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loro famiglie in Alto Adige, rapporto di ricerca (Bozen: Cedocs, ). Jürgen Habermas, eorie des kommunikativen Handelns (I: Handlungsrationalität.
Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements

ix xiii

Georg Grote and Hannes Obermair

Introduction: South Tyrol: Land on a Threshold. Really?

section i

History

xv

1

Rolf Steininger

1 1918/1919: Die Teilung Tirols

3

Carlo Moos

2 Südtirol im St Germain-Kontext

27

Nina F. Caprez

3 Economic Hurdles after the Great War: How the South Tyrol-based Swiss Monastery Muri-Gries Overcame an Existential Crisis

41

Sabine Mayr

4 The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Meran

53

vi section ii

Historiography

77

Markus Wurzer

5 Genesis of the South Tyrolean Iconic Figure Sepp Innerkofler: Actors, Narrative, Functions

79

Georg Grote

6 Challenging the Zero-Hour Concept: Letters across Borders

101

Eva Pfanzelter

7 The (Un)digested Memory of the South Tyrolean Resettlement in 1939

section iii

Society Today

119

145

Sarah Oberbichler

8 “Calcutta lies … near the Rombrücke”: Migration Discourse in the South Tyrolean Newspapers Alto Adige and Dolomiten, exemplifed by their Coverage of the Bozen “Immigrant Barracks Camps” of the Early 1990s

147

Julia Tapfer

9 Ankommen, verbinden, vernetzen: Vereine und Vereinigungen von Migrant_innen in Südtirol. Eine Gegenüberstellung der Donne Nissà, der Associazione Panalbanese Arbëria und der Rumänischen Gemeinde

173

Friederike Haupt

10 Beobachtungen aus musiksoziologischer Sicht

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vii Bettina Schlorhaufer

11 Historicism and the Rise of Regionalism as “Style”: South Tyrol’s Successful Special Path

217

Gareth Kennedy

12 Die Unbequeme Wissenschaft (The Uncomfortable Science)

section iv

Border Stories

239

257

Johanna Mitterhofer

13 Border Stories: Negotiating Life on the Austrian– Italian border

259

Paolo Bill Valente

14 Sulla soglia. Leggende meranesi, storie di confine

275

Marta Villa

15 Identità e riconoscimento attraverso i culti della fertilità e il paesaggio agricolo nel Tirolo del Sud: il case study della popolazione giovane maschile di Stilfs in Vinschgau

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section v

305

Renegotiating Belonging

Antonio Elorza

16 Alsace, South Tyrol, Basque Country (Euskadi): Denationalization and Identity

307

Lucio Giudiceandrea and Aldo Mazza

17 Living Together is an Art

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viii Hans Karl Peterlini

18 Between Stigma and Self-Assertion: Difference and Belonging in the Contested Area of Migration and Ethnicity

341

Barbara Angerer

19 Living Apart Together in South Tyrol: Are Institutional Bilingualism and Translation Keeping Language Groups Apart? 361 Siegfried Baur

20 Grenzregion Südtirol: Schwierigkeiten und Möglichkeiten einer Erziehung zur Mehrsprachigkeit für ein vielsprachiges Europa

381

Chiara De Paoli

21 Redefining Categories: Construction, Reproduction and Transformation of Ethnic Identity in South Tyrol Notes on Contributors

395 409

Hans Karl Peterlini

18 Between Stigma and Self-Assertion: Difference and Belonging in the Contested Area of Migration and Ethnicity

abstract Hans Karl Peterlini looks at migration from the perspective of ethnic majority–minority issues by focusing on South Tyrol, which was a part of the old Austrian monarchy and annexed by Italy after the World War I. The mono-national and monolingual construction characteristic of national states is disturbed by the presence of two protected language minorities. In the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano, nearly 70 per cent of the population is German-speaking and about 4 per cent speaks the old Rhaeto-Romanic (here called “Ladin”). The tension between equality and difference or homogeneity and heterogeneity in such areas asks for a special theoretical and methodological approach. The focus cannot be limited, in a dichotomous way, to the particularity of migrants or their so-called host society, but has to consider the “in between” as a pedagogical space. The intertwined complexity of ethnic defensive reactions, forms of integration, pressure for assimilation and attempts of self-assertion has to be taken into account. This will complicate simple answers, but hopefully thereby also amplify and deepen insight into societies distinguished by migration and ethnification.

