UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)

Strange neighbors Politics of ‘living together’ in Antwerp Vollebergh, A.S.

Publication date 2016 Document Version Final published version

Link to publication

Citation for published version (APA): Vollebergh, A. S. (2016). Strange neighbors: Politics of ‘living together’ in Antwerp.

General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons).

Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.

UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl)

Download date:05 Oct 2021 Part I

-

Politics of ‘living together’

Chapter 1

Borgerhout/Borgerokko: the nascence of ‘living together’ as a political project

Until the 1980s, Borgerhout was a rather inconspicuous municipality situated to the north-east of the Antwerp city center. Thereafter, it ceased to be just a geographical location, instead becoming a mythical space, widely known beyond Borgerhout and Antwerp as ‘Borgerokko’. Within the Flemish public imagination, ‘Borgerokko’ functioned as an “icon” (Beyen 2008) of the problems and dangers associated with the new presence of non-Western migrants in Flanders and Flemish urban space, much like Kreuzberg in Berlin or East London. At the same time, the meaning of ‘Borgerokko’ is more complex and multilayered. It is also deeply connected to the shock caused by the electoral success of the Flemish nationalist and extreme-right party Flemish Block (Vlaams Blok, renamed Vlaams Belang in 200427). ‘Borgerokko’ is an icon not only of “the confrontation with the allochthonous other” (ibid: 163), but also, so I argue, of a split within the Flemish national ‘we’ around the question of how that confrontation should be engaged with. I argue that a relatively new idea underlies and unites the different layers of meaning of, and responses to, ‘Borgerokko’: the notion that ‘living together’ [samenleven] between different groups of citizens has become absent and needs to be restored. ‘Living together’ emerges here not as a neutral concept or an objective, measurable sociological fact, but as constituting a new political project and prism through which Flanders has come to understand itself. This project implies a shift in how the relationship between the nation-state and difference is imagined and governed. Everyday affective relations between different citizens – how they perceive, feel about and act towards each other – are now conceptualized as being vital to the well-being of the nation. In this chapter, I trace which social relationships have come to be subsumed under the notion of ‘living together’, and how these have been turned into a legible and governable domain.

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 27 I will refer to ‘Flemish Block’ when describing the period to 2004, and to ‘Flemish Interest’ for the period after that. In my ethnographic chapters I will stick to the terms used by my interlocutors, who, as we will see, often still used the old name ‘Flemish Block’, or simply ‘the Block’, or used it interchangeably with ‘Flemish Interest’.

45 ' ‘Borgerokko’:.symbol.of.cultural.alienation.in.Flemish.Block. discourse.. Oud-Borgerhout has often been described as a ‘popular’ [volks, in Flemish] or ‘working class’ inner-city borough (e.g. Beyen and Destatte 2009: 1671). A more useful understanding of Borgerhout’s class history and morphology is to emphasize that it was an independent municipality until 1982, consisting of two very different parts. On the one hand, there is Oud-Borgerhout, which has an inner-city feel, is located within the Antwerp ring road and is part of the ‘belt’ of neighborhoods built around Antwerp’s mediaeval city to accommodate a large influx of rural migrants (and the outflux of the bourgeoisie) at the end of the nineteenth century (Bertels, Bisschops and Blondé 2011: 45). New-Borgerhout is situated outside the ring road, and originated from the suburbanization of the 1950s. It is now much less ethnically diverse, more spacious and more affluent than Oud-Borgerhout. The mythical status of ‘Borgerhout’ in fact only concerns Oud-Borgerhout, which consists of a northern and a southern part, divided by a busy traffic axis (de Turnhoutsebaan) connecting Antwerp city center to the ring road and suburbs. The area bears the signs of the immense population density and the uncontrolled speculation of small-time private developers in the nineteenth century, which makes for a dense and somewhat chaotic street network (Peleman 2001: 101- 103, BOM/SOMA 1997a, Inleiding: 3). Oud-Borgerhout consists of sections of crammed terraced houses and low-rise apartment buildings built for the working classes, as well as slightly more spacious lower-middle class streets and sections characterized by nineteenth century bourgeois mansions built for local notables and the bourgeoisie. In the first half of the twentieth century, Borgerhout was mostly a lower- middle class municipality, characterized by a large amount of small retail businesses and factories and a Catholic and Flemish nationalist political identity (Lotens 2010: 68-70). In the 1970s and 1980s, the dual development of economic decline and demographic change affected Oud-Borgerhout (Swyngedouw 2000). The Antwerp urban area started to be visibly affected by its younger and middle class citizens moving to the suburbs. The nineteenth century belt in particular, including Oud-Borgerhout, felt the repercussions of what was termed ‘city flight’, suffering from vacancies and a dilapidated public space and an old and low quality housing stock (Kesteloot 1996). This was aggravated by the lack of a coherent urban planning policy and a financial crisis in the Antwerp municipal government (Swyngedouw 2000: 123-124). At the same time, new, and generally poorer, groups found their way to Antwerp and the cheap housing it provided, most visibly the so-called ‘guest workers’ from Morocco and Turkey. The latter had been hailed as low-skilled workers through bilateral agreements between the Belgian state and the Moroccan and Turkish governments during the more prosperous sixties; in Antwerp they worked especially in the city’s (petrochemical) industries and port. They settled very unevenly across the city, with the presence of ‘Moroccan’ immigrants concentrated in Borgerhout. There the numbers of ‘Moroccan’ ‘guest workers’ were the highest in the entire city (Swyngedouw 1989; RISO-Antwerpen 1988a: 7). While the Borgerhout immigrant population rose from some hundreds to several thousands over the 1970s, the ‘Belgian’ population diminished steadily (Vanden

46 ' Kattendijkdok Asiadok

Kempischdok

Lobroekdok

Bisschoppenhof Park Spoor Noord Verbindingsdok

Bonapartedok Willemdok

Stuivenbergplein

Groot Schijn

Oud-Borgerhout Rozentuin

Turn NoordKrugerpark hout Rivierenhof sebaan Nieuw-Borgerhout Stadspark Oud-Borgerhout Zuid

Harmoniepark

Te Boelaarpark Koning Albertpark

Hof Van Leysen

Boekenbergpark

De Villegaspark

Mastvest

Figure 1. Oud-Borgerhout (map based on scalablemaps.com)

Eynde 1992: 72; Migranten Overleg Borgerhout 1982: 2). To this day, the Borgerhout population with a Moroccan background – as well as in Flanders more generally – suffers from a very low socio-economic position, with very high levels of poverty, school drop-outs and unemployment. In this 1970s context of economic crisis combined with the settling of Moroccan migrants (buying houses28, opening shops, and bringing over wife and children), a discourse emerged within Borgerhout and other working class areas in which white ‘Belgians’ positioned themselves as profoundly alienated and marginalized within their own neighborhood. This was a discourse about migrants - ‘strangers’ [vreemden, vreemdelingen], ‘browns’ and ‘macaques’ [makaken]- taking over and ‘playing boss', with no one looking out for ‘ordinary’ ‘Borgerhoutenaars’ or ‘Antwerpians’. The term ‘Borgerokko’, which was probably first coined as part of the popular (i.e. working class, volks in Flemish) pub talk repertoire of word play and crude jokes, gave expression to

28 Home-ownership was mostly a necessity forced by a lack of social housing (not more than 10% in Borgerhout and Antwerp) and rampant discrimination in the private rental market.

47 this sense of alienation (Beyen 2008: 165). It was then picked up and introduced to a wider audience by the popular Antwerp band ‘The Strangers’ [sic] in their song ‘Borgeri, Borgerhout, Borgerokko’ (1985). The song mockingly depicts Borgerhout as the perfect holiday destination: just like Marrakech - except for the camels - but conveniently around the corner. “That is paradise for me”, goes the refrain, which is an ironic reference to the Antwerp political establishment’s refusal to take complaints about immigrants seriously (Swyngedouw 1990: 402, 2000: 133). To some extent, the term ‘Borgerokko’ thus referred to a demographic reality: the new presence of (Moroccan) immigrants. However, it implied from the outset a self-consciously classed and demonstratively anti-establishment racialized reading of that reality as amounting to white alienation. ‘Borgerokko’ gained a more explicitly political layer of meaning when the party Flemish Block adopted this popular discourse of alienation in its political program and party propaganda (Beyen 2008: 166-167). Flemish Block is best understood against the background of the tension that existed within the Flemish movement since the interbellum between a radicalized, anti-Belgian and anti-democratic section, and a section that sought to find Flemish autonomy within the Belgian state and democratic system (Gijsels 1992: 15; Husbands 1992: 134; De Wever and Vrints 2008). Flemish Block was founded following a split from the democratic Flemish nationalist party VU (Volksunie, People’s Union) in 1979: Flemish Block activists, for whom sovereignty for the ‘organic’ Flemish nation could only exist when the ‘foreign’ yoke that was the Belgian state was destroyed, saw VU’s support for another step towards federalization as treason (De Wever and Vrints 2008: 365-367; Govaert 1995; Husbands 1992).29 If Vlaams Blok originated from the wish for an independent Flanders, it shifted its rhetoric in the early 1980s to both the so-called ‘foreigner problem’ (vreemdelingenproblematiek), inspired by the success of Le Pen’s Front National, and a more deliberately populist performance (Witte en Meynen 2006: 259; Husbands 1992: 137; Govaert 1995: 539). From then on, Vlaams Blok conceptualized ‘Flemish identity’ as simultaneously threatened by the Belgian state as much as by non-European immigration, and as betrayed by its own political elite. With slogans such as “500,000 unemployed, why then foreign workers?”, “Own people first”, “Antwerp for the Antwerpians”, and “In self-defence” (with the image of two boxing gloves), Vlaams Blok posed as the sole defender and true spokesperson of ‘ordinary’ ‘Flemings’ or ‘the people’. In its program and campaigns, Flemish Block associated ‘North-African’ and ‘Muslim’ immigration with a wide array of social maladies: criminality, a lack of safety, drug abuse, unemployment, ghettoization, neighborhood decline, cultural alienation, race riots and Muslim fundamentalism (Ceuppens 2006: 166-7). The party’s aims were '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 29 Segments of this radical Flemish nationalism modeled themselves in line with New Order movements. Due to its collaboration with the German occupying forces during WWII, Flemish nationalism, and especially its radicalized form, was discredited and perceived as being morally tainted in the post-war years (De Wever 2003, see note 33). Volksunie (VU) was established in 1954 and chose a democratic reformist path, aiming for federalization. Subsumed in the outer-right fringes of the VU, however, a radical faction from the collaboration milieu remained (De Wever and Vrints 2008: 365).

48 ' an end to migration and the (forced) return of migrants to their home countries30. In other words, Flemish Block is a prime example of the far-right and neo-nationalist parties that arose in Europe at the time of the economic crisis in the 1980s, and whose discourse marked a shift from open references to ‘race’ to an exclusive and essentialist use of ‘culture’31 (Arnaut and Ceuppens 2004: 40-42; Pinxten 2006). Oud-Borgerhout was important to Flemish Block in several ways. First, it was one of the deprived Antwerp districts where it achieved its first successes, gaining between 20 and 30% of the vote in the 1985 and 1987 national elections (Swyngedouw 1989, 2000: 135). The party explicitly considered Borgerhout to be its electoral base and home territory (Lotens 2010: 134-5). It organized local campaigns such as a protest against a new mosque in a Borgerhout street (with black flags and the slogan “More Borgerhout, less Borgerokko”) (Beyen 2008: 166), a mediatized ‘mosque walk’ through Borgerhout (with a pamphlet calling for the ‘return’ of their own boroughs to the ‘Borgerhoutians’) (Lotens 2010: 137), and the occupation of the Borgerhout district hall to demonstrate against ‘ghettoization’ (ibid: 134). With these actions, Flemish Block was the first movement to strategically use Borgerhout as a stage for making a particular political vision tangible to (inter-)national audiences (Lotens 2010: 123, 134-137). In Flemish Block’s rhetoric, then, ‘Borgerokko’ was made to function as a symptom of the ills of migration and cultural alienation threatening the Flemish nation, and as a “frontline” of cultural and racial conflict (see also quotes in Lotens 2010: 136):

Go and talk to the Flemings in Borgerhout in Antwerp who have to deal with Arab shopkeepers on a daily basis. Who see their neighborhood changing, who are confronted with nuisance and noise around [the times of] the mosque prayer services, often until deep into the night. That’s a phenomenon of a different culture. (Gerolf Annemans, Flemish Block member of the Belgian parliament at the time, quoted in van den Brink 1994: 113)

By co-opting the term ‘Borgerokko’, the party gave itself a powerful symbol through which it could express what it considered to be the ‘migrant problem’ in one evocative image.

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 30 See, for a more elaborate discussion of Flemish Block’s program: Ivaldi and Swyngedouw 2001; Govaert 1995; Gijsels 1992. 31 In response to this aspect of Flemish Block’s rhetoric, a great deal of litertaure has been devoted to uncovering its program and rhetoric as racist and anti-democratic (e.g. Spruyt 2000; Gijsels 1994; Spruyt 2006).

49 ' Black.Sundays:.Borgerhout.as.the.symbol.of.the.rise.of.the.extremeZ right. Flemish Block had its first breakthrough during the 1982 municipal elections. Since 1921, political power in Antwerp had been firmly in the hands of coalitions of Christian democrats (CVP) and social democrats (BSP). The city was ruled through a “clientalistic system of compartmentalized political families” (Swyngedouw 2000: 123), the two parties dividing offices between themselves and binding their voters to them in pillars encompassing most facets of their daily lives. Although the bond between the parties and Antwerp’s voters had already started to loosen due to depillarization and the city flight of the middle classes, the stability of this system received a final blow with the municipal merger of 1981 (Swyngedouw 1990: 404; Swyngedouw 2000: 130-131; Ceuppens 2003: 596-597), when seven small neighboring and formerly independent municipalities, including Borgerhout, were turned into districts of Antwerp. Voters, especially in the new districts, felt increasingly alienated from, and abandoned by, city hall politics. The CVP-SP City hall coalition dismissed the 1982 success of Flemish Block as a xenophobic reaction instigated by the concentrated presence of Islamic migrants in some areas and the so-called “conflicts of living together” [samenlevingsconflicten] that this presence was seen to cause (Swyngedouw 1990: 402). It also failed to develop effective policy measures concerning the three new (very much urban) issues that concerned citizens most, and that Flemish Block, with its focus on the effect of ‘strangers’ on ‘problem neighborhoods’, had put on the agenda, namely: urban dilapidation, migrants, and safety (Swyngedouw 2000: 131-134; Uitermark 2003: 65-69). Voters increasingly turned away from the traditional parties, causing the Antwerp ruling coalition of SP and CVP to lose its majority in the 1988 municipal elections. Flemish Block not only increased its share of the vote with every election, but also extended its reach beyond its original base in deprived boroughs to Antwerp as a whole, including its prosperous areas (Swyngedouw 1990, 2000: 135-6) Then came 24 November 1991. Although further Flemish Block success had been expected, the results of the national elections came as a shock: 10.3% of the Flemish vote went to the party, and 25.5% of the vote in Antwerp. As Mark Elchardus (1992) describes, ‘24 November’ was immediately depicted in the Flemish media as an event of catastrophic proportions - a disaster, earthquake, levee breach, the bursting of a tumor. The date became known as ‘Black Sunday’, which expresses how much this landslide victory for Flemish Block was felt as a “defilement of the political system and signals a threatening dark danger” (Elchardus 1992: 32, my translation). It also instigated a period of confused debate consisting of accusations and soul-searching - “a dance of explanations” (Elchardus 1992: 31) - with which the political community and the part of the Flemish public that did not have Flemish Block-sympathies grappled32. The discussion that transpired roughly revolved around the following questions: was one of four Antwerpians racist, or had they reacted against an actual ‘migrant problem’? Or '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 32 See, for a selection of this discussion: Piryns 1992.

50 ' had deeper, structural causes (poverty, neoliberalism, policy failure) driven them into the fascist hands of Flemish Block? Or was this not so much about racism as about a broader ‘gap’ between politics and ordinary people, signaling a democratic crisis? In this debate, Black Sunday was broadly felt to be a matter of “good and evil” (Elchardus 1992: 33), of morality rather than politics. This moral weight should be understood in the light of the specific meaning of the term ‘black’ in Belgium in relation to World War II. Supporters of the New Order parties that had collaborated with the Nazi occupying forces during World War II, and, after the war, the Flemish collaboration milieu more generally, were called ‘black’ or ‘brown’ in reference to the colors of their paramilitary uniforms33. In the eyes of many (especially the Francophone part of the country, and the socialist and liberal political families), the collaboration of Flemish nationalist parties and organizations had exposed a moral rot and anti- democratic darkness at the very heart of Flemish nationalism and, by extension, the Flemish movement. In the debates about Black Sunday, the breakthrough of Flemish Block was seen as a repeat, or a direct continuation, of this history, with its active supporters frequently called ‘blacks’ or ‘brown shirts’. It is this historical link and its politicization that made the rise of the extreme right uniquely traumatic in Flanders. The image of an intrinsically morally degraded and collaborating Flanders that existed in Walloon and Brussels, combined with the absence of a similar definitive breakthrough of the extreme right in Francophone Belgium and the high numbers of Flemish Block votes in Antwerp, all made it impossible in Flanders to consider the extreme right as a phenomenon on the margins of society. Whether or not the success of Flemish Block was connected to the very nature of Flemishness itself was a question that surfaced repeatedly in the Black Sunday debates: had Flemings, due to the ‘exclusive’ or ‘ethnic’ construction of the Flemish nation34, or as an inherently '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 33 The period after the war in which the “repression” of former collaborators took place is very differently remembered by Francophones and in Flanders, and has become one of the stakes in the political battle between them (Gotovitch and Kesteloot 2003; see for the details of the way in which collaborators were defined and punished: Huyse and Dhondt 1991; Huyse and Hoflack 1996). In Wallonia and Brussels, the (Francophone) New Order movements were despised as traitors against the Belgian nation and isolated at the end of the war. Punishment for collaboration was seen as necessary and just (Colignon 2003). In Flanders, in contrast, former collaborators, especially those who had collaborated out of Flemish-nationalist motives, perceived the repression as a gravely unjust political reckoning by the Belgian government to wipe out the Flemish movement. This sense of victimhood was the basis of a collaborationist, or anti-repression, milieu that remained active in Flanders after the war in a range of organizations, journals, and, later on, political Flemish-nationalist parties (‘amnesty’ for repression victims has been a key point in the programs of both the Volksunie and Vlaams Blok). Their portrayal of collaboration as having sprung solely from ‘love for the Flemish nation’, and of repression as an anti-Flemish ‘feast of hatred’, became hegemonic among large parts of the (Catholic) Flemish public, including academics and war historians (Beyen 2003). It was not until the 1990s, that historical studies were published that dismantled this Flemish myth (most notably: Huyse and Dhondt 1991; Dewever 1994) (Beyen 2003: 112). Meanwhile, in Wallonia and Brussels, the image of an intrinsically morally degraded and collaborating Flanders had been cultivated after the war against a self-image of an inherently more democratic Wallonia (Colignon and Kesteloot 2003). 34 See, for a critical discussion of this explanation of the success of Flemish Bock: Ceuppens 2003: 622- 625.

51 ' “shy and eenzelvig people” (Piryns 1992: 12), perhaps been particularly sensitive to the cancer of racism? Black Sunday was thus framed as Flanders’ continued confrontation with a ‘black danger’ within, potentially tainting the moral integrity of the political community and, more broadly, of all Flemings. Through the establishment of a ‘cordon sanitaire’, the other political parties sought to minimize the direct political influence of Flemish Block. This moral reading of Black Sunday also had a great mobilizing effect, leading to a range of symbolic “purification rituals” (Elchardus 1992: 34) meant to restore the values that Flemish Block was felt to threaten (solidarity, tolerance), and through which people wanted to publicly self-identify as anti-Flemish Block. Petitions against racism were signed, mass hand-in-hand manifestations and wakes with candle light were held, and a manifesto drafted (Charta ‘91) through which intellectuals hoped “to re-impregnate Flanders with a consciousness” (Piryns 1992: 9). The national trauma of the discovery of a racist evil within the Flemish ‘we’ was projected onto Borgerhout (where Flemish Block had gained 40% of the vote) in the aftermath of Black Sunday. This was ironic, because the 1991 elections had precisely meant the spread of Flemish Block beyond its former strongholds of Antwerp’s deprived neighborhoods into middle class areas and suburbs. As we will see below, the focus on Borgerhout is telling of the way in which the extreme-right would be framed as primarily linked to deprived, poor, volkse white Flemings. The term ‘Borgerokko’ became highly charged and taboo in the battle against Flemish Block (Beyen 2008: 167). At the same time, Borgerhout itself became the preferred locus for the Flemish (and international) media to try to understand and confront Flanders’ “black demons” (Lotens 2010: 12). “From march until June 2000 I have travelled through parts of ‘extreme-right Europe’, through Austria and Italy”, wrote reporter Rudi Rotthier in his book Hotel Fabiola (2001) about Borgerhout during the municipal elections of 2000, “and it seems logical to now take residence in the neighborhood that has come to be the symbol of the breakthrough of [the] extreme-right in Flanders.” By that time, several new Black Sundays had followed the first one: during the municipal elections of 1994, Flemish Block had gained 28% of the Antwerp vote, meaning that it could only be kept out of City hall by a monster coalition of all the other parties (Swyngedouw 2000: 134). Indeed, throughout the 1990s, Flemish Block increased its electoral support, especially in Antwerp, where it caused deep polarization (Beyen en Destatte 2009: 1671-1672)35.

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 35 During the 1995 and 1999 national elections, Flemish Block attracted 15% of the Flemish vote, and over 30% of the Antwerp vote (and 40-50% in Borgerhout) (Swyngedouw 2000: 142).

52 ' “Symbol.of.urban.blight,.deprivation.and.criminality”.36:.Borgerokko. and.the.discovery.of.a.problem.of.‘living.together’.. One of the consequences of the rise of Flemish Block was, ironically, the emergence of the so-called ‘migrant problem’ on the national political agenda and the start of a, still ongoing, debate about migration, integration and multicultural society (Phalet and Krekels 1998; Martens and Caestecker 2001: 102)37. This fits with a broader pattern in the political reactions to Flemish Block, where, on the one hand, the party and its program are strongly condemned, yet, on the other, Flemish Block themes are taken up by other parties (Witte and Meynen 2006: 147). The notion that migrants formed a problem that had not been adequately tackled by politics - and the linking of this problem to urban ‘concentration neighborhoods’, nuisance and street crime by ethnic youths in the public space, and to ‘ethnic tensions’ - became broadly shared. Not all migrant groups, or all ‘allochtonen’ , as post-migrants were later called, were problematized to the same extent: the focus was mostly on ‘Moroccans’ (‘Turks’ to a lesser extent) or ‘Muslims’, while migrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, the US or the Netherlands were hardly or never discussed (Van den Broeck 2002: 19).38 Although the presence of migrants had already been problematized in the 1970s by Francophone politicians in Brussels (Van den Broeck 2002: 17), it was through the breakthrough of Flemish Block that Belgium definitively realized that it had become an immigration country (Martens and Caestecker 2001: 102). Black Sunday thus signaled the traumatic discovery of two Others: a racist, morally ‘black’ Other within the Flemish ‘we’, and a non-white, non-European, Muslim migrant Other that turned out to be in society to stay. It also signaled the discovery of the impoverished, multi-ethnic neighborhood as the dangerous space where these two Others combined. As the site of ‘concentrated’ social problems and political unruliness (i.e. support for an ‘anti-democratic’ party) and as apparently fraught with ethnic tensions, the impoverished ethnic neighborhood emerged as deeply threatening to the stability of the nation-state. In Flanders, these anxieties were projected onto Borgerhout (Lotens 2010: 13). “Borgerhout is known as a ‘risk municipality’ and a ‘migrant ghetto’, and symbolizes urban blight, deprivation and criminality”, read the headlines of a HUMO report on Borgerhout after the 1994 elections39.

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 36 Quoted from a report about Borgerhout in the journal HUMO in the wake of the 1994 municipal elections: ‘If it is so nice, go and live there yourself: Borgerhout’ (Als het er zo goed is, ga er dan wonen: Borgerhout) HUMO Nr. 2826, 3 November 1994, P: 36. 37 See, for an in-depth analysis or representation of that debate in the 1990s: Blommaert and Verschuren (1992); at the turn of the 20th century: van den Broeck and Foblets (2002); and at the beginning of the 21st century: Ceuppens 2003: 709-823; Arnaut e.a. 2009. 38 An additional factor was the so-called ‘migrant riots’ between migrant youths and the police in Brussels’ poor neighborhoods during the summer of 1991. The stream of media images that this evoked visualized the ‘migrant problem’ to the Belgian audience, and accentuated that it was taking place against a desolate urban background (Phalet and Krekels 1998: 153). 39 ‘Als het er zo goed is, ga er dan wonen: Borgerhout’, HUMO Nr. 2826, 3 November 1994, p: 36.

53 ' In the dominant line of analysis that gradually emerged in policy circles in reaction to Flemish Block, the migrant problem and the rise of the extreme-right were defined as interrelated and essentially springing from the same deeper cause. This definition meant the co-optation by the federal and Flemish government of an “opportunity deprivation [kansenarmoede]/social exclusion frame” that had been developed earlier in the welfare sector (Stouthuysen e.a. 1999; Witte and Meynen 2006: 148; Uitermark 2003: 70)40. This frame is based on the idea that there are also structural inequalities within the welfare state in all domains (housing, education, employment), leading to the prolonged exclusion of marginal and low income groups (Stouthysen e.a. 1999: 582-4; Witte and Meynen 2006: 149-150). Deprivation, and especially its spatial accumulation in underprivileged urban neighborhoods [achtergestelde buurten], is understood in this frame to have a destabilizing effect throughout society as a whole: “This rupture [breuk] in the urban economic, social and cultural fabric contains the danger of conflicts that threaten harmonious living together” (Stouthuysen 1999: 583). This frame was attractive for a range of political actors – and the leftist parties especially. It contained a recognition of the problems that the emergence of Flemish Block apparently signaled, while simultaneously offering an alternative discourse that (seemingly) bypassed Flemish Block’s emphasis of cultural conflict through a discovery of the ‘urban poor’ (Uitermark 2003: 71). A “new social question” was thus defined in the wake of Flemish Block (Witte and Meynen 2006: 148): the issue of a dangerous deficit of social embeddedness in deprived urban spaces, and of migrants and deprived white ‘Flemings’ sharing a situation of societal ‘disintegration’ resulting in their being unable to ‘live together’. As Elchardus points out, this question required a new political project: “The aim of politics is, according to this vision, the organization of living together”, or, rather, the “shaping of those preferences and modes of behavior that make living together possible” (Elchardus 1992: 39). It is here, then, that a broad politics and governance of ‘living together’ emerged. In the sections that follow, I trace the development of the three policy domains and related social science analyses through which this political project took concrete shape: a deprivation policy from within which has sprung an integration policy and an urban policy. I discuss these with a special focus on how the problem of ‘living together’ '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 40 In Antwerp, for example, the Regional Institute for Community Building (Regionaal Instituut Samenlevingsopbouw) had already contested in the 1980s the, until then dominant explanation, that Flemish Block votes were the result of xenophobia as a more or less natural response of white Antwerpians to the presence of migrants (e.g. CBW/RISO-Antwerpen 1988; RISO-Antwerpen 1988 a, 1988b). Alternatively, it emphasized that especially residents of derelict neighborhoods - the working areas of the opbouwwerk of RISO - had voted Flemish Block, and re-conceptualized this as a form of protest of the poor against the neglect they and their neighborhoods had suffered, which they falsely deflected onto migrants under the influence of the racist propaganda of Flemish Block. After the 1988 elections, it urged the new city hall coalition to develop a policy that would ameliorate “the shared living conditions of deprived authochthons and migrants in deprived neighborhoods” in a range of domains (urban planning, housing, education, work, youth work), which it defined as “crucial to the community building between Flemings and migrants” (RISO-Antwerpen 1988b: 1).

