Coercive Concern

Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth

Reva Jaffe-Walter

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780804798426, 9780804796217
• eBook ISBN: 9780804798600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Many liberal-minded Western democracies pride themselves on their commitments to egalitarianism, the fair treatment of immigrants, and the right to education. These environments would seem to provide a best-case scenario for the reception of immigrant youth. But that is not always the case. Coercive Concern explores how stereotypes of Muslim immigrants in Western liberal societies flow through public schools into everyday interactions, informing how Muslim youth are perceived by teachers and peers. Beyond simply identifying the presence of racialized speech in schools, this book uncovers how coercive assimilation is cloaked in benevolent narratives of care and concern.

Coercive Concern provides an ethnographic critique of the "concern" that animates integration policy in Danish schools. Reva Jaffe-Walter focuses on the experiences of Muslim youth at a public school where over 40% of the student body is of immigrant descent, showing how schools operate as sites of governance. These efforts are led by political leaders who promote national fears of immigrant take-over, by teachers in schools, and by everyday citizens who are concerned about "problems" of immigration. Jaffe-Walter exposes the psychic and material costs immigrant youth endure when living in the shadow of social scrutiny, but she also charts a path forward by uncovering the resources these youth need to attain social mobility and success.

Chapter 1

Imagining the Nation

Danish Citizens and Muslim Others

Their religion has attacked our system. Back in the fifties, during my childhood, there was only one way to consider the world and how life should be lived, but now there are many aspects to be considered [laughs sarcastically], many cultural riches. Many immigrants have come in the sixties and seventies, and they have made their footprint in our culture and society.

—Holger, German teacher, Engby School

FOLLOWING THE HEBDO INCIDENT in Paris and the violence in Copenhagen in early 2015, there has been an upsurge in talk about the “integration” crisis in Europe and the threats to the values of freedom and democracy. These events reveal that fears of extremist violence and the recruitment of youth into organizations like ISIS are not unfounded. However, what seems to be missing from this conversation in the dominant discourse is a critical analysis of what is really meant by the term integration. Listening to media stories, we hear of the shock of a community when Muslim girls—described as “good students, modern, well-integrated, well-adjusted kids”—from a British private school are recruited to Syria (Shapiro 2015). European notions of integration change shape depending on the speaker and context but seem to rest with an understanding that well-integrated Muslims and immigrants do not display high levels of religiosity or emphasize their ties to their native countries. In addition, they should feel comfortable making public proclamations about feeling “British, Danish or French.” In an article responding to the events in Copenhagen, a New York Times reporter wrote, “As in many other European countries, Muslims in Denmark may coexist with their non-Muslim neighbors, but they often cling to the values and conspiracy-driven mind-set of their home countries” (Higgins 2015). Echoing through such media and dominant discourses is an age-old story about enlightened Western Europeans and barbaric Muslims, a history that I briefly trace in this chapter.

Thus, the “integration” crisis is presented as the problem of Muslim immigrants and citizens who insist on holding on to their culture, language, and attachments to home countries, stubbornly refusing to embrace European values. As Lena, a teacher in my study, explains about the immigrant girls in her class, “They have to be part of the jobs and the education system, to be open minded to what is . . . where I can no longer live in my little safe world where I did what my mother did, and she did what her mother did. The more we can try to open them up the better it will be for their integration as a whole.” There is an implicit idea that Muslim youth set themselves apart from society, residing in immigrant enclaves, refusing to take up the offerings of their generous hosts.

