Watching Arabic Television in Europe

From Diaspora to Hybrid Citizens

Christina Slade

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137352422
• eBook ISBN: 9781137352439
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

What are Arabic Europeans watching on television and how does it affect their identities as Europeans? New evidence from seven capitals shows that, far from being isolated in ethnic media ghettoes, they are critical news consumers in Arabic and European languages and engaged citizens.

1

‘Dark Tribalism’: Does Arabic Television Undermine Integration in Europe?

[D]ark tribalism has swept Europe ... In country after country, immigrants, often from Muslim countries, are being targeted ... Immigration to Europe has exploded in recent years, so much so that the EU has overtaken the US as the world’s premier destination for people seeking a better life abroad. The migrants are provoking deep fears that Europe’s racial and religious identity is being lost. (Theil, 2010)

9/11, 2001 in the United States ignited fears of a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington, 1996) between Islam and the West. In Europe, 9/11 was followed by the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004, the Madrid bombings of 2004, the 2005 London bombings on 7/7 and the 2005 Paris riots. The Islamic citizens of Europe were seen as an enemy within. Scandinavia was rocked by violent reactions to the publication of cartoons of Mohammed, also in 2005. These events provided the context that gave rise to this book. I was living in Utrecht in 2004–2005 and observed the anti-Islamic riots that followed the murder of Van Gogh. I worked with an Arabic speaking research assistant to find out what Arabic speakers were saying, what they were watching on television, what they believed. I was struck by the sophistication of the responses, and the ability of sometimes illiterate Arabic speakers to negotiate Dutch, Arabic and transnational media (Slade, 2007). Were Arabic speakers in Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Paris and Stockholm doing the same?

Over the following years, anti-immigrant rhetoric bloomed in Europe. Sarrazin (2010) warned that Germany was destroying itself with migration. Multiculturalism became unfashionable. Angela Merkel (Reuters, 2010) and David Cameron (News of the World, 2011) were vocally sceptical about the concept. Anti-immigrant political parties gained momentum in countries regarded as tolerant: UKIP in the UK, Austria’s Freedom Party, Vlaams Belang in Belgium. Even in Sweden, the anti-immigrant Swedish Democrats gained representation in Parliament (Walker & Duxbery, 2010). Two leading figures, Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom Party and Marine Le Pen of the Front National in France, recently announced an alliance of populists across Europe (Garton Ash, 2013). ‘Dark tribalism’ is on the rise in Western Europe.

Underlying dark tribalism is a claim that the stability of a society depends on homogeneity of cultures and values of those who are citizens. This assumption was evident in the remarks of the then French President Sarkozy in 2010 discussing the banning of the full Islamic veil:

We cannot accept to have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity, Mr Sarkozy told a special session of parliament in Versailles¹. (BBC, 22 June 2010)

Sarkozy is talking here of the full-face veil. The debate is not restricted to full-face coverage. In 1989, the ‘Affaire du foulard’ in France was a passionate debate about whether wearing a headscarf was appropriate in secular society, in particular in schools (Benhabib, 2004, pp.51–62). This issue resurfaced in France in 2013 (Lichfield, 2013), following a heated debate in the United Kingdom in 2013 (Taylor, 2013).² Sarkozy’s remarks touched a sensitive nerve among many liberal thinkers. Not only is the full-face veil dangerous, preventing women who wear it from seeing properly, putting them at risk in traffic, interfering with their ability to communicate; it also symbolises repression, since the veil is imposed by men and may be tantamount to the claim that all men are rapacious.

Sarkozy’s remarks were insensitive. To say that the veil ‘cuts women off from all social life, and deprives them of identity’ assumes that personal identity is undermined by the very fact that face-to-face communication is mediated by a veil. It is not true that ‘unveiled’ face-to-face communication is the only possible form of ‘social life’ in modern society. Think of the telephone, of email, of Facebook. Nor is the veil necessarily imposed by husbands or fathers. Many young women of European citizenship choose to adopt the veil. My research assistant in the project in Utrecht, for instance, was of Moroccan descent, was born and had grown up in the Netherlands, and spent summers in Morocco where she taught swimming. She explained that, as she began her Masters and was re-evaluating her identity, wearing a headscarf helped her define herself. She wore particularly elegant combinations of colours, reminiscent of Vermeer’s famous image of the girl with a pearl earring. The veil may prevent certain kinds of social interaction and limit a certain sort of gaze, but it equally enables other sorts of interaction with peers who share the values signalled by the veil.³

For an older woman in London, the veil is ‘a private matter’. A veil defines social interactions, just as a nun’s headgear structures social relationships, or for that matter a mini-skirt or a black tie does. A young woman in London said of her English friends: ‘When they hit 18, they go clubbing and ... I don’t fit in.’ Dress shows she is different. The veil is a signal of a style of interaction. Banning the veil is no more likely to ensure social interaction than medieval sumptuary laws limiting how middle class women should dress prevented the accumulation and display of wealth by the trading classes.

