The shifting borders of modern Europe?

It is often conceded that several peoples and cultures inhabit the Eu­ropean continent, but it is also believed that there is a single history that articulates European civilization—and therefore European identity.

Muslims as a “Religious Minority” in Europe 171 all, we are left with the conundrum of a space proclaiming itself center and border at the same time.”²²

Andersons witty account highlights the illogicality of recent defini­tions of Europe. Yet it is precisely the politics of civilizational identity that is at work in the discourse of Europe’s extent. For Poles, Czechs, and Hun­garians it is a matter not only of participating in the European common market, but of distancing themselves from a socialist history. "Where Eu­rope’s borders are to be drawn is also a matter of representing what Euro­pean civilization is.

J. G. A. Pocock has spelled out another aspect of this politics of civi­lization: “‘Europe’—both with and without the North America whose ad­dition turns it from ‘Europe’ into ‘Western Civilization’—is once again an empire in the sense of a civilized and stabilized zone which must decide whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent cultures along its borders but not within its system.”²³ In Pocock’s separation between a “civilized zone” and “violent cultures,” we sense that Europe’s borders at once protect and threaten its unity, define its authority and engage with ex­ternal powers that have entered its domain. The “inside” cannot contain the “outside,” violent cultures cannot inhabit a civil one—Europe cannot contain non-Europe. Certainly immigrants in the grip of Islamic passions and ideas cannot live comfortably in the civilized institutions of secular Eu­rope. And yet Europe must try to contain, subdue, or incorporate what lies beyond it, and what consequently comes to be within it. European strate­gic and economic interests cannot be confined to the European continent. Nor its desire to morally redeem the world—although that desire has now seized the extension of Europe we know as the United States of America.

The representation of Europe’s borders is, of course, symbolic. But the signs and symbols have a history. Like the borders of its constituent states, the European Community’s boundaries are inscribed in treaties ac­cording to the conventions of international law—the cumulative result of

22. P. Anderson, “The Europe to Come,” London Review of Books, January 25,1996.

23. J. G. A. Pocock, “Deconstructing Europe,” London Review of Books, De­cember 19,1991. j

earlier narratives of Europe. The status of individual borders as well as the very institution of international law that regulates today’s worldwide soci­ety of nation-states have been constituted by narratives of Europe.

Adarh Watson summarizes the story: “The expansion of Europe was neither uniform nor systematic. It occurred over several centuries, for a number of reasons, and assumed many different forms. Chronologically we can distinguish in retrospect four main phases. First came the medieval crusades into Iberia and round the Baltic. The second phase covered three centuries of competitive maritime exploration and expansion and the par­allel evolution of a European international society. Thirdly in the nine­teenth century the industrial revolution enabled the European Concert to encompass the entire globe and to administer most of it. Lastly in our own century the tide of European dominion ebbed, and was replaced by a world-wide society based on the European model but in which Europeans now play only a modest role.”^[111] What this story misses is that Europe did not simply expand overseas; it made itself through that expansion. It also underemphasizes the role that Europeans—especially those who inhabit the United States—still play in regulating “world-wide society,” a role that is by no means “modest.” The borders of political Europe have varied not only over time, but also according to the European model governing global relations.

Can Muslims be represented in Europe? As members of states that form part of what Watson and others call European international society Muslims have, of course, long been represented (and regulated) in it. But representing Muslims in European liberal democracies is a different mat­ter. It raises a question that does not apply to the international system: how can a European state represent its “minorities”?

European liberal democracy and minority representation

So far I have explored the idea that Islam is excluded from represen­tations of Europe and the narratives through which the representations are constituted. I now approach the question from another angle: What are the possibilities of representing Muslim minorities in secular European states?

I begin with what many readers will consider an outrageous state­ment: The ideology of political representation in liberal democracies makes it difficult if not impossible to represent Muslims as Muslims.

In principle, therefore, nothing should distinguish Muslims from

25. Marie Collins Swabey, The Theory of the Democratic State, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939, pp. 18-20; emphasis in original.

26. See Alain Desrosifcres, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History ofStatis­tical Reasoning, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. non-Muslims as citizens of a European democratic state other than their fewer numbers. But “a minority” is not a purely quantitative concept of the kind stipulated by Swabey, not an outcome of probability theory applied to determine the opinion of a corporate body—“the people as a whole.” The concept of minority arises from a specific Christian history: from the dis­solution of the bond that was formed immediately after the Reformation between the established Church and the early modern state. This notion of minority sits uncomfortably with the secular Enlightenment concept of the abstract citizen.

