<http://www.soc.uiuc.edu/about/Transnational/Global.pdf>
GLOBAL MULTICULTURALISM, FLEXIBLE ACCULTURATION
Jan Nederveen Pieterse1
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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.
