SOCIAL COHESION AND TOLERANCE

V. Frameworks for Integration

With regard to political processes and policy-making concerning immigrants and social cohesion, each society carries its own general notions as to what are the ties which bind its members (cf. McAndrew & Weinfeld 1996). Differential frameworks and policies ensue. Nevertheless, there are common spheres regularly addressed in each context. Some of these are suggested in the following section.

regimes of immigrant incorporation

The nationally differentiated set of relations between ideals of social cohesion and responses to immigration have usually been most evident in laws, institutions, and policies with regard to socio-political incorporation (a term open to a variety of interpretations, but generally referring to institutional regulations determining facets of status, opportunity, access to public resources, and representation). As research is increasingly demonstrating, the frameworks for, and operationalization of, immigrant incorporation differ considerably at neighbourhood, municipal, state/provincial, national, and international levels.

Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut (1996) approach modes of incorporation by way of a typology which maps the complex formed by: the policies of the host government (receptive, indifferent or hostile); forms of social reception faced by immigrants (prejudiced or nonprejudiced); and the characteristics of the co-ethnic community. With regard to these variables, researchers need to analyse both vulnerabilities and opportunities surrounding the trajectory of immigrant individuals and groups, including the differential resources which pathways of incorporation present (see Portes & Böröcz 1989, Portes & Zhou 1993).

In parallel ways, Yasemin Soysal (1994) has formulated a typology of ‘regimes of incorporation’ represented by various European states. These include, with regard to the state and what it regards as acceptable conditions for immigrants: the rules of membership, rights, statuses, provision and capacity for organisational activity, access and use of resources, and modes of participation in political affairs, commerce and the labour market. Soysal describes the types of regimes which emerge from her analysis as: corporatist (represented by Sweden and the Netherlands), individualist (Switzerland and Great Britain), state-centralised (France) and mixed statist-corporatist (Germany).

Another important analysis of any state’s system of immigrant incorporation emerges from considering processes of ‘institutional channelling’, as described in detail through a comparative study by Patrick Ireland (1994). Ireland describes how legal conditions and political institutions -- particularly on the local municipal level -- shape, limit and direct forms of socio-political mobilisation and participation among immigrants.

conflict resolution

Most state administrative units (on levels from inter-governmental organizations such as the EU down to the municipal level) have created frameworks, policies and institutions for containing and resolving conflicts within the population, including those between and among immigrants and established residents. These include special community relations institutions set up in a variety of formats to facilitate common communication between groups and between a minority group and the state (see Anderson 1990). On a more mundane level, social services departments perform many such conflict assuaging roles successfully on a day to day basis.

However, with reference to the ways conflicting interests are approached by public agents, one must question the degree to which social cohesion is, or is not, fostered. Routinely these days social workers, health care practitioners and police are trained in ‘multicultural awareness’, which often means exposure to quick and easy (that is, stereotypical) summaries of the values and habits of ethnic others. Following such, with good intentions these public servants often read insurmountable cultural difference into everyday incidents of social conflict (such as neighbourhood disputes and domestic violence; see Vertovec 1996a). Robert Bach (1996: 161) describes how the best efforts to resolve conflicts often backfire:

Professional mediators or the media often mistakenly represent interpersonal incidents as intergroup conflict. Community dispute resolution efforts can bring into a neighborhood mediators who work with models of group membership that force residents to seek out appropriate group representatives to satisfy the required rules of formal negotiations. This representational model transforms neighborly disputes into conflicting claims about distributive justice among groups. When mediators are not present, social tensions are often worked out between the individuals involved.

Surely mechanisms and frameworks for the resolution of conflicts concerning immigrants should be supported, but serious thought needs to be put into assessing their baseline assumptions, flexibility, and efficacy.

‘recognition’

In many places, the seeking, gaining or enhancing of public acceptance and participation among immigrants and ethnic minorities has been undertaken through calls for ‘recognition’ (yet another term which has widely varying informal and formal/legal meanings in different nation-states; see Rath et al. 1991, Taylor 1992, Vertovec & Peach 1997). Events and campaigns associated with ‘the politics of recognition’ are, from nation-state to nation-state, conditioned by national political philosophies (especially surrounding assimilation and the image of the homogeneous nation-state), legislation, and popular perceptions and pressures (see, for example, Dwyer & Meyer 1995).

