multiculturalism | ukwatch.net

The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain

JamieSW — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 10:40:48 +0000

The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain
Arun Kundnani, 2007, Pluto Press, ISBN 978-0-7453-2645-0

For all the time that politicians, columnists and activists spend discussing it, racism is seldom defined with any precision or accuracy, or indeed in any way that might inculcate an awareness of its complex, multiple nature and origins. It’s most often understood simply (and yet very specifically) as discrimination, by an individual, on the basis of another individual’s skin colour. Sir William Macpherson’s report into ‘matters arising’ from the murder of Stephen Lawrence asserted that this discrimination may be practised, fostered or encouraged, even unwittingly, by institutions as well as individuals; a fairly mild, reasonably obvious statement, which nonetheless seemed to create consternation at the time.1

But Macpherson’s slight extension of racism’s mode of operation (refuted, at any rate, soon afterwards by the government who caused it to be written2) brings us no closer to describing what racism actually is, if indeed it’s more than just simple discrimination. Racism can be construed as an effect, arising from a broad range of conditions of disparity: historical, economic, ideological, and crudely political. In this interpretation, it is the expression of all of these conditions, and as such it is ultimately symptomatic of the inequalities inherent in what we now call ‘the global order’. But racism can simultaneously be understood to lie within the originary inequality itself, to be implicated at the cause, in the rationale lying behind policy and law; so it is in its nature cyclical – as a system of belief, a way of thinking difference, it is implicit in the basic legal and social structure of our modern state, and, expressed as a set of behaviours, it is then perpetuated by this structure.

One of the most persuasive and accessible historians of the roots and forms of racism, Paul Gilroy, emphasises what he terms ‘racialisation’, the ideological and historical processes by which thinking in terms of race became first possible, then predominant, and finally unavoidable.3 Gilroy details a history of ‘racialised thinking’, the positing of a type of ineluctable difference determined by biological categories of race. The basis of racism lies in this troubled history of the thinking of the concept of race itself. But this thinking is not static, and nor are the social contexts upon which it is brought to bear; so biological race is inflected now as cultural or ethnic difference, and is no less irreducible. As Kundnani points out,

“… race is a socially constructed concept that is both wider in its range and more profoundly rooted in the history of the nation than is commonly supposed. Moreover, the restriction of the concept of racism to ‘colour’ difference has concealed the full range of ways in which racism has operated in Britain, including against Jews, Gypsies and the Irish.”4

This is extremely pertinent to any current discussion of racism, which is now, in Britain as elsewhere, overwhelmingly directed against Muslims. Columnists and commentators of many political persuasions pronounce that anti-Muslim sentiment is not racism at all, since Islam is a religion, not a race; such argument betrays not only an ignorance of the workings, history and logic of racism, contemporary or otherwise, but also an adherence to a rather literal and outdated concept of ‘race’. As a legitimation of discrimination in law and vilification in society, anti-Muslim racism is every bit as real as the anti-Semitic racism that was propagated so blithely by the British rightwing press of the 1930s.

In order to substantiate this already complex definition of racism, one must also account for the way in which relations of power are implicated in racism. Racism (as effect) is the public enactment of a prior disparity of power between one group and another; indeed, far from being ‘anti-social’, racism is a violent demonstration that this disparity has already been sanctioned, historically, within society and the state.5 Most often, a group that experiences racism has received its identification, its definition as a coherent group, from the powerful group (it has been ‘overdetermined from without’), in order that it can be ‘acted upon’. (And, as Kundnani demonstrates, this identification can change to suit current policy: in the late 1990s, second- and third-generation British Pakistanis found that they had ceased to be ‘Asian’ and had become ‘Muslims’.) But racism is not merely the expression of this power relationship (calling someone a ‘black bastard’); for the power relationship is itself shaped and defined by racism. This is why, within a British context, anti-white feeling amongst, say, black or Asian groups cannot be called ‘black on white racism’: because the unequal relationship that defines racism is entirely absent in this situation.6

It might appear that The End of Tolerance is about far more than just racism; but then, racism itself is about far more than ‘just racism’. The task that Kundnani sets himself is to guide us through the many contributory factors to 21st-century British racism, to show how old arguments are given new articulation, how, in the process, racism becomes more, not less institutionalised, its causes becoming more tortuously misrepresented, and how, as a consequence, its comprehension grows more difficult. Most significantly, and most damningly, he examines rigorously the contribution made by government. Whilst any citizen of average intelligence is aware of the essential duplicity of their government, it is nevertheless extremely disturbing to realise, as one reads the book, the extent to which government action and policy – sometimes knowingly pernicious, sometimes merely feckless and populist – has been the single most active agent in the promulgation of a new racism. To this end, he describes in turn the details and effects of New Labour’s radical restructuring of immigration, asylum and nationality law; its reckless and calamitous foreign policy (both before and after the 11th of September 2001); its repressive and cavalier instincts in criminal justice; its contempt for international conventions and doctrines of universal human rights; its subservience to globalised corporate interests very often in direct conflict with the interests of British citizens; and its framing of, and pandering to, a populist agenda around issues of cultural identity, in the interests of maintaining its electoral base with white middle-class voters.

A picture emerges of policy and legislation that, accustomed as we are to viewing it always through the exigencies of the current moment, is usually only visible in fragments: the disparate statements and actions, consultation documents and acts of parliament are considered in painstaking detail, and one starts to appreciate that, incrementally, an entire regime of racist ideology has been constructed over the last decade, one which goes further in terms of law and consequence than anything enacted by the governments of Thatcher or Major (whose own more overtly racist, but, in many ways, less thoroughly invasive and far-reaching policies the Labour opposition of the time regularly spoke and voted against).

Multiculturalism

A great angst is at large in the country at present, amongst government ministers in particular, about communities (almost always Muslim) who ‘refuse’ to ‘integrate’ into British society and culture: they speak their own languages, at home and on the street; they follow an alien religion; they wilfully dress, eat and behave differently; and they live in ‘no-go’ areas that ‘British people’ (that is, white Britons) are afraid of entering. The main problem with this overall diagnosis lies not in its individual inaccuracies, but in the inference drawn: that these communities have willingly cut themselves off from the ‘shared values’ of society, that they are an alien and potentially hostile presence living amongst the host community (a phrase which carries obvious and intentional connotations of parasitism), and that we should not be expected to tolerate this any longer, as we have done, so blindly, for so many decades. After all (it is argued) it is precisely this toleration, under the guise of multiculturalism, which brought us to this situation in the first place.
There are a great many misrepresentations in this set of attitudes. Small distortions are piled upon greater falsifications to create a thoroughly mendacious, thoroughly racist picture of minority communities in Britain, and their situations and concerns. The notion that multiculturalism ‘allowed’ communities to ‘self-segregate’, by encouraging the expression of their culture on an equal footing, is one of a series of reversals of cause and effect that render the argument fairly worthless. As Kundnani writes,

