Diversity management in Spain: New dimensions, new challenges

Introduction: multiple diversity in Spain

In the current critical European dilemma as to whether to increase diversity policies or move towards an assimilationist policy,¹ it is difficult to know what the Spanish approach is. Because immigration is relatively new in Spain, government policies are struggling to manage the diversity it entails. Spanish policymakers are aware of different policy approaches in older European host countries, but do not seem to be convinced by any of them. The multicultural model, which is now negatively associated with segregation and social marginalization, appears to have the fewest converts. In order to avoid immigrants being segregated in cities, the citizenship approach has been presented within the policy discourse as a new focus that includes both immigrants and native Spaniards. As we shall see later, citizenship policy has a proactive meaning, rather than a reactive one legitimating conservative national identity, as is the case in practically the whole of Europe (Zapata-Barrero, 2009c).

The main challenges in Spain derived from immigration must be understood within the context of the democratic transition. The terms of the debate were twofold: how was Spain to be demonopolized from the Catholic Church, which played a legitimating role during the dictatorial francoist regime; and how was the emergent cultural diversity related to minority nations with their own languages, histories and ‘societal cultures’ to be managed?² That is, religion and national language were basically the driving categories forming the main reference framework for legitimating policies.

Both issues frame today’s basic diversity challenges related to immigration. Governed by its recent democratic past, Spain has today multiple difficulties in adopting a coherent immigration policy, since the arguments driving its political approach come from a tradition that has unresolved challenges, basically related to identity. Questions formulated during the democratic transition have resurfaced due to current diversity- and immigration-related issues, and press both policymakers and society to draw specific answers to potential dilemmas such as: what is the role of the Catholic Church in education and in a public sphere which has different religious demands? Must the Catholic Church share the same opportunities as the new demands coming from immigration? How can we give policy-coherent answers to practical demands related to dress code, religious festivities, worship, and so on? Is Spain composed of nations or of cultural communities without any national and State legitimizing possible claims? Is Spain multinational? What is the political role of other languages in Spain such as Catalan, Basque and Galician? Should they enjoy the same level of recognition as the Spanish language?

The contextual dependence of its recent past is at the core of Spain’s difficulties. Spain’s dilemma is therefore to decide the model of society it aims to follow, given the current diversity of national languages, religions and cultures. The fact that Spain is witnessing today two diversity-related social dynamics, with their own public opinion reactions and their own political discourse, illustrates the interaction of two diversity frameworks. And this is a unique case in Europe. This is the starting premise behind the rationale of this book in which I shall argue that Spain’s recent past and its different traditions play the role of an iron cage, limiting institutional innovation and structural change, and forcing it to follow a practical approach.

Under this new angle of diversity management, I shall follow three main steps in my argumentation. The first is the idea that Spanish context exemplifies, as I have previously said, a different context of diversity, which I call ‘multiple diversity’, where two frameworks of diversity interact: an old unresolved one arising from the democratic transition and a new one due to immigration. This two-dimensional framework explains how Spain can be considered a laboratory and gives meaning to the practical approach I shall defend as a second step of my argumentation. This practical philosophy is characterized by a willingness to provide practical answers to current diversity-related conflicts, without any long-term model of a diverse society, and limiting both institutional innovation and structural change in Spain. This is why, as a third step of my argumentation, I shall try to draw at the end a heuristic model, which will help interpret the Spanish way of accommodating diversity by identifying the main institutional and structural system of restrictions. In order to go through these three steps of my argumentation, I will take three case studies, which have been at the forefront of the political and social agenda these last decades: education, the workplace and political rights. These three policy areas illustrate both concrete case studies of multiple diversity (first step of my argumentation), but also its limits for institutional and structural innovation (second step of my argumentation) and will help me, by inference, to draw a heuristic model (third step of my argumentation).

