EpiCenter

The International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship's Quarterly Newsletter
Welcome to number 4 of the Winter 1999 edition of  EpiCenter, the Newsletter for the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship.

Social science in the United States generally treats race, ethnicity and immigration as distinct spheres of scholarly investigation. As a consequence, research on these topics are generally thought to form separate, somewhat unrelated literatures. A conjunctural analysis of laws pertaining to immigration, racial slavery and movement restrictions imposed upon black freedpersons, however, points to the nexus of immigration, racial segregation and political repression which suggests that these scholarly distinctions are not so separate and discrete in U.S. history and politics. State and federal laws concerning slavery and black insurrection in the 19th and 20th centuries directly influenced the development of national immigration policy, the internal movement of black peoples within the United States, as well as restrictions upon the travel and movement of black citizen/subjects of the United States in other polities. Though much has been written about the circumspect of a second class citizenship of U.S. African-Americans, less attention has been given to one of the definitional or categorical implications of the paradoxical position of U.S. African-Americans within the U.S. body politic as native-born foreigners.

Common to African-Americans and many immigrant populations in the United States has been the monitoring, surveillance and restriction of movement by the state. Restrictions and discriminations of both subject populations are part of a more general process of actively structuring and policing the body politic, or political community. Thus, the relationship between definitions of citizen, subject and political community has been undergirded by racialized and ideologically driven notions of the body politic. The equation of people of African descent as foreign inhabitants within the body politic makes the analytic distinctions between migrant, immigrant and foreigner less stark than one might originally imagine. Movement restrictions upon U.S. African-American slaves and freed persons predated movement restrictions upon state-determined Foreigners; U.S. African-Americans were consequently familiar with both the restrictions and the attendant status position attached to undesirable foreigners. For black political actors in the United States over the course of the 19th and 20th century, the recog-nition of the often-blurred lines between these three categories of populations within the United States enabled them to link the mistreatment of people of African descent within the body politic not only to their exclusion from the political community of the nation, but to the denial of citizenship status to people of African descent in other nation-states as well.

This article seeks to underscore the ways in which immigration and movement restrictions imposed by the U.S. state apparatus upon people of African descent has had two largely unexamined consequences for U.S. racial politics and black political mobilization. First, state monitoring of U.S. African-American movement and migration has been, from the outset, related to broader fears of racial and ideological subversion in national political culture. Thus, the concept of a body politic is more encompassing in its scope and organizes distinctions between racial and immigrant exclusions under a single rubric. Secondly, while such exclusions had different impacts for different populations residing in or attempting to enter the United States, restrictions upon citizenship and movement within the United States for African-descended populations led to the transnational political mobilization of black political actors. Though the term "sojourner" has normally been applied in literature on immigration to first-generation immigrants of any race, ethnicity or nationality whose political commitments within their countries of origin made their residence in host nations contingent and often short term, the term can also be used to characterize the activ-ities of African descended transnational political actors from the United States. Unlike sojourner status and consciousness among white ethnics as well as Latinos, the political legacy of African-American sojourners in the United States does not diminish over generational time, has remained a constant feature of U.S. African-American life and politics. Black sojourner consciousness is the result of the differentiated but nonetheless continuous tensions between black political actors and the state in domestic and international politics. Unlike the standard view of immigration over generational time, through which Outsiders to the United States become insiders through incorporation, black political sojourners undertook the reverse trajectory, from the absence of political incorpo-ration to departure from the territorial domain of the U.S. nation-state to decry their treatment within the body politic.

From the earliest colonization and back-to-Africa efforts of black nationalists, to contemporary discussions about a return to the Motherland, the outsider-insider trajectory of white ethnics (and incidentally, the transformation from race to ethnicity) is reversed when considering U.S. African-Americans and Afro-West Indians living within the U.S. A complicated pattern of emigration, exile, fugitive status and repatriation was precipitated among black activist communities by state responses to their political behavior, so that their status as sojourners was a constant, as opposed to an epochal or generational, feature of black politics. These sojourners were not, as the immigration literature characterizes sojourners more generally, first-generation immigrants who largely shuttled between the United States and their country of origin. They were recurrent in black communities and politics nationally, as succession of politi-cal actors who sought relatively open channels for political expression and movement in a variety of nation-states in Europe, Africa and Asia.

