Revisiting Iris Marion Young on Normalisation, Inclusion and Democracy

U. Vieten

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137440976
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Revisiting Iris Marion Young on Normalisation, Inclusion and Democracy presents an innovative collection of politically and theoretically inspiring papers by feminist, queer and postcolonial writers. All authors engage with Young's politics of cultural difference and a 'politics of positional difference' read against her critique of normalisation.

1

Why Should We Think of Structural Injustice When Speaking About Culture?

Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán

Abstract: This Chapter will focus on I. M. Young’s notions of heterogeneity, inclusion and social groups, which emphasise agonistic and frictional aspects of human life and social structures, in order to propose new alternatives for approaching issues of immigrant integration to liberal strategies and statements.

My purpose is to apply what she calls the Structural Inequality Model to the dismantling and transforming of structures, processes and categories that produce oppression and domination in the integration process of immigrant populations in European cities. Thus, I seek not only to criticise presuppositions and assumptions in current political theory but also to suggest alternative forms for inclusion.

Keywords: critical theory; immigration; inclusion; structural injustice

Vieten, Ulrike M. Revisiting Iris Marion Young on Normalisation, Inclusion and Democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137440976.0006.

Imagination as emancipation

Iris Marion Young’s work was always motivated by the desire to look for alternative interpretations of social reality in order to achieve its transformation. That is, a reorientation of looking, aimed at seeing the unrealised possibilities that each society ‘experiences as lacks and desires’ (2000a: 10) so we can make them into reality through the ‘norms and ideals (which) arise from the yearning that is an expression of freedom’ (ibid.). For her, critical theory should reflect on existing social relations and interactions, and then identify and systematise those experiences and feelings of lacking and dissatisfaction.

The imagination is ‘the faculty of transforming the experience of what is into a project of what could be’ (1990: 6). This is the tool with which to start to identify and expand our thinking possibilities. From those imagined possibilities emerge the ideals and principles which will play a critical function because they permit the envisioning of what is in light of what could be.

In this Chapter I propose Young’s understanding of critical theory as a general discursive framework for several reasons. I shall start by focusing specifically on some European cities such as Paris or Amsterdam because they are pertinent contexts of Young’s analysis of city life as an alternative to an ideal of community or to liberal individualism (1990: 226–248; 1999). I consider the case of Paris as paradigmatic primarily due to its relatively large non-European migrant population that is experienced as racially and culturally different. Also due to the fact that the French republican values of homogeneity and unity build a national identity that typically results in situating some people at a structural disadvantage while at the same time producing and maintaining advantages for others.

In Paris, the visual appearance of the veil is not only an indicator of difference but also a sign that this difference is covered by a language and policy which usually aims to ‘make social and economic deviants fit into dominant norms and institutions’ (2000a: 13). In these cases of inclusion of immigrant groups, the veil should make us aware of the lack of fit between the cultural repertoires and attributes of those social groups and the structures, norms and aesthetic standards dominant in our societies (Vieten, 2011).

The second reason for using Young’s understanding of critical theory is that this Chapter aims to challenge the liberal strategies of assimilation and accommodation of immigrant social groups. Inspired by her insights, I suggest that these liberal strategies operate with mechanisms generally assumed as given and which tend to limit the capacity for imagination that could help solve some structural injustices. In Young’s account, conflicts concerning group differences, for instance, are viewed as struggles about opportunities for achieving well-being, while the main liberal outlooks put their concern on questions of tolerance and its limits. This reconfiguration operates re-inscribing a logic of normal and deviant that I aim to call into question.

Finally, according to the practical commitment to emancipation that grounded her interpretation of critical theory, I seek to provoke a critical examination of the basic liberal vocabulary underlying these strategies in order to reach an alternative for solving some existing structural injustices.

