The true nature of the international system under which we were living was not realized until it failed. --Karl Polanyi
My title directs a certain amount of irony, obviously, toward George Bush. It suggests that this "new world order" is increasingly and complexly a racial order, and that we ought to work on understanding its dynamics better.
The pundits and sages don't generally place the racial dimensions of the post-cold war world in the center of the picture; usually race is off to the side somewhere. If it is acknowledged at all, it is subsumed within the "ethnicity" or "nationalism" categories. We hear about "the resurgence of ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe...," for example, or about "the upsurge of nationalism in a world which can no longer think in terms of superpower rivalry." Such formulas aren't exactly wrong; they just fail to take race into account.
What if we looked at the post-cold war world from a more race-conscious perspective? What if we tried to make sense of the vast political-economic and cultural transformations occurring today using a different method? Suppose we drew our inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois's comparative inquiries into the operations of the "color line" on a global scale, or even from C.L.R. James's analyses of the relationship of black revolutionary struggles to the fight against fascism in the 20th century? This essay is an attempt in that direction.
I: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
From a global point of view, the last two-three decades have established that indeed, "the empire strikes back." Plural societies are in place just about everywhere. This pluralized and heterogeneous situation, this multiplication of group identities, furthermore, is racialized throughout the developed world.
In the Americas, of course, racialized social heterogeneity is an old story, dating back to the conquest and the inception of African slavery. Thus the contemporary debates about race going on beyond our frontiers seem to echo our hemispheric past. But in Europe, with the notable and significant exception of anti-semitism (an exception that both requires deep examination in its own right and bears in many ways on the present European situation), this phenomenon of a pluralized and racialized population is actually quite new. Though a few colonial subjects were inevitably present in the European metropoles, the influx of substantial numbers of nonwhites during the postwar, postcolonial period has deeply altered a dynamic in which the racial order and the imperial order had been one, in which the "other" was by and large kept outside the gates of the "mother country." As a stroll around London, Frankfurt, Paris, or Madrid will quickly reveal, those days are now gone forever.
Nor is the European situation exceptional. The challenges posed by this new and often racialized heterogeneity reach right around the globe. They extend, for example, to Japan, where Yamato hegemony is coming in for renewed questioning. They apply to Australia, where Asian populations are expanding and native peoples are more organized than ever. They resonate in such places as southern Africa and Latin America, which have long histories of eurocentric orientation and white supremacy. They find parallels in what used to be called "Soviet Central Asia" and in Eastern Europe as well.
There are, to be sure, enormous variations in the local situations I am describing: the degree to which minorities are racialized varies; in fact, the meaning of race varies among and indeed within the various societies I've mentioned. As always, the meaning of race has to be understood as a prime theme of political contestation; that is the racial formation argument, which I have been developing over the past fifteen years or so. But for now, I want to stipulate to those variations and recognize the main point: that throughout the world, and especially in the North, a new and politicized racial heterogeneity is the norm, and that this is going to remain the case for the forseeable future.
II. RACIAL HETEROGENEITY IS LINKED WITH OTHER FORMS OF CRISIS
At present, world population is growing at about 100 million/year. While population growth is quite modest in the North, it is very rapid in the South, where the "demographic transition" is still an outcome devoutly to be wished. Since there is no appreciable improvement in southern "life chances" -- with a few well-known exceptions -- the "push" pressures for migration to the North can hardly be expected to abate.
Meanwhile, the earlier, postwar "pull" factors which existed in the North have largely evaporated. These arose in the earlier postwar period from relative labor shortages, and from the high growth rates which permitted various pacts (or tacit agreements for cooperation) between capital and labor. The German, Swiss, and Scandinavian gastarbeiter programs, the repeal of restrictive (and racist) US immigration laws in 1965 (leading to extensive inflows of Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian immigrants), the active British recruitment of labor in the West Indies from the late 1940s into the 1960s, the French absorption of widespread numbers of Maghrebines in the wake of the Algerian defeat, the creation of a large Korean community in Japan..., all these took shape at a time when "pull" strategies were organized and administered by northern governments.
Today all this is in the past. Probably the last relic of "openness to the South" was the German asylum law, which was ostensibly a political not an economic measure (an increasingly nonexistent distinction). This policy allowed for the large-scale influx of both economic migrants and political refugees from central Europe and the Balkans, until it was repealed in 1993 with broad support across the political spectrum from right to left.
