Transnationalism, Migration and the Challenge to Europe

The Enlargement of Meaning

Kevin Robins, Asu Aksoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367875145
• eBook ISBN: 9781317338598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Transnationalism, Migration and the Challenge to Europe: The Enlargement of Meaning puts forward an alternative outline for thinking about migration in a European context. Moving beyond the agenda of identity politics, the book addresses possibilities more related to the experiential and existential dimensions of migratory – and importantly, post-migratory – lives. Examining the fundamental and radical argument that migrants should be regarded not as a problematical category, but rather as opening up new cultural and imaginative channels for those living in Europe, the book draws on extensive empirical work by the authors undertaken over the past ten years.

Grounded in the actual lives and experiences of migrant Turks, the book evaluates how their articulations regarding identity and belonging have been changing over the last decade. The agenda regarding migration and belonging has shifted over this crucial period of time. This shift is counterpoised against the unchanging national positions, and against the supra-national stance of 'official' European approaches and policies regarding migration and identity.

Transnationalism, Migration and the Challenge to Europe would be of interest to those involved in sociology, anthropology, transnational studies, migration studies, cultural studies, media studies, European studies.

Chapter 1
Europe – is it in motion?

A context

Our agenda in this book will be concerned with transformations occurring as a consequence of contemporary transnational (or globalising) developments. And specifically, it will consider transformations occurring with respect to Turkish migrations into Europe from the 1960s onwards. Of course, we will address the question of what this so-called transmigration means, or might mean, for the various Turkish populations themselves – the ways in which they have been negotiating, and thinking about, their position vis-à-vis both their country of origin and their new European ‘host’ societies. In so doing, however, we will inevitably have to take on board the question of what their translated presence means, or could mean, for Europe – for the twenty-first century configuration of Europe, and for how Europe might now re-negotiate its own history, and its own historically accumulated sense of what constitutes its ‘identity’, its ‘heritage’, and the values that it stands for. We are interested in the contemporary challenges to European culture, and in how European states and institutions might respond to the new demands being put before them by their migrant ‘minorities’, in all their multiplicity and diversity. How, if at all, might Europe be capable of transforming itself in the new nation-questioning and nation-challenging context of the twenty-first century? Is it capable of dealing in a constructive and creative way with the presence of its very numerous Turkish (and other) ‘minority’ populations?

The migrant question and the new European question are absolutely interdependent. For Turkish migrants, their new European locations provide the context within which both possibilities towards a new life, as well as distressing constraints, are now being experienced and engaged with. We begin this book, then, with a discussion of the European side of the equation – with the Europe that must receive and accept its new migrants, which is the same Europe that also constantly and resentfully fights against open-mindedness and consequent reconstitution and realignment. Europe is not an abstract or static phenomenon or concept. It is always in motion – and maybe the changes it is experiencing at the present time are particularly dramatic. We want to consider the Europe in transition or transformation that Turkish migrants are having to come to terms with, at the same time as they (but, of course, not they alone) are now in a position to disconcert and to undermine what seemed perhaps to be a settled and secure way of being.

Europe and its national question

A key objective of this chapter will be to draw attention to the significance of new transnational and transcultural developments in Europe. In order to do so, however, we have to first address Europe's national question – which is what now stands in the way of the advancement of transcultural processes and practices. In order to begin thinking about transcultural possibilities, we first have to come to terms with the entrenched European national imaginary – with the national frame of reference within which, in the modern era, cultural positioning has for the most part been elaborated. It is the nation and the nation state that have served as the primary context for cultural affairs and cultural location in the modern period. The central objective of European states has been to create and establish a sense of belonging and allegiance to the national territory and community. The institution of a culture in common has been the fundamental aspiration, valued as an integrating mechanism, binding the citizens of a country together as compatriots – and giving expression, moreover, to the collective spirit, the character, the historical continuity – the shared destiny even – of an imagined-as-distinctive ‘people’.

