self-organization and the municipality. The framework for this relationship had already been defined in a policy report of 1989. In the programme the municipality recently issued, the role of self-organization is identified as a bridge between societal and internal community dynamics. The concept of ‘interculturalization’ is a central idea in this policy framework seeking to develop a proactive approach to the forming of a social coalition within society (maatschappelijke coalitievorming). This reflects an attempt to avoid the separate development of ethnic communities, which was allegedly produced by the earlier minority policy. Indeed, the city of Utrecht’s new policy implicitly gives a positive answer to the following questions: Has the minority policy led to the isolation of immigrant minority communities from the mainstream? And was the old policy framework disruptive in terms of social cohesion?

Conclusion This comparative overview of three case studies has taught us some important lessons about patterns and forms of immigrant political incorporation. We have observed sociopolitical participation in mainstream political institutions, ethnic mobilization and less politically significant internal community dynamics. The minority response the Moroccan communities exemplified revealed the importance of ethnic mobilization within independent ethnic and religious associations, the deployment of civic, youth, gender and neighbourhood mobilization, as well as the involvement of minority candidates in mainstream party politics.

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capacity for mobilization

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The Islamic groups and associations have shown us that their form of ethnic mobilization may not be temporary. In all three cities, Islamic organizations proved their capacity to attract massive audiences within Moroccan communities and one could contend that the impact of Islamic ethnic mobilization is, in political terms, still in its infancy. Although some Islamic associations of the older generation are resisting Islam being brought into the public sphere, the opposite phenomenon has been growing in significance within Moroccan communities since the mid-1980s. Though one can, of course, identify more secularized attitudes among the second and third generations, the ethnic mobilization of Islamic associations should not be seen as dependent on cultural and religious values and norms. Islam provides an identity option, the significance of which will depend in the long run on the projects pursued by this youth and by the place open to them within their societies. On the other hand, the secularist left-wing movement of Moroccan workers and students that dominated the stage during the 1970s and 1980s has in the three cities lost its capacity to engage in mass contentious collective action. We have also seen appearing the mobilization of youth, gender, generational and locational identities, which proves that minority communities are internally segmented along a number of consequential divides. These factors of internal division should be seen as being a problem intrinsically, even though they preclude the possibility of uniting resources and energies. Of course, a common immigrant political agenda cross-cutting internal and external ethnic boundaries is, under such circumstances, close to utopia. In the three case studies, we have seen external institutional forces constrain integrationist forms of political incorporation. We have also seen that local authorities have a number of policy options at hand to deal with the sociopolitical demands of immigrant minority communities. The local authorities of the three cities under review adopted policies of sustained communication with ethnic and multiethnic minority associations (Utrecht, Lille), funding to ethnic and multiethnic associations (Lille, Liège, Utrecht), consultative politics (Liège, Utrecht), and enfranchisement for local elections (Utrecht).14 The efficiency of these policies partly depends on their cumulation and coordination. However, as the Dutch case study reveals, a consistent, coordinated, multicultural approach still manifests serious difficulties. This latter indication points out that both the institutional political strategy of incorporation and the minority response have not had far-reaching effects on the collective position of minority communi-

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ties in the three societies. In other words, while the nature of immigrant’s inclusion has diversified, the impact of immigrants’ mobilization on a wide number of issues of collective importance has remained extremely weak. The collective position of Moroccans in areas such as education, employment or housing in the three countries, remains an issue of serious concern and the same holds true for the legal position of Moroccan women. Although Miller (1981) was partly right in saying immigrants and their offspring are neither voiceless nor powerless, the reality seems to fall short of his optimistic view of foreign workers as an ‘emerging political force’. One must conclude that the social, political and economic emancipation of ethnic minority groups is still heavily dependent on the implementation of liberal political agendas from the majorities. The experience that Moroccans share with other ethnic minorities in northwest Europe leads to another more general conclusion. Although their demographic share is massively increasing within European urban populations, this has not yet been reflected in the most formal political institutions in which, collectively, they remain under-represented.

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Notes 1 One should, however, call for cautious use of the classical Marshallian distinction of citizenship rights in three spheres: civic, social and political (Marshall, 1950). In many circumstances, political activities are not dependent on the possession of formal political rights. The civil and social rights open to immigrants play in many cases as a legal juridical protection to their extra-parliamentary political activities (see also Miller, 1981: 15-20). 2 On this particular point, the situation for foreign communities in continental Europe is substantially different from that in Britain, where foreign residents who are citizens of Commonwealth countries are fully enfranchized. 3 Withol de Wenden and Hargreaves (1993: 2) rightly note that this option has always been more than a theoretical possibility for foreign residents even in countries implementing jus sanguinis-types of naturalization regulations. 4 There are some notable exceptions to the rule, including among others de Graaf (1986); de Graaf, Penninx, Stoové (1988) and Van der Valk (1996). 5 Use is made in this research of a qualitative methodology based on the selection of three urban sites of empirical work in three different countries. The three urban contexts were chosen in the three countries with the largest Moroccan emigrant communities. Among the 1.1 million Moroccan emigrants settled in Europe, almost half are permanent residents in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. I have selected three cities that attracted significant numbers of immigrant workers in the period of massive immigration from the Mediteranean (1959-74). It should also be mentioned that they are university cities, which is a relevant consideration given that the migration of Moroccan students towards European universities has played an important role in the sociopolitical organization of these communities.

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6 In Begium, the most formal aspects of political participation (the right to vote and to stand as a candidate) are dependent on the possession of Belgian nationality. 7 Historically, the first attempts to create collective infrastructures for Moroccan workers came from the government of the country of origin. These resulted in the establishment of a European-wide network of amicales (friendship societies of Moroccan merchants and workers). Their role consisted of organizing political control over the Moroccan communities. The very undemocratic activities of the amicales supported by Moroccan embassies and consulates have, in many middle sized European cities, triggered the same sort of fierce conflicts that were being activated in the same period in bigger cities like Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris (van der Valk, 1996). 8 The mosque of El Mouahidin early on refused to make any reference to the ‘the Commander of the Faithfuls’, King Hassan II of Moroccó, during the traditional Friday speech (Saïdi and Aghion, 1987). 9 Liège is one of the few Belgian cities with an Islamic cemetery within a Belgian one. The high demand for burial in this cemetery can no longer be handled, thus the request for a new Islamic cemetery in the region of Liege. 10 Farid Sellani, a young Algerian, running on the list of former and re-elected Mayor Pierre Mauroy, has been appointed the delegate to support the ‘association’s projects’. 11 One of Utrecht’s first amicale activists, and later co-founder of the controversial Union of Moroccan Mosques in the Netherlands (UMMON), recently reflected on this period in a chapter of a book in which the leader of the Dutch right-wing party VVD held conversations with minority leaders (see, Bolkestein, 1997: 45-65). 12 There are six mosques in Utrecht, which can be classified in three groups: (1) the mosques controlled by the coalition of Moroccan consular agents, the amicales and the Union of Moroccan Mosques of the Netherlands (UMMON), (2) the El Dawa mosque of the Worldwide Islamic League and (3) a group of smaller independent and neighbourhood mosques. 13 In the Municipal Department for Welfare’s 1997 programme, this decision is justified as follows: ‘The project has been funded for two years (...) Although it answers a need, we are not ready to extend the subsidies. There is no more funding for 1997. It is important that we do not provide structural funding to educational activities organized by people who are not independent of religious organizations’ (rough translation of Ontwerp Welzijnsprogramma, 1997, City of Utrecht, Department of Welfare). 14 Although the enfranchisement of foreigners is a prerogative of national authorities, local decision-makers can influence political participation through, for instance, policies of information in the languages of minorities.

For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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Integration and nations: the nation-state and research on immigrants in Western Europe1 Adrian Favell

The proliferation of integration studies in Europe is, according to the sociologist and philosopher Adrian Favell, part and parcel of a wider ‘nationstate-society’ paradigm. Those who work within this paradigm see the nation state as the principal organising unit of society. Moreover, they see society as a bounded, functional whole. The state achieves this by creating policies and institutions. Favell has doubts about whether this ‘nation-state-society’ paradigm is still sufficiently appropriate for understanding the evolving relationship between immigrants and their host context. This article is a strong plea for research that goes beyond such crude and fairly static entities such as nation-states. Despite its somewhat old-fashioned, functionalist air, ‘integration’ is still the most popular way of conceptualizing the developing relationship between old European nation-states and their growing non-European, ‘ethnic’ immigrant populations. It is also widely used to frame the advocacy of political means for dealing with the consequences of immigration in the post-World War II period. Many similar, difficult-to-define concepts can be used to describe the process of social change that occurs when immigrants are ‘integrated’ into their new host society. But none occurs with the frequency or all-encompassing scope of the idea of integration across such a broad range of West European countries. This fact continues to decisively structure policy research and policy debate on these subjects in Europe. The wide and varied ordinary language usages of the term are linked to a deeper association of the concept with a longstanding intellectual paradigm at the root of modern western society’s conception of itself. This paradigm roots applied social policy thinking in the idea of the ‘nation-state’ as the principal organizing unit of society, with all the epistemological assumptions and political constraints that this term implies. By using the term, writers continue

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to conceive of ‘society’ as a bounded, functional whole, structured by a state which is able to create policies and institutions to achieve this goal. This ‘nation-state-society’ paradigm may now no longer be the appropriate one for charting the evolving relationship of new immigrants and their host contexts in Europe. In this paper, then, I seek to explore the strengths and weaknesses of ‘integration’ as the seemingly inevitable framework for discussing issues in policy-directed research on immigration and ethnic relations.2 After discussing why integration is still such a prevalent term in European thinking – despite emerging theoretical challenges associated with globalization and transnationalism – I explore some of the distinct national and supra-national contributions to research in this field. Our comparative understanding is often distorted by the predominant focus in much research on big and established country cases such as Britain, Germany or France. I also make reference therefore to newer debates surfacing in less central European nations such as Italy, the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as the insights afforded by unusual cases such as Austria and Belgium.

‘Integration’ in ordinary language usages

long-term consequences

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What is typically spoken of when academics or policy makers use the term ‘integration’ to speak of a collective goal regarding the destiny of new immigrants or ethnic minorities? We can, of course, think of a long list of measures designed to deal with the longer term consequences of migration and settlement. These can be distinguished from immigration policies per se, such as policies on border control, rights of entry and abode, or of asylum. ‘Integration’ conceptualizes what happens after, conceiving practical steps in a longer process which invariably includes the projection of both deep social change for the country concerned, and of fundamental continuity between the past and some idealized social endpoint. Measures concerned with integration include (the list is by no means exhaustive, but indicative): basic legal and social protection; formal naturalization and citizenship (or residency-based) rights; anti-discrimination laws; equal opportunities positive action; the creation of corporatist and associational structures for immigrant or ethnic organizations; the redistribution of targeted socioeconomic funds for minorities in deprived areas; policy on public housing; policy on law and order; multicultural education policy; policies and laws on tolerating cultural practices; cultural funding for ethnic associations or religious organizations; language and cultural courses in the host society’s culture,

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and so on (for similar checklists of policies, see Kymlicka, 1995, pp. 37-8; Soysal, 1994, pp. 79-82; Vertovec, 1997, pp. 61-2). What is interesting is when and why such measures are packaged together and interlinked within the broader concept of ‘integration’. The very difficult-to-define process of social change with historical continuity pictured here, is for sure spoken of using a plethora of other terms: assimilation, absorption, acculturation, accommodation, incorporation, inclusion, participation, cohesion-building, enfranchisement, toleration, anti-discrimination, and so on. Yet other terms on this list are either vaguer (absorption, accommodation, toleration); too technically precise, and hence absorbed within integration (such as incorporation, which specifies a legal process, or antidiscrimination, which only describes one type of practical measure); or are concepts which can be used descriptively without necessarily invoking the active intervention of some political agency (assimilation, or acculturation). In recent years, less loaded terms such as inclusion and participation have had some popularity, but neither can match the technical ‘social engineering’ quality of the term integration; nor do they invoke a broader vision of an ideal endgoal for society as a whole. Visionary academics and pragmatic policy makers all need a descriptive and normative umbrella term, that can give coherence and polish to a patchy list of policy measures aiming at something which, on paper, looks extremely difficult and improbable: the (counterfactual) construction of a successful, well-functioning multicultural or multi-racial society. The identification of this conceptual space in progressive-minded practical thinking about the consequences of immigration has – however euphemistic – always been a key part of the term’s success. The other key thing about the list of measures seen to be part of ‘integration policy’, is that they are all things that a state can ‘do’. Although for the time being it is rare to come across a specifically designated ‘Ministry of Integration’, the policy field has emerged as a differentiated area of government, often crossing the competences of different departments. Integration is thus not only an ideal goal for society; it is also something a government sets out to achieve. This assumption is crucial to the nation-state centred conceptualization of social processes that will be found at the core of practical ordinary language usages of the term. Such a use precludes the idea that a society might achieve an integrated state of affairs without the state’s intervention. Sociologically speaking, we can, of course, conceive of integration taking place without the structure-imposing involvement of the state. Immigrants can be ‘integrated’ into the local labour market as

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employees or service providers, or they can be ‘integrated’ into complex inter-community relations at, say, city or district level. Looked at from a bottom-up perspective – where the integration of society as a whole is not assumed as the end goal of interaction between ethnically diverse groups – multicultural relations can be seen to take all kinds of organized and semi-organized forms. These may not at all be encompassed by the top-down, organized structures typical of state thinking on the subject, such as policy frameworks, official channels of participation, or legally circumscribed rights, restrictions and entitlements. Multiculturalism as a descriptive state-of-affairs, in this sense, could be the product of something that never had anything to do with the ‘multicultural’ policies or institutions of the state. However – as historical theorists of the state would remind us with their vivid terminology – the state has always constituted itself in the way it imposes formal structures and institutionalizes social relations via a systematic ‘embracing’, ‘caging’ and/or ‘penetrating’ of society (Torpey, 2000). This logic of incorporation has invariably in recent history taken a dominant form of collective social power (to borrow the terms of Mann, 1993) that seeks to encompass, contain and bind together the state’s domination of society, and all the varied market or community relations inside it. This form is the modern nation state. And, as soon as we begin to think of integration as a collective societal goal which can be achieved through the systematic intervention of collective political agency, we inevitably begin to invoke the nation-state in the production of a different, caged and bounded version of multicultural social relations. It is very difficult, then, to make much sense of the term integration in practical, applied terms, without bringing back in the nationstate, at least in the European political context. This is not only because the term gets monopolized by nationally rooted policy makers who, I will suggest, typically link their ideas about integration and their measures for achieving it – even when they are ‘multicultural’ in inspiration – to historical concerns with nation-building. As I will also go on to explain, it is equally because of a range of epistemological constraints imposed by the practical operationalization of integration as a framework for applied research, whether targeted at questions of policy or at generating knowledge through survey-based studies of immigrants and ethnic minorities. Looking across Western Europe in the broadest possible way, it is clear that ‘integration’ has emerged as the most widely used general concept for describing the target of post-immigration policies. This is not to say that every political figure or intellectual in every country likes or uses the term. The synthetic, cross-national pronounce-

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ments of international and intergovernmental organizations might be taken as one good indicator of its pervasive acceptance by the end of the 1990s. It is noticeable how, for example, the conclusions of the presidency of the European Council of Ministers at Tampere in October 1999, gestured specifically towards integration as the key term for encompassing the post-immigration processes EU institutions would like to get involved with in this area of rising political significance. Although rarely defined, it is also noticeably foregrounded in the formulations of some of the broadest cross-national programmes instigated by organizations as varied as the Council of Europe, the ILO or the OSCE. The formulations of NGOs in Brussels likewise constantly use the term, as do influential transatlantic policy for a such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace or Metropolis.3 This success echoes the past and recent history of policy debate in individual nation-states. The case of France here is typical. The emergence of ‘intégration’ as the central term of the ‘new republican synthesis’ of the 1980s, followed a period in which older assimilationist ideas vied with the post-60s inheritance of ideas about cultural difference and the anti-racist struggle (Costa-Lascoux, 1989; Weil, 1991; Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, 1993). Integration became the sensible position for the centre trying to distinguish itself from xenophobic nationalism on the one hand, and radical anti-system discourses on the other. A similar centrist convergence occurred earlier in Britain in the late 1960s, notably in a well remembered quotation from then Home Office minister Roy Jenkins, one of the principal architects of race relations legislation (Rose et al., 1969; Rex, 1991). Although the anti-racist left has always rejected it, the concept has retained a high degree of practical significance for the liberal, cross-party centre. Indeed, with the emergence of new migration questions surrounding the reception of asylum seekers, integration has re-emerged as the most comprehensive term for conceiving resettlement policies, and has been central to recent Home Office consultations on immigration policy (Castles et al., 2002). France and Britain are the paradigmatic early ‘integration nations’ in Europe: turning post-war, post-colonial policies into a mildly nationalist reaffirmation of the tolerant, cosmopolitan, inclusive nature of their conceptions of nationhood (on this, see Favell, 1998). Across other European countries, we can find numerous examples of countries converging similarly on integration as the widest frame for discussing postimmigration policies (see Mahnig, 1998). It is used frequently in research in Germany or Belgium, albeit with ambiguity about what the immigrant is integrating into, given the

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federal, city-centred and multi-levelled nature of the process here (Esser, 1999; Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998). It has returned to the fore in the Netherlands and Sweden, after periods of flirtation with more cultural differentialist thinking, as they seek to reconnect the provision of welfare benefits and multicultural policy with conditions about the learning of the national language and culture (Fermin, 1999; Soininen, 1999). It has also been the most obvious frame for ‘new’ (or self-discovering) countries of immigration – such as Italy, Spain, Denmark or Austria – finally formulating a centrist, more progressive response to their current immigration ‘crisis’.4 Perhaps even more importantly, immigrant and ethnic groups themselves speak of desiring integration, or phrase their criticisms of racism and exclusion as barriers to full or fair integration (see, for example, the frequent use of word in Alibhai-Brown, 2000, a wellknown ethnic minority spokesperson in Britain). Some of these ordinary language usages shadow the well-established American preference for ‘assimilation’ as the core sociological concept (Alba and Nee, 1997). In terms of recent immigrants, ‘integration’ is here often used interchangeably with assimilation in the US, when it is gesturing to the functional involvement of new migrant ‘ethnic’ groups in the society’s housing, educational, welfare or employment systems (Edmonston and Passel, 1994). Here, indeed, the term has been moved away from its discredited links with desegregation issues over black/white public relations in the 1960s, to a more European-looking concern with the cultural and social absorption of diverse new populations that have grown dramatically in the US since the opening up of immigration laws in 1965. Europeans, however, usually shy away from the term assimilation, which in a European context would smack of biological overtones and the nasty cultural intolerance of the past. But the European preference for ‘integration’ ahead of ‘assimilation’ is not really the choice of a less loaded or more politically sensitive term over one which implies greater conformist and exclusionary pressures, quite the contrary. It signals, rather, a deeper concern with the fact that the changes brought on by post-war immigration in Europe have raised anew questions over historical continuity – about the substance of nation-building – which echo once again the longer histories of nation-building: the more-or-less coercive absorption of minority populations and regions through centralizing processes of modernization (the classic formulation of this is Gellner, 1983). Integration, then, is about imagining the national institutional forms and structures that can unify a diverse population; hence imagining what the state can actively do to ‘nationalize’ newcomers and re-constitute the na-

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tion-state under conditions of growing cultural diversity. The nation building institutions of European nations are – unlike the US and other continents of immigration – not historically built on immigration and geographical distance from Europe, but on bounded notions of specific territory and the constant self-distinction of ‘indigenous’, culturally ‘unique’ populations constrained to live alongside very close, and troublesomely similar neighbours. The essential problematic worrying European policy makers is, then, the difficult and often only partial accommodation of culturally distinct outsiders and foreigners into longstanding social and cultural institutions which were essentially defined historically within Europe, and for highly local reasons, in quite exclusive and belligerent terms. The fear which thus defines the problematic of immigrant integration is that full assimilation on these conditions is probably never likely to occur. The everyday popularity of integration as a term may appear peculiar at a time when so-called globalization and, in particular, new forms of migration and mobility are said to have generated all kinds of nation-state-transcending ‘transnational’ actors and forms of organization (see Faist, 2000; Papastergiadis, 1999). Our unit of society is now routinely said to be something we must look for beyond the nation-state (Cohen and Kennedy, 2000). In the more speculative fancies of social theorists we are invited to think of the trajectory of (post-) modernity as going beyond society itself (for example, Giddens, 1990; Urry, 2000). Under these conditions, migrant groups might be thought of as not following the same westernizing, modernizing integration path into full citizenship, membership and belonging of their new host societies. Pan-national and regional cooperation, as well as the re-emergence of the city as the locus for integration, is also said to have reduced the significance of the nation-state as an exclusive, bounded ‘population container’ in Europe (Torpey, 2000). Yet the endurance of ‘integration’ as the goal of most practical policy thought on this question in Europe – including amongst the leading independent academic authorities – gives us a clue to the vested interests and applied imperatives of the older, nation-state building paradigm. As soon as their minds turn to applied policy formulations, these people recognize no ‘beyond-the-nation-state’ to immigration policy. Europeans continue to speak of the integration of immigrants into bounded, nationally-distinct societal units – focusing attention on typical nation-building questions such as naturalization, access to citizenship, access to the welfare state, participation in political and social institutions, and so on – precisely because anything else threatens the basic political ordering of European cultural and social diversity into state-centred, state-organized social forms.

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To put it another way, the incentive structures of policy thinking and comparative research on the integration of immigrants in Europe, are still very much set by the imperatives of the singular nation-statesociety, which recognizes this and only this as the fundamental problematic at stake here.

Integration as a paradigm for policy research

practical integration solutions

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Unlike in America, academic research on immigrants and integration in Europe is still dominantly structured by its explicit or implicit links to the knowledge demands of specific policy agendas and political discussions in different national contexts (on these, see Favell, 2001). In Europe, the overlap and interpenetration of research and policy making is pervasive at national and, increasingly, international level. Academics are co-opted into politicized roles either through the direct shaping of the research agenda by public and institutional funding opportunities to do ‘applied’ work; by the invitation to take on the role of public intellectual in media or government work; or by their activist involvement as campaigners, in which their work is used to articulate political positions. This involvement clearly is linked to society’s functional need for someone to express political agency, with academics contributing through their research to the construction of both social problems (as they are perceived) and their solution. Insofar as their work also often serves to ‘think’ for the state, it also helps underwrite dominant nation-building ideologies. Such a role has its costs. The involvement of researchers in activism or the policy process can also diminish the intellectual autonomy and viability of independent academic research outside of more instrumentalized uses. European nations are obviously at different stages of development in their internal debates, but in most cases academic thinking is now moving beyond purely denunciatory work on the negative consequences of immigration (such as studies of racism) into the conceptualization of practical integration solutions and trajectories of multicultural social change. For example, in Britain, the popular sub-field of more critical anti-racist, Marxist and post-Marxist writers (such as the cultural studies writers inspired by Stuart Hall) – whose work tended to focus on condemning the racism of state institutions and celebrating the ‘resistance’ of immigrant cultures – have themselves found there is a limit to what can be done with such arguments. More recently, they have begun to more consciously contribute to debates about multicultural citizenship, in relation to mainstream

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policy formulations (i.e., Gilroy, 2000; Alibhai-Brown, 2000).5 The desire to make a respectable intervention into the public debate, or to get hired for research by the government or political think-tanks, can thus be a disciplining experience. Such contributions can, as the evolution of anti-racist and multicultural thinking in Britain shows, play a major role in legitimizing in the mainstream a national sense of ease with difference and diversity. In many other countries, a similar evolution can be observed, with discussion about ‘integration’ playing the central mainstream role as a focus for constructive, pragmatic, policy-related interventions. National self-sufficiency in policy debates has, however, been the rule. The terms and categories that dominate discussion in different places – for example, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘race relations’ in Britain, or republicanism and citoyenneté in France – are the product of often exclusively internal national political dynamics. Notably, they are discourses which reflect and reproduce longer standing narratives of nationhood and national destiny popular in these countries. When references to other countries appear, comparison usually enters as a further self-justificatory strategy for the national ideology. In France, for example, a key move among many public intellectuals involved in producing the ‘new republican synthesis’ and idea of intégration of the 1980s was the contrasting of the ‘universalist’ French tradition with the ‘differentialism’ of its European and North American rivals (most dramatically in Schnapper, 1991; Todd, 1994): Over time, however, the prejudices of comparison have softened, especially as policy actors and academics have themselves been increasingly exposed to debates and consultation with other national counterparts. Under these conditions, their national reflection may begin to incorporate more explicit elements of structured comparative knowledge, recognizing the specificities of the other national starting points and the opportunities of cross-national policy learning. The emergence of pan-European structures (both EU and Council of Europe) has added to this imperative, tendering research which, in order to get funded, must be explicitly cross-national in scope and personnel, and policy oriented in its objectives. The first result of academic cross-national policy comparison was the identification of ideal-type national ‘models’ of citizenship and integration (Hammar, 1985; Castles, 1995). This Weberian comparative impulse was strongly influenced by North American writers bringing a more autonomous set of interests to the study of immigration in Europe (especially Brubaker 1989, 1992). The models approach was popular because it proved to be such an effective heuristic strategy: reducing the problem of the vague and indefinable object

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of enquiry – a national ‘society’ in all its complexity – to a ‘model’ which captures the key explanatory variables of social change. These were invariably identified as ‘path dependent’ historical sources of national cultural difference. The most well-known argument linked to the models approach has been the classic distinction between the ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ nation in citizenship studies, distilled from a reductive (and largely inaccurate) stylization of French and German nationality law as ideal types of ius soli and ius sanguinis citizenship. It was surely questionable to ‘explain’ the differences between these two similar cases by reference to national ideologies, themselves produced in the past by nationalist intellectuals and state actors to distinguish one nation from the other (on this see Weil, 1996). Yet even if historically dubious, the power of the contrast here worked to generate effective normative arguments about a de facto national convergence across Europe foreseeing mixed sources of nationality and a limited recognition of ius soli for second and third generations – thus helping German policy makers to move towards reforms (Hansen and Weil, 2000). The deeper explanatory challenge here would be to produce a more reflexive understanding of the ideological modes by which similar European nation-states have justified and reproduced their own models, as culturally distinct projections of collective identity (see Favell, 1998; Alund and Schierup, 1991; Joppke, 1999). More even handed comparison has gone on to recognize that while national policy legacies matter, they cannot be reduced to positive and negative national examples. One response was the move to introduce typologies of incorporation, factoring in modes of state-society relations and multi-levelled constitutional structures, as a more sophisticated reflection of the different factors determining integration. Soysal’s work in particular had the virtue of turning the ethnic/civic distinction on its head: highlighting in its arguments about the postnational status of migrant groups such as Turks in Germany, the normative dogma involved in always equating full national citizenship with full integration (Soysal, 1994): Structured case-by-case comparisons along these institutionalist lines have enabled a more fruitful type of cross-national work, particularly those located at sub-national levels such as the city (i.e., Ireland, 1994; Bousetta, 2000). However, away from these predominantly North American led comparative efforts, more explicitly policy-oriented studies with a comparative range have tended to follow the least sophisticated academic approaches. This has certainly been the case with work produced through the sponsorship of European institutions. For example, the big winner from an intense bidding struggle among

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academics in this field for money from the Targeted Social and Economic Research (TSER) programme on ‘exclusion’ was a national models-based study – led by well-known national figures Friedrich Heckmann and Dominique Schnapper – that explicitly structured its investigations around the idea that immigration and ethnic relations in each country are determined by classic policy ‘models’ rooted in political cultural differences between France, Germany, Britain and so on (Heckmann and Schnapper, 2003). A models-based approach of this kind will often itself reproduce the ideological fictions each nation has of its own and others’ immigration politics. Schnapper and associates duly found that minorities and majorities do indeed talk about the issues in each country in ways that follow the distinct national ideologies. But little or no self-reflexive effort was made to ask how these nation-sustaining ideas about distinct national ‘models’ have themselves been created and sustained by politicians, the media and the policy academics themselves in each country, precisely in order to foreclose the possibility that external international or transnational influences might begin to affect domestic minority issues and policy considerations. Practical institutional imperatives also dictate that the policy study packages and presents its findings in a narrowly targeted way, which naturally curtails many of the more interesting lines of enquiry. This has been well-understood by one of the more influential NGOs in this field in Brussels – the Migration Policy Group – who have been involved in two of the most wide ranging funded surveys on integration policies across European society (Vermeulen, 1997; MPG, 1996). In the latter, the ‘societal integration project’, they set up roundtables in around twenty countries, and listened to the expert opinions of policy makers and policy intellectuals, generating a mass of material about how policy makers talk about the same issues in different places. However, in the end the slim report of highlights and recommendations boiled all this down to a reaffirmation that convergence was the source of future norms on citizenship and integration across Europe. Being limited to the typical state-centric talk and self-justification of policy makers, it was unable to offer any genuine comparative evaluation. Moreover, the freedom of reflection of such a project is naturally cut down by the expectations of the sponsors who lay down the lines of research. By definition, such comparative policy studies produce findings which reinforce the state-centred, top-down formulations familiar at national level. The one difference here – as a product of a supra-national European initiative = is that the conclusions about the inevitability of convergence underline a familiar EU strategy to focus, not on national exceptionality or uniqueness (as do

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Migration Policy Group

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national level studies) but rather on the narrowing of national differences. In other words, as we might expect given the sponsors involved, these arguments work to narrow down the freedom of agency of individual states, hence their sovereignty. Convergent citizenship criteria become like convergent criteria for monetary union. To really be able to answer the evaluatory question of which nation-states are doing better on integration than others, we would need some kind of ‘integration index’: a convertible scale which enabled us to read off across European societies degrees of social segregation in housing, success in schooling or employment, differences in resistance of cultural behaviour, persistence of racist attitudes, relative social mobility, or whatever is argued to be the best set of objective measures. These indicators would then have to be linked to the existence, or the success and failure, of specific national policies or institutions. The inevitable impulse to cross-national evaluation of state policy is not only exceedingly difficult to do, given the crossnational data constraints I will go on to discuss. It also imposes as an assumption an untenable automatic correlation between success on the index and the effectiveness of state policies having achieved their goals by shaping or influencing the behaviour of groups and individuals. This assumption itself is a state-reinforcing one, penalizing any society which is less structured by state intervention, regardless of how well ‘integrated’ groups or individuals may in fact be. The one way this kind of approach works is as a comparative shaming strategy directed towards states with less extensive formal rights and entitlements for migrants than others. The most extensive survey of this kind was a six nation Austrian study which did just this, in order to shame the Austrian government into better migration policy and anti-discrimination measures (Çinar et al., 1995; Waldrauch and Hofinger, 1997; Waldrauch, 2001). The extensively documented study broke down all formal rights and entitlements of non-nationals across various European states, rating each one between 0 and 1 as an index to barriers to integration. By definition, the approach foresees a state-centred, state-organized solution to integration, and cannot capture any forms of multiculturalism which are the outcome of more laissez-faire style approaches. We end up with the very common conclusion that highly state-organized societies, such as Sweden or the Netherlands, do it best. Yet these are also highly unified national societies, who put high demands of linguistic and cultural assimilation on their inhabitants (something to which the index is blind). They are also societies racked with dilemmas of informal economy, and high degrees of social segregation among their immigrant population. Current discussions on immigration in

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Denmark provide a good example of the paradoxes here in some of Europe’s most enlightened social democracies. Laws and policies ensure excellent access to rights and high rates of formal participation among the so-called ‘new Danes’. Yet the many socioeconomic problems linked to disadvantaged immigrants are routinely interpreted in political discussion as dysfunctional to the smooth running of the Danish national welfare state, and stigmatized as ‘ikke dansk’; i.e., rule-breaking immigrants not behaving in a ‘true’ Danish manner (on Denmark, see Schierup, 1993). Rights-based evaluations of integration contrast dramatically with those which focus on different formal indicators. Britain, with its weak constitutional structures and idiosyncratic race relations institutions, does rather badly in the Austrian study, yet this contrasts sharply with how comparative British evaluations of European experiences view the matter. Contrasting its longstanding and successful multicultural practices with the troubled politics and social situations of many continental European societies, the most extensive studies made by British researchers have always found Britain to be far better endowed with antidiscrimination legislation and multicultural policies (Forbes and Mead, 1992; Wrench, 1996). The British state in fact pursues a minimalist style of intervention into the many and diverse forms of multiculturalism that have developed in the country. Yet homegrown studies routinely link these successes to the agency of the British state and its policy legacy: what is perceived by them as the existence of a strong state-centred multicultural race relations framework. Multiculturalism is thus claimed as an achievement of the British state, rather than a consequence of the weak penetration of the state in everyday life in Britain. From this point of view which is more plausible in a comparative perspective – it could be argued that it is laissez faire that has enabled London and a small handful of other cities to develop as multicultural cities, in sharp distinction from the white and intolerant provincial hinterlands. As more positive visions of multicultural integration become prevalent across Europe, other less ‘advanced’ integration nations than France or Britain are likely to follow their lead and see their ruling national elites claim the multicultural success in the name of their own tradition of nationhood. For sure, France and Britain look like successful multicultural societies on this score. Yet, it is precisely a country like France which imposes the biggest cultural burdens on newcomers in terms of their adhesion to the particular ways of the nation; or a country like Britain, which buys enlightened race relations as a trade-off for some of the toughest border controls in Europe. These paradoxical results follow from the fact that both

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countries practice ‘multiculturalism-in-one-nation’: a multicultural nationalism, that sees no other source of multiculturalism than the miraculously tolerant cosmopolitanism of the home culture. Such countries may then be ‘universalist’, and yet apparently highly intolerant of specific cultural differences; or they might be highly multicultural and multi-racial, and yet be at the same time extraordinarily xenophobic. There are clear costs involved in the stubborn maintenance of the fiction of exclusive nation-state agency over the multicultural aspects of these locations. The strong sense of national self-preservation displayed here perhaps explains why the European Union has only been able to gain the weakest influence over immigrant integration policies, jealously guarded at the national level. The EU can get involved to identify good practices, or the best convergent norms across societies; but it cannot begin to constitute itself as a political agency here without taking agency (i.e., sovereignty) away from nation-states, which have used issues of immigrant integration precisely to actually underline and reproduce their own existence as coherent, bounded, nationbuilding societies. European integration is of course itself the search for political agency at a supra-national level; but the fact that it seems to fail to constitute itself as a state, suggests that this is largely because the actual boundaries of European society remain very much fixed at the national level.

Survey and census based work on integration It is no surprise that policy-centred studies should inevitably reproduce the state-centred, nation-building optic in their framing and prescription of ways to achieve integration. As the preceding discussion has indicated, such studies by definition can say very little about the kind of less structured social processes that are characteristic of much multiculturalism to be found in Europe’s cities and metropolitan regions. Rather, where they recognize multiculturalism, policy and institutional-based studies tend to bolster nationalizing ideologies which affirm the nation-state as the sole relevant locus of political agency able to shape a ‘society’. They are also, needless to say, the contributions which best chime with the interests of agents of the state, concerned with maximizing their realm of political influence by emphasizing the growing importance of top-down immigration and integration policy. But what of bottom-up studies: empirical work which focuses on the experiences, attitudes or social mobility of the immigrants or

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ethnic minority members themselves? Policy and institutional-based studies often have very little to say about actual migrant experiences of integration. Here, more ambitious uses of survey and census-based work, based on studying their values, discourses and behaviour, offer a more advanced integration index for measuring and evaluating what is going on. Clearly, this would be material close to the actual process of social change going on inside ‘multicultural’ nation-states; and, it might be thought, material more likely to reveal evidence of tendencies that are decomposing the conventional nation-state integration paradigm. For example, it might be expected to find strong evidence – in those European cities that are significant ‘nodes’ in the global economy – of the growing transnationalism characteristic of the social and cultural forms of migrant groups whose activities are embedded in global economic networks (see Faist, 2000; Rath, 2000). Ambitious studies along these lines are now beginning to emerge. The possibility of doing such work has grown out of an increasing societal thirst for more systematic knowledge about immigration phenomena as the political salience of the subject has risen. Governments, policy think tanks, international institutions and the media, are all beginning to show interest in funding much more large-scale survey data driven studies of integration issues. The positivistic style of large-scale survey work offers an interesting counterpoint to the normative leanings of policy studies and institutional-based works, which have tended to frame their more journalistic-style methods with the value-laden rhetoric of citizenship and rights. Survey-based researchers, meanwhile, preserve their credibility, not by shadowing the language and conceptualizations of policy actors, but by the distinct ‘scientific’ autonomy of their methodology and results. By definition, the kind of work they are doing cannot be mounted by the personnel of governments and newspapers, lacking in the specialist quantitative and qualitative techniques required; such work has to be commissioned, with freedom of research negotiated in advance. This fact creates distinctive material conditions for the kind of work produced. One advantage is that the process of deriving ‘policy’ directed normative conclusions is (or should be) left to post-hoc interpretation, and not in-built in the normative state-centred conceptualizations which typically measure integration: such as those which rate already institutionalized state policy structures linked to citizenship rights or legal and political channels. Numerous examples of impressive large-scale survey work do now exist in various countries at the single-case national level (see the discussion in Phalet and Swyngedouw, 1999; examples are

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Modood et al., 1997; Tribalat et al., 1996; Swyngedouw, Phalet, and Deschouwer, 1999; Phalet et al., 2000; Diehl et al., 1999; Veenman, 1998; Lesthaege, 2000). The new frontier for survey-based research is the possibility of cross-national comparative survey work on the integration of immigrants. However, as was clear from exploratory discussions at a conference in September 1999 on the subject organized by Hartmut Esser – which brought together the European Consortium for Sociological Research, a grouping of the leading quantitative social scientists in Europe – very few of the epistemological problems of doing such work have yet been considered by researchers more familiar with doing cross-national studies on employment, educational mobility or inequality (e.g., Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992). Cross-national efforts have to be synthesized from the best of the national level data provided on a nation-by-nation basis by governments. The very best of current cross-national efforts in the area of immigration mounted by an international organization, which monitors migration stocks and flows around the developed world – the annual OECD-SOPEMI report – is notoriously hampered by the fact that the expert respondents each report figures for its own country based on different national means of data-gathering (SOPEMI, 1998). Moreover, there is nothing like the systematic quantitative effort on integration questions as there is in the report for basic issues of entry, legality, residence and so on. The report does have a growing section on integration, but it is by far the weakest part of it, reflecting perhaps a lack of sociological expertise among the geographers and economists who make up the immigration specialist panel. The report in fact falls back into a more policy-centred style of analysis: reproducing the same old frameworks about national models and comparative rights indices. We can imagine perhaps a more concerted attempt to conceptualize the integration questions in a way which escapes this nominalist nation-state centred approach. But the real problem here is that all available data on immigrant or minority numbers basic to the SOPEMI effort, follow the significantly different conventions in each country about collecting population data. There is, in other words, an in-built dependency on nationally-specific research technologies; usually the state apparatus that has been built up around census gathering. The specific methods used to identify populations of immigrant origin in the post-war period vary from country to country, as does the political sensitivity with which this information is released or extrapolated. The technical methods – and the politics surrounding such sensitive state knowledge production – inevitably reflect the national ideology each nation has fashioned for itself as a

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narrative of nation-building. No matter how insulated the methodology, the broader national policy definition of integration as a social process impacts upon the production of categories and numbers elicited from survey results. Counting only non-nationals as the immigrant population is still the base-line norm across nearly all European countries except Britain, which has a famously idiosyncratic form of ethnic self-identification in its census. Most comparative tables offer figures for non-nationals by nationality, which works up to point in countries where original nationality remains a distinguishing factor (as, say, in Germany, Italy or Spain; although it runs into problems in Germany, for example, in counting the three million Aussiedler from Eastern Europe). This method is clearly a criterion of declining usefulness, however, as increasing numbers of second and third generation immigrant children in fact accede to full national citizenship; it can indeed be simply a crude measure of administrative exclusion. Naturalization rates over time are a second set of figures, which trace the absorption of immigrants over shorter, given periods of time. Other countries may also offer figures which count those people who identify older family members born outside of the country. From this, a great deal can be extrapolated into second and third generation, but a country such as France still maintains barriers for ideological reasons to researchers using this information, which means that some naturalized second or third generation are lost to studies once they leave the immigrant household. A strong moral prohibition, meanwhile, exists on the classification of people by race or religion across Europe. There is little more distasteful to continental Europeans than anything with a whiff of former Nazi racial classifications, or indeed the common practice in multinational empires such as the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia to brand people permanently on their interior passports with an ‘ethnic’ nationality (see Brubaker, 1995). However, a more racially heterogeneous population such as the Portuguese avoids these racial classifications for rather different reasons, to do with the cosmopolitan colonial conception of the nation. In Belgium, you are classified by language according to political records after you vote, religion after you choose university. Here, however, the census is banned by law to answer such questions up front. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, there is no national census at all, after a libertarian public revolt in the 1970s. Ethnic statistics here have to be reconstructed from local city and police records or special ministry surveys, something that has contributed significantly to the sense of unease about the numbers of ‘undocumented’ residents in the country. Other coun-

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racial classification

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tries, however, such as Denmark and Britain – which in other respects have very different census methods – are prepared under certain circumstances to make available census data to track specified (anonymous) individuals over time between censuses, in order, for example, to analyze spatial mobility or rates of political participation (see Togeby, 1999; Fielding, 1995). Such a babel of census information is a difficult starting point. In talking about integration, who are we talking about: ‘legally resident foreigners’, ‘immigrants’, ‘illegal/ undocumented residents’, ‘third-country nationals’, ‘ethnic groups’, ‘racial minorities’, new or naturalized ‘citizens’, or simply formally undistinguishable ‘nationals’ with a different de facto cultural history or skin colour? The narrow definition of immigrants as resident non-nationals has the virtue of avoiding the integration issue entirely. It offers the normative panacea of equating citizenship with full integration, an idea which has long reassured French republicans on the virtues of a cosmopolitan type of nationhood. A normative dogma such as this makes no sociological sense, of course, once anyone is willing to admit that host populations and migrants alike will continue to informally discriminate themselves and each other regardless of which passport they are holding. Once some outsiders become insiders, however, their formal categorization (or ‘recognition’, in more affirmative terms) itself becomes a part of the integration process. Whether or not they are separated off for official monitoring purposes, and how and where they can be placed on some path towards full integration, becomes a crucial part of the integrative process itself, not least because the separation from one’s original nationality may also be a coercive state enforced act (see Simon, 1997). There is a profound moral truth in the French refusal to actually recognize any French citizen of non-national ‘ethnic’ origin as such in official statistics, because the recognition itself can indeed be a form of inequality or discrimination. The power of naming does indeed count for something. The French refusal is also a dramatic statement of the nation-state’s continued prerogative to nationalize a new citizen as indivisibly French. Yet, on the other hand, no policy can be devised for systematic integration of foreign-origin groups until the nationstate begins to collectively recognize and classify minorities of ethnic origin, with special claims – targeted policies, resources, legal allowances, etc – that follow from this (this is the central problematic of the influential work of Kymlicka, 1995). There is another side of the classificatory separation, however. Integration cannot be conceived, identified, let alone measured as degrees of inequality and so on, until a control group representa-

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tive of the national population has been specified. But this raises the question: we are talking about integration into what? Here, the logic of classification becomes even more slippery. Are they the indigenous population (‘de souche’ in French), but if so, what length of time constitutes ‘roots’; are they defined culturally, by their family origins, by their length of residence; are they, rather, simply to be identified as the majority ‘white’ or ‘European’ population; or, are we in fact speaking of some representative sample or statistical mean of the citizenry as a whole, including all those new and culturally exotic recent additions? Moreover, as Michael Banton points out (2001), it makes little sense to measure the integration of an immigrant or ethnic minority population, until we have some precise measurement of how well the majority population is integrated as a nation. Whatever method is chosen – however the state chooses to classify, count and control its population or define those who are in and those who are out – will again amount to a pre-determined national ‘sampling frame’, that is very closely linked to the ideological concept of nationhood present. Behind this, of course, lies the normative commitment to integration as societal end-goal, the underlying assumption that holds the nation-state-society unit together. Researchers who thus set out to objectively measure integration, without taking into account how much the nation-state unit has already determined the very quantitative tools they use, will fail to see how much the bounds of what they can discover have already been pre-set for them. If so, they are working no less to underwrite the predominance of the nation-state optic, than policy studies researchers who accept without challenge nation-state centred definitions of ‘universal’ citizenship or ‘cosmopolitan’ multiculturalism. On the whole, however, progressive minded commentators across Europe do not challenge this conceptual recuperation of their very tools of research by a nation-state centred vision of integration. The majority, rather, has been content to push a different, conciliatory line, that squares the circle between the reality of ongoing nation-building efforts and the contrasting idealism of cosmopolitan multiculturalism. They argue that European nations have become, or are becoming, ‘countries of immigration’. Such arguments have been very much present in those countries whose right wing refuses to recognize the reality of continued immigration and settlement at all. Among those promoting this happier version of Europe’s immigrant future, the coercive weight of ever-present nation-building processes is thus lightened by the claim that the integration of immigrants in Europe can be equated with what happens to immigrants in Australia, Canada or the US. The normative inspiration is clear

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– constitutional universalism, cosmopolitan idealism, the melting pot, open immigration regimes, and so on – but the idea of the old nation-states of Europe metamorphosizing into brand new ‘countries of immigration’ is a dubious rhetoric on any empirical level, not least from a historical point of view. In Europe, we are talking about tightly bounded and culturally specific nation-states dealing in the post-war period with an unexpected but still not very large – influx of highly diverse immigrant settlers, at a time when, for other international reasons, their sense of nationhood is insecure or in decline. It is a problematic very different to those faced by the US or Australia, whose histories and sense of nationhood have always been built on immigration. Europe, rather, faces a problematic where the continuity of nation-building is perhaps a much more significant fact than the multicultural hybridity that is sometimes sought for in these other, newer ‘model’ nations. A great deal of revisionist effort has gone into reconstructing certain European nations as undiscovered immigration nations (e.g., Noiriel, 1991). Although widely accepted, it is an effort which in fact empties significance out of other empirical attempts to problematize integration as a limited process of cultural change, combining multicultural adaptation with national reinvention. Instead, it rather lamely gestures European survey-based researchers back towards the most culturally-neutral model available: that of classic American assimilation research, which charts the progress of different immigrant ethnic groups towards some ideal-typical absorption into the suburban middle class – a process where the pervasively national orientation of American assimilation is never even put into question, and where the nation-building effect here stays invisible (see also Brubaker, 2001). The spectacular resurgence of American patriotism in its crudest forms post ‘9/11’ has at least clarified how deeply nationalistic ideas of American unity and America’s global role in fact are. Operationalizing this particular normative frame for immigrant integration which recasts European societies as immigration nations in the idealized, immigrant American mould – has been done in distinctive national ways. On the face of it, the French offer the purest instance of a self-styled universalist country of immigration, not least after the assiduous reconstruction of this idea by historians and sociologists in the 1980s. Establishing this as the normative frame for new progressive policies was relatively straightforward. But, in empirical terms, the formal prohibition in official survey data on introducing any sub-categorization of the population by ethnicity (i.e., in the data produced by the national statistics office, INSEE), left grandiose declarations about the continued success of the French republi-

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can model bereft of evidence for these claims. For how else could the sociological integration of different cultural groups in France in fact be measured? A study which reintroduced some sub-classification of the population by ethnicity was, in other words, needed to show that ethnicity in fact did not matter. The nation-sustaining argument about integration was in a sense generating its own contradictions, that would then need resolution by a new scientific approach. This, then, was the background to the ambitious study by INED, headed by Michèle Tribalat, that still represents the state-of-the-art in integration research in France (Tribalat, 1995; Tribalat et al., 1996). Sample ethnic groups of different national origin – tracked down by ethnographic investigation, using the census only indirectly – were compared to a control group of non-immigrant origin French on questions of cultural behaviour, language use, housing concentration, political participation, and so on. The strongly French socialization of most groups observed – the Turkish and Chinese being the two outliers – in fact offered strong evidence for continued ‘assimilation’ in France, as Tribalat preferred to call it. The mere introduction of ethnicity into the survey, however, brought desperately controversial public reactions from other commentators, such as Hervé Le Bras (1998); and this despite the fact that it led to such conventionally ‘French’ results. Systematic cross-ethnic comparative work is much more highly developed in Germany, which has strong national surveys of data by national-origin available, such as the socioeconomic panel commissioned annually by the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaft, which provides data on ethnicity, language, identity questions and participation (an example of such work being Diehl et al., 1999). Progressive researchers here are even more sensitive to the de-categorization of foreigners and the positive idea of Germany as a country of immigration. There have been advantages to such research in the fact it has had to be diverted away from the ideologically dominated discussions on citizenship and naturalization, where progress has been more difficult. German research is thus more likely to concentrate on conceptualizing integration in technical socioeconomic terms: in terms of participation in the welfare state, and in differences between federal or city level contexts. One consequence is the possibility of internal comparisons of integration geographically within the nation, something of which there is no trace in France and Britain. German research, however, does not escape the pervasively nationcentred frame which dominates its political debates. Negative evidence of non-integration – such as ethnic concentration or the failure of second and third generations to speak German – tends to get

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Germany: strong national-origin data

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constructed as evidence of segregation or marginalization, in contrast with more successful state-centred integration or assimilation. These closed typologies of immigrant trajectories – which reinforce the idea of full national integration as the ideal – can be found in research going on in all kinds of countries (Nauck and Schönpflug, 1997; see also the closed scheme of claims-making laid out as an introduction by Koopmans and Statham, 2000). In Britain, meanwhile, the ‘ethnic’ self-identification question in its census is clearly out of sync with its European neighbours. It indicates a conceptual history that has always looked for its normative inspiration to American race relations of the 1960s, and has always defined Britain more narrowly as a country of postcolonial immigration only. For all the masses of data provided about the select group of post-colonial racial and national groups recognized in the census, the framework has come to have serious limitations over time. The categories themselves have become highly politicized, putting into practice a variable geometry that has sought to respond to the emerging demands of new and increasingly diverse migrant groups who recognize that the census categories are a fundamental source of recognition, as well as legal coverage and public funding. Basic black and white distinctions, for example, have now fallen away into a broader recognition of Asian groups. Other new migrants in Britain, however, find themselves lost between the generic ‘white’ and ‘other’ boxes. Indeed, with Jewish and Irish anti-discrimination campaigners forcing open the pandora’s box of whiteness (the all important control group) in the census of 2001, it is quite likely that the sharp ‘minority’ ethnic groupings that have been the core and inspiration of British race research may in future begin to crumble. Obviously, the sources of minority data, and the qualitative evidence it also provides about nuances in ethnic self-identification, have created a boon for identities type work in Britain, much of it now pursued under the banner of ‘new ethnicities’. There are numerous studies in which individuals are ethnographically studied playing with or resisting (unsurprisingly) their given ‘ethnic minority’ category (Back, 1995; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1993; Modood et al., 1994). Such work can often be an ideal vehicle for articulating ethnic ‘voices’ themselves. But structural work about the social mobility of such groups is hampered by the crude comparison forced by the data between racially designated ethnic groups and the generic ‘white’ block of the host population; this, inevitably it seems, leads research to claim ethnic success as rooted in minority group solidarity, but ethnic failure as rooted in majority group racial discrimination. In this frame, too, there is no way of assessing the continued

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impact of nation-building assimilation – via evidence on cultural behaviour, etc – on ethnic groups, despite the self-evident Britishness of many of these well-established minority groups. Nor is it easy in this frame to cross-check for class, gender or regional factors, particularly if these might lead to the declining salience of race-based explanations. In some of the best recent work on social mobility and ethnic identities, transnational behaviour and sources of social success are still surprisingly downplayed against the interpretation that ethnic minority success is further proof of vibrant British multiculturalism (Modood et al., 1997). Britain celebrates with some pride its longstanding role in Europe as the leading country of post-war immigration; yet has until very recently refused officially to see itself as a country of new immigration. Within this paradoxical picture, well-integrated and recognized ethnic minorities have a status and advantage denied to the many other new migrant groups now found in the country. In the nation-state centred version of integration research in the larger European countries, there is something odd about the fact that the status and success of immigrants gets measured entirely in terms of a social mobility relative to norms of integration into the nation-society, or average national social mobility paths; yet it is increasingly normal to think of elites in the same country becoming increasingly transnational in their roles, networks and trajectories. The exclusive destiny of full integration into host nation states may however not be the norm for immigrants in the future. Already, in other smaller European nations, a rather different picture is emerging. New migration countries such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal are actually going through the process of formulating their own uncertain national conceptions of integration at a very different historical moment compared to larger nations who continue to offer their models. As well as being countries that are more geographically exposed to migration, they are, moreover, countries with weaker state penetration of society or the market. In these less structured situations, the normative imperative of full national integration begins to lessen, if new non-nation-centred structures of social integration begin to emerge. A similar consequence follows from research on integration into a non-unified or multi-levelled state such as Belgium. In seeking to avoid the inevitability of nation-state centred visions of integration apparently forced on research by the kind of data available and the kind of concepts we work with, studying these smaller or newer integration scenarios may indeed offer a way forward out of the current paradigm.

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non-nation-centred structures of social integration

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Beyond the integration paradigm?

informal sources of power

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The clear message from the critical survey of current integration research in Europe offered here is that better research would be research that sets out to be more autonomous academically, and more thoroughly comparative in its intent. Academics need to escape their role of underwriting nation-building efforts directed towards small immigrant populations that have provoked a renewed symbolic effort to imagine (inclusive) western nation-state cultures. A much higher degree of self-consciousness is needed about the way contextual factors determine the intellectual content of research itself. How might this be done? I will conclude with a discussion of some of the newer insights provided by the way scholars of transnationalism have approached the problem (e.g., Portes, 1996; Basch et al., 1994; Smith and Guarnizo, 1998). Scholars of transnationalism have sought – for exactly the kinds of reasons I spell out in this paper – to expunge ‘integration’ from their terms of research. By definition, they do not wish to be underwriting the nation-state in a world which they see as increasingly transnational or global. Methodologically, too, their bottom up, ethnographic drive suits a style of work which draws large conclusions from the study of cases likely to be seen as exceptional, or indeed deviant from the conventional integration-focused perspective. For sure, it is this too which may account for the often excessively celebratory tone of transnational studies. Seeking a new kind of liberation, some studies fall into the longstanding problem that has distorted much radical ethnic and racial studies: the transfer of sympathy for the experiences, difficulties, and sometimes plight of migrants and ethnic minorities, into visions of these groups as some sort of heroic new ‘proletariat’. Although the ‘search for a new world’ – and the slogan ‘globalization from below’ – is the rather romantic packaging chosen in the work of Portes, Castells et al., this should not deflect us from the key insights of their work. Its major advance has been the empirical uncovering of trans-state, transnation economic and cultural networks of transactions (and protean forms of social organization) among new and developing migrant groups. These networks are clearly generating sources of collective social power outside of territorial state structures familiar from our conventional understanding of the world of nations. Whereas Portes principally recognizes the source of transnational power as the global market, others might point to Islam or Hispanic culture, or indeed informal (‘illegal’) sources of these same powers (see Cohen, 1997; Phizacklea, 1998). The other crucial aspect of Portes’s work, however, is its insistence

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on linking emergent transnational forms with classic integration questions. The exploration of the notion of ‘segmented assimilation’ in the US, has pointed towards the new structural relationship between the transnational ‘survival’ strategies resorted to by migrant groups and the unappealing ‘downward assimilation’ offered to them by the host societies’ state and societal structures (Portes, 1995). European examples of this have been the similar emergence of community resilience against the negative socioeconomic conditions they found themselves in, or the strongly assimilatory host reception. The results have been the paradoxical innovations of the informal economy or inner city Islam in many European cities. The integration path may indeed prove to be, in Kloosterman and Rath’s terms, ‘a long and winding road’ (Kloosterman et al., 1998). As the Dutch state, for example, seems ever tighter in its heavily legislated attempt to discover, encompass, regularize and normalize the spontaneous economic activities of new migrants, so there has seemed to be an ever-growing over-flow of undisciplined, self-organized informal activities in the country (Engbersen, 1996). The very best continental European work has focused on precisely this issue of informality or non-institutionalized forms of social organization; often focusing, unsurprisingly, on those groups identified in conventional integration research as the ethnic cases which fit worst into the kinds of automatically integrating schemes set up, for example, by French and British research (Fennema and Tillie, 1999; Bousetta, 1997; Phalet et al., 2000). It is not surprising that this work has invariably focused on either Turkish or Moroccan groups in various countries: two newer, non-colonial migrant groups that have displayed some of the most pronounced ‘transnational’, non-integrating social trajectories in Europe. Systematizing these deviant tendencies in research without simply reproducing the nation-state-society as the container unit has proven a lot more difficult. One might point to the Polanyi-inspired way forward in recent work by Faist (2000) or Kesteloot (2000). In this they offer schemes of transnational or local integration in economic and community structures which cross-cut with national, citizenship-centred forms. Empirical anthropologists, too, have provided some of the best recent work about immigrant and ethnic selforganization in urban contexts (Werbner, 1999; Baumann, 1996). Whether it is the bustling migrant markets of old Antwerp or East Amsterdam, or the mosque-centred inner city Islam of Turks and Moroccans in Brussels, there is clearly a need to recognize these cityembedded activities as emergent forms of social organization – and hence social power largely unstructured or not incorporated (in for-

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mal or informal terms) by the state. The somewhat anarchical multiculturalism of some European cities now points towards a new type of multi-ethnic culture in Europe, rather different to the multicultural citizenship shaped by integrating nation-states. It is not egalitarian, it is not anchored in rights, and it is certainly not conflict free; but it is, for better or for worse, much less disciplined by the nationbuilding pressures hidden in top-down policies of ‘integration’. Interestingly, however, even this kind of multicultural challenge to dominant European nation-state-centred cultures tends to still be anchored in deterritorialized ‘nationalities’: the persistence of important political and social links with the ‘homeland’, as both a concrete and symbolic reference. This fact – which is certainly the case with Turks and Moroccans in Europe – indicates a limit to these forms of transnationalism outside of their European context. Viewed from here they are not really transnational at all, but rather examples of deterritorialized nation-state building, familiar perhaps from the older diasporic histories of countries like Ireland, Italy or Greece. What there is precious little evidence of across Europe is the kind of radical diasporic multicultural forms, beloved of British cultural studies writers: the ‘black’ Atlantic diaspora or ‘black’ Asian pan-ethnic groups (see Gilroy, 1987; Brah, 1993; Hall, 1988). Such diasporas would indeed constitute a more radical challenge to the present day international system, still fixed upon relations between nation-states in the western and developing world to the south and east. But their absence betrays just how British these writers in fact are; reflecting – in their archetypal radical responses to frustrations encountered in the ethnic categories of the liberal multicultural race relations framework – the everyday activist struggles of British race politics. As these overwhelmingly national sources for transnational ideas suggest, we should be wary of seeing transnationalism as an end to the integration paradigm. Rather, transnationalism in Europe has to be seen as a growing empirical exception to the familiar nationcentred pattern of integration across the continent. This remains the dominant focus for policy actors and migrant activists alike. Transnationalism points towards the new sources of power accessed by migrant groups when they begin to organize themselves and their activities in ways not already organized for them by an integrating nation-state. By setting these forms against the continuity of nationstate centred patterns of integration, we may be able to understand how and why new spaces in the empire of the state are beginning to develop. What transnationalists should not do is leap beyond this into claims of an emerging international or global structure, in which all these nation-state challenging phenomena add up to a new global

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framework of governance, at which level a new kind of incorporation will be achieved (Soysal’s supra-national human rights regime, for example). To do so is to project the same old normative nation-statebuilding impulses onto an emerging international situation characterized rather by its market and culture led undermining of traditional nation-state powers. It means, in other words, to reinvent the state by the back door at global level. There are, of course, political actors who dream of a postnational state at European, even global level; but the factual capture of this ideal by the far more powerful realpolitik of everyday international relations, simply turns these efforts back into a paradoxical ‘rescue of the nation-state’, to borrow Alan Milward’s (1992) famous phrase. In many ways, the continued focus on integration as the central idea in postimmigration policy debates across Europe, is itself a choice of rhetoric designed explicitly to rescue the nation-state. European policy makers and commentators have begun to formulate more constructive visions of a multicultural future that will be able to contain and structure within the nation-state the many new forms of immigration and multiculturalism beginning to spring up across the continent. As I have argued, these visions – and the academic research which has provided the knowledge to substantiate their claims – have continued to work within a nation-state centred paradigm, even when they claim to be transcending it. An awareness of transnational phenomena, as well as a better consciousness of the pervasive way work has been structured by a nation-state centred epistemology, may enable migration and ethnic studies researchers to escape in their analyses the normative constraints of the integration paradigm. But it is vital in looking for new concepts and tools to describe the changing relations of state and society across the continent, that we also continue to recognize the extraordinary continuity and resilience of the nation-state-society as the dominant principle of social organization in Europe.

