Who Belongs?: How Ideas about Inclusion and Exclusion Are Shaping Our World, for Better and for Worse

By Nils Junge

Why do some people belong and others do not? What does it take to be accepted? Who decides? Based on what justification?

Who Belongs? takes a bracing look at a frequently debated question, as personal as it is political.

Rising migration flows, escalating global conflicts, faltering democracies, and pola

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Aug 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889267225

Book preview

Introduction

A Few Universal Questions

Why do some people belong and others do not? What does it take to be accepted? Who decides? Based on what justification?

If you follow the news, I can almost guarantee that within the next twenty-four hours you will come across a story tied to one of these questions. It will center on a dispute over whether someone was included or excluded and whether it was legitimate. Maybe they crossed a boundary others felt they absolutely had no right to cross. Maybe they were unable to cross a boundary others adamantly believed they should be able to cross.

A few years ago, when I started to explore the ideas that would lead to writing this book, domestic politics and the international order were already being wracked by tensions between those favoring more open and accepting societies and those favoring the opposite.

In the US, politicians were whipping up excitement over walls to keep out migrants while, across the Atlantic, British politicians were scaring voters in the run-up to the Brexit vote with visions of an immigrant invasion. Under President Trump, the US would build a few more miles of wall with Mexico where none had been before. The UK would churn through five prime ministers as it left the EU. Migrants, legal and illegal, kept coming, and their numbers grew.

Germany, on the other hand, under Chancellor Angela Merkel, actively welcomed over a million, mostly Middle Eastern, migrants and refugees, and in return saw its first far-right party since the Nazis, Alternative for Germany (AfD), jump in popularity.

International borders are just one divider between who’s in and who’s out. Inside a country, myriad dividers exist too. In the US, many companies and organizations, especially universities, have scaled up efforts to become more inclusive and diverse. They hired more administrative staff and trained their employees in being inclusive and aware.

In the meantime, one event after the other put us on notice; who belongs and who doesn’t is a matter of life and death. George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis in May 2020, leading to a reckoning with racial injustice on a global scale. President Trump’s resentment over his election loss fueled the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. The US suddenly exited Afghanistan in August 2021, abandoning the country to the Taliban, and its women to their fate, which turned out to be banishment from public life. In February 2022, Russia invaded its neighbor, Ukraine, in a blatant and violent attempt to destroy its culture and identity.

The issue of belonging is more pressing for some than for others: Ukrainians, Palestinians, the Rohingya, Uyghurs, and Kurds are just several peoples who have struggled for years to assert or defend their autonomy and identity. These groups often have a precarious hold on their territory. In the US, African Americans and American Indians,[1] excluded from full participation in society for centuries, have borne the brunt of exclusionary domestic policies. Refugees and undocumented migrants, ethnic and religious minorities, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, and women, among many other groups, all face risks when it comes to their safety within the larger group.

We can also frame the issue of belonging in terms of fate and autonomy. Consider the fact that we have no control over the circumstances of our birth. Our parents, gender, personality, ethnicity, and nationality are chosen for us. To put it bluntly, we enter the world weak and dependent, at the mercy of fate. As we mature, we develop autonomy and capacity. We no longer need to blindly accept our circumstances. With help from others, if we’re lucky, we can start to pursue our life goals.

Some Border Issues

Although I have called Washington, DC, my home for over two decades, I spent most of my life living, traveling, and working in many different countries. And at some point, many years ago, I realized something odd. For genetically inexplicable reasons, my appearance more closely resembled peoples living in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean than that of my Northern European ancestors. My American mother is of mostly Scottish, Dutch, and Norwegian background; my father is German. Frequently, people from these more southern and eastern countries take me for one of them. They would address me in their own tongue. They tell me I look like I came from their part of the world.

Perhaps out of a desire not to disappoint, I have spent years dutifully attempting to master as many languages as I could from countries in those regions—Russian, Italian, French, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian, and Albanian. I dabbled in Armenian and Arabic. Growing up between Germany, Canada, and the US, I absorbed the lesson that you adapt to your environment, which meant speaking the local language. In Germany, we spoke German at home; in the US and Canada, we spoke English.

My aversion to arbitrary divisions goes back to childhood. I find international and linguistic borders annoying. I recognize their necessity and the protection they provide. I understand the concept of sovereignty. But aren’t borders there to be overcome, like running the hurdles in track and field?

I derive a certain amount of satisfaction from participating in different subcultures, too, which is also a kind of border crossing. I’ve lived as a homeless person on the streets of Toronto to get a sense of the other side—part of an informal high school sociology experiment. After college, I moved to New York City and worked as a record store clerk, as an actor, and on Wall Street. I’ve worked at a Russian orphanage, as a house painter, and as a community development organizer in a migrant camp in Albania.

