The European Dream (43 page)

The very notion of a diaspora is that one’s allegiances and loyalties are still partially attached to one’s traditional homeland. A homeland is often territorial but is also defined in terms of shared customs and traditions, common language, folklore, and religion.

Communications and transportation, in particular, have allowed people to be in two worlds at the same time. In past centuries, land migrations and journeys across oceans to distant lands were usually permanent. Few ever returned to their native land. And communication by letters back home was so unpredictable and took so long that little contact was maintained with family and friends in the old country. While the old cultural ways stayed alive for a time in the hearts and in the practices of immigrants, they invariably faded after two or three generations in a new land.

Today, an Egyptian immigrant to America can watch television programming twenty-four hours a day from his native country. Sports, entertainment, and news keep the immigrant abreast of the latest developments back home. The Internet, landlines, and cell phones provide instant contact with kin. Cheap airline travel allows for frequent personal trips back and forth between both homes. One can engage in a rich network of commercial, social, and even political activity with members of the same culture strung out in cultural pockets all over the world. These diaspora public spheres create a new dimension to culture. No longer strictly bound by geography, cultures are becoming increasingly de-territorialized and mobile. One’s sense of being is less anchored to a place than to a state of mind. Cultures are becoming transnational and global, just like commercial and political activity.

People live their culture “both here and there,” notes the German sociologist Ulrich Beck.
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Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent migratory flows between Mexico and the United States. A detailed study of Mexican communities in the U.S. by the American sociologist Robert Smith reveals how different the new twenty-first-century post-modern immigration is from the earlier assimilationist, or “melting pot,” models of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Smith reports on the establishment of support committees in New York made up of Mexican migrant workers who donated money for the laying down of drinking-water pipes and for the reconstruction of churches, buildings, and even town squares back in their native villages in Mexico. The sums collected by Mexican migrants living in the U.S. were often greater than the public expenditures on infrastructure in their villages back home. Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. also participated actively in decisions on how the funds were to be deployed and were in continual dialogue with officials in their native communities vis-à-vis tele-conferences.
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Mexican mayors even traveled to New York to submit community investment proposals before migrant associations.
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Transnational businesses also enmesh Mexican migrants in the States with their counterparts in Mexico. For example, La Puebla Food Corporation, a small family-run tortilla-producing businesses in New York, connects its production and marketing operations with business and markets back home, creating its own version of transnational commerce.

Moreover, the increasing number of Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. gives them additional political clout. Politicians running for office in much of the Southwest part of the U.S. cannot hope to be elected without the support of Mexican-American voters. That gives Mexican-American associations the political muscle to influence political decisions in the U.S. that affect the vital interests of Mexico.
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Nor is the Mexican-American immigrant unique. It is estimated, for example, that just the flow of funds from immigrants back to their native communities amounts to more than $100 billion per year, with 60 percent of the funds going to developing countries. That exceeds official development assistance to third-world countries.
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In many instances, the proliferation of cultural diasporas with split allegiances and loyalties has proved to be vexing and even threatening to the native-born population. The influx of Muslims into Europe, and especially France, is a good case study. Muslims now make up 8 percent of the French population. Many of the nearly five million Muslim immigrants—mostly from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia—are second and third generation.
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They consider themselves both French and Muslim. Sometimes, however, the two loyalties collide.

In 2003, in the city of Lyon, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl wore a head scarf—the traditional garb among Muslim women—to public school, igniting a political firestorm across France about what should be regarded as appropriate behavior of immigrants living in the country. Teachers at the school saw the girl’s act as provocative and divisive and refused to let her attend class. A 1994 government policy ruling allows schools to prohibit “ostentatious displays” of religious symbols within the schools. France’s official head-scarf mediator, Hanifa Cherifi, attempted to mediate between the girl’s family and local school authorities and eventually succeeded in arranging a compromise between the parties—but not before the French public weighed in on both sides of the issue in a highly charged and polarized debate.
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The Muslim community argued that the girl’s right to practice her religion and customs was being violated. Government officials, however, made the point that French policy, ever since the founding of the republic, has emphasized the indivisibility of French citizenry, and therefore does not recognize the existence of minorities or separate nations in its midst. Roger Fauroux, president of France’s High Council on Integration, an independent body that advises the government on integration issues, spoke for many of his fellow countrymen, arguing that “there has been one obsession since the French Republic was created: The unity of the French people is fragile so let’s not make it more fragile.”
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On February 12, 2004, the French National Assembly voted by an overwhelming margin of 494 to 36 to ban the wearing of Muslim head scarves and other religious symbols including Christian crosses and Jewish skullcaps in public schools. While the new law reflects the sentiment of the vast majority of French citizens, it served to further anger an already deeply alienated Muslim community living in France.
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The French assimilationist ideal has been under increasing attack in recent decades, as Muslims and other immigrants have flooded into France. In Marseille, France’s second largest city, where 10 percent of the population is Arab and 17 percent Muslim, the question is becoming, What is authentic French culture? “We are no longer a France of baguettes and berets, but a France of ‘Allah-u akbar’ and mosques,” quipped Mustapha Zergour, the head of a French-Arab radio station in Marseille.
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The Muslim diasporas are transforming parts of France into a multicultural transnational sphere. Many of the immigrants are poor, discriminated against, jobless, and living in squalid urban and suburban ghettos with high crime rates. They are regarded with increasing suspicion and fear among the older entrenched French population. At the same time, the dire plight of many young Muslims is pushing some toward extreme religious fundamentalism. Al Qaeda and other militant Muslim groups have been successful in recruiting Muslim youth into terrorist cells, casting fear among Frenchmen everywhere in the country.