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Notes 1 Published in ‘The multicultural challenge’, Comparative Social Research, 22, 2003, pp. 13-42, reprinted with permission from Elsevier Ltd. 2 A more extended discussion and survey can be found in Favell (2001). Responding to this piece, Banton (2001) dismisses the use of ‘integration’ – ‘a treacherous mathematical metaphor’ – in any sociological studies on the subject. His vision is to purify sociological research on ethnic and race relations of these pervasive ordinary language concepts. Though a valid scientific response to the dilemma of using such terms, it forecloses the possibility in

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our research of reflexively accounting for why such terms are so predominant in policy discussions and academic research alike. See also related discussions in Bommes (1998) and Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002). 3 The number of quasi-academic policy studies on integration funded by such organizations in recent years has been remarkable. The Council of Europe’s Committee on Migration has produced a number of reports on gender and religious issues, labour markets, and social and political participation, as well as an outstanding conceptual framework for research by Bauböck (1994). The ILO has pursued work on integration in labour markets (Doomernik 1998), and the OSCE has been linking minority rights and integration. Among NGOs in Brussels, there is the highly active Migration Policy Group, who have produced major cross-national studies of policies and policy thinking on integration (MPG 1996; Vermeulen 1997). Finally, charitable transatlantic organizations have also joined the trend. The Carnegie Endowment’s massively ambitious ‘Comparative Citizenship Project’ identified political and social integration as two key areas of concern (Aleinikoff and Klusmeyer, 2002), and the Canadian-led Metropolis project focused on migrants in cities has sponsored several major studies (i.e., Cross and Waldinger, 1997; Vertovec, 1997). These various studies are some of the most ambitious comparative international projects to be found. Here, I mention but a sample. 4 For example, there was the creation by the left wing government of Italy in 1999 of a ‘Commissione per l’integrazione’ under the leadership of political sociologist Giovanna Zincone. This was explicitly intended to counter the increasingly salient use of negative anti-immigration rhetoric by Berlusconi’s right wing coalition. In Denmark, again under pressure from the right, the government passed an ‘Act on the Integration of Aliens in Denmark’ in July 1998, followed by much public discussion and further reports on continuing integration problems. In Austria, the turn to integration (see Waldrauch and Hofinger, 1997) has been formulated by the opposition as a response to specifically exclusionary government attitudes. 5 In the report of the Commission on Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000), which involved some of these more radical commentators alongside more mainstream figures, ‘integration’ was the organizing concept that dared not speak its name. However, the Commission’s chair, Bhikhu Parekh, has frequently written about the concept in his own work (Parekh, 2000).

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Part III Conceptual issues

marge tekst

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Introduction to ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organization of cultural difference Fredrik Barth

In 1969, the anthropologist Fredrik Barth published a collection of groundbreaking essays entitled Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. This collection criticised the orthodoxy of the time that conceived of ethnic groups as tribes or people who are able to maintain their individual cultural traits despite the ignorance of their neighbours. It is in geographical and social isolation that one can find ethnic groups in their purity. Barth argued convincingly against the suggestion that splendid isolation is the critical factor in sustaining cultural diversity. He took the innovative position that ethnic identity is basically a social identity that emerges in interaction with others. Ethnic groups are categories of ascription and identification taken on by the actors themselves, having the capacity to organise interaction between people. To observe these processes the focus of investigation should be shifted from separate groups’ internal constitutions and histories to ethnic boundaries and boundary maintenance. This collection of essays addresses itself in the problems of ethnic groups and their persistence. This is a theme of great, but neglected, importance to social anthropology. Practically all anthropological reasoning rests on the premise that cultural variation is discontinuous: that there are aggregates of people who essentially share a common culture, and interconnected differences that distinguish each such discrete culture from all others. Since culture is nothing but a way to describe human behaviour, it would follow that there are discrete groups of people, i.e. ethnic units, to correspond to each culture. The differences between cultures, and their historic boundaries and connections, have been given much attention; the constitution of ethnic groups, and the nature of the boundaries between them, have not been correspondingly investigated. Social anthropologists have largely avoided these problems by using a highly abstracted concept of ‘society’ to represent the encompassing social system within which

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smaller, concrete groups and units may be analysed. But this leaves untouched the empirical characteristics and boundaries of ethnic groups, and the important theoretical issues which an investigation of them raises. Though the naïve assumption that each tribe and people has maintained its culture through a bellicose ignorance of its neighbours is no longer entertained, the simplistic view that geographical and social isolation have been the critical factors in sustaining cultural diversity persists. An empirical investigation of the character of ethnic boundaries, as documented in the following essays, produces two discoveries which are hardly unexpected, but which demonstrate the inadequacy of this view. First, it is clear that boundaries persist despite a flow of personnel across them. In other words, categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories. Secondly, one finds that stable, persisting, and often vitality important social relations are maintained across such boundaries, and are frequently based precisely on the dichotomized ethnic statuses. In other words, ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of social interaction and acceptance, but are quite to the contrary often the very foundations on which embracing social systems are built. Interaction in such a social system does not lead to its liquidation through change and acculturation; cultural differences can persist despite inter-ethnic contact and interdependence.

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General approach There is clearly an important field here in need of rethinking. What is required is a combined theoretical and empirical attack: we need to investigate closely the empirical facts of a variety of cases, and fit our concepts to these empirical facts so that they elucidate them as simply and adequately as possible, and allow us to explore their implications. In the following essays, each author takes up a case with which he is intimately familiar from his own fieldwork, and tries to apply a common set of concepts to its analysis. The main theoretical departure consists of several interconnected parts. First, we give primary emphasis to the fact that ethnic groups are categories of ascription and identification by the actors themselves, and thus have the characteristic of organizing interaction between people. We attempt to relate other characteristics of ethnic groups to this primary feature.

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Second, the essays all apply a generative viewpoint to the analysis: rather than working through a typology of forms of ethnic groups and relations, we attempt to explore the different processes that seem to be involved in generating and maintaining ethnic groups. Third, to observe these processes we shift the focus of investigation from internal constitution and history of separate groups to ethnic boundaries and boundary maintenance. Each of these points needs some elaboration.

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Ethnic group defined The term ethnic group is generally understood in anthropological literature (cf. e.g. Narroll 1964) to designate a population which: 1. is largely biologically self-perpetuating 2. shares fundamental cultural values, realized in overt unity in cultural forms 3. makes up a field of communication and interaction 4. has a membership which identifies itself, and is identified by others, as constituting a category distinguishable from other categories of the same order. This ideal type definition is not so far removed in content from the traditional proposition that a race = a culture = a language and that a society = a unit which rejects or discriminates against others. Yet, in its modified form it is close enough to many empirical ethnographic situations, at least as they appear and have been reported, so that this meaning continues to serve the purposes of most anthropologists. My quarrel is not so much with the substance of these characteristics, though as I shall show we can profit from a certain change of emphasis; my main objection is that such a formulation prevents us from understanding the phenomenon of ethnic groups and their place in human society and culture. This is because it begs all the critical questions: while purporting to give an ideal type model of a recurring empirical form, it implies a preconceived view of what are the significant factors in the genesis, structure, and fundion of such groups. Most critically, it allows us to assume that boundary maintenance is unproblematical and follows from the isolation which the itemized characteristics imply: racial difference, cultural difference, social separation and language barriers, spontaneous and organized enmity. This also limits the range of factors that we use to explain cultural diversity: we are led to imagine each group developing its cultural and social form in relative isolation, mainly in response to local ecologic

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factors, through a history of adaptation by invention and selective borrowing. This history has produced a world of separate peoples, each with their culture and each organized in a society which can legitimately be isolated for description as an island to itself.

Ethnic groups as culture-bearing units

implications

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Rather than discussing the adequacy of this version of culture history for other than pelagic islands, let us look at some of the logical flaws in the viewpoint. Among the characteristics listed above, the sharing of a common culture is generally given central importance. In my view, much can be gained by regarding this very important feature as an implication or result, rather than a primary and definitional characteristic of ethnic group organization. If one chooses to regard the culture-bearing aspect of ethnic groups as their primary characteristic, this has far-reaching implications. One is led to identify and distinguish ethnic groups by the morphological characteristics of the cultures of which they are the bearers. This entails a prejudged viewpoint both on (1) the nature of continuity in time of such units, and (2) the locus of the factors which determine the form of the units. 1. Given the emphasis on the culture-bearing aspect, the classification of persons and local groups as members of an ethnic group must depend on their exhibiting the particular traits of the culture. This is something that can be judged objectively by the ethnographic observer, in the culture-area tradition, regardless of the categories and prejudices of the actors. Differences between groups become differences in trait inventories; the attention is drawn to the analysis of cultures, not of ethnic organization. The dynamic relationship between groups will then be depicted in acculturation studies of the kind that have been attracting decreasing interest in anthropology, though their theoretical inadequacies have never been seriously discussed. Since the historical provenance of any assemblage of culture traits is diverse, the viewpoint also gives scope for an ‘ethnohistory’ which chronicles cultural accretion and change, and seeks to explain why certain items were borrowed. However, what is the unit whose continuity in time is depicted in such studies? Paradoxically, it must include cultures in the past which would dearly be excluded in the present because of differences in form – differences of precisely the kind that are diagnostic in synchronic differentiation of ethnic units. The interconnection between ‘ethnic group’ and ‘culture’ is certainly not clarified through this confusion.

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2. The overt cultural forms which can be itemized as traits exhibit the effects of ecology. By this I do not mean to refer to the fact that they reflect a history of adaptation to environment; in a more immediate way they also reflect the external circumstances to which actors must accommodate themselves. The same group of people, with unchanged values and ideas, would surely pursue different patterns of life and institutionalize different forms of behaviour when faced with the different opportunities offered in different environments? Likewise, we must expect to find that one ethnic group, spread over a territory with varying ecologic circumstances, will exhibit regional diversities of overt institutionalized behaviour which do not reflect differences in cultural orientation. How should they then be classified if overt institutional forms are diagnostic? A case in point is the distributions and diversity of Pathan local social systems, discussed below (pp, 117 ff.). By Pathan local basic Pathan values, a Southern Pathan from the homogeneous, social systems lineage-organized mountain areas, can only find the behaviour of Pathans in Swat so different from, and reprehensible in terms of, their own values that they declare their northern brothers ‘no longer Pathan’. Indeed, by ‘objective’ criteria, their overt pattern of organization seems much closer to that of Panjabis. But I found it possible, by explaining the circumstances in the north, to make Southern Pathans agree that these were indeed Pathans too, and grudgingly to admit that under those circumstances they might indeed themselves act in the same way. It is thus inadequate to regard overt institutional forms as constituting the cultural features which at any time distinguish an ethnic group – these overt forms are determined by ecology as well as by transmitted culture. Nor can it be claimed that every such diversification within a group represents a first step in the direction of subdivision and multiplication of units. We have wellknown documented cases of one ethnic group, also at a relatively simple level of economic organization, occupying several different ecologic niches and yet retaining basic cultural and ethnic unity over long periods [cf., e.g., inland and coastal Chuckchee (Bogoras 1904-9) or reindeer, river, and coast Lapps (Gjessing, 1954]. In one of the following essays, Bjorn (pp. 74 ff.) argues cogently on this point with reference to central Norwegian mountain farmers. He shows how their participation and self-evaluation in terms of general Norwegian values secures them continued membership in the larger ethnic group, despite the highly characteristic and deviant patterns of activity which the local ecology imposes on them. To analyse such cases, we need a viewpoint that does not confuse

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the effects of ecologic circumstances on behaviour with those of cultural tradition, but which makes it possible to separate these factors and investigate the non-ecological cultural and social components creating diversity.

Ethnic groups as an organizational type

ethnic ascription

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By concentrating on what is socially effective, ethnic groups are seen as a form of social organization. The critical feature then becomes item (4) in the list on p. 409 the characteristic of self-ascription and ascription by others. A categorical ascription is an ethnic ascription when it classifies a person in terms of his basic, most general identity, presumptively determined by his origin and background. To the extent that actors use ethnic identities to categorize themselves and others for purposes of interaction, they form ethnic groups in this organizational sense. It is important to recognize that although ethnic categories take cultural differences into account, we can assume no simple one-toone relationship between ethnic units and cultural similarities and differences. The features that are taken into account are not the sum of ‘objective’ differences, but only those which the actors themselves regard as significant. Not only do ecologic variations mark and exaggerate differences; some cultural features are used by the actors as signals and emblems of differences, others are ignored, and in some relationships radical differences are played down and denied. The cultural contents of ethnic dichotomies would seem analytically to be of two orders: (i) overt signals or signs – the diacritical features that people look for and exhibit to show identity, often such features as dress, language, house-form, or general style of life, and (ii) basic value orientations: the standards of morality and excellence by which performance is judged. Since belonging to an ethnic category implies being a certain kind of person, having that basic identity, it also implies a claim to be judged, and to judge oneself, by those standards that are relevant to that identity. Neither of these kinds of cultural ‘contents’ follows from a descriptive list of cultural features or cultural differences; one cannot predict from first principles which features will be emphasized and made organizationally relevant by the actors. In other words, ethnic categories provide an organizational vessel that may be given varying amounts and forms of content in different socio-cultural systems. They may be of great relevance to behaviour, but they need not be; they may pervade all social life, or they may be relevant only in limited sectors of activity. There is thus

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an obvious scope for ethnographic and comparative descriptions of different forms of ethnic organization. The emphasis on ascription as the critical feature of ethnic groups also solves the two conceptual difficulties that were discussed above. 1. When defined as an ascriptive and exclusive group, the nature of continuity of ethnic units is clear: it depends on the maintenance of a boundary. The cultural features that signal the boundary may change, and the cultural characteristics of the members may likewise be transformed, indeed, even the organizational form of the group may change – yet the fact of continuing dichotomization between members and outsiders allows us to specify the nature of continuity, and investigate the changing cultural form and content. 2. Socially relevant factors alone become diagnostic for membership, not the overt, ‘objective’ differences which are generated by other factors. It makes no difference how dissimilar members may be in their overt behaviour – if they say they are A, in contrast to another cognate category B, they are willing to be treated and let their own behaviour be interpreted and judged as A’s and not as B’s; in other words, they declare their allegiance to the shared culture of A’s, The effects of this, as compared to other factors influencing actual behaviour, can then be made the object of investigation.

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The boundaries of ethnic groups The critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses. The boundaries to which we must give our attention are of course social boundaries, though they may have territorial counterparts. If a group maintains its identity when members interact with others, this entails criteria for determining membership and ways of signalling membership and exclusion. Ethnic groups are not merely or necessarily based on the occupation of exclusive territories; and the different ways in which they are maintained, not only by a once-and-for-all recruitment but by continual expression and validation, need to be analysed. What is more, the ethnic boundary canalizes social life – it entails a frequently quite complex organization of behaviour and social relations. The identification of another person as a fellow member of an ethnic group implies a sharing of criteria for evaluation and judgement. It thus entails the assumption that the two are fundamentally

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‘playing the same game’, and this means that there is between them a potential for diversification and expansion of their social relationship to cover eventually all different sectors and domains of activity. On the other hand, a dichotomization of others as strangers, as members of another ethnic group, implies a recognition of limitations on shared understandings, differences in criteria for judgement of value and performance, and a restriction of interaction to sectors of assumed common understanding and mutual interest. This makes it possible to understand one final form of boundary maintenance whereby cultural units and boundaries persist. Entailed in ethnic boundary maintenance are also situations of social contact between persons of different cultures: ethnic groups only persist as significant units if they imply marked difference in behaviour, i.e. persisting cultural differences. Yet where persons of different culture interact, one would expect these differences to be reduced, since interaction both requires and generates a congruence of codes and values – in other words, a similarity or community of culture (cf. Barth 1966, for my argumentation on this point). Thus the persistence of ethnic groups in contact implies not only criteria and signals for identification, but also a structuring of interaction which allows the persistence of cultural differences. The organizational feature which, I would argue, must be general for all inter-ethnic relations is a systematic set of rules governing inter-ethnic social encounters. In an organized social life, what can be made relevant to interaction in any particular social situation is prescribed (Goffman 1959). If people agree about these prescriptions, their agreement on codes and values need not extend beyond that which is relevant to the social situations in which they interact. Stable inter-ethnic relations presuppose such a structuring of interaction: a set of prescriptions governing situations of contact, and allowing for articulation in some sectors or domains of activity, and a set of proscriptions on social situations preventing inter-ethnic interaction in other sectors, and thus insulating parts of the cultures from confrontation and modification.

Poly-ethnic social systems This of course is what Furnivall (1944) so dearly depicted in his analysis of plural society: a poly-ethnic society integrated in the market place, under the control of a state system dominated by one of the groups, but leaving large areas of cultural diversity in the religious and domestic sectors of activity. What has not been adequately appreciated by later anthropolo-

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gists is the possible variety of sectors of articulation and separation, and the variety of poly-ethnic systems which this entails. We know of some of the Melanesian trade systems in objects belonging to the highprestige sphere of the economy, and even some of the etiquette and prescriptions governing the exchange situation and insulating it from other activities. We have information on various traditional polycentric systems from S.E. Asia (discussed below, Izikowitzs, pp. 135 ff.) integrated both in the prestige trade sphere and in quasi-feudal political structures. Some regions of S.W. Asia show forms based on a more fully monetized market economy, while political integration is polycentric in character. There is also the ritual and productive cooperation and political integration of the Indian caste system to be considered, where perhaps only kinship and domestic life remain as a proscribed sector and a wellspring for cultural diversity. Nothing can be gained by lumping these various systems under the increasingly vague label of ‘plural’ society, whereas an investigation of the varieties of structure can shed a great deal of light on social and cultural forms. What can be referred to as articulation and separation on the macro-level corresponds to systematic sets of role constraints on the micro-level. Common to all these systems is the principle that ethnic identity implies a series of constraints on the kinds of roles an individual is allowed to play, and the partners he may choose for different kinds of transactions.1 In other words, regarded as a status, ethnic identity is superordinate to most other statuses, and defines the permissible constellations of statuses, or social personalities, which an individual with that identity may assume. In this respect ethnic identity is similar to sex and rank, in that it constrains the incumbent in all his activities, not only in some defined social situations.2 One might thus also say that it is imperative, in that it cannot be disregarded and temporarily set aside by other definitions of the situation. The constraints on a person’s behaviour which spring from his ethnic identity thus tend to be absolute and, in complex poly-ethnic societies, quite comprehensive; and the component moral and social conventions are made further resistant to change by being joined in stereotyped clusters as characteristics of one single identity.

variety of poly-ethnic systems

The associations of identities and value standards The analysis of interactional and organizational features of interethnic relations has suffered from a lack of attention to problems of boundary maintenance. This is perhaps because anthropologists

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have reasoned from a misleading idea of the prototype inter-ethnic situation. One has tended to think in terms of different peoples, with different histories and cultures, coming together and accommodating themselves to each other, generally in a colonial setting. To visualize the basic requirements for the coexistence of ethnic diversity, I would suggest that we rather ask ourselves what is needed to make ethnic distinctions emerge in an area. The organizational requirements are clearly, first, a categorization of population sectors in exclusive and imperative status categories, and second, an acceptance of the principle that standards applied to one such category can be different from that applied to another. Though this alone does not explain why cultural differences emerge, it does allow us to see how they persist. Each category can then be associated with a separate range of value standards. The greater the differences between these value orientations are, the more constraints on inter-ethnic interaction do they entail: the statuses and situations in the total social system involving behaviour which is discrepant with a person’s value orientations must be avoided, since such behaviour on his part will be negatively sanctioned. Moreover, because identities are signalled as well as embraced, new forms of behaviour will tend to be dichotomized: one would expect the role constraints to operate in such a way that persons would be reluctant to act in new ways from a fear that such behaviour might be inappropriate for a person of their identity, and swift to classify forms of activity as associated with one or another cluster of ethnic characteristics. Just as dichotomizations of male versus female work seem to proliferate in some societies, so also the existence of basic ethnic categories would seem to be a factor encouraging the proliferation of cultural differentiae. In such systems, the sanctions producing adherence to groupspecific values are not only exercised by those who share the identity. Again, other imperative statuses afford a parallel: just as both sexes ridicule the male who is feminine, and all classes punish the proletarian who puts on airs, so also can members of an ethnic group in a poly-ethnic society act to maintain dichotomies and differences. Where social identities are organized and allocated by such principles, there will thus be a tendency towards canalization and standardization of interaction and the emergence of boundaries which maintain and generate ethnic diversity within larger, encompassing social systems.

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Interdependence of ethnic groups The positive bond that connects several ethnic groups in an encompassing social system depends on the complementarity of the groups with respect to some of their characteristic cultural features. Such complementarity can give rise to interdependence or symbiosis, and constitutes the areas of articulation referred to above; while in the fields where there is no complementarity there can be no basis for organization on ethnic lines – there will either be no interaction, or interaction without reference to ethnic identity. Social systems differ greatly in the extent to which ethnic identity, as an imperative status, constrains the person in the variety of statuses and roles he may assume. Where the distinguishing values connected with ethnic identity are relevant only to a few kinds of activities, the social organization based on it will be similarly limited. Complex polyethnic systems, on the other hand, clearly entail the existence of extensively relevant value differences and multiple constraints on status combinations and social participation. In such systems, the boundary maintaining mechanisms must be highly effective, for the following reasons: (i) the complexity is based on the existence of important, complementary cultural differences; (ii) these differences must be generally standardized within the ethnic group – i.e. the status cluster, or social person, of every member of a group must be highly stereotyped – so that inter-ethnic interaction can be based on ethnic identities; and (iii) the cultural characteristics of each ethnic group must be stable, so that the complementary differences on which the systems rest can persist in the face of close inter-ethnic contact. Where these conditions obtain, ethnic groups can make stable and symbiotic adaptations to each other: other ethnic groups in the region become a part of the natural environment; the sectors of articulation provide areas that can be exploited, while the other sectors of activity of other groups are largely irrelevant from the point of view of members of anyone group.

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complementarity

Ecologic perspective Such interdependences can partly be analysed from the point of view of cultural ecology, and the sectors of activity where other populations with other cultures articulate may be thought of as niches to which the group is adapted. This ecologic interdependence may take several different forms, for which one may construct a rough typology. Where two or more ethnic groups are in contact, their adaptations may entail the following forms:

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(1) They may occupy clearly distinct niches in the natural environment and be in minimal competition for resources. In this case their interdependence will be limited despite co-residence in the area, and the articulation will tend to be mainly through trade, and perhaps in a ceremonial-ritual sector. (2) They may monopolize separate territories, in which case they are in competition for resources and their articulation will involve politics along the border, and possibly other sectors. (3) They may provide important goods and services for each other, i.e. occupy reciprocal and therefore different niches but in close interdependence. If they do not articulate very closely in the political sector, this entails a classical symbiotic situation and a variety of possible fields of articulation. If they also compete and accommodate through differential monopolization of the means of production, this entails a close political and economic articulation, with open possibilities for other forms of interdependence as well. These alternatives refer to stable situations. But very commonly, one will also find a fourth main form: where two or more interspersed groups are in fact in at least partial competition within the same niche. With time one would expect one such group to displace the other, or an accommodation involving an increasing complementarity and interdependence to develop. From the anthropological literature one can doubtless think of type cases for most of these situations. However, if one looks carefully at most empirical cases, one will find fairly mixed situations obtaining, and only quite gross simplifications can reduce them to simple types. I have tried elsewhere (Barth 1964b) to illustrate this for an area of Baluchistan, and expect that it is generally true that an ethnic group, on the different boundaries of its distribution and in its different accommodations, exhibits several of these forms in its relations to other groups.

Demographic perspective These variables, however, only go part of the way in describing the adaptation of a group. While showing the qualitative (and ideally quantitative) structure of the niches occupied by a group, one cannot ignore the problems of number and balance in its adaptation. Whenever a population is dependent on its exploitation of a niche in nature, this implies an upper limit on the size it may attain corresponding to the carrying capacity of that niche; and any stable adapta-

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tion entails a control on population size. If, on the other hand, two populations are ecologically interdependent, as two ethnic groups in a symbiotic relationship, this means that any variation in the size of one must have important effects on the other. In the analysis of any poly-ethnic system for which we assert any degree of time depth, we must therefore be able to explain the processes whereby the sizes of the interdependent ethnic groups are balanced. The demographic balances involved are thus quite complex, since a group’s adaptation to a niche in nature is affected by its absolute size, while a group’s adaptation to a niche constituted by another ethnic group is affected by its relative size. The demographic problems in an analysis of ethnic inter-relations in a region thus centre on the forms of recruitment to ethnic groups and the question of how, if at all, their rates are sensitive to pressures on the different niches which each group exploits. These factors are highly critical for the stability of any poly-ethnic system, and it might look as if any population change would prove destructive. This does not necessarily seem to follow, as documented e.g. in the essay by Siverts (pp. 101 ff.), but in most situations the poly-ethnic systems we observe do entail quite complex processes of population movement and adjustment. It becomes clear that a number of factors other than human fertility and mortality affect the balance of numbers. From the point of view of any one territory, there are the factors of individual and group movements: emigration that relieves pressure, immigration that maintains one or several co-resident groups as outpost settlements of larger population reservoirs elsewhere. Migration and conquest play an intermittent role in redistributing populations and changing their relations. But the most interesting and often critical role is played by another set of processes that effect changes of the identity of individuals and groups. After all, the human material that is organized in an ethnic group is not immutable, and though the social mechanisms discussed so far tend to maintain dichotomies and boundaries, they do not imply ‘stasis’ for the human material they organize: boundaries may persist despite what may figuratively be called the ‘osmosis’ of personnel through them. This perspective leads to an important clarification of the conditions for complex poly-ethnic systems. Though the emergence and persistence of such systems would seem to depend on a relatively high stability in the cultural features associated with ethnic groups – i.e. a high degree or rigidity in the interactional boundaries – they do not imply a similar rigidity in the patterns of recruitment or ascription to ethnic groups: on the contrary, the ethnic inter-relations that we observe frequently entail a variety of processes which effect

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changes in individual and group identity and modify the other demographic factors that obtain in the situation. Examples of stable and persisting ethnic boundaries that are crossed by a flow of personnel are clearly far more common than the ethnographic literature would lead us to believe. Different processes of such crossing are exemplified in these essays, and the conditions which cause them are shown to be various. We may look briefly at some of them.

Factors in identity change Yao assimilation

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The Yao described by Kandre (1967b) are one of the many hill peoples on the southern fringe of the Chinese area. The Yao are organized for productive purposes in extended family households, aligned in clans and in villages. Household leadership is very clear, while community and region are autochthonously acephalous, and variously tied to poly-ethnic political domains. Identity and distinctions are expressed in complex ritual idioms, prominently involving ancestor worship. Yet this group shows the drastic incorporation rate of 10% non-Yao becoming Yao in each generation (Kandre 1967a: 594). Change of membership takes place individually, mostly with children, where it involves purchase of the person by a Yao houseleader, adoption to kinship status, and full ritual assimilation. Occasionally, change of ethnic membership is also achieved by men through uxorilocal marriage; Chinese men are the acceptable parties to such arrangements. The conditions for this form of assimilation are clearly twofold: first, the presence of cultural mechanisms to implement the incorporation, including ideas of obligations to ancestors, compensation by payment, etc., and secondly, the incentive of obvious advantages to the assimilating household and leader. These have to do with the role of households as productive units and agro-managerial techniques that imply an optimal size of 6-8 working persons, and the pattern of intra-community competition between household leaders in the field of wealth and influence. Movements across the southern and northern boundaries of the Pathan area (cf. pp. 123 ff.) illustrate quite other forms and conditions. Southern Pathans become Baluch and not vice versa; this transformation can take place with individuals but more readily with whole households or small groups of households: it involves loss of position in the rigid genealogical and territorial segmentary system of Pathans and incorporation through clientage contract into the hierarchical, centralized system of the Baluch. Acceptance in the receiving group is conditional on the ambition and opportunism of

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Baluch political leaders. On the other hand, Pathans in the north have, after an analogous loss of position in their native system, settled in and often conquered new territories in Kohistan. The effect in due course has been a reclassification of the settling communities among the congeries of locally diverse Kohistani tribes and groups. Perhaps the most striking case is that from Darfur provided by Haaland (pp, 58 ff.), which shows members of the hoe-agricultural Fur of the Sudan changing their identity to that of nomadic cattle Arabs. This process is conditional on a very specific economic circumstance: the absence of investment opportunities (or capital in the village economy of the Fur in contrast to the possibilities among the nomads. Accumulated capital, and the opportunities for its management and increase, provide the incentive for Fur households to abandon their fields and villages and change to the life of the neighbouring Baggara, incidentally also joining one of the loose but nominally centralized Baggara political units if the change has been economically completely successful. These processes that induce a flow of personnel across ethnic boundaries will of necessity affect the demographic balance between different ethnic groups. Whether they are such that they contribute to stability in this balance is an entirely different question. To do so, they would have to be sensitive to changes in the pressure on ecologic niches in a feed-back pattern. This does not regularly seem to be the case. The assimilation of non-Yao seems further to increase the rate of Yao growth and expansion at the expense of other groups, and can be recognized as one, albeit minor, factor furthering the progressive Sinization process whereby cultural and ethnic diversity has steadily been reduced over vast areas. The rate of assimilation of Pathans by Baluch tribes is no doubt sensitive to population pressure in Pathan areas, but simultaneously sustains an imbalance whereby Baluch tribes spread northward despite higher population pressures in the northern areas. Kohistani assimilation relieves population pressure in Pathan area while maintaining a geographically stable boundary. Nomadization of the Fur replenishes the Baggara, who are elsewhere becoming sedentarized. The rate, however, does not correlate with pressure on Fur lands – since nomadization is conditional on accumulated wealth, its rate probably decreases as Fur population pressure increases. The Fur case also demonstrates the inherent instability of some of these processes. and how limited changes can have drastic results: with the agricultural innovation of orchards over the last ten years, new investment opportunities are provided which will probably greatly reduce, or perhaps for a while even reverse, the nomadization process.

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Thus, though the processes that induce change of identity are important to the understanding of most cases of ethnic interdependence, they need not be conducive to population stability. In general, however, one can argue that whenever ethnic relations are stable over long periods, and particularly where the interdependence is close, one can expect to find an approximate demographic balance. The analysis of the different factors involved in this balance is an important part of the analysis of the ethnic inter-relations in the area.

The persistence of cultural boundaries

the Pathan case

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In the preceding discussion of ethnic boundary maintenance and interchange of personnel there is one very important problem that I have left aside. We have seen various examples of how individuals and small groups, because of specific economic and political circumstances in their former position and among the assimilating group, may change their locality, their subsistence pattern, their political allegiance and form, or their household membership. This still does not fully explain why such changes lead to categorical changes of ethnic identity, leaving the dichotomized ethnic groups unaffected (other than in numbers) by the interchange of personnel. In the case of adoption and incorporation of mostly immature and in any case isolated single individuals into pre-established households, as among the Yao, such complete cultural assimilation is understandable: here every new person becomes totally immersed in a Yao pattern of relationships and expectations. In the other examples, it is less clear why this total change of identity takes place. One cannot argue that it follows from a universally imputable rule of cultural integration, so that the practice of the politics of one group or the assumption of its pattern of ecologic adaptation in subsistence and economy, entails the adoption also of its other parts and forms. Indeed, the Pathan case (Ferdinand 1967) directly falsifies this argument, in that the boundaries of the Pathan ethnic group crosscuts ecologic and political units. Using self-identification as the critical criterion of ethnic identity, it should thus be perfectly possible for a small group of Pathans to assume the political obligations of membership in a Baluch tribe, or the agricultural and husbandry practices of Kohistanis, and yet continue to call themselves Pathans. By the same token one might expect nomadization among the Fur to lead to the emergence of a nomadic section of the Fur, similar in subsistence to the Baggara but different from them in other cultural features, and in ethnic label. Quite clearly, this is precisely what has happened in many his-

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torical situations. In cases where it does not happen we see the organizing and canalizing effects of ethnic distinctions. To explore the factors responsible for the difference, let us first look at the specific explanations for the changes of identity that have been advanced in the examples discussed above. In the case of Pathan borderlands, influence and security in the segmentary and anarchic societies of this region derive from a man’s previous actions, or rather from the respect that he obtains from these acts as judged by accepted standards of evaluation. The main fora for exhibiting Pathan virtues are the tribal council, and stages for the display of hospitality. But the villager in Kohistan has a standard of living where the hospitality he can provide can hardly compete with that of the conquered serfs of neighbouring Pathans, while the client of a Baluch leader cannot speak in any tribal council. To maintain Pathan identity in these situations, to declare oneself in the running as a competitor by Pathan value standards, is to condemn oneself in advance to utter failure in performance. By assuming Kohistani or Baluch identity, however, a man may, by the same performance, score quite high on the scales that then become relevant. The incentives to a change in identity are thus inherent in the change in circumstances. Different circumstances obviously favour different performances. Since ethnic identity is associated with a culturally specific set of value standards, it follows that there are circumstances where such an identity can be moderately successfully realized, and limits beyond which such success is precluded. I will argue that ethnic identities will not be retained beyond these limits, because allegiance to basic value standards will not be sustained where one’s own comparative performance is utterly inadequate.3 The two components in this relative measure of success are, first, the performance of others and, secondly, the alternatives open to oneself. I am not making an appeal to ecologic adaptation. Ecologic feasibility, and fitness in relation to the natural environment, matter only in so far as they set a limit in terms of sheer physical survival, which is very rarely approached by ethnic groups. What matters is how well the others, with whom one interacts and to whom one is compared, manage to perform, and what alternative identities and sets of standards are available to the individual.

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Ethnic identity and tangible assets

productive resources

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The boundary-maintaining factors in the Fur are not immediately illuminated by this argument. Haaland (pp. 65 f.) discusses the evaluation of the nomad’s life by Fur standards and finds the balance between advantages and disadvantages inconclusive. To ascertain the comparability of this case, we need to look more generally at all the factors that affect the behaviour in question. The materials derive from grossly different ethnographic contexts and so a number of factors are varied simultaneously. The individual’s relation to productive resources stands out as the significant contrast between the two regions. In the Middle East, the means of production are conventionally held as private or corporate, defined and transferable property. A man can obtain them through a specific and restricted transaction, such as purchase or lease; even in conquest the rights that are obtained are standard, delimited rights. In Darfur, on the other hand, as in much of the Sudanic belt, the prevailing conventions are different. Land for cultivation is allocated, as needed, to members of a local community. The distinction between owner and cultivator, so important in the social structure of most Middle Eastern communities, cannot be made because ownership does not involve separable, absolute, and transferable rights. Access to the means of production in a Fur village is therefore conditional only on inclusion in the village community – i.e. on Fur ethnic identity. Similarly, grazing rights are not allocated and monopolized, even as between Baggara tribes. Though groups and tribes tend to use the same routes and areas every year, and may at times try in an ad hoc way to keep out others from an area they wish to use, they normally intermix and have no defined and absolute prerogatives. Access to grazing is thus an automatic aspect of practising husbandry, and entails being a Baggara. The gross mechanisms of boundary maintenance in Darfur are thus quite simple: a man has access to the critical means of production by virtue of practising a certain subsistence; this entails a whole style of life, and all these characteristics are subsumed under the ethnic labels Fur and Baggara. In the Middle East, on the other hand, men can obtain control over means of production through a transaction that does not involve their other activities; ethnic identity is then not necessarily affected and this opens the way for diversification. Thus nomad, peasant, and city dweller can belong to the same ethnic group in the Middle East; where ethnic boundaries persist they depend on more subtle and specific mechanisms, mainly connected with the unfeasibility of certain status and role combinations.

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Ethnic groups and stratification Where one ethnic group has control of the means of production utilized by another group, a relationship of inequality and stratification obtains. Thus Fur and Baggara do not make up a stratified system, since they utilize different niches and have access to them independently of each other, whereas in some parts of the Pathan area one finds stratification based on the control of land, Pathans being landowners, and other groups cultivating as serfs. In more general terms, one may say that stratified poly-ethnic systems exist where groups are characterized by differential control of assets that are valued by all groups in the system. The cultures of the component ethnic groups in such systems are thus integrated in a special way: they share certain general value orientations and scales, on the basis of which they can arrive at judgements of hierarchy. Obversely, a system of stratification does not entail the existence of ethnic groups. Leach (1967) argues convincingly that social classes are distinguished by different sub-cultures, indeed, that this is a more basic characteristic than their hierarchical ordering. However, in many systems of stratification we are not dealing with bounded strata at all: the stratification is based simply on the notion of scales and the recognition of an ego-centered level of ‘people who are just like us’ versus those more select and those more vulgar. In such systems, cultural differences, whatever they are, grade into each other, and nothing like a social organization of ethnic groups emerges. Secondly, most systems of stratification allow, or indeed entail, mobility based on evaluation by the scales that define the hierarchy. Thus a moderate failure in the ‘R’ sector of the hierarchy makes you a ‘C’, etc. Ethnic groups are not open to this kind of penetration: the ascription of ethnic identity is based on other and more restrictive criteria. This is most clearly illustrated by Knutsson’s analysis of the Galla in the context of Ethiopian society (pp. 86 ff.) – a social system where ‘Whole ethnic groups are stratified with respect to their positions of privilege and disability within the stale. Yet the attainment of a governorship does not make an Amhara of a Galla, nor does estrangement as an outlaw entail loss of Galla identity. From this perspective, the Indian caste system would appear to be a special case of a stratified poly-ethnic system. The boundaries of castes are defined by ethnic criteria: thus individual failures in performance lead to out-casting and not to down-casting. The process whereby the hierarchical system incorporates new ethnic groups is demonstrated in the sanscritization of tribals: their acceptance of the critical value scales defining their position in the hierarchy of ritual

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purity and pollution is the only change of values that is necessary for a people to become an Indian caste. An analysis of the different processes of boundary maintenance involved in different inter-caste relations and in different regional variants of the caste system would, I believe, illuminate many features of this system. The preceding discussion has brought out a somewhat anomalous general feature of ethnic identity as a status: ascription4 is not conditional on the control of any specific assets, but rests on criteria of origin and commitment; whereas performance in the status, the adequate acting out of the roles required to realize the identity, in many systems does require such assets. By contrast, in a bureaucratic office the incumbent is provided with those assets that are required for the performance of the role; while kinship positions, which are ascribed without reference to a person’s assets, likewise are not conditional on performance – you remain a father even if you fail to feed your child. Thus where ethnic groups are interrelated in a stratified system, this requires the presence of special processes that maintain differential control of assets. To schematize: a basic premise of ethnic group organization is that every A can act roles 1, 2 and 3. If actors agree on this, the premise is self-fulfilling, unless acting in these roles requires assets that are distributed in a discrepant pattern. If these assets are obtained or lost in ways independent of being an A, and sought and avoided without reference to one’s identity as an A, the premise will be falsified: some A’s become unable to act in the expected roles. Most systems of stratification are maintained by the solution that in such cases, the person is no longer an A. In the case of ethnic identity, the solution on the contrary is the recognition that every A no longer can or will act in roles 1 and 2. The persistence of stratified poly-ethnic systems thus entails the presence of factors that generate and maintain a categorically different distribution of assets: state controls, as in some modern plural and racist systems; marked differences in evaluation that canalize the efforts of actors in different directions, as in systems with polluting occupations; or differences in culture that generate marked differences in political organization, economic organization, or individual skills.

The problem of variation Despite such processes, however, the ethnic label subsumes a number of simultaneous characteristics which no doubt cluster statistically, but which are not absolutely interdependent and connected. Thus there will be variations between members, some showing

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many and some showing few characteristics. Particularly where people change their identity, this creates ambiguity since ethnic membership is at once a question of source of origin as well as of current identity. Indeed, Haaland was taken out to see ‘Fur who live in nomad camps’, and I have heard members of Baluch tribal sections explain that they are ‘really Pathan’. What is then left of the boundary maintenance and the categorical dichotomy, when the actual distinctions are blurred in this way? Rather than despair at the failure of typological schematism, one can legitimately note that people do employ ethnic labels and that there are in many parts of the world most spectacular differences whereby forms of behaviour cluster so that whole actors tend to fall into such categories in terms of their objective: behaviour. What is surprising is not the existence of some actors that fall between these categories, and of some regions in the world where whole persons do not tend to sort themselves out in this way, but the fact that variations tend to cluster at all. We can then be concerned not to perfect a typology, but to discover the processes that bring about such clustering. An alternative mode of approach in anthropology has been to dichotomize the ethnographic material in terms of ideal versus actual or conceptual versus empirical, and then concentrate on the consistencies (the ‘structure’) of the ideal, conceptual part of the data, employing some vague notion of norms and individual deviance to account for the actual, statistical patterns. It is of course perfectly feasible to distinguish between a people’s model of their social system and their aggregate pattern of pragmatic behaviour, and indeed quite necessary not to confuse the two. But the fertile problems in social anthropology are concerned with how the two are interconnected, and it does not follow that this is best elucidated by dichotomizing and confronting them as total systems. In these essays we have tried to build the analysis on a lower level of interconnection between status and behaviour. I would argue that people’s categories are for acting, and are significantly affected by interaction rather than contemplation. In showing the connection between ethnic labels and the maintenance of cultural diversity, I am therefore concerned primarily to show how, under varying circumstances, certain constellations of categorization and value orientation have a self-fulfilling character, how others will tend to be falsified by experience, while others again are incapable of consummation in interaction. Ethnic boundaries can emerge and persist only in the former situation, whereas they should dissolve or be absent in the latter situations. With such a feedback from people’s experiences to the categories they employ, simple ethnic dichotomies can be retained, and their stereotyped

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behavioural differential reinforced, despite a considerable objective variation. This is so because actors struggle to maintain conventional definitions of the situation in social encounters through selective perception, tact, and sanctions, and because of difficulties in finding other, more adequate codifications of experience. Revision only takes place where the categorization is grossly inadequate – not merely because it is untrue in any objective sense, but because it is consistently unrewarding to act upon, within the domain where the actor makes it relevant. So the dichotomy of Fur villagers and Baggara nomads is maintained despite the patent presence of a nomadic camp of Fur in the neighbourhood: the fad that those nomads speak Fur and have kinship connections with villagers somewhere does not change the social situation in which the villager interacts with them – it simply makes the standard transactions of buying milk, allocating camp sites, or obtaining manure, which one would have with other Baggara, flow a bit more smoothly. But a dichotomy between Pathan landowners and non-Pathan labourers can no longer be maintained where non-Pathans obtain land and embarrass Pathans by refusing to respond with the respect which their imputed position as menials would have sanctioned.

Minorities, pariahs, and organizational characteristics of the periphery

minorities

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In some social systems, ethnic groups co-reside though no major aspect of structure is based on ethnic inter-relations. These are generally referred to as societies with minorities, and the analysis of the minority situation involves a special variant of inter-ethnic relations. I think in most cases, such situations have come about as a result of external historical events; the cultural differentiae have not sprung from the local organizational context – rather, a pre-established cultural contrast is brought into conjunction with a pre-established social system, and is made relevant to life there in a diversity of ways. An extreme form of minority position, illustrating some but not all features of minorities, is that of pariah groups. These are groups actively rejected by the host population because of behaviour or characteristics positively condemned, though often useful in some specific, practical way. European pariah groups of recent centuries (executioners, dealers in horseflesh and -leather, collectors of nightsoil, gypsies, etc.) exemplify most features: as breakers of basic taboos they were rejected by the larger society. Their identity imposed a definition on social situations which gave very little scope for interac-

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tion with persons in the majority population, and simultaneously as an imperative status represented an inescapable disability that prevented them from assuming the normal statuses involved in other definitions of the situation of interaction. Despite these formidable barriers, such groups do not seem to have developed the internal complexity that would lead us to regard them as full-fledged ethnic groups; only the culturally foreign gypsies5 clearly constitute such a group. The boundaries of pariah groups are most strongly maintained by the excluding host population, and they are often forced to make use of easily noticeable diacritica to advertise their identity (though since this identity is often the basis for a highly insecure livelihood, such over-communication may sometimes also serve the pariah individual’s competitive interests). Where pariahs attempt to pass into the larger society, the culture of the host population is generally well known; thus the problem is reduced to a question of escaping the stigmata of disability by dissociating with the pariah community and faking another origin. Many minority situations have a trace of this active rejection by the host population. But the general feature of all minority situations lies in the organization of activities and interaction: In the total social system, all sectors of activity are organized by statuses open to members of the majority group, while the status system of the minority has only relevance to relations within the minority and only to some sectors of activity, and does not provide a basis for action in other sectors, equally valued in the minority culture. There is thus a disparity between values and organizational facilities: prized goals are outside the field organized by the minority’s culture and categories. Though such systems contain several ethnic groups, interaction between members of the different groups of this kind does not spring from the complementarity of ethnic identities; it takes place entirely within the framework of the dominant, majority group’s statuses and institutions, where identity as a minority member gives no basis for action, though it may in varying degrees represent a disability in assuming the operative statuses. Eidheim’s paper gives a very clear analysis of this situation, as it obtains among Coast Lapps. But in a different way, one may say that in such a poly-ethnic system, the contrastive cultural characteristics of the component groups are located in the non-articulating sectors of life. For the minority, these sectors constitute a ‘backstage’ where the characteristics that are stigmatic in terms of the dominant majority culture can covertly be made the objects of transaction.

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The present-day minority situation of Lapps has been brought about by recent external circumstances. Formerly, the important context of interaction was the local situation, where two ethnic groups with sufficient knowledge of each other’s culture maintained a relatively limited, partly symbiotic relationship based in their respective identities. With the fuller integration of Norwegian society, bringing the northern periphery into the nation-wide system, the rate of cultural change increased drastically. The population of Northern Norway became increasingly dependent on the institutional system of the larger society, and social life among Norwegians in Northern Norway was increasingly organized to pursue activities and obtain benefits within the wider system. This system has not, until very recently, taken ethnic identity into account in its structure, and until a decade ago there was practically no place in it where one could participate as a Lapp. Lapps as Norwegian citizens, on the other hand, are perfectly free to participate, though under the dual disability of peripheral location and inadequate command of Norwegian language and culture. This situation has elsewhere, in the inland regions of Finnmark, given scope for Lappish innovators with a political program based on the ideal of ethnic pluralism (cf. Eidheim 1967), but they have gained no following in the Coast Lapp area here discussed by Eidheim. For these Lapps, rather, the relevance of Lappish statuses and conventions decreases in sector after sector (cf. Eidheim 1966), while the relative inadequacy of performance in the widest system brings about frustrations and a crisis of identity.

Culture contact and change

new elites

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This is a very widespread process under present conditions as dependence on the products and institutions of industrial societies spreads in all parts of the world. The important thing to recognize is that a drastic reduction of cultural differences between ethnic groups does not correlate in any simple way with a reduction in the organizational relevance of ethnic identities, or a breakdown in boundary-maintaining processes. This is demonstrated in much of the case material. We can best analyse the interconnection by looking at the agents of change: what strategies are open and attractive to them, and what are the organizational implications of different choices on their part? The agents in this case are the persons normally referred to somewhat ethno-centrically as the new elites: the persons in the less industrialized groups with greater contact and more dependence on the goods and organizations of industrialized societies. In their pur-

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suit of participation in wider social systems to obtain new forms of value they can choose between the following basic strategies: (i) they may attempt to pass and become incorporated in the pre-established industrial society and cultural group; (ii) they may accept a ‘minority’ status, accommodate to and seek to reduce their minority disabilities by encapsulating all cultural differentiae in sectors of non-articulation, while participating in the larger system of the industrialized group in the other sectors of activity; (iii) they may choose to emphasize ethnic identity, using it to develop new positions and patterns to organize activities in those sectors formerly not found in their society, or inadequately developed for the new purposes. If the cultural innovators are successful in the first strategy, their ethnic group will be denuded of its source of internal diversification and will probably remain as a culturally conservative, low-articulating ethnic group with low rank in the larger social sytem. A general acceptance of the second strategy will prevent the emergence of a clearly dichotomizing polyethnic organization, and – in view of the diversity of industrial society and consequent variation and multiplicity of fields of articulation – probably lead to an eventual assimilation of the minority. The third strategy generates many of the interesting movements that can be observed today, from nativism to new states. I am unable to review the variables that affect which basic strategy will be adopted, which concrete form it may take, and what its degree of success and cumulative implications may be. Such factors range from the number of ethnic groups in the system to features of the ecologic regime and details of the constituent cultures, and are illustrated in most of the concrete analyses of the following essays. It may be of interest to note some of the forms in which ethnic identity is made organizationally relevant to new sectors in the current situation. Firstly, the innovators may choose to emphasize one level of identity among the several provided by the traditional social organization. Tribe, caste, language group, region or state all have features that make them a potentially adequate primary ethnic identity for group reference, and the outcome will depend on the readiness with which others can be led to embrace these identities, and the cold tactical facts. Thus, though tribalism may rally the broadest support in many African areas, the resultant groups seem unable to stand up against the sanctioning apparatus even of a relatively rudimentary state organization. Secondly, the mode of organization of the ethnic group varies, as does the inter-ethnic articulation that is sought. The fact that contemporary forms are prominently political does not make them any less ethnic in character. Such political movements constitute new ways

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of making cultural differences organizationally relevant (Kleivan 1967), and new ways of articulating the dichotomized ethnic groups. The proliferation of ethnically based pressure groups, political parties, and visions of independent statehood, as well as the multitude of subpolitical advancement associations (Sommerfelt 1967) show the importance of these new forms. In other areas, cult-movements or mission-introduced sects are used to dichotomize and articulate groups in new ways. It is striking that these new patterns are so rarely concerned with the economic sector of activities, which is so major a factor in the culture contact situation, apart from the forms of state socialism adopted by some of the new nations. By contrast, the traditional complex poly-ethnic systems have been prominently based on articulation in this sector, through occupational differentiation and articulation at the market place in many regions of Asia and Middle America, or most elaborately, through agrarian production in South Asia. Today, contending ethnic groups not infrequently become differentiated with respect to educational level and attempt to control or monopolize educational facilities for this purpose (Sommerfelt 1967), but this is not so much with a view to occupational differentiation as because of the obvious connection between bureaucratic competence and opportunities for political advancement. One may speculate that an articulation entailing complex differentiation of skills, and sanctioned by the constant dependence on livelihood, will have far greater strength and stability than one based on revocable political affiliation and sanctioned by the exercise of force and political fiat, and that these new forms of poly-ethnic systems are probably inherently more turbulent and unstable than the older forms. When political groups articulate their opposition in terms of ethnic criteria, the direction of cultural change is also affected. A political confrontation can only be implemented by making the groups similar and thereby comparable, and this will have effect on every new sector of activity which is made politically relevant. Opposed parties thus tend to become structurally similar, and differentiated only by a few clear diacritica. Where ethnic groups are organized in political confrontation in this way, the process of opposition will therefore lead to a reduction of the cultural differences between them. For this reason, much of the activity of political innovators is concerned with the codification of idioms: the selection of signals for identity and the assertion of value for these cultural diacritica, and the suppression or denial of relevance for other differentiae. The issue as to which new cultural forms are compatible with the native ethnic identity is often hotly contended, but is generally settled in favour of syncretism for the reasons noted above. But a great amount

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of attention may be paid to the revival of select traditional culture traits, and to the establishment of historical traditions to justify and glorify the idioms and the identity. The interconnection between the diacritica that are chosen for emphasis, the boundaries that are defined, and the differentiating values that are espoused, constitute a fascinating field for study.6 Clearly, a number of factors are relevant. Idioms vary in their appropriateness for different kinds of units. They are unequally adequate for the innovator’s purposes, both as means to mobilize support and as supports in the strategy of confrontation with other groups. Their stratificational implications both within and between groups are important: they entail different sources and distributions of influence within the group, and different claims to recognition from other groups through suppression or glorification of different forms of social stigmata. Clearly, there is no simple connection between the ideological basis of a movement and the idioms chosen; yet both have implications for subsequent boundary maintenance, and the course of further change.

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Variations in the setting for ethnic relations These modern variants for poly-ethnic organization emerge in a world of bureaucratic administration, developed communications, and progressive urbanization. Clearly, under radically different circumstances, the critical factors in the definition and maintenance of ethnic boundaries would be different. In basing ourselves on limited and contemporary data, we are faced with difficulties in generalizing about ethnic processes, since major variables may be ignored because they are not exhibited in the cases at our disposal. There can be little doubt that social anthropologists have tended to regard the rather special situation of colonial peace and external administration, which has formed the backdrop of most of the influential monographs, as if this were representative of conditions at most times and places. This may have biased the interpretation both of pre-colonial systems and of contemporary, emergent forms. The attempt in these essays to cover regionally very diverse cases is not alone an adequate defence against such bias, and the issue needs to be faced directly. Colonial regimes are quite extreme in the extent to which the administration and its rules are divorced from locally based social life. Under such a regime, individuals hold certain rights to protection uniformly through large population aggregates and regions, far beyond the reach of their own social relationships and institutions. This

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allows physical proximity and opportunities for contact between persons of different ethnic groups regardless of the absence of shared understandings between them, and thus clearly removes one of the constraints that normally operate on inter-ethnic relations. In such situations, interaction can develop and proliferate – indeed, only those forms of interaction that are directly inhibited by other factors will be absent and remain as sectors of non-articulation. Thus ethnic boundaries in such situations represent a positive organization of social relations around differentiated and complementary values, and cultural differences will tend to be reduced with time and approach the required minimum. In most political regimes, however, where there is less security and people live under a greater threat of arbitrariness and violence outside their primary community, the insecurity itself acts as a constraint on inter-ethnic contacts. In this situation, many forms of interaction between members of different ethnic groups may fail to develop, even though a potential complementarity of interests obtains. Forms of interaction may be blocked because of a lack of trust or a lack of opportunities to consummate transactions. What is more, there are also internal sanctions in such communities which tend to enhance overt conformity within and cultural differences between communities. If a person is dependent for his security on the voluntary and spontaneous support of his own community, selfidentification as a member of this community needs to be explicitly expessed and confirmed: and any behaviour which is deviant from the standard may be interpreted as a weakening of the identity, and thereby of the bases of security. In such situations, fortuitous historical differences in culture between different communities will tend to perpetuate themselves without any positive organizational basis: many of the observable cultural differentiae may thus be of very limited relevance to the ethnic organization. The processes whereby ethnic units maintain themselves are thus clearly affected, but not fundamentally changed, by the variable of regional security. This can also be shown by an inspection of the cases analysed in these essays, which represent a fair range from the colonial to the poly-centric, up to relatively anarchic situations. It is important, however, to recognize that this background variable may change very rapidly with time, and in the projection of long-range processes this is a serious difficulty. Thus in the Fur case, we observe a situation of externally maintained peace and very small-scale local political activity, and can form a picture of inter-ethnic processes and even rates in this setting. But we know that over the last few generations, the situation has varied from one of Baggara-Fur confrontation

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under an expansive Fur sultanate to a nearly total anarchy in Turkish and Mabdi times; and it is very difficult to estimate the efforts of these variations on the processes of nomadization and assimilation, and arrive at any long-range projection of rates and trends.

Ethnic groups and cultural evolution The perspective and analysis presented here have relevance to the theme of cultural evolution. No doubt human history is a story of the development of emergent forms, both of cultures and societies. The issue in anthropology has been how this history can best be depicted, and what kinds of analyses are adequate to discover general principles in the courses of change. Evolutionary analysis in the rigorous sense of the biological fields has based its method on the construction of phyletic lines. This method presumes the existence of units where the boundaries and the boundary-maintaining processes can be described, and thus where the continuity can be specified. Concretely, phyletic lines are meaningful because specific boundaries prevent the interchange of genetic material; and so one can insist that the reproductive isolate is the unit, and that it has maintained an identity undisturbed by the changes in the morphological characteristics of the species. I have argued that boundaries are also maintained between ethnic units, and that consequently it is possible to specify the nature of continuity and persistence of such units. These essays try to show that ethnic boundaries are maintained in each case by a limited set of cultural features. The persistence of the unit then depends on the persistence of these cultural differentiae, while continuity can also be specified through the changes of the unit brought about by changes in the boundary-defining cultural differentiae. However, most of the cultural matter that at any time is associated with a human population is not constrained by this boundary; it can vary, be learnt, and change without any critical relation to the boundary maintenance of the ethnic group. So when one traces the history of a ethnic group through time, one is not simultaneously, in the same sense, tracing the history of ‘a culture’: the elements of the present culture of that ethnic group have not sprung from the particular set that constituted the group’s culture at a previous time, whereas the group has a continual organizational existence with boundaries (criteria of membership) that despite modifications have marked off a continuing unit. Without being able to specify the boundaries of cultures, it is not

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possible to construct phyletic lines in the more rigorous evolutionary sense. But from the analysis that has been argued here, it should be possible to do so for ethnic groups, and thus in a sense for those aspects of culture which have this organizational anchoring.

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Notes 1 The emphatic ideological denial of the primacy of ethnic identity (and rank) which characterises the universal religions that have arisen in the Middle East is understandable in this perspective, since practically any movement for social or ethical reform in the poly-ethnic societies of that region would clash with conventions and standards of ethnic character. 2 The difference between ethnic groups and social strata, which seems problematical at this stage of the argument, will be taken up below. 3 I am here concerned only with individual failure to maintain identity, where most members do so successfully, and not with the broader questions of cultural vitality and anomie. 4 As opposed to presumptive classification in passing social encounters – I am thinking of the person in his normal social context where others have a considerable amount of previous information about him, not of the possibilities afforded occasionally for mispresenting one’s identity towards strangers. 5 The condemned behaviour which gives pariah position to the gypsies is compound, but rests prominently on their wandering life, originally in contrast to the serf bondage of Europe, later in their flagrant violation of puritan ethics of responsibility, toil and morality. 6 To my knowledge, Mitchell’s essay on the Kalda dance (Mitchell 1956) is the first and still the most penetrating study on this topic.