This organisation of cultures and identities on the basis of national imagined communities was a very particular way of organising them. And yet, albeit an evident social construction, it came in the modern period to seem a natural and self-evident social institution. But now, in the contemporary context of so-called globalisation and transnational developments, the national frame of reference seems less axiomatic, let us say, and the limitations of the national principle may be starting to become more apparent, and unsettling. In times that are constantly throwing up more complex forms of social and cultural experience – and that are consequently requiring more open and inventive kinds of response – the national agenda may increasingly be seen to have certain very significant insufficiencies. This is not at all to make the facile claim that the days of the nation state are numbered. It is simply to make the rather more modest point that the nation state's established ways of thinking and managing culture – or cultures – are now proving to be less than adequate. It is to say that we now need to be more reflexive with respect to the national imagination – to defamiliarise the logic of national cultural reasoning, and to critically reflect upon its now increasingly apparent limitations.

In this context, what has to be recognised is the peculiarity of the way in which culture and society have been represented according to the national imagination. As Craig Calhoun (1999: 217) has observed, national societies have always been imagined as ‘bounded, integral wholes with distinctive identities, cultures and institutions’. An imagined community is organised around a shared collective identity, an identity that each person shares with all the other ‘members’ of the community. A culture in common, a unitary culture, comes to be valued and cultivated as a mechanism for collective cultural bonding. As Katherine Verdery (1993: 38) notes, the national paradigm is informed by an essentially homogenising discourse: national culture ‘aims its appeal at people presumed to have certain things in common as against people thought not to have any mutual connections’. There is consequently a distance created towards and against those who do not seem to have any mutual connections, those who appear not to ‘belong’ – towards and against ‘them’, meaning both outlanders and inadmissible populations within. With respect to the others outside, the national community constantly seeks to differentiate itself, to maintain its fundamental discreteness, protecting its borders and asserting its sovereignty. And those within are marginalised, or minoritised, in order not to compromise the wished-for ‘clarity’ of the imagined community. Now, why should this be the case? Why should this matter of – actually very small – difference create a problem? For, imagined in this sense, the national community is always fated to anxiety. The coherence and integrity of what is held in common must always be conserved and sustained against the perceived threat of diversity and complexity, which come to be represented as forces of disintegration and potential dissolution. Ultimately, at the deepest level, difference is resented and feared, because it has come to be associated with the fragmentation of what should ideally be whole.

The national paradigm privileges cultural homogeneity, then, and is inherently and constantly anxious about the (imagined, and essentially resented) implications of cultural complexity and diversity. Now, let us be clear, this is not to say that national governments would, or even could, necessarily legislate and act according to this homogenising logic (which, in its most radical form would be the logic of ethnic cleansing). European governments have, of course, made gestures in recent decades – in different ways and with different senses of urgency – towards the needs and demands of their plural populations. The point, however, is that, whilst the reality of cultural diversity has been recognised – but most commonly recognised as a problem to be watched over, and managed – the fundamental logic of the imagined community paradigm remains intact. The ideal of bounded and homogeneous community still prevails in the collective psyche, and the anxieties about its potential dissolution persist, perhaps more than ever, in a world increasingly exposed to social and cultural flows.

Thus, in his book, On Nationality, David Miller puts forward the argument that the processes of globalization, involving accelerating global flows of people, mount a fundamental challenge to the ideal of national cultural integrity – ‘a challenge to the idea that people need to have the kind of map that a national identity provides’ (Miller, 1995: 165). As a consequence of ‘the impact of multiculturalism internally and the world economy externally’, he maintains, ‘societies are becoming more culturally fragmented’ (185). And what then ensues, as David Miller sees it, is the escalation of discourses concerned with ‘the quest for cultural diversity, to celebrate diversity, bolster ethnic pride and encourage people to pick and choose among the array of cultural identities that global culture makes accessible’ (186). As Miller's discourse of cultural resistance makes apparent, the national frame remains a very potent way of representing and organising and inhabiting social reality. And that must surely present a problem, must it not, in a period that is increasingly being shaped and defined by transnational mobilities, proliferating cultural diversities, and increasing difficulties in securing cultural borders and sovereignties?

The unworkable logic of minoritisation

In the recent period, European states and societies – on both the western and eastern sides of the continent – have dealt with a wide range of problems that they have generally tended to classify under the heading of ‘minority’ issues. In different ways, and with different senses of urgency, they have been called upon to respond to the needs and demands of those that they have, in their many different ways, ‘minoritised’. And then, it follows, to attempt to negotiate the complex – and maybe even impossible – relation between majority and minority populations. Over time, a range of legal and/or constitutional measures has been instituted to acknowledge the presence and demands of so-conceived minority groups in different European societies. Whilst progress has been highly uneven, we may say that, across the wider European space, there has been a general recognition – in principle, at least – of the need to take account of the interests and concerns of those identified by European nation states as, of course, ‘their’ national minorities. We might identify two key developments in this process of coming to terms with the reality and import of subordinated cultures – ironically, they are developments in which the coming into prominence of the ‘minority’ agenda might actually be made constructive within the longer-term European project.

