These notes are provided to assist your study, but I am not responsible if there are differences between the notes and lectures. The exam is based on the readings and lectures, not on these notes.
Political Globalization 1
Larry Diamond “The Globalization of Democracy” (packet)
David Held “Democracy and the New International Order” (packet)
John W. Meyer et al. “World Society and the Nation-State” (packet)
Democracy and democratization were once mainly studies by historians and social scientists in terms of
Political theory
Democratic revolutions (French, American)
Mechanisms of democratic governance (elections, parliaments, etc)
The classic distinction in the literature is between participative and representative democracy.
Today, more and more, democracy and democratization are viewed as global processes
The reason for this is mainly the spread of democracy across much of the world, and democracy’s dominance as a national political system. At least, it seems to be the dominant system.
Why are Communist and Authoritarian governments replaced by democratic systems?
National reasons?
Global forces?
It’s probably fair to say that American scholars have dominated debate on global democratization. Political scientists like Larry Diamond and Condoleeza Rice (both from Stanford) argue that democracy is a superior political system and that its spread worldwide, especially since the 1980s, is a good and inevitable process. They, and others, link democratization with economic neoliberalism: when countries open their markets to foreign influence, their people will demand greater freedoms and democracy will advance.
Others take issue with these broad claims, and cite China as an exception to this rule.
Larry Diamond “The Globalization of Democracy”
Larry Diamond is a well-known American sociologist who teaches at Stanford. He is known as an expert on democratization (democratic transitions) and appears regularly on US and international television. Recently he supported the Iraq War, and worked for the US in Iraq for 3 months. Since then he has written a book explaining what went wrong.
LD is a liberalizer, obviously very much in favor of democratization. He has much in common with economic liberals as well. He is in favor of a strong, outward-looking American foreign policy; thus his support for the Iraq war.
Generally he equates communism and socialism with authoritarianism, and favors democracy over both.
“3 Waves” of democratization (from Samuel Huntington)
1. 1828 (USA) to 1920s (fascism)
2. 1945 (WWII ends) to 1962 (decolonization, but shift to authoritarianism)
3. 1974 (Portugal) to early 1990s (eastern bloc countries)
Democratization seems to be a long-term, global trend. But it has eroded in many places, and is superficial in others.
What are the causes of this trend?
International
- US pressure (sanctions, withholding aid, diplomacy)
- trade liberalization, threat of trade sanctions
- threat of loss of membership in UN
- demonstration and diffusion (“snowballing effect”)
i. e.g. Eastern Europe
ii. e.g. South Africa à rest of Africa
iii. globalization of media
iv. education of 3rd-world elites in the West
Democratic assistance from international pro-democracy groups (e.g. for election monitoring, civil society, education)
Expatriate groups
David Held, “Democracy and the New International Order”
DH is a British political scientist at the London School of Economics
He presents a much less optimistic assessment of the relationship between globalization and democratization.
More careful and skeptical about global democratization than many American writers (similar pattern in the debate over economic globalization)
DH sees globalization as a challenge for democracy, because the people within a given nation do not determine decisions and policies directly for themselves. Elected representatives do not make decisions for their citizens, although in democratic theory they are supposed to do so.
Economic globalization
Trans-national issues (building a nuclear power plant near a national border)
International organizations (NATO, UN, EU, IMF)
The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia ended the German portion of the 30 years’ war, and established territorial sovereignty as a fundamental principle in international affairs. Nations had no legal right to interfere in each others’ affairs. Europe and eventually much of the world was ordered in terms of discrete nation-states whose national governments had sovereignty over what happened in their territory.
The United Nations charter, in 1945, broke with this Westphalian logic.
How to extend democracy in a way that addresses the undemocratic tendencies of globalization?
Held argues that what is needed today is greater power and effectiveness for the UN to promote human rights within nations.
He argues for “regional parliaments” like the EU in Latin America and Africa. Citizens should be able to vote on trans-national issues that affect them (energy policy, public transportation)
A stronger, reformed General Assembly of the UN
- US pressure (sanctions, withholding aid, diplomacy)
- trade liberalization, threat of trade sanctions
- threat of loss of membership in UN
- demonstration and diffusion (“snowballing effect”)
Americanization
Richard Kuisel “Debating Americanization: The Case of France”
Jan Nederveen Pieterse “Hyperpower Exceptionalism: Globalization the American Way”
Natan Sznaider “The Americanization of Memory: The Case of the Holocaust”
Anti-Americanism dates to the 19th century, when the United States expanded geographically, West and South; remained integrated after a civil war in the 1860s; and then industrialized rapidly. For Europeans, it seemed that the USA, a former European colony, was quickly becoming a superpower.
