Immigration Cinema in the New Europe

By Isolina Ballesteros

Immigration Cinema in the New Europe examines a variety of films from the early 1990s that depict and address the lives and identities of both first generation immigrants and children of the diaspora in Europe. Whether they are authored by immigrants themselves or by white Europeans who use the resources and means of production of dominant cinema to politically engage with the immigrants’ predicaments, these films, Isolina Ballesteros shows, are unmappable – a condition resulting from immigration cinema’s re-combination and deliberate blurring of filmic conventions pertaining to two or more genres. In an age of globalization and increased migration, this book theorizes immigration cinema in relation to notions such as gender, hybridity, transculturation, border crossing, transnationalism and translation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Feb 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781783204267

Isolina Ballesteros

Isolina Ballesteros is Associate Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature of Baruch College, CUNY. Her field of specialty is contemporary Spanish cultural studies. She has published extensively about Spanish and Latin American women writers, the image of women in the post-Franco literature, and Spanish and European film. She is the author of two books: Escritura femenina y discurso autobiográfico en la nueva novela española (1994), and Cine (Ins)urgente: textos fílmicos y contextos culturales de la España postfranquista (2001). She is currently working on a book called: 'Undesirable’ Otherness and ‘Immigration Cinema’ in the European Union.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

My interest in the subject of immigration and its cinematic representations grew out of a combination of personal and professional reasons. As a white Hispanic and European living and working in the United States since 1986, I share with the objects of my study the in-betweenness, double consciousness, and perpetual transience that result from belonging to two different cultural spaces and two linguistic codes. Like many of the characters in the films I include in this book, I have a merged border and bicultural identity. Although I assume my identity in all its diversity, on occasions I still see myself as the stranger; I recognize in myself the impossibility of fully assimilating to my adopted culture because of an accented identity that will forever mark me as a foreigner, destined to be an outsider, feeling fully at home in neither the homeland nor the host land.

Empathy and self-reflection were indeed important motivations as I directed my attention to a multiplicity of immigration tales and progressively made them my primary subject of study for over a decade. The seed of this project, which centers on immigration to Europe, can be found in a previous academic book project in which I explored the evolution of socially conscious cinema made in Spain from the end of the dictatorship (1975) to the early 2000s. One of the (ins)urgent topics documented by Spanish filmmakers in the early 1990s, which I addressed in one of that book’s chapters, was the then-still-scarce phenomenon of immigration to Spain. In fact, immigration had become part of the Spanish government’s immigration agenda only in 1985, after the country was admitted to the European Community (EC) and was asked to conform to EC legislation that sought to restrict non-EC citizen immigration. The sharp increase in the number of foreign residents in Spain since the mid-1990s forced subsequent reforms and the regularization processes of the Ley de Extranjería/Law on the Rights and Freedoms of Foreigners in Spain (1985), which took place in 1991, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and made immigration one of the most contested issues in the media and the second most important national issue for Spaniards after terrorism. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Spain, along with other southern European countries, had become a receiving country of immigrants, a gateway and frontline state on Europe’s southernmost border. In the first decade of this century, Spain’s foreign-born population increased from less than 4 percent to almost 14 percent of the total population. The small rafts (pateras) that crossed to the southernmost parts of Spain (Tarifa, Algeciras) from Morocco, filled with immigrants from both North African and sub-Saharan countries, were followed by medium-sized fishing boats (cayucos) arriving from West African countries to the Canary Islands. The patera crisis of the 1990s gave way to the cayuco crisis in the 2000s. This phenomenon was not limited to Spain; soon Italy and Greece experienced it as well, and images of drowned bodies and emaciated immigrants landing on the pristine touristic beaches of southern European coastal towns have become commonplace every summer.

