[NON BLOG] Reunification

A minor but important result of my most recent visit to Prince Edward Island was my reunification with certain of my cultural artifacts, after the space of a year and a half. In August of 2003, when it was still theoretically possible that I might return to the Island, there was no immediate rationale for shipping everything with me. In December of 2003, there was no room to allow mass shipments of even the books most significant to me. This December, I travelled with empty bags.

The music was the easiest to accomodate: four Jane Siberry albums (1984's No Borders Here, 1985's The Speckless Sky, 1987's The Walking, and 1989's Bound by the Beauty), Tracy Chapman's self-titled debut album, Peter Gabriel's Us, Mary Jane Lamond's Suas E! and assorted singles.

The books were rather more difficult, and almost as numerous as the several dozen CDs: The 1998 English translation of Dominique Simmonet's innovative Origins: Cosmos, Earth, and Mankind; Jean Anglade's La vie quotidienne des immigrés en France de 1919 à nos jours, a combined overview in statistics and interviews of immigrants in France from the perspective of the 1970s; the copy The Hours that I'd bought almost three years ago now in Richmond, my autographed copy of Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach ("May good spirits guide you"); Theodore Roszak's wise The Cult of Information and John Horgan's The End of Science; a boxed set of the first four volumes of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, a 1960s Fontana paperback of Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man eaturing an introduction by Sir Julian Huxley; the two of the three Terran Trade Authority spacecraft books that I own; Cornelius Howatt: Superstar!, written by David Weale and Harry Baglole and to be blogged by me fairly soon; my 1989 Unwin paperback edition of The Child Garden; my broken-back copy of Dark Mirror and Diane Duane's four Rihannsu novels; my two-volume edition of Alain Peyrefitte's revealing Quand la China s'éveillera ..., bought cheaply at my favourite used book store, in Moncton, four years ago; my collection of Institute of Island Studies books on the sociology, economy, and culture of Island societies.

More recent acquisitions lie on my shelves, too: a $6.95 Bibliothèque Québécoise edition of the collected poems of ?ile Nelligan bought at the Greater Moncton International Airport, drawn from the authoritative 1991 edition; the unexprugated Ghost in the Shell and GURPS Planet Krishna, bought at 40% off at the Grey Region; a lovely new hardcover edition of The Line of Beauty (were I industrious I'd have gotten the Prix Goncourt winner as well).

It's nice to live in a place that feels fully peopled again.

The question of my third language has been settled for me, incidentally. While rummaging about, I happened upon a 2-CD-ROM Spanish-instruction program. So, vivo la lengua española! and orlandobr, forgive me for this and other sins.

[BRIEF NOTE] A Question for Europeans

Back in November, Pearsall Helms wrote the interesting post "Things Americans don't understand about Europe". The central point of this post is that Americans do not understand how national identities in Europe are primordial, and that immigrants simply cannot pick up these new identities easily.

In most parts of Europe, at least in my experience, the indigenous populations tend to see themselves as having national identities that are intertwined with their ethnic/tribal identities, in a way that is completely different from American nationality, which is an ideological concept detached from 'blood-and-soil' legacies. For example, I doubt that by this point in history anywhere near a majority of white Americans can trace their ancestry to a single European ethnic group (my father's roots go to Germany and Northern Ireland and my mother's ancestors, who all arrived before the American Revolution, are from Britain, Holland, and possibly other places that we don't know about because it was so long ago), whereas in Europe you will have far far far more people who can say "all my ancestors back as far as I know have been German/French/Polish/whatever".

There are outliers, sure, like Switzerland (although the Swiss are pretty careful about separating 'foreigners' from the existing German, French, and Italian groups), and in a sense the United Kingdom falls into that category too, but mostly there is a broad connection between ethnic and national identities. Consider that in Germany, the grandchildren of Turkish immigrants are still unequivocally 'Turks' while freshly-arrived volksdeutsch (ethnic Germans) from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are pretty much immediately granted citizenship and seen as fundamentally German. Or the recent referendum in Ireland where 79.17% of voters voted to end the automatic right to citizenship of all babies born in Ireland. Americans have generally remained placid about levels of immigration (illegal and legal) that far outsrip in percentage terms what the various European nations receive.

[. . .]

In a lot of parts of continental Europe, you may speak the language, you may dress the same way as the locals, you may have been born there, but to many (the majority?) of the locals, you are fundamentally an outsider. You are always going to be a Turk, or an Arab, or an African, and that is that. The multiculturalism that is officially encouraged doesn't help matters because it legitimizes ethnic separation and encourages the local population to see the newcomers as a permanent foreign presence.

I don't contest Pearsall's analysis; he is, after all, in Europe. The problem that I have with it, though, is that it seems to go against the realities of massive immigration. In the case of France, for instance, Gérard Noiriel has examined the dynamics behind immigrant assimilation in France: Belgians and Italians and Spanish and Poles in the Third Republic, Maghrebins and Portuguese and Italians and Chinese and ex-colonials in the Fifth, France has taken on proportionally as many immigrants as the United States since the end of the Second Empire. Germany's immigration history might seem at first glance rather shorter, but quite apart from the massive immigrations into West Germany after the Second World War, Germany has managed to successfully assimilate, among other groups, the the Ruhr-Poles (German-language link). Saskia Sassen's Financial Times article "The migration fallacy", published on the 27th of December, talks at length about this selective historical amnesia.

Each phase of European Union enlargement has raised the spectre of mass migrations from poverty to prosperity. The prospect of Turkish membership is only the latest development to prompt concerns that western Europe will be unable to absorb such movements.

But western Europe actually has a history of assimilating millions of immigrants, albeit with difficulty. That is why, following five centuries of intra-European migration, Europeans are a rather mixed people: one-quarter of French people, for instance, have a foreign-born parent or grandparent; in Vienna, the figure is 40 per cent. How did Europe achieve this integration?

( The rest of the article. )

Sassen, though, says very little about the reasons for these convenient lacuna. What factors--social, economic, political--lie behind the creation of this yawning gaps in the national memories of Europe? (And not only Europe, mind, but leave that aside for now.)