Proposition 187 in California, restrictions on so-called extracommunitarios in Italy, the adoption by Margaret Thatcher of Powellism (in her famous speech about the "swamping" of the English by aliens -- persons who only a few years before had been entitled, as Commonwealth citizens, to full rights under British law).... All these developments highlight the disappearance of official support for immigration towards the North. More yet: they reveal the confusion and conflict which ex-imperialist states face when confronted by the mobility of their former subjects, and by the claims of those whose political rights were only recently restricted by racial caste systems which have now lost their grip.
III: THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
The political center cannot hold against this tide of racialized plurality. To the extent that all the northern countries are under the rule of technocratic state elites whose chief objective is to keep the bow of the ship of state pointed smartly into the economic wind, the presence of ex-colonials as citizens, or as permanent residents, or as increasingly expensive and demanding erstwhile peasants and subproletarians, is not a happy prospect. It threatens or even obliterates a whole range of formerly stability-oriented policies, transforming them into openly conflicting and contradictory policy imperatives.
Therefore, faced not only with a rising tide of immigration, but also with a far more developed and politicized heterogeneity among their populations (something true even in the US), governments have sought to reframe social policies in a host of related areas: to organize labor supplies, to control immigration flows, to distinguish among desirable and undesirable migrant workers, to handle social problems such as housing, education, and public health, to orient (and today) restrict welfare outlays to impoverished minority groups, to integrate them into social and political institutions (or to set up parallel institutions, or to handle the disruption costs of failing to achieve this integration), and finally, to reconceptualize themes of national identity and the logic of the nation state.
In the real world of today, where the tides which lift all boats have been out for 20 years, these tasks are beyond the capabilities of the centrist and technocratic elites that hold power throughout the developed North. After all: To organize the labor supply means concerting interests in low-wage and high-wage sectors in the economy and among the populace. To handle social problems like housing and education shortfalls means taxing established residents to pay for newcomers. Yet to restrict social welfare programs means fostering crime and social antagonism. To integrate minorities is either to problematize their identities, or to problematize the identities of established residents, as we can see in the hijab controversy in France, the English-only movement in the US, the general fear of Muslims throughout the North, etc.
These imperatives may be understood in marxist terms as deriving from obligations to safeguard accumulation and legitimation processes. They may be seen politically, as the ongoing necessity of constructing and maintaining a governing coalition. They may even be understood in functionalist terms as system maintenance and reproduction processes. But however they are understood, the key point here is that they cannot be performed, they cannot be carried out, under the complex circumstances presently confronted by the northern states.
IV: THE TRADITIONAL LEFT IS NOT UP TO THE TASK
Just as the center cannot hold, so the left is not up to the task. The centrist elites cannot master the overly burdensome set of reproduction imperatives they confront in the newly differentiated societies of the North; the traditional lefts are not up to the task of mobilizing these heterogeneous masses for change, either reformist or radical, precisely because of the narrowness of their social base.
With some occasional if noble exceptions, the northern lefts have generally been suspicious of transformations in the composition of the labor force. In previous moments and various countries they have resisted the incursions of freedmen, immigrants, women, ex-colonials, and various combinations thereof. Always fearful of low-wage competition, the left is threatened everywhere by the emergence of a "lean and mean" capitalism which is less dependent on the "mass worker" than ever before. This capitalism, as Manuel Castells has said, seeks to combine 21st century technology with 19th century labor. It is less inclined, therefore, not only to hire and train workers, but also to support the welfare state, which working class reformist movements had secured in the past as a price for their submission to capitalist discipline.
Native (or more accurately, white) workers everywhere in the North are thus more subject than ever to the blandishments of nativism and exclusionary politics. This is the home turf of the right, which as we shall see presents the welfare state and the low-income (racialized) strata as the enemies of the "salt of the earth" types who "play by the rules," "go to work each day," "pay their taxes" and end up "getting screwed" by the "freeloaders" who "don't even belong in this country."
In response to this, far from striving to increase class solidarity and oppose racism, the course generally preferred by socialists, what communists there still may be, and trade unionists alike is to court their traditional bases even harder, giving hostages to the right.
Many examples attest to the bankruptcy of the traditional left in the face of racism and nativism: the British Labor Party's resistance to the black sections; the anti-immigrant compromises of the German SPD and the French Socialists (not to mention the PCF), the divisions within the US trade union movement over immigration (although, to its credit, the AFL-CIO did take a stand against Prop. 187 in California), and the complicity of the Clinton Democrats in welfare "reform," to name but a few. A deeper treatment than I can provide here of the relationship between the traditional lefts and the many dimensions of racial heterogeneity would reveal that in most of the developed countries, there is a long tradition of hostility and racism built into the left. Indeed in some cases -- notably the US -- it is possible to see the very origins of socialism as a response to racialized threats to native labor.