But let me rewind to the point where in the process of tracing Spanish films about immigration to Spain for my previous book I became aware of the rapid increase in films made in Europe in the 1990s and 2000s that depicted the plights and challenges faced by economic immigrants and political refugees in Western European countries. I was exposed to most of these European immigration films, which are typically shown in festival circuits but are rarely released or distributed in the United States, primarily through the Film Society of the Lincoln Center in New York City and its various film series devoted to national cinemas and human rights films. The percentage of films that dealt with the issue of immigration from the global South to the North included in the European film series programmed in the city of New York—one of the major and most sophisticated hubs for the exhibition of international cinema—was large enough to consider it a trend. The coincidences in narrative and formal elements in the large number of films of different national origins that I viewed over the years were clear. An important part of my investigation covered the sociopolitical contexts that generated the need for and interest in these films and the engagement of intellectuals and filmmakers with the condition of immigrants on European soil. The investigation grew into a new book project; I gave the representational trend a title, Immigration Cinema; and my avid search for films about immigration and diasporas in Europe (and other parts of the West) continued until it became an obsession and a task that was almost impossible to complete. Old and new political conflicts and economic scarcity in the developing world, along with widespread globalization and the financial crisis in the developed world that began in 2008, propelled and complicated the human migratory impulse, and with it, the cinematic urge to recreate it. Thus, keeping up with the production of immigration European films proved to be a challenge. The more films I found, the more remained for me to locate and watch even in an era of instant streaming and online availability.

In this book I attempt to put forth a coherent narrative framework through which I can examine a considerable number of immigration films, trace the diversity of filmmakers’ approaches to the subject, and establish a thematic or generic dialogue between them. Some of the questions that this book attempts to answer, among many others that I address in its chapters, are the following: What is immigration cinema? Which films are to be included in this category? Is the immigration tale always one of either alienation or assimilation? Does immigration always have to be filmed through the cinéma vérité lens? Immigration cinema is primarily about the depiction of migratory movements and the particularities relating to the settlement and development of immigrant diasporas and cannot be identified just through the anecdotal or tangential inclusion of immigrant individuals and communities. Immigration cinema is neither homogeneous nor subjected to rigid generic conventions, and, like previous film movements and trends, it reflects dominant feelings about a concrete social issue and cuts across genres. In the 1940s and 1950s, Italian neorealist films were concerned with social content and ideology, with the scars and ruins of the war and the fascist past, the reconstruction of cities and nation, and the plights of lower-class workers and the disaffected. A realist aesthetic suited the daily struggles of the urban subject who would be captured in real locations and through conversational speech, surrounded by real sounds and impersonated by nonprofessional actors. A documentary, rather than a stylized aesthetic, complemented the filmmakers’ ideology and served the purpose of delivering social commentary. In the 1960s and 1970s subsequent European new waves and Third and World cinemas would continue the neorealists’ aesthetic and political projects of addressing issues that affect colonial and postcolonial realities and delivering social commentary with the aim of inspiring change. In immigration cinema—a similar attempt to raise consciousness in audiences about the issues of migration, mobility, and diaspora—the subject matter precedes and shapes the choice of genre and style. The documentary and realistic approach is incorporated one way or another into practically every immigration film. The ethical component inherent in the depiction of a humanitarian concern—a constant preoccupation and an unsolved yet urgent problem in Western governments’ agendas—is inserted through an aesthetic fictionalization that utilizes and combines a variety of genres and visual styles.

Despite this book’s ambitious title, what follows is by no means an exhaustive catalog, and even less an analysis, of every immigration film made in Europe. The selection of films studied or mentioned in the book’s seven chapters reflects my personal preferences concerning the films’ sociocultural accuracy, aesthetic achievement, and commercial availability, and it intends to provide a sample of the trend of representing immigration from a cinematic perspective. Many of the arguments and interpretations I present in this book could be equally suitable to the analysis of many other films, European or not, whose main intent is to give voice to the non-Western immigrants in Western societies, expose their predicaments, and raise Western audiences’ awareness about both the immigrants’ circumstances and the audiences reactions to them.

Following chronological order and going from the academic to the personal, I want to start by thanking Richard Peña, a colleague from my days at Barnard College/Columbia University and program director of the Film Society of the Lincoln Center in New York from 1988 to 2012. Because of the many film series devoted to worldwide national cinemas that he organized, I became aware of the existence of immigration films. I thank him not only for including those urgent films in the film series but, above all, for generously making some of them available to me in VHS and DVD formats.

