Distinction and Value-Addition

Toujours occupe seems as good a motto as any with which to confront the present debate about the new Europe and its sometimes siege mentality, when it comes to the so-called "non-Europeans" at its borders or in its midst. By proposing the idea of a permanent occupation, or more precisely, a double occupation, I am thinking of it as a kind of counter-metaphor to 'Fortress Europe', the term so often applied to the European Union's immigration policies.1 Toujour occupe keeps in mind the fundamental issue of the nation states' of Europe's own ethnicities and ethnic identities which, when looked at historically, strongly suggest that there has rarely been a space that can be defended against an outside of which "Europe" is the inside. There is no European, in other words, who is not already diasporic in relation to some marker of difference - be it ethnic, regional, religious or linguistic - and whose identity is not always already hyphenated or doubly occupied. I am not only thinking of the many European sites where the fiction of the fortress, the paranoid dream of tabula rasa,of cleansing, of purity and exclusion has led, or still continues to lead to bloody conflict, such as in Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, the Basque country, Cyprus, and further afield, in Israel and Palestine. To these, Tomi Ungerer's joke about Alsace may suggest the prospect of a happy ending, insofar as the European Union - founded, let us remember, initially to ensure that France and Germany would never again go to war with each other over Alsace-Lorraine - in this particular instance did provide a shift in the terms of reference by which the conflicting claims of nationality, sovereignty, ethnic identity, victim hood and statehood, solidarity and self-determination could be renegotiated. Indeed, this is the hope of the political elites in the European Union: that these conflicts can eventually be solved, by being given different frameworks of articulation and eventual settlement, after being first bought off with financial subsidies.

I shall come back to what I think these frameworks proposed by the European Union might entail as a political, but also symbolic-discursive space. Yet even outside the internationally notorious territories of overlapping identity-claims and inter-ethnic war-zones just mentioned, it is clear that Europe - nevertheless one wants to draw either the geographical reach (south: the Mediterranean, east: the Urals) or the historical boundaries (Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Greek, Roman or Holy Roman Empire) - has always been a continent settled and traversed by very disparate and mostly feuding ethnic entities. We tend to forget how relatively recent the nation-states of Europe are, and how many of them are the result of forcibly tethering together a patchwork quilt of tribes, of clans, of culturally and linguistically distinct groupings. Those identified with a region have seen a belated acknowledgement of their distinctiveness within the European Union under the slogan of 'the Europe of the regions', but even this opening up of different spaces of identity does not cover the current layeredness of ethnic Europe. One need only to think of the Sinti and Romas, the perpetual "others" of Europe, who because they have neither territory nor do they claim one, resist conventional classifications; they are inside the territorial boundaries of a dozen or so European countries, but finding themselves outside all these countries' national imaginaries. Nor does the Europe of the regions convey the historical "depth" of multi-ethnic Europe, a continent whose two- or three-thousand-year history is a relentless catalogue of migrations, invasions, occupations, conquests, pogroms, expulsions and exterminations.

Thus, the state of double occupancy applies to every part of Europe, and to all of us: our identities are multiply defined, multiply experienced, and can be multiply assigned to us, at every point in our lives, and this increasingly so - hopefully to the point where the very notion of national identity will fade from our vocabulary, and be replaced by other kinds of belonging, relating and being. Blood and soil, land and possession, occupation and liberation have to give way to a more symbolic or narrative way of negotiating contested ownership of both place and time, i.e., history and memory, for instance, inventing and maintaining spaces of discourse, as in the metaphoric occupation of Alsace or the increasing prominence achieved by hyphenated European nationals (German-Turkish, Dutch-Moroccan, French-Maghreb, British-Asian) in the spheres of literature, moviemaking, music and popular television shows. This is not to overlook the fact that there may be good motives why in some parts of Europe and especially on its current political borders, the recognition of national identity is still a prerequisite to being able to talk about belonging at all, as a consequence of having to cope with occupation, colonisation either directly or by proxy. This seems true for parts of the former Soviet Empire, such as the Ukraine or Belarus, claimed as their spheres of influence by Russia, the US, and of course, the European Union. Even in Alsace, matters are far from resolved: despite the fact that Strasbourg is the seat of the European parliament, Alsace is among the diparte-ments in France where the Fortress Europe populist Jean Marie Le Pen still has a substantial following, and the incidents of anti-Semitism reported from the region are alarmingly high.

