Community Cohesion as Safe Living: Delimiting the Obligations to and Dangers of proximity

Note aux lecteurs
Ce texte est un brouillon, écrit originalement pour une communication orale dans le contexte d’une conférence tenue en Décembre dernier. Depuis, j’ai révisé l’argument mais n’ai pas eu le temps de le formaliser dans le texte – de sorte qu’il n’apparaît qu’à la fin. En somme, je voudrais mettre d’avantage l’emphase sur l’aspect moral de cette politique de cohésion sociale, et sur la façon dont elle vise à produire des ‘ethical subjects’, c’est-à-dire des sujets-citoyens responsables de leur propre sécurité et de celle des autres; des sujets-citoyens judicieux qui savent se parer contre les dangers environnants et ceux qui savent se parer contre le risque potentiel de leur culture. Je crains que le texte ci-dessous soit loin d’avoir atteint ce degré de clarté et de ‘cohésion’…
Le texte sera soumis sous forme d’article pour un numéro thématique de Citizenship Studies sur ‘Designing Safe Living’. Vos commentaires seront fort appréciés.

Introduction

Community cohesion has become the ‘new’ framework for managing race relations in contemporary Britain. Initially established in government discourses following civil disturbances in the summer of 2001, community cohesion has developed into a preferred governing technology for the achievement of safe living. By looking at a Cabinet Office policy review document published in January 2007, this article traces how the discourse of community cohesion has evolved since 2001, in particular in relation to its framing of idealised conceptions of social proximity and closeness as means of facing the challenges posed by diversity, terrorism and economic deprivation.

I should clarify from the outset that I look at policy documents not as expressions of governing practices – that is, they do not necessarily tally with actual governing practices on the ground. But policy documents remain crucial in revealing particular ‘ways of seeing’ the world – as Gail Lewis argues, social policy documents ‘are texts that aim to lay out a problem of governance and suggest ways in which that problem might be managed or resolved. As texts they are forms of representation in which a relation between objects and subjects is constituted’ (2005: 537). By going to the ‘ways of seeing’ that policy documents open up, my aim is to attend to the ways in which policy discourses ‘figure social life in certain imaginary ways’ (Butler 2002: 28) that would exemplify the kind of coherence that is expected from individuals and groups¹ in their daily lives.

What I argue is that community cohesion is a governance technology that designs particular groups as well as particular practices in and out of the social space of the locality. For example, active citizenship is designed into the community along specific parameters, and those who fail – the ‘failed citizens’ – are designed out: the chav², the extremist Muslim, the illegal immigrant, the ‘bogus’ asylum seeker. At the same time, ethnic minorities other than Muslims are designed into the ‘community’ when it comes to achieving diversity and multiculture. A new imaginary landscape of multicultural Britain is emerging: one where British Ethnic Minorities (BMEs) are cast as settled into British society, against ‘immigrants’ and ‘Muslims’. Thus if, as some have argued, the earlier versions of community cohesion in British social policy combine visions of shared belonging with strategies of managing diversity (Alexander 2004; Worley 2005), more recent versions place a stronger emphasis on a management discourse as it relates no only to diversity, but also to migration, identity, and security. As I show below, the vision of cohesion is not so much one of shared belonging as it is one of a moral code that prescribes how to conduct oneself as an ethical subject. In this regard, community cohesion is an ethical project; it is imagined through specific emotional and ethical injunctions, such as adhering to core civic values, or being a discerning citizen. Moreover, these injunctions are imagined in the ambivalent spatial terms of obligations to and dangers of proximity (be it proximity with ‘others’ or proximity with the ‘risk-generating capacity’ [Geary 2007: 684] of one’s culture).

‘Origins’ of community cohesion

The British government’s faith in community cohesion was formulated in the aftermath of the uprisings in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford (Northern England) between May and July 2001 and was founded in concerns about distance and closeness between neighbouring communities within a given area. New forms of closeness, of ‘being together’ were invested in ideas of ‘community cohesion’ and their related technologies of corrective citizenship which were proposed in order to groom men and women into proper citizens of multicultural Britain.

Widely reported as ‘race riots’, the 2001 ‘summer of violence’ shook the nation into self-examination about its track record in multicultural management. The riots involved large numbers of people from different backgrounds – especially young men – and resulted in the destruction of property and attacks on individuals. The confrontations were largely between Asian youths and the police, and were prompted by racist groups, including the BNP, attacking Asian individuals and communities whom the police failed to protect (Kundnani 2001: 105). Local and national enquiries were set up to investigate the causes of the riots, including the independent Review Team led by Ted Cantle (Home Office 2001a; also known as the Cantle Report). The Cantle Report laid the foundations for subsequent government strategies and initiatives aimed as promoting community cohesion and racial equality. Ted Cantle is regarded as the ‘founding father’ of community cohesion in Britain (Benjamin 2005) and he has been associated with those who have sounded the death knell of multiculturalism on the basis of a narrow definition that associates it with a segregationist identity politics and practices.

As I argue elsewhere (2008), the Cantle Report marked the institutionalization of ‘mixing’ as a key governing principle for the management of diversity in local communities across the country. ‘Mixing’ was widely hailed as the antidote to segregation, disaffection, distrust, hate and fear, all of which result from too much sameness. It is noticeable that for all the discussions about racism available in the plethora of Home Office documents about community cohesion (albeit a racism reductively conceptualized as barely anything more than the consequence of ignorance or jealousy, which in turn, are seen as resulting from economic deprivation), what has dominated public debates since 2001 are concerns about ethnic segregation and separation. ‘Ethnic’ community cohesion was consistently singled out, and the overwhelming view remains that ‘Individuals may well be well integrated into their local ethnic or religious-based communities, which then creates divisions between these communities and others’ (Home Office 2001a: 70; my emphasis). The accepted understanding is that, due to mutual fear, suspicion or plain ignorance, ‘different ethnic groups are increasingly segregating themselves from each other and retreating into “comfort zones” made up of people like themselves’ (Ouseley 2001: 16; my emphasis). Thus ‘ethnic’ community cohesion hinders the version of cohesion favoured by the national government: ‘social cohesion requires that participation extends across the confines of local communities, knitting them together into a wider whole.’ (Ferlander and Timms in Home Office 2001a: 70; my emphasis). This version of mixing is about holding cultural boundaries tight, locked, and then talking across them. Furthermore, the key aim of this version of cohesion, as the Southall Black Sisters have pointed out, is ‘to promote racial harmony between communities, [while] it fails to deal with problems within communities’ (such as forced marriage; Southall Black Sisters in Razack 2004: 166; emphasis SBS’s).