My affection and appreciation for their academic effort go to my students at Baruch College, mainly first- and second-generation immigrants, who have attended my courses on immigration cinema, which served as the laboratory where many of the ideas of this book came to fruition. My students have recognized themselves and their families in the films and provided intelligent perspectives and real-life angles on the fictional representations. This book has always had students in mind; its purpose is fundamentally pedagogical.

Baruch College and PSC-CUNY (Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York) have provided constant institutional support to this project from its inception: through generous grants, the office of the Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences and the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program have funded my research trips to Europe, my attendance at conferences on immigration, and the teaching load release and sabbatical leave that allowed for the additional time to conduct my research and writing. I give special thanks to Jeffrey Peck, Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, for his support for the book’s publication and for his friendship. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature and the Film Studies Program at Baruch College for our collegial interactions and their interest in my project, especially Elena Martínez, chair of the Department of Modern Languages since my arrival in 2006, for accommodating my course schedule according to my research interests, and Ali Nematollahy and Esther Allen for all the intellectual conversations, dinners, parties, and movies we have shared together, for being friends as well as colleagues.

This book’s diction owes a great deal to Janet Hendrickson for her rigorous and swift editing. I thank Michael Schuessler for reviewing and providing suggestions on the book’s proposal and for being a great friend and travel companion; Roane Carey for his pertinent comments on the Introduction and for bringing joy and happiness to my life; Santiago Fouz Hernández for his excellent comments on chapter 4; Barbara Zecchi for sharing materials relevant to chapter 3; and Josetxo Cerdán for our rich conversations about cinema and his sharing of titles and materials. Pilar Rodríguez’s friendship and camaraderie throughout the years have been absolutely essential to the gestation of this book. With her I have shared numerous materials, ideas, conversations, conferences, and publications on the subject of immigration and exile in Spanish and European cinema; in addition to mutual feedback, we have shared our homes and enjoyed many moments of fun and laughter.

My New York friends have been a source of nurture, companionship, and intellectual and emotional encouragement. I am especially grateful (in strict alphabetical order) to Consuelo Arias, Marco Campello, Gabriel Cwilich, Mare Díaz, Isabel Estrada, Fernando de Giovanni, David Lounsbury, Cecilia Mandrile, Rafael Rosario, Alejandro Varderi, and Eva Woods. My appreciation goes as well to my extended US family of friends, in particular to my Boston sisters Irene Mizrahi and Lola Peláez, with whom I share the beginnings of my own migratory experience, for always being there for me, and to Tatjana Pavlovic, the greatest listener, colleague, hostess, and travel companion.

On the other side of the Atlantic, gracias to my beloved Spanish clan for your love, support, and respect for my career: my mother Isolina Díaz, my brothers Pedro, Rafael, and Ignacio, and my nieces Sofía and Maya, I miss you every day of my life; and gracias to Ana Cris Royo for her continued sisterhood, and to José María Conget, Maribel Cruzado, María Camí-Vela, and Ignacio Prado for your long-distance friendship and our stimulating conversations on cinema.

I would also like to thank the filmmakers and producers who kindly granted me permission to reproduce some of the images included in this book. The List of Illustrations gives proper credit to all of you.

Preliminary versions or parts of some of the chapters saw their life elsewhere. I gratefully acknowledge the following publications in which they appeared: a modified and much shorter version of the Introduction appeared under the title Immigration Cinema in/and the European Union, in Basque/European Perspectives on Cultural and Media Studies, vol. I (ed.), María Pilar Rodríguez, Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press (2009: 189–215). The sections pertaining to the Spanish films in chapter 1 appeared in Foreign and Racial Masculinities in Spanish Immigration Film, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 3 (2006: 169–185). A slightly different and shorter version of chapter 2 appeared under the title Female Transnational Migrations and Diasporas in European ‘Immigration Cinema,’ in Gesa Zinn and Maureen Tobin Stanley (eds.), Exile through a Gendered Lens: Women’s Displacement in Recent European History, Literature and Cinema, pp. 143–168, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Introduction

