Crises of Multiculturalism (pt 1)

This is an extract from Alana Len­tin and Gavan Titley’s new book, The Crises of Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism in Europe: Racism in a Neo­lib­eral Age, pub­lished in July 2011 by Zed Books. The extract is taken from chapter 3, ‘Free like me: the poly­phony of lib­eral post-​racialism.’

In the mir­ror, through the look­ing glass

In Veil: Mir­ror of Iden­tity (2009), Chris­tian Joppke exam­ines con­tro­ver­sies con­cern­ing the Muslim head­scarf in three dif­fer­ent coun­tries, and pos­its it as a mir­ror of iden­tity ‘…which forces the French, the Brit­ish and the Ger­mans to see who they are and to rethink the kinds of soci­et­ies and pub­lic insti­tu­tions they want to have’ (2009: x). Mir­rors are not inno­cent meta­phors, as both Lacan and Snow White would advise. We gaze into mir­rors and choose to focus on a par­tic­u­lar object. We accept the arbit­rary rela­tions of what is within and without the frame. Gaz­ing in this mir­ror involves a delib­er­ate decision to look for insight in this place, from this object, and through a struc­tured rela­tion that can­not but yield polar­ised and polar­ising like­nesses. Across Europe, the veil, broadly under­stood, has become the focus of an objec­ti­fy­ing gaze, not only as a piece of cloth but as a body of women, sig­ni­fy­ing cul­tural, reli­gious and eth­nic dif­fer­ences cul­tiv­ated by the fail­ures of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism (Rosen­ber­ger and Sauer 2006). While the meta­phor of the mir­ror plays out in dif­fer­ent ways in Joppke’s ana­lysis, it is import­ant to unsettle it as a nat­ur­al­ized meta­phor of reflec­tion, and instead to draw atten­tion to the idea of the veil as a float­ing sig­ni­fier, sought out for inter­pret­a­tion, and prob­lem­at­ized, medi­ated, and made stand for a range of problems.

While our focus here is on Joppke’s defence of the pro­hib­it­ive approach of the French Repub­lic, his study is com­par­at­ive, and involves a detailed dis­cus­sion of sub-​Federal Länder laws in Ger­many con­cern­ing dress for pub­lic school teach­ers in 2004 and 2005 and the ques­tion of school par­ti­cip­a­tion and the jilbab and niqab in the UK. In essen­tially award­ing Ger­many a third place fin­ish, as a con­sequence of its expli­citly ‘Christian-​occidental’ insti­tu­tional exclu­sion of Islam (2009: 125 – 126), Joppke situ­ates the debate on veils squarely in terms of con­trast­ing lib­eral approaches, with lib­er­al­ism ‘…con­stitutive of all the attempts at national self-​definition that have been made in Europe’s great debate sur­round­ing Muslim integ­ra­tion’ (2009: 25). This fram­ing extends bey­ond his trip­tych of illus­tra­tions. Across west­ern Europe, the veil is implic­ated in a meta-​discourse of nation­al­ised lib­er­al­ism versus Muslim illiberalism. [….]

This brief review of a com­plex European ter­rain is neces­sary if only to insist on the ways in which the veil has been incor­por­ated into polit­ical con­stel­la­tions and ves­ted with dis-​orientalist accents, pro­cesses of racial­iz­a­tion that are not only entirely absent, but act­ively dis­coun­ted in Chris­tian Joppke’s account of the ‘Islamic head­scarf’ as the prin­cipal ‘affront to lib­eral self-​definition’ in Europe (2009: 2). The con­struc­tion of the head­scarf as polit­ic­ally prob­lem­atic in these terms is prin­cip­ally asso­ci­ated with France. The French debate of 2003 – 4 must be related to its ante­cedents in 1989 and 1994, yet without see­ing this as a cumu­lat­ive con­front­a­tion with an increas­ing or homo­gen­ous ‘chal­lenge’ (Scott 2007: 21). In France, the veil, as a medi­at­ing sym­bol, has come to stand not only for incom­men­sur­able infra-​national loy­al­ties unfol­ded across lines of gender and cul­ture, but also for a polit­ics of immig­ra­tion centred on the prob­lem of second-​generation ‘immig­rant youth’ in the sym­bol­ic­ally freighted ban­lieues (Khiari 2006). Scott (2007) iden­ti­fies the tim­ing and gradual harshen­ing of approaches to the head­scarf with the desire of the polit­ical main­stream, par­tic­u­larly the RPR/​UMP, to both con­tain and trans­late the racist plat­forms of Le Pen’s Front national:

In 1989 the expul­sions at Creil fol­lowed Le Pen’s strong show­ing in the pres­id­en­tial elec­tion the year before; Bayrou’s min­is­terial cir­cu­lar and the sixty-​nine expul­sions in 1994 fol­lowed the National Front’s win­ning seats in the European par­lia­ment; and Chirac’s law came shortly after he defeated Le Pen in the second round of the pres­id­en­tial elec­tion of 2002. In each case, the fear of Le Pen’s party pushed more mod­er­ate parties farther to the right (2007: 38)

The force of Scott’s point is this: the debates sur­round­ing the even­tual imple­ment­a­tion of a law ban­ning ‘osten­ta­tious’ signs of reli­gious affil­i­ation took place in the after­math of an elec­tion where 16.86% of the elect­or­ate had voted for a fas­cist party. In con­trast, a con­sid­er­a­tion of this well-​known back­drop to racial con­flict in France is absent from Joppke’s dis­cus­sion. This is because, for Joppke, the Muslim head­scarf is not so much a ques­tion for the soci­olo­gical ana­lysis of polit­ical struggle as an instru­mental illus­tra­tion of the clas­sical lib­eral prob­lem: ‘the tol­er­a­tion of the intol­er­ant’ (2009: 117). Joppke’s threshold of tol­er­ance is a fun­da­ment, as it situ­ates Islam as ulti­mately incom­pat­ible with lib­eral demo­cracy. In endors­ing this clash, in these terms, Joppke’s ana­lysis exem­pli­fies three import­ant dimen­sions of postra­cial ana­lysis. Firstly, in atten­u­at­ing the man­i­fold lines of con­test­a­tion seared in liberalism’s shiny sur­faces, this ana­lysis has no interest in the ways in which race atten­u­ates lib­er­al­ism, clos­ing off the prom­ise of the ‘indi­vidual’ to the racial­ized. Secondly, the con­tex­tual his­tor­ies from which these crit­ical race inter­rog­a­tions have derived are also absent, as his­tor­ies of colo­ni­al­ism, post­co­lo­ni­al­ity and racism are expli­citly dis­missed in the debates sur­round­ing Muslims in Europe. Thirdly, and as a con­sequence of this his­tor­ical clos­ure, a dense soci­olo­gical lit­er­at­ure on the ‘veil’, that pays atten­tion to the lived exper­i­ences and social con­di­tions in France of those who wear it, is deemed irrel­ev­ant (cf. Chouder et al 2008).

Veil revis­its the drama of French debates to recon­sider the­or­et­ical debates about lib­eral ideas of the good life. More spe­cific­ally, the book aims to recon­cile head­scarf bans ‘

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