| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 58

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Catherine Dauvergne, Humanitarianism, Identity, and Nation: Migration Laws of Australia and Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press 2005)

REFUGEE AND MIGRATION policies have moved into the centre of global public debate, particularly after the events of 2001 and their aftermath. Refugees and migrants are being constructed as threats to national interests and national security. Now, Catherine Dauvergne offers a fresh perspective of the relationship among refugee migration, humanitarianism, and national identity. This perspective suggests that humanitarianism shapes national identity not only because inviting newcomers from "non-traditional" countries of origin changes the demographic and cultural composition of the country, but also because nations express their cultural "essence" through assuming political stances towards the definition, treatment, and admission of non-citizens who need help. Humanitarianism, Identity, and Nation examines the latter aspect of the relationship between humanitarianism and national identity in the context of Australia and Canada. As a new volume in the Law and Society Series by UBC Press, the book has a clear focus on law and its interpretation by government, administration, and the courts. However, it also expands this focus by discussing the links between liberal political philosophy and the construction of individual and national identities.

The book consists of eight chapters (including the Introduction and Conclusion), which are divided into two parts. The three substantive chapters of Part 1 articulate a theoretical framework of how migration law and humanitarianism relate to national identity. In Chapter 2, Dauvergne borrows from social theory and social psychology to illustrate how law constructs and is constructed by national identity. Chapter 3 then funnels this discussion to a migration context. Chapter 4, which Dauvergne describes as "the heart of this book," (60) zooms in on liberal political philosophy and its proponents to investigate the meaning of humanitarianism in the context of migration politics. This chapter leads to the conclusion that: "Humanitarianism provides a stand-in for justice in the immigration realm while reinforcing the boundary between an 'us' group and a 'them' group. Justice is a standard that implies, and applies, equality between individuals. Humanitarianism is the opposite; it is grounded in a specific type of difference created by material inequality." (72)

Dauvergne ties this observation back to the issue of national identity by suggesting that humanitarianism enables the members of a national community to define the "other" as the mirror image of the national self, and to characterize the nation as "good" by offering not only protection from humanitarian hardship to the identified beneficiaries, but also the prospect of a new identity. "Part of our humanitarianism is about ... applauding ourselves," (73) Dauvergne observes.

Part 2 of the book presents empirical evidence from studies in Australia and Canada for which the author reviewed legal cases and observed hearings. Chapter 5 examines the refugee admission processes and legal frameworks in the two countries, and how these processes and frameworks construct refugees as the "other" in opposition to national identity. Chapter 6 examines this "othering" process in the context of Canadian and Australian cases that do not directly fall under the refugee category, but in which admission is nevertheless granted (or denied) based on humanitarian grounds. The final substantive chapter investigates decisions by the highest courts of the two countries and reveals how rights discourses relate to humanitarianism, the situation of refugees, and the identity of the nation. A short conclusion summarizes the contributions of the book to the theoretical literature in law and the construction of national identity in Australia and Canada, and puts the book's theoretical and empirical findings in a wider context of identity construction pertaining to migrants and nations at a global scale.

The theoretical project of the book — to bridge literatures on identity formation, nationhood, and liberal political philosophy in the concrete context of refugee and humanitarian migration — is novel and a welcome contribution to the study of migration and law. One of the book's strengths is precisely its theoretical perspective on humanitarianism from a position of law and political philosophy. However, readers with different disciplinary backgrounds may perhaps wonder why more literature on social and cultural theory was not included in the author's arguments. In my view, the case Dauvergne argues would lend itself to a more rigorous incorporation of post-structural and other contemporary approaches to identity construction and nationhood. This shortcoming of the book, however, should not be interpreted as negligence, but rather as an intriguing possibility to engage law and legal practice towards migration even deeper with contemporary social and cultural theory.

Another positive aspect of the book is the level of detail devoted to the empirical information presented in Chapters 5–7. Altogether, 135 pages of the 241-page book (the publisher incorrectly claims in a promotional flyer that it has 256 pages!) are devoted to these three chapters. Although most readers will appreciate the empirical rigour of the book, I think the presentation of the empirical evidence could have been tightened without compromising its persuasiveness. A tightening of the empirical chapters in combination with an expansion of the theoretical discussion would have resulted in a greater balance between the two parts of the book—at least in terms of numbers of pages devoted to each part.

Similar to the theoretical project, which Dauvergne initiates with this book, so is the empirical work far from complete. Fascinating questions emerge when the geographical context of the central argument, that humanitarianism is about national identity, is extended to other traditional immigrant countries, such as the United States, or to countries that lack a strong identity as an immigration country, such as Germany or Switzerland, but nevertheless are committed to humanitarianism. The book has the potential to provide a conceptual anchor for future studies that seek to answer these and related questions.

As the audience of the book I envision primarily academics and students in law, political science, and migration studies. The latter, of course, encapsulates a range of disciplines throughout the social sciences, including anthropology, geography, and sociology. The readers of this journal may be interested in this book in order to obtain a perspective of migration politics that is not solely centred on economic gain and labour market regulation. The fact that the book is available in both cloth and paper—for $75.00 and $29.95, according to the publisher — makes it attractive to libraries and accessible to individuals and graduate students. Humanitarianism, Identity, and Nation presents stimulating and thought-provoking reading that I would recommend to anyone seeking to better understand the link between migration, nationhood, and identity.


Harald Bauder University of Guelph

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.