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Master Reference Master Public Discourse on Muslims and Foreigners FEDDERSEN, Alexandra Abstract This thesis analyzes the public discourse on foreigners and Muslims in Switzerland between 2000 and 2009. In Switzerland, as elsewhere in Europe, the debate on immigration, cultural identity and citizenship seems to focus more and more on the Muslim minority. While the Muslim population belonged to the generic group of foreigners in the public debate until recently, it seems that Muslims have become the main problem for integration in Switzerland. In the past decade, two direct democratic campaigns targeted Muslims, raising the question about the compatibility of Swiss and Muslim cultures. What makes Muslims a special group? How does the public discourse on Muslims differ from the portrayal of foreigners in general? Are Muslims perceived as the main threat to Swiss culture and gender equality? To answer these questions empirically, a quantitative content analysis of four major Swiss newspapers was conducted covering three direct democratic campaigns in the last decade. The aim of the analysis was to inductively grasp the discourse of institutional actors on Muslims and on foreigners in general and to discover the main [...] Reference FEDDERSEN, Alexandra. Public Discourse on Muslims and Foreigners. Master : Univ. Genève, 2013 Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:35314 Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version. 1 / 1 Green Lab N° 3 • 2013 Public Discourse on Muslims and Foreigners Alexandra Feddersen Geneva Laboratory of Political Science Afin de mieux se présenter, le Département de science politique de l'Université de Genève a lancé en 2009 deux nouvelles publications. Sous le nom de Geneva Laboratory of Political Science , ces publications aideront à diffuser les travaux qui se font au sein du Département et à nourrir les échanges avec l'extérieur. Le nom souligne la vocation de « laboratoire » de ces textes, c’est-à-dire de lieu de réflexion, d'expériences et de débat. La publication se distingue par deux couleurs. La série Blue Lab a été créée afin de favoriser la diffusion de travaux en cours de la part des membres du Département. Il peut s’agir de communications présentées à des colloques ou d’autres textes théoriques ou de recherche. La série Green Lab accueille des travaux plus achevés et généralement plus longs. Elle est destinée en particulier à la publication des meilleurs mémoires de Master des étudiantes et étudiants qui achèvent leurs études auprès du Département. Public Discourse on Muslims and Foreigners ________________________ Alexandra Feddersen Mémoire de Master en Science politique Directeur de Mémoire: Matteo Gianni Copyright © Alexandra Feddersen 2013 Editor Département de Science Politique et Relations Internationales Université de Genève Boulevard du Pont d'Arve 40 1211 – Genève 4 Switzerland ISSN 1663-649X (Printed Version) ISSN 1663-8751 (On-line Version) Public discourse on Muslims and foreigners Table of contents 1 Introduction and research question 3 2 Literature review 6 2.1 Basic concepts: the discourse on otherness in Switzerland 6 Culturalism Actors involved in the discourse on otherness 2.2 Discourse on otherness in historical prespective 10 Before the 1990s: a hardly integrable workforce The 1990s: the implementation of the cultural distance principle The turn of the millennium: the emergence of the Muslims population 2.3 Differences in representaitons between Muslims and foreigners: hypotheses 17 3 Research design 20 3.1 Case selection and data 20 The mass media as an arena of contention Three direct democratic campaigns Corpus 3.2 Coding method and most important variables 23 4 Analysis 25 4.1 Figures of otherness 25 4.2 Differences in topics 30 4.3 Differences in evaluations 33 5 Discussion 38 6 References 43 7 Appendix 49 7.1 Coding scheme 49 7.2 Tables 56 1 Public discourse on Muslims and foreigners 1 Introduction and research question International wars and terrorism, changing immigration flows and the success of populist right-wing parties has brought more public attention to the subject of immigration and intercultural relations in Western Europe than ever before. Particularly since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the Muslim community has been in the spotlight of controversies and political affairs. Since 2001, Muslims living in Switzerland found themselves in the center of several heated political debates - both on national and local level. They were targeted as a problematic group by two national direct democratic campaigns the last decade. The first debate took place during the referendum campaign about facilitated naturalization of second-generation immigrants in 2004. The referendum addressed the possibility of granting Swiss citizenship to the children of immigrants born in Switzerland, but the political and media debate turned into a discussion on the Muslim population. The second occasion was the well-known anti-minarets initiative in 2009. Through the tools of direct democracy, right-conservative circles tried - and succeeded - to