V: THE RIGHT IS ASCENDANT
Thus the center cannot manage the new racialized heterogeneity, while the traditional left cannot effectively mobilize in opposition to the old white supremacist order. Let's look now at the right and its response to racialized heterogeneity. In all the Northern countries, the right has been the chief beneficiary of the conflicts framed by the increasing racialization of politics. The right today is the repository of nationalism, whose core concepts of "autonomy, unity, identity" marked the rise and consolidation of nation-states throughout the early modern period. These concepts are put in question by the racialized heterogeneity I am discussing here.
The racialized challenge to national identity takes various forms. It reflects the shrinking and knitting together of the contemporary world. It mirrors the ever-greater internationalization of the movement of capital and labor, and the transnational phenomena of diaspora with its globalization of various identities: Jewish, Chinese, South Asian, Filipino, Greek, Palestinian, as well as African.
We can see these challenges to the established northern nationalisms framed by immigration, to be sure, but also by egalitarianism, by affirmative action (however called), by feminism and gay liberation (sexuality and race are deeply linked in nationalism), and by all forms of transnational identification that compete for loyalty with the national-patriotic.
Today in all the advanced countries, the established working classes are fearful and resentful. In the US, this is the "angry white male" phenomenon; elsewhere it focuses more particularly on immigration, or on Islam, but these are largely superficial differences. The "angry white males," the nativists, believed for a long time that their race, their gender, their religion more or less guaranteed them a middle class standard of living, a well-paying job, a secure home in a safe neighborhood, access to quality education and health care, paid vacations, a comfortable retirement.
These prospects are slipping away. Children are worse off than their parents were. The policies of the welfare state no longer appear able to fend off the unease of these modern bildungsburgers. Thus they look for someone to blame. In the tradition of American nativism and European colonialism, racialized minorities and immigrants furnish the ready scapegoat. It hardly seems necessary to repeat that the real culprit in this situation is not the racialized "other"; rather it is large-scale capital, which since the 1970s has openly declared its intention to redistribute income regressively, to maintain higher levels of unemployment, to break unions, to dismantle the welfare states, and to increase levels of repression, both political and "criminal." The turn to the political right, then, and to the nationalism this turn entails, is in many respects a clear political consequence of the capitalist class program in many of the developed countries.
In other respects, though, the global right turn is a much broader social and national rejection of the contemporary world. Thus, what Ronald Walters has characterized in the US context as "white racial nationalism" is, mutatis mutandis, a much broader phenomenon. It is a vision or an ideology of community, what Benedict Anderson calls an "imagined community," which emerges from revulsion at late modernity, or (perhaps we should say) which plausibly articulates the origins and social make-ups of the various northern nation-states, and which seeks to turn back the clock toward the white supremacy of the past.
The right sees the origins and social composition of the nation in terms of herrenvolk democracy. It identifies the nation with whiteness, with imperialism, with masculinity, and with heterosexuality. It questions even centrist countertraditions of the national, for example the neoconservative countertradition of an "American ethnic pattern."
Nathan Glazer wrote in 1978 that the "American ethnic pattern" meant that "The entire world would be allowed to enter the United States. The claim that some nations or races were to be favored in entry over others was, for a while, accepted, but it was eventually rejected." Amidst the current wave of anti-immigrant hysteria, we can see how dreamy this notion has become. Nor are its equivalents doing well in Europe, Canada, Australia, etc., not to mention Japan.
The right thus attempts to hold pluralistic and heterogeneous concepts of national identity, or of internationalism, at bay, but this is a difficult task to carry out in a democratic polity. Therefore there's an uneasy tension on the right between volk and citizenry. This is one of the central conflicts, perhaps the central conflict, which race poses for the right. At its core it is a conflict between democracy and fascism.
Even when framed as an appeal to civic values, such as absolute individualism and attendant citizenship rights, the identification of the nation as the primary collective entity involves an emphasis on homogeneity, on national frontiers actually dividing putatively "different" peoples, and therefore an assumption of distinctiveness among groups, which is always potentially available for racialization.
So, both in the US and elsewhere, right-wing currents are being pushed further to the right by the racialization of national politics.
VI: RACISM TAKES ON NEW FORMS; FASCISM IS A REAL THREAT
New forms of racism are developing as these racialized political dynamics work themselves out.
