Civic inclusion for permanent minorities: thinking through the politics of “ghetto” and “separatism” laws

ABSTRACT

Over the past twenty years, prominent theorists of citizenship envisaged cosmopolitan openings, the re-making of national identity, and progressive multicultural change. The paper explores perspectives on civic inclusion in Kymlicka's Multicultural Odysseys, Soysal's Limits of Citizenship, and Benhabib's Another Cosmopolitanism. It explores this work in light of two recent political episodes, the formulation of an “anti-separatism” law in France and “anti-ghetto” policies in Denmark. The paper contrast tendencies that theorists of inclusive citizenship envisage with the denial of associational rights in France and the assertion of racial logics in Denmark. It illustrates blinds spots in prominent accounts of civic inclusion, in particular the reliance on a prescriptive account of minority and post-migrant agency, a disembodied logic of human rights, and limited regard for status differentials on the inside of citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• political theory
• multiculturalism
• cosmopolitanism
• Denmark
• France

Introduction

At their optimistic peak, prominent theories of citizenship envisaged cosmopolitan openings, the re-making of national identity, and progressive multicultural change. For Western Europe, theorists of post-nationality anticipated “a more universalistic model of membership” that would transform access to rights and experiences of national belonging (Soysal 1994, 8). Immigrant and minority populations were to participate in and benefit from “democratic iterations” (Benhabib 2006) that would translate normative universals into national idioms and enhance the space for “difference”. Others saw tendencies towards multicultural “citizenization”, based on virtuous circle of liberal democratic accommodation, human rights diffusion and assertive minority claims-making (Kymlicka 2007). A sweeping normative drift would interact with post-migrant mobilization to produce new civic openings within and beyond the nation state.

Recent work strikes a more careful balance in its assessment of movement power, ambivalences of civicness and ethno-racial legacies (e.g. Goodman 2014; Mouritsen, Kriegbaum Jensen, and Larin 2019; Mondon and Winter 2020). Flawed assumptions around civic integration have been scrutinized (Kochenov 2019; Schinkel 2017). It no longer appears entirely self-evident that the politics of citizenship, insofar as it references the language of universal human rights, only needs to be channelled and expanded to benefit groups that face stigma and discrimination. Yet assumptions about the direction of inclusionary change that became influential in the 1990s and early 2000s have received limited retrospective scrutiny. The paper examines perspectives on civic inclusion – focusing on contributions by Kymlicka, Soysal and Benhabib – with an interest in the logic of political change at work in such accounts. It does so from the vantage point of two limit cases that point towards the hardening edge of citizenship politics in Western Europe.

1. In October 2020, the French President Macron (speech in Mureaux, Élysée 2020) announced new legal initiatives against “separatism”. His speech preceded the killing of Samuel Paty by a young Muslim radical, an incident that further strengthened the rationale for addressing “Islamist separatism”. In July 2021, the French Assemblée Nationale (2021) adopted a new legislative package to “reinforce respect for the principles of the Republic”, widely referred to as loi contre le séparatisme. The law establishes sweeping powers for the state to monitor and curtail civil society. It empowers ministerial authorities and security services to crack down on groups deemed hostile to republican values. The dissolution of the anti-discrimination organization Collectif contre l’Islamophobie (CCIF) for its “separatist” posture (Ministère de l’Intérieur 2020) preceded the implementation of the law but illustrates its thrust.

2. Danish “ghetto initiatives” identify neighbourhoods for sweeping policy intervention based on criteria that combine joblessness, crime rates, educational attainment and ethnic background, distinguishing between residents’ “Western” and “non-Western” origin.¹, ² Measures towards “tough ghettos” – neighbourhoods that remain in “ghetto”-measures for multiple years – include the eviction of tenants, the demolition of municipal housing stock and stiffened criminal penalties. Denmark’s new Social Democratic government set out to drop “ghetto”-term (Indenrigs Og Boligministeriet 2021), though it remains enshrined in law and demographic practice, and the application of ethno-racial criteria in the implementation of the policy has been stiffened.

The paper examines anti-separatism and anti-ghetto policy to contrast tendencies that theorists of inclusive citizenship envisage with the denial of associational rights in France and the assertion of racial logics in Denmark. It explores the two policy frameworks not as “test cases” but as illustrations of exclusionary policy that channels civic ideas and expresses universalist aspirations. It considers both sets of measures, as well as their justification and contestation, to interrogate tendencies of civic policy-making and dilemmas of movement agency that prominent theorists of inclusive citizenship seemingly failed to grasp. I argue that this failure results from the reliance on a prescriptive account of post-migrant agency and on a disembodied logic of human rights and that it shows lack of concern for status differentials on the inside of citizenship.

In a first step, the paper considers three positions – multicultural citizenization, post-national citizenship and cosmopolitanism – based on a selective review of Kymlicka’s (2007) Multicultural Odysseys, Soysal’s (1994) Limits of Citizenship, and Benhabib’s (2006) Another Cosmopolitanism. Reworking Benhabib’s terminology, the paper suggests that anti-separatism and anti-ghetto policy, which it explores in a second step, showcase the role of exclusionary iterations that generate more stringent requirements of national belonging, fortify systems of ethnic-racial inequality and shrink the space for minority claims-making. The paper provides a retrospective evaluation of the political dynamics towards civic inclusion that multicultural, post-national and cosmopolitan theorists envisaged. To different degrees, this work still needs to grapple with its failure to account for civic ideas and practices that don’t set post-migrant citizens on a path towards civic inclusion but that position them as “permanent minorities” (Mamdani 2020).