Like many people, I grew up between two cultures. Wherever we lived—Germany, the US, Canada—one of my parents was a foreigner. I always had one foot in the local culture and one somewhere else. I cannot say I ever experienced this not-quite-here-or-thereness as a problem, though. German-American relations had healed a generation before my birth. Still, memories of World War II were fresh enough in the late 1960s that, when my father told his mother he had proposed to an American woman, she shrieked, dropping the hot casserole dish she was holding to the floor.

My father’s studies and early career as a pastor meant that, before I turned six, I had already crossed the Atlantic four times, living in various cities in Germany and the US, before finally immigrating to Toronto, Canada, in 1975. My family was, incidentally, among the last to emigrate to the New World by boat. We sailed on a Polish ocean liner from Hamburg to Montreal, our belongings packed into wooden crates in the hold.

My paternal grandfather fought for the German Wehrmacht during World War II. On my mother’s side, we have a family tree going back to the seventeenth century. One of my forebearers, Scottish Huguenot Francis Buckalew, was born in France in 1640 and sailed to America in 1663. His great-great-great-grandson, who was my great-great-grandfather, William Buckalew, fought for the Union in the American Civil War. I have the diary he kept, with his terse descriptions of the Wilderness and Appomattox campaigns. My identity is thus deeply rooted in America, and at the same time completely foreign.

* * *

To lay my cards on the table, I consider myself a left-of-center moderate. That is where I belong, if you will. We moderates represent a significant chunk of most societies. In the US, moderates form about one-third of the population (Gallup 2021). However, by virtue of being moderate, our voices tend to get drowned out by the right and the left wings of the political spectrum. Moderate viewpoints are not widely reflected in the media. Both left and right have adopted an if-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us attitude.

I recognize the many benefits that inclusion and diversity bring. James Surowiecki, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, sums it up nicely: Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. But I also have to accept that exclusion and homogeneity have benefits—as, implicitly, do many on the left, their rhetoric notwithstanding.

I also suspect our ideological biases, and tribal instincts, may have scrambled some of our ideas around belonging, identity, inclusion, diversity, and autonomy in the current, hypervigilant climate, in which freedom of speech is under threat.

Humans have a deep-seated desire to belong. We also have a natural tendency to use our identities to categorize, sort, and divide ourselves, not to mention let others know where they belong. Our multiple identities, some of which we share and some of which we don’t, enable us to choose whether we want to connect. The need to belong is mirrored by a desire to exclude. That desire is not always a bad one. In fact, exclusion is a broadly accepted strategy for protection used by many groups.

* * *

Along the way, we will explore a number of ideas. For example, diversity is not an unconditionally good thing. Like everything else, it has pros and cons. Many groups are intentionally homogeneous. Relatedly, excluding others can be a valid principle. Some, like the Sentinelese tribe, take this to an extreme, apt to shoot and kill anyone who dares to make contact. Their attitude and actions are met with general approval, and this has enabled them to survive for perhaps sixty thousand years.

This is not a treatise on the benefits of belonging.

First, I doubt anyone needs to be convinced of this. Making a case for why belonging is desirable would be like making a case for why eating is good. Yes, everyone needs to eat, but not everyone can. And some foods are healthier than others. Second, even if I attempted to fill a book with arguments for belonging, skeptics would rightfully point out many groups would not voluntarily be joined by the average person—the destitute, the homeless, or any group being persecuted, to name a few. As these examples show, I am not limiting the concept of belonging to desirable groups only.

Skeptics might further point out that belonging for the sake of belonging is hardly something to encourage if it means joining, say, the neo-fascist Proud Boys or the violent Latino street gang MS-13. More than a few young men, and some women, have met a need to belong through membership in groups such as these. In other words, you can belong to a club that is bad for you—and for society—just as you can follow an unhealthy diet. Food high in sugar and fats may be tasty, but it will put you at risk of diabetes and many other illnesses.

Along with Karl Marx, we can look at the world and explain conflict through the lens of class struggle. Or we can look at the world through the lens of supply and demand, as an economist might. We can look through the lens of power, as a political scientist might; a race lens, as a social justice advocate might; or a gender lens, as a feminist might. These are all valid organizing principles that generate important insights. These perspectives also require putting on blinders, or at least downplaying other social dynamics. The lens I use in this book is inclusion/exclusion. Like other lenses, it too has limits. I don’t claim it is a better lens, nor is it the lens I normally wear. But I do think looking at what is happening from this perspective is extremely useful, precisely because it goes beyond race, gender, money, and power without, however, denying their importance.