54 ' is defined and what kind of governance technologies have been developed and implemented (and zooming in on new governmentalities in Borgerhout and Antwerp) to solve it41. I will demonstrate that, whereas ‘living together’ is first viewed as a problem of a lack of ‘integration’ in the sense of exclusion and marginalization, it gained a more liberal inflection of an individual ‘capacity’ for ‘responsible citizenship’ near the end of the 1990s. The sections are organized to highlight that this politics of ‘living together’ hinges on three political constructions, all of which echo deep historical anxieties over ‘anomie’ and ‘modernity’. These are: the ‘unintegrated allochtoon’, the ‘deprived autochtoon’ and ‘the urban (multi-ethnic/popular) neighborhood’. To some extent, the Belgian politics of ‘living together’ fits within a broader European pattern of governing (non-white) migrants and marginalized urban spaces through ‘integration’ (and less through segregation and penalization, see Uitermark 2014). It is exceptional, however, in the way it also explicitly problematizes an autochthon part of the population in terms of lacking integration, as well as in its anxious obsession with what it views as the disintegration of neighborhood life, and the dwindling of traditional forms of sociability more broadly (Elchardus 1992: 38). More than in any other European country: “[T]he implicit message is that the integration problem does not only concern migrants, but the entire Belgian society” (Phalet and Krekels 1998: 156). After Black Sunday, the ultimate meaning of Borgerhout/Borgerokko, in which all its layers of meaning are united, is that it functioned in the Flemish imagination as an icon for the new social question. In a novel by the Flemish writer and opinionist Tom Naegels, which is situated in Antwerp and Borgerhout, a young progressive journalist confronts both his Flemish Block-voting grandfather and his own cultural biases that emerge within his love for a Pakistani immigrant. Significantly, the novel is titled ‘Los’: ‘untied’, ‘loose’, and, in the context of the riots by ‘Moroccan’ youths that the journalist has to report, ‘unruly’. The novel reads as an investigation of the possibilities and impossibilities of social bonds across cultural difference. In the background, there is constantly the mythical status of Borgerhout as the dystopia of urban living together:

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 41 The idea that Belgian and Flemish ‘integration policies’ and ‘urban policies’ (Uitermark 2003; Stouthuysen e.a. 1999; Dedecker e.a. 2005) have first been developed in direct response to Flemish Block, and that both these policy lines were initially situated within a ‘deprivation policy’ [kansenarmoede beleid], is not new (Phalet and Krekels 1998: 159-160; Witte and Meynen 2006: 148-150; Verlot 2001: 32, 123-127; Martens en Caestecker 2001: 102, 111; Stouthuysen e.a. 1999; Uitermark 2003: 65-96; Kesteloot and De Maesschalck 2001). What I add to this is the argument that these policy domains are interrelated in a way that goes beyond the deprivation frame, and instead revolves around the notion of ‘living together’. My discussion of these policies through the lens of this argument means that there is a certain selective bias. See, for more in-depth and all-round discussion of Flemish integration policy: Foblets and Hubeau 1997, Verlot 2001, Vranken e.a. 2001; nationality legislation and migration laws: Hullebroeck 1993, Foblets and Yanasmayan 2010; and urban policy: DeDecker e.a. 1996, Uitermark 2003, De Decker e.a. 2005.

55 ' We are driving on the Turnhoutsebaan and entering Borgerhout. Our hearts start beating faster. Borgerhout! Even in the Netherlands they know what that means: somberness, tangible fear, dirt, daily riots between old, bitter Flemings who have seen their cozy [gezellig] municipality dilapidate [verkrotten] and the muscular, young, rowdy Maghrebins living in those slums [krotten]. The cradle of the Flemish Block! And we are driving into it!

(I’ll leave some room for shocked looks now). (Naegels 2005: 19)

Construing.the.‘unintegrated.allochthon’:.social.deprivation,.culture. and.‘harmonious.living.together’. A formalized national migrant policy was developed in Belgium only in direct reaction to the success of the extreme-right (Martens 1997: 69; Talhaoui 1997: 74; Verlot 2001: 32; Bousetta and Jacobs 2006). This late and reactive start resonated throughout its further development. Belgian integration policy is driven by waves of debate about particular issues (voting rights, headscarves, the cordon sanitaire) and pragmatic solutions to them, rather than by a systematic policy vision (Jacobs and Swyngedouw 2002; Bousetta and Jacobs 2006). Moreover, due to the different political paradigms with which the Francophone and Flemish Communities treat the topic of migrants, and the dynamic of conflict and compromise that is characteristic of the coalition governments at all institutional levels in the country, migrant policies are fragmented and characterized by ad hoc compromises (Martens 1997; Phalet and Krekel 1998: 155). The anxiety about the extreme-right that is the basis of migrant policy has also created a constant: in fine, the policy is conceived as a tool towards a stable society, and towards pacifying social conflict and urban unrest, rather than as an instrument to improve the position and rights of migrants as a goal in and of itself (Martens 1993; Blommaert and Martiniello 1996). Its ultimate aim is, as we will see, to create what is called ‘harmonious living together’. Analyzing Belgian and Flemish integration policies in light of this aim, I argue that there are two central aspects. First, through the concept of ‘integration’ that is central to the Belgian and Flemish policies I discuss here, ‘migrants’, or, as they are called later, ‘allochthons’, are construed as socio-economically and culturally deficient, and this deficiency is seen as an underlying cause to an assumed problematic absence of ‘living together’. I trace this political construction of migrants as doubly ‘unintegrated’, and the specific role ascribed to culture, to: on the one hand, the specifically Belgian history of the Flemish movement (Verlot 2001; Jacobs 2004; Loobuyck and Jacobs 2011); and, on the other, the colonial history of Belgium and Europe more broadly (Ceuppens 2003; Ceuppens and De Mul 2009; Bracke and De Mul 2009). The second, and much less discussed, aspect is that Belgian and Flemish integration policies do not just construct ‘migrant’ attitudes and behaviors as terrains to

56 ' be governed in order to restore ‘living together’, but also, and increasingly explicitly over the 1990s, the perceptions and neighborhood life of white or ‘autochthon’ ‘Belgians’.

The Royal Commissariat on Immigrant Policy: outlining basic principles In 1989, a Royal Commissariat on Immigrant Policy (KCM) was established by the federal government in response to the 1988 municipal elections. In a wide range of reports and policy recommendations, the KCM developed the first formal and coherent vision on the management of ethnic diversity on the level of the Belgian state (Bousetta and Jacobs 2006: 27)42. The Commissariat positioned itself emphatically in opposition to the vision of Flemish Block (mainly its notion that a peaceful multicultural society is, per definition, impossible, and its proposed solution of ‘remigration’), and came to be viewed as “a symbol of tolerant and pro-migrant Belgium” (Blommaert and Martinello 1996: 7). The starting point of the KCM was that migrants, including their cultural difference, form a de facto structural presence in Belgium, so that “it is the task of the Belgian governments to strive towards, and to create the conditions for, a harmonious pluricultural living together, via integration” (KCM 1989a: 40). In the view of the KCM, the migrant problem consisted of a combination of the socio-economic deprivation of migrants, of racism and discriminatory exclusion on the basis of migrants’ ‘ethnicity’, and of their culturally different behavior. Although the KCM pleaded for a ‘broad’ migrant policy (targeting labor migrants, refugees and minorities), it repeatedly mentioned migrants from Morocco and Turkey as ‘communities’ in which there existed “specific samenlevinsgproblemen [the term can be translated in two ways: ‘social problems’ or ‘problems of living together’] (KCM 1989a: 8). Through the notion of ‘integration’, the KCM developed a very ambivalent stance for managing what it viewed as the cultural aspect of the migrant problem. It is this concept that has been both its most contested and its most influential feat. ‘Integration’ was defined as the qualified ‘insertion’ [inpassing] of migrants within Belgian society in three domains (KCM 1989a: 34-39). First in the domain of public order, as defined by law, complete assimilation was required. The second domain was formed by what the KCM called the “fundamental orienting social principles underpinning the culture of the host land and which correspond to ‘modernity’, ‘emancipation’ [of women], and ‘pluralism’ in the meaning given by modern Western states” (38). The “highest degree” of the insertion of migrants was promoted with regard to these “orienting accomplishments of modern Western thought and praxis” (36), which “seem to carry the implicit consensus of an autochthonous majority” (37). Third, in all other domains of social life, the KCM maintained that “cultural-diversity- '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 42 Before the KCM, the only policy measures adopted by the Belgian state with respect to migrants and their descendants concerned their legal status, nationalization, work permits, and (only in 1981) anti- discrimination laws. There was no policy targeted at the circumstances and well-being of migrants as (temporary or permanent) residents in Belgium (Verlot 2001: 35)

57 ' as-mutual-enrichment” (39) is to be unequivocally respected, which the KCM viewed as in line with a specifically ‘Belgian’ tradition of pluralism. Fourth, insertion in these three domains was to be combined with an active encouragement of the structural involvement and societal and political participation of minorities. The major emphasis of the KCM was on remedying the exclusion and deprivation suffered by ‘migrants’, and on advocating measures that would allow them to emancipate and participate on an equal level in society. Indeed, the KCM brought about the first moment at which the socio-economic situation of ‘migrants’ and ‘minorities’ was thoroughly investigated and made visible to the state as a problem deserving government attention. However, due to this particular definition of integration, it thus also problematized non-Western migrants and their descendants as culturally unmodern and thereby blocking the desired ‘harmonious living together’ (Blommaert and Martiniello 1996: 8). Moreover, it introduced the idea of an ‘autochthonous’ population (interchangeably used with the term ‘Belgians’) - from the Greek autos khton, ‘born from the soil’ (Geschiere 2009: 2) - in opposition to ‘migrants’, ‘minorities’ and ‘allochthons’ (KCM 1989a: 33-34).43 The etymological logic of a division between ‘autochthons’, who supposedly have a ‘original’ link to a certain territory, and ‘allochthons’ who lack this original link by virtue of having arrived ‘later’ (Geschiere 2009: 6-16; Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005; Ceuppens 2006; Zenker 2011), would prove to be very important in Flemish policy and discourse in particular. At the same time, the KCM ‘integration’ concept also explicitly involved a “duty to accept” (43) cultural difference to a certain extent by what it calls the ‘autochthonous’ population. Although many authors view this as only rhetoric, the extent to which negative perceptions of migrants by certain sections of the Belgian population (described mainly as poor and elderly Belgians stuck in deprived urban neighborhoods) are repeatedly condemned should not be underestimated. “[This population] displays a tendency to glorify [sic] the values that it believes in, that it literally clings to, to the extreme, while it misrecognizes the values of the migrant population, especially the Turks and the Maghrebians, in an exaggerated fashion”, states one of the KCM reports (KCM 1990: 123). The KCM thus also problematizes the “attitude” or “mentality” of sections of the Belgian population as an obstacle to “living together between Belgians and migrants” (KCM 1990: 2). '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 43 Although it gives no definition for who this ‘autochthonous majority’ consists of, it thus defines ‘allochthons’: “people with a different socio-cultural origin, due to a different country of origin, irrespective of their current nationality; usually this is traced up to the third generation, to the extent that those people still want to see themselves as allochthons” (KCM 1989a: 34). It views the status of ‘allochthon’ as a phase that comes after that of being perceived as a ‘foreigner’, ‘guest worker’, or ‘immigrant’, and denotes that a specific group has “become [experienced as] already a little less strange” (ibid: 33). In contrast to the Netherlands, where the evolution of the term ‘allochtoon’ in policy documents is well described (Geschiere 2009: 148-149; Yanow and ter Haar 2013), there are no such studies of the genealogy of the term in Belgium. In general, however, population monitoring and labeling through statistical databases is much more fragmented, with diferent databases working with different indexes of nationality and methods for tracing ‘ethnic’ backgrounds than in the Netherlands (compare: Rotthier and Goyvaerts 2004 and Yanow and ter Haar 2013).

58 ' When it comes to that living together [samenleving], it is essential that explicit attention is given, besides to the objective socio-economic problems and the diversity of cultures, also to the experiential world [belevingswereld] of Belgians. (KCM 1990: 2)

The KCM reports are not only instructive in that they link ‘living together’ to the integration of ‘migrants’ and the perceptions of, especially elderly and poor, ‘Belgians’, but also in that they describe the problem of a lack of ‘living together’ as primarily situated in everyday cohabitation in a local (urban) context.

Everyday living together - ce terrible quotidien - that affects every life, [whether] he be Belgian or migrant, the evolution towards a multicultural society … is not seldom a process of fear, of rejecting the unfamiliar, of pain, and bitterness sometimes. (KCM 1989a: 16)

In the KCM reports, this ‘terrible quotidien’ of living together in urban spaces is thus turned into an urgent domain of governance. It is in the ‘everyday’ that cultural difference was imagined to be experienced as problematic and to lead to problems of “interhuman communication and expression in the public sphere” (KCM 1989a: 33). In the operationalization of its policy, the KCM therefore put great emphasis on the need: for the state to be present in urban deprived neighborhoods with an migrant population (especially to ameliorate “safety and feelings of safety”, see: KCM 1990: 4); for the development of local, municipal policies that directly target what it called the “concrete domain of living together” (KCM 1990: 2); and to set-up “actions that stimulate living together” (ibid: 4). The policy line of the KCM was immediately criticized for abnormalizing migrants as culturally archaic (Phalet en Krekels 1998: 158; Rea 2005: 183), and for blaming the ‘migrant problem’ on migrants’ assumed non-integration, while failing to deal with the issues (local voting rights, the implementation of the official recognition of Islam) that touch upon their political rights and participation (Blommaert and Verschueren 1992; Martens 1993; Blommaert and Martinello 1996). Nevertheless, the integration concept was formally confirmed by the federal government in 1990, and formed the basis for the integration policies developed by the Communities to which jurisdiction over integration was delegated.

59 ' Flemish integration policy: ‘culture’, emancipation and echoes of Flemish history There is a difference between the approach to integration developed in Wallonia- Brussels and that in Flanders. 44 Whereas the former is inspired by the French republican model, and emphasizes socio-economic factors, equality and citoyenetté, while shunning any reference to ethnicity or culture, the latter closely followed the Dutch model of recognizing ethno-cultural minorities (Verlot 2001; Jacobs 2004: 286; Loobuyck and Jacobs 2011: 134). Although the 1990s saw a shift in terminology from migrants to allochtonen and minorities, Flemish policy during that period45 was constant in that it was characterized by three tensions as to the meaning and role ascribed to ‘culture’ and ‘community’. What was termed migrants’ “cultural particularity” [culturele eigenheid] was conceptualized as both the cause of, and solution to, social deprivation (Verlot 2001: 125); and as the starting point for intercultural living together and a potential block thereto. Furthermore, while the cultural-linguistic particularity of Francophones was seen as an attack on Flemish identity and autonomy in the context of Brussels, cultural diversity was, in the first integration policy documents, encouraged as an enrichment to Flanders in relation to migrants (Verlot 2001: 123). Migrant policy was primarily conceived as a specific sub-form within the more general social deprivation policy [kansarmoedebeleid] (Verlot 2001: 125; Martens en Caestecker 2001: 111), and was directed not at migrants per se, but at those who were in an underprivileged position “due to their weak social-economic situation and their ethnic origin” (Vlaamse Executieve 1989: 4). On top of a lack of basic competencies and inadequate equipment that migrants were perceived to share with deprived autochthones, migrants’ “cultural particularity” was perceived as a cumulative problematic factor (Verlot 2001: 125) that aggravated their deprivation. At the same time, respect for and recognition of the cultural particularity of migrants as communities was conceptualized as the key to their emancipation. It was only by developing a positive awareness of their particular characteristics “rooted in their origin and culture”, and by organizing as a community, that the “collective emancipation and group-based integration” of migrants was envisioned to take place (Vlaamse Executieve 1989: 6). This led to a double-track policy. On the one hand, a policy track of equal opportunities was established and aimed at removing migrants’ underprivileged position in domains such as the labor market, housing and education. Although the '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 44 Although the way in which the migrant problem and policy measures are framed in Wallonia-Brussels and Flanders differ greatly with respect to the emphasis they place on socio-economics or culture and ethnicity, in practice the two policy lines are not so different and share a mostly pragmatist and flexible character (Phalet and Krekel 1998: 155, 159; Bousetta and Jacobs 2006). 45 This section is based on the following policy documents, which were developed by consecutive Flemish governments with a mostly social-democratic and Christian-democratic signature: Vlaamse Executieve (1989) ‘Nota Migrantenbeleid van de Vlaamse Executieve’; Vlaamse Regering (1993) ‘Beleidsbrief migrantenbeleid. Migrantenbeleid van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap, een beleid van gelijke kansen’; Interdepartementale Commissie Migranten (1996) ‘Strategisch plan voor het Vlaamse minderhedenbeleid t.a.v. etnisch-culturele minderheden’; Vlaams Parlement (1998) ‘Decreet inzake het Vlaamse beleid ten aanzien van ethnisch-culturele minderheden’.

60 ' ‘inclusive’ character of this policy goal (aimed at the problems shared by migrants and deprived autochtonen alike) was emphasized as being essential for reducing societal friction, it was mostly organized through categorical measures (Verlot 2001: 125-9). Funding was channeled through the Flemish budget for the integration of the socially deprived (VFIA, VFIK46), 25% of which was earmarked for projects specifically directed at migrants, while a network of regional and local integration centers (RICs and LICs) formed its organizational structure. A second track was a cultural policy aimed at the emancipation and interest representation of migrants, as well as at the stimulation of “harmonious living together” (Vlaamse Regering 1993: 5).47 As with the KCM, the aim of Flemish migrant policy was to change the present situation of “separate developments, misunderstanding and closure [geslotenheid]” between migrants and autochthons towards “active openness, exchange and interaction, mutual communication” (Vlaamse Executieve 1989: 3, 5). With respect to this overarching goal, there was a second ambivalence. Even though the development of their own cultural identity was perceived to be the basis of migrants’ integration in society and their openness [openheid] towards other cultural groups, there was also a fear of too much cultural particularity and communal seclusion. There are repeated warnings in the policy documents of the need to ensure that the stimulation of cultural community organizations will not become a hindrance to integration and lead to segregation. Migrant associations were thus not unconditionally recognized: they needed to be “inspired by the integration-principle”, their activities could not be religious and needed to mostly be conducted in Dutch (Verlot 2001: 131-2), and their activities should preferably be directed at intercultural initiatives and the emancipation of women (Martens and Caestecker 2001: 115). These conditions were not placed on subsidized ‘autochthonous’ associations. The extent to which the recognition of migrants’ cultural identity actually implies a shaping of it becomes very clear in the execution of the Flemish migrant policy through integration centers. Typical of Flemish policy at the time, these centers did not form a newly-created state administration. Instead, already existing local private initiatives and associations that worked with migrants, and whose nature varied widely depending on the local context, were assigned the status of (local or regional) integration center (Martens and Caestecker 2001: 111). As such, they were subsidized and made responsible for the task of developing “integration stimulating activities” that were assumed to be logically situated on a local, neighborhood level: Dutch language training, encouraging cultural “self-organizations” [zelforganisaties], education in Flemish culture and society, and creating contact and exchanges between migrants and the autochthonous population (Vlaamse Executieve 1989: 13). The LIC in Borgerhout, for example, consisted of a merger of two Moroccan women’s organizations '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 46 Flemish Fund for the Integration of the Underprivileged (Vlaams Fonds voor de Integratie van Achtergestelden, VFIA), founded in 1989; Flemish Fund for the Integration of the Opportunity Deprived (Vlaams Fonds voor de Integratie van Kansarmen), founded in 1990. 47 In 1995, the structural recognition and subsidization of migrant associations was included as part of a general decree on ‘Volksontwikkeling’ [development of the people] (Verlot 2001: 131-2).

61 ' [vrouwenwerkingen] that had themselves been founded by a Borgerhout private initiative working on the reception and well-being of (mostly Moroccan) labor migrants48. The main Moroccan associations in Borgerhout were established under the guidance of the LIC and the Regional Institute for Community building (RISO, later Samenlevingsopbouw), and were coached towards a strong emphasis on education and emancipation, and on improving ‘living together’ in the neighborhood in their activities49. In other words, what were called self-organizations were in fact often established by, or with the help of, initiatives that had the emancipation of migrants at heart, but were not themselves primarily run by migrants and nor did they have the development of their ‘cultural particularity’ as their prime goal. In the first half of the 1990s, Flemish integration policy thus displayed an optimism about the role of the ‘culture’ of migrants in organizing their emancipation and harmonious ‘living together’. As Verlot has shown, the Flemish governmental elite was explicitly inspired in this by the identitary logic of the history of Flemish emancipation [ontvoogdingsstijd], drawing parallels between the Flemish minority experience and the minority position of migrants (2001: 133-138; Loobuyck and Jacobs 2011: 134). The paternalistic element that was inherent in the Flemish movement is also present in these early Flemish integration policies. Just as the common people, especially the poor in the Flemish countryside, were conceptualized by the Flemish movement as both the true authentic carriers of Flemish culture and as in need of development [volksontwikkeling, volksverheffing] by the ‘leading’ middle class Flemish (and Catholic) vanguard in order to live its culture and speak its language properly (Ceuppens 2003: 20-25; De Smaele 2009: 270-299), so the emancipation of migrants was thought to imply the shaping of a proper, ‘integration-oriented’, form of their cultural identity and collective organization. The notion of a Flemish people with its own particularity that should be respected on Flemish territory also had another, very paradoxical, effect on integration policy. Precisely because Flemishness was ethnically defined, there was no expectation at this time that migrants should, or could, become ‘Flemish’. In other words, Flemish policy-makers displayed the idea that: “Flemishness is something for Flemings” (Verlot 2001: 137). Although the integrity of the link between language and territory is seen as crucial to the protection of the ‘Flemish’ identity, which explains the fervent reactions to Francophone demands for French language rights in the ‘Flemish’ municipalities around Brussels, the integration of migrants in this period was thus not linked to any

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 48 Due to the relatively visible presence of guest workers and their problems, the absence of a national integration policy was urgently felt in Borgerhout. In response, a range of private initiatives and services organized by volunteers from the Third World Movement aimed at the reception and well-being of labor migrants had already been established since the 1970s. The Center for Foreign Employees (CBW), most notably, had founded, amongst other services, migrant youth work, Moroccan women’s organizations, and Dutch language training. It was recognized as a Regional Integration Center and became an important supra-local player within the Flemish integration sector. 49 See, for the history of these organizations and the activities of the Borgerhout LIC: www.de8.be

62 ' specified substantive ‘Flemish’ cultural values, in contrast to the naming of Belgian ‘majority’ values in the KCM report (ibid). In the latter half of the 1990s, ‘Flemish’ migrant policy changed into a ‘minorities’ policy’50 targeting ‘allochthons’ (instead of ‘migrants’), refugees and traveling groups. In this new policy (ICM 1996; Vlaams Parlement 1998), the basic aims of emancipation and peaceful living together remained, but there were small gaps discernible in the previous optimism about the role of cultural identity and self-organization. The formal definition of ‘allochthons’51 meant that the link between ethno-cultural difference and a lagging social-economic status was construed as inheritable over generations, and as independent of someone’s legal national status. Indeed, the text of the “Strategic Plan for the Flemish Minority Policy” (ICM 1996) displays hints of frustration about the lack of progress made by ‘allochthonous’ minorities and worries about the willingness of ‘allochthons’ to “actively” participate in society. This is done in a discourse of some migrant communities “retreating into their communities” or being “insufficiently [willing to be] [sic] involved in society” (ICM 1996: 15). In the same document, “peaceful living together” as one of the main aims of the minority policy was more concretely operationalized into two domains. It was viewed as a Flemish government task to “optimize the attitude of the population towards minorities” (ICM 1996: 8), both as manifest in attitudinal research and in the domain of daily life, through “sensibilization campaigns”. Results in this domain were to be made legible via the Eurobarometer (where the high scores of Flanders in xenophobic attitudes were to be brought down to the European average) and through attitudinal polls (ICM1996: 11-12). A second domain of living together in which the Flemish government wanted to take up a stimulating role was “intercultural interaction in daily life”, which was defined as “the spontaneous contact, spontaneous communication, spontaneous cooperation between autochthons and allochthons, in common [gewone] day-to-day life” (ICM 1996: 34). The increase of “mixed neighborhood activities” and the decrease of “white facilitations” (i.e. run by and/or catering to ‘white’ denizens only) in neighborhoods were taken as indicators (35). So, whereas the development of measures to increase ‘living together’ was previously delegated mostly to private initiatives and local quasi-NGOs, the Flemish government now defined local ‘everyday living together’ also as a domain of direct state governance. Similarly, the Minorities Decree of 1998 obliged municipalities to create an integration service and develop local minority policies, thus taking over responsibility for integration from the integration

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 50 In contrast to the Dutch minorities policy upon which it was based, the Flemish policy does not formally identify specific ethnic-cultural minorities (‘Moroccans’, ‘Turks’ etc). In practice, however, and due to EU regulation, ‘allochthons’ from EU-countries have de facto more political rights than those with a non-EU background (Martens and Caestecker 2001: 103). 51 The definition is: “Legally residing in Belgium, independent of Belgian nationality, with the following characteristics: a) with at least one parent or grandparent born outside of Belgium, b) in a socially deprived position due to their ethnic origin and weak socio-economic situation.” (Vlaams Parlement 1998: 2)

63 ' centers. “The state, now on a local level, takes the control over its social policy back into its own hands” (Martens and Caestecker 2001: 113).

The emergence of a postcolonial template of strangeness: cultural determinism and ‘autochthony’ In federal and Flemish integration policies, the concept of ‘living together’ thus started to be used as if self-evidently referring to the relation between so-called ‘autochtonen’ and ‘allochtonen’ or ‘migrants’. Moreover, through the notion of ‘integration’ ‘allochtonen’ were defined as having a double deficit - a socio-economic deprived position linked to a problematic ‘culture’, unadapted to Belgian or Flemish society - which ‘allochtonen’ assumedly need to emancipate from in order for ‘harmonious living together’, especially on the level of local day-to-day life, to become possible. As to what migrants’ ‘cultural particularity’ was supposed to consist of, and how their cultural characteristics supposedly created a weak societal position and neighborhood conflict, Flemish integration policy remained vague, however. This could be so precisely because it was an intensely discussed topic in Flemish public debates on migrants and their ‘(failed) integration’. These debates are fragmented along political-ideological lines.52 Despite differences in emphasis and terminology, however, Flemish public discourse is characterized by two tendencies that have become more hegemonic over time: a cultural determinism echoing a colonial past (Blommaert and Verschuren 1992; Ceuppens 2003: 520-544, 650-823; Arnaut e.a. 2009; Arnaut and Ceuppens 2009; Ceuppens and de Mul 2009; Bracke and Fadil 2012), and a flexible distinction between what is claimed as territorial rootedness versus ‘strangeness’ (Ceuppens 2003: 527-617; Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005; Ceuppens 2006). As said, in Flemish popular discourse, the terms ‘migrant’ and ‘allochtoon’ are commonly understood to be synonymous to ‘Moroccans’, ‘Turks’, and ‘Muslims’. A reified and deterministic use of the concept of ‘culture’ has become dominant common sense in Flemish public debate especially in relation to these non-European, post-labor migration categories. However, the precise way in which their ‘culture’ is defined and problematized has changed over time. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Flemish public debate was focused very much on the problem of “migrant youth”. This was so not just for Flemish Block, but also for social science researchers and welfare organizations engaged in investigating and ameliorating the situation of ‘migrants’ (I will use Hobin and Moelaert 1986, Hermans

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 52 In general, leftist and center-leftist parties stress the need to facilitate ‘diversity’, emphasize socio- economic factors, and strive against discrimination. They all compete for the type of voter that wants to distance him/herself from a racist stance (Jacobs 2004: 289). While the Christian-democrats try to follow a middle-course, liberals and those on the right have adopted Flemish Block’s law-and-order focus, as well as its culturalist explanations for the low socio-economic position of ‘allochthons’ (Jacobs 2004; Coene and Longman 2006: 193).

64 ' 1994, and RISO-Antwerpen 1988a as examples).53 Migrants youths were commonly conceptualized as trapped “between two cultures”: their ‘Moroccan’ home culture [thuiscultuur] and the ‘Belgian’ culture of their school and public space. Drawing on anthropological literature on Morocco and especially Berbers54, ‘the Moroccan culture’ was understood to be ‘rural’ and ‘traditional’ and described in terms of fixed elements of social organization and customs leading to a distinct mentality and outlook: e.g. the primacy of extended family and family honour, gender segregation, hierarchy and authoritarianism, formalism and distrust towards outsiders (Hermans 1994: 27-49; RISO-Antwerpen 1988a: 56-60). These cultural characteristics were, moreover, conceptualized as “diametrically opposed” (RISO-Antwerpen 1988a: 58) to ‘modern’ and ‘urban’ Belgian or ‘Western’ culture (e.g. Hobin and Moelart 1986: 11; Hermans 1994: 210-212, 272-279), which was in turn construed as revolving around individualism, equality, the nuclear family, and authentic self-expression. The general idea was that this contrast led to a parenting crisis with parents finding their authority and ‘traditional’ values undermined in Belgium, and to an identity crisis for migrant youth (RISO-Antwerpen 1988a: 60-61). Aggravated by bleak social- economic prospects, inadequate housing. and racism, these crises were seen as the underlying cause for migrant youth loitering in public space, failing results in education, and the risk of their falling victim to the lure of petty crime and drug abuse. It needs to be emphasized that in the research and welfare documents I discuss here, the authors highlight that migrant youths should be enabled to gain a more positive experience of their Moroccan background as the basis for emancipation. However, the substantive description of ‘Moroccan culture’ and the notion of ‘objective’ cultural difference (e.g. Hermans 1994: 271-279) suggests that migrants ultimately needed to be gently guided to overcoming their ‘traditional’ culture in order to function to their full potential in ‘modern’ Belgian society. In other words, as Blommaert and Verschueren (1992) argued, a certain ‘culturalization’ of the migrant problem could thus also be discerned in academic and leftist approaches, including an evolutionist “politics of time” (Fabian 1983/2002) in the sense that ‘Moroccan culture’ was construed as ‘backward’ and as if ‘lagging behind’ in another time. At the end of the 1990s, in Flanders as well as in the rest of Europe a discursive shift took place: “a new inflection of cultural racism in which beliefs, values and morals are the primary site for the marking of absolute difference, rather than ‘cultural practices’ such as customs, traditions, and ‘lifestyles’” (Fortier 2008: 6; see Chapter 2). In more or less the same period, and very much under the influence of shifts in the Dutch integration debate, the idea that integration had ‘failed’ (Van den Broeck and '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 53 Despite theoretical statements about cultural hybridity and the flexibility of ethnicity, these documents display an implicit assumption that there exists a specific constellation of fixed cultural characteristics constituting a ‘traditional Moroccan culture’. 54 Crucially, in contrast to the Netherlands, Belgian anthropology has not, or hardly, developed a tradition of carrying out ethnography ‘at home’. As a consequence, there has been comparatively little anthropological ethnographic research on Belgian multicultural society, and especially not on ‘autochthons’, carried out by Belgian anthropologists (Ceuppens 2003: xxxiv-xxxv).

