Jan Dobbernack

A Left Communitarianism? What about Multiculturalism?

A more plural approach can help to heal breaches both within the ‘multicultural community’ and beyond. Tariq Modood and Jan Dobbernack argue that an inclusive multiculturalism can be a learning experience for the centre left.

‘Things fall apart’: social imaginaries and the politics of cohesion

‘Social cohesion’ has been adopted on policy agendas across Europe. In the way the notion has been applied on recent public policy agendas, social problems are generally brought into connection with deficiencies in the social fabric and with scenarios of social disintegration. Policies towards cohesion, in turn, rely on ideas of civic activation and the inculcation of a sense of individual responsibility. Cohesion thus appears intimately linked to a revision of the role of government. To understand what it is that connects the turn to cohesion with new understandings of social governance, the article proposes the lens of ‘social imaginaries’. Drawing on contributions by Charles Taylor, Cornelius Castoriadis and Ernesto Laclau on ‘social imaginaries’, it suggests that this conceptual tool proves useful to understand how, with cohesion, a re-description of society links up to a re-orientation of social governance.

Misrecognition and Political Agency. The Case of Muslim Organisations in a General Election

Research Highlights and Abstract This article: Examines the meaning of claims for ‘recognition’ and struggles against ‘misrecognition’ by working through aspects of Muslim political agency in contemporary British politics; Contributes to research on the political mobilisation of Muslims in Britain by examining how civil society organisations respond to perceived stigmas and project a Muslim civic identity; Contributes to research that investigates dilemmas of political agency between the pressure to conform to standards of neutrality and maturity, on the one hand, and creativity and opposition, on the other; Demonstrates how minority actors manoeuvre and position themselves in the unsettled environment of contemporary British politics. It is a common complaint among Muslim civil society organisations that their presence in British politics is misconstrued. An increasing number of activists and groups are concerned to repudiate what they perceive to be the misperception of their political agency as exceptional and difficult to accommodate. Organisations and initiatives thus project and practice civic identities, to demonstrate that they are committed to the ‘common good’. This article explores how a number of organisations positioned themselves in response to experiences of ‘misrecognition’ in the context of the General Election 2010. With this conceptual focus we explore one of the most pertinent characteristics of Muslim political agency in Britain today: how actors respond to perceived pressures, make claims and project identities in opposition to alleged misperceptions or the refusal to acknowledge their desired self-descriptions. The article draws on a set of qualitative interviews with representatives of advocacy organisations that mobilised Muslim constituents in the run-up to the General Election 2010.

The politics of social cohesion in Germany, France and the United Kingdom

The last two decades have seen the appearance of a concern with social cohesion across Western Europe. Prominent politicians and public intellectuals increasingly proclaim social cohesion to be at risk and propose measures for its preservation or reinforcement. The social divisions that result from globalization, individualization or cultural pluralism - facts and processes that have characterized the European experience for some time - have become central in the debate about visions for social reform and governmental purposes. In a variety of contexts, the proposition now is that such processes constitute threatening divisions and require urgent efforts of political counterbalancing. Targeted interventions are needed to reinforce cohesion and need to be directed at the causes of social fragmentation and disunity. This concern with cohesion has found a conspicuous expression in programmes for political reform and social governance. In the explicit presentation of these programmes as political agendas for cohesion, agenda-setting politicians - often following the lead of public intellectuals and prominent policy entrepreneurs - have employed a rich socio-political vocabulary to define domains of problems and propose remedies. The mid-1990s to early 2000s thus saw the development of agendas of community cohesion in the United Kingdom, Burgergesellschaft in Germany and cohesion sociale in France. Following the shared objective to preserve cohesion, these agendas were targeted at different configurations of social problems and focused on different remedies: fostering political participation and active citizenship, reinforcing attitudes of reciprocity and social contact, or engaging and activating individuals in the labour market or as recipients of social welfare. Although there are significant precedents for anxiety about social disunity in European post-war politics, the proliferation and parallel emergence of cohesion during the mid- to late 1990s is striking and invites examination. Intellectual protagonists that contributed to the development of cohesion agendas, such as Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck or Pierre Rosanvallon, hark back to established themes in social and political theory, including functionalist sociology and communitarian themes in political philosophy. Yet the formation of cohesion agendas hardly confirms the notion that sociological or political theory provides ready-made blueprints for social reform. The conditions of their emergence raise questions about the specifically political environments in which social cohesion became an exceedingly popular objective. This book examines the formation of cohesion agendas in France, Germany and the United Kingdom and offers a political exploration of shared features and discontinuities in the politics of social cohesion across three countries. It explores the role of socio-political rhetoric and of imaginations of society in policy-making and political debate. It highlights the significance of public anxieties about disintegration and decline as well as the definition of desired social futures. It thus examines how three different concepts of cohesion acquired a sense of plausibility within particular intellectual and political contexts. The book pays particular attention to shared logics of social regulation and governance across politics of cohesion that were differently conceived. It suggests that, across France, Germany and the United Kingdom, different accounts of what constituted the ‘cohesive society’ entailed similar measures for promoting it. Despite their concern to address dissimilar domains of social problems, agendas of community cohesion, Burgergesellschaft and cohesion sociale proposed similarly focused measures of political intervention.

