The Political Agency of British Migrants

Brexit and Belonging

Fiona Ferbrache, Jeremy MacClancy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000298246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a comparative analysis of the political agency of British migrants in Spain and France and explores how they struggle for a sense of belonging in the wake of Brexit.

With the UK's departure from the European Union (EU), Britons are set to lose EU citizenship as their political rights are redefined. This book examines the impacts this is having on Britons living in two EU countries. It moves beyond the political agency of underprivileged migrants to demonstrate that those who are relatively well-off also have political subjectivities: they can enter the political fray if their fundamental values or key interests are challenged. This book is based on ethnographic inquiry into the political agency of Britons in the Spanish Province of Alicante and South West France in the twenty-first century. Themes such as Britons becoming elected as local councillors in their countries of residence, migrants' reactions to Brexit, organisation of anti-Brexit campaigners, and claims for residency and citizenship are examined. The book foregrounds the contemporary practice theory built on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, as well as Engin Isin's approach to enacting citizenship, to provide empirical insights into the political participation of Britons. It does so by demonstrating how the elected councillors stood against gross moral inequity and fought for a sense of local belonging; how campaigners emoted digitally in reaction to Brexit; and how some migrants, keen to remain without worry, learnt both to navigate and to contest the policy and practice of national bureaucracies.

This book makes a first-ever contribution to the fields of anthropology and geography in the study of impacts of Brexit on British migrants within Europe. It is also the first study into lifestyle migrants as political agents. It will thus appeal to anthropologists, human geographers, sociologists, as well as academics and students of citizenship studies, migration studies, European studies, and political geography.

1
An introductory tour of our topics

We study the political behaviour of advantaged migrants in their country of residence. We study this because other scholars have neglected it. Yet, as we argue and demonstrate throughout this book, the phenomenon is of increasing importance in today’s Europe. Some academics have researched and done extensive fieldwork on what they term ‘lifestyle migration’, the movement of those who seek to improve their quality of life (e.g. O’Reilly 2000; Benson 2011; MacClancy 2015). Others have investigated varieties of intra-European Union (EU) migration from the migrant’s perspective (Favell 2008; Recchi and Favell 2009; Brändle 2018). Many more have studied the political actions of disadvantaged migrants based in Europe (e.g. Kofman et al. 2000; McNevin 2006; Oliveri 2012; Peró 2014; Cantat et al. 2019). But, until very recently, almost none has investigated in-depth the political life of migrants who are well-to-do or relatively so. Hence this book: an ethnographic delve into the political agency of Britons who have migrated to live in Spain and France.

Jeremy has long spent time in rural Spain, Fiona in the French countryside. We were both initially interested in what we considered an unusual activity in our respective areas: British migrants getting elected as local councillors. Since a change in EU electoral regulations (implemented 1997 in Spain, 1998 in France), an increasing number of them have acted as participative, provocative agents in the social and political lives of their new places of residence, as they sought to forge a renovated sense of who they are, what they can do, and where. We thus see our work as an investigation into political subjectivities and political agency i.e. peoples’ conceptions of themselves and of what they might change within their world: a lived reality of plural institutions, multiple regulations, and uneven implementation. In 2015, we chose to work together, to study this topic comparatively. As our initial project was drawing to a close, the United Kingdom (UK) held its EU membership referendum (Brexit referendum). In both our fieldsites, the effect of the result on the British and their sense of self was so great, and the organisation of many into activist anti-Brexit groups so rapid, that following and analysing their progress seemed an obvious continuation of our politically oriented project.

We are not just interested in political agency. Both of us noted that many of the migrants’ grave concerns over Brexit hinged on rights and EU citizenship: they thought the result of the referendum endangered their rights and status and at worst would lead to their retraction and the need to leave the host country. Also, we were deeply aware that EU citizens from other member states had only been allowed to stand in Spanish and French local elections because the European Parliament had in 1992 stretched the idea of EU citizenship to include this novel extension of local franchise. In other words, in municipal elections questions of citizenship were at least implicit, and in the debates about Brexit they were explicit, upfront, and disputed. Moreover, in recent years within academia, citizenship studies have moved far beyond their initial enclosure within legal studies, transforming into a lively, expanding arena of interdisciplinary activity (e.g. Ho 2008; Staeheli et al. 2012; Lazar 2013; Yarwood 2014; Paz 2019; Kallio et al. 2020). For these various reasons, both political and scholarly, we chose as one of our research foci the various ideas of EU citizenship at play within our ethno-graphic field of study. We wanted to know: who was deploying which version of this notion, why, how, and to what effect?