Contextualizing Immigration Cinema

The immigrant populations of the European Union (EU) have experienced a tenfold increase in recent decades, and with this increase has come a proliferation of immigration films as well as publication of sociological and theoretical studies that document this social reality—and the ramifications of racism and xenophobia—and support the immigrants’ cause. This book aspires to join the ranks of publications devoted to the subject of immigration in and to Europe from the distinct perspective of film. It reflects on recent waves of immigration from the Global South and East to the EU after the Schengen Agreement of 1985, and it excludes internal migration within Europe, namely from Southern to Northern and Central Europe after World War II and throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Due to the proliferation of films on the subject, it would be impossible for me to address, let alone analyze, all of them, not even the ones that are available commercially. This book is not an encyclopedic enumeration of names and titles. Instead, my goal is to provide a conceptual and comparative consideration of the visual and narrative filmic conventions found in immigration films that allow them to be grouped under the label immigration cinema within broader preexisting categories such as social cinema, world cinema, and third cinema and in relation to notions such as gender, hybridity, transculturation, border crossing, transnationalism, and translation. I provide close textual analysis of a wide selection of films, and I study common patterns of representation in a variety of cinematographic formats and genres, examining the use of documentary techniques as well as of more experimental or commercial formats and classic fictional genres (comedy, melodrama, film noir, the road movie, etc.). I propose that the unmappable and hybrid condition of immigration cinema results from its free combination and deliberate blurring of filmic conventions pertaining to two or more genres, which makes it thus resist categorization in authorial or national terms as well as in film studies’ established and canonical categories of production and reception. In addition, I argue that immigration cinema benefits from the rise of new technologies of production, distribution, and international coproduction and thus provides a territory for political resistance without renouncing the medium’s commercial potential. Today’s transnational means of production and the existence of multicultural authors and audiences facilitate the dismantling of stable filmic categories. Immigration films’ approaches and methods emerge from the filmmakers’ understanding of cinema as a cultural, ideological, and ethical apparatus that represents the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Before I situate my work within the corpus of recent publications on the subject of European immigration cinema and outline the book’s structure and contents, I want to provide a brief sociopolitical and theoretical context for the reconfiguration of Europe’s racial and ethnic identity and consider the populist anti-immigration and xenophobic discourses provoked by immigration and the creation of diasporas in the EU. It is important to consider Europe both as a family of nations and as a Fortress that defends its borders from migratory invasions, an entity whose members are affected by the tensions provoked by their double belonging (double appartenance) to both their native sovereign states that still function at the local level and a constructed continental ensemble (the EU) in an increasingly globalized world (Maalouf 1998: 10). In this seemingly contradictory state of affairs, immigration provides a post-postmodern and postcolonial substitution for the concept of race. As the illusion of racial and ethnic purity progressively dismantles, hybridity is becoming the defining characteristic of Europe’s new identity.

Purity and Hybridity: Europe’s Changing Identity

A depiction of the EU as a family of nations repeats on a larger scale nationalist narratives that, since the nineteenth century, have symbolically configured the nation in terms of familiar domestic spaces and genealogies (McClintock 1995: 357). As Anne McClintock points out, the family trope permeates most national narratives and is understood as the "natural figure for sanctioning national hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests (1995: 357, original emphasis). That hierarchy requires the ethnic and religious assimilation of aliens into the social and political structure of the nation as well as the progressive annihilation of their native customs and practices. While sociopolitical assimilation may be possible, racial blending remains problematic, since it carries with it the literal and symbolic darkening of the European constitutive racial identity. The constant flow of migratory movements from Southern and Eastern populations undermines the European effort to maintain racial purity. Racialized Others are perceived to be a danger to a constructed purity in a paradigm that opposes ethnic unity with foreignness" (El-Tayeb 2001: 72–73).

