Empowering Citizens, Engaging the Public by Rainer Eisfeld

Author:Rainer Eisfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811359286
Publisher: Springer Singapore

On both continents, moreover, the political climate has become additionally charged by the threat of further Islamist terrorist acts. Still,domestic responses by “sanctuary” cities and counties and by courts to President Trump’s successive executive orders introducing travel bans targeted at Muslims,

no less than the rejection, by voters, of anti-immigration contenders in the 2017 Dutch parliamentary, the 2016 Austrian, and the 2017 French presidential elections

have shown that the impact of xenophobic diatribes, though considerable and frightening, may yet be contained.

The more pressing is the need for political science to intervene by in-depth studies—normatively driven, empirically grounded—in experiences with immigration and immigration policies, effectively summarized for public debate. Such studies could help to put in a better perspective the plethora of political, economic, and cultural challenges which have emerged across the entire European continent, in the United States, and in Canada. They could, it may be hoped, also help to deal with them more reasonably, more flexibly, more equitably.

The argumentative thrust of these studies ought to be the exact opposite of Samuel Huntington’s appeal to anxieties in his “ideological tract” (Etzioni ) Who Are We? discussed earlier. Huntington, it will be remembered, invoked the “American Creed”, which he portrayed as having emerged during the frontier period’s “settler society”, as a pillar of civilization that should persist unchanged, but was now being “undermined” by threatening “Hispanization”. In contrast, political science should—on condition that cultural “tribalization” can be avoided (Sartori 1997: 60/61, 62)—endorse the inherent “worth of diversity”: cultural “multiplicity” in the sense of a “cross-fertilized” culture as a humane perspective inherent in further change.

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