The Politics of Multiculturalism: Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain

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Author: Ben Pitcher

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The Politics of Multiculturalism

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The Politics of Multiculturalism Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain Ben Pitcher

© Ben Pitcher 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21034–9 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–21034–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To the memory of Mike Pitcher


Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: The Politics of Multiculturalism

1

1.

Understanding the Politics of Multiculturalism

11

2.

Black in the Union Jack: The Britishness Project

39

3.

Multiculturalism, Community and ‘the White Working Class’

75

4.

Multicultural Conflicts: The ‘Feminist’ State

109

5.

On the Islamic Question: Multicultural Nationalism and the War on Terror

135

Conclusion: Multiculturalism beyond ‘the Death of Multiculturalism’

163

Notes

178

References

193

Index

213

vii


Acknowledgements The following people have helped me out in one way or another during the researching and writing of this book, so thanks are due to Zeinab Abdi, Karen Cross, Gareth Farmer, Denis Fernando, Petra Grasl, Henriette Gunkel, Leon Gurevitch, Sarah Kavanagh, Fatima Mohammad Bhikoo, Mica Nava, Kate Pitcher, Rosie Pitcher, Tim Pitcher, Bill Schwarz, Ash Sharma, Sanjay Sharma, Helen Taylor and Nira Yuval-Davis. Thanks to Shirley Tan, Olivia Middleton and Philippa Grand at Palgrave Macmillan. I’d also like to thank my students at East London, Middlesex and South Bank, who will recognize some of this. Thanks above all to Rebecca Bramall for her love and support, and for pointing out the errors that/which I may or may not have corrected. The author and publishers wish to thank Lewisham Council for permission to reproduce the citizenship ceremony programme on page 70. I am also grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their financial support.

ix


Introduction: The Politics of Multiculturalism

Though this book sets out to make some sense of the contemporary politics of multiculturalism, it does so in full knowledge of the fact that what ‘multiculturalism’ describes in public debate is not a stable or coherent entity. Widespread discussion of the concept has not crystallized and focused debate, but more often than not divided and confused it. Multiculturalism is rejected, feted, celebrated or condemned from such a wide range of positions that it is often hard to pin down precisely what it might refer to in any particular instance, frustrating any attempts that might be made to derive a more general meaning from it. Yet it is this very instability and incoherency that makes multiculturalism such an important subject of investigation: it has become a point of contention and controversy around which a number of questions have organized themselves, the focus of an incredible variety of social, cultural and political issues. Whether to do with discussions about national loyalty or the origins of social cohesion, from arguments about appropriate behaviours for majorities and minorities to conflicts across and between racialized groups, from notions about what should be on the school curriculum to the nature of civil life, or from issues of disenfranchisement and social unrest to the relationship between race, terrorism and war, ideas about multiculturalism have increasingly become a part of contemporary life. The salience of multiculturalism to these arguments, discussions and debates is by no means accidental, and the attention it has received cannot be explained away simply by reference to the vagaries of fashion. Multiculturalism is meaningful because it signifies – however confusingly or inchoately – some of the key issues in the contemporary politics of race. Indeed, the claim I want to make from the start is that it is impossible to fully understand the politics of race and racism in our current 1

2 The Politics of Multiculturalism

historical moment without a sustained focus on multiculturalism. I will in due course give a more comprehensive definition of the term, but at this stage I simply want to recognize how multiculturalism relates to what we might call the facticity of difference, by which I mean the sense in which the existence of cultural difference – whether understood in terms of race, ethnicity, or religion – has become fully acknowledged as a constituent part of the societies within which we live today. In this most basic of senses, and irrespective of the extent to which it is tolerated, celebrated or condemned, multiculturalism describes the widespread recognition that we can no longer be in any doubt as to whether or not cultural difference is here to stay. The once prevalent fantasy of a ‘return’ to socially homogeneous societies that existed ‘before’ cultural difference has become increasingly unsustainable, and those engaged in the contemporary politics of race have accordingly shifted their emphasis onto questions of dealing with, managing, and understanding what that difference means. In this book I want to think about multiculturalism as a pragmatic concept with which to understand this particular moment in the politics of race: it does not describe an abstract ideal of social organization, but rather an already-existing sociopolitical reality of which cultural difference has become a defining feature.1 I begin Chapter 1 by suggesting that the facticity of difference has an important bearing on how we as students, researchers and political actors understand and engage with the politics of race and racism. Although acknowledging this might seem like quite a straightforward thing to do, I argue that a recognition of multiculturalism’s importance might actually be impeded by the some of the ways we have become accustomed to thinking about race politics. In order to effectively identify, confront or campaign against racist practices, I propose that we need to rethink some of the basic premisses of anti-racism. While the anti-racist disposition tends to make a clear and unambiguous distinction between racism and anti-racism, this book suggests that in order to really understand what is at stake in the contemporary politics of race, we must take account of the ways in which anti-racism has itself shaped in important ways the field of race discourse, helping to determine what can and cannot be said in the politics of race. The term ‘political correctness’ (PC) is often used by the right to rail against what is said to be the imposition of a left-wing moralism on public debate. This is in some respects an understandable interpretation, given the important role the left has historically played in deciding what is sayable and unsayable in public discourse. Yet this

Introduction: The Politics of Multiculturalism 3

definition of PC is actually rather disingenuous, because it does not admit the extent to which the terms of public debate are structured and shaped as much by the right as by the left. A more useful understanding of PC, then, might recognize that it describes the range of things that may be legitimately said and done about a particular subject. In this sense, PC is a term that is partisan neither to the left or the right, and can indeed take into account the influence of positions that cannot be readily mapped onto a left-right axis. If we think of PC, then, as an analytic term that simply describes the parameters of public debate, we can use it to clarify what exactly is going on in relation to our subject: PC describes the territory of social and political consensus that holds at any particular moment in the politics of race and racism. Consensus need not imply homogeneity, and indeed the terrain of PC is strafed by conflicting positions and interests (indeed it is this conflict that is actually constitutive of PC in the first place). The claim I am making in this book is, therefore, that ‘multiculturalism’ provides the best description of PC in the contemporary politics of race. It is a discursive formation that characterizes the (contingent) totality of positions that social actors are able to take within the bounds of social acceptability. And so rather than think of multiculturalism as a term that brings with it a particular political agenda (an agenda that would identify it as a project, say, of the left or the right), I employ multiculturalism here to describe a territory of minimal agreement in the politics of race. Multiculturalism therefore requires us to rethink anti-racism because it recognizes what is blindingly obvious to anyone who thinks about what is actually going on in the contemporary politics of race: that it has become increasingly hard to think of (as it is often presented) as an explicit, straightforward struggle between racists and anti-racists. Multiculturalism describes how the politics of race and racism actually happens, where all social actors are in agreement on the facticity of difference (and, moreover, will tend to go out of their way to stress their anti-racist credentials). To begin with this basic recognition is not in any way to diminish the importance of fighting racism, but simply to acknowledge a basic fact about the field of legitimate racial reference. It forces us to recognize that practices that we would want to critique and confront as racist are now expressed in or legitimized by terms that as a basic principle assert their rejection of racism. The task of confronting disavowed racism requires, this book argues, more attention to what positions taken in the politics of race actually do, rather than taking at face value what they say they do.


To think about multiculturalism as the ground on which the contemporary politics of race takes place means that it becomes important to understand the positions that social and political actors take up upon it. If the battles fought in the politics of race and racism are won and lost on the terrain of multiculturalism, it is necessary to account for the specific ways in which these struggles occur. As well as an interest in how the politics of multiculturalism take place, this book is also concerned with understanding why they take place. Again, this emphasis takes us away from the racism/anti-racism binary, and places a focus on the productive nature of multicultural discourse. Multiculturalism is a terrain on which things get done, where various social actors deploy forms of social and cultural politics to serve their interests and objectives. Thus multiculturalism can, I suggest, also be thought of as a form of social practice, a practice that not only engages with an existing repertoire of race politics, but can be shown to serve as a tool for its expansion, drawing in a diverse range of issues that come to be understood, explored and enacted within a framework of race. The status of multiculturalism as a form of social practice draws our attention to the kinds of things that a multicultural politics does, and reminds us of the particular importance to multiculturalism of a national horizon. Multiculturalism is always in some respect to do with the organization and composition of the societies we live in. Whether or not social actors themselves have social jurisdiction, their engagement with the politics of race is nearly always an involvement in what happens – or what they think should happen – at a national level of identity and belonging. Whatever claims may be made as to the importance of forms of social organization at local or transnational levels (claims which will be explored and given due credence in the pages that follow), the national remains an ultimate horizon. This book’s engagement with multiculturalism accordingly brings to the fore the role of the state as the single most important social actor in the politics of race, and indeed concentrates on an analysis of multiculturalism as a form of state practice. This is a focus that provides an especially useful point of entry into the subject, and allows me to demonstrate how and why it is that multiculturalism has become such an important mechanism for engaging with, manipulating, modifying, constructing and inventing contemporary race discourse. The state serves of course as a point of focus around which other actors – the media, religious, campaigning and advocacy groups, and so on – interact and interrelate. This book takes as a case study the British state under New Labour to explore the specific conditions of multicultural practice. The politics of


multiculturalism are invariably stamped with a character in many respects unique to the social and cultural contexts in which they have been generated, and it would be an act of unhelpful generalization to deviate from these circumstances and conditions of practice. For example, the politics of race in Britain is clearly marked by the nation’s particular historical status as a major imperial power, and its continuing relationship with its ex-colonial possessions, their diasporas, cultures and traditions. The distinctive character of this history, from the days of slavery to postcolonial immigration and beyond, has of course shaped a distinctive experience that demands careful attention to the specificities of British multiculturalism. Similarly, the realm of state practice that provides the focus of this book requires an attentiveness not only to the history of legislation, policy and wider public debate within which race is constituted as a matter of interest and concern, but also the specific configurations of race politics that obtain within governments and parties. For example, the national identity politics of Britishness (explored in Chapter 2) are impossible to understand without taking into account New Labour’s manoeuvrings to replace the Conservatives as the party of mainstream British nationalism. Having said this, there are, if we adopt a broader perspective, many parallels to be drawn between the issues described here and developments in a range of contemporary social contexts, in Europe and beyond. As well as referencing some of these developments, this book sets out to provide some conceptual tools, frameworks and vocabularies that can help us make sense of the key dynamics and problematics of race politics today. This book’s practical orientation to comprehending the changing conditions of racial practice in Britain has at the same time an important theoretical dimension that can be usefully applied to a far wider range of social formations. In its exploration of the terms by which social actors are increasingly engaging with the facticity of difference, this book also gives some attention to the broader social, cultural and political contexts within which this paradigmatic change is taking place. One very important factor underlying the contemporary politics of multiculturalism the world over is the sense in which, for a variety of reasons, some of the predicates of an ‘old’ race politics have been superceded or have fallen away. For example, the increasing dominance of neoliberal political and economic relations have been registered on a worldwide basis, and certain related phenomena – such as increasing transnational mobility, the global interconnectedness enabled by media and information technology, or shifts in social


morphology relating to the rise of the service sector in the global North – have had a palpable effect on the composition, character and orientation of many present-day societies. There is a widespread recognition that such changes do not necessarily rely in quite the same ways on explicitly racist forms of social organization and exploitation as older political and economic arrangements once did. While I would suggest that this does not mean – as some have argued – that capitalism in its neoliberal incarnation is no longer implicated in the creation and maintenance of the structures of race and racism, it does indicate that the structures it produces and reproduces do not necessarily take the same forms as in the past. While the inefficiencies of older kinds of racial order may now be overcome by practices that are able to operate differently and differentially – by making use of ideas of race and culture in a more flexible and productive manner – this has entailed not the obsolescence but the transformation of racism. By recognizing that it has accordingly become necessary to think about the politics of race and racism within a new framework, this book’s case study of British multiculturalism provides an example of some of the ways such rethinking may begin to be done. Within the broad context of global capitalist relations, a range of common themes and issues present themselves. Figurations of race in the contemporary politics of nationalism, for example, can be usefully understood in relation to attempts by political actors to inculcate some conception of social and cultural distinctiveness in the face of increasing challenges to the sovereignty of nation-states brought about by the demands and requirements of transnational capital. Rather than think about racialized nationalism as a residual phenomenon, it can be shown to have taken on a new significance in our contemporary social formations: the politics of Britishness thus stands as just one example of a widespread concern in governmental and party politics to impute a definitive cultural content to the idea of national belonging. In the context of ‘fortress Europe’ and member states’ increasingly restrictive asylum and immigration regimes, the British case exemplifies some more general trends in contemporary race politics. This book examines too issues of social policy, regulation and control in the context of a deregulated and privatized civil realm, an increasingly common problematic within many contemporary states where racialized demands, competition and conflicts are serving as the conduit for protests against and expressions of social inequality and civic decline. It is in this context that far right parties have an increasing presence in a number of regional and national political frameworks,


particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. While this book cannot make a claim to comprehensiveness in dealing with these issues, its attempt to understand how dominant ideas of race are thus operationalized in new and complex ways provides us with some tools to understand better the conditions that have led to the resurgence of the far right. Also of wider international significance are the racial politics of the War on Terror, and in particular the degree to which the character of US foreign policy has shaped understandings of and engagements with Islam the world over. Centring on the British example, this book’s focus is on the circumstances of the 2005 London bombings and the way women’s rights have been championed as a justification for war. In other contexts, the newly central role of Islam within the politics of race and racism has given focus to a range of other debates and controversies, from the cartoons of Mohammed in Denmark to l’affaire foulard in France. Uniting all such disparate phenomena is the sense in which, while not necessarily reducible to the exigencies of the War on Terror, they have nevertheless served to cohere certain ideas of race similarly operative on a ‘civilizational’ horizon. It is in this climate that a racialized conception of ‘the West’ has come to be redrawn, and ideas of cultural superiority have been created through an incredibly complex reckoning with cultural difference. As a treatment of some of the local repercussions of the War on Terror as an inter- and transnational phenomenon, this book’s analysis makes a contribution towards a broader understanding of its racial politics. In more general terms, this book is committed to thinking critically about some of the longstanding frameworks that have been used to think about and understand its subject. It tries to be open to a consideration of what might be genuinely new about race and racism in the twenty first century, and in particular how we might need to rethink anti-racism in accordance with the changing conditions of racist practice. While its analysis is one that is local and specific, the issues it confronts have a far broader relevance, and will most likely continue to determine the parameters of race politics for some time to come.

Chapter outline Chapter 1 explores in more detail the conceptual framework I have just sketched out. I begin by considering the influence of anti-racism on the politics of race, and set out why a focus on multiculturalism equips us with the most useful tools for thinking about the current


conjuncture. I then go on to underline the historical importance of nationalism to racial politics, and the role of the state in this. Finally, I explain my emphasis on New Labour, the particularities of British race politics in the early twenty-first century, and the continued pertinence of the concept of ‘race crisis’. Chapter 2 begins by assessing New Labour’s motivations in its concerted project to redefine Britain’s national identity, often in explicitly multicultural terms. I outline the main causal influences of this project, which range from the electoral considerations of party politics and commitments to political devolution to the need to construct and reinforce a sense of social solidarity under the pressures of neoliberal reform. The chapter goes on to consider how New Labour have rationalized a turn to nationalist discourses given their longstanding association with the political right. I then take as a case study pronouncements on ‘Britishness’ made by the then Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown, and consider what has motivated a renewed interest in redefining Britain’s imperial history. This chapter goes on to consider how a multicultural politics of Britishness has extended beyond questions of legal entitlement to foreground ideas of cultural citizenship in defining the parameters of national belonging. Like the German conception of Leitkultur or the French debates around laïcité, the Britishness project has – with the introduction of citizenship tests and ceremonies – become a new means of deciding who does and does not belong to the nation-state. I argue that while the search for a positive content to Britishness is ultimately an impossible task, it nevertheless has a clear function in reproducing a racialized narrative of national belonging. While Chapter 2 looks at the national horizons of state multiculturalism, Chapter 3 explores how state discourses of race have been deployed in a policy response to social conflict at a local level, in particular to the so-called ‘race riots’ that occurred in the North of England in the summer of 2001. I argue that a particular idea of racial conflict provided the state with a convenient optic through which to approach the 2001 riots which, while having a highly complex range of causal factors, could appear to be remedied through a specific type of state intervention. The state was thus able to construct a crisis of race in terms that could be apparently remedied by its own preferred methods, namely the culturalist policy programme that goes by the name of ‘community cohesion’. Predicated on an ideal model of community derived from US communitarian theory, I argue that community cohesion’s apparent pluralism actually conceals a highly prescriptive agenda which


imposes the state’s own definition of community and sets out the terms of legitimate belief and behaviour that may occur within it. This chapter goes on to show how multicultural communitarianism has introduced a new social actor into the politics of race. Giving credence to reactionary forms of racial identification promoted by the far right, the white working class are conceived as a group with their own ‘ethnic’ culture, a set of legitimate cultural needs and aspirations to be taken into account in the delivery of multicultural social policy. I argue that the tendency to construct the white working class as a race apart is based on a failure to fully grasp the complex interrelationship between race and class. Erroneously viewed through the frame of a multicultural politics of race, the white working class are attributed a pseudo-emancipatory character which brings them into direct conflict with ‘traditionally’ racialized groups in civic funding projects and welfare regimes. Chapter 4 turns its attention to the British state’s role in mediating the relationship between race and gender in recent conflicts over cultural difference. While there have been significant critiques of multiculturalism from a feminist perspective, considerably less attention has been paid to the ways in which a discourse of gender equality has operated as part of a state’s racial politics. I consider how humanitarianfeminist arguments were deployed in Britain and the US in the legitimation of the war on Afghanistan, and how such discourses have longstanding precedents in colonial history. Exploring the implications of a racialized ‘feminism’ in the domestic sphere, I interrogate a range of multicultural controversies, from forced marriage to veiling and female genital mutilation. Making comparison with recent developments in other European states, I argue that the British state’s avowed role as a crusader for enlightened, feminist values has yoked issues of women’s rights to a nationalist and anti-immigrant politics, consolidating a racialized distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This chapter goes on to explore how it is that such discourses are able to escape the charge of racism, which relates to the way in which the state’s ‘feminism’ operates in an ethical register. Chapter 5 moves on to look at state multiculturalism beyond the nation-state. Taking as its subject the British state’s response to the London suicide bombings of July 2005, this chapter explores how an explicitly multicultural framework was employed to further a particular political agenda, concealing a full understanding of the bombers’ motives and screening the executive’s responsibility for its own foreign policy commitments. In particular, I demonstrate how depictions of an innocent and plural nation under attack centred on British Prime


Minister Tony Blair’s refusal to countenance the relationship between events in the domestic sphere and the prosecution of the War on Terror. I describe how the position of the state towards British Muslims is internally divided, as they are simultaneously celebrated and condemned on the basis of their utility to a nationalist project: in one respect held up as exemplars of multicultural Britishness, their transnational commitments have at the same time been problematized by the British state in its efforts to prescribe the terms of their belonging to the nation. This chapter illustrates how state multiculturalism stops abruptly at the material and symbolic borders of the nation-state, and demonstrates how a meaningful commitment to multicultural practice must find a way of proceeding beyond them. In my concluding chapter, I discuss how a multicultural politics has persisted beyond the recent declamation of its ‘death’, and how it continues to prove indispensable to a wide range of political projects. I finally consider some of the more theoretical questions relating to the multicultural turn in discourses of race, dealing particularly with the sense in which multiculturalism provides a mechanism for the persistence and renewal of racism beyond its formal denial, and the implications this has for anti-racist practice.

1 Understanding the Politics of Multiculturalism

Race and racism after anti-racism As I suggested in my introduction, the role anti-racism plays in shaping the politics of race is frequently underestimated, if not neglected entirely. This has arguably got quite a lot to do with the status of antiracism as a critical discourse: to recognize racist practices we will invariably make an implicit distinction between what is and is not racist. As such, the anti-racist position will tend to automatically construct a clear distinction between itself and what it identifies as racist practice. The diagnosis of racism, in other words, will be made on the basis of anti-racism’s own anti-racist credentials, which accordingly does not permit any ambiguities or contradictions in the status of racism itself. The conceptual purity of this basic critical manoeuvre is clearly accentuated by the ethical claim that anti-racism invariably makes, for the diagnosis of racism is never simply a matter of abstract categorization, but is always invested with a degree of moral force. While this ethical claim is a powerful and important component of antiracist practice, it accentuates anti-racism’s tendency to make a neat distinction between ‘the racists’ and ‘the anti-racists’. This distinction, I want to suggest, does not readily allow us to recognize or understand practices that take place between or beyond its limits. In practical terms, this means that prevailing discourses of anti-racism are ill-equipped to understand precisely what is at stake in the contemporary politics of race. I am not for a moment trying to propose that the Manichean certainties of anti-racism should be curbed by a more ‘generous’ or ‘understanding’ approach to racist practice; neither am I arguing that the moral force that motivates anti-racism is somehow misplaced or misconceived (indeed, it is precisely this moral force that has motivated 11


the writing of this book). All I am trying to suggest here is that antiracism – if it is to be effective – cannot simply rely on its immediate, abstract, diagnostic logic if it is to successfully recognize and contest contemporary acts of racism. Anti-racism needs to be able to understand precisely how anti-racist practice has itself shaped and modified the kinds of things that may be said and done about race and racism: it needs a reflexive understanding of its own influence on the field of racial discourse if it is to retain a purchase on the object of its critique. So what does this reflexive understanding of anti-racism entail? Firstly, it obliges us to recognize how little the binary logic of antiracism I have just sketched out actually corresponds to meaningful anti-racist practice. It requires us to account for the fact that, while anti-racism typically imagines a clear and straightforward confrontation between racism and itself, between racists and anti-racists and (in the most reductive sense), between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, the reality is actually far removed from this.1 In some respects anti-racism’s caricature of racist practice is simply imaginary, a quixotic projection of a fiction onto social reality. In other respects it is merely anachronistic, and involves anti-racism’s fixation onto historically concluded models of racist practice. In either case, the problem is that these targets of the anti-racist imagination effectively conceal the realities of effective anti-racism: we begin looking for racism in the wrong places, or misrecognize it as something else entirely. In order to prevent this from happening, it is important, as I have been suggesting, to acknowledge the longstanding historical relationship between racism and anti-racism, and in particular the ways in which anti-racism has modified the ways and means by which racist practices take place. Consider, for example, some of the dominant social and cultural conditions of contemporary Western societies. The demotic influence of minority cultures has been well documented, and their impact on popular culture over the last fifty or so years has been profound. Cultural diversity, commodified and consumed in arts, foodstuffs and fashions, has been widely valued as an intrinsic good (see, for example, Bhattacharyya, 1998). Racially exclusive ideas of culture, history and heritage have been widely and publicly (if inadequately) reconsidered by dominant social institutions (see Littler and Naidoo, 2005). Convincing arguments have also been made for the development of a convivial vernacular of cultural syncretism describing a genuinely new facet of life in postcolonial societies (Gilroy, 2004). Corporate cultures too have announced, if less frequently acted upon, a desire to better reflect the plural demographics of contemporary social life, and indeed

Understanding the Politics of Multiculturalism 13

it has been plausibly suggested that recent capitalist transformations have actively promoted a socially liberal approach to cultural difference. Underlying these shifts has been a more general trend – brought about not least by concerted anti-racist struggle – that has increasingly signalled the unacceptability of racism in the public sphere. Racial discourses have decreasing legitimacy as explicit markers of superiority and exclusion (Winant, 1997: 40), and have been largely replaced by ostensibly egalitarian commitments to ‘racelessness’, that is, an insistence on ‘rendering invisible the racial sinews of the body politic and modes of rule and regulation’ (Goldberg, 2002: 203). In our contemporary social formations, the charge of racism is a slur on one’s character, and to openly proclaim racist beliefs is effectively a declaration of one’s moral degeneracy. While not entirely reducible to its influence, these developments can in part be seen as examples of the impact anti-racism has had on the moral architecture of our societies and cultures. They all represent departures from the crude righteous confrontations of the anti-racist imaginary. Though the racist villains of anti-racism’s caricature might from time to time be glimpsed – embodied in the far-right ideologue or fascistic thug – it should be recognized that they are the exception rather than the rule (as, in truth, they always were). The critical point here is emphatically not that the politics of race and racism are somehow less important than they once were, or that anti-racism’s successes make the struggle against racial discrimination any less of a priority. Rather, it is to recognize that many decades of sustained anti-racist practice (over half a century in many Western nation-states) has shaped in real and significant terms dominant ways of seeing and thinking about race and racism. My understanding of what constitutes anti-racism here is of course an expansive one, and includes not only the influence of the most radical forms of anti-racist activism on racial practice, but also – and just as importantly – what might be called liberal and indeed conservative forms. To confine our analysis to the former might enable us to construct a reasonably watertight and coherent definition, but it would be to neglect anti-racism’s actual social and cultural history. It would also gloss over the extent to which anti-racist practice has always had its contradictions and internal conflicts, a fact that selfconsciously radical manifestations are often loath to acknowledge. The ‘radical’ rejoinder that the influence of liberal and conservative antiracism has brought about changes that are cosmetic or insincere is of course an important observation, but it misses the point of what is


really at stake here, which relates – as I have been suggesting – to antiracism’s role in shaping the terms of debate and the parameters of the field of racial reference. One key area that this book sets out to explore, then, is this basic conceptual shift whereby a hitherto marginal and oppositional set of beliefs and practices have been institutionalized within dominant discourses of race, identity and belonging. If, as Charles Mills suggests, ‘power relations can survive the formal dismantling of their more overt supports’ (Mills, 2003: 179), then it is important to pay attention not only to the ways in which racist practices may continue under these new conditions, but moreover what new forms of racism these new conditions might facilitate. It is my argument here that the impetus behind the widespread embrace of anti-racism needs to be understood at least as much in terms of the (procedural) negotiation of antiracism’s ethical imperatives as it is about a (substantive) attempt to address problems of racism and discrimination. While the widespread popularity of anti-racist positions does not necessarily condemn them to failure, it should be recognized that the ‘premature’ embrace of antiracism can effectively serve to conceal and perpetuate racist practice. As I will argue in Chapter 2, revisionist narratives of racism’s overcoming can expunge racism from the historical record, and in doing so can make it harder to admit and recognize racist practices that occur in the present. By cultivating a liberal and enlightened stance on questions of race, it is possible for social actors to defend themselves against accusations of racism, engaging in racist practices at precisely the same moment as their disavowal.2 If actors such as the state have learned to speak the language of diversity and anti-racism, becoming fluent in a progressive idiom of race while simultaneously maintaining and consolidating racist practices, then anti-racism is confronted with the crucial problem of maintaining hold on a critical discourse which has to all intents and purposes fallen into the hands of its adversaries. Such explicit disavowals of racism highlight the paradox of antiracism’s success in reforming the field of racial reference. With parallels to the impact of feminist language on the terminology of public debate (see Chapter 4), any approach to the question of race must be channelled through a public discourse that explicitly signals the illegitimacy of racist beliefs and practices. If the object ‘racism’ is consigned to the past and rejected in the present, its content does not necessarily vanish, but may be understood to be reappropriated in discourses of racial disavowal as ‘not racism’. As an example of what has been called


a ‘dilemmatic’ ideology (Billig et al., 1988: 25–42), the discourse of antiracism can be said, ironically, to provide a refuge for the very beliefs and practices it claims to have overcome. While a project of discursive hegemony has been central to the theory of anti-racist practice, anti-racism’s decisive success in shaping dominant discourses of race has arguably resulted in a situation where anti-racist discourses exist alongside – and are to a significant extent intertwined with – continuing racist practices. Despite the fact that the moral arguments over race have ostensibly been won (in that there appears to be an official consensus that racism is a bad thing), the anti-racist struggle is by no means over, as we are far from a similar agreement on the correct methods for understanding or bringing about the eradication of racist practice. This struggle is in a sense complicated by anti-racism’s putative victories, as it is now harder than before to challenge racist discourses that are, as a result, obliged to find expression in language that is determined in important respects by anti-racism’s influence. If the ‘deep grammar’ of race (Goldberg, 1993: 225) continues to structure discourses that ostensibly reject its existence, it is accordingly important to recognize that it can no longer be presupposed (if, indeed, it ever could) that what we call anti-racism will necessarily describe a set of values that will challenge and deconstruct racist practice.

The dialectics of critique This understanding of the relationship between racism and its own critique parallels in many ways the argument advanced by the authors of The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). Taking as their subject ‘the ideological changes that have accompanied recent transformations in capitalism’ (ibid. 3), Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello attempt to account for the means by which radical neoliberal change was brought about in the organization of French capitalism in the last thirty years of the twentieth century – change which resulted in a substantial worsening in conditions for most French workers – without encountering any great political resistance. While Boltanski and Chiapello give due acknowledgement to the failures of social actors who might have become agents of such a critique (political parties, trades unions, etc.), the answer they give to this conundrum places its main emphasis on the nature of critique itself. Rather than supposing there is a fundamental opposition between capitalism and its critiques, they suggest a dialectical relation between the two. Indeed, according


to Boltanski and Chiapello, capitalism depends on its critiques to furnish ideological resources which, while absolutely necessary to guarantee the support of its workers, cannot be generated by capitalism itself. Their version of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ thus describes the ideological mechanism that justifies workers’ consent for and engagement in the capitalist system, an engagement that is underwritten by the active incorporation by capitalism of its own critique. As the authors argue, The dynamic impact of critique on the spirit of capitalism […] takes the form of a strengthening of the justifications and associated mechanisms which, while it does not challenge the principle of accumulation itself, or the need for profits, partially satisfies the critique and integrates into capitalism constraints that correspond to the points of most concern to its detractors. The price paid by critique for being listened to, at least in part, is to see some of the values it has mobilized to oppose the form taken by the accumulation process being placed at the service of accumulation (ibid. 28–9). For Boltanski and Chiapello, capitalism in France was able to renew and reorganize itself after its crisis in the late 1960s and early 1970s by undergoing a profound restructuring that took account of the arguments of those who opposed it. The precise nature of the new spirit of capitalism need not detain us here; we need simply note its ethical dimension. To provide justification and consent for its renewal, they argue, the capitalist system ‘incorporates moral principles on which people can depend to denounce those aspects which do not respect the values it has annexed to itself’ (ibid. 487). It is thus the case that capitalism can inoculate itself against its own critique by partially incorporating elements of that critique for its own purposes, shaping itself in relation to an anti-capitalist ethics without relinquishing its fundamental commitment to the accumulation process. The affinities between my argument and that of Boltanski and Chiapello should be clear. While I am not suggesting that a direct comparison can be drawn here between capitalism’s regional justificatory regimes and the agents of contemporary racist practice, what they share is a profound capacity to assimilate critique. In precisely the same way that the new spirit of capitalism describes a set of social values that, while ostensibly in opposition to the capitalist system, in fact permit and finesse its development, adjustments made by key actors in racial politics have provided those actors with new opportunities to exploit the advantages of racial reference while at the same time


denying and disavowing racist intent. In both cases, the ‘original’ form of critique is disarmed and incapacitated by its incorporation. When the critical vocabulary of race is incorporated into the very practices it sets itself against, progressive struggles risk redundancy, to follow JeanFrançois Lyotard, by becoming ‘transformed into regulators of the system’ (Lyotard, 1984: 13; see also Jameson, 1984: 87). To consider that anti-racism might not actually do away with but rather regulate and mollify racist practice is again a rather uncomfortable thought for anti-racists to entertain, but unless we are able to get to grips with this possibility, we lack the capacity to do very much about it. One way of thinking through this problematic is to recognize the simple but important fact that there is no necessary identity between critical discourses, the politics they name, and the outcomes they produce. While the meaning and objectives of an ‘original’ critique can be quite precise, it cannot be guaranteed that this precision will be maintained once it has been expressed. An entirely ‘pure’ critique is, of course, a totally impotent one, for it is in the act of being made public that critique stands the chance of having some social impact; yet it is at this very moment that critique is also amenable to misinterpretation and appropriation. A critique will always be subject to determination according to the wider social and political context within which it is articulated. Once critique has moved beyond the control of its originator (as, we might say, it is pushed beyond principled obscurity towards social engagement), its discourse becomes polysemous and open to rearticulation and reappropriation. Critique no longer ‘belongs’ to its theoretical origins but has a wider discursive presence that may, under certain conditions, become complicit with its object and ‘betray’ that politics of origin. While it is of course always possible for critics to redeploy critique, to reassert the terms of its relationship to the object it names, and thus to demonstrate the disingenuousness of its misappropriation, this will not be an easy task if a misappropriated critique maintains its social credibility as a critique. If it is widely believed that a misappropriated critique continues to function as critique (that it still names its object), then its actual function (that is, the betrayal of critique) is effectively concealed from view. Although, as this book will demonstrate, it is indeed possible for an appropriated critique to wholly betray its origin (for a putative anti-racism to have unequivocally racist consequences), what is more frequently the case is its partial failure: when anti-racist critique is taken up by the state its effects may be uneven: valid in some respects, yet not so in others. Dominant discourses of race may,


for example, ostensibly ‘say the right thing’, yet fail to translate a rhetorical commitment into meaningful practice; alternatively, social practices may indeed be positively informed by anti-racism but in effect be stymied by complications, conflicts and wider contradictions. Just as in the example from Boltanski and Chiapello, critique may bring about limited change while at the same time facilitating an underlying continuity. Under these conditions – where critique remains meaningful even to a limited extent – it is particularly difficult to demonstrate its simultaneous failures and negative effects. The ‘dilemmatic’ nature of these ambiguous discourses of race highlights a further problem that pertains to the question of intentionality in racist practice. Rather than suggest that putatively anti-racist discourses are simply used to conceal racist intent (though this can undoubtedly be the case), the ethics of race thinking can also be said to inflect the rationalization of that belief. The ethical injunction on racist reference and the threat of social censure, it can be argued, are strong enough to determine the parameters of self-definition, such that the rejection of the appellation ‘racist’ occurs not just at the level of speech, but in the process of cognition itself. It is therefore possible for discourses of race to be inflected by racist beliefs while at the same time denying their very possibility. If we follow Charles Mills in his suggestion that the power of racism (in his terminology, ‘white supremacy’), is located not simply in an ideational or psychological realm, but is a deeply embedded social ontology, then an inability to recognize racist practices can be ascribed to a ‘cognitive dysfunction’ in the epistemological structures of racist societies (Mills, 1997: 93). It can accordingly be hard to make a meaningful distinction between a disingenuous rhetorical concealment of racist beliefs, and their sincere and deeply held rejection. Given that the disavowal of racism has, as I am suggesting, been elevated to the status of an uncontested truth of practical social consciousness – that the discourse of anti-racism has become, to a large extent, hegemonic – it becomes quite possible for racism to be unrecognizable as such to its practitioners, who will automatically search for other social agents to account for its persistence.3 In any case, while it may be correct to suggest that the position taken by a particular social actor is disingenuous, it cannot be said that an ‘insincere’ discourse is any more or less significant in its effects than a ‘sincere’ one. It is, in fact, ultimately impossible to make any such clear distinction between ‘rhetoric’ and ‘reality’ or ‘language’ and ‘practice’. The way the subjects of race and racism are thought about and acted upon, how they have been conceptualized and discussed, will


inevitably come to bear on how race is manifested and experienced. I am not concerned here with race’s veridicality, but with its social practice: race has no objective reality beyond this. Rather than engage in the impossible task of trying to discern the intentionality or sincerity of discourses of race, it is more important to gauge their concrete outcomes. In order to do this, and thus to begin to understand what is significant about the politics of race in the current historical moment, it is necessary to approach the subject in a way that is able to bracket off this kind of judgement, and ditch some of the disabling pieties that can bedevil anti-racist critique.

Defining multiculturalism I never know, although I use the term myself occasionally, quite what people mean when they talk about multiculturalism. Tony Blair4 This book advances the concept of multiculturalism as most adequate to describing the contemporary politics of race and racism. While multiculturalism is, as I have already noted, by no means free from certain difficulties and contradictions, it nevertheless remains incredibly useful for understanding precisely what is at stake in the racial politics of the twenty-first century. To place multiculturalism at the centre of our analysis is to recognize the basic fact that I have been setting out over the preceding pages: that the politics of race and racism are strongly and increasingly marked by the terms of legitimate racial reference that have in turn been shaped, in part, by the anti-racist struggle. In this context, social and cultural diversity are not alien concepts, but absolutely integral to dominant discourses of race. The field of racial discourse operative in our contemporary societies bears little or no likeness to its representation in the anti-racist imaginary, where racism is easily, unmistakably recognizable, as in the caricature of a jackbooted Nazi. What confronts us is a far more complicated picture, where even the fascists have learnt to speak the language of cultural diversity. To speak of multiculturalism is simply to recognize that the terrain of contemporary race discourse is not singular, but plural; it is to acknowledge that ideas about tolerance and coexistence are not marginal, but dominant. Whether these ideas are meaningful or sincerely held is, as I have just suggested, of course another question entirely. To describe the contemporary politics of race as multicultural is therefore to define a more realistic starting point than the anachronistic


adversarial and monocultural presumptions that, rather perversely, continue to inform much contemporary work on race and racism. At risk of repeating myself, this is not to suggest that our contemporary societies have somehow transmogrified into post-racist entities. Far from it. Rather, it is to recognize a discursive shift that has substantially transformed the terms of legitimate racial reference. Multiculturalism describes a racial politics wrought out of a lexicon of pluralism and diversity. This does not mean that pluralism and diversity are universally valued, or that practices that take place in their name are always sincere; neither does it necessarily imply agreement as to the form this diversity takes – to what extent, for example, we treat ideas like race, culture or ethnicity as meaningful categories of social identification. The basic point here is that we do not need to suspend our critical faculties to accept the irreducibly plural nature of contemporary race discourse: to thus view the politics of multiculturalism in a descriptive rather than normative light allows us to avoid having at every moment to judge what is or is not ‘genuinely’ multicultural, and to concentrate our efforts on understanding how multicultural discourses have been employed in practice (and irrespective of whether or not they have been explicitly defined in multicultural terms). This does not do away with judgement, but defers it in order to be able to attain a critical distance that takes such practices seriously in the sense that they have meaningful consequences within the field of race discourse.5 Multiculturalism, then, can be thought of as the conceptual framework within which the contemporary politics of race finds expression. It has largely come to replace older frameworks that conceived of racial politics as presenting straightforward problems of or conflicts between ‘us’ versus ‘them’, and readily accepts an answer that ranges between or across such exclusive categories of identity and belonging. Why multiculturalism, though? Why does this term organize the contemporary politics of race, and why am I making the claim that it reflects most accurately the influence of anti-racism in shaping what may or may not be said within it? There are two basic characteristics I want to impute to multiculturalism that go some way to explaining its significance. Firstly, I am deploying multiculturalism as a politically agnostic concept. Despite an historical association with a politics that is of the left (or is at least left-leaning), a multicultural politics does not necessarily signify anything beyond a basic recognition of the facticity of social and cultural diversity. It does not, in my descriptive use of the term, imply a commitment to anything more than this basic recognition. There is accordingly a certain conceptual realism in my use of


multiculturalism as a description of the contemporary politics of race. It bears the mark of a history in which race has remained obstinate as a category of social identification, where ideas about difference continually create, inscribe and reinscribe boundaries between social groups. Multiculturalism describes a political reality where the abolition of such distinctions has increasingly come to seem like a modernist fantasy (of whatever political persuasion). While there are certainly positions that are theoretically incompatible with a multicultural politics (such as the polarities of racist particularism and anti-racist universalism), it is, in practical terms, the only game in town. The conceptual framework I call multiculturalism, then, provides a shorthand for the persistence of difference, for a social politics indelibly marked by the particularity of its historical development. While specific use of the term itself has enjoyed varying degrees of fashionability, and has indeed been widely resisted, it has become increasingly apparent that, whatever outcome is desired, multiculturalism is in practical terms how contemporary race politics actually happens. In the sense that I am using it, multiculturalism is not an ideology; it does not require us to believe in it to recognize it is true. As I will go on to argue, even outright rejections of multiculturalism are still most convincingly and coherently understood as remaining part of, rather than as a departure from, a multicultural politics. If multiculturalism presents itself as the most appropriate concept for describing the contemporary politics of race, the term can be said to have a second characteristic that makes it particularly useful for understanding that politics, and which dictates how it will be approached in this critical investigation: that is, the sense in which it can be thought of as a category that refers to social practice. Stuart Hall highlights this when he draws a distinction between an adjectival ‘multi-cultural’ and a substantive ‘multiculturalism’. While to Hall the former describes the culturally heterogeneous social landscape of contemporary societies in which different cultural communities live together and attempt to build a common life while retaining something of their ‘original’ identity […] ‘multiculturalism’ […] references the strategies and policies adopted to govern or manage the problems of diversity and multiplicity which multi-cultural societies throw up (Hall, 2000: 209). Although I do not retain Hall’s nomenclature, the distinction he makes is a productive one. While the ‘multi-cultural’ is little more than a


statement of anthropological fact, ‘multiculturalism’ describes a site of political contestation which, as he goes on to remark, can take on a wide range of forms right across the political spectrum. Hall’s understanding of multiculturalism accordingly focuses on this realm of practice, obtaining significance in the context of its application, rather than on its own terms. Such an emphasis is not in any sense to empty multiculturalism of ‘theoretical’ content, but rather to recognize that the theory of multiculturalism can only meaningfully describe the ‘strategies and policies’ that constitute that social practice. This is to make an intentional break with the large literature on multiculturalism that conceives of the concept as a category of political theory (see, for example, Kymlicka, 1995; Taylor, 1992; Laden and Owen, 2007). What tends to limit these kinds of discussions is their concern with the ideal conditions under which multiculturalism as (to use Charles Taylor’s terminology) a ‘politics of recognition’ might take place. While such work usually attempts to set out a legal basis for the granting of group rights, it is not equipped to get to grips with the dynamic process by which the politics of race and culture actually operates, a process that in its complexity and contradiction ultimately reveals as rather static, empty and abstract the logics of liberal political philosophy. My emphasis on multiculturalism as a form of social practice facilitates an understanding not of what multiculturalism ‘is’ or might be (in an ideal or futurial sense), but rather what it does. This book takes as a point of departure the idea that a politics of multiculturalism has become dominant because it has provided an incredibly useful set of resources in the contemporary politics of race. Not only has a multicultural politics become the ideal medium for social actors and institutions to negotiate a social landscape shaped by anti-racism’s ethical injunctions, it has also become a foremost mechanism for getting things done, a mode of social intervention that has been brought to bear on a wide range of contexts, issues and problems. Multicultural practices have, as I will demonstrate, not been confined to structuring a pre-existing politics of race, but have also been called upon to organize, regulate and make sense of an expanded range of social problems.

Nationalism, race and state To understand multiculturalism as a form of social practice is of course to beg the question as to who it is that is doing the practicing. While there are a range of perspectives from which the politics of multiculturalism might be usefully explored, the emphasis of this study is on the state.


One reason for this is because the state’s importance has until very recently been underplayed in much contemporary academic work on the subject of race and racism. This book is an attempt to redress that balance, and to highlight the significance of state practices to the contemporary politics of race. Because of its dominant (if underacknowledged) status, the institution of the state also provides a focal point around which we might understand the activities of other important social actors, which will often only make sense within the framework of state practice. To be clear about the relevance of the state here, it is worth reminding ourselves that multiculturalism is a way of thinking and talking about identity and belonging in relation to a conception of social order. If multiculturalism is, to return again to Hall’s definition, to do with ‘strategies and policies adopted to govern or manage […] multi-cultural societies’, then the politics of multiculturalism will by definition always involve state actors as agents uniquely positioned to legislate, enforce and govern over that social order. As such, it is hard to imagine how a politics of multiculturalism might operate outside of the realm of state practice. While it is sometimes useful to think about multiculturalism as a local phenomenon, and particularly of contemporary urban life, states ultimately concern themselves with the nation as a fundamental horizon of identity and belonging. As such, the politics of multiculturalism are ultimately a national politics, and are concerned with what it means to identify with and belong to society as a whole, even if this belonging takes a particular form. The state’s claim to represent or speak for the nation is, I want to suggest, absolutely essential for an understanding of the contemporary politics of multiculturalism. Before going on to explore this in more detail, it is first necessary to note the historical importance of the state in shaping the politics of race and racism, and indeed that the very idea of race can be thought of as a product of state practices: the modern European nation-state was founded on nationalism, and race provided its organic ideology. It was the irrational, fictitious, quasi-religious idea of race that unified diverse populations and served to maintain the cultural, political and economic structures of developing nation-states.6 It was the idea of race that mobilized the necessary labour power to supply state war machines, and that turned sedition against the bourgeois state into an act of treason against the nation itself. Later, race came to be shaped by the colonial encounter, consolidating ideas of superiority and inferiority that legitimated the enslavement and exploitation of millions. Race came to be inscribed even in the rationalism of scientific endeavour that underwrote the


superior self-conception of Western nations: as Charles Mills has argued, ‘race is in no way an “afterthought,” a “deviation” from ostensibly raceless Western ideals, but rather a central shaping constituent of those ideals’ (Mills, 1997: 14). A reluctance or inability to acknowledge the role played by race in nationalist projects has led to a real conceptual blind spot which continues to prevent full recognition of how modern states have consistently depended upon and made use of discourses of race. Racialized nationalism as a state project only really came to be seriously challenged in the West in the wake of the persecution and extermination of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, which came to serve as an exemplary moment in the subsequent theorization of race – it is with reference to the Germany of the early 1930s that the origins of the term ‘racism’ derive (Taguieff, 2001: 82). A developing academic consensus has in recent years engaged in the important if controversial task of historicizing the Holocaust such that, while not diminishing its exceptionality within modern Europe, it is beginning to be understood as an event with many precedents in colonial history (see, for example, Lindqvist, 1997; Mills, 1997: 101–6). As Barnor Hesse has argued, a Eurocentric formulation of the concept of racism preceded decolonization, and has remained conceptually delimited by the status of the Holocaust as a paradigm case (Hesse, 2004). This has led to the implication that racism is ‘chiefly a contaminant of modernity’ (ibid. 22), which has accordingly tended to absolve the institutions of liberal democracy from responsibility for their enduring racist histories (see also Hesse, 1999: 208). Hesse points to the work of Hannah Arendt as representative of the racism-as-exception thesis, where the experience of the Holocaust is universalized as the dominant model. Arendt is a particularly important thinker here, for in her desire to exempt racism from the democratic tradition and thus stress its incompatibility ‘with all the Western political and moral standards of the past’ (Arendt, 1986: 184) she diminishes the role played by nationalism in racist practice. Dismissing the relationship between nationalism and racism as ‘an old misconception’ (ibid. 160), Arendt’s view positions them as in fact antithetical: the former describes an integrative mechanism, while the latter is ‘the most powerful weapon for the destruction’ of European nations (ibid. 161). While it cannot be denied that nationalism played a crucial role in structuring the social conditions of the modern nation-state, it has always taken on its integrative role alongside the subjugation and exclusion of racialized others. The two cannot be separated; they are aspects of the same phenomenon.


Arendt’s attempt to distance racism from nationalism represents a still dominant understanding of nationalist politics. In both academic and lay descriptions, an understanding of racialized nationalism tends to be reserved for the extremes of ‘totalitarianism’. Where it is acknowledged at all, the nationalism manifest in the liberal-democratic nation-state is most often conceived as a ‘moderate’ force, simply providing a politically neutral ‘conceptual and moral framework which permits human beings to comprehend their own existence within a community’ (Vincent, 2002: 6). The occlusion of the continuing role played by nationalism, the ideological progenitor of the modern nation-state, in the construction and reproduction of racist structures appears to run contrary to the ethos of contemporary liberal democracy, yet it is at least in part the traditions and philosophical doctrines of liberalism that have contributed to the strengthening of the relation between racism, nationalism and the state. To a significant extent this is simply because, as Phillip Cole points out, liberal political theory ‘addresses the problems of the distribution of freedom and welfare within bounded political communities, but rarely addresses the question of how membership of these communities is to be fixed’ (Cole, 2000: 60). The reified boundaries of the nation-state constitute the hidden limits of liberal thought in a ‘strategy of concealment’ (Cole, 1998: 137) that takes membership of the political community as given. By viewing such boundaries as natural or inevitable, the political philosophy that legitimates the nation-state’s democratic freedoms elides the historical foundations upon which those freedoms have been constructed, so that the development of liberal democracy within bounded nationstates is ultimately dependent on the exclusion of those understood to fall outside membership of the liberal polity. It is precisely because the legitimation of the nation-state by nationalist ideology is so arbitrary – and thus indefensible to the most rudimentary precept of liberal equality – that this most basic premiss cannot be openly acknowledged. While more recent theories of liberalism tend to skirt around this issue simply by restricting their ultimate horizon of justice to an ahistorical conception of society, and assuming nations to be empty units bound by the formal equality of international law (see, for example, Rawls, 1999), earlier liberal thinkers were somewhat more candid. Although deriding nationalism (‘nationality’) ‘in the vulgar sense of the term’ as an unthinking xenophobia, John Stuart Mill nevertheless makes recourse to a nationalistic affectivity in his definition of solidarity in political society as a ‘feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government, and are contained within the


same natural or historical boundaries’ (Mill, 1969: 135). Then, as now, liberal political philosophy may more truthfully be described as a form of liberal nationalism, however keen its advocates are on maintaining the invisibility of the second term. Even were we to accept that the idealized liberal-democratic principle of self-determination legitimates the sovereignty of the state over the nation, and thus permits it some form of agency over control of national borders, it would be incorrect to assume that this has been possible without employing the concept of race. When, in the twentieth century, European states began to restrict immigration flows by legislative means, it was primarily to ‘common sense’ ideas of racialized nationalism that they appealed, for only then was it possible to deny the exclusionary nature of an activity that ran counter to the ethos of liberal egalitarianism. Whatever their claim to political membership (which in the case of colonial and ex-colonial subjects has been especially strong), immigrants were (and still are) typically understood to hail from beyond the naturalized boundaries of the nation, an understanding of social and geographical space as the natural home of a native population (defined in terms of biology or culture) possessed of finite social and material resources. As David Goldberg writes, the commitment of liberalism ‘to principles of universality is practically sustained only by the reinvented and racialized exclusions of racial particularity’ (Goldberg, 1993: 39). Racialized others are placed beyond the purview of the democratic nation-state even when they are found within its territory (and whether or not they have obtained formal citizenship), for ‘the racializing politics of liberal modernity’ (ibid.) function by continually affirming their difference – and thus the grounds of their exemption – from a normative conception of national belonging (see also Mills, 2003: 150; Balibar, 1993: 191–204). It is thus the case that any understanding of the historically mutating phenomenon of racism cannot be detached from the coterminous development of the nation-state and the ideology of nationalism upon which it derives its legitimacy. While this does not mean that there are not or cannot be other socio-geographical contexts for racist practice, I maintain that any analysis of racism subsequent to the birth of the modern nation-state that does not give priority to the conceptual and interpretive power of nationalism will always be severely limited in its capacity to comprehend how racism derives its structure and meaning within the determinate set of historical, social and political relations that nationalism describes.7 The terms of racial reference change, and continue to do so, and the relationship


between race and nation is repackaged, occluded, sometimes conveniently forgotten, but it does not disappear. It is only with the most thorough critique of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck and Sznaider, 2006: 3–6) that the full meaning of this relationship can be made apparent. I accordingly place a focus on the state out of a need to take seriously this longstanding historical relationship between the political state, the ideology of nationalism, and the idea of race. While it may not be quite possible to argue that there is an absolute identity between the phenomenon of racism and nationalism, there is at very least a strong and longstanding correspondence or ‘reciprocal determination’ (Balibar, 1991: 52) between the two. This recognition is of utmost importance because, as later chapters will demonstrate, it is very much in a nationalist vein that contemporary states continue to employ and engage with the politics of race. A multicultural turn has, I suggest, involved the rejuvenation of a strong conception of nationalism, and it is the necessary contradiction between the nationalist mobilization of race and the notions of diversity and cultural pluralism with which it has been augmented that provides a critical point of departure for this book.

