Social Justice through Citizenship?

The Politics of Muslim Integration in Germany and Great Britain

A. Lewicki

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137436627
• eBook ISBN: 9781137436634
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Lewicki examines how current salient discourses of citizenship conceptualize democratic relations and frame the 'Muslim question' in Germany and Great Britain. Citizenship is understood not as a static or monolithic regime, but as being reproduced through competing discourses that can facilitate or inhibit the reduction of structural inequalities.

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Social Justice and Citizenship

This chapter introduces Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional theory of social justice and explores problems that arise from its application to post-migration minorities. Fraser’s critique of the politics of identity, I suggest, suffers from a currently not uncommon tendency to Orientalism among Western left-wing intellectuals, which excludes what is perceived as communitarian ‘particularism’ from what is constructed as progressive ‘universalism’. Fraser’s analytical and normative distinction between claims for recognition, redistribution and representation, however, offers a corrective for citizenship discourses, and helps to refocus these on to the requirements of social justice. The chapter thus revisits four influential citizenship discourses, notably civic republicanism, multiculturalism, civic universalism and denationalization and explores their capacity to account for a spectrum of structural impediments to parity of participation.

1.1 Social justice

While attempts to define social justice have been at the heart of philosophy since ancient Greece, post-war political theory has developed a specifically normative research agenda which seeks to identify and justify the contours of social justice in contemporary societies. John Rawls, most prominently, offered arguments for a liberal conception of social justice that linked national liberal pluralism to social-democratic redistribution (1972). His theory justified post-war welfare state institutions which were to remedy undeserved inequalities and value disagreement. Michael Walzer responded by questioning the possibility of identifying universal principles of justice, however thin they might be (1983). He claimed that egalitarian justice is a moral standard which varies across nations and societies. From his point of view, goods can only be distributed with regard to their contextual social meaning. Iris Marion Young then challenged the primacy of distributive accounts of social justice. Her work centred on cultural forms of domination and oppression and proposed a framework of differential rights for specific groups (Young 1990). Jürgen Habermas eventually proposed to define justice as an ongoing deliberative process of social inclusion (2010 [1989]). His work stresses the significance of social institutions and discursive practices. Justice emerges from the communicative premises of non-coercive negotiations and deliberations during which everyone is required and empowered to take the perspective of everyone else. Modern subjects create a communicative space for potential partners in dialogue who should be able to justify their beliefs, values and actions to each other, and to reach consensus on how to proceed. The public sphere as a critical idea defines a space in which public opinion emerges through processes of informal deliberation and is subsequently translated into legitimate and effective political decisions and administrative processes. Nancy Fraser’s work draws on some of Jürgen Habermas’ ideas, but also challenges his notion of the public sphere as a bourgeois construct (Fraser 1990) and moves the conceptualization of social justice further beyond a principle based substantiation. Fraser does not think that we can define or reach any ideal of social justice; however, we do experience injustice, and it is through this experience that we form an idea of justice (2012:43).

Her work is hence concerned with what she calls the grammar and the normative bases of political claims for social justice as they are articulated by social movements (2008a). Fraser argues that such claims reveal information about unjust institutional arrangements. Claims for recognition, for instance, problematize cultural status hierarchies; claims for redistribution point to socio-economic inequalities, and demands for political representation problematize impediments to political access. Social justice claims thus enable insights into a spectrum of structural manifestations of injustice. Currently, social movements and their claims differ according to their aspirations to transform the cultural, economic, or political ground rules that shape social interactions.

Fraser observes that since the 1990s, disputes about justice have become framed in a binary opposition between class- and culture-based social movements; mobilization, for instance, often takes shape as trade-unionism or multicultural identity politics respectively. Not only do these two paradigms seem to compete, they also conceive of structural injustices either in predominantly socio-economic or cultural terms. Whilst social democrats seek to restructure economic relations, multiculturalism advances symbolic change of hierarchical social norms. Rather than subsuming one within the analytical tools of the other, Fraser argues that maldistribution and misrecognition need to be considered as injustices in their own right; both bring about distinct claims against economic exploitation or denigrating patterns of cultural value, and both require distinct political institutional remedies, namely policies of redistribution and recognition (Fraser and Honneth 2003). More recently, Fraser turned her attention to a third dimension of injustice, which her earlier work did not spell out, namely the structural political conditions of claims-making (2005, 2007b, 2008a, b). She observes that claims, such as those for redistribution and recognition, can only be translated into institutional responses in the absence of political injustices such as ‘misrepresentation’ and ‘misframing’. Misrepresentation describes the inadequate translation of claims into political decisions, whereas misframing refers to constellations where individuals are subjected to a governance structure but cannot hold decision-makers accountable.

