Racism, desire, and the politics of immigration

TY - JOUR

T1 - Racism, desire, and the politics of immigration

AU - Doty, Roxanne Lynn

N1 - Funding Information: Doty Roxanne Lynn Department of Political Science, Arizona State University 12 1999 28 3 585 606 sagemeta-type Journal Article search-text 585 Racism, Desire, and the Politics of Immigration SAGE Publications, Inc.1999DOI: 10.1177/03058298990280031001 Roxanne LynnDoty Department of Political Science, Arizona State University It has been suggested that the late twentieth century is likely to be remembered by historians as a period in which immigrants and refugees were at the centre of political controversy.'The attention given to this topic by academics, policy- makers, and the media certainly seems to bear out this suggestion. While immigration is not a new phenomenon nor one confined to the late twentieth century, there seems to be a general consensus that the post-World War II migrations are different from previous ones due to their sheer volume, rapid growth, and shift in the sources of immigrants, both legal and illegal.2 Even when the numbers are not that great relatively speaking, the presence of a significant number of 'Third World' immigrants is often perceived with alarm. This was exemplified by Margaret Thatcher's well known suggestion in 1978 that 'People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture'. Maxim Silverman observes that in France the term 'immigrant' is frequently used only to signify non-Europeans, especially Africans and those from .the Caribbean.' Sitnilarly, Robert Miles notes that in European political discourse the categories 'immigration' and 'immigrant' do not refer to all people who move across national boundaries, but only to those who originate from nation-states included in the notion of the 'Third World'.' I would like to thank the Harry Frank Guggcnhcim Foundation tor a research grant that supported this project. 1. Anthony M. Messina, Luis R. Fraga, Laurie A. Rhodebeck, and Fredreick D. Wright, eds., Ethnic and Racial Minorities in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1992), 32. 2. For example, until the 1960s 80 per cent or immigrants to the US, Canada, and Australia came from other industrialized countries. By the end of the 1980s, 82 per cent came from developing countries. Similarly, in most European OECD countries the proportion of foreign residents from other EU countries has contracted significantly. See Systeme d'observation permenente des migrations (SOPEMI, Continuous Reporting System on Migration), Trends in International Migration (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1992), 20. In 1962 approximately 75 per cent of foreign residents in France were European. By 1982 this figure had changed to less than 50 per cent. Jonathan Marcus, The National Front and French Politics: The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 76. 3. Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. 4. Rohert Miles, Racism After Race Relations (New York: Routledge, 1993), 206-7. 586 Post-World War II immigration and reactions to it highlight the blurring of national boundaries and the increasingly problematic nature of presuming a unified 'inside' of nation-states characterised by domestic harmony and a shared national identity in contrast to an 'outside' characterised by disorder, conflict, and a multitude of identities. The movement of peoples, like the movement of capital, goods, and services constitutes part of the phenomenon referred to as globalisation. However, unlike the movement of goods and capital, the movement of people often elicits violent anti-immigrant and racist responses. Human beings who move across geographical borders make more visible targets than the goods and capital that move across the same borders. They are more readily perceived as 'others' who pose a challenge to the foundational elements of the nation-state, i.e., the unity of a people which is represented by a state and the ability of the state to control these movements. In the absence of these two elements, the very differentiation between the inside and the outside, the thing that the discipline of International Relations (IR) is most dependent upon, is called into question. Immigration then, presents us with an opportunity to re-examine some of the theoretical concepts that are central to I R. In this article I examine the implications that immigration has for conceptualising one of International Relations' key concepts, 'the state'. How should this entity be conceptualised when a cohesive political community can no longer be taken for granted and when the domestic-international divide is itself becoming increasingly blurred? I explore how the phenomenon of neo-racism is implicated in practices that arise in response to perceived threats to cohesion and community. In doing so, I present an alternative way of understanding the state which conceptualises it as a set of practices. I then illustrate the usefulness of this conceptualisation through an examination of France's responses to post-World War 11 immigration. Immigration and the Nation-State The movement of peoples from poor countries of the South to rich industrialised countries of the North has occurred at the same time that western nation-states have experienced many stresses, transformations, and challenges which some scholars have suggested constitute a crisis of the nation-state or a crisis of sovereignty. Silverman, for example, suggests that migration has exposed the inherent instability of the link between the nation and the state.s William Rogers Brubaker simliarly argues that massive post-war migrations pose a fundamental challenge to the nation-states of Europe and North America, challenging these countries to reinvent themselves.6 Kimberly Hamilton and Kate Holder also 5. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 35. 6. William Rogers Brubaker, Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America (London: University Press of America, 1989), 1. 587 suggest that international migration .poses new challenges to state sovereignty.' 7 Governments are inevitably drawn into conflicts that arise over immigration as they seek to ensure the cohesion of the nation-state. They engage in practices that are important in defining the criteria which determines who is to be included within the bounds of the domestic community-and thereby share in a particular national identity-and who is to be excluded. However, it is often the very promotion of national unity and a shared identity that is implicated in the promotion of anti-immigrant violence. A liberal democracy, in particular, cannot openly tolerate anti-immigrant racism and violence and thus must walk a thin line between succumbing to xenophobic pressures on the one hand and alienating those who oppose liberal immigration and citizenship policies and rights for immigrations on the other hand. Liberal democratic governments must attempt to maintain a delicate balance between inclusionary and exclusionary practices. Understanding how liberal democracies attempt to maintain this balance when it comes to immigration related policies has important theoretical implications. As noted earlier, the notion of the clearly bounded (socially, politically, and spatially) nation-state is central to a vast majority of IR theories, including the various branches of neo-realism and neo-liberalism as well as world systems theory. Theories of the state, which would be an obvious place to turn in seeking to understand the complexities of the state and its relationship to the nation, unfortunately also hold fast to this conception. International Relations theory views the inside as a realm of community, order, and stability, while the outside is viewed as a realm of anarchy, the classic Hobbesian state of nature. While state theory has little to say about the international realm, its implicit assumption is that its distinction from the domestic realm of state and civil society relations is unproblematic and that global phenomena are largely irrelevant to the constitution of state/society relations. The same spatial imagery based upon homogeneity within states is shared by IR theory and state theory. Global migration and the conflicts it gives rise to disrupts this spatial imagery and calls into question the adequacy of theories which cling to it. The space of the nation is deterritorialised in the sense that territory, national identity, and political community no longer neatly overlap one another.8 This elicits responses in the form of practices aimed at reterritorialisation. These responses come both from society and from governments. Racism and anti-immigrantism in their various guises can be thought of as practices of reterritorialisation. These can come from below so to speak (i.e., from society) in the form of violent assertions of difference between the 'us' that belongs to a particular territory and the 'them' that does not. Reterritorialisation practices can also come from official governmental arenas in the form of immigration rules and regulations as well as laws regarding citizenship and rights of immigrants. These 7. Kimberly Hamilton and Kate Holder, 'International Migration and Foreign Policy: A Survey of the Literature', The Washington Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1991): 195-211. 1. 8. Of course, such a neat overlap rarely if ever actually existed. However, it seems to be the case that this disjunction is more pronounced and or greater concern today. 588 responses in particular have important implications for developing a theoretical/conceptual understanding of the state which does not presuppose the social and spatial boundaries that existing theories of IR do. Immigration and the responses it elicits presents the opportunity to examine how boundaries, divisions, national identities-the inside and the outside of nation- states-are deconstructed and reconstructed on a continual basis. They also present the opportunity to examine how race is implicated in these processes. The concept of neo-racism, discussed below, has the capacity to link the issues of national identity, immigration, and xenophobia which are important elements in constructing national identity as well as in constructing the contemporary meaning of racism. Neo-Racism What has been termed 'the new racism' or 'neo-racism' is a particularly significant aspect of anti-immigrantism. Martin Barker suggested this term to describe a new kind of racism that does not draw upon the ideas of biological races that was prevalent in nineteenth century 'scientific racism'.9 Etienne Balibar refers to it as 'racism without race'. 