Within the discourse of threat: Minority versus migration “Are we becoming a minority in our own country?” asks the South Tyrolean party Die Freiheitlichen in a media broadcast from 18 June 2015, with reference to the “strongly” increasing “proportion of foreigners in South Tyrol’s kindergartens and primary schools” (Blaas 2015): “Not only this rapid increase poses major new challenges to our students and teachers, but is also dangerous on an ‘ethnic political’ (volkstumspolitisch) level. If the present

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trends continue, the decades-long decline in births and the non-European mass immigration could cause us, in a near future, to become a minority in our own country.” (ibid.) This “alarming development” (ibid.) is supported by data, which was delivered by Die Freiheitlichen as the outcome of a parliament request from the South Tyrolean provincial government. According to their findings, in the academic year 2014 to 2015, the “proportion of foreigners” in the German-speaking Kindergartens in South Tyrol was 10.1 per cent. While from 2011 to 2012, 959 children from migrant families attended German kindergartens, it is now 1,204 children who, according to the Freiheitlichen party, are a threat to the German-speaking South Tyrolean minority in Italy on an ethno-political basis. During the same period, the “proportion of foreigners” in the primary schools had passed from 6.5 to 7.7 per cent. What is interesting for the political interpretation of these numbers – yet unexciting in comparison with many European countries – is the situation in the educational institutions for the Italian-language group reported in the same media broadcast. With around 25 per cent of the kindergartens and primary schools, they show a much higher concentration of children from foreign families. In relation to the German-speaking population in South Tyrol, about which the Freiheitlichen party is concerned, this fact should put the alarm signal into perspective. At first glance it appears that the German-speaking minority – specially protected in the South Tyrol – is far less affected by migration than the Italian-speaking population. This (alleged) disproportion nurtures an equally existential allegation, albeit completely different ethno-political concern, namely that the majority of immigrant new citizens orientate themselves towards the Italian language, since initially they have the notion that they came to Italy. Usually, migrants only gradually become aware that in the territory of the Autonomous Province South Tyrol there are three officially recognized ethnic groups and that two of these, the German- and the Ladin-language groups, are constitutionally protected. Moreover, while the German-speaking population constitutes the majority in South Tyrol, with around 70 per cent, this population ratio is inverted in the city of Bolzano (Astat 2012: 4, 5). Migrants who settle in Bolzano and do not explore the largely Germanspeaking valleys initially miss out on the multilingual South Tyrol. Thus,

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they are not immediately conscious of the importance of mastering the German language, on the ground of its equality with the Italian language and of its economic utility in many work areas, for instance, tourism. The ethno-political concerns of the separatist movement Südtiroler Freiheit, which stand opposite to the Freiheitlichen’s concerns, connect to this principle. The idea is: when children from migrant families are socialized within the Italian-language world through the preferred enrolment in Italian educational institutions, they strengthen the Italianlanguage group at the expense of the German-speaking minority in South Tyrol. “Immigrants of today shall not be tomorrow’s Italians”, warned the Südtiroler Freiheit at the regional debate about the discussed 2011 Integration Act (Knoll 2011). The fact that the Italian State required foreigners applying for a residence permit in South Tyrol to pass an Italian examination, but did not allow an additional German examination, was interpreted as a deliberate strategy to “make the immigrants in South Tyrol Italians in the long term.” (Knoll / Klotz 2011) That would make the “integration and adaptation of immigration to the German language group […] difficult” (ibid.). Such a simple logic of assimilation expresses blatant hope that the integration of the “immigrants of today”, so to speak, into the German-language community would make them the tomorrow’s German-speaking South Tyrolean. Consequently, the German schools should – quite contrarily to the warnings of ethnic alienation – attract as much immigrant children as possible in order to foster their “integration and adaptation”. This, of course, comes in direct contradiction with those dominant, albeit totally unfounded everyday discourses implying that the presence of children from migrant families in kindergartens and schools jeopardizes the German “mother tongue” (compare affirmative , 11 December 2013, and contrasting AllemannGhionda 2006; 2013: 245). The exemplified strategic assessment of risks and opportunities that represents migration narrows the perception of migration in South Tyrol, considering it almost exclusively on its compatibility with the South Tyrolean minority protection. The two national patriotic parties namely agree on the fact that migration – if not prevented or ethnopolitically absorbed – threatens the very existence of the German-speaking minority. A projection of the statistics institute Istat, according to which