register a ban on building minarets in the Swiss constitution. The debate reached far beyond the mere architectural construction and developed into a discussion on the place of Islam in Switzerland. The arguments raised in the debate circled around the idea that so-called Muslim and Swiss or Western cultures and religions are simply too distant to be able to live together in one political and social sphere. The assumed cultural distance between Muslim and Swiss values was often exemplified by the way women and girls are presumably treated in Muslim culture or religion. During the anti-minaret campaign, the argument about women being oppressed by Islam was recurrent. Today, the discourse on the incompatibility of Swiss and Muslim cultures is not limited to populist right-wing discourse1 any more, but is also found in the media (Burger 2006) and public policy (Gianettoni and Roux 2010). However, the Muslims living in Switzerland were not perceived as a distinct group until the beginning of the new millennium. Instead, Muslim immigrants were classified according to their country of origin (Ettinger and Imhof 2011) and thus identified for example as Bosniaks or Turks. Recently, this classification according to nationalities gave way to a perception of religious and cultural homogeneity among Muslims (Behloul 2009). Indeed, during the direct democratic debates mentioned above, the Muslim population of Switzerland was perceived as a religious group sharing a great number of 1 Definitions follow in section 2 Literature review 3 Public discourse on Muslims and foreigners characteristics. Consequently, after having existed as a demographic reality for years, Muslims turned into a socially and politically relevant group (Gianni 2003) which, today, “[…] is indeed the main target of current social and political debates over the meaning of Swiss multiculturalism and of Swiss national identity […]” (Gianni and Clavien 2012:114). In sum, scientific literature holds that the Muslim population in Switzerland started to be visible about ten years ago and that the debate on immigration and intercultural relations suddenly dealt with new topics such as religion and gender. From being classified as foreigners2, Muslims seem to have become a religious minority in public discourse and gender seems to be an argument used to illustrate the cultural distance between Swiss people and Muslims. Did this shift in perception from foreign nationals to religious minority change the discourse on Muslims? Or does the debate on immigration and intercultural relations in general evolve around other topics today? It seems indeed that a systematic comparison with the representation of foreigners is crucial to be able to affirm the particularity or even uniqueness of the discourse on the Muslim minority. Put more bluntly, is the debate on foreigners in the public sphere very different from the one on Muslims? Are Muslims seen as worse - that is more problematic - than ordinary foreigners, not only threatening Swiss people’s jobs but also wanting to impose their presumed misogynous culture? The aim of this paper is to assess which arguments in public discourse make Muslims a special group and distinguish them from the generic group of foreigners. For that purpose, public discourse on foreigners and Muslims will be analyzed during three recent Swiss referendum campaigns. Besides the two campaigns in 2004 and 2009 mentioned above, a third referendum campaign which aimed at limiting the number of foreigners in Switzerland in 2000 will be included in the analysis. As will be shown later (3 Research Design), these periods of time are ideal to study public discourse since the debates taking place during direct democratic campaigns are characterized by a struggle of different actors to win the referendum and reveal a wide diversity of arguments. The red thread of my paper will be the following question: What are the main differences between the representations of foreigners and of Muslims in the public discourse in Switzerland during the referendum campaigns in 2000, 2004 and 2009? 2 In Switzerland, the common term for immigrant is “Ausländer•in” in German, “étranger•ère” in French and “straniero•a” in Italian. I will thus use the expression “foreigner” because it best catches the idea that immigrants are considered to be political and social “outsiders” (see also Giugni and Passy 2005:416). 4 Public discourse on Muslims and foreigners As far as I am aware, there are no systematic comparisons of the discourse on Muslims and foreigners and the argumentations lying underneath. Through a quantitative discourse analysis, I propose to compare the differences and similarities between the discourse on Muslims and on foreigners in general. My analysis, therefore, has a heuristic and explorative ambition and is not a test of a specific model. The aim is to present an overview over the Swiss public discourse on Muslims and foreigners in the last decade and to highlight differences and similarities. It is also an attempt to clarify certain affirmations and assumptions found in scientific literature.
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