Australia and New Zealand and the Brexit decision - 15th November 2016

I have recently spent several weeks in Australia and New Zealand.  One topic raised by many of those I met was the result of June’s UK referendum on EU membership.  People in the Antipodes are very interested in what is happening, and also what it means to them.  Being 18000 kilometres away also lends some perspective to anyone from Europe with views on the referendum outcome.

The attitude of almost all I spoke to was bafflement.  Why was the UK about to quit the European Union?  What did the British think about the future of trading relationships?  Had people in Britain reverted to a ‘little Englander’ mentality?  Everyone to whom I posed the question “how would you have voted” said they would have wanted to stay in the EU – and I only posed that question to those of British extraction (of whom I met a number, perhaps inevitably more in New Zealand than Australia).  There was also some amazement at the way in which old Commonwealth ties with Australia and New Zealand seemed to have been brought into some of the Brexiteers’ arguments – “Australia is keen to sign a free trade agreement with the UK” and so on.

If we look at the trade data we can see that the economic world has changed.  Statistics from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) for 2014 show that Germany is a bigger gross partner in goods than the UK – at twice the level of exports to Australia, although the UK imports more.  But in total, trade flows between the UK and Australia are worth AUS $ 10 million each year, whilst the value is AUS $ 18 millions with Germany.  The picture for New Zealand is not that different.  In total 6% of New Zealand’s exports are to the UK – but a further 8% are to the rest of the European Union.  Trade with the UK is just not that important now for either of Britain’s traditional cousin countries in the Antipodes.  In relation to Australian exports of goods, Britain lies in 8^th place as a consumer, after China, Japan, South Korea, the USA, Singapore, New Zealand, and Malaysia.  And amongst countries exporting goods to Australia the UK lies in 10^th place – after China, the USA, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Germany, Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand.

The UK holds a slightly more important place in New Zealand trade – the UK is the fifth biggest buyer of New Zealand goods and services (after Australia, China, the USA and Japan), but it falls down the ranks of those exporting to New Zealand, coming after those four countries but also Germany, South Korea and Malaysia.

Over half of Australia’s exports are minerals and raw materials – and the country that is hungriest for these is China.  New Zealand’s exports are more orientated to agricultural products – but once again the prime market is China, particularly after scandals there over contaminated milk led to increased demand for ‘pure’ products from a reliable source: I saw a huge new milk powder factory on the Canterbury Plains near Christchurch built specifically for this purpose.

Australia and New Zealand have re-orientated their economies since the old days of Imperial Preference.  The notion of a Commonwealth free trade area has been raised at various Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings over many years – and was raised again in support of arguments for Brexit.  But today’s reality for Australia and New Zealand is that trade agreements with nearby Asian countries are of considerably greater significance.

But the bafflement on the part of the people I met in Australia and New Zealand was not just about economic factors.  Many people in Britain still see Australia (and more particularly New Zealand) as a version of England.  Older people in the UK (more likely than the younger population to vote to leave the European Union) still remember the £10 passage and the ‘White Australia’ policy (which was actually abandoned 50 years ago in 1966) which helped to preserve an English flavour to the country.  But although those of English ethnicity remain the biggest minority group in Australia, the total of the next seven groups (Irish, Scottish, Italian, German, Chinese, Indian, and Greek) outweighs the English.  Australia is more of a multicultural society than many people imagine – and whilst elements of the population still look to the UK as some distant version of ‘home’, many others look to Italy or Greece, Ireland or Germany.  They are anxious about what a British separation from the rest of the European Union might mean.

This seems to be acutely felt in New Zealand where, in a small country (in terms of population) there has been a long tradition of young people gaining ‘OE’ – overseas experience.  There are even government web sites providing advice on how to make the most of an extended period of working abroad.  The UK, and particularly London, has traditionally been the main base for OE – in part because of the ease with which it can be used as a base for trips to visit other parts of Europe.  But, as one taxi driver put it to me, if travel between London and the rest of Europe becomes more bureaucratically encompassed then perhaps young New Zealanders will look elsewhere for their ‘OE’.