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the proportion of immigrants in Italy, due on the one hand to migration and on the other hand to the weak birth rate of the country’s population, will increase of 24 per cent by 2065 (in South Tyrol of 22.97 per cent). This was commented upon by both parties in dramatic language: “changing of the people is taking place”, pointed the Freiheitlichen parliamentarian Pius Leitner; a “serious threat to our survival”, pinpointed Sven Knoll from the Südtiroler Freiheit (Istat, 2011).

Within the discourse of ambivalence: Minority meets migration The clash of the most recent migration process with the protection of autochthonous minorities is undoubtedly both a minority right (cf. MeddaWindischer/Carlá 2015) and a social peculiarity. In the interaction of migration and ethnicity, categories such as difference and equality, heterogeneity and homogeneity are given in clear and absolute terms, but they appear in an ambivalent tension. Nevertheless, there is hope that strategies for the coexistence of different linguistic and cultural groups, tested in such areas for decades, even centuries to some extent, could now be useful for the migration experience. This applies even more to regions where after often heavy fighting and conflicts, peace was made and a resolution that satisfied big part of the population was agreed upon, just like South Tyrol with the Second Statute of Autonomy of 1972. Still, migration, as a profoundly mobilizing phenomenon per se, radically changes rules and forms of society (see Mecheril 2006, Mecheril and al 2013) and puts the areas with ethnic protection systems most especially to test. A similar concern about the outvoting of legally protected and recognized linguistic and ethnic minority in Canadian Quebec resulted in migrant families having to send their children to French schools (Taylor 1993: 52; Gouvernment du Québec 2012) in order to ensure the protection of the French-language community despite migration. In this case, the – ethno-culturally legitimized – special rights for the autochthonous linguistic minority are placed

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before the freedom of choice of the non-legitimized ethnic groups who have come to Quebec through recent migration. On a theoretical level, this reflects how different ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences can be welcomed and thus also co-constructed through recognition or ostracized, denied and suppressed through forced adaptation and assimilation (see Otto / Schrödter 2006). Hence, difference (as in otherness and strangeness opposed to the adoption of national homogeneity) appears in the same area once as a legally protected subjective and collective good, then as stigmatizing anomaly (cf. Waldenfels 2012, pp. 109–132, and Lippitz 2003). While the ethnic self-assertion of a protected autochthonous minority allows it to make claims and possibly achieve equality through the recognition of their difference, the difference of migrants is perceived as a disturbing phenomenon, as an anomaly that can be smoothed and ultimately as a stigma in a nationality of peers imagined as homogenous. In South Tyrol, migrants are not forced fitted into one or the other official language group. They can, regardless of their ethnicity and origin, freely decide whether to send their children to German- or to Italian-language educational institutions. In these institutions, the respective second language is taught on the basis of a limited number of lessons; in the two Ladin valleys, there are uniform educational institutions with an equal amount of German and Italian lessons and the additional use of Ladin as the language of play and utility. The “parental right” (Peterlini 2003: 97) of free ethnically bonded school choice was an important requirement in the negotiations on the South Tyrolean Autonomy. It had to ensure that in multilingual areas the families with Italian ancestors, parents, or even just with Italian surnames, could declare themselves as belonging to the German minority. Thus, the ethnicity was not defined as naturalized culture, but raised to the question of confession. This opens up a large free room, since in principle also Italian citizens could “confess” into the German-speaking minority and enrol their children in the German educational institutions (and vice versa). On the other hand, the question of belonging to one group or another through the confession right to culture and language policy questions is charged with fundamental values. The concerns and counter-strategies of the national patriotic parties in South Tyrol are ultimately nourished precisely by this freedom of choice for