It is at this point that multiple diversity takes its basic meaning: there are indeed various legitimate potential policy answers given the diversity of national traditions. Spain has been following a teleological path, centred in concrete aims dictated by practical conflicts, and always trying to take into consideration the consequences of current conflicts and policy answers to them. This is what I will call the Spanish practical approach, a conflict-oriented policy, with the aim of ensuring stability and cohesion in a short-term strategy, but without any clear long-term model of societal identity within the current dynamics of diversity.

I shall provide an overview of Spain’s policies on diversity management in a selected set of particular policy areas and public debates already framing the Spanish political agenda. I shall attempt to respond to the so-called ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ currently affecting Europe,³ showing the complexity arising from the Spanish case study and, by inference, offering at the end a heuristic mode of interpretation of Spanish multiple diversities. I shall now better conceptualize this theoretical framework and justify why Spain can be regarded as a laboratory within the given diversity policy debate in Europe.

By using the term ‘multiple diversity’ I wish to highlight the fact that the current diversity challenges in Spain foster a ‘mirror effect’ to the Spanish democratic transition period itself, where some questions related to identity needed to be discussed and solved in order to build the new democratic Spain and its model of society. These questions concern the diversity of nationalities and languages in Spain, but also what to do with the political power of the Catholic Church in public spheres in general and in the education system in particular, when various potential answers from the transition period come back again. The fact that new challenges arising from the different diversities spark more complex questions to old unresolved diversity challenges is what ‘multiple diversities’ tries also to capture. By applying this notion we can contribute to the current diversity debate in Europe, showing how the analysis of Spain can play an illustrative role when different dynamics of diversity frameworks interact. It is at this point that Spain can be presented as a laboratory of diversity management within the current European diversity debate.

Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of Spain is that immigration was not included in the democratic transition agenda, so that no definition in the distribution of competences or in the Spanish administrative structure has ever taken place. Immigration has never been considered as a power competence to be defined either in the constitutional framework or in any other constitutional law delimiting governance and policy management. Immigration emerged as an administrative and technical issue in the 1990s, and as a political and social issue in 2000. Spain therefore has to face the difficulty of managing this new phenomenon without any political and legal structure in place to deal with it. Spain is developing its competence on immigration inductively, by taking the policy instruments it has in its administrative and policy structure, and constructing its legal and regulatory instruments respecting its already decentralized division of power. It is also in this sense that Spain is a laboratory in a process of definition of its own philosophy. As such, Spain is an example of many issues which have already existed in other countries for a long time. And this is difficult to analyse, because some countries such as the US, Australia and Canada have been shaped taking immigrants into account. In some cases, immigration policies have come later but have been incorporated into a consolidated and already-existing federal/multi-level structure without any multinational dimension (Germany), or even with a multinational structure, but with a strict division of territory along identity or language lines such as in Switzerland and Belgium (Joppke and Seidle, 2012).

It is within this structural context that I propose to conceptualize diversity in Spain as ‘multiple diversity’. In this sense, this book is about diversity both as a concept and as a policy. Indeed, the epicentre of the analysis is how the ‘diversity of diversities’ interacts. This book not only focuses on conceptual thinking on diversity but also facilitates policy thinking on the concept involved in novel policy approaches towards diversity.

We shall then see how the concept of diversity is not set in stone and is not politically neutral. I always say there is something magical that happens when those who define diversity never include themselves inside the category. That is, those who claim to have the monopoly of the definition of diversity never incorporate their own differential features within the semantics of diversity. Paraphrasing Blommaert and Verschueren (1998) when they say that ‘the discourse on diversity is an instrument for the reproduction of social problems, forms of inequality and majority power’ (1998: 4), and that there is an ideological construction of a problem of diversity, since it seems that the definition is dominated and controlled by the majority and even a tendency to ‘abnormalise the other’ (1998: 19–20), we can apply this to the Spanish case. The discourse of diversity mirrors ontological national identity problems coming from the transition period in the 1980s, since most of the already-existing dynamics of diversity do not yet have a consensual answer of what sort of society they project to live in together with different national identities beyond the democratic form of organization. Spain is a laboratory since at least two different frameworks of diversity meet, following different historical paths, and expressing different froms of interaction between different categories of diversity (religion, language, culture, nationality).

