![Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse
2
2
of migration to Europe (and within this the UK), which has experienced a large-
scale
upswing in inward migration. However, when this migration started, it was insuffi-
ciently envisaged (and certainly not desired) that those who came would settle in the
country long term, and as such, incoming non-
nationals were seen as neither potential
citizens nor political actors (Martinello 2006).
Up until the late 1960s, political and public discussions on migration policy were
thin on the ground and bureaucratically curtailed; there was a general convergence of
opinions among mainstream parties on migration, which resulted in political consen-
sus and collectively accepted policy pathways. During the 1970s and 1980s though, it
became clear that migrant workers had begun to permanently settle. Combined with
the economic downturn caused by the oil crisis, this led to public debates on culture,
identity and what political rights should be afforded to non-citizens, as well as to social
unrest and an increase in racism. Over time, the discourse on immigration widened
and became interdiscursive in nature as connections were made by public sphere
actors between migration and other social fields, including the economy, education,
security, health and welfare. The phenomenon became politicized: processes of migra-
tion became crises of immigration that threatened security, nations, welfare access,
health, education and the economy.
As immigration shifted from being an issue of economics to one of social and political
import, policy responses began to deal with integration, underpinned by the belief that
part of any ‘successful’ integration policy would include control of further immigration.
Over time, more and more restrictions have been placed on inward migration to the UK,
and successive British governments have followed integration policy pathways that ran
from race relations through multiculturalism to social cohesion, which, as I will argue, are
explicitly and implicitly neo-
assimilationist in both their language and measures, often in
reaction to successive mediatizations of immigration. As such, ‘to the old policy assump-
tion that restrictive immigration is a necessary condition for the success of an integration
policy, a new one [has been] added: integration policy measures are used to select those
immigrants that are able and willing to integrate and deter who are not’ (Penninx 2010: 26).
This change in policy and rhetoric comes at a time when, throughout Europe, immigration
and integration have become increasingly politicized and mediatized issues, and there has
been noticeable discursive and policy shifts to the right.
At this juncture, I would like to make clear that I am not arguing here for a simple causal
relationship whereby increased immigration leads to racism. To do so would first fall into
the lazy ‘seuil de tolérance’ argument, whereby the presence of too many racially different
people leads to social tensions and a rise in racism. Second, it ignores the pre-
existence
of racism in the UK that has been directed by many different national, religious or ethnic
groups for centuries and was used, among other things, to justify colonial domination.
Popular racism was present throughout the last century and has not gone away; indeed, it
seems to be becoming more and more accepted, normalized, legitimized and co-
opted by
major parties and media outlets. That said, I do believe that integration policies and inte-
gration discourse are inextricably linked to immigration.
In the following chapters, I set out my argument that there was a distinct and clear
intensification in the discursive construction of integration in public sphere in the
UK between 2000 and 2010. At the beginning of the period, integration was more](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3489510-250622014522-95f853d3/85/Constructions-Of-Migrant-Integration-In-British-Public-Discourse-Becoming-British-Sam-Bennett-21-320.jpg)
![To Be or Not to Be (British) 7
7
participation is enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which citizens
deliberate about their common affairs, and hence an institutionalized arena of discur-
sive interaction’ (Fraser 1992: 59).
Today, the term ‘public sphere’, although widely used, has come to mean varied
things to different scholars and public commentators. According to Dahlgren (1995:
ix), it is the space ‘where information, ideas and debate can circulate in society, and
where political opinion can be formed’. For Calhoun (2001), communication within
the public sphere may seek to influence the state, civil society or even private individu-
als, whereas the Habermassian public sphere is constituted by private individuals who
are concerned with public issues. It is thus ‘a domain of our social life where such a
thing as public opinion can be formed [where] citizens ... deal with matters of general
interest without being subject to coercion ... [to] express and publicize their views’
(Habermas 1997: 105). Many outside academia subscribe to a very narrow definition
of the public sphere, though, as merely pertaining to the media, which in modern
society plays a central role in how the public sphere operates. It is the primary vessel
of information –a way by which news and opinion can be transmitted on a wide scale
to large populations, or –as Habermas (ibid.) would have it –‘when the public is large
this kind of communication requires certain means of dissemination and influence:
today, newspapers and periodicals, radio and television are the media of the public
sphere’. Indeed, one can now talk of post-
national diasporic public spheres (Appadurai
1996) or transnational public spheres or spheres which are only now possible due to
globalization and advances in technology (Fraser 2007). The possibility of such com-
munication with larger audiences and the expansion of the public sphere are relatively
new phenomena –the importance of the media in the construction and mediation of
the public sphere was extensively anticipated and explicated by Habermas. Thus, to
talk of the public sphere as merely a mediatized or mediated society is to ignore previ-
ous and current conceptions of public debate and the relationship between those who
govern and those who are governed.
A wider definition of the public sphere points towards a space, or spaces (both real
and virtual) where communication takes places surrounding issues of public interest
and where an often uneasy consensus is reached. Even this very simple definition is
fraught with uncertainties and begs more questions than it answers. What constitutes
an issue of public interest? How is consensus reached? How is discussion mediated and
controlled? And –maybe most importantly for work on integration and migrants –who
constitutes a public, and how does one gain access? Or, in other words, how does one
gain the ‘symbolic tools’ (Cohen 1985) required by a certain society to partake in public
discussion?
Aristotle distinguished the private as consisting of the oikos (household) –men,
women, slaves and children –whereas the public consisted of citizens (effectively only
men). However, unlike later theorists such as Habermas, Aristotle accepted that the
public and private were inseparable and that there was considerable interplay between
the two (Triadafilopoulos 1999). The agora was the interface where public and private
met. Citizens of a polis shared the responsibility of debating issues of public import-
ance (war, imports, exports and legislation) and ‘critically examining policies of the
state’ (Goçan 2008: 3). In Hannah Arendt’s (1958) view, this classic model of the public](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3489510-250622014522-95f853d3/85/Constructions-Of-Migrant-Integration-In-British-Public-Discourse-Becoming-British-Sam-Bennett-26-320.jpg)
![Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse
8
8
sphere that existed was characterized by its agonal nature; the deliberations within the
public space were combative with the idea of winning an argument rather than coming
to a compromise.
For Habermas, the public sphere was the interface at which the relationship
between the state and private individuals was mediated (Roberts and Crossley 2004).
A separation of the public (the state) from the private (work and family) existed dur-
ing the early mercantilist period. During this period, a further split emerged between
home and work for the burgeoning bourgeoisie, and the issues that were seen as pri-
vate became filtered out from the public debate. The nascent middle class now sought
a space in which to ‘be public’ –the coffee houses and salons that proliferated during
the eighteenth century –where literature and art could be discussed through the use of
reason and carefully crafted argument. As these places evolved into spaces for discus-
sions that were more political, economic and social in nature, Habermas argues that
the participants came to use logical, well-
argued debate to reach consensus (ibid.: 3).
Running concurrently to this was the growth of newspapers, which facilitated the
wider dissemination of information. Interested parties in the geographical and finan-
cial expansion of trade required up-
to-
date news on relevant matters such as taxes
and prices. Later, as these newspapers developed to include news, comment, opinion
and literary reviews, ‘critical reasoning made its way into the daily press’ (Habermas
1989: 25), which began to bring into question the previously solid control over public
opinion and power that had hitherto been maintained by the state and church. This
enabled the public to apply pressure on state institutions, and as a consequence, poli-
ticians started to appeal to the public opinion as transmitted in the newspapers and
salons of the time.
1.4.2 A public sphere, but who are ‘the public’?
Habermas’ burgeoning (ideal) public sphere was shaped in principle by the ‘val-
ues of egalitarian dialogue’ (Goode 2005: 9) and the concept of disregarding status
altogether. Everyone who participated had equal stature, and the debates were thus
open. Although Habermas accepted that access to this public sphere was limited
in practice to property-
owning men, he nevertheless maintained that within the
idea of free, critical argumentation and rational debate as a way of arriving at con-
sensus on issues of public interest, there was a ‘kernel of something emancipatory’
(Benson 2009: 176). Fraser argues it is wrong though to start from the assumption
that access to the public sphere was open to all on an equal footing and that social
equality and status could be ‘bracketed’ (Fraser 1992: 524). In reality, participation
in the public sphere was conditional on markers of style and decorum which, both
during the rise of the bourgeois public sphere and today still, are also markers of
status inequality that ‘[function] informally to marginalise women and members of
the plebeian classes and to prevent them from participating as peers’ (ibid.: 525).
Following Cohen (1985), this is what I would term the ‘symbolic tools of a com-
munity’ or, as Bourdieu (1986: 241) would call it, ‘cultural capital’, access to which is
further compounded in modern democracies that have witnessed mass migration](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3489510-250622014522-95f853d3/85/Constructions-Of-Migrant-Integration-In-British-Public-Discourse-Becoming-British-Sam-Bennett-27-320.jpg)
![This was my sole resource, my only plan;
Till that, which suits a part, infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
Such were, doubtless, the true and radical causes which, for the final
twenty-four years of Coleridge's life, drew him away from those
scenes of natural beauty in which only, at an earlier stage of life, he
found strength and restoration. These scenes still survived; but their
power was gone, because that had been derived from himself, and
his ancient self had altered. Such were the causes; but the
immediate occasion of his departure from the Lakes, in the autumn
of 1810, was the favourable opportunity then presented to him of
migrating in a pleasant way. Mr. Basil Montagu, the Chancery
barrister, happened at that time to be returning to London, with Mrs.
Montagu, from a visit to the Lakes, or to Wordsworth.[81]
His
travelling carriage was roomy enough to allow of his offering
Coleridge a seat in it; and his admiration of Coleridge was just then
fervent enough to prompt a friendly wish for that sort of close
connexion (viz. by domestication as a guest under Mr. Basil
Montagu's roof) which is the most trying to friendship, and which in
this instance led to a perpetual rupture of it. The domestic habits of
eccentric men of genius, much more those of a man so irreclaimably
irregular as Coleridge, can hardly be supposed to promise very
auspiciously for any connexion so close as this. A very extensive
house and household, together with the unlimited licence of action
which belongs to the ménage of some great Dons amongst the
nobility, could alone have made Coleridge an inmate perfectly
desirable. Probably many little jealousies and offences had been
mutually suppressed; but the particular spark which at length fell
amongst the combustible materials already prepared, and thus
produced the final explosion, took the following shape:—Mr. Montagu
had published a book against the use of wine and intoxicating
liquors of every sort.[82]
Not out of parsimony or under any suspicion
of inhospitality, but in mere self-consistency and obedience to his
own conscientious scruples, Mr. Montagu would not countenance the
use of wine at his own table. So far all was right. But doubtless, on](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3489510-250622014522-95f853d3/85/Constructions-Of-Migrant-Integration-In-British-Public-Discourse-Becoming-British-Sam-Bennett-61-320.jpg)
![Meantime, on reviewing this story, as generally adopted by the
learned in literary scandal, one demur rises up. Dr. Parr, a lisping
Whig pedant, without personal dignity or conspicuous power of
mind, was a frequent and privileged inmate at Mr. Montagu's. Him
now—this Parr—there was no conceivable motive for enduring; that
point is satisfactorily settled by the pompous inanities of his works.
Yet, on the other hand, his habits were in their own nature far less
endurable than Samuel Taylor Coleridge's; for the monster smoked;
—and how? How did the Birmingham Doctor[83]
smoke? Not as
you, or I, or other civilized people smoke, with a gentle cigar—but
with the very coarsest tobacco. And those who know how that
abomination lodges and nestles in the draperies of window-curtains
will guess the horror and detestation in which the old Whig's
memory is held by all enlightened women. Surely, in a house where
the Doctor had any toleration at all, Samuel Taylor Coleridge might
have enjoyed an unlimited toleration.[84]
From Mr. Montagu's Coleridge passed, by favour of what introduction
I never heard, into a family as amiable in manners and as benign in
disposition as I remember to have ever met with. On this excellent
family I look back with threefold affection, on account of their
goodness to Coleridge, and because they were then unfortunate,
and because their union has long since been dissolved by death. The
family was composed of three members: of Mr. M——, once a
lawyer, who had, however, ceased to practise; of Mrs. M——, his
wife, a blooming young woman, distinguished for her fine person;
and a young lady, her unmarried sister.[85]
Here, for some years, I
used to visit Coleridge; and, doubtless, as far as situation merely,
and the most delicate attentions from the most amiable women,
could make a man happy, he must have been so at this time; for
both the ladies treated him as an elder brother, or as a father. At
length, however, the cloud of misfortune, which had long settled
upon the prospects of this excellent family, thickened; and I found,
upon one of my visits to London, that they had given up their house
in Berners Street, and had retired to a cottage in Wiltshire. Coleridge](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3489510-250622014522-95f853d3/85/Constructions-Of-Migrant-Integration-In-British-Public-Discourse-Becoming-British-Sam-Bennett-63-320.jpg)
![from whose hand it might, it was done: ἑιργασται (heirgastai), it was
perpetrated, as saith the Medea of Euripides; and it will be
mentioned hereafter, more than either once or twice. It fell with
weight, and with effect upon the latter days of Coleridge; it took
from him as much heart and hope as at his years, and with his
unworldly prospects, remained for man to blight: and, if it did not
utterly crush him, the reason was—because for himself he had never
needed much, and was now continually drawing near to that haven
in which, for himself, he would need nothing; secondly, because his
children were now independent of his aid; and, finally, because in
this land there are men to be found always of minds large enough to
comprehend the claims of genius, and with hearts, by good luck,
more generous, by infinite degrees, than the hearts of Princes.
Coleridge, as I now understand, was somewhere about sixty-two
years of age when he died.[86]
This, however, I take upon the report
of the public newspapers; for I do not, of my own knowledge, know
anything accurately upon that point.
It can hardly be necessary to inform any reader of discernment or of
much practice in composition that the whole of this article upon Mr.
Coleridge, though carried through at intervals, and (as it has
unexpectedly happened) with time sufficient to have made it a very
careful one, has, in fact, been written in a desultory and
unpremeditated style. It was originally undertaken on the sudden
but profound impulse communicated to the writer's feelings by the
unexpected news of this great man's death; partly, therefore, to
relieve, by expressing, his own deep sentiments of reverential
affection to his memory, and partly, in however imperfect a way, to
meet the public feeling of interest or curiosity about a man who had
long taken his place amongst the intellectual potentates of the age.
Both purposes required that it should be written almost extempore:
the greater part was really and unaffectedly written in that way, and
under circumstances of such extreme haste as would justify the
writer in pleading the very amplest privilege of licence and indulgent](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/3489510-250622014522-95f853d3/85/Constructions-Of-Migrant-Integration-In-British-Public-Discourse-Becoming-British-Sam-Bennett-68-320.jpg)
Constructions Of Migrant Integration In British Public Discourse Becoming British Sam Bennett
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- 6. i Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse
- 7. ii Also available from Bloomsbury Second Language Identities by David Block Political Economies and Sociolinguistics by David Block Cultural Memory of Language by Susan Samata
- 8. LONDON • OXFORD • NEW YORK • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY iii Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse Becoming British Sam Bennett Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- 9. iv Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Sam Bennett, 2018 Sam Bennett has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2920-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2921-7 ePub: 978-1-3500-2922-4 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Critical Discourse Studies Series design by Louise Dugdale, Cover design by Olivia D'Cruz Cover image © Shutterstock/america365 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events, and the option to sign up for our newsletters.