What is important in theorizing tolerance today

if one wants to grasp tolerance politically, that is, as a problem of power and as organizing relations among citizens, subjects, peoples or states, then it must be understood, inter alia, as being enacted through contingent, historically specific discourses - linguistically organized norms operating as common sense. [...]any political discourse of tolerance - from that developed for handling Protestant sectarianism in seventeenth-century England to that used by the G.W. Bush Administration in the aftermath of 9/11 to distinguish the West from the rest, to that used by the Israeli state for describing (only) its policies toward homosexuals - is embedded within other discourses articulating the qualities and meanings of the religious, cultural, social or political order that the discourse of tolerance purports to pacify. [...]tolerance, correctly understood, is a virtue of the public use of reason.

Accepting Multiple Differences: The Challenge of Double Accommodation

In this chapter, we focus on what we take to be the most significant cultural-diversity challenge in Britain today. This is the diversity surrounding the post-immigration settlement of persons, mainly from the British Empire/Commonwealth (who enjoyed free right of entry and residence in Britain until 1962), of people marked by ‘race’ or ‘colour’. Despite this migration taking place primarily during 1950–1970, with significant family reunification going on until about the mid-1980s, these groups and their descendents are not unproblematically welcomed as co-nationals. Their acceptance in British society is still a live socio-political issue.

Misrecognition and Political Agency

It is a common complaint among Muslim civil society organizations and activists that their presence in British politics is misconceived. For example, and notwithstanding a broader commitment to pluralism in British politics, activists who mobilize on the basis of Muslim religious identities often encounter the charge that they foster sectarian divisions. Hence, following his victory in the Bradford West by-election, the salient charge was that George Galloway’s success was the outcome of a homogeneous Muslim voting block.

Making a presence: Images of polity and constituency in British Muslim representative politics

In its current shape, British Muslim politics has been described as following a ‘democratic constellation’. The idea challenges conventional understandings of post-immigrant agency, especially assumptions underpinning political representation. Recent contributions to the study of representation draw attention to assertions of ‘presence’ or highlight ‘acts of representation’. Both of these perspectives struggle to capture the self-conscious calibration of representative claims that is characteristic for Muslim representative politics today. Developing an alternative account of representation, the paper draws attention to the making of images of Muslim constituencies in correspondence with an image of the British polity. It considers evidence from three cases: (i) the mobilization of Muslim constituents by the advocacy group Mend; (ii) Sadiq Khan’s campaign for the London Mayoralty; and (iii) educational guidance issued by the Muslim Council of Britain.

Book Review: Timothy Peace (ed.), Muslims and Political Participation in Britain

party leadership, which occurred at the end of that year. Cameron’s ‘modernising’ agenda is subsequently depicted as the catalyst for determined efforts to revive the Conservative Party’s interest in innovative and ‘progressive’ social and welfare policy-making, without completely abandoning the neo-liberalism of the previous era. The focus on this past decade incorporates periods of opposition, coalition and current single-party rule, providing a concluding contemporary element to the overall structure. Fluently written and with credible arguments embracing historical, political and ideological perspectives, the book is suitable for undergraduate study while also enhancing established academic research within this specific area, featuring up-to date analysis and wide-ranging sources of rigorous quality.

The missing politics of muscular liberalism

ABSTRACT The article examines the idea of muscular liberalism, first invoked by David Cameron as a paradigm of assertive policymaking in opposition to ‘state multiculturalism’. The rhetoric of muscular liberalism is present across western Europe, but its political effects have not been convincingly explored. In scholarship on ethnic minority integration, a ‘stimulus–response model’ credits Muslim intransigence as the trigger for the muscular stance. Other commentators put muscular liberalism into a genealogical perspective but do little to consider the circumstances of its political deployment. Working towards an alternative account, the article examines two instances of muscular liberalism in Britain: the campaign against ‘Sharia Courts’ and the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair. Different from the concern with historical continuity or stable potentials of liberal normativity, it draws attention to political operations and strategic calculations that characterize the deployment of muscular liberalism in British politics.