The (im)plausibility of racism in Europe: policy frameworks on discrimination and integration

ABSTRACT

Rodríguez Maeso and Araújo analyse the reproduction of a dominant understanding of racism in policy discourses of integration and discrimination used by monitoring agencies in Portuguese and European Union (EU) institutional contexts. More specifically, they question the political concern over racism and discrimination vis-à-vis the idea of Europe ‘becoming increasingly diverse’ and the need to gather ‘evidence’ of discrimination. To that end, they examine periodic reports issued by EU monitoring agencies since the 1990s—paying specific attention to reporting on school segregation of Roma pupils in Portugal—and national integration policies and initiatives that, since the 2000s, have targeted mainly Roma and black families and youth. They argue that the dominant discourse of integration and cultural diversity conceives of racism as external to European political culture, and as a ‘factor’ of the ‘conflictive nature’ of social interactions in ethnoracially heterogeneous settings. This paves the way for calls for the ‘strengthening of social cohesion’—on the assumption that policy initiatives need to act on the ‘characteristics’ of so-called ‘vulnerable’ populations—whereas institutional arrangements and everyday practices remain unchallenged.     

Difference revisited: Women,men, and religious discourse

The study of language as a ‘site of struggle’ has generated a burgeoning body of feminist research. Over the past decade the two concepts central to the feminist debate on language— language and woman—have come under scrutiny from a variety of theoretical fronts. Recognising the inherent instability of both these categories, this paper adopts a poststruc‐turalist approach to the discussion on gender and language in an examination of one area of gender contestation—religious proclamation. An analysis of the discursive construction of four preaching events shows the ‘gendering’ of the whole communicative process to be more complex and ambiguous than previous studies on gender and preaching have suggested.     

Immigrant sexual citizenship: intersectional templates among Mexican gay immigrants to the USA

Existing literature on sexual citizenship has emphasized the sexuality-related claims of de jure citizens of nation-states, generally ignoring immigrants. Conversely, the literature on immigration rarely attends to the salience of sexual issues in understanding the social incorporation of migrants. This article seeks to fill the gap by theorizing and analyzing immigrant sexual citizenship. While some scholars of sexual citizenship have focused on the rights and recognition granted formally by the nation-state and others have stressed more diffuse, cultural perceptions of community and local belonging, we argue that the lived experiences of immigrant sexual citizenship call for multiscalar scrutiny of templates and practices of citizenship that bridge national policies with local connections. Analysis of ethnographic data from a study of 76 Mexican gay and bisexual male immigrants to San Diego, California, reveals the specific citizenship templates that these men encounter as they negotiate their intersecting social statuses as gay/bisexual and as immigrants (legal or undocumented); these include an ‘asylum’ template, a ‘rights’ template, and a ‘local attachments’ template. However, the complications of their intersecting identities constrain their capacity to claim immigrant sexual citizenship. The study underscores the importance of both intersectional and multiscalar approaches in research on citizenship as social practice.     

Incorporating immigrants as foreigners: multicultural politics in Japan

With the growth of immigrant population over the past couple of decades, a ‘multicultural’ discourse has emerged in Japan. A notable point is that immigrants are expected to be incorporated into the host society primarily as foreigners rather than as Japanese nationals with full citizenship rights. The purpose of this article is to understand this prevailing mode of immigrant incorporation and to consider the comparative implications. By examining the discursive aspects of claims-making on behalf of both old-timer and newcomer immigrants, I argue that the underlying opportunity structures have been reproduced in each phase of immigration-related development in Japan, facilitating the use of the ‘foreigner’ category in advocacy efforts. Official recognition of the category has also helped to further institutionalize it as the main target of immigrant policy. In comparative perspective, ‘incorporation as foreigners’ can be understood as a variant of the ethnic model of immigration regimes in that it tends to reinforce the dominant ethnocultural conception of Japanese nationhood.     

