|
|
|
|
Fall 1999: The Anonyms of Globalization
Initially, the contributions to this special issue of Cultures et Conflits were papers for a conference in Aix-en-Provence on Transnational Networks. This conference was the final result of a several years research program about economic networks between Europe and North Africa. This program shed light on the anonymous cultural and economic practices involved by globalization. The study of these entrepreneurs, merchants, religious leaders’ behaviors permitted to focus on the heteregenous dimensions of globalization rather than the homogeneous one. That is why a theoretical reflection concerning the sociological approach of globalization is necessary as well a methodological invesigation through network analysis.
This article deals with the application of the term “transnational” to religious identities in the field of migration, using the example of Turkish Islam settled in Germany. With a preference for the concept of “transnational space”, the author studies the resources mobilised by different categories of actors (individual as well as collective) of the Islamic Turkish associative network in Germany, linking it with the coincidence of constraints and opportunities related to both the context of residence (Germany) and the one of origin (Turkey). After a review of the debate on transnationalism, V. Amiraux puts the notion of “deterritorialisation” at the core of her analysis. Indeed, far from showing the end of a territorial definition of State action, transnationalism reformulates its mode of acting, adding new and original alternatives to it, especially as far as local and transborder dynamics are concerned. These dynamics are particularly relevant, even if limited, with regards to the post-migratory configuration in which political participation does not systematically take place in the place of residence. Then, from a constraint deriving from migration, transnationalism gives rise to a space where links, modes of belongings and identities, including the religious one, can be built up with more autonomy and mobility.
From empirical work undertaken on the commercial activity of migrant contractors in the district Belsunce in Marseilles, this article suggests some tracks of reflexions on the economic and social “complex” in which these actors are committed. Even if these activities of trade, or hawking raise, for a share, of what it is agreed to call “underground economy”, the article advances that they melt more probably the frameworks of a new “economy of bazaar”. That is to say an economy combining the substrate of Community relations and the urban forms of sociability, by privileging the interpersonal exchanges with the detriment of conventional frameworks. These exchanges are deployed on commercial trade routes and places which cover the extent of the migratory movements of this century.
This article relates to the organisational dimensions of the operation (ou working ou functioning) of various migrant groups to Europe, originating for most of them from Third countries (Tunisian and North African, Turks, Asians...) whom are very active and enterprising in the field of the private initiative and in the participation in the economic exchanges and transfers on a transnational scale. This economic dimension (entrepreneurial and independent activities, multipolarised circulation and mobility...) is in fact carried and promoted by very effective modes of communal organisation on the scale of the social advancement and control of the territories and spaces of mobility.
How it becomes possible that the geographical dispersion of a social group transforms itself into a “space resource”? The Chinesediaspora provides us an answer. Several narrowly overlapping processes allow this transformation. They take their origin in the special relationship that the diaspora maintains with the territory and in the effort which is made to think the unit of a dispersed group. One process consists in creating a genealogical continuity through the creation of one memory / history specific to the diaspora. Another process concerns the way according to which this genealogical continuity is transformed into geographical adjacency. Another finally consists of the way in which the relationship with territory, in this traditional meaning of space circumscribed by the presence of a perennial population, is replaced by a feeling of extra-territoriality. After having described these processes we will see how space resources are mobilized.
One of the most important characteristics of the new migration landscape in Europe since the end of eighties is the possibility for the citizens of Eastern and Central Europe not only to leave their country of origin but also to return to it. Their free circulation is taking place in an ever larger border space and in a context where Western Europe is practically closed to immigration, i.e. little open to permanent settlement of immigrants. The first section of the text presents the evolution of these circulatory or pendulum migrations in the period of post-communist transition.
In the second section the author draws on her own field work and analyses the strategies of pendulum migrants, and more specifically of traders and sojourners. The author compares their strategies to those of the self-employed immigrants and ethnic entrepreneurs. In order to circumvent blocked opportunities the ones set on to travel, the latter set up their enterprises. Whereas the latter seek stability, settlement and support among the resources and networks of their own community, the pendulum migrants have as their primary resource their mobility and their capacity to stay mobile long time. The networks that they set up are, like Granovetter’s “weak ties”, functional networks of “friends of passage”, often transnational and not based on the existence “strong ties” of primary groups. They are dissolved and again reconstituted all along the migrants itinerary, conditioned by their economic objectives.
The analysis shows that the circulatory migration is an alternative to emigration-immigration, a strategy of the migrant to improve her/his situation, without having to leave her/his country of origin permanently.
Each phase in the long history of the world economy raises specific conditions that make it possible. The current phase of economic globalization emphasises hypermobility, global communications and the neutralisation of place and distance. However, these aspects mustn’t occur that some resources (place and production process) for global economic activities are usually deeply embedded in place, notably places such as global cities. In this context, the duality national versus global doesn’t seem to be relevant. One of the main purposes of this paper is to recapture the geography of places involved in globalization: how interact global and national territories on which are located institutional arrangements for production? The implantation of global processes in major cities has led to new politico-alignments that characterises global cities.
As the word “diaspora” is currently more and more commonly used in the field of social sciences, its meaning and the heuristic scope of its use are still very blurred. It is possible, from critical reading of three recent and important books on this topic, to highlight the epistemological and theoretical problems characterizing the common use of “diaspora”. Considered, as it is often the case, as a given and not as a social product, it misses all the fluctuations of state that shape the structuration of collective experience abroad.
This article examines Hobbes’ theory of the social contract and Hegel’s theory of the fight for recognition as the starting point for a revived and revised theory of the political legitimation of the economic and social orders. First, it identifies work a the common and overarching principle of these orders and its definition provides the touchstone for a plausible theory of their political legitimation. Beyond the productive dimension to the activity of work, this approach is rooted in the acquisition by ch individual of certain gifts that he/she has received from nature, then proceeds to the assumption of an economic position related to these gifts. To capture the entirety of the activity of this work, and the persons who implement, define, and represent t, the article breaks up economic and social orders into three dimensions: (1) pre-political; (2) economic; and (3) political. In conclusion, certain contemporary theories of legitimacy are analyzed from the perspective of theoretical and methodological i ues embedded within these theories of social contract and recognition, to illustrate their contemporary reference.