In fact they are already doing so.  More and more are visiting China, Vietnam or other parts of East Asia.  And that is a reasonable reflection of geopolitical and social realities for both Australia and New Zealand.  As with their trade flows, and patterns of inward investment, they are now orientated to the rest of the west Pacific rim – and much less to a distant Europe.  I was particularly impressed by the dependence of the New Zealand tourist industry on Chinese visitors  - I encountered many more Chinese than English, for example.  And in many places in New Zealand leaflets are now being produced in Mandarin as the principal second language.

So in both Australia and New Zealand there is surprise at the outcome of the UK’s June referendum on EU membership: surprise based on a feeling that many in Britain are harking back to a vision of a past series of relationships that has now been drastically transformed.  Connections with the UK (except perhaps over cricket and rugby) are not the priority that they once were.

But perhaps the perception of the UK from the Antipodes has itself been affected by the referendum debate.  When one Australian tourist I met in New Zealand found out where I was from she exclaimed “England? Isn't that full of blacks (sic) now?”  Thus populist political rhetoric reaches the other side of the world.

Islamic headscarves: a sideshow - 5th September 2016

Until she was in her mid-40s my mother, a lifelong Methodist, would never have dreamt of going to church on Sunday without wearing a hat.   There are many Christian churches today where most women still wear hats, often quite flamboyant ones, particularly those churches with an Afro-Caribbean origin.  They are keeping up a tradition associated with a passage in Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 11.  My father never wore a hat in church – again following advice in Corinthians where a distinction is made between the requirements for men and for women.

The other day I was sitting in Bloomsbury Square in London and a large Jewish family group came to sit on the grass near me.  They were speaking in a mixture of American-accented English and Hebrew.  All the adult women had headscarves, and all but one of the men was wearing a kippah or skull-cap.  Clearly they were following practices recommended in the Talmud.

In my class at secondary school there was Sikh boy who wore a turban.

As I wrote in a separate blog (http://www.paulwhiteplaces.blogspot.co.uk - August 2016), I recently spent some time in the Goutte d’Or district of Paris, where many West African women were buying and selling goods in the street whilst adorned with their colourful ankle-length dresses and matching head coverings.

It is common nowadays throughout Europe to encounter Islamic women who cover their heads with a khimaar, hijab or scarf, although some also wear this around their necks and only raise it to their heads from time to time as a mark of respect.  They are following the guidance of the Qu'ran.

The tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam all have things to say about requirements for modesty in women, including head covering.  Islam and Judaism in particular also talk about modesty for men.  But a quick search of the internet shows that in each of these religions a great deal is left to the interpretation of rather vague passages in the relevant texts, particularly in Judaism and Islam.   Hence the great variety of practice between women (and men) adhering to different beaches of the faith, or coming from particular parts of the world.  And there is today a much wider and more significant question about the extent to which these various practices count as religious or cultural or both.  Religion is part of culture, so such practices could be said to be both.

Why this matters is because of the increasing level of debate over the wearing of the Islamic veil by women, and its possible prohibition.  A number of countries, or local authorities, have established bans on full face-veils – often in schools, sometimes more broadly in public places or in courts. France and Belgium brought in bans in 2011, the Ticino (in Switzerland) in 2013: some cities in Italy have followed suit, as has Barcelona in Spain.  A number of German Länder have banned all forms of Islamic headscarf in schools, whilst Denmark – in what is perhaps a more even-handed gesture – has since 2008 banned the wearing of certain religious identifications in courtrooms: Islamic veils but also Jewish skull-caps and Sikh turbans.

Meanwhile Turkey has gone in the opposite direction, with a loosening of earlier bans on certain items of Islamic dress and with the President clearly wishing to encourage a more all-embracing view of what should be classed as Islamic ‘modesty’.

In the last few weeks we have had the escalation of events in France with attempts to ban the ‘burkini’ on beaches on the Côte d’Azur.  In Germany the ruling Christian Democratic Union (the CDU) has adopted a policy of bringing in a federal ban on the headscarf.

