Blurred Boundaries

Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship

Rainer Bauböck,John Rundell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429861321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1999, this volume examines new forms of cultural diversity which result from migration and globalization. Historically, most liberal democracies have developed on the basis of national cultures – either a single one, or a dominant one, or a federation of several ones. However, political and economic developments have upset traditional patterns and have blurred established boundaries. Ongoing immigration from diverse origins has inserted new ethnic minorities into formerly homogenous populations. Democratic liberties and rights provided opportunities for old and new marginalized minorities to resist assimilation and to assert identities. The resulting pattern of multiculturalism is different from earlier ones. Often cultural boundaries are neither clearly defined nor do they simply dissolve by assimilation into a dominant group – they have become fuzzy and a constant source of real or imagined hostility and anxiety. A proliferation of mixed identities goes together with stronger claims for cultural rights and escalating hostilities between ethnic minorities and national majorities. In many countries multiculturalism is today perceived as a challenge rather than as an enrichment. The book focuses on the question how institution and policies of liberal democracies can cope with these trends.

The book addresses two tasks:

1) To compare different national contexts and types of ethnic groups (immigrant and indigenous, linguistic and religious minorities) and to discuss how policies of multicultural integration have to be adapted in order to cope with such differences.

2) To evaluate the impact of common rends of globalization which link societies and encourage convergence between national models of multicultural integration.

PART I

Migration and Minorities.
The Diversity of Experiences with Diversity

CHAPTER 1

The Crossing and Blurring of Boundaries in International Migration. Challenges for Social and Political Theory

Rainer Bauböck

In this chapter I want to discuss the effects of international migration on political boundaries in modem highly industrialized societies. I will consider three different kinds of political boundaries: first, territorial borders of states; second, boundaries of the polity, that is, of membership in political communities which is defined by citizenship status and citizenship rights;¹ third, boundaries of cultural communities which have become politicized because they are associated with national identities or because states grant specific rights to minority cultures. In my view, all three kinds of boundaries are essential features of modem societies which are not about to be abolished in a unified global society. However, international migration is a phenomenon which causes considerable irritation. It affects the social meaning, the permeability, the spatial location or the temporal stability of the three kinds of political boundaries.

I want to explore this phenomenon of boundary crossing and boundary blurring in international migration from three different angles: first, a sociological one which argues for combining the macro approaches of studying the effects of migration on societies and states with the micro and meso perspectives of the migrants, their networks and communities; second, an evolutionary perspective in political science which emphasizes the specific territoriality of modem nation-states as the general context for understanding the profound social and political irritations caused by international migration; third, a political theory perspective which addresses the normative question whether or to which degree liberal democracies ought to open their citizenship and their national cultures for immigrants.²

1 Towards a ‘Relativity Theory’ of Migration?

A sociological analysis of migration faces a descriptive and an explanatory task. It is first concerned with describing migratory patterns by answering questions of the following kind: How many people and which kind of people have moved from A to B in a given time period? The explanatory task is then to find out something about the causes of such migratory movements or about their effects on sending and receiving areas. The great challenge for theories of migration lies in those questions where migration figures either as the phenomenon to be explained or as the cause of some broader social change. However, attempts to formulate a general theory of human migration which started more than 100 years ago with E.G. Ravenstein’s search for the laws of migration (1885 and 1889) have not been successful since.³ The basic reason for this failure is that it seems exceedingly difficult and at the same time pointless to make the kind of generalizations that would be required for a general theory. Human migration is not determined by either a single kind of purpose of the individual migrants nor by a single function which migration fulfils for social systems.