Andalusia at the crossroads of Europeanness: immigration as a performance of coloniality

ABSTRACT

The semantics of cultural diversity, based on the political discourses of immigration as they appear in integration and anti-racist policies in Andalusia, underline the sense of Otherness of immigrant groups. In this article, Castaño, Martínez and Periáñez focus on the most relevant texts in the Planes Integrales para la Inmigración en Andalucía (Comprehensive Plans for Immigration in Andalusia). To date, these texts have formed the most significant discursive framework for representations of the third sector, trade unions and public agencies involved in the management of diversity. The key ideas in the plans revolve around transnational political references in the context of the European Union (EU). They impose a sense of Europeanness on Andalusia that is in opposition to its historical heritage, endogenous diversity and cultural specificity, and thus steer the imaginary of Andalusia's identity towards a Eurocentric idea that enhances the region's peripheral position. Immigration is regarded in the hegemonic media discourse and the social imaginary as a risk and a social problem. Integration policies, despite being couched in anti-racist rhetoric, are specifically targeted at immigrants, further enhancing the idea of Otherness. The notion of interculturality is the leitmotiv of these policies. In practical terms, however, action is limited to empty measures in the field of education. These policies, in sum, neutralize, rather than reinforce, the sense of equality on which interculturality is based. The examination of the intertextuality of Andalusian, Spanish and European discourses reveals the conformity of the discourse of Andalusia's coloniality within the framework of the EU.     

Taiwanizing female immigrant spouses and materializing differential citizenship

Taiwan holds the Asian record for the proportion of families that involve so-called ‘foreign brides’. Marriage migration has brought close to half a million immigrant spouses into the country over the past decades. Most of these women come from Mainland China, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. This paper discusses how the Taiwanese state and society have actively pursued the integration of immigrant spouses since 2002, with a set of policies that acknowledge the massive migration of ‘foreign brides’ and the impact of this phenomenon on society. It argues that the attempt to integrate new immigrants is fraught with a discourse that serves to further stigmatize these women, discriminate against them, and, therefore, create an ‘Other’ that is used to erect the ideology of nation-building in Taiwan. The paper provides a critical analysis of policies, academic discourse and NGOs fundraising strategies to show how these institutions reinforce the idea that immigrant spouses are problematic and, therefore, need to be ‘Taiwanized’. This results in a system of differential legal and social citizenship in which immigrant spouses are at the bottom of the social hierarchy in Taiwanese society.     

Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test‐based evaluation of teachers, and the promotion of competition are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school than those from more advantaged families. Because these policy initiatives do not directly address the educational challenges experienced by disadvantaged students, they have contributed little—and are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Moreover, such policies have the potential to do serious harm. Addressing the educational challenges faced by children from disadvantaged families will require a broader and bolder approach to education policy than the recent efforts to reform schools.     

Performance of political parties in the 2016 parliamentary election in Slovakia: regional comparisons and district-level determinants

This paper explores the results of the 2016 parliamentary election in the Slovak Republic, with a special emphasis on the regional aspects of participating political parties’ election campaigns. It summarizes the election results for the country as a whole, as well as separately by region. An empirical analysis of party electoral performance at the district level suggests that the incumbent Smer party tended to do well in districts with higher rates of unemployment and a lower proportion of university-educated population. Similar patterns hold for the Slovak ethnic nationalist Slovak National Party and the far-right People’s Party Our Slovakia. By contrast, the two parties that presented themselves as being starkly opposed to the Smer government’s policies—Freedom and Solidarity and Ordinary People and Independent Personalities—exhibit greater support in districts with more university-educated voters and lower unemployment rates.     

Linguistic polarization and conflict in the Basque Country

This paper investigates the relationship between linguistic polarization and conflict in the Basque Country. During the 40 years of Franco??s dictatorship the use of the Basque language was banned. Therefore, there may be some linguistic roots underlying the conflict in the Basque Country. We show that at the municipality level, linguistic polarization reduces the level of conflict. This finding is robust to various ways of measuring linguistic and ideological polarization and the inclusion of other covariates. In addition, we find that a high level of the stock of human capital is beneficial for reducing conflict intensity.     

Gender,HipHop and Pop-Islam: the urban identities of Muslim youth in Germany

While many opponents construe the growing presence of Muslim headscarves in Germany as evidence of creeping Islamicization, religious activism can also be interpreted as an attempt on the part of migrant offspring to forge positive ‘hyphenated identities’, rooted in urban culture, material consumption, and specific mosque communities. Islam has become ‘young, chic and cool’ among ethnic minorities, often denied citizenship and opportunity in their country of birth owing to jus sanguinis and/or other complex naturalization requirements. Religiosity, in turn, is slowly giving rise to new types of civic engagement, leading more ethnic youth to pursue German citizenship. Drawing on representative surveys, inter alia, this essay argues that while not problem free, an emerging Pop-Islam movement has provided Muslimas especially with an important platform for breaking with traditional gender roles, building social capital and acquiring the participatory skills necessary to bring ‘civil society’ into their own communities. It moreover infers that national policies banning headscarves in public service professions are increasingly at odds with European Union directives addressing gender equality and religious discrimination.     

