ABSTRACT
It has become apparent since the late 1990s that European integration politics did not work out well (Kaya 2009). Multiculturalist policies and assimilationist policies have failed to prompt migrants and minorities to organize and represent themselves in legitimate political structures. On the contrary, these two types of policies might have had the effect of further imprisoning migrants and their descendants in their own ghettoes. Various governmental policies concerning immigrants have contributed to the othering, re-minorization and re-ethnicization of immigrant populations in Western European countries, especially those of Muslim origin. Aras Ören, a Turkish novelist and poet, warns of the dangers inherent in the acceptance of otherness and cultural difference:
[I am afraid that while] the conservatives [assimilationists] lock us into our cultural ghetto by preserving the culture we brought with us as it is and by denying that there can be symbiosis or development . . . the progressives [multiculturalist liberals] try to drive us back into that same ghetto because, filled with enthusiasm, by the originality and exoticism of our culture, they champion it so fervently that they are even afraid it might disappear, be absorbed by German [Western] culture. (quoted in Suhr 1989: 102)
In the last decade, in several countries, we have been witnessing a shift from an indifferent multiculturalism to a more coercive form of monoculturalism. Community boundaries in the member states of the European Union are being redrawn due to the (re)ascendancy of ethno-culturalist and religious discourse as opposed to the perceived destabilizing forces and effects of globalization, such as deindustrialization, insecurity, poverty and unemployment. In this chapter, I argue that it is in this light that migrants and their descendants feel the urge to find methods and tactics to come to terms with the new forms of governmentality,1 in turn themselves taking recourse to ethnic and religious references and communal values. In particular, this chapter aims to examine how ‘ Euro-Turks’ reconstruct their community boundaries, focusing on honor, marriage and religion. The term ‘ Euro-Turk’ is used here for convenience, employed to refer to the migrants and their children of Turkish national origin who live in Western Europe. It is not employed in an attempt to propose new labels that contribute to or obstruct the integration of immigrant populations of Muslim Turkish
origin into the European way of life, or any such efforts by the people and their communities themselves.2 The term does manifest the existence of two antithetical processes taking place simultaneously in the life-worlds of immigrants of Turkish descent and their children. And such hyphenated identities do also refer to the fact that identities and cultures do not have fixed boundaries, and thus that they are always in the making. In fact, the hyphen addresses the fact that there is something anew on the way. This chapter will shed light upon the contemporary dynamics of community construction by Turkish origin migrants and their descendants, referred to as Euro-Turks, in Western European countries.3
