Games without
frontiers?
Questioning the transnational social power
of migrants in
Adrian
Favell
Associate
Professor of Sociology
email:
afavell@soc.ucla.edu
To
be published in
Archives Européennes de Sociologie
Winter
2003, XLIV, 3: 106-136
FINAL VERSION
Games without
frontiers?
Questioning the transnational social power
of migrants in
Abstract
A
sceptical, empirical review of the theoretical claims associated with the
transnational and global character of contemporary migration, as said to be
embodied by both non-western labour migrants and free moving global elites. The
paper seeks to question how successfully such groups are able to build forms of
transnational social power that might challenge the dominant nation-state
organised forms of society in the modern world. Building on debates about
immigrant social capital and social mobility, it first offers a review of the
growing literature on ‘ethnic’ immigrant integration and assimilation in
Keywords:
social power, social
capital, migration, mobility, transnational, elites, middle classes,
“The nation state is so 20th century. A rising regionalism around the world
is dissolving old national borders. The global city-region, cross-border
region, and super-region is the new parlance of a
borderless world of swashbuckling businessmen, high-speed commuters and
jetsetting teenagers... If a borderless world is truly in the making, then the
tool of choice for the 21st century cartographer won’t be the pencil
but the eraser. Wallpaper* patiently
awaits the new World Atlas sans
frontières.”
‘The new
world order’, Wallpaper magazine,
April 2000, pp.59-64.
“What the world ranging
activities of these major actors (large banks and corporations) do is to
provide examples, incentives and technical means for common people to attempt a
novel and previously unimagined alternative. By combining their new technological
prowess with mobilization of their social capital, former immigrant workers are
thus able to imitate the majors in taking advantage of economic opportunities
distributed unequally in space... The long-term potential of the transnationalization
of labor runs against growing international inequalities of wealth and power as
well as intra-national ones in the countries of out-migration. What the process
does above all is to weaken a fundamental premise of the hegemony of corporate
economic elites and domestic ruling classes... that labor and subordinate
classes remain ‘local’, while dominant elites are able to range ‘global’”
‘Globalization from
below: the rise of transnational communities’, Alejandro Portes (1997), p.18.
Introduction
Scholars
of the modern world state system have always emphasised how nation states
emerged hand in hand with forms of social power that solidified in specifically
nationalised forms (most notably Mann 1993). The social trajectories of
workers, middle classes and elites alike have thus, in the modern world,
typically played out within bounded, national templates of social mobility,
that have defined social hierarchy and order, as well as the limits of social
change. These borders also defined the limits of social research. Scholars of
social mobility and stratification, for example, have always focused on
variation across these different national spheres, using data sets derived from
exclusively national statistical sources (Breen and Rottman 1998). Given these
lines, it is no surprise that international migrants – the small minority of
unfixed populations moving across the
borders of the nation state system – have so often been the object of intense
political effort to definitively include or exclude them from these
container-like citizenries (Joppke 1998). Although always a challenge, there is
little doubt that historically nation states have mostly been able to achieve
their goal of integration or exclusion (or, alternatively, assimilation and
ethnic cleansing), and that this represented a further triumph of the national
in defining the bounds of what is socially possible.
This
classic account, of course, flies in the face of many of the claims associated
with migrants and migration under contemporary conditions of globalisation. The
lives, experiences and social patterns of international migrants, it is
suggested, best embody the potential of the transnational
in challenging the social systems of modern nation states: both from above, here seen in the free moving
elite lifestyles lovingly portrayed by the global yuppie magazine, Wallpaper; and from below, in the heroic social networks and transactions here charted
by (arguably) the most well known sociologist of immigration in the US,
Alejandro Portes. Contained within the idea of the transnational has invariably
been some notion that contemporary forms of international migration are leading
to social patterns of behaviour that disrupt, transcend, or even pave an
alternative to the national organisation of society, hitherto taken as a fixed
reference point for the sociology of modern societies. In this new world, the
spatially mobile are now playing games without frontiers, leading presumably to
social mobility unbounded by the old constraints of the national, as well as a
new sociology capable of studying such phenomena (Urry 2000; Cohen and Kennedy
2000). New forms of social power, social capital or social spaces are emerging
to enable and empower these moves (Basch et al 1994; Smith 2001; Faist, 1998,
2000).
My
goal here is to discuss possible ways of testing out these claims. To date, the
balance of theoretical speculation in this field far exceeds the empirical
evidence provided (see Favell 2001a). After a review of the shifting role of
migrants and migration studies in the sociology of the transnational, I discuss
briefly the ambiguous empirical findings to be found in the burgeoning
literature on non-European migrants in
Migrants, migration studies and social change in
The
migration experiences of elite, educated, professional or highly skilled
migrants in
Sociologists,
anthropologists and others have increasingly looked to the experiences and
trajectories of such ‘ethnic’ immigrants, as a privileged source of insight
into processes of social and cultural change in modern western societies more
generally. They embody in flesh and blood the abstract concerns widely
discussed under the rubric of multiculturalism, globalisation,
transnationalism, the decline of the nation state, and so on. In the
literature, they are the quintessential sources, agents, and victims of these
wider processes affecting European society as a whole. Immigrants have become,
in other words, a new, heroic proletariat of modern society: first, exploited
as labour guest workers by capitalism in the 50s, 60s and 70s; then condemned
to be the primary victims of the post-industrial shift and social polarisation
of the 80s; now in the 90s and after, the progenitors of multicultural social
change, diversity and ethnic resistance from below. Despite their numerical
slightness (still well below 5% of the population in most West European
countries), they have assumed a sociological importance as a litmus test of
society that far outweighs the social weight that such a marginal and
disadvantaged sector of the population might be thought to have. Why is this?
