Globalization, Migration and Social Transformation

Ireland in Europe and the World

Bryan Fanning, Ronaldo Munck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409411277
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317126874
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

In the space of around ten years Ireland went from being a traditional labour exporter to a leading European economy, and thus an attractive destination for immigrants from Eastern Europe and further afield. This produced a singular social laboratory, which this book explores in all its complexity set against the backdrop of globalization. Until recently seen as a showcase for the success of globalization, Ireland also became a destination for those displaced by the effects of globalization elsewhere. Globalization, Migration and Social Transformation takes Ireland as a paradigmatic case of social transformation, exploring the reasons why emigration was so rapidly replaced by immigration, along with the social, political, cultural and economic effects of this shift. Presenting the latest research around the themes of identity, social transformations and EU and Irish politics and policy, this book offers a rich array of detailed empirical case studies drawn from Ireland, which shed light on the experiences of immigrant groups from around the world and the wider processes of social transformation. In addition, it examines the manner in which the Irish state and the broader political system relate to new migrants and vice-versa, thus advancing our comparative understanding of how the European Union is responding to the challenge of mass migration. Globalization, Migration and Social Transformation makes a strong contribution to the comparative literature on immigration and integration, diaspora and social transformation in the era of globalization, and as such, it will appeal to social scientists with interests in migration, race and ethnicity, globalization and Irish studies.

PART I
Global and Diasporic Settings

Chapter 1
Ireland in the World, the World in Ireland

Ronaldo Munck

At the start of the 21st century, Ireland was widely seen as a show-case success story for the globalization narrative. Here was a small, peripheral, post-colonial country breaking through into the first class club. The country’s very openness to the global economy was seen as the key to its success. ‘Ireland in the World’ – that is Ireland’s complete integration and identification with the globalization master narrative – was matched by another facet, namely ‘The World in Ireland’ by which I refer to the 188 different nationalities living in Ireland around the year 2000. Whereas the old Ireland was deemed mono-cultural and mono-ethnic (never quite true of course) the ‘new Irish’ not only provided much of the labour power which generated the so-called Celtic Tiger but also promoted a veritable cultural renewal. Ireland in the World, the World in Ireland is thus a story with much broader implications than just the fate of a small off shore European island.

In 2009 the number of non-EU workers in Ireland fell by 41 per cent in the course of the year. Whereas one in ten Irish workers were losing their jobs, it was nearly one third of the immigrant workers who lost theirs. With Ireland particularly hard hit by the global recession that began in mid 2008 this devastation was not surprising. It was still a stark reminder of how integrally linked migration is to economic development. Where Ireland is more or less unique in the annals of the global political economy of migration (though there are parallels with Spain and Italy) is in how abruptly it had shifted in the mid 1990s from being a country of mass emigration to one of immigration. In the decade which followed, the government, non-governmental organizations and civil society at large sought to come to terms with the social transformations this shift unleashed. Those transformations are at the heart of all the contributions to this volume and an understanding of them is the core objective of the volume as a whole.

The overarching question in relation to the ‘new Irish’ as the migrants became known was the issue of their ‘integration’ into Irish society. The Irish government argued it would avoid the pitfalls of French style ‘assimilation’ and British ‘multiculturalism’ through the promotion of an ‘interculturalism’ which lay somewhere in between the two. In the mid 1990s the Irish state discourse went something like this: ‘Assimilation’ is not a good policy; look what happened in the Parisian banlieues when the descendants of North Africans decided they wanted the full rights of the citoyène. ‘Multiculturalism’ is not a good idea either; think of Bangladeshi women in Bradford who cannot speak English, think of the ‘second generation’ and what they planned to do on 7/7 when the UK’s ‘9/11’ took place. So Ireland should take up inter-culturalism as a ‘third way’ to achieve integration. However, there was little evidence of this rather woolly notion in the main government policy statements Migration Nation which, rather, exuded a fairly unreconstructed assimilationism. Now that the Celtic Tiger is well and truly in the past what will the national integration strategy and diversity management policy look like? The optimism created by a buoyant economy has evaporated, policy reforms in terms of social integration have been skin deep and the Irish national lifeboat is keen to cut any links which might curtail its chances to weather the global economic storm. It is in the Irish workplaces where we shall soon see if labour process level functional integration is robust enough to survive the divisive social pressures which emerge in any recession.