For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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The theory of race relation: a Weberian approach John Rex

The contribution of John Rex to the sociology of ethnic and race relations in Britain, as well as throughout the Continent, is immense. Nowadays, we often hear how ethnic and migration studies in Europe presents a lacuna: its lack of connection with the development of general social and political theories. In this article, first published under UNESCO’s auspices in 1980 in a book entitled Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, Rex clarifies the specificity of the Weberian approach to sociology. He does this with intelligence and sophistication, also identifying its particular contribution to the sociology of race relations. By doing so, Rex links the sociology of race relations to general sociological theory in a very rigorous way. This article illustrates the necessity of such theoretically oriented work for the further development of ethnic and migration studies. It would be foolish to suggest that any one school of sociology held a monopoly of wisdom in the field of race relations theory. Equally it would be misleading to suggest that any of the great founders of sociological theory in the nineteenth and early twentieth century had dealt directly with the problem of race relations. Nonetheless Max Weber is at least one of the founders of the discipline of sociology; there is what one might call a specifically Weberian style of sociological thinking; and there can be little doubt that the scope of Weber’s comparative studies, in terms of both time and place, make it inevitable that his work should throw at least an indirect light on the structure of the relationships between racial and ethnic groups. The following distinctions between schools of sociological thinking might perhaps be briefly made in order to clarify the specificity of the Weberian approach to sociology. They distinguish it from the tradition of French Positivism running from Comte to Durkheim and from that of Marxism, which, although it is far more than a sociology, is an approach to the study of nature, culture and society

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which has considerable implications for sociology. They also distinguish the approach of Weber from that of a number of contemporary schools of sociology, some of which represent out-growths of the Weberian approach, which emphasize certain implicit aspects of Weber’s thought. Thus one has in modern sociology Positivist Empiricism as represented in American sociology by such authors as Lazarsfeld and Blalock, the highly systematic general theory of Talcott Parsons commonly called Structural-Functionalism, and the various reactions to these schools which may loosely be called phenomenological, including the seminal work of Schutz, the trend known as Symbolic Interactionism deriving from the work of Mead, and the growing trend of Ethnomethodology. And while these are schools from which Weberian sociology has to be distinguished in America there are also distinctions to be made within European social thought. There, a variety of approaches to human affairs have arisen from the Phenomenology of Husserl, through the intermingling of phenomenological themes with those of existentialism, through the critique of the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle which culminates in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and later in the more complex theories of Habermas, through the new development of Structuralism in the social sciences deriving from the work of LeviStrauss, through the development of Orthodox Marxism within the Communist movement and through the differing critiques of this orthodoxy represented by the work of Lukacs, Gramsci, Althusser and related writers. I cannot hope to list systematically the differences of concept, style and method which distinguish the work of Weber from these trends taken one by one. But I may point to certain salient features of Weberianism which in part indicate its concern with a core of problems common to all sociological endeavour and in part indicate the specific restrictions which this approach places on the sociological enterprise. The common core of all sociology is to be found in its concern with social relations and, underlying this, with social action. Talcott Parsons in fact emphasized this in entitling his greatest book The structure of social action and underlined the point when he published The social system by saying that he would again have used the earlier title if it had not been pre-empted by the earlier work.1 What this definition of sociology’s core concern excludes is any kind of reductionism which reduces social facts to epiphenomena consequential upon biological or psychological causes as well as any kind of reification of social facts which suggests that they are ‘things’ or that they are to be seen as consequent upon the working of social systems. Such

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a concern is common to the early Marx, especially in the Theses on Feuerbach, to Simmel and to Weber, and is also evident in the practice of Emile Durkheim, if not in his systematic statements of his methodological position. It is also to be found in the concept of social structure, employed by the English anthropologist Radcliffe Brown and specifically rejected by Levi-Strauss. 2 It is also common to all the founders of sociology that they employed their concept of structure of social relations to distinguish the specificity of the modern capitalist industrial order and to contrast that order with pre-capitalist and putative post-capitalist formations. Quite obviously, Marx and Weber equally recognize that the modern capitalist order is a distinctive one not paralleled in the ancient world, even though they differ in their precise concepts of the distinction, and both attempt some sort of morphology and theory of the succession of social types. Again, both Durkheim and Simmel as well as Tonnies are concerned with the distinctiveness of the new industrial society brought into being by the industrial revolution even if they do not discuss this society as being essentially capitalist. All these writers have something to say about the nature of pre-historic society, about ancient civilizations, about the medieval or ‘feudal’ world, and about the possibilities of a socialist form of industrialism.

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Weber’s distinctiveness lies in his peculiar sensitivity to the tension between the notion of the ‘facticity’ of the social world on the one hand and its availability to human control on the other. He always insists that group concepts must be used only as a shorthand capable of being explicated in terms of more fundamental units, namely, the theoretical actors, whose taking account of one another’s actions serves to constitute the group’s structure. Yet he by no means suggests that social structure can be reduced to the motivations of individual empirical human beings. Structures are seen as arising from the continuity in time of interlocking patterns of interaction and, though these may be changed by intervention at strategic points, it would be utopian in the extreme to suggest that these structures were always and everywhere open to change by redefinition. This is what distinguishes Weber from all rigid forms of determinism on the one hand, and from any kind of subjectivism and utopianism on the other. He would be equally opposed to any orthodox or neoMarxist concept of a deterministic science of social formations, and to the kind of subjectivism common in the more vulgarized forms of phenomenological sociology which suggest that social reality is a matter of labels which can readily be replaced by alternative ones. More profoundly than this, it must also be said that Weber’s

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thinking about the nature of sociology and the vocation of the sociologist is deeply impregnated with the philosophy of Kant. What this means is that he recognizes the value of social science, but also sees its limitations. Social science does not yield ultimate truth. It involves looking at the world of social structure in a quasi-phenomenal way as organized in terms of humanly-imposed categories of action and social relations, and in using our knowledge of structure as a guide to practical action. But our findings about such structures have no ontological significance as they are frequently thought to have by writers in the Hegelian and Marxist traditions. It is also possible for men – appreciating, as the result of their sociological investigations, the intractability of the social world – to evaluate that world, to make their own judgements about it and, indeed, guided by freely-formed value judgements, to select certain limited ranges of determinate social reality for investigation in order that they might be better controlled. It is his awareness both of the intractability of an increasingly organized and bureaucratized world as well as his belief in the inescapable moral responsibility of men for their actions that produces in Weber a stance of intellectual heroism quite unlike that to be found in any other sociology. In particular, it is opposed to any post-Kantian tendency which asserts either the union of science and ethics in ontology, or the irrelevance or impropriety of value judgements about the findings of social science. Weber would not be at home, therefore, either with those Hegelian Marxists who insist upon the unity of the observed world and the observing subject, or with modern Positivist Empiricism which accords reality only to statements capable of being verified or disproved. All this may seem a far cry from the study of race relations. Yet it is precisely Weber’s stands on these issues which makes his sociology so relevant to the problems of understanding race relations today. For while Weber did make some empirical contribution to the analysis of structures closely connected with race relations problems, the most important point to notice about the relevance of his work to the study of race relations is that he shows us that while it is possible to follow through long chains of ‘causality’ in our study of ethnic and racial structures, it is also possible to evaluate those structures and to suggest points at which the institutionalized actions which underly structures may most effectively be altered so as to bring about a different social outcome. This is a point which was grasped lucidly and simply by Gunnar Myrdal in his study of North American race relations. Myrdal saw that, as a sociologist, he would be saying not merely that such-and-such was the case, but that is was necessarily the case, and that this kind of assertion imperiously posed the question ‘Necessary from what (or whose) point of view?’3

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So far as Weber’s direct empirical contribution to the study of race and ethnic relations is concerned, it is necessary, in the first place, to make some distinction between his overt political interventions and his more academic work in economic history. In neither case does he give any support to racist interpretations of events, but the former are more likely to be tinged with a political stance of nationalism which is missing in the more detached comparative historical work. Much of Weber’s earliest work was concerned with ancient and medieval history but, when he turned to modern problems, he did so asking what light this history threw on problems confronting the German nation of his day. Thus, some of his earliest work for the Verein fur Sozialpolitik was concerned with locating factors which might undermine the solidarity of the German nation. He studied the conditions of agricultural workers in East Germany, influenced by his belief that feudal and seignorial social relations represented some amelioration of the conditions of labour when these were contrasted with those of slaves in the latifundia of the late Roman empire. But these essentially paternalistic relations were being undermined in East Germany through the penetration of the system by the forces of unrestrained capitalism. Weber’s response to this situation was to deplore the establishment of master-servant relations based purely on what Marx called ‘the callous cash nexus’, but then to embark upon a prolonged series of studies which sought to show that a modernizing capitalist system could be based upon ethical values, albeit values of a peculiarly introverted and individualistic kind4. Superficially this study of immigrant labour would suggest that Weber was merely a crude nationalist who was opposed to the immigration of Polish workers simply because such workers did not fit in with the social structures or cultures of Germany. This conclusion would be wrong, however, as Weber’s more systematic writings on the question of race and ethnicity show. These are to be found in the early chapters of his Economy and society which occur in the final published version of that work as Part Two of Volume One, being preceded by four chapters of a systematic kind written later which make no reference to the question of race or ethnicity5. In this, Weber’s most explicit discussion of race and ethnicity, it is clear that Weber does not regard bonds based on ethnicity alone as significant bases for the structuration of society, at least so far as its economic operations are concerned. There is a renewed reference to the Poles in East Germany in the last part, but the discussion is discursive and, if anything, Weber underplays the degree to which they are or feel themselves to be segregated from German society. The main theoretical point made in this chapter taken as a whole is

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simply that, while race or ethnicity taken by itself is a weak structuring bond within the economy, when there is need for a group to close a social relationship and, thereby, also access to economic opportunities, race in the sense of difference of perceived physical appearance is one, but only one, possible basis for the exclusion of individuals from the closed relationship. The closure of relationships is the crucial factor for Weber. Human beings normally close relationships in order to ensure economic opportunities for an in-group at the expense of an out-group. Closure of relationships in this way is the most fundamental category of economic sociology and is prior to ‘appropriation’, which is the basis of property rights. Thus it is clear that race relations or ethnic group relations may have a crucial function for economic life and the making available of a group for exploitation. But race and ethnicity need not necessarily be salient in this way, the only functional necessity of the economic system being the division of a society into closed property-owning groups and those who do not have access to the same opportunities as the property-owners for the acquisition of utilities. Here, Weber is obviously very close to Marx, and clearly transcends the simple nationalism which might be read into his writings on East Germany. A good illustration of Weber’s economic or, in a loose sense, ‘Marxist’ interpretation of ethnic difference and segregation is to be found in his remarks on intermarriage between black and white in the United States. Thus he tells us: ‘Serious research on the sexual attraction and repulsion between different ethnic groups is only incipient, but there is not the slightest doubt that racial factors, that means common descent, influence the incidence of sexual relations and of marriage, sometimes decisively. However the existence of several million mulattoes in the United States speaks clearly against the assumption of a “natural” antipathy, even among quite different races. Apart from the laws against biracial marriage in the Southern States, sexual relations are now abhorred by both sides, but this development began only with emancipation and resulted from the Negroes’ demand for equal civil right. Hence this abhorrence on the part of Whites is socially determined by the previously sketched tendency toward the monopolization of social power and honour, a tendency which happens in this case to be linked to race.’6

Earlier, in his more general chapter on ‘The economic relationships of organized groups’, he writes:

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‘When the number of competitors increases in relation to the profit span the participants become interested in curbing competition. Usually one group of competitors takes some externally identifiable characteristic of another group of (actual or potential) competitors – race, language, religion, local or social origin, descent, residence etc. – as a pretext for attempting their exclusion. It does not matter which characteristic is chosen in the individual case: whatever suggests itself most easily is seized upon. Such group action may provoke a corresponding reaction on the part of those against whom it is directed.’7

These passages make it clear that Weber shares with liberals on the race question, as he does with Marxists, the belief that racial or ethnic exclusiveness is not effective as an intractable force in itself in creating racial separation and conflict. And with Marxists he would be predisposed to look for its origin in the attempt to close off economic opportunities by one group as against another. It by no means follows from this that even the most intense forms of closure and exploitation of the excluded, as in the case of slavery, necessarily and always lead to racial exclusiveness and conflict. This is clear from Weber’s extended discussion of slavery in the ancient world8 which he sees as an important and distinctive institution so far as the working of the economy is concerned but not, as in the North American case, leading to the closure of relationships on racial grounds. The question of slavery is so closely related to that of race relations in contemporary sociology, however, that it is necessary to see what Weber has to say about this institution and its relationship to the mode of production. The most important question here is that of the relationship between slavery and capitalism. Marx, it will be remembered, had characterized the ancient mode of production as being based upon slavery, just as the ‘feudal’ mode was based upon serfdom, and the capitalist mode upon free wage-labour. What then was Weber’s attitude to the question of the existence of capitalism in the ancient world, to the compatibility of slavery with such capitalism as existed and the relationship between both slavery and capitalism and the closure of social relationships? The basis of Weber’s position on capitalism in the ancient world is that it existed as a possible mode of want provision but that it was not the typical mode. Capitalism did exist, but there was no capitalist system. Perhaps the most crucial distinction of all in Weber’s systematic sociology is the distinction between ‘oikos’ and capitalist enterprise.

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slavery

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The term ‘oikos’ is taken over by Weber from Rodbertus and Karl Bucher. It refers for Weber to an ideal type of provisioning and of production within a closed group where all production, or nearly all of it, is for consumption within the group and in which the provision of needs is normally arranged within the group. The enterprise on the other hand is directed towards some kind of commercial transaction and involves the counting of funds before and after a project with a view to profit. In the ancient world capitalism as a system resting upon capitalist enterprises never finally gained the upper hand over the oikos economy. As Weber says in his Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum such a system excludes: ‘All manorial charges levied in rural areas on subject groups like the various tributes – rents, dues and services – extracted from peasants in the early Middle Ages... neither the land owned nor the people subjected can be regarded as capital; title to both depended not on purchase in the open market but on traditional ties.’

and although ‘There also existed in antiquity the commercial practice of dividing estates and leasing them out’ in this case ‘the land is used as a source of rent and capitalist enterprise is absent’.9 On the other hand capitalist investment with a view to profit does take place. It finds an outlet in the following limited range of functions: ‘(1) government contracts for partial or total collection of taxes and public works; (2) mines; (3) sea trade... (4) plantations; (5) banking and related activities; (6) mortgages; (7) overland trade; (8) leasing out slaves... (9) capitalist exploitation of slaves skilled in a craft.’10

‘adventurer capitalism’

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In one way or another all of these forms of capitalist investment involve high risk and the possible use of force. They are non-peaceful forms which Weber sometimes describes as ‘adventurer capitalism’ or ‘booty capitalism’. They never involve the systematic and continuous use of labour in a rationally-planned enterprise with a view to making profit through market opportunities.11 Thus there is an important difference between the typology of modes of production suggested by Weber and that suggested by Marx. For Marx the economy of the ancient world rests upon slavery and hence represents a non-capitalist mode of production. For Weber, on the other hand, it is possible to suggest that there are certain areas of activity which take a capitalist form, and that this form of capitalism

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differs from the prevailing in the modern Western capitalist system. Thus in some ways Weber established a more direct linkage between capitalism and slavery than Marx. But he is still eager to point out the differences between capitalism as it operates in a number of settings, including that of the slave plantation, and the way in which it operates within a fully-fledged capitalist system. In order to elaborate this, it is necessary to consider further Weber’s view both of the institution of slavery and that of the plantation. It should be noted that Weber does not say that slavery is itself a capitalist institution, only that in the three forms mentioned it may provide a field for capitalist investment. Clearly, in its most elementary form, it is an institution of the oikos, and probably the most frequently-found type of slavery is the domestic institution. The house slave is a part of his master’s household and participates in the larger economy only indirectly through his master. It is also possible for a large domain to attach to itself manufacturing and processing establishments, independent of any relationship to the market, and employing slave labour. When slave labour is used to make a profit through the provisions of goods and services for sale in the market, slavery comes to be part of a larger capitalist system, whether the unit which profits from slave labour and its product is a household or a deliberately created enterprise. Weber makes the point, however, in his study of ancient agricultural systems, that slave labour is not essential to these purposes, and that from the point of view of the attainment of the full purposes of capitalism, it is not particularly efficient. He disagrees with L.M. Hartmann in his discussion of the Roman Republic as follows:

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capitalism and slavery linked

‘L.M. Hartmann observed that in antiquity slavery was necessary because of the burden of army service which was borne by citizens. That is in part correct... However it is also true that such a generalization cannot explain that which is characteristic of Roman society, the development of large plantations worked by slaves, nor indeed can one deduce from it the necessity of slavery. The situation demanded that yeoman citizens be able to leave their lands to serve the State in politics and war and this need could have been met by other forms of unfree labour: serfdom, share-cropping, helotry and so on.’12

And argues that the actual emergence of slave plantations was the consequence of a particular social and class situation which emerged after the defeat of the Gracchi. As to the inefficiency of slavery Weber tells us that:

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‘when low sales cause suspension of production not only does capital invested in slaves bring no interest – as is true of capital invested in machines – but also slaves literally “eat up” additional amounts. The result is to slow down capital turnover and capital formation’.13

There is, moreover, ‘a large risk in investing capital in slave labour. This was due first of all to the fact that slave mortality was very high and entirely unpredictable causing capital loss to the owner’.

Slavery provides ‘no basis for reliable cost accounting, the necessary condition for large industrial enterprises based on the division of labour’, and: ‘Another limitation on the truly capitalist exploitation of slaves as a means of production was the fact that the slave market depended for supply on succesful wars. For full capitalist exploitation of the work force was possible only if the slaves had no families, in fact as well as in law; in other words they were kept in barracks which, however, made reproduction of slaves impossible. For the cost of maintaining women and rearing children would have been a dead ballast on working capital.’14

free labour

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For Weber, therefore, even though the slave plantation was a characteristic form of ancient capitalist enterprise, it was not compatible with the logic of the more advanced and systematic form of capitalism which emerged in Europe. Precisely in so far as the modern capitalist mode of production gained the ascendancy, slavery was likely to be superseded by free labour. So far as plantations are concerned, Weber did in his last lectures see them as essentially a capitalist phenomenon.15 The characteristic agricultural unit in most societies is the manor in which serfs hold their land subject to their paying dues to a lord. When such a unit begins to respond to market forces and production switches primarily to the market, the manor is likely to undergo two forms of development. Either the land is divided up between individual farmers who keep stock or raise crops for sale while the landlord ‘farms rent’ (this is what Weber calls an estate system), or the workforce is deprived of all freedom and put to work in labour-intensive forms of horticultural production. Mining, which may originally be organized to provide precious metals for the lord’s treasury, or to be yielded up to the lord’s monopoly of external trade, may undergo a parallel

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development, miners being engaged in labour-intensive extractive operations paralleling the horticultural occupations of the plantation slave. It seems that, by the time Weber came to give his lectures on ‘General economic history’, he was beginning to see the plantation not simply as a backward form of capitalism, but as a capitalist form which transcended feudal forms, particularly in agriculture. This is a question of some importance, as we shall see when we turn our attention to problems of slavery and race relations in the modern period. Apart from the question of the nature of slavery and of the plantation as social and economic forms, there is one other theme in Weber which is of importance for contemporary debates about slavery and race relations. This is the question of the role of religious and other ideological factors in shaping socio-economic systems. There is no need here to rehearse the well-known debate which Weber initiated about the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the capitalist spirit. What one should notice, however, is that according to Weber there was both a congruence between Calvinist teaching and capitalist social institutions, and an incompatibility between slave labour and capitalism. It would seem natural to deduce from this that Weber’s theories would imply that slavery would be most prevalent in those Christian countries which had not undergone anything like a Calvinist reformation, and that it would be displaced where there was Protestantism. This is certainly one of Weber’s theoretical beliefs which is at odds with much opinion about North and South American slavery. Weber wrote comparative economic history and also attempted, at the end of his life, to develop a set of type-concepts in terms of which any socio-economic formation could be analyzed. Thus, although he wrote about the institutions of the ancient and medieval world in Europe, about Chinese, Indian and Jewish civilizations, and about advanced forms of industrial and commercial capitalism, the nature of his concepts is such that they can very fruitfully be applied to modern empires and to the colonial social systems which they generate. It might be said that Weber believed that history repeats itself in bits. In so far as this is so, one might be able to understand the problems of colonialism, of colonial labour exploitation and of race relations in terms of the welding together of ‘bits’ already well-developed for the purposes of the analysis of ancient empires to form new patterns. It is sometimes said that the use of type concepts is defective because it suggests a bitty, mosaic view of historical societies, whereas the nature of these societies is not one which exhibits the mechani-

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cal unity of a mosaic, but rather the unity of a developing organism. There may be truth in this, and certainly Weber’s special skill lay in his ability to take out the bits of social systems, to look at them, and to see that they were not new. But it is also true that, however much Weber may have refused to consider any organic approach, his studies of the ancient world especially do not suggest simply a congeries of bits. There is a great deal of inter-connectedness between one institution and another, and any careful reading of these writings leaves an impression of an over-all pattern in which the various ancient social types are well distinguished in spirit from modern industrial capitalism. I may now turn to the application of concepts which, after all, were not primarily directed to the study of race relations and see whether they may not be fruitfully applied in those areas of academic interest which centre on modern problems of race relations. The core of this debate concerns the question of slavery and race relations in the Americas, and with this I shall deal first, but over and above this it will be necessary to look for the over-all pattern or developing system within which modern race relations problems occur. The crude lines of the debate about slavery turned, in the first place, on an argument amongst North American writers as to whether slavery was in fact the moral scandal which post-bellum politicians made it out to be and, secondly, on whether the Latin-American countries had produced a more humane form of slavery and, if so, why?16 First, I should deal with the question of the effect of ideology on differing systems. Here the suggestion has sometimes been made that, far from Calvinism, capitalism and free labour being systematically linked with one another, there is a strong relationship between the presence of Protestant religion and the harsher forms of slavery and racism. Racism, some would argue, is a Protestant phenomenon while Catholicism encourages relations between master and man and between dominant and subordinate peoples of a humane if paternalistic kind. In fact it is easy to show that this simple theory generalizes too much. Regardless of religious confession, legal systems or national ideology, there are economic circumstances which will facilitiate the development of a particular rationalized system of plantation production – what has sometimes been called a factory of the field – and other circumstances which will hinder it. But any simple theory of economic determinism of this kind also generalizes too much. It would be far better to say that particular economic circumstances of demand in the market do favour particular kinds of development,

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but that such developments are also affected by ideological traditions and also by historical lag. Perhaps the really interesting thing about the plantation as a social institution is precisely its relationship to other related agrarian forms. Weber was almost certainly wrong about the association of Protestantism and free labour, but he did see that the plantation was a social form which was continuous with various other forms such as the manor, the estate and independent peasant production. It may well be, indeed, that Weber’s approach is more useful in the study of plantation societies than any other, precisely because it uses typology and, by so doing, relates the plantation to other agrarian forms. Once one understands that the plantation may be thought of as an evolutionary development which arises out of the manor, it comes as no surprise that particular plantation systems lie somewhere along a continuum between a pure ‘factory of the field’, using disciplined unfree labour, and a quasi-manorial system in which at least a very large part of the worker’s product is used either to feed himself or to contribute to his ‘lord’s’ table. Nor should one be surprised if, in times when the plantation finds that demand for its product slackens, it survives as a kind of a manor with other than purely economic and market-oriented functions or, on the other hand, when what was once a manor becomes more and more like a plantation in times of economic boom. It is interesting to note here that both the manorial polar type of plantation, and the factory of the field type, use slave labour. This would suggest that, whether or not the settler conquerors set out to be seigneurs or lords, the mere fact that slaves were available meant that they were likely to be employed in preference to other forms of labour. In fact, it would seem that workers captured or purchased and transported from their native soil could be exploited more effectively and efficiently than either wage workers moving from the metropolis to the colonies, or the true natives whose ties to their own native soil made them less exploitable. One should not jump to the conclusion, however, that where there is conquest there will always be the same economic forms, for a slave’s subsequent destiny would depend both upon the social and legal structure in which he found himself (e.g. in a manor or a factory of the field), upon the way in which pressures were placed upon that particular productive institution by changing market forces. The debate about slave plantation systems should, however, be made more comprehensive by being extended in a number of different directions. In the first place it should be noted that the plantation, whether in its more manorial or more capitalist factory form, is

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only one of a number of related types of productive and exploitative systems. Others include the Spanish ecomienda, under which native people were assigned to conquerors for their use as workers, without necessarily being tied to a place; latifundia, or large estates which engulfed some peasants and made then subject to labour service or to rent payments; minifundia, or small peasant holdings whose economy was such that peasants were forced into debt and into migration to towns or to plantations; ‘reductions’ in which native people were in part separated, protected and educated, and in part made available for exploitation; and also all possible intermediate forms. If one regards the Americas as a kind of historical laboratory for the analysis of labour and productive systems, it is interesting to notice that the plantation system throve with imported African labour, whereas the estate system was widespread in areas where Spanish conquerors subdued an Amerindian population. Miscegenation was more frequent in the latter areas and in some of them the dominant group was subject over a few generations to considerable mestization. But one cannot conclude that harsh conditions, restriction of intermarriage, and a descent rule which made the offspring of miscegenation part of the subordinate group always occurred where African slave labour was employed in plantations. There was in fact a considerable difference between plantation systems, and the kinds of contact and intermarriage between the races which they allowed. It is this which led to the all-too-crude statement of the differences which existed between North and South American slavery. The real problem, however, is to discover the conditions under which different patterns of slavery and different patterns of race relations emerged. Even if one confines oneself to the question of different types of slavery, however, the problem is not an easy one. A ‘type of slavery’ includes all kinds of economic relationship, legal and customary forms, as well as ideological factors, and it may well be that variation in one respect does not necessarily imply variation in another. Moreover, if one tries to pursue a causal analysis in terms of dependent and independent variables, one quickly finds that it is very difficult indeed to be sure whether a particular factor, say a particular law or custom, should be counted as an independent or a dependent variable. In a causal analysis of this kind one often finds that particular features tend to crop up in both columns. It may well be that, at this point, Weber’s resolve in his methodological introduction to Economy and society to pursue both causal analysis and analysis in terms of meaning breaks down, and that the best that one could hope for is a hermeneutic analysis of the form of life exhibited in each particular variant of plantation society.

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Thus it would seem that a comparative analysis of plantation slavery itself involves grave difficulty, and any more far-reaching attempt to compare modern forms with those which prevailed in the ancient world is even more difficult. Nevertheless, the bitty nature of Weber’s analysis here has its merits. It is clear from his consideration of slavery in the ancient world that he would not be content with comparisons between units loosely defined as slave plantation systems. Such units can be broken down into a number of separate institutions and, when they are, much more fruitful comparisons become possible. It is interesting here to compare what would be involved in a Weberian theoretical and comparative analysis of slave systems with the best work currently being carried out by Genovese and others. Penetrating though these studies are, one can usefully ask whether the Marxian concepts which Genovese derives from Hobsbawn are not too general and imprecise.17 Weber’s analysis of the agrarian systems of antiquity appears far more precise and detailed in the concepts which it uses than does the Genovese analysis of modern slave systems. In the last analysis, Genovese’s merits are those of a historian and Weber’s those of a theoretical sociologist. These empirical problems could be even better illuminated by a scholar who combined the merits of both of them. The debate to which I have been referring confines itself to the economic relations between European settlers, Amerindians and African slaves in largely agriculturally-based societies in the Americas. One should now also note that the basic patterns of the plantation system of the factory of the field type are reproduced with other forms of unfree labour, that the labour is imported from other countries and cultures, and that it may be applied, not only in agriculture, but in mining and to some extent in the manufacturing industry. It has already been seen that, Weber’s reservations about the ultimate incompatibility of capitalism and slave labour notwithstanding, slave plantations did for long periods exist as highly efficient capitalist undertakings. One can say this even if one does not accept the full thesis of Fogel and Engermann in their recent work Time on the Cross.18 Indeed, one can find in the literature examples not merely of capitalist efficiency in plantations, but of detailed cost accounting coupled with a good dash of the Protestant ethic. One particular example of this is to be found in Pares account of a plantation-owning family, the Pinneys on the Island of Nevis.19 When this plantation passes into the hands of the generation most possessed by the Protestant spirit one finds that detailed accounting is applied not merely to the plantation as a capitalist enterprise but to the disposi-

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shorter-term contract labour

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tion of human resources within the family household. Nevertheless, there are difficulties in making slave labour fully efficient in changing conditions and some of these difficulties are circumvented in the labour forms which follow the emancipation movement. The emancipation of slaves did not of course occur solely for idealistic reasons. Its idealism was able to gain a hearing only because there were more efficient ways of carrying on production. In the case of the sugar plantations of Guyana, as well as in large areas in which the plantation system flourished in the East, slavery was superseded by the indentured labour system. This was not designed as a moral improvement on slave labour, but as a system which would in fact enable the employer to enjoy the advantages of slavery with none of its disadvantages. Thus, the labourers were formally more free than slaves and the term of their employment was limited, but this meant a much greater calculability of costs was possible for the employer. At the end of the contract he had no incalculable obligation to the worker, and the worker indeed often found that his right to return to freedom at home was theoretical rather than real. He would thus be available at first in semi-slave conditions, and then as a dependent and impoverished tenant or share-cropper. Such was the fate of Indian ‘coolie’ workers in Fiji, Malaya, Assam, Ceylon, Mauritius and Natal, as well as in Guyana, where they literally took the place of slaves.20 Even more important though for the sociology of colonial society has been the use of shorter-term contract labour in Africa. Its ideal form is to be found in South Africa and in the mines, where impoverished workers from the overcrowded rural reserves are separated from their families in barracks called compounds, are paid wages appropriate only to such barrack conditions, and are returned at the end of a nine-month contract period to the reserves which employers cynically describe as a kind of social security system. As I have said elsewhere, the South African labour system is probably the most efficient system for the capitalist exploitation of labour yet devised, resting as it does on the three institutions of the rural reserve, the mining compound and the controlled urban ‘location’.21 And if such a system exists empirically in an almost ideal typical form in mining, it is applied also in its essentials in manufacturing industry and in settler agriculture. As one famous settler in East Africa put the matter: ‘We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs... Compulsory labour is the corollary of our occupation of the country.’22 In the same territory, a Government commission nicely grasped the problem of African labour conditions when it discussed the housing of urban workers not in terms of housing units but in terms of ‘bedspaces’.23

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It is clear from these examples that one cannot discuss the colonial societies established by the European powers in terms of a slave and a post-slave period. And one is compelled to ask, as Weber did, whether the most significant aspect of the problem is the existence of slavery, since slavery is one means of achieving ends which may also be achieved through a variety of alternative forms of unfree labour. Nevertheless, there is a problem of very great importance to the history of race relations which arises from slave emancipation. It should be noticed that, thus far, I have not discussed ‘racism’ as an element in economic situations. Weber himself finds it possible to discuss similar problems in the ancient world by referring only to the distinction between closed and open social relationships. Thus, a group which monopolizes any type of economic opportunity by excluding outsiders tends to find some rationalization and justification of its actions by drawing attention to certain observable characteristics of the excluded group. But since Weber is so much concerned with the central problem for him of the rationalization of capitalist individualism in Calvinism, he has little to say about the kind of ideologies which might justify the exploitation of one group by another. The striking thing indeed about his account of Roman plantation slavery is that he does not see the system as justified in terms of any elaborate ideology about racial or any other group difference. Was it then the case that slavery and other harsh forms of political oppression and economic exploitation existed in the Roman Empire without the phenomenon of racism making an appearance, but that slavery in the modern period was associated from the first with racism? This is by no means an easy question to answer and the lines of the debate are often very confused indeed. Much depends upon what is meant by racism. It should be clear that nearly every group in modern times which was engaged in colonial conquest and exploitation found justification for its practice in abusive accounts of the exploited group. Charles Boxer, for example, has demonstrated24 that, however much the Portuguese might be Latin and Catholic, their settlers are on record, in Church as well as secular contexts, as abusing the native people of the Portuguese Empire. From such evidence many liberal scholars over-react by saying that one colonialist is much the same as another and that, whatever their culture and religion, they are all in the end not merely exploiters and oppressors but racists. Against this, one has to set the long record of influential clerics, particularly in the Spanish territories, arguing against the exploitation through enslavement of the native peoples of America. There can be little doubt that in the period of slavery and other

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relation to property

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early forms of violent colonial conquest and oppression many racist ideas were canvassed. What is perhaps more important, however, is that the structure of society depended upon the relations which men had to property. Whether they freely owned or were tied to their land with an obligation to labour services, whether they owned other workers, or whether they were themselves property, so long as there was a law which upheld such forms of inequality and sanctions to back it, the inequalities in the social structure did not depend upon the system of racist beliefs which were canvassed. The interesting thing from our point of view is that when the social order could no longer be buttressed by legal sanctions it had to depend upon the inculcation in the minds of both exploiters and exploited of a belief in the superiority of the exploiters and the inferiority of the exploited. Thus it can be argued that the doctrine of equality of economic opportunity and that of racial superiority and inferiority are complements of one another. Racism serves to bridge the gap between theory and practice. This is not, of course, to say that the use of force ceases with slave emancipation. In some countries like South Africa it is systematically mobilized on a political level to ensure continued white supremacy. But it is to say that when inequality, exploitation and oppression are challenged by economic liberalism, they have to be opposed by doctrines which explain the exceptions to the rule. While it is admitted that all men are equal, some men are deemed to be more equal than others. Doctrines of racial equality and inequality, and practices associated with them, are already worked out in slave societies before emancipation, for in all there are some free men or men whose affiliation to either the plantation-owners or the slaves is ambiguous. These include freed slaves, the offspring of miscegenation, and poor whites whose standard of life approximates to that of ‘coloureds’ even though they share the skin colour and other characteristics of the ruling group. The way in which these groups are related, in terms of status and life-changes to the plantation-owners and slaves, prepares the way for social stratification after emancipation. One possibility is that, from the point of view of status ideology, the crucial line will be that between whites and poor whites. Another is that there may be a status ordering of the society which overlaps with a racial or colour ordering, so that there is a continuous status gradation in which, roughly speaking, white or lightly-coloured people are at the top and completely black people at the bottom. Finally, there is the possibility that there will be three estates of White, Coloured and Black. Any incipient ordering of groups and individuals in terms of a status order of this kind has to bear a greater strain when the legal

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basis of inequality provided by slavery, as well as by legal estate systems, breaks down. In this situation everyone is theoretically equal, but a new status structure emerges in which race or colour is a crucial indicator of a man’s position. Even if it is at odds with the actual social relations of production prevailing in the new social order such a system will have some influence. But frequently, the status system and the economic order move into line when the society as a whole is deeply dependent upon production for the market, because highstatus, lightly-coloured people tend to close off economic opportunities to those lower down the scale and because money, education, and economic position are all said to ‘whiten’ the individual who possesses them. Moreover, since post-emancipation society is often economically stagnant, the status order may be the main structuring fact in the social order. In Barbados shortly before independence, for example, over-all stagnation and poverty were coupled, particularly among whiter, higher-status people, with a continuous preoccupation with matters of coulour and status. Weber would certainly have had much to say about the structure of colonial societies had he turned his attention to them because, although he shared with Marx an interest in social class (which he saw as a matter of groups with common or differentiated interests in a market situation), he supplemented this with a theory of status groups, differentiated in terms of styles of life and a consequent differential apportionment of honour.25 He also envisaged the possibility that a status group distinguished by its specific life-style might come to exercise hegemony over the society as a whole. Thus the Mandarins had imposed their way of life on ancient China, the Brahmins on India and the bourgeoisie (considered here as a status group rather than a class) on Western European society. He would therefore have had no difficulty in understanding a situation in which an ethnic group achieved hegemony. He might only have added to this a Marxian type of scepticism, suggesting that the claim made in terms of style of life was, in part at least, a cover for the closure of economic opportunities. Weber might, it is true, have had more difficulty in understanding a social order in which there was not so much status domination by a particular group as a status grading of individuals. Oliver Cromwell Cox makes a useful contribution here in distinguishing what – using the term in a peculiar sense – he calls ‘social class’ as distinct from caste, estate and political class.26 For Cox, this social class is a conceptual system in terms of which individuals rate themselves against others rather than a closed form of social grouping. So far, however, the focus in dealing with colonial societies in

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pluralism

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which race relations problems emerge has been a narrow one. I have dealt basically with the relationship between exploiting owners, coming to the colony from the metropolis, and the exploited workers or peasants, who are either colonial natives or imported slaves, together with those who have some relationship of descent with either of these two groups. This much can be comprehended in terms of a fairly simple model of an economic order, coupled with a status system which, in essence, has two poles. One of these is represented by the group of owners coming from the metropolis. The other is that of the major group of workers, slaves or peasants of colonial or imported origin. But few societies are as simple as this, because pluralism can be found among the exploited as well as among the colonialists, and there are other groups who have no ethnic and economic affiliation with either colonizers or colonized. First, one should notice the pluralism which comes from the division between workers in plantations, mines and factories on the one hand, and peasants on the other. Some societies are dominantly plantation societies and some are predominantly peasant societies, but in the former there are likely to be a minority of peasants, and in the latter a minority of workers in plantations, mines and factories. Very often the minority and the majority will be ethnically distinct. In a society which offers little scope for independent subsistence farming, ‘peasants’ will either be forced into being migrant labourers in plantations or towns, or they will be pushed to the margins of the society to carry on their segregated way of life in conditions which are ultimately insupportable. On the other hand, in societies in which there is a predominantly peasant population, urban industrial work and mining, as well as work on occasional plantations, may be carried on by specially imported workers or by ethnic minorities. In both of these cases we have ethnic and occupational differentiation combined with differences in status. The second extremely important alternative is that in which slaves of one race or ethnicity are replaced by indentured workers from another. In this case, cultural pluralism amongst the working people of the colony coexists with an ambiguity as to the relative status of the two groups. Guyana, for example, is what some think to be the classic case of a plural society, in which there are both Indians descended from indentured workers, and the descendants of African slaves. It is true, of course, that because of their differing history, these groups have their own distinct sets of domestic institutions and that they do not therefore amalgamate culturally, and it is also true that it is hard to place the two groups in terms of status in a horizontal sense, since one enjoys the advantage of having been recruited on theoretically

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less arduous terms, but the other group has now very largely left the plantation for the town and is culturally closer to the ruling group. This is an important type of intergroup situation in many colonial territories, and it is sometimes complicated by the fact that one of the two colonial groups is in a permanent majority (this is not the case in Guyana). M.G. Smith has used the model of this particular intergroup relationship as a general model for colonial societies in the Caribbean and in Africa.27 He argues that it is usually better to conceive colonial societies as plural rather than as horizontally stratified, that the different plural segments have no institution in common save the political one, and that the society as a whole is held together by the control of the political institution by one segment. This theory is by no means accepted here, since we have made it clear that there are both status orders and economic systems which bind groups and individuals in colonial societies together, and that what we are dealing with here is pluralism amongst the exploited workers and their descendants only. Nevertheless there are circumstances in which such groups contend for political power, when the political domination of the colonialists is withdrawn, and the struggle may not merely be two-sided, as in Guyana. It may have three sides, as in Malaya, or conceivably even more. In these circumstances, it may well be that a struggle for power becomes the central structuring theme in the post-colonial world. But it would be misleading, even in these cases where such an ethnic political struggle is evident, and still more so in others where it is not, to underestimate the binding force of economic institutions which are by no means necessarily displaced with the coming of political independence. What Smith seems to have done, at least in his earlier writing, is to over-emphasize the importance of one structuring feature of one kind of society and suggest that it is the basis for a general theory. Divisions among the exploited workers, such as those we have been discussing, are by no means the only other structuring features of ethnically-plural colonial societies, for such societies quite commonly also include a number of other elements. The most important of these are the pariah traders and the settlers, though we should also give some consideration to two other groups from the metropolis, namely, the missionaries and the governmental administrators who remain, to some extent, culturally and socially as well as functionally separate from other colonialists. Such distinctions would fit naturally into a Weberian sociology of the colonies, since Weber recognized that functional differentiation, not necessarily of a simple economic kind, did in fact generate what he loosely called class struggles in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.

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political power struggle

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cultural unity

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It seems to be almost universally the case that colonial societies provide subsidiary economic opportunities which major colonial owner-producers are unable, or unwilling, to exploit. Theoretically, there could be a pure plantation or manorial economy which satisfied all its own needs internally – a complete oikos economy. Normally, however, trade in food, household equipment and other commercial items falls to groups of outsiders, who have no aspiration to political control, or to direct exploitation of the colonial workers through production, and are prepared to live solely through trade. Such groups tend to be despised by the major colonial proprietors and to be regarded with suspicion by the workers themselves. Very easily, in times of difficulty, they can become a scapegoat group. In those cases where the scale of their economic activities is large the community which grows up around such trade may become a not insignificant structural element of the society. This is true, for instance, of the Indian traders in East Africa as it is of the Chinese in Malaysia. Weber would have recognized the similarities here with the role of the Jews in medieval Europe and of the metics in Ancient Greece. Quite commonly these groups of traders have an ethnic affiliation with groups of immigrant peasants and workers in the colonial territory. This is the case of Indian traders in Guyana or Natal, and also of the Chinese traders in Malaysia. The existence of such a community increases the power of the traders in political terms, and they often have political skills to offer to workers of their own ethnicity. One consequence of all this is that the potentiality for class politics even amongst an ethnically separate group of workers is undermined by the formation of strong ties of cultural unity and of clientage across class boundaries. This adds to the appearance of pluralism in the society, but also affects the group image which a particular group may have. Thus, attitudes towards all Indians in East Africa may be influenced by the image of the Indian trader or moneylender. It is perhaps not too much to say that, next to the tension between the main owning and exploiting groups, this is the major source of racial tension in colonial societies. So far, however, I have not spoken of the group who give the characteristic shape to one major type of colonial society, namely, the ‘white settlers’. This category should not be taken to include the owners of the major means of production, who appear to the settlers as a kind of plantocracy which often operates on an absentee basis. Nor should it be taken to include administrators and missionaries. It does include farmers, who are either able to occupy land on cheap terms following military conquest or participate directly in that conquest. It

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is characteristic of these settlers that they see the colonial situation as providing them with opportunities for economic acquisition and for status not available to them in the metropolitan country. This is obviously true of the farmer settler who very quickly behaves like a European lord on his manor. But it is also true of the worker, who recognizes that he might do easier manual work aided by a native assistant, and that he will be paid more for his skills because of his ethnic affiliation to the plantocracy and the administrators. If there are sufficient of these settlers a separate settler economy is likely to develop, separate both from that of the plantocracy and from that of the metropolitan country. There may be some divisions of interest among these settlers but, in general, alliances of a political kind will be possible among farmers, capitalists and urban workers. Again, class affiliations are transcended by ethnic ones although, in this case, the interlocking of interests of the separate groups of workers makes it possible for them to be seen simply as the settler interest for most purposes. In some cases the settlers eventually won political power for themselves, and were able to develop wholly new nations capable of standing up, and more, to the European nation States. This was most clearly the case in the United States of America where two crucial wars were fought, one against the mother country, and the other against the colonial plantocracy. Something similar also happened in South Africa and in the settler territories of Latin America. Where numbers were smaller, however, as in Algeria, and in East and Central Africa, the settlers fought unavailingly to succeed to political power in the post-colonial period and were forced, in the long run, to emigrate or to form such alliances as were necessary for their survival. If the American settlers defeated the plantocracy and the South African settlers the Uitlanders who opened up the Rand, they, however, by no means put an end to racist theory and racialist practice. Indeed, they had more reason in some ways than the planters protected by law and custom, for adopting racialist and exclusivist practice; Van den Berghe is perhaps correct here when he speaks of such situations as competitive rather than paternalist.28 Certainly the New Jerusalem which the settlers were seeking could be most obviously obtained only by finding ways of excluding competitors. Thus, the very essence of white settlerdom lay in its capacity to monopolize jobs, land, commercial, industrial and domestic property. In some ways, settler society therefore produced the extreme example of racial domination. The presence of missionaries in colonial territories is a recur-

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monopolization

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composite entities

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rent phenomenon, but it is ultimately a mistake to seek in any of the religions produced by the Christian Reformation, or by traditional Catholicism in Europe, the ideological source of inspiration for colonial practice relating to the equality or inequality which should prevail between individuals or groups. In fact, these new societies had to work out their own ideologies, and what the missionaries were often doing was to provide a setting in which new and appropriate ultimate value concepts could be worked out. Differential theological and ethical starting points did no doubt make some difference to what occurred, but what gave them their life was their capacity to accommodate wholly new patterns of social relations. Finally, one should notice that the cadre of colonial administrators had their peculiar role to play. They did not represent the interest of particular owners or particular groups. Rather they were there to ensure that the normal range of colonial operations could be carried on without the metropolitan government being dragged into unnecessary conflict. Thus, even though they, like the missionaries, did often side with the interests of the plantocracy or the settlers, they were to some extent bound to continue to hold the ring so that the colonial game might be played. As a consequence they sometimes seemed to be a kind of estate or caste or class apart, separated from their kinsmen who had more direct economic interests than they did. How then shall we view the new colonial societies brought into being by the expansion of Europe overseas from the fifteenth century onwards. Are they caste societies? Are they estate systems? Can they be understood in Marxian terms, as based either directly on a class struggle, or as resulting from a changing series of relationships consequential upon European need for the accumulation of capital, for raw materials, for markets or for the export of capital? In fact they are none of these purely and simply. Nor do they represent some new form of colonial stratification system distinct from Indian caste, medieval European estates or modern European class struggle. The truth is that they were not simple determinate economical systems capable of being understood through the use of some simple theoretical key. They were composite entities, very like the Roman Empire in their structural complexity and diversity. They have, of course, in various ways, been affected by the changes and developments at the centre of European capitalism, but whether they are needed or not by that capitalism, these societies have come into being and stay in being. It is within them, moreover, that the main problems of race relations in the modern world have their origin. These problems derive, as Weber saw, in the first place from the closure of relationships to protect and enhance economic opportunities. But long after the

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original closures and their accompanying privileges had ceased to be significant such problems and conflicts continued. The black descendant of a slave in a settler or a metropolitan society finds themself still marked with the stigma of slavery; the African peasant in South Africa finds himself kept in reserves for the purposes of ultra-exploitation, and excluded from social and economic and political participation on grounds of race; middlemen minorities of traders now find themselves the scapegoats for the ills of colonialism, and are threatened with expulsion and exclusion; and, in the wake of political colonialism, ethnic communities vie with each other in the struggle for political power. The diverse problems of race relations are now at the head of the world’s political agenda. They are all better understood in terms of the sort of sociological theory of colonialism which has been sketched here, and which applies some of the concepts and the style of sociological analysis to the modern colonial situation that Weber applied in his comparative and historical studies.29 So far, however, I have dealt only with problems of race relations between groups who constitute colonial societies. But the full understanding of race relations problems in the contemporary world must also include, over and beyond this, the study of the relations between these complex colonial structures, on the one hand, and the metropolitan economy on the other. This should include the study of the relationship between metropolitan societies and colonies, and the neo-colonialist period which often follows political independence, on the one hand, and the migration of workers from the colonies to the metropolis on the other. In considering the relations of metropolitan capitalism with colonial territories, there is a difference of emphasis between Weber’s approach and that of Marxists and neo-Marxists. The latter would see colonial societies as, successively, the source of primitive accumulation, the source of raw materials, an area for the expansion of markets and, finally, a means for the export of capital. More recently, under the influence of A.G. Frank30, Marxism has seen the so-called process of economic and social development in the Third World as a process of the development of under-development. A number of other scholars have suggested that, in the study of the modern world, there is only one unit within which studies can be adequately organized, and that this is a single world capitalist system31. The emphasis of all these studies moves the traditional locus of sociological interest from the study of structures of social relations and groups to the study of political economy. It is, of course, a part of the Marxist theory to suggest that the dynamics of economic change and revolution are to be found in a process of class struggle, but it is well known that, after

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Marxism

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he turned his attention to the theory of capitalist crisis, Marx did not adequately return to the problem of the structuration of classes. It is certainly true of neo-Marxist sociology of development that it fails to deal adequately with this theory. If any consideration is given to the question of the social formations which will lead to the overthrow of capitalism, the assumption appears to be that the process of capitalist exploitation in the Third World will go on until the world system of capitalism is ended by the action of the urban industrial working class in the most advanced countries. Now, there are some respects in which Weberian sociology is lacking when it comes to the study of the economics of imperialism. Weber writes as an economic historian and sociologist rather than as a political economist, with the result that his ideas on the accumulation of capital, the search for raw materials, the process of capital export, and so on, can only be gleaned from remarks which he makes en passant about particular historical episodes. In these he seems to adopt a quite cynical practical Marxism, taking as the main assumption that men seek profit and booty where they can. On the other hand, what is striking about Weber’s work on the ancient world is that he describes these processes of conquest and capitalism as being far more inhuman than those which occur in circumstances of advanced capitalism. The key to his thinking here lies in the notions of non-peaceful adventurer and booty capitalism. On the level of the study of social structure rather than that of political economy, these ideas are of some importance. The economic institutions which arose in the course of European imperialism involved not simply logical and necessary developments arising out of the capitalist system but a regression to the economic forms of booty capitalism which Weber had studied in the Roman Empire. The Marxian tendency to see these institutions as mercantilist, feudal, or in some other way at odds with capitalism, misses the point here. The crude processes of conquest and exploitation in Latin America, Africa and Asia are capitalist processes, but they belong as structures under the heading of booty capitalism. Characteristically, the major economic institution for colonial development is the chartered company which permits it to gather the revenue within a territory, to govern it, and to pursue monopolistic trading activities within it. This involves a licence to use force against the population, and to find labour for economic enterprises, not through the labour market, but by some non-peaceful means. This is a high-risk capitalism, as Weber pointed out, but it is also a capitalism which is capable of unrestrained exploitation. Thus Elkins is essentially right when he speaks of NorthAmerican slave plantations as working according to the dynamics of

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unopposed capitalism32. But it is precisely this absence of restraints on the use of force which distinguishes booty capitalism from the routine capitalism of advanced industrial societies. Use of some such term as booty capitalism to describe a set of institutions of economic exploitation gives us an ideal type, in terms of which typical patterns of colonial social structure can be understood. We should expect that where capitalism of this kind prevails we shall have chartered companies with a licence to gather revenue, to govern, and to engage in monopolistic trade; we shall have largescale estates, with servile labour provided by squatters; we shall have plantation systems; and we shall have the complex of institutions which characterize migrant labour in Southern Africa. On the other hand, we should expect a dualism in socio-economic structures as such societies develop. New economic institutions will arise in the towns, or among new metropolitan entrants to the colonial economy, and these will have more of the characteristics of routine capitalism based upon the calculation of market opportunity. It is true that Weber, committed as he was in economics to modern marginal utility theories, did not see the routine forms of capitalism as problematic, and that he probably over-emphasized the difference between the ancient imperial forms of capitalism and those of modern Europe. Nevertheless, there are differences here, most notably in the kinds of political structures and movements which are the consequence of booty capitalism. Moreover, it cannot be assumed that all the main features of this earlier socio-economic form have now been eliminated. They constitute the very centre of some of the most advanced capitalist economies in formerly colonial territories such as South Africa, with the result that the political sociology of these territories cannot be comprehended in terms of a simple political sociology of modern capitalism. Some Marxists have indeed recognized a similar point when they notice that the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ has to be extended to take account of ‘permanent primitive accumulation’. The simple political sociology to which I refer assumes that the major line of political development in a capitalist society is towards a polarization of classes and to the emergence of a united working class which, according to the Marxist alternative, carries through the revolution against capitalism and, according to the liberal and social democratic alternative, establishes a new social contract for the working class within a welfare State. These alternatives may be available for the workers within the metropolitan economy and within the modernized sectors of the colonial economy, but they are not available to the workers within the booty economy which still pre-

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vails in many areas. In these circumstances, it is not to be expected that all exploited workers will unite to defend themselves within an urban and trade-union based movement. Rather the workers who have experienced the political reality of booty capitalism will grapple with the problem of power, and may even find it necessary to oppose the Marxist or social-democratic movement in the more advanced sectors of capitalism, just as that movement may well act against it as it becomes compromised in the imperialist development of the metropolis. These reflections are borne out by the emergence in recent years of a theory of the Third World revolution which sets itself up against Marxism. It is expressed particularly sharply in the writings of such writers as Fanon33, Debray34 and Segal35. It cannot be said that this theory itself has Weberian origins. But once the sharp distinction between the institutions of booty capitalism and those of normal capitalism is understood, the possibility of two parallel revolutions can very well be envisaged. And the greater violence of the colonial revolution is likely to produce a need for simple definitions of ingroup and out-group which are readily provided by racist theories. Thus, soldiers from the metropolitan countries, sent to repress the colonial revolution, define their enemies racially, and Segal, at least, goes beyond Fanon in seeing the revolution of the Third World as a whole, not as simply a struggle of ‘the wretched of the earth’, but as race war. Similar considerations arise in connexion with the study of colonial migrant workers and their families in the metropolitan countries and, again, if Weber did not write about these problems directly, certain of his positions on the structure of the advanced capitalist societies suggest what his approach would have been. On the one hand he was very conscious – as one engaged in German politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – of the importance of the German Social Democratic movement and of the emergence of a Welfare State. On the other, his general notion of the closure of social relationship to protect economic opportunities would have led him to understand that that movement, and its related organizations, would not readily be sympathetic to immigration by less privileged and potentially more docile workers. In fact all of the advanced industrial societies have found it necessary to look for supplementary sources of labour, particularly to fill vacancies in arduous, inconvenient, or dirty work. This is in part due to the fact that employers consciously look for docile and cheap labour, and that the most obvious place to look for this labour is in the colonial world and in the more backward European countries. But it may also be the case that rising standards among workers in the

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advanced countries simply make them unwilling to take on such jobs at any price, and that any advanced economy would need immigrant labour, at least until jobs of this kind could be eliminated by technological advances. From the point of view of the immigrant worker, the ideal situation is one in which he gains entry to the ‘closed relationship’ that trade unions and Social Democratic parties have established. From the point of view of the metropolitan worker, however, there is some ambiguity: if the workers are admitted he would prefer them to be inside his organizations rather than as ‘unfair’ competitors outside; conversely, even if the workers join unions there is a danger of oversupply. Everywhere where workers face this competition, one might expect racial grounds to be offered, among others, for exclusion but, in the case of those countries with a direct experience of the colonial situation of the kind we have been discussing, the attraction of racist definitions may be overwhelming. Thus, although such a development is not inevitable and can be prevented by democratic political planning and by education, it must be expected that every advanced capitalist country employing immigrant labour from formerly colonial territories is likely to see the emergence of racist movements. Even though there may be some passage of immigrant workers and their children into full participation in working-class organizations, it is likely that the obstacles to entry to such organizations, and to the acquisition of trade union and welfare privileges, may well lead the immigrants themselves to define their conflict with society in racial terms. Naturally enough, too, some of them will see their struggle as immigrant workers as part of the revolution of the Third World. Political ideas of this kind are already widespread in the United States and in Britain, and they represent for the immigrant worker36 an historical equivalent to the ideas of Marxist and other forms of socialism among workers in the metropolises of earlier periods. In setting out these ideas I am of course going beyond the concepts, theories, and areas of concern which Max Weber actually had in his own work. But we are bound to do this in describing a Weberian approach to problems of race and ethnic relations which have become more acute since his day. What may certainly be said, however, is this: Weber, like Marx, would not have ascribed racism, and its practical correlate of racialism, to some simple factor of incompatibility of cultures or of natural antipathy to the unknown. Nor would he have attributed them to some unexplained factor of psychological prejudice. He was fully aware and, as we have seen, actually said that racial definitions of social groups were related to the pursuit of economic interest in closed social relations. Here again, there

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is much in common between Marxian and Weberian approaches. Where Weber differed from Marx was in his more detailed analysis of the kinds of social structure, organization, and process which were to be found in different historical periods. In his analysis of the economic institutions of the ancient world especially, we see the way in which he showed, in some detail, the kinds of capitalism which might operate. It is the reproduction of such structures in European empires of the last five centuries which have been productive of the specific kind of problems which we call race relations problems, and it is in the systematic analysis of these structures that we will find a characteristically Weberian approach to the study of race relations.

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Notes 1 Parsons, T. The social system, London, Tavistock, 1952, p. ix. 2 See e.g.: Levi-Strauss, C. The scope of anthropology. London, Jonathan Cape, 1967. 3 Myrdal, G. Value in social theory. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. Chapter VII. 4 See: Bendix, R. Max Weber: an intellectual portrait. London, Heinemann, 1962; Weber, M. Economy and society. Vol. I. New York, Bedminster Press, 1968 (Introduction by G. Roth); Gerth, H.; Mills, C.W. From Max Weber. London, Oxford University Press, 1946. p. 363-95. 5 Weber, M. op. cit. p. 339-97. 6 Ibid. p. 375-86. 7 Ibid., p. 341-2. 8 See especially: Weber, M. The agrarian sociology of ancient civilizations. London, New Left Book, 1976. p. 53-60. 9 Ibid., p. 49. 10 Ibid., p. 51. 11 Weber, M. Economy and society. op. cit. p. 164-5. See also: Weber, M. General economic history. New York, Collier Books, Macmillan. 12 Weber, M. The agrarian sociology... op. cit. p. 319. 13 Ibid., p. 53. 14 Ibid., p. 54. 15 Weber, M. General economic history. op. cit. 16 A good introduction to this debate with a select bibliography is to be found in: Foner, Laura; Genovese, E.D. Slavery in the New World. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1969. 17 Genovese, E.D. The world the slaveholders made. London, Allen Lane, 1969 (especially Chapters 1-2). Surprisingly Genovese sees Weber’s particular contribution as lying in his study of ideological factors, ignoring the direct contribution which he made to the analysis of the institution of plantation slavery. 18 Fogel, R.W.; Engermann, S.L. Time on the Cross. Boston, Little, 1974. (2 vols.). 19 Pares, R. A West Indian fortune. London, Longmans, 1950.

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20 Tinker, H. A new system of slavery. London, Oxford University Press, 1974. (Institute of Race Relations.) 21 Rex, J. The plural society: the South African case. Race (London), vol. XII, no. 3, 1971, p. 401-13; Rex, J. The compound, the reserve and the location – the essential institutions of South African labour exploitation. South African labour bulletin, vol. 1, no. 4, April 1971, p. 4-17; Van Onselen, C. Chibaro, African mine labour in Rhodesia 1900-1913. London, Pluto Press, 1976. 22 Woddis, J. Africa – the roots of revolt. London, Laurence & Wishart, 1960. p. 64. 23 Ibid., p. 143. 24 Boxer, C.R. Race relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415-1825. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963. 25 Weber, M. Economy and society. Vol. 2, op. cit. p. 926-39. 26 Cox, O. Caste, class and race. New York, Monthly Review Press, 1959. p. 14352. 27 Smith, M.G. The plural society in the British West Indies. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1965; Smith, M.G.; Kuper, L. Pluralism in Africa. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1969 (Chapters 2, 4 and 5). 28 Van den Berghe, P. Race and racism: a comparative perspective. New York, Wiley, 1967. p. 29 ff. 29 For a more extended discussion of these problems in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean, see: Rex, J. New nations and ethnic minorities: comparative and theoretical questions. To be published by Unesco in a symposium on inter-ethnic relations in the Caribbean and Latin America, 1977; Rex. J. Race relations in sociological theory. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970. 30 Frank, A.G. The sociology of underdevelopment and the underdevelopment of sociology. London, Pluto Press, 1971. See also: Oxaal, I.; Barnett, T.; Booth, D. Beyond the sociology of development. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. 31 Wallerstein, I. The modern world system. New York, Academic Press, 1974. 32 Elkins, S. Slavery. New York, Grossap & Dunlop, 1959. 33 Fanon, F. The wretched of the earth. London, Penguin Books, 1965. 34 Debray, R. The revolution in the revolution. New York, Grove Press, 1967. 35 Segal, R. The race war. London, Jonathan Cape, 1966. 36 The situation of the American black is seen here as equivalent to that of a colonial migrant.

For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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Contextualizing feminism: gender, ethnic and class divisions

Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis

The rise of ethnic studies in Europe coincided with a particular interest in exploring the interrelationship of race and class. This scholarship was profoundly theoretical, albeit embedded in a wider political struggle for equality. According to sociologists Floya Anthias and Nira Yuvall-Davis, the plight of black women was largely ignored within the literature of women’s and feminist studies as well as the wider feminist movement. Black feminism, which developed in response to this alleged ignorance, defined black women as suffering from the ‘triple oppression’ of race, gender and class. Anthias and Yuval-Davis dismissed this attitude for both theoretical and political reasons. They suggested that such features could not be enmeshed in each other. Moreover, they felt that the position of black women could not be reduced so simplistically in opposition to white women. In an influential article published by the journal Feminist Review in 1983, the authors set out to systematically address the issue of ethnic and gender divisions without reducing them to some form of class division.