10 The new racism is a theory of human nature which suggests that Human nature is such that it is natural to form a bounded community, a nation, aware of its differences from other nations. They are not better or worse. But feelings of antagonism will be aroused if outsiders are admitted. And there grows up a special form of connection between a nation and the place it lives.'' I I Neo-racism is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity, but the insurmountability of cultural differences. Ostensibly, it does not posit the superiority of certain groups of people in relation to others, but only the harmfulness of abolishing borders, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions. 12 This kind of racism has also been referred to as 'differentialist racism'. 9. Martin Barker, The New Racism (London: Routledge, 1981), 21. 10. Etienne Balibar, 'is There a Neo-Racism?', in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, eds. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 23. 11. Barker, The New Racism , 21. 12. This understanding of racism has been criticised as being all-inclusive. For example, Robert Miles makes the important point that there is a distinction between discourses which construct differences as natural in order to exclude and discourses which construct differences as natural 'not only in order to exclude, but additionally, in order to marginalise a social collectivity within a particular constellation of relations of domination'. Miles, Racism After Race Relations , 97-102. While this distinction is significant I believe that it ignores two important issues. First, it imputes an intentionatity behind discourse(s) when the power of discourse is often its relative autonomy, the inability to reduce it to the intentions of either individuals or groups. Second, it risks ignoring the fact that all too often exclusion and relations of domination go hand in hand. Differences are rarely constructed with the result being two separate but equal groups. 589 In contrast to earlier forms of racism which were legitimated by an ideology of inequality of human types, diffeivtiafist racism is 'predicated on the imperative of preserving the group's identity, whose "purity" it sanctifies'.'-' The mixing of cultures is thus seen as a mistake which endangers one's identity and can lead to social conflict. In terms of the nation and national identity, neo-racism induces an 'excess of purism'. For the nation to maintain its identity, to be truly itself, it must isolate and eliminate or expel the other, the false element. This can result in the racialisation of social groups and the attribution to them of various qualities signifying exteriority and impurity.'*' Balibar suggests that neo-racism is a racism of the reversal of population movements, i.e., movements from the poor Third World countries to the rich industrialised countries in contrast to movements in the opposite direction during the era of colonialism. To confuse neo-racism with earlier.forms of racism is, according to Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a theoretical error that both inhibits our ability to understand contemporary racism as well as seriously hampers struggles against it. Neo-racism is an insidious form of racism which can be difficult to combat. It often presents itself as anti-racist, promoting the respect for differences. As Howard Winant points out, The struggle against racism has for nearly half a century taken the principal form of the defence of difference, of the rights of minorities, of the irreducible variety and necessary plurality of human cultures.15 Neo-racism rearticulates this position within the context of increasing globalisation in the late twentieth century and the movement of non-white peoples into Western industrialised countries. It operates under the guise of the inevitability of conflict if human beings of different cultures are mixed in inappropriate numbers. Thus it permits the claim to be made that exclusionary policies are actually humane. Its implications are that conventional anti-racism is itself a cause of racism and conflict because of its failure to appreciate the laws of human nature. The significance of this phenomenon to immigration is obvious. Balibar, in fact, suggests that the very category of immigration has replaced that previously occupied by biological races.~r' While neo-racism draws its power from the notion of culture rather than science, its effects are no less damaging. According to the logic of neo-racism the creation of bounded communities founded on cultural differences is a natural result of human nature. The abolition of those boundaries or the co-existence of different cultural traditions within boundaries will naturally give rise to aggression and conflict. Therefore, in order to avoid such conflict the boundaries must be reinforced. One simply must accept the laws of human nature, the tolerance thresholds that are inherent in bounded communities. 13. Pierre-Andre Taguieff, 'The New Cultural Racism in France', Telos 83 (1990): 109-22. 14. Balibar, 'Is There a Neo Racism?', 59-60. 15. Howard Winant, Racial Conditions (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 101. 16. Balibar, 'Is There a Neo-Racism?', 20. 590 One could raise the question of just how new the 'new racism' actually is as well as what the relationship is between new and old racism. It certainly may be possible to find instances that would fit the description of neo-racism present in earlier times. The 'separate but equal' doctrine of the United States' South comes to mind. However, it is the widespread, dispersed quality of it today that makes it significant. Similar patterns of neo-racist discourse are present throughout Europe as well as the United States.17 Conversely, it would certainly be a mistake to suggest that the old kind of racism has totally died. What is important is to recognise the prevalence of the new doctrine and its practical effects. Taguieff cautions that to see racism only as the positing of superiority based on biological difference blinds us to the 'unprecedented gentle, and euphemised forms of racism' which praise difference. IS It should be obvious from this discussion that the presumption I begin with is that 'race' is a social construct. It has no inherent or fixed meaning. What 'race' is emerges within specific historical, economic, and political situations. David Goldberg has suggested that the power of race 'has consisted in its adaptive capacity to define population groups and, by extension, social agents as self and other at various historical moments'.19 The concept of neo-racism directs our attention to the construction of race at the historical moment of late twentieth century globalisation. It calls our attention to racism's implications for the construction of national boundaries and the politics of inclusion and exclusion.20 The presumption of such natural laws regarding human nature and the mixing of cultures looms large and underlies many responses to immigration. Neo-racism is thus a phenomenon specific to the era of globalisation and the crisis of the nation-state? Understanding neo-racism within this context focuses our attention to the concept of the state itself. In the following section, I offer a way of understanding the state that links it with the insecurity that can result from the various processes of globalisation, particularly immigration and the reactions it elicits. Desire and 'the State' The understanding of 'the state' offered here draws on the concept of desire. My aim is to offer a way of thinking about practices of statecraft that affords an escape 17. Winant suggests that the European experience resonates with developments in the United States where neoconservatism has worked out the main areas of "anti-racist racism" and where cultural difference arguments are daily becoming more central in racial discourse of all types'; see Racial Conditions, 101-2. 18. Taguieff, The New Cultural Racism, 118. 19. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 80. 20. See Roxanne Lynn Doty, 'The Bounds of Race in International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 22, no. 4 (1993): 443-61 for a discussion of 'race' that elaborates on its social constructedness and its relevance for the discipline of International Relations. 21. Etienne Balibar, 'Race, Nation, and Class: Interview with Etienne Balibar', in Race, Discourse and Power in France, ed. Maxim Silverman (Aldlershot: Gower Publishing, 1991), 79-80. 591 from the reification that is so prevalent in the International Relations literature. This understanding is heavily informed by the work of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Their conception of desire offers us a way of thinking about statecraft as a dynamic, contradictory, and tension-filled process. It gives us a way to conceptualise the coming together and crystallising of diverse energies in societies that move them in various directions, toward certain practices and policies. While the concept of desire is slippery and difficult to capture and theorise in a precise way, this should not deter us from pursuing its usefulness. The basis of Deleuze and Guattari's conception of desire is their critique of the psychoanalytic tradition's understanding of it as (1) a phenomenon internal to pregiven subjects, and (2) for something, an object that the subject lacks. This understanding denies desire the productive role that Deleuze and Guattari stress. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is a productive and socinl,Jorce. In much the same way that Michel Foucault suggests power is productive and prior to the subject, Deleuze and Guattari suggest desire produces subjects and social reality. Desire is an unbounded, free-floating energy which becomes coded and channelled in particular ways as it produces and attaches itself to the socius.22 Society is a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and to be marked.2' This marking channels and codes the flows of desire thereby creating meanings, values, hierarchies, inclusions, and exclusions.24 Historically, there have been three types of societies, or 'machines' to use Deleuze and Guatarri's term, based on the relationship between the social and its related network of desire: the primitive territorial machine, the despotic machine (the Urstaat), and the civilised capitalist machine. These are offered as general types rather than representations of any particular society. In each, desire is organised, coded, and repressed in particular ways. It is the Urstaat (a machine of complete social stability and order) and the civilised capitalist machine that offer the most relevant insights into the nature of the state. With the Urstaat, the body of the socius becomes the body of the despot. Subjects and meanings are organised into a hierarchy beneath the king, the despot. Old institutions remain, but are reinscribed by the despotic state.' This overcoding constitutes the essence of the state and measures both its continuity and its breaks with previous formations, Ironically perhaps, the sense in which we generally think of the state as territorial 22. One can note an obvious resonance between Foucault's conception of power and Deleuze and Guattari's conception of desire. Ronald Bogue, suggests that power is a restricted and reterritorialised form of desire. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989), 106. According to Philip Goodchild, formations of power in society are merely the workings of desire; see Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (London: Sage, 1996), 73. 23. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus-Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 33, 149. 24. Goodchild defines the term 'socius' simply as the 'phantasm of social space'. Within this social space are 'presuppositions as to what being with others means'. We can think of the socius as society always in the process of being produced and reproduced, coded, decoded and recoded; Deleuze and Guattari, 219. 25. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 195-6. 592 is, on this view, a result of deterritorialisation in that the state decodes and deterritorialises previous groupings and makes the earth an object of its higher unity, a forced, stratified, and overcoded aggregate. Notwithstanding the deterritorialising practices it engages in, the state is still highly territorial. It is, however, inextricably connected to processes that are not, such as capitalism. Capitalism is not territorial at all; on the contrary, it brings about the decoding of flows that the Urstaat coded and overcoded, and with it a new kind of socius. Decoded flows are those which escape social coding and thereby elude a certain degree of socio-political control. Decoding is inherent in codes themselves: 'Every code is affected by a margin of decoding'. 26 Deterritorilisation always has reterritorialisation as its flipside. 27 It is not a question of thinking in terms of two opposed models, that of fully territorialised, closed and coded totalities versus open-ended multiplicities. Rather, what is being suggested is a dynamic and simultaneous process of constructing a foundational, overcoded structure in which the breaking of connections and deterritorialisation is immanent. Desire is inherent in this ongoing process. Assemblages or conjunctions of decoded flows constitute one pole of desire, a desiring-machine that is at the same time technical and social. Capitalism is such a desiring machine.28 It decodes and deterritoriahses capital, production, and labour making these commodities that flow from one geographic location to another. The historical conjunction of these flows was purely contingent: it might not have happened. When the conjunction did occur though, a new threshold of deterritorialisation was created. Capitalism, while tending toward a threshold of decoding that would destroy the socius, signiticantly only functions on the condition that it inhibit this tendency to displace its own limits. Thus, along with the processes of deterritorialisation are the often violent processes of reterritorialisation, which are not purely technical operations, but rather require 'social organs of decision, administration, and inscription; a technocracy and a bureaucracy that cannot be reduced to the operation of technical machines'.2'' This is where the state comes in. The state, the desire for stability and order, is itself produced within the field of decoded flows. This is not to suggest that the state is solely an instrument of capitalism. Rather, it is to place the state in the context of a larger field of decoded and deterritorialised flows that by their very nature problemetise any bounded and unambiguous understanding of space. 311 26. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 53. 27. for example, the imperial state does not create large scale works without a flow of independent labor escaping its bureaucracy or a monetary form of tax without flows of money escaping and giving rise to other powers such as commerce and hanking. 28. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 224. 29. Ibid., 251-52. 30. While Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the decoded, deterritorialised flows that accompany capitalism, there are arguably many aspects of social/political/cultural life that can be considered in terms of flows which may not be related to capilalism. The flows of people are the concern here and 593Deleuze and Guattari's conception of, the state is one that is fundamentally despotic. The despotic state, the is hot one formation among others as their threefold typology might be taken to suggest. Rather, it is a regulatory ideal, an abstraction that is realised only as an abstraction: 'it assumes its immanent concrete existence only in the subsequent forms that cause it to return under other guises and conditions' .]1 The Urstaat reforms itself on modified foundations in order to spring back more mendacious, colder, and hypocritical than ever. So, while the modern democratic state is not identical to the Urstaat, it is haunted by it as a model and one of the poles between which it oscillates ., '2 This understanding of the state might be read as essentialist. However, I would argue that it is only essentialist if one conceives of desire in an essentialist manner. It is clear though that for Deleuze and Guattari desire should not be thought of in an essentialist manner. To suggest, as they do, that the state is fundamentally despotic should not be interpreted as suggesting that the state is an object, a reified entity. Rather, 'the state' is a name given to one pole of desire, the desire for order, the desire for a fully coded unity, as it becomes synthesised in various social practices, policies, and governmental institutions. The state is an abstraction, an ideal that is never fully realised, but is in a continual process of concretisation, a process which has significant social/political consequences. 'The state' is a desire for order which is manifested in practices of statecraft which can originate in official government bodies but can also come from civil society, practices we can think of as statecraft from below. The state is a desire to overcome ambivalence and undecidability, to make the numerous and diverse points of order, e.g.,while not all movements of people are directly related to capitalism, much of the post-World War II movement into western industrialised countries was directly related to capitalism. 31. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 220. 32. Ibid., 261. It may be taken by some as an extreme statement to suggest that the despotic state always lurks in the background. However, I would argue that a moments reflection should support this statement. The mark of the Urstaat is apparent in many and diverse instances. It is evident in Jeffrey Benzien, the South African police officer and member of the security branch, who daily left his suburban home to go to work and extract confessions with torture ('Apartheid Torturer Testifies As Evil Shows Its Banal Face', New York Times, 9 November 1997, A1, A10). The mark of the Urstaat is equally apparent in the Salvadoran Army's American-trained Atlacatl Battalion who systematically murdered hundreds of men, women, and children in the village of El Mozote in December 1981. See Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). the mark of the despotic state is perhaps less apparent, but nonetheless present in other attempts to maintain order and stability. Nor can it be said that these attempts always take place in what would generally be considered 'repressive states'. For example, the Urstaat raises its head at the United States/Mexican border when hundreds of human beings die trying to cross the border at extremely dangerous points due to US policies such as Operation Gatekeeper. See Sam Howe Verhovek, 'Silent Deaths Climbing Steadily as Migrants Cross Mexico Border' New York Times, 24 August 1997, A1; and Michael Huspek, 'U.S. Gatekeepers Crackdown Partly to Blame for Deadly Record', The Arizona Republic, 29 August 1997, B17. The British state oscillated to its despotic pole when Joy Gardner, a Jamaican immigrant, was killed after police gagged her with more than thirteen feet of adhesive tape during an attempt to deport her. See Amnesty International News 25, no. 9 (1995): 1. The Urstaat also lurks behind the various roundups of presumed, but not in tact, 'illegal aliens' such as those in Chandler, Arizona in July of 1997. See Julie Amparano, 'Brown Skin: No Civil Rights?'. The Arizona Republic, 27 August 1997, A1, A14. 594 geographic, ethnic, moral, economic, and so on resonate to affect a coherent whole. This understanding gives priority to flows and movement and the attempts to channel and code them. While capitalism is associated with the movement or flow of decoded desire, the state is associated with practices that channel and code desire, stop its flows, and territorialise it. The tendency toward, but never fully accomplished, concretisation of the state is the movement of this desire for an overcoded unity. This movement of desire is not confined to formal government organisations which are generally thought of as making up the state, although it is often most powerfully manifest here. To reiterate, the understanding of the state offered here should not be taken as essentialising the state. What we call 'the state' is a desire which is both produced and productive. By its very nature desire cannot be essentialised or fully coded and channelled. Our analytic attention is shifted towards what I call 'practices of statecraft' which can come from official government institutions, but also from a wide variety of other arenas. For Deleuze and Guattari, 'the state is desire that passes from the head of the despot to the heart of his subjects'. 13 Thus, a clear and unambiguous line between what is generally thought of as the state and civil society cannot unproblematically be drawn. In the following section I discuss some of the specific tensions that statecraft attempts to resolve, how immigration is involved in these tensions, and how neo-racism may be implicated in these processes. Order, Ambivalence, and the Nation-State Zygmunt Bauman suggests that the task of order or 'order as a task' is arguably the least possible among the impossible tasks that modernity sets for itself, but also the least disposable among the indispensable.]4 This tension between the essentially necessary task of creating order and the ultimate impossibility of doing so in any final sense is manifested in a number of related tensions that characterise the modern nation-state and the economic, social, and political processes that traverse it. The imperative to balance the tensions creates a dynamic that gives rise to contlict, practices, and counter-practices. For Deleuze and Guattari this tension is located in the two fundamental poles of desire, paranoia and schizophrenia, as they are manifested at the societal level. The paranoiac pole is evident in the desire for order and contains an inherent tendency toward despotism, repression, and fascism, though it can also be manifested in quite subtle and less overtly repressive ways. The schizophrenic pole is evident in capitalism's deterritorialising flows that threaten to destroy the codes that inscribe meaning to social formations. Modern societies oscillate between these. This tension is illustrated in two other works which are pertinent here: Karl Polanyi's writings on society and the capitalist market, and the work of Foucault 33. Dclcuzc and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 221. 34. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 4. 595 and others on governmentality. A tension that is arguably very much related to Deleuze and Guattari's two poles of desire can be found in Polanyi's notion of the double movement of society, i.e., the principle of economic liberalism and the principle of social protection. The self-adjusting market of capitalism could not exist for any length of time without annihilating society. No society could stand the effects of 'the commodity fiction', i.e., the principle that the market mechanism should be the sole determinant for human social, economic, and political relations. Yet the fiction that land, labour, and money are commodities must be upheld because there is no other way of organising production for the market in a capitalist society.'5 This idea fits well with Deleuze and Guattari's notion that the decoded flows associated with capitalism threaten to dissolve persons and society into them. In other words capitalism decodes land, labour, and money thus turning them into deterritorialised commodities. This very process threatens to destroy the social order upon which the market depends. Thus the society that the self-regulating market needs must be preserved through various self-protection measures which work to promote order and stability. While national societies have dealt with this threat to order through various social measures of self protection, the globalisation of the 'self-regulating market' raises issues which cannot be dealt with by national societies. There are no global welfare institutions, no global societal social protections to perpetuate the 'commodity fiction' as it concerns global labour. Social protection measures focus inward and are often exclusionary: reterritorialising practices that work to promote order through the construction of subjects who belong and thus deserve social protection, and those who don't belong and thus should be excluded. A related tension animates the writings of Foucault and others on governmental ity.36 The notion that society makes itself out of the tension between the centrifugal forces of economic egoisms and the centripetal forces of non- economic interests whereby individuals espouse the well-being of the family, the clan, the nation is compatible with an understanding of the state as a desire for order and unity. Society is constituted out of both the schizophrenic economic forces that continually defy and move away from any fixed centre and by the non- economic forces that continually construct the effect of a fixed centre of being whereby the well-being of bounded groups is promoted always in the shadow of forces motivated by the desire for order. Foucault locates what is specific and original in the liberal treatment of population in the discovery of economic man as a subject of interests, individual preferences, and choices which are irreducible (cannot be explained from any other, more fundamental causal principle) and non-transferrable (no external agency can supplant or constrain the individual determination of preferences). The subject of interest perpetually outflanks the scope of self-imposed limitation which 35. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 74, 132. 36. See Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governementality (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991). 596 constitutes the subject of law.'~ Both kinds of subjects are constituted by desire, the subject of interest located closer to Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic pole, the subject of law closer to the paranoiac pole. Flows, a non-totalisable multiplicity, characterise the subject of interest whereas the subject of law is a subject of self- imposed limitation, part of the totalising unity of the juridical sovereign. One could well argue that the channelling and coding of desire is indespensibe in the production of the subject of law. The non-totalisable multiplicity of subjects of interest are decoded, deterritorialised flows that always threaten to disrupt the ,juridical sovereign's desire for unity and order. The liberal state, the civilised machine, the self-protection measures that Polanyi refers to, are all embedded within a society which is always in the process of being decoded, deterritorialised, but whose identity as such depends upon a continual process of recoding, reterritorialisation, a process of construction that must not be acknowledged as such. Governmentality locates practices of statecraft in official government arenas, but also within civil society. We are thus encouraged to think of the state as the entire body of society and the various manifestations of the desire for order that traverse it.'18 It does not possess the unity, coherence, and 'thingness' that is generally attributed to it. Formal governmental institutions that are often defined as the state are certainly important elements of statecraft and at times may be the most significant, but they do not constitute statecraft in its entirety. In the complex domain of govern mentality is the domain of statecraft and it is in this complex domain that practices of statecraft balance the tensions discussed above. They channel, code, and territorialise desire and thereby construct the identity of 'the people', the nation. The issues, problems, and conflicts that these tensions give rise to are managed through various practices of statecraft. Of particular concern for this study are the perceived threats to order these tensions give rise to. Immigration, especially illegal but also legal, is an example of a decoded flow that can be perceived as a threat or potential threat to order. It is, however, also a flow that is itself intimately connected to the decoding and deterritorialisation that accompanies capitalism. The deterritorialised flows of capitalism give rise to what is currently popularly referred to as 'globalisation' which in.turn is implicated in the movement of peoples across territorialised and coded geographic, cultural, and political borders. While capitalism is not always a direct or even indirect cause of all population movements, immigrants do occupy 37. Colin Gordon, 'Governmental Rationality: An Introduction', in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 21. 38. Pasquale Pasquino notes that this understanding of 'the state' is in fact closer to its meaning in the seventeenth century; 'Theatrum Politicum: The Geneology of Capital: Policy and the State of Prosperity' in The Foucault Effect. Ellen Meiskins Wood also suggests a less distinct division between the state and civil society: 'Civil society represents a particular network of social relations which does not simply stand in opposition to the coercive policing and administrative functions of the state, but represents the relocation of these functions or at least some of them'. See Democracy Against Capitalism; Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 254. 597 an important position in the tension between potentially destructive forces of the unfettered, self-regulating market and societies' attempts at self-protection. The deterritorialisation and decoding that accompanies globalisation raises the issue of the definition/identity of the society in need of self-protection. The tension identified in governmentality, which directs attention to the well-being of the population, is significant because immigration raises the question of who is to be considered 'the population'. The question of how the population is constructed then follows. Inherent in this question is the issue of inclusion and exclusion. Deleuze and Guattari pose this question as follows, 'Are there people who are constituted in the overcoding empire, but constituted as necessarily excluded and decoded?''`' What is important here is the tigure of the excluded, the outsider, the stranger, the one who does not belong, but whose constitution is inherent in the constitution of the included and the social system of which they are part. The excluded can take many different forms. Neo-racism is important in understanding the form of exclusion that is particularly relevant to immigration. Neo-racism results from the overcoding practices that attempt to counter the decoding and deterritorialisation that is inherent in globalisation. Neo-racism functions as a supplement to the kind of nationalism that arises from the blurring of boundaries and the problemetising of national identity that the deterritorialisation of human bodies gives rise to. The desire for order is manifested in neo-racism's attempts to obliterate the ambiguity surrounding national identity that accompanies the movement and settlement of human beings across geopolitical boundaries. In the following section, I provide a brief background on immigration into France from the end of World War 11 until immigration was officially halted in 1974. I then explore the ideas discussed above within the context of the issues that arose in response to this immigration. This case illustrates the tensions between deterritorialisation and the desire for order and non-ambiguity, and how neo-racism is implicated in the state practices that seek to resolve these tensions,40 39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 449. Deleuze and Guattari offer the example freed slaves in the Chinese Empire. It was the freed slaves who formed the first seeds of private property and trade. Marx and Engels also noted that it was the Roman plebians who became the private owners of landed property and commercial and industrial wealth precisely because they were excluded from all public rights. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 449, 569. For Giovanna Procacci, the figure of the pauper in the nineteenth century offers a useful example of an excluded other that was constituted by the social order from which it was excluded; 'Social Economy and the Government of Poverty', in The Foucault Effect, 151-69. The category of the 'underclass' is also a useful example of such an excluded group. See Goldberg, Racist Culture, 168-75. 40. I should stress here that France is certainly not the only case that would illustrate this. One need only call attention to Thatcher's remarks in the beginning of this article. See Roxanne Lynn Doty, 'Statecraft's Desire and Anti-Immigrantism'. manuscript in process, 1999. 