- 10. v We asked for workers, but instead human beings came – Max Frisch
- 11. vi
- 12. vii Contents List of Figures xi List of Tables xii Acknowledgements xiii 1. To Be or Not to Be (British): Discourse, Integration and the Public Sphere 1 1.1 Immigration and integration: Two sides of the same coin 1 1.2 Why critical discourse? 3 1.3 ‘Discourse’, ‘text’ and ‘context’ 4 1.4 The public sphere: A space for discursive constructions and discursive practices 6 1.4.1 Models of the public sphere 6 1.4.2 A public sphere, but who are ‘the public’? 8 1.4.3 A discursive public sphere 10 1.5 Challenges of recent research 11 1.6 Problems, hypotheses and questions 13 1.7 The Discourse Historical Approach 14 1.8 Categories of analysis 16 1.9 Data triangulation 18 1.9.1 Governmental policy documents and media articles 19 1.9.2 Focus groups 21 1.10 Plan of the book 23 2. Discourse, Race and Migration 25 2.1 From biology to culture 25 2.2 Social constructions of race 26 2.3 Discursive constructions of race 30 2.4 Concluding remarks 33 3. (En)Acting Integration 35 3.1 Citizenship 36 3.1.1 Formulations of citizenship 36 3.1.2 A neoliberal discourse of citizenship 37 3.2 Integration 40 3.2.1 Theories of integration 40
- 13. Contents viii viii 3.2.2 Alternatives to multiculturalism 42 3.2.3 Practices of integration 44 3.3 Discursive practices of integration 48 3.4 Performing integration 50 3.5 Concluding remarks: Ideological performances 51 4. Historical and Socio- Political Contexts 53 4.1 Global and European socio-historical contexts 53 4.1.1 Historical global migration patterns 54 4.1.2 European immigration 55 4.1.3 European policy responses 58 4.2 The history of immigration and integration as political and politicized issues in the UK 59 4.2.1 The twentieth century: Shadows and forewarnings 61 4.2.2 Labour governments 1997–2010 63 4.3 The local context of Brighton and Hove 67 4.3.1 Inward migration and ethnic diversity 67 4.3.2 The local politics of immigration 69 4.4 Concluding remarks: Setting the scene 69 5. Analysis of Government Policy Texts 73 5.1 Integration and community cohesion in policy: A history of two concepts 74 5.2 The polysemy of ‘community’ 78 5.2.1 Locating the community 78 5.2.2 Being inside and outside the community 79 5.2.3 The nation as a wider community 81 5.3 The evolution of integration discourse 82 5.3.1 Topoi: The framing of integration as a problem 82 5.3.2 Integration as a normative phenomenon 84 5.3.3 The Sisyphean nature of integration 88 5.3.4 The linguistic agency of integration 89 5.4 Integration as performance 92 5.4.1 A neoliberal construction of integration 92 5.4.2 Discursive expectations of performative integration 93 5.5 Interdiscursive and intertextual links between integration and other policy areas 95 5.6 Concluding remarks 101
- 14. Contents ix ix 6. Analysis of Media Texts 103 6.1 A corpus analysis of media discourse 104 6.1.1 Word frequency 104 6.1.2 Concordance 105 6.2 Integration by any other name 110 6.3 Constructions of community 115 6.3.1 What is a community? 115 6.3.2 Exclusion and inclusion of migrants 117 6.4 The ‘perfect’ (British) citizen 122 6.4.1 British values 122 6.4.2 ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ migrants 124 6.5 Examples of journalistic bad practice 127 6.6 Concluding remarks 129 7. Analysis of Focus Groups with Incoming Non-Nationals 131 7.1 Discourse topics 132 7.1.1 Primary and secondary discourse topics 132 7.1.2 Mapping thematic links 134 7.2 Doing integration: Patterns and links in discourse 138 7.2.1 Language 138 7.2.2 Sites of integration 142 7.2.3 The uniqueness of Brighton 145 7.3 Feeling integrated: (Dis)attachments, (non-)belongings and (multiple) memberships 147 7.3.1 Contradicting and confirming the ‘Cricket test’ 148 7.3.2 Part of something: Belonging and membership 152 7.3.3 Multiple memberships 158 7.4 Perspectives on the public sphere 162 7.4.1 Knowledge of public discourse 162 7.4.2 Understandings of ‘integration’ 166 7.5 Concluding remarks 171 8. Discussion and Conclusion: The Discursive Construction of Integration in the Public Sphere 173 8.1 Revisiting the discursive public sphere 173 8.2 Discourses of integration: From theory to practice, and back again 175 8.3 Final remarks 182 8.3.1 The consequences of an exclusionary discourse of integration 182 8.3.2 Reframing integration: Towards tentative solutions 183
- 15. Contents x x Appendices 187 Appendix A: List of Policies and Reports Analysed 187 Appendix B: List of Articles Used as Examples in the Analysis 190 Appendix C: Discussion Topics and Question Prompts Used for Focus Groups 192 Appendix D: Focus Group Participants 195 Notes 198 References 204 Index 219
- 16. xi Figures 1.1. A model for the functioning of public discourse 10 3.1. Berry’s model of acculturation methods 45 3.2. Ager and Strang’s Indicators of Integration Framework (2004) 46 5.1. Chain of discursive causality from immigration to community cohesion 78 5.2. Cover of Focusing ESOL on Community Cohesion (2008) 99 6.1. Concordance lines for ‘integrat*’ 106 6.2. Concordance lines for ‘communit*’ 107 6.3. Concordance lines for race 109 7.1. Thematic links of primary discourse topic 6 (PT- VI –social contact) 137 7.2. Thematic links of primary discourse topic 1 (PT- I –perceptions of place of residence) 137 8.1. A model for the functioning of public discourse 174
- 17. xii Tables 1.1. Frequency by genre of UK government documents 19 1.2. Frequency by year of UK government documents 20 1.3. Breakdown of national newspapers 20 1.4. Newspaper corpus details 21 1.5. Focus group details 22 5.1. Interdiscursive connections in UK government policy (2000– 2010) 96 6.1. Noun frequency 105 6.2. Keyword frequency 106 6.3. Left collocates with ‘communit*’ 107 7.1. List of primary discourse topics 133 7.2. List of secondary discourse topics 134 7.3. Links between primary and secondary discourse topics for all focus groups 135
- 18. xiii Acknowledgements Thanks to Michał and Małgorzata for the brains, my parents for the support, and Ola for the love.
- 19. x i v
- 20. 1 1 To Be or Not to Be (British) Discourse, Integration and the Public Sphere 1.1 Immigration and integration: Two sides of the same coin Immigration has changed in character to such a great extent that migration research can no longer be decoupled from issues of settlement and integration. Immigration is not just a moving across geographical borders, but also a moving across ‘conceptual borders of identity, belonging and entitlement’ (Geddes 2007: 452). The subsequent long- term settlement of incoming non- nationals1 affects how individuals, communi- ties and nations discursively define themselves (and their cohabitants) spatially, tem- porally and corporeally (Fortier 2006). That is, continued large- scale immigration throws into question how non- nationals are integrated into local communities as well as the wider ‘imagined’ national communities (Anderson 1983) and poses a dilemma as to how to ‘reconcile cultural pluralism with political membership’ (Favell 1998: 22). That this dilemma exists is partly due to the universal- particularist paradox of lib- eral thought and the failure is to sufficiently theorize about the foreigner (Cole 2000). By their very nature as a non- citizen, the Other is outside the normal modes of ques- tioning in liberal thought. They are almost literally beyond the scope of comprehen- sion. The result is that those who reside in a state, but who are not citizens, are excluded from political thought because there are no, or at least very limited, obligations to them. In the modern state, this results in their denial of access to public funds. Without a fundamental philosophical basis on how to conceptualize the long- term presence of non- citizens, the potential for the ‘successful’ integration of incoming non- nationals appears hamstrung from the outset. A second paradox of liberal thought is revealed in the inconsistency of late capitalism between the liberal freedom movement for goods and services, on the one hand, and the control of movement of people, on the other. Freedom of movement has been enshrined in European law since the 1957 Treaty of Rome, but today’s common migration policies, based as they are on control, challenge this commitment to borderless economies and lived realities. The current restrictive policies and exclusionary language present in public sphere discourse of immigration and integration are not solely down to questions of philoso- phy though. Over the last seventy- five years, there has been a change in the character newgenprepdf
- 21. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 2 2 of migration to Europe (and within this the UK), which has experienced a large- scale upswing in inward migration. However, when this migration started, it was insuffi- ciently envisaged (and certainly not desired) that those who came would settle in the country long term, and as such, incoming non- nationals were seen as neither potential citizens nor political actors (Martinello 2006). Up until the late 1960s, political and public discussions on migration policy were thin on the ground and bureaucratically curtailed; there was a general convergence of opinions among mainstream parties on migration, which resulted in political consen- sus and collectively accepted policy pathways. During the 1970s and 1980s though, it became clear that migrant workers had begun to permanently settle. Combined with the economic downturn caused by the oil crisis, this led to public debates on culture, identity and what political rights should be afforded to non-citizens, as well as to social unrest and an increase in racism. Over time, the discourse on immigration widened and became interdiscursive in nature as connections were made by public sphere actors between migration and other social fields, including the economy, education, security, health and welfare. The phenomenon became politicized: processes of migra- tion became crises of immigration that threatened security, nations, welfare access, health, education and the economy. As immigration shifted from being an issue of economics to one of social and political import, policy responses began to deal with integration, underpinned by the belief that part of any ‘successful’ integration policy would include control of further immigration. Over time, more and more restrictions have been placed on inward migration to the UK, and successive British governments have followed integration policy pathways that ran from race relations through multiculturalism to social cohesion, which, as I will argue, are explicitly and implicitly neo- assimilationist in both their language and measures, often in reaction to successive mediatizations of immigration. As such, ‘to the old policy assump- tion that restrictive immigration is a necessary condition for the success of an integration policy, a new one [has been] added: integration policy measures are used to select those immigrants that are able and willing to integrate and deter who are not’ (Penninx 2010: 26). This change in policy and rhetoric comes at a time when, throughout Europe, immigration and integration have become increasingly politicized and mediatized issues, and there has been noticeable discursive and policy shifts to the right. At this juncture, I would like to make clear that I am not arguing here for a simple causal relationship whereby increased immigration leads to racism. To do so would first fall into the lazy ‘seuil de tolérance’ argument, whereby the presence of too many racially different people leads to social tensions and a rise in racism. Second, it ignores the pre- existence of racism in the UK that has been directed by many different national, religious or ethnic groups for centuries and was used, among other things, to justify colonial domination. Popular racism was present throughout the last century and has not gone away; indeed, it seems to be becoming more and more accepted, normalized, legitimized and co- opted by major parties and media outlets. That said, I do believe that integration policies and inte- gration discourse are inextricably linked to immigration. In the following chapters, I set out my argument that there was a distinct and clear intensification in the discursive construction of integration in public sphere in the UK between 2000 and 2010. At the beginning of the period, integration was more
- 22. To Be or Not to Be (British) 3 3 framed as a two- way process, but later, immigrants and certain groups of British citi- zens were expected to conform to so- called British values. Over time, both policy and public discourse came to be characterized by neo- assimilatory rhetoric, informed by a wider spread of neoliberal discourse. Overtly, at least, the first years of the Labour government were, by comparison to the later period, more open and welcoming of immigrants. This intensification should be contextualized within an extensive history of racist public discourse. As I mention in Chapter 4, racism has long been present in the UK, and the first discriminatory legislation dealing with immigrants was passed in 1905. Thus, I propose that this period was a continuation of a much longer pro- cess of race- based policies of immigration rather than a radical break in policy and discourse. This period was marked by an intensification of the discriminatory public discourse and corrective policies based on broadly neoliberal values that later came to be directed at Muslims (and continued to be directed at other groups, such as asylum- seekers). As I argue in later chapters, this extended the discourse and integration policy provisions to existing British citizens so that integration became a question of racial (qua ‘cultural/ religious’) difference rather than immigration per se. Again though, it is crucial to note that Islamophobia in the UK pre- exists the discursive change under Labour, as well as the global events such as 9/ 11 and 7/ 7 bombings. To be clear, I am arguing in this book that, despite the presence of racism in public discourse and poli- tics before 2000, there was nonetheless a discernible intensification of discriminatory integration policy between 2000 and 2010. 1.2 Why critical discourse? Discursively, I take as my starting point the assumption that in order to understand problems within society, the question of how societies speak (and indeed who speaks) about these problems publically needs to be addressed. The social world around us, the spaces in which we all exist and function, has been formed by social biases, inequalities and imbalances of power. As a linguist, albeit one with a natural affinity for the social sciences, I am drawn to attempts to uncover the true nature of these inequalities that are discursively hidden or distorted, with the broader, ‘emancipatory’ aim to empower those in society who are in some way affected by injustice. This has naturally led me to work within the critical discourse studies (CDS), which holds that because language is a form of social interaction, a thorough analysis of the micro-and macro- context of a discourse is vital to fully comprehend a given phenomenon. It is not, though, just a belief that a discourse event is influenced by context, but also that a discourse event itself influences the context. According to Fairclough and Wodak (1997), the socially constituted and constitutive nature of discourse directly relies on the Foucauldian premise that discourses are ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1972: 50). The problems which CDS practitioners gravitate to are varied, but all concern social inequalities in some shape or form, and the belief of critical discourse analysts is that these social inequalities are established and maintained through the use both of cer- tain language and of control over the means of discourse production and distribution.
- 23. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 4 4 Language choice is believed to be ideological, that is, discourse is not objective, and so there is a function to the language people use. The role of the researcher is to identify these choices as well as their effects and the motivation(s) behind them to critique dominant discourses and reveal the contradictions and non- expressions (Jäger 2001). Thus, in Weiss and Wodak’s words (2003: 45), the aim of CDS is ‘to demystify dis- courses by deciphering ideologies’. By demystifying discourses and bringing hidden ideologies to the fore, the sociopolitical aim of CDS is to systematize awareness of such a state of affairs as a precursor to the empowerment of individuals or communities that continue to be discriminated against. The practical application of findings can then be used to inform policy, be disseminated via workshops for professionals and media, or even to inform changes in school textbooks (Wodak 2001b).2 To qualitatively and critically analyse my data in the analytical chapters, I employ the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA; see Section 1.7). The DHA has been used by many researchers to analyse different forms of exclusion, especially racism and nation- alism (cf. Wodak et al. 1999, 2009; Reisigl and Wodak 2001; Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2008). The approach is appealing because, rather than focusing purely on language, it looks at wider social practices and analyses them linguistically. However, the key benefit that DHA brings to the table is that DHA practitioners should, wherever pos- sible, endeavour to offer prospective critique. That is, it is problem- oriented and aims to ‘contribute to an improvement of communication’ (Wodak 2009: 88). Given the starting point of this work and my decision to use DHA, the proceed- ing chapters thus have a certain practical relevancy in terms of informing local and national integration strategies, which are becoming more and more politicized and mediatized in the wake of increased migration, the result of the Brexit referendum, and the revival of populist politics in the UK and across Europe. Indeed, as I write this introduction, yet another government- commissioned independent report on integra- tion –the Casey Review (2016) –has just been published; the UK Home Office has launched an immigration inquiry; and a former Labour leadership candidate, Andy Burnham, has said that lack of action by the left on immigration is ‘undermining the cohesion of our communities and the safety of our streets’ (HC Debate, 7 December 2016). There is thus a clear and present need for rigorous academic work on immigra- tion and integration, now more than ever, and in this book I aim to add to and develop research into integration theory by providing an in- depth analysis on how migrants and other stakeholders view the process of integration. This is something which, as Bauböck (2006a) notes, has been lacking in the literature on integration up to now. The book also has a number of practical outcomes directly applicable to policy forma- tion, both nationally and locally. It is hoped that by improving the understanding of how incoming non- nationals experience integration, local integration strategies can be improved. 1.3 ‘Discourse’, ‘text’ and ‘context’ There has been, and continues to be, disagreement between whether discourse analysis can or should include the analysis of written texts. David Crystal (1986: 116) argues
- 24. To Be or Not to Be (British) 5 5 that discourse analysis is the study of ‘naturally occurring spoken language’, and this is placed in contrast to text analysis, although he goes on to note that this distinction is often not clear. Within the field of text linguistics (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981), there is a distinction between discourse, which is spoken and text, which is written, whereas Schiffrin (1992) notes that in the English- speaking world, there is more of a tendency to include both the written and the spoken in discourse. One major criticism which is often levelled at (critical) discourse analysts is that there is no systematized conceptual toolkit, and so understandings of ‘discourse’ and ‘text’ differ from author to author. Mills (2004: 6) points out that in Foucault’s work, there are three different meanings for ‘discourse’. First, in its broadest terms, it can mean all utterances and statements that have an effect on the real world. Such an approach is echoed by Macdonell (1986: 4), who argues that ‘whatever signifies or has meaning can be considered part of a discourse’. Second, discourse can mean ‘a regu- lated practice which accounts for a number of statements’ (Foucault 1972: 80). I would contend, though, that this understanding is more relevant as a description of the ‘order of discourse’ or ‘genre’ within which a discursive event is produced as it deals with rules and structures of a discourse. The third and final use of ‘discourse’ by Foucault is that which, with a few minor adjustments, seems to be the most adhered to by dis- course practitioners –namely that a discourse is a group of statements that ‘belong to a single discursive formation’ and which, taken together, have some level of coherence (Smart 2002: 32).3 Foucault talks of the ‘positivity’ of a discourse which, according to Smart, ‘characterizes the unity of a group of statements above and beyond books, texts, authors, through time, and independently of the proximity of epistemological validity, scientificity or truth. It reveals that within a discourse, reference is being made to the same thing within the same conceptual field, at the same level’ (ibid.). Going forward, I align myself with other DHA practitioners in following Reisigl and Wodak’s (2001) definition of a discourse which, unsurprisingly, is similar to that of Foucault’s: ‘a com- plex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts, which manifest themselves with and across the social fields of action as thematically interrelated semi- otic, oral or written tokens, very often as texts that belong to specific semiotic types, i.e. genres’. This definition seems to point to the thematic nature of Foucault’s third use of discourse, but also includes the importance of the second –genre –to a discourse. In a similar vein, for Fairclough (1995: 14), ‘a discourse is a way of signifying a particular domain of social practice from a particular perspective’. This intervention also points obliquely to the ideological nature of discourses and the subjectivity involved in all discursive events. It also points to another source of thinking of discourse, Bakhtin (1981: 293), who argued that a discourse is a way of using words which presumes authority and distinct perspective. Regarding texts, Mills (2004) rightly notes that a discourse is often defined nega- tively, and it is quite often juxtaposed to the concept of a text, possibly because texts are slightly easier to define through the use of positivist criteria, such as de Beaugrande and Dressler’s (1981) seven criteria of textuality. Within some approaches to the critical analysis of discourse, such as the DHA and Teun van Dijk’s socio- cognitive approach, discourse is described as a form of knowledge and memory, whereas texts are con- crete ‘oral utterances or written documents’ (Weiss and Wodak 2003: 13).4 However,
