Post-Immigration Social Cohesion Requires Open Borders and/or Urban Citizenship
Scholars in normative political philosophy and citizens of immigrant-receiving countries prominently argue that social cohesion is incompatible with immigration. According to this incompatibility legend, the welfare state can only survive if close-border policies protect the shared national identity. This blog post attempts to demonstrate that the incompatibility between social cohesion and immigration is only a myth and that open borders on the contrary support social cohesion in diverse societies, similarly to urban citizenship policies.
Strongly believed legends are important phenomena in democratic societies, as they influence the political attitudes of citizens, even if they lack scientific evidence and have the potential effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy. To understand this particular legend, one should delve into the meaning of social cohesion.
The Social Cohesion Legend
The Council of Europe defines it as “the capacity of a society to ensure the well-being of all its members – minimizing disparities and avoiding marginalization – to manage differences and divisions and ensure the means of achieving welfare for all members (2010, 2).” This definition raises the question of how this capacity can be observed to be actualized in the world.
Social scientists, such as political scientists, economists or sociologists, have provided various answers to both what social cohesion is and how it can be observed. Qualitative research papers speak of “social cohesion” by referring to stability, inter-group cooperation and shared identity; quantitative researchers, on the other hand, talk of “social capital” when referring to trust, networks and reciprocity. This divergence of views might be one reason why the research results are controversial. Moreover, the metastudy of Meer and Tolsma (2014) analyzing 90 research papers on whether sharing a common identity is necessary for supporting the welfare state, confirms the lack of conclusive evidence. The study finds that for every research project supporting the claim that diversity is detrimental to social cohesion, there is one providing evidence to the contrary. In short, scientifically, we really don’t know.
Normative political philosophy has also prominently considered social cohesion and immigration as incompatible. It, therefore, shows a different way of understanding social cohesion from empirical studies. That is “a line of argument” with different premises and conclusions. Moreover, as social cohesion concerns the functioning of societies, it is not evident what exactly makes societies function smoothly. In other words, is it a common political and public culture guaranteed by a shared national identity – as liberal nationalists such as David Miller claim – or universal principles embedded in a constitution, such as post-nationalist in the spirit of Jürgen Habermas have suggested?
As the liberal nationalist interpretation is prominent in most of the public debate on the issue, it makes more sense to focus only on this approach. According to it, social cohesion is normatively valuable for different reasons, for the support of the welfare state policies, liberal democratic institutions or democratic self-determination. In what follows, I will focus on the incompatibility between welfare state and immigration.
When philosophically examined, the incompatibility argument goes, as follows:
Premise 1: Social cohesion is valuable, given that it provides the necessary support to welfare state policies;
Premise 2: Social cohesion can be maintained to the extent that citizens share a common (national) identity;
Premise 3: Immigration renders such a sharing impossible and therefore,
Conclusion: States are justified in implementing restrictive border policies to maintain social cohesion.
As a careful reader could notice, the second premise of the argument is about how the world functions, and therefore is the subject matter of social sciences and not philosophy. Yet, as social sciences have clarified, what we know about this premise is that there is no causal relationship between social cohesion and a shared national identity. This means that even when social cohesion is taken as a line of argument; the incompatibility legend is simply false.
A Reverse Legend
If understood as “a line of argument”, social cohesion, when shared among the majority of citizens, can have counterproductive implications to its own ideals by leading citizens to associate immigration with an idea of a dysfunctional society, where solidarity is lacking. If most societies were to not have many culturally diverse foreign residents, as say in the case of Japan, supporting such an ideal might strengthen the “bonding social cohesion” among similar people. Yet, the current post-immigration societies are already diverse; for example, a quarter of the residents of Switzerland do not have Swiss citizenship. Therefore, the type of cohesion that would currently be beneficial here should bridge the differences due to cultural diversity, if social cohesion was the objective.
To this effect, it seems wiser to take the angle of normative political philosophy, as it points to how political institutions should be designed to support the bridging social cohesion. On the one hand, post-immigration states should ideally apply more open migration regimes to tackle the core of the problem. However, even if that would reflect what a liberal democratic ideal of the equal moral worth of everyone might require, it seems not feasible in the current political climate. Such an option might gain the democratic support of the highly diverse urban spaces, but not the homogenous rural areas. If, however, the political setting could defer more competences to shape their immigration and citizenship policies to urban authorities, as the cultural diversity is more concentrated there, then this would have a higher chance of success.
Perhaps a common urban identity could be more easily generated in an age when national identities are mostly determined by a diametrical opposition to immigrant identities. A focus on what urban citizenship requires in culturally diverse urban spaces has consequently been a recent development in normative political philosophy. The idea would be to focus on concrete examples of living together in cities and how this brings people together to create a layer of city identification, despite their various national identifications. In other words, if indeed a common identity should be shared, nothing requires it to be a national one. Leaving aside the question of how multilayered identities would function, it is evident that a common urban identity might have a better chance of disabling the diametrical opposition between various national identities and thus bridging the differences.
Esma Baycan Herzog has a joint Ph.D. in political science (University of Geneva) and philosophy (KU Leuven) and she is working on Democratic Citizenship in a Mobile and Multicultural World within the nccr – on the move. Her recent publications include: Baycan, Esma, and Matteo Gianni. (2019) “What Is Wrong with the Swiss Minaret Ban?” In Religion and Political Theory: Secularism, Accommodation and The New Challenges of Religious Diversity, eds. Jonathan Seglow and Andrew Shorten. ECPR Press.
References:
– Council of Europe. (2010) New Strategy and Council of Europe Action Plan for Social Cohesion.
– Meer, Tom van der, and Jochem Tolsma. (2014) “Ethnic Diversity and Its Effects on Social Cohesion.” Annual Review of Sociology 40(1): 459–78.