65 ' Foblets 2002; Coene and Longman 2006; Maly 2007; Arnaut e.a. 2009b; Zemni 2011), and that it had done so due to the ‘cultural relativism’ of the previous ‘multiculturalist’ approach covering up the ‘real’ problems of Islam and migrant cultures, gained headway. Throughout the political spectrum, including the left, politicians and intellectuals started to pose as speaking the truth of the ‘ordinary man’ and as defending their long neglected interests. “We need to throw our taboos overboard, dare to say things as they really are. The migrant culture hampers every integration”, said the Antwerp socialist Alderman Robert Voorhamme (quoted in Maly 2009: 168). In this ‘new realism’ (Prins 2002), the conceptualization of ‘integration’ and ‘living together’ as problems caused by social- economic deprivation and racism, as well as the optimism about cultural emancipation is abandoned. Though emphasis and precise framing have changed, the constant in the Flemish public discourse about migrants/allochthons is that they are described as having a cultural essence uniting them into a ‘community’: their behavior and mentality is construed as determined by their ‘culture’ or religion as a coherent whole of distinct, fixed characteristics (traditions, customs, values) that are also seen as ‘of another time’. As has been argued for the multicultural debates in other European countries (e.g. Hesse 2000; Gilroy 2005; Boehmer and De Mul 2012), the way in which an essentialist definition of ‘culture’ functioning as an index of insufficient modernity and uncompleted civilization is used to distinguish non-white from white residents echoes colonial perceptions of colonized subjects (Ceuppens 2003; Arnaut and Ceuppens 2009; Ceuppens and De Mul 2009). In the case of Belgian colonial history in Congo, the colonial perception of the ‘Congoleze’ as so deeply shaped by their ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional milieu’ of their customs and ‘bantu-mentality’, that even evolués were suspected of never truly reaching civilization at heart, amounted to the construction of a juridically recognized de facto racial distinction between white ‘civilized’ Belgians and black ‘uncivilized’ Congoleze underpinning and legitimating the colonial project as one of dominer pour servir (Ceuppens 2003: 127-164, 520-522).55 The continuity of culturalized framing as a postcolonial phenomenon is less clear- cut in Belgium than in other European countries, as its colonial history has not ‘come home’, or at least not in Flanders, in the form of significant immigration of former colonial subjects to the metropole after independence (Ceuppens and De Mul 2009: 62).56 Colonial history and the Belgian-Congoleze minority are absent in the Flemish '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 55 As Ceuppens explains, Belgian colonials were not attracted to biological racism and eugenetics in great numbers. When differentiating between Congoleze and Belgians, cultural arguments of ‘milieu’, ‘mentality’, ‘customs’, and ‘civilization’ dominated over references to purely physical or biological differences (2003:159). Nevertheless, juridical categorizations were de facto racialized, with ‘white’ equated to ‘civilized’ and ‘black’ to ‘uncivilized’, and a far going racial segregation of residence and public life was installed (2003: 145-148). 56 Congoleze were only allowed to migrate to Belgium after independence as students, so that their status for a long time did not seem to fit that of ‘migrants’, and they were not subsumed under the ‘migrant problem’. There is a significant Congoleze minority now, but it is localized almost exclusively in Brussels, making it a Francophone phenomenon that is not discussed in the Flemish public arena (Ceuppens and De Mul 2009: 62-3).

66 ' integration debate (Ceuppens 2003: xxxiv; Viaene, Van Reybrouck, Ceuppens 2009b). The Flemish discourse on integration is postcolonial in a doubly fractured way. There is a continuity of Belgian colonial perceptions in the form of the culture-concept (i.e. cultures as stable and coherent wholes of traditions and customs determining the behavior and nature of its carriers) as an abstract model for understanding and governing non-white Others as essentially different from and outside of (European) modern civilization (Ceuppens 2003: 663, 691, 689-699, 707, 775-809; Arnaut en Ceuppens 2009). The category on to which this cultural essentialism is now projected, however, has shifted: from Congolese colonial subjects to Moroccan and Turkish post- labor migrants. Due to this shift, the concrete applications of the abstract notion of ‘culture’ in Flemish integration debates are not always drawn only from the Belgian colonial heritage, but also from other European colonial and postcolonial discourses, most notably those pertaining to the French colonial project in North-Africa and to orientalist imaginaries of ‘Islam’ circulating in Europe more broadly (Zemni 2009). The effect is the same. ‘Congoleze’ were trapped between being the objects of a civilization project, while at the same time they were never allowed to become Belgian citizens due to their assumed inherent lack of civilization ultimately linked to ‘black’ skin color. In a similar circular way, the term allochtonen is reserved in popular use for non-white migrant groups whose supposedly ‘unmodern culture’ is thought to be innate and inheritable, so that based on their physical appearance they never become truly ‘autochtonous’, no matter how ‘integrated’ they are (Ceuppens 2003: 691; Ceuppens en De Mul 2009: 64). The meaning and weight of the distinction between ‘allochthons’ and ‘autochthons’ emerges not only out of the resonations with a broad European colonial history of deploying ‘culture’ to racialize non-white migrants as different and removed from ‘modern’ European civilization. The concept of ‘allochthons’ also implies strangeness in a different sense. In Western-Europe, contemporary autochthony discourses hark back to strong forms of localism, in which strangers were not necessarily defined in terms of ethnicity, nationality, or race, but as anyone from outside a specific locality, including representatives of the modern nation-state, as a threat to local autonomy (Ceuppens 2003: 527-551; Ceuppens 2006: 149). The primacy of local identities in Belgium and the importance of clientalism and factionalism in municipal politics, have caused for a tendency in local politics to redefine political adversaries as ‘aliens’ besieging the ‘locals’ either as colonizers or as scroungers. This meshed with the competition and conflict inherent to pillarization, and intersected with the rhetoric of the Flemish and Walloon movements (Ceuppens 2006). A main characteristic of autochthony discourses as they have now emerged in Africa and Western-Europe in response to globalization, is their “elasticity” and “fuzziness”: as claims to rootedness jump scales, autochthony discourses switch easily between different Others and defy a stable and concrete definition of the autochthon status (Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005: 387). The strength of Flemish Block’s discourse is then not an exclusive emphasis on ‘Moroccans’ and ‘Muslims’ - even though this emphasis is unmistakably there - but that it flexibly applies a historically familiar theme. Shifting between different categories of arrogant culturally colonizing (Francophones, Eurocrats), or economically parasiting Others (migrants, Muslims, Francophones), and

67 ' ‘alien’ supralocal political entities (the Belgian state, the EU) it constructs an image of ‘one’s own people’ as threatened in their rightful political and economic autonomy and hampered in their self-realization (Arnaut en Ceuppens 2004; Ceuppens 2006; cf. Holmes 2000). The superimposition of postcolonial discourses revolving around ‘culture’ as a ‘natural’ nexus of difference and (un)modernity onto this history of strong local identifications resulted in a migrant debate in which specific migrant groups (non-white, non-European) are construed as naturally ‘strange’ to ‘local’ or ‘original’ communities because of their culture, and as thereby disturbing what is implicitly constructed to have been a more homogeneous and cohesive past. Moreover, Flemish Block discourse, Flemish integration policy, and public debates about migration all converge around the idea that it is in the domain of neighborhood life that ‘allochtonen’ are thought to live their ‘strange’ culture most visibly and publicly and that ‘autochtonen’ are thus thought to be tangibly - in their everyday life - confronted with the alienating effects of migrants’ cultural Otherness. This is a more hidden effect of the colonial-cum-primordial culture concept: a general interest in the everyday behavior of ‘ordinary’ people and the role of ‘culture’ as that what regulates behavior and relations of a face-to-face community in a bounded local space. These are the main elements of what I will call the postcolonial template of strangeness: a syncing of non-rootedness in a primordialist sense with cultural Otherness in a postcolonial sense, and projected as naturally leading to conflict and alienation on the level of the neighborhood construed as the domain of tangible experiences and of primary forms of sociality. I find it useful to distinguish two different but interrelated discourses through which the ‘postcolonial template of strangeness’ operates which are usually analyzed in somewhat separate academic discussions. One is what I call the secular-liberal discourse, and focuses on religious differences, abstract values, and secular modernity. This discourse will be discussed more elaborately in the next chapter. The other is the ‘deprived ethnic neighborhood discourse’. In it, the idea of the neighborhood as the natural locus of ethno-cultural conflict is routed through anxieties over city life in general, and urban lower-class and racialized spaces specifically57. The emergence and historical layers of this second discourse are the subject of the next section.

Construing.the.‘deprived.autochthon’:.urban.disintegration,. ‘anomie’.and.divergent.worldviews.in.postZmodernity. The success of Flemish Block triggered not only the development of the category of the deprived and ‘un-integrated’ ‘migrant’ or ‘allochthon’ as the object of an

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 57 See for similar analyses of political anxieties over, and the racialization or stigmatization, of multiethnic urban spaces in Europe more generally: Baeten 2001, 2002; Cross and Keith 1993; Wacquant 1993, 2007; Uitermark and Duyvendak 2008; Uitermark 2014.

68 ' emancipative ‘integration policy’; it also meant the construction of a specific sub- category of ‘deprived’ ‘autochthons’ which was understood to be in equal need of ‘integration’ and ‘emancipation’ as a precondition for ‘harmonious samenleven’. In this section, I take a closer look at this construction. As I will demonstrate, this very conceptualization of Flemish Block voting as essentially linked to, and governable through, a problem of social deprivation constituted a specifically classed reading: it deflected ‘ethnocentrism’ and a problematic lack of ‘living together’ onto the (urban) lower class and the lower educated (Ceuppens 2003: 622-641). It did so, moreover, in a period in which Flemish Block expanded its electorate from deprived neighborhoods to middle class suburbs and upper class neighborhoods in Antwerp (in 1987, Swyngedouw 1990: 424), and from 1991 onwards throughout Flanders and outside urban conglomerates (De Maesschalck and Kesteloot 2000; De Decker e.a. 2005). The ‘deprived autochthon’ construct resembled that of its ‘allochtoon’ counterpart in two ways. First, it, too, had an ambivalent ‘emancipatory’ goal. Second, it was based on an understanding of a lack of ‘integration’ not only in socio-economic terms, but also in the assumption of what could be called a ‘cultural’ deficiency in relation to modernity. There was a fundamental tension between the emancipatory and disciplining aspects of the ‘deprivation policy’ and (social science) analyses through which this ‘deprived autochtonen’ category came in to being. On the one hand, as the deprivation frame became hegemonic in (federal and Flemish) policy circles at the end of the 1980s, ‘deprived autochthons’ were increasingly conceptualized as speaking or uncovering certain ‘truths’ via their voting behavior: about the neglect of underprivileged neighborhoods and inequality in society, and about the problem of the ‘integration’ of ‘migrants’. The amelioration of their social position and the recognition of their voice in politics were defined as essential preconditions for reducing the ‘gap’ [kloof] between politics and citizens and for restoring ‘living together’. This meant an enormous “scale jumping” for the urban poor (Loopmans e.a. 2003; Uitermark 2003: 72): they were now suddenly at the center of political attention, as their well-being was conceptualized as directly affecting the social and political well-being of the nation-state and, especially, the Flemish community. As with ‘migrants’ by way of the KCM, this led to an unprecedented effort from the federal government, via what was called the General Poverty Report [Algemeen Verslag van de Armoede], to gain insight into the life-worlds and needs of the poor, as well as into their ‘view from within’ (Stouthuysen e.a. 1999: 286; Uitermark 2003: 72-5). As will be described in detail below, the Flemish government invested in combating social exclusion and encouraging the ‘integration’ of deprived groups by financing local projects and new social housing in those municipalities and urban neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of deprived and migrant residents (Loopmans e.a. 2003; Uitermark 2003: 71; Loopmans e.a. 2010). However, these empowering aspects combined with a disciplinary undercurrent (cf. Cruikshank 1999). This tension had already been present in the welfare sector from which the deprivation frame was derived, and especially in the sectors of ‘(community) building’ [opbouwwerk, or samenlevingsopbouw] and ‘neighborhood work’ [buurtwerk], which

69 ' traditionally focused on the urban poor58. Although in the 1960s this sector strived to give voice to and empower the marginalized against their exclusion and misrecognition by the establishment, this always also entailed an element of ‘shaping’59, that is, of helping the poor to view and understand their situation in a particular way, as well as to stimulate the building of ‘community’ (gemeenschapsopbouw) and ‘living together’ or ‘integration’ of the (different groups among) the poor sharing a neighborhood (Van Dingenen 1980; Roelandt 1996; Demol 1998; Storme 1998). In the 1980s, RISO- Antwerp, for example, saw one of its prime tasks to be teaching ‘deprived autochthons’ how to live together with their ‘migrant’ neighbors, and helping them to broaden their horizons away from ‘racism’ towards a more political understanding of their situation (i.e. as caused by deprivation and not by the cultural difference of migrants).60 The ‘integration’ and emancipation of ‘deprived autochthons’ strived for via the Flemish deprivation policy was ultimately aimed at changing their perceptions away from political extremism and racism (cf. Uitermark 2014: 1426). In this sense, ‘deprived autochthons’ were thus also understood to have some kind of ‘cultural’ deficit. In order to understand what kind of imagination of ‘disintegration’, and what kind of imagined ‘cultural’ deficit, is subsumed in the construction of the ‘deprived autochthon’, I analyze two strands of Flemish social science research on Flemish Block voting that have been interrelated with Flemish policy-making. The first strand is that of socio-geographical analyses of Flemish Block voting (Swyngedouw 1989, 1990, 2000; De Maesschalck and Kesteloot 2000). The second concerns attitudinal (survey) and electoral (exit polls) research that has sought to explain the attitudes towards ‘migrants’ in the Flemish population and the (socio-economic and psychological) characteristics of Flemish Block voters compared to those who vote for other parties. Marc Swyngedouw’s (1989, 1990, 2000) early social geographic studies of the relative success of political parties per Antwerp neighborhood in the elections in the 1980s formed an important element in the cooptation of the deprivation frame from the welfare sector by policy circles (Uitermark 2003: 71). Drawing on the statistical mapping of deprivation indicators in poverty ‘atlases’ partly developed by RISO- Antwerpen, Swyngedouw argued that the distinguishing factor of the Antwerp neighborhoods characterized by Flemish Block voting in the 1985 to 1989 elections was not so much the presence or concentration of migrants per se, but the fact that they '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 58 See, for a history of community building work [samenlevinsgopbouw] in Flanders: http://www.samenlevingsopbouwgent.be/samen/geschiedenis.htm accessed 16 May 2013. 59 This kind of adult education aimed at self-development and empowerment is called vorming in Flemish, which literally means ‘to shape someone/something’, or ‘to give shape to something’ (in this case to ‘oneself’). 60 In the policy measures it promoted to counter the success of Flemish Block in deprived neighborhoods (RISO-Antwerpen 1988b: 13), it proposed, for example, the establishing of urban borough centers (stedelijke wijkcentra) to ensure the access of deprived residents to city services. These centers were envisioned to also function as local spaces for ‘encounters’ and to house yet to be established ‘integration forums’, where local groups could have guided discussions about samenlevingsconflicten, develop communal projects to counter minor discriminatory iinfractions in neighborhood life, and close “contracts of good neighborliness” (13).

70 ' were spaces of accumulated deprivation (1989, 1990; De Maesschalk and Kesteloot 2000: 28). He described the (elderly) ‘autochthonous’ residents of these popular (volkse) neighborhoods as having been ‘left behind’, severed from society proper (1990: 404; 2000) in several ways: literally, in the sense that they had not been able to join the city flight of the middle classes to the suburbs; socially, as the neighborhood associational life and social fabric had disintegrated with the absence of the middle classes and the influx of migrants; economically, in the sense that economic growth had not improved their employability in blue collar jobs; and politically, because of the municipal merger and depillarization. Stuck in this situation of socio-cultural and political disintegration from mainstream society, and facing competition over housing, jobs and the neighborhood space with migrants, Swyngedouw argued: “[t]he remaining autochthon population feels threatened in several spheres of life” (1990: 404). Under the influence of Flemish Block discourse and in reaction to the visible presence of migrants in the neighborhood space (ethnic shops, mosques, youths playing on the street), spatially concentrated deprivation leads residents, according to Swyngedouw, to falsely “mix cause and effect” (1990: 404), and to project their experience of displacement onto migrants, who function as “scapegoats” (De Maesschalck and Kesteloot 2000: 28). In this strand of analysis, including in its development beyond a focus on deprived neighborhoods (e.g. De Maesschalck and Kesteloot 2000; Jacobs e.a. 2001), the sense of displacement and the disintegration of society that were seen to characterize deprived urban neighborhoods is understood to be rooted in wider historical social shifts. Whereas the compartmentalization of everyday life along ideological lines and the political patronage of pillarization had firmly integrated residents in dense socio-cultural neighborhood networks, and had tied them to the traditional parties, this structure in which ideological conflict was ‘pacified’, and the experience of difference strongly regulated (Huyse 1970), fell apart when depillarization set in and individualization, secularization, mass-media and neoliberalism took over (Swyngedouw 2000; Jacobs e.a. 2001: 20). Referring to dominant sociological understandings of ‘late’ or ‘post-modernity’ (e.g. Giddens 1991; Beck 1992; Bauman 1997), VB-voting in this kind of analysis is triggered by the destabilizing and disintegrating effects of the shift from a modernity ordered and regulated by Fordism and the national welfare state to the uncertainties of neoliberal and globalized postmodernity. Residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods and unskilled blue-collar workers were the first “losers” (Swyngedouw 2000: 141; Jacobs e.a. 2001: 9-10, 20, 23) in this shift. They (and later also middle class suburban voters61) took refuge in VB, which “offered them the simple but misleading illusion that once all the immigrants have gone, the prospects for welfare and the certainties of the past will all come flooding back” (Swyngedouw 2000: 141). '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 61 In this field of study, Flemish Block voting in suburban neighborhoods or by middle class voters is usually understood as a secondary version of the ‘scapegoat racism’ of the urban lower classes. Although the middle classes are not objectively threatened in their socio-economic position by migrants, the idea is that they fear a spilling over of the problems of deprived neighborhoods into their spaces in the future (termed ‘distancing racism’) (e.g. De Maesschalk and Kesteloot 2000: 33).

71 ' This link between VB voting or xenophobia, the lower-classes and an inability to cope with the complexities of (post)modern urban life was further elaborated on in the field of attitudinal and electoral research. This line of research received a major financial and organizational boost (in the form of repeated national surveys) in direct reaction to the rise of Flemish Block62. In these studies, the statistical interrelations between socio- demographic factors (education, class, gender), ‘attitudes’ or ‘values’, and voting behavior were analyzed: to create a sociological profile of VB voters (e.g. Scheepers, Billiet, De Witte 1995; Billiet 1995; Billiet and De Witte 1995; Billiet and Swyngedouw 1995; Lubbers, Scheepers, Billiet 2000) and their “cognitive and affective maps” (Swyngedouw 2000); or to explain ethnocentrism (e.g. Billiet, Carton, Huys 1990a, 1990b; Jacobs e.a. 2001) and feelings of political powerlessness and revenge (Billiet, Swyngedouw, Carton 1993) in terms of individual characteristics. I understand this kind of social science research as yet another way in which the Belgian and Flemish governmental elite tried to make legible and measurable as indicators of ‘living together’, not just the characteristics and perceptions of Flemish Block voters, but also the attitude towards ‘migrants’ and the measure of (neighborhood) alienation of the Flemish population as a whole63. The main variables contributing to the likelihood of a VB-vote or a xenophobic attitude were, according to these studies: a blue-collar or low socio-economic status, marginal or non-involvement in religious or ideological networks, and, especially, lower or vocational educational levels (Billiet e.a 1990a, 1990b; Scheepers, Billiet, De Witte 1995). In order to explain this, recourse was taken to theoretical models that were developed to explain the electoral success of fascist parties in the 1930s64 (e.g. Scheepers, Billiet, De Witte 1995; Billiet 1995; Billiet and De Witte 1995). The assumption underlying these models was, very roughly, that VB voting and ethnocentrism were the result of either an objectively lacking or threatened ‘integration’ in society (or lack of ‘social capital’), or of what is called “anomie”. Anomie was operationalized as the subjective experience of societal powerlessness, disintegration, disidentification and political alienation (e.g. Billiet e.a. 1990a: 215, 1990b: 436; Jacobs e.a. 2001: 17). Both ‘objective’ disintegration and the ‘subjective’ condition of ‘anomie’

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 62 See http://www.kuleuven.be/facdep/social/ceso/onderzoek/9/onderzoekispo/verkiezing.htm accessed 5 May 2015. 63 One of the first studies investigating the attitudes of ‘Belgians’ towards ‘migrants’ (Billiet, Carton and Ruys 1990a) through surveys, perhaps unsurprisingly selected Borgerhout as one of the contrasting case studies where extensive surveys were taken to compare them to the attitudes found in ‘Flemings’, ‘Wallons’ and residents of Brussels more generally. 64 In these models, blue-collar workers and the lower educated would vote VB out of ethnocentrism, as they project their threatened socio-economic and cultural position onto migrants (i.e. the same scapegoat analysis), or as a result of ‘authoritarian’ dispositions, as their disorientation or sense of anomie in the increasingly complex postmodern society causes them to cling to conservative, simplistic solutions. Those who are insufficiently integrated in society or in local moral communities - i.e. ‘marginal religiosity’ or non-involvement in associations - would be attracted to VB’s nationalism and ethnocentrism as surrogate paths to a sense of community and identification. (Scheepers, Billiet, De Witte 1995; Billiet 1995; Billiet and De Witte 2001)

72 ' were seen in these studies as related to the increasing instability, individualism and complexity of society, which was assumed to affect the lower classes especially. Tellingly, a higher general education (as opposed to vocational or technical training) was defined as a crucial factor, not as an indication of status, but as a sign of a more ‘nuanced’ versus an ‘irrational’ “mode of societal coping and reflection” (Billiet e.a. 1990: 458, my translation): “We can assume that due to general education a more open attitude to other cultures is cultivated and that, in addition, thinking in terms of societal causes and effects is developed more strongly. This could mean that set-backs in [one’s] personal life or societal crisis situations are less quickly ascribed to alien minorities and are better comprehended in their multicausality and complexity” (ibid, my translation). This classed distinction between a “nuanced”, open outlook and an “irrational”, negative attitudinal response towards post-modernity was reinforced in research about so-called new political ‘cleavages’ and ‘value orientations’ (Swyngedouw 1993; Billiet and Swyngedouw 1995). According to this line of research, Flemish Block finds its antipode in the progressive, ecologist party AGALEV (Alternative Living, later re- named ‘Green!’). AGALEV was also founded in Borgerhout in the late 1970s, and can be understood as the political manifestation of what are often called the ‘new social movements’ (i.e. environmentalism, the Third World Movement, pacifism, anti-racism) (Geysels and Mertens 2008; Beyen and Destatte 2009: 1650-1670). Together, these new parties were taken to signal and contribute to the emergence of two new, overlapping ideological cleavages cross-cutting the older ideological schisms (Catholic versus anticlerical; capital versus labor): an opposition between ‘materialism’ and ‘postmaterialism’, and between ‘universalistic cultural openness’ and ‘particularistic cultural closedness’ (Swyngedouw 1993; Billiet and Swyngedouw 1995: 248). Not only were AGALEV and VB situated at the opposite extremes of these two value scales, but their voters were also described as each other’s mirror image in terms of attitudes and socio-demographic characteristics, even though they shared an urban bias. AGALEV voters, who are relatively often higher educated and have high-status jobs (Billiet and Swyngedouw 1995: 250), had outspokenly ‘positive attitudes’ to migrants, scored low on ‘anomie’ and ‘materialism’, and were neither ‘authoritarian’ nor ‘utilitarian individualist’ (Billiet and Swyngedouw 1995: 252-3). If VB voters were described as being at the margins of a new, globalized post- modernity, and as lacking the socio-economic and the mental or ‘educational’ capacity to properly engage with this new phase of modernity, AGALEV or Green voters were portrayed as being fully ‘of’ postmodernity and as capable of openly and reflexively engaging with its complexities (Jacobs e.a 2001; Pattyn and Van Liedekerke 2001: 94- 95; Pelleriaux 2001). It is in this opposition that the imagined ‘cultural’ deficit underlying the construction of the (Flemish Block-voting) ‘deprived autochthon’ emerges most clearly. Although this assumed ‘cultural’ deficit is one of lacking education and a resulting ‘simplistic’ or ‘false’ perception instead of (non-Western) ‘traditions’ or ‘values’, the effect is the same: both ‘the unintegrated allochthon’ and the ‘deprived autochthon’ are politically produced as unfit for, and incapable of dealing properly with, (post-)modernity.

73 ' Historical anti-urbanism: shifting racialized and classed anxieties over modernity This construction of the ‘deprived, VB-voting autochthon’ in terms of anomie, moral deficiency and politically unruliness located in urban impoverished spaces echoes older anxieties about the urban classes dangereuses (Kesteloot and De Maesschalck 2001; cf. Baeten 2001, 2002). Industrialization in Belgium had an early onset, especially in Wallonia, and took place at an extremely quick pace, creating very pronounced class cleavages and the rapid growth of an urban proletariat living in desolate conditions (Uitermark 2003: 55). In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Antwerp population tripled due to the influx of rural migrants, who settled mainly in the areas directly outside the then demolished Spanish city walls, creating the previously mentioned so-called nineteenth century belt (Blondé e.a. 2011: 298). Borgerhout saw its population sextuple (BOM/SOMA 1997a, Inleiding: 3). In Belgium at that time, as elsewhere in Europe, the urban masses were construed as uncivilized, irrational, unhealthy and politically dangerous elements threatening the health of the nation and the body social. Anxieties over the disintegrating effects of modernization were projected onto the city and the urban masses, especially by the powerful Catholic elite (which at the time had a very strong anti-modern current in Belgium, see: Ceuppens 2003: 12-16; De Smaele 2009), who developed a distinctly “anti-urban” policy strategy (Kesteloot and De Maesschalck 2001; Uitermark 2003: 55-63). Out of a fear of political unrest, the Antwerp bourgeoisie turned the urban poor into the object of disciplining and civilizing philanthropic programs targeting alcoholism and venereal diseases, and aiming to instill in them bourgeois values of decency and morality so as to create “a pure, harmonious and orderly urban society” (Blondé e.a. 2011: 299). In this period, the urban poor were thus also simultaneously perceived as the very embodiment of modernity and its dangers, as well as lacking the civilization and self-discipline to cope with modernity and to become ‘properly modern’. As other authors have pointed out (esp. Cooper and Stoler 1997; Stoler 2002: 61-66, 154), in the context of an exchange of scientific discourses and governing techniques between colonial and metropolitan civilizing projects, notions of ‘race’ and class overlapped in this construction of the lower classes. Eugenic theories about possible solutions for the ‘hygienic’ danger and the ‘degeneracy’ of the laboring classes (Vanpaemel and Beyen 1998: 5-6; Crombois 1998), as well as comparisons of their ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilized’ state with that of ‘Africans’ (Ceuppens 2003: 76), meant a racialization of the urban poor. The politically selective ascription of racism and intolerance to marginal and lower-class groups is not unique to Belgium in the current European context. As Paul Gilroy has argued, the shift from ‘race’ to ‘culture’ in European public discourses of difference after WWII has allowed political elites to redefine ‘racism’ (taken to mean ‘biological’ racism only) as something of the extreme right, so as to absolve ‘normal’ politics and society of blame (Gilroy 1992: 51; cf. Ceuppens 2003: 648). Instead of being problematized in terms of sanitation and socialist political revolt, the urban white ‘underclass’ is now problematized as dangerously susceptible to the extreme right and excluding itself from the civil nation because of its intolerance of cultural difference

74 ' (Balibar 1997; Haylett 2001; Tyler 2004; Hewitt 2005: 52-55). From being racialized in similarity to ‘black’ colonial subjects, they are now racialized as ‘too white’ (Haylett 2001) - as carrying an excessive nationalism that “shames the nation” (Fortier 2008: 30- 31) - in their assumed improperly ‘negative’ attitude to ‘non-white’ fellow residents from former colonies. What is unique to Belgium, and especially to Flanders, is the continuing weight of the role of Flemish nationalism during the two World Wars described above, so that the construct of the ‘deprived autochthon’ also has a morally ‘black’ connotation in a way that haunts the Flemish public imagination of ‘Flemishness’. This, in combination with a strong historical tradition of (Catholic) paternalistic anxiety over ‘modernity’ and its urban discontents caused a particularly heightened concern in Flanders over a, putatively lower-class, segment within the autochthonous ‘we’ in terms of ‘anomie’, ‘disintegration’ and a mental ‘lagging behind’ or being ‘stuck’ in relation to a globalized, disruptive (post-)modernity.

