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Toward a Politics-Centred Approach to the Production of Nationhood

Debates over whether and how to incorporate religious minorities are a central focus of nation-building projects in numerous immigrant-receiving countries. The United States is a recent example of this trend. With the inauguration of Donald Trump as president and the subsequent executive order restricting entry from seven (later reduced to six) predominantly Islamic countries, the position of Muslims in that country has become highly tenuous. In Europe, portrayals of a Muslim “other” have pervaded movements aimed at preserving distinct national identities. Concern over immigration from Muslim countries was central, for example, to the 2016 Brexit campaign for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU. Likewise, hostility to the Muslim presence played a key part in the 2017 Dutch election, in which the ultra-right populist Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) took second place, with 13 per cent of the vote.1

These broad-based debates over Muslims’ national belonging are often accompanied by campaigns to legally restrict the wearing of Islamic signs in public spaces and institutions. In 2018, Denmark joined France, Belgium, and Austria in prohibiting full facial coverings in public areas. The Netherlands also entered the fray when it introduced a partial ban in 2015, and in 2016, German chancellor Angela Merkel endorsed her party’s call to ban the full-face veil “wherever it is legally possible.”²

Scholars seeking to understand the proliferation of these restrictive campaigns have placed significant stock in the role of institutionally embedded discourses or “models” of nationhood, leaving the role of party political conflict relatively unexplored. The principal task of this chapter is to sketch the parameters of an alternative, politics-centred approach to understanding why states respond the way they do to minority religious signs and practices within their territories.

In the first part, I outline prevailing social scientific approaches to this question, highlighting their strengths and limitations. The first, which I call the national “models” approach, underscores the ideological determinants of state responses to immigrant selection and incorporation. The second approach focuses on the ways that institutions, via existing laws and policy frameworks, enable and/or constrain the actions of states in the realm of religious incorporation. While they each shed some light on the ideational and institutional contours of contemporary debates, I argue that neither of these perspectives accounts for France’s and Quebec’s precise and distinctive trajectories regarding the political response to Islamic veiling.

In the second part of the chapter, I present an alternative, politics-centred framework, which addresses the role of electoral competition, interests, and strategy in shaping how party political actors interpret and frame established ideas and institutional frameworks in the process of debating the religious signs issue. Using this approach, I propose that entrenched “models” of nationhood and the laws and institutions governing the place of religion in the public sphere matter in shaping the politics of secularism in France and Quebec, but primarily insofar as they serve parties’ struggles for “issue ownership.”

THE NATIONAL “MODELS” APPROACH: REPUBLICANISM IN FRANCE; INTERCULTURALISM IN QUEBEC

The central tenet of the national “models” approach is that state decisions regarding immigrant selection and incorporation reflect systems of meaning that are bound up in countries’ unique historical nation-building processes. Focusing on the discursive meaning(s) applied to nationhood,3 this research suggests that national ideological structures define the “grand narratives,”⁴ “philosophies,”⁵ “scripts,”⁶ and “cultural idioms”⁷ that prescribe the social and political boundaries of the nation. Over time, they also shape the way nation-states incorporate differences related to class, gender, race, and religion. For example, adherents of this approach have examined how class and gender considerations inform, and are shaped by, the emergence of distinct welfare state regimes.⁸ “Models” of nationhood also draw from and reinforce particular gendered and racial hierarchies.⁹ Recently, religion has re-emerged as a key problematic around which ideologies of nationhood are defined. Indeed, given its role in framing state strategies for regulating difference and demands for recognition, the question of secularism is now seen as inextricably linked to constructions of nationhood and citizenship,10 and as also playing a role in shaping the politics of gender across states.¹¹

The national “models” approach has been an especially powerful tool in scholarly discussions of French immigration policy and, more recently, of the French state’s response to religious signs. These discussions foreground the role of republicanism, suggesting that it advocates a restrictive approach to addressing diversity in France.

Rooted in the 1789 Revolution, French republicanism encompasses a Janus-faced set of ideals. On the one hand, it shares with Anglo-American liberalism a commitment to principles of justice and equality; the protection of individual rights through the separation of public and private spheres; and the notion that dignity lies in individuals’ capacities to create their own conceptions of the good. Where republicanism parts ways with liberal citizenship, however, is in the relative “thickness” of the civic bond and the expansiveness of the public sphere that it condones.¹² The latter is rooted in the Rousseauist attempt to reconcile the active participation of free and equal citizens with a commitment to the common good in democratic polities. Fearing that unbridled liberalism threatens the polity by fostering a disproportionate emphasis on individual rights and interests, Rousseau sought to ensure citizens’ political commitment under the Ancien Régime – which preceded the Revolution – by relaxing the liberal value of state neutrality and by defining civic virtue as a key aspect of citizenship. This advocacy of a strong public identity that transcends private preferences supplies the communitarian element of the republican discourse.¹³

The balance sought by Rousseau between the values of autonomy and civic virtue, or moral freedom and political obligation, is achieved via the intersection of liberté, égalité, fraternité, and laïcité in the French republican contract. France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) defines liberté as: “being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man or woman has no bounds other than those that guarantee other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights.” Égalité refers to the notion that the law “must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, shall be equally eligible to all high offices, public positions and employments, according to their ability, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.” Finally, fraternité is described in the republican discourse as the sense of community or brotherhood fostered by a collective commitment to the principles of liberté and égalité. In other words, it is by embracing common notions of liberté and égalité that individual citizens come to form a community of “public similars.”14 The boundaries of that community are further encompassed by the notion of laïcité, the French republican term for the separation of church and state.

