From Migrant to Citizen: Testing Language, Testing Culture

Christina Slade is Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at City University London. She was Dean of Humanities at Macquarie University from 2003-8 and has taught at a number of Universities including Universiteit Utrecht, as Professor of Media Theory, New York University, La Universidad Ibero Americana and the ITESM, in Mexico City. On Tuesday 16 December 2010 Dr Slade addressed The Sydney Institute alongside Professor Martina Mollering, for the launch of their book From Migrant to Citizen: Testing Language, Testing Culture.

FROM MIGRANT TO CITIZEN: TESTING LANGUAGE, TESTING CULTURE

Christina Slade

I am an Australian living and working in London. My co-editor of From Migrant to Citizen: testing language, testing culture Martina Möllering, now an Australian citizen, is also German. It is not perhaps surprising that we came together on this project.  It sprang from our recognition that debates about linguistic and cultural knowledge, quiescent over the 1990s, were coming to the fore in a number of countries at the beginning of the 21^st century, including those in Europe which were not traditional countries of migration.

While working at the University of Utrecht in 2004 I myself found that as a non-European I was confronted with an immigration regime of startling complexity. As I queued with Moroccans and Poles I talked with them about the newly introduced pre-immigration tests – tests of language and cultural skills applied to non-Western prospective migrants even before they entered the country. As a white Westerner I had not been required to do that test, but should I wish to become a citizen I would have to fulfil the processes of ‘inburgering onderzoek’ – research into my ability to become a burger. That would involve a test including obscure cultural questions about the royal family.

As it was, I was permitted to work in spite of my dismal Dutch: crossing borders is expected of knowledge workers in a globalised world. However those from Morocco would need first to learn some Dutch, and answer questions about Dutch society even to come to the country. Tests are for those deemed a threat to society, the disenfranchised and the poor.] Knowledge of the language and cultures of the Netherlands is assumed to ensure integration into the country and subscription to the shared values of the West .  Yet clearly knowledge of Dutch is not sufficient. Proof came with the murder of Theo van Gogh Mohammed Bouyeri in November 2004.  Bouyeri, a Dutch youth of Moroccan descent, spoke perfect Dutch, and even posted a note in traditional rhyming couplets to the corpse. He would have passed the test without difficulty.

I returned to Australia to find a citizenship test being debated. In the Australian case it would be a re-introduction: as Andrew Buck explains in the second chapter Australia had shared a dictation test with South Africa and Canada that was developed in the late nineteenth century and survived – only in Australia – until the Second World War. Yet in spite of our own mixed success with the earlier test, we turned again to Europe for a model. The Australian government sent a team to the Hague to look at how the Dutch test had been developed. The test was introduced in October 2007 after just over a year of consultation. It was at this point that Martina accosted me in the corridor in my then role of dean at Macquarie. Our concern was that while there was some debate about the tests, the linguistic, legal, sociological philosophical and political aspects of testing were never brought together. The Australian debate was carried out with little reference to the historical context or the pressures of globalisation. I drew together colleagues at Macquarie and devised a project which was funded by the university. We argued that the introduction of the Australian test had to be seen in the wider context in particular in Europe. At the time my European colleagues said ‘never in Sweden’, ‘never in Germany’.

The events of this last summer in Europe  have shown how wrong they were. Underlying a rise of testing regimes across Europe is the phenomenon (discussed by Murray Goot in the Australian case in the book) called ‘nativism’:

Slowly but surely the perception has arisen that the ‘native’ cultures of France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands are at risk of being swamped by the tides of immigrants who breed more than the indigenous majority and who are neither willing nor able to assimilate…This perception, visible in the UK as well, does not always represent racism in its purest form… [C]oncerns about the conservative attitudes of Muslim immigrants, especially in relation to women’s rights, are visible in Sweden. [i]

In July, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy led the French government’s expulsion of over a thousand Roma. In Germany the publication of Thilo Sarrazin’s Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany does away with itself), an anti-immigrant diatribe, led to the author’s resignation from the Board of Germany’s Bundesbank. The anti-immigrant Dutch politician Geert Wilders, whose Freedom Party, PVV, gained what is in effect the balance of power in the elections of 10 June In Sweden, an anti–immigrant party, the Sweden Democrats, gained more than 4% of the vote and thus representation in Parliament for the first time on September 19. These phenomena indicate a general shift in the accepted models of citizenship in Western Europe, reflected in sharpened debate on testing, the introduction of tougher tests in the UK and Netherlands, and a full national testing regime in Germany last year.

It is far too easy to caricature the rise of testing regimes as racist or crudely xenophobic. Issues of values and how a society comports itself are serious; times of economic hardship such as Europe is now suffering always put pressure on the most recent groups of migrants and their right to compete in the job market.  This book is a product of our conviction that we need careful scholarly work to understand the presuppositions of tests for citizenship, to grasp their historical, legal, philosophical and political foundations and to explore how they actually work. We need to consider, as Catriona MacKenzie does, what the limits of toleration are – how far can a multicultural society go without fragmenting into what Amartya Sen calls ‘plural monoculturalism’[ii]? We need to remember that Australia HAD a citizen test for the first part of the 20^th century, as Andrew Buck explains, and how new forms of citizenship arose as Alison Hollond, Lloyd Cox and Ian Tregenza do. And we need to think what we hope to achieve.

Testing regimes invoke 19^th century myth of contained  and homogeneous nation states – the homeland whose clothes and customs defined both a people and a nation. The citizen was supposed to have unique loyalties and shared beliefs. It IS a myth. Australians were all technically British citizens until after the Second World War. Sayla Benhabib puts it trenchantly

We are at a point in the political evolution of communities when the unitary model of citizenship that bundled together residency on a single territory with subjection to a common bureaucratic administration representing a people perceived to be a more or less cohesive entity is at an end’[iii]

The nation state has traditionally had control of the formal mechanisms of citizenship, of the right of work, to passports. In the EU, a transnational entity, those powers are already diluted.  Cultural citizenship is far more globalised.  To take just one case, access to satellite television and the internet means that those of us living away from our countries of birth can watch home television and read home newspapers more or less at will.

In countries of migration such as Australia, we have a long tradition of cultural diversity and tolerance. Why then do we turn to testing regimes at this particular moment? Could the  tests be effective – as they are touted to be – as  a screen for terrorists?  I suggest in the book that they are unlikely to be. Even the revised Australian test, focussing on values and the pledge of allegiance will not screen anyone seriously intending ill.  Would a thief asked whether they intended to obey the rule of law reply ‘no’?

[i] Barber, Financial Times, 4-5 September 2010

[ii] Identity and Violence, The Illusion of Destiny Norton, New York, 2006, pp.156ff

[iii] Another cosmopolitanism, The Berkeley Lectures Oxford, OUP, 2006, p.45