26 The Nation. October 9, 2017out. References to a “crisis” of immigration
have become a convenient way to talk about
many other things as well: race, ethnicity,
religion, gender, and, especially, the human
costs wrought by global capitalism and the
growing inequalities it has engendered within
and across the nations of the world.
These references to an “immigrant cri-
sis” antedate the arrival of waves of refugees
fleeing war and violence in Africa and the
Middle East; the recent refugees have only
heightened the discourse. Three new books
attempt to see beyond the contours of the
current crisis and to tap into a deeper set of
economic, political, and cultural anxieties.
Rita Chin’s The Crisis of Multiculturalism in
Europe offers a comparative history of the
ways in which politicians in several Western
European nations have dealt with growing
numbers of non-Western immigrants from
the 1950s to the present. Sara R. Farris’s In
the Name of Women’s Rights examines the
unlikely convergence in recent years among
right-wing nationalist political parties,
neoliberals, and certain feminists around
the question of “emancipation” and non-
Western—particularly Muslim—women in
France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Rafia
Zakaria’s Veil shifts the balance away from
white secular Europe toward the experience
of Muslim women, mapping the stereo-
typical representations of the veil in Western
culture and then reflecting, in an intensely
personal way, on the many meanings that
the veil can have for the people who wear it.
Despite their differences, these three
books illuminate how Western liberal de-
mocracies, since the 1950s, have struggled
to develop strategies to manage diversity in
societies once considered homogeneous—
secular, white, and Christian. Although some
of the nations of the West were long used
to assimilating other Europeans, the arrival
of former colonial subjects was a different
matter. Viewed through the racist lens that
had justified imperial conquest, these brown,
mostly Muslim people were seen not only as
different but as inferior. Their difference was
also seen as a threat to European national
identity. It was one thing to tolerate their
presence as a temporary solution to short-
ages of labor; it was quite another to consider
them and their families as permanent resi-
dents with the equal rights of fellow citizens.I
n her well-researched volume, Rita
Chin, a professor of history at the Uni-
versity of Michigan, provides detailed
information about the different policies
developed in the countries she studied:
France, Germany, Britain, Switzerland, andthe Netherlands. By comparing them, she
highlights not only their different policies
but also their overarching similarities: Cul-
tural racism is the underlying stance taken
in the face of increasingly diverse ethnic and
religious populations.
Chin calls this diversity “multicultural-
ism,” a term that—despite a whole chapter
devoted to its various definitions—remains
confusing in her various usages. It is Chin’s
word for describing an objective reality and
for invoking the policies that developed in
response to this reality. It is also an epithet
employed by European politicians in the
1990s to distinguish their policies from
the reviled American ones, which viewed
multiculturalism as a positive respect for
ethnic and racial differences. By using the
same word to denote the nature of diverse
populations and the discourses about them,
Chin’s study loses a certain analytic acuity.
Still, it offers a rich historical account of the
continuities and changes in immigration
policy in the countries she studied.
Chin’s account begins with labor re-
cruitment. She notes that guest-worker
programs took off after World War II and
flourished in the expanding economies of
the 1960s. When European laborers were
scarce, men were recruited from the former
colonies: “The twin concerns of empire
and labor...drove the emergence of multi-
cultural societies.” For these newcomers to
Europe, programs were set up by their hosts
that encouraged expressions of religious
and cultural difference as a way of main-
taining the workers’ attachments to their
countries of origin and in the expectation
that when the jobs were done, they would
return home. For example, religious leaders
were imported from these workers’ home
countries. The policies had little to do with
multiculturalism, in the sense of positively
recognizing the plural nature of European
nations. In fact, it was quite the opposite:They sought to ensure the disposable and
replaceable nature of the migrant labor
force as a “reserve industrial army.”
When guest workers were no longer
needed during the economic downturn of
the 1970s, Western European leaders moved
to close their nations’ borders and end the
recruitment of foreign labor. But they were
faced with a dilemma they couldn’t easily
resolve: These workers had been bringing
their families in the preceding decades with
an eye to settling on European soil, and
they had been living in Europe in com-
munities that had been encouraged through
various state-sponsored programs to express
their religious and cultural differences. Now
Western European countries had to come
to terms with their own labor and cultural
policies, having inadvertently brought the
empire home. “The nearly twenty-five year
scramble to procure foreign workers,” Chin
writes, “had resulted in the permanent set-
tlement of transient labor that was increas-
ingly nonwhite, non-Christian and non-
European.... Communities of different eth-
nicities, cultures, and religions increasingly
lived side by side with the British, French,
Dutch and Germans, spawning multicultur-
al societies throughout Western Europe.”
An aspect of this story that Chin doesn’t
emphasize enough is the vast economic
problem posed by the presence of these
now unemployed or underemployed sur-
plus laborers and their families, who found
themselves doubly disadvantaged by their
cultural difference. But she does describe
in detail the various strategies that national
leaders developed to deal with the presence
of these guests who had now overstayed
their welcome. The strategies included
policies that promoted views of ethnic and
racial groups as separate, balkanized iden-
tities and euphemisms about improving
“race relations” that denied the structures
of discrimination that poisoned them.
These strategies also included calls for
assimilation and integration that placed
the burden of religious and cultural accom-
modation on the migrants themselves. For
the most part, Western European countries
did not want to acknowledge “how radically
their societies had changed,” and many
politicians sought to depoliticize a situation
that would soon explode, despite their best
efforts, into furious debates about race, im-
migration, and national identity in the late
1980s and 1990s.
For many countries in Western Europe,
1989 seems to have been a turning point:
the moment when a series of developments
focused new attention on immigrants, espe-The Crisis of Multiculturalism
in Europe
A History
By Rita Chin
Princeton University Press. 384 pp. $35In the Name of Women’s Rights
The Rise of Femonationalism
By Sara R. Farris
Duke University Press. 272 pp. $25.95Veil
By Rafia Zakaria
Bloomsbury. 136 pp. $14.95