Equality

Although all liberal democracies affirm political equality as a foundational principle, France celebrates it as no other country. The French state proclaims that all French citizens are ‘one and indivisible’. All citizens appear equal before the law as abstract individuals stripped of their differences and subsumed into a social totality of co-equals.Footnote ² Over the past twenty years, historians of gender, race and empire have exposed the antinomies of French republicanism. In Only Paradoxes to Offer, Joan Scott examined the contradictory logic that women were at once equal as abstract individuals and different from men as real individuals.Footnote ³ Turning to France's empire, Alice Conklin uncovered the political contortions of the Third Republic, which venerated citizenship in rhetoric but refused to make colonial subjects citizens in West Africa.Footnote ⁴ In the Invention of Decolonization, Todd Shepard showed how French leaders struggled for decades to manage the paradoxes of ruling Algeria as if it were part of France.Footnote ⁵ And in Turn to Empire, Jennifer Pitts unearthed the intellectual history of French and British liberal thinkers who ‘offered some of the most insistent and well-developed arguments in favour of the conquest of non-European peoples and territories’.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, none other than Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that France must use ‘not only violent measures but visibly iniquitous ones’ to colonise Algeria.Footnote ⁷

Joining this effort to consider the paradoxes of French republicanism is a new cohort of historians interested in immigration. The three authors discussed here – younger scholars at the forefront of this group – reveal how French politicians, demographers, police officers, social reformers, feminists, labour activists and bureaucrats encountered the dilemmas of immigration in ways that were neither wholly exclusive nor wholly inclusive. All three historians – Clifford Rosenberg, Mary Dewhurst Lewis and Elisa Camiscioli – deal with the French Third Republic (1870–1940) and focus on the 1920s and 1930s, when France became the largest recipient of immigrants in the industrialised world. While France had experienced mass immigration before, during the 1880s, nothing compared to the influx of newcomers who crossed its borders after World War I. France initially welcomed this immigration because it needed labour amid a shrinking population after decades of declining birth-rates and the devastation of the world war. In 1931, 2.7 million foreigners lived in France.

How did state agencies and segments of French society respond to this rush of migrants? This question animates Camiscioli, Lewis and Rosenberg, although each one tackles it from a distinct direction and advances different answers. In Policing Paris, Rosenberg turns to studying law enforcement in the French capital. Based on a cache of documents that survived threats of water and war, Rosenberg addresses the themes of state control and surveillance. In particular, he peers into the inter-war Paris police immigration service, where he finds a vast apparatus renowned across the world for its ability to collect data on foreigners.

The service employed some fifty plainclothes inspectors, who roamed the streets of Paris to search for information about migrants and to ensure that their papers were in order. The data collected was conserved in a large archive in the Paris Police Prefecture's headquarters. Officials organised the information alphabetically as well as by nationality, profession and street. This mastery of knowledge clearly impressed some municipal officials; one bureaucrat gushed: ‘I have visited the premises and seen the attention to detail lavished on every decision: the dimension and colour of the index cards and the file folders, the wooden boxes that hold them, even the height of the chairs’ (Rosenberg, 52). Police utopias of order and knowledge had apparently come true in inter-war Paris.

At this moment, readers might reasonably expect dystopia to appear in Rosenberg's narrative à la Foucault: police officers traversing Paris seem like perfect examples of ‘governmentality’ and ‘spaces of security’ at work.Footnote ⁸ But Rosenberg resists Foucault, except as a cameo to push off stage (Rosenberg, 12–14). ‘Modernity’ cannot be reduced, he rejoins, to its repressive dynamics (Rosenberg, 210). But then what defines modernity? Rosenberg stresses modernity's ambiguities and contradictions. Modernity is a paradoxical condition comprised of ‘emancipatory power’ and ‘new forms of alienation and inequality’ (Rosenberg, 210). He reveals, for example, how multiple factors mitigated police abuses, including administrative rivalries, professionalism, careerism, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and interventions from foreign governments on behalf of their citizens working in France. Moreover, Rosenberg stresses the coexistence of repression and protection in inter-war Paris: surveillance, harassment, arrests and deportations defined the everyday lives of migrants in the capital, but also efforts to assist them through programmes such as subsidised housing, dispensaries of basic health care, and job centres. As Rosenberg writes, ‘liberal protections and new forms of inequality must be considered together’ (Rosenberg, 77).