Any academic account needs a theoretical frame. And if that is not stated and worked with, chances are the implicit theory is left unexamined, its exercise unscrutinised, and its potential unrealised. To avoid those errors, we strive to be explicit. We found contemporary practice theory, inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, to be particularly useful when attempting, in our initial chapters, to account for the motivations and experiences of British migrants, as well as the ideas and actions of those who would be municipal councillors. Also, other social scientists who have already worked on lifestyle migration in Western Europe relied on this approach and so it should not be overlooked (e.g. Oliver and O’Reilly 2010; Benson and Osbaldiston 2014). Practice theory is a renowned approach, of power and scope which accommodates multiple scales and a certain degree of fluidity. But it is a theory that focusses on social reproduction rather than social emergence. Thus, later in our text, to better understand the aims and behaviours of anti-Brexit campaigners, we turn to Engin Isin’s approach which focusses on activist subjects enacting performative citizenship. He places radical, creative change at the very centre of his mode of explanation, with subjects constituting themselves as agents through the imaginative acts that they enable. Practice theory, as its proponents point out (e.g. O’Reilly 2012), is not an exclusionary theory but rather an explicatory framework within which others nestle. Thus, we later deploy both neo-Bourdieuesque and Isinic approaches to comprehend migrants’ strategies to secure continued residence within the loose mesh of supranational regulation, its national implementations, and bureaucratic realities. Since every approach has its limits, in our closing assessment we try to pinpoint areas within which Isin’s approach might be strengthened. Criticism is not denigration, but recognition that his suggestive work is worthy of sustained attention.

Throughout our respective research, migrants were not coolly discussing citizenship and rights in the abstract, as isolated concepts subject to a finely focussed deconstructive analysis, more befitting of a detached, tenured academic. Rather, they were key concerns within a loose matrix of hotly debated ideas, ones central to the experiences of these migrants: besides citizenship and rights, that mesh includes residency, status, and belonging, the whole underpinned by a strong sense of morality. These contested concepts thus became further foci of our work, leading us to explore the ways migrants strove to control their own destinies, and to negotiate and fight against the categorical labyrinths created by nation-state bureaucracies.

For agitated migrants, the stakes were lofty, and their passions equally high, turning affective dimensions into structuring devices of their activities. As interviewees in Spain stated, municipal (mis)management of their place of residence goaded some into reflecting on what kind of sociality was minimally acceptable, and then putting that into effect by standing for office. The referendum and its aftermath had even deeper, broader effect, marshalling migrants into different camps and creating new socialities. For Brexit in particular, people were articulate about the affective as a driver of political encounter. This is central for, as Cook et al. put it,

If accounts of political dissatisfaction are to have either intellectual credibility or practical value, they have to be grounded in the specifici-ties of citizens’ subjective experiences, with particular attention paid to the factors that structure their visions of how best to relate to themselves and others, as well as to ideas, objects and institutions.

(Cook et al. 2016:3)

We have therefore striven to extricate these affective engagements as much as possible throughout our account, evidencing the transformative power of different emotions, indigenously conceived, whether positive or negative, at generating actions, agglutinatory as well as divisive. In this way, our book is a critical foray into the affective creation and consequences of contemporary political subjectivities and actions, one which we hope blends well with discriminating use of practice theory and Isin’s approach.