Through an analysis of the Importation debates pertaining to the slave trade which prompted specific laws about immigration, the Back to Africa and transnational abolitionist movements of the nineteenth century, as well as the surveillance, deportation and imprisonment of African-American (black U.S. and black West Indian) political activists during the first half of the twentieth century, the tensions between black political activism and state restriction made sojourners of many U.S. African-Americans and black West Indians residing in the United States.My conceptualization of black transnational sojourners is part of a broader attempt to problematize and complicate the extant view of black politics, social and political theory in the United States as resting squarely and solely on two points on an ideological continuum - separatism and assimilation. Michael Dawson has argued for a more complicated understanding of the evolution of black political ideology and behavior in the United States, in order to encompass the broad array of political positionings within black public spheres in response to racism, state power, regionalism and many other factors which contribute to black political cultures in the United States (Michael Dawson, Black Visions, in press). Consistent with Dawson's view, sojourner consciousness and politics combines elements of integrationist, nationalist and other ideological perspectives and prescriptions for racial equality. This portrait of black political sojourners could provide the evidentiary basis for combining issues of race, ethnicity and immigration in a unified analysis of the ideological effects of racial hierarchy and difference upon immigration policy, citizenship, and state surveillance of various populations who have been deemed threats to the body politic.

As Cobley (Alan Gregor Cobley, "Far From Home: The Origins and Significance of the Afro-Caribbean Community in South Africa to 1930," Journal of Southern African Studies, 18.2 (Tune 1992): 349-371, p. 350) has suggested in an analysis of Afro-Caribbeans in South Africa, most histories and sociological surveys of immigrant communities are written from the perspective of the host society, and not from the vantage point of specific populations and the ease or difficulty with which they are "incorporated" into a host nation. With this population-specific perspective, the critical and methodological aim of this article is to highlight the manner in which U.S. African-Americans and their politics have often served to define and clarify the constructed and often arbitrary distinctions between native and foreigner, and the significance of racial difference, ideology and state power in the formation of these categories.

CONCLUSION:
This article can be seen as an intervention into contemporary debates in U.S. political science concerning the degree to which U.S. liberalism is implicated in the racial exclusion of black subjects from the body politic, and, by extension, recent debates in the literature on nationalism and eth-nicity concerning the role of racism in the formation of national-state identity and imagined community. The evolution of immigration law and policy in the United States suggests that racial and ethnic differentiation were not epiphenomenal features of national political develop-ment, but primary considerations for which sub-groups could be considered members of the political community of the nation, citizens rather than subjects.
Like Rogin and, more recently, Rogers Smith (Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship ire U.S. Public Lain, 1997), this article emphasizes the simultaneous rhetorical adoption of liberal economic and political recepts, the rejection of European feudal and monarchal ideals, and the maintenance of legal, normative and coercive practices with respect to African-descended and other non-white populations that can be accurately char-acterized as illiberal and unequal. The U.S. state codified and legitimated racially unequal relations, formation and movement among its citizens and subjects, as the movement, travel and immigration restrictions upon former slaves and African-descended immigrants to the United States evidence.

Thus, it could be said that U.S. political and civil society was "universalist" only in its consideration of citizens and subjects who were deemed white, and particularist in its treatment of non-white populations who lived under its rule. In this sense, U.S. liberalism may bear greater similarity to the variants of "con-servative liberalism" found in fledgling Latin American nation-states in the mid-19th century, which emphasized laissez-faire capitalism while repressing the political freedoms which supposedly accom-panied capitalist development. Here again, the trajectory of African-descended populations in the United States differ radically from those peoples who entered the territorial United States as free subjects, if not citizens, since they arrived in the United States as a consequence of their enslavement, and not as individuals seeking liberties they could not attain at home. It should come as no wonder then, that members of this same population would seek both refuge and audience out-side the confines of the United States, since the state which claimed independence for itself and its citizens refused to grant them theirs.

As Smith argues, liberal norms and state practices have not been aberrational features of the U.S. body politic, but constitutive of it. What Smith refers to as the inegalitarian ascriptive traditions of Americanism wend their way into a view or theory of the United States as a site of multiple traditions that are neither exclusively liberal nor exclusively illiberal, but a composite of many ideological features and tendencies. That certain features may be more dominant at one time or another is a function or consequence of the particular intersection of ideology, politics, economy and culture at a given historical moment. During the McCarthy period, ideological conformity and narrow alle-giance to politically conservative and religious fundamentalist ideals were dominant features of the political landscape of the country. Yet even with the obsessive, scarlet letter quality of political repression during this era, "the enemy within" had multiple faces and has consistently had racist overtones. By the 1960s, the correlation of anxieties of racial and ideological subversion were inverted; obsessions with communism and other subversive ideas were in relief, while issues of race and genuine U.S. democracy were foregrounded. Yet the nexus of racial and ideological conformity were common features of both eras, as they are recurrent features of U.S. political culture.