The theory of inclusive citizenship

Theories of inclusive citizenship envisage the inclusion of excluded outsiders, the empowerment of rightless insiders and the deepening of either groups’ experience of belonging and access to rights over time. Generally speaking, a “more perfect union” is on the horizon, either because of existing historical trajectories towards inclusion or as an objective for nascent social-political movements to enact. In some accounts, inclusion is pushed forward by material struggles for equality. Others highlight normative potentials and constitutional commitments that float above movement agency and day-to-day politics yet play an important role in securing minority rights and accommodations. The achievement of civic inclusion is a distinct possibility that hinges on finely calibrated processes in which normative, political and sociological dynamics create inclusive pressures that implicate governments, public spheres, and ultimately societies as a whole.

For the accounts of inclusive citizenship considered in the following, such dynamics are crucially important. Yet the logic of change that citizenship theorists envisage often remains intangible, based on suppositions about liberal and cosmopolitan progress, the steady diffusion of human rights norms and the salutary role of social movement that seize openings and enact existing normative scripts. Kymlicka (2007, 109) acknowledges that inclusive citizenization – a term explored in more detail below – is “not self-enacting”, though he doesn’t shed much light on the circumstances of normative progress and moral learning that create opportunities for political actors to seize, or when such attempts fail. Other contributions provide a closer account of movement agency and ethno-cultural claims-making but face additional problems. When actual claims for inclusion don’t correspond to assumptions or follow a given (cosmopolitan or post-national) script, they are processed as aberrant or problematic (e.g. Soysal 1994, 114; Benhabib 2006, 57). The reference to normative potentials that obtain a force of their own, then, supersedes concern for concrete struggles and contradictory dynamics of political change. The three positions that the following examines – selected from each authors’ broader body of work, which the paper doesn’t examine comprehensively – reflect these and other problematic assumptions about inclusionary change.

Multicultural citizenization

What produces multicultural change is a question different versions of multicultural theory resolve differently. Hall (2000) sees a “multicultural drift” as the contingent outcome of everyday encounters and cultural production. Modood (2013) foregrounds “political struggles”. In Multicultural Odysseus, his attempt to trace the global diffusion of multicultural norms, Kymlicka (2007) develops an account of change in which normative commitments challenge expectations of ethno-cultural uniformity and exert a pull on exclusionary laws, institutions and social practices. The main lines of his broader contribution are well-known, and of interest here is only Kymlicka’s appeal to a normative background, which interacts with policy and the agency of social movements to produce multicultural openings. Kymlicka emphasizes large-scale tendencies of change over and above the minutiae of domestic politics and identifies potentials and obstacles: on the one hand, he acknowledges “factors that have made the trend towards the greater accommodation of ethnocultural diversity possible, and perhaps even inevitable, in the West” (2007, 87); on the other hand, he acknowledges the fragility of achievements and the possibility of reversals (e.g. 2007, 22, 109, 296)

Kymlicka’s treatment of minority agency and claims-making in this (admittedly globally focused) account is perfunctory, and the political, legal and logistical preconditions for successful minority mobilization don’t receive much attention. He suggests that modern states’ acknowledgment of human rights has “the inevitable result […] to legitimize attempts by ethnocultural groups to mobilize politically to claim these rights” (Kymlicka 2007, 43). The role of claims-making and movement mobilizations for equal rights seems unresolved: does it play an essential role in pushing states towards making accommodations or does it need to be viewed, as Kymlicka (2007, 87) also seems to suggest, primarily as an indicator of liberal states’ readiness to endure the risk of “ethnic politics”?

There are gaps in Kymlicka’s account the post-war Human Rights revolution in the West and the process of citizenization that this has produced. Citizenization, a term Kymlicka (2007, 96–97, also 2012, 2013) borrows from Tully (2001), entails the transformation of “vertical relationships between minorities and the state” (2012, 6). Essential here is the desire “not to suppress […] differential claims, but rather to filter and frame them through the language of human rights, civil liberties, and democratic accountability” (2007, 96). Yet despite some suggestions to the contrary, it does appear as if an invisible hand pushes (Western) citizenship towards inclusion. Political struggles for equality and civic inclusion, though acknowledged, disappear from view in favour of “liberal expectancy” (2007, 94) – the multicultural “gamble” that liberal acculturation will make ethno-cultural minorities easier to accommodate. With regards to immigrant multiculturalism, and the appropriate genre of “poly-ethnic rights” (Kymlicka 1995), this account of change seems to rest on the hope that large-scale normative learning among liberal states will facilitate the civic inclusion of ethno-cultural minorities that present themselves in a liberal light.

Postnationality

Different aspects of the post-national position have been scrutinized elsewhere (e.g. Hansen 2009; Koopmans 2012). Rather than their predictive achievements, the concern here is with the logic of change that Yasemin Soysal proposes. Soysal (1994, 137) envisages the “reconfiguration of citizenship from a more particularistic one based on nationhood to a more universalistic one based on personhood”. She suggests that the appeal to human rights, which have become gradually more effective, indicates “a more universalistic model of membership and rights comes to contest the exclusive model of citizenship anchored in national sovereignty” (1994, 8). The argument is that an incipient post-national condition is enshrined in human rights conventions that guide state practice and re-make liberal-democratic citizenship. Soysal draws attention to normative potentials – a “liberal transformation of citizenship [that] unfolded in stages” (Soysal 2021, 1520) – which permeate liberal-democratic state practice and re-structure the political space for minority actors.³

The political drivers that make this transformation possible, or that explain why it hasn’t been achieved as envisaged, remain largely unexplored. In Soysal’s work, it often appears that the mere availability of human rights as discursive universals, and their “continual invocation” (1994, 7) by claims-making actors, suffices for making citizenship inclusive. The presence of such universals receives considerable attention, certainly more than the actual content of minority claims or the contexts in which they are articulated and received.