598 Post-World War 11 Immigration in France Like in many other European countries, post World War II immigration into France was stimulated by the need for labour. In fact, France was one of the two European countries that sought the greatest number of guest workers to rebuild their economies after the war.41 There was a broad consensus among France's demographers, economists, and politicians in the immediate post war period that the reconstruction of France would necessitate a substantial increase in foreign labour. Charles de Gaulle argued that the status of France as a great power depended on an increase in population that would require an active immigration policy.42 Despite the fact that a 1945 law envisioned strict regulation and control of immigration and created the National Immigration Office (ONI) for this purpose, up until 1967 a policy of laissez-faire prevailed. Immigration was largely spontaneous and often clandestine (illegal) with the government turning a blind eye and 'regularising' those who arrived illegally. From the mid-1950s through the late 1960s, immigration into France increased rapidly with the immigrants becoming more diverse. Increasingly immigrants came from non-European countries, especially from former colonies in Africa.41 During this period of time immigrants were seen as a source of cheap, mobile labour and were considered a peripheral presence in French society. Over time reprehensible social conditions developed as immigrants were socially and geographically confined to areas on the outskirts of major cities in slums which came to be known as bidonvilles (shanty-towns). Immigration came to be perceived as a social problem and the discourse began to focus on issues of assimilability, race, and the social dangers created by immigration.44 On 26 February 1969 a report attempting to define a new immigration policy for France was presented to and adopted by the Social and Economic Council. The report, issued by M. Corentin Calvez, detailed the argument that has become the basis for contemporary French immigration policy and led to the adoption of an ethnically selective immigration policy.45 It called for a systematic rather than laissez-faire approach to immigration, arguing 41. Rita J. Simon and James P. Lynch, 'A Comparative Assessment of Public Opinion Toward Immigrants and Immigration Polcies', International Migration Review 33, no. 2 (1999): 455-66. 42. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 40, 71, and Gary P. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies: The French and British Experiences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 69. 43. Silverman, Deconstructing The Nation, 42-43. Competition with Germany and Switzerland for workers became more intense creating the necessity to go outside of Europe to recruit workers. In addition the liberal immigration policies toward Algeria and other French overseas departments contributed to the increase in the number of non-European immigrants. 44. Complicating the issue of immigration was the war with Algeria which functioned to provide a generally negative context within which immigration was discussed. The Evian Agreement of 1962 which ended the war and granted independence to Algeria maintained the principle of free movement for Algerians and created an agency based in Algeria for the purpose of recruiting workers for France. Limitations on Algerian immigration began in 1964 with the Franco-Algerian Accord. 45. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, 87; Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration. 'Race' and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London: Routledge, 1995), 216. 599 that immigration should be recognised'as an;issue of high priority because of the number of foreigners in France and their contribution to the economy. It also suggested that the nature of immigration had changed with Europeans being replaced by non-Europeans, especially North Africans. According to the report, this fact was disturbing because the non-Europeans caused social problems and were not easily assimilated. For the first time European immigrant workers were clearly differentiated from non-European immigrant workers.46 The report suggested that by the year 2000 the number of Algerians in France would constitute an 'inassimilable island' and it was therefore desirable to 'give to the influx of non-European origin, and principally to the current from the Maghreb, the character of a temporary immigration for work'." It was argued that limiting non-Europeans to the status of temporary immigrants and limiting the number of family members of non-Europeans permitted to join their relatives did not constitute discrimination, but rather was 'the guarantee of the profoundly humane preoccupation of an immigration policy .4' At the same time, the report called for improved social provisions for immigrants. During this period there was increasing anti-immigrant sentiment which included protests and violence against immigrants, especially Algerians. The National Front was formed in 1972 and in June 1973 the neo-fascist New Order (Ordre Nouveau, whose leadership established the National Front), launched its campaign against uncontrolled and illegal immigration. The National Front and its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen played a central role in creating and defining the debate on immigration. There was a massive outburst of racial violence in August and September. It was the most serious episode of racial violence in post-war France and precipitated the suspension of all further emigration to France by the Algerian government. The 1973 Middle East War and the sharp rise in oil prices that accompanied it sparked fears over the prospects for economic growth in Western Europe. Ostensibly due to fears of rising unemployment and economic recession, France and other labour importing European countries closed their borders to non EC immigrants.49 In 1974 France officially put into effect a ban on all primary immigration that is still in force today.50 Neo-Racism and the Serril de Tolernnce The laissez-faire approach that characterised the immediate post-World War 1\ period is consistent with the schizophrenic pole of desire discussed earlier, the pole tending in the direction of nearly infinite freedom, defying boundaries, and 46. Martin A. Schain, 'The National Front in France and the Construction of Political Legitimacy', West European Politics 10, no. 2 (1987): 229-52. 47. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, 88. 48. Quoted in Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, 88. 49. Hargreaves, Immigration. 'Race' and Ethnicity, 17; and Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation , 53. 50. The ban also applied to family reunification, but not to asylum-seekers. The ban on family reunification proved unworkable and in 1978 the Conseil d'Etat, France's highest administrative court, declared it to be unlawful. See Hargreaves, Immigration, 'Race' and Ethnicity, 18. 600 promoting flows of goods, capital, and human bodies. The laissez-faire approach essentially deterritorialised the human beings who were constructed primarily in terms of their labour power. This approach upheld the commodity fiction that labour can be separated from the human beings to whom it is attached. Immigration was considered most fundamentally an economic issue, the market mechanism for labour being the sole director of the fate of the immigrants. The emphasis on the temporary nature of this labour and the stress for the need for flexibility clearly illustrates this. However, as Polanyi points out, the human beings who embody labour power would perish without the various protections afforded by social institutions.51 As human beings perish from the effects of social exposure, the social order itself is threatened. This was precisely the danger as immigrant workers were relegated to the periphery of French society. At the same time though, the very definition of what constituted French society was problemetised. The presence of increasing numbers of human beings in France who were relegated to the margins of French society contributed to the tension out of which French society constituted itself and made it more difficult to successfully manage that tension. The desire for order motivated practices of govern mentality which attempted to balance the tensions created by the decoded, deterritorialised flows of humanity and the social protection necessary to prevent the destruction of society itself. it was in this process that a racialisation of the immigration issue took place. Recall that the key defining theme of neo-racism is the notion that bounded communities founded on cultural differences are the natural result of human nature. In France a kind of master theme underpinned much of the discourse on immigration. This was the notion of a 'threshold of tolerance' or seuil de ~olerance. Freeman points out that this theme grew out of theories of social scientists but became a working assumption of French policy makers and a large sector of the general public. 52 It was first used in 1964 by a sociologist who was investigating conflicts between Algerian families from the bidonvilles and French families from Parisian slums both of whom had been rehoused in a housing estate." Its 'truth' was widely accepted. The basic idea behind seuil de tolerance was that there exists a threshold of tolerance concerning the presence of foreigners in any society beyond which social conflict is inevitable. In 1970 Michel Massenet, an ardent proponent of .seuil de loler'ance, who held a variety of governmental posts dealing with immigration and was the most influential civil servant in the immigration field, suggested that: In a primary school class, the presence of more than 20 per cent of foreign children slows down the progress of all children. In a hospital, problems of coexistence arise when foreigners represent more than 30 per cent of the number of patients. In a block of flats, it is not wise to go beyond the 51. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 73. 52. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, 157. 53. Robin Cohen, Frontiers of Identity: The British and the Others (London: Longman, 1994), 177. 601 proportion of 10 to 15 per cent of families of foreign origin when these families are not accustomed to life in a modern environment. 54 In 1981 Charles Hernu, Mayor of Villeurbanne in Lyons, asserted that, I am striving to disperse them [the immigrants] throughout the city in such a way that no neighbourhood surpasses a threshold of ten per cent. I believe that there is a threshold that we cannot exceed without tragedy. 