Defining race and the state Despite the importance of this conceptual framework, I am not for a moment trying to suggest that it accounts for all that there is to say on the subject of race and racism. While I hold that the historical development of race is and continues to be intimately bound up with the state and the ideology of nationalism, it nevertheless extends beyond these origins and frameworks. There are other important sites at which the politics of race may be discerned and subjected to analysis, and I make no claim to comprehensiveness in this regard. It should also be noted that my focus on the state will necessarily lead to my privileging of a particular conception of race and racism, which has opened up certain critical avenues whilst closing down others. Approaches to race that deal, for example, with vernacular, quotidian and literary forms of cultural politics (Gilroy, 1993: 187–223; Lewis, 2007), or that employ methods involving autobiography (Ifekwunigwe, 1999), oral testimony (Webster, 1998; Frankenberg, 1993) or ethnography (Back, 1996; Baumann, 1999), have opened up a wide range of possibilities for academic work on the subject. They have contributed substantially to our understanding of racialized difference, and particularly the complex social positioning of racialized subjects. Moreover, such approaches have proven important


for the mediation of certain cultural and political orientations to a wider critical audience. Work in these and cognate areas has broadened the scope of race politics, and complicated many of the theoretical simplifications and overgeneralizations of race theory which, even when they are intended to be provisional, partial, and open to change, have a tendency to ossification in the language games of disciplinary boundary marking. The concept of ethnicity, for example, has become popularized as a potential solution to the problems of representing race by substituting a discredited biological content for a more sustainable admixture of cultural attributes, and provides a useful description of some of the plastic social forms that define the lived experience of minority communities (see, for example, Jenkins, 1997; Fenton, 1999). Anti-racist projects have also found it useful to utilize such ideas, recognizing the social complexity of many acts of discrimination. An explicitly anti-essentialist concept of culture provides an omnipresent warning of the dangers of racial determinism that have been and continue to be a constituent part of both racist and anti-racist thinking. Yet it remains the case that a subtle hand on culture and ethnicity brings with it its own theoretical blind spots when it is mobilized to deal with certain kinds of racist practice. It will be evident in the chapters that follow that many of the forms of racism I describe are experienced in particular and complex ways by certain cultural groups, but I would argue that to locate racism in the specificities of experience is to neglect the social origins of racist practice. It is, for example, not principally on account of their unique social and cultural locations that Muslims have been made a predominant focus of the attention of contemporary Western states. While it is frequently the case that what comes to be problematized in racial terms are indeed beliefs and practices that are seen as particular – in this case to the specificities of the Islamic religion – to recognize this is not to fall into the trap (which might be said to constitute a residual essentialist urge in even the most impeccably anti-essentialist endeavour) of locating this difference in the minds and bodies of Muslims themselves. As Mary Maynard warns, the replacement of race with ethnicity can overlook ‘the fact that it is quite possible for the concept to be used in an essentialist way’ (Maynard, 1994: 11). This work does not deal with the experience of race, but is a study of racism. I accordingly endorse the definition of racialization set out by Karim Murji and John Solomos as: A means of redirecting the conventional gaze of race relations sociology away from the characteristics and actions of those defined racially


and instead to focus upon the attitudes and motivations of more powerful social groups (Murji and Solomos, 2005: 16). This study neglects – admittedly at the risk of bending the stick too far in the other direction – the ‘bottom up’ social construction of identity, and tends not to consider the histories, traditions and attachments of our increasingly culturally literate multicultural societies (see for example Nava, 2007: 133–64). The interest of this work lies in the way that discourses of race and racism are articulated at certain levels of state practice. While recognition of the complexity of identity construction has made the concept of an explicitly anti-racist ‘black’ identity less fashionable in anti-racist politics, it remains the case that it is precisely such generalizable (and ethnically indeterminate) signifiers of difference that remain the typical determinants of state practice in the politics of race. ‘Identity politics’ may in some quarters have been exhausted as a critical resource, but it remains a standard feature of state discourses of race. This is simply another way of repeating the truism that racism is not the product of ‘races’ but rather the experience of those who have been marked out in racist societies as racially different. It is therefore entirely intentional that I collapse categories of religion, culture and ethnicity into the concept of race. This is not to say that we should neglect the distinctiveness of these categories as they are employed in state discourse, but rather that we need to recognize them as racial categories when they are being used as such. While, for example, the racist epithet ‘Paki’ might loosely reference a social, cultural, historical and ethnic designation, the motivations of its user will remain logically prior to its categorization: you do not need to be a ‘Paki’ to be called a ‘Paki’ (as will be demonstrated quite markedly in my discussion of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Chapter 5). Similarly, it is not, say, the wearing of the Muslim headscarf which should be identified as the origin of Islamophobic practice, but rather the discourses in which it is constituted as a signifier of race. This book takes seriously the primary recognition that discourses of race cannot ultimately be located as a property of the racialized, but must be seen as a property of the social structure which constructs cultural, ethnic or religious difference as a problem of race.8 The key role of the state in the constitution and articulation of racial difference and its contribution to the sociohistorical process of racial formation (Omi and Winant, 1994; Gilroy, 2002: 35–6) should accordingly be clear: by shaping the trajectory of dominant understandings


of those marked out as racially different, the state plays its part in identifying, inculcating and reproducing that difference. The state’s capacity to mobilize and reproduce ideas of race is clearly of particular significance given its status as a powerful social actor. Its ability to legislate on the symbolic and material limits of national belonging, to distribute social and economic resources, to structure institutional practices that problematize and police racialized groups, and so on, are accordingly the reasons why it has been made the primary focus of this study. Although there are now signs of a reversal of this trend, critical work had for some time tended to vacate critical enquiry into the relationship between race and the state, and many scholars of race turned their attention away from unfashionably broad explanatory models in favour of more nuanced yet decidedly less ambitious understandings of racialized phenomena. My interest here is not, it should be said, in an uncritical revival of the orthodox arguments of past social and political inquiry into race and the state, not least because subsequent work has – in empirical and theoretical engagement with these older traditions – rightly called into question many of their foundational and analytical principles. Yet while this book is by no means a return to oversimplified macroscopic models (wherein, for example, racialized difference figures as little more than an epiphenomenon of class struggle), neither does it reject the importance of getting a handle on some of the fundamental determining conditions of racist practice. By recognizing that the state is not the sole or final determinant of the social phenomena I will discuss here, it becomes possible to assess something of the very real role it does play in the politics of race and nation. The importance of the state has tended to be neglected in the vogue of ‘state denial’ (Weiss, 1998: 3) that has characterized much recent work which has questioned or disregarded its importance in the face of a seemingly unrestrainable onslaught of global social, economic and political forces.9 Yet it could be argued that a state-directed politics of race has become more rather than less important under the conditions of ‘globalization’, given, as I have already suggested, nationalism’s capacity to knit together social and political currents that might otherwise challenge the state’s hegemony.

New Labour and the British state Though many of the arguments made in this book are applicable to (and at times explicitly engage with) the racial politics of a range of contemporary Western contexts, my particular focus is on the British


state. As Ghassan Hage argues, multiculturalism delineates ‘a sharply different social space within each nation-state’ (Hage, 2005: 491), and it is only by being attentive to the specificities of its practice that it is possible to develop a sufficiently nuanced account. I do not attempt to encompass the totality of state practices, but confine this investigation to a relatively finite range of state actors. While it is more accurate to understand the state as not a monolithic bloc but a historically variable and strategic field of competing interests (Poulantzas, 2000: 138), constituted not only of national and local governmental apparatuses, but also with administrative, coercive and juridical functions (Barrow, 2002: 16), this somewhat exceeds the definition I have employed here. My pragmatic conceptualization of the state does not give equal weight to these constitutive elements of the state structure, but places most emphasis on the political executive, and – given my particular focus on recent developments – specifically on the leadership of the New Labour government.10 The role of the Labour Party is significant in itself, not simply because the British political system gives an incumbent party a particularly large influence over governmental practice but moreover because party government has taken on a particular shape under New Labour, whose leadership has tended to act with a significant degree of autonomy from either Parliament or its own rank and file membership. My attention to the state under New Labour (rather than to a more politically autonomous understanding of the state) is also in part due to the Labour Party’s historical standing as the natural home of Britain’s minority communities: according to the Parekh report, the Labour Party secured four out of every five black and Asian votes between 1974 and 1997 (Runnymede Trust, 2000a: 230). While the Party’s record in government has in practice been decidedly uneven on the question of race (see, for example, Knowles, 1992), it is nevertheless the case that Labour has overseen all of Britain’s Race Relations legislation, and has been a principal site of struggles for minority representation, particularly at the level of municipal politics, and within the national structures of the Party itself (see Sewell, 1993: 99–121; Jeffers, 1993). While Labour’s highest ever tally of thirteen non-white MPs at the last (2005) general election is woefully under-representative, it easily trumps the Conservatives’ two MPs, and the Liberal Democrats who presently have none. In this sense, my attention to New Labour is out of a desire to catalogue the Party’s particular approach to race politics since its election to government, and to assess its record in political office. I will therefore go into some detail about how state practices have been


developed out of and in relation to the Labour Party’s own history (and particularly the project of New Labour reform), and its relationship to think-tanks, political theorists, social movements, the political opposition, and so on. In other respects, my focus on New Labour is simply contingent on the fact that it has been the party of government in Britain for over a decade. Although the racial politics of the state would have indeed looked very different under another administration, I would contest that many of the issues I discuss here would have become manifest even had the Conservative Party stayed in power after 1997 and remained in government ever since. In some respects, the issues I address here are currently affecting a number of nation-states, and particularly those in Western Europe. The ideological convergence of political parties under pressure of the exigencies of neoliberal reform means that differences between states are often more stylistic than substantial: as Richard Johnson has put it, the skill of the New Labour leadership has been to ‘translate transnational demands into national currencies’ (Johnson, 2007: 105). If this study is therefore, if only by default, a study of New Labour in power, it is nevertheless the story of how the incumbent political party of a single European state has developed a politics of race at an historical moment where a range of common issues (particularly regarding asylum and immigration and the spectre of terrorism) have been high on the agenda of all European states, and many others across the world. New Labour, then, provide an interesting case study in understanding the contemporary politics of multiculturalism, embodying its conflicts and contradictions. As Back et al. have argued, the racial politics of the British state under New Labour have been Janus-faced (Back et al., 2002): serious attempts to implement progressive legislative change – the 1998 Human Rights Act, say, or the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act – have been accompanied by the pursuit of a disturbingly retrograde agenda. Draconian asylum and immigration legislation, a racialized security agenda, and an aggressive discourse of assimilation all call into question or substantially undermine the Labour Government’s avowedly anti-racist credentials (see also Schuster and Solomos, 2004). While New Labour commissioned the Macpherson report into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence (the landmark conclusions of which placed the issue of institutional racism firmly onto the British political agenda) it is unlikely that the enormous problems it highlighted will in the present political climate ever be adequately resolved. This book attempts to make some sense of these contradictions.11 This involves a recognition of what has changed just as much as what


has stayed the same. From a certain perspective it is arguable that there has always been a certain disingenuousness in the state’s approach to Britain’s minority communities: discriminations have often occurred alongside their official denial, and the state has – if only out of an interest in maintaining social order – had a longstanding commitment to the prevention of certain types of racism, while simultaneously helping to create the conditions under which they and other racisms occur. While this is indeed the case (and remains so), what I have attempted to highlight of the present situation is a general shift in the way the subject of race has come to be thought about and acted upon in the decade since New Labour’s election to political office in 1997. Notwithstanding the contradictions I have just noted, this has involved a move away from adversarial to ostensibly more conciliatory positions. The state’s antagonism towards those marked out as racially different has been transformed into an awkward embrace, such that the title of Paul Gilroy’s classic survey of the field of 1980s race politics (Gilroy, 2002) no longer rings quite true: in contemporary Britain there does indeed seem to be Black in the Union Jack. In accounting for this apparent shift, I want to draw particular attention to the discursive territory on which it has taken place. The state’s reorientation is marked not simply by an ostensible change of attitude towards Britain’s minority communities, but has moreover involved concerted attempts to redescribe the nature of British society in light of their symbolic admission to the national community. In the twentiethcentury history of race in Britain, even the most ‘progressive’ of state discourses (beyond a formal commitment to racial equality) were typically characterized by a clear understanding that minorities were being accommodated by a social and political system to which they were to remain, to a significant degree, outsiders. While such approaches would draw an absolute dividing line between members and nonmembers of the national community on the grounds of race, this is no longer a claim that can be made in such categorical terms. A conception of multiculturalism – as an acknowledgement of social and cultural diversity – has now been squarely positioned as an integral component of national belonging. To acknowledge the multicultural nature of recent state discourses is not to say that proprietorial assumptions have vanished, that distinctions are not made and lines not drawn; rather, it is to acknowledge and take seriously the changing dynamics of race discourse. Across a wide range of state practices, from the media statements of government ministers to the wording of social policy (if more rarely the letter


of the law), the subject of race has recently been approached in a new register that claims an ethos of cultural, religious and racial pluralism as its own. That which had stood outside of or in opposition to the state has become articulated as one of its core principles. Where race had been a thorn in the side of the political establishment, it has in a sense now become constitutive of its very identity, suggestive of a new compact with Britain’s minority communities. And yet the dynamics of state multiculturalism do not escape contradiction, for the terms of the reconstructed relation between the state and Britain’s minority communities are not as straightforward as they may at first appear. While the state appears to advance a new configuration of identity and belonging to replace anachronistic models of monoculturalism and racial exclusivity, the territory upon which this change has taken place is most usefully understood, as I have already suggested, as being defined by the politics of nationalism. The idea of belonging described by the concept of nationalism has been the longstanding mechanism by which ideologies of race have been manufactured, communicated and deployed in the service of the modern state. Historically, nationalism creates and feeds racism as it delineates the material and symbolic parameters of national life. If the state’s politics of race continue to be nationalist in spite of their new multicultural orientation, then we need to consider, ultimately, whose interests they really serve. It is, in other words, of utmost importance to decide if state multiculturalism really functions – as is its implicit claim – to reconstruct nationalist ideology in a totally new form, or whether it simply occults nationalism’s continuing function as a primary locus of racist practice. To recognize, as I do, the evident truth of the latter is not to suggest that the racial politics of the contemporary British state are simply a case of business as usual. Some of the old distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ have indeed been dissolved or rescinded, such that ‘they’ are now, in some important respects, a constituent part of ‘us’. Although what I will call multicultural nationalism does not signal an end to practices of state racism, this new dynamic nevertheless shapes the form in which that racism may now take place. As Ien Ang suggests, while multicultural discourses will no longer necessarily mark out as ‘other’ racialized groups through mechanisms of rejection or exclusion, processes of distinction still occur in ‘an ambivalent and apparently contradictory process of inclusion by virtue of othering’ (Ang, 2001: 139). Indeed, the differential inclusion of racialized others may be said to consolidate existing modes of nationalist belonging, whereby ‘the “we” of the nation [is] affirmed through the difference of the “stranger cultures” rather than against it’


(Ahmed, 2000: 95). To acknowledge a qualitative change in its discourses of race makes it necessary to understand how and why the state has embarked on this new orientation, and to recognize precisely what it stands to gain from it. While multicultural nationalism may indeed be a contradiction in terms, to simply point this out without interrogating its social and political effects would be to forego the possibility of revealing and challenging a new logic of racial practice.12

Race crisis race has come to provide the objective correlative of crisis – the area in which complex fears, tensions and anxieties, generated by the impact of the totality of the crisis as a whole on the whole society, can be most conveniently and explicitly projected and, as the euphemistic phrase runs, ‘worked through’. Stuart Hall et al.13 The British state’s mobilization of multicultural nationalism as a politics of identity and belonging can be usefully described in relation to the concept of social crisis. The most fundamental theorization of crisis relates to the basic contradiction between the socialization of production and the private accumulation of capital. The regulatory role of the modern state in ensuring that this contradiction does not jeopardize the social relations of production is axiomatic, and while the crisis tendency is integral to capitalist society and cannot therefore be resolved within it, the crisis can be modified so as not to imperil the social order. A similar dynamic can be said to operate in regard to other social contradictions, with an equally crucial role for state intervention. If, as Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz argue, crises occur ‘when the social formation can no longer be reproduced on the basis of the preexisting system of social relations’ (Hall and Schwarz, 1985: 9), then it becomes possible for us to consider multicultural nationalism as a tool by which the state may attempt to reduce the impact of contradictions that would otherwise develop an intractable tendency towards social disorder or, just as significantly, would call into question the role of the state itself in the perpetuation of those contradictions.14 My indebtedness here to the work of the Race and Politics Group at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies should be self-evident. The introductory chapter of The Empire Strikes Back (Solomos et al., 1982) brilliantly sets out a Gramscian theory of crisis in relation to a state politics of race and racism. According to its authors,


crises do not have a singular point of origin but are the ‘combined effect of economic, political, ideological and cultural processes’ (ibid. 11). At its most fundamental level, ‘organic crisis’ describes a ‘crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the state’ (Gramsci, 1971: 210). Crisis is thus operative at the total horizon of any given social order: there is no sense in which the state can prevent its own implication in these conditions, and is thus itself ‘a factor in the reproduction of the organic crisis’ (Solomos et al., 1982: 20). The authors of The Empire Strikes Back accordingly present their work as a concrete analysis of organic crisis, intending to show the mechanisms through which the presence of black people in Britain has become constructed ideologically as a national problem, thereby rendering them subject to specific and intense forms of control and repression. These themes must be related to the ways in which the developing organic crisis has been expressed as, and defined by, a ‘crisis of race relations’. The power of racial symbols and signification has had a profound impact on how the ‘crisis of society’ is perceived (ibid. 21). As well as implicitly highlighting the important relationship between nationalism and the state, Solomos et al. express two interwoven conceptual levels upon which hegemonic crisis and the politics of race may be said to be operative. Firstly, there is the sense in which racialized difference is directly constituted as a problem for society. This is discussed in terms of the construction of racialized minorities as an ‘enemy within’ (ibid.) and the pathologization of race in discourses of lawlessness and violence, social disorder, underachievement, and so on. If this first category relates to a view of the beliefs and behaviours of racialized groups as the location of crisis (albeit a crisis that is predominantly ideological, and always to do with constructions of race rather than its ‘authentic’ practice), then the second category pertains more to a sense in which the racialized become the locus of state attention as a surrogate for other social contradictions that are themselves insoluble. While the former case constructs race as a problem in itself, the second – although still considering race as a problem – mobilizes discourses of race as a proxy form of problem-solving, as a way of representing social crisis, and rendering this crisis amenable to remedial intervention. In the analysis of The Empire Strikes Back, state discourses of race take the form of a politics of diversion and distraction, and the racialized are targeted as a problem in the context of social decline, chronic unemployment and economic liberalization to ‘explain’ and


‘solve’ (albeit temporarily and superficially) a deeper structural crisis. The crisis of race is here constructed within state practices of crisis management to hold at bay ‘the organic crisis of British capitalism’ (ibid. 26) and, like the cultural dimensions of Habermas’s theory of the legitimation crisis (see Outhwaite, 1994: 64), to performatively demonstrate the state’s avowed role in the maintenance of social order. The way in which The Empire Strike Back describes the state’s response to/manufacture of crisis and its articulation to a racialized conception of national identity and belonging provides the dominant theoretical antecedent of the present study. This book holds that the British state’s politics of multiculturalism represents an engagement with and management of ideas of race that can only be coherently understood in relation to the wider contradictions of British society, and shares with the authors of The Empire Strikes Back a Gramscian understanding of the significance of racial politics to the national-popular as a site of hegemonic practice. The only real sense in which my thinking differs from theirs is around the relative weighting of this question: to what extent should the racial politics of the state be considered as a response to a ‘genuine’ crisis of race (i.e., the sense in which race might constitute part of a challenge to the dominant order), or to the ‘imaginary’ construction of race as a social problem (i.e., as a dissimulating response to hegemonic crisis)? The position of The Empire Strikes Back is rightly equivocal on this matter, because its authors recognize that the actions of the state necessarily intervene into and by doing so modify the grounds on which the crisis manifests itself. Yet their reckoning of the relative balance of forces suggests, to my mind, an overemphasis on the extent to which an organic crisis is catalysed by antihegemonic struggle. The political landscape of 1970s Britain that The Empire Strikes Back describes was one that saw the labour movement on the defensive, but was yet to witness the decisive defeats of the early 1980s. Accordingly, there is a sense in the book that there remains a real potential for a progressive and popular anti-racist politics to develop in the conditions of a growing and deepening organic crisis. By contrast, I would suggest that the intervening decades indicate that the victories have been mainly to the right. The British state has shown itself to have been particularly adept in the structural techniques of crisis management, and the impression given in The Empire Strikes Back that the developing ‘state authoritarianism’ (ibid. 16) of Thatcherism would lead to a decisive confrontation in race politics now seems, even in its pessimism, to be somewhat premature. The etiolation of the left in Britain has meant that the hopes implicit to the argument of The Empire Strikes Back – that the social movements


that were still ascendant at the time of its writing might bring about the conditions for a substantive challenge to the British state – no longer hold. While we can agree with the authors of that book that ‘what is seen to be at stake in the arena of race is the survival of the existing order of things’ (ibid. 27), we must recognize that the state now engages with the politics of race almost invariably as a surrogate crisis. There is no crisis of race in itself that has the power to jeopardize the social order and, relatedly, to call into question the legitimacy of the state. While perhaps not as intractable as the contradiction between social production and private accumulation, the crisis of race in Britain remains an enduring phenomenon, and the state has institutionalized the tools of its management and reproduction. The 1970s crisis of race described in The Empire Strikes Back is in many ways the same crisis that is examined over the following pages, and it is in a sense the stubborn continuities of this phenomenon that demand our critical attention. Yet as Hall and Schwarz point out, ‘each moment of crisis is also a moment of reconstruction: crises are the means by which social relations are reconstituted’ (Hall and Schwarz, 1985: 16). Crisis need not be total in order to involve the transformation of social relations. For the state, the management of race is not static, and though its underlying structure continues to be underwritten by the ideology of racialized nationalism, and thus retains a degree of continuity, the means by which the race crisis is engaged with and reproduced has developed with the changing social conditions of state practice. It is my contention that the most recent manifestation of the race crisis, and the defining moment of nationalism in the current conjuncture, can be understood in relation to the state’s entry into the realm of an explicitly multicultural politics. As a racial project of the contemporary British state, multicultural nationalism opens up avenues for new state practices. It negotiates a space in the field of contemporary race discourse, abiding by (as well as contributing to) its normative conceptual and ethical structures. It is by these means that a crisis of race has been managed, renewed and reinvigorated in twenty-first-century Britain. All the chapters that follow engage, in various ways, with this notion that the British state’s racial politics cannot be understood in isolation from its broader interests, involvements and obligations. They will examine how ideas of race are called upon to make explanations and interventions, to shape and to govern British society and culture. Given the dominant injunction on racist reference, they place a particular emphasis on scrutinizing ideas of racism’s overcoming in an attempt to uncover the true extent of its endurance.

2 Black in the Union Jack: The Britishness Project

National identity politics As I suggested in the last chapter, multiculturalism – as a means of describing, engineering or constructing plural forms of social identity and belonging – has in recent years been harnessed to a variety of state projects. In this chapter I want to focus on multiculturalism as a discourse of and about the nation. In particular, I will examine how an idea of multicultural pluralism has in Britain been foregrounded by New Labour as an instrument for the reconstruction of an explicitly nationalist politics. While Labour politicians have historically been wary of nationalism – not least for its indomitably racial connotations – multicultural discourses have presented themselves as a means of refuting that negative association, and reframing national belonging in unequivocally pluralist terms. Take, for example, the following soundbite attributed in March 2000 to the then Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown: Instead of a bland Britain, Britain is buzzing with difference; no longer a state in monochrome, but a nation in living colour (quoted in Wintour, 2000). Brown describes the qualities of contemporary Britain by analogy to a concept of historical progress set out in the terminology of technological change. The transition from monochrome to colour could be said to reference the development of photography or cinema, but perhaps more accurately describes a shift that took place in the last quarter of the twentieth century, as colour televisions gradually replaced black and white sets in the nation’s living rooms. In any case, what is 39


implied here is a parallel history, an identity in the social and technological unfolding of modern Britain. Those of us brought up in this Technicolor® age are instinctively apt to think of history in similar terms, as documentary footage of the earlier twentieth century confirms to us that the nation’s past had indeed taken place in flickering shades of grey. The transformation from the mono- to the polychromatic represents a shift in another register, as Brown’s mixed metaphors suggest a move from singularity to plurality, from bland monosemy to a spectrum of difference. According to Brown, contemporary Britain is diverse in both colour and custom: his technological narrative marks a qualitative change in the identity of the nation.1 Despite this mood of change, ‘Britain’ retains its status here as an object of continuity. Brown’s words have their place in an ongoing political project aimed at redefining a sense of national identity, a project that constitutes the subject of this chapter. Ideas of national belonging have a key determining position in the contemporary politics of race. They describe the point at which minorities meet majorities on an uneven national turf, where constituent parts form a national whole. Britishness mediates this relation by standing for a certain cultural content national life is said to possess: it defines a form of citizenship above and beyond juridical markers of national belonging. While Britishness is therefore necessarily impossible to rationalize in a formal legal sense, this does not prevent it from having a decisive impact on civil life. The centrality of Britishness to race politics is borne out by the reception of two of the key documents in the recent national history of race relations: while the contents of the Parekh and Macpherson reports by far exceeded the rather abstract (and, as this chapter will show, in many ways largely empty) Britishness debate, they were both in their own ways prevented from achieving anything like their full potential by their containment within its interpretative parameters. Attempts in the Parekh Report (Runnymede Trust, 2000a) to open up the nation’s history to critical scrutiny became the grounds of its dismissal by much of the British press, with the copy-writers of the Daily Telegraph reeling in mock outrage against a publication that, it suggested, had caused ‘offence to Britain’s indigenous population’ (Daily Telegraph, 2000).2 While, as Arun Kundnani argues, the Macpherson Report was generally welcomed for highlighting individual instances of bias and discrimination, its landmark structural diagnosis of ‘institutional racism’ proved a harder pill to swallow, and was seen by many ‘as an attack on Englishness’ (Kundnani, 2000: 2).3 As perhaps the most decisive force of overdetermination in British race politics,

Black in the Union Jack: The Britishness Project 41

Britishness and its cognate terms bring about a discursive closure that prescribe a limit to the ways in which race can be discussed, and the terms on which it is operative. This chapter will begin by examining some of the reasons why the Britishness project has become a key feature of the politics of the state under New Labour. It makes a case for understanding Labour’s turn to discourses of the nation in relation to its own reform agenda, as well as the Party’s search for a popular platform to mount a convincing challenge to ‘One Nation’ conservatism. It goes on to consider how New Labour’s embrace of a nationalist agenda has been rationalized as a legitimate project for the centre left. While I recognize that the celebration of ‘national diversity’ introduces a novel dimension to the politics of nationalism, it has not, in my view, precluded the racialization of the Britishness project. I go on to explore how the Britishness agenda has led to a reinterpretation of the nation’s imperial history. In a discussion of speeches by Gordon Brown which specifically address this question, I demonstrate how a multicultural interpretation of Britain’s past has permitted the limited recovery of a hitherto discredited colonial agenda. I also examine how a discourse of national ‘tolerance’ is mobilized in the area of asylum and immigration to defend exclusionary practices against the charge of racism. The remainder of the chapter focuses on recent policy initiatives that are specifically intended to identify and promulgate an idea of cultural citizenship. The nebulous category of multicultural Britishness, used to articulate a new modality of national belonging, has played a dominant role in the construction of new legislation on citizenship and naturalization. After discussing the new citizenship tests, I give a descriptive account of the British citizenship ceremony, and consider why it is that the contemporary state politics of race have become increasingly fixated with defining the chimerical cultural content of the British nation. While New Labour’s Britishness project announces itself as providing a new plural model of national identity, it remains trapped within an interpretive framework that reproduces old racialized forms of national belonging. Multicultural Britishness does not represent the transcendence of an insular and defensive British nationalism, but rather is symptomatic of an unwillingness to move beyond its conceptual strictures. The ‘living colour’ of contemporary Britain might evoke an imagined community better suited to the representation of its ‘coloured’ citizens, but it may likewise elide the inequalities that inhere to the glossy forward-thinking ideologies of Prospect and Progress.


Britishness: the recent history of an old idea This country is a blessed country. The British are special. The world knows it, we know it, this is the greatest country on earth. Tony Blair4 While the general concept of national identity signified by Britishness has, as noted in Chapter 1, had a long history, the particular meaning of the term as it is understood here can be ascribed to a relatively recent conjuncture of social and political currents. A search of British national newspapers reveals that over the last thirty years or so the concept of Britishness (invariably framed by inverted commas) had until quite recently tended to be used mainly in reference to individuals and groups whose claim to a British identity was in territorial dispute. Britishness was a term used most often to describe the national affiliation of members of Britain’s remaining colonial outposts: the Falklands/Malvinas, Gibraltar, and, most regularly, in Northern Ireland/ the six counties. Rarely was the word used, beyond these contested territories, to describe the Britishness of Britain. It is with Tony Blair’s New Labour Party that the concept of Britishness (without the inverted commas) took on a new meaning to become a significant feature of the nation’s political discourse. A collection of speeches and essays published as part of New Labour’s propaganda effort prior to its installation in government makes this clear. Entitled New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, Blair’s book is part of a concerted attempt to occupy the ‘One Nation’ territory that was hitherto most closely associated with the Conservative Party. In a speech reprinted in this book, originally made at the Labour Party Conference in October 1995, Blair describes the forthcoming 1997 General Election as ‘a battle for the soul of our nation’ (Blair, 1996: 71): New Labour cannot create new Britain alone. I challenge this country: let us rouse ourselves to a new moral purpose for our nation. Let’s build a new and young country that can lay aside the old prejudices that have dominated our land for generations. A nation for all the people, built by all the people, where old divisions are cast out. A new spirit in the nation based on working together, unity, solidarity, partnership. One Britain. This is the patriotism for the future (ibid.). Blair’s post-political social contract is no less than a vision of national rebirth. His ‘patriotism for the future’ is of course in part simply


populist rhetoric, and though it would indeed be possible to overinterpret the significance of his nationalist interpellations, Blair’s conception of a renewed national identity is not simply an empty display of meaningless platitudes. Just as with the rewriting of the Party’s Clause Four some five months previously (discussed in the next chapter), this speech constitutes an open and confident declaration of what had been a very real (if gradual) shift in the Party’s orientation. It is no coincidence that an emphasis on national identity was coterminous with the Party’s determination to shirk off its erstwhile commitments (however nominally held) to the labour movement. Labour’s battle to be seen to fully occupy the centre ground of British politics involved loosening its attachment to this constituency, divesting the Party of much of what Patrick Wright has called its ‘stylistic appeals to history’ (Wright, 1985: 158), and communicating to the electorate of Tory Britain in a symbolic language that refused the ‘old divisions’ between labour and capital. As Gerard Delanty argues, New Labour’s political rhetoric in the 1997 election made the terms ‘nation’ and ‘society’ interchangeable. Its nationalist appeals ‘allowed the Labour Party to take over the Conservative Party’s previous monopoly of the discourse of the nation’ (Delanty, 2003: 87). Television footage (in ‘living colour’) of Blair’s first triumphant arrival at Downing Street testified to this new populist orientation, as Party hacks and borrowed children thronged Whitehall pavements, waving miniature Union Jacks as if the future of the nation itself was held in that frantic blur of red, white, and blue. With a poster campaign featuring ‘Fitz’, the British bulldog, and a party political broadcast that saw Blair pacing the turf atop the white cliffs of Dover, the 1997 election campaign painted a diorama of unreconstructed national pride. While the war years were (and remain) the classical reference point in the imagery of contemporary nationalism (see Popular Memory Group, 1982: 213), Labour took advantage of another key moment in twentieth-century nationalist history, and by its close association with a brand of white guitar music that was itself structured around a nostalgic vision of pop history, the party’s embrace of ‘Cool Britannia’ referenced the populist touch that had done so much good for Labour under Harold Wilson in the mid 1960s. Yet the imagery of the war years and the homology between the swinging sixties and the revivalist posturing of Britpop again only tell the story of a publicity campaign, and it would be a mistake to imagine that Labour’s nationalist turn in the 1990s was a mere exercise in public relations. There were more substantial (and less obviously populist)


political reasons for the Party’s need to address questions of national identity. Labour had used the promise of regional devolution to bolster its support in Scotland and Wales, and was to shift (though not spectacularly) the relationship between Britain and its constituent nations by the creation of the Holyrood parliament and the assembly at Cardiff Bay. It is from the incomplete devolutionist project that many of the perennial confusions and elisions around ‘Britishness’ and ‘Englishness’ derive, and though there are of course significant political and cultural currents that centre on the articulation of Scottish, Welsh, English and Irish national identities, it remains the case that it is specifically questions of Britishness that have been of primary importance to New Labour in its stewardship of the British state.5 In the absence of a meaningful solution to constitutional questions, an elaborated concept of Britishness remained necessary for New Labour to shore up a continued hierarchical relation between the devolved national areas and the British parliament in England’s capital city. Although the Tories remain officially the Conservative and Unionist Party, their concentration on the English heartland had transformed Labour – by Gordon Brown’s own admission – into ‘the party of the Union’ (Brown, 2004: 15). More important still was a general question as to the ability of a government of New Labour’s political persuasion to live up to its promise of creating ‘One Britain’ that was any less socially divisive than its Tory precursors. The theoretical influence of communitarianism is something I discuss in the following chapter, and here I simply want to point to the general need for a party pursuing a neoliberal agenda to communicate its relevance to an electorate who were to face a range of economizing reforms in public service provision. If constitutional devolution was lacking in substance, this economic devolution was, by contrast, pursued with some vigour. New Labour’s promise had in part been predicated on the idea that they might provide a meaningful alternative to governing the social landscape of post-Thatcherite Tory Britain, yet its economic commitments to an increasingly ‘hollowed out’ model of state provision (see Jessop, 2002: 212) meant that it would prove hard to deliver the required social goods. And so just as invocations of Britishness were used to shore up short-term support for the Party in the context of the 1997 election campaign, they played a part in a long-term strategy that sought to address issues of social and political disenfranchisement in contemporary Britain. A common shorthand for neoliberal reform has been provided by the political discourse of ‘globalization’, which represents the very real


pressures faced by acquiescent executive structures to conform to the rules of global labour and investment markets. ‘Globalization’ glosses some of the social outcomes of the neoliberal capitalist project: it highlights the international mobility of specialist and unskilled labour markets (including the phenomenon of immigration), and the effects of transient capital on national economies largely beyond the control of states (like the UK) which have divested themselves of many of the regulatory levers of central planning. In the place of the British state’s postwar role in the maintenance of Keynesian welfarism, the economic stance that New Labour regarded as its inheritance outlawed interventions that would transgress its Chancellor’s ‘golden rule’ for public investment (see HM Treasury, 1998: 19). It is in such a climate, where the role of the British state is to a significant extent subordinated to the demands of the global ‘free’ market, that the rebranding of national identity takes on an important role. In one regard, this is part of the project of constructing the nation as a post-industrial knowledge economy, where attempts are made – particularly in the areas of education and employment – to lay down the structural conditions for continued neoliberal growth.6 In another, and more explicitly ‘ideological’ sense, the rebranding of Britishness has centred on the realm of culture in an attempt to act directly upon the citizens of the nation. Of relevance here is the concept of governmentality, probably the most useful formulation of power in the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault understands the art of government to be ‘essentially concerned with answering the question of how to introduce economy [that is, a question of managing individuals] into the management of the state’ (Foucault, 1994: 441). As a theory of ‘the conduct of conduct’ (Dean, 1999: 198), governmentality provides a useful critical standpoint from which it can be recognized how political power is exercised in ways that make use of – and, where possible, restructure – the subjective experience of individuals and groups so that they act in ways deemed appropriate by those who hold that power. To govern is ‘to structure the possible field of action of others’ (Foucault, 2000: 20). As Alan Finlayson argues of New Labour discourse, the realm of culture ‘becomes the terrain upon which citizensubjects will be managed and produced, inducing a form of citizenship that is essentially in harmony with the economy’ (Finlayson, 2003: 155). Given the range of possible interventions that are ruled out a priori from a neoliberal framework, the governmental application of ideas of culture and cultural citizenship has become a primary method by which the state has attempted to compensate for its withdrawal of


meaningful social support and – relatedly – mitigate against forms of social conflict that are its inevitable outcome. Because in important areas the contemporary British state has rescinded its commitments to the post-war social contract, emphasis has shifted onto the orientations, obligations and duties of citizens to lend greater coherence to the social fabric of the nation. And so it should be clear that New Labour’s Britishness project has a wide range of intended functions: it is part of the Party’s (highly successful) attempt to displace a One Nation Tory Party from the centre ground of British politics, and to replace it as ‘the party of the Union’. It is at the same time an effort to promote a sense of social cohesion that is being steadily eroded by Labour’s own commitments to privatization and welfare reform. Britishness is a straightforwardly political project of a party and of a state, but it is also an experiment in social engineering, an exercise in governmentality. Like the apparent reversal of Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft distinction I will discuss later in Chapter 3, the social dimensions of the Britishness project seem to turn on their head the developmental principles of classical sociology. While Durkheim described the transition from mechanistic to organic solidarity, where social cohesion was transformed from a condition of singular identity to one of plural interdependence (see Durkheim, 1964: 181), the perceived need to reinforce social solidarity under the conditions of ‘globalization’ is similarly driven by a seemingly anachronistic attempt to recapture a singular collective sense of belonging anchored in the transcendent ideology of the nation. Yet, as I will also show in relation to Tönnies’s concepts, this ‘recovery’ of a mechanistic solidarity is not conceived simply as a return to the cohesive society of (an imaginary) lost past. New Labour’s turn to Britishness is marked by a number of novel features that I will now discuss before turning to examine in a little more detail some of the outcomes of this reappraisal of the national past, present and future.

Novelty, constructionism and the politics of resignification In stark contrast to the general tenor of earlier nationalist projects, New Labour’s rebranding of Britain has been conducted with a remarkable degree of openness. This might be said at least in part to be down to a changed political landscape, where techniques of presenting political projects typically foreground their novelty as an asset and selling point. One of the best illustrations of this framing can be found in a Demos pamphlet written in 1997 by Mark Leonard, a sometime policy


advisor to the New Labour government on the promotion of Britain abroad, and the self-declared inventor of the term ‘Cool Britannia’. Between its startlingly bright lime green covers, Leonard’s Britain™ proposes ‘new mechanisms for renewing our identity’ (Leonard, 1997: 11), including a series of inclusive ‘trademarks’ (ibid. 62) that he suggests the British people can ‘buy into’ (ibid. 46). This national brand identity references many of the concerns facing the contemporary state that I have just sketched out: ‘Open for Business’ (ibid. 57) describes an entrepreneurial consumer society structured around a service economy; ‘Hub UK’ (ibid. 48–9) depicts the nation as the axis of global connectivity, and particularly as a bridge between Europe and the US; ‘Creative Island’, ‘Silent Revolutionary’ and ‘Nation of Fair Play’ (ibid. 52, 59, 61) all attempt to articulate supposedly defining characteristics of the British nation; finally, the slogan ‘United Colours of Britain’ (ibid. 56) is proposed to indicate a sense of the ‘hybrid forms’ (ibid.) that combine to make up the social fabric of late twentieth-century Britain. This nod to the controversialist poster campaigns of an Italian knitwear manufacturer weaves the nation’s brand identity on a multicultural loom: both ‘edgy’ and ‘contemporary’, the ‘United Colours of Britain’ perfectly articulates a pluralist approach to national identity as refracted through the imagery of the advertising world. Another device that makes Leonard’s pamphlet representative of New Labour thinking is the manner in which it attempts to utilize the power of nationalism as a force for popular mobilization, but is at the same time uncomfortable with its traditional narratives of blood and breeding. What we might call a new nationalist constructionism accordingly places stress on the historical contingency of nationalist projects as a means of distancing itself from their often dubious racial heritage, while holding open the possibility of their continued utilization. While The Invention of Tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) was clearly written with the intention of debunking the eternalizing historical claims of nationalist mythologies, Leonard references this key work in a spirit of enthusiasm (Leonard, 1997: 26), reconceiving its critique in programmatic (governmental) terms. According to Leonard, it is precisely because ‘nations have been recreating their identities throughout recorded history’ that ‘logos and branding techniques, advertising campaigns and festivals, speeches and trade fairs’ become the ‘new tools’ with which national identity may be manipulated by the contemporary British state (ibid. 15). This constructionist approach to national identity has, according to its proponents, the benefit of freeing nationalist projects from the taint of racial essentialism, and, in


the words of one of the most prominent ideologues of Britishness, enabling ‘the conscious creation of a progressive British nationalism’ (Goodhart, 2005; see also Goodhart, 2006). It is not only to those of us for whom Goodhart’s phrase will always be an oxymoron that the history of British nationalism constitutes a thorny problem. Impossible to ignore by even the keenest proponents of the Britishness project, nationalism’s immediate association with the (far) right has been the first stumbling block in the path of hopes of its ‘progressive’ resignification. A 2002 publication by the Foreign Policy Centre (of which Tony Blair is patron) signals knowledge of this in its title. With a contribution from Home Secretary David Blunkett and an introduction by the aforementioned Mark Leonard, Reclaiming Britishness (Griffith and Leonard, 2002) makes clear the extent to which British nationalism is far from the natural territory of Labour politics. ‘Reclaiming’ is not, of course, the same as ‘claiming’, and its suggestion that a progressive, inclusive Britishness is there to be recovered for the centre left is I would argue another unfortunate blind spot of New Labour’s Britishness project. George Orwell is a common reference point in such discussions, particularly since his long 1940 essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (Orwell, 1984) can in a certain light be seen as a direct precursor of this new concern for forging a strong national identity. What those keen on stressing Orwell’s status as a leftist antecedent of this project forget (or conveniently ignore) is the extent to which Orwell’s motives differed from those of New Labour. Orwell’s rather confused attempts to distinguish the legitimacy of patriotism from the evils of nationalism (Orwell, 1968: 362) can perhaps be excused, for the purpose that lay behind his writing on the subject was far from the warm embrace of national tradition suggested by its imagery of old maids and clattering clogs. For all of its frustrating romanticism, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ was a strategic intervention arguing for the development of a radically redistributive socialist system as the only practical means of defeating German fascism. Orwell’s declared ‘patriotism’ was not simply the romance of national cliché, but the social basis on which to begin a major social transformation (the romantic nationalism of ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ can accordingly be understood as a tactical device to domesticate a ‘foreign’ socialism for Orwell’s British readership). While it is true that current proponents of Britishness also make a claim (albeit far less ambitiously) for the progressive reconstruction of society, their attempts to circumvent British nationalism’s right-wing heritage – like their (mis)readings of Orwell – suggest that these are selective accounts that represent somewhat premature and wishful thinking.7


It is certainly the case, even if British nationalism could be ‘reclaimed’ from the right, that ‘progressive’ nationalists would still be hampered by an inability to conceive of a sufficiently progressive nationalist content. Evocations of Britishness, whatever their claim to novelty, will frequently founder on their tendency to reproduce politically conservative ideas of national identity. Take, for example, the following statement by MP and Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart, from the introduction to a consultation document on the government’s Community Cohesion and Race Equality Strategy of 2004: We need to ensure that all citizens feel a sense of pride in being British and a sense of belonging to this country and to each other, and to ensure that our national symbols, like the Union Jack and the flags of the four nations, are not the tools of extremists, but visibly demonstrate our unity, as we saw through the Golden Jubilee celebrations (Home Office, 2004a: 6). Tellingly, Mactaggart’s attempt to describe a fully inclusive Britishness against the extremism of the far right involves a tussle over the symbolism of the flag. Beyond her reliance on the inclusive pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’, Mactaggart’s best attempt at describing a new pluralist nationalism relies upon the stage-managed state pageantry of the 2002 Jubilee, the finale of which comprised an uncomfortable synthesis of military fly-pasts and steel pan bands.8 If a progressive British nationalism requires that an inclusive ‘sense of pride’ find expression through the public relations display of monarchical pomp, it is in some respects hard to identify what really distinguishes this from the old assimilationist narratives of an imperial Great Britain.9 It should at the same time be acknowledged that although such displays have perhaps more in common with the condescending tolerance of commonwealth etiquette than a meaningful engagement with the multicultural reality of contemporary Britain, they do nevertheless represent a dominant new idea of national identity. The Golden Jubilee’s final theme of ‘diversity’ would, after all, never have been considered for the Silver Jubilee of 1977. The version of cultural pluralism embraced in such spectacles is severely limited, but demonstrates at a certain level the symbolic success of multicultural nationalism in populist form. It is a success that has since been replicated for international audiences: the promotion of diversity as a national characteristic played a large part in Britain’s winning bid to host the 2012 Olympics. In both cases, ‘living colour’ replaces ‘monochrome’,


just as ‘ethnic’ food comes as a welcome change to a jaded national palate. What we must therefore consider here is not whether a multicultural Britishness is possible per se, but whether or not it is really capable of providing the basis for a progressive political project. While the analysis in this book owes a great deal to the work of Ernesto Laclau, it is in respect of his thinking around the politics of nationalism that a certain limitation in his approach becomes evident. Similar in some ways to the self-conscious nationalist constructionism of Leonard and Goodhart, Laclau has held open the possibility of a radical resignification of discourses of the nation, in the belief that a universal element of democratic pluralism has the potential to trump the regressive and reactionary aspects of nationalist identification. The forceful counter-argument Paul Gilroy makes in The Empire Strikes Back is of significance here, where Laclau is taken to task for his belief that ‘the discourse of “the nation” may be articulated into struggles where working-class interests are hegemonic, without antagonistic contradiction’ (Gilroy, 1982: 277–8). While Gilroy does not rule out the possibility of popular democratic struggle in anti-racist politics, he is scornful of Laclau’s suggestion that the British nation represents a viable territory within which this might take place. As he goes on to argue, It will take far more than the will to create a ‘pluralist national identity’ to prise the jaws of the bulldog of British nationalism free from the flesh of the labour movement. It is precisely because the discourses of the British Nation and the British People are racially exclusive that a contradiction around race becomes a grave problem for those who adopt Laclau’s framework (ibid. 278). Gilroy recognizes here the extent to which the idea of Britishness is overdetermined by the historical conditions of its emergence. Though Laclau’s most recent work dispenses altogether with a strong concept of class as a unit of collective political organization, he retains and places a greater emphasis on ideas of populism – and indeed populist nationalism – to stand in its place (Laclau, 2005). In acknowledging the socially constructed character of the nation, Laclau’s instinct is to regard it as another empty signifier, with a content that can be appropriated and transformed to progressive ends. While it is theoretically the case, from Laclau’s perspective, that the meaning of nationalism is dependent on the chain of equivalences with which it is associated (ibid. 227), and that its ontological function can therefore be hege-


monized by an alternative ontic content (ibid. 87), his argument cannot in practical terms be made applicable to the contemporary British situation.10 As Laclau would surely concur, simply because, vide Benedict Anderson (1991), the nation is ‘imagined’ does not mean that it is possible simply to decide to imagine it differently. It is not that ‘progressive nationalism’ is in all circumstances a totally impossible concept, as movements of national independence against European colonialism have amply shown; neither is it impossible to find examples of a contemporary nationalist politics strongly committed to antiracism, as is the case, for example, with policies developed in recent years by Sinn Féin (Sinn Féin, 2001). Both these examples, however, relate to postcolonial projects that involve a profound reconfiguration and recomposition of both state and society. In the absence of such a radical break with an existing nationalist history, or the historical conditions that might produce it, discourses of the nation will remain deeply marked by longstanding and entrenched economies of race and nation. As such, the Britishness project – as a nationalist venture conceived by the governing political party – cannot possibly escape the exclusionary conditions upon which it is founded. In recognizing the tenacity of racialized nationalism and thus the impossibility of Britishness as a progressive project, Gilroy has more recently come to define ‘Britain’s postmodern nationalism’ (Gilroy, 2004: 95) as a form of historical denial. He has placed stress upon the obsessive dwelling on (or in) a particular cultural manifestation of the national past, a phenomenon he has dubbed ‘postimperial melancholia’ (ibid. 95–132). His argument, adapted from post-war German social psychology, is that a neurotic return to the ‘martial images’ (ibid. 95) of national glory provides a positive (moral and victorious) narrative of British culture which papers over a decidedly less seductive reality of national decline. Postimperial melancholia is a diagnosis of cultural malaise predicated on ‘the loss of a fantasy of omnipotence’, where racialized others are ‘unwanted and feared precisely because they are the unwitting bearers of the imperial and colonial past’ (ibid. 108, 110), a constant reminder of a vanished empire ‘and the unsettling shame of its bloody management’ (ibid. 110). Gilroy’s argument is a seductive one, and his intention of foregrounding the need to return to the critique of empire and its ideological props is an important critical manoeuvre. Yet his focus does not necessarily provide us with the best framework for understanding what is at stake in the contemporary politics of Britishness. Gilroy places his emphasis on ambivalent feelings of ‘discomfort, shame, and perplexity’ (ibid. 98)


in a psychology of forgetting which, he argues, necessitates a collective working through of feelings towards empire as a lost object. His desire to stipulate the terms in which this relationship to colonial history should take place traps him in a circular argument where positions that do not fit his preferred model of remembrance are dismissed as by definition melancholic. In the next section of this chapter, I want to focus on descriptions of the imperial past that form a key part of the Britishness project, and suggest that recent attempts to revisit the history of British colonialism do not seem to constitute the evasion of imperial history that Gilroy suggests, and indeed appear to demonstrate a limited ‘working through’ of colonial ambivalence. The fact that neither I nor Gilroy would approve of the terms through which this postcolonial reckoning with the national past occurs does not by definition mean that it has not taken place.

