Walls, Borders, Boundaries

Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe

Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, Janet Ward

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857455055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie urbaine

How is it that walls, borders, boundaries—and their material and symbolic architectures of division and exclusion—engender their very opposite? This edited volume explores the crossings, permeations, and constructions of cultural and political borders between peoples and territories, examining how walls, borders, and boundaries signify both interdependence and contact within sites of conflict and separation. Topics addressed range from the geopolitics of Europe's historical and contemporary city walls to conceptual reflections on the intersection of human rights and separating walls, the memory politics generated in historically disputed border areas, theatrical explorations of border crossings, and the mapping of boundaries within migrant communities.

III

Migrating Boundaries

CHAPTER 8

Migrants, Mosques, and Minarets

Reworking the Boundaries of Liberal Democracy in Switzerland and Germany

PATRICIA EHRKAMP

On 29 November 2009, Switzerland’s citizens shocked many of their European neighbors by voting in a referendum to ban the construction of minarets on Swiss mosques. A clear majority of Swiss citizens voted “yes” in the referendum, which the Volksinitiative gegen den Bau von Minaretten (Popular Initiative against the Construction of Minarets, hereafter Volksinitiative) initiated in 2008. The ban on minarets neither ends the construction of mosques or (Muslim) places of worship themselves, nor applies to existing minarets and mosques, but bans the future construction of minarets as a symbol of what some groups deem Islamist or fundamentalist expression. Numerous right-wing parties and extremist groups on the political right in Europe welcomed the ban, but it also prompted strong criticism from politicians in Western Europe and elsewhere. Most comments from centrist and leftist segments of the political spectrum attributed the vote to fear and xenophobia, and commentators highlighted that the Swiss vote needed to be understood as an “expression of intolerance” toward Muslims.¹

By contrast, only three weeks earlier a hotly contested mosque construction project finally had gotten underway in the Cologne neighborhood of Ehrenfeld with the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone. The Cologne mosque, initiated as a “Zentralmoschee” (central mosque) for the city by the Germany-wide organization Diyanet Işleri Türk Islam Birliği (DITIB or Diyanet Turkish Islamic Union), had been debated for years and continues to be contested. Representatives of the municipal government originally envisioned it as providing a centralized place of worship for many different Muslim groups in the region. The DITIB mosque, once finished, will be one of numerous new mosques that have been built in German cities in recent years. Despite debates about Islam and opposition to mosque construction, a new landscape of prestigious mosques—most with minarets, although the architecture varies from traditional Ottoman to modernist designs—has emerged in German cities. Yet 44 percent of Germans would vote for banning minarets in Germany, according to a representative poll about the minaret ban in Switzerland conducted by TNS-Infratest on behalf of the news magazine Der Spiegel. In the same poll, 45 percent stated they would vote against banning minarets.² This nearly even split highlights Islamophobia’s prevalence in Germany as well, which becomes even more evident in the answers to other questions in the same poll: for instance, 78 percent answered “yes” to the question of whether they feared further struggles with radical forces of the Islamic world in the future. Building permits for mosques thus are not indicators of the absence of Islamophobia or the acceptance of Islam in Germany.

Building new prestigious mosques and banning minarets are but two expressions of the ways that Islam has occupied the imagination and public debate of Western European societies in recent decades. Since the late 1990s Islam has been at the center of debates about the integration of immigrants in Germany and Western Europe more generally. Some of these debates have explicitly focused on the ways that migrant groups’ transnational ties to Islamic organizations undermine liberal democratic values and threaten the security of Western European nation-states. Whether centered on headscarves (the so-called “Kopftuchstreit”), calls for prayers in the late 1990s, or more recently on forced marriages, honor killings, and the construction of prestigious mosques in German cities, a central question of public discourse with regard to immigration has been whether Islam is commensurate with the values of liberal democracy.³ The attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States and later attacks (and failed attempts) by violent Islamist groups in London and Madrid, as well as the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 at the hand of an Islamist extremist, have led to heightened scrutiny of Muslims residing in Europe. Muslim groups have become the target of surveillance measures aimed at making states more secure while doubly marginalizing Muslims as a religious minority and as potential terrorists.⁴ These debates demonize Islam and are indicative of a wider “war on Muslims” that cannot deny racist elements and motivations.⁵