These facts notwithstanding, the present insistence on cultural identity, as that which can most peacefully replace the older, more divisive nationalisms as well as reconcile individual to community, may well have to be re-thought across some other set of concepts, policies or ideas. This is not an easy task, as a quick review of the alternatives suggests. Multiculturalism, the term most readily offering itself, has come increasingly under fire: it underestimates the a-sym-metrical power-relations of the various constituencies, and ignores the rivalries among different ethnic communities and immigrant generations. Its notions of a rainbow coalition does not answer the thorny question of "integration" and "assimilation" versus "cultural autonomy" and "separate development" that characterizes the various policies tried or applied within the European nation states. In the European Union, as indeed in parts of the British education system, cultural identity is being officially replaced by "cultural diversity". Besides the blandness of the term and its tendency to be a euphemism for the problem rather than its solution, I find "diversity" problematic because it, too, leaves no room for the power structures in play, nor does it take account of the imbrication of inside and out, self and other, the singular and the collective. Double occupancy wants to be the intermediate terms between cultural identity and cultural diversity, recalling that there is indeed a stake: politics and power, subjectivity and faith, recognition and rejection, that is, conflict, contest, maybe even irreconcilable claims between particular beliefs and universal values, between what is "yours" and "mine". Philosophically, double occupancy also wants to echo Jacques Derrida's term of writing "under erasure", indicating the provisional nature of a text's authority, the capacity of textual space to let us see both itself and something else. One can even gloss it with Wittgenstein's reversible, bi-stable figure of the duck-rabbit picture, sign of the co-extensiveness of two perceptions in a single representational space.

Furthermore, I want the term to be understood as at once tragic, comic and utopian. Tragic, because the reality of feeling oneself invaded, imposed upon, deprived of the space and security one thinks one needs, is - whatever one's race, creed or gender, but also whatever one's objective motive or justification -a state of pathos, disempowerment and self-torment. Comic, in the way one considers mistaken identities as comic, that is, revealing ironies and contradictions in the fabric of language and its signifiers. And utopian, insofar as under certain conditions, I shall suggest, it opens up ways of sharing the same space while not infringing on the other's claims.

Perhaps I can illustrate what I mean by the more benign, symbolic and discursive forms that double occupation can take, with a scene from a documentary by Johan van der Keuken, Amsterdam Global Village (1996). By following the delivery rounds of a courier on a motorcycle, the director follows the lives of several immigrants who have made their life in Amsterdam: A businessman from Grosny, a young kickboxer from rural Thailand, a musician from Bogota who works as a cleaner, a woman discjockey from Iceland, a photographer, and also an elderly Jewish-Dutch lady, Henny Anke who with her 55-year old son is visiting the flat she lived in during the Occupation, when the Germans came to arrest her husband, deporting him to the Westerbork transit camp, and she had to decide whether to go into hiding with her little boy or to follow her husband to the camp.

The sheer physical contrast of the slight Jewish lady and the woman from Surinam, the discovery of the complete re-modelling that the flat has undergone, obliterating all the spatial memories Hennie might have had, is paralleled by the decor of white porcelain figures and lush green foliage, setting up what might have been a tragic-comic encounter of culture clashes. Yet, as Hennie recalls the terrible years, and re-lives the agony of her doubt about the choices she made, we sense the palpable fact of double occupancy of this domestic, physical and moral space, by two generations who have little in common either culturally or ethnically, but whose succession and coexistence in memory and spoken record, gives a truer picture of a national, but also trans-national history of occupation, colonialism, extermination and migration than either of the women could have given on their own. When the Surinamese mother says she now understands what the old lady has suffered, because she too has gone through re-location and exile, we know and Hennie Anke knows that there are important differences and the respective experiences may not be strictly comparable. But the gesture - even if it is one of mis-prision and mis-cognition - nonetheless sustains the fragile bridge these two women are able to build, establishing an image of transfer and safe-keeping of experience, as they embrace each other for the farewell. In the context of the movie's concern with singular fates, diaspora communities and the difficulties of maintaining a multi-cultural Amsterdam, but also following, as it does, harrowing portrayal of ethnic strife, death and devastation in Grosny, the encounter in the Amsterdam flat up the steep stairs encourages the viewer to ponder the possibility of putting space, time and place "under erasure": to see it both yield, erase and keep a memory within a history, while making room for a narrative of double occupancy. But the moment is as fleeting as it is utopian, and appears the more poignant, as one recalls what has happened in the Netherlands from the time that 2001 to its reputation for tolerance and to the consensus model of the social contract, extended to its ethnic communities. After the violent deaths of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, each in his way a flamboyant provocateur to the notion of consensus and diversity, this tolerant image is now frayed and seemingly in tatters.

