Introduction: European crises: contemporary nationalisms and the language of “race”

ABSTRACT

The Introduction begins by outlining the general theme of this special issue, “Race and Crisis”. It then moves to examine populist right-wing politics from 2015. Of the various ways in which the rise of such politics could be charted in this period, here the “success” of anti-immigrant and anti-E.U. parties in national-level elections is the focus. Success is understood in terms of share of the popular vote at national level, and the appeal of the right-wing parties in question gauged from their manifestos. In particular, manifesto proposals for renegotiating the principles of citizenship are considered, and their implicitly racist underpinnings noted. The final part of the Introduction presents some general observations on coded ways of evoking race and prompting racialization in contemporary political discourse. How the contributions to this special issue deal with that is briefly summarized.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial crisis
• refugee crisis
• popular vote
• citizenship
• coded racism
• race

The beginning

This special issue on “Race and Crisis” was initially planned in 2015, in the context of a project on Framing Financial Crisis and Protest (2014–2016, funded by the Leverhulme Trust). The idea was to analyse race-centred discourses in Europe amidst the financial crisis from 2007–2008 onwards. In the interim between 2015 and 2017, as this special issue moves toward publication, the thrust of those key words (“race” and “crisis”), and their purchase in political and public discourse, have shifted. By way of introducing this special issue, it is necessary to pause on these shifts – they are reflected in the papers that follow.

The editors and authors had decided to use Stuart Hall’s “third position” on ascriptions of race, replacing the broadly realist and the purely linguistic, as an analytical anchor for contributions to this issue:

The third position is that there are probably differences of all sorts in the world, that difference is a kind of anomalous existence out there, a kind of random series of all sorts of things in what you call the world, there’s no reason to deny this reality or this diversity. […] It’s only when these differences have been organized within language, within discourse, within systems of meaning, that the differences can be said to acquire meaning and become a factor in human culture and regulate conduct. That is the nature of what I’m calling the discursive concept of race. Not that nothing exists of differences, but that what matters are the systems we use to make sense, to make human societies intelligible. […] I think these are discursive systems because the interplay between the representation of racial difference, the writing of power, and the production of knowledge, is crucial to the way in which they are generated, and the way in which they function. (1997)

The discursive concept suggests that the enunciation of “race” is always more than simply a matter of talking about race. Or, more precisely, in discursive systems and practices the signification of “race” radiates into broad political dispositions and social structures; “race” is an unstable signifier which enables those structures and dispositions to apparently acquire meaning rather than denoting anything firmly in itself. Focusing on the instabilities of signifying “race” – with normative inflections, as synecdoche, as concretization, as simile, through substitution, allusively, ironically, by implication or even by elision, and so on – in specific contexts enables the social and political tendencies and contradictions of those contexts to be put into relief. Other or all significations of difference may, no doubt, serve a similar project – the signification of “race” is at issue here.

However, the discourses that build around enunciations of “race” usually appear with some preconceived and uncritical notion of talking about race – that is, as if “race” consensually means something and has a firm core. The discursive concept contends that a firm core cannot be articulated because enunciations of “race” offer none; significations of “race” are always contingent and elusive. Nevertheless, for analytical purposes it is unhelpful to not try and articulate the perception of this core to a minimum extent, that is, to the extent necessary to activate the discursive concept. As a minimum statement then, talking about race as if it means something involves an assumption of essentialist human categories: “the assumption, consciously or unconsciously held, that people can be divided into a distinct number of discrete ‘races’ according to physical, biological criteria and that systematic social differences automatically and inevitably follow the same lines of physical differentiation”, as Jackson (1989, 132) had usefully put it.¹

With Hall’s discursive concept in mind, the contributions to this special issue were not conceived according to a moral imperative, for advocacy against prejudice and discrimination; the idea was to explore significations of race in contemporary Europe. Prejudice and discrimination usually underpin racializing discourses and therefore cannot but be addressed. But it was clarifying the mechanics of discourses at this historical juncture rather than the general denunciation of prejudice which motivated this project. An anti-racist position is a given for this project; it is the only rational position from which analysis can be undertaken with Hall’s third position in mind.