Anti-Americanism has an especially long history in France, but also in Germany and elsewhere.
Americans were seen as lacking in culture and taste, and as a threat to European industry, military power, and values and cherished ways of life.
European anti-Americanism has shifted from the right to the left and back many times within European societies. The sense that America was a threat to national identities, in Europe and elsewhere, waned during the 50 years of the Cold War, but has reemerged in our era of ‘globalization.’
French scholars in the 1960s and 70s (and some today), along with French politicians (Charles DeGaulle) were strongly opposed to the ‘Americanization’ of their country following their defeat in WWII and liberation by the USA. Even today, in France globalization is identified as Americanization, and opposed by political activists (e.g. Jose Bove, the French farmer who became famous for smashing a French McDonalds) and others. Yet today, Starbucks coffee and McDonalds hamburgers are popular in France, French middle-class families aspire to send their children to elite American colleges, and French kids look, act, buy music, and dress very much like American kids.
Scholars of globalization have gone back and forth on Americanization. In the 1990s there was a reaction to the equation globalization=Americanization, although there has been a bit of a counter-reaction more recently.
Does globalization=Americanization?
And what is Americanization anyway?
Consumerism?
Liberal economics?
Popular culture (rather than high culture, or local culture)?
American values?
Are countries around the world really becoming more like the USA?
Richard Kuisel “Debating Americanization: The Case of France”
Kuisel reviews the evidence that France has indeed “succumbed to Americanization”.
American English is the second most popular language
2/3 of French citizens agree that everyone should know Amer. English
The French government has tried to limit use of AE by legislation
France has 800 McDonalds restaurants, is now the 3rd largest overseas market
Coca-Cola controls most of the cola market and half the soft drink market
In 1998 Hollywood movies earned almost 70% of ticket sales in France
Of the top 20 films only 3 were French
Disneyland Paris more popular than Notre Dame or the Louvre
Michael Jordan was voted the most popular athlete in France
American-style shopping malls and garden centers are popular (suburbanization)
French business managers are virtually indistinguishable from Americans
What is Americanization?
Kuisel defines Americanization in terms of imports of “products, images, technologies, practices and behavior closely associated with America/Americans”
Mass consumerism, market capitalism, mass culture
Begins after 1890, in France during the 1950s
Americanization in France is accepted more quickly by business groups, less by agricultural sector and rural communities
Kuisel places himself in the counter-reaction to the trend of weakening ideas of Americanization, in favor of globalization, diversity, and more complex analyses of ‘national cultures’
e.g. Pierre Bourdieu argued that America was a force for cultural imperialism, a hegemonic and despotic force; others have rejected his view; now Kuisel wants to salvage it, but with greater nuance
Four perspectives on Americanization
1. assimilation/domestication (local assimilation, negotiation, and interpretations of American products)
a. semiotic approach – changes in the meanings of symbols of America, e.g. Italian manufacturers using Cowboy images to sell jeans to other Europeans
but, as a counterpoint, when McDonalds entered the German market they remodeled their restaurants to look more “German” (wood paneling, darker lighting, beer)
but this failed, and McDonalds went back to their standard restaurant model, which is what gives them their unique identity
e.g. French teenagers claim to enjoy McDonalds because it is different from French restaurants and cafes, more relaxing and cool
also, French restaurants have voluntarily become more like McDonalds in order to compete
So assimilation/domestication has its limits
2. “Culture in motion”
a. culture is something complex, socially shaped
b. Americanization is accepted in different ways for different social classes within a country
c. But some things are still recognizably American
3. Globalization
a. Shouldn’t we be discussing “globalization” rather than “Americanization”?
b. Ideas, goods and services flow across the world, not just from America outward
c. E.g. look at the foods you can buy at a normal supermarket- feta cheese, jalapeno peppers, German beer, Indian chutney, Israeli oranges, Colombian coffee…
d. Globalization is “transnational”
Kuisel argues that globalization and Americanization are two different things, and that Americanization is still real and important
Globalization still has an American face, and American corporations generally win
4. Behaviour, meaning, and identity
a. To what degree is Americanization psychologically significant?
b. How does Americanization affect identity?
c. E.g. the widening of generational differences
d. E.g. casual dressing
e. E.g. changes in eating habits
f. E.g. changes in language
g. E.g. the spread of entrepreneurship
h. E.g. consumerism (e.g. its effects on the kibbutz movement)
Kuisel concludes that yes, Americanization is a real phenomenon, not reducible to anything else.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse “Hyperpower Exceptionalism: Globalization the American Way”
Pieterse is a Dutch academic who is associated with theories of “hybridity” and globalization, with the complexities and paradoxes produced by globalization rather than its homogenizing tendencies.