- 25. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 6 6 Fairclough (1995) argues that although texts should be primarily linguistic, there are increasing instances of non- linguistic texts, or at least texts which combine both lin- guistic and non- linguistic qualities. Finally, it should be made clear where a text ends and where a discourse begins. Is an interview one text or a collection of separate texts? One e-mail or many? One debate or a series? Can a text have more than one speaker/ author? The ultimate decision is the responsibility of the individual researcher, who must decide for themselves what understanding best suits their research. It is crucial though that, once decided upon, the researcher should ensure that their initial definition is adhered to throughout the analysis to guard against conceptual ‘slippage’ and subsequent confusion, which could impinge upon the methodological quality of the work. Lemke (1995: 7) forwards a use- ful separation of the text and discourse, which I attempt to follow in this book: When I speak about discourse in general, I will usually mean the social activity of making meanings with language and other symbolic systems ... On each occasion when the particular meaning characteristic of these discourses is being made, a text is produced ... When we want to focus on the specifics of an event or occasion, we speak of the text; when we want to look at patterns, commonality, relationships that embrace different texts and occasions, we can speak of discourses. In its very basest form, CDS calls for the discourse in its social context. Texts, as forms of interaction, are seen as discursive practices, and these discursive practices are also social practices. Succinctly put, ‘discourse makes people as well as people make dis- course’ (Fairclough 1995: 39), or at least the parameters in which discourse is produced. This idea echoes Halliday’s (1978: 2) view that ‘by their everyday acts of meaning, peo- ple act out the social structure affirming their own statuses and roles and establishing and transmitting the shared systems of value and of knowledge’. Elsewhere, Weiss and Wodak (2003: 10) state that ‘symbolic practices do not take place within social systems. Instead they reproduce the latter simply by taking place; the systems reproduced in this way then retroact on the conditions of action’ and thus ‘text production equals system reproduction’. Jäger (2001: 45) goes even further and argues that ‘everything that is human consciousness is constituted discursively’, and this echoes van Leeuwen’s (1993: 13) call that a critical approach to language ‘is, or should be, concerned with ... discourse as the instrument of power and control as well as with discourse as the instru- ment of the social construction of reality’. 1.4 The public sphere: A space for discursive constructions and discursive practices 1.4.1 Models of the public sphere At base, the functioning of the public sphere rests upon acts of communication among private actors (individuals, interest groups) but also between these private actors and the public actor, the state. It is ‘a theatre in modern societies in which political
- 26. To Be or Not to Be (British) 7 7 participation is enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs, and hence an institutionalized arena of discur- sive interaction’ (Fraser 1992: 59). Today, the term ‘public sphere’, although widely used, has come to mean varied things to different scholars and public commentators. According to Dahlgren (1995: ix), it is the space ‘where information, ideas and debate can circulate in society, and where political opinion can be formed’. For Calhoun (2001), communication within the public sphere may seek to influence the state, civil society or even private individu- als, whereas the Habermassian public sphere is constituted by private individuals who are concerned with public issues. It is thus ‘a domain of our social life where such a thing as public opinion can be formed [where] citizens ... deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion ... [to] express and publicize their views’ (Habermas 1997: 105). Many outside academia subscribe to a very narrow definition of the public sphere, though, as merely pertaining to the media, which in modern society plays a central role in how the public sphere operates. It is the primary vessel of information –a way by which news and opinion can be transmitted on a wide scale to large populations, or –as Habermas (ibid.) would have it –‘when the public is large this kind of communication requires certain means of dissemination and influence: today, newspapers and periodicals, radio and television are the media of the public sphere’. Indeed, one can now talk of post- national diasporic public spheres (Appadurai 1996) or transnational public spheres or spheres which are only now possible due to globalization and advances in technology (Fraser 2007). The possibility of such com- munication with larger audiences and the expansion of the public sphere are relatively new phenomena –the importance of the media in the construction and mediation of the public sphere was extensively anticipated and explicated by Habermas. Thus, to talk of the public sphere as merely a mediatized or mediated society is to ignore previ- ous and current conceptions of public debate and the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. A wider definition of the public sphere points towards a space, or spaces (both real and virtual) where communication takes places surrounding issues of public interest and where an often uneasy consensus is reached. Even this very simple definition is fraught with uncertainties and begs more questions than it answers. What constitutes an issue of public interest? How is consensus reached? How is discussion mediated and controlled? And –maybe most importantly for work on integration and migrants –who constitutes a public, and how does one gain access? Or, in other words, how does one gain the ‘symbolic tools’ (Cohen 1985) required by a certain society to partake in public discussion? Aristotle distinguished the private as consisting of the oikos (household) –men, women, slaves and children –whereas the public consisted of citizens (effectively only men). However, unlike later theorists such as Habermas, Aristotle accepted that the public and private were inseparable and that there was considerable interplay between the two (Triadafilopoulos 1999). The agora was the interface where public and private met. Citizens of a polis shared the responsibility of debating issues of public import- ance (war, imports, exports and legislation) and ‘critically examining policies of the state’ (Goçan 2008: 3). In Hannah Arendt’s (1958) view, this classic model of the public
- 27. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 8 8 sphere that existed was characterized by its agonal nature; the deliberations within the public space were combative with the idea of winning an argument rather than coming to a compromise. For Habermas, the public sphere was the interface at which the relationship between the state and private individuals was mediated (Roberts and Crossley 2004). A separation of the public (the state) from the private (work and family) existed dur- ing the early mercantilist period. During this period, a further split emerged between home and work for the burgeoning bourgeoisie, and the issues that were seen as pri- vate became filtered out from the public debate. The nascent middle class now sought a space in which to ‘be public’ –the coffee houses and salons that proliferated during the eighteenth century –where literature and art could be discussed through the use of reason and carefully crafted argument. As these places evolved into spaces for discus- sions that were more political, economic and social in nature, Habermas argues that the participants came to use logical, well- argued debate to reach consensus (ibid.: 3). Running concurrently to this was the growth of newspapers, which facilitated the wider dissemination of information. Interested parties in the geographical and finan- cial expansion of trade required up- to- date news on relevant matters such as taxes and prices. Later, as these newspapers developed to include news, comment, opinion and literary reviews, ‘critical reasoning made its way into the daily press’ (Habermas 1989: 25), which began to bring into question the previously solid control over public opinion and power that had hitherto been maintained by the state and church. This enabled the public to apply pressure on state institutions, and as a consequence, poli- ticians started to appeal to the public opinion as transmitted in the newspapers and salons of the time. 1.4.2 A public sphere, but who are ‘the public’? Habermas’ burgeoning (ideal) public sphere was shaped in principle by the ‘val- ues of egalitarian dialogue’ (Goode 2005: 9) and the concept of disregarding status altogether. Everyone who participated had equal stature, and the debates were thus open. Although Habermas accepted that access to this public sphere was limited in practice to property- owning men, he nevertheless maintained that within the idea of free, critical argumentation and rational debate as a way of arriving at con- sensus on issues of public interest, there was a ‘kernel of something emancipatory’ (Benson 2009: 176). Fraser argues it is wrong though to start from the assumption that access to the public sphere was open to all on an equal footing and that social equality and status could be ‘bracketed’ (Fraser 1992: 524). In reality, participation in the public sphere was conditional on markers of style and decorum which, both during the rise of the bourgeois public sphere and today still, are also markers of status inequality that ‘[function] informally to marginalise women and members of the plebeian classes and to prevent them from participating as peers’ (ibid.: 525). Following Cohen (1985), this is what I would term the ‘symbolic tools of a com- munity’ or, as Bourdieu (1986: 241) would call it, ‘cultural capital’, access to which is further compounded in modern democracies that have witnessed mass migration
- 28. To Be or Not to Be (British) 9 9 by the need to have a good grasp of the native language in order to participate fully. Habermas’ attempt to ‘bracket’ identities as if they did not exist actually ignores many inequalities and eliminates the possibility of ‘participatory parity’ (Fraser 1992: 525) and ignores the reality of the presence of myriad cultures within modern democracies and that these cultures are not valued equally. In a socially stratified society where there is only one formal (bourgeois) public sphere, members of sub- ordinated groups are denied the institutionalized space where they can exchange communication of their interests and any action on their part would be guided by the principles of the dominant public sphere. Marginalized, or in Fraser’s words ‘subordinated’, groups (ibid.: 526) are thus often excluded from access to ‘the mate- rial means for equal participation’. In the twenty- first century we are faced with a post- Westphalian reality in which geopolitically bounded publics are becoming increasingly multicultural. A result of this is that public opinion and the common good are no longer territorially restricted to the extent that in many countries the public ‘no longer coincides with a national citi- zenry’ (Fraser 2007: 16). For Husband, public spheres in countries of immigration are multi-ethnic in nature in which ethnic groups do not though co- exist in an equal way but rather ‘operate within a hegemonic context in which culture and identity is con- tested’ (1996: 207). Minorities are often denied access to or excluded entirely from the means of public communication, and this sets them at a disadvantage when it comes to participation in the modern public sphere where the media play such an impor- tant role. Subsequently, there is disconnect between those affected (by a policy) and political membership. From here, Fraser asks two very pertinent questions as far as this chapter is concerned: If the interlocutors do not constitute a demos, how can their collective opinion be translated into binding laws and administrative policies? If, moreover, they are not fellow citizens, putatively equal in participation rights, status and voice, then how can the opinion they generate be considered legitimate? How, in sum, can the critical criteria of efficacy and legitimacy be meaningfully applied to transnational public opinion in a post- Westphalian world? (2007: 16) The partial remedy to these questions, Fraser argues, is for public sphere participa- tion to be not limited by political membership and, as Calhoun (1992: 6) notes, ‘the importance of the public sphere lies in its potential as a mode of societal integration’. The risk is that if minority voices are not heard, then interests cannot be forwarded and society remains unequal. Migrants especially are formally and informally (discur- sively) excluded from the public sphere, and this leaves them particularly susceptible to exclusion from the public sphere. There is a link between ‘life chances’ and ‘dis- course chances’ and calls for greater provision of resources for excluded groups for ‘participation in and access to the public sphere’ (Goode 2005: 42). Following this line of argument, it becomes clear that access to the public sphere is a major component of integration of migrants, and from here, it is therefore necessary to investigate how and why migrants are discursively excluded/ integrated.
- 29. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 10 10 1.4.3 A discursive public sphere The sites of public discourse creation, mediation and reception are inherently inter- related in modern democracies. Political discourse is mediated and this is how dem- ocratic public sphere functions. The relationship though is not always one way, and the media may sometimes bring a particular issue to the attention of politicians –the so- called CNN effect (Livingston 1997). Media and political discourses rely upon an acceptance by an ‘interpretive community’ for their legitimacy,5 those to whom the ‘symbolic artefacts’ of an imagined community mean something, but more than this, it is only through public discourse that this ‘we’, or interpretive community, is con- structed. Figure 1.1 indicates, very simply, my concept of how public discourses relate to one another.6 In this model there are two discursive processes working alongside each other. The first is the national discourse. This is the ongoing, metanarrative attempt to cre- ate a cohesive community identity by a political actor (more often than not a national government, but the same can be said for sub- national groups or even specific pol- itical parties). Running concurrently to this are multiple issue-specific discourses, for example, immigration, European integration, foreign policy or citizenship. Taken together, these individual discourses work to create the ‘meta-narrative level’. Each one reinforces the overall national narrative by legitimizing, relegitimizing and delegit- imizing certain discourses and opening up possibilities for the integration of sup- plementary private and public social fields to be interdiscursively and intertextually incorporated. Individual areas of policy discourse such as health and social welfare provision, education, immigration, integration, citizenship, religion, terrorism, and the economy, in some way, uphold the larger overarching metanarrative as to what the UK ‘is’ and who can and cannot be considered to be members. The next point to highlight in my model is that the momentum for both discourses originates with political actors, as they ultimately have control over policy and legis- lation. This does not mean to say that a topic will not be instigated by the public or from the media. Indeed, it is quite frequent that policy discourses are reactive to the Political Discourse (politicians) Recontextualisation Recontextualisation Media Discourse (Journalists, owners) Interpretive Community (electorate) Legitimation (Critique or support) Discourse on a specific policy National Discourse Key: Legitimation (Acceptance or rejection of discourse) Figure 1.1 A model for the functioning of public discourse.
- 30. To Be or Not to Be (British) 11 11 public/ media. Indeed, during Labour’s time in power, their policies and discourses on immigration and integration became increasingly reactive to influential newspapers, especially the Daily Mail. It is, though, the government that has the final decision to act or not to act. The policies and viewpoints of politicians and political actors are dissemi- nated through a number of different possible genres such as speeches in parliament, ‘town hall’ meetings, election hustings, policy leaks, press releases and official policy documents. In the next stage, these pronouncements are recontextualized and reinter- preted by media outlets (individually and collectively). At one end of the scale of reac- tions, the media can accept the discourse and communicate it to the public, sometimes verbatim with the use of extensive quoting. At the other end of the scale, the discourse (or lack of it) can be challenged or rejected. This rejection will be communicated ‘up’ to the politicians and ‘down’ to the general public. The interpretive community then consumes the mediated discourse and will either accept or reject it. To be sure, there is a dialectical element present here also; there is always dissent and a multitude of view- points within the interpretative community. ‘Meaning can never be ultimately fixed and this opens up the way for constant social struggles about definitions of society and identity, with resulting social effects’ (Jorgensen and Phillips 2002: 24). However, the focus here is on the dominant response. Acceptance of the political discourse on a spe- cific policy area leads to legitimation of that discourse and the government’s actions. For example, the rhetoric of successive British governments over limiting immigration because of multiple problems it causes has been both called for and ‘accepted’ by the electorate. But more than this though, acceptance of such a discourse also means the acceptance of a certain conceptualization of British national identity. 1.5 Challenges of recent research There is a large body of existing literature on how migrants are discursively excluded from countries and communities. However, the discourse surrounding the concept and practice of integration and, crucially, how it is experienced by those involved, has not been sufficiently analysed and there has been no large- scale critical- analytic dis- course work published that focuses on integration. Outside of the UK, the only com- parable work has been on integration within Flemish- speaking Belgium (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998), which employed discourse pragmatics. Smaller- scale linguis- tic works on integration have mainly looked at political texts or media coverage at a national level and have failed to include analyses of migrant experiences. These include ‘Not Playing the Game’: Shifting Patterns in the Discourse of Integration (Horner and Weber 2011) and The Rhetoric of Acculturation: When Integration Means Assimilation (Bowskill, Lyons and Cole 2007). Bauböck (2006a) notes that qualitative studies on migrants’ self- interpretation of citizenship and integration practices are lacking within literature on citizenship and politics and that focus groups are well suited to this type research. While discursive work on migrants’ experiences is limited, publications of relevance to this work include New Discourses of Migration in Post- Communist Poland: Conceptual Metaphors and Personal Narratives in the Reconstruction of the Hegemonic Discourse (Fabiszak 2010b), The Discursive Construction of European Identities
- 31. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 12 12 (Krzyżanowski 2010), Polish Families and Migration since EU Accession (White 2010) and Lost in Communism, Lost in Migration: Narratives of the Post- 1989 Polish Migrant Experience (Galasiński and Galasińska 2007). Within critical discourse analysis, the focus has been on exclusion and racism without explicitly linking those to integration. Teun van Dijk (2005) has looked at ‘elite racism’, while Reisigl and Wodak (2001) and Krzyżanowski and Wodak (2008) have used the DHA to good effect in analysing exclusion, anti- Semitism and racism in public discourses in Austria. Much of the UK- focused research has been on media representations of migrants or ethnic minorities. O’Halloran (2009) has used a corpus- based approach to analysing immigration articles from the Sun, while (Mis)representing Islam (Richardson 2004) looked at the discursive construc- tion of Muslim broadsheet newspapers. The comprehensive work of the RASIM project at Lancaster University should also be noted. This project qualitatively and quantitatively looked at the discursive representations of immigrants, asylum- seekers and refugees in British papers between 1996 and 2006 (cf. Baker et al. 2008). Analyses of local newspapers have been carried out for London (Buchanan, Grillo and Threadgold 2004), East Anglia (Rasinger 2010) and Brighton (Bennett 2015a, b). Elsewhere, Leudar et al. (2008) have looked at how media and native hostil- ities to refugees and asylum- seekers in Manchester influence biographical self- representations of refugees and asylum- seekers. At a European level, the MEDIVA project undertook an in- depth analysis of media representations of migration (Bennett et al. 2013), journalistic practice (Gemi, Ulasiuk and Triandafyllidou 2013), media recruitment of migrants (McKay and Markova 2011) and media train- ing (O’boyle, Fehr and Preston 2011). Where academic research has dealt specifically with integration, it has not been discursive or linguistic. Adrian Favell’s Philosophies of Integration (1998, 2001) is a comparative analysis of French and British immigration policies over the last forty years. Mason (2010) has studied integration and national identity, whereas Da Lomba (2010) has studied how legal status impacts upon integration. Ager and Strang (2004, 2008) have created a conceptual framework of integration. In addition, a consider- able amount of work has been done on citizenship and integration by, for example, Bauböck (1994, 2006b) and Fortier (2006). Thus, although a lot of individual research has been undertaken, the dynamics of the public discourse on integration in the UK still remains an underresearched phe- nomenon. This book contributes, at least in some small way, towards filling a number of knowledge gaps in various academic fields. However, concerned as I am with lan- guage, the more focused goal is to shed much needed light on the discursive nature of the public sphere. By analysing integration across multiple discourse genres I am able to build up a much more complete view of how integration into the UK is discursively constructed and experienced. Within the more specific field of CDS, the book indi- cates the continued usefulness of the DHA as a tool for critical analysis of discursive constructions of racism and of public discourse. It will also indicate the connections between elite discourses (Van Dijk 1993) and migrants’ own conceptualizations of integration (Krzyżanowski 2010).