Absent from the conversation about the integration crisis is a historical and critical analysis of the terms of social incorporation of immigrants in Europe. Muslim citizens and migrants face a general climate of xenophobia and Islamophobia in European countries and citizenship is tied to racial and ethnic conceptions of belonging. Polls reveal that in most European countries, over half of the citizens hold negative views about the presence of immigrants, believing that immigration should be limited and that immigrants should be subjected to stricter integration requirements (Pew 2014: 26). While it is clear that Europe’s Muslim citizens and migrants are positioned as outsiders within the national discourse, there is still an expectation that they should work to better their condition, to make themselves more acceptable subjects of the nation. In an interview, filmmaker Hassan Preisler, whose father immigrated to Denmark from Pakistan, explains, “Someone like me does not choose if I am a Dane. . . . I was baptized in a Protestant church, I eat pork and play football, just like every other Dane—but still I am not a Dane.” He describes being set apart because of his name and skin color and challenges the discourse on integration: “Integration is an illusion. I am a living, walking, talking proof that it is an illusion. Everybody knows that it is not what we say it is about. You say it is about my cultural background, but I do not have any other background other than Danish” (Buskbjerg and Jackson 2009). In this book, I explore the contradictions that Preisler lays out, to consider the terms upon which immigrants and their children are positioned in Western liberal societies and the ways that the idea of integration is an illusion that is not as it seems and not accessible for most.

. . .

How are we to make sense of the seemingly contradictory responses of Western liberal nations toward immigrant Others? How do immigrants provoke public sympathy and anger, desires to rescue and to control? Current discourses on immigration are produced at the intersection of the forces of globalization and nationalism. Some theorists of globalization have argued that the growth of cross-border flows of trade and people, along with the proliferation of transnational networks, has led to the decreasing relevance of national borders. Others describe how globalization informs a renewed focus on national borders and on protecting the national imaginaries of nation-states (Sassen 2006; Castells 2004; Appadurai 1996; Anderson 2006). Increasing globalization strains national sovereignty, leading to the fear that immigrants pose an internal threat and hence new forms of exclusionary nationalism are needed. As Appadurai argues, “given the systemic compromise of national economic sovereignty that is built into the logic of globalization, and given the increasing strain this puts on states to behave as trustees of the interests of a territorially defined and confined ‘people,’ minorities are the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined)” (2006: 43). Thus, globalization drives a need to defend the “imagined community” of the nation, what Hedetoft (2006: 406) describes as a “right peopling” of the state. We hear this in the words of politicians across Europe and the United States who propagate fears of immigrant takeover and design policies that seek to control the flow of immigrants (Chavez 2013).

In the wake of 9/11 and the “war on terror,” anti-Muslim discourses and policies have gained traction as right-wing leaders in Europe and the United States have publicized and exploited fears about the possibility of a Muslim takeover (Nussbaum 2012; Bunzl 2005). Leaders promise to take control of national and cultural borders, protecting nations and Western civilization from the threat of Islam. They warn of the creation of parallel societies, of the possibility of majorities suddenly becoming minorities in their own land. The Gatestone Institute, a right-wing think tank in the United States, warns of the possibility of Muslim takeovers of European cities in which Muslim groups will establish autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic law (Sharia), and of a “cycle of Islamic honor killings, sexual assaults, beatings, and murder spiraling out of control” (Kern 2011). Following the Hebdo incident in Paris in January 2015, Fox News spoke with terrorist expert Steve Cameron, who reported that in some cities in England, the United States and France there are entirely Muslim neighborhoods, “no-go zones” for non-Muslims. He also added that in these areas “there are actually Muslim religious police that actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to religious Muslim attire” (Holehouse 2015). Fox News eventually apologized after the report was discredited, but this kind of reporting often goes unchallenged.

Stirring up dystopic images of the loss of all that is familiar, these nationalist agendas produce images of what Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cane refer to as “counter-worlds” in public consciousness. These are figured worlds that show “what should not be, what threatens us, and they [these figured worlds] position the persons presumed to inhabit them as relationally inferior and perhaps beyond the pale of any imagined community we would ever want to join” (1998: 250). Counter-worlds provide stock images or figures easily taken up in the national imaginary, used by individuals to explain the everyday changes they see around them. Further, they are a powerful tool in political discourse, unleashing anxieties that in turn justify more restrictive and coercive policies.