The “universalizing moment” that Soysal envisages entails the transformation of the political identity of minority claimants, in particular of ethno-religious actors that invoke universal rights. Their identities appear malleable and are, it appears, up for grabs. As Soysal (1994, 161) puts it, “particularistic identities are transformed into expressive modes of core humanness, thus acquiring universal currency”. In more concrete terms, by presenting requests and grievances in the language of rights,

Islamic groups saturate the public with the private, and infuse the public realm with “competing moral claims” and “inharmonious” difference. Hence, the public expression and mobilization of their identities inevitably appear as a threat to civil society. (Soysal 1997, 518)

When Muslims enter the scene as claimants (as they do in the later parts of Soysal’s Limits of Citizenship), attention turns away from the transformation of political spheres to accommodate religious freedom and associational rights. Instead, the reconfiguration of claimants’ ethno-religious identities appears to become the more pressing concern. During the 1990s, theorists of post-nationality expressed the hopeful certainty that human rights would create new potentials beyond the nation state. This hope coincided with the requirement for ethno-religious claimants to subject themselves to a process of universalization, presented as a requirement of universal reason, that would turn them into fundamentally different actors. The prospects for immigrant multiculturalism that Kymlicka envisages rely, at least in parts, on the liberal self-presentation of immigrant claimants. For Soysal, this posture is burdened by further expectations: the requirement for post-migrant actors to mirror an incipient post-national condition and showcase the transformation of their particularist selves.

Cosmopolitanism

Benhabib’s democratic cosmopolitanism points towards emerging human rights regimes and (also) sees “new postnational reconfigurations of sovereignty” (2006, 31). Benhabib disavows determinism at the level of political outcomes (2006, 50), yet she charts a developmental course for subjects to become “rights-bearing not only in virtue of their citizenship within states but in the first place in virtue of their humanity” (2006, 36).

Benhabib (2006, 49) envisages “democratic will-formation processes through argument, contestation, revision and rejection”. The driving force for her are “democratic iterations”, conceived as an insertion of universality (more specifically: rights-claims that invoke universal norms) into local, contextual circumstances where they are appropriated by minority actors and responded to by democratic majorities.

Every iteration involves making sense of an authoritative original in a new and different context. The antecedent thereby is reposited and resignified via subsequent usages and references. Meaning is enhanced and transformed; conversely, when the creative appropriation of that authoritative original ceases to have meaning for us, then the original loses its authority upon us as well. (Benhabib 2006, 38)

Democratic iterations, then, delineate a space of agency for movements actors whose claims push polities towards inclusive citizenship and cosmopolitan progress. It is interesting to see that participation in such processes of change, as the examples that Benhabib uses in Another Cosmpolitanism suggest, is conditional and burdened by expectations that require scrutiny.

The French affaires du foulard, sorting through the belonging of hijab-wearing citizens to the republic, receive Benhabib’s particular attention. Exchanges about Muslim religious dress illustrate the potential of democratic iterations, not as an opportunity to revise the framework of laïcité, but as instances where Muslim actors may insert their claims into this framework and justify their ethno-religious identity in the public sphere. Revisiting one of the earliest instances of recurrent debates about religious dress, Benhabib considers the rights-claims by teenage Muslim girls in Creil as follows:

[T]he girls themselves and their supporters, in the Muslim community and elsewhere, have to learn to give a justification of their actions with “good reasons in the public sphere”. In claiming respect and equal treatment for their religious belief, they have to clarify how they intend to treat the beliefs of others from different religions, and how, in effect, they would institutionalize the separation of religion and the state within Islamic tradition. (2006, 57)

It is not the point here to decide if such expectations are reasonable or how three Muslim teenagers during the initial affaires du foulard in 1989, much like their successors today, could satisfy the scrutiny that Benhabib envisages: by what concrete acts, promises or performances? It appears that the freedom that democratic iterations intimate is immediately limited by behavioural expectations and the performative burden to maintain a universalist posture. What remains if claimants’ performances don’t satisfy such burdens is exasperation that “[w]e have to live with the otherness of others whose ways of being may be deeply threatening to our own” (Benhabib 2006, 60).

The summary of citizenship theories is selective and focuses, perhaps unduly, on limitations and gaps in their respective account of political change. Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism struggles to reconcile an emphasis on normative background conditions with an appreciation for social movement agency and contingent outcomes. Post-national and cosmopolitan theories reduce post-migrant and minority claimants to conduits for their universalist scripts. More specifically, Soysal and Benhabib profess concern for the democratic mobilization of minority actors yet situate such agency within a narrow horizon of normative expectations and desirable outcomes. Both show little regard for how such expectations correspond with the ongoing scrutiny and surveillance that minority groups face for the adequacy of their normative posture or against the suspicion that Muslims, for example, inevitably dissemble as they express civic commitments and invoke human rights. They also fail to acknowledge the possibility of exclusionary iterations, that is, the democratic articulation of more perfectionist requirements of civic belonging, which are couched in universalist terms and push national policy frameworks towards ever more radical practices of exclusion. The following considers recent public policy in France and Denmark to develop this argument and provide material for a retrospective evaluation of the positions outlined above.