“… the policies that were implemented in the 1980s in the name of multiculturalism were a mode of control rather than a line of defence. Multiculturalism in this sense referred to a set of policies directed towards taking African-Caribbean and Asian cultures off the streets – where they had been politicised and turned into rebellions against the state – and putting them in the council chamber, in the classroom and on television, where they could be institutionalised, managed and commodified. Black culture was turned from a living movement into an object of passive contemplation, something to be ‘celebrated’ rather than acted upon. The method for achieving this was the separation of different ethnic groups into distinct cultural blocs, to be managed by a new cadre of ethnically defined ‘community leaders’, and the rethinking of race relations in terms of a view of cultural identity that was rigid, closed and almost biological…7”

By refocusing communities on a politics of competitive recognition, multiculturalism had the desired effect of fragmenting a broad-based movement that had, by the time of the Brixton, Handsworth and Toxteth riots of 1981, become a dangerous challenge to state authority. “The often conservative community leaderships tried to insulate their clans from the wider world, not… to strengthen group identity… but rather to protect the structures on which their power depended. Ethnic identity became an escape from a racist society rather than the basis for a challenge to it.”8

So a partial segregation of minority communities, who were kept at arm’s length both from the ‘centre’ and from one another, was one of the consequences of multiculturalism9; this was exacerbated, particularly in northern England, by a combination of rapid industrial decline and openly discriminatory housing policies, which led to workers and families who had previously been side by side in the same mills, factories and streets gradually being screened out to separate parts of town. Over time, in towns like Oldham or Bradford, this division became entrenched and self-perpetuating; damp, cramped ghettoes, centred around the Victorian back-to-backs vacated by rehoused white families, at least offered some safety for Asians who didn’t wish to risk racist attacks on the overwhelmingly white estates. The 1988 Education Act and its doctrine of parental choice further encouraged segregation; infamously, a year earlier, parents in Dewsbury had set up their own ‘white’ school in a room above a pub, on the grounds that their local school had too many Asian students.

This portrayal of two decades of managed, multifaceted discrimination as self-segregation, a refusal to integrate, and as something which is therefore the fault of the communities in question, is typical of the insidious nature of contemporary racism. Its apparently ‘commonsensical’ explanation of the segregation that clearly exists is also difficult to counter. Through careful, detailed argument, Kundnani turns the proposition on its head: it was neither state pandering to cultural difference, nor unwillingness to mix, that led to our segregated cities and society; rather, it was years of conscious, racist manipulation and exclusion of communities, conducted for short-term political advantage.

The demand now made of these communities is that they surrender their obstinate difference and declare their allegiance to as-yet-undefined ‘British values’ (as far as they can be identified, these seem, paradoxically, to be the very ‘values’ attacked in successive government legislation over the last decade). That the call for integration must simultaneously be accompanied by an agonised quest to invent a ‘British’ identity into which to integrate is, in the circumstances, only mildly amusing. The current focus on Muslim communities’ non-integration is of course sharpened by the supposed threat they pose – a threat upon which there seems to be consensus across the political spectrum. Kundnani develops this: “What had before been interpreted as a problem of Asians living in separate cultures has, since 9/11, been taken to be a problem of Muslims living by separate values.”10

If the very existence of cultural diversity within the nation has now come to be perceived as a threat, what hope is there for anti-racism? The type of pluralist solidarity that Kundnani calmly advocates now seems tantamount, in the state’s terms, to a call for bloody racial rioting on the streets of Britain. Clearly, the potential for collective action is severely restricted by the demonisation and suspicion directed at British Muslims (who can nowadays only be framed in a positive manner when they are supporting spurious government-authored definitions of ‘moderate Islam’, and thus attacking the externally perceived and misrepresented ills of their community). Kundnani notes that, today, “ ‘anti-racism’ is reduced to a conflict-management exercise carried out by the state, which does not grasp the underlying causes of racism and leaves existing power relationships in place.”11 One could comment that the state grasps the underlying causes of racism only too well.

The distorted debate over integration has a corollary, which has also been discussed with tedious regularity lately, the issue of religious tolerance. Just as the state now depicts Islam as uniquely anti-democratic, violent and authoritarian, and therefore the ‘enemy within’ British society, so a raft of ‘secularists’ of various persuasions argue that it is directly opposed to the very Enlightenment values that define and guarantee the rights and freedoms that we in the West cherish. For both parties, the fact that the men who bombed London on the 7th of July 2005 were born and raised in this country adds to the apparent urgency of delivering this challenge to Islam. Notwithstanding the fact that these defenders of ‘the Enlightenment’ rarely acknowledge the limits of their own positivistic world view (Theodor Adorno was not the only Western citizen to suppose that imperialism, totalitarianism and the gas chambers were a culmination of scientific rationalism, rather than its monstrous, aberrant deviation), the broader question that this raises concerns the nature of solidarity. We find ourselves in a pale re-enactment of the political territory of the 1960s and ’70s, when the British Left was perfectly happy to welcome immigrant communities under its umbrella, so long as their ‘sectional’, identitarian demands could be made subservient to the movement’s programmatic ‘universalism’.

For ‘integrationist feminists’ as Kundnani calls them, denouncing practices such as wearing the veil, forced marriage and ‘honour killing’ (usually the only examples of the patriarchal nature of Islamic culture that these commentators can cite, because they are the most visible to the outsider, and so are disproportionately reported in the media), “combating violence against Muslim women is seen as fighting against a culture, while combating violence against white women is seen as a fight for rights”.12 Kundnani points out that denunciation of inequality in Muslim communities almost never amounts to actual solidarity with women’s groups within those communities. And when the government chose to target forced marriage, instead of working with Muslim women, “solutions were sought in tightening up immigration controls; those trying to escape abusive marriages faced the threat of deportation rather than support and protection”.13

“Renunciation of one’s identity becomes a prerequisite for emancipation, and a new kind of superiority is entrenched in the name of feminism. State coercion is then justified as a possible means for bringing about this “emancipation”… Behind this “integrationist feminism” lies the tendency to regard the West as the sole bearer of enlightened progress and the European Enlightenment, not as one particular expression of universal values, but as the only possible expression for all time.”14

Kundnani argues, fairly vaguely at times, it must be said, for a pluralist tolerance which can make this kind of ‘cultural supremacy’ obsolete, but the question that remains unanswered is whether one can voice disapproval of, or disagreement with, Islamic religious culture without automatically being co-opted into a mainstream ‘secularist Enlightenment’ agenda. The answer may lie in a reappraisal of the question; or rather, in stating that another question might be both more pressing and more revealing. Why is it that a defence of the ‘progressive’ gains of bourgeois Western society necessarily involves an attack, specifically and most immediately, on Islam, rather than on any of the reactionary tendencies in our own culture? It often appears that much of this attention is the result of ignorance and laziness, an uncritical rush to ‘comment’ on whatever appears to be most topical. Furthermore, it’s at least arguable that to set out one’s secularist or socialist argument solely in reference to the predominant, stereotypical portrayal of the repressive, alien nature of Islam is itself reactionary: it further alienates the very individuals struggling to build progressive politics from the basis of their membership of the Muslim community. This isn’t in any way a renunciation of the responsibility to criticise or to analyse, for fear of somehow causing offence. It’s simply a caution that anti-racism – the central, most fundamental element of any progressive politics – must be based on solidarity, and that solidarity requires a relationship between equals.