While they recognize that France’s immigration laws have fluctuated over time, scholars have been keen to suggest that republicanism dictates the range of policy solutions that legislators adopt in this area. In his foundational study of French immigration policy, for instance, Brubaker identified republicanism as the key “cultural idiom,” which prescribes an open and civic conception of nationhood. That “idiom,” he suggested, has encouraged successive French governments to adopt a relatively permissive approach to naturalization and citizenship. Periodic rearticulations of republicanism, moreover, explain why France has fairly consistently naturalized the native-born children of immigrants according to a system of jus soli, which grants citizenship based on one’s birthplace rather than ancestry.¹⁵

Subsequent research has corroborated the view that France’s immigration and integration policies develop in consonance with the civic logic of republicanism. For example, Hollifield’s historical study points to the impact of a “republican synthesis” – which is both universalist and nationalist – in granting legitimacy to legal immigration in France and in explaining the continuity of French immigration policy through periods of crisis.¹⁶ The values embedded in republicanism have also been shown to permeate the juridical framings of immigration in France, leading to the entrenchment of social rights, including family reunification, in immigration policy,¹⁷ and to the adoption of an assimilationist “philosophy of integration.”¹⁸ Each of these approaches to defining republicanism – as “cultural idiom,” as “synthesis,” and as “philosophy of integration” – reinforces the belief that this set of ideals encourages a comparatively open, inclusive definition of membership in France.

The recent scholarship on laws that restrict religious symbols in the name of laïcité has generated a more critical view of republicanism’s role in shaping the terms of immigrants’ belonging in France. Since the 2004 ban of religious signs in schools, a plethora of studies has been published, many of which attribute this law to a more restrictive aspect of the republican ethos. Using terms like “pretext,”19 “technology of governance,”²⁰ or “tradition,”²¹ these studies suggest that republicanism increases the “sensitivity” of the Islamic veil question,²² bolsters the image of Muslim religious symbols as political weapons,²³ and determines which interpretations of gender and sexual equality civil society actors can legitimately deploy to confront Islam.²⁴ Some scholars propose that it is through its permeation into law and policy frames that republicanism dictates responses to the religious signs issue in France.²⁵ Others interpret the impact of republicanism in terms of its effect on the country’s historical relations between church and state.²⁶

Although they provide important insight into the discursive themes that French political actors bring to bear when debating issues like veiling, studies focusing on the causal effects of republicanism have not sufficiently problematized the multiple – even contradictory – conceptions of laïcité, the central republican value to appear in the French religious signs debate.²⁷ Laborde has helpfully grouped these conceptions of laïcité into three major strands. A first strand – laïcité as neutrality – calls for an end to state subsidization of religion. A second strand – laïcité as autonomy – sees laïcité as a doctrine of human emancipation, which takes shape through the liberalization of French society, in part through education. Lastly, laïcité as community is the least liberal of the concept’s three interpretations. Guided by an obsession with social cohesion in the face of foreign “threats,” proponents of this view apply the concept of laïcité not just to the state, but also to the behaviours of individual citizens.²⁸

In focusing on republicanism – and particularly laïcité – as the driving force for France’s restrictive response to religious signs like the face veil, many studies have glossed over the struggles, conflicts, and negotiations that underlie the diverse interpretations that political actors bring to these terms. Understanding how and why republicanism and laïcité became the hallmarks of a campaign to restrict certain Muslim religious practices requires a much more thorough investigation into the political contestations that surround issues of nationhood and belonging in France.

Like French republicanism, Quebec’s developing – but still unofficial – intercultural “model” of nationhood is subject to multiple and contradictory interpretations. Emerging in the policy debates of the 1980s, interculturalism characterizes membership in the Québécois nation as a “moral contract” between immigrants and the host community. The aim of this contract is to establish a “common public culture” in which French is the language of public life; the participation and the contribution of everyone is expected and encouraged; and the contributions of diverse groups are welcome but only within the limits imposed by the respect for fundamental democratic values, and the necessity of inter-community exchange.29 These three tenets amount to a “model” of nationhood, which relies for its content on both liberal and communitarian logics of membership. The emphasis on equal participation and insistence on adherence to democratic values (such as equality between the sexes) appeals to a universal and liberal notion of national belonging. Yet, at the same time, social cohesion, and indeed the practice of liberal citizenship itself, is viewed as predicated on a common commitment to unifying cultural characteristics, primarily language.

The intercultural “model” of nationhood differs from Canada’s federal multiculturalism policy – and overlaps with French republicanism – in several key respects. Most significantly, its roots lie in a majority/minorities paradigm, which prioritizes the cultural survival of Quebec’s francophone population. Thus, whereas Canada’s federal multicultural approach does not in principle adhere to the idea of a majority culture, interculturalism is underpinned by concerns about social fragmentation and ghettoization that define the larger effort to ensure the primacy of the French language in Quebec. Interculturalism’s emphasis on a “common public” culture also overlaps to some degree with the value attributed to “civic virtue” and public engagement by French republicanism. However, this approach distinguishes itself from the republican “model” in that it does not, according to its proponents, bestow a necessary precedence to the foundational cultural group.³⁰

While it has not been officially adopted as policy in Quebec, interculturalism has been invoked in reports by government commissions,³¹ by political parties,³² and by prominent intellectuals in the province’s religious signs debate.³³ As a result, it has also emerged as a key category of analysis in scholarly reflections on the production of Québécois citizenship and nationhood in the context of growing religious diversity.³⁴

However, interculturalism is by no means the sole discourse informing political responses to the religious signs issue in Quebec. For one, the past domination of the Catholic Church in Quebec remains visibly imprinted on the province’s cultural, political, and architectural landscape, suggesting that religion – and not only language – remains a key source of collective identification.35 Members of the National Assembly in Quebec City still enact laws under a cross that dominates the main wall of the chamber. In Montreal, a 100-foot cross lit by LED lights punctures the night sky atop the mountain at the centre of the city. The preservation of these prominent symbols has been defended in the name of protecting the province’s cultural “heritage.” Moreover, numerous politicians, academics, and political commentators in Quebec dislike the notion of interculturalism. When the Bouchard-Taylor report invoked the concept in 2008, many publicly rejected its ideals, on the basis that they too closely mirrored Canada’s federal multiculturalism policy.³⁶

In trying to understand the diverging outcomes of the religious signs debate in France and Quebec, therefore, it is tempting to turn to these nations’ somewhat distinct “models” of nationhood. While French republicanism advocates a relatively strict separation between the public and private spheres, which politicians can cite to advocate restrictive laws, Quebec’s intercultural discourse postulates a more interactive process for setting the parameters of integration, though one rooted in commitment to a “common public culture.”