Yet in this article, he pays a lot of attention to the Bush administration and their “unilateralism,” i.e. their willingness to use American military power when and where they see fit regardless of international opinion.
Pieterse looks much more closely at the USA than do most academics who are interested in Americanization and globalization (e.g. Kuisel, who looks at Americanization in France but not at America itself)
What is it about America that is different from the rest of the world, and why does it have such an enormous international influence?
1. “American exceptionalism”
combination of Republican and millennial (religious apocalyptic) traditions
anti-statist, pro-market ideology
reinforced by sustained economic growth
other countries (Germany, Japan) see themselves as unique, but are not superpowers
2. Free Enterprise Capitalism
no socialism or labor party
laissez-faire capitalism
3. Political Conservatism
small-government conservatism, from Thomas Jefferson to Bill Clinton
in a sense the US is more right-wing than other countries, but lacks an ethnic/racial nationalist-conservative right wing (e.g. Japan, Germany)
4. Social inequality
bourgeois nation geared to the marketplace
little concern for social equality, more for individual freedoms and equality of opportunity
5. Americanism
nationalism based on ideas, not on the folk
6. Shallow modernity
short historical memory, no feudalism, empire, absolutism, or peasant culture
the US was founded on principles of rational progressivism
- Military Strength
Pieterse argues that these exceptional national characteristics have had an international influence, through globalization, mainly through:
Laissez-faire economics after the British Empire
combined with
Weak world leadership (for a superpower) on women’s issues, the environment, and in the international community (for domestic political reasons)
Pieterse concludes that because of its inequality and economic instability, the USA cannot be a model for other nations, and he looks to the “other America” that is more attuned to world trends
Natan Sznaider “The Americanization of Memory: The Case of the Holocaust”
Has the USA “Americanized” the Holocaust, turning it into a consumer item and rendering it superficial, even trivial?
Americanization of the Holocaust refers to its “banalization” or “trivialization” or “Disneyfication” within popular culture
e.g. the soap opera “Holocaust”, movie Schindler’s List, even the US Holocaust Museum
That the Holocaust has been Americanized is an accusation heard in American Jewish circles, and in anti-American discourse
Sznaider does not agree with the critics of Americanization. Rather, he argues that Americanization is a gateway to the universalization of the Holocaust that may be a force for moral good in the world, e.g. in the Balkans, and perhaps in Sudan and elsewhere
The Holocaust has been internationalized during the post-WWII period by “cosmopolitans,” mostly American Jews who wished and worked to de-particularize the Holocaust. That is, they wanted it to be viewed not as only a Jewish tragedy, but as a universal human tragedy. This process was controversial, and began in the 1960s. It was effective for defending Israel in American political forums.
The universalism with which the Holocaust is viewed in America is quite different from how it is viewed in Israel or Germany.
This universalist American view, the “lessons of the Holocaust,” spurred the US to intervene to stop massacres in Kosovo, a move framed in moral terms, rather than in economic or political terms.
In the USA, Elie Wiesel has been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show. The discussion was not about the specific holocaust against the Jews, but about universal human suffering and its effects on the ‘self.’
Cultural Globalization 2 – homogeneity and hybridity
chapters 1 and 3 from Tomlinson Globalization and Culture (packet)
John Tomlinson “Cultural Imperialism” (packet)
Steve Derné 2004 “The (limited) effect of cultural globalization in India” (packet)
John Tomlinson
John Tomlinson is a British academic, a theorist of globalization, and one of the first writers to really focus on cultural aspects of globalization. One of his earlier books is Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. As the title suggests, he is critical of the very idea of cultural imperialism, and he wants to analyze it carefully.
There is a long history of writing on cultural imperialism, much of it French, and much of it focused on “Americanization” or something along these lines.
JT gives as an example the TV series Dallas, which gained international popularity in the 1980s. He cites a study by Ien Ang, who discusses both the popularity of Dallas and its critical reception in many countries.
