Double Occupancy and Small Adjustments

Space, Place and Policy in the New European Cinematograph from the time that the 1990s

The famous Strasbourg-born New York political cartoonist and writer of children's publications, Tomi Ungerer was once asked what it was like to grow up in Alsace (he was born in 1931), and he replied: It was like living in the toilet of a rural railway station: toujours occupe (always occupied). He was, of course, referring to the fact that for more or less four hundred years, and certainly during the period of 1871 to 1945 Alsace changed nationality many times over, back and forth, between France and Germany, and for most of that time, either nation was felt to be an occupying power by the inhabitants.

Double Occupancy: An Intermediary Concept

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.

Television and Cinematograph: Dis-articulating and Re-branding the Nation

Double occupancy, as the co-extensiveness of symbolic and ethnic identities, but also the overlap of media representations, racial stereotypes and day-to-day discriminations, connects directly with the re-figuration of the nation and the national discussed in an earlier chapter.

Sub-State and Supra-State Allegiances

A nation is always something smaller than mankind and bigger than an ethnic group or a geographical region. It lives from drawing boundaries, recognizing borders and operating categories of inclusion and exclusion. At the same time, identifying with one's "nation" is increasingly experienced as at once too big and too small to mesh with one's individual sense of (not) belonging. This applies to the disaffected youth in the banlieu of La Haine or the drug addicts in Trainspotting as much as to the cosmopolitan locals of Chocolat, the coma-prone mother in Goodbye Lenin and the bungling wannabe bank-robbers in Shoot Shoot Habibi! Nevertheless, in order to grasp what is happening even in these movies of the "New European Cinematograph", one needs to take a step back perhaps, and return to the origins of the post-national nationalisms, by which the "Fortress Europe" believes it is besieged. For as far as these new nationalisms are concerned, the general consensus seems to be that their contradictory and modern nature can best be grasped if one posits the presence of powers that put pressure on the typical conjunction of nation and state familiar in Europe, certainly from the time that Napoleon and the early 19th century, including the notion of sovereignty that became international law with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War in continental Europe in the wake of the Reformation.

A Proposal for Defining a New European Cinematograph

This very general sketch of some of the political ramifications of the many ways in which Europe as a union of nation-states is in the middle of a possibly long and painful process of dis-articulating and realigning key aspects of the traditional congruence between nation and state was inter alia also meant to underline the difficulty of drawing too direct a parallel between the question of national cinematograph on the one hand, and the nation on the other.

An "Enlightened" View of Immigration

The first position is perhaps the one most closely tied to the theme of the stranger and the migrant, and here I want to focus on what one might call the Tony Blair-Gerhard Schroeder "enlightened" view on immigration, that is the social-liberal one, which maintains that altogether, immigration is a good thing, and that Europe, and in particular Britain or Germany, have to honor their obligations and responsibilities of asylum.