The fears of racial and ideological subversion shared a common presumption about the nexus of personhood and citizenship; those who were non-citizens were also considered racially inferior. Racial and ideological heterogeneity was equated with a dissolution of the republic. With a particular emphasis on race, however, this article has sought to display how racially prejudicial attitudes and behaviors not only affected the treatment of former slaves and black immigrants after emancipation, or even serve to illuminate the multiple traditions thesis, but affected immigration policy and development, which, in turn, influenced federal policy on labor and debates about national identity and states rights.

State and civic elites, even its less august citizens, operated with two distinct work-ing definitions of nation: nation as ethnie and nation as territorial entity that its citizens, the ethnie in question, inhabited. Those who were not members of the ethnie were subjects, rather than citizens, even though both ethnic and non-ethnic inhabited the same territorial space. Thus, for the ethnic, a more Hegelian notion of nation-state as the ideal correlation between state and citizen was operative. For non-ethnies, nation and state were distinct albeit conjoined facets of one body politic which excluded them as members of the political community. Brubaker (Citizenship and Nationhood is France and Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, 34) writes of citizenship as both an instrument and object of closure, as part of the state's prerogative of endogamy. This closure on the part of the state and national-popular is largely formal and explicit. Yet the means by which the state and the national-popular further differentiate between those who are deemed worthy of full citizenship and
those who are not often has little to do with abstract definitions of citizenship. Or the state's responsibility in defending such definitions. The legacy of U.S. African-American resistance to contingent citizenship belied the hollowness of citizenship in abstraction. What can be thought of as a racially embodied citizenship limited the extension of recognition by Western powers, a limitation that would persist for over two and a half centuries. Thus, Brubaker's claims of closure can be qualified via the recognition that closure and aperture are internally complicated and even internally contradictory. They are formal dimensions of a broader process of inclusion and exclusion, in which even formal granting of citizenship recognition does not guarantee civic equality. From their status as taxable chattel to late 20th century citizens, the circumscribed citizenship of U.S. African-Americans has often led their advocates to pursue activism and non-governmental policy initiatives that have been at odds with U.S. domestic policies. For this reason, black activists who have operated on an international stage through transnational social movements, such as the abolitionist movement and, most recently, the anti-apartheid movement, have been perceived as subverters of the national and international order.

On November 11, 1998 the ICMEC, in conjunction with the New School-Cardozo Project on Comparative Constitutionalism, sponsored a panel discussion on "National and Transnational Citizenship." The panel of speakers included a distinguished group of academicians: Linda Bosniak, (Rutgers-Camden Law School); Alex Aleinikoff,(Georgetown University Law Center); Peter Spiro (Hofstra Law School); and Rogers Smith (Yale University, Department of Political Science). The ICMEC's Director, Aristide R. Zolberg, moderated the two-hour discussion, which drew a large number of interested faculty and students.

Linda Bosniak began the discussion by noting that scholars have only recently begun discussing the changing nature of citizenship. Consequently, the debate between those who disagree over the degree to which national citizenship has been eclipsed by transnational variants has not yet received the systematic or theoretical attention it deserves. The difficulty in proceeding with this project is partly tied to the durability of orthodox theories that presume that the inevitable site of citizenship is within the nation-state. The challenge for dissenting scholars and activists ties in persuading us that a process of de-nationalization is indeed occurring. Bosniak suggested that those arguing for a trend toward transnational-ism begin by providing evidence that such a trend does indeed exist. Having laid an empirical foundation for the claims, they might then decide whether the denation-alization of citizenship ought to be fostered and celebrated or feared.

Bosniak went on to identify four sites of citizenship that might be considered by the other panelists: citizenship as (i) legal status, (ii) rights, (iii) political activity, or (iv) collective identity. Recognizing citizenship's multiple dimensions fosters progressive and well-informed discourse. Invariably, the empirical strengths of claims will vary depending on the dimen-sion of the citizenship one is focusing on; for instance, the claim that citizenship is becoming transnational is probably weakest when applied to citizenship as legal status.