Introduction ‘Sisterhood is powerful.’ ‘Sisterhood’ can also be misleading unless contextualized. Black, minority and migrant women have been on the whole invisible within the feminist movement in Britain and within the literature on women’s or feminist studies. This paper attempts to explore the issue of the interrelationship of ethnic and gender divisions.1 Not only is such an attempt long overdue theoretically but it also raises political issues which must be central to feminist struggle. Our analysis serves to problematize the notion of ‘sisterhood’ and the implicit feminist assumption that there exists a commonality of interests and/or goals amongst all women. Rather we argue that ev-

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ery feminist struggle has a specific ethnic (as well as class) context. Although the notion of the ‘ethnic’ will be considered later in the paper we note here that for us it primarily relates to the exclusionary/ inclusionary boundaries of collectivities formed round the notion of a common origin.2 The ‘ethnic’ context of feminist struggles has been systematically ignored (except in relation to various minorities, especially ‘black’) and we suggest this has helped to perpetuate both political and theoretical inadequacies within feminist and socialist analyses. The black feminist movement has grown partly as a response to the invisibility of black women and to the racism of the white feminist movement. Recently several books have appeared, mostly American which discuss black women and feminism. Bell Hooks puts her case against white feminism clearly when she states: In much of the literature written by white women on the ‘woman question’ from the nineteenth century to the present day, authors will refer to ‘white men’ but use the word ‘woman’ when they really mean ‘white woman’. Concurrently, the term ‘blacks’ is often made synonymous with black men (1981: 140).

In addition she points out that there has been a constant comparison of the plight of ‘women’ and ‘blacks’ working with these racist/sexist assumptions and which has diverted attention from the specificity of the oppression of black women. We share this critique of white feminism which is found within the black feminist movement in Britain also. However we want to broaden out the frame of reference of the existing debate. Within black feminism the most dominant approach defines black women as suffering from the ‘triple oppression’ of race, gender and class. This approach is inadequate, however, both theoretically and politically. Race, gender and class cannot be tagged on to each other mechanically for, as concrete social relations, they are enmeshed in each other and the particular intersections involved produce specific effects. The need for the study of the intersection of these divisions has been recognized recently by black feminists.3 We also suggest, however, that the issue of the interrelationship of the different social divisions cannot focus only on black versus white women’s position. This has the theoretical effect of singling out ‘racism’ as applicable only to ‘black’ women and focusses then on the colour rather than on the structural location of ethnic groups as determinants of their social relations. In addition an exclusive focus on ‘racism’ fails to address the diversity of ethnic experiences which derive from other factors like economic or political position. The no-

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tion of ‘black women’ as delineating the boundaries of the alternative feminist movement to white feminism leaves non-British non-black women (like us – a Greek-Cypriot and an Israeli-Jew) unaccounted for politically. Although we recognize the impetus behind the black women’s movement and the need for its autonomous organization, black feminism can be too wide or too narrow a category for specific feminist struggles. On the one hand, there are struggles which concern all migrant women, like those against immigration laws, and on the other hand there are struggles which might concern only Sikh Indian women for instance. For these reasons, our paper will use the notion of ethnic divisions rather than the black/white division as a more comprehensive conceptual category for struggling against racism. One of our tasks will be to consider the links between the concepts of racism and ethnicity as well as attempting to relate ethnic divisions to those of gender and class. The marxist tradition of analysis which has informed much of socialist-feminist analysis has been partly responsible for the invisibility of ethnic divisions (as well as the feminist tradition itself which assumes unitary and biological roots to ‘women’). Contemporary marxist analysis has indeed recognized the importance of relating ethnic to class divisions and gender to class divisions but there has been little attempt to link ethnic and gender divisions to each other. In addition Marxism has had difficulty in analysing ethnic or gender divisions without reducing them to some form of class division. Because of the significance of this tradition of analysis for us we shall present a critique of Marxism as a necessary preliminary to developing our own position. We shall then present an exploratory framework for analysing the interrelationship of ethnic and gender divisions. We shall briefly examine these divisions within two central areas of feminist analysis, employment and reproduction. The paper will conclude by considering some of the implications of the analysis presented for the western/Third World feminist debate.

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ethnic divisions

Ethnic and gender divisions and marxism As already noted Marxism has particular difficulties in analysing nonclass social divisions. The marxist concept of the mode of production is based on an abstract model of relations that does not signal the concrete groups of people within it. It does however establish a firm grounding for class divisions in as much as the concept of class is

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hierarchically incorporated within a systematic theory whose central concept is that of mode of production. But ethnic divisions and gender divisions cannot be situated within this theory for they are not essential constituents of it – the theoretical basis for them is missing.4 The abstract level of analysis in Marx’s Capital presents problems for the analysis of concrete social relations including those of class. In some versions of Marxism found in economistic approaches, classes as concrete groups of people are reduced to the workings of the economy or the ‘needs’ of capital. We do not accept the depiction of class in concrete analysis as reducible to its own dynamics as found within the sphere of the economy. Indeed much recent analysis has treated classes as concrete historical groupings whose actual practices are not reducible to mode of production effects. We would take issue with a reductionist position that sees a necessary relationship between, for example, class determination and political/class position. Particularly we reject this not only because of the usual reasons given by Marxists, i.e. the separate effectivity of the ideological and political realms, but also because we consider the intersection between class, ethnic and gender divisions as important in the development of particular forms of political consciousness and action. Unlike the analysis of class which finds a theoretical basis in Marxism despite the difficulties encountered in concrete analysis, different problems are presented in the analysis of gender and ethnic divisions. When these categories are used by Marxists they often involve very common-sense usages since Marxism has not systematically concerned itself with them as theoretical constructs. This has led to very unclear and unspecific usages and shifts in meaning from, for example, identifying gender with a biological constituent and at other times seeing it as a social construct or race as historically produced and yet as basically organized around the ascriptive characteristic of ‘blackness’. Because of Marxism’s failure to specifically deal with gender and ethnic divisions, marxist-feminists and marxist anti-racists have attempted to ground them within economic relations, although marxist-feminists particularly have sought to do so in a non-class reductionist way. Ethnic and gender groups have been seen as structured by the ‘needs’ of capital for migrant labour or cheap labour. The reserve army of labour debate is an example of this.5 In addition there has been a tendency to reduce these groups to fundamentally class groupings. For example we have seen attempts to theorize black people in Britain as a class fraction, or an underclass and migrants in Europe as a ‘class stratum’ of the working class. This approach empirically

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fails to note the differentiation within the ethnic or migrant category, both in terms of ethnicity and gender and in terms of economic, political and ideological location. In addition this reduction to class can only present gender and ethnic identities as some form of ‘falseconsciousness’ – as illusionary. For example some attempts to theorize ethnicity have seen it as a form of incipient class consciousness whose essential project develops into that of class.6 (Interestingly the notion of women as a class is mostly systematically presented by Delphy (1977) from a radical-feminist position.) The marxist theorization of the state, ranging from the classical marxist tradition of Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg to more recent developments (instrumental, coordinator functional and state derivation approaches) presents a different problem for the analysis of ethnic divisions.7 Marxist theories of the state have tended to identify the boundaries of the national collectivity with that of the relations of production. This is found in Marx’s own assumption concerning the overlapping of the boundary between civil and political society. In Marx’s words ‘In the state the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomized’. For Marxists, on the whole, the rise of the nation-state is actively bounded by the relations of production and conditions of class conflict. For example the classical analysis of Engels of the emergence of the state depicts it as a result of society’s entanglement in insoluble class antagonisms (Engels, 1972). Thus marxist analyses have been sensitive to differential access to power of different classes but not to other forms of differential access based on gender or ethnic, national or racial divisions.8 These assumptions are not seriously challenged by the various recent marxist theorizations of the state. Our view is that it is not sufficient to assert as Schermerhorn (1970) does that each nation-state in the modern world contains subsections or sub-systems. It is also the case that in almost all social formations there are sections of the population that are to varying degrees excluded from political participation and representation. This exclusion operates at least partially in a different manner from the exclusion of ‘classes’ of the dominant national or ethnic group. For example, the new Nationality Bill in Britain presents exclusion not on the basis of class (as does legislation concerning private property for example) but on the basis of ethnicity and gender. A further problem within some marxist literature is the suggestion that internal ethnic divisions are ideological in the sense of ‘false’ or non-real. The attempt to theorize a distinction between historical (i.e. real) and non-historical (i.e. non-real) nations assumed that if an ethnic minority was able to obtain a separate and independent state,

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then it was based on a real and historical origin and other minorities were non-historical and only ‘ideological’.9 All three divisions have an organizational, experiential and representational form, are historically produced and therefore changeable, are affected by and affect each other and the economic, political and ideological relations in which they are inserted. Relations of power are usually found within each division and thus often the existence of dominant and subordinate partners. They are all therefore framed in relation to each other within relations of domination. They may thus involve political mobilization, exclusion from particular resources and struggles over them, claims to political representation and the formation of concrete interests and goals which may shift over time. It is not a question therefore of one being more ‘real’ than the others or a question of which is the most important. However it is clear that the three divisions prioritize different spheres of social relations and will have different effects which it may be possible to specify in concrete analysis. However we suggest that each division exists within the context of the others and that any concrete analysis has to take this into account. Firstly, we shall briefly comment on these divisions, clarifying the sense in which we use them and noting some of the main differences amongst them. Secondly, we shall begin to situate them in relation to each other in the spheres of employment and reproduction, two central areas of feminist analyses. We shall particularly note the links between gender and ethnic divisions since this has rarely been considered.

Class, gender and ethnic divisions As socialists working within a broadly marxist-informed analysis we see class divisions as grounded in the different relations of groups to the means of production which provides what has been called a group’s class determination. However class mobilization cannot be read from class determination for class goals are constructed through a variety of different mechanisms with ideological practices having a central role in this. Concrete class groupings may be composed of both men and women, of black and white and different cultures and ethnic identities. These concrete groupings are constructed historically. At times there may be a coincidence of class and gender or ethnic position (and at other times there maybe cross cuttings). For example, some fractions of the working class may be primarily composed of women or black people. This may reflect economic, po-

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litical and ideological processes but may also be structured through struggle and negotiation between the groups themselves and in relation to the state. Classes are not homogeneous ethnically, culturally or in terms of gender in most cases but class fractions may constitute some kind of homogeneity. Gender divisions relate to the organization of sexual difference and biological reproduction and establish forms of representation around these, although their concrete contents will include notions of the appropriateness of wage-labour, education and so on to men and to women. Usually sexual difference and biological reproduction (the ontological basis of gender) are represented as having necessary social effects (from say ‘sexual intercourse’ to ‘class position’). Gender divisions thus usually work with a notion of a ‘natural’ relationship between social effects and sexual differences/biological reproduction. We do not accept such a depiction nor that biological reproduction is an equivalent material basis for gender to that of production for class. Indeed the attempt to discover a feminist materialism in the social relations of reproduction fails precisely in the attempt to superimpose a materialist project onto a different object and reproduce its terms of reference.10 Finally the end result is indeed to reduce these social relations to their material base (biology) just as within marxist materialism the reduction is to ‘mode of production’. Rather we reject both biological reductionism and class reductionism. We are suggesting that there is an object of discursive reference in the sphere of gender divisions which relates to groups of subjects defined by their sexual/biological difference as opposed to groups of subjects defined by their economic production difference as in class. Gender divisions are ‘ideological’ to the extent that they do not have a basis in reproduction, but reproduction is represented as their basis. However, the ideological nature of gender divisions does not mean they do not exist nor that they do not have social origins and social effects or involve material practices. Unlike class and gender divisions, ethnic divisions are difficult to ground in some separate sphere of relations. This makes the various marxist and sociological attempts to try to find systematic conceptual differences between national/ethnic and racial groupings even more problematic. This attempt is never successful because it is impossible to systematically ascribe particular and different realms to them. Migration, conquest and colonization have developed a vast heterogeneous body of historical cases. The only general basis on which we can theorize what can broadly be conceived as ‘ethnic’ phenomena in all their diversity are as various forms of ideological construct which divide people into different

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collectivities or communities. This will involve exclusionary/inclusionary boundaries which form the collectivity. In other words although the constructs are ideological, they involve real material practices and therefore origins and effects. Whether the boundaries are those of a tribe, a nation or a linguistic or cultural minority, they will tend to focus themselves around the myth of common origin (whether biological, cultural or historical). Although sometimes there will be other means of joining the collectivity than being born into it (like religious conversion or naturalization), group membership is considered as the ‘natural’ right of being born into it. The salience of the collectivity and the social relations involved can vary greatly. Ethnicity is not only a question of ethnic identity. This latter does not exhaust the category of the ‘ethnic’ nor does it necessarily occur. Ethnicity may be constructed outside the group by the material conditions of the group and its social representation by other groups. However in practice ethnic identity and often solidarity may occur either as a pre-requisite for the group or as an effect of its material, political or ideological placement. In addition ethnicity involves struggle, negotiation and the use of ethnic resources for the countering of disadvantages or perpetuation of advantages. Conditions of reproduction of the ethnic group as well as its transformation are related to the divisions of gender and class. For example, class homogeneity within the ethnic group will produce a greater cohesion of interests and goals. The concept of ethnicity has too often been identified in Britain with the Ethnic School tradition which tends to concentrate on issues of culture or identity and has come under a great deal of justified attack for ignoring racism and the structural disadvantages of minority ethnic groups.11 However our use of the term ethnicity has as a central element exclusion/inclusion practices and the relations of power of dominance/subordination that are aspects of these. Majority groups possess an ethnicity as well as minority groups. Ethnicity and racism share both the categories of exclusion and power but racism is a specific form of exclusion. Racist discourse posits an essential biological determination to culture but its referent may be any group that has been ‘socially’ constructed as having a different ‘origin’, whether cultural, biological or historical. It can be ‘Jewish’, ‘black’, ‘foreign’, ‘migrant’, ‘minority’. In other words any group that has been located in ethnic terms can be subjected to ‘racism’ as a form of exclusion. The ‘Racist’ category is more deterministic than the mere ‘ethnic’ category. Concerning the difference between ethnic and national groups, it is often a question of the different goals and achievements of the col-

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lectivity. The nationalist project is more strictly political for its claims will necessarily include rights to separate political representation or to territory (as in the case of Palestinians and Jews in Israel and Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots in Cyprus). We consider that gender and ethnic divisions particularly are underpinned by a notion of a ‘natural’ relation. In gender divisions it is found in the positing of necessary social effects to sexual difference and biological reproduction and in ethnic divisions by assumptions concerning the ‘natural’ boundaries of collectivities or the ‘naturalness’ of culture. In capitalist societies like Britain very often the ‘natural’ ideological elements of gender and ethnic divisions are used to ‘naturalize’ unequal class divisions. Gender and ethnic divisions are used as legitimizors in two major ways. In patriarchal white societies it is perceived as ‘natural’ that men will occupy a higher economic position in the labour market than women and white people than black people. For example notions of women’s sexual difference (more ‘submissive’, ‘feminine’, ‘intuitive’, ‘expressive’, ‘dextrous’) and their ‘essential mothering role’ are used and are often manipulated for economically justifying (explaining) women’s position (at times by women themselves). Racism and ethnicity also have a role in justifying the economic/class subordination of black people. For example arguments about the cultural choices of ethnic groups – and racial stereotypes about Asian men (money-seeking) and Afro-Caribbean men (work idle) – are used to account for their economic position. The second way in which the ‘natural’ elements of gender and ethnic divisions are used is as rallying points for political struggle against class inequality as well as gender and ethnic inequalities. This is the case in most anti-imperialist struggles where notions of national identity are used. The black power movement has often used racial/ethnic identification partly as a counter to existing racial stereotypes and oppressions (for example in black nationalism the identification with Africa and in black power the ‘black is beautiful’ rhetoric and more recently, culturalist and religious revivals such as Rastafarianism). As regards gender, feminists have used women’s ‘nature’ as a rallying point, particularly with reference to the positive values of women’s culture and ‘nature’. However, using ethnic and gender categories in this way as rallying points for political mobilization in class-related struggles can present a problem for class unity. As well as ethnic and gender divisions being used for class goals, class divisions can provide the material conditions for ethnic and gender groups, for these will give unequal access to economic resources. State practices may exclude class, ethnic and gender group-

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ings in different ways, structure their relationship to each other and give differential political power to different groups. Therefore when we analyse specific historical cases these divisions often cannot be separated. We have suggested that the ‘natural’ ideological aspects of ethnic and gender groupings inform class relations. In addition we would suggest that ethnic and gender divisions are more socially immutable. Whereas it is possible theoretically for subjects to change class position (although empirically it may be difficult), it is not so for gender or ethnic position (especially for the ‘racial’ category). Gender position is fixed (apart from transexuals) and generally one is ‘born’ into one’s ethnic position. In particular cases, women can become ‘honorary’ men (when men are not available for example to do ‘male’ work as in war) or religious conversion can occur. But the major mechanism is ascriptive for both ethnic and gender divisions.

The relations between gender and ethnic divisions intermeshed divisions

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We suggested above all that three divisions are intermeshed in such a way that we cannot see them as additive or prioritize abstractly anyone of them. Each division presents ideological and organizational principles within which the others operate, although in different historical contexts and different social arenas their role will differ. The fusion of gender and class and ethnicity and class will also operate in the relationship between gender and ethnic divisions. For example if we consider the household we will find gender divisions will differ according to ethnicity. Ethnically specific definitions of women’s and men’s roles underlie the sexual division of labour in the family. Such aspects as mothering, housework, sexual obligations, obedience and submissiveness to male commands (and indeed to other members of the family) will differ according to ethnicity (as well as class of course). We would suggest that ethnic divisions are particularly important in the internal gender divisions within the household and family therefore, although state practices will affect them. If we consider the sphere of employment – the more public or external sexual division of labour – this will be affected particularly by the gender divisions of the majority ethnic group. Values and institutionalized practices about women’s ‘nature’ and ‘role’ present constraints to men and women from minority/subordinate ethnic groups despite their own gender ideologies. Another link between ethnic and gender divisions is found in the

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way in which the boundary of ethnicity depends on gender. The definition of membership within the ethnic group often depends on performing gender attributes correctly. Both identity and institutional arrangements of ethnic groups incorporate gender roles and specify appropriate relations between sexes such as, for example, who can marry them. A Greek-Cypriot girl of the second generation is regarded as ‘Kypraia’ usually when she conforms to rules about sexually appropriate behaviour – otherwise she becomes excluded. The definition of boundaries is far from being an internal practice alone. If we consider racial stereotypes we can see the centrality of gender roles; for example stereotypes about the ‘dominant’ Asian father and the ‘dominant’ black mother, or stereotypes about black men and women as sexual ‘studs’. These all indicate the reliance on gender attributes for specifying ethnic difference. We want to briefly suggest some more specific links between ethnic and gender divisions in employment and reproduction.

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Employment The internal gender divisions of an ethnic group will also affect the participation of men and women of the group in the labour market. Men and women of a specific ethnic group will tend to hold particular but different positions in the labour market; for example Afro-Caribbean men in the construction industry and on the buses, Afro-Caribbean women as service workers in manufacturing and as nurses, Asian men in textile firms and Asian women as outworkers in small-scale dress-making factories. A sexually differentiated labour market will structure the placement of subjects according to sex but ethnic divisions will determine their subordination within them so, for example, black and white women may both be subordinate within a sexually differentiated labour market but black women will be subordinated to white women within this. We would suggest that within western societies, gender divisions are more important for women than ethnic divisions in terms of labour market subordination. In employment terms, migrant or ethnic women are usually closer to the female population as a whole than to ethnic men in the type of wage-labour performed. Black and migrant women are already so disadvantaged by their gender in employment that it is difficult to show the effects of ethnic discrimination for them. When examining the position of ethnic minority men in the labour market, the effect of their ethnic position is much more visible. This may lead to a situation where for example Afro-Caribbean

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or Asian women have at times had greater ease in finding employment – as cheap labour in ‘women’s work’, whether it be nursing, assembly-line or clerical work – than the men. But the interrelationship between ethnic and gender divisions in employment goes beyond the mere differentiation in employment of ethnic subjects according to their gender. This additional dimension however is even less stressed in the literature on ethnic and race relations. The economic and social advancement of a migrant group may depend partly on the possibility of using the household and in particular the women within it as a labour resource. The extent to which migrant ethnic men have become incorporated into wider social production and the form this takes may also depend on the use of migrant women’s labour overall. Men from different migrant/ethnic groups have been incorporated differently economically. Afro-Caribbean men for example are in the ‘vanguard’ of British industry in large-scale production (Hall et al, 1978:349). Asian and Cypriot men on the other hand have had a greater tendency to go into small-scale entrepreneurial concerns and into the service sector of the economy. In particular, entrepreneurial concerns both within the formal and hidden economy depend on the exploitation of female wage-labour and in particular on kinship and migrant labour. Ethnic and familial bonds serve to allow the even greater exploitation of female labour (Anthias, 1983). The different form of the family and gender ideologies may partly explain the differences between AfroCaribbean employment patterns and those of Asians and Cypriots.

Reproduction gender, ethnic and class divisions

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We want now to turn to the area of reproduction and briefly consider it as a focus for the interrelation of gender, ethnic and class divisions. The concept of reproduction itself is a problematic one. This partly derives from the inconsistent and heterogeneous treatment it has received in the literature.12 Edholm et al (1977:103) suggest that the notion of reproduction might be read as assuming that ‘social systems exist to maintain themselves through time (to reproduce themselves) and secondly, that all levels of the system must be maintained through time in the same way’. This assumption indeed, would have all the pitfalls of the functionalist approach to social analysis. The reproduction of people and collectivities is directly shaped by the historical and social context in which it takes place. Nor is it an homogeneous process, and contradictions and conflicts are found not only in the reproduction of various entities that partially overlap each other but also in the form of the reproduction process itself.

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Women not only reproduce the future human and labour power and the future citizens of the state but also ethnic and national collectivities. As in other aspects of the gender division of labour, the ethnic and class position of women will affect their role in the reproduction process. Questions concerning who can actually reproduce the collectivity and under what conditions are often important here. Such things as the legitimacy of marriage, the appropriate religious conviction and so on are often preconditions for the legitimate reproduction of the nation or collectivity. The actual degree and form of control exercised by men of ethnic collectivities over their women can vary. In the Muslim world for example and in Britain under the old nationality law, the ethnic, religious or national position of women was immaterial. In other cases, like in the Jewish case, the mother’s origin is the most important one in delineating the boundaries of the collectivity, and this determined the reproduction of the Jewish ‘nation’ (Yuval-Davis, 1980). This clearly does not mean such women have greater freedom but only that they are subject to a different set of controls. As in other areas, the links between gender divisions and ethnic divisions can be and often are subject to the intervention of the state. For example, in Israel even secular people have to marry with a religious ceremony and according to traditional religious rules, in order for their marriage to be recognized by law. In the most extreme cases, the way the collectivity is constituted by state legislation virtually prevents inter-marriage between collectivities. In Egypt, for instance, while a Christian man can convert to Islam, Muslim women are prevent from marrying Christian Copts – if they do, they are no longer part of the Muslim community nor are they recognized as part of the Christian community and they virtually lose their legal status. The state may treat women from dominant and subordinate ethnic collectivities differently. For example, the new nationality law in Britain has given autonomous national reproduction rights to white British women, while totally witholding them from many others, mostly black women. This differential treatment does not relate only to ideological or legal control of reproduction. The infamous contraceptive injection Depo-Provera has been given in Britain and elsewhere virtually exclusively to black and very poor women, and a study found more birth control leaflets in family planning clinics in Asian languages than in English (see Brent Community Council, 1981). In Israel, Jewish families (under the label of being ‘relatives of Israeli soldiers’) receive higher child allowances than Arab ones, as part of an elaborate policy of encouraging Jewish population growth and discouraging

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that of Arabs. Indeed the Beveridge Report in Britain justified the establishment of child allowances in order to combat the danger of the disappearance of the British race (1942: 154). On the other hand, reproduction can become a political tool at the hand of oppressed ethnic minorities. A common Palestinian saying is that ‘The Israelis beat us at the borders and we beat them at the bedrooms’ – Palestinian women, like Jewish ones (and with a higher rate of success due to various material and ideological factors) are under pressure by their collectivity, although not by the state, to reproduce and enlarge it. It is a fact, for example, that no Palestinian children in Lebanon were allowed (unlike Vietnamese children under similar circumstances) to be adopted by non-Palestinians – all the children are looked on as future Palestinian liberation fighters. In other words, the control of reproduction can be used both as a subordinating strategy – by dominant groups against minority groups – as well as a ‘management’ strategy by ethnic collectivities themselves. We started the section by pointing out that the process of reproduction of human subjects, as well as of collectivities is never unitary. We want to emphasize that this is the case also concerning the participation of women themselves in the control of reproduction. We can point out that virtually everywhere, the interests of the nation or the ethnic group are seen as those of its male subjects, and the interests of ‘the state’ are endowed with those of a male ethnic class and not just a class which is ‘neutral’ in terms of ethnicity and gender. However, very often women participate directly in the power struggle between their ethnic collectivity and other collectivities and the state, including by voluntarily engaging in an intensive reproductive ‘demographic’ race. At the same time women of dominant ethnic groups are often in a position to control the reproductive role of women of other ethnic groups by state welfare and legal policies, as well as to use them as servants and child minders in order to ease part of their own reproductive burden. This last point leads us to consider the political implications of the above discussion concerning feminist politics and the commonality of feminist goals.

Political Implications As mentioned in the introduction to this paper, our interest in the subject is far from being merely academic. It originates from our own frustration in trying to find a political milieu in which ethnic divisions will be seen as an essential consideration, rather than as

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non-existent or as an immovable bloc to feminist politics. The theoretical part of this paper pointed out how misleading it is to consider gender relations without contextualizing them within ethnic and class divisions. Once we take the full implications of this into account, the mystification of the popular notion of ‘sisterhood’ becomes apparent. As we pointed out there can be no unitary category of ‘women’. The subordination of women to men, collectivities and the state operates in many different ways in different historical contexts. Moreover, very often women themselves participate in the process of subordinating and exploiting other women. One major form of women’s oppression in history has been their invisibility, their being ‘hidden from history’. The invisibility of women other than those who belong to the dominant ethnic collectivity in Britain within feminist analysis has been as oppressive. Except for black feminists who fought their own case in isolation, minority women have been virtually absent in all feminist analysis. Anthropological and historical differences in the situation of women have been explored, but only in order to highlight the social basis of gender relations in contemporary Britain. The heterogeneous ethnic character of the latter has never been fully considered. Recently there have been some signs of a developing awareness of the need to take into account ethnic diversity. Earlier writing by socialist-feminists like Michèle Barrett (1980) and Elizabeth Wilson (1977) on women in Britain had completely ignored minority, migrant, ethnic or black women. In the introduction to their latest books however (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982; Wilson, 1983) they acknowledge that they do not deal with ‘ethnic’ women or families. This recognition is clearly no substitute for an attempt to situate ethnic divisions when analysing ‘the family’ in Britain. On the political level some concessions have been made within the last few months to the black feminist movement. For example, the inclusion of black women in the Spare Rib Collective and on the Women’s Committee of the Greater London Council are unprecedented and very important political achievements. However, these concessions to black feminists are not a substitute for a coherent self-critique and analysis of the white feminist movement in contextualizing its own ethnic interests. When we talk about the need of white feminists in Britain to recognize their own ethnicity, we are relating to questions as basic as what we actually mean when we talk about ‘feminist issues’. Can we automatically assume, as has been done by western feminist movements, that issues like abortion, the depiction of the family as the site of female oppression, the fight for legal equality with men and

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against sex discrimination and so on are the feminist issues? Maxine Molyneux (1983) has recently argued that what separates Third World and western women is not so much the specific cultural or historical contexts in which they are engaged but differences of a theoretical and political nature. Different theoretical and political positions exist, of course, as Maxine claims, both in the West and in the Third World. But feminist goals cannot be the same in different historical contexts. For instance, the family may not be the major site for women’s oppression when families are kept apart by occupying or colonizing forces (as in Lebanon or South Africa), abortion may not be the major issue when forced sterilizations are carried out, nor is legal equality for women the first priority in polygamic societies where there is no independent autonomous mode of existence open to women whose husbands marry other younger and more fertile women. In their paper on the South African women’s movement, Judy Kimble and Elaine Unterhalter (1982) suggest that ‘the analysis and objective of western feminism cannot be applied abstractly and universally’. Western feminist struggles cannot be seen as dealing with ‘the feminist issues’ but with culturally and historically specific issues relevant mainly to middle class white women who have their own (invisible to them?) ethnicity. Judy and Elaine stress an essential point. However, it seems that in their search for an alternative perspective, they go to the other extreme and end up in fact with a circular argument – that feminist struggles in the context of national liberation movements are to be found in what the women in these movements do. In other words, once we stop perceiving western white feminism as providing the ultimate criteria for defining the contents of feminism, we are faced with the problem of how to politically evaluate various women’s struggles. The beginning of a possible approach might be found in an article by Gail Omvedt (1978) in which she suggests that there is a differentiation between ‘women’ struggles and ‘feminist’ struggles, in as much as the latter are those that challenge rather than use traditional gender divisions within the context of national or ethnic struggles. We would add, however, that the challenge has to be, in our opinion, directed to both women’s and men’s work. All too often, in national liberation struggles, as in other periods of social crisis, women are called upon to fulfill men’s jobs, as men are otherwise engaged at the front (as in war). This expansion in women’s roles is seen too often as an act of women’s liberation rather than as another facet of women’s work. When the crisis is over, women are often assigned again to the more exclusively feminine spheres of women, to the

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surprise, as well as disappointment, of all those who have seen in the mere participation of women in the ‘struggle’ (whether in the Israeli Kibbutz, Algiers or Vietnam), a feminist achievement. We claim therefore that the challenge has to be to the actual notion of the sexual division of labour rather than only to its specific boundaries. This is far from being simple, because so many, if not all ethnic cultures, as we have noted before, have as central the construction of a specific form of gender division. It is too easy to pose the question, as many anti-imperialist and anti-racist feminists do, as if the origin and site of their oppression is only constructed from above, by white male sexism. Ethnic and gender liberation struggles and solidarities can cut across each other and be divisive. We do not believe that there is one ‘right’ line to be taken in all circumstances. The focus or project of each struggle ought to decide which of the divisions we prioritize and the extent to which separate, as opposed to unified, struggle is necessary. Political struggles, however, which are formulated on an ethnic or sexual essence, we see as reactionary. Nor do we see it as a viable political option for women of subordinate collectivities to focus all their struggle against the sexism of dominant majority men. The direct conclusion from our analysis in this paper is that any political struggle in relation to any of the divisions considered in this paper, i.e. class, ethnic and gender, has to be waged in the context of the others. Feminist struggle in Britain today cannot be perceived as an homogeneous struggle, for the participation and oppression of women, both in the family and at the work site, are not homogeneous. White middle class feminists have to recognize the particularity of their own experiences, not only in relation to the Third World but also in relation to different ethnic and class grouping in Britain and integrate this recognition into their daily politics and struggles. Only on this basis can a valid sisterhood be constructed among women in Britain.

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Notes Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis lecture in Sociology at Thames Polytechnic, London. They are currently engaged on a research project on ethnic and gender divisions in Greenwich and Woolwich, Southeast London.

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1 Our analysis in this paper has benefitted much from discussions with and feedback from our colleagues in the Sociology Division at Thames Polytechnic who are working with us on the Ethnic and Gender Division Project and we would like to thank them all. We should also like to thank all those who participated in the Gender and Ethnic Divisions seminars arranged by the Sociology Division. Additionally we would like to thank the Sex and Class Group of the CSE, and the Feminist Review Collective, especially Annie Whitehead and Lesley Caldwell, for their insightful comments after reading the first draft of our paper. 2 The term ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethnicity’ have come under a great deal of attack recently for mystifying racist social relations. However, as we argue later, we do not use these concepts within a mainstream sociological tradition. For a critique of these terms see for example E. Lawrence (1982). 3 In a series of seminars organized by the Thames Polytechnic Sociology Division on Gender and Ethnic Divisions, Valerie Amos, Pratibha Parmar and Amina Mama all presented analyses that stressed the importance of studying the way in which the fusion of ethnic, gender and class divisions for black women gave a specificity to their oppression. 4 For the problems of theorizing gender divisions using a marxist framework see H. Hartmann (1979). For problems of theorizing race in Marxism see particularly J. Gabriel and G. Ben-Tovim (1978). 5 See V. Beechey (1977) for an attempt to apply the concept to women. See S. Castles and G. Kosack (1972) for an analysis of migrants as a reserve army. For a critique of such attempts see F. Anthias (1980). 6 For critical reviews of this position see J. Kahn (1981) and J.S. Saul (1979). 7 For a review of marxist theories of the State see Bob Jessop (1982). 8 Socialist-feminist analysis of course is an exception to this. For example see the work of E. Wilson (1977). 9 For example H.B. Davis (1973:31) states ‘Engels was using the theory of “historyless peoples” according to which peoples that have never formed a state in the past cannot be expected to form a viable state in the future’. 10 This approach is found for example in Z. Eisenstein (1979). 11 For a critique see J. Bourne and A. Sivanandan (1980). 12 See M. Mackintosh (1981), F. Edholm et al. (1977) and N. Yuval-Davis (1982).

References ANTHIAS, F. (1980) ‘Women and the Reserve Army of Labour’ Capital & Class No. 10. ANTHIAS, F. (1983) ‘Sexual Divisions and Ethnic Adaptation’ in PHIZACKLEA (1983). BARRETT, M. (1980) Women’s Oppression Today London: Verso. BARRETT, M. and McINTOSH, M. (1982) The Anti-social Family London: Verso. BEECHEY, V. (1977) ‘Some Notes on Female Wage Labour in the Capitalist Mode of Production’ Capital & Class No. 3. BOURNE, J. and SIVANANDAN, A. (1980) ‘Cheerleaders and

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Ombudsmen: the Sociology of Race Relations in Britain’ Race and Class Vol. XXI, No. 4. BRENT COMMUNITY COUNCIL (1981) Black People and the Health Service. CASTLES, S. and KOSACK, G. (1972) ‘The Function of Labour Immigration in Western European Capitalism’ New Left Review No. 73. CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES (1982) The Empire Strikes Back London: Hutchinson. DAVIS, H.B. (1973) Nationalism and Socialism New York: Monthly Review Press. DELPHY, C. (1977) The Main Enemy London: Women’s Research and Resources Centre. EDHOLM, F., HARRIS, O. and YOUNG, K. (1977) ‘Conceptualizing Women’ Critique of Anthropology Vol. 3, Nos. 9-10. EISENSTEIN, Z. (1979) editor Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism New York: Monthly Review Press. ENGELS, F. (1972) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State London: Lawrence and Wishart. GABRIEL, J. and BEN-TOVIM, G. (1978) ‘Marxism and the Concept of Racism’ Economy and Society Vol. 7, No. 2. HALL, S. et al. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order London: Macmillan. HARTMANN, H. (1979) ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’ Capital & Class No. 8. HM Government (1942) Social Insurance and Allied Services (The Beveridge Report) Cmd 6404 London: HMSO. HOOKS, B. (1981) Ain’t I a Woman? South End Press. JESSOP, B. (1982) The Capitalist State Oxford: Manin Robertson. KAHN, J. (1981) ‘Explaining Ethnicity’ Critique of Anthropology Vol. 4, No. 16, Spring. KIMBLE, J, and UNTERHALTER, E. (1982) ‘“We opened the road for you, you must go forward” ANC Women’s Struggles 19121982’ Feminist Review No. 12. LAWRENCE, E. (1982) ‘In the abundance of water the fool is thirsty: sociology and black “pathology” ’ in CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES (1982). MACKINTOSH, M. (1981) ‘Gender and Economics’ in YOUNG, WOLKOWITZ and McCULLOGH (1981). MOLYNEUX, M. (1983) ‘First and Third World Feminism: Solidarity and Conflict’ Paper presented to Socialist Society Conference on the Family, March 1983.

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OMVEDT, G. (1978) ‘Women and rural revolt in India’ Journal of Peasant Studies Vol 5, No. 3. PHIZACKLEA. A. (1983) editor, One Way Ticket London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (forthcoming). SAUL, J.S. (1979) ‘The dialectic of class and tribe’ Race and Class Vol. XX, No. 4. SCHERMERHORN, R. (1970) Comparative Ethnic Relations New York: Random House. WILSON, E. (1977) Women and the Welfare State London: Tavistock Publications. WILSON, E. (1983) What is to be done about violence against women? London: Penguin. YOUNG, K., WOLKOWITZ, C. and McCULLOGH, R. (1981) editors, Of Marriage and the Market London: CSE Books. YUVAL-DAVIS, N. (1980) ‘The bearers of the collective: Women and religious legislation in Israel’ Feminist Review No. 4. YUVAL-DAVIS, N. (1982) ‘National Reproduction: Sexism, Racism and the State’ Unpublished paper presented to BSA Conference, April 1982.

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Varieties of Marxist conceptions of ‘race’, class and the state: a critical analysis John Solomos

For a number of years, Marxist analysis of international migration and the interrelationship of race, class and the state were commonplace. Many ‘classic’ analyses, however, were dogged by economic determinism and theoretical abstraction. They failed to appreciate such complex non-class forms of division and oppression, including ethnic and religious loyalty, gender, racism and sexism. But Marxism was not composed of a unified set of dogmas. A growing number of authors responded to the theoretical imperfections by exploring these phenomena from a more critical position. Sociologist John Solomos’ article is a concise overview of the state of the art in the British neo-Marxist debate. All neo-Marxist theoretical approaches agree that there is no ‘race relations problem’ as such or, at least, that there is no problem of racism that can be thought of as separate from the structural features of capitalist society. The approaches differ with regard to the role of the state. This article also questions to what extent racial and ethnic categorisations are autonomous from economic and class determinations.

1. Introduction It is a commonplace that the reliance of Marxist theory on the pivotal concepts of mode of production and class, along with the preoccupation with general models of historical development, has precluded Marxists from making a significant contribution to the study of racial and ethnic divisions within capitalist society.1 The relative absence of a substantive discussion of these questions within the texts of classical Marxism seems to add weight to the assertion made by Frank Parkin that, as a form of social analysis, Marxism is incapable of dealing with such divisions short of subsuming them under more general social relations (production- or class-based) or treating them as a kind of superstructural phenomenon (Parkin 1979a and b).

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Parkin

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This commonplace assertion seems to be contradicted, however, by the increased interest among a number of Marxist theorists in clarifying the complex forms of non-class (even if class-related) forms of division and oppression that are characteristic of late capitalist societies, including racial and ethnic divisions, but also gender, national, regional, religious and locality-based divisions.2 Indeed, over the last decade in particular, a wide variety of Marxist conceptualisations of race, class and the state have emerged, including a substantial body of theoretical studies which attempt to develop a more precise and systematic understanding of racism in capitalist society as rooted in the dominant social relations and power structures (Genovese 1971, Nikolinakos 1973, Hall 1977, 1980b, Gabriel and Ben-Tovim 1978, Sivanandan 1982, Miles 1982, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1982, Brittan and Maynard 1984). In addition a number of Marxist-inspired historical and empirical studies of specific forms of racist structures in different societies have been published over the years, including the USA (Reich 1981, Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1983, Marable 1984) and South Africa (Wolpe 1980, Burawoy 1981). The existence of these theoretical and empirical studies does not, of course, mean that the criticisms of writers such as Frank Parkin can be dismissed. Many of the problems which they highlight within Marxist discourse, especially economic determinism and theoretical abstraction, are still to be found in much of the mainstream of Marxism, which continues to treat racism as little more than an irritant to the smoother structures of historical materialism (see BenTovim et al. in this volume for more discussion of this point). Racism remains an inadequately theorised concept within the terms of both sociological and Marxist theory. The remainder of this paper will, first, discuss some of the most important attempts to develop a critical understanding of the interrelationship between race, class and the state in contemporary capitalism. Second, I shall attempt to develop an alternative framework for analysing racism which builds upon the strengths of recent contributions, particularly in relation to the need to ground a theory of racism in the broader framework of political economy. The paper concludes with a few remarks about the implications of Marxist analyses of racism and the state for political practice, particularly in relation to anti-racist struggles.

2. Origins and foundations It will be helpful to clear away some preliminary points before proceeding. Although this paper addresses the question of a Marxist

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analysis of ‘race’ and racism in capitalist society, it would be quite mistaken to think of contemporary Marxism either as unified or as composed of a unified set of dogmas. This is an assumption that is too often made in the race relations literature, on the grounds that the substantial difference between a Marxist approach to race and other approaches lies in the reliance by Marxists on an economic determinist explanation for the emergence and reproduction of racism. Consider the following remarks from Frank Parkin’s critique of Marxism and its analysis of class:

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unified set of dogmas

On current evidence one could be forgiven for concluding that the preferred Marxist response to the fact of racial or communal strife is to ignore it. Not one of the various reformulations of class theory... makes any serious attempt to consider how the division between blacks and whites, Catholics and Protestants, Flemings and Walloons, Francophones and Anglophones, or between indigenous and immigrant workers affects their general analysis. It is especially difficult to see what kind of explanation could in any case be expected from those formulations which draw heavily upon the conceptual storehouse of political economy. Notions such as the mode of production make their claims to explanatory power precisely on the grounds of their indifference to the nature of the human material whose activities they determine. To introduce questions such as the ethnic composition of the workplace is to clutter up the analysis by laying stress upon the quality of social actors, a conception diametrically opposed to the notion of human agents as träger or ‘embodiments’ of systemic forces. (Parkin 1979b, p. XXX)

As a statement in support of the thesis that it is impossible to combine a Marxist analytic framework with a serious analysis of racial and/or ethnic divisions this passage suffers from several problems. First, it takes only a limited degree of knowledge about recent Marxist debates to see that Parkin’s main assertion, that the explanatory power of the concept of mode of production depends on an indifference to the role of social actors, is contradicted by the vast body of literature (on class, the state, the labour process and political economy) which has attempted to argue the centrality of human agency to any rounded Marxist explanatory model.3 More than this, the thrust of recent Marxist writings on class and the state has been informed by the need to take on board the insights derived from feminism, and this has further broadened the parameters of what Parkin calls the ‘conceptual storehouse of political economy’ (Sargent 1981, Gilroy 1982). More fundamentally, perhaps, there is little to support Parkin’s

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assertion that ‘the preferred Marxist response to the fact of racial or communal strife is to ignore it’. On the contrary, a sizeable and growing body of theory and research in the area of race and ethnic relations is based on or draws some inspiration from Marxism. While it may be true that much of the recent debate about class and the state does not say much that is of direct relevance to the question of race, it is strictly speaking not the case that recent Marxist writings ignore divisions within classes or the role of non-class political organisation. The substance of the work of authors such as Nicos Poulantzas, Manuel Castells, Guglielmo Carchedi and Erik Olin Wright recognises the reality of such divisions and the role that they play in processes of class formation and in political struggles.4 What is even more clear from these debates is that it is quite mistaken to see Marxism as a monolithic set of assertions or to assimilate it wholesale into some notion of economic determinism or class reductionism. Rather, it is best viewed today as consisting of a spectrum of competing schools of thought ranging from economic determinism to more sophisticated explanatory models which fully recognise the centrality of human agency and collective action (Wright 1980). This view of Marxism as heterogeneous contradicts the oft-stated assertion (which Parkin repeats) that the Marxist approach to racial and ethnic divisions can be identified according to the basic principles of reducing ‘race’ to class, and the explanation of the origins of racism as co-terminous with the rise of capitalism. Such a view of the Marxist contribution to the study of racism is seemingly supported by the close association between the class/race model developed by Oliver C. Cox in his study of Caste, Class and Race (first published in 1948) and some more contemporary contributions to the analysis of racism (Sivanandan 1982). Although this is not the place to develop a critical discussion of Cox’s analysis of class and ‘race’, it is important to point out that his work is by no means seen by contemporary Marxists as an adequate analysis of the complex historical determinants of racism or of the relationship between racism and capitalist social relations (see e.g. Gabriel and Ben-Tovim 1978, Miles 1980). Moreover, as Eugene Genovese (1971) has pointed out, Cox’s work was very much the product of his time, in that he was familiar with a Marxism that had not yet been influenced by the work of Gramsci and other ‘Western’ Marxists or by the experience of racial conflict that took place during the 1960s. If Parkin’s dismissive attitude towards Marxism does not hold on the grounds which he suggests, this is not to say that a coherent and fully fledged analysis of racism has been produced from a Marxist perspective. Far from it. Cox’s study, though not self-consciously

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written as a Marxist analysis, is still widely considered as the Marxist analysis of this question (see Banton, this volume), largely because it is the most substantive study which attempts to utilise concepts such as class and exploitation in order to explain the role of ‘race’ and racism in capitalist societies. Other studies written from a Marxist perspective have tended to limit their analysis to abstract theoretical exegesis, or to analyse the experience of one particular society in isolation. Cox’s attempt to combine theory with a comparative analysis of racism thus stands out as a unique contribution, whose status as a classic sociological analysis is acknowledged by even his most severe critics. There can be no question here of attempting critically to analyse the contribution of Cox to a Marxist analysis of racial and ethnic divisions, which is a theme in any case of other papers in this volume and of a growing debate within Marxist circles (Gabriel and BenTovim 1978, Miles 1980, 1982). It needs to be pointed out, however, that the model of Marxism with which Cox was familiar was based on the conceptual baggage of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ and an instrumental view of the state as the agent of the capitalist class (Cox 1948, p. 321). This adherence to such views runs counter to the main tendency of contemporary Marxist analysis, which in fact has evolved a number of competing schools of thought, and whose central concern is to question the tenability of the classical base-superstructure model as a conceptual framework (P. Anderson 1983). In relation to the question of class, for example, Adam Przeworski has pointed out that the traditional separation between the economic definition of classes and the political and ideological determinants of class-formation is in fact quite misleading when it comes to the concrete analysis of the contradictions that arise either within or between social classes. Przeworski argues, and here he expresses a view shared by most neo-Marxist writers, that it is not possible to separate the ‘objective’ analysis of class from the totality of economic, ideological and political relations which organise, disorganise and reorganise social classes as a result of class struggles and historical transformations (Przeworski 1977; but see also Wright 1980). It would be quite mistaken, therefore, to see recent Marxist writings on the question of race and class as deriving from Cox as such. In some cases Cox’s work does form one starting point, but only one among many. It can be argued that equally important influences on recent Marxist writings on ‘race’ are the works of neo-Marxist writers such as Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas, the criticisms levelled at economistic Marxism by such writers as John Rex and Edna Bonacich, and the works of feminist writers. All of these influences

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are evident in the approaches discussed below, although this does not mean that they do not also rely on the conceptual apparatus of classical Marxism and to some extent on the pioneering work of Cox and others (Gabriel and Ben-Tovim 1978). The argument developed in this paper, therefore, will be that there is not one approach to the question of race and class from within the Marxist tradition but rather several approaches. The equation of a Marxist approach with the work of Cox, or with a simple form of economic and class reductionism, is both mistaken and woefully out of date in the context of recent debates about the nature of the state, class and racism. In order to substantiate this point I would like to move on to a critical analysis of three of the most important Marxist approaches to race, class and the state.

3. Neo-Marxist approaches to ‘race’, class and the state

three models

CCCS

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Within the broad spectrum of recent Marxist or Marxisant approaches to ‘race’, class and the state it is possible to detect a wide variety of theoretical models, historical analyses and political arguments. Even though using similar theoretical reference points, either to classic texts by Marx and Engels or to the works of more contemporary Marxist thinkers such as Nicos Poulantzas, a number of fairly distinct schools of thought have emerged over the last decade. Each of these schools lays a claim to the work of Marx, either as a source of inspiration or more directly as a general theoretical framework within which any analysis of racism in capitalist society must be located. The complexity of recent debates cannot be adequately analysed within the limits of this paper, but for heuristic purposes I shall discuss three important models that constitute various dimensions of recent Marxist debates on ‘race’, class and the state: the relative autonomy model, the autonomy model and the migrant labour model.5 There can be no question here of attempting a general survey of all the literature that could be classified as falling into these models. Rather the limited objective of this paper is to raise some theoretical problems concerning all three approaches and to make some suggestions for an alternative formulation. (a) Relative autonomy model Within the last decade, one of the most important and influential redefinitions of the Marxist analysis of ‘race’ and racism has been developed by a number of studies originating from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS).6 The works

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which have emanated from CCCS over this period are heterogeneous in approach, substantive issues and political inclination but are unified through a common concern with developing an analysis of racism which fully accepts its relative autonomy from class-based social relations and its historical specificity in relation to the laws of motion of capitalist development. Although it would be unwise to label this body of work as a ‘school’ of thought with a coherent and fully worked out framework of analysis, there does seem to be some justification in Brittan and Maynard’s view (1984) that there is a distinct CCCS approach to such issues as racism, sexism and more generally intra-class divisions. Moreover, the theoretical and political controversy which surrounded the publication of The Empire Strikes Back in 1982 has resulted in a number of critical articles which question both the theoretical and the political linkages between recent CCCS texts and Marxism (Young 1983, Miles 1984a). The origins of the Centre’s concern with racism can be dated back to the early 1970s, when a number of research students and its then Director, Stuart Hall, became involved in a project which was concerned with explaining the development of ‘moral panics’ about the involvement of young blacks in a specific form of street crime, namely mugging.7 The context of this study was the environment of cities such as Birmingham, where sizeable black communities had grown up and established their own specific community, cultural and political practices. This in turn led to the development of ideological and political responses from within local communities, from the local state and its agencies and from the institutions of the central state. The research carried out by the CCCS team, which was eventually published in 1978 as Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978), took as its central concerns the processes by which ‘race’ came to be defined as a ‘social problem’ and the construction of ‘race’ as a political issue which required state intervention from both the central and the local state. There is no space here to discuss the rich and complex analysis which Hall and his associates developed of this period or the subsequent discussion of these issues by other authors.8 Suffice it to say that the concrete historical analysis on which Policing the Crisis is based provided a materialist basis for what has subsequently become known as the ‘CCCS approach’ to ‘race’ and class and has continued to exert a deep influence on the work of younger researchers at the Centre. This is best exemplified by the jointly produced volume of the CCCS Race and Politics Group, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982). Before moving on to discuss the more recent work of the Centre, however, it is important to understand the core concepts developed

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Policing the Crisis

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by Stuart Hall and his colleagues in the earlier phase. A purchase on the distinctiveness of this approach can be gained through Hall’s programmatic statement of his position in a paper significantly titled ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’ (1980b), which had been widely read and discussed even before it was published. Hall’s starting point is clear enough, in that he attempts to develop an analytic framework which locates racism in historically specific social relations while allowing for a degree of autonomy of the ‘racial aspects’ of society. He makes this clear when he argues that: There is as yet no adequate theory of racism which is capable of dealing with both the economic and the structural features of such societies, while at the same time giving a historically concrete and sociologically specific account of distinctive racial aspects. (Hall, 1980b, p. 336)

Rex

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From this starting point he engages in a dialogue with a number of sociological analyses of ‘race’, particularly the work of John Rex, and with the analyses of class ideology and the state which developed under the influence of Althusserian Marxism. At the core of this dialogue are two fundamentally important questions. The most important of these focuses on the relationship between racism and the structural features of capitalist society and asks ‘How does racism function within capitalist social relations and how is it produced/ reproduced?’ The second question points to a related but more concrete set of concerns about how racism is actually constituted in specific societies or institutions, asking ‘How does racism influence the ways in which class, political, gender and other social relationships are actually experienced?’ While the concerns of Hall and his associates in Policing the Crisis are somewhat different from those of the authors of The Empire Strikes Back, for example in relation to the analysis of black youth cultures and the role of the state, they generally agree on the importance of locating the relative autonomy of racism at a macro-level and on the centrality of racism in relations of power and domination in post-war Britain (Hall 1980a, CCCS 1982, chapters 1 and 8). Hall’s reconceptualisation of racism hinges upon a reappraisal both of Marxist concepts and of some aspects of the work of sociologists of ‘race’. In relation to the first he is particularly concerned to draw out the implications of the reconceptualisation of ideology and the state in contemporary Marxism for the analysis of racism. The bulk of his main theoretical paper on the subject begins by support-

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ing John Rex’s critique of reductionist Marxist analyses of racism, particularly in relation to South Africa, but then goes on to argue that the emergence of a critical theoretical paradigm within Marxism allows for a more adequate analysis of racism within the context of Marxist theoretical and historical research. Drawing upon studies of imperialism, dependency theory, the state and ideology, he argues: A new theoretical paradigm [has emerged], which takes its fundamental orientation from the problematic of Marx’s, but which seeks, by various theoretical means, to overcome certain of the limitations – economism, reductionism, ‘a priorism’, a lack of historical specificity – which beset certain traditional appropriations of Marxism, which still disfigure the contributions to this field by otherwise distinguished writers, and which have left Marxism vulnerable and exposed to effective criticism by many different variants of economic monism and sociological pluralism. (Hall 1980b, p. 336)

While conceding the criticisms made by Rex (1973, 1983c) and others of a simplistic ‘Marxist’ analysis of racism, Hall wants also to argue that a more critical and multi-dimensional materialist analysis of the phenomenon is possible. In establishing this possibility he himself suggests three principles as the starting point for a critical Marxist analysis of racism. First, he rejects the idea that racism is a general feature of all human societies, arguing that what actually exist are historically specific racisms. Though there may be features common to all racially structured societies, it is necessary to understand what produces these features in each specific historical situation before one can develop a comparative analysis of racism. The second principle is that, although racism cannot be reduced to other social relations, one cannot explain racism in abstraction from them. Racism has a relative autonomy from other relations, whether they be economic, political or ideological. This relative autonomy means that there is no one-way correspondence between racism and specific economic or other forms of social relations. Third, Hall criticises a dichotomous view of ‘race’ and ‘class’, arguing that in a ‘racially structured’ society it is impossible to understand them through discrete modes of analysis. ‘Race’ has a concrete impact on the class consciousness and organisation of all classes and class factions. But ‘class’ in turn has a reciprocal relationship with ‘race’, and it is the articulation between the two which is crucial, not their separateness (Hall 1980b, pp. 336-42). Hall’s own writings on this subject have been fairly limited and programmatic so far, and have moved little beyond the three prin-

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ciples suggested above. They have been influential, however, in the development of subsequent Marxist studies of racism, partly through the popularised and revised form of his ideas which can be found in The Empire Strikes Back, produced collectively by the Race and Politics Group of CCCS in 1982. Although written at a distance from some of the concerns to be found in the Centre’s earlier work on ‘race’ and from Hall’s theoretical sources, this volume took as its starting point a theme already made familiar by Hall and his colleagues, namely that the political construction of ‘race’ as a problem in contemporary Britain represents an integral aspect of how the British state is attempting to manage the current ‘organic crisis of British capitalism’ (CCCS 1982, chapters 1 and 8). Drawing particularly upon the work of a number of authors who have attempted to reconceptualise the role of the state in relation to racism (e.g. Carchedi, Sivanandan, and Castells), the authors of this work attempt to rework Hall’s earlier studies and to provide a more concrete analysis of the relation of ‘race’ to British decline during the 1970s. The Empire Strikes Back can be said to mark a change from the previous works of the Centre on ‘race’ in at least three senses. First, it argues that previous sociological and Marxist accounts of race relations represent a body of work which has done little to further our knowledge of racism and which can even be seen as reproducing ethnocentric or common-sense views of ‘race’ (CCCS 1982, chapters 2 and 8). This mode of critique is in fact quite different from Hall’s critical, but by no means unsympathetic, treatment of the works of ‘sociologists of race’ and their relationship to Marxism. In addition it links up with a more fundamental line of critique emanating from authors such as Cedric Robinson (1983), who sees the central concepts of Marxism as ‘Eurocentric’ and fairly limited in their applicability to ‘racially structured’ societies. The second divergence relates to the greater emphasis placed on the role of ‘state racism’, or the role of state activity in reproducing racism. While elements of this analysis can be traced back to the work of Hall and his associates (Hall et al. 1978), there is a sharper focus in The Empire Strikes Back on the concrete ways in which the state intervened to manage ‘race’ throughout the 1970s, in ways which were detrimental to the interests of black communities. This is achieved at a general level through an analysis of the growth of ‘authoritarian statism’ and ‘popular racism’ within the context of deep-seated crisis: The parallel growth of repressive state structures and new racisms has to be located in a non-reductionist manner, within the dynamics of both the international crisis of the capitalist world economy,

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and the deep-seated structural crisis of the British social formation. (CCCS 1982, p. 9)

It is also achieved through an emphasis on the ways in which racism structures different areas of social life, notably education, policing, youth policy and also the position of black women in the labour market (Solomos et al. 1982). This in turn links up to a third area, namely the attempt to reconceptualise the complex relationship between ‘class’ and ‘race’. In the concluding chapter of the book, Paul Gilroy mounts a sustained critique of both Marxist and sociological analysis of ‘race’ for failing to deal adequately with the autonomy of ‘race’ from ‘class’. In so doing he questions the view of the working class as a continuous historical subject, particularly since such a view cannot deal adequately with the ways in which blacks can constitute themselves as an autonomous social force in politics or with the existence of ‘racially demarcated class factions’ (Gilroy 1982, p. 284). The theoretical basis of this critique can be traced back to the work of Hall, although it also draws some of its inspiration from previous studies at the Centre of working-class culture (Hall et al. 1980) and from the more recent debates about class theory within Marxism (see e.g. Przeworski 1977). This is exemplified by the combination in Gilroy’s work of a model of determination which gives class struggle as opposed to class structure a degree of determinacy, and a view of black workers as racially structured. The difficulties which this position entails are made explicit when Gilroy argues:

class struggle

The class character of black struggles is not a result of the fact that blacks are predominantly proletarian, though this is true. It is established in the fact that their struggles for civil rights, freedom from state harassment, or as waged workers, are instances of the process by which the working class is constituted politically, organised in politics. (Gilroy 1982, p. 302)

Referring specifically to those excluded from employment, particularly the young black unemployed, he posits that there may be various types of struggles which mobilise them politically, not all of which bear a direct relationship to ‘objective’ conditions. It follows that ‘the privileged place of economic classes in the Marxist theory of history is not to be equated with an a priori assertion of their political primacy in every historical moment’ (Gilroy 1982, p. 303). It is also of some relevance to note, in relation to the above point, that The Empire Strikes Back includes some of the most sustained

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treatments of the place of gender in the dialectic of ‘race’ and class (see the chapters by Hazel Carby and Pratibha Parmar). Along with the work of Annie Phizacklea on migrant women (Phizacklea 1983), it constitutes an isolated attempt in this field seriously to analyse the role of gender in the articulation of racist ideologies. Perhaps the most notable absence from the Centre’s work on racism is a serious analysis of the political economy of racism. Apart from a rudimentary and limited study by Green (1979), and some minor references in both Policing the Crisis and The Empire Strikes Back, this remains a serious gap in the Centre’s work. It becomes particularly critical in the context of the oft-repeated criticisms made of mainstream sociological studies of ‘race’ for not taking account of the broad economic and social determinants of racism. The emphasis on the relative autonomy of racism seems to have led to a neglect of the economic context of racial structuration, or at the least to a deemphasis on the role played by the ‘economic’ in the narrow sense. This is a point that will be discussed later, particularly in relation to the migrant labour model. There are a number of other aspects of the Centre’s work on racism which can be fruitfully discussed (see Freedman 1983-4). Here I have tried to highlight the broad contours of the contribution it has made to a Marxist analysis of racism and to mention some of the ambiguities and tensions that arise. Before taking up the problems to which this model gives rise, it is necessary to outline the other two models. (b) Autonomy model Recently some Marxist theorists have argued that there is a need to go beyond the notion that racism is a ‘relatively autonomous’ social phenomenon and to break more definitely from the economic and class-reductionist elements in Marxist theory. Thus a major theme in the influential writings of John Gabriel and Gideon Ben-Tovim,9 who have developed a theoretical perspective which specifically emphasises this point, is that the bulk of neo-Marxist theory on racism is still based on implicit, if not explicit, economic and class-reductionist assumptions. They are particularly critical of the ‘relative autonomy’ model, which they see as defective from both a theoretical and a political perspective. From a theoretical angle they see the dichotomy between capitalist social relations and ‘race’ as merely another way of reproducing a more sophisticated form of class-reductionism, under the guise of the nebulous concept of relative autonomy. This in turn is seen as supporting a deterministic analysis of political struggles against racism and thus allowing little room for anti-racist politi-