On the one hand, Dallas was incredibly popular.
On the other, cultural critics often regarded Dallas as a threat to authentic national cultures and national identities.
e.g. in 1983 Jack Lang, the French Minister of Culture, proclaimed Dallas as the “symbol of American cultural imperialism”
and very recently, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian Prime Minister, banned Western music in Iran.
These kinds of reactions often draw on the “critical theory” of the sociologists Horkheimer and Adorno, both members of the Frankfurt School, who criticized mass culture of all kinds. They saw popular culture as a product of the “culture industries” – mainly Hollywood, but also the recording industry, Broadway, etc. Critical theorists borrowed much from Marx in arguing that mass culture (like religion for Marx) discouraged any kind of creative, critical, sophisticated, or authentic thought among audiences. It makes the public into passive consumers who do not question politics or economic inequality, and who do not aspire to any kind of cultural refinement, beauty or sophistication.
Horkheimer and Adorno were extremely highbrow European intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany for the “freedom” of the United States, only to end up living in California and being appalled by what they saw as the stupidity of consumer culture (Disneyland, Hollywood, and so on)
Since Horkheimer and Adorno, and before them as well, “professional intellectuals” have been dismissive of American-style consumer culture. Many analysts see popular culture as not just entertainment. They think it has obvious, manipulative ideological effects.
Ien Ang studied the reception of Dallas in the Netherlands, and found that many people who enjoyed watching the show also disapproved of its capitalistic ideology. Some people defended watching it with a populist anti-intellectual discourse. Others adopted an ironic stance toward the show.
So reactions in Holland were complex, to say the least.
Katz and Liebes, two American-Israeli social scientists, studied the reception of Dallas among lower middle class Israeli citizens. Their groups included:
Israeli Arabs
New immigrants from Russia
Immigrants from Morocco
Kibbutzniks
These were compared to similar groups in Los Angeles
They watched the show, then participated in an “open structured” discussion and filled out questionnaires.
They found that people interpreted the show in very different ways, sometimes incorrectly.
Some of the Moroccan Jews claimed that the show made them more proud of their Jewish identity and their moral standards (as compared with the Dallas characters, many of whom are “bastards”)
They conclude that the discourses of ordinary people about Dallas were quite sophisticated, so we should be skeptical about discussions of cultural imperialism and passive audiences.
Tomlinson, chapters 1 and 3 of Globalization and Culture
It is important to note that Tomlinson argues that we should not conflate globalization and modernity, and that today’s “global age” is something fairly new and is not just a continuation of modernity. Here he disagrees with Giddens.
Globalization threatens some aspects of modernity, such as the state, and it introduces new risks such as global environmental risks. Changes in communication technologies are also new.
Analysts like Giddens may be wrong and ethnocentric to counterpose Western modernity and tradition. There may be “multiple modernities” in different parts of the world, and culture is not mainly about maintaining difference but rather about meaning.
Dreams of Global Culture
In chapter 3, Tomlinson discusses some of the ways in which cultural universalism has been viewed in a very positive light. We have already talked about this in terms of some 19th century movements, such as the Esperanto movement and the standardization of many technologies (telegraph, transportation, electricity, the metric system, mail systems etc.)
European bourgeois values
Marxism, socialism and communism
Global communications outlets today (e.g. CNN)
Scientific research
United Nations and demands for more global governance
UNESCO programs around the world
Nightmares
American Marxist Herbert Schiller
Argues that transnational corporations are operating a dominant global political-economic system
These corporations have both political-economic power and ideological power to define reality for many people
More recently, books on The Global Media (1997) discuss how a small group of corporations, including Disney, TimeWarner, Viacom, Bertelsmann, and News Corporation.
Many of these writers are writing from a “neo-Marxist tradition”
Also writing on McDonaldization, Coca-Colonization, even McDisneyization
But isn’t there a “fallacy of internalism” in these writings. Just because cultural objects exist does not mean that they are internalized at a deep level.
Creolization, indigenization, hybridization and the “active audience”
Isn’t culture “globalized” rather than “global”
Steve Derne, The (limited) effect of cultural globalization in India
Derne is a young, American sociologist. We will read more work by analysts like him next semester, I think.
This is a case study of the effects of “new media” in India. It should allow us to answer some of our questions about culture and globalization.
The Indian media was rapidly liberalized in the 1990s, and cable television and foreign movies became widely available.
Because of the Gulf War and the increase in the price of oil, India sought IMF loans, and as a result was forced to open its internal markets to foreign competition.
