Negotiating Identities

States and Immigrants in France and Germany

Riva Kastoryano

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400824861
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Immigration is even more hotly debated in Europe than in the United States. In this pivotal work of action and discourse analysis, Riva Kastoryano draws on extensive fieldwork--including interviews with politicians, immigrant leaders, and militants--to analyze interactions between states and immigrants in France and Germany. Making frequent comparisons to the United States, she delineates the role of states in constructing group identities and measures the impact of immigrant organization and mobilization on national identity.Kastoryano argues that states contribute directly and indirectly to the elaboration of immigrants' identity, in part by articulating the grounds on which their groups are granted legitimacy. Conversely, immigrant organizations demanding recognition often redefine national identity by reinforcing or modifying traditional sentiments. They use culture--national references in Germany and religion in France--to negotiate new political identities in ways that alter state composition and lead the state to negotiate its identity as well.Despite their different histories, Kastoryano finds that Germany, France, and the United States are converging in their policies toward immigration control and integration. All three have adopted similar tactics and made similar institutional adjustments in their efforts to reconcile differences while tending national integrity.The author builds her observations into a model of ''negotiations of identities'' useful to a broad cross-section of social scientists and policy specialists. She extends her analysis to consider how the European Union and transnational networks affect identities still negotiated at the national level. The result is a forward-thinking book that illuminates immigration from a new angle.

CHAPTER ONE

The War of Words

Words are always questioned in terms of their representative values as virtual elements of discourse that prescribes the same mode of being for all.

—Michel Foucault

THE SCOPE OF THE POLITICAL ISSUE of immigration becomes evident in the verbal war it produces. Words and concepts concerning immigration or the presence of immigrants are controversial and loaded with feeling, sometimes spawning conflicts and sometimes contributing to them. Immigrants, foreigners, Islam, Islamism, fundamentalism, ghettos, ethnic groups, and communities are terms and concepts whose meaning shifts in time and space without regard for “the marks of their ancestral memory,” as Michel Foucault put it.

These words designate the Other and our own perception of the Other; they conjure up identities and differences and are irrational in some respects. In short, words, as agents of persuasion and influence, create public opinion and justify political orientations. Since Michel Rocard, the French prime minister, announced in 1990 that France “cannot accept all the poverty of the world,” and in Germany public debate on foreigners has been dominated for thirty years by the theme Wir sind kein Einwanderungsland (We are not a country of immigration), policies follow and public opinion must choose between national feeling and political morality, not to mention economic interests.

Headlines are filled with discourse that is often contradictory. The escalation of “preconceptions” in the Durkheimian sense makes the subject a commonplace, “allegedly known” (in journalese), where everyone has something to say. The words come out without thinking. The vocabulary relating to immigration and the presence of immigrants thus ends in a linguistic reflex in all three countries and is part of the conflict.

Thus, beyond simple terminology, words constitute the strategic weapons taken up by politicians, association activists, social workers, and intellectuals, who give them a new content according to actions and reactions. Intellectuals, whose discourse endeavors to be autonomous, “denounce” or “correct” the increasingly intractable discourse reproduced and intensified by the press. Although freedom of speech contradicts the linguistic code of “political correctness” in the United States, in France a juridical limitation does not prevent the politicians from adding their mite and forming public opinion.

A comparison of the terminology in France and Germany concerning immigration or the presence of foreigners shows both a similarity of expression and an evolution of terms. Even if a word or concept developed in a given historical and national context is used for political strategy in another context, we know that it does not transfer so easily. The same word—histoire, history, Geschichte—in French, English, and German, wrote Raymond Aron, “applies to historical reality and to our awareness of it.”¹ Moreover, since each of those words is loaded with ideology, it raises the question of adaptability to another context. There is also the voyage of words across frontiers between different languages—political language, media language, scientific language—each using the symbolic weight of the words to interpret social reality and to seek legitimacy. The multiple terms connected with immigration and their use with different definitions at different times produce a linguistic chaos that puts the subject of immigration beyond partisan disputes.

This chapter shows how France and Germany, two countries with two different political traditions, are increasingly inspired by the American vocabulary concerning immigration or foreigners and even the representation of their own society. This linguistic contagion demonstrates not only the heuristic status of American social reality and studies but also the acknowledgment of the similarities in all democratic pluralistic societies and the justification of a political convergence among them, even though each country resists giving a different meaning to the same word.