In political practice the government moved towards a redefinition of Irish citizenship through the 2004 Citizenship Referendum. Ostensibly about tightening up some ‘loose ends’ resulting from the Good Friday Agreement (the 1998 Anglo/Irish peace deal subscribed to by all parties eventually) in practice it served to reaffirm ‘blood and belonging’ notions of the Irish nation. A triple social transformation thus came to a culmination in the decade between 1995 and 2005: the economic development spurt known as the Celtic Tiger, the political peace process in Northern Ireland with its legitimation of peaceful united Ireland aspirations, and the rise of mass immigration and the new ‘intercultural’ Ireland. It is this triple helix which needs to be taken into account in any holistic attempt to grasp the complex nature of the rapid escalation of migration into Ireland during that decade. It was not like the earlier wave of migration into ‘older’ states such as Britain, France or Germany. Not only was the economic boom unprecedented in a country that only some years earlier had been called a Third World country (or ‘banana republic’ in Bob Geldof’s memorable phrase) but so also was the political settlement in the North of the country. For some the Good Friday Agreement ‘copper-fastened’ partition and the British presence but, equally, we could argue that this was the end game for British imperial pretensions in their neighbouring island. Britain’s first colony was now going to be its last. This was a confident nation that faced up to what most now saw as the challenge of migration.

Global Transformations

For much of the last decade Ireland has ranked as the most ‘globalized’ country in the world. One of the most influential globalization indeces deployed during this period measured IT, finance, trade, travel, technology and ‘politics’ in terms of their openness to measure integration into the world system. In 2000 financial portfolio flows into Ireland were the highest in the world, in terms of GDP. A benign tax regime and what the Foreign Policy analysts called ‘Ireland’s strong pro-business politics’ placed the country top of the globalization index several years in a row (Kearney 2003). A period of accelerated capital accumulation ensued although it was based largely on foreign investment, financial flows and an exceptionally over-heated property market. Whether this ‘Celtic Tiger’ was ever sustainable (and it was largely assumed that it was by most) it was certainly sufficiently dynamic to attract a huge influx of migrant workers from Eastern Europe and more widely.

Today we are in a position to see the clear rise and decline of neo-liberal globalization and the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ it was built on. After the Great Recession of 2008–2009 even the managers of globalization have had to admit that the neo-liberal development model was flawed. De-regulation, driving back the state and giving free-rein to market forces was not the way to sustained growth, never mind equitable development. In striving to prevent a global depression, on the scale of the 1930s, financial authorities practised essentially Keynesian policies to inject demand into the system. There was also a concerted turn towards re-regulation of economic and financial matters and an explicit recognition across the political spectrum that the market was not, after all, omniscient. In Ireland the crisis was particularly severe with the general downturn being overlaid by a dramatic collapse of the housing bubble and the banking-property developer alliance which helped create it.

While a certain version of globalization as dominant political project is now in crisis, the world is clearly more internationalized than it was twenty years ago. There is now a general understanding that the Great Recession will not deflect the growing internationalization of economic, political and social relations. This interconnectedness was the reason why a banking crisis in the US became a global recession but also why concerted counter-cyclical measures were applied in most countries in a quite decisive manner compared to the 1930s. This interconnectedness and inter-penetration of social and economic realms is certainly the most distinctive feature of contemporary globalization, defined by Ash Amin as the ‘interconnectedness, multiplexity and hybridization of social life at every level’ (Amin 1997: 129). Clearly this increasing interconnectedness has led to greater flows of people across national boundaries and the emergence of hybrid transnational communities quite different from classical 19th century/early 20th century migration patterns.

