“If only one person in this miserable town actually knew me, I would not be feeling lonely!” I was on the phone with a dear friend. “If only one person in this miserable town actually knew me…” Not “if only I knew someone” but if someone knew me. While writing this book, with the baby on the way, we moved to the West Coast from our beloved New York City. I had been in New York for 15 years. I had finished my Ph.D. there, formed friendships, met my beloved, and been working as an Assistant Professor for the last few years. Having left all that behind was hard, even though the weather was gorgeous in California, life seemed to go at a slower speed, and I was looking forward to meeting our little one. There was nobody who knew me. I did not feel known, acknowledged, recognized. I did not belong.
The existential need to belong is among those “basic aspects of the human condition” (Kennedy 2014: 11). It includes a longing to be a part of something larger than our fragile, precarious selves. Although this universal need seems harmless at first, it can be related to various types of violence. I belong: I give myself to a “We”. I let Self go. I violate the Self. Or, violence as belonging. I prove my belonging through violence. I deserve acceptance through violence. My violence proves that I belong. Many times it is the We (to which I long to belong) that does the violence. It is anxieties about belonging which drive much of our acceptance of technologies of surveillance, policing, and control. We rapidly legitimize, normalize, and accept these technologies while trying to answer the questions: Who belongs, who deserves to belong, who is willing to belong and is capable of belonging? Who is too different to be excluded? On the other hand, how can We talk about and acknowledge difference without discussions leading to violence of some sorts? How can I claim belonging without having to constantly pledge alliance to the larger social?
The Aims of the Book: What Is Belonging? How Do We Belong?
Neither rapid demographic changes and cultural diversity, nor living through crises are new phenomena which societies suddenly face today. Western societies have had to live through economic recessions, terrorist attacks, environmental crises in the past. Think of famines and child deaths, think of the world wars and genocides which, to a certain extent, defined the twentieth century. Even the anxiety surrounding the so-called migration problem—living with differences, social belonging, integration, and so on—is familiar to Western liberal societies. After all, August Comte, widely considered to be the “father of sociology”, became interested in studying society because of the socio-economic and demographic changes that took place in post-revolutionary France. Emile Durkheim (1996), who established sociology as an academic discipline, had a main concern: how much cultural diversity is too much for a society to function? He assumed that every society needs a certain level of cultural integration and social solidarity to exist. More recently, in urban sociology, Fincher and Jacobs (1998: 9) were asking, “How does one speak (and write) about such multiply constituted and locationally contingent notions of difference? What are the pertinent dimensions along which different identities are expressed and represented?” Almost two decades later, then as a foreign student in the United States, I started to work on this project. My intention was to understand the ways in which people express their difference in our post-September 11 era. Through the interviews I conducted, my main focus has shifted from different identifications, be it ethnic, religious, and/or sexual, to what seemed to connect human beings: the need to belong. My participants showed me how it is possible to claim belonging without having to constantly pledge alliance to one collective and reject another. So, this book is about the anxiety which leads to a need to belong and the everyday life acts as concomitants of the feelings of belonging.
Before even contemplating on the “acts of belonging”, I should clarify what I mean by “belonging” in the first place. I define belonging as a term which includes multiple forms and degrees of commonality and connectedness. It is somewhere between a fixed identity and a simple membership. It is not an easy task to conceptualize the simultaneous multiple identifications any member of any social will have. For this task, one can consider multiple social categorizations (Phinney and Alipura 2006), intersectionality (Brah and Phoenix 2004), and hybridity (Wagner et al. 2010). Belonging enables us to study identity classifications in more specific ways. It best captures the affective, dynamic, complex nature of human connectedness. Belonging goes beyond the limit of private versus public, emotional versus rational, local versus global. More importantly for this study, it is open (more open than the term identity, or even identification, implies, for instance) to the acts of individuals, and manifestations of their self-understanding.
Why Study Belonging and What Has Changed Since September 11, 2001?