As is the case almost everywhere, the foreign films and television shows available glamorized sex, consumerism, and violence.
Did the radically changed media landscape change the way people think and act, their beliefs and values?
Derne focuses on non-elite men only. Derne had previously interviewed many of these men in the 1980s, and most of them were proudly Indian and culturally conservative. They were family-oriented, and approved of arranged marriages and limitations on women’s movement outside the home.
In 1991 and 2001 he interviewed men in the small city of Dehra Dun in northern India.
In 1991 most nonelite men were not exposed to Western movies, while in 2001 most of them were.
In 2001, most nonelite men still had poor job prospects.
And yet, in 2001 most nonelite men still:
Rejected love marriages
Reject women’s autonomy
Approve of joint-family living
Reject global media messages
They came to embrace male violence more in films. They enjoyed the action scenes in Hollywood films.
They also enjoyed foreign pornography and films which objectify women.
For these men, cultural globalization seems to have reinforced preexisting arrangements rather than destroying or transforming them.
Women and Women’s Rights
Beijing Declaration UN Fourth World Conference on Women (packet)
Nitza Berkovitch “The Emergence and Transformation of the International Women’s Movement” (packet)
Richards, Patricia. 2005. The Politics of Gender, Human Rights, and Being Indigenous in Chile. Gender & Society19 (2): 199-220 (email)
Eschle, Catherine, 2005. "Skeleton Women": Feminism and the Antiglobalization Movement. Signs, 30, 3, spring, 1741-1769 (email)
In the last section we discussed global environmentalism, and found that environmental politics are shaped by globalization in complex ways. Environmental groups like Greenpeace are organized globally, as is discussed by Paul Wapner and others. Environmentalism is also associated with anti-globalization movements, including indigenous rights movements. Finally, as I have written about in several papers, environmental issues are increasingly organized in terms of transnational identity politics, aided by migration, global communications and the ease of global financial flows and travel.
Feminism and the global women’s movement overlaps historically with environmentalism and the global environmental movement, and there are many parallels between these two huge movements. Feminism and women’s rights are sometimes thought of in terms of national politics, but there are clearly global forces at work in women’s rights movements.
Nitza Berkovitch’s article on the International Women’s Movement provides us with one perspective on women’s rights. Berkovitch was a student of John Meyer, whom we read in December and January. Meyer argues that national politics is often a product of top-down globalization. “World society” refers to the global network of international governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and world society is the source of ideas that are now taken for granted in many places (such as women’s rights, human rights, equality, environmentalism, animal rights).
Berkovitch shows how the IWM evolved with World Society, and depended heavily on the creation of a robust WS.
The first phase of this evolution comes after WWI, when the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization were created (in 1919). These organizations provided a “central world focal point” for groups interested in women’s rights. Prior to this period, women’s groups were largely limited to lobbying national and local governments.
Many (Western) women’s groups moved their offices to Geneva, and in 1931 ten of them joined together to create the Liaison Committee of Women’s International Organizations (LCWIO). This was the beginning of a tradition of giving these kinds of organizations extremely long names that ended up being used as acronyms.
There were many tensions with the IWM, although their concerns were generally ignored until the 1970s, when women’s groups successfully lobbied for the creation of the UN Decade for Women (1976-1985). Women’s issues were tied to development for the first time, and ultimately this filtered down to states, such that women’s issues became a concern of the state. During the Decade for Women, the IWM shifted its emphasis from international law (for equality and rights) to concrete projects to emancipate and empower women (through education, employment, and development projects).
This movement has been powerful and to an extent successful, but it has always suffered from being seen as addressing the concerns of Western (or Northern) women rather than women in the global South, in developing countries. It is viewed in terms of cultural imperialism and, in some places, Americanization.
The sheer ambition of the IWM is made clear when we read the 1995 “Beijing Declaration” of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, which contains [at least] 35 points. The Beijing Declaration refers to equal rights and reproductive rights, empowerment and advancement of women, women’s equal access to economic resources (wages, land, credit), and the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. These rights are not seen as Western or as culturally limited in any way. They are universal, such that women’s rights are equated with human rights.
The Beijing Declaration is astoundingly universalist and ambitious when you consider that the ideas contained in it are almost totally at odds with most traditional cultures from around the world (which are usually patriarchal).