“In a context in which anti-Muslim racism is institutionalised by the ‘war on terror’, it is natural and necessary that Muslims organise as Muslim in fighting the specific racism they face. Confronted by an intensely anti-Muslim political culture, Muslims cannot be expected to leave their religious identity behind when they enter the public sphere. To do so would only reinforce the mistaken belief that there is an incompatibility between Islam and democracy.”15

Globalisation

British racism cannot be understood only in the context of conditions within Britain, and the larger part of Kundnani’s book sets about putting these conditions in the setting of the global factors that nourish racism everywhere. Ultimately, his plea is for a particular form of ‘global citizenship’, as the only ethical response to the structural inequalities of a world where corporations move capital unimpeded across borders and between territories, while nation states police the movement of people across the same borders.

Throughout, Kundnani combines historical overview with analysis of contemporary situations. So, for example, accounts of postwar immigration from the Commonwealth, the origins of International Monetary Fund (IMF) ‘structural adjustment’ programmes in the Third World, and historical conflicts in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan give important context to discussions of the development of present-day asylum and immigration law and foreign policy priorities. This gives Kundnani’s argument depth and authority, even if it can sometimes make the forces he describes seem depressingly unassailable. Many contemporary polemics fail adequately to historicise the mysterious and vaguely-defined phenomena that comprise globalisation; Kundnani’s measured descriptions of its origins and evolution make his work a valuable corrective. He describes the way in which IMF and World Bank debt ‘restructuring’ packages have repeatedly impoverished debtor nations and helped to breed repressive regimes, friendly to neo-colonial political and business interests, from Suharto in Indonesia, to Pinochet in Chile, Moi in Kenya and Abacha in Nigeria. He details how the US and UK over decades selectively sponsored other brutal administrations in Africa and the Middle East for the purposes of immediate regional leverage, only to turn away refugees subsequently displaced by conflict in those states. And through all such considerations he underlines the convergence of Western corporate and political interests at the global level.

This is most clearly the case in chapters on immigration, asylum and the ‘market-state’. Analysing the four major pieces of immigration legislation put onto the statute books by New Labour, Kundnani demonstrates how the treatment of refugees has deteriorated rapidly in ten years.16 During this decade, successive Home Secretaries have striven for two ends. Firstly, they have attempted to make conditions here so unattractive to potential refugees that they are deterred from attempting to come. Presumably, this is in large measure a populist approach, since the Home Office’s own research accepts that those fleeing their homes halfway round the world have very little knowledge of provision available here, and choose a destination based instead on existing or previous connections with a country, and perceptions of it as safe.17 Under Section 62 of the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act, the Home Secretary has the power arbitrarily to detain an asylum seeker until the settlement of their case (this is euphemistically referred to as the ‘fast-track procedure’); an enlargement of the Home Office’s estate of detention centres was announced in May 2008. At any time, around two-thirds of those in detention under Immigration Act powers are asylum seekers, and roughly five per cent of all asylum seekers are in detention centres.18 Statistics do not even exist for the numbers kept in prisons or police cells.

Secondly, entry into the UK for those without papers has been made much more difficult. Former Home Secretary Jack Straw, quoted by Kundnani, comments that the Geneva Convention “gives us the obligation to consider any claims made within our territory… but no obligation to facilitate the arrival on our territory of those who wish to make a claim”.19 Nearly all refugees will only be able to have their case considered once they have arrived in the UK. “And the only way they can do that is by some form of clandestine entry into the country: either stowing away in a lorry or boat, clambering on the undercarriage of a moving Channel Tunnel train or using forged documents.”20 And whilst, in theory, Article 31 of the Geneva Convention recognises that illegal entry of a country is sometimes necessary for persons escaping persecution, the government continues to criminalise those who are forced to use people traffickers to get to the UK. Furthermore, “those asylum seekers who do travel to the UK legally with a valid passport are told by the Home Office that they could not be a genuine refugee, on the assumption that the authorities in the home country would refuse to allow a genuine dissident to obtain one.”21 Roughly two-thirds of all asylum applications are refused, even in many cases where the applicants have independently verified proof of torture. Out of 380 decisions made on applications by Iraqis in the first quarter of 2008, 280 were refusals.22

If the government’s approach to asylum has the effect of giving trade to the people traffickers, so too does the market’s continued demand for low-paid, unprotected labour; many failed asylum seekers, driven into destitution by the summary withdrawal of support and unable to return home, find themselves working illegally, with no rights and no legal protections. Others come expressly to work for ‘gang bosses’ in the agricultural industries, and find that after ‘deductions’ for accommodation and transport to work every day, they have next to nothing to live on (not that there is much living to be done after an 18-hour day picking crops). The new five-tier, points-based ‘managed migration’ system is supposed to streamline entry into the UK for those coming to work, but it institutes a ‘guest-worker’ system under which low-skilled workers will have limited or no access to employment protection during their stay in the country, and on termination of their contract will have no right to remain. Migrants are now valued only as economic assets: there must be free movement of ‘labour’ – that is, of individuals as productive resources, servicing the demands of the ‘flexible’ marketplace wherever it may need them – but the right of individuals to live safely, free from persecution, must be restricted and rationalised as much as possible.
The effect of an asylum policy principally aimed at deterring applicants, of failed claimants becoming destitute in large numbers, and of low-paid, unprotected workers finding themselves constantly on the brink of illegality, is the effective criminalisation of large numbers of non-EU migrants. The supposed ‘proud tradition’ of Britain’s welcome to the displaced of the world (something of a myth to begin with, as many Jews fleeing Nazi Germany or East African Asians escaping Idi Amin could testify) is reduced to a squalid, dehumanising numbers game, with the government eagerly setting itself targets for numbers it will deport by the end of the year.

