Susan B. Rottmann and Myra

As European nations grapple with when and how to extend inclusive citizenship to their Muslim minorities, the parameters of Muslim women’s citizenship have jumped to the forefront of feminist concern. Much of the debate internationally has revolved around veiling, but we argue that this is only one element of how ethnic, religious, and other differences among women are addressed. In this paper, we choose two cases which highlight political choices surrounding intersectionality for German feminists: headscarf laws and antidiscrimination laws. Both laws are inherently intersectional, with significant and differential impact on Muslim women, but German feminists have engaged in these two issues quite differently. The so-called headscarf debate has drawn intense feminist involvement but changes in antidiscrimination law are rarely discussed in feminist media. We attempt to explain this difference by focusing Winter 2008 Pages 481–513 doi:10.1093/sp/jxn017 # The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] on how solidarity-across-difference is understood: as a strategic alliance around multiple axes of difference or as using the state as an ally to help “other” women address their special needs. In 2005, Turkey, the European Union’s Muslim neighbor, officially began accession negotiations for European Union (EU) membership. Muslim immigrants already are present in significant numbers in most European states; in Germany, the nearly two million Turkish-origin residents are 3–4% of the population. Including the Muslim “other” inside the boundaries of Europe has unleashed massive controversy about the parameters of citizenship. These debates often focus on the bodies of women, with the meaning of wearing a veil being a flashpoint for politicians in the popular press, where it is often construed as a symbol of the oppression of women inconsistent with “European values” (see reviews in Koonz 2007; Weber 2004; Vakulenko 2007). Indeed, the EU has committed itself with increasing specificity to mandating gender equality as a core value (Cichowski 2004). The EU demands that all its member-states implement enforceable antidiscrimination laws, both to ensure gender fairness and to protect racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and other minority groups, whether indigenous or immigrant. Unlike previous antidiscrimination measures, which focused solely on the workplace, these laws cover discrimination in civil society, such as in housing, credit, and public facilities. As part of the acquis communitaire, or shared principles of union, the equality of women and men has been made part of the definition of “Europeanness,” although how equality is defined and how well it has been achieved varies among the EU’s member states (Verloo 2005; Lombardo and Meier 2006). Regulation of veiling and of discrimination thus forms a double engagement with the politics of modernity, where gender plays an important symbolic role in defining citizenship rights (Berkovich 1999). These dual forms of regulation also provide the practical context in which German and Turkish women confront problems of sexism and patriarchy. For feminists, embracing the cause of “women” requires defining oneself in relation to “Europe” and its announced project of social inclusion. This inclusion is negotiated transnationally, as the boundaries of Europe are re-drawn through accession to membership in the EU. It is also negotiated interpersonally as both indigenous and immigrant women decide what local and global identities they embrace, and how these identities shape their interactions with others. Each of these negotiations draws on and defines the parameters of citizenship, in the sense of common membership in a single political community (Anderson 1983). 482 V Rottmann and Marx Ferree