Construing.‘the.neighborhood’:.the.development.of.a. neighborhood.governmentality. In the Belgian and Flemish policies developed in response to the rise of Flemish Block, the urban ‘neighborhood’ was consistently defined as the focal point for governing the integration of ‘deprived autochthons’ and ‘allochthons’, and for civilizing them towards more properly modern dispositions and attitudes. This development was discernible throughout Western Europe: the discovery of the (disadvantaged) neighborhood as the preferred unit or scale for governance and for the invention of new governing techniques aimed at ‘citizen participation’ and ‘community’ (Beaumont and Loopmans 2008: 97; Uitermark 2014; Brenner 2004; Rose 1999, 2000). In this section, I investigate the political construction of ‘the (deprived) neighborhood’ in Flanders, and sketch what I call an intensive ‘neighborhood governmentality’ that emerged in deprived urban neighborhoods like Borgerhout. As we will see, in the political construction of the neighborhood, a more general meaning of ‘living together’ originating in the welfare sector - referring to the inclusiveness and vitality, or ‘livability’, of the (local) social fabric (samenleving, leefbaarheid), as well as to problematic behavior affecting public neighborhood life caused by deprivation (samenlevingsproblemen) - overlaps with the newer and more specifically postcolonial meaning of ‘living together’ as the bridging of cultural difference (samen-leving; samenleven) that was put forward in ‘integration policies’. Due to the anti-urban governing strategy of the Belgian political elites mentioned above, it was not until the breakthrough of Flemish Block and AGALEV, and their pushing onto the political agenda issues of urban living conditions, that something akin to a coordinated urban policy emerged in Belgium, and especially on the level of the Flemish government (Stouthuysen e.a. 1999; Uitermark 2003: 65; Kesteloot and De

75 ' Maesschalck 2001: 57; De Decker e.a. 2005).65 This urban policy developed out of the social deprivation policy described above. It is in the Flemish opportunity deprivation policy (especially the VFIA and VFIK funds) that we first see a preference emerge for the ‘neighborhood’ or ‘borough’ [buurt, wijk] as a ‘natural’ scale or geographical unit for governance. This had several rationales. The emphasis on an ‘inclusive approach’ in the welfare sector, and its cooptation in deprivation policy (i.e. fighting deprivation via policies and projects that integrate all socio-economic domains), resulted in a territorial focus on the neighborhood as a unit where such an approach would be workable (Stouthuysen e.a. 1999: 583-584). The KCM had also insisted on a more intensive presence of the state in urban neighborhoods with migrant populations so as to counter social conflict in public space as well as ‘autochthons’’ feelings of unsafety. Moreover, in the electoral and attitudinal research mentioned above, an (‘anomic’ or ‘negative’) sense of alienation in one’s neighborhood had been defined as an important underlying factor of xenophobia and Flemish Block voting. In the background, also playing a role was a romantic notion of the neighborhood as a space of organic popular sociality and communitas (running through the history of community building work and its Catholic roots in Flanders, see: Van Hove and Nieuwinckel 1996: 51-52), and as a space for ‘organic’ contact between citizens and ‘their’ politicians (as in the role of parish councils and the Socialist ward propaganda associations in pillarization politics and clientelism, see: Swyngedouw 2000: 124-5). The Flemish deprivation funds and integration policies of the late 1980s provided the financial means for the emergence in Antwerp, and in Oud-Borgerhout, of a very dense, fragmented landscape of welfare projects, resident initiatives and newly- developed city services, which all took the ‘deprived neighborhood’ as the primary domain for ‘integrating’ poor ‘autochthons’ and ‘migrants’, as well as for creating ‘living together’. I will describe these in some detail, because they formed such an important part of the local Borgerhout context during my fieldwork. The city of Antwerp developed a range of new governmental structures and civil servant offices with the VFIK funds. In particular, it established municipal borough offices [stedelijke wijkkantoren] in deprived neighborhoods, including in Borgerhout, supported by a newly-founded Municipal Service for Community Building [Dienst Samenlevingsopbouw, DSO]. These borough offices were to function as “antennas” (Van Hove and Nieuwinckel 1996: 21) for the city, providing easy access to municipal '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 65 The urban renewal program of the Flemish government in the 1980s was a first hesitant step towards an urban policy: municipalities could put forward their most impoverished areas as ‘revaluation areas’ (herwaarderingsgebieden), and be awarded funds to revitalize them through small-scale social urban renewal projects and with the participation of residents. Because of the very limited amount of financial funds available, this policy was not very successful and was stopped, to the frustration of local stakeholders (De Decker e.a. 2005: 165; Uitermark 2003: 64-64). Oud-Borgerhout in its entirety was defined as a revaluation area, and it was one of the few places where an urban renewal project (the creation of the Krugerpark) was completed (Lotens 2010: 80, 225). A handful of other streets, squares and playing fields for youths were also restructured and created (Knops and Vanden Broeck 1992: 134-135; Lotens 2010: 80; Baelus 1996: 67-68).

76 ' administrative services for denizens as well as encouraging “good relations between different populations in the borough” (Marain 1993: 6). The borough offices also housed the newly-established Municipal Borough Consultation [Stedelijk Wijkoverleg], which had the task of building a structure for informing residents about, and involving them in, local policy decisions, especially restructuration or modification plans for crossings, squares etc. Attached to each borough office were so-called neighborhood supervisors (buurttoezichters) - a new civil servant office first tried out in one of the squares in Borgerhout (Marain 1993: 6). The neighborhood supervisor was a crucial node in the DSO strategy for tackling samenlevingsproblemen. These supervisors had the task of being visibly present in the neighborhood public space by walking the streets and talking to denziens, so as to: signal and report physical dilapidation or social problems (they were the “eyes and ears” of the city), offer residents a familiar face to discuss their complaints (about nuisance, wrongly parked cars, wrong garbage deposits), mediate in conflicts between neighbors or groups, and call residents out on their improper behavior in the public space (Marain 1993: 7-10)66. Especially after Black Sunday, there was increasing policy concern over the theme that Flemish Block had first brought to the spotlight: unsafety, criminality and nuisance in urban deprived neighborhoods. The ‘safety contracts’ policy that the federal government developed in 1992 (De Decker e.a. 2005: 166) provided additional funding for some of these municipal VFIK projects (Nieuwinckel 1996: 236), but also slightly adjusted their aim. Originally projects developed in the context of a deprivation policy - the neighborhood supervisors, for example - were now redefined as targeting “the social and societal problems underlying street criminality and the feelings of unsafety of a section of the population” (Marain 1993: 8). The neighborhood regime that was developed was not just a (local) state structure; it was a broad governmentality that also spanned non-state actors such as the community building work of RISO (RISO-Antwerp projects were also sponsored with VFIK means), youth work organizations, and, in Borgerhout, a booming field of local associations and resident initiatives that had arisen in response to Flemish Block’s success. Some of these were traditional ‘neighborhood houses’ (buurthuizen) offering activities, education and a space for encounter for deprived ‘autochthon’ residents. Others were neighborhood groups working to enhance what was called ‘neighborhood life’ (buurtleven) and the livability (leefbaarheid) of their neighborhood (Nieuwinckel 1996: 235-237; Lotens 2010: 226, 23667). The largest and most prominent of these resident associations, Borgerhout Beter Bekeken (A better view of/image for Borgerhout), fought against Borgerhout’s negative media image and wanted to create a ‘livable’ Borgerhout for all its residents. It also aimed “for the development of good modes of living '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 66 The establishment by DSO of so-called street corner coaches and the reinforcement of the three youth work associations in Borgerhout were also supported with VFIK funds (Nieuwinckel 1996: 236). Whereas the coaches were to help loitering groups of youths develop a “positive basic disposition” via daily guided activities on squares, youth work was seen to provide ‘structured’ leisure activities as an alternative to loitering in the street (BOM/SOMA 1997a, Jeugd en Vrije Tijd: 12-13). 67 See for the phenomenon of resident groups in Antwerp at large: Beaumont and Loopmans 2008.

77 ' together, of better contacts between residents”, through leaflets, an exhibition and an annual music festival (BBB statement of 1994, quoted in Lotens 2010: 237). This mostly white circuit cross-cut neighborhood-focused Moroccan self-associations (Safina, El Wafa) and community work aimed at Moroccan women, which were also supported by RISO and, from 1994 onwards, by the Local Integration Center in the context of the Flemish integration policy discussed above (Nieuwinckel 1996: 235). In the second half of the 1990s, there was a gradual shift in Flemish urban policy and local Antwerp and Borgerhout neighborhood governmentality away from an exclusive focus on social deprivation. An experimental project that was developed in Borgerhout and Antwerp North, the Neighborhood Development Corporation (BOM)68, functioned as a model in this policy reorientation. The basic tenet of BOM’s philosophy of integrated ‘neighborhood development’ was that deprivation can only be structurally alleviated by improving the economic sustainability of a deprived area as whole. Criticizing the incoherence of the VFIK projects and the bias towards the welfare sector and deprived groups, the BOM saw itself as a ‘project developer’, capitalizing on the resources and potential already present in the neighborhood, including what it called ‘active’ residents. It thus created local partnerships involving the ‘hard’ sectors, and designed strategic impulse projects to attract new businesses and middle class residents, reduce unemployment and improve the housing stock (Nieuwinckel 1996; Van Hove and Nieuwinckel 1996: Moelaert and Christiaens 2010; Christiaens, Moelaert, Bosmans 2007). In my analysis, the impact of BOM in terms of the new governance techniques that it produced lies primarily in its rationale of the ‘neighborhood’ and ‘living together’ as domains that can be (re)constructed through ‘management’ and new forms of partnership (especially with economically powerful actors and ‘active’ residents). In the form of detailed Neighborhood Development Plans (WOPs), BOM made the characteristics of a neighborhood and its ‘neighborhood life’ legible and ‘governable’ to an unprecedented degree69. It also developed a specific and more optimistic idea of ‘living together’ as a skill or disposition that can be learned via specifically organized spaces, communal activities and training. In the WOP for Borgerhout, it stated that every Borgerhout resident is “confronted with social situations (samenlevingssituaties) for which his cultural baggage falls short” (BOM/SOMA 1997b: 7). What was needed was the production of a new public culture and new modes of behavior “beyond conflict and withdrawal” (ibid: 12), and new ‘stories’ and ‘spaces’ with which residents could “together give meaning to living together” (samen-leven samen-duiden) (ibid: 9). In the '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 68 BOM was a public-private partnership uniting, amongst others, the City, Antwerp University and RISO, and was financed by VFIK and the EU’s Third Poverty Program. 69 The WOP for Oud-Borgerhout (BOM/SOMA 1997a) was a report of several hundred pages, written in close collaboration and consultation with a wide variety of local actors and residents ‘active’ on panels and working groups (Van Hove and Nieuwinckel 1996: 37-8). It contains extensive analyses of the character and problems of the neighborhood as a whole and its different domains (youth, communication and culture, education, housing, economy, physical infrastructure etc), providing an overview of its existing elaborate welfare infrastructure and overlapping initiatives, and suggesting a great many concrete policy measures.

78 ' WOP analysis, this required a policy that was not only aimed at strengthening the cultural organizations of deprived groups, but also stimulated the creation of “multicultural initiatives” and “positive encounter opportunities between the different cultural communities” (ibid: 12) that were now seen to be lacking. In the second half of the 1990s, the new Flemish government made the quality of life in cities, and especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods, one of its top priorities (Uitermark 2003: 76; Peeters 1997; De Decker e.a. 2005). For the first time, a (social- democratic) minister for Urban Policy was appointed. Deprived neighborhoods were now officially recognized as priority objects of governance, and the analysis that urban decay “affects the social fabric” and leads to “rising criminality, feelings of unsafety, and aversion from democracy” (Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap 1996: 3) first put forward by RISO had become Flemish government discourse. The Social Impulse Fund (SIF, merging VFIK and several other new funds) that was the spearhead of this urban policy was strongly inspired by the BOM’s notion of neighborhood development, and it draws on this notion as a tool to produce new forms of (active) citizenship and participation (Uitermark 2003: 78; Stouthuysen e.a. 1999: 589; Loopmans 2008: 2508; Christiaens, Moelaert, Bosmans 2007: 241). In the rhetoric of this new urban policy, and especially the introduction of the notion of ‘livability’, the emphasis shifted (compared to VFIK) from deprived groups alone to a more territorial approach of physical and economic renewal (Peeters 1997: 131 Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap 1996: 7), including the wish to attract the middle classes and the higher educated to the city so that they could function as ‘positive role models’ for their deprived fellow residents (Uitermark 2003: 77; Peeters: 1997: 134). In the Antwerp policy practice, however, notions of physical and economic renewal were largely peripheral, and there remained instead a strong emphasis on the social aspects of ‘livability’ (Loopmans 2007: 216; Loopmans, Uitermark, De Maeschalck 2003). This led to another expansion and strengthening of the influence of the welfare sector, as well as to the development of projects aimed at, as Loopmans analyzes it, “teaching people how to live together in diversity” (2008: 2509). One of the most prominent of these projects is the community involvement program Opsinjoren, which was first implemented in deprived neighborhoods, including in Borgerhout. The aim of Opsinjoren is to “make residents neighbors again” (Stad Antwerpen/ Opsinjoren 2007: 6) by encouraging them to take up ‘active’ engagement with and responsibility towards their neighborhood (Loopmans 2006). Residents are encouraged to jointly develop small-scale initiatives to beautify or clean their street, or to organize social gatherings such as street barbecues or New Year’s drinks for neighbors that aim to increase ‘social cohesion’. For those initiatives that are approved by Opsinjoren, residents receive small budgets and other means to carry out their plans, including the collaboration of relevant City departments. In addition, Opsinjoren organizes action days, such as spring cleaning or the annual neighbors’ day, in which residents or resident committees can participate. Via so-called “neighborhood contracts” and the position of “street volunteer”, Opsinjoren has developed forms for long-term partnerships with ‘active’ residents who commit themselves to the maintenance of a street, square or playground (Loopmans 2006: 110-111). Opsinjoren has been very popular with

79 ' residents and politicians (in 2011 there were 1091 street volunteers and 2432 facilitated resident initiatives70). More importantly, it produced the category of so-called ‘active’ residents that the city administration could rely on, while in turn giving these (mostly white and upper working or middle class) residents access to high-level officials and local politicians (Loopmans 2006; Loopmans 2008: 2509). Other examples of social cohesion projects developed with SIF money includes the provision of animation on squares in deprived neighborhoods over the summer (called Pleinanimatie), so that children could learn ‘how to play together’ and enjoy ‘meaningful’ holiday activities. So-called ‘streets for playing’ [speelstraten] where also invented, whereby a group of residents can apply to the City to temporarily close their street to traffic so that children could, presumably as in the olden days, play on the street, but now under the supervision of several parents. A speelstraat later became one of the formats for the resident initiatives facilitated by Opsinjoren. Throughout the 1990s, an intensive governmentality thus emerged in deprived urban neighborhoods like Borgerhout. This governmentality reconstituted ‘the neighborhood’ as the main social and political domain for remedying what were seen as acute threats to the social fabric of the nation (political extremism. inequality, racism and ethnic conflict)71. Due to this neighborhood focus, fighting exclusion was less a matter of integrating poor ‘authochthons’ and ‘migrants’ in the national economy or education system as it was of creating for them what Uitermark calls a “surrogate” neighborhood citizenship (2014: 1477) and of re-shaping their neighborhood engagements. A regiment of new kinds of municipal civil servants and welfare workers started to monitor neighborhood public space and denizens’ perceptions of their neighborhood (via maps and reports, resident panels and focus groups, and, especially, by ‘being there’, walking the streets and talking to residents) so that deprived neighborhoods and everyday neighborhood life were increasingly opened up to a governmental gaze (partly a ‘state’ gaze) and turned into domains that could be (re)constructed and ‘managed’. Reshaping residents’ neighborhood engagements is taken here as a way to reduce an assumed ‘gap’ between ‘politics’ and ‘ordinary people’, but also as a way of turning these ‘ordinary people’ into more desirable (‘integrated’, ‘democratic’, ‘modern’) subjects. What aspect of their neighborhood engagement was focused on differed somewhat for ‘deprived’ ‘autochthon’ and ‘allochthon’ residents. In the case of the former, the (indirect) aim of newly-developed governing technologies was to change their perceptions of their migrant neighbors and their experience of the neighborhood, in order to return them to ‘democratic’ politics. In the case of ‘allochthons’, and especially youths, it was their behavior in the public space that was the object of much more direct and repressive disciplining and monitoring.

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 70 Nieuwsbrief Opsinjoren, editie 19, januari 2012, pp: 5. 71 Cf. Uitermark (2014) on this ‘integrationist’ governance approach to urban marginality in Western Europe more widely.

80 ' Samenleven or samenlevingsconflicten gained a specific spatial connotation in this regime: referring simultaneously to everyday face-to-face relations and mutual perceptions between different ethno-cultural groups in the context of the neighborhood, as well as to what are seen as distinctly urban problems. The latter have all increasingly been caught under the umbrella-term ‘livability’, but range from: what is seen as the disintegration or withering of a previously more vibrant popular ‘neighborhood life’, causing a lack of sociality and sense of identification among residents (later called ‘social cohesion’); poor living conditions; behavior deemed improper (‘nuisance’); and experiences of ‘unsafety’ in the neighborhood public space.

The.discovery.of.the.city.as.a.redemptive.space.. With the 1999 elections, a liberal-green Flemish government was formed which took Flemish urban policy in a new direction (Vlaamse Regering 2000). Under the influence of the pro-urban party AGALEV and the lobbying of the large cities, the city was reconceptualized as a place of potential instead of problems. The leading premise was that cities should be allowed to restore themselves to their historic role of ‘breeding spaces’ and regional economic motors (Loopmans 2007: 218). Thereafter, they could, and should, “become again spaces of encounter, of tolerance [verdraagzaamheid]” (Vlaamse Regering 2000: 6). As elsewhere in Europe (Keith and Cross 1993: 6, 10), from symbols of ethnic conflict and degeneration, urban spaces were now redefined as the locus par excellence of new possibilities for cosmopolitan ‘living together’. The SIF’s social approach and emphasis on poverty alleviation was explicitly abandoned (Loopmans 2003; Uitermark 2003: 85; Loopmans 2007). Instead, the goal of the City Fund that replaced the SIF in 2003 was to re-create the city as an attractive living space for higher income groups, especially young middle class families and ‘new’ urban household types such as young urban professionals, dual income households and ‘active’ seniors (Uitermark 2003: 85). In the new urban policy, this “more vital population” (Vlaamse Regering 2000: 10) was described as providing the financial, social and ‘democratic’ impulse that cities needed; the new middle class would see and be able to grasp the potential of the urban. Portrayed as producing a more healthily “mixed” population, it was their presence that was expected to ‘upgrade’ [opwaarderen] deprived neighborhoods and “ameliorate living together with the (impoverished) migrants” (Vlaamse Regering 2000: 12).72 With this policy, the urban poor were again catapulted out of government attention (Loopmans, Uitermark, De Maesschalck 2003; Loopmans 2007: 223;). The ‘deprived neighborhood’ ceased to be the preferred unit for governance, as the focus of city fund investments came to lie on all neighborhoods (Christiaens, Moelaert, Bosmans 2007: 247) (to protect them from the dilapidation that was feared might spill over from disadvantaged areas), or rather, on the city as an (organic) whole (Uitermark 2003: 86). '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 72 See Loopmans, de Decker, Kesteloot (2010) for a more detailed analysis of the notion of “mixing” in Flemish urban policy.

81 ' Instead of social welfare projects, physical urban renewal and measures to enhance ‘safety’ were encouraged. The BOM idea that socio-cultural projects can function to instill in residents a more ‘active’ engagement with their neighborhood and nudge them towards “dialogue and encounter”, as well as boost the city’s ‘image’, was now applied to the city as a whole (Vlaamse Regering 2000: 13-14). A vibrant public neighborhood life and an affective attachment to the neighborhood space were in this new urban policy depicted as a ‘natural’ state of urban life that needed to be regained: “People know each other again, they talk and feel at home in their own neighborhood” (ibid: 13). Whereas the notion of ‘neighborhood life’ as something that should be governed and reconstructed was first developed as a means to re-integrate ‘deprived autochthons’ and ‘migrants’, it was re-defined in this liberal urban policy as a right, and a citizenship duty, of urban life in general. Paradoxically, in the politics of ‘living together’, ‘the neighborhood’ is thus imagined as the nation’s doom and its salvation. On the one hand, everyday life in neighborhood public space, especially in deprived ethnic neighborhoods, is thought to be the locus of a dangerous degeneration and absence of ‘living together’ that may contaminate the rest of the nation. On the other hand, ‘the neighborhood’ is regarded as a potentially extremely potent and ‘healing’ social and political space. What has remained constant throughout the political shifts in the ‘neighborhood governmentality’ is that, implicitly, ‘neighborhood life’, with its connotations of regular face-to-face interactions and the embodied sharing of the public space, is produced as a domain that is somehow ‘naturally’ immediate and meaningful to denizens and inherently important for their social sense of Self. When everyday neighborhood life becomes fragmented, anonymous or less meaningful, this is thought to be de facto deeply problematic and alienating for people. In its ‘natural state’, or if governed appropriately, ‘neighborhood life’ is assumed to provide a reservoir of deep attachments and organic sociality that can be tapped into and mobilized.

Of.‘negativos’.and.‘positivos’:.the.mythical.Borgerhout.and.its.cast. of.three.. “I’ll leave some room for shocked looks now”, said the journalist in Tom Naegels’ novel Los as he described driving into Borgerhout while conjuring up all the Borgerokko stereotypes. To what kind of reader is the irony of this aside about the myth of Borgerokko directed? The shock and aversion that the Black Sundays inspired suggest that there is a third position to the problem of ‘living together’ that I have, until now, only fleetingly referred to: that of those who identify with, and are mobilized on the basis of, an anti- Flemish Block and pro-migration stance, and who are, in political terms, most strongly associated with votes for the leftist or ‘progressive’ parties, especially AGALEV/Green!. As AGALEV was also rooted in Borgerhout, the ‘new cleavage’ represented by the opposition between it and Flemish Block is imagined to run throughout the area (Beyen and Destatte 2009: 1671-1673; Lotens 2010: 123). Although the story of Borgerokko/Borgerhout seemed to revolve around two archetypes (the

82 ' ‘deprived, VB-voting, autochthon’; the ‘unintegrated allochthon’), it in fact has a cast of three. It is this third archetypical Borgerhout resident, and his ironical stance towards the myth of ‘Borgerokko’, that is assumed in Naegels’ aside (cf. Beyen 2008: 169). From the early 1990s onwards, a new category of resident - young white families, the cultural classes, including artists and publicists - had started to move into Borgerhout, attracted to its central location, its streets with nineteenth century terraced houses with gardens, and its former small factories (Lotens 2010; Beyen: 168-169). These residents had become a politically active and visible factor in the neighborhood via initiatives that aimed to counter the influence of Flemish Block on living together and on the image of Borgerhout as, for example, BorgerhoutBeterBekeken. The success of AGALEV/Green! is strongly connected to the presence of these residents (Beyen and Destatte 2009: 1671). Flemish Block, in turn, had derisively labelled them as “elitist bo- bos (bourgeois-bohemians)”, accusing them of a hypocritical multiculturalism and detached from Borgerhout reality (Lotens 2010: 241). Although these residents had been mentioned in newspaper articles previously73, it was not until the early 2000s that they became fixed characters in the mediatized Borgerhout/Borgerokko landscape. In the previously mentioned Hotel Fabiola (2001), Rudi Rotthier describes how, during his four-month stay in Borgerhout, he discovered two kinds of ‘autochtoon’ Borgerhout resident who he termed “positivos” and “negativos” (2001: 98). In his depiction, positivos are “generally higher educated, new residents, who, when housing prices were low, have bought and renovated a house” (ibid); they read quality and leftist papers, they organize street feasts, and they demonstrate their engagement with ‘living together’ via posters of local cultural initiatives in their windows and their involvement with neighborhood associations. Negativos are the older ‘original’ Borgerhoutians, who he describes instead as entrenched in their distrust and their pessimism about Borgerhout – no posters on their doors and windows, but “I keep a watch dog” stickers instead (2001: 38). Positivos and negativos not only live in “separate life-worlds”, but form in the eyes of Rotthier opposite “camps” in terms of their engagement with Borgerhout: in the positivo camp, “the embrace of the neighborhood” is hegemonic, while an “aversion of the neighborhood” reigns in the negativo camp. “The relation between positivos and the others is one of shaking one’s head. The former shakes his head about the negativity of the latter, while the latter shakes his head about the naivety of the former” (2001: 100). Borgerhout thus has become the stage on which the imagination of a second cleavage crystallized, not only between ‘(deprived) autochthons’ and ‘allochthons’, but also within the ‘autochthon’ category itself. In the portrayal of the opposition between so-called ‘progressive Borgerhoutenaars’, ‘gentrifiers’, or ‘new Flemings’, on the one hand, and ‘old’, ‘original’ or ‘sour’ (verzuurde) Borgerhoutenaars on the other, political ideology, age, class and lifestyle all overlapp into starkly polarized neighborhood engagements. If, for the latter group, ‘Borgerokko’ symbolizes alienation and a loss of

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 73 See, for example: ‘Als het er zo goed is, ga er dan wonen: Borgerhout’, HUMO Nr.2826, 3 november 1994, pp: 42.

83 ' their neighborhood, the former group consciously inverted this meaning, deploying the term in an ironic way to express their “identification with an adventurous, multicultural world” and their “positive expectation … towards their self-chosen new living environment” (Beyen 2008: 169).

Antwerp.after.2000:.a.‘divided.city’.and.a.liberal.turn. The increasing visibility and political importance of this category, both in Borgerhout itself and in the Borgerokko myth, should be understood against the background of two developments. First, the 2000 and 2006 municipal elections, as well as a range of violent and highly mediatized incidents, caused Antwerp to be drawn into a deepening polarization. Second, the urban renewal and middle class citizenship values that were already spearheaded by the new Flemish urban policy of 1999 described above gained further prominence and led to increasing gentrification under the reign of the new mayor Patrick Janssens. This reflects a broader liberal turn, including on the level of federal and Flemish policies. The municipal elections in 2000 took place in a feverish and anxious atmosphere. For a large part of the Antwerp population, feelings of unsafety and fears of criminality had come to dominate their experience of the city. This was an image that was intensively propagated by the Antwerp Flemish Block, which had essentially become the only opposition party on the municipal council. The anxiety of another significant part of the Antwerp population was precisely focused on Flemish Block itself and the possibility that another electoral win would mean the end of the cordon sanitaire (Swyngedouw and Abts 2000). Flemish Block came close to gaining an absolute majority of the vote (33%), forcing the other parties again into a “coalition of the last chance” (Loopmans 2008: 2510). In Borgerhout’s district council, which was being directly elected for the first time,74 a similar process took place as Flemish Block (35%) and AGALEV (15.7%) became the largest parties. This political dynamic was cross-cut in 2002 by another source of polarization: the newly founded and highly controversial immigrant organization, the Arab- European League (AEL). The AEL positioned itself as an emancipative movement fighting racism and exclusion. It claimed political rights for what it alternately denoted the ‘Arab-European’ or ‘Muslim’ community, and combined this with a strong pro- Palestinian stance. Its leader, the Lebanese-Belgian Dyab Abou Jahjah, rapidly became a key actor in the Belgian multicultural debate. His critique of the Flemish integration policy as being inherently paternalistic and assimilationist, but especially his proposals to empower the Belgian Muslim community via Islamic schools, Muslim scouts and the '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 74 The district councils had had a purely advisory function since the municipal merger. In a process of decentralization that was hoped to bring politics closer to citizens again, the district councils were directly elected from the 2000 elections onwards. They receive their budget (increased over the years) from the municipality and are responsible for the local public space, and for creating local policies for youths, seniors and culture, including the organization of festivities (Thijssen and Van Assche 2002).