However, by themselves, these two “models” for incorporating newcomers cannot explain how France and Quebec embarked on distinct trajectories with respect to the religious signs issue. First and foremost, there is, as I have shown, no clear consensus as to the meaning of, or appropriate way of implementing, either French republican or Québécois intercultural nationhood. Both discourses remain subject to intense debate in the political sphere. Second, neither “model” provides a comprehensive explanation for the decisions surrounding religious signs. This is the case, in part, because both republicanism and interculturalism incorporate a diverse set of ideals. Some of those ideals align with a liberal conception of nationhood that prioritizes individual rights and freedoms. Others coincide with a communitarian logic that sees protection of the nation as a collective good. Because of the juxtaposition of these logics, it is difficult to draw causal inferences from the republican or intercultural “models” of nationhood. Finally, it is not sufficiently clear, from the events and processes that have occurred, how any differences that might exist between republicanism and interculturalism – such as the emphasis placed by the latter on the interactive character of integration – explain the divergent outcomes of campaigns to curtail religious signs in France and Quebec.

THE INSTITUTIONS APPROACH: THE 1905 LAW SEPARATING RELIGION AND THE STATE IN FRANCE; THE 1975 QUEBEC CHARTER OF HUMAN RIGHTS; AND THE 1982 CANADIAN CHARTER OF RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS

Institutional approaches to explaining state responses to religious diversity stem from an established research that sees decision-making by states as constrained by prevailing institutions such as constitutions, as well as by existing laws and policies. In specifying the mechanisms whereby “policies produce politics,” studies in this vein highlight the impact of “feedback effects,” arguing that entrenched policy frameworks determine which new policies “fit” – first, by creating resources and incentives that constitute a “sunk cost,” and, second, by informing the ways that actors navigate choices in contexts of information asymmetry.37

Expanding upon the latter argument, much work in institutional theory has focused explicitly on the ideational effects of institutions. This research shows that existing policy programs regulate future outcomes by informing the cognitive and normative schemes that motivate political action.³⁸ Peter A. Hall describes this effect by arguing that “politicians, officials, the spokesmen for social interests, and policy experts all operate within the terms of political discourse that are current in the nation at a given time, and the terms of political discourse generally have a specific configuration that lends representative legitimacy to some social interests more than others, delineates the accepted boundaries of state action, associates contemporary political developments with particular interpretations of national history, and defines the context in which many issues will be understood.”³⁹ This emphasis on the cognitive dimensions of policy feedback mechanisms also dovetails with research on the role of political and discursive opportunities in social movement research.⁴⁰

The concept of institutional “feedback effects” – whether these take the shape of material “sunk costs” or entrenched ideational systems – informs analysis of policy in multiple fields, from social welfare to immigration. Pierson convincingly argued that feedback effects account for the relative success of pension reform efforts in Britain compared to the United States in the 1980s. In contrast to Britain, where the fragmented and underdeveloped structure of old-age pension programs precluded the mobilization of a powerful opposition to reform, the larger scope of coverage in the United States made possible the emergence of an influential elderly lobby capable of successful resistance to attempts to dismantle the program.41 Addressing the role of institutions in shaping state responses to immigration, Bleich has shown that feedback mechanisms crucially inform contemporary discrimination policies in France and Britain. In particular, the desire for conformity with preexisting institutional templates explains in part why, in France, the fight against racism is the shared responsibility of the state and civil society, while in Britain, a quasi-governmental organization is responsible for dealing with concerns about race relations.⁴²

Although a useful tool in comparative research, institutionalism provides only a partial explanation for the diverging responses to religious signs in France and Quebec. In France, for example, legal interpretations of laïcité have fluctuated over time. The Jules Ferry laws of the 1880s removed the Catholic Church from French schools, thus establishing a system of free, mandatory, and secular education. By requiring public school teachers to be lay people (not priests) and instituting a secular curriculum in the classroom, these laws laid the foundation for French schools to become sites for educating citizens and integrating them into a sense of national belonging that is free from religion. Then, in 1905, the French government under the leadership of prominent Socialists further entrenched the secular meaning of national belonging by introducing the Law of Separation between Church and State. The first article – which guaranteed the individual right to the free exercise of religion – inscribed laïcité as a principle that protects private beliefs and behaviours. The second article – the one that established the non-subsidization of religion by the state – expanded the reach of laïcité over public expressions of belonging by applying the institutional separation of church and state to the whole of the public sphere.

