The Challenge of Minority Integration

Politics and Policies in the Nordic Nations

Peter A. Kraus, Peter Kivisto

• Publisher: De Gruyter Open Poland
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9783110441109
• eBook ISBN: 9783110456141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

How is solidarity achieved in highly diverse societies - particularly those that have been until recently characterized by rather homogeneous populations? What are the implications of growing levels of diversity on existing social arrangements? These two fundamental questions are explored in this edited collection, which examines the challenges of minority integration in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. These nations represent paradigmatic examples of social democratic welfare states that place a premium on a robust package of social rights, combined with policies aimed at reducing levels of class-based inequality and promoting gender equity. All four of these nations have witnessed growing levels of diversity due to immigration and three of them have been forced to rethink their policies concerning the indigenous Sámi, as well as old minority groups. Two introductory chapters, by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Peter Kivisto, serve as a conceptual framework for the seven case studies that follow, and which, from a variety of perspectives and with differing emphases, analyze the evolving realities in these nations today. Taken together, they offer evidence of the critical issues surrounding attempts to achieve solidarity while valorizing diversity.

PART I: Framing Integration and Solidarity in Contemporary Liberal Democracies

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

1 The Meaning of ‘We’

Some words typically used to characterise our present age – Western or non-Western – are flux, mobility, identity politics and multiculturalism, hybridity and the ongoing contestation of social and cultural boundaries. Issues taken on in the present volume include minority rights, citizenship, the dilemmas of multiculturalism in liberal societies, the often fraught relationship between state and civil society, and questions to do with the identity of the demos of a democracy. From this cluster of contentious and intellectually challenging questions I take my cue, and will use this opportunity to reflect on possible meanings of the word ‘we’ in the contemporary world.

The word ‘we’ is situational in that it can refer to a variety of collectivities depending on the context. It implies both inclusion and exclusion: by logical extension, the word ‘we’ implies ‘they’. Of particular interest is the question why certain ways of delineating a collective identity become empirically predominant while others are forgotten. This is not an issue of mere academic interest in a world which witnesses the upsurge of ethnic, religious and national identities – sometimes from below, in opposition to the state, sometimes from above, in defence of the state – while other forms of identification (based on, say, place or class) tend to be less visible. Regarding the contemporary state, the issue at hand concerns who is to be included in the state, and what it entails to be included.

In the following, I shall approach the question of ‘we’ from three perspectives. First, I simply ask what a society is. Secondly, I consider some kinds of dominant relationships that may lead to exclusion within a given society. Thirdly and finally, I distinguish between different forms of integration. As a result, it may be possible to explore questions of societal boundaries and collective identities slightly more accurately in the future.

1.1 What is a society?

‘What is a society?’ asks the anthropologist Maurice Godelier (2009:137) in a book that discusses Melanesian village societies and modern state societies in a comparative spirit. The question has been raised many times before. It is, in fact, much older than social science. In our era, this simple, but complex question has developed new meanings, and perhaps a more acute character than usual in human society. Rapid processes of change and enhanced mobility have made the boundaries of societies and their content less obviously clear than before.

When the classic sociologists, from Tönnies and Durkheim to Simmel and Weber, discussed the nature of society, they wrote against a backdrop of dramatic social transformations, that is the shift from agrarian to industrial society. In the decades around the last turn of the century, frantic industrialisation and urbanisation took place around Europe and North America, closely interconnected with the consolidation of colonial empires in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Formerly autonomous tribal societies were incorporated into colonial empires, at the same times as millions of Europeans moved from rural areas to towns. During the 19th century, the industrial capitalist took over from the feudal landowner as the engine of economic processes. International migration was widespread then as now, but the main currents went from countries in the north to European settler colonies such as Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. Actually, a significantly higher proportion of the world’s population lived outside their country of birth in 1911 than in 2011 (Castles and Miller 2003), although absolute numbers were lower. In 1911, the total population of the planet was 1.7 billion; it has been quadrupled in a hundred years, in other words.