84 ' recognition of Arabic as a fourth national language (Abou Jahjah 2002a, 2002b; Jacobs 2005), inspired fierce public and political reactions. The AEL not only changed the discursive parameters of the multicultural debate with its references to ‘Black panthers’ and pan-Arab nationalism, it also developed a new style for ethnic political mobilization: a “strategy of the street” (Jacobs 2005: 111). In 2002, the AEL sought out Antwerp, and especially Borgerhout, as a stage, and was able to gain a following among youths of Moroccan descent. It organized pro- Palestinian demonstrations - one of which led to what were internationally reported as ‘anti-Semitic riots’ in the Antwerp Jewish neighborhood (see Chapter 2) - and civil patrols monitoring police racism in Borgerhout. In the autumn of 2002, an elderly white resident killed his neighbor, a teacher with a Moroccan background living in Borgerhout. In response, two days of unrest broke out (spontaneous demonstrations, youths breaking shop windows and wrecking cars in the Turnhoutsebaan) in which AEL slogans were repeatedly used, although the role of Abu Jahjah himself as either ‘riot manager’ or ‘peacekeeper’ was highly contested. The political establishment reacted by criminalizing Dyab Abou Jahjah (and the AEL), portraying him as a fundamentalist, the Muslim equivalent of Filip Dewinter. He was incarcerated, and the AEL was investigated for links with terrorist organizations, and was shut out from the negotiations and ‘peace’ round-tables that Antwerp City Hall organized with migrant associations. The image of ‘Borgerokko’ as a place of confrontation between violent, ‘rioting’ ethnic youths and old, racist, Flemish Block voters returned with a vengeance in the national and international media. “Borgerokko like a war zone after riots”, headlined a Dutch newspaper (NRC 28 November 2002). The tensions that were once projected solely onto Borgerhout were, however, increasingly seen as plaguing the city as a whole. The image of Antwerp as a ‘divided city’ - between ‘allochthons’ and ‘autochthons’, and between pro- and anti-Flemish Block - was heightened when there were two more racist murders in 2006. A youngster, Hans van Themsche, whose extended family turned out to have ties with Flemish Block (by then renamed Flemish Interest75), gunned down a Turkish woman and a Malinese woman in the city center in what he himself later testified to be a raid on ‘foreigners’. The murders led to a battle between the pro- and anti-Flemish Block camps over Antwerp public space. A silent march to honor the victims was held in the city center, attracting tens of thousands of people. A hugely successful poster campaign of “Street without Hatred” signs was designed to enable Antwerp residents to symbolically ‘reclaim’ their street, and to turn their anti-racist and pro-tolerance identity into something they could publicly perform (the posters were still hanging in windows during my fieldwork in 2009).76

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 75 In 2004, several associations related to Flemish Block were convicted by a court under the anti-racism law. Flemish Block reacted instantly to avoid losing its state subsidies: the party Flemish Block was dissolved and renamed itself Flemish Interest (Beyen and Destatte 2009: 1609-1610). 76 The posters in the form of street signs were developed by a collection of Antwerp NGOs and cultural associations as an accessible tool to allow Antwerpians to “express their indignation about rising racism

85 ' This battle reached its zenith with the 2006 municipal elections, which had been preceded by a very polarized and almost “presidential campaign” for the mayorship between the leader of Flemish Interest, Filip DeWinter, and the socialist Patrick Janssens, who had become mayor after a fraud scandal involving the Antwerp ruling coalition in 2003 (Claes 2003; Van Aelst and Nuytemans 2007). Janssens, whose background was in sociology and advertising, had launched a rigorously orchestrated city-branding campaign with the slogan “The City is of everyone” [’t Stad is van iedereen] that aimed to instill in the Antwerp population a positive sense of identification with the city and a restored sense of communitas (Konings 2009: 120-122). The elections, in which residents with a non-EU background could participate on a larger scale than ever before77, resulted in what was perceived to be a turning point for the city. For the first time, the success of Flemish Interest was halted and Janssens’ Sp.a-Spirit gained the most votes. The Borgerhout district council, where a red-green coalition had gained the majority of the seats, prided itself on being the first place where Flemish Interest lost ground. Antwerp’s policy under Janssens’ rule was characterized by a liberal turn that reflected a similar move at the level of federal and Flemish policy, as well as throughout Europe. Urban planning was turned into a spearhead of the Antwerp coalition, and ‘new urban’ middle classes were, successfully, attracted via both flagship and small-scale urban renewal projects in cooperation with private investors (Loopmans 2008: 2510- 2512; Loopmans and Dirckx 2012). Moreover, the notion of ‘the neighborhood’ as something to be managed and reconstructed was now fully co-opted by the city administration, but with a twist. In line with the federal ‘Integral Safety’ policy, a ‘City Safety Plan’ (Stad Antwerpen 2004) was developed, which had as its aim ensuring that “Antwerp’s citizens must be able to feel safe in their neighborhood.” The fighting of nuisance [overlast], implicitly defined as infractions to a middle class sense of decency by marginal groups (especially ‘allochthonous’ youths), was seen as central to the creation of livable neighborhoods (and no longer the fighting of deprivation) (Loopman 2008: 2511). Behavior that could not be effectively handled by the police (loitering, intimidation, garbage dumping, alcohol abuse) was now to be disciplined through a prepressive regime (Schinkel 2011) that was coordinated by ‘neighborhood directors’ [buurtregisseurs] (Simons 2011). Although this approach was developed for so-called ‘hot- spots’ in ‘difficult neighborhoods’ (such as Borgerhout), neighborhood direction as a tool for creating neighborhoods that are “safe, neat, restored and cozy” (Stad Antwerpen 2005: 5) was later rolled out over the city as a whole.

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' and violence”, and to bring onto the Antwerp streetscape visible signs of “tolerance” [verdraagzaamheid]. See: http://www.zonderhaatstraat.be/antwerpse-perstekst.html accessed 5 June 2015. 77 In 2000, a new naturalization law was passed in which several previous limitations for non-EU born residents to apply for Belgian nationality were removed (most notably the investigation of an applicant's ‘willingness to integrate’). In 2004, non-EU born residents who had legally lived in Belgium for a period of five years and longer were granted voting rights for local elections (EU citizens had been granted that right in 1999).

86 ' In the same period, and again in line with Flemish policy (Vlaamse Regering 2004a, 2004b, see also Chapter 2), the city’s integration policy aimed at deprived groups and allochthons was replaced by a more general diversity policy directed at all Antwerp residents (Stad Antwerpen 2006, 2008, 2009a). “Living together in diversity” was re- defined as a “shared responsibility” and a matter of “sharing basic values” connected to the “achievements of the Enlightenment” (Stad Antwerpen 2008: 4-5). The prime goal of the policy was that “residents with different backgrounds [would] have a better understanding of one another” (ibid: 5), which the city wanted to realize via the encouragement of symbolic communal projects, “dialogue” and a (neighborhood- based) infrastructure for “encounters” (Stad Antwerpen 2008: 6-8). In this policy, the Opsinjoren idea of neighborly social cohesion as something that could be restored through ‘active citizenship’ and residents as co-managing ‘partners’ was no longer a tool towards the ‘integration’ of deprived groups, but was taken as the starting point for the development of a broad cosmopolitan urban citizenship and communitas78 (Stad Antwerpen 2009a: 24). Like neighborhood life and neighborliness in Opsinjoren, ‘living together in diversity’ was envisioned as both a skill to be learned and the object of state management and intervention, as exemplified by the foundation of a ‘diversity management office’ and a city service for ‘neighbor mediation’ [burenbemiddeling]. The extent to which the two strands of policy inflections of ‘living together’ (as the reconstruction of disintegrating urban neighborhood life and as the bridging of ethno-cultural difference) have come under Janssens’ coalition to be seen as overlapping and mutually constitutive is clearly signalled by the 2009 merger of the previously separate municipal administrative units ‘Integral Safety’ and ‘Living together in diversity’ into a new grand municipal service called, simply, ‘Living together’ [Dienst Samenleven]. Under Janssens, what were once developed as experimental and often private initiatives and new governance techniques in deprived urban spaces, have become co-opted by the city as regular municipal services and as common sense policy assumptions targeting all neighborhoods and all denizens.

Borgerhout.regained:.symbol.of.the.im/possibilities.of.‘living. together’. The journalist in Los, who was assigned to portray citizens engaged in peculiar projects, first interviews an elderly, overweight accountant in a run-down traditional pub, who is fighting a frustrated one-man fight against the ‘street for playing’ event organized on his Borgerhout street. The next day, the reporter visits the street in question:

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 78 Instead of minority associations being funded via SIF to combat exclusion and deprivation, the city now grants (mostly project-based) financial means to associations applying for initiatives or projects aimed at enhancing the ‘living together’ of residents of different ethno-cultural backgrounds or religions (Stad Antwerpen 2006: 59, 60; Stad Antwerpen 2009b).

87 ' The scene exudes liveliness. There are colorful chalk drawings across the entire length of the beautiful, well-maintained, expensive street (Is this Borgerhout? No way!). Girls play with hoops, boys with bikes and self- made toy airplanes, and in front of the doors of the bourgeois houses with the blue or green doors and children’s drawings in the windows, are the radiant, happy, beautiful young people who are the parents of these children, and who have organized the street for playing event. … They are architects, designers, chefs, decor producers, children’s book illustrators. … This will become a nice report. The images say it all: the somber, old, bald man … in the dark cafe beside the happy young people with their many smiling children in the sun. Old-young, dark- light, angry-happy, accountant-designer… My text will be neutral, although slightly tongue-in-cheek. The careful reader [goede verstaander] will know who the winner is. (Naegels 2005: 20-21, my translation)

The rise of the figure of the ‘new, progressive Fleming’ in the imagination of Borgerhout was thus part of a city-wide gentrification and of a polarized political battle for the city between what were felt to be two fundamentally different urban moralities and subjectivities. As the excerpt from Los demonstrates, with Janssens’ victory, it was sensed that Antwerp had finally reached the end of a dark period. While Rotthier explicitly distrusted the optimism of positivos and, like the journalists before him, preferred the authentic suffering of the negativos, the excerpt shows that in this context the new urban middle classes had become the implicit ‘winners’. It is their presence that - implicitly contrasted with the presence of both ‘negative’ ‘autochthon’ and ‘Moroccan’ residents - had brought optimism, light and liveliness back within the city’s, and Borgerhout’s, reach. By 2009, the two characteristics that had once made Borgerhout an exceptional neighborhood had ‘normalized’ in the sense that the visible presence of non-white and non-EU background residents, as well as Flemish Block support, had spread to virtually all Antwerp boroughs. Moreover, Borgerhout had become a genuinely ‘hip’ neighborhood for that specific class of young, white middle class families that wished to remain in the city. Housing prices were rising steadily. This group was increasingly marking Borgerhout’s public space (most notably with the re-opening of the Roma, an old cinema on the Turnhoutsebaan, which was turned into a hugely successful cultural podium), and had, with the Sp.a-Green! district coalition, also become the new ruling elite in the area. While Flemish Interest still resorted to ‘Borgerokko’ as a stage for what it increasingly re-defined as its fight against ‘Islamization’, these actions no longer seemed to be able to define Borgerhout’s image.79 Instead, media portrayals and

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 79For example: the press presentation of ‘Street without Jihad’ posters on the Turnhoutsebaan; a “safari”, as they called it, through Borgerhout for European new-right politicians during a conference on the “Islamization of Europe”.

88 ' commentaries posited that Borgerhout had been regained: that “‘Borgerokko’ has become Borgerhout again” (Beyen 2008: 168). Defending themselves against critiques of being naive or elitist gentrifiers pushing out the poor, ‘progressive’ residents have also taken Borgerhout as a platform to propagate their perception of urban multicultural life to a wider Flemish audience (e.g. Lotens 2010; Knack 20 March 2013). Walter Lotens’ Greetings from Borgerhout. Diary of a neighborhood resident (2010) is a mixed personal and journalistic account of the new neighborhood development policies and the engagement of what he calls the gentrifiers in Borgerhout, himself included, and their frustrations and successes.

Maybe this concrete story about the everyday praxis in a ‘problem neighborhood’ that no longer deserves that label can be a hopeful signal that living together in some boroughs in a cosmopolitan city like Antwerp is not an easy, but also not an altogether impossible, task. (Lotens 2010: 24)

In this depiction, a final layer of meaning is added to the myth of Borgerhout. Borgerhout is here no longer a symptom of a dystopic deficit of multicultural ‘living together’. It is, instead, presented as the locus par excellence of the exploration of new, bottom-up solutions; as the symptom of the, albeit hard-earned, potential of urban ‘living together’ in cultural difference. Borgerhout is at once a symbol of the impossibilities and possibilities of multicultural ‘living together’; simultaneously “an icon of the hope and of the despair of globalization” (Beyen 2008: 172). “That is one of the great riddles of Borgerhout”, wrote Tom Naegels in a long report about it after the AEL riots in 2002. “People who live in the same street feel completely different about life in the borough. For one it is a war zone, another finds it a village-in-the-city”.80 More precisely, Borgerhout has been deployed by a range of actors as a political stage and as a governance laboratory of the politics of ‘living together’. Most of all, it has functioned as the mythical screen onto which has crystallized a discussion and a cleavage within the Flemish ‘we’ around the question of the truth of samenleven and the ethics of multicultural life. '

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 80 Naegels, Tom, ‘Kerst na de Rellen’. De Nieuwe Gazet 24, December 2002, my translation.

89 '

Chapter 2

Are Antwerp’s strictly orthodox Jews becoming ‘allochtonen’?

In October 2009, the local branch of B’nai B’rith, an international Jewish service organization, held the annual commemoration of Mala Zimetbaum, an Antwerp Jewish woman murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. This year, however, a colloquium was added to the program with the title: “About civic integration” [Over inburgering]. As I will explain in more detail below, inburgering is a term that has only recently come into use in the context of Flemish integration policies, and testifies to the ‘culturalization’ of citizenship (Žižek 2008; Schinkel and van Houdt 2010; Schinkel 2013) as it has come about in Flanders and other European countries. The Flemish civic integration policy is based on the idea that real citizenship and successful ‘integration’ require certain social and cultural competencies, especially regarding language and so-called ‘Flemish’ “core values”. In order to achieve this, a policy of compulsory citizenship pathways [inburgeringstrajecten] for non-EU migrants and former migrants was established in 2003 (Van Mechelen 2005; Foblets and Yanasmayan 2010; Loobuyck and Jacobs 2011). The minister who had developed this policy was one of the speakers on the panel invited to discuss inburgering in relation to the Jewish community. As always, the event was well attended by politicians and several Antwerp council members. Behind the panel, next to a banner of B’nai B’rith and a large picture of Mala Zimetbaum, was the Belgian flag embroidered with a yellow Magen David. One of the prominent members of B’nai B’rith gave a speech, recounting the story of Mala Zimetbaum’s life as “an example of successful inburgering”. Recently migrated from Poland, Mala and her family took up residence in Antwerp. Mala went to a non-Jewish school and, later on, learned how to make a living cutting diamonds “without ever needing the help or support of the government.” Jewish Eastern European migrants who settled in Antwerp, so he elaborated: “never made any trouble and tried to live peacefully next to Antwerp’s original inhabitants. … Like so many others, the integration of Mala’s family happened immaculately.” After the speech and a Yiddish partisan song, the colloquium part of the evening began in earnest. The new laws regarding inburgering, so the chair of the panel stated with a nod to the former minister, were indeed justified by the recent waves of migration to Belgium. However, he argued, there were several points that needed to be considered with regard to the Jewish community:

91 ' First, this law only marginally, or not at all, concerns Jewish citizens. The Jewish presence is as old as Belgium itself. The Jewish Consistoire was established under Napoleon rule, so even before Belgian independence. Jewish citizens have always played a large role in the development of the country … and in Antwerp they have contributed to the diamond industry, the harbor trade and the metropolis itself … There is a very small minority of recent migrants, orthodox Jews, who have objections, moral objections against some of the principles of the courses, but not against the courses themselves. It’s our view that you should be entitled to have such objections. Jews mustn’t be assimilated [i.e. lumped together] with allochtonen or newcomers. The integration of Jews shouldn’t be called into question. In short: inburgering is a problem with which the Jewish community is not involved. If there are some individual cases, these should be handled flexibly.

During the panel discussion and the questions from the audience, these premises were confirmed and restated over and over again. The former minister was somewhat isolated in maintaining a discourse of emancipation, multiculturalism and diversity when he explained his policy and emphasized that everyone should know the “rules of the game”, irrespective of their religious convictions. He conceded in the end, however, agreeing that the Jewish community is indeed an example of integration, and was rewarded with loud applause. Some months later I had an appointment with a Hasidic man, the founder of Sharai Parnoese Toive (Gate of the Good Sustenance), a small organization committed to reducing the unemployment rates among Hasidic men by offering training and assistance. Not only had the SPT applied for, and received, subsidies from the city as an ‘allochthonous’ organization, but its director had also described Jews as ‘allochthons’ in need of special treatment in a newspaper article81. The article had been pointed out to me by a modern-orthodox respondent who was both shocked and dismayed at a Jew using this term to describe himself. When I asked the SPT founder how he felt about presenting his organization as ‘allochthonous’ in order to receive subsidies, he responded:

Do you know what the definition of the term allochtoon is? I’ll give you the definition: an allochtoon is someone whose grandparents, or one of them, comes from abroad82. I know there are people in our community who are not happy with being called allochtoon, but that’s simply because they don’t know the definition … Most Jewish people are allochtonen.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!! ! 81 ‘Antwerpse joden werkloos door diamantcrisis’, Vacature 14 March 2009, p.19-21. 82 In fact, the official definition of allochtoon also involves the criterion of an “underprivileged position” that is related to ethnic background and socio-economic position (see p. 58, note 43).

92 ! These two cases raise a series of questions. Why organize a colloquium on civic integration and the Jewish community when the consensus is that ‘integration’ does not concern Jews at all? On the other hand, why would a Hasidic Jew so readily take up the allochtoon label when it has all the negative connotations in popular and political discourse described in the previous chapter? In short, why did Antwerp’s Jews at this particular historic moment apparently feel the need to explicitly relate to the culturalist politics of ‘integration’ and the discourse of ‘allochtonen’? Yet there is also another question: if Antwerp’s Jews are indeed technically ‘allochtonen’, in that they are (post)migrants of various kinds, how is it that the broad consensus during this public event, including among the attending politicians, was that they are not? These vignettes thus beg the question: what is the relationship between Antwerp’s Jews, and especially the way they are imagined and governed, and the culturalist policies and politics of ‘integration’ and ‘living together’?

Shifting.formations.of.difference. Jewish minorities in post-war Europe are seldom the object of analysis within the growing fields of study addressing culturalist politics and lived multiculture83. Academics and official political discourse seem to agree that Jews somehow do not ‘fit’ within the framework of multiculturalism or integration politics. Indeed, when discussed within this framework, Jews are often put forward as exemplary ‘models of integration’ (e.g. Kudenko and Philips 2009). Alternatively, they are brought into this framework via the notion of ‘new anti-Semitism’ and the question of how it compares to, or is linked with, the rise of ‘Islamophobia’ in the New Europe (e.g. EUMC 2003; Klug 2003; Bunzl 2005; Fine 2009; Peace 2009). In other words, the positioning of ‘Jews’ as if they are outside the culturalist politics of ‘integration’ and unrelated to an assumed problem of ‘cultural strangeness’, as was argued during the colloquium, is not a uniquely Antwerp feat. How can we understand what kind of relationship between European Jews and culturalist politics is subsumed under this imagination of a ‘standing beside’? Although some of the analyses of ‘new anti-Semitism’ also offer fruitful points of entry for conceptualizing the interrelation between the positions that ‘Jews’ and ‘Muslims’ have been assigned in recent culturalist discourses on ‘Europe’ and European identity (e.g. Bunzl 2005 and commentaries; Silverstein 2008; Meer 2012), I take a different theoretical route in this chapter. A body of, mostly American, literature has emerged which studies the making of ‘race’ through the prism of the historical making of ‘whiteness’ (e.g. Brodkin 1998; Jacobsen 1998; Roediger 2005). These authors have shown that groups that are now '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 83 See, for exceptions and approaches somewhat akin to mine though with different ethnographic focus: Schnitzer e.a. (2011a, 2011b) on interactions between non-Jewish care professionals in Antwerp and strictly observant Jewish parents; Vincent and Warf (2002), Cousineau (2005), and Watson (2005) on moments of political contestation over the establishment of eruvim; Valins (2003) on other socio-spatial dimensions of strictly orthodox urban Judaism and cf. Goldschmidt (2006) for a US example.

93 ' commonly seen in the US context as securely ‘white’ or ‘white ethnics’ “outside of the world of race” (Roediger 2005: 25) (e.g. Irish, Italian, Eastern European, and Jewish former migrants from Europe), were commonly viewed as ‘black’ or as ‘non-white’ ‘races’ at the beginning of the 20th century. In order to explain this shifting racial assignment, the literature describes a multifaceted and fluctuating process of racialization. This process not only involves US foreign policy and public imagination, but also links these to: changing socio-economic policies and differentiating modes of governance in relation to global capitalism (Brodkin 2000), the influence of international events and emerging ideologies, and the way in which these populations have responded to their positioning. Moreover, these authors emphasize, as in the concept of “racial formations”, that the processes of racialization through which categories (‘black’, Anglo Saxon ‘white’, ‘off-white’ European migrants) emerge as ‘racially’ different are interrelated: the different racialized positions of populations and minorities always gain their meaning (and their governance function) vis-a-vis one another. As a result of their history of racial change and racial “inbetweenness” (Roediger 2005: 8), American Jews, argues Karen Brodkin: “have been a microcosm of American race-making processes” (Brodkin 1998: 22). In this body of literature, asking “how Jews became white folks” thus provides a prism for bringing into sharp relief these interrelated processes of racialization, and the way in which class, gender, religion, and notions of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ are made to intersect. This literature allows me to investigate what these two vignettes tell us about the kinds of position made available, or unavailable, to Antwerp’s Jews (and to European Jews more broadly) over time and in relation to the assigned position of other population categories and minorities. In this chapter, I trace the way in which the Antwerp Jewish population and ‘Jewish neighborhood’ have been imagined in public Belgian and Flemish discourse, and how it has been politically governed. I focus especially on the shift in the position that Antwerp’s Jews seem to now sense: from a relatively secure status (repeatedly evoked during the colloquium) of being publicly and politically recognized as incontestably ‘integrated’ and historically ‘belonging’ in Antwerp and Belgium, to a position that is increasingly akin to that of ‘allochtonen’. First, however, I briefly describe how the position of Jews as ‘autochthons of a special kind’, imagined as exotic but historically belonging at the same time, has come about. This is essential, given that Antwerp’s Jews, and those in Europe more broadly, were mainly perceived as poor, undesirable and ‘suspect’ aliens, and were the subject of antisemitic and xenophobic politics and imaginaries, in the first half of the 20th century (Steinberg 1993; Swyngedouw 1995; Saerens 2000). Explaining these shifts, I pay particular attention to, on the one hand (and following an argument of Hannah Arendt, 1973), the way in which the Belgian state and the Antwerp ruling elite have sought to govern the Antwerp Jewish population in relation to the diamond sector, and the specific governing relationship that has emerged out of this. On the other hand, I link this relationship to a ‘liberal’ Belgian tradition for governing religion and its discontents, as well as to recent shifts in Flanders and throughout Europe in culturalist discourses and politics towards a very particular secular-liberalist definition of so-called ‘Western’ and ‘modern’ values of secular

94 ' freedom and equality. This includes what Joan Scott has recently termed “sexular” politics (2009). This chapter, then, serves both as an introduction to the ‘Jewish neighborhood’ and its political production, and as a sketch of the broader historical ‘formations of difference’ within and against which the culturalist politics of ‘integration’ and ‘living together’ have emerged, so as to better bring out their particularities.

The.position.of.Antwerp’s.Jews.before.the.war:.threatening. ‘strangers’. In 1880, an estimated 1200 Jews lived in Antwerp (and about 4000 in Belgium, Saerens 2000: xvi, 10). They had migrated from France, Germany or the Netherlands in the 19th century, and aspired to an ‘emancipated’ or ‘assimilated’ lifestyle, like Jews in Western Europe more generally at the time, and in line with the gradual removing of exclusionary laws and the granting of (some) equality in citizenship rights to Jews in the wake of the French Revolution. These Jews were mostly liberal, Belgian patriots, and practiced their religion (if at all) in a style akin to Reform Judaism (Van den Daelen 2008: 27, 161). There was then an influx of impoverished, partly orthodox, Yiddish speaking Eastern European Jews from the 1880s onwards. They were fleeing pogroms and economic destabilization in Czarist Russia, what is now Poland, and, in the 1930s, Nazi Germany. This group settled mainly in Brussels and Antwerp, which meant an explosive growth in the Antwerp Jewish population, as well as a radical change in its profile and outlook. In 1914, there were an estimated 20,000 Jews in Antwerp, which rose to 35,500 in 1939, from a total population of 270,000 (Saerens 2000: 10, 201; Van den Daelen 2008: 29). This constituted the largest Jewish population in the country, followed by that of Brussels84. In comparison to the Jewish populations in surrounding countries, those of Belgium was thus a very ‘new’ (Eastern European) migrant population. While the (large) majority of Jews in France, the Netherlands and Germany were nationals, this was only the case for 6.6% of the registered Jewish population in Belgium in 1940. These Ostjuden, as they were generally referred to in Western Europe at the time, brought traces of their former shtetl life to Antwerp (Vanden Daelen 2008: 28; Saerens 2000: 17). They settled in a very spatially concentrated manner in a few neighborhoods around Antwerp Central Station and the diamond district, as well as in adjacent parts of Borgerhout (Saerens 2000: 10, 20-21; Vanden Daelen 2008: 28; Vanden Daelen 2009). The area was called, or likened to, a “ghetto” (Saerens 2000: 24). Community life '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 84 These numbers do not reflect a steady rise: the Jewish population in Antwerp fluctuated greatly in that period, with people leaving the city en masse as a consequence of World War I or the economic depression in the 1930s. Moreover, due to its port and the Red Star line to the United States, Antwerp was very much a transit city, especially for Eastern European and German Jews. Saerens reports that numbers up to 47,000 a year of transit-migrants to America from Eastern Europe and Germany passed through Antwerp between 1900 and WWI (Searens 2000: 6). When the US restricted its migration laws in 1924, more Jews sought to stay in Belgium and Antwerp (ibid: 15).

95 ' was vibrant and very heterogeneous. The Eastern European migrants had brought new social and cultural associations, as well as new political ideologies to Antwerp Jewish life, especially on the left of the political spectrum as well as Zionism in a great many guises (from religious to communist Zionism). Indeed, Antwerp became the “spearhead of Zionism” in Western Europe (Vanden Daelen 2008: 123-229; Saerens 2000: 27). Moreover, due to the new migrant presence, a vital and ‘booming’ Jewish religious life and infrastructure developed, including new synagogues, a great many prayer and religious study houses, a funeral organization, kosher facilities, and several Jewish day schools. The emphasis on orthodoxy (all three officially recognized Jewish communities were orthodox; Agudat Jisrael85 had a very strong branch; and there were several Hasidic86 sects) was unique within the Western European context, and often remarked upon by contemporary observers (Van den Daelen 2008: 159-167, 209; Saerens 2000: 16-17). The fact that Antwerp had an eruv87 as early as 1902 comprising almost the entire inner-city area within what is now Antwerp’s ring-road facilitated and attracted further orthodox life (Vanden Daelen 2008: 205-206; Vanden Daelen 2011: 53-55). European orthodox Jews considered Antwerp to be a very “respectable” place to live (Vanden Daelen 2008: 167). Although a small minority of these migrants managed to become part of the bourgeoisie and elite (as bankers, industrialists, diamond dealers, or working in the free professions), the majority of the East European Jewish immigrants were very poor and living conditions in the ‘Jewish neighborhood’ were dire (Saerens 2000: 12-14, 24-26). Although Jews worked in a variety of sectors (especially small trades, street peddling and semi-industrialized manufacturing that could be done from home; Saerens 2000: 25; Vanden Daelen 2008: 28), their involvement in the diamond sector was characteristic of Antwerp. The diamond industry in the city had received a major boost due to the Eastern European migrants in the 1880s (before them, Dutch Jews had also worked in the industry; Saerens 2000: 11; Vanden Daelen 2008: 70). The diamond sector provided the perfect economic niche for the immigrant proletariat for several '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 85 Agudat Yisrael was founded in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century as an umbrella (political) organization through which to unite all strictly orthodox Jews in opposition to the rise of Zionism. It was anti-Zionist before WWII, on the basis of the idea that a Jewish state should only emerge from divine intervention. After the war, it took a neutral, ‘non-Zionist’ stance, and has since participated as a political party in Israel. 86 Hasidism (meaning ‘piety’) is a mystical, strictly orthodox movement that arose in 18th century Central Europe, and sought to create and popularize a pious form of religiosity that extends beyond (intellectual) study and the confinement of religious knowledge and authority to the religious elite alone. It revolves around charismatic leaders called rebbes, who established their own dynastic ‘courts’. Each court or ‘sect’ has its own traditions, styles of dress, and emphases in religious experience. Before the war, as many as eight Hasidic sects had established prayer houses in Antwerp (Vanden Daelen 2008: 201). 87 On Sabbath and other important Jewish holidays, Jewish law restricts certain activities. One of those restrictions is to ‘carry’ or move objects (such as baby strollers), which is only allowed within private space (i.e. the home and the synagogue). An eruv, a symbolic enclosure around a specific locality, functions as an extension of private space within which the restriction to carry is lifted. In Antwerp, it follows ‘natural borders’ (the river Schelde, the railroad track, the medieval city walls, the ring road; these are connected with Sabbath poles).