Rosenberg has produced a nuanced, clearly written and thickly described political-institutional history of immigration control and surveillance. His narrative, though, thins when it addresses some of the larger analytical issues that his study raises, most significantly race and racism. He discusses at length the situation of North African colonial subjects in Paris. While North Africans totalled no more than 160,000 in the inter-war period, they endured greater police controls than any other migrants in the capital. Rosenberg suggests that this disparity was ‘the most dramatic inequality to emerge in inter-war France’, yet his explanation for it is ambiguous (Rosenberg, 206). He writes that ‘antiblack, anti-“Oriental” racism pervaded’ France before asserting two pages later that race thinking did not influence ‘the treatment of North African Muslims by the Paris police as much as their colonial status did’ (Rosenberg, 116, 119). A nuanced argument might be in the making here, but it needs refinement.

French ideas about ‘race’ are also underexplored in Mary Dewhurst Lewis's study on immigrant rights in the 1920s and 1930s. While Lewis speaks of ‘xenophobia’ (Lewis, 4, 15–16, 113, 118, 122, 147–8, and 173), she, too, hesitates to probe the possible racialisation of French perceptions of otherness and difference. Her book also overlaps with Rosenberg's in several other ways. Lewis studies urban France in the inter-war period; she presents thick, source-driven descriptions of her subjects; and she provides a political, social and institutional history of immigration. Yet, her book is also quite different from Rosenberg's. Lewis moves from Paris to the industrial and migrant cities of Marseilles and Lyons; she compares three different groups – European migrants, North African migrants, and Russian, Armenian and Jewish refugees; and, lastly, she gives voice to migrants, uncovering their sometimes crucial role in securing their own rights.

With this multifaceted approach, Lewis builds an argument about the vicissitudes of rights. She shows that immigrant rights varied depending on where migrants lived, where they worked, what officials they encountered, who they knew, and what nationality they held. All of these contingencies altered, in turn, over time and location. In the 1920s, for example, residency rights hinged on labour contracts, as France sought to attract single men to work for short periods of time in what was effectively Europe's first ‘guest worker’ programme in all but name. By the mid-1930s, however, French bureaucrats changed their preferences entirely. The right to work now depended on residency permits in a new regime that privileged immigrants who had settled down in France and who had produced families. This change turned the single men recruited a decade earlier into ‘pariahs’ (Lewis, 248). Furthermore, international relations were important to securing rights. Foreigners, whose governments had secured bilateral labour agreements with France in the 1920s, generally enjoyed more protections than migrants who had no state pressing for their rights, above all refugees and North African colonial subjects.Footnote ⁹

In uncovering this intricate history of rights, Lewis makes two key contributions. First, she compellingly looks below the level of national government and policy. Although she recognises the importance of national politicians, parliaments, courts and bureaucracies in formulating immigration policies, she reveals how migrant experiences also crucially depended on quotidian, local encounters with bosses, co-workers, city officials and neighbours. Second, she touches on what she calls the ‘liberal paradox’ of democracies in practice (Lewis, 3). Mature capitalist economies demand immigrant labour; liberal societies value mobility; and democratic regimes celebrate the ideals of equality before the law. But states deport migrants, close their borders to others and curtail immigration rights. As Lewis puts it, ‘If democratic culture and free-enterprise economies oblige liberal societies to maintain relatively open borders, states pursue openness only to the extent consistent with maintaining domestic political and economic stability’ (Lewis, 3). In short, even as she methodologically cuts below the nation state, she confirms its central importance in adjudicating rights, a role the nation state still plays to this day, notwithstanding the historic emergence of supranational rights after 1945.Footnote ¹⁰

Colour-blindness

Race is central to unravelling this liberal paradox, no matter how much politicians, writers, intellectuals and journalists in liberal democracies might discursively claim otherwise. Colour-blindness has long been and still is today one of democracy's most powerful mobilising narratives.Footnote ¹¹ Two books under discussion here, Elisa Camiscioli's Reproducing the French Race and Rita Chin's The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany, address the complexities of race, racism, and racialisation in the two very different temporal contexts of inter-war France and post-1945 West Germany. As race has traditionally been neglected in their respective historiographies, both authors provide especially novel insights into our understanding of French and German notions of difference in the inter-war and post-war periods.Footnote ¹²

Camiscioli explores the intersections of race and the body over five succinct chapters on immigration, demography, labour, intermarriage, sex and assimilation in the early twentieth century. In so doing, she compellingly challenges the myth of a colour-blind France and rethinks the overly sharp distinction, so often made, between French universalism and German particularism in matters of citizenship and identity.Footnote ¹³ Intervening in the perennial question of continuities, she ties the Third Republic and Vichy France closely together as two ‘racial regimes’, in the sense that both insisted on procreation as a national duty (Camiscioli, 49). While she more often asserts this argument than develops it, some of her evidence points to broad continuities in race thinking. In 1915, for instance, the deputy Adolphe Landry submitted a bill to the Chamber of Deputies concerning immigration. ‘If foreign workers must mix with the French population’, Landry wrote, ‘if their arrival in France is to introduce new elements into our race, it is necessary that these elements not be of the kind that will profoundly alter or debase the race’ (Camiscioli, 21).