Revisiting empire: Gordon Brown in Africa I want us to make sense of our history. There is a lot of rubbish talked about the Empire. In my view, we should not either be apologising for it or wringing our hands about it. Tony Blair11 [T]he fact that the nation was formed as part of the empire means that the empire remains part of the nation for a long time after physical and juridical separation. Étienne Balibar12 On a visit in 2005 to Britain’s former East African colony of Tanzania, the then Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown took the opportunity to publicly set out his position on British colonialism. In a commonwealth cemetery in Dar es Salaam, Brown told the Daily Mail that ‘the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over. We should move forward’ (in Brogan, 2005). Not only would there be no word or act of contrition from the British government, but there should, according to Brown, be a degree of triumphalism in the recollection of the nation’s imperial past: ‘we should’, he told the Mail’s reporter, ‘celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it’ (ibid.). The debate on apology and reparation is far less advanced in Britain than in, say, the United States,13 and Brown’s unequivocal declamations made it perfectly clear that no such ideas were going to feature on New Labour’s political agenda. While it would of course be


possible to view these statements as exemplary of Gilroy’s postimperial melancholia – for their bullishness to be indicative of a denial of the reality of Britain’s colonial history – this would be to diminish the extent to which the idea of British imperialism evoked here is made as an offensive, rather than defensive, gesture. Brown’s words are of course a denial of sorts, but his purposeful and deliberate tone does not suggest ‘discomfort, shame, and perplexity’, but rather a newly confident belief in the rectitude of British colonialism. The significance of this becomes clear if we turn to consider how Britain’s imperial history has been treated in two roughly contemporaneous speeches by Brown on the subject of national identity.14 The first, entitled ‘Britishness’, was the British Council Annual Lecture of 2004 (Brown, 2004); the second, ‘The Future of Britishness’, was a keynote speech to a conference of the same name organized by the Fabian Society in January 2006 (Brown, 2006). As the second speech is to a significant extent simply a reworking of the first, I will treat them as part of the same argument, and attempt to demonstrate how their continuity encompasses the intervening remarks Brown made in Tanzania. What the Britishness speeches illustrate is the extent to which Brown does engage in a radical reappraisal of the legacies of empire. He describes the familiar content of the ‘imperial Britain’ of his youth (Brown, 2004: 3), a cultural milieu which, set out in almost precisely the same terms as Gilroy, has as its ultimate horizon the nationalist mythology of the Second World War: I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties on maps of the world with a quarter of it pink and on British books and comics and then films which glorified the Blitz, the Spitfires, Sir Douglas Bader and endless reruns of The Guns of Navarone (ibid.).15 Brown expresses his unease at the way in which such narratives of British history have taken the form of an obstructive fixation with the postulated glory days of the nation’s past. He considers the ensuing decades of ‘post-war Britain’ to be characterized by ‘a long half-century of uncertainty’, where the image of Britain came to be marked by ‘managed decline’ as ‘the sun set on the empire’ (ibid. 4). Using words that begin by mirroring Gilroy’s melancholia argument, Brown suggests that: It was almost as if we looked back with nostalgia because we could not look forward with hope. And so the gap between imperial myth


and reality grew, so too the view grew that Britain was not, in fact, underpinned by any strong sense of Britishness at all (ibid.). This is, of course, the point at which Brown and Gilroy’s respective historiographies part company. While Gilroy would argue that the ‘gap between imperial myth and reality’ provides the opportunity for a clear-eyed scrutiny of the empire’s continuing racial legacy, Brown returns to the nation’s imperial history as a means of breaking with post-war nostalgia, and his nationalist genealogy stresses the continuities between imperial Britain and a reinvigorated patriotism. Rather than problematizing the romance of Britain’s colonial empire, it is the last fifty or so years which are to Brown urgently in need of reassessment. The past in Brown’s version of Britishness is the storehouse of a set of ‘core values’ (ibid. 6) which, while temporarily mislaid with the dented confidence brought about by the end of empire, have not been lost forever. The ‘golden thread which runs throughout British history’ (ibid.) can accordingly be picked up once again to guide the nation into its proud future. Purportedly promoted by a progressive lineage of literary antecedents – which include Milton, Wordsworth, Hazlitt and (unsurprisingly) Orwell – (Brown, 2006), this golden thread stretches some 2,000 years (Brown, 2004: 6) to the limits of prehistory, where Brown identifies the origins of the nation’s unique cultural heritage. Claiming as one defining attribute the tradition of ‘liberty’ (ibid. 7), Brown makes the extraordinary claim that it is because different ethnic groups came to live together in one small island that we first made a virtue of tolerance – welcoming and including successive waves of settlers from Saxons and Normans to Hugenots and Jews and Asians and Afro-Caribbeans, and recognising plural identities (ibid.). I need not set out here the catalogue of war, colonialism, genocide, exploitation, xenophobia and race hatred that is elided in this description. Instead, I would like to highlight the way in which Brown’s manipulation of the golden thread seeks to recover a central tenet of ‘a confident post-imperial Britain’ (Brown, 2006) by means of a reacquaintance with the nation’s eternal values that are, in this case, said to be a product of the social geography of a plural island race. Brown uses a concept of Britishness to insert a contemporary ethical idealism (the valorization of ‘plural identities’) into a highly selective reading of the nation’s past. This nationalist revisionism has the intended effect


not only of purging racism from the historical record, but also of setting up a precursive tradition that roots a story of multicultural harmony in the deep soil of a nationalist poetics. As well as being a denial of a racist past, Brown’s celebration of Britain’s ‘uniquely rich and diverse culture’ (Brown, 2004: 6) is also, effectively, the disavowal of a racist present. There is, he implies, no place for racism in British society because it has no precedent in the nation’s history. Racist practices here become deviations from the national story: were they to exist at all (and Brown’s history allows only the slightest adumbration of their possibility), they would represent deviations from the unblemished path of the golden thread. Embroidering on the theme of liberty, Brown is able to make an equally audacious claim as to imperial Britain’s legacy by similarly passing over in silence its role in creating some of the largest and most systematic regimes of slavery and bondage in modern history. Although Brown admits that ‘history is strewn with examples of how we failed to live up to our ideals’ (Brown, 2004: 7), he goes on to argue that the idea of liberty did mean, in practice, that for half a century it was Britain that led the worldwide anti-slavery movement with engraved on the badge of the anti-slavery society a figure of a black man and the quote, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Indeed at home no slave was ever permitted and abroad the Royal Navy searched the world to eradicate slavery (ibid.). Because the central role of the state in the practice of slavery is erased from view, a progressive history of Wilberforcean reform and abolition can be erected in its place. This suggests that the nationalist geist of liberty can, where necessary, become conveniently detached from the actions of the state. The way national ‘values’ are abstractly decoupled from their conflictual histories is commented on by Stuart Hall, who points to the way in which totemic ‘national’ achievements – such as the abolition of slavery – are in reality ‘a product of a ferocious struggle between one sort of English person and another. Only retrospectively, after the real dust had cleared, were they rewoven into the seamless unfolding story of an ascendant Englishness, which effortlessly is then elided into Britishness’ (Hall, 2001: 9; see also Levitas, 1998: 114; Balibar, 2002: 124). This observation might be extended into a more general point about the relationship between official histories (such as Brown’s account of Britishness here) and the moral ‘lessons’ of history (i.e., an idea about the horror of the middle passage as from the


perspective of the present). The former will invariably attempt to appropriate the latter as their own even when, historically speaking, an identity is at best ambiguous, if not a downright lie. While, as the truism goes, history gets to be written by the victors, it is nevertheless the case that the content of that history is often supplied by history’s losers. The contradictions of dominant histories – such as their sheer brutality – are concealed in such manoeuvres, and become replaced by a piety and sufferance derived from an emphatic overidentification with the victim. In Brown’s speeches, slavery is understood not as a cause for regret and reconciliation, but as the evil against which the golden thread of Britishness has asserted its libertarian spirit. While Britain’s naval dominance had in reality provided the necessary sea power for its imperial expansion, and was thus the precondition of the state’s control over the transatlantic slave trade, Brown recasts the Royal Navy as the enlightened agent of a roving humanitarianism. As before, this rewriting exonerates both past and present within a bowdlerized account of British history. A very similar argument is made by Barnor Hesse in his brilliant analysis of the memorialization of the slave trade in Spielberg’s Amistad which, Hesse argues, ‘reinforces Western culture’s proprietorial memory of slavery as the memory of its abolition’ (Hesse, 2002: 149). This form of revisionism has, as Alastair Bonnett indicates, many historical precedents (Bonnett, 2000a: 50). Brown’s latter description of colonial Britain gives us some clues as to the motivations behind the determination with which he set out on his African tour to ‘move forward’, celebrate the past, and stop apologizing for it. Like the popular revisionist historian Niall Ferguson, Brown appears to be suggesting that empire is ‘a form of international government that can work – and not just for the benefit of the ruling power’ (Ferguson, 2003: 362).16 Although Brown’s account of Britishness bears no meaningful relation to the historical record, it is less an expression of postimperial melancholia (that is, an inability to mourn the loss of empire prompted by feelings of guilt or shame) than, rather more disturbingly, an articulation of imperial history in a new configuration of race and nation shaped by our postimperial – and indeed multicultural – present.17 To conceive of Brown’s account of Britishness as a melancholic reaction to inexorable decline is thus to overemphasize the concluded nature of the British state’s continuing geopolitical role, and underplay the significance of imperial revivalism as an expression of current and ongoing interests.18 While of course the might of the imperial Britain that Brown hankers after is long gone, this does not mean that its evocation does not serve important and powerful


agendas, not only as part of a programme for nationalist revival in the domestic sphere, but also in relation to new imperialisms that are irreducible to the expression of national interests alone. For example, Brown argues that his progressive tradition of Britishness provides a template for a revivified international mandate, which has provided a discourse of legitimation for direct imperial interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq (see also Chapters 4 and 5), as well as the application of neocolonial economic and trade regimes elsewhere: Being clear what Britishness means in a post-imperial world is essential if we are to forge the best relationships with the developing world and in particular with Africa (Brown, 2006). Britishness thus sets out the grounds for the development of a new world role that has its direct progenitor in the civilizing mission of British imperialism. Take, for example, the package approved by Brown and agreed by the G8 nations at the Gleneagles summit in July 2005 (see G8, 2005), where valuable commitments to debt relief were made conditional on the adoption of policies of ‘structural adjustment’, involving the dismantling of trade barriers and the privatization and deregulation of African national economies (see Gibson, 2004). It is in the name of ‘liberty, responsibility and fairness’ (Brown, 2006) that Brown sets out his justification for an imperial mandate that has many continuities with that described in Kwame Nkrumah’s classic account of neo-colonialism (Nkrumah, 1971). What is notable here is not the expected degree of hypocrisy and double-standards, but the way in which the expressed values of racial diversity and cultural pluralism are co-opted to an idea of Britishness in order to legitimate – both in the past and the present – what can only be called an imperialist agenda.19 We might say that Brown’s historical revisionism, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘succeeds in imposing itself durably only in so far as it manages to secure recognition, which is nothing other than a misrecognition of its principle’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 104). Multicultural discourse becomes the ideal language for the concealment of an unmentionable historical legacy, while to a significant extent also perpetuating that legacy by purporting to have overcome it. As a helpful corrective to those who are keen to dismiss the role of state nationalism in an era of ‘globalization’, or who see multiculturalism as by its very nature transcendent of nationalist boundaries, Brown’s multicultural framing of Britishness as ‘progressive’ nationalism reminds us of ‘the recuperative power of multiculturalism for ideologies of national unity’ (Huggan, 2001: 79).20


Asylum, immigration and ‘tolerance’ The dividing line, therefore, will not be about who is the racist or anti-racist but about who has the proposals that work in the interests of Britain. Tony Blair21 The capacity of multicultural discourses to be overdetermined by their containment within nationalist parameters is particularly evident in recent state discourses on asylum and immigration. As Irene Gedalof has pointed out, the titular ordering of the 2001 White Paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven (Home Office, 2002) indicates the extent to which current security regimes make Britain’s status as a place of refuge conditional upon the prior defence of the geographical and symbolic borders of the nation. Focusing on gendered discourse of home, she suggests that this ordering is predicated on ‘an anxiety over how much difference the “home” community can absorb before it becomes “unhomely”’ (Gedalof, 2007: 77). An emergent focus on conditionality, while in effect subordinating the notion of rights to a concept of pure economic expediency (see Flynn, 2003: 8), is paradoxically provided with a veneer of ethical legitimacy within an anthropological discourse of a ‘tolerant’ Britishness. Take, for example, Tony Blair’s argument in a foreword to the Government’s five-year strategy for asylum and immigration, published in February 2005. It is, he suggests, in the nature of the people of Britain to be ‘moderate and tolerant’, yet goes on to argue that this traditional tolerance is under threat. It is under threat from those who come to live here illegally by breaking our rules and abusing our hospitality (Home Office, 2005a: 5). While tolerance is, as in the use of the term by Gordon Brown in his imperial rewritings, conceived as a national characteristic that proves the benevolent inclusivity of Britishness, Blair makes clear that this indigenous trait leaves the nation open to exploitation by unscrupulous outsiders. The racialized complexion of the discourse of tolerance is illustrated by another statement made by Blair in the same text: This generosity and tolerance helps explain why race relations here have, in general, been a quiet success story. And many of us


now, of course, are first or second-generation immigrants ourselves (ibid.). If generosity and tolerance describe the predisposition of the British people to the history of postcolonial migration which made ‘race relations’ a feature of national life, then they are unequivocally the property of a ‘host’ community that predates twentieth century mass immigration. As such, generosity and tolerance are not simply national virtues, but virtues that an imagined white nation has extended to its racialized immigrants. These are not, after all, terms of legal entitlement (such as justice), but are concepts based on the possibility of moral choice, and as such presuppose a (collective) moral actor who can choose whether or not to exercise them. They are based on a fantasy of proprietorial omnipotence that constructs the white nationalist ‘as a manager of national space’ (Hage, 1998: 90). As such, the discourse of generosity and tolerance perpetuates, in the words of Ien Ang, ‘the self-other divide which is the epistemological basis of the very possibility of racism in the first place’ (Ang, 2001: 142). Blair’s pluralistic hedging (‘many of us […] are […] immigrants ourselves’) attempts to conceal the racist nature of his Government’s asylum and immigration policies by drawing a distinction between earlier immigrants (who proved ‘our’ tolerance), and today’s immigrants and asylum seekers (who threaten to betray it). By reconstructing tolerance as the ethical property of a multicultural nation, it becomes possible to inoculate exclusionary practices against the charge of racism.22 The concatenation of tolerance with a territorial nationalism presupposes, as I have suggested, an anthropological limit. For Blair, this limit provides justification for an increasingly restrictive asylum and immigration system. As he goes on to argue in the five-year strategy of Britain’s ‘traditional tolerance’, unless we act to tackle abuses [in the asylum and immigration systems], it could be increasingly exploited by extremists to promote their perverted views of race (Home Office, 2005a: 5). By sounding a warning that unless the policies set out in the strategy are adopted, the nation’s hospitality will continue to be abused, Blair’s argument reconfigures racism as an organic response to an external threat. In this instance, racism is projected onto the figure of ‘extremists’, a reference to the parties of the far right. While these extremists thus remain logically outside of a multicultural Britishness, there remains a


close affinity between extremism and national tolerance, because the extremist response is essentially conceived of as motivated by a tolerance betrayed. The ‘extremists’, in other words, are simply the tolerant pushed beyond their natural limits. Blair is thus able to present the necessity of asylum and immigration restrictions as a prophylactic against racist practices, and thus for the good of all inhabitants of multicultural Britain. Blair’s patrician discourse legitimates exclusionary practices as a defence against the threat of a potentially intolerant and illiberal (white) British population poised on the verge of racist violence against non-white citizens and immigrants. Though such arguments have been a longstanding characteristic of immigration and race discourse deriving from the state,23 it is important to note how they persist here in spite of – and arguably as a result of – their multicultural gloss. Similar grounds have also been cited in the state’s response to the 2001 ‘race riots’ (see Chapter 3), and demonstrate the extent to which, despite an accompanying refrain of multicultural celebration, they rely on a continuing racialized distinction within ideas of Britishness between white and non-white, between an idea of tolerant ‘natives’, tolerated ‘minorities’, and the immigrants and asylees who threaten to tip their delicate balance.24

Lessons in Britishness The attribution of particular cultural traits to inhabitants of the nationstate brings us back to David Goodhart and his ‘progressive British nationalism’ (Goodhart, 2005). Goodhart’s argument, which achieved a large amount of coverage in the broadsheet press following its original publication in his own magazine Prospect in February 2004, centres around a ‘thick’ concept of citizenship, where the altruism of British citizens towards one another depends upon the existence of a shared sense of identity founded on collective experiences, histories and values (Goodhart, 2004: 32). Concerning himself with the question of how state practices may encourage or impede the development of social solidarity, Goodhart gives substance to his views in a nationalistic framing of social psychology. He argues that support for social institutions, and particularly the welfare state, hinges on a ‘special commitment’ between members of the national community who ‘prefer our own kind’ (ibid. 32, 31). While equivocating his argument by insisting that this social solidarity is not in essence ‘a natural or biological category’ (ibid. 31), it is clear that Goodhart does not leave the positive content of Britishness entirely open. We are told, for example,


that while immigrants should retain ‘some core aspects of their own culture’, they are nonetheless obliged to live ‘by the laws and norms of the host society’ (ibid. 36). An obligation to abide by the law (on the presumption that such laws are not in themselves discriminatory) is beyond dispute. Considerably less clear is on what basis Goodhart’s ‘norms’ are established. What is important to recognize here is precisely the lack of formal legal status of these normative requirements, a problem which goes to the heart of the Britishness debate. As David Taylor has argued, the concept of citizenship already pertains not only to an individual’s legal rights and their subjection to the law, ‘but a whole set of socio-economic and ideological practices associated with nationalism’ (Taylor, 1994: 142). To understand the importance of the cultural dimensions of citizenship is to reveal the limitations of dominant theoretical models. The concept of citizenship elaborated by T. H. Marshall, for example, is particularly weak in this regard (see Marshall, 1950). While Marshall’s tertiary stage of citizenship theoretically smoothes class inequalities by entrenching social rights within the welfare state, such hopes have hardly been borne out by historical experience, and hold little promise in a reformed and restructured welfare state (It should be remembered that ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ was written only shortly after the establishment of Britain’s welfare state. Marshall’s clear optimism for the potential of Keynesian social policy can perhaps go some way to explaining his failings here). Marshall’s static view of the boundaries of community and society, and his assumption that different social groups have equal access to state resources (Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1992: 30–3), have meant that he has come in for criticism on other grounds, for Marshall’s model is both gender- and race-blind (see also Waylen, 1998). For our present purposes, the early critique of Marshall by Talcott Parsons is probably the most fundamental. Marshall’s claim that social citizenship is predicated on ‘a direct sense of community membership based on loyalty to a civilisation which is a common possession’ (Marshall, 1950: 40–1), is rightly criticized by Parsons on account of its failure to recognize the extent to which the norms and values of a majority culture cannot simply be adopted by racialized minorities, but must be reworked in order to facilitate the development of a social order that places majorities and minorities on an equal footing (Parsons, 1965). If Marshall’s approach falls on these conceptual grounds, it must also be pointed out how his concern with social rights is in practice reflected far less strongly in contemporary social policy, as shifts to the right have in recent decades laid emphasis on the social obligations of citizenship


(Roche, 2000). Accordingly, the transfer of responsibilities from the state to the citizen has placed greater stress on the value of culture as a mechanism for the expression of this duty – particularly in regard to the strengthening of social solidarity – and has become an important element of New Labour’s Britishness project. Noting a similar phenomenon in US discourses of the nation, Lauren Berlant describes ‘a rhetorical shift from a state-based and thus political identification with nationality to a culture-based concept of the nation as a site of integrated social membership’ (Berlant, 1997: 3). By basing ideas of cultural legitimacy on a modality of belonging to the British nation, cultural citizenship – as I will demonstrate below – has involved the construction and determination of normative models of Britishness which cannot avoid reproducing racialized hierarchies of national belonging. The very idea of cultural citizenship can be said to describe a range of informal mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that operate in a similar way to the mechanisms of ‘cultural heredity’ in the pedagogic reproduction of class society that Bourdieu and Passeron identified in their work on French schools and universities (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979, 1990). It is salient that New Labour’s first legislative moves on citizenship were themselves advanced through the educational system. Citizenship education had long been advocated by Bernard Crick, advisor to Neil Kinnock and mentor of long-time Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett, and it was Crick who was given the task of chairing an advisory group to set out the parameters of this new subject. Crick’s model, which was subsequently adopted by the DfEE (later DfES/DCSF) and incorporated as a compulsory element of the National Curriculum places a greater emphasis on duties rather than rights in its conception of ‘active citizenship’ (Crick, 1998: 10). The report takes up, in slightly amended form, the Marshallian model of civil, political and social citizenship in its three developmental strands of social and moral responsibility, community involvement, and political literacy (ibid. 39–40). Given these theoretical debts to Marshall, it is not surprising that Crick’s report makes little reference to cultural difference or racism in citizenship education (see Osler and Starkey, 2001; Olssen, 2004). The few references that do occur suggest an unreflexive conception of cultural integration that leaves Crick similarly open to Parsons’s critique: Majorities must respect, understand and tolerate minorities and minorities must learn and respect the laws, codes and conventions as much as the majority – not merely because it is useful to do so,


but because this process helps to foster common citizenship (Crick, 1998: 17–18). While it must be acknowledged that in practice the citizenship education curriculum can, with the right teaching approaches and resources, provide a useful mechanism for an exploration of cultural differences and the promotion of anti-racism within the classroom (see Shukra et al., 2004: 191), this potential is significantly undermined by the degree to which it has become yoked to the Britishness project. When Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett claimed that citizenship education ‘offers the opportunity of developing a greater sense of belonging and identity in the future to reinforce our sense of history, culture and nation’ (Blunkett, 2001: 29), we should remember to whom this history, culture and nation is understood to belong. As Blunkett went on to argue, a political community can require new members to learn about its basic procedures and fundamental values. With citizenship on the school curriculum, it is clearly time to ensure that the same understanding is available for those seeking naturalization in Britain (ibid. 129). If citizenship education is part of a rite of passage into adulthood, and thus membership of the political community, Blunkett regards a similar process of enculturation to be a precondition for the granting of British citizenship to immigrants. Migrants are, in other words, seen as equivalent to minors until they can demonstrate their transition into civil adulthood, taking on the mantle of national identity by learning the ‘basic procedures’ and adopting the ‘fundamental values’ of Britishness. The novelty of such requirements illustrates a developing conception of the fragility of national identity. While the reproduction of British culture has presumably hitherto taken place without any special measures, a new anxiety warns that Britishness will not survive without the state actively undertaking to conserve and protect it. British culture becomes a site for practices of governmentality, requiring that immigrants’ knowledge and understanding of British culture be mediated through official mechanisms of enculturation. As in Goodhart’s formulation, it is no longer sufficient for migrants to commit themselves to the formal legal obligations of citizenship; they must underwrite this with a further cultural commitment if they are to make the symbolic transmutation from a state of civil immaturity to become fully-fledged members of the national community. At the time Blunkett was writing,


ideas as to how this might take place were themselves in a state of infancy, and it was again to Bernard Crick that New Labour was to turn in an attempt to give them substance. The emphasis already mentioned in the White Paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven on the conditionality of refuge was carried over into subsequent legislation during New Labour’s second term. The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 (Great Britain, 2002) established controversial accommodation centres for asylum seekers, and strengthened powers for the detention and removal of foreign nationals. It also made the demonstration of knowledge of ‘life in the United Kingdom’ a condition for the attainment of British citizenship. It was to this end that Crick was called upon to chair an advisory group set up in September 2002, with a remit ‘to advise the Home Secretary on the method, conduct and implementation of a “Life in the United Kingdom” naturalisation test’ (Crick, 2003: ii). For all intents and purposes, this was no less than a commission to set out a definition of Britishness, and to identify, in concrete terms, the lengths to which migrants would be obliged to go in order to obtain the prize of national identity for themselves. This second Crick report was based on much the same conceptual territory as the first, and, with a nod to the new constructionist orthodoxy of ‘fluid’ identities, stressed the importance for those seeking naturalization to ‘gain a deeper knowledge of our country’s history, traditions, and collective memories’ (ibid. 10, 13). It was out of Crick’s deliberations that new citizenship requirements came to be established. From February 2004, all prospective citizens were obliged to attend a citizenship ceremony, and from November 2005 the proposed citizenship tests came into force. Migrants who want to obtain British citizenship either have to pass a computerized multiple-choice test with twenty-four questions on ‘life in the UK’ or, if their English language skills make this difficult, they are obliged to complete a level three course in ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), with citizenship content. (In a nod to political devolution, it is also possible to take the citizenship test and language courses in Scottish Gaelic or Welsh, though indications from the Home Office suggest that this option has rarely – if ever – been taken up). I will in a moment consider the practice of the citizenship ceremony, but would first like to give some attention to the ‘life in the UK’ test, which is based on sections of a Home Office publication overseen by Crick, itself designed as a ‘Citizenship Handbook’ (Home Office, 2004b). The following are an example of four sample questions from the test taken from its associated government website (www.lifeintheuktest.gov.uk):


Which of these courts uses a Jury System? • Magistrate’s Court • Crown Court • Youth Court • County Court Which TWO telephone numbers can be used to dial the emergency services? • 112 • 123 • 555 • 999 Is the statement below TRUE or FALSE? Your employer can dismiss you for joining a trade union • TRUE • FALSE Which of these statements is correct? • A television license is required for each television in a home • A single television license covers all televisions in a home While knowledge that one can telephone the emergency services on 112, or that it is not necessary to buy more than one television licence, are not entirely useless pieces of information, they can hardly be said to do the task for which these tests were apparently designed – that is, to demonstrate that potential citizens have imbibed the quintessence of Britishness. The essential problem here is not that these are the wrong questions per se, but rather that they are the only questions it is really possible to ask. As soon as attempts are made to codify the content of Britishness in concrete terms, a host of difficulties become apparent. In abstract terms, the idea that knowledge of Britishness will invariably involve an understanding of ‘history, traditions and collective memories’ (Crick, 2003: 13) might seem unproblematic. In practice, this is far from the case, and the long historical chapter in the citizenship handbook is entirely avoided as source material for the citizenship tests, which derive their questions from five (originally three) subsequent chapters. This intentional neglect of British history is presumably for the reason that the history chapter is, as the handbook acknowledges, ‘inherently more interpretative’ – and thus contestable


– than some of its other material (Home Office, 2004b: 9 n.1).25 Yet this still begs the question as to what, precisely, the purpose of these tests might then be. In the absence of any clear answer to this, the tests have focused on some rather pragmatic material potentially relevant to UK residents, including descriptions of political institutions, demographics and religion, but it remains questionable as to how significant any of this knowledge really is for the purposes of ‘naturalisation’.26 My point here is simply that what the citizenship tests were intended to do – that is, to set out and examine knowledge of the content of Britishness – is an impossible task. This is the case not only on account of the practical political imperatives that make its definition subject to uncontentiously anodyne limits, but moreover for the reason that Britishness, as the positive cultural attribute of an indigenous adult collectivity to be taught to minors or learnt by migrants, does not and cannot exist. Britishness fails to translate into a pedagogy because it simply cannot be taught. It is ‘inherently […] interpretative’: a definition of the cultural content of the nation cannot be agreed at the level of the nation. As Roger Brubaker has argued, ‘nation’ is seen best as a category of practice rather than a category of analysis (Brubaker, 1996: 7). As such, Britishness can be thought of as a rhetorical device that at the moment of its elaboration creates the familiar nationalist distinction between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the assimilable and the unassimilable, in short between ‘us’ (the nation) and ‘them’ (who are outside of it). Similar devices deployed by other European nationalist projects share this same conceptual territory, and highlight the extent to which their use is invariably tied to an understanding of racial difference. The supposedly universal nationalist concept of laïcité in France, for example, has been utilized to exclude Muslim girls from state schools (see Chapter 4), whilst in Germany, the term Leitkultur, popularized by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, has provided a culturally exclusive description of national identity in debates around immigration and integration. In 2006 the Christian-Democrat government of the German province of Baden-Württemberg introduced a test of cultural values that was widely recognized to be a de facto ‘Muslim test’. Quoting from immigration guidelines proposed by Germany’s smaller Christian Social Union (CSU), Hartwig Pautz highlights the deep affinities between versions of Leitkultur and Britishness: the CSU stipulated that immigration from non-EU states must be limited in order to preserve the ‘identity of our country’ and to save


Germany from cultural conflict. Adoption of the ‘Leitkultur must [involve] more than just acquisition of the language and the recognition of laws’, it required ‘tolerance and consideration for the norms and customs’ of the native population (Pautz, 2005: 46). The cultural content that is identified by Leitkultur or Britishness is logically ancillary to the racialized marking of cultural difference. Because there is no culture of Britishness prior to the definition of cultural difference (or, in explicitly multicultural descriptions, prior to the definition of excessive cultural difference), the actual content of Britishness can only be determined relative to a constitutive outside.27 It is not, therefore, incorrect to see the cultural norms and values of Britishness as nothing more than a nationalist fiction, an imaginary container of belonging expressing an anxious demand for social conformity by repeating and consolidating by that repetition the current parameters of cultural (read: racial) propriety. There is and can be no ‘host’ culture, for any nation’s social fabric is too diverse for there to exist a ‘golden thread’ that will knit it into a cohesive and coherent whole. In the absence of a genuine connection, the expression of nationalist sentiment inevitably reproduces an exclusionary logic that is a proxy for other (achievable, if not gilded) forms of social solidarity. The desire to define and describe the content of a ‘host’ culture indicates a crisis of national identity, and the impossible search for the precious substance of Britishness is revealed to be a function of that crisis.

Citizenship ceremonies Given the impossibility of providing Britishness with a cultural content, the question remains as to what particular purpose the new citizenship requirements might have. If they are the function of a national identity crisis then what, for potential citizens, are the effects of this crisis? The demand to prove linguistic competence is the first and most obvious obligation, as if the Government’s belief in the status of English as a global language gave it permission to make it compulsory ‘at home’ (there are of course formally three official British languages, but characteristically Welsh and Scottish Gaelic tend not to get a mention in such discussions). Implicit to the language requirement is the contestable presupposition that a certain facility with English is a precondition for ‘integration’ into British society, and moreover that unless coerced migrants would be reluctant to learn the English language. If protocitizens are infantilized, they are, without state intervention, also


considered to lack a viable means of self-expression. An observation by Kobena Mercer here takes on an extra dimension: ‘[a] minority is literally a minor, not simply the abject and dependent childlike figure necessary for the legitimation of paternalistic ideologies of assimilation and integration, but a subject that is in-fans, without a voice’ (Mercer, 2000: 510). The articulacy of a British citizen thus depends upon a demonstrable commitment to an official definition of linguistic competence. Remarks made by Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett perhaps clarify the objectives of the language requirement, which are again less to do with facilitating the entry of migrants into the workplace or civil society, and more to do with forcing them to exhibit a willingness to adapt themselves to a national culture which, however imaginary, should not be taken for granted: ‘Not everybody can attain fluency. But at very least we can ask people to make an effort’ (Blunkett, 2004: 9). Perhaps the citizenship ceremony – that moment of symbolic transition – is similarly less to do with the embrace of a really existing Britishness, and more a staged renunciation of a non-British past, a baptism into the Church of Britain that involves the abasement of one’s migrant status in the font of nationalism? Certainly, this is the strong impression one receives on attending the citizenship ceremony. The statutory content of the ceremony is marked by its explicit description as a ‘rite of passage’ into ‘full membership of the British Family’ (British Citizenship Website, n.d.). The two forms of the citizenship pledge, the oath and the affirmation of allegiance, pragmatically negotiate the question of religious affiliation in the absence of a proper constitutional separation between church and state. Both however require that a new citizen will be ‘faithful and bear true allegiance’ to the Queen, and pledge to give my loyalty to the United Kingdom and respect its rights and freedoms. I will uphold its democratic values. I will observe its laws faithfully and fulfil my duties and obligations as a British citizen (ibid.). This pledge spells out the dominant understanding of citizenship already discussed in this chapter. Note how ‘rights and freedoms’ are expressed as the property of the state, whereas ‘duties and obligations’ pertain to the citizen. Other statutory elements of the ceremony maintain a royalist theme: it is compulsory to display the Queen’s portrait and the Union flag, and to play a recording of the national anthem. This musical element is particularly interesting, in that the last sixty or so years have seen the anthem silently withdrawn from British public


life. Gradually discarded at the end of theatrical performances and (with the independent commercial television of the mid-1950s) removed from television schedules, the national anthem has not fared well in the transition from ‘monochrome’ to ‘living colour’. It has become little more than the monarch’s theme tune, and keeps a tentative grip on the broadcast media only in the nocturnal shadows of BBC Radio 4, as it closes the day’s programming and hands over to the (Foreign and Commonwealth Office funded) World Service. The use of the national anthem in the new citizenship ceremonies is of course culturally anachronistic, yet it retains its symbolic function in consolidating the quasi-religious character of national affiliation.28 It is in the non-statutory elements of the citizenship ceremony that the character of its nationalist-religious symbolism is in even greater evidence. While of course ceremonies can vary, it is useful to note how they have been staged in practice, which can also provide us with the opportunity to gauge the expectations that new citizens have of the occasion. The ceremony I attended was one of the earliest, and took place in 2004 in the civic suite of Lewisham town hall in Catford, South East London (see Figure 2.1). Despite the Crick Report’s recommendation that the ceremony be public and ‘memorable to the whole community’ (Crick, 2003: 30), it took several written requests and telephone calls over a period of four months for me to gain permission to attend. The town hall had been decorated especially for the occasion with red, white and blue helium balloons tied with tricolour ribbons to a welcome desk. Prospective citizens were given similarly coloured posies to wear, and were taken to a room where soft drinks and biscuits were served on white plates with red and blue napkins. As light piano music played in the background, attendees were ushered into the council chamber to await the entrance of ‘the dignitaries’. As well as the Superintendant Registrar, who had responsibility for the statutory elements of the ceremony described above, these were the Council’s Deputy Mayor (a Labour councillor), and a Deputy Lieutenant for Greater London who, dressed in full ceremonial regalia, was in attendance to represent the Queen. While the Deputy Mayor’s words were civic-minded with a touch of party politics, the Deputy Lieutenant’s speech was far more definite in its description of Britishness. The pledge of loyalty to the Queen, he said, conferred upon new citizens the status of ‘free people’. My earlier remarks about the infantilization of the prospective citizen were borne out in the Deputy Lieutenant’s choice of poetry, as he proceeded to recite in full the four stanzas of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’. This poem’s collection of prolix maxims


Figure 2.1

Programme for Lewisham Council’s citizenship ceremony


addressed to a boy on the threshold of manhood was clearly intended to represent the symbolic transition from the nonage of foreignness to the state of mature Britishness. Whether the new citizens were struck by the incongruity of being lectured on twenty-first century citizenship in the words of the great poet of late imperial Britain is a moot point, though it is perhaps significant that not one of the sixteen new citizens that day was, when requested to sing the national anthem, sufficiently inspired to do so. I had taken the opportunity to talk with a number of the prospective citizens and their families before the ceremony began, and all seemed a little bemused by its intended function. Their reasons for going through with the ceremony were, as one might expect, entirely practical. Most of the people I spoke to had lived in Britain for far longer than the minimum requirements for citizenship of three to five years; they had jobs and families, and had a demonstrably higher knowledge of the English language than the requisite ESOL level three. They had applied for British citizenship in order to obtain passports and thus facilitate business and leisure travel, and to make use of employment possibilities opened up by their simultaneously becoming citizens of the European Union. Tellingly, it was a non-white applicant who expressed an anxiety as to whether he would be subjected in the ceremony to a test of his Britishness. Only one individual, a white Australian and partner of another applicant, thought that the citizenship ceremony had any significance in itself. She spoke too of the need for citizenship education to prevent the development of what she called ‘un-British’ cultural enclaves, separatist communities of which she would, presumably, not consider herself or her partner to be potential members. As the newly minted British citizens filed out of the council chamber for the advertised ‘afternoon tea’ and a photo opportunity with the white gloved Deputy Lieutenant, it was hard not to be struck by the disparity between the new citizens’ expectations and the ceremony’s intended purpose. With its nationalistic styling, monarchical pomp and imperial nostalgia, the citizenship ceremony provided a performance of Britishness as if imagined by the heritage industry and put on for credulous tourists. As I have been arguing, the citizenship ceremony, like the test, is in many respects simply a mildly humiliating ritual, to be endured for the sake of a quicker passage through passport control. Its significance is entirely symbolic, conducted in a vain attempt to shore up an idea of national culture which, as I have repeatedly shown, retains its elusive (because illusive) quality. Into the void of Britishness falls the meaningless detritus of faded glories, not because


they retain any particular contemporary significance, but because they symbolize a cultural content that non-citizens cannot possess. Although, as I have suggested, it remains doubtful that this content can really be said to belong to ‘the British people’, it nevertheless serves as a boundary marker between the native and the foreign, a mechanism of exclusion that conjures a national identity in the face of its palpable absence. The fact that the new citizenship requirements apply only to migrants demonstrates a dependence on a frankly mythical conception of national identity. They imply that the ‘native’ British possess the requisite cultural knowledge and values by the mere fact of their birth on British soil, that the required qualities of Britishness are mystically imbibed in non-migrants’ earliest associations with the territory of the nationstate. Although British children are provided with a citizenship education now that the subject has become an element of the national curriculum, there is no necessary test or pass-mark.29 Of course, the honour of Britishness is not magically conferred on non-migrants as a matter of right, for the national loyalties of certain categories of citizen remain in question. Their treason is a constant possibility which, as I will show in later chapters, requires some vigilance on the part of the self-declared guardians of the nation.

The impossibility of cultural citizenship If, on leaving this Pavilion, the visitor from overseas concludes that he is still not much the wiser about the British national character, it might console him to know that British people are themselves still very much in the dark about it. From the guidebook to the South Bank Exhibition, part of the 1951 Festival of Britain30 There are, of course, far more significant forms of racialized exclusion than the absurd comedy of citizenship tests and ceremonies. Their example is nevertheless useful in pointing to how a racialized nationalism is structured around an idea of cultural belonging. They show, more than anything, that those marked out by cultural difference cannot obtain for themselves an identity in Britishness without publicly renouncing something of that difference. Even when such renunciations take place and a new fealty to Britishness is proclaimed, this does not guarantee exemption from nationalist scrutiny, for the arbitrary content of Britishness means that the terms of national belonging are always contingent, and thus subject to change. If Britishness is indeed best seen


not as an inherent property of a national culture, but as a device for the exclusion of what is deemed to lie outside of it, then there is no belonging that is secure enough and no civil affiliation that is strong enough not to be called into question by it. As long as Britishness is deployed as a means of creating distinctions in citizenship status (whether formal or informal) on the basis of culture, it will always remain the agent of racist exclusions. As I have shown, recent definitions of Britishness do open up a certain space for cultural pluralism, but this pluralism remains subject to containment within nationalist parameters that effectively perpetuate existing racialized hierarchies between ‘visitors’ and ‘hosts’. Gordon Brown’s multicultural rewriting of Britain’s imperial history, for example, is more to do with the ‘progressive’ rebranding of colonialism than a recognition of its continuing racist legacies; new citizenship requirements do not facilitate cultural ‘integration’ so much as erect a series of hurdles which communicate that simply obtaining legal citizenship status is no guarantee of belonging. Just as there is always a limit to ‘tolerance’, the elusive prize of Britishness can at best be a temporary gift to the new citizens of a nation said to possess a single, unifying culture. And this is why a multicultural politics is already fatally compromised when it concedes to nationalism as an ultimate horizon of affinity. While Bhikhu Parekh moves in the right direction when he stresses that ‘a common sense of belonging’ must be political (rather than ethnic or cultural) in nature (Parekh, 2000: 341), it is testimony to the grip of the ideology of the nation that such a belonging is rarely imagined without recourse to the kinds of racialized exclusion that, as we have seen, provide the basis for determining the commonality of Britishness. When the Crick report argues that social cohesion is the inevitable outcome of ‘both new and settled inhabitants taking pride in our country’ (Crick, 2003: 8), it clearly overestimates nationalism’s capacity to transcend the divisions of race. Likewise when Trevor Phillips, as head of the Commission for Racial Equality, argues that cultural differences are acceptable ‘as long as new customs do not conflict with our values’ (Phillips, 2005), he is mistaken in his suggestion that it is somehow possible to arrive at a definition of a universal value system coterminous with the territory of the nation-state. There are not, and can never be, any such values beyond the word of the law (which is itself open to political contestation). The persistent call for immigrants and minority communities to integrate into a common British culture is in reality an impossible request, for beyond the anachronistic paraphernalia of national symbolism, there is not actually anything for them to integrate into. This will remain the case regardless


of how many citizenship reports get commissioned, however much the flying of the Union Jack is encouraged (DCMS, 2007), or whether or not some patriot pens a national motto as a ‘Statement of British Values’ (Wills, 2008). This has not, of course, prevented the New Labour government from trying to associate civil life with some essential cultural content. The Britishness project has by definition taken place at a national level, but the desire to inculcate social solidarity in multicultural Britain has led to significant state interventions on a smaller social scale, and it is to the concept of community that I will now turn.

3 Multiculturalism, Community and ‘the White Working Class’

Race and community It is near-impossible to talk about race without using the word ‘community’, for race is a collective noun that describes a social relation. More significantly, the inseparability of race from community is indicative of the concrete social histories through which the subjects of racial discourse have always lived. To recognize the necessarily collective nature of all race thinking is to acknowledge how discourses of race are shaped by their ongoing historical development in relation to the social interaction between the racialized and the racializing. At a certain level of particularity, community describes racialized difference operative within determinate social-geographical (and typically urban) contexts. Here, the ‘Asian’ or ‘African-Caribbean’ community refers to, say, groups living in a town or city, within particular neighbourhoods or streets, or wherever ideas of race are deployed in relation to a particular locality. At a more general level, community describes race as a common essence or shared experience that transcends geographical specificity, an affiliation that may be naturalized in the very same signifiers or, for example, in the anti-racist formulation of ‘black’. This basic duality in the concept of racial community is more than simply a question of scale, for though these micro- and macrodimensions imply different emphases and accordingly prove more or less useful according to the particular object of our critical attention, they retain nevertheless a strong tendency for mutual determination. Any discussion of community in race discourse cannot escape the fact of this constant slippage between levels. Attention to discourses of community can help us to reveal the interaction between the general and the particular, to focus on the processes by which race is deployed 75


and transformed, and to identify some of the principal agents of this transformation as they come to structure and restructure our understanding of the concept. While community thus provides us with a device to critically mediate between different interwoven levels of race discourse, it also highlights the contested nature of racialized identity, being as it is a key term through which the concept of race has historically been deployed by those with competing claims on its meaning and use. While the ‘internally’ contested nature of racialized community is an important subject of enquiry, highlighting questions of power within the politics of group representation, my focus here is almost exclusively on the racial politics of community developed and exercised by the contemporary state. There is nothing particularly new in the state’s use of community as an apparatus of its racial politics. While the basic civil rights legislation of Britain’s race relations acts is centred on a conception of the individual who faces discrimination, and has therefore no real capacity to consider racialized difference in the context of a framework of corporate rights (such as in the constitutional federalism of the Canadian state’s Official Multiculturalism Act), this belies the extent to which the concept of community, while not formally possessed of any substantive political powers, has in the British context nevertheless provided a de facto mechanism through which the institutions of the state have sought to understand and deal with racialized groups. From the translation and education programmes provided by the Local Government Act of 1966 (Rees, 1982: 91–4) to the experiments in civic multiculturalism by Labour-led councils in the early 1980s (Solomos, 1989: 14), community has become the main site at which the state and its agencies have sought to understand and construct policies designed to affect or influence racialized minorities in particular socio-geographical contexts. In one respect, this can be understood as a largely pragmatic response to the historical circumstances in which race became a concern of the state in modern Britain. From colonial and diasporic settlements through to postcolonial migrations, and on to the present day, the particular territorial concentration of racialized minorities in towns and cities demonstrates the extent to which understandings of race have been necessarily linked to the fabric of urban social geography. The idea of community has thus presented itself as a convenient concept for understanding the social dynamics of race as they come to be lived and acted upon in the context of everyday life, providing a point of contact between the agencies of the state and racialized minorities in particular

Multiculturalism, Community and ‘the White Working Class’ 77

civic contexts. Of course, the aggregation of individuals into racialized communities in urban Britain cannot be comprehended without taking into account the histories of racism with which they are so intimately bound. Discrimination in education, social housing and other aspects of state welfare provision clearly demonstrates the extent to which community-centred understandings of race must be understood as a product, at least in part, of a wide range of popular and state racisms. As before, the general informs the particular, and the particular the general; community is the point of their overlap and interaction in discourses of race. In this chapter I will first examine how ideas of community and race have been mobilized in current state approaches to theorizing and acting upon issues of social cohesion, and trace their development in the political philosophy of New Labour. I will then go on to consider their particular application, taking as a case study the concept of ‘community cohesion’ which framed the state’s response to the ‘race riots’ that took place in the North of England in 2001, and which has since been taken up as a new multicultural paradigm for the local politics of race. I will, as with my discussion of Britishness in the last chapter, question the way in which state discourses of community announce themselves as neutral descriptions of actually existing social space, and will suggest that they might be better understood as a mode of intervention into particular urban social geographies where questions of race and cultural difference have emerged as the locus of social conflict. ‘Community cohesion’ is accordingly understood as a state practice designed to render community open to the exercise of government. It brings with it a conceptual vocabulary that has begun to reconfigure certain categories of group identity. The discourse of community cohesion targets not only the activities of existing racialized groups, but also creates a new role for the white working class. I will thus look at how ideas of ‘white ethnicity’ have developed in recent state discourses. The racialization of the white working class is not in itself a new phenomenon (see, for example, Bonnett, 1998), but what is arguably particular to the current historical moment is the sense in which this racialization is taking place as a component part of an explicitly multicultural politics. This, I want to suggest, represents a major policy shift with significant implications for the future politics of both race and class in twenty-first-century Britain. There are accordingly several dimensions in which it is useful to think about multiculturalism as a politics of community: as a way of describing and explaining racialized difference and conflict, as a mode of intervention, and in particular as the


site at which racial categories get made and remade according to the expediencies of governmental practice.