96 ' reasons, including the fact that the Belgian authorities stimulated the industry for commercial purposes by adopting a laissez-faire attitude in terms of minimal regulation and provided maximum support. This made it fairly easy for newly-arrived workers to receive residence permits or work illegally. Moreover, jobs in the trade and cleaving and cutting did not require a diploma, there were few overheads, the work was easy to learn, and it provided a good income in relatively little time. Meanwhile, the system of Jewish solidarity, providing loans with little or no interest, solved the issue of the necessary starting capital (Vanden Daelen 2008: 88-89, 2010, 2011).88 Although portrayed as ‘examples of integration’ in 2009, this Eastern European Jewish migrant population in Antwerp was not viewed in this way by non-Jewish society, or by those Jews who had carefully established an assimilated lifestyle before the arrival of these relative newcomers (Saerens 2000). Reflecting a tension between ‘assimilated’ Jews and Ostjuden that was not unique to Antwerp (e.g. Brown 2006: 57), the former viewed “Polish Jews” or “Polaks”, as they called them, as lacking the ‘civilization’ of the modern ‘Western’ and ‘European’ culture they themselves had acquired. Indeed, to assimilated Jews, these Yiddish speaking, orthodox, poor migrants and their ‘foreign’ and ‘backward’ ways - “characterized by the stench of sweat, peas and herrings” (quoted in Vanden Daelen 2008: 162, my translation) – were an embarrassment (Vanden Daelen 2008: 160-162, 213; Saerens 2000: 24).89 Although the ‘Jewish question’ was much less of a debate of national proportions in Belgium in the late 19th century than it was in France or Germany (due to the small number of ‘Belgian’ Jews)90, Jews, and especially the new Eastern European migrants, were negatively viewed in Antwerp, and increasingly so towards the start of World War II. Anti-Jewish sentiment was especially strong in Catholic circles, where ‘Jews’ were seen as the driving forces, and secret financiers (including, at some point, of the Antwerp liberal mayor), of the modern, ‘revolutionary’ secular political forces (first mainly liberalism, then socialism and communism) that were felt to endanger and erode the Catholic order and tradition. The liberal and socialist press, in contrast, presenting themselves respectively as the heirs to Enlightenment tolerance and as advocates of international solidarity, described Catholic anti-Judaism as just another example of

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 88 Even though a considerable part of the pre-war Antwerp Jewish population worked in the diamond sector, this did not mean that the majority of the diamond workforce was Jewish: only 25% of the industry’s laborers were Jewish. In the trade (as brokers and dealers or as owners of ateliers), however, Jews were dominant (Vanden Daelen 2008: 71; Henn and Laureys 2008: 8). 89 Dutch Jews and bourgeois Belgian Jews lived a certain spatial distance from the “ghetto”: Dutch Jews in Deurne/Berchem, Belgian Jews in the bourgeois 19th century quartiers around the Belgielei and the Stadspark (Saerens 2000: 24). Despite these tensions, there was an especially elaborate and efficiently centralized structure of Jewish private welfare and charity organizations in Antwerp, which transcended these differences of background and religious orientation (Vanden Daelen 2008: 93-96, 151). The diamond sector was also a binding factor, where Belgian, Dutch and Eastern European Jews met and worked with each other. 90 However, it was not absent either, and the Deyfus affaire kept public opinion busy, as it did on the entire continent (Saerens 2000: 44-46). Nevertheless, there were no parties or organizations in Belgium and Antwerp for whom antisemitism was their sole program and raison d’être until the 1930s (ibid: 95).

97 ' clerical narrow-mindedness and “hate”. In other words, the imagination of, and attitude towards, ‘Jews’, including general anti-Semitic notions about a ‘Jewish conspiracy’, Jewish ‘dishonesty’, and Jewish political manipulation, were put to use in the political battle between clericals and anti-clericals (Saerens 2000: 40-75, 94-98, 735). In the context of the 1930s economic crisis and hardship, Jewish migrants were increasingly seen as alien parasites, accused of stealing jobs and unfair competition, and as supporting the city’s ‘Francophonization’. These accusations were first leveled at Eastern European Jews as much as at other migrants and aliens (Italians, Poles). However, under the rising influence of national socialism, and with the establishment of specifically anti-Semitic organizations in the 1930s, this discourse gradually focused on ‘Jews’ (immigrant or not) as threatening, ‘strange’ [volksvreemd] migrants par excellence (Swyngedouw 1995; Saerens 2000: xxi, 161-163, 421-422, 736-737). New Order parties and pamphlets depicted Jews in increasingly epidermal terms, as an intrinsically ‘unassimilable’ element, whose ‘strange’ ‘nature’ [aard] would automatically lead to the degeneration and “denationalization” of the national body91. In this atmosphere, a discourse arose in Antwerp that also specifically targeted the local Jewish population as “untrustworthy” and “unhygienic”, and accused Jews of “overrunning” entire neighborhoods and “taking over” the City Park, while “refusing to adjust” to, and “playing boss” over, the “Sinjoren” and “our own Antwerp people” (Saerens 2000: 346-347, 372, 382, 388, 408; Steinberg 1993: 242). Many authors have remarked that in contemporary Europe, the “Muslim question” has replaced the “Jewish question”; i.e. that ‘Muslims’ have now come to be assigned to the “racialized slot” of the ‘stranger’ (Silverstein 2005: 366), just as ‘Jews’ were in Europe before the War.92 There are indeed striking resemblances. Moreover, there is also a real historical overlap in the European racialized perception of ‘Jews’ and (colonized) ‘black’ or non-white subjects. Along with the proletarian masses, they were the object of the same epidermal racist discourse that construed them as (racially, culturally and politically) degenerative to the nation, the ‘race’, or ‘European civilization’93, to the extent that Jews were frequently described as “black” or “negroid” '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 91 Flemish-nationalism before the 1930s was relatively ‘cosmopolitan’ in the sense that it saw language (which could be learned) as the primary criterion of Flemishness. In Antwerp, there were some quite prominent Jewish Flamingants. This was very much in contrast to Belgian nationalism, which had a strong anti-Jewish undercurrent much earlier on (Saerens 2000: 736). On the other hand, Flemish nationlists accused migrants in general, and Jews especially, of adding to the ‘Francophonization’ [verfransing] of Antwerp (because many migrants, including Jews, prefered to learn and teach their children French as the language of social climbing and the bourgeoisie instead of Dutch) (Saerens 2000: 94). As Flemish-nationalism radicalized and national-socialism gained a strong attraction among young Flemish nationalists, a much more völkish and, in the end, also antisemitic landscape of Flemish nationalist parties and organizations emerged, especially in Antwerp (Saerens 2000: 270-307, 388-415). 92 E.g. Silverstein 2005: 366; Brodkin 2005; see, for the Antwerp case specifically: Saerens 2000: 758; Swyngedouw 1995. 93 I disagree with Matti Bunzl (2005) here, who argues that the difference between antisemitism and Islamophobia is that the former construed ‘Jews’ primarily as threats to the nation, whereas the latter primarily construes ‘Muslims’ as unfit for ‘Europe’. I argue that, both antisemitic and anti-Muslim discourses, historic and recent, are very flexible in combining and sliding back and forth between

98 ' in their physical characteristics (Gilman 1991: 171-181; see also Mosse 1985: 133-152; Stoler 2002: 80-84). However, there is also a crucial difference in the way in which the strangeness of Jews was conceptualized – a difference other than a shift from explicit references to biological difference to ‘culturalism’ in the public arena. In what I call the ‘pre-war template of strangeness’, the imagined strangeness of Jews was inherently ambivalent in multiple ways (Bauman 1998; Klug 2003: 124). Jews were simultaneously regarded as a “nation-within-the-nation”, and as disturbing the natural order as a uniquely “nationless” and “unrooted” people [vaderlandsloos, in the Flemish discourses described above]. They were seen as too uncivilized and unmodern to ever become fully ‘Western’ or ‘European’ (especially Ostjuden), and as the very cause and instigators of modernity and its alienating forces (communism, capitalism). On the one hand imagined as ‘strangers’ overrunning society from without, they were also seen as too internal: as having penetrated state power, the elite, and the masses, and as holding an invisible sway over society. As Zygmunt Bauman has captured with the term “allosemitism” (Bauman 1998), it is this construction of the ‘Jew’ as a uniquely ambivalent figure - making him utterly different from all other people in the world - which created ‘Jews’ as the epitome of ‘strangeness’. In Antwerp, where antisemitic groups were already quite strong before the war; where the first large razzias by the German occupying forces had taken place (with police cooperation); and where local authorities had obediently carried out German orders, Jews suffered much more from German occupation and Nazi persecution than in the rest of Belgium. In Brussels, 37% of the Jewish population was deported compared to 65% of Antwerp’s Jews (Saerens 2000: 557-656, 745; Steinberg 1993). In Brussels, where many Antwerp Jews fled (and continued to live after the war), some official Jewish life remained throughout the war. Moreover, in contrast to Antwerp, Jews had been able to survive the war without going into hiding (Vanden Daelen 2008: 31). In Antwerp, however, all Jewish institutions, organizations and places of worship were dissolved by German command. “When the occupying forces left Antwerp, the city was Judenrein” (Vanden Daelen 2005: 27). Only 800 Jews had survived the war in hiding in Antwerp (Vanden Daelen 2008: 31). Indeed, from the end of the war onwards, the Jewish community in Brussels has been the largest in Belgium.

After.World.War.II:.Antwerp’s.Jews.as.‘autochthons.of.a.special. kind’. How did the position of Jews in Antwerp make this enormous shift: from a persecuted, unassimilably ‘alien’ threat to nation and society, to a position in which they are perceived as historically belonging and their ‘integration’ in Belgium and Antwerp is uncontested in the political and public sphere? After World War II, a “normalization of

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' different ‘scales’ (nation, race, Europe, humankind) and ‘prisms’ (culture, race, civilization) of identification and exclusion.

99 ' the Jewish presence in Europe” occurred (Bunzl 2005: 502) more generally. Indeed, after the war and the atrocities of the Holocaust, expressions of (biological) racism and antisemitic sentiments in the public and political arena gradually became taboo, and in many West European countries eventually also forbidden by law94. Moreover, “the Holocaust stands at the core of the new Europe” (Bunzl 2005: 501). The European project was conceived as an antithesis to, and the overcoming of, the racism and genocidal nationalisms of the old Europe. The implication of this is that the new Europe fundamentally construed itself around an investment in the lasting or renewed presence of Jews as explicitly recognized as belonging in Europe and in the absence of antisemitism. This shift in what is considered legitimate and (scientifically) true thinking about human difference had global (the work of UNESCO to falsify racism and eugenics), European, and national dimensions. It also forms the broad context in which the shifting position of the Antwerp Jewish community should be understood. In Antwerp, however, the Jewish community developed in a direction that was unique for post-war Europe: it became more exclusively (strictly) orthodox and more dependent on one economic niche (Vanden Daelen 2008, 2012). In these aspects, Antwerp’s Jews diverged strongly not only from other European Jewish communities, but also from their non-Jewish secularizing fellow Antwerp residents. This makes the shift in the assigned position of Jews in Antwerp somewhat puzzling. It may also bring out an aspect of the position of European Jews that is more submerged in other contexts, i.e. that in post-war Europe, Jews have come to be constructed as both naturally ‘autochthonous’ to their respective nation-state, and inherently ‘European’, but remaining always of ‘a special kind’. In the years after the war, the Jewish population in Belgium grew very quickly, as Jewish refugees, displaced persons and repatriating Jews arrived, especially in Antwerp (from 2000 in 1944 to 15,000 in 1950)95. In the 1950s, there was a second, fairly small, migration from Eastern Europe, and of Hasidic Jews from Hungary in particular (Vanden Daelen 2005: 38, 2008: 32-36; 202). Nowadays, the Antwerp Jewish population is estimated to be 20,000 to 25,000 (and 40-50,000 for Belgium as a whole) (Vanden Daelen 2008: 15). The Eastern European and ‘alien’ character of the pre-war Belgian Jewish population remained in the decades after the war: even though a considerable part of the post-war population (an estimated 60-70%, Gutwirth 1968: 123) already lived in Antwerp before the war, they, too, were mostly first or second generation migrants and not Belgian nationals. Jews in Belgium were mostly Poles and Germans, and, in Antwerp, also Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs and Russians (Vanden Daelen 2008: 31-36, 66; Gutwirth 1968: 124).

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 94 See, for detailed descriptions of the contention and ambiguity that characterized this process of tabooization, especially in the first two decades after the war, and the way in which philosemitism came to serve as a “cultural code” (Moyn 2009: 4) for expressing feelings of guilt, shame, and remaining antisemitic sentiments: Stern 1992, 1993; Bodeman 1996; Moyn 2009. 95 From the approximately 40,000 Jews that had been deported from Belgian, only 1335 people survived (Vanden Daelen 2008: 50).

100 ' The reconstruction and specific outlook of the Antwerp Jewish community after the war was deeply entwined with the diamond sector: “Jews made for the revival of the diamond trade, and the diamond trade made for the revival of Jewish life in Antwerp” (Vanden Daelen 2006: 12). However, this development was not driven by the choices of Jews alone; it was also the product of the way in which the Belgian state and (local) authorities governed this population by making possible and encouraging certain options and effectively blocking others. Hannah Arendt (1973, Part I) provides some pointers for understanding the dynamics of the particular way in which the Belgian government and authorities have sought to govern the Antwerp Jewish population. She argues that in the 19th century, the relationship between European Jews and the emerging nation-states where they lived had become inherently ambivalent. On the one hand, it was financially and economically lucrative for the state to grant a small, financial Jewish elite a privileged status and, in that sense, to govern ‘Jews’ as a separate group. On the other hand, the notion of ‘equality’ as the basis for a new body politic meant that the state was simultaneously and gradually incorporating Jews as individual national citizens. Arendt therefore conceptualizes 19th century Jewish emancipation as both the granting of equality and the extension of ‘privilege’ to ever wider circles of the Jewish population (1973: 12). This same tension between ‘normalizing’ the position of Jews while also granting them a very particular minority status that sets them apart (complicated by the Belgian pillarized model for governing religion) characterizes the governance relationship of Antwerp’s Jews. During, and even before, World War II, the Antwerp and Belgian authorities actively pursued safeguarding and restoring the economic interests and revenues of the diamond sector (accounting for 6% of Belgian export revenues and creating an estimated 125,000 jobs directly and indirectly before the war), which had been dissolved by the German occupying force (Vanden Daelen 2008: 73-79; Vanden Daelen 2012). Through a range of special measures, the Belgian government tried to convince wealthy Jewish diamond traders who had fled to the US and UK to return to Antwerp (as Vanden Daelen points out, this was probably a unique event in Jewish history) and re- establish the industry. Delegations of government representatives were sent to persuade them, and the Belgian government offered practical and financial assistance and incentives (visas and citizenships were granted, suspending the usual formalities of the immigration police and national security; help was offered with restitution and indemnification for stolen property and assets; and tax exemptions and exceptional measures were granted). Exemptions to state regulations and special privileges for the diamond sector as a whole were also put in place, so that the sector was governed through a very liberal regime guaranteeing little to no state control (Vanden Daelen 2008: 78-79; 2012). These efforts were eventually successful, and the majority of the Antwerp diamond diaspora returned from London and the diamond business in Antwerp was re-established. The exceptional measures granted to wealthy “diamond Jews”, and the repeated reassurance by government representatives that they were welcome and belonged in Antwerp, stood in stark contrast to the way in which the Belgian government handled

101 ' Jewish refugees and relief to the Jewish population in general (Vanden Daelen 2012: 248). Maintaining its pre-war attitude to Jewish immigrants and refugees, the government was initially keen on getting foreign German and Eastern European Jewish refugees out of the country; initially, it allowed a portion of the refugees to stay only if the Jewish community itself would guarantee to provide their care (Vanden Daelen 2008: 32, 40). State recognition and aid to Jews as victims of racial oppression was, compared to surrounding countries, lacking. It was also largely restricted to the small minority of Jews with Belgian nationality, while the chances for Jews to gain nationality, or even a work permit, were very slim in the initial post-war years (Vanden Daelen 2012: 244, 247, 251-252). The cohesive and extensive private Jewish welfare system that the Antwerp Jewish community (re-)created after the war, which protects (orthodox) Jews from having to rely on official agencies unfamiliar with their specific needs and traditions, was thus very much also the forced result of the state’s restrictive measures towards non-national returning Jewish migrants after the war, and towards Jewish refugees especially. Indeed, the internal welfare system arose out of concern that the visible poverty that ensued from restrictive measures by the state would lead to antisemitism (Vanden Daelen 2008: 93-96, 127-128, 151) Throughout the 1950s to 1980s, up to 80% of Antwerp’s Jews worked in jobs in, or related to, the diamond sector (Vanden Daelen 2006: 6). As the sector became dependent on the Antwerp Jewish community more or less as a whole, the Belgian government extended its inclusive attitude: by 1960, a majority of Antwerp’s Jews had been able to become Belgian nationals (Vanden Daelen 2008: 32, 33). In this period, the diamond industry changed from being the “migrant profession” for arriving Jews to forming a “religious economic niche” for orthodox and strictly orthodox Jews (Vanden Daelen 2009: 21). This change is related to another shift caused by the rupture of the war: the heterogeneity in political and religious ideologies, and especially the vibrant leftist organizational life that characterized pre-war Antwerp Jewish community life, was replaced by an increasingly more homogenous orthodox outlook to the extent that it has become “the characteristic feature” of Jewish life in Antwerp (Vanden Daelen 2011: 48)96. The migration waves at the end of the 1940s and 1950s brought an influx of strictly orthodox and Hasidic Jews to Antwerp (Vanden Daelen 2005: 38, 2011: 48). Of the eight Hasidic sects that had branches in Antwerp before the war, the number had risen to approximately 20 by 2008, while the relative proportion of Hasidic Jews doubled from 12% in 1960 to an estimated 25% in 2004 (Vanden Daelen 2008: 201- 203, 218). Within Antwerp’s strictly orthodox and Hasidic circles, marriage migration

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 96 This evolution is not unique to Antwerp; hareidi (i.e. strictly orthodox) Judaism and Hasidism have flourished and gained in importance worldwide since the war, especially in Israel and the United States, just as is the case for non-liberal movements in Islam and Christianity (Heilman 1992; Soloveitchik 1994). Antwerp is now one of many centers for strictly orthodox and Hasidic life, and is also deeply connected with other Hasidic comunities (especially in London and Manchester in the UK, New York, Montreal and Jerusalem).

102 ' to and from other Hasidic Jewish communities, especially in the UK, the US, Israel, France and Switzerland, continues to this day. For orthodox Jews, working in the diamond industry was interesting, because it was compatible with strictly observant practices (keeping the Sabbath and other holy days, intensive study and synagogue attendance). In particular, it meant that they could work flexible hours at home as cleavers, while, after the war, Jewish dominance caused the entire diamond sector to increasingly follow the Jewish calendar and use Yiddish as the language of business (Vanden Daelen 2008: 88-89, 2011: 50-51). Moreover, the industry does not require any secular degree, and provides an income high enough to support large families and religious education at unsubsidized and international religious schools and institutes. These favorable economic and living conditions, in turn, again attracted more strictly observant Jews to come and move to Antwerp. Reportedly, all Hasidic groups, as well as the two recognized orthodox communities, count among their members one or more prominent diamond dealers (Van den Daelen 2009: 16). The attraction of Antwerp did not solely lie in economics, but also in what this economic foundation made possible. This included: the rebuilding of an extensive Jewish infrastructure of synagogues and prayer houses, Jewish schools, kosher shops and facilities; Jewish welfare and charity; and sports and cultural organizations, all of which were now increasingly formed around orthodoxy and fragmentation and segmentation within orthodoxy (Vanden Daelen 2008: 171-220; 2011). In stark contrast to Brussels and most other Jewish communities in Western Europe, neither a ‘liberal’ nor a ‘conservative’ branch of Judaism, nor organizations representing secular (‘laïc’) Jews, have been developed or institutionalized in Antwerp. This does not mean that all Antwerp’s Jews are orthodox. Instead, it means that the segment of the Jewish population that identifies as culturally Jewish, or whose style of observance is close to liberal or conservative Judaism (and who now live mostly in the suburbs of Wilrijk and Edegem, and not in the Jewish neighborhood), is dependent on and co-opted within an orthodox infrastructure (Vanden Daelen 2008: 185, 217). The two main communities, both of which are recognized by the state, are orthodox: Shomre Hadas, which counts among its members the ‘liberal’ segment of the Antwerp population, and Machsike Hadas, which has a more strictly orthodox profile and contains the Hasidic groups97. The proliferation and increasingly internal diversification of orthodoxy in the post-war period is more clearly reflected in the Jewish educational landscape. If 30% of Jewish children went to Jewish day schools previously, this figure rose to 80% in the 1950s and 90% today (Vanden Daelen 2008:

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 97 The third is the Sefardi community of the Portguese rite, which is very small compared to the other two. Before the war, Shomre Hadass was the largest communty; in the post-war period, however, Machsike Hadass doubled in size and is now the largest. Before the war, Shomre Hadass accomodated its liberal (and mostly Dutch) membership by having two rabbis and two recognized synagogues, each with their own specific profile: one more liberal and attached to the Bouwmeester synagogue, and another for more strictly observant members attached to the Vanden Nestlei synagogues. After the war, it chose a Hasidic rabbi to lead the congregation; ultimately, the rabbi representing a more ‘liberal’ stream was not replaced (Vanden Daelen 2008: 180-181, 185, 217.

103 ' 316). After the war, the two main Jewish schools, each affiliated with one of the two communities, grew more apart. The Tachkemoni is now the only gender-mixed Jewish school catering to the non-orthodox and largely Francophone Jewish population living in the suburbs, and has a strong Zionist character. The more strictly orthodox Jesode Hatorah-Beth Jacob, which used to have a heterogeneous population from modern- orthodox to Hasidic, now has wide competition. On the ‘modern’ side, this comes from the modern-orthodox and religious-Zionist school Yavne, while on the other side it arises from the multiple Hasidic and strictly orthodox Hadorim (religious elementary schools), girls’ schools, and yeshivas (religious academies for Talmud study) that were founded after the war, and especially in the last two decades98. The re-establishment of the diamond sector and growing orthodoxy both had an impact on the ‘Jewish neighborhood’. After the war, returning Antwerp Jews and Jewish newcomers had settled in the same area around the station and the diamond district where the Jewish neighborhood had been located before the war. Due to the increasing orthodox visibility of Jews99, the outlook of the areas shifted from being a ‘migrant’ to an ‘orthodox’ neighborhood. Moreover, especially from the 1960s onwards, the diamond sector made possible a certain embourgeoisement of Antwerp’s Jews, including the (strictly) orthodox. Jews had already lived in the 19th century bourgeois quartiers around the Belgielei and the City Park on the west side of the railroad track before the war (these are now the administrative boroughs Klein Antwerpen and Haringrode). After the war, there was a gradual geographical shift in the location of the Jewish neighborhood

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 98 Hadorim (in Antwerp organized by the Hasidic communities of Belz, Satmer, Bobov and Wiznitz) offer limited secular schooling, although the time spent on secular subjects varies between schools. As girls are not expected to study the Talmud, their schools offer more extensive secular programs alongside religious subjects, and offer both elementary and secondary schooling. Parts (kindergarten, elementary school, secondary school) of some of the girls’ schools and some of the Hadorim are recognized ‘free’ schools and subsidized by the state. However, this is an ever-shifting landscape, as some Jewish schools decide to apply for, but also frequently choose to stop, receiving state subsidies (Perry-Hazan 2014). The Hasidic hadorim feed into Yeshivas for ages 13-15, which do not result in recognized secular diploma’s. Jesode Hatorah, which is state-recognized, offers a secondary school for boys combining Talmud study and a state-recognized secular program. At age 16, the majority of strictly orthodox boys in Antwerp go to a Yeshiva in the city or abroad to Israel, the US, or the UK. Jesode Hatorah offers a program which combines Yeshivishe Talmud study with a secular program leading to a recognized high-school diploma, but by 2009 the pupils opting for this path had become a minority (Perry-Hazan 2014; see Vanden Daelen 2008: 315-350, for the development of the Jewish educational system after the war). 99 When Hasidic newcomers first arrived, the pronounced visibility as ‘Jews’ of their specific Hasidic dress (sidelocks, beards, kaftans, and Sabbath fur hats - shtreimels - for men, and sheitels (wigs) and modest dress for women) deeply concerned returned Antwerp Jews who were afraid this visibility would instigate antisemitic reactions and ‘alienate’ the population and Belgian government. They thus tried to persuade them to tone their visibility down (Vanden Daelen 2008: 212-214). The post-war generation has been more comfortable with being visibly Jewish than the war generation, wearing skull caps (kippot) and prayer shawls (tallilot). Although formal suits and hats were still normal attire for the entire population in the immediate post-war years, they have increasingly become typically, and visibly, ‘Jewish’ only (Vanden Daelen 2011: 56-59). Moreover, especially from the 1980s onwards, a change in norms for dress and appearance towards more stringency and visibility - sidelocks (pejes) and shtreimels for men, and sheitels and hats or headscarves for women - have become common throughout the entire orthodox spectrum.

104 ' towards these areas and away from the more impoverished sites around the station, especially in Borgerhout and Zurenborg, which were located on the east side of the rail road (Vanden Daelen 2009, 2011: 51). To some extent, labor migrants from Morocco took their place (Saerens 2000: 758).

Central Station

Krugerpark

Diamant- Borgerhout wijk

StadsparkStadspark

Klein Antwerpen Zurenborg

BelgiëleiHaringrode

Harmoniepark

Te Boelaarpark Koning Albertpark

Hof Van Leysen

Figure 2. Map of the administrative boroughs making up the current Jewish Neighborhood (map based on scalablemaps.com).

During my fieldwork, the area around the Belgi lei especially had emerged as a second center of strictly orthodox Jewish life, with a great many kosher shops and eateries, and a constantly evolving and expanding landscape of prayer houses and schools next to the historically older concentration of Jewish facilities in the diamond district and area around the central station. My fieldwork was focused on this relatively new part (i.e. Klein Antwerpen and Haringrode) of what has now also come to be known as the Jewish neighborhood. 100 Those replicating a bourgeois lifestyle and the more liberal

100 The reason for this was that almost only strictly orthodox and Hasidic Jews live in the historically older parts of the Jewish neighborhood today, and no longer the more modern segments of the Jewish population. Although this is a diverse neighborhood (in the diamond district, there are also populations with Indian and Eastern European backgrounds; in the Kievit neighborhood below Central Station, there

105 or ‘modern’ segments of the population - especially those who would eventually move to the suburbs – took up French as their lingua franca (remember that the non-Jewish bourgeoisie in Antwerp was also largely Francophone), which was a phenomenon that had already existed before the war. Yiddish is the language most commonly spoken among the more strictly orthodox and Hasidic part of the population. All those raised in Antwerp learned Dutch in school (Vanden Daelen 2008: 330; Gutwirth 1968: 124- 125). The development of a largely self-sufficient and self-regulating orthodox infrastructure was financially grounded in Jews’ involvement in the diamond sector – and in the strongly cohesive character of the Antwerp Jewish population across religious and other internal divides in terms of shared financial support for this infrastructure101. It was made possible, however, because of the specific way in which the Belgian state governs religion and has organized state ‘neutrality’, which was born out of the continuing conflict and compromises between anti-clericals and Catholics throughout Belgian history. The leading principles are that of state ‘neutrality’ and ‘subsidized freedom’, and they are also the basis of the system of pillarization. The state is ‘neutral’ because it provides the administrative financial means, in theory equally, for all recognized faiths to practice their religion (the maintenance of religious buildings, paying the salaries of religious personnel); for the private organization of charity and welfare; and for education organized by denominational communities, while giving them autonomy over the ideological organization of this ‘private’ sphere. Judaism was among the religions officially recognized by the newly-founded Belgian state. Organizing themselves via the Central Israelite Consistory, Jews in Belgium had been able to arrange for local Jewish communities, synagogues and schools to be recognized and subsidized by the state already at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Vanden Daelen 2008: 93, 157-158, 315-319). Jews have thus been co-opted in this specific historic tradition for governing ideological and religious difference, and were allowed to organize themselves along the pillarized system, including in the post-war period. The autonomy or freedom that Catholics had carved out for themselves in this system, and that Antwerp Jews have also drawn upon, is extensive (Vanden Daelen 2008: 93, 117, 315-316, 352). In particular, it has allowed for the existence of non-recognized religious Jewish schools that teach only a limited secular program (which does not lead to a recognized diploma)

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' are many residents of Moroccan and Eastern European descent), the proportion of white ‘autochthons’ is very low. 101 It has been common for wealthy diamond dealers who are themselves not orthodox to also contribute financially to orthodox institutions, whether directly via donations to a Yeshiva, or indirectly via contributions to De Centrale (the Jewish welfare organization that offers care and relief with respect to orthodox norms). This strong cohesive structure, despite the presence of internal divides and conflicts, is usually ascribed to the diamond sector and the spatial concentration of the Jewish population in the same neighborhood, which means that those from different denominations, sects and class backgrounds interact and meet on a daily basis (Vanden Daelen 2008: 90, 149-151, 2011: 59-60).

