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The nation state is no longer the "container" of multiculturalism. Yet the multiculturalism literature remains overwhelmingly focused on the relationship between migrants and the host country and national policy options. This is unrealistic. It overlooks that for migrants and their offspring the conversation with the host nation is one among several, a conversation in which participation is optional and partial. The cultural ambience of the host nation is no longer encompassing; e-media tune to many worlds. Second, it underplays the dynamics of the host country -- assimilation into what? The "nation" is a series of vortices of change -- local, regional, national, macro-regional, transnational. Asian Muslims in the UK function locally in their workplaces, neighborhoods and cities, regionally, in Yorkshire etc., nationally, in the context of British policies and culture, move in the European Union with British passports, and relate to country of origin culture and transnational Islam or Hinduism. Third, this overlooks the role of rainbow conversations and economies across cultures -- such as South African Malays studying Islam in Karachi; Turks selling Belgian carpets to Moroccans in the Netherlands (Nederveen Pieterse 2003). Fourth, it ignores the emergence of intermediary formations such as "Euro-Islam" ("a hybrid that attempts to reconcile the principles laid out in the Koran with life in a secular, democratic Europe"; Simons 2005), which is neither national nor belongs to another civilization. Multiculturalism is global too because several diasporas outnumber the nations. The 73 million people of Irish descent worldwide dwarf the 4 million living in the Irish republic; out of almost 15 million Jewish people worldwide about 5 million live in Israel and similar equations apply to Greeks, Lebanese and Armenians. Multiethnicity exists worldwide and multiculturalism discourse and policy is spreading widely. Postnationalism may be exaggerated shorthand but surely the national center and space hold much less than they did in the past. Multiculturalism debates suffer from methodological and policy nationalism.
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In both episodes in Denmark and the Netherlands, conflict was sparked by willed provocations: symbolic violence begat violence. In both episodes the conflicts were about the character of the public sphere, a central arena of multiculturalism. In both cases appeals were made on behalf of "western values" (free speech, modernity) and involved a politics of tension targeting Islam or Islamism, but in effect marginal immigrants. It seems inappropriate to discuss this in normative terms of free speech or blasphemy; it should be addressed first in political terms: cui bono, who benefits from fomenting strife between Muslims and Denmark or Europe? In both cases the target is Islam and the backdrop to these multiculturalism skirmishes is heightened tension in relation to the Middle East. It is appropriate to consider the link between Islam and global multiculturalism.
The Middle East has long been an arena of geopolitical conflict. Consider the configuration that Tim Mitchell calls "McJihad" (2002) and Fatima Mernissi (2003) refers to as "palace fundamentalism": the relationship between western oil companies, the US government, arms sales, the Saudi royal family, wahhabite clergy, and the transnational network of conservative Islam. The nucleus of this configuration goes back to well before world war two. The conservative Muslim network, sustained by a steady flow of oil dollars, was mobilized in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan and by Israel and other governments as counterweights to leftwing forces. In significant measure the conservative Islamic network is a western creation, codependent with modern capitalism, a holdover of anti-communism, and now a source of blowback (Johnson 2000). What Samuel Huntington calls a clash of civilizations is no clash of civilizations at all but the political ramifications of political interventions in the Middle East going back for over half a century. Political tensions have escalated particularly since 9/11, the war on terror, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, pressure on Syria and Iran, American expansion in Central Asia with a view to the Caspian basin, and lasting stalemate in Palestine. Conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir, while not necessarily directly related to wider fault lines, add to the general conflagration involving Islam.
