Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas
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France’s and Germany’s different historical sequences of nation- and state-building led them to develop different conceptions of nationhood. Once established, these conceptions are normally reflected in citizenship and nationality policies in a fairly stable, continuing fashion. Given their symbolic and emotional significance, they are stubbornly resistant to change.3 According to Brubaker’s thesis, in Germany, where nation-building preceded state-building, nationhood is understood in “ethnocultural” terms. In nationality law, this is expressed through reliance on jus sanguinis, the attribution of national citizenship on the basis of descent. In contrast, where state-building happened first, as in France, nationhood takes on a more civic-political character and is understood in less primordial terms, leading to nationality laws in which jus soli, the attribution of nationality on the basis of birthplace, figures more prominently.4
More recent work has applied this kind of national traditions approach to other aspects of the politics of belonging and policy decisions associated with it. For instance, different policy responses to demands for accommodation of new, Muslim religious minorities have been explained by reference to different traditions of church-state relations and their lasting institutional legacies (Soper and Fetzer 2005). Similarly, Hollifield traces states’ different levels of ability to manage immigration-related conflicts over distribution to immigration’s historical relationship to nation-building in different countries. The more centrally immigration figures in “the political myths that legitimate and give life to the regime,” Hollifield argues, the more politically manageable the negative side effects of immigration have proved, and the less effective public backlash against immigrants has developed (Hollifield 2004: 183–214).
These contrasting perspectives would lead one to expect different specific sorts of changes in citizenship and nationality laws. According to the post-nationalist view, there is a growing dissociation of rights from legal nationality as national-political rights based on membership are increasingly superseded by more universal human rights based on personhood. Certainly, some post-nationalists recognize that this dissociation does not currently extend fully to political rights (e.g., Soysal 1994). However, insofar as it is an ongoing trend, as the post-nationalist perspective suggests, one would expect movements for extending the same post-national logic to political rights to be gaining ground. Furthermore, if national citizenship status is losing importance as a basis for staking claims, one should also expect declining interest in national-level citizenship policy changes. Finally, as citizenship and rights become increasingly post-national, belief in the need for a shared national culture as a basis or precondition for legal citizenship should be waning. As a “post-national model of membership” takes hold, citizenship rights and national culture should become increasingly dissociated, and assimilation should be of declining significance as a condition for claiming citizenship and rights associated with it.
By contrast, from the national traditions perspective, one would predict that, even if nationality laws are modified over time, they should remain fundamentally consistent in whether they combine jus sanguinis with jus soli. Following a more subtle reading, one would at least expect that criteria for citizenship putting a positive premium on “ethnocultural” ties should be more significant where nation-building preceded state-building than where state-building came first.
A common weakness of both predominant approaches is that they underemphasize the political interpretation of social developments and the political manipulation of ideas. As the analysis of France’s recent politics of membership and key policy developments associated with it in Parts II and III will show, today’s politics of belonging cannot be properly understood without careful attention to these factors. This book seeks to derive a conceptual framework that offers critical analytical distance and facilitates international and historical comparison, yet also makes meaningful, sympathetic sense of actors’ positions.. This study therefore begins theoretically, by presenting a new framework for identifying different ideas of political membership and tracing and comparing their political invocation over time.
Chapter 2 taps a radically new source of insight for developing such a framework, one never before applied to this area of study—namely, “ordinary language philosophy.” This approach is applied to patterns of ordinary language use in discussion of various forms of membership. Drawing on the results of that analysis, the chapter presents a new theoretical framework for analyzing and comparing alternative visions of political membership.
Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7 apply the new theoretical framework to the recent politics of citizenship and immigration in France. Issues of political membership have figured centrally in French politics for three decades. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, France has seen a whole series of debates on these issues—from early discussions of a “new citizenship” that would separate citizenship from nationality, to repeated discussions of the laws granting French nationality to foreign immigrants and their descendants, to discussions of whether and to what extent religious identities should be recognized and allowed expression in the public sphere. These debates have inspired much sustained intellectual reflection and discussion within France, with sometimes surprising results. In examining these key, interrelated debates, this study looks at how key political actors have answered these questions, and how publicly acceptable answers have shifted over time as a result.
The book draws on the rich collection of available primary source materials—editorials, transcripts of parliamentary debates, newspaper articles, radio and television transcripts, and official reports—to document each controversy. It analyzes not only the major actors’ positions, but also their arguments and the models of membership on which they draw. That analysis tells us much about contemporary French cultural politics. Moreover, and more directly, it helps explain how and why particular kinds of policy responses to issues raised by the integration of immigrants and their descendants have taken form, and how they have been publicly justified or legitimated.
Such legitimation is no mere “window dressing”: it tells us much about why sometimes seemingly odd or unlikely policy responses to changing social conditions have attracted public support. These patterns of support, as the chapters that follow reveal, have often been rather surprising. Contrary to what many have claimed, conventional distinctions between left and right have not been wholly eclipsed by new issues of membership. Left-right differences in parties’ ways of understanding and responding to the issues of membership raised by immigrants and their integration are discernible, and have played a role in structuring debates on these issues (cf. Hollifield 1997, 2004; Sa’adah 2003: 215–24). But these conventional political categories cannot fully account for the sometimes odd patterns of support for recent policies that have emerged. Parts of the French left have surprised many observers by adamantly eschewing the multiculturalist approach to inclusion embraced by many self-styled leftists and progressives in other countries. Understanding the contextually specific terms in which policy options have been legitimated is essential particularly for understanding the the French left’s positions, and divisions. At the same time, this book aims to transcend the specificities of French politics, comparing aspects of French policy and debates about membership to recent developments elsewhere.
Chapters 3–5 look at two key episodes in France’s politics of membership during the 1980s: demands for extending local voting rights to foreign residents accompanied by promotion of a “new citizenship” separating citizenship from nationality, and the highly publicized discussions and public hearings of the late 1980s prompted by demands for revision of France’s nationality law (code de la nationalité française). In contrast to other studies that have stressed theoretical commonalities and elements of conceptual consensus at the national level (Brubaker 1992; Favell 1998), my treatment of these early French debates emphasizes the role of competitive political dynamics in shaping the politics of membership. Even the ways recent debates hark back to revered elements of French historical tradition