It is important to remark that I am going to explore some political concepts from Young’s account such as normalisation, inclusion or social groups because they give meaning to certain phenomena by paying attention to group differences generated from structures of power as they also continue to reflect on conflicts over national or religious difference. Thus, this Chapter will highlight some aspects of immigrant experiences in European cities that are contradictory to what is currently viewed as ‘inclusion’. That said, the language of social exclusion very often is a euphemism for politically, socially and economically caused deviance, particularly in the case of immigrants who are experienced as racially or culturally different. This is what one major interpretation of normalisation means: ‘that no one should be stigmatized in status or disadvantage in their access to the resources necessary for a basic standard of well being because of socio-cultural attributes into which they have been socialized by a community’ (2006: 97). Processes of normalisation produce such stigmatisation and disadvantage.

I will show how current liberal strategies for dealing with immigration tend to obscure issues of structural injustice. The vocabulary prevailing in this context focuses on unity. Accordingly, my argument marks a critical break with liberal assumptions about the integration of immigrants. My intent is to identify levels of analysis relating to existing inequalities and social injustices that are not well captured by the liberal strategies of accommodation and integration of immigrants. Equating equality with equal treatment tends to ignore differences in social position, socialised capacities or normalising standards and ways of living. Thus, I endorse what Young has termed the Structural Inequality Model in relation to immigration politics in European cities because I rely on Young’s conviction that ‘identity assertions of cultural groups usually appear in the context of structural relations of privilege and disadvantage’ (2000a: 106). The text aims to approach immigration politics by paying attention to the experience derived primarily from structural differentiation and structural inequalities.

Although this Chapter closely follows Young’s work in pursuing descriptions and envisioning alternatives, I do not consider her thinking to be bounded and enclosed. On the contrary, I seek to participate in the discussions she started by applying her arguments, questions and suggestions as interpretative codes of reality. I do not intend to be definitive, but rather to stir political dialogues that imagine and create possible alternatives to generalised and normalised assumptions. This, I believe, is what she intended as well.

Puzzling liberal assumptions: Is the common good the good [or perhaps, ‘go(o)d’] of a few?

In recent years, struggles for recognition and cultural distinctiveness have substantially mobilised liberal principles through special rights, exemptions and dispensations on identity, cultural and religious-based claims under the theoretical frame of multiculturalism (Kymlicka, 1995; Parekh, 2000). Currently, concern over issues of identity and culture are growing in the context of many Western liberal democracies. Assimilation is being addressed under the concerns of immigration control, scrutinised most often by conservative and right wing governments of security regimens. It is important here to point out that public debate about multiculturalism and immigration policy in Western places focuses predominantly on issues such as the commitment to democratic institutions, liberal democratic values, violence, terrorism and Islam (Tillie and Slifper, 2007: 206). Without any doubt, in this context state governmentality and security panic refer to the symbolic meaning of 9/11, 2011.

In Justice Interruptus Nancy Fraser speaks about the ‘post-socialist’ condition as the period in which the political imaginary of the left has changed through the displacement of the redistribution axis by the recognition and identity politics axis (1997: 11–23). My suggestion in this Chapter is that one of these ideological drives relates to the concern for identity politics and can be understood as the renaissance of ethnic nationalisms or nationalist ideologies that try to preserve a ‘national identity or character that all members share’. The argument is that this common commitment serves not only to engage citizens in political debates but also to include minority communities in those societies. The inclusion of ethnic minorities occurs through a process of assimilation in which immigrants are required to accept the hegemonic national political values, rules and principles represented by what Young calls ‘the dominant national majority’ (2000a: 220). This ‘dominant national majority’ sets the terms of acceptance and inclusion for those judged racially or culturally different. My argument is that in these debates the ‘dominant national majority’ is understood as the common good, so the stance of tolerant integration requires that the migrants be perceived as affirming the values and sociocultural accomplishments of that common good.

