Ethnic Europe

Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World

Roland Hsu, Roland Hsu

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804773799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Ethnic Europe examines the increasingly complex ethnic challenges facing the expanding European Union. Essays from eleven experts tackle such issues as labor migration, strains on welfare economies, the durability of local traditions, the effects of globalized cultures, and the role of Islamic diasporas, separatist movements, and threats of terrorism. With Europe now a destination for global immigration, European countries are increasingly alert to the difficult struggle to balance minority rights with social cohesion. In pondering these dilemmas, the contributors to this volume take us from theory, history, and broad views of diasporas, to the particularities of neighborhoods, borderlands, and popular literature and film that have been shaped by the mixing of ethnic cultures.

CHAPTER ONE

The Ethnic Question

Premodern Identity for a Postmodern Europe?

ROLAND HSU

In periods of European Union expansion and economic contraction, European leaders have been pressed to define the basis for membership and for accommodating the free movement of citizens. With the lowering of Europe’s internal borders,¹ the member nations have raised the question of whether a European passport is sufficient to integrate mobile populations into local communities. Addressing the European Parliament on the eve of the 1994 vote on the Czech Republic accession to the European Union, Vaclav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic, selected particular civic values to define the new Europe to which all citizens would subscribe:

The European Union is based on a large set of values, with roots in antiquity and in Christianity, which over 2,000 years evolved into what we recognize today as the foundations of modern democracy, the rule of law and civil society. This set of values has its own clear moral foundation and its obvious metaphysical roots, whether modern man admits it or not.²

Havel’s claim that Greco-Roman and Christian values define what it means to be European can be read as a prescription for policy, and even sociability. In the increasingly multicultural Europe his definition has been repeated, but it has also been challenged: scholars, policy makers, and ethnic community representatives debate the most effective response to increasing heterogeneity and social conflict. For those who endorse, and also for those who reject Havel’s idea of binding moral roots, this new collection on ethnicity in globalized Europe reveals surprising positions.

The scale and quality of change since Havel’s 1994 speech challenges confidence that we know the principles to socialize new Europe. During 1995–2005, immigration into the European Union grew at more than double the annual rate of the previous decade.³ Within the overall population growth, employment statistics, specifically for residents of very recent immigrant origin, are difficult to aggregate, but in terms of accessing professional positions, the numbers show a steep downward trend.⁴ As immigration continues to grow, the lagging employment statistics offer one kind of evidence that recent immigrants face disproportionate difficulty accessing economic benefits beyond state welfare and unemployment provisions.⁵ In this constituency, the rising entry rate and falling number of fully employed raise questions about how newer ethnic communities integrate into local community, and also about how they participate in the Union’s system of expanding regional mobility. Once within the European Union, does the failure of particular groups to gain professional employment constrain access to economic and educational mobility? What impact does the lack of mobility have on ethnic and civic identity?

This collection offers new ways to see how thinking ethnically, even in sympathy with minority rights, may be creating a condition that constrains the European Union’s grand promise of a European community. While Europe’s open internal borders offer the promise of professional and social mobility, the region is following two tracks, in one direction for mobile citizens and in another for immigrants who arrive from increasingly distant origins and who do not integrate in the flow of students and advanced professionals able to relocate around Europe. In one tightly integrated volume, this collection gives the reader the unique and exciting combination of social science and humanist answers to these questions of globalized Europe. The essays, written by some of our most influential authors and analysts, take us into Europe’s fast-growing communities, sweeping us from the global to the local. The collection moves along as if descending from the high vantage point of generalized views of mass-scale diasporas, down into the details of neighborhoods, borderlands, and the arts and literature spawned by the creative mixing of ethnic cultures. We begin by forming a theoretical basis for discussion.

Using Ethnicity

Beyond lack of integration, increasingly intense and at times violent conflict raises questions about ethnic theory and policy. When we use ethnic categories, do we protect or rather divide and marginalize an identity? In the East, such questions spring from states founded on ethnic ties: will European Union and international community safeguards of ethnic Balkan enclaves produce normalized relations after massacres and ethnic cleansing? Does European and U.S. recognition of Albanian Kosovo validate claims for Flanders, Scottish, and Corsican independence and Basque ethnic heritage? Does litigation in the name of Roma—as opposed to human—rights impose on Italy and Croatia a mandate for effective policies of integration, or segregation ?⁶ In the West, concern stems from the contrary tradition of suppressing the politics of ethnic difference: the widespread riots in France in 2005 and 2007 by urban youths of mainly North and West African descent against police forces raise questions about the relevance and enforcement of the French non-ethnic, secular, republican model. In the United Kingdom, the tradition of multiculturalism, while distinct from French republicanism, is aimed for a similar goal of creating a common community beyond ethnic difference.⁷ Yet the recent trials of suspects in the 2005 London transit bombings, ending in several court dismissals, have done little to resolve confusion about government policies to recognize local Imams as representatives of British Islamic communities.⁸ With eroding confidence in national or local religious leaders to explain the violence, analysts assert contradictory explanations linking or distinguishing violence, ethnic communities, and policies of multiculturalism. Government prosecutors, media outlets, and self-proclaimed Islamic community leaders each speak for increasingly suspected UK Muslim communities, alternately claiming that the London public was targeted by those protesting UK troops sent to Iraq, or rather by domestic Islamic fundamentalist terrorist cells waging a campaign for community Shari’a law within larger UK society.⁹