Fraser’s distinction between claims that problematize misrecognition, malredistribution and misrepresentation, as has been often misunderstood, is not intended to contrast real world injustices with each other (Young 1997), weigh them up against each other or to suggest manifestations of them might be ‘merely’ cultural (Butler 1998), specifically economic or genuinely political; she does also not seek to establish a hierarchy of various forms of injustice or deny the multiple intersections between them (Fraser 1998). Rather, her concern is that a culturalist, economist or politist view of society tends to occlude other struggles, be they for redistribution, representation or recognition (Fraser 2007a:307). She hence introduces an analytical distinction that assists in unmasking a spectrum of roots of injustice so their interrelatedness can be addressed through a variety of institutional remedies.

Overcoming injustice means deinstitutionalizing and dismantling obstacles that ‘prevent some people from participating on a par with others, as full partners of social interaction’ (Fraser 2008a:60). The ‘parity of participation’ principle is based on the idea of equal moral worth; it provides a measure for social arrangements which can be assessed according to whether they permit individuals to participate as peers in key areas of social life (Fraser 2008a:60).

The parity of participation principle has distinct normative implications for different forms of social relationships. For instance, within economic social interactions, it enables an assessment of institutional arrangements according to whether they enable equal access to economic resources; cultural parity of participation is a critical yardstick that measures whether cultural norms are defined on even terms by all members of society. The political dimension of parity of participation requires the political co-authorship of everybody who is subjected to a governance structure that shapes the ground rules for their social interactions (Fraser 2008a, 2009b); political institutions are assessed as to their capacity to guarantee that all viewpoints are considered in political negotiations and decision-makers can be held accountable.

This approach to social justice assumes that any approximation of justice in any working context has to originate in a democratic dialogue between different points of view (Fraser 2008a, b, cf. Parekh 2004:211). Rather than defined by means of a fixed definition, justice is facilitated through broadening the space for an on-going contestation of various positions. Fraser appreciates that the expansion of contention alone cannot overcome injustice (2008b:402). Rather than solving ongoing disagreements about the substance of justice in any given context, the parity of participation principle is designed to improve reflexivity within disputes about social change and to assist in assessing currently existing social arrangements.

The principle is to be applied dialogically and discursively by the give and take of arguments and conflicting judgements (Fraser 2003:43). It functions as an idiom for public reason and discourse ethics in a Habermasian sense (1989), evaluating the rules and the processes of political decision-making but also the content of the institutional provisions that result from these processes. The legitimacy of decisions depends on their representativeness, namely the inclusion of feedback by as wide a co-authorship as possible (see also Squires 2002:269); the content of a political outcome is assessed as to whether it makes a qualitative contribution to the realization of parity of participation in its various meanings.

Fraser’s recent interest in the political preconditions of claims-making resonates with theoretical debates about democratic citizenship. She shares a core concern with philosophical cosmopolitanism, namely the equal moral worth of human beings, which entails engaging with others as equals as well as the commitment to treat the vulnerable with compassion (Linklater 1998:34, Held 2010:15). Similar to cosmopolitanism, she also conceptualizes the political as the enabling sphere of democratic rights, obligations and procedures; however, where cosmopolitan citizenship stresses the impartial consideration of claims in public deliberation and argument (Linklater 1998:34, Benhabib 2008:15, Held 2010:15, 41), Fraser’s parity principle implies an additional egalitarian commitment that also applies to cultural relationships and economic interactions. For instance, in contrast to Held, who thinks that people ‘suffer disadvantage not primarily because they have less than others in this instance, but because they can participate less in the processes and institutions that shape their lives’ (2010:45),¹ Fraser’s principle goes beyond the idea of equal access to political negotiations by defining a normative measure for the outcomes of such processes.

Although cosmopolitan citizenship is not oblivious to three-dimensionality (Benhabib 2008:45, 175), it derives (1) a decline of the moral relevance of racial and cultural difference, (2) the spread of political rights of participation, and (3) efforts to dismantle economic exclusion, from the entrenchment of ethical universalism of human rights in democratic public law (Linklater 1998:36, 2007, Benhabib 2008:16–20, Held 2010:17, 53–71, 105–112). In contrast, Fraser militates against a one-size-fits-all framing of justice (2009b:294) and questions the possibility of approximating social justice through a universal set of principles. Compared to cosmopolitanism, her normative measure is less specific, insofar as it does not prescribe the inter-subjective validity of any set of norms, but provides a normative standard for the evaluation of rules and their emergence.²

My comparative study of democratic citizenship discourse in two multi-ethnic societies draws on Fraser’s normative and analytical concerns; I suggest that Fraser’s theory provides a critical yardstick for theoretical and empirical citizenship discourses, which can help to refocus citizenship’s function as a tool that enables social actors to move closer to three-dimensional social justice. Against this background, I discuss four existing citizenship discourses and conduct a comparative study of two recent political initiatives in Germany and the United Kingdom. I explore whether and to what degree minority actors had access to the negotiation of policy measures that establish significant ground rules for their social interactions. I also examine which claims minorities articulated throughout the political process and whose claims were then translated into binding measures. Beyond this focus on the political process, I explore which kinds of inequalities these claims problematized and to what degree the political outcomes contributed to eradicating structural inequalities.