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immigrants to turn towards either of the language groups. With this comes an interesting development: is it true that by percentages the proportion of migrant children in the Italian educational institutions, with around 25 per cent, is much higher than in the German kindergartens and schools, but this does not mean a disproportionate orientation of migrant families towards the Italian-language group. In absolute terms, the repartition of migration children that takes place in primary schools is almost 50:50 (approximately 1,500 children) and in kindergartens 60:40 “in favour” of the German facilities. In the ethno-logic of the two German patriotic parties, this would even respect the ethnic balance between Germans and Italians in South Tyrol. The only difference is that the – far weaker in number – Italian institutions are characterized by a much stronger migrant percentage. This can also be explained by the fact that the Italian population is concentrated in the city of Bolzano, where the migration percentage is the highest.

Within the discourse of ethnic proportional representation: Outvoting as trauma and motive for defence The suspicious ethnic monitoring of migration is undoubtedly a consequence of the fact that the provincial autonomy is structured according to language-group strength. This had – in the first launch in 1948 and expanded model in 1972 – as a causal and central purpose the protection of the German language and of the – far less substantial and thus less rigid – Ladin minority. While in the post-war period, State outvoting was maintained beyond fascism as a policy against the German and Ladin populations through forced migration from Italian regions after a long and sometimes-violent independence struggle (see Peterlini 2007; 2013), it led to a protection system that is now acclaimed as exemplary throughout Europe. The South Tyrolean autonomy has – according to Palermo 1999 – a two-fold dimension: the Province of South Tyrol, a territorial configuration with potent self-management skills that ultimately benefits all language groups and ethnicities, but also a segregating structure

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with specific protection provisions for the two ethnic minorities. The most effective, but also the most incisive instrument is – in addition to the ethnically separate school systems for securing and strengthening the German-language education – the allocation of public funds, positions of power, careers in the public sector and social housing by language-group strength, the so-called “ethnic proportional representation” (Peterlini O. 1980; 1997). This partition and hence division strategy has proven to be the one pacifying instrument between State and minorities; the sources of conflict calmed down and it created an almost mathematical distributive justice after decades of unequal treatment. At the same time, the concept of ethnic protection through isolation and division has made its way so deeply in the collective consciousness and in the political culture of South Tyrol, that the logic of proportional strength is superior to all other considerations. From this angle, this we that is, according to the ethno-patriotic parties, threatened by migration – “because in medium term we will become a minority in our own country”, Blaas 2014 – was back. This we is – in contrast to regions and states imagined as nationally homogeneous – not the host society, but a segregated part of it, only a privileged minority group who defines itself by its difference from the “national people”. The way migration affects the whole society and the way European States can cope with the almost daily refugee tragedies is – cynically speaking – almost negligible from such a perspective. What is relevant for the discourse is whether the rights of the minority are secured or whether migration messes up the laboriously stabilized power relations between majority and minority, to the detriment of the latter. From the perspective of the indigenous minorities, migration is connected with the additional fear that the representatives of new difference could estrange the long-established protected minorities and, sooner or later, push them into that impotent offside against which they had asserted themselves successfully against State outvoting attempts. Such ethno-centric discourse defeats Universalist aspirations, as acknowledges Habermas for culturalized Communities, when he speaks of a “normative core” in which “the individual members ‘know of being one’” and find “forms of collective identity” (Habermas 1976: 25). Accordingly, the members of such communities or groups would see “any destruction or violation of this normative