106 ' without state interference (as in the case of the Hasidic Hadorim and Yeshivas).102 It has also meant that the Jewish welfare organization has been able to arrange with public welfare agencies that it could coordinate and distribute state relief subsidies, so that its members did not have to apply for welfare individually (Vanden Daelen 2008: 117). Moreover, Jews continued to be governed through this pillarized logic, while, simultaneously, a new logic, namely that of ‘integration’ and ‘living together’, for governing cultural and religious difference was developed for, and applied to, Moroccan and Turkish labor migrants who had arrived not that much later than the post-war Jewish immigrants103. Jews were not target groups for federal and Flemish integration policies. Moreover, the neighborhood governance regime was not put in place in the ‘Jewish neighborhood’ (not being a ‘deprived neighborhood’, there was no community work, youth work, or neighborhood development projects), and it was never the subject of public or political anxieties about ‘Flemish alienation’ or problems of ‘living together’. Although Islam was recognized by the state in 1974, by the end of the 1990s this had not resulted in the recognition and subsidizing of any of Antwerp’s mosques, and there has been continuous state and political intervention in the establishment of a representative body on the grounds of concerns over ‘radicalism’104. By the time of my research, only two of approximately 35 Antwerp mosques were recognized and subsidized, while none of the ‘Moroccan’ mosque applications were approved. As we have seen, moreover, the encouragement of migrant self-organizations in Flemish integration policy was not a matter of granting ‘subsidized freedom’, but of developing

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 102 Children are obliged to receive education (schoolplicht), but they are not required to follow a set curriculum (leerplicht): i.e. anyone can found a school, and, as long as the state does not subsidize it, it is not bound by state regulations. Only those schools that are ‘free-subsidized’ (i.e private schools that are recognized by the state) are controlled by the inspectorate (since federalization, this is the domain of the Communities), but they, too, are free to choose their curriculum and pedagogy. The inspectorate controls whether schools reach the required ‘competencies’ in the determined ‘learning areas’, as well as whether they comply with the obligation to systematically examine and monitor their own quality (Perry-Hazan 2014: 486). 103 At the same time, the continued expansion of private Jewish orthodox education and community life along the pillarized model also started to contrast with the non-Jewish population, which was increasingly engaged in a process of depillarization, individualization and secularization. Nevertheless, the free- subsidized Catholic educational network remains the largest in Flanders. 104 See Rath e.a. 2001: 204-224; Bastenier 1988; Bousetta 2000, for the elaborate and problematic process of, and active state and political interference in, the establishment of a representative body for Islam (akin to the Jewish Consistory) that forms the basis of the lack of the execution of rights that the 1974 recognition should have theoretically brought about. Elections that would lead to such a representative body finally took place in 1998 (the preparation and organization of the elections were both heavily supported and steered by the Belgian government). A constituent assembly was chosen that appointed an executive committee that was recognized as the Belgian government’s official interlocutor for the Muslim community. However, in 1999, half the members of the committee were rejected by the Ministry of Justice on the grounds of what was presented as their excessively radical orientation (based on a confidential state security risk assessment). The constituent assembly was thus dissolved in 2004 before the end of its term, and new elections were organized (Ferrari 2005: 17).

107 ' these organizations (via integration centers and welfare work) towards ‘integration’ and ‘living together’ in the neighborhood. The idea of the establishment of an Islamic ‘pillar’ consistently led to public and political contestation (Martens 1997). From its very conception in 1989, the one Islamic school in the country (in Brussels) triggered political opposition and public concern over its assumed negative impact on ‘integration’, including on the part of the Royal Commissioner for Migrant Policy (KCM), Paula D’Hondt (Rath e.a. 2001: 221-226.) She asserted that a comparison with Jewish schools was out of place, as they had only come about after “the Belgians and the Jews had lived together for many centuries … whereas in the case of the Muslim schools ‘the problems of living together were yet to be solved’” (paraphrased and quoted in Rath e.a. 2001: 224). Three interlocking developments thus gradually made a position as if outside the multicultural constellation of migrants, minorities and allochtonen available for the Antwerp Jewish community in the post-war period. Due to this position, the culturalist framing of religious and cultural difference as a political problem of national cultural integrity, ‘living together’, and neighborhood alienation, was construed as inapplicable to ‘Jews’. The first development was the intertwinement of the Antwerp Jewish population with the diamond sector, and the measure of embourgeoisement and extensive self-regulating and largely self-sufficient Jewish orthodox infrastructure that this made possible. Second, this was in turn the result of specific regimes of state governance that were liberal in a particular way, granting major autonomy and the absence of state interference to the diamond sector and the Jewish community as a denominational ‘pillar’. Most importantly, these regimes continued to be applied to Jews parallel to the emergence of a very different culturalist governing regime of ‘integration/living together’ for other migrant-religious minorities. Third, this was all set against a broad post-war political context, in which public expressions of antisemitism - of perceiving Jews as threatening ‘strangers’ - were becoming taboo. This does not mean that antisemitism in Antwerp ceased to exist in the post-war period. In fact, there are some indications that an Antwerp vernacular negative discourse about ‘Jews’ and their ‘strange’ and ‘untrustworthy’ ways has remained (Ceuppens 2003: 657-658). It does, however, mean that there was no longer a place for aspects of this vernacular discourse in the public and political domain. As a result of these interlocking developments, Antwerp’s Jews became simultaneously positioned as ‘normal’, ‘autochtonous’ citizens with a long historic presence in Belgium, and as economically separate and religiously different. In a philosemitic twist of the pre-war anxieties over Jews’ ‘alienness’, the Antwerp Jewish population and the ‘Jewish neighborhood’ came to be routinely constructed as harmless and beneficial to society, and as historically belonging and ‘typically Antwerpian’ precisely because of its visible orthodoxy and imagined exotic, ‘mysterious’ seclusion in the diamond world of the ‘Jerusalem of the North’. Moreover, as the colloquium showed, Jewish spokespersons also started to routinely present themselves as such.105 '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 105 See for an example of such a Jewish self-presentation in the public arena in the 1990s: Davids 1993.

108 ' Antwerp’s.Jews.drawn.into.culturalist.politics:.the.ambivalence.of. the.‘other.Other’.position. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the position to which Antwerp’s Jews have been assigned has started shifting again. The notion of the ‘integration’ of orthodox Jews especially is no longer uncontested in the public domain; it has become a point of discussion and contestation, and the colloquium described at the beginning of this chapter was a sign of this development. I argue that, increasingly, a variety of political and social actors, not just in Antwerp, but throughout Western Europe, have come to turn to a construction of ‘Jews’ as Europe’s other Others (or as Europe’s other Selves) as a way to understand, claim, and contest what the problem of ‘culture’ and culturalist politics in the New Europe are really about. In other words, European Jews’ position as a constitutive ‘third’ has become highlighted within culturalist politics and within discussions about culturalist politics in a more explicit and more volatile way, while previously their ternary position was more securely that of an implicit contrastive category. As a result, the ambivalence of the position of Jews within Europe’s formations of difference has become more marked and politicized. Nowhere has this development been as accentuated as it is in Antwerp, where it takes place against the context of an already deeply polarized politics. Two evolutions, both related to the distinctive features of the Antwerp Jewish population, underlie this shift in the case of Jews in Antwerp. The first is economic in nature, as the 1970s’ changes in the global diamond trade have also had an impact on the diamond sector in Antwerp. First, the industrial jobs of cleaving and cutting diamonds were exported to low-income countries. Then from the 1990s onwards, Indians specializing in smaller and lower quality diamonds started taking over the diamond trade, which had the result of eroding the Jewish dominance in Antwerp (Siegel 2009: 88, 97)106. The percentage of Antwerpean Jews employed in the diamond sector went from an estimated 70% to 30%.107 The recent economic crises have hit the diamond trade especially hard. As a result, unemployment and poverty have risen steeply in the strictly orthodox midst, while those (also non- or modern-orthodox) Jews who used to financially support the institutionalized forms of Jewish solidarity and welfare are no longer sufficiently capable of doing so (Vanden Daelen 2011: 51). The system of self-sufficiency and increasing orthodoxy has come under severe pressure, and reports mentioning poverty in the strictly orthodox community in Antwerp have surfaced regularly in the Flemish and international media from approximately 2004 onwards108.

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 106 See also: ‘Indians unseat Antwerp’s Jews as the biggest diamond traders’, The Wall Street Journal, 27 May 2003, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB105389295228553000, accessed 1 October 2015. 107 These percentages are mentioned in: ‘Over vijftig jaar zijn er geen joden meer in Antwerpen’, De Standaard 21 June 2010. 108 See, for example: ‘Antwerpse joden werkloos door diamantcrisis’, Vacature 14 March 2009; ‘Over vijftig jaar zijn er geen joden meer in Antwerpen’, De Standaard 21 June 2010; ‘Antwerp’s Diamond Business: Jews surrender gem trade to Indians’, Spiegel Online 20/2006, http://www.spiegel.de/international /spiegel/ antwerp-s-diamond-business-jews-surrender-gem-trade-

109 ' Previously, a certain level of economic prosperity, in combination with the strong ‘pillarized’ organization of the Antwerp Jewish community, had had the effect that Antwerp’s Jews and Jewish organizations had to open themselves up, as it were, to the standardizing gaze of bureaucratic practice to only a very limited extent. Poor Jews were not dependent on state welfare – or, if they were, this was mediated via the Jewish welfare organization. This meant that Jewish organizations were able to function without subsidies, and non-recognized schools and prayer houses could be paid for. The employment opportunities in the diamond sector also meant that the need for a secular higher education, or even fluency in Flemish reading and writing skills, was limited (Perry-Hazan 2014: 481). Combined with the fact that ‘Jewishness’ (in contrast to ‘allochthonness’ or a ‘Moroccan background’ via the parents’ nationality) is not statistically measurable in Belgium, this ensured that Jewish unemployment rates, education gaps, and welfare dependency were not just low, but also relatively illegible to the state. The growing orthodoxy of Antwerp Jewish life and Jewish strictly orthodox praxis had remained largely outside the purview and working terrain of government (federal, communal, local) administrations. However, due to the decline of the diamond sector, this is now changing. The second underlying evolution is one that is less exclusive to Antwerp, and I have already partly touched on it in Chapter 1, i.e. a general backlash against (often retrospectively projected) ‘multiculturalism’ in Europe in the early 2000s and a concomitant shift within culturalist discourse and integration policies. This shift entailed that European political elites and governments started redefining (in explicitly liberal-secularist terms) the assumed problem of ‘culture’ as one of ‘clashing’ or ‘incompatible’ civilizational ‘values’ (Brown 2006; Žižek 2008; Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010). Due to this shift, religion, or rather ‘Islam’, has become more strongly problematized. Within this relatively new culturalist discourse, so I argue, strictly orthodox Jews, such as those who determine the image of the Antwerp Jewish population, constitute a conceptual problem109. In what follows, I first sketch the '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' to-indians-a-416243.html, accessed 1 October 2015; ‘For Antwerp Jews, turns out diamonds aren’t forever’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency 4 December 2009, http://www.jta.org/2009/12/04/life-religion/for- antwerp-jews-turns-out-diamonds-arent-forever, accessed 1 October 2015; ‘An Industry struggles to keep its Luster’, The New Tork Times 6 November 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/world/europe/ antwerps-diamond-industry-tries-to-keep-its- luster.html?_r=0, accessed 1 October 2015. An additional factor is that there has been a small influx of ‘Georgian’ or ‘Russian’ Jews in the 1990s (most of whom have Israeli citizenship), which has been associated, both by Jews working in the official diamond sector and Antwerp’s authorities, with organized crime, smuggling and an illegal jewelry trade. There have been several ‘clean-up’ operations by the police of the gold and jewelry shops near the central station that were assumedly owned by ‘Georgians’. The more established Antwerp Jewish population tends to look down on this group – there were many suspicions about their ‘Jewish’ status – and fears that its business practices could “polute” the sector as a whole (see Siegel 2009: 88-92, 181- 183). 109 Orthodox Christians form a similar conceptual problem, as their presence also forms a dissonance with contemporary political constructions of ‘Europe’ and specific national ‘cultures’ (such as in the Netherlands, see Verkaaik 2009; Mepschen, Duyvendak, Tonkens 2010) as inherently consisting of

110 ' different aspects of this Europe-wide liberalist shift, and the form this has taken in Flemish integration policy. I then show how the heightened focus on religion and ‘Enlightenment’ values has drawn strictly orthodox Antwerpean Jews into public discussions surrounding ‘Islam’ and ‘integration’ in highly contradictory ways, and has made them the (unintended) target of integration and diversity policies. Last, I argue that the economic precariousness caused by the declining role of Jews in the diamond sector and the new liberal-secularist politics interlock in the introduction of strictly orthodox Jews to what are, for them, new regimes of governance. As a result, both municipal civil servants and strictly orthodox Jews alike find themselves in the new situation of having to deal with each other and negotiate pious Jewish norms and practices in a bureaucratic context.!!

A.secularZliberalist.shift.within.culturalist.politics.in.Europe. A negative focus on Islam constructed as a threat to ‘Western’ values is not new. The Rushdie affair and the French affaire du foulard had already sparked intense debates in the late 1980s about the new ‘Muslim’ presence in Europe and its feared implications for the role of religion in society. In Belgium, Flemish Block had targeted ‘strangers’ also as ‘Muslims’, and repeatedly projected a looming image of Muslim fundamentalism reigning over ‘Flemish’ neighborhoods. Furthermore, as we have seen, the KCM proclaimed so-called ‘Western’ ‘societal principles’ as the most important domain within which migrants should become ‘integrated’. At the start of the 1990s, the Flemish liberal party affirmed the idea that Islam was supposedly incompatible with Belgian democratic citizenship ideals, especially in terms of gender relations, the separation of church and state, and tolerance of diversity (Berouag, Keskin & Maly 2007: 88; Arnaut e.a. 2009b: 11-12). At the turn of the 21st century, and especially after 9 September 2001, and exacerbated by the ensuing ‘war on terror’, the idea that ‘Islam’ is inherently different from, and threatening to, European civilization and ‘Western’ liberal values became mainstream in European and Flemish public debates and media images (Butler 2009; Ewing 2008; Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens 2010; see, for Flanders specifically: Maly 2007; Zemni 2009, 2011). Those who were formerly problematized and discussed in terms of their ‘migranthood’ or ‘ethnicity’ were now increasingly construed and addressed as ‘Muslims’. There are several aspects to this liberal-secularist shift within European culturalist politics. The first is the more explicit political construction of Europe as a specific, unique ‘civilization’ that is traced to what are called its “Judeo-Christian” roots or to its “Enlightenment” tradition of secular, liberal values. Islam is doubly constructed as a constitutive, abject Other to this Europe: as ‘religion’ and as essentially ‘non- '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' ‘progressive’ libertarian, secular values. For an ethnographic exploration of how self-identified Christian and Muslim students in the Netherlands relate to this discourse, and to one another within this context, see: Beekers 2014, 2015.

111 ' Western’ (Bracke and Fadil 2008: 2). As others have also pointed out (Butler 2008; Bracke and Fadil 2008; Ewing 2008; Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens 2010;), this imagination of Islam as a ‘backward’, ‘anachronistic’ Other with respect to which Europe can project itself “as the avatar of both freedom and modernity” (Butler 2008: 2) has historical roots in an orientalist tradition that legitimized Europe’s colonial and imperial projects (Said 1978). Judaism and Jews, on the other hand, are explicitly claimed as an essential historical part of the European ‘modernity’ that is the basis of Europe’s respective ‘national cultures’ (especially by the conservative and far right). They are also put forward as “the oldest Europeans” by virtue of their assumed post- national cosmopolitanism that the New Europe so needs today (by the progressive left and EU officials; see Bunzl 2005: 502). ‘Jews’ and ‘Muslims’ are thus pitted against one another in this discourse in new ways. The second aspect of this liberal-secularist discourse is its focus on gender equality and sexual freedom as the ultimate signs or criteria of ‘modernity’, and the turning of the two into assumedly inherent values or ‘achievements’ of, for example, ‘Dutch culture’ (Butler 2008; Verkaaik 2009; Mepschen, Duyvendak, Tonkens 2010). The panic over headscarves and burkas, and the dominant discourse of Muslim women as needing to be freed from their ‘oppression’ at the hands of Muslim men (itself a discourse with a colonial history: Scott 2009: 7; see, for echoes of Belgian colonial history in this discourse: Bracke and De Mul 2009), are aspects of such “sexularism” (Scott 2009)110. Whereas the far right talks in terms of the ‘Islamization’ of Europe and renders Islam as an inherently aggressive religion out to conquer ‘Eurabia’, the progressive left instead tends to pose as invested in safeguarding the equal rights of women and sexual minorities, and as protecting pluralism and humanistic values.111 However, what is new is that this political cleavage sometimes collapses to the extent that these two discourses are more often than not interrelated and combined (Bracke and Fadil 2009; Maly 2009). They converge in the idea of ‘Islam’ as an essentially ‘oppressive’ and ‘intolerant’, and therefore ‘intolerable’, religion (Brown 2006; Zemni 2011: 39-40; Bracke and Fadil 2008: 14). In the Flemish context, this means that the problem of a lack of ‘living together’ and what became dominantly claimed as the “failure of integration” is no longer seen as related to deprivation, but is instead presumed to be caused by “Islam’s rejection of, and resistance to, modernity” and Muslims’ assumed unwillingness to open up to and interact with others (Zemni 2011: 32, 37)112. '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 110 See, for discussions of headscarf debates, burka bans, and the role of gender in the construction of an Islamic ‘threat’ in various countries: Werbner 2007; Bowen 2007; Ewing 2008; Moors and Salih 2009; Bracke 2011; Brems e.a. 2013. 111 In the Netherlands, a suprising evolution has emerged in which it is the far right itself which poses explicitly as the protector of homosexuals and sexual freedom against the intolerance of Muslims (see Prins and Saharso 2010; Mepschen, Duvendak and Tonkens 2010). This is not the case in Flanders – Flemish Interest is staunchly against what it views as lifestyles eroding traditional family values. 112 See, for examples of the different arguments and parties in the Flemish discussion about ‘failed integration’: Van den Broeck and Foblets 2002. For an essayistic and an academic example of such analyses of Islam’s assumed inherent hostility to non-Muslims and ‘closure’ as a characteristic that is very

112 ' Here, Jews are again brought into the equation via the issue of ‘antisemitism’, and the idea that there is a ‘new antisemitism’ in Europe that is viewed as predominantly a phenomenon caused by Muslim youths (Bunzl 2005; Fine 2009). Like homophobia (Butler 2008; Bracke and Fadil 2009; Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens 2010), antisemitism has also come to be construed as a sign of ‘unmodernity’ and ‘non- belonging’ (Silverstein 2008). Far right, neo-nationalist parties throughout Europe have radically repositioned themselves around ‘Jews’. Indeed, even those that originated in an antisemitic or neo-Nazi tradition, now co-opt ‘Jews’ as the primary victims of ‘Muslim’ aggression and court them by posing as their protectors against antisemitism (Bunzl 2005: 503). While the construction of ‘antisemitic attitudes’ as a sign of problematic ‘unmodernity’ and non-belonging in Europe has thus received a new and heavily politicized impulse, there has also emerged a concern among European and national elites over the rise of ‘Islamophobia’ in Europe. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are now both seen as problematic attitudes and sentiments, and are regularly monitored and measured by EU organizations and scientific research on the national level (e.g. EUMC 2004; for Flanders, e.g. Billiet and Swyngedouw 2009; Vettenburg, Elchardus and Put 2011). Much of the academic and political discussion about the ‘new antisemitism’ is related to the question (implying a competition of victimhood between ‘Jewish’ and ‘Muslim’ minorities) of which of the two is the more urgent problematic form of Othering plaguing the New Europe. As in other European countries, this liberal-secularist shift in culturalist discourse, and the now dominant projection that previous so-called ‘multiculturalist’ or cultural ‘relativist’ policies had failed to bring about ‘integration’ and had only led to ‘allochtonen’ living enclosed within their own communities, induced a shift in Flemish policy. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the new policy was built around two notions (Vlaamse Regering 2004a, 2004b, 2009): 1) the idea of “living together in diversity” and the building of “social cohesion” as an aspect of “active and shared citizenship” for the Flemish population as a whole; and 2) the notion of the need for the “civic integration” [inburgering, a term copied from the Netherlands] of allochthonous “newcomers” and “oldcomers” organized by the Flemish government. Both ideas are based on the notion that ‘living together’ can only be achieved if all citizens know and respect the “shared values” that are seen as the “rules of the game of an open, diverse and modern society” (Vlaamse Regering 2004a: 3, 16):

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' specific to the ‘Muslim’ minority, see, respectively: de Rooij (2008) and Vettenburg, Elchardus and Put (2011).

113 ' The Flemish public culture is rooted in the achievements of the Enlightenment, with free and responsible people, separation between church and state, equality between men and women, no discrimination based on sexual orientation, etc. (Vlaamse Regering 2009: 9)

The aim of the civic integration policy is to help newcomers find their way into Belgian society and, especially, to lead them into employment. Specific groups of newly-arrived immigrants are entitled to follow a trajectory of taking Dutch language courses, a course in ‘societal orientation’, and a pathway into employment. Over the years, following this path has become obligatory for an increasing number of newcomers and (also naturalized) “oldcomers” (especially those from outside the EU)113. Indeed, people can be fined up to 5000 Euros if they fail to participate, and more emphasis has been placed on ‘shared norms and values’ in the societal orientation course (Foblets and Yanasmayan 2010; Loobuyk and Jacobs 2011: 133-136). This includes information on sexuality, HIV, abortion legislation, and the right to gay marriage.

Inburgering,.headscarves,.and.sexual.education:.recent.public. discussions.of.Antwerp’s.Jews. How did these Europe-wide developments take form in relation to the imagination and discussion of Antwerp’s orthodox Jews? The dynamic in which various actors sought to position themselves, or sought to make claims about the nature of Flanders’ integration politics via the Antwerp Jewish community, first took place in the context of the polarization of Antwerp’s politics at the start of the 21st century. In the wake of the commencement of the second intifada in Israel-Palestine in 2000, a range of antisemitic incidents was reported in Antwerp and Brussels (and elsewhere in Europe, see: Bergmann and Wetzel 2003; EUMC 2004). Especially after the pro-Palestinian demonstrations organized by the Arab-European League in 2002, a wave of media articles were printed claiming “inter-ethnic tensions”, “antisemitic riots” and “Antwerp Jews living in fear”, while the Central Station neighborhood was called “Gaza”. Flemish Block tapped into this dynamic towards the time of the 2003 elections, and started '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 113 First, only asylum seekers and non-EU newcomers marrying a non-EU citizen were obliged to do so; migrants from within the EU are entitled, but not obliged, to follow the trajectory. Since 2006, religious personnel (i.e. imams) for recognized religions migrating from non-EU countries, as well as non-EU partners of naturalized Belgian citizens of non-EU origin have become obliged to follow a civic integration trajectory (the latter is mainly targeted at marriage migration from Morocco and Turkey). Long-standing citizens (including those holding Belgian nationality) with non-EU origins whose mastery of Dutch is deemed insufficient can now also be required to follow a civic integration path in several situations: when they have children of school-age, are unemployed, or want to be eligible for social housing. In contrast to the Netherlands, it is the participation that is obligatory and the measure of successfully achieving civic integration, not the successful passing of language or knowledge tests (Loobuyck and Jacobs 2011: 133; Foblets and Yanasmayan 2010)

114 ' actively seeking Jewish votes in Antwerp by claiming it was the only party prepared to ‘defend’ Jews against Moroccan-Muslims, and by emphasizing that it perceived Hasidic Jews as being fully integrated:114

The Jewish community is integrally entwined with this city. There is no cultural cleavage [i.e. between ‘Hasidic Jews’ and ‘Flemings’, AV]. They accept our norms and values, or even: they share them. That’s integration … Muslims don’t want to integrate. Look at the headscarves, or the chador: symbols of resistance against the European culture. (Filip De Winter quoted in Vrij Nederland 10 May 2003: 42, emphasis in original)

The AEL in turn projected the Antwerp Jewish community as “the stronghold of Zionism in Europe” and claimed that “in Antwerp, the Zionist lobby and the extreme- right racists are pulling the strings of power”.115 The pattern of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, antisemitic incidents, and deeply politicized concerns over a rise of antisemitism among ‘Muslim’ youths has been repeated with every intensification of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, including at the start of my fieldwork in 2009116. The shift towards a discourse of liberal-secular ‘values’, and the increasing problematization of Islam in Flemish public discourse, led to several occasions on which the question of the ‘integration’ of Antwerp’s Jews, especially in relation to pious Jewish practice and institutions, was brought into the Flemish public debate as a topic not of confirmation, but of politicized discussion. To illustrate this, I focus on two such occasions during my 2009 fieldwork: the so-called Jewish “refusal” to follow obligatory inburgeringscursussen117, already referred to during the colloquium, and the de facto ban on headscarves in all Antwerp schools and the subsequent question of the desirability of Islamic schools. During these media discussions, a range of actors sought to make claims about the nature of the problem of ‘integration’ in Flanders, or about the nature of Flemish integration politics, via the Antwerp Jewish community. In 2006, the Antwerp admitting agency [onthaalbureau] for immigrants found itself confronted by Hasidic Jewish men who had migrated from outside the European Union '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 114 Filip Dewinter was photographed shaking the hand of a Hasidic rebbe and holding a bottle of wine from the Golan (products from there are generally boycotted in Belgium). The photo, originally published in the Haredi Israeli monthly Hamispacha (March 2003), was re-issued in various journals: e.g. ‘Daar Bloeit iets moois’, De Morgen 17 May 2003; ‘Vlaams Blok, Jodenvriend’, Vrij Nederland 10 May 2003. Flemish Block had already tried to present itself as ‘non-racist’ from the 1990s onwards by emphasizing what they construed as the esssential difference between the Antwerp Jewish population and Muslim migrants (e.g. in Rinke vanden Brink 1994: 130). For the stir the political rapprochement by Flemish Block caused in Antwerpean Jewish midst: see the issues of Belgisch Israelitisch Weekblad of 4 March, 11 April, 3 May and 23 May 2003. It has been suggested that there has been voting for Flemish Block ever since, especially among the strictly orthodox segment of the Antwerp Jewish population, but this has not been verified. 115 www.arabeuropean.org 8 June 2002, last accessed, 1 May 2010. 116 See, for the influence of the Gaza conflict on Belgium in that period: Jacobs e.a. 2011. 117 ‘Ultraorthodoxe joden weigeren inburgeringscursussen te volgen’, De Standaard 2 February 2009.

115 ' (mainly the USA and Israel) to marry and come to live in Antwerp, and for whom they needed to organize an inburgering pathway118. This posed practical problems (a Yiddish speaking teacher was needed for the societal orientation class), and required negotiations (demands for all male classes and a male teacher) that were in fact resolved with the cooperation of the previously mentioned strictly orthodox organization the SPT. One of the SPT members, an Antwerp Hasid himself, was hired to teach the societal orientation course. He adjusted the course program to the pious sensitivities of his students, and was allowed to do so, largely leaving out ‘delicate’ subjects pertaining to sexuality. As we will see below, shortly after his installment, city employees were forbidden from wearing religious symbols. He, however, refused to take off his kippah, making it necessary to find a new teacher. He could still function as an interpreter for the new (non-Jewish) teacher and continued to soften the impact of what for the students were controversial issues. Nevertheless, with the new emphasis on ‘norms and values’, this was no longer condoned and he was fired. A woman came out best in the application procedure for the new interpreter and the admitting agency had no other choice than to hire her, despite knowing that the participants would find this extremely problematic. Up until this point, nothing about the entry of Jews into the inburgering administration had become known to the general public. The prospect of a female teacher who would also not shield off parts of the course, however, caused a stir in Hasidic circles. A group of rabbis wrote a letter to the immigrants in question stating that the course was in conflict with the Torah, and instructing them to not participate or to delay coming to Belgium until the issue was resolved. The students who were supposed to follow the course did not turn up. Somehow, the letter got into the hands of the national media. News articles then appeared about Jews “refusing” or “boycotting” civic integration or “cutting classes”.119 A modern-orthodox Antwerp Jewish interest organization, the Forum of Jewish Organizations (FJO), tried to hush the matter up, explaining that Hasidic Jews really do not want to break the law; they were only asking if the course could be a little “more careful”120. The Flemish Minister of Civic Integration reacted instantly, stating that courses would not be adjusted to anyone’s background or religion, and that anybody obliged to take the courses who did not do so would be fined. “This also applies to people of the Jewish community”, he was quoted.121 Then, an interview with the former Hasidic teacher was published in the national newspaper De Standaard.122 He tried to explain the moral universe in which these

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 118 Inburgering students have the right to follow courses in a language they speak, which in practice means that the Antwerp admitting agency needs to organize them in dozens of languages. Apparently, the Hasidic men on the first course asked for a course in Yiddish. 119 ‘Ultraorthodoxe Joden spijbelen inburgeringscursus’, De Standaard 2 February 2009; ‘Chassidische Joden boycotten inburgeringscursus’, De Standaard 7 February 2009 120 ‘Ultraorthodoxe Joden spijbelen inburgeringscursus’, De Standaard 2 February 2009 121 ‘Wie inburgeringscursus weigert, krijgt boete’, De Morgen 1 February 2009 122 ‘Chassidische Joden boycotten inburgeringscursus’, De Standaard 7 February 2009

116 ' ‘husbands-to-be’ are brought up, and asked how introducing these sexually inexperienced men to homosexuality and abortion, which they would not encounter within their community anyway, would make them better citizens. The second occasion in which Antwerpean Jews were drawn into a debate about integration revolved around headscarves. Belgium has known several ‘headscarf debates’ that have intensified over the past few years, usually in response to developments in France. In relation to the question of bans on the wearing of headscarves in schools, the notion that the hijab is a ‘sexist’ or ‘oppressive’ praxis, and the idea that Muslim girls and women need to be protected from ‘social pressure’ or ‘force’ from peers, parents or their ‘community’, has structured the debate. A second, recurrently invoked notion is that of the need for the ‘neutrality’ of the public sphere (Bracke and Fadil 2012: 80-81). Unlike in France, no national legislation against religious symbols, including the hijab, was put in place in Belgium. Instead, schools, private employers and local governments were left to decide the issue for themselves, and they have done so by taking different measures restricting or de facto banning veiling (Longman 2003; Coene and Longman 2008; Bracke and Fadil 2012). In 2004, the city of Antwerp issued a total ban on wearing a burka in public space. Then, from 2007 onwards, city employees who come into direct contact with clients were forbidden to wear any political or religious symbols in order, so the argument went, to accommodate diversity in ‘neutral’ official public space. Religious symbols mentioned in the policy guidelines included headscarves and, for the first time, the skull cap [keppeltje].123 Later, in 2009, the consequences of the utterly fragmentized and localized legislation became clear. In the years following the headscarf debate in 2004, all but three (public) Antwerp high schools turned out to have issued clothing rules that excluded veiling inside school or during school hours. Before the summer, two of the remaining high schools announced that the enormous increase in Muslim students since 2004 had resulted in fierce “social pressure” on female students to veil, and that the schools, as a result, saw themselves forced into banning the headscarf from the next school year onwards. An intense debate ensued that lasted for months, protests were organized and a number of students did not return to the schools after the summer. In the debate, one of the main arguments against a general or citywide ban in schools was that it would push Muslims into creating Islamic schools. Indeed, some Muslim spokespersons stated that a general ban in Antwerp would leave the Islamic community no other choice than to establish their own schools. Politicians reacted by stating that Islamic schools were highly undesirable, a hindrance to integration and a guarantee that “Muslims and non-Muslims will grow even further apart”.124 During the debate, the particular anxious political attitude towards the possibility of an ‘Islamic pillar’ was made explicit and questioned by journalists, as well as by politicians and activists with a ‘Moroccan’ or ‘Turkish’ background. This was not done by referring to the fact that the

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 123 In 2011, a general ban on wearing clothing that covers the face in public space was imposed in Belgium (Brems e.a. 2013). 124 De Standaard 18 September 2009.