Unearthing sources such as this one, Camiscioli excavates French anxieties about how immigrants could either ‘enhance or deter the social reproduction of the citizenry’ (Camiscioli, 3). In the face of declining birth-rates, pronatalists and demographers glorified fecundity and racial hygiene in seeking to remake French society. They venerated the reproductive capital of women and elevated procreation to a national service. Yet, because France's demographic crisis was so severe after the First World War, pronatalists and demographers begrudgingly saw immigration as necessary to their country's sustenance. They argued that certain groups of European immigrants, above all Belgians, Italians and Spaniards, could assimilate into ‘Frenchness’ and procreate with native-born French citizens to rejuvenate the nation.

This organicist, assimilationist discourse defined France as a ‘white nation whose future depended on the immigration and assimilation of European foreigners alone’ (Camiscioli, 47). In this racial logic of white western European endogamy, migrants from other parts of the world – especially from North Africa – were deemed inassimilable and never exalted as potential procreative healers of the ailing French nation. Similarly, labour experts, recruiters and government officials devalued the productive capacity of colonial workers in comparison to the normative model of French workers. One labour expert ranked Italians at the top as ‘very good’ and workers from Madagascar and Martinique at the bottom as ‘physically weak’ (Camiscioli, 68–9).

The crimes of Nazism and fascism largely discredited such overtly racial idioms after 1945. Most Europeans eschewed, at least in public life, explicit references to race. They were now supposedly committed to colour-blindness and antiracism more than ever before in their history. And yet, European mentalities and practices changed in gradual and complex ways. Beginning in the late 1940s, Western Europe received millions of immigrants from across the world through labour, refugee, asylum and postcolonial migration. Struggling to make sense of this influx of newcomers, West Europeans have often framed immigration as a ‘problem’. Cycles of xenophobia and racism have erupted as the affect of anxiety has dominated West European emotions, sensibilities and thoughts about ethnic, cultural and religious differences.

One explanation for the prevalence of such anxiety might lie in the somewhat unexpected nature of post-war immigration. Germany is a prime example, where the state hardly intended or prepared for immigration at all. From 1955 to 1968, West Germany signed agreements with eight countries to bring in ‘guest workers’. While most of these workers eventually returned to their home countries, about three million stayed and were then accompanied by their families, substantially increasing the number of immigrants in West Germany. Today, 8.8% of Germany's population is foreign-born and 19.3% has a migration background.Footnote ¹⁴ Turks are the country's largest group of ethnic minorities.

This unanticipated immigration has profoundly changed German society, politics and culture, as Rita Chin explores in her book on public discourses about identity and difference in West Germany from the mid-1950s to 1990. Chin combines cultural, political, intellectual and social history, moving seamlessly from discussions about charity organisations to German Turkish literature, as she traces multiple German and migrant discussions about difference. Informed by theoretical discussions about the public sphere, race, migration and ethnicity, she carefully listens to the views, fears and aspirations of Germans and Turkish migrants in a variety of media. She examines the rise of minority literature and of integrationist rhetoric in the 1970s before turning to German conservative critiques of ‘integration’ in the 1980s. At the same time, she discusses bold attempts to forge new forms of multi-ethnic belonging. All the while, Chin takes on the delicate theme of race and racism in post-war Germany.Footnote ¹⁵ While the word ‘race’ has largely vanished from the German language, the idioms and practices of flattening individuals into hermetic, essentialised and hierarchical groups continued in West Germany.