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cal strategies to be effective rather than symbolic (Gabriel and BenTovim 1979, Ben-Tovim et al. 1981a). Contrary to the bulk of recent Marxist writings on racism, which take capitalist social relations and class relations as a starting point, Gabriel and Ben-Tovim argue that racism can best be understood as the product of contemporary and historical struggles which are by no means reducible to wider sets of economic or social relations. This leads them to take as their starting point the various struggles, local and national, political and ideological, which go into the social construction of ‘race’ in specific situations (Gabriel and Ben-Tovim 1978). Yet it would be too simplistic to see their position as one which holds that racism is not in some way related to wider social relations. A number of their papers on anti-racist struggles do in fact show how wider structural constraints do play a role in limiting the effectiveness of such struggles (e.g. Ben-Tovim et al. 1981a). What they do argue, however, is that there is no way of determining what these limits are, outside of specific struggles and historical situations. The consequences of this position are that there is no a priori reason to see racism as the product of class or economic relations, and that the only way to overcome the traditional dilemma in relation to the ‘base/superstructure’ model is to eschew any attempt to analyse racism outside of its own ideological conditions of existence (Gabriel and Ben-Tovim 1978). In opposition to the preoccupation of the CCCS studies with the linkages between ‘race’ and class, and more concretely with the articulation between capitalist crisis and the development of racism, Gabriel and Ben-Tovim suggest that the starting point of a Marxist analysis should be the ideological and political practices which work autonomously to produce racism. Rejecting all forms of reductionism they argue that:

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ideological and political practices

Racism has its own autonomous formation, its own contradictory determinations, its own complex mode of theoretical and ideological production, as well as its repercussions for the class struggle at the levels of the economy and the state. (Gabriel and Ben-Tovim 1978, p. 146)

In this view, the ideological level is primary, since it is only after the ideological production of racist ideologies that they intervene at the level of the economy and of political practice. In effect, Gabriel and Ben-Tovim attempt to push beyond the constraints of the relative autonomy model by questioning the viability of any attempt to situate ‘race’ in terms of class. The ‘autonomy’ of racism lies precisely in its irreducibility to any other set of social relations, since any attempt to

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account for racism in terms of external relations entails a reductionist argument (Ben-Tovim et al., this volume). Moving a step beyond this formal critique of reductionist Marxism, supporters of the autonomy model would also argue that their analysis provides a more relevant guide to the complex political realities of racist politics and anti-racist struggles (Ben-Tovim et al. 1981a). Starting from the position that the state as an institution is not monolithic but the site of constant struggles, compromises and administrative decisions, they argue that the most important task of research on ‘race’ is to highlight the political and ideological context in which anti-racist struggles occur. Referring to the need for struggles to change institutionalised racism as a ‘long march through the institutions’, with the overall objective of bringing about ‘positive and democratically based political and policy changes to secure the elimination of racial discrimination and disadvantage’ (p. 178), they question the usefulness of the notion of relative autonomy when confronted with the complexity of political struggles against racism. This last point is important in understanding the coherence of the analysis developed by Gabriel and Ben-Tovim, since they selfconsciously see their theoretical work as linking up with political practice. There is no space here to discuss the detailed and rich analysis they have made of the political context of anti-racist struggles in Liverpool and Wolverhampton. Suffice it to say that the development of their approach, from the early formal critique of traditional Marxist views of ‘race’ and class to their more recent preoccupation with the local politics and racism, reflects their actual political involvement in anti-racist politics. Another way of making this point is that although they would agree with Hall that ‘race’ and ‘class’ form part of a complex dialectical relation in contemporary capitalism, they would question the usefulness of interpreting this relationship in terms of the ‘relative autonomy’ of racism. Ultimately they see a contradiction in arguing that racist ideologies have a certain autonomy from material relations, while also holding on to the principle that it is these relations which determine ‘in the last instance’ the degree of autonomy. More fundamentally, they seem to be arguing that even the work of Hall and his associates, with its explicit disavowal of determinism, supports an implicit base/superstructure model. Given their insistence on the irreducibility of ‘race’ to class, and the political conclusions they draw from this position, it may not be surprising that Gabriel and Ben-Tovim do not spend much time discussing the degree of determinancy which state power and class relations have in relation to racial structuration. Their version of the

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‘extended’ as opposed to the ‘monolithic’ state does have a rather pluralistic ring about it, at least as regards their discussion of the role of race relations legislation and the role of the local state. Their dual strategy of attrition against racism, both within and outside the state apparatuses, is predicated upon the premise of the primacy of struggle over all other levels of determinancy (Ben-Tovim et al. 1981a, and Ben-Tovim et al., this volume). But this seems to push the agency versus structure argument in the direction of a voluntarist theory of political change, and one which ignores the centrality of the distinction between the appearance and the reality of political struggles (Connolly 1981). Moreover, there seems to be a heavy emphasis in their approach on the importance of policy-oriented research as a tool for anti-racist struggles. The lack of policy-relevance is one of the weaknesses they highlight in other Marxist approaches in this field. The ambiguities of the autonomy model relate as much to political issues as to straightforward theoretical questions. The work of Gabriel and Ben-Tovim can also be read, however, as a theoretical innovation in the sense that it breaks quite fundamentally with the main concern of other Marxists working in this field, namely the search for a non-reductionist and historically specific analysis of racism. For Gabriel and Ben-Tovim the search for a more plausible model of determination leads into a cul-de-sac, and they have responded by rejecting all forms of determination outside of struggle. (c) Migrant labour model The third explanatory model which has been used by recent Marxist writers, especially by Robert Miles and Annie Phizacklea,10 takes a radically different starting point from the other two approaches outlined above. Arguing on the basis of a critical reinterpretation of classical and neo-Marxist theories of class, the state and ideology, Miles and Phizacklea construct a theoretical model of racism which prioritises the ‘political economy of migrant labour’ as opposed to what they call the ‘race relations problematic’ (Miles 1980, 1982, Phizacklea and Miles 1980, Phizacklea 1984). The substance of the difference between this approach and the previous two is that throughout their work Miles and Phizacklea seek to prioritise the role that class and production relations play in the reproduction of racism. This position has recently been clearly stated by Phizacklea, who argues:

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the ‘political economy of migrant labour’

If social scientists continue to use the term ‘race’... because people act as though ‘race’ exists, then they are guilty of conferring analytical

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status on what is nothing more than an ideological construction. Our object of analysis cannot be ‘race in itself’, but the development of racism as an ideology within specific historical and material contexts. (Phizacklea 1984, p. 200)

racial categorisation

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This quotation is from an article which bears the title ‘A Sociology of Migration or “Race Relations”?’. In a similar vein Miles argues that the work of some Marxists (notably that of Sivanandan and the authors of The Empire Strikes Back) shares a common terrain with the ‘race relations’ problematic of John Rex, because they both ‘attribute the ideological notion of “race” with a descriptive and explanatory importance’ (Miles, 1984a, p. 218). Central to this position is the notion that racism can only be understood by analysing it in relation to the basic structural features of capitalism. This is linked to a related point, which has been repeatedly made by Miles and Phizacklea, in relation both to the sociology of race relations and to other Marxist studies of racism. Their work carefully eschews any reference to ‘race’ except in inverted commas, because they see ‘race’ as itself an ideological category which requires explanation and which therefore cannot be used for either analytical or explanatory purposes (Miles 1982, 1984a, Phizacklea 1984). The reason for their insistence on the distinction between ‘race’ and racism becomes clear through their reliance on what they call ‘the process of racialisation’ or ‘racial categorisation’ (Miles 1982, pp. 153-67, Phizacklea 1984). Broadly speaking, this concept posits that ‘race’ is a social construction which attributes meanings to certain patterns of phenotypical variation. This process of attributing meaning to ‘race’ results in a reification of real social relations into ideological categories and leads to the commonsense acceptance that ‘race’ is an objective determinant of the behaviour of black workers or other racially defined social categories. As evidence of this confusion Miles and Phizacklea cite the example of how black workers are not analysed in terms of the social relations of production but as a ‘race apart’ (Phizacklea and Miles 1980, Miles 1982), the ways in which politicians and governments have utilised the category of ‘race’ in order to obfuscate the reality of racism (Miles and Phizacklea 1984), and at a more concrete level the way in which the use of the idea of ‘race’ to interpret the 1958 riots deflected attention away from the actions of racists against blacks and from the role of the state (Miles 1984b). Precisely because they conceptualise ‘race’ as an ideological reification, and one which can do little to challenge common-sense images of ‘race’, they suggest two main programmatic conclusions: (a) that ‘race’ cannot be the object of analysis in itself, since it is a social

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construction which requires explanation; (b) that the object of analysis should be the process of ‘racialisation’ or ‘racial categorisation’, which takes place within the context of specific economic, political and ideological relations. In rejecting the descriptive or analytical value of ‘race’ as a concept Miles and Phizacklea insist on the importance of racism, and the discriminatory practices which it produces, as the crucial factor in the formation of what they call a racialised fraction of the working class, and of other classes (Phizacklea and Miles 1980, Miles 1984a, pp. 229-30). This has been interpreted as a way of reiterating the role of class determination as opposed to ‘race’, or the use of an economistic version of Marxism to analyse the position of black workers in Britain (Gilroy 1982). In addition, it has been argued that the emphasis that Miles and Phizacklea put on ‘class’ as opposed to ‘race’ serves to underplay the role that black struggles play in unifying people who ostensibly occupy different class positions (Parmar 1982). In rejecting these criticisms Miles has recently attempted to clarify the starting point of his work, and its relationship to the work of CCCS and Gabriel and Ben-Tovim (Miles 1984a). Rejecting the view that his work, along with that of Annie Phizacklea, asserts the primacy of class over ‘race’, he goes on to argue that his model is grounded in the notion that internal and external class relations are shaped by a complex totality of economic, political and ideological processes. As regards the role of racism in this complex totality he develops a definition of racialisation which differentiates between the economic and the political/ideological determinants. Miles explains:

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redefinition of racialisation

The ‘race’/class dichotomy is a false construction. Alternatively, I suggest that the reproduction of class relations involves the determination of internal and external class boundaries by economic, political and ideological processes. One of the central political and ideological processes in contemporary capitalist societies is the process of racialisation... but this cannot, in itself, over-ride the effects of the relations of production. Hence, the totality of ‘black’ people in Britain cannot be adequately analysed as a ‘race’ outside or in opposition to class relations. Rather, the process by which they are racialised, and react to that racialisation (both of which are political and ideological processes), always occurs in a particular historical and structural context, one in which the social relations of production provide the necessary and initial framework within which racism has its effects. The outcome may be the formation of racialised class fractions. (Miles 1984a, p. 233)

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‘silence on production relations’

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What is important about this redefinition is that it (1) locates racism as a process of ideological construction, and (2) prioritises the ‘effects’ of the relations of production. The substantial difference between the migrant labour model and the two previous models lies precisely in the emphasis it places on the ways in which migrant labour is included or excluded in terms of the relations of production. In the later works associated with this approach the model of ‘racialisation’ gains an added dimension through comparative references to the experience of migrant labour in other advanced capitalist societies. This is seen as providing added proof as to the limited nature of the race relations approach (Phizacklea 1984). Another area in which Miles and Phizacklea have shown a growing interest is the role of political discourse and ideologies, particularly in relation to the construction of ‘immigration’ and ‘race relations’ as a political problem (Miles and Phizacklea 1984). Miles’s critique of the approach encapsulated in The Empire Strikes Back is a succinct statement of this difference of approach. Distinguishing between the liberal and the radical sociology of ‘race’ relations, he identifies the work of John Rex as representing the former and the work of CCCS (1982) as representing the latter. He does so on the ground that both liberal and radical sociologists of ‘race’ share the same terrain, i.e. they both hold that ‘race’ is a real political phenomenon with its own effects and determinate relationships, but they are distinguished by the latter’s attachment to Marxism (Miles 1984a, p. 218). As a starting point, therefore, Miles argues that while all variants of the sociology of ‘race’ accept the equivalence of class and ‘race’ as analytic concepts, the Marxist position should be that production relations provide the historical and structural context within which racialisation occurs. Although he accepts that in some respects the CCCS authors question the validity of ‘race’ as an analytic concept, he makes the point that this critique is undermined by their emphasis on the importance of cultural as opposed to production relations. It is this ‘silence on production relations’ that leads the CCCS authors, according to Miles, to ignore the material and political basis of racism within the working class (Miles 1984a, pp. 228-30). Both of these issues are of some significance, since they highlight a point often repeated by Miles and Phizacklea in their empirical research, namely that blacks are not a ‘race’ apart which has to be related to class but ‘persons whose forms of political struggle can be understood in terms of racialisation within a particular set of production (class) relations’ (Miles 1984a, p. 230). At any particular time racism can have an autonomous impact, but its effects will be limited by the wider sets of capitalist social relations.

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The migrant labour model diverges drastically from the work of Gabriel and Ben-Tovim, although perhaps less so from the work of Hall or the authors of The Empire Strikes Back. Although it is clearly arguing against a simple reductionism, to the economic or other levels, it also consciously avoids the ‘silence on production relations’ which it sees as characteristic of the CCCS school. What is at issue in the migrant labour model is not ‘race’ as such but the racialisation of a specific migrant population in the historical context of post-1945 Britain.

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4. A critique and an alternative framework As argued above, the basic problem confronting any Marxist (and perhaps non-Marxist) account of the complex relations between ‘race’, class and the state is to be found in the very nature of ‘racism’ in contemporary capitalist societies. From the brief survey of the competing approaches to this question in neo-Marxist discourse it should be clear that there are at least two problems which seem to defy resolution. First, the question of the ‘relative autonomy’ or ‘autonomy’ of racial and ethnic categorisations from economic and class determination. Second, the role of the state and the political institutions of capital societies in the reproduction of racism, including the complex role of state intervention in many countries to control immigration, to manage ‘race relations’ and, more broadly, to ‘integrate’ racial and ethnic groupings into the ‘wider society’. Finally, it must be remembered that few Marxist writers have ventured beyond theoretical and macro-level analysis, resulting in a mode of analysis that points to contradictions and struggle but says little about the concrete historical and contemporary experience of racism at the level of everyday life and human agency.11 This has meant a notable failure to push Marxist analysis beyond the theoretical understanding of racism towards the practical understanding of how to overcome it, a point noted elsewhere in this volume of Ben-Tovim and his co-authors. Before venturing into a discussion of these implications, however, I want to reiterate that it is far too simplistic to see Marxism as essentially a determinist theory of social development, whether from an economic or a class perspective. Given the wide currency which is still given to such a view of Marxism within the race relations literature (see e.g. Jeffcoate 1984), and the tendency to search for an essentialist theory of racism in some Marxist writings, it may be as well to note that numerous schools of thought within Marxism have been established precisely in opposition to a determinist interpreta-

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tion of Marxist theory. Many of the most challenging Marxist studies of the state, ideology, social class and specific historical events over the last two decades have attempted to develop an analytic framework and empirical analyses which question deterministic models of politics and society (Wright 1980, Anderson 1983, Jessop 1982, 1983). Moreover, there is by now a sizeable body of empirical and historical studies which have relied on Marxist analytic concepts in order to analyse specific aspects of advanced industrial societies (Anderson 1983, Burawoy and Skocpol 1983). Taken together these two bodies of literature bear ample witness to the vitality and complexity of neoMarxist theory and to the futility of trying to construct an analytic framework of racism which is acceptable to all Marxists. What follows therefore are some suggestions which are meant to draw together strands of argument which were developed in the previous sections and to open up questions for debate. Now, if the arguments developed above are accepted, one must ask what kind of theory of racism is possible within a Marxist framework if each kind of racism has to be analysed in relation to its historical and socio-political context. Bearing in mind the critical observations about the three analytic models discussed above, I want to draw briefly on a point first made by Stuart Hall and his colleagues and recently taken up by a number of other authors, namely that in post-1945 Britain: Race is intrinsic to the manner in which the black labouring classes are complexly constituted... Race enters into the way black labour, male and female, is distributed as economic agents on the level of economic practice – and the class struggles which result from it into the way the fractions of the black labouring class are constituted as a set of political forces in the ‘theatre of politics’ – and the political struggle which results; and in the manner in which the class is articulated as the collective and individual ‘subjects’ of emergent ideologies and forms of consciousness – and the struggle over ideology, culture and consciousness which results. This gives the matter of race and racism a theoretical as well as a practical centrality to all the relations and practices which affect black labour. The constitution of this class fraction as a class, and the class relations which inscribe it, function as race relations. The two are inseparable. Race is the modality in which class is lived. It is also the medium in which class relations are experienced. (Hall et al. 1978, p. 394, emphasis added)

This reconceptualisation of the class-‘race’ dialectic is certainly awkward, and represents a programmatic statement rather than a fully

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worked-out framework of analysis. But it has the merit of focusing on racism as a specific social relation and on the need to analyse the historical conditions which make distinctions based on ‘race’ and ethnic origins an important issue in a specific society. In addition it serves to highlight the weakness of the accusation that Marxist accounts of the ‘race’-class dialectic are necessarily deterministic. There is, however, a degree of obfuscation in the argument that ‘race’ and class relations are inseparable, since this tells us little about the specificity of either, or of the historical processes which produce this complex structure in dominance.12 In the end the approach suggested by Hall, and by subsequent CCCS work, does little to show the specificity of racism, or to analyse the ‘work’ which racism accomplishes (Hall et al. 1978, p. 338). It merely suggests ways of reworking the categories of Marxist analysis in such a way as to account for the complex reality of racial categorisation in contemporary capitalism, and it does not tackle thorny problems in the definition of ‘relative autonomy’. It has thus been criticised for being too abstract and ahistorical in its analysis of the role of black labour in Britain and of migrant labour more generally. In considering this problem the work of Gabriel and Ben-Tovim suggests the most straightforward resolution. Arguing that the choice between ‘determinism’ and relative autonomy is a false one, they go on to reject the whole idea of a ‘society structured in dominance’ because they see it as introducing a base/superstructure model by the back door. By implication they argue that the central question is not the relationship between racism and the wider social totality but the conceptualisation of racism as the object of struggle in historically defined conditions (Ben-Tovim et al., this volume). Another resolution is suggested by the work of Miles and Phizacklea. They reject the problematic of ‘race in itself’ and concentrate their analysis on the development and reproduction of racism as an ideology based on specific political, economic and ideological relations (Miles and Phizacklea 1984, Phizacklea 1984). In essence this second approach sees attempts to analyse the ‘interrelationship between race and class’ as based on the false premise that these two categories have the same analytical significance, while in fact racism is but one of the means which transform the positions occupied by class fractions in capitalist societies (Miles 1984a, pp. 228-9). The work of the autonomy and migrant labour schools, like that of CCCS and Sivanandan, does indeed raise the questions which remain unclear in much of the Marxist discussion of ‘race’ and class. But they all do so within fairly limited parameters, and they have by no means exhausted the potential for a more rigorous formulation

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historically defined conditions

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three propositions

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of the theoretical problems confronting a Marxist analysis of racism. What follows are some tentative suggestions about how to build upon and move beyond the parameters of recent debates. It is not my intention to develop a fully fledged alternative framework for dealing with the issues raised in the previous discussion. Rather, the limited objective here is to draw out some of the implications of the criticisms made above for a critical analysis of the dialectic of ‘race’, class and state. I want to concentrate, particularly, on the problems which arise in trying to utilise a Marxist analytic framework for explaining racism, by outlining a conceptual model which holds that: (a) there is no problem of ‘race relations’ which can be thought of separately from the structural (economic, political and ideological) features of capitalist society; (b) there can be no general Marxist theory of racism, since each historical situation needs to be analysed in its own specificity; and (c) ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ divisions cannot be reduced to or seen as completely determined by the structural contradictions of capitalist societies. In broad outline these three propositions are meant to establish the interconnectedness of racism with wider social relations, while allowing for a degree of autonomy and discontinuity. This in itself does not take us very far in establishing the actual nature of discontinuities in an empirical sense, and indeed this is perhaps impossible without comparative and national studies of different kinds of racism. But it seems to me to be important that the three propositions remain interlinked, because short of this it is only possible to achieve a one-dimensional analysis of racism and not the dialectical and dynamic approach which Bonacich (1980) rightly identifies as the basic feature of Marxist approaches to ‘race’. Nevertheless, it should be clear from the above discussion that all three propositions are essentially contested among Marxists. While propositions (b) and (c) can be said to have a wide currency in one form or another, there is much dispute about (a), whether at a macrolevel or through specific debates about the relationship of ‘race’ and class. Gabriel and Ben-Tovim would dispute the relevance of point (a) in relation to a concrete analysis of racist ideologies. The problem remains, however, that economic and social conditions do play a role in structuring racism as an ideology and as a set of practices in specific institutions. If this is accepted, and to some extent even Gabriel and Ben-Tovim accept that there are limits on the effectiveness of struggles against racism, then the question arises of how one conceptualises the relationship between ideologies and social structures. Is it simply a question of an eclectic combination of autonomous levels in a specific situation? Or do economic, political and ideological

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relations exercise some determining influence on the expression of racist ideologies? The fundamental problem with abandoning the relative autonomy model is that of avoiding the trap of a simple pluralism, which sees ‘race’ and class relationships as completely separate. This is why it seems to me that it is important to insist on the complexity of ‘determination in the last instance’, while accepting that there is some form of determination of racism by other social relations. For example, within the context of economic decline and political crisis-management during the post-war period, can one really talk of the complete autonomy of racism? Or can one separate out the political meanings which are attached to ‘race’ today from the actions of successive governments in defining and redefining the immigration/‘race’ issue during the last four decades? Or can one understand the long-term patterns of inclusion and exclusion of black workers in the labour market without an analysis of the restructuring of British industry during this period? For these reasons alone there are grounds for questioning whether a pluralistic version of Marxism is any more adequate in analysing the contradictions of racial structuration than pluralistic theories have been in their analysis of capitalist societies (Meiksins Wood 1983, Connolly 1981). Additionally, however, there seems to be little possibility that the autonomy model can capture the complexity of power relations or adequately analyse the historical context in which racism has become entrenched, in different societies and at different times, at all levels of the social formation. In this sense I am less worried about the distance Gabriel and Ben-Tovim have travelled from classical Marxism than about the fact that their model does not seem to be able to analyse the development of racism except through the ever-present concept of ‘struggle’, which is not located in any social context. Perhaps one way of dealing with the issue of determinism may be through a strict application of proposition (b), namely that there can be no general theory of racism. It is precisely on this point that there hinges the possibility of further advance in Marxist theory, since it focuses attention on the contexts in which racist ideologies develop and are transformed, or on what Gilroy has called ‘the construction, mobilisation, and pertinence of different forms of racist ideology and structuration in specific historical circumstances’ (Gilroy 1982, p. 281). But the application of this position has led to the emergence of more problems, since few Marxists have actually analysed processes of racial structuration at the level of actual societies. The example of South Africa is one which has attracted most attention (Wolpe 1980,

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Burawoy 1981), along with some aspects of racism in contemporary Britain. This had led to a tendency to produce more refined concepts without approaching the more thorny questions relating to their applicability to actual concrete situations (Rex 1981). The unsettling nature of the encounter between contemporary Marxism and ‘race’ is far from reaching a conclusion. This is reflected in the numerous either/or kind of formulations which have been summarised and criticised above; for example do we talk of ‘race’ or class, ‘race’ or racism, autonomy or relative autonomy, ‘race’ or ‘migrant labour’? This type of debate is prominent in the early stages of theoretical discussion, when there is uncertainty about the exact nature of differences and agreements across the main contestants. The further development of debate, however, would require greater specification of the social relations of racism in specific societies, and its interconnections with class and non-class aspects of social reality (Resnick and Wolff, 1982). Once the question is defined in this way it also becomes clear that, although it is important in a specifically Marxist framework to establish some degree of determination, Marxian theory is also radically anti-determinist. It needs to be said that there are numerous aspects of recent debates which have not been fully covered in the above discussion. All three theoretical models, for example, are closely linked to differing assessments of the role of the state, of politics and of the possibility of anti-racist struggles. The role of autonomous black political struggles in relation to class-based political action remains a central area of dispute, as does the issue of the role of state intervention in the area of ‘race relations’. Many of these issues are also the object of lively discussion outside of Marxism (Rex 1981). These are questions, however, which need to be addressed separately, since they relate to more specific assessments of the political economy of contemporary Britain.

5. Conclusion This paper has tried to locate the position of ‘race’ in Marxist discourse and to assess the adequacy of the various theoretical approaches to its study in capitalist societies. While much of the recent literature written from the various perspectives analysed above hardly merits the designation of a ‘Marxist theory of race and ethnic relations,’ it clearly represents a large and growing body of work. I have tried to argue that Marxist theories of ‘race’ are heterogeneous in approach, though it can be argued that they are unified through a common

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concern with (a) the material and ideological basis of racism and racial oppression, however it may be defined, and (b) the role that racism plays in structuring the entire social, political and economic structures of societies. In other words, the basic level of agreement between the various Marxist approaches is that they accept that there is no race relations problem as such, that there is no problem of racism which can be thought of as separate from the structural features of capitalist society. Equally important, however, are the differences in approach which have become evident over the last decade within the broad spectrum of Marxist writings on racism. It is in this context that we can best appreciate the studies discussed above. Whatever their theoretical deficiencies and analytic weaknesses, the overall effect of Marxist contributions in this area has been to redefine the problem of ‘race’ in capitalist society in a way that makes theoretical and political debate more open and challenging. They have focused attention on the history and contemporary reality of racism in capitalist society, and its complex economic, political and ideological preconditions. By questioning the adequacy of both traditional Marxist and nonMarxist treatments of racism, and by emphasising the need for linking theoretical analysis to anti-racist politics, these studies have in their different ways helped reinstate the idea that racism is no mere epiphenomenon but a social construct resulting from the complex social relationships and economic and political structures of capitalist societies (Hall et al. 1980, Freedman 1983-4, Miles 1984a). But the interest of these studies is not restricted to the field of Marxist theory and politics. For the problems with which they have been grappling occur in similar forms in non-Marxist social and political theory. For although the basic starting point of Marxist approaches to this question may be said to differ markedly from the various non-Marxist approaches, there can be little doubt that many of the substantive analytical problems are actually quite similar. This is not to say that the specific theoretical and analytical divergences between the two sets of approaches are not important, for they clearly are. What is at issue, however, is the adequacy of the explanations they offer about the role of racism in contemporary capitalist societies, the role of the state in reproducing or countering racist practices, and the adequacy of the political conclusions they draw about how to overcome racism. Because the Marxist approaches have focused on the social relations that produce and reproduce racism, they have touched upon issues which are of concern to non-Marxist theorists, namely the origins of racist ideologies and institutions and the role of political power relations. In so doing, recent Marxist analyses may

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well open up possibilities for broadening out the debates about ‘race’, class and the state in potentially fruitful directions. Perhaps in the long run this will be seen as one of the main achievements of recent Marxist debates on racism. The kinds of question which they raise about theory and anti-racist politics open up the possibility for reflective discussions of the role of racism in contemporary societies and the strategies for overcoming it. The theoretical and political selfconsciousness which the approaches discussed above show are a fundamental challenge to both traditional Marxism and rival problematics within the social sciences, and one which deserves to be taken up across a variety of disciplines. In addition, however, they have provided an extra impetus to attempts to link academic research to questions of practice, particularly in relation to political struggles against racism. In so doing they have posed questions beyond the limits of traditional Marxist class analysis and have pointed to the need for a deeper analysis of non-class forms of domination. If this brief sketch of the content of recent Marxist debates on ‘race’, class and the state is accurate, there are many questions about the specificity of racism which have been inadequately theorised. But recent debates have at least opened up the possibility of a more dynamic and accessible Marxist contribution to the analysis of racism. Whether this possibility is realised depends on the success of attempts to broaden the horizons of current Marxian conceptions of the dynamics of advanced capitalism. Along with gender, racism remains one of the key axes on which this reconceptualisation has to take place, both at the level of theory and at that of practice.

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Notes 1 Apart from the work of Parkin, which is discussed below, see Forsythe 1979, Stone 1977, Bonacich 1980, Brotz 1983, Banton 1983. 2 It is not possible to discuss these issues specifically in the context of this paper, but valuable and provocative overviews of all of them can be found in Wright 1980, Sargent 1981, Resnick and Wolff 1982 and Cottrell 1984. 3 The dialectic of ‘agency’ and structure in Marxist thinking is usefully discussed in Gintis and Bowles (1981), where it is argued that there are usually two opposing tendencies in Marxist writing, one based on a commitment to structural determination and another committed to a notion of practice. They themselves suggest a resolution in terms of a unified conception of structure and practice. 4 A useful and challenging discussion of the political context of their analysis can be found in Jessop 1982. But see also Meiksins Wood 1983. 5 This threefold classification is imposed and reflects an assessment of the main tendency in each body of work. There are no doubt other models which

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8 9

10 11

12

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can be usefully discussed, or other points on which these three approaches could be sub-divided. Nevertheless for the purposes of this presentation this classification seemed most appropriate. See also Bonacich 1980, G. Morgan 1981 and Omi and Winant 1983. A somewhat broader overview of the Centre’s work on this can be found in Freedman 1983-4. On the work of the Centre more generally see the edited volume, Culture, Media and Language, by Hall et al. 1980, and Johnson 1983. The concern with racism can be traced back further in terms of Hall’s own work, but the impact of ‘race’ on the Centre’s project dates from this period and therefore predates Hall’s more theoretical studies of racism and social relations. A fuller discussion of this point can be found in Solomos et al. 1982. Throughout this paper I refer to the work of Gabriel and Ben-Tovim, though in fact much of their work has been carried out with a number of other researchers associated with their work in Wolverhampton and Liverpool. On the theoretical origins of the criticisms which this model develops in relation to relative autonomy see Cutler et al. 1977-8, Hindess 1984, and more generally the work associated with Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst. In a recent paper Phizacklea argues that there are links between this position and the broader tradition of the sociology of migration which has developed in both Europe and the USA (Phizacklea 1984). The relative absence of historical awareness and specificity from much of the Marxist debate on racism has been noted, from rather different angles, by Rex 1981, Bonacich 1981a and 1981b, Miles 1982, Robinson 1983, and Brittan and Maynard 1984. What is surprising, however, is that despite this awareness few attempts have been made to redress the balance and develop historically based analyses of racist ideologies and practices. This is a problem discussed from a different perspective by G. Morgan 1981 and Green 1979. For an interesting American perspective see Omi and Winant 1983.

For references please consult the bibliography of the book in which this article was originally published. (see List of sources, page 609)

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Racism, migration and the state in Western Europe: a case for comparative analysis* Frank Bovenkerk, Robert Miles and Gilles Verbunt

In the 1980s, the criminologist Frank Bovenkerk and the sociologists Robert Miles and Gilles Verbunt embarked on an ambitious project. They sought to compare post-war migration to Western Europe and the political and ideological responses that this migration elicited. The project was undertaken by developing a theoretical framework that was broad enough to encompass the historical specificity of – and between – particular cases, while still permitting a general explanation that was sensitive to the specificity and variation. Bovenkerk, Miles and Verbunt’s framework revolves around the formation of the nation state and highlights the state’s role in the reproduction of the nation as imagined community. These processes, they suggest, are embedded in a more universal process of the regulation of scarcity. Critical here are the inclusion and exclusion of people from the hierarchy of political, economic and ideological positions in the nationstate.

Introduction Given the still vivid memory of the holocaust, and following a long period of affluence and relative social order after the Second World War, it was widely believed within Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s that racism, and related ideologies, had been permanently eliminated. But to the surprise of many, the ‘race’ myth (in old or new forms) has gained renewed support. It is being suggested once more that the origin of long-standing and emergent economic and cultural problems lies in the presence of groups who do not ‘belong’ to the nation-state by virtue of biological, social and/or cultural characteristics that they are thought to possess inherently. Although the complex of ideas is spread more widely, they have found formal political expression in all countries of Western Europe in different ways and at different times.

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the ‘race’ myth

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Taking the example of the far-right political agitation and the resurgence of neo-fascist groups, these were first evident in Britain and Switzerland (National Front, the Schwarzenbach referendum) in the 1960s, other countries such as Holland and France (Centrumpartij, Front National) followed in the 1970s, and last have been Belgium and the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s (Vlaams Blok, Republikaner). Immigrants, or more accurately, certain categories of immigrants, have become the main targets of the hostility either generated or fostered by this agitation and these political organisations. Our primary interest in this paper is with the interrelationship between the common appearance of this hostility and agitation throughout Western Europe and the differentiation in the mode and timing of expression in the constituent countries. Further, it provides an outline agenda for research.

Common themes, dissimilar expressions

a variety of anti-immigrant sentiments

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There are remarkable similarities in the manifestation of hostility to certain migrant groups in the various countries of Western Europe. There are demands to stop or ‘control’ immigration; a movement to send migrants back (‘to assist in their repatriation’); a demand for the withdrawal of political and social rights; a quest for repressive measures to curb ‘ethnic’ and ‘racial’ crime, and so on. At the same time, there are considerable differences between these countries with respect to the content, timing and progress of various forms of anti-immigrant sentiment. For example, in Britain, its surface content seems to be dominated by a discourse on ‘race’ as a biological entity, by conceptions of unassimilability on the grounds of cultural or national origin as in Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Federal Republic of Germany, and on perceptions of social undesirability as in the Netherlands. However, a more detailed analysis of the ideological content of this agitation is necessary, and may reveal a more deep-seated arrangement of similar themes and content, even if the specific interrelationship varies from country to country. Concerning timing, political opposition to certain categories of migrant began earlier in Britain where serious political consideration was given (although in secret) to stopping ‘coloured’ immigration (but not immigration from, for example, the Republic of Ireland) as soon as it began in the late 1940s. Controls were eventually introduced in 1962. Politicians justified their decisions on the grounds that they would improve ‘race relations’ (e.g. Joshi and Carter 1984;

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MacDonald 1987). The first political concerns in France were expressed publicly in the late 1960s, but the debate on immigration control and, more generally, the politicisation of the migrant presence, did not begin until the early 1970s (Freeman 1979; Verbunt 1985). In the Netherlands, following the expression of public and political concern over political terrorism during the mid-1970s by a small Moluccan group, the introduction of an extensive social policy programme for ‘minorities’ was legitimated by an accompanying decision to seriously curtail further immigration in the early 1980s (Groenendijk 1988). There are also differences in the progress of increasing electoral support for right-wing and neo-fascist political parties. Racist voting recently increased significantly in the Federal Republic of Germany and in Belgium, but seems to have declined or stabilised so far in England and France following its growth in the 1970s and early 1980s respectively (e.g. Fielding 1981; Ogden 1987). It has reemerged in the late 1980s, after apparent dormancy, in Switzerland and the Netherlands (e.g. Donselaar and Praag 1983). Also marked is the difference in the penetration of political racism into the formal political system and, especially significant is the variety of ways in which the major established and governing political parties have reacted, ranging from rejection to the incorporation of anti-immigrant themes in their agitation and propaganda. The generality of the phenomenon suggests common causes and we believe that, in so far as there are, they are to be found in important changes within the capitalist mode of production and in political strategies to respond to and reverse the economic crises of the early 1970s. But the extent of diversity is equally impressive: the specific relationship between economic, political and ideological dynamics clearly varies from one country to another. It follows that arguments which advance a simple, linear determination in which racism or other forms of anti-immigrant sentiment are explained as a functional product of a particular economic development such as the economic crisis (Castles and Kosack 1973) have, at best, only a limited utility. Because there is considerable variation in the nature, extent and pace of the politicisation of the migrant presence, an explanation must also be historically specific if one wishes to grasp both the complex whole and the nature of the reaction in each country. This paper constitutes a first, preliminary step in effecting this task. We begin to construct a theoretical framework on the foundation of a set of assumptions which are transhistorical, but in order to offer explanations which take account of historical specificity. The Marxist tradition, characterised by historical materialism, has been

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an important source of inspiration for this perspective. For example, Marx argued concerning production: However, all epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition. Still this general category, this common element sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times over and splits into different determinations. Some determinations belong to all epochs, others only to a few. (Marx 1973: 85)

specificity

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Thus, a central analytical assumption is that certain relations are found in all social formations, but they always exist only in specific, historically constituted forms, and within that specificity lies differentiation and variability which also requires explanation. More recently, Sayer has sought to retrieve and highlight the historical dimension of Marx’s theory in the context of the influence of structuralism during the 1960s and 1970s (Sayer 1983, 1987). In the light of this, we consider it to be necessary to formulate a theoretical framework which identifies the relevant historical dynamics and processes both generally and in each specific instance. Hence, the guiding principle is the dialectic between historical generality and specificity. Thus, it is only by recognising the generality of certain processes which characterise the historical development of the capitalist mode of production (e.g. capital accumulation, nation-state formation and reproduction, labour shortage, migration etc.) alongside the equally important search for the historically specific forms that these take that a full explanation can be found. For example, the expression of anti-immigrant feeling is a generality, but it takes a particular form in each country. For instance, the degree to which these expressions are ‘racialised’, i.e. defined in terms of a discourse of ‘race’, may vary. By following this dialectical method, we seek to avoid not only the rather futile debate about whether there is more racism in one country compared with another, but also the conclusion that because there is racism and economic crisis in each country there is little or nothing more that requires explanation. For reasons given in the following section, we shall concentrate our analysis on what we believe to be the all-important, or even decisive, influence of the state. It is our aim to explain the general character of these phenomena, and their specific manifestations and development. The methodological instrument is comparative analysis

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and, because our subject is considerably complex, we wish to hold constant as many potential explanada as possible (compare with Przeworski and Teune’s ‘most similar systems approach’, 1970) in order to maximise the theoretical scope of the analysis. However, it would be presumptuous to announce that we are the first to use comparative analysis. Elsewhere (Bovenkerk, Miles and Verbunt 1990) we have reviewed critically the major comparative works on migration and racism in Europe that focus on the role of the state. The specific, empirical object of analysis is state responses to migration, and to the ideological and political reaction to migration, in three countries in Western Europe since 1945: Britain, France and the Netherlands. These three countries have been chosen because they were all prominent participants in the historical emergence of capitalism in Europe, a process that included the creation of nationstates as political units and of colonial empires. They all remain amongst the group of most ‘advanced’ capitalist societies, sharing a mode of production which is now characterised by an interdependence of capital accumulation and rapid technological change, a ‘welfare state’ and a form of representative government based upon universal suffrage. These three countries are to be distinguished from other West European countries, most notably in this context by their colonial histories which are evident in the contemporary period in the form of the settlement of colonial migrants (although they share the experience of other migration movements). In the light of historical and cultural explanations for racism, which place particular explanatory significance upon the colonial enterprise and experience, the relevance of this factor is self-evident. Furthermore, since 1945, all three countries have witnessed four analytically distinct (though, logically not mutually exclusive) migration movements that have been the object of different forms of state regulation: (1) of owners of wealth, along with managerial and technical staff of international companies; (2) of (industrial) workers; (3) of colonial subjects; and (4) of refugees. In all three countries, the combined numbers of resulting settlers are very small, being around 5 to 7 per cent of the total population.

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state responses

The significance of the state Against the background of (a) changes in production relations and in the political power structure on a world scale that has led inter alia to decolonisation and (b) the crisis of accumulation that developed from the end of the 1960s and that fundamentally restructured both

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migration and capital flows, our interest lies in analysing the interrelationship between two political and ideological processes. These are, first, the manner in which processes of migration and consequent settlement of a significant proportion of migrants within Western Europe have been structured by direct and active state intervention. Second, we examine the extent to which the nature and content of the political and ideological reaction to migration and settlement has also been shaped by state involvement. It should be emphasised that neither the process of migration, nor theories of migration, are the object of our study here. We focus on state reactions to migration and, in terms of methodology, the ‘stimulus’ to state intervention is considered to be sufficiently similar to be conceived of as constant. This procedure is warranted on the level of abstraction that we have identified. Thus, although owners of capital and company management may originate from quite different countries (United States of America, Canada, Japan etc.), they belong to the same ‘class of migration’ by virtue of their function in the spatial restructuring of production relations. For example, colonial migrants to Britain originate mainly from the British Caribbean, the Indian sub-continent and East African countries; those who came to the Netherlands left Indonesia and the Dutch Caribbean; French colonial immigrants originated from North Africa and the French Caribbean. Although their migration histories may differ, all these groups took part in a migration movement that has been closely linked to the decolonisation process and that has depended upon special political links with the ‘mother country’. Those who have come as migrant labourers proper have responded to labour shortages that have been produced by a certain state in the post-war accumulation process. They may come from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Italy etc., but they also belong to a same ‘migration class’ of workers. Finally, political refugees who have gained access in small numbers in the three countries under study tend to originate from the same background. All three countries have migrants from, for example, Hungary, Vietnam, Chile and Sri Lanka. It should be clear that these four categories need not be mutually exclusive (for instance, both Britain and France have imported migrant labour from their colonies) but they can be analytically separated in so far as they constitute distinct categories to which the state has reacted in all three instances. We use the concept of state to refer to an institutional complex which comprises minimally government, bureaucratic administration, judiciary, police and military forces. These collectively claim and use power to structure a particular ensemble of economic, social and

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political relations within a specified spatial unit and to mediate the impact of exterior forces upon that unit. Historically, within capitalist societies, the state bureaucracy has expanded to include additional apparatuses concerned with the provision of education and medical care, with the redistribution of material resources in the form of welfare and unemployment cash payments, and with the provision of a collective material infrastructure for commodity production and exchange. This definition could be understood as representing the state as a monolithic unity. In fact, state activity and intervention consist of a specific action or a complex of actions on the part of a person or persons within one or more of these institutions. The possibility of contestation both within and between different institutions is assumed rather than a purposive, consistent strategy followed by a complex but cohesive unit. Furthermore, if the state is conceived as, in part, a reflection of the contradictions within the social formation, it follows that state activity can be the outcome of internal struggle and compromise. If we take the function of the state to be to guarantee and safeguard the reproduction of the dominant mode of production, then this role entails the organisation of not only economic but also political and ideological practices, and the regulation of structural and conjunctural contradictions. Moreover, economic relations can never be divorced absolutely from political and ideological relations. For example, the operation of the market has certain political conditions of existence: in so far as the functioning of the market is dependent upon exchange regulated by contracts enforceable by law, and in so far as resistance must be suppressed, then the state (as a political institution) is an essential relation of production, a condition of existence of the market (Corrigan et al. 1980; Rueschemeyer and Evans 1985). Thus, within the capitalist mode of production, the role of the state should not be conceived in a narrow economistic manner but also in terms of the reproduction of certain essential political and ideological conditions and relations. There is an empirical and a theoretical reason for our emphasis on state intervention. The development of capitalism is paralleled historically by an expansion in the size and complexity of the state apparatus, and by an increase in its power to regulate the range and scope of actions of individuals and classes. A large part of our empirical motivation to study state intervention is our contention that its influence on the social, economic and political position of migrants is far greater than has been recognised by scholars who have studied the migration process so far. The same holds true for the develop-

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state power

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immigration controls

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ment of anti-immigrant ideologies and related practices: rather than studying the extent of ‘prejudice’ among (segments of) the indigenous populations or measuring the incidence of discriminatory practices, we seek to show that the way in which the state regulates migration processes, and consequent political and ideological processes, is in the end decisive. Part of the explanation for this belated recognition may be the fact that much research on migration and ‘prejudice’ has been funded by state institutions themselves. Governments that have socially constructed problems of ‘ethnic minority formation’ or ‘racial intolerance’ and that spend money on scientific research to document such phenomena, can hardly be expected to invite scholars to analyse their own preconceptions. This may be more true in some countries (the Netherlands, Sweden, Federal Republic of Germany) than others (France, Britain). This shows that the organisation of scientific research on these matters is an integral part of state activity and it should therefore be part of our comparative research project. Additionally, the ‘welfare state’ constitutes the apex of state power thus far within Western-type democracies. This has given rise to renewed theoretical interest in the role and activities of the state on the part of Marxist and Weberian scholars (e.g. Anderson 1979; Evans et al. 1985) and has led to heated political discussion between social democrats, socialists and neoconservatives about the nature and relevance of state intervention (e.g. Keane 1984, 1988: 1-30). The escalation of intervention to regulate international migration (Plender 1988: 61-93) provides an excellent illustration of increasing state power. Immigration controls are, in historical terms, a very recent phenomenon. Broadly speaking, the era of politically unrestricted migration and entry in Western Europe ends only at the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, although significant state controls were first introduced in Britain in an Aliens Act of 1793 in an attempt to restrict the entry of refugees from the French Revolution, the provisions in the Act were weakened by legislation in 1824 and 1826. Consequently, the nineteenth century is now generally regarded as lacking effective state controls over migration, and restrictive state controls begin with the Aliens Act of 1905 (Plender 1972: 39-50; MacDonald 1987: 7). Concerning the Netherlands, foreigners were freely admitted until the first half of the nineteenth century and a law of 1798 explicitly granted a number of freedoms. The first Aliens Act was enacted in 1849. However, as it was rarely used in practice, it was not until two bills were passed in 1918 and 1920 that an effective system of immigration control was established. It should be noted that

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this legislation was not so much motivated by worries about unrestricted immigration as it was by concern about the revolutionary events throughout Europe in 1848 and the failure of revolutionary movements in Germany and the Netherlands in 1918 (Swart 1978; Lucassen and Penninx 1985). The first measures in France date from 1893 (Withol de Wenden 1988: 24-28). They were intended to register the number of foreigners resident in France, and their places of work and residence, in order to provide protection for native French workers. Controls over entry into France were institutionalised in 1906. It should be noted that, during this period, private companies, especially those involved in mining and metal production, determined and organised immigration rather than the government. Direct state intervention began in 1914, and thereafter immigration was promoted in order to compensate for the loss of the male work force in the First World War. These brief remarks on the history of immigration controls provide a preliminary illustration of the reasons why we have chosen to place so much emphasis upon state intervention. Given that, since the seventeenth century, the world has been increasingly divided spatially into nation-states where, since the nineteenth century, these separate populations have been constructed legally and ideologically by the legal categories of nationality and citizenship (Plender 1988: 4-6, 9), states constitute the institutions which regulate international spatial movements of people. Citizens of other nation-states are prevented, permitted or encouraged to cross national boundaries as a result of decisions by governments exercising political sovereignty within specified territories. Moreover, it is within the jurisdiction of the states that conditions of continued residence (or return) of those who are not citizens are determined. All this highlights the gatekeeper role of the state. This role has become increasingly significant as capitalist expansion has taken as one of its forms the export of industrial capital which has, in turn, intensified the longer-term development of an international labour market. This has been facilitated by technical development, which has helped to create the possibility of fast and efficient long-distance transport, and by the increasing awareness of enormous differences in wealth and compliance with human rights which has motivated people to seek refuge in other lands and continents. Both processes have been overdetermined by the development of worldwide communication systems. Second, the economic and social circumstances of the population living within the boundary of the nation are no less determined by state decisions. Education, housing, welfare and other aspects of re-

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the collective consumption role

the law and order role

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production have become, to varying degrees, state responsibilities, and the government has become one of the largest single employers. Here we refer to the welfare or collective consumption role of the state. Just as people are divided into citizens, noncitizens and other legal categories by decisions of the state functioning as gatekeeper, the collective consumption function also implies the distribution of scarce resources and services, which can also only be effected by establishing criteria of eligibility. These criteria may or may not include some or all of the population of immigrant origin. In this respect, a critical issue arises in circumstances where migrants settle in one nationstate, but retain a legal status as a national or citizen of another. Because migrants are legally aliens in their country of residence, their access to rights and resources is usually restricted in comparison to those allocated to nationals. A third role of the state apparatus is to maintain social order and sustain a democratic legitimation. This constitutes the law and order role of the state. The exercise of this function impinges upon populations of migrant origin in different ways. When immigration is followed by resistance and conflict, either by sections of the indigenous population opposing the migrant presence or by migrants resisting racism and discrimination, state intervention will be required to regulate the ensuing disorder. The nature of this regulation may have enormous consequences for the quality of life of the immigrants (for example, Commission for Racial Equality 1986). To take another striking example of the importance of state intervention, the state has considerable powers to signify certain activities as illegal or to persecute specific criminal offences, that is to criminalise designated activities and groups, in the process of maintaining social order. If such groups happen to be of migrant origin (and they often are), criminalisation may have far-reaching effects on the wider social representation of that group at large (Hall et al. 1978; CCCS 1982).

A theoretical background Against this background, we proceed to sketch a transhistorical theoretical framework which will lead us to a preliminary agenda of comparative research. The general processes will be deducted on the basis of political economy theory and a related conception of the nation-state. The reproduction of all forms of social organisation depends upon, first, production of the means of human existence and, second, the maintenance of mechanisms to regulate (relative and ab-

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solute) scarcity in relation to socially defined human needs, that is, processes of distribution. Relations of production and distribution are therefore essential relations in all modes of production and in all social formations. Whilst we acknowledge that (because there can be no distribution without prior production) production is the superordinate element, ‘the point of departure’ as Marx (1973: 89, also 94) put it, and that ‘production predominates not only over itself ... but over the other moments as well’ (Marx 1973: 99), our problematic here leads us to focus upon the regulation of scarcity and therefore upon processes of distribution by which scarce goods are allocated. This follows from our focus not on the determinants of migration per se, but on state responses to migration, a process that we conceive broadly to encompass various dimensions of inclusion and exclusion relating to the mobility of human beings across national boundaries and their temporary or permanent settlement within nation-states other than that of their birth. The regulation of scarcity implies decisions about who are to receive or share and who are not. This is expressed in the twin concepts of inclusion and exclusion. Hence, effective regulation requires the creation of a hierarchy by which people are organised into distinct collectivities in order to effect the uneven distribution of scarce resources. This requires the interrelated processes of signification and categorisation, whereby certain characteristics are chosen to effect and legitimate a process of differentiation. These characteristics are then utilised to typify individuals and sort them in groups (Miles 1989). This process of allocation includes people in so far as they are placed in privileged positions and in so far as they receive scarce resources; and it excludes them in so far as they are placed in a disadvantaged position and as they are denied resources. The regulation of scarcity is an economic issue in so far as human material needs must be met in order to guarantee social reproduction. But it is not only an economic process. It is a political question in so far as human choices are made as to whom and to what available resources are to be allocated. And it is an ideological question in so far as cultural and biological characteristics (real and imagined), in combination with economic position, are signified and reified as criteria of differentiation in the process of the allocation of resources. Hence, when analysing the capitalist mode of production (or any other), we do not conceive of scarcity exclusively in terms of the distribution of forces of production or concrete commodities: it is a condition that is also evidenced, for example, in the processes by which individuals are distributed to different economic positions, in relation to the acquisition of juridical status and citizenship, and in

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the determination of eligibility for access to state-allocated resources. The concepts of inclusion and exclusion are central to understanding the processes of class formation and reproduction. For example, within the capitalist mode of production, a large proportion of the population are excluded from access to the means of production. Historically, these have been made scarce by the social processes of dispossession and the concentration of ownership in few hands (that is, by historically concrete acts of exclusion). While, abstractly, this is understood to result in the formation of two classes (the bourgeoisie and the proletariat), in reality this dichotomy is better understood as a more complex hierarchy. Thus, there are important gradations within the ranks of those who own and control the means of production (e.g. ‘big’ capital and ‘small’ capital, finance and manufacturing capital), while those who have only their labour power to sell are able to do so with different (socially produced) abilities and skills (e.g. manual as compared with non-manual labour, the possession of trade skills as compared with no formal skills, etc.). There are, in addition, those who are excluded from access to wage labour, and those who utilise their own labour power to exploit the means of production on a small scale (i.e. the petite bourgeoisie). The processes of class formation and reproduction have two main dimensions which are analytically distinct (although in reality closely interrelated), the formation and reproduction of the positions in the structure and the distribution of people to occupy those positions. The distinction is embodied in Marx’s claim that: The individual comes into the world possessing neither capital nor land. Social distribution assigns him at birth to wage labour. But this situation of being assigned is itself a consequence of the existence of capital and land property as independent agents of production. (1973: 96)

The positions in the structure are established by the mode of production (although the mode of production is not a natural given but the result of previous class struggles). The process of ‘social distribution’ is characterised by inclusionary and exclusionary dimensions. For example, with respect to the hierarchy of positions within the proletariat, the outcome of the distribution process depends not only upon which positions are available in what quantity (e.g. determined by the circumstances of the labour market) but also upon individual capacities such as physical strength, linguistic skills and the way in which individuals have been prepared for these positions by, for example, the institutions of the family and the educational system.

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There are, in other words, many dimensions of human differentiation (both real and imagined) which serve as pre-selectors or criteria of pre-emption, or which mediate between human potentials and access to positions and resources. The complex processes of class formation and reproduction within the capitalist mode of production are based on these processes of inclusion and exclusion. And while they do not encompass the totality of inclusionary and exclusionary processes, they do constitute the foundation upon which all others rest. This is because social life is only possible if human material needs are met, and this requires some process of production (of food, shelter etc.): the social relations which are organised in the process of establishing and reproducing a system of production are therefore prior to and so constitutive of (but do not necessarily determine) all other social relations. Furthermore, the additional dimensions and consequences of inclusion and exclusion cannot be detached absolutely from the collectivities of class because those who are their object are not thereby displaced from the occupation of any position relative to the means of production. Nevertheless, there are other dimensions of human differentiation that have been signified in the allocation of people to structural positions relative to production in the context of scarcity. Sexual difference is one and a gendered division of labour (understood in relation to waged labour but also in relation to unpaid domestic labour) is one of its results. Phenotypical characteristics (often signified by the idea of ‘race’ which is a central element in discourse within Europe, North America, Australia and South Africa) are also widely signified to both exclude certain groups of people from access to wage labour positions when these have been scarce, and to include other groups of people when recruiting in situations of labour shortage. This racialisation of the process of class formation gives rise to a racialised labour market (Miles 1989). Other aspects of human differentiation include age, physical capacity, subculture or way of life, religion, and language, all of which are associated with segregation on the labour market. Some of these properties are valued positively, others negatively. What is true for the labour market holds for access to all other scarce resources, including those of a political and ideological character (e.g. citizenship, access to the media, protection against physical attack, the issue of residence permits). The allocation or distribution process comprises the totality of human decisions on access to scarce resources that are based on varying combinations of evaluated properties within a given social context. Within these combinations, in which not all dimensions of evaluation need to be present, some of

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nationalisation

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them override others. A particular distribution process can be characterised by the hierarchy of properties that have been weighted. Class formation (in association with processes of gendering, racialisation and other forms of differentiation and exclusion) within the capitalist mode of production has occurred historically within distinctive spatial and political units that are called nation-states. Within these, certain cultural characteristics (e.g. a specific language, legal system, religion) have been constructed and signified by the dominant class as universal attributes of the ‘nation’. This ideological process implies the establishment of criteria which serve as a further measure of inclusion and exclusion, that is, as a measure of ‘belonging’ to the nation. From the late eighteenth century, these cultural characteristics have been interpreted as given and natural. Moreover, certain biological characteristics have been typified as indicators of the existence of the ‘nation’. Both serve to constitute an imagined community (Anderson 1983), whereby a specific collection of people that normally would not know each other personally nevertheless believe that they share a common identity, and therefore a common heritage and future. Hence, members of all social classes, including the proletariat, within a territorial boundary tend to consider themselves as sharing something essential with each other. This sense of identification has been reinforced by the foundation of forms of political representation, the creation of citizenship and a complex of state institutions, such as schools, that educate all those defined as belonging to the nation. We refer to this as a process of nationalisation in the sense explicated by Nairn (1988: 281). The creation of national identity around specific characteristics serves not only as an inclusionary process within the nation-state. It defines by implication Others inside and outside the nation-state. Thus, the boundaries of the nation-state have been marked not only by the specific form given to state institutions, but also by the signification by the dominant class of cultural symbols which exclude those with a different cultural profile. It follows that competition between each national bourgeoisie was not only economic but also cultural in form for each believed that it was the agent of a distinct and superior civilisation. The formation of nation-states is therefore the consequence of a combination of ideological signification and struggles by culturally specific dominant classes to gain and retain access to scarce resources within a defined space by representing certain characteristics as signifying a collective interest. It follows that the nation-state has a political and ideological reality which is dependent upon an international process of inclusion

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and exclusion. As a result, nationality generally has become a highly significant juridical status and each specific instance has a peculiar quality of scarcity. In a world divided into nation-states, nationality has become a juridical status that most people acquire at birth and that is based on descent (jus sanguinis) and that is linked to residence in that nation-state. Moreover, it is a juridical status which, in association with the notion of citizenship, usually carries with it rights to specific forms of economic and political participation within the nation-state. Its significance, and its scarcity, only become apparent when people cross the boundary of the nation-state and take up residence in another. Such mobility is not automatically followed by the acquisition of a new juridical status. Access to this status is state-regulated (qua gatekeeper) which imposes certain conditions which, in turn, ensure that the quality of scarcity is retained.

A preliminary research agenda So far we have identified four categories of migrants that are present in the three countries studied and we have distinguished three forms of state regulation that impinge upon the management of migration flows. Further, we have argued that mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion should be the central focus in seeking a comparative understanding of state responses to both migration and the political and ideological responses to migration. We are not only or not primarily concerned with actual policy measures and practices, but rather with the ideological constructions that lie behind, or are embedded in, these policies and practices. Our comparative research effort would concentrate on identifying the real or assumed properties of categories of people that are subject to inclusion and exclusion. Through deductive reasoning, we have left the space to study historical specificity. In seeking to study exclusionary and inclusionary processes in three different nation-states, we therefore do not assume a priori that this is effected by the signification of one factor (for example, skin colour) in all three cases. In other words, it may not be racism per se that is the main mechanism to keep people out of, or in an inferior position within, the nation-state. For example, in Britain much of the official and public discourse dealing with and responding to post-1945 migration has been dominated by the notions of ‘race’ and colour. But French discourse on the same matter seems much less concerned with ‘race’ as such, and tends to refer to culture and religion. The discourse in the Netherlands is about eth-

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nic minorities and reflects concerns about social undesirability and therefore we wish to investigate empirically the value of the concept of minorisation (Rath 1988). The degree of exclusion and the mechanisms by which exclusion is effected may not differ a great deal from one country to another, but the discourse does. This reflects separate national traditions and sensitivities and this needs to be clearly grasped conceptually and analytically. Concerning the access of migrants to the three countries, a first question would be: on what conditions have the four categories been admitted by the state? But it is equally important to ascertain who has been denied access. Thereafter, one should investigate the grounds upon which people have been accepted or refused entry? This requires a detailed study of government sources (both public and private) in order to analyse the ideological content and discourse employed in effecting and legitimating differential migration controls. This research is now in progress within our research group. As for the management of the migrants’ presence, a first priority would be to study the meaning and the history of the various words that have been employed to identify ‘these people’, following their permanent settlement in the three countries. A general term for larger categories of migrants is omnipresent in Europe. Instead of differentiating by referring to Pakistani British, Dutch Surinamers or French people of Algerian origin, there is always a generic term: travailleurs immigrés, ethnic minorities, foreign workers, (‘coloured’) immigrants etc. Explaining the origin and meaning of these different terms constitutes a significant task within our problematic. Furthermore, it seems strategic to select a single dimension of legal status which may be considered as an act of inclusion within the nation-state. Hence, that issue would be closely connected to conceptions of citizenship and national belonging. For example, two case studies would be particularly appropriate, one on the debate on citizenship and the other on the debate of voting rights for foreign citizens. Again, the specific measures themselves would be of less interest to us (and not only because they have been listed already, see Brubaker 1989 and Layton-Henry 1989), because we are more interested in the ideological construction of the pluriform reality that is hidden in the discourse. A further central dimension of the state’s role in managing the presence of migrants concerns its reaction to their own political activity. Specifically, it would be strategic to study forms of political action around issues that are signified as potentially challenging or subverting the unity implied of the nation-state as an ‘imagined community’. For example, within all three countries, there is now a sig-

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nificant Muslim presence as a result of post-1945 migration flows, and their faith is considered to be alien to European nation-states wherein the Christian religion continues to be signified as a central dimension of the official national identity. All Muslims demand specific rights (to open mosques, ritual slaughter, segregation in schools etc.) and meet resistance. We might then compare the ways in which the state of our three countries has dealt with Muslim demands. The migrant presence has also become the object of hostile political activity from within the ‘indigenous’ population. Certain forms of such action constitute a challenge to ‘law and order’, to which the state must necessarily respond. For example, in all three countries extreme right-wing and neofascist parties have organised racist campaigns against the migrant presence and have sought to gain electoral support for a range of racist demands, including ‘repatriation’. We might therefore ask how the state has responded to these exclusionary political actions in each of the three countries? Second, and not unrelated to the first instance, certain migrant populations have become the object of violence, which might be considered to be one of the ultimate acts of exclusion. Again, we might consider to what extent the state has formally acknowledged such exclusionary acts by defining it as a ‘law and order’ problem, along with the measures taken to prevent such violence.

