2 results
8 - Xenophobia, hostility and austerity: European migrants and civil society in Wales
- Edited by Paul Chaney, Cardiff University, Ian Rees Jones, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- Civil Society in an Age of Uncertainty
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 16 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 October 2022, pp 163-185
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- Chapter
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Summary
The last few years have often been characterised by turbulence and uncertainty. The election of populist leaders in the USA, India, Italy, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil and Hungary, the notable electoral performance of far-right and populist parties in France, Germany, Sweden and elsewhere, and the UK’s decision to withdraw from the European Union have seen a disruption to the established expectations of liberal-democratic states following neoliberal practice. However, these did not emerge in 2016. Austerity politics, population displacement following conflict, and climate emergencies over the previous decade and beyond – and the perceived failure of states to deal with these justly – have contributed to this condition. What is clear, however, is that the world is a less certain place on issues of migration and beyond through the unsettling of previously established norms and conventions. Furthermore, specific questions about the UK’s future relationship with the European Union pose uncertainty regarding several fields, including future movement of people.
The UK’s 2016 EU membership referendum marked the culmination of restrictive immigration legislation and policy over the last two decades. The Asylum and Immigration Act, 1999, for example, introduced a number of restrictions, including replacing monetary support for refugees and asylum seekers with vouchers, and the forcible dispersal of asylum seekers across the UK (Kofman 2002; Hubbard 2005; Darling 2011). In the following decade, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made his plea for ‘British jobs for British workers’ at his first Labour Party conference as prime minister, restrictions and surveillance were placed on marriages between UK and non-UK citizens in the UK (Mulvey 2010; Wray 2011; Yuval-Davis et al 2017), and on non-EU citizens accessing benefits and the NHS (Guentner et al 2016; Hiam et al 2018). The policing of state boundaries further encroached into everyday life with the requirement of landlords and employers to verify tenants’ and employees’ migration statuses under the Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016 (Hall 2015; Yuval-Davis et al 2017). These developments, which constituted a policy of maintaining a ‘hostile environment’ against immigrants in the UK during Theresa May’s tenure as Home Secretary, and which placed extensive restrictions on immigrants to the UK, criticised as overly complex by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales (Yeo 2017), continued after her elevation to the premiership (Burrell and Schweyher 2019).
6 - Digital threat or opportunity? Local civil society in an age of global inter-connectivity
- Edited by Paul Chaney, Cardiff University, Ian Rees Jones, Cardiff University
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- Book:
- Civil Society in an Age of Uncertainty
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 16 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 18 October 2022, pp 111-132
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
Writing in the 1960s, the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan foresaw the emergence of a ‘global village’ as technology dismantled the significance of distance (McLuhan 1964). The metaphor of the village not only conveyed the proximity of social and economic relations in the new global age, but also indicated the forging of a new universal space of social consciousness, identity and belonging, and collective action. In the ensuing decades, the advent of digital technologies extending far beyond those envisaged by McLuhan has facilitated the articulation of a ‘global civil society’ (Keane 2003), underpinned by a growth in global consciousness and a globalisation of values, and mediated by transnational institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (Arts 2004). Most recently, social media technologies have permitted new forms of transnational social mobilisation that can bypass the mediation of institutions and NGOs, as individuals around the world connect and engage directly and instantaneously, further embedding the ‘villageness’ of global civil society.
It would be tempting to see the corollary of this rise of global civil society as the diminution of local civil society, with the global and the local pitted against each other in a zero-sum game. Certainly, scholars have documented the erosion of traditional structures of civic engagement and lamented the loss of ‘community’ in parallel with globalisation. Robert Putnam (2000), for instance, described the erosion of bonding social capital and local civil society structures in American communities in his seminal study Bowling Alone, which he attributed in part to the atomisation of society under the spell of television and the mass media, even as digital technology was in its infancy. Charts in the appendix of Bowling Alone meticulously detailed the falling membership of conventional civic and local social organisations, but also the expansion of national or international campaigning groups. Other observers similarly noted a shift towards more individualistic, nationally mediated and passive forms of social and political participation, coining terms such as ‘armchair activism’ and ‘cheque-book participation’.
Yet, the popular narrative of the emasculation of the local by the global has long been countered by alternative discourses that have emphasised globalisation-as-hybridisation over globalisation-as-homogenisation (Robertson 1992; Pieterse 2003) and pointed to the relational constitution of localities.