Session 3
Citizenship and Political Participation
Professor Jorgen S. Nielsen
I'm going to concentrate on the European environment in which Muslims finds themselves having to function rather than on Muslims themselves. It seems to me that if we're going to talk about citizenship and participation that's where we need to start. The second point that I'd like to emphasise very strongly is that it's very difficult to talk in very general terms about Europe. The situation varies, significantly sometimes, from European country to another. When you start digging beneath the surface you also begin to see significant variations from one place to another within the same country. Anybody who has studied the situation in Britain knows that Bradford is not Birmingham and Birmingham is not Bradford. And a third point of emphasis for context: I think we also have to emphasise and constantly remember something we very often tend to forget when we engage in this discussion, namely that we're actually in the middle of a process What we record and analyse today is not what it was yesterday and not what it's going to be tomorrow - which gives me a good escape route if someone tells me that I'm wrong, I'll say: that was yesterday. We're talking from within a situation, in a process which has moved from, on the whole (even here you can't generalise), migration through immigration into integration and ultimately into participation. Now, once I've laid out those four terms it's already clear that bits of that process, certainly integration and participation, are much more a gleam in the eye than a reality on the ground. But there are bits of everything there and certainly if you look at Germany, one gets the impression that the public debate is still very much at the level of migration, even though the reality has moved significantly ahead of that. In a book I was reviewing just the other day there was an article by Bassam Tibi who was still talking about "Migranten". He of all people ought to know better.
I'm going to focus around citizenship and want to make three main points before coming to a final short fourth. Clearly once you start talking about citizenship there is an issue of legal status. If you want to talk meaningfully about citizenship you have to distinguish between citizenship as a legal formality, and an informal dimension to citizenship which is much deeper, much more substantial. If we limit ourselves to the legal concept of citizenship, we see enormous variations across Europe. There are countries in which the access to citizenship is very easy. Britain is a particular case in point, although here it's interesting that the legal concept of citizenship is very, very new compared to the rest of Europe. Among the first significant pieces of legislation in which citizenship becomes a legal concept is the 1981 Nationality Act. Citizenship in Britain is still shot through with the underlying medieval concept of subject, the British subject, which is ironic given that it's because of the survival of the concept of subject that it's been comparatively easy and unproblematical for the legal system in Britain to absorb Commonwealth citizens. They were subjects of the king/queen. And the idea then of giving political participation rights to subjects, whether they have U.K. citizenship or not, is a minor issue. Being a Danish citizen, I cannot vote in U.K. general elections. It was only the European Union which gave me voting rights in local elections recently, in the Maastricht treaty. But my Commonwealth students from Malaysia and Pakistan and so on have always been able to vote and stand for election if they so wished. So access to citizenship, legally speaking, and access to political participation in Britain is easy. Germany and, above all, Switzerland are examples of the opposite end of the scale. Germany has only recently changed to allow, very reluctantly as we know, dual citizenship.
But even having defined citizenship legally, whatever the ease or difficulty of access to it across Europe, you still have different understandings of citizenship. We can go into it at great length - I won't - but the French concept of citoyen is on one level a legal matter, but it's permeated by the concept of a very active, participatory understanding of citizenship. And even in two countries like Britain and the U.S., where you have a legal concept of citizenship which are very similar, once you move outside the legal framework in the U.S. the concept of being a U.S. citizen is much more active and participatory than it is in the U.K. where citizenship is minimal in its expectations. It's only when the Home Secretary starts talking about teaching "active citizenship" that Britain gets anywhere near an American or French understanding of citizenship.