ON THE IMMIGRANT

Twenty years after the decision to stop immigration to France, there was still talk of the immigrant. Article 6 of a law of December 2, 1945, defines an immigrant as “the foreigner who lives in the country for more than three months; he or she then may remain for an indefinite period.”² This definition does not mention social status, but it tacitly implies that the immigrant is a worker. In Germany the worker is invited. He is a Gastarbeiter, a title that grants legal status and underscores not only the limited length of stay but also the reason for the invitation. The term “immigrant,” as used in France, tacitly emphasizes the controversial aspect of the presence of foreigners. Its German equivalent, Einwanderer, which has recently replaced Gastarbeiter in the conventional vocabulary of immigration, looks more like an acceptance of the guests’ long stay. One piece of evidence for this is that Marie-Louise Beck, the commissioner of Bundesausländerbeauftragte, prefers the terms Migrantinnen and Migranten, leaving the content as abstract and ambiguous as it is in France.

In France the immigrant no longer seems to have a precise nationality. The term refers primarily to a perception and not necessarily to a reality. It now automatically refers to a person in the highly “visible” group from North Africa—whether the immigrant was born in France or retains citizenship in some North African country. In Germany he or she is a Turk and remains a foreigner—an Ausländer—living in Germany. He or she is no longer a Gastarbeiter. In the United States the migrant is someone in the last wave of the many waves that populated the continent over two centuries.

Today politicians and the public often view immigrants in Europe and in the United States as “clandestines,” “illegals,” or “without papers” (sans-papiers). The same applies to refugees, who are increasingly treated as immigrants (legal or illegal). In Europe they have kept coming long after the borders were closed in 1973-74; in the United States they are outside the quota. Politicians define them as “counterfeit immigrants,” and the public perceives them as such. They are also regarded as requesting asylum so as to gain access to the high standards of living of industrialized countries. So they are “counterfeit asylum seekers” (Schien-Asylanten), and this has created the terms “economic refugees” in the United States and Wirtschaftsasylanten in Germany. It is not their number, which is hard to determine, but the perception of them in the collective imagination that has led politicians to blame them for the “problem of immigration,” a specifically Turkish problem in Germany: Türkenproblem.

Thus, use of the term immigrant and its connotations follow from the varied definitions attributed to them in public discourse, revealing the shift from a general discussion toward one aimed at a specific group. That group then becomes the target of the media and public opinion, and immigration becomes a battlefield in which words go to war.

Since the parties of the extreme right in France (the National Front) and the Right in Germany (such as the Christian Democratic Party, or the CDU) have built their campaign on the “problem” of immigration, there has been a war of words. But in France use of those words goes beyond the bounds of the National Front and produces a common arena of discussions and confrontations, first between the opposition and the government. Michel Poniatowski referred to immigration as the “occupation”; for Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, it is the “invasion.”³ Occupation makes the immigrant an “enemy,” and invasion makes him or her a “barbarian.” By choosing two terms loaded with either recent or remote memories, in time or space, each party tries to attack the current government as being unable to control the borders, the territorial boundary of identity, and to defend national interests; thus they compete with the National Front on the battlefield.

Whereas occupation refers to a precise event in French history, an allusion to invasions is broader and has already been used in the past. The word refers to immigration, but in “peaceful” terms, as Jean-Baptiste Duroselle emphasized in his book L’invasion⁴ and in an article in L'Aurore of February 27, 1963: “The Peaceful Invasion: The Arrival of the Blacks.” The historian Yves Lequin adopted the term as the title of an article on the various waves of immigrants who settled in France between 1850 and 1930 and their professional and geographical paths.⁵ In it, Lequin drew attention to the development of immigration and the atmosphere prevailing in the cities: “More than any other arena, the big city consists essentially of an ‘invasion,’ which some are beginning to judge as no longer peaceful.”

In fact, in the late 1960s, the immigration that shattered this peaceful atmosphere was publicly described as “savage.” In an article in the journal Mots, Colette Guillaumin raised the question of what meaning could be given to the term “savageimmigration” (in one word). Was it uncontrolled immigration, did the word savage refer quite simply to immigration, or was it used in the sense of exotic?⁶ Under the pressure of public opinion influenced by such discourse, governments today define measures to combat a “savage immigration.”

Similar discourse can also be found in the German press even though in relation to a different context. More than regulating the border crossings of “counterfeit workers,” after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Federal Republic is afraid that asylum seekers will abuse the right to stay or that the status of Aussiedler (persons of German origin naturalized de facto) will be counterfeited. “Aussiedler must prove German ancestry”; yet “20% are suspected of not being of German nationality,” claimed an article on foreigners in Der Spiegel of March 6, 1989.