Decades ago, Frantz Fanon alleged that colonial space was divided into two camps: the white and the black (Fanon 1967: 10) and split by a pathological geography of power, separating the bright, well-fed settler’s town from the hungry, crouching casbah (Fanon 1967: 30). The current geographical organization of postcolonial European urban space still reproduces the colonial division Fanon observed. Foreigners are still deemed to personify the strange, the uncanny, the impenetrable of certain customs, the vagueness of certain dangers and threats (Bauman 2006: 27). As Smaïn Laacher also writes, [Foreigners] are generally perceived as a kind of floating population who are, by definition, unable to settle. Their identities are fluid, their intentions unclear. From the point of view of the state and society they have no fixed identity and no real home (2007: 18–19). They are relegated to ghettos as a consequence of a social mixophobia that prompts locals to protect themselves from a multiform and multilingual world in small fortresses of sameness and interdictory spaces (Flusty 1997). As Zygmunt Bauman writes, using Flusty’s architectural term, interdictory spaces are the voluntary ghettos of the high and mighty whose purpose is to divide, segregate and exclude—not to build bridges, easy passages and meeting places, facilitate communications and otherwise bring the residents together (Bauman 2007: 77–78). Bauman interprets that Flusty’s interdictory spaces are the updated equivalents of the premodern [and colonial] moats, turrets and embrasures of the city walls; but rather than defending the city and all its dwellers against the enemy outside, they are erected to set and keep the various kinds of city residents apart from each other (and away from mischief)—and to defend some of them against the others, once they have been cast in the status of adversaries by the very act of spatial isolation (Bauman 2007: 78). Interdictory spaces’ purpose is to erect compact little fortresses inside which the members of the supraterritorial global elite can groom, cultivate and relish their bodily, in addition to spiritual, independence and isolation from the locality. In the landscape of the city, ‘interdictory spaces’ have become landmarks of the disintegration of locally grounded, shared communal living (Bauman 2007: 78).

However, as Bauman and other cultural critics also remind us, in these urban spaces, mixophilia coexists with mixophobia, since both impulses live inside of every citizen inhabiting such spaces (Bauman 2006: 36). In two earlier essays, Bauman delved into this ambiguity toward the figure of the stranger in the postmodern city. According to him, the stranger has two faces: one is mysterious, inviting, promising pleasure and joy, adventure, and opportunity; the other is also mysterious but sinister, menacing, intimidating (Bauman 1995: 137). For the native inhabitants of residential areas of urban centers, the foreigner is, above all, a service or source of aesthetic pleasure (for example, inexpensive domestic service, exotic food and customs) that does not compromise their freedom. As consumers, clients, and patrons, they are always in charge (Bauman 1996: 71). A decade later, Paul Gilroy writes along the same lines: Exciting, unfamiliar cultures can be consumed in the absence of any face-to-face recognition or real time negotiation with their actual creators (Gilroy 2005: 125). In this era of global capitalism, European major cities are cosmopolitan and multicultural centers thanks to the proliferation of ethnic neighborhoods that are indispensable urban fixtures where ethnic products are becoming consumably chic (Mandel 2008: 95). However, multiculturalism and ethnicity are not unequivocally positive terms as cultural critics have critiqued them for being euphemistic for colonialist and racialist categories. According to Slavoj Zizek’s negative perception of multiculturalism, the multiculturalist’s respect for the Other’s identity and specificity is nothing else but a patronizing form of maintaining his Eurocentric privileged universal position and asserting his own superiority (Zizek 1997: 44). In a more nuanced critique of multiculturalism and the current refashioning of ethnicity, Polona Petek and Ruth Mandel, referring to the specific case of Germany, remind us that Europeans’ (and more broadly, Westerners’) attraction to and respect for their ethnic Others are contingent on the commodification and assimilation of those Others to the nation state. Multiculturalism, Petek says, only comes about once the non-Western Other’s radical alterity has been trimmed and transformed into something to be consumed (2007: 179); and ethnic is in, Mandel argues, when it does not extend beyond the friendly staff of the quaint and colorful ethnic restaurant, when it remains tourist-friendly in a native village, when it stays in its safe, commodified place (2008: 96).