With this as background Bosniak proceeded to present a qualified defense of post-nationalism (transnationalism), arguing that multiple citizenships are still multiple national citizenships, so the rights aliens enjoy in nation-states "have a national, and not a transnational source." In this sense, citizenship is not denationalized; rather current changes represent "a demystification of an ideal conception of citizenship." Rosniak concluded by arguing that we must move away from treat-ing citizenship as a "monolithic whole" and from assuming a priori that citizenship is a national enterprise.

In contrast to Bosniak, Alex Aleinikoff argued that rather than shifting toward a postnational model, the U.S. is drifting towards an even more national model, as the national Immigration Act of 1986 and welfare legislation cutbacks might suggest. In the end, Aleinikoff contended that recent changes are indicative of a shift towards more and more inter-nationalism, where individuals are "rooted in more than one community."

Peter Spiro voiced support for Linda Bosniak's recommendation that we look at the different components of citizenship. He argued that we should "look at how the nation-state is becoming less significant (and) look at alternative locations of citizenship, such as subnational, diasporic, and non-territorial, non-national." According to Spiro, one's identity is highly contingent and largely determined by the immediate situation. In the past one
might assume that "[a]n American in Paris [was] not a Parisian, but an American." Spiro contended that this was less clear today. Recent changes have meant that "nationality is not so clearly defined, for inclusion dilutes identity." Rogers Smith urged that we strive to build egalitarian, inclusive, liberal com-munities and weigh the merits of moving in a more cosmopolitan direction. Liberal states committed to the protection of equality and human rights for all their citizens are superior to more dispersed forms of local government and vaguely defined transnational bodies. Nation-states, with all their flaws, still have the capacity to make good their promises and shelter their citizens from "the dangers of illiberal stigmatism."

The panel concluded with questions from the audience that sparked lively discussion. The evening concluded with plans to organize future meetings devoted to this significant topic. Please call the ICMEC, (212) 229-5399, for further information and suggestions.

There are today some 10-12 million Muslims in the coun-tries of what continues to be called western Europe. The vast majority of these are people who have immigrated from Muslim countries since the 1950s. 1t continues to be com-mon to talk of immigrants, although the term ethnic minority is beginning to take over as the proportion of those were born in Europe increases to around the 50% level today. The main countries of Muslim residence are Britain with some 1.2-1.5 million people of Muslim cultural background, Germany with about 2 million, and France with some 3-4 million. Statistics in this field are notoriously unreliable, most being based on extrapolations from censuses, local government and social survey statistics identifying nationality or ethnicity rather than religion. Based on such foundations it is possible to estimate populations in the 400,000 to 600,000 range in Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, with figures in the lower 6-digit range in Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. This paper will not deal with eastern Europe, where the Muslim population may reach as high as 25 million if European Russia is included.

There has developed a common assumption among Europeans that "identity" is a fixed non-moveable entity. This may in part be the influence of unfortunate and incomplete perceptions of popular psychology, but there are also reasons in European history which we shall touch on later. This has as a consequence that as European institutions - local and national govern-ment as well as non-governmental -have sought to respond to the developments of immigration and ethnic minorities they have responded with policies based on perceptions of mono-identities. So Britain has passed laws against racial discrimination, and to monitor their effect has introduced subcategories of "race" into surveys and censuses. So Indians are differentiated from Pakistanis, and black Africans are distinguished from African Asian. A Syrian national of Armenian descent has to choose to identify as Arab, White or Other. There is even a category of `other other'. More sophisticated social surveys will occasionally break down the population of South Asian origin by Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, but not do so with the population of Arab origin.

Whatever the intentions behind such measures, they not only reflect presuppositions amongst their authors, they also have direct effects on the formation of communal identities. This has recently been analyzed in some detail by Gerd Bauman, an anthropologist who lived among and studied the communities of Southall in West London. His work looks at how various definitions of "culture" and "community" are mobilized by different sectors of the local society. These sectors include the religious leaderships, the extended family elites, the developing youth groups, local government, and local agencies of central government. In some cases definitions offered from outside are adopted as the basis of policy making. This is particularly the case with government agencies which have adopted the classifications of the Census and, secondarily and increasingly in recent years, classifications by religion. Other classifications offered from the outside have been those of political party or, within specific religions, various sects or religion-political tendencies.