Islamophobia killed Samuel Paty

Anxiety about Islam, which French policy makers invoke and manufacture, underpins recurring attempts to “reinforce” republican values. The appeal to laïcité, as a normative consensus threatened by Muslim religious practice, has been a feature of French political life for more than two decades (Bowen 2010; Fernando 2014).⁴ The killing of Samuel Paty by a young Muslim radical on 16 October 2020 was processed accordingly and led to further administrative and legal changes. This now extends to the regulation of civil society organizations and attempts to curtail the operation of groups suspected of séparatisme or communautarisme, including new initiatives to monitor places of Muslim worship (Assemblée Nationale 2021).

Deliberations around the “anti-separatism law” proceed in a context of substantial far-right pressure, with dark threats by military figures about the dissolution of the republic.⁵ During the 2022 presidential campaign, the stable presence of the Front National (FN), rebranded as Rassemblement National, seemed briefly overshadowed by the insurgent candidacy of Eric Zemmour, seeking to outmanoeuvre FN’s Le Pen with more radical anti-Muslim manifesto commitments.⁶ Attempts to sharpen the contours of laïcité in relation to the notion of Islamic "separatism", and to own its meaning, equally occur within the political centre, where members of Emmanuel Macrońs ministerial team seek to enhance their profile by launching competing initiatives to shore up the secular framework (Le Monde 2021).

The horizon of republican values, with its “near magical functions” (Révauger 2006, 117), is a rich space for the identification of threats, enemies and outsiders. Les valeurs de la république are the primary site for the articulation of universal aspirations of difference-blind equality. Indeed, it is their democratic re-iteration that Benhabib has in mind as she anticipates how democratic iterations could advance the rights and religious freedoms of French Muslims. Yet it is evidently problematic to consider invocations of laïcité, which Bowen (2006, 33) characterizes as “series of debates, laws, and multiple efforts to assert claims over public space” primarily for their inclusionary potentials. The new loi contre le séparatisme, detailed in the following, points in a different direction.

Now adopted, the policy entails new requirement for civil society organization and religious groups, extends executive powers to dissolve undesired organizations, creates a new offence of “separatism” and enhances oversight of non-state education.⁷ It was justified to combat an “insidious, powerful, communitarian entryism (that) is slowly destroying the foundations of our society” (Assemblée Nationale 2021); a threat that was “mostly Islamist in inspiration”. It targets a “conscious, theorized, politico-religious political project”, which attacks republican values and “sets in motion a separatist dynamic which aims at division”. The idea that internal divisions need to be countered from a position of strength is the dominant theme. Launching the initiative, Macron addressed the “a methodical organization to contravene the laws of the Republic and create a parallel order, erect other values, develop another organization of society, separatist at first, but whose final goal is to take control” (Élysée 2020).

Accordingly, the French government seeks to increase pressure on groups that are suspect of establishing “parallel orders” and undermining republican values. The thickened conception of laïcité that it espouses underpins a new policy objective to monitor civil society. Organizations come in for scrutiny not just for their actions but also for their requisite posture and for the content of their claims-making.

In practice, this implies an assault on a specific genre of rights-claims, notably those that address infringements on Muslim religious freedom. Mainstream bodies without much record of controversy, including the Observatoire de la laïcité⁸ or the Ligue de droits de l’homme, have been singled out for their overly lenient posture towards Muslim rights-claims. Rhetoric that was previously part of the far-right, such the notion of “Islamo-leftism”, have been taken up by prominent government actors (Delaporte 2021).

Yet Muslim representative bodies and civil society organizations face particular pressure and new legal constraints. Macron’s initial comments on the anti-separatism framework attracted attention for his comments on Islam as a religion in “crisis” and for his objective “to build a form of Islam in our country that is compatible with Enlightenment values” (Macron’s speech in Mureaux in Le Monde 2020). He singled out the training of French imams and the role Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM), an umbrella body of mosques and Muslim congregations that was set up to facilitate state relations with organized Islam (Bowen 2006, 62). Macron highlighted the principled independence of the body while maintaining that “we are putting enormous pressure on them”. The response from CFCM leadership was further complicated by its coincidence with denunciations of Macron’s claims by the Turkish President, Tayyip Erdogan. The body provided the following statement to affiliated imams and suggested it to be read out during Friday prayer:

No! We Muslims are not persecuted in France. We are full citizens in our country. Like all our fellow citizens, we have guaranteed rights and duties to fulfil. […] Those who denounce an alleged Islamophobia […] risk fuelling and exacerbating hatred against our country and our fellow citizens. (CFCM 2020)

In subsequent statements, the CFCM leadership sought to meet the threshold that Macron had set. This required not just an endorsement of republican values but the rejection of “grievance politics” and of the notion that French Muslims, beyond acts of misguided individuals, were victims of discrimination. The CFCM outlined its commitments in a charter that responded to Macron’s pressure and closely approximated the presidential terminology by endorsing “laïcité as a principle which permits each citizen to believe, or not to believe, and to practice the religion of his or her choice and to change religions” (CFCM 2021). Not all associations within the CFCM’s remit decided to sign up to this charter. It reveals, as Dhume and Lorcerie (2021) suggest, that “it is expected from French imams that they absolutely refrain from criticizing the State, its policies, and its agents”.