The precise details of ministerial statements on the imminent existential threat posed by immigration, even those that gain some brief notoriety, have the habit of slipping from public consciousness very shortly after they’ve disappeared from the headlines and opinion columns. Successive acts of parliament redefine the territory until it’s unclear which rights exist and which have been repealed, who is welcome and who unwelcome. What persists, what is nurtured, is a generalised, non-specific fear and paranoia. The asylum seeker, the illegal immigrant, the economic migrant, all these various ‘underclasses’ of non-citizen or para-citizen come to represent the same thing: a gathering, innumerable encroachment, threatening the fragile ‘being’ of the state. The great merit of Kundnani’s work is his ability to trace the connections between the domestic contexts of racism and the many aspects that bear down on the discussion, and legislation, of immigration and asylum. Likewise, chapters linking Britain’s foreign policy adventures and their aftermaths (current, recent and more distant), with the progressive withdrawal of civil rights, the extension of arbitrary executive powers to detain and deport, and the new regime of control orders and internment, illustrate the bluntly racist motivations behind an extraordinarily repressive array of measures.

Nevertheless there are problems with the book, mostly editorial in nature. Many of the book’s different chapters originated as articles for Race & Class, of which Kundnani is editor. The original articles, closely argued, densely substantiated pieces of sociological research, could have been more extensively reworked to make them fit together better: the book’s 200 pages feel longer, partly because of the book’s great scope, but also because its chapters jump between complex topics fairly unpredictably. Also, because of the essentially hermetic nature of each chapter, there’s a certain amount of repetition or, conversely, spreading of related information between disparate chapters. There is a certain chronology imposed on the contents, but this soon becomes lost because of the number of subjects tackled by Kundnani in his twelve chapters. Closer editorial attention might also have achieved a greater evenness of tone throughout: some chapters begin with extensive historical or contextual notes (which in places, such as the first chapter, read like a school history textbook), and move to personalised ‘case study’ illustrations of the topic at hand, statistical or quantitative analysis, or passionate polemic. Kundnani is a sociologist first and foremost, and his expertise is the book’s strength, but he is also a perceptive and persuasive activist-writer, and he (or his editors) perhaps should have decided who might be the book’s primary audience.

There’s a narrowness to his terms of reference too, no doubt due in part to his social scientist’s suspicion of the ‘cultural turn’ in the politics of race and class. His cursory, two-page summary of everything in postcolonial theory from Stuart Hall to Homi Bhabha does him no favours (Gilroy doesn’t warrant a single mention); whilst it’s true that postcolonial critics challenged the ‘politically black’ identity of the 1970s (the discarding of which he presents as a uniquely retrograde step), just as they challenged all such overarching categorisations of identity, the solidarity of broad interests of culture, race and class that he espouses would be supported by those critics too; and ‘political blackness’ was already under attack, as he himself shows, from other directions. At this point his history is less than complete.

Finally, and most surprisingly, there are some basic errors in the use of statistics: in chapter 10, for example, he quotes Home Office asylum figures for the second quarter of 2006 to show the number of asylum seekers in detention, but reads the wrong column: “by June 2006, there were 2,285 being held in detention centres, despite a lower rate of asylum claims than in 1997”.23 There were indeed 2,285 people detained under Immigration Act powers as of the 24th of June 2006, but only 1,705 of these had ever sought asylum at any stage. This is a small, and perhaps quite pedantic quibble, but any text that straddles a line between pure sociology and anti-racist activism needs to be doubly sure of its numbers: it’s the easiest way for an opponent to discredit the whole enterprise.

Universal rights

“… asylum seekers do not ask for British charity; they claim rights as global citizens in an age when the national sovereignty of poorer nations has been eroded. Through its part in the empire of global capitalism, Britain carries with it a profound obligation to today’s migrants… It is an obligation that runs through the dirty politics of sponsoring foreign regimes that oppress their own people, in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and elsewhere… It runs through the wealth that Britain continues to extract from Africa and Asia… Ultimately, it is an obligation to treat today’s migrants, not as scroungers or opportunists or victims of some self-created calamity of which little is known, but as global citizens. It is in the very processes of globalising capitalism, which Britain has led and profited from, that their global citizenship derives.24

It turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their human rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them… The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human.”25

Hannah Arendt’s words of half a century ago seem to ring with a new urgency (but nothing in this discussion is really new, just endlessly revisited; the phrase ‘never again’ really must be the most callous irony, the rhetorical equivalent of putting one’s hands over one’s eyes and ears). The governments of highly-developed nations carry out foreign invasions in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’ – in the name, that is, of abstracted ‘human rights’, belonging to no-one and yet ultimately enforceable; at the same time, they abnegate their duty to protect those made destitute and stateless by their actions, and raise the possibility of ‘opting out’ of the Geneva Convention on Refugees (where extra-territorial rights were defined and promised for the first time), or the European Convention on Human Rights, because they no longer feel the lavish protections they afford are ‘appropriate’ to our age, with its new security concerns. As Arendt so mordantly points out, one’s universal rights are only an issue when it is finally impossible to protect them.

We might follow Slavoj Zizek in arguing that we must not therefore dismiss human rights as “a reified fetish”, well-intended but worthless: rather, this stage of globalised neocolonial capitalism is precisely the point at which these rights can posit the political space proper, the point at which the individual subject – the refugee, the internee, the illegal worker – is able to assert their exclusion, their statelessness, their absolute repudiation, as the only meaningful point from which to assert the “universality of the social itself”: and they become the universal political subject.26 On these terms, it could not be more essential for anti-racists in Britain to build positions of solidarity with those struggling to make this most fundamental of assertions, for the sake of every subject.

1. Sir William Macpherson (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry (London: The Stationery Office), http://www.archive.officialdocuments.co.uk/document/cm42/4262/4262.htm.