When it actually gets down to that interaction between citizenship and participation, it's the informal concepts of citizenship, the informal meanings of citizenship which are in some ways much more important than the initial formal obstacles of getting a passport. And the informal, the broader concepts, the deeper ideas of understanding of citizenship, that understanding which encourages or gives access to participation in the broader society is influenced, I think, very much by collective perceptions of the self and the other. The extent to which we think of ourselves as accepting of difference, the extent to which we think of ourselves as admitting into our collective those who are different and with that acceptance then the access to participation. The taking for granted who is different, who has entered or is perceived to have entered our collective, the taking for granted that having entered, they have the right to participate politically, socially, culturally, etc, etc. That collective perception of oneself and the other has to do with the national self-perceptions, the national myths, if you like, of the various parts of Europe. Here one can say general things about the idea of the nation and so and so forth, but that doesn't help us much, because if you look around Europe the conception of nation differs enormously from one country to the other. To a certain extent in some place this influences the legal definition of citizenship. We take again the contrast between the United Kingdom and Germany where the traditional conception of "Germanness" as it developed in the 18th and 19th centuries was tribal based, therefore the relationship of the myth of blood relationship of descent and therefore the effective law of return which allows people claiming to be German after 300 years of living in the Volga valley to come back and fully participate as German citizens without going through a whole naturalization process, whereas a Turk born in Germany of grandparent immigrants, until recently, found it extraordinarily difficult to become a German. By contrast, as I said, here you don't even have to become a U.K. citizen to take part in political life. It has to do also with the degree to which the national self-perception is monolithic or plural.
Here I contrast the United Kingdom and Denmark. You don't find a national self-perception in Europe which is much more monolithic than the Danish.. When one has lived outside Denmark for many years and then goes home and hears people talk about Danishness, it is absolutely astounding, it's 19th century. It really is "One people, one state, one…" I would assert, with all the provisos that you can list around it, that the U.K. conception of the self has plurality - not pluralism, but plurality - writ central. The United Kingdom is a nationally plural collective, it's an ethnically plural collective, even in the nation founding myth of the English there is an express, an explicit dualism in the marriage between Anglo-Saxon and Norman. In religious terms the U.K. is plural and has been plural consciously since the Reformation. The religious pluralism has been beset by trouble at various points, and you could argue that the kind of things said about Muslims today are tame compared to the kinds of things that were said about Catholics 150 years ago. In this kind of situation it is conceptually easier to add another component to the plural mix than it is in Denmark. Things have changed since I went to school in Denmark, but one of my best friends in class at school in the early 1960s in Copenhagen, was a Danish Baptist. He was a good deal more Danish than I ever was, but the fact that he was a Baptist had constant questions raging: "How come you're Danish, you're a Baptist, it's not possible, you've got to be Lutheran". And so you can carry on around the countries of Western Europe and, increasingly over the last decade or so, the countries of Eastern Europe where the whole question of national identity has been revised post-communism. I know Bulgaria quite well and it's very interesting to follow there the discussions about how Bulgaria Muslims, so-called Pomaks, or ethnic Turks Bulgarian. To what extent are they accepted as Bulgarians, to what extent do they feel themselves Bulgarian? And the answer to those questions determine to an extent how far those people are allowed to participate, or how far their participation is acceptable and shades into the area of the "taken for granted".
Related to all this is then the question of identity. I'd just like to make a couple of points for discussion. As a product of the nation-building projects of the last 200 years, we have, certainly in Northwestern Europe, ended up at the point where identity is often assumed to be a singula. You often get this question: "What are you?" What is the answer to the question of "what are you?" And the expectation is, if you say you're a British Pakistani then to demand which comes first, British or Pakistani. Are you French Muslim or are you Muslim French. There's an underlying sense that there's a degree of contradiction and incompatibility in that multiple identity. There was a wave of literature in ethnic minority and race relations study 20-30 years ago which talked about the first generation of post-immigration young people being "between two identities", as if they were kind of lost, as if identity is something, a commodity in a box, and you had to choose between boxes or, if you were really clever, you were able to pick something out of one box and pick out something of another box and make a temporary mixture of the two which suited you, but the boxes remained unchanged. There was an assumption also, which is reinforced by the political right, that this singular identity, the national identity, the Danishness to get back to that one, is static. It is something that somehow or other appeared and it's there and will be there for ever. And any change amounts to a threat, a corruption. Whereas I suspect all of us in this room would have no problem talking about multiple identities, flexible, mobile, constantly changing identities, the public discourse is very much dominated by the other, older view. A good piece of work I refer to on this one is Gerhard Baumann's little book on Contesting Culture (CUP 1996) following his field work in Slough where he discusses how people operate with different identities, identities which are offered to them by the external structures.