In practice, however, this institutional separation has been somewhat limited. Because the principle of equality enshrined in France’s 1905 law was not retroactive, it has allowed the Catholic Church certain advantages not possessed by other religions that are newer to French society. For example, since Church property belonged to the state in the first place, the French state today continues to be responsible for its upkeep. The current regime of church-state relations also includes a great deal of government activity on behalf of certain religions, including: government funds to finance the upkeep of religious buildings that existed in 1905; government management and financing of chaplains’ offices for major religions; explicit provisions for religious representation in a number of domains; and government funds to pay teachers’ salaries in private confessional schools that have entered into contract with the state.43

Contemporary debates over minority religious signs have added further nuance to the definition of laïcité. In 2003, politicians intent on removing headscarves from schools began calling forth an alternative secular discourse, one that aims to integrate newcomers by limiting their practice of religion to the private sphere. The contours of this approach were drawn during the proceedings of the 2003 Stasi commission, the state-appointed inquiry into the status of secularism in schools, which heard testimony from teachers, intellectuals, politicians, and activists. The commission’s final report, which recommended a complete ban of “ostentatious” religious signs in the public school system, departed from prior definitions of laïcité by suggesting that headscarves not only violate the secularity of the school as public institution; they also threaten students’ private religious rights by subjecting them to proselytization. In this way, the Stasi commission severed the divide that previously existed between providers of public services – who are required to physically embody the neutrality of the state – and users – whose conduct had until this period been defined according to the principle of freedom of conscience.

As I will demonstrate in subsequent chapters, the meaning(s) attached to laïcité shifted once again in the context of France’s recent face veil debate. Aware of the legal obstacles to using laïcité as a basis for regulating individual behavior outside of public institutions, proponents of the 2010 ban opted to construct the law around the more neutral principle of “public order,” which was deemed to override the right to religious freedom. Yet, this did not prevent a significant backlash from the courts. In its March 2010 consultative ruling, for example, the Conseil d’État (Council of State, France’s highest administrative court) declared that a general ban would violate nondiscrimination and other fundamental rights, including the right to religious expression.⁴⁴ Adopting the 2010 face veil ban thus required significant effort on the part of politicians to override the institutional framework of the French legal system.45

Just as they cannot explain the expression of a “consensus” in France, principles institutionalized in legal texts cannot explain the conflict-ridden debate over religious signs in Quebec. The main legal principle to shape the debate over legal restrictions in that setting is that of “reasonable accommodation.” This term first appeared in Canadian jurisprudence in the Supreme Court judgment in O’Malley and Ontario Human Rights Commission v. Simpsons-Sears Limited (1985). In this case, the appellant, O’Malley, alleged discrimination by her employer because she was periodically asked to work Friday evenings and Saturdays, preventing her from observing her religion. The Court ruled in favor of the appellant, finding that “An employment rule, honestly made for sound economic and business reasons and equally applicable to all to whom it is intended to apply, may nevertheless be discriminatory if it affects a person or persons differently from others to whom it is intended to apply. The intent to discriminate is not a governing factor in construing human rights legislation aimed at eliminating discrimination. Rather, it is the result or effect of the alleged discriminatory action that is significant.”⁴⁶ Subsequent Supreme Court decisions have more fully clarified “reasonable accommodation” as a basis for adjudicating requests for religious exemptions in Canada.⁴⁷ In Alberta v. Hutterian Brethren Church of Wilson (2009), for example, the Court denied a request by Alberta’s Hutterite community to be exempt from driving licence photographs, on the basis that granting such an exemption might elevate the risk of identity theft.⁴⁸

Because it challenged the principle of “reasonable accommodation,” by proposing to outlaw religious coverings from public sector employment, Quebec’s 2013 Charter of Values drew opposition from several high profile legal associations. These include the Quebec Bar Association and the Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse (Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission, CDPDJ), which argued that the proposed legislation would contravene both the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.⁴⁹

The Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms is a statutory human rights code enacted in 1975. It is older than the constitutionally enshrined Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982. While it is technically only a statute, it is interpreted by the courts as having quasi-constitutional status. It is also symbolically important because Quebec never agreed to the 1982 amendment to the federal constitution, which brought about the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms, though the federal constitution nonetheless applies in the province.50 When litigants challenge Quebec legislation under both the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and the federal constitution, Canadian courts consider the Quebec Charter first.⁵¹

Confronted with the challenge that the Charter of Values was contrary to the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms, its advocates proposed to circumvent both. Since the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms is a statutory enactment, the National Assembly could amend the statute to avoid a conflict. As to the federal constitution, advocates of the bill urged the Parti Québécois government to invoke the notwithstanding clause.⁵² This clause allows the federal parliament and provincial legislatures to override certain sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms – including those regarding freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and equality – for a period of up to five years.⁵³

These solutions (amending the Quebec Charter and invoking the notwithstanding clause) carry significant risks. For a government to invoke these options to override fundamental rights and freedoms, it must be certain there is widespread support for its position. Thus, both the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms posed a significant obstacle to the Charter of Values.

However, it was not the legal but rather the political process that doomed the Charter of Values – specifically, the failure of the Parti Québécois to secure a sufficient number of seats in the 2014 provincial election. In the lead-up to the election, Premier Marois and her colleagues mobilized a discourse of values and cultural threat to generate public support for the Charter of Values. In contrast, the PLQ leader, Philippe Couillard, drew upon a rights-based and pluralist understanding of national belonging to raise doubts about the PQ’s capacity to serve the interests of all Québécois, especially minorities. As the electoral campaign wore on, these conflicting images of nationhood became entangled in debates over whether to pursue a third referendum on Quebec’s independence from Canada. Although the PQ’s official platform did not promise a referendum, a star candidate and future leader of the party, Pierre Karl Péladeau, injected this issue into the public debate when he raised a clenched fist at a campaign rally, declaring his desire to “make Quebec a country.”54 Although Marois skirted around the issue, promising not to hold a referendum until the Québécois “are ready,” the uncertainty that Péladeau’s gesture aroused was enough to propel the Parti libéral du Quebec into government.