Social
research is invariably driven – and distorted – by the perceived need to focus
on topics that have emerged as visible social and political problems. Behind
the obviously growing symbolic salience of immigration as a political dilemma,
lies a deeper sociological problematique:
the encounter in the post-war period of old, ethnically-rooted European nation
states, with a range of non-European cultures brought to them by recent
immigration. The ensuing questions of immigration and integration have led to
vast range of comparative studies on the transformation of citizenship and
nationality in European states, and the emergence of a variety of multicultural
societies (a sample of edited collections: Brubaker 1989; Baldwin-Edwards and
Schain 1994; Modood and Werbner 1997; Cesarani and Fulbrook 1996). Activist
academics at the hipster end of cultural studies have gone even further and
turned their celebration of ‘black’ and ‘minority’ cultures of resistance,
diaspora and hybridity (Brah 1996; Gilroy 1993; Hall 1988), into the very
cultural powerhouse of progressive change in European societies (particularly,
of course, in ‘multi-ethnic’ Britain); a change located in the ‘struggle’
against the various racisms and xenophobias of the old Europe (Anthias and
Yuval-Davis 1993). Meanwhile, as the focus (and funding) of research has become
Europeanised, the same immigration question is now also being mooted more
broadly as the key litmus test of any future multicultural European unity
(i.e., Kastoryano 1998).
The
politically well-meaning affirmation of Europe as a continent of immigration,
or of European nation states as emergent multicultural societies (within an
emerging ‘post-national’ European Union), may serve as a valuable normative
corrective to the still strong political forces of ethno-national exclusion and
exclusivity. But, empirically, it is a sociologically questionable conclusion.
As demographers tirelessly try to emphasise, international migration is by far
a marginal phenomenon compared to non-migration and immobility, which perhaps
should be the true research puzzle of migration studies. 98% of the world’s
population lives in the country it was born (Hammar et al 1997). Moreover,
there is far less international migration in Europe that in other parts of the
world, such as Africa or the Far East, let alone North America (Boyle et al
1998). Immigration is now growing again in
While
ethnic migrants are said to bring with them one form of globalisation and
intercultural change, a far more obviously powerful and prominent vanguard of
transnational forces – the mobile ‘elites’ that populate international
corporations and public organisations – are identified with rather different
outcomes of globalisation. In their case, it is not multicultural,
transnational diversity they are expected to bring, but international cultural
convergence and transnational similarity. Migration scholars interested in
social and cultural change thus often overlook or dismiss this particular group
of migrants (an exception is the work of John Salt, i.e. Salt 1992). They
assume that free movement and migration for these elites is easy and inconsequential,
as they move through the airport lounges and the hotel lobbies of international
business life; that they are ‘invisible’ to their host nations, and do not
challenge or upset the cultural order of things in the way that ethnic migrants
are supposed to; that life for them in a foreign country is merely an extension
of the life they would have back home. Globalisation scholars, meanwhile – who
certainly do put this emerging ‘transnational capitalist class’ and its
information age networks of power and influence at the heart of their claims
(i.e., Sklair 2001; Castells 1997) – often blithely assume that these elites
are culturally interchangeable ‘citizens of the world’, liberated from
‘national’ lifestyles, values and constraints; that they are unproblematically
converging on a form of life which incarnates a privileged ‘global society’,
beyond the nation state and the nationally-defined social structures to which
they would have once been wedded. For these people, the transnational is an assumed
fact of life.
The
contrast with ‘ethnic’ migrants sometimes suggests another reading. As
formulated by the social theorist Zygmunt Bauman (1998), many assume the cliché
of a new ‘global apartheid’, in which the disenfranchised are controlled and
regulated by immigration restrictions and social constraints that no longer
apply to the ultra-mobile, free moving elites. Whatever the liberatory powers
of transnational ethnic migrants, a
fortiori it is assumed that migrants at the higher end of the social scale
must embody the freedoms and payoffs of new global opportunities, escaping the
damaging human consequences of mobility that may befall others less rich in
human and social capital (see also Burawoy et al 2000; Tarrius 1992, 2000).
This judgement is mirrored in the immense literature on socially polarised
‘global cities’ inspired by the work of Saskia Sassen (2001), tirelessly
generated by economic geographers from macro-economic data about finance and
business organisation (i.e., the GaWC network, see Taylor and Hoyler 2000). In
effect, these scholars use faceless quantitative and network based data about
global social and spatial structures, that are predicated in an unspecified way
on real human lives and social phenomena. These, presumably, must somehow and
somewhere be fulfilled in flesh and blood. From a similarly stratospheric
height, John Meyer and followers have elaborated the isomorphic convergence on
global forms, institutionalised as a result of these macro-developments (Meyer
et al 1997).
My
aim here is to critically question the existence of these two forms or sources
of the transnational, by switching the emphasis to the micro-sociological
level, and to do so first by considering in a specifically European context the
translation of ideas pioneered most notably by Alejandro Portes (Portes 1995,
Portes et al 1998). In Europe, these have perhaps been most extensively
developed in the work of Thomas Faist (1998, 2000). In an extraordinary spin on
theories of transnational migration, Portes famously argued that transnational
migrants are the global progenitors of a ‘new world’, in which certain (usually
‘ethnic’) migrants are able to live in two or more societies at once, and are
carving out new forms of economic and social power in the spaces created by
transnational business and communication. Drawing on a wealth of new studies of
Asian and Latin American migration in the North American context, Portes’ work
brings together a series of ideas developed by scholars in a variety of fields.
It links the explanation of migration as dependent on culturally-rooted
‘migration systems’, with the development of informal economic activities
outside of nation state regulation, and the emergence of international forms of
non-state, non-hierarchical governance. Faced with situations in which the
primary alternative is ‘downward assimilation’ into disadvantaged, racially
stigmatised inner city cultures, some ethnic migrant groups are able to develop
a range of resistant transnational practices and activities, which reject the
integration pressures of the homogenising nation state and its institutional
infrastructure of bureaucratic organisation. Instead, they play on the fact
they can get certain services and benefits here,
while continuing political and social engagements there, often creating a form of extended family life that stretches
across the two (or more) countries of residence (see also Levitt 2001; Kyle
2000; Smith and Guarnizo 1998). The claim is that such forms of social
organisation – enabled by modern communication and transport links, and
facilitated by the development of global economic activities – engender a kind
of economic mobility that is not dependent on social and cultural integration
in the host country; and, further, that this is a major source of social and
cultural transformation in both the sending country (promoting democratisation,
internationalisation and development through return and/or remittances) and the
host country (increasing internationalisation and multiculturalism; breaking down
sovereign national state powers and jurisdiction).