This public commitment to the common good must be free of any kind of religious symbolism, expression or manifestation of any particular identity. This was the argument used by the French government for the defence of laïcité in the affaire of the veil in public schools. Indeed some scholars pointed out how the debate of laïcité ‘touched upon the self-understanding of French republicanism for the left as well as the right, on the meaning of social and sexual equality, and liberalism versus republicanism versus multiculturalism in French life’ (Benhabib, 2002: 96). The argument for gender equality was naturalised then as a French republican value, so the veil was equated with the oppression of women in Islam but also in the French suburbs (Al-Saji, 2010). It was as a symbol of Islamic gender oppression and demands were public that the veil should be banned from public schools. It is important to note here that this argument was articulated by some French feminists as well (Ezekiel, 2006).

The commitment to republican principles helped not only to include all members of the community but also to protect marginalised sub-groups within minority communities such as the girls who did not want to wear the veil imposed by their families (Pollit, 1999: 29–30).

For David Miller, it is important to ‘share a common national identity to solve collective action problems’. This common nationality is regarded as ‘common good’ and implies the acceptance by the immigrant population of ‘current political structures within the host community, so that a new common identity can be forged’ (1995: 130). Other authors such as Yael Tamir have manifested similar positions of identity liberalism that also seek the endorsement of immigrants for the national values of the host nation (Tamir, 1993).

Why social groups instead of ethnic minorities? Culture or structure?

I began arguing from a conviction that the liberal approaches of equality and non-discrimination, such as the multicultural approaches, have failed to respond adequately to the demands for inclusion of some ethnic minorities who emigrated from other countries into European societies. At one stage or the other, immigrants become nationals when they intend to adopt the new national passport. From this assumption, I derive several observations.

First, I use the notion of ethnic minority from Kymlicka’s account, who theorises social minority collectives as cultural minorities that are expected to integrate into a larger nation, under the argument that public accommodation to and support of cultural difference is compatible with just institutions. I propose instead Young’s concept of ‘social group’ for a better understanding of ethnic minorities as a group of people that neither have a given set of boundaries nor have been founded on the basis of identity as essentiality, and whose differences are primarily generated from structures of power and social positions rather than from conflicts of nationality or religion (2000a: 99–102).

Second, I take the term inclusion from Iris Young because I believe that it describes more appropriately the claims of those oppressed and marginalised groups to be included in the social life and political processes of these democracies. I differentiate this from other concepts such as integration, assimilation or accommodation because I think that these other terms presuppose a state of policy in which there is a ‘given set of procedures, institutions, and terms of public discourse into which (those immigrant groups) have to be incorporated without change’ (2000a: 11).

This acceptance of the status quo that maintains certain given presumptions and interests, and that usually entails the simple expansion of some political rights, generates and keeps the subordinate position from any relevant influence over the policy-making process of these groups located in liberal democracies. While integration, accommodation or assimilation refers to this acceptance of the status quo, inclusion relies on democratic processes that are challenging and searching for new ways of institutional and social organisation by hearing new voices that are generally excluded from these promises of equality and non-discrimination.

Thirdly, when speaking about liberal strategies of integration I refer to the dominant paradigm of equality where non-discrimination implies the application of the same principles of evaluation and distribution to all persons, ignoring gender, racial or sexual differences among people. I also include in this liberal paradigm the version of those politics of difference that are focused on differences of nationality, ethnicity and religion. The current approaches of politics of difference challenge the liberal principle of equality as the application of the same standards to all people in the same way. However, they seek the public accommodation of cultural differences into liberal institutions with the idea that they may be compatible. I suggest that in doing so, this kind of politics of difference does not confront those liberal conceptualisations related to strategi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Keeping Youngs Legacy Alive: Why Does Understanding Normalisation Matter to Difference, Democracy and Inclusion?
• 1  Why Should We Think of Structural Injustice when Speaking about Culture?
• 2  Communicative Democracy and Solidarity Across Racial and Sexual Differences
• 3  Routed Connections in Late Modern Times
• 4  Just Causes, Unruly Social Relations. Universalist-Inclusive Ideals and Dutch Political Realities
• 5  Diversity Politics and the Politics of Difference
• Index