2. Kundnani quotes former Home Secretary David Blunkett, who in 2003 told Black and Asian Home Office workers that ‘institutional racism’ was ‘a slogan’ that ‘missed the point’. Kundnani, p. 131.
3. See particularly Gilroy (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (London: Verso) and (2000) Between Camps (London: Allen Lane).
4. Kundnani, p. 15.
5. Of course, certain types of crude, overtly racist behaviour are (often somewhat belatedly and begrudgingly) outlawed by the State, but this apparent paradox simply testifies to the gulf that can exist between appearance and actuality: whilst racialised thinking underpins the workings of the State, the government can distance itself from the ‘working out’ of this thinking, separating cause from effect in a manner that we shall return to later.
6. As has been exhaustively argued elsewhere, white people’s act of identifying themselves ‘as white’ is, in a curious way, an act of disidentification, of claiming to have no race, much in the same way as individuals often presume themselves to have no accent. See Theodore W. Allen (1994) The Invention of the White Race: Volume One; Racial Oppression and Social Control (London: Verso); Alastair Bonnett (2000) White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (Harlow: Prentice Hall); David Roediger (1991) The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, Verso). Also see Suzanna Chan (2005) ‘Some notes on deconstructing Ireland’s Whiteness: Immigrants, emigrants and the perils of jazz’, Variant 22, available at http://www.variant.randomstate.org/22texts/Whiteness.html; and the journal Race Traitor, available at http://racetraitor.org.
7. Kundnani, pp. 44-45.
8. Ibid., p. 45.
9. For a further consideration of the history and problematics of multiculturalism, see Daniel Jewesbury (2006) ‘Show some disrespect!’ in Mute 2:2, available online at http://www.metamute.org/en/show-some-disrespect
10. Ibid., p. 127.
11. Ibid., p. 133.
12. Ibid., p. 138.
13. Ibid., p. 139.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., pp. 185-186.
16. The four acts are, in order of implementation, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 and the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006. Multiple Statutory Instruments have also been passed under the terms of these acts, for example, those providing for the ‘fast-track’ asylum procedure and the new five-tiered points-based managed migration system.
17. See Kundnani, p. 77.
18. Home Office Research Development Statistics (2008) Asylum Statistics: First Quarter 2008, at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/asylumq108.pdf.
19. Kundnani, p. 68.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 69.
22. Home Office, op. cit.
23. Kundnani, p. 159.
24. Ibid., p. 71.
25. Hannah Arendt (1958) The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books), pp. 292-297
26. Slavoj Zizek (2005) ‘Against Human Rights’, in New Left Review no. 34, p.131. Available to download free at http://libcom.org/library/against-human-rights-zizek.

How thinktanks shape the agenda on Muslims in Britain

JamieSW — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:19:36 +0000

Over the last two months, a number of writers, journalists and policymakers associated with the Policy Exchange (PX) thinktank have taken up key positions on Boris Johnson’s London mayoral team. The most prominent of these appointments is that of former Times journalist Anthony Browne, who became policy director at City Hall in July 2008. Browne has been PX’s director since 2007 and is tipped for a senior role at Downing Street in any future Cameron government.

Founded in 2002, PX is regarded as having a considerable influence on David Cameron’s repositioning of the Conservatives as progressive and liberal, particularly on issues to do with multiculturalism and the ‘war on terror’. Two events in 2005 transformed the way that Conservatives present themselves on ‘race and immigration’ issues. Their general election defeat in that year led to a reluctance to repeat Michael Howard’s strategy of making immigration a key campaigning issue. And the London bombings a few weeks later shifted the focus from immigration per se onto questions of Muslims in particular, multiculturalism and Britishness – issues that PX has pursued vigorously since then.

The critique of multiculturalism

In the past, liberals tended to support multicultural policies while conservatives saw multiculturalism as a threat to national cohesion and social order. Since 7/7, many liberals have joined with conservatives in thinking that multicultural tolerance has gone too far and that the failure to defend western values has fostered ‘Islamic extremism’ leading, ultimately, to the creation of British suicide bombers. PX has led the way in promoting this argument across the political spectrum. Its critiques have focused not just on multiculturalism but also on the Muslim political leadership which multiculturalism has given rise to, in particular the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).

In 2006, PX published a major report on the MCB, entitled When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, criticising its ‘known links to the ideology of radical Islamism’.1 Following this report, Labour government ministers began to distance themselves from the MCB and promoted the Sufi Muslim Council as an alternative Muslim representative organisation that was more supportive of western foreign policy. The importance of these issues for Cameron’s ‘modernised’ Conservative Party was also highlighted by the report’s author, New Statesman political editor Martin Bright, who noted the willingness of the ‘Tory progressives at Policy Exchange’ to take up the issues and the ‘signs that the reformist Cameron wing of the Conservative Party’ would pursue them.

In January 2007, PX released a far more wide-ranging report on Muslims and multiculturalism, entitled Living Apart Together. Billed as an attempt to find ‘the reasons why there has been a significant rise in Islamic fundamentalism amongst the younger generation’, its answer was that multiculturalism and Britain’s failure to assert the superiority of its national values had encouraged young Muslims to feel victimised and adopt anti-western views.2 The report was released to the press to coincide with a speech by David Cameron attacking multiculturalism and Muslim ‘extremists’ who seek ‘special treatment’. A policy document published simultaneously by the Tories suggested that the MCB was dominated by such ‘separatism’.3 Munira Mirza, a co-author of the PX report, is now working as Boris Johnson’s director of arts.

Later in the same year, PX published a report on ‘extremist literature’ which claimed that ‘radical material’ was being distributed in a quarter of Britain’s mosques and called for greater regulation and a new ‘gold standard’ to promote a ‘moderate Islam’.4 The report was criticised by a BBC Newsnight investigation which suggested that book receipts collected by PX researchers had been faked.

Anthony Browne’s writings over the last six years exemplify this shift in emphasis from a general concern with ‘Third World immigration’ to a focus on Muslims in Britain. In August 2002, Browne wrote an article for The Times entitled ‘Britain is losing Britain’ in which he stated that ‘an unprecedented and sustained wave of immigration [is] utterly transforming the society in which we live against the wishes of the majority of the population, damaging quality of life and social cohesion, exacerbating the housing crisis and congestion’. He added that ‘in the past five years, while the white population grew by 1 per cent, the Bangladeshi community grew by 30 per cent, the black African population by 37 per cent and the Pakistani community by 13 per cent’; what he called ‘little Third World colonies’ had appeared in Britain.5 A few months later, Browne wrote in the Spectator (then edited by Boris Johnson) that ‘it is not through letting in terrorists that the government’s policy of mass immigration – especially from the Third World – will claim the most lives. It is through letting in too many germs.’6

Following 7/7, Anthony Browne turned his attention to what he called Islamic ‘fascism’. Political correctness, he argued, had ‘allowed the creation of alienated Muslim ghettoes which produce young men who commit mass murder against their fellow citizens’.7 Groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, he said, are ‘like Hitler’ and Islamic ‘fascism’ has taken root in Britain because of the Left’s failure to break down Muslim separatism. The response to 7/7 must be a clamp down on arranged marriages, the deportation of imams who support the Muslim Brotherhood and possibly a French-style ban on the hijab in schools.8

Similarly, Charles Moore, the current chairman of PX and a former editor of the Telegraph and the Spectator, gave a speech in March 2008 outlining a ‘possible conservative approach to the question of Islam in Britain’. The government, he argued, should maintain a list of Muslim organisations which, while not actually inciting violence, ‘nevertheless advocate such anti-social attitudes that they should not receive public money or official recognition’ – in this category would fall any groups with links to the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jamaati-e-Islami, as well as individuals, such as Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss philosopher and fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford.9

Finally, there is Michael Gove, a founding chairman of PX and one of the young Conservative MPs who make up David Cameron’s shadow cabinet. In his 2006 book Celsius 7/7, Gove defines ‘Islamism’ as an ideology that is similar to fascism and includes Tariq Ramadan as a follower. He states that in the war against ‘Islamism’, it will be necessary for Britain to carry out assassinations of terrorist suspects, in order to send ‘a vital signal of resolution’. More generally, a ‘temporary curtailment of liberties’ will be needed to prevent Islamism from destroying western civilisation.10 Fellow Tories regard Gove as a leading expert on Muslims in Britain.