Examining the treatment of Muslims and immigrants in Western European societies highlights the ways that racism and Islamophobia permeate political decisions and legislation about immigration, citizenship, and membership. Debates about citizenship, belonging, and liberal democracy as they are waged over the inclusion and exclusion of Islam in European societies and cities provide important insights into the construction of political subjectivities among members of society and the polity. I argue that rather than simply taking for granted the notion of Western racism as the basis for the exclusion of Muslims in contemporary Europe, these debates provide insights into what the “war on Muslims” means for the shape and future of liberal democracy in immigrant receiving societies.

Immigration and the Boundaries of Liberal Democratic Citizenship

Questions of immigrants’ social, economic, cultural, and political incorporation have occupied scholarship across the social sciences and philosophy since the early twentieth century. Initially immigration research considered the incorporation of migrants a societal process of adaptation that would increase similarity between longer-term residents and newcomers.⁶ Assimilation theories suppose that immigrants adapt to receiving societies both socioeconomically and culturally.⁷ Processes of globalization have increased the cultural diversity of migrants as women and men move from increasingly different places of origin to a larger number of destinations, necessitating new approaches toward understanding immigrant integration. Migrants’ increased ability to maintain ties across borders and to create transnational spaces has further led scholars to examine the consequences of migrant transnationalism for immigrant integration, nation-building processes, and loyalties toward sending and receiving societies.⁸ Together these changing processes have brought about a rethinking of the concepts of integration and assimilation. Such works increasingly challenge assumptions of an already formed “host society” and of linear processes of assimilation.⁹ Recent changes to immigration, integration, and citizenship laws further suggest an increasing need to consider societal, political, and legal processes in relation to one another to account for the increasing complexity of contemporary immigration.

Migrants’ greater ability to maintain political, social, and religious ties across borders has subjected them to greater scrutiny by receiving states. Public discourses depict the transnational ties and religious practices of Muslim migrants as undermining notions of secularism and the authority of the liberal democratic state. The rhetoric of the supposed anti-democratic tendencies of Islamic groups, in which violent practices such as honor killings are ascribed to Islam, has very real material effects. States have increased the surveillance of Islamic associations and Muslim migrants in the interest of governance.¹⁰ Muslims are increasingly scrutinized in the contemporary period, as the definition and redefinition of rights and of liberal democratic systems and values are at stake. The securitization of migration provides a mechanism to reduce the risk that liberal democracy faces when allowing for cultural, religious, and political differences in the space of the polity.¹¹ Katharyne Mitchell suggests that Western European countries have moved away from notions of multiculturalism and instead exert more assimilation pressures on migrants.¹² The French government’s efforts at banning headscarves in schools to promote assimilation of Muslims into the French nation is a recent example of how wholesale ascriptions of culture have led to attempts at disciplining visible difference.¹³ Yet to uphold the French ideal of “egalité,” the government also had to ban religious symbols of Christians and Jews. The assimilation of Muslim immigrants and their political incorporation into the receiving polity thus have tangible consequences for non-Muslims and restrict the freedom of religious expression for all members of French society.