Civil society organizations that do not meet such anti-separatist requirements and highlight systemic and institutional realities of disadvantage for French Muslims (and the reality of structural racism more generally) experience heightened pressure. The case of the Collective contre l’islamophobie en France (CCIF), an organization with the objective to document discrimination and put pressure on public institutions, is instructive here. In the aftermath of the killing of Samuel Paty, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, set out to dissolve CCIF by decree.⁹

The justification for the dissolution was based on provisions in the French Internal Security Law (L212-1). The law envisages executive powers to dissolve associations and religious groups in a number of scenarios, among which the government invoked an organization’s (6) “incitement to hatred” against groups defined by a number of protected characteristics and (7) “incitement to terrorist acts”.¹⁰ CIIF’s assertive, yet consistently peaceful, advocacy against institutional Islamophobia doesn’t appear to meet either standard, and the government’s rationale for the dissolution is based on the accusation that

by the publication of its [CCIF’s] own statistics or its denunciations, [it delivers] a message that passes off as Islamophobic any act or event that affects people of Muslim faith, not hesitating, in certain cases, to disguise the truth and thereby create in the public a permanent suspicion of religious persecution likely to stir up hatred, violence or discrimination (Ministère de l'Intérieur 2020)¹¹

Administrative courts have followed this rationale and upheld CIIF’s dissolution, although the organization has been provisionally re-established in Brussels. The episode illustrates the boundaries the French state imposes on the mobilization against discrimination and on claims-making for religious and associational rights. References to Islamophobia are increasingly registered as anti-secular, separatist propositions and as a form of hate speech. Caroline Fourest, a prominent feminist and anti-Islam activist, launched the recently convened Etats Généraux de la Laïcité, with the claim that “it was the word Islamophobia that had killed Samuel Paty”.¹²

The previous account is not more than a snapshot of longer-term transformations of the republican posture towards claims for religious equality and non-discrimination. It illustrates how ongoing democratic deliberations of republican principles, rather than facilitating civic inclusion, shrink the space for “difference”. The scope for Muslim claimants to inscribe their expectations and experiences into this horizon is evidently limited.

In the ghetto

The exclusionary drift of Danish policy towards refugees, immigrants and minority-background citizens attracts new attention (Salo and Rydgren 2021; Seemann 2021). Of particular interest in this section are symbolic resources of Danishness and their invocation in the country’s recent policy drift, with a focus on recent “ghetto”-initiatives.¹³ Perfectionist ideas of liberal togetherness play a central role as prerequisites for equality and civility in the Danish national community. The historical context is Denmark’s modernization towards a new form of vernacular liberalism in the later nineteenth century, associated with Grundtvig’s political and pedagogic contributions (Hall, Korsgaard, and Pedersen 2015). Upon its defeat by expansionist Prussia, the internal bonds of Danishness, especially the ties among peasants and urban dwellers, required revision. This was met with a push towards cultural nation-building, which Grundtvig ([1848], cited in Böss 2015, 80) outlined as the

transition to a new order of things, far freer, more in harmony with the people [folkelig] and more human than we have seen for a long time, so that we may expect as genuine and blissful a peace as can be found in the realms of this world.

This “enlightened peoplehood” (Böss 2015, 88) emphasized civic emancipation and new horizontal ties, grounded in a “distinctive and primordial collective personality which has a name, unique origins, history, culture, homeland, and social and political practices” (Hutchinson 1999, 394). For Anthony Smith (2015, 70), this was moment that had the “effect of turning Danes ‘inwards’, making them focus on the nature of the cultural, historical, and social bond of mutual obligation that held them together”.

Borevi (2017, 369) points towards the “unity of land, country, God, and people (folk)”. Although such principles are often presented as civic, she suggests, they reflect “pre-existing, settled ideas about Danishness” (2017, 377). Pertaining to the welfare state, this means that “social cohesion and cultural homogeneity are perceived to be [its] causal prior” (379). Mouritsen (2013, 377) similarly points here to the “value of sameness” that is considered “foundational of trust and of the welfare state”. Liberal values are brought into view as distinctively Danish and their acquisition requires “familiarity with and loyalty towards a deeper Danish culture that includes language and history” (Mouritsen and Olsen 2013, 692).

More than the content of this “national identity-infused citizenship approach” (Mouritsen and Olsen 2013, 695–696), it is the reiteration of stringent conditions for belonging that is of interest here. Danish urban policy towards so-called ghettos targets a perceived nexus of criminality, deprivation and religious otherness that offends the perfectionist consensus and requires heavy-handed intervention. The policy to regulate and dismantle “ghettos” had been introduced by the previous centre-right coalition government, which relied on parliamentary support of the far-right Dansk Folkeparti. The centre-left coalition that assumed power in 2019 expressed concern over the “ghetto” label but kept measures in place and even sharpened their implementation.

The provisions of the “anti-ghetto” draw on the statistical targeting of neighbourhoods for criteria that combine joblessness, crimes rates, educational attainment and ethnic background – distinguishing between “Western” and “non-Western” origins.¹⁴ Where “non-Western” demography exceeds a 50 per cent threshold, government designates “vulnerable areas” as “ghettos” or “hard ghettoes”, which then entails a legal requirement for sweeping interventions. These include evictions, the obligatory sale of municipal housing to private providers, the demolition of residential blocks to reduce housing supply, compulsory enrolment of children in Danish-language day-care and higher penalties for a range of petty and more serious crimes in the designated areas.¹⁵ The new Social Democratic government promised to step away from the “ghetto”-label, though it remains widely used and continues to be enshrined in law and demographic practice. The new government reduced the threshold at which neighbourhoods would be considered candidates for intervention to the proportion of 30 per cent “non-Western” residents.