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core as a threat to their sense of identity” (ibid.). From the viewpoint of an ethnic minority that feels threatened, newly arriving citizens are not considered on the basis of the challenge and/or enrichment they can bring to the host society. For the same reason, the question of how the coexistence with them could be designed is not raised. They are reduced to how they – under disclosure of their difference – can be classified into the existing ethnic order, without endangering them. This amounts to assimilation into the minority group: “belonging” is offered under the condition to abandon your own difference, or at least put it aside in favour of a commitment to the locally available differentiation. The success story of the South Tyrolean minority apparently does not lead to increased sensitivity towards other minorities and minorities in the minority, but to the hierarchizing of minorities between ancestral and recognized minorities and those who have immigrated and therefore have to adapt. This especially manifests itself in the application of ethnic proportional representation and the related declaration of language-group membership. The South Tyrolean minority protection is practically based on the right to confession of difference. People can, in fact must, declare themselves either German or Italian or Ladin, therewith proportional political offices, public authorities, social resources and social housing are divided. Now this protection system oriented on the confession right compels other ethnic groups such as Chinese, Moroccans, Serbs, Albanians, Pakistanis, Kurds, of course, to find their place in this system in which all persons residing in South Tyrol can first declare himself as “other”, but then must be assigned to one of the three language groups, for the purpose of ethnic proportional representation. This choice of different groups instead of a forced association with the minority is good by comparison to Quebec, but requires officially the denial of one’s own ethnic difference. Wherever migrants come from, in South Tyrol they are officially either German or Italian or Ladin. A pretty curious result is that in South Tyrol, because this classification system, there are two groups of Chinese or Moroccans or Indians or Albanians for example: those who (must) associate themselves with the German-language group, and those who associate themselves to the Italian-language group.

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Within the discourse of difference: The own, the other, the in-between At the clash of minority protection and migration the otherwise rather diffuse ambivalence of a belonging determined by difference becomes visible. The perception, visualization, habitual and legal-juridical emphasis on ethnic difference can – as in the case of protected indigenous minorities – on the one hand allow social and political positioning, provided that the difference is recognized and/or is at least legitimized through recognition struggles, as it is the case for the German-speaking population in Italy. On the other hand, this privileged recognition of difference tends to cover other differences or the “differences within the differences” (KrügerPotratz, 2005: 152). This applies in particular to social differences, which in ethnicized regions often have only weak political influence (Peterlini, 2011: 31f ). The unification constraints also reach private lifestyles and individual identity formation, where people simply do not fit into the either-Germanor-Italian-grid because they have parents from different language groups. The multilingual families in South Tyrol were long vilified as representing threatening “mixed cultures”, but at the same time – and it is still – made invisible in the statistics (Chisholm / Peterlini 2012: 54ff ). This way the experience’s potential remains hidden. Without an official place (see de Certeau 1988), the understanding/learning of positioning in the cultural “in-between” (Bhabha 2000: 4) can be rather difficult. It is only through the recognition of bridges and intermediate identities that their social role as “pioneers of interculturalism” (Chisholm / Peterlini 2012: 132), or – in the case of migrants – as “pioneers of a transnationalization” (Yildiz 2014: 22) can be appreciated. Instead, the richness of their experience (see Cennamo 2013) is forced into the anonymity of private retreat worlds or drawn through foreign ethnicization in the wake of two strong populations. Indeed, a first crack in the “monolingual habitus” (Gogolin 1994) appeared in South Tyrol with the recognition of the autochthonous minorities. The fact that Italy is visibly not homogeneously Italian, has not overcome the monolingual habitus, but rather doubled it in a monolingual habitus of the minority and a monolingual habitus of the majority. This leaves all