Community and New Labour Never was the word ‘community’ used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life. Eric Hobsbawm1 In a major speech on 2 October 2001 at the British Labour Party’s annual conference, Tony Blair used the word ‘community’ seventeen times. Gerard Delanty2 For anyone conversant with classical sociology, there is a certain temporal irony implicit to the British state’s turn to community under New Labour. A few years short of the twenty-first, Tony Blair was making the case for community as a replacement for ‘the old ideologies’ of the twentieth century (Blair, 1996: x). Yet over 100 years earlier the concept was already being thought of as archaic: indeed, the entire sociological tradition is arguably predicated on this observation. As Ferdinand Tönnies famously argued in his description of cultural transformations within German society, the Gemeinschaft (community), conceived of as the special social force and fellow feeling that holds people together as members of a whole (Tönnies, 2001: 32–3), is lost with the birth of the Gesellschaft (society). In the move from one to the other, rational will replaces natural will (ibid. 130); individual autonomous relations take the place of organic bonds of attachment (ibid. 52); in short, modernity supplants tradition. While Tönnies uses Gemeinschaft to critique Gesellschaft (that is, makes use of an idealized concept of pre-bourgeois society to criticize the general form of social alienation born of bourgeois capitalism), he remains clear that there is no viable possibility of a return to the Gemeinschaft, and that if modern society is to recover any sense of the organic community it has lost, then this process must take place within the Gesellschaft, and develop out of entirely new forms of corporate behaviour. For Tönnies, then (and the broad modernist tradition of which he is a part), the qualitative changes brought about by the development of modern society are such that the full recovery of community is a retrograde step, neither achievable nor desirable. Much might indeed


be said of the politics of the labour movement out of which New Labour has grown: the principles of nationalization and economic redistribution relied not on a sense of civil society bound by traditional organic structures, but by the rational and objective calculation of the planned economy. Like the concept of Britishness in the last chapter, the idea of community has to a significant extent always been a peculiarly conservative obsession, bound up in notions of restitution, return and natural order. And so why is it that community is paraded by New Labour as a social panacea? How is it the case that the ‘big idea left in politics’ (Blair, 1996: x) is centred around a sociologically obsolete category of human association? One answer to these questions can be found precisely in the measures the New Labour leadership has taken to distance the party from its own history. Community indeed played a key part in the public reinvention of Labour when, at a special conference in April 1995, delegates overwhelmingly voted to redraft Clause Four of the Party’s constitution. As the 1995 rewrite retreated from the principles of common ownership set out in Arthur Henderson and Sydney Webb’s original text, it actively embraced the concept of community. While the 1918 text makes no reference to the concept, the 1995 Clause mentions community twice within the space of a few hundred words. In the earlier document, ideas of collectivity are expressed in the discourse of labour and social class: ‘the workers’ and, more broadly, ‘the people’ are the sole and undifferentiated subject of its address (reprinted in Levitas, 1998: 190). By contrast, the two uses of community in the 1995 version represent a retreat from this partisan ethos. The first, though ostensibly redistributive, is shorn of antagonism and conflict; here, community is used to describe a ‘common endeavour’, a cooperative social space coterminous with the boundaries of the British nation. If this first use of community extends the constituency of New Labour beyond class politics, the second represents its contraction or devolution, and is utilized to articulate a vision of ‘open democracy’ where ‘decisions are taken as far as practicable by the communities they affect’ (ibid. 191). Here, the use of the concept in the plural signals a further divergence from the earlier text’s class-inflected universalism, and suggests that different communities may have different principles, beliefs, or needs. The simultaneous widening and contraction of how British society is conceived in New Labour discourse hints at the new ideas of social organization that had gained the favour of the Party leadership. The use of community in the reinvention of Labour also had the advantage of differentiating the Party’s position (at least rhetorically) from the laissez-faire policies of Thatcherite neo-liberalism. In searching


for a replacement in social policy for the largely structural theories of social causation that had underwritten the old Clause Four, New Labour turned to reacquaint itself with some of the core principles of its own liberal thinking, namely the ‘new liberalism’ propounded by the likes of L. T. Hobhouse and T. H. Green in the early decades of the twentieth century (Mouffe, 1998: 21; Seldon, 2001: 565; Foote, 1997: 347). This exhumed tradition permitted a tempered critique of the stridently individualistic ethos of Thatcherism, whilst at the same time treating with equal scepticism the Labour Party’s own political heritage. This involved a reconfiguration of the relationship between the rights and responsibilities of social actors where obligations and duties to society were now given greater priority over the stress on individual rights and freedoms – where, as the new Clause Four argued, ‘the rights we enjoy reflect the duties that we owe’ (in Levitas, 1998: 191). The political philosophy adopted by New Labour under the influence of the (old) new liberalism sought to set out a middle ground (or Third Way) between corporatism and individualism. Despite the fact that the dominant market-led paradigm of state restructuring had, under New Labour, hardly broken with the Conservative policies of the 1980s and 90s, the idea of community has provided a key signifier of New Labour’s difference, part of its claim to represent a coherent alternative to Conservative rule. While Margaret Thatcher had famously argued that there was no such thing as society – ‘there are individual men and women, and there are families’ (Thatcher, 1993: 626), for the Labour Party modernizers individuals and families came together in a broader category of collective interest: community had taken the place of social class as a fundamental unit of social belonging (see Brown, 1992). As an archetype of New Labour discourse, Tony Blair’s 1998 pamphlet The Third Way makes use of community as a kind of immanent social critique, embodying something of the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction, so that the idea of community (located in a nostalgic description of post-war Labour Britain) contrasts with the recent Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite past (Blair, 1998: 5–6). Yet in this document Blair is at the same time clear that the ‘old certainties’ (ibid. 7) should not be taken up again without modification. Although the positive gravity of the idea of community remains inextricably linked to the notion of a lost past, its use by New Labour is not in Tönnies’s terms simply a return to the Gemeinschaft but rather a tool for the reconfiguration of the Gesellschaft. And so community should not be regarded as an anachronism, nor simply as a mechanism for differentiating New Labour from either its


own roots or its political competition. Most importantly, community can be said to have opened up new territories for state intervention. To follow Chapter 2 and consider community as a form of governmentality allows us to recognize how the concept may be used to mobilize strategies of social control (see Foucault, 1994, 2000; Poulantzas, 2000: 45). In highlighting community as a particular problem of government, state discourses have not only constructed a framework in which a range of social questions have come to be posed, but moreover have, as a tool shaping ‘the conduct of conduct’ (Dean, 1999: 198), become actively creative of new relationships in which the agency of certain individuals and social groups is determined by parameters set out by the state. It thus becomes possible to exercise government through community. As Nikolas Rose argues, The community of the third sector, the third space, the third way of governing is not primarily a geographical space, a social space, a sociological space or a space of services, although it may attach itself to any or all such spatializations. It is a moral field binding persons into durable relations. It is a space of emotional relationships through which individual identities are constructed through their bonds to micro-cultures of values and meanings (Rose, 1999: 172). The ‘moral field’ of community may be said to bring about a new regime of social life that reconfigures the relationship between the state and its subjects. As Rose points out elsewhere, this ‘ethopolitics’ (Rose, 2000: 324) represents an attempt to inculcate social order and regulate individual conduct by establishing a set of moral norms and values which are applied to the actions of groups and individuals, and by which they come to be judged legitimate or illegitimate. Such a conception of community can be seen at work in ideas of ‘social capital’ enthusiastically adopted by New Labour from the work of the popular US sociologist Robert Putnham. Putnham ascribes a late twentieth-century demise of community to the reduced voluntary participation of US citizens in formal organizations and informal networks of association. The role of the state here, according to Putnham, is to decentralize the resources and authority of government (Putnham, 2000: 413), and to encourage through social policies the development of ‘richer social networks’ that will not only increase civic participation, but which should concomitantly translate into the economic enrichment of society as a whole (ibid. 325). As New


Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett argues, ‘community empowerment’ depends on a fine grained understanding of what holds modern communities together. This is where social capital theory helps. It gives concrete empirical and theoretical content to ideas about community networks, the bonds of trust and belonging, and shared values amongst families, friends and communities. It shows just how important these ties and values are to individual well being – such as educational attainment, health or happiness – and to communities as a whole. Social capital theory claims that communities suffer less crime, anti-social behaviour and family breakdown, when people know and trust each other, and interact in clubs, associations and voluntary groups (Blunkett, 2003b: 26). Presented as a panacea for tackling deprivation and social conflict, a politics of community is here given an instrumental role in the reconfiguration of society. The powers of the state are devolved to the functional community, which is understood to create social stability of and for itself.3 A similar understanding of community can also be seen in the influence of another US sociologist, the communitarian Amitai Etzioni.4 Based on the diagnosis of a gradual but inexorable moral decline in North American social life, Etzioni’s best-selling book The Spirit of Community positions itself in a very similar manner to The Third Way’s critique of Thatcherism, and is likewise used in an attempt to propound a new combination of corporatism and individualism. While recognizing the validity of the challenges to the prevailing social order represented by the social movements of the 1950s and 60s, Etzioni argues that a resultant ‘destruction’ of moral traditions, social values and institutions has led to the opening of a moral ‘vacuum’ at the heart American society (Etzioni, 1994: 12). His proposed solution to this putative decline is ‘a change of heart’ (ibid. 18) occurring not at the level of the state and its institutions, but on a smaller scale, beginning with the family, and disseminating from this basic unit through different communities (entered into on a voluntary basis), which are in turn linked in a kind of social web which binds them together in reciprocity. According to Etzioni’s proposals, then, the reinvention of society can occur from below: society is no more than a ‘community of communities’ (ibid. 145), and it is an ethical commitment to one’s immediate community that in turn permits the ‘remoralization of social life’ (Levitas, 1998: 91).


For our purposes, the most important aspect of Etzioni’s ‘[c]ommunitarian nexus’ (Etzioni, 1994: 10) is that its communities, although networked together into a social whole, retain a certain autonomy in relation to one another. Etzioni’s model, in this respect, is a theory of multicultural association, a plurality of interwoven communities which seeks to ‘balance both diversity and unity’ (Etzioni, 1994: 122), thus supplying a ‘third alternative that allows us to keep a set of shared values while providing full opportunities for the constituent ethnic and racial communities to honor their particular heritages as important, indeed enriching, subcultures’ (ibid. 149). This version of communitarianism attempts to broker a compromise between the competing demands of social cohesion and the rights of communities to selfdetermination. Leaving to one side a range of problems to do with the way in which individuals may successfully negotiate the demands of ‘diversity and unity’ (namely, questions of free choice versus obligation to collectively defined identity), I want to concentrate here on how communitarianism conceptualizes unevenness between one community and another. How can a ‘community of communities’ begin to deal with conflicts, or clear disparities of power and privilege between its constituent parts? The communitarian answer to this question is found in Etzioni’s formulation of the national supracommunity, that is, American society. While communitarianism is ostensibly predicated on the ethical freedom of individual communities to intersubjective self-determination, this commitment is at the same time contradicted by the demands of national cohesion. Indeed, according to Etzioni, it is ‘a commitment [by constituent communities] to core American ideals’ that serves to ‘maintain the American society, protect minority members, and undergird individual rights’ (ibid. 160). Ultimately, Etzioni’s communitarianism becomes a theory of US nationalism, for its shared cultural values ‘are not found, or are poorly grounded, in other cultures’ (Etzioni, 1994: 158). For Etzioni, ‘core American ideals’ are the essential precondition of the ‘pluralism-within-unity’ (ibid. 157) of the communitarian model. What makes a community different is only permissible so long as it serves to confirm the final authority of the already-existing value structure of national society. Like the nationalist horizons which delimited the scope of multicultural Britishness in the previous chapter, Etzioni’s theory of cultural pluralism – though nominally posited as a means of reconstructing the social in the name of diversity – is displaced in the name of national unity. All potential to challenge social inequalities is from the start overruled by this primary imperative; indeed, the very


principles of communitarian philosophy are themselves held in check by this requirement for the maintenance of an existing social order. While Etzioni’s communitarianism remains in principle a multicultural theory, it is permissive of a pluralism of communities only so long as they do not jeopardize national cohesion. It is my contention that the influence of this type of communitarianism has informed the British state’s turn to community under New Labour. In the case of both Putnham and Etzioni, communitarian ideas announce themselves as a departure from outdated monadic models of national society, yet retain a fundamental objective in producing and reproducing a singular, non-conflictual idea of the social. Despite its putative ethos of cultural pluralism, the basic source of social cohesion in New Labour’s conception of community is similarly ‘seen to lie ultimately in conformity to a common moral code which binds together all members of a society’ (Shaw, 2003: 19). The example of Etzioni and Putnham demonstrates how it is possible to formally adhere to certain principles of social and cultural pluralism, while at the same time containing them within a governmental framework that acts upon communities to reproduce official parameters of belief and behaviour. This is precisely how the logic of multicultural governmentality has been brought to bear on racial difference at the level of community, ostensibly devolving state powers while refining and enforcing the horizon of their effective practice. Indeed, it is by these means that certain ideas of race have been mobilized by the British state as a positive template for its visions of a communally-oriented social order. As Stuart Hall has suggested, racialized groups are often evoked in public discourses as representative of ‘that “sense of community” that liberal society is supposed to have lost’ (Hall, 2000: 221; see also Alexander, 2004: 533–4; Cohen, 1997: 38; Back and Keith, 1999: 133; Malek, 1997). What is interesting about the state’s valorization of minority communities are not so much the inevitably conservative values – typically of hard work, respect for authority, the importance of family, an ethos of care within wider social networks, and so on, – that ‘model minorities’ are said to embody, but the ways in which racialized difference can hereby become incorporated into practices of government. The communitarian model can be said to provide the state with a means of appropriating racialized difference while retaining for itself the right to judge precisely what forms of difference are to be considered appropriate, what is to be encouraged and what is to be subject to censure. As this chapter will go on to demonstrate, it is in its particular attention to an ethics of com-


munity that the ‘enabling state’ (Blunkett, 2003b: 22) has attempted to transform the local politics of race. To view New Labour’s turn to community in terms of the politics of governmentality is to treat with a degree of scepticism the extent to which it can be seen as a credible unit of autonomous political association. Rather, the state politics of community involves the conceptualization of cohesive and consensual social-geographical associations as sites of governance, where community is made amenable to technical manipulation by the agencies of the state (Rose, 1992: 12). We should be alert here to the ways in which, though celebrated as a universal and common good, community is only subject to governmental attention in certain specific social contexts. As Zygmunt Bauman has argued, trends among the affluent in post-industrial societies are marked by social disengagement, a ‘secession of the successful’ (Bauman, 2001: 50–7) to the ‘voluntary ghetto’ (ibid. 116), predicated on the defence of private space. An inversion of the real ghetto (where outsiders can get in, but insiders cannot get out), the voluntary ghetto signifies ‘the impossibility of community’ (ibid. 122), a rejection of the ethos of communal solidarity in defence of privilege. As a counterpoint to the secession of the successful, we can accordingly identify in communitarian discourses its logical correlative, that is, a class-inflected demand for community-for-others. Left between the spaces vacated by selfghettoizing elites, we find relatively immobile populations for whom secession may be a dream but not a meaningful reality. Here the idea of community is in itself a marker of social failure, the aggregation of those who cannot live successfully without state intervention. The micro-management of problematized behaviour (that is, behaviour that is not considered conducive to the functional operation of the self-sustaining moral community) becomes the legitimate target of governmental strategies of control and risk containment (see Burchell et al., 1991: 46; Rose, 2000: 331–5). Despite a rhetoric of self-empowerment, state discourses of community are not integrated into the democratic structures of either the national or local state. Guided by an ethos of civil engagement that escapes existing political frameworks, and marked by the promotion of needs and duties considered specific to particular social geographies, the concept of community is denuded of the critical potential to make wider or more general connections across the fabric of society. The promotion of particular, local knowledge is indicative of a relativistic turn in governmental understandings of communal association: what counts here are no longer objective (or, at least, objectivated) understandings


of social need, conflict and disadvantage, but rather those that are proven to be functional for the self-governing community.5 It can be argued that the state may derive a further benefit here in terms of self-legitimation. By making community the subject of governmental attention, it is able to solve, at least rhetorically, the thorny problem of establishing ‘social control’ such that it is no longer, in the words of David Blunkett, ‘equated with repression or forced uniformity’ (Blunkett, 2003b: 15). By this means community takes on the functions of government, directed by, but at one remove from, the state and its institutions. While I maintain that the communities that the state describes – and seeks to engage with – have no originary existence outside its technologies of governance, this is not to say that state practices of community do not have real and lasting effects. Indeed, it is entirely possible for individuals and groups to recognize themselves within a governmental community – to be interpellated as its subjects – and for them to go on to claim that community as their own. By highlighting the constructed nature of community as governmentality, I want to demonstrate how state discourses are indeed productive of new social relationships and interpretive mechanisms which at both local and national levels have significant implications for the contemporary politics of race. It is precisely the way in which certain groups have been shaped, constructed and reconstructed that makes the contemporary state’s turn to community an important subject of critical attention. Having set out some of the historical and theoretical background to this subject, I now want to examine these issues more concretely, by assessing how New Labour’s communitarianism has, in practice, been applied as a response to a recent episode of racialized conflict.

Community cohesion If an outbreak of more than usual violence occurs, as in 1935 or in 1943, it is met with sorrow and surprise and rage; the social hostility of the rest of the city feeds on this as proof that they were right all along, and the hostility increases; speeches are made, committees set up, investigations ensue. Steps are taken to right the wrong, without, however, expanding or demolishing the ghetto. The idea is to make it less of a social liability, a process about as helpful as make-up to a leper. James Baldwin6 Between April and July 2001, the northern English towns of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley were witness to a series of social disturbances


involving groups of white and Asian people that have been commonly characterized as ‘race riots’. While most discussion of the riots has been highly problematic, is at best partial, and at worst fundamentally flawed,7 a fully comprehensive account would take us too far from the subject of this chapter. For our purposes the northern riots were important in providing the New Labour government with the ‘symbolic raw material and social pretext’ (Keith, 1993: 53) for setting out its new communitarian approach to race politics. If the Notting Hill riots took the temperature of state discourses of race and colonial immigration in the late 1950s, and the Brixton riots and their aftermath told us something of the Thatcher government’s racialization of crime and policing in the early 1980s, then New Labour’s response to the 2001 riots can be seen as similarly enlightening in regard to the current conjuncture. Events in the northern towns posed an urgent question to the British state, and its answer came loud and clear: the problem of race is a problem of community. By the end of 2001, the reports of major inquiries into the riots and the circumstances around them had been published. The reports by Sir Herman Ouseley (Bradford), Lord Anthony Clarke (Burnley), and David Ritchie (Oldham) were supplemented by that of a national review team, established by the Home Secretary David Blunkett and chaired by local government bureaucrat Ted Cantle. A high-profile inter-departmental Ministerial group, chaired by John Denham MP, was also established, and had likewise produced a report giving its analysis of the events earlier that year, and which made recommendations to be implemented at local and national levels. I shall in what follows draw on the findings and recommendations of these reports, together with subsequent official reports, statements and speeches.8 The first observation to make of the reports is the extent to which they fit into the explanatory paradigms I have just discussed. Their attempts to make sense of the events of 2001 depend on existing ideas of social order which attribute its lack to a failure of community. Jack Straw, who became New Labour’s first Home Secretary, spoke in the mid-1990s of his belief that ‘the breakdown in law and order is intimately bound with the break-up of strong and cohesive local communities’ (in Levitas, 1998: 123). It is accordingly the case that the specific terms of reference of the Cantle report were to consult ‘on the issues that need to be addressed in developing confident, active communities and social cohesion’ (Cantle, 2001: 5). If this suggests a certain premature diagnosis of the issues at hand, the remit of John Denham’s ministerial group – to report what could be done to minimize the risk


of further disorder and ‘to help build stronger, more cohesive communities’ (Denham, 2001: 1) – can leave us in little doubt as to the fact that New Labour’s ideas about community constitute an apriori judgement of the causes of the riots, and set out the preferred framework for the prevention of their recurrence.9 Herman Ouseley neatly sums up this familiar schema of community decline in the introduction to his report. The Bradford district, he writes, ‘has struggled to define itself as a modern, 21st century, competitive, multi-cultural area and has lost its spirit of community togetherness’ (Ouseley, 2001: 1). While suggesting that Bradford’s decline may have come about by a fall in regional prosperity, an engagement with the political and economic factors that underpin this are far beyond the limits of Ouseley’s recommendations. Rather, Ouseley seeks to inculcate social cohesion in communitarian terms, identifying a conflict of sorts between Bradford’s cultural diversity and (echoing the title of Amitai Etzioni’s communitarian manifesto) its ‘spirit of community’. The social capital analysis propounded by Robert Putnham is also taken up in state responses to the ‘race riots’, and in a speech given in 2004 David Blunkett cites evidence taken from Putnham ‘that the more diverse an area is in racial terms, the less likely its residents are to feel that they trust each other’ (Blunkett, 2004: 4). In both cases, the imputed loss of ‘togetherness’ and ‘trust’ is seen as a problem specific to the experience of racial or cultural difference. Like David Goodhart’s social-psychological argument discussed in Chapter 2 (Goodhart, 2004), the Denham report suggests there is an inverse relationship between cultural diversity and social solidarity: Our society is multicultural, and is shaped by the interaction between people of diverse cultures. There is no single dominant and unchanging culture into which all must assimilate. The public realm is founded on negotiation and debate between competing viewpoints, at the same time as it upholds inviolable rights and duties. Citizenship means finding a common place for diverse cultures and beliefs, consistent with our core values (Denham, 2001: 20; my emphasis). Just as in The Spirit of Community, we find in such descriptions a putative commitment to a form of dialogical cultural pluralism. Yet if the need to establish community cohesion (predicated on the diagnosis of its absence) signifies a certain breakdown of the ‘public realm’, and


thus the impossibility of resolving social conflict on these terms, then there must be some recourse to an external authority for its solution. In the same way that Etzioni works out this problem by giving a casting vote to the value structure of an American supracommunity, Denham likewise tempers his espousal of cultural pluralism by reference to ‘our core values’, the property of a national society which is the ultimate arbiter of social discord. This is an analysis that is also taken up three years later by the Community Cohesion Panel, an extension of Cantle’s review team, which reported in July 2004 that: We need more integration, but we also want each community to feel proud of its heritage and traditions – in other words we need a type of multi-culturalism in which everyone supports the values and laws of the nation, whilst keeping hold of their cultural identity. […] To achieve this everyone must have a real sense of belonging and they must share common values (Community Cohesion Panel, 2004: 8). Here it is possible to see most clearly how New Labour’s use of the concept of community cohesion expounds a multicultural theory of cultural difference, whilst retaining the overarching authority of an explicitly national value system (in the sense that it is state-defined). Without ‘common values’, the Panel suggest, there can be no legitimate expression of particular cultural identities. Community cohesion, then, provides a conceptual structure which sets out to mediate between the cultural differences of racialized groups and a generalized requirement for social order, and community is proposed as the terrain upon which this coming together should take place. Understood in this way, it is clear how community cohesion works as a form of governmentality: while ostensibly devolving agency to local communities (see Denham, 2001: 34), the state retains for itself the power to define precisely what constitutes community, and what its social functions are. Thus by setting out and encouraging a certain definition of the social, community cohesion becomes a mechanism by which strategies of control can be inserted into problematized social contexts, while only apparently facilitating an ‘organic’ process of communal association. If discourses of the cohesive community are the means by which the state seeks to act upon ‘the conduct of conduct’, then race is the medium in which these governmental strategies have been given shape. The executive summary of the Cantle report spells out the sense


in which cultural differences are understood as the underlying cause of social tensions between different sections of the polity: Whilst the physical segregation of housing estates and inner city areas came as no surprise, the team was particularly struck by the depth of polarisation of our towns and cities. The extent to which these physical divisions were compounded by so many other aspects of our daily lives, was very evident. Separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives. These lives often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges (Cantle, 2001: 9). The ‘parallel lives’ argument makes a case for the fragmentation of urban communities along the lines of culture and race. Although there is some understanding in this and the other reports of alternative factors that might be said to have contributed to the outbreak of the 2001 riots, this idea of monadic (self-) segregation can be seen to structure and inform virtually all analyses and policy recommendations that they make. Nearly three quarters of the sixty-seven recommendations made by Cantle address themselves to the alleged problem of racially segregated communities (see Cantle, 2001: 46–52). Yet, as I have suggested, because the cohesive (unsegregated) community is itself the product of state discourses, it does not necessarily bear any meaningful relationship to the populations it purports to describe and act upon. The supposition of irreconcilable cultural and racial differences in community cohesion discourse continually underplays common social and cultural experiences that cut across the civil and civic lives of minorities and majorities alike (see Kalra, 2002). The thesis of segregation and ‘parallel lives’ is, in other words, simply the outcome of racialized discourses of community unmediated by any significant engagement with the real social conditions of urban multiculture in contemporary Britain. It is, I suggest, also founded on a basic misunderstanding of cultural difference. If the apparent segregation of the northern towns is understood not in terms of the historical experience of racism that has led to the socio-geographical concentration of racialized minorities (and which continues to impede their access to employment, education and decent housing, and is compounded by poor policing, racist violence and other forms of discrimination) but instead transmutes this ‘separatism’ into an obstructive or oppositional expression of cultural identity, then community cohesion discourse effectively requires of


minorities the impossible task of remedying the negative effects of their own racialization. While the phenomenon of ‘white flight’ can undoubtedly tell us far more about the social processes that lead to the segregation of minorities, and while the black middle class are able to move away from poor urban areas and make their own ‘secession of the successful’,10 the myth that constructs the ‘segregated’ urban community as an expression of cultural or racial difference continues to construe racialized minorities as the primary impediment to the cohesive community, and the embodiment of forms of behaviour that contravene the limits of what the Denham report identifies as ‘our core values’ (Denham, 2001: 20).

Bad Asians The section in the Cantle report entitled ‘People and Values’ illustrates perhaps most clearly the problematization of racialized difference in the discourse of community cohesion. Although Cantle places an emphasis on the need ‘to gain consensus on the fundamental issue of “cultural pluralism”’, and for ‘both white and non-white communities […] to change both attitudes and behaviour’ (Cantle, 2001: 18, 19), in practice a rather different pattern of obligation emerges, as indicated by the following ‘expectations’: that the use of the English language, which is already a pre-condition of citizenship (or a commitment to become more fluent within a period of time) will become more rigorously pursued, with appropriate support (ibid. 19); [that] minority groups will participate [in the political system] without the burden of ‘back home’ politics (ibid. 20); [that a concept of citizenship be developed which recognises] the contribution of all cultures to this Nation’s development throughout its history, but establishes a clear primary loyalty to this Nation (ibid.); [that women should be allowed] to make choices about lifestyles, free from violence and intimidation (ibid.); to foster a greater variety of career choices without undue constraints imposed by cultural traditions (ibid.). In this section of the Cantle report, despite an introductory rhetoric suggesting a parity of obligation, every single example can be shown to


require, in subtle and often not-so-subtle ways, that adjustment in the name of community cohesion places particular emphasis on minority groups. The first three statements about language, politics and citizenship construct the schema of a superior, monolingual British identity that is already familiar to us from Chapter 2, where what marks out a particular cultural identity as different comes to be reconceived as a form of narcissism obstructive to multicultural association. While Cantle would surely argue that these ‘expectations’ of behavioural change are simply prerequisites of the cohesive community, their anxious tone implies that they are underwritten by racialized insecurities that, beneath a multicultural rhetoric, find the expression of certain types of cultural difference incompatible with the idea of community. The last two ‘expectations’ seem harder to argue with, in that equality of access to employment and an end to sex discrimination are of course laudable aims in any context, but they are set here in a discursive context which takes as its explicit subject the behaviour of minority communities. By making these otherwise progressive demands of minorities in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham (and not to their populations as a whole), they effectively single out these communities as particularly problematic, and by doing so conform to popular stereotypes of race which highlight the alleged cultural conservatism and oppressive patriarchal structures of British Asian culture.11 These statements are put into context by remarks made by Home Secretary David Blunkett who, in an interview which took place a few days before the publication of the Denham and Cantle reports, demanded that minorities adopt British social values and ‘norms of acceptability’ (quoted in Womack, 2001). In both cases, ‘Asian’ difference is problematized on the basis of its deviation from a normative model of ‘national’ behaviour promoted by state discourses of community cohesion. A similar dynamic can seen at work in the following description of Oldham by a representative of the local council: The reality in Oldham is that we still have communities in some areas that are inward facing rather than outward facing. In other words, they are not susceptible to dialogue and discussion and are not open to outside influences and to the development of relationships that are central to community cohesion (in ODPM, 2004: 10). What I want to highlight here is not simply the case that the proprietorial ‘we’ is set against a racialized ‘they’ (and by doing so placing onto ‘them’ rather than ‘us’ the responsibility for change), but moreover


that the governmental logic of community cohesion bears no relationship to the communitarian idea that the groups in question are to be considered the active agents of social change. The dialogic principles upon which the rhetoric of community cohesion is founded are hereby laid bare for what they really are: that is, simply a convenient means of articulating a series of behavioural requirements as set out by the (in this case, local) state. If ‘they’ are ‘not open to […] the development of relationships that are central to community cohesion’, then the concept, as I suggested of Etzioni’s communitarianism, is no longer a model of incorporative social interaction, but one that from the outset demands the renunciation of practices and behaviours that by its own determining logic and cultural bias come to be deemed obstructive to communal association. As Floya Anthias argues of dialogical solutions to social conflict, without a common starting point in terms of social conditions and structures of power, dialogue will become monologue, a means simply of perpetuating existing power structures as a tool of their legitimation (Anthias, 2002: 282). It should hardly need saying that the problematization of cultural difference in community cohesion discourse not only singles out particular racialized groups for state scrutiny, but conceives of their difference in terms of an irreducible social identity that serves to close down more complex understandings of perceived segregation and violence. Community cohesion frameworks are insufficiently capable of recognizing the structural, historical and institutional factors that underwrite social conflict. An alternative, more adequate framework would not locate solutions to that conflict in terms of the cohesive community but in wider issues of racism and discrimination, and would thus give legitimacy to the practices of self-organization and cultural autonomy within racialized groups that proponents of community cohesion identify as particularly unacceptable. Having made no such attempt to broaden its analysis, the state’s approach can be shown to have encouraged the disproportionate targeting of racialized minorities in the legal response to the Bradford, Burnley and Oldham riots. As Chris Allen argues of the Bradford situation, this may be understood to be a form of ‘community sentencing’ (Allen, 2003: 46) intended to send out a strong message to the Asian population underlining the extent to which they were held responsible for the 2001 riots. The length of the sentences, quite inconsistent when compared with other recent manifestations of social disorder that were not interpreted within a racialized framework (ibid. 41–5), have in many cases subsequently been reduced or overturned on appeal, with an


acknowledgement that those charged with violent disorder were acting in legitimate self-defence (see Kundnani, 2003). This partial capitulation within the judicial system should be contrasted with Home Secretary David Blunkett’s description of the convicted rioters as ‘whining maniacs’ who had been dealt sentences which he considered served as ‘a message to the community’ (in Travis, 2002). While it cannot be denied that the problematization of racialized difference in state discourses of community cohesion does not, in essence, differ in any important respect from longstanding discourses of state racism which target the supposed isolationism and unruly behaviour of minority groups (see, for example, Smith, 1994: 99), it should be noted that, as a multicultural discourse, community cohesion does nevertheless represent a significant shift in approaches to race under New Labour. The cohesive community is not, after all, a community without racial, religious or cultural difference: it is not, for example, a community without ‘Asians’. Rather, it is a community which curbs Asian difference in the name of social cohesion. While communitarian discourses make demands on racialized groups to adapt themselves to normative models of behaviour, they depend at the same time on the incorporation of approved cultural differences explicitly marked in racial terms. It is by this means that the avowedly multicultural state is able to advance community cohesion as a putatively anti-racist policy. To return to Blunkett once more: I want to make it absolutely clear that discrimination and hatred against others on racial, ethnic or religious grounds are repugnant and unacceptable. Such attitudes and behaviour threaten our common good and cannot be tolerated. I will press on relentlessly to root them out. But this ongoing challenge must be combined with longer term objectives. In the longer term the best way to counter bigotry is to build better understanding within and between communities (Blunkett, 2003a: 22). Here, Blunkett outlines the state’s role in explicitly anti-racist terms, yet signals with his qualifying ‘but’ a different emphasis of approach. With his assertion in the wake of the 2001 riots that ‘it is overwhelmingly local people who have damaged their own community and its future’ (BBC News, 2001a), Blunkett makes clear the extent to which any understanding of the wider structures of racism is closed down in


favour of community-oriented solutions. As I have suggested, while the state retains for itself the ultimate power to decide on the normative terrain of communal association (thus also maintaining its monopoly on coercive intervention), it at the same time situates itself as the benign arbiter of social conflict. If civic multiculturalism is a place of reconciliation between cultures – the ideal, conflict-free space of the cohesive community – then it becomes necessary to consider not only the Asian communities of the three northern towns, but also the other key social actors implicated in this scenario, namely, the white working class.12

Bad whites and white minority discourse It isn’t a simple picture of white advantage and minority ethnic disadvantage, and a crude analysis would hide the wide variations in achievement both between and within ethnic groups, significant regional variations and the enduring differences in the experiences of men and women. And this is being reflected in the direction that Trevor Phillips is taking the CRE, ensuring that it has relevance for all communities and not just Black and minority ethnic ones. David Blunkett MP13 [We] need to articulate a vision of multiculturalism that speaks to the fears of all communities, including the white working class in industrial heartland areas. Peter Mandelson MP14 I will turn to the obvious question as to why the state’s response to the riots has marked British Asians in terms of race, and whites in terms of class, towards the end of this chapter. For now, I would like to note that both groups are represented in community cohesion discourse as internally divided. Just as there are good and bad ways of being Asian in multicultural Britain, there are good and bad ways of being white too. If assimilable Asian difference is valorized in state multiculturalism, then so is assimilable white difference, and in exactly the same terms: i.e., in the extent to which it validates a vision of the cohesive and conflict-free multicultural community. While problematic forms of Asian difference are typically marked out by a motif of separatism, conceived of as an unwillingness to ‘join in’, problematic forms of white difference take the form of racist beliefs and practices, another – and very different – form of resistance to multicultural norms. We thus


have in community cohesion a balanced (though, significantly, not symmetrical15) model that apportions responsibility for social conflict to these two opposing extremes, and situates the cohesive community as the point of their resolution. In so doing, the discourse of community cohesion constructs an exemplary role for the state in three respects. Firstly, as we have seen, an official promotion of multiculture simultaneously provides the means by which unwelcome minority difference can be policed in the name of community; secondly, it confirms the state’s procedural neutrality in its avowed role as arbiter between competing groups; thirdly, it serves as an explanation of racist practice. Community cohesion explains racism in exactly the same terms as it problematizes certain minority cultural differences, in this case fixing onto the antagonistic white subject, who is thereby denied a place within the cohesive multicultural community. By taking to task both the ‘unassimilable’ cultural difference of minority separatism and abstentionism, and at the same time the ‘excessive’ antagonism of the white working class, New Labour’s multicultural discourse can account for racism and yet disavow any implication in its practice. Seen thus as a new hegemonic form of ‘enlightened’ and ‘nonracist’ multicultural practice, community cohesion represents a rhetorical disaffiliation from openly racist or white supremacist discourses and practices (see Weigman in Chow, 2002: 12–13). Here, racism becomes easily identifiable as a practice for which perpetrators on both ‘sides’ can be found and subjected to remedial and corrective interventions. Clearly, the positioning of the white working class as the perpetrators of racism should lead us to question the efficacy of governmental policies that do not address themselves to the far more thorny issues of the institutional and structural foundations of racist practice, but instead substitute for them these shameful and easily prosecutable subjects, pariahs of twenty-first-century multicultural Britain. This is of course not to deny the existence of an (albeit pleonastic) ‘white racism’. Rather, it is to question the means by which it is focused upon – and seen to be the sole property of – ‘the white working class’. For example, to attribute the attacks on Asian communities in the ‘race riots’ to the ‘organic’ expression of a white working class alienated from multicultural society is to neglect the fact that organized far-right groups were heavily involved in the 2001 riots, and brought activists into the northern towns from far beyond the local community.16 While there is strong evidence for a certain scapegoating of the white working class in the name of multicultural cohesion,17 their status in


New Labour’s communitarian discourse is complex, and requires more detailed attention. As I have argued, the state discourse of community under New Labour is explicitly multicultural. Social needs and conflicts are thereby deemed to be the property of the various cultural groups that go to make up the cohesive community. This constructs an entirely different role for the white working class, who come to be conceived as embodying a number of characteristics (beliefs, practices, behaviours) that are peculiar to them as a cultural group. The crucial issue here is not so much the attribution of such characteristics – for any definition of class location will necessarily be ascribed some positive (if contingent) content – but the fact that they come to be ultimately seen as attributes not of class but of a racial identity, of whiteness, which is accordingly given a privileged status in contemporary discourses of community. Take the following example from the Ouseley report: The current Bradford scenario is one in which many white people feel that their needs are neglected because they regard the minority ethnic communities as being prioritised for more favourable public assistance; some people assert that Muslims and, in particular, the Pakistanis, get everything at their expense. Simultaneously, the Asian communities, particularly the Muslim community, are concerned that racism and Islamaphobia continue to blight their lives resulting in harassment, discrimination and exclusion. They argue that they do not receive favourable or equal treatment and that their needs are marginalised by decision-makers and public service leaders (Ouseley, 2001: 16). A theory of community that took racism seriously would quite easily be able to make a coherent distinction between perceptions of discrimination and concrete racist practice. Instead, however, of making a case for challenging the unfounded status of the former, and suggesting how the latter might be effectively tackled, Ouseley’s text establishes a relativity and equivalence between the two opposing positions. In both cases there is the implication of inferior treatment in public service provision, yet Ouseley does not attempt to make a judgement as to the respective merits of either claim. This, I would argue, is because the discourse of community cohesion that underwrites his report no longer regards this as a viable distinction to make (and might itself be said to depend on the manufacture of a conflict over state resources). Consider the following, which is taken from a report by the Office of the Deputy


Prime Minister on social cohesion. It quotes Rodney Green, the Chief Executive of Leicester City Council, on similar claims of unfairness in the distribution of public funds: This works particularly badly in the white working class outer estates which see community cohesion as something that has an unfortunate bias towards more recent arrivals of persons from abroad and see their own white working class culture being taken for granted, and I think if we are not careful both in the substance of deployment of regeneration resources and (just as importantly) the communication about the fairness of it to change the perception, this can turn itself into being a problem [sic] (ODPM, 2004: 20). Just as in the Ouseley report, ‘perception[s]’, while not seen as identical to social facts, are nevertheless treated as if they were. Effective community cohesion practice, argues Green, demands not simply that the representation of state resource provision be made with regard to its reception by the white working class, but that changes should be made ‘in the substance of [its] deployment’, i.e., that the attitudes of the white working class be made a determining factor in deciding the quantitative basis of regeneration funding. The significance of this is profound, for while until now the general ethos of any state provision to deprived communities can only have been – in theory if not in practice – on the basis of universal need alone, here Green is arguing for the provision of state resources on the grounds of the imputed needs of the white working class as a cultural group, with ‘their own white working class culture’. A similar dynamic can be observed in the following quotation, which comes from the Community Cohesion Panel report: many disadvantaged communities will perceive that newcomers are in competition for scarce resources and public services, such as housing and school places. The pressure on resources in those areas is often intense and local services are often insufficient to meet the needs of the existing community, let alone newcomers. These fears cannot be disregarded (Community Cohesion Panel, 2004: 15). Here, the ‘fears’ of the white working class, represented as an ‘existing’ (and later described as a ‘host’) community, are explicitly used to justify calls for the managed reduction of immigration, so that, as the Panel go on to recommend, ‘[t]he economic needs of the country now


have to be balanced by greater attention to the social and psychological needs of communities and take into account the pace of change at which these [immigrants] can be accommodated’ (ibid. 16). The general point I want to make about the three examples I have quoted is that they all, in one form or another, make use of the idea of the white working class as having a genuine and legitimate range of needs which are either placed in jeopardy by the state’s attention to non-white citizens or recent migrants, or suddenly become visible under the conditions of urban multiculture. While, as I argued in the last chapter, the supposed illiberality and resistance to change of a ‘native’ population has always been used by the state in discourses of race and immigration to justify restrictive policies and practices, longevity should not be regarded as proof of the veracity of such claims. Where the new discourse of community differs from these old (and overtly racist) models is in the extent to which it conceives of the white working class as being possessed of a series of legitimate beliefs and needs that express their identity as a specific cultural – ‘ethnic’ – community. The state’s position here appears to concord with the newright concept of ‘ethnopluralism’, which affirms the legitimacy of cultural difference as a premiss for the defence of racial purity (see Betz, 1999: 309).18 And it is the structural logic of community cohesion discourse, as a dominant interpretative schema, that can be understood to have underwritten the phenomenon of ‘white ethnicity’ in the contemporary governmental politics of race. Because the state’s embrace of communitarianism under New Labour constructs the cohesive community as the point at which imputed conflict between cultural groups finds its resolution, such discourses are implicitly structured around an idea of the social comprised of competing groups that can only be recognized on account of what makes them distinctive, i.e., on the basis of their claim to legitimate cultural difference. Community cohesion takes up a model of multicultural association – a theory of cultural difference – and extends it so that it applies no longer simply to racialized minorities (who have some legitimate claim to special rights and representation in a racist society), but across the entire social fabric of poor urban Britain. The Community Cohesion Panel make a ‘recurring theme’ of their report the notion that ‘White communities’ (note capitalization) ‘need to be much more engaged with [the community cohesion] agenda and that their needs, both social and psychological, also need to be addressed’ (Community Cohesion Panel, 2004: 12). In the discourse of community


cohesion, there is a requirement for the distinct cultural identity of the white working class to be articulated and respected alongside existing racialized minorities. This explicit redefinition of the equalities agenda in the name of social inclusivity (see Cantle, 2001: 39) is of course problematic in terms of reducing the interpretative status of racism as a means of understanding social inequality. If ‘deprived white communities’ (John Denham in Runnymede Trust, 2003: 5) have the same status as ‘minority communities’, then they effectively have the same claim to rights and representation: a theory of racism in a coherent historical sense is hereby displaced in favour of a seemingly universalistic and atemporal paradigm of equal treatment, which can be said to compound and confirm racial asymmetries and inequalities that are visible only in a broader sociological context (see Back and Keith, 1999: 149–51). Like many approaches to race that perceive unfairness by erroneously universalizing an abstract conception of group equality, community cohesion discourse thrives on the logic of simple inversions, and in doing so effectively turns arguments for equality into arguments in defence of privilege. A reluctance or inability to recognize the contextual differences of whites and non-whites within a framework of race means that community cohesion is, for all intents and purposes, a theory of racial difference without a theory of racism. Since the 2001 riots provided the pretext for its development, the communitarian project of community cohesion has been ‘mainstreamed’ across the institutions of the British state, and its effects have been wide-ranging. The recommendation of the Community Cohesion Panel that Single Group Funding be withheld from community groups and projects that cannot demonstrate ‘progress towards community cohesive activities in contact with other groups’ (Community Cohesion Panel, 2004: 51), has already led to the closure of a number of community centres and services aimed specifically at the needs of particular minority groups. Favoured projects are required to operate on an explicitly cross-cultural basis (see Kundnani, 2004).19 Such policies have even jeopardized the future of high-profile campaigning and advocacy groups like Southall Black Sisters (Topping, 2008; Sharma, 2008). Charities, NGOs and voluntary organizations are accordingly adapting their working practices in order to deal with the ‘justifiable grievances’ of ‘our poor white working class communities’ (Miha, 2003), and millions of pounds of state expenditure has been committed – at the expense, of course, of other possible approaches to racial disadvantage and discrimination – to the community cohesion agenda of building ‘local solutions to local problems’ (Beverley Hughes in Runnymede Trust,


2003: 15). Pressure was put on the Commission for Racial Equality to carry out its work in ways that encourage ‘a greater understanding between different communities’ (ODPM, 2004: 58). The Home Office’s three year Race Equality Strategy, launched in January 2005, placed community cohesion at the heart of its analysis, and declared that its ‘approach is not to privilege Black and minority ethnic groups above any other groups, but is rather one element of our overall commitment to increasing life chances for all’ (Home Office, 2005b: 24). The design of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), launched in 2007, was also informed by communitarian thinking. We should not only be sceptical of what is to be gained by such approaches, but critical of the extent to which they forego the conceptual advantages of explicit anti-racist practice in favour of the nebulous ideology of the cohesive community. These are by no means the only issues that arise from the development of a notion of white ethnicity in contemporary race politics. Because New Labour’s paradigm of communitarian multiculturalism replaces earlier models of state policy that formulated questions of race in terms only of minority groups, the white working class are of course relative newcomers to the racial politics of community. As such, contemporary state discourses of community make a great effort to construct the white working class in the image of existing minorities, as a result shoring up their legitimacy as a marginalized cultural group. The Cantle report, for example, recommends that ‘the white community should be encouraged to develop a leadership capacity in the same way as the black and ethnic minority communities’ (Cantle, 2001: 50). Similarly, the Community Cohesion Panel suggest, with respect to cultural heritage, that The promotion of events, such as carnivals and cultural exhibitions, have been focused on minority communities. This is understandable as those minority communities were struggling to establish their identity. In a multicultural society, however, no-one’s heritage should be taken for granted and should be promoted without any sense of embarrassment or difficulty. The promotion of heritage should be on an inclusive basis inviting other cultures to develop their understanding of that heritage (Community Cohesion Panel, 2004: 14). Again, the ethos of community cohesion is such that state multiculturalism perversely closes down the potential for the ‘promotion’ of


cultural heritage to operate as a form of anti-racist critique (i.e., to challenge the dominance of, or build alternatives to, a hegemonic white culture), and instead attempts to create a complete equivalence between cultures of identity. Though the avowed intention here is to foster cross-cultural understanding, what, it might be asked, might constitute the positive content of a cultural heritage so construed as the manifestation of an ethnic whiteness? Might not the promotion of white heritage be informed by the exclusivist, hierarchical and essentializing discourses of racial difference that have always constructed whites as a race apart (see, for example, Ware and Back, 2002: 197), and if so, how might the definition of the white working class as one ethnic minority among others play into the hands of the far right, who are increasingly taking on the language of ethnic and cultural entitlement to fuel a divisive politics of ‘rights for whites’?