In This Together

In over two decades as an international development practitioner, I have been involved in designing, implementing, and evaluating programs. These programs improve access to things like water, electricity, roads, health care, and education. One of the top questions is always whether the program in question promotes social inclusion and access to public goods by the poor.

Some years ago, I was evaluating a United Nations project in Morocco. I was advising a team assessing the impacts of the government’s expansion of access to the water network in peri-urban areas. I was struck by what one middle-aged woman who lived in a poor outlying neighborhood of Rabat told us. We had asked her to explain what finally having running water inside her home meant to her. My new connection has made me very happy! Not just because having water indoors is so convenient, but because now I feel like I am part of civilization! Indoor plumbing—essentially water and drainage on demand—had changed her sense of belonging and of who she was.

Clearly, creating a sense of belonging can involve practical and technical steps that have nothing to do with ideology. Yet who belongs, and why, is one of the most contentious issues of our time. I expect it to remain so for the rest of the century. For good reason, it lies at the core of debates about migration. At the global level, conflict, persecution, rising hate crimes, and climate change are pushing millions of people to migrate to find a better life, or just to survive.

One way of characterizing modernity is as a story of inclusion, of more and more members of society participating in and gaining access to amenities, such as running water and health care, that were once limited to the nobility, the wealthy, and the religious elites.

The theme of the past few decades, indeed of the past several centuries, has been a seemingly relentless expansion of yes, you can with respect to material and civic opportunities. A generation ago, few people had access to the internet. Two generations ago, almost no one owned a computer. Three generations ago, few had a television. Until the 1960s, Blacks in the US were unable to participate in society. Before the spread of the welfare state in the early twentieth century, old age and unemployment meant penury for most people. A century ago, women did not have the right to vote.

Through the end of the nineteenth century, running water, indoor plumbing, vehicle ownership, and many other aspects of modern life we take for granted were enjoyed by a tiny share of the population in the West. The ability to participate in public discourse without being punished for it and to hold government officials accountable was rare. For the citizens of many countries of the world today, these things are still out of reach. It is also clear many countries are highly inequitable, as economic gains go to those least in need.

Inclusive policies expand access for individuals and groups. Inclusiveness is about people gaining opportunities, government services, political and economic rights. The ultimate goal of such policies is to improve the economic and social well-being of those on the bottom rung of the ladder. Inclusiveness suffuses the rhetoric of the progressive agenda—access to health care, access to affordable childcare, rights for LGBTQ community, justice for ethnic minorities and especially African Americans, equal pay for women. All of these things are about bringing more people in from the cold so they can enjoy what those inside already do. Better access means being able to cross the barrier that has kept you away from what you want.

Increasing access to public goods—clean water, plumbing, education, and so on, which many in the rich world take for granted—is generally seen as the key to lifting people out of poverty and creating opportunities for them they would not otherwise have. The path to prosperity is built on basic access to reliable electricity and water supplies, good roads, a social safety net, health care, education and, increasingly, digital technologies and platforms. Often, however, a person’s minority or outsider identity—for example related to their ethnicity, social status, gender, sexual orientation, or age—prevents them from gaining access.

If promoting inclusion underpins a large part of the progressive platform in the West, it also informs the goals of development agencies such as the World Bank and the United Nations. Most international development projects aim to increase inclusion in one way or another. Development assistance is not just about modernization and economic growth, but about expanding membership of the middle class.

Reflecting on the fixation on ever-rising GDP, some economists have argued that growth is not sufficient if the gains are not broadly shared and that distribution of the gains within the population is at least as important. Inclusive growth is now a widely used term, and the World Bank’s mission of shared prosperity is focused on expanding development benefits to the bottom 40 percent on the income ladder. Of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals agreed to in 2016, six refer explicitly to inclusiveness. Inclusion, if understood as bringing more people into the social and economic systems and structures of modern society, is part of the underlying rationale of many donor investment projects.

A Question That Won’t Go Away

In 2021, Freedom House reported the fifteenth consecutive year of decline in global freedom (Repucci 2022). Dwindling participation in democratic processes across the globe means fewer people participating politically. On the climate front, the devastations wrought by extreme weather events are pushing people to move and may foreshadow massive migrations to come. In 2020, the New York Times declared the great climate migration had begun. As they flee the effects of climate change, the pressure on countries in more moderate climates will increase. Over one billion people could be displaced by 2050 as a result of environmental change, conflict, and civil unrest. That would be about one out of every seven people on the planet (Institute for Economics and Peace 2020).

If this sounds like the world is facing a problem of overcrowding, many places are facing the opposite challenge of not enough people. In January 2023, the Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, said his country was on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions as its birth rate dipped to 1.34 children per woman in 2020, well below the 2.1 children needed for replacement