The
key to these arguments is the role of ‘social capital’ in the resources that
such transnational migrant groups are able to call upon. In a modern,
individualistic society characterised by social fragmentation and a decline in
traditional social solidarity, the ‘weak ties’ (Granovetter 1985) provided by
ethnic identity create a form of ‘transnational social capital’ that can
explain both successful migration patterns, and the capacity of certain migrant
groups to self-organise and develop a form of internal resilience to host
society integration pressures (Portes 1995). Typically, in comparative and
inter-group studies, this level of social capital is also used to differentiate
between different ethnic groups and their trajectories. Migration scholars in
recent years have pointed to ‘astronauts’ (Asian migrants commuting weekly
between North America or Australia and Asia, who parachute their children into
schools in different countries), or ‘dual nationals’ (for example, Indians or
Turkish migrants involved in a range of business or political activities both
here and there) as archetypal transnational users of this new social system of
‘flexible citizenship’. Such individuals opportunistically play on their dual
or multiple affiliations, free movement opportunities, and rights in different
contexts (Ong 1999). Indian IT workers in the US and Europe are perhaps the
most obvious emblematic embodiment of these possibilities (Chakravartty 2001).
The contrast, of course, is with national ‘elites’, who may still hold all the
traditional forms of social power in their grasp, but are stunted in the
international context by the baggage of national level socialisation and
obligation. Can we still imagine someone exclusively socialised in the cultural
minutiae of English public school and Oxbridge, or the French grandes écoles and ENA, adapting or
thriving in this ‘new world’, in quite the same way as a transnational product
of Asian family culture, extensive international travel and Californian
business school?
These,
at least, are the transnational arguments being put forward. They represent a
quite remarkable spin on the traditional wisdom about immigration: that
non-integration in the host society equals exclusion, disadvantage, and a
sub-optimal outcome of permanent cultural difference and non-interaction. Yet,
for all the attractiveness of these ideas, in relation to substantial questions
of social structure and reproduction over generations, they float uneasily in a
world of transient observations. What kind of permanence do these new forms of
transnational innovation have?
Once
questions concerning the educational success of children and the social
mobility of migrant families over several generations are raised, it is
difficult to deny the substantive pressures of ‘mainstream’ national-cultural
integration as transnational theorists do. For a start, transnational
opportunities seem far more delimited by the permissiveness of the host state,
and the international relations it happens to have with the sending countries,
than the transnational ideas about radical new social spaces suggest (Waldinger
and Fitzgerald 2004). Moreover, when translated into typical social mobility
questions, the ‘new world’ in the US seems invariably in the long run to boil
down the same, mainstream measurements of social attainment that one would
imagine for the domestic middle and upper classes: improved income and suburban
housing, a good college education, escape from the pathologies of social
disadvantage, such as unemployment, crime, gangs, etc (Portes and Rumbaut 2001,
Rumbaut and Portes 2001). This looks a lot like good old-fashioned all-American
assimilation still hard at work (Alba and Nee 2003). The alternatives – vague
and unsubstantiated claims about post-national citizenship or global society –
seem far less convincing as a social context for international social mobility.
This is, not least, because of their apparently thin sociological basis: having
only really been substantiated at all in terms of political claims making
(Soysal 1997; Tarrow 1995), and to some, highly controversial, extent in
international law (Soysal 1994, Jacobson 1997)
So
is a durable transnational social capital really possible, or is it just a
transient product of the survival of first and second generation migrants
between cultures, still faced with an inevitable path to integration or
assimilation in their new host society? And can we see different outcomes
between ethnic and elite migrants on this question? In short – in the European
context – is a globalisation (or internationalisation) of transnational social
forms and social mobility really occurring, or is there still a dominant, if
partially challenged, national ‘order of things’ that continues to exert an
overwhelming pressure on the socialisation of new migrants in different host
societies?
Research on ‘ethnic’ migrants in Europe
The
problem with answering these questions is that, in terms of empirical work, it
is still very difficult to find meaningful cross-national studies and data that
allow for the juxtaposition of emergent transnational forms of social and
organisation, alongside
conventional
studies on immigrant integration and social mobility. Large scale national
surveys in various countries are only now beginning to emerge, and very few
systematic attempts by migration scholars to do cross-national comparisons in
Europe have been attempted. Nor have social stratification scholars (in the
tradition of Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992) yet successfully brought their
methodologies to bear on the subject. This is largely because official survey
and population data in different countries – the very ways
in which an immigrant or ethnic population is identified, counted and compared
to dominant national norms - are so incompatible, and typically only reinforce
nation state centred interpretations of the immigration process (Codagnone
1998; Phalet and Swyngedouw 1998; Favell 2003).
French
and British differences on the subject are perhaps the best known, but the
truth is, all current scientific ways of identifying minorities or ethnic
groups and gauging ‘integration’ reflect the dominant ideological constructions
of nationality and citizenship in the various countries (Favell 2001b). And, by
definition, integration studies that seek to compare how immigrants perform in
relation to the dominant norms of the middle or upper classes of a particular
society leave little space at all for resistant transnational forms of
behaviour and self-organisation, that will inevitably be classified as
integration ‘failure’ or ‘downward mobility’ by this kind of study. On the
other hand, ethnographic style work which focuses on the transnational cultural
and social forms of immigrant self-organisation will have a hard time assessing
at all the comparative effectiveness of these strategies, if no point of
comparison with conventional national socialisation and social mobility is
found.
This
can be illustrated briefly by mentioning the contradictory findings of current
comparative and cross-national studies of Turks and Moroccans in various
European nation states: in this case, the Netherlands, Belgium and France (some
sources: Kloosterman, van der Leun and Rath 1998; Rath and Kloosterman 1998;
Fennema and Tillie 1999; Lesthaege 2000; Swyngedouw et al 1999; Phalet et al
2000; Jacobs 1998; Jacobs 2000; Bousetta 2000a; Bousetta 2000b; Kesteloot 2000;
Tribalat et al 1996; Kastoryano 1993; Cesari 1994; Crul and Vermeulen 2004).