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the others left out or forced into the Procrustean bed of ethnic confession to declare themselves as German or Italian Chinese – or for the one with parents of different language to decide whether he love “his father or his mother” (from an interview with Pier Paolo Pasqualoni,. see also Pasqualoni 2007). For migrants majority–minority areas thus represent an additional challenge of seeking residence in the diffuse, counter-rotating, historically overloaded and often taboo narrative spot. As an Iraqis working and living in Bolzano, Adel Jabbar called the new beginning of migrants at the place of arrival (if it is a permanent arrival at all) as a “second birth” (personal speech note), connected to a new learning a new language, a new way to walk, in many cases also with a conviction to the marginalization, the devaluation of the self, for the withdrawal of minimum humanitarian standards (see Jabbar 2015). They oscillate between the need for adaption for survival reasons and the need for recognition of their otherness (see Jabbar / Lonardi 1999: 25). The difference itself could be that something unique, which confers status, creates self-esteem and self-efficacy. Yet, it frequently encounters ostracism and rejection and creates a “social distance” between the migrants and the receiving society that is hard to overcome (cf. Jabbar / Lonardi 2000). What is for the one an identity that is worth protecting, is in regular discourses considered by the others with suspicion, rejection, and in the worst cases with disgust. If now however juridical belonging is denied to demos by origin, if emotional affiliation is installed through the being different or only at the price of self-abandon and integration is understood as assimilation, if social exclusion and economic deprivation, including any formal affiliation over generations is scorned and scoffed at because “migration background” (see Hamburger 2010: 17f ) sticks to one – then the difference become the stigma that burns on the forehead and at the same time restricts one’s perception of himself. Ultimately, migrants are confronted to a similar (not same) dilemma as autochthonous minorities; to external ethnicization by the nation state, the only option remaining is self-ethnicization, which at least allows to acquire a status, precisely the one of ethnicized minority (see Butler / Spivak 2011 : 24ff ).

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Within the discourse of the national state: Minority and migration policy as transnational phenomena Thus, migration challenges both the State, imagined as nationally homogenous, and the special protection for ethnic minorities. While the difference of autochthonous minorities is to some extent reconciled with the claim of absoluteness of the national state by ethnic recognition and protection systems in which it accepts to restrict national homogeneity by demarcated areas, the same recognition of what is brought by migration difference would literally crumble any national homogeneity claim, due to the exponentially increased and all social spaces penetrating difference. A minority protection as the one enjoyed by the (by international standards) privileged indigenous South Tyrolean minority, even in its most basic form, is unthinkable for the many ethnic groups of migrants. The most convenient, politically seductive and implicitly predominant way out is that of assimilation – either to the State majority or to the minority. What is a sacred right for the one, is of course, denied to the other. This unequal valuation of difference ultimately finds legitimacy in the fact that the ones have always been there, while the others have only arrived recently. Such an argument ignores the fact that the ones came from somewhere too and that migration is not a current anomaly, but is to be understood as a fundamental experience and a “proper form of human existence” (Hoffmann – Nowotny 1994: 388). Whether the right to be different and to participate in society by respecting this difference alone permanently with the reference can be justified on earlier rights, can be put into question in a political and ethical way, but first and foremost from the point of view of minority protection. For example, if in the Tyrolean municipality of Franzensfeste (near the Brenner frontier), with its high migration density in both the German and the Italian primary school classes, reaches a 100 per cent of children from migrant families, this would also put the separate school system in South Tyrol into question. If the previously so successful South Tyrolean minority protection policy is not overrun by a development that can be rejected, but not stopped, a reflection would be required as to how the South Tyrolean school should align itself in the future, in a