- 32. To Be or Not to Be (British) 13 13 1.6 Problems, hypotheses and questions One of the central tenets of CDS is that research should be problem- oriented and should aim to provide a socio- prognostic critique. Below are four ‘lead- off’ problems that I look at in the book: 1. Traditionally understood nation- states such as the UK have to face the cultural pluralism that long- term immigration brings to their societies. 2. The discourse of integration in the UK, and the policies and regimes of control that form and inform them, is highly normative in nature. However, these discourses fail to understand the lived reality of incoming non- nationals, settled non- residents and new citizens. As a result, policy responses do not allow for multiple identities and belongings that are part and parcel of migrant experiences. 3. Linked to this, due to entrenched societal inequalities and power relations in the UK, the discourse of integration excludes incoming non- nationals and new citizens from the sites and modes of discourse production. 4. Within the British public sphere, there is a consensus that integration is a good thing. However, there is insufficient questioning of what integration includes and this has allowed the discourse to become more exclusionary. As stated at the outset, in order to understand societal problems, one needs to investigate the discourse(s) surrounding the issue. Thus, based on the above problems, my research is heuristically pitched towards six discursive hypotheses. 1. Discourse affects social action. The discursive construction of integration leads to the creation of insufficient integration strategies. This negatively impacts on how new citizens and incoming non- nationals integrate into UK society, which in turn leads to less cohesive communities. 2. The public sphere is discursive in nature. The discourse of integration in the British public sphere is primarily dominated by elite social actors found within politics and the media. Non- elites, especially ethnic minorities and incoming non- nationals, are denied agency and excluded from contributing to the discussion on what integration is and should be in the future. 3. Discourses of integration are not static over time. The discursive construction of integration in the UK changed in response to politicized and mediatized real- world events between 2000 and 2010. 4. There is a high degree of intertextuality and interdiscursivity between integration and other policy areas and concepts. 5. A key context in discourse is power. There is a contradiction between, on the one hand, the explicit rhetoric of integration as being a two- way process based on multiculturalism and, on the other hand, the implicit neo- assimilatory and conformist discursive practices. 6. There is a contradiction between top- down normative discourse of integration and bottom- up lived experiences of integration by incoming non- nationals.
- 33. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 14 14 In order to operationalize the above hypotheses and provide a framework for analy- sis, I propose four research questions that will guide my investigation. RQ1: How was migrant integration discursively constructed in government policy between 2000 and 2010? Which social fields (e.g. discourse, concepts, policy areas and events) was integration discursively connected to? RQ2: How was integration discursively constructed by the media over the same period? To what extent was the political discourse recontextualized? RQ3: How is integration discursively constructed by those it affected, that is, resident non- nationals and new citizens? To what extent is there a dissonance between these constructions and the dominant public sphere discourse of integration? RQ4: How do these discursive constructions actually affect the integration of incoming non- nationals? Are all types of migrant affected equally? 1.7 The Discourse Historical Approach The DHA was first forwarded by Wodak (2001a) and Reisigl and Wodak (2001, 2009; see also Wodak et al. 1999) and has since been used and moved forward by many oth- ers (cf. Wodak and Weiss 2004; Krzyżanowski and Oberhuber 2007; Krzyżanowski 2010). According to Wodak (2001a: 65), DHA adheres to CDA’s use of critical theory, and in her explanation of the approach, she foregrounds the three dimensions of cri- tique. Text-or discourse- immanent critique aims to uncover ‘inconsistencies, (self- ) contradictions, paradoxes and dilemmas in the text- internal or discourse- internal structures’. Second, in applying an unmasking, or socio- diagnostic, critique, the aim is to demystify exposure of the –manifest or latent –possibly persuasive or ‘manip- ulative’ character of discursive practices’ (2001a: 65). The critique thus goes beyond the textual and makes use of other knowledge of wider socio- political, economic and historical contexts. This also necessitates the inclusion of wider social theories and requires an interdisciplinary approach. Finally, prognostic critique contributes to the transformation and improvement of communication, and so DHA can, therefore, said to be problem- oriented (2001a: 69). As with many CDA approaches, DHA takes discourse to be both ‘socially consti- tuted and constitutive’ and ‘a cluster of context dependent semiotic practices that are situated within specific fields of social action’ (Reisigl and Wodak 2009: 89). Discourses are made up of multiple texts that belong to specific semiotic types (Wodak 2001a: 66). Discourses and texts cannot be understood without reference to the other: ‘Whereas patterns and communalities or argumentation or themes are embedded in discourses, texts comprise a representation of discourse in a particular context and situation’ (Krzyżanowski 2010: 76). The idea of discourse as social action –as understood in DHA –is similar to the idea of ‘fields of action’ (Bourdieu 1977). Thus, discourses are not hermetically sealed but rather ‘are open and hybrid’ (Wodak 2001a: 66). The distinction between different fields of action is based on the functional aims of a dis- cursive practice.
- 34. To Be or Not to Be (British) 15 15 An array of text genres can potentially be found within each sub-field of action within a wider field of politics and how, together, these texts produce discourse topics. Genre has been defined as ‘a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes ... In addition to purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience’ (Swales 1990: 58); and within CDS as ‘the conventionalized, more or less schematic- ally fixed use of language associated with a particular activity, as “a socially ratified way of using language in connection with a particular type of social activity”’ (Fairclough 1995: 14). There is, then, a functional aspect to genre. Within CDS, the importance of the genre that a text belongs to has been well established, in particular, the decision to use one particular genre as a method of communicating a message over another. As Wodak (2001b: 11) argues, ‘(p)ower is signalled not only by grammatical forms within a text, but also by a person’s control of a social occasion by means of the genre of a text’. According to Wodak, ‘“discourse” about a specific topic can find its starting point within one field of action and proceed through another one. Discourses and discourse topics “spread” to different fields and discourses. They cross between fields, overlap, refer to each other or are in some other way socio- functionally linked with each other’ (2001a: 67). Another way in which texts and discourses are linked is through intertextuality and interdiscursivity. Intertextuality is the relationship between texts that come before or after a given text (cf. De Beaugrande and Dressler 1981). This may come in the form of direct or indirect reference to another text or by the use of the same narra- tive, argumentative, descriptive or instructive structures. Intertextuality, on the other hand, is the idea that discourses are connected both synchronically and diachronically (Krzyżanowski 2010: 77). Key to these two processes is recontextualization (Bernstein 1990) whereby texts and discourses ‘move between spatially and temporally differ- ent contexts and are subject to transformations whose nature depends upon rela- tionships and differences between such contexts’ (Wodak and Fairclough 2010: 22). Recontextualization is frequently the result of a ‘mixing’ of new recontextualized ele- ments and older ones such as particular words, phrases, arguments or topoi (Wodak 2011: 630). Within DHA, identifying intertextual and interdiscursive connections is seen as an important component of investigating the constructions of discriminatory discourses, and they thus necessitate the ‘historical’ element of analysis to ascertain the sources of discourses. As with other critically discursive approaches, another important element of DHA is the consideration of context. For Wodak (1996: 18), ‘it is not enough to analyse texts –one also needs to consider how texts are interpreted and received and what social effects texts have’. Within DHA, four levels of context should be taken into account (Wodak 2001a: 67): 1. language and text internal co- text 2. intertextual and interdiscursive connections between utterances, texts, genres, and discourses 3. extralinguistic variables and institutional frames of a specific ‘context of situation’ 4. wider socio- political and historical contexts in which discourses occur and are related to.
- 35. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 16 16 1.8 Categories of analysis Practitioners of the DHA often take a three- dimensional approach to the job of ana- lysing data. First, the specific content or topics of a discourse are identified. The next stage is to determine which discursive strategies are used, and finally ‘the linguis- tic means (as types) and the specific, context- dependent linguistic realizations (as tokens)’ are analysed (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 44). Krzyżanowski (2010: 81) uses these same three dimensions but groups them into a two- stage analysis. The first stage, or ‘entry- level examination’, is a thematic analysis of discourse topics, and the second stage, or in-depth analysis, looks at argumentation (topoi) and other linguistic features. In presenting the DHA, Reisigl and Wodak (2001) explain the role of analysis to answer five questions: 1. How are persons named and referred to linguistically? 2. What traits, characteristics, qualities and features are attributed to them? 3. By means of what arguments and argumentation schemes do specific persons or social groups try to justify and legitimize the exclusion, discrimination, suppression and exploitation of others? 4. From what perspective or point of view are these namings, attributions and arguments expressed? 5. Are the respective discriminating utterances articulated overtly, are they even intensified or are they mitigated? To operationalize these questions, five types of discursive strategies are of interest, which together can be implemented in creating positive self- representations and nega- tive other-representations that are the bedrock of discriminatory and exclusionary dis- cursive practices such as immigration control or integration policies. Referential and nominational strategies are used to construct social actors (indi- viduals, groups or institutions). They can be used to identify actors negatively purely through naming them, that is, nigger or kike, and need no supplementary attributions. A number of strategies indicated by Reisigl and Wodak are based on van Leeuwen’s social actors analysis (1996). Set within social semiotics (cf. Halliday 1978; Hodge and Kress 1988), the social actors analysis is a taxonomy, or ‘socio-semantic inventory’ (van Leeuwen 1996: 32), for identifying the way that actors and actions are constructed in discourse. van Leeuwen follows Halliday’s view of the function of language and that language is a system of pragmatic options (Halliday 1985; van Leeuwen 1996: 36). Using this framework, representations of actors and processes are identified through the use of sociological categories; their qualities, agency, role allocation and actions are indicated through examples. Following van Leeuwen, Reisigl and Wodak (2001: 48–52) highlight a number of different strategies that can be found in racist and exclusionary discourses, including somatization spatialization, actionalization- explicit dissimila- tion, collectivization, culturalization, economization, politicization, social problemati- zation and relationalization.7
- 36. To Be or Not to Be (British) 17 17 For Reisigl and Wodak (2001: 45), referential strategies are specific types of predi- cational strategies because ‘referential identification very often already involves a denotatively as well as connotatively more or less deprecatory or appreciative labelling of the social actors’. This allows actors to be separated along binary, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, categorizations or, what van Leeuwen (1996: 58) calls, appraisement and are often rep- resentations of difference, similarity, collectivity, unity, (social) cohesion and (social) exclusion. Third, argumentation strategies –topoi or argumentation schemes –should be ana- lysed. Topoi serve to link discourses to one another, giving a text its coherence and function ‘by creating connections between utterances and areas of experience, bridg- ing contradictions, generating plausibilities and acceptances’ (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 35). According to Krzyżanowski (2010: 85), topoi are ‘certain headings of arguments which, in a way, summarize the argument while also providing it with a necessary “skeleton” which is fleshed over by respective discourse contents’. Within their work on New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca (1969: 84) argue that topoi are used to persuade the listener and are ‘an indispensible arsenal on which a person wish- ing to persuade another will have to draw, whether he likes it or not’. Furthermore, topoi can be both universal or context-and content- dependent (cf. Kienpointner 1992, following Krzyżanowski 2010).8 An alternative understanding of topoi comes from van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s (1992: 96) pragma- dialectical approach which posits that topoi are ‘a more or less conventionalised way of representing the rela- tion between what is stated in the argument and what is stated in the standpoint’. Topoi, then, are ‘“signals” or “indications” (or summaries) letting the interlocutors (including readers/ audiences) know the aim of the argument’ (Krzyżanowski 2010: 84). However, it is worth mentioning that within the discursive public sphere, clas- sic rules of rhetoric are ignored for strategic reasons and therefore ‘arguments may be expressed implicitly’ (ibid.). Thus, the aim of topoi analysis is to ascertain the links between topics and topoi, as well as how these topoi are linguistically rendered. There are a number of topoi that are common to discourses of exclusion and inclu- sion, including topoi of danger/ threat, burden, cost, numbers, authority, history, cul- ture, law and abuse. Linked to this, van Leeuwen has identified legitimation as another form of argumentation strategy used to legitimize or delegitimize a speaker, action or event. van Leeuwen (2007: 92) highlights four categories of legitimation techniques – authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization and mythopoesis. Returning to Reisigl and Wodak’s categories of analysis, a fourth strategy to take into account is the perspectivization, framing and discourse representation through which the speaker(s) or author(s) indicate their involvement in a discourse. This is done via reporting, describing, narrating or quoting events or utterances (Wodak 2001a: 73). Finally, intensification and mitigation strategies modify and qualify the strength of a proposition by altering the ‘illocutionary force’ or perlocutionary effect of a text or utterance (Wodak 2001a: 73), which is linguistically realized through use of modal verbs, adverbs and adjectives. All of the five categories of analysis will be considered within the analysis in the subsequent chapters, but specific attention will be paid to the construction of social actors and how they are identified as either being included
- 37. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 18 18 or excluded from certain groups (nation, city, community). Therefore, throughout the analysis, the focus will be on nomination and predication strategies as well as argu- mentation strategies (topoi and legitimation), and I refer to instances of perspectiviza- tion/ framing and mitigation/ intensification only where necessary. Although in this book I take a primarily qualitative approach to discourse analysis, in the chapter on newspaper articles, I do employ an initial quantitative, corpus lin- guistic approach which is then followed by a more fine- grained qualitative analysis of select texts.9 By focusing on frequency of occurrences and their collocations, within large amounts of data, it reduces the chances of the work being accused of researcher bias, a common criticism laid at the feet of CDS. The benefits of synthesizing CDS with corpus linguistics include down- sampling, which allows for larger amounts of texts to be analysed than would normally be the case in CDS work. However, because it is a machine reading of a large corpus of text based on one or more keywords, the wider discursive and semiotic context can get lost and so, in order to ameliorate this decon- textualization, after quantitative analysis is carried out, a detailed qualitative interpre- tation is required to complete the analysis. 1.9 Data triangulation In order to get as complete a picture as possible of the discourse of integration that circulated in the UK, it is necessary to implement a triangulation of more than one class of data. A triangulatory approach to the analysis of empirical data combines a variety of research methods or data sources to ‘identify, explore, and understand differ- ent dimensions of the units of study, thereby strengthening their findings and enrich- ing their interpretations’ (Rothbauer 2008: 893). To rationalize this process, we must return briefly to the model of how a discourse flows through the public sphere in which there are three major sites of the discursive public sphere –political, media and the interpretative community (or general public). The first type of data for analysis is political texts of a number of genres. It is often exactly within the genres associated with given social occasions that power is exercised or challenged. A good example of this is a white paper, which is a strictly controlled genre aimed at a certain audience with a specific aim in mind; they are ‘political texts ... primarily designed to make a persuasive case’ (Fairclough 2001: 132). They are uni- directional and rarely offer chances of dialogue with, for example, voters and those who are the targets of a particular policy, in this case, incoming non- nationals. Even when a right of reply is possible, or even requested in green papers (consultation docu- ments), the parameters for communication are strictly controlled by those in power (short time limits for responses, limitations on who can respond, limited methods of response). The second tranche of data for analysis comes from articles in national and local newspapers. Newspaper outlets and other media are key components in the discursive public sphere. They play a vital intermediary role, (re)communicating and mediating policy discourse for their audiences. Although the shifts in methods of news consump- tion –primarily due to communication technology –have led to a decline in print
- 38. To Be or Not to Be (British) 19 19 media landscape, newspapers are still influential in the framing of national and local issues. In deciding to include a discursive analysis of newspaper articles, my aim was to ascertain how governmental policy discourse on integration was reported on and to what extent it was recontextualized. The discourse on integration is framed and dominated by actors within the public sphere who have the power and access to means of (media) production. Policies are informed by reactions to public opinion, responses to consultation documents from stakeholders, think- tanks and government advisors. Those who are most affected by integration policies and policies in related areas (immigration, community cohesion and citizenship) are migrants themselves, and yet, they are the ones most excluded from the decision- making process. In part, this is because of their lack of power, as well as their status as non- citizens. By including this type of data, I am also follow- ing Altrichter, Posch and Somekh’s (1993: 113) approach to triangulation in that I am aiming to break the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ that is afforded the political elite and the media within the public sphere. As well as being an analysis of discursive content, it is also an attempt to give a voice to those who are often silenced in public debate. Such an approach follows the work done by Krzyżanowski (2008, 2010) and Krzyżanowski and Wodak (2007) on using focus groups as method of investigating ‘voices of migrants’ (Krzyżanowski 2008: 163). 1.9.1 Governmental policy documents and media articles The material for the analysis of government policy comes from documents that all fall into the field of action of ‘law making and political procedure’ (Wodak 2001a: 68). Within this field of action, the documents represent a number of genres, including green papers (consultation documents), white papers (government policy documents), strategy documents, government-commissioned reports and government responses to parliamentary committees (see Table 1.1). This notwithstanding, the analysed policy documents quite often contained multiple genres. For example, white papers fre- quently start with prime ministerial or ministerial forewords, after which executive summaries, ‘commentary boxes’, focus group results, best practice examples or short Table 1.1 Frequency by genre of UK government documents Genre Frequency Policy documents (white paper) 7 Government-commissioned reports 5 Guidance for local authorities 5 Consultation documents (green paper) 5 Parliamentary reports 2 Select committee reports 1 Government responses to reports 1 Government reports 1 Total 27
- 39. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 20 20 narratives from people may also be found. Each of these genres has its own specific orders or discourse and serves different purposes. After an initial survey of government policy, it became clear that although inte- gration policy most frequently formed part of immigration policies, there were also a number of other, connected policy areas that pertained to integration –commu- nity cohesion, English language teaching provision, citizenship and, later, terrorism. Given the breadth of the topic, it is unsurprising that the documents were released by a number of different government departments and agencies, including the Home Office, UK Borders Agency (UKBA), Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), the Local Government Association (LGA) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS). Such a broad range of departments points to the complexity of integration in policy, as well as a level of (inter)discursiv- ity. In total, twenty- seven documents were selected for analysis (see Appendix A for a full list of documents). The first was published in November 2000 and the last in July 2009. As can be seen in Table 1.2, the relevant polices were very evenly spread across the period of analysis apart from a very large spike in 2008 when eight documents were published. To get as representative a sample of UK newspaper discourse as possible, I will ana- lyse texts from five daily newspapers (and their Sunday editions), which takes into account the type (broadsheet/ tabloid), editorial stance (left/ right) and geographical reach (national/local). In addition, a local newspaper was included –the Brighton Argus (hereafter the Argus) –in order to capture the local nature of integration (see Table 1.3). If all articles had been included during the extended length of the period of ana- lysis (2000– 2010), it would have led to an unmanageable corpus size for this book. Instead, seven- day ‘snapshot’ periods were chosen during election periods (the day of the election and the six days preceding it). For the four national newspapers, three periods were chosen corresponding to the three general elections during the period of analysis (2001, 2005 and 2010). For the Argus, the sample period was extended to one month and additional sample periods correlating with the local elections in 2003 and 2007 were also included. I retrieved articles using ten relevant keywords: integrate, Table 1.2 Frequency by year of UK government documents Year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Total Frequency 1 2 2 1 3 3 2 2 8 3 27 Table 1.3 Breakdown of national newspapers Editorial position Liberal Conservative Broadsheet Guardian Daily Telegraph Tabloid Daily Mirror Daily Mail
- 40. To Be or Not to Be (British) 21 21 integration, migration, immigration, migrant(s), immigrant(s), asylum seeker(s), refugee(s), sex traffick(ing) and community cohesion. The initial keyword search pro- duced 732 articles after which the corpus was downsized according to a number of variables, including articles not relating to the UK,10 lifestyle, arts and sports articles, obituaries and ‘false positives’ such as the migration of birds or corporate integration. Opinion articles and editorials were included, though, and after downsizing, the final corpus amounted to 444 articles (see Table 1.4). 1.9.2 Focus groups After close analysis of government policies, it was evident that migrants who come to the UK were often categorized in terms of their legal status and their method of entry into the country and that integration and migration policies differed according to the type of migrant. The first distinction is between migrants from EU member states Table 1.4 Newspaper corpus details Year Sample period Election type Newspaper Sample after initial keyword search Sample after downsizing 2001 1 June– 7 June General Daily Telegraph 58 20 Guardian 72 25 Daily Mirror 22 16 Daily Mail 29 16 Brighton Argus 5 5 Total 186 82 2003 1 April– 1 May Local Brighton Argus 17 12 Total 17 12 2005 29 April– 5 May General Daily Telegraph 69 38 Guardian 79 50 Daily Mirror 22 17 Daily Mail 35 29 Brighton Argus 10 7 Total 215 141 2007 3 April– 3 May Local Brighton Argus 11 10 Total 11 10 2010 30 April– 6 May General Daily Telegraph 99 66 Guardian 108 57 Daily Mirror 45 39 Daily Mail 42 29 Brighton Argus 9 8 Total 303 199 Total sample size 732 444
- 41. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 22 22 and those from outside (third- country nationals –TCNs). Within this second group, a further distinction can be made. First, there are migrants who have applied for, and been granted, asylum. That is, they have first travelled to the UK and then sub- mitted their claim for asylum. The second category of non- EU migrants consists of those who have been granted refugee status prior to arriving in the UK after applying in- country. This group partly consists of refugees that the British government agreed to resettle, after referral from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees as part of the United Nation’s refugee resettlement programme (in the UK, this system is known as the Gateway Protection Programme). Thus, for the analysis to be useful, focus groups needed to be carried out with more than one group of migrants and that the core variable would be their migration path (see Table 1.5 for full details of the focus groups).11 The numbers of participants in FG1 and FG2 are relatively low for focus groups as it was immensely difficult to reach informants from such communities and with such legal status. Refugees and asylum- seekers are often reluctant to discuss their situation publically because of a general distrust of authority (possibly stemming from pre- vious experiences of authoritarian regimes) and also because such groups are often asked for their opinions (by NGOs or local governments) but never see the outcome of research or any material changes in their lives. This is why dissemination of results back to those who participated in the focus groups is a vital post- publication goal of this book. Although the focus groups were semi- structured, certain topics and question prompts were used in the interviews as a way of directing the discussion and stimulat- ing debate on those topics which were related to integration. The topics were based on a modified version of Agar and Strang’s Indicators of Integration Framework (2004; cf. Chapter 3 in this book). To recapitulate, this decision was taken for three rea- sons. First, the model comes out of a UK context and is thus directly applicable to my study. Second, the framework is based on an extensive literature review of inte- gration from government, academia and NGOs. Third, this research was backed up Table 1.5 Focus group details Focus group Code Migration path Country of origin Number of participants Participant code used in analysis*** Length of recording 1 FG1 TCN– Gateway Oromo (Ethiopia)* 5 OR# 01:33:27 2 FG2 TCN–asylum Iran 4 IN# 01:33:29 3 FG3 EU Poland, Hungary** 6 PL#/HU# 01:28:52 *The participants from Ethiopia identified themselves as Oromo, their nation or ethnic group, rather than Ethiopian, which they felt neither recognized nor represented them fully. **One participant in FG3 was from Hungary and, therefore, fitted into the EU variable. ***Names were replaced with a code consisting of two letters (denoting country of origin and focus group) and one number (denoting what position they first spoke). For example, the first person to speak in FG1 was coded OR1 and the fifth person to speak in FG3 was coded PL5.
