A scholar explores the relationship between democracy and immigrants
Could there be a better time than this for a scholar to publish a book about foreigners in democracies? Or, in the current climate, will people turn deaf ears to it?
Bonnie Honig, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, is finding out. Her book Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton University Press) came out the week before the terrorist attacks of September 11. After her initial horror and grieving over the devastation, she allowed herself a selfish thought. “Do you realize this book is dead?” she said to her husband. “Who is going to be interested in a critique of xenophobia right now?”
An understandable concern, to be sure. And yet Ms. Honig has been in considerable demand since the publication of her book. She has been interviewed by the BBC and by public radio in Chicago -- a rare political theorist among the many area experts and geopolitical commentators -- and is lecturing about the book on college campuses.
Reactions to foreigners in the United States since September 11 reflect a deep national ambivalence: Government officials affirm respect for Islam and Muslim Americans, while placing new restrictions on immigration and student visas. Television commercials celebrate the multicolored face of America, yet fear of terrorists is widespread, and people of Middle Eastern origin have been attacked.
Those tensions are no accident, according to Ms. Honig. Ambivalence about foreigners and foreignness, she argues, is at the very heart of democratic politics.
Close to Home
Ms. Honig has long been preoccupied with such themes. The dedication in Democracy and the Foreigner, hints at why: “For my parents, David and Schewa Honig, whose foreignness shaped their lives and mine.” Her parents emigrated from Romania and Poland to Montreal, where Ms. Honig was born and raised. She grew up hearing a mixture of Yiddish and English at home, attending an Orthodox Hebrew day school, and watching her parents “negotiate” their foreignness as immigrants, as Jews, and as members of Montreal’s minority Anglophone community.
Foreigners such as her parents, argues Ms. Honig, in the unmistakable Canadian accent that still marks her speech, play an essential role in democratic societies -- not only in economic and demographic terms but in symbolic ones. The ideals of American democracy, which have influenced liberal democracies around the world, rely crucially on the notion of consent as the basis of citizenship: What makes someone an American is that he or she agrees to be one. Ms. Honig is quick to acknowledge that American democracy was not founded entirely on voluntary immigration; the story is instead a “more complicated and messy” one involving “conquest, appropriation, purchase, genocide, and immigration, both voluntary and not.”
Still, as she recently explained on public radio, “It’s very important to our democracy that people understand themselves as having come here out of choice, as living here voluntarily, as being here because it’s a good place to be. Immigrants perform this for us.” By raising their hands and taking the pledge of citizenship, immigrants formally enact the consent upon which our political system depends, yet which native-born citizens only tacitly affirm.
While democracies thus depend heavily on outsiders, she argues, a deep anxiety about foreigners persists simultaneously. We need immigrants, and yet we’re “nervous about what [they] are going to do to our democracy. We criminalize alien populations, bar them from political activity, marginalize them in terms of the labor force,” she explains. “We practice xenophobia and xenophilia at the same time.”
In the United States, where public participation in the political process has declined, we’ve become even more dependent on this symbolic work the foreigner does for us, Ms. Honig argues. With shrinking percentages of Americans voting in elections, less consent is exercised via the mechanisms of representative democracy. That makes it all the more important, she says, to recall that our democracy is sustained by continuously arriving consenting immigrants, people who “vote with their feet.”
The Foreign Unconscious
But the role of the foreigner in democratic politics goes even deeper, according to Ms. Honig. One section of Democracy and the Foreigner is devoted to “the foreigner as founder": instances, drawn from sources as diverse as the biblical Book of Ruth, The Wizard of Oz, Rousseau’s Social Contract, the movie Shane, and Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, in which a foreigner turns out to be nothing less than a community’s founding figure.
In The Social Contract, for example, Rousseau used the foreign founder to resolve a dilemma. The legitimacy of a regime must rest with the people, but there is no guarantee that the people will see beyond their factional interests toward the common good. His answer was the “alien lawgiver” -- someone whose outsiderness places him above the messy disputes internal to society.
The problem of founding, Ms. Honig argues, is not simply shrouded in history; it is something we face continually. “Every day, you have to reconstitute the members of your society into a self-understanding,” she says, in which citizens “see themselves as a collective.” Virtually every nation “has had this anxious relationship to an outside that was always already inside.”
That’s why the foreign founder “pops up repeatedly in Western culture, high and low,” writes Ms. Honig. The biblical Moses was something of a foreign founder to begin with -- a Jewish child, raised by Egyptians, who handed down God’s laws to the Israelites. Freud speculated, however, that Moses was not Jewish at all but, rather, an Egyptian mythically imagined to have been a Jew, and thus a particularly juicy example of Ms. Honig’s foreign founder.
Even Dorothy, in The Wizard of Oz, can be viewed as a kind of foreign founder. Ms. Honig sees her as “the émigré, the stranger, the foreigner who arrives inexplicably from elsewhere” and liberates the people of Oz through her encounters with their wicked and chimerical rulers.
Drawing on “texts” from popular culture is nothing new in literary studies and other humanities. It’s unusual, though, in political theory, where the objects of interpretation remain the canonical books of the tradition. The appearance of popular movies side by side with works of political philosophy is not something one is likely to find, say, in the pages of the journal Political Theory (for which Ms. Honig serves as book-review editor).
Ms. Honig’s analysis of the centrality of foreigners to democracy is, according to Rogers M. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “both topical and of enduring importance.” She has highlighted a theme, he says, that has “rarely [been] explored so explicitly and evocatively.”