Part of the Middle East stalemate is double dealing on the part of the United States and other western powers. American support for autocracies and double standards in dealing with Israel continue to alienate and radicalize people in the region. Since political avenues other than Islam are generally closed off, Islam is a major avenue of political articulation. The US claims to seek accommodation in the region through cooperation with moderate governments and moderate Islam by promoting democracy; however its policies (unconditional support for Israel, detention without trial, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo) alienate the very moderates it claims it wants to cultivate. Since Middle East policies are not under discussion in the US the situation is addressed through ideological repackaging and public diplomacy (Steger 2005). This targets Islamism as part of a discourse that places Islam on the outskirts of modernity -- along the lines of Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, Daniel Pipes, Thomas Friedman, Bassam Tibi, usually in binarisms (tradition - modernity, conservative - progressive, pro - anti-western, etc.). It is difficult to synch this diagnosis with the region's decades of global economic integration via the oil industry and decades of political integration under American tutelage, facing Israeli expansion and on the receiving end of the largest arms sales to any part of the world.
How does this affect global multiculturalism? Recent American policies escalate tensions that reverberate in every circuit. The ongoing stalemate and frustrations felt in the region, the expanding confrontations with the Islamic world, and the diplomacy of bullying have wide ripple effects.
Consider a news item such as this: "The Bush administration . . . proposed Wednesday to spend $85 million to promote political change inside Iran by subsidizing dissident groups, unions, student fellowships and television and radio broadcasts." According to secretary of state Rice, "We will use this money to develop support networks for Iranian reformers, political dissidents and human rights activists." (Weisman 2006) The policy will probably make progressive ideas in Iran suspect and will bolster hardliners, as have past policies such as declaring Iran part of the axis of evil. If hegemonic power strides across borders and adopts regime change from within as policy, then why should migrants be required to integrate in national society rather than integrating, likewise, along crossborder lines?
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Flexible acculturation is as old as the phenomenon of subcultures that offer variable acculturation, as old as the situation imagined in the song "By the rivers of Babylon . . . we remembered Zion." What is new is the scope and degree of multi-circuit identification. During Nazism in the 1930s some emigrated from Germany while others opted for "inner migration," taking their thoughts and hopes to imaginary realms. In the US many blacks live on the other side of the tracks in poor housing and receive substandard education and services but participate in alternative circuits -- churches, music circuits of blues and hip hop, the sports world in which their stars shine, the Black Entertainment channel, circuits of drugs and crime. These circuits offer belonging, recognition and a sense of feeling at home. Globalization amplifies the sources of the self (Nederveen Pieterse 2004a) and flexible acculturation is one of the forms this takes. It is cultural agency and picking and choosing cultural affiliation in the setting of global culture.
Asian Muslims in English cities, North African _beurs_ in French banlieues and many other migrants and their offspring share experiences of social exclusion and are increasingly ghettoized. "Asian communities living in several UK cities face social isolation as severe as that experienced in the black ghettoes of divided American cities like Chicago and Miami." UK cities are rising in the world rankings of segregation. "The idea was that people would assimilate. The danger is that the assimilation process is so slow that for many it is just not possible" (Adam 2005, Draper 2005).
Exclusion in many instances is not occasional but institutionalized. . . .
It is not occasional also because multiculturalism often combines with institutionalized amnesia and the refusal to view the country's colonial past in other than a benevolent light. This is a factor notably in France, Belgium, Japan and to a lesser extent the UK. According to article four of a law passed on February 23 2005, it is now compulsory in France to emphasise the positive dimension of the French colonial era in high school history courses and textbooks. When the Socialist party tried to overturn this controversial law recently, it was defeated in the National Assembly by a conservative majority that may have moved further to the right as a result of the recent violence. (Moisi 2005)
Dominique Moisi comments,
By imposing political correctness on the teaching
of the past, the National Assembly has committed
more than a crime. It has made a crucial error.
If one of the big challenges confronting France
in the global age is that of integrating its minorities,
then the imposition of a unilateral reading of history
on all French people whatever their origins is not only
anachronistic but offensive.
Refusal to come to terms with the French imperial past and the Algerian war combines with reluctance to view Algerian immigrants as permanent residents and citizens (Lyons 2004). The French law banning overt religious signs in schools, directed at the wearing of the hijab fits the same pattern of integration of minorities at terms set by the French elite, in other words monocultural multiculturalism (Vidal 2004: 4; Wieviorka 2004b). "France is a multicultural society par excellence still living the Jacobin dream of uniformity" (Wallerstein 2005).