Perhaps most significantly, Chin situates post-war German history at once within and beyond the nation state. On the one hand, Germany comes off in her account as wrestling with ethno-cultural differences like any other democracy transformed by mass immigration (both before and after 1945). The many master narratives of German exceptionalism, which have dominated the writing of German history since 1945, refreshingly never make it into her book. On the other hand, Chin shows that Germany has struggled with the changes wrought by immigration in distinct ways. For example, many Germans appear acutely anxious about discussing the existence of race thinking and racism in their own society.Footnote ¹⁶ As the German Turkish writer Zafer Şenocak put it recently, ‘everything that has to do with racism, with crimes against others and otherness has naturally a very, very strong connotation in Germany’.Footnote ¹⁷ The spectre of Nazism has blinded some segments of German society to seeing new forms of racism and essentialised notions of human differences. Whereas in France abstract individualism subsumes all differences into the utopia of political equality, in Germany the putative erasure of discrimination and race thinking undergirds narratives of post-war German redemption: the arrival of liberal democracy cleanses German society of Nazi racism and engenders a kind of new colour-blind society.Footnote ¹⁸

Tolerance

Tolerance is the final idiom that I see some of the most recent research on immigration complicating. Liberal democracies, as Wendy Brown has explored, often discursively invoke tolerance as a guiding political identity of enlightenment, modernity and refinement.Footnote ¹⁹ In so doing, democracies brandish tolerance as a symbol of social apotheosis. This self-celebration effaces the power relations inherent in the practice of tolerating unsavoury differences, and it obscures the existence of intolerance. The myth of ‘immigrant America’ is probably one of the most mobilised and popularly ingrained narratives of rhetorical, identity-performing tolerance in the world. While settlement, assimilation, citizenship and upward mobility are the story's teleologies, its social power lies in re-enacting universalism, inclusiveness and openness as bedrocks of American exceptionalism.Footnote ²⁰ This account forgets past episodes of exclusion and obscures the precarious condition of many migrants living in the United States today. In contemporary Europe, tolerance is wielded differently, not as a celebratory story of immigration, but as part of the continent's cathartic narrative of democratic redemption after the violence and repression of the twentieth century. After Nazism and communism, Europe has now apparently successfully arrived as a tolerant, democratic and liberal continent. Yet, since the 1980s, anti-immigrant sentiment has emerged across Western Europe, posing substantial challenges to the politics of tolerance and pluralism.

Attempting to make some sense of this increased xenophobia is the task of David Art's comparative study on seventeen anti-immigration parties in Western Europe. A comparative political scientist, Art looks at strong and weak ‘radical right parties’ in ten countries. He aims to understand why some parties fail and others succeed in countries facing similar socio-economic changes. How does one account for the strength of radical right parties in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Norway and Switzerland and their electoral weakness in Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden (the latter two at the time of the book's completion in 2009/2010)?

Art posits four interrelated answers. First, party activists and leaders are important: their competency, legitimacy, number, cohesiveness and experience increase electoral viability. Second, the presence of a ‘nationalist subculture’ provides fertile ground for right-wing parties to emerge. Third, the reaction of other political parties and media outlets to radical right parties affects their long-term legitimacy. And finally, the transformation of a pre-existing political party into a right-wing one increases chances of electoral success.

This multi-prong argument will surely offer future scholars ideas to consider in greater analytical, empirical and contextual depth. However, Art's approach has limitations. Focused only on radical parties, it misses the wider circulation and production of anti-immigrant ideas among mainstream parties. Germany is a case in point. As Art shows, Germany's radical right parties have posted some of the weakest election numbers in Europe over the past twenty years, in large part because Germany's political, cultural and intellectual elites have been very vigilant about combating extreme conservatism in the light of their country's Nazi past.Footnote ²¹ And yet, at the same time, anti-immigrant ideas have proliferated among mainstream German politicians. Discursive attacks against ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘failed integration’ have become respectable expressions of political thought, articulated by prominent politicians of both the Social Democratic Party and the Christian Democratic Union. The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung has recently declared that Germany's ‘middle is in crisis’.Footnote ²²

All of this, however, is not to imply that Germany – and Europe more broadly – is awash in xenophobia. The contemporary situation is complex, as Douglas B. Klusmeyer and Demetrios G. Papademetriou show in their nuanced study on German immigration policies. In 1999, Germany eased its historically strict regulations on naturalisation, and it has made attempts over the past decade to incorporate migrants more fully into German society through education, language and economic reforms. The state's general approach to immigration appears to have become more sensible after two decades of highly charged ideological discussions about integration and difference. As Klusmeyer and Papademtriou put it, ‘the “body language” of the German government towards Germany's immigrants has been changing in the direction of greater tolerance and inclusion’ (Klusmeyer and Papademtriou, 284).

