Economic opportunities, cultural racism and capitalist norms
Liberal advocates of human rights criticise arbitrary and repressive treatments of immigrants committed by the institutions that control borders, migration, and integration. Liberal critique is general and formalistic: it expresses a cautious concern about the massive normalisation of undemocratic procedures imposed upon migrants. What is missing is an analysis of structural changes of the Western state and of the economic system in Europe. On the other hand radical leftists impose the concept of the proletariat onto immigrants; they presume immigrants to be the collective political subject of revolutionary systemic change because they suffer discrimination, economic precariousness, social marginalisation, and symbolic exclusion.
Several mistakes are made by these two discourses. The speculation of the leftist radicals is unreal, because it concurs in no way with the motives and biographic goals of individual immigrants. All that the majority of immigrants wish to get is a chance to integrate into a wealthy society of commodity economy, namely to get a job or to start one's own business. Theirs is a search to obtain legal status as an instrumental precondition for entrance into the capitalist economy without being extra burdened by the daily possibility of being captured and deported by the repressive apparatus. However, the burden of regulatory capitalist exploitation is something with which an immigrant, who yearns for "a better life", reconciles himself. Regarding personal goals and points of view on the existing social system, immigrants seem to think like liberals do. Their common ideological framework is a utilitarian one (the aspiration for welfare and private happiness), and their political paradigm is focused on the social inclusion of immigrants as well as of all other marginal groups.
Instead of revolutionary expectations regarding immigrants, we should pose two reflexive questions. Why do immigrants find it so difficult to realise their dreams of "a better life"? What can the status of immigrants and the stipulated conditions of their successful integration indicate about Western society?
The liberal paradigm is shallow if it does not ask the question: what does social inclusion mean and imply? Social inclusion basically means someone's inclusion and integration into the present historical form of the society, its mechanisms and norms. The present Western society is structured along the lines of capital, wage labour, and consumerism. Liberals think about social inclusion in terms of participation in welfare opportunities and in terms of gaining social acceptance. The availability of economic opportunities and a dignified social status are really interconnected, but neither of them can be practically assured only by an equal formal treatment, grounded in universal human rights. Even more: these fields or discourses are non-consumable because one of these universal human rights implies the equality of everyone, yet the point of capitalist economy and of corresponding social ranking creates and emphasises inequalities and distinctions. The utilitarian values of liberals thwart their morals of human rights.
The key problem of immigrant access to the desired Western welfare exists in the mechanisms of reproduction of welfare within a particular national space. One of these mechanisms is control over populations in regard to the economic needs of the society. National borders have kept their importance in the period of financial globalisation because they enable the control of the flow of people. The operative of borders is to divide people into two categories: the economically useful and those with a specific high social status are welcome; all others are superfluous. The general appeal of liberals to be tolerant towards foreigners forgets that toleration - being basically a virtuous private inclination - works only if everybody is empowered and equal. If not, then social acceptance is only a symbolic aspect of economic relations and of calculation. In principle, human beings should have equal rights and opportunities to pursue one's own, autonomously chosen goals, but bare principles cannot convince the rich to share their wealth with the poorer, when the very economic system is based upon exploitation and upon the reproduction of varying rates of development.
The root of contemporary Western xenophobia is the general lack of economic opportunities in post-Fordist and neo-liberal Western societies. The conservative right speaks out openly about these deficiences. Its realistic ascertainment, undisturbed by universalistic morals, is that there is no room for the newcomers and that the locals defend their own comfortable way of life. The conservatives draw the conclusion that if the present system of capitalism is legitimate, then its social consequences, both on the national as well as on the international level, should be legitimate, too. While the liberals make an abstract "sweet talk" of human rights without addressing the question of their compatibility with neo-liberal capitalism, the conservatives vindicate a quasi-solution of this question of justice in the way of subsumption of human rights into the particular Western way of life which should be defended against "non-liberal civilizations".
According to Étienne Balibar, in the gap between the global accumulation of Western welfare, and the unpreparedness for global justice, lays the ground for the flourishing of racism. Its outburst and the "European Apartheid" as its institutional extension are the results of uncertainty caused by deindustrialisation and of regression of the welfare state in Europe. Balibar points at class relations and at the state's powerlessness in order to diagnose the phenomenon of racism.
