Fostering Pluralism through Solidarity Activism in Europe

Everyday Encounters with Newcomers

Feyzi Baban, Kim Rygiel, Feyzi Baban, Kim Rygiel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030568931
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030568948
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection brings together academics, artists and members of civil society organizations to engage in a discussion about the ideas of living with others, through concepts such as cosmopolitanism, solidarity, and conviviality, and the practices of doing so.  

In recent years, right wing and populist movements have emerged and strengthened across Europe and North America, rejecting the value of cultural, ethnic and religious plurality. Governments in Europe and North America are weakening their commitment to the international refugee regime, erecting new barriers to entry. Even as governments fail to accommodate growing pluralism, however, civil society initiatives have emerged with the aim of welcoming newcomers, such as migrants and refugees, and finding alternative ways of living together in diverse societies. Motivated by a desire to show solidarity, these initiatives demonstrate enormous creativity in fostering pluralism in an environment that has largely become hostile to the arrival of newcomers. The contributions gathered here seek to explore such initiatives and the important work that they do in fostering ways of living together with others from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. In focusing conceptually and empirically on discussions and examples of civil society initiatives, this book interrogates why, how and under what circumstances are some communities more welcoming than others.

Part IThinking Cosmopolitanism, Conviviality and Solidarity Activism in Everyday Living

© The Author(s) 2020

F. Baban, K. Rygiel (eds.)Fostering Pluralism through Solidarity Activism in EuropePalgrave Studies in Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56894-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Living with Others: Opening Communities to Newcomers

Feyzi Baban¹ and Kim Rygiel²

(1)

Departments of International Development and Politics, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada

(2)

Department of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada

Feyzi Baban (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Kim Rygiel

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

SolidarityCosmopolitanismCivil societyNewcomersPluralismSocial movementsMigrationActivismXenophobiaCultureEurope

End Abstract

This book, like so many of life’s endeavors, arises from both troubles and inspirations. Like the sentiments expressed in the song “Troubled Times” by American punk rock band, Green Day, many of us are troubled by the times we live in: “What good is love and peace on earth / when it’s exclusive?” Worldwide inequality continues to grow with “[t]he average income of the richest 10% of the population … about nine times that of the poorest 10% across the OECD, up from seven times 25 years ago” (OECD n.d.). Societies around the world are increasingly polarized, under pressure from such forces as fascism and authoritarianism, xenophobia and racism, and misogyny and homophobia. In recent years, right-wing and populist movements have emerged across Europe and North America, posing a double challenge to the post-Second World War domestic and international orders. Domestically, powerful populist movements have gained power by rejecting the post-war consensus upholding certain liberal, democratic principles, such as the belief in the value of cultural, ethnic and religious plurality. Internationally, governments in Europe and North America have buckled under pressure from these same populist movements, weakening their commitment to the international refugee regime. Rather than offering protection to those fleeing war and other forms of violence, governments have erected more restrictive barriers preventing their arrival. These challenges come, moreover, at a time when the need for protection and resettlement is growing. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR 2019: 2), some 70.8 million individuals have been forcibly displaced worldwide in the past year alone. This figure includes some 25.9 million refugees, 3.5 million asylum seekers and 41.3 million persons who are internally displaced (Ibid.). Contributing to these high numbers is the Syrian war, now in its seventh year and which has displaced more than 12 million people (UNHCR n.d.), with figures suggesting that between those forcibly displaced and those who choose to move, some 258 million people live outside of their country of birth (UN DESA 2017). This number also includes the growing numbers of Syrians, who have fled war and resettled in countries such as Turkey, which now hosts more than 3.5 million Syrians, Germany with almost a million (UNHCR n.d.), and smaller numbers of Syrians living in countries elsewhere, such as Canada, which resettled some 40,000 Syrians between November 2015 and the end of January 2017 (Government of Canada n.d, #WelcomeRefugees). The large number of people living outside their country of birth, and the urgent need to resettle those displaced, has given renewed importance to the issue of welcoming newcomers into our communities—the focus of this book—both in Europe and in North America.

