Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
3 - The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
Summary
As a normatively charged concept, assimilation, in this sense, is opposed not to difference but to segregation, ghettoisation and marginalisation (Brubaker 2001: 543).
It is not ethnic, cultural or religious peculiarity that divides people into ethnic categories. Rather, it is social segregation (prohibition of communality and commerce, ritualisation of intercourse, maintenance of symbolic distinction, refusal of social esteem, etc.) which leads to the self-construction and self-perpetuation of ethnic identities (Bauman 1988: 66).
A sociological debate about assimilation and its normative implications for multiculturalism
This chapter critically discusses two central contributions to the recently-developed position in migration studies, here called a ‘liberal sociology of assimilation’, which tends to be critical of multiculturalism. The first is Joppke and Morawska's (2003) programmatic introduction to Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States. The second is Brubaker's (2001) reconceptualisation of assimilation, on which Joppke and Morawska's reintroduction of the concept is founded. Brubaker's article, entitled ‘The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and Its Sequels in France, Germany and the United States’, summarises a reconceptualisation of assimilation in American sociology without explicitly linking it to a liberal political theory. This reconceptualisation stands at the basis of the more normatively-oriented ‘liberal assimilationism’ outlined by Joppke and Morawska.
The major reason for Brubaker, as well as for Joppke and Morawska, to reintroduce assimilation is their claim that its use as a legitimate sociological and normative concept prevents us from focusing on differences only. It also helps us to avoid theoretically endorsing or masking processes of social exclusion in terms of (desirable) cultural difference. These authors criticise the multiculturalist argument that the cultural diversity produced by migration in liberal societies should lead to the explicit recognition of migrants as distinct ethnic groups or ethnic minorities. In this sense, their view is related to Noiriel’s, who Brubaker (2001) mentions as an important resource. Like Noiriel, Brubaker, Joppke and Morawska argue that assimilation as a concept was rejected for the wrong reasons in the late 20th-century age of postmodernist differentialism. It is necessary, they suggest, to reflect on assimilation's morally legitimate uses. Unlike Noiriel, however, the liberal assimilationists do not consider assimilation as necessarily a violent social process that forces migrants and their children to adapt to the receiving society at multiple levels.
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- Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of MulticulturalismFrench Modernist Legacies, pp. 83 - 116Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013