The post-Reformation doctrine that it was the state’s business to se­cure religious uniformity within the polity—or at least to exclude Dis­senters from important rights—was crucial to the formation of the early modern state. By contrast, the secular Enlightenment theory that the po­litical community consists of an abstract collection of equal citizens was propounded as a criticism of the religious inequality characterizing the ab­solutist state. The most famous document embodying that theory was the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” The theory was criti­cized almost from the moment it was first stated—notably by Burke for the license it gave to destructive passions, and by Marx for disguising bour­geois self-interest. However, the decisive movements that helped to break the alliance of church and state seem to have been religious rather than sec­ular—Tractarianism in England, and Ultramontanism in France and Eu­rope generally. The arguments they deployed most effectively were strictly theological and were aimed at securing the freedom of Christ’s church from the constraints of an earthly power.²⁷ An important consequence of abandoning the total union of church and state was the eventual emer­gence of “minority rights” as a central theme of national politics.

The political inclusion of minorities has meant the acceptance of groups formed by specific (often conflicting) historical narratives, and the embodied memories, feelings, and desires that the narratives have helped to shape. The rights that minorities claim include the right to maintain

27. Joseph Heim, “The Demise of the Confessional State and the Rise of the Idea of a Legitimate Minority,” in J. W. Chapman and A. Wertheimer, eds., Majorities and Minorities, New York: New York University Press, 1990.

Muslims as a "Religious Minority” in Europe 175 and perpetuate themselves as groups. “Minority rights” are not derivable from general theories of citizenship: status is connected to membership in a specific historical group, not in the abstract class of citizens. In that sense minorities are no different from majorities, also a historically constituted group. The feet that they are usually smaller in number is an accidental fea­ture. Minorities may be numerically much larger than the body of equal citizens from whom they are excluded. In the British empire vast numbers of colonial subjects were ruled by a democratic state of citizens far smaller in number through a variety of constitutional devices—which rendered them legally and ideologically minorities.^[112] Because minorities are defined as minorities only in hierarchical structures of power.

Take the case of France. Religious Muslims who reside in France are similar to the Christian (and post-Christian) inhabitants of that country in this regard: each group has constituted itself as a group through its own narratives. These narratives, and the practices they authorize, help to de­fine what is essential to each group. To insist in this context that Muslim groups must not be defined in terms they regard as essential to themselves is in effect to demand that they can and should shed the narratives and practices they take to be necessary to their lives as Muslims. The crucial difference between the “majority” and the “minorities” is, of course, that the majority effectively claims the French state as its national state. In other words, to the extent that “France” embodies the Jacobin narrative, it essen­tially represents the Christian and post-Christian citizens who are consti­tuted by it.

Thus Jean Le Pen’s insistence in the early 1980s on the right of the majority (“the French in France”) to protect its distinctive character against the influence of minority difference is not only an extension of the left slo­gan “the right to difference.” It is a claim that the majority’s right to be French “in their own country” precludes the right of minorities to equal treatment in this regard. “We not only have the right but the duty to de­fend our national personality,” Le Pen declares, “and we too have our right

Vj6 SZOSLIMSM

to be different.”²⁹ Given the existence of a French national personality of which the Jacobin republic—secular and rational—is claimed to be the embodiment, and given that the majority is its representative, Le Pen can argue that only those immigrants able and willing to join them (thereby ceasing to belong to a minority) have the right to remain in France as French citizens. It follows that the “inassimilable” ones (North African Muslims) should be encouraged to leave when their labor is no longer re­quired by France. This may be an intolerant position but it is not illogi­cal.³⁰ To be a French citizen is to reflect, as an individual, the collective per­sonality that was founded in the French Revolution and embodied in the laws and conventional practices of the French Republic, and that is re­counted in its national story. Although that personality may not be re­garded as eternal and unchangeable, it represents a precondition of French citizenship. As even liberals concede, the individual citizen cannot make with the state any contract he or she chooses independently of that per­sonality. In brief, the narratives that define “being French,” and the prac­tices they authorize, cannot be regarded as inessential. French citizens, car­riers of a secular heritage, cannot be de-essentializecL This view, shared by left, center, and right, rejects the notion that the citizen is identical only with himself or herself, that he or she therefore essentially represents an abstract quantity that can be separated from his or her social identity, added up and then divided into groups that have only numerical value. It should not be surprising that Le Pen has been able to push the greater part of the major­ity toward endorsing reforms of the Nationality Code in the direction de-