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exclusionary acts

Conclusion Within each of the Western European nation-states, it has been publicly recognised to varying degrees that the post-1945 experience of migration has been paralleled by the expression of hostility and resistance which has commonly taken a racist form. Furthermore, social scientists of various disciplinary backgrounds have recognised the importance and value of a comparative analysis of these migrations and their political and ideological consequences, and there is now an escalating literature devoted to such research. Elsewhere, we have critically evaluated an important part of this body of literature, concluding that the comparative method employed in most cases has been significantly flawed (Bovenkerk, Miles and Verbunt 1990). Adequate comparative analysis presumes a conceptual framework which is formulated at a level of generality which encompasses the historical specificity of, and variation between, particular instances, yet which permits a general explanation which is sensitive to that specificity and variation. The general theoretical approach outlined above, and the illustrative research agenda, are offered in the light of this critique and objective.

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• This paper is the momentary outcome of a discussion that has continued for a period of more than three years and that has involved the present authors, a group of young researchers and established scholars in three countries. Its aim is to formulate a design for an ambitious comparative research project based on insights grounded in political economy theory. Whilst bearing sole responsibility for the content of this paper, the authors wish to acknowledge the assistance of Paula Cleary, Moustapha Diop, Han Entzinger, Marjan van Hunnik, Francien Keers, Jan Rath, Marel Rietman, John Schuster and Jeanne Singer-Kerel who have at various stages participated in a series of seminars in Utrecht and Paris at which the arguments set out here were discussed.

References ANDERSON, B. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. ANDERSON, P. 1979. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso. BOVENKERK, F., MILES, R. and VERBUNT, G. Forthcoming 1991. ‘Comparative Studies of Migration and Racism in Western Europe: A Critical Appraisal’. International Migration Review. BRUBAKER, W.R. ed. 1989./mmigralion and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America. Lanham: University Press of America. CASTLES, S. and KOSACK, G. 1973. Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe. London: Oxford University Press. CCCS 1982. The Empire Strikes Back. London: Hutchinson. Commission for Racial Equality 1986. Immigration Control Procedures: Report of a Formal Investigation. London: Commission for Racial Equality. CORRIGAN, P. et al. 1980. ‘The State as a Relation of Production’, in Corrigan, P. (ed.), Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory: Historical Investigations. London: Quartet Books. DONSELAAR, J. and PRAAG, C. 1983. Stemmen op de Centrumpartij: De Opkomst van Antivreemdelingenpartijen in Nederland. Leiden: C.O.M.T. (Rijksuniversiteit Leiden). EVANS, P.B., RUESCHEMEYER, D. and SKOCPOL, T. 1985. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. FIELDING, N. 1981. The National Front. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. FREEMAN, G. 1979. Immigrant Labour and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies: the French and British Experience, 1945-1975. Princeton: Princeton University Press. GROENENDIJK, K. 1988. ‘Migratiebeheersing, controle en discrim-

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inatiebestrijding: de dubbelzinnigheid van het overheidsbeleid’. Migrantenrecht 2. HALL, S. et al. 1978. Policing the Crisis. London: Hutchinson. JOSHI, S. and CARTER, B. 1984. ‘The Role of Labour in the Creation of a Racist Britain’. Race and Class 25 (3). KEANE, J. 1984. Public Life and Late Capitalism: Toward a Socialist Theory of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. KEANE, J. 1988. Democracy and Civil Society: On the Predicaments of European Socialism, the Prospects for Democracy, and the Problem of Controlling Social and Political Power. London: Verso. LAYTON-HENRY, Z. 1989. The Political Rights of Migrant Workers in Western Europe. London: Sage. LUCASSEN, J. and PENNINX, R. 1985. Nieuwkomers: Immigranten en hun nakomelingen in Nederland 1550-1985. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff Informatief. MACDONALD, I. 1987. Immigration Law and Practice. London: Butterworths. MARX, K. 1973. Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin. MILES, R. 1989. Racism. London: Routledge. NAIRN, T. 1988. The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy. London: Radius. OGDEN, P. 1987. ‘Immigration, Cities and the Geography of the National Front in France’, in Glebe, G. and O’Loughlin, J. (eds.), Foreign Minorities in Continental European Cities. Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag. PLENDER, R. 1972. International Migration Law. Leiden: Sijhoff. PLENDER, R. 1988. International Migration Law. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. PRZEWORSKI, A. and TEUNE, H. 1970. The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry. New York: Wiley. RATH, J. 1988. ‘Minorisation in the Netherlands: the Political Participation of Immigrants’. Paper presented to Intercongress Meeting of the Research Committee on Migration of the International Sociological Association, University of Utrecht, 30 March – 1 April. RUESCHEMEYER, D. and EVANS, P.B. 1985. ‘The State and Economic Transformation: Toward an Analysis of the Conditions Underlying Effective Intervention’, in Evans, P.B., Rueschemeyer, D. and Skocpol, T. (eds.), Bringing the State Back in. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SAYER, D. 1983. Marx’s Method: Ideology, Science and Critique in ‘Capital’. Brighton: Harvester Press.

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SAYER, D. 1987. The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. SWART, A.H. 1978. De toelating en uitzetting van vreemdelingen. Deventer: Kluwer. VERBUNT, G. 1985. ‘France’, in Hammar, T. (ed.), European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. WIHTOL DE WENDEN, C. 1988. Les immigrés et la politique. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques.

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Migration, racism and ‘postmodern’ capitalism1 Robert Miles and Victor Satzewich

This article was part of an ongoing debate on the nature of racism. The sociologists Robert Miles and Vic Satzewich positioned themselves against the more vulgar Marxist, functionalist explanations of racism. According to their explanations, racism is not an independent phenomenon, but the product of the divide-and-rule policy of the bourgeoisie and its agent – the state. Miles and Satzewich argued, however, that racism did not originate as a conspiracy by capitalists. The ruling class gained no benefit from conflicts within the working class. Neither the capitalists nor the state had an interest in stirring up working-class racism. According to Miles and Satzewich, the working class was fragmented long before there was any immigration. They also opposed the assumption that the development of racism had been linear, as racism is a far from homogeneous phenomenon.

Introduction In these ‘new times’, it has become de riguer to undertake a re-examination of the theories that Marxists have been using to analyse contemporary capitalism, its ‘laws of motion’ and its future development. Certainly, there has been a major reorganization of the capitalist accumulation process over the past decade or more and that this has had significant implications for, inter alia, international migration flows. The general assumption is that, with the ending of the expansionary boom in the early 1970s, the era of large-scale labour migration from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘centre’ of the world economic system also terminated (e.g. Salt 1987: 241). If this assumption were to be correct, it might be concluded that there is no longer any object for a theory of the interplay between capitalism and migration. But is the assumption correct? There are commonsense and anecdotal reasons to question not only the assumption that labour migra-

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tion has ceased but also the assumption that the only migration flows that occur are composed of persons seeking to sell their labour power for a wage. For example, during the 1980s, the British government has had to respond to the attempt on the part of refugees from Sri Lanka to seek asylum in Britain and with a continuing movement of refugees from Vietnam to Hong Kong, one of Britain’s last remaining colonies. And political events in China in 1989 raised again the question of why it is that UK passport holders in Hong Kong do not have the right to migrate and settle in Britain. To take another recent example, during the 1980s, there have been large-scale movements of population from East Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union into West Germany, movements supported and encouraged by the West German state which simultaneously sought to deny entry to political refugees from Sri Lanka on the grounds that the ‘boat is already too full’. This evidence points not only to the continuing reality of international migration flows as an empirical phenomenon but also to a qualitative theoretical problem. Because these ‘refugee’ migrations do not have their origin, at least not in any direct form, in the capital accumulation process, then they cannot be conceptualized within theories of migration which prioritize that process as the determinant force. There is also academic evidence to consider. The ‘postmodern’ world capitalist system is characterized by the domination of multinational companies and a new international division of labour. And, as theorists of the latter have emphasized (e.g. Fröbel et al. 1980), mass commodity production has not ceased, but rather has to a significant degree been relocated in Export Processing Zones in the ‘peripheries’ of the world economic system. And, as Sassen (1988) has shown, this process of capital export has stimulated a new phase of migration and proletarianization within those peripheries as well as to the United States. This leads us to suggest that the European experience of the nineteenth century has not so much been overtaken by a new epoch but is being extended to spatial locations which previously escaped the interplay of migration and proletarianization (cf. Warren 1980). Indeed, the partial transfer of mass commodity production to these new spatial locations is a crucial precondition for the processes that the postmodernists constantly refer to. For example, new information technologies and the computer age could not exist without the ‘nimble fingers’ of migrant and recently proletarianized ‘Third World’ women assembling micro-processors (Lim 1978, Safa 1981). The ‘brave new world’ of Western Europe is therefore dependent upon the continuation elsewhere of the separation of the direct pro-

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ducer from the means of production and their spatial mobility to find a capitalist wishing to purchase and exploit labour power for a wage. There is also a ‘hidden side’ to these processes. Discussion of the export of capital often takes on a reified character if it focuses only upon the movement of sums of money. As Marx constantly reiterated, the concept of capital refers not so much to a thing but to a social relation (e.g. 1976: 932) between two classes which is mediated by things. Consequently, the export of capital involves not only the movement of money but also the ‘agents’ of capital, understood to refer to both those who own and control capital directly and those who manage in various ways the use of capital. There has been an undue silence about the migration of such people within Marxist and nonMarxist theories of migration, a silence which becomes even more inappropriate in the context of the increasing mobility of capital within the world capitalist system. Hence, the intention of this paper is to offer some critical reflections on the development of a Marxist theory of migration. However, our objective is not to formulate a new ‘postmodern’ theory of migration. Rather, we argue that the apparent difficulties facing political economy explanations of migration when interpreting recent evidence of migration flows arise largely from their inadequacies in explaining migration in pre-‘postmodern’ capitalism.

Marxist theory of migration

Marxism and migration theory The Marxist tradition has made a significant contribution to the debate about the interrelationship between the development of capitalism and migration flows, both within and between nation states, and has provided a foundation for the development of an alternative approach to the dominant position of the sociology of ‘race/ethnic relations’ in Britain (Miles 1982). Central to work within this tradition has been the contribution of Stephen Castles and his various collaborators. Castles and Kosack’s Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (1973) is widely regarded as the classic statement of the Marxist analysis of the interrelationship between migration and capitalism (see also History Task Force 1979). Similarly, while part of the more recent work of Castles, especially Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities (1984), arguably departs from the Marxist approach, this book has already taken its place as an important work within the tradition of political economy. Indeed, there is much that is of continuing value in this work, as we reiterate below. It rejects those theoretical traditions which anal-

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yse migration in terms of individual decision making in the context of a variety of discrete ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors (Jackson 1986: 13-16) in favour of an examination of the significance and dynamics of migration in the material and structural processes of capital accumulation and uneven development. This analysis has therefore become an important corrective to orthodox studies of migration which focus primarily upon individuals who migrate and their ‘problems’ of ‘adaptation, assimilation and integration’ (Bolaria 1984: 219). Nevertheless, aspects of the work of Castles and Kosack have been criticized, although many of these writers remain sympathetic to its broader underlying assumptions. For example, Lever-Tracy (1983) and Miles (1986) have questioned their use of the concept of reserve army of labour to describe the structural position of foreign-born workers within Western Europe; Burawoy (1976) has queried their assumption that migrant labour is ‘cheap labour’ and their instrumentalist view of the state; Böhning (1984) has criticized their tendency to over-generalize and blur important differences in patterns of migration both within and between nation states; and Miles (1982, 1986) and Phizacklea and Miles (1980: 11-12) have questioned their functionalist analysis of the relationship between racism and migration and their conception of the impact of migration on the class structure of Western Europe since 1945 and 1973. In this paper, we draw upon and extend certain of these themes. In order to do so, we summarize briefly the main arguments of Castles and his collaborators. The initial stimulus to migration into post-1945 Western Europe is located in the interrelated processes of capital accumulation and uneven development which create reserve armies of labour within the periphery of the world system. Pressure to emigrate is regarded as an expression of inequality among nation states and between the centre and the periphery of the world capitalist system. The tendency to import labour is regarded as a cyclical expression of the uneven expansion of capital accumulation among economic sectors, among nation states and within the world economy (e.g. Petras 1980). During the early post-war years, the process of capital accumulation resulted in an increase in the demand for unskilled and semiskilled labour. Unskilled and semi-skilled positions were vacated by the indigenous male working class, a proportion of whom found better paying work in more skilled sectors of production. Western European capital responded to this trend by mobilizing internal reserves of labour. These included, amongst others, women who had previously worked solely within the domestic unit and the latent reserves of rural agricultural commodity producers. In most

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cases, however, these internal reserves were exhausted during the early 1950s or soon after, and were insufficient to fill all of the emergent vacancies (Castles et al. 1984: 25; see also Castles 1985: 519). The respective states, and employers within various social formations, responded to the continued demand for unskilled labour, in some cases by implementing new labour saving technologies and in others through the recruitment of foreign-born labour (see also Kindelberger 1967; Sassen-Koob 1978). Two main sources of labour were identified: the colonial and excolonial formations in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and the spatially proximate social formations of the Mediterranean periphery. They suggest that those who migrated to Western Europe were primarily young single males and females who were displaced by the penetration of capitalist relations of production in agricultural sectors of peripheral formations. As such, the majority of post-war migration to Western Europe was made up, according to Castles et al. (1984: 25) of a movement of a latent reserve army of labour which was spatially located in the periphery of the world capitalist system. During the initial phase of mass labour migration, which lasted from around 1950 to 1973, the state is accorded a peripheral, instrumental role in the process of migration. State intervention, in the form of the formulation, articulation and administration of an ‘immigration policy’ was only developed several years after the migratory process began: ‘Government immigration policies have come after the event, to control and direct existing movements rather than to determine them from the outset’ (Castles and Kosack 1973: 26; see also Castles et al. 1984: 6). Thus, before 1973, migration is defined as a relatively spontaneous reaction to labour demand (Castles et al. 1984: 2; Castles and Kosack 1973: 25). But the minimal nature of state intervention which did occur was structured solely by the interests of employers. According to Castles, ‘When recruitment started in the late 1950’s state migration policies were concerned only with short-term fulfillment of capital’s labour requirements’ (1985: 522). The years 1973/74 were a turning point in the history of labour migration to post-war Western Europe. Each Western European state, with the exception of Britain where legislation had been passed in 1962, placed restrictions on the entry of migrants who were seeking work. According to Castles et al (1984: 28-9), this decision was the outcome of a number of conjunctural economic, political and ideological factors. The immediate economic reason for the partial ban on primary labour migration was the ‘oil crisis’ and the accompanying economic recession. However, they suggest (1984: 29; cf. Cohen 1987: 140-3) that the

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political and ideological determinants

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restrictions were also motivated by political and ideological considerations. The repeated renewal of labour contracts and the accompanying process of family reunification, without corresponding increases in state expenditure on services in demand by foreign-born workers and their families, meant increasing ‘immigrant’ competition for education, housing, health and social services with the indigenous population. The competition for scarce resources resulted in increasing conflicts between the foreign-born and indigenous populations, and constituted a threat to the social order of the labour importing nation states. Furthermore, foreign workers were becoming increasingly militant both politically and on the shop-floor. Their presence became defined as a threat to the long term stability of the social order, and limits were placed on the scope for their use as a docile and manipulable labour force (Castles et al. 1984: 30). The restrictions imposed on migration, then, signalled the emergence of a set of qualitatively new political priorities and concerns on the part of the respective states. Whereas prior to 1973, the state and capital both defined foreign-born labour in strictly economic terms, its value lying in its relative ‘cheapness’ and in its contribution to industrial production, after 1973 political and ideological considerations about the future stability of the nation state pushed these strictly economic factors into the background (Castles et al 1984: 2932). The central assertion therefore is that state intervention and the expression of political and ideological concern were evident only after the migration was underway. In the remainder of the paper, we shall argue that this theoretical approach, because of its economism, has been blind to the significance of the political and ideological determinants of migration flows and of the significance of the migration of not only skilled nonmanual labour but also of the owners of capital and their ‘agents’. Moreover, it ignores the considerable evidence of the state’s concern about the political and ideological implications of migration long before the economic crisis of 1973/74. It is ironic that this error in Castle’s work mirrors a feature of a great deal of non-Marxist writing on the history of migration to Britain in so far as it asserts that the period before 1962 was an ‘age of innocence’, a period of laissez-faire, wherein the state played no role in relation to migration flows (Deakin 1970: 47; Carter, Harris and Joshi 1987: 335; Miles and Solomos 1987: 88-9). Consequently, when viewed from the perspective of the late 1980s, what has changed in the period since the late 1940s has been relative rather than absolute in character. That is to say, there is nothing new about refugee migrations or about the migration of the bourgeoisie

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and skilled non-manual labour into European social formations but rather that these migrations have become relatively more significant than in the past. Moreover, there is nothing new about state intervention to control migration flows, only a change in the visibility and/or extent of the state’s intervention.

Post-1945 migration flows During the 1980s, political and public attention has increasingly focused on refugee migrations (for example, the flight of people from Vietnam, Chile, Iran and Sri Lanka) into Western Europe, and increasing academic attention is being devoted to such migrations (e.g. Kay 1987). The state in most Western European countries have been anxious to, at the very least, reduce these migration flows, usually claiming that many of the refugees are bogus because their migration has been motivated by the desire to find paid employment (i.e. that they are economic migrants rather than political refugees) (Cleary 1989). When interpreted in the light of Castles’ theoretical analysis of post-1945 migration, these migrations seem to constitute novel events which cannot be explained easily within the tradition of the political economy of migration because such theories reduce migration (Zolberg 1983a: 4):

refugee migrations

to a unidimensional process of uneven economic exchange between states of origin and destination. As such, all appears to have been said when migration has been identified as another variety of exploitation, a process into which every policy variation is made to fit.

But as a more comprehensive overview of both pre- and post-1945 European migration history reveals (e.g. Zolberg 1983b; Marrus 1985), there is little novelty, certainly not in any absolute sense, in recent refugee migrations. While there are significant problems in defining refugees and refugee migrations (e.g. Zolberg 1983a: 19-22; 1983b 25-7), there is no doubt that they constitute a large proportion of international migration in the twentieth century (Beijer 1969). For example, and considering the British case, refugee migrations have been of considerable numerical and political significance over the past one hundred years, the most prominent being those of Jews from Eastern Europe and, later, from Germany (Miles and Solomos 1987; Holmes 1988). Since 1945, although the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and the 1965 White Paper on Commonwealth Immigration effectively brought to an end what was largely an ec-

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Tripartite Conference in Potsdam

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onomically induced migration from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, this legislation did not prohibit migration flows per se. The most notable, subsequent migrations were those from East Africa in the late 1960s and again in the early 1970s (Bachu 1985), migrations of people who held UK passports but whose right to enter Britain was withdrawn in 1968 in response to the migration from Kenya which began to increase in the second half of 1967. The origin of these migrations lay in colonial history and in postindependence political developments in Kenya and Uganda, developments which led to a large proportion of the population of South Asian origin in both of these countries concluding that they faced an uncertain economic and political future in East Africa in the context of policies of Africanization. In the case of Uganda, there was a formal expulsion of this population. The migration to Britain therefore resulted from a political process in the course of which they were defined, and defined themselves, as not belonging to the post-colonial and newly emergent nation-states of Kenya and Uganda. In a loose sense, therefore, they might all be considered to be politically induced migrants, although the Ugandan Asians were certainly, in a formal sense, political refugees. Without doubt, it is impossible to explain these migrations from East Africa in terms of a response to labour shortages in the British economy (Bachu 1985: 2-3). The apparent novelty of the refugee migrations of the 1980s is further reduced when one considers the immediate post-1945 period of European, and especially West German (Herbert 1986: 179-86), history. In the decade beginning in 1945, approximately 20 million people either fled or were expelled, transferred or exchanged within Europe. Of this massive migration of population, the largest component consisted of around 13 million people of German origin (usually known as volkdeutsche) who were officially returned, or who were expelled or fled to Germany (Schechtman 1962: 363; Marrus 1985: 330). The official transfers of population arose from a decision of the Tripartite Conference in Potsdam in 1945 concerning the population of German origin in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary (Schechtman 1962: 36). In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, there was considerable concern about the economic and political consequences of such a large transfer of population into West Germany in the context of the widespread destruction of the economy and the social infrastructure. However, this proved to be misplaced in the light of the subsequent development of the post-war economy, sustained in part by the import of capital from the United States. In 1946, the index of industrial production in West Germany stood at 34 (1936 =

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100) but it had regained its pre-war level by 1950, and by 1956, it was twice the 1936 level. Gross National Product increased from $23.1 billion in 1950 to $52.6 billion in 1958 and industrial production tripled between 1949 and 1959. Integral to this successful expansion of capitalism was an increase in the labour force from 13.6 million persons in 1949 to 19.6 million in 1959 while unemployment fell from 8.8 per cent of manpower in 1949 to 1 per cent in 1959. A key component of this increased labour force consisted of the migrant population of German origin which was transferred or expelled from Eastern and south-eastern Europe in the course of redrawing the boundaries of nation states and negotiating respective spheres of influence between Western and Eastern political blocs (Schechtman 1962: 315-7; Marrus 1985:330-1). But it was not only the migration of expellees and refugees from Eastern Europe that added to the population and the labour force of West Germany. In addition, in the post-war ‘Cold War’ period, there was a continuing migration of refugees from Eastern Europe, and especially East Germany, into West Germany. This movement of population was composed largely of people who emigrated illegally or in violation of government policy rather than of people formally expelled from the territory in which they were living. After 1948, this refugee migration to the West became increasingly difficult with the formation of Communist governments in Eastern Europe and with the subsequent sealing of the borders, although the peculiar situation of Berlin continued to permit relatively easy access to the West for those who lived in the Eastern sector of the city or who could enter that sector. In 1949, formal procedures for granting political asylum were established in West Germany, permitting a more precise enumeration of the flow of refugees into the country. In 1950, 197,000 people entered West Germany as refugees, the figures for the following three years being 165,000, 182,000 and 331,000 respectively. By 1952, there were nearly 200,000 anti-Communist refugees living in various camps and centres in Berlin and West Germany. This exodus continued for a decade more from 1951, during which time approximately 3.5 million people entered West Germany from East Germany. This migration was finally terminated in 1961 with the building of the Berlin Wall (Marrus 1985: 354-5; Esser and Korte 1985: 169; Bade 1987: 151). A similar relationship between refugee migration and the expansion of the national labour force can be found in the work of the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The IRO was established by the United Nations in December 1946 to organize the repatria-

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tion of the remaining refugees, about a third of whom remained in Displaced Persons camps in Italy, Germany and Austria. About half of those in the camps were of Polish origin, and there were also significant numbers of Balts, Ukranians and Yugoslavs. When the IRO began work in mid-1947, it became responsible for approximately 1.5 million refugees in total, and in the period up to the end of 1951, it resettled 1,039,150 people. More than 75 per cent were resettled in the United States, Australia, Canada and Israel, while European nation states accepted around 170,000 people. Of the latter, 86,000 entered Britain, 38,000 went to France and 22,000 were resettled in Belgium (Marrus 1985: 344-5). A major IRO objective was to link resettlement with post-war economic reconstruction in Europe, and even where resettlement occurred outside Europe, an attempt was made to marry the economic skills and experience of the refugees with the stated economic demands of the receiving countries. Thus, a policy of refugee resettlement became intertwined with a labour migration policy, with the IRO thereby functioning as a form of international labour exchange. This role was further illustrated by the fact that, by mid-1949, the majority of the 175,000 people remaining under the supervision of the IRO were people whose age, health or physical condition made an economically conditioned resettlement elsewhere in the world difficult (Marrus 1985: 345). This same interrelationship was evident in the initiative in 1946 of the British post-war Labour Government to resolve specific labour shortages in key sectors of the economy by the recruitment of refugees from the Displaced Persons camps in Germany and Austria. Between 1947 and 1949, some 91,000 men and women arrived in Britain as European Volunteer Workers and were placed in agriculture, in the mining and textile industries, and in hospital and domestic service, under a set of restrictive conditions which expressed the contradiction between what was in one sense a labour recruitment scheme and, in another, a refugee resettlement programme (Kay and Miles 1988, 1990). Castles and his various collaborators have noted the occurrence of these ‘refugee’ migrations (e.g. 1984: 25), but have not sought to explain them. Indeed, within the context of their theoretical framework, they are difficult to explain because they were not immediately determined by the capital accumulation process. Yet, at least in the case of the immediate post-war refugee migrations, an articulation of political and economic relations determines their occurrence, as Castles acknowledges implicitly when he notes that the German state only initiated a formal ‘guestworker’ recruitment system when the flow of political refugees began to decline.

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But the silence about the migration of refugees within and into Europe is not the only silence within the political economy of migration. It also fails to acknowledge the migration of skilled non-manual labour and of capitalists. Assessing the scale and significance of these migrations within Western Europe since 1945 is difficult because of the limited academic attention devoted to the phenomenon and of the absence of adequate official statistics. Both factors reflect a broader determinant. These migration flows are accepted as part of the normal and necessary working of the capitalist economy and are therefore not considered worthy of identification within the political system as being the source of alleged political and ideological problems for the indigenous population. Because such migrations have not been identified by leading politicians and by sections of the working class as problematic, there is no ‘problem’ to document and, therefore, no need to investigate the occurrence, scale and determinants of such migrations. Throughout Western Europe since 1945, there has been a close relationship between the migration of semi- and unskilled labourers seeking to enter manual wage labour and the movement of indigenous labour into a variety of semi- and highly skilled non-manual jobs, especially in the tertiary or service sector of the economy (Böhning 1984). Thus, this specific migration has served to fill positions in the hierarchy of wage labour vacated by indigenous workers as a result of the availability of better paid jobs, or jobs involving more attractive work and/or conditions. But this form of internal occupational mobility has not been sufficient to ensure that all salaried, non-manual positions in tile economy have been filled by indigenous labour. First, in the age of the transnational company, staff are transferred from one branch to another in a different part of the world as an alternative to the recruitment and employment of indigenous labour, partly in order to create a career structure for non-manual, salaried staff and partly to obviate local labour shortages of highly skilled non-manual labour. Second, there is an international labour market for various forms of highly specialized, skilled non-manual labour. In situations of scarcity, such labour can be highly mobile in response to high salaries offered in different parts of the world, especially where the training of such labour is very expensive and/ or where it is only required for relatively short periods of time (as for example in the case of oil exploration). In these latter circumstances, the recruitment of non-manual workers from outside the nation-state as a form of migrant labour might be chosen as the most suitable solution to the need to recruit skilled non-manual labour.

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multinational firms

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Here, when referring to skilled non-manual, we are concerned with various categories of managerial, technical and professional staff. The significance of the international migration of such staff employed in transnational companies has been discussed by Salt (1983, 1984, 1988) who has shown that companies with branches and subsidiaries in several countries constitute a form of closed labour market within which managerial and technical staff are able to circulate. Thus, while remaining in employment in the same company, they migrate from one country to another for limited periods of time while moving up the career hierarchy. Hence, this international migration of labour is synonymous with the pursuit of selfadvancement within the transnational company. The implication of his argument is that as the number and scale of transnational companies have increased since 1945, then so has the significance of this form of international migration. More specifically, on the basis of the limited date available, Salt ‘has concluded that company managers and various professionals are a major component of the migration between advanced capitalist nation states (1984: 638, 645-6). The migration of managerial. technical and professional staff occurs not only within the advanced capitalist sector of the world economic system, but also between that sector and other sectors undergoing capitalist development (Findlay 1987). Included here are employees of multinational firms operating in regions such as the Middle East as well as individuals with specialist, non-manual skills engaged on short-term contracts by recruitment agencies instructed by both local and international companies operating in the region (Salt 1988: 390). In contrast with the international migration of semi- and unskilled manual labourers, considerably greater formal assistance to facilitate migration and temporary settlement is provided by the companies involved, including the direct and indirect provision of the reproduction costs of the managerial or professional migrant worker. International companies employ staff to negotiate and obtain work and residence permits where necessary, and either employ agencies to obtain accommodation or purchase property to let, often at subsidised rents, to the migrant manager or professional (Salt 1984: 648-9). One of the consequences is a high degree of residential segregation on the part of highly skilled non-manual labour. Where those persons providing this labour power possess a distinct cultural heritage (as, for example, in the case of Japanese managers employed in transnational firms in Europe), the result is what might be considered to be a form of ‘ethnic segregation’ (Findlay 1987: 8,16) similar yet distinct from that which has usually preoccupied academic investigators.

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Sassen’s recent attempt to ‘capture analytically and empirically the articulation of the process of labour migration with fundamental processes in the contemporary phase of the world economy’ (1988: 186), in which she argues that the internationalization of production is a key dimension, makes no mention of the migration of managerial, technical and professional staff of transnational companies. Yet, she highlights the importance of the growth of Export Processing Zones and describes in some detail the increasing scale of foreign investment by companies based in the advanced capitalist sector of the world economic system, a trend encouraged by the adoption of export-led industrialization by the states in the ‘peripheries’ of that system (1988: 98-105). But her interest in analysing this globalization of production is exclusively with the interrelated processes of proletarianization, feminization and the international emigration of semi- and unskilled manual labour that it stimulates, and so she ignores the migration of managerial, technical and professional staff that accompanies the migration of capital and who organize and promote these processes. In addition to the relative silence about the fact and extent of such migrations, there is also the issue of the nature of the explanation to be offered for them. Salt initially questioned the applicability to ‘postindustrial societies’ of theories which were generated in the context of a transition from rural, subsistence production to urban, industrial production, and he offered an alternative analytical framework which focused on the nature of modern labour markets ‘in which specialist skills and training mean that the workforce is segmented into self-contained noncompeting groups’ (1984: 634). As Salt’s more recent writing indicates (1988, also Salt and Findlay 1989), this is a rather narrow basis on which to explain the phenomenon because it disembodies the labour market for managerial, technical and professional staff from the wider operations and development of national and transnational capital. It is only on the basis of the successful operation of the transnational company within the capital accumulation process on a world scale that a career structure can be available to company managerial and technical staff. Understood simplistically, the migration of these ‘mental labourers’ is a concomitant of the migration of capital, and so the factors determining the migration of capital structure the international mobility of highly skilled managerial and technical staff. Amongst the highest ranks of managerial and professional staff employed by international companies, one finds a stratum of the capitalist class proper, those managers who also own and control capital in some combination. But this concept also refers to people

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Britain

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whose ownership and control of capital means that they personally run companies of various sizes. In the context of a world economic system, especially where regional economies are of increasing significance, such capitalists also migrate in the search for the best spatial location for investment, to develop markets, to obtain supplies of raw materials etc. Again, it is difficult to assess the nature and extent of this migration because the statistical measurement of migration is oriented primarily to assessing and controlling the migration of actual or potential wage labourers. A very partial assessment of the significance of the migration of the capitalist class and of the managerial and technical staff of multinational capital is possible in relation to Britain using the immigration statistics collected by the Home Office. In Table 1, we document the number of foreign people of non-EEC origin allowed to enter Britain annually between 1974 and 1986 because they were in possession of a work permit or because they sought to pursue business activity. Concerning the first category, during the 1970s, the work permit system allowed the entry of semi- and unskilled manual labour for, for example, hotel and catering work, but this option was removed in 1979 and, since 1980, work permits have been issued primarily to professional, administrative and technical staff under very restrictive procedures (Macdonald 1987: 194-203; Salt 1988: 391). Thus, Table I shows that, through the 1980s, the number of managerial and technical staff (a large proportion of whom were probably in the employ of non-EEC based multinational companies operating in Britain) allowed to enter Britain remained at a fairly constant level of around 12,000 people. One can reasonably assume that the number of such skilled, non-manual staff allowed entry into Britain from other countries is considerably higher than this because employees of companies based in other EEC countries are excluded from these statistics. 1 Source: Control of Immigration Statistics, United Kingdom, 19741986, London: HMSO, 1975-87. 2 Statistics exclude EEC nationals but include Commonwealth citizens and non-EEC foreign nationals. 3 Business passengers include all those given leave to enter for less than 12 months for business purposes. 4 Work permit holders given leave to enter includes those holding permits for 12 months and less than 12 months.

The other category, those given leave to enter Britain for business purposes, includes two groups of people who unfortunately (but sig-

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nificantly) are not separately aggregated. The first are those who enter Britain to undertake self-employment or to establish a business, or to join or take over an existing business. As with the work permit system, there is a long history to the development of the regulations governing the entry of people seeking to establish themselves as capitalists. The most recent, important changes occurred in 1980, as a result of which those currently seeking to enter Britain for the purpose of self-employment or to establish, to join or to take over a business must have a minimum investment of £150,000 and must demonstrate that this investment will create new, full-time employment for persons already settled in Britain. The intention of these conditions is to prevent the entry of petit bourgeois capitalists (especially from the Indian subcontinent and Cyprus) intending to establish small shops, restaurants and manufacturing activities dependent on family labour (Macdonald 1987: 204). The second group includes those people who are engaged on a temporary business visit. The criteria employed by immigration officials to permit entry for such purposes are probably detailed in the Immigration Rules which are not published. One assumes that a large proportion of those permitted entry are capitalists or company managers and technical staff (including sales staff) who are engaged on official company business and who may stay for a few days or weeks (but perhaps months) at the most. How many become permanent settlers is impossible to determine from these statistics alone. Again, when assessing the significance of the scale of this migration into Britain, it should be noted that the statistics exclude nationals of EEC countries. Table 1 shows that the number of aliens (including Commonwealth citizens) granted entry to Britain for business purposes has almost doubled between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, and that, during the 1980s, the British state has permitted around or in excess of three-quarters of a million of aliens to enter Britain annually for such purposes. If numbers really are a crucial indicator of the problematic consequences of a migrant presence, this is a figure that we might have expected to generate considerable political alarm and controversy within Britain. The fact that it has not done so, along with the fact that academic interest in migration on such a scale has been very limited, is therefore highly significant. The silence about these migrations within the writing of Castles and other Marxist theorists is puzzling because, in principle, an explanation for them can be found with reference to the capital accumulation process. The increasing concentration and centralization of capital within the world economic system is associated with

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capital export, and hence with the increased mobility of the owners and agents of capital. Perhaps the explanation for the silence is to be found in the fact that a research focus on such migrations seems more likely to reveal privilege rather than exploitation, although this is not an especially good reason to ignore processes which are integral to our understanding of the expansion of the capitalist mode of production on a world scale. Yet, even if we were to explore such a theoretical explanation, it would leave unanalysed the mediating role of the state in all international migration flows.

Migration and the role of the state

autonomous state

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In the previous section of the paper, we have identified certain migrations which have been ignored and/or which cannot be easily explained by a capital accumulation theory of migration. We now turn to an evaluation of Castles’ claim that, in post-1945 Europe, the state was an absent force in relation to the pre-1973 development of migration flows. We criticize this interpretation and highlight the central and partially autonomous role of the state in the regulation of post1945 migration flows by considering migration to Britain between 1945 and the early 1950s (Isaac 1954). These migration flows were composed largely of people from the Irish Republic, from Poland, from the Baltic states, and from the Ukraine, although there were also small movements of people from north west Europe. Hereafter, we ignore the migration of people from the Republic of Ireland because, by virtue of defining citizens of the Republic as in effect British citizens, the state was not able to control this migration. But these other populations, by virtue of being defined in law as aliens, were subject to state regulation on entry and after taking up residence in Britain (Miles 1989b). The British state intervened in several ways to structure these migrations. First, because the migrants were aliens, the state necessarily provided the political/legal framework for members of the Polish armed forces and their dependents to remain and settle in Britain, and for Displaced Persons to enter Britain (Miles and Solomos 1987: 85-6). Second, the state actively recruited and screened the Displaced Persons, not only to identify war criminals and fascist sympathisers, but also to ensure that they would be productive workers. Representatives of the Ministry of Labour ‘handpicked’ those granted permission to enter Britain from amongst those who volunteered ‘with preference going to “men of labouring type who are hardy and of good physical standard”... and those prepared to leave behind their

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dependents until further arrangements could be made’ (Harris 1987: 60). Identical concerns were evident in the recruitment of women (Kay and Miles 1988: 219-21). Third, the state intervened in the process of migration by initially imposing conditions on the rights of Displaced Persons selected to enter Britain. In the first instance, they were granted entry for a period of one year and their chance of remaining in the country was conditional in part on their behaving ‘as a worthy member of the British community’ (Tannahill 1958: 123-8; Kay and Miles 1988: 2213). However, their status as refugees placed limits on the power of the state to require them to leave Britain because there was nowhere for them to go to, other than the Displaced Persons camps that they had been recruited from. In effect, therefore, these migrants were eventually to become permanent settlers (Layton-Henry 1984: 19; Kay and Miles 1988). Fourth, in the case of the Poles, the state intervened to encourage the retention of a distinct cultural identity and community structure by providing money and other resources for the running of three Polish hospitals, educational facilities and hostel accommodation (Miles and Solomos 1987: 86). Fifth, the British state intervened to structure the migrants’ entry into, and place within, the labour market. The entry of Displaced Persons was dependent upon their signing a contract of employment which stipulated that they accept work selected by the Minister of Labour and that they could change employment only with the permission of the Minister (Miles and Solomos 1987: 87; Kay and Miles 1988: 222-3). They were therefore unable to freely dispose of their labour power as a commodity and so constituted a form of unfree wage labour (Miles 1987b: 32-4). Thus, they occupied a qualitatively different position in production relations when compared with British workers (as well as migrants from British colonial societies) who were not subject to such restrictions. Indeed, it was just this characteristic that made them especially desirable from the point of view of British employers and the British state. According to a government inter-departmental working party, the recruitment of EVWs (cited in Harris 1987: 61),

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enables the Department [of Labour] both to put these foreign workers into specific jobs and to keep them in those jobs. The sanction that lies at hand to guard against noncompliance with these landing conditions is deportation of the workers concerned to the ‘Displaced Persons’ camps in Europe, and this sanction has from the very beginning proved to be an extremely effective one. Besides being kept out of ‘inessential’ industries, European Volunteer Workers who have

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been brought into this country could not for any length of time remain unemployed at public expense.

recruitment

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These restrictions were not however permanent: in 1951, the government lifted all conditions of the sale of their labour power once the individual had been resident in Britain for three years (Kay and Miles 1988: 229-30). The decision to impose these conditions reveals a dialectic of economic, political and ideological rationality. In part, the British state sought to ensure that specific industries which were short of labour had a ‘guaranteed’ workforce for at least three years. But it was also the case that their formal legal status as aliens facilitated the state’s decision to constitute these migrants as a form of unfree wage labour (Freeman and Spencer 1980: 63-4). In other words, it was politically possible to deny certain basic rights to non-citizens, a denial that was very difficult to legitimate in the case of migrants who were British citizens. European refugees had been exhausted as a source of labour before the end of the 1940s but the demand for labour remained high. British employers continued to rely on Irish labour, along with a limited recruitment under contract from elsewhere in Europe, especially Italy (Miles and Phizacklea 1984: 24; Duffield 1988: 11-14) but they were unable to fill all the emergent vacancies from these sources. This was the key domestic economic determinant of the increased migration from British colonial and ex-colonial societies which began in the late 1940s and which expanded during the 1950s, although it was facilitated by the legal status of such people as British citizens. Unlike with the migrations considered above, the state was, with one exception, not directly involved in recruitment. Rather, in the context of a long tradition of emigration from the Caribbean (e.g. Thomas-Hope 1986; Petras 1988), this migration was largely ‘spontaneous’ and took the form of an informal chain migration, although some employers did recruit labour directly in Barbados (Sivanandan 1982: 102; Layton-Henry 1984: 23). Although the state did not actively recruit labour on a significant scale in the 1950s, it was not an absent force (Carter, Harris and Joshi 1987). The state in fact intervened in two important ways. First, the absence of state-organized recruitment of labour from the colonies and ex-colonies was in itself a form of intervention. The decision not to recruit such labour was a conscious decision which racialized the migrants in such a way that they were deemed unacceptable. According to a prominent civil servant (cited in Joshi and Carter 1984: 59):

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Whatever may be the policy about British citizenship, I do not think any scheme for the importation of colonials for permanent settlement should be embarked upon without the full understanding that this means that a coloured element will be brought in for permanent absorption into our population.

Second, between 1948 and the mid-1950s, the British state intervened directly in the process of colonial and ex-colonial migration using various covert administrative measures, some illegal (Carter, Harris and Joshi 1987: 336-7). The measures varied according to the Commonwealth or colonial status of the potential entrants. In the case of the West Indies, for example, Carter, Harris and Joshi have documented that (1987: 336): Governors were asked to tamper with shipping lists and schedules to place migrant workers at the back of the queue; to cordon off ports to prevent passport-holding stowaways from boarding ships and to delay the issue of passports to migrants. This last measure was also adopted by India and Pakistan where the ... Governments refused passports if migrants had no firm prospect of establishing themselves. Police reports were carried out at the request of the Home Office to establish the basis of these prospects.

Thus, well before the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, the state actively, although surreptitiously, intervened in the process of migration. The 1962 Act, and the subsequent legislation, are now well documented and need not be recounted here (Layton-Henry 1984; Miles and Phizacklea 1984). These interventions of the state were the result of a complex of political and ideological processes, and cannot in any direct way be attributed to the economic needs of capital as is implied by the work of Castles and his various collaborators (see also Miles 1985). For example, the state decided not to recruit colonial British subjects in part precisely because their formal status as British citizens meant that they could not be treated differently from the rest of the British working class and could not be disciplined with the sanction of deportation. Thus, it was because they could not be allocated a position in production relations as unfree wage labour that worked against their recruitment by the state. The civil servant cited above put the matter in these terms in 1948 (Joshi and Carter 1984: 59):

Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962

Unlike ex-prisoners of war or other aliens, I assume there could be no authority for deporting coloured British subjects if they felt they

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wished to stay here and take their chance. If there were any assurance that these people could in fact be sent away when they had served their purpose, this proposition might be less unacceptable.

state intervention

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In addition, the state did not actively recruit in the Caribbean and other colonial and ex-colonial formations because of its concern over the creation of a ‘race relations’ problem in Britain (Carter, Harris and Joshi 1987: 345). State officials, along with the media and sections of the working class, constructed the ‘imagined community’ which constituted the English/British nation in terms of the idea of ‘race’ (Miles 1987a: 38-40). ‘Coloured’ people were defined as an ‘alien race’ whose presence constituted a threat to the ‘British way of life’. In the light of all this evidence, what Castles et al. identify as the beginning of the period of the British state’s intervention in the process of migration, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, was really the formal culmination of a process of state intervention (and racialisation) which began soon after the end of the war. The state did not restrict colonial and ex-colonial migration through a formally codified and publically visible ‘immigration policy’, in part because of an apparent continued commitment to the idea of a ‘free and equal’ Commonwealth of nation-states. Similarly, the British state intervened in the process of migration through the recruitment, control and provision of settlement assistance to Eastern European refugees, practices which suggest that from the British state’s point of view, not all of those people who were born outside of the spatial boundaries of the British nation-state were defined as equally suitable sources of wage labour. More generally, comparative research on post-1945 migration to Europe reveals important differences in the form and consequences of state intervention to regulate migration flows (e.g. Freeman 1979; Edye 1987). One of the more general conclusions to emerge from these studies is that the state has not acted consistently in an instrumentalist fashion, seeking to serve only the interests of capital. This is in part because there is no single interest of capital in relation to labour migration and, in part, because the partially autonomous existence of the state is grounded in the necessity to mediate not only the competing demands of different fractions of capital but also to guarantee the political and ideological conditions for the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production within a given national territory. For example, there was conflict between Die Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbaede (BDA), the West German employers’ federation, and the German state from the early 1970s. When

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the German government halted the recruitment of foreign labour in 1973, partly in response to concerns about the social and political consequences of the increasing presence of foreign workers in Germany, the BDA was strongly opposed. It objected to the sudden implementation of the ban, arguing that at least those workers who were already in the process of recruitment should have been allowed to enter Germany. It also proclaimed the need for greater flexibility, especially with respect to the employment of seasonal labour under contract, and argued that, because of the central role of foreign labour in the economy, it would be necessary for the foreseeable future. During the mid-1970s, the BDA reported that certain employers were unable to recruit the foreign labour that they needed. The Deutscher Hotel- und Gaststaettenverband (DEHOGA) was especially active in its opposition to the recruitment ban of 1973 (Edye 1987: 88-90, 92-6). Consequently, in a world which has been divided into nationstates, the state is necessarily involved as a determinant actor, with its own distinct (although not autonomous) interests, in mediating international migration flows. Concomitant with the formation of the nation-state has been the creation of nationality as a legal concept and the creation and policing of national boundaries which constitute a political barrier to human spatial mobility because each human being has been attributed with a legal status ‘tying’ him or her to that nation state. And within those boundaries, a central role of the state is to reproduce social order, a process that entails both hegemonic practices and direct force. Hegemonic practices include the reproduction of national identity, which includes a process of selfidentification with the state itself. This is constantly secured by the identification of different Others outside and beyond the nation state, and it can therefore be threatened by the migration of representatives of these Others. Constantly assured that its ‘own’ national community is a superior economic and cultural force, it is not surprising that sections of the working class within a nation state may become involved in agitation against a migrant presence, a process that is further encouraged by material scarcity. The process of international migration, especially when ‘required’ by the need to expand the size of the labour force, may therefore constitute a contradictory phenomenon in so far as the state has to regulate both the entry of capitalists, non-manual and manual labour as well as refugees and the social disorder that can arise from agitation against that presence. We have shown above that concerns about social order were prominent in the evaluation of the British state concerning migration in the immediate post-war period and did not emerge only after the migration flows had ‘matured’.

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Conclusion The tradition of the political economy or migration, as represented in the work of Castles and his various collaborators, and despite its real strengths, has failed to highlight and explain certain significant international migrations, and to adequately specify the significance of the role of the state in organizing and regulating international migration flows since 1945. Thus, insofar as there is reason to believe that the migration of refugees, of skilled non-manual labour and of the bourgeoisie itself will continue during the epoch of ‘postmodern’ capitalism, we need to elaborate upon, in order to develop, this theoretical tradition, not only to explain the present and the future, but also the past. In order to do this, it is necessary to highlight the role of both the nation as a spatial and political unit, and of the state as an institutional complex in the analysis of international migration processes (Miles 1987b: 181-6). In this respect, we reinforce the point made by Zolberg that (1983a: 4): it is the political organisation of contemporary world space into mutually exclusive and legally sovereign territorial states which delineates the specificity of international migration as a distinctive process and hence as an object of theoretical reflection.

historical articulation

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But in so doing, we do not abstract political relations from economic and political relations in the way that he appears to do. This is because the rise of the nation state was dialectically related to the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, a mode of production that had profound implications for spatial mobility as a result of the new social relations of production. We therefore seek to explain international migration flows in relation to the historical articulation between the process of capital accumulation and the reproduction of the nation state, an articulation which is mediated by the state, the role of which is to guarantee the reproduction of the dominant mode of production and, hence, the nation state itself. In this context, refugee migrations appear far less anomalous. If, following Zolberg, such migrations result from the historical process of nation-state formation (l983b: 30), then that is a process mediated by the emergence of the world economic system as structured by the capitalist mode of production. Furthermore, it is mediated by the interventions of national states as they seek to, in turn, mediate the articulation between the reproduction of the mode of production and the nation-state which provides the political and spatial context

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for the interrelated activities of capital and labour. This is well illustrated by the example previously cited of the migrations of Kenyan and Ugandan Asians to Britain, both of which resulted from a process of nation-state formation after decolonization in the context of the promotion of capitalist development by means of, inter alia, Africanization. And the process of nation-state formation is still far from complete in Africa, not to mention the Middle East, Southern Africa and the Indian subcontinent. all spatial contexts which generate large refugee migrations. But the articulations and mediations referred to can be, in specific conjunctures. even more precise in advancing the interests of capital. The massive movements of refugees within Europe immediately after the Second World War arose not only from the consequences of fascism, but also from the processes of redrawing the boundaries of nation-states and of giving a new political content to nation-state formation in Eastern Europe. Yet the resolution of the problem of stateless populations resident within Western Europe was to a significant degree facilitated by the new phase of capitalist accumulation that was launched in the late 1940s, a process that required significant additions to the size of the national labour forces. In this conjuncture, a large proportion of a relatively surplus (refugee) population was constituted in the realm of political relations, and drawn into the nation states of Western Europe in order to fill vacant positions in the hierarchy of wage labour (Kay and Miles 1988: 231). The concept of refugee-worker is helpful in conceptualizing this process (Kay and Miles 1988: 215). Thus, what is new about the refugee crisis of the 1980s is not its existence per se, but rather that the scope for this new surplus population to be drawn into the capitalist world economy is, comparatively, considerably constrained. A further context in which to examine the articulation and mediation of the capitalist mode of production. the nation-state as a spatialpolitical structure and the state as an institutional complex, is the interplay of different international migration flows. A more accurate comprehension of these migrations would focus not only on the migration of semi- and unskilled manual labourers from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘centre’ of the world economy, but also upon the migration of skilled managers, technicians and professionals within the ‘centre’ and from the ‘centre’ to the ‘periphery’. Arguably, the latter has become more important than the former in the past fifteen years, at least in Europe, in the light of the fact that the export of capital has to a significant extent replaced the import of manual labour. Such a focus returns us centrally to the task of analysing the process of capital accumulation on a world scale, not in order to understand the

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migration of labour but rather the migration of capital. But we make a mistake if we counterpose the movement of sums of money (to represent capital export) to the movement of peasants and proletarians (to represent labour import) in order to understand this dynamic. For not only are capital (in the sense of money) flows from one spatial location to another dependent upon the permission of the respective states, but so is the movement of those who own those sums of money as well as those who manage, control and service their utilisation. All these people have a national status, and their international mobility is therefore also subject to the controls established by the states which control entry into the space and the social relations that they administer. We might be well advised to examine much more closely the privileged terms on which such people are able to move from one nation-state to another (alongside the scale of such mobility) because, in so far as the ownership of capital serves to mediate restrictions on entry and settlement (i.e. mediate the ties of national status), this is the outcome of a political decision. In turn this might tell us rather more about the patterns, processes and consequences of ‘flexible accumulation’ than musing about the aesthetics of the architecture of the offices of the multinational firms that such people use to exercise their control over us all. This is also a dimension of the central task of contextualizing the impact of racism (Miles 1989: 134). Specifically, the British discussion about immigration control has centred almost exclusively on the manner in which it has been determined by racism and has thereby ignored its class character. We have shown above that British immigration controls facilitate the entry of persons engaged in business activity, persons with capital in excess of £150,000 and managerial, technical and professional employees of international companies. Consequently, with respect to British immigration control, the exclusion of ‘black’ migrants seeking to enter wage labour, along with those seeking to establish themselves as a petite bourgeoisie, is one pole of a dialectic in which there is a simultaneous inclusion of members and agents of the capitalist class. The silence about this latter migration is of considerable significance in relation to the expression of racism within contemporary Western European nation states. The articulation of that racism, whether by the state itself or by sections of the working class, focuses upon the presence and cultural consequences of those who migrated with the purpose of selling their labour power. And there is no doubt that these migrations have led to a range of cultural transformations within Western Europe. But we might also begin to consider the cultural transformations consequent upon the migration of capital, cap-

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italists and their various ‘agents’. Thus, alongside the cultural transformations initiated by, for example, the increased Muslim presence in Western Europe, we might also begin to consider the transformations of Western European nation states that constitute the processes of Americanization and ‘Japanization’. To cite a single example, Western European city centres have been transformed by, inter alia, the establishment of a range of ‘fast food’ outlets. Both the companies themselves, and the commodity that they supply, constitute a major cultural transformation about which there is a comparative silence in comparison with, for example, agitation against the appearance of a mosque. Thus, the reasons why certain cultural transformations consequent upon certain migrations become the object of racist agitation while others consequent upon other migrations are ignored is an important academic and political question which leads us to consider both the nature of racism and the role of the state in its reproduction. And as a prelude to such a study, we need first to undertake an analysis of the migration of the bourgeoisie and its agents to assess the material foundation for these ‘hidden’ cultural transformations.

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Note 1 This is a revised version of a paper prepared for a conference on ‘Racism and the Post-Modern City’ held at the University of Warwick, 29-31 March 1989. We acknowledge the useful comments by conference participants and by the Editors of Economy and Society but we take full responsibility for this draft.

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Burawoy, M. (1976) ‘The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labour’, American Journal of Sociology, 81: 1051-87. Carter, B., Harris, C. and Joshi, S. (1987) ‘The 1951-55 Conservative Government and the Racialisation of Black Immigration’, Immigrants and Minorities, 6: 335-47. Castles, S. (1985) ‘Guests Who Stayed: The Debate on Foreigners Policy in the German Federal Republic’, International Migration Review, 19: 517-34. –, and Kosack, G. (1973) Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, London: Oxford University Press. –, Booth, H. and Wallace, T. (1984) Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities, London: Pluto Press. Cleary, P. (1989) Human Rights and the Admission of Refugees: the British Case, Glasgow University: mimeo. Cohen, R. (1987) The New Helots: Migrants in the International Division of Labour, Farnborough: Avebury. Deakin, N. (1970) Colour, Citizenship and British Society, London: Panther Books. Duffield, M. (1988) Black Radicalism and the Politics of Deindustrialisation: The Hidden History of Indian Foundry Workers, Farnborough: Avebury. Edye, D. (l987) Immigrant Labour and Government Policy: the Cases of the Federal Republic of Germany and France, Aldershot: Gower. Esser, H. and Korte, H. (1985) ‘Federal Republic of Germany’, in T. Hammer (ed.), European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Findlay, A. (1987) The Development Implications of Skilled International Migration for Host and Sender Societies, Glasgow: University of Glasgow Department of Geography Occasional Paper no. 20. Freeman, G. (1979) Immigrant Labour and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies: The French and British Experience, 1945-1975, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Freeman, M. and Spencer, S. (1980) ‘Immigration Control, Black Workers and the Economy’, British Journal of Law and Society, 6: 53-81. Frobel, Heinrichs, J. and Kreye, O. (1980) The New International Division of Labour, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, C. (1987) ‘British Capitalism, Migration and Relative Surplus Population: A Synopsis’, Migration, 1: 47-90. Herbet, U. (1986) Geschichte der Ausländer-beschäftigung in Deutschland 1880 bis 1980: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Bonn: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachf. History Task Force (l979) Labor Migration/ under Capitalism: The Puerto Rican Experience, New York: Monthly Review Press.

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Holmes, C. (1988) John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971, London: Macmillan. Isaac, J. (1954) British Post-War Migration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, J.A. (1986) Migration, London: Longman. Joshi, S. and Carter, B. (1984) ‘The Role of Labour in the Creation of a Racist Britain’, Race and Class, 25: 53-70. Kay, D. (1987) Chileans in Exile: Private Struggles, Public Lives, London: Macmillan. –, and Miles, R. (1988) ‘Refugees or Migrant Workers? The Case of the European Volunteer Workers in Britain (1946-1951)’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 1: 214-36. and – (1990), Refugees Or Migrant Workers?, London: Routledge (forthcoming) . Kindelberger, C. (1967) Europe’s Postwar Growth, London: Oxford University Press. Layton-Henry, Z. (1984) The Politics of Race in Brtain, London: Allen & Unwin. Lever-Tracy, C. (1983) ‘Immigrant Workers and Postwar Capitalism: In Reserve or Core Troops in the Front Line?’, Politics alld Society, 12: 127-57. Lim, L.Y.C. (1978) Women in Export Processing Zones, New York: United Nations Industrial Development Organisation. Macdonald, I.A. (1987) Immigration Law and Practice in the United Kingdom, London: Butterworths. Marrus, M. R. (1985) The Unwanted: European refugees in the Twentieth Century, New York: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. (1976) Capital, Vol. I; Harmondsworth: Penguin. Miles, R. (1982) Racism and Migrant Labour: A Critical Text, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. – (1985) The Relative Autonomy of Ideology: Labour Migration and Racism in Britain, Paris: Groupe de Reserche et d’Analyse des Migrations Internationales, Document de Travail, no. 7. – (1986) ‘Labour Migration, Racism and Capital Accumulation in Western Europe Since 1945: An Overview’, Capital and Class, 28: 49-86. – (1987a) ‘Recent Marxist Theories of Nationalism and the Issue of Racism’, British Journal of Sociology, 38: 24-43. – (1987b) Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity?, London: Tavistock. – (1989a) Racism, London: Routledge. – (1989b) ‘Nationality, Citizenship and Immigration in Britains Journal of Law and Society, 1989: ??.

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– and Phizacklea, A. (1984) White Man’s Country: Racism in British Politics, London: Pluto Press. – and Solomos, J. (1987) ‘Migration and the State in Britain: A Historical Overview’, in C. Husband (ed.), ‘Race in Britain: Continuity and Change, London: Hutchinson. Petras, E. (1980) ‘The Role of National Boundaries in a Cross National Labour Market’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 4: 157-95. – (1988) Jamaican Labor Migration: White Capital and Black Labor, 1850-1930, Boulder: Westview Press. Phizacklea, A. and Miles, R. (1980) Labour and Racism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Safa, H.I. (1981) ‘Runaway Shops and Female Employment: the Search for Cheap Labour’, Signs, 7: 418-33. Salt, J. (1983) ‘International Labor Migration in Western Europe: A Geographical Review’, in M.M. Kritz, C.B. Keeley and S.M. Tomasi (eds), Global Trends in Migration: Theory and Research on International Population Movements, New York: Center for Migrarion Studies. – (1984) ‘High Level Manpower Movements in Northwest Europe and the Role of Careers: An Explanatory Framework’, International Migration Review,17:633-52. – (1987) ‘Contemporary Trends in International Migration Study’, International Migration, 25: 241-51. – (1988), ‘Highly-skilled International Migrants, Careers and Internal Labour Markets’, Geoforum, 19: 387-99. – and Findlay, S. (1989), ‘International Migration of Highly Skilled Manpower: Theoretical and Developmental Issues’, in R. Appleyard (ed.), The Impact International Migration on Developing Countries, Paris: OECD. Sassen, S. (1988) The Mobility of Labour and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labour Flow, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sassen-Koob, S. (1978) ‘The International Circulation of Resources and Development: The Case of Migrant Labour’, Development and Change, 9: 509-45. Schechtman, J.B. (1962) Postwar Population Transfers in Europe 19451955, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sivanandan, A. (1982) A Different Hunger, London: Pluto Press. Tannahill, J. (1958) European Volunteer Workers in Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thomas-Hope, E.M. (1986) ‘Caribbean Diaspora - the Inheritance of Slavery: Migrations from the Commonwealth Caribbean” in

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C. Brock (ed.), The Caribbean in Europe: Aspects of the West Indian Experience in Britain, France and the Netherlands, London: Frank Cass. Warren, B. (1980) Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, London: Verso. Zolberg, A. (1983a) ‘International Migrations in Political Perspective’ in M.M. Kritz, C.B. Keeley and S.M. Tomasi (eds.), Global Trends in Migration: Theory and research on International Population Movements, New York: Center for Migration Studies. – (1983b) ‘The Formation of New States as a Refugee Generating Process’, Annuals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 467: 24-38.