In Britain the Sun columnist Kelvin MacKenzie objected to Channel 4 News having a hijab­-wearing Muslim woman covering the terrorist attack in Nice on Bastille Day.  Yet this could equally well be celebrated as showing the more tolerant attitudes in the UK than in several other European countries where such dress would not be allowed at all for a television employee.

Issues of the integration of ethnic minorities are to the fore in almost every European country, focused particularly on Islamic populations.  Yet it is odd that the symbolic centrepiece of the discussion has become what women wear on their heads (and only Islamic women at that).  Commentators lament that the headscarf shows the oppression of Muslim women by men, yet many Islamic women (as also many Jewish women talking about their scarves or wigs, and many Afro-Caribbean women wearing their big hats to church) see what they wear as part of their personal identity and their feeling of who they are.  I’m sure my mother felt the same.   

And in the case of the burkini, it has been a passage of only 60 years – much less than a lifetime – between the period when women on many European beaches were asked to cover up their new bikinis, and today when we have images of police officers on the beach at Nice requiring women to remove some of their clothing in order to be allowed to stay put.

Certainly the creation of cohesive societies embracing people of diverse origins is something that many people hold as a key goal throughout Europe.  But legislating on clothing is a sideshow in comparison to the real issues for progress.  It would be very strange if the success of integration policies was to be measured solely by Islamic women giving up wearing the headscarf or veil.

Attitudes to minorities with particular reference to France - 27th July 2016

Most countries in Europe these days sign most international conventions relating to anything to do with human rights.  So here’s a riddle – what Convention have the following four countries (and only these) not signed up to – Andorra, Monaco, France and Turkey?

Back in the late 1990s I was asked to act as joint rapporteur for a Council of Europe delegation visiting Russia to consider what that country was doing to guarantee equality of opportunity and civil rights for members of the many non-Russian ethnic minorities present there.  (My fellow rapporteur was a woman who was a leading figure in pursuing the rights of Hungary’s Roma population.)   Apart from presentations about policies we also met representatives of communities such as the Bashkirs, Tatars and Circassians, as well as the chief rabbi of Moscow.  Russia had signed the convention on the protection of national  minorities a year or two earlier, in 1996, and was preparing for its first official inspection.

France, Turkey and the two smaller states of Andorra and Monaco will not have to make such preparations.  For they are the only European countries that have not signed the ‘Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities’, a measure that was agreed by almost all Council of Europe states in 1995.  (I will add here that a handful of other European states have signed the Convention but not yet ratified it – I will return to them later.)

So why have France and Turkey not signed the Convention, and what are the consequences of them not having done so?

The Convention is actually rather vague on the definition of ‘national minorities’, leaving this up to individual governments.  But a general definition would be of groups of a distinctive and different ethnicity (religion, language, family or political customs and so on) from that associated with the country as a whole or with its state ideology and self-identity, with the added proviso that these groups should not be primarily the product of recent migration flows.  Roma gypsies are thus a national minority in almost every European state, and Jewish communities could be regarded in a similar light (certainly that was the case in my visit to Moscow in 1999).  But almost every European country has one or more national minorities within its borders:  Catalans, Galicians and Basques in Spain; Frisians in the Netherlands; Welsh- and Scots Gaelic-speakers in the United Kingdom; French- and German- speakers in Italy; Turks in Bulgaria; German-speakers in Romania; Swedish-speakers in Finland; Russians in Estonia and Lithuania – the list goes on.

The Framework Convention guarantees the right of such groups to preserve their cultures, with a responsibility for signing governments (and I quote from the web site relating to the Convention - http://www.coe.int/it/web/minorities/fcnm-factsheet -“to promote full and effective equality of persons belonging to minorities in all areas of economic, social, political, public and cultural life together with conditions that will allow them to express, preserve and develop their culture, religion, language and traditions. They have to ensure their freedom of assembly, association, expression, thought, conscience, religion and their access to and use of media. The Convention also provides guidelines for their linguistic freedom and rights regarding education.”

