Abstract
In this chapter, I propose to explore the cultivation of the secular selves and bodies of state agents in charge of implementing the fight against marriages of convenience in Brussels. I argue that civil servants operate a shift between the official goal of preventing "cheaters" who use marriage as a way to cross European boundaries, and the “civilizational project” at work by selecting “modern” couples and rejecting those somehow perceived as archaic. I will develop a twofold reflection on the concrete application of two apparently contradictory activities at the core of the professional routines of the civil servants I worked with. The first is about the vicissitudes and the difficulty to concretize the ideal of neutrality and the principle of impersonality at the core of the secular state. The second reflection concerns the concrete implementation of the fight against marriages of convenience where it is not unusual to observe administrative employee diverting the legislation on marriage of convenience to refuse Islamic arranged marriage on the grounds that parties are ignorant of each other and/or the fact that union is the result of a rapid process.
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Notes
- 1.
Cityville or Steenzeel are fictive names for existing municipalities of Brussels in order to preserve anonymity.
- 2.
The day before Saint Valentine’s Day of 2013, I organized a one-day conference (Journée d’étude L’amour et ses frontières : la régulation étatique des mariages transnationaux, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 13 February 2013, http://is.ulb.ac.be/uploads/pdf/pour%20Agenda/2013/affiche%20JE13fev13.pdf) in an effort to establish a dialogue between scholars from different European countries and associative groups working on cross-border marriages. I invited people from my fieldwork (administrative employees and policemen specialized in these cases) to be part of the public (see Maskens 2013).
- 3.
Thanks to Nadia Fadil for her generous comments on a previous version of this chapter.
- 4.
My translation.
- 5.
An administrative circular is provided to help employees in their task of assessing fake marriages. Elements that may indicate a sham marriage include:The parties do not understand each other or have difficulties in having a dialogue, or appeal to an interpreter;The parties never met before the marriage;One of the parties lives with somebody else in a long-term arrangement;The parties do not know the name or the nationality of the other;One of the future spouses does not know where the other one works;There is an obvious difference between the statements of the two parties regarding the circumstances of their meeting; A sum of money is promised to contract the marriage; One or both are engaged in prostitution; There is the intervention of an intermediary; A significant difference in age.
- 6.
My fieldwork took place in various civil registrar offices in Brussels, between January 2012 and June 2013. My participant observation and field descriptions included administrative procedures, 15 two-hour interviews with couples wanting to get married, and interviews with 15 members of staff in these offices. I also conducted interviews with ten deputy town mayors of various Brussels civil registrar offices. My work involved the examination of various types of stored data, meetings with specialized police, interviews with lawyers representing municipalities, and the examination of trial proceedings of a typical “grey marriage.” The study was enriched with interviews with the founder of a non-governmental organization called “Trapped Hearts” which defends the rights of the victims of such grey marriages and also interviews with Belgian citizens who have engaged in sham marriages.
- 7.
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach notes that it was in 2007 that the French Integration Minister Eric Besson coined the term “grey marriage” to describe a union between a French partner marrying for love and a foreign partner marrying solely for “migratory purposes” (2013, 1). She adds that this “term has since made its way into parliamentary debates, legal texts and bureaucratic practices, and the public debate around the notion has contributed to the emergence of a generalized climate of suspicion towards French-foreign couples ”. The term spread in Belgium at the same period and also fuels the climate of suspicion regarding migrants in this country. This term federates civil registrar officers who gathered years earlier alerted by reports of abuse of some of their colleagues. To explain their initial need for collective meetings, many of them related the cases of young women coming in their office shortly after their wedding, crying because they realize their partner only wanted to obtain residence permit. Civil registrar officers base their commitment on forms of “rescue narrative” (Bracke 2012) that gives their ungrateful task of inspector of affects an extra touch of soul. Those meetings prefigured a change of legislation since 1999 through preventive measures and punitive means since early 2006 (Foblets and Vanheule 2006, 264).
- 8.
I learnt later on that for the head of the department, this “distance” lied in the fact that Kayla was lesbian.
- 9.
The CPAS is the Centre Public d’Action Sociale, a state organization providing social assistance.
- 10.
Here the assumption is that there would be a clear equivalence between intimate events, the intensity and quality of a relationship, and its formulation in words and sentences. The way culture shapes intimacy and the way we talk about it is never considered by state agents.
- 11.
There is an Arabic saying condensing this very idea: “the mirror of love is blind, it makes zucchini into okra”.
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Maskens, M. (2017). Secular Selves and Bodies: The Case of State Agents in Charge of Implementing the Fight against Marriages of Convenience in Brussels. In: Mapril, J., Blanes, R., Giumbelli, E., Wilson, E. (eds) Secularisms in a Postsecular Age?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43726-2_2
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