Imagining the Nation

The national imaginaries of Western countries are continually being reproduced in relation to immigrant Others. As Holger expresses in the epigraph to this chapter, “Their religion has attacked our system”; their footprint is in “our” culture and society. Holger wistfully looks to the past, the ’50s, as a time when life was simpler, before the arrival of Muslim guest workers and their families. His tone and facial expression as he talks with me reveal he is upset about immigrant challenges to “the one way to consider the world and how life should be lived.” In countries like Denmark with a deep internal sense of cultural solidarity and a taken-for-granted sense of shared norms and values, immigration and globalization introduce a disruption. One can no longer assume that citizens share a time-honored set of values and norms. Such conceptions of shared values are socially constructed and produced (Anderson 2006; Gellner 2008); they are felt and experienced in the hearts of citizens. Before moving more deeply into the roots of this “disruption” I examine how conceptions of the nation are imagined and produced within the minds and hearts of individuals like Holger and within political discourse and policy.

While the discourses on nationalism and immigration in European countries are remarkably similar in recent days, with an emphasis on border control and preserving the distinctive aspects of national cultures (Sassen 1999; Chavez 2013), European nations have each had their own unique ways of defining their criteria for admission into the nation. For example, historically, German conceptions of the nation were based on the principle of jus sanguinis, or a nation that is formed by those with common blood. This translated into citizenship laws that allowed Germans residing abroad in the early twentieth century to maintain their German citizenship while it excluded Turkish guest workers who were born in Germany from being considered citizens. Even though the German economy required immigrant labor to fuel its industrial growth, it did not conceive of itself as an immigration nation and made it very difficult for migrants to acquire German citizenship. Thus the nation is constructed in terms of ethnos—a shared biological connection stemming from the past and a reference point for the nation’s existence and coherence—rather than demos, the peoples of a nation-state.

France has taken an alternative approach, with membership in the nation defined in terms of shared universal political values rather than blood or descent. The French Republic was founded on the ideals of equality, secularism, and unity—a country where all citizens are equal regardless of their racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds and where all are united around a common history, language, and culture (Pelvey 2000). The French model reflects a confidence in the power of French schools, government, and the military to assimilate all members of society into this common culture. While Germany sought to clearly define immigrants who resided in the nation as semi-permanent guests, France conceived of itself as an immigration nation based on the ideal of demos and encouraged immigration with the ideal of “let them come and make them all French” (Sassen 1999).

In comparison to European countries, the United States has been touted as more inclusive, as a nation of immigrants. However, historical analysis reveals that the United States has deployed exclusionary practices to maintain a white national imaginary. At the same time that the colonial image of the melting pot represented American racial blending and harmony, the government declared Chinese laborers in the U.S. West “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” continued to dispossess Native Americans, and colonized Mexicans in annexed territories. Critical race scholar Eduardo Bonilla-Silva explains: “The idea of the melting pot has a long history in the American tradition, but it really was a notion that was extended exclusively to white immigrants. That pot never included people of color: Blacks, Chinese, Puerto Ricans . . . could not melt into the pot. They could be used as wood to produce the fire for the pot, but they could not be used as material to be melted into the pot” (Adelman 2003). Thus, while U.S. civic nationalism perpetuates the idea that the United States is a joining of diverse peoples around common principles of equality and freedom and scholars use this as a counterexample to countries like Germany and Japan, where national identity is based on ethnic nationalism, a closer analysis reveals how racialized hierarchies are central to U.S. constructions of nationhood.

Interrogating the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalisms to explore the myths and assumptions that underlie each provides a useful foundation for further understanding the assimilative nature of Western citizenship and education. Michael Ignatieff sets out the distinction:

Civic nationalism [or demos], maintains that the nation should be composed of all those—regardless of race, color, creed, gender, language, or ethnicity—who subscribe to the nation’s political creed. . . . It envisages the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values. . . . Ethnic nationalism claims . . . that an individual’s deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen. It is the national community which defines the individual, not the individuals who define the national community. (1995: 3–5)

The distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism serves to distinguish civic or “good” inclusive nationalism from “ethnocentric” visions of nationalism. Civic nationalism sets out a more palatable vision of a nation for many democratic citizens, one that channels national feelings and emotions into a liberal political order allowing for individual rights and diversity. Yet as Bernard Yack explains, “I am skeptical about this familiar contrast between civic and ethnic nationalism. It all seems a little too good to be true, a little too close to what we would like to believe about the world. The civic/ethnic dichotomy parallels a series of other contrasts that should set off alarm bells: not only Western/Eastern, but rational/emotive, voluntary/inherited, good/bad, ours/theirs!” (Yack 1996: 105, emphasis in original).