Sarkozy’s real concern was that the veil interferes with the full civic engagement of women in a modern secular democracy: the veil is an outward manifestation of ethnically and religiously defined minorities who isolate themselves from the broader social and political life of the country in which they live. This view is one many share. Yet the women he refers to are probably French citizens, almost certainly French speakers, multiply connected to French society through work and the schooling of children and family. The evidence presented in the book shows that they are most likely critical viewers of French television, listening to French radio. They, together with their families, discuss French politics. They have a strong sense of connection to society and to France.

This book seeks to discover just how Arabic speakers in Europe engage with public debate. Are they cut off from society, locked into an alien civilisation? Are they part of a larger Arabic-speaking conspiracy within or beyond Europe? Does the Arabic language fuel the clash of civilisations? There are hundreds of Arabic language channels available in Europe. Are those channels undermining Europe? The empirical evidence suggests not. Those watching Arabic language media are not separate and cut off from Europe. Arabic speaking women in Paris, for instance, are likely to be engaged in quite sophisticated ways, mainly via television, with French news and entertainment as well as with news and entertainment in Arabic. In our study, 98 per cent of Arabic speaking women in Paris watch both Arabic language and French local channels. This is also true of more recent migrants: 97 per cent of those born in Arabic speaking countries in Paris watch television in both languages. This is remarkable evidence of integration that Sarkozy’s rhetoric fails to acknowledge.

Sarkozy’s remarks serve to highlight the issues around which the research reported in this book revolves. While Europe is a site of rising anti-Arab sentiment and increasingly rigorous migration regulation, media are becoming increasingly globalised. The discussion is often highly charged, the theoretical and philosophical issues complex. My aim was to question assumptions and provide evidence to assist in the debate.

Media and citizenship

The relationship between media and citizenship in Europe can be approached from many directions. The theoretical framework of Habermas’s ([1962], 1989) conception of the ‘ideal public sphere’ is widely used in studies of communication. Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, he was concerned to ensure that nation states maintained effective debate about political issues, and allowed a space in which political dogma could be questioned. His model is of an ideal of reasoned debate among the citizenry, supported by publicly funded media. Debate in the media helps in questioning and legitimating democratic leadership. The ‘ideal public sphere’ was, as it was first conceptualised, a national public sphere. As he himself (Habermas, 2001, 2009, 2012) recognises, both media and the nation state have altered. No longer can we assume that there is a monolingual nation state controlling its media. Nevertheless, his model of the ideal of media providing informed debate for a strong democratic state has been the basis for much research in the field of communication (Lunt & Livingstone, 2013), and remains a useful framework for bringing together media and citizenship.

I also draw on Habermas’s (1986, 1995) account of ‘discourse ethics’. For Habermas, the foundation of ethics derives not from universal ethical principles, but from debate, regulated by principles of logical coherence and consistency. In the final chapter of this book, I address the question of whether principles of logical coherence and consistency are universal, and argue that, while there is no absolute logic, conventions of reasoning can emerge as a product of debate. The analysis of Arabic speakers’ discussions about media and citizenship provides a number of instances of real moral debate, about which they argued passionately. In interpreting these debates, I draw on argumentation theory (e.g. Johnson, 2000), as well as my approach to media and reason (Slade, 2002).

Citizenship itself is a complex notion, explored in Chapter 2. Being a citizen encompasses everything from the formal possession of a passport to the political, economic and cultural attributes a citizen is supposed to have. Miller distinguishes them as follows: the political, consisting of the politico–legal rights of citizenship; the economic rights ‘to work and prosper’; and the cultural, which he defines as ‘the right to know and speak’ (2007, p.35). He charts a web of political, sociological, philosophical, historical and legal arguments based on notions of cultural citizenship. I draw a broad distinction between what is legally implied by citizenship, labelled ‘formal citizenship’, and concepts of cultural belonging or ‘cultural citizenship’. Migration is a matter of formal citizenship. Media are at the heart of cultural citizenship in the modern world. Dahlgren argues that the connection between the domains lies in a conception of citizenship as ‘civic agency’: ‘stepping into the public sphere, making sense of media representations’ (2009, p.76). That conception informs the analysis of how Arabic speakers’ portray themselves as citizens.