The historical juncture the authors and editors had in mind in 2015 was the financial crisis in Europe from 2007–08 onwards, that is, in the transnational formation of the E.U., within and across member states and neighbouring states. The financial crisis was understood here as follows: it was not simply located within financial institutions and national governance structures, but, rather, appeared as a juncture which crystallises and puts pressure upon various facets of political, economic and cultural life, widely dispersed. These facets of life have naturally obtained for long but, amidst the financial crisis, appeared to become inextricably grounded in a dominant – and oppressive – political and economic rationale. The rationale could variously be apprehended under the rubric of “financialization”, “neoliberalism”, cost-benefit accounting in “biopolitics”, the ethical weight of “sovereign debt” and strategies of “austerity” regimes; and the agencies of the rationale were being tested through numerous modes of resistance (ballot boxes, marches, occupations, riots, strikes, hacktivism and so on). In brief, the financial crisis incorporated and generated a web of crises gripping social life at various levels. Though the financial crisis had been prolifically explored along these lines by 2015, few attempts to examine it directly in relation to race and racism had appeared then. Scholarly publications that did so were focused primarily on the U.S.A. (e.g. Dymski 2009; Wyly et al. 2009; Chakravarty and da Silva 2012; Rugh, Albright, and Massey 2015) or specific European countries (for Britain, e.g. Gillborn 2013; Redclift 2014), and very occasionally attempted a global view (Castles 2012). It seemed in 2015 that relatively few studies on race and racism generally across the nation-states of Europe had appeared recently (those included Lentin 2004; Fekete 2009; Taras 2012; Fella and Ruzza 2013), and, in relation to the financial crisis, tended to be refracted through the lens of immigration (as in Livola 2013).

So, within the webs of crises growing around the financial crisis from 2007–2008, the editors and authors proposed a sequence of thematic nodes wherein significations of “race” have played a part:

• Disinvestments and vulnerable populations: the gradual minimization of welfare arrangements and the corresponding production of vulnerable or dispossessed populations – the poverty-stricken, unemployed or precariously employed (especially youth), etc.

• Tied in with the above, anxiety about migration: at two principal levels, into the E.U. and across member-states.

• Tied in with both of the above, a surge of neo-nationalisms fracturing always-shaky E.U. integrities (raising the spectre of exits) and also pressing upon the integrity of nation-states (e.g. prodding secessionist moves).

• Activated through all the above, hardening protectionist policies and declaring states of exception: securing boundaries and policing populations in the name of economic necessity and security.

That’s where this project stood in 2015; now, this project finds itself on somewhat different ground. In brief, in the interim priorities in the sequence of bullet-pointed thematic nodes above have changed: the first point has now dropped to the bottom, and the second and third points are now squarely and equally at the top, concretizing and pushing the fourth. In other words, in dominant public and political discourse the financial crisis has been superseded by – appears to have become conditional to – an “immigration crisis” and coevally an “E.U. crisis” (of the transnational formation). Intensifying concern from 2015 about how to deal with refugees from conflict-ridden Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc., morphed into a generalized anxiety about immigration and the presence of immigrants, in fact exacerbating long-simmering sensitivities about religious and cultural and “racial” difference. Simultaneously, the E.U. is increasingly held to be an apparatus for supporting immigration and the accommodation of difference, for which neoliberal policies are considered the pathway and of which austerity measures are understood as symptoms. Disaffection has gradually come to be focalized more on immigration and immigrants than on neoliberalism and austerity. A drift towards hardening nation-state boundaries, both physically and conceptually, has followed, so that the fluidity of European contexts contemplated in 2015 seems increasingly anachronistic. Under these circumstances, it is to be expected that articulations of “race” would be more forcefully and explicitly foregrounded in public and political discourse, and in academic discourse, than it seemed to be in early 2015. That indeed is the case. A more evidenced and nuanced, albeit still sketchy, discussion of these interim developments follows.

The interim

The shift in political discourses between 2015 and 2017 can be tracked variously: by examining media coverage of immigrants or refugees, by investigating regime changes for processing immigrants and policing borders (Fekete 2009 persuasively argued that these embed “xeno-racism” in Europe), or by exploring legislation concerning ethnic minorities within political states. By way of a manageable overview of a significant area of Europe, a more schematic path is followed here: considering nation-state-level elections from 2015 onwards, with a focus on the electoral success of nationalist right-wing parties with anti-E.U. stances. Electoral success is understood here in a narrow way, as consisting not so much in finding a place in government (though some have) but in achieving a growing share of the popular vote in state-level elections (proportion of all voters relative to the previous election) where the full range of parties competed. From this point of view, for two-round systems – such as presidential elections in Austria and France – the first round is more indicative than the final. Such electoral success of nationalist parties is considered here as indicating polarization against mainstream or new centrist and leftist parties; this means that the latter have to then either co-opt from what gives nationalist parties popular appeal or make stronger counter-appeals. Since anxiety about immigrants and minorities features significantly and consistently in the proposals of electorally successful nationalist parties, racist attitudes simmer close to the surface of their claims – but seldom explicitly or directly. Here, successful nationalist parties’ policies are gauged from their official manifestos; it is assumed that these offer politically legitimate (or legitimized) interventions in a public discourse sphere, and have a direct bearing on their electoral success. Admittedly, this is a simplistic assumption. For each election in each political state, a range of other factors play into the political appeal of a party (such as local activity, record of performance, personalities of leaders, media interventions), and, equally, the popular-vote share as response is complicated by regional variations, controversies, etc. These complexities are prolifically debated around each election event. For a broad comparative view, however, a relationship between official manifesto and share of popular vote at state level may be considered a reasonable assumption.