The appeal of liberal “civic” nationalism is that it creates an illusion of unity and a sense of the nation as tolerant of difference. But the truth is nationalisms are not inherently pluralistic as they seek to perpetuate particular cultures and agendas (Lichtenberg 1999). Is the “civic” identity of the French citizen less rooted in an inherited notion of peoplehood and culture than the “ethnic” identity of the German citizen? Although liberal nationalists make great claims about their commitment to individual rights and tolerance, these values are delivered through a political system that has produced an imaginary that draws on specific cultural practices, ways of being, and historical traditions. To believe in the liberal idea of civic nationalism one must ignore a whole series of particular social practices, the cultural specifics of what it means to be French or German, Danish or American.

What does the distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism reveal about the stories Western liberal nations tell themselves regarding national identity and belonging? How does this tension between wanting to “feel at home” in national culture and wanting to believe in one’s own goodness and openness translate into everyday nationalisms that inform how immigrants are positioned within Western liberal nations? National culture provides its citizens with a sense of feeling at home in the world, familiar sounds and smells of particular geographies and a coherence in which things seem in their place. This introduces one of the great contradictions of liberal nationalisms. Bhikhu Parekh speaks to this limitation: “However liberal she might be, a nationalist remains more or less antipathetic to strong forms of cultural diversity. Since she cherishes and feels at ease only in a homogenous cultural environment, the nationalist is profoundly disoriented by difference, which she finds threatening, and [to which she] lacks the psychological resources to respond positively” (1999: 318). Inevitably, this disorientation or disturbance leads to desires to preserve a sense of life as it once was or is imagined to have been, to reduce the complexity introduced by immigration. Duyvendak describes how the increasing diversity in Europe is largely responsible for national nostalgia based on a vision of a nation of the past and a “renewed popularity of the nation-as-home ideal” (2011: 2). He concludes: “many of those who see the reaffirmation of national identity as a solution to the current malaise dig deeper and deeper into the national past, feeling nostalgia for a time when populations were—supposedly—still homogenous. Nostalgic nations feel a loss of unity, of collective identity; even the most progressive among them look backwards to find a way out of their national crises” (2011: 3).

Defining “Our” People

The most prominent twentieth-century scholars of nationalism reject the claim that nations actually reflect true preexisting ethnicities (Calhoun 1993). Nations do not naturally have an ethnic basis for their existence, instead they center on notions of peoplehood produced by cultural elites who mold a vision of the nation based on preferred notions of ethnicity and sameness (Balibar 1991). As Calhoun argues, “nationalism is not simply a claim of ethnic similarity, but a claim that certain similarities should count as the definition of political community” (1993: 229, emphasis in the original). National imaginaries are produced around constructed notions of the people, what Balibar refers to as a “fictive ethnicity” that typically takes the form of characteristics imagined to be inherently derived from forefathers and descendants. Parekh describes how the image of the nation is typically produced in terms of a particular racial vision: “in such countries as Australia, Canada and the United States it includes only the white immigrants and never the original inhabitants, who are confined to the prehistory of these countries and to whom no familiar bonds are established” (1999: 297). Those who existed within the geographical boundaries of the nation before its imagined inception, such as Native Americans, Hawaiians, and Puerto Ricans (within the realm of the United States), are subjected to state technologies that seek to retroactively bring them into the community of the nation. Early citizenship laws in the United States ruled that Native Americans were “domestic foreigners” because they did not share the white European values of the early republic.¹ As Tuck...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ethnographic Journeys through Concern
• 1. Imagining the Nation: Danish Citizens and Muslim Others
• 2. Integration and Immigration: Creating Ideal Liberal Subjects
• 3. Liberalizing Muslim Girls
• 4. Negotiating Relationships to Hostlands and Homelands
• 5. Somali by Nature, Muslim by Choice, Danish by Paper: Narrating Identities
• 6. Teachers’ Counter-Narratives and Comparative Sites of Possibility
• Conclusion: Interrogating Liberal Blind Spots and Silences
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Series List