55 Numerous other examples of how prevalent this idea or theory was can be found. In December 1989 French President Fran~ois Mitterrand declared on national television that the threshold for the numbers of immigrants in France had been reached in the 1970s.sG In January 1990, former Prime Minister under Giscard d'Estaing, Raymond Barre, suggested that a coherent immigrant policy would avoid 'large concentrations of immigrants in certain quarters or certain towns' .57 In n 1991 leader of the mainstream right party, Rassemblement pour la Republique (RPR) and former Prime Minister Jacques Chirac suggested, we risk exceeding the threshold of tolerance, whose existence has been recognised by the President. It is not sensible to deny it in the name of some anti-racist ideology or other...We must have an immediate moratorium on family immigration.58 It is important to note that the ideas behind a 'threshold of tolerance' were shared across a wide spectrum of society. In 1980, Paris Communiste Franqais (PCF) General Secretary Georges Marchais sent an open letter to the Rector of the Paris Mosque justifying the actions of a group of PCF supporters who had used a bulldozer to destroy the power supplies and staircases of a hostel used by immigrant workers. The attack had been led by the Communist Mayor of Vitry. Marchais backed the Mayor insisting that the threshold of tolerance had been passed.59 The threshold of tolerance theory permits and justifies policies of exclusion on the grounds of the inevitability of conflict if human beings of different cultures are mixed in inappropriate ways. Thus it can claim that what are in fact racist, exclusionary policies are actually humane, as did the Calvez report cited in the previous section. Social problems that arise in the context of immigration can be attributed to this 'natural law' of human populations. In turn the very existence of social problems can be used as evidence to support the 'truth' of this theory. 54. Quoted in Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, 158. 55. Quoted in Neil MacMaster, 'The "Seuil de Tolerance ": The Uses of a "Scientific" Racist Concept, in Race, Discourse, and Power in France, ed. Maxim Silverman (Aldershot: Gower, 1991): 14-28. 56. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 95. 57. From Liberation, 12 January 1990. Quoted in Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 96. 58. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 96. 59. Jonathan Marcus, The National Front and French Politics, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 77. 602 From 1977, the discourse on immigration focused on the immigrant as antithetical to the interests of the nation-state and since the early 1980s it has become commonplace to hear claims that immigration is a threat to national identity.`'" The attempts at deportation are perhaps the most obvious examples of the desire to restore purity to the French nation by expelling those deemed 'unabsorbable'. ln 1977 Lionel Stoleru, Minister of State for Immigrant Workers, introduced a repatriation scheme which offered 10,000 francs as encouragement to immigrants to return to their country of origins. The aim was to remove one million foreigners from French soil in five years. It failed, in that only 57,953 took up the offer and most of these were Spanish and Portuguese workers, not the expected non-Europeans. In 1979 President Giscard d'Estaing attempted to repatriate by force 500,000 Algerians, but failed due to widespread opposition by left wing parties, labour unions, and churches as well as the Guallist and Christian- Democratic right wing parties.61 Interior Minister .Christian Bonnet used his discretionary powers to expel on average 5,000 immigrant workers a year between 1978 and 1981, most of whom were young Maghrebis.62 The Bonnet Law of 1980 made expulsion of 'irregulars' an administrative rather than judicial matter, hence speeding up the process and removing it from the jurisdiction of the law .61 Immigration figured prominently in the 1986 general election which was a victory for the mainstream Right, with the National Front gaining its first parliamentary seat.64 The Pasqua approach to immigration, named after Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, advocated a policy of winning National Front voters by pursuing tough immigration policies championed by Le Pen. This approach was followed between 1986 and 1988 and then again in 1993. The 1986 Pasqua Law required anyone entering the country to prove they had adequate means of support and significantly widened the categories of people who could be expelled or refused entry on the grounds that they were a threat to public order.65 The 1993 Pasqua Law, which took effect on I January 1994, limited rights of asylum-seekers, reformed access to French nationality, facilitated easier identity checks by police, and limited entry and residence rights of foreigners. It amended Article 23 60. See Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 56, and Hargreaves, Immigration. Race and Ethnicity, 151. Hargreaves cites a 29 November 1985 opinion poll in Paris Match, in which two thirds of those questioned said France was in danger of losing her national identity if nothing was done to limit the foreign population. In 1993, 67 per cent of French respondents agreed that something must he done about immigrants because France risked losing her national identity. See Rita J. Simon and James P. Lynch, 'A Comparative Assessment of Public Opinion toward immigrants and immigration Policies', International Migration Review 33, no. 2 (1999): 455-67. 61. Patrick Weil and John Crowley, 'Integration in Theory and Practice: A Comparison of France and Britain', West European Politics 17, no. 2 (1994): 110-26. 62. Hargreaves, Immigration, Race and Ethnicity, 19. 63. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 342. When the Left came to power in 1981, most of the expulsions were stopped and a general amnesty was declared for illegal immigrants provided they had entered France prior to I January. One hundred and thirty-two thousand illegal immigrants were regularized. See Hargreaves, Immigration, 'Race' and Ethnicity, 21. 64. Marcus, The National Front, 80. 65. Ibid., 80-81. 603 of the Code de la Na~ionalile Fran~aise, (the French Nationality Code) which conferred French nationality autoniatically to anyone born in France having at least one parent who was also born on French Territory.66 The presumption of an authentic national identity is evident in the desire to restore this authenticity through deporting the inauthentic who disturb the boundaries between the inside and the outside. The idea of a threshold of tolerance is also compatible with policies of integration and assimilation. The use of selective criteria based on some ultimately vague notion of assimilability is quite consistent with the notion of a threshold of tolerance. Freeman points out that while the idea of a threshold of tolerance may at first seem at odds with the traditional French view of its endless absorptive capacity, it is in fact quite compatible." Only a fully assimilated minority would not activate the process of rejection. Efforts should thus focus on assimilating those immigrants already in France. Those groups that could not or would not assimilate should no longer be permitted entry. Seuil de tolerance thus promotes the two pronged strategy of strictly controlling entry and integrating and assimilating those already present. Assimilation was a key aspect of French immigration policy but was always inextricably linked to the issue of control, especially to the control of illegal immigration. Assimilation, as it was constructed in post World War II France, was important in constructing the notion of a homogeneous national identity in a time of perceived threat to order and stability. The discourse of assimilation created a dichotomy between the easy absorption of previous European immigrants and the inassimilablity of the new (mostly African) immigrants thereby racialising the entire immigration issue. While in one sense promoting the inclusion of the new immigrants, it simultaneously constructed an internal frontier between these immigrants and those who were 'truly' French. Silverman refers to this as the 'paradox of assimilation'. Ostensibly assimilation implies invisibility in that those who are assimilated are no longer strangers, no longer the other. However, the very notion of assimilation presumes the visibility of a difference that must be eradicated. No theoretical discourse on the dignity of all cultures will really compensate for the fact that, for a 'Black' in Britain or a 'Beur' in France, the assimilation 66. Under this article, the children of Algerian immigrants as well as certain other former colonies were automatically citizens because these areas were French territory. The 1993 law amended article 23 so that it no longer applies to children horn since then to sub-Saharan Africans. Children born in France to Algerian parents would he French only if one of their parents had lived in France for at least live years prior to their birth. Hargreaves, Immigration. 'Race' and Ethnicity, 173-77. A new law was approved on 8 April 1998 which liberalised the 1993 law. The new law gives children born in France of foreign parents the absolute right to French citizenship at 18, provided they have lived in France for at least five years. It also permits children 13 and older to become French citizens and permits foreigners who marry French citizens to naturalise after 12 months of marriage, 'France: New Law', Migration News 5, no. 5 (1998): 1. 67. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, 159. 604 demanded of them before they can become 'integrated' into the society in which they already live (and which will always be suspected of being superficial imperfect, or simulated) is presented as progress, as an emancipation, a conceding of rights.68 It presupposes the idea of a homogeneous national collectivity that the strangers must become like. Neo-racism is an integral aspect of assimilation in this specific historical context. It is a product of the desire for an authentic core which would identify the 'true' and 'pure' nationals. Insofar as that authentic core cannot be found (and arguably does not exist) assimilation becomes a quest for an inaccessible goat.'' The discourse of assimilation and control recoded and reterritorialised the human beings whose presence brought ambiguity to French national identity. Despite its ostensibly inclusionary character, assimilation can work to differentiate and externalise certain groups, in this case non-European immigrants. It constructed the Third World immigrant as a stranger, albeit a stranger whose presence is rather long term. This long term presence is what necessitated the recoding and reterritorialisation. The immigrant's presence raised the question of who was to be considered authentically French. The physical closeness yet social, political, and economic remoteness of the immigrants problemetised the notion of France as a unitary society with a shared sense of national identity. Policies of assimilation would facilitate a recoding of the immigrants as 'truly' French and thereby reterritorialise their identity within French society. The concept of governmentality discussed earlier is relevant here. Practices of govern mentality must constantly negotiate and define or redefine the space of the population in order to balance the tensions between the pole of social order and the pole of deterritorialised flows. After 1974 the state became increasingly involved in social efforts pertaining to immigrants, particularly in the areas of housing and other welfare services. A Ministry, in fact, was created for this purpose; Antoine Postel-Vinay was appointed Minister of State for Immigrant Workers. He immediately proposed an end to further labour recruitment, coupled with an ambitious programme designed to improve the living conditions of immigrants already in France. 