But, before we enter the ethnography proper, in the remainder of this introduction, let us clarify our approach to political agency in these settings, dwell briefly on EU citizenship, clarify our use of otherwise misleading terms, and then account for our field methods.¹

Approaches to political activity

Some of the theoretically most sophisticated approaches to lifestyle migration have been inspired by Bourdieu’s theory of practice (e.g. Bourdieu 1977; Bousiou 2008; Janoschka 2009, 2011; O’Reilly 2012; Lawson 2016). For these authors, Bourdieu’s work is valuable because it can integrate micro- and macro-levels of analysis; attempts, via his concept of habitus, to transcend dualisms of structure and agency, materialism and idealism; and deploys a fine-grained approach towards the investigation of social class and its sub-sections. For example, Oliver and O’Reilly show how migrants might move in order ‘to start a new life’ only to find that non-economic forms of capital come to loom large and divide the incomers according to other resources (Oliver and O’Reilly 2010). Also, the ‘clean’ break with their past which many migrants claim to desire turns out in fact to be constrained by their habitus. It is not so much that they cannot realise their dreams; rather the constitution of their dreams is part of the past they wished to leave behind. ‘In other words, their relative symbolic capital (incorporating educational, cultural, and social capital) impacts on the decision to migrate and the destinations chosen, but also the life then led in the destination’ (Benson and O’Reilly 2009:618).

Bourdieu’s approach can be criticised for its ‘ethnocentric’ conceptions of social class, elitist modes of distinction, and other universalising notions, while his focus on reproduction of social forms is claimed to leave little room for change (Jenkins 1992; Bousiou 2008:22; Beigel 2009:20–1; Gem-perle 2009:14; Woodward and Emmison 2009:2; Daloz 2013). In response, Bourdieu claimed that he had intended habitus as a generative structure, albeit one whose generative capacity is limited by conditions of the time and place of its production (Bourdieu 1990). Thus, his later elaborated idea of habitus can be made to accommodate ‘invention and improvisation, such as lifestyle projects’ (Benson and O’Reilly 2009:617).

Contemporary practice theorists, building on Bourdieu’s work while fully acknowledging its limits, seek to overcome some of the previous difficulties and broach more centrally the analysis of change. Mouzelis calls for the need to recognise both intra-habitus tensions and interaction between actors in a field (Mouzelis 2007). Kemp argues that habitus needs to be integrated with reflexivity, to provide scope for individual agency (Kemp 2010). O’Reilly, a leading exponent of modern practice theory, attempts to synthesise many of these corrective elements in a broad overarching approach to migration studies, which strives to take account of external structures, internal structures (including habitus), communities of practice, and outcomes. Of habitus she states that it is both ‘fairly fixed and transposable’ and ‘constantly changing and adapting’, though she does not detail the relation between fixture and change (O’Reilly 2012:151, 160). While her synthetic approach to practice theory is broadly encompassing, she recognises it ‘merely provides the meta-theoretical frame within which disparate studies can be brought together. It does not attempt to do all the work that other theories and concepts contribute’ (ibid.:84). She affirms her ‘careful and critical’ eclectic style of practice theory should ‘not be applied too rigorously’: it is, after all, a heuristic framework (ibid.:7, 160). Postill argues in a parallel manner that practice theory ‘cannot be a theoretical cure-all’; e.g. it cannot tackle a ‘world-historical moment’, such as the Danish Muhammed cartoons controversy, caused by the September 2015 publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting Mohammed, which he considers more a political process than a social practice (Postill 2010:12–13). Comparable comments could be made about Brexit: it is above all an extended process, and as we go on to show, the anti-Brexit campaign is not a set practice but an innovative part of that process.

For Swartz, Bourdieu expected everyday disalignment between habitus and particular fields: mild disjuncture leads to adaptation, a gradual modification of structures; considerable disjuncture to transformation, producing resignation or revolt. Yet how these protests can lead to change is left unsaid: Bourdieu did not develop a politics of habitus (Swartz 2013:236–41). Swartz’s concerns are bared in the illuminating work of modern practice theorist Michael Janoschka, who like Jeremy, worked in Alicante province, and on politically active migrants: the mid-2000s successful campaigners against mass-expropriation programmes in the Valencian Community (which includes Alicante); they were protesting against local politicians’ abuse of legislation in order to urbanise private land and charge the landowners for doing so.² Janoschka recognises practice theory, ‘developed in and exemplified by a virtually pre-modern society, … has certain shortcomings if the mobile conditions of people, capital, knowledge and practices in late modernity are reckoned’ (Janoschka 2011:228; also Kemp 2010:156). However, ‘a rapid and shock-like transformation’ can ‘produce a field of critical attitude that requires new interpretations and incorporations of the social world’ (ibid.: 228). Thus, threatened incomers in Valencia established ‘a temporarily radicalized habitus’, on a par with Bourdieu’s late invention of a ‘subversive habitus’ (ibid.:234; Bourdieu 2005). But Janoschka declares he cannot tell if the consciousness of the usual habitus dispositions endures and ‘the weight of the reified world is still felt’, or if a prolongation of the crisis turns the provisionally radicalised habitus into a permanently reconstituted one (ibid.:229). We suggest an empirical answer to his dilemma later in our text.