Very roughly speaking, the findings of research on these migrant groups in
Belgium and the Netherlands (which should themselves be divided and
disaggregated in various ways) finds that the more evidently ‘transnational’
Turks appear to be more successful at cultural and religious self-organisation,
political networking and economic entrepreneurship (in both the informal
economy and niche service industries), than the more fragmented, socially
disadvantaged Moroccans. On the other hand, integration-style studies of the
same groups in the Netherlands and France will show consistently that Moroccans
are better integrated on most scales of acculturation, such as language,
education, inter-marriage, housing and participation in mainstream political
parties, and that Turks are often cited as a case of integration ‘failure’ –
particular in relation to illegal international criminal activities, but also,
in general, to their refusal (like the Chinese) to become French. Then again,
it is likely to be highly ‘French’, and culturally-integrated Moroccans who will
be found rioting or involved in petty criminal activities on the streets of the
banlieues, as opposed to the
culturally conservative Turks (notwithstanding the occasional ‘transnational’
riot between politically secular Turks and Kurds on the streets of Brussels).
Yet again, in contrast, the highly Islamic cross-national maghrèbin religious organisations are often highly integrated in a
nationally-specific (and non-confrontational) political and social know-how of
the host society that allows them to become quite significant political actors
at local level. This too can vary by context: Turkish networks are politically
more successful in the
The
point of counterposing these varied contradictory research findings is to
emphasise how both conventional
integration/mobility and new transnational interpretations can be made here;
which, will depend a lot on the national or international perspective of the
research project. Of course, it can be objected that some of the examples of
transnational behaviour are very far from that: they are simply national
Turkish politics playing out on the streets of an indifferent foreign capital.
The Portes argument depends on the creation of social capital because of the
‘neither here nor there’ situation of migrant groups, but social capital can be
generated in other ways. It may be then that Moroccans organising a political
caucus around Moroccan migrant interests within a mainstream Belgian political
party, are more successfully generating a culture-specific social capital than
their Turkish counterparts who have parties of their own. What is clear from
these examples – with the exception of cross-national Islamic self-organisation
(which is itself usually still nationally organised in most cases) – is that
none substantiate the kinds of claims about ‘hybridity’ and ‘new identities’
popular in influential British cultural studies. Despite all the claims about
distinctive transnational ‘black’ diasporas or Asian consciousness, if those
few systematic British studies of multiculturalism (i.e., Modood et al 1994;
Modood et al 1997) were done in a genuinely cross-national, comparative frame,
it is likely they would find that British ethnic minority cultural
assertiveness is – as in all these other European examples – a temporary form
of resistance to socialisation processes. They too fall squarely into a
conventional pattern of accommodation and national integration over time, if
residence is permanent. The two most celebrated immigrant nations in
However,
in all the different European contexts, the ‘success’ of a resistant,
transnational form of self-organisation is ambiguous, not least because of the
precariously ‘informal’ or ‘illegal’ forms that much of it takes. Over the 2nd
and 3rd generation, in Belgium and the Netherlands, as in Britain
and France, transnational sources of social power are eroded as the host
society’s forms of bureaucracy and social organisation are brought to bear:
through language, access to welfare, education, political and social
institutions. All these background ‘rules of the game’ impose themselves,
coupled with the inevitable cultural socialisation that migrant children will
go through as part of absorbing everyday influences around them. As the
behaviour of some of the most successful Asian groups in Britain shows (Modood
et al 1997), they often become hyper-conformers in educational and professional
social mobility terms. This is comparable to the social mobility of (rather
different) Asian immigrant children in the US. Seen in these terms, America
research on assimilation, such as that by Richard Alba and associates, should
not be viewed as such a distant framework after all. Too often researchers have
got caught up in an ideological game of definitions and typologies in an
attempt to distinguish (nation-based) multiculturalism from integration, or
integration from assimilation. Yet, in scholarly terms, these concepts all
point towards the same underlying sociological process, and it may be the least
favoured of them – assimilation – that best captures the dynamic of national
socialisation and nation-building that remains the norm for immigration in
Europe (as noted presciently by Brubaker 2001, and built on systematically in
European research only by Esser 2001).
Social capital and social power
What
does all this tell us about the conceptualisation of social capital used in
these kinds of migration studies? Is the kind of social capital embodied in
ethnic weak ties really convertible into a meaningful kind of transnational
social power? The apparent incompatibility between the transnational
perspective on immigrant self-organisation and resistance, and the
integrationist perspective on inclusion, social mobility and nation-building,
lies in the fact that the empirical uses of social capital in migration
research have mostly conceptualised it in a narrow, incomplete way. Taking
their cue from American sociologists’ definitions of social capital – in which
the concept was devised to extend an interpersonal, ‘sociological’ dimension to
individualistic models of rational action (Coleman 1991; Putnam 1993) – social
capital has been conceived from an agency point of view. It is seen as a set of
resources that immigrants, who are embedded in migration systems, or relations
of trust and obligation based on ethnic identity, can call upon to give them an
edge over individualistic westerners or isolated fellow immigrants, who are
poor in such interpersonal networks. However, this agency-based focus omits to
specify the wider structural context within which a form of capital comes to
have ‘currency’ and hence specific value. The weak ties of ethnic identity
might help a young immigrant get a job in an ethnically controlled form of
business in the inner city, or allow a baker to absorb transaction costs via
employing relatives, but will prove useless in getting access to an Ivy League
school, where different forms of network connection and criteria of competence
are used to restrict access and select entrants.
This
suggestion points us in the direction of the other major development of the
concept, in the work of Bourdieu and followers. Here, social capital is defined
according to the ways distinct culturally-defined practices shared by a
particular group, allow it to create forms of social distinction from other
groups. This can generate power by seizing monopolies on certain areas of
public life, that others are denied access to by the need for insider know-how
of specific cultural codes or specialised expertise (Bourdieu 1979). In other words,
a group is able to take and hold social power by defining a ‘social field’
within with its own culturally specific forms of capital alone have currency.
In discussing the social power of conventional national elites in France, for
example, Bourdieu stresses how the power of, say, civil servants or
journalists, is anchored in a complex sets of insider cultural practices
(‘habitus’), that enforce barriers between one social elite and another, and
thereby define fields of expertise and competence that they monopolise in
public life (Bourdieu 1989; 1996). Of course, on a small scale, this is
precisely what informal ethnic entrepreneurs are doing when they corner the
market for a service industry niche, or create a culturally-specific system of
‘mafia’ in order to advance certain social or political interests in the city.