Like most social scientists in our century, Godelier writes against a backdrop of globalisation processes, but his vantage point is not the Northern metropoles. Instead, he takes his point of departure in his own long-term research among the Baruya, a people in the New Guinea highlands who number roughly two thousand individuals. Before the Australian-British colonisation of Papua New Guinea reached the lands of the Baruya in 1960, they doubtless constituted a society, according to Godelier. They were an autonomous group, which stood in contact with other autonomous peoples (with whom they traded salt and other goods), but who were themselves in charge of their social, cultural and ritual institutions. Following the Australian and later Papuan incorporation of Baruya territory into a state formation, it is increasingly debatable whether the concept ‘society’ is appropriate for them. For a society is not merely an aggregate of persons with certain formal traits in common (e.g. language or religion), or simply a state or otherwise delineated territory. More is required for the term society to fit. Godelier formulates his question like this:

What are the connections – political, religious, economic, kinship, or other – that have the capacity to bring together groups and individuals who thereby form a ‘society’ (with borders that are known if not recognized by the neighbouring societies) and so fuse them into an all-encompassing whole that endows them with an additional, overarching, shared identity? (Godelier, 2009:142)

The Baruya have been integrated into a social system at a high level of scale (the nation-state Papua New Guinea) and partly into an economic system at an even higher level of scale (global capitalism). They have lost their sovereignty over ‘their mountains and rivers, and over their own selves’ (Godelier, 2009:142), and have been subjected to the power of a state - an institution totally alien to them. From being an independent society, they have been re-defined as a ‘local tribal group’ that forms part of a larger regional ethnic group (the Anga) in PNG. The system boundaries have become unclear. The state has redefined the Baruya language into a dialect. The word ‘we’ has become ambiguous and contested. This kind of historical process has been common in many parts of the world, and some of the results can be observed first hand in Native American reserves (where violence and alcoholism are endemic) or in Australian cities (where most homeless are Aborigines). The changes in question are not primarily cultural; they do not chiefly pertain to changes in language, clothing or food habits. Anthropologists tell of communities in the Amazon that, on first contact with Europeans, happily don Manchester United T-shirts and dance to Western music without considering any of this as a threat to their culture. However, changes in their social relations and kin patterns, as a result of wage work or enforced migration, or subjugation by the law and other institutions of the state, would be perceived as a grave threat. The history of modernity is the story of the transition from the concrete to the abstract, from small to large scale. Autonomous communities have been incorporated with or (usually) without their consent into mighty states and empires. Many have been erased from history, while others continue to exist, now as local communities or ethnic minorities within a state. Godelier is aware that he cannot write about the Baruya today independently of globalisation processes – or, rather, the tension between the global and the local, the big and the small, the abstract and the concrete. No society, small or large, governs its own destiny fully and is defined by sharp, uncontested boundaries. Even the most isolated, most closely-knit community has porous boundaries, but in our time, the currents connecting societies and relativising their boundaries are stronger and more comprehensive than ever before. Autonomy becomes a question of degree, just as internal cohesion or integration. In his analyses of the Baruya, Godelier emphasises the ‘politico-religious’ as the foundation of society. Put differently: Political power and economic integration are essential, but a system of symbolic meaning is also necessary in order to provide the members of a society with an ‘overarching shared identity’. In most of the societies we know from anthropology and history, religion and rituals constitute the most important symbolic foundation for integration. The separation of religion from politics was established late if at all; in Europe, the Treaty of Westphalia from 1648 is often mentioned, but a few countries, such as Norway, still have a state church, and it was only in 1945 that Emperor Hirohito was forced to concede that he was not of divine stock, following the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The question is, accordingly, which shared basis of identity, which can also legitimise political power, is possible in a country with no shared religion. In much of the 20th century, nationalism largely took the place of religion as a secular alternative to it, but it has increasingly been shown to separate as much as it unites; not only because the growing numbers of minorities feel uncomfortable with the nationalism of the majorities, but also because many members of the majorities orient themselves in other directions than inwards and backwards. Whereas Godelier writes from one of the outposts of globalisation – the mountain valleys of New Guinea – the chapters in this book deal with a less marginal area. Although Finland and the other Nordic countries may be geographically peripheral and climatically hostile, they are in other respects typical rich countries in the era of globalisation, seamlessly integrated into global economic processes, which entails wide-ranging exchange relations comprising, among other things, persons, commodities, services, symbols, commitments and insults with respect to the rest of the world, inside and outside of the European Union. The question concerning the boundaries of society and its substance are being raised here, as among the Baruya, but against a very different version of global modernity, characterised by migration, porous boundaries and global networks of information and communication. Whereas the early social theorists saw industrialisation, bureaucratisation and colonialism as the most powerful agents of change in their time, the focus now has to be shifted to other forces, such as transnational processes, instantaneous global communication, complex and contested identities, demographic change and value pluralism. In order to make sense of this new world, a varied analytical toolbox is necessary, utilising both old concepts (tailored to fit the situation around the last turn of the century) and new ones made to measure to suit the present era; some of the classic sociological concepts are still useful, whereas others have become ‘zombie concepts’ (Beck 2009): undead words. They are still in circulation, but no longer have anything to say. Looking at the debates about citizenship, national identities, ethnic diversity and transnationalism, one may well ask if ‘society’ may be such a concept.