In the current European debate on diversity, it has been noted that theories and concepts of diversity having their origins in North America have difficulties of applicability in Europe (Modood, Triandafyllidou and Zapata-Barrero, 2006). However, more generally, there are also specific theoretical stances and debates over diversity which are very heavily dependent, also in scholarly debates, upon real political disputes, dilemmas, structural contexts and specific historical points. Therefore, this book is particularly interested in showing how the concept of diversity is many-fold and covers different policy spheres (education, workplace and the political sphere), where interactions between different dynamics of diversity take place and play, as we shall see, a structural role.

I shall also argue that, conceptually, ‘diversity’ has no unified meaning. It is a constructed category, which takes its meaning according to context. I shall also consider ‘diversity’ as an interpretative concept, in the sense that it helps us interpret the new dynamics that have to be incorporated within the policy and management realm. It is thus ‘constructed by societal agents by drawing demarcation lines between classifications with social meanings and sometimes defining certain classifications as the dominant ones’ (Faist, 2009: 178). One of the basic premises of this book is that the first principle to clarify in a diverse context is diversity itself. It is also in this sense that I shall defend theoretically that Spain is a laboratory of ‘multiple diversities’.

In this conceptual framework, this book focuses mainly on immigration-related diversity. There has also been a tendency in immigration theory to understand the category of immigration in a uniform, homogeneous way. However, linked to diversity, some authors argue that there is a ‘diversification of diversity’ and that the best notion encapsulating the reality is ‘super-diversity’, pointing to the necessity of considering multidimensional conditions and processes affecting immigrants (Vertovec, 2007), such as multiple immigration statuses, varying entitlements/restrictions/rights, labour market experiences, gender and age profiles, geographic distribution and mixed responses of service providers. This way of thinking can also be applied to debates surrounding other diversities, such as religious, language and national diversities that are (re)activated by the presence of immigrants. These various immigrant categories and their sub-categories represent different systems and levels of rights, opportunities, constraints and ‘access to full membership’. Existing theories and methods of studying migration and diversity are yet to take account of or be thoroughly applied to super-diversity.

Vertovec (2007: 1024) defines ‘super-diversity’ as ‘a notion intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced. Such a condition is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade’. The premise of Vertovec’s theoretical framework is that we have to take into account both the ‘multiple immigrants demand’ and its multiple origins and conditions. This way of thinking needs still to be applied to debates surrounding other diversities, such as religious, language and national diversities that may be, as mentioned earlier, (re)activated by the presence of immigrants.

Taking the Spanish context into account we can see that immigrant diversity does not come in an ex-novo context, but in an already dynamic diversity, that perhaps the concept of ‘super-diversity’ assumes. There is then a historical background of diversity to the very identity of Spain, which is basically multinational and religious, which plays a driving role in understanding current policy answers. Theoretically, then, in this book I argue that immigration is not so much a component of diversity, as is assumed in given debates, but a vehicle through which existing diversities are brought to the fore. This means that the arrival of immigrants, with their diversity of religions, languages and cultures, reactivate other unresolved identity-related debates in a given country. For Spain we have to go back to the democratic transition period, and see how new immigration-related challenges today reactivate old questions related to religion and national languages (Zapata, 2010a). The question of how to manage the conditions of diversity, to use Gagnon, Guibernau and Rocher’s (2003) expression, provokes, in this respect, a mirror effect regarding how Spain conceives of itself as a diverse society. Immigration is not, then, a specific type of diversity separated from other types of diversity (linguistic, religious, national), but rather a vehicle for the expression of ‘multiple diversities’, category-based, rather than group-based as the diversity-related immigration theory assumes (Zapata-Barrero, 2010b: 44–45).