The first development concerns a change of approach towards the minorities – a change that could, potentially at least, be a productive shift in perspective towards the meaning and significance of subordinate cultures in Europe. In the post-World War II period, governments and other institutions began to develop policy agendas around what was conceived as the ‘minority’ question. The minority question in Europe has essentially been about the problem of immigrant and migrant cultures in, and for, the European order of nation states. And the debate consequently focused on the nature of the perceived difficulties that ‘alien’ populations throw up for majority cultures, and the policy measures that the majorities and their governments could take to manage and contain those problems. Recently, however, in some quarters, there has been something of a discursive shift, in which, at an official level at least, the language of ‘minorities’ has begun to be displaced by a new conceptual frame concerned with ‘diversity’. This change of approach has been significant for the way in which it may be taking the issue of difference and complexity in European culture some way beyond the simplistic ‘minority/majority’ opposition. It presents certain possibilities, at least, to normalise, and maybe even validate, difference (but let us repeat that, at this point, this betokens only a shift in principle – though, of course, even a shift in principle is to be welcomed).

What is at issue in the second key development that addresses the challenge of European ‘minority cultures’ concerns a change of geographical perspective and scope. For the most part, as we have been arguing, the minority question has been approached from the point of view of the social and cultural ‘integration’ of minorities into the dominant national order. What have become ever more apparent, however, are the difficulties and limitations of this integrationist, often interpreted de facto as assimilationist, approach. Recent developments in patterns of migration, as well as in life strategies of migrant populations, have made it clear that minority issues – which are increasingly coming to be cast as diversity issues – can no longer be easily contained within the national frame of reference. Diversity policies are now being pulled into both an international and a transnational frame of reference. Thus, we have seen a move – largely as a consequence of the interventionist role of high-level transnational European institutions, notably the European Commission and the Council of Europe – towards a European-wide harmonisation of national approaches and strategies for cultural diversity. There has been a growing recognition at this level that diversity issues are increasingly exceeding and surpassing the policy capacities of national governments and institutions. The Council of Europe's Declaration on Cultural Diversity makes clear the growing expectation that member states acknowledge that ‘cultural diversity [can] no longer be effectively dealt with only at the national level’ (2001: 7). What has become more and more, and inescapably, evident is that global mobilities in the twenty-first century have brought with them new kinds of diversity and complexity, and therewith new experiences of cultural juxtaposition, encounter, connection, exchange and mixing, both transnational and transcultural in their nature.

Transnational migrations and mobilities

We are living in a time of accelerated transnational migrations. The new migrations into the European space, which bring with them complex new dynamics of social mobility, are now raising issues – from demographic through to political and cultural – of probably an unprecedented kind. They are dramatically changing the social and cultural configuration of European societies, and presenting a fundamental challenge to European social and cultural policy. There are clearly possibilities that these proliferating transnational migrations will bring with them new dangers of social tension, polarisation and antagonism. But perhaps it is also the case that they just might open up new possibilities for overhauling the existing European social model?

In order to avert the potential dangerous possibilities and to be able to recognise the more constructive ones, we need to understand the nature and significance of these contemporary migrations. There have been two major phases of migration into the European continent in the post-World War II period. The first took off in the 1950s, and was generally characterised by migrations of colonial and post-colonial populations to the imperial ‘mother countries’ – for example, migrations from West Africa and the Maghreb into France, from Indonesia into the Netherlands, or from the Caribbean and South Asia into Britain. Migrants travelled to particular and limited destinations, determined for the most part by shared (albeit unequally) historical, cultural and linguistic links. In recent years, this pattern of post-colonial migration has been of diminishing significance, and we may now say that it has progressively given way to new migrations of a different – global or transnational – kind. For a whole swathe of economic, political and cultural reasons, Europe has become an increasingly attractive destination for both economic and forced migrants from diverse parts of the world (Nigerians, Somalis, Iraquis, Tamils, Turks, Kurds, Afghans, Bosnians, Kosovans, Chinese, Russians, etc.). And what we are consequently experiencing is a profound change in the dynamics of migration, mobility and affiliation.

