Session 3
Citizenship and Political Participation
Dr. Jocelyne Cesari
I would like to address not the municipal, institutional environment of Muslim population but their attitudes and practices and how they've been involved in politics in the last two decades. First of all, what do we mean by about political participation in Western Europe? There are different ways to deal with this topic. First we can think of participation of Muslims in different elections, local, national, even European sometimes, as voters, or as eligible candidates. We can also think of political participation in terms of lobbying.
I would like to develop these two dimensions of citizenship and political participation.
Of course, I'm taking for granted that there are Muslims in Western Europe who are citizens of their different countries of residence. I'm not addressing here the particular case of immigrants who are entitled to vote at the local level, which was a very hot topic in the 70s and beginning of the 80s and start decreasing when migrants of Muslim background were getting the citizenship of the different countries in which they live.
First, I would like to mention something that comes up very often, but if we look at the facts it's not very representative of all, which is the creation of explicitly Muslim parties, meaning trying to deal with politics on a Muslim basis. Of course we are here in the U.K. where there was the example of the Muslim Parliament and, as you know, it was a very limited experience and to my knowledge I don't see in Europe very successful or powerful attempts to do politics on a Muslim basis or to create separate political parties or institutions to do politics. As you know after the death of the leader of the Muslim Parliament it faded away and it disappeared. We had in France an attempt at an Islamic party in 1995 that also was not very successful and even in the U.S. there was the attempt in the 70s of an Islamic party based on African-American population and it didn't succeed either. So I put aside these particular approaches even though it's very present in the mind of lots of non-Muslim interlocutors or observers of the situation of Muslim populations in European societies.
So if we look at the participation of Muslims in politics, in mainstream politics, what do we have? First we have to look at the local level. We can see the active presence of people with a Muslim background at the municipality level in most of the "Muslim countries" of Europe, meaning France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium,. The recent wave of local election in different European countries show this presence. In 2001 130 councillors with a Muslim/North African background were elected, 120 the same year in Belgium, there was roughly the same number in the Netherlands and, of course, the British case is more significant since the first Muslim woman was elected as mayor here in England in 1994, which was very early if you compare with other European countries. Then the question is on which basis are these people elected? The Islamic variable is not always relevant. Actually what we can see is a sort of intertwined religious and ethnic identity and most of the time people try to present themselves with, you know, a North African background or, Jorgen Nielsen was mentioning, the South Asian label here in the U.K. or even the same thing in Germany with the Turkish origin. So here we have modes of identification into the political game that plays on the complexity of multiple allegiances, especially between religious and ethnic memberships. Because we are living in secular countries it's more legitimate to do politics on an ethnic rather than, a religious basis even if we observe a sort of continuous confusion between Islam and ethnicity. It is also interesting that when these people are elected, they don't want to address particularly Islamic issues or they don't want to address particularly the question of "I am the representative of a particular religious or ethnic group", they want to talk for the common group, for the local population and they want to address mainstream and general issues. Some of them have restated this position several times in France and Belgium, in Germany. It also tells you a lot about the ambiguities of what we call Muslim political representation. If we look at the national level then we get at the level of symbolic politics, because if it's not always relevant to represent a particular ethnic/religious group at the local level you can imagine that at the national level it's even more so and then we get into, what I call, the token representatives. And here the numbers are shrinking. We can talk about people on the fingers of one hand, five representatives there, four representatives here at the national level, meaning at the level of elected parliaments or even in the House of Lords. There are significant differences between European countries. We can talk about the U.K. and even the Netherlands as more advanced, for example, than France where we don't have any member of parliament with a North African background. There are people of Muslim origin present in the national administration and in the government, but we don't have elected people such as MP or senators.
Another aspect of Muslim participation which is very much fantasised is the Muslim vote. There is the idea that Muslims are voting for rather one political party than another. This has been, for example, very much present in French politics since the 80s. Even though we don't have a Muslim vote per se, because it's very difficult and risky to define since it can convey a very essentialized approach to Muslim and Islam, some recurrent studies show cases of blocked/polarized vote. It means that some people with a north African origin , not all of them, but significant numbers of them vote, for each elections e for the left or even the extreme left parties. One of the reason is the political treatment of security and immigration issues. Extreme-right parties such has the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen and conservative parties are seen by these voters as sharing the same opinions in terms of immigration and security policies that target particularly Muslims It was interesting for me to look at the debate in America for the presidential election in 2000, because Muslim leaders at this time were very proud to say that they have influenced the election of President Bush in the State of Florida. They were using also this kind of argument that their vote made a difference in a polarized and blocked situation. It's impossible to really check the reliability of such a statement, maybe Professor Esposito has more data about it, but it was a strong political stand from major Muslim organizations on the existence of a Muslim vote in Florida that had helped out President Bush, which became a kind of paradox after 9/11….
After this brief and non-exhaustive review of participation of Muslims to institutionalized politics, we have also to look too more informal ways of doing politics. I completely agree with Jorgen Nielsen about the fact that if we limit our perception of political participation to this field, we are missing lots of political involvement of Muslims in different arenas. In this regard I would like to apply the concept of 'civil' citizenship, to refer to people, who maybe don't even have the legal status of citizen, but who are involved in different collective activities at the local level, Sometimes at the regional level, or national level, as Muslims and citizens and they want to participate into major social issues and control political decisions making in the place in which they live. Then the question of Muslim participation takes another direction, because we can see that Islamic Centers are relevant places for this civil citizenship, whatever the nationality, the citizenship, of legal status of people belonging to this place. It's interesting to see that for lots of young Muslims these are now the places where they are reshaping, refining their membership to the collective community, not only the Muslim community but the broader one. For example, they argue: What can we do as believers to help out on social issues like delinquency, drugs? and so on. This discourse is justified the basis of their Muslim faith. It is very interesting to see that this kind of involvement at the local level get more and more attention from the political, institutional level. In other words I don't know any place today in most European cities where there is no dialogue between municipal, even if sometimes it's does not go easily, but there is dialogue or mutual recognition between municipalities and Islamic organizations or Islamic centers at the local level.
The last point I would like to address concerns lobbying and the creation of pressure groups to defend Islamic issues. Here there is a big inequality among European states societies. Not to mention that there is a big gap between Europe and the U.S. on this topic. Most American Muslims are involved in lobbying for the Islamic cause and fight against all situations where, Islam is object of discrimination. It's less obvious in European societies. Maybe it is changing here in the U.K. with the creation of FAIR, which is a mirror of CAIR in the U.S and which is explicitly tackling Islamophobia and discrimination against Islam. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist in other European countries, I'm just saying that it's not articulated and elaborated as a lobby activity, per se, in other European countries. One more point to conclude: maybe (or maybe not), you can find surprising that did not address the question of institutionalization of Islam. The reason is because even if the question of citizenship and political participation overlap with the institutionalization of Islam, in most of the case it's really something related to the status of Islam vis a vis the State and religious organizations’s relationship.
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