As a whole, Ms. Honig’s scholarship has yet to occasion much criticism or debate. An early encounter with a harsh critic, however, made a lasting impression on her. At a conference two years out of graduate school, one academic (whom she will not identify by name) gave what she calls a “rant of a discussant comment” in response to a paper Ms. Honig had delivered that was critical of the political philosopher John Rawls. She says that a number of people approached her after the panel to say that they had “never seen anything like that before.”
“But I learned from it,” she says. She asked herself what it was about her approach to the subject that provoked such an extreme reaction. She rewrote that paper in its entirety to get “really inside” Rawls’s work, to “feel it in its bones and in its veins.” The experience taught her, she says, to say “yes” to the thinker one is studying before moving into a critique. “There must be something in every thinker’s work that you can take some inspiration from.” It is a lesson, she says, that has stayed with her.
The Personal Is Theoretical
Ms. Honig first left Canada and got what she calls “the bug” for political theory after college, when she went to the London School of Economics and Political Science and earned a master’s degree under the influential political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. She began to feel a deep excitement “about debates and thinkers who are long dead,” she says, but whose ideas were far from moot. She started to believe “in the small powers of political-cultural analysis and rhetorical appeal.”
Of the many thinkers who have influenced Ms. Honig, Rousseau and Hannah Arendt are the most important. “They’re both radical thinkers,” she says, “in the sense that they think things through all the way down to their roots.” Both explored, in original and penetrating ways, the core questions of political theory: equality and inequality, legitimacy and illegitimacy, democracy and power. “They go where their questions take them,” Ms. Honig says, “and they don’t stop short when those questions take them into places they don’t want to be. I admire that about both of them.”
It wasn’t until her third or fourth year in the doctoral program at the Johns Hopkins University that she decided to make political theory a career. Until that point, it was simply about learning, she says -- study as an end in itself. “That might have come from having been educated in an Orthodox setting,” she reflects. “You can go to Yeshiva forever” -- with the qualification, she hastens to add, “if you’re a guy.”
That career has not been without its bumps. She landed a job at Harvard University, where she wrote Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell University Press, 1993), which argues that the dominant schools of thought in contemporary political theory eschew politics -- in the sense of conflict and discord -- in their relentless quest for reconciliation and harmony. Against this approach, she advocated a view of political life, influenced by Arendt, as an irreducible contest among multiple agents. That book won the American Political Science Association’s 1994 award for the best first book in political theory. By the time Ms. Honig came up for tenure, she had also edited the volume Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). But in 1997, despite thumbs-up votes from the government department and a higher-level panel established to judge her candidacy, Harvard’s president, Neil L. Rudenstine, rejected her tenure (The Chronicle, June 6, 1997). She prefers not to talk about the experience, and her time at Harvard is not even listed on her curriculum vitae.
Northwestern hired Ms. Honig for a half-time appointment as a tenured full professor, along with her husband, Michael Whinston, an economist who received tenure at Harvard. She spends the rest of her time at the American Bar Foundation, a think tank dealing with law and legal institutions, where she is a senior research fellow. (She is free to become full time at Northwestern whenever she chooses, but prefers the latitude her split appointment gives her.)
The Theory in Action
While the current political climate has thrust her book before audiences who might not otherwise have seen it, Ms. Honig fears that the anti-xenophobic message of Democracy and the Foreigner is unlikely to resonate now.
That is why it is important, Ms. Honig argues, to have a continuing discussion about the politics of foreignness. Society’s “scripts” about foreigners influence us in ways we’re “maybe not even conscious of,” and those scripts “get mobilized at their most intense during periods of crisis,” when there is no time to think.
One concern she voices is that measures like the restrictions on immigrants contained in new anti-terrorism legislation won’t be temporary. “It’s very difficult to pull back” from emergency measures taken in times of crisis, she says. “Sometimes those crises are real and sometimes they’re not, and sometimes they’re not as big as it’s said they are.”
Ms. Honig calls President Bush’s recent decision to institute emergency military tribunals to detain and try suspected terrorists “cause for concern on the part of any proponent of democracy.” It’s difficult to justify such measures, she says, “because the things that justify them all have to be secret, so there’s no allowance for democratic debate about them.” The “asymmetries” in who possesses information are extreme at the moment, she says, a situation that “makes public debate and criticism much more difficult.”
“As citizens and residents of the regime,” she says, “it is important for all of us to express our opinions about these new developments.”
As a political theorist, however, Ms. Honig retains a degree of caution about venturing judgments on current affairs. “I am used to taking some time to reflect about events,” she says. “Theory requires of us that we digest the news and think about it slowly in relation to texts and histories that precede and exceed the everyday.”
Forever Foreign
If Ms. Honig grew up the daughter of Eastern European immigrants in Canada, she is a foreigner herself today in the United States. The first item on her vita, after her name, reads “Citizenship: Canadian.”
Despite having lived in the United States for two decades now -- her entire adult life, in effect -- she has never sought American citizenship. It isn’t simply a matter of not having gotten around to it; she has made a conscious decision.
Asked why, she responds simply, “I’m Canadian.” To become a U.S. citizen, she says, would “feel as strange as changing my name just because I got married. It would be weird.”
And yet there is almost nothing about Canada in her writing. The United States, in contrast, enjoys virtual center stage under her theoretical microscope. “The self-images of American democracy, as consent-worthy and legitimate” are exported and disseminated widely, she says. They “affect the way many liberal democracies see themselves.”
“I don’t live in Canada, and I haven’t lived there for 20 years. So I’m not as informed about Canadian cultural politics now,” she says.
It’s not clear whether, by remaining in the United States, Ms. Honig “consents,” in effect, to the American polity. Perhaps in her case the ambivalence the state feels toward the foreigner is a two-way street.
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