This also means that we are interested in the cultural and practical effects of living in an increasingly diverse context. Diversity causes a qualitative change in the relations between people and between people and institutions (such as education), at the society level in general and in the political arena in particular, and also between workers at their working place. These three arenas will be the subject of an in-depth analysis. They are at the root of a complex process of change in accommodation, where all dimensions of the basic structure of Spanish society are affected. A country or a public organization that recognizes its dynamics of diversity, the traditional ones such as religion and national identity, but especially the new ones, related to cultural practices, religion, language and nationality, is implicitly expressing a political recognition to ‘multiple diversity’.

Given this first theoretical framework, I would like to invite the reader to see the argument also from another angle. I shall demonstrate how the Spanish societal structure has difficulties in adapting to new dynamics of immigration-related diversity. Diversity is considered as a new paradigm since it involves policies, programmes and routines (Faist, 2009), and as such Spain shows the system of restrictions adjusting practices to old and new forms of diversity in order to ‘mainstream’ their structures and other routines, which were a matter of agreement during the democratic transition.

In sum, the fact that diversity is often the subject of theoretical debates is illustrated by the multitude of academic publications on diversity in the area of political theory. However, this meeting between two frameworks of diversity, the old one related to religion and national identity, and the new ones related to diversity of religions, languages, cultures and nationalities, as exemplifies the case of Spain, has not been thoroughly analysed. It is this added dimension which illustrates the multiple diversity debate I would like to put forward. For example, some theorists focus on cultural diversity (Kymlicka, 1995; Jones, 1998; Parekh, 2000; Phillips, 2008), while others discard culture as a useful concept, because it might not be specific enough to describe the dynamics of diversity (Phillips, 2007). They believe markers such as race and religion (Thompson, 2008) or additional variables such as immigrant statuses, divergent labour market experiences, gender and age profiles, special distribution and mixed local area responses (Vertovec, 2007) might be more adequate. There are many theorists who believe there are multiple relevant forms of diversity (Verloo 2006; Yuval-Davis, 2006). Some of them doubt they should be treated in the same way, separating for example gender diversity versus ethnic diversity (Okin, 1998; Sinclair, 2000), while others believe all of these social-collective forms of diversity should be replaced by more neutral forms of diversity such as lifestyle, thinking types, professional experience, personality types and functional background (Wise and Tschirhart, 2000; Point and Singh 2003). The fact that diversity is the subject of policy debate as well is illustrated by the multitude of academic publications of diversity policies. Some authors focus on national or regional public policies, often linked to anti-discrimination or integration, distinguishing specific policy discourses or policy regimes with regard to diversity (Castles, 2002; Zapata-Barrero, 2009c). Other scholars focus on policies at the organizational level (whether public institutions or private organizations), distinguishing specific policy approaches with regard to diversity (Liff, 1997; Wrench, 2007).

This conceptualization of multiple diversity will be at the forefront of the empirical analysis I will do at three basic policy areas: education, workplace and political rights, because it is here that the current immigration debate in Spain better exemplifies this multiple diversity dynamics. A decentralized education system, discrimination in the workplace and ethnicization of political rights are direct examples of how this multiple diversity framework has a heuristic value, which will be the main subject of the concluding chapter. At this point we enter the second and third step of my argumentation, after showing the framework of multiple diversity: namely, the practical approach followed by Spanish policy decisions, and, finally the purpose to offer at the end, and by inference of the three areas of analysis, a heuristic model, which helps us interpret the ‘Spanish laboratory of diversities’. In order to understand better this heuristic final purpose, let me first introduce the second step of my argumentation – the argument I will defend within this multiple diversity framework – the practical approach followed by Spain.

I argue that the multiple diversity framework helps us to understand why Spain is following a practical approach. All these three policy areas (education, workplace and political rights) illustrate both concrete case studies of multiple diversity, but also its limits for institutional and structural innovation.