Yet the emphasis on existing social hierarchies and the struggle for social
reproduction in the Bourdieu approach, re-emphasises
just how disadvantaged are new immigrants. Compare their social capital with
that of established elites, who have inherited all kinds of insider advantages
via their starting positions, and have had a lifetime’s socialisation through
family and education into the nationally-specific paths of social mobility that
define success in professions and public life (see also Bertaux and Thompson
1997). The blunt fact is that typical ethnically-organised first and second
generation strategies of survival are unlikely to have much impact in the long
run on the ingrained orders of social power in the host society, unless they
are rooted in wider, transnational social structures. And this will happen only
if the rootless, international free movers begin to define their own fields of
economic, social and political power; their own forms of distinction to those
that have in the modern age always been rooted, contained and firmly embedded
in nation state forms of social organisation.
It
is precisely here that transnational elites are thought to be rising up as a
challenge to this national ‘order of things’. Bauman, Sklair, Castells,
Tarrius, Sassen and others are pointing imaginatively, if indeterminately, to a
new ‘class’ of persons, educated and socialised under conditions of
globalisation, and a new social structure to match. Surely these people, with
their effortless mobility and global cities, their multinational corporate
careers and high tech networks, are able to define their own fields of social
power? In a European context, who might these people be, and how are they doing?
Studying ‘elite’ migrants in Europe
All
talk of transnational elites remains speculative until it can be set up and
studied empirically. Ideally, this would call for the kind of systematic large
scale survey that might re-map classic comparative social stratification
questions onto a world in which transnational social mobility is also a
possibility. In advance of this mammoth task, what is needed first is
qualitative, contextualised work that might at least accumulate evidence on the
new social strategies and lifestyles being pioneered by transnational elites.
Work on global elites in global cities and multinational corporations – such as
finance professionals in cities such as Singapore, Tokyo or New York (i.e.,
Beaverstock 2001, 2002) –
would be one route. An alternative venue for these ideas is the
emergent transnational European context.
What
the European Union offers is a context in which one would expect the barriers
to the transnational to be most substantially down, and for a far wider range
of people, than the opportunities enjoyed by the highest flying global elites.
Multinational corporations are certainly one set of transnational structures
within which people move and build careers, but they should not be thought of
as the only context for this. In fact, MNCs create rather special terms of
mobility for their employees – typically transient and delimited in choice –
with migration under these circumstances by definition rarely leading to
settlement or acculturation. One ambitious European study of MNC employees and
their families in Paris ends up trapped with studying this kind of free mover
alone; it is not a reliable guide to the far wider range of persons moving
within the EU (Wagner 1998). Indeed, what is appealing about the EU as a context, is the fact that it offers a set of rights and
entitlements to European citizens that enable individuals themselves – not
corporations – to make the choices about moving.
The
political effort behind the construction of the EU – here understood as principally
a market-building operation engaged in breaking down national barriers to trade
(Fligstein and Mara-Drita 1996) – has made the attainment of conditions of free
movement arguably the central
component of the European integration dynamic. The canonical free movement of
capital, goods and services is famously accompanied by an ever expanding range
of free movement of persons provisions, that have
pushed out from narrow labour market definitions of mobility through to all
kinds of other categories of migrants. The effort and ideology of European
market building is precisely to break national monopolies on access to
business, professions, education and so on, in the name of a politically
regulated free market. The market is designed at once to enhance productivity
and economic dynamism and to preserve
Europe from the kind of capital-driven national conflicts of interest that
proved so disastrous in the past.
But,
of course, what has, over a series of decades, proceeded quite rapidly in terms
of breaking down barriers to the movement of capital and goods – even the
exchange and trade of very culturally specific goods such as food and drink,
for example – has proven far harder to achieve in the realm of professional
qualifications and rights of establishment. Undistorted access to spatial and
social mobility across European countries is far from accomplished. Europe
compares very unfavourably with North America on this score: a continent where
high mobility, flexibility of employment conditions, and the lowness of social
start-up costs in moving to any new state or city, have always been ensured to
favour free movers as a fundamental dynamo of the market. Americans change
state of residence up to five times more readily than do Europeans. Despite all
the efforts at creating a common European space for free movement, migration
rates within Europe are remarkably low, and have not risen
much over a thirty year period (Dobson and Salt 2002). This fact alone might
lead us to speculate about the potential informal barriers to mobility that persist despite the formal removal of such: on questions
such as access to pensions, housing, or education, recognition of professional
qualifications and competence, or basic social know-how.
Although
the numbers cast a shadow of a doubt over the enterprise here, the original
question should be pursued. Given the intent of European free movement
provisions, what might transnational social power in this context consist of?
What would be an example of internationally convertible (European)
transnational social power?
Two
possibilities spring to mind. One is, I think, a form that is already well
established and noted in the careers and social trajectories of those working
within specific European institutions and their environs. The world of Brussels
in this sense has clearly created an international zone for individuals endowed
with a very specific kind of trans-euro social capital. Influence and success
in these environs depends on having access to the insider networks, know-how
and euro-expertise that are monopolised by successful European political
actors, bureaucrats, lobbyists and campaign organisations based in Brussels
(Abélès 1996; Favell 2000).
But
this is only a very narrow and specific field of transnational social power,
one entirely predictable as the institutionalisation of the EU has proceeded
apace. There is a second, far bigger enjeu
in the social dimension of European integration contained in the ideas of free
movement: the creation of conditions of success and social mobility for
European individuals who achieve a new kind of cross-national understanding (or
competence) of living and working in different European countries.
The
analogy, of course, is mastering languages and the local rules of the game; the
kind of savoir-faire portrayed in
cross-cultural businessman guides (i.e., Hill 1998). Is it possible to imagine
someone mastering all the different social habits that would enable a
successful, interchangeable mobility between and across different European national
contexts? A well-known humorous postcard in Brussels depicts what the perfect
European should be like, portraying the ideal European as a combination of all
the worst traits of each national
member state: driving like the French, cooking like a Brit, proud as a
Spaniard, as generous as a Dutchman, as technical as a Portuguese, etc.