The conceptual status of white ethnicity Before leaving the subject of white ethnicity, it is worth considering something of its general status in race debates. The study of whiteness – as the hitherto unmarked and unnamed axis of racial normativity – has in recent years become an important subject of academic enquiry. This work has generally served to demonstrate the historical contingency of whiteness and by doing so has sought to denaturalize the unquestioned social truths of racial meaning (see Bonnett, 1997, 2000b; Frankenberg, 1997; Lipsitz, 1998; Nakayama and Martin, 1999; Newitz and Wray, 1997; Ware and Back, 2002; Winant, 1997; Wray and Newitz, 1997). The study of whiteness is not, however, without its problems, and I will now turn to briefly examine a conceptual error that is made with increasing frequency in discussions of whiteness and cultural diversity. This revolves around an idea of whiteness as a positive social identity, and typically takes a working class subject.20 The white working class are attributed a set of cultural dispositions and orientations to place that mark out a spatial habitus, a conception of belonging symbolically and affectively anchored in a particular locality. This identity, the argument goes, is subject to an usurpation or displacement under the conditions of multiculture, with a decline in territorial control leading to feelings of resentment. While most scholars are quick to point out that this loss of home is an entirely imaginary one, i.e., that even when a feeling of loss is genuine, it remains the creation of a fantasy discourse that erroneously identifies what is missing as the


work of racialized others (Zˇizˇek, 1989: 126; Hage 1998, 2003), some, like Leonie Sandercock, argue that this imaginary ‘is actually, literally embodied in the local spaces of one’s street, neighbourhood and city’ (Sandercock, 2003: 112). Another recent publication, The New East End, makes white loss its central theme. Employing a troublingly ahistorical and monoethnic conception of class,21 the white working class are portrayed as a neglected cultural group, sidelined by anti-racists and a universal welfare state, and dishonoured by being placed ‘on a par with the last immigrants off the plane or the most tenuous of hyphenates’ (Dench et al., 2006: 219). With its nostalgic lament for a lost ‘golden age’ (ibid. 19), The New East End has much in common with contemporary state discourses of the white working class. These racialized versions of the lost community myth can only further contribute to the social insecurity of racialized minorities, constructed as the agents of a supposed white identity crisis. Such positions fail to recognize the extent to which ‘communities consist of discursive spaces, rather than geographical locations’ (Laclau, 1990: 245), and that lamentations for the neglect of the white working class are essentially predicated on a defence of white racial privilege. Just as the ‘problematic’ difference of minority groups only becomes evident through normative definitions of social behaviour, and is thus most accurately seen as an effect of racialized discourses of community, such pleas on behalf of the white working class could be said to have a similarly tenuous understanding of the collectivity they purport to describe.22 While the suggestion implicit to such positions – that the white working class have in some sense an originary cultural-territorial claim – is unequivocally fallacious, it is possible to understand to some degree their motivation. Indeed, they have something in common with my project here in that they are typically an attempt to formulate a critique of state practice. Take away the raciological framing of these studies and we have a reasonable – if often not particularly sophisticated – description of post-industrial decline, a tale of the abandonment of the economically unproductive, of a welfare state in recession, and so on. In short, we have an attempt to describe the neglect and contempt for the lower sections of the working class in contemporary neoliberal social policy. But why the compulsion to construct the white working class as a race apart? Why the failure to make a coherent analytical connection between white and non-white, a connection that can see class through race? While there is no straightforward answer to this, it is perhaps the case that racialized explanations are attractive because they appear to


be an improvement on more orthodox (and now discredited) ‘race blind’ models of social class. The category confusion they make is a seductive one, for it appears to be a new way of thinking about working classness as a positive identity: viewed through the optic of a progressive race politics, the white working class take on a pseudoemancipatory character. To think about the white working class as an ethnic group is to invest in them a radicalism – a sense in which they might be equipped to struggle for their own social equality.23 This tendency can also be identified outside the academic realm. Michael Collins’s The Likes of Us (Collins, 2004) and Billy Bragg’s The Progressive Patriot (Bragg, 2006) both set out, in quite similar ways, to tell popular histories of the white working class. Contrary to their intentions, both fall into the trap of constructing an imaginary identity between ‘working-classness’ and whiteness. This leads, in Bragg’s case, to a misplaced attentiveness to ‘the rights of the indigenous majority’ (ibid. 260). Collin’s legitimate consideration of the scapegoating of poor whites by the media class similarly slips over into a racialized defence of the white working class who are, he argues, ‘becoming a minority’ in the twenty-first century metropolis (Collins, 2004: 233), a group that are left ‘[d]owncast, confused, and apparently redundant in a world of Tate Moderns and multiculturalism’ (ibid. 262). In both cases, a failure to recognize the inherently multicultural character of the contemporary working class means that important points about poverty and social marginalization get lost in a misplaced nostalgia for an idea of white ethnicity.24 While it is easy for us to dismiss such positions, their prevalence is indicative of the capacity of ideas of a racialized whiteness to mark the conceptual frameworks of those who would doubtless be horrified by the imputation to their words of racist intent. They also demonstrate how, with repetition, such understandings of race and class begin to take on an unjustified air of reality, and start to become a way that people make sense of the world. The same can, of course, be said of community cohesion and the whole communitarian discourse of the state under New Labour: while it is both conceptually flawed and of little use in tackling racism and discrimination, this does not mean that it has and will have no significant impact on the racial geographies of contemporary urban life. Finding its materialization in an increasingly wide range of policies and practices, the communitarian myth of the cohesive community has nevertheless become the state’s preferred means of making sense of racism and racialized disadvantage in multicultural Britain.25 Neglecting the extent to which events such as the 2001 riots were the result of


outside provocation by far-right groups, nation-wide patterns of racialized disadvantage, and nationally produced discourses of race, they come to be conceived as local phenomena, and poor urban Britain is forced to begin to understand itself in communitarian terms. Like the spectre of Asian separatism, the discrete cultural identity signified by white working class ethnicity is a fabrication, an identity largely constructed from without. Yet of course these roles are played, and discourses of urban social policy institute policy cultures which in turn ‘produce cultural meanings and identities for the people and places they target’ (Haylett, 2003: 65). To a significant extent, the Asian separatist and the white ‘ethnic minority’ do not exist as members of organic cultural communities,26 but through the policies and practices that constitute individuals and groups as such, and through the intervention of political interests that make gain from these interpellations, their future existence is rendered not only possible, but quite likely.27

The multicultural welfare state There is a case not just in moral terms but in enlightened selfinterest to act, to tackle what we all know exists – an underclass of people cut off from society’s mainstream, without any sense of shared purpose. Tony Blair28 I have outlined in this chapter a significant shift to community in the social policies of the British state under the auspices of New Labour. This, I have argued, has moved away from the class-based understandings of deprivation as set out in the old Clause Four, and instituted a new regime of engagement with the social structure. The turn to community attempts to reawaken the idea of the Gemeinschaft within the social conditions of modern society. This operates both as a critique of Conservative individualism and a means of introducing implicitly nationalist theories of communal association imported from popular American sociology. In placing the demand for social solidarity – expressed through a dynamic of inclusion and exclusion – above that of an egalitarian politics of redistribution, we can identify in Third Way approaches to community the substitution of an explicit politics of the social for a form of managerial sociologism (see Finlayson, 2003: 127). The self-sufficient community is hereby constructed principally as a form of ethical association amenable to governmental techniques of social control. This conception of community is based on a form of


association that operates outside of any democratic structures, and focuses on certain social geographies in a class-inflected demand for community-for-others. The need for community is hereby only made apparent in problematized urban settings, and calls for forms of associational behaviour that are not required in more affluent (and ostensibly more functional) social contexts. I went on to demonstrate how community has become under New Labour a de facto theory of race relations which, using the motif of multicultural incorporation, has constructed an ambivalent role for racialized minorities. The state’s policies of community cohesion, situated as a response to the 2001 ‘race riots’, turn the multicultural community into a place of reconciliation between groups defined in terms of their cultural difference, and set out to correct the perceived ‘separatism’ of minority groups by the imposition of normative models of desired social behaviour. I have highlighted how the community cohesion model, while policing the behaviour of long-racialized minority communities, also establishes a status for the white working class in terms of their own racialized cultural identity. This has given the white working class a dual role in state discourses of multicultural cohesion: they are constructed not only as scapegoats (alongside their ‘bad’ Asian counterparts) for racialized social conflict and violence as a group antagonistic to the self-sustaining community, but are at the same time legitimized as an ‘ethnic’ group with particular social and cultural needs. The efficacy of this approach as a means of dealing with racism and discrimination is, I have argued, dubious to say the least. Yet the practical benefits of this governmental multiculturalism to the contemporary state are clear: the need to address the root causes of racism – as well, of course, as the state’s own culpability for racist practice – is effectively side-stepped, and with minimal effort or resources, while at the same time the rhetoric of multicultural pluralism is enthusiastically espoused as a solution to the perennial problem of racial violence. The state retains for itself a role here as the progressive arbiter of social conflict, and places itself in a position of benign neutrality between competing racialized groups.29 To conclude, I would like to draw together some of these observations, and indicate how the British state’s racialization of community represents an understanding of society with potentially profound significance for the politics of race and class. In an era where class is – at least in terms of state approaches – no longer considered to be a particularly valid or meaningful category of social analysis, the spectre of poverty remains an intractable problem for the British state. Of course, the history of race in Britain, as else-


where, has meant that race, poverty and geography coincide, such that some of the poorest areas of the country are inhabited by racialized groups. This is the case with all three of the northern towns in which the 2001 riots took place.30 Yet despite the popular ideas of cultural apartheid that are encouraged by the community cohesion analysis, even areas with the highest concentrations of non-white residents have large (most often proportionately larger) populations of white people.31 Poverty will often be a result of racism,32 but it is no respecter of racialized difference. The urban communities targeted by community cohesion policies are, as a result, always racially ‘mixed’. While the poverty of traditionally racialized groups has always (and ineffectively) been dealt with in terms of their racial difference, such that New Labour’s turn to community is to a large extent a case of business as usual, the poverty of white people has not. The great advantage to the state of the reinterpretation of class difference as racial difference, then, is the means by which they too can be incorporated into the very same policy regime as non-whites: the white working class (just like racialized minorities) are denuded of their class identity and remade as an ethnic group, so that their poverty can similarly be acted upon – and, just as importantly, explained – in terms of their racial difference. The racialization of a white ‘underclass’ is demonstrated most keenly by the social geographer Chris Haylett in her work on welfare provision and social renewal in modern Britain. Stressing an affinity with historical representations of class and welfare that distinguish between respectable and non-respectable social groups, between the deserving and undeserving poor, Haylett traces the precedents of contemporary state practices in a social science literature on the ‘culture of poverty’. This discourse was developed in the 1950s by US anthropologist Oscar Lewis, and influenced politicians and theorists on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s and 70s (Haylett, 2003: 61). Haylett identifies the means by which the ‘socially excluded’ and ‘welfare dependent’ are constructed by New Labour in terms not of poverty or need but a problematized – and frequently pathologized – cultural identity. Urban communities, approached in these identitarian terms, hereby become a site for governmental intervention, designed to alter deviant behaviour and bring them into line with normative models of social order (Haylett, 2001, 2003). As Gus John, a professor of education and member of the Home Secretary’s Race Relations Forum suggests, Community Cohesion has got to be seen in the context of a strategic approach to eliminating the cycle of dispossession and social


exclusion in which so many white working class are trapped (quoted in Browne, 2003: 34). Again, (and with continued parallels to the treatment of the cultural difference of existing minorities), John’s endorsement of the ‘culture of poverty’ thesis conceptualizes the poverty of the white working class as a property of their status as a cultural community. The enculturation of poverty turns poor whites into a pathological underclass, and opens them up to the exercise of remedial state policies on these grounds. It is arguably the case, then, that the most significant result of the British state’s turn to community under New Labour is the extent to which multicultural communitarianism is becoming a paradigmatic approach to questions of social inequality and deprivation. Rather than signifying the redundancy of multiculturalism (see Alibhai-Brown, 2000), the concept has been taken on as a general model for reshaping social welfare provision. Universal models of welfare distribution are replaced by regional and relativistic models at the level of the self-sustaining community; cultural difference is turned into the object of governmental scrutiny, and all social problems become problems of community. The British state’s turn to community under New Labour can thus be seen as incorporating existing racialized minorities and poor whites into a single multicultural policy framework. While in a certain sense this approach could be seen as a step forward in race relations in that it at least attempts to take seriously the social fact of racialized difference, any progressive potential here is undermined by a highly problematic discourse of social cohesion which, as I have argued, will only accommodate certain approved types of cultural difference at the expense of expelling others from the ambit of legitimate social life. This dynamic of inclusion and exclusion reinvents the old racially exclusive politics of assimilation for multicultural Britain. Now that the white working class are incorporated into a politics of racial community there is a likelihood that their interpellation will result in a localized competition for state resources, for if urban communities are entirely made up of racialized groups, the needs of poor whites will come to rival the demands of existing minorities.33 If the genuine social and economic needs of the whole community are channelled as cultural needs into the private domains of particular racialized groups (see Ahmed, 2000: 99), and racism can be reduced to a question of social cohesion, the governmental politics of multicultural community can be said to aggravate, rather than remedy, the local conditions of racial conflict.34

4 Multicultural Conflicts: The ‘Feminist’ State

In this book, I have used the concept of multicultural nationalism to describe how a racialized nationalism continues to underpin state practices, even when they take on an explicitly multicultural aspect. I have attempted to move beyond superficially appealing yet theoretically unsustainable distinctions that describe these practices in terms of sincerity or intentionality, trying instead to understand the contradictions of multicultural nationalism as shaped by an underlying crisis in state discourses of race. This orientation has put into question the necessary coherence and transparency of such discourses, and has enabled me to consider the ways in which they may be divided within themselves. If the ‘dilemmatic’ nature of multicultural nationalism indicates ‘a divide in the prevailing ideology’ (Billig et al., 1988: 109), then our critical task becomes one of describing how this ideological divide is manifested in state practices; of accounting for how contradiction plays itself out. One way of thinking about the contradictions of multicultural nationalism that I have found particularly useful has been an emphasis on the relationship between the state and its critique. The anti-racist project has played a key role in determining the illegitimacy of pejorative racial reference in contemporary British society, and has made an indelible mark on state discourses of race. Yet as a war of position (Gramsci, 1971: 238–9), the fact of its discursive hegemony cannot be thought of as a decisive and unambiguous victory of anti-racism. Rather, as I have tried to show, the phenomenon of multicultural nationalism can in part be understood in terms of a process by which anti-racism as an oppositional discourse has been institutionalized by the state. This has allowed me to consider the ways in which the critical potential of anti-racism is attenuated by its co-option, and how state racism may indeed come to be expressed through its disavowal. 109


The dialectical relation between the state and its anti-racist critique brings to mind an obvious parallel with other oppositional discourses that also have their origins beyond the aegis of the conventional political system, and there is a body of work in social movement theory that addresses itself to precisely these questions (see, for example, the literature review in Coy and Hedeen, 2005). In this chapter I would like to explore a specific correspondence between the British state’s racial politics and its adoption and deployment of discourses that derive from the feminist movement, and examine the interrelationship between state discourses of race and gender in recent conflicts over cultural difference. It is my contention here that discourses of gender equality are becoming an important component in the regulation of Britain’s current race crisis, providing a means not only of making socially legitimate interventions into the field of race politics, but also of creating distinctions between majorities and minorities on the pretext of defending women’s rights. I will begin by noting some observations feminists have made on the complexities and dilemmas of engagement with the state. I will then turn to the central concern of this chapter: to examine how an understanding of racial difference underpins certain state discourses of gender equality. The state has a long history of acting in problematic ways ‘on behalf of’ women, and the protection and salvation of women from oppressive cultures is a standard trope of colonial discourse. Having noted this important historical precedent, I will explore how a similar dynamic has developed in relation to a more contemporary discourse of women’s rights. Taking as a template feminism’s self-critique, I will apply some of the insights of black and third world feminism to state practices. I demonstrate how a putative feminism has been taken up in British state discourses in relation to the recent war in Afghanistan, and consider what it is about discourses of women’s equality that give them the power to provide explanations of and justifications for the war’s prosecution. Turning to questions of cultural conflict in the domestic sphere, I will then attempt to describe how the state’s ‘feminist’ discourses have functioned as part of its politics of race. Using recent statements by Government Ministers and Labour MPs to illustrate my argument, I suggest that state discourses of gender equality applied to minority communities invariably adopt a racialized understanding of antifeminist practice, casting the state in the role of a crusader for progressive, feminist values. I then consider the further development of this tendency in a number of European states, where the deployment of

Multicultural Conflicts: The ‘Feminist’ State 111

feminist discourses has yoked more strongly the issue of women’s rights to a nationalist and anti-immigrant politics. Finally, I will briefly discuss the notion that the ability of the state’s ‘feminism’ to escape the charge of racism relates to the way in which it operates in an ethical register.

Feminism and the state To begin, then, I would like to briefly note how feminists have developed a sophisticated understanding of the complex and ambiguous relationship between feminism and the state. In Britain, as elsewhere, this has varied according to political objectives and social circumstances. While the particular aims of feminists have always been diverse, and resist reduction to a single programme or project, it is nevertheless possible to identify the prevalence of certain trends in feminist practice. One such trend, as Sylvia Walby has remarked, has been a recent shift ‘from autonomous forms of organization to increased engagement with the state’ (Walby, 2002: 551). This engagement can usefully be understood in relation to the concept of ‘gender mainstreaming’, first developed over twenty years ago in the international development arena, subsequently adopted by international organizations like the United Nations and the European Commission, and latterly the British Government (see EOC, 2003). As the name suggests, Mainstreaming signifies a push towards systematic procedures and mechanisms within organizations – particularly government and public institutions – for explicitly taking account of gender issues at all stages of policy-making and programme design and implementation (Baden and Goetz, 1998: 19). Feminist theorists and those working within the state bureaucracy have recognized the political opportunities that have accordingly been opened up to influence the direction of state policy and practice (Charles, 2000: 16). The term ‘state feminism’ has been used to describe a range of different phenomena, from the activities of women in political office, to government structures charged with furthering women’s rights, or to ‘women friendly’ state policies (Mazur, 2001: 26; Nielsen, 1983: 16; Stetson and Mazur, 1995: 1–2). While I broadly follow Joni Lovenduski in her definition of state feminism as ‘the advocacy of women’s movement demands within the state’ (Lovenduski, 2005: 14), it is important to recognize that the state’s attention to problems of


gender inequality has by no means had the undiscerning and unqualified support of feminist critics. Concern has been expressed as to the state’s influence on feminist politics, both in terms of the limitations of its initiatives, and of the effects of state involvement upon feminist thinking and practice. Recognizing that the ‘process of state engagement has led to the transformation of feminist goals’ (Charles, 2000: 208), some feminists have identified a shift from ‘an early radicalism, autonomy and challenge to the state’ to ‘a more moderate, state-involved and accomodationist stance’ (Banaszak et al., 2003: 2). As Jane Franklin has suggested, If the goals of second-wave feminism were to make visible and transform gender relations, the effect of engagement in political institutions has been to dilute this goal so that it fits with the prevailing political discourse (Franklin, 2003: 184). By transforming feminism into a technocratic discourse, it has been argued that gender mainstreaming is unaccountable to – or buys off – grassroots activists (Baden and Goetz, 1998: 21). Others have suggested that the ‘power dominance of statutory agencies means that radical perspectives from “outside” are absorbed, deflected or neutralized’ (Newman, 2002: 12). Placing stress on the ways in which mainstreaming has required a ‘strategical framing’ of feminist objectives in order to ensure their appeal to a wider target audience, Mieke Verloo warns of the possibility of ‘rhetorical entrapment’ that can effectively lead to their incapacitation (Verloo, 2001: 9, 10). These latter notes of unease highlight the analytical importance of distinguishing between feminist goals and the ways in which feminist issues have, in practice, been tackled by the state. To acknowledge, for example, that the procedural representation of women in state structures – such as the record number of women MPs elected to the British House of Commons at the 1997 General Election – does not necessarily bring about a substantive recognition of feminist concerns (see Lovenduski et al., 2005: 267) is to recognize something of the present limits of the ‘feminist’ state. If we can disaggregate procedural from substantive representation, it is also useful to differentiate between the procedural and substantive outcomes of discourses of gender equality: while the state’s engagement with a feminist agenda has led to its ‘mainstreaming’, what results is ‘a discourse about women that is not necessarily feminist or change oriented’ (Banaszak et al., 2003: 26).1


The colonial ‘feminist’ model It is accordingly on the basis of this recognition by feminists that while the state may act in the name of women’s rights it does not necessarily advance an agenda that will straightforwardly serve women’s interests, that it becomes possible to develop a critique of such practices from a feminist perspective. Indeed, it is one objective of this chapter to describe how state discourses of gender equality may be exercised with a considerable degree of autonomy from any position that is recognizably feminist. I will accordingly use the terms ‘feminist’ and ‘feminism’ (in inverted commas) to describe state discourses that invoke the idea of feminism but which would not necessarily receive the endorsement of feminists. This is admittedly a difficult distinction to make, for feminism describes a broad theoretical and political spectrum that cannot be reduced to a singular position (indeed, it is quite possible for feminists to support the state’s ‘feminism’). While it is therefore impossible to make a categorical distinction between feminism and ‘feminism’ without advancing an abstract and ideal version of the former, the differentiation I make is nevertheless intended to place an emphasis on the particular ways in which agents and representatives of the state engage with and deploy discourses of women’s rights. In other words, ‘feminism’ signifies the state’s discursive practice rather than its coherent espousal of a particular moral or political philosophy. Before going on to consider examples of contemporary state discourse, it is first necessary to recognize a significant historical precedent. A number of feminist historians have explored the ways in which feminist ideas were frequently deployed in the service of Western colonialism. As Leila Ahmed remarks, late nineteenth-century colonial discourses brought together ideas of women’s rights and cultural difference, creating a fusion between the issues of women, their oppression, and the cultures of Other men. The idea that Other men, men in colonized societies or societies beyond the borders of the civilized West, oppressed women was to be used, in the rhetoric of colonialism, to render morally justifiable its project of undermining or eradicating the cultures of colonized peoples (Ahmed, 1992: 151). As Ahmed argues, ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ (ibid. 243) were channelled through a gendered idiom in which colonizing states would gauge their moral supremacy and thus authority over colonized cultures.


Her suggestion is that such discourses derived their legitimacy not simply on the basis of an imputed cultural superiority, but were moreover fed by ‘the language of feminism’ (ibid. 152). In her study of Victorian feminist periodicals, Antoinette Burton makes a more pointed claim that British feminists of that period constructed an idea of the enslaved Indian women who ‘acted as a foil against which British feminism gauged its own progress’ (Burton, 1990: 295). Though such arguments give an important insight into the history of feminism in the West, I do not want to dwell here on the question of the complicity of Western feminists with colonialism. In any case, what is of significance are not so much the origins of feminist discourses, but rather the ways they were deployed to carry out ‘the ideological work of empire’ (ibid. 306). While aspects of late nineteenth-century feminism may have aided Western colonialism by providing a pretext for the defamation of other cultures, of more importance is the manner in which it was taken up and applied in colonial projects. As Ahmed recognizes, the appropriation of feminist discourses can be shown to be partial and inconsistent: the keen promotion of ‘feminism’ abroad often went hand in hand with resistance to and suppression of ‘[f]eminism on the home front and feminism directed against white men’ (Ahmed, 1992: 153). And so even though elements of nineteenth-century feminist thought in the West can indeed be shown to draw on ethnocentric and racist discourses (an inevitable fact, it might be argued, given that it ‘matured during an age of empire’ (Burton, 1990: 295)), it is nevertheless problematic to place the blame for the colonial application of feminist discourse directly and exclusively onto Western feminists, as if this gave a full and exhaustive explanation of such practices. The problem I want to explore here is to do with the way in which feminist discourses are assimilated, and the ends to which they are put, by the state. Rather than understand this as having to do with how feminist movements may be compromised by racism, my immediate interest – to follow Ahmed again – is in the negative consequences following from the construction and dissemination of a Western patriarchal discourse targeting the issue of women and coopting the language of feminism in the service of its strategies of domination (Ahmed, 1992: 168). The idea of women’s rights hereby becomes strictly subordinate to the practice of colonial racism. Predicated on the notion that ‘we’ in the West treat ‘our’ women better than ‘they’ do, it is thus possible


to consider that the feminist language deployed in colonial discourses ultimately served, as Ahmed suggests, a patriarchal agenda (see also Allen, 1998: 58). Though the mutual implication of racism and patriarchy within the totality of social relations means that it would be overly reductive to ascribe state discourses of ‘feminism’ to the expression of patriarchy alone (see Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992: 109; Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, 1992: 31), my contention here is that Ahmed’s colonial model of co-option remains very useful in demonstrating how feminist discourses continue to be drawn on and applied by the contemporary state. What is of primary interest here is the problematic I have been exploring repeatedly in relation to state discourses of cultural pluralism: in the same way that the ‘progressive’ character of state multiculturalism effectively conceals the extent to which it may become a vehicle for racist practice, the state’s ‘feminism’ similarly foregrounds a conception of itself as a discourse of liberation, a politics of freedom. I accordingly want to show how this rhetoric of emancipation, as in the example of colonial ‘feminism’, remains tightly bound up with ideas of racial difference. Of course, today’s feminist discourses take on different forms and emphases than they did in the late nineteenth century. While I want to show that there is, on the most general of levels, a basic continuity between colonial ‘feminism’ and recent state practices, I will also demonstrate that the particular ideas of women’s rights taken up by the contemporary state and placed in the service of current state agendas involve appropriations from a more recent repertoire of feminist positions.

Humanitarian ‘feminism’ and the war on Afghanistan The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women. Laura Bush2 The most obvious, straightforward and dramatic demonstration of the influence of the colonial model on contemporary state discourses of gender equality is the way in which women’s rights were mobilized in the legitimation of the war on Afghanistan. While the War on Terror (a subject of further discussion in Chapter 5) was originally launched against Afghanistan on the basis of the Taliban’s imputed role in the execution of the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001, the idea of women’s rights was swiftly invoked on both sides of the Atlantic as a supplementary rationalization for invasion.3 Take, for


example, the following speech made by Tony Blair at the Labour Party conference in October 2001, five days before the onset of the US and UK bombing of Afghanistan, where he listed the privations to which women were subject under the Taliban regime: Women are treated in a way almost too revolting to be credible. First driven out of university; girls are not allowed to go to school; no legal rights; unable to go out of doors without a man. Those that disobey are stoned (Blair, 2001). It is worth noting here how the colonial model is updated to include contemporary signifiers of women’s equality. Blair fashions a conception of progress and civilization that utilizes current tropes of female emancipation: the deprivation of tertiary education and legal rights augment a standard depiction of patriarchal brutality. The plight of Afghan women was again solicited a few weeks later when, in the midst of heavy fighting and the continued aerial bombardment of the country, Cherie Blair followed Laura Bush by arguing that the British intervention would ‘give back a voice’ to Afghan women (quoted in Ward, 2001). The co-ordination of these speeches was, according to the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesperson, part of ‘a concerted effort, on both sides of the Atlantic, to lift the veil and publicise the suffering of women under the Taliban regime’ (PMOS, 2001). The day after his wife’s press conference, on a diplomatic trip to shore up European support for the war, the British Prime Minister again placed stress on the importance of Afghan women to its prosecution, arguing that: We have an obligation to the Afghan people perhaps especially to the women in Afghanistan that we should not and most [sic] not run away from but that we must fulfil (quoted in BBC News, 2001b). Rather than being a rearticulation of war aims – for the plight of Afghan women had been a part of the language of war from the start – Blair’s statement is an expression of one of the war’s key premisses. Although its alleged involvement in the attacks on the US had made the Taliban regime the target of US and UK attention, its pariah status was not reducible to this association. Represented in the crudest sense as an enemy ‘other’, the Taliban’s treatment of women itself provided justification for the pursuit of war. While no such interventions were considered prior to the 2001 attacks on the US, the Taliban’s antifeminism had suddenly become an important factor in the war’s


prosecution. The War on Terror was simultaneously a war on patriarchy, and Afghan women had nothing to lose but their veils.4 The fact that the predicament of Afghan women takes on a new importance in the context of war not only renders the state’s ‘feminism’ as a premiss for global interventionism open to the charge of inconsistency (why target Afghanistan and not Saudi Arabia, Algeria, etc.), but of course also opens up questions as to whether the war has, in practice, helped or hindered the cause of women’s rights. Both these questions have been tackled elsewhere (see, for example, Stabile and Kumar, 2005: 775–7), and I do not want to deal with them directly here. What they do highlight, however, is the extent to which the state’s ‘feminist’ positions are indisputably more to do with shoring up the legitimacy of the war for domestic audiences than with a coherent policy of feminist interventionism. If it is true to say that in the case of Afghanistan ‘military action gathered support on the basis of a “feminist” cause’ (Bahramitash, 2005: 221), then it is worth exploring what it is that gives ‘feminism’ its particular propaganda value. One way of going about this might be to think about the sense in which ‘feminism’ was able to fill what we might call a legitimacy gap in the prosecution of this war. Given that it lacked grounding in the standard norms of military engagement (i.e., in international law), a discourse of women’s rights came to serve as a supplementary rationale: the longstanding principle of the sovereignty of nation-states was superseded and replaced by a humanitarian ethos, of which ‘feminist’ interventionism became a key signifier. Thus, as Danilo Zolo has suggested of other recent military interventions, legal norms are suspended in a ‘meta-legal’ (Zolo, 2002: 77) appeal to a higher moral position, where the ethico-theological doctrine of bellum iustum (just war), a traditional apologetic instrument of Western wars, threatens to metamorphose into a ‘humanitarian claim’ according to which the use of force – and the killing of innocents – is compatible with the defence of human rights (ibid. 3). If state discourses of feminism make a ‘humanitarian claim’, we can see how they are able to do so on the basis of a qualitative distinction between Western and non-Western cultures. This polarization of ‘us’ (who believe in female equality) and ‘them’ (who do not) opens up the space in which humanitarian war may be legitimately waged. This differentiation relates to an idea of racial difference, but – as with the


colonial ‘feminist’ model – it is also able to escape the charge of racism. The ‘progressive’ ethical connotations attached to discourses of women’s salvation and emancipation place practices conducted in their name beyond the limits of contestability (more on this later). A racialized hierarchy is thus both constructed and concealed by the discourse of humanitarian feminism. Where once imperial interventions were justified on the basis of bringing civilization to colonial subjects, the neo-imperialism of the war on Afghanistan finds justification on account of its putatively humanitarian outcomes. An idea of women’s rights is championed in a ‘militant liberal-democratic discourse’ calling for liberation from ‘“antiWestern” authoritarian regimes’ (Therborn, 2007: 75). The application of ‘feminism’ in the Afghanistan war can tell us something of the wider discursive economy of contemporary ‘humanitarian’ warfare. Take, for example, the following statement by Patricia Hewitt, Minister for Women, speaking in the House of Commons on International Women’s Day in 2003: Our armed forces fought in Kosovo to end the horror of ethnic cleansing and a conflict in which rape was deployed as a deliberate weapon of war. Millions of women and men are now rebuilding their lives and their country. We fought in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and international terrorism and, with the removal of the Taliban that followed, girls are now back at school for the first time in a decade. I recently had the privilege of meeting Habiba Sorabi, the Minister for Women in the new Afghan administration who, with her colleagues, is helping to rebuild that country. If we do fight in Iraq, it will be to uphold international law and get rid of weapons of mass destruction, but the defeat of Saddam will also be the liberation of the women of Iraq (Hansard, 2003a. col. 977). Here, Hewitt constructs women’s emancipation as a necessary outcome of British military intervention. As such, her words depend implicitly on the idea that the motives for going to war are less important than securing a just (that is to say, ‘feminist’) outcome. The point I want to make here – which does not depend on whether or not Hewitt’s argument holds water – simply relates to the sense in which the ‘progressive’ profeminist result of military intervention, while being part of the argument for war, never in itself provides the impetus for waging war in the first place. Hewitt herself admits as much: the feminist argument is always supplementary to other concerns (in this example, over ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘terrorism’, ‘weapons of mass destruction’). This is a truism, and on


the face of it a rather banal one, but it nevertheless prompts an important question: why is it that wars which are not, ultimately, waged ‘for’ feminism justified – at the time, or retrospectively – on ‘feminist’ grounds? Why is it that ‘nonfeminist’ wars are conducted in the name of feminism? How is it that feminism plays such a large role in structuring the meaning of contemporary warfare? To answer these questions it is necessary to call into question the sincerity of the state’s displays of humanitarian feminism. The suffering of women is a powerful propaganda tool, and is able ‘to mobilize the indignation of the masses’ (Lutz et al., 1995), but is ultimately subsidiary to the real task at hand. It is important to recognize that I am not arguing here that the feminist concerns expressed in these state discourses are in themselves necessarily faulty or misplaced. It is not wrong that the Taliban’s treatment of women became an object of the British state’s attention. What remains highly problematic is the way a discourse of women’s rights comes to occupy the position that it does, and the means by which it has functioned to justify and facilitate a military agenda with, to say the least, dubious feminist credentials. The symbol of the suffering woman is part of what, following Cynthia Enloe (Enloe, 2004: 147), could be called the militarization of compassion, a humanitarian rhetoric developed to secure popular support, a reinforcement for the ideology of a ‘just war’. A discourse of women’s rights stands in for and to an extent replaces a less popular or morally insufficient rationale for invasion (see also Chandler, 2006: 168). Such discourses can be said to operate not only to conceal alternative objectives and motivations, but can also be shown to structure the terms in which Afghan women became visible as a matter of the state’s interest and concern in the first place. The notion that the identification of women as vulnerable relates as much to the objectives of the state as to the needs of women themselves is something I now want to give some further attention.

Basic values: the racialization of antifeminism Sometimes I feel as though I want to rejoice in cultural insensitivity, especially when it is about FGM and forced marriages, since, as my hon. friend says, cultural differences can only be sacrosanct when they respect human rights. Anne Cryer MP5 I will now move on to consider a more particular relationship between state discourses of gender equality and the domestic politics of race.


Just as the state has always played an important role in constructing and regulating women’s bodies in relation to laws and policies concerning reproduction (Waylen, 1998: 10), women have also featured prominently in contemporary controversies over cultural difference. As Seyla Benhabib points out, over half of the practices Bhikhu Parekh has identified ‘that most frequently lead to clashes of intercultural evaluation […] concern the status of women in distinct cultural communities’ (Benhabib, 2002: 83). Such conflicts will also invariably bring into play the politics of race and nation: as Elizabeth Povinelli has suggested, ‘public anxieties about cultural diversity and national identity are often expressed at the tip of the clitoris’ (Povinelli, 1998: 575). I want to suggest that the colonial ‘feminist’ model can also be discerned here, albeit in less dramatic form. Discourses of gender equality have a rhetorical function in the politics of multicultural Britishness, and the figuration of women’s oppression in minority communities serves to shore up a conception of the state and majority society as progressive, sexually equal, and morally superior. I will illustrate my argument with a range of examples of state discourse, including commons statements from MPs, public speeches and policy documents. What these texts have in common is a conceptual approach to the understanding of antifeminist practices in minority communities. They share an interpretive framework that is invariably racialized, and which can be said to strengthen a moral hierarchy in which the figure of the vulnerable woman serves to reinforce the distinction between a feminist ‘us’ and a patriarchal ‘them’. Before looking at some specific examples, I would like to clarify my position in order to forestall an obvious criticism. Some of the issues that are touched on here – such as forced marriage and female genital mutilation – have been subject to recent policy and legislative changes which can be said to have brought about positive outcomes (if not unequivocally so) for women in Britain’s minority communities (Sahgal, 2006: 214).6 Policy around forced marriage in particular has been subject to appraisal elsewhere, and I would concur with the criticisms of Phillips and Dustin (2004) and Siddiqui (2003) that although in certain respects problematic (particularly the way in which forced marriage has been linked to immigration restrictions), it is not as a point of principle misguided or wrong for the state to make interventions in this area. Antifeminist practices within Britain’s minority communities are certainly not the imaginary creation of a racist state, and attempts to deal with them are by no means illegitimate.7


My interest here is in approaching this issue from a slightly different angle. I will not engage in an evaluation of the import or usefulness of state practices addressed to the issues faced by women, but am more concerned – as with the Afghanistan example – in casting light on a broader territory in which state discourses of women’s rights are operative, and the wider political uses to which they may be put. Discourses of race and gender have a symbolic currency beyond the realm of their immediate application, and their polyvalence means that it is possible for ostensibly quite reasonable concerns for gender equality to nevertheless remain problematic in the particularity of their formulation and expression. And so while my analysis in this section will not advance an understanding of the state’s ‘feminism’ as an offensive against Britain’s minority communities per se, it nevertheless highlights the extent to which antifeminist practices have come to be understood through the lens of racial difference. I want to start by giving some attention to the language employed by two Labour MPs who have both gone out of their way to broach the subject of antifeminism in Britain’s minority communities. The first example is from Anne Cryer, who addresses the practice of forced marriage in a contribution to the second reading of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill in 2004: Clearly, this is a question not of religion but of culture – or, more correctly, of the use of and reliance on perceived cultural values to excuse behaviour that we in the 21st century rejected years ago. For us to do nothing would, through our inactivity, sanction abuses of human rights, and young people would continue to suffer as a result of outdated and unacceptable perceived cultural traditions (Hansard, 2004. col. 579). The second example comes from Home Secretary David Blunkett, who makes the following statement about female genital mutilation in a public speech in 2003 about ‘unity and diversity in multi-faith Britain’: We cannot tolerate the intolerable. Female genital mutilation is one example. Like September 11, this is not about East versus West, or Islam versus Christianity – it is about extremism versus modernity. It is an affront to modern values of equality, equal respect and respect for human life and suffering (Blunkett, 2003c). It is first important to acknowledge here the note of caution in both speeches. Cryer and Blunkett are both very careful to frame their


arguments in such a way as not to associate forced marriage or female genital mutilation with religious practice. In this, of course, they are quite correct, for all major religious faiths in Britain are officially opposed to female genital mutilation and committed to the principle of consent within marriage (Although it should be recognized that religion has not always escaped attention as a central problem in parliamentary debates on these issues (see Siddiqui, 2003: 73)). Cryer even goes so far as to hedge the notion that forced marriage is a ‘cultural’ practice, and suggests with her use of the word ‘perceived’ (used twice in the quoted extract) that even this is to give too much credence to the idea that it might have its origin in anything other than an aberration of tradition or belief. Blunkett’s denial that female genital mutilation is a matter of ‘East versus West’ similarly serves as a further qualification, ostensibly refusing to view the problem through an orientialist frame, and so refuting the Huntingtonian rhetoric of civilizational conflict upon which he might otherwise have relied. Yet while in one sense both MPs’ positions self-consciously reject a narrative of cultural conflict, the conceptual resources they both deploy still require some critical attention. What, in particular, is being suggested in the distinction that Cryer and Blunkett make between antifeminist practices and the values of ‘the 21st century’ or ‘modernity’? Clearly, the criteria by which forced marriage and female genital mutilation are deemed illegitimate hang on a temporal dichotomy that consigns both practices to a pre-modern and long-since rejected past. As such, the arguments of both MPs can be shown to have an affinity with what Meyda Yeg˘enog˘lu describes as the ‘temporalizing devices’ of colonial discourse which serve ‘as a means of distancing or pushing the cultural other back in time’ (Yeg˘enog˘lu, 1998: 96). While explicitly refusing to make a racialized value judgement in respect of a particular religion or culture, Cryer and Blunkett nonetheless set out an understanding of forced marriage and female genital mutilation that depends on a standard trope of colonial racism. While not a matter of ‘East versus West’ the MPs’ statements still echo a colonial distinction between the progressive and the primitive (Parpart and Marchand, 2001: 522). Blunkett’s association of female genital mutilation and ‘September 11’ is particularly telling: it thus becomes an external threat, an attack from a pernicious quarter that – though impossible to pin down to a specific geographical or cultural origin – is nonetheless categorically marked by both its foreignness and its opposition to the values of ‘modernity’ (see Ålund, 1999: 150; Povinelli, 1998: 577n.8).8


The dependence here on a developmental narrative of ‘racial historicism’ (Goldberg, 2002: 43) should not, as I stressed above, necessarily be understood as an attack on Britain’s minority communities. There is room for cultural and religious pluralism in the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ that both Cryer and Blunkett deploy, for it remains only the particular practices of forced marriage and female genital mutilation that are subject to their criticism. Yet while this is so, it does not obviate the dependency of their statements on an idea of racial difference. It is this categorization, after all, that makes it possible for the MPs to reinforce the moral probity of their own positions. By confirming the anachronism of these practices, Cryer and Blunkett are able to represent their own standpoints as rooted in the superior ethical territory of the present. In short, forced marriage and female genital mutilation are used in similar ways by Cryer and Blunkett to create that primary distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. They are used to define an interpretive community on the basis of its commitment to ‘21st century’ ‘modern values’, values that achieve their substance and coherence only by reference to the temporal and ethical distance that antifeminist practices provide. It is accordingly not necessary for these practices to be identified with a particular religious or cultural group, for their main task, I would suggest, is to affirm the superior beliefs that ‘we’ possess. It is simply enough to know that they derive from a culture that is not ‘our’ own. It is of course on this basis that they also provide ‘us’ with the moral imperative to act: both Cryer and Blunkett are clear that antifeminist practices must be confronted in the name of these superior beliefs and values, for, as Blunkett’s oxymoronic phrase attests, ‘[w]e cannot tolerate the intolerable’. By placing an emphasis on the wider rhetorical function of state ‘feminism’, it becomes possible to build up an understanding – as with the colonial model – of how it founds its progressive character on a racialized understanding of antifeminist practice. Such is a familiar argument in postcolonial and third world feminism, which problematizes the way in which non-Western women are constructed in Western feminist discourses. As Chandra Talpade Mohanty suggests in her famous essay on colonialism and feminist scholarship, representations of ‘the third world woman’ in Western feminist writing are ‘predicated upon (and hence obviously bring into sharper focus) assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated, and having control over their own lives’ (Mohanty, 1997: 85). As Helma Lutz remarks of the discursive treatment of immigrant women in the Netherlands, dominant social discourses which express the standing of (white) Western women


as ‘triumphant in the realization of equal rights and social equality’, and as having become ‘straightforward and autonomously successful beings whose gendered life has been freed of major contradictions and ambivalence’ simply reflects the ‘host’ societies’ contact with the immigrant rather than providing us with information about immigrants themselves. In other words, it is not the immigrant woman or her assumed lack of social competence [that is the real object of such discourses], but rather a social-genetic assignment with a political function, in which the indigenous Westerner (male and female) becomes a citizen through the othering of the immigrant (Lutz, 1994: 186). Like Lutz, what I want to suggest here is that state discourses of gender equality are perhaps less to do with proving the emancipated nature of Western women per se, than of articulating a liberated conception of Western culture in general. To be more specific, it is state actors – speaking and acting on behalf of a national community – that derive their authority from their association with a discourse of female emancipation. As with the war example, ‘feminism’ acts as a ‘humanitarian claim’, an intervention with a function at least as much to do with defining the superiority of the position from which that claim is made as it is about addressing the problems it ostensibly describes.9 Although it is strictly speaking antifeminist practices and not minority communities that are racialized, there is undeniably a certain slippage that occurs here, for the state’s ‘feminism’ must hold someone responsible for these practices. The wider function of state discourses of gender equality – that is, the elevation of the cultural majority as a champion of women’s rights – cannot therefore fail to make minority communities objects of suspicion as groups within which antifeminist practices are said to constitute a particular problem. By framing antifeminism in terms of racial difference, an opposition between ‘outdated […] cultural traditions’ and ‘modernity’ overemphasizes the historical longevity of what, in reality, are often relatively recent developments in the nation’s political landscape. Take the following statement, also by David Blunkett, which precedes a discussion of forced marriage and female genital mutilation: Common citizenship in a liberal democracy […] preclude[s] practices which violate the basic procedural foundations of democracy:


banning of freedom of speech; denying women the vote; or substituting force for democratic dialogue (Blunkett, 2001: 128). Contemporary ideals are hereby inserted into the national past, thus making rhetorical use of antifeminist practices to retrospectively secure an idea of gender equality as a foundational tenet of the modern nation-state. While equal suffrage in Britain was achieved only in 1928, descriptions such as this serve to dehistoricize the (ongoing) conflictual relationship between feminism and the state, and falsely assert an identity between them.10 Consider, in relation to this, another statement by Patricia Hewitt, Minister for Women, which was made as the Government launched its first project on forced marriage in late 2001: There is the fear of being accused of stirring up racist beliefs […] but I think we ought to have the confidence of our beliefs and that includes the belief – part of a broad, liberal, enlightened attitude – in the basic human dignity of women as well as men (Hewitt in Ahmed et al., 2001). As in the previous examples, Hewitt justifies tackling the issue of forced marriage by recourse to the authority of ‘our beliefs’. The problem here, as before, is not a question of whether or not it is appropriate for the state to develop policy to tackle forced marriage, but with the terms upon which its engagement with the issue takes place. As before, a position of superior judgement serves to idealize a normative profeminist belief as the property of a dominant culture so that, as Randi Gressgård and Christine Jacobsen have argued, ‘“our ideals” are compared with “their reality”’ (Gressgård and Jacobsen, 2003: 71). As well as serving to obscure the prevalence of antifeminist practices in that dominant culture, such pronouncements tend to underplay the ways in which antifeminist practices are tackled and challenged by women in minority communities, constructing them instead as passive victims to be saved by an enlightened state. Hewitt’s articulation of a putatively universal feminist principle thus remains ‘tied to the representative particularity of its enunciation’ (Hesse, 1999: 211; see also Laclau, 1996: 47–65), and cannot as a result avoid reproducing a racialized understanding of the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This might be said to indicate a difficulty that is inherent in any possible attempt by the state to deal with antifeminist practices in minority communities (indeed, Hewitt’s acknowledgement that she


might be ‘accused of stirring up racist beliefs’ seems to recognize this as an unavoidable outcome of engagement with the problem of forced marriage).11 And so while it can be argued that this tendency should not stand in the way of the state tackling antifeminist issues in minority communities per se (and should certainly not be used as an excuse to turn a blind eye) it should nonetheless be recognized that such discourses will create side-effects liable to reinforce the value dominance that is attributed to the idea of a majority culture. What I am suggesting here is that the very terms in which issues like forced marriage are constructed as a problem implicitly depend on a concept of cultural hierarchy. The two outcomes of this conceptual framework – the pejorative categorization of racialized difference and the elevation of the cultural majority – are mutually determining, such that state discourses of gender equality might be said to have a peculiar dependency on the exhibition of antifeminism in minority communities. With its racialization, antifeminism is externalized, projected beyond the state and the majority culture in whose name it speaks. To return to Lutz’s argument, state discourses of gender equality might accordingly be seen as forming a narrative of the historical overcoming of sexism in ‘majority’ Britain, a fiction only made possible by concerted attention to examples of racialized patriarchy. Antifeminism is hereby screened as a more general social problem: the fixation of the state’s ‘feminism’ onto the practices of racialized others compartmentalizes a feminist critique of British society as a problem for ‘them’ rather than ‘us’, projecting an ongoing truth of sexual politics onto the bodies of those marked out as racially different. While it would be incorrect to suggest that this is the only way in which discourses of gender equality are mobilized by the contemporary state, it nonetheless appears to be a dominant characteristic of the state’s ‘feminism’ when it crosses over into the politics of race. The repeated return to a figuration of antifeminism as an aberration from the norms of a cultural majority highlights the extent to which the very idea of gender equality feeds off the threat of its betrayal by racialized others. Consider this constitutive role in respect of the way in which the interpretation of the Human Rights Act is framed in the 2002 immigration White Paper Secure Borders, Safe Haven: The Human Rights Act 1998 can be viewed as a key source of values that British citizens should share. The laws, rules and practices which govern our democracy uphold our commitment to the equal worth and dignity of all our citizens. It will sometimes be necessary to con-


front some cultural practices which conflict with these basic values – such as those which deny women the right to participate as equal citizens (Home Office, 2002: 30). Found in a section of the White Paper addressed to ‘the rights and responsibilities that come with the acquisition of British citizenship’ (ibid. 29), this passage is clearly addressed to an implied conflict between the beliefs and behaviours of recent immigrants and the ‘basic values’ set out in the Human Rights Act. Once more, the concept of women’s equality is employed to illustrate cultural conflict, and again ‘basic values’ come to be associated with the progressive equalitarian norms of a majority culture (as defined by the state). We might relate this to the familiar notion that women frequently come to stand as symbols of the nation. If, as Nira Yuval-Davis suggests, women have long been constructed ‘as the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honour’ (YuvalDavis, 1997: 45; see also Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989: 7; Sharp, 1996), then it can be argued that it is precisely this symbolic function that has determined the state’s interest in and attention to the rights of migrant women. As Irene Gedalof has suggested in her analysis of this White Paper and other recent immigration legislation, ‘a “gender-aware” discourse is appropriated to produce her [‘the migrant woman’] as a kind of victim, and to use her victim status as the measure against which a “progressive” British identity and citizenship is established’ (Gedalof, 2007: 90). It should be noted that this attention to the victimhood of ‘the migrant woman’ has not translated in any meaningful sense into an improvement in the conditions for women in Britain’s asylum and immigration system. As I have repeatedly demonstrated in this book, the state’s embrace of multiculturalism does not, in practice, necessarily mean that its actions are no longer inflected by racism. Similarly, a critical examination of the state’s ‘feminism’ can be said to reveal the extent to which approaches to gender equality in minority communities cannot be thought of as autonomous of the structures of racial difference, but must be understood to be deeply inflected by them. It seems that the British state cannot tackle antifeminism in minority communities without recourse to a discourse of race. As judgements made from a position of cultural superiority, state discourses invariably relegate minorities to a subordinate position, and the oppressed or suffering woman serves to mark this distinction, reflexively cohering the values of the dominant culture in relation to the threat of their betrayal. Because it can be said to be revealed only at such moments, ‘the dominant culture’


can thus be thought of as a largely imaginary entity, akin to the mythical content of Britishness as explored in Chapter 2. Because state discourses of gender equality remain ‘tied to the representative particularity of their enunciation’, they do not account for the ways in which the negative categorization of racialized difference becomes a necessary precondition of their expression. The ‘feminism’ of state discourses renders them impervious to an acknowledgement of their own racialization, and at the same time serves to defend them from anti-racist critique.

‘Feminist’ ethics as a new racism? [T]he non-feminist Other is not so much patriarchy as the nonWestern woman. Aihwa Ong12 A particularly clear illustration that demonstrates the racialization of feminist discourse relates to the debates that have circulated around practices of veiling by Muslim women. While Britain has had its own debate on the veil, which began with an article written by Jack Straw, Leader of the House of Commons, for the Lancashire Evening Telegraph (see BBC News 2006), the most developed example to date comes from France. The French controversy over the Muslim headscarf – l’affaire foulard – starkly demonstrates the way in which women (in this case schoolgirls) have been made the focus of a conflict between the state and a racialized (here religious) minority. Beginning with a ruling by the Council d’Etat in 1989 with the expressed intention of guaranteeing the principle of laïcité – the concept of secularism understood to be the foundation of republican civil life – the wearing of the foulard was banned in state schools on grounds of it being an ‘ostentatious or combative’ sign of religious belonging (translation in Benhabib, 2002: 98). Despite there being only four cases in which girls were actually excluded from schools as a result of this ruling, l’affaire foulard came to be a major preoccupation of the French state. In 2003 a Presidential Commission was set up to investigate the application of laïcité, resulting in a new law passed in February 2004, which came into effect with the new school term the following autumn. Again, the actual number of students involved was minimal (see BBC News, 2004). In an insightful article written at the beginning of that year, Emmanuel Terray places stress on the extent to which a notion of women’s rights had become a key feature of l’affaire foulard. He describes the French state’s dogged and wholly disproportionate legislative persecution of a handful of young girls as a kind of fictitious problem that served as a


proxy for the more general, urgent and widespread issues of which the headscarf had become a convenient symbol (Terray, 2004). Terray suggests that the state’s failure (founded partly on its reluctance, partly on its inability) to make any significant progress on the questions of racism and sexual inequality acutely faced by France’s five million Muslims led to its adoption of the foulard controversy as a staged confrontation between its secular republican ideals and the threat of their betrayal by a faith with which they were deemed wholly incompatible.13 Laïcité thus came to take on its true political form in opposition to the Muslim schoolgirls. As Terray argues, l’affaire foulard functioned as a substitute answer to the real social problems faced by French Muslims due to the means by which it symbolically addressed cultural exclusion and gender inequality. The confrontation between laïcité and Islam may have been largely confected, but it nevertheless dramatized in miniature a resolution to both of these problems. A ‘feminist’ cause thus served not only as a proxy, an entry point into an otherwise far more controversial terrain of coercive state intervention, but it also had an explanatory function: an answer to ghettoization, low levels of educational achievement and discrimination was found not in the removal of the racism in which they find their origins, but in the removal of the foulard that stood as the most visible symbol of Muslims’ denizen status in contemporary France. Likewise, the doubly subordinate status of Muslim women in French society was symbolically remedied by casting aside the cloth that had been constructed as the badge of their oppression. In one theatrical gesture, the French state was able to unite popular, political, journalistic and intellectual opinion in apparent confirmation of its universal values, and, while effectively contributing to the stigmatization, isolation and social exclusion of Muslim girls, did so in the name of their freedom, emancipation and social integration. The French ban is by no means the only instance of the way in which a discourse of women’s rights has become harnessed to a racist state agenda. In other European states the racialization of antifeminism has developed at a more rapid pace than in Britain, and ‘feminism’ has been embraced with a greater fervour as a raison d’etat (a turn of events that should set alarm bells ringing for feminists whose ideas are not typically met with such a degree of enthusiasm, let alone elevated as core and defining social ideals). The recent introduction of citizenship tests in Denmark and parts of Germany and an ‘integration contract’ in the Netherlands all construct the issue of gender equality as a marker of national belonging (for a useful overview of such policies within the EU, see Fekete, 2006; see also Hudson, 2006). Across Western


Europe, ‘feminism’ has become yoked to an anti-immigrant and nationalist politics which sets out to prove that a Western liberal tradition is irreconcilable with the cultures of immigrants and minority communities (see Lütticken, 2007).14 While the British state has not to date developed comparable policies and legislation, its own version of the veil debate and the longstanding fact that antifeminist practices have been ‘used as expressions of different moral standards seen as inherent to different cultures’ (Fortier, 2003, n.p.) suggests that the conceptual framework is nevertheless in place for this to happen. My attention to ‘feminism’ as a potential site of state racism relates to a key argument of this book. As I have suggested, the discursive hegemony of a minimal concept of anti-racism has led to the re-routing of racism through a variety of alternative and often novel media. There is something particular to feminism’s status as a ‘progressive’ discourse and its close association (like anti-racism) with the political left that has, in these European examples, made it a convenient conduit for racist expression, providing a legitimate point of entry into a controversial realm of racial politics that would otherwise be resolutely off-limits.15 ‘Feminism’ has the capacity to screen or override what would otherwise be contested as straightforwardly racist practices, while at the same time conferring upon its exponents a superior status over those on whom it passes judgement. These racially inflected ‘feminist’ narratives of national superiority prove that feminism and nationalism are not, as Gisela Kaplan claims, ‘always incompatible ideological positions within the European context’ (Kaplan, 1997: 3). Indeed, to adapt an argument Elizabeth Povinelli makes about multicultural discourse, feminist struggles are hereby transformed into ‘moments in which the future of the nation and its core institutions and values are ensured rather than shaken’ (Povinelli, 1998: 579). One way of thinking about how state discourses of gender equality become articulated to a nationalist agenda relates to their ethical status. By ethics I do not so much refer to the moral content of the state’s ‘feminism’, but rather to its social and institutional status as morally authoritative. Thus to categorize state discourses of gender equality as ethical is to say something about how they set out a dominant interpretive framework in which ‘feminism’ comes to be positioned as a final and non-negotiable arbiter of any given situation upon which it is called to pass judgement. Like the ‘humanitarian claim’ (Zolo, 2002: 3) of ‘feminism’ in the legitimation of the Afghanistan war, an understanding of state discourses of gender equality as ethical foregrounds this sense in which they come to be elevated as an ultimate criterion of judgement, trumping a consideration of their racial connotations by


asserting a primary allegiance to an idea of women’s rights. State ‘feminism’ operates as a discourse of ethical propriety that in a profound structural sense underwrites the probity of the interpretive community that uses it. As the primary and dominant discourse of judgement, it conceals its divisive and negative tendencies in the same way that, as I argued in Chapter 1, anti-racism may close itself off to certain types of criticism. The undeniably rational or commonsensical appearance of state ‘feminism’ can thus be said to belie the contradictions on which it rests, contradictions that are embedded in the particular context of its formulation and expression, but are hidden by an apparently universal function. As such, the multicultural conflicts I describe in this chapter might be understood to represent the displacement of contradictions and inequalities within state practices that a discourse of feminism works to conceal from view. Thus, for example, the state’s recent attentiveness to gender issues in British Asian communities can be understood in part as the symptomatic expression of its concurrent racialization of Muslims. An effective attack is hereby concealed within an incontestable idea of the good, as the geopolitics of our current historical moment come to structure and shape official discourses of women’s rights. State actors may think that they are universally interested in the human rights of women, but may in fact be more interested in consolidating a worldview attesting that the West is the bearer and protector of those rights, particularly in the face of their blatant and widespread abuse. If, as I have tried to argue, women’s rights in minority communities only become an object of the state’s attention through a racializing discourse, then what is ostensibly staged as a conflict between the demands of feminism and cultural difference is invariably overdetermined by this prior conceptualization. It is therefore the case that a ‘genuine’ conflict of interests is in practice an impossibility, for the terms in which that conflict comes to be understood are shaped by the priority of a ‘feminist’ ethics. Within this framework, minority cultures come to be represented as ‘fundamentally inimical to women’ (Ahmed, 1992: 244) in a way that the ‘majority’ culture is not. As Sawitri Saharso argues, this overdetermination will also tend to invalidate the ‘choices’ of racialized women when they run contrary to a majoritarian norm (Saharso, 2003: 209; see also Badiou, 2001: 24). All this implies a complex relationship between the state’s ‘feminist’ discourses and their putative origin in feminist thought and practice. As I noted earlier and have tried to demonstrate throughout, the ‘feminism’ of state practices is best understood to operate with a considerable degree of autonomy from the interests or goals of any position


that might be recognized as straightforwardly feminist. Its actions, I would suggest, are largely independent not only of feminist thinkers and activists (and are in this sense not representative of a ‘movement’, however understood), but also from the theoretical positions that such actors might hold. My understanding of the state’s ‘feminist’ ethics, then, is in direct contradistinction to the claims made by state representatives in the examples I gave earlier regarding the status of feminism as a basic or fundamental value. Like the profound inconsistencies of colonial ‘feminism’, they exhibit no coherent ontological or programmatic commitment to gender equality, but rather an opportunistic and largely rhetorical dependence upon it. This is of course not to suggest that such state discourses are, due to this lack of grounding or attachment, hereby weakened or rendered meaningless, for what is ‘borrowed’ from feminism is precisely its ethical character. It is my argument that state discourses derive a considerable power from their association with feminism as a moral paradigm, a touchstone which provides them with the authority to make the judgements they do. This is precisely why I have been keen to hold onto the ambiguity of the state’s ‘feminism’ rather than to dismiss it outright, for it is on account of the capacity of ‘feminism’ to reference a ‘genuinely’ feminist politics that gives it its discursive authority. Though, as I suggested earlier, it is ultimately impossible to make a clear distinction between feminism and ‘feminism’, the distance between the two is to some extent clarified in the specific terms of such relations. An interesting dimension of this mode of ethical authorization is therefore the extent to which it works, and continues to work, even without the active support of feminists. The relative autonomy of the state’s ‘feminism’ is testimony to the power of a politics ‘played out in the moral register’ (Mouffe, 2005: 75) to transcend the conditions in which that morality originated, and apply it in entirely new contexts, to entirely new ends. While much feminist thinking has, at least for the last thirty years or so, paid careful attention to the contexts of its enunciation and the sophisticated and complex relationships between gender and other forms of social discrimination (particularly racism), the same cannot be said of ‘feminism’ beyond the immediate control of feminists, as in my example here of state ‘feminism’. The dogged persistence of an unnuanced form of identity politics in ‘feminist’ state discourses poses some interesting questions in respect of the disjunctive relationship between state ‘feminism’ and other forms of feminist practice. Though an ‘internal’ critique from black, third world and postcolonial feminist perspectives has played a significant role in


broadening feminism and challenging its ‘ethnic and racial provincialism’ (Segal, 2000: 28), it is hard to see how this criticism might be taken into account in respect of the activities of the ‘feminist’ state. While one of feminism’s strengths has always been its moral incontrovertibility, it can be argued that this is also what has made it so attractive to – and has facilitated its appropriation by – dominant social actors like the state. Making sense of these conditions of appropriation and dependency would require a more complex understanding than we currently have of the syntax of feminism as a moral vocabulary. One question that might be usefully posed here is one of causality: does ‘feminism’ depend upon and go looking for its ‘others’, or does the need to create a relationship with otherness precede the discovery of ‘feminism’ as a mechanism for developing that relation? In other words, when we are thinking about the ‘feminist’ state, can the politics of gender equality be thought of in any meaningful sense as a real objective, or is it just a symptom of a process of legitimation? This chapter has, I think, suggested that these are not mutually exclusive, and can actually be occurring simultaneously. The state’s feminism is thus both ‘genuine’ and ‘inauthentic’. The mainstreaming of feminism is indeed a real victory of feminist struggle, but at the same time has subordinated a feminist agenda to a variety of additional uses, of which this chapter has given just one example. To acknowledge that ‘feminism’ has become a legitimate point of entry onto an otherwise proscribed territory of race politics, and to recognize that there is something particular about the status of ‘feminism’ as an ethical discourse that permits it to evade the censorial grasp of a nominal anti-racist orthodoxy, is not to suggest that we should contest the idea of women’s rights as a fundamental political position. Rather, it is to put in question the notion that feminism’s non-negotiability also amounts to an uncritical acceptance of the normative presuppositions structured by the particular social and cultural circumstances under which it comes to be expressed. If, in other words, we can recognize that the contextual articulation of a universal feminist ethics can never itself be universal, and may be overdetermined by an underlying structure of racism, then it remains possible to challenge the terms of its expression without challenging the principles of feminism itself. This is the kind of approach worked out by feminist theorists of ‘intersectionality’, who attempt to understand how ostensibly separate systems of oppression ‘mutually construct one another’ (Collins, 1998: 63). An intersectional approach to state discourses of gender equality might avoid falling into the trap of dismissing the state’s ‘feminist’ interventions into the politics of race as necessarily invalid (as a result of their being


inherently ethnocentric) or of accepting them unconditionally (and so turning a blind eye to the ways in which they rely on pejorative ideas of racial difference) – see, for example, Patel (2003: 251). In reality, however, it must be recognized that intersectional practice is still subject to containment within a discursive framework that remains beyond the control of intersectional practitioners – that, in other words, however careful we are to recognize the complexities of the articulation of gender and race, our interventions are subject to overdetermination and misconstrual in a broader discursive context, for ultimately intersectionality (like any other framework of political practice) is only really functional within its own hermeneutic. The unavoidability of this overdetermination should stand as a constant warning to those who, rightly recognizing the need to avoid the paralysis of epistemic relativism in dealing with antifeminist practices, insist on the unproblematic assertion of a basic set of principles, and thus unwittingly allow their critique to become subsumed into a partial and falsely universalistic moral framework. ‘Civilizational’ discourses of Western superiority can readily speak through a feminist mouthpiece, and to neglect this fact is to fail to acknowledge that such interests and concerns are never entirely ‘innocent’ or unmarked by the key determining structures and systems through which power is wielded and manifest.16 In relation to this, there is a need to account more specifically for the way in which the ‘mainstreaming’ of ‘feminism’ has, like multiculturalism, become increasingly aligned to a nationalist agenda. This is currently more evident in a number of other European states than it is in Britain, but examples from France and elsewhere – along with the British state’s own actions in its prosecution of the Afghanistan war – give us reason to think that the issue of women’s rights could increasingly become an arena in which the beliefs and practices of minorities are distinguished from the normative values of a majority culture. Without dealing with the way in which state discourses of women’s liberation rely on ideas of racial difference, it is unlikely that antifeminist practices in minority communities will be tackled without contributing to their further racialization. Again, the clear task for feminists and anti-racists is to disrupt the false association between feminism and the nation, not in order to deride or dismiss attempts to progress a feminist agenda through the state and its institutions, but to push beyond a racialized frame in which cultural or religious difference necessarily become an impediment to sexual equality, and insist on a feminist cause as an objective for all.

