Islam, Depoliticization and the European Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

A new form of political discourse hostile to Islam has been gaining ground in Europe. Initiated by neo-nationalist parties it appeals to liberal values and is now penetrating mainstream politics. The recent French presidential campaign threw light on the way Centre Right parties vying for government are increasingly instrumentalizing hostility towards Islam to respond to the political crisis triggered by the problem of public debt across the European Union. Critics are approaching this phenomenon through the lens of Foucault's notion of governmentality, questioning the assertion that Muslims cannot integrate in European societies because of their religion and highlighting the failure of European nation states to treat them as citizens and promote their socio-economic inclusion. This perspective yields valuable insights: it shows how the presence of Muslims challenges the belief of European societies in their self-perceived rationality and tolerance, resting on their commitment to secularity as epistemic category. The strident defense of secularism that accompanies Islamophobia is part of the discourse of securitization that characterizes the neo-liberal form of contemporary governmentality and promotes the de-politicization of social problems. The notion of governmentality, however, cannot account fully for the root-cause of Islamophobia: the loss of collective purpose that has triggered a crisis of government and seen the concern for efficient governance to erase the goal of collective self-determination. At heart, Islamophobia constitutes a manifestation of the European states' crisis of democratic legitimacy.

Notes

¹Sam Cherribi, In the House of War: Dutch Islam Observed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

²Ayhan Kaya, ‘Islamophobia as a Form of Governmentality: Unbearable Weightiness of the Politics of Fear’. Malmö Will Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations 1, 2011.

³Luca Mavelli, Europe's Encounter with Islam. The Secular and Post-secular (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).

⁴Pierre Rosanvallon, Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity (trans. Arthur Goldhammer) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

⁵Stefano Bartolini, ‘Political Parties, Ideology and Populism, in the Post-crisis Europe’, paper presented at European Seminar organised by the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), 1011, July 2011, http://europeanseminars.eliamep.gr/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Stefano-Bartolini-Paper.pdf.

⁶Stephen Castles, Heather Booth and Tina Wallace, Here for Good: Western Europe's New Ethnic Minorities (London: Pluto Press, 1984).

⁷TürkülerIsiksel, ‘On Europe's Functional Constitutionalism. Towards a Constitutional Theory of Specialised International Regimes’, Constellations, 19:1 (2012), pp. 102–120.

⁸Ibid., p. 112.

⁹John McCormick, Weber, Habermas, and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social, and Supranational Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Bartolini, op. cit.

¹⁰Cas Mudde, ‘The Populist Radical Right: A Pathological Normalcy’, West European Politics, 33:6 (2010), pp. 1167–1186.

¹¹Yves Mény, ‘De la démocratie en Europe: Old Concepts and New Challenges’, 41:1 (2002), pp. 1–13.

¹²Giandomenico Majone, ‘The Rise of the Regulatory State in Europe’, Journal of Public Policy, 17:3 (1994), pp. 77–101.

¹³Mény, op. cit.

¹⁴Stefano Bartolini, Restructuring Europe. Centre Formation, System Building, and Political Structuring Between the Nation State and the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

¹⁵Nicholas Jabko, Playing the Market: A Political Strategy for Uniting Europe, 1985–2005 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

¹⁶Stephen Wilks, ‘Competition Policy. Towards an Economic Constitution?’ in Helen Wallace, William Wallace and Mark A. Pollack (eds) Policy-making in the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 143–155.

¹⁷Tony Judt, ‘The Social Democratic Moment’ in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), pp. 360–389.

¹⁸Steven Liebfried, ‘Social Policy. Left to the Judges and the Market?’ in Helen Wallace, William Wallace and Mark A. Pollack (eds.) Policy-making in the European Union (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 253–281.

¹⁹Etienne Balibar, ‘Europe's Revolution From Above’, The Guardian, 23 November 2011.

²⁰The term ‘Troïka’ is being used in the media as shorthand for the three agencies involved in the management of the current financial crisis: the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

²¹Yanis Vaoufakis, Thoughts for the Post-2008 World Blog: ‘Never Bailed Out: Europe's Ants and Grasshoppers Revisited’, 2011, http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2011/12/15/never-bailed-out-europes-ants-and-grasshoppers-revisited.

²²Elisabetta Croci Angelina and and Francesco Farina, ‘Real Divergence Across Europe and the Limits of EMU Macroeconomic Governance’ in Pompeo Della Posta, and Leila Talani (eds) Europe and the Financial Crisis (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), pp. 46–90.