Flipping these ideas over gives us some idea however of the rational Europe
that ought to be the product of European Union: if the perfect transnational
European were indeed to cook like an Italian, time-keep like a German,
implement fair rules like a Brit, philosophise like the French, and be
hospitable as a Greek, etc. The perfect European, presumably, would have both
effective nationally specific know-how, and a transnational ease of
convertibility, that would enable her to operate in all circumstances
successfully. Some such individual is no-doubt envisaged in the corridors of
Brussels as a flattering self-image of the highly educated and idealist young
cosmopolitans driving EU policy making and lobbying. But is it a realistic
portrait of the kind of euro-socialised individuals who might be striving to
succeed in various professions in different cities and national contexts across
the European Union?
To
examine this, it is perhaps worth hypothesising here what we should expect such ‘elite’ Europeans
migrants to be able to do, under the privileged conditions of European free
movement with the barriers down, in contrast to disadvantaged ethnic migrants.
These, as I have suggested, suffer severe barriers over generations to creating
and sustaining viable forms of transnational social power in the same context.
Formally speaking, long term resident third country nationals do not yet even
enjoy rights of European citizenship, hence still in fact face
straightforwardly formal barriers to similar mobility.
1)
Elite migrants should be able to thrive in a foreign context without needing to
assimilate into the local national social system; or at least be able to
acculturate selectively so that they can get what they need from the local
system without sacrificing their own cultural practices and habits. In
addition, the developing international environment to be found in all ‘global’
cities should make life easy and unproblematic in practical terms. Within a
regional context, such as the European Union, one would expect then that the
Europeanisation of elite cultures will enable European free movers to succeed
in any part of Europe, without needing to undergo the kind of socialisation to
national integration norms that would have hitherto been demanded of all
newcomers as a condition of social mobility.
2)
Similarly they should face less discrimination and exclusion from their host
environment, because of their invisibility, their unproblematic presence
formally, their non-conflictual relationship with local practices,
and their value as affluent international residents.
3)
Return or going back-and-forth to the country of origin should be easy at any
point, and the time spent learning about the foreign country and its good
points should have significant added-value and be easy to convert when it is
brought back as a new practice, skill or idea to the original country.
Eurostars and Eurocities
To
answer these hypotheses fully will require a large scale sociological effort.
Remarkably little research of this kind has been done. One such project, to
which my work is linked, is the Framework V funded PIONEUR project. This is to
construct a survey and data base that will furnish social scientists for the
first time with systematic data (socio-economic variables, values, behaviour
measures, etc) about the minority mobile European population, in relation to
existing Eurostat and Eurobarometer data about the majority population of
‘stayers’ in Western Europe.[1]
Here, however, I offer tentative findings from my own book length study on the
subject.[2]
My
own strategy has been to opt for qualitative ethnographic and interviews based
research and narrow down the search for the mythical European elite – Eurostars, as I call them – to those
contexts where one might reasonably assume that transnational social power or a
successful transnational lifestyle to be most possible. In other words, it
follows a research logic of: if not here then where? I home in on those places that are the most obvious urban
epicentres of European mobility, in all its forms: Eurocities, in this case, Amsterdam, London and Brussels. One could
of course equally plump for Paris, or Munich, or Frankfurt, or Barcelona, or
Milan, or Vienna, but my strategy throughout was to head to those places where
mobility has been thought to be most unproblematic; those European cities
thought of as the most global, cosmopolitan and/or ‘euro’ in nature. These
famous north western cities between them share a long heritage of diversity,
tolerance, and (in the case of Brussels) multinational composition, long
predating post-war immigration. They are also among the very wealthiest urban
regions in Europe, and have very large foreign populations.
Choosing
these three thus similar cities also allows a good deal of contextual
variation. In global city ratings that measure the degree of network
embeddedness and location of MNCs, London, Brussels, and Amsterdam in fact rank
as first, second and third division cities in that order (Taylor et al 2000).
Amsterdam, however, when seen as the core of the Randstad metropolis, might be
better viewed as the leading metropole of the country routinely ranked as the
most economically open and globalised in the world, with the employment
opportunities that go with this (Kearney 2001). Moreover, it outscores any city
in Europe in terms of its liberal appeal. Building on a historical tradition of
religious tolerance and asylum, this hub of European international trade is a
non-English speaking city where even the bus drivers, small shop owners (and
junkies!) speak excellent English; and its famously liberal attitudes make it a
magnet for all seeking a refuge from conservatism. Moreover, unlike the
sprawling suburban metropolis of London, and the classically
industrial/post-industrial trajectory of Brussels, it is also a classic
medieval European city, with a true bourgeois centre, a concentric structure,
and the poorest neighbourhoods of housing projects (de Bijlmer, for example)
out on the periphery, along with new corporate edge city developments. I take
Amsterdam to represent the cultural
Eurocity.
London,
of course, is the global city par
excellence, seen by all observers as the most international city in Europe
– possibly the world – and a gateway for all Europeans to global English
language business, media, and cultural worlds. Its long history of immigration
and asylum is second to none, something only deepened by the post-colonial
multiculturalism that has developed in the post-war period. Moreover, in the
liberal 90s, it has developed an extraordinarily open labour market for
foreigners with a remarkable degree of mostly undocumented immigration, not
least as a mecca for the young of Europe everywhere who have moved in droves to
learn the global language, and be part of the swinging, libertarian de facto capital of Europe. This last
fact alone embeds it profoundly in Europe and European social structures,
despite the grating euroscepticism of the nation around it. For me, London, represents the economic
Eurocity.
Brussels,
the self-styled official capital of Europe, is the political hub of the
European Union and NATO, and increasingly the place where the world does
European political business. It is thus, of course, the political Eurocity in my study, though it is worth noting that this
somewhat accidental honour was built successfully in large part because of
Brussels’ extraordinary location as a historical crossroads of Europe (its
francophone, dutch, germanophone, and now anglophone cultural dimensions).
Recent years have seen major non-European immigration to add to its older
Italian and Spanish populations. It is the only state capital that is
simultaneously a bi-lingual capital of two distinct national communities, who
make up distinct sections of the population; it is also a dramatically
federalised city, with one of the most multicultural city governments.