Why "racism" and not a milder term? First, a wide segment of immigrants (illegals, asylum seekers, non-high-tech workers, even ghettoised immigrants of the second and the third generations) are put into a reproduced coincidence of several bad positions: economic underclass, suffering hyper-exploitation, legal discrimination, cultural otherness, and symbolic exclusion. Second, racism, as distinguished from nationalism, is not a particularistic ideology, but it refers to humanity as a whole. It constructs ranked categories of humans and subhumans, who supposedly have an essentially different nature. It legitimises the established relations of mistreatment by the supposed unworthy nature (or culture) of subhumans, and therefore it denies the normative concept of a basic equality of every human. In the context of immigrations, racism provides an Orientalism-like (according to Saïd) cultural homogenisation of heterogeneous immigrant populations: its crucial object is people of Islamic origin. Cultural racism produces the construct of threatening Islamists, and it argues that the homogenised "Islamic civilisation" cannot be combined with the Western liberal civic values and its way of life.
The "politically correct" sort of speech in favour of exclusion and closing of borders does not clearly say that human rights and prospects of immigrants should be restricted, because they are hardly to be combined with the present level of welfare in the circumstances of deepening economic inequalities within the Western societies as well as globally. It says that immigrants should be prevented from crossing the borders in order not to interfere with liberal civilisation. The price of keeping quiet about the economic structures and the reduced opportunities is an "en gros" suspension of the liberal theoretical trust in human reason and changeability, a suspension ignorant of the fact that most of those who wish to move to and to integrate into Western commodified societies accept just the liberal economic and social values.
What about those who really deviate from these values? What can we get to know about the structure of the present Western society, from the mistreatment of such immigrant groups? Even if economic opportunities are rich, some types of immigrants would probably remain unwanted. The key case of such a category are Roma travelling beggars, who in the last years have numerously been coming from Romania and elsewhere to richer countries of the EU. They are exposed to massive deportations despite the principle of free mobility of EU citizens. What is unbearable about the Roma beggars in the eyes of the commodified society is their non-commodified economic culture, inclined to leisureliness, lacking in any formal work-ethic, and lenient towards small offences against private property.
The intolerability of such a life-style is a symptom of certain liberal norms that are more obligatory then the well-known liberal individualistic liberties. Liberalism is not only about tolerating all the autonomous choices that do not intervene in the liberties of others. It also demands "social responsibility", which means respect of the regime of welfare-making. It expects diligence, productivity, self-responsibility, and respect of property, as the conditions for gaining a respectful status in the society. The liberal way of socialisation is not only laissez-faire regarding private matters; it is also requires assimilation into the common norms and the binding public morals, which are the basis of the Western way of life and its economic and social order.
Evidently, liberalism functions if it is organised as a communitarianism that breeds conviction of liberal values and norms. Liberalism breaks down if it does not control the means of ideological reproduction, that is, schools and other paedagogical practices, needed in the upbringing of its public culture. The so-called "multi-cultural integration" of immigrants permits keeping folkloristic elements of their cultures, but it demands the assimilation into the norms of the liberal community. (Therefore, I cannot recognise a very clear distinction between the concepts of integration and of assimilation.) The offered alternative is marginalisation, repression, or expulsion.
Literature
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
Balibar, Étienne. Mi, državljani Evrope?: Meje, država, ljudstvo (Nous, citoyens d'Europe? Les frontières, l'État, le peuple). Ljubljana: Sophia, 2007.
Balibar, Étienne. Strah pred množicami: Politika in filozofija pred Marxom in po njem (La crainte des masses). Ljubljana: Studia humanitatis, 2004.
Balibar, Étienne and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London and New York: Verso, 1991.
Kymlicka, Will. Sodobna politična filozofija: Uvod (Contemporary Political Philosophy. An Introduction). Ljubljana: Krtina, 2005.
Saïd, Edward W. Orientalizem: Zahodnjaški pogledi na Orient (Orientalism). Ljubljana: Institutum studiorum humanitatis, Fakulteta za podiplomski humanistični študij, 1996.
Gorazd Kovačič, MA, is an assistant of Sociology at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana. His main areas of research interest are: political theory, political sociology, theoretical sociology, studies of political ideologies, media studies and Euro-Atlantic integrations.