If the world has long seen diversity, suffered from socio-cultural and economic conflicts and crises, questioned belonging, loyalties, and identities, what has changed since September 11? Some scholars point to the degree of diversity not seen before in Western liberal societies. Vertovec (2007) uses the term “super-diversity” to bring attention to various levels of diversity in such societies. Country of origin, migration channel, legal status, migrants’ human capital (such as education), access to employment, locality, transnationalism, and, finally, local authorities and service providers all contribute to the complex situation Western societies find themselves in. However, the absence of an agreed-on meaning for diversity can mean that it can be defined in quite different ways (Ahmed 2012: 79). One can suggest that an individual, any individual, has always been made up of multiple layers, regardless of the place and the era they have lived in. In Turkey of the 1940s, a farmer in a small village on the West coast of the country could have easily been from Greece; they might have (had to) come to the country with the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, been a legal citizen yet without any Turkish education. This individual’s age, gender, sexuality, marital status, the number of children they have, their network (or lack thereof) in Turkey, physical and mental challenges, and the stance of the local governing authorities toward the Greek-Turks would all have been contributing factors to the “super-diversity” in the post-independence war Turkey.
September 11 does not signify a radical break from the diversities of the past. Saying that it does enables the West to absolve themselves of their historical responsibility—be it colonialism, imperialism, global capitalism, and so on. But the politics of diversity and belonging have been invigorated by the sense of crisis and anxiety of the post-September 11 period. What seems to be specific to our post-September 11 era has its roots in the staging of violence as a global spectacle. A broad range of security measures were enacted post-September 11 whose justification is based on a new understanding of “international terrorism”. From specific tribunals created for foreigners, to the abandonment of the habeas corpus for those labeled as “terrorists” (without any evidence presented), “racism is spoken and openly asserted, formalized and institutionalized in criminal law” (Delphy 2015: 74). In Germany, the Counterterrorism Act of 2002, supplemented by the 2007 Anti-Terrorism Act, amended a number of existing laws, including the Law on Aliens (Ausländergesetz) and the Law on the Registration of Foreigners (Vereinsgesetz). These changes permitted raids of mosques and other Muslim institutions by revoking the immunity of religious organizations from state surveillance. What is more, shortly after September 11, German authorities started to collect lists of foreign nationals thought to be of Islamic religious affiliation and who were between the ages of 18 and 24, with no criminal record (Murphy 2013: 153–159). Applicants for naturalization must now be certified by the Federal Bureau of the Protection of the Constitution. The automatic right of relatives of the applicant to remain in Germany has been revoked. Profiling has been used extensively. Cesari (2004) notes that following September 11, young students who were thought by the police to be Muslim were profiled and placed under suspicion in an effort to identify Al-Qaeda sleepers in Germany.
Therefore, although the governance of difference is not a new phenomenon, issues of difference and belonging are the fundamental terrain and a spectacle of contestation of our era. In line with this, the techniques which power holders use to govern have changed. The toolbox now includes anything from the monopoly of information and data to counterterrorism laws justified by a new dimension of “international terrorism”. Post-September 11 is a revision, rearrangement, and reworking of a much longer history of managing difference.
Why This Group of People? Citizenship in Europe After September 11
Traditionally, citizenship has been about civil, political, and social rights and obligations (Marshall 1950). Having been defined and enjoyed by the dominant classes, it was never egalitarian. In recent decades, culture has come to play a central role in citizenship and belonging discussions. One has to constantly prove their attachment to the country of residence through symbols, declaring emotions, openly embracing certain norms and values affiliated with the so-called mainstream culture. This “culturalization of politics”, tying political, legal, and social belonging to the embrace of a certain set of values, takes place especially in relation to gender and sexuality.
The German context is specifically intriguing because of the contradictory combination of large numbers of migrants and highly restrictive rules about foreigners becoming part of the polity. As Rita Chin suggests, this contradiction has made Germany distinctive among Western European nations (2007: 28). In 1...