In his popular textbook in cultural anthropology from 1981, Roger M. Keesing defined (a) society like this:

Society: A population marked by relative separation from surrounding populations and a distinctive culture (complex societies may include two or more distinctive cultural groups incorporated within a single social system) (Keesing 1981:518).

Note the caveat ‘relative separation’. Anthony Giddens, in his no less widely read textbook in sociology from 1993, defined the concept of society as follows:

SOCIETY: A society is a group of people who live in a particular territory, are subject to a common system of political authority, and are aware of having a distinct identity from other groups around them. Some societies, like those of hunters and gatherers, are very small, numbering no more than a few dozen people. Others are very large, involving many millions…(Giddens 1993:746).

Like Keesing, Giddens emphasises physical separation from the surroundings. Keesing’s formulation ‘two or more distinctive cultural groups’ is theoretically dated, however, since complex societies contain many borderline cases, frontier areas and overlapping or hybrid cultural worlds. Giddens’ phrase ‘a distinct identity’ is conceptually better, but needs to be checked against diverse empirical realities. Indeed, much current research on complex societies and their internal dynamics of inclusion and exclusion indirectly responds to general phrases of this kind, although the theoretical implications are too rarely spelled out.

Many have proposed new terminologies tailored to help conceptualise the current era, partly replacing the ‘zombie concepts’ of old in the process. Among the most radical bids is John Urry’s proposal to replace the term ‘society’ with ‘mobility’ (Urry 2000). What if, he reasons, we study social life through a lens of mobility rather than stability? The result would doubtlessly be quite different from a conceptualisation (still common in social science) assuming, almost in an axiomatic way, that stable societies are the stuff that social life is made of. At the same time, however, much would be lost if the concept of society was relegated to the dustbin of history, since it is an empirical fact that people all over the world seek stability, continuity, security and predictability (Eriksen, Bal and Salemink 2010), often by defending or creating spatial belonging, border demarcations and collective memories anchored in particular places (Connerton 2009). What has been ‘dis-embedded’ is, in a multitude of ways, being ‘re-embedded’.

Less revolutionary, but still fairly radical attempts to renew the conceptual apparatus of the social sciences, can be found in works by, inter alia, Castells (1996–8), Giddens (1991), Beck (2009), Bourdieu (1977) and Bauman (2000), who have suggested ter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Framing Integration and Solidarity in Contemporary Liberal Democracies
• PART II: Case Studies from the Nordic Nations
• Index
• Backcover