I shall then justify why I introduce the idea of ‘limit’ here. The practical approach argument plays both an explanatory function in my analysis, since it helps explain institutional and policy answers to diversity-related conflicts, and also an interpretative function, since it allows me to interpret (to give meaning to) the limits of institutional innovation and structural change. The practical approach helps us, then, both to explain and interpret the limit for innovation and change in Spain. All three policy areas present both an example of multiple diversity and its limits for institutional and structural innovation.

The main academic challenge we have is to connect the theoretical and empirical analysis of Spain. Each policy realm analyzed (education, workplace and political rights) defines diversity and studies diversity in its own specific way, but always showing a practical approach and how this approach is at the origin of a system of restrictions limiting policy innovation and structural change.

Spain has experienced a sharp increase in immigration over the last twenty years. This has also involved an increase in new patterns of diversity within the pre-existing context of diversity with Spain as multinational State. There are several studies describing this new dynamic, but there has been no broad research focused on identifying a general ‘philosophy’ behind political reactions and policy practices in this multiple diversity framework. What is the Spanish approach to diversity related to immigration? This is perhaps the main question that most international and European scholars working on immigration and diversity pose when they refer to Spain. This question is the driving force behind this book. Within this conceptual framework of multiple diversity, I shall argue that the main answer is that Spain is following ‘a practical approach’.

Bearing in mind the crucial importance of context in the European diversity debate, the main argument of this book is that this practical approach works as a restraint to political innovation and institutional framing, since most of the arguments behind this approach come from unresolved problems related to identity-diversity arising from the relatively recent democratic transition period. If we define ‘philosophy of immigration’ as a set of explicit and coherently developed policies for managing the accommodation of diversity related to immigration, then Spain’s philosophy is undoubtedly a practical one. I shall now define the argument that will serve as guiding thread in the analysis of each policy area.

By ‘practical philosophy’, I basically mean both that Spain works by induction, taking policy instruments and developing their legal and regulatory frameworks while respecting its already politically and administratively decentralized structure, and that the Spanish way of accommodating diversity is not based on established and preconceived ideas which project its own vision of society, such as French republicanism or British multiculturalism, but instead on questions and answers that arise in the day-to-day governance of immigration, as will be seen in the education, workplace and political participation policy fields. This pragmatism provides a strategic direction for political action. As we are in an interpretative framework of analysis rather than an explanatory one, we will also consider for all three areas examined that one common factor explaining this pragmatism is the historical and structural background, coming basically from the democratic transition and the way Spain has left aside unresolved questions related to its own diversity arising from identity (multinationality and religion). But it is also worth stressing an important advantage of this practical philosophy: it is guided by anticipation, in contrast to the experiences of other European countries. Spain is benefiting from this ‘time advantage’ based on pragmatic criteria, as it has already seen the potential social problems of the future by looking at other European States. It is on this basis that Spain is building its own philosophy. This is why I will also argue that the Spanish practical philosophy is neither universalistic nor enclosed by rigid theoretical principles, but is instead a philosophy constructed using practical questions generated by context and by immediate question/ policy answers logic of action.

The first set of case studies focuses on the measures and practices adopted when dealing with diversity in secondary education. At this point I shall show that the practical approach drives most of the policy decisions in an educational decentralized system that is itself controversial and shows the multiplicity of diversity that is at stake (i.e. language, religion, culture etc.). The second set of case studies assesses the implementation of the European Union (EU) 2000 anti-discrimination directive in the workplace, which has been, as we shall argue, one of the main criticisms of the Spanish policy in the workplace, and demonstrates how the practical approach governing Spanish philosophy avoids introducing innovation and new patterns of behaviour in one prominent sector, which contributes to the growth of irregular migration with its informal market. Finally, the third set of case studies considers voting rights and overall issues of political participation and representation of immigrant communities in Spain. Here again the practical approach will operate negatively, avoiding solution