Reviving the cold war

What Browne’s, Moore’s and Gove’s comments illustrate is the attempt to justify illberal policies in the name of defending ‘liberal’ western values against an alien ‘totalitarian’ threat. This is the paradoxical project that is now the major theme of centre-Right thinking on multiculturalism and the ‘war on terror’. Indeed, the debate on multiculturalism has become a part of what many regard as a new ‘cultural’ cold war to promote a ‘moderate’ (i.e. pro-western) Islam across the globe – and particularly in Europe. This is a model that has been endorsed by Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has spoken of a new cold war against ‘Muslim extremism’, fought through the ‘soft power’ of cultural influence.11 The role of thinktanks would then not only be to supply political parties with policy suggestions but also to popularise the idea of ‘Islamism’ as an existential threat to the West that requires a hardline, Cold War-style response. As Dean Godson, a research director at PX who has strong links to well-known Washington neoconservatives, wrote in 2006: ‘During the Cold War, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence.’12

Encounter, of course, was covertly funded by the CIA. But Godson’s suggestion has been taken up with the launch of Standpoint magazine, published by another thinktank, the Social Affairs Unit (SAU). Its editor Daniel Johnson explicitly sees Standpoint as a 21st-century version of Encounter, except with Islamism replacing communism as the threat to western civilisation.13 By uniting around the formula of the ‘defence of the liberal West against the Islamists’, the magazine has been able to incorporate pro-Iraq war ‘liberal’ writers, such as Nick Cohen and Julie Burchill, with neoconservatives. Michael Gove serves on the magazine’s advisory board, as does Gertrude Himmelfarb (one of Gordon Brown’s favourite historians and wife and mother of the leading US neoconservatives Irving and William Kristol).

In Standpoint‘s first issue in June 2008, the historian Michael Burleigh praised Cameron’s approach to the ‘war on terror’, suggesting that, once in government, he would end Britain’s excessive multicultural tolerance and adopt a tougher counter-terrorist stance. Cameron, he says, has understood that ‘jihadism’ threatens the very existence of the West and that the way to fight it is through the dismantling of ‘state multiculturalism’, the banning of extremist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, the deportation of ‘foreign agitators’ and withdrawal from European human rights commitments.14 In the same issue, there is an essay by the Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali, arguing that ‘radical Islam’ is filling the gap left by the decline of Christian influence at the core of British identity.15

Like PX, the SAU has also published a series of reports on ‘Islamic extremism’. Its 2005 study of ‘terrorist and extremist activity on British campuses’ by Anthony Glees, entitled When Students Turn to Terror, was widely seen as exaggerated and flawed yet had a significant impact in fostering an atmosphere of suspicion in further and higher education.16 The report argued the need for greater monitoring and surveillance of students by police and security forces.17

The focus on campuses was repeated in a 2008 report by the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC). Islam on Campus by John Thorne and Hannah Stuart claimed that involvement in university Islamic Societies tends to encourage extremism.18 In response, Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, argued that the survey on which the report was based asked Muslim students ‘vague and misleading questions, and their answers were then misinterpreted’.19 The CSC is a project of the right-wing thinktank Civitas, which before 7/7 published a number of reports describing immigration as damaging to British life. Since the CSC was established in 2007, it has focused on what it regards as the threat to cohesion represented by British Muslim communities. Its neoconservative director Douglas Murray has stated that ‘conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board’ and has called for a bar on immigration from Muslim countries.20 The CSC’s reports reflect this agenda.

The lack of an alternative vision

While PX, the SAU and the CSC have focused extensively on the crisis that they say has been caused by multiculturalism and on the Muslim presence in Britain, thinktanks which locate themselves on the left of the political spectrum have tended to approach these issues through the concept of community cohesion and the new identity politics of Britishness. The notion of community cohesion directs attention to local policy initiatives that might bind communities together more strongly. The new concern with Britishness is a way of responding to right-wing attacks on multiculturalism that favours a ‘third way’ on identity, rooting national belonging in liberal values. These have been the approaches adopted by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), the Smith Institute and the Fabian Society.21 In effect, this has meant that the right-wing thinktanks’ definition of a ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ has not been challenged and the Left has differed only in the sorts of solutions it proposes. While IPPR, in particular, has over the last few years published reports that question the perception of an ‘immigration crisis’, it has not done the same to challenge the idea of a ‘multiculturalism crisis’ or a ‘Muslim problem’.

The only major thinktank that has attempted an alternative approach to notions of Muslim extremism is Demos. Its research has sought to challenge the conflation of Islamism, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. In July 2008, as part of this research project, Demos decided to host a session at the Islam Expo in London Olympia on the subject of ‘The Islamist Threat: myth or reality?’.22 But Demos’ involvement drew a storm of protest as critics such as Martin Bright branded the event ‘Hamas at Olympia’.23 Nick Cohen accused Demos of ‘appeasement’ and ‘collaborating’ with a fascist enemy.24 Demos’ then director Catherine Fieschi resigned on the following Monday.

What of the political magazines of the liberal centre and centre-Left? Again, rather than challenge the tenets of the Right’s framework on these issues, the approach has been one of borrowing and adaptation. The liberal Prospect magazine, for example, has promoted a debate on whether the Left’s support for multiculturalism has been misguided. Its editor David Goodhart argued in his influential 2004 essay, ‘Too Diverse?’, that multiculturalism should be dropped since the welfare state was incompatible with ethnic diversity – a view that was influential with the Labour government. On British Muslims, Goodhart has written that he hopes that a ‘moderate’ leadership will emerge to defuse the Islamist threat and foster integration. What, though, makes a ‘moderate’ Muslim? Tariq Ramadan was one for a while, and was even held by Goodhart to be a positive example of a pro-integrationist Muslim leader, but was then rejected after arguing in the Guardian in 2007 that ‘a link exists between terrorism and foreign policy’.25 Ramadan’s article was denounced by Goodhart as a ‘grievance-seeking, responsibility-avoiding diatribe’. And in an ‘open letter’ to Ramadan, Goodhart announced that his liking for him had come to an end: ‘You, I thought, were different. You were modern, confident, educated, in favour of Muslim integration against religious and ethnic balkanisation. ... I was wrong about you.’26 At the centre-Left New Statesman, the political editor Martin Bright has launched a number of attacks on the MCB and called for the Left to define Islamists as ‘Islamic fascists’. Only individual columnists, such as the New Statesman‘s Ziauddin Sardar and, at the Guardian, Seumas Milne and Madeleine Bunting, have tried to offer a positive view of multiculturalism and a more complex account of Muslim politics.