Klusmeyer and Papademtriou have written a useful account of German national policies regarding migrants. They carefully adjudicate Germany's complex set of policies and laws vis-à-vis German minorities from Eastern Europe (Aussiedler/Spätaussiedler), asylum seekers, labour migrants and Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Periodically, their book mentions initiatives on the local level in cities such as Berlin and Frankfurt, pointing to a substantial lacuna in the literature: few fine-grained, empirical micro-studies currently exist, except about Berlin, that explore the policies and practices of municipal officials, local politicians, grass-roots organisers and religious leaders. Our understanding of neighbourhood politics is much less developed than that of federal policies. Most importantly, though, Klusmeyer and Papademtriou capture the contradictions of a contemporary moment defined by periods of xenophobia and steps towards greater tolerance.

Paradoxes?

Societies have been grappling with the dilemmas wrought by human mobility for centuries. So, what seems new about the discordant labours discussed above in twentieth-century Western Europe? On a broad level, little appears entirely new. The Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe – a ground-breaking reference tool, comprising over 200 detailed entries on migrant groups since the seventeenth century, that scholars and students will be using for years – shows how Europeans have strained to receive and integrate migrants in shared ways across multiple periods of time and political regimes. While immigration policies have varied greatly over time and the markers of human difference have changed dramatically from the early modern to the modern period, the basic task of integrating newcomers into existent social, cultural, political, economic and religious systems has elicited some of the same general responses in earlier periods that it has in the twentieth century.Footnote ²³ Thus, if migration is as central to the ‘human condition as birth, procreation, sickness, and death’, so, too, are struggles to accommodate migrants and to come to terms with the differences that they introduce into established communities (Bade et al., xix).

That said, the challenges related to immigration are of course deeply shaped by the temporal, geographic and political contexts in which they unfold. To illuminate briefly this point, as well as to conclude this essay, let us return to the particular political context held constant here – liberal democracy. In the examples discussed above, the principles of equality, tolerance, universalism and rights have shaped the politics of immigration in contradictory ways. On the one hand, democratic aspirations have inspired or demanded expanded forms of citizenship in Western Europe, among many other changes. Indeed, as Christian Joppke argues in Citizenship and Immigration, a gradual liberalisation of citizenship has taken place in Western Europe over the course of the twentieth century, leading to ever more ‘inclusive and universalistic’ conceptions of political rights (Joppke, 31). On the other hand, liberal democratic principles have been mobilised to exclude reputed illiberal groups. This exclusionary practice happens, Joppke suggests, when nation states embrace liberal democracy, not as a political system, but as a particularistic identity. In this way, societies harness liberal democracy as a collective marker to separate themselves from illiberal others.Footnote ²⁴ In 2010, British Prime Minister and Conservative Party member David Cameron provided an especially vivid example of such identity liberalism at work when he remarked:

While we might dismiss such rhetoric as mere bravado, I think taking it seriously brings to the fore several final questions. How do we, as scholars, make sense of such liberal democratic discourse, which flatly contradicts precisely the principles it espouses? How do we make sense of the opposite histories of exclusion and inclusion seen in this essay? Should we call them paradoxes? Tensions? Failings? Pathologies?

Paradox is the word most commonly used by the authors discussed here. The Oxford English Dictionary defines paradox as ‘a statement or tenet contrary to received opinion or belief’. Paradox marks discordance with apparently logical premises; it declares arguments and actions self-contradictory because they conflict with ideals and principles that people, societies and political systems claim to embrace. In the cases here, racism, intolerance and inequality appear inconsistent with the liberal democratic principles, values and idioms of the Third Republic, the Federal Republic and Western Europe more generally.

Yet are democratic exclusions only to appear as self-contradictions to us? Jacques Derrida, for one, links hospitality with hostility. But his aporia perhaps goes too far.Footnote ²⁶ Does hospitality always have to emerge with limits and boundaries? The histories of inclusion, which the books here also uncover, might suggest otherwise. For another, Camiscioli suggests that race thinking and universalism co-exist as ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Camiscioli, 76). But how do these two sides relate? If we accept Joppke's argument that democratic idioms and practices can perpetuate exclusion, then the two sides must relate to each other more dynamically than the coin simile would permit. Or to go further: does the conceptualisation of dichotomies – hospitality and hostility; civic and ethnic nationalism; particularism and universalism – illuminate insufficiently the very convoluted ways in which humans interact with those whom they view and mark as different? In raising these challenging political and epistemological questions, among many others, this collection of books points to stimulating new ways of thinking about the histories of immigration in modern Europe.