Institutional analyses reveal a great deal about the real pragmatic constraints that state actors face in advocating policies regarding religious signs. However, they cannot fully account for the precise trajectories of political debates in this area. In France, for example, laws relating to the separation of religion from the state have traditionally provided that individuals are free to express their religious beliefs so long as they do not infringe the neutrality of the state. Yet, politicians determined to restrict Muslim dress were able to override these principles and use other values, like public order, to invoke a different conception of laïcité. Existing policy frameworks are of similarly limited use in understanding the trajectory of Quebec’s religious signs debate. Although the Charter of Values would have faced significant legal obstacles had it been adopted by the National Assembly, it was on-the-ground political contestations over sovereignty that ultimately defeated its proposals.

BRINGING POLITICS IN: CLASS-BASED POLITICS IN FRANCE; NATION-CENTRED POLITICS IN QUEBEC

Having concluded that neither the national “models” nor the institutional approach fully illuminates the bases of state decision-making in the French and Québécois religious signs debates, I turn to an alternative area of research: the dynamics of party political competition. I utilize this literature to propose that entrenched “models” of nationhood and the laws and institutions governing the place of religion in the public sphere matter primarily insofar as they map onto the strategic interests of political parties. The framework I develop extends the political “articulation” thesis in the sociological study of electoral politics to emphasize parties’ capacity to generate the meanings of secularism and national identity.

Social scientific researchers broadly agree that politics and “political elites” play a role in immigration debates and policy-making.⁵⁵ Yet, very few have directly explored the impact of political parties in shaping the terms of migrants’ cultural, political, or economic incorporation across different national settings.56 Critics attribute this omission to the fact that “the political science communities working on asylum and immigration, on the one hand, and [those studying political] parties, on the other, have traditionally sat at separate tables.”⁵⁷ Whatever its origins, the dearth of research on parties’ roles in debates around immigrant incorporation has led studies to downplay the contestations that arise around questions of belonging and citizenship.⁵⁸ It also results in a neglect of the fact that “it is through the agency of political parties that the issues of immigration are often politicized.”⁵⁹ Before presenting my approach to studying the role of political parties in the French and Québécois secularism debates, a review of some broad developments in the social scientific theorizing of party politics is necessary.

Over the last several decades, there has been considerable debate among social scientists about whether and how parties impact social change. In the post-war period, the dominant approach – which originated in the work of Lipset and Rokkan (1967) – conceived parties as generated by, and ultimately reflecting, extant social identities and cleavages.⁶⁰ Although studies based on this “reflection thesis” paid some attention to social cleavages not directly related to class, scholars saw income and occupational hierarchies as the primary sources of voter-party alignment.

The sociological focus on political parties experienced a marked decline in the 1970s and 1980s, when non-party political phenomena – mainly states, state-building, and social movements – began to take precedence.⁶¹ This shift in emphasis was partly motivated by evidence of parties’ diminishing significance to policy-making, and by a perception that “post-material” concerns – such as environmentalism, gender equality, self-expression, and freedom of speech – were supplanting traditional class-based electoral coalitions. According to scholars, the impact of these concerns on voting patterns, social movement platforms, and civic participation indicated the advance of a “new politics,” in which individual characteristics superseded structural location as correlates of political behaviour. Thanks to these shifts, social classes, and the “material” values associated with them, were no longer seen as the key referents for ideology, social division, and political activism.⁶²

While much of the literature on “post-materialism” focused on social movement activity, its impacts were also observed in the changing structure of party political alignments. Left-right party distinctions have remained essential to many democratic systems.63 Yet, studies also show that cleavages linked to class are no longer the main driving forces behind parties’ electoral platforms.⁶⁴ In their effort to draw support from growing middle class strata, for instance, left-wing parties have largely abandoned explicitly socialist agendas in favour of programs targeting social issues,⁶⁵ deploying discourses of equal recognition over redistribution.⁶⁶

The 1990s marked another sea change in the social scientific study of political parties, one that informs my analysis of party political debates over secularism in France and Quebec. In that decade, scholars began recasting political parties as playing a constitutive – rather than just derivative – role in the elaboration of social identities and divisions. More than mere conduits of public opinion, they argued, parties “help to structure as well as to reflect voter opinion – not only in terms of what citizens think but also what they think about.”⁶⁷ Despite becoming increasingly disconnected from citizens and the class struggle, political parties were deemed crucial in defining and enacting political cultural norms.⁶⁸ Through their interactions with the media, for instance, parties were shown to provide “powerful journalistic heuristics” that influence reporters’ stories on political conflict⁶⁹ and contribute to the proliferation of media-produced “imagined communities.”⁷⁰ Taken together, these discoveries amounted to a revelation that parties define, as well as reflect, political cleavages and identities.

Evidence that political parties play a critical role in constituting the boundaries of political space ultimately spawned a new analytic perspective, which rejects the “reflection” thesis of the postwar period in favour of a conception of parties as vehicles for “articulating” social meanings. De Leon and colleagues – the main architects of this approach – posit that, by assembling, disassembling, and reassembling disparate constituencies into politically salient voting “blocs,” parties fashion various social formations, creating “unity out of disparity.”⁷¹ In arriving at this conclusion, the authors take seriously the Gramscian and Laclauian notion that class cleavages take shape and become “naturalized” through political struggle. They further draw on Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” to suggest that “political parties reconstruct certain issues as grievances through the differential interpellation of subjects, defined as the process of recognition of an individual as a concrete subject by ideological-political practice … Outside this process of recognition, individuals or groups do not possess clearly specified political issues or grievances. Politics (re)defines what the grievance is and who the sufferers (and thus the people who should be mobilizing) are.”72 The articulation model thus marks a clear departure from the reflection thesis: rather than serve as vehicles for the expression of extant social divisions, political parties exercise significant control over the production, articulation, and ultimate meanings of those divisions.