An atmosphere of suspicion

A number of questions can be raised about the methodologies of the reports that PX, the SAU and the CSC have produced on Muslims in Britain. But the deeper issue is their disproportionality and selectivity, which – in the absence of an alternative perspective from other thinktanks – end up reinforcing a systematic and unchallenged conflation of extremism and the wider British Muslim presence. The publication of these reports is often followed by incendiary newspaper headlines on the ‘Islamic threat’. As Ronan Bennett has written: ‘Hardly a day goes by when they [British Muslims] are not lectured and scolded by writers claiming to be the champions of true liberalism.’27 This gradual ratcheting up of an atmosphere of suspicion and crisis contributes to Labour government policies that erode civil liberties and democratic freedoms. Yet, in the next general election campaign, the Conservatives are likely to take a tougher approach to multiculturalism and Muslim organisations – as they did in the London mayoral elections. The interpretation of ‘Islamic extremism’ that has been fostered by PX, the SAU and the CSC is likely to feed into this process.

It is of course true that some interpretations of multiculturalism have been counter-productive and that Muslim political leaders need to be held to account by the communities they represent. But that is a far cry from the political agenda implied by these writers. Certainly, their writings can be seen as contributing to an ideological atmosphere in which attacks on multiculturalism and demands to restrict civil liberties, suppress democratic Muslim voices and downplay the legitimate issues that fuel Muslim anger at western states all become increasingly acceptable and part of a common political agenda across the party divide.28

Arun Kundnani is the editor of Race & Class and the author of The End of Tolerance: racism in 21st century Britain (Pluto Press, 2007).

1. Martin Bright, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: the British state’s flirtation with radical Islamism (London, Policy Exchange, 2006).
2. Munira Mirza, Abi Senthilkumaran and Zein Ja’far, Living apart together: British Muslims and the paradox of multiculturalism (London, Policy Exchange, 2007).
3. Will Woodward, ‘Tories set sights on separatist British Muslims‘, Guardian (30 January 2007).
4. Denis MacEoin, The Hijacking of British Islam: how extremist literature is subverting mosques in the UK (London, Policy Exchange, 2007), p. 7.
5. Anthony Browne, ‘Britain is losing Britain’, The Times T2 (7 August 2002), p. 2.
6. Anthony Browne, ‘The secret threat to British lives‘, Spectator (25 January 2003).
7. Anthony Browne, The Retreat of Reason: political correctness and the corruption of public debate in modern Britain (London, Civitas, 2006), p. xiii.
8. Anthony Browne, ‘Fundamentally, we’re useful idiots’, The Times (1 August 2005).
9. Charles Moore, Centre for Policy Studies, Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture, 10 March 2008.
10. Michael Gove, Celsius 7/7 (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), pp. 45, 103, 136.
11. George Jones, ‘Terrorism fight is our cold war, says Brown’, Telegraph (3 July 2007).
12. Dean Godson, ‘The feeble helping the unspeakable‘, The Times (5 April 2006).
13. Daniel Johnson, ‘Moving the world‘, Standpoint (June 2008).
14. Michael Burleigh, ‘How to defeat the global jihadists‘, Standpoint (June 2008).
15. Michael Nazir-Ali, ‘Breaking faith with Britain‘, Standpoint (June 2008).
16. Anthony Glees and Chris Pope, When Students Turn to Terror: terrorist and extremist activity on British campuses (London, Social Affairs Unit, 2005).
17. David Renton, ‘Document on student extremism seriously flawed‘, IRR News (10 April 2008).
18. John Thorne and Hannah Stuart, Islam on Campus: a survey of UK student opinions (London, Centre for Social Cohesion, July 2008).
19. ‘FOSIS and NUS criticises report by Centre for Social Cohesion‘, press release by Federation of Student Islamic Societies.
20. Douglas Murray, ‘What are we to do about Islam?‘, speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference on Europe and Islam, The Hague, February 2006.
21. See, for examples, Rick Muir, The New Identity Politics (London, Institute for Public Policy Research, 2007); Nick Johnson (ed.), Citizenship, Cohesion and Solidarity (London, Smith Institute, 2008).
22. Peter Harrington, ‘Myths and monsters‘, Progress (10 July 2008).
23. Martin Bright, ‘Hamas at Olympia‘, New Statesman (10 July 2008).
24. Nick Cohen, ‘Demos and IslamExpo‘, Harry’s Place (16 July 2008).
25. Tariq Ramadan, ‘Blair can no longer deny a link exists between terrorism and foreign policy’, Guardian (4 June 2007).
26. David Goodhart, ‘An open letter to Tariq Ramadan’, Prospect (Issue 135, June 2007).
27. Ronan Bennett, ‘Shame on us‘, Guardian (19 November 2007).
28. For a more detailed analysis, see Arun Kundnani, ‘Islamism and the roots of liberal rage‘, Race & Class (Vol. 50, no. 2, October 2008).

Mistaken Identity

tim — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:44:53 +0000

It is one of the biggest complaints about globalisation: that as market forces sweep across the world, so does Western culture. In the end, many fret, whether you are in New York, Rome, Beijing or Mumbai you will buy the same pair of jeans in the same shopping mall, drink the same overpriced latte in the same coffee shop, and watch the same dreary Hollywood blockbuster. Local culture will be no more.

Ironically, though, the greatest Western cultural export is not Disney or Starbucks or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of local culture. A notion that originated in late-eighteenth century Europe, in the Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment, has today the whole world in its grip. Every island in the Pacific, every tribe in the Amazon, has its own culture that it wants to defend against the depredation of Western cultural imperialism. You do not even have to be human to possess a culture. Primatologists tell us that different groups of chimpanzees each has its own culture. No doubt some chimp will soon complain that its traditions are disappearing under the steamroller of human cultural imperialism.

We’re All Multiculturalists Now observed the American academic, and former critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer. And indeed we are. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics – these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies.

At the heart of most multicultural philosophies is the belief that an individual’s cultural background frames their identity and helps define who they are. If we want to treat individuals with dignity and respect we must also treat with dignity and respect the groups that furnish them with their sense of personal being. We cannot, in other words, treat individuals equally unless groups are also treated equally. And since, in the words of the American theorist Iris Young, ‘groups cannot be socially equal unless their specific, experience, culture and social contributions are publicly affirmed and recognised’, so society must protect and nurture cultures, ensure their flourishing and indeed their survival.