In
each city, I interviewed around 25 resident foreign West European nationals,
between the ages 25-45. All were educated to college level or equivalent, and
included both longer term settlers and more temporary residents. Around half
were women, although I also interviewed some couples. They varied by
profession, by nationality, by marital status, and whether or not they had
children. I backed this up with extensive data gathering on the foreign
European population in each city, and more locally by the residential
neighbourhoods that they tended to live in, and looked at indicators of their
economic, social and political participation. The weaknesses of official data –
indeed the almost total lack of official knowledge about who this population is in each case – led me to more profitably,
via further interviews and textual analysis, to construct an image of these
populations through the eyes of employers and service providers (i.e., expat
magazine and internet publishers, relocation agencies, consultancies, etc), out
of which I built up the loosely representative, small scale sample of types,
ages, etc. This was supplemented by ethnographic observations while living and
working in each of the cities as a resident, tracing the places these
individuals frequented and the network of contacts they built while living
there. My approach was thus mainly qualitative, and designed to get inside the
oral histories and everyday details of living an effective life as a European
foreigner in these cities. Piecing this together, I sought to assess how well
they were achieving personal goals (career, family life, lifestyle) against
this transnational backdrop, and to compare how individuals might have done in
relation to peer groups that they had left back home.[3]
Mobility
has clearly become attractive to a wider range of Europeans, beyond the obvious
high end global elites. The motives of my respondents mixed the purely
professional, with more personal and adventurous routes. It is Southern
Europeans and the Irish who most fulfil the EU’s official ideas of conscious
self-improvement and mobility as a professional and economic dynamic. Across
professions, there was widespread reporting of highly open labour market
opportunities in each city, often encouraged by more international sectors and
businesses, and very little reporting of any conscious discrimination or blocks
on their career ambitions. There are clearly short run benefits to mobility,
and many professions now clearly give an edge in career terms to people with
openness to mobility and international experience. This is especially so within
MNCs, who have moved to a more supply-led conception of encouraging individuals
to actively construct their own international fast track careers.
In
some cases, I found organised networks of migrants (sustaining social capital),
who might actually find work for friends, or at least offer the kind of social
support (places to stay, introductions to friends) that make mobility appear
viable. The Irish are easily the most organised in this respect, having
embraced European mobility as a familiar opportunity after college. One friend
referred affectionately to
Contexts
which appear formally open, however, tend to close in subtler, more informal
ways. Very few Eurostars reported significant social networks or acquaintances
outside of their own national compatriots or other resident foreigners. The
obvious exception would be those who intermarry, but even there this tends to
transform the two national spouses into an international family rather than
vice versa. Curiously, despite this, these Europeans migrants are always quite
strongly socialised by their host context into local social patterns. It might
be thought that London would provide all the opportunities in the world to
preserve home country practices, but in fact it is not unusual at all for young
Italian or Spanish residents to adopt wholesale the rather ‘uncivilised’ habits
of young British professionals when going out in the evenings (excessive
drinking in pubs, less importance to eating well, etc). This suggests –
ironically – a kind of downward assimilation to national norms, rather than a Europeanisation of the city. This was less the case in
Inside
companies, high flying international employees had become conscious of certain
barriers to their advancement linked to their status as foreigners. The
informal and ostensibly open, tolerant environment in the
Virtually
no experience of overt discrimination or exclusion by the host society or its
institutions was ever noted, save for occasional crude hostility towards
Germans. But these cities vary hugely in what can be achieved through informal
know-how and local knowledge, as life becomes more settled. Money buys many
things, and most obviously in the highly materialistic
This
problem was also clear in the longer term settlement dilemmas that many
Eurostars were beginning to face in their 30s. A perpetually unsettled
‘studenty’ lifestyle imposes costs that rise each year relative to those who
stayed at home, with the international or cosmopolitan benefits perhaps
declining. European mobility offers a brave new world, but the benefits are not
clear cut. People in the
The
routes to return for Eurostars are not clear. There are well documented
psychological costs to return for expats. No-one is ever the same after an
international experience, and this distances people from their peer groups back
home, even when the career opportunities are there to return to, and the
networks remain strong. Among many there is a quite tragic sense of paths not
taken, even if it is the case – as it is with even the most veteran mobile
Southern Europeans – that they know ‘home’ is there, not here. Returning to a
bourgeois region or city you left is, in any case, not going to be easy, once
you cut yourself out of the long term investment plans. A further international
step is a better route, and a number of them head off and move into the ranks
of the ultra-mobile, global high flyers. In some professions, the international
pay off is clear: London is an essential step for those with ambitions in
finance or media, and with returning Spanish or French, for example, this can
lead to immediate career rewards back home. This is very much not the case for
architects, lawyers or academics however, professions with strong nationally
specific hierarchies.
What
of their material and cultural impact on the cities? City elites are almost
ignorant of these large, economically significant populations, and they are
certainly not seen in any way as an important social issue. The Mayor’s office
in
To
summarise. More people are trying mobility, and
‘short termism’ – a sense of the temporary and indefinite nature of the
enterprise – is the best strategy. Increased mobility, rather than increased
migration, might indeed be the greatest achievement of EU free movement
accords. One can expect more intermarriages and European families, but this is
a very slow route to integration. Other forms of mobility are going to be far
more significant. Erasmus style student exchanges, retirement migration,
cross-border commuting and shopping will all have more impact on integration,
although none of these forms of mobility are premised on a substitution of
one’s principle national affiliation for a more European one.
MNCs
do indeed provide the one clear, alternative transnational social structure to
the tried and tested nation state; their role within Europe is strengthened by
the geographical fact that somewhat more rooted Europeans can now opt for
lucrative mobility packages within MNCs, because of proximity to home and
flexibility of return. Such expat packages, however, usually contain sunset
clauses that remove supplementary mobility allowances for foreign residents
after time, and such special treatment obviously runs contrary to the
egalitarian non-discrimination idea behind free movement rights.
Eurostars
do find themselves more marginalised in other areas of their transnational
life. Social networks hit barriers, which are reinforced by the subtle
incentive structures that lead them to choose and construct family lives that
remain outside of the host country’s norms. Getting what you want out of city
has higher costs of investment and identification than at first seem apparent.