29. "Nous croyons que la France est notre patrie, que les Fran^ais y ont des devoirs mais aussi des droits supdrieurs & tous autres, et que nous avons non seule- ment le droit mais le devoir de ddfendre notre personnalitd nationale et nous aussi notre droit & la difference” (Le Monde, September 21, 1982, cited in part, and in English translation, by Miriam Feldblum, “Re-Visions of Citizenship: The Politics of Nation and Immigration in France, 1981-1989,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1991, p. 48. My translation of the original is slightly different from Feldblum’s).

30. Feldblum argues that the immigration politics of the extreme right are better described as “nativist” than as “racist,” because the latter term does not explain why many of the nonracist left also share certain crucial elements of the same position. While Feldblum’s study as a whole is valuable for under­standing developments in recent French ideas of national identity, she does not discuss the contradictions inherent in liberal ideas of citizenship. Her use of the pejorative term “nativism” to denote populist denunciation of “foreign influ­ences” deflects her from an adequate consideration of liberal forms of exclu- sivism and intolerance.

Muslims as a "Religious Minority” in Europe 177 manded by the extreme right.³¹ The very existence of the French Jacobin narrative permits the extreme right to occupy the ideological center in con­temporary French immigration politics.

Liberals are generally dismayed at the resurgence of the right, but the notion of primordial intolerance will not explain it. Many critics have ob­served that part of the problem resides in the identification of national boundaries with those of the state. Some of them have sought a solution in the radical claim that all boundaries are indeterminate and ambiguous. William Connolly has recently theorized the matter more perceptively. He asks, pointedly, “whether it is possible to prize the indispensability of boundaries to social life while resisting overdetermined drives to overcode a. particular set.” He goes on to question the assumption that “the bound­aries of a state must correspond to those of a nation, both of these to a fi­nal site of citizen political allegiance, and all three of those to the parame­ters of a democratic ethos.”³²

The problem of representing Islam (or any other “minority” religion) in European liberal democracies cannot be addressed adequately unless such questioning is taken seriously. With America especially in mind, Con­nolly urges a shift in the prevalent idea of pluralism “from a majority na-. tion presiding over numerous minorities in a democratic state to a demo­cratic state of multiple minorities contending and collaborating with a general ethos of forbearance and critical responsiveness.”³³ The decentered pluralism he advocates in place of liberal doctrines of multiculturalism re­quires a continuous readiness to deconstruct historical narratives consti­tuting identities and their boundaries (which, he argues, have a tendency to become sacralized and fundamentalized) in order to “open up space through which care is cultivated for the abundance of life.”³⁴

To what extent and how often historical narratives that constitute identities can be politically deconstructed remains a difficult question. Thus I have been arguing on the one hand that Europe’s historical narra­tive of itself needs to be questioned, and on the other that the historical narratives produced by so-called “minorities” need to be respected. This

31. See Hargreaves, op. cit., pp. 169-76.

32. W. E. Connolly, “Pluralism, Multiculturalism and the Nation-State: Re­thinking the Connections,” Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 1, no. 1,1996, p. 58; emphasis in original.

33. Ibid., p. 61.

34. Ibid., p. 70; emphasis in original.

apparent inconsistency is dictated partly by a liberal concern that time and place should be made for weaker groups within spaces and times com­manded by a dominant one. Muslims in Europe, I have implied, should be able to find institutional representation as a minority in a democratic state that consists only of minorities. For where there are only minorities the possibilities of forging alliances between them will be greater than in a state with a majority presiding over several competing minorities. To what extent the realities of power (especially disparities in wealth and informa­tion) and of habitus obstruct such possibilities is of course an important consideration.

But my comments also reflect an unresolved tension: how can re­spect for individuals be ensured and conditions be fostered that nurture collective “ways of life”? This concern is not merely a matter of “recogni­tion”—of the demand that one should be able to name oneself as a group and be confirmed by others as the bearer of that name, and thereby have one’s anxieties allayed. It is also a matter of embodied memories and prac­tices that are articulated by traditions, and of political institutions through which these traditions can be fully represented. (The constituency repre­sented does not have to be geographically continuous or univocal.) Our at­tention needs to be directed not so much at how identities are negotiated and recognized (for example through exploratory and constructive dia­logue, as Charles Taylor has advocated).³⁵ Rather, the focus should be on what it takes to live particular ways of life continuously, co-operatively, and unselfconsciously.