One expression of such equal treatment is the growing tendency in some Western nations for religious law – such as the Jewish halakha and the Islamic sharia – to take precedence over national secular law in civil, and occasionally criminal, cases. Another expression can be found in Australia, where the courts increasingly accept that Aborigines should have the right to be treated according to their own customs rather than be judged by ‘whitefella law’. According to Colin McDonald, a Darwin barrister and expert in customary law, ‘Human rights are essentially a creation of the last hundred years. These people have been carrying out their law for thousands of years’. Some multiculturalists go further, requiring the state to ensure the survival of cultures not just in the present but in perpetuity. The philosopher Charles Taylor suggests that the Canadian and Quebec governments should take steps to ensure the survival of the French language in Quebec ‘through indefinite future generations’.

The demand that because a cultural practice has existed for a long time, so it should be preserved, is a modern version of the naturalistic fallacy – the belief that ought derives from is. For nineteenth century social Darwinists, morality – how we ought to behave – derived from the facts of nature – how humans are. This became an argument to justify capitalist exploitation, colonial oppression, racial savagery and even genocide. Today, virtually everyone recognises the falsity of this argument. Yet, when talking of culture rather than of nature, many multiculturalists continue to insist that ‘is’ defines ‘ought’.

Part of the problem here is a constant slippage in multiculturalism talk between the idea of humans as culture-bearing creatures and the idea that humans have to bear a particular culture. Clearly no human can live outside of culture. But then no human does.

To say that no human can live outside of culture, however, is not to say they have to live inside a particular one. To view humans as culture-bearing is to view them as social beings, and hence as transformative beings. It suggests that humans have the capacity for change, for progress, and for the creation of universal moral and political forms through reason and dialogue.

To view humans as having to bear specific cultures is, on the contrary, to deny such a capacity for transformation. It implies that every human being is so shaped by a particular culture that to change or undermine that culture would be to undermine the very dignity of that individual. The biological fact of Jewish or Bangladeshi ancestry, it suggests, somehow make a human being incapable of living well except as a participant of Jewish or Bangladeshi culture. This would only make sense if Jews or Bangladeshis were biologically distinct – in other words if cultural identity was really about racial difference.

The relationship between cultural identity and racial difference becomes even clearer if we look at the argument that cultures must be protected and preserved. The political philosopher Will Kymlicka argues that since cultures are essential to peoples’ lives, so where ‘the survival of a culture is not guaranteed, and, where it is threatened with debasement or decay, we must act to protect it’. For Charles Taylor, once ‘we’re concerned with identity’, nothing ‘is more legitimate than one’s aspiration that it is never lost’.

But what does it mean for a culture to decay? Or for an identity to be lost? Kymlicka draws a distinction between the ‘existence of a culture’ and ‘its “character” at any given moment’. The character of culture can change but such changes are only acceptable if the existence of that culture is not threatened. But how can a culture exist if that existence is not embodied in its character? By ‘character’ Kymlicka seems to mean the actuality of a culture: what people do, how they live their lives, the rules and regulations and institutions that frame their existence. So, in making the distinction between character and existence, Kymlicka seems to be suggesting that Jewish, Navajo or French culture is not defined by what Jewish, Navajo or French people are actually doing. For if Jewish culture is simply that which Jewish people do or French culture is simply that which French people do, then cultures could never decay or perish – they would always exist in the activities of people.

If a culture is not defined by what its members are doing, what does define it? The only answer can be that it is defined by what its members should be doing. And what you should be doing, for cultural preservationists, is what your ancestors were doing. Culture here has become defined by biological descent. And biological descent is a polite way of saying ‘race’. As the American writer Walter Benn Michaels puts it, ‘In order for a culture to be lost… it must be separable from one’s actual behaviour, and in order for it to be separable from one’s actual behaviour it must be anchorable in race.’

The logic of the preservationist arguments is that every culture has a pristine form, its original state. It decays when it is not longer in that form. There are echoes here of the concept of ‘type’ that was at the heart of nineteenth century racial science. For all the talk about culture as fluid and changing, multiculturalism, no less than old-fashioned racism, invariably leads people to think of human groups in fixed terms. Both sides of the race debate have their own dialect of difference. The right has appropriated the language of diversity to promote its message of racial exclusion. Liberals often turn to the idiom of exclusion to articulate a pluralist idea of culture.

‘Every society, every nation is unique’, claimed Enoch Powell, the most vocal opponent of black immigration in postwar Britain. ‘It has its own past, its own story, its own memories, its own languages or ways of speaking, its own – dare I use the word – culture.’ This is why, he argued, immigrants, who belong to different cultures and different traditions, could never be fully British. In France the far right has astutely exploited the idea of cultural differences to promote its anti-Muslim message. ‘It is a tragic mistake to want to have communities representing different civilisations live together in the same country’, argued former Gaullist minister Michel Poniatowski. ‘I love North Africans’, Jean-Marie Le Pen has declared, ‘but their place is in the Mahgreb’. Through the language of diversity, racism has been transformed into just another cultural identity.

If the right has taught itself the grammar of diversity, liberals have adopted the idiom of racial identity. Will Kymlicka is anything but a xenophobe. Yet his pluralism leads him to adopt the language of exclusion. ‘It is right and proper’, Kymlicka believes, ‘that the character of a culture changes as a result of the choices of its members’. But, he goes on, ‘while it is one thing to learn from the larger world’, it is quite another ‘to be swamped by it’. What could this mean? That a culture has the right to keep out members of another culture? That a culture has the right to prevent its members from speaking another language, singing non-native songs or reading non-native books?

Kymlicka’s warning about ‘swamping’ should make us sit up and take notice. The right has long exploited fears of cultural swamping to promote the idea that Western nations should pull up the drawbridge against immigrants whose cultural difference make them unsuitable. It is an argument that Kymlicka undoubtedly abhors. Yet once it becomes a matter of political principle that cultures should not be swamped by outsiders, then it is difficult to know how one could possibly resist such anti-immigration arguments.

Historically, antiracists challenged both the practice of racism and the process of racialisation; that is, both the practice of discriminating against people by virtue of their race and the insistence that an individual can be defined by the group to which he or she belongs. Today’s multiculturalists argue that to fight racism one must celebrate group identity. The consequence has been the resurrection of racial ideas and the imprisonment of people within their cultural identities. Racial theorists and multiculturalists, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observes, have ‘conflicting credos but the same vision of the world’. Both fetishise difference. Both seek to ‘confine individuals to their group of origin’. Both undermine ‘any possibility of natural or cultural community among peoples’. Challenging such a politics of difference has become as important today as challenging racism.