Immigration and Citizenship
Changing Parameters of Citizenship and Claims-Making: Organized Islam in European Public Spheres. Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu, Theory and Society, 1997 (email)
Global Modernisers or Local Subalterns? Parallel Perceptions of Chinese Transnationals in Hungary. Nyiri, Pal, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2005 (email)
The post-war acceleration of immigration, mostly from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, but also from Asia and Latin America to North America, has been the topic of a large amount of social research, and also of political debate.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western migration was mostly from overpopulated, poor parts of Europe to North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The first waves were of Irish and Scottish, suffering from the 19th century potato famine and general poverty. Also, as a result of religious conflicts and the industrialization and transformation of the European feudal agricultural economy, there was migration from Germany, Italy, and Eastern Europe. Later, there were waves of migration from Southern, Eastern, and Central Europe: Greek, Italian, European Jewish, etc.
The mode of social integration of immigrants was, generally, strongly assimilationist. It was understood that immigrants needed to be made into Americans, Australians, Canadians, etc., and that this process might take a few generations. It would be accomplished through education, intermarriage, military service, and national mass culture: television, movies, sports, national rituals and celebrations, and perhaps religion.
Assimilation was never the only mode of social integration. Even under conditions of strong nationalism, there has always been a degree of pluralism (and corporatism) in host societies. Immigrants’ ethnic and religious identities persist even after several generations within a host country.
Corporatism refers to a mode of social integration in which ethnic and religious differences are accepted and even encouraged by host countries. For example, in the Netherlands immigrant children are often free to choose to attend government-sponsored schools for their ethnic group.
Clearly, countries differ in terms of their immigration and assimilation policies. The USA has generally been strongly integrationist, while Europe is more pluralist/corporatist. France, however, has generally been thought of as assimilationist and secularist: every citizen of France is equal under the law, and France’s educational system is strongly secular: expressions of religious identity are not accepted.
Postwar immigration is usually discussed in terms of North African and Middle Eastern immigration to Europe, and Asian and Latin American immigration to North America.
The trend has generally been away from assimilationist policies and toward more pluralism and multiculturalism. Much of this is due to globalization: it is easier to organize, communicate, send money, and travel across national borders, so citizens of a given country do not need to feel as strong an allegiance to that country: they have more options, in terms of their identity and cultural activities.
Also, dual (or triple, quadruple) citizenships are increasingly recognized in the postwar period.
In Europe today, the pluralist/corporatist model is increasingly questioned. Some Europeans see the USA as a better model. Most European states also have anti-immigrant political parties, and there is even strong opposition to immigration in the United States. Business generally favors immigration because of the cheap labor it provides.
In Europe, unlike in the US, there is a strong cultural and religious component to immigration debates, because so much immigration is from predominantly Muslim countries.
In the US, this is less of an issue, because of course Latin America is almost entirely Christian, and even many Asian immigrants to the US are Christian (e.g. from South Korea).
Yasemin Soysal
Yasemin Soysal is one of the major writers on postwar immigration to Europe. She is Turkish, but teaches in the UK and was the president of the European Sociological Association.
She is interested in changes in the definition of citizenship in the postwar period under conditions of immigration and globalization.
Citizenship was once based on territorially bounded nations. This conception has been challenged by three processes, she argues:
1 universal notions of human rights
2 “cultural rights”
3 multi-level politics (e.g. the European Union)
Thus, Soysal argues that Islamic organizations in Europe refer to these 3 principles, which are fairly new, rather than to traditional religious teachings or values.
Pal Nyiri
This article is on Chinese immigrants in Hungary, who are generally treated as second-class citizens by Hungarians (Hungarian media, government officials), but who view themselves, at least through immigrant media and the Chinese government, as transnational pioneers.
Hungary is often ranked as the country with the highest levels of xenophobia in Europe.
Hungarian media generally depict the country’s 10-15,000 Chinese citizens as criminals, exotic, and of low status.
The Chinese language media in Hungary, however, emphasize the economic efficiency, productivity, global outlook, and modernity of Chinese workers in Hungary, as compared to the provincial backwardness of the local population.
In the Chinese Hungarian media, local Hungarians are depicted as colorful but silly, as waiters, translators.
Chinese in Hungary do not use the minority rights language discussed by Soysal. They don’t seem to be particularly concerned with Hungarians’ attitudes towards them.
They are classical a “middleman minority” in that they serve economic functions in the host society, but are not quite accepted as part of it. But they do not seem to care because they are part of a large transnational Chinese community and are protected and supported by a very strong Chinese state.