An issue which arises out of this is the "ethnification" of Islam, a process which has been determined in part by the terms of the Race Relations Act. To get any kind of protection under the Act, Muslims have had to present themselves in ethnic terms, a process which aware Muslims have themselves not really wanted to take part in. But to get legal protection, for example wearing head scarves at work, they have to do this. So I wonder what will be the impact in the medium to long term of the imposition from December this year of the European Directive against religious discrimination in employment and training. Muslims will then be able to identify themselves within that legal framework as Muslims, without having to do all kinds of awkward negotiations with their own identities to get themselves accepted as some kind of racial or ethnic minority. But another element here is also, and here again the differences come across Europe, where there is an overlap between religious identity and racial, ethnic identity, which in the U.K. affects the public image of Islam which is dominated by the primarily Pakistani, Indian subcontinent nature of the publically active Muslim organizations. But Muslims of Indian subcontinent and Pakistani background make up not much more than half and maximum two thirds of the Muslim population of the country. So, in a sense, there is a kind of "Indian subcontinent-ization" of the 5000-8000 Yemenis among the 140,000 Muslims in Birmingham. Similarly, in a country like Germany, I can imagine it must be quite difficult to be a non-Turkish Muslim, because the structures and the politics and the public images are so dominated by the equation between Islam and Turkish. In France, possibly less so, but it's still very much a North African public phenomenon.
In Britain, however, and particularly in London, the ethnic national diversity of the Muslim community and the fact that we have significant racial, ethnic minorities that are not Muslim, especially Christian Afro-Caribbeans do ensure that the Pakistani hegemony of the public image remains under challenge. So this identification between Islam and racial or ethnic minority remains complex. But precisely because there is this variety of different population groups in Britain, it's much easier here also to establish alliances of single issue, temporary alliances of convenience, which takes us on to participation. Such alliances have taken place for years now at the local level. Most of the big cities in Britain have elected representatives on the local council from the various local communities including the ethnic and religious minorities, which effectively reflect the population. In Birmingham, for example, we have had Muslim representatives or elected councillors who are of Muslim background, to be more accurate, in roughly the same proportion as the populations existing in the city. That's been 20 years. It's when it gets to the national level, and the public visibility of Islam at that level, that the difficulties begin to rise. Perhaps a word about the media in this connection. The way the media deal with these issues differs very significantly between local and national media. Local media, on the whole, in Britain take a much more accepting view of local ethnic and religious pluralism. They have to. The Birmingham Evening Mail has to watch it if it antagonises Muslims because it loses potentially 14 percent of its market. And more significantly it loses potentially a significant portion of its advertisers. The Sun can afford to lose potentially two percent of its market and I'm not aware of any significant Muslim business that has ever wanted to advertise there. So there is not the same financial pressure. So when issues become national, they become ideologized, they become problematized in a way they aren't in the local press. A telling littleincident: about three years ago, somebody produced a demographic projection in Birmingham suggesting by 2020 the white population was going to be a numerical minority. So Birmingham is becoming a city of ethnic minorities. The City Council have already recognised that the Irish and the Scots and the Welsh are ethnic minorities, we are all ethnic minorities in Birmingham, by 2020 the white population as a whole will be a minority. The response of the local media, the response of the local public opinion was a kind of collective shrug of the shoulders. I can imagine what would have happened if that had been published about Copenhagen in the Danish press: there would have been a national crisis, as there would have been in most other cities if someone had come up with that demographic prognosis. So participation as a result of such perceptions is much easier to achieve across the board, not just politically, but socially, culturally, in localities, and in the first instance it is localities before it is countries. In places where there has developed, for whatever reasons, a kind of acceptance that plurality is a natural state of affairs, not quite taken for granted, but a natural state of affairs. And that participation therefore is something which can only really take place within a space which can be negotiated, and that space has to be negotiated with reference to all of these various points - and you can probably think of other points as well. Thank you.
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