- 42. To Be or Not to Be (British) 23 23 by qualitative research interviews with refugees in two areas of the UK (Croydon in London and Pollockshaws in Glasgow), and these interviews subsequently influenced the framework (Agar and Strang 2004). Their framework is thus the most compre- hensive and the most relevant study of integration in the UK. It also lends itself to the design of questions for the interviews and from there to the study of how the ten sites of integration are discursively constructed and how they interact and overlap. Further input came from the literature review on integration and citizenship and a detailed analysis of government policy. The ideas for prompts and questions are heav- ily based on Krzyżanowski (2008; cf. also Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2007: 207– 10). A full list of the topics and question prompts used in the three focus groups are given in Appendix C.12 1.10 Plan of the book The book consists of eight further chapters. Chapter 2 is given over to my explanation of the discursive nature of racism and exclusion. After indicating a number of theories of racism, I argue for a discursive explanation for the existence of racism in today’s society. In Chapter 3 I explain the concepts of integration and citizenship. As well as defining these two ‘fuzzy’ concepts, it will be argued that integration is a performa- tive, and therefore discursive, process and also that both citizenship and integration are now based on neoliberal conceptions of what it is to be a ‘good’ member of soci- ety. In Chapter 4 the wider historical and social context of the research is explained. Starting with an overview of the demographic and immigration policy changes that have occurred globally and regionally, I then move to a detailed explanation of UK integration and immigration policies and an explanation of the two as increasingly politicized and mediatized phenomena. I devote Chapters 5– 7 to a critical discursive analysis of the data using the DHA. In Chapter 5 I offer a detailed analysis of offi- cial government discourse between 2000 and 2010. In Chapter 6 I shift the focus to media representation of migrant integration. I begin with a corpus analysis and move to a more fine- grained qualitative analysis of the discourse found in both local and national newspapers. In some ways, Chapter 7, the final analytical chapter, should be considered the most crucial aspect of the data as it provides an analysis of ‘bot- tom- up’ discourses of integration –the result of focus groups with different groups of foreign- born residents. In it, I first aim to show how discursive social practices (e.g. citizenship and integration policy and media representations) affect their day- to- day lives and their experiences of (non)integration. Second, in a nod towards the critical research paradigm that this book is grounded in, I try to redress the balance of the almost total silence of migrant voices found within not just the political and media sites of public discourse on integration but also in academic work on the subject. In the concluding chapter, I offer an interpretation of the findings and, in doing so, relate them to the research questions and hypotheses outlined above, before ending with suggestions as to the wider implications of the work and potential directions for follow-up research.
- 43. 24
- 44. 25 2 Discourse, Race and Migration The spectre of racism has the uncanny ability, in both the lay and the more strictly psy- choanalytical sense, to maintain its prominence and influence. Regardless of attempts to eradicate it, ‘race’, as a socially constructed phenomenon, appears to be intransigent (Hook 2006: 17) and racism of one form or another is on the increase throughout Europe, a trend that has run concurrent to a rise in immigration into EU states. Today’s refugees and asylum- seekers are the new ‘Others’ (Delanty, Jones and Wodak 2008), but it should be added that as well as being the targets of new racism, migrant groups have long- settled presences within European societies and so the discursively con- structed, racialized thinking behind these outward examples of racism are very much historically and intertextually rooted. The purpose of this chapter is to explain the discursive nature of racism and the current antipathy to racialized ‘Others’ evident in the UK. What I am concerned with here is how theories of race relate to its discursive construction and realization in pol- icy and the media. I begin the chapter with an investigation into historical theoretical shifts in understandings of race and racism as well other closely related terms such as xenophobia and ‘othering’. This is followed by a description of social constructivist theories of racism that now dominate academic research on race, and finally, I argue for a discursive explanation for the existence of racism in society. 2.1 From biology to culture Racism is as much an historical concept as it is social (Miles 2000). By this, we can take historical to mean, first, that there is a long history of racism and, second, that today’s manifestations of racism themselves rely on national or ethno- national histo- ries. The concept of race as a (pseudo)biological method of differentiating people along primarily phenotypical grounds became widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to this ‘scientification’ of the concept, it was largely used to explain aristocratic descent and membership of the nobility (Reisigl and Wodak 2001) and to separate populations into crude social classes. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, race became linked to social Darwinism whereby ‘folk taxonomies’ (Triandafyllidou 2001: 6) were constructed and hierachialized to explain processes of
- 45. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 26 26 history.Throughthisracistframe,historywasinterpretedas‘a“racialstruggle”inwhich only the fittest “races” would have the right to survive’ (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 4). This form of racist discourse and thinking was used to justify imperial ventures, colo- nial expansion, subjugation and slavery. Within a Marxist interpretation of racism, racial prejudice was used as a legitimation for the mistreatment of black Africans, and the racialized hierarchy of groups legitimized processes of labour exploitation (Miles 2000). The success of the European colonial programme required legitimation and jus- tification, and this was achieved by discursively constructing the colonial subject(s) – in science, public pronouncements and policy –as inferior along both pseudo- bio- logical and ethno- cultural lines. This led, and continues to contribute to, a European narcissism that is based upon two tenets (Kamali 2008). First, this narcissism stems from a feeling of superiority that, if no longer based on a biological conception of distinct races, is most certainly cultural and has its origins in the belief of universal- ism based on values that are claimed as originating from Europe. Such an example of this narcissism and othering is Orientalism (Said 1995) in which there is a ‘Western assumption that “our present is your future” (Gabriel 1994: 25). Second, this narcissism is maintained discursively via the construction of a ‘purified’ (Kamali 2008: 306) or rewritten history that denies previous racism and discrimination. The concept of race was also closely tied to that of ‘nation’ (Anderson 1983) and of ‘volk’ (Gellner 1983), and through a combination of these, during the period of bur- geoning nationalisms in the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie were bestowed with, or more precisely bestowed upon themselves, a racialized history and character which was typical of the nation and in opposition to the working class who lacked these quali- ties (Triandafyllidou 2001).1 Miles (1993) also suggests that this racialization, as a pre- cursor of justifying the marginalization of peasants and the proletariat, was evident in the first- stage development of the nation- state and only later was the strategy used against foreigners. The normalization and acceptance of a racialized hierarchy of peo- ples continued until the twentieth century where –because of the brutal excesses of Nazi Germany that led to the Holocaust, combined with scientific work that disproved race theories –the concept of biological race eventually came to be delegitimized in politics. The mention of race became all but taboo in some countries such as Germany and France (Reisigl and Wodak 2001). Indeed, the term racism has been so discredited that the use of it has become a significant rhetorical and political charge to level against a person or institution (Doane 2006) and the denial of racism has become a common strategy of racist public sphere actors. 2.2 Social constructions of race We now exist at a time when race and racism are understood as socially constructed, cultural phenomena rather than based on biological differences. Rather than social relations being somatically determined so that race determines historical and social processes, the opposite is in fact true. Namely that the concept of race is itself histori- cally and socially contingent and constructed (Miles 2000).2 The important thing to note about these constructed categories and the differences between them is that the
- 46. Discourse, Race and Migration 27 27 actual existence of them and their scale, in terms of their continued use and power, is almost irrelevant. These constructions do not need to be logical but merely ‘psycho- logically coherent’ (Downing and Husband 2005: 5). What is important is that there is a ‘shared conviction’ among a society as to the reality of these discursively constructed differences. More often than not, this is a historically embedded process that incor- porates social and political phenomena that are discursively linked to race, such as nationalism and collective memory (ibid.; cf. also Reisigl and Wodak 2001; Wodak et al. 1999, 2009). Thus, it is right to differentiate between old (somatic) and new (cultural) racism. In instances of old racism, groups were constructed as unegalitarian due to biological inferiority. Juxtaposed to this is new racism, discursively constructed in texts rang- ing from school books to political pronouncements and media coverage, it isa ‘dif- ferentialist’ (Reisigl and Wodak 2001) racism based on culture, lifestyles, habits and traditions, and the threat which too much mixing will bring to the dominant society. Goldberg (1999) argues that race- based discourses no longer explicitly reference hier- archy. However, I would contend that there is an implicit hierarchialization at work in modern racisms as well. Note that racism is based on a construction of groups based on the possession or non- possession of certain traits (physical, cultural, linguistic, traditional) which are negatively evaluated (Reisigl and Wodak 2001). This is what has become to be known as ‘racialization’ (Omi and Winant 1986: 64), which is ‘the extension of racial meaning to previously racially unclassified relationships, social practices or groups’. As a consequence, any such separation of groups will inevitably lead to a taxonomization of the groups, however informal (and baseless). Despite the withdrawal of its biological underpinnings, racism and racialized characteristics are still projected onto social groups and particularly onto migrants as racialized oth- ers. The prominence of such racialized characteristics has been difficult to shake off; they remain important in ‘common sense thought’ (Miles 2000: 138) and are still very much a part of many people’s thinking on social relations in present- day Europe which continues to experience increasing levels of migration. The difference now is that a new racism exists based not on phenotypical difference but along what can broadly be defined as ethno- cultural lines. Certain cultural markers such as language, dress, traditions, food and beliefs have become socially signified. Via this racism, a cultural chauvinism emerges whereby ‘their’ culture is incompatible with ‘ours’, and those who ‘refuse’ to integrate are labelled ‘intolerant’. As a rejoinder to this, Delanty, Jones and Wodak (2008) stress that the discourse of racism has been ‘dereferentialized’ in the sense that race is now removed from the racial subject and is now a ‘floating discourse’ that encompasses many other differences. There can be racism without ‘race’. Although discursive and rhetorical racism may have evolved over the course of the twentieth century from a focus on phenotypical to ‘cultural’ differences, the underly- ing practical function of racism has remained. Because differences are socially con- structed, it logically follows that one must ask the question, Why is it constructed? It stands to reason that there must be a ‘need’ or at least reason for such a construction. I would like to propose three interrelated functions that racial categorizations and rac- ism serve at this point. First, race cannot be separated from questions of power and ide- ology. Second, and stemming from the first, racism –and xeno- racism (Delanty, Jones
- 47. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 28 28 and Wodak 2008) that characterizes present- day antipathy to migrants in Europe – is about the distribution of resources (which are discursively conveyed as being lim- ited). Third, by differentializing and hieraichializing groups via race, the dominant in- group is favoured and the collective identity is reinforced (this partly relates back to the first point). ‘Race’, as a discursively constructed method of social categorization and separa- tion, is at base functional, serving a purpose for those in power. Furthermore, racism is an ideology and a ‘discriminatory social (including discursive) practice that could be backed by hegemonic social groups’ (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 10).3 Indeed, social issues are discursively framed as racial issues for political reasons by politicians and other members of society who have power (Doane 2006). For Memmi (1992: 103), race is a ‘generalised and absolute evaluation of real or fictitious differences that is advanta- geous to the ‘accuser’ and detrimental to his or her “victim”’, whereas Goldberg (1999: 374) argues that race gives social relations the appearance of fixedness and ‘charac- terises assent relations in the language of descent’. Here, then, we see quite starkly the argument for the notion that racism is ‘done’ for a reason, that there is an advantage in acting in such a way, material or otherwise. Guillaumin (1991: 164) has established four facets of racism, three of which can be defined as political. Racism is a political program, a legal structure (such as citizenship –which thus introduces immigration and the question of who is or is not a member of the society) and the ‘practical horizon’ (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 6) of the state, for example, the desire for racial purity. The fourth element of racism is practical behaviour, that is, on a day- to- day basis on the street. Guillamin’s conception of race is of one that originates from politicians and is thus about power. However, this ignores the question of consent and does not answer how the political programme filters down to the everyday behaviour or how this relates to, and relies upon, the ‘uncritical transmission’ (Downing and Husband 2005: 5) by the media of the political discourse of the first three points. Within race theory and racist social practices, it is worth considering Essed’s theory of ‘everyday racism’ (1991, 2002) to fill this explanatory gap. ‘Everyday racism’ is a process ‘involving the con- tinuous, often unconscious, exercise of power predicated in taking for granted the privileging of whiteness (Frankenberg 1993), the universality of Western criteria of human progress, and the primacy of European (derived) cultures’ (Essed 2002: 204). For Essed, the macro- structures, that is, politics, connect to micro events on a day- to- day basis. This perspective is echoed by Fairclough’s view that there is a ‘discursive dia- lectical relationship’ between structure and event in all communicative acts (following Richardson 2004: 4). The macro- structure, that is, the social and political context in which relations occur between individuals, and between and within groups, is shaped by power structures. This is what can be termed ‘institutional racism’ which, for Essed (2002), is the argument that institutions embody certain cultural values and racism is ideologically mediated via the practices of these institutions. This differs slightly from MacPherson’s (1999) definition in a UK government report that focused on police fail- ings in the murder of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, in London: ‘The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin’, which ‘can be seen or detected in pro- cesses, attitudes, and behaviour, which amount to discrimination through unwitting