John Milbanks arguments for decentering are different from Con­nolly’s, and they are linked to a specifically medieval historical experience. His contrast between what he calls “enlightenment simple space” and “gothic complex space” has implications for a Europe of nation-states: “complex space has a certain natural, ontological priority, simple space remains by comparison merely an abstracting, idealizing project.... This is the case be­cause there is no such thing as absolute non-interference; nd action can be perfectly self-contained, but always impinges upon other people, so that spaces will always in some degree ‘complexly’ overlap, jurisdictions always in some measure be Competing, loyalties remain (perhaps benignly) divided.”³⁶, 35. See Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition, ”

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

36. J. Milbank, “Against the Resignations of the Age,” in F. P. McHugh and S. M. Natale, eds., Things Old and New: Catholic Social Teaching Revisited, New York: University Press of America, 1993, p. 19.

One consequence of this fact is that the sovereign state cannot (.never could) contain all the practices, relations, and loyalties of its citizens.

The idea of complex space (in contrast to the discourse of a border­less world³⁷) is in my view a fruitful way of thinking about the intersecting boundaries and heterogeneous activities of individuals as well as of groups related to traditions. Unlike the modern, secular world of nation-states, medieval Christendom and Islam recognized a multiplicity of overlapping bonds and identities. People were not always expected to subject them­selves to one sovereign authority, nor were they themselves sovereign moral subjects.

But in addition to complex space we need to think also of heteroge­neous time: of embodied practices rooted in multiple traditions, of the dif­ferences between horizons of expectation and spaces of experience—dif­ferences that continually dislocate the present from the past, the world experienced from the world anticipated, and call for their revision and re­connection. These simultaneous temporalities embrace both individuals and groups in complexities that imply more than a simple process of secu­lar time.

Complex space and complex time reduce the scope for “national pol­itics’’ with its exclusive boundaries and homogeneous temporality. The question here is not simply one of devolution or of regional integration, the question now being debated in the European Community, but of how overlapping patterns of territory, authority, and time collide with the idea of the imagined national community. The scope of national politics is re­duced in part for the well-known reason that the forces of global capital­ism often undermine attempts to manage the national economy—al­though it is necessary to stress that this is truer of some national economies than of others. And it is reduced also because networks that straddle na­tional boundaries mobilize variable populations for diverse tasks that have unpredictable consequences.

But there is something else: because the temporalities of many tradition-rooted practices (that is, the time each embodied practice re­quires to complete and to perfect Itself, the past into which it reaches, that it reencounters, reimagines, and extends) cannot be translated into the homogeneous time of national politics. The body’s memories, feel­ings, and desires necessarily escape the rational/instrumental; orienta-

37. Kenichi Ohmae, Thè Borderless 'World: Power and Strategy in the Inter­linked Economy, New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

tion of such politics. (This is not properly understood by those well­wishing critics who urge Asian immigrants to abandon their traditions, to regard some of their collective memories and desires as not essentially their own/and to embrace instead the more modern conception of self- determination underlying the European nation-state in which they now live.^[113]) For many Muslim minorities (though by no means all) being Muslim is more than simply belonging to an individual faith whose pri­vate integrity needs to be publicly respected by the force of law, and being able to participate in the public domain as equal citizens. It is more, cer­tainly, than a cultural identity recognized by the liberal democratic state. It is being able to live as autonomous individuals in a collective life that ex­tends beyond national borders. One question for them (although not nec­essarily asked by all of them) is: What kind of conditions can be developed in secular Europe—and beyond—in which everyone may live as a minor­ity among minorities?

I conclude with another question because decisive answers on this subject are difficult to secure. If Europe cannot be articulated in terms of complex space and complex time that allow for multiple ways of life (and not merely multiple identities) to flourish, it may be fated to be no more than the common market of an imperial civilization,^[114] always anxious about (Muslim) exiles within its gates and (Muslim) barbarians beyond. In such an embattled modern space—a space of abundant consumer choice, optional life styles, and slogans about the virtues, of secularism—is it pos­sible for Muslims (or any other immigrants, for that matter) to be repre­sented as themselves?