Many Multiplicities: Identity in an Age of Movement

PAUL SPICKARD

The face of europe is changing. People who are not supposed to be there are there in abundance. Each nation of Europe has its own story, but each imagines itself as a naturally ethnically homogeneous place. Yet each contains large numbers of people who do not fit that ethnic self-definition. Some are migrants (see Table 1.1), some domestic minorities of long standing. Despite the fond wishes of some members of the dominant ethnic group in each country, the migrants are not going back where they came from. In many cases, they are already two or three generations resident in their European host country. The degree to which they have succeeded in making places for themselves in their host societies – and, conversely, the amount of discrimination they experience – varies widely.

Over the past several years, the peoples of most European nations and their leaders have engaged in sharp debates about migrants, less so about domestic minorities. Such discussions have focused on migrants as social problems, as people with deficits that need to be measured and remediated, and, all too often, as people who ought to go away. The discussions have in most cases missed who the migrants and minorities are, how they live their lives, and what the content of their identities may be. Simply put, policy makers and the educated public in Europe need to know more about migrants and minorities, how they conceive of themselves, and how they actually live their lives.

The scholars who wrote this book are all students of the lived experiences of migrants and minorities in Europe. It turns out that migrants and minority group members have complex identities, often multiple identities at one time, and that those identities shift and change over the course of time and changing circumstance. This book is about how those migrants and minorities experience their lives and manage their multiple identities. It addresses the situations of migrants and minorities in some powerful European nations like Germany and the United Kingdom and also in Finland, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, and Kazakhstan. It looks at minorities who have received a lot of attention, like Turkish Germans, and also at some who have received little notice, such as Kashubians and Tatars in Poland and Chinese in Switzerland. It explores the lives and social locations of children, young adults, and mature people. It examines international adoption and cross-cultural love. Finally, it describes a few situations that may provide models for multicultural success.

MIGRANTS AND MINORITIES: A PROBLEM FOR EUROPEANS

Every modern European nation is founded on an idea of ethnic homogeneity that is thought to reach deep into its past. The idea can be summed easily in this equation:

One Nation = One Ethnic Group

= One Religion

= One Language

= One Territory

= One Government

This is the way it is supposed to be. For most Europeans, as for scholars who study nationalism, it is taken for granted that each nation is founded on a single ethnic group – a specific people from a specific place, with a shared history, language, and ancestry. For many such people, like the Czech philosopher Ernest Gellner, multiethnic states are conceptually incoherent and inherently unstable. Such people see an intimate connection between the formation of particular ethnic groups and particular nations. In the words of the British sociologist Anthony D. Smith, "modern nations – a fusion of premodern ethnic identities and modern 'civic' elements – require the symbols, myths and memories of ethnic cores if they are to generate a sense of solidarity and purpose.... there is ... [an] inner 'antiquity' of many modern nations." The essence of nationalism is the assumption of the existence of a founding race.

These are powerful ideas. They have attended the making of every modern nation, and they lie at the root of many ethnic groups' yearnings for nation-states of their own. For Germans, the racial or ethnic foundation of the nation is an idea – which can be found in the writings of J. G. Herder, J. G. Fichte, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as in the soaring imagination of Richard Wagner – that the German Volk were a mystical entity that existed in germ form many centuries prior to the predestined establishment of a German state. In this construction, all people who speak some language that may be called Germanic are necessarily Germans (no matter that they live in the Czech Republic or Ukraine), and all people who stand outside that historical, spiritual (dare one say biological?) essence are not true Germans and cannot become Germans. Never mind that a state called Germany did not exist throughout most of human history, nor that a very substantial portion of the supposedly Germanic peoples have never been part of that polity, nor indeed that the population of German territory always included many non-Germanic peoples. The Germanic-speaking peoples are supposed to be its grounding, and wherever they are, they are natural Germans, while others are not, even if they live within German borders and carry German passports.

We can see the artificial (though undeniably powerful) quality of nationalism alive in the history of every modern state. Throughout the Middle Ages, there was, of course, a political entity called France, but the...