The legal framework, based on the proposal “ghettos must be eradicated” (Rasmussen cited in Regeringen 2018), follows the claim that “far too many immigrants and descendants have ended up without connection to the surrounding society”. It invokes the defence of a Danish normative-civic horizon:

We have a group of citizens who have not taken Danish norms and values to heart. Where women are seen as less worth than men. Where social control and lack of gender equality set narrow limits for the individual’s free development. (Regeringen 2018)

This defence requires “cracking down on those who abuse our hospitality, challenge our way of life and put tolerance at risk”. The method for demarcating potential abusers invokes ethno-cultural and racial belonging, though the value horizon of Danishness allows officials to deflect from the “ghetto”-policy’s ethno-racial thrust. Prime Minister Frederiksen’s (cited in Statsministeriet 2020) justification for the continuation of the law references the struggle “between us who want security, decency, democracy, equality, freedom on the one hand – and those who want the exact opposite, on the other”.

As it defends the “ghetto”-measures against queries from international human rights bodies, the Danish government downplays its practice of ethnic targeting and highlights the aim to reduce “tendencies towards societal segregation by increasing active participation on the labour market and society in general” (Human Rights Council 2021, 5). There is wide range of anti-racist, civil society mobilizations in contemporary Denmark (see Siim and Meret 2019), yet the racist thrust of “ghetto”-measures appears difficult to repudiate within the given national-normative horizon. In a petition to the (Social Democrat) Housing Minister, Kaare Dybvad, a group of young Muslim women from the Copenhagen neighbourhood of Tingbjerg offered a personal plea for the abandonment of the “ghetto” lists:

We live and work in Tingbjerg, and we love our lives here. But the “ghetto” list points to Tingbjerg as something infected. A problem. But we are not a virus in Danish society. We work hard at our studies, we work and contribute to Danish society - and we feel a huge responsibility to contribute to Denmark. We are fellow citizens, but the “ghetto” list makes us feel hated and unwanted in the country that is our home. (Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke 2019)

The formal removal of the “ghetto”-label leaves the effective targeting of problematic neighbourhoods based on ethno-racial criteria in place. Similarly, recommendations by the Danish Council for Ethnic Minorities (Rådet for Etniske Minoriteter 2021, 2), which argues that “ghetto”-rhetoric was “counter-productive” and suggests an alternative focus on “integration” (2021, 6), appears to leave dominant images of urban otherness unchallenged.

Other mobilizations highlight the socio-economic impact of the “ghetto policy”, including the privatization of municipal housing stock. The Open Justice Initiative (2020a, 2020b, 2020c) initiated challenges against the Danish government, taking up the case of residents of Copenhagen’s Mjølnerparken neighbourhood facing eviction.¹⁶ Measures impact equally on white and non-white “ghetto”-tenants and mobilizations invoke not just anti-racist themes but also a right to the city. In this way, Almen Modstand brings together a range of residents from affected neighbourhoods. In addition to the racializing logic of “ghetto”-measures, the mobilization addresses gentrification and the policy logic to “turn around” neighbourhoods through privatization and middle-class upscaling. The question raised here is why “are these immigrants and refugees allowed to hold such valuable real estate?” (NPR 2020). The demand, in this context, is for “the right to diversity and affordable housing” (Peoples Dispatch 2019).

Exclusionary iterations

Human rights bodies and advocacy groups condemn executive overreach and restrictions to civil liberty in France’s anti-separatism framework (Amnesty International 2021a, 2021b). The OHCHR (2020) raises “serious concerns of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, and other protected grounds” regarding the Danish anti-ghetto law. The measures raise questions about Danish obligations under the European Union’s Race Equality Directive and French compliance with commitments to uphold associational rights and free expression (Art. 19, ICCPR).

The availability of such norms by themselves – without effective domestic pressure or social movement activity – doesn’t seem to provide much relief.¹⁷ Centrist policymakers in Denmark and France show limited sensitivity to human rights-based denunciations of either policy’s impact. Against outside critique, they suggest that critics fail to understand national particularities and present themselves as conveyors of uncomfortable truths and “realists” about immigration, community relations and Islam and defenders of distinctive universalist models.¹⁸ Moreover, it appears that mobilization against the laws based on the specific impact that they have on ethno-religious minority groups is weak. Activism against anti-Muslim discrimination in France is burdened by suspicion; when it highlights systematic disadvantage, it is cast as “separatist” under the terms of the new policy. As a result, the space for minority activists to raise claims about disadvantage and the denial of rights – an important condition in the idealized view of democratic exchanges that Soysal and Benhabib envisage – appears increasingly narrow. In Denmark there is evidence of cross-cutting mobilization against the neoliberal thrust of urban public policy and around the “ghetto”-label. Yet the conspicuous ethno-racial logic of the “ghetto law” receives less attention and minority claims-making against the implementation of the law on such grounds lacks visibility and effectiveness.