Meanwhile, “asylum seekers are lightning rods,” declared a deputy of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) in response to the speeches of a CDU deputy, who stated that “90% of the refugees usurp that title.” The origin of the asylum seekers does not matter; they merge once again with the Gastarbeiter, for, together, they are seen as foreigners contributing to the Überfremdung (foreign overpopulation) of German society. Germany risks being “drowned by external elements.” In 1892-93 Max Weber used the terms in his first Empirical Survey of the socioeconomic development of Northeast Prussia, referring to the “ethnic” Poles living in eastern Prussia. Today this image, etched in the collective memory, reappears with the massive arrival of asylum seekers (Asylanten). In reaction to the increased number of foreigners (Ausländer), one speaks of a flood: Ausländersschwemme. In the 1970s, Germany already was described as a packed ship: das Boot ist voll (the boat is full).

In both France and Germany, the immigrant who came or was invited for the economic reconstruction of the country is now seen as troublesome. Since the memory of the economic growth of the Thirty Glorious Years (1948-78) is too recent, imagination seems to draw on resources from a more distant past, particularly from national political crises.

BOUNDARIES OF IDENTITY OR “THRESHOLD OF TOLERANCE”

Metaphors draw the attention of public opinion to the boundaries of acceptability: the frontiers and beyond, a threshold that is not to be crossed, the “threshold of tolerance.” That expression appeared in a report on the policy of “relocation” in Nanterre in 1964 and was intended initially as a marker. As a result of a local study on the inhabitants of the shantytowns, the report implied a ratio—the threshold—of foreigners to natives. If that proportion was exceeded, tensions and then conflicts would appear. Once the politicians got hold of the term, its “marking function” yielded to its “polemical function,”⁷ which was magnified in the media. A headline in Le Figaro of October 21, 1980, reads: “More Than Four Million Immigrants,” adding in large letters: “At the Threshold of Intolerance.” Thus, the initial empirical aspect has assumed an ideological form that lends itself to political strategies and aims at collective sensibilities. The idea has subsequently been used, often indirectly, in many opinion polls with questions like: “Do you think there are too many foreigners in your neighborhood?”

The “threshold” very quickly stretches from a neighborhood to national borders. The “tolerance” attributed to the inhabitants of the neighborhood is projected onto the politicians, whose discourse anticipates the assumed “frustration” of public opinion about immigration. Both the Left and the Right seem to be unanimous about the need to remove the specter of immigration. François Mitterrand referred to the “threshold of tolerance,” and Charles Pasqua announced that “France can no longer be a country of immigration.”

Everyone has a threshold. In France the threshold is not a given number, but in Germany, particularly in Berlin, it does correspond to a precise percentage. It even defines a housing policy for foreigners in the city (Zuzugssperre) that forbids newcomers to move into neighborhoods that have 12 percent or more of foreigners of the same nationality,⁸ and a limit of 20 percent has been set for the children of foreigners in school as part of an integration policy after the 1980s. Thus, the “threshold” in Berlin is closer to the American term “critical threshold,” used to evaluate mixed neighborhoods of blacks and whites.⁹

But Germany is also experiencing a shift toward an undefined notion of the threshold of tolerance, working from the local to the national scale, and from one group to another. In fact, the massive arrival of Aussiedler¹⁰ and asylum seekers, whose number has constantly increased since the wall came down, has led to discussions and even a law proposed by the CDU “to limit [requests for asylum] to preserve harmony.” Parliamentary extremists are taking advantage of the situation to sound a call to arms on the presence of the Ausländer and to invoke “a bearable limit” of foreigners (Grenzen der Belastbarkeit). Senate debates allude to integration and to foreigners’ right to vote, which are current topics, as if to emphasize what is both politically (un)acceptable and economically (un)bearable about the presence of the Aussiedler by drawing attention to the social cost of their integration into German society. This logic also led to the asylum compromise (Asylkompromiss) of 1992-93, which imposed an annual maximum of 225,000 new Aussiedler.¹¹

In the United States, the expression “the tipping point” is equivalent to the threshold of tolerance and indicates the threshold of concentration of blacks among the residents of the same neighborhood beyond which whites begin to desert the neighborhood (white flight); this threshold is at about 20 percent.¹²

Thus, terms transferred from one national context to another still follow their own path according to the empirical data that guide them.

THE BATTLE OF NUMBERS

The war of words continues, and numbers constitute the weapons of the war! As the geographer Pierre George emphasizes, “Two facts intersect in considering immigration: the first is a numerical fact expressed in absolute numbers and as a ratio on the local, regional, and national level; the second is a qualitative fact: the perception of difference. This is what makes immigration in this second half of the century original and gives relations between native and immigrant populations a new echo of incompatibility.”¹³

The numbers increase awareness and are provocative. They either make fears concrete or provide relief, depending on the analysis and interpretation of the results. In fact, statistics—by definition a barometer of social reality—lead to polemics, depending on how they are used and by whom. First, concerning the number of foreigners, the controversy implies unlimited entry, hence the “r...