- 48. Discourse, Race and Migration 29 29 prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping, which disadvantages minority ethnic people’ (Macpherson 1999: para 6:34). To place the blame at the meta- phorical feet of institutions, though, fails to sufficiently acknowledge that institutions are run and led by people and so the agency of those in positions of power in main- taining or failing to bring racism to an end should not be left unquestioned. In Reisigl and Wodak’s (2001) terms, it is better to call this form of racism ‘institutionalized’ or ‘institutionally supported’. Within a theory of everyday racism, racism is not a single act but a collection of acts that are experienced vicariously and directly, the impact of which are strengthened by each experience as well as by the memory of previous experiences. It is racism by ‘a thousand paper cuts’. For Essed (2002: 210), there are three processes through which racism functions. First ‘socialized racist notions are integrated in meanings that make practices immediately definable and manageable’. Second, ‘practices with racist impli- cations become in themselves familiar and repetitive’; and finally, ‘underlying racial and ethnic relations are actualized and reinforced through these routine or familiar practices in everyday situations’. The use of racial hierarchies allows for domination by a majority group and the subordination of a minority group or groups. Domination, here, following van Dijk (2005), is the illegitimate use of power in which power is the preferential access to and control over social resources. And so, the result of racist domination is social inequal- ity, whereby minorities have less access to and control over resources which, for politi- cal purposes, are discursively constructed as scarce. Racism, argues Lipman- Blumen (1994: 110), is about the negotiation of resources in which a given group gains and attempts to preserve their ‘capacity to impose its will repeatedly upon another, despite any opposition, by its potential to contribute or withhold critical resources from the central task, as well as by offering or withholding rewards, or by threatening or invok- ing punishment’. This control of resources is visible in discourses of migration that have come to predominate in European debates. A major tenet of the xenophobia that abounds presently is of an economic bent, and migrants are simultaneously, and coun- terlogically, constructed as taking jobs from the indigenous population and of being a burden on the state via benefits and access to healthcare and education.4 A final element of racism requires explanation here –that of its influence on col- lective identity. Within a phenomenological theory of racism, xenophobia and racism play a role in securing collective identity in times of crisis. During or after periods of intense social upheaval and modernization in which, for example, certain resources can no longer remain shared (such as a more comprehensive welfare state), ‘anomic tensions’ arise and spread throughout society, which in turn lead to a crisis of collec- tive identity (Wimmer 1997: 27). The rise in populism and economic nationalism in Europe since the global financial crisis attests to this hypothesis, and linked to this, migration is another such process that can lead to societies regressing to basic ‘self/ other’ dichotomies based on historic myths and an ‘imagined community’ of nation- hood (Anderson 1983). These basic forms of identity go some way in solving the crisis of identity by answering the question of what or who ‘we’ are. By focusing attention on the ‘other’, it also ‘delivers an explanation of the malaises’ cause’ (Wimmer 2002: 211). For Richard Sennett (following Delanty 2009), the ‘we’ is a defensive mechanism to
- 49. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 30 30 protect a society against the ravages of modern capitalism, and with regard to racial discrimination, Goldberg (1999: 374) sees race as a way of dealing with the ‘anonymity of mass social relations in modernity’.5 There are a number of troubling issues with this explanation of racism, though. First, to conceive of racism as some kind of ‘natural’ reaction of societies to threats to their identity pathologizes racism. If it can be explained away as a purely psycho- logical or evolutional response to a ‘threat’, then there is very little that governments can do to change the situation, and migration, for example, will always be a troubling issue that will never fully go away and can never be solved. Second, by arguing that ‘if they didn’t come here, there wouldn’t be any racism’ lays the blame for racism fairly and squarely at the feet of the victims of racism –in this case, minority groups and migrants –and removes the agency of racism and racialization from where it actually lies –the dominant in- group in a society. Third, this approach ignores the socially (and discursively) constructed nature of crises. As noted in Chapter 1, it is through policy, both foreign and domestic, that the outer boundaries of a collective identity are constructed, via a marginalization of others. It is the same case with political reactions to crises of modernity, of which migration and integration are very visible reminders. Indeed, migrants appear to be excellent subjects for othering because of their position and their limited access to social capital with which they might be able to react against marginalization.6 2.3 Discursive constructions of race Racism is not just about possessing beliefs based on negative stereotypes of a racialized group, it also involves the power or ability to impose those beliefs as hegemonic and thus a basis for denial of rights (Richardson 2009). Minority groups cannot become racialized without this power of the dominant group to impose a racialized identity. The words and deeds of people with power and influence, combined with established rules and societal norms, function together to produce and reproduce racism (Kamali 2008). This racism is realized and reified within a discursive public sphere in which racist discourses reach a long way back into (constructed) histories and at the same time are normative, and so future-oriented. Thus, to be very clear, first, racist discourses cannot and do not appear externally to a specific socio- historical context; and second, racism is at least initially a ‘top- down’ process initiated by those with power and/ or social capital. Within discourse analysis –and in particular in critical discourse studies –there has been some discussion as to just how discursive racism is. Goldberg (1999) has argued that there is no racism without racialized discourse and that racism is a spe- cific field of discourse which is made up of all racialized expressions including beliefs, acts and their consequences. The criticism of this position is that, following Garcia (2001), for it to hold weight, either the concept of discourse needs to be widened to extralinguistic phenomena, or it reduces racism to the purely discursive. I am minded, though, to side more with Goldberg and other discourse analysts. The fundamental tenet of a discursive theory of racism is that racist opinions are produced through
- 50. Discourse, Race and Migration 31 31 discourse. For Anthias (1995: 294), racism is ‘a discourse and practice whereby ethnic groups are inferiorized’. However, Richardson (2004) contends that there is no need to separate discourse and practice and that discourse is practice. This is the position taken by discourse analysts as defining discourse as ‘language in use’ (Brown and Yule 1983: 1). Similarly, within discursive psychology, Lecouter and Augoustinos (2001: 230) state that racism is an ‘interactional, language-based practice’, whereas for Gilroy (1987), racism is an effect of discourse. Within CDS, Richardson (2004) argues that Fairclough’s (1995) three components of communicative acts (social practice, discur- sive practice and the text itself) all need to be analysed when taking a discursive line on racism (Richardson 2004). I would propose that racism is discursive in two key, interrelated ways. First, it is through discourse that we learn discriminatory beliefs and negative stereotypes; and second, ‘discriminatory discourse is itself a form of racist practice’ (van Dijk 2005: 10). Thus, it is a process similar to a serpent inescapably biting its own tail: racist ideolo- gies are produced in discourse and reproduced and acted upon through discourse, the effects of which, in turn, reinforce our initial conceptions. According to van Dijk (ibid.), racist discourse can appear in many functions and processes within a society, and we receive our filtered images of minorities primarily through discursive repre- sentations, because on a day- to- day basis dominant group interaction with minorities is minimal and often limited to fleeting experiences within an economic or capitalist prism in which ‘they’ provide ‘us’ with goods and services (airports, restaurants, secur- ity guards, cleaners, shop owners). Indeed, when there is more extended interaction, the experience can be so different to expectations, precisely because it is in sharp con- flict with previously held negative representations. Positive experiences with a minor- ity are explained away as exceptions to the rule, whereas a negative experience will automatically serve to reinforce what was already ‘known’ (Delanty, Jones and Wodak 2008), and so members of the dominant in- group are discursively and socio- cogni- tively ‘primed’ (van Dijk 2005). Given this limited level of interaction, dominant in- group views of minorities are necessarily mediated through varying discourse genres. The two main forms of discourse pertinent to this book are media and politics. As van Dijk (ibid.: 5– 6) notes, ‘popular racism actually does not have a popular source but is instead produced and reproduced in elite (discourses of) racism’. There are many other sites where racist or discriminatory discourse is visible such as school textbooks and children’s literature, conversations with friends, training courses, academic work (and its funding streams), welfare institutions and health services. As with Essed, van Dijk (2005) argues that the power of racism endures because it is so ingrained into how members of a given society cognitively order the world around them. In ‘everyday racism’, the victims experience not one or two major racist events but many smaller events that build upon the previous. The case is a similar one for how members of soci- ety obtain and retain racist ideologies. We are bombarded by exclusionary discourse from childhood onwards –at school, on television, in newspapers, at the cinema, in interaction with others at university, in the workplace and in the pub. These experience memories ‘shape our perception and comprehension of discursive practices and also imply stereotypes and prejudices, if such mental models become rigid’ (Wodak and Busch 2004: 110). As such, it is difficult to reject what has been learnt over a lifetime,
- 51. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 32 32 and moreover, these discourses are more readily accepted if they are ‘consistent with our own interests’ (van Dijk 2005: 10), that is, if parents want their child to go to a bet- ter school, or if a patient is on a long waiting list for an operation. It is here that the question of race and power again becomes clear. In the first place, racism is a system of social domination based on discursively constructed differences. Within this system, the dominant group constructs minority groups as either possess- ing or lacking certain traits that have deemed to have symbolic capital. In the second, the leaders of the dominant group aim to uphold the status quo with regard to control over and access to resources, including power itself. In the third, (restriction of) access to the discursive public sphere is one of many forms of power abuse by elites. By limit- ing access to the public sphere, and/or by wielding the power to set the agenda and thus limit the parameters of debate, exclusionary discourses are allowed to prevail without any serious challenge. Fourth, public consent for these policies is sought and found by the construction of justificatory discourses in which those who are to be excluded are constructed as in some way threatening to the general public. These sociocogni- tive acceptances of such constructions are, as noted above, dependent upon the initial stereotypes that exist within a diachronic spread. The same argument can, of course, be made for other forms and processes of exclusion such as gender, class and nationality. Along with these processes, which are constantly in motion and ‘being done’, a major part of the discursive nature of racism is the denial of racism. For Essed (2002: 210), racial privilege is perpetuated ‘when those who claim superior judgement are insensi- tive to recognizing everyday racial injustices, while claiming exclusive power to define reality as void of racism’. By discursively constructing a society as ‘void of racism’ (ibid.), the power of rebellion or even comment over ‘everyday racism’ is rendered less possible. Racism is denied in a number of ways. First, as mentioned above, racism, qua biological differences, is now a taboo concept so that in modern western democra- cies, it is constructed, through talk and text, as having been consigned to history, as something that happened but no longer does. In a similar way to which Fukuyama (1993) proclaimed the ‘end of history’ with reference to the fall of Communism, so now governments claim the end of racism. A consequence of this delegitimization has been far- right political actors taking a consciously narrow definition of racism as only about phenotypical differences as a way of legitimizing discriminatory opinions. For example, far- right actors in the UK, such as Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League, have sometimes stated that they cannot be accused of racism towards Muslims because Islam is not a race. In the United States, since the battle for civil rights, many Republican politicians have followed a philosophy of colour- blindness whereby race should no longer matter, although Doane (2006) notes that the role of the colour- blind ideology is to defend white advantages. For these self- proclaimed ‘post- racist’ countries, racism does exist but only elsewhere: it is a problem for other countries that want to be like us –that is, racist football fans in countries in the former Yugoslavia, the governments of which are pushing for EU membership. Here we see a further discursive construction of the linear development of societies in which Western European (derived) states are always at the vanguard and whose culture is the one to be copied and followed by those playing catch- up. In instances where accepted as existing within a society, it is discursively confined to a problem of the far- right and
- 52. Discourse, Race and Migration 33 33 not representative of wider society. By constructing racism in such a way, it can be safely ‘quarantined’, and daily life can go on as normal.7 Furthermore, although institu- tional racism does undoubtedly exist, the focus on it ignores the (potential) agency of the wider public in continuing racism. These two discursive realizations allow people to continue to reject any blame for structural inequalities. Indeed, van Dijk (2005) argues that far- right political parties serve a purpose –such groups are described as the ‘real’ racists, thereby allowing discriminatory practices to continue unabated. They are also an easy target because the language used is much more explicitly racist than the implicit discriminatory language of mainstream politics (and media). Rather, now, as racism has moved from biological to ethno- cultural justification, so too has the language which is used to discriminate. Reeves (1983) talks of a discursive deracializa- tion in which racial matters are spoken about by the use of symbolic signifiers rather than explicit racial language, the rise of dog- whistle politics in which certain words or phrases are used, or symbolic topics are focused on, which, despite not being explic- itly racist, are easily cognitively linked to negative stereotypes of a minority group. Similarly, Delanty, Jone and Wodak (2008) have argued that discrimination against minorities is coded in less explicit discourse. I would argue, though, that these claims are somewhat outdated given the intensification of public sphere discourses on immi- gration and integration, as outlined in later chapters. We have seen a re- emergence of more overtly racist language that has originated from the extreme- right and found a new home in the manifestos of mainstream political parties in the UK and across Europe. This has led to a paradoxical situation where racism is on the rise and yet there are only a few ‘racists’ (Delanty, Jones and Wodak 2008: 11). Denial of racism is also manifested in the reversal of racism. Those who claim to be discriminated against are labelled as racist against whites (which, at its far- right extreme, is manifested in claims of white genocide), being oversensitive, politically correct or as playing the race card, which, given the taboo nature of the word, automatically ‘neutralises minority claims of discrimination’ (Doane 2006: 269). 2.4 Concluding remarks At the beginning of the chapter, I investigated salient theories of racism and indicated the important shift of justification for racism from biological to ethno-cultural reasons. I argued that racism and racialization serve practical purposes and –from here –that four functions of racism were explained: first, that racism concerns power and ideol- ogy; second, that racism is often constructed as a battle over socially shared resources; third, racism secures collective (national) identities that have been called into question via modernity and globalization. This point is accepted with the caveat that racism does not appear in a decontextualized vacuum, but rather foreigners or outsiders are racialized through discourse that originate from those within the dominant group who hold power, and there is thus a fourth, practical reasoning behind racism.8 In the remainder of the chapter, I argued for a discursive understanding of racism. Following critical discourse analysts such as Fairclough, Wodak and van Dijk, I con- tend that racism is ‘done’ through discourse in a variety of ways on a day- to- day basis,
- 53. Constructions of Migrant Integration in British Public Discourse 34 34 and that discursive constructions of racism are produced and reproduced through a model of public discourse outlined in Chapter 1 (on a day- to- day basis, on the streets, in politics and by media actors). Furthermore, by limiting access to these discourse sites within the public sphere, minorities are further victims of racial exclusion. Within Europe today, and more specifically in the UK, the object this racism is often the migrant, and this has been the case for at least the last fifty years. Fekete (2001) has termed the current racism in Europe a xeno- racism, which is racist in substance but xenophobic in form. ‘They’ are a problem for ‘us’ not because ‘they’ are biologically inferior but because ‘they’ are taking resources from ‘us’ and their culture is different from ours.