Bauman shows how sectors within the local society have repositioned themselves to benefit from the resources being distributed by the holders of power according to such selected definitions. But he also shows how especially, but not only, among the ethnic minorities one can observe a high level of skill in moving among the various identities on offer and adapting other previously offered identities to maximize interests. A good example of the latter is the way in which a consensus, which prevailed in the race relations industry in the 1970s, that all Afro-Asian ethnic minorities could be encompassed within the category of "black", broke down during the 1980s progressively through a distinction between Afro-Caribbean and South Asian into a much more complex categorization which today includes reference to religion. He shows successfully that not only are the identities fluid but that people operate, often consciously, with multiple identities selecting the one which is perceived to be most functional at any one time for a particular situation: one might call it situational identity choice.
It should be noted that the objective of the choice is not always the one which would most benefit the interests of the participant as perceived by the outsider. A group may very well come to the conclusion that its interests are best served by isolating themselves from the wider society and find it useful to complement their own sense of uniqueness with negative images of them being promulgated by the environment so as to minimize the escape of individual members. Negative images presented in the media can also be presented internally as proof of their perversity and one's own righteousness.

The other side of this coin is, finally, the impact on the majority identity. Here one has to take into account the complexity of the construction of that majority identity, brought about as it has been through a steady interaction between historical events, development of ideas in philosophy and literature, and the invention of shared foundation myths. This is the story of the European nation, the formation of which is a watershed in European history. Most scholars would argue that the key period in the formation of the nation in Europe lies roughly between 1750 and 1850. It is associated with the rise of industrial modes of production and the need for harmonization of law, communications and education within the state territories. Clashes for power between town, countryside and monarchy lead to a realignment of powers which lay the foundations for a gradual spread of political participation. The French Revolution is not only the key founding event in the creation of the French nation state, it is also that against which the occupied peoples of the Napoleonic empire respond by developing their own national identity.

There is a pre-history, in the English case a very long pre-history, and some elements do not fall into place until the middle of the 20th century. But I would argue that, however one times it, the formative period of the modern European nation has become the kind of prism which the church councils of the 4th-5th centuries AD and their dogmatic statements have become in Christianity: all previous history is viewed and interpreted by its paradigms and they are the foundation for all subsequent collective self-perception and political action.

The foundation myths which are central to such a collective national self-perception are a major influence on how a nation leg-islates, arranges its social and educational priorities, and how it receives strangers. In the period since 1945, the stability and self-assurance which Europeis nations felt they had achieved, in east and west each in their own distinctive way, has been deeply challenged by immigration and ethnic minority in the west and, more recently, by the disappearance of communism in the east. It is too soon to assess which course developments are likely to take in the east. Suffice it to note that the removal of the dogmatic language of international workers solidarity has revealed a host of unresolved conflicts from a previous era where relations between nationality, culture, religion and citizenship are again being contested.

In the west, it is interesting to explore the extent to which national self-perceptions and the resources of the underlying foundation myths allow the making of space or even integration of the different outsider. I would argue that here Germany has the most difficult problem to solve. The German foundation myths are those of the tribe: the federation of Germanic tribes which stood up to imperial Rome and was Christianized in the form of the Holy Roman Empire of the German People in the middle ages. The Romantic movement in literature and the arts discovered the traditions of the German people in their folk tales and music, expressed at their most flamboyant, some might say radical extreme, in the operas of Wagner. It follows that German-ness is primarily acquired by descent and that naturalization requires evidence of feeling German. So it is logical that German citizenship should be extended automatically to Volga Germans coming home after several centuries of existence in the east - a law of return akin to that of Israel - while Turks in Cologne in the third generation remain Turks.

At the other end of the spectrum I would place Britain. In itself it is consciously plural, even in the restricted term of 19th century nation formation, consisting of English, Scot, Welsh and Irish. Even the English are consciously the result of the marriage between Saxon and Norman, a theme which is strong in the literature of the Romantics. But it is also religiously plural as the birthplace of all kinds of Christian non-conformism and dissidence. The weakness of the concept of citizenship relative to that of subject of the sovereign adds to the ease with which the outsider can be absorbed: all that is needed is an oath of loyalty.

Against such, possibly slightly caricatured images, one should record the strength of the liberal democratic tradition in Germany which was also associated with the Romantic movement and which has been
immeasurably strengthened since 1945. Likewise, there is little doubt that there exists a little England's tradition which stretches from the patronizing superiority of certain sections of the surviving aristocracy to the yobbish elements among English football supporters and the British National Party.

It is ultimately at this level, that of the ability of European national identity to shift and show flexibility, which will
determine the extent to which communities which are increasingly identifying themselves as Muslim, but not in the ways of their parents, will allow themselves to be integrated and to become European. It is also at this level that Europe's pride in the democratic core of its traditions, principles enshrined at the center of European institutions like the Council of Europe and the European Union, will be most tested.