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Class racism Etienne Balibar

In the 1980s, the concept of racism was high on the academic agenda. The philosopher Etienne Balibar published extensively on the issue. At that time, many others treated this concept in a one-dimensional, monocausal sense. They argued that racism was intrinsically rooted in the colonial project, often starting from the assumption that the only – or anyway, the most important – racism is that with black people as its object. Balibar was one of the first to demonstrate how the problematisation of some categories of non-black natives – e.g. the ‘labouring classes’ or the ‘dangerous classes’ – has remarkable congruence with those of some categories of blacks. By showing that particular sections of the (native, white) working class can also be victims of racism – ‘class racism’ in this case – it became clear that the history of colonialism is not a sufficiently adequate starting point for theoretical discussion about the nature and significance of racism in Europe. In the same vein, Balibar gave suggestions for a new theoretical approach to racism. Academic analyses of racism, though according chief importance to the study of racist theories, none the less argue that ‘sociological’ racism is a popular phenomenon. Given this supposition, the development of racism within the working class (which, to committed socialists and communists, seems counter to the natural order of things) comes to be seen as the effect of a tendency allegedly inherent in the masses. Institutional racism finds itself projected into the very construction of that psycho-sociological category that is ‘the masses’. We must therefore attempt to analyse the process of displacement which, moving from classes to masses, presents these latter both as the privileged subjects of racism and its favoured objects. Can one say that a social class, by its situation and its ideology (not to mention its identity), is predisposed to racist attitudes and behaviour? This question has mainly been debated in connection with the rise of Nazism, first speculatively and then later by taking vari-

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ous empirical indicators.1 The result is quite paradoxical since there is hardly a social class on which suspicion has not fallen, though a marked predilection has been shown for the ‘petty bourgeoisie’. But this is a notoriously ambiguous concept, which is more an expression of the aporias of a class analysis conceived as a dividing up of the population into mutually exclusive slices. As with every question of origins in which a political charge is concealed, it makes sense to turn the question around: not to look for the foundations of the racism which invades everyday life (or the movement which provides the vehicle for it) in the nature of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’, but to attempt to understand how the development of racism causes a ‘petty bourgeois’ mass to emerge out of a diversity of material situations. For the misconceived question of the class bases of racism, we shall thus substitute a more crucial and complex question, which that former question is in part intended to mask: that of the relations between racism, as a supplement to nationalism, and the irreducibility of class conflict in society. We shall find it necessary to ask how the development of racism displaces class conflict or, rather, in what way class conflict is always already transformed by a social relation in which there is an inbuilt tendency to racism; and also, conversely, how the fact that the nationalist alternative to the class struggle specifically takes the form of racism may be considered as the index of the irreconcilable character of that struggle. This does not of course mean that it is not crucial to examine how, in a given conjuncture, the class conditions [la condition de classe] (made up of the material conditions of existence and labour, though also of ideological traditions and practical relationships to politics) determine the effects of racism in society: the frequency and forms of the ‘acting out’ of racism, the discourse which expresses it and the membership of organized racist movements. The traces of a constant overdetermination of racism by the class struggle are as universally detectable in its history as the nationalist determination, and everywhere they are connected with the core of meaning of its phantasies and practices. This suffices to demonstrate that we are dealing here with a determination that is much more concrete and decisive than the generalities dear to the sociologists of ‘modernity’. It is wholly inadequate to see racism (or the nationalism-racism dyad) either as one of the paradoxical expressions of the individualism or egalitarianism which are supposed to characterize modern societies (following the old dichotomy of ‘closed’, ‘hierarchical’ societies and ‘open,’ ‘mobile’ societies) or a defensive reaction against that individualism, seen as expressing nostalgia for a social order based on the existence of a ‘community’.2 Individualism only

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exists in the concrete forms of market competition (including the competition between labour powers) in unstable equilibrium with association between individuals under the constraints of the class struggle. Egalitarianism only exists in the contradictory forms of political democracy (where that democracy exists), the ‘welfare state’ (where that exists), the polarization of conditions of existence, cultural segregation and reformist or revolutionary utopias. It is these determinations, and not mere anthropological figures, which confer an ‘economic’ dimension upon racism. Nevertheless, the heterogeneity of the historical forms of the relationship between racism and the class struggle poses a problem. This ranges from the way in which anti-Semitism developed into a bogus ‘anti-capitalism’ around the theme of ‘Jewish money’ to the way in which racial stigma and class hatred are combined today in the category of immigration. Each of these configurations is irreducible (as are the corresponding conjunctures), which make it impossible to define any simple relationship of ‘expression’ (or, equally, of substitution) between racism and class struggle. In the manipulation of anti-Semitism as an anti-capitalist delusion, which chiefly occurred between 1870 and 1945 (which is, we should note, the key period of confrontation between the European bourgeois states and organized proletarian internationalism), we find not only the designation of a scapegoat as an object of proletarian revolt, the exploitation of divisions within the proletariat and the projective representation of the ills of an abstract social system through the imaginary personification of those who control it (even though this mechanism is essential to the functioning of racism).3 We also find the ‘fusion’ of the two historical narratives which are capable of acting as metaphors for each other: on the one hand, the narrative of the formation of nations at the expense of the lost unity of ‘Christian Europe’ and, on the other, that of the conflict between national independence and the internationalization of capitalist economic relations, which brought with it the attendant threat of an internationalization of the class struggle. This is why the Jew, as an internally excluded element common to all nations but also, negatively, by virtue of the theological hatred to which he is subject, as witness to the love that is supposed to unite the ‘Christian peoples’, may, in the imaginary, be identified with the ‘cosmopolitanism of capital’ which threatens the national independence of every country while at the same time re-activating the trace of the lost unity.4 The figure is quite different when anti-immigrant racism achieves a maximum of identification between class situation and ethnic origin (the real bases for which have always existed in the inter-regional,

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antagonistic social functions

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international or intercontinental mobility of the working class;’ this has at times been a mass phenomenon, at times residual, but it has never been eliminated and is one of the specifically proletarian characteristics of its condition). Racism combines this identification with a deliberate confusion of antagonistic social functions: thus the themes of the ‘invasion’ of French society by North Africans or of immigration being responsible for unemployment are connected with that of the money of the oil sheikhs who are buying up ‘our’ businesses, ‘our’ housing stock or ‘our’ seaside resorts. And this partly explains why the Algerians, Tunisians or Moroccans have to be referred to generically as ‘Arab’ (not to mention the fact that this signifier, which functions as a veritable ‘switch word’, also connects together these themes and those of terrorism, Islam and so on). Other configurations should not, however, be forgotten, including those which are the product of an inversion of terms: for example, the theme of the ‘proletarian nation’, which was perhaps invented in the 1920s by Japanese nationalism5 and was destined to play a crucial role in the crystallization of Nazism, which cannot be left out of consideration when one looks at the ways in which it has recently reappeared. The complexity of these configurations also explains why it is impossible to hold purely and simply to the idea of racism being used against ‘class consciousness’ (as though this latter would necessarily emerge naturally from the class condition, unless it were blocked, misappropriated or de-natured by racism), whereas we accept as an indispensable working hypothesis that ‘class’ and ‘race’ constitute the two antinomic poles of a permanent dialectic, which is at the heart of modern representations of history. Moreover, we suspect that the instrumentalist, conspiracy-theory visions of racism within the labour movement or among its theorists (we know what high price was to be paid for these: it is tremendously to the credit of Wilhelm Reich that he was one of the first to foresee this), along with the mechanistic visions which see in racism the ‘reflection’ of a particular class condition, have also largely the function of denying the presence of nationalism in the working class and its organizations or, in other words, denying the internal conflict between nationalism and class ideology on which the mass struggle against racism (as well as the revolutionary struggle against capitalism) depends. It is the evolution of this internal conflict I should like to illustrate by discussing here some historical aspects of ‘class racism’. Several historians of racism (Leon Poliakov, Michele Duchet and Madeleine Réberioux, Colette Guillaumin, Eric Williams on modern slavery, and others) have laid emphasis upon the fact that the modern

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notion of race, in so far as it is invested in a discourse of contempt and discrimination and serves to split humanity up into a ‘superhumanity’ and a ‘sub-humanity’, did not initially have a national (or ethnic), but a class signification. Or rather (since the point is to represent the inequality of social classes as inequalities of nature) a caste signification.6 From this point of view, it has a twofold origin: first, in the aristocratic representation of the hereditary nobility as a superior ‘race’ (that is, in fact, the mythic narrative by which an aristocracy, whose domination is already coming under threat, assures itself of the legitimacy of its political privileges and idealizes the dubious continuity of its genealogy); and second, in the slave owners’ representation of those populations subject to the slave trade as inferior ‘races’, ever predestined for servitude and incapable of producing an autonomous civilization. Hence the discourse of blood, skin colour and cross-breeding. It is only retrospectively that the notion of race was ‘ethnicized’, so that it could be integrated into the nationalist complex, the jumping-off point for its successive subsequent metamorphoses. Thus it is clear that, from the very outset, racist representations of history stand in relation to the class struggle. But this fact only takes on its full significance if we examine the way in which the notion of race has evolved, and the impact of nationalism upon it from the earliest figures of ‘class racism’ onwards – in other words, if we examine its political determination. The aristocracy did not initially conceive and present itself in terms of the category of ‘race’: this is a discourse which developed at a late stage, the function of which is clearly defensive (as can be seen from the example of France with the myth of ‘blue blood’ and the ‘Frankish’ or ‘Germanic’ origin of the hereditary nobility), and which developed when the absolute monarchy centralized the state at the expense of the feudal lords and began to ‘create’ within its bosom a new administrative and financial aristocracy which was bourgeois in origin, thus marking a decisive step in the formation of the nation-state. Even more interesting is the case of Spain in the Classical Age, as analysed by Poliakov: the persecution of the Jews after the Reconquista, one of the indispensable mechanisms in the establishment of Catholicism as state religion, is also the trace of the ‘multinational’ culture against which Hispanization (or rather Castilianization) was carried out. It is therefore intimately linked to the formation of this prototype of European nationalism. Yet it took on an even more ambivalent meaning when it gave rise to the ‘statutes of the purity of the blood’ (limpieza de sangre) which the whole discourse of European and American racism was to inherit: a product of the disavowal of the original interbreeding with the Moors and

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the Jews, the hereditary definition of the raza (and the corresponding procedures for establishing who could be accorded a certificate of purity) serves in effect both to isolate an internal aristocracy and to confer upon the whole of the ‘Spanish people’ a fictive nobility, to make it a ‘people of masters’ at the point when, by terror, genocide, slavery and enforced Christianization, it was conquering and dominating the largest of the colonial empires. In this exemplary line of development, class racism was already transformed into nationalist racism, though it did not, in the process, disappear.8 What is, however, much more decisive for the matter in hand is the overturning of values we see occurring from the first half of the nineteenth century onwards. Aristocratic racism (the prototype of what analysts today call ‘self-referential racism’, which begins by elevating the group which controls the discourse to the status of a ‘race’ – hence the importance of its imperialist legacy in the colonial context: however lowly their origins and no matter how vulgar their interests or their manners, the British in India and the French in Africa would all see themselves as members of a modern nobility) is already indirectly related to the primitive accumulation of capital, if only by its function in the colonizing nations. The industrial revolution, at the same time as it creates specifically capitalist relations of production, gives rise to the new racism of the bourgeois era (historically speaking, the first ‘neoracism’): the one which has as its target the proletariat in its dual status as exploited population (one might even say super-exploited, before the beginnings of the social state) and politically threatening population. Louis Chevalier has described the relevant network of significations in detail.9 It is at this point, with regard to the ‘race of labourers’ that the notion of race becomes detached from its historicotheological connotations to enter the field of equivalences between sociology, psychology, imaginary biology and the pathology of the ‘social body’. The reader will recognize here the obsessive themes of police/detective, medical and philanthropic literature, and hence of literature in general (of which it is one of the fundamental dramatic mechanisms and one of the political keys of social ‘realism’). For the first time those aspects typical of every procedure of racialization of a social group right down to our own day are condensed in a single discourse: material and spiritual poverty, criminality, congenital vice (alcoholism, drugs), physical and moral defects, dirtiness, sexual promiscuity and the specific diseases which threaten humanity with ‘degeneracy’. And there is a characteristic oscillation in the presentation of these themes: either the workers themselves constitute a degenerate race or it is their presence and contact with them or in-

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deed their condition itself which constitute a crucible of degeneracy for the ‘race’ of citizens and nationals. Through these themes, there forms the phantasmatic equation of ‘labouring classes’ with ‘dangerous classes’, the fusion of a socioeconomic category with an anthropological and moral category, which will serve to underpin all the variants of sociobiological (and also psychiatric) determinism, by taking pseudoscientific credentials from the Darwinian theory of evolution, comparative anatomy and crowd psychology, but particularly by becoming invested in a tightly knit network of institutions of social surveillance and control.10 Now this class racism is indissociable from fundamental historical processes which have developed unequally right down to the present day. I can only mention these briefly here. First, class racism is connected with a political problem that is crucial for the constitution of the nation-state. The ‘bourgeois revolutions’ – and in particular the French Revolution, by its radical juridical egalitarianism – had raised the question of the political rights of the masses in an irreversible manner. This was to be the object of one and a half centuries of social struggles. The idea of a difference in nature between individuals had become juridically and morally contradictory, if not inconceivable. It was, however, politically indispensable, so long as the ‘dangerous classes’ (who posed a threat to the established social order, property and the power of the ‘elites’) had to be excluded by force and by legal means from political ‘competence’ and confined to the margins of the polity – as long, that is, as it was important to deny them citizenship by showing, and by being oneself persuaded, that they constitutionally ‘lacked’ the qualities of fully fledged or normal humanity. Two anthropologies clashed here: that of equality of birth and that of a hereditary inequality which made it possible to re-naturalize social antagonisms. Now, this operation was overdetermined from the start by national ideology. Disraeli11 (who showed himself, elsewhere, to be a surprising imperialist theorist of the ‘superiority of the Jews’ over the Anglo-Saxon ‘superior race’ itself) admirably summed this up when he explained that the problem of contemporary states was the tendency for a single social formation to split into ‘two nations’. In so doing, he indicated the path which might be taken by the dominant classes when confronted with the progressive organization of the class struggle: first divide the mass of the ‘poor’ (in particular by according the qualities of national authenticity, sound health, morality and racial integrity, which were precisely the opposite of the industrial pathology, to the peasants and the ‘traditional’ artisans); then progressively displace the markers of dangerousness and he-

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redity from the ‘labouring classes’ as a whole on to foreigners, and in particular immigrants and colonial subjects, at the same time as the introduction of universal suffrage is moving the boundary line between ‘citizens’ and ‘subjects’ to the frontiers of nationality. In this process, however, there was always a characteristic lag between what was supposed to happen and the actual situation (even in countries like France, where the national population was not institutionally segregated and was subject to no original apartheid, except if one extends one’s purview to take in the whole of the imperial territory): class racism against the popular classes continued to exist (and, at the same time, these classes remained particularly susceptible to racial stigmatization, and remained extremely ambivalent in their attitude towards racism). Which brings us to another permanent aspect of class racism. I am referring to what must properly be called the institutional racialization of manual labour. It would be easy to find distant origins for this, origins as old as class society itself. In this regard, there is no significant difference between the way contempt for work and the manual worker was expressed among the philosophical elites of slave-owning Greece and the way a man like Taylor could, in 1909, describe the natural predisposition of certain individuals for the exhausting, dirty, repetitive tasks which required physical strength, but no intelligence or initiative (the ‘man of the type of the ox’ of the Principles of Scientific Management: paradoxically, an inveterate propensity for ‘systematic soldiering’ is also attributed to this same man: this is why he needs a ‘man to stand over him’ before he can work in conformity with his nature).12 However, the industrial revolution and capitalist wage labour here effect a displacement. What is now the object of contempt – and in turn fuels fears – is no longer manual labour pure and simple (we shall, by contrast, see this theoretically idealized – in the context of paternalistic, archaizing ideologies – in the form of ‘craft work’), but mechanized physical work, which has become ‘the appendage of the machine’ and therefore subject to a violence that is both physical and symbolic without immediate precedent (which we know, moreover, does not disappear with the new phases of the industrial revolution, but is rather perpetuated both in ‘modernized’ and ‘intellectualized’ forms – as well as in ‘archaic’ forms in a great many sectors of production). This process modifies the status of the human body (the human status of the body): it creates body-men, men whose body is a machine-body, that is fragmented and dominated, and used to perform one isolable function or gesture, being both destroyed in its integrity and fetishized, atrophied and hypertrophied in its ‘useful’ organs.

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Like all violence, this is inseparable from a resistance and also from a sense of guilt. The quantity of ‘normal’ work can only be recognized and extracted from the worker’s body retrospectively, once its limits have been fixed by struggle: the rule is overexploitation, the tendential destruction of the organism (which will be metaphorized as ‘degeneracy’) and, at the very least, excess in the repression of the intellectual functions involved in work. This is an unbearable process for the worker, but one which is no more ‘acceptable’, without ideological and phantasmatic elaboration, for the worker’s masters: the fact that there are body-men means that there are men without bodies. That the body-men are men with fragmented and mutilated bodies (if only by their ‘separation’ from intelligence) means that the individuals of each of these types have to be equipped with a superbody, and that sport and ostentatious virility have to be developed, if the threat hanging over the human race is to be fended off…13 Only this historical situation, these specific social relations make it possible fully to understand the process of aestheticization (and therefore of sexualization, in fetishist mode) of the body which characterizes all the variants of modern racism, by giving rise either to the stigmatization of the ‘physical marks’ of racial inferiority or to the idealization of the ‘human type’ of the superior race. They cast light upon the true meaning of the recourse to biology in the history of racist theories, which has nothing whatever to do with the influence of scientific discoveries, but is, rather, a metaphor for – and an idealization of – the somatic phantasm. Academic biology, and many other theoretical discourses, can fulfil this function, provided they are articulated to the visibility of the body, its ways of being and behaving, its limbs and its emblematic organs. We should here, in accordance with the hypotheses formulated elsewhere regarding neo-racism and its link with the recent ways in which intellectual labour has been broken down into isolated operations, extend the investigation by describing the ‘somatization’ of intellectual capacities, and hence their racialization, a process visible everywhere – from the instrumentalization of IQ to the aestheticization of the executive as decision maker, intellectual and athlete.14 But there is yet another determining aspect in the constitution of class racism. The working class is a population that is both heterogeneous and fluctuating, its ‘boundaries’ being by definition imprecise, since they depend on ceaseless transformations of the labour process and movements of capital. Unlike aristocratic castes, or even the leading fractions of the bourgeoisie, it is not a social caste. What class racism (and, a fortiori, nationalist class racism, as in the case of immigrants) tends to produce is, however, the equivalent of a caste

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anthroponomic practices

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closure at least for one part of the working class. More precisely, it is maximum possible closure where social mobility is concerned, combined with maximum possible openness as regards the flows of proletarianization. Let us put things another way. The logic of capitalist accumulation involves two contradictory aspects here: on the one hand, mobilizing or permanently de-stabilizing the conditions of life and work, in such a way as to ensure competition on the labour market, draw new labour power continually from the ‘industrial reserve army’ and maintain a relative over-population; on the other hand, stabilizing collectivities of workers over long periods (over several generations), to ‘educate’ them for work and ‘bond’ them to companies (and also to bring into play the mechanism of correspondence between a ‘paternalist’ political hegemony and a worker ‘familialism’). On the one hand, class condition, which relates purely to the wage relation, has nothing to do with antecedents or descendants; ultimately, even the notion of ‘class belonging’ is devoid of any practical meaning; all that counts is class situation, hic et nunc. On the other hand, at least a section of the workers have to be the sons of workers, a social heredity has to be created.15 But with this, in practice, the capacities for resistance and organization also increase. It was in response to these contradictory demands that the demographic and immigration policies and policies of urban segregation, which were set in place both by employers and the state from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards – policies which D. Bertaux has termed anthroponomic practicesl6 – were born. These have two sides to them: a paternalistic aspect (itself closely connected to nationalist propaganda) and a disciplinary aspect, an aspect of ‘social warfare’ against the savage masses and an aspect of ‘civilizing’ (in all senses of the term) these same masses. This dual nature we can still see perfectly illustrated today in the combined social and police approach to the ‘suburbs’ and ‘ghettos’. It is not by chance that the current racist complex grafts itself on to the ‘population problem’ (with its series of connotations: birth rate, depopulation and overpopulation, ‘interbreeding’, urbanization, social housing, public health, unemployment) and focuses preferentially on the question of the second generation of what are here improperly called ‘immigrants’ with the object of finding out whether they will carry on as the previous generation (the ‘immigrant workers’ properly so-called) – the danger being that they will develop a much greater degree of social combativeness, combining class demands with cultural demands; or whether they will add to the number of ‘declassed’ individuals, occupying an unstable position between subproletarianization and ‘exit’

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from the working class. This is the main issue for class racism, both for the dominant class and for the popular classes themselves: to mark with generic signs populations which are collectively destined for capitalist exploitation – or which have to be held in reserve for it – at the very moment when the economic process is tearing them away from the direct control of the system (or, quite simply, by mass unemployment, is rendering the previous controls inoperative). The problem is to keep ‘in their place’, from generation to generation, those who have no fixed place; and for this, it is necessary that they have a genealogy. And also to unify in the imaginary the contradictory imperatives of nomadism and social heredity, the domestication of generations and the disqualification of resistances. If these remarks are well founded, then they may throw some light on what are themselves the contradictory aspects of what I shall not hesitate to call the ‘self-racialization’ of the working class. There is here a whole spectrum of social experiences and ideological forms we might mention: from the organization of collectivities of workers around symbols of ethnic or national origin to the way in which a certain workerism, centred on criteria of class origins (and, consequently, on the institution of the working-class family, on the bond which only the family establishes between the ‘individual’ and ‘his class’) and the over-valorization of work (and, consequently, the virility which it alone confers), reproduces, within the ambit of ‘class consciousness’, some part of the set of representations of the ‘race of workers’.17 ‘Admittedly, the radical forms of workerism, at least in France, were produced more by intellectuals and political apparatuses aiming to ‘represent’ the working class (from Proudhon down to the Communist Party) than by the workers themselves. The fact remains that they correspond to a tendency on the part of the working class to form itself into a closed ‘body’, to preserve gains that have been made and traditions of struggle and to turn back against bourgeois society the signifiers of class racism. It is from this reactive origin that the ambivalence characterizing workerism derives: the desire to escape from the condition of exploitation and the rejection of the contempt to which it is subject. Absolutely nowhere is this ambivalence more evident than in its relation to nationalism and to xenophobia. To the extent that in practice they reject official nationalism (when they do reject it), the workers produce in outline a political alternative to the perversion of class struggles. To the extent, however, that they project on to foreigners their fears and resentment, despair and defiance, it is not only that they are fighting competition; in addition, and much more profoundly, they are trying to escape their own exploitation. It is a hatred of themselves, as proletarians – in so far as they are in

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danger of being drawn back into the mill of proletarianization – that they are showing. To sum up, just as there is a constant relation of reciprocal determination between nationalism and racism, there is a relation of reciprocal determination between ‘class racism’ and ‘ethnic racism’ and these two determinations are not independent. Each produces its effects, to some extent, in the field of the other and under constraints imposed by the other. Have we, in retracing this overdetermination in its broad outline (and in trying to show how it illuminates the concrete manifestations of racism and the constitution of its theoretical discourse), answered the questions we posed at the beginning of this chapter? It would be more accurate to say that we have reformulated them. What has elsewhere been called the excess which, by comparison with nationalism, is constitutive of racism turns out at the same time to be a shortfall as far as the class struggle is concerned. But, though that excess is linked to the fact that nationalism is formed in opposition to the class struggle (even though it utilizes its dynamic), and that shortfall is linked to the fact that the class struggle finds itself repressed by nationalism, the two do not compensate one another; their effects tend, rather, to be combined. The important thing is not to decide whether nationalism is first and foremost a means of imagining and pursuing the unity of state and society, which then runs up against the contradictions of the class struggle, or whether it is primarily a reaction to the obstacles which the class struggle puts in the way of national unity. By contrast, it is crucially important to note that, in the historical field where both an unbridgeable gap between state and nation and endlessly re-emerging class antagonisms are to be found, nationalism necessarily takes the form of racism, at times in competition with other forms (linguistic nationalism, for example) and at times in combination with them, and that it thus becomes engaged in a perpetual headlong flight forward. Even when racism remains latent, or present only in a minority of individual consciousnesses, it is already that internal excess of nationalism which betrays, in both senses of the word, its articulation to the class struggle. Hence the ever recurring paradox of nationalism: the regressive imagining of a nation-state where the individuals would by their nature be ‘at home’, because they would be ‘among their own’ (their own kind), and the rendering of that state uninhabitable; the endeavour to produce a unified community in the face of ‘external’ enemies and the endless rediscovery that the enemy is ‘within’, identifiable by signs which are merely the phantasmatic elaboration of its divisions. Such a society is in a real sense a politically alienated society. But are not all contemporary societies, to some degree, grappling with their own political alienation?

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Notes

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1 Pierre Ayçoberry, The Nazi Question; An Essay on the Interpretation of National Socialism (1922-73), transl. R. Hurley, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1981. 2 See the theorizations of Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (2 vols), 5th edn (revised), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1966; and, more recently, of Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective; University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1986. 3 The personification of capital, a social relation, begins with the very figure of the capitalist. But this is never sufficient in itself for arousing an emotional reaction. This is why, following the logic of ‘excess’, other real-imaginary traits accumulate: life-style, lineage (the ‘200 families’*), foreign origins, secret strategies, racial plots (the Jewish plan for ‘world domination’), etc. The fact that, specifically in the case of the Jews, this personification is worked up in combination with a process of fetishization of money is clearly not accidental. * The idea that 200 families held most of the wealth of France and used it to exert political power was current in France in the 1930s, being quoted by Daladier at the Radical Congress of 1934. It seems probable that the figure 200 derived from the number of shareholders allowed to attend the annual meeting of the Bank of France. 4 Matters are further complicated by the fact that the lost unity of ‘Christian’ Europe, a mythic figuration of the’ ‘origins of its civilization’, is thus represented in the register of race at the point when that same Europe is embarking upon its mission of ‘civilizing the world’, i.e. submitting the world to its domination, by way of fierce competition between nations. 5 Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, London 1983, pp. 923. 6 L. Poliakov, The History of Anti-semitism (4 vols), transl. R. Howard, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1974; M. Duchet & M. Réberioux, ‘Préhistoire et histoire du racisme’, in P. de Commarond and C. Duchet, eds, Racisme et societé, Maspero, Paris 1969; C. Guillaumin, L’idéologie raciste. Genèse et langage actuel, Mouton, Paris-The Hague 1972; ‘Caractères spécifiques de l’idéologie raciste’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, vol. LIII, 1972; ‘Les ambiguïtés de la catégorie taxinomique “race”’, in L. Poliakov ed., Hommes et bêtes: Entretiens sur le racisme (I), Mouton, Paris-The Hague 1975; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1944. 7 And one which substitutes itself, in the French case, for the ‘ideology of the three orders’, a basically theological and juridical ideology, which is, by contrast, expressive of the organic place occupied by the nobility in the building of the State (‘feudalism’ properly so-called). 8 L. Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, vol. 2, pp. 222-32. 9 Louis Chevalier, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. transl. F. Jellinek. Routledge & Kegan Paul. London 1973. 10 Cf. G. Netchine, ‘L’individuel et le collect if dans les représentations psychologiques de la diversité des êtres humains au XIXe siècle’, in L. Poliakov. ed., Ni juif ni grec: Entretiens sur le racisme (II), Mouton, Paris-The Hague 1978; L. Murard and P. Zylberman. Le Petit Travailleur infatigable ou le prolétaire régénéré. Villes-usines, habitat et intimités au XIXe siècle, Editions Recherches, Fontenay-sous-Bois 1976.

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11 Cf. H. Arendt. ‘Antisemitism’, Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Andre Deutsch, London 1986, pp.68-79; L. Poliakov. History of Anti-semitism. vol. 3. pp. 328-37: Karl Polanyi, ‘Appendix II: Disraeli’s “Two Nations” and the problem of colored races’, The Great Transformation. Beacon Press, Boston 1957. pp. 290-94. 12 Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 1911. See the commentaries by Robert Linhart. Lenine, les paysans. Taylor, Seuil, Paris 1976; and Benjamin Coriat, L’Atelier et le chronomètre. Christian Bourgeois. Paris 1979. See also my study, ‘Sur le concept de la division du travail manuel et intellectuel’ in Jean Belkhir et al., L’Intellectuel, l’intelligentsia et les manuels, Anthropos, Paris 1983. 13 Clearly, the ‘bestiality’ of the slave has been a continual problem, from Aristotle and his contemporaries down to the modern slave trade (the hypersexualization to which it is subject is a sufficient indication of this): but the industrial revolution brought about a new paradox: the ‘bestial’ body of the worker is decreasingly animal and increasingly technicized and therefore humanized. It is the panic fear of a super-humanization of man (in his body and his intelligence which is ‘objectivized’ by cognitive sciences and the corresponding techniques of selection and training), rather than his sub-humanization – or, in any case, the reversibility of these two – which discharges itself in phantasies of animality and these are projected for preference on to the worker whose status as an ‘outsider’ [étranger] confers upon him at the same time the attributes of an ‘other male’, a ‘rival’. 14 See chapters I and 3 above. 15 Not only in the sense of individual filiation, but in the sense of a ‘population’ tending towards the practice of endogamy; not only in the sense of a transmission of skills (mediated by schooling, apprenticeship and industrial discipline) but in the sense of a ‘collective ethic’, constructed in institutions and through subjective identification. Alongside the works already cited. see J.-P. de Gaudemar. La Mobilisation générale. Editions du Champ Urbain, Paris 1979. 16 Daniel Bertaux, Destins personnels et structure de classe, PUF, Paris 1977. 17 C.G. Noiriel. Longwy: Immigrés et prolétaires. 1880-1980, PUF, Paris 1985: J. Fremontier, La Vie en bleu: Voyage en culture ouvrière, Fayard, Paris 1980; Françoise Duroux, ‘La Famille des ouvriers: mythe au politique?’, unpublished thesis, Université de Paris VII, 1982.

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The ghetto and the ethnic enclave Ceri Peach

This article is about the social process of assimilation and the spatial pattern of concentration and dispersal. Ethnic concentrations are often associated with segregation and regarded as a barrier for integration. The geographer Ceri Peach, however, argues that this common-sense take on spatial concentration is rooted in the early American literature on segregation. Peach gives a critical review of this theoretical literature, arguing that it fails to make a clear distinction between the ghetto and the ethnic enclave and presents an alternative model for understanding spatial concentration. He also presents clear definitions and concrete operationalisations for the concepts of the ghetto and the enclave, and discusses their theoretical implications. This article is a good example of the kind of scholarship that does not take common-sense notions for granted, but critically questions theoretical and methodological issues. This chapter examines the reasons behind the political fear of ethnic concentrations. It asks the question: is segregation always bad? It examines how a confusion of terminology in the early American analysis of ethnic and racial segregation has produced a malignant effect on the literature, politics and policies affecting the ways in which minorities are accommodated in west European cities. The paper is, in a way, a piece of intellectual archaeology, but it has a potent message for our current understanding of segregation and policies of minority accommodation. The key point is that there is a major difference between the ghetto and the ethnic enclave. However, American sociology for a long time failed to make this distinction and, worse still, linked the ghetto to the enclave to the suburb as the first of three spatial stages on the inevitable process of ethnic assimilation. The problem of intellectual archaeology is to separate (1) theory and methodology on the one hand from (2) models and application on the other. The theory and methodology devel-

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oped in the literature are correct; the model of application has been far too restrictive. The truth of the matter is that there are two basic models of minority incorporation: the assimilationist (melting pot) and the multiculturalist (mosaic). The enclave is part of the assimilationist model; the ghetto is confined to the multiculturalist model. Multiculturalism is a necessary condition for the ghetto, but it is not a sufficient condition. The central theory in the study of the spatial patterns of ethnic residential segregation is that there is a direct relationship between the social process of assimilation and the spatial pattern of dispersal (Park 1926; Duncan & Lieberson 1959; Peach 1975; Massey 1984). This view is, I believe, correct. The problem is that assimilation is not the only model for ethnic accommodation and integration. However, taking the theory first, seventy five years ago, Robert Park argued: “It is because social relations are so frequently and so inevitably correlated with spatial relations; because physical distances, so frequently are, or seem to be, the indexes of social distances, that statistics have any meaning whatsoever for sociology” (Park 1926: 18).

From this observation developed one of the most fruitful theories of the Chicago School of the 1920s and 1930s and one of the few examples of cumulative social science. The theory equated the statistical levels of residential segregation of minority ethnic populations to their levels of assimilation to the wider society. High levels of segregation were equated with non-assimilation; low levels with high levels of assimilation. The key process involved was social interaction; cultural behavior was modified according to whether one interacted more with one’s own ethnic group or with the charter population. This interaction was controlled by proximity to, and intermingling with, the respective groups. Residential isolation was hypothesized to minimize social interaction with outsiders while promoting social interaction within the group. Within-group interaction was hypothesized to reinforce the group’s identity, language maintenance and in-marriage.

Interpretation and operationalization Although the general proposition of the relationship between residential segregation and social assimilation was clear, there were problems of operationalization. Assimilation was difficult to de-

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fine. Books were written on the topic (for example, Gordon 1964). However, Lieberson (1963) provides us with a helpful definition: “assimilation has taken place when it is no longer possible to predict anything about an individual or a group on the basis of their ethnic origins than it is for any member of the population as a whole.” Operationalization meant taking multidimensional comparisons of the minority population in relation to the target of the core society. Structural assimilation, or the large scale entry into prime group (close friendship circles) of the core society was regarded by Gordon as the key step (Gordon 1964: 81). Thereafter, intermarriage and other identificational changes were seen by Gordon to follow inevitably. Thus operationally, assimilation was treated as a multi-dimensional phenomenon and its progress was measured by examining longitudinal change of its many variables (Gordon 1964). Acquisition of the English language, socio-economic status, out-marriage, citizenship were some of the variables examined. Segregation also proved problematic to operationalize, largely because of the different ways in which it was conceptualized (Peach 1981). Residential segregation is also a multidimensional phenomenon. A large number of different techniques, differing not only in mathematical formula but in conceptualization of segregation itself have been suggested (Peach 1981). Massey and Denton (1993) have suggested a battery of five measures to measure what they have termed the hyper segregation of African Americans. However, a review paper by Duncan and Duncan (1955) effectively concentrated most subsequent work on the Index of Dissimilarity (id). id measures the percentage of a population which would have to shift its area of residence in order to replicate the distribution of the population with which it is being compared. id is a measure of unevenness with similar characteristics and values to the economists’ Gini Index. Lieberson’s P* (Lieberson 1981), a measure of isolation, has also come into more general use since the 1980s. Unlike id it is an asymmetric measure. It recognizes that the degree of exposure of a small group to a large group is different from the exposure of the large group to the small group. Unlike id its use has tended to be descriptive rather than analytical in correlation regressions.

multidimensionality

Segregation and interaction Duncan and Lieberson demonstrated for Chicago in the 1930s and 1950s that there was an inverse relationship between the level of segregation of foreign national groups and the percent of the group able

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584 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

social interaction

ceri peach

to speak English. They also showed that high degrees of out-marriage correlated with low levels of segregation (Duncan & Lieberson 1959; Lieberson 1963: 156-158). Their argument was taken further by Peach (1980a; 1980b) who demonstrated that Kennedy’s (1944; 1952) triple melting pot (Protestants, Catholics and Jews) in New Haven, Connecticut, did not exist. The Irish Poles and Italians in the supposed Catholic melting pot were all highly segregated from each other. Intermarriage rates between these groups were lower than statistically expected while Irish intermarriage with the (‘Protestant’) British, Germans and Scandinavians, from whom they had low levels of segregation, were higher than statistically expected. Residential segregation was the clearest predictor of group intermarriage. Thus, residential mixing was hypothesized as the key to social interaction. If residential mixing is limited to one’s own ethnic group, then the values and taken-for-granted nature of the group’s beliefs will be reinforced. If mixing takes place with outsiders, then takenfor-granted values, language and expected marriage partner choice is likely to become modified. Residential mixing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for social interaction. However, where residential mixing takes place, it is likely to promote social interaction. The hypothesis formed itself into what we may conceive of as a simple three stage cycle. The first generation of immigrants clustered together in high concentrations and high segregation in the central city. There they were unassimilated, few spoke English; overwhelmingly they married their own ethnic group. The second generation moved a little away from their inner city port of entry; they were less segregated; a higher proportion spoke English; a greater proportion married out. The third generation suburbanized, spoke English and intermarried fully. They were assimilated.

But assimilation is not the only model However, one should not assume that assimilation was the desired outcome for all groups. On the one hand, social assimilation is enhanced by residential dispersal, while on the other hand, residential segregation has the opposite effect. Therefore, a group wishing to assimilate will tend to disperse, whilst for a group wishing to maintain its ethnic identity, clustering is an important strategy. It is also true that a group that disperses tends to assimilate whether or not the group as a whole is in favor of assimilation or not. There are thus two basic ways in which minorities are accommodated into a wider society: assimilation and integration. Assimilation

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585

argues for the disappearance of difference either through conforming to a dominant structure (as in Anglo conformism) or through merging (as in the melting pot). Integration or plurality or multiculturalism means accommodation while maintaining a separate identity. Integration is often economic while maintaining social closure. The two models will thus be expected to produce different spatial outcomes. Assimilation requires spatial diffusion. The minority and majority become socially and residentially intermixed. Multiculturalism or integration (as opposed to assimilation) posits a plural society in which social encapsulation and residential concentrations and separation, through higher degrees of segregation, remain.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Not all plurality is voluntary However, the ghetto model may come about from totally different causes. It may be either voluntarily embraced or negatively enforced (Boal 1981). A hegemonic group wishing to separate itself from its perceived inferiors will attempt to enforce segregation upon the lower group (Massey & Denton 1993; Lemon 1991). There are therefore two diametrically different reasons for ethnic segregation. Ethnic segregation may be either voluntarily adopted as a strategy for group survival or else it may be negatively imposed upon a weaker group. While there are two different models of accommodation, key points of the interpretation of the levels of social integration represented by the degree of spatial segregation of groups from one another remain the same. Low levels of segregation indicate high degrees of social interaction; high levels of segregation represent low degrees of social interaction. Thus interpreting the probable outcomes of given levels of segregation, it is not critical to know whether those levels are the net result of positive or negative forces.

imposition

The problem with the Chicago School The central problem with the Chicago School was that while it correctly conceptualized the relationship between spatial pattern and social process, it failed to recognize that the unidirectional transition from the highly concentrated inner city to suburban dispersal was not an inevitable process nor was it the only process. The Chicago School did not distinguish between the melting pot and the mosaic.

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differentiation

ceri peach

They did not distinguish between the assimilationist and the pluralistic models. They did not distinguish between the ghetto and the enclave. The ghetto and the immigrant colony were conceptualized as interchangeable terms. “The Chinatowns, the Little Sicilians, and the other so-called ‘ghettos’ with which students of urban life are familiar are special types of a more general species of natural area which the conditions and tendencies of city life inevitably produce (...) the keener, the more energetic and the more ambitious very soon emerge from their ghettos and immigrant colonies and move into an area of second immigrant settlement, or perhaps into a cosmopolitan area in which the members of several immigrant and racial groups live side by side” (Park 1926: 9).

Worse still, not only did the Chicago School fail to distinguish between the ghetto and the enclave, but it believed that the ghetto was a stage within the melting pot model. It saw the ghetto as the first stage of three generational progression of (1) ghetto, (2) enclave, (3) suburb. In this fundamental misunderstanding the Chicago School falsified the ethnic history of long settled groups, misunderstood the processes affecting African Americans and mis-forecast their future in American cities. For the Chicago School, the terms “ghetto” and “enclave” were not problematized. Furthermore, it was assumed that the outward movement of minority ethnic populations away from the inner city equated to dispersal. A series of researchers in the lower foothills of the Chicago School busied themselves demonstrating the unstoppable outward diffusion of minority groups from their inner city segregated ports of entry to their inevitable suburban diffusion (Cressey 1938; Ford 1950; Kiang 1968). However, while they demonstrated the progressive shift of the center of gravity of ethnic groups away from the cbd over time, in the case of African Americans, outward movement did not always equate to dispersal. The ghetto moved out with them like the tongue of a glacier. Diagrammatically, Figure 1 shows the outward movement of the centre of gravity of the ethnic populations of Chicago, over time, from the cbd. The diagram also shows the decrease in the degree of concentration as the suburbanizing process continues. The expected relationship between segregation, measured by the index of dissimilarity and assimilation is shown in Figure 2. The combined relationship between outward movement, decreasing segregation and increasing assimilation is represented in Figure 3.

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However, for the African American population, the level of segregation remained obstinately fixed on the high side of the assimilation diagram, even when the center of gravity of the group showed movement away from the central city (Figure 4).

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

The flaws of the three generational model While the basic hypothesis of the equation of high segregation with non-assimilation remains valid, interpretations of the model were flawed by the mistaken belief that the hypothesis had universal validity, that all groups would conform to this three generational cycle. Even in the 1950s it was confidently declared by the Head of the Chicago School, Philip Hauser, that African Americans would inevitably follow this model.

universal validity

“The Negro migrant to the city will, without question, follow the same pattern of mobility blazed by the successive waves of immigrants who settled our central cities. Just as the immigrant underwent a process of ‘Americanization’ the immigrant Negro is undergoing a process of ‘urbanization’. The Negro is already rising and will continue to rise on the social-economic scale as measured by education, occupation, income and the amenities of urban existence. Furthermore, the Negro, in time, will diffuse through the metropolitan area and occupy outlying suburban as well as central city areas” (Hauser 1958: 65).

This view was deeply mistaken. It equated upward mobility with spatial diffusion. It regarded the process of ghetto formation and dispersal as the same as the three generation process of other immigrant groups. It regarded time as the independent variable for ghetto dissolution. It was wrong on all counts. In reality, the African American ghetto was different in kind from the ethnic enclave of the European and other ethnics. Park’s casual equation of Chinatowns, Little Sicily’s and other so-called “ghettos” with the black ghetto (Park 1926: 9) was deeply flawed. The black ghetto was dually segregated; nearly all urban African Americans lived in such areas; almost the whole population in such areas was black. The enclaves, on the other hand, were dually dilute. Only a minority of ethnic lived in areas which were associated with them. Very rarely did they form even a majority of the population of what were

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ceri peach

Figure 1 Outward movement of minority groups, Chicago, 1890-1914

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

II III IV V VI VII VIII XI X Mile Zones DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONS BORN IN CHICAGO

60 56 52 48 44 40 36 32 28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0

I

II III IV V VI VII VIII XI X Mile Zones DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONS BORN IN IRELAND

II III IV V VI VII VIII XI X Mile Zones DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONS BORN IN GERMANY

I

II III IV V VI VII VIII XI X Mile Zones DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONS BORN IN POLAND

60 56 52 48 44 40 36 32 28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0

I

II III IV V VI VII VIII XI X Mile Zones DISTRIBUTION OF NEGROES

Percent

I

Percent

60 56 52 48 44 40 36 32 28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0

1890 1940

Percent

I

Percent

60 56 52 48 44 40 36 32 28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0

60 56 52 48 44 40 36 32 28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0

Percent

Percent

60 56 52 48 44 40 36 32 28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0

I

II III IV V VI VII VIII XI X Mile Zones DISTRIBUTION OF PERSONS BORN IN ITALY

Source: Ford 1950

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part iii – conceptual issues

Figure 2 Hypothesized relationship between segregation (Index of Dissimilarity) and assimilation over time Exepected Relationship between Residential Segregation and Social Assimilation; Assimilation Model

Start

assimilation model

Finish

100 High Segregation Non Assimilation

0 Low Segregation Total Assimilation

City of Chicago, 1930, 1950 and 1960 Indices of Dissimilarity for Foreign-born Whites born in Poland 1930 (58)

1950 1960 (45) (38) 1990 (19)

100

0

supposedly “their” areas. Thomas Philpott’s (1978) book The Slum and the Ghetto, hammered the point home (Table 1). It can be seen that while 92.7% of the black population lived in the black ghetto and the African American population formed 81.5% of the population of the black ghetto, only 3% of the Irish lived in Irish areas and they formed only one third of the population of Irish areas. The two most concentrated white groups were the Italians and the Poles. Just under half of the Italians lived in Italian areas and they formed just under half of the population of Italian areas. The Poles were a little more concentrated: 61% lived in Polish areas and they formed just over half of the population of Polish areas.

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590

ceri peach

Figure 3 Hypothesized relationship between decreases in segregation and group outward movement from inner cities

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

100

% ethinic group

First generation INNER CITY

Ch

ang

eo ver tim e Second generation Third generation SUBURB

0 Distance from centre

Change over time Second 50 generation First 70 generation

30 Third generation

100

0 Degree of segregation, index of dissimilarity High segregtion Low segregtion Non-assimilation High assimilation Non-English-speaking English-speaking High in-marriage Low in-marriage Wearing of traditional dress

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part iii – conceptual issues

Figure 4 Failure of the African American levels of segregation (id) to decrease over time, Chicago, 1930-1990

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Black-White Segregation Chicago 1930 – 1990 (Ward/tract level)

1930 (76) 1980 (80) 1990 (85) 1970 (92) 100

0

‘Ghettoization’ of ethnic groups, Chicago, 1930

Table 1 Group

Group’s City Population

Group’s “Ghetto” Population

Total Percentage “Ghetto” of group Population “Ghettoized”

Group’s percentage “Ghetto” Population

Irish

169,568

4,993

14,595

2.9

33.8

German

377,975

53,821

169,649

14.2

31.7

Swedish

140,913

21,581

88,749

15.3

24.3

Russian

169,736

63,416

149,208

37.4

42.5

Czech

122,089

53,301

169,550

43.7

31.4

Italian

181,861

90,407

195,736

49.7

46.2

Polish

401,316

248,024

457,146

61.0

54.3

Negro

233,903

216,846

266,051

92.7

81.5

Source: Philpott 1978: 141, Table 7

However, even these levels of concentration were different in kind rather than different in degree from the situation of African Americans. All the European minorities lived in mixed areas. Hardly any of the blacks did. While white ethnic enclaves dissolved over time, black ghettos intensified and expanded territorially in a compact form. Even in 1990, the massive concentration of the African American population into black areas of Chicago continued (Table 2). Two thirds of the African American population were living in areas which were 90% or more black; 82% were in areas that were 50% or more black.

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ceri peach

Table 2 Percentage of the African American population of Chicago PMSA, living in tracts of a given black percentage, 1990 Black Percentage of Tract

Black Population living in such tracts

Percentage of the total Black Population of Chicago in such tracts

100%

111,804

8.4

99% or more

381,347

28.7

90% or more

884,725

66.5

50% or more

1,087,600

81.7

30% or more

1,163,969

87.5

Total Black Population

 1,330,636

Source: Based on data from GeoLytics Census cd +Maps us Census 1990 data

the ghetto-enclave link

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 592

If one compares the Chicago situation in 1930 and 1990 with London in 1991 (Table 3) the difference in kind rather than degree between the situation of blacks in the US and Britain is vividly illustrated. The column heading “Percentage of Group Ghettoized” simply copies Philpott’s category, but refers to the proportion of a group living in areas arbitrarily defined as those where they form 30% + of an enumeration district (block). By failing to distinguish between the ghetto and the ethnic enclave, the two distinct phenomena were linked together as the first two stages of the three generational model: ghetto – enclave – suburb. From here it was an easy step to envisage groups occupying these three positions as occupying places on an escalator. Those at the bottom of the staircase, in the ghetto, were new arrivals; those at the top, in the suburbs had been on the staircase longest and had reached their destination. Those who were half way up had previously been at the bottom and were now on their way to the top. From this conceptualization, it became easy to see time/space substitutions in the three generational model. If, for the sake of argument, the Irish were suburbanized and the Poles were still in an enclave and the African Americans in the ghetto, then it became possible to argue that a generation previously, the Irish were in the enclave and two generations ago, they were in the ghetto. The AfricanAmericans and the Poles were envisaged as representing the first two stages of the Irish past. In the same way, the contemporarily suburbanized Irish, predicted the Polish future in the next generation and the African American future in two generations. This, af-

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part iii – conceptual issues

ter all was what Hauser (1958) was predicting. However, while the Polish/Irish time/space substitution was correct, the Irish future did not exist for the black population. Nor did the contemporaneously ghettoized black situation represent the Irish past. No other group had experienced the hyper segregation of the African Americans. Table 3 ‘Ghettoization’ of ethnic groups at London, 30% cutoff Group

Group’s Group’s Total City “Ghetto” “Ghetto” Population Population Population

Non-white

 1,346,119

Black Caribbean Black African Black Other

721,873

 1,589,476

290,968

7,755

22,545

163,635

3,176

8,899

level in Greater

ed

Percentage Group’s of group percentage “Ghettoized” “Ghetto” Population 53.6 45.4 2.6

34.4

2.0

35.6

80,613

.

.

.

.

347,091

88,887

202,135

25.6

44.0

Pakistani

87,816

1,182

3,359

1.4

35.2

Bangladeshi

85,738

28,280

55,500

33.0

51.0

Chinese

56,579

38

111

0.0

34.2

Other Asian

112,807

176

572

0.2

30.8

Other Other

120,872

209

530

0.2

39.4

Irish born

256,470

1023

2,574

0.4

39.8

Indian

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Source: Peach 1996

While Hauser in 1958 could confidently predict the inevitability of black diffusion and assimilation, seven years later the whole optimistic edifice collapsed with the publication of Karl and Alma Taeuber’s book Negroes in Cities (1965). Using the first large scale availability of census block data from the 1960 census, the Taeubers demonstrated the overwhelming segregation of African Americans in American cities. On a scale from 0 (no segregation) to 100 (total segregation) the Taeubers showed that the mean segregation index was 86.2 for the 207 cities for which block level data were available in 1960. They showed that the index was high in all regions (1965: 37), that it was high irrespective of whether city populations were large or small, whether the non-white population was large or small, whether the non-white percentage was high or low. They showed that indexes had

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segregation by income

ceri peach

been high in the past and had remained high. Hauser’s comforting expectation of decreasing segregation with time was a delusion. The Taeubers also dealt a death blow to another American dream. This was that economic progress would dissolve racial segregation. Using Lieberson’s (1963) technique of indirect standardization, they calculated how segregated the black population of Chicago would be from whites, if income differences were the only variable affecting their distribution. This is achieved by applying the percentage that African Americans form of each income band in the city population to the appropriate number of person in each income band in each tract in the city. For example, if blacks formed 10% of the middle income group in Chicago, then 10% of the middle income group would be expected to be black, wherever the middle income group lived and so forth. Having calculated the “expected” distribution of black and white in the city, the degree of segregation between the two groups could be calculated and compared with the observed level of segregation. On this basis, the observed level of segregation in Chicago in 1960 was 83 and the “expected” index was 10. In other words, only 10/83 or 12% of the observed level of segregation could be attributed to differences in income (Taeuber & Taeuber 1964). Blacks were segregated from whites because black, not because they were poorer than whites. Subsequent work by Massey and Denton (1993: 86) showed that the intervening years since Taeuber and Taeuber’s work (pace William Julius Wilson 1978) had not produced a decline in the significance of race. Massey and Denton demonstrated that irrespective of income level, poor black were segregated from poor whites, middle income blacks from middle income whites and rich blacks from rich whites by the same massive amounts, with indexes over 80 almost without exception (Table 4). Table 4 Segregation by income in thirty metropolitan areas with the largest black populations, 1970-1980 Income Category Metropolitan area

Under $2,500 $25,000-$27,500 $50,000 +

Northern areas

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 594

Boston

85.1

83.9

89.1

Buffalo

85.2

80.0

90.0

Chicago

91.1

85.8

86.3

Cincinnati

81.7

70.9

74.2

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part iii – conceptual issues

Table 4

Continued

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Income Category Metropolitan area

Under $2,500 $25,000-$27,500 $50,000 +

Cleveland

91.6

87.1

86.4

Columbus

80.3

74.6

83.4

Detroit

88.6

85.0

86.4

Gary-Hammond-E.Chicago

90.6

89.5

90.9

Indianapolis

80.8

76.6

80.0

Kansas City

86.1

79.3

84.2

Los Angeles-Long Beach

85.4

79.8

78.9

Milwaukee

91.3

87.9

86.3

New York

86.2

81.2

78.6

Newark

85.8

79.0

77.5

Philadelphia

84.9

78.6

81.9

Pittsburgh

82.1

80.6

87.9

St. Louis

87.3

78.4

83.2

San Francisco-Oakland

79.9

73.7

72.1

Average

85.8

80.7

83.2

Atlanta

82.2

77.3

78.2

Baltimore

82.4

72.3

76.8

Birmingham

46.1

40.8

45.2

Dallas-Ft. Worth

83.1

74.4

82.4

Greensboro-Winston Salem

63.2

55.1

70.8

Houston

73.8

65.5

72.7

Memphis

73.8

66.8

69.8

Miami

81.6

78.4

76.5

New Orleans

75.8

63.1

77.8

Norfolk-Virginia Beach

70.1

63.3

72.4

Tampa-St. Petersburg

81.8

76.0

85.7

Washington, D.C.

79.2

67.0

65.4

Average

74.4

66.7

72.8

Southern Areas

Source: Massey &: Denton 1993 (Table 4.1, p. 86)

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ceri peach

Thus we arrive at the realization that there is not one model of American minority integration but two: the assimilationist and the pluralist, the enclave and the ghetto. The great error has been to force the pluralist model of African American segregation into the assimilationist framework and to graft on the contemporary ghetto model onto the historical European settlement patterns in cities. The ghetto was different in kind; the ghetto was distinct from the ethnic enclave. We can summarise some of the differences (Table 5). Table 5 Summary of differences between the African American ghetto and the ethnic enclave African American Ghetto

Ethnic Enclave

Dually segregated: Large majority of Dually dilute: only a minority of the blacks are in it; large majority in it are group are in it; they form only a miblack nority of the population of the area associated with the group Negative

Positive

Enforced

Voluntary

Expanding

Residual

Real

Symbolic

Threatening

Touristic

Permanent

Temporary

Is all high segregation for negative reasons?

negative discrimination

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 596

However, because the disproving of the universality of the Chicago School’s three generational model was demonstrated through the example of the African American ghetto, another error was created. This error was the belief that all high levels of segregation were produced by negative discrimination. The reason for this belief is not hard to find. First, the expectation of decreasing levels of segregation over time led to the belief that high segregation was an early and primitive feature of minority settlement. Secondly, nearly all of the available examples of high segregation related to groups which were disadvantaged. Thirdly, the key minority group, the Jews, on whom the plural model of socioeconomic-progress-but-continuing-ethnic-segregation could be tested, were not counted in the US census as either a national origin group nor as an ethnic group. “Russian-born” was treated by some analysts

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part iii – conceptual issues

as a surrogate for Jewish origin (Lieberson & Waters 1988: 10-11) but of course not all Jews were of Russian origin nor were all of Russian origin Jewish. Nathan Kantrowitz (1969) hinted at segregation as a viable strategy for groups that wished to maintain their ethnic identity, but in a fairly oblique way, arguing only that decreases in the level of European segregation in American cities should not be expected to continue for ever. However, while US government identified the Jewish population as a religious rather than ethnic group and therefore desisted the census from enumerating them, the Canadian census harbored no such delicacy. The Canadian census counts the Jewish population as both a religious and as an ethnic group. The levels of Jewish residential segregation in Canadian cities is markedly high (Table 6). In terms of the Index of Dissimilarity, Jewish segregation is as high as African American segregation in American cities. In Toronto and Montreal, which in 1991 contained the two largest concentrations of the Jewish population of Canada, the ids were 75 and 82 respectively. The Canadian Jewish population is extremely successful on a socio-economic scale and although anti Semitism exists in Canada, there is no indication that the levels of Jewish segregation noted in the table are not the result of positive wishes for association (Darroch & Marston 1972; Hiebert 1995).

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Index of Dissimilarity

Table 6 Indices of dissimilarity for the Jewish ethnic population of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Winnipeg, 1991

Jewish id Jewish % Pop Jewish Pop Total Pop

Toronto

Montreal

Vancouver

Winnipeg

Calgary

75.0

81.9

56.8

71.6

58.2

3.0

2.46

0.68

1.84

114,735

76,780

10,930

11,980

3,893,046

3,127,242

1,602,502

652,364

0.56 4,240 754,033

Source: Author’s calculation from StatsCanada data

Perhaps, even more interesting about the Jewish patterns of segregation is the suggestion that it has come about accompanied not only by upward social mobility but by suburbanization as well. However, the high indices of dissimilarity for the Jewish population in Toronto and Montreal are similar to those for African Americans south of the border, the Jewish population lives in enclaves rather than ghettos on the black model. The highest percentage that the religious Jewish population formed of any Toronto tract was 70% in 1991

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Europe

ceri peach

and only 2% of the population lived there. Only a third of the Jewish population lived in areas in which they formed a majority of the tract population and all of these tracts held a mixed (i.e. non Jewish) population as well (Table 7). In Montreal, the highest percentage which the Jewish religious population formed of any tract was 90%. Like Toronto, a third of the Montreal religious Jewish population lived in tracts where they formed a majority of the population. In London, although we do not have ethnic census data, it is apparent from other sources that the Jewish population which originally settled in the working class East End at the end of the nineteenth century, suburbanized, notably to the north western outer fringes of the city during the twentieth century, but remained concentrated (Newman 1985; Waterman & Kosmin 1986a, 1986b). Such patterns of ethnic pluralism may be referred to as relocating enclaves (see Figure 5)· There is also evidence from European experience that some affluent minority ethnic populations manifest high levels of segregation. Glebe’s work on the Japanese in Dusseldorf (1986) and White’s work on the Japanese in London (1998) both indicate id’s in the seventies. These groups differ, of course from settled minorities in that they are largely composed of sojourners who are seconded by their firms for a period of years. Such concentrations may be thought of as parachuted communities (see Figure 5). On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that levels of segregation in European cities do not approach the levels observed for African Americans and that the European experience is closer to the ethnic enclave model than to the ghetto (Amersfoort 1974, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1987; Amersfoort & Cortie 1973, 1994; Friedrichs 1998; Giffinger 1998; Kempen & Özüekren 1998; Kempen & Van Weesep 1998; Kesteloot & Cortie 1998; Musterd et al. 1998). Table 7 Percentage of the Religious Jewish Population of Toronto living in tracts where they formed a given percentage of the population Jewish percentage of tract population 70+

Jewish population living in such tracts

% of total Toronto Jewish population in such tracts

3,135

2.1

60-69

20,470

13.5

50-59

29,300

19.4

40-49

14,955

9.9

Toronto

151,115

100.0 *

* = 3,9% of total Toronto population of 3,893,046

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Summary of types of enclaves and ghettos

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We may now summarize a variety of enclaves and ghettos in a diagram. Model 1 is the traditional assimilation-diffusion model of the Chicago three generational schemas. This is the most widespread and general type. Settlement begins in the inner city; the second generation moves out a little and becomes more assimilated; the third generation is suburbanized diffused and totally assimilated. Even in its early days, the center is not the exclusive preserve of one group. Model 2 is the American Ghetto Model. It is involuntary and plural (nonassimilatory). It starts in the inner city, but with almost exclusive concentration of the minority. Nearly all blacks are in it; nearly all in it are black. It expands outwards in a segment shape over time, but remains dually exclusive. Figure 5 Diagrammatic representation of different spatial models of assimilation and multi-culturalism Model 1 Assimilation - Diffusion (Examples: Europeans in US cities)

Model 2 Involuntary Plural (High Segregation) (Examples: Chicago South Side Black Ghetto)

Model 3a Voluntary Plural in Situ Persistent Ethnic Enclave, moderately high segregation (Examples: Turks in Berlin, Pakistanis in Birmingham)

Model 3b Voluntary Plural: Relocation (Example: London Jewish model)

Model 3c PARACHUTED SUBURBAN Instant suburbanization, Affluent immigrants (Examples: London Indian, Düsseldorf Japanese, London Japanese, Brussels American)

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600 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

ceri peach

Model 3a is what we may call the voluntary plural, in situ, persistent enclave. It is the San Francisco or New York Chinatown model. A high proportion of the population of the areas may be of a given ethnic group, but the Chinese population in Chinatown forms only a minority (often a small minority) of the total Chinese population of the city. It is a symbolic or touristic center. It is an institutional or market center. It may remain and persist over time, but it is not the exclusive center of the ethnic group. Model 3b is the voluntary plural relocated model. The Jewish inner city location, which relocates en masse to the suburbs is the key exemplar. The London Jewish shift from the East End to the northwestern suburbs is the best studied example. Although segregation levels measured by the Index of Dissimilarity may be high, the areas are not the exclusive preserve of the Jewish population, but are mixed. Nor are all Jews living in such areas. Model 3c is what I have termed the Parachuted Suburban model. These are concentrated areas of affluent often transitory sojourners. The Japanese in London and Dusseldorf or the Hong Kong Chinese in Vancouver are good examples.

