Identification,the exercise of democracy and the fear of the Other – the June EU referendum in the UK

ABSTRACT

The focus is the oscillation among leave voters in the EU referendum from the exercise of rights - an act of dis-identification – towards the assertion of identity as members of a British community. This was mediated by voters acting in an association of citizens calling on the equalising agency of the British people whilst claiming membership of a locally circumscribed community, perceived as injured, through entanglement with the Other prominent among them Europeans. Hence the recovery of the injured community as the object of the denunciators’ desire for identity coupled with the fear of the Other. Predicated on this was the resumption of class, gender and ethnic roles reflected in division among voters. The denunciation of togetherness with Europeans served leave voters to substitute the exercise of rights with a longing for identity. Instrumental in this was the lack of deliberation in the plebiscite to articulate the will of individual voters through a general will. The ‘direct power’ exercised enabled many to cast away their role as citizen in an attempt to claim their privileges as members of a racially and culturally demarcated British community. Paradoxically, the voters’ unashamed disavowal of their agency as citizens by seeking to restore a divided social world as the source of their identity was represented as an exercise in democracy. To some playing on words was supplemented by the use of force removing the gap between the discursive exclusion of the Other and the continued physical presence of bearers of different races and culture.     

Non-migrants’ interethnic relationships with migrants: the role of the residential area,the workplace,and attitudes toward migrants from a longitudinal perspective

This paper studies the determinants of interethnic relationships between non-migrants and migrants in Germany. A large body of literature documents that such relationships generate positive outcomes for individual migrants as well as non-migrants and the social cohesion of host-societies at large. Previous research tends to focus on the migrant side, thereby neglecting the factors enabling non-migrants’ interethnic relationships. Moreover, the existing research on non-migrants exclusively uses cross-sectional data for causal inferences. In contrast, this paper draws on longitudinal data, thus providing a more comprehensive and empirically rigorous picture of the determinants of interethnic relationships. The paper identifies possible determinants of non-migrants’ interethnic relationships, combining them into a single analytical framework that allows for gauging their relative importance. Moderately high migrant shares in the neighbourhood are found to be connected to more interethnic relationships, while a higher share of foreigners in the wider region only has a positive effect for the employed. Neither employment status nor migrant share at work are found to be connected to non-migrants’ interethnic relationships. Finally, persons feeling threatened by immigration and migrants are largely found to be less likely to have interethnic relationships, while sympathy with migrants works in the opposite direction.     

Disobedient subjects – constructing the subject,the state and religion in the European Court of Human Rights

In this article, I analyse how the law participates in the (re)production process of the subject, the state and religion, and how the law's indefiniteness allows various constructions of them all. In the first part of the article I discuss the Islamic headscarf cases of the European Court of Human Rights as examples of how the discursive constructions of the state and the subject can be challenged by means of disobedience. Here the focus is particularly on Turkey and on France, where the principle of secularism is largely regarded as the basis of the republic and of the national identity. The law provides an arena where the disobedient subject and the state can challenge and re-establish the prevailing conceptualizations of the subject. In the second part of the article I address the Court's alleged Islamophobia. I explore how the constructions of the state and the subject contribute to the way religion is framed in the Court's argumentation in relation to the freedom of religion guaranteed under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The analysis shows that religion can be framed as a personal belief system, a cultural tradition, or politics which, in turn, affects the course of legal argumentation. I conclude that the Court can plausibly be accused of Christian bias, but that this conclusion is often based on insufficient analysis of the Court's case law. This article contributes to the interdisciplinary discussion on the headscarf bans from the socio-legal perspective. The aim is to explore what, besides providing legal solutions, the law does.     

‘Settling’ the multicultural nation-state: Little Mosque on the Prairie,and the figure of the ‘moderate Muslim’

