GLOBALISATION AND ETHNICITY

Globalization and Ethnicity

Globalization and Ethnicity

Introduction

While the term 'globalization' generally refers to “a late twentieth century condition of economic, social, and political interdependence across cultures, societies, nations, and regions precipitated by an unprecedented expansion of capitalism on a global scale” the implications of the term are not so straight-forward. Critics of the term 'globalization' suggest, as Lisa Lowe notes, that “[the term] obscures a much longer history of global contacts and connections…[in which] Asian, Arab, and European civilizations mingled through trade, travel, and resettlement…[and] yet today the term 'globalization' is used to name a specific set of late twentieth-century transformations” that involve “Western European and North American dominance” and, thereby, suggest that this “relatively recent global interconnection” is a new phenomenon pioneered by western Europe and the United States, as opposed to a centuries old practice engineered and carried out by earlier eastern civilizations (Porterfield 1998).

Many of today's debates about immigration have to do with arguments around the positive and negative effects of increased ethnic diversity and who should be entitled to legal membership. Immigrant political incorporation is more than often considered a difficult process for outsiders but it is expected to be somewhat of an advantage if one arrives as a legal immigrant and implied as a member of a host society due to either shared legal citizenship or co-ethnicity. Hence, one would expect the Frances' “civic” and liberal and Japan's “ethnic” and conservative traditions and institutions to effectively incorporate their respective overseas citizens and co-ethnics. If political incorporation is difficult for legal immigrants advantaged with the same legal citizenship or dominant ethnicity of the host country, it should be even more daunting for the multitudes of others without legal or ethnic ties. As immigration continues to escalate and many legal residents of immigrant or ethnic minority background with legal citizenship or without it are effectively excluded from participation in the political systems of many countries, these issues are of particular relevance to the maintenance of democracy around the world. In this way, studying the political incorporation of legal immigrants who share the legal citizenship or dominant ethnicity of the host society can say a lot about what impedes or facilitates the political incorporation of all new immigrants and marginalized groups.

Algerian History in France

Nomads and hordes were more than orientalist tropes in nineteenth-century France and Algeria, they were also figures of social disorder and political upheaval. After the 1789 Revolution destroyed guilds and corporations, French laborers competed individually for work, which led to deracination and economic precariousness. In the early 1830s, a state official called such migrants “the Bedouins of France.” In another tribal reference, Tocqueville compared the worker-insurgents of June 1848 to “the Vandals and the Goths” who sacked ancient Rome (Porterfield 1998) . Similar anxieties about nomads abounded in colonial North Africa. Following the 1830 conquest of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers, tribes people eluded colonial authorities by migrating seasonally to trade, plant, and graze their ...