5 On the Islamic Question: Multicultural Nationalism and the War on Terror

Just as when the state evangelises when, although it is a state, it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civil rights. Karl Marx1 There can be little disputing the proposition that the War on Terror has been the most important force shaping the global politics of race in the twenty-first century. The escalation of military violence in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on America in September 2001 gave voice, coherence and justification to a brand of racial politics consonant with the idea of a spectacular, religiously inflected battle between good and evil. Despite its high drama, the War on Terror was from the very start not the most concrete of undertakings, and it was in part its nebulous character – as a conflict without definite objectives or certain enemies – that meant that it readily lent itself to structuring and shaping a variety of discourses formed with and through the politics of race. Though bearing the mark of the American neoconservative project, these discourses were in themselves irreducible to its designs, and the War was in truth often only a convenient cipher that held together a broader ranging and more historically durable set of racial practices, some of which – to do with security and immigration regimes, social control and ‘cohesion’, narratives of national belonging and moral superiority – I have explored in the preceding chapters of this book. These various phenomena are thus not confined to Britain and America as the major partners in the ‘coalition of the willing’, and can, in spite of important differences, be shown to have patterned a remarkably consistent racial politics more generally operative in the West. The ‘War on Terror’ is therefore the name we might give to events that 135


cohere in the shadow of America’s war, but which in their substance preceded and will doubtless outlast it. Having said that, this study’s focus on the British state inevitably registers the particular influence of the United States, and much of what will be discussed here – in particular the ‘blowback’ from the War on Terror – is indeed predicated on Britain’s ‘special’ relationship with its senior partner. While Britain’s racial politics have for hundreds of years developed in relation to its own imperial history, they are now clearly being shaped in new ways by America’s current imperial practice. The ways in which the field of racial politics in Britain has accordingly been framed, I will suggest, places greater strain than ever before on the state’s capacity to hold together an ethics of multicultural pluralism in the face of the exigencies of war. This chapter sets out to examine the racial politics of the British state in its response to the London bombings of 7 July 2005. It looks at the way in which the Islamic faith has been understood in the context of Britain’s involvement in recent major military conflicts with Arab states, and more particularly how British Muslims have been subjected to state scrutiny as a result of this. Despite recognition by expert and public opinion alike that the London bombings were a direct response to the British state’s involvement in the prosecution of the War on Terror, I will argue that state discourses attempted to deflect critical attention away from such understandings, and transform terrorist violence motivated by political intent into an arbitrary attack on an innocent, cohesive multicultural society. Through a reading of speeches, statements, legislation and policy made in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings, this chapter explores the British state’s multicultural response. While the celebration of diversity became central to official definitions of collective victimhood, I will argue that this declared pluralism is undermined by its constraint within the physical and symbolic borders of the nationstate. The limits of state multiculturalism depend on the construction of a racialized distinction between the inside and outside of the national community. Subsequent efforts by the state to maintain nationalist exclusions – by the expulsion or incarceration of individuals marked out by their actions, religious beliefs, affiliations or associations as ‘foreign’ – likewise demonstrate the racialized limits of state multiculturalism when it is invoked in the service of Britain’s ‘national interest’. This chapter highlights the imbrication of local and global as a basic fact of the War on Terror’s transnational diffusion, and suggests that the state’s conflicted treatment of British Muslims is indicative of

On the Islamic Question: Multicultural Nationalism and the War on Terror 137

an increasingly desperate attempt to separate one from the other, thus revealing perhaps the most fundamental contradiction in the politics of multicultural nationalism.

On ‘7/7’ Before setting out this argument, I would like to discuss briefly the almost universal adoption of the name ‘7/7’ for the London bombings. Questions of nomenclature have been of central importance to this book, from the politics of Britishness and conceptions of community to the uses of feminism. The choice of terminology invariably brings with its own range of meanings, shaping our understanding of a subject, opening up certain interpretative possibilities and closing down others. What is notable of the London bombings is the rapidity with which the epithet ‘7/7’ became attached as a hegemonic description. Internet blogs were already using the term on the day of the bombings, and a ‘7/7 community’ was set up on the image-sharing website Flickr within hours of the attacks. By 8 July 2005 the name had stuck, and the London Evening Standard and Express, Guardian, Mirror, Star, and Times newspapers all made reference – in some cases extensively – to ‘7/7’. The swift – it might be said, immediate – naturalization of ‘7/7’ thus came about without discussion or argument. This has, rather worryingly, been carried over into academic treatments of the London bombings, and researchers have in large part not seen fit to problematize or contest the use of the term in their own work. This is a mistake for a number of reasons. By so closely associating the London bombings with the North American attacks of 2001, it becomes easy to neglect the social and historical specificity of either event, and to presuppose that both attacks were carried out by similar agents with common motives and objectives. Perhaps most importantly, this association glosses over the fact that while the North American attacks provided an opportunity for the declaration of a ‘war on terror’ (Bush, 2001a), the London bombings occurred subsequently to this declaration, and after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. While within the dominant discourse of the War on Terror such close associations make perfect sense (on 8 July 2005, for example, the Daily Star editorial was quick to point out that ‘this was our 9/11’ (Daily Star, 2005)), it would be a critical mistake to confuse superficial likenesses for an identity between the two events. The implicit identification of ‘9/11’ and ‘7/7’ plays into a very particular Anglo-American interpretation of events. Rarely now are the


Madrid train attacks of 2004 – which more closely resemble the London bombings – referred to as ‘3/11’, and seldom are they spoken of in the same terms. There seems to have been no space reserved on the memorial calendar for the Mombassa or Bali bombings of 2002. The selectiveness of commemoration, most significantly, does not extend to the routine experience of mass murder in ‘post’-occupation Iraq, where comparable events would, at the time of writing, still easily mark every calendar day in a similar fashion, where there would be little to distinguish 7/7 from 8/7, or 9/11 from 9/12. To even begin to talk about ‘7/7’, then, is to come dangerously close to accepting an explanatory paradigm with these built-in conceptual weaknesses and interpretative biases. It is to risk identifying oneself as a member of a geopolitical community for whom the London bombings are privileged above other (and quantitatively worse) atrocities. More importantly still, it is to risk contributing to – rather than challenging – a dominant interpretative discourse which reconceives imperial adventurism as legitimate self-defence, the effects of which have continued to play out – unmourned and unnamed – from Iraq to Afghanistan. To recognize that discussion of the London bombings as ‘7/7’ will necessarily bring with it all this ideological baggage requires us to pay close attention to the terms in which the event it names has been conceived and understood.

Don’t mention the war On the day of the London bombings Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, made a widely reported statement that was understood by many to be a heartfelt and eloquent expression of a prevailing mood of shock and outrage: This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was aimed not at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever (Livingstone, 2005). Livingstone’s words were echoed right across the political spectrum, and state and media representatives spoke with rare unanimity. Without exception, the bombings on 7 July 2005 were said to be an attack on a capital city epitomized by its cultural, religious and racial diversity:


they were an assault on an explicitly multicultural society, a defining property that, according to Livingstone, made the city of London ‘the greatest in the world’ (ibid.). To describe London as the capital of a multicultural nation is, of course, a statement of fact, and among the victims of the bombings were people from a wide range of cultural and religious groups (including Muslims), as well as individuals – whether British citizens or foreign nationals – who had come to live and work in London from over twenty nations (see Wyndown, 2005). Livingstone’s immediate response – together with his subsequent championing of the ‘London United’ and ‘One London’ campaigns over the weeks that followed – can accordingly be seen as an entirely appropriate and politically responsible reaction to the bombings. There is no doubt that his words, which as I say found their correlatives throughout civil society and the political establishment, helped to ensure that the inevitable anti-Muslim backlash and substantial rise in hate crimes against minorities (see Dodd, 2005a) were subject to near-universal condemnation, and were dampened in number and effect by this refusal to fan the flames of racial conflict. Such responses were politically astute in other ways, too: not least because subsequent police investigations would require the maintenance of good relations with the British Muslim community. The multicultural nature of a nation under terrorist attack was again stressed on 11 July, in the Prime Minister’s first statement to the House of Commons after the London bombings. Speaking on behalf of the British people, Tony Blair argued that: We are united in our determination that our country will not be defeated by such terror but will defeat it and emerge from this horror with our values, our way of life, our tolerance and respect for others, undiminished (Blair, 2005d). Blair links his evocation of a strong and defiant citizenry under attack to the capital’s subjection to air raids during the Second World War: Yesterday we celebrated the heroism of world war two including the civilian heroes of London’s blitz. Today what a different city London is – a city of many cultures, faiths and races, hardly recognisable from the London of 1945. So different and yet, in the face of this attack, there is something wonderfully familiar in the confident spirit which moves through the city, enabling it to take the blow but still not flinch from re-asserting its will to triumph over adversity.


Britain may be different today but the coming together is the same (ibid.). As I noted in Chapter 2, the Second World War has a particularly strong capacity to structure the contemporary nationalist imagination, and it is hardly surprising that Blair chooses to invoke the idea of the blitz to provide this image of a stoical national character. In this description, multicultural London stands in synecdochic substitution for the nation as a whole, the inheritor of a national spirit of defiant forbearance. Before considering the importance of Blair’s multicultural emphasis, it is worth drawing a historical parallel to his nationalist rhetoric. It was the future war leader Winston Churchill who had, some three months after Britain’s entry into the First World War, declared ‘business as usual’ to be ‘the maxim of the British people’ (OUP, 1967: 62). Churchill evokes an idea of national forbearance at a time of imperial warfare. He codes normalcy as heroism in the face of a conflict that would ultimately claim over 700,000 British lives. While not making a direct comparison between contemporary events and either world war, Blair’s statement has a rhetorical affinity with Churchill’s, and serves to remind us that his words of national unity were likewise spoken in the context of a major military engagement of the British state. That Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war had been a major causal factor of the London terrorist attacks is a view that, beyond the threshold of 10 Downing Street, can hardly be called into question. Whitehall’s Joint intelligence Committee warned of this in February 2003 (see Norton-Taylor, 2005), and top Foreign Office officials had continued to stress that domestic terrorism was a likely outcome of the state’s military project (Bright, 2005). The independent think tank the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) had likewise made the same connection (Hencke, 2005). The statement of responsibility that appeared on the internet a few hours after the attacks cited retaliation as the bombers’ motive (Rai, 2006: 129), and opinion polls conducted in July 2005 suggested that nearly two-thirds of the British public and almost four-fifths of British Muslims believed that Britain’s participation in the invasion of Iraq was a factor leading to the London bombings (see Dodd, 2005b). The video message made by one of the 7 July suicide bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, and first broadcast on the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera, likewise made this point in unequivocal terms: Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world, and your support of


them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Unless we feel security, you will be our targets. Unless you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight (BBC News, 2005a). Although Khan’s posthumous indictment of Blair is obviously constructed to serve the purposes of his own polemic, it must nevertheless be recognized that his words – like the aforementioned expert opinions – repeatedly and persistently stress that his actions were motivated by British foreign policy. In the face of this evidence, Blair’s insistence that the attacks on London were simply the product of an ‘evil ideology’ that bore no relation to the actions of the British state (in Hencke, 2005) seems, at best, like wishful thinking. Blair’s denial is so forthright because he has an awful lot at stake here. In his dogged insistence that the attacks were targeted at the British people, he seeks to deflect and reroute the undeniable challenge posed by such terrorism, domesticating its morality as a challenge to ‘our’ society, rather than to the actions of a state engaged in a war and occupation.2 Describing the bombings as a ‘murderous carnage of the innocent’ (Blair, 2005d), the Prime Minister capitalizes on the imagery of a pluralist national society, against which he constructs that singular, fanatical ‘evil ideology’. The responsibility of the British state is hereby sidestepped, and criticism for its actions is deflected onto the bombers as agents of Britain’s national suffering. It is not a particularly novel observation that the valuation of human life is shaped by a politics of cultural proximity (a phenomenon Gilbert Achcar has dubbed ‘narcissistic compassion’ (Achcar, 2002: 22)), but it is nevertheless worth noting that while the Iraqi death toll as a result of the war was in July 2005 in the hundreds of thousands,3 the 52 deaths that resulted from the London bombings are given a special, privileged status (and attain a near-monopoly of suffering) in Blair’s blank refusal to make a connection between the two. The ‘blitz spirit’ of a nation under siege – a description of a wartime experience where innocent civilians must do their best to survive the onslaught of a superior military technology – might with bitter irony have been a better description of the plight of the Iraqi rather than the British people, yet by deflecting criticism of the actions of the British state onto the suffering of its citizens, our attention is turned inwards rather than outwards, to Londoners, not Baghdadis. Those who died on 7 July 2005 were indeed innocent civilians, but they were also, contrary to Blair’s insistence, not the bombers’ real target. As collateral damage sustained in violence directed against the actions of the


British state, these Londoners were little more than extras in a spectacular event staged for the consumption of the world’s media. Blair’s denial of the political nature of the attacks is only to be expected; of more interest here are the terms in which his refusal is couched, which continue to circulate around a multicultural narrative of national life. This is not to invalidate an explicitly multicultural response to bombings that killed and injured those from all faiths and backgrounds, and which, as I have already suggested, likely played a part in preventing further violence. The prevailing climate was, for one thing, strong enough to draw widespread condemnation of – and a resounding electoral defeat to – the British National Party who attempted to capitalize on the bombings on the streets of East London a week later.4 It is, however, to place a stress on the way in which the language of cultural diversity – with certain parallels to my earlier discussion of the deployment of ‘feminism’ in the prosecution of the Afghanistan war – came to be used by Tony Blair as a means of effectively closing down the debate on why London had become the target of a major terrorist offensive before it could even begin. In the place of a rational questioning as to the causes of this assault and the motivations of those behind it, we were confronted with the vision of a blameless multicultural nation as the collective victim of a seemingly random act of violence. Despite Blair’s refusal to explicitly acknowledge the link between the London bombings and the war in Iraq, his blitz reference prompts us to reconsider those invocations of brave multicultural solidarity, which in light of this begin to take on a rather more belligerent tone. Take, for example, the words of a rather Churchillian speech broadcast from Downing Street on the afternoon of 7 July: I think we all know what they are trying to do, they are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal as we are entitled to do and they should not and must not succeed. When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated, when they seek to change our country, our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed. When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm (Blair, 2005c). This statement, when read as the words of a Prime Minister at war, is infused with double meanings. At one level, here is ostensibly another


celebration of the ‘blitz spirit’: if ‘we’, as Blair continually insists, are an innocent people subjected to an arbitrary evil with divisive intent, it is, he suggests, our duty to stick together, harden our resolve and not make concessions to it. At another level, Blair’s speech sets out his position vis-à-vis the (albeit denied and unacknowledged) challenge that the bombings presented to Britain’s participation in the War on Terror. In fact, the speech only makes sense as an implicit response to the question of the war. What else are ‘the things we want to do’ that the terrorists are trying ‘to frighten us out of doing’, if they do not refer to Britain’s role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq? The genius of Blair’s speech is that he manages to conflate these two levels, such that the contested question of British foreign policy is transformed into one of support for an innocent nation under attack. At the first level of overt meaning, Blair’s rejection of the terrorists’ intention ‘to divide our people’ speaks of a responsible commitment to multicultural pluralism and a refusal to scapegoat British Muslims; at the second, latent, level, this division pertains to the British people’s (in reality highly divided) support for Blair’s position on the war. The audacity of Blair’s conflation here is profound: the controversial adventurism of the Iraq war is presented as if it were equivalent to the banal activity of London’s commuters, a part of the quotidian routine of ‘going about our business as normal’. The Prime Minister’s nationalist ‘we’ is not a passive or disinterested description of a multicultural society, but part of an attempt to consolidate support for an unpopular war. An apologia for Britain’s foreign policy is cloaked in an almost parodic language of stoical forbearance, as disarmingly ‘British’ as the number 30 bus before it was ripped to pieces in Tavistock Square.

Islamic transnationalism I place stress on Blair’s multicultural response to the London bombings because it has played and continues to play a key role in the politics of race and racism in the context of the so-called War on Terror. Because a plural nation united against terrorism is necessarily conflict free, there is no room for voices of dissent in Blair’s multicultural society. When asked to comment on Mohammad Sidique Khan’s videotaped statement, Blair’s response was to argue that ‘it’s absurd of anyone growing up in our country to say they are a victim or have a grievance on these issues’ (quoted in BBC News, 2005b). Blair’s attempt to close down criticism of his liability for Britain’s actions in Iraq is bound up in a racialized understanding of the obligations that come with


membership of the British nation.5 As a significant moment of crisis in multicultural nationalism, the way the British state has dealt with the London bombings can reveal how certain expressions of race, culture and religion continue to be thought to contravene the acceptable limits of national belonging. While I am in no sense defending the actions of the London bombers, it is important to move beyond the clamour of condemnation that inevitably accompanies such attacks, and take seriously the ethical position that served as their motivation. When Khan spoke of ‘protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters’ (BBC News, 2005a), he articulated a sense in which Islam may be considered a form of human solidarity that is innately and unavoidably internationalist in scope. The concept of the Muslim ummah describes this broad idea of commonality that cuts across the boundaries of the nation-state. Such universalism is in some sense a feature of all the major world religions, but what sets Islam apart in the present historical conjuncture is the extent to which it has been drawn into the material and ideological conflicts of the War on Terror, and thus into tension with the British state. In essence, what I am getting at here is the sense in which the basic transnational community structure symbolized by the ummah reveals the contradictory (yet at the same time constitutive) structure of state multicultural discourse. While the celebration of Britain’s multicultural diversity became the standard trope by which a nation under attack came to be defined in the aftermath of the London bombings, its declared pluralism stops abruptly at the physical and symbolic borders of the nation-state. In direct contrast to this contractive vision, the ummah as an expansive concept of Muslim solidarity pushes beyond such arbitrary limits, placing stress on a common humanity shared by Muslims across the world.6 Blair’s multiculturalism is turned inwards and becomes domesticated as a trope of nationalism: to him, Muslims at home and abroad are different categories of person.7 Khan’s strong sense of a singular religious identity proves, paradoxically perhaps, to be the more ecumenical of the two. The suicide bombers’ interpretation of the Muslim ummah – that which is deemed in nationalist discourses to be in excess of multicultural society – hereby becomes the embodied symbol of a global inequality that Blair’s restricted notion of cultural pluralism must conceal or, as I will demonstrate below, expel from the territory of the British nation. To put this slightly differently, it might be said that a singular transnational conception of human solidarity here reveals the limits of plural


conceptions of multicultural difference when they are delimited by a nationalist agenda. In the case of the Iraq war, racism (by which I mean the fundamental nationalist distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that the ummah cannot in this context recognize) does not disappear when it is rejected as an official ideology governing a national society (as in multicultural Britain), but has become externalized to legitimate the mass expenditure of civilian life in the Middle East. By refusing to accept that responsibility to others stops at the borders of the nation, but extends on a global basis, the suicide bombers’ adherence to the idea of the ummah, however problematic their interpretation of it, nevertheless demonstrates the racialized inequality upon which Blair’s version of British multiculturalism sits. This is not to suggest that the idea of the ummah does not have its own self-evident limitations. In any context, as Bobby Sayyid points out (Sayyid, 1997), the ummah is no less an ‘imagined community’ than the nation, and there are no grounds to suggest that interpretations of it describe, unproblematically, a preconstituted Muslim subjectivity or solidarity that can be said to exist in any empirical sense (see also Sayyid, 2000b). The ummah is not an egalitarian philosophy, and cannot in itself provide the basis for the construction of a meaningful multicultural politics. Yet it can nevertheless demonstrate the absence of such a politics, and reveal, as I have suggested, the racialized contradictions of multicultural nationalism. Indeed, a case could be made that the 7 July bombings were themselves a direct result of these contradictions, which provided the suicide bombers with a motive and justification for their actions. Had the British state refused to be drawn into the War on Terror, it is, after all, unlikely that the bombings would have taken place at all. The concept of the ummah that motivated the bombers can thus be seen at least in part as the outcome of practices of the British state, an idea of religious solidarity that was retroactively given life by the state’s inability or refusal to fully consider its possibility.8 Tony Blair’s descriptions of multicultural Britain turn inwards; they depict a single nation as if it were the world. The London bombings, in the most dramatic sense, make it absolutely clear that this is a lie. In spite of these differences, it is worth noting that there is a curious symmetry in the respective discourses of Blair and the bombers, in that both depend on a strong conception of the British people as a collective political unit to legitimate their respective positions. While Blair insists that the bombs were an attack on the British people, the targeting of civilians is invariably justified in such actions by the premiss


that the electorate of democratic states may be considered responsible for the actions of their government on the basis that its actions are an expression of popular will, or at very least consent. As Mohammad Sidique Khan argued in his videotape, ‘Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world and your support of them makes you directly responsible’ (BBC News, 2005a). Both assumptions are, of course, a nonsense. There is a gap between rhetoric and reality here that is shared by both antagonists. This gap, effectively the perennial ‘democratic deficit’, is rejected by both Blair and the bombers, for it calls into question the legitimacy of the former to speak and act on behalf of, and the latter to visit violence upon, the British people.

Race and war While the political relevance of the ummah to the London bombers was certainly accentuated by the conduct of the War on Terror, we should not fall into the trap of thinking that the bombers’ religious identity makes them generally representative of Muslims, in Britain or elsewhere. The tendency to over-extrapolate on the basis of religion and conceive of very specific political violence as characteristic of Islam in general became a defining feature of the War on Terror, and is reflected in a tendency to assert a false causality in the conflict between British Muslims and the state. It is not, in the main, British Muslims who have demonstrated hostilities to the British state, but rather it is the state that has constructed an antagonism towards them. Considering the diasporic connections of Muslim communities to exceed the official parameters of multicultural Britain, it is the state that has exposed them to increasing levels of governmental intervention in accordance with the operational logic of the War on Terror. In order to discuss something of the relationship that developed between Muslims and the British state, it becomes important to recognize the ways in which Blair’s multicultural nationalism is unavoidably dependent on an antithetical relationship between the state and those with whom the nation is said to be at war.9 Like the dialectics of racial difference that originate in Hegel’s formulation of the master-slave relation and which find their most skilled expositor in Frantz Fanon (1986), the maintenance of a national identity that will successfully do the job required of it similarly relies on the construction of an opposing concept against which it can achieve definition. In one sense, the ideological battle fought here by Blair is no different from that waged in the context of


any significant military conflict. Nationalism is a cheap and highly effective resource upon which political leaders of liberal-democratic states have repeatedly drawn to guarantee popular support for conflicts supposedly waged in the national interest (Habermas, 1996: 288). Surprisingly perhaps, there has been little attention paid to how race features in this context. While the history of European colonialism has rightly become a key element of contemporary race studies in the West, the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been subject to a relative neglect. We might speculate that this is for two principal reasons. Firstly, because modern European histories of race have a tendency to make a temporal and spatial shift from slavery and colonialism to postwar immigration, and thus focus their attention on the domestic dynamics of race and racism. Secondly, because narratives of the Second World War tend to foreground the Nazi Holocaust as the defining moment in the modern history of race, and by doing so bracket off questions of race and war which accordingly appear to vanish with the defeat of German fascism and a postwar consensus on the illegitimacy of racial genocide.10 It is, as I argued in Chapter 1, the post-holocaustal history of race that has shaped the political and ethical conditions of contemporary Western thinking on the subject (see Hesse, 2004). This has obscured the significance of racism to colonial projects, of which I would argue that the War on Terror provides – albeit in a novel form – the most recent example. A further reason for this neglect is arguably that the processes at work here are on the face of it quite rudimentary, and accordingly do not seem to demand much critical attention. In one sense there is little to distinguish between the construction of an enemy on the basis of broadly racial characteristics and their negative characterization on other grounds, i.e., simply as an expression of crude xenophobia. While the terms of such descriptions vary according to context, the basic requirement of wartime propaganda will invariably involve, in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, the construction of ‘the solidarity of an imaginary “us” against a symbolic “them”’ (Hobsbawm, 1990: 163). It is, accordingly, Islam which has served as the ‘constitutive outside’ (Staten, 1985: 18) of the War on Terror. For despite very public attempts by the war leaders of both Britain and the US to stress that the War on Terror is not a war against a religion, but rather ‘a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam’ (Bush, 2001b), the multicultural rhetoric of Bush and Blair is weakened and undermined by policies and practices that have explicitly targeted followers of the Islamic faith. Moreover, in Afghanistan and Iraq, war has


been waged against predominantly Muslim countries on the premiss that they have supported ‘Islamic terrorism’ (Blair, 2004). Because Islam is hereby conceived as the conduit for the dissemination of a terroristic ‘evil ideology’ (Blair in Hencke, 2005), it is Muslims who, in the War on Terror’s ‘struggle of good versus evil’ (Bush, 2001a), have in the domestic sphere borne the brunt of anti-terrorism measures.11 Yet, as I have already suggested, the Manichean logic of the War on Terror does not sit comfortably with the reality of multicultural Britain. The choice of Islam as an antagonist does not permit a clean and clear distinction to be made between ‘us’ and ‘them’, for it transforms Britain’s two million Muslims into a potential threat. The boundary between the nation at war and its constitutive outside cannot be held, for the constitutive outside becomes, effectively, an ‘inside’ as well. Thus comparison with other historical moments where the ideological element of warfare is uppermost – such as the Cold War – becomes particularly appropriate, for like the experience of McCarthyism in 1950s America, the post-2001 conjuncture in Britain has led to the increased surveillance, policing, and repression of an enemy within. In spite of frequent promises not to use racial profiling, Muslims were unapologetically informed by Counter-Terrorism Minister Hazel Blears in March 2005 that ‘some of our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately experienced by the Muslim community’ (quoted in Demetriou, 2005). Home Office figures accordingly show a 393 per cent rise in stops and searches of Asians between 2001–02 and 2003–04 (see Cowan, 2004; Ford and Tendler, 2005). The 2003–04 and 2005–6 statistics show that Asians were stopped and searched with twice the frequency of white people (Shiner, 2006: 3; Ministry of Justice, 2007: x). When the state’s anti-terrorist proposals (discussed below) suspend legal norms in favour of a pre-emptive security regime, their conceptual affinity with the abolished stop and search Sus laws of the 1980s becomes starkly evident (see Sivanandan, 2006: 4). When suspicion becomes elevated as a criterion of law enforcement, it is invariably marked by racialized conventions. The belief that race provides legitimate grounds for suspicion is not the unwritten code of unscrupulous police officers, but received official sanction by the Chief Constable of the British Transport Police, who in August 2005 argued that in conducting stop and searches the police ‘should not waste time searching old white ladies’ (BLINK, 2005). If race can be considered a reasonable frame of reference for intelligence-based anti-terrorist policing, with the targeting of certain bodies and not others, then the domestic pol-


itics of the War on Terror can be said to reveal and reinforce the differential racial modalities of national belonging. The moment of crisis heralded by the War on Terror has illuminated continuing racial hierarchies within the structure of the multicultural British state. Though in certain respects the War on Terror has required the construction of British Muslims as an enemy within, it would be simplistic to suggest they have been placed on a par with their co-religionists in Afghanistan or Iraq; indeed, a recognition of this differential treatment provided the basis of Mohammad Sidique Khan’s criticism of the British state. The claim to moral superiority of a nation at war has depended on stress being placed on its values of tolerance and pluralism, which have been constructed against the intolerant singularity of terrorist fundamentalism.12 British Muslims have accordingly been made symbolic of the very values against which the enemy is defined. The rationale behind the simultaneous designation of guilt and innocence, where British Muslims are by turn accused and acquitted, is highlighted most clearly in the legislative proposals worked out in the months following the London bombings. Before going on to look at some of these proposals, it is important to note the differences of approach that resulted from competing state agendas, and which can be identified in a tactical conflict between Whitehall and Downing Street. It is arguably the long historical experience of the civil service in the management and governance of the colonial theatre that has equipped it with a greater degree of sophistication in dealing with these matters. A 2004 draft paper from the Home and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices on relations with the Muslim community, subsequently leaked to The Times, demonstrates that these departments recognized the importance of ‘gaining the active cooperation of Muslims, immigrant and British’ (Turnbull, 2004) in the prosecution of the War on Terror, and by doing so, as a later leak from the FCO put it, engaging in ‘“hearts and minds” activity’ (Ehrman, 2004).13 Following the London bombings, the Islamic Issues advisor of the FCO, supported by top officials, continued to advise against the exclusion of ‘radical clerics’ such as the Sunni preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi, stating that: We certainly do not agree with Qaradawi’s views on Israel or Iraq, but we have to recognize that they are not unusual or even exceptional amongst Muslims. In fact it is correct to say that these views are shared by a majority of Muslims in the Middle East and the UK. Refusing entry on these grounds would open a Pandora’s box in


relation to entry clearance for others in the Muslim world (Ali, 2005: 3). The FCO appeared to recognize that to focus on Islam in response to the London attacks would be a counterproductive measure, particularly in this case since Qaradawi had himself vocally condemned the bombings. Despite this, the Prime Minister stood firm to his declaration in the aftermath of the bombings that ‘the rules of the game’ had changed (Blair, 2005e). By this stage, the alleged differences between Blair and his Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, had been resolved in Blair’s favour, and new anti-terror legislation was drafted that would turn ‘Qaradawi’s views on Israel or Iraq’ into an offence on the grounds of the encouragement or glorification of terrorism under section one of the 2006 Terrorism Act, thus providing a legal basis for his exclusion or deportation (see Home Office 2005c, 2005d). It is on these grounds that Qaradawi has since been denied a visa to enter the UK (Dodd, 2008). In other respects, Whitehall’s preferred approach to these issues prevailed. The co-operation of designated ‘moderate’ Muslim organizations such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was secured,14 and initiatives which called for their frequent and unconditional condemnation of ‘extremism’, together with a package of self-policing measures, were readily agreed by the MCB and its affiliates in exchange for a platitudinous official discourse that recognized the legitimacy of ‘the decent law-abiding Muslim community of Great Britain’ (Blair, 2005e). A task force of British Muslim leaders met with leaders of the main political parties, and discussions took place to set up a media unit to rebut negative press stories about Muslims (see Dodd, 2005c).Yet the terms of the unwritten contract between the state and British Muslims meant that it remained the ‘decent law-abiding Muslim community’ who shouldered the burden of responsibility for having somehow permitted the execution of the 2005 attacks. As Shahid Malik, newly elected Labour MP for Dewsbury, and himself a Muslim, spelled out a couple of weeks after the London Bombings: The choices are stark and clear – we either confront the enemy within or are seen to condone [the London bombings]. […] the battle for the hearts and souls of British Muslims, here in Dewsbury and across the country, has truly begun (Malik, 2005). In Malik’s words a strategic appeal to hearts and minds becomes an evangelical battle for ‘hearts and souls’, as emphasis is placed on Islam


as essentially divided between support for terrorist fundamentalists and patriotic support for a nation under attack. The unequivocal message here to British Muslims echoed the words addressed to the international community by the US President in 2001: ‘You are either with us or you are against us in the fight against terror’ (Bush, 2001c).

Natives and foreigners [I]f people want to come here as refugees fleeing persecution, or as people seeking a different or better way of life, they come here and they play by our rules and our way of life. If they don’t then they are going to have to go because they are threatening people in our country and that’s not right either. Tony Blair15 As I have been suggesting, the position of the British state towards Muslims in the context of the War on Terror was, and is, in itself divided. Competing state agendas have been operative simultaneously, and British Muslims have been caught up in the space of their conflict and contradiction. The boundary between acceptable and unacceptable ways of being a Muslim in Britain has increasingly come to be drawn on the basis of the shifting requirements of the War on Terror, and British Muslims have been alternately celebrated or condemned on these grounds. This has involved the imposition of a nationalist framework that, in attempting to reconcile these contradictions, has judged Islam on the basis of whether it can be understood to be a native form (and hence ‘moderate’ and praiseworthy) or a foreign form (and hence ‘fundamentalist’ and the target of remedial action).16 The policy proposals worked out in the response to the London bombings reflect this nationalist typology, and individuals and groups targeted are judged in relation to whether their actions and beliefs are considered to be of the ‘foreign’ or ‘native’ variety. In a press conference held at the beginning of August 2005, Tony Blair took the opportunity to announce several new legislative measures. To give some idea of how the immediate response to the bombing was framed, what follows is a brief examination of these proposals, with some discussion of the ways in which they have subsequently been adopted.17 Blair’s first proposal concerned a bid to deport or exclude foreign nationals on the grounds of their fostering hatred, advocating, justifying or validating terrorist violence, or being connected with a range of websites, bookshops, networks or organizations on a proscribed list


drawn up by the Home Office. In short, the assumption here was that terrorism is by definition a foreign entity. Despite evidence to the contrary, in that both the 7 July bombers and the perpetrators of the unsuccessful 21 July attacks were themselves British citizens, terrorism is understood to derive from beyond the territorial borders of the British nation. In a game with changed rules, the physical expulsion of questionable individuals is said to promote the interests of national security, and Blair proposed derogating Britain’s current interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights in order to protect these interests.18 The British nation features here, somewhat ironically, in a similar manner to the way in which victims are framed in ‘hate speech’ legislation, presented as a vulnerable body in need of protection against what might be said or done to it by strangers. Another three of Blair’s proposals also applied exclusively to individuals with origins beyond the bounds of the British nation. One proposal sought to automatically refuse asylum to ‘anyone who has participated in terrorism, or has anything to do with it anywhere’, another to speed up extradition proceedings for terrorist suspects wanted elsewhere, and a third to bring forward plans for the issue of ‘biometric visas’, and to compile ‘an international database of those individuals whose activities or views pose a threat to Britain’s security’. Whereas terrorism had hitherto been considered contextually – on the basis of the well-worn cliché that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, and that acts of violence against states may under certain circumstances be considered legitimate – under Blair’s proposals such practical distinctions seem prima facie to be ruled out. This still left Blair with the thorny problem of those we could call ‘insider outsiders’, individuals who might be considered terrorists (or sympathizers or supporters of terrorism) whose ‘foreignness’ – by virtue of their holding British citizenship – is more difficult to establish. In a further proposal put forward to obviate this problem, Blair built on earlier legislation which allowed the revocation of citizenship in the case of those with dual citizenship, and suggested that citizenship could be stripped from ‘naturalized citizens engaged in extremism’. This measure holds onto the idea that foreignness is an essential attribute of terrorism, and seeks simply to alter an immigrant’s citizenship status in accordance with this. Representing a differential approach to formal citizenship, where migrants – however long their residency in Britain – would be liable to have their citizenship revoked were they deemed at any point to ‘act in a way that is contrary to the interests of this country’, this would effectively create a permanent distinction between British citizens on


the basis of their place of birth. While those who were born in Britain would have to remain – whatever criminal acts they might perpetrate – British nationals, the citizenship status of immigrants would effectively be made akin to that of an indefinitely suspended sentence in the criminal justice system, where an individual’s citizenship remains conditional on their good behaviour. In all cases the proposed measures construct as a basic principle the inadmissibility of any persons connected with terrorism to the national space: ‘Britain’ and ‘terrorism’ are mutually exclusive entities. It should be noted that in all the proposals discussed so far, individuals suspected of terrorist-related activity do not have to be charged with any particular crime. Their exclusion, deportation, or imprisonment is not based on evidence that would permit any ordinary legal proceedings to be brought against them. The emphasis here is on the possibility that they might commit a crime, or that their presence in Britain is not conducive to the national interest. Legal norms are hereby made subordinate to a regime of pre-emptive security (see Hörnqvist, 2004) as the primary operational principle of anti-terrorism in the context of the War on Terror. An essential distinction is made between the inside and the outside of the national space, such that those who are identified as a threat, as outsiders, no longer fall under the jurisdiction of longstanding ethical and legal frameworks, and are accordingly stripped of their basic human rights. The effective lowering of the burden of proof in the security regime of the War on Terror is carried over into another proposal that seeks to increase the possible ‘pretrial’ period of detention for terrorist suspects. This measure, over which Blair sustained his first ever Commons defeat, was first proposed by the Association of Chief Police Officers, and was an attempt to extend the period an individual may be held without charge from two weeks to ninety days (equivalent to the time typically served under a six month prison sentence). Though the twenty-eight days that was eventually voted for dealt a considerable blow to the Prime Minister’s ambitions, it was nevertheless a substantial increase, and effectively represented the reintroduction of internment laws which, as the experience in the North of Ireland has shown, inevitably contribute to feelings of alienation, intimidation and resentment within communities and groups so targeted. It is with a certain bitter irony that the values that are used to justify the War on Terror (i.e., the defence of human rights, freedom, cultural pluralism, democracy) are the very values that are here broken, contravened, or proven to be suspensible in the name of national security. It


is accordingly not surprising that the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has achieved considerable popularity among those trying to make sense of the operating principles of the War on Terror. As Agamben argues of the refugee, a figure similarly deterritorialized (culturally and socially, as well as spatially) by current security regimes, The so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to the citizens of a state (Agamben, 1998: 126). The refugee and the terrorist suspect can both be said to ‘put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis’ (ibid. 131), a crisis that is resolved by the expulsion of these figures from the material and symbolic boundaries of the nation-state. A ‘juridico-institutional’ conception of political power is thus founded on the exclusion of the terrorist subject from the national territory: ‘the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’ (ibid. 6). The suspension of basic human rights has become normalized as a standard feature of the War on Terror, and it is in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and any number of secret military facilities across the world (see Priest, 2005) that the logic of such measures have reached their apotheosis. The ease with which rights are removed, deferred or suspended thus suggest that a logic of exclusion permanently exists behind, beyond or beneath the semblance of legal probity, as a virtuality or latency permanently on the horizon of modern social life (see Fanon, 1970: 51). And it is, of course, Muslims who are the main targets of all the legislative proposals I have been discussing, for alongside Blair’s descriptions of a non-specific (though indisputably foreign) terrorist threat, and his intended methods for dealing with it, were a series of proposals aimed specifically at sections of the Muslim community. One of these was directed towards the proscription of certain Islamic organizations, and in particular the two highest profile radical Islamic organizations in Britain, Hizb-ut-Tahrir and breakaway group Al-Muhajiroun, both of whom had condemned the London bombings and had no established terrorist links.19 Another proposal sought new powers to close down Mosques that are alleged to be used to foment extremism, and to draw up a list of non-British clerics designated unsuitable to preach, who would then be excluded from the country. In a further proposition, Blair promised to review exiting thresholds for the granting of citizenship, and called for the better integration of Britain’s Muslim community.


State anxieties over the content of citizenship in multicultural Britain (examined in more detail in Chapter 2) here reveal how the supposed objective of Blair’s proposals – the prevention of further terrorist violence – merged with an entirely unrelated yet longstanding concern over integration. By bringing the two together in this context, the implication was once again that terrorism is the product of an innately foreign type of Islam. The idea that violence against the state might be carried out by fully British citizens is not entertained, for even if the bombers were formally British, their cultural credentials would then be called into question. The notion that a person’s standard of English or ability to pass a citizenship test might have any bearing at all on their criminal activities is of course laughable, but it demonstrates the lengths to which Blair was prepared to go in order to prove that Britishness and terrorism are irreconcilable positions, that it is only a foreigner who can plant a bomb.20 Cultural, religious or racialized difference are inherently grounds for suspicion, and the hoary old question of national allegiance – as famously spelled out in Norman Tebbit’s ‘cricket test’ – is rehearsed here in a new form. Of Blair’s twelve separate proposals, over half were specifically concerned with the exclusion, deportation, or control of individuals (whether British citizens, immigrants or visitors) on the basis that their place of origin makes them subject to greater suspicion than others. Four proposals sought to problematize and police the affiliations and practices (including religious matters) of Muslims, with particular emphasis placed on the threat posed by Muslim clerics and organizations from abroad, and the rest can generally be said to have the aim of eroding civil liberties and removing existing legal impediments to the detainment and prosecution of terrorist suspects. Though in the event few of these proposals ever made it into law (at least in the form in which they were announced), they give a clear indication of the general orientation of the government’s position. When taken together, Blair’s proposals to deal with terrorist violence in the wake of the July 2005 bombings construct a terrorist enemy who is for all intents and purposes either foreign, Muslim, or (typically) both. As Giorgio Agamben has argued more recently, the ‘state of exception’ that characterizes such actions can be understood not, in fact, as an exceptional situation, but rather a constitutive element of legislative practice. An undeclared permanent state of emergency permits the state to exercise its sovereign power outside of the normative juridical order. While the War on Terror provides us with particularly acute examples of this practice, the state of exception can be understood to describe a


long-term and underlying relation between the British state and racialized groups and individuals. Race remains a tool for identifying and acting upon ‘entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system’ (Agamben, 2005: 2).

‘Bombers are all spongeing asylum seekers’: the extended logic of the war on terror The state’s treatment of Muslims at home and abroad has wider social repercussions, and the nationalist exclusions that have applied to Muslims in the War on Terror have arguably legitimized a range of racist and Islamophobic practices in institutions and across civil society. Racist attacks on account of an individual’s physical appearance have their official counterpart in the Anti-Terrorism Minister’s acknowledged criteria for stop and search; attacks on Mosques and other places of worship have their correlative in police surveillance and raids; social prejudices that question the loyalty of Muslims to British culture and traditions echo state discourses that doubt British Muslims’ allegiance to the national community. As Phillip Cole reminds us when he writes about immigration, As the boundaries between citizens/subjects and citizens/outsiders coincide, the way the external boundary is policed will have an impact on the way the internal boundary is policed. In effect, any group which shares characteristics with those identified as outsiders will themselves be in a vulnerable position. Their membership will be constantly questioned; they will be subjected to forms of surveillance from which other members are free, and their access to the public sphere of citizenship will become hazardous. If the external boundary of the community is policed by the criteria based on ‘race’, however indirectly, then those members who share the criteria will be subjected to racism, from other groups and individuals who refuse to identify with them, and from institutions (Cole, 2000: 10–11). The wider social effects of anti-Islamic policies of course feed into longstanding discourses of race and racism. Against the background of the Iraq war, the caricatured figure of the extremist cleric became a mainstay of the British media, and was given iconic form in the figure of Abu Hamza, that evil Muslim with a hook for a right hand, who played the part of the archetypal storybook villain as his descriptions made increas-


ing reference to Captain Hook, the pirate adversary of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. When it transpired that two of the perpetrators of the failed London bombings on 21 July were, as children, refugees from Eritrea and Somalia, right-wing tabloid headlines unanimously conflated their migrant status with their criminal actions. While the front pages of the Sun and the Daily Mail set out how the attempted bombings were the ungrateful gift of the bombers to a nation that had housed and schooled them, the Express led with the even more succinct ‘BOMBERS ARE ALL SPONGEING ASYLUM SEEKERS’ (Daily Express, 2005). Such positions are not dissimilar to the government’s intended policy response that I have just sketched out, for again that which is said to be at variance with a conflict-free multicultural Britain is found to have a foreign origin: Britain’s native hospitality is said to be abused, and repaid with terrorist violence. On its second page, the Express ran an item for a telephone vote, asking ‘should all asylum seekers now be turned back?’ (ibid.). The error, to these newspapers, had of course been one of letting them in in the first place.21 I am not suggesting here that the racializing logic of the War on Terror has itself created the negative association between criminality and immigration and asylum, which clearly have a long and complicated history of their own. Rather, it is more meaningful to consider how the responses of the state and the tabloids to the bombings are both informed by pre-existing racist discourses. The idea of race provides an incredibly flexible organizing concept into which it is possible to insert any number of possible antagonists, and thus derives its very utility as a social taxonomy from the malleability of its definitions and the opacity of its criteria (Stoler, 1995: 133). While nationalist discourses implicitly depend on the creation and maintenance of a constitutive outside, the positive content of this ‘anti-nation’ remains, as we have seen, open to resignification as the targets of the War on Terror have shifted according to circumstance. What the state’s response to the bombings does is to sanction the content of the inside-outside relation between Britain and its enemies, so that in confirming the link between asylees and terrorism by insisting on the innately foreign nature of the latter, it becomes legitimate (and perhaps a patriotic duty) to make an enemy of the former. Once the racializing logic of the War on Terror has assumed hegemony as an interpretative device, it becomes effectively self-replicating. An eyewitness report of the murder at Stockwell underground station by anti-terrorist police of the innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, on 22 July 2005 described ‘An Asian guy […] no more than five yards away from where I was sitting as I saw it with my own eyes […] He looked like a Pakistani’ (Guardian, 2005).