This paper analyzes Little Mosque on the Prairie, its characters and themes within the context of post-9/11 discourses of nationalism and citizenship. Against the backdrop of the Canadian national narrative, I argue that the sitcom foregrounds a ‘moderate Muslim’ that demarcates the boundaries of the multicultural nation-state, especially when juxtaposed against the racially and sexually coded Muslim ‘other’ on the global landscape. The moderate Muslim is represented as ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’, one who seeks to integrate her faith into the multicultural fabric of society. Such a figure, represented both as a ‘good’ Muslim/immigrant and a ‘good’ Canadian citizen-subject, illuminates the boundaries of ‘acceptability’ within the Canadian national imaginary. The figure of the moderate Muslim reinforces the racial coding embedded in this imaginary, while enabling the state to proclaim its ‘multicultural tolerance’ and benevolence. Building on previous scholarship on race, citizenship, and nation-building, I argue that the moderate Muslim – as exemplified in Little Mosque on the Prairie – serves important ideological functions in (re)defining the internal (and racially coded) borders of the nation. While Little Mosque on the Prairie makes an important contribution to the representation of Muslims, challenging some stereotypes, I argue that it does not deliver on its considerable potential to articulate nuanced representations of Muslims. Through its foregrounding of the figure of the moderate Muslim, the sitcom reaffirms key norms, engages in a politics of authenticity, and reinforces hegemonic messages, both within Muslim communities and in Canadian society. Thus, the moderate Muslim becomes a key player in enabling the state to render invisible its exclusion of the ‘Muslim Other,' while maintaining its non-racist credentials.     

Speed,timing and duration: contested temporalities,techno-political controversies and the emergence of the EU’s smart border

ABSTRACT

Practices of border control increasingly rely on digital biometrics in order to sort and filter cross-border movements. But while its effects are well examined in migration and border studies, less is known about the intricate ways in which biometric bordering is politically negotiated and socio-technically put into practice. Therefore, in this paper, I trace the contested emergence of one particular scheme of biometric border control currently in the making: the EU’s Smart Borders Package. Proposed by the European Commission in 2013, it aims at digitally registering all third-country nationals’ entries to and exits from the Schengen area, while simultaneously accelerating the border crossing of certain travellers. I argue that, unlike other forms of biometric bordering, the Smart Borders Package problematises border control primarily on the level of its temporalities and constitutes the speed of border crossings, the timing of control as well as third-country nationals’ duration of stay as distinct objects of governing. Meanwhile, the project’s political negotiations have sparked techno-political controversies that repeatedly brought it to the brink of failure. Yet, these controversies have significantly enhanced the intelligibility and practicability of biometric bordering, contributing to the emergence of what I call the self-service border.     

Contamination,deception and ‘othering’: the media framing of the horsemeat scandal

Food and consumption practices are cultural symbols of communities, nations, identity and a collective imaginary which bind people in complex ways. The media framed the 2013 horsemeat scandal by fusing discourses beyond the politics of food. Three recurrent media frames and dominant discourses converged with wider political debates and cultural stereotypes in circulation in the media around immigration and intertextual discourse on historical food scandals. What this reveals is how food consumption and food-related scandals give rise to affective media debates and frames which invoke fear of the other and the transgression of a sacred British identity, often juxtaposing ‘Britishness’ with a constructed ‘Otherness’.     

Experiments on puerile nations,or the impossibility of surpassing your father: the case of the Anglo‐Greek dialogue

This article is concerned with the dialogic construction of Greek national and British imperial identities. It examines the gendered language in which the Greeks and the British addressed each other in the 1860s and the 1870s. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, anthropology, studies of nationalism and post‐colonial theory, it looks at the symbolic structure of Anglo‐Greek cultural exchange. In this analysis, it is argued that the familial imageries both sides employed to describe themselves and/or each other were constitutive of the roles they had assumed in Anglo‐Greek relations, but also part of the very process of Greek nation‐building and British imperialism.     