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way that it would be even moderately fair to the country’s new diversity. And this applies to many other issues of minority protection, which could come under pressure in a purely defensive posture. If the other’s the right to their otherness, to their difference, was to be revoked, this could easily lead to the delegitimization of otherness in general and thus also that of autochthonous minorities. Of course, globalized and globalizing migration conditions also keep the claims of ethnicity from becoming obsolete. The indications about opening and hybridizing identity variations in global and glocal societies are confronted to indications about the growing importance of ethnicity (see Peterlini 2011). This way Wenning’s early forecasts shall continue to be valid: “In the future, migration dynamics will not fade away and ethnicity will not become meaningless” (Wenning 1993: 98). The transnationality and transculturality experienced around the world stand in a tense relationship with the mono-national discourses that are still established. For the production and approval of a national we, these rely on the ethnicization of others (see Peterlini 2011), which also leads them to situations of marginalization and discrimination (see Broden / Mecheril 2010, Hamburg 2010, Terkessidis 2010). Integration as a unilateral adjustment effort is required but not granted in a reliable way. This ambivalence between equality and equalization claims on the one hand, and between difference claims and stigmatization on the other hand, demands, according to Wenning, an awareness of and a working with the “tension between equal and different” (2004: 579). The protection of autochthonous linguistic minorities is based on the insight that social disregard for cultural communities and identities can lead to the subalternity, the marginalization and the internalized inferiority of the members of these communities and must therefore be repealed by positive discrimination (Taylor 1993: 14ff ). Accordingly, literacy in the mother tongue at the level of language formation is not only a foundation for further language learning (Cummins 1984), but also for reaching higher-education language and thus for equal political and social articulation above all. If this is denied or ignored, the concern for the protection of autochthonous minorities, entangled in an ethno-centricity founded on historical rights (“to have always been there”), would lead to a simultaneous

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deprivation of rights for the allochthonous minorities, ethnic communities and diaspora communities. The key questions of migration societies thus are: How can the interand trans-cultural diversity, partially generated and partially only made visible by migration, be compatible with mono-national and mono-ethnic concepts of state law and political practice at all? How can national frontier drawing- and discriminating practices be justified, when social spaces can only be described as transnational? In majority–minority areas these questions of high complexity can make one clueless at first, but on the other hand they help revealing resources hitherto little perceived and therefore underestimated. Can a system which has itself established ethnically special rights for some communities, just ignore all other ethno-cultural needs and, consequently, make growing segments of the population virtually “speechless”? Conversely, is it conceivable to attribute those recognitions even to the languages of migrant families, without which their speakers are deprived of the most elementary possibility of social participation? And if this is not possible, then how can the special protection for certain ethnic groups be maintained? The questions are not looking for answers, but rather to irritate the usually unquestioned (because presupposed as naturally given) paradigms of national and ethnic identity as a justification for social equality and participation. As long as state laws and boundaries practices are nationally justified, inevitably national and ethnic identity will be established as the privileged, if not the only way for one to socially and politically position himself and demand rights. It is nothing less than the conception of the national state that is on trial, a conception that leads not only its majority, but also its minorities to ethnification as the (almost) only possible way of fighting social equality (see Butler / Spivak, 2011: 24ff ). Given the recent migration flows, this can simply not be maintained by constantly creating new ethnic group rights, but demands an overcoming of national and ethnic legitimation of political participation. This is hardly imaginable “in the enclosure of belonging” (Bienfait 2006) as an ethnically and nationally defined condition for existence and for participation rights, since in European democracies in the first place, the idea of a unified nation – as a fictitious unity of demos and ethnos – has produced democratic citizens. In a globalized world, in which all major survival and

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security issues, as well as questions of economic distribution and justice, are no longer manageable on the national level, but only in the sense of the “global governance” of Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker (see Bartosch 2007), the national state reaches to its limit in the equalization of demos and ethnos. In a transnational world, whose economy, cultural production, sports and entertainment industry is globalized, neither migration nor the protection of minorities can be portrayed as a disturbance. It is rather the national State that unmasks itself as the expression of some phantasms of unity and purity that does not meet real life.