If the conceptual parameters of the War on Terror can be said to have overdetermined the ocular evidence of this particular eyewitness, this might be said to symbolize, in a metonymic sense, a more general phenomenon at work here. Jean Charles de Menezes was provided with a racial identity (and even a specific ethnic-national designation) at the moment he was pursued and shot. It was in the actions of the state embodied in the form of the armed police (who had been mobilized as a direct response to the bombings) that de Menezes attained, in the eyewitness’s mind, his (false) identity.22 If a person’s shooting can spontaneously set into operation an interpretative schema to make sense of state-sanctioned assassinations on the Victoria Line (man shot by anti-terrorist police = Asian = Pakistani), then the tabloid reporting of the failed bombers can be seen simply as an extension of this associative chain (Asian = Pakistani = Muslim = terrorist = asylum-seeker = benefit scrounger, etc.). For all its familiarity, there is nothing inevitable about this sequence, yet it remains implicitly sanctioned by state discourses that do not simply fail to challenge it, but are moreover themselves responsible for the creation and maintenance of some of the key conceptual relations upon which it is built. As I have shown, it is in the prosecution of the War on Terror (whether in the actions of the military in Afghanistan or Iraq, Draconian legislative changes in Britain, policing practices, and so on), that terrorism has consistently been determined to be – despite strong evidence to the contrary – a force essentially alien to British society, cultivated by an equally foreign brand of fundamentalist Islam. A basic refusal here to countenance the possibility that terrorism might be ‘indigenous’ to the nation, or, more pointedly, the mistaken belief that a complete separation can be made between its inside and outside such that foreign policy decisions have no bearing on its social and political life, has resulted in the prescription of a range of legitimate behaviours and practices for British Muslims. All these are ultimately determined by the requirement that Muslims demonstrate their primary loyalty to the nation. The with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the War on Terror has, in multicultural guise, indeed created a space for British Muslims in discourses of the nation, but this is a space that has become increasingly difficult for them to occupy. While they have in one sense become emblematic of British tolerance and diversity, this remains conditional on their support for the War on Terror, and endorsement of the social, political and moral values that are supposed to underpin it. It involves, as I have suggested, foregoing the universalist transnational solidarity that is a marker of religious belief, and replacing it with a


partial, bordered (and, from a theological perspective, entirely arbitrary) commitment to the absolute priority of the nation. While Blair sought to detach ‘good’ Islam from ‘bad’, his multicultural nationalism remained in direct competition with ideas of Islamic transnationalism in defining the boundaries of the ethical community, forestalling the operation of other categories of identity and belonging that might operate outside these incredibly narrow parameters of allegiance and belief.

On The Islamic Question Towards the end of his early polemical essay ‘On The Jewish Question’, Karl Marx puts forward an argument that can be usefully considered in this context. In a passage which is frequently cited as an example of the author’s alleged anti-Semitism, Marx makes use of the idea of Jewishness in the classic pejorative sense, i.e., to refer to the negative stereotype of the Jew as fixated with the covetous accumulation of money. If we attempt to translate this concept into a more contemporary language of race, and regard Jewishness as the racialized construction of a dominant social order, such that it becomes the mode in which Jews were permitted to exist as a minority in mid-nineteenth century Germany (as money lenders, etc.), it becomes possible to draw a comparison between Jewishness (as a property of anti-Semitism) and concepts of Islam that are have circulated in recent years, and particularly after the terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001. When Marx argues that ‘[t]he Jew, who exists as a distinct member of civil society, is only a particular manifestation of the Judaism of civil society’ (Marx, 1975: 171), he suggests that the activity for which Jews have been most criticized – the antisocial and egoistic celebration of money – is in reality a property of the social order that makes this judgement. Jewishness hereby becomes a symptom of the dominant social order: it is the religious embodiment of a disavowed but universal value of secular society. As an equivalent to Marx’s ‘Jewishness’, the Islamic faith has been cast most frequently as the embodiment of ‘fundamentalism’ and, by implication, a threat of disruption to or violence against our contemporary social orders.23 If we apply the same technique of reversal to the British Muslim as Marx did to the German Jew, it requires that we consider ‘fundamentalist violence’ and the diagnosis of a belief system irreconcilable with the liberal democratic state to be similarly the projection of a property of the hegemonic social order onto a religious


minority. The conceptualization of Islam in such dogmatic terms has very little to do with the actual practice of the faith in Britain, but rather is, as I have suggested in this chapter, part of a long and continuing history of state racism. This racism has most lately manifested in the logic of a nation at war, dependent on the representation of a racialized Islamic fundamentalism for the rationalization of its own fundamentalist (unlawful, antidemocratic and violent) actions. ‘Islamic’ terrorism might in this sense be seen as the perfect symbolic critique of Western power: it is an orientalist response to an orientalist stereotype. Thus when Marx concludes that ‘[t]he social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism’ (ibid. 174), we might find grounds upon which the ‘Islamic threat’ might be resolved in our own time and place: the social emancipation of the Muslim (including, of course, those interpellated as ‘Muslim’) will come about when our states and societies are emancipated from a fundamentalist antagonism towards Islam. Just as it is always worth repeating the truism that racism is not caused by racialized groups, but the societies that define them as such, it will remain the case that British Muslims will continue to be problematized in discourses of the nation until it becomes possible to articulate a meaningful collective identity that does not consider their transnational commitments to constitute a threat to it. Multicultural nationalism, as I have suggested, is a tautology. The continuing diasporic relationships that connect Muslims in Britain to South Asia, the Middle East, and beyond are incompatible with the nationalist imperative: to be at all meaningful, multiculturalism must imply an obligation to what lies beyond the physical and symbolic limits of the nation. Of course, it would indeed be possible for Muslims in Britain to forego the universal element of their faith and for them to cultivate, as the head of the Commission for Racial Equality suggested, a ‘British form of Islam’ (Phillips, 2004). This British Islam would be consonant with and contained within the symbolic borders of the national space, so that the religious connection between a British Muslim and a fellow believer in Iraq would become as politically meaningless as that which effectively exists between their respective Christian neighbours. This could indeed happen, and it would be understandable if it did, for parochial isolation might be thought a reasonable exchange for Muslims’ current pariah status.24 Yet there remains a critical potential in the kind of identification that the ummah describes. In a political climate where multicultural nationalism operates in the service of imperial warfare, it is (however


perversely in the case of the London bombers) followers of the Islamic faith who have most urgently and forcefully insisted on a basic humanistic solidarity that cuts across nationalist exclusions and the quietistic pieties of national life. The contradiction that British Muslims presently embody reveals the inconsistencies and racialized exclusions of a putatively pluralistic conception of national belonging when it is subordinated to the ‘national interest’ of British foreign policy. For as long as there remains a tension and non-identity in the hyphenated space between ‘British’ and ‘Muslim’, and thus a radical incompleteness to the ideology of multicultural Britishness, there remains the possibility of its subversion and reconstruction to more progressive ends. The actions of the London bombers have clearly led to British Muslims (or those mistaken for them) becoming a greater target of popular and state racism, a situation which looks set to continue for some time to come. We should accordingly guard against imputing to the bombers the revolutionary glamour of ‘radical chic’ (Wolfe, 1989). These are sober times in the politics of race, and it would be foolish to position the bombers, in the rightfully scornful words of Michael Keith, as the ‘teleological delivery boys’ of revolutionary theory for a white left in search of ‘transgressive heroes’ (Keith, 2000: 531, 530). Yet their actions are nevertheless likely to make the British state consider with a little more care the consequences of its involvement in future cosmopolitanimperialist wars (see Zolo, 1997). As such, the London bombings are symbolic of a new reality of multicultural Britain, a multiculturalism that is best thought of not as moral, but as structural, not a nice idea but a social reality, and a necessary consideration in future state practice. The bombings demonstrate that it is no longer as easy as it once was for the state to pursue certain policy agendas without fear of repercussions in the domestic sphere. Memorial services have been held in honour of the victims of the London bombings, books of condolence signed, and national newspapers filled with their photographs and memories. In stark contrast to events in Iraq, death has been connected in a meaningful sense to the lives of ordinary people. If these sympathies which humanize murder can extend beyond the commemorative limits of ‘7/7’ and bring the disasters of Iraq closer to home, they will serve as an important reminder – and a reminder that democratic and non-violent mass protests did not make with sufficient force – that the British state has a long way to go before it has anything that remotely resembles an ethical foreign policy. One viable basis for the establishment of that policy would be in an attempt to do away with the increasingly untenable racialized


distinction between the inhabitants of the nation and those who fall outside of its material and symbolic borders. It would be to employ a multiculturalism that could see beyond the racially inflected limits of the nation-state. Rather than being an obstacle to this project, Islam could in many ways serve as its model.

Conclusion: Multiculturalism beyond ‘the Death of Multiculturalism’

Multicultural nationalism and the British state The concept of multiculturalism put forward in this book has not been used to define an abstract political philosophy, nor an anthropology. It has been employed to signal the ways in which the field of racial reference has been radically shaped by racism’s rejection and critique. Using as a case study the British state under New Labour, I have suggested that the politics of multiculturalism signal a break with earlier models of state practice, as an engagement with the fact of social and cultural diversity is posited as an essential component of its racial politics. As I have shown, state multiculturalism extends across a wide range of policy agendas. It is not in itself a consistent practice, and neither can it be, and there is no corresponding ideal against which it can be evaluated. In this admittedly loose sense, multiculturalism is simply the dominant mode in which the state engages with the politics of race in contemporary Britain. In Chapter 1, I sketched out Stuart Hall’s distinction between an adjectival ‘multi-cultural’ and a substantive ‘multiculturalism’. Hall used the former to describe a demographic fact of contemporary social life, and the latter to reference the ‘strategies and policies adopted to govern or manage’ the societies it describes (Hall, 2000: 209). In accordance with this, it might be suggested that the British state’s contemporary politics of multiculturalism represents a (belated) acknowledgement of a necessary relationship between the two. While it would be inaccurate to say that this recognition is entirely absent from the earlier history of British race relations, I have tried to suggest in this book that a hitherto irregular and piecemeal component of state 163


practice has in recent years become far more systematic. Whereas earlier moments in the twentieth-century history of race were arguably marked by the state’s uncertainty as to what cultural difference might mean in the medium to long term (were, for example, migrant workers here to stay?), it is my understanding that such questions have in certain respects been resolved (if only out of the reluctant admission, to use the same example, that there is nowhere else for ‘them’ to go). The politics of multiculturalism can accordingly be said to signal an incipient realism in state practice, a recognition that the ‘multicultural’ is not a transitory phase or optional component of twentyfirst-century society, but an integral and defining feature of life in Britain today. The relative permanency of this multicultural politics means we need to recognize that it is substantially independent of whatever currency the specific term ‘multiculturalism’ might have at any particular point in time. I want to insist on this point in the face of a recent trend to call into question the efficacy and desirability of multiculturalism as a form of state practice. This is by no means a trend that is confined to Britain, and though I will continue to draw on the British example, it should be noted that the governmental critique of multiculturalism has in recent years become prevalent in a number of nation-states, particularly in Western Europe.

The death of multiculturalism But is not multiculturalism the whole point of the Commission he runs? Not any more. ‘The word is not useful, it means the wrong things.’ Shall we kill it off? ‘Yes, let’s do that,’ he replies. ‘Multiculturalism suggests separateness. We are in a different world from the Seventies’. Trevor Phillips1 These remarks, made in 2004 by the then head of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, exemplify a tendency to historicize a version of multiculturalism as a failed venture, a fashionable social experiment of ‘the Seventies’ that has had its day. Trevor Phillips’s figuration of multiculturalism as an ideology of ‘separateness’ shares with a number of recent governmental statements a desire to question the usefulness of the concept. In a speech announcing the launch of a new Commission on Integration and Cohesion in August 2006, for example, Community and Local Government Secretary Ruth Kelly echoed Phillips’s

Conclusion: Multiculturalism beyond ‘the Death of Multiculturalism’ 165

words in her insistence on the need for ‘a debate about who we are and what we are as a country’: I believe this is why we have moved from a period of uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism, to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness (Kelly, 2006). For Kelly as with Phillips, multiculturalism suggests an excess of cultural autonomy, an isolationist concept that is unfit for furthering necessary ‘debate’. By calling the term into question, Kelly clearly signals a regressive moment in contemporary state discourses of race, an open return to a more assimilationist racial politics. And yet it would be easy to overemphasize the importance of such dismissals, a superficial reading of which might appear to invalidate the central premiss of this book. Despite a recent appetite for obituary-writing, pronouncements of the ‘death of multiculturalism’ are premature. It is not that multiculturalism, as I have described it in this book, is actually being rejected as a state discourse: what is being subjected to criticism is the rhetorical status of the term ‘multiculturalism’ within that discourse. It is indeed the case (particularly since the onset of the War on Terror) that the British state’s position on race has become increasingly critical of the concept of multiculturalism, yet even this rejection can really only be meaningfully understood as part of a multicultural politics. The purpose of this rejection is to symbolize and benefit from a popular anxiety about ‘separateness’, not to indicate a substantial change in policy and practice. Implicitly depending, I would suggest, on a caricature of the rejected politics of a ‘loony left’, and feeding off a stock of right-wing myths about the tyrannies of ‘political correctness’, multiculturalism is invoked as a straw target, a faddish, outdated and – more to the point – unpopular position in race politics. New Labour’s critique of multiculturalism is a clever rhetorical manoeuvre, but does not signal a fundamental change in the racial politics of the British state. While its dismissal undoubtedly represents a retrograde step, and accompanies – as this book has shown – the reinscription of lines of racial demarcation in a wide range of social contexts, this does not mean that the state has, in fact, relinquished what in my understanding constitutes a politics of multiculturalism: the rejection of ‘multiculturalism’ is simply the continuation of multicultural politics by another name. In this respect, a speech given by Tony Blair towards the end of his time as Prime Minister better reflects the true status of


multiculturalism in British state practice. While Blair’s words are even more forthright than Kelly’s on minorities’ ‘duty to integrate’, his demand is explicitly framed as taking place in the context of a ‘multicultural, multi-faith Britain’ (Blair, 2006b). I stand by the usefulness of my conception of multiculturalism as a descriptive account of state practices in Britain under New Labour. As an accommodation to ideas of cultural, religious, or racial pluralism (and irrespective of the sincerity of state actors or its effectiveness as anti-racist practice), multiculturalism prevails as the dominant framework within which the state politics of race takes place today. The rhetorical rejection of the concept does not mean that the state has foregone the advantages it continues to derive from a multicultural politics. Beyond its ‘death’, multiculturalism alone is able to account for contradictory practices that simultaneously reject and exploit the economies of racial difference. It is this capacity of multiculturalism to (temporarily) hold in equilibrium these opposing forces that make it a defining feature of Britain’s current race crisis, that point at which race is constituted as both a question and a problem. The state does not have an interest in the resolution of this crisis, but rather its careful management. While the contemporary British state has been unwilling to forego the advantages of racial reference and has in many respects overseen a reactionary politics of race, multiculturalism has provided it with a mechanism to do so whilst at the same time negotiating a hegemonic ethical discourse of ‘racelessness’ (Goldberg, 2002: 203). Multiculturalism has become the most successful means by which a nominal liberalism and egalitarianism have been squared with the brutal fact of racist practice. Like Ghassan Hage’s excellent study of racial politics in Australia (Hage, 1998), this book has argued that a politics of multiculturalism can be said to reproduce, rather than transcend, dominant structures of racial privilege and power. In accordance with the analysis put forward in The Empire Strikes Back (Solomos et al., 1982), the state’s management of race crisis involves more than simply the careful balancing of an inherently contradictory politics of race. It is the argument of this book that multiculturalism has been the site at which the state has sought to resolve a range of other social problems that do not or need not have their origin in discourses of race. From the local politics of welfare and regeneration to the global reach of the War on Terror, multiculturalism has been increasingly called upon to organize and make sense of a range of other contradictions and crises. As a mechanism of regulation, a crisis of race has come to stand in the place of social and political problems that


would otherwise be unmanageable within the parameters of New Labour’s political practice. It has provided a proxy solution to problems of state legitimacy and social order, channelling intractable issues in such a way that they can be addressed and ‘solved’ by calling into play the remarkable explanatory powers of race. Placing stress on the importance of an understanding of nationalism to comprehend the relationship between racism and the state, I have argued that the state’s multiculturalism is invariably overdetermined by a politics of national identity. I have used the oxymoronic concept of multicultural nationalism in an attempt to indicate the importance of this determination, suggesting that the state’s contemporary politics of race is best understood as delimited by the material and symbolic boundaries of the nation-state. This is not to detract from race as a supranational phenomenon, or the extent to which categories of race have derived their meaning from beyond and across the nation’s borders. Rather, it is to stress that nationalism as a state practice remains a key site for determining the local, national, and transnational structures of racial difference. While we may look to alternative political formations to provide a model of cosmopolitan ethics beyond the state (see, for example, Derrida, 2001), it is an idealist delusion to imagine that it would be possible to thereby circumvent the primary determining conditions of state practice. The argument I made in Chapter 2 examined perhaps the most straightforward employment of multicultural nationalism in recent British history. I considered how it is that a notion of cultural pluralism has been utilized by New Labour as a means of reconstructing a strong nationalist politics, and in particular how it has played a role in revaluating a narrative of British imperialism. Rather than providing a means of engaging constructively with Britain’s history of slavery and colonialism, I argued that multiculturalism has perversely been used to provide a retrospective justification of that history. Multicultural nationalism, I suggested, is an ideology that describes a tolerant and plural nation, but which uses these very ideas to prescribe a racialized limit to national belonging. The historical revisionism facilitated by multicultural nationalism has not only screened off the state’s responsibility and legitimated current racist exclusions, but has also played a role in the nationalist identity politics of Britishness. Intended to describe the positive content of national identity, I have argued that the search for Britishness is an impossible task, but one that has nevertheless had its political uses. As a discourse of cultural citizenship, a quasi-religious form of Britishness operates beyond the formal juridical


markers of national identity, and in the form of citizenship tests and ceremonies has served to reinforce the racialized boundaries of the nation-state. In the context of the Britishness project, multicultural nationalism is not simply a passive and descriptive concept, but has, in the example of tests and ceremonies, facilitated the expansion of new areas of state practice. The same can be said of the concept of community cohesion I examined in Chapter 3. Community cohesion promotes a theory of multicultural association as a framework to shape the relationship between racialized groups in poor urban communities. As with Britishness, an ostensibly pluralist model is overdetermined by official limits: while the state poses as a neutral arbiter of social conflict, it in fact sets out the terms of legitimate belief and behaviour through the differential valorization and problematization of cultural difference. Its definition of community is explicitly multicultural, but cannot properly account for the experience of racism and racialized disadvantage. As a result, the state’s politics of community is not only conceptually weak, but moreover facilitates the further racialization of poor urban Britain. The remaking of the white working class as an ‘ethnic’ group is one significant outcome of this approach. Reprising old ideas about the ‘culture of poverty’, the white working class are made part of a multicultural underclass in a new articulation of poverty and race. This turns racial conflict into a problem of and for the poor urban community, absolving the state of its responsibility to engage in a sustained and meaningful way with the root causes of racism and discrimination, and giving credence to forms of racial identification promoted by the far right. If the example of community cohesion shows how state practices set out an interpretive paradigm that exonerates the state of responsibility for its own shortcomings, my discussion of state practices in Chapters 4 and 5 was similarly concerned with the masking of racist practice. Chapter 4 considered how issues of women’s rights have come to be framed by the state within a discourse of race. With significant precedents in colonial discourse and the rhetoric of ‘humanitarian’ warfare, I argued that attention to women’s rights in minority communities is to a worrying extent made possible only by the racialization of antifeminism. Escaping ethical censure, a discourse of ‘feminism’ becomes a legitimate mechanism of racist practice, and women in minority communities are constructed as a point of contention in a nationalist struggle between a progressive ‘us’ and a patriarchal ‘them’. While Chapter 4 showed how racism underpins – yet is at the same time hidden by – state ‘feminism’, Chapter 5 returned to an explicitly


multicultural discourse. It placed stress on how an interpretive framework of multiculturalism was employed to conceal the British state’s liability for the actions of the London bombers in the summer of 2005. I argued how the representation of an innocent nation under attack was predicated on an idea of multicultural belonging, a diverse conception of human sympathy that nevertheless comes to an abrupt end at the borders of the nation-state. This chapter suggested that the prosecution of the War on Terror led to a significant contradiction in the domestic politics of race: British Muslims were simultaneously held up as potential traitors to and exemplars of multicultural Britishness, a polarization that has stretched the ideology of multicultural nationalism to breaking point. Throughout this book I have tried to show the uses to which multicultural discourses have been put by the contemporary state. In so doing, I have emphasized the ways in which they have been transformed and shaped in relation to state interests. Each chapter has explored, in a variety of ways, how the state’s multicultural turn has facilitated the exercise of very different kinds of policy and practice. While in some respects the state’s racial politics have been developed as a response to events, it would be easy to over-emphasize their reactive character: the basic framework of community cohesion was worked out a significant time in advance of the first Northern riot; the multicultural reaction to the London bombs was already part of the wider conceptual logic of the War on Terror. This is why I have accordingly placed stress on the productive nature of multicultural discourses of race. While it is contradictory and inconsistent, multicultural nationalism nonetheless describes a moment in the history of the British state’s racial politics where ideas of culture, religion and race have been actively and purposely called into play, to be engaged with and manipulated as tools of government.

Anti-racism, the politics of disavowal and the theory of hegemony To end, I would now like to extend my analysis to summarize in more general terms some of the problems raised by the contemporary politics of multiculturalism. Not only is multiculturalism likely to be of increasing importance to the state politics of race, but it is in my judgement becoming paradigmatic of race discourse in general. The state practices I have discussed in this book have by analogy or direct correlative their equivalents in a wide range of contemporary social contexts, in


Britain and elsewhere. I want to concentrate here on the notion that a key dynamic of the contemporary politics of race involves the disavowal – but not necessarily the overcoming – of racist practice. The British state’s multicultural turn might here be considered exemplary of a more general maturation in the politics of race. As I have already suggested, the rapprochement with difference that multiculturalism promises signals a decisive change in the ways and means by which race is approached as a topic or a problem. In certain respects, a longstanding plea to take the complexities of race seriously has now been taken into account. While not so long ago it was a radical (and if not radical then at the very least a consciously political) act to describe our societies in multicultural terms, now it is a largely unproblematic statement of social orthodoxy. Beyond its own obituaries, multiculturalism has come to describe a consensus view of race. Similarly, while in the 1970s and 80s the politics of anti-racism could be described as a social movement, as a cause for political demonstration, it is now more likely to be thought of as a model of best practice, a category of public and private administration. The discursive hegemony of certain kinds of multiculturalism and anti-racism has led to their ‘mainstreaming’ and institutionalization. In turn, this has inevitably channelled and shaped the meanings of them both as critical discourses. The process of discursive co-option has been of central concern to this book. The reasons underlying this process are numerous: partly out of a fidelity to a strong moral consensus on the illegitimacy of overt racist practice and a genuine commitment to the ideal of a culturally and racially plural society; partly as a result of changed social attitudes within wider society; partly as an attempt to engage with the reality of a diverse social landscape. Whatever the motivations that have shaped the development of such discourses, the conclusions of this book are clear: the disavowal of racism has not brought about an end to racist practice, but rather its rearticulation in novel forms that are able to assert racism through that disavowal.2 In summary, it might be said that there are broadly two ways of characterizing these disavowed forms of racism. The first, which we might term ‘cynical’ denial, announces its anti-racist credentials as a means of concealing a true racist intent. Here, the rhetoric of disavowal simply provides the easiest means of ensuring a desired outcome while negotiating a moral consensus that condemns overt racist practice. This form of denial, as I noted in Chapter 1, relates to a basic contradiction between what social actors say and what they do. While it is not impossible that the disavowal of racism is nearly always ‘cynical’, it


is more likely – and in certain respects of more concern – that many racist practices take on an alternative form. This second form of denial, which we might understand in a more ideological sense, lacks the cynicism of the first, and is as a result far harder to recognize for what it is. While the first form can be understood as a hypocritical deceit, this second version of disavowal is by contrast a kind of misrecognition, made in the sincere belief that it is itself a rejection or overcoming of racist beliefs and practices. To suggest that this second form of disavowal is not recognized as such by its agents is not to consign it to the unconscious. Its racism is not a suppressed truth to be recovered in analysis or reflection, and it cannot be countered by an embrace of the irrational as a principle of anti-racist practice.3 To understand this ‘well-meaning’ but ultimately divisive denial, it is necessary to recognize the status of race as a social ontology, and the ways in which it can structure beliefs and practices at the most fundamental of levels. It is, to return to examples I used earlier, an outcome of David Goldberg’s ‘deep grammar’ of race (Goldberg, 1993: 225), or the epistemological ignorance of what Charles Mills calls ‘white cognitive dysfunction’ (Mills, 1997: 95), an understanding of race that is shaped by the attempts of social actors to reconcile good intentions with concrete social and historical conditions that are incapable of realizing them. It has been my argument that this ‘well-meaning’ denial of racism is a key feature of the contemporary politics of race. While it remains possible to demonstrate the disingenuity of ‘cynical’ denial, ‘wellmeaning’ denial is far harder to critique, for it already incorporates a defence against such challenges, inoculating itself against anti-racist arguments by claiming them as its own. Testimony to the paradoxical successes of anti-racism’s discursive hegemony, this form of disavowed racism is likely to become an increasingly important mode of racism, as dominant narratives of race self-consciously reject a racist motive yet continue to engage in de facto racist practice. The incorporation and institutionalization of ‘progressive’ discourses of race by no means guarantees a victory to the politics they name. The ‘well-meaning’ disavowal of race poses urgent questions for a politics of anti-racism if it is to retain a distinctive hold on what were hitherto critical and oppositional discourses, and prevent their neutralization and practical redundancy at the hands of their self-declared champions. As I indicated right at the start of this book, and have suggested at a number of points subsequently, one way of developing an understanding of this problematic of racism beyond its disavowal is to recognize


how it is that racism becomes framed as an ethical problem. By problematizing ethics in this way I do not mean to suggest that the moral critique of racism is necessarily invalid; indeed, I do not actually consider it possible to transcend morality in anti-racist politics. Like Alastair Bonnett, I think of moralism as a problem ‘to be acknowledged, to be lived with, rather than solved or banished’ (Bonnett, 2000a: 168). What follows then is a recognition of some of the limitations of anti-racist morality, understood as a function of the complicated relationship between anti-racism and its object of critique. The first and most obvious point to make here is that moral positions tend to encourage an idea of causality that is not always as robust as it might at first appear to be. Certain structural and material conditions cannot be altered by a change of moral perspective: an anti-racist ethics does not, after all, transform a long history of racial injustice, but at best only revises social actors’ current orientation towards it. There is accordingly a sense in which it is useful to think of ethical commitments as being possessed of a kind of false dimensionality. Like the illusion of threedimensionality in a perspective drawing, ethical positions can give the impression of a substantiality they do not in truth possess. The illusion remains real enough in the extent to which it successfully covers over its own limitations, concealing the fact that an ethical position alone is inadequate to the task it describes. To think about ethics in this way suggests a further problem, which is again to do with the way that ethical conviction (for example that, in the most basic sense, racism is ‘wrong’) short-circuits the relationship between itself and the politics it names. The ethical illusion is such that social actors may fixate on their own moral rectitude to the extent that they may fail to realize that what they valorize is the name for a thing, rather than the thing itself. A gap thus opens up between a ‘genuine’ anti-racism and the ideas about anti-racism that social actors hold. This unwitting nominalism may then allow, in precisely the same way as the example of ‘feminism’ in Chapter 4, for ostensibly progressive positions to be subordinated to unproductive or indeed reactionary agendas. Another variation of this difficulty, which is essentially a problem with the idealism of ethical positions, is the potential failure of social actors to appreciate that while ethical belief is by definition anchored in sincerity and certitude, its meaning is never an expression of some innate quality, but derives from its status within a wider discursive structure. This is to recognize little more than the fact that our words and actions belong less to us than to the contexts of their enunciation,


but it can nevertheless tell us something quite significant about the conceptual status of ethical belief in the politics of race. Given how fraught, contentious, and conceptually ambiguous the subject of race is, it would be fallacious to imagine that any position held, any statement of belief, is ever insulated from the vast and excited theatre of racial connotation in which those positions and statements derive their social meanings. In this sense, the plain truth of an ethical position is revealed as simply an inappropriate means of engaging with the politics of race. In the crudest sense, morality is, as before, just not equipped to carry out the kind of commitments to which it attests. The ideal masquerades as the real, but produces its own reality effects, which make that idealism appear more plausible than it really is. The final and very basic point that I want to make about the ethics of anti-racism is also to do with the particular character of ethical positions. It can be argued that moral discourses work through processes of distinction: they do not demonstrate in a positive sense their advocate’s ‘progressive’ credentials so much as the regressiveness of someone else’s. According to this logic, anti-racism may be espoused not as a result of a serious commitment, but because it puts its exponent in a position of advantage in a moral economy. This does not mean that the espousal of an anti-racist position is necessarily disingenuous, but rather that its importance to its exponent ultimately lies less in that commitment than in creating a form of social judgement (a key characteristic of judgement, of course, is that it tends to excuse the judger from the position of being judged). Relative mastery of the ethics of anti-racism does not therefore guarantee an obligation to anti-racist practice, it merely guarantees that one does not get called a racist. For social actors to stress their culturally pluralist and anti-racist credentials can in this sense be seen as a self-serving activity, a way of dodging responsibility for and implication in the racial conditions of the present, and at the same time conferring upon themselves a degree of moral probity by enthusiastically aligning themselves with the ever-increasing ranks of those who decry the evils of racism.4 The knowledge that certain forms of anti-racism involve the disavowal but not the overcoming of racism serves to remind us, if nothing else, of the uncomfortable social and psychological truth that it is quite possible for social actors to hold inconsistent and contradictory views with little or no discomfort. Perhaps even more disturbingly, it also suggests that ostensible commitments to anti-racism or cultural pluralism may be layered on top of rather less progressive beliefs: that they may, for example, constitute a ‘charitable’ or ‘tolerant’ veneer that


conceals a more deep-rooted prejudice. This possibility is to a large extent supported by my reading of state practice, and the deep contradictions of its politics of race. Yet while the idea of ethics is valuable here, it does not really give much of an indication of what might be done to mitigate a phenomenon like racial disavowal and construct a more robust and effective anti-racism. While it would be easy to make a facile distinction between, say, ethics and politics as a way of indicating the difference between a ‘real’ anti-racism and its dissimulating simulacra, such a distinction would be predicated on the notion that it is an easy and straightforward thing to measure and judge the difference between the two.5 The argument of this book has been that the reality is far more complex, and that the defining issue of the twenty-first-century politics of race is not to do with making a more convincing argument for anti-racism (as if our problem were simply one of finding the right words), but rather with dealing with the fact that a dominant social consensus on the illegitimacy of racist practice is patently not the same thing as an end to racism itself. The key problem that confronts us here may accordingly be framed in terms of dealing – perversely – with the success of anti-racist discourse. This ‘success’ is a problem inherent to hegemonic practice. Whether or not it has been explicitly theorized as such, anti-racism is predicated on an idea of hegemony, the project of installing itself as the only legitimate position in the politics of race. The theory of hegemony – particularly in its poststructuralist form as first coherently formulated in Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2001 [1985]) – is quite capable of accounting for the kinds of co-option and perversion I have been discussing here. According to Laclau and Mouffe, there is no necessary relationship between a particular discourse and what we might call its meaning or political valency: this meaning depends on a process of articulation which is itself contingent on hegemonic practice. The theory of hegemony is therefore readily able to recognize how putatively progressive discourses may become articulated to politically regressive ends: a discourse like anti-racism is the subject of contestation in a tug-of-war between competing political interests. Yet a real difficulty remains here, which such a theory is less adequately set up to deal with. This relates to what might be described as a problem of conceptual inertia: the obstinate tendency for certain concepts to hold onto and continue to refer to certain meanings, even when they have effectively become detached from them. A major problem with the ‘success’ of anti-racism is that, while it may indeed have been


co-opted to socially regressive ends, it continues to signify an ‘original’ meaning. As discussed in Chapter 4, this conceptual inertia is precisely why ‘progressive’ discourses are co-opted in the first place: their capacity to retain an association with an ‘earlier’ meaning is what gives them value as markers of moral authority and social legitimacy. While Laclau and Mouffe’s position appears to presuppose that it is always possible to tell which political actors have effective ‘control’ over the meaning of a discourse at any particular moment, this is in reality far from the case. In the context of the politics of race, the problem starkly confronting us is precisely to do with the chronic ambiguities of discursive hegemony, the sense in which a meaningful anti-racism may indeed be dominant at certain levels yet at the same time be subverted or coopted at others. It is a problem of hegemony at an historical moment when it is no longer possible to coherently map discursive positions onto particular political agents, a moment in which the specific meaning of anti-racism is no longer underwritten by a social movement that once functioned reasonably effectively as its progenitor and guarantor. It has been suggested from various quarters that precisely the kind of problems I am describing here – novel and confusing reconfigurations of political practice that subvert longstanding conventions; the imminence and internalization of governmental power; a radical decline in democratic participation precipitated by the atrophy of recognized forms of political agency in the context of neoliberal globalization; the associated failure of social actors to identify with political parties or social movements, and so on – represent social conditions that can no longer be coherently understood within the theory of hegemony (see, for example, Grossberg, 2005; Lash, 2007; Thoburn, 2007). Though the arguments made for alternatives to hegemony or for developing a theory of ‘posthegemony’ provide some interesting ways of dealing with the problem I am sketching out here, I would suggest that maintaining hegemony as a theoretical model will continue to provide the most thorough and convincing framework with which to understand the contemporary politics of race. What it lacks is not the capacity to describe what is taking place, but rather the ability to indicate how to reconstruct and revivify a meaningful anti-racism in the face of its discursive appropriation. Anti-racism is, while ultimately not tied to any ‘essential’ content, totally incapacitated if it foregoes its claim on its ‘successes’ by declaring them damaged goods. What the theory of hegemony requires, in this context, is precisely a recognition of its complexities as an ethical framework and a greater attentiveness to the pragmatics of conceptual reinvention: the discourse of anti-racism


has been a long and difficult time in the making, it has a real historicity, and is inextricably bound to many of our cultural and political institutions (even if some of these institutions currently lie fallow). As such, anti-racism cannot simply be reinvented from scratch. One possible means of reconstructing an effective anti-racism would – as I am implying – be an attempt to reinvigorate the agents of hegemonic contestation, to re-embody anti-racism as a social movement, and introduce forms of conditionality into anti-racist practice that would provide a means of contesting and reclaiming ownership of ideas that are, as this book has suggested, betrayed when harnessed to reactionary political agendas.6 Such a solution would, of course, have to be alert to the extent to which the terms of hegemony are indeed changing in the politics of race: the increased role and significance of visuality and media spectacle in the politics of Britishness, or the transnational scope of the War on Terror, for example, both bring with them forms of racial politics that can no longer be adequately understood or addressed within existing frameworks of anti-racist practice. A reinvigorated anti-racism must be equipped to operate in a highly mediated global arena, and be capable of constant adaptation and transformation in response to and anticipation of novel and rapid reconfigurations of racist practice that will tend as a first principle to defend themselves against anti-racist critique. And so what, finally, of multiculturalism? It should by now be clear that my use of multiculturalism to describe the field of contemporary race practice means that I do not consider it particularly useful to think about multiculturalism as a concept that one can declare oneself ‘for’ or ‘against’. Yet it should nevertheless be acknowledged that the term ‘multiculturalism’ continues to signify within this discursive formation, and it continues to become variously attached to particular ideas and projects. In light of the argument I have just made, our critical task in response to multiculturalism’s problematic and at times racist articulations is not to reject the term outright.7 To give up on multiculturalism is to give up on the struggle over its meaning, a struggle in which it is becoming increasingly important to engage. If, as I have been suggesting, it is true to say that an accommodation to cultural difference is – however unsatisfactorily – a key component of contemporary race discourse, then to fail to properly recognize this fact and the potential that ‘multiculturalism’ has to play within it is to risk remaining trapped within a conceptual framework that is no longer an adequate description of race politics today. When apologists of nationalism co-opt multiculturalism to insist on the inclusiveness of their project, or when the


valorization of cultural pluralism serves to conceal another kind of discrimination, the concept of multiculturalism retains the potential to reveal the contradictions of its articulation, to decentre the universal (Sayyid, 2000a: 16) and uncover what is discrepant in dominant discourses of race (Hesse, 2000: 16). This capacity to interrupt the logic of official discourses of race and culture continues to make it an essential tool of anti-racism. Of course, the kinds of co-options and appropriations described in this book have made the critical politics of multiculturalism a harder task, but one that is all the more necessary as a result.

Notes

Introduction: The Politics of Multiculturalism 1 The ambiguity of the term ‘cultural difference’ here is an intentional one, for I use it to refer to both ‘real’ formations of history and culture (i.e., as equivalent to what gets called ‘ethnicity’) and the ‘unreal’ categories of race. I use ‘cultural difference’ in the recognition that it is ultimately impossible to make a clear and clean distinction between the two.

Chapter 1

Understanding the Politics of Multiculturalism

1 My characterization of anti-racism’s ‘binary logic’ here is of course necessarily simplified. For a sustained treatment of anti-racism’s complex and conflicted histories, see Bonnett (2000a). 2 As I will frequently return to the concept of disavowal, a brief note is necessary here. While it is a term that has been most typically employed in relation to theories of race developed in dialogue with a psychoanalytic tradition (see, for example Bhabha, 1994: 66–84), my emphasis here is a resolutely social one. While it is impossible to deny a psychic and unconscious dimension to discourses of race, my analysis concentrates on how racism’s disavowal has worked in the service of more explicitly political – that is to say, institutional – interests. Here, I follow Judith Butler in her recognition that it is ultimately impossible to maintain a distinction between the laws of the symbolic and the social, on account of the former comprising ‘the sedimentation of social practices’ (Butler, 2000: 19). 3 In the same way that, according to Karl Marx, we should ‘not form the narrow-minded notion that the petty-bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egotistic class interest’, but rather acknowledge it is prey to a conceptual error that considers the special conditions of its emancipation to be the general conditions for the emancipation of all (Marx, 1998: 50), it should be recognized that the adherents of nominally anti-racist practices that serve to reinforce racism are not necessarily motivated by racist intent, and in fact may in their own understanding be acting with the best of intentions. 4 Blair (2005e). 5 I am, accordingly, not interested in making a prima facie distinction between the kinds of multicultural practices I approve of, and those I do not. To do so would only serve to maintain a normative distinction between good and bad that tends, I am suggesting, to prevent a fuller understanding of what is at stake in multicultural practice. 6 Contrary to those who would link the genesis of nationalism to an earlier – even primordial – historical moment, and by doing so locate its origins in a 178

Notes to pages 26–35 179

7

8 9

10

11

12

13 14

common national identity antedating the state (see, for example, A. D. Smith, 1998), here I follow the lead of modernist historians who argue with varying degrees of emphasis that the phenomenon of nationalism – as a description of the convergence between the political state and the population over whom it has jurisdiction – can be traced back no further than the social and industrial revolutions of the modern period (see, for example, Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990; Anderson, 1991; Breuilly, 1993). For an excellent study that focuses on the importance of nationalism (as ‘the dominant operative ideology of modernity’) to our ideas about identity ∨ and belonging, see Malesevic´ (2006). For a short, clear explanation of the status of race as neither an entirely ‘objective’ or ‘ideological’ phenomenon, see Omi and Winant (1993). I am thinking here not only of the vulgate that posits that the state has become redundant under the conditions of neoliberal globalization, but also those philosophical currents that adopt dispersed and decentralized models of political power in which the role of the state as a political actor tends to vanish (see Aranowitz and Bratis, 2002). This is in part out of a need to develop a kind of methodological shorthand: the emphasis I will give to the importance of race as a nationalist politics would not be possible without some finite grasp of the social agents whose actions codify a ‘state’ position. The conceptual advantages I derive from this approach – not least in being able to trace a certain political logic in what might otherwise seem entirely contradictory practices – will outweigh, I believe, an inevitable and accompanying tendency to overemphasize the state’s autonomy and coherence as a social actor. I am willing to engage in a degree of simplification here in the conviction that it is important to hold onto a conception of the state as an object of analysis. My choice of subject matter here has largely been dictated by a desire to cover a broad range of state practices, from the local politics of community to the international politics of war. There are some very important events this book has not dealt with – perhaps most notably the murder of Stephen Lawrence and its aftermath – because they have been given sustained academic treatment elsewhere. The term ‘multicultural nationalism’ or a close variation of it, has been variously used to signify ambiguous new configurations of ‘civic’ and ‘ethnocultural’ nationalism (Brown, 2000: 48), to describe Canada’s federal unionism (Kernerman, 2005), or the relationship between cultural pluralism and substate nationalism in Scotland (Hussain and Miller, 2006). My usage places its emphasis on the pluralization of official discourses of identity and belonging, and is closest to Anne-Marie Fortier’s definition of ‘multiculturalist nationalism’, as a ‘narrative that posits multiculture and diversity at the heart of the nationalist project’ (Fortier, 2008: 22). Stuart Hall et al. (1978: 333). Social contradictions are of course intractable only in the sense that they cannot find resolution within the existing parameters of any designated social order. It is, in other words, in defence of a certain social order (and a refusal to entertain the possibility of an alternative one) that the state acts in a regulatory role.

180 Notes to pages 39–51

Chapter 2

Black in the Union Jack: The Britishness Project

1 Note too how the changing status of Britain is signalled as a popular liberation as ‘nation’ supersedes ‘state’ as the container of Britishness. 2 For detailed commentary on the media’s reception of the Parekh Report, see Fortier (2005), McGalughlin and Neal (2004) and Runnymede Trust (2000b). 3 ‘Englishness’ is of course not the same as ‘Britishness’, though in the context of these debates there is in fact very little to distinguish the two. I will briefly consider these nationalist terminologies in a discussion below. 4 Blair in Tempest (2007b). 5 As national statistics demonstrate (see National Statistics Online, 2006), a British identity has the added advantage of being a category of identification taken up with somewhat more enthusiasm by a non-white population (predominantly resident in England) who are typically more sensitive to the abiding racial connotations of Englishness. While a civil sense of Britishness might thus be thought to provide an opportunity to develop a genuinely plural national identity, the state’s recent practices – as the following pages will argue – have moved Britishness towards, rather than away from, a racialized idea of national belonging. 6 This turn to discourses of nationalism as one of the few means of articulating a sense of governmental distinctiveness and agency under the conditions of what Colin Crouch calls ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch, 2004) is becoming a familiar phenomenon across a number of Western states, and has of course also underwritten the popular appeal of the parties of the European far right. 7 This is not to engage in a tug of war over Orwell, whose thinking on nationalism and race make him in many ways a product of his time. The recognition that British radical traditions have historically often been compromised by nationalist forms is still not adequately acknowledged (see, for example, the admission of nationalist ambivalence in the editor’s preface to Samuel (1989), or the critique of New Left historiography in Gilroy (1993: 1–40)). 8 As the nation was treated to the spectacle of performers from the Notting Hill Carnival dancing in the Mall beneath an ageing rock guitarist noodling the national anthem from the roof of Buckingham Palace, it was hard not to recall the words of Prince Philip to an Aboriginal elder in Northern Queensland some three months previously: ‘do you still throw spears at each other?’ (quoted in Marks, 2002). 9 Consider, with reference to my earlier remarks on the reception of the Parekh and Macpherson reports, former Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont’s description of the Queen Mother’s funeral: ‘What was moving about the lying in state in Westminster Hall was the large number of West Indians, Africans and Indians who filed past the coffin. One was reminded that the monarchy does far more to reconcile differences among ourselves than any amount of reports from the Runnymede Trust or Sir William Macpherson’ (Lamont, 2002). 10 For a useful critique of a certain formalism in Laclau’s theory, particularly in relation to the politics of cultural difference, see A. M. Smith (1998: 177–202).

Notes to pages 52–59 181 11 Blair (1997). 12 Balibar (1999: 166). 13 Despite the US walkout infamously ordered by Colin Powell at the Durban World Conference Against Racism in 2001, North America’s pressing need to deal with the history of slave labour in its southern states has meant that in debate (if not action) these questions have generally been approached with a greater degree of sophistication than in Britain. 14 According to Paul Routledge (2006: 16), Brown’s position on this subject has derived from his speechwriter Michael Wills. 15 Compare this with the opening words of the chapter I have been quoting by Gilroy: ‘Tales of heroism by the brave pilots of Spitfires and Hurricanes were important to my postwar childhood. Their Anti-Nazi action established one dimension of my moral universe. [Yet] Why are those martial images—the battle of Britain, the Blitz, and the war against Hitler—till circulating and, more importantly, still defining the nation’s finest hour?’ (Gilroy, 2004: 95). 16 As Robert Spencer argues, a new taste for empire is something of a trend in contemporary conservative historiography (Spencer, 2006). For a detailed consideration of recent popular and academic literature that articulates an ‘emerging consensus for the normative possibilities of a new imperialism’, see Bormann et al. (2005: 2). 17 The importance of this emphasis on the present, at least within the nationstate, is something Gilroy has himself recognized elsewhere in his endorsement of Stuart Hall’s claim that the effects of racist practice are ‘specific to the present organization of society, to the present unfolding of its dynamic political and cultural processes – not simply to its repressed past’ (Hall in Gilroy, 1990: 265). 18 Although, as I argued in Chapter 1, it is correct to say that the origins of modern British racism lie in the nation’s imperial past, it is not necessarily the case that this past is always causally paramount. A scepticism towards the historicization of racial determination is a rather heretical position in current race theory. For some rare – if brief – considerations of this question, see Frankenberg (1993: 242) and Reynolds (1997: 100). 19 In relation to the present, this is an imperialism that clearly needs to be understood not as a project of the British state alone, but one in which it acts alongside and as an agent of the complex range of interests that might be roughly sketched as representing the forces of neoliberal capitalism. 20 The 2007 bicentennial commemorations of the abolition of the slave trade were another recent example of the British state’s conflicted attempts to reconcile the national past with ideas of its present. While Tony Blair’s ‘deep sorrow’ (Blair, 2006a) might be thought an improvement on Brown’s imperialist apologia, it can also be understood as an act of pre-emptive foreclosure. Blair’s capacity to emote stopped short of an apology that might have had legal ramifications: regret does not entail reparation. For a discussion of the cultural politics of regret, see Ahmed (2004: 118–19). 21 Blair (2005a). 22 This peculiar position has been adopted by none other than the seasoned race commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, herself a refugee from Idi Amin’s Uganda, who has argued that ‘there are genuine refugees who cannot all be


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given asylum because of demographic pressures on this small island’ (Alibhai-Brown, 2000: 82). For more on the disavowal of racism in electoral politics, see Pitcher (2006). Take, for example, the words of Aretas Akers-Douglas, Secretary of State for the Home Department, who, during the second reading of the Bill that would become the 1905 Aliens Act, argued ‘[o]ne reason why I am so anxious to get a settlement of this question of the regulation of the entrance of undesirables to this country is that I believe that if this grievance continues there is a great chance in ignorant quarters of an Anti-Semitic movement arising’ (Hansard, 1905: col. 752). For a more detailed discussion of the ‘threshold of tolerance’ in discourses of race, see Blommaert and Verschueren (1998: 77–8). Interpretative, contestable and, as historians were quick to note of the citizenship handbook’s first edition, full of errors and inaccuracies (see Glendinning, 2006). Crick’s text was rewritten for the handbook’s second edition. Australia’s citizenship test has similarly come in for some criticism on account of the usefulness of its contents, which apparently include a question authored by former Prime Minister John Howard asking potential citizens to name ‘Australia’s greatest cricketer’ (McMahon, 2008). All nationalist discourse is characterized by a particularly strong form of the Derridean logic of supplementarity (see Derrida, 1976: 145). Descriptions of the nation’s pure (because ‘imaginary’) form will by definition require reinforcement at its borders, and this reinforcement occurs on an infinite range of spatial, moral, cultural, racial, etc., registers. As the US historian Carlton Hayes wrote in his comparison of nationalism and religion, ‘a national anthem is not a profane thing […] It is the Te Deum of the new dispensation; worshippers stand when it is intoned, the military “at attention”, and the male civilians with uncovered heads, all with the external show of respect and veneration’ (Hayes, 1960: 167). Non-compulsory citizenship ceremonies for all 18-year-olds to mark their transition into adulthood were first mooted in 2005 (see Travis, 2005). The idea was subsequently picked up in a review of British citizenship headed by the former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith QC in 2008. As well as proposing a national day on the Australian model, Goldsmith discussed the extension of citizenship ceremonies to all young people, with the suggestion that they might incorporate ‘the Oath of Allegiance to the Queen and the Pledge of Commitment to the UK’ (Goldsmith, 2008: 98). Cox (1951: 68).

Chapter 3 Multiculturalism, Community and ‘the White Working Class’ 1 Hobsbawm (1994: 428). 2 Delanty (2003: 154). 3 I do not have the space here to explore the many conceptual and methodological problems with Putnham’s thesis. For a comparative analysis that refutes Putnham’s contention of associational decline in the British context, see Hall (1999).