Central to the articulation thesis is the notion that contemporary processes of political articulation are marked by the contestations among “traditional” parties – that is, those that “orient toward minor questions, the resolution of which tends to maintain the existing social order” – and “integral” parties – that is, those that “orient to transformational questions” and, in doing so, “politicize hitherto apolitical social identities.”⁷³ In the current political climate, ultra-right parties are among the “integral” parties receiving the most scholarly attention. These parties share several distinguishing characteristics.

First, ultra-right parties favour an explicit or implicit anti-immigrant stance, which they use to mobilize “a deeper protest about the nature of postwar politics in general.”⁷⁴ Resentment toward immigrants – for “stealing” jobs from the native-born and threatening to dilute the nation’s ethnic and cultural character – are often conflated with other salient issues in these parties’ platforms. In the case of France’s Front National, for example, hostility to immigrants is intertwined with the party’s critical stance on European integration and its alleged threat to national sovereignty.⁷⁵

A second distinguishing feature of ultra-right parties is their tendency to combine anti-systemic positions with centralized organizational structures aimed at ensuring their electoral survival. In other words, these parties’ anti-elitist – even anti-political – platforms do not deter them from centralizing leadership in highly personalized and charismatic individuals capable of garnering much-needed media attention.⁷⁶

Third, because they emphasize the need to foster a “different kind of politics,” ultra-right parties are able to attract a wide range of constituencies, from the working class to disenchanted skilled workers, the unemployed, and pensioners. They achieve this “assembling” of voters in part by borrowing from, and rearticulating, the narratives of their mainstream competitors.⁷⁷

Due to a cross-national diffusion of their frames, ultra-right parties now constitute a new “party family” in Western Europe,78 one that scholars hold (at least partially) responsible for the rise in antiforeigner and anti-Muslim sentiment⁷⁹ and of exclusionary citizenship and integration policies.⁸⁰ But the sources of ultra-right parties’ electoral success in Europe and elsewhere go beyond these issues. For one, these parties appeal to voters’ growing apathy around mainstream political organizations. Disillusionment with such organizations is at the root, for instance, of the Front National’s political ascent in France. With attachment to mainstream parties on the decline, and an overall rise in support for a less important role for parties in government, this party has managed to profile itself as a protest party, gaining legitimacy in the process.⁸¹

The rising success of ultra-right parties is also tied to the value shifts associated with “post-materialism.” According to scholars, ultra-right political rhetoric is the result of a “silent counter-revolution,” which opposes the egalitarianism and cultural libertarianism of the “new left.”⁸² Capitalizing on their populations’ distrust of social and political institutions and a growing fear that ethnic and racial minorities pose a threat to national identity, parties such as the Front National, the Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom, Netherlands), and the United Kingdom Independence Party have resonated with many voters.

The messaging of ultra-right parties is also rendered more salient by larger macro-structural changes. Welfare-state retrenchment combined with the emergence of a global economic infrastructure has produced “winners” and “losers.” “Winners” include “entrepreneurs and qualified employees in sectors open to international competition,” as well as “cosmopolitan citizens.” The “losers,” by contrast, include those “in protected sectors,” as well as “citizens who strongly identify themselves with their national community.”⁸³ Attempts by these “losing” groups to regain their social and economic foothold explain in large part why ultra-right parties in Europe have gained popularity since the 1980s and 1990s.⁸⁴ In 1984, France’s Front National saw an important breakthrough when it attracted 11 per cent of the vote in the European elections.⁸⁵ In 1991, Sweden saw the rise of Ny Demokrati (New Democracy), a sibling to the long established and anti-taxation Fremskridtspartiet (Progress Party) in Denmark and Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party) in Norway. That same year, the radical nationalist Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc) saw its best-ever performance in the Belgian elections. By 1994, Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party) went from near dissolution to gaining 23 per cent of the vote, its highest share of the national vote until that point.86 Italy’s Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance) reached equal if not superior heights, when it won 14 per cent of the vote in the 1994 legislative election, and thus acquired five cabinet posts in Berlusconi’s government.⁸⁷ And in 2002, the French Front National shocked many when its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, beat out the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin to make it into the second round of the presidential election, though he ultimately received a paltry 18 per cent of the vote.

Concern over Europe’s ability to handle the 2008 economic crisis has led ultra-right parties to take on even greater significance on the world political stage. According to Müller, governments’ reliance on technocratic solutions to the Eurocrisis has contributed to these parties’ rise, by legitimizing an apolitical, and ultimately undemocratic, approach to policy-making.⁸⁸ Since the 2008 crisis, there has been an upsurge in ultra-right party representation at the continental level. For instance, in March of 2014, European politics were jolted when a record fifty-two candidates representing ultra-right populist parties were elected to the European Parliament. What’s more, two ultra-right parties – France’s Front National and the Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) – gained the highest percentage of votes in their respective nationwide elections. In the French case, this entailed a quadrupling of the Front National’s share of the vote from 6 per cent in 2009 to 25 per cent in 2014.⁸⁹

By tapping into voters’ disenchantment with their mainstream representatives, and by mobilizing public discontent over the economic and cultural impacts of globalization, ultra-right parties have thus made significant electoral gains, especially in Europe. In the process, they have contributed to the production of hostile discursive environments surrounding issues of diversity, religion, and belonging. Yet, the mechanisms by which ultra-right contenders inform “traditional” parties’ articulation of these issues remain poorly understood. Moreover, scholars’ focus on ultra-right political discourses and platforms has come at the expense of understanding how debates over religious signs shape up in democratic systems – like Quebec’s – that lack a strong ultra-right contender. I address these unanswered questions by drawing an analytic distinction between the contexts and processes that shape parties’ articulation of cleavages around religious diversity.