Janoschka’s response to the challenges of his fieldsite is imaginative, but he makes habitus do too much work. He stretches it into a catch-all concept so malleable nothing can escape its reach. This version of praxis puts it on a logical par with Darwinianism: all examples, no matter how seemingly aberrant, can be made to fit into its theoretical schema. In sum, when powerful external forces, on the very margins of the quotidian habitus, stimulate a diversity of creative responses in people trying to imagine, and to influence their place in an open-ended future, then expanded versions of the concept of habitus are stretched to new levels of elasticity, with all the tensions that entails. The relative inertia of habitus, unless defined in O’Reilly’s terms, is not easy to reconcile with the consideration of radical, lasting alteration. At the very least, just as a Darwinian framework forces one to think in terms of evolution, so deployment of habitus reminds us that dispositions are not wholly individual but structured, perhaps malleable but not completely open to fundamental change. Given this orientation of habitus towards more stable dispositions, it seems advisable, when studying fast-moving processes of significant change, such as Brexit, to look elsewhere, for instance to the work of Engin Isin on politics within Europe.

We are not antagonistic to contemporary practice theory. When it is pitched at such a high level as O’Reilly’s informative approach, it is complementary to, not conflictive with alternative theories, e.g. Isin’s. In this book, one question we ask is, which explanatory frameworks are the most suitable when accounting for gradual change or for abrupt alteration. Which is the more telling, for each context?

In his evolving work on citizenship in Europe, Isin is not concerned with social reproduction but with social emergence (Isin 2008). For that reason, he wishes to avoid the downsides of conventional modes of thought in the political sciences, which otherwise threaten to confine new configurations of social process within traditional taxa. He wants to catch, and follow the provisional, fluid nature of challenging processes in a vocabulary unfettered by the confining connotations of established terms, developed in times of different circumstances, when nation-states seemed sovereign and groups clearly defined. Isin’s approach, therefore, is particularly relevant as a lens to examine emergent and unprecedented events such as Brexit.

To free himself from those tired vocabularies, Isin devises a novel nomenclature and procedures for studying what he terms ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin 2013:21–8): ‘the moment in which a subject – a person, a collective – asserts a right of entitlement to a liveable life when no such prior authorization exists, when no clearly enabling convention is in place’ (Butler 2004 in Isin 2013:24). This is an activist-centred approach, which does not concentrate on rights as legal rules upheld by authoritative bodies integral to the nation-state or supranational body, i.e. the EU. Isin sees citizenship as much a bundle of legal rights as ‘a social process through which individuals and social groups engage in claiming, expanding or losing rights’ (Isin and Turner 2002:4). Thus, his emphasis tends towards the study of practices, meanings, and identities rather than legal rights and norms.

Rather than researching even relatively stable social states, Isin focusses on unfolding, future-oriented, exploratory, contested processes, which at the same time form its activist protagonists into groups. For him there is no fixed EU polity but rather a complex European juridico-political space, composed of elements and arrangements, i.e. the legal and constitutional foundations of citizenship, which are sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary. Citizenship here is not a stable category but contingent, dynamic, and performed (Isin 2017). Subjects make claims to rights, which in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An introductory tour of our topics
• 2 British migrants in Alicante province and South West France
• 3 Political agency, electioneering, municipalities
• 4 Brexit, a referendum, a declaration of values
• 5 Getting agitated, together, about Brexit
• 6 Rights and residency
• 7 Could there be a conclusion?
• References
• Index