²³Fritz Scharpf, ‘Monetary Union, Fiscal Crisis and the Preemption of Democracy’, London School of Economics Europe in Question Series, 2011, pp. 34–37.

²⁴Jürgen Habermas, ‘Bringing the Integration of Citizens into Line with the Integration of States’, The European Law Journal, 18:4 (2012), pp. 485–488.

²⁵Scharpf, op. cit., pp. 34–37.

²⁶‘On the March. Populist Anti-immigration Parties are Performing Strongly Across Northern Europe’, The Economist, 17 March 2011.

²⁷‘Nicolas Sarkozy Joins David Cameron and Angela Merkel View that Multiculturalism has Failed’, The Daily Mail, 11 February 2011.

²⁸Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

²⁹André Gingrich and Marcus Banks, Neo-nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives From Social Anthropology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).

³⁰Hagen Schulz-Forberg and Bo Stråth, The Political History of European Integration: The Hypocrisy of Democracy-Through-Market (New York: Routledge, 2010). This is the context within which the ‘domophilia’ discussed by Ahmad (this issue, pp. 234–252) was reactivated, in tandem with European cosmopolitanism.

³¹Hans-Georg Betz, Radical Right-wing Populism in Western Europe (New York: St Martin's Press, 1994).

³²Georgios Karyoti, ‘The Fallacy of Securitizing Migration: Elite Rationality and Unintended Consequences’ in G. Lazaridis (ed.) Security, Insecurity and Migration in Europe (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), p. 24.

³³The influence of the securitization paradigm over discussions of Muslims in Europe appears clearly in the identification of minarets with rockets by Barbara Steinemann of the Swiss SVP/UDC party as discussed by Douglas Pratt in this issue (pp. 193–207).

³⁴Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 2009); Ayhan Kaya, Islam, Migration and Integration: The Age of Securitisation (London: Palgrave, 2009).

³⁵Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000). See also Bo Stråth, ‘A European Identity: To the Historical Limits of a Concept’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4:5 (2002), pp. 387–401.

³⁶Ayhan Kaya, ‘Islamophobia as a Form of Governmentality’, p. 6. See the introduction to this issue for an overview of the notion.

³⁷Kaya, Islam, Migration and Integration, pp. 15–24.

³⁸‘French Minister's Controversial Remarks an Election “Stunt”’, France 24 International News, 6 March 2012, http://www.france24.com/en/20120207-france-muslims-target-unequal-clash-civilisations-elections-islam-gueant.

³⁹Official statistics on religious affiliation being unconstitutional, the number of practising Muslims living in France can only be estimated as being between 6 and 8.5 per cent of the population (3.5 to 5 million, 2 possessing citizenship). ‘Islam in France’, Euro-Islam Info, Paris, 18 December 2012, http://www.euro-islam.info/country-profiles/france/.

⁴⁰Rawi Abdelal, Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 58–65.

⁴¹‘La Participation électorale depuis 1815’, Assemblée Nationale, 2012, http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/suffrage_universel/suffrage-participation.asp.

⁴²European elections database, Norwegian Social Sciences Database, http://www.nsd.uib.no/european_election_database/country/france/.

⁴³Florence Haegel, ‘Nicolas Sarkozy a-t-il radicalisé la droite française? Changements idéologiques et étiquettages politiques’, French Politics, Culture & Society, 29:3, pp. 63–77.

⁴⁴‘Un expert de l'ONU fustige le ministère de l’éducation', Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 June 2007.

⁴⁵‘La Burqa, une prison ambulante’, Libération, 17 June 2009. See also Natalie J. Doyle, ‘Lessons from France: Popularist Anxiety and Veiled Fears of Islam’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 22:4 (2011), pp. 475–489.

⁴⁶‘Burqa Ban Passes French Lower House Overwhelmingly’, CNN, 13 July 2010, http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/07/13/france.burqa.ban/index.html. See Gould on this discussion (this issue, pp. 173–192) for a more detailed discussion of the ‘Burka ban’ and its echoes in other European countries.

⁴⁷Olivier Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam (trans. G. Holoch) (Chichester, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007).

⁴⁸The headscarf ban was the only one of the recommendations by the Stasi Commission not endorsed unanimously. See Natalie J. Doyle, op. cit. As argued there is in fact no clear social consensus on the norms invoked under the banner of laïcité.