Migration is a human activity involving a shift in territorial residence. Micro theories focus on the individuals who move and their motives. People migrate to improve their income, to join their family or to establish a new one. They migrate because they prefer a destination society for cultural, religious or political reasons to their society of present residence or because they have been forced to flee as undesirable minorities. The emphasis on individual purposes and agency is essential for understanding these phenomena. Migration is never fully explained by structural forces. Not only voluntary, but also most kinds of forced migration involve migrants as human agents who take decisions whether, when or where to go. A sufficiently general rational choice approach may account for most of these motives. However, a comprehensive theory must not only adequately represent the diversity of reasons, but also the different specific cases where it is not the migrants themselves, but others who take the basic decisions.⁴ The formation of some nation-states has involved organized population transfers or exchanges of ethnic minorities. Prisoners of war or slaves have been forcefully brought into another country rather than being forced to go there themselves. Refugees are driven out of their homes by their persecutors, but they may also be taken out of their country by international rescue operations. These are extreme cases. If we understand migration as a purposive human activity we could suggest to exclude them by definition. However, they serve to illustrate the broader problem present in most other forms of migration as well. We cannot simply assume that the motive of the individual migrant is the relevant explanans or cause while structural variables and decisions by other agents are merely constraining and intervening conditions.

At the other end of the spectrum of sociological theories we find structuralist explanations which see migration as the outcome of macro processes of functional adaptation or systemic requirements. In some neo-Marxist accounts, for example, migration is basically explained by the capitalist need for providing an ongoing supply of foreign labour for a broad industrial reserve army or for specific jobs shunned by natives. However, slave trade, indentured labour, guestworker recruitment and spontaneous chain migration may all serve this purpose. Any plausible theory will have to account for the differences of status and agency of migrants involved in these types of movements. Furthermore, the structural causes vary themselves strongly for different kinds of migration. Some are economic but others are essentially political. Germany’s open door policy for ethnic German immigrants from Eastern Europe⁵ cannot be explained by economic needs (neither of the German economy nor of the immigrants themselves). More generally, differences in wages, employment rates, social security and welfare provision are normally not sufficient to predict the direction and size of migrations. Historic ties between states and societies, cultural similarities, constructions of national identities, foreign policy interests and, last but not least, efforts to enforce political control over emigration or immigration are highly relevant for the transformation of latent migration potentials into actual flows.

What these cursory remarks want to suggest is that the study of migration is a genuinely interdisciplinary task in which one should deliberately avoid attempts to construct a unified theory or to establish migration studies as a discipline of its own with its particular methodology and leading paradigm. As a social phenomenon migration crosses and blurs the boundaries of societies; as an object of scientific enquiry it crosses and blurs the boundaries of academic disciplines. In order to understand migration we need, among others, theories of labour markets as well as of nation-building; but we probably do not need the theory of migration.

The descriptive task of migration research seems much easier to tackle than the explanatory one of migration theory. The former is concerned with finding patterns in the direction, size and composition of migratory movements. The first step is to collect demographic and geographic data which could categorize and compare different migratory patterns. In order to do this, one has to make some basic decisions about the spatial and time units over which individual movements will be aggregated. To a considerable extent the patterns we find will depend on the units we choose. In international migration it is obviously sovereign states which are the relevant spatial units.⁶ This creates the problem that effects of size can be quite difficult to standardize for comparative purposes. While ceteris paribus larger countries admit larger absolute numbers of migrants, smaller countries generally have higher percentages of inflows and stocks of immigrants per head of their population. The reason for this phenomenon is that in a larger territory a larger percentage of the total amount of long-distance migration will be internal movement of citizens. It is therefore not difficult to explain why Luxembourg and Switzerland have such a high percentage of foreign populations and why many European states have long overtaken the USA in terms of their shares of foreign-bom populations.