Nuclear fetishism,the fear of the ‘Islamic’ bomb and national identity in Iran

The paper's focus is the concurrence in the Islamic Republic of Iran between the state's enrichment of uranium, internationally feared as a potential Islamic atomic bomb, and the identification of the radio-active material by many Iranians as a national cultural object. In contrast to the Islamic virtues imposed by the state that had created an autarkic image of Iranians in the global context, nuclear technology offered them the opportunity to become cosmopolitan consumers of nuclear energy, a global product that also represented the ‘excellence’ of Iranian scientists’ and engineers’ competence. Instrumental in this re-invention of national identity outside the political space was a reified (fetishised) conception of the nuclear object as a utility – nuclear energy. The enhanced utilitarian use of nuclear material mystified (metamorphosed) both the oppressive relation of Iranian people with their Muslim rulers and their incongruous relation with the rest of the world. The mystifying impact of nuclear production on their national and international relations served Iranians to draw on their role as internationally recognised bourgeois agents (burghers) by subsuming (neutralising) their brutalised relation with the Muslim rulers within the instrumental relation of producers/consumers of the nuclear product. Thus, in their exclusive demand for the right to emulate the non-Iranian producers/consumers of nuclear energy as a global product, Iranians acted in their capacity as burghers. A burgher is defined here, following Hegel, as the agent of civil society whose primary concern is to pursue his/her own interest by using the needs of others as the means to satisfy his/her own. The rationality that governs the action by burghers is ‘the suitability of means to their ends’. By adopting the rationality of a burgher, Iranians abandoned their quest for citizenship. The rights of citizen, in contrast with the cosmopolitan right of burgher to emulate producers/consumers, were geared to the exercise of individual autonomy within the political space, as a domain of contested representations. The paper examines the inadequate mediation of modern institutions that has historically postponed the nationalisation of Iranian society and has delayed the emergence of the Iranian nation as a political community. Looked at from this standpoint, nuclear production offered to Iranians the opportunity to avoid a hazardous route of taking part in a political construction of Iranian identity by acting as citizens and instead draw on their fragmented bourgeois identity to define the nuclear product as ‘national’. This identification matched their Muslim rulers’ interest to represent the enriched uranium internationally as a national, as opposed to Islamic, achievement without having to face the Iranian nation as a political community. The consequence was the Iranians’ failure to deal with nuclear technology and the question of public safety both as a national and international issue which could only be addressed if Iranians had acted in their capacity as citizens.     

The AKP,sectarianism, and the Alevis’ struggle for equal rights in Turkey

ABSTRACT

The Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been ruling Turkey since 2002, was founded by a splinter group from within the Islamist Virtue Party (FP). The most obvious difference between the old guard of the FP and the younger, reformist cadres who established the AKP was the latter’s deliberate and efficacious implementation of the discourse of democracy and human rights in articulating their political agenda. This discursive shift not only increased the AKP’s votes, but also gained them many supporters among liberal intellectuals in Turkey and abroad, who saw in them a potential to reconcile Islam with democracy. So much was invested in this hopeful vision that pro-AKP liberals for a long time turned a blind eye to many contrary developments in the country or tried to diminish their significance. One such major blind spot has been the Alevis, who after nearly 14 years of AKP rule continue to face formal and informal discrimination on a daily basis. Despite their alleged commitment to religious freedom, and notwithstanding an ephemeral ‘Alevi opening’ in 2007–2008, the disenfranchisement of the Alevis has only deepened under the AKP with its accelerated top-down Islamization of broader Turkish society and the corollary intensification of sectarian discourse both in domestic and foreign policy.     

Emigration 2.0? Young Moroccans,emigration and the Internet*

This article examines the relationship between young Moroccans’ uses of the Internet and their migratory project to Europe. It frames its analysis within key debates on international migration and makes the case for a more systematic exploration of the symbolic dimensions of emigration. The research conducted, (2011/2012) including qualitative interviews, focus groups and a survey, shows that although an increasing number of young Moroccans are using the Internet to migrate into Europe, the majority are, unlike the findings of previous empirical research [Sabry, T. (2003). Exploring Symbolic Dimensions of Emigration: Mental and Physical Emigrations, Ph.D. thesis, University of Westminster] have shown, less keen to emigrate. The research also shows how young Moroccans are more interested in communicating with other young Moroccans on social media than they are with young people from Europe or in other parts of the world. Qualitative material has also shown how young Moroccans’ interactions with Arabs from the Gulf, using social media, has exposed serious contradictions between profane and sacred Islam. The story that emerges is not one of heightened global or westernised consciousness, but one of localization par excellence.     

‘We Lay Claim to Him!’ Berlin,Rothko, Eisenstein,and the Reorientation of Latvian National Identity

Since the late 1990s, Latvia has increasingly made claim on the intellectual and cultural heritage of Sir Isaiah Berlin, Mark Rothko, and Sergei Eisenstein. This article adopts a social constructivist approach in comparing and contrasting the role of intellectuals in framing nineteenth-century national identities and their contemporary instrumentalization as tools in the construction of national identity. The article then considers the “seizure” of Berlin, Rothko, and Eisenstein as “Latvians,” arguing that this process has been undertaken for both international and domestic purposes—to socialize and integrate Latvia with the West, and to promote domestic value change.     