In one sense, ‘recognition’ usually refers to granting certain freedoms (which have been noted above as ‘minority rights’, including the freedom to organise formal associations, to exercise religious practices, to pursue education perhaps independently of the state system), gaining access to state largesse or resource provision (for associations, community centres, festivals, schools, places of worship, and so forth) and political representation as a group (in special consultative fora or directly in policy-making capacity, for instance in education). In every case ‘recognition’ affords a group -- and particularly, in many cases, a specific organization which claims to represent the interests of the group -- legitimacy, status and authority.

Another sense of ‘recognition’, following Charles Taylor (1992) and others, involves a demand for remedy regarding cultural injustice. In this way Nancy Fraser (1995: 73) has characterised ‘recognition’ as ‘upwardly revaluing disrespected identities and the cultural products of maligned groups’ with a broader aim of ‘positively valorizing cultural diversity’. As laudable and necessary as such a call is, Fraser points out that such revaluing and valorizing will ultimately mean little without a redistribution of power and material resources as well.

accommodation

Accommodation can refer to a kind of ‘recognition’ involving specificities. The depth and breadth of any society’s vision of multicultural social cohesion can be gauged by its degree and mode of allowance surrounding traditions, practices and values most dissimilar from its own long-standing norms. ‘[E]quality requires a rejection of arbitrary or irrelevant differences,’ Bhikhu Parekh (1994b: 306) points out, ‘and a full recognition of legitimate or relevant differences. A society committed to it must know how to be discriminating without being discriminatory.’ This entails willing to accommodate specific differences among societies’ constituent groups -- and represented probably most by immigrant-origin ethnic minorities -- in the legal and justice systems, social services, schools, neighbourhoods, and workplaces.

In Britain, for example, accommodation of many specific traditions, practices and values of minorities has been, on the whole, considerable and progressive. This is because such markers have been either disregarded as irrelevant to the functioning of certain public institutions, or recognised as legitimately pertaining to the social and human rights of these groups and therefore seen as grounds for institutional change. By way of example, South Asian religions have posed some of the greatest challenges along these lines; among a wide variety of possible examples, accommodations have been made regarding:

• prescribed modes of dress. Under the Motor-Cycle Crash-helmets Act 1976, turban-wearing Sikhs are excused from wearing crash helmets. Similarly, the Construction (Head-Protection) Regulation of 1989 specifically exempts turban-wearing Sikhs from having to wear safety helmets on building sites. In the police force and armed services, Sikhs are entitled to wear turbans as well. Within the Criminal Justice Act 1988 the law on carrying knives in public places exempts Sikhs carrying them for religious reasons;

• demands for time-off of work for religious purposes (such as for visiting mosques to participate in Friday prayer) or for appropriate prayer facilities in the workplace. Such demands are addressed by specific employers concerned; in factories with large numbers of Muslims, prayer facilities are often allocated. The Commission for Racial Equality have been approached on several occasions where discrimination is suspected in cases of refusal of demands in this area;

• matters surrounding burial, such as gaining designated areas of public cemeteries for specific religious communities, obtaining permission for burial in a cloth shroud instead of a coffin, urging speedy issuing of death certificates for burial within twenty-four hours, and immersion in water the ashes of cremated persons;

• taking oaths on scriptures sacred to a person’s own religious tradition. Under the Oaths Act of 1978, Muslims may swear on the Qur’an, Hindus on the Bhagavad Gita or the Vedas, Sikhs on the Guru Granth Sahib or Gutka, and Parsis on the Zendavesta.

In numerous other countries there is great reluctance to provide the slightest accommodations along these lines -- justified through nationally specific appeals to social cohesion (read as cultural homogeneity). The French ‘headscarves affair’ is but one, often-cited case along these lines (see Vertovec & Peach 1997).

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