Is it that France and Turkey have not signed the Convention because they have no national minorities within their boundaries?  Of course not.  France has significant and historic groups of Bretons, French Basques, Alsatians, Catalans and Flemish within its borders, not to speak of a substantial Roma presence; and Turkey has the Kurds.  (We can leave Andorra and Monaco on one side here – both under the geopolitical influence of France.)

Here we get to a wider issue, in some ways, than that of attitudes to national minorities.  This is about the self-image of states and peoples.  The 1^st article of the Constitution of the French 5^th Republic says: “France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic.” La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale in the original.  The gloss on that word ‘indivisible’ talks about the uniform application of law across the whole of national territory (see http://www.vie-publique.fr/decouverte-institutions/institutions/veme-republique/heritages/quels-sont-principes-fondamentaux-republique-francaise.html). But ‘indivisibility’ also means that there is only one way to be French, with no special provisions for any sub-group.  And that leads to a failure to make any special provision for those who might be ‘other French’ – and no recognition of any specific rights for them, or the promulgation of policies towards them.  Hence France does not recognize the concept of ‘National Minorities’, since to do so would undermine the rhetoric and ideology of ‘indivisible France.’ 

But this goes further, to affect France’s more recent diverse communities of migrant origin.  Whilst British officialdom enumerates (for example through the census) and monitors policy outcomes in terms of definitions of ‘Black British’, ‘British Caribbean’, ‘British-born Chinese’ and other groups, the whole idea of ethnic varieties of French-ness is anathema across the Channel.  So it is not only the contrast between the recognition of the Basques in Spain (official with a degree of local autonomy) and France (ignored and suffering cultural decline) that is significant, but also the contrast between the treatment and discourse around Islamic and other groups in, say France and the UK. 

The lack of France’s signature to the Framework Convention on National Minorities is indicative of something broader – a normative and traditional view of what it is to be French.  This goes along with a historically assimilationist view of the aims for the integration of ‘new’ or ‘other’ groups in the country: “only if they act like us French will we accept them as French” would be a reasonable paraphrase of the tenor of much discussion of the issue.  Turkey’s non-signature is for similar reasons – just as there is only one way to be French, there is only one way to be Turkish.

I need to touch briefly on four other European countries who have signed the Convention but failed, as yet, to ratify it and put it into practice.  National minorities are not an issue of any importance in Iceland, perhaps explaining the non-ratification of the Convention for which the country was an initial signatory back in 1995.  Luxembourg was also an original signatory – but there is now the paradox that native Luxembourgers are almost a minority in their own country, where they are outnumbered by various groups of migrant origin.  Issues of identity are highly complex in Belgium – a third non-ratification state – where there is no real national ideology but instead a pairing of Flemish and Walloon identities (supplemented by a Brussels capital identity and by the German minority community in Eupen and Malmedy in the east). The final country to sign the Convention but not yet to ratify it is Greece.  Greece recognizes the Islamic Turkish minority in Thrace but has been criticized by the Council of Europe for not according this minority full rights, and for not recognizing other Slavic-speaking national minorities, particularly those claiming Macedonian identity.  Greece, like France and Turkey, seems to depend on a view that there is only one way to be a full member of the national society.

Does all this matter?  Clearly it does for the minority communities themselves.  But I would argue that France’s continuing adherence to the ideology of ‘indivisibility’ permeates discussion much more widely than just about the Bretons or the Basques.  Indivisibility, coupled with secularism, prevents France from recognizing, promoting policies for, or monitoring the life conditions of various of its minority communities – most especially its Islamic minorities of North African or Middle Eastern origin.  In a world of globalization, mass migration and the dissemination of varieties of cultures, states and societies need to be more flexible about recognizing the legitimacy of ‘other’ ways of being and operating – whether that is Welsh-speakers in the UK, Catalans in Spain, or both the Breton and the Islamic population of France.  In a world of increased diversity, arguing the necessity and desirability of homogeneity is outdated and potentially repressive.