Youthscapes: the politics of belonging for ‘Makwerekwere’ youth in South African schools

This article is framed within the global context of immigration and the resultant debates around citizenship, belonging, inclusion and exclusion. The task of schools as social institutions is to ‘integrate’ and ‘educate’ immigrant youth and as such they can be seen as the primary sites where the politics of belonging and struggles over belonging and citizenship are waged. Drawing on the conceptual framework of ‘youthscapes’ and the theoretical framework of critical race theory, this article engages with the contradictions inherent in schools and the manner in which the South African education system is implicated in constructing different ‘kinds’ of citizens and reproducing hierarchies of belonging, even in its efforts at inclusivity.     

Asian Americans for equality: A case study of strategies for expanding immigrant homeownership

Abstract

At a time when the overall homeownership rate in the United States is at a historic high, many groups still face severe hurdles in realizing the American dream. The public, private, and nonprofit sectors are working to address these barriers, and this article examines one nonprofit's activities. Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE) is a civil rights and housing organization providing homeownership and other services to Asian Americans, a group that often faces language, cultural, credit, and financial difficulties in achieving homeownership.

AAFE addresses these challenges by providing aggressive outreach through housing fairs and neighborhood publications; it offers homeownership education and counseling in a variety of languages and settings, secures multiple housing subsidies and develops affordable housing, and educates lenders on the employment and credit practices of the Asian community. AAFE thus helps tailor the complex web of activities required to expand homeownership to traditionally underserved—especially immigrant—populations.     

The ‘Othering’ of ‘Red Ed’, or How the Daily Mail ‘Framed’ the British Labour Leader

This article takes as its starting point the attack on the late Ralph Miliband, the left‐wing intellectual and father of the current Labour leader Ed Miliband, by the Daily Mail in late 2013. It argues that this attack was a response by the Mail to its failed campaign to dub the Labour leader ‘Red Ed’. The article demonstrates that ever since Miliband won the Labour leadership in 2009, the Mail has sought to ‘other’ him by presenting him as ‘alien’—this by constant references to his Jewish background, his upbringing in a wealthy North London intellectual milieu, his supposed extreme left‐wing views and his ineffable ‘oddness’—at least, an oddness as characterised by the newspaper. The paper will conclude by asking why the Daily Mail's ‘Red Ed’ moniker failed to catch on, while noting that their ‘Odd Ed’ moniker seems to have had more resonance.     

Articulating language oppression: colonialism,coloniality and the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages

ABSTRACT

Roche’s article discusses ‘language oppression’ as a form of domination that is coherent with other forms of oppression along the lines of ‘race’, nation, colour and ethnicity. Scholars have defined language oppression as the ‘enforcement of language loss by physical, mental, social and spiritual coercion’. It is part of an evolving suite of concepts from linguistics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology that examines issues of language discrimination, or ‘linguicism’. Roche explores one aspect of linguicism—language erasure—and how it relates to language oppression, focusing on Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He examines how language oppression is produced through practices of erasure: the ways in which certain populations and their languages are systematically rendered discursively invisible. He argues that the erasure of certain languages in the Tibetan context is systematically reproduced by two otherwise opposed political projects: the colonial project of the PRC state; and the international Tibet movement that seeks to resist it. He refers to the contingent cooperation between these two opposed projects as ‘articulated oppression’. In concluding the article he examines how the disarticulation of this oppression is a necessary condition for the emancipation of Tibet’s minority languages, and discusses the broader significance of this study for understanding language oppression, and its relation to other forms of oppression.     

A Tale of Two Inquiries: Sans Everything and Ely

The government acknowledged scandalously poor care of long‐stay patients in National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in 1969. This followed the Ely Hospital inquiry, which emerged in the aftermath of revelations of abuse at seven hospitals described in Barbara Robb's book Sans Everything: A Case to Answer (1967). Allegations in Sans Everything and at Ely were similar. However, the inquiry committees which investigated, ‘disproved’ those in Sans Everything and upheld those at Ely. The Ely inquiry became pivotal to NHS policy reform for long‐stay mental illness and mental handicap hospitals, and for giving patients and their families a greater voice if they had concerns about inadequacies. This paper explains the relationship between Sans Everything and ‘Ely’ and analyses the impact of Robb's work—her high‐profile press campaign, networking, and determination to achieve improvement—which triggered revelations at Ely and elsewhere, and helped shape the course and constructive outcome of the Ely inquiry.     