In the US we have a lot of experience by now with right-wing egalitarianism: the "colorblind" politics which have characterized neoconservative and black conservative appeals are by now so familiar that they have become "grass roots" ideologies, "common sense." My students frequently assert this position as follows: "I don't care if someone is black, brown, white, green, or purple. A person's just an individual to me...," etc. A comfortable if shallow veneer of egalitarianism can thus be maintained over the deep structures of racial privilege; one can convince oneself, with the help of endless assertions of the point in the media and the halls of power, that one has overcome racism. Indeed, from such a perspective, the true racists are those -- often racialized minorities themselves -- who "bring up race all the time," and who "inject it into everything."
In Europe parallel patterns are developing along the lines of what Pierre-Andre Taguieff calls "differentialist racism." The US has important lessons to learn from these developments, just as the Europeans have a lot to learn from the US experience. "Differentialist racism" asserts that, while certainly all peoples are equal, it is "natural" for every group to prefer its own kind, to be averse to those who are different, and to prefer to stay separate from them. In contrast with traditional forms of racism which claimed that there were fundamental inequalities among human groups, "differentialist racism" adopts and rearticulates egalitarian notions of difference, for example, those of Levi-Strauss. "Differentialist racism," Taguieff says, ..."cannot be reduced to a theory of inequality authorizing domination. Rather it is predicated on the imperative of preserving the group's identity, whose `purity' it sanctifies. It stigmatizes the mixing of cultures as the supreme mistake."
In short, throughout the North, in a complex response to the heterogeneity I have discussed, there is a new variety of racism(s). The older, discriminatory, hierarchized racism still flourishes, retaining its commitment to biologism and notions of racial superiority and inferiority. Alongside this, coexisting more or less harmoniously for decades in the US, there has been neoconservatism, which operates as a "soft" racism, advocating a "colorblind," individualistic, conservative approach to race. Its egalitarian claims consist at best in its preferred combination of racial policies: sanctions for active discrimination, and laissez-faire with respect to the results. Unable to escape its own ulteriority, it often adopts a "blame the victim" strategy, which also has the advantage of justifying ongoing white privilege.
Meanwhile in Europe, "differentialist" racism, which breaks with the logic of "natural" inequality, asserts instead a doctrine of "natural" differences: ostensibly non-hierarchized, but generally congruent with national borders, and with supposedly homogeneous national cultures. It hardly needs saying that this "differentialist racism" neglects or denies a millenial history of population movements, "race-mixing," etc.
Counterarguments need to be posed to both these "streamlined" and "rationalized" forms of racism, but neither in the US nor in Europe can they be decisive. What will determine the long term success of these "new racisms" (or "neo-racism" as Balibar would have it), is the extent to which they can be implanted as the "common sense" or hegemonic discourses of race in the various countries with which we are concerned. And this in turn depends on the degree of political momentum that can be mobilized in favor or against this or that articulation of the meaning of race in each national setting.
VII. SOME POLITICAL CONCLUSIONS
At present, lamentably, very little popular mobilization is underway against the racial nationalism of the right. Given the analysis I have made, it is quite understandable why this is so: the center and the left do not have the tools to carry out the job, first of all, and racially-defined minorities must confront the high degree of racial chauvinism which the northern "democratic" national cultures still secrete.
Racial minorities thus find it difficult to reinterpret national identity and national culture in a progressive way, let us say a "multicultural" way (although that term has been debased to mean no more than tolerance). From the standpoint of racialized minorities, it is not so easy to embrace what is still in many ways a herrenvolk-based national identity: the "white man's country." This remains true in the US, even for those who have been here for centuries. It is true a fortiori for more recent arrivals: the immigrant Pakistani or 2nd generation Trinidadian in England, the French muslim, the Korean or Salvadoran newly settled in Los Angeles.
For this reason among others anti-racist opposition for a long time to come will properly take on a nationalist and diasporic character. This "defensive" nationalism will inevitably share some of the problematic features of the right-wing nationalisms I have discussed: masculinism, homophobia, and ethnocentrism, for example. The theoretical conundrums posed by this overlap between the nationalisms of the subordinate and those of the dominant racial/ethnic groups are hardly new; they shaped a well-known debate between Luxemburg and Lenin nearly a century ago. But however this dilemma is approached, one salient fact about nationalisms of the racially subordinated is clear: consciousness of the world-historical nature of white supremacy is not a relic of the postwar anti-colonial struggles, nor of an earlier pan-Africanism, but a well-established and probably permanent feature of the new world racial order.