Even when acknowledging the aforementioned critiques of Europe’s attempts at multiculturalism, the coexistence of mixophilic and mixophobic impulses complicate the construction of a single narrative of the European family. Most importantly, the simple division into black and white, native and foreigner camps should prove even more elusive once the European citizen is presented with the heterogeneity of diasporas and the unstoppable destiny of Europe as a multiethnic and multiracial family. Multiracialism should be understood as the European future, especially when one acknowledges that heterogeneity, cross-cultural influences and hybridity have long been the living norms in the European past (Tawadros 2001: 11). Since colonial times, Europe has been defined by its others (Jameson 2001: 297), constructed through the simultaneous regurgitation and erasure of the reality of those Others and the perpetuation of a deep denial about the global dimensions of its imperial history and the compromised morality of its colonial historicity (Gilroy, 2005: 143). As Gilroy suggests, a critical work about the condition and future of European identity must be ready to confront imperial denial and the flourishing revisionist scholarship that supports it and be willing to demonstrate how the presence of strangers, aliens and blacks, and the distinctive dynamics of Europe’s imperial history have combined to shape its cultural and political habits and institutions (Gilroy 2005: 142–143). Gilroy is right to insist that

knowledge of Europe’s colonial past must be employed to challenge fantasies of the newly embattled European region as a culturally bleached or politically fortified space, closed off to further immigration, barred to asylum seeking and willfully deaf to any demand for hospitality made by refugees and other displaced people.

(2005: 141)

We can only celebrate Gilroy’s commitment when he insists on the need to conjure up a future in which black and brown Europeans stop being seen as migrants (2005: 149) and as permanently stuck in the present, devoid of historicity to the point that succeeding generations of their locally born descendants […] get trapped in the vulnerable role of perpetual outsider (Gilroy 2005: 123).

Thomas Elsaesser has used the term double occupancy to refer to European identity and as a counter-metaphor to Fortress Europe, a term often applied to the EU’s immigration policies (Elsaesser 2005: 108). As he rightly observes, [T]here is no European […] who is not already diasporic in relation to some marker of difference—be it ethnic, regional, religious or linguistic—and whose identity is not always already hyphenated or doubly occupied (Elsaesser 2005: 108). He anticipates the irrelevance of the notion of national identity and wishes it to be replaced by other narratives that would describe more accurately an increasingly impure and hyphenated world:

[O]ur identities are multiply defined, multiply experienced, and can be multiply assigned to us, at every point in our lives, and this increasingly so—hopefully to the point where the very notion of national identity will fade from our vocabulary, and be replaced by other kinds of belonging, relating and being. Blood and soil, land and possession, occupation and liberation have to give way to a more symbolic or narrative way of negotiating contested ownership of both place and time, i.e., history and memory, for instance, inventing and maintaining spaces of discourse, as in […] the increasing prominence achieved by hyphenated European nationals (German-Turkish, Dutch-Moroccan, French-Maghreb, British-Asian) in the spheres of literature, filmmaking, music and popular television shows.

(Elsaesser 2005: 109–110)

Similarly, the Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf calls on immigrants to fully assume their own diversity, their double belonging (double appartenance), and their hyphenated identity (identité composée), and he calls on European societies to embrace the multiple belongings that have forged their identities throughout history. He argues that if we are willing to accept our hyphenated identity, we will never become fanatics, assassins of the identity of Others. We do not have to choose between negation of ourselves and the negation of others, between essentialism (integrisme) and disintegration (Maalouf 1998: 45).