Global news has altered the notions of time and geographical place (Giddens, 1990; Price, 2002). Technologies such as the internet and the mobile telephone have altered patterns of social and political relations, so that the state-based hierarchical models are increasingly replaced by networks (Castells, 2001). Gitlin (1998) talks of ‘public sphericules’, groupings smaller than the state in which debate on public affairs occurs. Volkmer (2006, 2011, 2014) prefers to talk of trans- or supra-national public spheres that extend beyond the limits of the state. Cunningham (2001) created the label ‘ethno-specific public sphericules’, to identify linguistically delimited cross-national public spheres such as those identified among Arabic speakers. I draw on these approaches as I discuss the impact of technology of the transformation of European democracy in Chapter 3.

Arabic media have been discussed by a range of scholars (Ayish, 2003; Chalaby, 2005; Kraidy and Khalil, 2009; Miladi, 2003; Miles, 2005; Sakr, 2001; Seib, 2008). Marie Gillespie (2006) led a team in Britain that looked at how Muslim viewers evaluated the press after 9/11. This provided both a starting point and methodological insights for our analysis. Audience analysis, developed over the 1980s and 1990s, suggests that it is essential to analyse not just television content, but also the ways those who are watching interpret content, as well as the role of television in the family and its broader cultural impact. These traditions inform the focus group work. In recent years, audience analysis has developed into theories of mediation. Silverstone defines mediation thus:

Mediation ... describes the fundamentally, but unevenly, dialectical process in which institutionalized media of communication (the press, broadcast radio and television, and increasingly the World Wide Web) are involved in the general circulation of symbols in social life. That circulation no longer requires face-to-face communication, though it does not exclude it. (2002, p.761)

Livingstone (2009) surveys the terminology surrounding the notions of mediation, saying:

... first the media mediate, entering into and shaping the ubiquitous relations among individuals and between individuals and society; and second, as a result, the media mediate, for better or for worse, more than ever before. (Livingstone, 2009, p.6)

In describing the ways Arabic speakers talk of their media use, and its impact on their understanding of society, I draw on this understanding of mediation. When focusing on the impact of media on Arabic speakers’ understanding of civil society and citizenship in Europe, the German tradition of ‘mediatization’ is a theoretical construct which is increasingly used in the field.⁴ Couldry and Hepp (2013) describe mediatisation as:

[A] concept used to analyse critically the interrelation between changes in media and communications on the one hand, and changes in culture and society on the other. (p.197)

Content now moves seamlessly across media platforms. Television is available via the internet and on mobile phones. This phenomenon of ‘transmedia’ or polymedia’ in Madianou and Miller’s (2013) evocative term, means that television is just one component of a densely mediated environment. A focus on a particular medium, such as television, may appear outdated. However television remains a core feature of mediated social life. As Couldry himself says:

television is likely to remain most people’s primary medium of communication in the foreseeable future, however delivered and with whatever Web-based enhancements. (2012, p.18, his italics)

Turner and Tay (2009) agree that television remains ‘central’ to the mediated experience of the young. Seib makes an even broader claim, which supports the focus on satellite television: ‘satellite television has been the driving force of intellectual globalisation’ (2008, p.18).

Media research in Europe on minority or diasporic media has been mainly national in focus (e.g. Hall, 1992; Aksoy and Robins, 2000). Diasporic media is generally conceptualised as media delivered in a host country in the language of the homeland. Such media have not disappeared. London continues to be a major centre of Arabic language newspapers. But satellite and cable channels bring media from different nations together in a space that is, at least for the viewer, a single simultaneous space of news. News from the country of origin is no longer, as it used to be, months old, nor is it mediated by others and shot through with nostalgic framing. Instead, it is immediate, aired in the country of origin and the host country at the same time. Where once diasporic communities gathered and shared news of the country of birth in phy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Dark Tribalism: Does Arabic Television Undermine Integration in Europe?
• 2  Arabic Citizens of Europe: Nativism, Formal and Cultural Citizenship
• 3  Europe Remediated: A Transnational Public Sphere?
• 4  Television Diaries: Arabic Media Consumption in the EU
• 5  Arabic is important to me: Making Sense of Media
• 6  Citizenship Means Belonging: Arabic-Speaking Europeans
• 7  From Diaspora to Hybrid Citizen: Reasoning across Communities
• Bibliography
• Index