Contexts of Partisan Conflict: The “Axis of Competition”

In their initial formulation of the articulation thesis, de Leon and colleagues contended that class, ethnic, and racial formations “do not naturally carry a political valence,” but are rather “deployed by parties to aggregate minorities through processes of ‘interpellation.’”90 Recent adaptations have tempered the voluntarism attributed to parties in this approach, by taking seriously the constraining effect that extant political cleavages, cultures, and institutions – what I call contexts of partisan conflict – have on party behaviour and decision-making. According to Eidlin: “While emphasizing parties’ centrality, articulation models must also recognize that parties’ actions are constrained by prior political identities, cultures, and institutional arrangements. These establish a range of possible identities or coalitions that exist prior to parties. But there is a gap between this range and the coalitions/identities that actually develop. Parties’ actions bridge the gap between possible and actual outcomes.”⁹¹ Eidlin’s analysis of party conflict differs from that of de Leon and colleagues in that it hinges on already-bound constituencies, which parties can either incorporate or ignore in their representation of political issues. In other words, pre-existing political coalitions “set limits on parties’ scope of action,”⁹² shaping – though not determining – their strategic choices.

In thinking about how established coalitions inform the strategic choices of parties in the religious signs debate, we can draw insight from the research on “axes of competition.” In every political system, parties derive their strategic calculations from the positions they occupy along theoretically and empirically separable ideological dimensions or “axes.” Set in place by prior conflicts, these dimensions “provide a common, simplified language for expressing political values,” and infuse “the political system with stability, by constraining political actors, as well as with legitimacy of rule, by granting them a political mandate.”⁹³ In most western electoral systems, the prevailing “axis of competition” largely centres on issues of class and the distribution of economic resources. However, as I mentioned above, an alternative axis of competition has emerged in many societies, along which parties take position vis-à-vis issues – such as the environment and identity – that diverge from class-based concerns.

Like Britain, France’s electoral system has, until very recently, centred around a class-based axis of competition, with factors like religion, ethnicity, and language having only minor cross-cutting effects.94 As the hegemonic party of the left from the late 1970s to 2017, the Parti socialiste (Socialist Party, PS) has traditionally vied for electoral success on the basis of an economic vision that prioritizes diminishing class inequality. Thanks to its focus on this issue, the party has also historically fared much better than its right-wing opponents in constituencies with a large number of immigrant residents, particularly those of North African origin. Meanwhile, as the predominant voice of the right in France, the Union pour un movement populaire (renamed Les Républicains, or “The Republicans,” in 2015) has tied its economic vision to free market principles. As a result, it has attracted voters who are economically more conservative, especially shopkeepers, craftsmen, and farmers.

The growing political salience of post-material values has affected public opinion in France, with some effect on these parties’ positioning. Like left parties elsewhere, the Socialists have taken up postmaterialist issues, from feminism to anti-nuclear energy. This shift has complicated the party’s relationship to the working class and to class ideology more generally. Although it still competes with the Parti communiste français (Communist Party of France, PCF) for working class support, the Socialist Party has increasingly become one of white-collar, middle-class membership and votes.⁹⁵ The UMP has, for its part, taken up the issue of national identity with increasing fervor, thus attracting more votes from practising Catholics.⁹⁶ However, with the exception of the emergence of the ultra-right Front National, the French political system has, from the postwar period until the recent 2017 presidential election, remained relatively stable. This is because, in their effort to distance themselves from their new competitors, moderate right parties have enforced a somewhat artificial institutional distinction, which masks the similarities in their own and the far right’s ideological programs.⁹⁷

By comparison, party political divides in Quebec have traditionally been much less influenced by class-based affiliations or interests. For one, class voting is less prominent in countries (like Canada) with multi-level governance structures, where responsibility for economic outcomes is shared across levels of government.⁹⁸ More importantly, party tensions in Quebec are instead dominated by attitudes to the “national question.”⁹⁹ The Parti libéral du Québec has for decades been the predominant federalist voice in Quebec provincial politics. A centre-right party, it mainly draws votes from urban ridings, particularly in Montreal, and from those with a large number of non-francophone inhabitants. The party also has strong ties to its federal level counterpart, the Liberal Party of Canada.

Until the provincial election of 2018, which saw it lose its official party status with less than 20 per cent of the vote,100 the Parti Québécois was the predominant nationalist voice in electoral politics in Quebec. Since its creation in 1968, the party has governed the province through two failed referenda on sovereignty, one in 1980 and the other in 1995. In the case of the 1995 referendum, the pro-sovereignty option lost by a margin of less than 1 per cent. Although the Parti Québécois’ sovereigntist agenda historically coincided with a left, welfare-statist view of governance and an inclusive national identity, the current leadership has broken somewhat with that tradition by shifting its economic program to the right and, most importantly for our purposes, by advocating a more closed national identity, which the proposed Charter of Values embodied.

Two relatively new parties – the Coalition avenir Québec (Coalition for Quebec’s Future, CAQ) and Québec solidaire (Quebec in Solidarity, QS) – have begun to occupy a much more prominent role in Quebec’s electoral politics. Both parties identify as nationalist, but only QS supports independence as the most appropriate solution to the “national question.” Moreover, while QS advocates a welfare-statist approach to social, economic, and environmental issues, the CAQ campaigns on conservative economic policies and, increasingly, a restrictive immigration agenda. This latter vision succeeded in capturing voters’ imaginations in the provincial election of 2018, when the CAQ swept unexpectedly to power, earning an unprecedented 37.41 per cent of the vote.¹⁰¹

Although they advocate different policies of redistribution, Quebec’s traditional and newer political parties are largely known for their distinctive approaches to questions of recognition, whether geared to the nation as a whole or to its distinct minorities. Scholars argue that the significance of nationalism as a driver of party politics in Quebec draws the attention of subordinate social classes away from social democracy, a fact which until recently was reflected in relatively low support for the New Democratic Party in federal elections.¹⁰² Combined with the importance of linguistic and religious cleavages, this contributes to the relatively limited effect of class on voting in Quebec.¹⁰³

Processes of Partisan Conflict: Contests for “Issue ownership”

Contexts of partisan conflict significantly shape the long-term trends in voter-party alignment across different political settings. Yet, as the political articulation thesis emphasizes, parties play an active role in refashioning those structures. In the process, they redefine the boundaries of electoral debate and, I will argue, shift the parameters of nationhood and national belonging.