Given our interest in the language of “race”, only some parts of the manifestos in question are registered here. Naturally, attention is given to definitions of nationality, to statements about national solidarity and belonging, and equally to statements on immigrants and minorities which situate them in relation to definitions of nationality. Particular emphasis is laid on proposals for adjusting the legal norms for citizenship. The first principle of citizenship in all European countries and generally in modern political states is that each citizen is equal in the eyes of the law. This principle undergirds all other policies and measures. Its contravention is only contemplated now in a condition of exception or corruption (e.g. conflict situations), or as a temporarily ratified policy (such as, in positive action measures, which are usually designed to effect pragmatic social equalization for discriminated groups to the extent that equality before law becomes meaningful) – almost never within the norm of the law. Sought-after adjustments in this legal norm have wide-ranging implications for entire populations; any measure of public support of such proposals is politically and socially significant within the life of a nation state. It is in such proposals that racial preconceptions are most directly if not explicitly encountered.

The 2015 start point and the above delimitations bring the following right-wing parties squarely into focus here: The U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) had the third largest share of voters at 12.7 per cent in the May 2015 general elections, from 3.1 per cent in 2010, but secured only a single seat in parliament; Prawa i Sprawiedliwośći (PiS), or Law and Justice Party of Poland, became the ruling party with an outright majority and the largest share of votes in the October 2015 parliamentary elections, with 37.58 per cent compared to 29.89 per cent in 2011; Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) or Swiss People’s Party increased its share of votes in the October 2015 federal elections to 29.4 per cent from 26.6 per cent in 2011, having been the largest since 1999; Dansk Folkeparti (DF) or Danish People’s Party had the second largest vote share in the December 2015 general elections, 21.6 per cent from 12.9 per cent in 2011, providing parliamentary support to the new government; Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) or Party for Freedom in the Netherlands had the second largest vote share in the March 2017 general elections, 13.1 per cent from 10.1 per cent in 2012; Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) or Alternative for Germany is expected to get a higher share of votes [opinion polls put it as 8–12 per cent] in the September 2017 federal elections over its 4.7 per cent in 2013, having won seats in eleven state parliaments in the interim from none at the end of 2013. Among two-round presidential elections where the first round gives a good sense of the popular vote at state level: in April 2016 Norbert Hofer of Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) got 35.1 per cent of the vote where Alexander von der Bellen (Green) got 21.3 per cent, though the latter won the presidency narrowly in the run-off – in the one-round 2011 election the FPÖ candidate Barbara Rosenkranz got 15.4 per cent as opposed to Heinz Fischer’s (SDP) 79.33 per cent; in April 2017 Marine La Pen of Front National (FP) in France secured 21.3 per cent in the first round of the Presidential elections and then 33.9 per cent in the run-off against the eventual winner, Emmanuel Macron. The FN’s share of the vote under Marine has almost doubled since 2002 when her father, Jean-Marie, secured 18.2 per cent of the vote when losing to Jacques Chirac in the final round.

The 2015 start date here focuses attention on the effect of the so-called refugee crisis, but it is still somewhat arbitrary. It draws attention away from similar nationalist and electorally successful parties, such as Fidesz in the April 2014 Hungarian parliamentary elections, the regionalist Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA) or New Flemish Alliance in the May 2014 Belgian general elections, and Moderata or Moderate Party and the Sverigedemokraterna (SD) or Swedish Democrats in the September 2014 Swedish general elections. The dynamics of N-VA’s Flemish nationalism is internal to the federal state of Belgium; Moderata and, especially, the nationalist SD, with respectively the second and third largest shares of the popular vote in Sweden, have strong anti-immigration agendas (Schierup, Ålund and Neergaard’s paper discusses the Swedish context); and Fidesz has taken a particularly hard line against refugees since 2015. Other state-level elections in this period include the two in Greece in 2015 (January and September), in which the recently formed anti-austerity left-wing Syriza alliance took the upper hand in the popular vote and in government, while the popularity of right-wing Laïkós Sýndesmos or Golden Dawn and Anexartitoi Ellines (ANEL) or Independent Greeks dipped, though the latter joined Syriza in a government-forming coalition (Giorgos and Elisavet address the Greek situation for immigrants below). New anti-austerity and broadly progressive parties, such as Podemos and Citizens (Cs-C), were also, at least initially, electorally successful in Spain’s otherwise indecisive general elections in December 2015 and in June 2016. Indecisive also were parliamentary elections in Bulgaria in March 2017, after previous elections in 2014 and 2013, with centre-right GERB (Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria) dominating the popular vote but failing to achieve the majority it had in 2009. Other new parties, with ambiguous agendas about immigration, emerged with notable success in the popular vote in 2013 elections: the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) or 5 Star Movement in Italy (racism in the Italian context is discussed in Oliveri’s paper), and ANO 2011 in the Czech Republic (the hardline Czech response to refugees in 2015 is explored in Tyler’s paper). The 2015 legislative elections in Portugal, and 2016 general elections in Ireland and legislative elections in Romania presented no significant disturbance or sharp polarization in the established political order, though in the latter the new Uniunea Salvați România (USR) or Save Romania Party, with a domestically centered anti-corruption and development agenda, made an impression in the popular vote (with the third largest share). Various referendums are enormously significant here for this period, and fall outside the schematic approach taken: especially, the Greek bailout referendum of July 2015, the Italian constitutional referendum of December 2016, and, particularly momentously, the Brexit referendum of June 2016. The relevance of the Brexit referendum to the theme of this special issue can scarcely be overstated, and two papers – by Virdee and McGeever and by Seed – are devoted to it; Murji’s paper is also addressed to the British context, but with regard to the earlier juncture of the 2011 riots.