70 In 1980 new measures were introduced to improve the housing, employment, and educational prospects of immigrants. Foreign groups were allowed the free right of association which had previously required the approval of the Interior Ministry. Substantial state funding was made available to support these groups.71 ln July 1984 the left passed a law granting automatically renewable ten-year combined work and residence permits to the majority of 68. Balibar, 'Is There a Neo-Racism?', 25. 69. Etienne Balibar, 'Racism and Nationalism', in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguious Identities, 60. 70. Hargreaves, Immigration , Race and Ethnicity, 193. Postal-Vinay resigned in July when it became clear that his housing proposals would not receive the required funding. He was replaced by Paul Dijoud and later by Lionel Stoleru in 1977. 71. Hargreaves, Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity, 195. 605 foreigners legally in France. This law. was at least partially in response to the demands of immigrant associations, who had been pressing for changes in the previous system under which immigrants had to be holders of both a residence and a work permit each of which was valid for one, three, or ten years, which did not necessarily have the same duration.72 The non-European immigrant population became increasingly stable in the sense that they became a permanent aspect of French society, thus redefining 'the population' and expanding the realm of govern mentality. Failing to address the issues of concern and consequence to the immigrant community would have rendered them outside of the realm of governmentality and thus made them 'social dangers' to French society. Conclusion Bauman suggests that order is continuously engaged in a war of survival which entails efforts to exterminate ambivalence, to define precisely, and to suppress or eliminate everything that cannot be precisely defined. The construction of order sets the limits to incorporation and admission. Securing supremacy for a designed, artificial order is a two-pronged task: it demands the unity and integrity of the internal realm as well as the security of the borders separating it from the external realm. Both sides of the task converge in one effort, that of separating the inside from the outside, making the boundary of the organic structure sharp and clearly marked." Attempts to do this in post-World War 11 France illustrate the usefulness of the understanding of the state suggested in this article. Immigration-related policies were characterised by a process which simultaneously coded and recoded the identity of those human beings who were to be considered 'authentically' French, thus to reaffirm seemingly the unity of the internal realm. However, this very process redefined what 'authentically' French in fact was and thus reterritorialised the internal realm. The inherent instability of this realm was thereby exposed. The desire for this purity, this unambiguous differentiation from the external realm is the ideal that is the state. Its concrete manifestation took place within a context traversed by the initial need for foreign labour and the previously constructed ideals of universality and assimilation. Statecraft oscillated between the desire for order and stability and the facilitation of flows of human beings. While France proclaims a 'zero option' policy on immigration and has authorised no new immigration since 1974, the facts suggest a more complicated story. One study predicts that from 16 million to 20 million additional young immigrants will settle in France by the year 2050.74 The desire for purity continues as well. A 1997 poll conducted by Le Monde found that 60 per cent of respondents 72. Ibid., 339. 73. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 7-8, 24. 74. Frank Viviano, 'Europe Suddenly Doesn't Even Recognize Itself', San Francisco Chronicle, 5 March 1999, Al. 606 said there were too many Arabs in France.75 An informal survey by a reporter for the San Francisco C'hronicle observed 45 young men and women who were visibly Arab or black being stopped and asked for their papers in a two hour period at the Gare du Nord railway station in metropolitan Paris. 6 Neo-racism has been integral to this desire for a pure unambiguous space of national identity, a space which was (and continues to be) widely perceived as threatened by the flow of deterritorialised human bodies. This is not to suggest a functionalist understanding of racism. Silverman calls for a conceptualisation of racisms as opposed to one universal and timeless racism. This permits the concept to have relative mobility and flexibility which can be articulated within various discourses in a variety of diverse times and places.77 Neo-racism is one of the racisms that functions within the context of contemporary globalisation and immigration is the phenomenon that spurs it. 75. Viviano, 'Europe Suddenly Doesn't Even Recognize Itself'. This same source cites a July 1998 European-wide study's finding that 48 per cent of the French describe themselves as 'racist' or 'fairly racist'. 76. Ibid., Al. 77. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 121. 1. Anthony M. Messina, Luis R. Fraga, Laurie A. Rhodebeck, and Fredreick D. Wright, eds., Ethnic and Racial Minorities in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1992), 32. 2. For example, until the 1960s 80 per cent or immigrants to the US, Canada, and Australia came from other industrialized countries. By the end of the 1980s, 82 per cent came from developing countries. Similarly, in most European OECD countries the proportion of foreign residents from other EU countries has contracted significantly. See Systeme d'observation permenente des migrations (SOPEMI, Continuous Reporting System on Migration), Trends in International Migration (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1992), 20. In 1962 approximately 75 per cent of foreign residents in France were European. By 1982 this figure had changed to less than 50 per cent. Jonathan Marcus, The National Front and French Politics: The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 76. 3. Maxim Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism, and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. 4. Rohert Miles, Racism After Race Relations (New York: Routledge, 1993), 206-7. 5. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation , 35. 6. William Rogers Brubaker, Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America (London: University Press of America, 1989), 1. 7. Kimberly Hamilton and Kate Holder, 'International Migration and Foreign Policy: A Survey of the Literature', The Washington Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1991): 195-211. 1. 8. Of course, such a neat overlap rarely if ever actually existed. However, it seems to be the case that this disjunction is more pronounced and or greater concern today. 9. Martin Barker, The New Racism (London: Routledge, 1981), 21. 10. Etienne Balibar, 'is There a Neo-Racism?', in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, eds. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 23. 11. Barker, The New Racism , 21. 12. This understanding of racism has been criticised as being all-inclusive. For example, Robert Miles makes the important point that there is a distinction between discourses which construct differences as natural in order to exclude and discourses which construct differences as natural 'not only in order to exclude, but additionally, in order to marginalise a social collectivity within a particular constellation of relations of domination'. Miles, Racism After Race Relations , 97-102. While this distinction is significant I believe that it ignores two important issues. First, it imputes an intentionatity behind discourse(s) when the power of discourse is often its relative autonomy, the inability to reduce it to the intentions of either individuals or groups. Second, it risks ignoring the fact that all too often exclusion and relations of domination go hand in hand. Differences are rarely constructed with the result being two separate but equal groups. 13. Pierre-Andre Taguieff, 'The New Cultural Racism in France', Telos 83 (1990): 109-22. 14. Balibar, 'Is There a Neo Racism?', 59-60. 15. Howard Winant, Racial Conditions (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 101. 16. Balibar, 'Is There a Neo-Racism?', 20. 17. Winant suggests that the European experience resonates with developments in the United States where neoconservatism has worked out the main areas of "anti-racist racism" and where cultural difference arguments are daily becoming more central in racial discourse of all types'; see Racial Conditions , 101-2. 18. Taguieff, The New Cultural Racism, 118 . 19. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 80. 20. See Roxanne Lynn Doty, 'The Bounds of Race in International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 22, no. 4 (1993): 443-61 for a discussion of 'race' that elaborates on its social constructedness and its relevance for the discipline of International Relations. 21. Etienne Balibar, 'Race, Nation, and Class: Interview with Etienne Balibar', in Race, Discourse and Power in France , ed. Maxim Silverman (Aldlershot: Gower Publishing, 1991), 79-80. 22. One can note an obvious resonance between Foucault's conception of power and Deleuze and Guattari's conception of desire. Ronald Bogue, suggests that power is a restricted and reterritorialised form of desire. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989), 106. According to Philip Goodchild, formations of power in society are merely the workings of desire; see Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (London: Sage, 1996), 73. 23. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus-Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 33, 149. 24. Goodchild defines the term 'socius' simply as the 'phantasm of social space'. Within this social space are 'presuppositions as to what being with others means'. We can think of the socius as society always in the process of being produced and reproduced, coded, decoded and recoded; Deleuze and Guattari , 219. 25. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus , 195-6. 26. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 53. 27. for example, the imperial state does not create large scale works without a flow of independent labor escaping its bureaucracy or a monetary form of tax without flows of money escaping and giving rise to other powers such as commerce and hanking. 28. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus , 224. 29. Ibid., 251-52. 