What precisely is it, then, that is new and distinctive about these so-called migrations of globalisation? We shall try to address this question in terms of four, closely interrelated, aspects of new, transnational migrant practices and socialities.

• First, we should note that, unlike the earlier generation of settlers, these migrants have not travelled to an imperial centre, but to whichever European country would accept them. They have no historical, and therefore privileged, relation to any particular European country – it is not a historical ‘destiny’, but something far more arbitrary, which has generally brought them to wherever they happen to land up in the European continent. As a result of this more random logic of migration, the new waves of migrants that have been coming to Europe since the 1990s have generally tended to be dispersed to more than one country. What is characteristic, then, is the relatively wide distribution of particular groups across the European space, and beyond. And, as a consequence of this new kind of dispersed and cross-border migration pattern, what we may observe is the coming into existence of new and complex migrant flows, connections and networks. What is original is the nature and degree and complexity of transnational connectivity and connectedness between what are variously referred to as ‘transnational communities’ (Portes et al., 1999), ‘transmigrants’ (Glick Schiller et al., 1995), or ‘new global diasporas’ (Cohen, 1997). Migrant populations are connected to each other, and commonly also in close connection to not only their country of origin, but also to contacts in other countries of reception. This is precisely the transnational dimension of their lives. Absolutely crucial here, of course, is the technological and communications infrastructure that now makes this kind of interconnection possible, and even routine, whether it be through cheap and easy air travel or new communications media (e.g. satellite television, the Internet). Being able to communicate and travel – even to ‘commute’ – between places in which one has vital interests changes the nature of migrant experience significantly What communications technologies are now making possible is the enlargement of the lifespace of migrants, involving the capacity to be synchronised with lifeworlds situated elsewhere.
• The second aspect of transnational migrant practices that is new and distinctive concerns the way in which new economic and social livelihoods are being established on the basis of this networking culture. Alejandro Portes and his co-researchers suggest that the development of transnational businesses and enterprises may now be regarded as a new and fast growing form of immigrant economic adaptation (Portes et al., 2002). What we are seeing is the emergence of new forms of enterprise, of diverse kinds, operating on the basis of transnational economic and social networks. These may often be fairly precarious and ephemeral, amounting to what we may call the transnationalisation of informality. In other cases, however, what are coming into existence are more robust and durable ventures, businesses attuned to the needs of transnational populations (and then also extending beyond them), and drawing upon the particular skills accumulated and developed by transnational migrants (bi- or multi-lingualism; cultural flexibility). Portes et al. (1999: 229) make very clear the logic underpinning this distinctive entrepreneurial turn:

Whereas, previously economic success and social status depended exclusively on rapid acculturation and entrance into mainstream circles of the host society, at present they depend (at least for some) on cultivating strong social networks across national borders.… For immigrants involved in transnational activities and their home country counterparts, success does not so much depend on abandoning their culture and language to embrace those of another society as on preserving their original cultural endowments, while adapting instrumentally to a second.

It is precisely through their strategic non-assimilation that such migrants make their living and create new lifespaces for themselves, in which it may actually be in their interest to remain at odds with the host society (and also with the society of origin). And, given the practical and productive sense that this strategy creates, it seems that such transnational practices ‘from below’ are likely to become even more prevalent in the future.

• The consequences of such strategies, pursued now by a growing number of transnational migrants, are, in their aggregation, significant for European nation states. These mundane, everyday strategies for a better life and lifespace actually turn out to have quite considerable implications for national cultures and the national frame of the European ‘host’ countries. The crucially significant issue is that these migrants are no longer choosing to assimilate into national societies in the way that they once had to. ‘In a global economy’, Glick Schiller et al. (1995: 52) observe, ‘contemporary migrants have found full incorporation in the countries within which they settle either not possible or not desirable’. Transnational migrants are actively involved in multiple linkages, and depend for their livelihoods on such linkages, and therefore they tend to have complex sets of affiliatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Europe – is it in motion?
• 2 The unprecedented problem
• 3 Thinking across spaces
• 4 From spaces of identity to mental spaces
• 5 Banal transnationalism, or the demystification of elsewhere
• 6 Always a question of a greeting
• 7 Parting from phantoms
• 8 Whoever looks always finds
• 9 Above the countries
• References
• Index