In addition to displacement, social and economic injustices and polarization, another trouble weighing on us is how to respond in these troubled times. At an academic conference in Europe a few years ago, a lively discussion broke out over how we could—and should—best respond the forms of violence and injustices existing in our lives and characterizing our times. We were disturbed to see a consensus so readily settle in among the group. The consensus that emerged was that, while we should engage in struggle from our various vantage points and positionalities, the idea of common struggle was both a goal undesirable and too difficult for many. No doubt this position was partly informed by important anti-racist, feminist, postcolonial and other forms of critical analyses, which have made important interventions over the past several decades, drawing our awareness to power inequalities and how we are each embedded and reproduce power and inequality in various ways. Such critique has meant that people are often wary of speaking for or on behalf of others, leaving them to act from their own specific locations and identities. Yet, it was when a long-time activist and academic broke the consensus, crying out in frustration that they/we would never have witnessed the end of official apartheid had black and white South Africans not worked together across their differences and on behalf of a common cause, that we were inspired. The speaker declared that fighting apartheid politics had only been possible as a result of a politics of connectivity and exchange that necessitated reaching out to others, despite being differently situated within power hierarchies, in order to find and build common ground.

We believe we have much to learn from the experiences of those who have walked paths of earlier struggles of resistance. It struck us that, today, we are in such a moment of needing to build and to acknowledge such a politics of connectivity and exchange, a politics that many undertake, in fact, every day but which often goes unnoticed when actions or interventions are quieter or smaller in size and scope. Now, more than ever, as we find ourselves in a world that is increasingly polarized, we need to shine a spotlight on the many acts, programs and initiatives that individuals, groups and communities are undertaking in order to build new ways of interacting with one another, creating new spaces of exchange, where we encounter and come to know one another, and where we can find possibilities for building common ground. For it is only in the exchange that we can come to know and learn from one another and to build community anew together. We hope that this book contributes to this endeavor in some small way by making visible some of the important work being done by scholars, artists and activist, and a variety of grassroots movements and civil society organizations to welcome newcomers into our communities, thereby fostering pluralism and alternative ways of living together in these troubled times.

Finding common ground here should not be understood as that which results from some Darwinian or Hobbesian form of realpolitik, where what is “common” emerges from competing interests in which the strongest idea, voice, person or positionality wins out. Nor should “common” be understood in the liberal sense of finding a goal or an ideal that is universal or intrinsic to us all. Common also does not suggest that there exists a harmony of interests that arises either through complex negotiations of competing interests (although it may well do so) or which is delivered as a result of some external force like an “invisible hand” (Smith 2003 [1776]). Rather, our understanding of finding common ground is one which is inspired by Edward Said’s (1993) notion of “contrapuntal reading,” as something that emerges as a result of difficult translation processes. Said (1993: 51) developed this notion of contrapuntal reading from Western classical music explaining, “In the counterpoint of Western classical music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work.” Building on this musical example, Said saw contrapuntality as providing a more critical approach to reading, understanding and knowledge production. Contrapuntality means, for example, reading “the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” (Said 1993: 66). Moreover, “For each locale in which engagement occurs, and the imperialist model is disassembled, its incorporative, universalizing, and totalizing codes rendered ineffective and inapplicable, a particular type of research and knowledge begins to build up” (Ibid.: 51). In other words, contrapuntality requires interpreting the “major metropolitan cultural texts” not just from the dominant perspectives but from the margins, that is from the perspectives of those who have been marginalized and written out of the texts, but yet are integral to their creation (Said 1993: 53). It means paying attention to the “moments of resistance,” which provide counter-narratives and ways of understanding and being in the world (Ibid.). For it is only by such an approach that “Western cultural forms can be taken out of the autonomous enclosures in which they have been protected, and placed instead in the dynamic global environment created by imperialism, itself revised as an ongoing contest between north and south, metropolis and periphery, white and native” (Said 1993: 51).

With res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Thinking Cosmopolitanism, Conviviality and Solidarity Activism in Everyday Living
• Part II
• Back Matter