‘And ever give us cause’: Understanding the investments of the ‘Ur-anthem’, ‘God Save the King/Queen’

This paper engages a close analytical reading of the lyrics of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ in order to understand what the functional survival of this song tells us about the rhetorical/affective investments of national devotion in the British sense. This study asks also how the lyrics of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ figure in the general definition of anthem and in the generic classification of anthems worldwide? Because of the song's international spread, and status as ‘Ur-anthem’, much may be gleaned from it as to both the nature of the speech act entailed in the prayer-type of anthem and the nature of ‘anthem quality’ more generally. ‘Anthem quality’, for the purposes of this paper, is defined as that soul stirring effect which certain combinations of music and lyrics achieve, most typically in the service of national affiliation. Theories of nation and nationalism are drawn on to frame affective relations between nation, state and citizenry as implied by, fostered by and utilized in anthems. Parodies and other derivative texts are considered in order to reach a better understanding of the sources and the pragmatic uses of anthem quality in the world today.     

The reign of Christ over the nation: The Basque question in the Spanish Republic, 1931–1936

The debate on the Basque Statute during the Spanish Republic (1931–39) became an exceptional political myth in contemporary Basque politics. According to current political narratives of Basque identity, the traditional will to self-government of the Basque people was expressed during those years in a broad demand for autonomy and collective identity. This article outlines the social complexity of the autonomy project, more related to religion than to ethnic conflict. This approach suggests that present concerns with Basque identity narratives undermine the historical parameters operative in the past, disabling our understanding of the history of the Basques.     

‘They Give Evidence’: Bodies,Borders and the Disappeared

In this essay I explore certain relations between bodies and borders as threshold spaces marking both separation and connection, and functioning as the bearers of political meanings. My title refers to Dadang Christanto's installation ‘They Give Evidence’, a series of standing, naked figures, bearing in their outstretched arms the remnants of burnings, drownings, beatings and other mutilations that leave their subjects stripped of any markers of identity. These nameless bodies, an image of contemporary political violence, invite exploration of the relations between the bodies of the dead and the living, between practices of bearing witness and giving evidence. Beginning with the disappeared of the SIEV X sinking, euphemistically referred to in the recent Senate Inquiry as ‘A Certain Maritime Incident’, this essay examines ways in which nameless bodies of the dead and disappeared are made present in contemporary Australia as evidence, as political bodies.     

‘Asian fail’: Chinese Canadian men talk about race,masculinity, and the nerd stereotype

Popular representations of Asians – and especially Asian men – often stereotype them as nerds. Drawing on qualitative field studies of Chinese Canadians' beliefs about ‘authentic’ identity and of an urban ‘nerd-culture scene,’ this article examines the perceived nerdiness of Asians. Membership Categorization Analysis is used as a framework to analyze two Chinese Canadian men's self-categorizing discourses. One embraces his nerdiness but is ambivalent about his racial/ethnic identity; the other is comfortable being categorized as Asian but distances himself from what he describes as the ‘typical’ nerdy Asian male. Although orientations to their presumptive categorization as Chinese or Asian differ, both design their self-presentations to manage inferences made about them. We argue that Canadian multiculturalism complicates these processes by discursively transforming racial difference into ‘cultural diversity’. This produces systematic errors in categorization, leading to inaccurate inferences of cultural competences or stereotypes social attributes from perceptions of physical difference. Under these conditions, the linking of nerds and Asians not only constrains individual life projects but can function as the ‘benign discourse’ that hides a racial subtext, reproducing historic, anti-Asian stereotypes in a seemingly neutral guise.     

Refugees,migrants, neither,both: categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’

The use of the categories ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ to differentiate between those on the move and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of their claims to international protection has featured strongly during Europe’s ‘migration crisis’ and has been used to justify policies of exclusion and containment. Drawing on interviews with 215 people who crossed the Mediterranean to Greece in 2015, our paper challenges this ‘categorical fetishism’, arguing that the dominant categories fail to capture adequately the complex relationship between political, social and economic drivers of migration or their shifting significance for individuals over time and space. As such it builds upon a substantial body of academic literature demonstrating a disjuncture between conceptual and policy categories and the lived experiences of those on the move. However, the paper is also critical of efforts to foreground or privilege ‘refugees’ over ‘migrants’ arguing that this reinforces rather than challenges the dichotomy’s faulty foundations. Rather those concerned about the use of categories to marginalise and exclude should explicitly engage with the politics of bounding, that is to say, the process by which categories are constructed, the purpose they serve and their consequences, in order to denaturalise their use as a mechanism to distinguish, divide and discriminate.