Andreas Huyssen proposes that one possible way to undermine the dichotomy of diaspora and nation may come from acknowledging that in terms of their memory formation, diaspora and nation, rather than being in opposition to each other, may have more troubling affinities than are visible at first sight (Huyssen 2003: 150) These affinities remain seriously understudied, above all, because the millions of migrants who now live in dozens of diasporas within European nation states remain structurally excluded from such national historiography of memory (Huyssen 2003: 152). As Huyssen points out in regard to the specific context of Germany and its Turkish diaspora, both diasporic memory and the traditional memorial culture of the host nation focus on the notion of loss. The host nation mourns the loss of a homogeneous culture, and the diasporic community is by definition tied to that which has been lost rather than to its negotiation with the majority culture within which it operates (Huyssen 2003: 153–54). However, Huyssen argues, insisting on a perception of loss does not necessarily promote a better understanding of the Other. The fundamental questions, according to Huyssen, should be how the diasporic immigrant can relate to the memory of the host nation and how can diasporic memory have an impact on the national memory into which it migrates (2003: 154). Huyssen proposes that a starting point toward a negotiation between host countries and diasporas could be an acknowledgment of the memory of a common colonial past, in the case of colonial empires such as France and Great Britain and their colonial ex-subjects, or of a common experience of victimization and genocidal perpetration, in the cases of Germany (with the Nazi genocide of the Jews) and Turkey (with the Armenian genocide). However, Huyssen’s point is that Germany, as well as other European host countries, need to go beyond recognizing their traumatic past to find in it lessons for a better understanding of diasporic culture in the future and a redefinition of nationhood (Huyssen 2003: 164).

It is not a surprise that the liberal intellectual articulation of this hybrid and multiracial reality, along with the popular consumption and assimilation of exotic, ethnic Otherness, coexist with the still prevalent, official synonymy of the terms European and white and the fallacy of national purity, both of which contribute to the radicalization of official xenophobic discourses. What prevails in this worldview is a fundamental contradiction between Europe’s distinctive diversity and identity, which consists of multiple belongings, and the homogenizing official narratives that insist upon denying the reality of an inherently mixed system. In spite of the well-known fact that the EU’s economies still depend on immigrants’ cheap labor and their contributions to the welfare state, right-wing political parties survive to a great extent on populist anti-immigration and xenophobic narratives. In September 2007 the European Parliament called for more legal immigration into the EU, citing an aging population and low levels of skilled labor as justifications; meanwhile, the European justice chief told the EU that it had to relax its immigration controls and open the door to twenty million workers over the next decade, citing the need for more skilled labor from overseas. In opposition to German conservatives’ efforts to create measures to keep undesired foreigners out of the country, in January 2014 the European Commission sent a proposal to the European Court of Justice asking that Germany open its doors to more immigrants from poor EU member countries (namely, Romania and Bulgaria) and extend social benefits to all them, even if they have never worked in Germany.¹ Nonetheless, People’s Parties, as they are called in many Western European countries (Switzerland, Denmark, and Holland, among others), grow in numbers every year while they propose the creation of laws both to reduce the number of new immigrants and expel the ones already in the state, and amendments to constitutions to regulate who belongs to the national family. France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, and most recently Greece and Norway have all witnessed the rise of a conservative discourse that has shifted the gravitational center of immigration politics toward the right.

The radicalization of these discourses and the xenophobia against Muslim populations all over Europe increased exponentially after terrorist bombings took place in Europe (in Spain on March 11, 2004 and in London on July 7, 2007) following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. In 2004, after filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was assassinated by a radical Dutch-born Muslim of Moroccan origin, a heated debate about the increasing Muslim population and the right to free expression took place in the Netherlands. The tragedy compromised Holland’s tolerant approach to immigration but also highlighted the broader dilemma of how to handle the tension between freedom of speech and the global impact of publicly offending the religious beliefs of others. A xenophobic campaign and violent right-wing extremist acts followed, encouraged by the media and the coalition government of the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) and the right-wing People’s Party for Liberty and Democracy (VVD). A similar controversy sprung up a year later in Denmark after violent reactions took place in the Muslim world following the publication of cartoons caricaturing and linking the Prophet Muhammad to terrorism in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Meanwhile, throughout Europe, repressive legislation has been passed in recent years targeting immigrants. While Nicolas Sarkozy held the French presidency between 2007 and 2012, his race politics included the creation of a new Ministry of Immigration and National Identity which pushed for a Europe-wide pact to keep immigrants from entering Europe illegally through tighter border controls, unified asylum policies, and fewer amnesties granted to the undocumented already in Europe. Sarkozy also proposed new legislation—approved by France’s National Assembly—requiring that immigrants who wish to bring relatives into their host country use DNA testing to prove bloodlines. Meanwhile, in 2008, under Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing administration, the Italian Senate passed a law requiring, among other things, that illegal immigrants convicted of crimes face jail sentences a third longer than those given to Italians. Under the same law, courts can jail illegal immigrants for up to four years instead of simply deporting them; property rented to illegal immigrants can also be confiscated; and the period of detention for illegal immigrants waiting to be deported was increased from 60 days to eighteen months, in line with EU anti-immigration guidelines introduced around the same time.² In Switzerland, before the country’s national elections in October 2007, the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (the most powerful party in the federal parliament) courted Swiss voters with an image of three white sheep kicking out a black sheep. On June 1, 2008, the same People’s Party introduced a referendum that would have given municipalities the final say in granting citizenship and would have allowed townspeople to vote in secret as to whether foreign members of their communities could receive Swiss passports. Even though almost 22 percent of Swiss residents are foreigners, the People’s Party insisted that they had the power to reject immigrants or deny them citizenship on the grounds of insufficient integration (Harnischfeger 2008). The measure was ultimately defeated by public referendum on June 8, 2008.