The research objective is not to measure empirical processes against a positive normative ideal, but to analyse which forms of injustice are debated and addressed within academic citizenship discourses and real-world discussions about democratic integration. Fraser’s theory assists me in establishing which structural inequalities are problematized in empirical claims-making processes, and it allows me to register which ones might not have not been discussed and to ask why this might be the case.

1.2 The case of post-migration minorities

Fraser’s three-dimensional theory of justice reflects a development which feminist struggles have undergone over recent decades (Squires 2003, Fraser 2009a). The first ‘wave’ of feminist social movements in the early 20th century problematized the denial of equality before the law, manifested in, for instance, differential rights to political participation. The claim for voting rights implied a demand for equal treatment of women and men and rested on an understanding of equality as impartiality of political institutions. In the 1960s and 1970s, the second wave criticized culturally coded social norms that posed impediments to parity of participation for women in socio-economic and interpersonal relations; claims challenged the prevalent conceptualization of public and private, which inhibited a contestation of sexual harassment in the ‘private sphere of the family’ or criticized the organization of labour which favoured a male lifecycle and imposed an androcentric order on society. Pointing to gender based differences, second wave movements demanded that social norms and collective institutions should reflect and address the specific needs of both sexes; impartiality of public institutions did not suffice to overcome traditional patterns that upheld, for instance, the gender pay gap. Positive action drew on an understanding of equality as difference, which was to enable women to gain a positive sense of their common identity as women (Squires 2003:13). This ‘cultural’ revolution was criticized for its tendency to essentialize gender difference and to reinforce categorizations and ascriptions. Feminist theory has since sought to overcome a perspective that paired ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ dichotomously by deconstructing the dichotomy itself (Squires 2003:14). The third wave, as Squires suggests, does not weight gender neutrality against gender visibility, nor does it simply reflect a desire for ‘agreement or synthesis’ (Squires 2003:15). Rather, it seeks ‘to move beyond and complement equal treatment and positive action’ (Squires 2003:16). Thereby the approach is analytically distinct from an equality approach, which would seek to merely ‘add women’ to the existing scheme; it also varies from a ‘difference’ based viewpoint which overlooks that ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’ themselves are socially constructed (Squires 2003:15). The third wave, which emerged in the 1990s, marked a shift to a gender perspective which acknowledges differences between the sexes, but involves both, men and women, into the negotiation of social change (Squires 2003:15). Rather than putting women at the centre, a ‘diversity’ oriented perspective seeks to ‘deconstruct centres’.

Theoretical and empirical debates about democracy in culturally diverse societies currently stage a similar disagreement between advocates of a socio-economic ‘equality as impartiality’ and supporters of a cultural ‘equality as respect for difference’. An exchange with feminist theory can thus help to overcome such binaries. Fraser’s theory constitutes an attempt to take feminist movements further by integrating them with other contemporary social struggles, such as for instance, post-migration minority claims for accommodation or LGBT movements. Her argument is that various manifestations of injustice are particularly salient within certain social groups and thus likely to be articulated by them; many of these injustices, however, equally affect other groups or all members of society. Thus she seeks to offer a theory of social justice that assesses democratic policies as to their ability to remove barriers to economic, cultural and political parity of participation that all members of society face. I suggest that if Fraser’s theory is to live up to the wider applicability it aspires to, it can benefit from further refinement through a dialogue with theoretical disputes about disability rights, sexual identity struggles or post-migration minority accommodation (see also Siim and Squires 2007), which can help to take it further beyond a perspective that originates in gender struggles within Western liberal democracy. I shall leave the dialogue with disability (Danermark and Gellerstedt 2004) or queer studies to others, but will try to make Fraser’s arguments applicable to post-migration minorities.

While I am aware that terms such as ‘post-migration minority’ or ‘post-migration subject position’ problematically generalize individual self-perceptions in several respects, I nevertheless chose this terminology to grasp the positionality of individuals who have settled in a country different from their ancestors, in which public institutions have not been designed to meet the requirement of their ancestors’ cultural customs or religious observance. When I refer to a post-migration subject position or post-migration minorities, I include individuals who, as a result of their own or their parents’ (in some cases even grandparents’) migration experience, feel they belong to a cultural or religious minority group and those who are perceived by others as members of a particular cultural or religious group. In the following, I sketch how Fraser’s specification of structural forms of injustice helps us to identify the structural asymmetries that arise for this particular positionality and engage critically with her reservations towards the politics of identity.

Fraser argues that it is worth distinguishing manifestations of economic deprivation, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Social Justice and Citizenship
• 2  Research Methodology
• 3  The German Islam Conference: Institutionalized Dialogue with Muslims
• 4  Institutionalized Consultations with Muslims in Great Britain
• 5  The British Equalities Framework: Discrimination on Grounds of Religion
• 6  The German Equal Treatment Act: Discrimination on Grounds of Religion
• 7  The Politics of Muslim Integration in Germany and Great Britain
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index