Discussion and conclusion

brick-in-the-pond model

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The United States has had an unparalleled, successful history of assimilating minorities. Buoyed by this success, the theorization of this process has been cast into a single model, which I have characterized as the three generational model. However, it has ignored the multicultural or plural model and worse still, tried to make this essentially contrasting model part of the assimilation model itself. Put crudely, the assimilation model is a brick-in-the-pond model. The group starts concentrated, segregated and unassimilated in the inner city; it speaks a foreign language; it marries its own kind; it is unassimilated. The second generation ripples out a little, mixes more with the charter group, learns English and begins to marry out. The third generation replicates the socioeconomic structure of the population as a whole; it speak English; it is highly intermarried; it is suburbanized and assimilated. The theory states that there is a direct relationship between the degree of residential, spatial segregation and the degree of social distance: high spatial segregation, high social distance between groups; low segregation, low social distance (and high degree of social interaction, marriage et cetera).

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The methodology of using the Index of Dissimilarity to measure the degrees of spatial segregation is correct. High indices of dissimilarity give an excellent and consistent measure of group social distances. The problem lies in assuming that there is only one model. The single model argument is for an inevitable, unidirectional change from high to low segregation over time. This model does work for a large number of groups in a large number of situations. But, it is not the only model. The African American population does not fit into this model, nor does the Jewish population. For a long time, attempts were made to interpret the African American experience in terms of the single model when the evidence pointed in a totally different direction. Black segregation was high and remained high. The Jewish pattern escaped notice because the data were not collected in the US. But, if we can extrapolate Canadian experience, where such data exist, the Canadian data show an unmistakable pattern of high and long-lasting segregation. But Jewish concentration does not constitute a ghetto, but a voluntary enclave. Because the us sociological analysis operated for so long on the single model, it had a massively distorting effect on both historical analysis and on contemporary policy. Historically, it was assumed that all groups were previously as segregated as the contemporary African American population. There was a mythological back-projection of current levels of black segregation onto the nineteenth century history of European immigration. The ghetto came to be seen as a stage through which all immigrant groups went. Hence the Chicago School references to Irish ghettos, German ghettos et cetera. Since there was only one model it was assumed that it was only a matter of time before African Americans would diffuse through the urban system and assimilate like the Irish and Germans. This process for different groups was viewed as a time/space substitution, with old groups representing the future positions of new groups and new groups representing the past position of old groups. However, the black ghetto was different in kind from the degree of segregation experienced by other groups. It was massively more concentrated and dually segregated: nearly all blacks were in the ghetto and nearly all of the ghetto population was black. The black ghetto did not dissolve with time. The Jewish high levels of concentration, also failed to dissipate over time. The precise locations did change. There was movement from the inner city to the suburbs, but it was a movement en masse: a relocation rather than a diffusion. Unlike the black segregation, however, these concentrations were voluntaristic and by no means as dually segregated as the black experience. Not all

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 601

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single model argument

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602 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Britain

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 602

ceri peach

of the Jewish population lived in Jewish areas, nor was the population of Jewish areas all Jewish. Both the African American and the Jewish populations were following plural rather than assimilatory models. The assimilation model was not the only one. If we look at the contemporary experience of Britain, we can see both the plural and the assimilatory models in existence. The Black Caribbean population has followed the assimilatory trajectory. Its levels of segregation in London have fallen, census by census since 1961. The areas of greatest concentration have experienced the greatest losses of Caribbean population. The movement has followed the classic pattern of outward movement from the center towards the periphery. However, when we look at the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations, changes in population have tended to reinforce rather than reduce existing areas of concentration. Both the assimilation and the multicultural models equate dispersal, diffusion and low segregation with assimilation. However, the dominant model of the Chicago School considered the assimilation model to be the only one and considered its process to be inevitable. It recognized the existence of the ghetto, but did not distinguish it from the enclave. It conceptualized the ghetto as the first stage of the sequence of the three generational model. It incorporated its very antithesis as part of the model itself. The failure to distinguish between the ghetto and the enclave has had a pernicious effect on the understanding of ethnic areas in American cities. First, it has conceptualized the ghetto as a temporary phenomenon. In reality the ghetto has become permanent. Secondly, it envisioned socio-economic improvement as the mechanism for the dissolution of the ghetto; in reality, rich African Americans are as segregated from rich whites as poor blacks are from poor whites. Economic differences are not unimportant but they do not explain black segregation. Thirdly, it encouraged academics to identify the ghetto as a product of wealth difference rather than race (Harvey 1973: 120-152; Wacquant 1997; Peach 1998). Fourthly it has falsified our view of ethnic history in the United States by envisioning a ghettoized past for the early years of all groups; it has led to the assumption that Irish, Italian and other ethnic enclaves were homogeneously made up of the Irish, Italians or whatever. They never were. Fifthly it encouraged the belief that the African American ghetto would dissolve in a “natural” and inevitable way. Sixthly, it encouraged the belief that all segregation was bad and negatively superimposed on groups. In reality, for those groups who choose it and for whom it is not enforced, concentration has many benefits. However, we need to be able to recognize the difference between the chosen enclave and the enforced ghetto.

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1997 “Three Pernicious Premises In The Study Of The American Ghetto.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21(2): 341-353. Waterman, S. & B.A. Kosmin 1986a “Residential patterns and processes: a study of Jews in three London boroughs.” Transactions, Institute of British Geographers ns 13: 79-95. 1986b “Mapping an underenumerated ethnic population: Jews in London.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 9(4): 484-501. White, P. 199 “The Settlement Patterns of Developed World Migrants in London.” Urban Studies 35(10): 1725-1744. Wilson, W.J. 1978 The Declining Significance Of Race: Blacks And Changing American Institutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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About the editors

Marco Martiniello is research director of the National Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS) in Belgium and a professor of sociology and politics at the University of Liège, where he serves as director of the Center for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM). He is also a member of the IMISCOE Executive Board and president of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Sociology of Migration. He has authored and edited numerous works providing transatlantic comparative perspectives on migration, ethnicity, racism, multiculturalism and citizenship in the European Union. Recent publications include The Transnational Political Participation of Immigrants: A Transatlantic Perspective (Routledge 2009), Citizenship in European Cities: Immigrants, Local Politics and Integration Policies (Ashgate 2004), Migration between States and Markets (Ashgate 2004) and La nouvelle Europe migratoire: Pour une politique proactive de l’immigration (Labor 2001). Jan Rath is a professor of urban sociology at the University of Amsterdam, where he serves as director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (IMES). He is also the European chair of International Metropolis and a member of the IMISCOE Board of Directors. An anthropologist and an urban studies specialist, he has authored and edited numerous works on the sociology, politics and economics of post-migration processes. Recent publications include Tourism, Ethnic Diversity and the City (Routledge 2007), Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Venturing Abroad in the Age of Globalization (Berg 2003), Unravelling the Rag Trade: Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Seven World Cities (Berg/New York University Press 2002) and Immigrant Businesses: The Economic, Political and Social Environment (Macmillan 2000). For more information see www.janrath.com.

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List of Sources

Part I – The migration process 1 Castles, S. & G. Kosack (1972), ‘The function of labour immigration in Western European capitalism’, New Left Review 73(MayJune): 3-21. 2 Hammar, T. (1985), ‘Introduction to European immigration policy: A comparative study’, European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study, 1-13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3 Faist, T. (1997), ‘The crucial meso-level’, in T. Hammar, G. Brochmann, K. Tamas & T. Faist (eds.), International Migration, Immobility and Development: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 187217. Oxford/New York: Berg. 4 Vertovec, S. (1999), ‘Conceiving and researching transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(2): 447-462. 5 King, R. (2002), ‘Towards a new map of European migration’, International Journal of Population Geography 8(2): 89-106. 6 Guiraudon, V. (2003), ‘The constitution of a European immigration policy domain: A political sociology approach’, Journal of European Policy 10(2): 263-282. 7 Sayad, A. (2004), ‘Immigration and “state thought”’, in A. Sayad (ed.), The Suffering of the Immigrant, 278-293. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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list of sources

Part II – Modes of incorporation

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8 Van Amersfoort, H. (1982), ‘Minority as a sociological concept’, Immigration and the Formation of Minority Groups: The Dutch Experience 1945-1975, 10-30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9 Modood, T. (1983), ‘“Black”, racial equality and Asian identity’, New Community 14(3): 397-405. 10 Brubaker, W. R. (1989), ‘Introduction to immigration, immigration and the politics of citizenship in Europe and North America’, in W. R. Brubaker, Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America, 1-22. Lanham: University Press of America. 11 Martiniello, M. (1993), ‘Ethnic leadership, ethnic communities’ political powerlessness and the state in Belgium’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 16(2): 236-255. 12 Wieviorka, M. (1994), ‘Racism in Europe: Unity and diversity’, in A. Rattansi & S. Westwood (eds.), Racism, Modernity and Identity: On the Western Front, 173-188. Cambridge: Polity Press. 13 Bauböck, R. (1994), ‘Changing the boundaries of citizenship: The inclusion of immigrants in democratic polities’, in R. Bauböck (ed.), From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe, 199-232. Aldershot: Avebury. 14 Kloosterman, R. J. van der Leun & J. Rath (1999), ‘Mixed embeddedness: (In)formal economic activities and immigrant businesses in the Netherlands’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23(2): 252-267. 15 Simon, P. (2000), ‘The mosaic pattern: Cohabitation between ethnic groups in Belleville, Paris’, in S. Body-Gendrot & M. Martiniello (eds.), Minorities in European Cities: The Dynamics of Social Integration and Social Exclusion at the Neighbourhood Level, 100-115. Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire/New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press. 16 Bousetta, H. (2000), ‘Political dynamics in the city: Three case studies’, in S. Body-Gendrot & M. Martiniello (eds.), Minorities

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in European Cities: The Dynamics of Social Integration and Social Exclusion at the Neighbourhood Level, 129-144. Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire/New York: Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press.

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17 Favell, A. (2003), ‘Integration and nations: The nation-state and research on immigrants in Western Europe’, Comparative Social Research 22: 13-42.

Part III – Conceptual issues 18 Barth, F. (1969) ‘Introduction to ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of cultural difference’, in F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, 9-38. London: George Allen & Unwin. 19 Rex, J. (1980), ‘The theory of race relations: A Weberian approach’, in UNESCO, Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, 117-142. Paris: UNESCO. 20 Anthias, F. & N. Yuval-Davis (1983), ‘Contextualizing feminism: Gender, ethnic and class divisions’, Feminist Review 15(Winter): 62-75. 21 Solomos, J. (1986), ‘Varieties of Marxist conceptions of “race”, class and the state: A critical analysis’, in J. Rex & D. Mason (eds.), Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations, 84-109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 22 Bovenkerk, F., R. Miles & G. Verbunt (1990), ‘Racism, migration and the state in Western Europe: A case for comparative analysis’, International Sociology 5(4): 475-490. 23 Miles, R. & V. Satzewich (1990), ‘Migration, racism and “postmodern” capitalism’, Economy and Society 19(3): 334-358. 24 Balibar, E. (1991), ‘Class racism’, in E. Balibar & I. Wallerstein (eds.), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, 204-216. London: Verso. 25 Peach, C. (2005), ‘The ghetto and the ethnic enclave’, in D. P. Varady (ed.), Desegregating the City: Ghettos, Enclaves and Inequalities, 31-48. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Index

A Ackerman, B. A., 278 Africa, 7, 26, 50, 65, 78, 82, 122, 203, 204, 216, 452, 457, 462, 477, 541, 559, 572 Africanization, 544, 559 African Island of Réunion, 26 Agrarverhältnisse in Altertum, 444 Alba, R. D., 240, 376 Albania, 112, 123 Alger, C., 98 Algeria, 48, 89, 97, 342, 459 Algiers, 485 Alibhai-Brown, Y., 376, 379 Aliens Act of 1905, 524 Aliens Act of 1973, 524 Althusser, L., 438, 493 Althusserian Marxism, 496 Alund, A., 380 Amendement 14th 1868, 225, 226 America/Americas the, 14, 68, 100, 111, 203, 210, 267, 378, 438, 448, 450, 451, 453 Americanization, 561, 587 Amersfoort, H. van, 183, 598 Amicales, 366 Amsterdam, 143, 145, 148-152, 159, 315, 318, 326 Amsterdam Treaty, 150, 154, 158 Ancient Greece, 458 Andall, J., 125 Anderson, B., 350, 530 Anderson, P., 493, 508, 524 Antarctica, 284 Anthias, F., 124, 238, 392, 469, 480 Antwerp, 395 Anwar, M., 117 Appadurai, A., 95, 96, 99-101 Arab Gulf, 103 Arendt, H., 279, 300 Aristide, J. B., 100

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 613

Aristotle, 279 Asia, 7, 26, 49, 50, 216, 432, 462, 541 Asia-Pacific, 104 Assam, 452 Assimilation Model, 589 Associatie Marokkaanse Migranten Utrecht (AMMU), 366 Association de Mineurs Marocains du Nord, 364 Association de Travailleurs Marocains en France (ATMF), 364 Atlanta, 595 Atlantic, 220 Atlas of International Migration, 116 Australia, 36, 295, 389, 390, 529, 546 Austria, 25, 46, 149, 272, 284, 372, 376, 546 Autonomy model, 494, 500, 511 B Bachelard, G., 9 Bachu, P., 544 Back, L., 392 Baden-Württemberg, 29 Baetsen, P., 327 Baggara, 421, 422, 424, 425 Bagley, C., 195 Bakker, E. S. J., 326-328 Balibar, E., 266, 567 Baltic states, 552 Baltimore, 595 Baluch tribe, 422 Baluchistan, 418 Bamyeh, M. A., 91 Banfield, E., 87 Bangladesh, 112, 121, 199 Banton, M., 389, 493 Barbados, 455, 554 Barcelona, 128 Barkan, E., 262 Barker, M., 268

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614 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Barrett, G., 316, 319, 324 Barret, M., 483 Barth, F., 241, 350, 359, 407, 414, 418 Barthes, R., 350 Basch, L., 92, 94, 100, 394 Base/superstructure model, 501 Basic Law of the Federal Republic, 222 Basic value-expectancy model, 62 Bastenier, A., 248 Baubock, R., 275 Baumann, Z., 104, 395 Baumgartner, F., 144 Beck, U., 98 Beijer, G. J., 543 Belgian law 1974, 363 Belgium, 25, 46, 237, 238, 239, 244-251, 253-255, 273, 301, 355, 357, 372, 375, 387, 393, 518, 519, 546 Belleville, 339, 341-345, 347-353 Belleville model, 352 Belleville cohabitation model, 348 Belleville quarter, 341 Bellevilleuse La, 351 Bendix, R., 186 Ben-Tovim, G., 490, 493, 494, 500-503, 505, 507, 508, 510, 511 Berger, J., 131 Berger, M., 9 Berghe van den, P. L., 192-194, 459, 545 Berlin, 545, 599 Berlin Wall, 158, 27 Bertaux, D., 576 Beveridge Report, 482 Bhabha, H, 99 Bigo, D., 142 Big Overseas Experience (BOE), 127 Birmingham, 494, 495, 595, 599 Bjorn, 411 Black feminist movement, 470, 483 Black Section movement, 201 Blalock, H. M., 438 Blankenburg, E., 322 Blommaert, J., 367 Bloom, L. 184 Blotevogel, H. H., 122 Boal, F. W., 585 Bodnar, J., 70 Body-Gendrot, S., 316, 324 Bogoras, W., 411 Böhning, R., 540, 547 Bolaria, S., 540 Bolivia, 103 Bonacich, E., 244, 493, 510

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 614

index Bosnia, 103 Bosscher, A., 152 Boston, 594 Bouamama, S., 364, 365 Boulevard de Belleville, 345, 346, 348 Bourdieu, P., 9, 73, 143, 156, 168 Bousetta, H., 355, 380, 395 Bovenkerk, F., 517, 521, 533 Box, C., 453 Boyd, M., 65 Brah, A., 396 Brandt, W., 34 Bras, H. le, 391 Brass, P., 239, 241 Breckenridge, C., 95, 96 Brent, 209 Brent Community Council, 481 Breton, R., 250 Britain, 25-30, 33, 34, 36, 46, 47, 49-51, 57, 103, 104, 187, 202, 204, 206209, 216, 220, 224, 225, 322, 372, 375, 376, 378, 379, 381, 383, 387, 388, 391-393, 437, 465, 469, 470, 472, 473, 476, 477, 481-483, 485, 498, 505, 507-509, 512, 517, 521, 522, 524, 531, 538, 539, 541, 542, 544, 546, 550-554, 556, 559, 592, 602 Brittan, A., 490, 495 BBC (Britisch Broadcasting Corporation), 201, 207 British Caribbean, 191, 522 British Commission for Racial Equality, 154 British Unions, 37 Brochman, G., 59 Brouwer, J. W. de, 148 Brown, R., 439 Brubaker, W. R., 215, 379, 387, 390, 532 Bruinsma, F., 322 Brussels, 128, 145, 153, 155, 157, 241, 248, 375, 381, 395 Bucher, K., 444 Budapest process, 149 Buffalo, 594 Buller, H., 128 Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbaede (BDA), 556, 557 Burawoy, M., 490, 508, 512, 540 Burgers, J., 367 Burgers Report, 367 Burgess, E., 353

04-03-10 15:58

index Burt, R. S., 66 Butcher Vocational Training, 329, 330 C Caces, F., 85 Calgary, 597 Callovi, G., 152 Calvinism, 448, 453 Campani, G., 124 Canada, 7, 103, 202, 215, 216, 221, 226, 227, 389, 522, 546, 597 Cape Verdeans, 125 Capital, 472 Carby, H., 500 Carchedi, G., 492, 498 Carens, J., 216, 228, 229, 233 Caribbean/Caribbean Islands, 26, 68, 89, 191, 216, 225, 457, 541, 544, 554, 556 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace or Metropolis, 375 Carpentier, A., 339 Carter, B., 518, 542, 554-556 Carter, T., 205 Cassarino, J. P., 323 Caste, Class and Race, 492 Castells, M., 92-94, 96, 98, 100, 320, 394, 492, 498 Castilianization, 571 Castles, S., 7, 21, 104, 114, 115, 375, 379, 519, 539-543, 546, 551, 552, 555, 556, 558 Catholicism, 448, 460, 571 CBD (Central Business District), 586 Census in France 1968, 29 Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS), 317, 318 Central Africa, 459 Central European Initiative, 149 Centre of working-class culture, 499 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), 490, 494-496, 498, 499, 501, 505-507, 509, 526 Centrum Partij, 518 Certeau de, M., 341 Ceylon, 452 Chairs of Committees, 205 Chamber of Commerce, 329, 330 Chambers, I., 118 Charbonnages de France, 364 Chevalier, L., 572 Chicago, 583, 586, 588, 589, 591, 592, 594

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 615

615 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Chicago PMSA, 592 Chicago three generational schemas, 599 Chicago School, 11, 14, 340, 582, 585587, 596, 601, 602 Chile, 224, 522, 543 China, 103, 455 Chinatown, 586, 587, 600 Christianization, 572 Christian Reformation, 460 Choldin, H. M., 66 Chow, R., 96 Chuckchee, 411 Çinar, D., 382 Cincinnati, 594 Citroen, 30 City of Light, 339 Civil Rights Act 1866, 225 Civil Service Commission, 210 Civil War, 226 Clark, K., 187 Classical Age, 571 Class/race model, 492 Cleary, P., 543 Cleveland, 595 Clifford, J., 94 Coast Lapp area, 430 Code of Hygiene for Islamic Butchers, 328 Cohen, R., 66, 93, 95, 97, 99, 114, 119, 121, 124, 377, 394 Cohn-Bendit, D., 153 Coing, H., 343 Cold War, 68, 129, 147, 148, 545 Collective consumption role, 526 Columbus, 595 Commission Directorate for Employment and Social Affairs, 152 Committee of Experts for Identity Documents and the Movement of Persons, 149 Committee for Islamic Butchers, 330 Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), 208-210, 526 Commodity Board for Cattle, Meat and Eggs, 326 Commonwealth, 27 Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, 543, 555, 556 Communist movement, 438 Communist Party, 577 Community Relations Council, 208 Comte, A., 437

04-03-10 15:58

616 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), 37 CGT labour federation (Confédération Générale du Travail), 33, 37, 38, 364 Connecticut, 584 Connell, J., 96 Connolly, W.E. 503, 511 Conseil consultatif des Immigrés de la Ville (CCILg), 361-363 Conseil consultatif pour les Populations d’origine étrangère (CCPOE), 362 Conspiracy-theory, 570 Continental Europe, 11, 15 Control of Immigration Statistics, 550 Cornelius, W., 7, 85 Corrigan, P., 523 Cortie, C., 598 Costa del Sol, 116, 129 Costa-Lascoux, J., 375 Council of Europe Committee of Experts on the Legal Aspects of Territorial Asylum, Refugees, and Stateless People, 149 Council Social Affairs, 155 Courbage, Y., 353 Couronnes metro station, 346 Cox, O. C., 184, 492-494 Craignos les, 363, 364 Cram, L., 153 Cressey, P. F., 586 Criminal Law, 321 Critical Theory, 438 Cromwell Cox, O., 455 Currency Reform 1949, 26 Cwerner, S. B., 126 Cyprus, 477, 551 Czechoslovakia, 544 D Dallas-Ft. Worth, 595 Darfur, 421, 424 Darroch, A. G., 597 Darwinian theory of evolution, 573 Dassetto, F., 248 DaVanzo, J. S., 63 Dawa mosque, El, 367 Dayton Agreement 1995, 123 Deakin, N., 542 Debray, R., 464 Delors, J., 157 Delphy, C., 473 Demokratische Partei Deutschland, 270 Denmark, 25, 46, 151, 223, 303, 372, 376, 383, 388

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 616

index Denton, N., 583, 585, 594, 595 Department of Education and Science’s survey, 210 Depo-Provera, 481 Deschouwer, K., 386 Detroit, 595 Deutsche Institut für Wirtschaft, 391 Deutscher Hotel-und Gaststaettenverband (DEHOGA), 557 Deutsche Volksunions, 270 DGB (Confederation of German Trade Unions), 38, 272 Dicken, P., 96 Diehl, C., 386, 391 Di Rupo, E., 249 Displaces Persons camp, 546, 552, 553 Disraeli, B. 573 Dissanayake, W., 95 Dobson, J., 133 Donselaar, J., 519 Douglas, J. D., 206 Dublin agreement, 149 Dublin Convention 1990, 145 Durkheim, E., 437, 439 Dutch Caribbean, 522 Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, 325 Dutch National Bureau against Racism, 154 Duchet, M., 570 Duffield, M., 554 Duncan, O.D. 582-584 Dusseldorf, 598 Dworkin, R., 300 E East Africa, 452, 458, 459, 544 East Amsterdam, 395 East Europe/Eastern Europe, 23, 47, 48, 125, 216, 226, 277, 387, 522, 543, 545, 559 East Germany, 26, 47, 272, 441, 442, 538, 545 East Indies, 184 Ecolo, 361 Ecomienda, 450 Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), 91, 102, 104 Economic Control Service, 329, 330 Economic crisis of 1973/1974, 542 Economist, The, 97, 322 Economy and society, 441, 450

04-03-10 15:58

index Ecuador, 103 Edholm, F., 480 Edmonston, B., 376 Edye, D., 556, 557 Egypt, 97, 481 Eidheim, H., 429, 430 Elias, N., 343, 351 Elkins, S., 462 El Salvador, 100 Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, The, 495, 496, 498500, 506, 507 Employment and Social Affairs DG, 153 Engbersen, G., 320, 395 Engels, F., 22, 24, 473, 494 Engermann, S. L., 451 England, 221, 224, 273, 519 Epstein, R. A., 323 Equal Treatment Directive, 154 Erasmus, 127 Erasmus exchanges, 126 Erikson, R., 386 Eritrea, 103 Escriva, A., 125 Espace Intégration, 364 Esping-Andersen, G., 323 Esser, H., 62, 376, 386, 545 Ethnic and Racial Studies, 13, 91, 92, 200, 237 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Differences, 407 Ethnic School, 476 Ethnomethodology, 438 Europe, 7, 8, 10, 13-16, 26, 33, 45, 47, 50, 68, 70, 78, 91, 103, 104, 111, 112, 114, 119-122, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131133, 142, 144, 145, 151-153, 215, 217, 220, 221, 230, 243, 259, 260, 263, 265, 267, 270, 271, 289, 355, 369, 371, 372, 375-381, 383, 384, 386, 387, 389, 390, 393-397, 437, 446, 447, 460, 463, 469, 472, 521, 525, 529, 532, 544, 546-548, 553, 554, 559 European Commission, 126, 150, 153, 156 European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme, 13 European Community (EC), 45, 142, 148, 149, 244, 247, 260 European Consortium for Sociological Research, 386 European Council/Council of Europe, 298, 375, 379

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 617

617 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

European Council of Ministers Tampere, 375 European Court of Justice (ECJ), 143, 145, 150, 152, 156, 158 European Economic Community (EEC), 27, 51, 145 European Economic Community (EEC) countries, 550, 551 European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study, 45 European Monetary Union (EMU), 142, 153 European Parliament, 298 European Political Union, 248 ESE, 157 European Services Forum (ESF), 157 European Union (EU), 115, 119, 122, 125-127, 131, 141-146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154-159, 298, 299, 357, 375, 379, 381, 383 European Union Studies Association, 141 European University Institute Florence, 237 EURODAC (European Dactyloscopie), 145 European Voluntary Workers, 26, 37, 546, 553 Eurostat, 130 Evans, P. B., 523, 524 EVWs (European Voluntary Workers), 553 Export Processing Zones, 538, 549 F Fainstein, S., 320 Faist, T., 59, 65, 115, 377, 385, 395 Fanon, F., 464 Fargues, P., 353 Favell, A., 143, 153, 371, 375, 378, 380 Fawcett, J. T., 62, 66 Federal Republic of Germany, 216, 518, 519, 524 Fédération des Associations des Jeunes de Quartier (FAJQ), 364 Feirabend, J., 366 Feminist Review, 469 Fennema, M., 330, 395 Ferdinand, K., 422 Ferguson, J., 93 Fermin, A., 376 Fielding, A. J., 388, 519 Fiji, 452

04-03-10 15:58

618 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Findlay, A. M., 125, 548, 549 Finland, 47, 50, 223, 303 Finnmark, 430 First World War/World War I, 23, 199, 227, 302, 525 Flanders, 248, 249, 270, 273 Florida, R., 8 Fogel, R. W., 451 Foner, N., 99, 101 Forbes, I., 383 FO (Force Ouvrière), 37 Ford, R., 125 Ford, R. G., 586, 588 Ford of Cologne, 30 Fordism, 122 Foreigners Law 1965, 27 Foreign Origin Populations’ Consultative Councils (FOPCC), 251, 252 Foundation for Population, Migration and Environment (PME/BMU), 13 Fox, R., 253 Fox-Genovese, E., 490 France, 24-31, 33, 37, 40, 46, 47, 49-51, 57, 65, 87, 89, 126, 128, 144, 148, 149, 150, 173, 215, 216, 219, 221224, 233, 259, 264, 265, 270, 273, 301, 303, 341, 355-357, 360, 364, 365, 372, 375, 379, 381, 383, 387, 391, 518, 519, 521, 522, 524, 525, 546, 571, 574, 577 France Plus, 365 Frank, A. G., 461 Frankfurt, 128 Frankfurt Bureau for Multicultural Affairs, 153 Frankfurt School, 438 Fraser, F., 206 Freedman, M. 500, 513 Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), 155, 270 Free labour movement policy, 27 Freeman, G. P., 157, 324, 519, 554, 556 Free Movement of Workers, Migrant, Integration and Anti-racism, 152 French Caribbean, 522 French Community government, 249 French Positivism, 437 French Revolution, 186, 230, 524, 573 Freyer, P., 206 Friedrichs, J., 598 Fröbel, H. J., 538 From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 618

index Status of Immigrants in Europe, 275 Front National, 270, 271, 518 Fur case, 421, 434 Furnivall, J. S., 190, 414 G Gabriel, J., 490, 493, 494, 500-503, 505, 507, 509-511 Gans, H., 250, 349 Garbage can model, 141, 144, 147 Gardner, R. W., 64 Gary-Hammond-E.Chicago, 595 Gatekeeper role, 525 Geddes, A., 132, 153-155 Geisser, V., 365 Gellner, E., 267, 293, 294, 376 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), 157 Geneva, 38, 128 Geneva Convention, 68 Genovese, E. D., 490, 492 German Democratic Republic, 48 German Federal Republic, 34 German Foreigners Law of 1965, 33 German Marshall Fund, 216 German Reich, 24 Germany, 24, 25, 27-34, 36, 38, 39, 46, 47, 49-51, 57, 60, 89, 103, 116, 126, 144, 146-150, 156, 216, 219, 222, 270, 272, 284, 288, 303, 357, 360, 372, 375, 380, 381, 387, 391, 441, 525, 543, 544, 546, 557, 588 German Social Democratic movement, 464 Ghetto model/American Ghetto Model, 585, 599 Giddens, A., 377 Giffinger, R., 598 Gilbertson, G. A., 80 Gillespie, M., 96 Gilroy, P., 95, 206, 379, 396, 491, 499, 505, 511 Gini Index, 583 Giullaumin, C., 570 Gjessing, G., 411 Glazer, N., 15 Glebe, G., 598 Glick-Schiller, N., 89, 92, 94, 100, 115 Global Political Networks, 103 Goa, 68 Goffman, E., 414 Golbert, R., 132

04-03-10 15:58

index Goldring, L., 86, 100, 101 Goldthorpe, J., 386 Gordon, M. M., 193, 583 Gouldner, A. W., 74 Gramsci, A., 438, 492 Granovetter, M. S., 80, 83, 323 Great Britain, 65, 102, 302 Great Depression, 55 Greece, 7, 47, 50, 117, 123, 149, 199, 263, 396, 574 Green, D. P., 500 Greensboro-Winston Salem, 595 Groenendijk, K., 519 Groeneveld-Yayci, A., 328 Gross National Product, 545 Guarnizo, L. E., 92, 94, 97, 101, 316, 394 Guillon, M., 340 Guiraudon, V., 141, 147 Gulf War, 122 Gupta, A., 93 Gurak, D. T., 80 Guyana, 452, 456-458 H Haaland, G., 421, 424, 425 Habermas, J., 73, 438 Hague The, 315, 318, 326 Hailbronner, K., 216, 228 Haiti, 89, 100 Halder, J., 155 Hall, S., 95, 129, 378, 396, 480, 490, 495-499, 502, 507-509, 513, 526 Hammar, T., 45, 59, 216, 229, 306, 356, 379 Handboek Minderheden, 330 Handsworth, 204 Handsworth Harambee organization, 204 Hannerz, U., 92, 100, 102 Hansen, R., 380 Hargreaves, A. G., 357 Harris, C., 542, 553-556 Harris, J. R., 111 Harris, M., 185, 186 Hart-Celler Act 1965, 226 Hartmann, 445 Harvey, D., 602 Hatton, T. J., 68 Hauser, P., 587, 593 Haussmann, G. E., 341 Häußermann, H., 316 Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, 375

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 619

619 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Hear van, N., 93, 98 Heckmann, F., 381 Heisenberg, D., 141 Held, D., 277 Henry, L., 358 Herbert, U., 544 Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities, 539 Hiebert, D., 597 High-Level Working Group (HLWG), 151 Hispanization, 571 History Task Force, 539 Hobbes, T., 275, 281, 290, 291 Hobsbawm, E., 294, 451 Hoffmann-Nowotny, H. J., 64, 65 Hofinger, C., 382 Hoggart, K., 128 Holland, 190, 192, 194, 195, 518 Hollifield, J., 7, 141 Holmes, C., 543 Home Office, 550 Hong Kong, 225, 538 Hooks, B., 470 Houston, 595 Hoxha, E., 123 Hreblay, V., 146 Hugo, G., 70 Hungary, 522, 544 Husserl, E., 438 Huysmans, J., 147 I Iglicka, K., 126 Iman mosque, El, 363 IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe), 16 Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Europe, 21 Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, 539 Immigrants Communal Consultative Councils (ICCC), 251, 252 Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America, 215 Immigration Act of 1971, 28, 33, 51 Immigration Rules, 551 Independent The, 322 Index of Dissimilarity (ID), 583, 589, 597, 601 India, 47, 50, 89, 97, 103, 203, 217, 225, 455, 555, 572

04-03-10 15:58

620 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Indian caste system, 425 Indian sub-continent, 522, 544, 559 Indianapolis, 595 Indonesia, 47, 86, 522 INED (Institut National Etudes Demographiques), 391 Information Age, 93 INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques), 390 Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), 154, 158, 159 International Journal of Population Geography, 111 International Labor Organisation (ILO), 68, 375 International Migration, Immobility and Development: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 59 International Migration Review, 13 International non-governmental organizations (INGOs), 98, 99, 143 International Organization for Migration, 119 International Red Cross, 98 International Refugee Organization (IRO), 545, 546 Iran, 34, 224, 543 Iraq, 121, 152, 224 Ireland, 7, 47, 128, 216, 224, 358, 380, 396, 588 Irish Republic, 26, 303, 552 Iron Curtain, 120, 126 Isaac, J., 552 ISI Web of Knowledge, 13 Island of Nevis, 451 Israel, 288, 481, 546 Italy, 7, 24, 27, 47, 123, 125, 149, 195, 247, 250, 272, 273, 376, 387, 393, 396, 522, 546, 554, 588 Itissam association el, 364 Itissam mosque, El, 363 Izikowitzs, K. G., 415 IDS (Index of Dissimilarity), 597 J Jacobson, M. F., 99 Jackson, J., 210 Jackson, J. A., 540 Jacquemet, G., 342 Jamaica, 225 Jamieson, A., 124 Jansen, C., 112, 113

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 620

index Jansen, S., 132 Japan, 522 Japanization, 561 Jeffcoate, R., 507 Jenkins, R., 375 Jenkins, S., 360 Jessop, B., 508 Joly, D., 360 Jones, B., 144 Jong de, G. F., 62 Jong de, W., 352 Joppke, C., 380 Joshi, S., 518, 542, 554-556 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 13 Jura, 303 Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), 148, 151 K Kaldor, M., 99 Kandre, P., 420 Kansas City, 595 Kant, I., 440 Kantrowitz, N., 597 Kastoryano, R., 153 Kay, D., 543, 546, 553, 554, 559 Keane, J., 524 Kearney, M., 100 Kelsen, H., 168, 169 Kempen, R. Van., 598 Kennedy, P., 377 Kenya, 544 Kepel, G., 346 Kerneis, P., 157 Kesteloot, C., 248, 395, 598 Keyes, C., 240 Keynsian economics/Keynesian Economic Theory, 23, 55 Kiang, Y. -C., 586 Kibbutz, 485 Kimble, J., 484 Kindelberger, C., 541 King, R., 96, 111, 117, 121, 122, 129, 130 Kingdon, J., 144, 154 Kleivan, H., 432 Kloosterman, R., 315, 316, 318, 319, 323, 324, 332, 395 KnowNothings, 226 Knutsson, K. E., 425 Kockel, U., 121, 128 Kohistan, 421 Kohl, H. 147

04-03-10 15:58

index KMAN (Komitee Marokkaanse Arbeiders in Nederland), 366 Koopmans, R., 392 Korte, H., 545 Kosack, G., 21, 519, 539-541, 543 Koser, K., 122, 125, 130 Kosmin, B. A., 598 Kraal, K., 9 Kriesberg, L., 98, 99 Kritz, M. M., 60 Kymlicka, W., 373, 388 Kypraia, 479 K4 committee, 148, 151 L Labour Party, 201 Laczko, F., 122 Lamy, P., 157 Landolt, P., 92, 94, 101 Lapeyronnie, D., 15 Latifundia, 441, 450 Latin America, 7, 47, 49, 78, 459, 462 Lavenex, S., 151 Law and order role, 526 Law on Economic Criminal Offences, 326 Layton-Henry, Z., 532, 553-555 Lazaridis, G., 123, 124, 125 Lazarsfeld, P. F., 438 Leach, M., 425 Leagues, 272 Lebanon, 482, 484 Lee, E. S., 61, 111 Lenin, V., 23, 24, 473 Lemon, A. 585 Le Pen, J. M., 222 Lessinger, J., 97 Lesthaege, R., 386 Leun van der, J., 315, 318, 324, 332 Lever-Tracy, C., 540 Levi-Strauss, C., 268, 351, 438, 439 Lewis, B., 347 Lieberson, S., 582-584, 594, 597 Lieberson’s P, 583 Liechtenstein, 49 Liège, 355, 360-365, 367, 368 Lier van, R. A. J., 190-192 Light, I., 317 Lijphart, A.,193, 194 Lille, 363-365, 368 Lille Sud mosque, 364 Lim, L. Y. C., 538 Limburg, 249

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 621

621 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Lisbon Agenda, 8 Little Sicily, 587 Live, Y.S. 347 Liverpool, 502 Lloyd, C., 15 Lobkowicz, W. de, 148 Locke, J., 290, 291, 293, 302, 304 Lodge, D., 131 Logical Positivism, 438 London, 29, 128, 209, 316, 383, 550, 592, 598, 600, 602 Lord, C, 150 Lorenzo, P., 11, 12 Los Angeles, 7, 316 Los Angeles-Long Beach, 595 Lucassen, J., 525 Lukacs, G., 438 Lukes, S., 237, 243 Lutz, H., 122, 125, 130 Luxemburg, 49 Luxemburg, R., 473 Lyon, 30 M Maastricht, 148, 153 Maastricht Treaty 1992, 298 MacDonald, I., 519, 524, 550, 551 Madrid, 8, 116 Magobunje, A. L., 65 Mahler, S. J., 100 Mahnig, H., 375 Majorca, 129 Malaya, 452, 457 Malaysia, 458 Ma Mung, E., 316, 324 Mann, M., 374 Mangrove case, 33 Marable, M., 490 March, J., 141, 142, 144, 147 Marches de Beurs 1983, 364 Marcinelle mine, 247 Marcus, G. E., 101 Marquez, G. G., 201 Marrus, M. R., 543-546 Marseille, 316 Marshall, D., 83 Marshall, T. H., 186, 187 Marston, W. G., 597 Martin, P., 7, 97 Martinelli, A., 317, 323 Martiniello, M., 7, 15, 237, 243, 247249, 361 Marx, K., 22, 24, 239, 439, 442-445,

04-03-10 15:58

622 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

455, 462, 465, 466, 520, 527, 528, 539 Marxism, 461, 462, 464, 471, 472, 489492, 494-499, 502, 505-507, 511, 512, 514 Marxist theory, 461, 489, 490, 508, 511-513 Marxist theories of migration, 539 Marxist theory of race and ethnic relations, 512 Marxist theory of racism, 510 Massey, D. S., 60, 84, 85, 117, 582, 583, 585, 594, 595 Mauritius, 452 May Events, 33 Maynard, M., 490, 495 Mazey, S., 154 McGrew, A., 277 McHugh, K., 126 Mc Intosh, M., 483 Mead, G. H., 383, 438 Meditteranean, 111 Meditteranean caravanserai, 130 Med TV, 96 Melanesian trade systems, 415 Member of European Parliament (MEP), 153 Memmi, A., 347 Memphis, 595 Ménilmontant, 346 Merriman, J., 432 Messamah, K., 353 Mexican Bracero Program, 7 Mexico, 86, 89, 117 Mezzogiorno, 27 Miami, 595 Middle Ages, 444 Middle America, 432 Middle East, 424, 548, 559 Migrants’ Forum, 153, 154, 158 Migrant labour model, 494, 503 Migration Policy Group (MPG), 154, 157, 158, 381 Miles, R., 490, 493, 495, 503-506, 509, 513, 517, 521, 527, 529, 533, 539, 540, 542, 552-556, 558-560 Miller, M., 7, 216, 356, 369 Milward, A., 397 Milwaukee, 595 Minifundia, 450 Ministerial Order on Meat Inspection, 326 Ministry of Integration, 373

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 622

index Ministry of Labour, 552 Ministry of Public Health and Environmental Protection, 326 Minorities in European Cities, 355 Minorities in the New World, 185 Mitchell, K., 97, 99, 101 Modood, T., 201, 386, 392, 393 Molyneux, M., 484 Montreal, 597, 598 Moravcsik, A., 150 Morelli, A., 247 Morley, D., 96 Morocco, 47, 121, 195, 326 Mouahidin mosque, El, 363 Moynihan, D., 15 Musterd, S., 325, 598 Myrdal, G., 85, 251, 440 N Nagel, J., 359 Nairn, T., 530 Narroll, R., 407 Natal, 452, 458 National Association of Asian Probation Staff, 210 National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO), 205 National Front, 518 Nationality Bill, 473 National Union of Moroccan Students (UNEM), 362 Nauck, B., 392 Nazism, 570 Near East, 50 Nee, V., 376 Nelli, H. S., 250 Netherlands, 7, 46, 47, 49-51, 57, 65, 126, 144, 183, 303, 315, 317-321, 324326, 330-332, 355, 356, 360, 366, 372, 376, 382, 387, 518, 519, 521, 522, 524, 525, 531 Neuchâtel, 303 Nevada, 320 Newark, 595 New Community, 201 New Left Review, 21 New Haven, 584 New Jerusalem, 459 Newman, D., 598 New Opportunities for Research Funding Co-operation in Europe network (NORFACE), 13

04-03-10 15:58

623

index New Orleans, 595 New World, 11 New World Order post-1989, 119 New York/New York City, 7, 80, 81, 87, 89, 316, 595 New York Chinatown model, 600 New Zealand, 302 Nikolinakos, M., 490 Noiriel, G., 10, 390 Nonini, D. M., 95, 98, 101 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), 69, 142, 143, 145, 153-155, 157, 158, 375, 381 Non-resident Indians (NRIs), 97 North Africa, 27, 49, 60, 216, 342, 346, 522 North America, 7, 104, 215, 217, 220, 230, 289, 529 Northern Ireland, 151, 192 Norfolk-Virginia Beach, 595 Northern Norway, 430 Northwest Europe, 111, 552 Norway, 25, 46, 223, 303 Nozick, R., 291 O Office of Population and Censuses Surveys (OPCS), 209, 210 Ogden, P., 519 Ögelman, N., 234 Oikos economy, 444 Oil crisis of 1973, 9 Olsen, J., 141, 142, 144, 147 Olzak, S., 359 Omvedt, G., 484 O’Neill, O., 297 Ong, A., 95, 98, 101 Opel, 30 O’Reilly, K., 128 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 130, 317 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 149, 375 OECD-SOPEMI report, 386 Oriol, M., 10, 14 Orthodox Marxism, 438 Oswald, I., 316 Ottoman Empire, 353 Oude Westen, Het, 352 Overseas Departments, 26 Oxford University, 102

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 623

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

ÖzüekrenA. S., 598 P Pakistan, 26, 46, 47, 50, 97, 225, 555 Panafit, L., 363 Papastergiadis, N., 377 Panjabis, 411 Parachuted Suburban Model, 600 Pareto, W., 243 Paris, 29, 128, 316, 339-341, 345-346, 353 Paris Commune, 342 Park, R. E., 349, 582, 586, 587 Parkin, F., 489-492 Parmar, P., 500, 505 Parsons, T., 75, 187, 438 Passel, J. S., 376 Pastore, F., 123 Pathan, 423 Pathan area, 420, 421, 425 Pathan case, 422 Pathan local social systems, 411 Pathan values, 411 Pathan value standard, 423 Peach, C., 581-584, 593, 602 Pelagic islands, 410 Penal Code, 171 Penninx, R., 9 Peters, L., 73 PEP study, 33 Péraldi, M., 316 Père Lachaise cemetery, 346 Petersen, W. 185 Petersen, W., 65 Petite, M., 149, 150 Petras, E., 540, 554 Pettigrew, T., 268 Phalet, K., 385, 386, 395 Phenomenology, 438 Philadelphia, 595 Philippines, 89, 97, 112 Philpott, T., 589, 591, 592 Phizacklea, A., 124, 394, 500, 503-506, 509, 540, 554, 555 Piore, M. J., 78 Pittsburgh, 595 Platform Marokkaanse Jongeren Utrecht (PMJU), 366 Plato, 275 Plender, R., 524, 525 Pohjola, A., 80 Poland, 24, 47, 195, 538, 544, 552, 588, 589 Polanyi, K., 323

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624 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Poliakov, L., 570, 571 Policing the Crisis, 495, 496, 500 Polish Peasant in Europe and America the, 70, 89 Pollack, M., 154 Poly-ethnic social systems, 414 Portal, M., 146 Portes, A., 60, 65, 73, 92, 94, 98, 101, 104, 115, 316, 320, 323, 328, 394, 395 Portugal, 7, 27, 47, 263, 344, 393 Portuguese Empire, 453 Positivist Empiricism, 438, 440 Potsdam, 544 Poulantzas, N., 492-494 Poutsma, E., 318, 319, 325 Powell, E., 35 Praag, C., 519 Prezworski, A., 493, 499, 521 Pries, L., 79, 115 Principles of Scientific Management, 574 Protestantism, 447, 449 Proudhon, P.J. 577 Prussia, 221 Pugliese, E., 132 Q Quebec, 227 R Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance, 496 Race and Politics Group of CCCS, 495, 498 Race Relations Act, 205 Racial and cultural minorities, 184 Racism and xenophobia, 260 Racism, Modernity and Identity, 259 Ramadan, 346 Rastafarianism, 477 Rath, J., 7, 9, 315, 316, 319-324, 326, 332, 366, 385, 395 Ratnesarr, R., 122 Raulin, A., 345, 347, 353 Ravenstein, E. G., 61, 111 Réberioux, M., 570 Reconquista, 571 Reich, M., 490 Reich, W., 570 Relative autonomy model, 494 Relative Deprivation theory, 83 Renaissance, 260 Renault, 30

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 624

index Renooy, P. H., 320 Republic of Ireland, 151, 518, 552 Republikaner, 518 Resnick, S. A., 512 Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 13 Rex, J., 184, 191, 359, 360, 375, 437, 493, 496, 497, 506, 512 Rhode, B., 121, 125 Ribas Mateos, N., 124, 130 Richardson, J., 154 Roberts, B., 320, 323 Robins, K., 96 Robinson, C., 498 Rodbertus, K., 444 Rokkan, S., 186 Roland, C. 342 Roman Catholic Church, 250 Roman Empire, 441, 453, 457, 460, 462 Roman Republic, 445, 457 Rome, 116, 128, 247, 250 Romeo and Juliet, 249 Rose, E. J. B., 187, 375 Rosenstein, C., 317 Ross, G., 141, 157 Rotterdam, 315, 318, 322, 326, 352 Rousseau, J. J., 279, 293 Rudder de, A., 345 Rue de Belleville, 347, 348 Rueschemeyer, D., 523 Ruggie, J., 147 Ruhr, 29, 221 Rush Portuguesa decision 27 March 1990, 156 Ruzza, C., 153 Rwanda, 297 S Sabbath, 347 Safa, H. I., 538 Safran, W., 93 Sahlins, M. D., 75 Salt, J., 122, 125, 131, 537, 548-550 San Fransisco, 600 San Fransisco-Oakland, 595 Sanguinetti, A., 364 Sargent, T. J., 491 Sassen, A., 319 Sassen, S., 538 Sassen-Koob, S., 316, 320, 541 Satzewich, V., 537 Savona, E. U., 94 Sayad, A., 10-12, 165, 344

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index Sayer, D., 520 Segal, S., 464 Sensenbrenner, J., 320 Schechtman, J. B., 544, 545 Schengen, 143, 144, 149-151, 158, 159 Schengen agreement 1985, 146, 149, 152 Schengen Implementation Agreement (SIA), 146, 147 Schengen Information System, 145, 147 Schengenland, 116, 119 Schermerhorn, R. A., 196, 200, 239, 473 Schierup, C.-U., 380, 383 Schmidtt, C., 281 Schnapper, D., 379, 381 Schoenenberg, A., 360 Schönpflug, U., 392 Schuck, P., 216, 229, 230 Schumpeter, J., 282, 292 Schuster, J., 321 Schutz, A., 438 Schwarzenbach Initiative, 35 Schwarzenbach Referendum, 518 Scotland, 224, 273 Scotson, J. L., 343, 351 Scott, J. C., 71 Seattle, 157 Second World War/World War II, 24, 26, 68, 195, 249, 254, 262, 263, 284, 517, 559 Segal, A., 116 Senegal, 112 Seville, 159 Seville 2002 summit, 142, 159 Shah, N. M., 82 Sheffer, G., 93 Shell, 125 Shohat, E., 96 Shuttleworth, I., 121 Sicily, 27 Sieyès, A., 221 Silj, A., 124 Simmel, G., 439 Simon, P., 316, 339, 342, 344, 388 Simpson, G. E., 184, 190, 197 Simpson Senator, 233 Sinization, 421 Sivanandan, A., 490, 492, 498, 509, 554 Siverts, H., 419 Sjaastad, L. A., 111 Sklair, L., 96, 97

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 625

625 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Skocpol, T., 508 SLG (Starting Line Group), 158 Slum and the Getto, The, 589 Smith, J., 99 Smith, M. G., 191-194, 457 Smith, M. P., 94, 101, 394 Smith, R. C., 97, 101 Social Democratic parties, 465 Social-Economic Council, 330 Social system the, 438 Sociology beyond Societies, 131 Sociology of Migration or Race Relations A, 504 Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, 437 Socrates exchanges, 126 Soininen, M., 376 Solidarité Arabe, 362 Solomos, J., 489, 499, 542, 543, 552, 553 Sommerfelt, A., 432 SOPEMI, 130, 386 South Africa/Southern Africa, 184, 185, 432, 452, 454, 459, 461, 463, 484, 490, 497, 511, 529, 559 Southeast Asia, 103, 190, 353, 415 South-eastern Europe, 545 Southern Europe, 23, 25, 26, 50, 60, 120, 124, 125, 216, 226 Southern Italy, 87 Southern Pathan, 411 Southern States, 442 Southwest Asia, 415 Soviet Union, 116, 120, 217, 387, 538 Soysal, Y., 373, 380, 397 Space TV Systems, 96 Spain, 7, 24, 27, 47, 125, 128, 376, 393, 263, 387, 571 Spare Rib Collective, 483 Sparkbrook, 360 Spencer, S., 554 Spivak, G., 96 Sri Lanka, 522, 538, 543 Stam, R., 96 Stares, P. B., 94 Stark, O., 64 Starting Line Group (SLG), 154 Statham, P., 392 Statistisches Bundesamt, 60 Stein, J., 131 Stepick, A., 316 Stillwell, J., 133 St. Louis, 595 Stone, J., 200

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626 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Stone, D., 144 Structuralism, 438, 520 Structural-Functionalism, 438 Structure of social action the, 438 Sudan, 421 Sudanic belt, 424 Supreme Court, 233 Surinam, 190, 192 Swart, A. H., 525 Swat, 411 Swedberg, R., 323 Sweden, 25, 46, 47, 50, 51, 57, 215, 216, 219, 221, 223, 224, 302, 303, 376, 382, 524 Swiss unions, 37 Switzerland, 24-29, 31-35, 38, 46, 49, 51, 57, 149, 518, 519 Swyngedouw, M., 385, 386 Symbolic Interactionism, 438 Szanton-Blanc, C., 92, 94, 100 T Taeuber, A., 593, 594 Taeuber, K. E., 593, 594 Taguieff, P. A., 268 Taj Mahal, 202 Tamas, K., 59 Tampa-St. Petersburg, 595 Tampere 1999 summit, 142 Tannahill, J., 553 Tap, L. J., 326-328 Tapia, C., 344 Targeted Social and Economic Research (TSER), 381 Tarrius, A., 316, 320 Taylor, F.W. 574 Teune, H., 521 Texture, 364, 365 Theory of Power, 237 Theory of the Third World revolution, 464 Thesis on Feuerbach, 439 Thistlethwaite, F., 68 Third Reich, 268 Third World, 23, 277, 461, 462, 464, 465, 484, 485, 538 Thirld World feminist debate, 471 Thomas, B., 70 Thomas, W., 70, 71, 75, 87, 89 Thomas-Hope, E. M., 554 Thompson, B., 344 Thompson, D., 122 Three generational model, 587, 596

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 626

index Tillaart van den, H., 318, 319, 325 Tillie, J., 330, 395 Tilly, C., 66, 88 Time on the Cross, 451 Todaro, M. P., 111 Todd, E., 379 Tölölyan, K., 93 Tonnies, F., 439 Toronto, 597, 598 Torpey, J., 374, 377 Toubon, J. C., 353 Touraine, A., 264 Trade Commission, 156, 157 TUC (Trades Union Congress), 37 Trading Association of Butchers, 327330, 332 Training on Commercial Practice, 329 Tränhardt, D., 130 Transnational Communities Programme, 100, 104 Transnational corporations (TNCs), 96, 103 Transnational Household Strategies, 103 Transnational Religious Communities, 104 Transnational Social Movement Organizations (TSMOs), 99 Trevi group 1970, 146 Tribalat, M., 386, 391 Trieste, 126 Trinidad, 89 Tripartite Conference, 544 Tunderman, B., 329 Tunisia, 344, 345 Turk, A., 146 Turkey, 27, 46, 47, 50, 82, 89, 145, 152, 195, 199, 224, 326, 522 Tyson, A., 155 U Ueda, R., 302 Uganda, 544 Ugur, E., 148 Ukraine, 552 UN Commission on Crime Prevention, 149 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), 437 UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), 69 UNICE (Union of Industrial and

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index Employers’ Confederations of Europe), 157 Unified Jewish Social Fund, 344 United Kingdom (UK), 9, 11, 89, 91, 114, 126, 127, 151, 203, 215, 225, 259, 273, 550 United Nations (UN), 28, 122, 284, 545 United Nations Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, 287 United States (US/USA), 7, 11, 14, 15, 71, 78, 79, 86, 89, 100, 117, 157, 192, 193, 202, 215, 216, 220, 221, 226, 227, 233, 301, 302, 324, 376, 377, 389, 390, 395, 442, 459, 465, 490, 522, 538, 544, 546, 592, 596, 600-602 United States Black Power Groups, 201 United States Department of Defense (DoD), 94 United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, 230 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, 287 University of Utrecht, 367 Unterhalter, E., 484 Urry, J., 126, 131, 377 Utrecht, 315, 318, 326, 355, 364-368 V Valenci, L., 353 Valk, I. van der, 366 Vancouver, 597, 600 Veenman, J., 386 Verbunt, G., 517, 519, 521, 533 Verein fur Sozialpolitik, 441 Vermeulen, H., 381 Verschueren, J., 376 Vertovec, S., 91, 93, 373 Vienna, 270 Vienna Circle, 438 Vienna Club, 149 Vienna Group, 149 Vietnam, 224, 485, 522, 538, 543 Visco, I., 132 Vlaams Blok, 254, 270, 518 Volkskrant de, 326-328 Volkswagen, 30 Voskamp, J., 327 W Wacquant, L., 602 Waffen SS, 155 Wagley, C., 185, 186

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 627

627 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Wakeman, F. E., 94 Waldinger, R., 320 Waldrauch, H., 382 Wales, 224 Wallerstein, I., 266 Wallonia, 249 Walton, J., 65 Walzer, M., 234, 301, 309 War of Independence, 225 Warnes, T., 129 Warren, B., 538 Washington, D. C., 595 Waterman, S., 598 Waters, M.C. 597 Weber, M., 241, 437-450, 453, 455, 457, 461-466 Weberianism, 438 Weesep, J. van., 598 Weil, P., 375, 380 Wentholt, R., 321 Werbner, P., 395 West German employer’s federation, 556 West German recession of 1966-67, 28 West Germany, 25, 27, 28, 47, 215, 222, 223, 233, 538, 544, 545 West Indies, 26, 47, 50, 555 West Midlands, 29 Western Europe/West Europe, 8, 21, 2326, 30-32, 34, 37-40, 48-50, 53, 122, 237, 282, 297, 371, 374, 517, 518, 521, 522, 524, 538-543, 547, 559, 561 White, P., 598 White, P. E., 96, 111 White Paper on Commonwealth Immigration of 1965, 543 Wickens, E., 124 Wieviorka, M., 259, 260, 262, 264, 267, 269 Williams, A. M., 128, 129 Williams, E., 570 Williamson, J. G., 68 Williams, P., 94 Wilpert, C., 360 Wilson, E., 483 Wilson, R., 95 Wilson, W. J., 268, 594 Winn, N., 150 Winnipeg, 597 Wirth, L., 183-185, 189, 190, 196, 197 Withol de Wenden, C., 356, 357, 525 Wolff, R. D., 512 Wolpe, H., 490, 511

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628 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

index

Wolverhampton, 502 Women’s Committee of the Greater London Council, 483 Wood, M. E., 511 Woods, R. I., 111 World Bank, 97 Wrench, J., 383 Wright, E. O., 492, 493, 508 Y Yearbook of International Organizations, 99 Yinger, J. M., 184, 190, 197 Young, J. 495 Yugoslavia, 27, 47, 50, 116, 344, 387 Yuval-Davis, N., 392, 469, 481 Z Zee TV, 96 Zhou, M., 320 Zinn, D. L., 123 Zlotnik, H., 60 Znaniecki, F. W., 70, 71, 75, 87, 89 Zolberg, A. R., 68, 543, 558 Zontini, E., 125 Other 9/11, 8, 390 3/11, 8

migration en ethnic deel 2.indd 628

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IMISCOE Research Rinus Penninx, Maria Berger, Karen Kraal, Eds. The Dynamics of International Migration and Settlement in Europe: A State of the Art 2006 (ISBN 978 90 5356 866 8) (originally appearing in IMISCOE Joint Studies) Leo Lucassen, David Feldman, Jochen Oltmer, Eds. Paths of Integration: Migrants in Western Europe (1880-2004) 2006 (ISBN 978 90 5356 883 5) Rainer Bauböck, Eva Ersbøll, Kees Groenendijk, Harald Waldrauch, Eds. Acquisition and Loss of Nationality: Policies and Trends in 15 European Countries, Volume 1: Comparative Analyses 2006 (ISBN 978 90 5356 920 7) Rainer Bauböck, Eva Ersbøll, Kees Groenendijk, Harald Waldrauch, Eds. Acquisition and Loss of Nationality: Policies and Trends in 15 European Countries, Volume 2: Country Analyses 2006 (ISBN 978 90 5356 921 4) Rainer Bauböck, Bernhard Perchinig, Wiebke Sievers, Eds. Citizenship Policies in the New Europe 2007 (ISBN 978 90 5356 922 1) Veit Bader Secularism or Democracy? Associational Governance of Religious Diversity 2007 (ISBN 978 90 5356 999 3)

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