- 54. 35 3 (En)Acting Integration It is only relatively recently that European countries have witnessed immigration on a large scale. Since the end of the Second World War, a number of processes have con- tributed to a considerable increase in non- nationals crossing the borders into Europe. These include the end of many French, Dutch and British colonial occupations and the subsequent migration of subjects to the metropole, the need to rebuild cities and – running concurrently to these –an improvement in living standards and conditions in European countries, which has become a strong pull factor for migrants. Up until the 1960s and 1970s, migrants came to northern Europe for labour reasons, and it was insufficiently envisaged or expected (and certainly not desired) that in the long run they would settle in the country and thus were never seen as potential citizens or politi- cal actors (Martinello 2006). They were there to produce but never reproduce and set- tle. Since the mid- 1970s, there has been a shift in migration patterns from temporary labour, the archetypal guest- worker, to one of more permanent migration motivated by push factors (environmental disasters and armed conflicts, ethnic cleansing) and pull factors (the chance of a better quality of life through greater economic, social and educational opportunities). This change in both the levels of and reasons for immigra- tion has brought many results, but two stand out. First, the permanence of migra- tion has necessitated state leaders to decide whether, and how, to integrate newcomers. Integration, Horner and Weber (2011: 139– 59) note, is not just a moving across geo- graphical borders but also ‘conceptual borders of identity, belonging and entitlement’. Migration affects how individuals, communities and nations imagine themselves and their cohabitants spatially, temporally and corporeally (Fortier 2006). Second, the ever- extended presence of migrants also invites questions to be asked regarding citi- zenship, because it brings with it a need to ‘reconcile cultural pluralism with political membership’ (Favell 1998: 22). As such, migration also brings into question European governments’ purported fidelity to ideals of justice, equality, liberalism and tolerance for all (ibid.). In this chapter I want to explain the concomitant concepts of citizenship and integra- tion and how they relate both to each other and to other concepts such as race, immigra- tion and public sphere. Following this, I then propose that integration is a performative –and therefore at least partly discursive –process and that in more recent times the key basis of this ‘performance’ has been neoliberal values. Staying with this theatrical
- 55. Exploring the Variety of Random Documents with Different Content
- 56. cultivated in the north of England. Sedburgh, for many years, was a sort of nursery or rural chapel-of-ease to Cambridge. Dawson of Sedburgh was a luminary better known than ever Dr. Watson was, by mathematicians both foreign and domestic. Gough, the blind mathematician and botanist of Kendal, is known to this day; but many others in that town had accomplishments equal to his; and, indeed, so widely has mathematical knowledge extended itself throughout Northern England that, even amongst the poor Lancashire weavers, mechanic labourers for their daily bread, the cultivation of pure geometry, in the most refined shape, has long prevailed; of which some accounts have been recently published. Local pique, therefore, must have been at the bottom of Dr. Whittaker's sneer. At all events, it was ludicrously contrasted with the true state of the case, as brought out by the meeting between Coleridge and the Bishop. Coleridge was armed, at all points, with the scholastic erudition which bore upon all questions that could arise in polemic divinity. The philosophy of ancient Greece, through all its schools, the philosophy of the schoolmen technically so called, Church history, c., Coleridge had within his call. Having been personally acquainted, or connected as a pupil, with Eichhorn and Michaelis, he knew the whole cycle of schisms and audacious speculations through which Biblical criticism or Christian philosophy has revolved in Modern Germany. All this was ground upon which the Bishop of Llandaff trod with the infirm footing of a child. He listened to what Coleridge reported with the same sort of pleasurable surprise, alternating with starts of doubt or incredulity, as would naturally attend a detailed report from Laputa—which aërial region of speculation does but too often recur to a sober-minded person in reading of the endless freaks in philosophy of Modern Germany, where the sceptre of Mutability, that potentate celebrated by Spenser, gathers more trophies in a year than elsewhere in a century; the anarchy of dreams presides in her philosophy; and the restless elements of opinion, throughout every region of debate, mould themselves eternally, like the billowy sands of the desert as
- 57. beheld by Bruce, into towering columns, soar upwards to a giddy altitude, then stalk about for a minute, all aglow with fiery colour, and finally unmould and dislimn, with a collapse as sudden as the motions of that eddying breeze under which their vapoury architecture had arisen. Hartley and Locke, both of whom the bishop made into idols, were discussed; especially the former, against whom Coleridge alleged some of those arguments which he has used in his Biographia Literaria. The bishop made but a feeble defence; and upon some points none at all. He seemed, I remember, much struck with one remark of Coleridge's, to this effect:—That, whereas Hartley fancied that our very reasoning was an aggregation, collected together under the law of association, on the contrary, we reason by counteracting that law: just, said he, as, in leaping, the law of gravitation concurs to that act in its latter part; but no leap could take place were it not by a counteraction of the law. One remark of the bishop's let me into the secret of his very limited reading. Coleridge had used the word apperception, apparently without intention; for, on hearing some objection to the word, as being surely not a word that Addison would have used, he substituted transcendental consciousness. Some months afterwards, going with Charles Lloyd to call at Calgarth, during the time when The Friend was appearing, the bishop again noticed this obnoxious word, and in the very same terms:—Now, this word apperception, which Mr. Coleridge uses in the last number of 'The Friend,' surely, surely it would not have been approved by Addison; no, Mr. Lloyd, nor by Swift; nor even, I think, by Arbuthnot. Somebody suggested that the word was a new word of German mintage, and most probably due to Kant—of whom the bishop seemed never to have heard. Meantime the fact was, and to me an amusing one, that the word had been commonly used by Leibnitz, a classical author on such subjects, 120 years before. In the autumn of 1810, Coleridge left the Lakes; and, so far as I am aware, for ever. I once, indeed, heard a rumour of his having passed through with some party of tourists—some reason struck me at the
- 58. time for believing it untrue—but, at all events, he never returned to them as a resident. What might be his reason for this eternal self- banishment from scenes which he so well understood in all their shifting forms of beauty, I can only guess. Perhaps it was the very opposite reason to that which is most obvious: not, possibly, because he had become indifferent to their attractions, but because his undecaying sensibility to their commanding power had become associated with too afflicting remembrances, and flashes of personal recollections, suddenly restored and illuminated—recollections which will Sometimes leap From hiding-places ten years deep, and bring into collision the present with some long-forgotten past, in a form too trying and too painful for endurance. I have a brilliant Scotch friend, who cannot walk on the seashore—within sight of its ανηριθμον γελασμα (anêrithmon gelasma), the multitudinous laughter of its waves, or within hearing of its resounding uproar, because they bring up, by links of old association, too insupportably to his mind the agitations of his glittering, but too fervid youth. There is a feeling—morbid, it may be, but for which no anodyne is found in all the schools from Plato to Kant—to which the human mind is liable at times: it is best described in a little piece by Henry More, the Platonist. He there represents himself as a martyr to his own too passionate sense of beauty, and his consequent too pathetic sense of its decay. Everywhere—above, below, around him, in the earth, in the clouds, in the fields, and in their garniture of flowers—he beholds a beauty carried to excess; and this beauty becomes a source of endless affliction to him, because everywhere he sees it liable to the touch of decay and mortal change. During one paroxysm of this sad passion, an angel appears to comfort him; and, by the sudden revelation of her immortal beauty, does, in fact, suspend his grief. But it is only a suspension; for the sudden recollection that her privileged condition, and her exemption from
- 59. the general fate of beauty, is only by way of exception to a universal rule, restores his grief: And thou thyself, he says to the angel— And thou thyself, that com'st to comfort me, Wouldst strong occasion of deep sorrow bring, If thou wert subject to mortality! Every man who has ever dwelt with passionate love upon the fair face of some female companion through life must have had the same feeling, and must often, in the exquisite language of Shakspere's sonnets, have commanded and adjured all-conquering Time, there, at least, and upon that one tablet of his adoration, To write no wrinkle with his antique hand. Vain prayer! Empty adjuration! Profitless rebellion against the laws which season all things for the inexorable grave! Yet not the less we rebel again and again; and, though wisdom counsels resignation, yet our human passions, still cleaving to their object, force us into endless rebellion. Feelings the same in kind as these attach themselves to our mental power, and our vital energies. Phantoms of lost power, sudden intuitions, and shadowy restorations of forgotten feelings, sometimes dim and perplexing, sometimes by bright but furtive glimpses, sometimes by a full and steady revelation, overcharged with light—throw us back in a moment upon scenes and remembrances that we have left full thirty years behind us. In solitude, and chiefly in the solitudes of nature, and, above all, amongst the great and enduring features of nature, such as mountains, and quiet dells, and the lawny recesses of forests, and the silent shores of lakes, features with which (as being themselves less liable to change) our feelings have a more abiding association— under these circumstances it is that such evanescent hauntings of our past and forgotten selves are most apt to startle and to waylay us. These are positive torments from which the agitated mind shrinks in fear; but there are others negative in their nature—that is, blank mementoes of powers extinct, and of faculties burnt out within
- 60. us. And from both forms of anguish—from this twofold scourge— poor Coleridge fled, perhaps, in flying from the beauty of external nature. In alluding to this latter, or negative form of suffering—that form, I mean, which presents not the too fugitive glimpses of past power, but its blank annihilation—Coleridge himself most beautifully insists upon and illustrates the truth that all which we find in Nature must be created by ourselves; and that alike whether Nature is so gorgeous in her beauty as to seem apparelled in her wedding- garment or so powerless and extinct as to seem palled in her shroud. In either case, O, Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live; Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud. It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life whose fountains are within. This was one, and the most common, shape of extinguished power from which Coleridge fled to the great city. But sometimes the same decay came back upon his heart in the more poignant shape of intimations and vanishing glimpses, recovered for one moment from the paradise of youth, and from fields of joy and power, over which, for him, too certainly, he felt that the cloud of night was settling for ever. Both modes of the same torment exiled him from nature; and for the same reasons he fled from poetry and all commerce with his own soul; burying himself in the profoundest abstractions from life and human sensibilities. For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal, From my own nature, all the natural man;
- 61. This was my sole resource, my only plan; Till that, which suits a part, infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. Such were, doubtless, the true and radical causes which, for the final twenty-four years of Coleridge's life, drew him away from those scenes of natural beauty in which only, at an earlier stage of life, he found strength and restoration. These scenes still survived; but their power was gone, because that had been derived from himself, and his ancient self had altered. Such were the causes; but the immediate occasion of his departure from the Lakes, in the autumn of 1810, was the favourable opportunity then presented to him of migrating in a pleasant way. Mr. Basil Montagu, the Chancery barrister, happened at that time to be returning to London, with Mrs. Montagu, from a visit to the Lakes, or to Wordsworth.[81] His travelling carriage was roomy enough to allow of his offering Coleridge a seat in it; and his admiration of Coleridge was just then fervent enough to prompt a friendly wish for that sort of close connexion (viz. by domestication as a guest under Mr. Basil Montagu's roof) which is the most trying to friendship, and which in this instance led to a perpetual rupture of it. The domestic habits of eccentric men of genius, much more those of a man so irreclaimably irregular as Coleridge, can hardly be supposed to promise very auspiciously for any connexion so close as this. A very extensive house and household, together with the unlimited licence of action which belongs to the ménage of some great Dons amongst the nobility, could alone have made Coleridge an inmate perfectly desirable. Probably many little jealousies and offences had been mutually suppressed; but the particular spark which at length fell amongst the combustible materials already prepared, and thus produced the final explosion, took the following shape:—Mr. Montagu had published a book against the use of wine and intoxicating liquors of every sort.[82] Not out of parsimony or under any suspicion of inhospitality, but in mere self-consistency and obedience to his own conscientious scruples, Mr. Montagu would not countenance the use of wine at his own table. So far all was right. But doubtless, on
- 62. such a system, under the known habits of modern life, it should have been made a rule to ask no man to dinner: for to force men, without warning, to a single (and, therefore, thoroughly useless) act of painful abstinence, is what neither I nor any man can have a right to do. In point of sense, it is, in fact, precisely the freak of Sir Roger de Coverley, who drenches his friend the Spectator with a hideous decoction: not, as his confiding visitor had supposed, for some certain and immediate benefit to follow, but simply as having a tendency (if well supported by many years' continuance of similar drenches) to abate the remote contingency of the stone. Hear this, ye Gods of the Future! I am required to perform a most difficult sacrifice; and forty years hence I may, by persisting so long, have some dim chance of reward. One day's abstinence could do no good on any scheme: and no man was likely to offer himself for a second. However, such being the law of the castle, and that law well known to Coleridge, he nevertheless, thought fit to ask to dinner Colonel (then Captain) Pasley, of the Engineers, well known in those days for his book on the Military Policy of England, and since for his System of Professional Instruction. Now, where or in what land abides that Captain, or Colonel, or Knight-in-arms, to whom wine in the analysis of dinner is a neutral or indifferent element? Wine, therefore, as it was not of a nature to be omitted, Coleridge took care to furnish at his own private cost. And so far, again, all was right. But why must Coleridge give his dinner to the captain in Mr. Montagu's house? There lay the affront; and, doubtless, it was a very inconsiderate action on the part of Coleridge. I report the case simply as it was then generally borne upon the breath, not of scandal, but of jest and merriment. The result, however, was no jest; for bitter words ensued—words that festered in the remembrance; and a rupture between the parties followed, which no reconciliation has ever healed.
- 63. Meantime, on reviewing this story, as generally adopted by the learned in literary scandal, one demur rises up. Dr. Parr, a lisping Whig pedant, without personal dignity or conspicuous power of mind, was a frequent and privileged inmate at Mr. Montagu's. Him now—this Parr—there was no conceivable motive for enduring; that point is satisfactorily settled by the pompous inanities of his works. Yet, on the other hand, his habits were in their own nature far less endurable than Samuel Taylor Coleridge's; for the monster smoked; —and how? How did the Birmingham Doctor[83] smoke? Not as you, or I, or other civilized people smoke, with a gentle cigar—but with the very coarsest tobacco. And those who know how that abomination lodges and nestles in the draperies of window-curtains will guess the horror and detestation in which the old Whig's memory is held by all enlightened women. Surely, in a house where the Doctor had any toleration at all, Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have enjoyed an unlimited toleration.[84] From Mr. Montagu's Coleridge passed, by favour of what introduction I never heard, into a family as amiable in manners and as benign in disposition as I remember to have ever met with. On this excellent family I look back with threefold affection, on account of their goodness to Coleridge, and because they were then unfortunate, and because their union has long since been dissolved by death. The family was composed of three members: of Mr. M——, once a lawyer, who had, however, ceased to practise; of Mrs. M——, his wife, a blooming young woman, distinguished for her fine person; and a young lady, her unmarried sister.[85] Here, for some years, I used to visit Coleridge; and, doubtless, as far as situation merely, and the most delicate attentions from the most amiable women, could make a man happy, he must have been so at this time; for both the ladies treated him as an elder brother, or as a father. At length, however, the cloud of misfortune, which had long settled upon the prospects of this excellent family, thickened; and I found, upon one of my visits to London, that they had given up their house in Berners Street, and had retired to a cottage in Wiltshire. Coleridge
- 64. had accompanied them; and there I visited them myself, and, as it eventually proved, for the last time. Some time after this, I heard from Coleridge, with the deepest sorrow, that poor M—— had been thrown into prison, and had sunk under the pressure of his misfortunes. The gentle ladies of his family had retired to remote friends; and I saw them no more, though often vainly making inquiries about them. Coleridge, during this part of his London life, I saw constantly— generally once a day, during my own stay in London; and sometimes we were jointly engaged to dinner parties. In particular, I remember one party at which we met Lady Hamilton—Lord Nelson's Lady Hamilton—the beautiful, the accomplished, the enchantress! Coleridge admired her, as who would not have done, prodigiously; and she, in her turn, was fascinated with Coleridge. He was unusually effective in his display; and she, by way of expressing her acknowledgments appropriately, performed a scene in Lady Macbeth —how splendidly, I cannot better express than by saying that all of us who then witnessed her performance were familiar with Mrs. Siddons's matchless execution of that scene, and yet, with such a model filling our imaginations, we could not but acknowledge the possibility of another, and a different perfection, without a trace of imitation, equally original, and equally astonishing. The word magnificent is, in this day, most lavishly abused: daily I hear or read in the newspapers of magnificent objects, as though scattered more thickly than blackberries; but for my part I have seen few objects really deserving that epithet. Lady Hamilton was one of them. She had Medea's beauty, and Medea's power of enchantment. But let not the reader too credulously suppose her the unprincipled woman she has been described. I know of no sound reason for supposing the connexion between Lord Nelson and her to have been other than perfectly virtuous. Her public services, I am sure, were most eminent—for that we have indisputable authority; and equally sure I am that they were requited with rank ingratitude.
- 65. After the household of the poor M—— s had been dissolved, I know not whither Coleridge went immediately: for I did not visit London until some years had elapsed. In 1823-24 I first understood that he had taken up his residence as a guest with Mr. Gillman, a surgeon, in Highgate. He had then probably resided for some time at that gentleman's: there he continued to reside on the same terms, I believe, of affectionate friendship with the members of Mr. Gillman's family as had made life endurable to him in the time of the M—— s; and there he died in July of the present year. If, generally speaking, poor Coleridge had but a small share of earthly prosperity, in one respect at least he was eminently favoured by Providence: beyond all men who ever perhaps have lived, he found means to engage a constant succession of most faithful friends; and he levied the services of sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, from the hands of strangers—attracted to him by no possible impulses but those of reverence for his intellect, and love for his gracious nature. How, says Wordsworth—
- 66. ----How can he expect that others should Sow for him, reap for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no thought at all? How can he, indeed? It is most unreasonable to do so: yet this expectation, if Coleridge ought not to have entertained, at all events he realized. Fast as one friend dropped off, another, and another, succeeded: perpetual relays were laid along his path in life, of judicious and zealous supporters, who comforted his days, and smoothed the pillow for his declining age, even when it was beyond all human power to take away the thorns which stuffed it. And what were those thorns?—and whence derived? That is a question on which I ought to decline speaking, unless I could speak fully. Not, however, to make any mystery of what requires none, the reader will understand that originally his sufferings, and the death within him of all hope—the palsy, as it were, of that which is the life of life, and the heart within the heart—came from opium. But two things I must add—one to explain Coleridge's case, and the other to bring it within the indulgent allowance of equitable judges:—First, the sufferings from morbid derangements, originally produced by opium, had very possibly lost that simple character, and had themselves re-acted in producing secondary states of disease and irritation, not any longer dependent upon the opium, so as to disappear with its disuse: hence, a more than mortal discouragement to accomplish this disuse, when the pains of self- sacrifice were balanced by no gleams of restorative feeling. Yet, secondly, Coleridge did make prodigious efforts to deliver himself from this thraldom; and he went so far at one time in Bristol, to my knowledge, as to hire a man for the express purpose, and armed with the power of resolutely interposing between himself and the door of any druggist's shop. It is true that an authority derived only from Coleridge's will could not be valid against Coleridge's own counter-determination: he could resume as easily as he could delegate the power. But the scheme did not entirely fail; a man
- 67. shrinks from exposing to another that infirmity of will which he might else have but a feeble motive for disguising to himself; and the delegated man, the external conscience, as it were, of Coleridge, though destined—in the final resort, if matters came to absolute rupture, and to an obstinate duel, as it were, between himself and his principal—in that extremity to give way, yet might have long protracted the struggle before coming to that sort of dignus vindice nodus: and in fact, I know, upon absolute proof, that, before reaching that crisis, the man showed fight, and, faithful to his trust, and comprehending the reasons for it, declared that, if he must yield, he would know the reason why. Opium, therefore, subject to the explanation I have made, was certainly the original source of Coleridge's morbid feelings, of his debility, and of his remorse. His pecuniary embarrassments pressed as lightly as could well be expected upon him. I have mentioned the annuity of £150 made to him by the two Wedgwoods. One half, I believe, could not be withdrawn, having been left by a regular testamentary bequest. But the other moiety, coming from the surviving brother, was withdrawn on the plea of commercial losses, somewhere, I think, about 1815. That would have been a heavy blow to Coleridge; and assuredly the generosity is not very conspicuous of having ever suffered an allowance of that nature to be left to the mercy of accident. Either it ought not to have been granted in that shape—viz. as an annual allowance, giving ground for expecting its periodical recurrence—or it ought not to have been withdrawn. However, this blow was broken to Coleridge by the bounty of George IV, who placed Coleridge's name in the list of twelve to whom he granted an annuity of 100 guineas per annum. This he enjoyed so long as that Prince reigned. But at length came a heavier blow than that from Mr. Wedgwood: a new King arose, who knew not Joseph. Yet surely he was not a King who could so easily resolve to turn adrift twelve men of letters, many of them most accomplished men, for the sake of appropriating a sum no larger to himself than 1200 guineas—no less to some of them than the total freight of their earthly hopes?—No matter: let the deed have been
- 68. from whose hand it might, it was done: ἑιργασται (heirgastai), it was perpetrated, as saith the Medea of Euripides; and it will be mentioned hereafter, more than either once or twice. It fell with weight, and with effect upon the latter days of Coleridge; it took from him as much heart and hope as at his years, and with his unworldly prospects, remained for man to blight: and, if it did not utterly crush him, the reason was—because for himself he had never needed much, and was now continually drawing near to that haven in which, for himself, he would need nothing; secondly, because his children were now independent of his aid; and, finally, because in this land there are men to be found always of minds large enough to comprehend the claims of genius, and with hearts, by good luck, more generous, by infinite degrees, than the hearts of Princes. Coleridge, as I now understand, was somewhere about sixty-two years of age when he died.[86] This, however, I take upon the report of the public newspapers; for I do not, of my own knowledge, know anything accurately upon that point. It can hardly be necessary to inform any reader of discernment or of much practice in composition that the whole of this article upon Mr. Coleridge, though carried through at intervals, and (as it has unexpectedly happened) with time sufficient to have made it a very careful one, has, in fact, been written in a desultory and unpremeditated style. It was originally undertaken on the sudden but profound impulse communicated to the writer's feelings by the unexpected news of this great man's death; partly, therefore, to relieve, by expressing, his own deep sentiments of reverential affection to his memory, and partly, in however imperfect a way, to meet the public feeling of interest or curiosity about a man who had long taken his place amongst the intellectual potentates of the age. Both purposes required that it should be written almost extempore: the greater part was really and unaffectedly written in that way, and under circumstances of such extreme haste as would justify the writer in pleading the very amplest privilege of licence and indulgent
- 69. construction which custom concedes to such cases. Hence it had occurred to the writer, as a judicious principle, to create a sort of merit out of his own necessity, and rather to seek after the graces which belong to the epistolary form, or to other modes of composition professedly careless, than after those which grow out of preconceived biographies, which, having originally settled their plan upon a regular foundation, are able to pursue a course of orderly development, such as his slight sketch had voluntarily renounced from the beginning. That mode of composition having been once adopted, it seemed proper to sustain it, even after delays and interruption had allowed time for throwing the narrative into a more orderly movement, and modulating it, as it were, into a key of the usual solemnity. The qualis ab incepto processerit—the ordo prescribed by the first bars of the music predominated over all other considerations, and to such an extent that he had purposed to leave the article without any regular termination or summing up—as, on the one hand, scarcely demanded by the character of a sketch so rapid and indigested, whilst, on the other, he was sensible that anything of so much pretension as a formal peroration challenged a sort of consideration to the paper which it was the author's chief wish to disclaim. That effect, however, is sufficiently parried by the implied protest now offered; and, on other reasons, it is certainly desirable that a general glance, however cursory, should be thrown over the intellectual claims of Mr. Coleridge by one who knew him so well, and especially in a case where those very claims constitute the entire and sole justification of the preceding personal memoir. That which furnishes the whole moving reason for any separate notice at all, and forms its whole latent interest, ought not, in mere logic, to be left without some notice itself, though as rapidly executed as the previous biographical sketch, and, from the necessity of the subject, by many times over more imperfect. To this task, therefore, the writer now addresses himself; and by way of gaining greater freedom of movement and of resuming his conversational tone, he will here again take the liberty of speaking in the first person.