⁴⁹Talal Asad, ‘French Secularism and the “Islamic Veil Affair”’, The Hedgehog Review, 8:1–2 (2006), pp. 93–106.

⁵⁰Ibid., p. 106.

⁵¹This view is endorsed by Mayanthi Fernando in ‘Reconfiguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the Limits of Secular Law and Public Discourse in France’, American Ethnologist, 37:1 (2010), p. 22.

⁵²Roy, op. cit.

⁵³Fernando, op. cit., p. 23.

⁵⁴See Farhad Khosrokhavar, L'Islam dans les prisons (Paris: Balland, 2004); James A. Beckford, Danièle Joly and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Muslims in Prison: Challenge and Change in Britain and France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). In this issue, see Khosrokhavar (pp. 284–306) and Andre and Shandon-Harris's discussion of the violent radicalization of Mohammed Mera (pp. 307–319).

⁵⁵Kaya, op. cit.

⁵⁶Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

⁵⁷Brown's discussion of governmentality touches upon some limitations of Foucault's discussion of the modern state but space constraints prevent me from addressing her analysis's nuances. I discuss these limitations briefly in my concluding remarks.

⁵⁸Unpublished seminars. See introductory reflection in Marcel Gauchet, La Démocratie: D'une crise à l'autre (Paris: Cécile Defaut, 2007).

⁵⁹Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986).

⁶⁰See Natalie J. Doyle, ‘Autonomy and Modern Liberal Democracy: From Castoriadis to Gauchet’, European Journal of Social Theory, 15:3 (2012), pp. 331–347.

⁶¹Elise S. Brezis, ‘Globalisation and the Emergence of a Transnational Elite’, UNU – WIDER Working Paper No. 2010/05, 2010.

⁶²See footnote 30 and Daniele Archibugi and David Held (eds.) Cosmopolitan Democracy. An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

⁶³John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). McCormick advocates a return to a Machiavellian republicanism characterised by a sharp awareness of the problem of domination.

⁶⁴Mavelli, op. cit.

⁶⁵For a most sustained discussion of the concept of immunity, see Salvatore in this issue, pp. 253–264.

⁶⁶Mavelli also discusses Durkheim's belief in the need for a secular transcendence of the state. Relying only on one short text by Durkheim and on secondary literature, this analysis does not account for the complexity of Durkheim's sociology. Suffice it to say that this analysis is derived from the critique of the neo-Kantian postulates of early French elite republicanism, extended by Foucault, which failed to account for Durkheim's insights into the political. See the introduction by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith to the Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 2005) and Bernard Lacroix, Durkheim et le Politique (Paris: Fondation des Sciences de l'Homme and Montréal: Presses Universitaires de Montréal, 1981).

⁶⁷Jürgen Habermas, ‘Three Normative Models of Democracy’, Constellations, 1:1 (1994), pp. 1–10.

⁶⁸Pope Benedict XVI, Jürgen Habermas and Forian Schuller, The Dialectics of Secularisation (San Francisco: St Ignatius Press, 2006). For a discussion of the persistent role of Christianity in the discourse of European identity in Denmark and Germany, see Sedgwick and Gould in this issue, pp. 208–233 and pp. 173–192.

⁶⁹Jan-Werner Müller, Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

⁷⁰Julien Barroche, État, libéralisme et christianisme. Critique de la subsidiarité européenne (Paris, Dalloz, 2012).

⁷¹Marcel Gauchet, ‘La nouvelle Europe’ in La Condition politique (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), pp. 494–504. As already noted, it goes without saying that this pacification was only intra-European.

⁷²Reinhardt Koselleck, Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988).

⁷³Like Koselleck, John P. McCormick (op. cit.) sees this tradition as originating in the struggle of the French Enlightenment with monarchical absolutism.

⁷⁴Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 32–50; Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). See also Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

⁷⁵Brian C. J. Singer and Lorna Weir, ‘Sovereignty, Governance and the Political: The Problematic of Foucault’, Thesis Eleven, 94 (2008), pp. 49–71.

⁷⁶Claude Lefort, ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-political?’ in David Macey (ed. and trans.) Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 213–255.

⁷⁷Mavelli, op. cit.

⁷⁸Andreas Kalyvas, ‘Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power’, Constellations, 12:2 (2005), pp. 223–244.