Suchergebnisse

Work Package 4: National Case Studies of Challenges to Tolerance in Political Life ; The ACCEPT PLURALISM project (2010-2013) is funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme, Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities. (Call FP7-SSH-2009-A, Grant Agreement no: 243837). Coordinator: Prof. Anna Triandafyllidou, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute.

Work Package 4: National Case Studies of Challenges to Tolerance in Political Life ; The ACCEPT PLURALISM project (2010-2013) is funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme, Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities. (Call FP7-SSH-2009-A, Grant Agreement no: 243837). Coordinator: Prof. Anna Triandafyllidou, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute.

This paper aims to shed light upon the dynamics of community construction by migrants of Turkish origin, or what I call Euro-Turks, and their descendants residing in European countries such as Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.1 A retrospective analysis of the dynamics of community construction among the Euro-Turks reveals that they have always been engaged in producing and reproducing communities deriving from various needs. The construction of communities is sometimes a response to social-economic deprivation, sometimes to the form of affiliation with the homeland, and sometimes to the transition of the welfare state into post-social prudentialist state. This paper claims that Euro-Turks have become more occupied with the construction and articulation of ethno-cultural and religious communities in the last two decades due to the ascendancy of culturalist and civilizationist discourse along with neo-liberal forms of governmentality (Foucault, 1979) essentializing ethnic, cultural and religious boundaries, and generating an Islamophobic, migrantphobic and xenophobic climate in the west. As Wendy Brown (2010: 33) rightly stated the civilizationist discourse brought two disparate images together in order to produce a single figure of danger justifying exclusion and closure: "the hungry masses" and "cultural-religious aggression toward Western values." The growing stream of citizenship tests, attitude tests, zero-tolerance policy towards unqualified migrants, and negative public opinion vis-a-vis migrants, in general, results in that the European countries are recently inclined to be more assimilationist vis-a-vis Muslim origin migrant populations, who are perceived to be hostile toward Western values. Social, political and economic changes at global level have brought about the revitalization of an Islamophobic discourse in a way that leads to the redefinition of community boundaries through nationalist and religious lines. "I fear that we are approaching a situation resembling the tragic fate of ...

The aim of this paper is to provide a review of the contemporary literature on Islamophobia in Europe, through the lens of immigration issues, socio-economic status and civic participation of Muslim origin migrants and their descendants as well as international constraints. In addition to critically reviewing the current state of knowledge and debate about Islamophobia through the literature, the paper seeks to address the most recent data, survey findings and public discourses available about the current state of Islamophobia in Europe. In the process, some references will also be made to the current rise of Islamophobia in the United States and its differences with the European context. Describing Islamophobia as a form of governmentality in Foucaultian sense, I shall argue that it operates as a form of cultural racism in Europe, which has become apparent together with the process of securitizing and stigmatizing migration and migrants in the age of neo-liberalism. Furthermore, I shall also claim that the growing Islamophobic form of governmentality has produced unintended consequences on both minorities and majorities in a way that has so far led to the political and social instrumentalization of Islam by Muslim origin minorities, and to the deployment of an antimulticulturalist discourse by the majority societies in the west.

"This chapter claims that there is a new social and political phenomenon in Europe, which comes into force along with the visibility of Islam in the public space. It argues that there are two simultaneously running processes regarding the changing nature of Euro-Islam, which seem to be antithetical: individualization of Islam versus institutionalization of Islam. The underlying assumption of the work is that while the processes of globalization seem to prompt younger generations with Muslim background, in particular 'Türkiyeli', to liberate themselves from the constraints of their patriarchal parental and community culture, western states as well as ethno-cultural and religious brokers tend to reify, or reinforce, the existing communal and religious boundaries. That is to say that the descendants of migrants seem to be torn between individualization and institutionalization of Islam. The chapter focuses on the ways in which Islam has recently been accommodated by the state in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland." (author's abstract)