Both cases trouble the scenarios that theories of inclusive citizenship envisage. Human rights commitments do not provide a wedge that Muslim civil society groups or “ghetto”-residents could employ to bring about inclusionary change. The idea that ethno-religious groups in Denmark and France should revisit their own parochial identities in a universalist light – important for Benhabib’s account of the French scene but also intimated in Kymlicka’s (2007, 94) work – seems equally misplaced. The CCIF, for example, invokes human rights norms – against executive overreach and limitations to associational rights – at every possible occasion. This type of universalist claims-making seems to fail in the face of the exclusionary arguments that actors such as CCIF, facing suspicion for their adequate civic posture, invariably encounter. This suspicion draws on the denunciation of French Muslims and Danish “ghetto” residents as dangerously uncivic: separatist, communitarian, and self-segregating.

None of the perspectives on civic inclusion considered in this paper rules out the possibility of regression, although some of them show a distinctive liberal exuberance. However, the failures considered in this paper are not about misguided predictions towards civic inclusion. First, the perfunctory treatment of minority claims-making, and the tendency to prioritize a sweeping normative background over the meaningful consideration of post-migrant mobilizations and rights-claims, is shared among all three accounts. Second, the scrutiny Kymlicka, Soysal and Benhabib envisage for post-migrant actors – regarding the content of their claims, their language and posture, and the credibility of their liberal acculturation – mirrors the anxious inspection that is distinctive for the civic exclusions that minoritized groups continue to face. This suspicious scrutiny is justified in civic terms and underpins, among other policy measures elsewhere, the “ghetto” and “separatism” frameworks. Theories of inclusive citizenship are unable to account for the formulation of ever more stringent requirements of civic belonging. Their purview does not include the political strategies that re-iterate and fortify such standards and they fail to consider the circumstances such re-iterations produce for minority actors that articulate a sense of injustice, contest racism and claim rights.

Anti-separatism and anti-ghetto measures emerge in distinctive political contexts. Yet many European states continue to anxiously scrutinize the civic integration of their post-migrant populations. The semantics of contemporary citizenship controversies, and whether these foreground liberal togetherness, republican solidarity, constitutional loyalty, or other national-normative objectives, vary. In different ways, post-migrant groups become visible for their failure to live up to expectations of universality and as outsiders to the national-normative horizon. With the anti-separatism and anti-ghetto frameworks, French and Danish governments have adopted particularly sweeping restrictions to associational, social and religious rights. Yet anxiety about the civic belonging of post-migrant subjects is widespread further and triggers debates, controversies and policy initiatives that are equally difficult to contest on civic terms and challenge the outlook that theories of inclusive citizenship propose.

The “ghetto”-initiative points towards the growing importance of ethnicity in understandings of equal belonging to the Danish national-civic community. This ethniciziation of Danishness isn’t new, as Mouritsen and Olsen (2013) or Borevi (2017) note, but it has become more explicit, consensual and consequential. Non-western background is processed as a risk to the experience of equality; it becomes the negative foil for positive assertions of welfarist nationality. The experience of freedom and equality that laïcité enables, as French policymakers suggest, become substantial by contrast with Muslim religious difference. The suspicion that Muslim citizens face plays an important role in making French republicanism substantial and tangible. In both cases, confrontational universality, stoked in recurring citizenship controversies, plays a crucial role for pinning down national belonging. The contrast with civic deficiencies found among Muslim citizens and non-Western “ghetto”-residents is a central feature of this ongoing nation-building processes.

The notion that this would be the terrain for post-migrant and minoritized groups to engage their experience of exclusion seems doubtful, and reasons for such doubt aren’t new. According to positions considered in this paper, the objective for post-migrant citizens that mobilize for equality is to enact contextual potentials of universality without concern that such potentials – and their anxious re-iteration – constitute important drivers of exclusion. If the scope for re-working contextual universals was wide and the re-making of relevant civic and constitutional norms presented itself as a genuine potential – in the reality of democratic politics, not according to idealized assumptions that democratic theory stipulates – circumstances might be different. The accounts examined in this paper do not provide a meaningful account of such circumstances. Instead they envisage the careful policing of appropriate claims-making by minoritized citizens. They caution against risky “ethnic politics” and the danger of mobilization outside of narrow normative strictures. In Benhabib’s account of the affaires du foulard, the burden of change – to rediscover themselves and rearticulate their identity in a new light – is placed on Muslim women. As they articulate their experience of exclusion, they are simultaneously expected to contest and justify their Muslimness in the public sphere.¹⁹ The terms of laïcité, and the pressure that the anxious reiteration of such civic standards produces, remain stable enough.

Conclusion

The two initiatives examined in this paper respond to the familiar securitization of Islam with a view to geopolitical threats and the preservation of “civility” in urban spaces. Both grow out of successive attempts to substantiate ideas of belonging and fortify European national identities. This is said to require firmness and the willingness to endure liberal discomfort, a posture that centrist politicians like to embrace. The receptiveness in the French and Danish mainstream to such dynamics is noteworthy but not exceptional. In other European contexts, the cordon sanitaire between mainstream and far-right is positions is also loosening (Ansari and Hafez 2012; Heinze 2018; Brown, Mondon, and Winter 2021). The preoccupation with national models in Denmark and France is intense, though other polities use different semantics of citizenship in their own, similarly anxious, debate about national belonging. There is a broader story to tell, then, how the language of civic universalism plays a role in exclusionary nation-building processes. Critical scholarship on the “civic turn” is valuable (e.g. Mouritsen, Kriegbaum Jensen, and Larin 2019), yet tends to prioritize conceptual and normative analysis over the close study of conjunctures, opportunities, and obstacles.