117 ' large majority of Flemish schools are Catholic, but by mentioning the many Jewish schools in Antwerp. Muslim spokespersons (like Abu Jahjah) had previously referred to the organization of the Jewish community as a model for the kinds of rights and recognitions they also wanted for the Muslim community (e.g. Abu Jahjah 2002a, 2002b). Now, however, they referred to the “seclusion” of Antwerp’s orthodox Jews in Jewish schools to argue that ‘Muslims’ and ‘Moroccans’ were in fact more and better “integrated” than orthodox Jews, pointing out the inequality of what they saw as the undemocratic, privileged treatment of orthodox Jews:

Why would I continue to commit myself to the integration of Muslims when the political world acts so hypocritically about the integration of another group, allegedly because they do not cause anyone trouble [omdat niemand er last van heeft]. They are allowed to build their own schools, with barricades of concrete around them.125 But lo and behold if a Muslim dares to say that he would like to develop plans for an Islamic school… The oppression of women, too, is apparently a phenomenon of Muslims only. What a capitulation of democracy. (Hicham El Mzairh, politician for the Flemish liberal party, De Morgen 23 January 2008)

The recent Jewish entanglement in headscarf and civic integration policies and debates came about either unintentionally (as shown by the surprise of inburgering officials when finding out the policy apparently also pertained to strictly orthodox Jews), or indirectly through a comparison with Muslims or Muslim religious symbols. The premises of equal rights and anti-discrimination make it, theoretically at least, problematic for a government to explicitly differentiate between different kinds of minorities or allochtonen (besides the difference between EU and non-EU migrants) when developing integration policies. As a result, there is a comparative logic of equality not only ‘for’ all, but also ‘between’ all, that is inherent in contemporary notions of ‘diversity’ and multiculturalism. However, the ‘all’ here actually refers only to those subjected to diversity and integration policies, namely minorities and ‘allochtonen’. It was precisely this comparative logic that Antwerp’s Jewish spokespersons (very much confined to the editor of the Flemish Jewish magazine Joods Actueel, which is primarily directed at a ‘liberal’ or ‘modern orthodox’ Jewish audience) sought to undermine or delegitimize in their public responses to these debates (apart from the interview with the former SPT civic integration teacher, strictly orthodox or Hasidic spokespersons did not play a role in the Flemish debate). The logic behind these responses was one of separating and distinguishing orthodox Jews from ‘Muslim’ '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 125 He refers here to the security measures taken in Antwerp since a terrorist attack in the diamond district in 1981. These measures have become more stringent since the second intifada, and include a heightened police presence, concrete blocks on parking places and sidewalks at the entrances of Jewish institutions (schools, synagogues), as well as privately organized security.

118 ' ‘allochthons’, whereby both the skull cap and the wig worn by orthodox Jewish women were presented as “individual” and “flexible”choices and juxtaposed against the headscarf as essentially “women unfriendly.”126 The difference between Jews and Muslims was also highlighted in public Jewish responses by portraying what was argued to be a specifically Jewish kind of good citizenship. “We behave well”, the former inburgering teacher was quoted as saying. “With us, there’s practically no violence, no criminality. Isn’t that more important than us talking freely about sex and abortion?”127 The few readers’ letters and op-ed pieces published in Flemish newspapers that discussed orthodox Jews in relation to civic integration or the ban on headscarves, displayed a specific kind of indignation and annoyance. This seemed to particularly spring from what was seen as the ‘arrogance’ of Jews putting themselves above other allochtonen, as it were, and, in that sense, not knowing their proper place and proper solidarity, i.e. with other ‘allochthonous’ minorities. Jewish demands for adjustments in the inburgering course were deemed “unacceptable”; any indulgence towards this group, one author argued, would trigger demands from other groups and, in the end, lead to a country “that is nothing but a collection of ghettos.”128 In another reader’s letter, the author asserted that the wig was equally symbolic of a “patriarchal vision of female sexuality”, and that the Joods Actueel editor kept silent about “the innumerable lacks of freedom [onvrijheden] within his own Hasidic milieu.”129 In these debates, Antwerp’s orthodox Jews were thus claimed by some as a ‘model’ minority compared to ‘Muslims’, while they were deployed by others to argue the relative ‘integration’ of ‘Muslims’. Phrased in the terms of a formation of difference, if ‘Muslim allochtonen’ had from the start been assigned a position implicitly in relation to the different role that ‘Jews’ were ascribed to (i.e. ‘autochthons of a special kind’), this relationship was now turned into one of explicit and politicized competition (cf. Bousetta 2005: 178; Bousetta, Gsir and Jacobs 2005: 33; see for a similar dynamic in France: Safran 2004; Silverstein 2008; Cohen 2009: 230-232)130. The position of Antwerp’s Jews has now become deeply ambiguous, as they are no longer imagined and discussed in the public arena only as ‘autochthons of a special kind’, but increasingly also as akin and comparable to ‘allochtonen’. Their position has come to straddle the politicized deployment of two different culturalist imaginations of the problem of ‘cultural difference’ simultaneously, which is succinctly highlighted in an op-ed piece about the civic integration discussion:

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 126 Michael Freilich, ‘Voorwoord’, Joods Actueel October 2009 127 ‘Chassidische Joden boycotten inburgeringscursus’, De Standaard 7 February 2009 128 “Standpunt rabbijnen is onaanvaadbaar”, Gazet van Antwerpen 1 February 2009 129 ‘Pruik en hoofddoek’, De Morgen 23 October 2009 130 For the France situation, both Cohen and Silverstein emphasize that this dynamic also had colonial roots.

119 ' Now, what is it? Are orthodox Jews the worst or the most well integrated community in our country? This week you could hear both viewpoints being proclaimed loudly and both can indeed be argued for. (Tom Naegels, ‘Shalomo’, De Standaard 7 February 2009)

After my fieldwork, the problematization of orthodox Jewish practice, and the increasing, but never complete, ‘allochthonization’ of Antwerp’s strictly orthodox Jews, took new flight in a prolonged media discussion of what was called “extreme censorship” in Jewish strictly orthodox schools, especially of images depicting human bodies in textbooks, and the teaching of sexual education and evolution theory. News reports followed about the “radicalization” of the Jewish orthodox community, and about strictly orthodox Jewish schools losing their recognized status. Also new were political outcries (especially by the Flemish nationalist N-VA) and appeals to the Flemish Minister of Education for stricter control and enforcement, first mainly of Jewish subsidized schools, and later also of unrecognized private schools.131 In 2013, driven partly by concern over poverty and a lack of economic independence in Antwerpean Hasidic midst, a new Flemish decree on home schooling severely restricted the independent status of unrecognized strictly orthodox and Hasidic schools.132

Straddling.two.modes.of.governance:.a.new.bureaucratic.encounter. The shift towards an increasingly ambiguous position of Antwerp’s Jews in relation to the notion of ‘integration’ did not only occur in the domain of the Flemish public imagination and debate. The interlocking of the increasing economically insecure position with the new liberal-secularist discourse also resulted in a partial shift in the way in which strictly orthodox Jews are governed. More specifically, it resulted in the introduction of strictly orthodox Jews to the work field of civil servants who they previously did not have to deal with, most notably those concerned with implementing ‘civic integration’ and ‘diversity’ policies. To illustrate, I return to the strictly orthodox organization introduced at the start of the chapter, the SPT, which a group of Hasidic Jews founded to help reduce

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' '''''''' ' 131 E.g.: ‘Extreme censuur in joodse scholen’, Gazet van Antwerpen 27 October 2010; ‘Vlaamse leerkrachten op joodse scholen trekken aan de alarmbel’, Gazet van Antwerpen 2 November 2010; ‘De joden zijn hard op weg de taliban in te halen’, P-Magazine 21 September 2010; ‘Durft Pascal Smet wel opteden tegen censuur in joodse scholen?’, Gazet van Antwerpen 17 January 2011; ‘Antwerpse Jesode- Hatora-school radicaliseert’, Koppen (VRT television program) broadcast 17 March 2013; ‘Joodse school dreigt erkenning te verliezen’, Het Niewsblad 18 July 2013; ‘Antwerp haredi schools forced to choose between censorship and subsidies’, The Jerusalem Post 8 August 2012, http://www.jpost.com/Jewish- World/Jewish-News/Antwerp-haredi-schools-forced-to-choose-between-censorship-and-subsidies- 323496, accessed 1 October 2015. 132 Pupils who follow education under the home schooling regulations – including in non-recognized schools – are now obliged to take centralized exams; if they fail these twice, home schooling is discontinued.

120 ' unemployment and poverty within their own community. With the assistance of several local governmental services, they set up a program ranging from Dutch language courses to professional attitudes, which was developed to facilitate the entry of strictly orthodox men into vocational training or employment in a non-Jewish environment. After much hesitation, they successfully applied for subsidies with the city’s ‘diversity service’. However, despite negotiations with a number of interested Antwerp companies, the project failed to lead strictly orthodox Jews into employment, and the subsidies were discontinued by the municipality. The SPT continued its work, but decided not to re-apply for subsidies. In this case, Antwerp’s civil servants and strictly orthodox Jews alike found themselves in the new situation of having to deal with each other and negotiate orthodox norms in a bureaucratic context. The dynamic that ensued, and the different views of it, are telling. One of the civil servants working for the municipal Dienst Levensbeschouwingen (Service for Religious and Humanistic Denominations), which was handling the SPT application, recollected:

[Unlike with the Muslim community] with the Jewish community, it really was like: and suddenly they were there. … Man, really, they demanded some things! Like the ‘women-on-the-work floor’ issue, that they won’t work with women, and everything related to food, those were very heavy demands. ... But the [SPT] project was doomed to failure from the beginning, because, well, I’m not sure, their demands of course, but also because of the interaction with the city that didn’t know how to react.

From the perspective of the SPT, though, formulating these demands involved a constant balancing act, both towards its own community as well as in its contacts with local officials. In strictly orthodox circles, small financial stipends are offered to young adult men to continue intensive religious studies after marriage, and it has become common to do so. Giving up time reserved for religious study to follow secular job training was thus not easily achieved. Orthodox Jewish gender relations outside the home follow a very contextual logic, and the practical boundaries set in this regard vary from person to person (see Chapter 6 and 9). The challenge for the SPT was to make sure they did not delegitimize themselves in the eyes of their most strictly orthodox constituency, while also having to formulate comprehensible demands for civil servants who were completely unacquainted with Jewish orthodox life. In their perception, the bureaucrats with whom they worked displayed little willingness and leeway to adjust the standardized administrative policy to their demands. This state interference was the reason why the SPT, in the end, decided to try to function without subsidies. As the SPT founder explained:

Yesterday I had a meeting with VDAB [Flemish Service for Employment Mediation and Training] and between the lines I heard: they’ll just wait until the poverty is so enormous that we have no other

121 ' choice than to come outside [sic]. And that’s absurd, because all the time they talk about ‘multicultural’. But that’s not what they mean. … To live according to one’s own culture without disturbing others, that’s what multicultural means to me. But for them multicultural is that men and women are everywhere [together] and I don’t know what.

For the middle-level bureaucrat in question, there was a different balancing act.

How do you respond to that [i.e. strictly orthodox Jewish demands] as a city? Sometimes in a very uncomfortable way. From your own services and from the political experience the city has with Jews you get some recommendations of how to deal with it: we’re not going to do anything different than we do with other groups. But, on the other hand, you sense, how to say this? The Jewish community still stands on a pedestal a little bit. […] So what we’ve learned [from the SPT case] is: we’ll no longer treat anyone as if they’re different. We also don’t do that with Pakistanis.

What the case of the SPT shows is that the economic decline of the diamond sector has resulted in a re-configuration of the relations between the Antwerp Jewish population and the state. A historically particular governance relationship, based on the pillarized organization of Jewish community life and Jewish religious representation, representatives of the diamond sector, and the coordination of security measures of Jewish institutions and buildings, and organized around relatively direct interactions with the (local, regional, national) politicians and officials responsible for those domains, now co-exists with the economically forced entry into the standardizing and equalizing workings of the city administration.

Jews.and.the.politics.of.‘living.together’?.. Antwerp’s Jews are gradually being drawn into the culturalist politics of difference, and to some extent their position, especially that of strictly orthodox Jews, has become more akin to and paired with that of ‘allochtonen’. This is, for Antwerpean Jews, a deeply insecure and unstable new situation. Within the public arena, those who present themselves as Jewish spokesperson have engaged with this primarily by trying to separate and distance themselves from the ‘allochtoon’ position - and the colloquium described at the start of the chapter should be understood as one such effort. However, it must be emphasized that the media and governance discussions about ‘Jews’ and their ‘integration’ that I have described here are very much phenomena scattered on the margins of a much more dominant, coherent, and ever-continuing debate and political governance project of the assumed failed ‘integration’ of ‘Muslims/Moroccans’. It is still uncommon to call, and think of, orthodox Jews as allochtonen pure and simple. Indeed, no one except the SPT founder has done so during my fieldwork.

122 ' The drawing of Antwerp’s Jews into the ‘integration’ frame has been a largely unintentional, haphazard, and fragmented process. With the exception of the AEL and Flemish Block/Interest, most actors brought ‘Jews’ into the discussion not to position themselves based on how they think about ‘Jews’, but as a means to show how they think about ‘integration’ and ‘integration politics’. This is deeply related to the hegemonic idea that ‘autochthonous’ Flemings are not antisemitic (anymore), and to the deflection of ‘antisemitism’ as a problem of ‘Muslim’ youths (and ‘Poles’) only. Moreover, even though the notion of ‘integration’ has come to be applied to Antwerpean Jews, the question of ‘living together’ has not been explicitly posed. There have been no media discussions mentioning so-called ‘samenlevingsproblemen’ between orthodox Jews and non-Jews, and nor has the ‘Jewish neighborhood’ been depicted as a space where ‘autochtonen’ feel alienated or threatened by the supposed strangeness of ‘Jews’. Since 2005, however, and as part of mayor Patrick Janssens’ policy to roll out the neighborhood governance regime over the entire city, some of the municipal services focusing on nuisance and social cohesion in the neighborhood public space (Neighborhood Direction, Opsinjoren, and Neighborhood Supervision) have also started working in the boroughs that make up the Jewish neighborhood. Moreover, although these boroughs used to have a distinct bourgeois character, this changed somewhat from the 1990s onwards. Due to a combination of urban demise (slumming, poor maintenance) and an influx of especially Eastern European and Indian migrants, these neighborhoods have become much more diverse, both ethnically and socio- economically. In contrast to Borgerhout, then, the culturalist politics of ‘integration’/‘living together’ has been brought to bear on the Jewish neighborhood in a very ambiguous, fragmented, and incoherent way. The shift in their position is not that they have become ‘allochtonen’, but that the ambiguity inherent in their ascription of the role of ‘other Other’ in Flemish (and European) post-colonial formations of difference has become increasingly politicized and marked. They are now simultaneously claimed as ‘fully integrated’ and akin to autochtonen, while also being described as akin to ‘allochthonen’ or even accused of being the ‘least integrated’, and wrongly ‘arrogant’ at that. Non- liberal pious Jews, not just in Antwerp, but also all over Europe, are a visible incongruence to the idea of an essentially ‘Enlightened’ and secular Europe based on a ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition. In other words, the ‘other Other’ position ascribed to Antwerp’s Jews, complicates and destabilizes any easy answer to the question of what ‘strangeness’ is taken to mean and how it operates in contemporary culturalist politics.

123 '

Conclusion

Characteristics of the politics of ‘living together’

What’s.new?.The.nationZstate.and.feelings.for.cultural.strangers. Anne-Marie Fortier writes that British multicultural politics in the post 9/11 era have taken a turn towards a “governing through affect” (2010: 22) and the political engineering of the “feeling states” (2008: 87) that multicultural intimacies are construed to involve or require: “Multicultural encounters are not only negotiated and ‘managed’ in literal spatial form… but these relations are imagined through specific emotional and ethical injunctions, such as mixing, tolerance, ‘embracing the other’… and loving thy neighbour” (2008: 7, emphasis in original). Indeed, what I call the politics of ‘living together’ revolves around the investment of the nation-state in the way in which citizens, construed as culturally ‘strange’ to one another, feel about and interact with each other in their everyday lives as a politico-moral project. In my analysis, however, this is not a feature of the recent liberalist shift of culturalist policies in Europe towards ‘community cohesion’ and ‘diversity’. Instead, I suggest that it is an intrinsic aspect of culturalist politics. Indeed, as the history of the political production of Borgerhout has shown, concerns about a deficit of ‘living together’ have been entwined with anxieties and policies of ‘integration’ from the start. The historical lines I have traced in the two preceding chapters suggest in fact that what is new about culturalist politics are not the anxieties over migrants and minorities as cultural ‘strangers’ threatening the integrity of the body of the nation, or the questioning of the possibility of their ‘integration’. Although the delegitimization of biological racism and eugenics constituted a major post-war shift in the public and state- sanctioned thinking of difference, pre-war constructions of ‘racial’ difference (i.e. colonial racism, antisemitism, and epidermal anxieties about the urban proletariat) were deeply inflected with (and not separate from) notions of ‘culture’, ‘mentality’, and ‘civilization’, as well as entwined with ideas about class and religious difference. The construction of cultural ‘strangeness’ as a threat to national integrity is in this sense a constant throughout modern European history. In my reading, what is new about culturalist politics, is, rather, the turning of cultural ‘strangeness’ into a problem of ‘living together’: the notion that the well-being of the nation-state is dependent on the way in which ‘culturally different’ citizens perceive, feel about, and interact with each other.

125 ' The managing of the social fabric – in the sense of preventing violent conflict between different groups of citizens - as well as the disciplining of citizens’ feelings towards one another - is of course a fundamental aspect of nation building. As Benedict Anderson and Georg Mosse have described, turning subjects into ‘nationals’ and ensuring the national body politic meant turning citizens’ feelings towards each other into ‘fraternal’ “comradeship” (Anderson 1991: 7) and “friendship” (Mosse 1985: 66- 89), so that they would be prepared to sacrifice themselves for one another as ‘brothers’ of the same ‘mother nation’. However, in the politics of ‘living together’, the investment of the nation-state is in different categories of citizens’ affective perceptions of one another, not as individual fellow nationals, but as denizens belonging to culturally different groups. This means that a political project has emerged that monitors and manages how, for example, ‘autochthons’ view and interact with ‘Moroccans/Muslims’ as ‘Moroccan/Muslim’ neighbors, or how ‘Muslims’ view ‘Jews’ as ‘Jews’. In the Belgian case, this project contrasts with three previous modes for governing cultural (linguistic, ideological, sub-national) difference. First of all, the Belgian state has consistently dealt with the challenge of two sub-national movements not through a top-down, unified nationalization of its citizens’ sentiments towards brotherly love, but by allowing the two sub-national brothers increasing autonomy over their own rooms within the national house. Second, even though in pre-war Antwerp (and elsewhere in Europe) anti-Jewish sentiments and antisemitism espoused by Catholic, and later also New Order, press and politicians were condemned by liberal and socialist politicians as uncivilized ‘intolerance’ and ‘hatred’, this was never discussed in terms of a deficit of ‘living together’ that needed political intervention or a disciplining neighborhood governance regime aimed at shaping ‘ordinary’ denizens’ feelings and everyday relationships towards ‘openness’ and ‘neighborliness’. Third, the politics of ‘living together’ also forms a sharp break with the governing of ideological or religious difference in relation to national sentiment via the system of compartmentalization and the notion of state ‘neutrality’ (i.e. pillarization). The pillarized system was partly based on the cultivation by the pillar elites of a certain measure of negative feelings and everyday practices of distinction within their own ‘ordinary’ followers vis-à-vis the other ideological communities (but simultaneously containing these feelings away from open violent conflict). At the same time, this system also required a certain measure of tolerance of the governing pillar elites with respect to one another to make national political rule possible. In contrast, in the politics of ‘living together’, ‘harmonious living together’ is no longer seen as dependent on the tolerance of cultural difference as a mode of governance and elite compromise at the institutional level. Instead, ‘harmonious living together’ is now imagined as essentially located on the level of everyday neighborhood life and as dependent on ‘tolerance’ as an affective state and capacity of individual, ‘ordinary’ denizens. Although new in comparison to these other governmental concerns over, and modes of managing, cultural difference and conflict, I have argued that the politics of ‘living together’ also taps into historical traditions of political concerns that have been exceptionally heightened in Belgium: i.e. about the moral integrity of modern urban society and the moral character of the (Flemish) nation. First, I have shown that there

126 ' is a history of strong Catholic political anxieties in Flanders about what was seen as the deracinating and alienating effect of secular modernity, which was projected onto urban spaces and urban lower classes especially. Moreover, this combined with a second political-moral concern since the interbellum, namely over a possible moral darkness (of anti-democracy and fascism) within the Flemish movement, or within ‘Flemishness’ in general. These two moral concerns and their echoing in culturalist anxieties over the fabric of multicultural society are not exclusive to Belgium. Front National and other neo-nationalist parties in Western Europe have also been related to histories of Nazi collaboration and racist nationalism, while the problematization of anti-immigrant responses and far right support (for the British National Party) as a typically white working class phenomenon in Britain can also be traced to older anxieties about working class culture. However, it is the meshing of these two moral anxieties, in combination with the deep fragmentation and polarization of the social fabric on the level of the federal state, that has caused the desire for ‘harmonious living together’ (deflected from the ‘multinational’ question into a problem of ‘multicultural’ society) to have become so pronounced in Belgium and Flanders. The comparison of the political histories attached to Borgerhout and the Antwerp ‘Jewish neighborhood’ also evokes questions about the meaning and role of ‘strangeness’ in culturalist politics. Instead of a neat dichotomous culturalist construction of (‘Muslim’/non-white) ‘allochthons’ as ‘culturally strange’ and lacking in modernity, and an ‘autochthonous’ national ‘we’ that is familiar to itself, culturally homogenous and securely modern, the picture that emerged of Flemish culturalist politics was one of a complex array of cleavages, alienations, and ambivalences within and across these two categories. Binaries of modern-traditional, reflexive-authoritarian, and parochial-cosmopolitan turned out to be implicated not only in the construction of non-white post-migrants as Others, but just as much in an internal cleavage within the Flemish national ‘we’, as well as in the ambiguous position of Antwerp’s Jews. In other words, even though postcolonial constructions of non-whiteness via notions of ‘culture’ and ‘civilized modernity’ figure large in the hegemonic distinction between ‘allochthons’ and ‘autochthons’, strangeness and estrangement in this post-colonial template can not be wholly reduced to ‘non-whiteness’ and non-European post-migranthood alone. What do strangeness and familiarity mean, then, and how do they play out in the context of everyday neighborhood life, given this multiplicity of cleavages and alienations in Flemish culturalist politics? Moreover, the specific characteristics of the conceptualization of Jews as ‘strangers’ in what I called the pre-war template, as well as the shift towards the notion of ‘living together’ in culturalist politics, beg a second question about the meaning of ‘strangeness’. Does the emergence of culturalism in post-colonial Europe constitute a shift in who occupies the ‘stranger slot’ – from Jews to post-colonial, Muslim migrants as Europe’s Other? Or, does this personnel shift contain a more fundamental change, i.e. a shift in the very construction and imagination of the meaning of the slot itself? And, if so, what is the role of the notion of ‘living together’ in such a shift in the conceptualization of ‘strangeness’?

127 ' Staging.neighborhood.life,.governing.everyday.perceptions.and. interactions. The emergence of a politics of ‘living together’ has meant that the notion that relations between ‘Belgians’ and ‘migrants (or, more broadly, between what are construed as culturally different groups or ‘communities’) are problematic and deficient has become widely shared throughout society. I have shown that the idea of a political and societal problem of ‘living together’ has become the subject of political contestation: a prism through which Flemish society and politics have come to understand themselves, and a point around which new political positionings and subjectivities have crystallized. The emergence of a politics of ‘living together’ has also meant that certain domains of social life that previously laid mostly outside the interest and purview of governance have come to be monitored and researched, and have been turned into the object of new governmentalities: 1) denizens’ perceptions of, and engagements with, neighborhood public space and ‘the neighborhood’ in relation to the presence of culturally different ‘strangers’ in the neighborhood street; and 2) the way in which culturally different denizens interact with, and affectively relate to, one another as ‘neighbors’ and in relation to the idea of ‘neighborhood life’. The way in which these domains have been imagined and governed, however, has shifted over time. The assumed deficit of ‘living together’ was first seen as a problem resulting from an underlying cause of deprivation concentrated in specific urban spaces (the deprived ethnic neighborhood), and related to specific categories (‘deprived autochtonen’ and ‘allochthonen’) suffering from both a socio-economic and a cultural ‘lagging behind’. From the end of the 1990s onwards, as we have seen, ‘living together’ has increasingly been conceived as an individual capacity grounded in shared liberal- secular ‘values’ and ‘active citizenship’. It is no longer governed indirectly via ‘emancipation’, but directly and explicitly as a problem and promise of a rightly- governed urban population. An important consequence of the politics of ‘living together’ is that a set of seemingly neutral or descriptive terms have become imbued with political meaning and have turned into objects of governance: not just ‘living together’, but also ‘the neighborhood’, ‘everyday neighborhood life’, ‘ordinary people’, and ‘encounters’. The politics of ‘living together’ relates to the concepts of the ‘everyday’ and ‘the ordinary’ in a deeply ambiguous way. On the one hand, it is in everyday neighborhood life (“ce terrible quotidien”, as the KCM report put it), and in the experiences and perceptions of ‘ordinary’ denizens, that the ‘real’ of the neighborhood and ‘living together’ is imagined to lie. In the sense that the ‘everyday’ and the views of ‘ordinary people’ have come to be seen as indications of a particular truth about multicultural society and its problems, and in an attempt to uncover this (whether through surveys and polls, or through the new civil servants’ task of walking and talking in the neighborhood street), the politics of ‘living together’ have led to a wide-spread investment in and “valorization of the ethnographic real” (Keith 2005: 41). On the other hand, the everyday and the ordinary are also imagined as precisely the sites of deficit. They are regarded as domains that have lost their ‘natural’ state of

128 ' being under the deforming pressure of ‘disintegration’, and that are in need of governance and management to become properly realized. Through the development and establishment of a neighborhood governmentality, an assemblage of new civil servant offices (of neighborhood supervisors, directors, neighbor mediators etc), semi- private welfare work organizations, and resident initiatives have emerged. This assemblage works to ‘stage’ the neighborhood, as it were; to produce neighborhood life in what is seen as its ‘proper’, ‘authentic’ form. In this perspective, denizens with diverse backgrounds sharing a neighborhood in the course of daily life – waiting for the bus, passing one another on the street – is considered to be the domain of ‘living together’, but is not perceived to constitute ‘true’ ‘living together’ in and of itself. The everyday is problematic, because it assumedly consists of people living “next to” [naast elkaar], but not yet “with”, one another [met elkaar] (e.g. Stad Antwerpen 2006: 33). The paradoxical logic of the neighborhood governance regime is that, in order to redeem the neighborhood and achieve proper ‘living together’ in the domain of everyday life, specific people, spaces, and events that are precisely bracketed off from, and not subsumed in, ‘everyday life’ are perceived to be required. It is only through the influx of the new urban middle class and the organization of dialogue evenings, street feasts, and neighborhood centers that ‘encounter’ is assumed to be achieved, and the redemptive, ‘organic’ qualities of neighborhood life and true ‘living together’ are presumed to be restored. Despite all the political discussions and governing regimes around ‘living together’, the term itself is strangely empty. As it is primarily discussed in terms of what it is not, what ‘living together’ actually, substantively, practically means – and what ‘true’ ‘living together’ looks like or consists of - remains opaque. In the next two Parts, I turn to the way in which ‘strangeness’ (Part II) and this opaque ideal of ‘living together’ (Part III) figure in Borgerhout and the ‘Jewish neighborhood’, and how denizens engage with the ambiguous political investment in ‘everyday neighborhood life’ as they live their everyday lives in the neighborhood context. '

129 '