Since 2008, southern European countries such as Spain, Italy, and Greece have been suffering the severe effects of the global recession, and their citizens have been struggling to survive a stagnant economy, record rates of unemployment, and austerity measures imposed by the European Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Against this backdrop, once nonexistent- or insignificant-ultranationalist, right-wing parties that espouse virulent anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric have gained popularity. One example is Greece’s Golden Dawn Party, which defines itself as a nationalist party that identifies with common Greeks and wants to get rid of political corruption and illegal immigrants so that the country can recover from the economic crisis. This party taps into anti-immigrant resentment, fomenting the idea that undocumented immigrants are a threat to Greek identity. The Golden Dawn platform resonates among a growing number of Greeks who feel dismayed with the economic and political direction of their country. The conception of immigrants as a threat is not held exclusively by this ultranationalist neo-Nazi party but has also been expressed by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, who leads the conservative New Democracy Party, the main member of a three-party coalition government that has governed Greece since June 2012. Samaras and other politicians have accused immigrants of spreading infectious diseases, crowding day-care centers, and contributing to the sharp increase in crime in Athens, where most of the country’s undocumented immigrants live. As a result, Greece is becoming a hostile place for immigrants, and many have suffered xenophobic attacks by gangs of vigilantes, many sporting Golden Dawn t-shirts (Kakissis 2012).

More broadly, the rise of Golden Dawn reflects the move of the Far Right into mainstream European politics over the past decade. For example, the success of France’s right-wing National Front (FN) led by Marine Le Pen in the 2012 general election (winning 18 percent of the vote) reflects a change in voters’ geography, age, and gender. The FN, whose message has always been popular among people living in poverty, now gets support from unemployed young people, who see little hope in mainstream politics and from women who identify with Marine Le Pen. In addition, the party has found increasing support not only in the urban centers that receive high levels of immigration but also in rural areas, small provincial towns, and above all, the banlieues. As Hugh Schofield observes in an article covering the election for the BBC, For these people an FN vote offers both a protest (against the wealthy, against the EU, against the establishment), but also a claim: for an identity and the right to a traditional ‘French’ way of life (2012). A similar situation has developed in Norway where the Progress Party, another populist anti-immigration party, won 16.3 percent of the vote in the September 2013’s general elections, enough to form a coalition with the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Erna Solberg, and despite the fact that a former party member, a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik, bombed government buildings in Olso, killing eight people and then 69 more people, mostly teenagers, in a mass shooting at a Labor Party summer camp on the island of Utøya in 2011 (Erlanger 2014).

This populist, xenophobic, anti-immigration and often openly racist trend had its painful confirmation in the recent elections to the European Parliament that took place on May 25, 2014. Although centrist parties retained control of the parliament, Far-Right (and some Left) fringe political groups from countries such as France, Denmark, Britain, Austria and the Netherlands scored dramatic gains in the election. France’s National Front won 26 percent of the vote, more than any other party, defeating the governing Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement, a center-right party. The significance of the parliamentary elections is limited, because politics in Europe remains highly local and turnout was only 43.1 percent. But these forces now have a larger platform to promote