What is most remarkable about some of the landmark social science treatments of globalization is how little attention they gave to migration – the movement of people – compared to capital and finance mobility. Thus Manuel Castells in his three volume magnum opus (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998) barely mentions migration at all even though he had long term experience of migration in Latin America and elsewhere. This is not surprising, however, given his overarching view that while capital exists in the space of flows and lives in the instantaneous time of computerized networks, labour still toils in the ‘space of places’ and lives by the old clock of everyday life (Castells 1996: 475). From this globalist new economy perspective, while all stress is on footloose and fancy-free finance, workers are assumed to be static in place. This glaring omission is part of a wider trend toward constructing a ‘workerless’ international political economy as though it was no longer work but finance which makes the world go round. There is now, however, a growing literature showing how globalization was, in a very real sense, ‘made’ by workers (see Munck 2002) much as the original working class was part of its own making. Steven Vertovec argues in a parallel fashion that while the impacts of migrant transnationalism may not be ‘bringing about societal transformations by themselves, patterns of cross-border exchange and relationship among migrants may contribute significantly to broadening, deepening conjoined processes of transformation that are already ongoing (and often subsumed by the overarching concept of globalization)’ (Vertovec 2009: 24). Not only can we legitimately argue that it is still work which generates wealth but also that workers have shaped globalization by their work, struggles and movements across time and place.

One of the most fruitful concepts which international political economy has deployed recently to critically analyze the globalization of production is that of ‘global commodity chains’. The dispersion of production and the distribution of goods as a consequence of globalization has generated a transnational complex of networks in these two areas. National development – in the traditional sense – lacks analytical and practical purchase in this new order. Global commodity chains can thus be seen as networks of production, labour, households, states and enterprises which act as a complex web to generate commodities. We thus can detect socially constructed and socially embedded modes of organizing inputs, labour, distribution and consumption processes. This approach encourages a more nuanced analysis of the social and spatial inequalities of the world system. Labour migration chains can thus be integrated into a more holistic view of production/consumption in the era of globalization.

More recently there has been a move to expand the realm of social inequalities explored by the global value chain analysis to embrace the realm of social reproduction. In particular the ‘global care chain’ concept directs us to the crucial importance of the gendered division of labour, not least in the realm of migration processes. As Nicola Yeates puts it, this concept helps us illuminate ‘an alternative set of global connections between the global economy and female labour, between the care economy and migrant labour …’ (Yeates 2009: 7). At first this ‘global care chain analysis’ focused on the woman from the South caring for children in the North but it has now expanded to correct or enrichen the productivist bias of much of migration studies so than gender, the family and the household are now ever-present. It also promotes a greater emphasis on migrant agency and breaks with traditional notions of Southern passivity.

Migrations studies have, on the whole, stood outside of the debates on global transformation. The dominant economic perspective on migration posits a simple push-pull model whereby rational individuals are pushed out of stagnant rural economies and pulled towards the dynamic urban economies of the North. This mono-causal explanation is based on a narrow individualism and unquestioned assumptions around the all-prevailing ‘economic man’ rationality. It is entirely oblivious to gender and cultural factors and simply cannot explain why it is not in fact the ‘poorest of the poor’ who tend to migrate. More recently here has been a move beyond the false universalism of this model and an increasing acceptance of the complexity of migration flows particularly in the current era (see Papastergiadis 2000). Individual income maximization is a poor explanation for the turbulence of migration and the importance of agency in determining the movement of people from one place to another.

If the massive social, economic, spatial and cultural transformations on a global scale now under way due to what we call in short-hand globalization are, indeed, a step-change in human evolution, then international migration needs to be set within their context. Migration theory, if we were to call it that, has responded to the new order through the adoption of social network theories, the emphasis on migration as a household livelihood strategy and the turn towards migrant transnationalism (see De Haas 2010). These new approaches, all in their different ways, accept the essential interconnectedness of the contemporary world. In relation to globalization and labour more broadly we see an interconnected process of proletarianization/pauperization in the global South and a fragmentation/informalization of labour in the North (Munck 2006). Thus national studies of industrial relation systems and labour practices can only be partial unless set within the broader parameters of globalization and its contestation. This is clearly also the case for labour migration insofar as migration is part of the global process of capital accumulation and the subsumption of labour in its pursuit.