If Amsterdam Global Village illustrates the utopian dimension, the case of the moviemaker, journalist and television personality van Gogh, who was assassinated as a consequence of making a movie deemed by some Muslims to be offensive to their religion, is perhaps more revealing for the tragic dimensions of double occupancy. Van Gogh often argued that his sometimes quite outrageous statements in the media, notably on television and in his newspaper opinion column, was the exact opposite of intolerance, but the expression of his faith in democracy, the law and free speech: by testing the limits, he wanted to safeguard its fundamental principles, very much in the spirit of the famous dictum, (mis-) attributed to Voltaire: "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it".4 Van Gogh's provocation was, in this sense, a mimicking, a "staging" and thus an impersonation of racism, prejudice and othering, by which he wanted to keep alive the emotional reservoir and the very real fund of resentment existing among the population, the better to engage with it. His "activism" sought to expose the sometimes hypocritical lipservice to multicultural ideals in what remains a consensual but deeply conservative society. Perhaps one can think of van Gogh's polemics as a pharmakon, a homeopathic cure, by way of inoculation and administered to the deeper feelings of fear of the other, "acting out" the aggression towards every kind of "otherness" associated with traditional forms of nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Heir to the radical 1960s, but also part of the performative 80s and 90s, van Gogh saw television, movie-making and even tabloid journalism as fields of symbolic action, deploying a language of signs, cliches and stereotypes as the common code of a culture that lives its differences in the realm of discourse, rather than by power. His death at the hands of a self-styled Muslim radical, who grew up in the Netherlands, might indicate that the space for symbolic action had vanished in the aftermath of 9-11 and the "war on terror". Yet van Gogh's assailant not only is literate, fluent in Dutch, "integrated" and adept at using the modern technologies of communication, such as web-sites and the internet: the murder itself, with its ritualistic overtones and easily decodable symbolism, had the performative dimension of other acts of barbarity deliberately staged to produce shocking media images and atrocity events. This would be another meaning of my term "double occupancy" - that semantically, as well as in the performativity deployed, modern media spaces have acquired the power of a first-order reality, by comparison with which the world of flesh and blood risks becoming a second-order realm, subservient to the order of spectacular effects. The privilege of van Gogh's persona, occupying the symbolic space of discourse, became the nemesis of Theo van Gogh the person, brutally deprived of life for the sake of another symbolic space.

A comic version of double occupancy is attempted in another Dutch movie, Shouf Shouf Habibi! (Albert Ter Heerdt, 2004), which looks at a dysfunctional Moroccan family living in the Netherlands from the point of view of one of the sons, fed up with his life of petty crime and wanting to make good. Ab (short for Abdullah), too, is fully integrated as well as fully alienated with respect to Dutch society. A duck-rabbit, as it were, even more to himself than in the eyes of others, he knows the cultural codes of both communities, their sensitivities as well as the narrow limits to their tolerance. Like Tomi Ungerer or Renton in Trainspotting, the young Moroccans, with whom Ab hangs out, direct their best jokes against themselves: "what's the difference between E.T. and a Moroccan? E.T. had a bicycle E.T. was good-looking..., E.T. actually wanted to go home." Ab would like to be an actor, but realizes that demand for Arabs as leads after 9/11 is low, a joke that would fall flat indeed were it not contradicted by the movie itself, which briefly did make Mimoun Oai'ssa into a star, from the time that the movie became a big hit in the Netherlands. Sparing neither the Dutch nor the Moroccans, Shouf Shouf Habibi! uses its subaltern humour and television family sit-com setting to appeal to a complicity of ineptitude (another version of double occupancy), which allows for a democracy of bunglers and losers to emerge as the movie's political ideal, in the absence of - or while waiting for - better options.