These recent developments suggest that the boundaries of belonging and the values and ideas of liberal democracy are being renegotiated in Europe. Liberal democratic citizenship entails the guarantee of rights in exchange for certain duties and responsibilities to the state.¹⁴ More important, it also defines a moral community that frequently highlights citizens’ obligations toward the political community.¹⁵ Such obligations include the affirmation of secularism, which can in turn be considered a form of governance aimed at immigrants.¹⁶ Debates about the cultural “fit” of Muslim migrants, for example, certainly display traits of nationalism and racism aimed at the exclusion of so-called Others.¹⁷ Media and public discourses have instrumentalized Muslim migrant women (and their ascribed oppression) in particular to justify heightened scrutiny, restrictive legislation, and demands for more integration and commitments to liberal democracy.¹⁸ Feminist scholars have shown that public discourses about forced marriages portray Muslim women as the victims of their culture. In such discourses, that culture in turn appears to be static and to determine Muslim women’s practices, providing no room for independent thinking or acting.¹⁹ Ascribing at the same time the potential for violence to Muslim men, these discourses demonize Muslims and Islam more broadly.²⁰

In this current climate, Muslim migrants (especially Muslim women) are faced with demands that they act as if they were citizens and assert their gender equality in particular. This active practice of citizenship increasingly becomes a condition for formal citizenship for Muslim migrants, rather than being afforded to them as a benefit of such membership. While migrants do need to show their commitment (and willingness to assimilate) to liberal democracy, nonmigrant Germans are not asked to affirm democratic values by practicing them. Such differentiated expectations of enacting and affirming the values of liberal democracy undermine ideals of citizenship such as equality because not all citizens are expected to practice active citizenship.²¹ Negotiations over legal restrictions and the conditions under which receiving states will accept newcomers thus also affect longer-term residents when citizenship rights and responsibilities become subject to debate. Although debates currently question whether Muslim immigrants and their beliefs are commensurable with the ideals of liberal democratic citizenship, such questions clearly have consequences for non-Muslims and non-immigrants as states redraw the legal and cultural boundaries of belonging.

In the following I examine three recent instances that rework democratic rights and responsibilities in relation to religious expression. I begin with a brief analysis of prolonged debates about a so-called “Deutsche Leitkultur” in Germany. Translated as the “German guiding culture” and understood as rooted in Judeo-Christian traditions and liberal democracy, politicians mobilize the term to demand immigrant assimilation without a notion of force (hence the ostensibly benign pedagogical idea of “guiding”). The 2009 minaret ban in Switzerland and conflicts over the building of the Cologne-Ehrenfeld mosque provide two further instances. Together these cases shed light on the ways that the boundaries of liberal democracy are being redrawn in contemporary Western Europe. They highlight how discussions of the right of religious expression aimed at Muslim migrants (and legal changes that ensue as a result) also have consequences for the broader understandings and practices of liberal democracy in Germany and Switzerland. But these debates further show how migrants themselves participate in liberal democracy as they engage in debates and pursue their ideas of citizenship and integration.

Leitkultur, Democracy, and Islam in Germany

Since the late 1990s, the landscape of Germany’s citizenship and immigration laws has changed dramatically. Germany enacted a new citizenship law in 2000 and added entirely new, comprehensive immigration legislation coupled with an integration law in 2005. These were enacted at the same time to set criteria for the admission of new immigrants to Germany and to improve the integration of immigrants already residing in Germany. These legal changes were important steps in redefining Germany’s overall attitudes, as the government finally began distancing itself from the statement “Germany is not a country of immigration.” But they also brought new expectations and regulations for immigrant assimilation, including mandatory participation in “Integrationskurse” (integration courses) upon arrival in Germany. The new citizenship law in particular met with obstacles and objections, even after careful deliberations that involved scaling back more generous provisions for dual citizenship.

The new citizenship law added elements of jus soli (territorial birthright citizenship) to the previously valid jus sanguinis, an ethnic definition of citizenship that had prevailed since 1913. Along with this added territorial notion, the new law created provisions for dual citizenship that allow children born to noncitizen parents to hold German as well as their parents’ citizenship until the age of twenty-three, when they must decide to retain either German citizenship or their parents’ nationality. The requirement of having to choose a nationality emerged as a compromise...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction: Walls, Borders, Boundaries
• I. City Walls
• II. Border Zones
• III. Migrating Boundaries
• Works Cited
• Index