The Enemies of Promise: Labour's Long War against Education

Labour and New Labour alike have been the enemies of education. Consider the brutalism of Charles Clarke—‘history for display purposes only’; statistics of achievement based on the soft marking of soft subjects to achieve soviet pig‐iron statistics; fat inspection and thin curriculum; compulsory lesson plans and paper plagues; foreign languages as too difficult. Before all that, remember Anthony Crosland ‘destroying their schools if it's the last fucking thing I do’ and the consequent rise of the public schools as bought excellence. What to do : Follow Housman's dictum, ‘Knowledge is happiness’; rescue good minds in bad places with state places in boarding schools; utilise the quiz nationally the as a pop method to stimulate the study habit; get back to French and German; take the educationalism out of education especially in training colleges; thin inspection down from terror to weather‐eye mentoring.     

The Catholic Lobby: Structures,Policy Styles and Religious Networks

This article is about the place of lobbying by the Catholic Church in contemporary Australian federal politics. It builds on some previous attention by political scientists to Catholic political campaigning (eg, Hogan 1978, 1993 ; see also Byrnes 1993 ), but it is more comprehensive. Discussion of such lobbying uses various terminology and, like much lobbying, it can be viewed in a normative sense either favourably or unfavourably, as democratic or undemocratic. During the parliamentary debate in December 1996 on the anti‐euthanasia private members bill introduced by Kevin Andrews, for instance, Nick Dondas (Country Liberal, Northern Territory) alleged that ‘the debate has been driven by the Catholic community of this country’. To which his Catholic colleague Tony Abbott (Liberal, New South Wales), alleging that Dondas had blamed the bill on the ‘Catholic lobby’, responded that ‘those comments were beneath him’. ¹     

Consenting to Exclude? Empirical Patterns of Democracy and Immigrant Integration Policy

Studies explaining immigrant integration policies commonly focus on single aspects such as right-populist party politics or the immigration legacy of a country. This neglects the overall character of the democratic system within which policy-making unfolds. Research on empirical patterns of democracy, in turn, suggests that consensus democracies pursue ‘kinder and gentler’ policies and outperform majoritarian democracies in terms of minority representation. The article tests whether this conclusion holds for the specific group of immigrant minorities and analyses the relationship between patterns of democracy and immigrant integration policy using a new dataset on empirical democracies in 30 European and North American countries. Simultaneously estimating the character of democratic systems in terms of power dispersion and its effect on integration policies, the analysis reveals a distinct ‘Janus-faced’ pattern: while proportional power dispersion tends to coincide with more inclusive immigrant integration policies, pronounced veto structures tend to foster exclusion.     

Reconciling China with international order

Abstract

The debate about Western policies towards China ('containment’ versus ‘engagement') is intellectually and politically misleading. At issue is not so much the policy blueprint but the ability of Western countries to design and implement coherent and consistent policies towards China, and to coordinate those policies between themselves. This ability has been affected by a trend towards the ‘domestication’ of foreign policies — a trend which is particularly marked in the case of the United States, but clearly visible in France, the UK and Germany as well. If the capacity to design, implement and coordinate effective China policies is to be regained, the problems will have to be recognized and addressed.     

Totalitarianism and justice: Hannah Arendt’s and Judith N. Shklar’s political reflections in historical and theoretical perspective

We locate Arendt’s and Shklar’s writings within what Katznelson has identified as an attempt to create a new language for politics after the cataclysm of the twentieth century, and Greif has called the new ‘maieutic’ discourse of ‘re-enlightenment’ in the ‘age of the crisis of man’. More specifically, we compare and contrast two related, but in many ways also differing, ways of thinking about totalitarianism and its legal repercussions. To this end, we examine two sets of studies: Arendt’s The origins of totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil and Shklar’s After utopia: The decline of political faith and Legalism: An essay on law, morals, and politics. While The origins of totalitarianism and After utopia discussed totalitarian ideology and its consequences for modern political thought, the Eichmann report and Legalism dealt with the question of whether and how justice is possible after the extreme experience of totalitarianism. We argue that the maieutic impulse led Arendt and Shklar to find distinct routes to address a common concern. Our paper ends with a discussion of some of the surplus meaning that was generated by the different maieutic performances of the two thinkers.