Exclusion is not occasional also because multiculturalism is under multiple pressures: competitive globalization translates into pressure on welfare states and in view of the securitization of migration (discussed below) immigrants face increasing demands to conform and decreasing resources and incentives to integrate. The welfare state is shrinking precisely when demand for welfare services is expanding. Third, rightwing forces focus on migrants as a soft target and in several countries the political center has moved to the right on multiculturalism.
Global multiculturalism provides multiple circuits of identification and integration that can make up for social exclusion at least symbolically. Alternative circuits are appealing when mainstream circuits are alienating; in social psychology this two-way traffic is termed interactive acculturation (Bourhis et al. 1997). It takes two to tango: the wider the gap between multiculturalism rhetoric and actual socioeconomic integration the greater the appeal of alternative and symbolic spaces of identification; that seems to be the basic geometry of flexible acculturation. In France, "the immigrant origin populations turn to Islam, not only out of fidelity to the values and religion of their parents but also because it gives meaning to an existence in a society which tends to despise them, to discredit them or to exclude them. . . Here religion is part of an endeavour to participate in modernity rather than to exclude oneself from it" (Wieviorka 2004a: 284). This may refer to an alternative modernity. Multi-circuit multiculturalism includes tea houses, cyberspace, mosques, "Muslim by day, disco at night" (Nederveen Pieterse 1997). _Beur_ youths synchronized their riot actions across Paris quartiers and other cities via websites and mobile phones. The easy media terminology of "riots" underplays their degree of coordination and organization.
For many migrants at the bottom rungs of social experience, multiculturalism is a bogus exercise, a regime of platitudes, a tedious "race relations industry" that mainly benefits a small elite. The reality of multiculturalism on the ground is often a furnace of discontent where grinding anger results in inner migration into imaginary worlds of cyberspace, subcultures of gangs and petty crime, or desire to strike back and affiliate with hostile forces. This is part of what looms behind the 7/7 and August 2006 episodes in the UK: a backlash against bogus multiculturalism and alienation felt by Muslim youth in UK ghettoes and a response to the belligerent policies of the US and UK in the Middle East, Palestine and Iraq. The appeal of militant Islam is a matter of pull and push. It reflects the nature of conflict in the age of accelerated globalization -- conflict is discursive, unfolds through representations, is channeled via media, crosses borders with the speed of light, is no longer spatially sequestered, is subject to multiple interpretations and evokes a wide variety of agency.
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The growing role of "intermestic" (international-domestic) affairs is a general trend. Global multiculturalism means engagement with conflicts worldwide. If societies are engaged globally it means that conflicts travel too. Conflicts cannot be contained locally. Multiculturalism and foreign policy cannot be treated separately. This has been part of global experience since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal and part of recent European experience for instance in the Kurdish presence in Germany and Sweden. Lines drawn in multiculturalism are often drawn globally, for instance the French foulard affair: "the French debate has become 'global.' It has developed both locally and well beyond France, and has considerable diplomatic and geopolitical implications" (Wieviorka 2004b: 72). It reverberates from Turkey to North Africa.
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The account of contemporary globalization as the "annihilation of distance" (the death of distance, end of geography etc.) is shallow. What matters is social distance, mediated by cultural affinity. So what is at issue is the arbitrage of distance: distance or exclusion in one circuit is compensated for by integration in another, though not in a linear fashion. Nor are the circuits comparable in the goods they provide. They refer to different sectors -- economic, social, cultural, cyberspace, symbolic -- and provide diverse benefits.
Flexible accumulation deploys flexible methods (production, product features, location, labor conditions) towards a single purpose (accumulation). Flexible acculturation deploys flexible methods (switching and mixing cultural vocabularies and alternating circuits of affiliation) towards the general aim of belonging and being at home in the world. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>