Stephen Castles has recently argued persuasively for the need to carry out a re-embedding of migration studies within the wider processes of social transformation (Castles 2010). We might simply need to accept that there can be no single unified and overarching theory of migration in and of itself or in the strong sense to put it that way. Apart from the economistic bias already outlined above there is a strong receiving country bias in the literature as through that was the only end of the migration chain that mattered. Rather we should, perhaps, seek to situate migration flows within the complex process of globalization now under way with the increasing breadth and depth of interconnectedness it has led to. We need to, further, understand that the world is not ‘flat’ (as per Friedman 2005) and that there is a ‘politics of scale’ impacting on the movement of people at local, regional, national and transnational levels. In that complex socio-spatial dynamic, the agency of people is as important, at least, as the structures of political economy.

Globalization is clearly a complex process and cannot be conceived of as something ‘out there’ doing things to regions, nation-states and localities ‘down here’. The internationalization of capital and the extension of the wage-labour relation world-wide has effected a dramatic re-organization of the global system. Not least it has led to a rescaling of state territorial power. Amongst geographers in particular, there has been an increased attention to the political economy of scale (see Marston 2000 for an overview) which can enrich our understanding of social reality considerably. The complex processes implicit in the term globalization have accentuated uneven development on a global scale. Economic production and social reproduction are being rescaled and, at least in part, denationalized. The local scale has, for its part, been revalorized not least by those social forces seeking to resist the commodification of social life. Sometimes this results in the hybrid process of ‘glocalization’ where the local and the global mix directly. For its part the regional scale – both in a subnational and supranational sense – has crystallized as an important arena for capitalist accumulation and social legitimation as for example in the case of the European Union.

What has all this got to do with migration we might ask? For one thing, paying close attention to the politics of scale and the scale of politics will help us break with the methodological nationalism which has for long held sway in migration studies. At its simplest level we can see how a clearly transnational process such as migration is not amenable to national responses alone. This is one reason why merely national migration policies tend to end up in disarray. At a more fundamental level this problematic allows us to move beyond the nationalist forms of inclusion and exclusion which still dominate in migration management discourses. As Wimmer and Schiller put it, the various theories of immigrant integration developed under the methodological nationalist problematic, ‘all presuppose that the relevant entities to be related are a nation-state society on the one hand and immigrants coming from outside this nation-state on the other’ (Wimmer and Schiller 2003: 584). While integration of the outsider is seen as problematic it is more or less taken for granted that those inside the vessel of the nation-state are integrated, homogeneous and characterized by a pre-existing form of social cohesion.

Geographical scale has a huge impact on the way migrants both act socially and are portrayed. As Harold Bauder puts it: ‘scale is a way of framing our reality’ (Bauder 2006: 30). At a community level, in Ireland as elsewhere, we saw an emphasis on the social embeddedness of migrants or, as the official discourse put it, their integration. Migrants were portrayed as hard working people who would contribute to cultural diversity as well as their skilled or unskilled labour. At the level of the nation-state, however, the discourse around migrants shifted to the challenge they posed to national culture and their impact in terms of ‘displacing’ native workers. The migrant worker was not now seen as a neighbour or a work colleague but, rather, as a foreigner. The category of national citizenship also followed a politics of scale where migrants are often allowed to vote in local elections but not in national elections.

While this volume is concerned with migration in relation to a given nation-state it rejects the common assumptions of methodological nationalism. The ‘container’ model of the nation-sate assumes a congruence between territory, sovereignty, society and citizenship. It is ill-equipped to deal with the ambiguous, fluid and liminal nature of migrant identities and forms of citizenship. For conventional migration theories immigrants destroy the isomorphism between a people, sovereignty and citizenry. Immigrants are perceived as alien to the community of shared loyalty towards the state and the shared rights guaranteed by the state (see Wimmer and Schiller 2003). This nation-statist discourse was particularly open in Ireland where migrants were classified as ‘non-nationals’ and where the 2004 Citizenship Referendum set about rectifying the constitution to reaffirm the citizenship priorities of the ‘truly’ Irish as against the transient non-national populations.

The turn toward transnationalism has provided a powerful boost to the new migration studies. It has given rise to a far more fluid and pluralist understanding of migration com...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Abbreviations and Irish Terms
• Series Editor's Preface
• Foreword: Diversity and Post-Tiger Ireland
• Part I: Global and Diasporic Settings
• Part II: European Settings
• Part III: Immigrant Experiences in Ireland
• Bibliography
• Index