In the French case, the violence of 2005 and 2007 has ruptured confidence in the balance traditionally struck between public security and ethnic tolerance.¹⁰ France’s official response was aimed more to excise rather than reintegrate the protesters. If there are identity-based messages from the protestors, their shared grievance has been effectively characterized as little more than the urge to vandalize. In 2005, against a backdrop of successive nights of media images of attacks on security police and private property, then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced the imposition of “zero tolerance” for those he termed “racaille” [scum].¹¹ The descriptor was deployed to shape public opinion, and by and large had its intended effect. The Interior Ministry was given responsibility to marshal the response, when the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, initiated a meeting of the government (Conseil des Ministres) to declare a national state of emergency. The declaration of emergency invoked a law dating from the 1954–62 War of Algerian Independence, and applied only previously against ethnic uprisings in French Algeria and New Caledonia for searches, detainments, house arrests, and press censorship without court warrant. Today we can note the irony of invoking a law originally written to suppress ethnic independence in order to put down what the government insisted was mainly vandalism; but at the time, fear of violence overwhelmed such insight into the government’s awareness of the importance of the protestors’ ethnic identity.

Based on the ministry’s own records, the violence likely did not catch the government by complete surprise. As was reported in early July 2004, before the first episodes of riots, the French Interior Ministry had been presented with a report as early as June 2004 which documented nearly two million citizens living in districts of social alienation, racial discrimination, and poor community policing.¹² The document raised an alert that youth unemployment in what journalists have long referred to as quartiers chauds [troubled neighborhoods] surpassed 50 percent. Although a 1978 law has to a large extent impeded ethnic-based surveys, the report nevertheless acknowledges what most already understood: that the majority of the unemployed and disenfranchised youth were French-born whose parents or grandparents were of African descent.¹³

French researchers continue to struggle with constraints limiting ethnic data gathering. Social scientists characterize the problem of ethnic identity in France as a challenge to make visible the social phenomenon that is lived but officially kept invisible.¹⁴ A recent book from the School for Advanced Study of the Social Sciences (EHESS) documents what seems to be renewed self-identification among French of Caribbean and African descent of a newly reconsidered common “black” identity.¹⁵ The shared identity is not easily created. Post-war labor migrations from the French Caribbean and Francophone African diasporas formed mainly separate communities in France, but their children may be forming bonds.¹⁶ While state-sponsored surveys still cannot collect data on ethnic family heritage, the youngest generation of French families from the Caribbean and the sub-Saharan Africa are creating an ethnic identity one step beyond even family heritage. The most recent generation of children of immigrants from the French Caribbean and from French sub-Saharan Africa are identifying as a community of “black” French.

Ethnicity—Postwar and Today

Postwar era immigration, from the 1950s European reconstruction through the 1960s and 1970s decolonization, is best defined as postcolonial migration. ¹⁷ As part of the extensive rebuilding of postwar Europe, European governments targeted particular nationalities in and around the greater Mediterranean region to attract an immigrant labor force. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, continued immigrant labor programs brought workers and their families, as well as the development of communities—planned and unplanned—that became neighborhoods for immigrants who essentially moved from countries that had been colonial periphery regions to the outskirts of cities in what had been the imperial metropole.¹⁸ The new residents’ education, language, and collective memory had been significantly shaped by colonial administrations, and that background gave them some familiarity with the host societies. Since 1990, however, and based on projections in this collection, we have entered a period, for lack of a better name, of post-postcolonial diaspora.

The peoples emigrating to Europe are increasingly coming from lands without characteristic European colonial heritage.¹⁹ While few countries of origin have no instance of European intervention, the new arrivals are adding rapidly growing numbers of émigrés of global diasporas from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and Israel, as well as the Indonesian archipelago, the Philippines, and sub-Saharan and East Africa. This most recent demographic trend takes Europe, and the larger transatlantic West, into an era not well served by existing models of how individuals integrate and communities differentiate.²⁰

In this collection, nine prominent authors substantiate this shift. The essays offer extended arguments on microhistories and long-term trends. In combination they create an unusual and productive dialogue between humanist cultural studies and social scientist modeling to confront assumptions and clarify recent trends of immigrant origin, European identity, and policies of tolerance.²¹ It is clearest to begin the collection with the most basic question: How and why are some included and others excluded as members of new Europe? In Part One, three essays by Saskia S...