30. While Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the decoded, deterritorialised flows that accompany capitalism, there are arguably many aspects of social/political/cultural life that can be considered in terms of flows which may not be related to capilalism. The flows of people are the concern here and while not all movements of people are directly related to capitalism, much of the post-World War II movement into western industrialised countries was directly related to capitalism. 31. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus , 220. 32. Ibid., 261. It may be taken by some as an extreme statement to suggest that the despotic state always lurks in the background. However, I would argue that a moments reflection should support this statement. The mark of the Urstaat is apparent in many and diverse instances. It is evident in Jeffrey Benzien, the South African police officer and member of the security branch, who daily left his suburban home to go to work and extract confessions with torture ('Apartheid Torturer Testifies As Evil Shows Its Banal Face', New York Times , 9 November 1997, A1, A10). The mark of the Urstaat is equally apparent in the Salvadoran Army's American-trained Atlacatl Battalion who systematically murdered hundreds of men, women, and children in the village of El Mozote in December 1981. See Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). the mark of the despotic state is perhaps less apparent, but nonetheless present in other attempts to maintain order and stability. Nor can it be said that these attempts always take place in what would generally be considered 'repressive states'. For example, the Urstaat raises its head at the United States/Mexican border when hundreds of human beings die trying to cross the border at extremely dangerous points due to US policies such as Operation Gatekeeper. See Sam Howe Verhovek, 'Silent Deaths Climbing Steadily as Migrants Cross Mexico Border' New York Times , 24 August 1997, A1; and Michael Huspek, 'U.S. Gatekeepers Crackdown Partly to Blame for Deadly Record', The Arizona Republic , 29 August 1997, B17. The British state oscillated to its despotic pole when Joy Gardner, a Jamaican immigrant, was killed after police gagged her with more than thirteen feet of adhesive tape during an attempt to deport her. See Amnesty International News 25, no. 9 (1995): 1. The Urstaat also lurks behind the various roundups of presumed, but not in tact, 'illegal aliens' such as those in Chandler, Arizona in July of 1997. See Julie Amparano, 'Brown Skin: No Civil Rights?'. The Arizona Republic, 27 August 1997, A1, A14. 33. Dclcuzc and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 221. 34. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 4. 35. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 74, 132. 36. See Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governementality (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991). 37. Colin Gordon, 'Governmental Rationality: An Introduction', in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 21. 38. Pasquale Pasquino notes that this understanding of 'the state' is in fact closer to its meaning in the seventeenth century; 'Theatrum Politicum: The Geneology of Capital: Policy and the State of Prosperity' in The Foucault Effect. Ellen Meiskins Wood also suggests a less distinct division between the state and civil society: 'Civil society represents a particular network of social relations which does not simply stand in opposition to the coercive policing and administrative functions of the state, but represents the relocation of these functions or at least some of them'. See Democracy Against Capitalism; Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 254. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , 449. Deleuze and Guattari offer the example freed slaves in the Chinese Empire. It was the freed slaves who formed the first seeds of private property and trade. Marx and Engels also noted that it was the Roman plebians who became the private owners of landed property and commercial and industrial wealth precisely because they were excluded from all public rights. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , 449, 569. For Giovanna Procacci, the figure of the pauper in the nineteenth century offers a useful example of an excluded other that was constituted by the social order from which it was excluded; 'Social Economy and the Government of Poverty', in The Foucault Effect , 151-69. The category of the 'underclass' is also a useful example of such an excluded group. See Goldberg, Racist Culture , 168-75. 40. I should stress here that France is certainly not the only case that would illustrate this. One need only call attention to Thatcher's remarks in the beginning of this article. See Roxanne Lynn Doty, 'Statecraft's Desire and Anti-Immigrantism'. manuscript in process, 1999. 41. Rita J. Simon and James P. Lynch, 'A Comparative Assessment of Public Opinion Toward Immigrants and Immigration Polcies', International Migration Review 33, no. 2 (1999): 455-66. 42. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation , 40, 71, and Gary P. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict in Industrial Societies: The French and British Experiences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 69. 43. Silverman, Deconstructing The Nation , 42-43. Competition with Germany and Switzerland for workers became more intense creating the necessity to go outside of Europe to recruit workers. In addition the liberal immigration policies toward Algeria and other French overseas departments contributed to the increase in the number of non-European immigrants. 44. Complicating the issue of immigration was the war with Algeria which functioned to provide a generally negative context within which immigration was discussed. The Evian Agreement of 1962 which ended the war and granted independence to Algeria maintained the principle of free movement for Algerians and created an agency based in Algeria for the purpose of recruiting workers for France. Limitations on Algerian immigration began in 1964 with the Franco-Algerian Accord. 45. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict , 87; Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration . 'Race' and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (London: Routledge, 1995), 216. 46. Martin A. Schain, 'The National Front in France and the Construction of Political Legitimacy', West European Politics 10, no. 2 (1987): 229-52. 47. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict , 88. 48. Quoted in Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, 88. 49. Hargreaves, Immigration. 'Race' and Ethnicity , 17; and Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation , 53. 50. The ban also applied to family reunification, but not to asylum-seekers. The ban on family reunification proved unworkable and in 1978 the Conseil d'Etat , France's highest administrative court, declared it to be unlawful. See Hargreaves, Immigration , 'Race' and Ethnicity , 18. 51. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 73. 52. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, 157. 53. Robin Cohen, Frontiers of Identity: The British and the Others (London: Longman, 1994), 177. 54. Quoted in Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, 158. 55. Quoted in Neil MacMaster, 'The "Seuil de Tolerance ": The Uses of a "Scientific" Racist Concept, in Race, Discourse, and Power in France, ed. Maxim Silverman (Aldershot: Gower, 1991): 14-28. 56. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 95. 57. From Liberation, 12 January 1990. Quoted in Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 96. 58. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 96. 59. Jonathan Marcus, The National Front and French Politics, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 77. 60. See Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 56, and Hargreaves, Immigration. Race and Ethnicity, 151. Hargreaves cites a 29 November 1985 opinion poll in Paris Match, in which two thirds of those questioned said France was in danger of losing her national identity if nothing was done to limit the foreign population. In 1993, 67 per cent of French respondents agreed that something must he done about immigrants because France risked losing her national identity. See Rita J. Simon and James P. Lynch, 'A Comparative Assessment of Public Opinion toward immigrants and immigration Policies', International Migration Review 33, no. 2 (1999): 455-67. 61. Patrick Weil and John Crowley, 'Integration in Theory and Practice: A Comparison of France and Britain', West European Politics 17, no. 2 (1994): 110-26. 62. Hargreaves, Immigration, Race and Ethnicity, 19. 63. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 342. When the Left came to power in 1981, most of the expulsions were stopped and a general amnesty was declared for illegal immigrants provided they had entered France prior to I January. One hundred and thirty-two thousand illegal immigrants were regularized. See Hargreaves, Immigration, 'Race' and Ethnicity, 21. 64. Marcus, The National Front, 80. 65. Ibid., 80-81. 66. Under this article, the children of Algerian immigrants as well as certain other former colonies were automatically citizens because these areas were French territory. The 1993 law amended article 23 so that it no longer applies to children horn since then to sub-Saharan Africans. Children born in France to Algerian parents would he French only if one of their parents had lived in France for at least live years prior to their birth. Hargreaves, Immigration. 'Race' and Ethnicity, 173-77. A new law was approved on 8 April 1998 which liberalised the 1993 law. The new law gives children born in France of foreign parents the absolute right to French citizenship at 18, provided they have lived in France for at least five years. It also permits children 13 and older to become French citizens and permits foreigners who marry French citizens to naturalise after 12 months of marriage, 'France: New Law', Migration News 5, no. 5 (1998): 1. 67. Freeman, Immigrant Labor and Racial Conflict, 159. 68. Balibar, 'Is There a Neo-Racism?', 25. 69. Etienne Balibar, 'Racism and Nationalism', in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguious Identities, 60. 70. Hargreaves, Immigration , Race and Ethnicity, 193. Postal-Vinay resigned in July when it became clear that his housing proposals would not receive the required funding. He was replaced by Paul Dijoud and later by Lionel Stoleru in 1977. 71. Hargreaves, Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity, 195. 72. Ibid., 339. 73. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 7-8, 24. 74. Frank Viviano, 'Europe Suddenly Doesn't Even Recognize Itself', San Francisco Chronicle, 5 March 1999, Al. 75. Viviano, 'Europe Suddenly Doesn't Even Recognize Itself'. This same source cites a July 1998 European-wide study's finding that 48 per cent of the French describe themselves as 'racist' or 'fairly racist'. 76. Ibid., Al. 77. Silverman, Deconstructing the Nation, 121.

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