Within the discourse of diversity: Foreignness experiences as potential In the light of these considerations, migration policy in majority–minority areas such as South Tyrol – but also as Carinthia, Istria, the Trieste area, and other overlapping areas in Europe – faces very special duties and opportunities. Here we find an often-unrecognized wealth of experience, which can also be useful for migration discourse far beyond these regions. On the one hand, collective foreignness- and experiences of submission were made, which are sedimented in the cultural memory (see Assmann 2002), but on the other hand further development was made available – in some case better, in others worse. At least to a certain extent, political practice and social negotiation also facilitate the reformulation of traditional narratives – in the sense of a social memory (see Assmann A. 2006). These experiences in majority–minority areas represent a breach in the normality construct of national homogeneity. At the same time they make the potential of difference visible (see Gombos 2007), for instance if the model of South Tirol is seriously examined in order to determine whether it would be suitable for Tibet, for Ukraine, for Sandžak between Serbia and Montenegro or for Kashmir. Or if a bilingual school as the VS24 in Klagenfurt pretends that the Slovenian minority language – without being a language of prestige – can also awaken the interest of German families

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(see Wakounig 2008). In successful examples the monolingual habitus, which relegates broad sections of the population beyond language inferiority and disadvantage, experiences politically fought and real-life proofs that the learning of a minority language is not only reasonable, but also represents a source of joy and richness for the children of the majority culture. To some extent, a possible answer to the migration areas central and mostly avoided question – how diversity in monolingual institutions and schools find space and can be expressed in practice (Gombos 2010) – can be found here. This could be the pearls which can be retrieved in majority–minority areas as regional transnational spaces (see Pilch / Schröttner 2012, Scott 2003). They lay in the middle of everything (between the linguistic groups, cultural groups, nationalities, ethnic groups) which relates to Homi Bhabha’s in-between as well as to Terkessidis’ Interkultur (2010), as the living, albeit publicly often tabooed expression of transnationality (see Pries 1996; 1998; Glick-Schiller and al. 1992) and transculturality (see Welsch 1995; 2004). The in-between – also as a space for educational thinking and action – refers to negotiations between cultural, linguistic, ethnic, social, gender, sexual and other differences as productive force. Equality is a democratic principle that aims to prevent the stigmatization of difference. Without looking at the difference (in terms of a difference-sensitive inclusion, see Habermas 1996) assumptions of equality disguise real inequalities, bore and settled through power relations, behind the homogeneity claim. The experience that State, demos and ethnos do not necessarily have to cover each other, that cultures are not demarcated closed formations but always permeable in a transcultural sense (Welsch 1995; 2004), could be a resource for a difference-conscious, but not difference-fixing attitude towards cultural, intercultural and transcultural positioning of people. These are not counted into ethnic group rights, although these rights – as experienced by the South Tyrolean minority – may be important for political, social and economic participation. The Italian immigration of the 1950s sparked bombings on building shells for the new settlers (Peterlini 2010; 2011). This occurred in a – not unjustified – feeling that there was a governmental preference and even in certain historical phases a targeted government regulation of immigration aiming to outvote the minorities.

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The present-day migration is not directed by the state, it springs no conspiracy and no plan of higher powers, it is a movement of people, as it always existed – in higher and lower concentrations – and which cannot be stopped by shifting boundaries nor barricades (see Mezzadra 2004). Moreover, the motives for migration are existentially too mandatory, regardless of whether it is fleeing from tyranny and terror or because of poverty and lack of perspective on the place of origins. The implied strategy of national states to adhere to their mononational conceptions, leads to severe marginalization, discrimination and thus also social dangers for broad new populations. Like many other areas of Europe, South Tyrol has the uneasy task of dealing with a fact that is all the more perceived as a problem, the more identity alone is defined ethnic- linguistic. Such we is too narrow for the already set and further setting diversity. The dilemma is to not overlook everything else which makes us humans, in the process of fixing ethnic identity concepts. Their social and economic needs and concerns, their social and economic benefits, their cultural, intercultural and transcultural talents, their social, political values and their values as human beings within or beyond ethnicized identification and religiosity, cannot simply be split with the ethnical axe. South Tyrol is therefore not much than many European regions, but it has collected some experience about what flows into hostility and destruction, and what on the other hand can lead to coexistence, peace and collective well-being.

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