- 70. If Mr. Coleridge had been merely a scholar—merely a philologist—or merely a man of science—there would be no reason apparent for travelling in our survey beyond the field of his intellect, rigorously and narrowly so called. But, because he was a poet, and because he was a philosopher in a comprehensive and a most human sense, with whose functions the moral nature is so largely interwoven, I shall feel myself entitled to notice the most striking aspects of his character (using that word in its common limited meaning), of his disposition, and his manners, as so many reflex indications of his intellectual constitution. But let it be well understood that I design nothing elaborate, nothing comprehensive or ambitious: my purpose is merely to supply a few hints and suggestions drawn from a very hasty retrospect, by way of adding a few traits to any outline which the reader may have framed to himself, either from some personal knowledge, or from more full and lively memorials. One character in which Mr. Coleridge most often came before the public was that of politician. In this age of fervent partisanship, it will, therefore, naturally occur as a first question to inquire after his party and political connexions: was he Whig, Tory, or Radical? Or, under a new classification, were his propensities Conservative or Reforming? I answer that, in any exclusive or emphatic sense, he was none of these; because, as a philosopher, he was, according to circumstances, and according to the object concerned, all of these by turns. These are distinctions upon which a cloud of delusion rests. It would not be difficult to show that in the speculations built upon the distinction of Whig and Tory, even by as philosophic a politician as Edmund Burke, there is an oversight of the largest practical importance. But the general and partisan use of these terms superadds to this πρωτον ψευδος (prôton pseudos) a second which is much more flagrant. It is this: the terms Whig or Tory, used by partisans, are taken extra gradum, as expressing the ideal or extreme cases of the several creeds; whereas, in actual life, few such cases are found realized, by far the major part of those who answer to either one or the other denomination making only an approximation (differing by infinite degrees) to the ideal or abstract
- 71. type. A third error there is, relating to the actual extent of the several denominations, even after every allowance made for the faintest approximations. Listen to a Whig, or to a Tory, and you will suppose that the great bulk of society range under his banner: all, at least, who have any property at stake. Listen to a Radical, and you will suppose that all are marshalled in the same ranks with himself, unless those who have some private interest in existing abuses, or have aristocratic privileges to defend. Yet, upon going extensively into society as it is, you find that a vast majority of good citizens are of no party whatsoever, own no party designation, care for no party interest, but carry their good wishes by turns to men of every party, according to the momentary purpose they are pursuing. As to Whig and Tory, it is pretty clear that only two classes of men, both of limited extent, acknowledge these as their distinctions: first, those who make politics in some measure their profession or trade— whether by standing forward habitually in public meetings as leaders or as assistants, or by writing books and pamphlets in the same cause; secondly, those whose rank, or birth, or position in a city, or a rural district, almost pledges them to a share in the political struggles of the day, under the penalty of being held fainéans, truants, or even malignant recusants, if they should decline a warfare which often, perhaps, they do not love in secret. These classes, which, after all, are not numerous, and not entirely sincere, compose the whole extent of professing Whigs and Tories who make any approach to the standards of their two churches; and, generally speaking, these persons have succeeded to their politics and their party ties, as they have to their estates, viz. by inheritance. Not their way of thinking in politics has dictated their party connexions; but these connexions, traditionally bequeathed from one generation to another, have dictated their politics. With respect to the Radical or the Reformer, the case is otherwise; for it is certain that in this, as in every great and enlightened nation, enjoying an intense and fervid communication of thought through the press, there is, and must be, a tendency widely diffused to the principles of sane reform—an anxiety to probe and examine all the institutions of the land by the increasing lights of the age—and a salutary determination that no
- 72. acknowledged abuse shall be sheltered by prescription, or privileged by its antiquity. In saying, therefore, that his principles are spread over the length and breadth of the land, the Reformer says no more than the truth. Whig and Tory, as usually understood, express only two modes of aristocratic partisanship: and it is strange, indeed, to find people deluded by the notion that the reforming principle has any more natural connexion with the first than the last. Reformer, on the other hand, to a certain extent expresses the political creed and aspect of almost every enlightened citizen: but, then, how? Not, as the Radical would insinuate, as pledging a man to a specific set of objects, or to any visible and apparent party, having known leaders and settled modes of action. British society, in its large majority, may be fairly described as Reformers, in the sense of being favourably disposed to a general spirit of ventilation and reform carried through all departments of public business, political or judicial; but it is so far from being, therefore, true that men in general are favourably disposed to any known party, in or out of Parliament, united for certain objects and by certain leaders, that, on the contrary, this reforming party itself has no fixed unity, and no generally acknowledged heads. It is divided both as to persons and as to things: the ends to be pursued create as many schisms as the course of means proper for the pursuit, and the choice of agents for conducting the public wishes. In fact, it would be even more difficult to lay down the ideal standard of a Reformer, or his abstract creed, than of a Tory: and, supposing this done, it would be found, in practice, that the imperfect approximations to the pure faith would differ by even broader shades as regarded the reforming creed than as regarded that of the rigorous or ultra Tory. With respect to Mr. Coleridge: he was certainly a friend to all enlightened reforms; he was a friend, for example, to Reform in Parliament. Sensible as he was of the prodigious diffusion of knowledge and good sense amongst the classes immediately below the gentry in British society, he could not but acknowledge their right to a larger and a less indirect share of political influence. As to the plan, and its extent, and its particular provisions,—upon those he
- 73. hesitated and wavered; as other friends to the same views have done, and will continue to do. The only avowed objects of modern Reformers which he would strenuously have opposed, nay, would have opposed with the zeal of an ancient martyr, are those which respect the Church of England, and, therefore, most of those which respect the two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. There he would have been found in the first ranks of the Anti-Reformers. He would also have supported the House of Peers, as the tried bulwark of our social interests in many a famous struggle, and sometimes, in the hour of need, the sole barrier against despotic aggressions on the one hand, and servile submissions on the other. Moreover, he looked with favour upon many modes of aristocratic influence as balances to new-made commercial wealth, and to a far baser tyranny likely to arise from that quarter when unbalanced. But, allowing for these points of difference, I know of little else stamped with the general seal of modern reform, and claiming to be a privileged object for a national effort, which would not have had his countenance. It is true,—and this I am sensible will be objected,— that his party connexions were chiefly with the Tories; and it adds a seeming strength to this objection, that these connexions were not those of accident, nor those which he inherited, nor those of his youthful choice. They were sought out by himself, and in his maturer years; or else they were such as sought him for the sake of his political principles; and equally, in either case, they argued some affinity in his political creed. This much cannot be denied. But one consideration will serve greatly to qualify the inference from these facts. In those years when Mr. Coleridge became connected with Tories, what was the predominating and cardinal principle of Toryism, in comparison with which all else was willingly slighted? Circumstances of position had thrown upon the Tories the onus of a great national struggle, the greatest which History anywhere records, and with an enemy the most deadly. The Whigs were then out of power: they were therefore in opposition; and that one fact, the simple fact, of holding an anti-ministerial position, they allowed, by a most fatal blunder, to determine the course of their foreign politics. Napoleon was to be cherished simply because he was a
- 74. thorn in Mr. Pitt's side. So began their foreign policy—and in that pettiest of personal views. Because they were anti-ministerial, they allowed themselves passively to become anti-national. To be a Whig, therefore, in those days, implied little more than a strenuous opposition to foreign war; to be a Tory pledged a man to little more than war with Napoleon Bonaparte. And this view of our foreign relations it was that connected Coleridge with Tories,—a view which arose upon no motives of selfish interest (as too often has been said in reproach), but upon the changes wrought in the spirit of the French Republic, which gradually transmuted its defensive warfare (framed originally to meet a conspiracy of kings crusading against the new-born democracy of French institutions, whilst yet in their cradle) into a warfare of aggression and sanguinary ambition. The military strength evoked in France by the madness of European kings had taught her the secret of her own power—a secret too dangerous for a nation of vanity so infinite, and so feeble in all means of moral self-restraint. The temptation to foreign conquest was too strong for the national principles; and, in this way, all that had been grand and pure in the early pretensions of French Republicanism rapidly melted away before the common bribes of vulgar ambition. Unoffending states, such as Switzerland, were the first to be trampled under foot; no voice was heard any more but the brazen throat of war; and, after all that had been vaunted of a golden age, and a long career opened to the sceptre of pure political justice, the clouds gathered more gloomily than ever; and the sword was once more reinstated, as the sole arbiter of right, with less disguise and less reserve than under the vilest despotism of kings. The change was in the French Republicans, not in their foreign admirers; they, in mere consistency, were compelled into corresponding changes, and into final alienation of sympathy, as they beheld, one after one, all titles forfeited by which that grand explosion of pure democracy had originally challenged and sustained their veneration. The mighty Republic had now begun to revolve through those fierce transmigrations foreseen by Burke, to every one of which, by turns, he had denounced an inevitable purification by fire and blood: no trace remained of her primitive character: and of
- 75. that awful outbreak of popular might which once had made France the land of hope and promise to the whole human race, and had sounded a knell to every form of oppression or abuse, no record was to be found, except in the stupendous power which cemented its martial oligarchy. Of the people, of the democracy—or that it had ever for an hour been roused from its slumbers—one sole evidence remained; and that lay in the blank power of destruction, and its perfect organization, which none but a popular movement, no power short of that, could have created. The people, having been unchained, and as if for the single purpose of creating a vast system of destroying energies, had then immediately recoiled within their old limits, and themselves become the earliest victim of their own stratocracy. In this way France had become an object of jealousy and alarm. It remained to see to what purpose she would apply her new energies. That was soon settled; her new-born power was wielded from the first by unprincipled and by ambitious men; and, in 1800, it fell under the permanent control of an autocrat, whose unity of purpose, and iron will, left no room for any hope of change. Under these circumstances, under these prospects, coupled with this retrospect, what became the duty of all foreign politicians? of the English above all, as natural leaders in any hopeful scheme of resistance? The question can scarcely be put with decency. Time and season, place or considerations of party, all alike vanished before an elementary duty to the human race, which much transcended any duty of exclusive patriotism. Plant it, however, on that narrower basis, and the answer would have been the same for all centuries, and for every land under a corresponding state of circumstances. Of Napoleon's real purposes there cannot now be any reasonable doubt. His confessions—and, in particular, his indirect revelations at St. Helena—have long since removed all demurs or scruples of scepticism. For England, therefore, as in relation to a man bent upon her ruin, all distinctions of party were annihilated—Whig and Tory were merged and swallowed up in the transcendent duties of patriots, Englishmen, lovers of liberty. Tories, as Tories, had here no peculiar or separate duties—none which belonged to their separate
- 76. creed in politics. Their duties were paramount; and their partisanship had here no application—was perfectly indifferent, and spoke neither this way nor that. In one respect only they had peculiar duties, and a peculiar responsibility; peculiar, however, not by any difference of quality, but in its supreme degree; the same duties which belonged to all, belonged to them by a heavier responsibility. And how, or why? Not as Tories had they, or could they have, any functions at all applying to this occasion; it was as being then the ministerial party, as the party accidentally in power at the particular crisis: in that character it was that they had any separate or higher degree of responsibility; otherwise, and as to the kind of their duty apart from this degree, the Tories stood in the same circumstances as men of all other parties. To the Tories, however, as accidentally in possession of the supreme power, and wielding the national forces at that time, and directing their application—to them it was that the honour belonged of making a beginning: on them had devolved the privilege of opening and authorizing the dread crusade. How and in what spirit they acquitted themselves of that most enviable task— enviable for its sanctity, fearful for the difficulty of its adequate fulfilment—how they persevered, and whether, at any crisis, the direst and most ominous to the righteous cause, they faltered or gave sign of retreating—History will tell—History has already told. To the Whigs belonged the duty of seconding their old antagonists: and no wise man could have doubted that, in a case of transcendent patriotism, where none of those principles could possibly apply by which the two parties were divided and distinguished, the Whigs would be anxious to show that, for the interests of their common country, they could cheerfully lay aside all those party distinctions, and forget those feuds which now had no pertinence or meaning. Simply as Whigs, had they stood in no other relation, they probably would have done so. Unfortunately, however, for their own good name and popularity in after times, they were divided from the other party, not merely as Whigs opposed to Tories, but also upon another and a more mortifying distinction, which was not, like the first, a mere inert question of speculation or theory, but involved a vast practical difference of honours and emoluments:—they were divided,
- 77. I say, on another and more vexatious principle, as the Outs opposed to the Ins. Simply as Whigs, they might have coalesced with the Tories quoad hoc, and merely for this one purpose. But, as men out of power, they could not coalesce with those who were in. They constituted his Majesty's Opposition; and, in a fatal hour, they determined that it was fitting to carry their general scheme of hostility even into this sacred and privileged ground. That resolution once taken, they found it necessary to pursue it with zeal. The case itself was too weighty and too interesting to allow of any moderate tone for the abetters or opposers. Passion and personal bitterness soon animated the contest: violent and rash predictions were hazarded—prophecies of utter ruin and of captivity for our whole army were solemnly delivered: and it soon became evident, as indeed mere human infirmity made it beforehand but too probable, that, where so much personal credit was at stake upon the side of our own national dishonour, the wishes of the prophet had been pledged to the same result as the credit of his political sagacity. Many were the melancholy illustrations of the same general case. Men were seen fighting against the evidences of some great British victory with all the bitterness and fierce incredulity which usually meet the first rumours of some private calamity: that was in effect the aspect in their eyes of each national triumph in its turn. Their position, connected with the unfortunate election made by the Whig leaders of their tone, from the very opening of the contest, gave the character of a calamity for them and for their party to that which to every other heart in Britain was the noblest of triumphs in the noblest of causes; and, as a party, the Whigs mourned for years over those events which quickened the pulses of pleasure and sacred exultation in every other heart. God forbid that all Whigs should have felt in this unnatural way! I speak only of the tone set by the Parliamentary leaders. The few who were in Parliament, and exposed to daily taunts from the just exultation of their irritated opponents, had their natural feelings poisoned and envenomed. The many who were out of Parliament, and not personally interested in this warfare of the Houses, were left open to natural influences of
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