Euro-Turks: Dwelling in a Space of Their Own
By Ayhan Kaya

A young French-Turkish veiled woman testifies that she successfully learned to play with her multiple identities: "When I was a child I was feeling more Turkish although I had several French peers. When I became older my French identity has become more visible in the public space. Lately I have discovered another part of my identity, i.e., Islam. I have a triple identity. And the good thing is that I can live with all those three, and I don't have to choose one of them." (1)

Migration brings about new openings, encounters, bridges, doors, and windows, but it may also become an attractive form of governing ideology to be employed by conservative political elite. Migration has recently been framed as a source of fear and instability for the nation-states in the West, though it was rather a source of content and happiness in the 1960s. What has changed in the meantime? Why is this shift in the framing of migration occurring? Several different reasons like deindustrialization, rising productivity, unemployment, poverty, and neo-liberal political economy can be enumerated to answer such questions. One should not also underestimate the enormous demographic change led by the dissolution of the Eastern Block. The period starting with 1989 signifies the beginning of an essential historical epoch resulting with the massive migration flows of ethnic Germans, ethnic Hungarians, ethnic Russians, and Russian Jews from one place to another. The post-Communist era has also brought about a process which corresponds to the re-homogenization attempts of the western nation-states like Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Political instability and ethnic conflicts in the former Eastern Block (USSR and former Yugoslavia) pushed some ethnic groups to immigrate to some western European countries due to ethnic affinity. The mobility of millions of people has stimulated the nation-states to 'ethnicize' their migration policies in a way that approved the arrival of co-ethnic immigrants, but disapproved the status of the existing migrants. Nation-states were not suitably equipped to absorb the spontaneous arrival of millions of ethnics. This period of demographic change in Western Europe is paralleled by the rise of the 'heterophobic' discourses like the 'clash of civilizations,' 'culture wars,' and Islamophobia, as well as with the reinforcement of restrictive migration policies and territorial border security vis-à-vis the nationality of the third countries outside the European space.

Some other issues should also be underlined. Reducing migration to statistics has become one of the popular sports lately, and it has the risk of making political elite, media, and bureaucracy neglect the social, political, cultural, and economic gains that migrants supply to the receiving societies. On the other hand, the common tendency of categorization of migration together with drug trafficking, human trafficking, international criminality, and terrorism by the western states turns out to promote the fear of migration and 'others'. The securitization of migration has become a vital issue after the 9/11. States seem to employ the discourse of securitization as a political technique with a capacity to integrate a society politically by staging a credible existential threat in the form of an internal, or even an external, enemy. For instance, the popularity of the claim that the EU will encounter an 'influx' of migration from Turkey when it joins the Union illustrates such a politically- and socially-constructed fear.

Furthermore, constant reference to the rising number of illegal migrants has also become rather more a stagnant and conservative act in a way that underlines the prevention of a national, social, ethnic, and 'racial' body from being polluted and contaminated. It seems that the modern state is now more into the protection of the social and cultural body of the nation in order to keep it 'sterile' from contamination, which is likely to be caused by culturally and religiously different migrants. One should also keep in mind that immigrant-bashing becomes a social sport in a time when net migration is almost at zero, or even negative, in several countries like France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. This fact also makes the securitization of migration a rather nonsensical process. One could recall how the conservative political circles brought up the 'Polish plumber' issue in France immediately on the eve of the European Constitutional referendum in 2004. One should note that the total number of the Polish origin plumbers then in France was only 640, which is an insufficient number to challenge the domestic labor market. The media also play a role in the securitization process of migration by stereotypically casting migration and emphasizing its disrupting consequences. Migration is often presented as an imagined alien enemy that undermines its culture, saps its scarce resources, steals its jobs, and communicates alien customs and religions.

What I want to do is to scrutinize the ways in which the Euro-Turks living in Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands respond to the changing perception of migration and Islam in the west. There are more than 4.5 million Euro-Turks dwelling in the European Union countries, around 3 million of whom live in Germany, 400,000 in France, 400,000 in the Netherlands, and 200,000 in Belgium. Migrants by and large tend to comply with the legal, political, social, and economic structure of the country they dwell in. That is why one can not expect to have migrants coming from a particular country of origin and dispersed in various countries of destination to generate similar political participation strategies.

The discussions about the Euro-Turks have been heated in a time when Turkey has been given a full-membership perspective to the European Union. These discussions have also become imbedded in the debates on 9/11, 7/7, Islam, the killing of anti-Islamist political leader Pim Fortuyn and film director Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, the cartoon crisis in Denmark, and the Pope's unfortunate gaffe about the Prophet Mohammad. In the meantime, Euro-Muslims in general, and Euro-Turks in particular, have had a greater visibility in the European public sphere in a way that has fueled Islamophobic sentiments.

However, it seems that the real clash is not between Christians and Muslims; it is rather between the so-called seculars and Muslims who become more visible in the public space. Turkey's attempts to become a full member of the EU also triggers the Islamophobic sentiments of the seculars in a way that reveals the fact that enlightened European secularism is not yet ready to accommodate Muslims in the public space.

Secular political figures like Giscard d'Estain and Helmut Schmitt have lately become obsessed with underlining the Christian roots of the European civilization at the expense of risking the channels of dialogue between the EU and its immediate neighbors in the south and southeast. Seculars have opted for a religious discourse that tries to make use of the defensive cultural and religious mood prevailing in Europe. The escalation of this conflict between the autochthonous (local) and allochthonous (migrant) populations has resulted in the politicization of a massive number of Euro-Turks in countries like Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Although the new political atmosphere seems to be strenuous for the Euro-Muslims and Euro-Turks, it has compelled them to express themselves through legitimate political channels rather than through culture, ethnicity and religion.

Sources:
1. Şengül Kara, "Testimony," ELELE Conference - L'acse, French Senate, Paris, 27 January 2007.

This essay was written for the AICGS Workshop on "Transatlantic Perspectives on Religion and Politics in Global Affairs," which was held in Berlin on April 20, 2007.