A second and more interesting complication is that in order to aggregate movements one has to assume that the units of aggregation themselves do not move. We therefore suppose that states are entities with stable borders and definitions of citizenship. But this is not always the case. State borders sometimes move, too. There are different ways how this can happen. In some rare cases like Poland after 1945 entire countries have been shifted on the map. More frequently states have expanded or shrunk in size due to acquisitions or loss of territories. In some cases borders have been fully abolished and states have disappeared through voluntary unifications or forceful annexations. Finally imposed division, unilateral secession or agreed separation can create new states and borders where none (or only provincial ones) had existed before.⁷ Borders may also remain fixed in their territorial location but change in their significance for sovereign statehood. Colonialism was highly inventive in creating different grades of formal dependency which could be manipulated and changed in response to pressure for decolonization. French and British legislation on immigration and citizenship are still trying to cope with this legacy which creates all kinds of strange irregularities (such as holders of British passports not entitled to enter the country).⁸ Finally, even when there are no changes with regard to the borders or status of territories, modifications in the legislation on naturalization and citizenship may have substantial impacts on the statistical data supposed to measure international migration. For example, comparing the percentages of resident foreigners between countries with ius soli or ins sanguinis legislation may be highly misleading because the latter include second and third generations of immigrant descent bom in the country.

Even the accurate definition of immigrants as foreign-bom populations can present problems when borders and definitions of citizenship have changed. An example that shows the impact of both is Austria in the inter-war period. The 25 years before World War I were a time of fervent migratory activity with large-scale immigration especially in the capital Vienna. However, international migration was negligible because virtually all of these migrants came from other parts of the Empire. The breakup of the dual monarchy transformed the immigrants of the previous period suddenly into foreign residents and thus redefined their internal migration ex post as an international one.⁹ In 1934 12% of the population qualified as ‘immigrants’ by the common criterion that they were bom outside the territory of the new Austrian republic. A greatly reduced movement between the successor states of the monarchy during the inter-war period led then to much more impressive statistics of international migration and prompted the first attempt to control the access of foreigners to the labour market.¹⁰ Similar phenomena have occurred with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The assumption that states are stable and people move is not only indispensable for statistical aggregation of migration data, but it also dominates social perceptions. This may explain why people who stay are suddenly perceived as foreign immigrants if a movement of borders has redefined their origins as foreign. Let me use an analogy to illustrate this phenomenon. Imagine you sit in a train waiting in the station and there is another train on the rail next to yours. The other train fills the whole background of what you see when you look out of your window. If that train starts to move you will experience the irresistible impression that it is rather your own one which moves in the opposite direction. Our normal experience is that backgrounds do not move when foregrounds stay still. So we reinterpret such an event by experiencing it as if we had moved ourselves. State borders and the boundaries of citizenship form a similarly pervasive national background for the perception of migration. When they move this deviation from common experience is corrected by treating the people whose background has been shifted beyond the new boundaries as if they had just moved in the opposite direction, that is, as if they had entered from outside.

Once we have discarded the illusion of permanently stable backgrounds against which to register migration we might as well go a step further. When we begin to doubt the experience just described, we may look out of the opposite window and see the station. This will reassure us that it is not our train which has moved. And once the station seems to move we will immediately know that now our train is indeed departing. However, our previous disillusion might warn us to reflect on this new experience. Could we not as well say that the station has moved in relation to our train? In fact this is probably a quite accurate description of the experience of people like the ticket collector who live on the train for a large part of their daily lives. Could the migrant experience be described in these terms? From the point of view of resident populations migrants come and go; from the migrants’ perspective states enter their lives and leave again.

This switching of perspectives informs an alternative descriptive approach in migration research. While the dominant method focuses on macro processes and chooses resident populations as reference groups, the alternative approach is oriented towards the micro level and studies the process from the perspective of migrant populations. This change involves also an inversion in the relation between time and space. In macro approaches the basic unit is a spatial one with regard to which we register incidents of individuals crossing its borders and aggregate them over any chosen period of time. The patterns of inflows, outflows and times of residence of migrant groups are aspects of the historical time as it is experienced by the society inhabiting a given territory. In micro perspectives the basic unit is a temporal one, the biography of migrants with birth and death as its ultimate limits. The crossing of territorial borders introduces spatial markers into the flow of time. For migrants biographical time is structured into periods marked by changes of places of residence.

For sociological purposes we will be interested in broader migratory patterns rather than in single biographies of individu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Migration and Minorities. The Diversity of Experiences with Diversity
• Part II: Groups, Rights and Citizenship in Multicultural Contexts
• List of Contributors