The concepts of nationality outlined in the manifestos of the electorally successful nationalist and anti-E.U. parties named above – UKIP, PiS, SVP, DF, PVV, AfD, NF, FPÖ – in common with other similar parties named above but not focused on here (Fidesz, Golden Dawn, ANEL, Moderata, SD), have a distinctive thrust. They are designed to stop social fluidities and ambiguities and make the contours of history stand still, to harden and neaten a social order and render it perpetual. In brief, they seek to: make the political boundaries of states firm and impervious; have political states as the final arbiters for all internal matters and dealings with other states and external alignments (“sovereignty”); render the populations within states ethnically homogeneous and self-procreating. The last, wound in with the former two, is where racial ascriptions play their part directly but through careful misdirection. The careful play of direction through misdirection works with two familiar strategies in manifesto definitions of nationality.

The first is to declare nationality as being forged through a long process of history and evolution whereby a unitary national character has developed, embodied in the authentic present-day citizen, which consists in an inextricable combination of language, culture, religion, values and inherited legitimacy (usually, bloodlines). Historically validated authenticity and the unitary character of national citizenship are the keys. Presence over several generations (the longer the better) also authenticates the citizenship of ethnic minorities to some degree, and permits some tolerable departure from the unitary national character of citizens. The presentation of this position is contextually varied in the different manifestos in question, but enables an explicit rejection of “multiculturalism” in all cases – which is associated with the E.U. establishment. For NF as for UKIP such time-honoured national belonging is too obvious to need defining, and is evoked as already shared ground. NF (2017) uses loaded abstractions to remind the electorate of this shared ground. The consonance of patriote, “patrimoine historique et culturel”, “patriotisme économique” works to that effect, bolstered by historically resonant terms like laïcité (generally but ineffectively translated as “secularism” in English) and the constitutional verve of La République (relatively rarely used as synonymous with nation in English, and naturally never in Britain). So, the following NF proposal involving a constitutional amendment is quite difficult to convey succinctly in English and asserts a collectively recognized national principle against the intersection of “multiculturalism” and “religious community” (i.e. minority religious community):

Promouvoir la laïcité et lutter contre le communautarisme. Inscrire dans la Constitution le principe : “ La République ne reconnaît aucune communauté. “ Rétablir la laïcité partout, l’étendre à l’ensemble de l’espace public et l’inscrire dans le Code du travail. (15)

[Sort of:] Promote secularism and fight against communitarianism. Insert the following principle in the Constitution: “The Republic does not recognise any community”. Restore secularity everywhere, extend it throughout the public sphere and inscribe it in the Labour Code. [On all translations, please see the note at the end.]

More straightforwardly, UKIP (2015) pins its manifesto slogan, “Believe in Britain”, to a nationalist version of “international history” in quick strokes: “We led the way in the abolition of the slave trade. Our Industrial Revolution transformed the world. A plethora of great Britons stream through international history. Our language is the most widely spoken on the planet.” (61). Other nationalist manifestos present the knot of unitary citizenship and historical authenticity directly. Thus the AfD (2017) manifesto:

Cultures, languages and national identities have developed historically over centuries. For those attached to them these provide indispensable spaces of identification, which are only available within national states having a democratic constitution. Only thus can people’s sovereignty be made alive, which is the mother and the heart of democracy. (6)

The only allowance to diversity that AfD makes is with regard to the cultural prerogatives of the federal states [zur Kulturhoheit der Bundesländer], while promising to stop any initiative to do with “politically correct” (using the English phrase) art and culture (43). And similarly, the DF (2009) programme, which has held since, maintains that “only the Judeo-Christian, Western cultural circle has managed to do away with the medieval worldview”, and promises to fight “opposition to the old norms and authorities [that] have developed into a rejection of our own cultural background and the moral and ethical norms which Denmark is built upon”, and which is leading to “the conflict between our civilization and immigrant civilizations that have not undergone [gennemgået] reformations” (17). And FPÖ’s (2011) programme says:

The language, history and culture of Austria are German. The vast majority of Austrians are part of the German peoples’ linguistic and cultural community. The indigenous ethnic groups of the Burgenland Croats, Slovenians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks and the Roma are historical minorities in our country and as such both enrich and are an integral part of Austria and our nation. (5)

A slight precarity in the undeniable acceptance of these minorities of “autochthonous groups of people which have developed through history” (17) by the majority German peoples might be discerned there; they mark a boundary of necessary tolerance. In this vein PiS’s (2014) programme is of particular interest since it is characteristic of former Eastern Blok countries before the 2015 “refugee crisis”. This was generally more concerned with emigration and population decline than immigration, and preoccupied with underdevelopment as the perpetual effect of a communist past. It declares:

We do not define the nation in an ethnic sense – not only because we do not accept nationalist superstitions [narodowych przesądów], but also because of our knowledge of Polish history. Polish nationality evolved and matured by bringing together people of different ethnic backgrounds. (9)

At the same time:

We see our belonging to the Polish nation as a value not just because it was given to us through birth and cultural heritage and is the result of our traditions. Our belonging is also inextricably tied in with Christianity […]. (9)

So PiS’s (2014) programme struck a historically informed anti-nationalist stance to assert quite a restrictive sense of historically affirmed national authenticity, bearing in mind that it put at least “autochthonous groups”, such as Tatar Muslims who have lived there since the fourteenth century, and, of course, Jews since the tenth century, in an invidious position. How receptive the PiS would be to more recent Muslim immigrants and refugees can be inferred from that.

In contrast to such historically authenticated and unitarily characterizable citizens, appear those that are not historically authenticated and threaten the unitary character. There are three consistent motifs here in these nationalist manifestos. First, “criminals” are predominantly “foreign”, and “terrorists” are invariably “foreign” and “Islamic”, and are imposing upon and corrupting (infiltrating) the authentic citizenry. In all cases, the line between “criminal” and “terrorist” is indistinct (“terrorism” is a particularly heinous subset of “crime”), and that between “foreign” and “Islamic” is blurred (“Islamic” is “foreign” accentuated). So: UKIP (2015) devotes a section to “dealing with foreign criminals” because, “There is significant public concern about the ability of convicted foreign criminals first to gain entry to the UK and subsequently to obtain British citizenship” (55); DP (2009) details how, “Many immigrants from non-Western countries commit violent crimes as well as property crimes at rates that are several times higher than those by the Danes” (9); AfD promises a much firmer line that the present “against the high proportion of violent and drug-related criminal acts performed by foreigners” (21), and has a marked agenda directed towards terrorist organizations and “criminal clans” [kriminellen Clans, a term reserved primarily for gangs from Eastern, especially Muslim, countries]; SVP (2015) makes the following smooth inference, “There are 932 break and enters per 100,000 inhabitants each year. That makes Switzerland destination country number one in Europe for gangs and thieves.” (43); and so on. Second, the putatively adverse impact of immigration on historical authenticity and unitary culture has become synonymous with the term “Islamization”, and explicit measures to deal with the “increased immigration [that] can lead to a devastating Islamization of Europe”, as DP (2009) puts it (and dwells upon), are detailed by most – at length in SVP (2015), NF (2017) and AfD (2017). At the level of the formal manifesto, FPÖ (2011) and UKIP (2015) are circumspect in this respect and avoid naming Muslims/Islam. The most emphatically exclusionary is PVV (2017), where half of the one-page manifesto is devoted to the subject and is worth quoting:

Millions of Dutch citizens have simply had enough of the Islamization of our country. Enough of the mass immigration and asylum, terror, violence and insecurity.

Here is our plan: instead of financing the entire world and people we don’t want here, we’ll spend money on ordinary Dutch citizens.

This is what the PVV will do:

1. De-Islamize the Netherlands

− No Islamic headscarves in public functions

− Prohibition of other Islamic expressions which violate public order

− Preventive detention of radical Muslims

− Denaturalization and expulsion of criminals with a dual nationality

− Jihadists who went to Syria will not be allowed to return to the Netherlands

− Close all mosques and Islamic schools, ban the Koran

This programme made PVV the second largest party in terms of the popular vote in the Netherlands in 2017. The third motif apropos of authentic and unitary citizenry is the most familiar: that the state’s existing population is being swamped and overtaken by immigrants by putatively statistical gauges. As UKIP (2015) puts it pithily, “Immigration is not about race; it is about space” (11). More often in these manifestos, there is the fear of Islam and prejudice against Muslims woven into spatial concerns, without denials of a racial quotient. And, perhaps the unusual section on African immigration which occupies a whole section of the AfD (2017) manifesto (Section 5.1, entitled Die demographischen Probleme Europas und Afrikas) is more than a little “about race”. Much unreferenced statistics is quoted there to assert that: “Europe [now] faces a migration pressure which assumes the proportion of dealing with an invasion of peoples [der Dimensionen einer Völkerwanderung]” from Africa. Consequently:

Given this problematic background it is obvious that migration from Africa to Europe along the anticipated lines can destabilize our continent in a few years. Overall immigration quotas for those who are willing to emigrate would be unethical because they would simultaneously exclude the great majority. Political demands made along these lines are thus pseudohumanitarian and self-destructive. Individual rights of protection and asylum guarantees were created in 1949 for persecuted individuals. They made promises which are impossible to maintain under current conditions of mass global migratory movements.

The aim of the AfD is self-preservation, not the self-destruction of our state and people. The future of Germany and Europe must be secured in the long term. (25)

What this means in policy terms is not spelled out in AfD (2017); it is left to the imagination of the electorate.

The historically authenticated and unitary character of citizenship in these manifestos is articulated in terms which are unproblematic in common parlance now: the “nationality”, “ethnicity”, “identity” of “indigenous” or “autochthonous” “peoples” or “majorities”, wherein “language”–“culture”–“values”–“traditions” are all inextricably fused and sealed by “history”, the passage of “centuries”, and proximity, in a uniformly salutary way. Similarly, the threat to this authentic citizenry is couched in terms which are unexceptional in everyday and formal usage: “immigrants”, “refugees”, “foreigners”, “Muslims”, especially associated with “crime”, “terrorism”, “violence”, “fanaticism”, identified by different “languages”–“cultures”–“values”–“traditions”, all those also fused and sealed into homogeneous forms from “outside-Europe”, “non-European cultures”, and embodying “multiculturalism” within Europe. It is evident to electorates reading these manifestos that there are ascriptions of race amidst this binaristic play of terms, but the precise mechanics of ascription are elusive. The terms have race in them, but always in a deniable way; there is a racial quotient, but equally there is more than that in every term. These terms’ suggestiveness to essentializing and discriminating gazes (associating social behaviours with physiognomies and anatomies, genes and bloodlines) is countered at the selfsame moment by obviously social constructionist connotations. The logic of essentialist racialization is often implicit and always ambiguous. It comes through in how terms are welded together into inextricable singularities for describing peoples, in the implicit “nativity” within “nationality”, in the “father” within “patriot”. But these terms are slippery: there’s race in there, but not necessarily.

Nevertheless, in such manifestos the essentialist ascriptions of race are also unambiguously tractable in relation to the legal norms for citizenship. Many of these manifestos emphasize the racial quotient of citizenship in legal terms (birth and parentage), and often propose adjusting the legal norms to (re-)harden that racial quotient. So, when FPÖ (2011) states that, “Austria is not a country of immigration. This is why we pursue a family policy centred around births”, effectively the racial basis of citizenship is asserted. And when AfD (2017) declares: “We want to withdraw the birthplace principle [Geburtsortsprinzip] (acquisition of German citizenship by birth in Germany, even though neither parent is German), and return to the principle of origin [Abstammungsprinzip] as applied till 2000” (29), that’s a bid to retrieve an unambiguously racial basis for citizenship. Almost all the manifestos mentioned above seek to adjust the legal norms of citizenship so as to putatively defend the historically authenticated citizen from the threat of corruption and infiltration by suspect immigrants. On the one hand, this involves introducing legal provisions for withholding citizenship from those who would be entitled to it under the existing regime; on the other hand, it involves adjustments to the legal norms to enable withdrawal of citizenship where that is already acquired or owned. The first could be regarded as a short-term way of using citizenship as a bargaining chip; the first and second together could be considered a long-term programme for purifying the citizenry. It is the second which is worth focusing on: that implies making it a legal norm to introduce distinctions or gradations within the body of existing citizens in a political state. Such proposals disturb the legal first principle of the equality of citizens in the eyes of the law; ergo, they suggest that certain existing citizens should be considered more suspect than others by legal definition, and as having different fundamental rights compared to others in law. These proposals rebound into the existing populations of political states to legalize second-class citizenship. Variously, such proposals for making existing citizenship removable apply to persons with dual citizenship, naturalized citizens, and in one case (AfD) “citizens from migrant backgrounds” who may be accused of or suspected of being criminals or terrorists (as observed above, these terms merge into each other). If such proposals become enacted in law, all dual citizens, naturalized citizens and “citizens from migrant backgrounds” would become legally different from other citizens. They would become more suspect than other citizens, subject to punishments that are different from those for other citizens committing the same offences – therefore, second-class citizens in law.