And why not? If socialists and communists and human rights activists and indeed fascists can develop their international solidarity, why should people of African descent, indigenous people, or diasporized Arabs be condemned for developing theirs? Though I am no theoretical fan of Afrocentrism, I find it more than a little amusing to hear the Schlesingers, Ravitches, and Bennetts -- to draw examples from the US context -- lecturing black people about how they are really Americans.
On the other side of the equation, at a certain point racism also brings internal conflicts and divisions home to the right. There are different factions on the right. There is a "softer," more-or-less rational, democratic right, which perhaps believes in civic duty and firm patriarchal authority, but doesn't necessarily capitulate to the irrationalism and volkish politics of fascism. That's on the one hand.
On the other hand, developing throughout the North, there is a "hard" right, which has serious proto-fascist tendencies. This "hard" right -- more visible in the US since the Oklahoma City bombing -- includes a lot of people who are armed and dangerous. In the US it includes militant and millenarian religious sects, which are also virulently white supremacist and anti-semitic. In Europe it includes groups which survived the debacle of European fascism and regrouped along explicitly fascist and Nazi lines. There are potentially some major conflicts on the right, but for the present they have been far more successfully papered over than have conflicts on the left. We (racially-defined minorities, feminists and gays, progressive workers, intellectuals and artists, students, etc. -- that's crudely who the "we" is), must learn how to exploit the divisions and antagonisms that persist on the right, particularly where race is concerned.
For example, in the US the right confronts a significant secular-religious conflict in its own ranks. Capital in general is secular. It is not particularly opposed to immigration: the decidedly right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page endorses "open borders"; obviously such a policy cheapens the price of labor, but still and all, this position conflicts with many right-wing nationalisms. Large-scale capital in fact expects its workforce (both low-waged and "professional-managerial") to be multiracial and to include women. Therefore its mouthpieces are often explicitly "multicultural" in their politics.
On the other hand, authoritarian, populist, and religious rightism, "grass roots" rightism let us say, is often more explicitly racist, prone to violence, and "workerist" in the US context. It aspires to represent threatened sectors of labor, small farmers, and vulnerable strata of the middle class, the traditional fascist base.
In Europe, the "national-popular," national identity, and nationalism are in far greater crisis than in the US. Here too capital is multinational in scope, while workers, farmers, and the various petit bourgeoisies are local.
Any mobilization against the right will necessarily take on different forms in different countries.
In the US, where the welfare state is far less advanced, struggles over racism will focus on drawing the line between productive and unproductive members of society. There will be comparatively less focus on "differentialist racism," and more on individualism, meritocracy, and equality of opportunity vs. equality of result (aka neoconservatism). The "soft" right will deny its racism by stressing absolute individualism, colorblindness, secularism, and the primacy of market forces. It will be at pains to deny not only racism but antisemitism. In contrast, the "hard" right will increasingly avow a biologistic form of racism that harks back to eugenics, that stresses old-fashioned beliefs about superiority and inferiority, that embraces the authority of a "righteous" nation rather than that of a "soulless" marketplace, that emphasizes sexual racism, that acommodates if it does not actively promote anti-semitism, and that explicitly links itself to religious fanaticism and fascism.
In Europe, where the welfare state is far more entrenched and European unity is a powerful (if embattled) trend, struggles over racism will focus on citizenship and immigration, on "Europe and its others." The "soft" right will stress the impossibility of assimilation and the need for secure borders. It will deny its racism by emphasizing the necessity of unified national-cultural identities. The "hard" right will increasingly work to recuperate fascist tendencies, antisemitism, and hardcore volkish nationalism.
A final note about progressive mobilization under the new world racial order: we need to learn from our past, particularly the 1930s. We need to look at the great analyses that were produced during that time: THE BLACK JACOBINS (written, James said, amid "the booming of Franco's heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin's firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence"), BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA (Du Bois: "In fine, I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience"), Gramsci's PRISON NOTEBOOKS, and some of the key Frankfurt School texts, for example. These works have much to tell us about how the right works, and about racism as the ideological cement that holds together the disparate components of authoritarianism in the west.
Race splits "us"; class splits "them." We do not need to be class reductionists to see that a progressive racial politics must address the dynamics of class. We must understand the struggle for racial justice as central to the struggle for social justice, as central to any resistance to capital's drive to dominate, to discipline, to control not only labor, but society as a whole. We must understand that logic in order to resist it.
*This essay appears in Chester Hartman, ed., DOUBLE EXPOSURE: POVERTY AND RACE IN AMERICA (Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 1997).