Notes to pages 82–92 183 4 It was Etzioni’s role in providing Bill Clinton with some theoretical substance for his tough policies on crime and social order in his 1992 election campaign that brought him to the attention of New Labour policy-makers (Anderson and Mann, 1997: 245; see also Burnett, 2004). Although Etzioni has undeniably been the dominant source of interest in communitarianism within New Labour, it should be noted that an older British communitarian tradition has underpinned and facilitated his appeal. The influence of Christian socialism, and particularly the Scottish communitarian John Macmurray, is openly acknowledged by Tony Blair to have had a formative influence on his own intellectual development (Anderson and Mann, 1997: 10; Bevir, 2000, 2005: 132; Bevir and O’Brien, 2003; Driver and Martell, 1998: 27). 5 It is this functionalist emphasis that has led to Ruth Levitas’s description of New Labour’s focus on social exclusion as a ‘new Durkheimian hegemony’ (Levitas, 1998: 178). 6 Baldwin (1985: 58). 7 For some of the more credible narratives, see, in particular, the critical analysis of policing in King and Waddington (2004); the treatment of discourses of Asian/Muslim identity in Alexander (2004, 2005) and Hussain and Bagguley (2005); discussion of the criminalization of Asian youth in Burnett (2004); and the role of the far right in Kalra (2003) and Seward (2006: 25–7). For discussions of how complex and heterogeneous episodes of social conflict come to be understood (and acted upon) as ‘race riots’, see Gilroy and Lawrence (1988); Keith (1993: 64); Rowe (2004); Solomos et al. (1982). 8 Although the local reports are ostensibly the autonomous product of large public consultation exercises, and cannot therefore be seen to derive directly from Westminster in the same way that the Cantle and Denham reports can, it should be noted that, being funded by their respective borough councils and with support (financial, in the case of the Ritchie report) from the Home Office, that neither should they be regarded as entirely independent of central government. I refer to them below only where they support the analysis of the national reports (which they invariably do), or shed some light upon them. It should also be noted that the Ouseley report was published immediately before the first major outbreaks of violence. While it is therefore not strictly a report on the riots per se, its focus on racial conflict in Bradford in the months directly preceding them meant that it came to be placed alongside the Clarke and Ritchie reports. No official report on the Bradford riots was subsequently commissioned. 9 For the unconvinced, it is worth noting the full title of Denham’s Ministerial Group, set up only one day after the main period of disorder in Bradford, was from the start known as The Inter-Departmental Ministerial Group on Public Order and Community Cohesion. 10 See, for example, the study undertaken by Deborah Phillips at Leeds University which demonstrates how class differentiation within racialized communities has led to the dispersal of Asian professionals away from the ‘ethnic ghetto’ (Phillips, 2002). 11 The deployment of ‘feminist’ arguments by the state with regard to the policing of minority cultural practices and the construction of unacceptable


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beliefs and practices as the particular properties of certain racialized groups are subjects I look at in some detail in the next chapter. It is worth noting here that my references to both ‘Asians’ and ‘the white working class’ are intended to describe social groups as they are conceived in state discourses of community, and should as such not be understood as empirical descriptions of actually existing social groups. The importance of this distinction will be made apparent below. Blunkett (2004: 16). Mandelson (2003). This asymmetry should alert us to the inequality of power relations within the concept of community cohesion as a theory of race relations. If problematic Asian difference is characterized by withdrawal, and problematic white difference by racist violence, then it can be argued that there is a failure here to confront the extent to which the dynamics of racism operate within and are perpetuated by the community cohesion concept, i.e., in its inability to recognize the extent to which Asian abstentionism might itself be determined by the structures of a racist society. For details of far right involvement in the Oldham and Bradford riots, see Renton (2003: 79). The role played by the far right in the Burnley riots is tacitly acknowledged in the Burnley police report (Clarke, 2001: Appendix 10K). See also Lowes (2001), CARF (2001) and Seward (2006: 25–7). Though it must be recognized that the policing of the 2001 riots, as Mike King and David Waddington argue of Burnley, meant that the behaviour of ‘white racists’ was often tolerated or ignored (King and Waddington, 2004: 130–4), and that it was as a result members of the Asian community that were disproportionately targeted within the criminal justice system. As I argued in Chapter 1, I have generally preferred to collapse the concept of ‘ethnicity’ into that of ‘race’ in accordance with my understanding of racism as a structural entity existing beyond, or prior to, particular cultural differences. I retain ‘ethnicity’ in this instance to indicate how racializing discourses have constructed a class differentiation within whiteness that refuses to recognize the identity of white people as a whole, but which reserves a category of racial difference for an understanding of the particular character of white people living in civic proximity to minority communities (i.e., in certain poor inner-city areas). Although it can be argued that a more extensive idea of white racial identity underpins the community cohesion analysis, it only finds expression in particular ideas of class difference. Ethnicity therefore denotes the way in which the concept of race is reserved for the white working class, rather than white people in general. It should be noted that the British state is not alone in this course of action. Seyla Benhabib notes (though in her case with approval) that in 1999 Amsterdam City Council ‘passed a decree encouraging “inter-” as opposed to “intracultural” centers, policies and groups’ (Benhabib, 2002: 79). As with the aforementioned bourgeois desire for community-for-others, a racial identity is rarely ascribed to middle class whites. Exemplified, for example, in a constant slippage between ‘the white working class’, ‘the indigenous working class’ and ‘working class people’ (Dench et al., 2006: 5). The idea that ‘immigrants’ (ibid.) might themselves be a part of


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a local working class identity is not even considered, for East London’s white working class is said to have ‘its own specific interests’ that place it ‘in direct competition for local resources’ with ‘Bangladeshi newcomers’ (ibid. 206). Roger Hewitt (1996, 2005) is another writer who seems overly concerned with stressing the status of the white working class as a marginalized and denigrated group in multicultural contexts. For an excellent critique of Hewitt, see Bonnett, (2000b: 131). This is certainly a tendency in Matt Wray’s historical sociology of poor whites in America (Wray, 2006). See Pitcher (2009, forthcoming). This is a nostalgia that also strongly informed BBC2’s ‘White Season’, a documentary series broadcast in March 2008 which asked ‘is white working class Britain becoming invisible?’. That community cohesion is likely to be around for some time to come is indicated by the establishment in 2005 of an Institute of Community Cohesion, a quango coordinated across four Midlands universities that is charged with developing and promulgating the concept. In 2008 the Institute started offering a postgraduate certificate, diploma and MA qualification in ‘Community Cohesion Management’ (see http://www.coventry.ac.uk/researchnet/ icoco). The institute is chaired by Ted Cantle (of the riots’ national review team) who, according to the copy on the jacket of his recent book on the subject, is now ‘regarded as the founding father of “community cohesion”’ (Cantle, 2005). Where such groups appear to exist, one often finds that there is nothing remotely organic about them: the avowed status, for example, of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (see Kundnani, 2002: 77) and the ‘support group’ Families Against Immigrant Racism (see BNP, 2003) as expressions of ethnic/racial community is negated by their explicitly political status as fronts for far right organizations. This process of ethnicization as a form of governmentality has of course also been a key characteristic of interventionist policy in the global theatre. The US’s post-invasion governance of Iraq has in particular depended upon the imputation of ‘ethnic’ causes to political violence (see Bonnett, 2006: 1098). Tony Blair in Holmes (2000: 183). This quotation comes from Tony Blair’s first speech as Prime Minister. It is worth noting that the ‘underclass’ concept is (yet) another US import (McVeigh and Lentin, 2002: 14; Haylett, 2001: 358). Here I would follow Judith Butler in her discussion of how state power becomes displaced onto ‘citizen-subjects’ prosecuted for hate speech (Butler, 1997: 48). The state’s mediatory role conceals the extent to which conflict between groups is manifested through the authority of the state. 2007 figures from the Office for National Statistics rank the local authority areas of Burnley, Oldham and Bradford as respectively 42, 21 and 32 on its index of multiple deprivation, where 1 represents the most deprived area and 354 the least (change from 37, 43 and 30 in 2004). Certain wards within them rank within the bottom one per cent nationally (www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk). Of the fifty-nine local wards that go to make up the local authority areas cited in the previous note, only in four of these do non-whites outnumber

186 Notes to pages 107–120 whites. Of these, Toller, the Bradford ward with the most non-white inhabitants, still has nearly a third of its residents describing themselves in the 2001 census as ‘white’ (www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk). 32 Government research published in 2005 revealed that two-thirds of Britain’s ethnic minority population live in its poorest neighbourhoods, compared with thirty-seven per cent of whites (Morris, 2005). 33 The affinity between community cohesion and the ‘ethnopluralism’ of the far right has arguably aided the electoral rise of the British National Party, who increasingly present the white working class as an oppressed minority culture. At the time of writing (May 2008), the BNP have a record number of fifty-seven councillors, and a seat on the London Assembly (UAF, 2008). 34 While beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to note the extent to which New Labour have begun to embrace an explicitly religious form of communitarian politics. In 2003 a high-level steering group was established to ‘consider the most effective means of achieving greater involvement of the faith communities in policy-making and delivery’ (Hansard, 2003c. col. 12W). As part of the multicultural welfare state, New Labour ministers have argued the case for ‘a greater role for faith based groups in UK welfare delivery’ (DWP, 2007). For a critical overview of ‘faith communities’ as a resource in urban regeneration, see Furbey and Macey (2005).

Chapter 4

Multicultural Conflicts: The ‘Feminist’ State

1 It should be noted that this chapter will concentrate on how state discourses of gender equality are structured in relationship to the politics of race. It necessarily does this at a certain level of generalization and abstraction, and does not pay close attention to the particular ways in which a feminist agenda has been taken up by the British state. There is another more coherently historicized story to be told here about the relationship between feminists and the mainstream political system (and particularly the Labour Party). This would involve a consideration of the role played by former women’s movement activists as state representatives in setting and negotiating the political agenda on feminist issues. 2 L. Bush (2001). According to Zillah Eisenstein, Bush’s radio address – from which this statement derives – was of particular note on account of it being the first time that the US President’s wife had ever spoken on behalf of women’s rights (Eisenstein, 2004: 157). 3 State discourses were echoed in the media (Stabile and Kumar, 2005) and indeed by some Western feminists (Mohanty, 2006). 4 As an imperial ‘feminism’, this blunt and categorical reasoning is of course not able to imagine the possibility of an Afghan feminism, such as, for example, that espoused for over thirty years by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (see www.rawa.org). 5 Cryer in Hansard (2003b. Col. 1201). 6 A working group on forced marriage was set up by the Home Office after a Commons debate in February 1999. Its findings led to the creation of the Forced Marriage Unit in 2005. Based jointly in the Home and Foreign Offices, the Forced Marriage Unit supplemented the work of the Foreign


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Office’s Community Liaison Unit, which was established in 2000 to deal with international cases of forced marriage. Changes have also been made to immigration legislation, and a number of other legislative measures have been undertaken which strengthen the powers of the courts to protect victims of domestic violence. In addition, police, education and social work guidelines have been introduced to set out good practice when dealing with alleged cases of forced marriage. For more on proposed legislation around forced marriage, see Wilson (2007). The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 updates and strengthens earlier legislation on female genital mutilation (see www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2003/ukpga_20030031_en_1). We should be aware that the naming of certain practices as particular to certain minority groups can, however, serve to conceal the extent to which similar practices occur within the wider society. Take, for example, approaches by British state representatives to forms of domestic violence where, as Sherene Razack has argued, a racialized framework has been employed which makes an explicit distinction between ‘crimes of honour’ (where violence is linked to family, community or culture) and ‘crimes of passion’ (where they are not) (Razack, 2004: 151–3). Consider also the temporal, developmental distinction Blunkett makes between the cultures of ‘highly advanced countries’ and ‘those which, because of education or geography, find themselves catapulted into effectively different centuries. They are making a journey in the space of a few weeks or months, which it has taken us hundreds of years to make’ (Blunkett, 2002: 68). It should be noted that this might ultimately serve – as with colonial ‘feminism’ – a patriarchal agenda. As Jeannie Martin has argued, the ‘use of women to spell out the limits of tolerance in a culturally diverse society is not prompted by an interest in female equality, and certainly not by female oppression itself. The concern is not at all with questions of “women’s liberation”; rather it is overridingly about treating women […] decently, as a norm of conduct governing the ranking of men’ (Martin, 1991: 122). To employ a different example of a conflict over cultural difference, it is seldom recognized that when certain Islamic teachings on homosexuality are deemed incompatible with ‘modern’ or ‘Western’ values that homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain only in 1967, and that gay people only received basic civil partnership rights in late 2005. This might only be thought of as inevitable, of course, for as long as the political system is not adequately representative of women in Britain’s minority communities. Ong (2001: 108). Of course, as per my discussion above, secular republican ideals are precisely that, and the French state’s support of the Catholic church makes Edgar Morin’s conjunctive neologism ‘catholaïcité’ a more fitting description of its normative cultural foundations (see Balibar, 1999: 169). Feminism has not been the only resource called upon to bolster nationalist and imperialist projects. The liberalization of attitudes towards homosexuality has in many Western states been accompanied by the use of gay rights and the concept of tolerance as a marker of ‘civilizational’ distinction, particularly in relation to Islam in the context of the War on Terror.

188 Notes to pages 130–144 For more on this, see Puar (2005, 2007) and contributions to Gunkel and Pitcher (2008). 15 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, it should be noted that this kind of political bricolage has also become a defining feature of populist elements of the European far right. 16 For a sensitive exploration of this problematic, see Catherine Raissiguier’s account of the sudden popularity of the black feminist group Ni Putes Ni Soumises in the context of the scapegoating of Muslim men in contemporary France (Raissiguier, 2008).

Chapter 5 On the Islamic Question: Multicultural Nationalism and the War on Terror 1 Marx (1975: 160). 2 Comparison can be made here with the reaction to the previous major terrorist attack on a European target, the bombing of Madrid’s railway system on 11 March 2004. There, the Spanish Prime Minster, José María Aznar, opportunistically laid blame for the bombings on Basque nationalists. It was the Spanish electorate’s recognition that the attack was similarly motivated by the nation’s involvement in the Iraq war that led to the deposition of Aznar and the election of José Rodríguez Zapatero’s socialists in the following general election, and the swift fulfilment of Zapatero’s pledge to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. While Blair’s attempts to dodge the Iraq question prove to be infinitely more successful than Aznar’s (not least due to the lack of a credible political opposition), the Spanish example demonstrates the high political stakes involved in the response to such attacks. 3 In 2004, the most thorough study of Iraqi deaths as a result of the war put the probable death toll at around 100,000 (Roberts et al., 2004). This study was updated in 2006, and estimated deaths as of July that year had risen to around 655,000 (Burnham et al., 2006). A subsequent survey, conducted in 2007, has estimated that over one million Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict (ORB, 2008). 4 The BNP had put out a leaflet in the Beacontree ward of Barking with a photograph of the Tavistock bus explosion and a call to end immigration and ‘SAY “NO” TO LABOUR’S MULTI-CULTURAL EXPERIMENT’ (BNP, 2005) in its campaigning for a by-election held on 14 July. 5 Though Islam is of course a religious affiliation, I use the language of race here intentionally. The experience of Muslims in Britain (the majority of whom are South Asians of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin or descent) is inextricably linked to their experience as a de facto racial minority (see Modood et al., 2002: 422). Though Islam is in no way the exclusive means by which British South Asians identify themselves, it remains the case that, given the tenor of the War on Terror, it has nevertheless become the primary means by which they (whether secular, Muslim, or followers of other religions) are identified by others in discourses of race. Though the frequency with which non-Asians are identified and prosecuted in the War on Terror might be thought to go some way towards breaking an imputed


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identity in popular and media discourse between ‘Muslim’ and ‘South Asian’, this racialized categorization has proven to be stubbornly persistent. See Werbner (2002) for a convincing argument about the development of a diasporic consciousness among Muslims as part of a transnational moral community. Such thinking is in a sense a prerequisite of the War on Terror. In the same way that the colonial expansion of the British Empire recognized the sovereignty of peoples on the condition that they assumed civilized forms of social life (see the discussion of John Stuart Mill in Goldberg (1993: 35)), the allegation that a contemporary state harbours, encourages, or sympathizes with terrorism (and thus does not display the requisite levels of ‘civilized’ behaviour) has become justification enough for its invasion. As Milan Rai has argued, this conception of Islamic solidarity contrasts markedly with the parochialism of the Sufi Sunni tradition in which three of the four London bombers were brought up. In Rai’s analysis, an appeal to the transnational fellowship of the ummah is the mark of a younger generation (Rai, 2006: 108), radicalized by British foreign policy. As I have already noted, the War on Terror is not an exclusively British project, but rather is one in which Britain plays the role of junior partner to the United States. I defend my focus on Britain’s war on the grounds that each state wages an internal battle to guarantee democratic consent for its actions abroad. Although there is also a strong ‘civilizational’ element to this project, which in the name of defending ‘what we hold dear in this country and other civilised nations throughout the world’ (Blair, 2005b) constructs an orientalist opposition between the West and the (Middle) East, the relationship between states and their domestic audiences (and particularly minority communities) is in each case socially and historically particular. For some rare exceptions to this rule, see the essays on US anti-Japanese racism in Krenn (1998, 1999) and discussions of the Cold War propaganda value of discourses of racial equality in Furedi (1998). In reality, of course, Islam was only ever a proxy target of the War on Terror: neither Britain nor the US were illogical or foolhardy enough to wage a war against a religion. Yet to admit the real premiss on which these wars were fought would be to lay bare the geopolitical manoeuvrings of imperial adventure, and thus shatter the veneer of legitimacy provided by the threat of ‘Islamic terrorism’. As long as the War on Terror could be presented as a defensive rather than aggressive policy then the destabilization and destruction of nations and the killing of hundreds of thousands of people could continue to be justified in the name of domestic security. The spectre of Islam became the only means to defend the otherwise indefensible, and could on no account be given up as the principal adversary in the War on Terror. It is not coincidental that in recent years there has been some limited legal protection against religious discrimination, with the launch in 2003 of employment equality regulations, and the Race and Religious Hatred Act which came into force in 2007. For evidence of cabinet disagreement on these questions, and the refusal by MI6 to be drawn into a ‘political decision’, see McSmith (2006).

190 Notes to pages 150–157 14 The MCB had been courted continuously by the Labour Government since its establishment in 1998, despite the vocal opposition of many of its member groups to the invasion of Iraq (see Birt, 2005). Such a relationship is commensurate with a greater emphasis under New Labour on the role of religion in civil life. Significant public funds have been committed to closer working with faith communities (see Tempest, 2007a), subject to tests measuring the degree to which religious groups are engaged in ‘promoting community cohesion and integration’ (Blair in Mulholland, 2006). For a clear-sighted discussion of the increasing role played by the Islamic right in British politics and its displacement of forms of secular Asian anti-racism, see Bhatt (2006). 15 Blair (2005e). 16 For a meditation on this nationalist contradiction that considers the ‘ordinariness’ of the London bombers in relation to Freud’s understanding of the uncanny as a trope of familiarity, see Fortier (2008: 54–65). 17 All unattributed quotations in this section derive from Blair (2005e). 18 The prospect of deporting foreign nationals to their potential torture was, despite opposition from human rights groups, a popular measure in the climate of the War on Terror, and some sixty-two per cent of the public polled in August 2005 agreed with the deportation ‘of foreign nationals who spread radical Islamist views, even if they were returned to countries which use torture’ (Branigan, 2005). 19 While in the event Hizb ut-Tahrir escaped a ban, two successor organizations to Al-Muhajiroun were proscribed under the 2006 Terrorism Act for glorifying terrorism. 20 It is worth recalling that the most recent significant terrorist attacks on the British mainland prior to July 2005 were the London nail-bombings committed in 1999 by David Copeland, who killed three and injured over 110 people in attacks against Britain’s African-Caribbean, Bangladeshi, and lesbian and gay communities in Brixton, Brick Lane, and Soho. Copeland, as a BNP activist and local organizer of the National Socialist Movement (see Sykes, 2005: 135), would for one be the first to stress his credentials as a bona fide Brit. For a discussion of Tony Blair’s multicultural response to the nail-bombings, see Fortier (2002). When thinking about the comparisons that are and are not made in the discourse of the War on Terror, it is worth going back a little further and considering the IRA’s bombing campaign on the British mainland which came to an end only in the mid 1990s. It might be argued that the state’s refusal to make any connection here (an association that, on anecdotal evidence, was frequently made by Londoners in the aftermath of the 2005 bombings) is to do with the state’s tactical differences in dealing with the two conflicts. To make this connection would draw to light the more conciliatory approach that has characterized the peace process since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a considerable contrast to the hawkish methods of the War on Terror. 21 This is not to suggest that such views are the sole preserve of the right-wing tabloid press. The ability to conceive of Islam in religious rather than racial terms (and thus sidestep the charge of racism) has facilitated the widespread expression of Islamophobic sentiment. See the discussion of anti-Muslim views in The Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent in Allen (2005).

Notes to pages 158–176 191 22 Another example that shows the against-the-odds resilience of the idea of racial phenotype in relation to de Menezes is the photographic collage that was produced by the defence at the 2007 Metropolitan Police trial in an attempt to demonstrate the facial similarities between de Menezes and the terrorist suspect Hussain Osman, and thus to illustrate the legitimate confusion of the officers who pursued and shot de Menezes. Besides their short hair and relative youth, and despite the alleged doctoring of the photographs, it is difficult to identify any real physical or physiognomical likeness between the two men. 23 It is not a coincidence that the outsider status of both Muslims and Jews is so often based on their imputed lack of loyalty to the nation. While, as I have suggested, the transnationalism of the Muslim ummah places the national allegiances of Muslims in doubt, the foundational myth of the Jewish exodus has similarly been a longstanding premiss to question the commitment of Jewish people to national belonging. 24 Whether such actions would also bring an end to racism and social discrimination against Muslims in Britain is a moot point. Though the War on Terror has certainly determined the conditions of Islamophobic practice in recent years, this is no guarantee that it will not take other forms in the future. In the same way that non-Muslims may become racialized and suffer Islamophobia on account of an imputed ethnic designation, racial categorization cannot be readily switched on and off by such measures (which is why they tend to constitute a capitulation to racism rather than an overcoming of it).

Conclusion: Multiculturalism beyond ‘the Death of Multiculturalism’ 1 Phillips in Baldwin (2004). 2 It should be noted that the disavowal of racism is not in itself a new thing, and has in fact been a longstanding component of racist practice. The claim I am making here for multiculturalism is that it is currently the dominant form that disavowal takes. For discussion of an earlier form of racial disavowal, consider, for example, the anti-semitism of the ‘Jew-lover’ in Theodor Adorno’s outline of a research project (1998). 3 See, for example, the critique of Phil Cohen by Gordon (2001). 4 For a useful discussion that is realistic about the likely causal efficacy of moral argument without embracing a relativistic or nihilistic position, see Mills (2003: 59–88). Elsewhere, Mills has explored in very interesting ways the ‘unintentional’ racialization of dominant ethical structures as an implicit defence of white privilege in his concept of a Herrenvolk ethics (Mills, 1998: 139–65). 5 The difficulty of making a clear distinction here is what necessitates a secondary ethical reflection on moral practice such as that recommended by Zylinska (2005, 2006). 6 My point here about Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony is that it underplays the extent of its dependence on the political conditions of the specific historical context in which it came to prominence. Though not explicitly a

192 Notes to page 176 part of it, their hegemony theory relied for its success on a concept of the political exterior to itself. In the case of Western race politics, this centred on an anti-racist movement that, much like the other new social movements, took a far more coherent organizational and institutional form than it does today. The fact that contemporary discourses of anti-racism lack this specific underpinning thus requires us to modify in certain respects the theory of hegemony in anti-racist practice. For a more detailed version of this argument, transposed to the problematic of anti-essentialism, see Pitcher (2008). The solution I am proposing, it might be contested, is in denial as to the present impossibility of a hegemonic politics, and erroneously attempts to reconstruct its ideal conditions by reinventing anti-racism as a social movement without recognizing that its conditions of possibility are long since passed. This is of course a conclusion I do not support, but it should be noted that while I am enthusiastic about the institutional possibilities of an anti-racist politics I recognize that this would require a radical reinvention of anti-racism’s form and role as an agent of hegemonic contestation. 7 To dismiss multiculturalism as simply a top-down rationalization of ghettoizing processes (Malik, 1996: 177; see also Malik 2001) or, more grandly, as ‘the cultural logic of multinational capitalism’ (Zˇizˇek, 1997; see also Zˇizˇek, 1999: 215–39) is to fail to recognize that multiculturalism remains a concept with a critical potential that makes it worth retaining as part of the antiracist project. At heart, both of these critiques offer little more than an anachronistic complaint of deviationism. In Malik’s estimation, multiculturalism foregoes the critical values of the Enlightenment in favour of a distracting romanticism of difference; to Zˇizˇek, multicultural ideology presents little more than a pretext for and screen of capitalist exploitation. Zˇizˇek’s position is particularly counterproductive, for to recognize that racial practices are intimately linked to prevailing social and economic conditions is surely cause to better examine and understand a problematic like multiculturalism, rather than reject it out of hand. If, as I have been suggesting, we do not limit multiculturalism to an understanding of multinational capitalism but recognize how it stands as the dominant cultural logic of all race politics today, then Zˇizˇek’s position is tantamount to a blank refusal to understand and engage with the contemporary conditions of racial practice, conditions which – as this book has shown – are uneven, ambiguous, and by no means as straightforward as he implies.

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Index ‘3/11’, 138; see also Madrid train bombings (2004) ‘7/7’, 137–8, 161; see also London bombings (2005) ‘9/11’, 137–8; see also United States of America, terrorist attacks on (2001) Abu Hamza al-Masri, 156–7 Achcar, Gilbert, 141 Adorno, Theodor, 191n2 affaire foulard, 7, 128–9 Afghan women, 116–17, 119, 186n4 Afghanistan, war on, 9, 57, 110, 115–18, 130, 134, 137, 138, 142, 147, 149, 158 African-Caribbeans, 54, 75, 190n20 Agamben, Giorgio, 154, 155–6 Ahmed, Leila, 113–15, 131 Ahmed, Sara, 34–5, 108, 181n20 Akers-Douglas, Aretas, 182n23 Al Jazeera, 140 Algeria, 117 Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, 108, 181n22 Aliens Act, 182n23 Allen, Chris, 93 Al-Muhajiroun, 154, 190n19 Al-Qaeda, 119 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf, see Qaradawi, Yusuf al Anderson, Benedict, 51, 179n6 Ang, Ien, 34, 59 Anthias, Floya, 61, 93, 115, 127 anti-essentialism, 28, 192n6 anti-racism co-option of, 57, 109, 170, 174–5, 176–7 as form of distinction, 173 ethical claim, 11, 13, 14, 18, 22, 38, 58, 59, 147, 172–5, 191n4 as hegemonic project, 18, 37, 109, 130, 171, 174–6

influence on politics of race, 2–3, 7, 11–15, 17–18, 109–10, 130, 172 institutionalization of, 14, 22, 109, 170, 171, 175–6 liberal and conservative forms of, 13–14 and multiculturalism, 19–22 rethinking, 2–3, 7, 11–19, 174–6, 192n6 as social movement, 170, 175–6, 192n6 anti-semitism, 159, 182n23, 191n2 Arendt, Hannah, 24–5 Asians, 31, 54, 75, 87, 92–5, 96, 97, 105, 106, 131, 148, 157–8, 183n7, 183n10, 184n12, 184n15, 184n17, 188n5, 190n14 assimilation, 32, 49, 66, 68, 88, 95–6, 108, 165 asylum, 6, 32, 41, 58–60, 64, 127, 152, 157–8, 182n22 Australia, 166, 182n26 Aznar, José María, 188n2 Back, Les, 27, 32, 84, 100, 102 Baldwin, James, 86 Bali bombings, 138 Balibar, Étienne, 26, 27, 52, 55, 187n13 Bangladeshi, 175n21, 188n5, 190n20 Barking, 188n4 Barrie, J.M., 157 Basque nationalism, 188n2 Bauman, Zygmunt, 85 Benhabib, Seyla, 120, 128, 184n19 Berlant, Lauren, 62 black (as anti-racist identity), 29, 75 Blair, Cherie, 116 Blair, Tony, 10, 19, 42–3, 48, 52, 58–60, 78–9, 80, 105, 116, 139–46, 147, 148, 150, 151–5, 159, 165–6, 181n20, 183n4, 188n2, 189n9, 190n14, 190n20 213

214 Index Blears, Hazel, 148 Blitz, 53, 139–43, 181n15 Blunkett, David, 48, 62, 63, 68, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 92, 94, 95, 121–5, 187n8 Boltanski, Luc, 15–17, 18 Bonnett, Alastair, 56, 77, 102, 172, 178n1, 185n22, 185n27 Bourdieu, Pierre, 57, 62 Bradford, 86, 87, 88, 92, 93, 97, 183nn8–9, 184n16, 185n30, 186n31 Bragg, Billy, 104 Brick Lane, 190n20 British National Party (BNP), 142, 185n26, 186n33, 188n4, 190n20; see also far right British Nationalism, see under nationalism Britishness, 5, 6, 8, 10, 33, 39–74, 77, 79, 83, 92, 120, 126–8, 137, 140, 143–6 155, 156, 158, 160–1, 167–8, 169, 176, 180n1, 180n3, 180n5 Britpop, 43 Brixton, 87, 190n20 Brown, Gordon, 8, 39–40, 41, 44, 52–7, 58, 73, 80, 181n14, 181n20 Brubaker, Roger, 66 Burnley, 86, 87, 92, 93, 184nn16–17, 185n30 Burton, Antionette, 114 Bush, George W., 137, 147–8, 151 Bush, Laura, 115–16, 186n2 Butler, Judith, 178n2, 185n29 Canada, 76, 179n12 Cantle Report, 87, 89–90, 91–2, 100, 101, 183n8 Cantle, Ted, 87, 89, 185n25 capitalism, 6, 15–16, 37, 78, 182n19, 192n7 Chiapello, Ève, 15–17, 18 Christianity, 121, 135, 183n4 Christians, 138, 160 Churchill, Winston, 140 citizenship ceremonies, 8, 41, 64, 67–72, 168, 182n29

cultural, 8, 40, 41, 45, 60–2, 73, 88, 91–2, 124, 127, 155, 156, 167 education, 62–3, 71, 72 formal, 26, 40, 61, 62, 63, 64, 71, 73, 91–2, 152–3, 154 handbook, 64–5, 182n25 tests, 8, 41, 64–7, 71, 72, 129, 155, 168, 182n26 civil service, 149 Clarke Report, 87, 183n8, 184n16 Clarke, Charles, 150 class, 9, 30, 50, 61–2, 77, 79, 80, 85, 91, 95, 103–4, 105–8, 138, 168, 178n3, 183n10, 184n18, 184nn20–1; see also white working class Clause Four, 43, 79–80, 105 Clinton, Bill, 183n4 Cold War, 148, 189n10 Cole, Phillip, 25, 156 Collins, Michael, 104 colonialism, 9, 23–4, 26, 73, 110, 113–15, 118, 122, 147, 168 British, 5, 41, 42, 51–7, 149, 167, 189n7 neocolonialism, 41, 57 Commission on Integration and Cohesion, 164 Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), 73, 95, 101, 160, 164 communitarianism, 8–9, 44, 82–6, 87, 88, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 101, 104–5, 108, 183n4, 186n34 community, 8–9, 58–9, 61, 62, 69, 75–108, 137, 159, 168, 179n11, 184n12, 184n20, 185n26, 187n7 imagined, 41, 51, 145 national, 33, 41, 60, 63, 83, 89, 124, 136, 151, 156 political, 25, 63 transnational, 10, 144, 158–60, 189n6, 189n8, 191n23 Community Cohesion Panel, 89, 98, 99, 100, 101 community cohesion, 8, 49, 77, 86–102, 104–8, 168–9, 183n9, 184n15, 184n18, 185n25, 186n33, 190n14 conceptual inertia, 174–5

Index 215 Conservative Party, 5, 31, 32, 42, 43, 44, 46, 80, 105 constitutive outside, 67, 147–8, 157, 182n27 ‘Cool Britannia’, 43, 47 Copeland, David, 190n20 Crick, Bernard, 62–5, 69, 73, 182n25 ‘cricket test’, 155, 182n26 critique, dialectics of, 15–19 Crouch, Colin, 180n6 Cryer, Ann, 119, 121–3 cultural heritage, 12, 54, 83, 89, 101–2 cultural pluralism, 20, 27, 34, 39, 49, 57, 73, 83–4, 88, 89, 91, 106, 115, 123, 136, 143–4, 149, 153, 166, 167, 170, 173, 177, 179n12 ‘culture of poverty’, 107–8, 168 Daily Express, 137, 157 Daily Mail, 52, 157 Daily Mirror, 137 Daily Star, 137 Daily Telegraph, 40, 190n21 de Menezes, Jean Charles, 29, 157–8, 191n22 Delanty, Gerard, 43, 78 democracy, 50, 68, 79, 85, 106, 124–5, 126, 140, 146, 153, 161, 175, 189n9; see also liberal democracy Demos, 46 Denham, John, 87, 100, 183n9 Denham Report, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 183n8 Denmark, 7, 129 Derrida, Jacques, 167, 182n27 devolution, 8, 44, 64 domestic violence, 187n7 Durban World Conference Against Racism (2001), 181n13 Durkheim, Émile, 46, 183n5 Eisenstein, Zillah, 186n2 England, 8, 44, 77, 86, 180n5 English (language), 64, 67, 71, 91, 155 Englishness, 40, 44, 55, 180n3 Enloe, Cynthia, 119

Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), 101 Eritrea, 157 ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), 64, 79 essentialism, 28, 47, 74, 102, 175 ethnicity, 2, 20, 28, 29, 73, 83, 158, 178n1, 184n18, 185nn26–7, 191n24; see also ‘white ethnicity’ Empire Strikes Back, The, 35–8, 50, 166 ‘ethnopluralism’, 99, 186n33 Etzioni, Amitai, 82–4, 88–9, 93, 183n4 Eurocentrism, 24 Europe, 5, 9, 23–4, 26, 47, 66, 110, 116, 129, 130, 134 Central and Eastern, 7 ‘fortress’, 6 Western, 32, 129–30, 164 European colonialism, 23–4, 51, 147 Commission, 111 Convention on Human Rights, 152 far right, 180n6, 188n15 Union, 71 Evening Standard, 137 Fabian Society, 53 facticity of difference, 2, 3, 5, 20–1 Fanon, Frantz, 146, 154 far right, 6–7, 9, 13, 48, 49, 59–60, 96, 102, 105, 168, 180n6, 183n7, 184n16, 185n26, 186n33, 188n15 fascism, 13, 19, 48, 147 female genital mutilation (FGM), 9, 119, 121–3, 124, 187n6 feminism 9, 14, 109–34, 137, 186n1, 186nn3–4 anti-, 110, 116, 120–7, 128, 129–30, 134, 168 black, third world and postcolonial, 110, 123, 132, 188n16 colonial/imperial 113–15, 132, 142, 186n4, 187n9, 187n14 as ethical discourse, 9, 111, 118, 123, 128–33, 168 as humanitarian discourse, 9, 117–19, 124, 130, 168 mainstreaming of, 111–12 133, 134

216 Index feminism – continued as movement, 110, 113–14, 132, 186n1 as nationalist discourse, 9, 134, 187n14 as ‘progressive’ discourse, 9, 110, 130, 172 racialized, 9, 110, 114, 118, 120–1, 123–6, 128, 130, 134 state, 9, 109–34, 168, 183n11 universalist, 126, 131, 133–4 Ferguson, Niall, 56 Festival of Britain (1951), 72 Finlayson, Alan, 45, 105 First World War, 140 Flickr, 137 forced marriage, 9, 119, 120–3, 124, 125–6, 186n6 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), 69, 140, 149–50, 186n6 Foreign Policy Centre, 48 Fortier, Anne-Marie, 130, 179n12, 180n2, 190n16, 190n20 Foucault, Michel, 45, 81 France, 7, 16, 66, 128–9, 134, 188n16 Franklin, Jane, 112 Freud, Sigmund, 190n16 fundamentalism, 149, 159–60 G8, 57 Gaelic, 64, 67 Gedalof, Irene, 58, 127 Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, 46, 78, 80, 105 gender mainstreaming, 111–12 general election (1997), 33, 42–3, 44, 112 (2005), 31 Germany, 24, 66–7, 129, 159 Gilroy, Paul, 12, 27, 29, 33, 50–4, 180n7, 181n15, 181n17, 183n7 globalization, 5–7, 30, 44–6, 57, 175, 179n9 Goldberg, David Theo, 13, 15, 26, 123, 166, 171, 189n7 Golden Jubilee, 49 Goldsmith, Peter (Lord Goldsmith QC), 182n29

Good Friday Agreement (1998), 190n20 Goodhart, David, 48, 50, 60–1, 63, 88 government, 25, 31–2, 33, 42, 44, 47, 52, 56, 64, 68, 74, 77, 81, 87, 111, 146, 169, 183n8 governmentality, 45–6, 47, 63, 81, 84–6, 89, 93, 105–8, 175, 185n27 Gramsci, Antonio, 35–7, 109 Green, Rodney, 98 Gressgård, Randi, 125 Guardian, 137, 190n21 Habermas, Jurgen, 37, 147 Hage, Ghassan, 31, 59, 103, 166 Hall, Stuart, 21–2, 23, 35, 38, 55, 84, 163, 181n17 Hayes, Carlton, 182n28 Haylett, Chris, 105, 107, 185n28 Hazlitt, William, 54 headscarf, see veil ‘hearts and minds’, 149, 150 Hegel, G. W. F., 147 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 174 hegemony, 15, 36, 117, 130, 157, 170–1, 174–6, 191n6 Henderson, Arthur, 79 Hesse, Barnor, 24, 56, 125, 147, 177 Hewitt, Patricia, 118, 125–6 Hewitt, Roger, 185n22 Hindus, 138 Hizb ut-Tahrir, 154, 190n19 Hobsbawm, Eric, 47, 78, 147, 179n6 Holocaust, 24, 147 Home Office, 64, 101, 148, 149, 152, 183n8, 186n6 homosexuality, 187n10, 187n14, 190n20 ‘honour crimes’, 187n7 Howard, John, 182n26 Hughes, Beverley, 100 Human Rights Act (1998), 32, 126–7 humanitarian warfare, 117–19, 168 immigration, 5, 6, 26, 32, 41, 45, 58–60, 64, 66, 87, 98–9, 120, 126–7, 135, 147, 156–7, 187n6, 188n4

Index 217 imperialism, 118, 140, 161, 181n19, 187n14 British, 5, 8, 41, 49, 51–7, 58, 71, 73, 118, 136, 160, 167, 181nn19–20, 189n11 neo-, 56–7, 118, 181n16, 181n18 US, 118, 136, 138, 160, 189n11 see also postimperial Britain; ‘postimperial melancholia’ Independent, 190n21 intersectionality, 133–4 Invention of Tradition, The, 47 IRA (Irish Republican Army), 190n20 Iraq, 118, 138, 149, 150, 160, 161, 185n27 war (2003–), 57, 137, 138, 140–5, 147, 156, 158, 161, 188nn2–3, 190n14 Ireland, 42, 153 Islam, 7, 28, 121, 129, 136, 144–6, 147–50, 151, 154–5, 158–62, 187n10, 187n14, 188n5, 189n8, 189n11, 190n14, 190n18, 190n21 racialization of, 160, 188n5 Islamophobia, 29, 97, 139, 156, 190n21, 191n24 Israel, 149–50 Jacobsen, Christine, 125 Jewishness, 159 Jews, 24, 54, 135, 159–60, 191n23 John, Gus, 107–8 Johnson, Richard, 32 Joint Intelligence Committee, 140 Judaism, 159–60, 191n23 Kalra, Virinder, 90, 183n7 Kaplan, Gisela, 130 Keith, Michael, 84, 87, 100, 161, 183n7 Kelly, Ruth, 164–6 Keynesianism, 45, 61 Khan, Mohammad Sidique, 140–1, 143–4, 146, 149 Kinnock, Neil, 62 Kipling, Rudyard, 69–71 Kosovo, 118 Kundnani, Arun, 40, 94, 100, 185n26

labour movement, 37, 43, 50, 79 Labour Party, 31–2, 39, 43, 76, 79–80, 186n1; see also New Labour Laclau, Ernesto, 50–1, 103, 125, 174–5, 180n10, 191n6 laïcité, 8, 66, 128–9 Lamont, Norman, 180n9 Lancashire Evening Telegraph, 128 Lawrence, Stephen, 32, 179n11 Leitkultur, 8, 66–7 Leonard, Mark, 46–7, 48, 50 Levitas, Ruth, 55, 79–80, 82, 87, 183n5 Lewis, Oscar, 107 Lewisham, 69–70 liberal democracy, 24–6, 118, 124–5, 147, 159 Liberal Democrats, 31 liberalism, 22, 25–6 ‘new’, 180n7 social, 13–14 Livingstone, Ken, 138–9 Local Government Act (1966), 76 London bombings (2005), 7, 9, 135–62, 169, 189n8, 190n16, 190n20 as multicultural city, 138–43 nailbombings (1999), 190n20 ‘loony left’, 165 Lovenduski, Joni, 111–12 Lutz, Helma, 123–4, 126 Lyotard, Jean François, 17 McCarthyism, 148 Macmurray, John, 183n4 Macpherson Report, 32, 40, 180n9 Mactaggart, Fiona, 49 Madrid train bombings (2004), 138, 188n2 Malik, Kenan, 192n7 Malik, Shahid, 151 Mandelson, Peter, 95 Marshall, T. H., 61–2 Martin, Jeannie, 187n9 Marx, Karl, 135, 159–60, 178n3 Maynard, Mary, 28 Mercer, Kobena, 68 Merkel, Angela, 66 Middle East, 145, 149, 160, 189n9

218 Index Mill, John Stuart, 25–6, 189n7 Mills, Charles, 14, 18, 24, 26, 171, 191n4 Milton, John, 54 ‘model minorities’, 84 modernity, 24, 78, 121–2, 124, 179n7 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 123, 186n3 Mombassa bombing (2002), 138 moralism, 2, 172 Morin, Edgar, 187n13 Mouffe, Chantal, 80, 132, 174–5, 191n6 multicultural nationalism, 34–5, 38, 49, 109, 137, 144, 145, 146, 159, 160, 167, 168, 169, 179n12 multiculturalism ‘death of’, 10, 164–6 definition of, 1–7, 19–22 and the state, 22–7 Murji, Karim, 28–9 Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), 150, 190n14 Muslims, 10, 28, 29, 66, 97, 128–9, 131, 136, 138, 139, 140–1, 143, 144–5, 146, 148–51, 154–61, 169, 183n7, 188n16, 188n5, 189nn5–6, 191nn23–4 national anthem, 68–9, 70, 71, 180n8, 182n28 national curriculum, 62, 63, 72 national identity, 8, 37, 39–74, 120, 146, 167–8, 179n6, 180n5 crisis of, 67 rebranding, 45–7 see also Britishness nationalism, 5, 6, 8, 22–7, 34, 38, 39, 41, 47, 48–57, 59, 61, 68, 73, 130, 144, 147, 167, 176, 178n6, 179n7, 180nn6–7, 182n28 British, 39–74 liberal, 25–6 origins of, 178n6 pluralist, 9, 20, 39, 41, 47, 49, 136, 141, 143, 144, 149, 161, 167, 168, 170, 180n5 ‘progressive’, 48–51, 57, 60

racialized, 6, 24–5, 34, 38, 51, 72, 109 romantic, 48 and the state, 22–7, 36, 57, 167 US, 83 see also multicultural nationalism; transnationalism Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act (2002), 64 neoliberalism, 5–7, 8, 15, 32, 44–5, 103, 175, 179n9, 181n19 Netherlands, 123, 129 New East End, The, 103, 184n21 New Labour, 4, 5, 8, 32, 39, 41, 42–6, 47–8, 52, 62, 64, 77, 78–82, 84–9, 94, 96–7, 99, 101, 104, 106–8, 163, 165–7, 183nn4–5, 186n34, 190n14 government, 31, 33, 47, 64, 74, 87 leadership, 32, 79 and the state, 30–3, 41, 44, 105, 108, 166 see also Labour Party New Spirit of Capitalism, The, 15–17 Nkrumah, Kwame, 57 Notting Hill, 87, 180n8 Oldham, 86, 87, 92, 93, 184n16, 185n30 Olympics (2012), 49 ‘On the Jewish Question’, 159 Ong, Aihwa, 128 Orwell, George, 48, 54, 180n7 orientalism, 160, 189n9 Osman, Hussain, 191n22 Ousley Report, 87, 88, 97, 98, 183n8 Pakistani, 97, 157–8, 188n5 ‘parallel lives’, 90 Parekh, Bhikhu, 73, 120 Parekh Report, 31, 40, 180n2, 180n9 Parsons, Talcott, 61, 62 Passeron, Luc, 62 patriotism, 42, 48, 54, 74, 151, 157 Pautz, Hartwig, 66–7 Phillips, Deborah, 183n10 Phillips, Trevor, 73, 103, 160, 164–5 police, 139, 148, 153, 156, 157–8, 184n16, 187n6, 191n22

Index 219 political correctness (PC), 2–3, 165 postcolonial immigration, 5, 59, 76, 87 societies, 12, 51 postimperial Britain, 54, 56, 57 ‘postimperial melancholia’, 51–3, 56 post-industrial, 45, 85, 103 poverty, 104, 105–8, 168 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 120, 122, 130 Powell, Colin, 181n13 Prince Philip, Duke Of Edinburgh, 180n8 privatization, 6, 46, 57 Prospect, 41, 60 Putnham, Robert, 81, 84, 88, 182n3 Qaradawi, Yusuf al-, 149–50 Queen Elizabeth II, 68–9, 182n29

‘radical chic’, 161 Radio 4, 69 Rai, Milan, 140, 189n8 Raissiguier, Catherine, 188n16 Razack, Sherene, 187n7 refugees, 151, 154, 157, 181n22; see also asylum Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, 186n4 riots (2001), 8, 60, 77, 86–8, 90, 93–4, 95, 96, 100, 104, 106–7, 169, 183nn7–8, 184nn16–17, 185n25 Ritchie Report, 87, 183n8 Rose, Nikolas, 81, 85 Routledge, Paul, 181n14 Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), 140

race and class, 9, 30, 103–4, 105–8, 168, 183n10, 184n18, 184nn20–1, 186n33 and gender, 9, 109–34, 186n1, 187n9, 188n16 and nation, 23–7, 39–74, 180nn5–6, 180n9, 181n18, 181n20 and religion, 136–7, 143–6, 159–62, 188n5, 189n8, 189n11, 190n21, 191nn23–4 and the state, 27–30, 167 Race and Religious Hatred Act (2007), 189n12 race crisis, 8, 35–8, 109–10, 144, 149, 166 Race Relations (Amendment) Act (2000), 32 ‘race riots’, see riots (2001) racism as ‘dilemmatic’, 15, 18, 109 disavowal of, 14, 18, 55, 63, 109, 170–4, 178n2, 182n22, 191n2 institutional, 30, 32, 38, 40, 93, 96, 156 structural, 18, 29, 40, 93, 94, 96, 133, 166, 167, 184n15, 184n18 see also anti-racism

Saharso, Sawitri, 131 Sandercock, Leonie, 103 Saudi Arabia, 117 Sayyid, Bobby S., 145, 177 Schwarz, Bill, 35, 38 Scotland, 44, 179n12 Scottish (identity), 44 Second World War, 43, 44, 53–4, 139–40, 142, 147, 181n15 Secure Borders, Safe Haven (White Paper), 58, 64, 126 separatism, 90, 95–6, 105, 106 September 11, 121–2; see also 9/11; terrorist attacks on America (2001) sexual equality, 129, 134 discourse of, 92, 120, 126 Sinn Féin, 51 slavery, 5, 23, 55–6, 114, 147, 167, 181n13, 181n20 Smith, Anna Marie, 94, 180n10 socialism, 48, 183n4, 188n2 social capital, 81–2, 88 social cohesion, 1, 8, 46, 54, 60, 62, 67, 73–4, 77, 83, 84, 87, 88, 94, 98, 105, 108, 135 social movements, 32, 37, 82, 110, 170, 175–6, 192n6 social solidarity, see social cohesion Soho, 190n20

220 Index Solomos, John, 28–9, 32, 35–6, 76, 166, 183n7 Somalia, 157 South Asia, 160 South Asians, 188n5 Southall Black Sisters, 100 Spencer, Robert, 181n16 Spielberg, Steven, 56 Spirit of Community, The, 82, 88 state, importance of, 4, 22–7; see also feminism, state; nationalism and the state; New Labour and the state; race and the state Stockwell underground station, 157 stop and search, 148 Straw, Jack, 87, 128 Sun, 157 Taliban, 115–16, 118, 119 Tanzania, 52–3 Tavistock Square, 143 Taylor, Charles, 22 Taylor, David, 61 television, 39–40, 43, 65, 69 Terray, Emmanuel, 128–9 Terrorism Act (2006), 150, 190n19 Thatcher, Margaret, 80 Thatcherism, 37, 44, 79, 80, 82, 87 Third Way, The, 80, 82 Times, The, 137, 149, 190n21 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 46, 78, 80 Tories, see Conservative Party trades unions, 15, 65 transnationalism, 10, 144, 158–9, 160, 189n6, 189n8, 191n23 Uganda, 181n22 ummah, 144–5, 146, 160, 189n8, 191n23 underclass, 105, 107–8, 168, 187n28 Union Jack, 33, 43, 49, 68, 74 unionism, 44, 46, 179n12 United States of America, 9, 47, 52, 81, 82, 83, 107, 115–16, 135–7, 147–8, 159, 181n13, 189n9, 189n11 foreign policy, 7, 116, 185n27

nationalism, 62, 83 terrorist attacks on (2001), 115, 116, 135, 137, 159 veil, 9, 29, 116, 117, 128–9, 130 Verloo, Mieke, 112 voluntary association, 81–2, 90, 100 Walby, Sylvia, 111 Wales, 44 War on Terror, 7, 10, 115, 117, 135–62, 165, 166, 169, 176, 187n14, 188n5, 189n7, 189n9, 189n11, 190n18, 190n20, 191n24 Webb, Sydney, 79 welfare state, 60–1, 103, 105–8, 186n34 Welsh (identity), 44 Welsh (language), 64, 67 ‘white flight’, 91 white working class, 9, 77, 95–108, 168, 184n12, 184n18, 184n21, 185n22, 185n24, 186n33 whiteness identity crisis, 103 proprietorial, 59 ‘white ethnicity’, 9, 77, 99, 101–5, 106–7, 168, 184n18 Wilberforce, William, 55 Wills, Michael, 181n14 Wilson, Harold, 43 Wordsworth, William, 54 World Service, 69 Wray, Matt, 102, 185n23 Wright, Patrick, 43 Ye˘ geno˘ glu, Meyda, 122 Yugoslavia, 57 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 61, 115, 127 Zapatero, José Rodríguez, 188n2 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, 103, 192n7 Zolo, Danilo, 117, 130, 161

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