The conditions set for such proposed measures underline racial identification of suspect citizenship relative to racial baselines for historically authenticated citizenship (by parentage and birth over generations). That is, the identification of the suspect citizen is laid bare to shared essentialist preconceptions. Thus: DF (2009)

wishes for naturalization legislation to be designed in such a way that Danish citizenship can be revoked by a judgment if the person in question commits a serious crime, or has been part of or has participated in terrorist acts in Denmark or abroad (32);

UKIP (2015) “take the view that British citizens who choose to fight alongside terrorist organisations effectively abdicate their rights to citizenship” (13); PVV (2017) has a succinct promise in its programme to “de-Islamicize” the Netherlands by the “Denaturalization and expulsion of criminals with a dual nationality”. With regard to suspect citizens, AfD (2017) proposes measures grounded on its bid to return to a racial basis for citizenship:

The naturalization of criminals should be controlled by: 1. Stopping the acquisition of German nationality by mere birth in Germany, since, among other things, members of criminal clans automatically become German citizens thereby; […].

Finally, the expatriation of criminal citizens with a migration background should be made possible when: 1. There is evidence of serious criminality within ten years after successful naturalization; 2. In case of participation in terrorist organizations (e.g., IS); 3. If they are affiliated to criminal clans, even if that means expatriation so that they become stateless. (21)

Similarly, there are the NF (2017) campaign promises, which effectively remove the threats of immigrants procreating or migrant miscegenation:

26 Reducing legal migration to an annual balance of 10,000. Ending automaticity of family consolidation and reconciliation, as well as the automatic acquisition of French nationality by marriage. Remove the suction pumps from immigration.

27 Delete the right of the soil: the acquisition of French nationality will be possible only by filiation or naturalization, the conditions for which will become more stringent. Deletion of dual extra-European citizenship. (6)

SVP (2011) is clearest in suggesting that all naturalized citizenship is suspect:

Problems “naturalised”: Due to the mass naturalisations of the past few years, many people who received the Swiss passport have not been integrated. A not insignificant number of new Swiss do not understand any of the country’s national languages, do not accept the local customs and, shortly after their naturalisation, commit a criminal offence. Statistically though, these people are then counted as Swiss. As a result, many problems with foreigners were simply “naturalised”. (32)

The schematic approach taken here to focus on electorally successful nationalist parties and their manifestos might give the impression that such concepts of citizenship are entertained, and measures proposed, only by that category of parties. It is possible that parties which are otherwise liberally inclusive or even socialist might also uncritically accept and promote similar measures, especially under the pressure of political polarization. Readers of this special issue can determine for themselves what share of the electorate of any contemporary European nation-state might subscribe to such notions irrespective of the parties they vote for.

The language of “race”

Denials of reference to race in the manifestos cited above usually appear with the suggestion that such reference is the province of irrational liberal moralism (“political correctness”). Thus, UKIP’s (2015) manifesto observes dismissively that “even our prime ministers have labelled good, decent people ‘closet racists’ and ‘bigots’”, before announcing that “Immigration is not about race; it is about space”; and AfD’s (2017) manifesto states that it “is opposed to any defamation of rational religious criticism as ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘racism’. We urge everyone to replace such polemics by intellectual discourse”. As observed above, such circumspection about referring directly to race opens space for implicit insertions of race, thereby rendered all the more subliminally persistent; the terms used have a racial quotient while connoting more than race or also something other than race. Under these circumstances, engaging with race and racism seriously seems narrow-minded – especially when those perceived as belonging to racialized minorities do so. For the latter, contemplating race, however analytically, seems a self-fulfilling compliance with their own racialization.

This kind of language, which is and yet is not quite about race, has naturally exercised researchers investigating racialization and racism. On the one hand, they have felt at times that a new “post-racial” or “colour-blind” political discourse has emerged (which often focalizes “class”); on the other hand, they have simultaneously suspected that “post-racial” and “colour-blind” claims are often mendacious, seeking to evade, perpetuate or even exacerbate existing racism; and, underpinning both hands, they have then felt that their own language – their academic discourse itself – needs to be rejuvenated to be equal to analysing such slippery articulations of race. Negotiating with academic discourse itself amidst putatively “post-racial” discourses has been a fraught matter at times. For instance, amongst race researchers in the USA, Barrack Obama’s victory in the 2008 Presidential elections appeared to put the academic language for analysing race into question. Thus, Wise (2010) had to assert soon after that “Race continues to matter” (20) and analyse Obama’s own colour-blind pronouncements to explain why. Leonardo (2012) observed that “Race scholars carry on as usual, but we do so with an increasing sense of doubt and doom about the very nature of our topic” (126), and offered a precise statement of the sticking point: “Race does not disappear because we alter conceptualizing each other as post- or non-racial if we act on the world in a racial way and with racial consequences” (136, emphasis in original). In introducing an edited volume on the “post-racial” era, Ivery and Bassett (2015) came up with the programmatic demand for “new models of ‘talking about race’ – or similarly, a new language of race”, especially to “vigorously interrogate the ascendance of class (i.e. class theories) as a new dominant rationale in explaining racial inequalities” (3, emphasis in original). Other similar observations may be cited, but the point is evident: at least until 2014 or 2015, it seemed that a putatively “post-racial” or “colour-blind” political discourse has emerged which might be suspect, and which necessitated self-reflection within academic discourse. Such self-reflectiveness complicated and deferred analysis of the ambiguous language of race out there in the political sphere (“post-racial”/“colour-blind” discourse), suggesting some degree of sceptical complicity between scholarly and political references to “race”. López’s (2014) Dog Whistle Politics presented a relatively rare attempt to pin down the evasive language of race in American politics, tracing it from Civil Liberties movements to Obama’s presidency, without turning self-reflectively upon academic discourse itself. The succinct generalizations he offered of “coded racial appeals” are worth noting here, since, though centred on the U.S.A., they effectively describe the discursive context wherein the European nationalist manifestos outlined above make their appeal:

The new racial politics presents itself as steadfastly opposed to racism and ever ready to condemn those who publicly use racial profanity. We fiercely oppose racism and stand prepared to repudiate anyone who uses the n-word. Meanwhile, though, the new racial discourse keeps up a steady drumbeat of subliminal racial grievances and appeals to color-coded solidarity. But let’s be honest: some groups commit more crimes and use more welfare, other groups are mainly unskilled and illiterate illegals, and some religions inspire violence and don’t value life. (3–4, emphasis in original)

That these messages are coded, López argues, is an acknowledgement that many do not sympathise with their racial content; their coding also underlines that they contradict established anti-racist tenets. At the same time, the coding allows for usefully variegated reception: those who are sympathetic to the racial message will find it there, while those who are not will be able to persuade themselves that it is not there.

In 2015, when this special issue was being planned, academic self-reflectiveness among race scholars seemed more the trend of the day, and not just in the U.S.A. Making the connection from the U.S.A. to the U.K., Paul (2014) observed: “A form of racial neo-liberalism is arguably unfolding in the UK – erasing and/or muting any explicit articulation of race from government policies and equality discourse” (707); he found it a challenge to “develop a language for having a sophisticated discussion on the ethical and political dilemmas associated with race that would not disable communication” (708). In 2017, as this special issue goes into production, López’s more direct engagement with coded racial appeals seems more of the moment. As the discussion of the manifestos suggests, race is closer to the surface of political discourse now – it is, so to speak, barely coded. The papers below, written in the interim between 2015 and 2017, all find ways of articulating and analysing this barely coded language of race and racism effectively. Schierup, Ålund and Neergaard’s contribution gives a careful account of the bio-political management through which race has surfaced in Swedish politics, and notes moments when explicit racial terms are rendered covert. Oliveri understands racialism as a form of governmentality (à la Foucault) in Italy, the contours of which become manifest when racialising and counter-racialising moves are considered together. Tyler contemplates the growing “state racism” in Europe (especially the Czech Republic) directed against refugees, by developing a concept of racial stigma. Virdee and McGeever locate racialization within a glaring erasure of the history of migration, which was inextricably entwined with race politics and policies, in recent Brexit debates. Murji’s paper draws on framing analysis to explore accounts of riots in Britain, thereby sharpening the mechanics of racialization and de-racialization. With pedagogic practice in view, West-Pavlov understands racism as a freezing and polarizing of essentially fluid identities in response to political and economic upheavals. The insertion of colour-terms does the deliberative work of accentuating race within coded appeals in some of the contributions. De Genova brings out the barely concealed racism that dehumanizes the “black and brown bodies” of illegal migrants who die in attempting the Mediterranean crossing. Giorgos and Elisavet present Greek anxieties about accommodating different groups of immigrants through a grid of “whitening” and “blackening” factors (with reference to Aihwa Ong). Pondering the results of the Brexit referendum, Seed pauses on pat explanations pointing to the “white working class” and recriminations about their xenophobia, and considers more complex and historically informed ways of understanding the referendum result.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Michał P. Garapich, Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Achim Brosch and Prem Poddar for helping them understand and translate from the Polish, Danish and German manifestos discussed in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While the concept of race was invented to legitimize racism, those who bore the weight of such oppression have appropriated the category and infused it with an emancipatory vision to combat racism. In fact, one of the ramifications of the last cycle of protest (of anti-colonial revolt in the Global South accompanied by the anti-racist movements of the Anglo-American world) was its wounding of the project of legitimizing racism in the name of race (Virdee 2014). In its slipstream, however, have emerged cultural racisms and more recently the post-racial moment, where the concept of post-racial serves to occlude the on-going material force of racism and discrimination (see, for example, Lentin 2014; Valluvan 2016).