Particularly in electoral systems that feature emerging ultra-right competitors, party competition is constituted by struggles over the dimensional configuration of political space. In election periods especially, parties must decide whether to compete along the main axis of competition or whether to challenge that axis by highlighting other, unaligned issues. Because they tend to have long-standing societal roots and organizational apparatuses, “traditional” parties are apt to reproduce existing issue linkages. By contrast, “integral” parties have an interest in bundling political issues in such a way as to divide incumbent parties and produce additional planes of party competition by creating systemic instability.

When “integral” parties on the ultra-right threaten the dimensional status quo by injecting new themes into political debate, “traditional” parties have two options. One response they can bring to this challenge is to compete for ownership of the issues that their new competitors inject into the political discourse.104 Since they typically already “own” the ethno-nationalist discourses that inform opposition to immigration, right-wing parties are most directly threatened by the ultra-right’s anti-immigrant stance. However, left-wing parties are also susceptible to “contagion from the right” in this area. Studies show that, in response to pressure from their mainstream and ultra-right political foes, left parties have increasingly gotten “tough on immigration” and begun to advocate policies that narrow the boundaries of national membership and belonging.¹⁰⁵

Parties’ efforts to “own” the issues raised by new competitors can coexist with attempts to rebuild the boundaries of legitimacy among parties. Indeed, a second solution that “traditional” parties bring in combatting new challengers is to reassert the frontiers of “legitimate” politics in ways that exclude those challengers. As Hagelund explains, parties of the mainstream right and left often retaliate against their ultra-right opponents by identifying them as the “indecent other” whose very existence bolsters their own “decency.” This process of erecting boundaries around what constitutes “decent” politics has been illustrated in the case of Norway’s anti-immigrant Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party). In addition to its actual proposals, this party has influenced the Norwegian party system through what it has been “made into” by the other parties. Ironically, the presence of this party has contributed to a sense of unity in electoral politics, by serving as the outsider “against which all other parties contrast themselves.”106

This process of discursively separating the “insiders” and “outsiders” of electoral politics closely mirrors the interplay between “sameness” and “difference” in national boundary drawing. At the root of all boundary formation projects – whether these apply to ethnic, religious, or other groupings – is the attempt to distinguish “us” from “them.”¹⁰⁷ Likewise, belonging to the nation is “always constituted vis-à-vis what or who we are not.” In producing a bounded sense of national identity, therefore, national actors must construct a kind of “imagined homogeneity” that downplays “the realities of difference in the populations constituting the nation.”¹⁰⁸

The struggle to demarcate electoral boundaries can also shape national boundary drawing. According to research, political parties not only contribute to the proliferation of media-produced “imagined communities”;¹⁰⁹ they also influence public opinion on various matters, including immigrants’ belonging to the nation¹¹⁰ and group identity.¹¹¹

I utilize these insights to contend that differing contexts of partisan conflict – which are tied to the historic prevalence of distinct axes of electoral competition – have contributed to producing different processes of contention among the major parties involved in the French and Québécois secularism debates. In France, where class conflicts have until very recently dominated voter-party alignments, the traditional political parties have been willing to claim consensus – whether real or imagined – around questions of national identity and minority integration if it enables them to deflect the ultra-right political threat. In Quebec, however, where distinct nationalist visions dictate much of the battle among parties, consensus around matters of identity and integration has been far more elusive.¹¹²

In placing the processes of partisan conflict at the centre of the analysis, I do not deny the influence of established ideas or institutions over the politics of secularism and the production of nationhood in France and Quebec. I take seriously the notion that the political mention of ideas and institutions is a highly strategic and goal-oriented endeavour. However, I also appreciate the important role that these factors play in setting the “overall constitutive rules, the ideological terrain of taken-for-granted assumptions, within which strategic action occurs.”113 These “rules” and “assumptions” are not necessarily always coherent. In this regard, I suggest that, as they become bases for political action, overarching ideas like republicanism and interculturalism, and the institutional frameworks that sustain them, can and do take on shifting meanings.¹¹⁴ I in turn propose that those meanings are profoundly influenced by interests,¹¹⁵ in particular by parties’ strategic efforts to “own” salient political issues in order to gain control over what constitutes “legitimate” politics.

CONCLUSION

Given the significant shortcomings of the national “models” and institutional approaches in explaining the trajectories of the religious signs debate in France and Quebec, I have proposed in this chapter a politics-centred framework for examining these processes. This framework foregrounds the linkages between attempts by political parties to “own” the religious signs issue – reshaping the boundaries of the political sphere in the process – and the demarcation of national boundaries. A central tenet of this approach, moreover, is that the extent to which class-based versus nation-centred social cleavages motivate electoral competition affects parties’ articulations of – and positioning around – secularism and religious diversity. Over the next several chapters, I will employ this politics-centred framework to argue that the differing contexts and processes of partisan conflict in France and Quebec have led parties to articulate the religious signs issue in different ways, with implications for representing Muslims’ belonging to the nation.