Eurocities remain distinctive, variable environments at the international
level, and one has to compete with all the in-built advantages of the local
bourgeoisie. Only in rare cases is there a critical mass of foreign residents,
such that the structure of the city itself is changed. This is partially the
case in Brussels.
Conclusion
Studying
European ‘elites’ is likely to only reveal facts about the specific European
context, and these populations clearly may not stand as an easy proxy for
global elites more generally. However, to focus on global elites is to bias the
idea of the transnational far too much in the direction of MNC lifestyles,
which alone provide the context for more global kinds of expatriate mobility.
The EU, with its highly developed free movement regime, is a far more likely
place to find individually driven choices of regional mobility, and hence
meaningful forms of social mobility across a much broader range of professions.
The
evidence for any emergent transnational social power among Eurostars is mixed.
It is happening – in Brussels, London, Amsterdam and elsewhere – but these are
marginal cases, and their ideal type scenarios suggests that genuine free
movement opportunities are far more difficult than even the European Commission
might imagine. Curiously, though, this is not because of any residual, formal
barriers or conscious discrimination; but, rather, to do with the
self-preservation of a certain form of European city life, which delivers
quality of life to long term residents in return for a special kind of urban
investment and identification. In a sense, affluent foreigners are always
welcome, but they are expected to adapt to these constraints, and recognise
that cities owe little or nothing to people who might just come and go. The
obstacles to urban identification and investment are at their lowest in
Brussels, significantly a city with a poor sense of identity and self-esteem.
It is also an extreme case, given that, among major European cities, it is one
that was among the most dramatically affected by post-industrial
suburbanisation processes, and the one with the highest aggregate foreign
resident population. And, if transnational social power or lifestyles are only
possible with great difficulty in Brussels, London or Amsterdam, they are going
to be well nigh impossible in Bruges, Bristol or Groningen.
Eurocities
are far from becoming interchangeable ‘global’ cities. The typical image
derived from the work of Sassen and others is wrong. These very varied European
cities do not fulfil the image of places where cosmopolitan elites have
converged on the same set of social and economic practices. These are not
cities that each have a structurally similar
exploitation zone, in which elites are mobile and unfettered, and disadvantaged
migrants are immobile and unable to have little influence on the city around
them. While economic and social polarisation is clearly a reality to some
degree, it is not necessarily the case that so-called elite migrants have it
easy as foreigners, or do not encounter barriers to their meaningful engagement
with the place; nor is it necessarily true that ethnic migrants have no social
impact, or access to goods and forms of social power, despite their disadvantaged
economic situation.
In
the end, the continued national and local peculiarities of even the most global
of European cities continues to belie the claim that distinct national European
societies are converging into a globalised international pattern, that is
essentially no different in New York, Singapore or Tokyo. Both ‘ethnic’ and
‘elite’ migrants struggle to adapt, resist and innovate in the heavily
assimilatory national environments they face. At base, this is because it is
not ultra-mobile, elite, global opportunities that foreigners most require when
they relocate, but access to very average middle class satisfactions. This is
the goal of most non-European immigrants; but it also very much the goal of
most of the people hitherto thought of as European elites. In the end, the
vision we have of ultra-mobile global elites is a only
reality for a very small part of the internationally mobile population. On the
contrary, it is middle class ambitions and achievements that are where the real
payoffs to free movement quantitatively must lie, and it is here that the idea
of free movement attracts most resistance. The reasons for this are historical.
European nation states have institutionalised themselves dominantly around the
interests and benefits of the domestic bourgeoisie. Thus, it is the domestic
bourgeoisie that has the strongest grip on taxation; on welfare benefits and
political representation; on education and social reproduction; and on access to, and monopoly over, the quality of life in competitive
environments. It is these sedimented structures of middle class social power, that provide the most difficult obstacles to
foreigners’ transnational lifestyles.
Eurostars
are themselves typically educated, middle class people, who settle with
averagely middle class ambitions. They are not the mythical global movers
imagined in the pages of magazines like Wallpaper.
Indeed, on this point, it is highly significant that the pages of Wallpaper are full primarily of
mannequins, and empty, inhuman designer worlds. Outside of these glossy pages,
in fact, global elites simply do not have the same quantitative reality as the
far more mundane middle classes. Globalisation theorists have predicated their
ideas on the existence of ‘global’ individuals, who must somehow fulfil the structures
predicted by the macro-level data. But if we go looking at the micro-level for
people and real lives to populate these theories, and it turns out these
populations do not in fact exist, we should revise our ideas about
globalisation accordingly.
Acknowledgements
This
paper build on an outline of research first presented at a conference of the
European Consortium of Sociological Research, organised by Hartmut Esser and
Antonio Schizzerotto, Obernai, Sept 1999: ‘European Societies or European Society:
Migrations and Inter-Ethnic Relations in Europe’. Research was funded in part
by the Brussels Regional Government, the British Council-NWO UK-Netherlands
Partnership Programme in Science, and a UCLA Senate Grant 2002-3. I acknowledge
collaboration with the PIONEUR research network, with thanks especially to
Ettore Recchi and Damian Tambini. Thanks to research assistance from Kristin
Surak, UCLA. The final draft was written as a visiting fellow at the Centre for
Socio-Legal Studies and Wolfson College, Oxford University, June-July 2003. I
am grateful to these institutions for their kind invitation.
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[1] The PIONEUR project – ‘Pioneers of Europe's Integration “from below”: Mobility and the Emergence of European Identity among National and Foreign Citizens in the EU’ – is a three year network based project begun Jan 2003. It is funded by the EU’s Framework V programme. See the website for further details and publications: <http://www.obets.ua.es/pioneur>.
[2] Adrian Favell, Eurostars and Eurocities, forthcoming.
[3] Two key inspirations for this present study are the work of Sennett (1998) and Lamont (1992; 2000). Methodologically, the work falls somewhere between these. On issues of ‘constructing the research object’, on understanding the limitations of data, and on the need to actively ‘construct’ population samples from official representations, see the discussions in Bourdieu et al (1968); Champagne et al (1996).