The aim with this paper was to provide a limited evaluation of blind spots in prominent theories of civic inclusion that have not received the level of critical attention they require. The paper has drawn attention to their reliance on a prescriptive account of post-migrant agency and a disembodied perspective on political claims that reference universal rights. A further shortcoming, which can only be briefly highlighted here, is the failure to take seriously the legacy of inequality on the inside of citizenship. In this regard, Balibar (2015, 73) draws attention “grey areas” where “individuals are neither completely included nor completely excluded”, which aligns with “the legacy of centuries-old discrimination against the ‘subjects’ of colonial domination” (Balibar 2015, 67). The circumstances of Danish history differ from France’s colonial legacy, yet Denmark’s “ghetto”-policy envisages measures towards populations marked as “non-Western”, including separate penal arrangements for offences in “ghetto” neighbourhoods that point towards models of neo-colonial rule. With such legacies in mind, Mamdani (2020, 335) observes the neo-colonial lineage of contemporary civic practices. The incitement of recurring citizenship controversies enshrines otherness and positions “permanent minorities” as subjects of perpetual suspicion. Liberal citizenship theorists prioritize a linear account of inclusion over historical contexts and political mechanisms that perpetuate marginality. As a result, Mamdani suggests that the civic gains they offer remain conditional and precarious. Such gains are only conceivable “as a gift from the permanent majority” (Mamdani 2020, 329).

It is not possible here to explore potentials for civic claims-making by “policed post-colonial subjects” (Honig 2006, 108). It is clear, however, that the horizon for legitimate post-migrant agency is considerably narrower than theories of inclusive citizenship envisage. Kymlicka relies on the “liberal acculturation” of post-migrant citizens, a process of moral learning that (presumably) requires ongoing scrutiny. Soysal and Benhabib expect marginalized actors to enact potentials of universality although the marginality that these actors encounter is constituted by constant, anxious references to the very same potentials. Since the publication of their influential contributions, it has become more urgent to contest exclusionary iterations of civic belonging and consider their role in the production of marginality, which theorists of inclusive citizenship have been unable or unwilling to see.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am grateful to Terri Teo and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier draft.

2 Countries processed as “Western” include European Union member states and non-European countries from the white Anglosphere. See Fn.14.

3 More recently, Soysal (2021, 1521) suggests that the “post-war liberal order […] falter[s]” and expresses skepticism about post-national potentials. Considering her earlier work, the nature of this disruption – after all, the relevant human rights treaties and the horizons of post-nationality they establish largely remain in place – is unclear.

4 This tends to occur in the form of staged public consultations, e.g. Grand Débats sur la Nationalité (2009) or the recent invocation of États Généraux de Laïcité (2021).

5 Published in the far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles.

6 Zemmour is known, among other positions, for his earlier suggestion to deport “5 million Muslims” (Massone 2014). In 2022, he ran on a platform of republican “reconquest” that leans into the language of militant identitarian politics and the “great replacement”.

7 https://www.vie-publique.fr/loi/277621-loi-separatisme-respect-des-principes-de-la-republique-24-aout-2021

8 The Observatoire, a commission that advised successive French governments on religion in public life, has come under sustained critique for its position towards Islam, with some commentators accusing the commission of “practicing inclusiveness towards circles not really friends with laïcité” (Brachet 2021). Its dissolution was announced in March 2021.

9 The organization dissolved itself to anticipate its official dissolution. Darmanin portrayed his ban of CCIF as a signature achievement, also towards party-political competitors, as he tweeted that “everybody talked about it [the possible ban], but nobody had done anything” (https://twitter.com/GDarmanin/status/1356531557377470464)

10 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000025505191/

11 Similarly interesting are the semantic contortions evident in the government’s case against CCIF for alleged “incitement to terrorism”: “the ‘Collective against Islamophobia in France’ defends and promotes a particularly broad concept of ‘Islamophobia’, not hesitating to count as ‘Islamophobic acts’ administrative police measures, or even judicial decisions, taken in the framework of the fight against terrorism; that in doing so, the ‘Collective against Islamophobia in France’ must be considered as participating in the legitimization of such acts” (Ministère de l'Intérieur 2020).

12 See https://twitter.com/ManifSystem/status/1384626190217060370. Marlène Schiappa was the minister in charge of this initiative, which Macron later denounced as “empty talk” (Le Monde 2021).

13 See Seemann (2021) for an overview of different “ghetto” initiatives.

14 Countries classed as “Western” are European Union member as well as non-EU countries in Western Europe, alongside a selection of non-European countries from the white Anglosphere. The Open Justice Initiative (2020c, 12) notes that “[a]lthough the countries included within the definition of ‘Western’ lack geographical coherence, they do share one common characteristic: all the countries have majority populations which are perceived to be white”.

15 There is some competition for the harshest possible measures in this area. A Dankse Folkeparti spokesperson, for example, suggested “ankle bracelets for ‘ghetto children’ to enforce an 8pm curfew” (BT 2018).

16 The management company for public housing in Mjølnerparken had been forced to sell off 226 housing units under the provisions of the law (Peoples Dispatch 2019).

17 Domestic litigation against aspects of the Danish “ghetto”-framework continues (Open Justice Initiative 2021). The highest French court has ratified the ban of CCIF (Conseil d'État, 24 September 2021).

18 Defending his policy agenda towards the English-speaking press, Macron (cited in McAuley 2021) argued: “I believe in plurality in universalism, but that is to say, whatever our differences, our citizenship makes us build a universal together.”

19 This refers, again, to the Muslim girls from Creil who Benhabib (2006, 57) expects “to give a justification of their actions with ‘good reasons in the public sphere.’”