In 2003, the French government established the French Council of the Muslim Faith, an organization whose function is to represent the Muslim community at the national level. France is also experimenting, for the first time, with affirmative action programs in an effort to lift the prospects of poor Muslim youth.
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France is not the only country in Europe confronted with a growing population of Muslim immigrants. There are now more than ten million Muslim immigrants living inside the European Union, in addition to another five million Muslims who have lived in places like Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo for centuries. Europe is expected to take in ten million more Muslims in the next ten years alone, and if Turkey becomes part of the Union, sixty million more Muslims will join the ranks of EU citizenry. As the native population of Europe ages, demographers estimate that a younger Muslim population sporting larger families will soon come to make up more than 10 percent of the European population, and maybe much more by mid-century. Already, Muslim Turks in Germany, Muslim Pakistanis in the U.K., and Muslim Moroccans in Spain make up sizable cultural diasporas.
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Their presence is transforming their new homelands. Writing in
The New York Times Magazine,
Timothy Garton Ash reflects on how pervasive the Muslim immigrants’ influence is becoming. He writes, “I have just bought my newspaper from a Muslim news agent, picked up my cleaning from a Muslim cleaner, and collected my prescription from a Muslim pharmacist, all in leafy North Oxford.”
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The Muslim influence is particularly challenging because Islam has traditionally viewed itself as a universal brotherhood of the faith. One’s allegiance to Islam is supposed to supercede allegiances to any particular culture, place, or political institution. Many devout Muslims believe that one’s first loyalty must be directed toward upholding the faith and expressing solidarity with other Muslims. Loyalty to nation-states has been far less central to the thinking of the Muslim world than in the Christian world. In the post-9/11 era, the uncovering of global Muslim networks channeling financial assistance, political support, and even paramilitary support to terrorist networks was unsettling.

Growing concern over possible terrorist attacks on European soil became real on March 11, 2004, when Muslims from the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, with suspected links to Al Qaeda, blew up commuter trains in downtown Madrid, killing 200 people and injuring more than 1,500 people. The worst terrorist attack in more than a half century in Europe sent the continent reeling. Within days of the strike, Spanish voters went to the polls in a national election and cast out the center-right Popular Party in favor of the Socialists, in large part to express their opposition to Spain’s decision, a year earlier, to support the U.S. by committing Spanish troops to the Iraqi war. The incoming Socialist Prime Minister, José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, announced that Spain was withdrawing its troops from Iraq and declared the Iraqi war “a disaster” that “hasn’t generated anything but more violence and hate.”
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Only one of the suspected terrorists in the Madrid bombings was a Spanish citizen. Still, the Spanish public, and Europeans in general, worry that terrorists from outside the Union might find safe havens among local Islamic populations living in Europe, allowing them to recruit new members and establish home-grown cells.

Although the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, law-abiding citizens of the countries in which they reside, it is probably fair to say that there are at least some whose loyalty to the state is thin in comparison to their loyalty to Islam. (The same might be said of certain Orthodox Jewish sects and fundamentalist Christian communities.) Interestingly, their very universalism makes the Muslim world potentially more comfortable in a globalized society than many others. The challenge is whether the Muslim faith can reinstate the kind of tolerant acceptance of other religions and cultures that was the religion’s moniker at the peak of its influence in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

Cultural diasporas are undermining the traditional relationship between a people, property, and territory. For aeons of history, the three were virtually inseparable. No longer. Cultures exist in multiple domains, both virtual and real. As cultural communities disperse throughout the world, they begin to reorganize themselves in ways that more closely resemble nodes in networks. Sophisticated communications and transportation technologies allow members of shared cultures to stay linked socially and commercially across myriad national boundaries. Cultural diasporas provide a vehicle that allows a people to retain their sense of identity while negotiating their way in an increasingly globalized world. In the new era, everything is more mobile. Even property, in the form of capital, credit, and investment, is no longer rigidly attached to territory but free to circulate between nodes within worldwide diaspora networks.

Seen in a broader perspective, the proliferation of cultural diasporas marks the beginning of the end of the more geographically limited notion of the “public sphere” as a boundaried system inside a nation-state container. Cultural diasporas open the door to the possibility of a truly global public sphere made up of diverse cultural communities that exist both inside and across national boundaries and are no longer determined by territory.

Yale University anthropologist Arjun Appadurai makes the argument that much of the violence unfolding between cultural groups is the result of not being able to escape the old political logic that ties nation to territory and state.

According to Appadurai, cultural diasporas have yet to create a language “to capture complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance.” He concludes by suggesting that “neither popular nor academic thought . . . has come to terms with the difference between being a land of immigrants and being one node in a postnational network of diasporas.”
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What happens, then, in an era of global labor flows, when people switch from one region of the world to another with the same ease that people used to shift residence from one town to the next? And, if they take their cultural identity with them wherever they take up residence in the world, so they can be “both here and there” at the same time, how are we to go about redefining the politics of geography? Diaspora politics is, by its very nature, transnational and global in its frame of reference and outlook. A Europe made up of cultural diasporas from all over the world becomes, in effect, a global public square.