Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas
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of the modern “nation” as “community of citizens,” for example? This inclusive vision of the nation should not be too hastily dismissed as a product of mere terminological confusion. Moreover, as Albrow and O’Byrne (2000) point out, globalization is not just weakening the connection between nations and states (76–79). Insofar as it involves “transnational definitions of public goods,” it also serves as a reminder of the potential disjunction that has always existed between the state and citizenship, or between good citizenship and duty to a particular state (71–73).
Part of the problem is McCrone and Kiely’s primary focus on Britain, where the concepts of state and nation have remained unusually distinct. The clear-cut division suggested by the British case is somewhat at odds with the authors’ own discussion of how the two ideas were historically compounded elsewhere as state boundaries came to define national ones, and vice versa (27–29). Discussions of “nationality” are often confused precisely because the term has come to refer to both “nationhood” and formal, legal membership as granted and recognized by the state. We might be tempted to call the latter “legal citizenship” rather than “nationality.” Caution is in order here, however: the French law specifying who qualifies for such a status is, for example, called le code de la nationalité française, and French discussions of nationalité have concerned both “nation-ness” and what McCrone and Kiely would call “citizenship.” Even in Britain, recent discussions of what it means to be “British,” notably those touched off by the Rushdie affair, have given involved membership both in the nation and in the state.
As these examples suggest, citizenship and nationality today cannot be distinguished as neatly as one might wish. McCrone and Kiely may well be right that “nation-ness and state-ness need not be, and increasingly are not, aligned” (2000: 25). However, concepts are forged by long histories of usage, not current conditions alone, and nations and states have in many cases historically redefined one another. Because many debates have been shapted by conceptions of both nationality and citizenship, and because the distinction varies from one country to another and is often itself politically contested, we need a typology covering both conceptions of citizenship and nationality.
Fortunately, even if we are not content simply to take individual debates, or those of each particular country, “on their own terms,” there is another classificatory schema at our disposal. Despite the ubiquity in the scholarly literature of the dichotomy of civic and ethnic, it is not the only available way of categorizing conceptions of political membership. As Chapter 2 shows, we actually already know another way of systematically distinguishing different ways of thinking about membership. Using methods originating in ordinary language philosophy to analyze our usual ways of talking about memberships in different kinds of groups suggests a new, more theoretically refined framework.
Chapter 2
What We Talk About When We Talk About Belonging: A New Framework for Analyzing Political Controversies
The Discreet Existence of an Ordinary Language Typology of Memberships
As we have seen, the contrast between civic and ethnic is conceptually problematic in a number of ways. However, comparative study of the politics of belonging does require some kind of overarching conceptual framework for identifying and comparing ideas of citizenship and national membership that emerge in different times and places. Moreover, without an external analytical framework through which to interpret the stakes of particular national controversies, there is little chance of political actors gaining critical distance on current events. In the absence of a clear alternative, the continued influence of the contrast between civic and ethnic in comparative politics, whatever its conceptual limitations, is not surprising.
Drawing on methods and insights from ordinary language philosophy, this chapter shows that this is actually not the only way we know how to distinguish between different kinds of membership. In reality, we already have another, more subtle and precise way of categorizing memberships, one that informs the way we talk about them in ordinary English. This alternative, “ordinary language” approach to classifying and categorizing memberships is at least as orderly and systematic as the dichotomy of civic and ethnic, and permits a variety of distinctions that simpler, dichotomous approaches have tended to conceal.
The way we discuss membership in our ordinary speech is more orderly and systematic than it might first appear. The surprisingly systematic way in which we unreflectingly classify memberships is apparent in the way we normally choose verbs to discuss voluntary terminations of membership in various groups. As we shall see, the pattern underlying our ordinary choice of verbs in this area is not arbitrary or isolated. It is reflected also in the way we discuss entering and involuntarily exiting from different kinds of groups. In fact, in choosing verbs that sound right when we talk about these aspects of various forms of memberships, we are already semiconsciously classifying all memberships into five basic categories.These five types of belonging in fact correspond to five distinct ways of understanding political membership. Ordinary language analysis thus suggests an alternative theoretical framework for examining and comparing public debates on citizenship and nationality, including those triggered by reactions to immigration and its long-term effects.
Memberships: Some You Cancel, Some You Quit, Some You Leave, Some You Change, and Some from Which There Is No Escape
Voluntary Terminations of Membership
In discussing voluntary termination of a given membership, not just any verb will do. In English, we have what at first appears to be a vast array of verbs from which to choose for this. A closer examination of this long preliminary list, however, shows that what we really have is a much smaller number of relatively common, less specialized verbs, such as “quit,” “leave,” or “cancel,” and a much larger number of relatively more specialized terms, such as “abjure,” “resign,” or “renounce.” Appendix Table 1 provides a full list of English-language verbs for referring to voluntary terminations of memberships of different kinds. Each of the verbs most commonly used to designate voluntary terminations of memberships can be used to form colloquial, normal, and natural-sounding sentences about ending some memberships, but not others.
Cancel. Take the relatively common membership-ending verb “to cancel.” One may “cancel” one’s membership in the American Automobile Association (AAA), the Sierra Club, Costco, Elvis’s fan club, the American Political Science Association (APSA), the racquetball club, or the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). By contrast, one does not “cancel” one’s membership in one’s bridge club, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the Communist Party, the Republican Party, the gay community, one’s gender, or the squash team. Only some memberships end by being canceled, namely those in which the member’s status as such is essentially contingent on paying fees, whether the member receives services or materials or merely contributes to a cause. Memberships one ends by “canceling” comprise one distinct subset of memberships.
Quit. A second subset consists of memberships that one ends by “quitting.” One might “quit” the soccer team, the debate team, PTSA, Little League, or the army. However, members are not ordinarily said to have “quit” AAA, their families, or their countries. Memberships that are voluntarily terminated by quitting are those in groups where the member’s contribution consists primarily of rendering time and services, even if fees are also required.
Leave. The third subset of memberships consists of those one ends by “leaving” a group. One may “leave” one’s church, the Communist Party, one’s co-op, the KKK, the Democratic Party, and any “communities” to which one might belong, whether or not they are geographically defined. Memberships one “leaves” are those in which the member’s role is defined primarily in terms of subjective identification with the group or its aims and characteristics, although members may often also be expected to pay fees (as they would to a Cancel group) or to render time and services (as they would to a Quit group).
Consider the way one would view a member of a Leave group who did not actually subjectively identify with the group and yet did