But these conventional political categories cannot fully account for the sometimes odd patterns of support for recent policies that have emerged. Parts of the French left have surprised many observers by adamantly eschewing the multiculturalist approach to inclusion embraced by many self-styled leftists and progressives in other countries. Understanding the contextually specific terms in which policy options have been legitimated is essential particularly for understanding the the French left’s positions, and divisions. At the same time, this book aims to transcend the specificities of French politics, comparing aspects of French policy and debates about membership to recent developments elsewhere.
Chapters 3–5 look at two key episodes in France’s politics of membership during the 1980s: demands for extending local voting rights to foreign residents accompanied by promotion of a “new citizenship” separating citizenship from nationality, and the highly publicized discussions and public hearings of the late 1980s prompted by demands for revision of France’s nationality law (code de la nationalité française). In contrast to other studies that have stressed theoretical commonalities and elements of conceptual consensus at the national level (Brubaker 1992; Favell 1998), my treatment of these early French debates emphasizes the role of competitive political dynamics in shaping the politics of membership. Even the ways recent debates hark back to revered elements of French historical tradition can, in fact, best be understood less as instances of historical overdeterminism than as tactics, or particularly sharp moves, in competitive cultural politics. Just as Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) widely regarded work on nationalism revealed the active political invention of tradition, this study highlights its active political reproduction. The analytic framework introduced in Chapter 2 helps make sense of the symbolic strategies involved in this reproduction.
In actual political debates, the models of membership identified in Chapter 2 do not always simply face off as singular, unified positions. As Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate, they can be strategically combined and recombined in efforts both to construct new alliances and to break up existing alliances by recharacterizing other positions. I call this process, which the theoretical model developed in Chapter 2 helps elucidate, the “politics of misrepresentation.” Chapters 3–5 show how the politics of misrepresentation shaped French responses to demands for a “new citizenship” and nationality law reform.
Chapter 6 focuses on the repeated changes in nationality law that resulted from these key moments in France’s politics of membership since the 1980s. This chapter sets developments in French nationality policy in a broader comparative context, examining the extent to which French developments have coincided with immigration-related changes in the nationality laws of Europe’s other two most significant immigration-receiving societies—Britain and Germany. This comparison of developments in French nationality law with policy changes in Britain and Germany sheds light on whether or to what extent recent developments in this area have been confirming the expectations of post-nationalists and multiculturalists optimistic about the likelihood of growing policy convergence, on the one hand, or of analysts stressing the continued, lasting effects of national traditions who are accordingly skeptical regarding future policy convergence in this area, on the other. Post-nationalist, multiculturalist, and national traditions perspectives each capture certain elements of recent developments in nationality policy, but, I show, they need to be combined in order fully to interpret the direction of important immigration-related policy changes. My framework is also helpful for understanding recent developments in this area, particularly where changing assumptions about culture have been involved. Together, Chapters 3–6 form Part II, concerned with how the recent politics of membership relates to attributions of citizenship and nationality as formal legal statuses, conferring particular sets of rights on different categories of people, particularly residents of foreign birth or origin.
Chapters 7–8 focus on a second key face of recent membership politics, one that has become increasingly central since 1989: whether and how expressions of cultural and religious difference are recognized and accommodated in the public sphere. The most important debates raising this issue in France have been those about whether female students should be permitted to wear Islamic headscarves in public schools, and those about veiling in public spaces generally. Chapter 7 looks at the emergence of the first affaire du foulard or “headscarves affair” in 1989–1990, a dramatic and divisive debate of lasting consequence in France. The chapter examines the initial local context of the debate and then its national-level politicization. Using the framework presented in Chapter 2 to analyze the affaire du foulard of 1989–1990, Chapter 7 characterizes the nature of the political alliances and divisions that formed in the course of the first affaire du foulard much better than could the prevailing dichotomy of civic and ethnic. Like earlier debates about French nationality law, the affaire du foulard was mainly a “civic-civic” issue, not one that simply pitted “civic” perspectives against more “ethnic” ones. To understand what divided the two sides, the more precise terms suggested by ordinary language analysis are needed. The seemingly reasonable policy compromise that emerged in response to the initial affaire du foulard was relatively short-lived. In 2004, France passed a law prohibiting students from wearing Islamic headscarves or other conspicuous religious signs in French public schools. This unusual law shocked and puzzled many observers in other countries. Chapter 8 looks at the reasons for this surprising development. Some observers, especially in France, would prefer to explain the law as a simple reflection of deep traditions of republican thinking about citizenship and its relation to other forms of membership. However, to understand why policy in this area has been changing, one must look beyond long-standing republican traditions to more recent social, political, and legal developments. Contrary to what post-nationalists might assume, developments in international human rights law did not prevent French policy from taking this restrictive new direction. French policy makers’ reading of cases in the European Court of Human Rights may even have encouraged a more symbolically charged framing of the issue, and a more rigid resolution.
The final chapters conclude the book by showing how the new analytic framework can be used to compare membership-related debates in different national settings, and to analyze current debates about citizenship at the global and international levels. Chapters 9–10 examine a key British political controversy also deeply concerned with understandings of political membership: the Rushdie affair. Like France’s affaire du foulard, the Rushdie affair in Britain concerned dangers to national integrity and social cohesion perceived as associated with settlement of Muslim immigrants coming mainly from the country’s former colonies. Participants in both debates contested the desirability of a postcolonial multiculturalism as well as its preconditions and necessary limits. While sparked by very different substantive policy issues, both debates also raised questions about what makes particular residents of a country bona fide members of the political community.
